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A Child's History of England

by Charles Dickens

October, 1996  [Etext #699]


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A Child's History of England by Charles Dickens
Scanned and Proofed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





A Child's History of England




CHAPTER I - ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS



IF you look at a Map of the World, you will see, in the left-hand 
upper corner of the Eastern Hemisphere, two Islands lying in the 
sea.  They are England and Scotland, and Ireland.  England and 
Scotland form the greater part of these Islands.  Ireland is the 
next in size.  The little neighbouring islands, which are so small 
upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of 
Scotland, - broken off, I dare say, in the course of a great length 
of time, by the power of the restless water.

In the old days, a long, long while ago, before Our Saviour was 
born on earth and lay asleep in a manger, these Islands were in the 
same place, and the stormy sea roared round them, just as it roars 
now.  But the sea was not alive, then, with great ships and brave 
sailors, sailing to and from all parts of the world.  It was very 
lonely.  The Islands lay solitary, in the great expanse of water.  
The foaming waves dashed against their cliffs, and the bleak winds 
blew over their forests; but the winds and waves brought no 
adventurers to land upon the Islands, and the savage Islanders knew 
nothing of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world knew 
nothing of them.

It is supposed that the Phoenicians, who were an ancient people, 
famous for carrying on trade, came in ships to these Islands, and 
found that they produced tin and lead; both very useful things, as 
you know, and both produced to this very hour upon the sea-coast. 
The most celebrated tin mines in Cornwall are, still, close to the 
sea.  One of them, which I have seen, is so close to it that it is 
hollowed out underneath the ocean; and the miners say, that in 
stormy weather, when they are at work down in that deep place, they 
can hear the noise of the waves thundering above their heads.  So, 
the Phoenicians, coasting about the Islands, would come, without 
much difficulty, to where the tin and lead were.

The Phoenicians traded with the Islanders for these metals, and 
gave the Islanders some other useful things in exchange.  The 
Islanders were, at first, poor savages, going almost naked, or only 
dressed in the rough skins of beasts, and staining their bodies, as 
other savages do, with coloured earths and the juices of plants.  
But the Phoenicians, sailing over to the opposite coasts of France 
and Belgium, and saying to the people there, 'We have been to those 
white cliffs across the water, which you can see in fine weather, 
and from that country, which is called BRITAIN, we bring this tin 
and lead,' tempted some of the French and Belgians to come over 
also.  These people settled themselves on the south coast of 
England, which is now called Kent; and, although they were a rough 
people too, they taught the savage Britons some useful arts, and 
improved that part of the Islands.  It is probable that other 
people came over from Spain to Ireland, and settled there.

Thus, by little and little, strangers became mixed with the 
Islanders, and the savage Britons grew into a wild, bold people; 
almost savage, still, especially in the interior of the country 
away from the sea where the foreign settlers seldom went; but 
hardy, brave, and strong.

The whole country was covered with forests, and swamps.  The 
greater part of it was very misty and cold.  There were no roads, 
no bridges, no streets, no houses that you would think deserving of 
the name.  A town was nothing but a collection of straw-covered 
huts, hidden in a thick wood, with a ditch all round, and a low 
wall, made of mud, or the trunks of trees placed one upon another.  
The people planted little or no corn, but lived upon the flesh of 
their flocks and cattle.  They made no coins, but used metal rings 
for money.  They were clever in basket-work, as savage people often 
are; and they could make a coarse kind of cloth, and some very bad 
earthenware.  But in building fortresses they were much more 
clever.

They made boats of basket-work, covered with the skins of animals, 
but seldom, if ever, ventured far from the shore.  They made 
swords, of copper mixed with tin; but, these swords were of an 
awkward shape, and so soft that a heavy blow would bend one.  They 
made light shields, short pointed daggers, and spears - which they 
jerked back after they had thrown them at an enemy, by a long strip 
of leather fastened to the stem.  The butt-end was a rattle, to 
frighten an enemy's horse.  The ancient Britons, being divided into 
as many as thirty or forty tribes, each commanded by its own little 
king, were constantly fighting with one another, as savage people 
usually do; and they always fought with these weapons.

They were very fond of horses.  The standard of Kent was the 
picture of a white horse.  They could break them in and manage them 
wonderfully well.  Indeed, the horses (of which they had an 
abundance, though they were rather small) were so well taught in 
those days, that they can scarcely be said to have improved since; 
though the men are so much wiser.  They understood, and obeyed, 
every word of command; and would stand still by themselves, in all 
the din and noise of battle, while their masters went to fight on 
foot.  The Britons could not have succeeded in their most 
remarkable art, without the aid of these sensible and trusty 
animals.  The art I mean, is the construction and management of 
war-chariots or cars, for which they have ever been celebrated in 
history.  Each of the best sort of these chariots, not quite breast 
high in front, and open at the back, contained one man to drive, 
and two or three others to fight - all standing up.  The horses who 
drew them were so well trained, that they would tear, at full 
gallop, over the most stony ways, and even through the woods; 
dashing down their masters' enemies beneath their hoofs, and 
cutting them to pieces with the blades of swords, or scythes, which 
were fastened to the wheels, and stretched out beyond the car on 
each side, for that cruel purpose.  In a moment, while at full 
speed, the horses would stop, at the driver's command.  The men 
within would leap out, deal blows about them with their swords like 
hail, leap on the horses, on the pole, spring back into the 
chariots anyhow; and, as soon as they were safe, the horses tore 
away again.

The Britons had a strange and terrible religion, called the 
Religion of the Druids.  It seems to have been brought over, in 
very early times indeed, from the opposite country of France, 
anciently called Gaul, and to have mixed up the worship of the 
Serpent, and of the Sun and Moon, with the worship of some of the 
Heathen Gods and Goddesses.  Most of its ceremonies were kept 
secret by the priests, the Druids, who pretended to be enchanters, 
and who carried magicians' wands, and wore, each of them, about his 
neck, what he told the ignorant people was a Serpent's egg in a 
golden case.  But it is certain that the Druidical ceremonies 
included the sacrifice of human victims, the torture of some 
suspected criminals, and, on particular occasions, even the burning 
alive, in immense wicker cages, of a number of men and animals 
together.  The Druid Priests had some kind of veneration for the 
Oak, and for the mistletoe - the same plant that we hang up in 
houses at Christmas Time now - when its white berries grew upon the 
Oak.  They met together in dark woods, which they called Sacred 
Groves; and there they instructed, in their mysterious arts, young 
men who came to them as pupils, and who sometimes stayed with them 
as long as twenty years.

These Druids built great Temples and altars, open to the sky, 
fragments of some of which are yet remaining.  Stonehenge, on 
Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, is the most extraordinary of these.  
Three curious stones, called Kits Coty House, on Bluebell Hill, 
near Maidstone, in Kent, form another.  We know, from examination 
of the great blocks of which such buildings are made, that they 
could not have been raised without the aid of some ingenious 
machines, which are common now, but which the ancient Britons 
certainly did not use in making their own uncomfortable houses.  I 
should not wonder if the Druids, and their pupils who stayed with 
them twenty years, knowing more than the rest of the Britons, kept 
the people out of sight while they made these buildings, and then 
pretended that they built them by magic.  Perhaps they had a hand 
in the fortresses too; at all events, as they were very powerful, 
and very much believed in, and as they made and executed the laws, 
and paid no taxes, I don't wonder that they liked their trade.  
And, as they persuaded the people the more Druids there were, the 
better off the people would be, I don't wonder that there were a 
good many of them.  But it is pleasant to think that there are no 
Druids, NOW, who go on in that way, and pretend to carry 
Enchanters' Wands and Serpents' Eggs - and of course there is 
nothing of the kind, anywhere.

Such was the improved condition of the ancient Britons, fifty-five 
years before the birth of Our Saviour, when the Romans, under their 
great General, Julius Caesar, were masters of all the rest of the 
known world.  Julius Caesar had then just conquered Gaul; and 
hearing, in Gaul, a good deal about the opposite Island with the 
white cliffs, and about the bravery of the Britons who inhabited it 
- some of whom had been fetched over to help the Gauls in the war 
against him - he resolved, as he was so near, to come and conquer 
Britain next.

So, Julius Caesar came sailing over to this Island of ours, with 
eighty vessels and twelve thousand men.  And he came from the 
French coast between Calais and Boulogne, 'because thence was the 
shortest passage into Britain;' just for the same reason as our 
steam-boats now take the same track, every day.  He expected to 
conquer Britain easily:  but it was not such easy work as he 
supposed - for the bold Britons fought most bravely; and, what with 
not having his horse-soldiers with him (for they had been driven 
back by a storm), and what with having some of his vessels dashed 
to pieces by a high tide after they were drawn ashore, he ran great 
risk of being totally defeated.  However, for once that the bold 
Britons beat him, he beat them twice; though not so soundly but 
that he was very glad to accept their proposals of peace, and go 
away.

But, in the spring of the next year, he came back; this time, with 
eight hundred vessels and thirty thousand men.  The British tribes 
chose, as their general-in-chief, a Briton, whom the Romans in 
their Latin language called CASSIVELLAUNUS, but whose British name 
is supposed to have been CASWALLON.  A brave general he was, and 
well he and his soldiers fought the Roman army!  So well, that 
whenever in that war the Roman soldiers saw a great cloud of dust, 
and heard the rattle of the rapid British chariots, they trembled 
in their hearts.  Besides a number of smaller battles, there was a 
battle fought near Canterbury, in Kent; there was a battle fought 
near Chertsey, in Surrey; there was a battle fought near a marshy 
little town in a wood, the capital of that part of Britain which 
belonged to CASSIVELLAUNUS, and which was probably near what is now 
Saint Albans, in Hertfordshire.  However, brave CASSIVELLAUNUS had 
the worst of it, on the whole; though he and his men always fought 
like lions.  As the other British chiefs were jealous of him, and 
were always quarrelling with him, and with one another, he gave up, 
and proposed peace.  Julius Caesar was very glad to grant peace 
easily, and to go away again with all his remaining ships and men.  
He had expected to find pearls in Britain, and he may have found a 
few for anything I know; but, at all events, he found delicious 
oysters, and I am sure he found tough Britons - of whom, I dare 
say, he made the same complaint as Napoleon Bonaparte the great 
French General did, eighteen hundred years afterwards, when he said 
they were such unreasonable fellows that they never knew when they 
were beaten.  They never DID know, I believe, and never will.

Nearly a hundred years passed on, and all that time, there was 
peace in Britain.  The Britons improved their towns and mode of 
life:  became more civilised, travelled, and learnt a great deal 
from the Gauls and Romans.  At last, the Roman Emperor, Claudius, 
sent AULUS PLAUTIUS, a skilful general, with a mighty force, to 
subdue the Island, and shortly afterwards arrived himself.  They 
did little; and OSTORIUS SCAPULA, another general, came.  Some of 
the British Chiefs of Tribes submitted.  Others resolved to fight 
to the death.  Of these brave men, the bravest was CARACTACUS, or 
CARADOC, who gave battle to the Romans, with his army, among the 
mountains of North Wales.  'This day,' said he to his soldiers, 
'decides the fate of Britain!  Your liberty, or your eternal 
slavery, dates from this hour.  Remember your brave ancestors, who 
drove the great Caesar himself across the sea!'  On hearing these 
words, his men, with a great shout, rushed upon the Romans.  But 
the strong Roman swords and armour were too much for the weaker 
British weapons in close conflict.  The Britons lost the day.  The 
wife and daughter of the brave CARACTACUS were taken prisoners; his 
brothers delivered themselves up; he himself was betrayed into the 
hands of the Romans by his false and base stepmother:  and they 
carried him, and all his family, in triumph to Rome.

But a great man will be great in misfortune, great in prison, great 
in chains.  His noble air, and dignified endurance of distress, so 
touched the Roman people who thronged the streets to see him, that 
he and his family were restored to freedom.  No one knows whether 
his great heart broke, and he died in Rome, or whether he ever 
returned to his own dear country.  English oaks have grown up from 
acorns, and withered away, when they were hundreds of years old - 
and other oaks have sprung up in their places, and died too, very 
aged - since the rest of the history of the brave CARACTACUS was 
forgotten.

Still, the Britons WOULD NOT yield.  They rose again and again, and 
died by thousands, sword in hand.  They rose, on every possible 
occasion.  SUETONIUS, another Roman general, came, and stormed the 
Island of Anglesey (then called MONA), which was supposed to be 
sacred, and he burnt the Druids in their own wicker cages, by their 
own fires.  But, even while he was in Britain, with his victorious 
troops, the BRITONS rose.  Because BOADICEA, a British queen, the 
widow of the King of the Norfolk and Suffolk people, resisted the 
plundering of her property by the Romans who were settled in 
England, she was scourged, by order of CATUS a Roman officer; and 
her two daughters were shamefully insulted in her presence, and her 
husband's relations were made slaves.  To avenge this injury, the 
Britons rose, with all their might and rage.  They drove CATUS into 
Gaul; they laid the Roman possessions waste; they forced the Romans 
out of London, then a poor little town, but a trading place; they 
hanged, burnt, crucified, and slew by the sword, seventy thousand 
Romans in a few days.  SUETONIUS strengthened his army, and 
advanced to give them battle.  They strengthened their army, and 
desperately attacked his, on the field where it was strongly 
posted.  Before the first charge of the Britons was made, BOADICEA, 
in a war-chariot, with her fair hair streaming in the wind, and her 
injured daughters lying at her feet, drove among the troops, and 
cried to them for vengeance on their oppressors, the licentious 
Romans.  The Britons fought to the last; but they were vanquished 
with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen took poison.

Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken.  When SUETONIUS 
left the country, they fell upon his troops, and retook the Island 
of Anglesey.  AGRICOLA came, fifteen or twenty years afterwards, 
and retook it once more, and devoted seven years to subduing the 
country, especially that part of it which is now called SCOTLAND; 
but, its people, the Caledonians, resisted him at every inch of 
ground.  They fought the bloodiest battles with him; they killed 
their very wives and children, to prevent his making prisoners of 
them; they fell, fighting, in such great numbers that certain hills 
in Scotland are yet supposed to be vast heaps of stones piled up 
above their graves.  HADRIAN came, thirty years afterwards, and 
still they resisted him.  SEVERUS came, nearly a hundred years 
afterwards, and they worried his great army like dogs, and rejoiced 
to see them die, by thousands, in the bogs and swamps.  CARACALLA, 
the son and successor of SEVERUS, did the most to conquer them, for 
a time; but not by force of arms.  He knew how little that would 
do.  He yielded up a quantity of land to the Caledonians, and gave 
the Britons the same privileges as the Romans possessed.  There was 
peace, after this, for seventy years.

Then new enemies arose.  They were the Saxons, a fierce, sea-faring 
people from the countries to the North of the Rhine, the great 
river of Germany on the banks of which the best grapes grow to make 
the German wine.  They began to come, in pirate ships, to the sea-
coast of Gaul and Britain, and to plunder them.  They were repulsed 
by CARAUSIUS, a native either of Belgium or of Britain, who was 
appointed by the Romans to the command, and under whom the Britons 
first began to fight upon the sea.  But, after this time, they 
renewed their ravages.  A few years more, and the Scots (which was 
then the name for the people of Ireland), and the Picts, a northern 
people, began to make frequent plundering incursions into the South 
of Britain.  All these attacks were repeated, at intervals, during 
two hundred years, and through a long succession of Roman Emperors 
and chiefs; during all which length of time, the Britons rose 
against the Romans, over and over again.  At last, in the days of 
the Roman HONORIUS, when the Roman power all over the world was 
fast declining, and when Rome wanted all her soldiers at home, the 
Romans abandoned all hope of conquering Britain, and went away.  
And still, at last, as at first, the Britons rose against them, in 
their old brave manner; for, a very little while before, they had 
turned away the Roman magistrates, and declared themselves an 
independent people.

Five hundred years had passed, since Julius Caesar's first invasion 
of the Island, when the Romans departed from it for ever.  In the 
course of that time, although they had been the cause of terrible 
fighting and bloodshed, they had done much to improve the condition 
of the Britons.  They had made great military roads; they had built 
forts; they had taught them how to dress, and arm themselves, much 
better than they had ever known how to do before; they had refined 
the whole British way of living.  AGRICOLA had built a great wall 
of earth, more than seventy miles long, extending from Newcastle to 
beyond Carlisle, for the purpose of keeping out the Picts and 
Scots; HADRIAN had strengthened it; SEVERUS, finding it much in 
want of repair, had built it afresh of stone.

Above all, it was in the Roman time, and by means of Roman ships, 
that the Christian Religion was first brought into Britain, and its 
people first taught the great lesson that, to be good in the sight 
of GOD, they must love their neighbours as themselves, and do unto 
others as they would be done by.  The Druids declared that it was 
very wicked to believe in any such thing, and cursed all the people 
who did believe it, very heartily.  But, when the people found that 
they were none the better for the blessings of the Druids, and none 
the worse for the curses of the Druids, but, that the sun shone and 
the rain fell without consulting the Druids at all, they just began 
to think that the Druids were mere men, and that it signified very 
little whether they cursed or blessed.  After which, the pupils of 
the Druids fell off greatly in numbers, and the Druids took to 
other trades.

Thus I have come to the end of the Roman time in England.  It is 
but little that is known of those five hundred years; but some 
remains of them are still found.  Often, when labourers are digging 
up the ground, to make foundations for houses or churches, they 
light on rusty money that once belonged to the Romans.  Fragments 
of plates from which they ate, of goblets from which they drank, 
and of pavement on which they trod, are discovered among the earth 
that is broken by the plough, or the dust that is crumbled by the 
gardener's spade.  Wells that the Romans sunk, still yield water; 
roads that the Romans made, form part of our highways.  In some old 
battle-fields, British spear-heads and Roman armour have been 
found, mingled together in decay, as they fell in the thick 
pressure of the fight.  Traces of Roman camps overgrown with grass, 
and of mounds that are the burial-places of heaps of Britons, are 
to be seen in almost all parts of the country.  Across the bleak 
moors of Northumberland, the wall of SEVERUS, overrun with moss and 
weeds, still stretches, a strong ruin; and the shepherds and their 
dogs lie sleeping on it in the summer weather.  On Salisbury Plain, 
Stonehenge yet stands:  a monument of the earlier time when the 
Roman name was unknown in Britain, and when the Druids, with their 
best magic wands, could not have written it in the sands of the 
wild sea-shore.



CHAPTER II - ANCIENT ENGLAND UNDER THE EARLY SAXONS



THE Romans had scarcely gone away from Britain, when the Britons 
began to wish they had never left it.  For, the Romans being gone, 
and the Britons being much reduced in numbers by their long wars, 
the Picts and Scots came pouring in, over the broken and unguarded 
wall of SEVERUS, in swarms.  They plundered the richest towns, and 
killed the people; and came back so often for more booty and more 
slaughter, that the unfortunate Britons lived a life of terror.  As 
if the Picts and Scots were not bad enough on land, the Saxons 
attacked the islanders by sea; and, as if something more were still 
wanting to make them miserable, they quarrelled bitterly among 
themselves as to what prayers they ought to say, and how they ought 
to say them.  The priests, being very angry with one another on 
these questions, cursed one another in the heartiest manner; and 
(uncommonly like the old Druids) cursed all the people whom they 
could not persuade.  So, altogether, the Britons were very badly 
off, you may believe.

They were in such distress, in short, that they sent a letter to 
Rome entreating help - which they called the Groans of the Britons; 
and in which they said, 'The barbarians chase us into the sea, the 
sea throws us back upon the barbarians, and we have only the hard 
choice left us of perishing by the sword, or perishing by the 
waves.'  But, the Romans could not help them, even if they were so 
inclined; for they had enough to do to defend themselves against 
their own enemies, who were then very fierce and strong.  At last, 
the Britons, unable to bear their hard condition any longer, 
resolved to make peace with the Saxons, and to invite the Saxons to 
come into their country, and help them to keep out the Picts and 
Scots.

It was a British Prince named VORTIGERN who took this resolution, 
and who made a treaty of friendship with HENGIST and HORSA, two 
Saxon chiefs.  Both of these names, in the old Saxon language, 
signify Horse; for the Saxons, like many other nations in a rough 
state, were fond of giving men the names of animals, as Horse, 
Wolf, Bear, Hound.  The Indians of North America, - a very inferior 
people to the Saxons, though - do the same to this day.

HENGIST and HORSA drove out the Picts and Scots; and VORTIGERN, 
being grateful to them for that service, made no opposition to 
their settling themselves in that part of England which is called 
the Isle of Thanet, or to their inviting over more of their 
countrymen to join them.  But HENGIST had a beautiful daughter 
named ROWENA; and when, at a feast, she filled a golden goblet to 
the brim with wine, and gave it to VORTIGERN, saying in a sweet 
voice, 'Dear King, thy health!' the King fell in love with her.  My 
opinion is, that the cunning HENGIST meant him to do so, in order 
that the Saxons might have greater influence with him; and that the 
fair ROWENA came to that feast, golden goblet and all, on purpose.

At any rate, they were married; and, long afterwards, whenever the 
King was angry with the Saxons, or jealous of their encroachments, 
ROWENA would put her beautiful arms round his neck, and softly say, 
'Dear King, they are my people!  Be favourable to them, as you 
loved that Saxon girl who gave you the golden goblet of wine at the 
feast!'  And, really, I don't see how the King could help himself.

Ah!  We must all die!  In the course of years, VORTIGERN died - he 
was dethroned, and put in prison, first, I am afraid; and ROWENA 
died; and generations of Saxons and Britons died; and events that 
happened during a long, long time, would have been quite forgotten 
but for the tales and songs of the old Bards, who used to go about 
from feast to feast, with their white beards, recounting the deeds 
of their forefathers.  Among the histories of which they sang and 
talked, there was a famous one, concerning the bravery and virtues 
of KING ARTHUR, supposed to have been a British Prince in those old 
times.  But, whether such a person really lived, or whether there 
were several persons whose histories came to be confused together 
under that one name, or whether all about him was invention, no one 
knows.

I will tell you, shortly, what is most interesting in the early 
Saxon times, as they are described in these songs and stories of 
the Bards.

In, and long after, the days of VORTIGERN, fresh bodies of Saxons, 
under various chiefs, came pouring into Britain.  One body, 
conquering the Britons in the East, and settling there, called 
their kingdom Essex; another body settled in the West, and called 
their kingdom Wessex; the Northfolk, or Norfolk people, established 
themselves in one place; the Southfolk, or Suffolk people, 
established themselves in another; and gradually seven kingdoms or 
states arose in England, which were called the Saxon Heptarchy.  
The poor Britons, falling back before these crowds of fighting men 
whom they had innocently invited over as friends, retired into 
Wales and the adjacent country; into Devonshire, and into Cornwall.  
Those parts of England long remained unconquered.  And in Cornwall 
now - where the sea-coast is very gloomy, steep, and rugged - 
where, in the dark winter-time, ships have often been wrecked close 
to the land, and every soul on board has perished - where the winds 
and waves howl drearily and split the solid rocks into arches and 
caverns - there are very ancient ruins, which the people call the 
ruins of KING ARTHUR'S Castle.

Kent is the most famous of the seven Saxon kingdoms, because the 
Christian religion was preached to the Saxons there (who domineered 
over the Britons too much, to care for what THEY said about their 
religion, or anything else) by AUGUSTINE, a monk from Rome.  KING 
ETHELBERT, of Kent, was soon converted; and the moment he said he 
was a Christian, his courtiers all said THEY were Christians; after 
which, ten thousand of his subjects said they were Christians too.  
AUGUSTINE built a little church, close to this King's palace, on 
the ground now occupied by the beautiful cathedral of Canterbury.  
SEBERT, the King's nephew, built on a muddy marshy place near 
London, where there had been a temple to Apollo, a church dedicated 
to Saint Peter, which is now Westminster Abbey.  And, in London 
itself, on the foundation of a temple to Diana, he built another 
little church which has risen up, since that old time, to be Saint 
Paul's.

After the death of ETHELBERT, EDWIN, King of Northumbria, who was 
such a good king that it was said a woman or child might openly 
carry a purse of gold, in his reign, without fear, allowed his 
child to be baptised, and held a great council to consider whether 
he and his people should all be Christians or not.  It was decided 
that they should be.  COIFI, the chief priest of the old religion, 
made a great speech on the occasion.  In this discourse, he told 
the people that he had found out the old gods to be impostors.  'I 
am quite satisfied of it,' he said.  'Look at me!  I have been 
serving them all my life, and they have done nothing for me; 
whereas, if they had been really powerful, they could not have 
decently done less, in return for all I have done for them, than 
make my fortune.  As they have never made my fortune, I am quite 
convinced they are impostors!'  When this singular priest had 
finished speaking, he hastily armed himself with sword and lance, 
mounted a war-horse, rode at a furious gallop in sight of all the 
people to the temple, and flung his lance against it as an insult.  
From that time, the Christian religion spread itself among the 
Saxons, and became their faith.

The next very famous prince was EGBERT.  He lived about a hundred 
and fifty years afterwards, and claimed to have a better right to 
the throne of Wessex than BEORTRIC, another Saxon prince who was at 
the head of that kingdom, and who married EDBURGA, the daughter of 
OFFA, king of another of the seven kingdoms.  This QUEEN EDBURGA 
was a handsome murderess, who poisoned people when they offended 
her.  One day, she mixed a cup of poison for a certain noble 
belonging to the court; but her husband drank of it too, by 
mistake, and died.  Upon this, the people revolted, in great 
crowds; and running to the palace, and thundering at the gates, 
cried, 'Down with the wicked queen, who poisons men!'  They drove 
her out of the country, and abolished the title she had disgraced.  
When years had passed away, some travellers came home from Italy, 
and said that in the town of Pavia they had seen a ragged beggar-
woman, who had once been handsome, but was then shrivelled, bent, 
and yellow, wandering about the streets, crying for bread; and that 
this beggar-woman was the poisoning English queen.  It was, indeed, 
EDBURGA; and so she died, without a shelter for her wretched head.

EGBERT, not considering himself safe in England, in consequence of 
his having claimed the crown of Wessex (for he thought his rival 
might take him prisoner and put him to death), sought refuge at the 
court of CHARLEMAGNE, King of France.  On the death of BEORTRIC, so 
unhappily poisoned by mistake, EGBERT came back to Britain; 
succeeded to the throne of Wessex; conquered some of the other 
monarchs of the seven kingdoms; added their territories to his own; 
and, for the first time, called the country over which he ruled, 
ENGLAND.

And now, new enemies arose, who, for a long time, troubled England 
sorely.  These were the Northmen, the people of Denmark and Norway, 
whom the English called the Danes.  They were a warlike people, 
quite at home upon the sea; not Christians; very daring and cruel.  
They came over in ships, and plundered and burned wheresoever they 
landed.  Once, they beat EGBERT in battle.  Once, EGBERT beat them.  
But, they cared no more for being beaten than the English 
themselves.  In the four following short reigns, of ETHELWULF, and 
his sons, ETHELBALD, ETHELBERT, and ETHELRED, they came back, over 
and over again, burning and plundering, and laying England waste.  
In the last-mentioned reign, they seized EDMUND, King of East 
England, and bound him to a tree.  Then, they proposed to him that 
he should change his religion; but he, being a good Christian, 
steadily refused.  Upon that, they beat him, made cowardly jests 
upon him, all defenceless as he was, shot arrows at him, and, 
finally, struck off his head.  It is impossible to say whose head 
they might have struck off next, but for the death of KING ETHELRED 
from a wound he had received in fighting against them, and the 
succession to his throne of the best and wisest king that ever 
lived in England.



CHAPTER III - ENGLAND UNDER THE GOOD SAXON, ALFRED



ALFRED THE GREAT was a young man, three-and-twenty years of age, 
when he became king.  Twice in his childhood, he had been taken to 
Rome, where the Saxon nobles were in the habit of going on journeys 
which they supposed to be religious; and, once, he had stayed for 
some time in Paris.  Learning, however, was so little cared for, 
then, that at twelve years old he had not been taught to read; 
although, of the sons of KING ETHELWULF, he, the youngest, was the 
favourite.  But he had - as most men who grow up to be great and 
good are generally found to have had - an excellent mother; and, 
one day, this lady, whose name was OSBURGA, happened, as she was 
sitting among her sons, to read a book of Saxon poetry.  The art of 
printing was not known until long and long after that period, and 
the book, which was written, was what is called 'illuminated,' with 
beautiful bright letters, richly painted.  The brothers admiring it 
very much, their mother said, 'I will give it to that one of you 
four princes who first learns to read.'  ALFRED sought out a tutor 
that very day, applied himself to learn with great diligence, and 
soon won the book.  He was proud of it, all his life.

This great king, in the first year of his reign, fought nine 
battles with the Danes.  He made some treaties with them too, by 
which the false Danes swore they would quit the country.  They 
pretended to consider that they had taken a very solemn oath, in 
swearing this upon the holy bracelets that they wore, and which 
were always buried with them when they died; but they cared little 
for it, for they thought nothing of breaking oaths and treaties 
too, as soon as it suited their purpose, and coming back again to 
fight, plunder, and burn, as usual.  One fatal winter, in the 
fourth year of KING ALFRED'S reign, they spread themselves in great 
numbers over the whole of England; and so dispersed and routed the 
King's soldiers that the King was left alone, and was obliged to 
disguise himself as a common peasant, and to take refuge in the 
cottage of one of his cowherds who did not know his face.

Here, KING ALFRED, while the Danes sought him far and near, was 
left alone one day, by the cowherd's wife, to watch some cakes 
which she put to bake upon the hearth.  But, being at work upon his 
bow and arrows, with which he hoped to punish the false Danes when 
a brighter time should come, and thinking deeply of his poor 
unhappy subjects whom the Danes chased through the land, his noble 
mind forgot the cakes, and they were burnt.  'What!' said the 
cowherd's wife, who scolded him well when she came back, and little 
thought she was scolding the King, 'you will be ready enough to eat 
them by-and-by, and yet you cannot watch them, idle dog?'

At length, the Devonshire men made head against a new host of Danes 
who landed on their coast; killed their chief, and captured their 
flag; on which was represented the likeness of a Raven - a very fit 
bird for a thievish army like that, I think.  The loss of their 
standard troubled the Danes greatly, for they believed it to be 
enchanted - woven by the three daughters of one father in a single 
afternoon - and they had a story among themselves that when they 
were victorious in battle, the Raven stretched his wings and seemed 
to fly; and that when they were defeated, he would droop.  He had 
good reason to droop, now, if he could have done anything half so 
sensible; for, KING ALFRED joined the Devonshire men; made a camp 
with them on a piece of firm ground in the midst of a bog in 
Somersetshire; and prepared for a great attempt for vengeance on 
the Danes, and the deliverance of his oppressed people.

But, first, as it was important to know how numerous those 
pestilent Danes were, and how they were fortified, KING ALFRED, 
being a good musician, disguised himself as a glee-man or minstrel, 
and went, with his harp, to the Danish camp.  He played and sang in 
the very tent of GUTHRUM the Danish leader, and entertained the 
Danes as they caroused.  While he seemed to think of nothing but 
his music, he was watchful of their tents, their arms, their 
discipline, everything that he desired to know.  And right soon did 
this great king entertain them to a different tune; for, summoning 
all his true followers to meet him at an appointed place, where 
they received him with joyful shouts and tears, as the monarch whom 
many of them had given up for lost or dead, he put himself at their 
head, marched on the Danish camp, defeated the Danes with great 
slaughter, and besieged them for fourteen days to prevent their 
escape.  But, being as merciful as he was good and brave, he then, 
instead of killing them, proposed peace:  on condition that they 
should altogether depart from that Western part of England, and 
settle in the East; and that GUTHRUM should become a Christian, in 
remembrance of the Divine religion which now taught his conqueror, 
the noble ALFRED, to forgive the enemy who had so often injured 
him.  This, GUTHRUM did.  At his baptism, KING ALFRED was his 
godfather.  And GUTHRUM was an honourable chief who well deserved 
that clemency; for, ever afterwards he was loyal and faithful to 
the king.  The Danes under him were faithful too.  They plundered 
and burned no more, but worked like honest men.  They ploughed, and 
sowed, and reaped, and led good honest English lives.  And I hope 
the children of those Danes played, many a time, with Saxon 
children in the sunny fields; and that Danish young men fell in 
love with Saxon girls, and married them; and that English 
travellers, benighted at the doors of Danish cottages, often went 
in for shelter until morning; and that Danes and Saxons sat by the 
red fire, friends, talking of KING ALFRED THE GREAT.

All the Danes were not like these under GUTHRUM; for, after some 
years, more of them came over, in the old plundering and burning 
way - among them a fierce pirate of the name of HASTINGS, who had 
the boldness to sail up the Thames to Gravesend, with eighty ships.  
For three years, there was a war with these Danes; and there was a 
famine in the country, too, and a plague, both upon human creatures 
and beasts.  But KING ALFRED, whose mighty heart never failed him, 
built large ships nevertheless, with which to pursue the pirates on 
the sea; and he encouraged his soldiers, by his brave example, to 
fight valiantly against them on the shore.  At last, he drove them 
all away; and then there was repose in England.

As great and good in peace, as he was great and good in war, KING 
ALFRED never rested from his labours to improve his people.  He 
loved to talk with clever men, and with travellers from foreign 
countries, and to write down what they told him, for his people to 
read.  He had studied Latin after learning to read English, and now 
another of his labours was, to translate Latin books into the 
English-Saxon tongue, that his people might be interested, and 
improved by their contents.  He made just laws, that they might 
live more happily and freely; he turned away all partial judges, 
that no wrong might be done them; he was so careful of their 
property, and punished robbers so severely, that it was a common 
thing to say that under the great KING ALFRED, garlands of golden 
chains and jewels might have hung across the streets, and no man 
would have touched one.  He founded schools; he patiently heard 
causes himself in his Court of Justice; the great desires of his 
heart were, to do right to all his subjects, and to leave England 
better, wiser, happier in all ways, than he found it.  His industry 
in these efforts was quite astonishing.  Every day he divided into 
certain portions, and in each portion devoted himself to a certain 
pursuit.  That he might divide his time exactly, he had wax torches 
or candles made, which were all of the same size, were notched 
across at regular distances, and were always kept burning.  Thus, 
as the candles burnt down, he divided the day into notches, almost 
as accurately as we now divide it into hours upon the clock.  But 
when the candles were first invented, it was found that the wind 
and draughts of air, blowing into the palace through the doors and 
windows, and through the chinks in the walls, caused them to gutter 
and burn unequally.  To prevent this, the King had them put into 
cases formed of wood and white horn.  And these were the first 
lanthorns ever made in England.

All this time, he was afflicted with a terrible unknown disease, 
which caused him violent and frequent pain that nothing could 
relieve.  He bore it, as he had borne all the troubles of his life, 
like a brave good man, until he was fifty-three years old; and 
then, having reigned thirty years, he died.  He died in the year 
nine hundred and one; but, long ago as that is, his fame, and the 
love and gratitude with which his subjects regarded him, are 
freshly remembered to the present hour.

In the next reign, which was the reign of EDWARD, surnamed THE 
ELDER, who was chosen in council to succeed, a nephew of KING 
ALFRED troubled the country by trying to obtain the throne.  The 
Danes in the East of England took part with this usurper (perhaps 
because they had honoured his uncle so much, and honoured him for 
his uncle's sake), and there was hard fighting; but, the King, with 
the assistance of his sister, gained the day, and reigned in peace 
for four and twenty years.  He gradually extended his power over 
the whole of England, and so the Seven Kingdoms were united into 
one.

When England thus became one kingdom, ruled over by one Saxon king, 
the Saxons had been settled in the country more than four hundred 
and fifty years.  Great changes had taken place in its customs 
during that time.  The Saxons were still greedy eaters and great 
drinkers, and their feasts were often of a noisy and drunken kind; 
but many new comforts and even elegances had become known, and were 
fast increasing.  Hangings for the walls of rooms, where, in these 
modern days, we paste up paper, are known to have been sometimes 
made of silk, ornamented with birds and flowers in needlework.  
Tables and chairs were curiously carved in different woods; were 
sometimes decorated with gold or silver; sometimes even made of 
those precious metals.  Knives and spoons were used at table; 
golden ornaments were worn - with silk and cloth, and golden 
tissues and embroideries; dishes were made of gold and silver, 
brass and bone.  There were varieties of drinking-horns, bedsteads, 
musical instruments.  A harp was passed round, at a feast, like the 
drinking-bowl, from guest to guest; and each one usually sang or 
played when his turn came.  The weapons of the Saxons were stoutly 
made, and among them was a terrible iron hammer that gave deadly 
blows, and was long remembered.  The Saxons themselves were a 
handsome people.  The men were proud of their long fair hair, 
parted on the forehead; their ample beards, their fresh 
complexions, and clear eyes.  The beauty of the Saxon women filled 
all England with a new delight and grace.

I have more to tell of the Saxons yet, but I stop to say this now, 
because under the GREAT ALFRED, all the best points of the English-
Saxon character were first encouraged, and in him first shown.  It 
has been the greatest character among the nations of the earth.  
Wherever the descendants of the Saxon race have gone, have sailed, 
or otherwise made their way, even to the remotest regions of the 
world, they have been patient, persevering, never to be broken in 
spirit, never to be turned aside from enterprises on which they 
have resolved.  In Europe, Asia, Africa, America, the whole world 
over; in the desert, in the forest, on the sea; scorched by a 
burning sun, or frozen by ice that never melts; the Saxon blood 
remains unchanged.  Wheresoever that race goes, there, law, and 
industry, and safety for life and property, and all the great 
results of steady perseverance, are certain to arise.

I pause to think with admiration, of the noble king who, in his 
single person, possessed all the Saxon virtues.  Whom misfortune 
could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose 
perseverance nothing could shake.  Who was hopeful in defeat, and 
generous in success.  Who loved justice, freedom, truth, and 
knowledge.  Who, in his care to instruct his people, probably did 
more to preserve the beautiful old Saxon language, than I can 
imagine.  Without whom, the English tongue in which I tell this 
story might have wanted half its meaning.  As it is said that his 
spirit still inspires some of our best English laws, so, let you 
and I pray that it may animate our English hearts, at least to this 
- to resolve, when we see any of our fellow-creatures left in 
ignorance, that we will do our best, while life is in us, to have 
them taught; and to tell those rulers whose duty it is to teach 
them, and who neglect their duty, that they have profited very 
little by all the years that have rolled away since the year nine 
hundred and one, and that they are far behind the bright example of 
KING ALFRED THE GREAT.



CHAPTER IV - ENGLAND UNDER ATHELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY-KINGS



ATHELSTAN, the son of Edward the Elder, succeeded that king.  He 
reigned only fifteen years; but he remembered the glory of his 
grandfather, the great Alfred, and governed England well.  He 
reduced the turbulent people of Wales, and obliged them to pay him 
a tribute in money, and in cattle, and to send him their best hawks 
and hounds.  He was victorious over the Cornish men, who were not 
yet quite under the Saxon government.  He restored such of the old 
laws as were good, and had fallen into disuse; made some wise new 
laws, and took care of the poor and weak.  A strong alliance, made 
against him by ANLAF a Danish prince, CONSTANTINE King of the 
Scots, and the people of North Wales, he broke and defeated in one 
great battle, long famous for the vast numbers slain in it.  After 
that, he had a quiet reign; the lords and ladies about him had 
leisure to become polite and agreeable; and foreign princes were 
glad (as they have sometimes been since) to come to England on 
visits to the English court.

When Athelstan died, at forty-seven years old, his brother EDMUND, 
who was only eighteen, became king.  He was the first of six boy-
kings, as you will presently know.

They called him the Magnificent, because he showed a taste for 
improvement and refinement.  But he was beset by the Danes, and had 
a short and troubled reign, which came to a troubled end.  One 
night, when he was feasting in his hall, and had eaten much and 
drunk deep, he saw, among the company, a noted robber named LEOF, 
who had been banished from England.  Made very angry by the 
boldness of this man, the King turned to his cup-bearer, and said, 
'There is a robber sitting at the table yonder, who, for his 
crimes, is an outlaw in the land - a hunted wolf, whose life any 
man may take, at any time.  Command that robber to depart!'  'I 
will not depart!' said Leof.  'No?' cried the King.  'No, by the 
Lord!' said Leof.  Upon that the King rose from his seat, and, 
making passionately at the robber, and seizing him by his long 
hair, tried to throw him down.  But the robber had a dagger 
underneath his cloak, and, in the scuffle, stabbed the King to 
death.  That done, he set his back against the wall, and fought so 
desperately, that although he was soon cut to pieces by the King's 
armed men, and the wall and pavement were splashed with his blood, 
yet it was not before he had killed and wounded many of them.  You 
may imagine what rough lives the kings of those times led, when one 
of them could struggle, half drunk, with a public robber in his own 
dining-hall, and be stabbed in presence of the company who ate and 
drank with him.

Then succeeded the boy-king EDRED, who was weak and sickly in body, 
but of a strong mind.  And his armies fought the Northmen, the 
Danes, and Norwegians, or the Sea-Kings, as they were called, and 
beat them for the time.  And, in nine years, Edred died, and passed 
away.

Then came the boy-king EDWY, fifteen years of age; but the real 
king, who had the real power, was a monk named DUNSTAN - a clever 
priest, a little mad, and not a little proud and cruel.

Dunstan was then Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, whither the body of 
King Edmund the Magnificent was carried, to be buried.  While yet a 
boy, he had got out of his bed one night (being then in a fever), 
and walked about Glastonbury Church when it was under repair; and, 
because he did not tumble off some scaffolds that were there, and 
break his neck, it was reported that he had been shown over the 
building by an angel.  He had also made a harp that was said to 
play of itself - which it very likely did, as AEolian Harps, which 
are played by the wind, and are understood now, always do.  For 
these wonders he had been once denounced by his enemies, who were 
jealous of his favour with the late King Athelstan, as a magician; 
and he had been waylaid, bound hand and foot, and thrown into a 
marsh.  But he got out again, somehow, to cause a great deal of 
trouble yet.

The priests of those days were, generally, the only scholars.  They 
were learned in many things.  Having to make their own convents and 
monasteries on uncultivated grounds that were granted to them by 
the Crown, it was necessary that they should be good farmers and 
good gardeners, or their lands would have been too poor to support 
them.  For the decoration of the chapels where they prayed, and for 
the comfort of the refectories where they ate and drank, it was 
necessary that there should be good carpenters, good smiths, good 
painters, among them.  For their greater safety in sickness and 
accident, living alone by themselves in solitary places, it was 
necessary that they should study the virtues of plants and herbs, 
and should know how to dress cuts, burns, scalds, and bruises, and 
how to set broken limbs.  Accordingly, they taught themselves, and 
one another, a great variety of useful arts; and became skilful in 
agriculture, medicine, surgery, and handicraft.  And when they 
wanted the aid of any little piece of machinery, which would be 
simple enough now, but was marvellous then, to impose a trick upon 
the poor peasants, they knew very well how to make it; and DID make 
it many a time and often, I have no doubt.

Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, was one of the most sagacious 
of these monks.  He was an ingenious smith, and worked at a forge 
in a little cell.  This cell was made too short to admit of his 
lying at full length when he went to sleep - as if THAT did any 
good to anybody! - and he used to tell the most extraordinary lies 
about demons and spirits, who, he said, came there to persecute 
him.  For instance, he related that one day when he was at work, 
the devil looked in at the little window, and tried to tempt him to 
lead a life of idle pleasure; whereupon, having his pincers in the 
fire, red hot, he seized the devil by the nose, and put him to such 
pain, that his bellowings were heard for miles and miles.  Some 
people are inclined to think this nonsense a part of Dunstan's 
madness (for his head never quite recovered the fever), but I think 
not.  I observe that it induced the ignorant people to consider him 
a holy man, and that it made him very powerful.  Which was exactly 
what he always wanted.

On the day of the coronation of the handsome boy-king Edwy, it was 
remarked by ODO, Archbishop of Canterbury (who was a Dane by 
birth), that the King quietly left the coronation feast, while all 
the company were there.  Odo, much displeased, sent his friend 
Dunstan to seek him.  Dunstan finding him in the company of his 
beautiful young wife ELGIVA, and her mother ETHELGIVA, a good and 
virtuous lady, not only grossly abused them, but dragged the young 
King back into the feasting-hall by force.  Some, again, think 
Dunstan did this because the young King's fair wife was his own 
cousin, and the monks objected to people marrying their own 
cousins; but I believe he did it, because he was an imperious, 
audacious, ill-conditioned priest, who, having loved a young lady 
himself before he became a sour monk, hated all love now, and 
everything belonging to it.

The young King was quite old enough to feel this insult.  Dunstan 
had been Treasurer in the last reign, and he soon charged Dunstan 
with having taken some of the last king's money.  The Glastonbury 
Abbot fled to Belgium (very narrowly escaping some pursuers who 
were sent to put out his eyes, as you will wish they had, when you 
read what follows), and his abbey was given to priests who were 
married; whom he always, both before and afterwards, opposed.  But 
he quickly conspired with his friend, Odo the Dane, to set up the 
King's young brother, EDGAR, as his rival for the throne; and, not 
content with this revenge, he caused the beautiful queen Elgiva, 
though a lovely girl of only seventeen or eighteen, to be stolen 
from one of the Royal Palaces, branded in the cheek with a red-hot 
iron, and sold into slavery in Ireland.  But the Irish people 
pitied and befriended her; and they said, 'Let us restore the girl-
queen to the boy-king, and make the young lovers happy!' and they 
cured her of her cruel wound, and sent her home as beautiful as 
before.  But the villain Dunstan, and that other villain, Odo, 
caused her to be waylaid at Gloucester as she was joyfully hurrying 
to join her husband, and to be hacked and hewn with swords, and to 
be barbarously maimed and lamed, and left to die.  When Edwy the 
Fair (his people called him so, because he was so young and 
handsome) heard of her dreadful fate, he died of a broken heart; 
and so the pitiful story of the poor young wife and husband ends!  
Ah!  Better to be two cottagers in these better times, than king 
and queen of England in those bad days, though never so fair!

Then came the boy-king, EDGAR, called the Peaceful, fifteen years 
old.  Dunstan, being still the real king, drove all married priests 
out of the monasteries and abbeys, and replaced them by solitary 
monks like himself, of the rigid order called the Benedictines.  He 
made himself Archbishop of Canterbury, for his greater glory; and 
exercised such power over the neighbouring British princes, and so 
collected them about the King, that once, when the King held his 
court at Chester, and went on the river Dee to visit the monastery 
of St. John, the eight oars of his boat were pulled (as the people 
used to delight in relating in stories and songs) by eight crowned 
kings, and steered by the King of England.  As Edgar was very 
obedient to Dunstan and the monks, they took great pains to 
represent him as the best of kings.  But he was really profligate, 
debauched, and vicious.  He once forcibly carried off a young lady 
from the convent at Wilton; and Dunstan, pretending to be very much 
shocked, condemned him not to wear his crown upon his head for 
seven years - no great punishment, I dare say, as it can hardly 
have been a more comfortable ornament to wear, than a stewpan 
without a handle.  His marriage with his second wife, ELFRIDA, is 
one of the worst events of his reign.  Hearing of the beauty of 
this lady, he despatched his favourite courtier, ATHELWOLD, to her 
father's castle in Devonshire, to see if she were really as 
charming as fame reported.  Now, she was so exceedingly beautiful 
that Athelwold fell in love with her himself, and married her; but 
he told the King that she was only rich - not handsome.  The King, 
suspecting the truth when they came home, resolved to pay the 
newly-married couple a visit; and, suddenly, told Athelwold to 
prepare for his immediate coming.  Athelwold, terrified, confessed 
to his young wife what he had said and done, and implored her to 
disguise her beauty by some ugly dress or silly manner, that he 
might be safe from the King's anger.  She promised that she would; 
but she was a proud woman, who would far rather have been a queen 
than the wife of a courtier.  She dressed herself in her best 
dress, and adorned herself with her richest jewels; and when the 
King came, presently, he discovered the cheat.  So, he caused his 
false friend, Athelwold, to be murdered in a wood, and married his 
widow, this bad Elfrida.  Six or seven years afterwards, he died; 
and was buried, as if he had been all that the monks said he was, 
in the abbey of Glastonbury, which he - or Dunstan for him - had 
much enriched.

England, in one part of this reign, was so troubled by wolves, 
which, driven out of the open country, hid themselves in the 
mountains of Wales when they were not attacking travellers and 
animals, that the tribute payable by the Welsh people was forgiven 
them, on condition of their producing, every year, three hundred 
wolves' heads.  And the Welshmen were so sharp upon the wolves, to 
save their money, that in four years there was not a wolf left.

Then came the boy-king, EDWARD, called the Martyr, from the manner 
of his death.  Elfrida had a son, named ETHELRED, for whom she 
claimed the throne; but Dunstan did not choose to favour him, and 
he made Edward king.  The boy was hunting, one day, down in 
Dorsetshire, when he rode near to Corfe Castle, where Elfrida and 
Ethelred lived.  Wishing to see them kindly, he rode away from his 
attendants and galloped to the castle gate, where he arrived at 
twilight, and blew his hunting-horn.  'You are welcome, dear King,' 
said Elfrida, coming out, with her brightest smiles.  'Pray you 
dismount and enter.'  'Not so, dear madam,' said the King.  'My 
company will miss me, and fear that I have met with some harm.  
Please you to give me a cup of wine, that I may drink here, in the 
saddle, to you and to my little brother, and so ride away with the 
good speed I have made in riding here.'  Elfrida, going in to bring 
the wine, whispered an armed servant, one of her attendants, who 
stole out of the darkening gateway, and crept round behind the 
King's horse.  As the King raised the cup to his lips, saying, 
'Health!' to the wicked woman who was smiling on him, and to his 
innocent brother whose hand she held in hers, and who was only ten 
years old, this armed man made a spring and stabbed him in the 
back.  He dropped the cup and spurred his horse away; but, soon 
fainting with loss of blood, dropped from the saddle, and, in his 
fall, entangled one of his feet in the stirrup.  The frightened 
horse dashed on; trailing his rider's curls upon the ground; 
dragging his smooth young face through ruts, and stones, and 
briers, and fallen leaves, and mud; until the hunters, tracking the 
animal's course by the King's blood, caught his bridle, and 
released the disfigured body.

Then came the sixth and last of the boy-kings, ETHELRED, whom 
Elfrida, when he cried out at the sight of his murdered brother 
riding away from the castle gate, unmercifully beat with a torch 
which she snatched from one of the attendants.  The people so 
disliked this boy, on account of his cruel mother and the murder 
she had done to promote him, that Dunstan would not have had him 
for king, but would have made EDGITHA, the daughter of the dead 
King Edgar, and of the lady whom he stole out of the convent at 
Wilton, Queen of England, if she would have consented.  But she 
knew the stories of the youthful kings too well, and would not be 
persuaded from the convent where she lived in peace; so, Dunstan 
put Ethelred on the throne, having no one else to put there, and 
gave him the nickname of THE UNREADY - knowing that he wanted 
resolution and firmness.

At first, Elfrida possessed great influence over the young King, 
but, as he grew older and came of age, her influence declined.  The 
infamous woman, not having it in her power to do any more evil, 
then retired from court, and, according, to the fashion of the 
time, built churches and monasteries, to expiate her guilt.  As if 
a church, with a steeple reaching to the very stars, would have 
been any sign of true repentance for the blood of the poor boy, 
whose murdered form was trailed at his horse's heels!  As if she 
could have buried her wickedness beneath the senseless stones of 
the whole world, piled up one upon another, for the monks to live 
in!

About the ninth or tenth year of this reign, Dunstan died.  He was 
growing old then, but was as stern and artful as ever.  Two 
circumstances that happened in connexion with him, in this reign of 
Ethelred, made a great noise.  Once, he was present at a meeting of 
the Church, when the question was discussed whether priests should 
have permission to marry; and, as he sat with his head hung down, 
apparently thinking about it, a voice seemed to come out of a 
crucifix in the room, and warn the meeting to be of his opinion.  
This was some juggling of Dunstan's, and was probably his own voice 
disguised.  But he played off a worse juggle than that, soon 
afterwards; for, another meeting being held on the same subject, 
and he and his supporters being seated on one side of a great room, 
and their opponents on the other, he rose and said, 'To Christ 
himself, as judge, do I commit this cause!'  Immediately on these 
words being spoken, the floor where the opposite party sat gave 
way, and some were killed and many wounded.  You may be pretty sure 
that it had been weakened under Dunstan's direction, and that it 
fell at Dunstan's signal.  HIS part of the floor did not go down.  
No, no.  He was too good a workman for that.

When he died, the monks settled that he was a Saint, and called him 
Saint Dunstan ever afterwards.  They might just as well have 
settled that he was a coach-horse, and could just as easily have 
called him one.

Ethelred the Unready was glad enough, I dare say, to be rid of this 
holy saint; but, left to himself, he was a poor weak king, and his 
reign was a reign of defeat and shame.  The restless Danes, led by 
SWEYN, a son of the King of Denmark who had quarrelled with his 
father and had been banished from home, again came into England, 
and, year after year, attacked and despoiled large towns.  To coax 
these sea-kings away, the weak Ethelred paid them money; but, the 
more money he paid, the more money the Danes wanted.  At first, he 
gave them ten thousand pounds; on their next invasion, sixteen 
thousand pounds; on their next invasion, four and twenty thousand 
pounds:  to pay which large sums, the unfortunate English people 
were heavily taxed.  But, as the Danes still came back and wanted 
more, he thought it would be a good plan to marry into some 
powerful foreign family that would help him with soldiers.  So, in 
the year one thousand and two, he courted and married Emma, the 
sister of Richard Duke of Normandy; a lady who was called the 
Flower of Normandy.

And now, a terrible deed was done in England, the like of which was 
never done on English ground before or since.  On the thirteenth of 
November, in pursuance of secret instructions sent by the King over 
the whole country, the inhabitants of every town and city armed, 
and murdered all the Danes who were their neighbours.

Young and old, babies and soldiers, men and women, every Dane was 
killed.  No doubt there were among them many ferocious men who had 
done the English great wrong, and whose pride and insolence, in 
swaggering in the houses of the English and insulting their wives 
and daughters, had become unbearable; but no doubt there were also 
among them many peaceful Christian Danes who had married English 
women and become like English men.  They were all slain, even to 
GUNHILDA, the sister of the King of Denmark, married to an English 
lord; who was first obliged to see the murder of her husband and 
her child, and then was killed herself.

When the King of the sea-kings heard of this deed of blood, he 
swore that he would have a great revenge.  He raised an army, and a 
mightier fleet of ships than ever yet had sailed to England; and in 
all his army there was not a slave or an old man, but every soldier 
was a free man, and the son of a free man, and in the prime of 
life, and sworn to be revenged upon the English nation, for the 
massacre of that dread thirteenth of November, when his countrymen 
and countrywomen, and the little children whom they loved, were 
killed with fire and sword.  And so, the sea-kings came to England 
in many great ships, each bearing the flag of its own commander.  
Golden eagles, ravens, dragons, dolphins, beasts of prey, 
threatened England from the prows of those ships, as they came 
onward through the water; and were reflected in the shining shields 
that hung upon their sides.  The ship that bore the standard of the 
King of the sea-kings was carved and painted like a mighty serpent; 
and the King in his anger prayed that the Gods in whom he trusted 
might all desert him, if his serpent did not strike its fangs into 
England's heart.

And indeed it did.  For, the great army landing from the great 
fleet, near Exeter, went forward, laying England waste, and 
striking their lances in the earth as they advanced, or throwing 
them into rivers, in token of their making all the island theirs.  
In remembrance of the black November night when the Danes were 
murdered, wheresoever the invaders came, they made the Saxons 
prepare and spread for them great feasts; and when they had eaten 
those feasts, and had drunk a curse to England with wild 
rejoicings, they drew their swords, and killed their Saxon 
entertainers, and marched on.  For six long years they carried on 
this war:  burning the crops, farmhouses, barns, mills, granaries; 
killing the labourers in the fields; preventing the seed from being 
sown in the ground; causing famine and starvation; leaving only 
heaps of ruin and smoking ashes, where they had found rich towns.  
To crown this misery, English officers and men deserted, and even 
the favourites of Ethelred the Unready, becoming traitors, seized 
many of the English ships, turned pirates against their own 
country, and aided by a storm occasioned the loss of nearly the 
whole English navy.

There was but one man of note, at this miserable pass, who was true 
to his country and the feeble King.  He was a priest, and a brave 
one.  For twenty days, the Archbishop of Canterbury defended that 
city against its Danish besiegers; and when a traitor in the town 
threw the gates open and admitted them, he said, in chains, 'I will 
not buy my life with money that must be extorted from the suffering 
people.  Do with me what you please!'  Again and again, he steadily 
refused to purchase his release with gold wrung from the poor.

At last, the Danes being tired of this, and being assembled at a 
drunken merry-making, had him brought into the feasting-hall.

'Now, bishop,' they said, 'we want gold!'

He looked round on the crowd of angry faces; from the shaggy beards 
close to him, to the shaggy beards against the walls, where men 
were mounted on tables and forms to see him over the heads of 
others:  and he knew that his time was come.

'I have no gold,' he said.

'Get it, bishop!' they all thundered.

'That, I have often told you I will not,' said he.

They gathered closer round him, threatening, but he stood unmoved.  
Then, one man struck him; then, another; then a cursing soldier 
picked up from a heap in a corner of the hall, where fragments had 
been rudely thrown at dinner, a great ox-bone, and cast it at his 
face, from which the blood came spurting forth; then, others ran to 
the same heap, and knocked him down with other bones, and bruised 
and battered him; until one soldier whom he had baptised (willing, 
as I hope for the sake of that soldier's soul, to shorten the 
sufferings of the good man) struck him dead with his battle-axe.

If Ethelred had had the heart to emulate the courage of this noble 
archbishop, he might have done something yet.  But he paid the 
Danes forty-eight thousand pounds, instead, and gained so little by 
the cowardly act, that Sweyn soon afterwards came over to subdue 
all England.  So broken was the attachment of the English people, 
by this time, to their incapable King and their forlorn country 
which could not protect them, that they welcomed Sweyn on all 
sides, as a deliverer.  London faithfully stood out, as long as the 
King was within its walls; but, when he sneaked away, it also 
welcomed the Dane.  Then, all was over; and the King took refuge 
abroad with the Duke of Normandy, who had already given shelter to 
the King's wife, once the Flower of that country, and to her 
children.

Still, the English people, in spite of their sad sufferings, could 
not quite forget the great King Alfred and the Saxon race.  When 
Sweyn died suddenly, in little more than a month after he had been 
proclaimed King of England, they generously sent to Ethelred, to 
say that they would have him for their King again, 'if he would 
only govern them better than he had governed them before.'  The 
Unready, instead of coming himself, sent Edward, one of his sons, 
to make promises for him.  At last, he followed, and the English 
declared him King.  The Danes declared CANUTE, the son of Sweyn, 
King.  Thus, direful war began again, and lasted for three years, 
when the Unready died.  And I know of nothing better that he did, 
in all his reign of eight and thirty years.

Was Canute to be King now?  Not over the Saxons, they said; they 
must have EDMUND, one of the sons of the Unready, who was surnamed 
IRONSIDE, because of his strength and stature.  Edmund and Canute 
thereupon fell to, and fought five battles - O unhappy England, 
what a fighting-ground it was! - and then Ironside, who was a big 
man, proposed to Canute, who was a little man, that they two should 
fight it out in single combat.  If Canute had been the big man, he 
would probably have said yes, but, being the little man, he 
decidedly said no.  However, he declared that he was willing to 
divide the kingdom - to take all that lay north of Watling Street, 
as the old Roman military road from Dover to Chester was called, 
and to give Ironside all that lay south of it.  Most men being 
weary of so much bloodshed, this was done.  But Canute soon became 
sole King of England; for Ironside died suddenly within two months.  
Some think that he was killed, and killed by Canute's orders.  No 
one knows.



CHAPTER V - ENGLAND UNDER CANUTE THE DANE



CANUTE reigned eighteen years.  He was a merciless King at first.  
After he had clasped the hands of the Saxon chiefs, in token of the 
sincerity with which he swore to be just and good to them in return 
for their acknowledging him, he denounced and slew many of them, as 
well as many relations of the late King.  'He who brings me the 
head of one of my enemies,' he used to say, 'shall be dearer to me 
than a brother.'  And he was so severe in hunting down his enemies, 
that he must have got together a pretty large family of these dear 
brothers.  He was strongly inclined to kill EDMUND and EDWARD, two 
children, sons of poor Ironside; but, being afraid to do so in 
England, he sent them over to the King of Sweden, with a request 
that the King would be so good as 'dispose of them.'  If the King 
of Sweden had been like many, many other men of that day, he would 
have had their innocent throats cut; but he was a kind man, and 
brought them up tenderly.

Normandy ran much in Canute's mind.  In Normandy were the two 
children of the late king - EDWARD and ALFRED by name; and their 
uncle the Duke might one day claim the crown for them.  But the 
Duke showed so little inclination to do so now, that he proposed to 
Canute to marry his sister, the widow of The Unready; who, being 
but a showy flower, and caring for nothing so much as becoming a 
queen again, left her children and was wedded to him.

Successful and triumphant, assisted by the valour of the English in 
his foreign wars, and with little strife to trouble him at home, 
Canute had a prosperous reign, and made many improvements.  He was 
a poet and a musician.  He grew sorry, as he grew older, for the 
blood he had shed at first; and went to Rome in a Pilgrim's dress, 
by way of washing it out.  He gave a great deal of money to 
foreigners on his journey; but he took it from the English before 
he started.  On the whole, however, he certainly became a far 
better man when he had no opposition to contend with, and was as 
great a King as England had known for some time.

The old writers of history relate how that Canute was one day 
disgusted with his courtiers for their flattery, and how he caused 
his chair to be set on the sea-shore, and feigned to command the 
tide as it came up not to wet the edge of his robe, for the land 
was his; how the tide came up, of course, without regarding him; 
and how he then turned to his flatterers, and rebuked them, saying, 
what was the might of any earthly king, to the might of the 
Creator, who could say unto the sea, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and 
no farther!'  We may learn from this, I think, that a little sense 
will go a long way in a king; and that courtiers are not easily 
cured of flattery, nor kings of a liking for it.  If the courtiers 
of Canute had not known, long before, that the King was fond of 
flattery, they would have known better than to offer it in such 
large doses.  And if they had not known that he was vain of this 
speech (anything but a wonderful speech it seems to me, if a good 
child had made it), they would not have been at such great pains to 
repeat it.  I fancy I see them all on the sea-shore together; the 
King's chair sinking in the sand; the King in a mighty good humour 
with his own wisdom; and the courtiers pretending to be quite 
stunned by it!

It is not the sea alone that is bidden to go 'thus far, and no 
farther.'  The great command goes forth to all the kings upon the 
earth, and went to Canute in the year one thousand and thirty-five, 
and stretched him dead upon his bed.  Beside it, stood his Norman 
wife.  Perhaps, as the King looked his last upon her, he, who had 
so often thought distrustfully of Normandy, long ago, thought once 
more of the two exiled Princes in their uncle's court, and of the 
little favour they could feel for either Danes or Saxons, and of a 
rising cloud in Normandy that slowly moved towards England.



CHAPTER VI - ENGLAND UNDER HAROLD HAREFOOT, HARDICANUTE, AND EDWARD 
THE CONFESSOR



CANUTE left three sons, by name SWEYN, HAROLD, and HARDICANUTE; but 
his Queen, Emma, once the Flower of Normandy, was the mother of 
only Hardicanute.  Canute had wished his dominions to be divided 
between the three, and had wished Harold to have England; but the 
Saxon people in the South of England, headed by a nobleman with 
great possessions, called the powerful EARL GODWIN (who is said to 
have been originally a poor cow-boy), opposed this, and desired to 
have, instead, either Hardicanute, or one of the two exiled Princes 
who were over in Normandy.  It seemed so certain that there would 
be more bloodshed to settle this dispute, that many people left 
their homes, and took refuge in the woods and swamps.  Happily, 
however, it was agreed to refer the whole question to a great 
meeting at Oxford, which decided that Harold should have all the 
country north of the Thames, with London for his capital city, and 
that Hardicanute should have all the south.  The quarrel was so 
arranged; and, as Hardicanute was in Denmark troubling himself very 
little about anything but eating and getting drunk, his mother and 
Earl Godwin governed the south for him.

They had hardly begun to do so, and the trembling people who had 
hidden themselves were scarcely at home again, when Edward, the 
elder of the two exiled Princes, came over from Normandy with a few 
followers, to claim the English Crown.  His mother Emma, however, 
who only cared for her last son Hardicanute, instead of assisting 
him, as he expected, opposed him so strongly with all her influence 
that he was very soon glad to get safely back.  His brother Alfred 
was not so fortunate.  Believing in an affectionate letter, written 
some time afterwards to him and his brother, in his mother's name 
(but whether really with or without his mother's knowledge is now 
uncertain), he allowed himself to be tempted over to England, with 
a good force of soldiers, and landing on the Kentish coast, and 
being met and welcomed by Earl Godwin, proceeded into Surrey, as 
far as the town of Guildford.  Here, he and his men halted in the 
evening to rest, having still the Earl in their company; who had 
ordered lodgings and good cheer for them.  But, in the dead of the 
night, when they were off their guard, being divided into small 
parties sleeping soundly after a long march and a plentiful supper 
in different houses, they were set upon by the King's troops, and 
taken prisoners.  Next morning they were drawn out in a line, to 
the number of six hundred men, and were barbarously tortured and 
killed; with the exception of every tenth man, who was sold into 
slavery.  As to the wretched Prince Alfred, he was stripped naked, 
tied to a horse and sent away into the Isle of Ely, where his eyes 
were torn out of his head, and where in a few days he miserably 
died.  I am not sure that the Earl had wilfully entrapped him, but 
I suspect it strongly.

Harold was now King all over England, though it is doubtful whether 
the Archbishop of Canterbury (the greater part of the priests were 
Saxons, and not friendly to the Danes) ever consented to crown him.  
Crowned or uncrowned, with the Archbishop's leave or without it, he 
was King for four years:  after which short reign he died, and was 
buried; having never done much in life but go a hunting.  He was 
such a fast runner at this, his favourite sport, that the people 
called him Harold Harefoot.

Hardicanute was then at Bruges, in Flanders, plotting, with his 
mother (who had gone over there after the cruel murder of Prince 
Alfred), for the invasion of England.  The Danes and Saxons, 
finding themselves without a King, and dreading new disputes, made 
common cause, and joined in inviting him to occupy the Throne.  He 
consented, and soon troubled them enough; for he brought over 
numbers of Danes, and taxed the people so insupportably to enrich 
those greedy favourites that there were many insurrections, 
especially one at Worcester, where the citizens rose and killed his 
tax-collectors; in revenge for which he burned their city.  He was 
a brutal King, whose first public act was to order the dead body of 
poor Harold Harefoot to be dug up, beheaded, and thrown into the 
river.  His end was worthy of such a beginning.  He fell down 
drunk, with a goblet of wine in his hand, at a wedding-feast at 
Lambeth, given in honour of the marriage of his standard-bearer, a 
Dane named TOWED THE PROUD.  And he never spoke again.

EDWARD, afterwards called by the monks THE CONFESSOR, succeeded; 
and his first act was to oblige his mother Emma, who had favoured 
him so little, to retire into the country; where she died some ten 
years afterwards.  He was the exiled prince whose brother Alfred 
had been so foully killed.  He had been invited over from Normandy 
by Hardicanute, in the course of his short reign of two years, and 
had been handsomely treated at court.  His cause was now favoured 
by the powerful Earl Godwin, and he was soon made King.  This Earl 
had been suspected by the people, ever since Prince Alfred's cruel 
death; he had even been tried in the last reign for the Prince's 
murder, but had been pronounced not guilty; chiefly, as it was 
supposed, because of a present he had made to the swinish King, of 
a gilded ship with a figure-head of solid gold, and a crew of 
eighty splendidly armed men.  It was his interest to help the new 
King with his power, if the new King would help him against the 
popular distrust and hatred.  So they made a bargain.  Edward the 
Confessor got the Throne.  The Earl got more power and more land, 
and his daughter Editha was made queen; for it was a part of their 
compact that the King should take her for his wife.

But, although she was a gentle lady, in all things worthy to be 
beloved - good, beautiful, sensible, and kind - the King from the 
first neglected her.  Her father and her six proud brothers, 
resenting this cold treatment, harassed the King greatly by 
exerting all their power to make him unpopular.  Having lived so 
long in Normandy, he preferred the Normans to the English.  He made 
a Norman Archbishop, and Norman Bishops; his great officers and 
favourites were all Normans; he introduced the Norman fashions and 
the Norman language; in imitation of the state custom of Normandy, 
he attached a great seal to his state documents, instead of merely 
marking them, as the Saxon Kings had done, with the sign of the 
cross - just as poor people who have never been taught to write, 
now make the same mark for their names.  All this, the powerful 
Earl Godwin and his six proud sons represented to the people as 
disfavour shown towards the English; and thus they daily increased 
their own power, and daily diminished the power of the King.

They were greatly helped by an event that occurred when he had 
reigned eight years.  Eustace, Earl of Bologne, who had married the 
King's sister, came to England on a visit.  After staying at the 
court some time, he set forth, with his numerous train of 
attendants, to return home.  They were to embark at Dover.  
Entering that peaceful town in armour, they took possession of the 
best houses, and noisily demanded to be lodged and entertained 
without payment.  One of the bold men of Dover, who would not 
endure to have these domineering strangers jingling their heavy 
swords and iron corselets up and down his house, eating his meat 
and drinking his strong liquor, stood in his doorway and refused 
admission to the first armed man who came there.  The armed man 
drew, and wounded him.  The man of Dover struck the armed man dead.  
Intelligence of what he had done, spreading through the streets to 
where the Count Eustace and his men were standing by their horses, 
bridle in hand, they passionately mounted, galloped to the house, 
surrounded it, forced their way in (the doors and windows being 
closed when they came up), and killed the man of Dover at his own 
fireside.  They then clattered through the streets, cutting down 
and riding over men, women, and children.  This did not last long, 
you may believe.  The men of Dover set upon them with great fury, 
killed nineteen of the foreigners, wounded many more, and, 
blockading the road to the port so that they should not embark, 
beat them out of the town by the way they had come.  Hereupon, 
Count Eustace rides as hard as man can ride to Gloucester, where 
Edward is, surrounded by Norman monks and Norman lords.  'Justice!' 
cries the Count, 'upon the men of Dover, who have set upon and 
slain my people!'  The King sends immediately for the powerful Earl 
Godwin, who happens to be near; reminds him that Dover is under his 
government; and orders him to repair to Dover and do military 
execution on the inhabitants.  'It does not become you,' says the 
proud Earl in reply, 'to condemn without a hearing those whom you 
have sworn to protect.  I will not do it.'

The King, therefore, summoned the Earl, on pain of banishment and 
loss of his titles and property, to appear before the court to 
answer this disobedience.  The Earl refused to appear.  He, his 
eldest son Harold, and his second son Sweyn, hastily raised as many 
fighting men as their utmost power could collect, and demanded to 
have Count Eustace and his followers surrendered to the justice of 
the country.  The King, in his turn, refused to give them up, and 
raised a strong force.  After some treaty and delay, the troops of 
the great Earl and his sons began to fall off.  The Earl, with a 
part of his family and abundance of treasure, sailed to Flanders; 
Harold escaped to Ireland; and the power of the great family was 
for that time gone in England.  But, the people did not forget 
them.

Then, Edward the Confessor, with the true meanness of a mean 
spirit, visited his dislike of the once powerful father and sons 
upon the helpless daughter and sister, his unoffending wife, whom 
all who saw her (her husband and his monks excepted) loved.  He 
seized rapaciously upon her fortune and her jewels, and allowing 
her only one attendant, confined her in a gloomy convent, of which 
a sister of his - no doubt an unpleasant lady after his own heart - 
was abbess or jailer.

Having got Earl Godwin and his six sons well out of his way, the 
King favoured the Normans more than ever.  He invited over WILLIAM, 
DUKE OF NORMANDY, the son of that Duke who had received him and his 
murdered brother long ago, and of a peasant girl, a tanner's 
daughter, with whom that Duke had fallen in love for her beauty as 
he saw her washing clothes in a brook.  William, who was a great 
warrior, with a passion for fine horses, dogs, and arms, accepted 
the invitation; and the Normans in England, finding themselves more 
numerous than ever when he arrived with his retinue, and held in 
still greater honour at court than before, became more and more 
haughty towards the people, and were more and more disliked by 
them.

The old Earl Godwin, though he was abroad, knew well how the people 
felt; for, with part of the treasure he had carried away with him, 
he kept spies and agents in his pay all over England.

Accordingly, he thought the time was come for fitting out a great 
expedition against the Norman-loving King.  With it, he sailed to 
the Isle of Wight, where he was joined by his son Harold, the most 
gallant and brave of all his family.  And so the father and son 
came sailing up the Thames to Southwark; great numbers of the 
people declaring for them, and shouting for the English Earl and 
the English Harold, against the Norman favourites!

The King was at first as blind and stubborn as kings usually have 
been whensoever they have been in the hands of monks.  But the 
people rallied so thickly round the old Earl and his son, and the 
old Earl was so steady in demanding without bloodshed the 
restoration of himself and his family to their rights, that at last 
the court took the alarm.  The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
the Norman Bishop of London, surrounded by their retainers, fought 
their way out of London, and escaped from Essex to France in a 
fishing-boat.  The other Norman favourites dispersed in all 
directions.  The old Earl and his sons (except Sweyn, who had 
committed crimes against the law) were restored to their 
possessions and dignities.  Editha, the virtuous and lovely Queen 
of the insensible King, was triumphantly released from her prison, 
the convent, and once more sat in her chair of state, arrayed in 
the jewels of which, when she had no champion to support her 
rights, her cold-blooded husband had deprived her.

The old Earl Godwin did not long enjoy his restored fortune.  He 
fell down in a fit at the King's table, and died upon the third day 
afterwards.  Harold succeeded to his power, and to a far higher 
place in the attachment of the people than his father had ever 
held.  By his valour he subdued the King's enemies in many bloody 
fights.  He was vigorous against rebels in Scotland - this was the 
time when Macbeth slew Duncan, upon which event our English 
Shakespeare, hundreds of years afterwards, wrote his great tragedy; 
and he killed the restless Welsh King GRIFFITH, and brought his 
head to England.

What Harold was doing at sea, when he was driven on the French 
coast by a tempest, is not at all certain; nor does it at all 
matter.  That his ship was forced by a storm on that shore, and 
that he was taken prisoner, there is no doubt.  In those barbarous 
days, all shipwrecked strangers were taken prisoners, and obliged 
to pay ransom.  So, a certain Count Guy, who was the Lord of 
Ponthieu where Harold's disaster happened, seized him, instead of 
relieving him like a hospitable and Christian lord as he ought to 
have done, and expected to make a very good thing of it.

But Harold sent off immediately to Duke William of Normandy, 
complaining of this treatment; and the Duke no sooner heard of it 
than he ordered Harold to be escorted to the ancient town of Rouen, 
where he then was, and where he received him as an honoured guest.  
Now, some writers tell us that Edward the Confessor, who was by 
this time old and had no children, had made a will, appointing Duke 
William of Normandy his successor, and had informed the Duke of his 
having done so.  There is no doubt that he was anxious about his 
successor; because he had even invited over, from abroad, EDWARD 
THE OUTLAW, a son of Ironside, who had come to England with his 
wife and three children, but whom the King had strangely refused to 
see when he did come, and who had died in London suddenly (princes 
were terribly liable to sudden death in those days), and had been 
buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.  The King might possibly have made 
such a will; or, having always been fond of the Normans, he might 
have encouraged Norman William to aspire to the English crown, by 
something that he said to him when he was staying at the English 
court.  But, certainly William did now aspire to it; and knowing 
that Harold would be a powerful rival, he called together a great 
assembly of his nobles, offered Harold his daughter ADELE in 
marriage, informed him that he meant on King Edward's death to 
claim the English crown as his own inheritance, and required Harold 
then and there to swear to aid him.  Harold, being in the Duke's 
power, took this oath upon the Missal, or Prayer-book.  It is a 
good example of the superstitions of the monks, that this Missal, 
instead of being placed upon a table, was placed upon a tub; which, 
when Harold had sworn, was uncovered, and shown to be full of dead 
men's bones - bones, as the monks pretended, of saints.  This was 
supposed to make Harold's oath a great deal more impressive and 
binding.  As if the great name of the Creator of Heaven and earth 
could be made more solemn by a knuckle-bone, or a double-tooth, or 
a finger-nail, of Dunstan!

Within a week or two after Harold's return to England, the dreary 
old Confessor was found to be dying.  After wandering in his mind 
like a very weak old man, he died.  As he had put himself entirely 
in the hands of the monks when he was alive, they praised him 
lustily when he was dead.  They had gone so far, already, as to 
persuade him that he could work miracles; and had brought people 
afflicted with a bad disorder of the skin, to him, to be touched 
and cured.  This was called 'touching for the King's Evil,' which 
afterwards became a royal custom.  You know, however, Who really 
touched the sick, and healed them; and you know His sacred name is 
not among the dusty line of human kings.



CHAPTER VII - ENGLAND UNDER HAROLD THE SECOND, AND CONQUERED BY THE 
NORMANS



HAROLD was crowned King of England on the very day of the maudlin 
Confessor's funeral.  He had good need to be quick about it.  When 
the news reached Norman William, hunting in his park at Rouen, he 
dropped his bow, returned to his palace, called his nobles to 
council, and presently sent ambassadors to Harold, calling on him 
to keep his oath and resign the Crown.  Harold would do no such 
thing.  The barons of France leagued together round Duke William 
for the invasion of England.  Duke William promised freely to 
distribute English wealth and English lands among them.  The Pope 
sent to Normandy a consecrated banner, and a ring containing a hair 
which he warranted to have grown on the head of Saint Peter.  He 
blessed the enterprise; and cursed Harold; and requested that the 
Normans would pay 'Peter's Pence' - or a tax to himself of a penny 
a year on every house - a little more regularly in future, if they 
could make it convenient.

King Harold had a rebel brother in Flanders, who was a vassal of 
HAROLD HARDRADA, King of Norway.  This brother, and this Norwegian 
King, joining their forces against England, with Duke William's 
help, won a fight in which the English were commanded by two 
nobles; and then besieged York.  Harold, who was waiting for the 
Normans on the coast at Hastings, with his army, marched to 
Stamford Bridge upon the river Derwent to give them instant battle.

He found them drawn up in a hollow circle, marked out by their 
shining spears.  Riding round this circle at a distance, to survey 
it, he saw a brave figure on horseback, in a blue mantle and a 
bright helmet, whose horse suddenly stumbled and threw him.

'Who is that man who has fallen?' Harold asked of one of his 
captains.

'The King of Norway,' he replied.

'He is a tall and stately king,' said Harold, 'but his end is 
near.'

He added, in a little while, 'Go yonder to my brother, and tell 
him, if he withdraw his troops, he shall be Earl of Northumberland, 
and rich and powerful in England.'

The captain rode away and gave the message.

'What will he give to my friend the King of Norway?' asked the 
brother.

'Seven feet of earth for a grave,' replied the captain.

'No more?' returned the brother, with a smile.

'The King of Norway being a tall man, perhaps a little more,' 
replied the captain.

'Ride back!' said the brother, 'and tell King Harold to make ready 
for the fight!'

He did so, very soon.  And such a fight King Harold led against 
that force, that his brother, and the Norwegian King, and every 
chief of note in all their host, except the Norwegian King's son, 
Olave, to whom he gave honourable dismissal, were left dead upon 
the field.  The victorious army marched to York.  As King Harold 
sat there at the feast, in the midst of all his company, a stir was 
heard at the doors; and messengers all covered with mire from 
riding far and fast through broken ground came hurrying in, to 
report that the Normans had landed in England.

The intelligence was true.  They had been tossed about by contrary 
winds, and some of their ships had been wrecked.  A part of their 
own shore, to which they had been driven back, was strewn with 
Norman bodies.  But they had once more made sail, led by the Duke's 
own galley, a present from his wife, upon the prow whereof the 
figure of a golden boy stood pointing towards England.  By day, the 
banner of the three Lions of Normandy, the diverse coloured sails, 
the gilded vans, the many decorations of this gorgeous ship, had 
glittered in the sun and sunny water; by night, a light had 
sparkled like a star at her mast-head.  And now, encamped near 
Hastings, with their leader lying in the old Roman castle of 
Pevensey, the English retiring in all directions, the land for 
miles around scorched and smoking, fired and pillaged, was the 
whole Norman power, hopeful and strong on English ground.

Harold broke up the feast and hurried to London.  Within a week, 
his army was ready.  He sent out spies to ascertain the Norman 
strength.  William took them, caused them to be led through his 
whole camp, and then dismissed.  'The Normans,' said these spies to 
Harold, 'are not bearded on the upper lip as we English are, but 
are shorn.  They are priests.'  'My men,' replied Harold, with a 
laugh, 'will find those priests good soldiers!'

'The Saxons,' reported Duke William's outposts of Norman soldiers, 
who were instructed to retire as King Harold's army advanced, 'rush 
on us through their pillaged country with the fury of madmen.'

'Let them come, and come soon!' said Duke William.

Some proposals for a reconciliation were made, but were soon 
abandoned.  In the middle of the month of October, in the year one 
thousand and sixty-six, the Normans and the English came front to 
front.  All night the armies lay encamped before each other, in a 
part of the country then called Senlac, now called (in remembrance 
of them) Battle.  With the first dawn of day, they arose.  There, 
in the faint light, were the English on a hill; a wood behind them; 
in their midst, the Royal banner, representing a fighting warrior, 
woven in gold thread, adorned with precious stones; beneath the 
banner, as it rustled in the wind, stood King Harold on foot, with 
two of his remaining brothers by his side; around them, still and 
silent as the dead, clustered the whole English army - every 
soldier covered by his shield, and bearing in his hand his dreaded 
English battle-axe.

On an opposite hill, in three lines, archers, foot-soldiers, 
horsemen, was the Norman force.  Of a sudden, a great battle-cry, 
'God help us!' burst from the Norman lines.  The English answered 
with their own battle-cry, 'God's Rood!  Holy Rood!'  The Normans 
then came sweeping down the hill to attack the English.

There was one tall Norman Knight who rode before the Norman army on 
a prancing horse, throwing up his heavy sword and catching it, and 
singing of the bravery of his countrymen.  An English Knight, who 
rode out from the English force to meet him, fell by this Knight's 
hand.  Another English Knight rode out, and he fell too.  But then 
a third rode out, and killed the Norman.  This was in the first 
beginning of the fight.  It soon raged everywhere.

The English, keeping side by side in a great mass, cared no more 
for the showers of Norman arrows than if they had been showers of 
Norman rain.  When the Norman horsemen rode against them, with 
their battle-axes they cut men and horses down.  The Normans gave 
way.  The English pressed forward.  A cry went forth among the 
Norman troops that Duke William was killed.  Duke William took off 
his helmet, in order that his face might be distinctly seen, and 
rode along the line before his men.  This gave them courage.  As 
they turned again to face the English, some of their Norman horse 
divided the pursuing body of the English from the rest, and thus 
all that foremost portion of the English army fell, fighting 
bravely.  The main body still remaining firm, heedless of the 
Norman arrows, and with their battle-axes cutting down the crowds 
of horsemen when they rode up, like forests of young trees, Duke 
William pretended to retreat.  The eager English followed.  The 
Norman army closed again, and fell upon them with great slaughter.

'Still,' said Duke William, 'there are thousands of the English, 
firms as rocks around their King.  Shoot upward, Norman archers, 
that your arrows may fall down upon their faces!'

The sun rose high, and sank, and the battle still raged.  Through 
all the wild October day, the clash and din resounded in the air.  
In the red sunset, and in the white moonlight, heaps upon heaps of 
dead men lay strewn, a dreadful spectacle, all over the ground.

King Harold, wounded with an arrow in the eye, was nearly blind.  
His brothers were already killed.  Twenty Norman Knights, whose 
battered armour had flashed fiery and golden in the sunshine all 
day long, and now looked silvery in the moonlight, dashed forward 
to seize the Royal banner from the English Knights and soldiers, 
still faithfully collected round their blinded King.  The King 
received a mortal wound, and dropped.  The English broke and fled.  
The Normans rallied, and the day was lost.

O what a sight beneath the moon and stars, when lights were shining 
in the tent of the victorious Duke William, which was pitched near 
the spot where Harold fell - and he and his knights were carousing, 
within - and soldiers with torches, going slowly to and fro, 
without, sought for the corpse of Harold among piles of dead - and 
the Warrior, worked in golden thread and precious stones, lay low, 
all torn and soiled with blood - and the three Norman Lions kept 
watch over the field!



CHAPTER VIII - ENGLAND UNDER WILLIAM THE FIRST, THE NORMAN 
CONQUEROR



UPON the ground where the brave Harold fell, William the Norman 
afterwards founded an abbey, which, under the name of Battle Abbey, 
was a rich and splendid place through many a troubled year, though 
now it is a grey ruin overgrown with ivy.  But the first work he 
had to do, was to conquer the English thoroughly; and that, as you 
know by this time, was hard work for any man.

He ravaged several counties; he burned and plundered many towns; he 
laid waste scores upon scores of miles of pleasant country; he 
destroyed innumerable lives.  At length STIGAND, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, with other representatives of the clergy and the 
people, went to his camp, and submitted to him.  EDGAR, the 
insignificant son of Edmund Ironside, was proclaimed King by 
others, but nothing came of it.  He fled to Scotland afterwards, 
where his sister, who was young and beautiful, married the Scottish 
King.  Edgar himself was not important enough for anybody to care 
much about him.

On Christmas Day, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey, under 
the title of WILLIAM THE FIRST; but he is best known as WILLIAM THE 
CONQUEROR.  It was a strange coronation.  One of the bishops who 
performed the ceremony asked the Normans, in French, if they would 
have Duke William for their king?  They answered Yes.  Another of 
the bishops put the same question to the Saxons, in English.  They 
too answered Yes, with a loud shout.  The noise being heard by a 
guard of Norman horse-soldiers outside, was mistaken for resistance 
on the part of the English.  The guard instantly set fire to the 
neighbouring houses, and a tumult ensued; in the midst of which the 
King, being left alone in the Abbey, with a few priests (and they 
all being in a terrible fright together), was hurriedly crowned.  
When the crown was placed upon his head, he swore to govern the 
English as well as the best of their own monarchs.  I dare say you 
think, as I do, that if we except the Great Alfred, he might pretty 
easily have done that.

Numbers of the English nobles had been killed in the last 
disastrous battle.  Their estates, and the estates of all the 
nobles who had fought against him there, King William seized upon, 
and gave to his own Norman knights and nobles.  Many great English 
families of the present time acquired their English lands in this 
way, and are very proud of it.

But what is got by force must be maintained by force.  These nobles 
were obliged to build castles all over England, to defend their new 
property; and, do what he would, the King could neither soothe nor 
quell the nation as he wished.  He gradually introduced the Norman 
language and the Norman customs; yet, for a long time the great 
body of the English remained sullen and revengeful.  On his going 
over to Normandy, to visit his subjects there, the oppressions of 
his half-brother ODO, whom he left in charge of his English 
kingdom, drove the people mad.  The men of Kent even invited over, 
to take possession of Dover, their old enemy Count Eustace of 
Boulogne, who had led the fray when the Dover man was slain at his 
own fireside.  The men of Hereford, aided by the Welsh, and 
commanded by a chief named EDRIC THE WILD, drove the Normans out of 
their country.  Some of those who had been dispossessed of their 
lands, banded together in the North of England; some, in Scotland; 
some, in the thick woods and marshes; and whensoever they could 
fall upon the Normans, or upon the English who had submitted to the 
Normans, they fought, despoiled, and murdered, like the desperate 
outlaws that they were.  Conspiracies were set on foot for a 
general massacre of the Normans, like the old massacre of the 
Danes.  In short, the English were in a murderous mood all through 
the kingdom.

King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came back, and 
tried to pacify the London people by soft words.  He then set forth 
to repress the country people by stern deeds.  Among the towns 
which he besieged, and where he killed and maimed the inhabitants 
without any distinction, sparing none, young or old, armed or 
unarmed, were Oxford, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, 
Lincoln, York.  In all these places, and in many others, fire and 
sword worked their utmost horrors, and made the land dreadful to 
behold.  The streams and rivers were discoloured with blood; the 
sky was blackened with smoke; the fields were wastes of ashes; the 
waysides were heaped up with dead.  Such are the fatal results of 
conquest and ambition!  Although William was a harsh and angry man, 
I do not suppose that he deliberately meant to work this shocking 
ruin, when he invaded England.  But what he had got by the strong 
hand, he could only keep by the strong hand, and in so doing he 
made England a great grave.

Two sons of Harold, by name EDMUND and GODWIN, came over from 
Ireland, with some ships, against the Normans, but were defeated.  
This was scarcely done, when the outlaws in the woods so harassed 
York, that the Governor sent to the King for help.  The King 
despatched a general and a large force to occupy the town of 
Durham.  The Bishop of that place met the general outside the town, 
and warned him not to enter, as he would be in danger there.  The 
general cared nothing for the warning, and went in with all his 
men.  That night, on every hill within sight of Durham, signal 
fires were seen to blaze.  When the morning dawned, the English, 
who had assembled in great strength, forced the gates, rushed into 
the town, and slew the Normans every one.  The English afterwards 
besought the Danes to come and help them.  The Danes came, with two 
hundred and forty ships.  The outlawed nobles joined them; they 
captured York, and drove the Normans out of that city.  Then, 
William bribed the Danes to go away; and took such vengeance on the 
English, that all the former fire and sword, smoke and ashes, death 
and ruin, were nothing compared with it.  In melancholy songs, and 
doleful stories, it was still sung and told by cottage fires on 
winter evenings, a hundred years afterwards, how, in those dreadful 
days of the Normans, there was not, from the River Humber to the 
River Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field - 
how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creatures 
and the beasts lay dead together.

The outlaws had, at this time, what they called a Camp of Refuge, 
in the midst of the fens of Cambridgeshire.  Protected by those 
marshy grounds which were difficult of approach, they lay among the 
reeds and rushes, and were hidden by the mists that rose up from 
the watery earth.  Now, there also was, at that time, over the sea 
in Flanders, an Englishman named HEREWARD, whose father had died in 
his absence, and whose property had been given to a Norman.  When 
he heard of this wrong that had been done him (from such of the 
exiled English as chanced to wander into that country), he longed 
for revenge; and joining the outlaws in their camp of refuge, 
became their commander.  He was so good a soldier, that the Normans 
supposed him to be aided by enchantment.  William, even after he 
had made a road three miles in length across the Cambridgeshire 
marshes, on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter, thought it 
necessary to engage an old lady, who pretended to be a sorceress, 
to come and do a little enchantment in the royal cause.  For this 
purpose she was pushed on before the troops in a wooden tower; but 
Hereward very soon disposed of this unfortunate sorceress, by 
burning her, tower and all.  The monks of the convent of Ely near 
at hand, however, who were fond of good living, and who found it 
very uncomfortable to have the country blockaded and their supplies 
of meat and drink cut off, showed the King a secret way of 
surprising the camp.  So Hereward was soon defeated.  Whether he 
afterwards died quietly, or whether he was killed after killing 
sixteen of the men who attacked him (as some old rhymes relate that 
he did), I cannot say.  His defeat put an end to the Camp of 
Refuge; and, very soon afterwards, the King, victorious both in 
Scotland and in England, quelled the last rebellious English noble.  
He then surrounded himself with Norman lords, enriched by the 
property of English nobles; had a great survey made of all the land 
in England, which was entered as the property of its new owners, on 
a roll called Doomsday Book; obliged the people to put out their 
fires and candles at a certain hour every night, on the ringing of 
a bell which was called The Curfew; introduced the Norman dresses 
and manners; made the Normans masters everywhere, and the English, 
servants; turned out the English bishops, and put Normans in their 
places; and showed himself to be the Conqueror indeed.

But, even with his own Normans, he had a restless life.  They were 
always hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English; and 
the more he gave, the more they wanted.  His priests were as greedy 
as his soldiers.  We know of only one Norman who plainly told his 
master, the King, that he had come with him to England to do his 
duty as a faithful servant, and that property taken by force from 
other men had no charms for him.  His name was GUILBERT.  We should 
not forget his name, for it is good to remember and to honour 
honest men.

Besides all these troubles, William the Conqueror was troubled by 
quarrels among his sons.  He had three living.  ROBERT, called 
CURTHOSE, because of his short legs; WILLIAM, called RUFUS or the 
Red, from the colour of his hair; and HENRY, fond of learning, and 
called, in the Norman language, BEAUCLERC, or Fine-Scholar.  When 
Robert grew up, he asked of his father the government of Normandy, 
which he had nominally possessed, as a child, under his mother, 
MATILDA.  The King refusing to grant it, Robert became jealous and 
discontented; and happening one day, while in this temper, to be 
ridiculed by his brothers, who threw water on him from a balcony as 
he was walking before the door, he drew his sword, rushed up-
stairs, and was only prevented by the King himself from putting 
them to death.  That same night, he hotly departed with some 
followers from his father's court, and endeavoured to take the 
Castle of Rouen by surprise.  Failing in this, he shut himself up 
in another Castle in Normandy, which the King besieged, and where 
Robert one day unhorsed and nearly killed him without knowing who 
he was.  His submission when he discovered his father, and the 
intercession of the queen and others, reconciled them; but not 
soundly; for Robert soon strayed abroad, and went from court to 
court with his complaints.  He was a gay, careless, thoughtless 
fellow, spending all he got on musicians and dancers; but his 
mother loved him, and often, against the King's command, supplied 
him with money through a messenger named SAMSON.  At length the 
incensed King swore he would tear out Samson's eyes; and Samson, 
thinking that his only hope of safety was in becoming a monk, 
became one, went on such errands no more, and kept his eyes in his 
head.

All this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coronation, 
the Conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of cruelty 
and bloodshed, to maintain what he had seized.  All his reign, he 
struggled still, with the same object ever before him.  He was a 
stern, bold man, and he succeeded in it.

He loved money, and was particular in his eating, but he had only 
leisure to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of 
hunting.  He carried it to such a height that he ordered whole 
villages and towns to be swept away to make forests for the deer.  
Not satisfied with sixty-eight Royal Forests, he laid waste an 
immense district, to form another in Hampshire, called the New 
Forest.  The many thousands of miserable peasants who saw their 
little houses pulled down, and themselves and children turned into 
the open country without a shelter, detested him for his merciless 
addition to their many sufferings; and when, in the twenty-first 
year of his reign (which proved to be the last), he went over to 
Rouen, England was as full of hatred against him, as if every leaf 
on every tree in all his Royal Forests had been a curse upon his 
head.  In the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had four sons) 
had been gored to death by a Stag; and the people said that this so 
cruelly-made Forest would yet be fatal to others of the Conqueror's 
race.

He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about some 
territory.  While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that King, 
he kept his bed and took medicines:  being advised by his 
physicians to do so, on account of having grown to an unwieldy 
size.  Word being brought to him that the King of France made light 
of this, and joked about it, he swore in a great rage that he 
should rue his jests.  He assembled his army, marched into the 
disputed territory, burnt - his old way! - the vines, the crops, 
and fruit, and set the town of Mantes on fire.  But, in an evil 
hour; for, as he rode over the hot ruins, his horse, setting his 
hoofs upon some burning embers, started, threw him forward against 
the pommel of the saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt.  For six 
weeks he lay dying in a monastery near Rouen, and then made his 
will, giving England to William, Normandy to Robert, and five 
thousand pounds to Henry.  And now, his violent deeds lay heavy on 
his mind.  He ordered money to be given to many English churches 
and monasteries, and - which was much better repentance - released 
his prisoners of state, some of whom had been confined in his 
dungeons twenty years.

It was a September morning, and the sun was rising, when the King 
was awakened from slumber by the sound of a church bell.  'What 
bell is that?' he faintly asked.  They told him it was the bell of 
the chapel of Saint Mary.  'I commend my soul,' said he, 'to Mary!' 
and died.

Think of his name, The Conqueror, and then consider how he lay in 
death!  The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, and 
nobles, not knowing what contest for the throne might now take 
place, or what might happen in it, hastened away, each man for 
himself and his own property; the mercenary servants of the court 
began to rob and plunder; the body of the King, in the indecent 
strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone, for hours, upon the 
ground.  O Conqueror, of whom so many great names are proud now, of 
whom so many great names thought nothing then, it were better to 
have conquered one true heart, than England!

By-and-by, the priests came creeping in with prayers and candles; 
and a good knight, named HERLUIN, undertook (which no one else 
would do) to convey the body to Caen, in Normandy, in order that it 
might be buried in St. Stephen's church there, which the Conqueror 
had founded.  But fire, of which he had made such bad use in his 
life, seemed to follow him of itself in death.  A great 
conflagration broke out in the town when the body was placed in the 
church; and those present running out to extinguish the flames, it 
was once again left alone.

It was not even buried in peace.  It was about to be let down, in 
its Royal robes, into a tomb near the high altar, in presence of a 
great concourse of people, when a loud voice in the crowd cried 
out, 'This ground is mine!  Upon it, stood my father's house.  This 
King despoiled me of both ground and house to build this church.  
In the great name of GOD, I here forbid his body to be covered with 
the earth that is my right!'  The priests and bishops present, 
knowing the speaker's right, and knowing that the King had often 
denied him justice, paid him down sixty shillings for the grave.  
Even then, the corpse was not at rest.  The tomb was too small, and 
they tried to force it in.  It broke, a dreadful smell arose, the 
people hurried out into the air, and, for the third time, it was 
left alone.

Where were the Conqueror's three sons, that they were not at their 
father's burial?  Robert was lounging among minstrels, dancers, and 
gamesters, in France or Germany.  Henry was carrying his five 
thousand pounds safely away in a convenient chest he had got made.  
William the Red was hurrying to England, to lay hands upon the 
Royal treasure and the crown.



CHAPTER IX - ENGLAND UNDER WILLIAM THE SECOND, CALLED RUFUS



WILLIAM THE RED, in breathless haste, secured the three great forts 
of Dover, Pevensey, and Hastings, and made with hot speed for 
Winchester, where the Royal treasure was kept.  The treasurer 
delivering him the keys, he found that it amounted to sixty 
thousand pounds in silver, besides gold and jewels.  Possessed of 
this wealth, he soon persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury to 
crown him, and became William the Second, King of England.

Rufus was no sooner on the throne, than he ordered into prison 
again the unhappy state captives whom his father had set free, and 
directed a goldsmith to ornament his father's tomb profusely with 
gold and silver.  It would have been more dutiful in him to have 
attended the sick Conqueror when he was dying; but England itself, 
like this Red King, who once governed it, has sometimes made 
expensive tombs for dead men whom it treated shabbily when they 
were alive.

The King's brother, Robert of Normandy, seeming quite content to be 
only Duke of that country; and the King's other brother, Fine-
Scholar, being quiet enough with his five thousand pounds in a 
chest; the King flattered himself, we may suppose, with the hope of 
an easy reign.  But easy reigns were difficult to have in those 
days.  The turbulent Bishop ODO (who had blessed the Norman army at 
the Battle of Hastings, and who, I dare say, took all the credit of 
the victory to himself) soon began, in concert with some powerful 
Norman nobles, to trouble the Red King.

The truth seems to be that this bishop and his friends, who had 
lands in England and lands in Normandy, wished to hold both under 
one Sovereign; and greatly preferred a thoughtless good-natured 
person, such as Robert was, to Rufus; who, though far from being an 
amiable man in any respect, was keen, and not to be imposed upon.  
They declared in Robert's favour, and retired to their castles 
(those castles were very troublesome to kings) in a sullen humour.  
The Red King, seeing the Normans thus falling from him, revenged 
himself upon them by appealing to the English; to whom he made a 
variety of promises, which he never meant to perform - in 
particular, promises to soften the cruelty of the Forest Laws; and 
who, in return, so aided him with their valour, that ODO was 
besieged in the Castle of Rochester, and forced to abandon it, and 
to depart from England for ever:  whereupon the other rebellious 
Norman nobles were soon reduced and scattered.

Then, the Red King went over to Normandy, where the people suffered 
greatly under the loose rule of Duke Robert.  The King's object was 
to seize upon the Duke's dominions.  This, the Duke, of course, 
prepared to resist; and miserable war between the two brothers 
seemed inevitable, when the powerful nobles on both sides, who had 
seen so much of war, interfered to prevent it.  A treaty was made.  
Each of the two brothers agreed to give up something of his claims, 
and that the longer-liver of the two should inherit all the 
dominions of the other.  When they had come to this loving 
understanding, they embraced and joined their forces against Fine-
Scholar; who had bought some territory of Robert with a part of his 
five thousand pounds, and was considered a dangerous individual in 
consequence.

St. Michael's Mount, in Normandy (there is another St. Michael's 
Mount, in Cornwall, wonderfully like it), was then, as it is now, a 
strong place perched upon the top of a high rock, around which, 
when the tide is in, the sea flows, leaving no road to the 
mainland.  In this place, Fine-Scholar shut himself up with his 
soldiers, and here he was closely besieged by his two brothers.  At 
one time, when he was reduced to great distress for want of water, 
the generous Robert not only permitted his men to get water, but 
sent Fine-Scholar wine from his own table; and, on being 
remonstrated with by the Red King, said 'What! shall we let our own 
brother die of thirst?  Where shall we get another, when he is 
gone?'  At another time, the Red King riding alone on the shore of 
the bay, looking up at the Castle, was taken by two of Fine-
Scholar's men, one of whom was about to kill him, when he cried 
out, 'Hold, knave!  I am the King of England!'  The story says that 
the soldier raised him from the ground respectfully and humbly, and 
that the King took him into his service.  The story may or may not 
be true; but at any rate it is true that Fine-Scholar could not 
hold out against his united brothers, and that he abandoned Mount 
St. Michael, and wandered about - as poor and forlorn as other 
scholars have been sometimes known to be.

The Scotch became unquiet in the Red King's time, and were twice 
defeated - the second time, with the loss of their King, Malcolm, 
and his son.  The Welsh became unquiet too.  Against them, Rufus 
was less successful; for they fought among their native mountains, 
and did great execution on the King's troops.  Robert of Normandy 
became unquiet too; and, complaining that his brother the King did 
not faithfully perform his part of their agreement, took up arms, 
and obtained assistance from the King of France, whom Rufus, in the 
end, bought off with vast sums of money.  England became unquiet 
too.  Lord Mowbray, the powerful Earl of Northumberland, headed a 
great conspiracy to depose the King, and to place upon the throne, 
STEPHEN, the Conqueror's near relative.  The plot was discovered; 
all the chief conspirators were seized; some were fined, some were 
put in prison, some were put to death.  The Earl of Northumberland 
himself was shut up in a dungeon beneath Windsor Castle, where he 
died, an old man, thirty long years afterwards.  The Priests in 
England were more unquiet than any other class or power; for the 
Red King treated them with such small ceremony that he refused to 
appoint new bishops or archbishops when the old ones died, but kept 
all the wealth belonging to those offices in his own hands.  In 
return for this, the Priests wrote his life when he was dead, and 
abused him well.  I am inclined to think, myself, that there was 
little to choose between the Priests and the Red King; that both 
sides were greedy and designing; and that they were fairly matched.

The Red King was false of heart, selfish, covetous, and mean.  He 
had a worthy minister in his favourite, Ralph, nicknamed - for 
almost every famous person had a nickname in those rough days - 
Flambard, or the Firebrand.  Once, the King being ill, became 
penitent, and made ANSELM, a foreign priest and a good man, 
Archbishop of Canterbury.  But he no sooner got well again than he 
repented of his repentance, and persisted in wrongfully keeping to 
himself some of the wealth belonging to the archbishopric.  This 
led to violent disputes, which were aggravated by there being in 
Rome at that time two rival Popes; each of whom declared he was the 
only real original infallible Pope, who couldn't make a mistake.  
At last, Anselm, knowing the Red King's character, and not feeling 
himself safe in England, asked leave to return abroad.  The Red 
King gladly gave it; for he knew that as soon as Anselm was gone, 
he could begin to store up all the Canterbury money again, for his 
own use.

By such means, and by taxing and oppressing the English people in 
every possible way, the Red King became very rich.  When he wanted 
money for any purpose, he raised it by some means or other, and 
cared nothing for the injustice he did, or the misery he caused.  
Having the opportunity of buying from Robert the whole duchy of 
Normandy for five years, he taxed the English people more than 
ever, and made the very convents sell their plate and valuables to 
supply him with the means to make the purchase.  But he was as 
quick and eager in putting down revolt as he was in raising money; 
for, a part of the Norman people objecting - very naturally, I 
think - to being sold in this way, he headed an army against them 
with all the speed and energy of his father.  He was so impatient, 
that he embarked for Normandy in a great gale of wind.  And when 
the sailors told him it was dangerous to go to sea in such angry 
weather, he replied, 'Hoist sail and away!  Did you ever hear of a 
king who was drowned?'

You will wonder how it was that even the careless Robert came to 
sell his dominions.  It happened thus.  It had long been the custom 
for many English people to make journeys to Jerusalem, which were 
called pilgrimages, in order that they might pray beside the tomb 
of Our Saviour there.  Jerusalem belonging to the Turks, and the 
Turks hating Christianity, these Christian travellers were often 
insulted and ill used.  The Pilgrims bore it patiently for some 
time, but at length a remarkable man, of great earnestness and 
eloquence, called PETER THE HERMIT, began to preach in various 
places against the Turks, and to declare that it was the duty of 
good Christians to drive away those unbelievers from the tomb of 
Our Saviour, and to take possession of it, and protect it.  An 
excitement such as the world had never known before was created.  
Thousands and thousands of men of all ranks and conditions departed 
for Jerusalem to make war against the Turks.  The war is called in 
history the first Crusade, and every Crusader wore a cross marked 
on his right shoulder.

All the Crusaders were not zealous Christians.  Among them were 
vast numbers of the restless, idle, profligate, and adventurous 
spirit of the time.  Some became Crusaders for the love of change; 
some, in the hope of plunder; some, because they had nothing to do 
at home; some, because they did what the priests told them; some, 
because they liked to see foreign countries; some, because they 
were fond of knocking men about, and would as soon knock a Turk 
about as a Christian.  Robert of Normandy may have been influenced 
by all these motives; and by a kind desire, besides, to save the 
Christian Pilgrims from bad treatment in future.  He wanted to 
raise a number of armed men, and to go to the Crusade.  He could 
not do so without money.  He had no money; and he sold his 
dominions to his brother, the Red King, for five years.  With the 
large sum he thus obtained, he fitted out his Crusaders gallantly, 
and went away to Jerusalem in martial state.  The Red King, who 
made money out of everything, stayed at home, busily squeezing more 
money out of Normans and English.

After three years of great hardship and suffering - from shipwreck 
at sea; from travel in strange lands; from hunger, thirst, and 
fever, upon the burning sands of the desert; and from the fury of 
the Turks - the valiant Crusaders got possession of Our Saviour's 
tomb.  The Turks were still resisting and fighting bravely, but 
this success increased the general desire in Europe to join the 
Crusade.  Another great French Duke was proposing to sell his 
dominions for a term to the rich Red King, when the Red King's 
reign came to a sudden and violent end.

You have not forgotten the New Forest which the Conqueror made, and 
which the miserable people whose homes he had laid waste, so hated.  
The cruelty of the Forest Laws, and the torture and death they 
brought upon the peasantry, increased this hatred.  The poor 
persecuted country people believed that the New Forest was 
enchanted.  They said that in thunder-storms, and on dark nights, 
demons appeared, moving beneath the branches of the gloomy trees.  
They said that a terrible spectre had foretold to Norman hunters 
that the Red King should be punished there.  And now, in the 
pleasant season of May, when the Red King had reigned almost 
thirteen years; and a second Prince of the Conqueror's blood - 
another Richard, the son of Duke Robert - was killed by an arrow in 
this dreaded Forest; the people said that the second time was not 
the last, and that there was another death to come.

It was a lonely forest, accursed in the people's hearts for the 
wicked deeds that had been done to make it; and no man save the 
King and his Courtiers and Huntsmen, liked to stray there.  But, in 
reality, it was like any other forest.  In the spring, the green 
leaves broke out of the buds; in the summer, flourished heartily, 
and made deep shades; in the winter, shrivelled and blew down, and 
lay in brown heaps on the moss.  Some trees were stately, and grew 
high and strong; some had fallen of themselves; some were felled by 
the forester's axe; some were hollow, and the rabbits burrowed at 
their roots; some few were struck by lightning, and stood white and 
bare.  There were hill-sides covered with rich fern, on which the 
morning dew so beautifully sparkled; there were brooks, where the 
deer went down to drink, or over which the whole herd bounded, 
flying from the arrows of the huntsmen; there were sunny glades, 
and solemn places where but little light came through the rustling 
leaves.  The songs of the birds in the New Forest were pleasanter 
to hear than the shouts of fighting men outside; and even when the 
Red King and his Court came hunting through its solitudes, cursing 
loud and riding hard, with a jingling of stirrups and bridles and 
knives and daggers, they did much less harm there than among the 
English or Normans, and the stags died (as they lived) far easier 
than the people.

Upon a day in August, the Red King, now reconciled to his brother, 
Fine-Scholar, came with a great train to hunt in the New Forest.  
Fine-Scholar was of the party.  They were a merry party, and had 
lain all night at Malwood-Keep, a hunting-lodge in the forest, 
where they had made good cheer, both at supper and breakfast, and 
had drunk a deal of wine.  The party dispersed in various 
directions, as the custom of hunters then was.  The King took with 
him only SIR WALTER TYRREL, who was a famous sportsman, and to whom 
he had given, before they mounted horse that morning, two fine 
arrows.

The last time the King was ever seen alive, he was riding with Sir 
Walter Tyrrel, and their dogs were hunting together.

It was almost night, when a poor charcoal-burner, passing through 
the forest with his cart, came upon the solitary body of a dead 
man, shot with an arrow in the breast, and still bleeding.  He got 
it into his cart.  It was the body of the King.  Shaken and 
tumbled, with its red beard all whitened with lime and clotted with 
blood, it was driven in the cart by the charcoal-burner next day to 
Winchester Cathedral, where it was received and buried.

Sir Walter Tyrrel, who escaped to Normandy, and claimed the 
protection of the King of France, swore in France that the Red King 
was suddenly shot dead by an arrow from an unseen hand, while they 
were hunting together; that he was fearful of being suspected as 
the King's murderer; and that he instantly set spurs to his horse, 
and fled to the sea-shore.  Others declared that the King and Sir 
Walter Tyrrel were hunting in company, a little before sunset, 
standing in bushes opposite one another, when a stag came between 
them.  That the King drew his bow and took aim, but the string 
broke.  That the King then cried, 'Shoot, Walter, in the Devil's 
name!'  That Sir Walter shot.  That the arrow glanced against a 
tree, was turned aside from the stag, and struck the King from his 
horse, dead.

By whose hand the Red King really fell, and whether that hand 
despatched the arrow to his breast by accident or by design, is 
only known to GOD.  Some think his brother may have caused him to 
be killed; but the Red King had made so many enemies, both among 
priests and people, that suspicion may reasonably rest upon a less 
unnatural murderer.  Men know no more than that he was found dead 
in the New Forest, which the suffering people had regarded as a 
doomed ground for his race.



CHAPTER X - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE FIRST, CALLED FINE-SCHOLAR



FINE-SCHOLAR, on hearing of the Red King's death, hurried to 
Winchester with as much speed as Rufus himself had made, to seize 
the Royal treasure.  But the keeper of the treasure who had been 
one of the hunting-party in the Forest, made haste to Winchester 
too, and, arriving there at about the same time, refused to yield 
it up.  Upon this, Fine-Scholar drew his sword, and threatened to 
kill the treasurer; who might have paid for his fidelity with his 
life, but that he knew longer resistance to be useless when he 
found the Prince supported by a company of powerful barons, who 
declared they were determined to make him King.  The treasurer, 
therefore, gave up the money and jewels of the Crown:  and on the 
third day after the death of the Red King, being a Sunday, Fine-
Scholar stood before the high altar in Westminster Abbey, and made 
a solemn declaration that he would resign the Church property which 
his brother had seized; that he would do no wrong to the nobles; 
and that he would restore to the people the laws of Edward the 
Confessor, with all the improvements of William the Conqueror.  So 
began the reign of KING HENRY THE FIRST.

The people were attached to their new King, both because he had 
known distresses, and because he was an Englishman by birth and not 
a Norman.  To strengthen this last hold upon them, the King wished 
to marry an English lady; and could think of no other wife than 
MAUD THE GOOD, the daughter of the King of Scotland.  Although this 
good Princess did not love the King, she was so affected by the 
representations the nobles made to her of the great charity it 
would be in her to unite the Norman and Saxon races, and prevent 
hatred and bloodshed between them for the future, that she 
consented to become his wife.  After some disputing among the 
priests, who said that as she had been in a convent in her youth, 
and had worn the veil of a nun, she could not lawfully be married - 
against which the Princess stated that her aunt, with whom she had 
lived in her youth, had indeed sometimes thrown a piece of black 
stuff over her, but for no other reason than because the nun's veil 
was the only dress the conquering Normans respected in girl or 
woman, and not because she had taken the vows of a nun, which she 
never had - she was declared free to marry, and was made King 
Henry's Queen.  A good Queen she was; beautiful, kind-hearted, and 
worthy of a better husband than the King.

For he was a cunning and unscrupulous man, though firm and clever.  
He cared very little for his word, and took any means to gain his 
ends.  All this is shown in his treatment of his brother Robert - 
Robert, who had suffered him to be refreshed with water, and who 
had sent him the wine from his own table, when he was shut up, with 
the crows flying below him, parched with thirst, in the castle on 
the top of St. Michael's Mount, where his Red brother would have 
let him die.

Before the King began to deal with Robert, he removed and disgraced 
all the favourites of the late King; who were for the most part 
base characters, much detested by the people.  Flambard, or 
Firebrand, whom the late King had made Bishop of Durham, of all 
things in the world, Henry imprisoned in the Tower; but Firebrand 
was a great joker and a jolly companion, and made himself so 
popular with his guards that they pretended to know nothing about a 
long rope that was sent into his prison at the bottom of a deep 
flagon of wine.  The guards took the wine, and Firebrand took the 
rope; with which, when they were fast asleep, he let himself down 
from a window in the night, and so got cleverly aboard ship and 
away to Normandy.

Now Robert, when his brother Fine-Scholar came to the throne, was 
still absent in the Holy Land.  Henry pretended that Robert had 
been made Sovereign of that country; and he had been away so long, 
that the ignorant people believed it.  But, behold, when Henry had 
been some time King of England, Robert came home to Normandy; 
having leisurely returned from Jerusalem through Italy, in which 
beautiful country he had enjoyed himself very much, and had married 
a lady as beautiful as itself!  In Normandy, he found Firebrand 
waiting to urge him to assert his claim to the English crown, and 
declare war against King Henry.  This, after great loss of time in 
feasting and dancing with his beautiful Italian wife among his 
Norman friends, he at last did.

The English in general were on King Henry's side, though many of 
the Normans were on Robert's.  But the English sailors deserted the 
King, and took a great part of the English fleet over to Normandy; 
so that Robert came to invade this country in no foreign vessels, 
but in English ships.  The virtuous Anselm, however, whom Henry had 
invited back from abroad, and made Archbishop of Canterbury, was 
steadfast in the King's cause; and it was so well supported that 
the two armies, instead of fighting, made a peace.  Poor Robert, 
who trusted anybody and everybody, readily trusted his brother, the 
King; and agreed to go home and receive a pension from England, on 
condition that all his followers were fully pardoned.  This the 
King very faithfully promised, but Robert was no sooner gone than 
he began to punish them.

Among them was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, on being summoned by 
the King to answer to five-and-forty accusations, rode away to one 
of his strong castles, shut himself up therein, called around him 
his tenants and vassals, and fought for his liberty, but was 
defeated and banished.  Robert, with all his faults, was so true to 
his word, that when he first heard of this nobleman having risen 
against his brother, he laid waste the Earl of Shrewsbury's estates 
in Normandy, to show the King that he would favour no breach of 
their treaty.  Finding, on better information, afterwards, that the 
Earl's only crime was having been his friend, he came over to 
England, in his old thoughtless, warm-hearted way, to intercede 
with the King, and remind him of the solemn promise to pardon all 
his followers.

This confidence might have put the false King to the blush, but it 
did not.  Pretending to be very friendly, he so surrounded his 
brother with spies and traps, that Robert, who was quite in his 
power, had nothing for it but to renounce his pension and escape 
while he could.  Getting home to Normandy, and understanding the 
King better now, he naturally allied himself with his old friend 
the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had still thirty castles in that 
country.  This was exactly what Henry wanted.  He immediately 
declared that Robert had broken the treaty, and next year invaded 
Normandy.

He pretended that he came to deliver the Normans, at their own 
request, from his brother's misrule.  There is reason to fear that 
his misrule was bad enough; for his beautiful wife had died, 
leaving him with an infant son, and his court was again so 
careless, dissipated, and ill-regulated, that it was said he 
sometimes lay in bed of a day for want of clothes to put on - his 
attendants having stolen all his dresses.  But he headed his army 
like a brave prince and a gallant soldier, though he had the 
misfortune to be taken prisoner by King Henry, with four hundred of 
his Knights.  Among them was poor harmless Edgar Atheling, who 
loved Robert well.  Edgar was not important enough to be severe 
with.  The King afterwards gave him a small pension, which he lived 
upon and died upon, in peace, among the quiet woods and fields of 
England.

And Robert - poor, kind, generous, wasteful, heedless Robert, with 
so many faults, and yet with virtues that might have made a better 
and a happier man - what was the end of him?  If the King had had 
the magnanimity to say with a kind air, 'Brother, tell me, before 
these noblemen, that from this time you will be my faithful 
follower and friend, and never raise your hand against me or my 
forces more!' he might have trusted Robert to the death.  But the 
King was not a magnanimous man.  He sentenced his brother to be 
confined for life in one of the Royal Castles.  In the beginning of 
his imprisonment, he was allowed to ride out, guarded; but he one 
day broke away from his guard and galloped of.  He had the evil 
fortune to ride into a swamp, where his horse stuck fast and he was 
taken.  When the King heard of it he ordered him to be blinded, 
which was done by putting a red-hot metal basin on his eyes.

And so, in darkness and in prison, many years, he thought of all 
his past life, of the time he had wasted, of the treasure he had 
squandered, of the opportunities he had lost, of the youth he had 
thrown away, of the talents he had neglected.  Sometimes, on fine 
autumn mornings, he would sit and think of the old hunting parties 
in the free Forest, where he had been the foremost and the gayest.  
Sometimes, in the still nights, he would wake, and mourn for the 
many nights that had stolen past him at the gaming-table; 
sometimes, would seem to hear, upon the melancholy wind, the old 
songs of the minstrels; sometimes, would dream, in his blindness, 
of the light and glitter of the Norman Court.  Many and many a 
time, he groped back, in his fancy, to Jerusalem, where he had 
fought so well; or, at the head of his brave companions, bowed his 
feathered helmet to the shouts of welcome greeting him in Italy, 
and seemed again to walk among the sunny vineyards, or on the shore 
of the blue sea, with his lovely wife.  And then, thinking of her 
grave, and of his fatherless boy, he would stretch out his solitary 
arms and weep.

At length, one day, there lay in prison, dead, with cruel and 
disfiguring scars upon his eyelids, bandaged from his jailer's 
sight, but on which the eternal Heavens looked down, a worn old man 
of eighty.  He had once been Robert of Normandy.  Pity him!

At the time when Robert of Normandy was taken prisoner by his 
brother, Robert's little son was only five years old.  This child 
was taken, too, and carried before the King, sobbing and crying; 
for, young as he was, he knew he had good reason to be afraid of 
his Royal uncle.  The King was not much accustomed to pity those 
who were in his power, but his cold heart seemed for the moment to 
soften towards the boy.  He was observed to make a great effort, as 
if to prevent himself from being cruel, and ordered the child to be 
taken away; whereupon a certain Baron, who had married a daughter 
of Duke Robert's (by name, Helie of Saint Saen), took charge of 
him, tenderly.  The King's gentleness did not last long.  Before 
two years were over, he sent messengers to this lord's Castle to 
seize the child and bring him away.  The Baron was not there at the 
time, but his servants were faithful, and carried the boy off in 
his sleep and hid him.  When the Baron came home, and was told what 
the King had done, he took the child abroad, and, leading him by 
the hand, went from King to King and from Court to Court, relating 
how the child had a claim to the throne of England, and how his 
uncle the King, knowing that he had that claim, would have murdered 
him, perhaps, but for his escape.

The youth and innocence of the pretty little WILLIAM FITZ-ROBERT 
(for that was his name) made him many friends at that time.  When 
he became a young man, the King of France, uniting with the French 
Counts of Anjou and Flanders, supported his cause against the King 
of England, and took many of the King's towns and castles in 
Normandy.  But, King Henry, artful and cunning always, bribed some 
of William's friends with money, some with promises, some with 
power.  He bought off the Count of Anjou, by promising to marry his 
eldest son, also named WILLIAM, to the Count's daughter; and indeed 
the whole trust of this King's life was in such bargains, and he 
believed (as many another King has done since, and as one King did 
in France a very little time ago) that every man's truth and honour 
can be bought at some price.  For all this, he was so afraid of 
William Fitz-Robert and his friends, that, for a long time, he 
believed his life to be in danger; and never lay down to sleep, 
even in his palace surrounded by his guards, without having a sword 
and buckler at his bedside.

To strengthen his power, the King with great ceremony betrothed his 
eldest daughter MATILDA, then a child only eight years old, to be 
the wife of Henry the Fifth, the Emperor of Germany.  To raise her 
marriage-portion, he taxed the English people in a most oppressive 
manner; then treated them to a great procession, to restore their 
good humour; and sent Matilda away, in fine state, with the German 
ambassadors, to be educated in the country of her future husband.

And now his Queen, Maud the Good, unhappily died.  It was a sad 
thought for that gentle lady, that the only hope with which she had 
married a man whom she had never loved - the hope of reconciling 
the Norman and English races - had failed.  At the very time of her 
death, Normandy and all France was in arms against England; for, so 
soon as his last danger was over, King Henry had been false to all 
the French powers he had promised, bribed, and bought, and they had 
naturally united against him.  After some fighting, however, in 
which few suffered but the unhappy common people (who always 
suffered, whatsoever was the matter), he began to promise, bribe, 
and buy again; and by those means, and by the help of the Pope, who 
exerted himself to save more bloodshed, and by solemnly declaring, 
over and over again, that he really was in earnest this time, and 
would keep his word, the King made peace.

One of the first consequences of this peace was, that the King went 
over to Normandy with his son Prince William and a great retinue, 
to have the Prince acknowledged as his successor by the Norman 
Nobles, and to contract the promised marriage (this was one of the 
many promises the King had broken) between him and the daughter of 
the Count of Anjou.  Both these things were triumphantly done, with 
great show and rejoicing; and on the twenty-fifth of November, in 
the year one thousand one hundred and twenty, the whole retinue 
prepared to embark at the Port of Barfleur, for the voyage home.

On that day, and at that place, there came to the King, Fitz-
Stephen, a sea-captain, and said:

'My liege, my father served your father all his life, upon the sea.  
He steered the ship with the golden boy upon the prow, in which 
your father sailed to conquer England.  I beseech you to grant me 
the same office.  I have a fair vessel in the harbour here, called 
The White Ship, manned by fifty sailors of renown.  I pray you, 
Sire, to let your servant have the honour of steering you in The 
White Ship to England!'

'I am sorry, friend,' replied the King, 'that my vessel is already 
chosen, and that I cannot (therefore) sail with the son of the man 
who served my father.  But the Prince and all his company shall go 
along with you, in the fair White Ship, manned by the fifty sailors 
of renown.'

An hour or two afterwards, the King set sail in the vessel he had 
chosen, accompanied by other vessels, and, sailing all night with a 
fair and gentle wind, arrived upon the coast of England in the 
morning.  While it was yet night, the people in some of those ships 
heard a faint wild cry come over the sea, and wondered what it was.

Now, the Prince was a dissolute, debauched young man of eighteen, 
who bore no love to the English, and had declared that when he came 
to the throne he would yoke them to the plough like oxen.  He went 
aboard The White Ship, with one hundred and forty youthful Nobles 
like himself, among whom were eighteen noble ladies of the highest 
rank.  All this gay company, with their servants and the fifty 
sailors, made three hundred souls aboard the fair White Ship.

'Give three casks of wine, Fitz-Stephen,' said the Prince, 'to the 
fifty sailors of renown!  My father the King has sailed out of the 
harbour.  What time is there to make merry here, and yet reach 
England with the rest?'

'Prince!' said Fitz-Stephen, 'before morning, my fifty and The 
White Ship shall overtake the swiftest vessel in attendance on your 
father the King, if we sail at midnight!'

Then the Prince commanded to make merry; and the sailors drank out 
the three casks of wine; and the Prince and all the noble company 
danced in the moonlight on the deck of The White Ship.

When, at last, she shot out of the harbour of Barfleur, there was 
not a sober seaman on board.  But the sails were all set, and the 
oars all going merrily.  Fitz-Stephen had the helm.  The gay young 
nobles and the beautiful ladies, wrapped in mantles of various 
bright colours to protect them from the cold, talked, laughed, and 
sang.  The Prince encouraged the fifty sailors to row harder yet, 
for the honour of The White Ship.

Crash!  A terrific cry broke from three hundred hearts.  It was the 
cry the people in the distant vessels of the King heard faintly on 
the water.  The White Ship had struck upon a rock - was filling - 
going down!

Fitz-Stephen hurried the Prince into a boat, with some few Nobles.  
'Push off,' he whispered; 'and row to land.  It is not far, and the 
sea is smooth.  The rest of us must die.'

But, as they rowed away, fast, from the sinking ship, the Prince 
heard the voice of his sister MARIE, the Countess of Perche, 
calling for help.  He never in his life had been so good as he was 
then.  He cried in an agony, 'Row back at any risk!  I cannot bear 
to leave her!'

They rowed back.  As the Prince held out his arms to catch his 
sister, such numbers leaped in, that the boat was overset.  And in 
the same instant The White Ship went down.

Only two men floated.  They both clung to the main yard of the 
ship, which had broken from the mast, and now supported them.  One 
asked the other who he was?  He said, 'I am a nobleman, GODFREY by 
name, the son of GILBERT DE L'AIGLE.  And you?' said he.  'I am 
BEROLD, a poor butcher of Rouen,' was the answer.  Then, they said 
together, 'Lord be merciful to us both!' and tried to encourage one 
another, as they drifted in the cold benumbing sea on that 
unfortunate November night.

By-and-by, another man came swimming towards them, whom they knew, 
when he pushed aside his long wet hair, to be Fitz-Stephen.  'Where 
is the Prince?' said he.  'Gone! Gone!' the two cried together.  
'Neither he, nor his brother, nor his sister, nor the King's niece, 
nor her brother, nor any one of all the brave three hundred, noble 
or commoner, except we three, has risen above the water!'  Fitz-
Stephen, with a ghastly face, cried, 'Woe! woe, to me!' and sunk to 
the bottom.

The other two clung to the yard for some hours.  At length the 
young noble said faintly, 'I am exhausted, and chilled with the 
cold, and can hold no longer.  Farewell, good friend!  God preserve 
you!'  So, he dropped and sunk; and of all the brilliant crowd, the 
poor Butcher of Rouen alone was saved.  In the morning, some 
fishermen saw him floating in his sheep-skin coat, and got him into 
their boat - the sole relater of the dismal tale.

For three days, no one dared to carry the intelligence to the King.  
At length, they sent into his presence a little boy, who, weeping 
bitterly, and kneeling at his feet, told him that The White Ship 
was lost with all on board.  The King fell to the ground like a 
dead man, and never, never afterwards, was seen to smile.

But he plotted again, and promised again, and bribed and bought 
again, in his old deceitful way.  Having no son to succeed him, 
after all his pains ('The Prince will never yoke us to the plough, 
now!' said the English people), he took a second wife - ADELAIS or 
ALICE, a duke's daughter, and the Pope's niece.  Having no more 
children, however, he proposed to the Barons to swear that they 
would recognise as his successor, his daughter Matilda, whom, as 
she was now a widow, he married to the eldest son of the Count of 
Anjou, GEOFFREY, surnamed PLANTAGENET, from a custom he had of 
wearing a sprig of flowering broom (called Genˆt in French) in his 
cap for a feather.  As one false man usually makes many, and as a 
false King, in particular, is pretty certain to make a false Court, 
the Barons took the oath about the succession of Matilda (and her 
children after her), twice over, without in the least intending to 
keep it.  The King was now relieved from any remaining fears of 
William Fitz-Robert, by his death in the Monastery of St. Omer, in 
France, at twenty-six years old, of a pike-wound in the hand.  And 
as Matilda gave birth to three sons, he thought the succession to 
the throne secure.

He spent most of the latter part of his life, which was troubled by 
family quarrels, in Normandy, to be near Matilda.  When he had 
reigned upward of thirty-five years, and was sixty-seven years old, 
he died of an indigestion and fever, brought on by eating, when he 
was far from well, of a fish called Lamprey, against which he had 
often been cautioned by his physicians.  His remains were brought 
over to Reading Abbey to be buried.

You may perhaps hear the cunning and promise-breaking of King Henry 
the First, called 'policy' by some people, and 'diplomacy' by 
others.  Neither of these fine words will in the least mean that it 
was true; and nothing that is not true can possibly be good.

His greatest merit, that I know of, was his love of learning - I 
should have given him greater credit even for that, if it had been 
strong enough to induce him to spare the eyes of a certain poet he 
once took prisoner, who was a knight besides.  But he ordered the 
poet's eyes to be torn from his head, because he had laughed at him 
in his verses; and the poet, in the pain of that torture, dashed 
out his own brains against his prison wall.  King Henry the First 
was avaricious, revengeful, and so false, that I suppose a man 
never lived whose word was less to be relied upon.



CHAPTER XI - ENGLAND UNDER MATILDA AND STEPHEN



THE King was no sooner dead than all the plans and schemes he had 
laboured at so long, and lied so much for, crumbled away like a 
hollow heap of sand.  STEPHEN, whom he had never mistrusted or 
suspected, started up to claim the throne.

Stephen was the son of ADELA, the Conqueror's daughter, married to 
the Count of Blois.  To Stephen, and to his brother HENRY, the late 
King had been liberal; making Henry Bishop of Winchester, and 
finding a good marriage for Stephen, and much enriching him.  This 
did not prevent Stephen from hastily producing a false witness, a 
servant of the late King, to swear that the King had named him for 
his heir upon his death-bed.  On this evidence the Archbishop of 
Canterbury crowned him.  The new King, so suddenly made, lost not a 
moment in seizing the Royal treasure, and hiring foreign soldiers 
with some of it to protect his throne.

If the dead King had even done as the false witness said, he would 
have had small right to will away the English people, like so many 
sheep or oxen, without their consent.  But he had, in fact, 
bequeathed all his territory to Matilda; who, supported by ROBERT, 
Earl of Gloucester, soon began to dispute the crown.  Some of the 
powerful barons and priests took her side; some took Stephen's; all 
fortified their castles; and again the miserable English people 
were involved in war, from which they could never derive advantage 
whosoever was victorious, and in which all parties plundered, 
tortured, starved, and ruined them.

Five years had passed since the death of Henry the First - and 
during those five years there had been two terrible invasions by 
the people of Scotland under their King, David, who was at last 
defeated with all his army - when Matilda, attended by her brother 
Robert and a large force, appeared in England to maintain her 
claim.  A battle was fought between her troops and King Stephen's 
at Lincoln; in which the King himself was taken prisoner, after 
bravely fighting until his battle-axe and sword were broken, and 
was carried into strict confinement at Gloucester.  Matilda then 
submitted herself to the Priests, and the Priests crowned her Queen 
of England.

She did not long enjoy this dignity.  The people of London had a 
great affection for Stephen; many of the Barons considered it 
degrading to be ruled by a woman; and the Queen's temper was so 
haughty that she made innumerable enemies.  The people of London 
revolted; and, in alliance with the troops of Stephen, besieged her 
at Winchester, where they took her brother Robert prisoner, whom, 
as her best soldier and chief general, she was glad to exchange for 
Stephen himself, who thus regained his liberty.  Then, the long war 
went on afresh.  Once, she was pressed so hard in the Castle of 
Oxford, in the winter weather when the snow lay thick upon the 
ground, that her only chance of escape was to dress herself all in 
white, and, accompanied by no more than three faithful Knights, 
dressed in like manner that their figures might not be seen from 
Stephen's camp as they passed over the snow, to steal away on foot, 
cross the frozen Thames, walk a long distance, and at last gallop 
away on horseback.  All this she did, but to no great purpose then; 
for her brother dying while the struggle was yet going on, she at 
last withdrew to Normandy.

In two or three years after her withdrawal her cause appeared in 
England, afresh, in the person of her son Henry, young Plantagenet, 
who, at only eighteen years of age, was very powerful:  not only on 
account of his mother having resigned all Normandy to him, but also 
from his having married ELEANOR, the divorced wife of the French 
King, a bad woman, who had great possessions in France.  Louis, the 
French King, not relishing this arrangement, helped EUSTACE, King 
Stephen's son, to invade Normandy:  but Henry drove their united 
forces out of that country, and then returned here, to assist his 
partisans, whom the King was then besieging at Wallingford upon the 
Thames.  Here, for two days, divided only by the river, the two 
armies lay encamped opposite to one another - on the eve, as it 
seemed to all men, of another desperate fight, when the EARL OF 
ARUNDEL took heart and said 'that it was not reasonable to prolong 
the unspeakable miseries of two kingdoms to minister to the 
ambition of two princes.'

Many other noblemen repeating and supporting this when it was once 
uttered, Stephen and young Plantagenet went down, each to his own 
bank of the river, and held a conversation across it, in which they 
arranged a truce; very much to the dissatisfaction of Eustace, who 
swaggered away with some followers, and laid violent hands on the 
Abbey of St. Edmund's-Bury, where he presently died mad.  The truce 
led to a solemn council at Winchester, in which it was agreed that 
Stephen should retain the crown, on condition of his declaring 
Henry his successor; that WILLIAM, another son of the King's, 
should inherit his father's rightful possessions; and that all the 
Crown lands which Stephen had given away should be recalled, and 
all the Castles he had permitted to be built demolished.  Thus 
terminated the bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, and 
had again laid England waste.  In the next year STEPHEN died, after 
a troubled reign of nineteen years.

Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a humane 
and moderate man, with many excellent qualities; and although 
nothing worse is known of him than his usurpation of the Crown, 
which he probably excused to himself by the consideration that King 
Henry the First was a usurper too - which was no excuse at all; the 
people of England suffered more in these dread nineteen years, than 
at any former period even of their suffering history.  In the 
division of the nobility between the two rival claimants of the 
Crown, and in the growth of what is called the Feudal System (which 
made the peasants the born vassals and mere slaves of the Barons), 
every Noble had his strong Castle, where he reigned the cruel king 
of all the neighbouring people.  Accordingly, he perpetrated 
whatever cruelties he chose.  And never were worse cruelties 
committed upon earth than in wretched England in those nineteen 
years.

The writers who were living then describe them fearfully.  They say 
that the castles were filled with devils rather than with men; that 
the peasants, men and women, were put into dungeons for their gold 
and silver, were tortured with fire and smoke, were hung up by the 
thumbs, were hung up by the heels with great weights to their 
heads, were torn with jagged irons, killed with hunger, broken to 
death in narrow chests filled with sharp-pointed stones, murdered 
in countless fiendish ways.  In England there was no corn, no meat, 
no cheese, no butter, there were no tilled lands, no harvests.  
Ashes of burnt towns, and dreary wastes, were all that the 
traveller, fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad at all hours, 
would see in a long day's journey; and from sunrise until night, he 
would not come upon a home.

The clergy sometimes suffered, and heavily too, from pillage, but 
many of them had castles of their own, and fought in helmet and 
armour like the barons, and drew lots with other fighting men for 
their share of booty.  The Pope (or Bishop of Rome), on King 
Stephen's resisting his ambition, laid England under an Interdict 
at one period of this reign; which means that he allowed no service 
to be performed in the churches, no couples to be married, no bells 
to be rung, no dead bodies to be buried.  Any man having the power 
to refuse these things, no matter whether he were called a Pope or 
a Poulterer, would, of course, have the power of afflicting numbers 
of innocent people.  That nothing might be wanting to the miseries 
of King Stephen's time, the Pope threw in this contribution to the 
public store - not very like the widow's contribution, as I think, 
when Our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over-against the Treasury, 'and 
she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.'



CHAPTER XII - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE SECOND - PART THE FIRST



HENRY PLANTAGENET, when he was but twenty-one years old, quietly 
succeeded to the throne of England, according to his agreement made 
with the late King at Winchester.  Six weeks after Stephen's death, 
he and his Queen, Eleanor, were crowned in that city; into which 
they rode on horseback in great state, side by side, amidst much 
shouting and rejoicing, and clashing of music, and strewing of 
flowers.

The reign of King Henry the Second began well.  The King had great 
possessions, and (what with his own rights, and what with those of 
his wife) was lord of one-third part of France.  He was a young man 
of vigour, ability, and resolution, and immediately applied himself 
to remove some of the evils which had arisen in the last unhappy 
reign.  He revoked all the grants of land that had been hastily 
made, on either side, during the late struggles; he obliged numbers 
of disorderly soldiers to depart from England; he reclaimed all the 
castles belonging to the Crown; and he forced the wicked nobles to 
pull down their own castles, to the number of eleven hundred, in 
which such dismal cruelties had been inflicted on the people.  The 
King's brother, GEOFFREY, rose against him in France, while he was 
so well employed, and rendered it necessary for him to repair to 
that country; where, after he had subdued and made a friendly 
arrangement with his brother (who did not live long), his ambition 
to increase his possessions involved him in a war with the French 
King, Louis, with whom he had been on such friendly terms just 
before, that to the French King's infant daughter, then a baby in 
the cradle, he had promised one of his little sons in marriage, who 
was a child of five years old.  However, the war came to nothing at 
last, and the Pope made the two Kings friends again.

Now, the clergy, in the troubles of the last reign, had gone on 
very ill indeed.  There were all kinds of criminals among them - 
murderers, thieves, and vagabonds; and the worst of the matter was, 
that the good priests would not give up the bad priests to justice, 
when they committed crimes, but persisted in sheltering and 
defending them.  The King, well knowing that there could be no 
peace or rest in England while such things lasted, resolved to 
reduce the power of the clergy; and, when he had reigned seven 
years, found (as he considered) a good opportunity for doing so, in 
the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  'I will have for the 
new Archbishop,' thought the King, 'a friend in whom I can trust, 
who will help me to humble these rebellious priests, and to have 
them dealt with, when they do wrong, as other men who do wrong are 
dealt with.'  So, he resolved to make his favourite, the new 
Archbishop; and this favourite was so extraordinary a man, and his 
story is so curious, that I must tell you all about him.

Once upon a time, a worthy merchant of London, named GILBERT A 
BECKET, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was taken prisoner 
by a Saracen lord.  This lord, who treated him kindly and not like 
a slave, had one fair daughter, who fell in love with the merchant; 
and who told him that she wanted to become a Christian, and was 
willing to marry him if they could fly to a Christian country.  The 
merchant returned her love, until he found an opportunity to 
escape, when he did not trouble himself about the Saracen lady, but 
escaped with his servant Richard, who had been taken prisoner along 
with him, and arrived in England and forgot her.  The Saracen lady, 
who was more loving than the merchant, left her father's house in 
disguise to follow him, and made her way, under many hardships, to 
the sea-shore.  The merchant had taught her only two English words 
(for I suppose he must have learnt the Saracen tongue himself, and 
made love in that language), of which LONDON was one, and his own 
name, GILBERT, the other.  She went among the ships, saying, 
'London! London!' over and over again, until the sailors understood 
that she wanted to find an English vessel that would carry her 
there; so they showed her such a ship, and she paid for her passage 
with some of her jewels, and sailed away.  Well!  The merchant was 
sitting in his counting-house in London one day, when he heard a 
great noise in the street; and presently Richard came running in 
from the warehouse, with his eyes wide open and his breath almost 
gone, saying, 'Master, master, here is the Saracen lady!'  The 
merchant thought Richard was mad; but Richard said, 'No, master!  
As I live, the Saracen lady is going up and down the city, calling 
Gilbert!  Gilbert!'  Then, he took the merchant by the sleeve, and 
pointed out of window; and there they saw her among the gables and 
water-spouts of the dark, dirty street, in her foreign dress, so 
forlorn, surrounded by a wondering crowd, and passing slowly along, 
calling Gilbert, Gilbert!  When the merchant saw her, and thought 
of the tenderness she had shown him in his captivity, and of her 
constancy, his heart was moved, and he ran down into the street; 
and she saw him coming, and with a great cry fainted in his arms.  
They were married without loss of time, and Richard (who was an 
excellent man) danced with joy the whole day of the wedding; and 
they all lived happy ever afterwards.

This merchant and this Saracen lady had one son, THOMAS A BECKET.  
He it was who became the Favourite of King Henry the Second.

He had become Chancellor, when the King thought of making him 
Archbishop.  He was clever, gay, well educated, brave; had fought 
in several battles in France; had defeated a French knight in 
single combat, and brought his horse away as a token of the 
victory.  He lived in a noble palace, he was the tutor of the young 
Prince Henry, he was served by one hundred and forty knights, his 
riches were immense.  The King once sent him as his ambassador to 
France; and the French people, beholding in what state he 
travelled, cried out in the streets, 'How splendid must the King of 
England be, when this is only the Chancellor!'  They had good 
reason to wonder at the magnificence of Thomas a Becket, for, when 
he entered a French town, his procession was headed by two hundred 
and fifty singing boys; then, came his hounds in couples; then, 
eight waggons, each drawn by five horses driven by five drivers:  
two of the waggons filled with strong ale to be given away to the 
people; four, with his gold and silver plate and stately clothes; 
two, with the dresses of his numerous servants.  Then, came twelve 
horses, each with a monkey on his back; then, a train of people 
bearing shields and leading fine war-horses splendidly equipped; 
then, falconers with hawks upon their wrists; then, a host of 
knights, and gentlemen and priests; then, the Chancellor with his 
brilliant garments flashing in the sun, and all the people capering 
and shouting with delight.

The King was well pleased with all this, thinking that it only made 
himself the more magnificent to have so magnificent a favourite; 
but he sometimes jested with the Chancellor upon his splendour too.  
Once, when they were riding together through the streets of London 
in hard winter weather, they saw a shivering old man in rags.  
'Look at the poor object!' said the King.  'Would it not be a 
charitable act to give that aged man a comfortable warm cloak?'  
'Undoubtedly it would,' said Thomas a Becket, 'and you do well, 
Sir, to think of such Christian duties.'  'Come!' cried the King, 
'then give him your cloak!'  It was made of rich crimson trimmed 
with ermine.  The King tried to pull it off, the Chancellor tried 
to keep it on, both were near rolling from their saddles in the 
mud, when the Chancellor submitted, and the King gave the cloak to 
the old beggar:  much to the beggar's astonishment, and much to the 
merriment of all the courtiers in attendance.  For, courtiers are 
not only eager to laugh when the King laughs, but they really do 
enjoy a laugh against a Favourite.

'I will make,' thought King Henry the second, 'this Chancellor of 
mine, Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.  He will then be 
the head of the Church, and, being devoted to me, will help me to 
correct the Church.  He has always upheld my power against the 
power of the clergy, and once publicly told some bishops (I 
remember), that men of the Church were equally bound to me, with 
men of the sword.  Thomas a Becket is the man, of all other men in 
England, to help me in my great design.'  So the King, regardless 
of all objection, either that he was a fighting man, or a lavish 
man, or a courtly man, or a man of pleasure, or anything but a 
likely man for the office, made him Archbishop accordingly.

Now, Thomas a Becket was proud and loved to be famous.  He was 
already famous for the pomp of his life, for his riches, his gold 
and silver plate, his waggons, horses, and attendants.  He could do 
no more in that way than he had done; and being tired of that kind 
of fame (which is a very poor one), he longed to have his name 
celebrated for something else.  Nothing, he knew, would render him 
so famous in the world, as the setting of his utmost power and 
ability against the utmost power and ability of the King.  He 
resolved with the whole strength of his mind to do it.

He may have had some secret grudge against the King besides.  The 
King may have offended his proud humour at some time or other, for 
anything I know.  I think it likely, because it is a common thing 
for Kings, Princes, and other great people, to try the tempers of 
their favourites rather severely.  Even the little affair of the 
crimson cloak must have been anything but a pleasant one to a 
haughty man.  Thomas a Becket knew better than any one in England 
what the King expected of him.  In all his sumptuous life, he had 
never yet been in a position to disappoint the King.  He could take 
up that proud stand now, as head of the Church; and he determined 
that it should be written in history, either that he subdued the 
King, or that the King subdued him.

So, of a sudden, he completely altered the whole manner of his 
life.  He turned off all his brilliant followers, ate coarse food, 
drank bitter water, wore next his skin sackcloth covered with dirt 
and vermin (for it was then thought very religious to be very 
dirty), flogged his back to punish himself, lived chiefly in a 
little cell, washed the feet of thirteen poor people every day, and 
looked as miserable as he possibly could.  If he had put twelve 
hundred monkeys on horseback instead of twelve, and had gone in 
procession with eight thousand waggons instead of eight, he could 
not have half astonished the people so much as by this great 
change.  It soon caused him to be more talked about as an 
Archbishop than he had been as a Chancellor.

The King was very angry; and was made still more so, when the new 
Archbishop, claiming various estates from the nobles as being 
rightfully Church property, required the King himself, for the same 
reason, to give up Rochester Castle, and Rochester City too.  Not 
satisfied with this, he declared that no power but himself should 
appoint a priest to any Church in the part of England over which he 
was Archbishop; and when a certain gentleman of Kent made such an 
appointment, as he claimed to have the right to do, Thomas a Becket 
excommunicated him.

Excommunication was, next to the Interdict I told you of at the 
close of the last chapter, the great weapon of the clergy.  It 
consisted in declaring the person who was excommunicated, an 
outcast from the Church and from all religious offices; and in 
cursing him all over, from the top of his head to the sole of his 
foot, whether he was standing up, lying down, sitting, kneeling, 
walking, running, hopping, jumping, gaping, coughing, sneezing, or 
whatever else he was doing.  This unchristian nonsense would of 
course have made no sort of difference to the person cursed - who 
could say his prayers at home if he were shut out of church, and 
whom none but GOD could judge - but for the fears and superstitions 
of the people, who avoided excommunicated persons, and made their 
lives unhappy.  So, the King said to the New Archbishop, 'Take off 
this Excommunication from this gentleman of Kent.'  To which the 
Archbishop replied, 'I shall do no such thing.'

The quarrel went on.  A priest in Worcestershire committed a most 
dreadful murder, that aroused the horror of the whole nation.  The 
King demanded to have this wretch delivered up, to be tried in the 
same court and in the same way as any other murderer.  The 
Archbishop refused, and kept him in the Bishop's prison.  The King, 
holding a solemn assembly in Westminster Hall, demanded that in 
future all priests found guilty before their Bishops of crimes 
against the law of the land should be considered priests no longer, 
and should be delivered over to the law of the land for punishment.  
The Archbishop again refused.  The King required to know whether 
the clergy would obey the ancient customs of the country?  Every 
priest there, but one, said, after Thomas a Becket, 'Saving my 
order.'  This really meant that they would only obey those customs 
when they did not interfere with their own claims; and the King 
went out of the Hall in great wrath.

Some of the clergy began to be afraid, now, that they were going 
too far.  Though Thomas a Becket was otherwise as unmoved as 
Westminster Hall, they prevailed upon him, for the sake of their 
fears, to go to the King at Woodstock, and promise to observe the 
ancient customs of the country, without saying anything about his 
order.  The King received this submission favourably, and summoned 
a great council of the clergy to meet at the Castle of Clarendon, 
by Salisbury.  But when the council met, the Archbishop again 
insisted on the words 'saying my order;' and he still insisted, 
though lords entreated him, and priests wept before him and knelt 
to him, and an adjoining room was thrown open, filled with armed 
soldiers of the King, to threaten him.  At length he gave way, for 
that time, and the ancient customs (which included what the King 
had demanded in vain) were stated in writing, and were signed and 
sealed by the chief of the clergy, and were called the 
Constitutions of Clarendon.

The quarrel went on, for all that.  The Archbishop tried to see the 
King.  The King would not see him.  The Archbishop tried to escape 
from England.  The sailors on the coast would launch no boat to 
take him away.  Then, he again resolved to do his worst in 
opposition to the King, and began openly to set the ancient customs 
at defiance.

The King summoned him before a great council at Northampton, where 
he accused him of high treason, and made a claim against him, which 
was not a just one, for an enormous sum of money.  Thomas a Becket 
was alone against the whole assembly, and the very Bishops advised 
him to resign his office and abandon his contest with the King.  
His great anxiety and agitation stretched him on a sick-bed for two 
days, but he was still undaunted.  He went to the adjourned 
council, carrying a great cross in his right hand, and sat down 
holding it erect before him.  The King angrily retired into an 
inner room.  The whole assembly angrily retired and left him there.  
But there he sat.  The Bishops came out again in a body, and 
renounced him as a traitor.  He only said, 'I hear!' and sat there 
still.  They retired again into the inner room, and his trial 
proceeded without him.  By-and-by, the Earl of Leicester, heading 
the barons, came out to read his sentence.  He refused to hear it, 
denied the power of the court, and said he would refer his cause to 
the Pope.  As he walked out of the hall, with the cross in his 
hand, some of those present picked up rushes - rushes were strewn 
upon the floors in those days by way of carpet - and threw them at 
him.  He proudly turned his head, and said that were he not 
Archbishop, he would chastise those cowards with the sword he had 
known how to use in bygone days.  He then mounted his horse, and 
rode away, cheered and surrounded by the common people, to whom he 
threw open his house that night and gave a supper, supping with 
them himself.  That same night he secretly departed from the town; 
and so, travelling by night and hiding by day, and calling himself 
'Brother Dearman,' got away, not without difficulty, to Flanders.

The struggle still went on.  The angry King took possession of the 
revenues of the archbishopric, and banished all the relations and 
servants of Thomas a Becket, to the number of four hundred.  The 
Pope and the French King both protected him, and an abbey was 
assigned for his residence.  Stimulated by this support, Thomas a 
Becket, on a great festival day, formally proceeded to a great 
church crowded with people, and going up into the pulpit publicly 
cursed and excommunicated all who had supported the Constitutions 
of Clarendon:  mentioning many English noblemen by name, and not 
distantly hinting at the King of England himself.

When intelligence of this new affront was carried to the King in 
his chamber, his passion was so furious that he tore his clothes, 
and rolled like a madman on his bed of straw and rushes.  But he 
was soon up and doing.  He ordered all the ports and coasts of 
England to be narrowly watched, that no letters of Interdict might 
be brought into the kingdom; and sent messengers and bribes to the 
Pope's palace at Rome.  Meanwhile, Thomas a Becket, for his part, 
was not idle at Rome, but constantly employed his utmost arts in 
his own behalf.  Thus the contest stood, until there was peace 
between France and England (which had been for some time at war), 
and until the two children of the two Kings were married in 
celebration of it.  Then, the French King brought about a meeting 
between Henry and his old favourite, so long his enemy.

Even then, though Thomas a Becket knelt before the King, he was 
obstinate and immovable as to those words about his order.  King 
Louis of France was weak enough in his veneration for Thomas a 
Becket and such men, but this was a little too much for him.  He 
said that a Becket 'wanted to be greater than the saints and better 
than St. Peter,' and rode away from him with the King of England.  
His poor French Majesty asked a Becket's pardon for so doing, 
however, soon afterwards, and cut a very pitiful figure.

At last, and after a world of trouble, it came to this.  There was 
another meeting on French ground between King Henry and Thomas a 
Becket, and it was agreed that Thomas a Becket should be Archbishop 
of Canterbury, according to the customs of former Archbishops, and 
that the King should put him in possession of the revenues of that 
post.  And now, indeed, you might suppose the struggle at an end, 
and Thomas a Becket at rest.  NO, not even yet.  For Thomas a 
Becket hearing, by some means, that King Henry, when he was in 
dread of his kingdom being placed under an interdict, had had his 
eldest son Prince Henry secretly crowned, not only persuaded the 
Pope to suspend the Archbishop of York who had performed that 
ceremony, and to excommunicate the Bishops who had assisted at it, 
but sent a messenger of his own into England, in spite of all the 
King's precautions along the coast, who delivered the letters of 
excommunication into the Bishops' own hands.  Thomas a Becket then 
came over to England himself, after an absence of seven years.  He 
was privately warned that it was dangerous to come, and that an 
ireful knight, named RANULF DE BROC, had threatened that he should 
not live to eat a loaf of bread in England; but he came.

The common people received him well, and marched about with him in 
a soldierly way, armed with such rustic weapons as they could get.  
He tried to see the young prince who had once been his pupil, but 
was prevented.  He hoped for some little support among the nobles 
and priests, but found none.  He made the most of the peasants who 
attended him, and feasted them, and went from Canterbury to Harrow-
on-the-Hill, and from Harrow-on-the-Hill back to Canterbury, and on 
Christmas Day preached in the Cathedral there, and told the people 
in his sermon that he had come to die among them, and that it was 
likely he would be murdered.  He had no fear, however - or, if he 
had any, he had much more obstinacy - for he, then and there, 
excommunicated three of his enemies, of whom Ranulf de Broc, the 
ireful knight, was one.

As men in general had no fancy for being cursed, in their sitting 
and walking, and gaping and sneezing, and all the rest of it, it 
was very natural in the persons so freely excommunicated to 
complain to the King.  It was equally natural in the King, who had 
hoped that this troublesome opponent was at last quieted, to fall 
into a mighty rage when he heard of these new affronts; and, on the 
Archbishop of York telling him that he never could hope for rest 
while Thomas a Becket lived, to cry out hastily before his court, 
'Have I no one here who will deliver me from this man?'  There were 
four knights present, who, hearing the King's words, looked at one 
another, and went out.

The names of these knights were REGINALD FITZURSE, WILLIAM TRACY, 
HUGH DE MORVILLE, and RICHARD BRITO; three of whom had been in the 
train of Thomas a Becket in the old days of his splendour.  They 
rode away on horseback, in a very secret manner, and on the third 
day after Christmas Day arrived at Saltwood House, not far from 
Canterbury, which belonged to the family of Ranulf de Broc.  They 
quietly collected some followers here, in case they should need 
any; and proceeding to Canterbury, suddenly appeared (the four 
knights and twelve men) before the Archbishop, in his own house, at 
two o'clock in the afternoon.  They neither bowed nor spoke, but 
sat down on the floor in silence, staring at the Archbishop.

Thomas a Becket said, at length, 'What do you want?'

'We want,' said Reginald Fitzurse, 'the excommunication taken from 
the Bishops, and you to answer for your offences to the King.'  
Thomas a Becket defiantly replied, that the power of the clergy was 
above the power of the King.  That it was not for such men as they 
were, to threaten him.  That if he were threatened by all the 
swords in England, he would never yield.

'Then we will do more than threaten!' said the knights.  And they 
went out with the twelve men, and put on their armour, and drew 
their shining swords, and came back.

His servants, in the meantime, had shut up and barred the great 
gate of the palace.  At first, the knights tried to shatter it with 
their battle-axes; but, being shown a window by which they could 
enter, they let the gate alone, and climbed in that way.  While 
they were battering at the door, the attendants of Thomas a Becket 
had implored him to take refuge in the Cathedral; in which, as a 
sanctuary or sacred place, they thought the knights would dare to 
do no violent deed.  He told them, again and again, that he would 
not stir.  Hearing the distant voices of the monks singing the 
evening service, however, he said it was now his duty to attend, 
and therefore, and for no other reason, he would go.

There was a near way between his Palace and the Cathedral, by some 
beautiful old cloisters which you may yet see.  He went into the 
Cathedral, without any hurry, and having the Cross carried before 
him as usual.  When he was safely there, his servants would have 
fastened the door, but he said NO! it was the house of God and not 
a fortress.

As he spoke, the shadow of Reginald Fitzurse appeared in the 
Cathedral doorway, darkening the little light there was outside, on 
the dark winter evening.  This knight said, in a strong voice, 
'Follow me, loyal servants of the King!'  The rattle of the armour 
of the other knights echoed through the Cathedral, as they came 
clashing in.

It was so dark, in the lofty aisles and among the stately pillars 
of the church, and there were so many hiding-places in the crypt 
below and in the narrow passages above, that Thomas a Becket might 
even at that pass have saved himself if he would.  But he would 
not.  He told the monks resolutely that he would not.  And though 
they all dispersed and left him there with no other follower than 
EDWARD GRYME, his faithful cross-bearer, he was as firm then, as 
ever he had been in his life.

The knights came on, through the darkness, making a terrible noise 
with their armed tread upon the stone pavement of the church.  
'Where is the traitor?' they cried out.  He made no answer.  But 
when they cried, 'Where is the Archbishop?' he said proudly, 'I am 
here!' and came out of the shade and stood before them.

The knights had no desire to kill him, if they could rid the King 
and themselves of him by any other means.  They told him he must 
either fly or go with them.  He said he would do neither; and he 
threw William Tracy off with such force when he took hold of his 
sleeve, that Tracy reeled again.  By his reproaches and his 
steadiness, he so incensed them, and exasperated their fierce 
humour, that Reginald Fitzurse, whom he called by an ill name, 
said, 'Then die!' and struck at his head.  But the faithful Edward 
Gryme put out his arm, and there received the main force of the 
blow, so that it only made his master bleed.  Another voice from 
among the knights again called to Thomas a Becket to fly; but, with 
his blood running down his face, and his hands clasped, and his 
head bent, he commanded himself to God, and stood firm.  Then they 
cruelly killed him close to the altar of St. Bennet; and his body 
fell upon the pavement, which was dirtied with his blood and 
brains.

It is an awful thing to think of the murdered mortal, who had so 
showered his curses about, lying, all disfigured, in the church, 
where a few lamps here and there were but red specks on a pall of 
darkness; and to think of the guilty knights riding away on 
horseback, looking over their shoulders at the dim Cathedral, and 
remembering what they had left inside.


PART THE SECOND


WHEN the King heard how Thomas a Becket had lost his life in 
Canterbury Cathedral, through the ferocity of the four Knights, he 
was filled with dismay.  Some have supposed that when the King 
spoke those hasty words, 'Have I no one here who will deliver me 
from this man?' he wished, and meant a Becket to be slain.  But few 
things are more unlikely; for, besides that the King was not 
naturally cruel (though very passionate), he was wise, and must 
have known full well what any stupid man in his dominions must have 
known, namely, that such a murder would rouse the Pope and the 
whole Church against him.

He sent respectful messengers to the Pope, to represent his 
innocence (except in having uttered the hasty words); and he swore 
solemnly and publicly to his innocence, and contrived in time to 
make his peace.  As to the four guilty Knights, who fled into 
Yorkshire, and never again dared to show themselves at Court, the 
Pope excommunicated them; and they lived miserably for some time, 
shunned by all their countrymen.  At last, they went humbly to 
Jerusalem as a penance, and there died and were buried.

It happened, fortunately for the pacifying of the Pope, that an 
opportunity arose very soon after the murder of a Becket, for the 
King to declare his power in Ireland - which was an acceptable 
undertaking to the Pope, as the Irish, who had been converted to 
Christianity by one Patricius (otherwise Saint Patrick) long ago, 
before any Pope existed, considered that the Pope had nothing at 
all to do with them, or they with the Pope, and accordingly refused 
to pay him Peter's Pence, or that tax of a penny a house which I 
have elsewhere mentioned.  The King's opportunity arose in this 
way.

The Irish were, at that time, as barbarous a people as you can well 
imagine.  They were continually quarrelling and fighting, cutting 
one another's throats, slicing one another's noses, burning one 
another's houses, carrying away one another's wives, and committing 
all sorts of violence.  The country was divided into five kingdoms 
- DESMOND, THOMOND, CONNAUGHT, ULSTER, and LEINSTER - each governed 
by a separate King, of whom one claimed to be the chief of the 
rest.  Now, one of these Kings, named DERMOND MAC MURROUGH (a wild 
kind of name, spelt in more than one wild kind of way), had carried 
off the wife of a friend of his, and concealed her on an island in 
a bog.  The friend resenting this (though it was quite the custom 
of the country), complained to the chief King, and, with the chief 
King's help, drove Dermond Mac Murrough out of his dominions.  
Dermond came over to England for revenge; and offered to hold his 
realm as a vassal of King Henry, if King Henry would help him to 
regain it.  The King consented to these terms; but only assisted 
him, then, with what were called Letters Patent, authorising any 
English subjects who were so disposed, to enter into his service, 
and aid his cause.

There was, at Bristol, a certain EARL RICHARD DE CLARE, called 
STRONGBOW; of no very good character; needy and desperate, and 
ready for anything that offered him a chance of improving his 
fortunes.  There were, in South Wales, two other broken knights of 
the same good-for-nothing sort, called ROBERT FITZ-STEPHEN, and 
MAURICE FITZ-GERALD.  These three, each with a small band of 
followers, took up Dermond's cause; and it was agreed that if it 
proved successful, Strongbow should marry Dermond's daughter EVA, 
and be declared his heir.

The trained English followers of these knights were so superior in 
all the discipline of battle to the Irish, that they beat them 
against immense superiority of numbers.  In one fight, early in the 
war, they cut off three hundred heads, and laid them before Mac 
Murrough; who turned them every one up with his hands, rejoicing, 
and, coming to one which was the head of a man whom he had much 
disliked, grasped it by the hair and ears, and tore off the nose 
and lips with his teeth.  You may judge from this, what kind of a 
gentleman an Irish King in those times was.  The captives, all 
through this war, were horribly treated; the victorious party 
making nothing of breaking their limbs, and casting them into the 
sea from the tops of high rocks.  It was in the midst of the 
miseries and cruelties attendant on the taking of Waterford, where 
the dead lay piled in the streets, and the filthy gutters ran with 
blood, that Strongbow married Eva.  An odious marriage-company 
those mounds of corpse's must have made, I think, and one quite 
worthy of the young lady's father.

He died, after Waterford and Dublin had been taken, and various 
successes achieved; and Strongbow became King of Leinster.  Now 
came King Henry's opportunity.  To restrain the growing power of 
Strongbow, he himself repaired to Dublin, as Strongbow's Royal 
Master, and deprived him of his kingdom, but confirmed him in the 
enjoyment of great possessions.  The King, then, holding state in 
Dublin, received the homage of nearly all the Irish Kings and 
Chiefs, and so came home again with a great addition to his 
reputation as Lord of Ireland, and with a new claim on the favour 
of the Pope.  And now, their reconciliation was completed - more 
easily and mildly by the Pope, than the King might have expected, I 
think.

At this period of his reign, when his troubles seemed so few and 
his prospects so bright, those domestic miseries began which 
gradually made the King the most unhappy of men, reduced his great 
spirit, wore away his health, and broke his heart.

He had four sons.  HENRY, now aged eighteen - his secret crowning 
of whom had given such offence to Thomas a Becket.  RICHARD, aged 
sixteen; GEOFFREY, fifteen; and JOHN, his favourite, a young boy 
whom the courtiers named LACKLAND, because he had no inheritance, 
but to whom the King meant to give the Lordship of Ireland.  All 
these misguided boys, in their turn, were unnatural sons to him, 
and unnatural brothers to each other.  Prince Henry, stimulated by 
the French King, and by his bad mother, Queen Eleanor, began the 
undutiful history,

First, he demanded that his young wife, MARGARET, the French King's 
daughter, should be crowned as well as he.  His father, the King, 
consented, and it was done.  It was no sooner done, than he 
demanded to have a part of his father's dominions, during his 
father's life.  This being refused, he made off from his father in 
the night, with his bad heart full of bitterness, and took refuge 
at the French King's Court.  Within a day or two, his brothers 
Richard and Geoffrey followed.  Their mother tried to join them - 
escaping in man's clothes - but she was seized by King Henry's men, 
and immured in prison, where she lay, deservedly, for sixteen 
years.  Every day, however, some grasping English noblemen, to whom 
the King's protection of his people from their avarice and 
oppression had given offence, deserted him and joined the Princes.  
Every day he heard some fresh intelligence of the Princes levying 
armies against him; of Prince Henry's wearing a crown before his 
own ambassadors at the French Court, and being called the Junior 
King of England; of all the Princes swearing never to make peace 
with him, their father, without the consent and approval of the 
Barons of France.  But, with his fortitude and energy unshaken, 
King Henry met the shock of these disasters with a resolved and 
cheerful face.  He called upon all Royal fathers who had sons, to 
help him, for his cause was theirs; he hired, out of his riches, 
twenty thousand men to fight the false French King, who stirred his 
own blood against him; and he carried on the war with such vigour, 
that Louis soon proposed a conference to treat for peace.

The conference was held beneath an old wide-spreading green elm-
tree, upon a plain in France.  It led to nothing.  The war 
recommenced.  Prince Richard began his fighting career, by leading 
an army against his father; but his father beat him and his army 
back; and thousands of his men would have rued the day in which 
they fought in such a wicked cause, had not the King received news 
of an invasion of England by the Scots, and promptly come home 
through a great storm to repress it.  And whether he really began 
to fear that he suffered these troubles because a Becket had been 
murdered; or whether he wished to rise in the favour of the Pope, 
who had now declared a Becket to be a saint, or in the favour of 
his own people, of whom many believed that even a Becket's 
senseless tomb could work miracles, I don't know:  but the King no 
sooner landed in England than he went straight to Canterbury; and 
when he came within sight of the distant Cathedral, he dismounted 
from his horse, took off his shoes, and walked with bare and 
bleeding feet to a Becket's grave.  There, he lay down on the 
ground, lamenting, in the presence of many people; and by-and-by he 
went into the Chapter House, and, removing his clothes from his 
back and shoulders, submitted himself to be beaten with knotted 
cords (not beaten very hard, I dare say though) by eighty Priests, 
one after another.  It chanced that on the very day when the King 
made this curious exhibition of himself, a complete victory was 
obtained over the Scots; which very much delighted the Priests, who 
said that it was won because of his great example of repentance.  
For the Priests in general had found out, since a Becket's death, 
that they admired him of all things - though they had hated him 
very cordially when he was alive.

The Earl of Flanders, who was at the head of the base conspiracy of 
the King's undutiful sons and their foreign friends, took the 
opportunity of the King being thus employed at home, to lay siege 
to Rouen, the capital of Normandy.  But the King, who was 
extraordinarily quick and active in all his movements, was at 
Rouen, too, before it was supposed possible that he could have left 
England; and there he so defeated the said Earl of Flanders, that 
the conspirators proposed peace, and his bad sons Henry and 
Geoffrey submitted.  Richard resisted for six weeks; but, being 
beaten out of castle after castle, he at last submitted too, and 
his father forgave him.

To forgive these unworthy princes was only to afford them 
breathing-time for new faithlessness.  They were so false, 
disloyal, and dishonourable, that they were no more to be trusted 
than common thieves.  In the very next year, Prince Henry rebelled 
again, and was again forgiven.  In eight years more, Prince Richard 
rebelled against his elder brother; and Prince Geoffrey infamously 
said that the brothers could never agree well together, unless they 
were united against their father.  In the very next year after 
their reconciliation by the King, Prince Henry again rebelled 
against his father; and again submitted, swearing to be true; and 
was again forgiven; and again rebelled with Geoffrey.

But the end of this perfidious Prince was come.  He fell sick at a 
French town; and his conscience terribly reproaching him with his 
baseness, he sent messengers to the King his father, imploring him 
to come and see him, and to forgive him for the last time on his 
bed of death.  The generous King, who had a royal and forgiving 
mind towards his children always, would have gone; but this Prince 
had been so unnatural, that the noblemen about the King suspected 
treachery, and represented to him that he could not safely trust 
his life with such a traitor, though his own eldest son.  Therefore 
the King sent him a ring from off his finger as a token of 
forgiveness; and when the Prince had kissed it, with much grief and 
many tears, and had confessed to those around him how bad, and 
wicked, and undutiful a son he had been; he said to the attendant 
Priests:  'O, tie a rope about my body, and draw me out of bed, and 
lay me down upon a bed of ashes, that I may die with prayers to God 
in a repentant manner!'  And so he died, at twenty-seven years old.

Three years afterwards, Prince Geoffrey, being unhorsed at a 
tournament, had his brains trampled out by a crowd of horses 
passing over him.  So, there only remained Prince Richard, and 
Prince John - who had grown to be a young man now, and had solemnly 
sworn to be faithful to his father.  Richard soon rebelled again, 
encouraged by his friend the French King, PHILIP THE SECOND (son of 
Louis, who was dead); and soon submitted and was again forgiven, 
swearing on the New Testament never to rebel again; and in another 
year or so, rebelled again; and, in the presence of his father, 
knelt down on his knee before the King of France; and did the 
French King homage:  and declared that with his aid he would 
possess himself, by force, of all his father's French dominions.

And yet this Richard called himself a soldier of Our Saviour!  And 
yet this Richard wore the Cross, which the Kings of France and 
England had both taken, in the previous year, at a brotherly 
meeting underneath the old wide-spreading elm-tree on the plain, 
when they had sworn (like him) to devote themselves to a new 
Crusade, for the love and honour of the Truth!

Sick at heart, wearied out by the falsehood of his sons, and almost 
ready to lie down and die, the unhappy King who had so long stood 
firm, began to fail.  But the Pope, to his honour, supported him; 
and obliged the French King and Richard, though successful in 
fight, to treat for peace.  Richard wanted to be Crowned King of 
England, and pretended that he wanted to be married (which he 
really did not) to the French King's sister, his promised wife, 
whom King Henry detained in England.  King Henry wanted, on the 
other hand, that the French King's sister should be married to his 
favourite son, John:  the only one of his sons (he said) who had 
never rebelled against him.  At last King Henry, deserted by his 
nobles one by one, distressed, exhausted, broken-hearted, consented 
to establish peace.

One final heavy sorrow was reserved for him, even yet.  When they 
brought him the proposed treaty of peace, in writing, as he lay 
very ill in bed, they brought him also the list of the deserters 
from their allegiance, whom he was required to pardon.  The first 
name upon this list was John, his favourite son, in whom he had 
trusted to the last.

'O John! child of my heart!' exclaimed the King, in a great agony 
of mind.  'O John, whom I have loved the best!  O John, for whom I 
have contended through these many troubles!  Have you betrayed me 
too!'  And then he lay down with a heavy groan, and said, 'Now let 
the world go as it will.  I care for nothing more!'

After a time, he told his attendants to take him to the French town 
of Chinon - a town he had been fond of, during many years.  But he 
was fond of no place now; it was too true that he could care for 
nothing more upon this earth.  He wildly cursed the hour when he 
was born, and cursed the children whom he left behind him; and 
expired.

As, one hundred years before, the servile followers of the Court 
had abandoned the Conqueror in the hour of his death, so they now 
abandoned his descendant.  The very body was stripped, in the 
plunder of the Royal chamber; and it was not easy to find the means 
of carrying it for burial to the abbey church of Fontevraud.

Richard was said in after years, by way of flattery, to have the 
heart of a Lion.  It would have been far better, I think, to have 
had the heart of a Man.  His heart, whatever it was, had cause to 
beat remorsefully within his breast, when he came - as he did - 
into the solemn abbey, and looked on his dead father's uncovered 
face.  His heart, whatever it was, had been a black and perjured 
heart, in all its dealings with the deceased King, and more 
deficient in a single touch of tenderness than any wild beast's in 
the forest.

There is a pretty story told of this Reign, called the story of 
FAIR ROSAMOND.  It relates how the King doted on Fair Rosamond, who 
was the loveliest girl in all the world; and how he had a beautiful 
Bower built for her in a Park at Woodstock; and how it was erected 
in a labyrinth, and could only be found by a clue of silk.  How the 
bad Queen Eleanor, becoming jealous of Fair Rosamond, found out the 
secret of the clue, and one day, appeared before her, with a dagger 
and a cup of poison, and left her to the choice between those 
deaths.  How Fair Rosamond, after shedding many piteous tears and 
offering many useless prayers to the cruel Queen, took the poison, 
and fell dead in the midst of the beautiful bower, while the 
unconscious birds sang gaily all around her.

Now, there WAS a fair Rosamond, and she was (I dare say) the 
loveliest girl in all the world, and the King was certainly very 
fond of her, and the bad Queen Eleanor was certainly made jealous.  
But I am afraid - I say afraid, because I like the story so much - 
that there was no bower, no labyrinth, no silken clue, no dagger, 
no poison.  I am afraid fair Rosamond retired to a nunnery near 
Oxford, and died there, peaceably; her sister-nuns hanging a silken 
drapery over her tomb, and often dressing it with flowers, in 
remembrance of the youth and beauty that had enchanted the King 
when he too was young, and when his life lay fair before him.

It was dark and ended now; faded and gone.  Henry Plantagenet lay 
quiet in the abbey church of Fontevraud, in the fifty-seventh year 
of his age - never to be completed - after governing England well, 
for nearly thirty-five years.



CHAPTER XIII - ENGLAND UNDER RICHARD THE FIRST, CALLED THE LION-
HEART



IN the year of our Lord one thousand one hundred and eighty-nine, 
Richard of the Lion Heart succeeded to the throne of King Henry the 
Second, whose paternal heart he had done so much to break.  He had 
been, as we have seen, a rebel from his boyhood; but, the moment he 
became a king against whom others might rebel, he found out that 
rebellion was a great wickedness.  In the heat of this pious 
discovery, he punished all the leading people who had befriended 
him against his father.  He could scarcely have done anything that 
would have been a better instance of his real nature, or a better 
warning to fawners and parasites not to trust in lion-hearted 
princes.

He likewise put his late father's treasurer in chains, and locked 
him up in a dungeon from which he was not set free until he had 
relinquished, not only all the Crown treasure, but all his own 
money too.  So, Richard certainly got the Lion's share of the 
wealth of this wretched treasurer, whether he had a Lion's heart or 
not.

He was crowned King of England, with great pomp, at Westminster:  
walking to the Cathedral under a silken canopy stretched on the 
tops of four lances, each carried by a great lord.  On the day of 
his coronation, a dreadful murdering of the Jews took place, which 
seems to have given great delight to numbers of savage persons 
calling themselves Christians.  The King had issued a proclamation 
forbidding the Jews (who were generally hated, though they were the 
most useful merchants in England) to appear at the ceremony; but as 
they had assembled in London from all parts, bringing presents to 
show their respect for the new Sovereign, some of them ventured 
down to Westminster Hall with their gifts; which were very readily 
accepted.  It is supposed, now, that some noisy fellow in the 
crowd, pretending to be a very delicate Christian, set up a howl at 
this, and struck a Jew who was trying to get in at the Hall door 
with his present.  A riot arose.  The Jews who had got into the 
Hall, were driven forth; and some of the rabble cried out that the 
new King had commanded the unbelieving race to be put to death.  
Thereupon the crowd rushed through the narrow streets of the city, 
slaughtering all the Jews they met; and when they could find no 
more out of doors (on account of their having fled to their houses, 
and fastened themselves in), they ran madly about, breaking open 
all the houses where the Jews lived, rushing in and stabbing or 
spearing them, sometimes even flinging old people and children out 
of window into blazing fires they had lighted up below.  This great 
cruelty lasted four-and-twenty hours, and only three men were 
punished for it.  Even they forfeited their lives not for murdering 
and robbing the Jews, but for burning the houses of some 
Christians.

King Richard, who was a strong, restless, burly man, with one idea 
always in his head, and that the very troublesome idea of breaking 
the heads of other men, was mightily impatient to go on a Crusade 
to the Holy Land, with a great army.  As great armies could not be 
raised to go, even to the Holy Land, without a great deal of money, 
he sold the Crown domains, and even the high offices of State; 
recklessly appointing noblemen to rule over his English subjects, 
not because they were fit to govern, but because they could pay 
high for the privilege.  In this way, and by selling pardons at a 
dear rate and by varieties of avarice and oppression, he scraped 
together a large treasure.  He then appointed two Bishops to take 
care of his kingdom in his absence, and gave great powers and 
possessions to his brother John, to secure his friendship.  John 
would rather have been made Regent of England; but he was a sly 
man, and friendly to the expedition; saying to himself, no doubt, 
'The more fighting, the more chance of my brother being killed; and 
when he IS killed, then I become King John!'

Before the newly levied army departed from England, the recruits 
and the general populace distinguished themselves by astonishing 
cruelties on the unfortunate Jews:  whom, in many large towns, they 
murdered by hundreds in the most horrible manner.

At York, a large body of Jews took refuge in the Castle, in the 
absence of its Governor, after the wives and children of many of 
them had been slain before their eyes.  Presently came the 
Governor, and demanded admission.  'How can we give it thee, O 
Governor!' said the Jews upon the walls, 'when, if we open the gate 
by so much as the width of a foot, the roaring crowd behind thee 
will press in and kill us?'

Upon this, the unjust Governor became angry, and told the people 
that he approved of their killing those Jews; and a mischievous 
maniac of a friar, dressed all in white, put himself at the head of 
the assault, and they assaulted the Castle for three days.

Then said JOCEN, the head-Jew (who was a Rabbi or Priest), to the 
rest, 'Brethren, there is no hope for us with the Christians who 
are hammering at the gates and walls, and who must soon break in.  
As we and our wives and children must die, either by Christian 
hands, or by our own, let it be by our own.  Let us destroy by fire 
what jewels and other treasure we have here, then fire the castle, 
and then perish!'

A few could not resolve to do this, but the greater part complied.  
They made a blazing heap of all their valuables, and, when those 
were consumed, set the castle in flames.  While the flames roared 
and crackled around them, and shooting up into the sky, turned it 
blood-red, Jocen cut the throat of his beloved wife, and stabbed 
himself.  All the others who had wives or children, did the like 
dreadful deed.  When the populace broke in, they found (except the 
trembling few, cowering in corners, whom they soon killed) only 
heaps of greasy cinders, with here and there something like part of 
the blackened trunk of a burnt tree, but which had lately been a 
human creature, formed by the beneficent hand of the Creator as 
they were.

After this bad beginning, Richard and his troops went on, in no 
very good manner, with the Holy Crusade.  It was undertaken jointly 
by the King of England and his old friend Philip of France.  They 
commenced the business by reviewing their forces, to the number of 
one hundred thousand men.  Afterwards, they severally embarked 
their troops for Messina, in Sicily, which was appointed as the 
next place of meeting.

King Richard's sister had married the King of this place, but he 
was dead:  and his uncle TANCRED had usurped the crown, cast the 
Royal Widow into prison, and possessed himself of her estates.  
Richard fiercely demanded his sister's release, the restoration of 
her lands, and (according to the Royal custom of the Island) that 
she should have a golden chair, a golden table, four-and-twenty 
silver cups, and four-and-twenty silver dishes.  As he was too 
powerful to be successfully resisted, Tancred yielded to his 
demands; and then the French King grew jealous, and complained that 
the English King wanted to be absolute in the Island of Messina and 
everywhere else.  Richard, however, cared little or nothing for 
this complaint; and in consideration of a present of twenty 
thousand pieces of gold, promised his pretty little nephew ARTHUR, 
then a child of two years old, in marriage to Tancred's daughter.  
We shall hear again of pretty little Arthur by-and-by.

This Sicilian affair arranged without anybody's brains being 
knocked out (which must have rather disappointed him), King Richard 
took his sister away, and also a fair lady named BERENGARIA, with 
whom he had fallen in love in France, and whom his mother, Queen 
Eleanor (so long in prison, you remember, but released by Richard 
on his coming to the Throne), had brought out there to be his wife; 
and sailed with them for Cyprus.

He soon had the pleasure of fighting the King of the Island of 
Cyprus, for allowing his subjects to pillage some of the English 
troops who were shipwrecked on the shore; and easily conquering 
this poor monarch, he seized his only daughter, to be a companion 
to the lady Berengaria, and put the King himself into silver 
fetters.  He then sailed away again with his mother, sister, wife, 
and the captive princess; and soon arrived before the town of Acre, 
which the French King with his fleet was besieging from the sea.  
But the French King was in no triumphant condition, for his army 
had been thinned by the swords of the Saracens, and wasted by the 
plague; and SALADIN, the brave Sultan of the Turks, at the head of 
a numerous army, was at that time gallantly defending the place 
from the hills that rise above it.

Wherever the united army of Crusaders went, they agreed in few 
points except in gaming, drinking, and quarrelling, in a most 
unholy manner; in debauching the people among whom they tarried, 
whether they were friends or foes; and in carrying disturbance and 
ruin into quiet places.  The French King was jealous of the English 
King, and the English King was jealous of the French King, and the 
disorderly and violent soldiers of the two nations were jealous of 
one another; consequently, the two Kings could not at first agree, 
even upon a joint assault on Acre; but when they did make up their 
quarrel for that purpose, the Saracens promised to yield the town, 
to give up to the Christians the wood of the Holy Cross, to set at 
liberty all their Christian captives, and to pay two hundred 
thousand pieces of gold.  All this was to be done within forty 
days; but, not being done, King Richard ordered some three thousand 
Saracen prisoners to be brought out in the front of his camp, and 
there, in full view of their own countrymen, to be butchered.

The French King had no part in this crime; for he was by that time 
travelling homeward with the greater part of his men; being 
offended by the overbearing conduct of the English King; being 
anxious to look after his own dominions; and being ill, besides, 
from the unwholesome air of that hot and sandy country.  King 
Richard carried on the war without him; and remained in the East, 
meeting with a variety of adventures, nearly a year and a half.  
Every night when his army was on the march, and came to a halt, the 
heralds cried out three times, to remind all the soldiers of the 
cause in which they were engaged, 'Save the Holy Sepulchre!' and 
then all the soldiers knelt and said 'Amen!'  Marching or 
encamping, the army had continually to strive with the hot air of 
the glaring desert, or with the Saracen soldiers animated and 
directed by the brave Saladin, or with both together.  Sickness and 
death, battle and wounds, were always among them; but through every 
difficulty King Richard fought like a giant, and worked like a 
common labourer.  Long and long after he was quiet in his grave, 
his terrible battle-axe, with twenty English pounds of English 
steel in its mighty head, was a legend among the Saracens; and when 
all the Saracen and Christian hosts had been dust for many a year, 
if a Saracen horse started at any object by the wayside, his rider 
would exclaim, 'What dost thou fear, Fool?  Dost thou think King 
Richard is behind it?'

No one admired this King's renown for bravery more than Saladin 
himself, who was a generous and gallant enemy.  When Richard lay 
ill of a fever, Saladin sent him fresh fruits from Damascus, and 
snow from the mountain-tops.  Courtly messages and compliments were 
frequently exchanged between them - and then King Richard would 
mount his horse and kill as many Saracens as he could; and Saladin 
would mount his, and kill as many Christians as he could.  In this 
way King Richard fought to his heart's content at Arsoof and at 
Jaffa; and finding himself with nothing exciting to do at Ascalon, 
except to rebuild, for his own defence, some fortifications there 
which the Saracens had destroyed, he kicked his ally the Duke of 
Austria, for being too proud to work at them.

The army at last came within sight of the Holy City of Jerusalem; 
but, being then a mere nest of jealousy, and quarrelling and 
fighting, soon retired, and agreed with the Saracens upon a truce 
for three years, three months, three days, and three hours.  Then, 
the English Christians, protected by the noble Saladin from Saracen 
revenge, visited Our Saviour's tomb; and then King Richard embarked 
with a small force at Acre to return home.

But he was shipwrecked in the Adriatic Sea, and was fain to pass 
through Germany, under an assumed name.  Now, there were many 
people in Germany who had served in the Holy Land under that proud 
Duke of Austria who had been kicked; and some of them, easily 
recognising a man so remarkable as King Richard, carried their 
intelligence to the kicked Duke, who straightway took him prisoner 
at a little inn near Vienna.

The Duke's master the Emperor of Germany, and the King of France, 
were equally delighted to have so troublesome a monarch in safe 
keeping.  Friendships which are founded on a partnership in doing 
wrong, are never true; and the King of France was now quite as 
heartily King Richard's foe, as he had ever been his friend in his 
unnatural conduct to his father.  He monstrously pretended that 
King Richard had designed to poison him in the East; he charged him 
with having murdered, there, a man whom he had in truth befriended; 
he bribed the Emperor of Germany to keep him close prisoner; and, 
finally, through the plotting of these two princes, Richard was 
brought before the German legislature, charged with the foregoing 
crimes, and many others.  But he defended himself so well, that 
many of the assembly were moved to tears by his eloquence and 
earnestness.  It was decided that he should be treated, during the 
rest of his captivity, in a manner more becoming his dignity than 
he had been, and that he should be set free on the payment of a 
heavy ransom.  This ransom the English people willingly raised.  
When Queen Eleanor took it over to Germany, it was at first evaded 
and refused.  But she appealed to the honour of all the princes of 
the German Empire in behalf of her son, and appealed so well that 
it was accepted, and the King released.  Thereupon, the King of 
France wrote to Prince John - 'Take care of thyself.  The devil is 
unchained!'

Prince John had reason to fear his brother, for he had been a 
traitor to him in his captivity.  He had secretly joined the French 
King; had vowed to the English nobles and people that his brother 
was dead; and had vainly tried to seize the crown.  He was now in 
France, at a place called Evreux.  Being the meanest and basest of 
men, he contrived a mean and base expedient for making himself 
acceptable to his brother.  He invited the French officers of the 
garrison in that town to dinner, murdered them all, and then took 
the fortress.  With this recommendation to the good will of a lion-
hearted monarch, he hastened to King Richard, fell on his knees 
before him, and obtained the intercession of Queen Eleanor.  'I 
forgive him,' said the King, 'and I hope I may forget the injury he 
has done me, as easily as I know he will forget my pardon.'

While King Richard was in Sicily, there had been trouble in his 
dominions at home:  one of the bishops whom he had left in charge 
thereof, arresting the other; and making, in his pride and 
ambition, as great a show as if he were King himself.  But the King 
hearing of it at Messina, and appointing a new Regency, this 
LONGCHAMP (for that was his name) had fled to France in a woman's 
dress, and had there been encouraged and supported by the French 
King.  With all these causes of offence against Philip in his mind, 
King Richard had no sooner been welcomed home by his enthusiastic 
subjects with great display and splendour, and had no sooner been 
crowned afresh at Winchester, than he resolved to show the French 
King that the Devil was unchained indeed, and made war against him 
with great fury.

There was fresh trouble at home about this time, arising out of the 
discontents of the poor people, who complained that they were far 
more heavily taxed than the rich, and who found a spirited champion 
in WILLIAM FITZ-OSBERT, called LONGBEARD.  He became the leader of 
a secret society, comprising fifty thousand men; he was seized by 
surprise; he stabbed the citizen who first laid hands upon him; and 
retreated, bravely fighting, to a church, which he maintained four 
days, until he was dislodged by fire, and run through the body as 
he came out.  He was not killed, though; for he was dragged, half 
dead, at the tail of a horse to Smithfield, and there hanged.  
Death was long a favourite remedy for silencing the people's 
advocates; but as we go on with this history, I fancy we shall find 
them difficult to make an end of, for all that.

The French war, delayed occasionally by a truce, was still in 
progress when a certain Lord named VIDOMAR, Viscount of Limoges, 
chanced to find in his ground a treasure of ancient coins.  As the 
King's vassal, he sent the King half of it; but the King claimed 
the whole.  The lord refused to yield the whole.  The King besieged 
the lord in his castle, swore that he would take the castle by 
storm, and hang every man of its defenders on the battlements.

There was a strange old song in that part of the country, to the 
effect that in Limoges an arrow would be made by which King Richard 
would die.  It may be that BERTRAND DE GOURDON, a young man who was 
one of the defenders of the castle, had often sung it or heard it 
sung of a winter night, and remembered it when he saw, from his 
post upon the ramparts, the King attended only by his chief officer 
riding below the walls surveying the place.  He drew an arrow to 
the head, took steady aim, said between his teeth, 'Now I pray God 
speed thee well, arrow!' discharged it, and struck the King in the 
left shoulder.

Although the wound was not at first considered dangerous, it was 
severe enough to cause the King to retire to his tent, and direct 
the assault to be made without him.  The castle was taken; and 
every man of its defenders was hanged, as the King had sworn all 
should be, except Bertrand de Gourdon, who was reserved until the 
royal pleasure respecting him should be known.

By that time unskilful treatment had made the wound mortal and the 
King knew that he was dying.  He directed Bertrand to be brought 
into his tent.  The young man was brought there, heavily chained, 
King Richard looked at him steadily.  He looked, as steadily, at 
the King.

'Knave!' said King Richard.  'What have I done to thee that thou 
shouldest take my life?'

'What hast thou done to me?' replied the young man.  'With thine 
own hands thou hast killed my father and my two brothers.  Myself 
thou wouldest have hanged.  Let me die now, by any torture that 
thou wilt.  My comfort is, that no torture can save Thee.  Thou too 
must die; and, through me, the world is quit of thee!'

Again the King looked at the young man steadily.  Again the young 
man looked steadily at him.  Perhaps some remembrance of his 
generous enemy Saladin, who was not a Christian, came into the mind 
of the dying King.

'Youth!' he said, 'I forgive thee.  Go unhurt!'  Then, turning to 
the chief officer who had been riding in his company when he 
received the wound, King Richard said:

'Take off his chains, give him a hundred shillings, and let him 
depart.'

He sunk down on his couch, and a dark mist seemed in his weakened 
eyes to fill the tent wherein he had so often rested, and he died.  
His age was forty-two; he had reigned ten years.  His last command 
was not obeyed; for the chief officer flayed Bertrand de Gourdon 
alive, and hanged him.

There is an old tune yet known - a sorrowful air will sometimes 
outlive many generations of strong men, and even last longer than 
battle-axes with twenty pounds of steel in the head - by which this 
King is said to have been discovered in his captivity.  BLONDEL, a 
favourite Minstrel of King Richard, as the story relates, 
faithfully seeking his Royal master, went singing it outside the 
gloomy walls of many foreign fortresses and prisons; until at last 
he heard it echoed from within a dungeon, and knew the voice, and 
cried out in ecstasy, 'O Richard, O my King!'  You may believe it, 
if you like; it would be easy to believe worse things.  Richard was 
himself a Minstrel and a Poet.  If he had not been a Prince too, he 
might have been a better man perhaps, and might have gone out of 
the world with less bloodshed and waste of life to answer for.



CHAPTER XIV - ENGLAND UNDER KING JOHN, CALLED LACKLAND



AT two-and-thirty years of age, JOHN became King of England.  His 
pretty little nephew ARTHUR had the best claim to the throne; but 
John seized the treasure, and made fine promises to the nobility, 
and got himself crowned at Westminster within a few weeks after his 
brother Richard's death.  I doubt whether the crown could possibly 
have been put upon the head of a meaner coward, or a more 
detestable villain, if England had been searched from end to end to 
find him out.

The French King, Philip, refused to acknowledge the right of John 
to his new dignity, and declared in favour of Arthur.  You must not 
suppose that he had any generosity of feeling for the fatherless 
boy; it merely suited his ambitious schemes to oppose the King of 
England.  So John and the French King went to war about Arthur.

He was a handsome boy, at that time only twelve years old.  He was 
not born when his father, Geoffrey, had his brains trampled out at 
the tournament; and, besides the misfortune of never having known a 
father's guidance and protection, he had the additional misfortune 
to have a foolish mother (CONSTANCE by name), lately married to her 
third husband.  She took Arthur, upon John's accession, to the 
French King, who pretended to be very much his friend, and who made 
him a Knight, and promised him his daughter in marriage; but, who 
cared so little about him in reality, that finding it his interest 
to make peace with King John for a time, he did so without the 
least consideration for the poor little Prince, and heartlessly 
sacrificed all his interests.

Young Arthur, for two years afterwards, lived quietly; and in the 
course of that time his mother died.  But, the French King then 
finding it his interest to quarrel with King John again, again made 
Arthur his pretence, and invited the orphan boy to court.  'You 
know your rights, Prince,' said the French King, 'and you would 
like to be a King.  Is it not so?'  'Truly,' said Prince Arthur, 'I 
should greatly like to be a King!'  'Then,' said Philip, 'you shall 
have two hundred gentlemen who are Knights of mine, and with them 
you shall go to win back the provinces belonging to you, of which 
your uncle, the usurping King of England, has taken possession.  I 
myself, meanwhile, will head a force against him in Normandy.'  
Poor Arthur was so flattered and so grateful that he signed a 
treaty with the crafty French King, agreeing to consider him his 
superior Lord, and that the French King should keep for himself 
whatever he could take from King John.

Now, King John was so bad in all ways, and King Philip was so 
perfidious, that Arthur, between the two, might as well have been a 
lamb between a fox and a wolf.  But, being so young, he was ardent 
and flushed with hope; and, when the people of Brittany (which was 
his inheritance) sent him five hundred more knights and five 
thousand foot soldiers, he believed his fortune was made.  The 
people of Brittany had been fond of him from his birth, and had 
requested that he might be called Arthur, in remembrance of that 
dimly-famous English Arthur, of whom I told you early in this book, 
whom they believed to have been the brave friend and companion of 
an old King of their own.  They had tales among them about a 
prophet called MERLIN (of the same old time), who had foretold that 
their own King should be restored to them after hundreds of years; 
and they believed that the prophecy would be fulfilled in Arthur; 
that the time would come when he would rule them with a crown of 
Brittany upon his head; and when neither King of France nor King of 
England would have any power over them.  When Arthur found himself 
riding in a glittering suit of armour on a richly caparisoned 
horse, at the head of his train of knights and soldiers, he began 
to believe this too, and to consider old Merlin a very superior 
prophet.

He did not know - how could he, being so innocent and 
inexperienced? - that his little army was a mere nothing against 
the power of the King of England.  The French King knew it; but the 
poor boy's fate was little to him, so that the King of England was 
worried and distressed.  Therefore, King Philip went his way into 
Normandy and Prince Arthur went his way towards Mirebeau, a French 
town near Poictiers, both very well pleased.

Prince Arthur went to attack the town of Mirebeau, because his 
grandmother Eleanor, who has so often made her appearance in this 
history (and who had always been his mother's enemy), was living 
there, and because his Knights said, 'Prince, if you can take her 
prisoner, you will be able to bring the King your uncle to terms!'  
But she was not to be easily taken.  She was old enough by this 
time - eighty - but she was as full of stratagem as she was full of 
years and wickedness.  Receiving intelligence of young Arthur's 
approach, she shut herself up in a high tower, and encouraged her 
soldiers to defend it like men.  Prince Arthur with his little army 
besieged the high tower.  King John, hearing how matters stood, 
came up to the rescue, with HIS army.  So here was a strange 
family-party!  The boy-Prince besieging his grandmother, and his 
uncle besieging him!

This position of affairs did not last long.  One summer night King 
John, by treachery, got his men into the town, surprised Prince 
Arthur's force, took two hundred of his knights, and seized the 
Prince himself in his bed.  The Knights were put in heavy irons, 
and driven away in open carts drawn by bullocks, to various 
dungeons where they were most inhumanly treated, and where some of 
them were starved to death.  Prince Arthur was sent to the castle 
of Falaise.

One day, while he was in prison at that castle, mournfully thinking 
it strange that one so young should be in so much trouble, and 
looking out of the small window in the deep dark wall, at the 
summer sky and the birds, the door was softly opened, and he saw 
his uncle the King standing in the shadow of the archway, looking 
very grim.

'Arthur,' said the King, with his wicked eyes more on the stone 
floor than on his nephew, 'will you not trust to the gentleness, 
the friendship, and the truthfulness of your loving uncle?'

'I will tell my loving uncle that,' replied the boy, 'when he does 
me right.  Let him restore to me my kingdom of England, and then 
come to me and ask the question.'

The King looked at him and went out.  'Keep that boy close 
prisoner,' said he to the warden of the castle.

Then, the King took secret counsel with the worst of his nobles how 
the Prince was to be got rid of.  Some said, 'Put out his eyes and 
keep him in prison, as Robort of Normandy was kept.'  Others said, 
'Have him stabbed.'  Others, 'Have him hanged.'  Others, 'Have him 
poisoned.'

King John, feeling that in any case, whatever was done afterwards, 
it would be a satisfaction to his mind to have those handsome eyes 
burnt out that had looked at him so proudly while his own royal 
eyes were blinking at the stone floor, sent certain ruffians to 
Falaise to blind the boy with red-hot irons.  But Arthur so 
pathetically entreated them, and shed such piteous tears, and so 
appealed to HUBERT DE BOURG (or BURGH), the warden of the castle, 
who had a love for him, and was an honourable, tender man, that 
Hubert could not bear it.  To his eternal honour he prevented the 
torture from being performed, and, at his own risk, sent the 
savages away.

The chafed and disappointed King bethought himself of the stabbing 
suggestion next, and, with his shuffling manner and his cruel face, 
proposed it to one William de Bray.  'I am a gentleman and not an 
executioner,' said William de Bray, and left the presence with 
disdain.

But it was not difficult for a King to hire a murderer in those 
days.  King John found one for his money, and sent him down to the 
castle of Falaise.  'On what errand dost thou come?' said Hubert to 
this fellow.  'To despatch young Arthur,' he returned.  'Go back to 
him who sent thee,' answered Hubert, 'and say that I will do it!'

King John very well knowing that Hubert would never do it, but that 
he courageously sent this reply to save the Prince or gain time, 
despatched messengers to convey the young prisoner to the castle of 
Rouen.

Arthur was soon forced from the good Hubert - of whom he had never 
stood in greater need than then - carried away by night, and lodged 
in his new prison:  where, through his grated window, he could hear 
the deep waters of the river Seine, rippling against the stone wall 
below.

One dark night, as he lay sleeping, dreaming perhaps of rescue by 
those unfortunate gentlemen who were obscurely suffering and dying 
in his cause, he was roused, and bidden by his jailer to come down 
the staircase to the foot of the tower.  He hurriedly dressed 
himself and obeyed.  When they came to the bottom of the winding 
stairs, and the night air from the river blew upon their faces, the 
jailer trod upon his torch and put it out.  Then, Arthur, in the 
darkness, was hurriedly drawn into a solitary boat.  And in that 
boat, he found his uncle and one other man.

He knelt to them, and prayed them not to murder him.  Deaf to his 
entreaties, they stabbed him and sunk his body in the river with 
heavy stones.  When the spring-morning broke, the tower-door was 
closed, the boat was gone, the river sparkled on its way, and never 
more was any trace of the poor boy beheld by mortal eyes.

The news of this atrocious murder being spread in England, awakened 
a hatred of the King (already odious for his many vices, and for 
his having stolen away and married a noble lady while his own wife 
was living) that never slept again through his whole reign.  In 
Brittany, the indignation was intense.  Arthur's own sister ELEANOR 
was in the power of John and shut up in a convent at Bristol, but 
his half-sister ALICE was in Brittany.  The people chose her, and 
the murdered prince's father-in-law, the last husband of Constance, 
to represent them; and carried their fiery complaints to King 
Philip.  King Philip summoned King John (as the holder of territory 
in France) to come before him and defend himself.  King John 
refusing to appear, King Philip declared him false, perjured, and 
guilty; and again made war.  In a little time, by conquering the 
greater part of his French territory, King Philip deprived him of 
one-third of his dominions.  And, through all the fighting that 
took place, King John was always found, either to be eating and 
drinking, like a gluttonous fool, when the danger was at a 
distance, or to be running away, like a beaten cur, when it was 
near.

You might suppose that when he was losing his dominions at this 
rate, and when his own nobles cared so little for him or his cause 
that they plainly refused to follow his banner out of England, he 
had enemies enough.  But he made another enemy of the Pope, which 
he did in this way.

The Archbishop of Canterbury dying, and the junior monks of that 
place wishing to get the start of the senior monks in the 
appointment of his successor, met together at midnight, secretly 
elected a certain REGINALD, and sent him off to Rome to get the 
Pope's approval.  The senior monks and the King soon finding this 
out, and being very angry about it, the junior monks gave way, and 
all the monks together elected the Bishop of Norwich, who was the 
King's favourite.  The Pope, hearing the whole story, declared that 
neither election would do for him, and that HE elected STEPHEN 
LANGTON.  The monks submitting to the Pope, the King turned them 
all out bodily, and banished them as traitors.  The Pope sent three 
bishops to the King, to threaten him with an Interdict.  The King 
told the bishops that if any Interdict were laid upon his kingdom, 
he would tear out the eyes and cut off the noses of all the monks 
he could lay hold of, and send them over to Rome in that 
undecorated state as a present for their master.  The bishops, 
nevertheless, soon published the Interdict, and fled.

After it had lasted a year, the Pope proceeded to his next step; 
which was Excommunication.  King John was declared excommunicated, 
with all the usual ceremonies.  The King was so incensed at this, 
and was made so desperate by the disaffection of his Barons and the 
hatred of his people, that it is said he even privately sent 
ambassadors to the Turks in Spain, offering to renounce his 
religion and hold his kingdom of them if they would help him.  It 
is related that the ambassadors were admitted to the presence of 
the Turkish Emir through long lines of Moorish guards, and that 
they found the Emir with his eyes seriously fixed on the pages of a 
large book, from which he never once looked up.  That they gave him 
a letter from the King containing his proposals, and were gravely 
dismissed.  That presently the Emir sent for one of them, and 
conjured him, by his faith in his religion, to say what kind of man 
the King of England truly was?  That the ambassador, thus pressed, 
replied that the King of England was a false tyrant, against whom 
his own subjects would soon rise.  And that this was quite enough 
for the Emir.

Money being, in his position, the next best thing to men, King John 
spared no means of getting it.  He set on foot another oppressing 
and torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite in his way), and 
invented a new punishment for one wealthy Jew of Bristol.  Until 
such time as that Jew should produce a certain large sum of money, 
the King sentenced him to be imprisoned, and, every day, to have 
one tooth violently wrenched out of his head - beginning with the 
double teeth.  For seven days, the oppressed man bore the daily 
pain and lost the daily tooth; but, on the eighth, he paid the 
money.  With the treasure raised in such ways, the King made an 
expedition into Ireland, where some English nobles had revolted.  
It was one of the very few places from which he did not run away; 
because no resistance was shown.  He made another expedition into 
Wales - whence he DID run away in the end:  but not before he had 
got from the Welsh people, as hostages, twenty-seven young men of 
the best families; every one of whom he caused to be slain in the 
following year.

To Interdict and Excommunication, the Pope now added his last 
sentence; Deposition.  He proclaimed John no longer King, absolved 
all his subjects from their allegiance, and sent Stephen Langton 
and others to the King of France to tell him that, if he would 
invade England, he should be forgiven all his sins - at least, 
should be forgiven them by the Pope, if that would do.

As there was nothing that King Philip desired more than to invade 
England, he collected a great army at Rouen, and a fleet of 
seventeen hundred ships to bring them over.  But the English 
people, however bitterly they hated the King, were not a people to 
suffer invasion quietly.  They flocked to Dover, where the English 
standard was, in such great numbers to enrol themselves as 
defenders of their native land, that there were not provisions for 
them, and the King could only select and retain sixty thousand.  
But, at this crisis, the Pope, who had his own reasons for 
objecting to either King John or King Philip being too powerful, 
interfered.  He entrusted a legate, whose name was PANDOLF, with 
the easy task of frightening King John.  He sent him to the English 
Camp, from France, to terrify him with exaggerations of King 
Philip's power, and his own weakness in the discontent of the 
English Barons and people.  Pandolf discharged his commission so 
well, that King John, in a wretched panic, consented to acknowledge 
Stephen Langton; to resign his kingdom 'to God, Saint Peter, and 
Saint Paul' - which meant the Pope; and to hold it, ever 
afterwards, by the Pope's leave, on payment of an annual sum of 
money.  To this shameful contract he publicly bound himself in the 
church of the Knights Templars at Dover:  where he laid at the 
legate's feet a part of the tribute, which the legate haughtily 
trampled upon.  But they DO say, that this was merely a genteel 
flourish, and that he was afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket 
it.

There was an unfortunate prophet, the name of Peter, who had 
greatly increased King John's terrors by predicting that he would 
be unknighted (which the King supposed to signify that he would 
die) before the Feast of the Ascension should be past.  That was 
the day after this humiliation.  When the next morning came, and 
the King, who had been trembling all night, found himself alive and 
safe, he ordered the prophet - and his son too - to be dragged 
through the streets at the tails of horses, and then hanged, for 
having frightened him.

As King John had now submitted, the Pope, to King Philip's great 
astonishment, took him under his protection, and informed King 
Philip that he found he could not give him leave to invade England.  
The angry Philip resolved to do it without his leave but he gained 
nothing and lost much; for, the English, commanded by the Earl of 
Salisbury, went over, in five hundred ships, to the French coast, 
before the French fleet had sailed away from it, and utterly 
defeated the whole.

The Pope then took off his three sentences, one after another, and 
empowered Stephen Langton publicly to receive King John into the 
favour of the Church again, and to ask him to dinner.  The King, 
who hated Langton with all his might and main - and with reason 
too, for he was a great and a good man, with whom such a King could 
have no sympathy - pretended to cry and to be VERY grateful.  There 
was a little difficulty about settling how much the King should pay 
as a recompense to the clergy for the losses he had caused them; 
but, the end of it was, that the superior clergy got a good deal, 
and the inferior clergy got little or nothing - which has also 
happened since King John's time, I believe.

When all these matters were arranged, the King in his triumph 
became more fierce, and false, and insolent to all around him than 
he had ever been.  An alliance of sovereigns against King Philip, 
gave him an opportunity of landing an army in France; with which he 
even took a town!  But, on the French King's gaining a great 
victory, he ran away, of course, and made a truce for five years.

And now the time approached when he was to be still further 
humbled, and made to feel, if he could feel anything, what a 
wretched creature he was.  Of all men in the world, Stephen Langton 
seemed raised up by Heaven to oppose and subdue him.  When he 
ruthlessly burnt and destroyed the property of his own subjects, 
because their Lords, the Barons, would not serve him abroad, 
Stephen Langton fearlessly reproved and threatened him.  When he 
swore to restore the laws of King Edward, or the laws of King Henry 
the First, Stephen Langton knew his falsehood, and pursued him 
through all his evasions.  When the Barons met at the abbey of 
Saint Edmund's-Bury, to consider their wrongs and the King's 
oppressions, Stephen Langton roused them by his fervid words to 
demand a solemn charter of rights and liberties from their perjured 
master, and to swear, one by one, on the High Altar, that they 
would have it, or would wage war against him to the death.  When 
the King hid himself in London from the Barons, and was at last 
obliged to receive them, they told him roundly they would not 
believe him unless Stephen Langton became a surety that he would 
keep his word.  When he took the Cross to invest himself with some 
interest, and belong to something that was received with favour, 
Stephen Langton was still immovable.  When he appealed to the Pope, 
and the Pope wrote to Stephen Langton in behalf of his new 
favourite, Stephen Langton was deaf, even to the Pope himself, and 
saw before him nothing but the welfare of England and the crimes of 
the English King.

At Easter-time, the Barons assembled at Stamford, in Lincolnshire, 
in proud array, and, marching near to Oxford where the King was, 
delivered into the hands of Stephen Langton and two others, a list 
of grievances.  'And these,' they said, 'he must redress, or we 
will do it for ourselves!'  When Stephen Langton told the King as 
much, and read the list to him, he went half mad with rage.  But 
that did him no more good than his afterwards trying to pacify the 
Barons with lies.  They called themselves and their followers, 'The 
army of God and the Holy Church.'  Marching through the country, 
with the people thronging to them everywhere (except at 
Northampton, where they failed in an attack upon the castle), they 
at last triumphantly set up their banner in London itself, whither 
the whole land, tired of the tyrant, seemed to flock to join them.  
Seven knights alone, of all the knights in England, remained with 
the King; who, reduced to this strait, at last sent the Earl of 
Pembroke to the Barons to say that he approved of everything, and 
would meet them to sign their charter when they would.  'Then,' 
said the Barons, 'let the day be the fifteenth of June, and the 
place, Runny-Mead.'

On Monday, the fifteenth of June, one thousand two hundred and 
fourteen, the King came from Windsor Castle, and the Barons came 
from the town of Staines, and they met on Runny-Mead, which is 
still a pleasant meadow by the Thames, where rushes grow in the 
clear water of the winding river, and its banks are green with 
grass and trees.  On the side of the Barons, came the General of 
their army, ROBERT FITZ-WALTER, and a great concourse of the 
nobility of England.  With the King, came, in all, some four-and-
twenty persons of any note, most of whom despised him, and were 
merely his advisers in form.  On that great day, and in that great 
company, the King signed MAGNA CHARTA - the great charter of 
England - by which he pledged himself to maintain the Church in its 
rights; to relieve the Barons of oppressive obligations as vassals 
of the Crown - of which the Barons, in their turn, pledged 
themselves to relieve THEIR vassals, the people; to respect the 
liberties of London and all other cities and boroughs; to protect 
foreign merchants who came to England; to imprison no man without a 
fair trial; and to sell, delay, or deny justice to none.  As the 
Barons knew his falsehood well, they further required, as their 
securities, that he should send out of his kingdom all his foreign 
troops; that for two months they should hold possession of the city 
of London, and Stephen Langton of the Tower; and that five-and-
twenty of their body, chosen by themselves, should be a lawful 
committee to watch the keeping of the charter, and to make war upon 
him if he broke it.

All this he was obliged to yield.  He signed the charter with a 
smile, and, if he could have looked agreeable, would have done so, 
as he departed from the splendid assembly.  When he got home to 
Windsor Castle, he was quite a madman in his helpless fury.  And he 
broke the charter immediately afterwards.

He sent abroad for foreign soldiers, and sent to the Pope for help, 
and plotted to take London by surprise, while the Barons should be 
holding a great tournament at Stamford, which they had agreed to 
hold there as a celebration of the charter.  The Barons, however, 
found him out and put it off.  Then, when the Barons desired to see 
him and tax him with his treachery, he made numbers of appointments 
with them, and kept none, and shifted from place to place, and was 
constantly sneaking and skulking about.  At last he appeared at 
Dover, to join his foreign soldiers, of whom numbers came into his 
pay; and with them he besieged and took Rochester Castle, which was 
occupied by knights and soldiers of the Barons.  He would have 
hanged them every one; but the leader of the foreign soldiers, 
fearful of what the English people might afterwards do to him, 
interfered to save the knights; therefore the King was fain to 
satisfy his vengeance with the death of all the common men.  Then, 
he sent the Earl of Salisbury, with one portion of his army, to 
ravage the eastern part of his own dominions, while he carried fire 
and slaughter into the northern part; torturing, plundering, 
killing, and inflicting every possible cruelty upon the people; 
and, every morning, setting a worthy example to his men by setting 
fire, with his own monster-hands, to the house where he had slept 
last night.  Nor was this all; for the Pope, coming to the aid of 
his precious friend, laid the kingdom under an Interdict again, 
because the people took part with the Barons.  It did not much 
matter, for the people had grown so used to it now, that they had 
begun to think nothing about it.  It occurred to them - perhaps to 
Stephen Langton too - that they could keep their churches open, and 
ring their bells, without the Pope's permission as well as with it.  
So, they tried the experiment - and found that it succeeded 
perfectly.

It being now impossible to bear the country, as a wilderness of 
cruelty, or longer to hold any terms with such a forsworn outlaw of 
a King, the Barons sent to Louis, son of the French monarch, to 
offer him the English crown.  Caring as little for the Pope's 
excommunication of him if he accepted the offer, as it is possible 
his father may have cared for the Pope's forgiveness of his sins, 
he landed at Sandwich (King John immediately running away from 
Dover, where he happened to be), and went on to London.  The 
Scottish King, with whom many of the Northern English Lords had 
taken refuge; numbers of the foreign soldiers, numbers of the 
Barons, and numbers of the people went over to him every day; - 
King John, the while, continually running away in all directions.

The career of Louis was checked however, by the suspicions of the 
Barons, founded on the dying declaration of a French Lord, that 
when the kingdom was conquered he was sworn to banish them as 
traitors, and to give their estates to some of his own Nobles.  
Rather than suffer this, some of the Barons hesitated:  others even 
went over to King John.

It seemed to be the turning-point of King John's fortunes, for, in 
his savage and murderous course, he had now taken some towns and 
met with some successes.  But, happily for England and humanity, 
his death was near.  Crossing a dangerous quicksand, called the 
Wash, not very far from Wisbeach, the tide came up and nearly 
drowned his army.  He and his soldiers escaped; but, looking back 
from the shore when he was safe, he saw the roaring water sweep 
down in a torrent, overturn the waggons, horses, and men, that 
carried his treasure, and engulf them in a raging whirlpool from 
which nothing could be delivered.

Cursing, and swearing, and gnawing his fingers, he went on to 
Swinestead Abbey, where the monks set before him quantities of 
pears, and peaches, and new cider - some say poison too, but there 
is very little reason to suppose so - of which he ate and drank in 
an immoderate and beastly way.  All night he lay ill of a burning 
fever, and haunted with horrible fears.  Next day, they put him in 
a horse-litter, and carried him to Sleaford Castle, where he passed 
another night of pain and horror.  Next day, they carried him, with 
greater difficulty than on the day before, to the castle of Newark 
upon Trent; and there, on the eighteenth of October, in the forty-
ninth year of his age, and the seventeenth of his vile reign, was 
an end of this miserable brute.



CHAPTER XV - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE THIRD, CALLED, OF WINCHESTER



IF any of the English Barons remembered the murdered Arthur's 
sister, Eleanor the fair maid of Brittany, shut up in her convent 
at Bristol, none among them spoke of her now, or maintained her 
right to the Crown.  The dead Usurper's eldest boy, HENRY by name, 
was taken by the Earl of Pembroke, the Marshal of England, to the 
city of Gloucester, and there crowned in great haste when he was 
only ten years old.  As the Crown itself had been lost with the 
King's treasure in the raging water, and as there was no time to 
make another, they put a circle of plain gold upon his head 
instead.  'We have been the enemies of this child's father,' said 
Lord Pembroke, a good and true gentleman, to the few Lords who were 
present, 'and he merited our ill-will; but the child himself is 
innocent, and his youth demands our friendship and protection.'  
Those Lords felt tenderly towards the little boy, remembering their 
own young children; and they bowed their heads, and said, 'Long 
live King Henry the Third!'

Next, a great council met at Bristol, revised Magna Charta, and 
made Lord Pembroke Regent or Protector of England, as the King was 
too young to reign alone.  The next thing to be done, was to get 
rid of Prince Louis of France, and to win over those English Barons 
who were still ranged under his banner.  He was strong in many 
parts of England, and in London itself; and he held, among other 
places, a certain Castle called the Castle of Mount Sorel, in 
Leicestershire.  To this fortress, after some skirmishing and 
truce-making, Lord Pembroke laid siege.  Louis despatched an army 
of six hundred knights and twenty thousand soldiers to relieve it.  
Lord Pembroke, who was not strong enough for such a force, retired 
with all his men.  The army of the French Prince, which had marched 
there with fire and plunder, marched away with fire and plunder, 
and came, in a boastful swaggering manner, to Lincoln.  The town 
submitted; but the Castle in the town, held by a brave widow lady, 
named NICHOLA DE CAMVILLE (whose property it was), made such a 
sturdy resistance, that the French Count in command of the army of 
the French Prince found it necessary to besiege this Castle.  While 
he was thus engaged, word was brought to him that Lord Pembroke, 
with four hundred knights, two hundred and fifty men with cross-
bows, and a stout force both of horse and foot, was marching 
towards him.  'What care I?' said the French Count.  'The 
Englishman is not so mad as to attack me and my great army in a 
walled town!'  But the Englishman did it for all that, and did it - 
not so madly but so wisely, that he decoyed the great army into the 
narrow, ill-paved lanes and byways of Lincoln, where its horse-
soldiers could not ride in any strong body; and there he made such 
havoc with them, that the whole force surrendered themselves 
prisoners, except the Count; who said that he would never yield to 
any English traitor alive, and accordingly got killed.  The end of 
this victory, which the English called, for a joke, the Fair of 
Lincoln, was the usual one in those times - the common men were 
slain without any mercy, and the knights and gentlemen paid ransom 
and went home.

The wife of Louis, the fair BLANCHE OF CASTILE, dutifully equipped 
a fleet of eighty good ships, and sent it over from France to her 
husband's aid.  An English fleet of forty ships, some good and some 
bad, gallantly met them near the mouth of the Thames, and took or 
sunk sixty-five in one fight.  This great loss put an end to the 
French Prince's hopes.  A treaty was made at Lambeth, in virtue of 
which the English Barons who had remained attached to his cause 
returned to their allegiance, and it was engaged on both sides that 
the Prince and all his troops should retire peacefully to France.  
It was time to go; for war had made him so poor that he was obliged 
to borrow money from the citizens of London to pay his expenses 
home.

Lord Pembroke afterwards applied himself to governing the country 
justly, and to healing the quarrels and disturbances that had 
arisen among men in the days of the bad King John.  He caused Magna 
Charta to be still more improved, and so amended the Forest Laws 
that a Peasant was no longer put to death for killing a stag in a 
Royal Forest, but was only imprisoned.  It would have been well for 
England if it could have had so good a Protector many years longer, 
but that was not to be.  Within three years after the young King's 
Coronation, Lord Pembroke died; and you may see his tomb, at this 
day, in the old Temple Church in London.

The Protectorship was now divided.  PETER DE ROCHES, whom King John 
had made Bishop of Winchester, was entrusted with the care of the 
person of the young sovereign; and the exercise of the Royal 
authority was confided to EARL HUBERT DE BURGH.  These two 
personages had from the first no liking for each other, and soon 
became enemies.  When the young King was declared of age, Peter de 
Roches, finding that Hubert increased in power and favour, retired 
discontentedly, and went abroad.  For nearly ten years afterwards 
Hubert had full sway alone.

But ten years is a long time to hold the favour of a King.  This 
King, too, as he grew up, showed a strong resemblance to his 
father, in feebleness, inconsistency, and irresolution.  The best 
that can be said of him is that he was not cruel.  De Roches coming 
home again, after ten years, and being a novelty, the King began to 
favour him and to look coldly on Hubert.  Wanting money besides, 
and having made Hubert rich, he began to dislike Hubert.  At last 
he was made to believe, or pretended to believe, that Hubert had 
misappropriated some of the Royal treasure; and ordered him to 
furnish an account of all he had done in his administration.  
Besides which, the foolish charge was brought against Hubert that 
he had made himself the King's favourite by magic.  Hubert very 
well knowing that he could never defend himself against such 
nonsense, and that his old enemy must be determined on his ruin, 
instead of answering the charges fled to Merton Abbey.  Then the 
King, in a violent passion, sent for the Mayor of London, and said 
to the Mayor, 'Take twenty thousand citizens, and drag me Hubert de 
Burgh out of that abbey, and bring him here.'  The Mayor posted off 
to do it, but the Archbishop of Dublin (who was a friend of 
Hubert's) warning the King that an abbey was a sacred place, and 
that if he committed any violence there, he must answer for it to 
the Church, the King changed his mind and called the Mayor back, 
and declared that Hubert should have four months to prepare his 
defence, and should be safe and free during that time.

Hubert, who relied upon the King's word, though I think he was old 
enough to have known better, came out of Merton Abbey upon these 
conditions, and journeyed away to see his wife:  a Scottish 
Princess who was then at St. Edmund's-Bury.

Almost as soon as he had departed from the Sanctuary, his enemies 
persuaded the weak King to send out one SIR GODFREY DE CRANCUMB, 
who commanded three hundred vagabonds called the Black Band, with 
orders to seize him.  They came up with him at a little town in 
Essex, called Brentwood, when he was in bed.  He leaped out of bed, 
got out of the house, fled to the church, ran up to the altar, and 
laid his hand upon the cross.  Sir Godfrey and the Black Band, 
caring neither for church, altar, nor cross, dragged him forth to 
the church door, with their drawn swords flashing round his head, 
and sent for a Smith to rivet a set of chains upon him.  When the 
Smith (I wish I knew his name!) was brought, all dark and swarthy 
with the smoke of his forge, and panting with the speed he had 
made; and the Black Band, falling aside to show him the Prisoner, 
cried with a loud uproar, 'Make the fetters heavy! make them 
strong!' the Smith dropped upon his knee - but not to the Black 
Band - and said, 'This is the brave Earl Hubert de Burgh, who 
fought at Dover Castle, and destroyed the French fleet, and has 
done his country much good service.  You may kill me, if you like, 
but I will never make a chain for Earl Hubert de Burgh!'

The Black Band never blushed, or they might have blushed at this.  
They knocked the Smith about from one to another, and swore at him, 
and tied the Earl on horseback, undressed as he was, and carried 
him off to the Tower of London.  The Bishops, however, were so 
indignant at the violation of the Sanctuary of the Church, that the 
frightened King soon ordered the Black Band to take him back again; 
at the same time commanding the Sheriff of Essex to prevent his 
escaping out of Brentwood Church.  Well! the Sheriff dug a deep 
trench all round the church, and erected a high fence, and watched 
the church night and day; the Black Band and their Captain watched 
it too, like three hundred and one black wolves.  For thirty-nine 
days, Hubert de Burgh remained within.  At length, upon the 
fortieth day, cold and hunger were too much for him, and he gave 
himself up to the Black Band, who carried him off, for the second 
time, to the Tower.  When his trial came on, he refused to plead; 
but at last it was arranged that he should give up all the royal 
lands which had been bestowed upon him, and should be kept at the 
Castle of Devizes, in what was called 'free prison,' in charge of 
four knights appointed by four lords.  There, he remained almost a 
year, until, learning that a follower of his old enemy the Bishop 
was made Keeper of the Castle, and fearing that he might be killed 
by treachery, he climbed the ramparts one dark night, dropped from 
the top of the high Castle wall into the moat, and coming safely to 
the ground, took refuge in another church.  From this place he was 
delivered by a party of horse despatched to his help by some 
nobles, who were by this time in revolt against the King, and 
assembled in Wales.  He was finally pardoned and restored to his 
estates, but he lived privately, and never more aspired to a high 
post in the realm, or to a high place in the King's favour.  And 
thus end - more happily than the stories of many favourites of 
Kings - the adventures of Earl Hubert de Burgh.

The nobles, who had risen in revolt, were stirred up to rebellion 
by the overbearing conduct of the Bishop of Winchester, who, 
finding that the King secretly hated the Great Charter which had 
been forced from his father, did his utmost to confirm him in that 
dislike, and in the preference he showed to foreigners over the 
English.  Of this, and of his even publicly declaring that the 
Barons of England were inferior to those of France, the English 
Lords complained with such bitterness, that the King, finding them 
well supported by the clergy, became frightened for his throne, and 
sent away the Bishop and all his foreign associates.  On his 
marriage, however, with ELEANOR, a French lady, the daughter of the 
Count of Provence, he openly favoured the foreigners again; and so 
many of his wife's relations came over, and made such an immense 
family-party at court, and got so many good things, and pocketed so 
much money, and were so high with the English whose money they 
pocketed, that the bolder English Barons murmured openly about a 
clause there was in the Great Charter, which provided for the 
banishment of unreasonable favourites.  But, the foreigners only 
laughed disdainfully, and said, 'What are your English laws to us?'

King Philip of France had died, and had been succeeded by Prince 
Louis, who had also died after a short reign of three years, and 
had been succeeded by his son of the same name - so moderate and 
just a man that he was not the least in the world like a King, as 
Kings went.  ISABELLA, King Henry's mother, wished very much (for a 
certain spite she had) that England should make war against this 
King; and, as King Henry was a mere puppet in anybody's hands who 
knew how to manage his feebleness, she easily carried her point 
with him.  But, the Parliament were determined to give him no money 
for such a war.  So, to defy the Parliament, he packed up thirty 
large casks of silver - I don't know how he got so much; I dare say 
he screwed it out of the miserable Jews - and put them aboard ship, 
and went away himself to carry war into France:  accompanied by his 
mother and his brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who was rich and 
clever.  But he only got well beaten, and came home.

The good-humour of the Parliament was not restored by this.  They 
reproached the King with wasting the public money to make greedy 
foreigners rich, and were so stern with him, and so determined not 
to let him have more of it to waste if they could help it, that he 
was at his wit's end for some, and tried so shamelessly to get all 
he could from his subjects, by excuses or by force, that the people 
used to say the King was the sturdiest beggar in England.  He took 
the Cross, thinking to get some money by that means; but, as it was 
very well known that he never meant to go on a crusade, he got 
none.  In all this contention, the Londoners were particularly keen 
against the King, and the King hated them warmly in return.  Hating 
or loving, however, made no difference; he continued in the same 
condition for nine or ten years, when at last the Barons said that 
if he would solemnly confirm their liberties afresh, the Parliament 
would vote him a large sum.

As he readily consented, there was a great meeting held in 
Westminster Hall, one pleasant day in May, when all the clergy, 
dressed in their robes and holding every one of them a burning 
candle in his hand, stood up (the Barons being also there) while 
the Archbishop of Canterbury read the sentence of excommunication 
against any man, and all men, who should henceforth, in any way, 
infringe the Great Charter of the Kingdom.  When he had done, they 
all put out their burning candles with a curse upon the soul of any 
one, and every one, who should merit that sentence.  The King 
concluded with an oath to keep the Charter, 'As I am a man, as I am 
a Christian, as I am a Knight, as I am a King!'

It was easy to make oaths, and easy to break them; and the King did 
both, as his father had done before him.  He took to his old 
courses again when he was supplied with money, and soon cured of 
their weakness the few who had ever really trusted him.  When his 
money was gone, and he was once more borrowing and begging 
everywhere with a meanness worthy of his nature, he got into a 
difficulty with the Pope respecting the Crown of Sicily, which the 
Pope said he had a right to give away, and which he offered to King 
Henry for his second son, PRINCE EDMUND.  But, if you or I give 
away what we have not got, and what belongs to somebody else, it is 
likely that the person to whom we give it, will have some trouble 
in taking it.  It was exactly so in this case.  It was necessary to 
conquer the Sicilian Crown before it could be put upon young 
Edmund's head.  It could not be conquered without money.  The Pope 
ordered the clergy to raise money.  The clergy, however, were not 
so obedient to him as usual; they had been disputing with him for 
some time about his unjust preference of Italian Priests in 
England; and they had begun to doubt whether the King's chaplain, 
whom he allowed to be paid for preaching in seven hundred churches, 
could possibly be, even by the Pope's favour, in seven hundred 
places at once.  'The Pope and the King together,' said the Bishop 
of London, 'may take the mitre off my head; but, if they do, they 
will find that I shall put on a soldier's helmet.  I pay nothing.'  
The Bishop of Worcester was as bold as the Bishop of London, and 
would pay nothing either.  Such sums as the more timid or more 
helpless of the clergy did raise were squandered away, without 
doing any good to the King, or bringing the Sicilian Crown an inch 
nearer to Prince Edmund's head.  The end of the business was, that 
the Pope gave the Crown to the brother of the King of France (who 
conquered it for himself), and sent the King of England in, a bill 
of one hundred thousand pounds for the expenses of not having won 
it.

The King was now so much distressed that we might almost pity him, 
if it were possible to pity a King so shabby and ridiculous.  His 
clever brother, Richard, had bought the title of King of the Romans 
from the German people, and was no longer near him, to help him 
with advice.  The clergy, resisting the very Pope, were in alliance 
with the Barons.  The Barons were headed by SIMON DE MONTFORT, Earl 
of Leicester, married to King Henry's sister, and, though a 
foreigner himself, the most popular man in England against the 
foreign favourites.  When the King next met his Parliament, the 
Barons, led by this Earl, came before him, armed from head to foot, 
and cased in armour.  When the Parliament again assembled, in a 
month's time, at Oxford, this Earl was at their head, and the King 
was obliged to consent, on oath, to what was called a Committee of 
Government:  consisting of twenty-four members:  twelve chosen by 
the Barons, and twelve chosen by himself.

But, at a good time for him, his brother Richard came back.  
Richard's first act (the Barons would not admit him into England on 
other terms) was to swear to be faithful to the Committee of 
Government - which he immediately began to oppose with all his 
might.  Then, the Barons began to quarrel among themselves; 
especially the proud Earl of Gloucester with the Earl of Leicester, 
who went abroad in disgust.  Then, the people began to be 
dissatisfied with the Barons, because they did not do enough for 
them.  The King's chances seemed so good again at length, that he 
took heart enough - or caught it from his brother - to tell the 
Committee of Government that he abolished them - as to his oath, 
never mind that, the Pope said! - and to seize all the money in the 
Mint, and to shut himself up in the Tower of London.  Here he was 
joined by his eldest son, Prince Edward; and, from the Tower, he 
made public a letter of the Pope's to the world in general, 
informing all men that he had been an excellent and just King for 
five-and-forty years.

As everybody knew he had been nothing of the sort, nobody cared 
much for this document.  It so chanced that the proud Earl of 
Gloucester dying, was succeeded by his son; and that his son, 
instead of being the enemy of the Earl of Leicester, was (for the 
time) his friend.  It fell out, therefore, that these two Earls 
joined their forces, took several of the Royal Castles in the 
country, and advanced as hard as they could on London.  The London 
people, always opposed to the King, declared for them with great 
joy.  The King himself remained shut up, not at all gloriously, in 
the Tower.  Prince Edward made the best of his way to Windsor 
Castle.  His mother, the Queen, attempted to follow him by water; 
but, the people seeing her barge rowing up the river, and hating 
her with all their hearts, ran to London Bridge, got together a 
quantity of stones and mud, and pelted the barge as it came 
through, crying furiously, 'Drown the Witch!  Drown her!'  They 
were so near doing it, that the Mayor took the old lady under his 
protection, and shut her up in St. Paul's until the danger was 
past.

It would require a great deal of writing on my part, and a great 
deal of reading on yours, to follow the King through his disputes 
with the Barons, and to follow the Barons through their disputes 
with one another - so I will make short work of it for both of us, 
and only relate the chief events that arose out of these quarrels.  
The good King of France was asked to decide between them.  He gave 
it as his opinion that the King must maintain the Great Charter, 
and that the Barons must give up the Committee of Government, and 
all the rest that had been done by the Parliament at Oxford:  which 
the Royalists, or King's party, scornfully called the Mad 
Parliament.  The Barons declared that these were not fair terms, 
and they would not accept them.  Then they caused the great bell of 
St. Paul's to be tolled, for the purpose of rousing up the London 
people, who armed themselves at the dismal sound and formed quite 
an army in the streets.  I am sorry to say, however, that instead 
of falling upon the King's party with whom their quarrel was, they 
fell upon the miserable Jews, and killed at least five hundred of 
them.  They pretended that some of these Jews were on the King's 
side, and that they kept hidden in their houses, for the 
destruction of the people, a certain terrible composition called 
Greek Fire, which could not be put out with water, but only burnt 
the fiercer for it.  What they really did keep in their houses was 
money; and this their cruel enemies wanted, and this their cruel 
enemies took, like robbers and murderers.

The Earl of Leicester put himself at the head of these Londoners 
and other forces, and followed the King to Lewes in Sussex, where 
he lay encamped with his army.  Before giving the King's forces 
battle here, the Earl addressed his soldiers, and said that King 
Henry the Third had broken so many oaths, that he had become the 
enemy of God, and therefore they would wear white crosses on their 
breasts, as if they were arrayed, not against a fellow-Christian, 
but against a Turk.  White-crossed accordingly, they rushed into 
the fight.  They would have lost the day - the King having on his 
side all the foreigners in England:  and, from Scotland, JOHN 
COMYN, JOHN BALIOL, and ROBERT BRUCE, with all their men - but for 
the impatience of PRINCE EDWARD, who, in his hot desire to have 
vengeance on the people of London, threw the whole of his father's 
army into confusion.  He was taken Prisoner; so was the King; so 
was the King's brother the King of the Romans; and five thousand 
Englishmen were left dead upon the bloody grass.

For this success, the Pope excommunicated the Earl of Leicester:  
which neither the Earl nor the people cared at all about.  The 
people loved him and supported him, and he became the real King; 
having all the power of the government in his own hands, though he 
was outwardly respectful to King Henry the Third, whom he took with 
him wherever he went, like a poor old limp court-card.  He summoned 
a Parliament (in the year one thousand two hundred and sixty-five) 
which was the first Parliament in England that the people had any 
real share in electing; and he grew more and more in favour with 
the people every day, and they stood by him in whatever he did.

Many of the other Barons, and particularly the Earl of Gloucester, 
who had become by this time as proud as his father, grew jealous of 
this powerful and popular Earl, who was proud too, and began to 
conspire against him.  Since the battle of Lewes, Prince Edward had 
been kept as a hostage, and, though he was otherwise treated like a 
Prince, had never been allowed to go out without attendants 
appointed by the Earl of Leicester, who watched him.  The 
conspiring Lords found means to propose to him, in secret, that 
they should assist him to escape, and should make him their leader; 
to which he very heartily consented.

So, on a day that was agreed upon, he said to his attendants after 
dinner (being then at Hereford), 'I should like to ride on 
horseback, this fine afternoon, a little way into the country.'  As 
they, too, thought it would be very pleasant to have a canter in 
the sunshine, they all rode out of the town together in a gay 
little troop.  When they came to a fine level piece of turf, the 
Prince fell to comparing their horses one with another, and 
offering bets that one was faster than another; and the attendants, 
suspecting no harm, rode galloping matches until their horses were 
quite tired.  The Prince rode no matches himself, but looked on 
from his saddle, and staked his money.  Thus they passed the whole 
merry afternoon.  Now, the sun was setting, and they were all going 
slowly up a hill, the Prince's horse very fresh and all the other 
horses very weary, when a strange rider mounted on a grey steed 
appeared at the top of the hill, and waved his hat.  'What does the 
fellow mean?' said the attendants one to another.  The Prince 
answered on the instant by setting spurs to his horse, dashing away 
at his utmost speed, joining the man, riding into the midst of a 
little crowd of horsemen who were then seen waiting under some 
trees, and who closed around him; and so he departed in a cloud of 
dust, leaving the road empty of all but the baffled attendants, who 
sat looking at one another, while their horses drooped their ears 
and panted.

The Prince joined the Earl of Gloucester at Ludlow.  The Earl of 
Leicester, with a part of the army and the stupid old King, was at 
Hereford.  One of the Earl of Leicester's sons, Simon de Montfort, 
with another part of the army, was in Sussex.  To prevent these two 
parts from uniting was the Prince's first object.  He attacked 
Simon de Montfort by night, defeated him, seized his banners and 
treasure, and forced him into Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, 
which belonged to his family.

His father, the Earl of Leicester, in the meanwhile, not knowing 
what had happened, marched out of Hereford, with his part of the 
army and the King, to meet him.  He came, on a bright morning in 
August, to Evesham, which is watered by the pleasant river Avon.  
Looking rather anxiously across the prospect towards Kenilworth, he 
saw his own banners advancing; and his face brightened with joy.  
But, it clouded darkly when he presently perceived that the banners 
were captured, and in the enemy's hands; and he said, 'It is over.  
The Lord have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are Prince 
Edward's!'

He fought like a true Knight, nevertheless.  When his horse was 
killed under him, he fought on foot.  It was a fierce battle, and 
the dead lay in heaps everywhere.  The old King, stuck up in a suit 
of armour on a big war-horse, which didn't mind him at all, and 
which carried him into all sorts of places where he didn't want to 
go, got into everybody's way, and very nearly got knocked on the 
head by one of his son's men.  But he managed to pipe out, 'I am 
Harry of Winchester!' and the Prince, who heard him, seized his 
bridle, and took him out of peril.  The Earl of Leicester still 
fought bravely, until his best son Henry was killed, and the bodies 
of his best friends choked his path; and then he fell, still 
fighting, sword in hand.  They mangled his body, and sent it as a 
present to a noble lady - but a very unpleasant lady, I should 
think - who was the wife of his worst enemy.  They could not mangle 
his memory in the minds of the faithful people, though.  Many years 
afterwards, they loved him more than ever, and regarded him as a 
Saint, and always spoke of him as 'Sir Simon the Righteous.'

And even though he was dead, the cause for which he had fought 
still lived, and was strong, and forced itself upon the King in the 
very hour of victory.  Henry found himself obliged to respect the 
Great Charter, however much he hated it, and to make laws similar 
to the laws of the Great Earl of Leicester, and to be moderate and 
forgiving towards the people at last - even towards the people of 
London, who had so long opposed him.  There were more risings 
before all this was done, but they were set at rest by these means, 
and Prince Edward did his best in all things to restore peace.  One 
Sir Adam de Gourdon was the last dissatisfied knight in arms; but, 
the Prince vanquished him in single combat, in a wood, and nobly 
gave him his life, and became his friend, instead of slaying him.  
Sir Adam was not ungrateful.  He ever afterwards remained devoted 
to his generous conqueror.

When the troubles of the Kingdom were thus calmed, Prince Edward 
and his cousin Henry took the Cross, and went away to the Holy 
Land, with many English Lords and Knights.  Four years afterwards 
the King of the Romans died, and, next year (one thousand two 
hundred and seventy-two), his brother the weak King of England 
died.  He was sixty-eight years old then, and had reigned fifty-six 
years.  He was as much of a King in death, as he had ever been in 
life.  He was the mere pale shadow of a King at all times.



CHAPTER XVI - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE FIRST, CALLED LONGSHANKS



IT was now the year of our Lord one thousand two hundred and 
seventy-two; and Prince Edward, the heir to the throne, being away 
in the Holy Land, knew nothing of his father's death.  The Barons, 
however, proclaimed him King, immediately after the Royal funeral; 
and the people very willingly consented, since most men knew too 
well by this time what the horrors of a contest for the crown were.  
So King Edward the First, called, in a not very complimentary 
manner, LONGSHANKS, because of the slenderness of his legs, was 
peacefully accepted by the English Nation.

His legs had need to be strong, however long and thin they were; 
for they had to support him through many difficulties on the fiery 
sands of Asia, where his small force of soldiers fainted, died, 
deserted, and seemed to melt away.  But his prowess made light of 
it, and he said, 'I will go on, if I go on with no other follower 
than my groom!'

A Prince of this spirit gave the Turks a deal of trouble.  He 
stormed Nazareth, at which place, of all places on earth, I am 
sorry to relate, he made a frightful slaughter of innocent people; 
and then he went to Acre, where he got a truce of ten years from 
the Sultan.  He had very nearly lost his life in Acre, through the 
treachery of a Saracen Noble, called the Emir of Jaffa, who, making 
the pretence that he had some idea of turning Christian and wanted 
to know all about that religion, sent a trusty messenger to Edward 
very often - with a dagger in his sleeve.  At last, one Friday in 
Whitsun week, when it was very hot, and all the sandy prospect lay 
beneath the blazing sun, burnt up like a great overdone biscuit, 
and Edward was lying on a couch, dressed for coolness in only a 
loose robe, the messenger, with his chocolate-coloured face and his 
bright dark eyes and white teeth, came creeping in with a letter, 
and kneeled down like a tame tiger.  But, the moment Edward 
stretched out his hand to take the letter, the tiger made a spring 
at his heart.  He was quick, but Edward was quick too.  He seized 
the traitor by his chocolate throat, threw him to the ground, and 
slew him with the very dagger he had drawn.  The weapon had struck 
Edward in the arm, and although the wound itself was slight, it 
threatened to be mortal, for the blade of the dagger had been 
smeared with poison.  Thanks, however, to a better surgeon than was 
often to be found in those times, and to some wholesome herbs, and 
above all, to his faithful wife, ELEANOR, who devotedly nursed him, 
and is said by some to have sucked the poison from the wound with 
her own red lips (which I am very willing to believe), Edward soon 
recovered and was sound again.

As the King his father had sent entreaties to him to return home, 
he now began the journey.  He had got as far as Italy, when he met 
messengers who brought him intelligence of the King's death.  
Hearing that all was quiet at home, he made no haste to return to 
his own dominions, but paid a visit to the Pope, and went in state 
through various Italian Towns, where he was welcomed with 
acclamations as a mighty champion of the Cross from the Holy Land, 
and where he received presents of purple mantles and prancing 
horses, and went along in great triumph.  The shouting people 
little knew that he was the last English monarch who would ever 
embark in a crusade, or that within twenty years every conquest 
which the Christians had made in the Holy Land at the cost of so 
much blood, would be won back by the Turks.  But all this came to 
pass.

There was, and there is, an old town standing in a plain in France, 
called Chƒlons.  When the King was coming towards this place on his 
way to England, a wily French Lord, called the Count of Chƒlons, 
sent him a polite challenge to come with his knights and hold a 
fair tournament with the Count and HIS knights, and make a day of 
it with sword and lance.  It was represented to the King that the 
Count of Chƒlons was not to be trusted, and that, instead of a 
holiday fight for mere show and in good humour, he secretly meant a 
real battle, in which the English should be defeated by superior 
force.

The King, however, nothing afraid, went to the appointed place on 
the appointed day with a thousand followers.  When the Count came 
with two thousand and attacked the English in earnest, the English 
rushed at them with such valour that the Count's men and the 
Count's horses soon began to be tumbled down all over the field.  
The Count himself seized the King round the neck, but the King 
tumbled HIM out of his saddle in return for the compliment, and, 
jumping from his own horse, and standing over him, beat away at his 
iron armour like a blacksmith hammering on his anvil.  Even when 
the Count owned himself defeated and offered his sword, the King 
would not do him the honour to take it, but made him yield it up to 
a common soldier.  There had been such fury shown in this fight, 
that it was afterwards called the little Battle of Chƒlons.

The English were very well disposed to be proud of their King after 
these adventures; so, when he landed at Dover in the year one 
thousand two hundred and seventy-four (being then thirty-six years 
old), and went on to Westminster where he and his good Queen were 
crowned with great magnificence, splendid rejoicings took place.  
For the coronation-feast there were provided, among other eatables, 
four hundred oxen, four hundred sheep, four hundred and fifty pigs, 
eighteen wild boars, three hundred flitches of bacon, and twenty 
thousand fowls.  The fountains and conduits in the street flowed 
with red and white wine instead of water; the rich citizens hung 
silks and cloths of the brightest colours out of their windows to 
increase the beauty of the show, and threw out gold and silver by 
whole handfuls to make scrambles for the crowd.  In short, there 
was such eating and drinking, such music and capering, such a 
ringing of bells and tossing of caps, such a shouting, and singing, 
and revelling, as the narrow overhanging streets of old London City 
had not witnessed for many a long day.  All the people were merry 
except the poor Jews, who, trembling within their houses, and 
scarcely daring to peep out, began to foresee that they would have 
to find the money for this joviality sooner or later.

To dismiss this sad subject of the Jews for the present, I am sorry 
to add that in this reign they were most unmercifully pillaged.  
They were hanged in great numbers, on accusations of having clipped 
the King's coin - which all kinds of people had done.  They were 
heavily taxed; they were disgracefully badged; they were, on one 
day, thirteen years after the coronation, taken up with their wives 
and children and thrown into beastly prisons, until they purchased 
their release by paying to the King twelve thousand pounds.  
Finally, every kind of property belonging to them was seized by the 
King, except so little as would defray the charge of their taking 
themselves away into foreign countries.  Many years elapsed before 
the hope of gain induced any of their race to return to England, 
where they had been treated so heartlessly and had suffered so 
much.

If King Edward the First had been as bad a king to Christians as he 
was to Jews, he would have been bad indeed.  But he was, in 
general, a wise and great monarch, under whom the country much 
improved.  He had no love for the Great Charter - few Kings had, 
through many, many years - but he had high qualities.  The first 
bold object which he conceived when he came home, was, to unite 
under one Sovereign England, Scotland, and Wales; the two last of 
which countries had each a little king of its own, about whom the 
people were always quarrelling and fighting, and making a 
prodigious disturbance - a great deal more than he was worth.  In 
the course of King Edward's reign he was engaged, besides, in a war 
with France.  To make these quarrels clearer, we will separate 
their histories and take them thus.  Wales, first.  France, second.  
Scotland, third.


LLEWELLYN was the Prince of Wales.  He had been on the side of the 
Barons in the reign of the stupid old King, but had afterwards 
sworn allegiance to him.  When King Edward came to the throne, 
Llewellyn was required to swear allegiance to him also; which he 
refused to do.  The King, being crowned and in his own dominions, 
three times more required Llewellyn to come and do homage; and 
three times more Llewellyn said he would rather not.  He was going 
to be married to ELEANOR DE MONTFORT, a young lady of the family 
mentioned in the last reign; and it chanced that this young lady, 
coming from France with her youngest brother, EMERIC, was taken by 
an English ship, and was ordered by the English King to be 
detained.  Upon this, the quarrel came to a head.  The King went, 
with his fleet, to the coast of Wales, where, so encompassing 
Llewellyn, that he could only take refuge in the bleak mountain 
region of Snowdon in which no provisions could reach him, he was 
soon starved into an apology, and into a treaty of peace, and into 
paying the expenses of the war.  The King, however, forgave him 
some of the hardest conditions of the treaty, and consented to his 
marriage.  And he now thought he had reduced Wales to obedience.

But the Welsh, although they were naturally a gentle, quiet, 
pleasant people, who liked to receive strangers in their cottages 
among the mountains, and to set before them with free hospitality 
whatever they had to eat and drink, and to play to them on their 
harps, and sing their native ballads to them, were a people of 
great spirit when their blood was up.  Englishmen, after this 
affair, began to be insolent in Wales, and to assume the air of 
masters; and the Welsh pride could not bear it.  Moreover, they 
believed in that unlucky old Merlin, some of whose unlucky old 
prophecies somebody always seemed doomed to remember when there was 
a chance of its doing harm; and just at this time some blind old 
gentleman with a harp and a long white beard, who was an excellent 
person, but had become of an unknown age and tedious, burst out 
with a declaration that Merlin had predicted that when English 
money had become round, a Prince of Wales would be crowned in 
London.  Now, King Edward had recently forbidden the English penny 
to be cut into halves and quarters for halfpence and farthings, and 
had actually introduced a round coin; therefore, the Welsh people 
said this was the time Merlin meant, and rose accordingly.

King Edward had bought over PRINCE DAVID, Llewellyn's brother, by 
heaping favours upon him; but he was the first to revolt, being 
perhaps troubled in his conscience.  One stormy night, he surprised 
the Castle of Hawarden, in possession of which an English nobleman 
had been left; killed the whole garrison, and carried off the 
nobleman a prisoner to Snowdon.  Upon this, the Welsh people rose 
like one man.  King Edward, with his army, marching from Worcester 
to the Menai Strait, crossed it - near to where the wonderful 
tubular iron bridge now, in days so different, makes a passage for 
railway trains - by a bridge of boats that enabled forty men to 
march abreast.  He subdued the Island of Anglesea, and sent his men 
forward to observe the enemy.  The sudden appearance of the Welsh 
created a panic among them, and they fell back to the bridge.  The 
tide had in the meantime risen and separated the boats; the Welsh 
pursuing them, they were driven into the sea, and there they sunk, 
in their heavy iron armour, by thousands.  After this victory 
Llewellyn, helped by the severe winter-weather of Wales, gained 
another battle; but the King ordering a portion of his English army 
to advance through South Wales, and catch him between two foes, and 
Llewellyn bravely turning to meet this new enemy, he was surprised 
and killed - very meanly, for he was unarmed and defenceless.  His 
head was struck off and sent to London, where it was fixed upon the 
Tower, encircled with a wreath, some say of ivy, some say of 
willow, some say of silver, to make it look like a ghastly coin in 
ridicule of the prediction.

David, however, still held out for six months, though eagerly 
sought after by the King, and hunted by his own countrymen.  One of 
them finally betrayed him with his wife and children.  He was 
sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; and from that time 
this became the established punishment of Traitors in England - a 
punishment wholly without excuse, as being revolting, vile, and 
cruel, after its object is dead; and which has no sense in it, as 
its only real degradation (and that nothing can blot out) is to the 
country that permits on any consideration such abominable 
barbarity.

Wales was now subdued.  The Queen giving birth to a young prince in 
the Castle of Carnarvon, the King showed him to the Welsh people as 
their countryman, and called him Prince of Wales; a title that has 
ever since been borne by the heir-apparent to the English throne - 
which that little Prince soon became, by the death of his elder 
brother.  The King did better things for the Welsh than that, by 
improving their laws and encouraging their trade.  Disturbances 
still took place, chiefly occasioned by the avarice and pride of 
the English Lords, on whom Welsh lands and castles had been 
bestowed; but they were subdued, and the country never rose again.  
There is a legend that to prevent the people from being incited to 
rebellion by the songs of their bards and harpers, Edward had them 
all put to death.  Some of them may have fallen among other men who 
held out against the King; but this general slaughter is, I think, 
a fancy of the harpers themselves, who, I dare say, made a song 
about it many years afterwards, and sang it by the Welsh firesides 
until it came to be believed.

The foreign war of the reign of Edward the First arose in this way.  
The crews of two vessels, one a Norman ship, and the other an 
English ship, happened to go to the same place in their boats to 
fill their casks with fresh water.  Being rough angry fellows, they 
began to quarrel, and then to fight - the English with their fists; 
the Normans with their knives - and, in the fight, a Norman was 
killed.  The Norman crew, instead of revenging themselves upon 
those English sailors with whom they had quarrelled (who were too 
strong for them, I suspect), took to their ship again in a great 
rage, attacked the first English ship they met, laid hold of an 
unoffending merchant who happened to be on board, and brutally 
hanged him in the rigging of their own vessel with a dog at his 
feet.  This so enraged the English sailors that there was no 
restraining them; and whenever, and wherever, English sailors met 
Norman sailors, they fell upon each other tooth and nail.  The 
Irish and Dutch sailors took part with the English; the French and 
Genoese sailors helped the Normans; and thus the greater part of 
the mariners sailing over the sea became, in their way, as violent 
and raging as the sea itself when it is disturbed.

King Edward's fame had been so high abroad that he had been chosen 
to decide a difference between France and another foreign power, 
and had lived upon the Continent three years.  At first, neither he 
nor the French King PHILIP (the good Louis had been dead some time) 
interfered in these quarrels; but when a fleet of eighty English 
ships engaged and utterly defeated a Norman fleet of two hundred, 
in a pitched battle fought round a ship at anchor, in which no 
quarter was given, the matter became too serious to be passed over.  
King Edward, as Duke of Guienne, was summoned to present himself 
before the King of France, at Paris, and answer for the damage done 
by his sailor subjects.  At first, he sent the Bishop of London as 
his representative, and then his brother EDMUND, who was married to 
the French Queen's mother.  I am afraid Edmund was an easy man, and 
allowed himself to be talked over by his charming relations, the 
French court ladies; at all events, he was induced to give up his 
brother's dukedom for forty days - as a mere form, the French King 
said, to satisfy his honour - and he was so very much astonished, 
when the time was out, to find that the French King had no idea of 
giving it up again, that I should not wonder if it hastened his 
death:  which soon took place.

King Edward was a King to win his foreign dukedom back again, if it 
could be won by energy and valour.  He raised a large army, 
renounced his allegiance as Duke of Guienne, and crossed the sea to 
carry war into France.  Before any important battle was fought, 
however, a truce was agreed upon for two years; and in the course 
of that time, the Pope effected a reconciliation.  King Edward, who 
was now a widower, having lost his affectionate and good wife, 
Eleanor, married the French King's sister, MARGARET; and the Prince 
of Wales was contracted to the French King's daughter ISABELLA.

Out of bad things, good things sometimes arise.  Out of this 
hanging of the innocent merchant, and the bloodshed and strife it 
caused, there came to be established one of the greatest powers 
that the English people now possess.  The preparations for the war 
being very expensive, and King Edward greatly wanting money, and 
being very arbitrary in his ways of raising it, some of the Barons 
began firmly to oppose him.  Two of them, in particular, HUMPHREY 
BOHUN, Earl of Hereford, and ROGER BIGOD, Earl of Norfolk, were so 
stout against him, that they maintained he had no right to command 
them to head his forces in Guienne, and flatly refused to go there.  
'By Heaven, Sir Earl,' said the King to the Earl of Hereford, in a 
great passion, 'you shall either go or be hanged!'  'By Heaven, Sir 
King,' replied the Earl, 'I will neither go nor yet will I be 
hanged!' and both he and the other Earl sturdily left the court, 
attended by many Lords.  The King tried every means of raising 
money.  He taxed the clergy, in spite of all the Pope said to the 
contrary; and when they refused to pay, reduced them to submission, 
by saying Very well, then they had no claim upon the government for 
protection, and any man might plunder them who would - which a good 
many men were very ready to do, and very readily did, and which the 
clergy found too losing a game to be played at long.  He seized all 
the wool and leather in the hands of the merchants, promising to 
pay for it some fine day; and he set a tax upon the exportation of 
wool, which was so unpopular among the traders that it was called 
'The evil toll.'  But all would not do.  The Barons, led by those 
two great Earls, declared any taxes imposed without the consent of 
Parliament, unlawful; and the Parliament refused to impose taxes, 
until the King should confirm afresh the two Great Charters, and 
should solemnly declare in writing, that there was no power in the 
country to raise money from the people, evermore, but the power of 
Parliament representing all ranks of the people.  The King was very 
unwilling to diminish his own power by allowing this great 
privilege in the Parliament; but there was no help for it, and he 
at last complied.  We shall come to another King by-and-by, who 
might have saved his head from rolling off, if he had profited by 
this example.

The people gained other benefits in Parliament from the good sense 
and wisdom of this King.  Many of the laws were much improved; 
provision was made for the greater safety of travellers, and the 
apprehension of thieves and murderers; the priests were prevented 
from holding too much land, and so becoming too powerful; and 
Justices of the Peace were first appointed (though not at first 
under that name) in various parts of the country.


And now we come to Scotland, which was the great and lasting 
trouble of the reign of King Edward the First.

About thirteen years after King Edward's coronation, Alexander the 
Third, the King of Scotland, died of a fall from his horse.  He had 
been married to Margaret, King Edward's sister.  All their children 
being dead, the Scottish crown became the right of a young Princess 
only eight years old, the daughter of ERIC, King of Norway, who had 
married a daughter of the deceased sovereign.  King Edward 
proposed, that the Maiden of Norway, as this Princess was called, 
should be engaged to be married to his eldest son; but, 
unfortunately, as she was coming over to England she fell sick, and 
landing on one of the Orkney Islands, died there.  A great 
commotion immediately began in Scotland, where as many as thirteen 
noisy claimants to the vacant throne started up and made a general 
confusion.

King Edward being much renowned for his sagacity and justice, it 
seems to have been agreed to refer the dispute to him.  He accepted 
the trust, and went, with an army, to the Border-land where England 
and Scotland joined.  There, he called upon the Scottish gentlemen 
to meet him at the Castle of Norham, on the English side of the 
river Tweed; and to that Castle they came.  But, before he would 
take any step in the business, he required those Scottish 
gentlemen, one and all, to do homage to him as their superior Lord; 
and when they hesitated, he said, 'By holy Edward, whose crown I 
wear, I will have my rights, or I will die in maintaining them!'  
The Scottish gentlemen, who had not expected this, were 
disconcerted, and asked for three weeks to think about it.

At the end of the three weeks, another meeting took place, on a 
green plain on the Scottish side of the river.  Of all the 
competitors for the Scottish throne, there were only two who had 
any real claim, in right of their near kindred to the Royal Family.  
These were JOHN BALIOL and ROBERT BRUCE:  and the right was, I have 
no doubt, on the side of John Baliol.  At this particular meeting 
John Baliol was not present, but Robert Bruce was; and on Robert 
Bruce being formally asked whether he acknowledged the King of 
England for his superior lord, he answered, plainly and distinctly, 
Yes, he did.  Next day, John Baliol appeared, and said the same.  
This point settled, some arrangements were made for inquiring into 
their titles.

The inquiry occupied a pretty long time - more than a year.  While 
it was going on, King Edward took the opportunity of making a 
journey through Scotland, and calling upon the Scottish people of 
all degrees to acknowledge themselves his vassals, or be imprisoned 
until they did.  In the meanwhile, Commissioners were appointed to 
conduct the inquiry, a Parliament was held at Berwick about it, the 
two claimants were heard at full length, and there was a vast 
amount of talking.  At last, in the great hall of the Castle of 
Berwick, the King gave judgment in favour of John Baliol:  who, 
consenting to receive his crown by the King of England's favour and 
permission, was crowned at Scone, in an old stone chair which had 
been used for ages in the abbey there, at the coronations of 
Scottish Kings.  Then, King Edward caused the great seal of 
Scotland, used since the late King's death, to be broken in four 
pieces, and placed in the English Treasury; and considered that he 
now had Scotland (according to the common saying) under his thumb.

Scotland had a strong will of its own yet, however.  King Edward, 
determined that the Scottish King should not forget he was his 
vassal, summoned him repeatedly to come and defend himself and his 
judges before the English Parliament when appeals from the 
decisions of Scottish courts of justice were being heard.  At 
length, John Baliol, who had no great heart of his own, had so much 
heart put into him by the brave spirit of the Scottish people, who 
took this as a national insult, that he refused to come any more.  
Thereupon, the King further required him to help him in his war 
abroad (which was then in progress), and to give up, as security 
for his good behaviour in future, the three strong Scottish Castles 
of Jedburgh, Roxburgh, and Berwick.  Nothing of this being done; on 
the contrary, the Scottish people concealing their King among their 
mountains in the Highlands and showing a determination to resist; 
Edward marched to Berwick with an army of thirty thousand foot, and 
four thousand horse; took the Castle, and slew its whole garrison, 
and the inhabitants of the town as well - men, women, and children.  
LORD WARRENNE, Earl of Surrey, then went on to the Castle of 
Dunbar, before which a battle was fought, and the whole Scottish 
army defeated with great slaughter.  The victory being complete, 
the Earl of Surrey was left as guardian of Scotland; the principal 
offices in that kingdom were given to Englishmen; the more powerful 
Scottish Nobles were obliged to come and live in England; the 
Scottish crown and sceptre were brought away; and even the old 
stone chair was carried off and placed in Westminster Abbey, where 
you may see it now.  Baliol had the Tower of London lent him for a 
residence, with permission to range about within a circle of twenty 
miles.  Three years afterwards he was allowed to go to Normandy, 
where he had estates, and where he passed the remaining six years 
of his life:  far more happily, I dare say, than he had lived for a 
long while in angry Scotland.

Now, there was, in the West of Scotland, a gentleman of small 
fortune, named WILLIAM WALLACE, the second son of a Scottish 
knight.  He was a man of great size and great strength; he was very 
brave and daring; when he spoke to a body of his countrymen, he 
could rouse them in a wonderful manner by the power of his burning 
words; he loved Scotland dearly, and he hated England with his 
utmost might.  The domineering conduct of the English who now held 
the places of trust in Scotland made them as intolerable to the 
proud Scottish people as they had been, under similar 
circumstances, to the Welsh; and no man in all Scotland regarded 
them with so much smothered rage as William Wallace.  One day, an 
Englishman in office, little knowing what he was, affronted HIM.  
Wallace instantly struck him dead, and taking refuge among the 
rocks and hills, and there joining with his countryman, SIR WILLIAM 
DOUGLAS, who was also in arms against King Edward, became the most 
resolute and undaunted champion of a people struggling for their 
independence that ever lived upon the earth.

The English Guardian of the Kingdom fled before him, and, thus 
encouraged, the Scottish people revolted everywhere, and fell upon 
the English without mercy.  The Earl of Surrey, by the King's 
commands, raised all the power of the Border-counties, and two 
English armies poured into Scotland.  Only one Chief, in the face 
of those armies, stood by Wallace, who, with a force of forty 
thousand men, awaited the invaders at a place on the river Forth, 
within two miles of Stirling.  Across the river there was only one 
poor wooden bridge, called the bridge of Kildean - so narrow, that 
but two men could cross it abreast.  With his eyes upon this 
bridge, Wallace posted the greater part of his men among some 
rising grounds, and waited calmly.  When the English army came up 
on the opposite bank of the river, messengers were sent forward to 
offer terms.  Wallace sent them back with a defiance, in the name 
of the freedom of Scotland.  Some of the officers of the Earl of 
Surrey in command of the English, with THEIR eyes also on the 
bridge, advised him to be discreet and not hasty.  He, however, 
urged to immediate battle by some other officers, and particularly 
by CRESSINGHAM, King Edward's treasurer, and a rash man, gave the 
word of command to advance.  One thousand English crossed the 
bridge, two abreast; the Scottish troops were as motionless as 
stone images.  Two thousand English crossed; three thousand, four 
thousand, five.  Not a feather, all this time, had been seen to 
stir among the Scottish bonnets.  Now, they all fluttered.  
'Forward, one party, to the foot of the Bridge!' cried Wallace, 
'and let no more English cross!  The rest, down with me on the five 
thousand who have come over, and cut them all to pieces!'  It was 
done, in the sight of the whole remainder of the English army, who 
could give no help.  Cressingham himself was killed, and the Scotch 
made whips for their horses of his skin.

King Edward was abroad at this time, and during the successes on 
the Scottish side which followed, and which enabled bold Wallace to 
win the whole country back again, and even to ravage the English 
borders.  But, after a few winter months, the King returned, and 
took the field with more than his usual energy.  One night, when a 
kick from his horse as they both lay on the ground together broke 
two of his ribs, and a cry arose that he was killed, he leaped into 
his saddle, regardless of the pain he suffered, and rode through 
the camp.  Day then appearing, he gave the word (still, of course, 
in that bruised and aching state) Forward! and led his army on to 
near Falkirk, where the Scottish forces were seen drawn up on some 
stony ground, behind a morass.  Here, he defeated Wallace, and 
killed fifteen thousand of his men.  With the shattered remainder, 
Wallace drew back to Stirling; but, being pursued, set fire to the 
town that it might give no help to the English, and escaped.  The 
inhabitants of Perth afterwards set fire to their houses for the 
same reason, and the King, unable to find provisions, was forced to 
withdraw his army.

Another ROBERT BRUCE, the grandson of him who had disputed the 
Scottish crown with Baliol, was now in arms against the King (that 
elder Bruce being dead), and also JOHN COMYN, Baliol's nephew.  
These two young men might agree in opposing Edward, but could agree 
in nothing else, as they were rivals for the throne of Scotland.  
Probably it was because they knew this, and knew what troubles must 
arise even if they could hope to get the better of the great 
English King, that the principal Scottish people applied to the 
Pope for his interference.  The Pope, on the principle of losing 
nothing for want of trying to get it, very coolly claimed that 
Scotland belonged to him; but this was a little too much, and the 
Parliament in a friendly manner told him so.

In the spring time of the year one thousand three hundred and 
three, the King sent SIR JOHN SEGRAVE, whom he made Governor of 
Scotland, with twenty thousand men, to reduce the rebels.  Sir John 
was not as careful as he should have been, but encamped at Rosslyn, 
near Edinburgh, with his army divided into three parts.  The 
Scottish forces saw their advantage; fell on each part separately; 
defeated each; and killed all the prisoners.  Then, came the King 
himself once more, as soon as a great army could be raised; he 
passed through the whole north of Scotland, laying waste whatsoever 
came in his way; and he took up his winter quarters at Dunfermline.  
The Scottish cause now looked so hopeless, that Comyn and the other 
nobles made submission and received their pardons.  Wallace alone 
stood out.  He was invited to surrender, though on no distinct 
pledge that his life should be spared; but he still defied the 
ireful King, and lived among the steep crags of the Highland glens, 
where the eagles made their nests, and where the mountain torrents 
roared, and the white snow was deep, and the bitter winds blew 
round his unsheltered head, as he lay through many a pitch-dark 
night wrapped up in his plaid.  Nothing could break his spirit; 
nothing could lower his courage; nothing could induce him to forget 
or to forgive his country's wrongs.  Even when the Castle of 
Stirling, which had long held out, was besieged by the King with 
every kind of military engine then in use; even when the lead upon 
cathedral roofs was taken down to help to make them; even when the 
King, though an old man, commanded in the siege as if he were a 
youth, being so resolved to conquer; even when the brave garrison 
(then found with amazement to be not two hundred people, including 
several ladies) were starved and beaten out and were made to submit 
on their knees, and with every form of disgrace that could 
aggravate their sufferings; even then, when there was not a ray of 
hope in Scotland, William Wallace was as proud and firm as if he 
had beheld the powerful and relentless Edward lying dead at his 
feet.

Who betrayed William Wallace in the end, is not quite certain.  
That he was betrayed - probably by an attendant - is too true.  He 
was taken to the Castle of Dumbarton, under SIR JOHN MENTEITH, and 
thence to London, where the great fame of his bravery and 
resolution attracted immense concourses of people to behold him.  
He was tried in Westminster Hall, with a crown of laurel on his 
head - it is supposed because he was reported to have said that he 
ought to wear, or that he would wear, a crown there and was found 
guilty as a robber, a murderer, and a traitor.  What they called a 
robber (he said to those who tried him) he was, because he had 
taken spoil from the King's men.  What they called a murderer, he 
was, because he had slain an insolent Englishman.  What they called 
a traitor, he was not, for he had never sworn allegiance to the 
King, and had ever scorned to do it.  He was dragged at the tails 
of horses to West Smithfield, and there hanged on a high gallows, 
torn open before he was dead, beheaded, and quartered.  His head 
was set upon a pole on London Bridge, his right arm was sent to 
Newcastle, his left arm to Berwick, his legs to Perth and Aberdeen.  
But, if King Edward had had his body cut into inches, and had sent 
every separate inch into a separate town, he could not have 
dispersed it half so far and wide as his fame.  Wallace will be 
remembered in songs and stories, while there are songs and stories 
in the English tongue, and Scotland will hold him dear while her 
lakes and mountains last.

Released from this dreaded enemy, the King made a fairer plan of 
Government for Scotland, divided the offices of honour among 
Scottish gentlemen and English gentlemen, forgave past offences, 
and thought, in his old age, that his work was done.

But he deceived himself.  Comyn and Bruce conspired, and made an 
appointment to meet at Dumfries, in the church of the Minorites.  
There is a story that Comyn was false to Bruce, and had informed 
against him to the King; that Bruce was warned of his danger and 
the necessity of flight, by receiving, one night as he sat at 
supper, from his friend the Earl of Gloucester, twelve pennies and 
a pair of spurs; that as he was riding angrily to keep his 
appointment (through a snow-storm, with his horse's shoes reversed 
that he might not be tracked), he met an evil-looking serving man, 
a messenger of Comyn, whom he killed, and concealed in whose dress 
he found letters that proved Comyn's treachery.  However this may 
be, they were likely enough to quarrel in any case, being hot-
headed rivals; and, whatever they quarrelled about, they certainly 
did quarrel in the church where they met, and Bruce drew his dagger 
and stabbed Comyn, who fell upon the pavement.  When Bruce came 
out, pale and disturbed, the friends who were waiting for him asked 
what was the matter?  'I think I have killed Comyn,' said he.  'You 
only think so?' returned one of them; 'I will make sure!' and going 
into the church, and finding him alive, stabbed him again and 
again.  Knowing that the King would never forgive this new deed of 
violence, the party then declared Bruce King of Scotland:  got him 
crowned at Scone - without the chair; and set up the rebellious 
standard once again.

When the King heard of it he kindled with fiercer anger than he had 
ever shown yet.  He caused the Prince of Wales and two hundred and 
seventy of the young nobility to be knighted - the trees in the 
Temple Gardens were cut down to make room for their tents, and they 
watched their armour all night, according to the old usage:  some 
in the Temple Church:  some in Westminster Abbey - and at the 
public Feast which then took place, he swore, by Heaven, and by two 
swans covered with gold network which his minstrels placed upon the 
table, that he would avenge the death of Comyn, and would punish 
the false Bruce.  And before all the company, he charged the Prince 
his son, in case that he should die before accomplishing his vow, 
not to bury him until it was fulfilled.  Next morning the Prince 
and the rest of the young Knights rode away to the Border-country 
to join the English army; and the King, now weak and sick, followed 
in a horse-litter.

Bruce, after losing a battle and undergoing many dangers and much 
misery, fled to Ireland, where he lay concealed through the winter.  
That winter, Edward passed in hunting down and executing Bruce's 
relations and adherents, sparing neither youth nor age, and showing 
no touch of pity or sign of mercy.  In the following spring, Bruce 
reappeared and gained some victories.  In these frays, both sides 
were grievously cruel.  For instance - Bruce's two brothers, being 
taken captives desperately wounded, were ordered by the King to 
instant execution.  Bruce's friend Sir John Douglas, taking his own 
Castle of Douglas out of the hands of an English Lord, roasted the 
dead bodies of the slaughtered garrison in a great fire made of 
every movable within it; which dreadful cookery his men called the 
Douglas Larder.  Bruce, still successful, however, drove the Earl 
of Pembroke and the Earl of Gloucester into the Castle of Ayr and 
laid siege to it.

The King, who had been laid up all the winter, but had directed the 
army from his sick-bed, now advanced to Carlisle, and there, 
causing the litter in which he had travelled to be placed in the 
Cathedral as an offering to Heaven, mounted his horse once more, 
and for the last time.  He was now sixty-nine years old, and had 
reigned thirty-five years.  He was so ill, that in four days he 
could go no more than six miles; still, even at that pace, he went 
on and resolutely kept his face towards the Border.  At length, he 
lay down at the village of Burgh-upon-Sands; and there, telling 
those around him to impress upon the Prince that he was to remember 
his father's vow, and was never to rest until he had thoroughly 
subdued Scotland, he yielded up his last breath.



CHAPTER XVII - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE SECOND



KING Edward the Second, the first Prince of Wales, was twenty-three 
years old when his father died.  There was a certain favourite of 
his, a young man from Gascony, named PIERS GAVESTON, of whom his 
father had so much disapproved that he had ordered him out of 
England, and had made his son swear by the side of his sick-bed, 
never to bring him back.  But, the Prince no sooner found himself 
King, than he broke his oath, as so many other Princes and Kings 
did (they were far too ready to take oaths), and sent for his dear 
friend immediately.

Now, this same Gaveston was handsome enough, but was a reckless, 
insolent, audacious fellow.  He was detested by the proud English 
Lords:  not only because he had such power over the King, and made 
the Court such a dissipated place, but, also, because he could ride 
better than they at tournaments, and was used, in his impudence, to 
cut very bad jokes on them; calling one, the old hog; another, the 
stage-player; another, the Jew; another, the black dog of Ardenne.  
This was as poor wit as need be, but it made those Lords very 
wroth; and the surly Earl of Warwick, who was the black dog, swore 
that the time should come when Piers Gaveston should feel the black 
dog's teeth.

It was not come yet, however, nor did it seem to be coming.  The 
King made him Earl of Cornwall, and gave him vast riches; and, when 
the King went over to France to marry the French Princess, 
ISABELLA, daughter of PHILIP LE BEL:  who was said to be the most 
beautiful woman in the world:  he made Gaveston, Regent of the 
Kingdom.  His splendid marriage-ceremony in the Church of Our Lady 
at Boulogne, where there were four Kings and three Queens present 
(quite a pack of Court Cards, for I dare say the Knaves were not 
wanting), being over, he seemed to care little or nothing for his 
beautiful wife; but was wild with impatience to meet Gaveston 
again.

When he landed at home, he paid no attention to anybody else, but 
ran into the favourite's arms before a great concourse of people, 
and hugged him, and kissed him, and called him his brother.  At the 
coronation which soon followed, Gaveston was the richest and 
brightest of all the glittering company there, and had the honour 
of carrying the crown.  This made the proud Lords fiercer than 
ever; the people, too, despised the favourite, and would never call 
him Earl of Cornwall, however much he complained to the King and 
asked him to punish them for not doing so, but persisted in styling 
him plain Piers Gaveston.

The Barons were so unceremonious with the King in giving him to 
understand that they would not bear this favourite, that the King 
was obliged to send him out of the country.  The favourite himself 
was made to take an oath (more oaths!) that he would never come 
back, and the Barons supposed him to be banished in disgrace, until 
they heard that he was appointed Governor of Ireland.  Even this 
was not enough for the besotted King, who brought him home again in 
a year's time, and not only disgusted the Court and the people by 
his doting folly, but offended his beautiful wife too, who never 
liked him afterwards.

He had now the old Royal want - of money - and the Barons had the 
new power of positively refusing to let him raise any.  He summoned 
a Parliament at York; the Barons refused to make one, while the 
favourite was near him.  He summoned another Parliament at 
Westminster, and sent Gaveston away.  Then, the Barons came, 
completely armed, and appointed a committee of themselves to 
correct abuses in the state and in the King's household.  He got 
some money on these conditions, and directly set off with Gaveston 
to the Border-country, where they spent it in idling away the time, 
and feasting, while Bruce made ready to drive the English out of 
Scotland.  For, though the old King had even made this poor weak 
son of his swear (as some say) that he would not bury his bones, 
but would have them boiled clean in a caldron, and carried before 
the English army until Scotland was entirely subdued, the second 
Edward was so unlike the first that Bruce gained strength and power 
every day.

The committee of Nobles, after some months of deliberation, 
ordained that the King should henceforth call a Parliament 
together, once every year, and even twice if necessary, instead of 
summoning it only when he chose.  Further, that Gaveston should 
once more be banished, and, this time, on pain of death if he ever 
came back.  The King's tears were of no avail; he was obliged to 
send his favourite to Flanders.  As soon as he had done so, 
however, he dissolved the Parliament, with the low cunning of a 
mere fool, and set off to the North of England, thinking to get an 
army about him to oppose the Nobles.  And once again he brought 
Gaveston home, and heaped upon him all the riches and titles of 
which the Barons had deprived him.

The Lords saw, now, that there was nothing for it but to put the 
favourite to death.  They could have done so, legally, according to 
the terms of his banishment; but they did so, I am sorry to say, in 
a shabby manner.  Led by the Earl of Lancaster, the King's cousin, 
they first of all attacked the King and Gaveston at Newcastle.  
They had time to escape by sea, and the mean King, having his 
precious Gaveston with him, was quite content to leave his lovely 
wife behind.  When they were comparatively safe, they separated; 
the King went to York to collect a force of soldiers; and the 
favourite shut himself up, in the meantime, in Scarborough Castle 
overlooking the sea.  This was what the Barons wanted.  They knew 
that the Castle could not hold out; they attacked it, and made 
Gaveston surrender.  He delivered himself up to the Earl of 
Pembroke - that Lord whom he had called the Jew - on the Earl's 
pledging his faith and knightly word, that no harm should happen to 
him and no violence be done him.

Now, it was agreed with Gaveston that he should be taken to the 
Castle of Wallingford, and there kept in honourable custody.  They 
travelled as far as Dedington, near Banbury, where, in the Castle 
of that place, they stopped for a night to rest.  Whether the Earl 
of Pembroke left his prisoner there, knowing what would happen, or 
really left him thinking no harm, and only going (as he pretended) 
to visit his wife, the Countess, who was in the neighbourhood, is 
no great matter now; in any case, he was bound as an honourable 
gentleman to protect his prisoner, and he did not do it.  In the 
morning, while the favourite was yet in bed, he was required to 
dress himself and come down into the court-yard.  He did so without 
any mistrust, but started and turned pale when he found it full of 
strange armed men.  'I think you know me?' said their leader, also 
armed from head to foot.  'I am the black dog of Ardenne!'  The 
time was come when Piers Gaveston was to feel the black dog's teeth 
indeed.  They set him on a mule, and carried him, in mock state and 
with military music, to the black dog's kennel - Warwick Castle - 
where a hasty council, composed of some great noblemen, considered 
what should be done with him.  Some were for sparing him, but one 
loud voice - it was the black dog's bark, I dare say - sounded 
through the Castle Hall, uttering these words:  'You have the fox 
in your power.  Let him go now, and you must hunt him again.'

They sentenced him to death.  He threw himself at the feet of the 
Earl of Lancaster - the old hog - but the old hog was as savage as 
the dog.  He was taken out upon the pleasant road, leading from 
Warwick to Coventry, where the beautiful river Avon, by which, long 
afterwards, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born and now lies buried, 
sparkled in the bright landscape of the beautiful May-day; and 
there they struck off his wretched head, and stained the dust with 
his blood.

When the King heard of this black deed, in his grief and rage he 
denounced relentless war against his Barons, and both sides were in 
arms for half a year.  But, it then became necessary for them to 
join their forces against Bruce, who had used the time well while 
they were divided, and had now a great power in Scotland.

Intelligence was brought that Bruce was then besieging Stirling 
Castle, and that the Governor had been obliged to pledge himself to 
surrender it, unless he should be relieved before a certain day.  
Hereupon, the King ordered the nobles and their fighting-men to 
meet him at Berwick; but, the nobles cared so little for the King, 
and so neglected the summons, and lost time, that only on the day 
before that appointed for the surrender, did the King find himself 
at Stirling, and even then with a smaller force than he had 
expected.  However, he had, altogether, a hundred thousand men, and 
Bruce had not more than forty thousand; but, Bruce's army was 
strongly posted in three square columns, on the ground lying 
between the Burn or Brook of Bannock and the walls of Stirling 
Castle.

On the very evening, when the King came up, Bruce did a brave act 
that encouraged his men.  He was seen by a certain HENRY DE BOHUN, 
an English Knight, riding about before his army on a little horse, 
with a light battle-axe in his hand, and a crown of gold on his 
head.  This English Knight, who was mounted on a strong war-horse, 
cased in steel, strongly armed, and able (as he thought) to 
overthrow Bruce by crushing him with his mere weight, set spurs to 
his great charger, rode on him, and made a thrust at him with his 
heavy spear.  Bruce parried the thrust, and with one blow of his 
battle-axe split his skull.

The Scottish men did not forget this, next day when the battle 
raged.  RANDOLPH, Bruce's valiant Nephew, rode, with the small body 
of men he commanded, into such a host of the English, all shining 
in polished armour in the sunlight, that they seemed to be 
swallowed up and lost, as if they had plunged into the sea.  But, 
they fought so well, and did such dreadful execution, that the 
English staggered.  Then came Bruce himself upon them, with all the 
rest of his army.  While they were thus hard pressed and amazed, 
there appeared upon the hills what they supposed to be a new 
Scottish army, but what were really only the camp followers, in 
number fifteen thousand:  whom Bruce had taught to show themselves 
at that place and time.  The Earl of Gloucester, commanding the 
English horse, made a last rush to change the fortune of the day; 
but Bruce (like Jack the Giant-killer in the story) had had pits 
dug in the ground, and covered over with turfs and stakes.  Into 
these, as they gave way beneath the weight of the horses, riders 
and horses rolled by hundreds.  The English were completely routed; 
all their treasure, stores, and engines, were taken by the Scottish 
men; so many waggons and other wheeled vehicles were seized, that 
it is related that they would have reached, if they had been drawn 
out in a line, one hundred and eighty miles.  The fortunes of 
Scotland were, for the time, completely changed; and never was a 
battle won, more famous upon Scottish ground, than this great 
battle of BANNOCKBURN.

Plague and famine succeeded in England; and still the powerless 
King and his disdainful Lords were always in contention.  Some of 
the turbulent chiefs of Ireland made proposals to Bruce, to accept 
the rule of that country.  He sent his brother Edward to them, who 
was crowned King of Ireland.  He afterwards went himself to help 
his brother in his Irish wars, but his brother was defeated in the 
end and killed.  Robert Bruce, returning to Scotland, still 
increased his strength there.

As the King's ruin had begun in a favourite, so it seemed likely to 
end in one.  He was too poor a creature to rely at all upon 
himself; and his new favourite was one HUGH LE DESPENSER, the son 
of a gentleman of ancient family.  Hugh was handsome and brave, but 
he was the favourite of a weak King, whom no man cared a rush for, 
and that was a dangerous place to hold.  The Nobles leagued against 
him, because the King liked him; and they lay in wait, both for his 
ruin and his father's.  Now, the King had married him to the 
daughter of the late Earl of Gloucester, and had given both him and 
his father great possessions in Wales.  In their endeavours to 
extend these, they gave violent offence to an angry Welsh 
gentleman, named JOHN DE MOWBRAY, and to divers other angry Welsh 
gentlemen, who resorted to arms, took their castles, and seized 
their estates.  The Earl of Lancaster had first placed the 
favourite (who was a poor relation of his own) at Court, and he 
considered his own dignity offended by the preference he received 
and the honours he acquired; so he, and the Barons who were his 
friends, joined the Welshmen, marched on London, and sent a message 
to the King demanding to have the favourite and his father 
banished.  At first, the King unaccountably took it into his head 
to be spirited, and to send them a bold reply; but when they 
quartered themselves around Holborn and Clerkenwell, and went down, 
armed, to the Parliament at Westminster, he gave way, and complied 
with their demands.

His turn of triumph came sooner than he expected.  It arose out of 
an accidental circumstance.  The beautiful Queen happening to be 
travelling, came one night to one of the royal castles, and 
demanded to be lodged and entertained there until morning.  The 
governor of this castle, who was one of the enraged lords, was 
away, and in his absence, his wife refused admission to the Queen; 
a scuffle took place among the common men on either side, and some 
of the royal attendants were killed.  The people, who cared nothing 
for the King, were very angry that their beautiful Queen should be 
thus rudely treated in her own dominions; and the King, taking 
advantage of this feeling, besieged the castle, took it, and then 
called the two Despensers home.  Upon this, the confederate lords 
and the Welshmen went over to Bruce.  The King encountered them at 
Boroughbridge, gained the victory, and took a number of 
distinguished prisoners; among them, the Earl of Lancaster, now an 
old man, upon whose destruction he was resolved.  This Earl was 
taken to his own castle of Pontefract, and there tried and found 
guilty by an unfair court appointed for the purpose; he was not 
even allowed to speak in his own defence.  He was insulted, pelted, 
mounted on a starved pony without saddle or bridle, carried out, 
and beheaded.  Eight-and-twenty knights were hanged, drawn, and 
quartered.  When the King had despatched this bloody work, and had 
made a fresh and a long truce with Bruce, he took the Despensers 
into greater favour than ever, and made the father Earl of 
Winchester.

One prisoner, and an important one, who was taken at Boroughbridge, 
made his escape, however, and turned the tide against the King.  
This was ROGER MORTIMER, always resolutely opposed to him, who was 
sentenced to death, and placed for safe custody in the Tower of 
London.  He treated his guards to a quantity of wine into which he 
had put a sleeping potion; and, when they were insensible, broke 
out of his dungeon, got into a kitchen, climbed up the chimney, let 
himself down from the roof of the building with a rope-ladder, 
passed the sentries, got down to the river, and made away in a boat 
to where servants and horses were waiting for him.  He finally 
escaped to France, where CHARLES LE BEL, the brother of the 
beautiful Queen, was King.  Charles sought to quarrel with the King 
of England, on pretence of his not having come to do him homage at 
his coronation.  It was proposed that the beautiful Queen should go 
over to arrange the dispute; she went, and wrote home to the King, 
that as he was sick and could not come to France himself, perhaps 
it would be better to send over the young Prince, their son, who 
was only twelve years old, who could do homage to her brother in 
his stead, and in whose company she would immediately return.  The 
King sent him:  but, both he and the Queen remained at the French 
Court, and Roger Mortimer became the Queen's lover.

When the King wrote, again and again, to the Queen to come home, 
she did not reply that she despised him too much to live with him 
any more (which was the truth), but said she was afraid of the two 
Despensers.  In short, her design was to overthrow the favourites' 
power, and the King's power, such as it was, and invade England.  
Having obtained a French force of two thousand men, and being 
joined by all the English exiles then in France, she landed, within 
a year, at Orewell, in Suffolk, where she was immediately joined by 
the Earls of Kent and Norfolk, the King's two brothers; by other 
powerful noblemen; and lastly, by the first English general who was 
despatched to check her:  who went over to her with all his men.  
The people of London, receiving these tidings, would do nothing for 
the King, but broke open the Tower, let out all his prisoners, and 
threw up their caps and hurrahed for the beautiful Queen.

The King, with his two favourites, fled to Bristol, where he left 
old Despenser in charge of the town and castle, while he went on 
with the son to Wales.  The Bristol men being opposed to the King, 
and it being impossible to hold the town with enemies everywhere 
within the walls, Despenser yielded it up on the third day, and was 
instantly brought to trial for having traitorously influenced what 
was called 'the King's mind' - though I doubt if the King ever had 
any.  He was a venerable old man, upwards of ninety years of age, 
but his age gained no respect or mercy.  He was hanged, torn open 
while he was yet alive, cut up into pieces, and thrown to the dogs.  
His son was soon taken, tried at Hereford before the same judge on 
a long series of foolish charges, found guilty, and hanged upon a 
gallows fifty feet high, with a chaplet of nettles round his head.  
His poor old father and he were innocent enough of any worse crimes 
than the crime of having been friends of a King, on whom, as a mere 
man, they would never have deigned to cast a favourable look.  It 
is a bad crime, I know, and leads to worse; but, many lords and 
gentlemen - I even think some ladies, too, if I recollect right - 
have committed it in England, who have neither been given to the 
dogs, nor hanged up fifty feet high.

The wretched King was running here and there, all this time, and 
never getting anywhere in particular, until he gave himself up, and 
was taken off to Kenilworth Castle.  When he was safely lodged 
there, the Queen went to London and met the Parliament.  And the 
Bishop of Hereford, who was the most skilful of her friends, said, 
What was to be done now?  Here was an imbecile, indolent, miserable 
King upon the throne; wouldn't it be better to take him off, and 
put his son there instead?  I don't know whether the Queen really 
pitied him at this pass, but she began to cry; so, the Bishop said, 
Well, my Lords and Gentlemen, what do you think, upon the whole, of 
sending down to Kenilworth, and seeing if His Majesty (God bless 
him, and forbid we should depose him!) won't resign?

My Lords and Gentlemen thought it a good notion, so a deputation of 
them went down to Kenilworth; and there the King came into the 
great hall of the Castle, commonly dressed in a poor black gown; 
and when he saw a certain bishop among them, fell down, poor 
feeble-headed man, and made a wretched spectacle of himself.  
Somebody lifted him up, and then SIR WILLIAM TRUSSEL, the Speaker 
of the House of Commons, almost frightened him to death by making 
him a tremendous speech to the effect that he was no longer a King, 
and that everybody renounced allegiance to him.  After which, SIR 
THOMAS BLOUNT, the Steward of the Household, nearly finished him, 
by coming forward and breaking his white wand - which was a 
ceremony only performed at a King's death.  Being asked in this 
pressing manner what he thought of resigning, the King said he 
thought it was the best thing he could do.  So, he did it, and they 
proclaimed his son next day.

I wish I could close his history by saying that he lived a harmless 
life in the Castle and the Castle gardens at Kenilworth, many years 
- that he had a favourite, and plenty to eat and drink - and, 
having that, wanted nothing.  But he was shamefully humiliated.  He 
was outraged, and slighted, and had dirty water from ditches given 
him to shave with, and wept and said he would have clean warm 
water, and was altogether very miserable.  He was moved from this 
castle to that castle, and from that castle to the other castle, 
because this lord or that lord, or the other lord, was too kind to 
him:  until at last he came to Berkeley Castle, near the River 
Severn, where (the Lord Berkeley being then ill and absent) he fell 
into the hands of two black ruffians, called THOMAS GOURNAY and 
WILLIAM OGLE.

One night - it was the night of September the twenty-first, one 
thousand three hundred and twenty-seven - dreadful screams were 
heard, by the startled people in the neighbouring town, ringing 
through the thick walls of the Castle, and the dark, deep night; 
and they said, as they were thus horribly awakened from their 
sleep, 'May Heaven be merciful to the King; for those cries forbode 
that no good is being done to him in his dismal prison!'  Next 
morning he was dead - not bruised, or stabbed, or marked upon the 
body, but much distorted in the face; and it was whispered 
afterwards, that those two villains, Gournay and Ogle, had burnt up 
his inside with a red-hot iron.

If you ever come near Gloucester, and see the centre tower of its 
beautiful Cathedral, with its four rich pinnacles, rising lightly 
in the air; you may remember that the wretched Edward the Second 
was buried in the old abbey of that ancient city, at forty-three 
years old, after being for nineteen years and a half a perfectly 
incapable King.



CHAPTER XVIII - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE THIRD



ROGER MORTIMER, the Queen's lover (who escaped to France in the 
last chapter), was far from profiting by the examples he had had of 
the fate of favourites.  Having, through the Queen's influence, 
come into possession of the estates of the two Despensers, he 
became extremely proud and ambitious, and sought to be the real 
ruler of England.  The young King, who was crowned at fourteen 
years of age with all the usual solemnities, resolved not to bear 
this, and soon pursued Mortimer to his ruin.

The people themselves were not fond of Mortimer - first, because he 
was a Royal favourite; secondly, because he was supposed to have 
helped to make a peace with Scotland which now took place, and in 
virtue of which the young King's sister Joan, only seven years old, 
was promised in marriage to David, the son and heir of Robert 
Bruce, who was only five years old.  The nobles hated Mortimer 
because of his pride, riches, and power.  They went so far as to 
take up arms against him; but were obliged to submit.  The Earl of 
Kent, one of those who did so, but who afterwards went over to 
Mortimer and the Queen, was made an example of in the following 
cruel manner:

He seems to have been anything but a wise old earl; and he was 
persuaded by the agents of the favourite and the Queen, that poor 
King Edward the Second was not really dead; and thus was betrayed 
into writing letters favouring his rightful claim to the throne.  
This was made out to be high treason, and he was tried, found 
guilty, and sentenced to be executed.  They took the poor old lord 
outside the town of Winchester, and there kept him waiting some 
three or four hours until they could find somebody to cut off his 
head.  At last, a convict said he would do it, if the government 
would pardon him in return; and they gave him the pardon; and at 
one blow he put the Earl of Kent out of his last suspense.

While the Queen was in France, she had found a lovely and good 
young lady, named Philippa, who she thought would make an excellent 
wife for her son.  The young King married this lady, soon after he 
came to the throne; and her first child, Edward, Prince of Wales, 
afterwards became celebrated, as we shall presently see, under the 
famous title of EDWARD THE BLACK PRINCE.

The young King, thinking the time ripe for the downfall of 
Mortimer, took counsel with Lord Montacute how he should proceed.  
A Parliament was going to be held at Nottingham, and that lord 
recommended that the favourite should be seized by night in 
Nottingham Castle, where he was sure to be.  Now, this, like many 
other things, was more easily said than done; because, to guard 
against treachery, the great gates of the Castle were locked every 
night, and the great keys were carried up-stairs to the Queen, who 
laid them under her own pillow.  But the Castle had a governor, and 
the governor being Lord Montacute's friend, confided to him how he 
knew of a secret passage underground, hidden from observation by 
the weeds and brambles with which it was overgrown; and how, 
through that passage, the conspirators might enter in the dead of 
the night, and go straight to Mortimer's room.  Accordingly, upon a 
certain dark night, at midnight, they made their way through this 
dismal place:  startling the rats, and frightening the owls and 
bats:  and came safely to the bottom of the main tower of the 
Castle, where the King met them, and took them up a profoundly-dark 
staircase in a deep silence.  They soon heard the voice of Mortimer 
in council with some friends; and bursting into the room with a 
sudden noise, took him prisoner.  The Queen cried out from her bed-
chamber, 'Oh, my sweet son, my dear son, spare my gentle Mortimer!'  
They carried him off, however; and, before the next Parliament, 
accused him of having made differences between the young King and 
his mother, and of having brought about the death of the Earl of 
Kent, and even of the late King; for, as you know by this time, 
when they wanted to get rid of a man in those old days, they were 
not very particular of what they accused him.  Mortimer was found 
guilty of all this, and was sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn.  The 
King shut his mother up in genteel confinement, where she passed 
the rest of her life; and now he became King in earnest.

The first effort he made was to conquer Scotland.  The English 
lords who had lands in Scotland, finding that their rights were not 
respected under the late peace, made war on their own account:  
choosing for their general, Edward, the son of John Baliol, who 
made such a vigorous fight, that in less than two months he won the 
whole Scottish Kingdom.  He was joined, when thus triumphant, by 
the King and Parliament; and he and the King in person besieged the 
Scottish forces in Berwick.  The whole Scottish army coming to the 
assistance of their countrymen, such a furious battle ensued, that 
thirty thousand men are said to have been killed in it.  Baliol was 
then crowned King of Scotland, doing homage to the King of England; 
but little came of his successes after all, for the Scottish men 
rose against him, within no very long time, and David Bruce came 
back within ten years and took his kingdom.

France was a far richer country than Scotland, and the King had a 
much greater mind to conquer it.  So, he let Scotland alone, and 
pretended that he had a claim to the French throne in right of his 
mother.  He had, in reality, no claim at all; but that mattered 
little in those times.  He brought over to his cause many little 
princes and sovereigns, and even courted the alliance of the people 
of Flanders - a busy, working community, who had very small respect 
for kings, and whose head man was a brewer.  With such forces as he 
raised by these means, Edward invaded France; but he did little by 
that, except run into debt in carrying on the war to the extent of 
three hundred thousand pounds.  The next year he did better; 
gaining a great sea-fight in the harbour of Sluys.  This success, 
however, was very shortlived, for the Flemings took fright at the 
siege of Saint Omer and ran away, leaving their weapons and baggage 
behind them.  Philip, the French King, coming up with his army, and 
Edward being very anxious to decide the war, proposed to settle the 
difference by single combat with him, or by a fight of one hundred 
knights on each side.  The French King said, he thanked him; but 
being very well as he was, he would rather not.  So, after some 
skirmishing and talking, a short peace was made.

It was soon broken by King Edward's favouring the cause of John, 
Earl of Montford; a French nobleman, who asserted a claim of his 
own against the French King, and offered to do homage to England 
for the Crown of France, if he could obtain it through England's 
help.  This French lord, himself, was soon defeated by the French 
King's son, and shut up in a tower in Paris; but his wife, a 
courageous and beautiful woman, who is said to have had the courage 
of a man, and the heart of a lion, assembled the people of 
Brittany, where she then was; and, showing them her infant son, 
made many pathetic entreaties to them not to desert her and their 
young Lord.  They took fire at this appeal, and rallied round her 
in the strong castle of Hennebon.  Here she was not only besieged 
without by the French under Charles de Blois, but was endangered 
within by a dreary old bishop, who was always representing to the 
people what horrors they must undergo if they were faithful - first 
from famine, and afterwards from fire and sword.  But this noble 
lady, whose heart never failed her, encouraged her soldiers by her 
own example; went from post to post like a great general; even 
mounted on horseback fully armed, and, issuing from the castle by a 
by-path, fell upon the French camp, set fire to the tents, and 
threw the whole force into disorder.  This done, she got safely 
back to Hennebon again, and was received with loud shouts of joy by 
the defenders of the castle, who had given her up for lost.  As 
they were now very short of provisions, however, and as they could 
not dine off enthusiasm, and as the old bishop was always saying, 
'I told you what it would come to!' they began to lose heart, and 
to talk of yielding the castle up.  The brave Countess retiring to 
an upper room and looking with great grief out to sea, where she 
expected relief from England, saw, at this very time, the English 
ships in the distance, and was relieved and rescued!  Sir Walter 
Manning, the English commander, so admired her courage, that, being 
come into the castle with the English knights, and having made a 
feast there, he assaulted the French by way of dessert, and beat 
them off triumphantly.  Then he and the knights came back to the 
castle with great joy; and the Countess who had watched them from a 
high tower, thanked them with all her heart, and kissed them every 
one.

This noble lady distinguished herself afterwards in a sea-fight 
with the French off Guernsey, when she was on her way to England to 
ask for more troops.  Her great spirit roused another lady, the 
wife of another French lord (whom the French King very barbarously 
murdered), to distinguish herself scarcely less.  The time was fast 
coming, however, when Edward, Prince of Wales, was to be the great 
star of this French and English war.

It was in the month of July, in the year one thousand three hundred 
and forty-six, when the King embarked at Southampton for France, 
with an army of about thirty thousand men in all, attended by the 
Prince of Wales and by several of the chief nobles.  He landed at 
La Hogue in Normandy; and, burning and destroying as he went, 
according to custom, advanced up the left bank of the River Seine, 
and fired the small towns even close to Paris; but, being watched 
from the right bank of the river by the French King and all his 
army, it came to this at last, that Edward found himself, on 
Saturday the twenty-sixth of August, one thousand three hundred and 
forty-six, on a rising ground behind the little French village of 
Crecy, face to face with the French King's force.  And, although 
the French King had an enormous army - in number more than eight 
times his - he there resolved to beat him or be beaten.

The young Prince, assisted by the Earl of Oxford and the Earl of 
Warwick, led the first division of the English army; two other 
great Earls led the second; and the King, the third.  When the 
morning dawned, the King received the sacrament, and heard prayers, 
and then, mounted on horseback with a white wand in his hand, rode 
from company to company, and rank to rank, cheering and encouraging 
both officers and men.  Then the whole army breakfasted, each man 
sitting on the ground where he had stood; and then they remained 
quietly on the ground with their weapons ready.

Up came the French King with all his great force.  It was dark and 
angry weather; there was an eclipse of the sun; there was a 
thunder-storm, accompanied with tremendous rain; the frightened 
birds flew screaming above the soldiers' heads.  A certain captain 
in the French army advised the French King, who was by no means 
cheerful, not to begin the battle until the morrow.  The King, 
taking this advice, gave the word to halt.  But, those behind not 
understanding it, or desiring to be foremost with the rest, came 
pressing on.  The roads for a great distance were covered with this 
immense army, and with the common people from the villages, who 
were flourishing their rude weapons, and making a great noise.  
Owing to these circumstances, the French army advanced in the 
greatest confusion; every French lord doing what he liked with his 
own men, and putting out the men of every other French lord.

Now, their King relied strongly upon a great body of cross-bowmen 
from Genoa; and these he ordered to the front to begin the battle, 
on finding that he could not stop it.  They shouted once, they 
shouted twice, they shouted three times, to alarm the English 
archers; but, the English would have heard them shout three 
thousand times and would have never moved.  At last the cross-
bowmen went forward a little, and began to discharge their bolts; 
upon which, the English let fly such a hail of arrows, that the 
Genoese speedily made off - for their cross-bows, besides being 
heavy to carry, required to be wound up with a handle, and 
consequently took time to re-load; the English, on the other hand, 
could discharge their arrows almost as fast as the arrows could 
fly.

When the French King saw the Genoese turning, he cried out to his 
men to kill those scoundrels, who were doing harm instead of 
service.  This increased the confusion.  Meanwhile the English 
archers, continuing to shoot as fast as ever, shot down great 
numbers of the French soldiers and knights; whom certain sly 
Cornish-men and Welshmen, from the English army, creeping along the 
ground, despatched with great knives.

The Prince and his division were at this time so hard-pressed, that 
the Earl of Warwick sent a message to the King, who was overlooking 
the battle from a windmill, beseeching him to send more aid.

'Is my son killed?' said the King.

'No, sire, please God,' returned the messenger.

'Is he wounded?' said the King.

'No, sire.'

'Is he thrown to the ground?' said the King.

'No, sire, not so; but, he is very hard-pressed.'

'Then,' said the King, 'go back to those who sent you, and tell 
them I shall send no aid; because I set my heart upon my son 
proving himself this day a brave knight, and because I am resolved, 
please God, that the honour of a great victory shall be his!'

These bold words, being reported to the Prince and his division, so 
raised their spirits, that they fought better than ever.  The King 
of France charged gallantly with his men many times; but it was of 
no use.  Night closing in, his horse was killed under him by an 
English arrow, and the knights and nobles who had clustered thick 
about him early in the day, were now completely scattered.  At 
last, some of his few remaining followers led him off the field by 
force since he would not retire of himself, and they journeyed away 
to Amiens.  The victorious English, lighting their watch-fires, 
made merry on the field, and the King, riding to meet his gallant 
son, took him in his arms, kissed him, and told him that he had 
acted nobly, and proved himself worthy of the day and of the crown.  
While it was yet night, King Edward was hardly aware of the great 
victory he had gained; but, next day, it was discovered that eleven 
princes, twelve hundred knights, and thirty thousand common men lay 
dead upon the French side.  Among these was the King of Bohemia, an 
old blind man; who, having been told that his son was wounded in 
the battle, and that no force could stand against the Black Prince, 
called to him two knights, put himself on horse-back between them, 
fastened the three bridles together, and dashed in among the 
English, where he was presently slain.  He bore as his crest three 
white ostrich feathers, with the motto ICH DIEN, signifying in 
English 'I serve.'  This crest and motto were taken by the Prince 
of Wales in remembrance of that famous day, and have been borne by 
the Prince of Wales ever since.

Five days after this great battle, the King laid siege to Calais.  
This siege - ever afterwards memorable - lasted nearly a year.  In 
order to starve the inhabitants out, King Edward built so many 
wooden houses for the lodgings of his troops, that it is said their 
quarters looked like a second Calais suddenly sprung around the 
first.  Early in the siege, the governor of the town drove out what 
he called the useless mouths, to the number of seventeen hundred 
persons, men and women, young and old.  King Edward allowed them to 
pass through his lines, and even fed them, and dismissed them with 
money; but, later in the siege, he was not so merciful - five 
hundred more, who were afterwards driven out, dying of starvation 
and misery.  The garrison were so hard-pressed at last, that they 
sent a letter to King Philip, telling him that they had eaten all 
the horses, all the dogs, and all the rats and mice that could be 
found in the place; and, that if he did not relieve them, they must 
either surrender to the English, or eat one another.  Philip made 
one effort to give them relief; but they were so hemmed in by the 
English power, that he could not succeed, and was fain to leave the 
place.  Upon this they hoisted the English flag, and surrendered to 
King Edward.  'Tell your general,' said he to the humble messengers 
who came out of the town, 'that I require to have sent here, six of 
the most distinguished citizens, bare-legged, and in their shirts, 
with ropes about their necks; and let those six men bring with them 
the keys of the castle and the town.'

When the Governor of Calais related this to the people in the 
Market-place, there was great weeping and distress; in the midst of 
which, one worthy citizen, named Eustace de Saint Pierre, rose up 
and said, that if the six men required were not sacrificed, the 
whole population would be; therefore, he offered himself as the 
first.  Encouraged by this bright example, five other worthy 
citizens rose up one after another, and offered themselves to save 
the rest.  The Governor, who was too badly wounded to be able to 
walk, mounted a poor old horse that had not been eaten, and 
conducted these good men to the gate, while all the people cried 
and mourned.

Edward received them wrathfully, and ordered the heads of the whole 
six to be struck off.  However, the good Queen fell upon her knees, 
and besought the King to give them up to her.  The King replied, 'I 
wish you had been somewhere else; but I cannot refuse you.'  So she 
had them properly dressed, made a feast for them, and sent them 
back with a handsome present, to the great rejoicing of the whole 
camp.  I hope the people of Calais loved the daughter to whom she 
gave birth soon afterwards, for her gentle mother's sake.

Now came that terrible disease, the Plague, into Europe, hurrying 
from the heart of China; and killed the wretched people - 
especially the poor - in such enormous numbers, that one-half of 
the inhabitants of England are related to have died of it.  It 
killed the cattle, in great numbers, too; and so few working men 
remained alive, that there were not enough left to till the ground.

After eight years of differing and quarrelling, the Prince of Wales 
again invaded France with an army of sixty thousand men.  He went 
through the south of the country, burning and plundering 
wheresoever he went; while his father, who had still the Scottish 
war upon his hands, did the like in Scotland, but was harassed and 
worried in his retreat from that country by the Scottish men, who 
repaid his cruelties with interest.

The French King, Philip, was now dead, and was succeeded by his son 
John.  The Black Prince, called by that name from the colour of the 
armour he wore to set off his fair complexion, continuing to burn 
and destroy in France, roused John into determined opposition; and 
so cruel had the Black Prince been in his campaign, and so severely 
had the French peasants suffered, that he could not find one who, 
for love, or money, or the fear of death, would tell him what the 
French King was doing, or where he was.  Thus it happened that he 
came upon the French King's forces, all of a sudden, near the town 
of Poitiers, and found that the whole neighbouring country was 
occupied by a vast French army.  'God help us!' said the Black 
Prince, 'we must make the best of it.'

So, on a Sunday morning, the eighteenth of September, the Prince 
whose army was now reduced to ten thousand men in all - prepared to 
give battle to the French King, who had sixty thousand horse alone.  
While he was so engaged, there came riding from the French camp, a 
Cardinal, who had persuaded John to let him offer terms, and try to 
save the shedding of Christian blood.  'Save my honour,' said the 
Prince to this good priest, 'and save the honour of my army, and I 
will make any reasonable terms.'  He offered to give up all the 
towns, castles, and prisoners, he had taken, and to swear to make 
no war in France for seven years; but, as John would hear of 
nothing but his surrender, with a hundred of his chief knights, the 
treaty was broken off, and the Prince said quietly - 'God defend 
the right; we shall fight to-morrow.'

Therefore, on the Monday morning, at break of day, the two armies 
prepared for battle.  The English were posted in a strong place, 
which could only be approached by one narrow lane, skirted by 
hedges on both sides.  The French attacked them by this lane; but 
were so galled and slain by English arrows from behind the hedges, 
that they were forced to retreat.  Then went six hundred English 
bowmen round about, and, coming upon the rear of the French army, 
rained arrows on them thick and fast.  The French knights, thrown 
into confusion, quitted their banners and dispersed in all 
directions.  Said Sir John Chandos to the Prince, 'Ride forward, 
noble Prince, and the day is yours.  The King of France is so 
valiant a gentleman, that I know he will never fly, and may be 
taken prisoner.'  Said the Prince to this, 'Advance, English 
banners, in the name of God and St. George!' and on they pressed 
until they came up with the French King, fighting fiercely with his 
battle-axe, and, when all his nobles had forsaken him, attended 
faithfully to the last by his youngest son Philip, only sixteen 
years of age.  Father and son fought well, and the King had already 
two wounds in his face, and had been beaten down, when he at last 
delivered himself to a banished French knight, and gave him his 
right-hand glove in token that he had done so.

The Black Prince was generous as well as brave, and he invited his 
royal prisoner to supper in his tent, and waited upon him at table, 
and, when they afterwards rode into London in a gorgeous 
procession, mounted the French King on a fine cream-coloured horse, 
and rode at his side on a little pony.  This was all very kind, but 
I think it was, perhaps, a little theatrical too, and has been made 
more meritorious than it deserved to be; especially as I am 
inclined to think that the greatest kindness to the King of France 
would have been not to have shown him to the people at all.  
However, it must be said, for these acts of politeness, that, in 
course of time, they did much to soften the horrors of war and the 
passions of conquerors.  It was a long, long time before the common 
soldiers began to have the benefit of such courtly deeds; but they 
did at last; and thus it is possible that a poor soldier who asked 
for quarter at the battle of Waterloo, or any other such great 
fight, may have owed his life indirectly to Edward the Black 
Prince.

At this time there stood in the Strand, in London, a palace called 
the Savoy, which was given up to the captive King of France and his 
son for their residence.  As the King of Scotland had now been King 
Edward's captive for eleven years too, his success was, at this 
time, tolerably complete.  The Scottish business was settled by the 
prisoner being released under the title of Sir David, King of 
Scotland, and by his engaging to pay a large ransom.  The state of 
France encouraged England to propose harder terms to that country, 
where the people rose against the unspeakable cruelty and barbarity 
of its nobles; where the nobles rose in turn against the people; 
where the most frightful outrages were committed on all sides; and 
where the insurrection of the peasants, called the insurrection of 
the Jacquerie, from Jacques, a common Christian name among the 
country people of France, awakened terrors and hatreds that have 
scarcely yet passed away.  A treaty called the Great Peace, was at 
last signed, under which King Edward agreed to give up the greater 
part of his conquests, and King John to pay, within six years, a 
ransom of three million crowns of gold.  He was so beset by his own 
nobles and courtiers for having yielded to these conditions - 
though they could help him to no better - that he came back of his 
own will to his old palace-prison of the Savoy, and there died.

There was a Sovereign of Castile at that time, called PEDRO THE 
CRUEL, who deserved the name remarkably well:  having committed, 
among other cruelties, a variety of murders.  This amiable monarch 
being driven from his throne for his crimes, went to the province 
of Bordeaux, where the Black Prince - now married to his cousin 
JOAN, a pretty widow - was residing, and besought his help.  The 
Prince, who took to him much more kindly than a prince of such fame 
ought to have taken to such a ruffian, readily listened to his fair 
promises, and agreeing to help him, sent secret orders to some 
troublesome disbanded soldiers of his and his father's, who called 
themselves the Free Companions, and who had been a pest to the 
French people, for some time, to aid this Pedro.  The Prince, 
himself, going into Spain to head the army of relief, soon set 
Pedro on his throne again - where he no sooner found himself, than, 
of course, he behaved like the villain he was, broke his word 
without the least shame, and abandoned all the promises he had made 
to the Black Prince.

Now, it had cost the Prince a good deal of money to pay soldiers to 
support this murderous King; and finding himself, when he came back 
disgusted to Bordeaux, not only in bad health, but deeply in debt, 
he began to tax his French subjects to pay his creditors.  They 
appealed to the French King, CHARLES; war again broke out; and the 
French town of Limoges, which the Prince had greatly benefited, 
went over to the French King.  Upon this he ravaged the province of 
which it was the capital; burnt, and plundered, and killed in the 
old sickening way; and refused mercy to the prisoners, men, women, 
and children taken in the offending town, though he was so ill and 
so much in need of pity himself from Heaven, that he was carried in 
a litter.  He lived to come home and make himself popular with the 
people and Parliament, and he died on Trinity Sunday, the eighth of 
June, one thousand three hundred and seventy-six, at forty-six 
years old.

The whole nation mourned for him as one of the most renowned and 
beloved princes it had ever had; and he was buried with great 
lamentations in Canterbury Cathedral.  Near to the tomb of Edward 
the Confessor, his monument, with his figure, carved in stone, and 
represented in the old black armour, lying on its back, may be seen 
at this day, with an ancient coat of mail, a helmet, and a pair of 
gauntlets hanging from a beam above it, which most people like to 
believe were once worn by the Black Prince.

King Edward did not outlive his renowned son, long.  He was old, 
and one Alice Perrers, a beautiful lady, had contrived to make him 
so fond of her in his old age, that he could refuse her nothing, 
and made himself ridiculous.  She little deserved his love, or - 
what I dare say she valued a great deal more - the jewels of the 
late Queen, which he gave her among other rich presents.  She took 
the very ring from his finger on the morning of the day when he 
died, and left him to be pillaged by his faithless servants.  Only 
one good priest was true to him, and attended him to the last.

Besides being famous for the great victories I have related, the 
reign of King Edward the Third was rendered memorable in better 
ways, by the growth of architecture and the erection of Windsor 
Castle.  In better ways still, by the rising up of WICKLIFFE, 
originally a poor parish priest:  who devoted himself to exposing, 
with wonderful power and success, the ambition and corruption of 
the Pope, and of the whole church of which he was the head.

Some of those Flemings were induced to come to England in this 
reign too, and to settle in Norfolk, where they made better woollen 
cloths than the English had ever had before.  The Order of the 
Garter (a very fine thing in its way, but hardly so important as 
good clothes for the nation) also dates from this period.  The King 
is said to have picked 'up a lady's garter at a ball, and to have 
said, HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE - in English, 'Evil be to him who 
evil thinks of it.'  The courtiers were usually glad to imitate 
what the King said or did, and hence from a slight incident the 
Order of the Garter was instituted, and became a great dignity.  So 
the story goes.



CHAPTER XIX - ENGLAND UNDER RICHARD THE SECOND



RICHARD, son of the Black Prince, a boy eleven years of age, 
succeeded to the Crown under the title of King Richard the Second.  
The whole English nation were ready to admire him for the sake of 
his brave father.  As to the lords and ladies about the Court, they 
declared him to be the most beautiful, the wisest, and the best - 
even of princes - whom the lords and ladies about the Court, 
generally declare to be the most beautiful, the wisest, and the 
best of mankind.  To flatter a poor boy in this base manner was not 
a very likely way to develop whatever good was in him; and it 
brought him to anything but a good or happy end.

The Duke of Lancaster, the young King's uncle - commonly called 
John of Gaunt, from having been born at Ghent, which the common 
people so pronounced - was supposed to have some thoughts of the 
throne himself; but, as he was not popular, and the memory of the 
Black Prince was, he submitted to his nephew.

The war with France being still unsettled, the Government of 
England wanted money to provide for the expenses that might arise 
out of it; accordingly a certain tax, called the Poll-tax, which 
had originated in the last reign, was ordered to be levied on the 
people.  This was a tax on every person in the kingdom, male and 
female, above the age of fourteen, of three groats (or three four-
penny pieces) a year; clergymen were charged more, and only beggars 
were exempt.

I have no need to repeat that the common people of England had long 
been suffering under great oppression.  They were still the mere 
slaves of the lords of the land on which they lived, and were on 
most occasions harshly and unjustly treated.  But, they had begun 
by this time to think very seriously of not bearing quite so much; 
and, probably, were emboldened by that French insurrection I 
mentioned in the last chapter.

The people of Essex rose against the Poll-tax, and being severely 
handled by the government officers, killed some of them.  At this 
very time one of the tax-collectors, going his rounds from house to 
house, at Dartford in Kent came to the cottage of one WAT, a tiler 
by trade, and claimed the tax upon his daughter.  Her mother, who 
was at home, declared that she was under the age of fourteen; upon 
that, the collector (as other collectors had already done in 
different parts of England) behaved in a savage way, and brutally 
insulted Wat Tyler's daughter.  The daughter screamed, the mother 
screamed.  Wat the Tiler, who was at work not far off, ran to the 
spot, and did what any honest father under such provocation might 
have done - struck the collector dead at a blow.

Instantly the people of that town uprose as one man.  They made Wat 
Tyler their leader; they joined with the people of Essex, who were 
in arms under a priest called JACK STRAW; they took out of prison 
another priest named JOHN BALL; and gathering in numbers as they 
went along, advanced, in a great confused army of poor men, to 
Blackheath.  It is said that they wanted to abolish all property, 
and to declare all men equal.  I do not think this very likely; 
because they stopped the travellers on the roads and made them 
swear to be true to King Richard and the people.  Nor were they at 
all disposed to injure those who had done them no harm, merely 
because they were of high station; for, the King's mother, who had 
to pass through their camp at Blackheath, on her way to her young 
son, lying for safety in the Tower of London, had merely to kiss a 
few dirty-faced rough-bearded men who were noisily fond of royalty, 
and so got away in perfect safety.  Next day the whole mass marched 
on to London Bridge.

There was a drawbridge in the middle, which WILLIAM WALWORTH the 
Mayor caused to be raised to prevent their coming into the city; 
but they soon terrified the citizens into lowering it again, and 
spread themselves, with great uproar, over the streets.  They broke 
open the prisons; they burned the papers in Lambeth Palace; they 
destroyed the DUKE OF LANCASTER'S Palace, the Savoy, in the Strand, 
said to be the most beautiful and splendid in England; they set 
fire to the books and documents in the Temple; and made a great 
riot.  Many of these outrages were committed in drunkenness; since 
those citizens, who had well-filled cellars, were only too glad to 
throw them open to save the rest of their property; but even the 
drunken rioters were very careful to steal nothing.  They were so 
angry with one man, who was seen to take a silver cup at the Savoy 
Palace, and put it in his breast, that they drowned him in the 
river, cup and all.

The young King had been taken out to treat with them before they 
committed these excesses; but, he and the people about him were so 
frightened by the riotous shouts, that they got back to the Tower 
in the best way they could.  This made the insurgents bolder; so 
they went on rioting away, striking off the heads of those who did 
not, at a moment's notice, declare for King Richard and the people; 
and killing as many of the unpopular persons whom they supposed to 
be their enemies as they could by any means lay hold of.  In this 
manner they passed one very violent day, and then proclamation was 
made that the King would meet them at Mile-end, and grant their 
requests.

The rioters went to Mile-end to the number of sixty thousand, and 
the King met them there, and to the King the rioters peaceably 
proposed four conditions.  First, that neither they, nor their 
children, nor any coming after them, should be made slaves any 
more.  Secondly, that the rent of land should be fixed at a certain 
price in money, instead of being paid in service.  Thirdly, that 
they should have liberty to buy and sell in all markets and public 
places, like other free men.  Fourthly, that they should be 
pardoned for past offences.  Heaven knows, there was nothing very 
unreasonable in these proposals!  The young King deceitfully 
pretended to think so, and kept thirty clerks up, all night, 
writing out a charter accordingly.

Now, Wat Tyler himself wanted more than this.  He wanted the entire 
abolition of the forest laws.  He was not at Mile-end with the 
rest, but, while that meeting was being held, broke into the Tower 
of London and slew the archbishop and the treasurer, for whose 
heads the people had cried out loudly the day before.  He and his 
men even thrust their swords into the bed of the Princess of Wales 
while the Princess was in it, to make certain that none of their 
enemies were concealed there.

So, Wat and his men still continued armed, and rode about the city.  
Next morning, the King with a small train of some sixty gentlemen - 
among whom was WALWORTH the Mayor - rode into Smithfield, and saw 
Wat and his people at a little distance.  Says Wat to his men, 
'There is the King.  I will go speak with him, and tell him what we 
want.'

Straightway Wat rode up to him, and began to talk.  'King,' says 
Wat, 'dost thou see all my men there?'

'Ah,' says the King.  'Why?'

'Because,' says Wat, 'they are all at my command, and have sworn to 
do whatever I bid them.'

Some declared afterwards that as Wat said this, he laid his hand on 
the King's bridle.  Others declared that he was seen to play with 
his own dagger.  I think, myself, that he just spoke to the King 
like a rough, angry man as he was, and did nothing more.  At any 
rate he was expecting no attack, and preparing for no resistance, 
when Walworth the Mayor did the not very valiant deed of drawing a 
short sword and stabbing him in the throat.  He dropped from his 
horse, and one of the King's people speedily finished him.  So fell 
Wat Tyler.  Fawners and flatterers made a mighty triumph of it, and 
set up a cry which will occasionally find an echo to this day.  But 
Wat was a hard-working man, who had suffered much, and had been 
foully outraged; and it is probable that he was a man of a much 
higher nature and a much braver spirit than any of the parasites 
who exulted then, or have exulted since, over his defeat.

Seeing Wat down, his men immediately bent their bows to avenge his 
fall.  If the young King had not had presence of mind at that 
dangerous moment, both he and the Mayor to boot, might have 
followed Tyler pretty fast.  But the King riding up to the crowd, 
cried out that Tyler was a traitor, and that he would be their 
leader.  They were so taken by surprise, that they set up a great 
shouting, and followed the boy until he was met at Islington by a 
large body of soldiers.

The end of this rising was the then usual end.  As soon as the King 
found himself safe, he unsaid all he had said, and undid all he had 
done; some fifteen hundred of the rioters were tried (mostly in 
Essex) with great rigour, and executed with great cruelty.  Many of 
them were hanged on gibbets, and left there as a terror to the 
country people; and, because their miserable friends took some of 
the bodies down to bury, the King ordered the rest to be chained up 
- which was the beginning of the barbarous custom of hanging in 
chains.  The King's falsehood in this business makes such a pitiful 
figure, that I think Wat Tyler appears in history as beyond 
comparison the truer and more respectable man of the two.

Richard was now sixteen years of age, and married Anne of Bohemia, 
an excellent princess, who was called 'the good Queen Anne.'  She 
deserved a better husband; for the King had been fawned and 
flattered into a treacherous, wasteful, dissolute, bad young man.

There were two Popes at this time (as if one were not enough!), and 
their quarrels involved Europe in a great deal of trouble.  
Scotland was still troublesome too; and at home there was much 
jealousy and distrust, and plotting and counter-plotting, because 
the King feared the ambition of his relations, and particularly of 
his uncle, the Duke of Lancaster, and the duke had his party 
against the King, and the King had his party against the duke.  Nor 
were these home troubles lessened when the duke went to Castile to 
urge his claim to the crown of that kingdom; for then the Duke of 
Gloucester, another of Richard's uncles, opposed him, and 
influenced the Parliament to demand the dismissal of the King's 
favourite ministers.  The King said in reply, that he would not for 
such men dismiss the meanest servant in his kitchen.  But, it had 
begun to signify little what a King said when a Parliament was 
determined; so Richard was at last obliged to give way, and to 
agree to another Government of the kingdom, under a commission of 
fourteen nobles, for a year.  His uncle of Gloucester was at the 
head of this commission, and, in fact, appointed everybody 
composing it.

Having done all this, the King declared as soon as he saw an 
opportunity that he had never meant to do it, and that it was all 
illegal; and he got the judges secretly to sign a declaration to 
that effect.  The secret oozed out directly, and was carried to the 
Duke of Gloucester.  The Duke of Gloucester, at the head of forty 
thousand men, met the King on his entering into London to enforce 
his authority; the King was helpless against him; his favourites 
and ministers were impeached and were mercilessly executed.  Among 
them were two men whom the people regarded with very different 
feelings; one, Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice, who was hated for 
having made what was called 'the bloody circuit' to try the 
rioters; the other, Sir Simon Burley, an honourable knight, who had 
been the dear friend of the Black Prince, and the governor and 
guardian of the King.  For this gentleman's life the good Queen 
even begged of Gloucester on her knees; but Gloucester (with or 
without reason) feared and hated him, and replied, that if she 
valued her husband's crown, she had better beg no more.  All this 
was done under what was called by some the wonderful - and by 
others, with better reason, the merciless - Parliament.

But Gloucester's power was not to last for ever.  He held it for 
only a year longer; in which year the famous battle of Otterbourne, 
sung in the old ballad of Chevy Chase, was fought.  When the year 
was out, the King, turning suddenly to Gloucester, in the midst of 
a great council said, 'Uncle, how old am I?'  'Your highness,' 
returned the Duke, 'is in your twenty-second year.'  'Am I so 
much?' said the King; 'then I will manage my own affairs!  I am 
much obliged to you, my good lords, for your past services, but I 
need them no more.'  He followed this up, by appointing a new 
Chancellor and a new Treasurer, and announced to the people that he 
had resumed the Government.  He held it for eight years without 
opposition.  Through all that time, he kept his determination to 
revenge himself some day upon his uncle Gloucester, in his own 
breast.

At last the good Queen died, and then the King, desiring to take a 
second wife, proposed to his council that he should marry Isabella, 
of France, the daughter of Charles the Sixth:  who, the French 
courtiers said (as the English courtiers had said of Richard), was 
a marvel of beauty and wit, and quite a phenomenon - of seven years 
old.  The council were divided about this marriage, but it took 
place.  It secured peace between England and France for a quarter 
of a century; but it was strongly opposed to the prejudices of the 
English people.  The Duke of Gloucester, who was anxious to take 
the occasion of making himself popular, declaimed against it 
loudly, and this at length decided the King to execute the 
vengeance he had been nursing so long.

He went with a gay company to the Duke of Gloucester's house, 
Pleshey Castle, in Essex, where the Duke, suspecting nothing, came 
out into the court-yard to receive his royal visitor.  While the 
King conversed in a friendly manner with the Duchess, the Duke was 
quietly seized, hurried away, shipped for Calais, and lodged in the 
castle there.  His friends, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, were 
taken in the same treacherous manner, and confined to their 
castles.  A few days after, at Nottingham, they were impeached of 
high treason.  The Earl of Arundel was condemned and beheaded, and 
the Earl of Warwick was banished.  Then, a writ was sent by a 
messenger to the Governor of Calais, requiring him to send the Duke 
of Gloucester over to be tried.  In three days he returned an 
answer that he could not do that, because the Duke of Gloucester 
had died in prison.  The Duke was declared a traitor, his property 
was confiscated to the King, a real or pretended confession he had 
made in prison to one of the Justices of the Common Pleas was 
produced against him, and there was an end of the matter.  How the 
unfortunate duke died, very few cared to know.  Whether he really 
died naturally; whether he killed himself; whether, by the King's 
order, he was strangled, or smothered between two beds (as a 
serving-man of the Governor's named Hall, did afterwards declare), 
cannot be discovered.  There is not much doubt that he was killed, 
somehow or other, by his nephew's orders.  Among the most active 
nobles in these proceedings were the King's cousin, Henry 
Bolingbroke, whom the King had made Duke of Hereford to smooth down 
the old family quarrels, and some others:  who had in the family-
plotting times done just such acts themselves as they now condemned 
in the duke.  They seem to have been a corrupt set of men; but such 
men were easily found about the court in such days.

The people murmured at all this, and were still very sore about the 
French marriage.  The nobles saw how little the King cared for law, 
and how crafty he was, and began to be somewhat afraid for 
themselves.  The King's life was a life of continued feasting and 
excess; his retinue, down to the meanest servants, were dressed in 
the most costly manner, and caroused at his tables, it is related, 
to the number of ten thousand persons every day.  He himself, 
surrounded by a body of ten thousand archers, and enriched by a 
duty on wool which the Commons had granted him for life, saw no 
danger of ever being otherwise than powerful and absolute, and was 
as fierce and haughty as a King could be.

He had two of his old enemies left, in the persons of the Dukes of 
Hereford and Norfolk.  Sparing these no more than the others, he 
tampered with the Duke of Hereford until he got him to declare 
before the Council that the Duke of Norfolk had lately held some 
treasonable talk with him, as he was riding near Brentford; and 
that he had told him, among other things, that he could not believe 
the King's oath - which nobody could, I should think.  For this 
treachery he obtained a pardon, and the Duke of Norfolk was 
summoned to appear and defend himself.  As he denied the charge and 
said his accuser was a liar and a traitor, both noblemen, according 
to the manner of those times, were held in custody, and the truth 
was ordered to be decided by wager of battle at Coventry.  This 
wager of battle meant that whosoever won the combat was to be 
considered in the right; which nonsense meant in effect, that no 
strong man could ever be wrong.  A great holiday was made; a great 
crowd assembled, with much parade and show; and the two combatants 
were about to rush at each other with their lances, when the King, 
sitting in a pavilion to see fair, threw down the truncheon he 
carried in his hand, and forbade the battle.  The Duke of Hereford 
was to be banished for ten years, and the Duke of Norfolk was to be 
banished for life.  So said the King.  The Duke of Hereford went to 
France, and went no farther.  The Duke of Norfolk made a pilgrimage 
to the Holy Land, and afterwards died at Venice of a broken heart.

Faster and fiercer, after this, the King went on in his career.  
The Duke of Lancaster, who was the father of the Duke of Hereford, 
died soon after the departure of his son; and, the King, although 
he had solemnly granted to that son leave to inherit his father's 
property, if it should come to him during his banishment, 
immediately seized it all, like a robber.  The judges were so 
afraid of him, that they disgraced themselves by declaring this 
theft to be just and lawful.  His avarice knew no bounds.  He 
outlawed seventeen counties at once, on a frivolous pretence, 
merely to raise money by way of fines for misconduct.  In short, he 
did as many dishonest things as he could; and cared so little for 
the discontent of his subjects - though even the spaniel favourites 
began to whisper to him that there was such a thing as discontent 
afloat - that he took that time, of all others, for leaving England 
and making an expedition against the Irish.

He was scarcely gone, leaving the DUKE OF YORK Regent in his 
absence, when his cousin, Henry of Hereford, came over from France 
to claim the rights of which he had been so monstrously deprived.  
He was immediately joined by the two great Earls of Northumberland 
and Westmoreland; and his uncle, the Regent, finding the King's 
cause unpopular, and the disinclination of the army to act against 
Henry, very strong, withdrew with the Royal forces towards Bristol.  
Henry, at the head of an army, came from Yorkshire (where he had 
landed) to London and followed him.  They joined their forces - how 
they brought that about, is not distinctly understood - and 
proceeded to Bristol Castle, whither three noblemen had taken the 
young Queen.  The castle surrendering, they presently put those 
three noblemen to death.  The Regent then remained there, and Henry 
went on to Chester.

All this time, the boisterous weather had prevented the King from 
receiving intelligence of what had occurred.  At length it was 
conveyed to him in Ireland, and he sent over the EARL OF SALISBURY, 
who, landing at Conway, rallied the Welshmen, and waited for the 
King a whole fortnight; at the end of that time the Welshmen, who 
were perhaps not very warm for him in the beginning, quite cooled 
down and went home.  When the King did land on the coast at last, 
he came with a pretty good power, but his men cared nothing for 
him, and quickly deserted.  Supposing the Welshmen to be still at 
Conway, he disguised himself as a priest, and made for that place 
in company with his two brothers and some few of their adherents.  
But, there were no Welshmen left - only Salisbury and a hundred 
soldiers.  In this distress, the King's two brothers, Exeter and 
Surrey, offered to go to Henry to learn what his intentions were.  
Surrey, who was true to Richard, was put into prison.  Exeter, who 
was false, took the royal badge, which was a hart, off his shield, 
and assumed the rose, the badge of Henry.  After this, it was 
pretty plain to the King what Henry's intentions were, without 
sending any more messengers to ask.

The fallen King, thus deserted - hemmed in on all sides, and 
pressed with hunger - rode here and rode there, and went to this 
castle, and went to that castle, endeavouring to obtain some 
provisions, but could find none.  He rode wretchedly back to 
Conway, and there surrendered himself to the Earl of 
Northumberland, who came from Henry, in reality to take him 
prisoner, but in appearance to offer terms; and whose men were 
hidden not far off.  By this earl he was conducted to the castle of 
Flint, where his cousin Henry met him, and dropped on his knee as 
if he were still respectful to his sovereign.

'Fair cousin of Lancaster,' said the King, 'you are very welcome' 
(very welcome, no doubt; but he would have been more so, in chains 
or without a head).

'My lord,' replied Henry, 'I am come a little before my time; but, 
with your good pleasure, I will show you the reason.  Your people 
complain with some bitterness, that you have ruled them rigorously 
for two-and-twenty years.  Now, if it please God, I will help you 
to govern them better in future.'

'Fair cousin,' replied the abject King, 'since it pleaseth you, it 
pleaseth me mightily.'

After this, the trumpets sounded, and the King was stuck on a 
wretched horse, and carried prisoner to Chester, where he was made 
to issue a proclamation, calling a Parliament.  From Chester he was 
taken on towards London.  At Lichfield he tried to escape by 
getting out of a window and letting himself down into a garden; it 
was all in vain, however, and he was carried on and shut up in the 
Tower, where no one pitied him, and where the whole people, whose 
patience he had quite tired out, reproached him without mercy.  
Before he got there, it is related, that his very dog left him and 
departed from his side to lick the hand of Henry.

The day before the Parliament met, a deputation went to this 
wrecked King, and told him that he had promised the Earl of 
Northumberland at Conway Castle to resign the crown.  He said he 
was quite ready to do it, and signed a paper in which he renounced 
his authority and absolved his people from their allegiance to him.  
He had so little spirit left that he gave his royal ring to his 
triumphant cousin Henry with his own hand, and said, that if he 
could have had leave to appoint a successor, that same Henry was 
the man of all others whom he would have named.  Next day, the 
Parliament assembled in Westminster Hall, where Henry sat at the 
side of the throne, which was empty and covered with a cloth of 
gold.  The paper just signed by the King was read to the multitude 
amid shouts of joy, which were echoed through all the streets; when 
some of the noise had died away, the King was formally deposed.  
Then Henry arose, and, making the sign of the cross on his forehead 
and breast, challenged the realm of England as his right; the 
archbishops of Canterbury and York seated him on the throne.

The multitude shouted again, and the shouts re-echoed throughout 
all the streets.  No one remembered, now, that Richard the Second 
had ever been the most beautiful, the wisest, and the best of 
princes; and he now made living (to my thinking) a far more sorry 
spectacle in the Tower of London, than Wat Tyler had made, lying 
dead, among the hoofs of the royal horses in Smithfield.

The Poll-tax died with Wat.  The Smiths to the King and Royal 
Family, could make no chains in which the King could hang the 
people's recollection of him; so the Poll-tax was never collected.



CHAPTER XX - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE FOURTH, CALLED BOLINGBROKE



DURING the last reign, the preaching of Wickliffe against the pride 
and cunning of the Pope and all his men, had made a great noise in 
England.  Whether the new King wished to be in favour with the 
priests, or whether he hoped, by pretending to be very religious, 
to cheat Heaven itself into the belief that he was not a usurper, I 
don't know.  Both suppositions are likely enough.  It is certain 
that he began his reign by making a strong show against the 
followers of Wickliffe, who were called Lollards, or heretics - 
although his father, John of Gaunt, had been of that way of 
thinking, as he himself had been more than suspected of being.  It 
is no less certain that he first established in England the 
detestable and atrocious custom, brought from abroad, of burning 
those people as a punishment for their opinions.  It was the 
importation into England of one of the practices of what was called 
the Holy Inquisition:  which was the most UNholy and the most 
infamous tribunal that ever disgraced mankind, and made men more 
like demons than followers of Our Saviour.

No real right to the crown, as you know, was in this King.  Edward 
Mortimer, the young Earl of March - who was only eight or nine 
years old, and who was descended from the Duke of Clarence, the 
elder brother of Henry's father - was, by succession, the real heir 
to the throne.  However, the King got his son declared Prince of 
Wales; and, obtaining possession of the young Earl of March and his 
little brother, kept them in confinement (but not severely) in 
Windsor Castle.  He then required the Parliament to decide what was 
to be done with the deposed King, who was quiet enough, and who 
only said that he hoped his cousin Henry would be 'a good lord' to 
him.  The Parliament replied that they would recommend his being 
kept in some secret place where the people could not resort, and 
where his friends could not be admitted to see him.  Henry 
accordingly passed this sentence upon him, and it now began to be 
pretty clear to the nation that Richard the Second would not live 
very long.

It was a noisy Parliament, as it was an unprincipled one, and the 
Lords quarrelled so violently among themselves as to which of them 
had been loyal and which disloyal, and which consistent and which 
inconsistent, that forty gauntlets are said to have been thrown 
upon the floor at one time as challenges to as many battles:  the 
truth being that they were all false and base together, and had 
been, at one time with the old King, and at another time with the 
new one, and seldom true for any length of time to any one.  They 
soon began to plot again.  A conspiracy was formed to invite the 
King to a tournament at Oxford, and then to take him by surprise 
and kill him.  This murderous enterprise, which was agreed upon at 
secret meetings in the house of the Abbot of Westminster, was 
betrayed by the Earl of Rutland - one of the conspirators.  The 
King, instead of going to the tournament or staying at Windsor 
(where the conspirators suddenly went, on finding themselves 
discovered, with the hope of seizing him), retired to London, 
proclaimed them all traitors, and advanced upon them with a great 
force.  They retired into the west of England, proclaiming Richard 
King; but, the people rose against them, and they were all slain.  
Their treason hastened the death of the deposed monarch.  Whether 
he was killed by hired assassins, or whether he was starved to 
death, or whether he refused food on hearing of his brothers being 
killed (who were in that plot), is very doubtful.  He met his death 
somehow; and his body was publicly shown at St. Paul's Cathedral 
with only the lower part of the face uncovered.  I can scarcely 
doubt that he was killed by the King's orders.

The French wife of the miserable Richard was now only ten years 
old; and, when her father, Charles of France, heard of her 
misfortunes and of her lonely condition in England, he went mad:  
as he had several times done before, during the last five or six 
years.  The French Dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon took up the poor 
girl's cause, without caring much about it, but on the chance of 
getting something out of England.  The people of Bordeaux, who had 
a sort of superstitious attachment to the memory of Richard, 
because he was born there, swore by the Lord that he had been the 
best man in all his kingdom - which was going rather far - and 
promised to do great things against the English.  Nevertheless, 
when they came to consider that they, and the whole people of 
France, were ruined by their own nobles, and that the English rule 
was much the better of the two, they cooled down again; and the two 
dukes, although they were very great men, could do nothing without 
them.  Then, began negotiations between France and England for the 
sending home to Paris of the poor little Queen with all her jewels 
and her fortune of two hundred thousand francs in gold.  The King 
was quite willing to restore the young lady, and even the jewels; 
but he said he really could not part with the money.  So, at last 
she was safely deposited at Paris without her fortune, and then the 
Duke of Burgundy (who was cousin to the French King) began to 
quarrel with the Duke of Orleans (who was brother to the French 
King) about the whole matter; and those two dukes made France even 
more wretched than ever.

As the idea of conquering Scotland was still popular at home, the 
King marched to the river Tyne and demanded homage of the King of 
that country.  This being refused, he advanced to Edinburgh, but 
did little there; for, his army being in want of provisions, and 
the Scotch being very careful to hold him in check without giving 
battle, he was obliged to retire.  It is to his immortal honour 
that in this sally he burnt no villages and slaughtered no people, 
but was particularly careful that his army should be merciful and 
harmless.  It was a great example in those ruthless times.

A war among the border people of England and Scotland went on for 
twelve months, and then the Earl of Northumberland, the nobleman 
who had helped Henry to the crown, began to rebel against him - 
probably because nothing that Henry could do for him would satisfy 
his extravagant expectations.  There was a certain Welsh gentleman, 
named OWEN GLENDOWER, who had been a student in one of the Inns of 
Court, and had afterwards been in the service of the late King, 
whose Welsh property was taken from him by a powerful lord related 
to the present King, who was his neighbour.  Appealing for redress, 
and getting none, he took up arms, was made an outlaw, and declared 
himself sovereign of Wales.  He pretended to be a magician; and not 
only were the Welsh people stupid enough to believe him, but, even 
Henry believed him too; for, making three expeditions into Wales, 
and being three times driven back by the wildness of the country, 
the bad weather, and the skill of Glendower, he thought he was 
defeated by the Welshman's magic arts.  However, he took Lord Grey 
and Sir Edmund Mortimer, prisoners, and allowed the relatives of 
Lord Grey to ransom him, but would not extend such favour to Sir 
Edmund Mortimer.  Now, Henry Percy, called HOTSPUR, son of the Earl 
of Northumberland, who was married to Mortimer's sister, is 
supposed to have taken offence at this; and, therefore, in 
conjunction with his father and some others, to have joined Owen 
Glendower, and risen against Henry.  It is by no means clear that 
this was the real cause of the conspiracy; but perhaps it was made 
the pretext.  It was formed, and was very powerful; including 
SCROOP, Archbishop of York, and the EARL OF DOUGLAS, a powerful and 
brave Scottish nobleman.  The King was prompt and active, and the 
two armies met at Shrewsbury.

There were about fourteen thousand men in each.  The old Earl of 
Northumberland being sick, the rebel forces were led by his son.  
The King wore plain armour to deceive the enemy; and four noblemen, 
with the same object, wore the royal arms.  The rebel charge was so 
furious, that every one of those gentlemen was killed, the royal 
standard was beaten down, and the young Prince of Wales was 
severely wounded in the face.  But he was one of the bravest and 
best soldiers that ever lived, and he fought so well, and the 
King's troops were so encouraged by his bold example, that they 
rallied immediately, and cut the enemy's forces all to pieces.  
Hotspur was killed by an arrow in the brain, and the rout was so 
complete that the whole rebellion was struck down by this one blow.  
The Earl of Northumberland surrendered himself soon after hearing 
of the death of his son, and received a pardon for all his 
offences.

There were some lingerings of rebellion yet:  Owen Glendower being 
retired to Wales, and a preposterous story being spread among the 
ignorant people that King Richard was still alive.  How they could 
have believed such nonsense it is difficult to imagine; but they 
certainly did suppose that the Court fool of the late King, who was 
something like him, was he, himself; so that it seemed as if, after 
giving so much trouble to the country in his life, he was still to 
trouble it after his death.  This was not the worst.  The young 
Earl of March and his brother were stolen out of Windsor Castle.  
Being retaken, and being found to have been spirited away by one 
Lady Spencer, she accused her own brother, that Earl of Rutland who 
was in the former conspiracy and was now Duke of York, of being in 
the plot.  For this he was ruined in fortune, though not put to 
death; and then another plot arose among the old Earl of 
Northumberland, some other lords, and that same Scroop, Archbishop 
of York, who was with the rebels before.  These conspirators caused 
a writing to be posted on the church doors, accusing the King of a 
variety of crimes; but, the King being eager and vigilant to oppose 
them, they were all taken, and the Archbishop was executed.  This 
was the first time that a great churchman had been slain by the law 
in England; but the King was resolved that it should be done, and 
done it was.

The next most remarkable event of this time was the seizure, by 
Henry, of the heir to the Scottish throne - James, a boy of nine 
years old.  He had been put aboard-ship by his father, the Scottish 
King Robert, to save him from the designs of his uncle, when, on 
his way to France, he was accidentally taken by some English 
cruisers.  He remained a prisoner in England for nineteen years, 
and became in his prison a student and a famous poet.

With the exception of occasional troubles with the Welsh and with 
the French, the rest of King Henry's reign was quiet enough.  But, 
the King was far from happy, and probably was troubled in his 
conscience by knowing that he had usurped the crown, and had 
occasioned the death of his miserable cousin.  The Prince of Wales, 
though brave and generous, is said to have been wild and 
dissipated, and even to have drawn his sword on GASCOIGNE, the 
Chief Justice of the King's Bench, because he was firm in dealing 
impartially with one of his dissolute companions.  Upon this the 
Chief Justice is said to have ordered him immediately to prison; 
the Prince of Wales is said to have submitted with a good grace; 
and the King is said to have exclaimed, 'Happy is the monarch who 
has so just a judge, and a son so willing to obey the laws.'  This 
is all very doubtful, and so is another story (of which Shakespeare 
has made beautiful use), that the Prince once took the crown out of 
his father's chamber as he was sleeping, and tried it on his own 
head.

The King's health sank more and more, and he became subject to 
violent eruptions on the face and to bad epileptic fits, and his 
spirits sank every day.  At last, as he was praying before the 
shrine of St. Edward at Westminster Abbey, he was seized with a 
terrible fit, and was carried into the Abbot's chamber, where he 
presently died.  It had been foretold that he would die at 
Jerusalem, which certainly is not, and never was, Westminster.  
But, as the Abbot's room had long been called the Jerusalem 
chamber, people said it was all the same thing, and were quite 
satisfied with the prediction.

The King died on the 20th of March, 1413, in the forty-seventh year 
of his age, and the fourteenth of his reign.  He was buried in 
Canterbury Cathedral.  He had been twice married, and had, by his 
first wife, a family of four sons and two daughters.  Considering 
his duplicity before he came to the throne, his unjust seizure of 
it, and above all, his making that monstrous law for the burning of 
what the priests called heretics, he was a reasonably good king, as 
kings went.



CHAPTER XXI - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE FIFTH



FIRST PART


THE Prince of Wales began his reign like a generous and honest man.  
He set the young Earl of March free; he restored their estates and 
their honours to the Percy family, who had lost them by their 
rebellion against his father; he ordered the imbecile and 
unfortunate Richard to be honourably buried among the Kings of 
England; and he dismissed all his wild companions, with assurances 
that they should not want, if they would resolve to be steady, 
faithful, and true.

It is much easier to burn men than to burn their opinions; and 
those of the Lollards were spreading every day.  The Lollards were 
represented by the priests - probably falsely for the most part - 
to entertain treasonable designs against the new King; and Henry, 
suffering himself to be worked upon by these representations, 
sacrificed his friend Sir John Oldcastle, the Lord Cobham, to them, 
after trying in vain to convert him by arguments.  He was declared 
guilty, as the head of the sect, and sentenced to the flames; but 
he escaped from the Tower before the day of execution (postponed 
for fifty days by the King himself), and summoned the Lollards to 
meet him near London on a certain day.  So the priests told the 
King, at least.  I doubt whether there was any conspiracy beyond 
such as was got up by their agents.  On the day appointed, instead 
of five-and-twenty thousand men, under the command of Sir John 
Oldcastle, in the meadows of St. Giles, the King found only eighty 
men, and no Sir John at all.  There was, in another place, an 
addle-headed brewer, who had gold trappings to his horses, and a 
pair of gilt spurs in his breast - expecting to be made a knight 
next day by Sir John, and so to gain the right to wear them - but 
there was no Sir John, nor did anybody give information respecting 
him, though the King offered great rewards for such intelligence.  
Thirty of these unfortunate Lollards were hanged and drawn 
immediately, and were then burnt, gallows and all; and the various 
prisons in and around London were crammed full of others.  Some of 
these unfortunate men made various confessions of treasonable 
designs; but, such confessions were easily got, under torture and 
the fear of fire, and are very little to be trusted.  To finish the 
sad story of Sir John Oldcastle at once, I may mention that he 
escaped into Wales, and remained there safely, for four years.  
When discovered by Lord Powis, it is very doubtful if he would have 
been taken alive - so great was the old soldier's bravery - if a 
miserable old woman had not come behind him and broken his legs 
with a stool.  He was carried to London in a horse-litter, was 
fastened by an iron chain to a gibbet, and so roasted to death.

To make the state of France as plain as I can in a few words, I 
should tell you that the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of Burgundy, 
commonly called 'John without fear,' had had a grand reconciliation 
of their quarrel in the last reign, and had appeared to be quite in 
a heavenly state of mind.  Immediately after which, on a Sunday, in 
the public streets of Paris, the Duke of Orleans was murdered by a 
party of twenty men, set on by the Duke of Burgundy - according to 
his own deliberate confession.  The widow of King Richard had been 
married in France to the eldest son of the Duke of Orleans.  The 
poor mad King was quite powerless to help her, and the Duke of 
Burgundy became the real master of France.  Isabella dying, her 
husband (Duke of Orleans since the death of his father) married the 
daughter of the Count of Armagnac, who, being a much abler man than 
his young son-in-law, headed his party; thence called after him 
Armagnacs.  Thus, France was now in this terrible condition, that 
it had in it the party of the King's son, the Dauphin Louis; the 
party of the Duke of Burgundy, who was the father of the Dauphin's 
ill-used wife; and the party of the Armagnacs; all hating each 
other; all fighting together; all composed of the most depraved 
nobles that the earth has ever known; and all tearing unhappy 
France to pieces.

The late King had watched these dissensions from England, sensible 
(like the French people) that no enemy of France could injure her 
more than her own nobility.  The present King now advanced a claim 
to the French throne.  His demand being, of course, refused, he 
reduced his proposal to a certain large amount of French territory, 
and to demanding the French princess, Catherine, in marriage, with 
a fortune of two millions of golden crowns.  He was offered less 
territory and fewer crowns, and no princess; but he called his 
ambassadors home and prepared for war.  Then, he proposed to take 
the princess with one million of crowns.  The French Court replied 
that he should have the princess with two hundred thousand crowns 
less; he said this would not do (he had never seen the princess in 
his life), and assembled his army at Southampton.  There was a 
short plot at home just at that time, for deposing him, and making 
the Earl of March king; but the conspirators were all speedily 
condemned and executed, and the King embarked for France.

It is dreadful to observe how long a bad example will be followed; 
but, it is encouraging to know that a good example is never thrown 
away.  The King's first act on disembarking at the mouth of the 
river Seine, three miles from Harfleur, was to imitate his father, 
and to proclaim his solemn orders that the lives and property of 
the peaceable inhabitants should be respected on pain of death.  It 
is agreed by French writers, to his lasting renown, that even while 
his soldiers were suffering the greatest distress from want of 
food, these commands were rigidly obeyed.

With an army in all of thirty thousand men, he besieged the town of 
Harfleur both by sea and land for five weeks; at the end of which 
time the town surrendered, and the inhabitants were allowed to 
depart with only fivepence each, and a part of their clothes.  All 
the rest of their possessions was divided amongst the English army.  
But, that army suffered so much, in spite of its successes, from 
disease and privation, that it was already reduced one half.  
Still, the King was determined not to retire until he had struck a 
greater blow.  Therefore, against the advice of all his 
counsellors, he moved on with his little force towards Calais.  
When he came up to the river Somme he was unable to cross, in 
consequence of the fort being fortified; and, as the English moved 
up the left bank of the river looking for a crossing, the French, 
who had broken all the bridges, moved up the right bank, watching 
them, and waiting to attack them when they should try to pass it.  
At last the English found a crossing and got safely over.  The 
French held a council of war at Rouen, resolved to give the English 
battle, and sent heralds to King Henry to know by which road he was 
going.  'By the road that will take me straight to Calais!' said 
the King, and sent them away with a present of a hundred crowns.

The English moved on, until they beheld the French, and then the 
King gave orders to form in line of battle.  The French not coming 
on, the army broke up after remaining in battle array till night, 
and got good rest and refreshment at a neighbouring village.  The 
French were now all lying in another village, through which they 
knew the English must pass.  They were resolved that the English 
should begin the battle.  The English had no means of retreat, if 
their King had any such intention; and so the two armies passed the 
night, close together.

To understand these armies well, you must bear in mind that the 
immense French army had, among its notable persons, almost the 
whole of that wicked nobility, whose debauchery had made France a 
desert; and so besotted were they by pride, and by contempt for the 
common people, that they had scarcely any bowmen (if indeed they 
had any at all) in their whole enormous number:  which, compared 
with the English army, was at least as six to one.  For these proud 
fools had said that the bow was not a fit weapon for knightly 
hands, and that France must be defended by gentlemen only.  We 
shall see, presently, what hand the gentlemen made of it.

Now, on the English side, among the little force, there was a good 
proportion of men who were not gentlemen by any means, but who were 
good stout archers for all that.  Among them, in the morning - 
having slept little at night, while the French were carousing and 
making sure of victory - the King rode, on a grey horse; wearing on 
his head a helmet of shining steel, surmounted by a crown of gold, 
sparkling with precious stones; and bearing over his armour, 
embroidered together, the arms of England and the arms of France.  
The archers looked at the shining helmet and the crown of gold and 
the sparkling jewels, and admired them all; but, what they admired 
most was the King's cheerful face, and his bright blue eye, as he 
told them that, for himself, he had made up his mind to conquer 
there or to die there, and that England should never have a ransom 
to pay for HIM.  There was one brave knight who chanced to say that 
he wished some of the many gallant gentlemen and good soldiers, who 
were then idle at home in England, were there to increase their 
numbers.  But the King told him that, for his part, he did not wish 
for one more man.  'The fewer we have,' said he, 'the greater will 
be the honour we shall win!'  His men, being now all in good heart, 
were refreshed with bread and wine, and heard prayers, and waited 
quietly for the French.  The King waited for the French, because 
they were drawn up thirty deep (the little English force was only 
three deep), on very difficult and heavy ground; and he knew that 
when they moved, there must be confusion among them.

As they did not move, he sent off two parties:- one to lie 
concealed in a wood on the left of the French:  the other, to set 
fire to some houses behind the French after the battle should be 
begun.  This was scarcely done, when three of the proud French 
gentlemen, who were to defend their country without any help from 
the base peasants, came riding out, calling upon the English to 
surrender.  The King warned those gentlemen himself to retire with 
all speed if they cared for their lives, and ordered the English 
banners to advance.  Upon that, Sir Thomas Erpingham, a great 
English general, who commanded the archers, threw his truncheon 
into the air, joyfully, and all the English men, kneeling down upon 
the ground and biting it as if they took possession of the country, 
rose up with a great shout and fell upon the French.

Every archer was furnished with a great stake tipped with iron; and 
his orders were, to thrust this stake into the ground, to discharge 
his arrow, and then to fall back, when the French horsemen came on.  
As the haughty French gentlemen, who were to break the English 
archers and utterly destroy them with their knightly lances, came 
riding up, they were received with such a blinding storm of arrows, 
that they broke and turned.  Horses and men rolled over one 
another, and the confusion was terrific.  Those who rallied and 
charged the archers got among the stakes on slippery and boggy 
ground, and were so bewildered that the English archers - who wore 
no armour, and even took off their leathern coats to be more active 
- cut them to pieces, root and branch.  Only three French horsemen 
got within the stakes, and those were instantly despatched.  All 
this time the dense French army, being in armour, were sinking 
knee-deep into the mire; while the light English archers, half-
naked, were as fresh and active as if they were fighting on a 
marble floor.

But now, the second division of the French coming to the relief of 
the first, closed up in a firm mass; the English, headed by the 
King, attacked them; and the deadliest part of the battle began.  
The King's brother, the Duke of Clarence, was struck down, and 
numbers of the French surrounded him; but, King Henry, standing 
over the body, fought like a lion until they were beaten off.

Presently, came up a band of eighteen French knights, bearing the 
banner of a certain French lord, who had sworn to kill or take the 
English King.  One of them struck him such a blow with a battle-axe 
that he reeled and fell upon his knees; but, his faithful men, 
immediately closing round him, killed every one of those eighteen 
knights, and so that French lord never kept his oath.

The French Duke of Alen‡on, seeing this, made a desperate charge, 
and cut his way close up to the Royal Standard of England.  He beat 
down the Duke of York, who was standing near it; and, when the King 
came to his rescue, struck off a piece of the crown he wore.  But, 
he never struck another blow in this world; for, even as he was in 
the act of saying who he was, and that he surrendered to the King; 
and even as the King stretched out his hand to give him a safe and 
honourable acceptance of the offer; he fell dead, pierced by 
innumerable wounds.

The death of this nobleman decided the battle.  The third division 
of the French army, which had never struck a blow yet, and which 
was, in itself, more than double the whole English power, broke and 
fled.  At this time of the fight, the English, who as yet had made 
no prisoners, began to take them in immense numbers, and were still 
occupied in doing so, or in killing those who would not surrender, 
when a great noise arose in the rear of the French - their flying 
banners were seen to stop - and King Henry, supposing a great 
reinforcement to have arrived, gave orders that all the prisoners 
should be put to death.  As soon, however, as it was found that the 
noise was only occasioned by a body of plundering peasants, the 
terrible massacre was stopped.

Then King Henry called to him the French herald, and asked him to 
whom the victory belonged.

The herald replied, 'To the King of England.'

'WE have not made this havoc and slaughter,' said the King.  'It is 
the wrath of Heaven on the sins of France.  What is the name of 
that castle yonder?'

The herald answered him, 'My lord, it is the castle of Azincourt.'  
Said the King, 'From henceforth this battle shall be known to 
posterity, by the name of the battle of Azincourt.'

Our English historians have made it Agincourt; but, under that 
name, it will ever be famous in English annals.

The loss upon the French side was enormous.  Three Dukes were 
killed, two more were taken prisoners, seven Counts were killed, 
three more were taken prisoners, and ten thousand knights and 
gentlemen were slain upon the field.  The English loss amounted to 
sixteen hundred men, among whom were the Duke of York and the Earl 
of Suffolk.

War is a dreadful thing; and it is appalling to know how the 
English were obliged, next morning, to kill those prisoners 
mortally wounded, who yet writhed in agony upon the ground; how the 
dead upon the French side were stripped by their own countrymen and 
countrywomen, and afterwards buried in great pits; how the dead 
upon the English side were piled up in a great barn, and how their 
bodies and the barn were all burned together.  It is in such 
things, and in many more much too horrible to relate, that the real 
desolation and wickedness of war consist.  Nothing can make war 
otherwise than horrible.  But the dark side of it was little 
thought of and soon forgotten; and it cast no shade of trouble on 
the English people, except on those who had lost friends or 
relations in the fight.  They welcomed their King home with shouts 
of rejoicing, and plunged into the water to bear him ashore on 
their shoulders, and flocked out in crowds to welcome him in every 
town through which he passed, and hung rich carpets and tapestries 
out of the windows, and strewed the streets with flowers, and made 
the fountains run with wine, as the great field of Agincourt had 
run with blood.


SECOND PART


THAT proud and wicked French nobility who dragged their country to 
destruction, and who were every day and every year regarded with 
deeper hatred and detestation in the hearts of the French people, 
learnt nothing, even from the defeat of Agincourt.  So far from 
uniting against the common enemy, they became, among themselves, 
more violent, more bloody, and more false - if that were possible - 
than they had been before.  The Count of Armagnac persuaded the 
French king to plunder of her treasures Queen Isabella of Bavaria, 
and to make her a prisoner.  She, who had hitherto been the bitter 
enemy of the Duke of Burgundy, proposed to join him, in revenge.  
He carried her off to Troyes, where she proclaimed herself Regent 
of France, and made him her lieutenant.  The Armagnac party were at 
that time possessed of Paris; but, one of the gates of the city 
being secretly opened on a certain night to a party of the duke's 
men, they got into Paris, threw into the prisons all the Armagnacs 
upon whom they could lay their hands, and, a few nights afterwards, 
with the aid of a furious mob of sixty thousand people, broke the 
prisons open, and killed them all.  The former Dauphin was now 
dead, and the King's third son bore the title.  Him, in the height 
of this murderous scene, a French knight hurried out of bed, 
wrapped in a sheet, and bore away to Poitiers.  So, when the 
revengeful Isabella and the Duke of Burgundy entered Paris in 
triumph after the slaughter of their enemies, the Dauphin was 
proclaimed at Poitiers as the real Regent.

King Henry had not been idle since his victory of Agincourt, but 
had repulsed a brave attempt of the French to recover Harfleur; had 
gradually conquered a great part of Normandy; and, at this crisis 
of affairs, took the important town of Rouen, after a siege of half 
a year.  This great loss so alarmed the French, that the Duke of 
Burgundy proposed that a meeting to treat of peace should be held 
between the French and the English kings in a plain by the river 
Seine.  On the appointed day, King Henry appeared there, with his 
two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, and a thousand men.  The 
unfortunate French King, being more mad than usual that day, could 
not come; but the Queen came, and with her the Princess Catherine:  
who was a very lovely creature, and who made a real impression on 
King Henry, now that he saw her for the first time.  This was the 
most important circumstance that arose out of the meeting.

As if it were impossible for a French nobleman of that time to be 
true to his word of honour in anything, Henry discovered that the 
Duke of Burgundy was, at that very moment, in secret treaty with 
the Dauphin; and he therefore abandoned the negotiation.

The Duke of Burgundy and the Dauphin, each of whom with the best 
reason distrusted the other as a noble ruffian surrounded by a 
party of noble ruffians, were rather at a loss how to proceed after 
this; but, at length they agreed to meet, on a bridge over the 
river Yonne, where it was arranged that there should be two strong 
gates put up, with an empty space between them; and that the Duke 
of Burgundy should come into that space by one gate, with ten men 
only; and that the Dauphin should come into that space by the other 
gate, also with ten men, and no more.

So far the Dauphin kept his word, but no farther.  When the Duke of 
Burgundy was on his knee before him in the act of speaking, one of 
the Dauphin's noble ruffians cut the said duke down with a small 
axe, and others speedily finished him.

It was in vain for the Dauphin to pretend that this base murder was 
not done with his consent; it was too bad, even for France, and 
caused a general horror.  The duke's heir hastened to make a treaty 
with King Henry, and the French Queen engaged that her husband 
should consent to it, whatever it was.  Henry made peace, on 
condition of receiving the Princess Catherine in marriage, and 
being made Regent of France during the rest of the King's lifetime, 
and succeeding to the French crown at his death.  He was soon 
married to the beautiful Princess, and took her proudly home to 
England, where she was crowned with great honour and glory.

This peace was called the Perpetual Peace; we shall soon see how 
long it lasted.  It gave great satisfaction to the French people, 
although they were so poor and miserable, that, at the time of the 
celebration of the Royal marriage, numbers of them were dying with 
starvation, on the dunghills in the streets of Paris.  There was 
some resistance on the part of the Dauphin in some few parts of 
France, but King Henry beat it all down.

And now, with his great possessions in France secured, and his 
beautiful wife to cheer him, and a son born to give him greater 
happiness, all appeared bright before him.  But, in the fulness of 
his triumph and the height of his power, Death came upon him, and 
his day was done.  When he fell ill at Vincennes, and found that he 
could not recover, he was very calm and quiet, and spoke serenely 
to those who wept around his bed.  His wife and child, he said, he 
left to the loving care of his brother the Duke of Bedford, and his 
other faithful nobles.  He gave them his advice that England should 
establish a friendship with the new Duke of Burgundy, and offer him 
the regency of France; that it should not set free the royal 
princes who had been taken at Agincourt; and that, whatever quarrel 
might arise with France, England should never make peace without 
holding Normandy.  Then, he laid down his head, and asked the 
attendant priests to chant the penitential psalms.  Amid which 
solemn sounds, on the thirty-first of August, one thousand four 
hundred and twenty-two, in only the thirty-fourth year of his age 
and the tenth of his reign, King Henry the Fifth passed away.

Slowly and mournfully they carried his embalmed body in a 
procession of great state to Paris, and thence to Rouen where his 
Queen was:  from whom the sad intelligence of his death was 
concealed until he had been dead some days.  Thence, lying on a bed 
of crimson and gold, with a golden crown upon the head, and a 
golden ball and sceptre lying in the nerveless hands, they carried 
it to Calais, with such a great retinue as seemed to dye the road 
black.  The King of Scotland acted as chief mourner, all the Royal 
Household followed, the knights wore black armour and black plumes 
of feathers, crowds of men bore torches, making the night as light 
as day; and the widowed Princess followed last of all.  At Calais 
there was a fleet of ships to bring the funeral host to Dover.  And 
so, by way of London Bridge, where the service for the dead was 
chanted as it passed along, they brought the body to Westminster 
Abbey, and there buried it with great respect.



CHAPTER XXII - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE SIXTH



PART THE FIRST


IT had been the wish of the late King, that while his infant son 
KING HENRY THE SIXTH, at this time only nine months old, was under 
age, the Duke of Gloucester should be appointed Regent.  The 
English Parliament, however, preferred to appoint a Council of 
Regency, with the Duke of Bedford at its head:  to be represented, 
in his absence only, by the Duke of Gloucester.  The Parliament 
would seem to have been wise in this, for Gloucester soon showed 
himself to be ambitious and troublesome, and, in the gratification 
of his own personal schemes, gave dangerous offence to the Duke of 
Burgundy, which was with difficulty adjusted.

As that duke declined the Regency of France, it was bestowed by the 
poor French King upon the Duke of Bedford.  But, the French King 
dying within two months, the Dauphin instantly asserted his claim 
to the French throne, and was actually crowned under the title of 
CHARLES THE SEVENTH.  The Duke of Bedford, to be a match for him, 
entered into a friendly league with the Dukes of Burgundy and 
Brittany, and gave them his two sisters in marriage.  War with 
France was immediately renewed, and the Perpetual Peace came to an 
untimely end.

In the first campaign, the English, aided by this alliance, were 
speedily successful.  As Scotland, however, had sent the French 
five thousand men, and might send more, or attack the North of 
England while England was busy with France, it was considered that 
it would be a good thing to offer the Scottish King, James, who had 
been so long imprisoned, his liberty, on his paying forty thousand 
pounds for his board and lodging during nineteen years, and 
engaging to forbid his subjects from serving under the flag of 
France.  It is pleasant to know, not only that the amiable captive 
at last regained his freedom upon these terms, but, that he married 
a noble English lady, with whom he had been long in love, and 
became an excellent King.  I am afraid we have met with some Kings 
in this history, and shall meet with some more, who would have been 
very much the better, and would have left the world much happier, 
if they had been imprisoned nineteen years too.

In the second campaign, the English gained a considerable victory 
at Verneuil, in a battle which was chiefly remarkable, otherwise, 
for their resorting to the odd expedient of tying their baggage-
horses together by the heads and tails, and jumbling them up with 
the baggage, so as to convert them into a sort of live 
fortification - which was found useful to the troops, but which I 
should think was not agreeable to the horses.  For three years 
afterwards very little was done, owing to both sides being too poor 
for war, which is a very expensive entertainment; but, a council 
was then held in Paris, in which it was decided to lay siege to the 
town of Orleans, which was a place of great importance to the 
Dauphin's cause.  An English army of ten thousand men was 
despatched on this service, under the command of the Earl of 
Salisbury, a general of fame.  He being unfortunately killed early 
in the siege, the Earl of Suffolk took his place; under whom 
(reinforced by SIR JOHN FALSTAFF, who brought up four hundred 
waggons laden with salt herrings and other provisions for the 
troops, and, beating off the French who tried to intercept him, 
came victorious out of a hot skirmish, which was afterwards called 
in jest the Battle of the Herrings) the town of Orleans was so 
completely hemmed in, that the besieged proposed to yield it up to 
their countryman the Duke of Burgundy.  The English general, 
however, replied that his English men had won it, so far, by their 
blood and valour, and that his English men must have it.  There 
seemed to be no hope for the town, or for the Dauphin, who was so 
dismayed that he even thought of flying to Scotland or to Spain - 
when a peasant girl rose up and changed the whole state of affairs.

The story of this peasant girl I have now to tell.


PART THE SECOND:  THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC


IN a remote village among some wild hills in the province of 
Lorraine, there lived a countryman whose name was JACQUES D'ARC.  
He had a daughter, JOAN OF ARC, who was at this time in her 
twentieth year.  She had been a solitary girl from her childhood; 
she had often tended sheep and cattle for whole days where no human 
figure was seen or human voice heard; and she had often knelt, for 
hours together, in the gloomy, empty, little village chapel, 
looking up at the altar and at the dim lamp burning before it, 
until she fancied that she saw shadowy figures standing there, and 
even that she heard them speak to her.  The people in that part of 
France were very ignorant and superstitious, and they had many 
ghostly tales to tell about what they had dreamed, and what they 
saw among the lonely hills when the clouds and the mists were 
resting on them.  So, they easily believed that Joan saw strange 
sights, and they whispered among themselves that angels and spirits 
talked to her.

At last, Joan told her father that she had one day been surprised 
by a great unearthly light, and had afterwards heard a solemn 
voice, which said it was Saint Michael's voice, telling her that 
she was to go and help the Dauphin.  Soon after this (she said), 
Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret had appeared to her with 
sparkling crowns upon their heads, and had encouraged her to be 
virtuous and resolute.  These visions had returned sometimes; but 
the Voices very often; and the voices always said, 'Joan, thou art 
appointed by Heaven to go and help the Dauphin!'  She almost always 
heard them while the chapel bells were ringing.

There is no doubt, now, that Joan believed she saw and heard these 
things.  It is very well known that such delusions are a disease 
which is not by any means uncommon.  It is probable enough that 
there were figures of Saint Michael, and Saint Catherine, and Saint 
Margaret, in the little chapel (where they would be very likely to 
have shining crowns upon their heads), and that they first gave 
Joan the idea of those three personages.  She had long been a 
moping, fanciful girl, and, though she was a very good girl, I dare 
say she was a little vain, and wishful for notoriety.

Her father, something wiser than his neighbours, said, 'I tell 
thee, Joan, it is thy fancy.  Thou hadst better have a kind husband 
to take care of thee, girl, and work to employ thy mind!'  But Joan 
told him in reply, that she had taken a vow never to have a 
husband, and that she must go as Heaven directed her, to help the 
Dauphin.

It happened, unfortunately for her father's persuasions, and most 
unfortunately for the poor girl, too, that a party of the Dauphin's 
enemies found their way into the village while Joan's disorder was 
at this point, and burnt the chapel, and drove out the inhabitants.  
The cruelties she saw committed, touched Joan's heart and made her 
worse.  She said that the voices and the figures were now 
continually with her; that they told her she was the girl who, 
according to an old prophecy, was to deliver France; and she must 
go and help the Dauphin, and must remain with him until he should 
be crowned at Rheims:  and that she must travel a long way to a 
certain lord named BAUDRICOURT, who could and would, bring her into 
the Dauphin's presence.

As her father still said, 'I tell thee, Joan, it is thy fancy,' she 
set off to find out this lord, accompanied by an uncle, a poor 
village wheelwright and cart-maker, who believed in the reality of 
her visions.  They travelled a long way and went on and on, over a 
rough country, full of the Duke of Burgundy's men, and of all kinds 
of robbers and marauders, until they came to where this lord was.

When his servants told him that there was a poor peasant girl named 
Joan of Arc, accompanied by nobody but an old village wheelwright 
and cart-maker, who wished to see him because she was commanded to 
help the Dauphin and save France, Baudricourt burst out a-laughing, 
and bade them send the girl away.  But, he soon heard so much about 
her lingering in the town, and praying in the churches, and seeing 
visions, and doing harm to no one, that he sent for her, and 
questioned her.  As she said the same things after she had been 
well sprinkled with holy water as she had said before the 
sprinkling, Baudricourt began to think there might be something in 
it.  At all events, he thought it worth while to send her on to the 
town of Chinon, where the Dauphin was.  So, he bought her a horse, 
and a sword, and gave her two squires to conduct her.  As the 
Voices had told Joan that she was to wear a man's dress, now, she 
put one on, and girded her sword to her side, and bound spurs to 
her heels, and mounted her horse and rode away with her two 
squires.  As to her uncle the wheelwright, he stood staring at his 
niece in wonder until she was out of sight - as well he might - and 
then went home again.  The best place, too.

Joan and her two squires rode on and on, until they came to Chinon, 
where she was, after some doubt, admitted into the Dauphin's 
presence.  Picking him out immediately from all his court, she told 
him that she came commanded by Heaven to subdue his enemies and 
conduct him to his coronation at Rheims.  She also told him (or he 
pretended so afterwards, to make the greater impression upon his 
soldiers) a number of his secrets known only to himself, and, 
furthermore, she said there was an old, old sword in the cathedral 
of Saint Catherine at Fierbois, marked with five old crosses on the 
blade, which Saint Catherine had ordered her to wear.

Now, nobody knew anything about this old, old sword, but when the 
cathedral came to be examined - which was immediately done - there, 
sure enough, the sword was found!  The Dauphin then required a 
number of grave priests and bishops to give him their opinion 
whether the girl derived her power from good spirits or from evil 
spirits, which they held prodigiously long debates about, in the 
course of which several learned men fell fast asleep and snored 
loudly.  At last, when one gruff old gentleman had said to Joan, 
'What language do your Voices speak?' and when Joan had replied to 
the gruff old gentleman, 'A pleasanter language than yours,' they 
agreed that it was all correct, and that Joan of Arc was inspired 
from Heaven.  This wonderful circumstance put new heart into the 
Dauphin's soldiers when they heard of it, and dispirited the 
English army, who took Joan for a witch.

So Joan mounted horse again, and again rode on and on, until she 
came to Orleans.  But she rode now, as never peasant girl had 
ridden yet.  She rode upon a white war-horse, in a suit of 
glittering armour; with the old, old sword from the cathedral, 
newly burnished, in her belt; with a white flag carried before her, 
upon which were a picture of God, and the words JESUS MARIA.  In 
this splendid state, at the head of a great body of troops 
escorting provisions of all kinds for the starving inhabitants of 
Orleans, she appeared before that beleaguered city.

When the people on the walls beheld her, they cried out 'The Maid 
is come!  The Maid of the Prophecy is come to deliver us!'  And 
this, and the sight of the Maid fighting at the head of their men, 
made the French so bold, and made the English so fearful, that the 
English line of forts was soon broken, the troops and provisions 
were got into the town, and Orleans was saved.

Joan, henceforth called THE MAID OF ORLEANS, remained within the 
walls for a few days, and caused letters to be thrown over, 
ordering Lord Suffolk and his Englishmen to depart from before the 
town according to the will of Heaven.  As the English general very 
positively declined to believe that Joan knew anything about the 
will of Heaven (which did not mend the matter with his soldiers, 
for they stupidly said if she were not inspired she was a witch, 
and it was of no use to fight against a witch), she mounted her 
white war-horse again, and ordered her white banner to advance.

The besiegers held the bridge, and some strong towers upon the 
bridge; and here the Maid of Orleans attacked them.  The fight was 
fourteen hours long.  She planted a scaling ladder with her own 
hands, and mounted a tower wall, but was struck by an English arrow 
in the neck, and fell into the trench.  She was carried away and 
the arrow was taken out, during which operation she screamed and 
cried with the pain, as any other girl might have done; but 
presently she said that the Voices were speaking to her and 
soothing her to rest.  After a while, she got up, and was again 
foremost in the fight.  When the English who had seen her fall and 
supposed her dead, saw this, they were troubled with the strangest 
fears, and some of them cried out that they beheld Saint Michael on 
a white horse (probably Joan herself) fighting for the French.  
They lost the bridge, and lost the towers, and next day set their 
chain of forts on fire, and left the place.

But as Lord Suffolk himself retired no farther than the town of 
Jargeau, which was only a few miles off, the Maid of Orleans 
besieged him there, and he was taken prisoner.  As the white banner 
scaled the wall, she was struck upon the head with a stone, and was 
again tumbled down into the ditch; but, she only cried all the 
more, as she lay there, 'On, on, my countrymen!  And fear nothing, 
for the Lord hath delivered them into our hands!'  After this new 
success of the Maid's, several other fortresses and places which 
had previously held out against the Dauphin were delivered up 
without a battle; and at Patay she defeated the remainder of the 
English army, and set up her victorious white banner on a field 
where twelve hundred Englishmen lay dead.

She now urged the Dauphin (who always kept out of the way when 
there was any fighting) to proceed to Rheims, as the first part of 
her mission was accomplished; and to complete the whole by being 
crowned there.  The Dauphin was in no particular hurry to do this, 
as Rheims was a long way off, and the English and the Duke of 
Burgundy were still strong in the country through which the road 
lay.  However, they set forth, with ten thousand men, and again the 
Maid of Orleans rode on and on, upon her white war-horse, and in 
her shining armour.  Whenever they came to a town which yielded 
readily, the soldiers believed in her; but, whenever they came to a 
town which gave them any trouble, they began to murmur that she was 
an impostor.  The latter was particularly the case at Troyes, which 
finally yielded, however, through the persuasion of one Richard, a 
friar of the place.  Friar Richard was in the old doubt about the 
Maid of Orleans, until he had sprinkled her well with holy water, 
and had also well sprinkled the threshold of the gate by which she 
came into the city.  Finding that it made no change in her or the 
gate, he said, as the other grave old gentlemen had said, that it 
was all right, and became her great ally.

So, at last, by dint of riding on and on, the Maid of Orleans, and 
the Dauphin, and the ten thousand sometimes believing and sometimes 
unbelieving men, came to Rheims.  And in the great cathedral of 
Rheims, the Dauphin actually was crowned Charles the Seventh in a 
great assembly of the people.  Then, the Maid, who with her white 
banner stood beside the King in that hour of his triumph, kneeled 
down upon the pavement at his feet, and said, with tears, that what 
she had been inspired to do, was done, and that the only recompense 
she asked for, was, that she should now have leave to go back to 
her distant home, and her sturdily incredulous father, and her 
first simple escort the village wheelwright and cart-maker.  But 
the King said 'No!' and made her and her family as noble as a King 
could, and settled upon her the income of a Count.

Ah! happy had it been for the Maid of Orleans, if she had resumed 
her rustic dress that day, and had gone home to the little chapel 
and the wild hills, and had forgotten all these things, and had 
been a good man's wife, and had heard no stranger voices than the 
voices of little children!

It was not to be, and she continued helping the King (she did a 
world for him, in alliance with Friar Richard), and trying to 
improve the lives of the coarse soldiers, and leading a religious, 
an unselfish, and a modest life, herself, beyond any doubt.  Still, 
many times she prayed the King to let her go home; and once she 
even took off her bright armour and hung it up in a church, meaning 
never to wear it more.  But, the King always won her back again - 
while she was of any use to him - and so she went on and on and on, 
to her doom.

When the Duke of Bedford, who was a very able man, began to be 
active for England, and, by bringing the war back into France and 
by holding the Duke of Burgundy to his faith, to distress and 
disturb Charles very much, Charles sometimes asked the Maid of 
Orleans what the Voices said about it?  But, the Voices had become 
(very like ordinary voices in perplexed times) contradictory and 
confused, so that now they said one thing, and now said another, 
and the Maid lost credit every day.  Charles marched on Paris, 
which was opposed to him, and attacked the suburb of Saint Honore.  
In this fight, being again struck down into the ditch, she was 
abandoned by the whole army.  She lay unaided among a heap of dead, 
and crawled out how she could.  Then, some of her believers went 
over to an opposition Maid, Catherine of La Rochelle, who said she 
was inspired to tell where there were treasures of buried money - 
though she never did - and then Joan accidentally broke the old, 
old sword, and others said that her power was broken with it.  
Finally, at the siege of CompiŠgne, held by the Duke of Burgundy, 
where she did valiant service, she was basely left alone in a 
retreat, though facing about and fighting to the last; and an 
archer pulled her off her horse.

O the uproar that was made, and the thanksgivings that were sung, 
about the capture of this one poor country-girl!  O the way in 
which she was demanded to be tried for sorcery and heresy, and 
anything else you like, by the Inquisitor-General of France, and by 
this great man, and by that great man, until it is wearisome to 
think of! She was bought at last by the Bishop of Beauvais for ten 
thousand francs, and was shut up in her narrow prison:  plain Joan 
of Arc again, and Maid of Orleans no more.

I should never have done if I were to tell you how they had Joan 
out to examine her, and cross-examine her, and re-examine her, and 
worry her into saying anything and everything; and how all sorts of 
scholars and doctors bestowed their utmost tediousness upon her.  
Sixteen times she was brought out and shut up again, and worried, 
and entrapped, and argued with, until she was heart-sick of the 
dreary business.  On the last occasion of this kind she was brought 
into a burial-place at Rouen, dismally decorated with a scaffold, 
and a stake and faggots, and the executioner, and a pulpit with a 
friar therein, and an awful sermon ready.  It is very affecting to 
know that even at that pass the poor girl honoured the mean vermin 
of a King, who had so used her for his purposes and so abandoned 
her; and, that while she had been regardless of reproaches heaped 
upon herself, she spoke out courageously for him.

It was natural in one so young to hold to life.  To save her life, 
she signed a declaration prepared for her - signed it with a cross, 
for she couldn't write - that all her visions and Voices had come 
from the Devil.  Upon her recanting the past, and protesting that 
she would never wear a man's dress in future, she was condemned to 
imprisonment for life, 'on the bread of sorrow and the water of 
affliction.'

But, on the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction, the 
visions and the Voices soon returned.  It was quite natural that 
they should do so, for that kind of disease is much aggravated by 
fasting, loneliness, and anxiety of mind.  It was not only got out 
of Joan that she considered herself inspired again, but, she was 
taken in a man's dress, which had been left - to entrap her - in 
her prison, and which she put on, in her solitude; perhaps, in 
remembrance of her past glories, perhaps, because the imaginary 
Voices told her.  For this relapse into the sorcery and heresy and 
anything else you like, she was sentenced to be burnt to death.  
And, in the market-place of Rouen, in the hideous dress which the 
monks had invented for such spectacles; with priests and bishops 
sitting in a gallery looking on, though some had the Christian 
grace to go away, unable to endure the infamous scene; this 
shrieking girl - last seen amidst the smoke and fire, holding a 
crucifix between her hands; last heard, calling upon Christ - was 
burnt to ashes.  They threw her ashes into the river Seine; but 
they will rise against her murderers on the last day.

From the moment of her capture, neither the French King nor one 
single man in all his court raised a finger to save her.  It is no 
defence of them that they may have never really believed in her, or 
that they may have won her victories by their skill and bravery.  
The more they pretended to believe in her, the more they had caused 
her to believe in herself; and she had ever been true to them, ever 
brave, ever nobly devoted.  But, it is no wonder, that they, who 
were in all things false to themselves, false to one another, false 
to their country, false to Heaven, false to Earth, should be 
monsters of ingratitude and treachery to a helpless peasant girl.

In the picturesque old town of Rouen, where weeds and grass grow 
high on the cathedral towers, and the venerable Norman streets are 
still warm in the blessed sunlight though the monkish fires that 
once gleamed horribly upon them have long grown cold, there is a 
statue of Joan of Arc, in the scene of her last agony, the square 
to which she has given its present name.  I know some statues of 
modern times - even in the World's metropolis, I think - which 
commemorate less constancy, less earnestness, smaller claims upon 
the world's attention, and much greater impostors.


PART THE THIRD


BAD deeds seldom prosper, happily for mankind; and the English 
cause gained no advantage from the cruel death of Joan of Arc.  For 
a long time, the war went heavily on.  The Duke of Bedford died; 
the alliance with the Duke of Burgundy was broken; and Lord Talbot 
became a great general on the English side in France.  But, two of 
the consequences of wars are, Famine - because the people cannot 
peacefully cultivate the ground - and Pestilence, which comes of 
want, misery, and suffering.  Both these horrors broke out in both 
countries, and lasted for two wretched years.  Then, the war went 
on again, and came by slow degrees to be so badly conducted by the 
English government, that, within twenty years from the execution of 
the Maid of Orleans, of all the great French conquests, the town of 
Calais alone remained in English hands.

While these victories and defeats were taking place in the course 
of time, many strange things happened at home.  The young King, as 
he grew up, proved to be very unlike his great father, and showed 
himself a miserable puny creature.  There was no harm in him - he 
had a great aversion to shedding blood:  which was something - but, 
he was a weak, silly, helpless young man, and a mere shuttlecock to 
the great lordly battledores about the Court.

Of these battledores, Cardinal Beaufort, a relation of the King, 
and the Duke of Gloucester, were at first the most powerful.  The 
Duke of Gloucester had a wife, who was nonsensically accused of 
practising witchcraft to cause the King's death and lead to her 
husband's coming to the throne, he being the next heir.  She was 
charged with having, by the help of a ridiculous old woman named 
Margery (who was called a witch), made a little waxen doll in the 
King's likeness, and put it before a slow fire that it might 
gradually melt away.  It was supposed, in such cases, that the 
death of the person whom the doll was made to represent, was sure 
to happen.  Whether the duchess was as ignorant as the rest of 
them, and really did make such a doll with such an intention, I 
don't know; but, you and I know very well that she might have made 
a thousand dolls, if she had been stupid enough, and might have 
melted them all, without hurting the King or anybody else.  
However, she was tried for it, and so was old Margery, and so was 
one of the duke's chaplains, who was charged with having assisted 
them.  Both he and Margery were put to death, and the duchess, 
after being taken on foot and bearing a lighted candle, three times 
round the City, as a penance, was imprisoned for life.  The duke, 
himself, took all this pretty quietly, and made as little stir 
about the matter as if he were rather glad to be rid of the 
duchess.

But, he was not destined to keep himself out of trouble long.  The 
royal shuttlecock being three-and-twenty, the battledores were very 
anxious to get him married.  The Duke of Gloucester wanted him to 
marry a daughter of the Count of Armagnac; but, the Cardinal and 
the Earl of Suffolk were all for MARGARET, the daughter of the King 
of Sicily, who they knew was a resolute, ambitious woman and would 
govern the King as she chose.  To make friends with this lady, the 
Earl of Suffolk, who went over to arrange the match, consented to 
accept her for the King's wife without any fortune, and even to 
give up the two most valuable possessions England then had in 
France.  So, the marriage was arranged, on terms very advantageous 
to the lady; and Lord Suffolk brought her to England, and she was 
married at Westminster.  On what pretence this queen and her party 
charged the Duke of Gloucester with high treason within a couple of 
years, it is impossible to make out, the matter is so confused; 
but, they pretended that the King's life was in danger, and they 
took the duke prisoner.  A fortnight afterwards, he was found dead 
in bed (they said), and his body was shown to the people, and Lord 
Suffolk came in for the best part of his estates.  You know by this 
time how strangely liable state prisoners were to sudden death.

If Cardinal Beaufort had any hand in this matter, it did him no 
good, for he died within six weeks; thinking it very hard and 
curious - at eighty years old! - that he could not live to be Pope.

This was the time when England had completed her loss of all her 
great French conquests.  The people charged the loss principally 
upon the Earl of Suffolk, now a duke, who had made those easy terms 
about the Royal Marriage, and who, they believed, had even been 
bought by France.  So he was impeached as a traitor, on a great 
number of charges, but chiefly on accusations of having aided the 
French King, and of designing to make his own son King of England.  
The Commons and the people being violent against him, the King was 
made (by his friends) to interpose to save him, by banishing him 
for five years, and proroguing the Parliament.  The duke had much 
ado to escape from a London mob, two thousand strong, who lay in 
wait for him in St. Giles's fields; but, he got down to his own 
estates in Suffolk, and sailed away from Ipswich.  Sailing across 
the Channel, he sent into Calais to know if he might land there; 
but, they kept his boat and men in the harbour, until an English 
ship, carrying a hundred and fifty men and called the Nicholas of 
the Tower, came alongside his little vessel, and ordered him on 
board.  'Welcome, traitor, as men say,' was the captain's grim and 
not very respectful salutation.  He was kept on board, a prisoner, 
for eight-and-forty hours, and then a small boat appeared rowing 
toward the ship.  As this boat came nearer, it was seen to have in 
it a block, a rusty sword, and an executioner in a black mask.  The 
duke was handed down into it, and there his head was cut off with 
six strokes of the rusty sword.  Then, the little boat rowed away 
to Dover beach, where the body was cast out, and left until the 
duchess claimed it.  By whom, high in authority, this murder was 
committed, has never appeared.  No one was ever punished for it.

There now arose in Kent an Irishman, who gave himself the name of 
Mortimer, but whose real name was JACK CADE.  Jack, in imitation of 
Wat Tyler, though he was a very different and inferior sort of man, 
addressed the Kentish men upon their wrongs, occasioned by the bad 
government of England, among so many battledores and such a poor 
shuttlecock; and the Kentish men rose up to the number of twenty 
thousand.  Their place of assembly was Blackheath, where, headed by 
Jack, they put forth two papers, which they called 'The Complaint 
of the Commons of Kent,' and 'The Requests of the Captain of the 
Great Assembly in Kent.'  They then retired to Sevenoaks.  The 
royal army coming up with them here, they beat it and killed their 
general.  Then, Jack dressed himself in the dead general's armour, 
and led his men to London.

Jack passed into the City from Southwark, over the bridge, and 
entered it in triumph, giving the strictest orders to his men not 
to plunder.  Having made a show of his forces there, while the 
citizens looked on quietly, he went back into Southwark in good 
order, and passed the night.  Next day, he came back again, having 
got hold in the meantime of Lord Say, an unpopular nobleman.  Says 
Jack to the Lord Mayor and judges:  'Will you be so good as to make 
a tribunal in Guildhall, and try me this nobleman?'  The court 
being hastily made, he was found guilty, and Jack and his men cut 
his head off on Cornhill.  They also cut off the head of his son-
in-law, and then went back in good order to Southwark again.

But, although the citizens could bear the beheading of an unpopular 
lord, they could not bear to have their houses pillaged.  And it 
did so happen that Jack, after dinner - perhaps he had drunk a 
little too much - began to plunder the house where he lodged; upon 
which, of course, his men began to imitate him.  Wherefore, the 
Londoners took counsel with Lord Scales, who had a thousand 
soldiers in the Tower; and defended London Bridge, and kept Jack 
and his people out.  This advantage gained, it was resolved by 
divers great men to divide Jack's army in the old way, by making a 
great many promises on behalf of the state, that were never 
intended to be performed.  This DID divide them; some of Jack's men 
saying that they ought to take the conditions which were offered, 
and others saying that they ought not, for they were only a snare; 
some going home at once; others staying where they were; and all 
doubting and quarrelling among themselves.

Jack, who was in two minds about fighting or accepting a pardon, 
and who indeed did both, saw at last that there was nothing to 
expect from his men, and that it was very likely some of them would 
deliver him up and get a reward of a thousand marks, which was 
offered for his apprehension.  So, after they had travelled and 
quarrelled all the way from Southwark to Blackheath, and from 
Blackheath to Rochester, he mounted a good horse and galloped away 
into Sussex.  But, there galloped after him, on a better horse, one 
Alexander Iden, who came up with him, had a hard fight with him, 
and killed him.  Jack's head was set aloft on London Bridge, with 
the face looking towards Blackheath, where he had raised his flag; 
and Alexander Iden got the thousand marks.

It is supposed by some, that the Duke of York, who had been removed 
from a high post abroad through the Queen's influence, and sent out 
of the way, to govern Ireland, was at the bottom of this rising of 
Jack and his men, because he wanted to trouble the government.  He 
claimed (though not yet publicly) to have a better right to the 
throne than Henry of Lancaster, as one of the family of the Earl of 
March, whom Henry the Fourth had set aside.  Touching this claim, 
which, being through female relationship, was not according to the 
usual descent, it is enough to say that Henry the Fourth was the 
free choice of the people and the Parliament, and that his family 
had now reigned undisputed for sixty years.  The memory of Henry 
the Fifth was so famous, and the English people loved it so much, 
that the Duke of York's claim would, perhaps, never have been 
thought of (it would have been so hopeless) but for the unfortunate 
circumstance of the present King's being by this time quite an 
idiot, and the country very ill governed.  These two circumstances 
gave the Duke of York a power he could not otherwise have had.

Whether the Duke knew anything of Jack Cade, or not, he came over 
from Ireland while Jack's head was on London Bridge; being secretly 
advised that the Queen was setting up his enemy, the Duke of 
Somerset, against him.  He went to Westminster, at the head of four 
thousand men, and on his knees before the King, represented to him 
the bad state of the country, and petitioned him to summon a 
Parliament to consider it.  This the King promised.  When the 
Parliament was summoned, the Duke of York accused the Duke of 
Somerset, and the Duke of Somerset accused the Duke of York; and, 
both in and out of Parliament, the followers of each party were 
full of violence and hatred towards the other.  At length the Duke 
of York put himself at the head of a large force of his tenants, 
and, in arms, demanded the reformation of the Government.  Being 
shut out of London, he encamped at Dartford, and the royal army 
encamped at Blackheath.  According as either side triumphed, the 
Duke of York was arrested, or the Duke of Somerset was arrested.  
The trouble ended, for the moment, in the Duke of York renewing his 
oath of allegiance, and going in peace to one of his own castles.

Half a year afterwards the Queen gave birth to a son, who was very 
ill received by the people, and not believed to be the son of the 
King.  It shows the Duke of York to have been a moderate man, 
unwilling to involve England in new troubles, that he did not take 
advantage of the general discontent at this time, but really acted 
for the public good.  He was made a member of the cabinet, and the 
King being now so much worse that he could not be carried about and 
shown to the people with any decency, the duke was made Lord 
Protector of the kingdom, until the King should recover, or the 
Prince should come of age.  At the same time the Duke of Somerset 
was committed to the Tower.  So, now the Duke of Somerset was down, 
and the Duke of York was up.  By the end of the year, however, the 
King recovered his memory and some spark of sense; upon which the 
Queen used her power - which recovered with him - to get the 
Protector disgraced, and her favourite released.  So now the Duke 
of York was down, and the Duke of Somerset was up.

These ducal ups and downs gradually separated the whole nation into 
the two parties of York and Lancaster, and led to those terrible 
civil wars long known as the Wars of the Red and White Roses, 
because the red rose was the badge of the House of Lancaster, and 
the white rose was the badge of the House of York.

The Duke of York, joined by some other powerful noblemen of the 
White Rose party, and leading a small army, met the King with 
another small army at St. Alban's, and demanded that the Duke of 
Somerset should be given up.  The poor King, being made to say in 
answer that he would sooner die, was instantly attacked.  The Duke 
of Somerset was killed, and the King himself was wounded in the 
neck, and took refuge in the house of a poor tanner.  Whereupon, 
the Duke of York went to him, led him with great submission to the 
Abbey, and said he was very sorry for what had happened.  Having 
now the King in his possession, he got a Parliament summoned and 
himself once more made Protector, but, only for a few months; for, 
on the King getting a little better again, the Queen and her party 
got him into their possession, and disgraced the Duke once more.  
So, now the Duke of York was down again.

Some of the best men in power, seeing the danger of these constant 
changes, tried even then to prevent the Red and the White Rose 
Wars.  They brought about a great council in London between the two 
parties.  The White Roses assembled in Blackfriars, the Red Roses 
in Whitefriars; and some good priests communicated between them, 
and made the proceedings known at evening to the King and the 
judges.  They ended in a peaceful agreement that there should be no 
more quarrelling; and there was a great royal procession to St. 
Paul's, in which the Queen walked arm-in-arm with her old enemy, 
the Duke of York, to show the people how comfortable they all were.  
This state of peace lasted half a year, when a dispute between the 
Earl of Warwick (one of the Duke's powerful friends) and some of 
the King's servants at Court, led to an attack upon that Earl - who 
was a White Rose - and to a sudden breaking out of all old 
animosities.  So, here were greater ups and downs than ever.

There were even greater ups and downs than these, soon after.  
After various battles, the Duke of York fled to Ireland, and his 
son the Earl of March to Calais, with their friends the Earls of 
Salisbury and Warwick; and a Parliament was held declaring them all 
traitors.  Little the worse for this, the Earl of Warwick presently 
came back, landed in Kent, was joined by the Archbishop of 
Canterbury and other powerful noblemen and gentlemen, engaged the 
King's forces at Northampton, signally defeated them, and took the 
King himself prisoner, who was found in his tent.  Warwick would 
have been glad, I dare say, to have taken the Queen and Prince too, 
but they escaped into Wales and thence into Scotland.

The King was carried by the victorious force straight to London, 
and made to call a new Parliament, which immediately declared that 
the Duke of York and those other noblemen were not traitors, but 
excellent subjects.  Then, back comes the Duke from Ireland at the 
head of five hundred horsemen, rides from London to Westminster, 
and enters the House of Lords.  There, he laid his hand upon the 
cloth of gold which covered the empty throne, as if he had half a 
mind to sit down in it - but he did not.  On the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, asking him if he would visit the King, who was in his 
palace close by, he replied, 'I know no one in this country, my 
lord, who ought not to visit ME.'  None of the lords present spoke 
a single word; so, the duke went out as he had come in, established 
himself royally in the King's palace, and, six days afterwards, 
sent in to the Lords a formal statement of his claim to the throne.  
The lords went to the King on this momentous subject, and after a 
great deal of discussion, in which the judges and the other law 
officers were afraid to give an opinion on either side, the 
question was compromised.  It was agreed that the present King 
should retain the crown for his life, and that it should then pass 
to the Duke of York and his heirs.

But, the resolute Queen, determined on asserting her son's right, 
would hear of no such thing.  She came from Scotland to the north 
of England, where several powerful lords armed in her cause.  The 
Duke of York, for his part, set off with some five thousand men, a 
little time before Christmas Day, one thousand four hundred and 
sixty, to give her battle.  He lodged at Sandal Castle, near 
Wakefield, and the Red Roses defied him to come out on Wakefield 
Green, and fight them then and there.  His generals said, he had 
best wait until his gallant son, the Earl of March, came up with 
his power; but, he was determined to accept the challenge.  He did 
so, in an evil hour.  He was hotly pressed on all sides, two 
thousand of his men lay dead on Wakefield Green, and he himself was 
taken prisoner.  They set him down in mock state on an ant-hill, 
and twisted grass about his head, and pretended to pay court to him 
on their knees, saying, 'O King, without a kingdom, and Prince 
without a people, we hope your gracious Majesty is very well and 
happy!'  They did worse than this; they cut his head off, and 
handed it on a pole to the Queen, who laughed with delight when she 
saw it (you recollect their walking so religiously and comfortably 
to St. Paul's!), and had it fixed, with a paper crown upon its 
head, on the walls of York.  The Earl of Salisbury lost his head, 
too; and the Duke of York's second son, a handsome boy who was 
flying with his tutor over Wakefield Bridge, was stabbed in the 
heart by a murderous, lord - Lord Clifford by name - whose father 
had been killed by the White Roses in the fight at St. Alban's.  
There was awful sacrifice of life in this battle, for no quarter 
was given, and the Queen was wild for revenge.  When men 
unnaturally fight against their own countrymen, they are always 
observed to be more unnaturally cruel and filled with rage than 
they are against any other enemy.

But, Lord Clifford had stabbed the second son of the Duke of York - 
not the first.  The eldest son, Edward Earl of March, was at 
Gloucester; and, vowing vengeance for the death of his father, his 
brother, and their faithful friends, he began to march against the 
Queen.  He had to turn and fight a great body of Welsh and Irish 
first, who worried his advance.  These he defeated in a great fight 
at Mortimer's Cross, near Hereford, where he beheaded a number of 
the Red Roses taken in battle, in retaliation for the beheading of 
the White Roses at Wakefield.  The Queen had the next turn of 
beheading.  Having moved towards London, and falling in, between 
St. Alban's and Barnet, with the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of 
Norfolk, White Roses both, who were there with an army to oppose 
her, and had got the King with them; she defeated them with great 
loss, and struck off the heads of two prisoners of note, who were 
in the King's tent with him, and to whom the King had promised his 
protection.  Her triumph, however, was very short.  She had no 
treasure, and her army subsisted by plunder.  This caused them to 
be hated and dreaded by the people, and particularly by the London 
people, who were wealthy.  As soon as the Londoners heard that 
Edward, Earl of March, united with the Earl of Warwick, was 
advancing towards the city, they refused to send the Queen 
supplies, and made a great rejoicing.

The Queen and her men retreated with all speed, and Edward and 
Warwick came on, greeted with loud acclamations on every side.  The 
courage, beauty, and virtues of young Edward could not be 
sufficiently praised by the whole people.  He rode into London like 
a conqueror, and met with an enthusiastic welcome.  A few days 
afterwards, Lord Falconbridge and the Bishop of Exeter assembled 
the citizens in St. John's Field, Clerkenwell, and asked them if 
they would have Henry of Lancaster for their King?  To this they 
all roared, 'No, no, no!' and 'King Edward!  King Edward!'  Then, 
said those noblemen, would they love and serve young Edward?  To 
this they all cried, 'Yes, yes!' and threw up their caps and 
clapped their hands, and cheered tremendously.

Therefore, it was declared that by joining the Queen and not 
protecting those two prisoners of note, Henry of Lancaster had 
forfeited the crown; and Edward of York was proclaimed King.  He 
made a great speech to the applauding people at Westminster, and 
sat down as sovereign of England on that throne, on the golden 
covering of which his father - worthy of a better fate than the 
bloody axe which cut the thread of so many lives in England, 
through so many years - had laid his hand.



CHAPTER XXIII - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE FOURTH



KING EDWARD THE FOURTH was not quite twenty-one years of age when 
he took that unquiet seat upon the throne of England.  The 
Lancaster party, the Red Roses, were then assembling in great 
numbers near York, and it was necessary to give them battle 
instantly.  But, the stout Earl of Warwick leading for the young 
King, and the young King himself closely following him, and the 
English people crowding round the Royal standard, the White and the 
Red Roses met, on a wild March day when the snow was falling 
heavily, at Towton; and there such a furious battle raged between 
them, that the total loss amounted to forty thousand men - all 
Englishmen, fighting, upon English ground, against one another.  
The young King gained the day, took down the heads of his father 
and brother from the walls of York, and put up the heads of some of 
the most famous noblemen engaged in the battle on the other side.  
Then, he went to London and was crowned with great splendour.

A new Parliament met.  No fewer than one hundred and fifty of the 
principal noblemen and gentlemen on the Lancaster side were 
declared traitors, and the King - who had very little humanity, 
though he was handsome in person and agreeable in manners - 
resolved to do all he could, to pluck up the Red Rose root and 
branch.

Queen Margaret, however, was still active for her young son.  She 
obtained help from Scotland and from Normandy, and took several 
important English castles.  But, Warwick soon retook them; the 
Queen lost all her treasure on board ship in a great storm; and 
both she and her son suffered great misfortunes.  Once, in the 
winter weather, as they were riding through a forest, they were 
attacked and plundered by a party of robbers; and, when they had 
escaped from these men and were passing alone and on foot through a 
thick dark part of the wood, they came, all at once, upon another 
robber.  So the Queen, with a stout heart, took the little Prince 
by the hand, and going straight up to that robber, said to him, 'My 
friend, this is the young son of your lawful King!  I confide him 
to your care.'  The robber was surprised, but took the boy in his 
arms, and faithfully restored him and his mother to their friends.  
In the end, the Queen's soldiers being beaten and dispersed, she 
went abroad again, and kept quiet for the present.

Now, all this time, the deposed King Henry was concealed by a Welsh 
knight, who kept him close in his castle.  But, next year, the 
Lancaster party recovering their spirits, raised a large body of 
men, and called him out of his retirement, to put him at their 
head.  They were joined by some powerful noblemen who had sworn 
fidelity to the new King, but who were ready, as usual, to break 
their oaths, whenever they thought there was anything to be got by 
it.  One of the worst things in the history of the war of the Red 
and White Roses, is the ease with which these noblemen, who should 
have set an example of honour to the people, left either side as 
they took slight offence, or were disappointed in their greedy 
expectations, and joined the other.  Well! Warwick's brother soon 
beat the Lancastrians, and the false noblemen, being taken, were 
beheaded without a moment's loss of time.  The deposed King had a 
narrow escape; three of his servants were taken, and one of them 
bore his cap of estate, which was set with pearls and embroidered 
with two golden crowns.  However, the head to which the cap 
belonged, got safely into Lancashire, and lay pretty quietly there 
(the people in the secret being very true) for more than a year.  
At length, an old monk gave such intelligence as led to Henry's 
being taken while he was sitting at dinner in a place called 
Waddington Hall.  He was immediately sent to London, and met at 
Islington by the Earl of Warwick, by whose directions he was put 
upon a horse, with his legs tied under it, and paraded three times 
round the pillory.  Then, he was carried off to the Tower, where 
they treated him well enough.

The White Rose being so triumphant, the young King abandoned 
himself entirely to pleasure, and led a jovial life.  But, thorns 
were springing up under his bed of roses, as he soon found out.  
For, having been privately married to ELIZABETH WOODVILLE, a young 
widow lady, very beautiful and very captivating; and at last 
resolving to make his secret known, and to declare her his Queen; 
he gave some offence to the Earl of Warwick, who was usually called 
the King-Maker, because of his power and influence, and because of 
his having lent such great help to placing Edward on the throne.  
This offence was not lessened by the jealousy with which the Nevil 
family (the Earl of Warwick's) regarded the promotion of the 
Woodville family.  For, the young Queen was so bent on providing 
for her relations, that she made her father an earl and a great 
officer of state; married her five sisters to young noblemen of the 
highest rank; and provided for her younger brother, a young man of 
twenty, by marrying him to an immensely rich old duchess of eighty.  
The Earl of Warwick took all this pretty graciously for a man of 
his proud temper, until the question arose to whom the King's 
sister, MARGARET, should be married.  The Earl of Warwick said, 'To 
one of the French King's sons,' and was allowed to go over to the 
French King to make friendly proposals for that purpose, and to 
hold all manner of friendly interviews with him.  But, while he was 
so engaged, the Woodville party married the young lady to the Duke 
of Burgundy!  Upon this he came back in great rage and scorn, and 
shut himself up discontented, in his Castle of Middleham.

A reconciliation, though not a very sincere one, was patched up 
between the Earl of Warwick and the King, and lasted until the Earl 
married his daughter, against the King's wishes, to the Duke of 
Clarence.  While the marriage was being celebrated at Calais, the 
people in the north of England, where the influence of the Nevil 
family was strongest, broke out into rebellion; their complaint 
was, that England was oppressed and plundered by the Woodville 
family, whom they demanded to have removed from power.  As they 
were joined by great numbers of people, and as they openly declared 
that they were supported by the Earl of Warwick, the King did not 
know what to do.  At last, as he wrote to the earl beseeching his 
aid, he and his new son-in-law came over to England, and began to 
arrange the business by shutting the King up in Middleham Castle in 
the safe keeping of the Archbishop of York; so England was not only 
in the strange position of having two kings at once, but they were 
both prisoners at the same time.

Even as yet, however, the King-Maker was so far true to the King, 
that he dispersed a new rising of the Lancastrians, took their 
leader prisoner, and brought him to the King, who ordered him to be 
immediately executed.  He presently allowed the King to return to 
London, and there innumerable pledges of forgiveness and friendship 
were exchanged between them, and between the Nevils and the 
Woodvilles; the King's eldest daughter was promised in marriage to 
the heir of the Nevil family; and more friendly oaths were sworn, 
and more friendly promises made, than this book would hold.

They lasted about three months.  At the end of that time, the 
Archbishop of York made a feast for the King, the Earl of Warwick, 
and the Duke of Clarence, at his house, the Moor, in Hertfordshire.  
The King was washing his hands before supper, when some one 
whispered him that a body of a hundred men were lying in ambush 
outside the house.  Whether this were true or untrue, the King took 
fright, mounted his horse, and rode through the dark night to 
Windsor Castle.  Another reconciliation was patched up between him 
and the King-Maker, but it was a short one, and it was the last.  A 
new rising took place in Lincolnshire, and the King marched to 
repress it.  Having done so, he proclaimed that both the Earl of 
Warwick and the Duke of Clarence were traitors, who had secretly 
assisted it, and who had been prepared publicly to join it on the 
following day.  In these dangerous circumstances they both took 
ship and sailed away to the French court.

And here a meeting took place between the Earl of Warwick and his 
old enemy, the Dowager Queen Margaret, through whom his father had 
had his head struck off, and to whom he had been a bitter foe.  
But, now, when he said that he had done with the ungrateful and 
perfidious Edward of York, and that henceforth he devoted himself 
to the restoration of the House of Lancaster, either in the person 
of her husband or of her little son, she embraced him as if he had 
ever been her dearest friend.  She did more than that; she married 
her son to his second daughter, the Lady Anne.  However agreeable 
this marriage was to the new friends, it was very disagreeable to 
the Duke of Clarence, who perceived that his father-in-law, the 
King-Maker, would never make HIM King, now.  So, being but a weak-
minded young traitor, possessed of very little worth or sense, he 
readily listened to an artful court lady sent over for the purpose, 
and promised to turn traitor once more, and go over to his brother, 
King Edward, when a fitting opportunity should come.

The Earl of Warwick, knowing nothing of this, soon redeemed his 
promise to the Dowager Queen Margaret, by invading England and 
landing at Plymouth, where he instantly proclaimed King Henry, and 
summoned all Englishmen between the ages of sixteen and sixty, to 
join his banner.  Then, with his army increasing as he marched 
along, he went northward, and came so near King Edward, who was in 
that part of the country, that Edward had to ride hard for it to 
the coast of Norfolk, and thence to get away in such ships as he 
could find, to Holland.  Thereupon, the triumphant King-Maker and 
his false son-in-law, the Duke of Clarence, went to London, took 
the old King out of the Tower, and walked him in a great procession 
to Saint Paul's Cathedral with the crown upon his head.  This did 
not improve the temper of the Duke of Clarence, who saw himself 
farther off from being King than ever; but he kept his secret, and 
said nothing.  The Nevil family were restored to all their honours 
and glories, and the Woodvilles and the rest were disgraced.  The 
King-Maker, less sanguinary than the King, shed no blood except 
that of the Earl of Worcester, who had been so cruel to the people 
as to have gained the title of the Butcher.  Him they caught hidden 
in a tree, and him they tried and executed.  No other death stained 
the King-Maker's triumph.

To dispute this triumph, back came King Edward again, next year, 
landing at Ravenspur, coming on to York, causing all his men to cry 
'Long live King Henry!' and swearing on the altar, without a blush, 
that he came to lay no claim to the crown.  Now was the time for 
the Duke of Clarence, who ordered his men to assume the White Rose, 
and declare for his brother.  The Marquis of Montague, though the 
Earl of Warwick's brother, also declining to fight against King 
Edward, he went on successfully to London, where the Archbishop of 
York let him into the City, and where the people made great 
demonstrations in his favour.  For this they had four reasons.  
Firstly, there were great numbers of the King's adherents hiding in 
the City and ready to break out; secondly, the King owed them a 
great deal of money, which they could never hope to get if he were 
unsuccessful; thirdly, there was a young prince to inherit the 
crown; and fourthly, the King was gay and handsome, and more 
popular than a better man might have been with the City ladies.  
After a stay of only two days with these worthy supporters, the 
King marched out to Barnet Common, to give the Earl of Warwick 
battle.  And now it was to be seen, for the last time, whether the 
King or the King-Maker was to carry the day.

While the battle was yet pending, the fainthearted Duke of Clarence 
began to repent, and sent over secret messages to his father-in-
law, offering his services in mediation with the King.  But, the 
Earl of Warwick disdainfully rejected them, and replied that 
Clarence was false and perjured, and that he would settle the 
quarrel by the sword.  The battle began at four o'clock in the 
morning and lasted until ten, and during the greater part of the 
time it was fought in a thick mist - absurdly supposed to be raised 
by a magician.  The loss of life was very great, for the hatred was 
strong on both sides.  The King-Maker was defeated, and the King 
triumphed.  Both the Earl of Warwick and his brother were slain, 
and their bodies lay in St. Paul's, for some days, as a spectacle 
to the people.

Margaret's spirit was not broken even by this great blow.  Within 
five days she was in arms again, and raised her standard in Bath, 
whence she set off with her army, to try and join Lord Pembroke, 
who had a force in Wales.  But, the King, coming up with her 
outside the town of Tewkesbury, and ordering his brother, the DUKE 
OF GLOUCESTER, who was a brave soldier, to attack her men, she 
sustained an entire defeat, and was taken prisoner, together with 
her son, now only eighteen years of age.  The conduct of the King 
to this poor youth was worthy of his cruel character.  He ordered 
him to be led into his tent.  'And what,' said he, 'brought YOU to 
England?'  'I came to England,' replied the prisoner, with a spirit 
which a man of spirit might have admired in a captive, 'to recover 
my father's kingdom, which descended to him as his right, and from 
him descends to me, as mine.'  The King, drawing off his iron 
gauntlet, struck him with it in the face; and the Duke of Clarence 
and some other lords, who were there, drew their noble swords, and 
killed him.

His mother survived him, a prisoner, for five years; after her 
ransom by the King of France, she survived for six years more.  
Within three weeks of this murder, Henry died one of those 
convenient sudden deaths which were so common in the Tower; in 
plainer words, he was murdered by the King's order.

Having no particular excitement on his hands after this great 
defeat of the Lancaster party, and being perhaps desirous to get 
rid of some of his fat (for he was now getting too corpulent to be 
handsome), the King thought of making war on France.  As he wanted 
more money for this purpose than the Parliament could give him, 
though they were usually ready enough for war, he invented a new 
way of raising it, by sending for the principal citizens of London, 
and telling them, with a grave face, that he was very much in want 
of cash, and would take it very kind in them if they would lend him 
some.  It being impossible for them safely to refuse, they 
complied, and the moneys thus forced from them were called - no 
doubt to the great amusement of the King and the Court - as if they 
were free gifts, 'Benevolences.'  What with grants from Parliament, 
and what with Benevolences, the King raised an army and passed over 
to Calais.  As nobody wanted war, however, the French King made 
proposals of peace, which were accepted, and a truce was concluded 
for seven long years.  The proceedings between the Kings of France 
and England on this occasion, were very friendly, very splendid, 
and very distrustful.  They finished with a meeting between the two 
Kings, on a temporary bridge over the river Somme, where they 
embraced through two holes in a strong wooden grating like a lion's 
cage, and made several bows and fine speeches to one another.

It was time, now, that the Duke of Clarence should be punished for 
his treacheries; and Fate had his punishment in store.  He was, 
probably, not trusted by the King - for who could trust him who 
knew him! - and he had certainly a powerful opponent in his brother 
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, being avaricious and ambitious, 
wanted to marry that widowed daughter of the Earl of Warwick's who 
had been espoused to the deceased young Prince, at Calais.  
Clarence, who wanted all the family wealth for himself, secreted 
this lady, whom Richard found disguised as a servant in the City of 
London, and whom he married; arbitrators appointed by the King, 
then divided the property between the brothers.  This led to ill-
will and mistrust between them.  Clarence's wife dying, and he 
wishing to make another marriage, which was obnoxious to the King, 
his ruin was hurried by that means, too.  At first, the Court 
struck at his retainers and dependents, and accused some of them of 
magic and witchcraft, and similar nonsense.  Successful against 
this small game, it then mounted to the Duke himself, who was 
impeached by his brother the King, in person, on a variety of such 
charges.  He was found guilty, and sentenced to be publicly 
executed.  He never was publicly executed, but he met his death 
somehow, in the Tower, and, no doubt, through some agency of the 
King or his brother Gloucester, or both.  It was supposed at the 
time that he was told to choose the manner of his death, and that 
he chose to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine.  I hope the story 
may be true, for it would have been a becoming death for such a 
miserable creature.

The King survived him some five years.  He died in the forty-second 
year of his life, and the twenty-third of his reign.  He had a very 
good capacity and some good points, but he was selfish, careless, 
sensual, and cruel.  He was a favourite with the people for his 
showy manners; and the people were a good example to him in the 
constancy of their attachment.  He was penitent on his death-bed 
for his 'benevolences,' and other extortions, and ordered 
restitution to be made to the people who had suffered from them.  
He also called about his bed the enriched members of the Woodville 
family, and the proud lords whose honours were of older date, and 
endeavoured to reconcile them, for the sake of the peaceful 
succession of his son and the tranquillity of England.



CHAPTER XXIV - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE FIFTH



THE late King's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, called EDWARD 
after him, was only thirteen years of age at his father's death.  
He was at Ludlow Castle with his uncle, the Earl of Rivers.  The 
prince's brother, the Duke of York, only eleven years of age, was 
in London with his mother.  The boldest, most crafty, and most 
dreaded nobleman in England at that time was their uncle RICHARD, 
Duke of Gloucester, and everybody wondered how the two poor boys 
would fare with such an uncle for a friend or a foe.

The Queen, their mother, being exceedingly uneasy about this, was 
anxious that instructions should be sent to Lord Rivers to raise an 
army to escort the young King safely to London.  But, Lord 
Hastings, who was of the Court party opposed to the Woodvilles, and 
who disliked the thought of giving them that power, argued against 
the proposal, and obliged the Queen to be satisfied with an escort 
of two thousand horse.  The Duke of Gloucester did nothing, at 
first, to justify suspicion.  He came from Scotland (where he was 
commanding an army) to York, and was there the first to swear 
allegiance to his nephew.  He then wrote a condoling letter to the 
Queen-Mother, and set off to be present at the coronation in 
London.

Now, the young King, journeying towards London too, with Lord 
Rivers and Lord Gray, came to Stony Stratford, as his uncle came to 
Northampton, about ten miles distant; and when those two lords 
heard that the Duke of Gloucester was so near, they proposed to the 
young King that they should go back and greet him in his name.  The 
boy being very willing that they should do so, they rode off and 
were received with great friendliness, and asked by the Duke of 
Gloucester to stay and dine with him.  In the evening, while they 
were merry together, up came the Duke of Buckingham with three 
hundred horsemen; and next morning the two lords and the two dukes, 
and the three hundred horsemen, rode away together to rejoin the 
King.  Just as they were entering Stony Stratford, the Duke of 
Gloucester, checking his horse, turned suddenly on the two lords, 
charged them with alienating from him the affections of his sweet 
nephew, and caused them to be arrested by the three hundred 
horsemen and taken back.  Then, he and the Duke of Buckingham went 
straight to the King (whom they had now in their power), to whom 
they made a show of kneeling down, and offering great love and 
submission; and then they ordered his attendants to disperse, and 
took him, alone with them, to Northampton.

A few days afterwards they conducted him to London, and lodged him 
in the Bishop's Palace.  But, he did not remain there long; for, 
the Duke of Buckingham with a tender face made a speech expressing 
how anxious he was for the Royal boy's safety, and how much safer 
he would be in the Tower until his coronation, than he could be 
anywhere else.  So, to the Tower he was taken, very carefully, and 
the Duke of Gloucester was named Protector of the State.

Although Gloucester had proceeded thus far with a very smooth 
countenance - and although he was a clever man, fair of speech, and 
not ill-looking, in spite of one of his shoulders being something 
higher than the other - and although he had come into the City 
riding bare-headed at the King's side, and looking very fond of him 
- he had made the King's mother more uneasy yet; and when the Royal 
boy was taken to the Tower, she became so alarmed that she took 
sanctuary in Westminster with her five daughters.

Nor did she do this without reason, for, the Duke of Gloucester, 
finding that the lords who were opposed to the Woodville family 
were faithful to the young King nevertheless, quickly resolved to 
strike a blow for himself.  Accordingly, while those lords met in 
council at the Tower, he and those who were in his interest met in 
separate council at his own residence, Crosby Palace, in 
Bishopsgate Street.  Being at last quite prepared, he one day 
appeared unexpectedly at the council in the Tower, and appeared to 
be very jocular and merry.  He was particularly gay with the Bishop 
of Ely:  praising the strawberries that grew in his garden on 
Holborn Hill, and asking him to have some gathered that he might 
eat them at dinner.  The Bishop, quite proud of the honour, sent 
one of his men to fetch some; and the Duke, still very jocular and 
gay, went out; and the council all said what a very agreeable duke 
he was!  In a little time, however, he came back quite altered - 
not at all jocular - frowning and fierce - and suddenly said, -

'What do those persons deserve who have compassed my destruction; I 
being the King's lawful, as well as natural, protector?'

To this strange question, Lord Hastings replied, that they deserved 
death, whosoever they were.

'Then,' said the Duke, 'I tell you that they are that sorceress my 
brother's wife;' meaning the Queen:  'and that other sorceress, 
Jane Shore.  Who, by witchcraft, have withered my body, and caused 
my arm to shrink as I now show you.'

He then pulled up his sleeve and showed them his arm, which was 
shrunken, it is true, but which had been so, as they all very well 
knew, from the hour of his birth.

Jane Shore, being then the lover of Lord Hastings, as she had 
formerly been of the late King, that lord knew that he himself was 
attacked.  So, he said, in some confusion, 'Certainly, my Lord, if 
they have done this, they be worthy of punishment.'

'If?' said the Duke of Gloucester; 'do you talk to me of ifs?  I 
tell you that they HAVE so done, and I will make it good upon thy 
body, thou traitor!'

With that, he struck the table a great blow with his fist.  This 
was a signal to some of his people outside to cry 'Treason!'  They 
immediately did so, and there was a rush into the chamber of so 
many armed men that it was filled in a moment.

'First,' said the Duke of Gloucester to Lord Hastings, 'I arrest 
thee, traitor!  And let him,' he added to the armed men who took 
him, 'have a priest at once, for by St. Paul I will not dine until 
I have seen his head of!'

Lord Hastings was hurried to the green by the Tower chapel, and 
there beheaded on a log of wood that happened to be lying on the 
ground.  Then, the Duke dined with a good appetite, and after 
dinner summoning the principal citizens to attend him, told them 
that Lord Hastings and the rest had designed to murder both himself 
and the Duke if Buckingham, who stood by his side, if he had not 
providentially discovered their design.  He requested them to be so 
obliging as to inform their fellow-citizens of the truth of what he 
said, and issued a proclamation (prepared and neatly copied out 
beforehand) to the same effect.

On the same day that the Duke did these things in the Tower, Sir 
Richard Ratcliffe, the boldest and most undaunted of his men, went 
down to Pontefract; arrested Lord Rivers, Lord Gray, and two other 
gentlemen; and publicly executed them on the scaffold, without any 
trial, for having intended the Duke's death.  Three days afterwards 
the Duke, not to lose time, went down the river to Westminster in 
his barge, attended by divers bishops, lords, and soldiers, and 
demanded that the Queen should deliver her second son, the Duke of 
York, into his safe keeping.  The Queen, being obliged to comply, 
resigned the child after she had wept over him; and Richard of 
Gloucester placed him with his brother in the Tower.  Then, he 
seized Jane Shore, and, because she had been the lover of the late 
King, confiscated her property, and got her sentenced to do public 
penance in the streets by walking in a scanty dress, with bare 
feet, and carrying a lighted candle, to St. Paul's Cathedral, 
through the most crowded part of the City.

Having now all things ready for his own advancement, he caused a 
friar to preach a sermon at the cross which stood in front of St. 
Paul's Cathedral, in which he dwelt upon the profligate manners of 
the late King, and upon the late shame of Jane Shore, and hinted 
that the princes were not his children.  'Whereas, good people,' 
said the friar, whose name was SHAW, 'my Lord the Protector, the 
noble Duke of Gloucester, that sweet prince, the pattern of all the 
noblest virtues, is the perfect image and express likeness of his 
father.'  There had been a little plot between the Duke and the 
friar, that the Duke should appear in the crowd at this moment, 
when it was expected that the people would cry 'Long live King 
Richard!'  But, either through the friar saying the words too soon, 
or through the Duke's coming too late, the Duke and the words did 
not come together, and the people only laughed, and the friar 
sneaked off ashamed.

The Duke of Buckingham was a better hand at such business than the 
friar, so he went to the Guildhall the next day, and addressed the 
citizens in the Lord Protector's behalf.  A few dirty men, who had 
been hired and stationed there for the purpose, crying when he had 
done, 'God save King Richard!' he made them a great bow, and 
thanked them with all his heart.  Next day, to make an end of it, 
he went with the mayor and some lords and citizens to Bayard 
Castle, by the river, where Richard then was, and read an address, 
humbly entreating him to accept the Crown of England.  Richard, who 
looked down upon them out of a window and pretended to be in great 
uneasiness and alarm, assured them there was nothing he desired 
less, and that his deep affection for his nephews forbade him to 
think of it.  To this the Duke of Buckingham replied, with 
pretended warmth, that the free people of England would never 
submit to his nephew's rule, and that if Richard, who was the 
lawful heir, refused the Crown, why then they must find some one 
else to wear it.  The Duke of Gloucester returned, that since he 
used that strong language, it became his painful duty to think no 
more of himself, and to accept the Crown.

Upon that, the people cheered and dispersed; and the Duke of 
Gloucester and the Duke of Buckingham passed a pleasant evening, 
talking over the play they had just acted with so much success, and 
every word of which they had prepared together.



CHAPTER XXV - ENGLAND UNDER RICHARD THE THIRD



KING RICHARD THE THIRD was up betimes in the morning, and went to 
Westminster Hall.  In the Hall was a marble seat, upon which he sat 
himself down between two great noblemen, and told the people that 
he began the new reign in that place, because the first duty of a 
sovereign was to administer the laws equally to all, and to 
maintain justice.  He then mounted his horse and rode back to the 
City, where he was received by the clergy and the crowd as if he 
really had a right to the throne, and really were a just man.  The 
clergy and the crowd must have been rather ashamed of themselves in 
secret, I think, for being such poor-spirited knaves.

The new King and his Queen were soon crowned with a great deal of 
show and noise, which the people liked very much; and then the King 
set forth on a royal progress through his dominions.  He was 
crowned a second time at York, in order that the people might have 
show and noise enough; and wherever he went was received with 
shouts of rejoicing - from a good many people of strong lungs, who 
were paid to strain their throats in crying, 'God save King 
Richard!'  The plan was so successful that I am told it has been 
imitated since, by other usurpers, in other progresses through 
other dominions.

While he was on this journey, King Richard stayed a week at 
Warwick.  And from Warwick he sent instructions home for one of the 
wickedest murders that ever was done - the murder of the two young 
princes, his nephews, who were shut up in the Tower of London.

Sir Robert Brackenbury was at that time Governor of the Tower.  To 
him, by the hands of a messenger named JOHN GREEN, did King Richard 
send a letter, ordering him by some means to put the two young 
princes to death.  But Sir Robert - I hope because he had children 
of his own, and loved them - sent John Green back again, riding and 
spurring along the dusty roads, with the answer that he could not 
do so horrible a piece of work.  The King, having frowningly 
considered a little, called to him SIR JAMES TYRREL, his master of 
the horse, and to him gave authority to take command of the Tower, 
whenever he would, for twenty-four hours, and to keep all the keys 
of the Tower during that space of time.  Tyrrel, well knowing what 
was wanted, looked about him for two hardened ruffians, and chose 
JOHN DIGHTON, one of his own grooms, and MILES FOREST, who was a 
murderer by trade.  Having secured these two assistants, he went, 
upon a day in August, to the Tower, showed his authority from the 
King, took the command for four-and-twenty hours, and obtained 
possession of the keys.  And when the black night came he went 
creeping, creeping, like a guilty villain as he was, up the dark, 
stone winding stairs, and along the dark stone passages, until he 
came to the door of the room where the two young princes, having 
said their prayers, lay fast asleep, clasped in each other's arms.  
And while he watched and listened at the door, he sent in those 
evil demons, John Dighton and Miles Forest, who smothered the two 
princes with the bed and pillows, and carried their bodies down the 
stairs, and buried them under a great heap of stones at the 
staircase foot.  And when the day came, he gave up the command of 
the Tower, and restored the keys, and hurried away without once 
looking behind him; and Sir Robert Brackenbury went with fear and 
sadness to the princes' room, and found the princes gone for ever.

You know, through all this history, how true it is that traitors 
are never true, and you will not be surprised to learn that the 
Duke of Buckingham soon turned against King Richard, and joined a 
great conspiracy that was formed to dethrone him, and to place the 
crown upon its rightful owner's head.  Richard had meant to keep 
the murder secret; but when he heard through his spies that this 
conspiracy existed, and that many lords and gentlemen drank in 
secret to the healths of the two young princes in the Tower, he 
made it known that they were dead.  The conspirators, though 
thwarted for a moment, soon resolved to set up for the crown 
against the murderous Richard, HENRY Earl of Richmond, grandson of 
Catherine:  that widow of Henry the Fifth who married Owen Tudor.  
And as Henry was of the house of Lancaster, they proposed that he 
should marry the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of the 
late King, now the heiress of the house of York, and thus by 
uniting the rival families put an end to the fatal wars of the Red 
and White Roses.  All being settled, a time was appointed for Henry 
to come over from Brittany, and for a great rising against Richard 
to take place in several parts of England at the same hour.  On a 
certain day, therefore, in October, the revolt took place; but 
unsuccessfully.  Richard was prepared, Henry was driven back at sea 
by a storm, his followers in England were dispersed, and the Duke 
of Buckingham was taken, and at once beheaded in the market-place 
at Salisbury.

The time of his success was a good time, Richard thought, for 
summoning a Parliament and getting some money.  So, a Parliament 
was called, and it flattered and fawned upon him as much as he 
could possibly desire, and declared him to be the rightful King of 
England, and his only son Edward, then eleven years of age, the 
next heir to the throne.

Richard knew full well that, let the Parliament say what it would, 
the Princess Elizabeth was remembered by people as the heiress of 
the house of York; and having accurate information besides, of its 
being designed by the conspirators to marry her to Henry of 
Richmond, he felt that it would much strengthen him and weaken 
them, to be beforehand with them, and marry her to his son.  With 
this view he went to the Sanctuary at Westminster, where the late 
King's widow and her daughter still were, and besought them to come 
to Court:  where (he swore by anything and everything) they should 
be safely and honourably entertained.  They came, accordingly, but 
had scarcely been at Court a month when his son died suddenly - or 
was poisoned - and his plan was crushed to pieces.

In this extremity, King Richard, always active, thought, 'I must 
make another plan.'  And he made the plan of marrying the Princess 
Elizabeth himself, although she was his niece.  There was one 
difficulty in the way:  his wife, the Queen Anne, was alive.  But, 
he knew (remembering his nephews) how to remove that obstacle, and 
he made love to the Princess Elizabeth, telling her he felt 
perfectly confident that the Queen would die in February.  The 
Princess was not a very scrupulous young lady, for, instead of 
rejecting the murderer of her brothers with scorn and hatred, she 
openly declared she loved him dearly; and, when February came and 
the Queen did not die, she expressed her impatient opinion that she 
was too long about it.  However, King Richard was not so far out in 
his prediction, but, that she died in March - he took good care of 
that - and then this precious pair hoped to be married.  But they 
were disappointed, for the idea of such a marriage was so unpopular 
in the country, that the King's chief counsellors, RATCLIFFE and 
CATESBY, would by no means undertake to propose it, and the King 
was even obliged to declare in public that he had never thought of 
such a thing.

He was, by this time, dreaded and hated by all classes of his 
subjects.  His nobles deserted every day to Henry's side; he dared 
not call another Parliament, lest his crimes should be denounced 
there; and for want of money, he was obliged to get Benevolences 
from the citizens, which exasperated them all against him.  It was 
said too, that, being stricken by his conscience, he dreamed 
frightful dreams, and started up in the night-time, wild with 
terror and remorse.  Active to the last, through all this, he 
issued vigorous proclamations against Henry of Richmond and all his 
followers, when he heard that they were coming against him with a 
Fleet from France; and took the field as fierce and savage as a 
wild boar - the animal represented on his shield.

Henry of Richmond landed with six thousand men at Milford Haven, 
and came on against King Richard, then encamped at Leicester with 
an army twice as great, through North Wales.  On Bosworth Field the 
two armies met; and Richard, looking along Henry's ranks, and 
seeing them crowded with the English nobles who had abandoned him, 
turned pale when he beheld the powerful Lord Stanley and his son 
(whom he had tried hard to retain) among them.  But, he was as 
brave as he was wicked, and plunged into the thickest of the fight.  
He was riding hither and thither, laying about him in all 
directions, when he observed the Earl of Northumberland - one of 
his few great allies - to stand inactive, and the main body of his 
troops to hesitate.  At the same moment, his desperate glance 
caught Henry of Richmond among a little group of his knights.  
Riding hard at him, and crying 'Treason!' he killed his standard-
bearer, fiercely unhorsed another gentleman, and aimed a powerful 
stroke at Henry himself, to cut him down.  But, Sir William Stanley 
parried it as it fell, and before Richard could raise his arm 
again, he was borne down in a press of numbers, unhorsed, and 
killed.  Lord Stanley picked up the crown, all bruised and 
trampled, and stained with blood, and put it upon Richmond's head, 
amid loud and rejoicing cries of 'Long live King Henry!'

That night, a horse was led up to the church of the Grey Friars at 
Leicester; across whose back was tied, like some worthless sack, a 
naked body brought there for burial.  It was the body of the last 
of the Plantagenet line, King Richard the Third, usurper and 
murderer, slain at the battle of Bosworth Field in the thirty-
second year of his age, after a reign of two years.



CHAPTER XXVI - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE SEVENTH



KING HENRY THE SEVENTH did not turn out to be as fine a fellow as 
the nobility and people hoped, in the first joy of their 
deliverance from Richard the Third.  He was very cold, crafty, and 
calculating, and would do almost anything for money.  He possessed 
considerable ability, but his chief merit appears to have been that 
he was not cruel when there was nothing to be got by it.

The new King had promised the nobles who had espoused his cause 
that he would marry the Princess Elizabeth.  The first thing he 
did, was, to direct her to be removed from the castle of Sheriff 
Hutton in Yorkshire, where Richard had placed her, and restored to 
the care of her mother in London.  The young Earl of Warwick, 
Edward Plantagenet, son and heir of the late Duke of Clarence, had 
been kept a prisoner in the same old Yorkshire Castle with her.  
This boy, who was now fifteen, the new King placed in the Tower for 
safety.  Then he came to London in great state, and gratified the 
people with a fine procession; on which kind of show he often very 
much relied for keeping them in good humour.  The sports and feasts 
which took place were followed by a terrible fever, called the 
Sweating Sickness; of which great numbers of people died.  Lord 
Mayors and Aldermen are thought to have suffered most from it; 
whether, because they were in the habit of over-eating themselves, 
or because they were very jealous of preserving filth and nuisances 
in the City (as they have been since), I don't know.

The King's coronation was postponed on account of the general ill-
health, and he afterwards deferred his marriage, as if he were not 
very anxious that it should take place:  and, even after that, 
deferred the Queen's coronation so long that he gave offence to the 
York party.  However, he set these things right in the end, by 
hanging some men and seizing on the rich possessions of others; by 
granting more popular pardons to the followers of the late King 
than could, at first, be got from him; and, by employing about his 
Court, some very scrupulous persons who had been employed in the 
previous reign.

As this reign was principally remarkable for two very curious 
impostures which have become famous in history, we will make those 
two stories its principal feature.

There was a priest at Oxford of the name of Simons, who had for a 
pupil a handsome boy named Lambert Simnel, the son of a baker.  
Partly to gratify his own ambitious ends, and partly to carry out 
the designs of a secret party formed against the King, this priest 
declared that his pupil, the boy, was no other than the young Earl 
of Warwick; who (as everybody might have known) was safely locked 
up in the Tower of London.  The priest and the boy went over to 
Ireland; and, at Dublin, enlisted in their cause all ranks of the 
people:  who seem to have been generous enough, but exceedingly 
irrational.  The Earl of Kildare, the governor of Ireland, declared 
that he believed the boy to be what the priest represented; and the 
boy, who had been well tutored by the priest, told them such things 
of his childhood, and gave them so many descriptions of the Royal 
Family, that they were perpetually shouting and hurrahing, and 
drinking his health, and making all kinds of noisy and thirsty 
demonstrations, to express their belief in him.  Nor was this 
feeling confined to Ireland alone, for the Earl of Lincoln - whom 
the late usurper had named as his successor - went over to the 
young Pretender; and, after holding a secret correspondence with 
the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy - the sister of Edward the Fourth, 
who detested the present King and all his race - sailed to Dublin 
with two thousand German soldiers of her providing.  In this 
promising state of the boy's fortunes, he was crowned there, with a 
crown taken off the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary; and was 
then, according to the Irish custom of those days, carried home on 
the shoulders of a big chieftain possessing a great deal more 
strength than sense.  Father Simons, you may be sure, was mighty 
busy at the coronation.

Ten days afterwards, the Germans, and the Irish, and the priest, 
and the boy, and the Earl of Lincoln, all landed in Lancashire to 
invade England.  The King, who had good intelligence of their 
movements, set up his standard at Nottingham, where vast numbers 
resorted to him every day; while the Earl of Lincoln could gain but 
very few.  With his small force he tried to make for the town of 
Newark; but the King's army getting between him and that place, he 
had no choice but to risk a battle at Stoke.  It soon ended in the 
complete destruction of the Pretender's forces, one half of whom 
were killed; among them, the Earl himself.  The priest and the 
baker's boy were taken prisoners.  The priest, after confessing the 
trick, was shut up in prison, where he afterwards died - suddenly 
perhaps.  The boy was taken into the King's kitchen and made a 
turnspit.  He was afterwards raised to the station of one of the 
King's falconers; and so ended this strange imposition.

There seems reason to suspect that the Dowager Queen - always a 
restless and busy woman - had had some share in tutoring the 
baker's son.  The King was very angry with her, whether or no.  He 
seized upon her property, and shut her up in a convent at 
Bermondsey.

One might suppose that the end of this story would have put the 
Irish people on their guard; but they were quite ready to receive a 
second impostor, as they had received the first, and that same 
troublesome Duchess of Burgundy soon gave them the opportunity.  
All of a sudden there appeared at Cork, in a vessel arriving from 
Portugal, a young man of excellent abilities, of very handsome 
appearance and most winning manners, who declared himself to be 
Richard, Duke of York, the second son of King Edward the Fourth.  
'O,' said some, even of those ready Irish believers, 'but surely 
that young Prince was murdered by his uncle in the Tower!' - 'It IS 
supposed so,' said the engaging young man; 'and my brother WAS 
killed in that gloomy prison; but I escaped - it don't matter how, 
at present - and have been wandering about the world for seven long 
years.'  This explanation being quite satisfactory to numbers of 
the Irish people, they began again to shout and to hurrah, and to 
drink his health, and to make the noisy and thirsty demonstrations 
all over again.  And the big chieftain in Dublin began to look out 
for another coronation, and another young King to be carried home 
on his back.

Now, King Henry being then on bad terms with France, the French 
King, Charles the Eighth, saw that, by pretending to believe in the 
handsome young man, he could trouble his enemy sorely.  So, he 
invited him over to the French Court, and appointed him a body-
guard, and treated him in all respects as if he really were the 
Duke of York.  Peace, however, being soon concluded between the two 
Kings, the pretended Duke was turned adrift, and wandered for 
protection to the Duchess of Burgundy.  She, after feigning to 
inquire into the reality of his claims, declared him to be the very 
picture of her dear departed brother; gave him a body-guard at her 
Court, of thirty halberdiers; and called him by the sounding name 
of the White Rose of England.

The leading members of the White Rose party in England sent over an 
agent, named Sir Robert Clifford, to ascertain whether the White 
Rose's claims were good:  the King also sent over his agents to 
inquire into the Rose's history.  The White Roses declared the 
young man to be really the Duke of York; the King declared him to 
be PERKIN WARBECK, the son of a merchant of the city of Tournay, 
who had acquired his knowledge of England, its language and 
manners, from the English merchants who traded in Flanders; it was 
also stated by the Royal agents that he had been in the service of 
Lady Brompton, the wife of an exiled English nobleman, and that the 
Duchess of Burgundy had caused him to be trained and taught, 
expressly for this deception.  The King then required the Archduke 
Philip - who was the sovereign of Burgundy - to banish this new 
Pretender, or to deliver him up; but, as the Archduke replied that 
he could not control the Duchess in her own land, the King, in 
revenge, took the market of English cloth away from Antwerp, and 
prevented all commercial intercourse between the two countries.

He also, by arts and bribes, prevailed on Sir Robert Clifford to 
betray his employers; and he denouncing several famous English 
noblemen as being secretly the friends of Perkin Warbeck, the King 
had three of the foremost executed at once.  Whether he pardoned 
the remainder because they were poor, I do not know; but it is only 
too probable that he refused to pardon one famous nobleman against 
whom the same Clifford soon afterwards informed separately, because 
he was rich.  This was no other than Sir William Stanley, who had 
saved the King's life at the battle of Bosworth Field.  It is very 
doubtful whether his treason amounted to much more than his having 
said, that if he were sure the young man was the Duke of York, he 
would not take arms against him.  Whatever he had done he admitted, 
like an honourable spirit; and he lost his head for it, and the 
covetous King gained all his wealth.

Perkin Warbeck kept quiet for three years; but, as the Flemings 
began to complain heavily of the loss of their trade by the 
stoppage of the Antwerp market on his account, and as it was not 
unlikely that they might even go so far as to take his life, or 
give him up, he found it necessary to do something.  Accordingly he 
made a desperate sally, and landed, with only a few hundred men, on 
the coast of Deal.  But he was soon glad to get back to the place 
from whence he came; for the country people rose against his 
followers, killed a great many, and took a hundred and fifty 
prisoners:  who were all driven to London, tied together with 
ropes, like a team of cattle.  Every one of them was hanged on some 
part or other of the sea-shore; in order, that if any more men 
should come over with Perkin Warbeck, they might see the bodies as 
a warning before they landed.

Then the wary King, by making a treaty of commerce with the 
Flemings, drove Perkin Warbeck out of that country; and, by 
completely gaining over the Irish to his side, deprived him of that 
asylum too.  He wandered away to Scotland, and told his story at 
that Court.  King James the Fourth of Scotland, who was no friend 
to King Henry, and had no reason to be (for King Henry had bribed 
his Scotch lords to betray him more than once; but had never 
succeeded in his plots), gave him a great reception, called him his 
cousin, and gave him in marriage the Lady Catherine Gordon, a 
beautiful and charming creature related to the royal house of 
Stuart.

Alarmed by this successful reappearance of the Pretender, the King 
still undermined, and bought, and bribed, and kept his doings and 
Perkin Warbeck's story in the dark, when he might, one would 
imagine, have rendered the matter clear to all England.  But, for 
all this bribing of the Scotch lords at the Scotch King's Court, he 
could not procure the Pretender to be delivered up to him.  James, 
though not very particular in many respects, would not betray him; 
and the ever-busy Duchess of Burgundy so provided him with arms, 
and good soldiers, and with money besides, that he had soon a 
little army of fifteen hundred men of various nations.  With these, 
and aided by the Scottish King in person, he crossed the border 
into England, and made a proclamation to the people, in which he 
called the King 'Henry Tudor;' offered large rewards to any who 
should take or distress him; and announced himself as King Richard 
the Fourth come to receive the homage of his faithful subjects.  
His faithful subjects, however, cared nothing for him, and hated 
his faithful troops:  who, being of different nations, quarrelled 
also among themselves.  Worse than this, if worse were possible, 
they began to plunder the country; upon which the White Rose said, 
that he would rather lose his rights, than gain them through the 
miseries of the English people.  The Scottish King made a jest of 
his scruples; but they and their whole force went back again 
without fighting a battle.

The worst consequence of this attempt was, that a rising took place 
among the people of Cornwall, who considered themselves too heavily 
taxed to meet the charges of the expected war.  Stimulated by 
Flammock, a lawyer, and Joseph, a blacksmith, and joined by Lord 
Audley and some other country gentlemen, they marched on all the 
way to Deptford Bridge, where they fought a battle with the King's 
army.  They were defeated - though the Cornish men fought with 
great bravery - and the lord was beheaded, and the lawyer and the 
blacksmith were hanged, drawn, and quartered.  The rest were 
pardoned.  The King, who believed every man to be as avaricious as 
himself, and thought that money could settle anything, allowed them 
to make bargains for their liberty with the soldiers who had taken 
them.

Perkin Warbeck, doomed to wander up and down, and never to find 
rest anywhere - a sad fate:  almost a sufficient punishment for an 
imposture, which he seems in time to have half believed himself - 
lost his Scottish refuge through a truce being made between the two 
Kings; and found himself, once more, without a country before him 
in which he could lay his head.  But James (always honourable and 
true to him, alike when he melted down his plate, and even the 
great gold chain he had been used to wear, to pay soldiers in his 
cause; and now, when that cause was lost and hopeless) did not 
conclude the treaty, until he had safely departed out of the 
Scottish dominions.  He, and his beautiful wife, who was faithful 
to him under all reverses, and left her state and home to follow 
his poor fortunes, were put aboard ship with everything necessary 
for their comfort and protection, and sailed for Ireland.

But, the Irish people had had enough of counterfeit Earls of 
Warwick and Dukes of York, for one while; and would give the White 
Rose no aid.  So, the White Rose - encircled by thorns indeed - 
resolved to go with his beautiful wife to Cornwall as a forlorn 
resource, and see what might be made of the Cornish men, who had 
risen so valiantly a little while before, and who had fought so 
bravely at Deptford Bridge.

To Whitsand Bay, in Cornwall, accordingly, came Perkin Warbeck and 
his wife; and the lovely lady he shut up for safety in the Castle 
of St. Michael's Mount, and then marched into Devonshire at the 
head of three thousand Cornishmen.  These were increased to six 
thousand by the time of his arrival in Exeter; but, there the 
people made a stout resistance, and he went on to Taunton, where he 
came in sight of the King's army.  The stout Cornish men, although 
they were few in number, and badly armed, were so bold, that they 
never thought of retreating; but bravely looked forward to a battle 
on the morrow.  Unhappily for them, the man who was possessed of so 
many engaging qualities, and who attracted so many people to his 
side when he had nothing else with which to tempt them, was not as 
brave as they.  In the night, when the two armies lay opposite to 
each other, he mounted a swift horse and fled.  When morning 
dawned, the poor confiding Cornish men, discovering that they had 
no leader, surrendered to the King's power.  Some of them were 
hanged, and the rest were pardoned and went miserably home.

Before the King pursued Perkin Warbeck to the sanctuary of Beaulieu 
in the New Forest, where it was soon known that he had taken 
refuge, he sent a body of horsemen to St. Michael's Mount, to seize 
his wife.  She was soon taken and brought as a captive before the 
King.  But she was so beautiful, and so good, and so devoted to the 
man in whom she believed, that the King regarded her with 
compassion, treated her with great respect, and placed her at 
Court, near the Queen's person.  And many years after Perkin 
Warbeck was no more, and when his strange story had become like a 
nursery tale, SHE was called the White Rose, by the people, in 
remembrance of her beauty.

The sanctuary at Beaulieu was soon surrounded by the King's men; 
and the King, pursuing his usual dark, artful ways, sent pretended 
friends to Perkin Warbeck to persuade him to come out and surrender 
himself.  This he soon did; the King having taken a good look at 
the man of whom he had heard so much - from behind a screen - 
directed him to be well mounted, and to ride behind him at a little 
distance, guarded, but not bound in any way.  So they entered 
London with the King's favourite show - a procession; and some of 
the people hooted as the Pretender rode slowly through the streets 
to the Tower; but the greater part were quiet, and very curious to 
see him.  From the Tower, he was taken to the Palace at 
Westminster, and there lodged like a gentleman, though closely 
watched.  He was examined every now and then as to his imposture; 
but the King was so secret in all he did, that even then he gave it 
a consequence, which it cannot be supposed to have in itself 
deserved.

At last Perkin Warbeck ran away, and took refuge in another 
sanctuary near Richmond in Surrey.  From this he was again 
persuaded to deliver himself up; and, being conveyed to London, he 
stood in the stocks for a whole day, outside Westminster Hall, and 
there read a paper purporting to be his full confession, and 
relating his history as the King's agents had originally described 
it.  He was then shut up in the Tower again, in the company of the 
Earl of Warwick, who had now been there for fourteen years:  ever 
since his removal out of Yorkshire, except when the King had had 
him at Court, and had shown him to the people, to prove the 
imposture of the Baker's boy.  It is but too probable, when we 
consider the crafty character of Henry the Seventh, that these two 
were brought together for a cruel purpose.  A plot was soon 
discovered between them and the keepers, to murder the Governor, 
get possession of the keys, and proclaim Perkin Warbeck as King 
Richard the Fourth.  That there was some such plot, is likely; that 
they were tempted into it, is at least as likely; that the 
unfortunate Earl of Warwick - last male of the Plantagenet line - 
was too unused to the world, and too ignorant and simple to know 
much about it, whatever it was, is perfectly certain; and that it 
was the King's interest to get rid of him, is no less so.  He was 
beheaded on Tower Hill, and Perkin Warbeck was hanged at Tyburn.

Such was the end of the pretended Duke of York, whose shadowy 
history was made more shadowy - and ever will be - by the mystery 
and craft of the King.  If he had turned his great natural 
advantages to a more honest account, he might have lived a happy 
and respected life, even in those days.  But he died upon a gallows 
at Tyburn, leaving the Scottish lady, who had loved him so well, 
kindly protected at the Queen's Court.  After some time she forgot 
her old loves and troubles, as many people do with Time's merciful 
assistance, and married a Welsh gentleman.  Her second husband, SIR 
MATTHEW CRADOC, more honest and more happy than her first, lies 
beside her in a tomb in the old church of Swansea.

The ill-blood between France and England in this reign, arose out 
of the continued plotting of the Duchess of Burgundy, and disputes 
respecting the affairs of Brittany.  The King feigned to be very 
patriotic, indignant, and warlike; but he always contrived so as 
never to make war in reality, and always to make money.  His 
taxation of the people, on pretence of war with France, involved, 
at one time, a very dangerous insurrection, headed by Sir John 
Egremont, and a common man called John a Chambre.  But it was 
subdued by the royal forces, under the command of the Earl of 
Surrey.  The knighted John escaped to the Duchess of Burgundy, who 
was ever ready to receive any one who gave the King trouble; and 
the plain John was hanged at York, in the midst of a number of his 
men, but on a much higher gibbet, as being a greater traitor.  Hung 
high or hung low, however, hanging is much the same to the person 
hung.

Within a year after her marriage, the Queen had given birth to a 
son, who was called Prince Arthur, in remembrance of the old 
British prince of romance and story; and who, when all these events 
had happened, being then in his fifteenth year, was married to 
CATHERINE, the daughter of the Spanish monarch, with great 
rejoicings and bright prospects; but in a very few months he 
sickened and died.  As soon as the King had recovered from his 
grief, he thought it a pity that the fortune of the Spanish 
Princess, amounting to two hundred thousand crowns, should go out 
of the family; and therefore arranged that the young widow should 
marry his second son HENRY, then twelve years of age, when he too 
should be fifteen.  There were objections to this marriage on the 
part of the clergy; but, as the infallible Pope was gained over, 
and, as he MUST be right, that settled the business for the time.  
The King's eldest daughter was provided for, and a long course of 
disturbance was considered to be set at rest, by her being married 
to the Scottish King.

And now the Queen died.  When the King had got over that grief too, 
his mind once more reverted to his darling money for consolation, 
and he thought of marrying the Dowager Queen of Naples, who was 
immensely rich:  but, as it turned out not to be practicable to 
gain the money however practicable it might have been to gain the 
lady, he gave up the idea.  He was not so fond of her but that he 
soon proposed to marry the Dowager Duchess of Savoy; and, soon 
afterwards, the widow of the King of Castile, who was raving mad.  
But he made a money-bargain instead, and married neither.

The Duchess of Burgundy, among the other discontented people to 
whom she had given refuge, had sheltered EDMUND DE LA POLE (younger 
brother of that Earl of Lincoln who was killed at Stoke), now Earl 
of Suffolk.  The King had prevailed upon him to return to the 
marriage of Prince Arthur; but, he soon afterwards went away again; 
and then the King, suspecting a conspiracy, resorted to his 
favourite plan of sending him some treacherous friends, and buying 
of those scoundrels the secrets they disclosed or invented.  Some 
arrests and executions took place in consequence.  In the end, the 
King, on a promise of not taking his life, obtained possession of 
the person of Edmund de la Pole, and shut him up in the Tower.

This was his last enemy.  If he had lived much longer he would have 
made many more among the people, by the grinding exaction to which 
he constantly exposed them, and by the tyrannical acts of his two 
prime favourites in all money-raising matters, EDMUND DUDLEY and 
RICHARD EMPSON.  But Death - the enemy who is not to be bought off 
or deceived, and on whom no money, and no treachery has any effect 
- presented himself at this juncture, and ended the King's reign.  
He died of the gout, on the twenty-second of April, one thousand 
five hundred and nine, and in the fifty-third year of his age, 
after reigning twenty-four years; he was buried in the beautiful 
Chapel of Westminster Abbey, which he had himself founded, and 
which still bears his name.

It was in this reign that the great CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, on behalf 
of Spain, discovered what was then called The New World.  Great 
wonder, interest, and hope of wealth being awakened in England 
thereby, the King and the merchants of London and Bristol fitted 
out an English expedition for further discoveries in the New World, 
and entrusted it to SEBASTIAN CABOT, of Bristol, the son of a 
Venetian pilot there.  He was very successful in his voyage, and 
gained high reputation, both for himself and England.



CHAPTER XXVII - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE EIGHTH, CALLED BLUFF KING 
HAL AND BURLY KING HARRY



PART THE FIRST


WE now come to King Henry the Eighth, whom it has been too much the 
fashion to call 'Bluff King Hal,' and 'Burly King Harry,' and other 
fine names; but whom I shall take the liberty to call, plainly, one 
of the most detestable villains that ever drew breath.  You will be 
able to judge, long before we come to the end of his life, whether 
he deserves the character.

He was just eighteen years of age when he came to the throne.  
People said he was handsome then; but I don't believe it.  He was a 
big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, 
swinish-looking fellow in later life (as we know from the 
likenesses of him, painted by the famous HANS HOLBEIN), and it is 
not easy to believe that so bad a character can ever have been 
veiled under a prepossessing appearance.

He was anxious to make himself popular; and the people, who had 
long disliked the late King, were very willing to believe that he 
deserved to be so.  He was extremely fond of show and display, and 
so were they.  Therefore there was great rejoicing when he married 
the Princess Catherine, and when they were both crowned.  And the 
King fought at tournaments and always came off victorious - for the 
courtiers took care of that - and there was a general outcry that 
he was a wonderful man.  Empson, Dudley, and their supporters were 
accused of a variety of crimes they had never committed, instead of 
the offences of which they really had been guilty; and they were 
pilloried, and set upon horses with their faces to the tails, and 
knocked about and beheaded, to the satisfaction of the people, and 
the enrichment of the King.

The Pope, so indefatigable in getting the world into trouble, had 
mixed himself up in a war on the continent of Europe, occasioned by 
the reigning Princes of little quarrelling states in Italy having 
at various times married into other Royal families, and so led to 
THEIR claiming a share in those petty Governments.  The King, who 
discovered that he was very fond of the Pope, sent a herald to the 
King of France, to say that he must not make war upon that holy 
personage, because he was the father of all Christians.  As the 
French King did not mind this relationship in the least, and also 
refused to admit a claim King Henry made to certain lands in 
France, war was declared between the two countries.  Not to perplex 
this story with an account of the tricks and designs of all the 
sovereigns who were engaged in it, it is enough to say that England 
made a blundering alliance with Spain, and got stupidly taken in by 
that country; which made its own terms with France when it could 
and left England in the lurch.  SIR EDWARD HOWARD, a bold admiral, 
son of the Earl of Surrey, distinguished himself by his bravery 
against the French in this business; but, unfortunately, he was 
more brave than wise, for, skimming into the French harbour of 
Brest with only a few row-boats, he attempted (in revenge for the 
defeat and death of SIR THOMAS KNYVETT, another bold English 
admiral) to take some strong French ships, well defended with 
batteries of cannon.  The upshot was, that he was left on board of 
one of them (in consequence of its shooting away from his own 
boat), with not more than about a dozen men, and was thrown into 
the sea and drowned:  though not until he had taken from his breast 
his gold chain and gold whistle, which were the signs of his 
office, and had cast them into the sea to prevent their being made 
a boast of by the enemy.  After this defeat - which was a great 
one, for Sir Edward Howard was a man of valour and fame - the King 
took it into his head to invade France in person; first executing 
that dangerous Earl of Suffolk whom his father had left in the 
Tower, and appointing Queen Catherine to the charge of his kingdom 
in his absence.  He sailed to Calais, where he was joined by 
MAXIMILIAN, Emperor of Germany, who pretended to be his soldier, 
and who took pay in his service:  with a good deal of nonsense of 
that sort, flattering enough to the vanity of a vain blusterer.  
The King might be successful enough in sham fights; but his idea of 
real battles chiefly consisted in pitching silken tents of bright 
colours that were ignominiously blown down by the wind, and in 
making a vast display of gaudy flags and golden curtains.  Fortune, 
however, favoured him better than he deserved; for, after much 
waste of time in tent pitching, flag flying, gold curtaining, and 
other such masquerading, he gave the French battle at a place 
called Guinegate:  where they took such an unaccountable panic, and 
fled with such swiftness, that it was ever afterwards called by the 
English the Battle of Spurs.  Instead of following up his 
advantage, the King, finding that he had had enough of real 
fighting, came home again.

The Scottish King, though nearly related to Henry by marriage, had 
taken part against him in this war.  The Earl of Surrey, as the 
English general, advanced to meet him when he came out of his own 
dominions and crossed the river Tweed.  The two armies came up with 
one another when the Scottish King had also crossed the river Till, 
and was encamped upon the last of the Cheviot Hills, called the 
Hill of Flodden.  Along the plain below it, the English, when the 
hour of battle came, advanced.  The Scottish army, which had been 
drawn up in five great bodies, then came steadily down in perfect 
silence.  So they, in their turn, advanced to meet the English 
army, which came on in one long line; and they attacked it with a 
body of spearmen, under LORD HOME.  At first they had the best of 
it; but the English recovered themselves so bravely, and fought 
with such valour, that, when the Scottish King had almost made his 
way up to the Royal Standard, he was slain, and the whole Scottish 
power routed.  Ten thousand Scottish men lay dead that day on 
Flodden Field; and among them, numbers of the nobility and gentry.  
For a long time afterwards, the Scottish peasantry used to believe 
that their King had not been really killed in this battle, because 
no Englishman had found an iron belt he wore about his body as a 
penance for having been an unnatural and undutiful son.  But, 
whatever became of his belt, the English had his sword and dagger, 
and the ring from his finger, and his body too, covered with 
wounds.  There is no doubt of it; for it was seen and recognised by 
English gentlemen who had known the Scottish King well.

When King Henry was making ready to renew the war in France, the 
French King was contemplating peace.  His queen, dying at this 
time, he proposed, though he was upwards of fifty years old, to 
marry King Henry's sister, the Princess Mary, who, besides being 
only sixteen, was betrothed to the Duke of Suffolk.  As the 
inclinations of young Princesses were not much considered in such 
matters, the marriage was concluded, and the poor girl was escorted 
to France, where she was immediately left as the French King's 
bride, with only one of all her English attendants.  That one was a 
pretty young girl named ANNE BOLEYN, niece of the Earl of Surrey, 
who had been made Duke of Norfolk, after the victory of Flodden 
Field.  Anne Boleyn's is a name to be remembered, as you will 
presently find.

And now the French King, who was very proud of his young wife, was 
preparing for many years of happiness, and she was looking forward, 
I dare say, to many years of misery, when he died within three 
months, and left her a young widow.  The new French monarch, 
FRANCIS THE FIRST, seeing how important it was to his interests 
that she should take for her second husband no one but an 
Englishman, advised her first lover, the Duke of Suffolk, when King 
Henry sent him over to France to fetch her home, to marry her.  The 
Princess being herself so fond of that Duke, as to tell him that he 
must either do so then, or for ever lose her, they were wedded; and 
Henry afterwards forgave them.  In making interest with the King, 
the Duke of Suffolk had addressed his most powerful favourite and 
adviser, THOMAS WOLSEY - a name very famous in history for its rise 
and downfall.

Wolsey was the son of a respectable butcher at Ipswich, in Suffolk 
and received so excellent an education that he became a tutor to 
the family of the Marquis of Dorset, who afterwards got him 
appointed one of the late King's chaplains.  On the accession of 
Henry the Eighth, he was promoted and taken into great favour.  He 
was now Archbishop of York; the Pope had made him a Cardinal 
besides; and whoever wanted influence in England or favour with the 
King - whether he were a foreign monarch or an English nobleman - 
was obliged to make a friend of the great Cardinal Wolsey.

He was a gay man, who could dance and jest, and sing and drink; and 
those were the roads to so much, or rather so little, of a heart as 
King Henry had.  He was wonderfully fond of pomp and glitter, and 
so was the King.  He knew a good deal of the Church learning of 
that time; much of which consisted in finding artful excuses and 
pretences for almost any wrong thing, and in arguing that black was 
white, or any other colour.  This kind of learning pleased the King 
too.  For many such reasons, the Cardinal was high in estimation 
with the King; and, being a man of far greater ability, knew as 
well how to manage him, as a clever keeper may know how to manage a 
wolf or a tiger, or any other cruel and uncertain beast, that may 
turn upon him and tear him any day.  Never had there been seen in 
England such state as my Lord Cardinal kept.  His wealth was 
enormous; equal, it was reckoned, to the riches of the Crown.  His 
palaces were as splendid as the King's, and his retinue was eight 
hundred strong.  He held his Court, dressed out from top to toe in 
flaming scarlet; and his very shoes were golden, set with precious 
stones.  His followers rode on blood horses; while he, with a 
wonderful affectation of humility in the midst of his great 
splendour, ambled on a mule with a red velvet saddle and bridle and 
golden stirrups.

Through the influence of this stately priest, a grand meeting was 
arranged to take place between the French and English Kings in 
France; but on ground belonging to England.  A prodigious show of 
friendship and rejoicing was to be made on the occasion; and 
heralds were sent to proclaim with brazen trumpets through all the 
principal cities of Europe, that, on a certain day, the Kings of 
France and England, as companions and brothers in arms, each 
attended by eighteen followers, would hold a tournament against all 
knights who might choose to come.

CHARLES, the new Emperor of Germany (the old one being dead), 
wanted to prevent too cordial an alliance between these sovereigns, 
and came over to England before the King could repair to the place 
of meeting; and, besides making an agreeable impression upon him, 
secured Wolsey's interest by promising that his influence should 
make him Pope when the next vacancy occurred.  On the day when the 
Emperor left England, the King and all the Court went over to 
Calais, and thence to the place of meeting, between Ardres and 
Guisnes, commonly called the Field of the Cloth of Gold.  Here, all 
manner of expense and prodigality was lavished on the decorations 
of the show; many of the knights and gentlemen being so superbly 
dressed that it was said they carried their whole estates upon 
their shoulders.

There were sham castles, temporary chapels, fountains running wine, 
great cellars full of wine free as water to all comers, silk tents, 
gold lace and foil, gilt lions, and such things without end; and, 
in the midst of all, the rich Cardinal out-shone and out-glittered 
all the noblemen and gentlemen assembled.  After a treaty made 
between the two Kings with as much solemnity as if they had 
intended to keep it, the lists - nine hundred feet long, and three 
hundred and twenty broad - were opened for the tournament; the 
Queens of France and England looking on with great array of lords 
and ladies.  Then, for ten days, the two sovereigns fought five 
combats every day, and always beat their polite adversaries; though 
they DO write that the King of England, being thrown in a wrestle 
one day by the King of France, lost his kingly temper with his 
brother-in-arms, and wanted to make a quarrel of it.  Then, there 
is a great story belonging to this Field of the Cloth of Gold, 
showing how the English were distrustful of the French, and the 
French of the English, until Francis rode alone one morning to 
Henry's tent; and, going in before he was out of bed, told him in 
joke that he was his prisoner; and how Henry jumped out of bed and 
embraced Francis; and how Francis helped Henry to dress, and warmed 
his linen for him; and how Henry gave Francis a splendid jewelled 
collar, and how Francis gave Henry, in return, a costly bracelet.  
All this and a great deal more was so written about, and sung 
about, and talked about at that time (and, indeed, since that time 
too), that the world has had good cause to be sick of it, for ever.

Of course, nothing came of all these fine doings but a speedy 
renewal of the war between England and France, in which the two 
Royal companions and brothers in arms longed very earnestly to 
damage one another.  But, before it broke out again, the Duke of 
Buckingham was shamefully executed on Tower Hill, on the evidence 
of a discharged servant - really for nothing, except the folly of 
having believed in a friar of the name of HOPKINS, who had 
pretended to be a prophet, and who had mumbled and jumbled out some 
nonsense about the Duke's son being destined to be very great in 
the land.  It was believed that the unfortunate Duke had given 
offence to the great Cardinal by expressing his mind freely about 
the expense and absurdity of the whole business of the Field of the 
Cloth of Gold.  At any rate, he was beheaded, as I have said, for 
nothing.  And the people who saw it done were very angry, and cried 
out that it was the work of 'the butcher's son!'

The new war was a short one, though the Earl of Surrey invaded 
France again, and did some injury to that country.  It ended in 
another treaty of peace between the two kingdoms, and in the 
discovery that the Emperor of Germany was not such a good friend to 
England in reality, as he pretended to be.  Neither did he keep his 
promise to Wolsey to make him Pope, though the King urged him.  Two 
Popes died in pretty quick succession; but the foreign priests were 
too much for the Cardinal, and kept him out of the post.  So the 
Cardinal and King together found out that the Emperor of Germany 
was not a man to keep faith with; broke off a projected marriage 
between the King's daughter MARY, Princess of Wales, and that 
sovereign; and began to consider whether it might not be well to 
marry the young lady, either to Francis himself, or to his eldest 
son.

There now arose at Wittemberg, in Germany, the great leader of the 
mighty change in England which is called The Reformation, and which 
set the people free from their slavery to the priests.  This was a 
learned Doctor, named MARTIN LUTHER, who knew all about them, for 
he had been a priest, and even a monk, himself.  The preaching and 
writing of Wickliffe had set a number of men thinking on this 
subject; and Luther, finding one day to his great surprise, that 
there really was a book called the New Testament which the priests 
did not allow to be read, and which contained truths that they 
suppressed, began to be very vigorous against the whole body, from 
the Pope downward.  It happened, while he was yet only beginning 
his vast work of awakening the nation, that an impudent fellow 
named TETZEL, a friar of very bad character, came into his 
neighbourhood selling what were called Indulgences, by wholesale, 
to raise money for beautifying the great Cathedral of St. Peter's, 
at Rome.  Whoever bought an Indulgence of the Pope was supposed to 
buy himself off from the punishment of Heaven for his offences.  
Luther told the people that these Indulgences were worthless bits 
of paper, before God, and that Tetzel and his masters were a crew 
of impostors in selling them.

The King and the Cardinal were mightily indignant at this 
presumption; and the King (with the help of SIR THOMAS MORE, a wise 
man, whom he afterwards repaid by striking off his head) even wrote 
a book about it, with which the Pope was so well pleased that he 
gave the King the title of Defender of the Faith.  The King and the 
Cardinal also issued flaming warnings to the people not to read 
Luther's books, on pain of excommunication.  But they did read them 
for all that; and the rumour of what was in them spread far and 
wide.

When this great change was thus going on, the King began to show 
himself in his truest and worst colours.  Anne Boleyn, the pretty 
little girl who had gone abroad to France with his sister, was by 
this time grown up to be very beautiful, and was one of the ladies 
in attendance on Queen Catherine.  Now, Queen Catherine was no 
longer young or handsome, and it is likely that she was not 
particularly good-tempered; having been always rather melancholy, 
and having been made more so by the deaths of four of her children 
when they were very young.  So, the King fell in love with the fair 
Anne Boleyn, and said to himself, 'How can I be best rid of my own 
troublesome wife whom I am tired of, and marry Anne?'

You recollect that Queen Catherine had been the wife of Henry's 
brother.  What does the King do, after thinking it over, but calls 
his favourite priests about him, and says, O! his mind is in such a 
dreadful state, and he is so frightfully uneasy, because he is 
afraid it was not lawful for him to marry the Queen!  Not one of 
those priests had the courage to hint that it was rather curious he 
had never thought of that before, and that his mind seemed to have 
been in a tolerably jolly condition during a great many years, in 
which he certainly had not fretted himself thin; but, they all 
said, Ah! that was very true, and it was a serious business; and 
perhaps the best way to make it right, would be for his Majesty to 
be divorced!  The King replied, Yes, he thought that would be the 
best way, certainly; so they all went to work.

If I were to relate to you the intrigues and plots that took place 
in the endeavour to get this divorce, you would think the History 
of England the most tiresome book in the world.  So I shall say no 
more, than that after a vast deal of negotiation and evasion, the 
Pope issued a commission to Cardinal Wolsey and CARDINAL CAMPEGGIO 
(whom he sent over from Italy for the purpose), to try the whole 
case in England.  It is supposed - and I think with reason - that 
Wolsey was the Queen's enemy, because she had reproved him for his 
proud and gorgeous manner of life.  But, he did not at first know 
that the King wanted to marry Anne Boleyn; and when he did know it, 
he even went down on his knees, in the endeavour to dissuade him.

The Cardinals opened their court in the Convent of the Black 
Friars, near to where the bridge of that name in London now stands; 
and the King and Queen, that they might be near it, took up their 
lodgings at the adjoining palace of Bridewell, of which nothing now 
remains but a bad prison.  On the opening of the court, when the 
King and Queen were called on to appear, that poor ill-used lady, 
with a dignity and firmness and yet with a womanly affection worthy 
to be always admired, went and kneeled at the King's feet, and said 
that she had come, a stranger, to his dominions; that she had been 
a good and true wife to him for twenty years; and that she could 
acknowledge no power in those Cardinals to try whether she should 
be considered his wife after all that time, or should be put away.  
With that, she got up and left the court, and would never 
afterwards come back to it.

The King pretended to be very much overcome, and said, O! my lords 
and gentlemen, what a good woman she was to be sure, and how 
delighted he would be to live with her unto death, but for that 
terrible uneasiness in his mind which was quite wearing him away!  
So, the case went on, and there was nothing but talk for two 
months.  Then Cardinal Campeggio, who, on behalf of the Pope, 
wanted nothing so much as delay, adjourned it for two more months; 
and before that time was elapsed, the Pope himself adjourned it 
indefinitely, by requiring the King and Queen to come to Rome and 
have it tried there.  But by good luck for the King, word was 
brought to him by some of his people, that they had happened to 
meet at supper, THOMAS CRANMER, a learned Doctor of Cambridge, who 
had proposed to urge the Pope on, by referring the case to all the 
learned doctors and bishops, here and there and everywhere, and 
getting their opinions that the King's marriage was unlawful.  The 
King, who was now in a hurry to marry Anne Boleyn, thought this 
such a good idea, that he sent for Cranmer, post haste, and said to 
LORD ROCHFORT, Anne Boleyn's father, 'Take this learned Doctor down 
to your country-house, and there let him have a good room for a 
study, and no end of books out of which to prove that I may marry 
your daughter.'  Lord Rochfort, not at all reluctant, made the 
learned Doctor as comfortable as he could; and the learned Doctor 
went to work to prove his case.  All this time, the King and Anne 
Boleyn were writing letters to one another almost daily, full of 
impatience to have the case settled; and Anne Boleyn was showing 
herself (as I think) very worthy of the fate which afterwards befel 
her.

It was bad for Cardinal Wolsey that he had left Cranmer to render 
this help.  It was worse for him that he had tried to dissuade the 
King from marrying Anne Boleyn.  Such a servant as he, to such a 
master as Henry, would probably have fallen in any case; but, 
between the hatred of the party of the Queen that was, and the 
hatred of the party of the Queen that was to be, he fell suddenly 
and heavily.  Going down one day to the Court of Chancery, where he 
now presided, he was waited upon by the Dukes of Norfolk and 
Suffolk, who told him that they brought an order to him to resign 
that office, and to withdraw quietly to a house he had at Esher, in 
Surrey.  The Cardinal refusing, they rode off to the King; and next 
day came back with a letter from him, on reading which, the 
Cardinal submitted.  An inventory was made out of all the riches in 
his palace at York Place (now Whitehall), and he went sorrowfully 
up the river, in his barge, to Putney.  An abject man he was, in 
spite of his pride; for being overtaken, riding out of that place 
towards Esher, by one of the King's chamberlains who brought him a 
kind message and a ring, he alighted from his mule, took off his 
cap, and kneeled down in the dirt.  His poor Fool, whom in his 
prosperous days he had always kept in his palace to entertain him, 
cut a far better figure than he; for, when the Cardinal said to the 
chamberlain that he had nothing to send to his lord the King as a 
present, but that jester who was a most excellent one, it took six 
strong yeomen to remove the faithful fool from his master.

The once proud Cardinal was soon further disgraced, and wrote the 
most abject letters to his vile sovereign; who humbled him one day 
and encouraged him the next, according to his humour, until he was 
at last ordered to go and reside in his diocese of York.  He said 
he was too poor; but I don't know how he made that out, for he took 
a hundred and sixty servants with him, and seventy-two cart-loads 
of furniture, food, and wine.  He remained in that part of the 
country for the best part of a year, and showed himself so improved 
by his misfortunes, and was so mild and so conciliating, that he 
won all hearts.  And indeed, even in his proud days, he had done 
some magnificent things for learning and education.  At last, he 
was arrested for high treason; and, coming slowly on his journey 
towards London, got as far as Leicester.  Arriving at Leicester 
Abbey after dark, and very ill, he said - when the monks came out 
at the gate with lighted torches to receive him - that he had come 
to lay his bones among them.  He had indeed; for he was taken to a 
bed, from which he never rose again.  His last words were, 'Had I 
but served God as diligently as I have served the King, He would 
not have given me over, in my grey hairs.  Howbeit, this is my just 
reward for my pains and diligence, not regarding my service to God, 
but only my duty to my prince.'  The news of his death was quickly 
carried to the King, who was amusing himself with archery in the 
garden of the magnificent Palace at Hampton Court, which that very 
Wolsey had presented to him.  The greatest emotion his royal mind 
displayed at the loss of a servant so faithful and so ruined, was a 
particular desire to lay hold of fifteen hundred pounds which the 
Cardinal was reported to have hidden somewhere.

The opinions concerning the divorce, of the learned doctors and 
bishops and others, being at last collected, and being generally in 
the King's favour, were forwarded to the Pope, with an entreaty 
that he would now grant it.  The unfortunate Pope, who was a timid 
man, was half distracted between his fear of his authority being 
set aside in England if he did not do as he was asked, and his 
dread of offending the Emperor of Germany, who was Queen 
Catherine's nephew.  In this state of mind he still evaded and did 
nothing.  Then, THOMAS CROMWELL, who had been one of Wolsey's 
faithful attendants, and had remained so even in his decline, 
advised the King to take the matter into his own hands, and make 
himself the head of the whole Church.  This, the King by various 
artful means, began to do; but he recompensed the clergy by 
allowing them to burn as many people as they pleased, for holding 
Luther's opinions.  You must understand that Sir Thomas More, the 
wise man who had helped the King with his book, had been made 
Chancellor in Wolsey's place.  But, as he was truly attached to the 
Church as it was even in its abuses, he, in this state of things, 
resigned.

Being now quite resolved to get rid of Queen Catherine, and to 
marry Anne Boleyn without more ado, the King made Cranmer 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and directed Queen Catherine to leave the 
Court.  She obeyed; but replied that wherever she went, she was 
Queen of England still, and would remain so, to the last.  The King 
then married Anne Boleyn privately; and the new Archbishop of 
Canterbury, within half a year, declared his marriage with Queen 
Catherine void, and crowned Anne Boleyn Queen.

She might have known that no good could ever come from such wrong, 
and that the corpulent brute who had been so faithless and so cruel 
to his first wife, could be more faithless and more cruel to his 
second.  She might have known that, even when he was in love with 
her, he had been a mean and selfish coward, running away, like a 
frightened cur, from her society and her house, when a dangerous 
sickness broke out in it, and when she might easily have taken it 
and died, as several of the household did.  But, Anne Boleyn 
arrived at all this knowledge too late, and bought it at a dear 
price.  Her bad marriage with a worse man came to its natural end.  
Its natural end was not, as we shall too soon see, a natural death 
for her.



CHAPTER XXVIII - ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE EIGHTH



PART THE SECOND


THE Pope was thrown into a very angry state of mind when he heard 
of the King's marriage, and fumed exceedingly.  Many of the English 
monks and friars, seeing that their order was in danger, did the 
same; some even declaimed against the King in church before his 
face, and were not to be stopped until he himself roared out 
'Silence!'  The King, not much the worse for this, took it pretty 
quietly; and was very glad when his Queen gave birth to a daughter, 
who was christened ELIZABETH, and declared Princess of Wales as her 
sister Mary had already been.

One of the most atrocious features of this reign was that Henry the 
Eighth was always trimming between the reformed religion and the 
unreformed one; so that the more he quarrelled with the Pope, the 
more of his own subjects he roasted alive for not holding the 
Pope's opinions.  Thus, an unfortunate student named John Frith, 
and a poor simple tailor named Andrew Hewet who loved him very 
much, and said that whatever John Frith believed HE believed, were 
burnt in Smithfield - to show what a capital Christian the King 
was.

But, these were speedily followed by two much greater victims, Sir 
Thomas More, and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester.  The latter, 
who was a good and amiable old man, had committed no greater 
offence than believing in Elizabeth Barton, called the Maid of Kent 
- another of those ridiculous women who pretended to be inspired, 
and to make all sorts of heavenly revelations, though they indeed 
uttered nothing but evil nonsense.  For this offence - as it was 
pretended, but really for denying the King to be the supreme Head 
of the Church - he got into trouble, and was put in prison; but, 
even then, he might have been suffered to die naturally (short work 
having been made of executing the Kentish Maid and her principal 
followers), but that the Pope, to spite the King, resolved to make 
him a cardinal.  Upon that the King made a ferocious joke to the 
effect that the Pope might send Fisher a red hat - which is the way 
they make a cardinal - but he should have no head on which to wear 
it; and he was tried with all unfairness and injustice, and 
sentenced to death.  He died like a noble and virtuous old man, and 
left a worthy name behind him.  The King supposed, I dare say, that 
Sir Thomas More would be frightened by this example; but, as he was 
not to be easily terrified, and, thoroughly believing in the Pope, 
had made up his mind that the King was not the rightful Head of the 
Church, he positively refused to say that he was.  For this crime 
he too was tried and sentenced, after having been in prison a whole 
year.  When he was doomed to death, and came away from his trial 
with the edge of the executioner's axe turned towards him - as was 
always done in those times when a state prisoner came to that 
hopeless pass - he bore it quite serenely, and gave his blessing to 
his son, who pressed through the crowd in Westminster Hall and 
kneeled down to receive it.  But, when he got to the Tower Wharf on 
his way back to his prison, and his favourite daughter, MARGARET 
ROPER, a very good woman, rushed through the guards again and 
again, to kiss him and to weep upon his neck, he was overcome at 
last.  He soon recovered, and never more showed any feeling but 
cheerfulness and courage.  When he was going up the steps of the 
scaffold to his death, he said jokingly to the Lieutenant of the 
Tower, observing that they were weak and shook beneath his tread, 
'I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up; and, for my coming 
down, I can shift for myself.'  Also he said to the executioner, 
after he had laid his head upon the block, 'Let me put my beard out 
of the way; for that, at least, has never committed any treason.'  
Then his head was struck off at a blow.  These two executions were 
worthy of King Henry the Eighth.  Sir Thomas More was one of the 
most virtuous men in his dominions, and the Bishop was one of his 
oldest and truest friends.  But to be a friend of that fellow was 
almost as dangerous as to be his wife.

When the news of these two murders got to Rome, the Pope raged 
against the murderer more than ever Pope raged since the world 
began, and prepared a Bull, ordering his subjects to take arms 
against him and dethrone him.  The King took all possible 
precautions to keep that document out of his dominions, and set to 
work in return to suppress a great number of the English 
monasteries and abbeys.

This destruction was begun by a body of commissioners, of whom 
Cromwell (whom the King had taken into great favour) was the head; 
and was carried on through some few years to its entire completion.  
There is no doubt that many of these religious establishments were 
religious in nothing but in name, and were crammed with lazy, 
indolent, and sensual monks.  There is no doubt that they imposed 
upon the people in every possible way; that they had images moved 
by wires, which they pretended were miraculously moved by Heaven; 
that they had among them a whole tun measure full of teeth, all 
purporting to have come out of the head of one saint, who must 
indeed have been a very extraordinary person with that enormous 
allowance of grinders; that they had bits of coal which they said 
had fried Saint Lawrence, and bits of toe-nails which they said 
belonged to other famous saints; penknives, and boots, and girdles, 
which they said belonged to others; and that all these bits of 
rubbish were called Relics, and adored by the ignorant people.  
But, on the other hand, there is no doubt either, that the King's 
officers and men punished the good monks with the bad; did great 
injustice; demolished many beautiful things and many valuable 
libraries; destroyed numbers of paintings, stained glass windows, 
fine pavements, and carvings; and that the whole court were 
ravenously greedy and rapacious for the division of this great 
spoil among them.  The King seems to have grown almost mad in the 
ardour of this pursuit; for he declared Thomas a Becket a traitor, 
though he had been dead so many years, and had his body dug up out 
of his grave.  He must have been as miraculous as the monks 
pretended, if they had told the truth, for he was found with one 
head on his shoulders, and they had shown another as his undoubted 
and genuine head ever since his death; it had brought them vast 
sums of money, too.  The gold and jewels on his shrine filled two 
great chests, and eight men tottered as they carried them away.  
How rich the monasteries were you may infer from the fact that, 
when they were all suppressed, one hundred and thirty thousand 
pounds a year - in those days an immense sum - came to the Crown.

These things were not done without causing great discontent among 
the people.  The monks had been good landlords and hospitable 
entertainers of all travellers, and had been accustomed to give 
away a great deal of corn, and fruit, and meat, and other things.  
In those days it was difficult to change goods into money, in 
consequence of the roads being very few and very bad, and the 
carts, and waggons of the worst description; and they must either 
have given away some of the good things they possessed in enormous 
quantities, or have suffered them to spoil and moulder.  So, many 
of the people missed what it was more agreeable to get idly than to 
work for; and the monks who were driven out of their homes and 
wandered about encouraged their discontent; and there were, 
consequently, great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.  These 
were put down by terrific executions, from which the monks 
themselves did not escape, and the King went on grunting and 
growling in his own fat way, like a Royal pig.

I have told all this story of the religious houses at one time, to 
make it plainer, and to get back to the King's domestic affairs.

The unfortunate Queen Catherine was by this time dead; and the King 
was by this time as tired of his second Queen as he had been of his 
first.  As he had fallen in love with Anne when she was in the 
service of Catherine, so he now fell in love with another lady in 
the service of Anne.  See how wicked deeds are punished, and how 
bitterly and self-reproachfully the Queen must now have thought of 
her own rise to the throne!  The new fancy was a LADY JANE SEYMOUR; 
and the King no sooner set his mind on her, than he resolved to 
have Anne Boleyn's head.  So, he brought a number of charges 
against Anne, accusing her of dreadful crimes which she had never 
committed, and implicating in them her own brother and certain 
gentlemen in her service:  among whom one Norris, and Mark Smeaton 
a musician, are best remembered.  As the lords and councillors were 
as afraid of the King and as subservient to him as the meanest 
peasant in England was, they brought in Anne Boleyn guilty, and the 
other unfortunate persons accused with her, guilty too.  Those 
gentlemen died like men, with the exception of Smeaton, who had 
been tempted by the King into telling lies, which he called 
confessions, and who had expected to be pardoned; but who, I am 
very glad to say, was not.  There was then only the Queen to 
dispose of.  She had been surrounded in the Tower with women spies; 
had been monstrously persecuted and foully slandered; and had 
received no justice.  But her spirit rose with her afflictions; 
and, after having in vain tried to soften the King by writing an 
affecting letter to him which still exists, 'from her doleful 
prison in the Tower,' she resigned herself to death.  She said to 
those about her, very cheerfully, that she had heard say the 
executioner was a good one, and that she had a little neck (she 
laughed and clasped it with her hands as she said that), and would 
soon be out of her pain.  And she WAS soon out of her pain, poor 
creature, on the Green inside the Tower, and her body was flung 
into an old box and put away in the ground under the chapel.

There is a story that the King sat in his palace listening very 
anxiously for the sound of the cannon which was to announce this 
new murder; and that, when he heard it come booming on the air, he 
rose up in great spirits and ordered out his dogs to go a-hunting.  
He was bad enough to do it; but whether he did it or not, it is 
certain that he married Jane Seymour the very next day.

I have not much pleasure in recording that she lived just long 
enough to give birth to a son who was christened EDWARD, and then 
to die of a fever:  for, I cannot but think that any woman who 
married such a ruffian, and knew what innocent blood was on his 
hands, deserved the axe that would assuredly have fallen on the 
neck of Jane Seymour, if she had lived much longer.

Cranmer had done what he could to save some of the Church property 
for purposes of religion and education; but, the great families had 
been so hungry to get hold of it, that very little could be rescued 
for such objects.  Even MILES COVERDALE, who did the people the 
inestimable service of translating the Bible into English (which 
the unreformed religion never permitted to be done), was left in 
poverty while the great families clutched the Church lands and 
money.  The people had been told that when the Crown came into 
possession of these funds, it would not be necessary to tax them; 
but they were taxed afresh directly afterwards.  It was fortunate 
for them, indeed, that so many nobles were so greedy for this 
wealth; since, if it had remained with the Crown, there might have 
been no end to tyranny for hundreds of years.  One of the most 
active writers on the Church's side against the King was a member 
of his own family - a sort of distant cousin, REGINALD POLE by name 
- who attacked him in the most violent manner (though he received a 
pension from him all the time), and fought for the Church with his 
pen, day and night.  As he was beyond the King's reach - being in 
Italy - the King politely invited him over to discuss the subject; 
but he, knowing better than to come, and wisely staying where he 
was, the King's rage fell upon his brother Lord Montague, the 
Marquis of Exeter, and some other gentlemen:  who were tried for 
high treason in corresponding with him and aiding him - which they 
probably did - and were all executed.  The Pope made Reginald Pole 
a cardinal; but, so much against his will, that it is thought he 
even aspired in his own mind to the vacant throne of England, and 
had hopes of marrying the Princess Mary.  His being made a high 
priest, however, put an end to all that.  His mother, the venerable 
Countess of Salisbury - who was, unfortunately for herself, within 
the tyrant's reach - was the last of his relatives on whom his 
wrath fell.  When she was told to lay her grey head upon the block, 
she answered the executioner, 'No!  My head never committed 
treason, and if you want it, you shall seize it.'  So, she ran 
round and round the scaffold with the executioner striking at her, 
and her grey hair bedabbled with blood; and even when they held her 
down upon the block she moved her head about to the last, resolved 
to be no party to her own barbarous murder.  All this the people 
bore, as they had borne everything else.

Indeed they bore much more; for the slow fires of Smithfield were 
continually burning, and people were constantly being roasted to 
death - still to show what a good Christian the King was.  He 
defied the Pope and his Bull, which was now issued, and had come 
into England; but he burned innumerable people whose only offence 
was that they differed from the Pope's religious opinions.  There 
was a wretched man named LAMBERT, among others, who was tried for 
this before the King, and with whom six bishops argued one after 
another.  When he was quite exhausted (as well he might be, after 
six bishops), he threw himself on the King's mercy; but the King 
blustered out that he had no mercy for heretics.  So, HE too fed 
the fire.

All this the people bore, and more than all this yet.  The national 
spirit seems to have been banished from the kingdom at this time.  
The very people who were executed for treason, the very wives and 
friends of the 'bluff' King, spoke of him on the scaffold as a good 
prince, and a gentle prince - just as serfs in similar 
circumstances have been known to do, under the Sultan and Bashaws 
of the East, or under the fierce old tyrants of Russia, who poured 
boiling and freezing water on them alternately, until they died.  
The Parliament were as bad as the rest, and gave the King whatever 
he wanted; among other vile accommodations, they gave him new 
powers of murdering, at his will and pleasure, any one whom he 
might choose to call a traitor.  But the worst measure they passed 
was an Act of Six Articles, commonly called at the time 'the whip 
with six strings;' which punished offences against the Pope's 
opinions, without mercy, and enforced the very worst parts of the 
monkish religion.  Cranmer would have modified it, if he could; 
but, being overborne by the Romish party, had not the power.  As 
one of the articles declared that priests should not marry, and as 
he was married himself, he sent his wife and children into Germany, 
and began to tremble at his danger; none the less because he was, 
and had long been, the King's friend.  This whip of six strings was 
made under the King's own eye.  It should never be forgotten of him 
how cruelly he supported the worst of the Popish doctrines when 
there was nothing to be got by opposing them.

This amiable monarch now thought of taking another wife.  He 
proposed to the French King to have some of the ladies of the 
French Court exhibited before him, that he might make his Royal 
choice; but the French King answered that he would rather not have 
his ladies trotted out to be shown like horses at a fair.  He 
proposed to the Dowager Duchess of Milan, who replied that she 
might have thought of such a match if she had had two heads; but, 
that only owning one, she must beg to keep it safe.  At last 
Cromwell represented that there was a Protestant Princess in 
Germany - those who held the reformed religion were called 
Protestants, because their leaders had Protested against the abuses 
and impositions of the unreformed Church - named ANNE OF CLEVES, 
who was beautiful, and would answer the purpose admirably.  The 
King said was she a large woman, because he must have a fat wife?  
'O yes,' said Cromwell; 'she was very large, just the thing.'  On 
hearing this the King sent over his famous painter, Hans Holbein, 
to take her portrait.  Hans made her out to be so good-looking that 
the King was satisfied, and the marriage was arranged.  But, 
whether anybody had paid Hans to touch up the picture; or whether 
Hans, like one or two other painters, flattered a princess in the 
ordinary way of business, I cannot say:  all I know is, that when 
Anne came over and the King went to Rochester to meet her, and 
first saw her without her seeing him, he swore she was 'a great 
Flanders mare,' and said he would never marry her.  Being obliged 
to do it now matters had gone so far, he would not give her the 
presents he had prepared, and would never notice her.  He never 
forgave Cromwell his part in the affair.  His downfall dates from 
that time.

It was quickened by his enemies, in the interests of the unreformed 
religion, putting in the King's way, at a state dinner, a niece of 
the Duke of Norfolk, CATHERINE HOWARD, a young lady of fascinating 
manners, though small in stature and not particularly beautiful.  
Falling in love with her on the spot, the King soon divorced Anne 
of Cleves after making her the subject of much brutal talk, on 
pretence that she had been previously betrothed to some one else - 
which would never do for one of his dignity - and married 
Catherine.  It is probable that on his wedding day, of all days in 
the year, he sent his faithful Cromwell to the scaffold, and had 
his head struck off.  He further celebrated the occasion by burning 
at one time, and causing to be drawn to the fire on the same 
hurdles, some Protestant prisoners for denying the Pope's 
doctrines, and some Roman Catholic prisoners for denying his own 
supremacy.  Still the people bore it, and not a gentleman in 
England raised his hand.

But, by a just retribution, it soon came out that Catherine Howard, 
before her marriage, had been really guilty of such crimes as the 
King had falsely attributed to his second wife Anne Boleyn; so, 
again the dreadful axe made the King a widower, and this Queen 
passed away as so many in that reign had passed away before her.  
As an appropriate pursuit under the circumstances, Henry then 
applied himself to superintending the composition of a religious 
book called 'A necessary doctrine for any Christian Man.'  He must 
have been a little confused in his mind, I think, at about this 
period; for he was so false to himself as to be true to some one:  
that some one being Cranmer, whom the Duke of Norfolk and others of 
his enemies tried to ruin; but to whom the King was steadfast, and 
to whom he one night gave his ring, charging him when he should 
find himself, next day, accused of treason, to show it to the 
council board.  This Cranmer did to the confusion of his enemies.  
I suppose the King thought he might want him a little longer.

He married yet once more.  Yes, strange to say, he found in England 
another woman who would become his wife, and she was CATHERINE 
PARR, widow of Lord Latimer.  She leaned towards the reformed 
religion; and it is some comfort to know, that she tormented the 
King considerably by arguing a variety of doctrinal points with him 
on all possible occasions.  She had very nearly done this to her 
own destruction.  After one of these conversations the King in a 
very black mood actually instructed GARDINER, one of his Bishops 
who favoured the Popish opinions, to draw a bill of accusation 
against her, which would have inevitably brought her to the 
scaffold where her predecessors had died, but that one of her 
friends picked up the paper of instructions which had been dropped 
in the palace, and gave her timely notice.  She fell ill with 
terror; but managed the King so well when he came to entrap her 
into further statements - by saying that she had only spoken on 
such points to divert his mind and to get some information from his 
extraordinary wisdom - that he gave her a kiss and called her his 
sweetheart.  And, when the Chancellor came next day actually to 
take her to the Tower, the King sent him about his business, and 
honoured him with the epithets of a beast, a knave, and a fool.  So 
near was Catherine Parr to the block, and so narrow was her escape!

There was war with Scotland in this reign, and a short clumsy war 
with France for favouring Scotland; but, the events at home were so 
dreadful, and leave such an enduring stain on the country, that I 
need say no more of what happened abroad.

A few more horrors, and this reign is over.  There was a lady, ANNE 
ASKEW, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the Protestant opinions, 
and whose husband being a fierce Catholic, turned her out of his 
house.  She came to London, and was considered as offending against 
the six articles, and was taken to the Tower, and put upon the rack 
- probably because it was hoped that she might, in her agony, 
criminate some obnoxious persons; if falsely, so much the better.  
She was tortured without uttering a cry, until the Lieutenant of 
the Tower would suffer his men to torture her no more; and then two 
priests who were present actually pulled off their robes, and 
turned the wheels of the rack with their own hands, so rending and 
twisting and breaking her that she was afterwards carried to the 
fire in a chair.  She was burned with three others, a gentleman, a 
clergyman, and a tailor; and so the world went on.

Either the King became afraid of the power of the Duke of Norfolk, 
and his son the Earl of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, but 
he resolved to pull THEM down, to follow all the rest who were 
gone.  The son was tried first - of course for nothing - and 
defended himself bravely; but of course he was found guilty, and of 
course he was executed.  Then his father was laid hold of, and left 
for death too.

But the King himself was left for death by a Greater King, and the 
earth was to be rid of him at last.  He was now a swollen, hideous 
spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every 
sense that it was dreadful to approach him.  When he was found to 
be dying, Cranmer was sent for from his palace at Croydon, and came 
with all speed, but found him speechless.  Happily, in that hour he 
perished.  He was in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and the 
thirty-eighth of his reign.

Henry the Eighth has been favoured by some Protestant writers, 
because the Reformation was achieved in his time.  But the mighty 
merit of it lies with other men and not with him; and it can be 
rendered none the worse by this monster's crimes, and none the 
better by any defence of them.  The plain truth is, that he was a 
most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of 
blood and grease upon the History of England.



CHAPTER XXIX - ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE SIXTH



HENRY THE EIGHTH had made a will, appointing a council of sixteen 
to govern the kingdom for his son while he was under age (he was 
now only ten years old), and another council of twelve to help 
them.  The most powerful of the first council was the EARL OF 
HERTFORD, the young King's uncle, who lost no time in bringing his 
nephew with great state up to Enfield, and thence to the Tower.  It 
was considered at the time a striking proof of virtue in the young 
King that he was sorry for his father's death; but, as common 
subjects have that virtue too, sometimes, we will say no more about 
it.

There was a curious part of the late King's will, requiring his 
executors to fulfil whatever promises he had made.  Some of the 
court wondering what these might be, the Earl of Hertford and the 
other noblemen interested, said that they were promises to advance 
and enrich THEM.  So, the Earl of Hertford made himself DUKE OF 
SOMERSET, and made his brother EDWARD SEYMOUR a baron; and there 
were various similar promotions, all very agreeable to the parties 
concerned, and very dutiful, no doubt, to the late King's memory.  
To be more dutiful still, they made themselves rich out of the 
Church lands, and were very comfortable.  The new Duke of Somerset 
caused himself to be declared PROTECTOR of the kingdom, and was, 
indeed, the King.

As young Edward the Sixth had been brought up in the principles of 
the Protestant religion, everybody knew that they would be 
maintained.  But Cranmer, to whom they were chiefly entrusted, 
advanced them steadily and temperately.  Many superstitious and 
ridiculous practices were stopped; but practices which were 
harmless were not interfered with.

The Duke of Somerset, the Protector, was anxious to have the young 
King engaged in marriage to the young Queen of Scotland, in order 
to prevent that princess from making an alliance with any foreign 
power; but, as a large party in Scotland were unfavourable to this 
plan, he invaded that country.  His excuse for doing so was, that 
the Border men - that is, the Scotch who lived in that part of the 
country where England and Scotland joined - troubled the English 
very much.  But there were two sides to this question; for the 
English Border men troubled the Scotch too; and, through many long 
years, there were perpetual border quarrels which gave rise to 
numbers of old tales and songs.  However, the Protector invaded 
Scotland; and ARRAN, the Scottish Regent, with an army twice as 
large as his, advanced to meet him.  They encountered on the banks 
of the river Esk, within a few miles of Edinburgh; and there, after 
a little skirmish, the Protector made such moderate proposals, in 
offering to retire if the Scotch would only engage not to marry 
their princess to any foreign prince, that the Regent thought the 
English were afraid.  But in this he made a horrible mistake; for 
the English soldiers on land, and the English sailors on the water, 
so set upon the Scotch, that they broke and fled, and more than ten 
thousand of them were killed.  It was a dreadful battle, for the 
fugitives were slain without mercy.  The ground for four miles, all 
the way to Edinburgh, was strewn with dead men, and with arms, and 
legs, and heads.  Some hid themselves in streams and were drowned; 
some threw away their armour and were killed running, almost naked; 
but in this battle of Pinkey the English lost only two or three 
hundred men.  They were much better clothed than the Scotch; at the 
poverty of whose appearance and country they were exceedingly 
astonished.

A Parliament was called when Somerset came back, and it repealed 
the whip with six strings, and did one or two other good things; 
though it unhappily retained the punishment of burning for those 
people who did not make believe to believe, in all religious 
matters, what the Government had declared that they must and should 
believe.  It also made a foolish law (meant to put down beggars), 
that any man who lived idly and loitered about for three days 
together, should be burned with a hot iron, made a slave, and wear 
an iron fetter.  But this savage absurdity soon came to an end, and 
went the way of a great many other foolish laws.

The Protector was now so proud that he sat in Parliament before all 
the nobles, on the right hand of the throne.  Many other noblemen, 
who only wanted to be as proud if they could get a chance, became 
his enemies of course; and it is supposed that he came back 
suddenly from Scotland because he had received news that his 
brother, LORD SEYMOUR, was becoming dangerous to him.  This lord 
was now High Admiral of England; a very handsome man, and a great 
favourite with the Court ladies - even with the young Princess 
Elizabeth, who romped with him a little more than young princesses 
in these times do with any one.  He had married Catherine Parr, the 
late King's widow, who was now dead; and, to strengthen his power, 
he secretly supplied the young King with money.  He may even have 
engaged with some of his brother's enemies in a plot to carry the 
boy off.  On these and other accusations, at any rate, he was 
confined in the Tower, impeached, and found guilty; his own 
brother's name being - unnatural and sad to tell - the first signed 
to the warrant of his execution.  He was executed on Tower Hill, 
and died denying his treason.  One of his last proceedings in this 
world was to write two letters, one to the Princess Elizabeth, and 
one to the Princess Mary, which a servant of his took charge of, 
and concealed in his shoe.  These letters are supposed to have 
urged them against his brother, and to revenge his death.  What 
they truly contained is not known; but there is no doubt that he 
had, at one time, obtained great influence over the Princess 
Elizabeth.

All this while, the Protestant religion was making progress.  The 
images which the people had gradually come to worship, were removed 
from the churches; the people were informed that they need not 
confess themselves to priests unless they chose; a common prayer-
book was drawn up in the English language, which all could 
understand, and many other improvements were made; still 
moderately.  For Cranmer was a very moderate man, and even 
restrained the Protestant clergy from violently abusing the 
unreformed religion - as they very often did, and which was not a 
good example.  But the people were at this time in great distress.  
The rapacious nobility who had come into possession of the Church 
lands, were very bad landlords.  They enclosed great quantities of 
ground for the feeding of sheep, which was then more profitable 
than the growing of crops; and this increased the general distress.  
So the people, who still understood little of what was going on 
about them, and still readily believed what the homeless monks told 
them - many of whom had been their good friends in their better 
days - took it into their heads that all this was owing to the 
reformed religion, and therefore rose, in many parts of the 
country.

The most powerful risings were in Devonshire and Norfolk.  In 
Devonshire, the rebellion was so strong that ten thousand men 
united within a few days, and even laid siege to Exeter.  But LORD 
RUSSELL, coming to the assistance of the citizens who defended that 
town, defeated the rebels; and, not only hanged the Mayor of one 
place, but hanged the vicar of another from his own church steeple.  
What with hanging and killing by the sword, four thousand of the 
rebels are supposed to have fallen in that one county.  In Norfolk 
(where the rising was more against the enclosure of open lands than 
against the reformed religion), the popular leader was a man named 
ROBERT KET, a tanner of Wymondham.  The mob were, in the first 
instance, excited against the tanner by one JOHN FLOWERDEW, a 
gentleman who owed him a grudge:  but the tanner was more than a 
match for the gentleman, since he soon got the people on his side, 
and established himself near Norwich with quite an army.  There was 
a large oak-tree in that place, on a spot called Moushold Hill, 
which Ket named the Tree of Reformation; and under its green 
boughs, he and his men sat, in the midsummer weather, holding 
courts of justice, and debating affairs of state.  They were even 
impartial enough to allow some rather tiresome public speakers to 
get up into this Tree of Reformation, and point out their errors to 
them, in long discourses, while they lay listening (not always 
without some grumbling and growling) in the shade below.  At last, 
one sunny July day, a herald appeared below the tree, and 
proclaimed Ket and all his men traitors, unless from that moment 
they dispersed and went home:  in which case they were to receive a 
pardon.  But, Ket and his men made light of the herald and became 
stronger than ever, until the Earl of Warwick went after them with 
a sufficient force, and cut them all to pieces.  A few were hanged, 
drawn, and quartered, as traitors, and their limbs were sent into 
various country places to be a terror to the people.  Nine of them 
were hanged upon nine green branches of the Oak of Reformation; and 
so, for the time, that tree may be said to have withered away.

The Protector, though a haughty man, had compassion for the real 
distresses of the common people, and a sincere desire to help them.  
But he was too proud and too high in degree to hold even their 
favour steadily; and many of the nobles always envied and hated 
him, because they were as proud and not as high as he.  He was at 
this time building a great Palace in the Strand:  to get the stone 
for which he blew up church steeples with gunpowder, and pulled 
down bishops' houses:  thus making himself still more disliked.  At 
length, his principal enemy, the Earl of Warwick - Dudley by name, 
and the son of that Dudley who had made himself so odious with 
Empson, in the reign of Henry the Seventh - joined with seven other 
members of the Council against him, formed a separate Council; and, 
becoming stronger in a few days, sent him to the Tower under 
twenty-nine articles of accusation.  After being sentenced by the 
Council to the forfeiture of all his offices and lands, he was 
liberated and pardoned, on making a very humble submission.  He was 
even taken back into the Council again, after having suffered this 
fall, and married his daughter, LADY ANNE SEYMOUR, to Warwick's 
eldest son.  But such a reconciliation was little likely to last, 
and did not outlive a year.  Warwick, having got himself made Duke 
of Northumberland, and having advanced the more important of his 
friends, then finished the history by causing the Duke of Somerset 
and his friend LORD GREY, and others, to be arrested for treason, 
in having conspired to seize and dethrone the King.  They were also 
accused of having intended to seize the new Duke of Northumberland, 
with his friends LORD NORTHAMPTON and LORD PEMBROKE; to murder them 
if they found need; and to raise the City to revolt.  All this the 
fallen Protector positively denied; except that he confessed to 
having spoken of the murder of those three noblemen, but having 
never designed it.  He was acquitted of the charge of treason, and 
found guilty of the other charges; so when the people - who 
remembered his having been their friend, now that he was disgraced 
and in danger, saw him come out from his trial with the axe turned 
from him - they thought he was altogether acquitted, and sent up a 
loud shout of joy.

But the Duke of Somerset was ordered to be beheaded on Tower Hill, 
at eight o'clock in the morning, and proclamations were issued 
bidding the citizens keep at home until after ten.  They filled the 
streets, however, and crowded the place of execution as soon as it 
was light; and, with sad faces and sad hearts, saw the once 
powerful Protector ascend the scaffold to lay his head upon the 
dreadful block.  While he was yet saying his last words to them 
with manly courage, and telling them, in particular, how it 
comforted him, at that pass, to have assisted in reforming the 
national religion, a member of the Council was seen riding up on 
horseback.  They again thought that the Duke was saved by his 
bringing a reprieve, and again shouted for joy.  But the Duke 
himself told them they were mistaken, and laid down his head and 
had it struck off at a blow.

Many of the bystanders rushed forward and steeped their 
handkerchiefs in his blood, as a mark of their affection.  He had, 
indeed, been capable of many good acts, and one of them was 
discovered after he was no more.  The Bishop of Durham, a very good 
man, had been informed against to the Council, when the Duke was in 
power, as having answered a treacherous letter proposing a 
rebellion against the reformed religion.  As the answer could not 
be found, he could not be declared guilty; but it was now 
discovered, hidden by the Duke himself among some private papers, 
in his regard for that good man.  The Bishop lost his office, and 
was deprived of his possessions.

It is not very pleasant to know that while his uncle lay in prison 
under sentence of death, the young King was being vastly 
entertained by plays, and dances, and sham fights:  but there is no 
doubt of it, for he kept a journal himself.  It is pleasanter to 
know that not a single Roman Catholic was burnt in this reign for 
holding that religion; though two wretched victims suffered for 
heresy.  One, a woman named JOAN BOCHER, for professing some 
opinions that even she could only explain in unintelligible jargon.  
The other, a Dutchman, named VON PARIS, who practised as a surgeon 
in London.  Edward was, to his credit, exceedingly unwilling to 
sign the warrant for the woman's execution:  shedding tears before 
he did so, and telling Cranmer, who urged him to do it (though 
Cranmer really would have spared the woman at first, but for her 
own determined obstinacy), that the guilt was not his, but that of 
the man who so strongly urged the dreadful act.  We shall see, too 
soon, whether the time ever came when Cranmer is likely to have 
remembered this with sorrow and remorse.

Cranmer and RIDLEY (at first Bishop of Rochester, and afterwards 
Bishop of London) were the most powerful of the clergy of this 
reign.  Others were imprisoned and deprived of their property for 
still adhering to the unreformed religion; the most important among 
whom were GARDINER Bishop of Winchester, HEATH Bishop of Worcester, 
DAY Bishop of Chichester, and BONNER that Bishop of London who was 
superseded by Ridley.  The Princess Mary, who inherited her 
mother's gloomy temper, and hated the reformed religion as 
connected with her mother's wrongs and sorrows - she knew nothing 
else about it, always refusing to read a single book in which it 
was truly described - held by the unreformed religion too, and was 
the only person in the kingdom for whom the old Mass was allowed to 
be performed; nor would the young King have made that exception 
even in her favour, but for the strong persuasions of Cranmer and 
Ridley.  He always viewed it with horror; and when he fell into a 
sickly condition, after having been very ill, first of the measles 
and then of the small-pox, he was greatly troubled in mind to think 
that if he died, and she, the next heir to the throne, succeeded, 
the Roman Catholic religion would be set up again.

This uneasiness, the Duke of Northumberland was not slow to 
encourage:  for, if the Princess Mary came to the throne, he, who 
had taken part with the Protestants, was sure to be disgraced.  
Now, the Duchess of Suffolk was descended from King Henry the 
Seventh; and, if she resigned what little or no right she had, in 
favour of her daughter LADY JANE GREY, that would be the succession 
to promote the Duke's greatness; because LORD GUILFORD DUDLEY, one 
of his sons, was, at this very time, newly married to her.  So, he 
worked upon the King's fears, and persuaded him to set aside both 
the Princess Mary and the Princess Elizabeth, and assert his right 
to appoint his successor.  Accordingly the young King handed to the 
Crown lawyers a writing signed half a dozen times over by himself, 
appointing Lady Jane Grey to succeed to the Crown, and requiring 
them to have his will made out according to law.  They were much 
against it at first, and told the King so; but the Duke of 
Northumberland - being so violent about it that the lawyers even 
expected him to beat them, and hotly declaring that, stripped to 
his shirt, he would fight any man in such a quarrel - they yielded.  
Cranmer, also, at first hesitated; pleading that he had sworn to 
maintain the succession of the Crown to the Princess Mary; but, he 
was a weak man in his resolutions, and afterwards signed the 
document with the rest of the council.

It was completed none too soon; for Edward was now sinking in a 
rapid decline; and, by way of making him better, they handed him 
over to a woman-doctor who pretended to be able to cure it.  He 
speedily got worse.  On the sixth of July, in the year one thousand 
five hundred and fifty-three, he died, very peaceably and piously, 
praying God, with his last breath, to protect the reformed 
religion.

This King died in the sixteenth year of his age, and in the seventh 
of his reign.  It is difficult to judge what the character of one 
so young might afterwards have become among so many bad, ambitious, 
quarrelling nobles.  But, he was an amiable boy, of very good 
abilities, and had nothing coarse or cruel or brutal in his 
disposition - which in the son of such a father is rather 
surprising.



CHAPTER XXX - ENGLAND UNDER MARY



THE Duke of Northumberland was very anxious to keep the young 
King's death a secret, in order that he might get the two 
Princesses into his power.  But, the Princess Mary, being informed 
of that event as she was on her way to London to see her sick 
brother, turned her horse's head, and rode away into Norfolk.  The 
Earl of Arundel was her friend, and it was he who sent her warning 
of what had happened.

As the secret could not be kept, the Duke of Northumberland and the 
council sent for the Lord Mayor of London and some of the aldermen, 
and made a merit of telling it to them.  Then, they made it known 
to the people, and set off to inform Lady Jane Grey that she was to 
be Queen.

She was a pretty girl of only sixteen, and was amiable, learned, 
and clever.  When the lords who came to her, fell on their knees 
before her, and told her what tidings they brought, she was so 
astonished that she fainted.  On recovering, she expressed her 
sorrow for the young King's death, and said that she knew she was 
unfit to govern the kingdom; but that if she must be Queen, she 
prayed God to direct her.  She was then at Sion House, near 
Brentford; and the lords took her down the river in state to the 
Tower, that she might remain there (as the custom was) until she 
was crowned.  But the people were not at all favourable to Lady 
Jane, considering that the right to be Queen was Mary's, and 
greatly disliking the Duke of Northumberland.  They were not put 
into a better humour by the Duke's causing a vintner's servant, one 
Gabriel Pot, to be taken up for expressing his dissatisfaction 
among the crowd, and to have his ears nailed to the pillory, and 
cut off.  Some powerful men among the nobility declared on Mary's 
side.  They raised troops to support her cause, had her proclaimed 
Queen at Norwich, and gathered around her at the castle of 
Framlingham, which belonged to the Duke of Norfolk.  For, she was 
not considered so safe as yet, but that it was best to keep her in 
a castle on the sea-coast, from whence she might be sent abroad, if 
necessary.

The Council would have despatched Lady Jane's father, the Duke of 
Suffolk, as the general of the army against this force; but, as 
Lady Jane implored that her father might remain with her, and as he 
was known to be but a weak man, they told the Duke of 
Northumberland that he must take the command himself.  He was not 
very ready to do so, as he mistrusted the Council much; but there 
was no help for it, and he set forth with a heavy heart, observing 
to a lord who rode beside him through Shoreditch at the head of the 
troops, that, although the people pressed in great numbers to look 
at them, they were terribly silent.

And his fears for himself turned out to be well founded.  While he 
was waiting at Cambridge for further help from the Council, the 
Council took it into their heads to turn their backs on Lady Jane's 
cause, and to take up the Princess Mary's.  This was chiefly owing 
to the before-mentioned Earl of Arundel, who represented to the 
Lord Mayor and aldermen, in a second interview with those sagacious 
persons, that, as for himself, he did not perceive the Reformed 
religion to be in much danger - which Lord Pembroke backed by 
flourishing his sword as another kind of persuasion.  The Lord 
Mayor and aldermen, thus enlightened, said there could be no doubt 
that the Princess Mary ought to be Queen.  So, she was proclaimed 
at the Cross by St. Paul's, and barrels of wine were given to the 
people, and they got very drunk, and danced round blazing bonfires 
- little thinking, poor wretches, what other bonfires would soon be 
blazing in Queen Mary's name.

After a ten days' dream of royalty, Lady Jane Grey resigned the 
Crown with great willingness, saying that she had only accepted it 
in obedience to her father and mother; and went gladly back to her 
pleasant house by the river, and her books.  Mary then came on 
towards London; and at Wanstead in Essex, was joined by her half-
sister, the Princess Elizabeth.  They passed through the streets of 
London to the Tower, and there the new Queen met some eminent 
prisoners then confined in it, kissed them, and gave them their 
liberty.  Among these was that Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who 
had been imprisoned in the last reign for holding to the unreformed 
religion.  Him she soon made chancellor.

The Duke of Northumberland had been taken prisoner, and, together 
with his son and five others, was quickly brought before the 
Council.  He, not unnaturally, asked that Council, in his defence, 
whether it was treason to obey orders that had been issued under 
the great seal; and, if it were, whether they, who had obeyed them 
too, ought to be his judges?  But they made light of these points; 
and, being resolved to have him out of the way, soon sentenced him 
to death.  He had risen into power upon the death of another man, 
and made but a poor show (as might be expected) when he himself lay 
low.  He entreated Gardiner to let him live, if it were only in a 
mouse's hole; and, when he ascended the scaffold to be beheaded on 
Tower Hill, addressed the people in a miserable way, saying that he 
had been incited by others, and exhorting them to return to the 
unreformed religion, which he told them was his faith.  There seems 
reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even then, in return 
for this confession; but it matters little whether he did or not.  
His head was struck off.

Mary was now crowned Queen.  She was thirty-seven years of age, 
short and thin, wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy.  But she 
had a great liking for show and for bright colours, and all the 
ladies of her Court were magnificently dressed.  She had a great 
liking too for old customs, without much sense in them; and she was 
oiled in the oldest way, and blessed in the oldest way, and done 
all manner of things to in the oldest way, at her coronation.  I 
hope they did her good.

She soon began to show her desire to put down the Reformed 
religion, and put up the unreformed one:  though it was dangerous 
work as yet, the people being something wiser than they used to be.  
They even cast a shower of stones - and among them a dagger - at 
one of the royal chaplains who attacked the Reformed religion in a 
public sermon.  But the Queen and her priests went steadily on.  
Ridley, the powerful bishop of the last reign, was seized and sent 
to the Tower.  LATIMER, also celebrated among the Clergy of the 
last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and Cranmer speedily 
followed.  Latimer was an aged man; and, as his guards took him 
through Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, 'This is a place 
that hath long groaned for me.'  For he knew well, what kind of 
bonfires would soon be burning.  Nor was the knowledge confined to 
him.  The prisons were fast filled with the chief Protestants, who 
were there left rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separation 
from their friends; many, who had time left them for escape, fled 
from the kingdom; and the dullest of the people began, now, to see 
what was coming.

It came on fast.  A Parliament was got together; not without strong 
suspicion of unfairness; and they annulled the divorce, formerly 
pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen's mother and King Henry the 
Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject of religion that had 
been made in the last King Edward's reign.  They began their 
proceedings, in violation of the law, by having the old mass said 
before them in Latin, and by turning out a bishop who would not 
kneel down.  They also declared guilty of treason, Lady Jane Grey 
for aspiring to the Crown; her husband, for being her husband; and 
Cranmer, for not believing in the mass aforesaid.  They then prayed 
the Queen graciously to choose a husband for herself, as soon as 
might be.

Now, the question who should be the Queen's husband had given rise 
to a great deal of discussion, and to several contending parties.  
Some said Cardinal Pole was the man - but the Queen was of opinion 
that he was NOT the man, he being too old and too much of a 
student.  Others said that the gallant young COURTENAY, whom the 
Queen had made Earl of Devonshire, was the man - and the Queen 
thought so too, for a while; but she changed her mind.  At last it 
appeared that PHILIP, PRINCE OF SPAIN, was certainly the man - 
though certainly not the people's man; for they detested the idea 
of such a marriage from the beginning to the end, and murmured that 
the Spaniard would establish in England, by the aid of foreign 
soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish religion, and even the 
terrible Inquisition itself.

These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy for marrying young 
Courtenay to the Princess Elizabeth, and setting them up, with 
popular tumults all over the kingdom, against the Queen.  This was 
discovered in time by Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold county, 
the people rose in their old bold way.  SIR THOMAS WYAT, a man of 
great daring, was their leader.  He raised his standard at 
Maidstone, marched on to Rochester, established himself in the old 
castle there, and prepared to hold out against the Duke of Norfolk, 
who came against him with a party of the Queen's guards, and a body 
of five hundred London men.  The London men, however, were all for 
Elizabeth, and not at all for Mary.  They declared, under the 
castle walls, for Wyat; the Duke retreated; and Wyat came on to 
Deptford, at the head of fifteen thousand men.

But these, in their turn, fell away.  When he came to Southwark, 
there were only two thousand left.  Not dismayed by finding the 
London citizens in arms, and the guns at the Tower ready to oppose 
his crossing the river there, Wyat led them off to Kingston-upon-
Thames, intending to cross the bridge that he knew to be in that 
place, and so to work his way round to Ludgate, one of the old 
gates of the City.  He found the bridge broken down, but mended it, 
came across, and bravely fought his way up Fleet Street to Ludgate 
Hill.  Finding the gate closed against him, he fought his way back 
again, sword in hand, to Temple Bar.  Here, being overpowered, he 
surrendered himself, and three or four hundred of his men were 
taken, besides a hundred killed.  Wyat, in a moment of weakness 
(and perhaps of torture) was afterwards made to accuse the Princess 
Elizabeth as his accomplice to some very small extent.  But his 
manhood soon returned to him, and he refused to save his life by 
making any more false confessions.  He was quartered and 
distributed in the usual brutal way, and from fifty to a hundred of 
his followers were hanged.  The rest were led out, with halters 
round their necks, to be pardoned, and to make a parade of crying 
out, 'God save Queen Mary!'

In the danger of this rebellion, the Queen showed herself to be a 
woman of courage and spirit.  She disdained to retreat to any place 
of safety, and went down to the Guildhall, sceptre in hand, and 
made a gallant speech to the Lord Mayor and citizens.  But on the 
day after Wyat's defeat, she did the most cruel act, even of her 
cruel reign, in signing the warrant for the execution of Lady Jane 
Grey.

They tried to persuade Lady Jane to accept the unreformed religion; 
but she steadily refused.  On the morning when she was to die, she 
saw from her window the bleeding and headless body of her husband 
brought back in a cart from the scaffold on Tower Hill where he had 
laid down his life.  But, as she had declined to see him before his 
execution, lest she should be overpowered and not make a good end, 
so, she even now showed a constancy and calmness that will never be 
forgotten.  She came up to the scaffold with a firm step and a 
quiet face, and addressed the bystanders in a steady voice.  They 
were not numerous; for she was too young, too innocent and fair, to 
be murdered before the people on Tower Hill, as her husband had 
just been; so, the place of her execution was within the Tower 
itself.  She said that she had done an unlawful act in taking what 
was Queen Mary's right; but that she had done so with no bad 
intent, and that she died a humble Christian.  She begged the 
executioner to despatch her quickly, and she asked him, 'Will you 
take my head off before I lay me down?'  He answered, 'No, Madam,' 
and then she was very quiet while they bandaged her eyes.  Being 
blinded, and unable to see the block on which she was to lay her 
young head, she was seen to feel about for it with her hands, and 
was heard to say, confused, 'O what shall I do!  Where is it?'  
Then they guided her to the right place, and the executioner struck 
off her head.  You know too well, now, what dreadful deeds the 
executioner did in England, through many, many years, and how his 
axe descended on the hateful block through the necks of some of the 
bravest, wisest, and best in the land.  But it never struck so 
cruel and so vile a blow as this.

The father of Lady Jane soon followed, but was little pitied.  
Queen Mary's next object was to lay hold of Elizabeth, and this was 
pursued with great eagerness.  Five hundred men were sent to her 
retired house at Ashridge, by Berkhampstead, with orders to bring 
her up, alive or dead.  They got there at ten at night, when she 
was sick in bed.  But, their leaders followed her lady into her 
bedchamber, whence she was brought out betimes next morning, and 
put into a litter to be conveyed to London.  She was so weak and 
ill, that she was five days on the road; still, she was so resolved 
to be seen by the people that she had the curtains of the litter 
opened; and so, very pale and sickly, passed through the streets.  
She wrote to her sister, saying she was innocent of any crime, and 
asking why she was made a prisoner; but she got no answer, and was 
ordered to the Tower.  They took her in by the Traitor's Gate, to 
which she objected, but in vain.  One of the lords who conveyed her 
offered to cover her with his cloak, as it was raining, but she put 
it away from her, proudly and scornfully, and passed into the 
Tower, and sat down in a court-yard on a stone.  They besought her 
to come in out of the wet; but she answered that it was better 
sitting there, than in a worse place.  At length she went to her 
apartment, where she was kept a prisoner, though not so close a 
prisoner as at Woodstock, whither she was afterwards removed, and 
where she is said to have one day envied a milkmaid whom she heard 
singing in the sunshine as she went through the green fields.  
Gardiner, than whom there were not many worse men among the fierce 
and sullen priests, cared little to keep secret his stern desire 
for her death:  being used to say that it was of little service to 
shake off the leaves, and lop the branches of the tree of heresy, 
if its root, the hope of heretics, were left.  He failed, however, 
in his benevolent design.  Elizabeth was, at length, released; and 
Hatfield House was assigned to her as a residence, under the care 
of one SIR THOMAS POPE.

It would seem that Philip, the Prince of Spain, was a main cause of 
this change in Elizabeth's fortunes.  He was not an amiable man, 
being, on the contrary, proud, overbearing, and gloomy; but he and 
the Spanish lords who came over with him, assuredly did 
discountenance the idea of doing any violence to the Princess.  It 
may have been mere prudence, but we will hope it was manhood and 
honour.  The Queen had been expecting her husband with great 
impatience, and at length he came, to her great joy, though he 
never cared much for her.  They were married by Gardiner, at 
Winchester, and there was more holiday-making among the people; but 
they had their old distrust of this Spanish marriage, in which even 
the Parliament shared.  Though the members of that Parliament were 
far from honest, and were strongly suspected to have been bought 
with Spanish money, they would pass no bill to enable the Queen to 
set aside the Princess Elizabeth and appoint her own successor.

Although Gardiner failed in this object, as well as in the darker 
one of bringing the Princess to the scaffold, he went on at a great 
pace in the revival of the unreformed religion.  A new Parliament 
was packed, in which there were no Protestants.  Preparations were 
made to receive Cardinal Pole in England as the Pope's messenger, 
bringing his holy declaration that all the nobility who had 
acquired Church property, should keep it - which was done to enlist 
their selfish interest on the Pope's side.  Then a great scene was 
enacted, which was the triumph of the Queen's plans.  Cardinal Pole 
arrived in great splendour and dignity, and was received with great 
pomp.  The Parliament joined in a petition expressive of their 
sorrow at the change in the national religion, and praying him to 
receive the country again into the Popish Church.  With the Queen 
sitting on her throne, and the King on one side of her, and the 
Cardinal on the other, and the Parliament present, Gardiner read 
the petition aloud.  The Cardinal then made a great speech, and was 
so obliging as to say that all was forgotten and forgiven, and that 
the kingdom was solemnly made Roman Catholic again.

Everything was now ready for the lighting of the terrible bonfires.  
The Queen having declared to the Council, in writing, that she 
would wish none of her subjects to be burnt without some of the 
Council being present, and that she would particularly wish there 
to be good sermons at all burnings, the Council knew pretty well 
what was to be done next.  So, after the Cardinal had blessed all 
the bishops as a preface to the burnings, the Chancellor Gardiner 
opened a High Court at Saint Mary Overy, on the Southwark side of 
London Bridge, for the trial of heretics.  Here, two of the late 
Protestant clergymen, HOOPER, Bishop of Gloucester, and ROGERS, a 
Prebendary of St. Paul's, were brought to be tried.  Hooper was 
tried first for being married, though a priest, and for not 
believing in the mass.  He admitted both of these accusations, and 
said that the mass was a wicked imposition.  Then they tried 
Rogers, who said the same.  Next morning the two were brought up to 
be sentenced; and then Rogers said that his poor wife, being a 
German woman and a stranger in the land, he hoped might be allowed 
to come to speak to him before he died.  To this the inhuman 
Gardiner replied, that she was not his wife.  'Yea, but she is, my 
lord,' said Rogers, 'and she hath been my wife these eighteen 
years.'  His request was still refused, and they were both sent to 
Newgate; all those who stood in the streets to sell things, being 
ordered to put out their lights that the people might not see them.  
But, the people stood at their doors with candles in their hands, 
and prayed for them as they went by.  Soon afterwards, Rogers was 
taken out of jail to be burnt in Smithfield; and, in the crowd as 
he went along, he saw his poor wife and his ten children, of whom 
the youngest was a little baby.  And so he was burnt to death.

The next day, Hooper, who was to be burnt at Gloucester, was 
brought out to take his last journey, and was made to wear a hood 
over his face that he might not be known by the people.  But, they 
did know him for all that, down in his own part of the country; 
and, when he came near Gloucester, they lined the road, making 
prayers and lamentations.  His guards took him to a lodging, where 
he slept soundly all night.  At nine o'clock next morning, he was 
brought forth leaning on a staff; for he had taken cold in prison, 
and was infirm.  The iron stake, and the iron chain which was to 
bind him to it, were fixed up near a great elm-tree in a pleasant 
open place before the cathedral, where, on peaceful Sundays, he had 
been accustomed to preach and to pray, when he was bishop of 
Gloucester.  This tree, which had no leaves then, it being 
February, was filled with people; and the priests of Gloucester 
College were looking complacently on from a window, and there was a 
great concourse of spectators in every spot from which a glimpse of 
the dreadful sight could be beheld.  When the old man kneeled down 
on the small platform at the foot of the stake, and prayed aloud, 
the nearest people were observed to be so attentive to his prayers 
that they were ordered to stand farther back; for it did not suit 
the Romish Church to have those Protestant words heard.  His 
prayers concluded, he went up to the stake and was stripped to his 
shirt, and chained ready for the fire.  One of his guards had such 
compassion on him that, to shorten his agonies, he tied some 
packets of gunpowder about him.  Then they heaped up wood and straw 
and reeds, and set them all alight.  But, unhappily, the wood was 
green and damp, and there was a wind blowing that blew what flame 
there was, away.  Thus, through three-quarters of an hour, the good 
old man was scorched and roasted and smoked, as the fire rose and 
sank; and all that time they saw him, as he burned, moving his lips 
in prayer, and beating his breast with one hand, even after the 
other was burnt away and had fallen off.

Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were taken to Oxford to dispute with 
a commission of priests and doctors about the mass.  They were 
shamefully treated; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars 
hissed and howled and groaned, and misconducted themselves in an 
anything but a scholarly way.  The prisoners were taken back to 
jail, and afterwards tried in St. Mary's Church.  They were all 
found guilty.  On the sixteenth of the month of October, Ridley and 
Latimer were brought out, to make another of the dreadful bonfires.

The scene of the suffering of these two good Protestant men was in 
the City ditch, near Baliol College.  On coming to the dreadful 
spot, they kissed the stakes, and then embraced each other.  And 
then a learned doctor got up into a pulpit which was placed there, 
and preached a sermon from the text, 'Though I give my body to be 
burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.'  When you 
think of the charity of burning men alive, you may imagine that 
this learned doctor had a rather brazen face.  Ridley would have 
answered his sermon when it came to an end, but was not allowed.  
When Latimer was stripped, it appeared that he had dressed himself 
under his other clothes, in a new shroud; and, as he stood in it 
before all the people, it was noted of him, and long remembered, 
that, whereas he had been stooping and feeble but a few minutes 
before, he now stood upright and handsome, in the knowledge that he 
was dying for a just and a great cause.  Ridley's brother-in-law 
was there with bags of gunpowder; and when they were both chained 
up, he tied them round their bodies.  Then, a light was thrown upon 
the pile to fire it.  'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,' said 
Latimer, at that awful moment, 'and play the man!  We shall this 
day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust 
shall never be put out.'  And then he was seen to make motions with 
his hands as if he were washing them in the flames, and to stroke 
his aged face with them, and was heard to cry, 'Father of Heaven, 
receive my soul!'  He died quickly, but the fire, after having 
burned the legs of Ridley, sunk.  There he lingered, chained to the 
iron post, and crying, 'O!  I cannot burn!  O! for Christ's sake 
let the fire come unto me!'  And still, when his brother-in-law had 
heaped on more wood, he was heard through the blinding smoke, still 
dismally crying, 'O!  I cannot burn, I cannot burn!'  At last, the 
gunpowder caught fire, and ended his miseries.

Five days after this fearful scene, Gardiner went to his tremendous 
account before God, for the cruelties he had so much assisted in 
committing.

Cranmer remained still alive and in prison.  He was brought out 
again in February, for more examining and trying, by Bonner, Bishop 
of London:  another man of blood, who had succeeded to Gardiner's 
work, even in his lifetime, when Gardiner was tired of it.  Cranmer 
was now degraded as a priest, and left for death; but, if the Queen 
hated any one on earth, she hated him, and it was resolved that he 
should be ruined and disgraced to the utmost.  There is no doubt 
that the Queen and her husband personally urged on these deeds, 
because they wrote to the Council, urging them to be active in the 
kindling of the fearful fires.  As Cranmer was known not to be a 
firm man, a plan was laid for surrounding him with artful people, 
and inducing him to recant to the unreformed religion.  Deans and 
friars visited him, played at bowls with him, showed him various 
attentions, talked persuasively with him, gave him money for his 
prison comforts, and induced him to sign, I fear, as many as six 
recantations.  But when, after all, he was taken out to be burnt, 
he was nobly true to his better self, and made a glorious end.

After prayers and a sermon, Dr. Cole, the preacher of the day (who 
had been one of the artful priests about Cranmer in prison), 
required him to make a public confession of his faith before the 
people.  This, Cole did, expecting that he would declare himself a 
Roman Catholic.  'I will make a profession of my faith,' said 
Cranmer, 'and with a good will too.'

Then, he arose before them all, and took from the sleeve of his 
robe a written prayer and read it aloud.  That done, he kneeled and 
said the Lord's Prayer, all the people joining; and then he arose 
again and told them that he believed in the Bible, and that in what 
he had lately written, he had written what was not the truth, and 
that, because his right hand had signed those papers, he would burn 
his right hand first when he came to the fire.  As for the Pope, he 
did refuse him and denounce him as the enemy of Heaven.  Hereupon 
the pious Dr. Cole cried out to the guards to stop that heretic's 
mouth and take him away.

So they took him away, and chained him to the stake, where he 
hastily took off his own clothes to make ready for the flames.  And 
he stood before the people with a bald head and a white and flowing 
beard.  He was so firm now when the worst was come, that he again 
declared against his recantation, and was so impressive and so 
undismayed, that a certain lord, who was one of the directors of 
the execution, called out to the men to make haste!  When the fire 
was lighted, Cranmer, true to his latest word, stretched out his 
right hand, and crying out, 'This hand hath offended!' held it 
among the flames, until it blazed and burned away.  His heart was 
found entire among his ashes, and he left at last a memorable name 
in English history.  Cardinal Pole celebrated the day by saying his 
first mass, and next day he was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 
Cranmer's place.

The Queen's husband, who was now mostly abroad in his own 
dominions, and generally made a coarse jest of her to his more 
familiar courtiers, was at war with France, and came over to seek 
the assistance of England.  England was very unwilling to engage in 
a French war for his sake; but it happened that the King of France, 
at this very time, aided a descent upon the English coast.  Hence, 
war was declared, greatly to Philip's satisfaction; and the Queen 
raised a sum of money with which to carry it on, by every 
unjustifiable means in her power.  It met with no profitable 
return, for the French Duke of Guise surprised Calais, and the 
English sustained a complete defeat.  The losses they met with in 
France greatly mortified the national pride, and the Queen never 
recovered the blow.

There was a bad fever raging in England at this time, and I am glad 
to write that the Queen took it, and the hour of her death came.  
'When I am dead and my body is opened,' she said to those around 
those around her, 'ye shall find CALAIS written on my heart.'  I 
should have thought, if anything were written on it, they would 
have found the words - JANE GREY, HOOPER, ROGERS, RIDLEY, LATIMER, 
CRANMER, AND THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE BURNT ALIVE WITHIN FOUR YEARS OF 
MY WICKED REIGN, INCLUDING SIXTY WOMEN AND FORTY LITTLE CHILDREN.  
But it is enough that their deaths were written in Heaven.

The Queen died on the seventeenth of November, fifteen hundred and 
fifty-eight, after reigning not quite five years and a half, and in 
the forty-fourth year of her age.  Cardinal Pole died of the same 
fever next day.

As BLOODY QUEEN MARY, this woman has become famous, and as BLOODY 
QUEEN MARY, she will ever be justly remembered with horror and 
detestation in Great Britain.  Her memory has been held in such 
abhorrence that some writers have arisen in later years to take her 
part, and to show that she was, upon the whole, quite an amiable 
and cheerful sovereign!  'By their fruits ye shall know them,' said 
OUR SAVIOUR.  The stake and the fire were the fruits of this reign, 
and you will judge this Queen by nothing else.



CHAPTER XXXI - ENGLAND UNDER ELIZABETH



THERE was great rejoicing all over the land when the Lords of the 
Council went down to Hatfield, to hail the Princess Elizabeth as 
the new Queen of England.  Weary of the barbarities of Mary's 
reign, the people looked with hope and gladness to the new 
Sovereign.  The nation seemed to wake from a horrible dream; and 
Heaven, so long hidden by the smoke of the fires that roasted men 
and women to death, appeared to brighten once more.

Queen Elizabeth was five-and-twenty years of age when she rode 
through the streets of London, from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, 
to be crowned.  Her countenance was strongly marked, but on the 
whole, commanding and dignified; her hair was red, and her nose 
something too long and sharp for a woman's.  She was not the 
beautiful creature her courtiers made out; but she was well enough, 
and no doubt looked all the better for coming after the dark and 
gloomy Mary.  She was well educated, but a roundabout writer, and 
rather a hard swearer and coarse talker.  She was clever, but 
cunning and deceitful, and inherited much of her father's violent 
temper.  I mention this now, because she has been so over-praised 
by one party, and so over-abused by another, that it is hardly 
possible to understand the greater part of her reign without first 
understanding what kind of woman she really was.

She began her reign with the great advantage of having a very wise 
and careful Minister, SIR WILLIAM CECIL, whom she afterwards made 
LORD BURLEIGH.  Altogether, the people had greater reason for 
rejoicing than they usually had, when there were processions in the 
streets; and they were happy with some reason.  All kinds of shows 
and images were set up; GOG and MAGOG were hoisted to the top of 
Temple Bar, and (which was more to the purpose) the Corporation 
dutifully presented the young Queen with the sum of a thousand 
marks in gold - so heavy a present, that she was obliged to take it 
into her carriage with both hands.  The coronation was a great 
success; and, on the next day, one of the courtiers presented a 
petition to the new Queen, praying that as it was the custom to 
release some prisoners on such occasions, she would have the 
goodness to release the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and 
John, and also the Apostle Saint Paul, who had been for some time 
shut up in a strange language so that the people could not get at 
them.

To this, the Queen replied that it would be better first to inquire 
of themselves whether they desired to be released or not; and, as a 
means of finding out, a great public discussion - a sort of 
religious tournament - was appointed to take place between certain 
champions of the two religions, in Westminster Abbey.  You may 
suppose that it was soon made pretty clear to common sense, that 
for people to benefit by what they repeat or read, it is rather 
necessary they should understand something about it.  Accordingly, 
a Church Service in plain English was settled, and other laws and 
regulations were made, completely establishing the great work of 
the Reformation.  The Romish bishops and champions were not harshly 
dealt with, all things considered; and the Queen's Ministers were 
both prudent and merciful.

The one great trouble of this reign, and the unfortunate cause of 
the greater part of such turmoil and bloodshed as occurred in it, 
was MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS.  We will try to understand, in as 
few words as possible, who Mary was, what she was, and how she came 
to be a thorn in the royal pillow of Elizabeth.

She was the daughter of the Queen Regent of Scotland, MARY OF 
GUISE.  She had been married, when a mere child, to the Dauphin, 
the son and heir of the King of France.  The Pope, who pretended 
that no one could rightfully wear the crown of England without his 
gracious permission, was strongly opposed to Elizabeth, who had not 
asked for the said gracious permission.  And as Mary Queen of Scots 
would have inherited the English crown in right of her birth, 
supposing the English Parliament not to have altered the 
succession, the Pope himself, and most of the discontented who were 
followers of his, maintained that Mary was the rightful Queen of 
England, and Elizabeth the wrongful Queen.  Mary being so closely 
connected with France, and France being jealous of England, there 
was far greater danger in this than there would have been if she 
had had no alliance with that great power.  And when her young 
husband, on the death of his father, became FRANCIS THE SECOND, 
King of France, the matter grew very serious.  For, the young 
couple styled themselves King and Queen of England, and the Pope 
was disposed to help them by doing all the mischief he could.

Now, the reformed religion, under the guidance of a stern and 
powerful preacher, named JOHN KNOX, and other such men, had been 
making fierce progress in Scotland.  It was still a half savage 
country, where there was a great deal of murdering and rioting 
continually going on; and the Reformers, instead of reforming those 
evils as they should have done, went to work in the ferocious old 
Scottish spirit, laying churches and chapels waste, pulling down 
pictures and altars, and knocking about the Grey Friars, and the 
Black Friars, and the White Friars, and the friars of all sorts of 
colours, in all directions.  This obdurate and harsh spirit of the 
Scottish Reformers (the Scotch have always been rather a sullen and 
frowning people in religious matters) put up the blood of the 
Romish French court, and caused France to send troops over to 
Scotland, with the hope of setting the friars of all sorts of 
colours on their legs again; of conquering that country first, and 
England afterwards; and so crushing the Reformation all to pieces.  
The Scottish Reformers, who had formed a great league which they 
called The Congregation of the Lord, secretly represented to 
Elizabeth that, if the reformed religion got the worst of it with 
them, it would be likely to get the worst of it in England too; and 
thus, Elizabeth, though she had a high notion of the rights of 
Kings and Queens to do anything they liked, sent an army to 
Scotland to support the Reformers, who were in arms against their 
sovereign.  All these proceedings led to a treaty of peace at 
Edinburgh, under which the French consented to depart from the 
kingdom.  By a separate treaty, Mary and her young husband engaged 
to renounce their assumed title of King and Queen of England.  But 
this treaty they never fulfilled.

It happened, soon after matters had got to this state, that the 
young French King died, leaving Mary a young widow.  She was then 
invited by her Scottish subjects to return home and reign over 
them; and as she was not now happy where she was, she, after a 
little time, complied.

Elizabeth had been Queen three years, when Mary Queen of Scots 
embarked at Calais for her own rough, quarrelling country.  As she 
came out of the harbour, a vessel was lost before her eyes, and she 
said, 'O! good God! what an omen this is for such a voyage!'  She 
was very fond of France, and sat on the deck, looking back at it 
and weeping, until it was quite dark.  When she went to bed, she 
directed to be called at daybreak, if the French coast were still 
visible, that she might behold it for the last time.  As it proved 
to be a clear morning, this was done, and she again wept for the 
country she was leaving, and said many times, ' Farewell, France!  
Farewell, France!  I shall never see thee again!'  All this was 
long remembered afterwards, as sorrowful and interesting in a fair 
young princess of nineteen.  Indeed, I am afraid it gradually came, 
together with her other distresses, to surround her with greater 
sympathy than she deserved.

When she came to Scotland, and took up her abode at the palace of 
Holyrood in Edinburgh, she found herself among uncouth strangers 
and wild uncomfortable customs very different from her experiences 
in the court of France.  The very people who were disposed to love 
her, made her head ache when she was tired out by her voyage, with 
a serenade of discordant music - a fearful concert of bagpipes, I 
suppose - and brought her and her train home to her palace on 
miserable little Scotch horses that appeared to be half starved.  
Among the people who were not disposed to love her, she found the 
powerful leaders of the Reformed Church, who were bitter upon her 
amusements, however innocent, and denounced music and dancing as 
works of the devil.  John Knox himself often lectured her, 
violently and angrily, and did much to make her life unhappy.  All 
these reasons confirmed her old attachment to the Romish religion, 
and caused her, there is no doubt, most imprudently and dangerously 
both for herself and for England too, to give a solemn pledge to 
the heads of the Romish Church that if she ever succeeded to the 
English crown, she would set up that religion again.  In reading 
her unhappy history, you must always remember this; and also that 
during her whole life she was constantly put forward against the 
Queen, in some form or other, by the Romish party.

That Elizabeth, on the other hand, was not inclined to like her, is 
pretty certain.  Elizabeth was very vain and jealous, and had an 
extraordinary dislike to people being married.  She treated Lady 
Catherine Grey, sister of the beheaded Lady Jane, with such 
shameful severity, for no other reason than her being secretly 
married, that she died and her husband was ruined; so, when a 
second marriage for Mary began to be talked about, probably 
Elizabeth disliked her more.  Not that Elizabeth wanted suitors of 
her own, for they started up from Spain, Austria, Sweden, and 
England.  Her English lover at this time, and one whom she much 
favoured too, was LORD ROBERT DUDLEY, Earl of Leicester - himself 
secretly married to AMY ROBSART, the daughter of an English 
gentleman, whom he was strongly suspected of causing to be 
murdered, down at his country seat, Cumnor Hall in Berkshire, that 
he might be free to marry the Queen.  Upon this story, the great 
writer, SIR WALTER SCOTT, has founded one of his best romances.  
But if Elizabeth knew how to lead her handsome favourite on, for 
her own vanity and pleasure, she knew how to stop him for her own 
pride; and his love, and all the other proposals, came to nothing.  
The Queen always declared in good set speeches, that she would 
never be married at all, but would live and die a Maiden Queen.  It 
was a very pleasant and meritorious declaration, I suppose; but it 
has been puffed and trumpeted so much, that I am rather tired of it 
myself.

Divers princes proposed to marry Mary, but the English court had 
reasons for being jealous of them all, and even proposed as a 
matter of policy that she should marry that very Earl of Leicester 
who had aspired to be the husband of Elizabeth.  At last, LORD 
DARNLEY, son of the Earl of Lennox, and himself descended from the 
Royal Family of Scotland, went over with Elizabeth's consent to try 
his fortune at Holyrood.  He was a tall simpleton; and could dance 
and play the guitar; but I know of nothing else he could do, unless 
it were to get very drunk, and eat gluttonously, and make a 
contemptible spectacle of himself in many mean and vain ways.  
However, he gained Mary's heart, not disdaining in the pursuit of 
his object to ally himself with one of her secretaries, DAVID 
RIZZIO, who had great influence with her.  He soon married the 
Queen.  This marriage does not say much for her, but what followed 
will presently say less.

Mary's brother, the EARL OF MURRAY, and head of the Protestant 
party in Scotland, had opposed this marriage, partly on religious 
grounds, and partly perhaps from personal dislike of the very 
contemptible bridegroom.  When it had taken place, through Mary's 
gaining over to it the more powerful of the lords about her, she 
banished Murray for his pains; and, when he and some other nobles 
rose in arms to support the reformed religion, she herself, within 
a month of her wedding day, rode against them in armour with loaded 
pistols in her saddle.  Driven out of Scotland, they presented 
themselves before Elizabeth - who called them traitors in public, 
and assisted them in private, according to her crafty nature.

Mary had been married but a little while, when she began to hate 
her husband, who, in his turn, began to hate that David Rizzio, 
with whom he had leagued to gain her favour, and whom he now 
believed to be her lover.  He hated Rizzio to that extent, that he 
made a compact with LORD RUTHVEN and three other lords to get rid 
of him by murder.  This wicked agreement they made in solemn 
secrecy upon the first of March, fifteen hundred and sixty-six, and 
on the night of Saturday the ninth, the conspirators were brought 
by Darnley up a private staircase, dark and steep, into a range of 
rooms where they knew that Mary was sitting at supper with her 
sister, Lady Argyle, and this doomed man.  When they went into the 
room, Darnley took the Queen round the waist, and Lord Ruthven, who 
had risen from a bed of sickness to do this murder, came in, gaunt 
and ghastly, leaning on two men.  Rizzio ran behind the Queen for 
shelter and protection.  'Let him come out of the room,' said 
Ruthven.  'He shall not leave the room,' replied the Queen; 'I read 
his danger in your face, and it is my will that he remain here.'  
They then set upon him, struggled with him, overturned the table, 
dragged him out, and killed him with fifty-six stabs.  When the 
Queen heard that he was dead, she said, 'No more tears.  I will 
think now of revenge!'

Within a day or two, she gained her husband over, and prevailed on 
the tall idiot to abandon the conspirators and fly with her to 
Dunbar.  There, he issued a proclamation, audaciously and falsely 
denying that he had any knowledge of the late bloody business; and 
there they were joined by the EARL BOTHWELL and some other nobles.  
With their help, they raised eight thousand men; returned to 
Edinburgh, and drove the assassins into England.  Mary soon 
afterwards gave birth to a son - still thinking of revenge.

That she should have had a greater scorn for her husband after his 
late cowardice and treachery than she had had before, was natural 
enough.  There is little doubt that she now began to love Bothwell 
instead, and to plan with him means of getting rid of Darnley.  
Bothwell had such power over her that he induced her even to pardon 
the assassins of Rizzio.  The arrangements for the Christening of 
the young Prince were entrusted to him, and he was one of the most 
important people at the ceremony, where the child was named JAMES:  
Elizabeth being his godmother, though not present on the occasion.  
A week afterwards, Darnley, who had left Mary and gone to his 
father's house at Glasgow, being taken ill with the small-pox, she 
sent her own physician to attend him.  But there is reason to 
apprehend that this was merely a show and a pretence, and that she 
knew what was doing, when Bothwell within another month proposed to 
one of the late conspirators against Rizzio, to murder Darnley, 
'for that it was the Queen's mind that he should be taken away.'  
It is certain that on that very day she wrote to her ambassador in 
France, complaining of him, and yet went immediately to Glasgow, 
feigning to be very anxious about him, and to love him very much.  
If she wanted to get him in her power, she succeeded to her heart's 
content; for she induced him to go back with her to Edinburgh, and 
to occupy, instead of the palace, a lone house outside the city 
called the Kirk of Field.  Here, he lived for about a week.  One 
Sunday night, she remained with him until ten o'clock, and then 
left him, to go to Holyrood to be present at an entertainment given 
in celebration of the marriage of one of her favourite servants.  
At two o'clock in the morning the city was shaken by a great 
explosion, and the Kirk of Field was blown to atoms.

Darnley's body was found next day lying under a tree at some 
distance.  How it came there, undisfigured and unscorched by 
gunpowder, and how this crime came to be so clumsily and strangely 
committed, it is impossible to discover.  The deceitful character 
of Mary, and the deceitful character of Elizabeth, have rendered 
almost every part of their joint history uncertain and obscure.  
But, I fear that Mary was unquestionably a party to her husband's 
murder, and that this was the revenge she had threatened.  The 
Scotch people universally believed it.  Voices cried out in the 
streets of Edinburgh in the dead of the night, for justice on the 
murderess.  Placards were posted by unknown hands in the public 
places denouncing Bothwell as the murderer, and the Queen as his 
accomplice; and, when he afterwards married her (though himself 
already married), previously making a show of taking her prisoner 
by force, the indignation of the people knew no bounds.  The women 
particularly are described as having been quite frantic against the 
Queen, and to have hooted and cried after her in the streets with 
terrific vehemence.

Such guilty unions seldom prosper.  This husband and wife had lived 
together but a month, when they were separated for ever by the 
successes of a band of Scotch nobles who associated against them 
for the protection of the young Prince:  whom Bothwell had vainly 
endeavoured to lay hold of, and whom he would certainly have 
murdered, if the EARL OF MAR, in whose hands the boy was, had not 
been firmly and honourably faithful to his trust.  Before this 
angry power, Bothwell fled abroad, where he died, a prisoner and 
mad, nine miserable years afterwards.  Mary being found by the 
associated lords to deceive them at every turn, was sent a prisoner 
to Lochleven Castle; which, as it stood in the midst of a lake, 
could only be approached by boat.  Here, one LORD LINDSAY, who was 
so much of a brute that the nobles would have done better if they 
had chosen a mere gentleman for their messenger, made her sign her 
abdication, and appoint Murray, Regent of Scotland.  Here, too, 
Murray saw her in a sorrowing and humbled state.

She had better have remained in the castle of Lochleven, dull 
prison as it was, with the rippling of the lake against it, and the 
moving shadows of the water on the room walls; but she could not 
rest there, and more than once tried to escape.  The first time she 
had nearly succeeded, dressed in the clothes of her own washer-
woman, but, putting up her hand to prevent one of the boatmen from 
lifting her veil, the men suspected her, seeing how white it was, 
and rowed her back again.  A short time afterwards, her fascinating 
manners enlisted in her cause a boy in the Castle, called the 
little DOUGLAS, who, while the family were at supper, stole the 
keys of the great gate, went softly out with the Queen, locked the 
gate on the outside, and rowed her away across the lake, sinking 
the keys as they went along.  On the opposite shore she was met by 
another Douglas, and some few lords; and, so accompanied, rode away 
on horseback to Hamilton, where they raised three thousand men.  
Here, she issued a proclamation declaring that the abdication she 
had signed in her prison was illegal, and requiring the Regent to 
yield to his lawful Queen.  Being a steady soldier, and in no way 
discomposed although he was without an army, Murray pretended to 
treat with her, until he had collected a force about half equal to 
her own, and then he gave her battle.  In one quarter of an hour he 
cut down all her hopes.  She had another weary ride on horse-back 
of sixty long Scotch miles, and took shelter at Dundrennan Abbey, 
whence she fled for safety to Elizabeth's dominions.

Mary Queen of Scots came to England - to her own ruin, the trouble 
of the kingdom, and the misery and death of many - in the year one 
thousand five hundred and sixty-eight.  How she left it and the 
world, nineteen years afterwards, we have now to see.


SECOND PART


WHEN Mary Queen of Scots arrived in England, without money and even 
without any other clothes than those she wore, she wrote to 
Elizabeth, representing herself as an innocent and injured piece of 
Royalty, and entreating her assistance to oblige her Scottish 
subjects to take her back again and obey her.  But, as her 
character was already known in England to be a very different one 
from what she made it out to be, she was told in answer that she 
must first clear herself.  Made uneasy by this condition, Mary, 
rather than stay in England, would have gone to Spain, or to 
France, or would even have gone back to Scotland.  But, as her 
doing either would have been likely to trouble England afresh, it 
was decided that she should be detained here.  She first came to 
Carlisle, and, after that, was moved about from castle to castle, 
as was considered necessary; but England she never left again.

After trying very hard to get rid of the necessity of clearing 
herself, Mary, advised by LORD HERRIES, her best friend in England, 
agreed to answer the charges against her, if the Scottish noblemen 
who made them would attend to maintain them before such English 
noblemen as Elizabeth might appoint for that purpose.  Accordingly, 
such an assembly, under the name of a conference, met, first at 
York, and afterwards at Hampton Court.  In its presence Lord 
Lennox, Darnley's father, openly charged Mary with the murder of 
his son; and whatever Mary's friends may now say or write in her 
behalf, there is no doubt that, when her brother Murray produced 
against her a casket containing certain guilty letters and verses 
which he stated to have passed between her and Bothwell, she 
withdrew from the inquiry.  Consequently, it is to be supposed that 
she was then considered guilty by those who had the best 
opportunities of judging of the truth, and that the feeling which 
afterwards arose in her behalf was a very generous but not a very 
reasonable one.

However, the DUKE OF NORFOLK, an honourable but rather weak 
nobleman, partly because Mary was captivating, partly because he 
was ambitious, partly because he was over-persuaded by artful 
plotters against Elizabeth, conceived a strong idea that he would 
like to marry the Queen of Scots - though he was a little 
frightened, too, by the letters in the casket.  This idea being 
secretly encouraged by some of the noblemen of Elizabeth's court, 
and even by the favourite Earl of Leicester (because it was 
objected to by other favourites who were his rivals), Mary 
expressed her approval of it, and the King of France and the King 
of Spain are supposed to have done the same.  It was not so quietly 
planned, though, but that it came to Elizabeth's ears, who warned 
the Duke 'to be careful what sort of pillow he was going to lay his 
head upon.'  He made a humble reply at the time; but turned sulky 
soon afterwards, and, being considered dangerous, was sent to the 
Tower.

Thus, from the moment of Mary's coming to England she began to be 
the centre of plots and miseries.

A rise of the Catholics in the north was the next of these, and it 
was only checked by many executions and much bloodshed.  It was 
followed by a great conspiracy of the Pope and some of the Catholic 
sovereigns of Europe to depose Elizabeth, place Mary on the throne, 
and restore the unreformed religion.  It is almost impossible to 
doubt that Mary knew and approved of this; and the Pope himself was 
so hot in the matter that he issued a bull, in which he openly 
called Elizabeth the 'pretended Queen' of England, excommunicated 
her, and excommunicated all her subjects who should continue to 
obey her.  A copy of this miserable paper got into London, and was 
found one morning publicly posted on the Bishop of London's gate.  
A great hue and cry being raised, another copy was found in the 
chamber of a student of Lincoln's Inn, who confessed, being put 
upon the rack, that he had received it from one JOHN FELTON, a rich 
gentleman who lived across the Thames, near Southwark.  This John 
Felton, being put upon the rack too, confessed that he had posted 
the placard on the Bishop's gate.  For this offence he was, within 
four days, taken to St. Paul's Churchyard, and there hanged and 
quartered.  As to the Pope's bull, the people by the reformation 
having thrown off the Pope, did not care much, you may suppose, for 
the Pope's throwing off them.  It was a mere dirty piece of paper, 
and not half so powerful as a street ballad.

On the very day when Felton was brought to his trial, the poor Duke 
of Norfolk was released.  It would have been well for him if he had 
kept away from the Tower evermore, and from the snares that had 
taken him there.  But, even while he was in that dismal place he 
corresponded with Mary, and as soon as he was out of it, he began 
to plot again.  Being discovered in correspondence with the Pope, 
with a view to a rising in England which should force Elizabeth to 
consent to his marriage with Mary and to repeal the laws against 
the Catholics, he was re-committed to the Tower and brought to 
trial.  He was found guilty by the unanimous verdict of the Lords 
who tried him, and was sentenced to the block.

It is very difficult to make out, at this distance of time, and 
between opposite accounts, whether Elizabeth really was a humane 
woman, or desired to appear so, or was fearful of shedding the 
blood of people of great name who were popular in the country.  
Twice she commanded and countermanded the execution of this Duke, 
and it did not take place until five months after his trial.  The 
scaffold was erected on Tower Hill, and there he died like a brave 
man.  He refused to have his eyes bandaged, saying that he was not 
at all afraid of death; and he admitted the justice of his 
sentence, and was much regretted by the people.

Although Mary had shrunk at the most important time from disproving 
her guilt, she was very careful never to do anything that would 
admit it.  All such proposals as were made to her by Elizabeth for 
her release, required that admission in some form or other, and 
therefore came to nothing.  Moreover, both women being artful and 
treacherous, and neither ever trusting the other, it was not likely 
that they could ever make an agreement.  So, the Parliament, 
aggravated by what the Pope had done, made new and strong laws 
against the spreading of the Catholic religion in England, and 
declared it treason in any one to say that the Queen and her 
successors were not the lawful sovereigns of England.  It would 
have done more than this, but for Elizabeth's moderation.

Since the Reformation, there had come to be three great sects of 
religious people - or people who called themselves so - in England; 
that is to say, those who belonged to the Reformed Church, those 
who belonged to the Unreformed Church, and those who were called 
the Puritans, because they said that they wanted to have everything 
very pure and plain in all the Church service.  These last were for 
the most part an uncomfortable people, who thought it highly 
meritorious to dress in a hideous manner, talk through their noses, 
and oppose all harmless enjoyments.  But they were powerful too, 
and very much in earnest, and they were one and all the determined 
enemies of the Queen of Scots.  The Protestant feeling in England 
was further strengthened by the tremendous cruelties to which 
Protestants were exposed in France and in the Netherlands.  Scores 
of thousands of them were put to death in those countries with 
every cruelty that can be imagined, and at last, in the autumn of 
the year one thousand five hundred and seventy-two, one of the 
greatest barbarities ever committed in the world took place at 
Paris.

It is called in history, THE MASSACRE OF SAINT BARTHOLOMEW, because 
it took place on Saint Bartholomew's Eve.  The day fell on Saturday 
the twenty-third of August.  On that day all the great leaders of 
the Protestants (who were there called HUGUENOTS) were assembled 
together, for the purpose, as was represented to them, of doing 
honour to the marriage of their chief, the young King of Navarre, 
with the sister of CHARLES THE NINTH:  a miserable young King who 
then occupied the French throne.  This dull creature was made to 
believe by his mother and other fierce Catholics about him that the 
Huguenots meant to take his life; and he was persuaded to give 
secret orders that, on the tolling of a great bell, they should be 
fallen upon by an overpowering force of armed men, and slaughtered 
wherever they could be found.  When the appointed hour was close at 
hand, the stupid wretch, trembling from head to foot, was taken 
into a balcony by his mother to see the atrocious work begun.  The 
moment the bell tolled, the murderers broke forth.  During all that 
night and the two next days, they broke into the houses, fired the 
houses, shot and stabbed the Protestants, men, women, and children, 
and flung their bodies into the streets.  They were shot at in the 
streets as they passed along, and their blood ran down the gutters.  
Upwards of ten thousand Protestants were killed in Paris alone; in 
all France four or five times that number.  To return thanks to 
Heaven for these diabolical murders, the Pope and his train 
actually went in public procession at Rome, and as if this were not 
shame enough for them, they had a medal struck to commemorate the 
event.  But, however comfortable the wholesale murders were to 
these high authorities, they had not that soothing effect upon the 
doll-King.  I am happy to state that he never knew a moment's peace 
afterwards; that he was continually crying out that he saw the 
Huguenots covered with blood and wounds falling dead before him; 
and that he died within a year, shrieking and yelling and raving to 
that degree, that if all the Popes who had ever lived had been 
rolled into one, they would not have afforded His guilty Majesty 
the slightest consolation.

When the terrible news of the massacre arrived in England, it made 
a powerful impression indeed upon the people.  If they began to run 
a little wild against the Catholics at about this time, this 
fearful reason for it, coming so soon after the days of bloody 
Queen Mary, must be remembered in their excuse.  The Court was not 
quite so honest as the people - but perhaps it sometimes is not.  
It received the French ambassador, with all the lords and ladies 
dressed in deep mourning, and keeping a profound silence.  
Nevertheless, a proposal of marriage which he had made to Elizabeth 
only two days before the eve of Saint Bartholomew, on behalf of the 
Duke of Alen‡on, the French King's brother, a boy of seventeen, 
still went on; while on the other hand, in her usual crafty way, 
the Queen secretly supplied the Huguenots with money and weapons.

I must say that for a Queen who made all those fine speeches, of 
which I have confessed myself to be rather tired, about living and 
dying a Maiden Queen, Elizabeth was 'going' to be married pretty 
often.  Besides always having some English favourite or other whom 
she by turns encouraged and swore at and knocked about - for the 
maiden Queen was very free with her fists - she held this French 
Duke off and on through several years.  When he at last came over 
to England, the marriage articles were actually drawn up, and it 
was settled that the wedding should take place in six weeks.  The 
Queen was then so bent upon it, that she prosecuted a poor Puritan 
named STUBBS, and a poor bookseller named PAGE, for writing and 
publishing a pamphlet against it.  Their right hands were chopped 
off for this crime; and poor Stubbs - more loyal than I should have 
been myself under the circumstances - immediately pulled off his 
hat with his left hand, and cried, 'God save the Queen!'  Stubbs 
was cruelly treated; for the marriage never took place after all, 
though the Queen pledged herself to the Duke with a ring from her 
own finger.  He went away, no better than he came, when the 
courtship had lasted some ten years altogether; and he died a 
couple of years afterwards, mourned by Elizabeth, who appears to 
have been really fond of him.  It is not much to her credit, for he 
was a bad enough member of a bad family.

To return to the Catholics.  There arose two orders of priests, who 
were very busy in England, and who were much dreaded.  These were 
the JESUITS (who were everywhere in all sorts of disguises), and 
the SEMINARY PRIESTS.  The people had a great horror of the first, 
because they were known to have taught that murder was lawful if it 
were done with an object of which they approved; and they had a 
great horror of the second, because they came to teach the old 
religion, and to be the successors of 'Queen Mary's priests,' as 
those yet lingering in England were called, when they should die 
out.  The severest laws were made against them, and were most 
unmercifully executed.  Those who sheltered them in their houses 
often suffered heavily for what was an act of humanity; and the 
rack, that cruel torture which tore men's limbs asunder, was 
constantly kept going.  What these unhappy men confessed, or what 
was ever confessed by any one under that agony, must always be 
received with great doubt, as it is certain that people have 
frequently owned to the most absurd and impossible crimes to escape 
such dreadful suffering.  But I cannot doubt it to have been proved 
by papers, that there were many plots, both among the Jesuits, and 
with France, and with Scotland, and with Spain, for the destruction 
of Queen Elizabeth, for the placing of Mary on the throne, and for 
the revival of the old religion.

If the English people were too ready to believe in plots, there 
were, as I have said, good reasons for it.  When the massacre of 
Saint Bartholomew was yet fresh in their recollection, a great 
Protestant Dutch hero, the PRINCE OF ORANGE, was shot by an 
assassin, who confessed that he had been kept and trained for the 
purpose in a college of Jesuits.  The Dutch, in this surprise and 
distress, offered to make Elizabeth their sovereign, but she 
declined the honour, and sent them a small army instead, under the 
command of the Earl of Leicester, who, although a capital Court 
favourite, was not much of a general.  He did so little in Holland, 
that his campaign there would probably have been forgotten, but for 
its occasioning the death of one of the best writers, the best 
knights, and the best gentlemen, of that or any age.  This was SIR 
PHILIP SIDNEY, who was wounded by a musket ball in the thigh as he 
mounted a fresh horse, after having had his own killed under him.  
He had to ride back wounded, a long distance, and was very faint 
with fatigue and loss of blood, when some water, for which he had 
eagerly asked, was handed to him.  But he was so good and gentle 
even then, that seeing a poor badly wounded common soldier lying on 
the ground, looking at the water with longing eyes, he said, 'Thy 
necessity is greater than mine,' and gave it up to him.  This 
touching action of a noble heart is perhaps as well known as any 
incident in history - is as famous far and wide as the blood-
stained Tower of London, with its axe, and block, and murders out 
of number.  So delightful is an act of true humanity, and so glad 
are mankind to remember it.

At home, intelligence of plots began to thicken every day.  I 
suppose the people never did live under such continual terrors as 
those by which they were possessed now, of Catholic risings, and 
burnings, and poisonings, and I don't know what.  Still, we must 
always remember that they lived near and close to awful realities 
of that kind, and that with their experience it was not difficult 
to believe in any enormity.  The government had the same fear, and 
did not take the best means of discovering the truth - for, besides 
torturing the suspected, it employed paid spies, who will always 
lie for their own profit.  It even made some of the conspiracies it 
brought to light, by sending false letters to disaffected people, 
inviting them to join in pretended plots, which they too readily 
did.

But, one great real plot was at length discovered, and it ended the 
career of Mary, Queen of Scots.  A seminary priest named BALLARD, 
and a Spanish soldier named SAVAGE, set on and encouraged by 
certain French priests, imparted a design to one ANTONY BABINGTON - 
a gentleman of fortune in Derbyshire, who had been for some time a 
secret agent of Mary's - for murdering the Queen.  Babington then 
confided the scheme to some other Catholic gentlemen who were his 
friends, and they joined in it heartily.  They were vain, weak-
headed young men, ridiculously confident, and preposterously proud 
of their plan; for they got a gimcrack painting made, of the six 
choice spirits who were to murder Elizabeth, with Babington in an 
attitude for the centre figure.  Two of their number, however, one 
of whom was a priest, kept Elizabeth's wisest minister, SIR FRANCIS 
WALSINGHAM, acquainted with the whole project from the first.  The 
conspirators were completely deceived to the final point, when 
Babington gave Savage, because he was shabby, a ring from his 
finger, and some money from his purse, wherewith to buy himself new 
clothes in which to kill the Queen.  Walsingham, having then full 
evidence against the whole band, and two letters of Mary's besides, 
resolved to seize them.  Suspecting something wrong, they stole out 
of the city, one by one, and hid themselves in St. John's Wood, and 
other places which really were hiding places then; but they were 
all taken, and all executed.  When they were seized, a gentleman 
was sent from Court to inform Mary of the fact, and of her being 
involved in the discovery.  Her friends have complained that she 
was kept in very hard and severe custody.  It does not appear very 
likely, for she was going out a hunting that very morning.

Queen Elizabeth had been warned long ago, by one in France who had 
good information of what was secretly doing, that in holding Mary 
alive, she held 'the wolf who would devour her.'  The Bishop of 
London had, more lately, given the Queen's favourite minister the 
advice in writing, 'forthwith to cut off the Scottish Queen's 
head.'  The question now was, what to do with her?  The Earl of 
Leicester wrote a little note home from Holland, recommending that 
she should be quietly poisoned; that noble favourite having 
accustomed his mind, it is possible, to remedies of that nature.  
His black advice, however, was disregarded, and she was brought to 
trial at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire, before a tribunal 
of forty, composed of both religions.  There, and in the Star 
Chamber at Westminster, the trial lasted a fortnight.  She defended 
herself with great ability, but could only deny the confessions 
that had been made by Babington and others; could only call her own 
letters, produced against her by her own secretaries, forgeries; 
and, in short, could only deny everything.  She was found guilty, 
and declared to have incurred the penalty of death.  The Parliament 
met, approved the sentence, and prayed the Queen to have it 
executed.  The Queen replied that she requested them to consider 
whether no means could be found of saving Mary's life without 
endangering her own.  The Parliament rejoined, No; and the citizens 
illuminated their houses and lighted bonfires, in token of their 
joy that all these plots and troubles were to be ended by the death 
of the Queen of Scots.

She, feeling sure that her time was now come, wrote a letter to the 
Queen of England, making three entreaties; first, that she might be 
buried in France; secondly, that she might not be executed in 
secret, but before her servants and some others; thirdly, that 
after her death, her servants should not be molested, but should be 
suffered to go home with the legacies she left them.  It was an 
affecting letter, and Elizabeth shed tears over it, but sent no 
answer.  Then came a special ambassador from France, and another 
from Scotland, to intercede for Mary's life; and then the nation 
began to clamour, more and more, for her death.

What the real feelings or intentions of Elizabeth were, can never 
be known now; but I strongly suspect her of only wishing one thing 
more than Mary's death, and that was to keep free of the blame of 
it.  On the first of February, one thousand five hundred and 
eighty-seven, Lord Burleigh having drawn out the warrant for the 
execution, the Queen sent to the secretary DAVISON to bring it to 
her, that she might sign it:  which she did.  Next day, when 
Davison told her it was sealed, she angrily asked him why such 
haste was necessary?  Next day but one, she joked about it, and 
swore a little.  Again, next day but one, she seemed to complain 
that it was not yet done, but still she would not be plain with 
those about her.  So, on the seventh, the Earls of Kent and 
Shrewsbury, with the Sheriff of Northamptonshire, came with the 
warrant to Fotheringay, to tell the Queen of Scots to prepare for 
death.

When those messengers of ill omen were gone, Mary made a frugal 
supper, drank to her servants, read over her will, went to bed, 
slept for some hours, and then arose and passed the remainder of 
the night saying prayers.  In the morning she dressed herself in 
her best clothes; and, at eight o'clock when the sheriff came for 
her to her chapel, took leave of her servants who were there 
assembled praying with her, and went down-stairs, carrying a Bible 
in one hand and a crucifix in the other.  Two of her women and four 
of her men were allowed to be present in the hall; where a low 
scaffold, only two feet from the ground, was erected and covered 
with black; and where the executioner from the Tower, and his 
assistant, stood, dressed in black velvet.  The hall was full of 
people.  While the sentence was being read she sat upon a stool; 
and, when it was finished, she again denied her guilt, as she had 
done before.  The Earl of Kent and the Dean of Peterborough, in 
their Protestant zeal, made some very unnecessary speeches to her; 
to which she replied that she died in the Catholic religion, and 
they need not trouble themselves about that matter.  When her head 
and neck were uncovered by the executioners, she said that she had 
not been used to be undressed by such hands, or before so much 
company.  Finally, one of her women fastened a cloth over her face, 
and she laid her neck upon the block, and repeated more than once 
in Latin, 'Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit!'  Some say 
her head was struck off in two blows, some say in three.  However 
that be, when it was held up, streaming with blood, the real hair 
beneath the false hair she had long worn was seen to be as grey as 
that of a woman of seventy, though she was at that time only in her 
forty-sixth year.  All her beauty was gone.

But she was beautiful enough to her little dog, who cowered under 
her dress, frightened, when she went upon the scaffold, and who lay 
down beside her headless body when all her earthly sorrows were 
over.


THIRD PART


ON its being formally made known to Elizabeth that the sentence had 
been executed on the Queen of Scots, she showed the utmost grief 
and rage, drove her favourites from her with violent indignation, 
and sent Davison to the Tower; from which place he was only 
released in the end by paying an immense fine which completely 
ruined him.  Elizabeth not only over-acted her part in making these 
pretences, but most basely reduced to poverty one of her faithful 
servants for no other fault than obeying her commands.

James, King of Scotland, Mary's son, made a show likewise of being 
very angry on the occasion; but he was a pensioner of England to 
the amount of five thousand pounds a year, and he had known very 
little of his mother, and he possibly regarded her as the murderer 
of his father, and he soon took it quietly.

Philip, King of Spain, however, threatened to do greater things 
than ever had been done yet, to set up the Catholic religion and 
punish Protestant England.  Elizabeth, hearing that he and the 
Prince of Parma were making great preparations for this purpose, in 
order to be beforehand with them sent out ADMIRAL DRAKE (a famous 
navigator, who had sailed about the world, and had already brought 
great plunder from Spain) to the port of Cadiz, where he burnt a 
hundred vessels full of stores.  This great loss obliged the 
Spaniards to put off the invasion for a year; but it was none the 
less formidable for that, amounting to one hundred and thirty 
ships, nineteen thousand soldiers, eight thousand sailors, two 
thousand slaves, and between two and three thousand great guns.  
England was not idle in making ready to resist this great force.  
All the men between sixteen years old and sixty, were trained and 
drilled; the national fleet of ships (in number only thirty-four at 
first) was enlarged by public contributions and by private ships, 
fitted out by noblemen; the city of London, of its own accord, 
furnished double the number of ships and men that it was required 
to provide; and, if ever the national spirit was up in England, it 
was up all through the country to resist the Spaniards.  Some of 
the Queen's advisers were for seizing the principal English 
Catholics, and putting them to death; but the Queen - who, to her 
honour, used to say, that she would never believe any ill of her 
subjects, which a parent would not believe of her own children - 
rejected the advice, and only confined a few of those who were the 
most suspected, in the fens in Lincolnshire.  The great body of 
Catholics deserved this confidence; for they behaved most loyally, 
nobly, and bravely.

So, with all England firing up like one strong, angry man, and with 
both sides of the Thames fortified, and with the soldiers under 
arms, and with the sailors in their ships, the country waited for 
the coming of the proud Spanish fleet, which was called THE 
INVINCIBLE ARMADA.  The Queen herself, riding in armour on a white 
horse, and the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Leicester holding her 
bridal rein, made a brave speech to the troops at Tilbury Fort 
opposite Gravesend, which was received with such enthusiasm as is 
seldom known.  Then came the Spanish Armada into the English 
Channel, sailing along in the form of a half moon, of such great 
size that it was seven miles broad.  But the English were quickly 
upon it, and woe then to all the Spanish ships that dropped a 
little out of the half moon, for the English took them instantly!  
And it soon appeared that the great Armada was anything but 
invincible, for on a summer night, bold Drake sent eight blazing 
fire-ships right into the midst of it.  In terrible consternation 
the Spaniards tried to get out to sea, and so became dispersed; the 
English pursued them at a great advantage; a storm came on, and 
drove the Spaniards among rocks and shoals; and the swift end of 
the Invincible fleet was, that it lost thirty great ships and ten 
thousand men, and, defeated and disgraced, sailed home again.  
Being afraid to go by the English Channel, it sailed all round 
Scotland and Ireland; some of the ships getting cast away on the 
latter coast in bad weather, the Irish, who were a kind of savages, 
plundered those vessels and killed their crews.  So ended this 
great attempt to invade and conquer England.  And I think it will 
be a long time before any other invincible fleet coming to England 
with the same object, will fare much better than the Spanish 
Armada.

Though the Spanish king had had this bitter taste of English 
bravery, he was so little the wiser for it, as still to entertain 
his old designs, and even to conceive the absurd idea of placing 
his daughter on the English throne.  But the Earl of Essex, SIR 
WALTER RALEIGH, SIR THOMAS HOWARD, and some other distinguished 
leaders, put to sea from Plymouth, entered the port of Cadiz once 
more, obtained a complete victory over the shipping assembled 
there, and got possession of the town.  In obedience to the Queen's 
express instructions, they behaved with great humanity; and the 
principal loss of the Spaniards was a vast sum of money which they 
had to pay for ransom.  This was one of many gallant achievements 
on the sea, effected in this reign.  Sir Walter Raleigh himself, 
after marrying a maid of honour and giving offence to the Maiden 
Queen thereby, had already sailed to South America in search of 
gold.

The Earl of Leicester was now dead, and so was Sir Thomas 
Walsingham, whom Lord Burleigh was soon to follow.  The principal 
favourite was the EARL OF ESSEX, a spirited and handsome man, a 
favourite with the people too as well as with the Queen, and 
possessed of many admirable qualities.  It was much debated at 
Court whether there should be peace with Spain or no, and he was 
very urgent for war.  He also tried hard to have his own way in the 
appointment of a deputy to govern in Ireland.  One day, while this 
question was in dispute, he hastily took offence, and turned his 
back upon the Queen; as a gentle reminder of which impropriety, the 
Queen gave him a tremendous box on the ear, and told him to go to 
the devil.  He went home instead, and did not reappear at Court for 
half a year or so, when he and the Queen were reconciled, though 
never (as some suppose) thoroughly.

From this time the fate of the Earl of Essex and that of the Queen 
seemed to be blended together.  The Irish were still perpetually 
quarrelling and fighting among themselves, and he went over to 
Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, to the great joy of his enemies (Sir 
Walter Raleigh among the rest), who were glad to have so dangerous 
a rival far off.  Not being by any means successful there, and 
knowing that his enemies would take advantage of that circumstance 
to injure him with the Queen, he came home again, though against 
her orders.  The Queen being taken by surprise when he appeared 
before her, gave him her hand to kiss, and he was overjoyed - 
though it was not a very lovely hand by this time - but in the 
course of the same day she ordered him to confine himself to his 
room, and two or three days afterwards had him taken into custody.  
With the same sort of caprice - and as capricious an old woman she 
now was, as ever wore a crown or a head either - she sent him broth 
from her own table on his falling ill from anxiety, and cried about 
him.

He was a man who could find comfort and occupation in his books, 
and he did so for a time; not the least happy time, I dare say, of 
his life.  But it happened unfortunately for him, that he held a 
monopoly in sweet wines:  which means that nobody could sell them 
without purchasing his permission.  This right, which was only for 
a term, expiring, he applied to have it renewed.  The Queen 
refused, with the rather strong observation - but she DID make 
strong observations - that an unruly beast must be stinted in his 
food.  Upon this, the angry Earl, who had been already deprived of 
many offices, thought himself in danger of complete ruin, and 
turned against the Queen, whom he called a vain old woman who had 
grown as crooked in her mind as she had in her figure.  These 
uncomplimentary expressions the ladies of the Court immediately 
snapped up and carried to the Queen, whom they did not put in a 
better tempter, you may believe.  The same Court ladies, when they 
had beautiful dark hair of their own, used to wear false red hair, 
to be like the Queen.  So they were not very high-spirited ladies, 
however high in rank.

The worst object of the Earl of Essex, and some friends of his who 
used to meet at LORD SOUTHAMPTON'S house, was to obtain possession 
of the Queen, and oblige her by force to dismiss her ministers and 
change her favourites.  On Saturday the seventh of February, one 
thousand six hundred and one, the council suspecting this, summoned 
the Earl to come before them.  He, pretending to be ill, declined; 
it was then settled among his friends, that as the next day would 
be Sunday, when many of the citizens usually assembled at the Cross 
by St. Paul's Cathedral, he should make one bold effort to induce 
them to rise and follow him to the Palace.

So, on the Sunday morning, he and a small body of adherents started 
out of his house - Essex House by the Strand, with steps to the 
river - having first shut up in it, as prisoners, some members of 
the council who came to examine him - and hurried into the City 
with the Earl at their head crying out 'For the Queen!  For the 
Queen!  A plot is laid for my life!'  No one heeded them, however, 
and when they came to St. Paul's there were no citizens there.  In 
the meantime the prisoners at Essex House had been released by one 
of the Earl's own friends; he had been promptly proclaimed a 
traitor in the City itself; and the streets were barricaded with 
carts and guarded by soldiers.  The Earl got back to his house by 
water, with difficulty, and after an attempt to defend his house 
against the troops and cannon by which it was soon surrounded, gave 
himself up that night.  He was brought to trial on the nineteenth, 
and found guilty; on the twenty-fifth, he was executed on Tower 
Hill, where he died, at thirty-four years old, both courageously 
and penitently.  His step-father suffered with him.  His enemy, Sir 
Walter Raleigh, stood near the scaffold all the time - but not so 
near it as we shall see him stand, before we finish his history.

In this case, as in the cases of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen 
of Scots, the Queen had commanded, and countermanded, and again 
commanded, the execution.  It is probable that the death of her 
young and gallant favourite in the prime of his good qualities, was 
never off her mind afterwards, but she held out, the same vain, 
obstinate and capricious woman, for another year.  Then she danced 
before her Court on a state occasion - and cut, I should think, a 
mighty ridiculous figure, doing so in an immense ruff, stomacher 
and wig, at seventy years old.  For another year still, she held 
out, but, without any more dancing, and as a moody, sorrowful, 
broken creature.  At last, on the tenth of March, one thousand six 
hundred and three, having been ill of a very bad cold, and made 
worse by the death of the Countess of Nottingham who was her 
intimate friend, she fell into a stupor and was supposed to be 
dead.  She recovered her consciousness, however, and then nothing 
would induce her to go to bed; for she said that she knew that if 
she did, she should never get up again.  There she lay for ten 
days, on cushions on the floor, without any food, until the Lord 
Admiral got her into bed at last, partly by persuasions and partly 
by main force.  When they asked her who should succeed her, she 
replied that her seat had been the seat of Kings, and that she 
would have for her successor, 'No rascal's son, but a King's.'  
Upon this, the lords present stared at one another, and took the 
liberty of asking whom she meant; to which she replied, 'Whom 
should I mean, but our cousin of Scotland!'  This was on the 
twenty-third of March.  They asked her once again that day, after 
she was speechless, whether she was still in the same mind?  She 
struggled up in bed, and joined her hands over her head in the form 
of a crown, as the only reply she could make.  At three o'clock 
next morning, she very quietly died, in the forty-fifth year of her 
reign.

That reign had been a glorious one, and is made for ever memorable 
by the distinguished men who flourished in it.  Apart from the 
great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars, whom it produced, the 
names of BACON, SPENSER, and SHAKESPEARE, will always be remembered 
with pride and veneration by the civilised world, and will always 
impart (though with no great reason, perhaps) some portion of their 
lustre to the name of Elizabeth herself.  It was a great reign for 
discovery, for commerce, and for English enterprise and spirit in 
general.  It was a great reign for the Protestant religion and for 
the Reformation which made England free.  The Queen was very 
popular, and in her progresses, or journeys about her dominions, 
was everywhere received with the liveliest joy.  I think the truth 
is, that she was not half so good as she has been made out, and not 
half so bad as she has been made out.  She had her fine qualities, 
but she was coarse, capricious, and treacherous, and had all the 
faults of an excessively vain young woman long after she was an old 
one.  On the whole, she had a great deal too much of her father in 
her, to please me.

Many improvements and luxuries were introduced in the course of 
these five-and-forty years in the general manner of living; but 
cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-baiting, were still the 
national amusements; and a coach was so rarely seen, and was such 
an ugly and cumbersome affair when it was seen, that even the Queen 
herself, on many high occasions, rode on horseback on a pillion 
behind the Lord Chancellor.



CHAPTER XXXII - ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE FIRST



'OUR cousin of Scotland' was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in 
mind and person.  His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his 
legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes 
stared and rolled like an idiot's.  He was cunning, covetous, 
wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, 
and the most conceited man on earth.  His figure - what is commonly 
called rickety from his birth - presented a most ridiculous 
appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safeguard against 
being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a grass-
green colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his 
side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one 
eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it 
on.  He used to loll on the necks of his favourite courtiers, and 
slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and the 
greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in his letters 
to his royal master, His Majesty's 'dog and slave,' and used to 
address his majesty as 'his Sowship.'  His majesty was the worst 
rider ever seen, and thought himself the best.  He was one of the 
most impertinent talkers (in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and 
boasted of being unanswerable in all manner of argument.  He wrote 
some of the most wearisome treatises ever read - among others, a 
book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout believer - and 
thought himself a prodigy of authorship.  He thought, and wrote, 
and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he 
pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth.  This is 
the plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men 
about the court praised and flattered to that degree, that I doubt 
if there be anything much more shameful in the annals of human 
nature.

He came to the English throne with great ease.  The miseries of a 
disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, that 
he was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, and was 
accepted by the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge 
that he would govern well, or that he would redress crying 
grievances.  He took a month to come from Edinburgh to London; and, 
by way of exercising his new power, hanged a pickpocket on the 
journey without any trial, and knighted everybody he could lay hold 
of.  He made two hundred knights before he got to his palace in 
London, and seven hundred before he had been in it three months.  
He also shovelled sixty-two new peers into the House of Lords - and 
there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them, you 
may believe.

His Sowship's prime Minister, CECIL (for I cannot do better than 
call his majesty what his favourite called him), was the enemy of 
Sir Walter Raleigh, and also of Sir Walter's political friend, LORD 
COBHAM; and his Sowship's first trouble was a plot originated by 
these two, and entered into by some others, with the old object of 
seizing the King and keeping him in imprisonment until he should 
change his ministers.  There were Catholic priests in the plot, and 
there were Puritan noblemen too; for, although the Catholics and 
Puritans were strongly opposed to each other, they united at this 
time against his Sowship, because they knew that he had a design 
against both, after pretending to be friendly to each; this design 
being to have only one high and convenient form of the Protestant 
religion, which everybody should be bound to belong to, whether 
they liked it or not.  This plot was mixed up with another, which 
may or may not have had some reference to placing on the throne, at 
some time, the LADY ARABELLA STUART; whose misfortune it was, to be 
the daughter of the younger brother of his Sowship's father, but 
who was quite innocent of any part in the scheme.  Sir Walter 
Raleigh was accused on the confession of Lord Cobham - a miserable 
creature, who said one thing at one time, and another thing at 
another time, and could be relied upon in nothing.  The trial of 
Sir Walter Raleigh lasted from eight in the morning until nearly 
midnight; he defended himself with such eloquence, genius, and 
spirit against all accusations, and against the insults of COKE, 
the Attorney-General - who, according to the custom of the time, 
foully abused him - that those who went there detesting the 
prisoner, came away admiring him, and declaring that anything so 
wonderful and so captivating was never heard.  He was found guilty, 
nevertheless, and sentenced to death.  Execution was deferred, and 
he was taken to the Tower.  The two Catholic priests, less 
fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity; and Lord Cobham 
and two others were pardoned on the scaffold.  His Sowship thought 
it wonderfully knowing in him to surprise the people by pardoning 
these three at the very block; but, blundering, and bungling, as 
usual, he had very nearly overreached himself.  For, the messenger 
on horseback who brought the pardon, came so late, that he was 
pushed to the outside of the crowd, and was obliged to shout and 
roar out what he came for.  The miserable Cobham did not gain much 
by being spared that day.  He lived, both as a prisoner and a 
beggar, utterly despised, and miserably poor, for thirteen years, 
and then died in an old outhouse belonging to one of his former 
servants.

This plot got rid of, and Sir Walter Raleigh safely shut up in the 
Tower, his Sowship held a great dispute with the Puritans on their 
presenting a petition to him, and had it all his own way - not so 
very wonderful, as he would talk continually, and would not hear 
anybody else - and filled the Bishops with admiration.  It was 
comfortably settled that there was to be only one form of religion, 
and that all men were to think exactly alike.  But, although this 
was arranged two centuries and a half ago, and although the 
arrangement was supported by much fining and imprisonment, I do not 
find that it is quite successful, even yet.

His Sowship, having that uncommonly high opinion of himself as a 
king, had a very low opinion of Parliament as a power that 
audaciously wanted to control him.  When he called his first 
Parliament after he had been king a year, he accordingly thought he 
would take pretty high ground with them, and told them that he 
commanded them 'as an absolute king.'  The Parliament thought those 
strong words, and saw the necessity of upholding their authority.  
His Sowship had three children:  Prince Henry, Prince Charles, and 
the Princess Elizabeth.  It would have been well for one of these, 
and we shall too soon see which, if he had learnt a little wisdom 
concerning Parliaments from his father's obstinacy.

Now, the people still labouring under their old dread of the 
Catholic religion, this Parliament revived and strengthened the 
severe laws against it.  And this so angered ROBERT CATESBY, a 
restless Catholic gentleman of an old family, that he formed one of 
the most desperate and terrible designs ever conceived in the mind 
of man; no less a scheme than the Gunpowder Plot.

His object was, when the King, lords, and commons, should be 
assembled at the next opening of Parliament, to blow them up, one 
and all, with a great mine of gunpowder.  The first person to whom 
he confided this horrible idea was THOMAS WINTER, a Worcestershire 
gentleman who had served in the army abroad, and had been secretly 
employed in Catholic projects.  While Winter was yet undecided, and 
when he had gone over to the Netherlands, to learn from the Spanish 
Ambassador there whether there was any hope of Catholics being 
relieved through the intercession of the King of Spain with his 
Sowship, he found at Ostend a tall, dark, daring man, whom he had 
known when they were both soldiers abroad, and whose name was GUIDO 
- or GUY - FAWKES.  Resolved to join the plot, he proposed it to 
this man, knowing him to be the man for any desperate deed, and 
they two came back to England together.  Here, they admitted two 
other conspirators; THOMAS PERCY, related to the Earl of 
Northumberland, and JOHN WRIGHT, his brother-in-law.  All these met 
together in a solitary house in the open fields which were then 
near Clement's Inn, now a closely blocked-up part of London; and 
when they had all taken a great oath of secrecy, Catesby told the 
rest what his plan was.  They then went up-stairs into a garret, 
and received the Sacrament from FATHER GERARD, a Jesuit, who is 
said not to have known actually of the Gunpowder Plot, but who, I 
think, must have had his suspicions that there was something 
desperate afoot.

Percy was a Gentleman Pensioner, and as he had occasional duties to 
perform about the Court, then kept at Whitehall, there would be 
nothing suspicious in his living at Westminster.  So, having looked 
well about him, and having found a house to let, the back of which 
joined the Parliament House, he hired it of a person named FERRIS, 
for the purpose of undermining the wall.  Having got possession of 
this house, the conspirators hired another on the Lambeth side of 
the Thames, which they used as a storehouse for wood, gunpowder, 
and other combustible matters.  These were to be removed at night 
(and afterwards were removed), bit by bit, to the house at 
Westminster; and, that there might be some trusty person to keep 
watch over the Lambeth stores, they admitted another conspirator, 
by name ROBERT KAY, a very poor Catholic gentleman.

All these arrangements had been made some months, and it was a 
dark, wintry, December night, when the conspirators, who had been 
in the meantime dispersed to avoid observation, met in the house at 
Westminster, and began to dig.  They had laid in a good stock of 
eatables, to avoid going in and out, and they dug and dug with 
great ardour.  But, the wall being tremendously thick, and the work 
very severe, they took into their plot CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT, a 
younger brother of John Wright, that they might have a new pair of 
hands to help.  And Christopher Wright fell to like a fresh man, 
and they dug and dug by night and by day, and Fawkes stood sentinel 
all the time.  And if any man's heart seemed to fail him at all, 
Fawkes said, 'Gentlemen, we have abundance of powder and shot here, 
and there is no fear of our being taken alive, even if discovered.'  
The same Fawkes, who, in the capacity of sentinel, was always 
prowling about, soon picked up the intelligence that the King had 
prorogued the Parliament again, from the seventh of February, the 
day first fixed upon, until the third of October.  When the 
conspirators knew this, they agreed to separate until after the 
Christmas holidays, and to take no notice of each other in the 
meanwhile, and never to write letters to one another on any 
account.  So, the house in Westminster was shut up again, and I 
suppose the neighbours thought that those strange-looking men who 
lived there so gloomily, and went out so seldom, were gone away to 
have a merry Christmas somewhere.

It was the beginning of February, sixteen hundred and five, when 
Catesby met his fellow-conspirators again at this Westminster 
house.  He had now admitted three more; JOHN GRANT, a Warwickshire 
gentleman of a melancholy temper, who lived in a doleful house near 
Stratford-upon-Avon, with a frowning wall all round it, and a deep 
moat; ROBERT WINTER, eldest brother of Thomas; and Catesby's own 
servant, THOMAS BATES, who, Catesby thought, had had some suspicion 
of what his master was about.  These three had all suffered more or 
less for their religion in Elizabeth's time.  And now, they all 
began to dig again, and they dug and dug by night and by day.

They found it dismal work alone there, underground, with such a 
fearful secret on their minds, and so many murders before them.  
They were filled with wild fancies.  Sometimes, they thought they 
heard a great bell tolling, deep down in the earth under the 
Parliament House; sometimes, they thought they heard low voices 
muttering about the Gunpowder Plot; once in the morning, they 
really did hear a great rumbling noise over their heads, as they 
dug and sweated in their mine.  Every man stopped and looked aghast 
at his neighbour, wondering what had happened, when that bold 
prowler, Fawkes, who had been out to look, came in and told them 
that it was only a dealer in coals who had occupied a cellar under 
the Parliament House, removing his stock in trade to some other 
place.  Upon this, the conspirators, who with all their digging and 
digging had not yet dug through the tremendously thick wall, 
changed their plan; hired that cellar, which was directly under the 
House of Lords; put six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder in it, and 
covered them over with fagots and coals.  Then they all dispersed 
again till September, when the following new conspirators were 
admitted; SIR EDWARD BAYNHAM, of Gloucestershire; SIR EVERARD 
DIGBY, of Rutlandshire; AMBROSE ROOKWOOD, of Suffolk; FRANCIS 
TRESHAM, of Northamptonshire.  Most of these were rich, and were to 
assist the plot, some with money and some with horses on which the 
conspirators were to ride through the country and rouse the 
Catholics after the Parliament should be blown into air.

Parliament being again prorogued from the third of October to the 
fifth of November, and the conspirators being uneasy lest their 
design should have been found out, Thomas Winter said he would go 
up into the House of Lords on the day of the prorogation, and see 
how matters looked.  Nothing could be better.  The unconscious 
Commissioners were walking about and talking to one another, just 
over the six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder.  He came back and 
told the rest so, and they went on with their preparations.  They 
hired a ship, and kept it ready in the Thames, in which Fawkes was 
to sail for Flanders after firing with a slow match the train that 
was to explode the powder.  A number of Catholic gentlemen not in 
the secret, were invited, on pretence of a hunting party, to meet 
Sir Everard Digby at Dunchurch on the fatal day, that they might be 
ready to act together.  And now all was ready.

But, now, the great wickedness and danger which had been all along 
at the bottom of this wicked plot, began to show itself.  As the 
fifth of November drew near, most of the conspirators, remembering 
that they had friends and relations who would be in the House of 
Lords that day, felt some natural relenting, and a wish to warn 
them to keep away.  They were not much comforted by Catesby's 
declaring that in such a cause he would blow up his own son.  LORD 
MOUNTEAGLE, Tresham's brother-in-law, was certain to be in the 
house; and when Tresham found that he could not prevail upon the 
rest to devise any means of sparing their friends, he wrote a 
mysterious letter to this lord and left it at his lodging in the 
dusk, urging him to keep away from the opening of Parliament, 
'since God and man had concurred to punish the wickedness of the 
times.'  It contained the words 'that the Parliament should receive 
a terrible blow, and yet should not see who hurt them.'  And it 
added, 'the danger is past, as soon as you have burnt the letter.'

The ministers and courtiers made out that his Sowship, by a direct 
miracle from Heaven, found out what this letter meant.  The truth 
is, that they were not long (as few men would be) in finding out 
for themselves; and it was decided to let the conspirators alone, 
until the very day before the opening of Parliament.  That the 
conspirators had their fears, is certain; for, Tresham himself said 
before them all, that they were every one dead men; and, although 
even he did not take flight, there is reason to suppose that he had 
warned other persons besides Lord Mounteagle.  However, they were 
all firm; and Fawkes, who was a man of iron, went down every day 
and night to keep watch in the cellar as usual.  He was there about 
two in the afternoon of the fourth, when the Lord Chamberlain and 
Lord Mounteagle threw open the door and looked in.  'Who are you, 
friend?' said they.  'Why,' said Fawkes, 'I am Mr. Percy's servant, 
and am looking after his store of fuel here.'  'Your master has 
laid in a pretty good store,' they returned, and shut the door, and 
went away.  Fawkes, upon this, posted off to the other conspirators 
to tell them all was quiet, and went back and shut himself up in 
the dark, black cellar again, where he heard the bell go twelve 
o'clock and usher in the fifth of November.  About two hours 
afterwards, he slowly opened the door, and came out to look about 
him, in his old prowling way.  He was instantly seized and bound, 
by a party of soldiers under SIR THOMAS KNEVETT.  He had a watch 
upon him, some touchwood, some tinder, some slow matches; and there 
was a dark lantern with a candle in it, lighted, behind the door.  
He had his boots and spurs on - to ride to the ship, I suppose - 
and it was well for the soldiers that they took him so suddenly.  
If they had left him but a moment's time to light a match, he 
certainly would have tossed it in among the powder, and blown up 
himself and them.

They took him to the King's bed-chamber first of all, and there the 
King (causing him to be held very tight, and keeping a good way 
off), asked him how he could have the heart to intend to destroy so 
many innocent people?  'Because,' said Guy Fawkes, 'desperate 
diseases need desperate remedies.'  To a little Scotch favourite, 
with a face like a terrier, who asked him (with no particular 
wisdom) why he had collected so much gunpowder, he replied, because 
he had meant to blow Scotchmen back to Scotland, and it would take 
a deal of powder to do that.  Next day he was carried to the Tower, 
but would make no confession.  Even after being horribly tortured, 
he confessed nothing that the Government did not already know; 
though he must have been in a fearful state - as his signature, 
still preserved, in contrast with his natural hand-writing before 
he was put upon the dreadful rack, most frightfully shows.  Bates, 
a very different man, soon said the Jesuits had had to do with the 
plot, and probably, under the torture, would as readily have said 
anything.  Tresham, taken and put in the Tower too, made 
confessions and unmade them, and died of an illness that was heavy 
upon him.  Rookwood, who had stationed relays of his own horses all 
the way to Dunchurch, did not mount to escape until the middle of 
the day, when the news of the plot was all over London.  On the 
road, he came up with the two Wrights, Catesby, and Percy; and they 
all galloped together into Northamptonshire.  Thence to Dunchurch, 
where they found the proposed party assembled.  Finding, however, 
that there had been a plot, and that it had been discovered, the 
party disappeared in the course of the night, and left them alone 
with Sir Everard Digby.  Away they all rode again, through 
Warwickshire and Worcestershire, to a house called Holbeach, on the 
borders of Staffordshire.  They tried to raise the Catholics on 
their way, but were indignantly driven off by them.  All this time 
they were hotly pursued by the sheriff of Worcester, and a fast 
increasing concourse of riders.  At last, resolving to defend 
themselves at Holbeach, they shut themselves up in the house, and 
put some wet powder before the fire to dry.  But it blew up, and 
Catesby was singed and blackened, and almost killed, and some of 
the others were sadly hurt.  Still, knowing that they must die, 
they resolved to die there, and with only their swords in their 
hands appeared at the windows to be shot at by the sheriff and his 
assistants.  Catesby said to Thomas Winter, after Thomas had been 
hit in the right arm which dropped powerless by his side, 'Stand by 
me, Tom, and we will die together!' - which they did, being shot 
through the body by two bullets from one gun.  John Wright, and 
Christopher Wright, and Percy, were also shot.  Rookwood and Digby 
were taken:  the former with a broken arm and a wound in his body 
too.

It was the fifteenth of January, before the trial of Guy Fawkes, 
and such of the other conspirators as were left alive, came on.  
They were all found guilty, all hanged, drawn, and quartered:  
some, in St. Paul's Churchyard, on the top of Ludgate-hill; some, 
before the Parliament House.  A Jesuit priest, named HENRY GARNET, 
to whom the dreadful design was said to have been communicated, was 
taken and tried; and two of his servants, as well as a poor priest 
who was taken with him, were tortured without mercy.  He himself 
was not tortured, but was surrounded in the Tower by tamperers and 
traitors, and so was made unfairly to convict himself out of his 
own mouth.  He said, upon his trial, that he had done all he could 
to prevent the deed, and that he could not make public what had 
been told him in confession - though I am afraid he knew of the 
plot in other ways.  He was found guilty and executed, after a 
manful defence, and the Catholic Church made a saint of him; some 
rich and powerful persons, who had had nothing to do with the 
project, were fined and imprisoned for it by the Star Chamber; the 
Catholics, in general, who had recoiled with horror from the idea 
of the infernal contrivance, were unjustly put under more severe 
laws than before; and this was the end of the Gunpowder Plot.


SECOND PART


His Sowship would pretty willingly, I think, have blown the House 
of Commons into the air himself; for, his dread and jealousy of it 
knew no bounds all through his reign.  When he was hard pressed for 
money he was obliged to order it to meet, as he could get no money 
without it; and when it asked him first to abolish some of the 
monopolies in necessaries of life which were a great grievance to 
the people, and to redress other public wrongs, he flew into a rage 
and got rid of it again.  At one time he wanted it to consent to 
the Union of England with Scotland, and quarrelled about that.  At 
another time it wanted him to put down a most infamous Church 
abuse, called the High Commission Court, and he quarrelled with it 
about that.  At another time it entreated him not to be quite so 
fond of his archbishops and bishops who made speeches in his praise 
too awful to be related, but to have some little consideration for 
the poor Puritan clergy who were persecuted for preaching in their 
own way, and not according to the archbishops and bishops; and they 
quarrelled about that.  In short, what with hating the House of 
Commons, and pretending not to hate it; and what with now sending 
some of its members who opposed him, to Newgate or to the Tower, 
and now telling the rest that they must not presume to make 
speeches about the public affairs which could not possibly concern 
them; and what with cajoling, and bullying, and fighting, and being 
frightened; the House of Commons was the plague of his Sowship's 
existence.  It was pretty firm, however, in maintaining its rights, 
and insisting that the Parliament should make the laws, and not the 
King by his own single proclamations (which he tried hard to do); 
and his Sowship was so often distressed for money, in consequence, 
that he sold every sort of title and public office as if they were 
merchandise, and even invented a new dignity called a Baronetcy, 
which anybody could buy for a thousand pounds.

These disputes with his Parliaments, and his hunting, and his 
drinking, and his lying in bed - for he was a great sluggard - 
occupied his Sowship pretty well.  The rest of his time he chiefly 
passed in hugging and slobbering his favourites.  The first of 
these was SIR PHILIP HERBERT, who had no knowledge whatever, except 
of dogs, and horses, and hunting, but whom he soon made EARL OF 
MONTGOMERY.  The next, and a much more famous one, was ROBERT CARR, 
or KER (for it is not certain which was his right name), who came 
from the Border country, and whom he soon made VISCOUNT ROCHESTER, 
and afterwards, EARL OF SOMERSET.  The way in which his Sowship 
doted on this handsome young man, is even more odious to think of, 
than the way in which the really great men of England condescended 
to bow down before him.  The favourite's great friend was a certain 
SIR THOMAS OVERBURY, who wrote his love-letters for him, and 
assisted him in the duties of his many high places, which his own 
ignorance prevented him from discharging.  But this same Sir Thomas 
having just manhood enough to dissuade the favourite from a wicked 
marriage with the beautiful Countess of Essex, who was to get a 
divorce from her husband for the purpose, the said Countess, in her 
rage, got Sir Thomas put into the Tower, and there poisoned him.  
Then the favourite and this bad woman were publicly married by the 
King's pet bishop, with as much to-do and rejoicing, as if he had 
been the best man, and she the best woman, upon the face of the 
earth.

But, after a longer sunshine than might have been expected - of 
seven years or so, that is to say - another handsome young man 
started up and eclipsed the EARL OF SOMERSET.  This was GEORGE 
VILLIERS, the youngest son of a Leicestershire gentleman:  who came 
to Court with all the Paris fashions on him, and could dance as 
well as the best mountebank that ever was seen.  He soon danced 
himself into the good graces of his Sowship, and danced the other 
favourite out of favour.  Then, it was all at once discovered that 
the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not deserved all those great 
promotions and mighty rejoicings, and they were separately tried 
for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and for other crimes.  But, 
the King was so afraid of his late favourite's publicly telling 
some disgraceful things he knew of him - which he darkly threatened 
to do - that he was even examined with two men standing, one on 
either side of him, each with a cloak in his hand, ready to throw 
it over his head and stop his mouth if he should break out with 
what he had it in his power to tell.  So, a very lame affair was 
purposely made of the trial, and his punishment was an allowance of 
four thousand pounds a year in retirement, while the Countess was 
pardoned, and allowed to pass into retirement too.  They hated one 
another by this time, and lived to revile and torment each other 
some years.

While these events were in progress, and while his Sowship was 
making such an exhibition of himself, from day to day and from year 
to year, as is not often seen in any sty, three remarkable deaths 
took place in England.  The first was that of the Minister, Robert 
Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who was past sixty, and had never been 
strong, being deformed from his birth.  He said at last that he had 
no wish to live; and no Minister need have had, with his experience 
of the meanness and wickedness of those disgraceful times.  The 
second was that of the Lady Arabella Stuart, who alarmed his 
Sowship mightily, by privately marrying WILLIAM SEYMOUR, son of 
LORD BEAUCHAMP, who was a descendant of King Henry the Seventh, and 
who, his Sowship thought, might consequently increase and 
strengthen any claim she might one day set up to the throne.  She 
was separated from her husband (who was put in the Tower) and 
thrust into a boat to be confined at Durham.  She escaped in a 
man's dress to get away in a French ship from Gravesend to France, 
but unhappily missed her husband, who had escaped too, and was soon 
taken.  She went raving mad in the miserable Tower, and died there 
after four years.  The last, and the most important of these three 
deaths, was that of Prince Henry, the heir to the throne, in the 
nineteenth year of his age.  He was a promising young prince, and 
greatly liked; a quiet, well-conducted youth, of whom two very good 
things are known:  first, that his father was jealous of him; 
secondly, that he was the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, languishing 
through all those years in the Tower, and often said that no man 
but his father would keep such a bird in such a cage.  On the 
occasion of the preparations for the marriage of his sister the 
Princess Elizabeth with a foreign prince (and an unhappy marriage 
it turned out), he came from Richmond, where he had been very ill, 
to greet his new brother-in-law, at the palace at Whitehall.  There 
he played a great game at tennis, in his shirt, though it was very 
cold weather, and was seized with an alarming illness, and died 
within a fortnight of a putrid fever.  For this young prince Sir 
Walter Raleigh wrote, in his prison in the Tower, the beginning of 
a History of the World:  a wonderful instance how little his 
Sowship could do to confine a great man's mind, however long he 
might imprison his body.

And this mention of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had many faults, but 
who never showed so many merits as in trouble and adversity, may 
bring me at once to the end of his sad story.  After an 
imprisonment in the Tower of twelve long years, he proposed to 
resume those old sea voyages of his, and to go to South America in 
search of gold.  His Sowship, divided between his wish to be on 
good terms with the Spaniards through whose territory Sir Walter 
must pass (he had long had an idea of marrying Prince Henry to a 
Spanish Princess), and his avaricious eagerness to get hold of the 
gold, did not know what to do.  But, in the end, he set Sir Walter 
free, taking securities for his return; and Sir Walter fitted out 
an expedition at his own coast and, on the twenty-eighth of March, 
one thousand six hundred and seventeen, sailed away in command of 
one of its ships, which he ominously called the Destiny.  The 
expedition failed; the common men, not finding the gold they had 
expected, mutinied; a quarrel broke out between Sir Walter and the 
Spaniards, who hated him for old successes of his against them; and 
he took and burnt a little town called SAINT THOMAS.  For this he 
was denounced to his Sowship by the Spanish Ambassador as a pirate; 
and returning almost broken-hearted, with his hopes and fortunes 
shattered, his company of friends dispersed, and his brave son (who 
had been one of them) killed, he was taken - through the treachery 
of SIR LEWIS STUKELY, his near relation, a scoundrel and a Vice-
Admiral - and was once again immured in his prison-home of so many 
years.

His Sowship being mightily disappointed in not getting any gold, 
Sir Walter Raleigh was tried as unfairly, and with as many lies and 
evasions as the judges and law officers and every other authority 
in Church and State habitually practised under such a King.  After 
a great deal of prevarication on all parts but his own, it was 
declared that he must die under his former sentence, now fifteen 
years old.  So, on the twenty-eighth of October, one thousand six 
hundred and eighteen, he was shut up in the Gate House at 
Westminster to pass his late night on earth, and there he took 
leave of his good and faithful lady who was worthy to have lived in 
better days.  At eight o'clock next morning, after a cheerful 
breakfast, and a pipe, and a cup of good wine, he was taken to Old 
Palace Yard in Westminster, where the scaffold was set up, and 
where so many people of high degree were assembled to see him die, 
that it was a matter of some difficulty to get him through the 
crowd.  He behaved most nobly, but if anything lay heavy on his 
mind, it was that Earl of Essex, whose head he had seen roll off; 
and he solemnly said that he had had no hand in bringing him to the 
block, and that he had shed tears for him when he died.  As the 
morning was very cold, the Sheriff said, would he come down to a 
fire for a little space, and warm himself?  But Sir Walter thanked 
him, and said no, he would rather it were done at once, for he was 
ill of fever and ague, and in another quarter of an hour his 
shaking fit would come upon him if he were still alive, and his 
enemies might then suppose that he trembled for fear.  With that, 
he kneeled and made a very beautiful and Christian prayer.  Before 
he laid his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe, and 
said, with a smile upon his face, that it was a sharp medicine, but 
would cure the worst disease.  When he was bent down ready for 
death, he said to the executioner, finding that he hesitated, 'What 
dost thou fear?  Strike, man!'  So, the axe came down and struck 
his head off, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.

The new favourite got on fast.  He was made a viscount, he was made 
Duke of Buckingham, he was made a marquis, he was made Master of 
the Horse, he was made Lord High Admiral - and the Chief Commander 
of the gallant English forces that had dispersed the Spanish 
Armada, was displaced to make room for him.  He had the whole 
kingdom at his disposal, and his mother sold all the profits and 
honours of the State, as if she had kept a shop.  He blazed all 
over with diamonds and other precious stones, from his hatband and 
his earrings to his shoes.  Yet he was an ignorant presumptuous, 
swaggering compound of knave and fool, with nothing but his beauty 
and his dancing to recommend him.  This is the gentleman who called 
himself his Majesty's dog and slave, and called his Majesty Your 
Sowship.  His Sowship called him STEENIE; it is supposed, because 
that was a nickname for Stephen, and because St. Stephen was 
generally represented in pictures as a handsome saint.

His Sowship was driven sometimes to his wits'-end by his trimming 
between the general dislike of the Catholic religion at home, and 
his desire to wheedle and flatter it abroad, as his only means of 
getting a rich princess for his son's wife:  a part of whose 
fortune he might cram into his greasy pockets.  Prince Charles - or 
as his Sowship called him, Baby Charles - being now PRINCE OF 
WALES, the old project of a marriage with the Spanish King's 
daughter had been revived for him; and as she could not marry a 
Protestant without leave from the Pope, his Sowship himself 
secretly and meanly wrote to his Infallibility, asking for it.  The 
negotiation for this Spanish marriage takes up a larger space in 
great books, than you can imagine, but the upshot of it all is, 
that when it had been held off by the Spanish Court for a long 
time, Baby Charles and Steenie set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas 
Smith and Mr. John Smith, to see the Spanish Princess; that Baby 
Charles pretended to be desperately in love with her, and jumped 
off walls to look at her, and made a considerable fool of himself 
in a good many ways; that she was called Princess of Wales and that 
the whole Spanish Court believed Baby Charles to be all but dying 
for her sake, as he expressly told them he was; that Baby Charles 
and Steenie came back to England, and were received with as much 
rapture as if they had been a blessing to it; that Baby Charles had 
actually fallen in love with HENRIETTA MARIA, the French King's 
sister, whom he had seen in Paris; that he thought it a wonderfully 
fine and princely thing to have deceived the Spaniards, all 
through; and that he openly said, with a chuckle, as soon as he was 
safe and sound at home again, that the Spaniards were great fools 
to have believed him.

Like most dishonest men, the Prince and the favourite complained 
that the people whom they had deluded were dishonest.  They made 
such misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards in this 
business of the Spanish match, that the English nation became eager 
for a war with them.  Although the gravest Spaniards laughed at the 
idea of his Sowship in a warlike attitude, the Parliament granted 
money for the beginning of hostilities, and the treaties with Spain 
were publicly declared to be at an end.  The Spanish ambassador in 
London - probably with the help of the fallen favourite, the Earl 
of Somerset - being unable to obtain speech with his Sowship, 
slipped a paper into his hand, declaring that he was a prisoner in 
his own house, and was entirely governed by Buckingham and his 
creatures.  The first effect of this letter was that his Sowship 
began to cry and whine, and took Baby Charles away from Steenie, 
and went down to Windsor, gabbling all sorts of nonsense.  The end 
of it was that his Sowship hugged his dog and slave, and said he 
was quite satisfied.

He had given the Prince and the favourite almost unlimited power to 
settle anything with the Pope as to the Spanish marriage; and he 
now, with a view to the French one, signed a treaty that all Roman 
Catholics in England should exercise their religion freely, and 
should never be required to take any oath contrary thereto.  In 
return for this, and for other concessions much less to be 
defended, Henrietta Maria was to become the Prince's wife, and was 
to bring him a fortune of eight hundred thousand crowns.

His Sowship's eyes were getting red with eagerly looking for the 
money, when the end of a gluttonous life came upon him; and, after 
a fortnight's illness, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of March, one 
thousand six hundred and twenty-five, he died.  He had reigned 
twenty-two years, and was fifty-nine years old.  I know of nothing 
more abominable in history than the adulation that was lavished on 
this King, and the vice and corruption that such a barefaced habit 
of lying produced in his court.  It is much to be doubted whether 
one man of honour, and not utterly self-disgraced, kept his place 
near James the First.  Lord Bacon, that able and wise philosopher, 
as the First Judge in the Kingdom in this reign, became a public 
spectacle of dishonesty and corruption; and in his base flattery of 
his Sowship, and in his crawling servility to his dog and slave, 
disgraced himself even more.  But, a creature like his Sowship set 
upon a throne is like the Plague, and everybody receives infection 
from him.



CHAPTER XXXIII - ENGLAND UNDER CHARLES THE FIRST



BABY CHARLES became KING CHARLES THE FIRST, in the twenty-fifth 
year of his age.  Unlike his father, he was usually amiable in his 
private character, and grave and dignified in his bearing; but, 
like his father, he had monstrously exaggerated notions of the 
rights of a king, and was evasive, and not to be trusted.  If his 
word could have been relied upon, his history might have had a 
different end.

His first care was to send over that insolent upstart, Buckingham, 
to bring Henrietta Maria from Paris to be his Queen; upon which 
occasion Buckingham - with his usual audacity - made love to the 
young Queen of Austria, and was very indignant indeed with CARDINAL 
RICHELIEU, the French Minister, for thwarting his intentions.  The 
English people were very well disposed to like their new Queen, and 
to receive her with great favour when she came among them as a 
stranger.  But, she held the Protestant religion in great dislike, 
and brought over a crowd of unpleasant priests, who made her do 
some very ridiculous things, and forced themselves upon the public 
notice in many disagreeable ways.  Hence, the people soon came to 
dislike her, and she soon came to dislike them; and she did so much 
all through this reign in setting the King (who was dotingly fond 
of her) against his subjects, that it would have been better for 
him if she had never been born.

Now, you are to understand that King Charles the First - of his own 
determination to be a high and mighty King not to be called to 
account by anybody, and urged on by his Queen besides - 
deliberately set himself to put his Parliament down and to put 
himself up. You are also to understand, that even in pursuit of 
this wrong idea (enough in itself to have ruined any king) he never 
took a straight course, but always took a crooked one.

He was bent upon war with Spain, though neither the House of 
Commons nor the people were quite clear as to the justice of that 
war, now that they began to think a little more about the story of 
the Spanish match.  But the King rushed into it hotly, raised money 
by illegal means to meet its expenses, and encountered a miserable 
failure at Cadiz, in the very first year of his reign.  An 
expedition to Cadiz had been made in the hope of plunder, but as it 
was not successful, it was necessary to get a grant of money from 
the Parliament; and when they met, in no very complying humour, 
the, King told them, 'to make haste to let him have it, or it would 
be the worse for themselves.'  Not put in a more complying humour 
by this, they impeached the King's favourite, the Duke of 
Buckingham, as the cause (which he undoubtedly was) of many great 
public grievances and wrongs.  The King, to save him, dissolved the 
Parliament without getting the money he wanted; and when the Lords 
implored him to consider and grant a little delay, he replied, 'No, 
not one minute.'  He then began to raise money for himself by the 
following means among others.

He levied certain duties called tonnage and poundage which had not 
been granted by the Parliament, and could lawfully be levied by no 
other power; he called upon the seaport towns to furnish, and to 
pay all the cost for three months of, a fleet of armed ships; and 
he required the people to unite in lending him large sums of money, 
the repayment of which was very doubtful.  If the poor people 
refused, they were pressed as soldiers or sailors; if the gentry 
refused, they were sent to prison.  Five gentlemen, named SIR 
THOMAS DARNEL, JOHN CORBET, WALTER EARL, JOHN HEVENINGHAM, and 
EVERARD HAMPDEN, for refusing were taken up by a warrant of the 
King's privy council, and were sent to prison without any cause but 
the King's pleasure being stated for their imprisonment.  Then the 
question came to be solemnly tried, whether this was not a 
violation of Magna Charta, and an encroachment by the King on the 
highest rights of the English people.  His lawyers contended No, 
because to encroach upon the rights of the English people would be 
to do wrong, and the King could do no wrong.  The accommodating 
judges decided in favour of this wicked nonsense; and here was a 
fatal division between the King and the people.

For all this, it became necessary to call another Parliament.  The 
people, sensible of the danger in which their liberties were, chose 
for it those who were best known for their determined opposition to 
the King; but still the King, quite blinded by his determination to 
carry everything before him, addressed them when they met, in a 
contemptuous manner, and just told them in so many words that he 
had only called them together because he wanted money.  The 
Parliament, strong enough and resolute enough to know that they 
would lower his tone, cared little for what he said, and laid 
before him one of the great documents of history, which is called 
the PETITION OF RIGHT, requiring that the free men of England 
should no longer be called upon to lend the King money, and should 
no longer be pressed or imprisoned for refusing to do so; further, 
that the free men of England should no longer be seized by the 
King's special mandate or warrant, it being contrary to their 
rights and liberties and the laws of their country.  At first the 
King returned an answer to this petition, in which he tried to 
shirk it altogether; but, the House of Commons then showing their 
determination to go on with the impeachment of Buckingham, the King 
in alarm returned an answer, giving his consent to all that was 
required of him.  He not only afterwards departed from his word and 
honour on these points, over and over again, but, at this very 
time, he did the mean and dissembling act of publishing his first 
answer and not his second - merely that the people might suppose 
that the Parliament had not got the better of him.

That pestilent Buckingham, to gratify his own wounded vanity, had 
by this time involved the country in war with France, as well as 
with Spain.  For such miserable causes and such miserable creatures 
are wars sometimes made!  But he was destined to do little more 
mischief in this world.  One morning, as he was going out of his 
house to his carriage, he turned to speak to a certain Colonel 
FRYER who was with him; and he was violently stabbed with a knife, 
which the murderer left sticking in his heart.  This happened in 
his hall.  He had had angry words up-stairs, just before, with some 
French gentlemen, who were immediately suspected by his servants, 
and had a close escape from being set upon and killed.  In the 
midst of the noise, the real murderer, who had gone to the kitchen 
and might easily have got away, drew his sword and cried out, 'I am 
the man!'  His name was JOHN FELTON, a Protestant and a retired 
officer in the army.  He said he had had no personal ill-will to 
the Duke, but had killed him as a curse to the country.  He had 
aimed his blow well, for Buckingham had only had time to cry out, 
'Villain!' and then he drew out the knife, fell against a table, 
and died.

The council made a mighty business of examining John Felton about 
this murder, though it was a plain case enough, one would think.  
He had come seventy miles to do it, he told them, and he did it for 
the reason he had declared; if they put him upon the rack, as that 
noble MARQUIS OF DORSET whom he saw before him, had the goodness to 
threaten, he gave that marquis warning, that he would accuse HIM as 
his accomplice!  The King was unpleasantly anxious to have him 
racked, nevertheless; but as the judges now found out that torture 
was contrary to the law of England - it is a pity they did not make 
the discovery a little sooner - John Felton was simply executed for 
the murder he had done.  A murder it undoubtedly was, and not in 
the least to be defended:  though he had freed England from one of 
the most profligate, contemptible, and base court favourites to 
whom it has ever yielded.

A very different man now arose.  This was SIR THOMAS WENTWORTH, a 
Yorkshire gentleman, who had sat in Parliament for a long time, and 
who had favoured arbitrary and haughty principles, but who had gone 
over to the people's side on receiving offence from Buckingham.  
The King, much wanting such a man - for, besides being naturally 
favourable to the King's cause, he had great abilities - made him 
first a Baron, and then a Viscount, and gave him high employment, 
and won him most completely.

A Parliament, however, was still in existence, and was NOT to be 
won.  On the twentieth of January, one thousand six hundred and 
twenty-nine, SIR JOHN ELIOT, a great man who had been active in the 
Petition of Right, brought forward other strong resolutions against 
the King's chief instruments, and called upon the Speaker to put 
them to the vote.  To this the Speaker answered, 'he was commanded 
otherwise by the King,' and got up to leave the chair - which, 
according to the rules of the House of Commons would have obliged 
it to adjourn without doing anything more - when two members, named 
Mr. HOLLIS and Mr. VALENTINE, held him down.  A scene of great 
confusion arose among the members; and while many swords were drawn 
and flashing about, the King, who was kept informed of all that was 
going on, told the captain of his guard to go down to the House and 
force the doors.  The resolutions were by that time, however, 
voted, and the House adjourned.  Sir John Eliot and those two 
members who had held the Speaker down, were quickly summoned before 
the council.  As they claimed it to be their privilege not to 
answer out of Parliament for anything they had said in it, they 
were committed to the Tower.  The King then went down and dissolved 
the Parliament, in a speech wherein he made mention of these 
gentlemen as 'Vipers' - which did not do him much good that ever I 
have heard of.

As they refused to gain their liberty by saying they were sorry for 
what they had done, the King, always remarkably unforgiving, never 
overlooked their offence.  When they demanded to be brought up 
before the court of King's Bench, he even resorted to the meanness 
of having them moved about from prison to prison, so that the writs 
issued for that purpose should not legally find them.  At last they 
came before the court and were sentenced to heavy fines, and to be 
imprisoned during the King's pleasure.  When Sir John Eliot's 
health had quite given way, and he so longed for change of air and 
scene as to petition for his release, the King sent back the answer 
(worthy of his Sowship himself) that the petition was not humble 
enough.  When he sent another petition by his young son, in which 
he pathetically offered to go back to prison when his health was 
restored, if he might be released for its recovery, the King still 
disregarded it.  When he died in the Tower, and his children 
petitioned to be allowed to take his body down to Cornwall, there 
to lay it among the ashes of his forefathers, the King returned for 
answer, 'Let Sir John Eliot's body be buried in the church of that 
parish where he died.'  All this was like a very little King 
indeed, I think.

And now, for twelve long years, steadily pursuing his design of 
setting himself up and putting the people down, the King called no 
Parliament; but ruled without one.  If twelve thousand volumes were 
written in his praise (as a good many have been) it would still 
remain a fact, impossible to be denied, that for twelve years King 
Charles the First reigned in England unlawfully and despotically, 
seized upon his subjects' goods and money at his pleasure, and 
punished according to his unbridled will all who ventured to oppose 
him.  It is a fashion with some people to think that this King's 
career was cut short; but I must say myself that I think he ran a 
pretty long one.

WILLIAM LAUD, Archbishop of Canterbury, was the King's right-hand 
man in the religious part of the putting down of the people's 
liberties.  Laud, who was a sincere man, of large learning but 
small sense - for the two things sometimes go together in very 
different quantities - though a Protestant, held opinions so near 
those of the Catholics, that the Pope wanted to make a Cardinal of 
him, if he would have accepted that favour.  He looked upon vows, 
robes, lighted candles, images, and so forth, as amazingly 
important in religious ceremonies; and he brought in an immensity 
of bowing and candle-snuffing.  He also regarded archbishops and 
bishops as a sort of miraculous persons, and was inveterate in the 
last degree against any who thought otherwise.  Accordingly, he 
offered up thanks to Heaven, and was in a state of much pious 
pleasure, when a Scotch clergyman, named LEIGHTON, was pilloried, 
whipped, branded in the cheek, and had one of his ears cut off and 
one of his nostrils slit, for calling bishops trumpery and the 
inventions of men.  He originated on a Sunday morning the 
prosecution of WILLIAM PRYNNE, a barrister who was of similar 
opinions, and who was fined a thousand pounds; who was pilloried; 
who had his ears cut off on two occasions - one ear at a time - and 
who was imprisoned for life.  He highly approved of the punishment 
of DOCTOR BASTWICK, a physician; who was also fined a thousand 
pounds; and who afterwards had HIS ears cut off, and was imprisoned 
for life.  These were gentle methods of persuasion, some will tell 
you:  I think, they were rather calculated to be alarming to the 
people.

In the money part of the putting down of the people's liberties, 
the King was equally gentle, as some will tell you:  as I think, 
equally alarming.  He levied those duties of tonnage and poundage, 
and increased them as he thought fit.  He granted monopolies to 
companies of merchants on their paying him for them, 
notwithstanding the great complaints that had, for years and years, 
been made on the subject of monopolies.  He fined the people for 
disobeying proclamations issued by his Sowship in direct violation 
of law.  He revived the detested Forest laws, and took private 
property to himself as his forest right.  Above all, he determined 
to have what was called Ship Money; that is to say, money for the 
support of the fleet - not only from the seaports, but from all the 
counties of England:  having found out that, in some ancient time 
or other, all the counties paid it.  The grievance of this ship 
money being somewhat too strong, JOHN CHAMBERS, a citizen of 
London, refused to pay his part of it.  For this the Lord Mayor 
ordered John Chambers to prison, and for that John Chambers brought 
a suit against the Lord Mayor.  LORD SAY, also, behaved like a real 
nobleman, and declared he would not pay.  But, the sturdiest and 
best opponent of the ship money was JOHN HAMPDEN, a gentleman of 
Buckinghamshire, who had sat among the 'vipers' in the House of 
Commons when there was such a thing, and who had been the bosom 
friend of Sir John Eliot.  This case was tried before the twelve 
judges in the Court of Exchequer, and again the King's lawyers said 
it was impossible that ship money could be wrong, because the King 
could do no wrong, however hard he tried - and he really did try 
very hard during these twelve years.  Seven of the judges said that 
was quite true, and Mr. Hampden was bound to pay:  five of the 
judges said that was quite false, and Mr. Hampden was not bound to 
pay.  So, the King triumphed (as he thought), by making Hampden the 
most popular man in England; where matters were getting to that 
height now, that many honest Englishmen could not endure their 
country, and sailed away across the seas to found a colony in 
Massachusetts Bay in America.  It is said that Hampden himself and 
his relation OLIVER CROMWELL were going with a company of such 
voyagers, and were actually on board ship, when they were stopped 
by a proclamation, prohibiting sea captains to carry out such 
passengers without the royal license.  But O! it would have been 
well for the King if he had let them go!  This was the state of 
England.  If Laud had been a madman just broke loose, he could not 
have done more mischief than he did in Scotland.  In his endeavours 
(in which he was seconded by the King, then in person in that part 
of his dominions) to force his own ideas of bishops, and his own 
religious forms and ceremonies upon the Scotch, he roused that 
nation to a perfect frenzy.  They formed a solemn league, which 
they called The Covenant, for the preservation of their own 
religious forms; they rose in arms throughout the whole country; 
they summoned all their men to prayers and sermons twice a day by 
beat of drum; they sang psalms, in which they compared their 
enemies to all the evil spirits that ever were heard of; and they 
solemnly vowed to smite them with the sword.  At first the King 
tried force, then treaty, then a Scottish Parliament which did not 
answer at all.  Then he tried the EARL OF STRAFFORD, formerly Sir 
Thomas Wentworth; who, as LORD WENTWORTH, had been governing 
Ireland.  He, too, had carried it with a very high hand there, 
though to the benefit and prosperity of that country.

Strafford and Laud were for conquering the Scottish people by force 
of arms.  Other lords who were taken into council, recommended that 
a Parliament should at last be called; to which the King 
unwillingly consented.  So, on the thirteenth of April, one 
thousand six hundred and forty, that then strange sight, a 
Parliament, was seen at Westminster.  It is called the Short 
Parliament, for it lasted a very little while.  While the members 
were all looking at one another, doubtful who would dare to speak, 
MR. PYM arose and set forth all that the King had done unlawfully 
during the past twelve years, and what was the position to which 
England was reduced.  This great example set, other members took 
courage and spoke the truth freely, though with great patience and 
moderation.  The King, a little frightened, sent to say that if 
they would grant him a certain sum on certain terms, no more ship 
money should be raised.  They debated the matter for two days; and 
then, as they would not give him all he asked without promise or 
inquiry, he dissolved them.

But they knew very well that he must have a Parliament now; and he 
began to make that discovery too, though rather late in the day.  
Wherefore, on the twenty-fourth of September, being then at York 
with an army collected against the Scottish people, but his own men 
sullen and discontented like the rest of the nation, the King told 
the great council of the Lords, whom he had called to meet him 
there, that he would summon another Parliament to assemble on the 
third of November.  The soldiers of the Covenant had now forced 
their way into England and had taken possession of the northern 
counties, where the coals are got.  As it would never do to be 
without coals, and as the King's troops could make no head against 
the Covenanters so full of gloomy zeal, a truce was made, and a 
treaty with Scotland was taken into consideration.  Meanwhile the 
northern counties paid the Covenanters to leave the coals alone, 
and keep quiet.

We have now disposed of the Short Parliament.  We have next to see 
what memorable things were done by the Long one.


SECOND PART


THE Long Parliament assembled on the third of November, one 
thousand six hundred and forty-one.  That day week the Earl of 
Strafford arrived from York, very sensible that the spirited and 
determined men who formed that Parliament were no friends towards 
him, who had not only deserted the cause of the people, but who had 
on all occasions opposed himself to their liberties.  The King told 
him, for his comfort, that the Parliament 'should not hurt one hair 
of his head.'  But, on the very next day Mr. Pym, in the House of 
Commons, and with great solemnity, impeached the Earl of Strafford 
as a traitor.  He was immediately taken into custody and fell from 
his proud height.

It was the twenty-second of March before he was brought to trial in 
Westminster Hall; where, although he was very ill and suffered 
great pain, he defended himself with such ability and majesty, that 
it was doubtful whether he would not get the best of it.  But on 
the thirteenth day of the trial, Pym produced in the House of 
Commons a copy of some notes of a council, found by young SIR HARRY 
VANE in a red velvet cabinet belonging to his father (Secretary 
Vane, who sat at the council-table with the Earl), in which 
Strafford had distinctly told the King that he was free from all 
rules and obligations of government, and might do with his people 
whatever he liked; and in which he had added - 'You have an army in 
Ireland that you may employ to reduce this kingdom to obedience.'  
It was not clear whether by the words 'this kingdom,' he had really 
meant England or Scotland; but the Parliament contended that he 
meant England, and this was treason.  At the same sitting of the 
House of Commons it was resolved to bring in a bill of attainder 
declaring the treason to have been committed:  in preference to 
proceeding with the trial by impeachment, which would have required 
the treason to be proved.

So, a bill was brought in at once, was carried through the House of 
Commons by a large majority, and was sent up to the House of Lords.  
While it was still uncertain whether the House of Lords would pass 
it and the King consent to it, Pym disclosed to the House of 
Commons that the King and Queen had both been plotting with the 
officers of the army to bring up the soldiers and control the 
Parliament, and also to introduce two hundred soldiers into the 
Tower of London to effect the Earl's escape.  The plotting with the 
army was revealed by one GEORGE GORING, the son of a lord of that 
name:  a bad fellow who was one of the original plotters, and 
turned traitor.  The King had actually given his warrant for the 
admission of the two hundred men into the Tower, and they would 
have got in too, but for the refusal of the governor - a sturdy 
Scotchman of the name of BALFOUR - to admit them.  These matters 
being made public, great numbers of people began to riot outside 
the Houses of Parliament, and to cry out for the execution of the 
Earl of Strafford, as one of the King's chief instruments against 
them.  The bill passed the House of Lords while the people were in 
this state of agitation, and was laid before the King for his 
assent, together with another bill declaring that the Parliament 
then assembled should not be dissolved or adjourned without their 
own consent.  The King - not unwilling to save a faithful servant, 
though he had no great attachment for him - was in some doubt what 
to do; but he gave his consent to both bills, although he in his 
heart believed that the bill against the Earl of Strafford was 
unlawful and unjust.  The Earl had written to him, telling him that 
he was willing to die for his sake.  But he had not expected that 
his royal master would take him at his word quite so readily; for, 
when he heard his doom, he laid his hand upon his heart, and said, 
'Put not your trust in Princes!'

The King, who never could be straightforward and plain, through one 
single day or through one single sheet of paper, wrote a letter to 
the Lords, and sent it by the young Prince of Wales, entreating 
them to prevail with the Commons that 'that unfortunate man should 
fulfil the natural course of his life in a close imprisonment.'  In 
a postscript to the very same letter, he added, 'If he must die, it 
were charity to reprieve him till Saturday.'  If there had been any 
doubt of his fate, this weakness and meanness would have settled 
it.  The very next day, which was the twelfth of May, he was 
brought out to be beheaded on Tower Hill.

Archbishop Laud, who had been so fond of having people's ears 
cropped off and their noses slit, was now confined in the Tower 
too; and when the Earl went by his window to his death, he was 
there, at his request, to give him his blessing.  They had been 
great friends in the King's cause, and the Earl had written to him 
in the days of their power that he thought it would be an admirable 
thing to have Mr. Hampden publicly whipped for refusing to pay the 
ship money.  However, those high and mighty doings were over now, 
and the Earl went his way to death with dignity and heroism.  The 
governor wished him to get into a coach at the Tower gate, for fear 
the people should tear him to pieces; but he said it was all one to 
him whether he died by the axe or by the people's hands.  So, he 
walked, with a firm tread and a stately look, and sometimes pulled 
off his hat to them as he passed along.  They were profoundly 
quiet.  He made a speech on the scaffold from some notes he had 
prepared (the paper was found lying there after his head was struck 
off), and one blow of the axe killed him, in the forty-ninth year 
of his age.

This bold and daring act, the Parliament accompanied by other 
famous measures, all originating (as even this did) in the King's 
having so grossly and so long abused his power.  The name of 
DELINQUENTS was applied to all sheriffs and other officers who had 
been concerned in raising the ship money, or any other money, from 
the people, in an unlawful manner; the Hampden judgment was 
reversed; the judges who had decided against Hampden were called 
upon to give large securities that they would take such 
consequences as Parliament might impose upon them; and one was 
arrested as he sat in High Court, and carried off to prison.  Laud 
was impeached; the unfortunate victims whose ears had been cropped 
and whose noses had been slit, were brought out of prison in 
triumph; and a bill was passed declaring that a Parliament should 
be called every third year, and that if the King and the King's 
officers did not call it, the people should assemble of themselves 
and summon it, as of their own right and power.  Great 
illuminations and rejoicings took place over all these things, and 
the country was wildly excited.  That the Parliament took advantage 
of this excitement and stirred them up by every means, there is no 
doubt; but you are always to remember those twelve long years, 
during which the King had tried so hard whether he really could do 
any wrong or not.

All this time there was a great religious outcry against the right 
of the Bishops to sit in Parliament; to which the Scottish people 
particularly objected.  The English were divided on this subject, 
and, partly on this account and partly because they had had foolish 
expectations that the Parliament would be able to take off nearly 
all the taxes, numbers of them sometimes wavered and inclined 
towards the King.

I believe myself, that if, at this or almost any other period of 
his life, the King could have been trusted by any man not out of 
his senses, he might have saved himself and kept his throne.  But, 
on the English army being disbanded, he plotted with the officers 
again, as he had done before, and established the fact beyond all 
doubt by putting his signature of approval to a petition against 
the Parliamentary leaders, which was drawn up by certain officers.  
When the Scottish army was disbanded, he went to Edinburgh in four 
days - which was going very fast at that time - to plot again, and 
so darkly too, that it is difficult to decide what his whole object 
was.  Some suppose that he wanted to gain over the Scottish 
Parliament, as he did in fact gain over, by presents and favours, 
many Scottish lords and men of power.  Some think that he went to 
get proofs against the Parliamentary leaders in England of their 
having treasonably invited the Scottish people to come and help 
them.  With whatever object he went to Scotland, he did little good 
by going.  At the instigation of the EARL OF MONTROSE, a desperate 
man who was then in prison for plotting, he tried to kidnap three 
Scottish lords who escaped.  A committee of the Parliament at home, 
who had followed to watch him, writing an account of this INCIDENT, 
as it was called, to the Parliament, the Parliament made a fresh 
stir about it; were, or feigned to be, much alarmed for themselves; 
and wrote to the EARL OF ESSEX, the commander-in-chief, for a guard 
to protect them.

It is not absolutely proved that the King plotted in Ireland 
besides, but it is very probable that he did, and that the Queen 
did, and that he had some wild hope of gaining the Irish people 
over to his side by favouring a rise among them.  Whether or no, 
they did rise in a most brutal and savage rebellion; in which, 
encouraged by their priests, they committed such atrocities upon 
numbers of the English, of both sexes and of all ages, as nobody 
could believe, but for their being related on oath by eye-
witnesses.  Whether one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand 
Protestants were murdered in this outbreak, is uncertain; but, that 
it was as ruthless and barbarous an outbreak as ever was known 
among any savage people, is certain.

The King came home from Scotland, determined to make a great 
struggle for his lost power.  He believed that, through his 
presents and favours, Scotland would take no part against him; and 
the Lord Mayor of London received him with such a magnificent 
dinner that he thought he must have become popular again in 
England.  It would take a good many Lord Mayors, however, to make a 
people, and the King soon found himself mistaken.

Not so soon, though, but that there was a great opposition in the 
Parliament to a celebrated paper put forth by Pym and Hampden and 
the rest, called 'THE REMONSTRANCE,' which set forth all the 
illegal acts that the King had ever done, but politely laid the 
blame of them on his bad advisers.  Even when it was passed and 
presented to him, the King still thought himself strong enough to 
discharge Balfour from his command in the Tower, and to put in his 
place a man of bad character; to whom the Commons instantly 
objected, and whom he was obliged to abandon.  At this time, the 
old outcry about the Bishops became louder than ever, and the old 
Archbishop of York was so near being murdered as he went down to 
the House of Lords - being laid hold of by the mob and violently 
knocked about, in return for very foolishly scolding a shrill boy 
who was yelping out 'No Bishops!' - that he sent for all the 
Bishops who were in town, and proposed to them to sign a 
declaration that, as they could no longer without danger to their 
lives attend their duty in Parliament, they protested against the 
lawfulness of everything done in their absence.  This they asked 
the King to send to the House of Lords, which he did.  Then the 
House of Commons impeached the whole party of Bishops and sent them 
off to the Tower:

Taking no warning from this; but encouraged by there being a 
moderate party in the Parliament who objected to these strong 
measures, the King, on the third of January, one thousand six 
hundred and forty-two, took the rashest step that ever was taken by 
mortal man.

Of his own accord and without advice, he sent the Attorney-General 
to the House of Lords, to accuse of treason certain members of 
Parliament who as popular leaders were the most obnoxious to him; 
LORD KIMBOLTON, SIR ARTHUR HASELRIG, DENZIL HOLLIS, JOHN PYM (they 
used to call him King Pym, he possessed such power and looked so 
big), JOHN HAMPDEN, and WILLIAM STRODE.  The houses of those 
members he caused to be entered, and their papers to be sealed up.  
At the same time, he sent a messenger to the House of Commons 
demanding to have the five gentlemen who were members of that House 
immediately produced.  To this the House replied that they should 
appear as soon as there was any legal charge against them, and 
immediately adjourned.

Next day, the House of Commons send into the City to let the Lord 
Mayor know that their privileges are invaded by the King, and that 
there is no safety for anybody or anything.  Then, when the five 
members are gone out of the way, down comes the King himself, with 
all his guard and from two to three hundred gentlemen and soldiers, 
of whom the greater part were armed.  These he leaves in the hall; 
and then, with his nephew at his side, goes into the House, takes 
off his hat, and walks up to the Speaker's chair.  The Speaker 
leaves it, the King stands in front of it, looks about him steadily 
for a little while, and says he has come for those five members.  
No one speaks, and then he calls John Pym by name.  No one speaks, 
and then he calls Denzil Hollis by name.  No one speaks, and then 
he asks the Speaker of the House where those five members are?  The 
Speaker, answering on his knee, nobly replies that he is the 
servant of that House, and that he has neither eyes to see, nor 
tongue to speak, anything but what the House commands him.  Upon 
this, the King, beaten from that time evermore, replies that he 
will seek them himself, for they have committed treason; and goes 
out, with his hat in his hand, amid some audible murmurs from the 
members.

No words can describe the hurry that arose out of doors when all 
this was known.  The five members had gone for safety to a house in 
Coleman-street, in the City, where they were guarded all night; and 
indeed the whole city watched in arms like an army.  At ten o'clock 
in the morning, the King, already frightened at what he had done, 
came to the Guildhall, with only half a dozen lords, and made a 
speech to the people, hoping they would not shelter those whom he 
accused of treason.  Next day, he issued a proclamation for the 
apprehension of the five members; but the Parliament minded it so 
little that they made great arrangements for having them brought 
down to Westminster in great state, five days afterwards.  The King 
was so alarmed now at his own imprudence, if not for his own 
safety, that he left his palace at Whitehall, and went away with 
his Queen and children to Hampton Court.

It was the eleventh of May, when the five members were carried in 
state and triumph to Westminster.  They were taken by water.  The 
river could not be seen for the boats on it; and the five members 
were hemmed in by barges full of men and great guns, ready to 
protect them, at any cost.  Along the Strand a large body of the 
train-bands of London, under their commander, SKIPPON, marched to 
be ready to assist the little fleet.  Beyond them, came a crowd who 
choked the streets, roaring incessantly about the Bishops and the 
Papists, and crying out contemptuously as they passed Whitehall, 
'What has become of the King?'  With this great noise outside the 
House of Commons, and with great silence within, Mr. Pym rose and 
informed the House of the great kindness with which they had been 
received in the City.  Upon that, the House called the sheriffs in 
and thanked them, and requested the train-bands, under their 
commander Skippon, to guard the House of Commons every day.  Then, 
came four thousand men on horseback out of Buckinghamshire, 
offering their services as a guard too, and bearing a petition to 
the King, complaining of the injury that had been done to Mr. 
Hampden, who was their county man and much beloved and honoured.

When the King set off for Hampton Court, the gentlemen and soldiers 
who had been with him followed him out of town as far as Kingston-
upon-Thames; next day, Lord Digby came to them from the King at 
Hampton Court, in his coach and six, to inform them that the King 
accepted their protection.  This, the Parliament said, was making 
war against the kingdom, and Lord Digby fled abroad.  The 
Parliament then immediately applied themselves to getting hold of 
the military power of the country, well knowing that the King was 
already trying hard to use it against them, and that he had 
secretly sent the Earl of Newcastle to Hull, to secure a valuable 
magazine of arms and gunpowder that was there.  In those times, 
every county had its own magazines of arms and powder, for its own 
train-bands or militia; so, the Parliament brought in a bill 
claiming the right (which up to this time had belonged to the King) 
of appointing the Lord Lieutenants of counties, who commanded these 
train-bands; also, of having all the forts, castles, and garrisons 
in the kingdom, put into the hands of such governors as they, the 
Parliament, could confide in.  It also passed a law depriving the 
Bishops of their votes.  The King gave his assent to that bill, but 
would not abandon the right of appointing the Lord Lieutenants, 
though he said he was willing to appoint such as might be suggested 
to him by the Parliament.  When the Earl of Pembroke asked him 
whether he would not give way on that question for a time, he said, 
'By God! not for one hour!' and upon this he and the Parliament 
went to war.

His young daughter was betrothed to the Prince of Orange.  On 
pretence of taking her to the country of her future husband, the 
Queen was already got safely away to Holland, there to pawn the 
Crown jewels for money to raise an army on the King's side.  The 
Lord Admiral being sick, the House of Commons now named the Earl of 
Warwick to hold his place for a year.  The King named another 
gentleman; the House of Commons took its own way, and the Earl of 
Warwick became Lord Admiral without the King's consent.  The 
Parliament sent orders down to Hull to have that magazine removed 
to London; the King went down to Hull to take it himself.  The 
citizens would not admit him into the town, and the governor would 
not admit him into the castle.  The Parliament resolved that 
whatever the two Houses passed, and the King would not consent to, 
should be called an ORDINANCE, and should be as much a law as if he 
did consent to it.  The King protested against this, and gave 
notice that these ordinances were not to be obeyed.  The King, 
attended by the majority of the House of Peers, and by many members 
of the House of Commons, established himself at York.  The 
Chancellor went to him with the Great Seal, and the Parliament made 
a new Great Seal.  The Queen sent over a ship full of arms and 
ammunition, and the King issued letters to borrow money at high 
interest.  The Parliament raised twenty regiments of foot and 
seventy-five troops of horse; and the people willingly aided them 
with their money, plate, jewellery, and trinkets - the married 
women even with their wedding-rings.  Every member of Parliament 
who could raise a troop or a regiment in his own part of the 
country, dressed it according to his taste and in his own colours, 
and commanded it.  Foremost among them all, OLIVER CROMWELL raised 
a troop of horse - thoroughly in earnest and thoroughly well armed 
- who were, perhaps, the best soldiers that ever were seen.

In some of their proceedings, this famous Parliament passed the 
bounds of previous law and custom, yielded to and favoured riotous 
assemblages of the people, and acted tyrannically in imprisoning 
some who differed from the popular leaders.  But again, you are 
always to remember that the twelve years during which the King had 
had his own wilful way, had gone before; and that nothing could 
make the times what they might, could, would, or should have been, 
if those twelve years had never rolled away.


THIRD PART


I SHALL not try to relate the particulars of the great civil war 
between King Charles the First and the Long Parliament, which 
lasted nearly four years, and a full account of which would fill 
many large books.  It was a sad thing that Englishmen should once 
more be fighting against Englishmen on English ground; but, it is 
some consolation to know that on both sides there was great 
humanity, forbearance, and honour.  The soldiers of the Parliament 
were far more remarkable for these good qualities than the soldiers 
of the King (many of whom fought for mere pay without much caring 
for the cause); but those of the nobility and gentry who were on 
the King's side were so brave, and so faithful to him, that their 
conduct cannot but command our highest admiration.  Among them were 
great numbers of Catholics, who took the royal side because the 
Queen was so strongly of their persuasion.

The King might have distinguished some of these gallant spirits, if 
he had been as generous a spirit himself, by giving them the 
command of his army.  Instead of that, however, true to his old 
high notions of royalty, he entrusted it to his two nephews, PRINCE 
RUPERT and PRINCE MAURICE, who were of royal blood and came over 
from abroad to help him.  It might have been better for him if they 
had stayed away; since Prince Rupert was an impetuous, hot-headed 
fellow, whose only idea was to dash into battle at all times and 
seasons, and lay about him.

The general-in-chief of the Parliamentary army was the Earl of 
Essex, a gentleman of honour and an excellent soldier.  A little 
while before the war broke out, there had been some rioting at 
Westminster between certain officious law students and noisy 
soldiers, and the shopkeepers and their apprentices, and the 
general people in the streets.  At that time the King's friends 
called the crowd, Roundheads, because the apprentices wore short 
hair; the crowd, in return, called their opponents Cavaliers, 
meaning that they were a blustering set, who pretended to be very 
military.  These two words now began to be used to distinguish the 
two sides in the civil war.  The Royalists also called the 
Parliamentary men Rebels and Rogues, while the Parliamentary men 
called THEM Malignants, and spoke of themselves as the Godly, the 
Honest, and so forth.

The war broke out at Portsmouth, where that double traitor Goring 
had again gone over to the King and was besieged by the 
Parliamentary troops.  Upon this, the King proclaimed the Earl of 
Essex and the officers serving under him, traitors, and called upon 
his loyal subjects to meet him in arms at Nottingham on the twenty-
fifth of August.  But his loyal subjects came about him in scanty 
numbers, and it was a windy, gloomy day, and the Royal Standard got 
blown down, and the whole affair was very melancholy.  The chief 
engagements after this, took place in the vale of the Red Horse 
near Banbury, at Brentford, at Devizes, at Chalgrave Field (where 
Mr. Hampden was so sorely wounded while fighting at the head of his 
men, that he died within a week), at Newbury (in which battle LORD 
FALKLAND, one of the best noblemen on the King's side, was killed), 
at Leicester, at Naseby, at Winchester, at Marston Moor near York, 
at Newcastle, and in many other parts of England and Scotland.  
These battles were attended with various successes.  At one time, 
the King was victorious; at another time, the Parliament.  But 
almost all the great and busy towns were against the King; and when 
it was considered necessary to fortify London, all ranks of people, 
from labouring men and women, up to lords and ladies, worked hard 
together with heartiness and good will.  The most distinguished 
leaders on the Parliamentary side were HAMPDEN, SIR THOMAS FAIRFAX, 
and, above all, OLIVER CROMWELL, and his son-in-law IRETON.

During the whole of this war, the people, to whom it was very 
expensive and irksome, and to whom it was made the more distressing 
by almost every family being divided - some of its members 
attaching themselves to one side and some to the other - were over 
and over again most anxious for peace.  So were some of the best 
men in each cause.  Accordingly, treaties of peace were discussed 
between commissioners from the Parliament and the King; at York, at 
Oxford (where the King held a little Parliament of his own), and at 
Uxbridge.  But they came to nothing.  In all these negotiations, 
and in all his difficulties, the King showed himself at his best.  
He was courageous, cool, self-possessed, and clever; but, the old 
taint of his character was always in him, and he was never for one 
single moment to be trusted.  Lord Clarendon, the historian, one of 
his highest admirers, supposes that he had unhappily promised the 
Queen never to make peace without her consent, and that this must 
often be taken as his excuse.  He never kept his word from night to 
morning.  He signed a cessation of hostilities with the blood-
stained Irish rebels for a sum of money, and invited the Irish 
regiments over, to help him against the Parliament.  In the battle 
of Naseby, his cabinet was seized and was found to contain a 
correspondence with the Queen, in which he expressly told her that 
he had deceived the Parliament - a mongrel Parliament, he called it 
now, as an improvement on his old term of vipers - in pretending to 
recognise it and to treat with it; and from which it further 
appeared that he had long been in secret treaty with the Duke of 
Lorraine for a foreign army of ten thousand men.  Disappointed in 
this, he sent a most devoted friend of his, the EARL OF GLAMORGAN, 
to Ireland, to conclude a secret treaty with the Catholic powers, 
to send him an Irish army of ten thousand men; in return for which 
he was to bestow great favours on the Catholic religion.  And, when 
this treaty was discovered in the carriage of a fighting Irish 
Archbishop who was killed in one of the many skirmishes of those 
days, he basely denied and deserted his attached friend, the Earl, 
on his being charged with high treason; and - even worse than this 
- had left blanks in the secret instructions he gave him with his 
own kingly hand, expressly that he might thus save himself.

At last, on the twenty-seventh day of April, one thousand six 
hundred and forty-six, the King found himself in the city of 
Oxford, so surrounded by the Parliamentary army who were closing in 
upon him on all sides that he felt that if he would escape he must 
delay no longer.  So, that night, having altered the cut of his 
hair and beard, he was dressed up as a servant and put upon a horse 
with a cloak strapped behind him, and rode out of the town behind 
one of his own faithful followers, with a clergyman of that country 
who knew the road well, for a guide.  He rode towards London as far 
as Harrow, and then altered his plans and resolved, it would seem, 
to go to the Scottish camp.  The Scottish men had been invited over 
to help the Parliamentary army, and had a large force then in 
England.  The King was so desperately intriguing in everything he 
did, that it is doubtful what he exactly meant by this step.  He 
took it, anyhow, and delivered himself up to the EARL OF LEVEN, the 
Scottish general-in-chief, who treated him as an honourable 
prisoner.  Negotiations between the Parliament on the one hand and 
the Scottish authorities on the other, as to what should be done 
with him, lasted until the following February.  Then, when the King 
had refused to the Parliament the concession of that old militia 
point for twenty years, and had refused to Scotland the recognition 
of its Solemn League and Covenant, Scotland got a handsome sum for 
its army and its help, and the King into the bargain.  He was 
taken, by certain Parliamentary commissioners appointed to receive 
him, to one of his own houses, called Holmby House, near Althorpe, 
in Northamptonshire.

While the Civil War was still in progress, John Pym died, and was 
buried with great honour in Westminster Abbey - not with greater 
honour than he deserved, for the liberties of Englishmen owe a 
mighty debt to Pym and Hampden.  The war was but newly over when 
the Earl of Essex died, of an illness brought on by his having 
overheated himself in a stag hunt in Windsor Forest.  He, too, was 
buried in Westminster Abbey, with great state.  I wish it were not 
necessary to add that Archbishop Laud died upon the scaffold when 
the war was not yet done.  His trial lasted in all nearly a year, 
and, it being doubtful even then whether the charges brought 
against him amounted to treason, the odious old contrivance of the 
worst kings was resorted to, and a bill of attainder was brought in 
against him.  He was a violently prejudiced and mischievous person; 
had had strong ear-cropping and nose-splitting propensities, as you 
know; and had done a world of harm.  But he died peaceably, and 
like a brave old man.


FOURTH PART


WHEN the Parliament had got the King into their hands, they became 
very anxious to get rid of their army, in which Oliver Cromwell had 
begun to acquire great power; not only because of his courage and 
high abilities, but because he professed to be very sincere in the 
Scottish sort of Puritan religion that was then exceedingly popular 
among the soldiers.  They were as much opposed to the Bishops as to 
the Pope himself; and the very privates, drummers, and trumpeters, 
had such an inconvenient habit of starting up and preaching long-
winded discourses, that I would not have belonged to that army on 
any account.

So, the Parliament, being far from sure but that the army might 
begin to preach and fight against them now it had nothing else to 
do, proposed to disband the greater part of it, to send another 
part to serve in Ireland against the rebels, and to keep only a 
small force in England.  But, the army would not consent to be 
broken up, except upon its own conditions; and, when the Parliament 
showed an intention of compelling it, it acted for itself in an 
unexpected manner.  A certain cornet, of the name of JOICE, arrived 
at Holmby House one night, attended by four hundred horsemen, went 
into the King's room with his hat in one hand and a pistol in the 
other, and told the King that he had come to take him away.  The 
King was willing enough to go, and only stipulated that he should 
be publicly required to do so next morning.  Next morning, 
accordingly, he appeared on the top of the steps of the house, and 
asked Comet Joice before his men and the guard set there by the 
Parliament, what authority he had for taking him away?  To this 
Cornet Joice replied, 'The authority of the army.'  'Have you a 
written commission?' said the King.  Joice, pointing to his four 
hundred men on horseback, replied, 'That is my commission.'  
'Well,' said the King, smiling, as if he were pleased, 'I never 
before read such a commission; but it is written in fair and 
legible characters.  This is a company of as handsome proper 
gentlemen as I have seen a long while.'  He was asked where he 
would like to live, and he said at Newmarket.  So, to Newmarket he 
and Cornet Joice and the four hundred horsemen rode; the King 
remarking, in the same smiling way, that he could ride as far at a 
spell as Cornet Joice, or any man there.

The King quite believed, I think, that the army were his friends.  
He said as much to Fairfax when that general, Oliver Cromwell, and 
Ireton, went to persuade him to return to the custody of the 
Parliament.  He preferred to remain as he was, and resolved to 
remain as he was.  And when the army moved nearer and nearer London 
to frighten the Parliament into yielding to their demands, they 
took the King with them.  It was a deplorable thing that England 
should be at the mercy of a great body of soldiers with arms in 
their hands; but the King certainly favoured them at this important 
time of his life, as compared with the more lawful power that tried 
to control him.  It must be added, however, that they treated him, 
as yet, more respectfully and kindly than the Parliament had done.  
They allowed him to be attended by his own servants, to be 
splendidly entertained at various houses, and to see his children - 
at Cavesham House, near Reading - for two days.  Whereas, the 
Parliament had been rather hard with him, and had only allowed him 
to ride out and play at bowls.

It is much to be believed that if the King could have been trusted, 
even at this time, he might have been saved.  Even Oliver Cromwell 
expressly said that he did believe that no man could enjoy his 
possessions in peace, unless the King had his rights.  He was not 
unfriendly towards the King; he had been present when he received 
his children, and had been much affected by the pitiable nature of 
the scene; he saw the King often; he frequently walked and talked 
with him in the long galleries and pleasant gardens of the Palace 
at Hampton Court, whither he was now removed; and in all this 
risked something of his influence with the army.  But, the King was 
in secret hopes of help from the Scottish people; and the moment he 
was encouraged to join them he began to be cool to his new friends, 
the army, and to tell the officers that they could not possibly do 
without him.  At the very time, too, when he was promising to make 
Cromwell and Ireton noblemen, if they would help him up to his old 
height, he was writing to the Queen that he meant to hang them.  
They both afterwards declared that they had been privately informed 
that such a letter would be found, on a certain evening, sewed up 
in a saddle which would be taken to the Blue Boar in Holborn to be 
sent to Dover; and that they went there, disguised as common 
soldiers, and sat drinking in the inn-yard until a man came with 
the saddle, which they ripped up with their knives, and therein 
found the letter.  I see little reason to doubt the story.  It is 
certain that Oliver Cromwell told one of the King's most faithful 
followers that the King could not be trusted, and that he would not 
be answerable if anything amiss were to happen to him.  Still, even 
after that, he kept a promise he had made to the King, by letting 
him know that there was a plot with a certain portion of the army 
to seize him.  I believe that, in fact, he sincerely wanted the 
King to escape abroad, and so to be got rid of without more trouble 
or danger.  That Oliver himself had work enough with the army is 
pretty plain; for some of the troops were so mutinous against him, 
and against those who acted with him at this time, that he found it 
necessary to have one man shot at the head of his regiment to 
overawe the rest.

The King, when he received Oliver's warning, made his escape from 
Hampton Court; after some indecision and uncertainty, he went to 
Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight.  At first, he was pretty 
free there; but, even there, he carried on a pretended treaty with 
the Parliament, while he was really treating with commissioners 
from Scotland to send an army into England to take his part.  When 
he broke off this treaty with the Parliament (having settled with 
Scotland) and was treated as a prisoner, his treatment was not 
changed too soon, for he had plotted to escape that very night to a 
ship sent by the Queen, which was lying off the island.

He was doomed to be disappointed in his hopes from Scotland.  The 
agreement he had made with the Scottish Commissioners was not 
favourable enough to the religion of that country to please the 
Scottish clergy; and they preached against it.  The consequence 
was, that the army raised in Scotland and sent over, was too small 
to do much; and that, although it was helped by a rising of the 
Royalists in England and by good soldiers from Ireland, it could 
make no head against the Parliamentary army under such men as 
Cromwell and Fairfax.  The King's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, 
came over from Holland with nineteen ships (a part of the English 
fleet having gone over to him) to help his father; but nothing came 
of his voyage, and he was fain to return.  The most remarkable 
event of this second civil war was the cruel execution by the 
Parliamentary General, of SIR CHARLES LUCAS and SIR GEORGE LISLE, 
two grand Royalist generals, who had bravely defended Colchester 
under every disadvantage of famine and distress for nearly three 
months.  When Sir Charles Lucas was shot, Sir George Lisle kissed 
his body, and said to the soldiers who were to shoot him, 'Come 
nearer, and make sure of me.'  'I warrant you, Sir George,' said 
one of the soldiers, 'we shall hit you.'  'AY?' he returned with a 
smile, 'but I have been nearer to you, my friends, many a time, and 
you have missed me.'

The Parliament, after being fearfully bullied by the army - who 
demanded to have seven members whom they disliked given up to them 
- had voted that they would have nothing more to do with the King.  
On the conclusion, however, of this second civil war (which did not 
last more than six months), they appointed commissioners to treat 
with him.  The King, then so far released again as to be allowed to 
live in a private house at Newport in the Isle of Wight, managed 
his own part of the negotiation with a sense that was admired by 
all who saw him, and gave up, in the end, all that was asked of him 
- even yielding (which he had steadily refused, so far) to the 
temporary abolition of the bishops, and the transfer of their 
church land to the Crown.  Still, with his old fatal vice upon him, 
when his best friends joined the commissioners in beseeching him to 
yield all those points as the only means of saving himself from the 
army, he was plotting to escape from the island; he was holding 
correspondence with his friends and the Catholics in Ireland, 
though declaring that he was not; and he was writing, with his own 
hand, that in what he yielded he meant nothing but to get time to 
escape.

Matters were at this pass when the army, resolved to defy the 
Parliament, marched up to London.  The Parliament, not afraid of 
them now, and boldly led by Hollis, voted that the King's 
concessions were sufficient ground for settling the peace of the 
kingdom.  Upon that, COLONEL RICH and COLONEL PRIDE went down to 
the House of Commons with a regiment of horse soldiers and a 
regiment of foot; and Colonel Pride, standing in the lobby with a 
list of the members who were obnoxious to the army in his hand, had 
them pointed out to him as they came through, and took them all 
into custody.  This proceeding was afterwards called by the people, 
for a joke, PRIDE'S PURGE.  Cromwell was in the North, at the head 
of his men, at the time, but when he came home, approved of what 
had been done.

What with imprisoning some members and causing others to stay away, 
the army had now reduced the House of Commons to some fifty or so.  
These soon voted that it was treason in a king to make war against 
his parliament and his people, and sent an ordinance up to the 
House of Lords for the King's being tried as a traitor.  The House 
of Lords, then sixteen in number, to a man rejected it.  Thereupon, 
the Commons made an ordinance of their own, that they were the 
supreme government of the country, and would bring the King to 
trial.

The King had been taken for security to a place called Hurst 
Castle:  a lonely house on a rock in the sea, connected with the 
coast of Hampshire by a rough road two miles long at low water.  
Thence, he was ordered to be removed to Windsor; thence, after 
being but rudely used there, and having none but soldiers to wait 
upon him at table, he was brought up to St. James's Palace in 
London, and told that his trial was appointed for next day.

On Saturday, the twentieth of January, one thousand six hundred and 
forty-nine, this memorable trial began.  The House of Commons had 
settled that one hundred and thirty-five persons should form the 
Court, and these were taken from the House itself, from among the 
officers of the army, and from among the lawyers and citizens.  
JOHN BRADSHAW, serjeant-at-law, was appointed president.  The place 
was Westminster Hall.  At the upper end, in a red velvet chair, sat 
the president, with his hat (lined with plates of iron for his 
protection) on his head.  The rest of the Court sat on side 
benches, also wearing their hats.  The King's seat was covered with 
velvet, like that of the president, and was opposite to it.  He was 
brought from St. James's to Whitehall, and from Whitehall he came 
by water to his trial.

When he came in, he looked round very steadily on the Court, and on 
the great number of spectators, and then sat down:  presently he 
got up and looked round again.  On the indictment 'against Charles 
Stuart, for high treason,' being read, he smiled several times, and 
he denied the authority of the Court, saying that there could be no 
parliament without a House of Lords, and that he saw no House of 
Lords there.  Also, that the King ought to be there, and that he 
saw no King in the King's right place.  Bradshaw replied, that the 
Court was satisfied with its authority, and that its authority was 
God's authority and the kingdom's.  He then adjourned the Court to 
the following Monday.  On that day, the trial was resumed, and went 
on all the week.  When the Saturday came, as the King passed 
forward to his place in the Hall, some soldiers and others cried 
for 'justice!' and execution on him.  That day, too, Bradshaw, like 
an angry Sultan, wore a red robe, instead of the black robe he had 
worn before.  The King was sentenced to death that day.  As he went 
out, one solitary soldier said, 'God bless you, Sir!'  For this, 
his officer struck him.  The King said he thought the punishment 
exceeded the offence.  The silver head of his walking-stick had 
fallen off while he leaned upon it, at one time of the trial.  The 
accident seemed to disturb him, as if he thought it ominous of the 
falling of his own head; and he admitted as much, now it was all 
over.

Being taken back to Whitehall, he sent to the House of Commons, 
saying that as the time of his execution might be nigh, he wished 
he might be allowed to see his darling children.  It was granted.  
On the Monday he was taken back to St. James's; and his two 
children then in England, the PRINCESS ELIZABETH thirteen years 
old, and the DUKE OF GLOUCESTER nine years old, were brought to 
take leave of him, from Sion House, near Brentford.  It was a sad 
and touching scene, when he kissed and fondled those poor children, 
and made a little present of two diamond seals to the Princess, and 
gave them tender messages to their mother (who little deserved 
them, for she had a lover of her own whom she married soon 
afterwards), and told them that he died 'for the laws and liberties 
of the land.'  I am bound to say that I don't think he did, but I 
dare say he believed so.

There were ambassadors from Holland that day, to intercede for the 
unhappy King, whom you and I both wish the Parliament had spared; 
but they got no answer.  The Scottish Commissioners interceded too; 
so did the Prince of Wales, by a letter in which he offered as the 
next heir to the throne, to accept any conditions from the 
Parliament; so did the Queen, by letter likewise.

Notwithstanding all, the warrant for the execution was this day 
signed.  There is a story that as Oliver Cromwell went to the table 
with the pen in his hand to put his signature to it, he drew his 
pen across the face of one of the commissioners, who was standing 
near, and marked it with ink.  That commissioner had not signed his 
own name yet, and the story adds that when he came to do it he 
marked Cromwell's face with ink in the same way.

The King slept well, untroubled by the knowledge that it was his 
last night on earth, and rose on the thirtieth of January, two 
hours before day, and dressed himself carefully.  He put on two 
shirts lest he should tremble with the cold, and had his hair very 
carefully combed.  The warrant had been directed to three officers 
of the army, COLONEL HACKER, COLONEL HUNKS, and COLONEL PHAYER.  At 
ten o'clock, the first of these came to the door and said it was 
time to go to Whitehall.  The King, who had always been a quick 
walker, walked at his usual speed through the Park, and called out 
to the guard, with his accustomed voice of command, 'March on 
apace!'  When he came to Whitehall, he was taken to his own 
bedroom, where a breakfast was set forth.  As he had taken the 
Sacrament, he would eat nothing more; but, at about the time when 
the church bells struck twelve at noon (for he had to wait, through 
the scaffold not being ready), he took the advice of the good 
BISHOP JUXON who was with him, and ate a little bread and drank a 
glass of claret.  Soon after he had taken this refreshment, Colonel 
Hacker came to the chamber with the warrant in his hand, and called 
for Charles Stuart.

And then, through the long gallery of Whitehall Palace, which he 
had often seen light and gay and merry and crowded, in very 
different times, the fallen King passed along, until he came to the 
centre window of the Banqueting House, through which he emerged 
upon the scaffold, which was hung with black.  He looked at the two 
executioners, who were dressed in black and masked; he looked at 
the troops of soldiers on horseback and on foot, and all looked up 
at him in silence; he looked at the vast array of spectators, 
filling up the view beyond, and turning all their faces upon him; 
he looked at his old Palace of St. James's; and he looked at the 
block.  He seemed a little troubled to find that it was so low, and 
asked, 'if there were no place higher?'  Then, to those upon the 
scaffold, he said, 'that it was the Parliament who had begun the 
war, and not he; but he hoped they might be guiltless too, as ill 
instruments had gone between them.  In one respect,' he said, 'he 
suffered justly; and that was because he had permitted an unjust 
sentence to be executed on another.'  In this he referred to the 
Earl of Strafford.

He was not at all afraid to die; but he was anxious to die easily.  
When some one touched the axe while he was speaking, he broke off 
and called out, 'Take heed of the axe! take heed of the axe!'  He 
also said to Colonel Hacker, 'Take care that they do not put me to 
pain.'  He told the executioner, 'I shall say but very short 
prayers, and then thrust out my hands' - as the sign to strike.

He put his hair up, under a white satin cap which the bishop had 
carried, and said, 'I have a good cause and a gracious God on my 
side.'  The bishop told him that he had but one stage more to 
travel in this weary world, and that, though it was a turbulent and 
troublesome stage, it was a short one, and would carry him a great 
way - all the way from earth to Heaven.  The King's last word, as 
he gave his cloak and the George - the decoration from his breast - 
to the bishop, was, 'Remember!'  He then kneeled down, laid his 
head on the block, spread out his hands, and was instantly killed.  
One universal groan broke from the crowd; and the soldiers, who had 
sat on their horses and stood in their ranks immovable as statues, 
were of a sudden all in motion, clearing the streets.

Thus, in the forty-ninth year of his age, falling at the same time 
of his career as Strafford had fallen in his, perished Charles the 
First.  With all my sorrow for him, I cannot agree with him that he 
died 'the martyr of the people;' for the people had been martyrs to 
him, and to his ideas of a King's rights, long before.  Indeed, I 
am afraid that he was but a bad judge of martyrs; for he had called 
that infamous Duke of Buckingham 'the Martyr of his Sovereign.'



CHAPTER XXXIV - ENGLAND UNDER OLIVER CROMWELL



BEFORE sunset on the memorable day on which King Charles the First 
was executed, the House of Commons passed an act declaring it 
treason in any one to proclaim the Prince of Wales - or anybody 
else - King of England.  Soon afterwards, it declared that the 
House of Lords was useless and dangerous, and ought to be 
abolished; and directed that the late King's statue should be taken 
down from the Royal Exchange in the City and other public places.  
Having laid hold of some famous Royalists who had escaped from 
prison, and having beheaded the DUKE OF HAMILTON, LORD HOLLAND, and 
LORD CAPEL, in Palace Yard (all of whom died very courageously), 
they then appointed a Council of State to govern the country.  It 
consisted of forty-one members, of whom five were peers.  Bradshaw 
was made president.  The House of Commons also re-admitted members 
who had opposed the King's death, and made up its numbers to about 
a hundred and fifty.

But, it still had an army of more than forty thousand men to deal 
with, and a very hard task it was to manage them.  Before the 
King's execution, the army had appointed some of its officers to 
remonstrate between them and the Parliament; and now the common 
soldiers began to take that office upon themselves.  The regiments 
under orders for Ireland mutinied; one troop of horse in the city 
of London seized their own flag, and refused to obey orders.  For 
this, the ringleader was shot:  which did not mend the matter, for, 
both his comrades and the people made a public funeral for him, and 
accompanied the body to the grave with sound of trumpets and with a 
gloomy procession of persons carrying bundles of rosemary steeped 
in blood.  Oliver was the only man to deal with such difficulties 
as these, and he soon cut them short by bursting at midnight into 
the town of Burford, near Salisbury, where the mutineers were 
sheltered, taking four hundred of them prisoners, and shooting a 
number of them by sentence of court-martial.  The soldiers soon 
found, as all men did, that Oliver was not a man to be trifled 
with.  And there was an end of the mutiny.

The Scottish Parliament did not know Oliver yet; so, on hearing of 
the King's execution, it proclaimed the Prince of Wales King 
Charles the Second, on condition of his respecting the Solemn 
League and Covenant.  Charles was abroad at that time, and so was 
Montrose, from whose help he had hopes enough to keep him holding 
on and off with commissioners from Scotland, just as his father 
might have done.  These hopes were soon at an end; for, Montrose, 
having raised a few hundred exiles in Germany, and landed with them 
in Scotland, found that the people there, instead of joining him, 
deserted the country at his approach.  He was soon taken prisoner 
and carried to Edinburgh.  There he was received with every 
possible insult, and carried to prison in a cart, his officers 
going two and two before him.  He was sentenced by the Parliament 
to be hanged on a gallows thirty feet high, to have his head set on 
a spike in Edinburgh, and his limbs distributed in other places, 
according to the old barbarous manner.  He said he had always acted 
under the Royal orders, and only wished he had limbs enough to be 
distributed through Christendom, that it might be the more widely 
known how loyal he had been.  He went to the scaffold in a bright 
and brilliant dress, and made a bold end at thirty-eight years of 
age.  The breath was scarcely out of his body when Charles 
abandoned his memory, and denied that he had ever given him orders 
to rise in his behalf.  O the family failing was strong in that 
Charles then!

Oliver had been appointed by the Parliament to command the army in 
Ireland, where he took a terrible vengeance for the sanguinary 
rebellion, and made tremendous havoc, particularly in the siege of 
Drogheda, where no quarter was given, and where he found at least a 
thousand of the inhabitants shut up together in the great church:  
every one of whom was killed by his soldiers, usually known as 
OLIVER'S IRONSIDES.  There were numbers of friars and priests among 
them, and Oliver gruffly wrote home in his despatch that these were 
'knocked on the head' like the rest.

But, Charles having got over to Scotland where the men of the 
Solemn League and Covenant led him a prodigiously dull life and 
made him very weary with long sermons and grim Sundays, the 
Parliament called the redoubtable Oliver home to knock the Scottish 
men on the head for setting up that Prince.  Oliver left his son-
in-law, Ireton, as general in Ireland in his stead (he died there 
afterwards), and he imitated the example of his father-in-law with 
such good will that he brought the country to subjection, and laid 
it at the feet of the Parliament.  In the end, they passed an act 
for the settlement of Ireland, generally pardoning all the common 
people, but exempting from this grace such of the wealthier sort as 
had been concerned in the rebellion, or in any killing of 
Protestants, or who refused to lay down their arms.  Great numbers 
of Irish were got out of the country to serve under Catholic powers 
abroad, and a quantity of land was declared to have been forfeited 
by past offences, and was given to people who had lent money to the 
Parliament early in the war.  These were sweeping measures; but, if 
Oliver Cromwell had had his own way fully, and had stayed in 
Ireland, he would have done more yet.

However, as I have said, the Parliament wanted Oliver for Scotland; 
so, home Oliver came, and was made Commander of all the Forces of 
the Commonwealth of England, and in three days away he went with 
sixteen thousand soldiers to fight the Scottish men.  Now, the 
Scottish men, being then - as you will generally find them now - 
mighty cautious, reflected that the troops they had were not used 
to war like the Ironsides, and would be beaten in an open fight.  
Therefore they said, 'If we live quiet in our trenches in Edinburgh 
here, and if all the farmers come into the town and desert the 
country, the Ironsides will be driven out by iron hunger and be 
forced to go away.'  This was, no doubt, the wisest plan; but as 
the Scottish clergy WOULD interfere with what they knew nothing 
about, and would perpetually preach long sermons exhorting the 
soldiers to come out and fight, the soldiers got it in their heads 
that they absolutely must come out and fight.  Accordingly, in an 
evil hour for themselves, they came out of their safe position.  
Oliver fell upon them instantly, and killed three thousand, and 
took ten thousand prisoners.

To gratify the Scottish Parliament, and preserve their favour, 
Charles had signed a declaration they laid before him, reproaching 
the memory of his father and mother, and representing himself as a 
most religious Prince, to whom the Solemn League and Covenant was 
as dear as life.  He meant no sort of truth in this, and soon 
afterwards galloped away on horseback to join some tiresome 
Highland friends, who were always flourishing dirks and 
broadswords.  He was overtaken and induced to return; but this 
attempt, which was called 'The Start,' did him just so much 
service, that they did not preach quite such long sermons at him 
afterwards as they had done before.

On the first of January, one thousand six hundred and fifty-one, 
the Scottish people crowned him at Scone.  He immediately took the 
chief command of an army of twenty thousand men, and marched to 
Stirling.  His hopes were heightened, I dare say, by the 
redoubtable Oliver being ill of an ague; but Oliver scrambled out 
of bed in no time, and went to work with such energy that he got 
behind the Royalist army and cut it off from all communication with 
Scotland.  There was nothing for it then, but to go on to England; 
so it went on as far as Worcester, where the mayor and some of the 
gentry proclaimed King Charles the Second straightway.  His 
proclamation, however, was of little use to him, for very few 
Royalists appeared; and, on the very same day, two people were 
publicly beheaded on Tower Hill for espousing his cause.  Up came 
Oliver to Worcester too, at double quick speed, and he and his 
Ironsides so laid about them in the great battle which was fought 
there, that they completely beat the Scottish men, and destroyed 
the Royalist army; though the Scottish men fought so gallantly that 
it took five hours to do.

The escape of Charles after this battle of Worcester did him good 
service long afterwards, for it induced many of the generous 
English people to take a romantic interest in him, and to think 
much better of him than he ever deserved.  He fled in the night, 
with not more than sixty followers, to the house of a Catholic lady 
in Staffordshire.  There, for his greater safety, the whole sixty 
left him.  He cropped his hair, stained his face and hands brown as 
if they were sunburnt, put on the clothes of a labouring 
countryman, and went out in the morning with his axe in his hand, 
accompanied by four wood-cutters who were brothers, and another man 
who was their brother-in-law.  These good fellows made a bed for 
him under a tree, as the weather was very bad; and the wife of one 
of them brought him food to eat; and the old mother of the four 
brothers came and fell down on her knees before him in the wood, 
and thanked God that her sons were engaged in saving his life.  At 
night, he came out of the forest and went on to another house which 
was near the river Severn, with the intention of passing into 
Wales; but the place swarmed with soldiers, and the bridges were 
guarded, and all the boats were made fast.  So, after lying in a 
hayloft covered over with hay, for some time, he came out of his 
place, attended by COLONEL CARELESS, a Catholic gentleman who had 
met him there, and with whom he lay hid, all next day, up in the 
shady branches of a fine old oak.  It was lucky for the King that 
it was September-time, and that the leaves had not begun to fall, 
since he and the Colonel, perched up in this tree, could catch 
glimpses of the soldiers riding about below, and could hear the 
crash in the wood as they went about beating the boughs.

After this, he walked and walked until his feet were all blistered; 
and, having been concealed all one day in a house which was 
searched by the troopers while he was there, went with LORD WILMOT, 
another of his good friends, to a place called Bentley, where one 
MISS LANE, a Protestant lady, had obtained a pass to be allowed to 
ride through the guards to see a relation of hers near Bristol.  
Disguised as a servant, he rode in the saddle before this young 
lady to the house of SIR JOHN WINTER, while Lord Wilmot rode there 
boldly, like a plain country gentleman, with dogs at his heels.  It 
happened that Sir John Winter's butler had been servant in Richmond 
Palace, and knew Charles the moment he set eyes upon him; but, the 
butler was faithful and kept the secret.  As no ship could be found 
to carry him abroad, it was planned that he should go - still 
travelling with Miss Lane as her servant - to another house, at 
Trent near Sherborne in Dorsetshire; and then Miss Lane and her 
cousin, MR. LASCELLES, who had gone on horseback beside her all the 
way, went home.  I hope Miss Lane was going to marry that cousin, 
for I am sure she must have been a brave, kind girl.  If I had been 
that cousin, I should certainly have loved Miss Lane.

When Charles, lonely for the loss of Miss Lane, was safe at Trent, 
a ship was hired at Lyme, the master of which engaged to take two 
gentlemen to France.  In the evening of the same day, the King - 
now riding as servant before another young lady - set off for a 
public-house at a place called Charmouth, where the captain of the 
vessel was to take him on board.  But, the captain's wife, being 
afraid of her husband getting into trouble, locked him up and would 
not let him sail.  Then they went away to Bridport; and, coming to 
the inn there, found the stable-yard full of soldiers who were on 
the look-out for Charles, and who talked about him while they 
drank.  He had such presence of mind, that he led the horses of his 
party through the yard as any other servant might have done, and 
said, 'Come out of the way, you soldiers; let us have room to pass 
here!'  As he went along, he met a half-tipsy ostler, who rubbed 
his eyes and said to him, 'Why, I was formerly servant to Mr. 
Potter at Exeter, and surely I have sometimes seen you there, young 
man?'  He certainly had, for Charles had lodged there.  His ready 
answer was, 'Ah, I did live with him once; but I have no time to 
talk now.  We'll have a pot of beer together when I come back.'

From this dangerous place he returned to Trent, and lay there 
concealed several days.  Then he escaped to Heale, near Salisbury; 
where, in the house of a widow lady, he was hidden five days, until 
the master of a collier lying off Shoreham in Sussex, undertook to 
convey a 'gentleman' to France.  On the night of the fifteenth of 
October, accompanied by two colonels and a merchant, the King rode 
to Brighton, then a little fishing village, to give the captain of 
the ship a supper before going on board; but, so many people knew 
him, that this captain knew him too, and not only he, but the 
landlord and landlady also.  Before he went away, the landlord came 
behind his chair, kissed his hand, and said he hoped to live to be 
a lord and to see his wife a lady; at which Charles laughed.  They 
had had a good supper by this time, and plenty of smoking and 
drinking, at which the King was a first-rate hand; so, the captain 
assured him that he would stand by him, and he did.  It was agreed 
that the captain should pretend to sail to Deal, and that Charles 
should address the sailors and say he was a gentleman in debt who 
was running away from his creditors, and that he hoped they would 
join him in persuading the captain to put him ashore in France.  As 
the King acted his part very well indeed, and gave the sailors 
twenty shillings to drink, they begged the captain to do what such 
a worthy gentleman asked.  He pretended to yield to their 
entreaties, and the King got safe to Normandy.

Ireland being now subdued, and Scotland kept quiet by plenty of 
forts and soldiers put there by Oliver, the Parliament would have 
gone on quietly enough, as far as fighting with any foreign enemy 
went, but for getting into trouble with the Dutch, who in the 
spring of the year one thousand six hundred and fifty-one sent a 
fleet into the Downs under their ADMIRAL VAN TROMP, to call upon 
the bold English ADMIRAL BLAKE (who was there with half as many 
ships as the Dutch) to strike his flag.  Blake fired a raging 
broadside instead, and beat off Van Tromp; who, in the autumn, came 
back again with seventy ships, and challenged the bold Blake - who 
still was only half as strong - to fight him.  Blake fought him all 
day; but, finding that the Dutch were too many for him, got quietly 
off at night.  What does Van Tromp upon this, but goes cruising and 
boasting about the Channel, between the North Foreland and the Isle 
of Wight, with a great Dutch broom tied to his masthead, as a sign 
that he could and would sweep the English of the sea!  Within three 
months, Blake lowered his tone though, and his broom too; for, he 
and two other bold commanders, DEAN and MONK, fought him three 
whole days, took twenty-three of his ships, shivered his broom to 
pieces, and settled his business.

Things were no sooner quiet again, than the army began to complain 
to the Parliament that they were not governing the nation properly, 
and to hint that they thought they could do it better themselves.  
Oliver, who had now made up his mind to be the head of the state, 
or nothing at all, supported them in this, and called a meeting of 
officers and his own Parliamentary friends, at his lodgings in 
Whitehall, to consider the best way of getting rid of the 
Parliament.  It had now lasted just as many years as the King's 
unbridled power had lasted, before it came into existence.  The end 
of the deliberation was, that Oliver went down to the House in his 
usual plain black dress, with his usual grey worsted stockings, but 
with an unusual party of soldiers behind him.  These last he left 
in the lobby, and then went in and sat down.  Presently he got up, 
made the Parliament a speech, told them that the Lord had done with 
them, stamped his foot and said, 'You are no Parliament.  Bring 
them in!  Bring them in!'  At this signal the door flew open, and 
the soldiers appeared.  'This is not honest,' said Sir Harry Vane, 
one of the members.  'Sir Harry Vane!' cried Cromwell; 'O, Sir 
Harry Vane!  The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!'  Then he 
pointed out members one by one, and said this man was a drunkard, 
and that man a dissipated fellow, and that man a liar, and so on.  
Then he caused the Speaker to be walked out of his chair, told the 
guard to clear the House, called the mace upon the table - which is 
a sign that the House is sitting - 'a fool's bauble,' and said, 
'here, carry it away!'  Being obeyed in all these orders, he 
quietly locked the door, put the key in his pocket, walked back to 
Whitehall again, and told his friends, who were still assembled 
there, what he had done.

They formed a new Council of State after this extraordinary 
proceeding, and got a new Parliament together in their own way:  
which Oliver himself opened in a sort of sermon, and which he said 
was the beginning of a perfect heaven upon earth.  In this 
Parliament there sat a well-known leather-seller, who had taken the 
singular name of Praise God Barebones, and from whom it was called, 
for a joke, Barebones's Parliament, though its general name was the 
Little Parliament.  As it soon appeared that it was not going to 
put Oliver in the first place, it turned out to be not at all like 
the beginning of heaven upon earth, and Oliver said it really was 
not to be borne with.  So he cleared off that Parliament in much 
the same way as he had disposed of the other; and then the council 
of officers decided that he must be made the supreme authority of 
the kingdom, under the title of the Lord Protector of the 
Commonwealth.

So, on the sixteenth of December, one thousand six hundred and 
fifty-three, a great procession was formed at Oliver's door, and he 
came out in a black velvet suit and a big pair of boots, and got 
into his coach and went down to Westminster, attended by the 
judges, and the lord mayor, and the aldermen, and all the other 
great and wonderful personages of the country.  There, in the Court 
of Chancery, he publicly accepted the office of Lord Protector.  
Then he was sworn, and the City sword was handed to him, and the 
seal was handed to him, and all the other things were handed to him 
which are usually handed to Kings and Queens on state occasions.  
When Oliver had handed them all back, he was quite made and 
completely finished off as Lord Protector; and several of the 
Ironsides preached about it at great length, all the evening.


SECOND PART


OLIVER CROMWELL - whom the people long called OLD NOLL - in 
accepting the office of Protector, had bound himself by a certain 
paper which was handed to him, called 'the Instrument,' to summon a 
Parliament, consisting of between four and five hundred members, in 
the election of which neither the Royalists nor the Catholics were 
to have any share.  He had also pledged himself that this 
Parliament should not be dissolved without its own consent until it 
had sat five months.

When this Parliament met, Oliver made a speech to them of three 
hours long, very wisely advising them what to do for the credit and 
happiness of the country.  To keep down the more violent members, 
he required them to sign a recognition of what they were forbidden 
by 'the Instrument' to do; which was, chiefly, to take the power 
from one single person at the head of the state or to command the 
army.  Then he dismissed them to go to work.  With his usual vigour 
and resolution he went to work himself with some frantic preachers 
- who were rather overdoing their sermons in calling him a villain 
and a tyrant - by shutting up their chapels, and sending a few of 
them off to prison.

There was not at that time, in England or anywhere else, a man so 
able to govern the country as Oliver Cromwell.  Although he ruled 
with a strong hand, and levied a very heavy tax on the Royalists 
(but not until they had plotted against his life), he ruled wisely, 
and as the times required.  He caused England to be so respected 
abroad, that I wish some lords and gentlemen who have governed it 
under kings and queens in later days would have taken a leaf out of 
Oliver Cromwell's book.  He sent bold Admiral Blake to the 
Mediterranean Sea, to make the Duke of Tuscany pay sixty thousand 
pounds for injuries he had done to British subjects, and spoliation 
he had committed on English merchants.  He further despatched him 
and his fleet to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, to have every English 
ship and every English man delivered up to him that had been taken 
by pirates in those parts.  All this was gloriously done; and it 
began to be thoroughly well known, all over the world, that England 
was governed by a man in earnest, who would not allow the English 
name to be insulted or slighted anywhere.

These were not all his foreign triumphs.  He sent a fleet to sea 
against the Dutch; and the two powers, each with one hundred ships 
upon its side, met in the English Channel off the North Foreland, 
where the fight lasted all day long.  Dean was killed in this 
fight; but Monk, who commanded in the same ship with him, threw his 
cloak over his body, that the sailors might not know of his death, 
and be disheartened.  Nor were they.  The English broadsides so 
exceedingly astonished the Dutch that they sheered off at last, 
though the redoubtable Van Tromp fired upon them with his own guns 
for deserting their flag.  Soon afterwards, the two fleets engaged 
again, off the coast of Holland.  There, the valiant Van Tromp was 
shot through the heart, and the Dutch gave in, and peace was made.

Further than this, Oliver resolved not to bear the domineering and 
bigoted conduct of Spain, which country not only claimed a right to 
all the gold and silver that could be found in South America, and 
treated the ships of all other countries who visited those regions, 
as pirates, but put English subjects into the horrible Spanish 
prisons of the Inquisition.  So, Oliver told the Spanish ambassador 
that English ships must be free to go wherever they would, and that 
English merchants must not be thrown into those same dungeons, no, 
not for the pleasure of all the priests in Spain.  To this, the 
Spanish ambassador replied that the gold and silver country, and 
the Holy Inquisition, were his King's two eyes, neither of which he 
could submit to have put out.  Very well, said Oliver, then he was 
afraid he (Oliver) must damage those two eyes directly.

So, another fleet was despatched under two commanders, PENN and 
VENABLES, for Hispaniola; where, however, the Spaniards got the 
better of the fight.  Consequently, the fleet came home again, 
after taking Jamaica on the way.  Oliver, indignant with the two 
commanders who had not done what bold Admiral Blake would have 
done, clapped them both into prison, declared war against Spain, 
and made a treaty with France, in virtue of which it was to shelter 
the King and his brother the Duke of York no longer.  Then, he sent 
a fleet abroad under bold Admiral Blake, which brought the King of 
Portugal to his senses - just to keep its hand in - and then 
engaged a Spanish fleet, sunk four great ships, and took two more, 
laden with silver to the value of two millions of pounds:  which 
dazzling prize was brought from Portsmouth to London in waggons, 
with the populace of all the towns and villages through which the 
waggons passed, shouting with all their might.  After this victory, 
bold Admiral Blake sailed away to the port of Santa Cruz to cut off 
the Spanish treasure-ships coming from Mexico.  There, he found 
them, ten in number, with seven others to take care of them, and a 
big castle, and seven batteries, all roaring and blazing away at 
him with great guns.  Blake cared no more for great guns than for 
pop-guns - no more for their hot iron balls than for snow-balls.  
He dashed into the harbour, captured and burnt every one of the 
ships, and came sailing out again triumphantly, with the victorious 
English flag flying at his masthead.  This was the last triumph of 
this great commander, who had sailed and fought until he was quite 
worn out.  He died, as his successful ship was coming into Plymouth 
Harbour amidst the joyful acclamations of the people, and was 
buried in state in Westminster Abbey.  Not to lie there, long.

Over and above all this, Oliver found that the VAUDOIS, or 
Protestant people of the valleys of Lucerne, were insolently 
treated by the Catholic powers, and were even put to death for 
their religion, in an audacious and bloody manner.  Instantly, he 
informed those powers that this was a thing which Protestant 
England would not allow; and he speedily carried his point, through 
the might of his great name, and established their right to worship 
God in peace after their own harmless manner.

Lastly, his English army won such admiration in fighting with the 
French against the Spaniards, that, after they had assaulted the 
town of Dunkirk together, the French King in person gave it up to 
the English, that it might be a token to them of their might and 
valour.

There were plots enough against Oliver among the frantic 
religionists (who called themselves Fifth Monarchy Men), and among 
the disappointed Republicans.  He had a difficult game to play, for 
the Royalists were always ready to side with either party against 
him.  The 'King over the water,' too, as Charles was called, had no 
scruples about plotting with any one against his life; although 
there is reason to suppose that he would willingly have married one 
of his daughters, if Oliver would have had such a son-in-law.  
There was a certain COLONEL SAXBY of the army, once a great 
supporter of Oliver's but now turned against him, who was a 
grievous trouble to him through all this part of his career; and 
who came and went between the discontented in England and Spain, 
and Charles who put himself in alliance with Spain on being thrown 
off by France.  This man died in prison at last; but not until 
there had been very serious plots between the Royalists and 
Republicans, and an actual rising of them in England, when they 
burst into the city of Salisbury, on a Sunday night, seized the 
judges who were going to hold the assizes there next day, and would 
have hanged them but for the merciful objections of the more 
temperate of their number.  Oliver was so vigorous and shrewd that 
he soon put this revolt down, as he did most other conspiracies; 
and it was well for one of its chief managers - that same Lord 
Wilmot who had assisted in Charles's flight, and was now EARL OF 
ROCHESTER - that he made his escape.  Oliver seemed to have eyes 
and ears everywhere, and secured such sources of information as his 
enemies little dreamed of.  There was a chosen body of six persons, 
called the Sealed Knot, who were in the closest and most secret 
confidence of Charles.  One of the foremost of these very men, a 
SIR RICHARD WILLIS, reported to Oliver everything that passed among 
them, and had two hundred a year for it.

MILES SYNDARCOMB, also of the old army, was another conspirator 
against the Protector.  He and a man named CECIL, bribed one of his 
Life Guards to let them have good notice when he was going out - 
intending to shoot him from a window.  But, owing either to his 
caution or his good fortune, they could never get an aim at him.  
Disappointed in this design, they got into the chapel in Whitehall, 
with a basketful of combustibles, which were to explode by means of 
a slow match in six hours; then, in the noise and confusion of the 
fire, they hoped to kill Oliver.  But, the Life Guardsman himself 
disclosed this plot; and they were seized, and Miles died (or 
killed himself in prison) a little while before he was ordered for 
execution.  A few such plotters Oliver caused to be beheaded, a few 
more to be hanged, and many more, including those who rose in arms 
against him, to be sent as slaves to the West Indies.  If he were 
rigid, he was impartial too, in asserting the laws of England.  
When a Portuguese nobleman, the brother of the Portuguese 
ambassador, killed a London citizen in mistake for another man with 
whom he had had a quarrel, Oliver caused him to be tried before a 
jury of Englishmen and foreigners, and had him executed in spite of 
the entreaties of all the ambassadors in London.

One of Oliver's own friends, the DUKE OF OLDENBURGH, in sending him 
a present of six fine coach-horses, was very near doing more to 
please the Royalists than all the plotters put together.  One day, 
Oliver went with his coach, drawn by these six horses, into Hyde 
Park, to dine with his secretary and some of his other gentlemen 
under the trees there.  After dinner, being merry, he took it into 
his head to put his friends inside and to drive them home:  a 
postillion riding one of the foremost horses, as the custom was.  
On account of Oliver's being too free with the whip, the six fine 
horses went off at a gallop, the postillion got thrown, and Oliver 
fell upon the coach-pole and narrowly escaped being shot by his own 
pistol, which got entangled with his clothes in the harness, and 
went off.  He was dragged some distance by the foot, until his foot 
came out of the shoe, and then he came safely to the ground under 
the broad body of the coach, and was very little the worse.  The 
gentlemen inside were only bruised, and the discontented people of 
all parties were much disappointed.

The rest of the history of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell is a 
history of his Parliaments.  His first one not pleasing him at all, 
he waited until the five months were out, and then dissolved it.  
The next was better suited to his views; and from that he desired 
to get - if he could with safety to himself - the title of King.  
He had had this in his mind some time:  whether because he thought 
that the English people, being more used to the title, were more 
likely to obey it; or whether because he really wished to be a king 
himself, and to leave the succession to that title in his family, 
is far from clear.  He was already as high, in England and in all 
the world, as he would ever be, and I doubt if he cared for the 
mere name.  However, a paper, called the 'Humble Petition and 
Advice,' was presented to him by the House of Commons, praying him 
to take a high title and to appoint his successor.  That he would 
have taken the title of King there is no doubt, but for the strong 
opposition of the army.  This induced him to forbear, and to assent 
only to the other points of the petition.  Upon which occasion 
there was another grand show in Westminster Hall, when the Speaker 
of the House of Commons formally invested him with a purple robe 
lined with ermine, and presented him with a splendidly bound Bible, 
and put a golden sceptre in his hand.  The next time the Parliament 
met, he called a House of Lords of sixty members, as the petition 
gave him power to do; but as that Parliament did not please him 
either, and would not proceed to the business of the country, he 
jumped into a coach one morning, took six Guards with him, and sent 
them to the right-about.  I wish this had been a warning to 
Parliaments to avoid long speeches, and do more work.

It was the month of August, one thousand six hundred and fifty-
eight, when Oliver Cromwell's favourite daughter, ELIZABETH 
CLAYPOLE (who had lately lost her youngest son), lay very ill, and 
his mind was greatly troubled, because he loved her dearly.  
Another of his daughters was married to LORD FALCONBERG, another to 
the grandson of the Earl of Warwick, and he had made his son 
RICHARD one of the Members of the Upper House.  He was very kind 
and loving to them all, being a good father and a good husband; but 
he loved this daughter the best of the family, and went down to 
Hampton Court to see her, and could hardly be induced to stir from 
her sick room until she died.  Although his religion had been of a 
gloomy kind, his disposition had been always cheerful.  He had been 
fond of music in his home, and had kept open table once a week for 
all officers of the army not below the rank of captain, and had 
always preserved in his house a quiet, sensible dignity.  He 
encouraged men of genius and learning, and loved to have them about 
him.  MILTON was one of his great friends.  He was good humoured 
too, with the nobility, whose dresses and manners were very 
different from his; and to show them what good information he had, 
he would sometimes jokingly tell them when they were his guests, 
where they had last drunk the health of the 'King over the water,' 
and would recommend them to be more private (if they could) another 
time.  But he had lived in busy times, had borne the weight of 
heavy State affairs, and had often gone in fear of his life.  He 
was ill of the gout and ague; and when the death of his beloved 
child came upon him in addition, he sank, never to raise his head 
again.  He told his physicians on the twenty-fourth of August that 
the Lord had assured him that he was not to die in that illness, 
and that he would certainly get better.  This was only his sick 
fancy, for on the third of September, which was the anniversary of 
the great battle of Worcester, and the day of the year which he 
called his fortunate day, he died, in the sixtieth year of his age.  
He had been delirious, and had lain insensible some hours, but he 
had been overheard to murmur a very good prayer the day before.  
The whole country lamented his death.  If you want to know the real 
worth of Oliver Cromwell, and his real services to his country, you 
can hardly do better than compare England under him, with England 
under CHARLES THE SECOND.

He had appointed his son Richard to succeed him, and after there 
had been, at Somerset House in the Strand, a lying in state more 
splendid than sensible - as all such vanities after death are, I 
think - Richard became Lord Protector.  He was an amiable country 
gentleman, but had none of his father's great genius, and was quite 
unfit for such a post in such a storm of parties.  Richard's 
Protectorate, which only lasted a year and a half, is a history of 
quarrels between the officers of the army and the Parliament, and 
between the officers among themselves; and of a growing discontent 
among the people, who had far too many long sermons and far too few 
amusements, and wanted a change.  At last, General Monk got the 
army well into his own hands, and then in pursuance of a secret 
plan he seems to have entertained from the time of Oliver's death, 
declared for the King's cause.  He did not do this openly; but, in 
his place in the House of Commons, as one of the members for 
Devonshire, strongly advocated the proposals of one SIR JOHN 
GREENVILLE, who came to the House with a letter from Charles, dated 
from Breda, and with whom he had previously been in secret 
communication.  There had been plots and counterplots, and a recall 
of the last members of the Long Parliament, and an end of the Long 
Parliament, and risings of the Royalists that were made too soon; 
and most men being tired out, and there being no one to head the 
country now great Oliver was dead, it was readily agreed to welcome 
Charles Stuart.  Some of the wiser and better members said - what 
was most true - that in the letter from Breda, he gave no real 
promise to govern well, and that it would be best to make him 
pledge himself beforehand as to what he should be bound to do for 
the benefit of the kingdom.  Monk said, however, it would be all 
right when he came, and he could not come too soon.

So, everybody found out all in a moment that the country MUST be 
prosperous and happy, having another Stuart to condescend to reign 
over it; and there was a prodigious firing off of guns, lighting of 
bonfires, ringing of bells, and throwing up of caps.  The people 
drank the King's health by thousands in the open streets, and 
everybody rejoiced.  Down came the Arms of the Commonwealth, up 
went the Royal Arms instead, and out came the public money.  Fifty 
thousand pounds for the King, ten thousand pounds for his brother 
the Duke of York, five thousand pounds for his brother the Duke of 
Gloucester.  Prayers for these gracious Stuarts were put up in all 
the churches; commissioners were sent to Holland (which suddenly 
found out that Charles was a great man, and that it loved him) to 
invite the King home; Monk and the Kentish grandees went to Dover, 
to kneel down before him as he landed.  He kissed and embraced 
Monk, made him ride in the coach with himself and his brothers, 
came on to London amid wonderful shoutings, and passed through the 
army at Blackheath on the twenty-ninth of May (his birthday), in 
the year one thousand six hundred and sixty.  Greeted by splendid 
dinners under tents, by flags and tapestry streaming from all the 
houses, by delighted crowds in all the streets, by troops of 
noblemen and gentlemen in rich dresses, by City companies, train-
bands, drummers, trumpeters, the great Lord Mayor, and the majestic 
Aldermen, the King went on to Whitehall.  On entering it, he 
commemorated his Restoration with the joke that it really would 
seem to have been his own fault that he had not come long ago, 
since everybody told him that he had always wished for him with all 
his heart.



CHAPTER XXXV - ENGLAND UNDER CHARLES THE SECOND, CALLED THE MERRY 
MONARCH



THERE never were such profligate times in England as under Charles 
the Second.  Whenever you see his portrait, with his swarthy, ill-
looking face and great nose, you may fancy him in his Court at 
Whitehall, surrounded by some of the very worst vagabonds in the 
kingdom (though they were lords and ladies), drinking, gambling, 
indulging in vicious conversation, and committing every kind of 
profligate excess.  It has been a fashion to call Charles the 
Second 'The Merry Monarch.'  Let me try to give you a general idea 
of some of the merry things that were done, in the merry days when 
this merry gentleman sat upon his merry throne, in merry England.

The first merry proceeding was - of course - to declare that he was 
one of the greatest, the wisest, and the noblest kings that ever 
shone, like the blessed sun itself, on this benighted earth.  The 
next merry and pleasant piece of business was, for the Parliament, 
in the humblest manner, to give him one million two hundred 
thousand pounds a year, and to settle upon him for life that old 
disputed tonnage and poundage which had been so bravely fought for.  
Then, General Monk being made EARL OF ALBEMARLE, and a few other 
Royalists similarly rewarded, the law went to work to see what was 
to be done to those persons (they were called Regicides) who had 
been concerned in making a martyr of the late King.  Ten of these 
were merrily executed; that is to say, six of the judges, one of 
the council, Colonel Hacker and another officer who had commanded 
the Guards, and HUGH PETERS, a preacher who had preached against 
the martyr with all his heart.  These executions were so extremely 
merry, that every horrible circumstance which Cromwell had 
abandoned was revived with appalling cruelty.  The hearts of the 
sufferers were torn out of their living bodies; their bowels were 
burned before their faces; the executioner cut jokes to the next 
victim, as he rubbed his filthy hands together, that were reeking 
with the blood of the last; and the heads of the dead were drawn on 
sledges with the living to the place of suffering.  Still, even so 
merry a monarch could not force one of these dying men to say that 
he was sorry for what he had done.  Nay, the most memorable thing 
said among them was, that if the thing were to do again they would 
do it.

Sir Harry Vane, who had furnished the evidence against Strafford, 
and was one of the most staunch of the Republicans, was also tried, 
found guilty, and ordered for execution.  When he came upon the 
scaffold on Tower Hill, after conducting his own defence with great 
power, his notes of what he had meant to say to the people were 
torn away from him, and the drums and trumpets were ordered to 
sound lustily and drown his voice; for, the people had been so much 
impressed by what the Regicides had calmly said with their last 
breath, that it was the custom now, to have the drums and trumpets 
always under the scaffold, ready to strike up.  Vane said no more 
than this:  'It is a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a 
dying man:' and bravely died.

These merry scenes were succeeded by another, perhaps even merrier.  
On the anniversary of the late King's death, the bodies of Oliver 
Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, were torn out of their graves in 
Westminster Abbey, dragged to Tyburn, hanged there on a gallows all 
day long, and then beheaded.  Imagine the head of Oliver Cromwell 
set upon a pole to be stared at by a brutal crowd, not one of whom 
would have dared to look the living Oliver in the face for half a 
moment!  Think, after you have read this reign, what England was 
under Oliver Cromwell who was torn out of his grave, and what it 
was under this merry monarch who sold it, like a merry Judas, over 
and over again.

Of course, the remains of Oliver's wife and daughter were not to be 
spared either, though they had been most excellent women.  The base 
clergy of that time gave up their bodies, which had been buried in 
the Abbey, and - to the eternal disgrace of England - they were 
thrown into a pit, together with the mouldering bones of Pym and of 
the brave and bold old Admiral Blake.

The clergy acted this disgraceful part because they hoped to get 
the nonconformists, or dissenters, thoroughly put down in this 
reign, and to have but one prayer-book and one service for all 
kinds of people, no matter what their private opinions were.  This 
was pretty well, I think, for a Protestant Church, which had 
displaced the Romish Church because people had a right to their own 
opinions in religious matters.  However, they carried it with a 
high hand, and a prayer-book was agreed upon, in which the 
extremest opinions of Archbishop Laud were not forgotten.  An Act 
was passed, too, preventing any dissenter from holding any office 
under any corporation.  So, the regular clergy in their triumph 
were soon as merry as the King.  The army being by this time 
disbanded, and the King crowned, everything was to go on easily for 
evermore.

I must say a word here about the King's family.  He had not been 
long upon the throne when his brother the Duke of Gloucester, and 
his sister the PRINCESS OF ORANGE, died within a few months of each 
other, of small-pox.  His remaining sister, the PRINCESS HENRIETTA, 
married the DUKE OF ORLEANS, the brother of LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH, 
King of France.  His brother JAMES, DUKE OF YORK, was made High 
Admiral, and by-and-by became a Catholic.  He was a gloomy, sullen, 
bilious sort of man, with a remarkable partiality for the ugliest 
women in the country.  He married, under very discreditable 
circumstances, ANNE HYDE, the daughter of LORD CLARENDON, then the 
King's principal Minister - not at all a delicate minister either, 
but doing much of the dirty work of a very dirty palace.  It became 
important now that the King himself should be married; and divers 
foreign Monarchs, not very particular about the character of their 
son-in-law, proposed their daughters to him.  The KING OF PORTUGAL 
offered his daughter, CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA, and fifty thousand 
pounds:  in addition to which, the French King, who was favourable 
to that match, offered a loan of another fifty thousand.  The King 
of Spain, on the other hand, offered any one out of a dozen of 
Princesses, and other hopes of gain.  But the ready money carried 
the day, and Catherine came over in state to her merry marriage.

The whole Court was a great flaunting crowd of debauched men and 
shameless women; and Catherine's merry husband insulted and 
outraged her in every possible way, until she consented to receive 
those worthless creatures as her very good friends, and to degrade 
herself by their companionship.  A MRS. PALMER, whom the King made 
LADY CASTLEMAINE, and afterwards DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND, was one of 
the most powerful of the bad women about the Court, and had great 
influence with the King nearly all through his reign.  Another 
merry lady named MOLL DAVIES, a dancer at the theatre, was 
afterwards her rival.  So was NELL GWYN, first an orange girl and 
then an actress, who really had good in her, and of whom one of the 
worst things I know is, that actually she does seem to have been 
fond of the King.  The first DUKE OF ST. ALBANS was this orange 
girl's child.  In like manner the son of a merry waiting-lady, whom 
the King created DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH, became the DUKE OF 
RICHMOND.  Upon the whole it is not so bad a thing to be a 
commoner.

The Merry Monarch was so exceedingly merry among these merry 
ladies, and some equally merry (and equally infamous) lords and 
gentlemen, that he soon got through his hundred thousand pounds, 
and then, by way of raising a little pocket-money, made a merry 
bargain.  He sold Dunkirk to the French King for five millions of 
livres.  When I think of the dignity to which Oliver Cromwell 
raised England in the eyes of foreign powers, and when I think of 
the manner in which he gained for England this very Dunkirk, I am 
much inclined to consider that if the Merry Monarch had been made 
to follow his father for this action, he would have received his 
just deserts.

Though he was like his father in none of that father's greater 
qualities, he was like him in being worthy of no trust.  When he 
sent that letter to the Parliament, from Breda, he did expressly 
promise that all sincere religious opinions should be respected.  
Yet he was no sooner firm in his power than he consented to one of 
the worst Acts of Parliament ever passed.  Under this law, every 
minister who should not give his solemn assent to the Prayer-Book 
by a certain day, was declared to be a minister no longer, and to 
be deprived of his church.  The consequence of this was that some 
two thousand honest men were taken from their congregations, and 
reduced to dire poverty and distress.  It was followed by another 
outrageous law, called the Conventicle Act, by which any person 
above the age of sixteen who was present at any religious service 
not according to the Prayer-Book, was to be imprisoned three months 
for the first offence, six for the second, and to be transported 
for the third.  This Act alone filled the prisons, which were then 
most dreadful dungeons, to overflowing.

The Covenanters in Scotland had already fared no better.  A base 
Parliament, usually known as the Drunken Parliament, in consequence 
of its principal members being seldom sober, had been got together 
to make laws against the Covenanters, and to force all men to be of 
one mind in religious matters.  The MARQUIS OF ARGYLE, relying on 
the King's honour, had given himself up to him; but, he was 
wealthy, and his enemies wanted his wealth.  He was tried for 
treason, on the evidence of some private letters in which he had 
expressed opinions - as well he might - more favourable to the 
government of the late Lord Protector than of the present merry and 
religious King.  He was executed, as were two men of mark among the 
Covenanters; and SHARP, a traitor who had once been the friend of 
the Presbyterians and betrayed them, was made Archbishop of St. 
Andrew's, to teach the Scotch how to like bishops.

Things being in this merry state at home, the Merry Monarch 
undertook a war with the Dutch; principally because they interfered 
with an African company, established with the two objects of buying 
gold-dust and slaves, of which the Duke of York was a leading 
member.  After some preliminary hostilities, the said Duke sailed 
to the coast of Holland with a fleet of ninety-eight vessels of 
war, and four fire-ships.  This engaged with the Dutch fleet, of no 
fewer than one hundred and thirteen ships.  In the great battle 
between the two forces, the Dutch lost eighteen ships, four 
admirals, and seven thousand men.  But, the English on shore were 
in no mood of exultation when they heard the news.

For, this was the year and the time of the Great Plague in London.  
During the winter of one thousand six hundred and sixty-four it had 
been whispered about, that some few people had died here and there 
of the disease called the Plague, in some of the unwholesome 
suburbs around London.  News was not published at that time as it 
is now, and some people believed these rumours, and some 
disbelieved them, and they were soon forgotten.  But, in the month 
of May, one thousand six hundred and sixty-five, it began to be 
said all over the town that the disease had burst out with great 
violence in St. Giles's, and that the people were dying in great 
numbers.  This soon turned out to be awfully true.  The roads out 
of London were choked up by people endeavouring to escape from the 
infected city, and large sums were paid for any kind of conveyance.  
The disease soon spread so fast, that it was necessary to shut up 
the houses in which sick people were, and to cut them off from 
communication with the living.  Every one of these houses was 
marked on the outside of the door with a red cross, and the words, 
Lord, have mercy upon us!  The streets were all deserted, grass 
grew in the public ways, and there was a dreadful silence in the 
air.  When night came on, dismal rumblings used to be heard, and 
these were the wheels of the death-carts, attended by men with 
veiled faces and holding cloths to their mouths, who rang doleful 
bells and cried in a loud and solemn voice, 'Bring out your dead!'  
The corpses put into these carts were buried by torchlight in great 
pits; no service being performed over them; all men being afraid to 
stay for a moment on the brink of the ghastly graves.  In the 
general fear, children ran away from their parents, and parents 
from their children.  Some who were taken ill, died alone, and 
without any help.  Some were stabbed or strangled by hired nurses 
who robbed them of all their money, and stole the very beds on 
which they lay.  Some went mad, dropped from the windows, ran 
through the streets, and in their pain and frenzy flung themselves 
into the river.

These were not all the horrors of the time.  The wicked and 
dissolute, in wild desperation, sat in the taverns singing roaring 
songs, and were stricken as they drank, and went out and died.  The 
fearful and superstitious persuaded themselves that they saw 
supernatural sights - burning swords in the sky, gigantic arms and 
darts.  Others pretended that at nights vast crowds of ghosts 
walked round and round the dismal pits.  One madman, naked, and 
carrying a brazier full of burning coals upon his head, stalked 
through the streets, crying out that he was a Prophet, commissioned 
to denounce the vengeance of the Lord on wicked London.  Another 
always went to and fro, exclaiming, 'Yet forty days, and London 
shall be destroyed!'  A third awoke the echoes in the dismal 
streets, by night and by day, and made the blood of the sick run 
cold, by calling out incessantly, in a deep hoarse voice, 'O, the 
great and dreadful God!'

Through the months of July and August and September, the Great 
Plague raged more and more.  Great fires were lighted in the 
streets, in the hope of stopping the infection; but there was a 
plague of rain too, and it beat the fires out.  At last, the winds 
which usually arise at that time of the year which is called the 
equinox, when day and night are of equal length all over the world, 
began to blow, and to purify the wretched town.  The deaths began 
to decrease, the red crosses slowly to disappear, the fugitives to 
return, the shops to open, pale frightened faces to be seen in the 
streets.  The Plague had been in every part of England, but in 
close and unwholesome London it had killed one hundred thousand 
people.

All this time, the Merry Monarch was as merry as ever, and as 
worthless as ever.  All this time, the debauched lords and 
gentlemen and the shameless ladies danced and gamed and drank, and 
loved and hated one another, according to their merry ways.

So little humanity did the government learn from the late 
affliction, that one of the first things the Parliament did when it 
met at Oxford (being as yet afraid to come to London), was to make 
a law, called the Five Mile Act, expressly directed against those 
poor ministers who, in the time of the Plague, had manfully come 
back to comfort the unhappy people.  This infamous law, by 
forbidding them to teach in any school, or to come within five 
miles of any city, town, or village, doomed them to starvation and 
death.

The fleet had been at sea, and healthy.  The King of France was now 
in alliance with the Dutch, though his navy was chiefly employed in 
looking on while the English and Dutch fought.  The Dutch gained 
one victory; and the English gained another and a greater; and 
Prince Rupert, one of the English admirals, was out in the Channel 
one windy night, looking for the French Admiral, with the intention 
of giving him something more to do than he had had yet, when the 
gale increased to a storm, and blew him into Saint Helen's.  That 
night was the third of September, one thousand six hundred and 
sixty-six, and that wind fanned the Great Fire of London.

It broke out at a baker's shop near London Bridge, on the spot on 
which the Monument now stands as a remembrance of those raging 
flames.  It spread and spread, and burned and burned, for three 
days.  The nights were lighter than the days; in the daytime there 
was an immense cloud of smoke, and in the night-time there was a 
great tower of fire mounting up into the sky, which lighted the 
whole country landscape for ten miles round.  Showers of hot ashes 
rose into the air and fell on distant places; flying sparks carried 
the conflagration to great distances, and kindled it in twenty new 
spots at a time; church steeples fell down with tremendous crashes; 
houses crumbled into cinders by the hundred and the thousand.  The 
summer had been intensely hot and dry, the streets were very 
narrow, and the houses mostly built of wood and plaster.  Nothing 
could stop the tremendous fire, but the want of more houses to 
burn; nor did it stop until the whole way from the Tower to Temple 
Bar was a desert, composed of the ashes of thirteen thousand houses 
and eighty-nine churches.

This was a terrible visitation at the time, and occasioned great 
loss and suffering to the two hundred thousand burnt-out people, 
who were obliged to lie in the fields under the open night sky, or 
in hastily-made huts of mud and straw, while the lanes and roads 
were rendered impassable by carts which had broken down as they 
tried to save their goods.  But the Fire was a great blessing to 
the City afterwards, for it arose from its ruins very much improved 
- built more regularly, more widely, more cleanly and carefully, 
and therefore much more healthily.  It might be far more healthy 
than it is, but there are some people in it still - even now, at 
this time, nearly two hundred years later - so selfish, so pig-
headed, and so ignorant, that I doubt if even another Great Fire 
would warm them up to do their duty.

The Catholics were accused of having wilfully set London in flames; 
one poor Frenchman, who had been mad for years, even accused 
himself of having with his own hand fired the first house.  There 
is no reasonable doubt, however, that the fire was accidental.  An 
inscription on the Monument long attributed it to the Catholics; 
but it is removed now, and was always a malicious and stupid 
untruth.


SECOND PART


THAT the Merry Monarch might be very merry indeed, in the merry 
times when his people were suffering under pestilence and fire, he 
drank and gambled and flung away among his favourites the money 
which the Parliament had voted for the war.  The consequence of 
this was that the stout-hearted English sailors were merrily 
starving of want, and dying in the streets; while the Dutch, under 
their admirals DE WITT and DE RUYTER, came into the River Thames, 
and up the River Medway as far as Upnor, burned the guard-ships, 
silenced the weak batteries, and did what they would to the English 
coast for six whole weeks.  Most of the English ships that could 
have prevented them had neither powder nor shot on board; in this 
merry reign, public officers made themselves as merry as the King 
did with the public money; and when it was entrusted to them to 
spend in national defences or preparations, they put it into their 
own pockets with the merriest grace in the world.

Lord Clarendon had, by this time, run as long a course as is 
usually allotted to the unscrupulous ministers of bad kings.  He 
was impeached by his political opponents, but unsuccessfully.  The 
King then commanded him to withdraw from England and retire to 
France, which he did, after defending himself in writing.  He was 
no great loss at home, and died abroad some seven years afterwards.

There then came into power a ministry called the Cabal Ministry, 
because it was composed of LORD CLIFFORD, the EARL OF ARLINGTON, 
the DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM (a great rascal, and the King's most 
powerful favourite), LORD ASHLEY, and the DUKE OF LAUDERDALE, C. A. 
B. A. L.  As the French were making conquests in Flanders, the 
first Cabal proceeding was to make a treaty with the Dutch, for 
uniting with Spain to oppose the French.  It was no sooner made 
than the Merry Monarch, who always wanted to get money without 
being accountable to a Parliament for his expenditure, apologised 
to the King of France for having had anything to do with it, and 
concluded a secret treaty with him, making himself his infamous 
pensioner to the amount of two millions of livres down, and three 
millions more a year; and engaging to desert that very Spain, to 
make war against those very Dutch, and to declare himself a 
Catholic when a convenient time should arrive.  This religious king 
had lately been crying to his Catholic brother on the subject of 
his strong desire to be a Catholic; and now he merrily concluded 
this treasonable conspiracy against the country he governed, by 
undertaking to become one as soon as he safely could.  For all of 
which, though he had had ten merry heads instead of one, he richly 
deserved to lose them by the headsman's axe.

As his one merry head might have been far from safe, if these 
things had been known, they were kept very quiet, and war was 
declared by France and England against the Dutch.  But, a very 
uncommon man, afterwards most important to English history and to 
the religion and liberty of this land, arose among them, and for 
many long years defeated the whole projects of France.  This was 
WILLIAM OF NASSAU, PRINCE OF ORANGE, son of the last Prince of 
Orange of the same name, who married the daughter of Charles the 
First of England.  He was a young man at this time, only just of 
age; but he was brave, cool, intrepid, and wise.  His father had 
been so detested that, upon his death, the Dutch had abolished the 
authority to which this son would have otherwise succeeded 
(Stadtholder it was called), and placed the chief power in the 
hands of JOHN DE WITT, who educated this young prince.  Now, the 
Prince became very popular, and John de Witt's brother CORNELIUS 
was sentenced to banishment on a false accusation of conspiring to 
kill him.  John went to the prison where he was, to take him away 
to exile, in his coach; and a great mob who collected on the 
occasion, then and there cruelly murdered both the brothers.  This 
left the government in the hands of the Prince, who was really the 
choice of the nation; and from this time he exercised it with the 
greatest vigour, against the whole power of France, under its 
famous generals CONDE and TURENNE, and in support of the Protestant 
religion.  It was full seven years before this war ended in a 
treaty of peace made at Nimeguen, and its details would occupy a 
very considerable space.  It is enough to say that William of 
Orange established a famous character with the whole world; and 
that the Merry Monarch, adding to and improving on his former 
baseness, bound himself to do everything the King of France liked, 
and nothing the King of France did not like, for a pension of one 
hundred thousand pounds a year, which was afterwards doubled.  
Besides this, the King of France, by means of his corrupt 
ambassador - who wrote accounts of his proceedings in England, 
which are not always to be believed, I think - bought our English 
members of Parliament, as he wanted them.  So, in point of fact, 
during a considerable portion of this merry reign, the King of 
France was the real King of this country.

But there was a better time to come, and it was to come (though his 
royal uncle little thought so) through that very William, Prince of 
Orange.  He came over to England, saw Mary, the elder daughter of 
the Duke of York, and married her.  We shall see by-and-by what 
came of that marriage, and why it is never to be forgotten.

This daughter was a Protestant, but her mother died a Catholic.  
She and her sister ANNE, also a Protestant, were the only survivors 
of eight children.  Anne afterwards married GEORGE, PRINCE OF 
DENMARK, brother to the King of that country.

Lest you should do the Merry Monarch the injustice of supposing 
that he was even good humoured (except when he had everything his 
own way), or that he was high spirited and honourable, I will 
mention here what was done to a member of the House of Commons, SIR 
JOHN COVENTRY.  He made a remark in a debate about taxing the 
theatres, which gave the King offence.  The King agreed with his 
illegitimate son, who had been born abroad, and whom he had made 
DUKE OF MONMOUTH, to take the following merry vengeance.  To waylay 
him at night, fifteen armed men to one, and to slit his nose with a 
penknife.  Like master, like man.  The King's favourite, the Duke 
of Buckingham, was strongly suspected of setting on an assassin to 
murder the DUKE OF ORMOND as he was returning home from a dinner; 
and that Duke's spirited son, LORD OSSORY, was so persuaded of his 
guilt, that he said to him at Court, even as he stood beside the 
King, 'My lord, I know very well that you are at the bottom of this 
late attempt upon my father.  But I give you warning, if he ever 
come to a violent end, his blood shall be upon you, and wherever I 
meet you I will pistol you!  I will do so, though I find you 
standing behind the King's chair; and I tell you this in his 
Majesty's presence, that you may be quite sure of my doing what I 
threaten.'  Those were merry times indeed.

There was a fellow named BLOOD, who was seized for making, with two 
companions, an audacious attempt to steal the crown, the globe, and 
sceptre, from the place where the jewels were kept in the Tower.  
This robber, who was a swaggering ruffian, being taken, declared 
that he was the man who had endeavoured to kill the Duke of Ormond, 
and that he had meant to kill the King too, but was overawed by the 
majesty of his appearance, when he might otherwise have done it, as 
he was bathing at Battersea.  The King being but an ill-looking 
fellow, I don't believe a word of this.  Whether he was flattered, 
or whether he knew that Buckingham had really set Blood on to 
murder the Duke, is uncertain.  But it is quite certain that he 
pardoned this thief, gave him an estate of five hundred a year in 
Ireland (which had had the honour of giving him birth), and 
presented him at Court to the debauched lords and the shameless 
ladies, who made a great deal of him - as I have no doubt they 
would have made of the Devil himself, if the King had introduced 
him.

Infamously pensioned as he was, the King still wanted money, and 
consequently was obliged to call Parliaments.  In these, the great 
object of the Protestants was to thwart the Catholic Duke of York, 
who married a second time; his new wife being a young lady only 
fifteen years old, the Catholic sister of the DUKE OF MODENA.  In 
this they were seconded by the Protestant Dissenters, though to 
their own disadvantage:  since, to exclude Catholics from power, 
they were even willing to exclude themselves.  The King's object 
was to pretend to be a Protestant, while he was really a Catholic; 
to swear to the bishops that he was devoutly attached to the 
English Church, while he knew he had bargained it away to the King 
of France; and by cheating and deceiving them, and all who were 
attached to royalty, to become despotic and be powerful enough to 
confess what a rascal he was.  Meantime, the King of France, 
knowing his merry pensioner well, intrigued with the King's 
opponents in Parliament, as well as with the King and his friends.

The fears that the country had of the Catholic religion being 
restored, if the Duke of York should come to the throne, and the 
low cunning of the King in pretending to share their alarms, led to 
some very terrible results.  A certain DR. TONGE, a dull clergyman 
in the City, fell into the hands of a certain TITUS OATES, a most 
infamous character, who pretended to have acquired among the 
Jesuits abroad a knowledge of a great plot for the murder of the 
King, and the re-establishment if the Catholic religion.  Titus 
Oates, being produced by this unlucky Dr. Tonge and solemnly 
examined before the council, contradicted himself in a thousand 
ways, told the most ridiculous and improbable stories, and 
implicated COLEMAN, the Secretary of the Duchess of York.  Now, 
although what he charged against Coleman was not true, and although 
you and I know very well that the real dangerous Catholic plot was 
that one with the King of France of which the Merry Monarch was 
himself the head, there happened to be found among Coleman's 
papers, some letters, in which he did praise the days of Bloody 
Queen Mary, and abuse the Protestant religion.  This was great good 
fortune for Titus, as it seemed to confirm him; but better still 
was in store.  SIR EDMUNDBURY GODFREY, the magistrate who had first 
examined him, being unexpectedly found dead near Primrose Hill, was 
confidently believed to have been killed by the Catholics.  I think 
there is no doubt that he had been melancholy mad, and that he 
killed himself; but he had a great Protestant funeral, and Titus 
was called the Saver of the Nation, and received a pension of 
twelve hundred pounds a year.

As soon as Oates's wickedness had met with this success, up started 
another villain, named WILLIAM BEDLOE, who, attracted by a reward 
of five hundred pounds offered for the apprehension of the 
murderers of Godfrey, came forward and charged two Jesuits and some 
other persons with having committed it at the Queen's desire.  
Oates, going into partnership with this new informer, had the 
audacity to accuse the poor Queen herself of high treason.  Then 
appeared a third informer, as bad as either of the two, and accused 
a Catholic banker named STAYLEY of having said that the King was 
the greatest rogue in the world (which would not have been far from 
the truth), and that he would kill him with his own hand.  This 
banker, being at once tried and executed, Coleman and two others 
were tried and executed.  Then, a miserable wretch named PRANCE, a 
Catholic silversmith, being accused by Bedloe, was tortured into 
confessing that he had taken part in Godfrey's murder, and into 
accusing three other men of having committed it.  Then, five 
Jesuits were accused by Oates, Bedloe, and Prance together, and 
were all found guilty, and executed on the same kind of 
contradictory and absurd evidence.  The Queen's physician and three 
monks were next put on their trial; but Oates and Bedloe had for 
the time gone far enough and these four were acquitted.  The public 
mind, however, was so full of a Catholic plot, and so strong 
against the Duke of York, that James consented to obey a written 
order from his brother, and to go with his family to Brussels, 
provided that his rights should never be sacrificed in his absence 
to the Duke of Monmouth.  The House of Commons, not satisfied with 
this as the King hoped, passed a bill to exclude the Duke from ever 
succeeding to the throne.  In return, the King dissolved the 
Parliament.  He had deserted his old favourite, the Duke of 
Buckingham, who was now in the opposition.

To give any sufficient idea of the miseries of Scotland in this 
merry reign, would occupy a hundred pages.  Because the people 
would not have bishops, and were resolved to stand by their solemn 
League and Covenant, such cruelties were inflicted upon them as 
make the blood run cold.  Ferocious dragoons galloped through the 
country to punish the peasants for deserting the churches; sons 
were hanged up at their fathers' doors for refusing to disclose 
where their fathers were concealed; wives were tortured to death 
for not betraying their husbands; people were taken out of their 
fields and gardens, and shot on the public roads without trial; 
lighted matches were tied to the fingers of prisoners, and a most 
horrible torment called the Boot was invented, and constantly 
applied, which ground and mashed the victims' legs with iron 
wedges.  Witnesses were tortured as well as prisoners.  All the 
prisons were full; all the gibbets were heavy with bodies; murder 
and plunder devastated the whole country.  In spite of all, the 
Covenanters were by no means to be dragged into the churches, and 
persisted in worshipping God as they thought right.  A body of 
ferocious Highlanders, turned upon them from the mountains of their 
own country, had no greater effect than the English dragoons under 
GRAHAME OF CLAVERHOUSE, the most cruel and rapacious of all their 
enemies, whose name will ever be cursed through the length and 
breadth of Scotland.  Archbishop Sharp had ever aided and abetted 
all these outrages.  But he fell at last; for, when the injuries of 
the Scottish people were at their height, he was seen, in his 
coach-and-six coming across a moor, by a body of men, headed by one 
JOHN BALFOUR, who were waiting for another of their oppressors.  
Upon this they cried out that Heaven had delivered him into their 
hands, and killed him with many wounds.  If ever a man deserved 
such a death, I think Archbishop Sharp did.

It made a great noise directly, and the Merry Monarch - strongly 
suspected of having goaded the Scottish people on, that he might 
have an excuse for a greater army than the Parliament were willing 
to give him - sent down his son, the Duke of Monmouth, as 
commander-in-chief, with instructions to attack the Scottish 
rebels, or Whigs as they were called, whenever he came up with 
them.  Marching with ten thousand men from Edinburgh, he found 
them, in number four or five thousand, drawn up at Bothwell Bridge, 
by the Clyde.  They were soon dispersed; and Monmouth showed a more 
humane character towards them, than he had shown towards that 
Member of Parliament whose nose he had caused to be slit with a 
penknife.  But the Duke of Lauderdale was their bitter foe, and 
sent Claverhouse to finish them.

As the Duke of York became more and more unpopular, the Duke of 
Monmouth became more and more popular.  It would have been decent 
in the latter not to have voted in favour of the renewed bill for 
the exclusion of James from the throne; but he did so, much to the 
King's amusement, who used to sit in the House of Lords by the 
fire, hearing the debates, which he said were as good as a play.  
The House of Commons passed the bill by a large majority, and it 
was carried up to the House of Lords by LORD RUSSELL, one of the 
best of the leaders on the Protestant side.  It was rejected there, 
chiefly because the bishops helped the King to get rid of it; and 
the fear of Catholic plots revived again.  There had been another 
got up, by a fellow out of Newgate, named DANGERFIELD, which is 
more famous than it deserves to be, under the name of the MEAL-TUB 
PLOT.  This jail-bird having been got out of Newgate by a MRS. 
CELLIER, a Catholic nurse, had turned Catholic himself, and 
pretended that he knew of a plot among the Presbyterians against 
the King's life.  This was very pleasant to the Duke of York, who 
hated the Presbyterians, who returned the compliment.  He gave 
Dangerfield twenty guineas, and sent him to the King his brother.  
But Dangerfield, breaking down altogether in his charge, and being 
sent back to Newgate, almost astonished the Duke out of his five 
senses by suddenly swearing that the Catholic nurse had put that 
false design into his head, and that what he really knew about, 
was, a Catholic plot against the King; the evidence of which would 
be found in some papers, concealed in a meal-tub in Mrs. Cellier's 
house.  There they were, of course - for he had put them there 
himself - and so the tub gave the name to the plot.  But, the nurse 
was acquitted on her trial, and it came to nothing.

Lord Ashley, of the Cabal, was now Lord Shaftesbury, and was strong 
against the succession of the Duke of York.  The House of Commons, 
aggravated to the utmost extent, as we may well suppose, by 
suspicions of the King's conspiracy with the King of France, made a 
desperate point of the exclusion, still, and were bitter against 
the Catholics generally.  So unjustly bitter were they, I grieve to 
say, that they impeached the venerable Lord Stafford, a Catholic 
nobleman seventy years old, of a design to kill the King.  The 
witnesses were that atrocious Oates and two other birds of the same 
feather.  He was found guilty, on evidence quite as foolish as it 
was false, and was beheaded on Tower Hill.  The people were opposed 
to him when he first appeared upon the scaffold; but, when he had 
addressed them and shown them how innocent he was and how wickedly 
he was sent there, their better nature was aroused, and they said, 
'We believe you, my Lord.  God bless you, my Lord!'

The House of Commons refused to let the King have any money until 
he should consent to the Exclusion Bill; but, as he could get it 
and did get it from his master the King of France, he could afford 
to hold them very cheap.  He called a Parliament at Oxford, to 
which he went down with a great show of being armed and protected 
as if he were in danger of his life, and to which the opposition 
members also went armed and protected, alleging that they were in 
fear of the Papists, who were numerous among the King's guards.  
However, they went on with the Exclusion Bill, and were so earnest 
upon it that they would have carried it again, if the King had not 
popped his crown and state robes into a sedan-chair, bundled 
himself into it along with them, hurried down to the chamber where 
the House of Lords met, and dissolved the Parliament.  After which 
he scampered home, and the members of Parliament scampered home 
too, as fast as their legs could carry them.

The Duke of York, then residing in Scotland, had, under the law 
which excluded Catholics from public trust, no right whatever to 
public employment.  Nevertheless, he was openly employed as the 
King's representative in Scotland, and there gratified his sullen 
and cruel nature to his heart's content by directing the dreadful 
cruelties against the Covenanters.  There were two ministers named 
CARGILL and CAMERON who had escaped from the battle of Bothwell 
Bridge, and who returned to Scotland, and raised the miserable but 
still brave and unsubdued Covenanters afresh, under the name of 
Cameronians.  As Cameron publicly posted a declaration that the 
King was a forsworn tyrant, no mercy was shown to his unhappy 
followers after he was slain in battle.  The Duke of York, who was 
particularly fond of the Boot and derived great pleasure from 
having it applied, offered their lives to some of these people, if 
they would cry on the scaffold 'God save the King!'  But their 
relations, friends, and countrymen, had been so barbarously 
tortured and murdered in this merry reign, that they preferred to 
die, and did die.  The Duke then obtained his merry brother's 
permission to hold a Parliament in Scotland, which first, with most 
shameless deceit, confirmed the laws for securing the Protestant 
religion against Popery, and then declared that nothing must or 
should prevent the succession of the Popish Duke.  After this 
double-faced beginning, it established an oath which no human being 
could understand, but which everybody was to take, as a proof that 
his religion was the lawful religion.  The Earl of Argyle, taking 
it with the explanation that he did not consider it to prevent him 
from favouring any alteration either in the Church or State which 
was not inconsistent with the Protestant religion or with his 
loyalty, was tried for high treason before a Scottish jury of which 
the MARQUIS OF MONTROSE was foreman, and was found guilty.  He 
escaped the scaffold, for that time, by getting away, in the 
disguise of a page, in the train of his daughter, LADY SOPHIA 
LINDSAY.  It was absolutely proposed, by certain members of the 
Scottish Council, that this lady should be whipped through the 
streets of Edinburgh.  But this was too much even for the Duke, who 
had the manliness then (he had very little at most times) to remark 
that Englishmen were not accustomed to treat ladies in that manner.  
In those merry times nothing could equal the brutal servility of 
the Scottish fawners, but the conduct of similar degraded beings in 
England.

After the settlement of these little affairs, the Duke returned to 
England, and soon resumed his place at the Council, and his office 
of High Admiral - all this by his brother's favour, and in open 
defiance of the law.  It would have been no loss to the country, if 
he had been drowned when his ship, in going to Scotland to fetch 
his family, struck on a sand-bank, and was lost with two hundred 
souls on board.  But he escaped in a boat with some friends; and 
the sailors were so brave and unselfish, that, when they saw him 
rowing away, they gave three cheers, while they themselves were 
going down for ever.

The Merry Monarch, having got rid of his Parliament, went to work 
to make himself despotic, with all speed.  Having had the villainy 
to order the execution of OLIVER PLUNKET, BISHOP OF ARMAGH, falsely 
accused of a plot to establish Popery in that country by means of a 
French army - the very thing this royal traitor was himself trying 
to do at home - and having tried to ruin Lord Shaftesbury, and 
failed - he turned his hand to controlling the corporations all 
over the country; because, if he could only do that, he could get 
what juries he chose, to bring in perjured verdicts, and could get 
what members he chose returned to Parliament.  These merry times 
produced, and made Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, a 
drunken ruffian of the name of JEFFREYS; a red-faced, swollen, 
bloated, horrible creature, with a bullying, roaring voice, and a 
more savage nature perhaps than was ever lodged in any human 
breast.  This monster was the Merry Monarch's especial favourite, 
and he testified his admiration of him by giving him a ring from 
his own finger, which the people used to call Judge Jeffreys's 
Bloodstone.  Him the King employed to go about and bully the 
corporations, beginning with London; or, as Jeffreys himself 
elegantly called it, 'to give them a lick with the rough side of 
his tongue.'  And he did it so thoroughly, that they soon became 
the basest and most sycophantic bodies in the kingdom - except the 
University of Oxford, which, in that respect, was quite pre-eminent 
and unapproachable.

Lord Shaftesbury (who died soon after the King's failure against 
him), LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL, the Duke of Monmouth, LORD HOWARD, LORD 
JERSEY, ALGERNON SIDNEY, JOHN HAMPDEN (grandson of the great 
Hampden), and some others, used to hold a council together after 
the dissolution of the Parliament, arranging what it might be 
necessary to do, if the King carried his Popish plot to the utmost 
height.  Lord Shaftesbury having been much the most violent of this 
party, brought two violent men into their secrets - RUMSEY, who had 
been a soldier in the Republican army; and WEST, a lawyer.  These 
two knew an old officer of CROMWELL'S, called RUMBOLD, who had 
married a maltster's widow, and so had come into possession of a 
solitary dwelling called the Rye House, near Hoddesdon, in 
Hertfordshire.  Rumbold said to them what a capital place this 
house of his would be from which to shoot at the King, who often 
passed there going to and fro from Newmarket.  They liked the idea, 
and entertained it.  But, one of their body gave information; and 
they, together with SHEPHERD a wine merchant, Lord Russell, 
Algernon Sidney, LORD ESSEX, LORD HOWARD, and Hampden, were all 
arrested.

Lord Russell might have easily escaped, but scorned to do so, being 
innocent of any wrong; Lord Essex might have easily escaped, but 
scorned to do so, lest his flight should prejudice Lord Russell.  
But it weighed upon his mind that he had brought into their 
council, Lord Howard - who now turned a miserable traitor - against 
a great dislike Lord Russell had always had of him.  He could not 
bear the reflection, and destroyed himself before Lord Russell was 
brought to trial at the Old Bailey.

He knew very well that he had nothing to hope, having always been 
manful in the Protestant cause against the two false brothers, the 
one on the throne, and the other standing next to it.  He had a 
wife, one of the noblest and best of women, who acted as his 
secretary on his trial, who comforted him in his prison, who supped 
with him on the night before he died, and whose love and virtue and 
devotion have made her name imperishable.  Of course, he was found 
guilty, and was sentenced to be beheaded in Lincoln's Inn-fields, 
not many yards from his own house.  When he had parted from his 
children on the evening before his death, his wife still stayed 
with him until ten o'clock at night; and when their final 
separation in this world was over, and he had kissed her many 
times, he still sat for a long while in his prison, talking of her 
goodness.  Hearing the rain fall fast at that time, he calmly said, 
'Such a rain to-morrow will spoil a great show, which is a dull 
thing on a rainy day.'  At midnight he went to bed, and slept till 
four; even when his servant called him, he fell asleep again while 
his clothes were being made ready.  He rode to the scaffold in his 
own carriage, attended by two famous clergymen, TILLOTSON and 
BURNET, and sang a psalm to himself very softly, as he went along.  
He was as quiet and as steady as if he had been going out for an 
ordinary ride.  After saying that he was surprised to see so great 
a crowd, he laid down his head upon the block, as if upon the 
pillow of his bed, and had it struck off at the second blow.  His 
noble wife was busy for him even then; for that true-hearted lady 
printed and widely circulated his last words, of which he had given 
her a copy.  They made the blood of all the honest men in England 
boil.

The University of Oxford distinguished itself on the very same day 
by pretending to believe that the accusation against Lord Russell 
was true, and by calling the King, in a written paper, the Breath 
of their Nostrils and the Anointed of the Lord.  This paper the 
Parliament afterwards caused to be burned by the common hangman; 
which I am sorry for, as I wish it had been framed and glazed and 
hung up in some public place, as a monument of baseness for the 
scorn of mankind.

Next, came the trial of Algernon Sidney, at which Jeffreys 
presided, like a great crimson toad, sweltering and swelling with 
rage.  'I pray God, Mr. Sidney,' said this Chief Justice of a merry 
reign, after passing sentence, 'to work in you a temper fit to go 
to the other world, for I see you are not fit for this.'  'My 
lord,' said the prisoner, composedly holding out his arm, 'feel my 
pulse, and see if I be disordered.  I thank Heaven I never was in 
better temper than I am now.'  Algernon Sidney was executed on 
Tower Hill, on the seventh of December, one thousand six hundred 
and eighty-three.  He died a hero, and died, in his own words, 'For 
that good old cause in which he had been engaged from his youth, 
and for which God had so often and so wonderfully declared 
himself.'

The Duke of Monmouth had been making his uncle, the Duke of York, 
very jealous, by going about the country in a royal sort of way, 
playing at the people's games, becoming godfather to their 
children, and even touching for the King's evil, or stroking the 
faces of the sick to cure them - though, for the matter of that, I 
should say he did them about as much good as any crowned king could 
have done.  His father had got him to write a letter, confessing 
his having had a part in the conspiracy, for which Lord Russell had 
been beheaded; but he was ever a weak man, and as soon as he had 
written it, he was ashamed of it and got it back again.  For this, 
he was banished to the Netherlands; but he soon returned and had an 
interview with his father, unknown to his uncle.  It would seem 
that he was coming into the Merry Monarch's favour again, and that 
the Duke of York was sliding out of it, when Death appeared to the 
merry galleries at Whitehall, and astonished the debauched lords 
and gentlemen, and the shameless ladies, very considerably.

On Monday, the second of February, one thousand six hundred and 
eighty-five, the merry pensioner and servant of the King of France 
fell down in a fit of apoplexy.  By the Wednesday his case was 
hopeless, and on the Thursday he was told so.  As he made a 
difficulty about taking the sacrament from the Protestant Bishop of 
Bath, the Duke of York got all who were present away from the bed, 
and asked his brother, in a whisper, if he should send for a 
Catholic priest?   The King replied, 'For God's sake, brother, do!'  
The Duke smuggled in, up the back stairs, disguised in a wig and 
gown, a priest named HUDDLESTON, who had saved the King's life 
after the battle of Worcester:  telling him that this worthy man in 
the wig had once saved his body, and was now come to save his soul.

The Merry Monarch lived through that night, and died before noon on 
the next day, which was Friday, the sixth.  Two of the last things 
he said were of a human sort, and your remembrance will give him 
the full benefit of them.  When the Queen sent to say she was too 
unwell to attend him and to ask his pardon, he said, 'Alas! poor 
woman, SHE beg MY pardon!  I beg hers with all my heart.  Take back 
that answer to her.'  And he also said, in reference to Nell Gwyn, 
'Do not let poor Nelly starve.'

He died in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and the twenty-fifth of 
his reign.



CHAPTER XXXVI - ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE SECOND



KING JAMES THE SECOND was a man so very disagreeable, that even the 
best of historians has favoured his brother Charles, as becoming, 
by comparison, quite a pleasant character.  The one object of his 
short reign was to re-establish the Catholic religion in England; 
and this he doggedly pursued with such a stupid obstinacy, that his 
career very soon came to a close.

The first thing he did, was, to assure his council that he would 
make it his endeavour to preserve the Government, both in Church 
and State, as it was by law established; and that he would always 
take care to defend and support the Church.  Great public 
acclamations were raised over this fair speech, and a great deal 
was said, from the pulpits and elsewhere, about the word of a King 
which was never broken, by credulous people who little supposed 
that he had formed a secret council for Catholic affairs, of which 
a mischievous Jesuit, called FATHER PETRE, was one of the chief 
members.  With tears of joy in his eyes, he received, as the 
beginning of HIS pension from the King of France, five hundred 
thousand livres; yet, with a mixture of meanness and arrogance that 
belonged to his contemptible character, he was always jealous of 
making some show of being independent of the King of France, while 
he pocketed his money.  As - notwithstanding his publishing two 
papers in favour of Popery (and not likely to do it much service, I 
should think) written by the King, his brother, and found in his 
strong-box; and his open display of himself attending mass - the 
Parliament was very obsequious, and granted him a large sum of 
money, he began his reign with a belief that he could do what he 
pleased, and with a determination to do it.

Before we proceed to its principal events, let us dispose of Titus 
Oates.  He was tried for perjury, a fortnight after the coronation, 
and besides being very heavily fined, was sentenced to stand twice 
in the pillory, to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate one day, and 
from Newgate to Tyburn two days afterwards, and to stand in the 
pillory five times a year as long as he lived.  This fearful 
sentence was actually inflicted on the rascal.  Being unable to 
stand after his first flogging, he was dragged on a sledge from 
Newgate to Tyburn, and flogged as he was drawn along.  He was so 
strong a villain that he did not die under the torture, but lived 
to be afterwards pardoned and rewarded, though not to be ever 
believed in any more.  Dangerfield, the only other one of that crew 
left alive, was not so fortunate.  He was almost killed by a 
whipping from Newgate to Tyburn, and, as if that were not 
punishment enough, a ferocious barrister of Gray's Inn gave him a 
poke in the eye with his cane, which caused his death; for which 
the ferocious barrister was deservedly tried and executed.

As soon as James was on the throne, Argyle and Monmouth went from 
Brussels to Rotterdam, and attended a meeting of Scottish exiles 
held there, to concert measures for a rising in England.  It was 
agreed that Argyle should effect a landing in Scotland, and 
Monmouth in England; and that two Englishmen should be sent with 
Argyle to be in his confidence, and two Scotchmen with the Duke of 
Monmouth.

Argyle was the first to act upon this contract.  But, two of his 
men being taken prisoners at the Orkney Islands, the Government 
became aware of his intention, and was able to act against him with 
such vigour as to prevent his raising more than two or three 
thousand Highlanders, although he sent a fiery cross, by trusty 
messengers, from clan to clan and from glen to glen, as the custom 
then was when those wild people were to be excited by their chiefs.  
As he was moving towards Glasgow with his small force, he was 
betrayed by some of his followers, taken, and carried, with his 
hands tied behind his back, to his old prison in Edinburgh Castle.  
James ordered him to be executed, on his old shamefully unjust 
sentence, within three days; and he appears to have been anxious 
that his legs should have been pounded with his old favourite the 
boot.  However, the boot was not applied; he was simply beheaded, 
and his head was set upon the top of Edinburgh Jail.  One of those 
Englishmen who had been assigned to him was that old soldier 
Rumbold, the master of the Rye House.  He was sorely wounded, and 
within a week after Argyle had suffered with great courage, was 
brought up for trial, lest he should die and disappoint the King.  
He, too, was executed, after defending himself with great spirit, 
and saying that he did not believe that God had made the greater 
part of mankind to carry saddles on their backs and bridles in 
their mouths, and to be ridden by a few, booted and spurred for the 
purpose - in which I thoroughly agree with Rumbold.

The Duke of Monmouth, partly through being detained and partly 
through idling his time away, was five or six weeks behind his 
friend when he landed at Lyme, in Dorset:  having at his right hand 
an unlucky nobleman called LORD GREY OF WERK, who of himself would 
have ruined a far more promising expedition.  He immediately set up 
his standard in the market-place, and proclaimed the King a tyrant, 
and a Popish usurper, and I know not what else; charging him, not 
only with what he had done, which was bad enough, but with what 
neither he nor anybody else had done, such as setting fire to 
London, and poisoning the late King.  Raising some four thousand 
men by these means, he marched on to Taunton, where there were many 
Protestant dissenters who were strongly opposed to the Catholics.  
Here, both the rich and poor turned out to receive him, ladies 
waved a welcome to him from all the windows as he passed along the 
streets, flowers were strewn in his way, and every compliment and 
honour that could be devised was showered upon him.  Among the 
rest, twenty young ladies came forward, in their best clothes, and 
in their brightest beauty, and gave him a Bible ornamented with 
their own fair hands, together with other presents.

Encouraged by this homage, he proclaimed himself King, and went on 
to Bridgewater.  But, here the Government troops, under the EARL OF 
FEVERSHAM, were close at hand; and he was so dispirited at finding 
that he made but few powerful friends after all, that it was a 
question whether he should disband his army and endeavour to 
escape.  It was resolved, at the instance of that unlucky Lord 
Grey, to make a night attack on the King's army, as it lay encamped 
on the edge of a morass called Sedgemoor.  The horsemen were 
commanded by the same unlucky lord, who was not a brave man.  He 
gave up the battle almost at the first obstacle - which was a deep 
drain; and although the poor countrymen, who had turned out for 
Monmouth, fought bravely with scythes, poles, pitchforks, and such 
poor weapons as they had, they were soon dispersed by the trained 
soldiers, and fled in all directions.  When the Duke of Monmouth 
himself fled, was not known in the confusion; but the unlucky Lord 
Grey was taken early next day, and then another of the party was 
taken, who confessed that he had parted from the Duke only four 
hours before.  Strict search being made, he was found disguised as 
a peasant, hidden in a ditch under fern and nettles, with a few 
peas in his pocket which he had gathered in the fields to eat.  The 
only other articles he had upon him were a few papers and little 
books:  one of the latter being a strange jumble, in his own 
writing, of charms, songs, recipes, and prayers.  He was completely 
broken.  He wrote a miserable letter to the King, beseeching and 
entreating to be allowed to see him.  When he was taken to London, 
and conveyed bound into the King's presence, he crawled to him on 
his knees, and made a most degrading exhibition.  As James never 
forgave or relented towards anybody, he was not likely to soften 
towards the issuer of the Lyme proclamation, so he told the 
suppliant to prepare for death.

On the fifteenth of July, one thousand six hundred and eighty-five, 
this unfortunate favourite of the people was brought out to die on 
Tower Hill.  The crowd was immense, and the tops of all the houses 
were covered with gazers.  He had seen his wife, the daughter of 
the Duke of Buccleuch, in the Tower, and had talked much of a lady 
whom he loved far better - the LADY HARRIET WENTWORTH - who was one 
of the last persons he remembered in this life.  Before laying down 
his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe, and told the 
executioner that he feared it was not sharp enough, and that the 
axe was not heavy enough.  On the executioner replying that it was 
of the proper kind, the Duke said, 'I pray you have a care, and do 
not use me so awkwardly as you used my Lord Russell.'  The 
executioner, made nervous by this, and trembling, struck once and 
merely gashed him in the neck.  Upon this, the Duke of Monmouth 
raised his head and looked the man reproachfully in the face.  Then 
he struck twice, and then thrice, and then threw down the axe, and 
cried out in a voice of horror that he could not finish that work.  
The sheriffs, however, threatening him with what should be done to 
himself if he did not, he took it up again and struck a fourth time 
and a fifth time.  Then the wretched head at last fell off, and 
James, Duke of Monmouth, was dead, in the thirty-sixth year of his 
age.  He was a showy, graceful man, with many popular qualities, 
and had found much favour in the open hearts of the English.

The atrocities, committed by the Government, which followed this 
Monmouth rebellion, form the blackest and most lamentable page in 
English history.  The poor peasants, having been dispersed with 
great loss, and their leaders having been taken, one would think 
that the implacable King might have been satisfied.  But no; he let 
loose upon them, among other intolerable monsters, a COLONEL KIRK, 
who had served against the Moors, and whose soldiers - called by 
the people Kirk's lambs, because they bore a lamb upon their flag, 
as the emblem of Christianity - were worthy of their leader.  The 
atrocities committed by these demons in human shape are far too 
horrible to be related here.  It is enough to say, that besides 
most ruthlessly murdering and robbing them, and ruining them by 
making them buy their pardons at the price of all they possessed, 
it was one of Kirk's favourite amusements, as he and his officers 
sat drinking after dinner, and toasting the King, to have batches 
of prisoners hanged outside the windows for the company's 
diversion; and that when their feet quivered in the convulsions of 
death, he used to swear that they should have music to their 
dancing, and would order the drums to beat and the trumpets to 
play.  The detestable King informed him, as an acknowledgment of 
these services, that he was 'very well satisfied with his 
proceedings.'  But the King's great delight was in the proceedings 
of Jeffreys, now a peer, who went down into the west, with four 
other judges, to try persons accused of having had any share in the 
rebellion.  The King pleasantly called this 'Jeffreys's campaign.'  
The people down in that part of the country remember it to this day 
as The Bloody Assize.

It began at Winchester, where a poor deaf old lady, MRS. ALICIA 
LISLE, the widow of one of the judges of Charles the First (who had 
been murdered abroad by some Royalist assassins), was charged with 
having given shelter in her house to two fugitives from Sedgemoor.  
Three times the jury refused to find her guilty, until Jeffreys 
bullied and frightened them into that false verdict.  When he had 
extorted it from them, he said, 'Gentlemen, if I had been one of 
you, and she had been my own mother, I would have found her 
guilty;' - as I dare say he would.  He sentenced her to be burned 
alive, that very afternoon.  The clergy of the cathedral and some 
others interfered in her favour, and she was beheaded within a 
week.  As a high mark of his approbation, the King made Jeffreys 
Lord Chancellor; and he then went on to Dorchester, to Exeter, to 
Taunton, and to Wells.  It is astonishing, when we read of the 
enormous injustice and barbarity of this beast, to know that no one 
struck him dead on the judgment-seat.  It was enough for any man or 
woman to be accused by an enemy, before Jeffreys, to be found 
guilty of high treason.  One man who pleaded not guilty, he ordered 
to be taken out of court upon the instant, and hanged; and this so 
terrified the prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded guilty 
at once.  At Dorchester alone, in the course of a few days, 
Jeffreys hanged eighty people; besides whipping, transporting, 
imprisoning, and selling as slaves, great numbers.  He executed, in 
all, two hundred and fifty, or three hundred.

These executions took place, among the neighbours and friends of 
the sentenced, in thirty-six towns and villages.  Their bodies were 
mangled, steeped in caldrons of boiling pitch and tar, and hung up 
by the roadsides, in the streets, over the very churches.  The 
sight and smell of heads and limbs, the hissing and bubbling of the 
infernal caldrons, and the tears and terrors of the people, were 
dreadful beyond all description.  One rustic, who was forced to 
steep the remains in the black pot, was ever afterwards called 'Tom 
Boilman.'  The hangman has ever since been called Jack Ketch, 
because a man of that name went hanging and hanging, all day long, 
in the train of Jeffreys.  You will hear much of the horrors of the 
great French Revolution.  Many and terrible they were, there is no 
doubt; but I know of nothing worse, done by the maddened people of 
France in that awful time, than was done by the highest judge in 
England, with the express approval of the King of England, in The 
Bloody Assize.

Nor was even this all.  Jeffreys was as fond of money for himself 
as of misery for others, and he sold pardons wholesale to fill his 
pockets.  The King ordered, at one time, a thousand prisoners to be 
given to certain of his favourites, in order that they might 
bargain with them for their pardons.  The young ladies of Taunton 
who had presented the Bible, were bestowed upon the maids of honour 
at court; and those precious ladies made very hard bargains with 
them indeed.  When The Bloody Assize was at its most dismal height, 
the King was diverting himself with horse-races in the very place 
where Mrs. Lisle had been executed.  When Jeffreys had done his 
worst, and came home again, he was particularly complimented in the 
Royal Gazette; and when the King heard that through drunkenness and 
raging he was very ill, his odious Majesty remarked that such 
another man could not easily be found in England.  Besides all 
this, a former sheriff of London, named CORNISH, was hanged within 
sight of his own house, after an abominably conducted trial, for 
having had a share in the Rye House Plot, on evidence given by 
Rumsey, which that villain was obliged to confess was directly 
opposed to the evidence he had given on the trial of Lord Russell.  
And on the very same day, a worthy widow, named ELIZABETH GAUNT, 
was burned alive at Tyburn, for having sheltered a wretch who 
himself gave evidence against her.  She settled the fuel about 
herself with her own hands, so that the flames should reach her 
quickly:  and nobly said, with her last breath, that she had obeyed 
the sacred command of God, to give refuge to the outcast, and not 
to betray the wanderer.

After all this hanging, beheading, burning, boiling, mutilating, 
exposing, robbing, transporting, and selling into slavery, of his 
unhappy subjects, the King not unnaturally thought that he could do 
whatever he would.  So, he went to work to change the religion of 
the country with all possible speed; and what he did was this.

He first of all tried to get rid of what was called the Test Act - 
which prevented the Catholics from holding public employments - by 
his own power of dispensing with the penalties.  He tried it in one 
case, and, eleven of the twelve judges deciding in his favour, he 
exercised it in three others, being those of three dignitaries of 
University College, Oxford, who had become Papists, and whom he 
kept in their places and sanctioned.  He revived the hated 
Ecclesiastical Commission, to get rid of COMPTON, Bishop of London, 
who manfully opposed him.  He solicited the Pope to favour England 
with an ambassador, which the Pope (who was a sensible man then) 
rather unwillingly did.  He flourished Father Petre before the eyes 
of the people on all possible occasions.  He favoured the 
establishment of convents in several parts of London.  He was 
delighted to have the streets, and even the court itself, filled 
with Monks and Friars in the habits of their orders.  He constantly 
endeavoured to make Catholics of the Protestants about him.  He 
held private interviews, which he called 'closetings,' with those 
Members of Parliament who held offices, to persuade them to consent 
to the design he had in view.  When they did not consent, they were 
removed, or resigned of themselves, and their places were given to 
Catholics.  He displaced Protestant officers from the army, by 
every means in his power, and got Catholics into their places too.  
He tried the same thing with the corporations, and also (though not 
so successfully) with the Lord Lieutenants of counties.  To terrify 
the people into the endurance of all these measures, he kept an 
army of fifteen thousand men encamped on Hounslow Heath, where mass 
was openly performed in the General's tent, and where priests went 
among the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them to become 
Catholics.  For circulating a paper among those men advising them 
to be true to their religion, a Protestant clergyman, named 
JOHNSON, the chaplain of the late Lord Russell, was actually 
sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and was actually 
whipped from Newgate to Tyburn.  He dismissed his own brother-in-
law from his Council because he was a Protestant, and made a Privy 
Councillor of the before-mentioned Father Petre.  He handed Ireland 
over to RICHARD TALBOT, EARL OF TYRCONNELL, a worthless, dissolute 
knave, who played the same game there for his master, and who 
played the deeper game for himself of one day putting it under the 
protection of the French King.  In going to these extremities, 
every man of sense and judgment among the Catholics, from the Pope 
to a porter, knew that the King was a mere bigoted fool, who would 
undo himself and the cause he sought to advance; but he was deaf to 
all reason, and, happily for England ever afterwards, went tumbling 
off his throne in his own blind way.

A spirit began to arise in the country, which the besotted 
blunderer little expected.  He first found it out in the University 
of Cambridge.  Having made a Catholic a dean at Oxford without any 
opposition, he tried to make a monk a master of arts at Cambridge:  
which attempt the University resisted, and defeated him.  He then 
went back to his favourite Oxford.  On the death of the President 
of Magdalen College, he commanded that there should be elected to 
succeed him, one MR. ANTHONY FARMER, whose only recommendation was, 
that he was of the King's religion.  The University plucked up 
courage at last, and refused.  The King substituted another man, 
and it still refused, resolving to stand by its own election of a 
MR. HOUGH.  The dull tyrant, upon this, punished Mr. Hough, and 
five-and-twenty more, by causing them to be expelled and declared 
incapable of holding any church preferment; then he proceeded to 
what he supposed to be his highest step, but to what was, in fact, 
his last plunge head-foremost in his tumble off his throne.

He had issued a declaration that there should be no religious tests 
or penal laws, in order to let in the Catholics more easily; but 
the Protestant dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gallantly 
joined the regular church in opposing it tooth and nail.  The King 
and Father Petre now resolved to have this read, on a certain 
Sunday, in all the churches, and to order it to be circulated for 
that purpose by the bishops.  The latter took counsel with the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace; and they resolved 
that the declaration should not be read, and that they would 
petition the King against it.  The Archbishop himself wrote out the 
petition, and six bishops went into the King's bedchamber the same 
night to present it, to his infinite astonishment.  Next day was 
the Sunday fixed for the reading, and it was only read by two 
hundred clergymen out of ten thousand.  The King resolved against 
all advice to prosecute the bishops in the Court of King's Bench, 
and within three weeks they were summoned before the Privy Council, 
and committed to the Tower.  As the six bishops were taken to that 
dismal place, by water, the people who were assembled in immense 
numbers fell upon their knees, and wept for them, and prayed for 
them.  When they got to the Tower, the officers and soldiers on 
guard besought them for their blessing.  While they were confined 
there, the soldiers every day drank to their release with loud 
shouts.  When they were brought up to the Court of King's Bench for 
their trial, which the Attorney-General said was for the high 
offence of censuring the Government, and giving their opinion about 
affairs of state, they were attended by similar multitudes, and 
surrounded by a throng of noblemen and gentlemen.  When the jury 
went out at seven o'clock at night to consider of their verdict, 
everybody (except the King) knew that they would rather starve than 
yield to the King's brewer, who was one of them, and wanted a 
verdict for his customer.  When they came into court next morning, 
after resisting the brewer all night, and gave a verdict of not 
guilty, such a shout rose up in Westminster Hall as it had never 
heard before; and it was passed on among the people away to Temple 
Bar, and away again to the Tower.  It did not pass only to the 
east, but passed to the west too, until it reached the camp at 
Hounslow, where the fifteen thousand soldiers took it up and echoed 
it.  And still, when the dull King, who was then with Lord 
Feversham, heard the mighty roar, asked in alarm what it was, and 
was told that it was 'nothing but the acquittal of the bishops,' he 
said, in his dogged way, 'Call you that nothing?  It is so much the 
worse for them.'

Between the petition and the trial, the Queen had given birth to a 
son, which Father Petre rather thought was owing to Saint Winifred.  
But I doubt if Saint Winifred had much to do with it as the King's 
friend, inasmuch as the entirely new prospect of a Catholic 
successor (for both the King's daughters were Protestants) 
determined the EARLS OF SHREWSBURY, DANBY, and DEVONSHIRE, LORD 
LUMLEY, the BISHOP OF LONDON, ADMIRAL RUSSELL, and COLONEL SIDNEY, 
to invite the Prince of Orange over to England.  The Royal Mole, 
seeing his danger at last, made, in his fright, many great 
concessions, besides raising an army of forty thousand men; but the 
Prince of Orange was not a man for James the Second to cope with.  
His preparations were extraordinarily vigorous, and his mind was 
resolved.

For a fortnight after the Prince was ready to sail for England, a 
great wind from the west prevented the departure of his fleet.  
Even when the wind lulled, and it did sail, it was dispersed by a 
storm, and was obliged to put back to refit.  At last, on the first 
of November, one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight, the 
Protestant east wind, as it was long called, began to blow; and on 
the third, the people of Dover and the people of Calais saw a fleet 
twenty miles long sailing gallantly by, between the two places.  On 
Monday, the fifth, it anchored at Torbay in Devonshire, and the 
Prince, with a splendid retinue of officers and men, marched into 
Exeter.  But the people in that western part of the country had 
suffered so much in The Bloody Assize, that they had lost heart.  
Few people joined him; and he began to think of returning, and 
publishing the invitation he had received from those lords, as his 
justification for having come at all.  At this crisis, some of the 
gentry joined him; the Royal army began to falter; an engagement 
was signed, by which all who set their hand to it declared that 
they would support one another in defence of the laws and liberties 
of the three Kingdoms, of the Protestant religion, and of the 
Prince of Orange.  From that time, the cause received no check; the 
greatest towns in England began, one after another, to declare for 
the Prince; and he knew that it was all safe with him when the 
University of Oxford offered to melt down its plate, if he wanted 
any money.

By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way, touching 
people for the King's evil in one place, reviewing his troops in 
another, and bleeding from the nose in a third.  The young Prince 
was sent to Portsmouth, Father Petre went off like a shot to 
France, and there was a general and swift dispersal of all the 
priests and friars.  One after another, the King's most important 
officers and friends deserted him and went over to the Prince.  In 
the night, his daughter Anne fled from Whitehall Palace; and the 
Bishop of London, who had once been a soldier, rode before her with 
a drawn sword in his hand, and pistols at his saddle.  'God help 
me,' cried the miserable King:  'my very children have forsaken 
me!'  In his wildness, after debating with such lords as were in 
London, whether he should or should not call a Parliament, and 
after naming three of them to negotiate with the Prince, he 
resolved to fly to France.  He had the little Prince of Wales 
brought back from Portsmouth; and the child and the Queen crossed 
the river to Lambeth in an open boat, on a miserable wet night, and 
got safely away.  This was on the night of the ninth of December.

At one o'clock on the morning of the eleventh, the King, who had, 
in the meantime, received a letter from the Prince of Orange, 
stating his objects, got out of bed, told LORD NORTHUMBERLAND who 
lay in his room not to open the door until the usual hour in the 
morning, and went down the back stairs (the same, I suppose, by 
which the priest in the wig and gown had come up to his brother) 
and crossed the river in a small boat:  sinking the great seal of 
England by the way.  Horses having been provided, he rode, 
accompanied by SIR EDWARD HALES, to Feversham, where he embarked in 
a Custom House Hoy.  The master of this Hoy, wanting more ballast, 
ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen and 
smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed the King of their 
suspicions that he was a 'hatchet-faced Jesuit.'  As they took his 
money and would not let him go, he told them who he was, and that 
the Prince of Orange wanted to take his life; and he began to 
scream for a boat - and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of 
wood on his ride which he called a fragment of Our Saviour's cross.  
He put himself into the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, 
and his detention was made known to the Prince of Orange at Windsor 
- who, only wanting to get rid of him, and not caring where he 
went, so that he went away, was very much disconcerted that they 
did not let him go.  However, there was nothing for it but to have 
him brought back, with some state in the way of Life Guards, to 
Whitehall.  And as soon as he got there, in his infatuation, he 
heard mass, and set a Jesuit to say grace at his public dinner.

The people had been thrown into the strangest state of confusion by 
his flight, and had taken it into their heads that the Irish part 
of the army were going to murder the Protestants.  Therefore, they 
set the bells a ringing, and lighted watch-fires, and burned 
Catholic Chapels, and looked about in all directions for Father 
Petre and the Jesuits, while the Pope's ambassador was running away 
in the dress of a footman.  They found no Jesuits; but a man, who 
had once been a frightened witness before Jeffreys in court, saw a 
swollen, drunken face looking through a window down at Wapping, 
which he well remembered.  The face was in a sailor's dress, but he 
knew it to be the face of that accursed judge, and he seized him.  
The people, to their lasting honour, did not tear him to pieces.  
After knocking him about a little, they took him, in the basest 
agonies of terror, to the Lord Mayor, who sent him, at his own 
shrieking petition, to the Tower for safety.  There, he died.

Their bewilderment continuing, the people now lighted bonfires and 
made rejoicings, as if they had any reason to be glad to have the 
King back again.  But, his stay was very short, for the English 
guards were removed from Whitehall, Dutch guards were marched up to 
it, and he was told by one of his late ministers that the Prince 
would enter London, next day, and he had better go to Ham.  He 
said, Ham was a cold, damp place, and he would rather go to 
Rochester.  He thought himself very cunning in this, as he meant to 
escape from Rochester to France.  The Prince of Orange and his 
friends knew that, perfectly well, and desired nothing more.  So, 
he went to Gravesend, in his royal barge, attended by certain 
lords, and watched by Dutch troops, and pitied by the generous 
people, who were far more forgiving than he had ever been, when 
they saw him in his humiliation.  On the night of the twenty-third 
of December, not even then understanding that everybody wanted to 
get rid of him, he went out, absurdly, through his Rochester 
garden, down to the Medway, and got away to France, where he 
rejoined the Queen.

There had been a council in his absence, of the lords, and the 
authorities of London.  When the Prince came, on the day after the 
King's departure, he summoned the Lords to meet him, and soon 
afterwards, all those who had served in any of the Parliaments of 
King Charles the Second.  It was finally resolved by these 
authorities that the throne was vacant by the conduct of King James 
the Second; that it was inconsistent with the safety and welfare of 
this Protestant kingdom, to be governed by a Popish prince; that 
the Prince and Princess of Orange should be King and Queen during 
their lives and the life of the survivor of them; and that their 
children should succeed them, if they had any.  That if they had 
none, the Princess Anne and her children should succeed; that if 
she had none, the heirs of the Prince of Orange should succeed.

On the thirteenth of January, one thousand six hundred and eighty-
nine, the Prince and Princess, sitting on a throne in Whitehall, 
bound themselves to these conditions.  The Protestant religion was 
established in England, and England's great and glorious Revolution 
was complete.



CHAPTER XXXVII



I HAVE now arrived at the close of my little history.  The events 
which succeeded the famous Revolution of one thousand six hundred 
and eighty-eight, would neither be easily related nor easily 
understood in such a book as this.

William and Mary reigned together, five years.  After the death of 
his good wife, William occupied the throne, alone, for seven years 
longer.  During his reign, on the sixteenth of September, one 
thousand seven hundred and one, the poor weak creature who had once 
been James the Second of England, died in France.  In the meantime 
he had done his utmost (which was not much) to cause William to be 
assassinated, and to regain his lost dominions.  James's son was 
declared, by the French King, the rightful King of England; and was 
called in France THE CHEVALIER SAINT GEORGE, and in England THE 
PRETENDER.  Some infatuated people in England, and particularly in 
Scotland, took up the Pretender's cause from time to time - as if 
the country had not had Stuarts enough! - and many lives were 
sacrificed, and much misery was occasioned.  King William died on 
Sunday, the seventh of March, one thousand seven hundred and two, 
of the consequences of an accident occasioned by his horse 
stumbling with him.  He was always a brave, patriotic Prince, and a 
man of remarkable abilities.  His manner was cold, and he made but 
few friends; but he had truly loved his queen.  When he was dead, a 
lock of her hair, in a ring, was found tied with a black ribbon 
round his left arm.

He was succeeded by the PRINCESS ANNE, a popular Queen, who reigned 
twelve years.  In her reign, in the month of May, one thousand 
seven hundred and seven, the Union between England and Scotland was 
effected, and the two countries were incorporated under the name of 
GREAT BRITAIN.  Then, from the year one thousand seven hundred and 
fourteen to the year one thousand, eight hundred and thirty, 
reigned the four GEORGES.

It was in the reign of George the Second, one thousand seven 
hundred and forty-five, that the Pretender did his last mischief, 
and made his last appearance.  Being an old man by that time, he 
and the Jacobites - as his friends were called - put forward his 
son, CHARLES EDWARD, known as the young Chevalier.  The Highlanders 
of Scotland, an extremely troublesome and wrong-headed race on the 
subject of the Stuarts, espoused his cause, and he joined them, and 
there was a Scottish rebellion to make him king, in which many 
gallant and devoted gentlemen lost their lives.  It was a hard 
matter for Charles Edward to escape abroad again, with a high price 
on his head; but the Scottish people were extraordinarily faithful 
to him, and, after undergoing many romantic adventures, not unlike 
those of Charles the Second, he escaped to France.  A number of 
charming stories and delightful songs arose out of the Jacobite 
feelings, and belong to the Jacobite times.  Otherwise I think the 
Stuarts were a public nuisance altogether.

It was in the reign of George the Third that England lost North 
America, by persisting in taxing her without her own consent.  That 
immense country, made independent under WASHINGTON, and left to 
itself, became the United States; one of the greatest nations of 
the earth.  In these times in which I write, it is honourably 
remarkable for protecting its subjects, wherever they may travel, 
with a dignity and a determination which is a model for England.  
Between you and me, England has rather lost ground in this respect 
since the days of Oliver Cromwell.

The Union of Great Britain with Ireland - which had been getting on 
very ill by itself - took place in the reign of George the Third, 
on the second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight.

WILLIAM THE FOURTH succeeded George the Fourth, in the year one 
thousand eight hundred and thirty, and reigned seven years.  QUEEN 
VICTORIA, his niece, the only child of the Duke of Kent, the fourth 
son of George the Third, came to the throne on the twentieth of 
June, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-seven.  She was married 
to PRINCE ALBERT of Saxe Gotha on the tenth of February, one 
thousand eight hundred and forty.  She is very good, and much 
beloved.  So I end, like the crier, with

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!





End of the Project Gutenberg eText A Child's History of England

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#48 in our series by Charles Dickens


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Contributions to All The Year Round by Charles Dickens




Contents:


Announcement in "Household Words"
The Poor Man and his Beer
Five New Points of Criminal Law
Leigh Hunt:  A Remonstrance
The Tattlesnivel Bleater
The Young Man from the Country
An Enlightened Clergyman
Rather a Strong Dose
The Martyr Medium
The Late Mr. Stanfield
A Slight Question of Fact
Landor's Life
Address which appeared shortly previous to the completion of the
20th volume



ANNOUNCEMENT IN "HOUSEHOLD WORDS" OF THE APPROACHING PUBLICATION OF
"ALL THE YEAR ROUND"



After the appearance of the present concluding Number of Household
Words, this publication will merge into the new weekly publication,
All the Year Round, and the title, Household Words, will form a part
of the title-page of All the Year Round.

The Prospectus of the latter Journal describes it in these words:


"ADDRESS


"Nine years of Household Words, are the best practical assurance
that can be offered to the public, of the spirit and objects of All
the Year Round.

"In transferring myself, and my strongest energies, from the
publication that is about to be discontinued, to the publication
that is about to be begun, I have the happiness of taking with me
the staff of writers with whom I have laboured, and all the literary
and business co-operation that can make my work a pleasure.  In some
important respects, I am now free greatly to advance on past
arrangements.  Those, I leave to testify for themselves in due
course.

"That fusion of the graces of the imagination with the realities of
life, which is vital to the welfare of any community, and for which
I have striven from week to week as honestly as I could during the
last nine years, will continue to be striven for "all the year
round".  The old weekly cares and duties become things of the Past,
merely to be assumed, with an increased love for them and brighter
hopes springing out of them, in the Present and the Future.

"I look, and plan, for a very much wider circle of readers, and yet
again for a steadily expanding circle of readers, in the projects I
hope to carry through "all the year round".  And I feel confident
that this expectation will be realized, if it deserve realization.

"The task of my new journal is set, and it will steadily try to work
the task out.  Its pages shall show to what good purpose their motto
is remembered in them, and with how much of fidelity and earnestness
they tell

"the story of our lives from year to year.

"CHARLES DICKENS."


Since this was issued, the Journal itself has come into existence,
and has spoken for itself five weeks.  Its fifth Number is published
to-day, and its circulation, moderately stated, trebles that now
relinquished in Household Words.

In referring our readers, henceforth, to All the Year Round, we can
but assure them afresh, of our unwearying and faithful service, in
what is at once the work and the chief pleasure of our life.
Through all that we are doing, and through all that we design to do,
our aim is to do our best in sincerity of purpose, and true devotion
of spirit.

We do not for a moment suppose that we may lean on the character of
these pages, and rest contented at the point where they stop.  We
see in that point but a starting-place for our new journey; and on
that journey, with new prospects opening out before us everywhere,
we joyfully proceed, entreating our readers--without any of the pain
of leave-taking incidental to most journeys--to bear us company All
the year round.

Saturday, May 28, 1859.



THE POOR MAN AND HIS BEER



My friend Philosewers and I, contemplating a farm-labourer the other
day, who was drinking his mug of beer on a settle at a roadside ale-
house door, we fell to humming the fag-end of an old ditty, of which
the poor man and his beer, and the sin of parting them, form the
doleful burden.  Philosewers then mentioned to me that a friend of
his in an agricultural county--say a Hertfordshire friend--had, for
two years last past, endeavoured to reconcile the poor man and his
beer to public morality, by making it a point of honour between
himself and the poor man that the latter should use his beer and not
abuse it.  Interested in an effort of so unobtrusive and
unspeechifying a nature, "O Philosewers," said I, after the manner
of the dreary sages in Eastern apologues, "Show me, I pray, the man
who deems that temperance can be attained without a medal, an
oration, a banner, and a denunciation of half the world, and who has
at once the head and heart to set about it!"

Philosewers expressing, in reply, his willingness to gratify the
dreary sage, an appointment was made for the purpose.  And on the
day fixed, I, the Dreary one, accompanied by Philosewers, went down
Nor'-West per railway, in search of temperate temperance.  It was a
thunderous day; and the clouds were so immoderately watery, and so
very much disposed to sour all the beer in Hertfordshire, that they
seemed to have taken the pledge.

But, the sun burst forth gaily in the afternoon, and gilded the old
gables, and old mullioned windows, and old weathercock and old
clock-face, of the quaint old house which is the dwelling of the man
we sought.  How shall I describe him?  As one of the most famous
practical chemists of the age?  That designation will do as well as
another--better, perhaps, than most others.  And his name?  Friar
Bacon.

"Though, take notice, Philosewers," said I, behind my hand, "that
the first Friar Bacon had not that handsome lady-wife beside him.
Wherein, O Philosewers, he was a chemist, wretched and forlorn,
compared with his successor.  Young Romeo bade the holy father
Lawrence hang up philosophy, unless philosophy could make a Juliet.
Chemistry would infallibly be hanged if its life were staked on
making anything half so pleasant as this Juliet."  The gentle
Philosewers smiled assent.

The foregoing whisper from myself, the Dreary one, tickled the ear
of Philosewers, as we walked on the trim garden terrace before
dinner, among the early leaves and blossoms; two peacocks,
apparently in very tight new boots, occasionally crossing the gravel
at a distance.  The sun, shining through the old house-windows, now
and then flashed out some brilliant piece of colour from bright
hangings within, or upon the old oak panelling; similarly, Friar
Bacon, as we paced to and fro, revealed little glimpses of his good
work.

"It is not much," said he.  "It is no wonderful thing.  There used
to be a great deal of drunkenness here, and I wanted to make it
better if I could.  The people are very ignorant, and have been much
neglected, and I wanted to make THAT better, if I could.  My utmost
object was, to help them to a little self-government and a little
homely pleasure.  I only show the way to better things, and advise
them.  I never act for them; I never interfere; above all, I never
patronise."

I had said to Philosewers as we came along Nor'-West that patronage
was one of the curses of England; I appeared to rise in the
estimation of Philosewers when thus confirmed.

"And so," said Friar Bacon, "I established my Allotment-club, and my
pig-clubs, and those little Concerts by the ladies of my own family,
of which we have the last of the season this evening.  They are a
great success, for the people here are amazingly fond of music.  But
there is the early dinner-bell, and I have no need to talk of my
endeavours when you will soon see them in their working dress".

Dinner done, behold the Friar, Philosewers, and myself the Dreary
one, walking, at six o'clock, across the fields, to the "Club-
house."

As we swung open the last field-gate and entered the Allotment-
grounds, many members were already on their way to the Club, which
stands in the midst of the allotments.  Who could help thinking of
the wonderful contrast between these club-men and the club-men of
St. James's Street, or Pall Mall, in London!  Look at yonder
prematurely old man, doubled up with work, and leaning on a rude
stick more crooked than himself, slowly trudging to the club-house,
in a shapeless hat like an Italian harlequin's, or an old brown-
paper bag, leathern leggings, and dull green smock-frock, looking as
though duck-weed had accumulated on it--the result of its stagnant
life--or as if it were a vegetable production, originally meant to
blow into something better, but stopped somehow.  Compare him with
Old Cousin Feenix, ambling along St. James's Street, got up in the
style of a couple of generations ago, and with a head of hair, a
complexion, and a set of teeth, profoundly impossible to be believed
in by the widest stretch of human credulity.  Can they both be men
and brothers?  Verily they are.  And although Cousin Feenix has
lived so fast that he will die at Baden-Baden, and although this
club-man in the frock has lived, ever since he came to man's estate,
on nine shillings a week, and is sure to die in the Union if he die
in bed, yet he brought as much into the world as Cousin Feenix, and
will take as much out--more, for more of him is real.

A pretty, simple building, the club-house, with a rustic colonnade
outside, under which the members can sit on wet evenings, looking at
the patches of ground they cultivate for themselves; within, a well-
ventilated room, large and lofty, cheerful pavement of coloured
tiles, a bar for serving out the beer, good supply of forms and
chairs, and a brave big chimney-corner, where the fire burns
cheerfully.  Adjoining this room, another:

"Built for a reading-room," said Friar Bacon; "but not much used--
yet."

The dreary sage, looking in through the window, perceiving a fixed
reading-desk within, and inquiring its use:

"I have Service there," said Friar Bacon.  "They never went anywhere
to hear prayers, and of course it would be hopeless to help them to
be happier and better, if they had no religious feeling at all."

"The whole place is very pretty."  Thus the sage.

"I am glad you think so.  I built it for the holders of the
Allotment-grounds, and gave it them:  only requiring them to manage
it by a committee of their own appointing, and never to get drunk
there.  They never have got drunk there."

"Yet they have their beer freely?"

"O yes.  As much as they choose to buy.  The club gets its beer
direct from the brewer, by the barrel.  So they get it good; at once
much cheaper, and much better, than at the public-house.  The
members take it in turns to be steward, and serve out the beer:  if
a man should decline to serve when his turn came, he would pay a
fine of twopence.  The steward lasts, as long as the barrel lasts.
When there is a new barrel, there is a new steward."

"What a noble fire is roaring up that chimney!"

"Yes, a capital fire.  Every member pays a halfpenny a week."

"Every member must be the holder of an Allotment-garden?"

"Yes; for which he pays five shillings a year.  The Allotments you
see about us, occupy some sixteen or eighteen acres, and each garden
is as large as experience shows one man to be able to manage.  You
see how admirably they are tilled, and how much they get off them.
They are always working in them in their spare hours; and when a man
wants a mug of beer, instead of going off to the village and the
public-house, he puts down his spade or his hoe, comes to the club-
house and gets it, and goes back to his work.  When he has done
work, he likes to have his beer at the club, still, and to sit and
look at his little crops as they thrive."

"They seem to manage the club very well."

"Perfectly well.  Here are their own rules.  They made them.  I
never interfere with them, except to advise them when they ask me."


RULES AND REGULATIONS
MADE BY THE COMMITTEE
From the 21st September, 1857

One half-penny per week to be paid to the club by each member

1.--Each member to draw the beer in order, according to the number
of his allotment; on failing, a forfeit of twopence to be paid to
the club.

2.--The member that draws the beer to pay for the same, and bring
his ticket up receipted when the subscriptions are paid; on failing
to do so, a penalty of sixpence to be forfeited and paid to the
club.

3.--The subscriptions and forfeits to be paid at the club-room on
the last Saturday night of each month.

4.--The subscriptions and forfeits to be cleared up every quarter;
if not, a penalty of sixpence to be paid to the club.

5.--The member that draws the beer to be at the club-room by six
o'clock every evening, and stay till ten; but in the event of no
member being there, he may leave at nine; on failing so to attend, a
penalty of sixpence to be paid to the club.

6.--Any member giving beer to a stranger in this club-room,
excepting to his wife or family, shall be liable to the penalty of
one shilling.

7.--Any member lifting his hand to strike another in this club-room
shall be liable to the penalty of sixpence.

8.--Any member swearing in this club-room shall be liable to a
penalty of twopence each time.

9.--Any member selling beer shall be expelled from the club.

10.--Any member wishing to give up his allotment, may apply to the
committee, and they shall value the crop and the condition of the
ground.  The amount of the valuation shall be paid by the succeeding
tenant, who shall be allowed to enter on any part of the allotment
which is uncropped at the time of notice of the leaving tenant.

11.--Any member not keeping his allotment-garden clear from seed-
weeds, or otherwise injuring his neighbours, may be turned out of
his garden by the votes of two-thirds of the committee, one month's
notice being given to him.

12.--Any member carelessly breaking a mug, is to pay the cost of
replacing the same.


I was soliciting the attention of Philosewers to some old old
bonnets hanging in the Allotment-gardens to frighten the birds, and
the fashion of which I should think would terrify a French bird to
death at any distance, when Philosewers solicited my attention to
the scrapers at the club-house door.  The amount of the soil of
England which every member brought there on his feet, was indeed
surprising; and even I, who am professedly a salad-eater, could have
grown a salad for my dinner, in the earth on any member's frock or
hat.

"Now," said Friar Bacon, looking at his watch, "for the Pig-clubs!"

The dreary Sage entreated explanation.

"Why, a pig is so very valuable to a poor labouring man, and it is
so very difficult for him at this time of the year to get money
enough to buy one, that I lend him a pound for the purpose.  But, I
do it in this way.  I leave such of the club members as choose it
and desire it, to form themselves into parties of five.  To every
man in each company of five, I lend a pound, to buy a pig.  But,
each man of the five becomes bound for every other man, as to the
repayment of his money.  Consequently, they look after one another,
and pick out their partners with care; selecting men in whom they
have confidence."

"They repay the money, I suppose, when the pig is fattened, killed,
and sold?"

"Yes.  Then they repay the money.  And they do repay it.  I had one
man, last year, who was a little tardy (he was in the habit of going
to the public-house); but even he did pay.  It is an immense
Advantage to one of these poor fellows to have a pig.  The pig
consumes the refuse from the man's cottage and allotment-garden, and
the pig's refuse enriches the man's garden besides.  The pig is the
poor man's friend.  Come into the club-house again."

The poor man's friend.  Yes.  I have often wondered who really was
the poor man's friend among a great number of competitors, and I now
clearly perceive him to be the pig.  HE never makes any flourishes
about the poor man.  HE never gammons the poor man--except to his
manifest advantage in the article of bacon.  HE never comes down to
this house, or goes down to his constituents.  He openly declares to
the poor man, "I want my sty because I am a Pig.  I desire to have
as much to eat as you can by any means stuff me with, because I am a
Pig."  HE never gives the poor man a sovereign for bringing up a
family.  HE never grunts the poor man's name in vain.  And when he
dies in the odour of Porkity, he cuts up, a highly useful creature
and a blessing to the poor man, from the ring in his snout to the
curl in his tail.  Which of the poor man's other friends can say as
much?  Where is the M.P. who means Mere Pork?

The dreary Sage had glided into these reflections, when he found
himself sitting by the club-house fire, surrounded by green smock-
frocks and shapeless hats:  with Friar Bacon lively, busy, and
expert, at a little table near him.

"Now, then, come.  The first five!" said Friar Bacon.  "Where are
you?"

"Order!" cried a merry-faced little man, who had brought his young
daughter with him to see life, and who always modestly hid his face
in his beer-mug after he had thus assisted the business.

"John Nightingale, William Thrush, Joseph Blackbird, Cecil Robin,
and Thomas Linnet!" cried Friar Bacon.

"Here, sir!" and "Here, sir!"  And Linnet, Robin, Blackbird, Thrush,
and Nightingale, stood confessed.

We, the undersigned, declare, in effect, by this written paper, that
each of us is responsible for the repayment of this pig-money by
each of the other.  "Sure you understand, Nightingale?"

"Ees, sur."

"Can you write your name, Nightingale?"

"Na, sur."

Nightingale's eye upon his name, as Friar Bacon wrote it, was a
sight to consider in after years.  Rather incredulous was
Nightingale, with a hand at the corner of his mouth, and his head on
one side, as to those drawings really meaning him.  Doubtful was
Nightingale whether any virtue had gone out of him in that committal
to paper.  Meditative was Nightingale as to what would come of young
Nightingale's growing up to the acquisition of that art.  Suspended
was the interest of Nightingale, when his name was done--as if he
thought the letters were only sown, to come up presently in some
other form.  Prodigious, and wrong-handed was the cross made by
Nightingale on much encouragement--the strokes directed from him
instead of towards him; and most patient and sweet-humoured was the
smile of Nightingale as he stepped back into a general laugh.

"Order!" cried the little man.  Immediately disappearing into his
mug.

"Ralph Mangel, Roger Wurzel, Edward Vetches, Matthew Carrot, and
Charles Taters!" said Friar Bacon.

"All here, sir."

"You understand it, Mangel?"

"Iss, sir, I unnerstaans it."

"Can you write your name, Mangel?"

"Iss, sir."

Breathless interest.  A dense background of smock-frocks accumulated
behind Mangel, and many eyes in it looked doubtfully at Friar Bacon,
as who should say, "Can he really though?"  Mangel put down his hat,
retired a little to get a good look at the paper, wetted his right
hand thoroughly by drawing it slowly across his mouth, approached
the paper with great determination, flattened it, sat down at it,
and got well to his work.  Circuitous and sea-serpent-like, were the
movements of the tongue of Mangel while he formed the letters;
elevated were the eyebrows of Mangel and sidelong the eyes, as, with
his left whisker reposing on his left arm, they followed his
performance; many were the misgivings of Mangel, and slow was his
retrospective meditation touching the junction of the letter p with
h; something too active was the big forefinger of Mangel in its
propensity to rub out without proved cause.  At last, long and deep
was the breath drawn by Mangel when he laid down the pen; long and
deep the wondering breath drawn by the background--as if they had
watched his walking across the rapids of Niagara, on stilts, and now
cried, "He has done it!"

But, Mangel was an honest man, if ever honest man lived.  "T'owt to
be a hell, sir," said he, contemplating his work, "and I ha' made a
t on 't."

The over-fraught bosoms of the background found relief in a roar of
laughter.

"OR-DER!" cried the little man.  "CHEER!"  And after that second
word, came forth from his mug no more.

Several other clubs signed, and received their money.  Very few
could write their names; all who could not, pleaded that they could
not, more or less sorrowfully, and always with a shake of the head,
and in a lower voice than their natural speaking voice.  Crosses
could be made standing; signatures must be sat down to.  There was
no exception to this rule.  Meantime, the various club-members
smoked, drank their beer, and talked together quite unrestrained.
They all wore their hats, except when they went up to Friar Bacon's
table.  The merry-faced little man offered his beer, with a natural
good-fellowship, both to the Dreary one and Philosewers.  Both
partook of it with thanks.

"Seven o'clock!" said Friar Bacon.  "And now we better get across to
the concert, men, for the music will be beginning."

The concert was in Friar Bacon's laboratory; a large building near
at hand, in an open field.  The bettermost people of the village and
neighbourhood were in a gallery on one side, and, in a gallery
opposite the orchestra.  The whole space below was filled with the
labouring people and their families, to the number of five or six
hundred.  We had been obliged to turn away two hundred to-night,
Friar Bacon said, for want of room--and that, not counting the boys,
of whom we had taken in only a few picked ones, by reason of the
boys, as a class, being given to too fervent a custom of applauding
with their boot-heels.

The performers were the ladies of Friar Bacon's family, and two
gentlemen; one of them, who presided, a Doctor of Music.  A piano
was the only instrument.  Among the vocal pieces, we had a negro
melody (rapturously encored), the Indian Drum, and the Village
Blacksmith; neither did we want for fashionable Italian, having Ah!
non giunge, and Mi manca la voce.  Our success was splendid; our
good-humoured, unaffected, and modest bearing, a pattern.  As to the
audience, they were far more polite and far more pleased than at the
Opera; they were faultless.  Thus for barely an hour the concert
lasted, with thousands of great bottles looking on from the walls,
containing the results of Friar Bacon's Million and one experiments
in agricultural chemistry; and containing too, no doubt, a variety
of materials with which the Friar could have blown us all through
the roof at five minutes' notice.

God save the Queen being done, the good Friar stepped forward and
said a few words, more particularly concerning two points; firstly,
that Saturday half-holiday, which it would be kind in farmers to
grant; secondly, the additional Allotment-grounds we were going to
establish, in consequence of the happy success of the system, but
which we could not guarantee should entitle the holders to be
members of the club, because the present members must consider and
settle that question for themselves:  a bargain between man and man
being always a bargain, and we having made over the club to them as
the original Allotment-men.  This was loudly applauded, and so, with
contented and affectionate cheering, it was all over.

As Philosewers, and I the Dreary, posted back to London, looking up
at the moon and discussing it as a world preparing for the
habitation of responsible creatures, we expatiated on the honour due
to men in this world of ours who try to prepare it for a higher
course, and to leave the race who live and die upon it better than
they found them.



FIVE NEW POINTS OF CRIMINAL LAW



The existing Criminal Law has been found in trials for Murder, to be
so exceedingly hasty, unfair, and oppressive--in a word, to be so
very objectionable to the amiable persons accused of that
thoughtless act--that it is, we understand, the intention of the
Government to bring in a Bill for its amendment.  We have been
favoured with an outline of its probable provisions.

It will be grounded on the profound principle that the real offender
is the Murdered Person; but for whose obstinate persistency in being
murdered, the interesting fellow-creature to be tried could not have
got into trouble.

Its leading enactments may be expected to resolve themselves under
the following heads:

1.  There shall be no judge.  Strong representations have been made
by highly popular culprits that the presence of this obtrusive
character is prejudicial to their best interests.  The Court will be
composed of a political gentleman, sitting in a secluded room
commanding a view of St. James's Park, who has already more to do
than any human creature can, by any stretch of the human
imagination, be supposed capable of doing.

2.  The jury to consist of Five Thousand Five Hundred and Fifty-five
Volunteers.

3.  The jury to be strictly prohibited from seeing either the
accused or the witnesses.  They are not to be sworn.  They are on no
account to hear the evidence.  They are to receive it, or such
representations of it, as may happen to fall in their way; and they
will constantly write letters about it to all the Papers.

4.  Supposing the trial to be a trial for Murder by poisoning, and
supposing the hypothetical case, or the evidence, for the
prosecution to charge the administration of two poisons, say Arsenic
and Antimony; and supposing the taint of Arsenic in the body to be
possible but not probable, and the presence of Antimony in the body,
to be an absolute certainty; it will then become the duty of the
jury to confine their attention solely to the Arsenic, and entirely
to dismiss the Antimony from their minds.

5.  The symptoms preceding the death of the real offender (or
Murdered Person) being described in evidence by medical
practitioners who saw them, other medical practitioners who never
saw them shall be required to state whether they are inconsistent
with certain known diseases--but, THEY SHALL NEVER BE ASKED WHETHER
THEY ARE NOT EXACTLY CONSISTENT WITH THE ADMINISTRATION OF POISON.
To illustrate this enactment in the proposed Bill by a case:- A
raging mad dog is seen to run into the house where Z lives alone,
foaming at the mouth.  Z and the mad dog are for some time left
together in that house under proved circumstances, irresistibly
leading to the conclusion that Z has been bitten by the dog.  Z is
afterwards found lying on his bed in a state of hydrophobia, and
with the marks of the dog's teeth.  Now, the symptoms of that
disease being identical with those of another disease called
Tetanus, which might supervene on Z's running a rusty nail into a
certain part of his foot, medical practitioners who never saw Z,
shall bear testimony to that abstract fact, and it shall then be
incumbent on the Registrar-General to certify that Z died of a rusty
nail.

It is hoped that these alterations in the present mode of procedure
will not only be quite satisfactory to the accused person (which is
the first great consideration), but will also tend, in a tolerable
degree, to the welfare and safety of society.  For it is not sought
in this moderate and prudent measure to be wholly denied that it is
an inconvenience to Society to be poisoned overmuch.



LEIGH HUNT:  A REMONSTRANCE



"The sense of beauty and gentleness, of moral beauty and faithful
gentleness, grew upon him as the clear evening closed in.  When he
went to visit his relative at Putney, he still carried with him his
work, and the books he more immediately wanted.  Although his bodily
powers had been giving way, his most conspicuous qualities, his
memory for books, and his affection remained; and when his hair was
white, when his ample chest had grown slender, when the very
proportion of his height had visibly lessened, his step was still
ready, and his dark eyes brightened at every happy expression, and
at every thought of kindness.  His death was simply exhaustion; he
broke off his work to lie down and repose.  So gentle was the final
approach, that he scarcely recognised it till the very last, and
then it came without terrors.  His physical suffering had not been
severe; at the latest hour he said that his only uneasiness was
failing breath.  And that failing breath was used to express his
sense of the inexhaustible kindness he had received from the family
who had been so unexpectedly made his nurses,--to draw from one of
his sons, by minute, eager, and searching questions, all that he
could learn about the latest vicissitudes and growing hopes of
Italy,--to ask the friends and children around him for news of those
whom he loved,--and to send love and messages to the absent who
loved him."


Thus, with a manly simplicity and filial affection, writes the
eldest son of Leigh Hunt in recording his father's death.  These are
the closing words of a new edition of The Autobiography of Leigh
Hunt, published by Messrs. Smith and Elder, of Cornhill, revised by
that son, and enriched with an introductory chapter of remarkable
beauty and tenderness.  The son's first presentation of his father
to the reader, "rather tall, straight as an arrow, looking slenderer
than he really was; his hair black and shining, and slightly
inclined to wave; his head high, his forehead straight and white,
his eyes black and sparkling, his general complexion dark; in his
whole carriage and manner an extraordinary degree of life,"
completes the picture.  It is the picture of the flourishing and
fading away of man that is born of a woman and hath but a short time
to live.

In his presentation of his father's moral nature and intellectual
qualities, Mr Hunt is no less faithful and no less touching.  Those
who knew Leigh Hunt, will see the bright face and hear the musical
voice again, when he is recalled to them in this passage:  "Even at
seasons of the greatest depression in his fortunes, he always
attracted many visitors, but still not so much for any repute that
attended him as for his personal qualities.  Few men were more
attractive, in society, whether in a large company or over the
fireside.  His manners were peculiarly animated; his conversation,
varied, ranging over a great field of subjects, was moved and called
forth by the response of his companion, be that companion
philosopher or student, sage or boy, man or woman; and he was
equally ready for the most lively topics or for the gravest
reflections--his expression easily adapting itself to the tone of
his companion's mind.  With much freedom of manners, he combined a
spontaneous courtesy that never failed, and a considerateness
derived from a ceaseless kindness of heart that invariably
fascinated even strangers."  Or in this:  "His animation, his
sympathy with what was gay and pleasurable; his avowed doctrine of
cultivating cheerfulness, were manifest on the surface, and could be
appreciated by those who knew him in society, most probably even
exaggerated as salient traits, on which he himself insisted WITH A
SORT OF GAY AND OSTENTATIOUS WILFULNESS."

The last words describe one of the most captivating peculiarities of
a most original and engaging man, better than any other words could.
The reader is besought to observe them, for a reason that shall
presently be given.  Lastly:  "The anxiety to recognise the right of
others, the tendency to 'refine', which was noted by an early school
companion, and the propensity to elaborate every thought, made him,
along with the direct argument by which he sustained his own
conviction, recognise and almost admit all that might be said on the
opposite side".  For these reasons, and for others suggested with
equal felicity, and with equal fidelity, the son writes of the
father, "It is most desirable that his qualities should be known as
they were; for such deficiencies as he had are the honest
explanation of his mistakes; while, as the reader may see from his
writings and his conduct, they are not, as the faults of which he
was accused would be, incompatible with the noblest faculties both
of head and heart.  To know Leigh Hunt as he was, was to hold him in
reverence and love."

These quotations are made here, with a special object.  It is not,
that the personal testimony of one who knew Leigh Hunt well, may be
borne to their truthfulness.  It is not, that it may be recorded in
these pages, as in his son's introductory chapter, that his life was
of the most amiable and domestic kind, that his wants were few, that
his way of life was frugal, that he was a man of small expenses, no
ostentations, a diligent labourer, and a secluded man of letters.
It is not, that the inconsiderate and forgetful may be reminded of
his wrongs and sufferings in the days of the Regency, and of the
national disgrace of his imprisonment.  It is not, that their
forbearance may be entreated for his grave, in right of his graceful
fancy or his political labours and endurances, though -


Not only we, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past, not only we, that prate
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well.


It is, that a duty may be done in the most direct way possible.  An
act of plain, clear duty.

Four or five years ago, the writer of these lines was much pained by
accidentally encountering a printed statement, "that Mr. Leigh Hunt
was the original of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House".  The writer of
these lines, is the author of that book.  The statement came from
America.  It is no disrespect to that country, in which the writer
has, perhaps, as many friends and as true an interest as any man
that lives, good-humouredly to state the fact, that he has, now and
then, been the subject of paragraphs in Transatlantic newspapers,
more surprisingly destitute of all foundation in truth than the
wildest delusions of the wildest lunatics.  For reasons born of this
experience, he let the thing go by.

But, since Mr. Leigh Hunt's death, the statement has been revived in
England.  The delicacy and generosity evinced in its revival, are
for the rather late consideration of its revivers.  The fact is
this:

Exactly those graces and charms of manner which are remembered in
the words we have quoted, were remembered by the author of the work
of fiction in question, when he drew the character in question.
Above all other things, that "sort of gay and ostentatious
wilfulness" in the humouring of a subject, which had many a time
delighted him, and impressed him as being unspeakably whimsical and
attractive, was the airy quality he wanted for the man he invented.
Partly for this reason, and partly (he has since often grieved to
think) for the pleasure it afforded him to find that delightful
manner reproducing itself under his hand, he yielded to the
temptation of too often making the character SPEAK like his old
friend.  He no more thought, God forgive him! that the admired
original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the
fictitious creature, than he has himself ever thought of charging
the blood of Desdemona and Othello, on the innocent Academy model
who sat for Iago's leg in the picture.  Even as to the mere
occasional manner, he meant to be so cautious and conscientious,
that he privately referred the proof sheets of the first number of
that book to two intimate literary friends of Leigh Hunt (both still
living), and altered the whole of that part of the text on their
discovering too strong a resemblance to his "way".

He cannot see the son lay this wreath on the father's tomb, and
leave him to the possibility of ever thinking that the present words
might have righted the father's memory and were left unwritten.  He
cannot know that his own son may have to explain his father when
folly or malice can wound his heart no more, and leave this task
undone.



THE TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER



The pen is taken in hand on the present occasion, by a private
individual (not wholly unaccustomed to literary composition), for
the exposure of a conspiracy of a most frightful nature; a
conspiracy which, like the deadly Upas-tree of Java, on which the
individual produced a poem in his earlier youth (not wholly devoid
of length), which was so flatteringly received (in circles not
wholly unaccustomed to form critical opinions), that he was
recommended to publish it, and would certainly have carried out the
suggestion, but for private considerations (not wholly unconnected
with expense).

The individual who undertakes the exposure of the gigantic
conspiracy now to be laid bare in all its hideous deformity, is an
inhabitant of the town of Tattlesnivel--a lowly inhabitant, it may
be, but one who, as an Englishman and a man, will ne'er abase his
eye before the gaudy and the mocking throng.

Tattlesnivel stoops to demand no championship from her sons.  On an
occasion in History, our bluff British monarch, our Eighth Royal
Harry, almost went there.  And long ere the periodical in which this
exposure will appear, had sprung into being, Tattlesnivel had
unfurled that standard which yet waves upon her battlements.  The
standard alluded to, is THE TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER, containing the
latest intelligence, and state of markets, down to the hour of going
to press, and presenting a favourable local medium for advertisers,
on a graduated scale of charges, considerably diminishing in
proportion to the guaranteed number of insertions.

It were bootless to expatiate on the host of talent engaged in
formidable phalanx to do fealty to the Bleater.  Suffice it to
select, for present purposes, one of the most gifted and (but for
the wide and deep ramifications of an un-English conspiracy) most
rising, of the men who are bold Albion's pride.  It were needless,
after this preamble, to point the finger more directly at the LONDON
CORRESPONDENT OF THE TATTLESNIVEL BLEATER.

On the weekly letters of that Correspondent, on the flexibility of
their English, on the boldness of their grammar, on the originality
of their quotations (never to be found as they are printed, in any
book existing), on the priority of their information, on their
intimate acquaintance with the secret thoughts and unexecuted
intentions of men, it would ill become the humble Tattlesnivellian
who traces these words, to dwell.  They are graven in the memory;
they are on the Bleater's file.  Let them be referred to.

But from the infamous, the dark, the subtle conspiracy which spreads
its baleful roots throughout the land, and of which the Bleater's
London Correspondent is the one sole subject, it is the purpose of
the lowly Tattlesnivellian who undertakes this revelation, to tear
the veil.  Nor will he shrink from his self-imposed labour,
Herculean though it be.

The conspiracy begins in the very Palace of the Sovereign Lady of
our Ocean Isle.  Leal and loyal as it is the proud vaunt of the
Bleater's readers, one and all, to be, the inhabitant who pens this
exposure does not personally impeach, either her Majesty the queen,
or the illustrious Prince Consort.  But, some silken-clad smoothers,
some purple parasites, some fawners in frippery, some greedy and
begartered ones in gorgeous garments, he does impeach--ay, and
wrathfully!  Is it asked on what grounds?  They shall be stated.

The Bleater's London Correspondent, in the prosecution of his
important inquiries, goes down to Windsor, sends in his card, has a
confidential interview with her Majesty and the illustrious Prince
Consort.  For a time, the restraints of Royalty are thrown aside in
the cheerful conversation of the Bleater's London Correspondent, in
his fund of information, in his flow of anecdote, in the atmosphere
of his genius; her Majesty brightens, the illustrious Prince Consort
thaws, the cares of State and the conflicts of Party are forgotten,
lunch is proposed.  Over that unassuming and domestic table, her
Majesty communicates to the Bleater's London Correspondent that it
is her intention to send his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to
inspect the top of the Great Pyramid--thinking it likely to improve
his acquaintance with the views of the people.  Her Majesty further
communicates that she has made up her royal mind (and that the
Prince Consort has made up his illustrious mind) to the bestowal of
the vacant Garter, let us say on Mr. Roebuck.  The younger Royal
children having been introduced at the request of the Bleater's
London Correspondent, and having been by him closely observed to
present the usual external indications of good health, the happy
knot is severed, with a sigh the Royal bow is once more strung to
its full tension, the Bleater's London Correspondent returns to
London, writes his letter, and tells the Tattlesnivel Bleater what
he knows.  All Tattlesnivel reads it, and knows that he knows it.
But, DOES his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales ultimately go to
the top of the Great Pyramid?  DOES Mr. Roebuck ultimately get the
Garter?  No.  Are the younger Royal children even ultimately found
to be well?  On the contrary, they have--and on that very day had--
the measles.  Why is this?  BECAUSE THE CONSPIRATORS AGAINST THE
BLEATER'S LONDON CORRESPONDENT HAVE STEPPED IN WITH THEIR DARK
MACHINATIONS.  Because her Majesty and the Prince Consort are
artfully induced to change their minds, from north to south, from
east to west, immediately after it is known to the conspirators that
they have put themselves in communication with the Bleater's London
Correspondent.  It is now indignantly demanded, by whom are they so
tampered with?  It is now indignantly demanded, who took the
responsibility of concealing the indisposition of those Royal
children from their Royal and illustrious parents, and of bringing
them down from their beds, disguised, expressly to confound the
London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater?  Who are those
persons, it is again asked?  Let not rank and favour protect them.
Let the traitors be exhibited in the face of day!

Lord John Russell is in this conspiracy.  Tell us not that his
Lordship is a man of too much spirit and honour.  Denunciation is
hurled against him.  The proof?  The proof is here.

The Time is panting for an answer to the question, Will Lord John
Russell consent to take office under Lord Palmerston?  Good.  The
London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater is in the act of
writing his weekly letter, finds himself rather at a loss to settle
this question finally, leaves off, puts his hat on, goes down to the
lobby of the House of Commons, sends in for Lord John Russell, and
has him out.  He draws his arm through his Lordship's, takes him
aside, and says, "John, will you ever accept office under
Palmerston?"  His Lordship replies, "I will not."  The Bleater's
London Correspondent retorts, with the caution such a man is bound
to use, "John, think again; say nothing to me rashly; is there any
temper here?"  His Lordship replies, calmly, "None whatever."  After
giving him time for reflection, the Bleater's London Correspondent
says, "Once more, John, let me put a question to you.  Will you ever
accept office under Palmerston?"  His Lordship answers (note the
exact expressions), "Nothing shall induce me, ever to accept a seat
in a Cabinet of which Palmerston is the Chief."  They part, the
London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater finishes his
letter, and--always being withheld by motives of delicacy, from
plainly divulging his means of getting accurate information on every
subject, at first hand--puts in it, this passage:  "Lord John
Russell is spoken of, by blunderers, for Foreign Affairs; but I have
the best reasons for assuring your readers, that" (giving prominence
to the exact expressions, it will be observed) "'NOTHING WILL EVER
INDUCE HIM, TO ACCEPT A SEAT IN A CABINET OF WHICH PALMERSTON IS THE
CHIEF.'  On this you may implicitly rely."  What happens?  On the
very day of the publication of that number of the Bleater--the
malignity of the conspirators being even manifested in the selection
of the day--Lord John Russell takes the Foreign Office!  Comment
were superfluous.

The people of Tattlesnivel will be told, have been told, that Lord
John Russell is a man of his word.  He may be, on some occasions;
but, when overshadowed by this dark and enormous growth of
conspiracy, Tattlesnivel knows him to be otherwise.  "I happen to be
certain, deriving my information from a source which cannot be
doubted to be authentic," wrote the London Correspondent of the
Bleater, within the last year, "that Lord John Russell bitterly
regrets having made that explicit speech of last Monday."  These are
not roundabout phrases; these are plain words.  What does Lord John
Russell (apparently by accident), within eight-and-forty hours after
their diffusion over the civilised globe?  Rises in his place in
Parliament, and unblushingly declares that if the occasion could
arise five hundred times, for his making that very speech, he would
make it five hundred times!  Is there no conspiracy here?  And is
this combination against one who would be always right if he were
not proved always wrong, to be endured in a country that boasts of
its freedom and its fairness?

But, the Tattlesnivellian who now raises his voice against
intolerable oppression, may be told that, after all, this is a
political conspiracy.  He may be told, forsooth, that Mr. Disraeli's
being in it, that Lord Derby's being in it, that Mr. Bright's being
in it, that every Home, Foreign, and Colonial Secretary's being in
it, that every ministry's and every opposition's being in it, are
but proofs that men will do in politics what they would do in
nothing else.  Is this the plea?  If so, the rejoinder is, that the
mighty conspiracy includes the whole circle of Artists of all kinds,
and comprehends all degrees of men, down to the worst criminal and
the hangman who ends his career.  For, all these are intimately
known to the London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater, and
all these deceive him.

Sir, put it to the proof.  There is the Bleater on the file--
documentary evidence.  Weeks, months, before the Exhibition of the
Royal Academy, the Bleater's London Correspondent knows the subjects
of all the leading pictures, knows what the painters first meant to
do, knows what they afterwards substituted for what they first meant
to do, knows what they ought to do and won't do, knows what they
ought not to do and will do, knows to a letter from whom they have
commissions, knows to a shilling how much they are to be paid.  Now,
no sooner is each studio clear of the remarkable man to whom each
studio-occupant has revealed himself as he does not reveal himself
to his nearest and dearest bosom friend, than conspiracy and fraud
begin.  Alfred the Great becomes the Fairy Queen; Moses viewing the
Promised Land, turns out to be Moses going to the Fair; Portrait of
His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, is transformed, as if by
irreverent enchantment of the dissenting interest, into A Favourite
Terrier, or Cattle Grazing; and the most extraordinary work of art
in the list described by the Bleater, is coolly sponged out
altogether, and asserted never to have had existence at all, even in
the most shadow thoughts of its executant!  This is vile enough, but
this is not all.  Picture-buyers then come forth from their secret
positions, and creep into their places in the assassin-multitude of
conspirators.  Mr. Baring, after expressly telling the Bleater's
London Correspondent that he had bought No. 39 for one thousand
guineas, gives it up to somebody unknown for a couple of hundred
pounds; the Marquis of Lansdowne pretends to have no knowledge
whatever of the commissions to which the London Correspondent of the
Bleater swore him, but allows a Railway Contractor to cut him out
for half the money.  Similar examples might be multiplied.  Shame,
shame, on these men!  Is this England?

Sir, look again at Literature.  The Bleater's London Correspondent
is not merely acquainted with all the eminent writers, but is in
possession of the secrets of their souls.  He is versed in their
hidden meanings and references, sees their manuscripts before
publication, and knows the subjects and titles of their books when
they are not begun.  How dare those writers turn upon the eminent
man and depart from every intention they have confided to him?  How
do they justify themselves in entirely altering their manuscripts,
changing their titles, and abandoning their subjects?  Will they
deny, in the face of Tattlesnivel, that they do so?  If they have
such hardihood, let the file of the Bleater strike them dumb.  By
their fruits they shall be known.  Let their works be compared with
the anticipatory letters of the Bleater's London Correspondent, and
their falsehood and deceit will become manifest as the sun; it will
be seen that they do nothing which they stand pledged to the
Bleater's London Correspondent to do; it will be seen that they are
among the blackest parties in this black and base conspiracy.  This
will become apparent, sir, not only as to their public proceedings
but as to their private affairs.  The outraged Tattlesnivellian who
now drags this infamous combination into the face of day, charges
those literary persons with making away with their property,
imposing on the Income Tax Commissioners, keeping false books, and
entering into sham contracts.  He accuses them on the unimpeachable
faith of the London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater.  With
whose evidence they will find it impossible to reconcile their own
account of any transaction of their lives.

The national character is degenerating under the influence of the
ramifications of this tremendous conspiracy.  Forgery is committed,
constantly.  A person of note--any sort of person of note--dies.
The Bleater's London Correspondent knows what his circumstances are,
what his savings are (if any), who his creditors are, all about his
children and relations, and (in general, before his body is cold)
describes his will.  Is that will ever proved?  Never!  Some other
will is substituted; the real instrument, destroyed.  And this (as
has been before observed), is England.

Who are the workmen and artificers, enrolled upon the books of this
treacherous league?  From what funds are they paid, and with what
ceremonies are they sworn to secrecy?  Are there none such?  Observe
what follows.  A little time ago the Bleater's London Correspondent
had this passage:  "Boddleboy is pianoforte playing at St.
Januarius's Gallery, with pretty tolerable success!  He clears three
hundred pounds per night.  Not bad this!!"  The builder of St.
Januarius's Gallery (plunged to the throat in the conspiracy) met
with this piece of news, and observed, with characteristic
coarseness, "that the Bleater's London Correspondent was a Blind
Ass".  Being pressed by a man of spirit to give his reasons for this
extraordinary statement, he declared that the Gallery, crammed to
suffocation, would not hold two hundred pounds, and that its
expenses were, probably, at least half what it did hold.  The man of
spirit (himself a Tattlesnivellian) had the Gallery measured within
a week from that hour, and it would not hold two hundred pounds!
Now, can the poorest capacity doubt that it had been altered in the
meantime?

And so the conspiracy extends, through every grade of society, down
to the condemned criminal in prison, the hangman, and the Ordinary.
Every famous murderer within the last ten years has desecrated his
last moments by falsifying his confidences imparted specially to the
London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater; on every such
occasion, Mr. Calcraft has followed the degrading example; and the
reverend Ordinary, forgetful of his cloth, and mindful only (it
would seem, alas!) of the conspiracy, has committed himself to some
account or other of the criminal's demeanour and conversation, which
has been diametrically opposed to the exclusive information of the
London Correspondent of the Bleater.  And this (as has been before
observed) is Merry England!

A man of true genius, however, is not easily defeated.  The
Bleater's London Correspondent, probably beginning to suspect the
existence of a plot against him, has recently fallen on a new style,
which, as being very difficult to countermine, may necessitate the
organisation of a new conspiracy.  One of his masterly letters,
lately, disclosed the adoption of this style--which was remarked
with profound sensation throughout Tattlesnivel--in the following
passage:  "Mentioning literary small talk, I may tell you that some
new and extraordinary rumours are afloat concerning the
conversations I have previously mentioned, alleged to have taken
place in the first floor front (situated over the street door), of
Mr. X. Ameter (the poet so well known to your readers), in which, X.
Ameter's great uncle, his second son, his butcher, and a corpulent
gentleman with one eye universally respected at Kensington, are said
not to have been on the most friendly footing; I forbear, however,
to pursue the subject further, this week, my informant not being
able to supply me with exact particulars."

But, enough, sir.  The inhabitant of Tattlesnivel who has taken pen
in hand to expose this odious association of unprincipled men
against a shining (local) character, turns from it with disgust and
contempt.  Let him in few words strip the remaining flimsy covering
from the nude object of the conspirators, and his loathsome task is
ended.

Sir, that object, he contends, is evidently twofold.  First, to
exhibit the London Correspondent of the Tattlesnivel Bleater in the
light of a mischievous Blockhead who, by hiring himself out to tell
what he cannot possibly know, is as great a public nuisance as a
Blockhead in a corner can be.  Second, to suggest to the men of
Tattlesnivel that it does not improve their town to have so much Dry
Rubbish shot there.

Now, sir, on both these points Tattlesnivel demands in accents of
Thunder, Where is the Attorney General?  Why doesn't the Times take
it up?  (Is the latter in the conspiracy?  It never adopts his
views, or quotes him, and incessantly contradicts him.)
Tattlesnivel, sir, remembering that our forefathers contended with
the Norman at Hastings, and bled at a variety of other places that
will readily occur to you, demands that its birthright shall not be
bartered away for a mess of pottage.  Have a care, sir, have a care!
Or Tattlesnivel (its idle Rifles piled in its scouted streets) may
be seen ere long, advancing with its Bleater to the foot of the
Throne, and demanding redress for this conspiracy, from the orbed
and sceptred hands of Majesty itself!



THE YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY



A song of the hour, now in course of being sung and whistled in
every street, the other day reminded the writer of these words--as
he chanced to pass a fag-end of the song for the twentieth time in a
short London walk--that twenty years ago, a little book on the
United States, entitled American Notes, was published by "a Young
Man from the Country", who had just seen and left it.

This Young Man from the Country fell into a deal of trouble, by
reason of having taken the liberty to believe that he perceived in
America downward popular tendencies for which his young enthusiasm
had been anything but prepared.  It was in vain for the Young Man to
offer in extenuation of his belief that no stranger could have set
foot on those shores with a feeling of livelier interest in the
country, and stronger faith in it, than he.  Those were the days
when the Tories had made their Ashburton Treaty, and when Whigs and
Radicals must have no theory disturbed.  All three parties waylaid
and mauled the Young Man from the Country, and showed that he knew
nothing about the country.

As the Young Man from the Country had observed in the Preface to his
little book, that he "could bide his time", he took all this in
silent part for eight years.  Publishing then, a cheap edition of
his book, he made no stronger protest than the following:


"My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the
influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America, have any
existence but in my imagination.  They can examine for themselves
whether there has been anything in the public career of that country
during these past eight years, or whether there is anything in its
present position, at home or abroad, which suggests that those
influences and tendencies really do exist.  As they find the fact,
they will judge me.  If they discern any evidences of wrong-going,
in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that I
had reason in what I wrote.  If they discern no such thing, they
will consider me altogether mistaken.  I have nothing to defend, or
to explain away.  The truth is the truth; and neither childish
absurdities, nor unscrupulous contradictions, can make it otherwise.
The earth would still move round the sun, though the whole Catholic
Church said No."


Twelve more years having since passed away, it may now, at last, be
simply just towards the Young Man from the Country, to compare what
he originally wrote, with recent events and their plain motive
powers.  Treating of the House of Representatives at Washington, he
wrote thus:


"Did I recognise in this assembly, a body of men, who, applying
themselves in a new world to correct some of the falsehoods and
vices of the old, purified the avenues to Public Life, paved the
dirty ways to Place and Power, debated and made laws for the Common
Good, and had no party but their Country?

"I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of
virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.
Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with
public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous
newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful
trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is,
that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal
types, which are the dragon's teeth of yore, in everything but
sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the
popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences:
such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most
depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of
the crowded hall.

"Did I see among them, the intelligence and refinement:  the true,
honest, patriotic heart of America?  Here and there, were drops of
its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of
desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay.
It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make
the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of
all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded
persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to
battle out their selfish views unchecked.  And thus this lowest of
all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other countries
would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the
laws, do here recoil the farthest from that degradation.

"That there are, among the representatives of the people in both
Houses, and among all parties, some men of high character and great
abilities, I need not say.  The foremost among those politicians who
are known in Europe, have been already described, and I see no
reason to depart from the rule I have laid down for my guidance, of
abstaining from all mention of individuals.  It will be sufficient
to add, that to the most favourable accounts that have been written
of them, I fully and most heartily subscribe; and that personal
intercourse and free communication have bred within me, not the
result predicted in the very doubtful proverb, but increased
admiration and respect."

Towards the end of his book, the Young Man from the Country thus
expressed himself concerning its people:


"They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and
affectionate.  Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their
warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of
these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an
educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of
friends.  I never was so won upon, as by this class; never yielded
up my full confidence and esteem so readily and pleasurably, as to
them; never can make again, in half a year, so many friends for whom
I seem to entertain the regard of half a life.

"These qualities are natural, I implicitly believe, to the whole
people.  That they are, however, sadly sapped and blighted in their
growth among the mass; and that there are influences at work which
endanger them still more, and give but little present promise of
their healthy restoration; is a truth that ought to be told.

"It is an essential part of every national character to pique itself
mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its
wisdom from their very exaggeration.  One great blemish in the
popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable
brood of evils, is Universal Distrust.  Yet the American citizen
plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently
dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce
it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great sagacity
and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and
independence.

"'You carry,' says the stranger, 'this jealousy and distrust into
every transaction of public life.  By repelling worthy men from your
legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates for the
suffrage, who, in their every act, disgrace your Institutions and
your people's choice.  It has rendered you so fickle, and so given
to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you
no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down
and dash it into fragments:  and this, because directly you reward a
benefactor, or a public-servant, you distrust him, merely because he
IS rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to find out, either
that you have been too bountiful in your acknowledgments, or he
remiss in his deserts.  Any man who attains a high place among you,
from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that
moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens,
although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a
life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed.  You will
strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence, however
fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow a whole caravan
of camels, if they be laden with unworthy doubts and mean
suspicions.  Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the
character of the governors or the governed, among you?'

"The answer is invariably the same:  'There's freedom of opinion
here, you know.  Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be
easily overreached.  That's how our people come to be suspicious.'

"Another prominent feature is the love of 'smart' dealing:  which
gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a
defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold
his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter:  though it
has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness
has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to
cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, could
have effected in a century.  The merits of a broken speculation, or
a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its or
his observance of the golden rule, 'Do as you would be done by', but
are considered with reference to their smartness.  I recollect, on
both occasions of our passing that ill-fated Cairo on the
Mississippi, remarking on the bad effects such gross deceits must
have when they exploded, in generating a want of confidence abroad,
and discouraging foreign investment:  but I was given to understand
that this was a very smart scheme by which a deal of money had been
made:  and that its smartest feature was, that they forgot these
things abroad, in a very short time, and speculated again, as freely
as ever.  The following dialogue I have held a hundred times:  'Is
it not a very disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so
should be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious
means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been
guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your citizens?  He is a
public nuisance, is he not?'  'Yes, sir.'  'A convicted liar?'
'Yes, sir.'  'He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?'  'Yes,
sir.'  'And he is utterly dishonourable, debased, and profligate?'
'Yes, sir.'  'In the name of wonder, then, what is his merit?'
'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'

"But the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this;
and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.

"Schools may he erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be
taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands;
colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be
diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through
the land with giant strides; but while the newspaper press of
America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral
improvement in that country is hopeless.  Year by year, it must and
will go back; year by year, the tone of public opinion must sink
lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of
less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of
the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more,
in the bad life of their degenerate child.

"Among the herd of journals which are published in the States, there
are some, the reader scarcely need be told, of character and credit.
From personal intercourse with accomplished gentlemen connected with
publications of this class, I have derived both pleasure and profit.
But the name of these is Few, and of the others Legion; and the
influence of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison
of the bad.

"Among the gentry of America; among the well-informed and moderate;
in the learned professions; at the bar and on the bench; there is,
as there can be, but one opinion, in reference to the vicious
character of these infamous journals.  It is sometimes contended--I
will not say strangely, for it is natural to seek excuses for such a
disgrace--that their influence is not so great as a visitor would
suppose.  I must be pardoned for saying that there is no warrant for
this plea, and that every fact and circumstance tends directly to
the opposite conclusion.

"When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can
climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, without
first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee before
this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from
its attacks; when any social confidence is left unbroken by it; or
any tie of social decency and honour is held in the least regard;
when any man in that Free Country has freedom of opinion, and
presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, without humble
reference to a censorship which, for its rampant ignorance and base
dishonesty, he utterly loaths and despises in his heart; when those
who most acutely feel its infamy and the reproach it casts upon the
nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare to set their
heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all men:  then, I
will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning
to their manly senses.  But while that Press has its evil eye in
every house, and its black hand in every appointment in the state,
from a president to a postman; while, with ribald slander for its
only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous
class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or they will not
read at all; so long must its odium be upon the country's head, and
so long must the evil it works, be plainly visible in the Republic."


The foregoing was written in the year eighteen hundred and forty-
two.  It rests with the reader to decide whether it has received any
confirmation, or assumed any colour of truth, in or about the year
eighteen hundred and sixty-two.



AN ENLIGHTENED CLERGYMAN



At various places in Suffolk (as elsewhere) penny readings take
place "for the instruction and amusement of the lower classes".
There is a little town in Suffolk called Eye, where the subject of
one of these readings was a tale (by Mr. Wilkie Collins) from the
last Christmas Number of this Journal, entitled "Picking up Waifs at
Sea".  It appears that the Eye gentility was shocked by the
introduction of this rude piece among the taste and musical glasses
of that important town, on which the eyes of Europe are notoriously
always fixed.  In particular, the feelings of the vicar's family
were outraged; and a Local Organ (say, the Tattlesnivel Bleater)
consequently doomed the said piece to everlasting oblivion, as being
of an "injurious tendency!"

When this fearful fact came to the knowledge of the unhappy writer
of the doomed tale in question, he covered his face with his robe,
previous to dying decently under the sharp steel of the
ecclesiastical gentility of the terrible town of Eye.  But the
discovery that he was not alone in his gloomy glory, revived him,
and he still lives.

For, at Stowmarket, in the aforesaid county of Suffolk, at another
of those penny readings, it was announced that a certain juvenile
sketch, culled from a volume of sketches (by Boz) and entitled "The
Bloomsbury Christening", would be read.  Hereupon, the clergyman of
that place took heart and pen, and addressed the following terrific
epistle to a gentleman bearing the very appropriate name of Gudgeon:


STOWMARKET VICARAGE, Feb. 25, 1861.

SIR,--My attention has been directed to a piece called "The
Bloomsbury Christening" which you propose to read this evening.
Without presuming to claim any interference in the arrangement of
the readings, I would suggest to you whether you have on this
occasion sufficiently considered the character of the composition
you have selected.  I quite appreciate the laudable motive of the
promoters of the readings to raise the moral tone amongst the
working class of the town and to direct this taste in a familiar and
pleasant manner.  "The Bloomsbury Christening" cannot possibly do
this.  It trifles with a sacred ordinance, and the language and
style, instead of improving the taste, has a direct tendency to
lower it.

I appeal to your right feeling whether it is desirable to give
publicity to that which must shock several of your audience, and
create a smile amongst others, to be indulged in only by violating
the conscientious scruples of their neighbours.

The ordinance which is here exposed to ridicule is one which is much
misunderstood and neglected amongst many families belonging to the
Church of England, and the mode in which it is treated in this
chapter cannot fail to appear as giving a sanction to, or at least
excusing, such neglect.

Although you are pledged to the public to give this subject, yet I
cannot but believe that they would fully justify your substitution
of it for another did they know the circumstances.  An abridgment
would only lessen the evil in a degree, as it is not only the style
of the writing but the subject itself which is objectionable.

Excuse me for troubling you, but I felt that, in common with
yourself, I have a grave responsibility in the matter, and I am most
truly yours,

T. S. COLES.
To Mr. J. Gudgeon.


It is really necessary to explain that this is not a bad joke.  It
is simply a bad fact.



RATHER A STRONG DOSE



"Doctor John Campbell, the minister of the Tabernacle Chapel,
Finsbury, and editor of the British Banner, etc., with that massive
vigour which distinguishes his style," did, we are informed by Mr.
Howitt, "deliver a verdict in the Banner, for November, 1852," of
great importance and favour to the Table-rapping cause.  We are not
informed whether the Public, sitting in judgment on the question,
reserved any point in this great verdict for subsequent
consideration; but the verdict would seem to have been regarded by a
perverse generation as not quite final, inasmuch as Mr. Howitt finds
it necessary to re-open the case, a round ten years afterwards, in
nine hundred and sixty-two stiff octavo pages, published by Messrs.
Longman and Company.

Mr. Howitt is in such a bristling temper on the Supernatural
subject, that we will not take the great liberty of arguing any
point with him.  But--with the view of assisting him to make
converts--we will inform our readers, on his conclusive authority,
what they are required to believe; premising what may rather
astonish them in connexion with their views of a certain historical
trifle, called The Reformation, that their present state of unbelief
is all the fault of Protestantism, and that "it is high time,
therefore, to protest against Protestantism".

They will please to believe, by way of an easy beginning, all the
stories of good and evil demons, ghosts, prophecies, communication
with spirits, and practice of magic, that ever obtained, or are said
to have ever obtained, in the North, in the South, in the East, in
the West, from the earliest and darkest ages, as to which we have
any hazy intelligence, real or supposititious, down to the yet
unfinished displacement of the red men in North America.  They will
please to believe that nothing in this wise was changed by the
fulfilment of our Saviour's mission upon earth; and further, that
what Saint Paul did, can be done again, and has been done again.  As
this is not much to begin with, they will throw in at this point
rejection of Faraday and Brewster, and "poor Paley", and implicit
acceptance of those shining lights, the Reverend Charles Beecher,
and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher ("one of the most vigorous and
eloquent preachers of America"), and the Reverend Adin Ballou.

Having thus cleared the way for a healthy exercise of faith, our
advancing readers will next proceed especially to believe in the old
story of the Drummer of Tedworth, in the inspiration of George Fox,
in "the spiritualism, prophecies, and provision" of Huntington the
coal-porter (him who prayed for the leather breeches which
miraculously fitted him), and even in the Cock Lane Ghost.  They
will please wind up, before fetching their breath, with believing
that there is a close analogy between rejection of any such plain
and proved facts as those contained in the whole foregoing
catalogue, and the opposition encountered by the inventors of
railways, lighting by gas, microscopes and telescopes, and
vaccination.  This stinging consideration they will always carry
rankling in their remorseful hearts as they advance.

As touching the Cock Lane Ghost, our conscience-stricken readers
will please particularly to reproach themselves for having ever
supposed that important spiritual manifestation to have been a gross
imposture which was thoroughly detected.  They will please to
believe that Dr. Johnson believed in it, and that, in Mr. Howitt's
words, he "appears to have had excellent reasons for his belief".
With a view to this end, the faithful will be so good as to
obliterate from their Boswells the following passage:  "Many of my
readers, I am convinced, are to this hour under an impression that
Johnson was thus foolishly deceived.  It will therefore surprise
them a good deal when they are informed upon undoubted authority
that Johnson was one of those by whom the imposture was detected.
The story had become so popular, that he thought it should be
investigated, and in this research he was assisted by the Rev. Dr.
Douglas, now Bishop of Salisbury, the great detector of impostures"-
-and therefore tremendously obnoxious to Mr. Howitt--"who informs me
that after the gentlemen who went and examined into the evidence
were satisfied of its falsity, Johnson wrote in their presence an
account of it, which was published in the newspapers and Gentleman's
Magazine, and undeceived the world".  But as there will still remain
another highly inconvenient passage in the Boswells of the true
believers, they must likewise be at the trouble of cancelling the
following also, referring to a later time:  "He (Johnson) expressed
great indignation at the imposture of the Cock Lane Ghost, and
related with much satisfaction how he had assisted in detecting the
cheat, and had published an account of it in the newspapers".

They will next believe (if they be, in the words of Captain Bobadil,
"so generously minded") in the transatlantic trance-speakers "who
professed to speak from direct inspiration", Mrs. Cora Hatch, Mrs.
Henderson, and Miss Emma Hardinge; and they will believe in those
eminent ladies having "spoken on Sundays to five hundred thousand
hearers"--small audiences, by the way, compared with the intelligent
concourse recently assembled in the city of New York, to do honour
to the Nuptials of General the Honourable T. Barnum Thumb.  At about
this stage of their spiritual education they may take the
opportunity of believing in "letters from a distinguished gentleman
of New York, in which the frequent appearance of the gentleman's
deceased wife and of Dr. Franklin, to him and other well-known
friends, are unquestionably unequalled in the annals of the
marvellous".  Why these modest appearances should seem at all out of
the common way to Mr. Howitt (who would be in a state of flaming
indignation if we thought them so), we could not imagine, until we
found on reading further, "it is solemnly stated that the witnesses
have not only seen but touched these spirits, and handled the
clothes and hair of Franklin".  Without presuming to go Mr. Howitt's
length of considering this by any means a marvellous experience, we
yet venture to confess that it has awakened in our mind many
interesting speculations touching the present whereabout in space,
of the spirits of Mr. Howitt's own departed boots and hats.

The next articles of belief are Belief in the moderate figures of
"thirty thousand media in the United States in 1853"; and in two
million five hundred thousand spiritualists in the same country of
composed minds, in 1855, "professing to have arrived at their
convictions of spiritual communication from personal experience";
and in "an average rate of increase of three hundred thousand per
annum", still in the same country of calm philosophers.  Belief in
spiritual knockings, in all manner of American places, and, among
others, in the house of "a Doctor Phelps at Stratford, Connecticut,
a man of the highest character for intelligence", says Mr. Howitt,
and to whom we willingly concede the possession of far higher
intelligence than was displayed by his spiritual knocker, in
"frequently cutting to pieces the clothes of one of his boys", and
in breaking "seventy-one panes of glass"--unless, indeed, the
knocker, when in the body, was connected with the tailoring and
glazing interests.  Belief in immaterial performers playing (in the
dark though:  they are obstinate about its being in the dark) on
material instruments of wood, catgut, brass, tin, and parchment.
Your belief is further requested in "the Kentucky Jerks".  The
spiritual achievements thus euphoniously denominated "appear", says
Mr. Howitt, "to have been of a very disorderly kind".  It appears
that a certain Mr. Doke, a Presbyterian clergyman, "was first seized
by the jerks", and the jerks laid hold of Mr. Doke in that
unclerical way and with that scant respect for his cloth, that they
"twitched him about in a most extraordinary manner, often when in
the pulpit, and caused him to shout aloud, and run out of the pulpit
into the woods, screaming like a madman.  When the fit was over, he
returned calmly to his pulpit and finished the service."  The
congregation having waited, we presume, and edified themselves with
the distant bellowings of Doke in the woods, until he came back
again, a little warm and hoarse, but otherwise in fine condition.
"People were often seized at hotels, and at table would, on lifting
a glass to drink, jerk the liquor to the ceiling; ladies would at
the breakfast-table suddenly be compelled to throw aloft their
coffee, and frequently break the cup and saucer."  A certain
venturesome clergyman vowed that he would preach down the Jerks,
"but he was seized in the midst of his attempt, and made so
ridiculous that he withdrew himself from further notice"--an example
much to be commended.  That same favoured land of America has been
particularly favoured in the development of "innumerable mediums",
and Mr. Howitt orders you to believe in Daniel Dunglas Home, Andrew
Davis Jackson, and Thomas L. Harris, as "the three most remarkable,
or most familiar, on this side of the Atlantic".  Concerning Mr.
Home, the articles of belief (besides removal of furniture) are,
That through him raps have been given and communications made from
deceased friends.  That "his hand has been seized by spirit
influence, and rapid communications written out, of a surprising
character to those to whom they were addressed".  That at his
bidding, "spirit hands have appeared which have been seen, felt, and
recognised frequently, by persons present, as those of deceased
friends".  That he has been frequently lifted up and carried,
floating "as it were" through a room, near the ceiling.  That in
America, "all these phenomena have displayed themselves in greater
force than here"--which we have not the slightest doubt of.  That he
is "the planter of spiritualism all over Europe".  That "by
circumstances that no man could have devised, he became the guest of
the Emperor of the French, of the King of Holland, of the Czar of
Russia, and of many lesser princes".  That he returned from "this
unpremeditated missionary tour", "endowed with competence"; but not
before, "at the Tuileries, on one occasion when the emperor,
empress, a distinguished lady, and himself only were sitting at
table, a hand appeared, took up a pen, and wrote, in a strong and
well-known character, the word Napoleon.  The hand was then
successively presented to the several personages of the party to
kiss."  The stout believer, having disposed of Mr. Home, and rested
a little, will then proceed to believe in Andrew Davis Jackson, or
Andrew Jackson Davis (Mr. Howitt, having no Medium at hand to settle
this difference and reveal the right name of the seer, calls him by
both names), who merely "beheld all the essential natures of things,
saw the interior of men and animals, as perfectly as their exterior;
and described them in language so correct, that the most able
technologists could not surpass him.  He pointed out the proper
remedies for all the complaints, and the shops where they were to be
obtained";--in the latter respect appearing to hail from an
advertising circle, as we conceive.  It was also in this gentleman's
limited department to "see the metals in the earth", and to have
"the most distant regions and their various productions present
before him".  Having despatched this tough case, the believer will
pass on to Thomas L. Harris, and will swallow HIM easily, together
with "whole epics" of his composition; a certain work "of scarcely
less than Miltonic grandeur", called The Lyric of the Golden Age--a
lyric pretty nigh as long as one of Mr. Howitt's volumes--dictated
by Mr. (not Mrs.) Harris to the publisher in ninety-four hours; and
several extempore sermons, possessing the remarkably lucid property
of being "full, unforced, out-gushing, unstinted, and absorbing".
The candidate for examination in pure belief, will then pass on to
the spirit-photography department; this, again, will be found in so-
favoured America, under the superintendence of Medium Mumler, a
photographer of Boston:  who was "astonished" (though, on Mr.
Howitt's showing, he surely ought not to have been) "on taking a
photograph of himself, to find also by his side the figure of a
young girl, which he immediately recognised as that of a deceased
relative.  The circumstance made a great excitement.  Numbers of
persons rushed to his rooms, and many have found deceased friends
photographed with themselves."  (Perhaps Mr. Mumler, too, may become
"endowed with competence" in time.  Who knows?)  Finally, the true
believers in the gospel according to Howitt, have, besides, but to
pin their faith on "ladies who see spirits habitually", on ladies
who KNOW they have a tendency to soar in the air on sufficient
provocation, and on a few other gnats to be taken after their
camels, and they shall be pronounced by Mr. Howitt not of the
stereotyped class of minds, and not partakers of "the astonishing
ignorance of the press", and shall receive a first-class certificate
of merit.

But before they pass through this portal into the Temple of Serene
Wisdom, we, halting blind and helpless on the steps, beg to suggest
to them what they must at once and for ever disbelieve.  They must
disbelieve that in the dark times, when very few were versed in what
are now the mere recreations of Science, and when those few formed a
priesthood-class apart, any marvels were wrought by the aid of
concave mirrors and a knowledge of the properties of certain odours
and gases, although the self-same marvels could be reproduced before
their eyes at the Polytechnic Institution, Regent Street, London,
any day in the year.  They must by no means believe that Conjuring
and Ventriloquism are old trades.  They must disbelieve all
Philosophical Transactions containing the records of painful and
careful inquiry into now familiar disorders of the senses of seeing
and hearing, and into the wonders of somnambulism, epilepsy,
hysteria, miasmatic influence, vegetable poisons derived by whole
communities from corrupted air, diseased imitation, and moral
infection.  They must disbelieve all such awkward leading cases as
the case of the Woodstock Commissioners and their man, and the case
of the Identity of the Stockwell Ghost, with the maid-servant.  They
must disbelieve the vanishing of champion haunted houses (except,
indeed, out of Mr. Howitt's book), represented to have been closed
and ruined for years, before one day's inquiry by four gentlemen
associated with this journal, and one hour's reference to the Local
Rate-books.  They must disbelieve all possibility of a human
creature on the last verge of the dark bridge from Life to Death,
being mysteriously able, in occasional cases, so to influence the
mind of one very near and dear, as vividly to impress that mind with
some disturbed sense of the solemn change impending.  They must
disbelieve the possibility of the lawful existence of a class of
intellects which, humbly conscious of the illimitable power of GOD
and of their own weakness and ignorance, never deny that He can
cause the souls of the dead to revisit the earth, or that He may
have caused the souls of the dead to revisit the earth, or that He
can cause any awful or wondrous thing to be; but to deny the
likelihood of apparitions or spirits coming here upon the stupidest
of bootless errands, and producing credentials tantamount to a
solicitation of our vote and interest and next proxy, to get them
into the Asylum for Idiots.  They must disbelieve the right of
Christian people who do NOT protest against Protestantism, but who
hold it to be a barrier against the darkest superstitions that can
enslave the soul, to guard with jealousy all approaches tending down
to Cock Lane Ghosts and suchlike infamous swindles, widely degrading
when widely believed in; and they must disbelieve that such people
have the right to know, and that it is their duty to know, wonder-
workers by their fruits, and to test miracle-mongers by the tests of
probability, analogy, and common sense.  They must disbelieve all
rational explanations of thoroughly proved experiences (only) which
appear supernatural, derived from the average experience and study
of the visible world.  They must disbelieve the speciality of the
Master and the Disciples, and that it is a monstrosity to test the
wonders of show-folk by the same touchstone.  Lastly, they must
disbelieve that one of the best accredited chapters in the history
of mankind is the chapter that records the astonishing deceits
continually practised, with no object or purpose but the distorted
pleasure of deceiving.

We have summed up a few--not nearly all--of the articles of belief
and disbelief to which Mr. Howitt most arrogantly demands an
implicit adherence.  To uphold these, he uses a book as a Clown in a
Pantomime does, and knocks everybody on the head with it who comes
in his way.  Moreover, he is an angrier personage than the Clown,
and does not experimentally try the effect of his red-hot poker on
your shins, but straightway runs you through the body and soul with
it.  He is always raging to tell you that if you are not Howitt, you
are Atheist and Anti-Christ.  He is the sans-culotte of the
Spiritual Revolution, and will not hear of your accepting this point
and rejecting that;--down your throat with them all, one and
indivisible, at the point of the pike; No Liberty, Totality,
Fraternity, or Death!

Without presuming to question that "it is high time to protest
against Protestantism" on such very substantial grounds as Mr.
Howitt sets forth, we do presume to think that it is high time to
protest against Mr. Howitt's spiritualism, as being a little in
excess of the peculiar merit of Thomas L. Harris's sermons, and
somewhat TOO "full, out-gushing, unstinted, and absorbing".



THE MARTYR MEDIUM



"After the valets, the master!" is Mr. Fechter's rallying cry in the
picturesque romantic drama which attracts all London to the Lyceum
Theatre.  After the worshippers and puffers of Mr. Daniel Dunglas
Home, the spirit medium, comes Mr. Daniel Dunglas Home himself, in
one volume.  And we must, for the honour of Literature, plainly
express our great surprise and regret that he comes arm-in-arm with
such good company as Messrs. Longman and Company.

We have already summed up Mr. Home's demands on the public capacity
of swallowing, as sounded through the war-denouncing trumpet of Mr.
Howitt, and it is not our intention to revive the strain as
performed by Mr. Home on his own melodious instrument.  We notice,
by the way, that in that part of the Fantasia where the hand of the
first Napoleon is supposed to be reproduced, recognised, and kissed,
at the Tuileries, Mr. Home subdues the florid effects one might have
expected after Mr. Howitt's execution, and brays in an extremely
general manner.  And yet we observe Mr. Home to be in other things
very reliant on Mr. Howitt, of whom he entertains as gratifying an
opinion as Mr. Howitt entertains of him:  dwelling on his "deep
researches into this subject", and of his "great work now ready for
the press", and of his "eloquent and forcible" advocacy, and eke of
his "elaborate and almost exhaustive work", which Mr. Home trusts
will be "extensively read".  But, indeed, it would seem to be the
most reliable characteristic of the Dear Spirits, though very
capricious in other particulars, that they always form their circles
into what may be described, in worldly terms, as A Mutual Admiration
and Complimentation Company (Limited).

Mr. Home's book is entitled Incidents in My Life.  We will extract a
dozen sample passages from it, as variations on and phrases of
harmony in, the general strain for the Trumpet, which we have
promised not to repeat.


1.  MR. HOME IS SUPERNATURALLY NURSED


"I cannot remember when first I became subject to the curious
phenomena which have now for so long attended me, but my aunt and
others have told me that when I was a baby my cradle was frequently
rocked, as if some kind guardian spirit was attending me in my
slumbers."


2.  DISRESPECTFUL CONDUCT OF MR. HOME'S AUNT NEVERTHELESS


"In her uncontrollable anger she seized a chair and threw it at me."


3.  PUNISHMENT OF MR. HOME'S AUNT


"Upon one occasion as the table was being thus moved about of
itself, my aunt brought the family Bible, and placing it on the
table, said, 'There, that will soon drive the devils away'; but to
her astonishment the table only moved in a more lively manner, as if
pleased to bear such a burden."  (We believe this is constantly
observed in pulpits and church reading desks, which are invariably
lively.)  "Seeing this she was greatly incensed, and determined to
stop it, she angrily placed her whole weight on the table, and was
actually lifted up with it bodily from the floor."


4. TRIUMPHANT EFFECT OF THIS DISCIPLINE ON MR. HOME'S AUNT


"And she felt it a duty that I should leave her house, and which I
did."


5.  MR. HOME'S MISSION


It was communicated to him by the spirit of his mother, in the
following terms:  "Daniel, fear not, my child, God is with you, and
who shall be against you?  Seek to do good:  be truthful and truth-
loving, and you will prosper, my child.  Yours is a glorious
mission--you will convince the infidel, cure the sick, and console
the weeping."  It is a coincidence that another eminent man, with
several missions, heard a voice from the Heavens blessing him, when
he also was a youth, and saying, "You will be rewarded, my son, in
time".  This Medium was the celebrated Baron Munchausen, who relates
the experience in the opening of the second chapter of the incidents
in HIS life.


6.  MODEST SUCCESS OF MR. HOME'S MISSION


"Certainly these phenomena, whether from God or from the devil, have
in ten years caused more converts to the great truths of immortality
and angel communion, with all that flows from these great facts,
than all the sects in Christendom have made during the same period."


7.  WHAT THE FIRST COMPOSERS SAY OF THE SPIRIT-MUSIC, TO MR. HOME


"As to the music, it has been my good fortune to be on intimate
terms with some of the first composers of the day, and more than one
of them have said of such as they have heard, that it is such music
as only angels could make, and no man could write it."

These "first composers" are not more particularly named.  We shall
therefore be happy to receive and file at the office of this
Journal, the testimonials in the foregoing terms of Dr. Sterndale
Bennett, Mr. Balfe, Mr. Macfarren, Mr. Benedict, Mr. Vincent
Wallace, Signor Costa, M. Auber, M. Gounod, Signor Rossini, and
Signor Verdi.  We shall also feel obliged to Mr. Alfred Mellon, who
is no doubt constantly studying this wonderful music, under the
Medium's auspices, if he will note on paper, from memory, say a
single sheet of the same.  Signor Giulio Regondi will then perform
it, as correctly as a mere mortal can, on the Accordion, at the next
ensuing concert of the Philharmonic Society; on which occasion the
before-mentioned testimonials will be conspicuously displayed in the
front of the orchestra.


8.  MR. HOME'S MIRACULOUS INFANT


"On the 26th April, old style, or 8th May, according to our style,
at seven in the evening, and as the snow was fast falling, our
little boy was born at the town house, situate on the Gagarines
Quay, in St. Petersburg, where we were still staying.  A few hours
after his birth, his mother, the nurse, and I heard for several
hours the warbling of a bird as if singing over him.  Also that
night, and for two or three nights afterwards, a bright starlike
light, which was clearly visible from the partial darkness of the
room, in which there was only a night-lamp burning, appeared several
times directly I over its head, where it remained for some moments,
and then slowly moved in the direction of the door, where it
disappeared.  This was also seen by each of us at the same time.
The light was more condensed than those which have been so often
seen in my presence upon previous and subsequent occasions.  It was
brighter and more distinctly globular.  I do not believe that it
came through my mediumship, but rather through that of the child,
who has manifested on several occasions the presence of the gift.  I
do not like to allude to such a matter, but as there are more
strange things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of, even in my
philosophy, I do not feel myself at liberty to omit stating, that
during the latter part of my wife's pregnancy, we thought it better
that she should not join in Seances, because it was found that
whenever the rappings occurred in the room, a simultaneous movement
of the child was distinctly felt, perfectly in unison with the
sounds.  When there were three sounds, three movements were felt,
and so on, and when five sounds were heard, which is generally the
call for the alphabet, she felt the five internal movements, and she
would frequently, when we were mistaken in the latter, correct us
from what the child indicated."

We should ask pardon of our readers for sullying our paper with this
nauseous matter, if without it they could adequately understand what
Mr. Home's book is.


9.  CAGLIOSTRO'S SPIRIT CALLS ON MR. HOME


Prudently avoiding the disagreeable question of his giving himself,
both in this state of existence and in his spiritual circle, a name
to which he never had any pretensions whatever, and likewise
prudently suppressing any reference to his amiable weakness as a
swindler and an infamous trafficker in his own wife, the guileless
Mr. Balsamo delivered, in a "distinct voice", this distinct
celestial utterance--unquestionably punctuated in a supernatural
manner:  "My power was that of a mesmerist, but all-misunderstood by
those about me, my biographers have even done me injustice, but I
care not for the untruths of earth".


10.  ORACULAR STATE OF MR. HOME


"After various manifestations, Mr. Home went into the trance, and
addressing a person present, said, 'You ask what good are such
trivial manifestations, such as rapping, table-moving, etc.?  God is
a better judge than we are what is fitted for humanity, immense
results may spring from trivial things.  The steam from a kettle is
a small thing, but look at the locomotive!  The electric spark from
the back of a cat is a small thing, but see the wonders of
electricity!  The raps are small things, but their results will lead
you to the Spirit-World, and to eternity!  Why should great results
spring from such small causes?  Christ was born in a manger, he was
not born a King.  When you tell me why he was born in a manger, I
will tell you why these manifestations, so trivial, so undignified
as they appear to you, have been appointed to convince the world of
the truth of spiritualism.'"

Wonderful!  Clearly direct Inspiration!--And yet, perhaps, hardly
worth the trouble of going "into the trance" for, either.  Amazing
as the revelation is, we seem to have heard something like it from
more than one personage who was wide awake.  A quack doctor, in an
open barouche (attended by a barrel-organ and two footmen in brass
helmets), delivered just such another address within our hearing,
outside a gate of Paris, not two months ago.


11.  THE TESTIMONY OF MR. HOME'S BOOTS


"The lady of the house turned to me and said abruptly, 'Why, you are
sitting in the air'; and on looking, we found that the chair
remained in its place, but that I was elevated two or three inches
above it, and my feet not touching the floor.  This may show how
utterly unconscious I am at times to the sensation of levitation.
As is usual, when I had not got above the level of the heads of
those about me, and when they change their position much--as they
frequently do in looking wistfully at such a phenomenon--I came down
again, but not till I had remained so raised about half a minute
from the time of its being first seen.  I was now impressed to leave
the table, and was soon carried to the lofty ceiling.  The Count de
B- left his place at the table, and coming under where I was, said,
'Now, young Home, come and let me touch your feet.'  I told him I
had no volition in the matter, but perhaps the spirits would kindly
allow me to come down to him.  They did so, by floating me down to
him, and my feet were soon in his outstretched hands.  He seized my
boots, and now I was again elevated, he holding tightly, and pulling
at my feet, till the boots I wore, which had elastic sides, came off
and remained in his hands."


12.  THE UNCOMBATIVE NATURE OF MR. HOME


As there is a maudlin complaint in this book, about men of Science
being hard upon "the 'Orphan' Home", and as the "gentle and
uncombative nature" of this Medium in a martyred point of view is
pathetically commented on by the anonymous literary friend who
supplies him with an introduction and appendix--rather at odds with
Mr. Howitt, who is so mightily triumphant about the same Martyr's
reception by crowned heads, and about the competence he has become
endowed with--we cull from Mr. Home's book one or two little
illustrative flowers.  Sir David Brewster (a pestilent unbeliever)
"has come before the public in few matters which have brought more
shame upon him than his conduct and assertions on this occasion, in
which he manifested not only a disregard for truth, but also a
disloyalty to scientific observation, and to the use of his own
eyesight and natural faculties".  The same unhappy Sir David
Brewster's "character may be the better known, not only for his
untruthful dealing with this subject, but also in his own domain of
science in which the same unfaithfulness to truth will be seen to be
the characteristic of his mind".  Again, he "is really not a man
over whom victory is any honour".  Again, "not only he, but
Professor Faraday have had time and ample leisure to regret that
they should have so foolishly pledged themselves", etc.  A Faraday a
fool in the sight of a Home!  That unjust judge and whited wall,
Lord Brougham, has his share of this Martyr Medium's
uncombativeness.  "In order that he might not be compelled to deny
Sir David's statements, he found it necessary that he should be
silent, and I have some reason to complain that his Lordship
preferred sacrificing me to his desire not to immolate his friend."
M. Arago also came off with very doubtful honours from a wrestle
with the uncombative Martyr; who is perfectly clear (and so are we,
let us add) that scientific men are not the men for his purpose.  Of
course, he is the butt of "utter and acknowledged ignorance", and of
"the most gross and foolish statements", and of "the unjust and
dishonest", and of "the press-gang", and of crowds of other alien
and combative adjectives, participles, and substantives.

Nothing is without its use, and even this odious book may do some
service.  Not because it coolly claims for the writer and his
disciples such powers as were wielded by the Saviour and the
Apostles; not because it sees no difference between twelve table
rappers in these days, and "twelve fishermen" in those; not because
it appeals for precedents to statements extracted from the most
ignorant and wretched of mankind, by cruel torture, and constantly
withdrawn when the torture was withdrawn; not because it sets forth
such a strange confusion of ideas as is presented by one of the
faithful when, writing of a certain sprig of geranium handed by an
invisible hand, he adds in ecstasies, "WHICH WE HAVE PLANTED AND IT
IS GROWING, SO THAT IT IS NO DELUSION, NO FAIRY MONEY TURNED INTO
DROSS OR LEAVES"--as if it followed that the conjuror's half-crowns
really did become invisible and in that state fly, because he
afterwards cuts them out of a real orange; or as if the conjuror's
pigeon, being after the discharge of his gun, a real live pigeon
fluttering on the target, must therefore conclusively be a pigeon,
fired, whole, living and unshattered, out of the gun!--not because
of the exposure of any of these weaknesses, or a thousand such, are
these moving incidents in the life of the Martyr Medium, and similar
productions, likely to prove useful, but because of their uniform
abuse of those who go to test the reality of these alleged
phenomena, and who come away incredulous.  There is an old homely
proverb concerning pitch and its adhesive character, which we hope
this significant circumstance may impress on many minds.  The writer
of these lines has lately heard overmuch touching young men of
promise in the imaginative arts, "towards whom" Martyr Mediums
assisting at evening parties feel themselves "drawn".  It may be a
hint to such young men to stick to their own drawing, as being of a
much better kind, and to leave Martyr Mediums alone in their glory.

As there is a good deal in these books about "lying spirits", we
will conclude by putting a hypothetical case.  Supposing that a
Medium (Martyr or otherwise) were established for a time in the
house of an English gentleman abroad; say, somewhere in Italy.
Supposing that the more marvellous the Medium became, the more
suspicious of him the lady of the house became.  Supposing that the
lady, her distrust once aroused, were particularly struck by the
Medium's exhibiting a persistent desire to commit her, somehow or
other, to the disclosure of the manner of the death, to him unknown,
of a certain person.  Supposing that she at length resolved to test
the Medium on this head, and, therefore, on a certain evening
mentioned a wholly supposititious manner of death (which was not the
real manner of death, nor anything at all like it) within the range
of his listening ears.  And supposing that a spirit presently
afterwards rapped out its presence, claiming to be the spirit of
that deceased person, and claiming to have departed this life in
that supposititious way.  Would that be a lying spirit?  Or would it
he a something else, tainting all that Medium's statements and
suppressions, even if they were not in themselves of a manifestly
outrageous character?



THE LATE MR. STANFIELD



Every Artist, be he writer, painter, musician, or actor, must bear
his private sorrows as he best can, and must separate them from the
exercise of his public pursuit.  But it sometimes happens, in
compensation, that his private loss of a dear friend represents a
loss on the part of the whole community.  Then he may, without
obtrusion of his individuality, step forth to lay his little wreath
upon that dear friend's grave.

On Saturday, the eighteenth of this present month, Clarkson
Stanfield died.  On the afternoon of that day, England lost the
great marine painter of whom she will be boastful ages hence; the
National Historian of her speciality, the Sea; the man famous in all
countries for his marvellous rendering of the waves that break upon
her shores, of her ships and seamen, of her coasts and skies, of her
storms and sunshine, of the many marvels of the deep.  He who holds
the oceans in the hollow of His hand had given, associated with
them, wonderful gifts into his keeping; he had used them well
through threescore and fourteen years; and, on the afternoon of that
spring day, relinquished them for ever.

It is superfluous to record that the painter of "The Battle of
Trafalgar", of the "Victory being towed into Gibraltar with the body
of Nelson on Board", of "The Morning after the Wreck", of "The
Abandoned", of fifty more such works, died in his seventy-fourth
year, "Mr." Stanfield.--He was an Englishman.

Those grand pictures will proclaim his powers while paint and canvas
last.  But the writer of these words had been his friend for thirty
years; and when, a short week or two before his death, he laid that
once so skilful hand upon the writer's breast and told him they
would meet again, "but not here", the thoughts of the latter turned,
for the time, so little to his noble genius, and so much to his
noble nature!

He was the soul of frankness, generosity, and simplicity.  The most
genial, the most affectionate, the most loving, and the most lovable
of men.  Success had never for an instant spoiled him.  His interest
in the Theatre as an Institution--the best picturesqueness of which
may be said to be wholly due to him--was faithful to the last.  His
belief in a Play, his delight in one, the ease with which it moved
him to tears or to laughter, were most remarkable evidences of the
heart he must have put into his old theatrical work, and of the
thorough purpose and sincerity with which it must have been done.
The writer was very intimately associated with him in some amateur
plays; and day after day, and night after night, there were the same
unquenchable freshness, enthusiasm, and impressibility in him,
though broken in health, even then.

No Artist can ever have stood by his art with a quieter dignity than
he always did.  Nothing would have induced him to lay it at the feet
of any human creature.  To fawn, or to toady, or to do undeserved
homage to any one, was an absolute impossibility with him.  And yet
his character was so nicely balanced that he was the last man in the
world to be suspected of self-assertion, and his modesty was one of
his most special qualities.

He was a charitable, religious, gentle, truly good man.  A genuine
man, incapable of pretence or of concealment.  He had been a sailor
once; and all the best characteristics that are popularly attributed
to sailors, being his, and being in him refined by the influences of
his Art, formed a whole not likely to be often seen.  There is no
smile that the writer can recall, like his; no manner so naturally
confiding and so cheerfully engaging.  When the writer saw him for
the last time on earth, the smile and the manner shone out once
through the weakness, still:  the bright unchanging Soul within the
altered face and form.

No man was ever held in higher respect by his friends, and yet his
intimate friends invariably addressed him and spoke of him by a pet
name.  It may need, perhaps, the writer's memory and associations to
find in this a touching expression of his winning character, his
playful smile, and pleasant ways.  "You know Mrs. Inchbald's story,
Nature and Art?" wrote Thomas Hood, once, in a letter:  "What a fine
Edition of Nature and Art is Stanfield!"

Gone!  And many and many a dear old day gone with him!  But their
memories remain.  And his memory will not soon fade out, for he has
set his mark upon the restless waters, and his fame will long be
sounded in the roar of the sea.



A SLIGHT QUESTION OF FACT



It is never well for the public interest that the originator of any
social reform should be soon forgotten.  Further, it is neither
wholesome nor right (being neither generous nor just) that the merit
of his work should be gradually transferred elsewhere.

Some few weeks ago, our contemporary, the Pall Mall Gazette, in
certain strictures on our Theatres which we are very far indeed from
challenging, remarked on the first effectual discouragement of an
outrage upon decency which the lobbies and upper-boxes of even our
best Theatres habitually paraded within the last twenty or thirty
years.  From those remarks it might appear as though no such Manager
of Covent Garden or Drury Lane as Mr. Macready had ever existed.

It is a fact beyond all possibility of question, that Mr. Macready,
on assuming the management of Covent Garden Theatre in 1837, did
instantly set himself, regardless of precedent and custom down to
that hour obtaining, rigidly to suppress this shameful thing, and
did rigidly suppress and crush it during his whole management of
that theatre, and during his whole subsequent management of Drury
Lane.  That he did so, as certainly without favour as without fear;
that he did so, against his own immediate interests; that he did so,
against vexations and oppositions which might have cooled the ardour
of a less earnest man, or a less devoted artist; can be better known
to no one than the writer of the present words, whose name stands at
the head of these pages.



LANDOR'S LIFE



Prefixed to the second volume of Mr. Forster's admirable biography
of Walter Savage Landor, {1} is an engraving from a portrait of that
remarkable man when seventy-seven years of age, by Boxall.  The
writer of these lines can testify that the original picture is a
singularly good likeness, the result of close and subtle observation
on the part of the painter; but, for this very reason, the engraving
gives a most inadequate idea of the merit of the picture and the
character of the man.

From the engraving, the arms and hands are omitted.  In the picture,
they are, as they were in nature, indispensable to a correct reading
of the vigorous face.  The arms were very peculiar.  They were
rather short, and were curiously restrained and checked in their
action at the elbows; in the action of the hands, even when
separately clenched, there was the same kind of pause, and a
noticeable tendency to relaxation on the part of the thumb.  Let the
face be never so intense or fierce, there was a commentary of
gentleness in the hands, essential to be taken along with it.  Like
Hamlet, Landor would speak daggers, but use none.  In the expression
of his hands, though angrily closed, there was always gentleness and
tenderness; just as when they were open, and the handsome old
gentleman would wave them with a little courtly flourish that sat
well upon him, as he recalled some classic compliment that he had
rendered to some reigning Beauty, there was a chivalrous grace about
them such as pervades his softer verses.  Thus the fictitious Mr.
Boythorn (to whom we may refer without impropriety in this
connexion, as Mr. Forster does) declaims "with unimaginable energy"
the while his bird is "perched upon his thumb", and he "softly
smooths its feathers with his forefinger".

From the spirit of Mr. Forster's Biography these characteristic
hands are never omitted, and hence (apart from its literary merits)
its great value.  As the same masterly writer's Life and Times of
Oliver Goldsmith is a generous and yet conscientious picture of a
period, so this is a not less generous and yet conscientious picture
of one life; of a life, with all its aspirations, achievements, and
disappointments; all its capabilities, opportunities, and
irretrievable mistakes.  It is essentially a sad book, and herein
lies proof of its truth and worth.  The life of almost any man
possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself; and this
book enables us not only to see its subject, but to be its subject,
if we will.

Mr. Forster is of opinion that "Landor's fame very surely awaits
him".  This point admitted or doubted, the value of the book remains
the same.  It needs not to know his works (otherwise than through
his biographer's exposition), it needs not to have known himself, to
find a deep interest in these pages.  More or less of their warning
is in every conscience; and some admiration of a fine genius, and of
a great, wild, generous nature, incapable of mean self-extenuation
or dissimulation--if unhappily incapable of self-repression too--
should be in every breast.  "There may be still living many
persons", Walter Landor's brother, Robert, writes to Mr. Forster of
this book, "who would contradict any narrative of yours in which the
best qualities were remembered, the worst forgotten."  Mr. Forster's
comment is:  "I had not waited for this appeal to resolve, that, if
this memoir were written at all, it should contain, as far as might
lie within my power, a fair statement of the truth".  And this
eloquent passage of truth immediately follows:  "Few of his
infirmities are without something kindly or generous about them; and
we are not long in discovering there is nothing so wildly incredible
that he will not himself in perfect good faith believe.  When he
published his first book of poems on quitting Oxford, the profits
were to be reserved for a distressed clergyman.  When he published
his Latin poems, the poor of Leipzig were to have the sum they
realised.  When his comedy was ready to be acted, a Spaniard who had
sheltered him at Castro was to be made richer by it.  When he
competed for the prize of the Academy of Stockholm, it was to go to
the poor of Sweden.  If nobody got anything from any one of these
enterprises, the fault at all events was not his.  With his
extraordinary power of forgetting disappointments, he was prepared
at each successive failure to start afresh, as if each had been a
triumph.  I shall have to delineate this peculiarity as strongly in
the last half as in the first half of his life, and it was certainly
an amiable one.  He was ready at all times to set aside, out of his
own possessions, something for somebody who might please him for the
time; and when frailties of temper and tongue are noted, this other
eccentricity should not be omitted.  He desired eagerly the love as
well as the good opinion of those whom for the time he esteemed, and
no one was more affectionate while under such influences.  It is not
a small virtue to feel such genuine pleasure, as he always did in
giving and receiving pleasure.  His generosity, too, was bestowed
chiefly on those who could make small acknowledgment in thanks and
no return in kind."

Some of his earlier contemporaries may have thought him a vain man.
Most assuredly he was not, in the common acceptation of the term.  A
vain man has little or no admiration to bestow upon competitors.
Landor had an inexhaustible fund.  He thought well of his writings,
or he would not have preserved them.  He said and wrote that he
thought well of them, because that was his mind about them, and he
said and wrote his mind.  He was one of the few men of whom you
might always know the whole:  of whom you might always know the
worst, as well as the best.  He had no reservations or duplicities.
"No, by Heaven!" he would say ("with unimaginable energy"), if any
good adjective were coupled with him which he did not deserve:  "I
am nothing of the kind.  I wish I were; but I don't deserve the
attribute, and I never did, and I never shall!"  His intense
consciousness of himself never led to his poorly excusing himself,
and seldom to his violently asserting himself.  When he told some
little story of his bygone social experiences, in Florence, or where
not, as he was fond of doing, it took the innocent form of making
all the interlocutors, Landors.  It was observable, too, that they
always called him "Mr. Landor"--rather ceremoniously and
submissively.  There was a certain "Caro Pedre Abete Marina"--
invariably so addressed in these anecdotes--who figured through a
great many of them, and who always expressed himself in this
deferential tone.

Mr. Forster writes of Landor's character thus:


"A man must be judged, at first, by what he says and does.  But with
him such extravagance as I have referred to was little more than the
habitual indulgence (on such themes) of passionate feelings and
language, indecent indeed but utterly purposeless; the mere
explosion of wrath provoked by tyranny or cruelty; the
irregularities of an overheated steam-engine too weak for its own
vapour.  It is very certain that no one could detest oppression more
truly than Landor did in all seasons and times; and if no one
expressed that scorn, that abhorrence of tyranny and fraud, more
hastily or more intemperately, all his fire and fury signified
really little else than ill-temper too easily provoked.  Not to
justify or excuse such language, but to explain it, this
consideration is urged.  If not uniformly placable, Landor was
always compassionate.  He was tender-hearted rather than bloody-
minded at all times, and upon only the most partial acquaintance
with his writings could other opinion be formed.  A completer
knowledge of them would satisfy any one that he had as little real
disposition to kill a king as to kill a mouse.  In fact there is not
a more marked peculiarity in his genius than the union with its
strength of a most uncommon gentleness, and in the personal ways of
the man this was equally manifest."--Vol. i. p. 496.


Of his works, thus:


"Though his mind was cast in the antique mould, it had opened itself
to every kind of impression through a long and varied life; he has
written with equal excellence in both poetry and prose, which can
hardly be said of any of his contemporaries; and perhaps the single
epithet by which his books would be best described is that reserved
exclusively for books not characterised only by genius, but also by
special individuality.  They are unique.  Having possessed them, we
should miss them.  Their place would be supplied by no others.  They
have that about them, moreover, which renders it almost certain that
they will frequently be resorted to in future time.  There are none
in the language more quotable.  Even where impulsiveness and want of
patience have left them most fragmentary, this rich compensation is
offered to the reader.  There is hardly a conceivable subject, in
life or literature, which they do not illustrate by striking
aphorisms, by concise and profound observations, by wisdom ever
applicable to the deeds of men, and by wit as available for their
enjoyment.  Nor, above all, will there anywhere be found a more
pervading passion for liberty, a fiercer hatred of the base, a wider
sympathy with the wronged and the oppressed, or help more ready at
all times for those who fight at odds and disadvantage against the
powerful and the fortunate, than in the writings of Walter Savage
Landor."--Last page of second volume.


The impression was strong upon the present writer's mind, as on Mr.
Forster's, during years of close friendship with the subject of this
biography, that his animosities were chiefly referable to the
singular inability in him to dissociate other people's ways of
thinking from his own.  He had, to the last, a ludicrous grievance
(both Mr. Forster and the writer have often amused themselves with
it) against a good-natured nobleman, doubtless perfectly unconscious
of having ever given him offence.  The offence was, that on the
occasion of some dinner party in another nobleman's house, many
years before, this innocent lord (then a commoner) had passed in to
dinner, through some door, before him, as he himself was about to
pass in through that same door with a lady on his arm.  Now, Landor
was a gentleman of most scrupulous politeness, and in his carriage
of himself towards ladies there was a certain mixture of stateliness
and deference, belonging to quite another time, and, as Mr. Pepys
would observe, "mighty pretty to see".  If he could by any effort
imagine himself committing such a high crime and misdemeanour as
that in question, he could only imagine himself as doing it of a set
purpose, under the sting of some vast injury, to inflict a great
affront.  A deliberately designed affront on the part of another
man, it therefore remained to the end of his days.  The manner in
which, as time went on, he permeated the unfortunate lord's ancestry
with this offence, was whimsically characteristic of Landor.  The
writer remembers very well when only the individual himself was held
responsible in the story for the breach of good breeding; but in
another ten years or so, it began to appear that his father had
always been remarkable for ill manners; and in yet another ten years
or so, his grandfather developed into quite a prodigy of coarse
behaviour.

Mr. Boythorn--if he may again be quoted--said of his adversary, Sir
Leicester Dedlock:  "That fellow is, AND HIS FATHER WAS, AND HIS
GRANDFATHER WAS, the most stiff-necked, arrogant, imbecile, pig-
headed numskull, ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born
in any station of life but a walking-stick's!"

The strength of some of Mr. Landor's most captivating kind qualities
was traceable to the same source.  Knowing how keenly he himself
would feel the being at any small social disadvantage, or the being
unconsciously placed in any ridiculous light, he was wonderfully
considerate of shy people, or of such as might be below the level of
his usual conversation, or otherwise out of their element.  The
writer once observed him in the keenest distress of mind in behalf
of a modest young stranger who came into a drawing-room with a glove
on his head.  An expressive commentary on this sympathetic
condition, and on the delicacy with which he advanced to the young
stranger's rescue, was afterwards furnished by himself at a friendly
dinner at Gore House, when it was the most delightful of houses.
His dress--say, his cravat or shirt-collar--had become slightly
disarranged on a hot evening, and Count D'Orsay laughingly called
his attention to the circumstance as we rose from table.  Landor
became flushed, and greatly agitated:  "My dear Count D'Orsay, I
thank you!  My dear Count D'Orsay, I thank you from my soul for
pointing out to me the abominable condition to which I am reduced!
If I had entered the Drawing-room, and presented myself before Lady
Blessington in so absurd a light, I would have instantly gone home,
put a pistol to my head, and blown my brains out!"

Mr. Forster tells a similar story of his keeping a company waiting
dinner, through losing his way; and of his seeing no remedy for that
breach of politeness but cutting his throat, or drowning himself,
unless a countryman whom he met could direct him by a short road to
the house where the party were assembled.  Surely these are
expressive notes on the gravity and reality of his explosive
inclinations to kill kings!

His manner towards boys was charming, and the earnestness of his
wish to be on equal terms with them and to win their confidence was
quite touching.  Few, reading Mr. Forster's book, can fall to see in
this, his pensive remembrance of that "studious wilful boy at once
shy and impetuous", who had not many intimacies at Rugby, but who
was "generally popular and respected, and used his influence often
to save the younger boys from undue harshness or violence".  The
impulsive yearnings of his passionate heart towards his own boy, on
their meeting at Bath, after years of separation, likewise burn
through this phase of his character.

But a more spiritual, softened, and unselfish aspect of it, was to
derived from his respectful belief in happiness which he himself had
missed.  His marriage had not been a felicitous one--it may be
fairly assumed for either side--but no trace of bitterness or
distrust concerning other marriages was in his mind.  He was never
more serene than in the midst of a domestic circle, and was
invariably remarkable for a perfectly benignant interest in young
couples and young lovers.  That, in his ever-fresh fancy, he
conceived in this association innumerable histories of himself
involving far more unlikely events that never happened than Isaac
D'Israeli ever imagined, is hardly to be doubted; but as to this
part of his real history he was mute, or revealed his nobleness in
an impulse to be generously just.  We verge on delicate ground, but
a slight remembrance rises in the writer which can grate nowhere.
Mr. Forster relates how a certain friend, being in Florence, sent
him home a leaf from the garden of his old house at Fiesole.  That
friend had first asked him what he should send him home, and he had
stipulated for this gift--found by Mr. Forster among his papers
after his death.  The friend, on coming back to England, related to
Landor that he had been much embarrassed, on going in search of the
leaf, by his driver's suddenly stopping his horses in a narrow lane,
and presenting him (the friend) to "La Signora Landora".  The lady
was walking alone on a bright Italian-winter-day; and the man,
having been told to drive to the Villa Landora, inferred that he
must be conveying a guest or visitor.  "I pulled off my hat," said
the friend, "apologised for the coachman's mistake, and drove on.
The lady was walking with a rapid and firm step, had bright eyes, a
fine fresh colour, and looked animated and agreeable."  Landor
checked off each clause of the description, with a stately nod of
more than ready assent, and replied, with all his tremendous energy
concentrated into the sentence:  "And the Lord forbid that I should
do otherwise than declare that she always WAS agreeable--to every
one but ME!"

Mr. Forster step by step builds up the evidence on which he writes
this life and states this character.  In like manner, he gives the
evidence for his high estimation of Landor's works, and--it may be
added--for their recompense against some neglect, in finding so
sympathetic, acute, and devoted a champion.  Nothing in the book is
more remarkable than his examination of each of Landor's successive
pieces of writing, his delicate discernment of their beauties, and
his strong desire to impart his own perceptions in this wise to the
great audience that is yet to come.  It rarely befalls an author to
have such a commentator:  to become the subject of so much artistic
skill and knowledge, combined with such infinite and loving pains.
Alike as a piece of Biography, and as a commentary upon the beauties
of a great writer, the book is a massive book; as the man and the
writer were massive too.  Sometimes, when the balance held by Mr.
Forster has seemed for a moment to turn a little heavily against the
infirmities of temperament of a grand old friend, we have felt
something of a shock; but we have not once been able to gainsay the
justice of the scales.  This feeling, too, has only fluttered out of
the detail, here or there, and has vanished before the whole.  We
fully agree with Mr. Forster that "judgment has been passed"--as it
should be--"with an equal desire to be only just on all the
qualities of his temperament which affected necessarily not his own
life only.  But, now that the story is told, no one will have
difficulty in striking the balance between its good and ill; and
what was really imperishable in Landor's genius will not be
treasured less, or less understood, for the more perfect knowledge
of his character".

Mr. Forster's second volume gives a facsimile of Landor's writing at
seventy-five.  It may be interesting to those who are curious in
calligraphy, to know that its resemblance to the recent handwriting
of that great genius, M. Victor Hugo, is singularly strong.

In a military burial-ground in India, the name of Walter Landor is
associated with the present writer's over the grave of a young
officer.  No name could stand there, more inseparably associated in
the writer's mind with the dignity of generosity:  with a noble
scorn of all littleness, all cruelty, oppression, fraud, and false
pretence.



ADDRESS WHICH APPEARED SHORTLY PREVIOUS TO THE COMPLETION OF THE
TWENTIETH VOLUME (1868), INTIMATING A NEW SERIES OF "ALL THE YEAR
ROUND"



I beg to announce to the readers of this Journal, that on the
completion of the Twentieth Volume on the Twenty-eighth of November,
in the present year, I shall commence an entirely New Series of All
the Year Round.  The change is not only due to the convenience of
the public (with which a set of such books, extending beyond twenty
large volumes, would be quite incompatible), but is also resolved
upon for the purpose of effecting some desirable improvements in
respect of type, paper, and size of page, which could not otherwise
be made.  To the Literature of the New Series it would not become me
to refer, beyond glancing at the pages of this Journal, and of its
predecessor, through a score of years; inasmuch as my regular
fellow-labourers and I will be at our old posts, in company with
those younger comrades, whom I have had the pleasure of enrolling
from time to time, and whose number it is always one of my
pleasantest editorial duties to enlarge.

As it is better that every kind of work honestly undertaken and
discharged, should speak for itself than be spoken for, I will only
remark further on one intended omission in the New Series.  The
Extra Christmas Number has now been so extensively, and regularly,
and often imitated, that it is in very great danger of becoming
tiresome.  I have therefore resolved (though I cannot add,
willingly) to abolish it, at the highest tide of its success.

CHARLES DICKENS.



Footnotes:

{1}  Walter Savage Landor:  a Biography, by John Forster, 2 vols.
Chapman and Hall.





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American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens
Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





American Notes for General Circulation






PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION OF "AMERICAN NOTES"



IT is nearly eight years since this book was first published.  I 
present it, unaltered, in the Cheap Edition; and such of my 
opinions as it expresses, are quite unaltered too.

My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the 
influences and tendencies which I distrust in America, have any 
existence not in my imagination.  They can examine for themselves 
whether there has been anything in the public career of that 
country during these past eight years, or whether there is anything 
in its present position, at home or abroad, which suggests that 
those influences and tendencies really do exist.  As they find the 
fact, they will judge me.  If they discern any evidences of wrong-
going in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge 
that I had reason in what I wrote.  If they discern no such thing, 
they will consider me altogether mistaken.

Prejudiced, I never have been otherwise than in favour of the 
United States.  No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores, 
with a stronger faith in the Republic than I had, when I landed in 
America.

I purposely abstain from extending these observations to any 
length.  I have nothing to defend, or to explain away.  The truth 
is the truth; and neither childish absurdities, nor unscrupulous 
contradictions, can make it otherwise.  The earth would still move 
round the sun, though the whole Catholic Church said No.

I have many friends in America, and feel a grateful interest in the 
country.  To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature, animosity, 
or partisanship, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is 
always a very easy one; and which I have disregarded for eight 
years, and could disregard for eighty more.

LONDON, JUNE 22, 1850.




PREFACE TO THE "CHARLES DICKENS" EDITION OF "AMERICAN NOTES"



MY readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the 
influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America, had, at 
that time, any existence but in my imagination.  They can examine 
for themselves whether there has been anything in the public career 
of that country since, at home or abroad, which suggests that those 
influences and tendencies really did exist.  As they find the fact, 
they will judge me.  If they discern any evidences of wrong-going, 
in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that 
I had reason in what I wrote.  If they discern no such indications, 
they will consider me altogether mistaken - but not wilfully.

Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour 
of the United States.  I have many friends in America, I feel a 
grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will 
successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the 
whole human race.  To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-
nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish 
thing:  which is always a very easy one.



CHAPTER I - GOING AWAY



I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths 
comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of 
January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and 
put my head into, a 'state-room' on board the Britannia steam-
packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax 
and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty's mails.

That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles 
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even 
to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the 
fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin 
mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible 
shelf.  But that this was the state-room concerning which Charles 
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences 
for at least four months preceding:  that this could by any 
possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination, which 
Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy strong upon 
him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa, 
and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its 
limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more 
than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight 
(portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to 
say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a 
flower-pot):  that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, 
and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or 
connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous 
little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished 
lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the 
city of London:  that this room of state, in short, could be 
anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain's, 
invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of 
the real state-room presently to be disclosed:- these were truths 
which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to 
bear upon or comprehend.  And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair 
slab, or perch, of which there were two within; and looked, without 
any expression of countenance whatever, at some friends who had 
come on board with us, and who were crushing their faces into all 
manner of shapes by endeavouring to squeeze them through the small 
doorway.

We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming below, which, 
but that we were the most sanguine people living, might have 
prepared us for the worst.  The imaginative artist to whom I have 
already made allusion, has depicted in the same great work, a 
chamber of almost interminable perspective, furnished, as Mr. 
Robins would say, in a style of more than Eastern splendour, and 
filled (but not inconveniently so) with groups of ladies and 
gentlemen, in the very highest state of enjoyment and vivacity.  
Before descending into the bowels of the ship, we had passed from 
the deck into a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse 
with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy 
stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their 
hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary 
length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to 
the low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, 
hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather.  I had not at 
that time seen the ideal presentment of this chamber which has 
since gratified me so much, but I observed that one of our friends 
who had made the arrangements for our voyage, turned pale on 
entering, retreated on the friend behind him., smote his forehead 
involuntarily, and said below his breath, 'Impossible! it cannot 
be!' or words to that effect.  He recovered himself however by a 
great effort, and after a preparatory cough or two, cried, with a 
ghastly smile which is still before me, looking at the same time 
round the walls, 'Ha! the breakfast-room, steward - eh?'  We all 
foresaw what the answer must be:  we knew the agony he suffered.  
He had often spoken of THE SALOON; had taken in and lived upon the 
pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand, at home, that 
to form a just conception of it, it would be necessary to multiply 
the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven, and 
then fall short of the reality.  When the man in reply avowed the 
truth; the blunt, remorseless, naked truth; 'This is the saloon, 
sir' - he actually reeled beneath the blow.

In persons who were so soon to part, and interpose between their 
else daily communication the formidable barrier of many thousand 
miles of stormy space, and who were for that reason anxious to cast 
no other cloud, not even the passing shadow of a moment's 
disappointment or discomfiture, upon the short interval of happy 
companionship that yet remained to them - in persons so situated, 
the natural transition from these first surprises was obviously 
into peals of hearty laughter, and I can report that I, for one, 
being still seated upon the slab or perch before mentioned, roared 
outright until the vessel rang again.  Thus, in less than two 
minutes after coming upon it for the first time, we all by common 
consent agreed that this state-room was the pleasantest and most 
facetious and capital contrivance possible; and that to have had it 
one inch larger, would have been quite a disagreeable and 
deplorable state of things.  And with this; and with showing how, - 
by very nearly closing the door, and twining in and out like 
serpents, and by counting the little washing slab as standing-room, 
- we could manage to insinuate four people into it, all at one 
time; and entreating each other to observe how very airy it was (in 
dock), and how there was a beautiful port-hole which could be kept 
open all day (weather permitting), and how there was quite a large 
bull's-eye just over the looking-glass which would render shaving a 
perfectly easy and delightful process (when the ship didn't roll 
too much); we arrived, at last, at the unanimous conclusion that it 
was rather spacious than otherwise:  though I do verily believe 
that, deducting the two berths, one above the other, than which 
nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins, it 
was no bigger than one of those hackney cabriolets which have the 
door behind, and shoot their fares out, like sacks of coals, upon 
the pavement.

Having settled this point to the perfect satisfaction of all 
parties, concerned and unconcerned, we sat down round the fire in 
the ladies' cabin - just to try the effect.  It was rather dark, 
certainly; but somebody said, 'of course it would be light, at 
sea,' a proposition to which we all assented; echoing 'of course, 
of course;' though it would be exceedingly difficult to say why we 
thought so.  I remember, too, when we had discovered and exhausted 
another topic of consolation in the circumstance of this ladies' 
cabin adjoining our state-room, and the consequently immense 
feasibility of sitting there at all times and seasons, and had 
fallen into a momentary silence, leaning our faces on our hands and 
looking at the fire, one of our party said, with the solemn air of 
a man who had made a discovery, 'What a relish mulled claret will 
have down here!' which appeared to strike us all most forcibly; as 
though there were something spicy and high-flavoured in cabins, 
which essentially improved that composition, and rendered it quite 
incapable of perfection anywhere else.

There was a stewardess, too, actively engaged in producing clean 
sheets and table-cloths from the very entrails of the sofas, and 
from unexpected lockers, of such artful mechanism, that it made 
one's head ache to see them opened one after another, and rendered 
it quite a distracting circumstance to follow her proceedings, and 
to find that every nook and corner and individual piece of 
furniture was something else besides what it pretended to be, and 
was a mere trap and deception and place of secret stowage, whose 
ostensible purpose was its least useful one.

God bless that stewardess for her piously fraudulent account of 
January voyages!  God bless her for her clear recollection of the 
companion passage of last year, when nobody was ill, and everybody 
dancing from morning to night, and it was 'a run' of twelve days, 
and a piece of the purest frolic, and delight, and jollity!  All 
happiness be with her for her bright face and her pleasant Scotch 
tongue, which had sounds of old Home in it for my fellow-traveller; 
and for her predictions of fair winds and fine weather (all wrong, 
or I shouldn't be half so fond of her); and for the ten thousand 
small fragments of genuine womanly tact, by which, without piecing 
them elaborately together, and patching them up into shape and form 
and case and pointed application, she nevertheless did plainly show 
that all young mothers on one side of the Atlantic were near and 
close at hand to their little children left upon the other; and 
that what seemed to the uninitiated a serious journey, was, to 
those who were in the secret, a mere frolic, to be sung about and 
whistled at!  Light be her heart, and gay her merry eyes, for 
years!

The state-room had grown pretty fast; but by this time it had 
expanded into something quite bulky, and almost boasted a bay-
window to view the sea from.  So we went upon deck again in high 
spirits; and there, everything was in such a state of bustle and 
active preparation, that the blood quickened its pace, and whirled 
through one's veins on that clear frosty morning with involuntary 
mirthfulness.  For every gallant ship was riding slowly up and 
down, and every little boat was splashing noisily in the water; and 
knots of people stood upon the wharf, gazing with a kind of 'dread 
delight' on the far-famed fast American steamer; and one party of 
men were 'taking in the milk,' or, in other words, getting the cow 
on board; and another were filling the icehouses to the very throat 
with fresh provisions; with butchers'-meat and garden-stuff, pale 
sucking-pigs, calves' heads in scores, beef, veal, and pork, and 
poultry out of all proportion; and others were coiling ropes and 
busy with oakum yarns; and others were lowering heavy packages into 
the hold; and the purser's head was barely visible as it loomed in 
a state, of exquisite perplexity from the midst of a vast pile of 
passengers' luggage; and there seemed to be nothing going on 
anywhere, or uppermost in the mind of anybody, but preparations for 
this mighty voyage.  This, with the bright cold sun, the bracing 
air, the crisply-curling water, the thin white crust of morning ice 
upon the decks which crackled with a sharp and cheerful sound 
beneath the lightest tread, was irresistible.  And when, again upon 
the shore, we turned and saw from the vessel's mast her name 
signalled in flags of joyous colours, and fluttering by their side 
the beautiful American banner with its stars and stripes, - the 
long three thousand miles and more, and, longer still, the six 
whole months of absence, so dwindled and faded, that the ship had 
gone out and come home again, and it was broad spring already in 
the Coburg Dock at Liverpool.

I have not inquired among my medical acquaintance, whether Turtle, 
and cold Punch, with Hock, Champagne, and Claret, and all the 
slight et cetera usually included in an unlimited order for a good 
dinner - especially when it is left to the liberal construction of 
my faultless friend, Mr. Radley, of the Adelphi Hotel - are 
peculiarly calculated to suffer a sea-change; or whether a plain 
mutton-chop, and a glass or two of sherry, would be less likely of 
conversion into foreign and disconcerting material.  My own opinion 
is, that whether one is discreet or indiscreet in these 
particulars, on the eve of a sea-voyage, is a matter of little 
consequence; and that, to use a common phrase, 'it comes to very 
much the same thing in the end.'  Be this as it may, I know that 
the dinner of that day was undeniably perfect; that it comprehended 
all these items, and a great many more; and that we all did ample 
justice to it.  And I know too, that, bating a certain tacit 
avoidance of any allusion to to-morrow; such as may be supposed to 
prevail between delicate-minded turnkeys, and a sensitive prisoner 
who is to be hanged next morning; we got on very well, and, all 
things considered, were merry enough.

When the morning - THE morning - came, and we met at breakfast, it 
was curious to see how eager we all were to prevent a moment's 
pause in the conversation, and how astoundingly gay everybody was:  
the forced spirits of each member of the little party having as 
much likeness to his natural mirth, as hot-house peas at five 
guineas the quart, resemble in flavour the growth of the dews, and 
air, and rain of Heaven.  But as one o'clock, the hour for going 
aboard, drew near, this volubility dwindled away by little and 
little, despite the most persevering efforts to the contrary, until 
at last, the matter being now quite desperate, we threw off all 
disguise; openly speculated upon where we should be this time to-
morrow, this time next day, and so forth; and entrusted a vast 
number of messages to those who intended returning to town that 
night, which were to be delivered at home and elsewhere without 
fail, within the very shortest possible space of time after the 
arrival of the railway train at Euston Square.  And commissions and 
remembrances do so crowd upon one at such a time, that we were 
still busied with this employment when we found ourselves fused, as 
it were, into a dense conglomeration of passengers and passengers' 
friends and passengers' luggage, all jumbled together on the deck 
of a small steamboat, and panting and snorting off to the packet, 
which had worked out of dock yesterday afternoon and was now lying 
at her moorings in the river.

And there she is! all eyes are turned to where she lies, dimly 
discernible through the gathering fog of the early winter 
afternoon; every finger is pointed in the same direction; and 
murmurs of interest and admiration - as 'How beautiful she looks!' 
'How trim she is!' - are heard on every side.  Even the lazy 
gentleman with his hat on one side and his hands in his pockets, 
who has dispensed so much consolation by inquiring with a yawn of 
another gentleman whether he is 'going across' - as if it were a 
ferry - even he condescends to look that way, and nod his head, as 
who should say, 'No mistake about THAT:' and not even the sage Lord 
Burleigh in his nod, included half so much as this lazy gentleman 
of might who has made the passage (as everybody on board has found 
out already; it's impossible to say how) thirteen times without a 
single accident!  There is another passenger very much wrapped-up, 
who has been frowned down by the rest, and morally trampled upon 
and crushed, for presuming to inquire with a timid interest how 
long it is since the poor President went down.  He is standing 
close to the lazy gentleman, and says with a faint smile that he 
believes She is a very strong Ship; to which the lazy gentleman, 
looking first in his questioner's eye and then very hard in the 
wind's, answers unexpectedly and ominously, that She need be.  Upon 
this the lazy gentleman instantly falls very low in the popular 
estimation, and the passengers, with looks of defiance, whisper to 
each other that he is an ass, and an impostor, and clearly don't 
know anything at all about it.

But we are made fast alongside the packet, whose huge red funnel is 
smoking bravely, giving rich promise of serious intentions.  
Packing-cases, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, and boxes, are already 
passed from hand to hand, and hauled on board with breathless 
rapidity.  The officers, smartly dressed, are at the gangway 
handing the passengers up the side, and hurrying the men.  In five 
minutes' time, the little steamer is utterly deserted, and the 
packet is beset and over-run by its late freight, who instantly 
pervade the whole ship, and are to be met with by the dozen in 
every nook and corner:  swarming down below with their own baggage, 
and stumbling over other people's; disposing themselves comfortably 
in wrong cabins, and creating a most horrible confusion by having 
to turn out again; madly bent upon opening locked doors, and on 
forcing a passage into all kinds of out-of-the-way places where 
there is no thoroughfare; sending wild stewards, with elfin hair, 
to and fro upon the breezy decks on unintelligible errands, 
impossible of execution:  and in short, creating the most 
extraordinary and bewildering tumult.  In the midst of all this, 
the lazy gentleman, who seems to have no luggage of any kind - not 
so much as a friend, even - lounges up and down the hurricane deck, 
coolly puffing a cigar; and, as this unconcerned demeanour again 
exalts him in the opinion of those who have leisure to observe his 
proceedings, every time he looks up at the masts, or down at the 
decks, or over the side, they look there too, as wondering whether 
he sees anything wrong anywhere, and hoping that, in case he 
should, he will have the goodness to mention it.

What have we here?  The captain's boat! and yonder the captain 
himself.  Now, by all our hopes and wishes, the very man he ought 
to be!  A well-made, tight-built, dapper little fellow; with a 
ruddy face, which is a letter of invitation to shake him by both 
hands at once; and with a clear, blue honest eye, that it does one 
good to see one's sparkling image in.  'Ring the bell!'  'Ding, 
ding, ding!' the very bell is in a hurry.  'Now for the shore - 
who's for the shore?' - 'These gentlemen, I am sorry to say.'  They 
are away, and never said, Good b'ye.  Ah now they wave it from the 
little boat.  'Good b'ye! Good b'ye!'  Three cheers from them; 
three more from us; three more from them:  and they are gone.

To and fro, to and fro, to and fro again a hundred times!  This 
waiting for the latest mail-bags is worse than all.  If we could 
have gone off in the midst of that last burst, we should have 
started triumphantly:  but to lie here, two hours and more in the 
damp fog, neither staying at home nor going abroad, is letting one 
gradually down into the very depths of dulness and low spirits.  A 
speck in the mist, at last!  That's something.  It is the boat we 
wait for!  That's more to the purpose.  The captain appears on the 
paddle-box with his speaking trumpet; the officers take their 
stations; all hands are on the alert; the flagging hopes of the 
passengers revive; the cooks pause in their savoury work, and look 
out with faces full of interest.  The boat comes alongside; the 
bags are dragged in anyhow, and flung down for the moment anywhere.  
Three cheers more:  and as the first one rings upon our ears, the 
vessel throbs like a strong giant that has just received the breath 
of life; the two great wheels turn fiercely round for the first 
time; and the noble ship, with wind and tide astern, breaks proudly 
through the lashed and roaming water.



CHAPTER II - THE PASSAGE OUT



WE all dined together that day; and a rather formidable party we 
were:  no fewer than eighty-six strong.  The vessel being pretty 
deep in the water, with all her coals on board and so many 
passengers, and the weather being calm and quiet, there was but 
little motion; so that before the dinner was half over, even those 
passengers who were most distrustful of themselves plucked up 
amazingly; and those who in the morning had returned to the 
universal question, 'Are you a good sailor?' a very decided 
negative, now either parried the inquiry with the evasive reply, 
'Oh! I suppose I'm no worse than anybody else;' or, reckless of all 
moral obligations, answered boldly 'Yes:' and with some irritation 
too, as though they would add, 'I should like to know what you see 
in ME, sir, particularly, to justify suspicion!'

Notwithstanding this high tone of courage and confidence, I could 
not but observe that very few remained long over their wine; and 
that everybody had an unusual love of the open air; and that the 
favourite and most coveted seats were invariably those nearest to 
the door.  The tea-table, too, was by no means as well attended as 
the dinner-table; and there was less whist-playing than might have 
been expected.  Still, with the exception of one lady, who had 
retired with some precipitation at dinner-time, immediately after 
being assisted to the finest cut of a very yellow boiled leg of 
mutton with very green capers, there were no invalids as yet; and 
walking, and smoking, and drinking of brandy-and-water (but always 
in the open air), went on with unabated spirit, until eleven 
o'clock or thereabouts, when 'turning in' - no sailor of seven 
hours' experience talks of going to bed - became the order of the 
night.  The perpetual tramp of boot-heels on the decks gave place 
to a heavy silence, and the whole human freight was stowed away 
below, excepting a very few stragglers, like myself, who were 
probably, like me, afraid to go there.

To one unaccustomed to such scenes, this is a very striking time on 
shipboard.  Afterwards, and when its novelty had long worn off, it 
never ceased to have a peculiar interest and charm for me.  The 
gloom through which the great black mass holds its direct and 
certain course; the rushing water, plainly heard, but dimly seen; 
the broad, white, glistening track, that follows in the vessel's 
wake; the men on the look-out forward, who would be scarcely 
visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score 
of glistening stars; the helmsman at the wheel, with the 
illuminated card before him, shining, a speck of light amidst the 
darkness, like something sentient and of Divine intelligence; the 
melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain; 
the gleaming forth of light from every crevice, nook, and tiny 
piece of glass about the decks, as though the ship were filled with 
fire in hiding, ready to burst through any outlet, wild with its 
resistless power of death and ruin.  At first, too, and even when 
the hour, and all the objects it exalts, have come to be familiar, 
it is difficult, alone and thoughtful, to hold them to their proper 
shapes and forms.  They change with the wandering fancy; assume the 
semblance of things left far away; put on the well-remembered 
aspect of favourite places dearly loved; and even people them with 
shadows.  Streets, houses, rooms; figures so like their usual 
occupants, that they have startled me by their reality, which far 
exceeded, as it seemed to me, all power of mine to conjure up the 
absent; have, many and many a time, at such an hour, grown suddenly 
out of objects with whose real look, and use, and purpose, I was as 
well acquainted as with my own two hands.

My own two hands, and feet likewise, being very cold, however, on 
this particular occasion, I crept below at midnight.  It was not 
exactly comfortable below.  It was decidedly close; and it was 
impossible to be unconscious of the presence of that extraordinary 
compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on 
board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to 
enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold.  Two 
passengers' wives (one of them my own) lay already in silent 
agonies on the sofa; and one lady's maid (MY lady's) was a mere 
bundle on the floor, execrating her destiny, and pounding her curl-
papers among the stray boxes.  Everything sloped the wrong way:  
which in itself was an aggravation scarcely to be borne.  I had 
left the door open, a moment before, in the bosom of a gentle 
declivity, and, when I turned to shut it, it was on the summit of a 
lofty eminence.  Now every plank and timber creaked, as if the ship 
were made of wicker-work; and now crackled, like an enormous fire 
of the driest possible twigs.  There was nothing for it but bed; so 
I went to bed.

It was pretty much the same for the next two days, with a tolerably 
fair wind and dry weather.  I read in bed (but to this hour I don't 
know what) a good deal; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold 
brandy-and-water with an unspeakable disgust, and ate hard biscuit 
perseveringly:  not ill, but going to be.

It is the third morning.  I am awakened out of my sleep by a dismal 
shriek from my wife, who demands to know whether there's any 
danger.  I rouse myself, and look out of bed.  The water-jug is 
plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller 
articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a 
carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges.  Suddenly I 
see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which 
is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling.  At the same 
time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the 
floor.  Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing 
on its head.

Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible 
with this novel state of things, the ship rights.  Before one can 
say 'Thank Heaven!' she wrongs again.  Before one can cry she IS 
wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature 
actually running of its own accord, with broken knees and failing 
legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling 
constantly.  Before one can so much as wonder, she takes a high 
leap into the air.  Before she has well done that, she takes a deep 
dive into the water.  Before she has gained the surface, she throws 
a summerset.  The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward.  
And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving, 
jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking:  and going 
through all these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes 
altogether:  until one feels disposed to roar for mercy.

A steward passes.  'Steward!'  'Sir?'  'What IS the matter? what DO 
you call this?'  'Rather a heavy sea on, sir, and a head-wind.'

A head-wind!  Imagine a human face upon the vessel's prow, with 
fifteen thousand Samsons in one bent upon driving her back, and 
hitting her exactly between the eyes whenever she attempts to 
advance an inch.  Imagine the ship herself, with every pulse and 
artery of her huge body swollen and bursting under this 
maltreatment, sworn to go on or die.  Imagine the wind howling, the 
sea roaring, the rain beating:  all in furious array against her.  
Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds, in fearful 
sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air.  Add to 
all this, the clattering on deck and down below; the tread of 
hurried feet; the loud hoarse shouts of seamen; the gurgling in and 
out of water through the scuppers; with, every now and then, the 
striking of a heavy sea upon the planks above, with the deep, dead, 
heavy sound of thunder heard within a vault; - and there is the 
head-wind of that January morning.

I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the 
ship:  such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling 
down of stewards, the gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant 
dozens of bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far from 
exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the 
seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast.  I say 
nothing of them:  for although I lay listening to this concert for 
three or four days, I don't think I heard it for more than a 
quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down 
again, excessively sea-sick.

Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the 
term:  I wish I had been:  but in a form which I have never seen or 
heard described, though I have no doubt it is very common.  I lay 
there, all the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no 
sense of weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or 
take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or 
degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal 
indifference, having a kind of lazy joy - of fiendish delight, if 
anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title - in the fact 
of my wife being too ill to talk to me.  If I may be allowed to 
illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I 
was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after the 
incursion of the rioters into his bar at Chigwell.  Nothing would 
have surprised me.  If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of 
intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of 
Home, a goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into 
that little kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and, 
apologising for being damp through walking in the sea, had handed 
me a letter directed to myself, in familiar characters, I am 
certain I should not have felt one atom of astonishment:  I should 
have been perfectly satisfied.  If Neptune himself had walked in, 
with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have looked upon the 
event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences.

Once - once - I found myself on deck.  I don't know how I got 
there, or what possessed me to go there, but there I was; and 
completely dressed too, with a huge pea-coat on, and a pair of 
boots such as no weak man in his senses could ever have got into.  
I found myself standing, when a gleam of consciousness came upon 
me, holding on to something.  I don't know what.  I think it was 
the boatswain:  or it may have been the pump:  or possibly the cow.  
I can't say how long I had been there; whether a day or a minute.  
I recollect trying to think about something (about anything in the 
whole wide world, I was not particular) without the smallest 
effect.  I could not even make out which was the sea, and which the 
sky, for the horizon seemed drunk, and was flying wildly about in 
all directions.  Even in that incapable state, however, I 
recognised the lazy gentleman standing before me:  nautically clad 
in a suit of shaggy blue, with an oilskin hat.  But I was too 
imbecile, although I knew it to be he, to separate him from his 
dress; and tried to call him, I remember, PILOT.  After another 
interval of total unconsciousness, I found he had gone, and 
recognised another figure in its place.  It seemed to wave and 
fluctuate before me as though I saw it reflected in an unsteady 
looking-glass; but I knew it for the captain; and such was the 
cheerful influence of his face, that I tried to smile:  yes, even 
then I tried to smile.  I saw by his gestures that he addressed me; 
but it was a long time before I could make out that he remonstrated 
against my standing up to my knees in water - as I was; of course I 
don't know why.  I tried to thank him, but couldn't.  I could only 
point to my boots - or wherever I supposed my boots to be - and say 
in a plaintive voice, 'Cork soles:' at the same time endeavouring, 
I am told, to sit down in the pool.  Finding that I was quite 
insensible, and for the time a maniac, he humanely conducted me 
below.

There I remained until I got better:  suffering, whenever I was 
recommended to eat anything, an amount of anguish only second to 
that which is said to be endured by the apparently drowned, in the 
process of restoration to life.  One gentleman on board had a 
letter of introduction to me from a mutual friend in London.  He 
sent it below with his card, on the morning of the head-wind; and I 
was long troubled with the idea that he might be up, and well, and 
a hundred times a day expecting me to call upon him in the saloon.  
I imagined him one of those cast-iron images - I will not call them 
men - who ask, with red faces, and lusty voices, what sea-sickness 
means, and whether it really is as bad as it is represented to be.  
This was very torturing indeed; and I don't think I ever felt such 
perfect gratification and gratitude of heart, as I did when I heard 
from the ship's doctor that he had been obliged to put a large 
mustard poultice on this very gentleman's stomach.  I date my 
recovery from the receipt of that intelligence.

It was materially assisted though, I have no doubt, by a heavy gale 
of wind, which came slowly up at sunset, when we were about ten 
days out, and raged with gradually increasing fury until morning, 
saving that it lulled for an hour a little before midnight.  There 
was something in the unnatural repose of that hour, and in the 
after gathering of the storm, so inconceivably awful and 
tremendous, that its bursting into full violence was almost a 
relief.

The labouring of the ship in the troubled sea on this night I shall 
never forget.  'Will it ever be worse than this?' was a question I 
had often heard asked, when everything was sliding and bumping 
about, and when it certainly did seem difficult to comprehend the 
possibility of anything afloat being more disturbed, without 
toppling over and going down.  But what the agitation of a steam-
vessel is, on a bad winter's night in the wild Atlantic, it is 
impossible for the most vivid imagination to conceive.  To say that 
she is flung down on her side in the waves, with her masts dipping 
into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over on the 
other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a 
hundred great guns, and hurls her back - that she stops, and 
staggers, and shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent 
throbbing at her heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into 
madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped 
on by the angry sea - that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and 
wind, are all in fierce contention for the mastery - that every 
plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water 
in the great ocean its howling voice - is nothing.  To say that all 
is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is 
nothing.  Words cannot express it.  Thoughts cannot convey it.  
Only a dream can call it up again, in all its fury, rage, and 
passion.

And yet, in the very midst of these terrors, I was placed in a 
situation so exquisitely ridiculous, that even then I had as strong 
a sense of its absurdity as I have now, and could no more help 
laughing than I can at any other comical incident, happening under 
circumstances the most favourable to its enjoyment.  About midnight 
we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst 
open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the 
ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a 
little Scotch lady - who, by the way, had previously sent a message 
to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her 
compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the 
top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might 
not be struck by lightning.  They and the handmaid before 
mentioned, being in such ecstasies of fear that I scarcely knew 
what to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some 
restorative or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to 
me, at the moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumbler 
full without delay.  It being impossible to stand or sit without 
holding on, they were all heaped together in one corner of a long 
sofa - a fixture extending entirely across the cabin - where they 
clung to each other in momentary expectation of being drowned.  
When I approached this place with my specific, and was about to 
administer it with many consolatory expressions to the nearest 
sufferer, what was my dismay to see them all roll slowly down to 
the other end!  And when I staggered to that end, and held out the 
glass once more, how immensely baffled were my good intentions by 
the ship giving another lurch, and their all rolling back again!  I 
suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa for at least a quarter 
of an hour, without reaching them once; and by the time I did catch 
them, the brandy-and-water was diminished, by constant spilling, to 
a teaspoonful.  To complete the group, it is necessary to recognise 
in this disconcerted dodger, an individual very pale from sea-
sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his hair, last, at 
Liverpool:  and whose only article of dress (linen not included) 
were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly 
admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper.

Of the outrageous antics performed by that ship next morning; which 
made bed a practical joke, and getting up, by any process short of 
falling out, an impossibility; I say nothing.  But anything like 
the utter dreariness and desolation that met my eyes when I 
literally 'tumbled up' on deck at noon, I never saw.  Ocean and sky 
were all of one dull, heavy, uniform, lead colour.  There was no 
extent of prospect even over the dreary waste that lay around us, 
for the sea ran high, and the horizon encompassed us like a large 
black hoop.  Viewed from the air, or some tall bluff on shore, it 
would have been imposing and stupendous, no doubt; but seen from 
the wet and rolling decks, it only impressed one giddily and 
painfully.  In the gale of last night the life-boat had been 
crushed by one blow of the sea like a walnut-shell; and there it 
hung dangling in the air:  a mere faggot of crazy boards.  The 
planking of the paddle-boxes had been torn sheer away.  The wheels 
were exposed and bare; and they whirled and dashed their spray 
about the decks at random.  Chimney, white with crusted salt; 
topmasts struck; storm-sails set; rigging all knotted, tangled, 
wet, and drooping:  a gloomier picture it would be hard to look 
upon.

I was now comfortably established by courtesy in the ladies' cabin, 
where, besides ourselves, there were only four other passengers.  
First, the little Scotch lady before mentioned, on her way to join 
her husband at New York, who had settled there three years before.  
Secondly and thirdly, an honest young Yorkshireman, connected with 
some American house; domiciled in that same city, and carrying 
thither his beautiful young wife to whom he had been married but a 
fortnight, and who was the fairest specimen of a comely English 
country girl I have ever seen.  Fourthy, fifthly, and lastly, 
another couple:  newly married too, if one might judge from the 
endearments they frequently interchanged:  of whom I know no more 
than that they were rather a mysterious, run-away kind of couple; 
that the lady had great personal attractions also; and that the 
gentleman carried more guns with him than Robinson Crusoe, wore a 
shooting-coat, and had two great dogs on board.  On further 
consideration, I remember that he tried hot roast pig and bottled 
ale as a cure for sea-sickness; and that he took these remedies 
(usually in bed) day after day, with astonishing perseverance.  I 
may add, for the information of the curious, that they decidedly 
failed.

The weather continuing obstinately and almost unprecedentedly bad, 
we usually straggled into this cabin, more or less faint and 
miserable, about an hour before noon, and lay down on the sofas to 
recover; during which interval, the captain would look in to 
communicate the state of the wind, the moral certainty of its 
changing to-morrow (the weather is always going to improve to-
morrow, at sea), the vessel's rate of sailing, and so forth.  
Observations there were none to tell us of, for there was no sun to 
take them by.  But a description of one day will serve for all the 
rest.  Here it is.

The captain being gone, we compose ourselves to read, if the place 
be light enough; and if not, we doze and talk alternately.  At one, 
a bell rings, and the stewardess comes down with a steaming dish of 
baked potatoes, and another of roasted apples; and plates of pig's 
face, cold ham, salt beef; or perhaps a smoking mess of rare hot 
collops.  We fall to upon these dainties; eat as much as we can (we 
have great appetites now); and are as long as possible about it.  
If the fire will burn (it WILL sometimes) we are pretty cheerful.  
If it won't, we all remark to each other that it's very cold, rub 
our hands, cover ourselves with coats and cloaks, and lie down 
again to doze, talk, and read (provided as aforesaid), until 
dinner-time.  At five, another bell rings, and the stewardess 
reappears with another dish of potatoes - boiled this time - and 
store of hot meat of various kinds:  not forgetting the roast pig, 
to be taken medicinally.  We sit down at table again (rather more 
cheerfully than before); prolong the meal with a rather mouldy 
dessert of apples, grapes, and oranges; and drink our wine and 
brandy-and-water.  The bottles and glasses are still upon the 
table, and the oranges and so forth are rolling about according to 
their fancy and the ship's way, when the doctor comes down, by 
special nightly invitation, to join our evening rubber:  
immediately on whose arrival we make a party at whist, and as it is 
a rough night and the cards will not lie on the cloth, we put the 
tricks in our pockets as we take them.  At whist we remain with 
exemplary gravity (deducting a short time for tea and toast) until 
eleven o'clock, or thereabouts; when the captain comes down again, 
in a sou'-wester hat tied under his chin, and a pilot-coat:  making 
the ground wet where he stands.  By this time the card-playing is 
over, and the bottles and glasses are again upon the table; and 
after an hour's pleasant conversation about the ship, the 
passengers, and things in general, the captain (who never goes to 
bed, and is never out of humour) turns up his coat collar for the 
deck again; shakes hands all round; and goes laughing out into the 
weather as merrily as to a birthday party.

As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity.  This 
passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un 
in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of 
champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk), 
nobody knows.  The head engineer has distinctly said that there 
never was such times - meaning weather - and four good hands are 
ill, and have given in, dead beat.  Several berths are full of 
water, and all the cabins are leaky.  The ship's cook, secretly 
swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played 
upon by the fire-engine until quite sober.  All the stewards have 
fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with 
plasters in various places.  The baker is ill, and so is the 
pastry-cook.  A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to 
fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and 
jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and 
commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly 
bilious) it is death to him to look at.  News!  A dozen murders on 
shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea.

Divided between our rubber and such topics as these, we were 
running (as we thought) into Halifax Harbour, on the fifteenth 
night, with little wind and a bright moon - indeed, we had made the 
Light at its outer entrance, and put the pilot in charge - when 
suddenly the ship struck upon a bank of mud.  An immediate rush on 
deck took place of course; the sides were crowded in an instant; 
and for a few minutes we were in as lively a state of confusion as 
the greatest lover of disorder would desire to see.  The 
passengers, and guns, and water-casks, and other heavy matters, 
being all huddled together aft, however, to lighten her in the 
head, she was soon got off; and after some driving on towards an 
uncomfortable line of objects (whose vicinity had been announced 
very early in the disaster by a loud cry of 'Breakers a-head!') and 
much backing of paddles, and heaving of the lead into a constantly 
decreasing depth of water, we dropped anchor in a strange 
outlandish-looking nook which nobody on board could recognise, 
although there was land all about us, and so close that we could 
plainly see the waving branches of the trees.

It was strange enough, in the silence of midnight, and the dead 
stillness that seemed to be created by the sudden and unexpected 
stoppage of the engine which had been clanking and blasting in our 
ears incessantly for so many days, to watch the look of blank 
astonishment expressed in every face:  beginning with the officers, 
tracing it through all the passengers, and descending to the very 
stokers and furnacemen, who emerged from below, one by one, and 
clustered together in a smoky group about the hatchway of the 
engine-room, comparing notes in whispers.  After throwing up a few 
rockets and firing signal guns in the hope of being hailed from the 
land, or at least of seeing a light - but without any other sight 
or sound presenting itself - it was determined to send a boat on 
shore.  It was amusing to observe how very kind some of the 
passengers were, in volunteering to go ashore in this same boat:  
for the general good, of course:  not by any means because they 
thought the ship in an unsafe position, or contemplated the 
possibility of her heeling over in case the tide were running out.  
Nor was it less amusing to remark how desperately unpopular the 
poor pilot became in one short minute.  He had had his passage out 
from Liverpool, and during the whole voyage had been quite a 
notorious character, as a teller of anecdotes and cracker of jokes.  
Yet here were the very men who had laughed the loudest at his 
jests, now flourishing their fists in his face, loading him with 
imprecations, and defying him to his teeth as a villain!

The boat soon shoved off, with a lantern and sundry blue lights on 
board; and in less than an hour returned; the officer in command 
bringing with him a tolerably tall young tree, which he had plucked 
up by the roots, to satisfy certain distrustful passengers whose 
minds misgave them that they were to be imposed upon and 
shipwrecked, and who would on no other terms believe that he had 
been ashore, or had done anything but fraudulently row a little way 
into the mist, specially to deceive them and compass their deaths.  
Our captain had foreseen from the first that we must be in a place 
called the Eastern passage; and so we were.  It was about the last 
place in the world in which we had any business or reason to be, 
but a sudden fog, and some error on the pilot's part, were the 
cause.  We were surrounded by banks, and rocks, and shoals of all 
kinds, but had happily drifted, it seemed, upon the only safe speck 
that was to be found thereabouts.  Eased by this report, and by the 
assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in at three 
o'clock in the morning.

I was dressing about half-past nine next day, when the noise above 
hurried me on deck.  When I had left it overnight, it was dark, 
foggy, and damp, and there were bleak hills all round us.  Now, we 
were gliding down a smooth, broad stream, at the rate of eleven 
miles an hour:  our colours flying gaily; our crew rigged out in 
their smartest clothes; our officers in uniform again; the sun 
shining as on a brilliant April day in England; the land stretched 
out on either side, streaked with light patches of snow; white 
wooden houses; people at their doors; telegraphs working; flags 
hoisted; wharfs appearing; ships; quays crowded with people; 
distant noises; shouts; men and boys running down steep places 
towards the pier:  all more bright and gay and fresh to our unused 
eyes than words can paint them.  We came to a wharf, paved with 
uplifted faces; got alongside, and were made fast, after some 
shouting and straining of cables; darted, a score of us along the 
gangway, almost as soon as it was thrust out to meet us, and before 
it had reached the ship - and leaped upon the firm glad earth 
again!

I suppose this Halifax would have appeared an Elysium, though it 
had been a curiosity of ugly dulness.  But I carried away with me a 
most pleasant impression of the town and its inhabitants, and have 
preserved it to this hour.  Nor was it without regret that I came 
home, without having found an opportunity of returning thither, and 
once more shaking hands with the friends I made that day.

It happened to be the opening of the Legislative Council and 
General Assembly, at which ceremonial the forms observed on the 
commencement of a new Session of Parliament in England were so 
closely copied, and so gravely presented on a small scale, that it 
was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a 
telescope.  The governor, as her Majesty's representative, 
delivered what may be called the Speech from the Throne.  He said 
what he had to say manfully and well.  The military band outside 
the building struck up "God save the Queen" with great vigour 
before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted; the 
in's rubbed their hands; the out's shook their heads; the 
Government party said there never was such a good speech; the 
Opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and 
members of the House of Assembly withdrew from the bar to say a 
great deal among themselves and do a little:  and, in short, 
everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home 
upon the like occasions.

The town is built on the side of a hill, the highest point being 
commanded by a strong fortress, not yet quite finished.  Several 
streets of good breadth and appearance extend from its summit to 
the water-side, and are intersected by cross streets running 
parallel with the river.  The houses are chiefly of wood.  The 
market is abundantly supplied; and provisions are exceedingly 
cheap.  The weather being unusually mild at that time for the 
season of the year, there was no sleighing:  but there were plenty 
of those vehicles in yards and by-places, and some of them, from 
the gorgeous quality of their decorations, might have 'gone on' 
without alteration as triumphal cars in a melodrama at Astley's.  
The day was uncommonly fine; the air bracing and healthful; the 
whole aspect of the town cheerful, thriving, and industrious.

We lay there seven hours, to deliver and exchange the mails.  At 
length, having collected all our bags and all our passengers 
(including two or three choice spirits, who, having indulged too 
freely in oysters and champagne, were found lying insensible on 
their backs in unfrequented streets), the engines were again put in 
motion, and we stood off for Boston.

Encountering squally weather again in the Bay of Fundy, we tumbled 
and rolled about as usual all that night and all next day.  On the 
next afternoon, that is to say, on Saturday, the twenty-second of 
January, an American pilot-boat came alongside, and soon afterwards 
the Britannia steam-packet, from Liverpool, eighteen days out, was 
telegraphed at Boston.

The indescribable interest with which I strained my eyes, as the 
first patches of American soil peeped like molehills from the green 
sea, and followed them, as they swelled, by slow and almost 
imperceptible degrees, into a continuous line of coast, can hardly 
be exaggerated.  A sharp keen wind blew dead against us; a hard 
frost prevailed on shore; and the cold was most severe.  Yet the 
air was so intensely clear, and dry, and bright, that the 
temperature was not only endurable, but delicious.

How I remained on deck, staring about me, until we came alongside 
the dock, and how, though I had had as many eyes as Argus, I should 
have had them all wide open, and all employed on new objects - are 
topics which I will not prolong this chapter to discuss.  Neither 
will I more than hint at my foreigner-like mistake in supposing 
that a party of most active persons, who scrambled on board at the 
peril of their lives as we approached the wharf, were newsmen, 
answering to that industrious class at home; whereas, despite the 
leathern wallets of news slung about the necks of some, and the 
broad sheets in the hands of all, they were Editors, who boarded 
ships in person (as one gentleman in a worsted comforter informed 
me), 'because they liked the excitement of it.'  Suffice it in this 
place to say, that one of these invaders, with a ready courtesy for 
which I thank him here most gratefully, went on before to order 
rooms at the hotel; and that when I followed, as I soon did, I 
found myself rolling through the long passages with an involuntary 
imitation of the gait of Mr. T. P. Cooke, in a new nautical 
melodrama.

'Dinner, if you please,' said I to the waiter.

'When?' said the waiter.

'As quick as possible,' said I.

'Right away?' said the waiter.

After a moment's hesitation, I answered 'No,' at hazard.

'NOT right away?' cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that 
made me start.

I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, 'No; I would rather have 
it in this private room.  I like it very much.'

At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his 
mind:  as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition 
of another man, who whispered in his ear, 'Directly.'

'Well! and that's a fact!' said the waiter, looking helplessly at 
me:  'Right away.'

I saw now that 'Right away' and 'Directly' were one and the same 
thing.  So I reversed my previous answer, and sat down to dinner in 
ten minutes afterwards; and a capital dinner it was.

The hotel (a very excellent one) is called the Tremont House.  It 
has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can 
remember, or the reader would believe.



CHAPTER III - BOSTON



IN all the public establishments of America, the utmost courtesy 
prevails.  Most of our Departments are susceptible of considerable 
improvement in this respect, but the Custom-house above all others 
would do well to take example from the United States and render 
itself somewhat less odious and offensive to foreigners.  The 
servile rapacity of the French officials is sufficiently 
contemptible; but there is a surly boorish incivility about our 
men, alike disgusting to all persons who fall into their hands, and 
discreditable to the nation that keeps such ill-conditioned curs 
snarling about its gates.

When I landed in America, I could not help being strongly impressed 
with the contrast their Custom-house presented, and the attention, 
politeness and good humour with which its officers discharged their 
duty.

As we did not land at Boston, in consequence of some detention at 
the wharf, until after dark, I received my first impressions of the 
city in walking down to the Custom-house on the morning after our 
arrival, which was Sunday.  I am afraid to say, by the way, how 
many offers of pews and seats in church for that morning were made 
to us, by formal note of invitation, before we had half finished 
our first dinner in America, but if I may be allowed to make a 
moderate guess, without going into nicer calculation, I should say 
that at least as many sittings were proffered us, as would have 
accommodated a score or two of grown-up families.  The number of 
creeds and forms of religion to which the pleasure of our company 
was requested, was in very fair proportion.

Not being able, in the absence of any change of clothes, to go to 
church that day, we were compelled to decline these kindnesses, one 
and all; and I was reluctantly obliged to forego the delight of 
hearing Dr. Channing, who happened to preach that morning for the 
first time in a very long interval.  I mention the name of this 
distinguished and accomplished man (with whom I soon afterwards had 
the pleasure of becoming personally acquainted), that I may have 
the gratification of recording my humble tribute of admiration and 
respect for his high abilities and character; and for the bold 
philanthropy with which he has ever opposed himself to that most 
hideous blot and foul disgrace - Slavery.

To return to Boston.  When I got into the streets upon this Sunday 
morning, the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay:  
the signboards were painted in such gaudy colours; the gilded 
letters were so very golden; the bricks were so very red, the stone 
was so very white, the blinds and area railings were so very green, 
the knobs and plates upon the street doors so marvellously bright 
and twinkling; and all so slight and unsubstantial in appearance - 
that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in 
a pantomime.  It rarely happens in the business streets that a 
tradesman, if I may venture to call anybody a tradesman, where 
everybody is a merchant, resides above his store; so that many 
occupations are often carried on in one house, and the whole front 
is covered with boards and inscriptions.  As I walked along, I kept 
glancing up at these boards, confidently expecting to see a few of 
them change into something; and I never turned a corner suddenly 
without looking out for the clown and pantaloon, who, I had no 
doubt, were hiding in a doorway or behind some pillar close at 
hand.  As to Harlequin and Columbine, I discovered immediately that 
they lodged (they are always looking after lodgings in a pantomime) 
at a very small clockmaker's one story high, near the hotel; which, 
in addition to various symbols and devices, almost covering the 
whole front, had a great dial hanging out - to be jumped through, 
of course.

The suburbs are, if possible, even more unsubstantial-looking than 
the city.  The white wooden houses (so white that it makes one wink 
to look at them), with their green jalousie blinds, are so 
sprinkled and dropped about in all directions, without seeming to 
have any root at all in the ground; and the small churches and 
chapels are so prim, and bright, and highly varnished; that I 
almost believed the whole affair could be taken up piecemeal like a 
child's toy, and crammed into a little box.

The city is a beautiful one, and cannot fail, I should imagine, to 
impress all strangers very favourably.  The private dwelling-houses 
are, for the most part, large and elegant; the shops extremely 
good; and the public buildings handsome.  The State House is built 
upon the summit of a hill, which rises gradually at first, and 
afterwards by a steep ascent, almost from the water's edge.  In 
front is a green enclosure, called the Common.  The site is 
beautiful:  and from the top there is a charming panoramic view of 
the whole town and neighbourhood.  In addition to a variety of 
commodious offices, it contains two handsome chambers; in one the 
House of Representatives of the State hold their meetings:  in the 
other, the Senate.  Such proceedings as I saw here, were conducted 
with perfect gravity and decorum; and were certainly calculated to 
inspire attention and respect.

There is no doubt that much of the intellectual refinement and 
superiority of Boston, is referable to the quiet influence of the 
University of Cambridge, which is within three or four miles of the 
city.  The resident professors at that university are gentlemen of 
learning and varied attainments; and are, without one exception 
that I can call to mind, men who would shed a grace upon, and do 
honour to, any society in the civilised world.  Many of the 
resident gentry in Boston and its neighbourhood, and I think I am 
not mistaken in adding, a large majority of those who are attached 
to the liberal professions there, have been educated at this same 
school.  Whatever the defects of American universities may be, they 
disseminate no prejudices; rear no bigots; dig up the buried ashes 
of no old superstitions; never interpose between the people and 
their improvement; exclude no man because of his religious 
opinions; above all, in their whole course of study and 
instruction, recognise a world, and a broad one too, lying beyond 
the college walls.

It was a source of inexpressible pleasure to me to observe the 
almost imperceptible, but not less certain effect, wrought by this 
institution among the small community of Boston; and to note at 
every turn the humanising tastes and desires it has engendered; the 
affectionate friendships to which it has given rise; the amount of 
vanity and prejudice it has dispelled.  The golden calf they 
worship at Boston is a pigmy compared with the giant effigies set 
up in other parts of that vast counting-house which lies beyond the 
Atlantic; and the almighty dollar sinks into something 
comparatively insignificant, amidst a whole Pantheon of better 
gods.

Above all, I sincerely believe that the public institutions and 
charities of this capital of Massachusetts are as nearly perfect, 
as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make 
them.  I never in my life was more affected by the contemplation of 
happiness, under circumstances of privation and bereavement, than 
in my visits to these establishments.

It is a great and pleasant feature of all such institutions in 
America, that they are either supported by the State or assisted by 
the State; or (in the event of their not needing its helping hand) 
that they act in concert with it, and are emphatically the 
people's.  I cannot but think, with a view to the principle and its 
tendency to elevate or depress the character of the industrious 
classes, that a Public Charity is immeasurably better than a 
Private Foundation, no matter how munificently the latter may be 
endowed.  In our own country, where it has not, until within these 
later days, been a very popular fashion with governments to display 
any extraordinary regard for the great mass of the people or to 
recognise their existence as improvable creatures, private 
charities, unexampled in the history of the earth, have arisen, to 
do an incalculable amount of good among the destitute and 
afflicted.  But the government of the country, having neither act 
nor part in them, is not in the receipt of any portion of the 
gratitude they inspire; and, offering very little shelter or relief 
beyond that which is to be found in the workhouse and the jail, has 
come, not unnaturally, to be looked upon by the poor rather as a 
stern master, quick to correct and punish, than a kind protector, 
merciful and vigilant in their hour of need.

The maxim that out of evil cometh good, is strongly illustrated by 
these establishments at home; as the records of the Prerogative 
Office in Doctors' Commons can abundantly prove.  Some immensely 
rich old gentleman or lady, surrounded by needy relatives, makes, 
upon a low average, a will a-week.  The old gentleman or lady, 
never very remarkable in the best of times for good temper, is full 
of aches and pains from head to foot; full of fancies and caprices; 
full of spleen, distrust, suspicion, and dislike.  To cancel old 
wills, and invent new ones, is at last the sole business of such a 
testator's existence; and relations and friends (some of whom have 
been bred up distinctly to inherit a large share of the property, 
and have been, from their cradles, specially disqualified from 
devoting themselves to any useful pursuit, on that account) are so 
often and so unexpectedly and summarily cut off, and reinstated, 
and cut off again, that the whole family, down to the remotest 
cousin, is kept in a perpetual fever.  At length it becomes plain 
that the old lady or gentleman has not long to live; and the 
plainer this becomes, the more clearly the old lady or gentleman 
perceives that everybody is in a conspiracy against their poor old 
dying relative; wherefore the old lady or gentleman makes another 
last will - positively the last this time - conceals the same in a 
china teapot, and expires next day.  Then it turns out, that the 
whole of the real and personal estate is divided between half-a-
dozen charities; and that the dead and gone testator has in pure 
spite helped to do a great deal of good, at the cost of an immense 
amount of evil passion and misery.

The Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, at 
Boston, is superintended by a body of trustees who make an annual 
report to the corporation.  The indigent blind of that state are 
admitted gratuitously.  Those from the adjoining state of 
Connecticut, or from the states of Maine, Vermont, or New 
Hampshire, are admitted by a warrant from the state to which they 
respectively belong; or, failing that, must find security among 
their friends, for the payment of about twenty pounds English for 
their first year's board and instruction, and ten for the second.  
'After the first year,' say the trustees, 'an account current will 
be opened with each pupil; he will be charged with the actual cost 
of his board, which will not exceed two dollars per week;' a trifle 
more than eight shillings English; 'and he will be credited with 
the amount paid for him by the state, or by his friends; also with 
his earnings over and above the cost of the stock which he uses; so 
that all his earnings over one dollar per week will be his own.  By 
the third year it will be known whether his earnings will more than 
pay the actual cost of his board; if they should, he will have it 
at his option to remain and receive his earnings, or not.  Those 
who prove unable to earn their own livelihood will not be retained; 
as it is not desirable to convert the establishment into an alms-
house, or to retain any but working bees in the hive.  Those who by 
physical or mental imbecility are disqualified from work, are 
thereby disqualified from being members of an industrious 
community; and they can be better provided for in establishments 
fitted for the infirm.'

I went to see this place one very fine winter morning:  an Italian 
sky above, and the air so clear and bright on every side, that even 
my eyes, which are none of the best, could follow the minute lines 
and scraps of tracery in distant buildings.  Like most other public 
institutions in America, of the same class, it stands a mile or two 
without the town, in a cheerful healthy spot; and is an airy, 
spacious, handsome edifice.  It is built upon a height, commanding 
the harbour.  When I paused for a moment at the door, and marked 
how fresh and free the whole scene was - what sparkling bubbles 
glanced upon the waves, and welled up every moment to the surface, 
as though the world below, like that above, were radiant with the 
bright day, and gushing over in its fulness of light:  when I gazed 
from sail to sail away upon a ship at sea, a tiny speck of shining 
white, the only cloud upon the still, deep, distant blue - and, 
turning, saw a blind boy with his sightless face addressed that 
way, as though he too had some sense within him of the glorious 
distance:  I felt a kind of sorrow that the place should be so very 
light, and a strange wish that for his sake it were darker.  It was 
but momentary, of course, and a mere fancy, but I felt it keenly 
for all that.

The children were at their daily tasks in different rooms, except a 
few who were already dismissed, and were at play.  Here, as in many 
institutions, no uniform is worn; and I was very glad of it, for 
two reasons.  Firstly, because I am sure that nothing but senseless 
custom and want of thought would reconcile us to the liveries and 
badges we are so fond of at home.  Secondly, because the absence of 
these things presents each child to the visitor in his or her own 
proper character, with its individuality unimpaired; not lost in a 
dull, ugly, monotonous repetition of the same unmeaning garb:  
which is really an important consideration.  The wisdom of 
encouraging a little harmless pride in personal appearance even 
among the blind, or the whimsical absurdity of considering charity 
and leather breeches inseparable companions, as we do, requires no 
comment.

Good order, cleanliness, and comfort, pervaded every corner of the 
building.  The various classes, who were gathered round their 
teachers, answered the questions put to them with readiness and 
intelligence, and in a spirit of cheerful contest for precedence 
which pleased me very much.  Those who were at play, were gleesome 
and noisy as other children.  More spiritual and affectionate 
friendships appeared to exist among them, than would be found among 
other young persons suffering under no deprivation; but this I 
expected and was prepared to find.  It is a part of the great 
scheme of Heaven's merciful consideration for the afflicted.

In a portion of the building, set apart for that purpose, are work-
shops for blind persons whose education is finished, and who have 
acquired a trade, but who cannot pursue it in an ordinary 
manufactory because of their deprivation.  Several people were at 
work here; making brushes, mattresses, and so forth; and the 
cheerfulness, industry, and good order discernible in every other 
part of the building, extended to this department also.

On the ringing of a bell, the pupils all repaired, without any 
guide or leader, to a spacious music-hall, where they took their 
seats in an orchestra erected for that purpose, and listened with 
manifest delight to a voluntary on the organ, played by one of 
themselves.  At its conclusion, the performer, a boy of nineteen or 
twenty, gave place to a girl; and to her accompaniment they all 
sang a hymn, and afterwards a sort of chorus.  It was very sad to 
look upon and hear them, happy though their condition 
unquestionably was; and I saw that one blind girl, who (being for 
the time deprived of the use of her limbs, by illness) sat close 
beside me with her face towards them, wept silently the while she 
listened.

It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free 
they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts; 
observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask 
he wears.  Allowing for one shade of anxious expression which is 
never absent from their countenances, and the like of which we may 
readily detect in our own faces if we try to feel our way in the 
dark, every idea, as it rises within them, is expressed with the 
lightning's speed and nature's truth.  If the company at a rout, or 
drawing-room at court, could only for one time be as unconscious of 
the eyes upon them as blind men and women are, what secrets would 
come out, and what a worker of hypocrisy this sight, the loss of 
which we so much pity, would appear to be!

The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room, before a 
girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell; and nearly so of 
taste:  before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and 
hope, and power of goodness and affection, inclosed within her 
delicate frame, and but one outward sense - the sense of touch.  
There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, 
impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor 
white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some 
good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened.

Long before I looked upon her, the help had come.  Her face was 
radiant with intelligence and pleasure.  Her hair, braided by her 
own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and 
development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and 
its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern 
of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside 
her; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon. - From the 
mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this 
gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.

Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound 
round her eyelids.  A doll she had dressed lay near upon the 
ground.  I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet 
such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.

She was seated in a little enclosure, made by school-desks and 
forms, writing her daily journal.  But soon finishing this pursuit, 
she engaged in an animated conversation with a teacher who sat 
beside her.  This was a favourite mistress with the poor pupil.  If 
she could see the face of her fair instructress, she would not love 
her less, I am sure.

I have extracted a few disjointed fragments of her history, from an 
account, written by that one man who has made her what she is.  It 
is a very beautiful and touching narrative; and I wish I could 
present it entire.

Her name is Laura Bridgman.  'She was born in Hanover, New 
Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829.  She is described 
as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue 
eyes.  She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year 
and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her.  She was 
subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost 
beyond her power of endurance:  and life was held by the feeblest 
tenure:  but when a year and a half old, she seemed to rally; the 
dangerous symptoms subsided; and at twenty months old, she was 
perfectly well.

'Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly 
developed themselves; and during the four months of health which 
she enjoyed, she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother's 
account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence.

'But suddenly she sickened again; her disease raged with great 
violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, 
suppurated, and their contents were discharged.  But though sight 
and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child's sufferings were 
not ended.  The fever raged during seven weeks; for five months she 
was kept in bed in a darkened room; it was a year before she could 
walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day.  
It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely 
destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted.

'It was not until four years of age that the poor child's bodily 
health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her 
apprenticeship of life and the world.

'But what a situation was hers!  The darkness and the silence of 
the tomb were around her:  no mother's smile called forth her 
answering smile, no father's voice taught her to imitate his 
sounds:- they, brothers and sisters, were but forms of matter which 
resisted her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of 
the house, save in warmth, and in the power of locomotion; and not 
even in these respects from the dog and the cat.

'But the immortal spirit which had been implanted within her could 
not die, nor be maimed nor mutilated; and though most of its 
avenues of communication with the world were cut off, it began to 
manifest itself through the others.  As soon as she could walk, she 
began to explore the room, and then the house; she became familiar 
with the form, density, weight, and heat, of every article she 
could lay her hands upon.  She followed her mother, and felt her 
hands and arms, as she was occupied about the house; and her 
disposition to imitate, led her to repeat everything herself.  She 
even learned to sew a little, and to knit.'

The reader will scarcely need to be told, however, that the 
opportunities of communicating with her, were very, very limited; 
and that the moral effects of her wretched state soon began to 
appear.  Those who cannot be enlightened by reason, can only be 
controlled by force; and this, coupled with her great privations, 
must soon have reduced her to a worse condition than that of the 
beasts that perish, but for timely and unhoped-for aid.

'At this time, I was so fortunate as to hear of the child, and 
immediately hastened to Hanover to see her.  I found her with a 
well-formed figure; a strongly-marked, nervous-sanguine 
temperament; a large and beautifully-shaped head; and the whole 
system in healthy action.  The parents were easily induced to 
consent to her coming to Boston, and on the 4th of October, 1837, 
they brought her to the Institution.

'For a while, she was much bewildered; and after waiting about two 
weeks, until she became acquainted with her new locality, and 
somewhat familiar with the inmates, the attempt was made to give 
her knowledge of arbitrary signs, by which she could interchange 
thoughts with others.

'There was one of two ways to be adopted:  either to go on to build 
up a language of signs on the basis of the natural language which 
she had already commenced herself, or to teach her the purely 
arbitrary language in common use:  that is, to give her a sign for 
every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters by 
combination of which she might express her idea of the existence, 
and the mode and condition of existence, of any thing.  The former 
would have been easy, but very ineffectual; the latter seemed very 
difficult, but, if accomplished, very effectual.  I determined 
therefore to try the latter.

'The first experiments were made by taking articles in common use, 
such as knives, forks, spoons, keys, &c., and pasting upon them 
labels with their names printed in raised letters.  These she felt 
very carefully, and soon, of course, distinguished that the crooked 
lines SPOON, differed as much from the crooked lines KEY, as the 
spoon differed from the key in form.

'Then small detached labels, with the same words printed upon them, 
were put into her hands; and she soon observed that they were 
similar to the ones pasted on the articles.'  She showed her 
perception of this similarity by laying the label KEY upon the key, 
and the label SPOON upon the spoon.  She was encouraged here by the 
natural sign of approbation, patting on the head.

'The same process was then repeated with all the articles which she 
could handle; and she very easily learned to place the proper 
labels upon them.  It was evident, however, that the only 
intellectual exercise was that of imitation and memory.  She 
recollected that the label BOOK was placed upon a book, and she 
repeated the process first from imitation, next from memory, with 
only the motive of love of approbation, but apparently without the 
intellectual perception of any relation between the things.

'After a while, instead of labels, the individual letters were 
given to her on detached bits of paper:  they were arranged side by 
side so as to spell BOOK, KEY, &c.; then they were mixed up in a 
heap and a sign was made for her to arrange them herself so as to 
express the words BOOK, KEY, &c.; and she did so.

'Hitherto, the process had been mechanical, and the success about 
as great as teaching a very knowing dog a variety of tricks.  The 
poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated 
everything her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon 
her:  her intellect began to work:  she perceived that here was a 
way by which she could herself make up a sign of anything that was 
in her own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her 
countenance lighted up with a human expression:  it was no longer a 
dog, or parrot:  it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a 
new link of union with other spirits!  I could almost fix upon the 
moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light 
to her countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome; and 
that henceforward nothing but patient and persevering, but plain 
and straightforward, efforts were to be used.

'The result thus far, is quickly related, and easily conceived; but 
not so was the process; for many weeks of apparently unprofitable 
labour were passed before it was effected.

'When it was said above that a sign was made, it was intended to 
say, that the action was performed by her teacher, she feeling his 
hands, and then imitating the motion.

'The next step was to procure a set of metal types, with the 
different letters of the alphabet cast upon their ends; also a 
board, in which were square holes, into which holes she could set 
the types; so that the letters on their ends could alone be felt 
above the surface.

'Then, on any article being handed to her, for instance, a pencil, 
or a watch, she would select the component letters, and arrange 
them on her board, and read them with apparent pleasure.

'She was exercised for several weeks in this way, until her 
vocabulary became extensive; and then the important step was taken 
of teaching her how to represent the different letters by the 
position of her fingers, instead of the cumbrous apparatus of the 
board and types.  She accomplished this speedily and easily, for 
her intellect had begun to work in aid of her teacher, and her 
progress was rapid.

'This was the period, about three months after she had commenced, 
that the first report of her case was made, in which it was stated 
that "she has just learned the manual alphabet, as used by the deaf 
mutes, and it is a subject of delight and wonder to see how 
rapidly, correctly, and eagerly, she goes on with her labours.  Her 
teacher gives her a new object, for instance, a pencil, first lets 
her examine it, and get an idea of its use, then teaches her how to 
spell it by making the signs for the letters with her own fingers:  
the child grasps her hand, and feels her fingers, as the different 
letters are formed; she turns her head a little on one side like a 
person listening closely; her lips are apart; she seems scarcely to 
breathe; and her countenance, at first anxious, gradually changes 
to a smile, as she comprehends the lesson.  She then holds up her 
tiny fingers, and spells the word in the manual alphabet; next, she 
takes her types and arranges her letters; and last, to make sure 
that she is right, she takes the whole of the types composing the 
word, and places them upon or in contact with the pencil, or 
whatever the object may be."

'The whole of the succeeding year was passed in gratifying her 
eager inquiries for the names of every object which she could 
possibly handle; in exercising her in the use of the manual 
alphabet; in extending in every possible way her knowledge of the 
physical relations of things; and in proper care of her health.

'At the end of the year a report of her case was made, from which 
the following is an extract.

'"It has been ascertained beyond the possibility of doubt, that she 
cannot see a ray of light, cannot hear the least sound, and never 
exercises her sense of smell, if she have any.  Thus her mind 
dwells in darkness and stillness, as profound as that of a closed 
tomb at midnight.  Of beautiful sights, and sweet sounds, and 
pleasant odours, she has no conception; nevertheless, she seems as 
happy and playful as a bird or a lamb; and the employment of her 
intellectual faculties, or the acquirement of a new idea, gives her 
a vivid pleasure, which is plainly marked in her expressive 
features.  She never seems to repine, but has all the buoyancy and 
gaiety of childhood.  She is fond of fun and frolic, and when 
playing with the rest of the children, her shrill laugh sounds 
loudest of the group.

'"When left alone, she seems very happy if she have her knitting or 
sewing, and will busy herself for hours; if she have no occupation, 
she evidently amuses herself by imaginary dialogues, or by 
recalling past impressions; she counts with her fingers, or spells 
out names of things which she has recently learned, in the manual 
alphabet of the deaf mutes.  In this lonely self-communion she 
seems to reason, reflect, and argue; if she spell a word wrong with 
the fingers of her right hand, she instantly strikes it with her 
left, as her teacher does, in sign of disapprobation; if right, 
then she pats herself upon the head, and looks pleased.  She 
sometimes purposely spells a word wrong with the left hand, looks 
roguish for a moment and laughs, and then with the right hand 
strikes the left, as if to correct it.

'"During the year she has attained great dexterity in the use of 
the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes; and she spells out the words 
and sentences which she knows, so fast and so deftly, that only 
those accustomed to this language can follow with the eye the rapid 
motions of her fingers.

'"But wonderful as is the rapidity with which she writes her 
thoughts upon the air, still more so is the ease and accuracy with 
which she reads the words thus written by another; grasping their 
hands in hers, and following every movement of their fingers, as 
letter after letter conveys their meaning to her mind.  It is in 
this way that she converses with her blind playmates, and nothing 
can more forcibly show the power of mind in forcing matter to its 
purpose than a meeting between them.  For if great talent and skill 
are necessary for two pantomimes to paint their thoughts and 
feelings by the movements of the body, and the expression of the 
countenance, how much greater the difficulty when darkness shrouds 
them both, and the one can hear no sound.

'"When Laura is walking through a passage-way, with her hands 
spread before her, she knows instantly every one she meets, and 
passes them with a sign of recognition:  but if it be a girl of her 
own age, and especially if it be one of her favourites, there is 
instantly a bright smile of recognition, a twining of arms, a 
grasping of hands, and a swift telegraphing upon the tiny fingers; 
whose rapid evolutions convey the thoughts and feelings from the 
outposts of one mind to those of the other.  There are questions 
and answers, exchanges of joy or sorrow, there are kissings and 
partings, just as between little children with all their senses."

'During this year, and six months after she had left home, her 
mother came to visit her, and the scene of their meeting was an 
interesting one.

'The mother stood some time, gazing with overflowing eyes upon her 
unfortunate child, who, all unconscious of her presence, was 
playing about the room.  Presently Laura ran against her, and at 
once began feeling her hands, examining her dress, and trying to 
find out if she knew her; but not succeeding in this, she turned 
away as from a stranger, and the poor woman could not conceal the 
pang she felt, at finding that her beloved child did not know her.

'She then gave Laura a string of beads which she used to wear at 
home, which were recognised by the child at once, who, with much 
joy, put them around her neck, and sought me eagerly to say she 
understood the string was from her home.

'The mother now sought to caress her, but poor Laura repelled her, 
preferring to be with her acquaintances.

'Another article from home was now given her, and she began to look 
much interested; she examined the stranger much closer, and gave me 
to understand that she knew she came from Hanover; she even endured 
her caresses, but would leave her with indifference at the 
slightest signal.  The distress of the mother was now painful to 
behold; for, although she had feared that she should not be 
recognised, the painful reality of being treated with cold 
indifference by a darling child, was too much for woman's nature to 
bear.

'After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague 
idea seemed to flit across Laura's mind, that this could not be a 
stranger; she therefore felt her hands very eagerly, while her 
countenance assumed an expression of intense interest; she became 
very pale; and then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt 
and anxiety, and never were contending emotions more strongly 
painted upon the human face:  at this moment of painful 
uncertainty, the mother drew her close to her side, and kissed her 
fondly, when at once the truth flashed upon the child, and all 
mistrust and anxiety disappeared from her face, as with an 
expression of exceeding joy she eagerly nestled to the bosom of her 
parent, and yielded herself to her fond embraces.

'After this, the beads were all unheeded; the playthings which were 
offered to her were utterly disregarded; her playmates, for whom 
but a moment before she gladly left the stranger, now vainly strove 
to pull her from her mother; and though she yielded her usual 
instantaneous obedience to my signal to follow me, it was evidently 
with painful reluctance.  She clung close to me, as if bewildered 
and fearful; and when, after a moment, I took her to her mother, 
she sprang to her arms, and clung to her with eager joy.

'The subsequent parting between them, showed alike the affection, 
the intelligence, and the resolution of the child.

'Laura accompanied her mother to the door, clinging close to her 
all the way, until they arrived at the threshold, where she paused, 
and felt around, to ascertain who was near her.  Perceiving the 
matron, of whom she is very fond, she grasped her with one hand, 
holding on convulsively to her mother with the other; and thus she 
stood for a moment:  then she dropped her mother's hand; put her 
handkerchief to her eyes; and turning round, clung sobbing to the 
matron; while her mother departed, with emotions as deep as those 
of her child.

* * * * * *

'It has been remarked in former reports, that she can distinguish 
different degrees of intellect in others, and that she soon 
regarded, almost with contempt, a new-comer, when, after a few 
days, she discovered her weakness of mind.  This unamiable part of 
her character has been more strongly developed during the past 
year.

'She chooses for her friends and companions, those children who are 
intelligent, and can talk best with her; and she evidently dislikes 
to be with those who are deficient in intellect, unless, indeed, 
she can make them serve her purposes, which she is evidently 
inclined to do.  She takes advantage of them, and makes them wait 
upon her, in a manner that she knows she could not exact of others; 
and in various ways shows her Saxon blood.

'She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the 
teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried 
too far, or she becomes jealous.  She wants to have her share, 
which, if not the lion's, is the greater part; and if she does not 
get it, she says, "MY MOTHER WILL LOVE ME."

'Her tendency to imitation is so strong, that it leads her to 
actions which must be entirely incomprehensible to her, and which 
can give her no other pleasure than the gratification of an 
internal faculty.  She has been known to sit for half an hour, 
holding a book before her sightless eyes, and moving her lips, as 
she has observed seeing people do when reading.

'She one day pretended that her doll was sick; and went through all 
the motions of tending it, and giving it medicine; she then put it 
carefully to bed, and placed a bottle of hot water to its feet, 
laughing all the time most heartily.  When I came home, she 
insisted upon my going to see it, and feel its pulse; and when I 
told her to put a blister on its back, she seemed to enjoy it 
amazingly, and almost screamed with delight.

'Her social feelings, and her affections, are very strong; and when 
she is sitting at work, or at her studies, by the side of one of 
her little friends, she will break off from her task every few 
moments, to hug and kiss them with an earnestness and warmth that 
is touching to behold.

'When left alone, she occupies and apparently amuses herself, and 
seems quite contented; and so strong seems to be the natural 
tendency of thought to put on the garb of language, that she often 
soliloquizes in the FINGER LANGUAGE, slow and tedious as it is.  
But it is only when alone, that she is quiet:  for if she becomes 
sensible of the presence of any one near her, she is restless until 
she can sit close beside them, hold their hand, and converse with 
them by signs.

'In her intellectual character it is pleasing to observe an 
insatiable thirst for knowledge, and a quick perception of the 
relations of things.  In her moral character, it is beautiful to 
behold her continual gladness, her keen enjoyment of existence, her 
expansive love, her unhesitating confidence, her sympathy with 
suffering, her conscientiousness, truthfulness, and hopefulness.'

Such are a few fragments from the simple but most interesting and 
instructive history of Laura Bridgman.  The name of her great 
benefactor and friend, who writes it, is Dr. Howe.  There are not 
many persons, I hope and believe, who, after reading these 
passages, can ever hear that name with indifference.

A further account has been published by Dr. Howe, since the report 
from which I have just quoted.  It describes her rapid mental 
growth and improvement during twelve months more, and brings her 
little history down to the end of last year.  It is very 
remarkable, that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary 
conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the 
shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, 
having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep.  And it has 
been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much 
disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and 
confused manner on her fingers:  just as we should murmur and 
mutter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances.

I turned over the leaves of her Diary, and found it written in a 
fair legible square hand, and expressed in terms which were quite 
intelligible without any explanation.  On my saying that I should 
like to see her write again, the teacher who sat beside her, bade 
her, in their language, sign her name upon a slip of paper, twice 
or thrice.  In doing so, I observed that she kept her left hand 
always touching, and following up, her right, in which, of course, 
she held the pen.  No line was indicated by any contrivance, but 
she wrote straight and freely.

She had, until now, been quite unconscious of the presence of 
visitors; but, having her hand placed in that of the gentleman who 
accompanied me, she immediately expressed his name upon her 
teacher's palm.  Indeed her sense of touch is now so exquisite, 
that having been acquainted with a person once, she can recognise 
him or her after almost any interval.  This gentleman had been in 
her company, I believe, but very seldom, and certainly had not seen 
her for many months.  My hand she rejected at once, as she does 
that of any man who is a stranger to her.  But she retained my 
wife's with evident pleasure, kissed her, and examed her dress with 
a girl's curiosity and interest.

She was merry and cheerful, and showed much innocent playfulness in 
her intercourse with her teacher.  Her delight on recognising a 
favourite playfellow and companion - herself a blind girl - who 
silently, and with an equal enjoyment of the coming surprise, took 
a seat beside her, was beautiful to witness.  It elicited from her 
at first, as other slight circumstances did twice or thrice during 
my visit, an uncouth noise which was rather painful to hear.  But 
of her teacher touching her lips, she immediately desisted, and 
embraced her laughingly and affectionately.

I had previously been into another chamber, where a number of blind 
boys were swinging, and climbing, and engaged in various sports.  
They all clamoured, as we entered, to the assistant-master, who 
accompanied us, 'Look at me, Mr. Hart!  Please, Mr. Hart, look at 
me!' evincing, I thought, even in this, an anxiety peculiar to 
their condition, that their little feats of agility should be SEEN.  
Among them was a small laughing fellow, who stood aloof, 
entertaining himself with a gymnastic exercise for bringing the 
arms and chest into play; which he enjoyed mightily; especially 
when, in thrusting out his right arm, he brought it into contact 
with another boy.  Like Laura Bridgman, this young child was deaf, 
and dumb, and blind.

Dr. Howe's account of this pupil's first instruction is so very 
striking, and so intimately connected with Laura herself, that I 
cannot refrain from a short extract.  I may premise that the poor 
boy's name is Oliver Caswell; that he is thirteen years of age; and 
that he was in full possession of all his faculties, until three 
years and four months old.  He was then attacked by scarlet fever; 
in four weeks became deaf; in a few weeks more, blind; in six 
months, dumb.  He showed his anxious sense of this last 
deprivation, by often feeling the lips of other persons when they 
were talking, and then putting his hand upon his own, as if to 
assure himself that he had them in the right position.

'His thirst for knowledge,' says Dr. Howe, 'proclaimed itself as 
soon as he entered the house, by his eager examination of 
everything he could feel or smell in his new location.  For 
instance, treading upon the register of a furnace, he instantly 
stooped down, and began to feel it, and soon discovered the way in 
which the upper plate moved upon the lower one; but this was not 
enough for him, so lying down upon his face, he applied his tongue 
first to one, then to the other, and seemed to discover that they 
were of different kinds of metal.

'His signs were expressive:  and the strictly natural language, 
laughing, crying, sighing, kissing, embracing, &c., was perfect.

'Some of the analogical signs which (guided by his faculty of 
imitation) he had contrived, were comprehensible; such as the 
waving motion of his hand for the motion of a boat, the circular 
one for a wheel, &c.

'The first object was to break up the use of these signs and to 
substitute for them the use of purely arbitrary ones.

'Profiting by the experience I had gained in the other cases, I 
omitted several steps of the process before employed, and commenced 
at once with the finger language.  Taking, therefore, several 
articles having short names, such as key, cup, mug, &c., and with 
Laura for an auxiliary, I sat down, and taking his hand, placed it 
upon one of them, and then with my own, made the letters KEY.  He 
felt my hands eagerly with both of his, and on my repeating the 
process, he evidently tried to imitate the motions of my fingers.  
In a few minutes he contrived to feel the motions of my fingers 
with one hand, and holding out the other he tried to imitate them, 
laughing most heartily when he succeeded.  Laura was by, interested 
even to agitation; and the two presented a singular sight:  her 
face was flushed and anxious, and her fingers twining in among ours 
so closely as to follow every motion, but so slightly as not to 
embarrass them; while Oliver stood attentive, his head a little 
aside, his face turned up, his left hand grasping mine, and his 
right held out:  at every motion of my fingers his countenance 
betokened keen attention; there was an expression of anxiety as he 
tried to imitate the motions; then a smile came stealing out as he 
thought he could do so, and spread into a joyous laugh the moment 
he succeeded, and felt me pat his head, and Laura clap him heartily 
upon the back, and jump up and down in her joy.

'He learned more than a half-dozen letters in half an hour, and 
seemed delighted with his success, at least in gaining approbation.  
His attention then began to flag, and I commenced playing with him.  
It was evident that in all this he had merely been imitating the 
motions of my fingers, and placing his hand upon the key, cup, &c., 
as part of the process, without any perception of the relation 
between the sign and the object.

'When he was tired with play I took him back to the table, and he 
was quite ready to begin again his process of imitation.  He soon 
learned to make the letters for KEY, PEN, PIN; and by having the 
object repeatedly placed in his hand, he at last perceived the 
relation I wished to establish between them.  This was evident, 
because, when I made the letters PIN, or PEN, or CUP, he would 
select the article.

'The perception of this relation was not accompanied by that 
radiant flash of intelligence, and that glow of joy, which marked 
the delightful moment when Laura first perceived it.  I then placed 
all the articles on the table, and going away a little distance 
with the children, placed Oliver's fingers in the positions to 
spell KEY, on which Laura went and brought the article:  the little 
fellow seemed much amused by this, and looked very attentive and 
smiling.  I then caused him to make the letters BREAD, and in an 
instant Laura went and brought him a piece:  he smelled at it; put 
it to his lips; cocked up his head with a most knowing look; seemed 
to reflect a moment; and then laughed outright, as much as to say, 
"Aha!  I understand now how something may be made out of this."

'It was now clear that he had the capacity and inclination to 
learn, that he was a proper subject for instruction, and needed 
only persevering attention.  I therefore put him in the hands of an 
intelligent teacher, nothing doubting of his rapid progress.'

Well may this gentleman call that a delightful moment, in which 
some distant promise of her present state first gleamed upon the 
darkened mind of Laura Bridgman.  Throughout his life, the 
recollection of that moment will be to him a source of pure, 
unfading happiness; nor will it shine less brightly on the evening 
of his days of Noble Usefulness.

The affection which exists between these two - the master and the 
pupil - is as far removed from all ordinary care and regard, as the 
circumstances in which it has had its growth, are apart from the 
common occurrences of life.  He is occupied now, in devising means 
of imparting to her, higher knowledge; and of conveying to her some 
adequate idea of the Great Creator of that universe in which, dark 
and silent and scentless though it be to her, she has such deep 
delight and glad enjoyment.

Ye who have eyes and see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who 
are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces 
that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and 
mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind!  Self-elected 
saints with gloomy brows, this sightless, earless, voiceless child 
may teach you lessons you will do well to follow.  Let that poor 
hand of hers lie gently on your hearts; for there may be something 
in its healing touch akin to that of the Great Master whose 
precepts you misconstrue, whose lessons you pervert, of whose 
charity and sympathy with all the world, not one among you in his 
daily practice knows as much as many of the worst among those 
fallen sinners, to whom you are liberal in nothing but the 
preachment of perdition!

As I rose to quit the room, a pretty little child of one of the 
attendants came running in to greet its father.  For the moment, a 
child with eyes, among the sightless crowd, impressed me almost as 
painfully as the blind boy in the porch had done, two hours ago.  
Ah! how much brighter and more deeply blue, glowing and rich though 
it had been before, was the scene without, contrasting with the 
darkness of so many youthful lives within!

* * * * * *

At SOUTH BOSTON, as it is called, in a situation excellently 
adapted for the purpose, several charitable institutions are 
clustered together.  One of these, is the State Hospital for the 
insane; admirably conducted on those enlightened principles of 
conciliation and kindness, which twenty years ago would have been 
worse than heretical, and which have been acted upon with so much 
success in our own pauper Asylum at Hanwell.  'Evince a desire to 
show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people,' 
said the resident physician, as we walked along the galleries, his 
patients flocking round us unrestrained.  Of those who deny or 
doubt the wisdom of this maxim after witnessing its effects, if 
there be such people still alive, I can only say that I hope I may 
never be summoned as a Juryman on a Commission of Lunacy whereof 
they are the subjects; for I should certainly find them out of 
their senses, on such evidence alone.

Each ward in this institution is shaped like a long gallery or 
hall, with the dormitories of the patients opening from it on 
either hand.  Here they work, read, play at skittles, and other 
games; and when the weather does not admit of their taking exercise 
out of doors, pass the day together.  In one of these rooms, 
seated, calmly, and quite as a matter of course, among a throng of 
mad-women, black and white, were the physician's wife and another 
lady, with a couple of children.  These ladies were graceful and 
handsome; and it was not difficult to perceive at a glance that 
even their presence there, had a highly beneficial influence on the 
patients who were grouped about them.

Leaning her head against the chimney-piece, with a great assumption 
of dignity and refinement of manner, sat an elderly female, in as 
many scraps of finery as Madge Wildfire herself.  Her head in 
particular was so strewn with scraps of gauze and cotton and bits 
of paper, and had so many queer odds and ends stuck all about it, 
that it looked like a bird's-nest.  She was radiant with imaginary 
jewels; wore a rich pair of undoubted gold spectacles; and 
gracefully dropped upon her lap, as we approached, a very old 
greasy newspaper, in which I dare say she had been reading an 
account of her own presentation at some Foreign Court.

I have been thus particular in describing her, because she will 
serve to exemplify the physician's manner of acquiring and 
retaining the confidence of his patients.

'This,' he said aloud, taking me by the hand, and advancing to the 
fantastic figure with great politeness - not raising her suspicions 
by the slightest look or whisper, or any kind of aside, to me:  
'This lady is the hostess of this mansion, sir.  It belongs to her.  
Nobody else has anything whatever to do with it.  It is a large 
establishment, as you see, and requires a great number of 
attendants.  She lives, you observe, in the very first style.  She 
is kind enough to receive my visits, and to permit my wife and 
family to reside here; for which it is hardly necessary to say, we 
are much indebted to her.  She is exceedingly courteous, you 
perceive,' on this hint she bowed condescendingly, 'and will permit 
me to have the pleasure of introducing you:  a gentleman from 
England, Ma'am:  newly arrived from England, after a very 
tempestuous passage:  Mr. Dickens, - the lady of the house!'

We exchanged the most dignified salutations with profound gravity 
and respect, and so went on.  The rest of the madwomen seemed to 
understand the joke perfectly (not only in this case, but in all 
the others, except their own), and be highly amused by it.  The 
nature of their several kinds of insanity was made known to me in 
the same way, and we left each of them in high good humour.  Not 
only is a thorough confidence established, by those means, between 
the physician and patient, in respect of the nature and extent of 
their hallucinations, but it is easy to understand that 
opportunities are afforded for seizing any moment of reason, to 
startle them by placing their own delusion before them in its most 
incongruous and ridiculous light.

Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a 
knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman, whose 
manner of dealing with his charges, I have just described.  At 
every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among 
them from cutting the throats of the rest; but the effect of that 
influence is reduced to an absolute certainty, and is found, even 
as a means of restraint, to say nothing of it as a means of cure, a 
hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, 
fetters, and handcuffs, that ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty have 
manufactured since the creation of the world.

In the labour department, every patient is as freely trusted with 
the tools of his trade as if he were a sane man.  In the garden, 
and on the farm, they work with spades, rakes, and hoes.  For 
amusement, they walk, run, fish, paint, read, and ride out to take 
the air in carriages provided for the purpose.  They have among 
themselves a sewing society to make clothes for the poor, which 
holds meetings, passes resolutions, never comes to fisty-cuffs or 
bowie-knives as sane assemblies have been known to do elsewhere; 
and conducts all its proceedings with the greatest decorum.  The 
irritability, which would otherwise be expended on their own flesh, 
clothes, and furniture, is dissipated in these pursuits.  They are 
cheerful, tranquil, and healthy.

Once a week they have a ball, in which the Doctor and his family, 
with all the nurses and attendants, take an active part.  Dances 
and marches are performed alternately, to the enlivening strains of 
a piano; and now and then some gentleman or lady (whose proficiency 
has been previously ascertained) obliges the company with a song:  
nor does it ever degenerate, at a tender crisis, into a screech or 
howl; wherein, I must confess, I should have thought the danger 
lay.  At an early hour they all meet together for these festive 
purposes; at eight o'clock refreshments are served; and at nine 
they separate.

Immense politeness and good breeding are observed throughout.  They 
all take their tone from the Doctor; and he moves a very 
Chesterfield among the company.  Like other assemblies, these 
entertainments afford a fruitful topic of conversation among the 
ladies for some days; and the gentlemen are so anxious to shine on 
these occasions, that they have been sometimes found 'practising 
their steps' in private, to cut a more distinguished figure in the 
dance.

It is obvious that one great feature of this system, is the 
inculcation and encouragement, even among such unhappy persons, of 
a decent self-respect.  Something of the same spirit pervades all 
the Institutions at South Boston.

There is the House of Industry.  In that branch of it, which is 
devoted to the reception of old or otherwise helpless paupers, 
these words are painted on the walls:  'WORTHY OF NOTICE.  SELF-
GOVERNMENT, QUIETUDE, AND PEACE, ARE BLESSINGS.'  It is not assumed 
and taken for granted that being there they must be evil-disposed 
and wicked people, before whose vicious eyes it is necessary to 
flourish threats and harsh restraints.  They are met at the very 
threshold with this mild appeal.  All within-doors is very plain 
and simple, as it ought to be, but arranged with a view to peace 
and comfort.  It costs no more than any other plan of arrangement, 
but it speaks an amount of consideration for those who are reduced 
to seek a shelter there, which puts them at once upon their 
gratitude and good behaviour.  Instead of being parcelled out in 
great, long, rambling wards, where a certain amount of weazen life 
may mope, and pine, and shiver, all day long, the building is 
divided into separate rooms, each with its share of light and air.  
In these, the better kind of paupers live.  They have a motive for 
exertion and becoming pride, in the desire to make these little 
chambers comfortable and decent.

I do not remember one but it was clean and neat, and had its plant 
or two upon the window-sill, or row of crockery upon the shelf, or 
small display of coloured prints upon the whitewashed wall, or, 
perhaps, its wooden clock behind the door.

The orphans and young children are in an adjoining building 
separate from this, but a part of the same Institution.  Some are 
such little creatures, that the stairs are of Lilliputian 
measurement, fitted to their tiny strides.  The same consideration 
for their years and weakness is expressed in their very seats, 
which are perfect curiosities, and look like articles of furniture 
for a pauper doll's-house.  I can imagine the glee of our Poor Law 
Commissioners at the notion of these seats having arms and backs; 
but small spines being of older date than their occupation of the 
Board-room at Somerset House, I thought even this provision very 
merciful and kind.

Here again, I was greatly pleased with the inscriptions on the 
wall, which were scraps of plain morality, easily remembered and 
understood:  such as 'Love one another' - 'God remembers the 
smallest creature in his creation:' and straightforward advice of 
that nature.  The books and tasks of these smallest of scholars, 
were adapted, in the same judicious manner, to their childish 
powers.  When we had examined these lessons, four morsels of girls 
(of whom one was blind) sang a little song, about the merry month 
of May, which I thought (being extremely dismal) would have suited 
an English November better.  That done, we went to see their 
sleeping-rooms on the floor above, in which the arrangements were 
no less excellent and gentle than those we had seen below.  And 
after observing that the teachers were of a class and character 
well suited to the spirit of the place, I took leave of the infants 
with a lighter heart than ever I have taken leave of pauper infants 
yet.

Connected with the House of Industry, there is also an Hospital, 
which was in the best order, and had, I am glad to say, many beds 
unoccupied.  It had one fault, however, which is common to all 
American interiors:  the presence of the eternal, accursed, 
suffocating, red-hot demon of a stove, whose breath would blight 
the purest air under Heaven.

There are two establishments for boys in this same neighbourhood.  
One is called the Boylston school, and is an asylum for neglected 
and indigent boys who have committed no crime, but who in the 
ordinary course of things would very soon be purged of that 
distinction if they were not taken from the hungry streets and sent 
here.  The other is a House of Reformation for Juvenile Offenders.  
They are both under the same roof, but the two classes of boys 
never come in contact.

The Boylston boys, as may be readily supposed, have very much the 
advantage of the others in point of personal appearance.  They were 
in their school-room when I came upon them, and answered correctly, 
without book, such questions as where was England; how far was it; 
what was its population; its capital city; its form of government; 
and so forth.  They sang a song too, about a farmer sowing his 
seed:  with corresponding action at such parts as ''tis thus he 
sows,' 'he turns him round,' 'he claps his hands;' which gave it 
greater interest for them, and accustomed them to act together, in 
an orderly manner.  They appeared exceedingly well-taught, and not 
better taught than fed; for a more chubby-looking full-waistcoated 
set of boys, I never saw.

The juvenile offenders had not such pleasant faces by a great deal, 
and in this establishment there were many boys of colour.  I saw 
them first at their work (basket-making, and the manufacture of 
palm-leaf hats), afterwards in their school, where they sang a 
chorus in praise of Liberty:  an odd, and, one would think, rather 
aggravating, theme for prisoners.  These boys are divided into four 
classes, each denoted by a numeral, worn on a badge upon the arm.  
On the arrival of a new-comer, he is put into the fourth or lowest 
class, and left, by good behaviour, to work his way up into the 
first.  The design and object of this Institution is to reclaim the 
youthful criminal by firm but kind and judicious treatment; to make 
his prison a place of purification and improvement, not of 
demoralisation and corruption; to impress upon him that there is 
but one path, and that one sober industry, which can ever lead him 
to happiness; to teach him how it may be trodden, if his footsteps 
have never yet been led that way; and to lure him back to it if 
they have strayed:  in a word, to snatch him from destruction, and 
restore him to society a penitent and useful member.  The 
importance of such an establishment, in every point of view, and 
with reference to every consideration of humanity and social 
policy, requires no comment.

One other establishment closes the catalogue.  It is the House of 
Correction for the State, in which silence is strictly maintained, 
but where the prisoners have the comfort and mental relief of 
seeing each other, and of working together.  This is the improved 
system of Prison Discipline which we have imported into England, 
and which has been in successful operation among us for some years 
past.

America, as a new and not over-populated country, has in all her 
prisons, the one great advantage, of being enabled to find useful 
and profitable work for the inmates; whereas, with us, the 
prejudice against prison labour is naturally very strong, and 
almost insurmountable, when honest men who have not offended 
against the laws are frequently doomed to seek employment in vain.  
Even in the United States, the principle of bringing convict labour 
and free labour into a competition which must obviously be to the 
disadvantage of the latter, has already found many opponents, whose 
number is not likely to diminish with access of years.

For this very reason though, our best prisons would seem at the 
first glance to be better conducted than those of America.  The 
treadmill is conducted with little or no noise; five hundred men 
may pick oakum in the same room, without a sound; and both kinds of 
labour admit of such keen and vigilant superintendence, as will 
render even a word of personal communication amongst the prisoners 
almost impossible.  On the other hand, the noise of the loom, the 
forge, the carpenter's hammer, or the stonemason's saw, greatly 
favour those opportunities of intercourse - hurried and brief no 
doubt, but opportunities still - which these several kinds of work, 
by rendering it necessary for men to be employed very near to each 
other, and often side by side, without any barrier or partition 
between them, in their very nature present.  A visitor, too, 
requires to reason and reflect a little, before the sight of a 
number of men engaged in ordinary labour, such as he is accustomed 
to out of doors, will impress him half as strongly as the 
contemplation of the same persons in the same place and garb would, 
if they were occupied in some task, marked and degraded everywhere 
as belonging only to felons in jails.  In an American state prison 
or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade 
myself that I was really in a jail:  a place of ignominious 
punishment and endurance.  And to this hour I very much question 
whether the humane boast that it is not like one, has its root in 
the true wisdom or philosophy of the matter.

I hope I may not be misunderstood on this subject, for it is one in 
which I take a strong and deep interest.  I incline as little to 
the sickly feeling which makes every canting lie or maudlin speech 
of a notorious criminal a subject of newspaper report and general 
sympathy, as I do to those good old customs of the good old times 
which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third 
King George, in respect of her criminal code and her prison 
regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries 
on the earth.  If I thought it would do any good to the rising 
generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment 
of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more 
cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, 
gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the 
purpose.  My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as 
utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws 
and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or that their 
wonderful escapes were effected by the prison-turnkeys who, in 
those admirable days, had always been felons themselves, and were, 
to the last, their bosom-friends and pot-companions.  At the same 
time I know, as all men do or should, that the subject of Prison 
Discipline is one of the highest importance to any community; and 
that in her sweeping reform and bright example to other countries 
on this head, America has shown great wisdom, great benevolence, 
and exalted policy.  In contrasting her system with that which we 
have modelled upon it, I merely seek to show that with all its 
drawbacks, ours has some advantages of its own.

The House of Correction which has led to these remarks, is not 
walled, like other prisons, but is palisaded round about with tall 
rough stakes, something after the manner of an enclosure for 
keeping elephants in, as we see it represented in Eastern prints 
and pictures.  The prisoners wear a parti-coloured dress; and those 
who are sentenced to hard labour, work at nail-making, or stone-
cutting.  When I was there, the latter class of labourers were 
employed upon the stone for a new custom-house in course of 
erection at Boston.  They appeared to shape it skilfully and with 
expedition, though there were very few among them (if any) who had 
not acquired the art within the prison gates.

The women, all in one large room, were employed in making light 
clothing, for New Orleans and the Southern States.  They did their 
work in silence like the men; and like them were over-looked by the 
person contracting for their labour, or by some agent of his 
appointment.  In addition to this, they are every moment liable to 
be visited by the prison officers appointed for that purpose.

The arrangements for cooking, washing of clothes, and so forth, are 
much upon the plan of those I have seen at home.  Their mode of 
bestowing the prisoners at night (which is of general adoption) 
differs from ours, and is both simple and effective.  In the centre 
of a lofty area, lighted by windows in the four walls, are five 
tiers of cells, one above the other; each tier having before it a 
light iron gallery, attainable by stairs of the same construction 
and material:  excepting the lower one, which is on the ground.  
Behind these, back to back with them and facing the opposite wall, 
are five corresponding rows of cells, accessible by similar means:  
so that supposing the prisoners locked up in their cells, an 
officer stationed on the ground, with his back to the wall, has 
half their number under his eye at once; the remaining half being 
equally under the observation of another officer on the opposite 
side; and all in one great apartment.  Unless this watch be 
corrupted or sleeping on his post, it is impossible for a man to 
escape; for even in the event of his forcing the iron door of his 
cell without noise (which is exceedingly improbable), the moment he 
appears outside, and steps into that one of the five galleries on 
which it is situated, he must be plainly and fully visible to the 
officer below.  Each of these cells holds a small truckle bed, in 
which one prisoner sleeps; never more.  It is small, of course; and 
the door being not solid, but grated, and without blind or curtain, 
the prisoner within is at all times exposed to the observation and 
inspection of any guard who may pass along that tier at any hour or 
minute of the night.  Every day, the prisoners receive their 
dinner, singly, through a trap in the kitchen wall; and each man 
carries his to his sleeping cell to eat it, where he is locked up, 
alone, for that purpose, one hour.  The whole of this arrangement 
struck me as being admirable; and I hope that the next new prison 
we erect in England may be built on this plan.

I was given to understand that in this prison no swords or fire-
arms, or even cudgels, are kept; nor is it probable that, so long 
as its present excellent management continues, any weapon, 
offensive or defensive, will ever be required within its bounds.

Such are the Institutions at South Boston!  In all of them, the 
unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully 
instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by 
all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition 
will admit of; are appealed to, as members of the great human 
family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the 
strong Heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) 
Hand.  I have described them at some length; firstly, because their 
worth demanded it; and secondly, because I mean to take them for a 
model, and to content myself with saying of others we may come to, 
whose design and purpose are the same, that in this or that respect 
they practically fail, or differ.

I wish by this account of them, imperfect in its execution, but in 
its just intention, honest, I could hope to convey to my readers 
one-hundredth part of the gratification, the sights I have 
described, afforded me.

* * * * * *

To an Englishman, accustomed to the paraphernalia of Westminster 
Hall, an American Court of Law is as odd a sight as, I suppose, an 
English Court of Law would be to an American.  Except in the 
Supreme Court at Washington (where the judges wear a plain black 
robe), there is no such thing as a wig or gown connected with the 
administration of justice.  The gentlemen of the bar being 
barristers and attorneys too (for there is no division of those 
functions as in England) are no more removed from their clients 
than attorneys in our Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors 
are, from theirs.  The jury are quite at home, and make themselves 
as comfortable as circumstances will permit.  The witness is so 
little elevated above, or put aloof from, the crowd in the court, 
that a stranger entering during a pause in the proceedings would 
find it difficult to pick him out from the rest.  And if it chanced 
to be a criminal trial, his eyes, in nine cases out of ten, would 
wander to the dock in search of the prisoner, in vain; for that 
gentleman would most likely be lounging among the most 
distinguished ornaments of the legal profession, whispering 
suggestions in his counsel's ear, or making a toothpick out of an 
old quill with his penknife.

I could not but notice these differences, when I visited the courts 
at Boston.  I was much surprised at first, too, to observe that the 
counsel who interrogated the witness under examination at the time, 
did so SITTING.  But seeing that he was also occupied in writing 
down the answers, and remembering that he was alone and had no 
'junior,' I quickly consoled myself with the reflection that law 
was not quite so expensive an article here, as at home; and that 
the absence of sundry formalities which we regard as indispensable, 
had doubtless a very favourable influence upon the bill of costs.

In every Court, ample and commodious provision is made for the 
accommodation of the citizens.  This is the case all through 
America.  In every Public Institution, the right of the people to 
attend, and to have an interest in the proceedings, is most fully 
and distinctly recognised.  There are no grim door-keepers to dole 
out their tardy civility by the sixpenny-worth; nor is there, I 
sincerely believe, any insolence of office of any kind.  Nothing 
national is exhibited for money; and no public officer is a 
showman.  We have begun of late years to imitate this good example.  
I hope we shall continue to do so; and that in the fulness of time, 
even deans and chapters may be converted.

In the civil court an action was trying, for damages sustained in 
some accident upon a railway.  The witnesses had been examined, and 
counsel was addressing the jury.  The learned gentleman (like a few 
of his English brethren) was desperately long-winded, and had a 
remarkable capacity of saying the same thing over and over again.  
His great theme was 'Warren the ENGINE driver,' whom he pressed 
into the service of every sentence he uttered.  I listened to him 
for about a quarter of an hour; and, coming out of court at the 
expiration of that time, without the faintest ray of enlightenment 
as to the merits of the case, felt as if I were at home again.

In the prisoner's cell, waiting to be examined by the magistrate on 
a charge of theft, was a boy.  This lad, instead of being committed 
to a common jail, would be sent to the asylum at South Boston, and 
there taught a trade; and in the course of time he would be bound 
apprentice to some respectable master.  Thus, his detection in this 
offence, instead of being the prelude to a life of infamy and a 
miserable death, would lead, there was a reasonable hope, to his 
being reclaimed from vice, and becoming a worthy member of society.

I am by no means a wholesale admirer of our legal solemnities, many 
of which impress me as being exceedingly ludicrous.  Strange as it 
may seem too, there is undoubtedly a degree of protection in the 
wig and gown - a dismissal of individual responsibility in dressing 
for the part - which encourages that insolent bearing and language, 
and that gross perversion of the office of a pleader for The Truth, 
so frequent in our courts of law.  Still, I cannot help doubting 
whether America, in her desire to shake off the absurdities and 
abuses of the old system, may not have gone too far into the 
opposite extreme; and whether it is not desirable, especially in 
the small community of a city like this, where each man knows the 
other, to surround the administration of justice with some 
artificial barriers against the 'Hail fellow, well met' deportment 
of everyday life.  All the aid it can have in the very high 
character and ability of the Bench, not only here but elsewhere, it 
has, and well deserves to have; but it may need something more:  
not to impress the thoughtful and the well-informed, but the 
ignorant and heedless; a class which includes some prisoners and 
many witnesses.  These institutions were established, no doubt, 
upon the principle that those who had so large a share in making 
the laws, would certainly respect them.  But experience has proved 
this hope to be fallacious; for no men know better than the judges 
of America, that on the occasion of any great popular excitement 
the law is powerless, and cannot, for the time, assert its own 
supremacy.

The tone of society in Boston is one of perfect politeness, 
courtesy, and good breeding.  The ladies are unquestionably very 
beautiful - in face:  but there I am compelled to stop.  Their 
education is much as with us; neither better nor worse.  I had 
heard some very marvellous stories in this respect; but not 
believing them, was not disappointed.  Blue ladies there are, in 
Boston; but like philosophers of that colour and sex in most other 
latitudes, they rather desire to be thought superior than to be so.  
Evangelical ladies there are, likewise, whose attachment to the 
forms of religion, and horror of theatrical entertainments, are 
most exemplary.  Ladies who have a passion for attending lectures 
are to be found among all classes and all conditions.  In the kind 
of provincial life which prevails in cities such as this, the 
Pulpit has great influence.  The peculiar province of the Pulpit in 
New England (always excepting the Unitarian Ministry) would appear 
to be the denouncement of all innocent and rational amusements.  
The church, the chapel, and the lecture-room, are the only means of 
excitement excepted; and to the church, the chapel, and the 
lecture-room, the ladies resort in crowds.

Wherever religion is resorted to, as a strong drink, and as an 
escape from the dull monotonous round of home, those of its 
ministers who pepper the highest will be the surest to please.  
They who strew the Eternal Path with the greatest amount of 
brimstone, and who most ruthlessly tread down the flowers and 
leaves that grow by the wayside, will be voted the most righteous; 
and they who enlarge with the greatest pertinacity on the 
difficulty of getting into heaven, will be considered by all true 
believers certain of going there:  though it would be hard to say 
by what process of reasoning this conclusion is arrived at.  It is 
so at home, and it is so abroad.  With regard to the other means of 
excitement, the Lecture, it has at least the merit of being always 
new.  One lecture treads so quickly on the heels of another, that 
none are remembered; and the course of this month may be safely 
repeated next, with its charm of novelty unbroken, and its interest 
unabated.

The fruits of the earth have their growth in corruption.  Out of 
the rottenness of these things, there has sprung up in Boston a 
sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists.  On inquiring 
what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to 
understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly 
transcendental.  Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I 
pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the 
Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I 
should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.  
This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much 
that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), 
there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold.  
Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has 
not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not 
least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to 
detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting 
wardrobe.  And therefore if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be 
a Transcendentalist.

The only preacher I heard in Boston was Mr. Taylor, who addresses 
himself peculiarly to seamen, and who was once a mariner himself.  
I found his chapel down among the shipping, in one of the narrow, 
old, water-side streets, with a gay blue flag waving freely from 
its roof.  In the gallery opposite to the pulpit were a little 
choir of male and female singers, a violoncello, and a violin.  The 
preacher already sat in the pulpit, which was raised on pillars, 
and ornamented behind him with painted drapery of a lively and 
somewhat theatrical appearance.  He looked a weather-beaten hard-
featured man, of about six or eight and fifty; with deep lines 
graven as it were into his face, dark hair, and a stern, keen eye.  
Yet the general character of his countenance was pleasant and 
agreeable.  The service commenced with a hymn, to which succeeded 
an extemporary prayer.  It had the fault of frequent repetition, 
incidental to all such prayers; but it was plain and comprehensive 
in its doctrines, and breathed a tone of general sympathy and 
charity, which is not so commonly a characteristic of this form of 
address to the Deity as it might be.  That done he opened his 
discourse, taking for his text a passage from the Song of Solomon, 
laid upon the desk before the commencement of the service by some 
unknown member of the congregation:  'Who is this coming up from 
the wilderness, leaning on the arm of her beloved!'

He handled his text in all kinds of ways, and twisted it into all 
manner of shapes; but always ingeniously, and with a rude 
eloquence, well adapted to the comprehension of his hearers.  
Indeed if I be not mistaken, he studied their sympathies and 
understandings much more than the display of his own powers.  His 
imagery was all drawn from the sea, and from the incidents of a 
seaman's life; and was often remarkably good.  He spoke to them of 
'that glorious man, Lord Nelson,' and of Collingwood; and drew 
nothing in, as the saying is, by the head and shoulders, but 
brought it to bear upon his purpose, naturally, and with a sharp 
mind to its effect.  Sometimes, when much excited with his subject, 
he had an odd way - compounded of John Bunyan, and Balfour of 
Burley - of taking his great quarto Bible under his arm and pacing 
up and down the pulpit with it; looking steadily down, meantime, 
into the midst of the congregation.  Thus, when he applied his text 
to the first assemblage of his hearers, and pictured the wonder of 
the church at their presumption in forming a congregation among 
themselves, he stopped short with his Bible under his arm in the 
manner I have described, and pursued his discourse after this 
manner:

'Who are these - who are they - who are these fellows? where do 
they come from?  Where are they going to? - Come from!  What's the 
answer?' - leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with 
his right hand:  'From below!' - starting back again, and looking 
at the sailors before him:  'From below, my brethren.  From under 
the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one.  
That's where you came from!' - a walk up and down the pulpit:  'and 
where are you going' - stopping abruptly:  'where are you going?  
Aloft!' - very softly, and pointing upward:  'Aloft!' - louder:  
'aloft!' - louder still:  'That's where you are going - with a fair 
wind, - all taut and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory, 
where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked 
cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' - Another walk:  
'That's where you're going to, my friends.  That's it.  That's the 
place.  That's the port.  That's the haven.  It's a blessed harbour 
- still water there, in all changes of the winds and tides; no 
driving ashore upon the rocks, or slipping your cables and running 
out to sea, there:  Peace - Peace - Peace - all peace!' - Another 
walk, and patting the Bible under his left arm:  'What!  These 
fellows are coming from the wilderness, are they?  Yes.  From the 
dreary, blighted wilderness of Iniquity, whose only crop is Death.  
But do they lean upon anything - do they lean upon nothing, these 
poor seamen?' - Three raps upon the Bible:  'Oh yes. - Yes. - They 
lean upon the arm of their Beloved' - three more raps:  'upon the 
arm of their Beloved' - three more, and a walk:  'Pilot, guiding-
star, and compass, all in one, to all hands - here it is' - three 
more:  'Here it is.  They can do their seaman's duty manfully, and 
be easy in their minds in the utmost peril and danger, with this' - 
two more:  'They can come, even these poor fellows can come, from 
the wilderness leaning on the arm of their Beloved, and go up - up 
- up!' - raising his hand higher, and higher, at every repetition 
of the word, so that he stood with it at last stretched above his 
head, regarding them in a strange, rapt manner, and pressing the 
book triumphantly to his breast, until he gradually subsided into 
some other portion of his discourse.

I have cited this, rather as an instance of the preacher's 
eccentricities than his merits, though taken in connection with his 
look and manner, and the character of his audience, even this was 
striking.  It is possible, however, that my favourable impression 
of him may have been greatly influenced and strengthened, firstly, 
by his impressing upon his hearers that the true observance of 
religion was not inconsistent with a cheerful deportment and an 
exact discharge of the duties of their station, which, indeed, it 
scrupulously required of them; and secondly, by his cautioning them 
not to set up any monopoly in Paradise and its mercies.  I never 
heard these two points so wisely touched (if indeed I have ever 
heard them touched at all), by any preacher of that kind before.

Having passed the time I spent in Boston, in making myself 
acquainted with these things, in settling the course I should take 
in my future travels, and in mixing constantly with its society, I 
am not aware that I have any occasion to prolong this chapter.  
Such of its social customs as I have not mentioned, however, may be 
told in a very few words.

The usual dinner-hour is two o'clock.  A dinner party takes place 
at five; and at an evening party, they seldom sup later than 
eleven; so that it goes hard but one gets home, even from a rout, 
by midnight.  I never could find out any difference between a party 
at Boston and a party in London, saving that at the former place 
all assemblies are held at more rational hours; that the 
conversation may possibly be a little louder and more cheerful; and 
a guest is usually expected to ascend to the very top of the house 
to take his cloak off; that he is certain to see, at every dinner, 
an unusual amount of poultry on the table; and at every supper, at 
least two mighty bowls of hot stewed oysters, in any one of which a 
half-grown Duke of Clarence might be smothered easily.

There are two theatres in Boston, of good size and construction, 
but sadly in want of patronage.  The few ladies who resort to them, 
sit, as of right, in the front rows of the boxes.

The bar is a large room with a stone floor, and there people stand 
and smoke, and lounge about, all the evening:  dropping in and out 
as the humour takes them.  There too the stranger is initiated into 
the mysteries of Gin-sling, Cock-tail, Sangaree, Mint Julep, 
Sherry-cobbler, Timber Doodle, and other rare drinks.  The house is 
full of boarders, both married and single, many of whom sleep upon 
the premises, and contract by the week for their board and lodging:  
the charge for which diminishes as they go nearer the sky to roost.  
A public table is laid in a very handsome hall for breakfast, and 
for dinner, and for supper.  The party sitting down together to 
these meals will vary in number from one to two hundred:  sometimes 
more.  The advent of each of these epochs in the day is proclaimed 
by an awful gong, which shakes the very window-frames as it 
reverberates through the house, and horribly disturbs nervous 
foreigners.  There is an ordinary for ladies, and an ordinary for 
gentlemen.

In our private room the cloth could not, for any earthly 
consideration, have been laid for dinner without a huge glass dish 
of cranberries in the middle of the table; and breakfast would have 
been no breakfast unless the principal dish were a deformed beef-
steak with a great flat bone in the centre, swimming in hot butter, 
and sprinkled with the very blackest of all possible pepper.  Our 
bedroom was spacious and airy, but (like every bedroom on this side 
of the Atlantic) very bare of furniture, having no curtains to the 
French bedstead or to the window.  It had one unusual luxury, 
however, in the shape of a wardrobe of painted wood, something 
smaller than an English watch-box; or if this comparison should be 
insufficient to convey a just idea of its dimensions, they may be 
estimated from the fact of my having lived for fourteen days and 
nights in the firm belief that it was a shower-bath.



CHAPTER IV - AN AMERICAN RAILROAD.  LOWELL AND ITS FACTORY SYSTEM



BEFORE leaving Boston, I devoted one day to an excursion to Lowell.  
I assign a separate chapter to this visit; not because I am about 
to describe it at any great length, but because I remember it as a 
thing by itself, and am desirous that my readers should do the 
same.

I made acquaintance with an American railroad, on this occasion, 
for the first time.  As these works are pretty much alike all 
through the States, their general characteristics are easily 
described.

There are no first and second class carriages as with us; but there 
is a gentleman's car and a ladies' car:  the main distinction 
between which is that in the first, everybody smokes; and in the 
second, nobody does.  As a black man never travels with a white 
one, there is also a negro car; which is a great, blundering, 
clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in, from the kingdom of 
Brobdingnag.  There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of 
noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, 
a shriek, and a bell.

The cars are like shabby omnibuses, but larger:  holding thirty, 
forty, fifty, people.  The seats, instead of stretching from end to 
end, are placed crosswise.  Each seat holds two persons.  There is 
a long row of them on each side of the caravan, a narrow passage up 
the middle, and a door at both ends.  In the centre of the carriage 
there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal; 
which is for the most part red-hot.  It is insufferably close; and 
you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other 
object you may happen to look at, like the ghost of smoke.

In the ladies' car, there are a great many gentlemen who have 
ladies with them.  There are also a great many ladies who have 
nobody with them:  for any lady may travel alone, from one end of 
the United States to the other, and be certain of the most 
courteous and considerate treatment everywhere.  The conductor or 
check-taker, or guard, or whatever he may be, wears no uniform.  He 
walks up and down the car, and in and out of it, as his fancy 
dictates; leans against the door with his hands in his pockets and 
stares at you, if you chance to be a stranger; or enters into 
conversation with the passengers about him.  A great many 
newspapers are pulled out, and a few of them are read.  Everybody 
talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy.  If you are an 
Englishman, he expects that that railroad is pretty much like an 
English railroad.  If you say 'No,' he says 'Yes?' 
(interrogatively), and asks in what respect they differ.  You 
enumerate the heads of difference, one by one, and he says 'Yes?' 
(still interrogatively) to each.  Then he guesses that you don't 
travel faster in England; and on your replying that you do, says 
'Yes?' again (still interrogatively), and it is quite evident, 
don't believe it.  After a long pause he remarks, partly to you, 
and partly to the knob on the top of his stick, that 'Yankees are 
reckoned to be considerable of a go-ahead people too;' upon which 
YOU say 'Yes,' and then HE says 'Yes' again (affirmatively this 
time); and upon your looking out of window, tells you that behind 
that hill, and some three miles from the next station, there is a 
clever town in a smart lo-ca-tion, where he expects you have 
concluded to stop.  Your answer in the negative naturally leads to 
more questions in reference to your intended route (always 
pronounced rout); and wherever you are going, you invariably learn 
that you can't get there without immense difficulty and danger, and 
that all the great sights are somewhere else.

If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger's seat, the gentleman 
who accompanies her gives him notice of the fact, and he 
immediately vacates it with great politeness.  Politics are much 
discussed, so are banks, so is cotton.  Quiet people avoid the 
question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in 
three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high:  the 
great constitutional feature of this institution being, that 
directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of 
the next one begins; which is an unspeakable comfort to all strong 
politicians and true lovers of their country:  that is to say, to 
ninety-nine men and boys out of every ninety-nine and a quarter.

Except when a branch road joins the main one, there is seldom more 
than one track of rails; so that the road is very narrow, and the 
view, where there is a deep cutting, by no means extensive.  When 
there is not, the character of the scenery is always the same.  
Mile after mile of stunted trees:  some hewn down by the axe, some 
blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their 
neighbours, many mere logs half hidden in the swamp, others 
mouldered away to spongy chips.  The very soil of the earth is made 
up of minute fragments such as these; each pool of stagnant water 
has its crust of vegetable rottenness; on every side there are the 
boughs, and trunks, and stumps of trees, in every possible stage of 
decay, decomposition, and neglect.  Now you emerge for a few brief 
minutes on an open country, glittering with some bright lake or 
pool, broad as many an English river, but so small here that it 
scarcely has a name; now catch hasty glimpses of a distant town, 
with its clean white houses and their cool piazzas, its prim New 
England church and school-house; when whir-r-r-r! almost before you 
have seen them, comes the same dark screen:  the stunted trees, the 
stumps, the logs, the stagnant water - all so like the last that 
you seem to have been transported back again by magic.

The train calls at stations in the woods, where the wild 
impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is 
only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of 
there being anybody to get in.  It rushes across the turnpike road, 
where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal:  nothing but a 
rough wooden arch, on which is painted 'WHEN THE BELL RINGS, LOOK 
OUT FOR THE LOCOMOTIVE.'  On it whirls headlong, dives through the 
woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, 
rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which 
intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all 
the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and 
dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of 
the road.  There - with mechanics working at their trades, and 
people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites 
and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and 
children crawling, and pigs burrowing, and unaccustomed horses 
plunging and rearing, close to the very rails - there - on, on, on 
- tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; 
scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its 
wood fire; screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the 
thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people 
cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.

I was met at the station at Lowell by a gentleman intimately 
connected with the management of the factories there; and gladly 
putting myself under his guidance, drove off at once to that 
quarter of the town in which the works, the object of my visit, 
were situated.  Although only just of age - for if my recollection 
serve me, it has been a manufacturing town barely one-and-twenty 
years - Lowell is a large, populous, thriving place.  Those 
indications of its youth which first attract the eye, give it a 
quaintness and oddity of character which, to a visitor from the old 
country, is amusing enough.  It was a very dirty winter's day, and 
nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud, which 
in some parts was almost knee-deep, and might have been deposited 
there, on the subsiding of the waters after the Deluge.  In one 
place, there was a new wooden church, which, having no steeple, and 
being yet unpainted, looked like an enormous packing-case without 
any direction upon it.  In another there was a large hotel, whose 
walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it 
had exactly the appearance of being built with cards.  I was 
careful not to draw my breath as we passed, and trembled when I saw 
a workman come out upon the roof, lest with one thoughtless stamp 
of his foot he should crush the structure beneath him, and bring it 
rattling down.  The very river that moves the machinery in the 
mills (for they are all worked by water power), seems to acquire a 
new character from the fresh buildings of bright red brick and 
painted wood among which it takes its course; and to be as light-
headed, thoughtless, and brisk a young river, in its murmurings and 
tumblings, as one would desire to see.  One would swear that every 
'Bakery,' 'Grocery,' and 'Bookbindery,' and other kind of store, 
took its shutters down for the first time, and started in business 
yesterday.  The golden pestles and mortars fixed as signs upon the 
sun-blind frames outside the Druggists',  appear to have been just 
turned out of the United States' Mint; and when I saw a baby of 
some week or ten days old in a woman's arms at a street corner, I 
found myself unconsciously wondering where it came from:  never 
supposing for an instant that it could have been born in such a 
young town as that.

There are several factories in Lowell, each of which belongs to 
what we should term a Company of Proprietors, but what they call in 
America a Corporation.  I went over several of these; such as a 
woollen factory, a carpet factory, and a cotton factory:  examined 
them in every part; and saw them in their ordinary working aspect, 
with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary 
everyday proceedings.  I may add that I am well acquainted with our 
manufacturing towns in England, and have visited many mills in 
Manchester and elsewhere in the same manner.

I happened to arrive at the first factory just as the dinner hour 
was over, and the girls were returning to their work; indeed the 
stairs of the mill were thronged with them as I ascended.  They 
were all well dressed, but not to my thinking above their 
condition; for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful 
of their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated 
with such little trinkets as come within the compass of their 
means.  Supposing it confined within reasonable limits, I would 
always encourage this kind of pride, as a worthy element of self-
respect, in any person I employed; and should no more be deterred 
from doing so, because some wretched female referred her fall to a 
love of dress, than I would allow my construction of the real 
intent and meaning of the Sabbath to be influenced by any warning 
to the well-disposed, founded on his backslidings on that 
particular day, which might emanate from the rather doubtful 
authority of a murderer in Newgate.

These girls, as I have said, were all well dressed:  and that 
phrase necessarily includes extreme cleanliness.  They had 
serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks, and shawls; and were not 
above clogs and pattens.  Moreover, there were places in the mill 
in which they could deposit these things without injury; and there 
were conveniences for washing.  They were healthy in appearance, 
many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment of 
young women:  not of degraded brutes of burden.  If I had seen in 
one of those mills (but I did not, though I looked for something of 
this kind with a sharp eye), the most lisping, mincing, affected, 
and ridiculous young creature that my imagination could suggest, I 
should have thought of the careless, moping, slatternly, degraded, 
dull reverse (I HAVE seen that), and should have been still well 
pleased to look upon her.

The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves.  
In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained 
to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, 
cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would 
possibly admit of.  Out of so large a number of females, many of 
whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be 
reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in 
appearance:  no doubt there were.  But I solemnly declare, that 
from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I 
cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful 
impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of 
necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her 
hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the 
power.

They reside in various boarding-houses near at hand.  The owners of 
the mills are particularly careful to allow no persons to enter 
upon the possession of these houses, whose characters have not 
undergone the most searching and thorough inquiry.  Any complaint 
that is made against them, by the boarders, or by any one else, is 
fully investigated; and if good ground of complaint be shown to 
exist against them, they are removed, and their occupation is 
handed over to some more deserving person.  There are a few 
children employed in these factories, but not many.  The laws of 
the State forbid their working more than nine months in the year, 
and require that they be educated during the other three.  For this 
purpose there are schools in Lowell; and there are churches and 
chapels of various persuasions, in which the young women may 
observe that form of worship in which they have been educated.

At some distance from the factories, and on the highest and 
pleasantest ground in the neighbourhood, stands their hospital, or 
boarding-house for the sick:  it is the best house in those parts, 
and was built by an eminent merchant for his own residence.  Like 
that institution at Boston, which I have before described, it is 
not parcelled out into wards, but is divided into convenient 
chambers, each of which has all the comforts of a very comfortable 
home.  The principal medical attendant resides under the same roof; 
and were the patients members of his own family, they could not be 
better cared for, or attended with greater gentleness and 
consideration.  The weekly charge in this establishment for each 
female patient is three dollars, or twelve shillings English; but 
no girl employed by any of the corporations is ever excluded for 
want of the means of payment.  That they do not very often want the 
means, may be gathered from the fact, that in July, 1841, no fewer 
than nine hundred and seventy-eight of these girls were depositors 
in the Lowell Savings Bank:  the amount of whose joint savings was 
estimated at one hundred thousand dollars, or twenty thousand 
English pounds.

I am now going to state three facts, which will startle a large 
class of readers on this side of the Atlantic, very much.

Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the 
boarding-houses.  Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe 
to circulating libraries.  Thirdly, they have got up among 
themselves a periodical called THE LOWELL OFFERING, 'A repository 
of original articles, written exclusively by females actively 
employed in the mills,' - which is duly printed, published, and 
sold; and whereof I brought away from Lowell four hundred good 
solid pages, which I have read from beginning to end.

The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim, 
with one voice, 'How very preposterous!'  On my deferentially 
inquiring why, they will answer, 'These things are above their 
station.'  In reply to that objection, I would beg to ask what 
their station is.

It is their station to work.  And they DO work.  They labour in 
these mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is 
unquestionably work, and pretty tight work too.  Perhaps it is 
above their station to indulge in such amusements, on any terms.  
Are we quite sure that we in England have not formed our ideas of 
the 'station' of working people, from accustoming ourselves to the 
contemplation of that class as they are, and not as they might be?  
I think that if we examine our own feelings, we shall find that the 
pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even the Lowell 
Offering, startle us by their novelty, and not by their bearing 
upon any abstract question of right or wrong.

For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day 
cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked 
to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanising and laudable.  
I know no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in 
it, or more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for 
its associate.  I know no station which has a right to monopolise 
the means of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational 
entertainment; or which has ever continued to be a station very 
long, after seeking to do so.

Of the merits of the Lowell Offering as a literary production, I 
will only observe, putting entirely out of sight the fact of the 
articles having been written by these girls after the arduous 
labours of the day, that it will compare advantageously with a 
great many English Annuals.  It is pleasant to find that many of 
its Tales are of the Mills and of those who work in them; that they 
inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good 
doctrines of enlarged benevolence.  A strong feeling for the 
beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have 
left at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village 
air; and though a circulating library is a favourable school for 
the study of such topics, it has very scant allusion to fine 
clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life.  Some persons 
might object to the papers being signed occasionally with rather 
fine names, but this is an American fashion.  One of the provinces 
of the state legislature of Massachusetts is to alter ugly names 
into pretty ones, as the children improve upon the tastes of their 
parents.  These changes costing little or nothing, scores of Mary 
Annes are solemnly converted into Bevelinas every session.

It is said that on the occasion of a visit from General Jackson or 
General Harrison to this town (I forget which, but it is not to the 
purpose), he walked through three miles and a half of these young 
ladies all dressed out with parasols and silk stockings.  But as I 
am not aware that any worse consequence ensued, than a sudden 
looking-up of all the parasols and silk stockings in the market; 
and perhaps the bankruptcy of some speculative New Englander who 
bought them all up at any price, in expectation of a demand that 
never came; I set no great store by the circumstance.

In this brief account of Lowell, and inadequate expression of the 
gratification it yielded me, and cannot fail to afford to any 
foreigner to whom the condition of such people at home is a subject 
of interest and anxious speculation, I have carefully abstained 
from drawing a comparison between these factories and those of our 
own land.  Many of the circumstances whose strong influence has 
been at work for years in our manufacturing towns have not arisen 
here; and there is no manufacturing population in Lowell, so to 
speak:  for these girls (often the daughters of small farmers) come 
from other States, remain a few years in the mills, and then go 
home for good.

The contrast would be a strong one, for it would be between the 
Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow.  I abstain from 
it, because I deem it just to do so.  But I only the more earnestly 
adjure all those whose eyes may rest on these pages, to pause and 
reflect upon the difference between this town and those great 
haunts of desperate misery:  to call to mind, if they can in the 
midst of party strife and squabble, the efforts that must be made 
to purge them of their suffering and danger:  and last, and 
foremost, to remember how the precious Time is rushing by.

I returned at night by the same railroad and in the same kind of 
car.  One of the passengers being exceedingly anxious to expound at 
great length to my companion (not to me, of course) the true 
principles on which books of travel in America should be written by 
Englishmen, I feigned to fall asleep.  But glancing all the way out 
at window from the corners of my eyes, I found abundance of 
entertainment for the rest of the ride in watching the effects of 
the wood fire, which had been invisible in the morning but were now 
brought out in full relief by the darkness:  for we were travelling 
in a whirlwind of bright sparks, which showered about us like a 
storm of fiery snow.



CHAPTER V - WORCESTER.  THE CONNECTICUT RIVER.  HARTFORD.  NEW 
HAVEN.  TO NEW YORK



LEAVING Boston on the afternoon of Saturday the fifth of February, 
we proceeded by another railroad to Worcester:  a pretty New 
England town, where we had arranged to remain under the hospitable 
roof of the Governor of the State, until Monday morning.

These towns and cities of New England (many of which would be 
villages in Old England), are as favourable specimens of rural 
America, as their people are of rural Americans.  The well-trimmed 
lawns and green meadows of home are not there; and the grass, 
compared with our ornamental plots and pastures, is rank, and 
rough, and wild:  but delicate slopes of land, gently-swelling 
hills, wooded valleys, and slender streams, abound.  Every little 
colony of houses has its church and school-house peeping from among 
the white roofs and shady trees; every house is the whitest of the 
white; every Venetian blind the greenest of the green; every fine 
day's sky the bluest of the blue.  A sharp dry wind and a slight 
frost had so hardened the roads when we alighted at Worcester, that 
their furrowed tracks were like ridges of granite.  There was the 
usual aspect of newness on every object, of course.  All the 
buildings looked as if they had been built and painted that 
morning, and could be taken down on Monday with very little 
trouble.  In the keen evening air, every sharp outline looked a 
hundred times sharper than ever.  The clean cardboard colonnades 
had no more perspective than a Chinese bridge on a tea-cup, and 
appeared equally well calculated for use.  The razor-like edges of 
the detached cottages seemed to cut the very wind as it whistled 
against them, and to send it smarting on its way with a shriller 
cry than before.  Those slightly-built wooden dwellings behind 
which the sun was setting with a brilliant lustre, could be so 
looked through and through, that the idea of any inhabitant being 
able to hide himself from the public gaze, or to have any secrets 
from the public eye, was not entertainable for a moment.  Even 
where a blazing fire shone through the uncurtained windows of some 
distant house, it had the air of being newly lighted, and of 
lacking warmth; and instead of awakening thoughts of a snug 
chamber, bright with faces that first saw the light round that same 
hearth, and ruddy with warm hangings, it came upon one suggestive 
of the smell of new mortar and damp walls.

So I thought, at least, that evening.  Next morning when the sun 
was shining brightly, and the clear church bells were ringing, and 
sedate people in their best clothes enlivened the pathway near at 
hand and dotted the distant thread of road, there was a pleasant 
Sabbath peacefulness on everything, which it was good to feel.  It 
would have been the better for an old church; better still for some 
old graves; but as it was, a wholesome repose and tranquillity 
pervaded the scene, which after the restless ocean and the hurried 
city, had a doubly grateful influence on the spirits.

We went on next morning, still by railroad, to Springfield.  From 
that place to Hartford, whither we were bound, is a distance of 
only five-and-twenty miles, but at that time of the year the roads 
were so bad that the journey would probably have occupied ten or 
twelve hours.  Fortunately, however, the winter having been 
unusually mild, the Connecticut River was 'open,' or, in other 
words, not frozen.  The captain of a small steamboat was going to 
make his first trip for the season that day (the second February 
trip, I believe, within the memory of man), and only waited for us 
to go on board.  Accordingly, we went on board, with as little 
delay as might be.  He was as good as his word, and started 
directly.

It certainly was not called a small steamboat without reason.  I 
omitted to ask the question, but I should think it must have been 
of about half a pony power.  Mr. Paap, the celebrated Dwarf, might 
have lived and died happily in the cabin, which was fitted with 
common sash-windows like an ordinary dwelling-house.  These windows 
had bright-red curtains, too, hung on slack strings across the 
lower panes; so that it looked like the parlour of a Lilliputian 
public-house, which had got afloat in a flood or some other water 
accident, and was drifting nobody knew where.  But even in this 
chamber there was a rocking-chair.  It would be impossible to get 
on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair.  I am afraid to 
tell how many feet short this vessel was, or how many feet narrow:  
to apply the words length and width to such measurement would be a 
contradiction in terms.  But I may state that we all kept the 
middle of the deck, lest the boat should unexpectedly tip over; and 
that the machinery, by some surprising process of condensation, 
worked between it and the keel:  the whole forming a warm sandwich, 
about three feet thick.

It rained all day as I once thought it never did rain anywhere, but 
in the Highlands of Scotland.  The river was full of floating 
blocks of ice, which were constantly crunching and cracking under 
us; and the depth of water, in the course we took to avoid the 
larger masses, carried down the middle of the river by the current, 
did not exceed a few inches.  Nevertheless, we moved onward, 
dexterously; and being well wrapped up, bade defiance to the 
weather, and enjoyed the journey.  The Connecticut River is a fine 
stream; and the banks in summer-time are, I have no doubt, 
beautiful; at all events, I was told so by a young lady in the 
cabin; and she should be a judge of beauty, if the possession of a 
quality include the appreciation of it, for a more beautiful 
creature I never looked upon.

After two hours and a half of this odd travelling (including a 
stoppage at a small town, where we were saluted by a gun 
considerably bigger than our own chimney), we reached Hartford, and 
straightway repaired to an extremely comfortable hotel:  except, as 
usual, in the article of bedrooms, which, in almost every place we 
visited, were very conducive to early rising.

We tarried here, four days.  The town is beautifully situated in a 
basin of green hills; the soil is rich, well-wooded, and carefully 
improved.  It is the seat of the local legislature of Connecticut, 
which sage body enacted, in bygone times, the renowned code of 
'Blue Laws,' in virtue whereof, among other enlightened provisions, 
any citizen who could be proved to have kissed his wife on Sunday, 
was punishable, I believe, with the stocks.  Too much of the old 
Puritan spirit exists in these parts to the present hour; but its 
influence has not tended, that I know, to make the people less hard 
in their bargains, or more equal in their dealings.  As I never 
heard of its working that effect anywhere else, I infer that it 
never will, here.  Indeed, I am accustomed, with reference to great 
professions and severe faces, to judge of the goods of the other 
world pretty much as I judge of the goods of this; and whenever I 
see a dealer in such commodities with too great a display of them 
in his window, I doubt the quality of the article within.

In Hartford stands the famous oak in which the charter of King 
Charles was hidden.  It is now inclosed in a gentleman's garden.  
In the State House is the charter itself.  I found the courts of 
law here, just the same as at Boston; the public institutions 
almost as good.  The Insane Asylum is admirably conducted, and so 
is the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.

I very much questioned within myself, as I walked through the 
Insane Asylum, whether I should have known the attendants from the 
patients, but for the few words which passed between the former, 
and the Doctor, in reference to the persons under their charge.  Of 
course I limit this remark merely to their looks; for the 
conversation of the mad people was mad enough.

There was one little, prim old lady, of very smiling and good-
humoured appearance, who came sidling up to me from the end of a 
long passage, and with a curtsey of inexpressible condescension, 
propounded this unaccountable inquiry:

'Does Pontefract still flourish, sir, upon the soil of England?'

'He does, ma'am,' I rejoined.

'When you last saw him, sir, he was - '

'Well, ma'am,' said I, 'extremely well.  He begged me to present 
his compliments.  I never saw him looking better.'

At this, the old lady was very much delighted.  After glancing at 
me for a moment, as if to be quite sure that I was serious in my 
respectful air, she sidled back some paces; sidled forward again; 
made a sudden skip (at which I precipitately retreated a step or 
two); and said:

'I am an antediluvian, sir.'

I thought the best thing to say was, that I had suspected as much 
from the first.  Therefore I said so.

'It is an extremely proud and pleasant thing, sir, to be an 
antediluvian,' said the old lady.

'I should think it was, ma'am,' I rejoined.

The old lady kissed her hand, gave another skip, smirked and sidled 
down the gallery in a most extraordinary manner, and ambled 
gracefully into her own bed-chamber.

In another part of the building, there was a male patient in bed; 
very much flushed and heated.

'Well,' said he, starting up, and pulling off his night-cap:  'It's 
all settled at last.  I have arranged it with Queen Victoria.'

'Arranged what?' asked the Doctor.

'Why, that business,' passing his hand wearily across his forehead, 
'about the siege of New York.'

'Oh!' said I, like a man suddenly enlightened.  For he looked at me 
for an answer.

'Yes.  Every house without a signal will be fired upon by the 
British troops.  No harm will be done to the others.  No harm at 
all.  Those that want to be safe, must hoist flags.  That's all 
they'll have to do.  They must hoist flags.'

Even while he was speaking he seemed, I thought, to have some faint 
idea that his talk was incoherent.  Directly he had said these 
words, he lay down again; gave a kind of a groan; and covered his 
hot head with the blankets.

There was another:  a young man, whose madness was love and music.  
After playing on the accordion a march he had composed, he was very 
anxious that I should walk into his chamber, which I immediately 
did.

By way of being very knowing, and humouring him to the top of his 
bent, I went to the window, which commanded a beautiful prospect, 
and remarked, with an address upon which I greatly plumed myself:

'What a delicious country you have about these lodgings of yours!'

'Poh!' said he, moving his fingers carelessly over the notes of his 
instrument:  'WELL ENOUGH FOR SUCH AN INSTITUTION AS THIS!'

I don't think I was ever so taken aback in all my life.

'I come here just for a whim,' he said coolly.  'That's all.'

'Oh!  That's all!' said I.

'Yes.  That's all.  The Doctor's a smart man.  He quite enters into 
it.  It's a joke of mine.  I like it for a time.  You needn't 
mention it, but I think I shall go out next Tuesday!'

I assured him that I would consider our interview perfectly 
confidential; and rejoined the Doctor.  As we were passing through 
a gallery on our way out, a well-dressed lady, of quiet and 
composed manners, came up, and proffering a slip of paper and a 
pen, begged that I would oblige her with an autograph, I complied, 
and we parted.

'I think I remember having had a few interviews like that, with 
ladies out of doors.  I hope SHE is not mad?'

'Yes.'

'On what subject?  Autographs?'

'No.  She hears voices in the air.'

'Well!' thought I, 'it would be well if we could shut up a few 
false prophets of these later times, who have professed to do the 
same; and I should like to try the experiment on a Mormonist or two 
to begin with.'

In this place, there is the best jail for untried offenders in the 
world.  There is also a very well-ordered State prison, arranged 
upon the same plan as that at Boston, except that here, there is 
always a sentry on the wall with a loaded gun.  It contained at 
that time about two hundred prisoners.  A spot was shown me in the 
sleeping ward, where a watchman was murdered some years since in 
the dead of night, in a desperate attempt to escape, made by a 
prisoner who had broken from his cell.  A woman, too, was pointed 
out to me, who, for the murder of her husband, had been a close 
prisoner for sixteen years.

'Do you think,' I asked of my conductor, 'that after so very long 
an imprisonment, she has any thought or hope of ever regaining her 
liberty?'

'Oh dear yes,' he answered.  'To be sure she has.'

'She has no chance of obtaining it, I suppose?'

'Well, I don't know:' which, by-the-bye, is a national answer.  
'Her friends mistrust her.'

'What have THEY to do with it?' I naturally inquired.

'Well, they won't petition.'

'But if they did, they couldn't get her out, I suppose?'

'Well, not the first time, perhaps, nor yet the second, but tiring 
and wearying for a few years might do it.'

'Does that ever do it?'

'Why yes, that'll do it sometimes.  Political friends'll do it 
sometimes.  It's pretty often done, one way or another.'

I shall always entertain a very pleasant and grateful recollection 
of Hartford.  It is a lovely place, and I had many friends there, 
whom I can never remember with indifference.  We left it with no 
little regret on the evening of Friday the 11th, and travelled that 
night by railroad to New Haven.  Upon the way, the guard and I were 
formally introduced to each other (as we usually were on such 
occasions), and exchanged a variety of small-talk.  We reached New 
Haven at about eight o'clock, after a journey of three hours, and 
put up for the night at the best inn.

New Haven, known also as the City of Elms, is a fine town.  Many of 
its streets (as its ALIAS sufficiently imports) are planted with 
rows of grand old elm-trees; and the same natural ornaments 
surround Yale College, an establishment of considerable eminence 
and reputation.  The various departments of this Institution are 
erected in a kind of park or common in the middle of the town, 
where they are dimly visible among the shadowing trees.  The effect 
is very like that of an old cathedral yard in England; and when 
their branches are in full leaf, must be extremely picturesque.  
Even in the winter time, these groups of well-grown trees, 
clustering among the busy streets and houses of a thriving city, 
have a very quaint appearance:  seeming to bring about a kind of 
compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other 
half-way, and shaken hands upon it; which is at once novel and 
pleasant.

After a night's rest, we rose early, and in good time went down to 
the wharf, and on board the packet New York FOR New York.  This was 
the first American steamboat of any size that I had seen; and 
certainly to an English eye it was infinitely less like a steamboat 
than a huge floating bath.  I could hardly persuade myself, indeed, 
but that the bathing establishment off Westminster Bridge, which I 
left a baby, had suddenly grown to an enormous size; run away from 
home; and set up in foreign parts as a steamer.  Being in America, 
too, which our vagabonds do so particularly favour, it seemed the 
more probable.

The great difference in appearance between these packets and ours, 
is, that there is so much of them out of the water:  the main-deck 
being enclosed on all sides, and filled with casks and goods, like 
any second or third floor in a stack of warehouses; and the 
promenade or hurricane-deck being a-top of that again.  A part of 
the machinery is always above this deck; where the connecting-rod, 
in a strong and lofty frame, is seen working away like an iron top-
sawyer.  There is seldom any mast or tackle:  nothing aloft but two 
tall black chimneys.  The man at the helm is shut up in a little 
house in the fore part of the boat (the wheel being connected with 
the rudder by iron chains, working the whole length of the deck); 
and the passengers, unless the weather be very fine indeed, usually 
congregate below.  Directly you have left the wharf, all the life, 
and stir, and bustle of a packet cease.  You wonder for a long time 
how she goes on, for there seems to be nobody in charge of her; and 
when another of these dull machines comes splashing by, you feel 
quite indignant with it, as a sullen cumbrous, ungraceful, 
unshiplike leviathan:  quite forgetting that the vessel you are on 
board of, is its very counterpart.

There is always a clerk's office on the lower deck, where you pay 
your fare; a ladies' cabin; baggage and stowage rooms; engineer's 
room; and in short a great variety of perplexities which render the 
discovery of the gentlemen's cabin, a matter of some difficulty.  
It often occupies the whole length of the boat (as it did in this 
case), and has three or four tiers of berths on each side.  When I 
first descended into the cabin of the New York, it looked, in my 
unaccustomed eyes, about as long as the Burlington Arcade.

The Sound which has to be crossed on this passage, is not always a 
very safe or pleasant navigation, and has been the scene of some 
unfortunate accidents.  It was a wet morning, and very misty, and 
we soon lost sight of land.  The day was calm, however, and 
brightened towards noon.  After exhausting (with good help from a 
friend) the larder, and the stock of bottled beer, I lay down to 
sleep; being very much tired with the fatigues of yesterday.  But I 
woke from my nap in time to hurry up, and see Hell Gate, the Hog's 
Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious localities, attractive to 
all readers of famous Diedrich Knickerbocker's History.  We were 
now in a narrow channel, with sloping banks on either side, 
besprinkled with pleasant villas, and made refreshing to the sight 
by turf and trees.  Soon we shot in quick succession, past a light-
house; a madhouse (how the lunatics flung up their caps and roared 
in sympathy with the headlong engine and the driving tide!); a 
jail; and other buildings:  and so emerged into a noble bay, whose 
waters sparkled in the now cloudless sunshine like Nature's eyes 
turned up to Heaven.

Then there lay stretched out before us, to the right, confused 
heaps of buildings, with here and there a spire or steeple, looking 
down upon the herd below; and here and there, again, a cloud of 
lazy smoke; and in the foreground a forest of ships' masts, cheery 
with flapping sails and waving flags.  Crossing from among them to 
the opposite shore, were steam ferry-boats laden with people, 
coaches, horses, waggons, baskets, boxes:  crossed and recrossed by 
other ferry-boats:  all travelling to and fro:  and never idle.  
Stately among these restless Insects, were two or three large 
ships, moving with slow majestic pace, as creatures of a prouder 
kind, disdainful of their puny journeys, and making for the broad 
sea.  Beyond, were shining heights, and islands in the glancing 
river, and a distance scarcely less blue and bright than the sky it 
seemed to meet.  The city's hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, 
the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of 
wheels, tingled in the listening ear.  All of which life and stir, 
coming across the stirring water, caught new life and animation 
from its free companionship; and, sympathising with its buoyant 
spirits, glistened as it seemed in sport upon its surface, and 
hemmed the vessel round, and plashed the water high about her 
sides, and, floating her gallantly into the dock, flew off again to 
welcome other comers, and speed before them to the busy port.




CHAPTER VI - NEW YORK



THE beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city 
as Boston, but many of its streets have the same characteristics; 
except that the houses are not quite so fresh-coloured, the sign-
boards are not quite so gaudy, the gilded letters not quite so 
golden, the bricks not quite so red, the stone not quite so white, 
the blinds and area railings not quite so green, the knobs and 
plates upon the street doors not quite so bright and twinkling.  
There are many by-streets, almost as neutral in clean colours, and 
positive in dirty ones, as by-streets in London; and there is one 
quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of 
filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, 
or any other part of famed St. Giles's.

The great promenade and thoroughfare, as most people know, is 
Broadway; a wide and bustling street, which, from the Battery 
Gardens to its opposite termination in a country road, may be four 
miles long.  Shall we sit down in an upper floor of the Carlton 
House Hotel (situated in the best part of this main artery of New 
York), and when we are tired of looking down upon the life below, 
sally forth arm-in-arm, and mingle with the stream?

Warm weather!  The sun strikes upon our heads at this open window, 
as though its rays were concentrated through a burning-glass; but 
the day is in its zenith, and the season an unusual one.  Was there 
ever such a sunny street as this Broadway!  The pavement stones are 
polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red 
bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the 
roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on 
them, they would hiss and smoke, and smell like half-quenched 
fires.  No stint of omnibuses here!  Half-a-dozen have gone by 
within as many minutes.  Plenty of hackney cabs and coaches too; 
gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages - 
rather of a clumsy make, and not very different from the public 
vehicles, but built for the heavy roads beyond the city pavement.  
Negro coachmen and white; in straw hats, black hats, white hats, 
glazed caps, fur caps; in coats of drab, black, brown, green, blue, 
nankeen, striped jean and linen; and there, in that one instance 
(look while it passes, or it will be too late), in suits of livery.  
Some southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and 
swells with Sultan pomp and power.  Yonder, where that phaeton with 
the well-clipped pair of grays has stopped - standing at their 
heads now - is a Yorkshire groom, who has not been very long in 
these parts, and looks sorrowfully round for a companion pair of 
top-boots, which he may traverse the city half a year without 
meeting.  Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!  We have seen 
more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen 
elsewhere, in as many days.  What various parasols! what rainbow 
silks and satins! what pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of 
thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels, and display 
of rich cloaks with gaudy hoods and linings!  The young gentlemen 
are fond, you see, of turning down their shirt-collars and 
cultivating their whiskers, especially under the chin; but they 
cannot approach the ladies in their dress or bearing, being, to say 
the truth, humanity of quite another sort.  Byrons of the desk and 
counter, pass on, and let us see what kind of men those are behind 
ye:  those two labourers in holiday clothes, of whom one carries in 
his hand a crumpled scrap of paper from which he tries to spell out 
a hard name, while the other looks about for it on all the doors 
and windows.

Irishmen both!  You might know them, if they were masked, by their 
long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons, and their drab trousers, 
which they wear like men well used to working dresses, who are easy 
in no others.  It would be hard to keep your model republics going, 
without the countrymen and countrywomen of those two labourers.  
For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic 
work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of 
Internal Improvement!  Irishmen both, and sorely puzzled too, to 
find out what they seek.  Let us go down, and help them, for the 
love of home, and that spirit of liberty which admits of honest 
service to honest men, and honest work for honest bread, no matter 
what it be.

That's well!  We have got at the right address at last, though it 
is written in strange characters truly, and might have been 
scrawled with the blunt handle of the spade the writer better knows 
the use of, than a pen.  Their way lies yonder, but what business 
takes them there?  They carry savings:  to hoard up?  No.  They are 
brothers, those men.  One crossed the sea alone, and working very 
hard for one half year, and living harder, saved funds enough to 
bring the other out.  That done, they worked together side by side, 
contentedly sharing hard labour and hard living for another term, 
and then their sisters came, and then another brother, and lastly, 
their old mother.  And what now?  Why, the poor old crone is 
restless in a strange land, and yearns to lay her bones, she says, 
among her people in the old graveyard at home:  and so they go to 
pay her passage back:  and God help her and them, and every simple 
heart, and all who turn to the Jerusalem of their younger days, and 
have an altar-fire upon the cold hearth of their fathers.

This narrow thoroughfare, baking and blistering in the sun, is Wall 
Street:  the Stock Exchange and Lombard Street of New York.  Many a 
rapid fortune has been made in this street, and many a no less 
rapid ruin.  Some of these very merchants whom you see hanging 
about here now, have locked up money in their strong-boxes, like 
the man in the Arabian Nights, and opening them again, have found 
but withered leaves.  Below, here by the water-side, where the 
bowsprits of ships stretch across the footway, and almost thrust 
themselves into the windows, lie the noble American vessels which 
having made their Packet Service the finest in the world.  They 
have brought hither the foreigners who abound in all the streets:  
not, perhaps, that there are more here, than in other commercial 
cities; but elsewhere, they have particular haunts, and you must 
find them out; here, they pervade the town.

We must cross Broadway again; gaining some refreshment from the 
heat, in the sight of the great blocks of clean ice which are being 
carried into shops and bar-rooms; and the pine-apples and water-
melons profusely displayed for sale.  Fine streets of spacious 
houses here, you see! - Wall Street has furnished and dismantled 
many of them very often - and here a deep green leafy square.  Be 
sure that is a hospitable house with inmates to be affectionately 
remembered always, where they have the open door and pretty show of 
plants within, and where the child with laughing eyes is peeping 
out of window at the little dog below.  You wonder what may be the 
use of this tall flagstaff in the by-street, with something like 
Liberty's head-dress on its top:  so do I.  But there is a passion 
for tall flagstaffs hereabout, and you may see its twin brother in 
five minutes, if you have a mind.

Again across Broadway, and so - passing from the many-coloured 
crowd and glittering shops - into another long main street, the 
Bowery.  A railroad yonder, see, where two stout horses trot along, 
drawing a score or two of people and a great wooden ark, with ease.  
The stores are poorer here; the passengers less gay.  Clothes 
ready-made, and meat ready-cooked, are to be bought in these parts; 
and the lively whirl of carriages is exchanged for the deep rumble 
of carts and waggons.  These signs which are so plentiful, in shape 
like river buoys, or small balloons, hoisted by cords to poles, and 
dangling there, announce, as you may see by looking up, 'OYSTERS IN 
EVERY STYLE.'  They tempt the hungry most at night, for then dull 
candles glimmering inside, illuminate these dainty words, and make 
the mouths of idlers water, as they read and linger.

What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an 
enchanter's palace in a melodrama! - a famous prison, called The 
Tombs.  Shall we go in?

So.  A long, narrow, lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with 
four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and 
communicating by stairs.  Between the two sides of each gallery, 
and in its centre, a bridge, for the greater convenience of 
crossing.  On each of these bridges sits a man:  dozing or reading, 
or talking to an idle companion.  On each tier, are two opposite 
rows of small iron doors.  They look like furnace-doors, but are 
cold and black, as though the fires within had all gone out.  Some 
two or three are open, and women, with drooping heads bent down, 
are talking to the inmates.  The whole is lighted by a skylight, 
but it is fast closed; and from the roof there dangle, limp and 
drooping, two useless windsails.

A man with keys appears, to show us round.  A good-looking fellow, 
and, in his way, civil and obliging.

'Are those black doors the cells?'

'Yes.'

'Are they all full?'

'Well, they're pretty nigh full, and that's a fact, and no two ways 
about it.'

'Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely?'

'Why, we DO only put coloured people in 'em.  That's the truth.'

'When do the prisoners take exercise?'

'Well, they do without it pretty much.'

'Do they never walk in the yard?'

'Considerable seldom.'

'Sometimes, I suppose?'

'Well, it's rare they do.  They keep pretty bright without it.'

'But suppose a man were here for a twelvemonth.  I know this is 
only a prison for criminals who are charged with grave offences, 
while they are awaiting their trial, or under remand, but the law 
here affords criminals many means of delay.  What with motions for 
new trials, and in arrest of judgment, and what not, a prisoner 
might be here for twelve months, I take it, might he not?'

'Well, I guess he might.'

'Do you mean to say that in all that time he would never come out 
at that little iron door, for exercise?'

'He might walk some, perhaps - not much.'

'Will you open one of the doors?'

'All, if you like.'

The fastenings jar and rattle, and one of the doors turns slowly on 
its hinges.  Let us look in.  A small bare cell, into which the 
light enters through a high chink in the wall.  There is a rude 
means of washing, a table, and a bedstead.  Upon the latter, sits a 
man of sixty; reading.  He looks up for a moment; gives an 
impatient dogged shake; and fixes his eyes upon his book again.  As 
we withdraw our heads, the door closes on him, and is fastened as 
before.  This man has murdered his wife, and will probably be 
hanged.

'How long has he been here?'

'A month.'

'When will he be tried?'

'Next term.'

'When is that?'

'Next month.'

'In England, if a man be under sentence of death, even he has air 
and exercise at certain periods of the day.'

'Possible?'

With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and 
how loungingly he leads on to the women's side:  making, as he 
goes, a kind of iron castanet of the key and the stair-rail!

Each cell door on this side has a square aperture in it.  Some of 
the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; 
others shrink away in shame. - For what offence can that lonely 
child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here?  Oh! that boy?  
He is the son of the prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against 
his father; and is detained here for safe keeping, until the trial; 
that's all.

But it is a dreadful place for the child to pass the long days and 
nights in.  This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is 
it not? - What says our conductor?

'Well, it an't a very rowdy life, and THAT'S a fact!'

Again he clinks his metal castanet, and leads us leisurely away.  I 
have a question to ask him as we go.

'Pray, why do they call this place The Tombs?'

'Well, it's the cant name.'

'I know it is.  Why?'

'Some suicides happened here, when it was first built.  I expect it 
come about from that.'

'I saw just now, that that man's clothes were scattered about the 
floor of his cell.  Don't you oblige the prisoners to be orderly, 
and put such things away?'

'Where should they put 'em?'

'Not on the ground surely.  What do you say to hanging them up?'

He stops and looks round to emphasise his answer:

'Why, I say that's just it.  When they had hooks they WOULD hang 
themselves, so they're taken out of every cell, and there's only 
the marks left where they used to be!'

The prison-yard in which he pauses now, has been the scene of 
terrible performances.  Into this narrow, grave-like place, men are 
brought out to die.  The wretched creature stands beneath the 
gibbet on the ground; the rope about his neck; and when the sign is 
given, a weight at its other end comes running down, and swings him 
up into the air - a corpse.

The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle, 
the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five.  
From the community it is hidden.  To the dissolute and bad, the 
thing remains a frightful mystery.  Between the criminal and them, 
the prison-wall is interposed as a thick gloomy veil.  It is the 
curtain to his bed of death, his winding-sheet, and grave.  From 
him it shuts out life, and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood 
in that last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often all-
sufficient to sustain.  There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no 
ruffians to uphold a ruffian's name before.  All beyond the 
pitiless stone wall, is unknown space.

Let us go forth again into the cheerful streets.

Once more in Broadway!  Here are the same ladies in bright colours, 
walking to and fro, in pairs and singly; yonder the very same light 
blue parasol which passed and repassed the hotel-window twenty 
times while we were sitting there.  We are going to cross here.  
Take care of the pigs.  Two portly sows are trotting up behind this 
carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs have 
just now turned the corner.

Here is a solitary swine lounging homeward by himself.  He has only 
one ear; having parted with the other to vagrant-dogs in the course 
of his city rambles.  But he gets on very well without it; and 
leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat 
answering to that of our club-men at home.  He leaves his lodgings 
every morning at a certain hour, throws himself upon the town, gets 
through his day in some manner quite satisfactory to himself, and 
regularly appears at the door of his own house again at night, like 
the mysterious master of Gil Blas.  He is a free-and-easy, 
careless, indifferent kind of pig, having a very large acquaintance 
among other pigs of the same character, whom he rather knows by 
sight than conversation, as he seldom troubles himself to stop and 
exchange civilities, but goes grunting down the kennel, turning up 
the news and small-talk of the city in the shape of cabbage-stalks 
and offal, and bearing no tails but his own:  which is a very short 
one, for his old enemies, the dogs, have been at that too, and have 
left him hardly enough to swear by.  He is in every respect a 
republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the 
best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for every one 
makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest give him the wall, if 
he prefer it.  He is a great philosopher, and seldom moved, unless 
by the dogs before mentioned.  Sometimes, indeed, you may see his 
small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase 
garnishes a butcher's door-post, but he grunts out 'Such is life:  
all flesh is pork!' buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles 
down the gutter:  comforting himself with the reflection that there 
is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage-stalks, at any 
rate.

They are the city scavengers, these pigs.  Ugly brutes they are; 
having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old 
horsehair trunks:  spotted with unwholesome black blotches.  They 
have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of 
them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would 
recognise it for a pig's likeness.  They are never attended upon, 
or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own 
resources in early life, and become preternaturally knowing in 
consequence.  Every pig knows where he lives, much better than 
anybody could tell him.  At this hour, just as evening is closing 
in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their 
way to the last.  Occasionally, some youth among them who has over-
eaten himself, or has been worried by dogs, trots shrinkingly 
homeward, like a prodigal son:  but this is a rare case:  perfect 
self-possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being 
their foremost attributes.

The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down 
the long thoroughfare, dotted with bright jets of gas, it is 
reminded of Oxford Street, or Piccadilly.  Here and there a flight 
of broad stone cellar-steps appears, and a painted lamp directs you 
to the Bowling Saloon, or Ten-Pin alley; Ten-Pins being a game of 
mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an 
act forbidding Nine-Pins.  At other downward flights of steps, are 
other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster-cellars - pleasant 
retreats, say I:  not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of 
oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese-plates (or for thy dear 
sake, heartiest of Greek Professors!), but because of all kinds of 
caters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the 
swallowers of oysters alone are not gregarious; but subduing 
themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and 
copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in 
curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not by two hundreds.

But how quiet the streets are!  Are there no itinerant bands; no 
wind or stringed instruments?  No, not one.  By day, are there no 
Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurers, 
Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs?  No, not one.  Yes, I remember 
one.  One barrel-organ and a dancing-monkey - sportive by nature, 
but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian 
school.  Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white 
mouse in a twirling cage.

Are there no amusements?  Yes.  There is a lecture-room across the 
way, from which that glare of light proceeds, and there may be 
evening service for the ladies thrice a week, or oftener.  For the 
young gentlemen, there is the counting-house, the store, the bar-
room:  the latter, as you may see through these windows, pretty 
full.  Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of 
ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the 
process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass!  No 
amusements?  What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of 
strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety 
of twist, doing, but amusing themselves?  What are the fifty 
newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the 
street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but 
amusements?  Not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff; 
dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs 
of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and 
pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined 
lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life 
the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed 
and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and 
good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping 
of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey. - No 
amusements!

Let us go on again; and passing this wilderness of an hotel with 
stores about its base, like some Continental theatre, or the London 
Opera House shorn of its colonnade, plunge into the Five Points.  
But it is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two 
heads of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained 
officers if you met them in the Great Desert.  So true it is, that 
certain pursuits, wherever carried on, will stamp men with the same 
character.  These two might have been begotten, born, and bred, in 
Bow Street.

We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of 
other kinds of strollers, plenty.  Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, 
are rife enough where we are going now.

This is the place:  these narrow ways, diverging to the right and 
left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth.  Such lives as 
are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere.  The coarse 
and bloated faces at the doors, have counterparts at home, and all 
the wide world over.  Debauchery has made the very houses 
prematurely old.  See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and 
how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes 
that have been hurt in drunken frays.  Many of those pigs live 
here.  Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu 
of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?

So far, nearly every house is a low tavern; and on the bar-room 
walls, are coloured prints of Washington, and Queen Victoria of 
England, and the American Eagle.  Among the pigeon-holes that hold 
the bottles, are pieces of plate-glass and coloured paper, for 
there is, in some sort, a taste for decoration, even here.  And as 
seamen frequent these haunts, there are maritime pictures by the 
dozen:  of partings between sailors and their lady-loves, portraits 
of William, of the ballad, and his Black-Eyed Susan; of Will Watch, 
the Bold Smuggler; of Paul Jones the Pirate, and the like:  on 
which the painted eyes of Queen Victoria, and of Washington to 
boot, rest in as strange companionship, as on most of the scenes 
that are enacted in their wondering presence.

What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us?  A 
kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only 
by crazy wooden stairs without.  What lies beyond this tottering 
flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread? - a miserable room, 
lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that 
which may be hidden in a wretched bed.  Beside it, sits a man:  his 
elbows on his knees:  his forehead hidden in his hands.  'What ails 
that man?' asks the foremost officer.  'Fever,' he sullenly 
replies, without looking up.  Conceive the fancies of a feverish 
brain, in such a place as this!

Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the 
trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, 
where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come.  A 
negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer's voice - he 
knows it well - but comforted by his assurance that he has not come 
on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle.  The 
match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusty rags 
upon the ground; then dies away and leaves a denser darkness than 
before, if there can be degrees in such extremes.  He stumbles down 
the stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper with 
his hand.  Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise 
slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, 
waking from their sleep:  their white teeth chattering, and their 
bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and 
fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face 
in some strange mirror.

Mount up these other stairs with no less caution (there are traps 
and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as 
ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet 
overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the 
roof.  Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of 
sleeping negroes.  Pah!  They have a charcoal fire within; there is 
a smell of singeing clothes, or flesh, so close they gather round 
the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate.  
From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, 
some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near 
at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead.  Where 
dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to 
sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better 
lodgings.

Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep, 
underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked 
with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American 
eagles out of number:  ruined houses, open to the street, whence, 
through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as 
though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show:  
hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder:  
all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.

Our leader has his hand upon the latch of 'Almack's,' and calls to 
us from the bottom of the steps; for the assembly-room of the Five 
Point fashionables is approached by a descent.  Shall we go in?  It 
is but a moment.

Heyday! the landlady of Almack's thrives!  A buxom fat mulatto 
woman, with sparkling eyes, whose head is daintily ornamented with 
a handkerchief of many colours.  Nor is the landlord much behind 
her in his finery, being attired in a smart blue jacket, like a 
ship's steward, with a thick gold ring upon his little finger, and 
round his neck a gleaming golden watch-guard.  How glad he is to 
see us!  What will we please to call for?  A dance?  It shall be 
done directly, sir:  'a regular break-down.'

The corpulent black fiddler, and his friend who plays the 
tambourine, stamp upon the boarding of the small raised orchestra 
in which they sit, and play a lively measure.  Five or six couple 
come upon the floor, marshalled by a lively young negro, who is the 
wit of the assembly, and the greatest dancer known.  He never 
leaves off making queer faces, and is the delight of all the rest, 
who grin from ear to ear incessantly.  Among the dancers are two 
young mulatto girls, with large, black, drooping eyes, and head-
gear after the fashion of the hostess, who are as shy, or feign to 
be, as though they never danced before, and so look down before the 
visitors, that their partners can see nothing but the long fringed 
lashes.

But the dance commences.  Every gentleman sets as long as he likes 
to the opposite lady, and the opposite lady to him, and all are so 
long about it that the sport begins to languish, when suddenly the 
lively hero dashes in to the rescue.  Instantly the fiddler grins, 
and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the 
tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the 
landlady; new confidence in the landlord; new brightness in the 
very candles.

Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his 
fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the 
backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels 
like nothing but the man's fingers on the tambourine; dancing with 
two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two 
spring legs - all sorts of legs and no legs - what is this to him?  
And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such 
stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his 
partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping 
gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, 
with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one 
inimitable sound!

The air, even in these distempered parts, is fresh after the 
stifling atmosphere of the houses; and now, as we emerge into a 
broader street, it blows upon us with a purer breath, and the stars 
look bright again.  Here are The Tombs once more.  The city watch-
house is a part of the building.  It follows naturally on the 
sights we have just left.  Let us see that, and then to bed.

What! do you thrust your common offenders against the police 
discipline of the town, into such holes as these?  Do men and 
women, against whom no crime is proved, lie here all night in 
perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapours which encircle 
that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and 
offensive stench!  Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons as 
these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in 
the world!  Look at them, man - you, who see them every night, and 
keep the keys.  Do you see what they are?  Do you know how drains 
are made below the streets, and wherein these human sewers differ, 
except in being always stagnant?

Well, he don't know.  He has had five-and-twenty young women locked 
up in this very cell at one time, and you'd hardly realise what 
handsome faces there were among 'em.

In God's name! shut the door upon the wretched creature who is in 
it now, and put its screen before a place, quite unsurpassed in all 
the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the worst old town in Europe.

Are people really left all night, untried, in those black sties? - 
Every night.  The watch is set at seven in the evening.  The 
magistrate opens his court at five in the morning.  That is the 
earliest hour at which the first prisoner can be released; and if 
an officer appear against him, he is not taken out till nine 
o'clock or ten. - But if any one among them die in the interval, as 
one man did, not long ago?  Then he is half-eaten by the rats in an 
hour's time; as that man was; and there an end.

What is this intolerable tolling of great bells, and crashing of 
wheels, and shouting in the distance?  A fire.  And what that deep 
red light in the opposite direction?  Another fire.  And what these 
charred and blackened walls we stand before?  A dwelling where a 
fire has been.  It was more than hinted, in an official report, not 
long ago, that some of these conflagrations were not wholly 
accidental, and that speculation and enterprise found a field of 
exertion, even in flames:  but be this as it may, there was a fire 
last night, there are two to-night, and you may lay an even wager 
there will be at least one, to-morrow.  So, carrying that with us 
for our comfort, let us say, Good night, and climb up-stairs to 
bed.

* * * * * *

One day, during my stay in New York, I paid a visit to the 
different public institutions on Long Island, or Rhode Island:  I 
forget which.  One of them is a Lunatic Asylum.  The building is 
handsome; and is remarkable for a spacious and elegant staircase.  
The whole structure is not yet finished, but it is already one of 
considerable size and extent, and is capable of accommodating a 
very large number of patients.

I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of 
this charity.  The different wards might have been cleaner and 
better ordered; I saw nothing of that salutary system which had 
impressed me so favourably elsewhere; and everything had a 
lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful.  The 
moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the 
gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the 
vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands 
and lips, and munching of the nails:  there they were all, without 
disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.  In the dining-room, a 
bare, dull, dreary place, with nothing for the eye to rest on but 
the empty walls, a woman was locked up alone.  She was bent, they 
told me, on committing suicide.  If anything could have 
strengthened her in her resolution, it would certainly have been 
the insupportable monotony of such an existence.

The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were 
filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay within the shortest 
limits, and declined to see that portion of the building in which 
the refractory and violent were under closer restraint.  I have no 
doubt that the gentleman who presided over this establishment at 
the time I write of, was competent to manage it, and had done all 
in his power to promote its usefulness:  but will it be believed 
that the miserable strife of Party feeling is carried even into 
this sad refuge of afflicted and degraded humanity?  Will it be 
believed that the eyes which are to watch over and control the 
wanderings of minds on which the most dreadful visitation to which 
our nature is exposed has fallen, must wear the glasses of some 
wretched side in Politics?  Will it be believed that the governor 
of such a house as this, is appointed, and deposed, and changed 
perpetually, as Parties fluctuate and vary, and as their despicable 
weathercocks are blown this way or that?  A hundred times in every 
week, some new most paltry exhibition of that narrow-minded and 
injurious Party Spirit, which is the Simoom of America, sickening 
and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach, was 
forced upon my notice; but I never turned my back upon it with 
feelings of such deep disgust and measureless contempt, as when I 
crossed the threshold of this madhouse.

At a short distance from this building is another called the Alms 
House, that is to say, the workhouse of New York.  This is a large 
Institution also:  lodging, I believe, when I was there, nearly a 
thousand poor.  It was badly ventilated, and badly lighted; was not 
too clean; - and impressed me, on the whole, very uncomfortably.  
But it must be remembered that New York, as a great emporium of 
commerce, and as a place of general resort, not only from all parts 
of the States, but from most parts of the world, has always a large 
pauper population to provide for; and labours, therefore, under 
peculiar difficulties in this respect.  Nor must it be forgotten 
that New York is a large town, and that in all large towns a vast 
amount of good and evil is intermixed and jumbled up together.

In the same neighbourhood is the Farm, where young orphans are 
nursed and bred.  I did not see it, but I believe it is well 
conducted; and I can the more easily credit it, from knowing how 
mindful they usually are, in America, of that beautiful passage in 
the Litany which remembers all sick persons and young children.

I was taken to these Institutions by water, in a boat belonging to 
the Island jail, and rowed by a crew of prisoners, who were dressed 
in a striped uniform of black and buff, in which they looked like 
faded tigers.  They took me, by the same conveyance, to the jail 
itself.

It is an old prison, and quite a pioneer establishment, on the plan 
I have already described.  I was glad to hear this, for it is 
unquestionably a very indifferent one.  The most is made, however, 
of the means it possesses, and it is as well regulated as such a 
place can be.

The women work in covered sheds, erected for that purpose.  If I 
remember right, there are no shops for the men, but be that as it 
may, the greater part of them labour in certain stone-quarries near 
at hand.  The day being very wet indeed, this labour was suspended, 
and the prisoners were in their cells.  Imagine these cells, some 
two or three hundred in number, and in every one a man locked up; 
this one at his door for air, with his hands thrust through the 
grate; this one in bed (in the middle of the day, remember); and 
this one flung down in a heap upon the ground, with his head 
against the bars, like a wild beast.  Make the rain pour down, 
outside, in torrents.  Put the everlasting stove in the midst; hot, 
and suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch's cauldron.  Add a 
collection of gentle odours, such as would arise from a thousand 
mildewed umbrellas, wet through, and a thousand buck-baskets, full 
of half-washed linen - and there is the prison, as it was that day.

The prison for the State at Sing Sing is, on the other hand, a 
model jail.  That, and Auburn, are, I believe, the largest and best 
examples of the silent system.

In another part of the city, is the Refuge for the Destitute:  an 
Institution whose object is to reclaim youthful offenders, male and 
female, black and white, without distinction; to teach them useful 
trades, apprentice them to respectable masters, and make them 
worthy members of society.  Its design, it will be seen, is similar 
to that at Boston; and it is a no less meritorious and admirable 
establishment.  A suspicion crossed my mind during my inspection of 
this noble charity, whether the superintendent had quite sufficient 
knowledge of the world and worldly characters; and whether he did 
not commit a great mistake in treating some young girls, who were 
to all intents and purposes, by their years and their past lives, 
women, as though they were little children; which certainly had a 
ludicrous effect in my eyes, and, or I am much mistaken, in theirs 
also.  As the Institution, however, is always under a vigilant 
examination of a body of gentlemen of great intelligence and 
experience, it cannot fail to be well conducted; and whether I am 
right or wrong in this slight particular, is unimportant to its 
deserts and character, which it would be difficult to estimate too 
highly.

In addition to these establishments, there are in New York, 
excellent hospitals and schools, literary institutions and 
libraries; an admirable fire department (as indeed it should be, 
having constant practice), and charities of every sort and kind.  
In the suburbs there is a spacious cemetery:  unfinished yet, but 
every day improving.  The saddest tomb I saw there was 'The 
Strangers' Grave.  Dedicated to the different hotels in this city.'

There are three principal theatres.  Two of them, the Park and the 
Bowery, are large, elegant, and handsome buildings, and are, I 
grieve to write it, generally deserted.  The third, the Olympic, is 
a tiny show-box for vaudevilles and burlesques.  It is singularly 
well conducted by Mr. Mitchell, a comic actor of great quiet humour 
and originality, who is well remembered and esteemed by London 
playgoers.  I am happy to report of this deserving gentleman, that 
his benches are usually well filled, and that his theatre rings 
with merriment every night.  I had almost forgotten a small summer 
theatre, called Niblo's, with gardens and open air amusements 
attached; but I believe it is not exempt from the general 
depression under which Theatrical Property, or what is humorously 
called by that name, unfortunately labours.

The country round New York is surpassingly and exquisitely 
picturesque.  The climate, as I have already intimated, is somewhat 
of the warmest.  What it would be, without the sea breezes which 
come from its beautiful Bay in the evening time, I will not throw 
myself or my readers into a fever by inquiring.

The tone of the best society in this city, is like that of Boston; 
here and there, it may be, with a greater infusion of the 
mercantile spirit, but generally polished and refined, and always 
most hospitable.  The houses and tables are elegant; the hours 
later and more rakish; and there is, perhaps, a greater spirit of 
contention in reference to appearances, and the display of wealth 
and costly living.  The ladies are singularly beautiful.

Before I left New York I made arrangements for securing a passage 
home in the George Washington packet ship, which was advertised to 
sail in June:  that being the month in which I had determined, if 
prevented by no accident in the course of my ramblings, to leave 
America.

I never thought that going back to England, returning to all who 
are dear to me, and to pursuits that have insensibly grown to be a 
part of my nature, I could have felt so much sorrow as I endured, 
when I parted at last, on board this ship, with the friends who had 
accompanied me from this city.  I never thought the name of any 
place, so far away and so lately known, could ever associate itself 
in my mind with the crowd of affectionate remembrances that now 
cluster about it.  There are those in this city who would brighten, 
to me, the darkest winter-day that ever glimmered and went out in 
Lapland; and before whose presence even Home grew dim, when they 
and I exchanged that painful word which mingles with our every 
thought and deed; which haunts our cradle-heads in infancy, and 
closes up the vista of our lives in age.




CHAPTER VII - PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON



THE journey from New York to Philadelphia, is made by railroad, and 
two ferries; and usually occupies between five and six hours.  It 
was a fine evening when we were passengers in the train:  and 
watching the bright sunset from a little window near the door by 
which we sat, my attention was attracted to a remarkable appearance 
issuing from the windows of the gentleman's car immediately in 
front of us, which I supposed for some time was occasioned by a 
number of industrious persons inside, ripping open feather-beds, 
and giving the feathers to the wind.  At length it occurred to me 
that they were only spitting, which was indeed the case; though how 
any number of passengers which it was possible for that car to 
contain, could have maintained such a playful and incessant shower 
of expectoration, I am still at a loss to understand:  
notwithstanding the experience in all salivatory phenomena which I 
afterwards acquired.

I made acquaintance, on this journey, with a mild and modest young 
quaker, who opened the discourse by informing me, in a grave 
whisper, that his grandfather was the inventor of cold-drawn castor 
oil.  I mention the circumstance here, thinking it probable that 
this is the first occasion on which the valuable medicine in 
question was ever used as a conversational aperient.

We reached the city, late that night.  Looking out of my chamber-
window, before going to bed, I saw, on the opposite side of the 
way, a handsome building of white marble, which had a mournful 
ghost-like aspect, dreary to behold.  I attributed this to the 
sombre influence of the night, and on rising in the morning looked 
out again, expecting to see its steps and portico thronged with 
groups of people passing in and out.  The door was still tight 
shut, however; the same cold cheerless air prevailed:  and the 
building looked as if the marble statue of Don Guzman could alone 
have any business to transact within its gloomy walls.  I hastened 
to inquire its name and purpose, and then my surprise vanished.  It 
was the Tomb of many fortunes; the Great Catacomb of investment; 
the memorable United States Bank.

The stoppage of this bank, with all its ruinous consequences, had 
cast (as I was told on every side) a gloom on Philadelphia, under 
the depressing effect of which it yet laboured.  It certainly did 
seem rather dull and out of spirits.

It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular.  After walking 
about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the 
world for a crooked street.  The collar of my coat appeared to 
stiffen, and the brim of my bat to expand, beneath its quakery 
influence.  My hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded 
themselves upon my breast of their own calm accord, and thoughts of 
taking lodgings in Mark Lane over against the Market Place, and of 
making a large fortune by speculations in corn, came over me 
involuntarily.

Philadelphia is most bountifully provided with fresh water, which 
is showered and jerked about, and turned on, and poured off, 
everywhere.  The Waterworks, which are on a height near the city, 
are no less ornamental than useful, being tastefully laid out as a 
public garden, and kept in the best and neatest order.  The river 
is dammed at this point, and forced by its own power into certain 
high tanks or reservoirs, whence the whole city, to the top stories 
of the houses, is supplied at a very trifling expense.

There are various public institutions.  Among them a most excellent 
Hospital - a quaker establishment, but not sectarian in the great 
benefits it confers; a quiet, quaint old Library, named after 
Franklin; a handsome Exchange and Post Office; and so forth.  In 
connection with the quaker Hospital, there is a picture by West, 
which is exhibited for the benefit of the funds of the institution.  
The subject is, our Saviour healing the sick, and it is, perhaps, 
as favourable a specimen of the master as can be seen anywhere.  
Whether this be high or low praise, depends upon the reader's 
taste.

In the same room, there is a very characteristic and life-like 
portrait by Mr. Sully, a distinguished American artist.

My stay in Philadelphia was very short, but what I saw of its 
society, I greatly liked.  Treating of its general characteristics, 
I should be disposed to say that it is more provincial than Boston 
or New York, and that there is afloat in the fair city, an 
assumption of taste and criticism, savouring rather of those 
genteel discussions upon the same themes, in connection with 
Shakspeare and the Musical Glasses, of which we read in the Vicar 
of Wakefield.  Near the city, is a most splendid unfinished marble 
structure for the Girard College, founded by a deceased gentleman 
of that name and of enormous wealth, which, if completed according 
to the original design, will be perhaps the richest edifice of 
modern times.  But the bequest is involved in legal disputes, and 
pending them the work has stopped; so that like many other great 
undertakings in America, even this is rather going to be done one 
of these days, than doing now.

In the outskirts, stands a great prison, called the Eastern 
Penitentiary:  conducted on a plan peculiar to the state of 
Pennsylvania.  The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless 
solitary confinement.  I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel 
and wrong.

In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and 
meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised 
this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen 
who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are 
doing.  I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the 
immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, 
prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing 
at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon 
their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I 
am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible 
endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, 
and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature.  
I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the 
brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body:  and 
because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye 
and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are 
not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can 
hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment 
which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.  I hesitated 
once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying 
'Yes' or 'No,' I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where 
the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, 
that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath 
the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the 
consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no 
matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent 
cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.

I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially 
connected with its management, and passed the day in going from 
cell to cell, and talking with the inmates.  Every facility was 
afforded me, that the utmost courtesy could suggest.  Nothing was 
concealed or hidden from my view, and every piece of information 
that I sought, was openly and frankly given.  The perfect order of 
the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent 
motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration 
of the system, there can be no kind of question.

Between the body of the prison and the outer wall, there is a 
spacious garden.  Entering it, by a wicket in the massive gate, we 
pursued the path before us to its other termination, and passed 
into a large chamber, from which seven long passages radiate.  On 
either side of each, is a long, long row of low cell doors, with a 
certain number over every one.  Above, a gallery of cells like 
those below, except that they have no narrow yard attached (as 
those in the ground tier have), and are somewhat smaller.  The 
possession of two of these, is supposed to compensate for the 
absence of so much air and exercise as can be had in the dull strip 
attached to each of the others, in an hour's time every day; and 
therefore every prisoner in this upper story has two cells, 
adjoining and communicating with, each other.

Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary 
passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful.  
Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver's 
shuttle, or shoemaker's last, but it is stifled by the thick walls 
and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general 
stillness more profound.  Over the head and face of every prisoner 
who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in 
this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and 
the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again 
comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired.  He 
never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or 
death of any single creature.  He sees the prison-officers, but 
with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or 
hears a human voice.  He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in 
the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything 
but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.

His name, and crime, and term of suffering, are unknown, even to 
the officer who delivers him his daily food.  There is a number 
over his cell-door, and in a book of which the governor of the 
prison has one copy, and the moral instructor another:  this is the 
index of his history.  Beyond these pages the prison has no record 
of his existence:  and though he live to be in the same cell ten 
weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last 
hour, in which part of the building it is situated; what kind of 
men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there 
are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great 
jail, with walls, and passages, and iron doors between him and the 
nearest sharer in its solitary horrors.

Every cell has double doors:  the outer one of sturdy oak, the 
other of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his 
food is handed.  He has a Bible, and a slate and pencil, and, under 
certain restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the 
purpose, and pen and ink and paper.  His razor, plate, and can, and 
basin, hang upon the wall, or shine upon the little shelf.  Fresh 
water is laid on in every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure.  
During the day, his bedstead turns up against the wall, and leaves 
more space for him to work in.  His loom, or bench, or wheel, is 
there; and there he labours, sleeps and wakes, and counts the 
seasons as they change, and grows old.

The first man I saw, was seated at his loom, at work.  He had been 
there six years, and was to remain, I think, three more.  He had 
been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but even after his 
long imprisonment, denied his guilt, and said he had been hardly 
dealt by.  It was his second offence.

He stopped his work when we went in, took off his spectacles, and 
answered freely to everything that was said to him, but always with 
a strange kind of pause first, and in a low, thoughtful voice.  He 
wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it 
noticed and commanded.  He had very ingeniously manufactured a sort 
of Dutch clock from some disregarded odds and ends; and his 
vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum.  Seeing me interested in 
this contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, 
and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he 
hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it 
'would play music before long.'  He had extracted some colours from 
the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on 
the wall.  One, of a female, over the door, he called 'The Lady of 
the Lake.'

He smiled as I looked at these contrivances to while away the time; 
but when I looked from them to him, I saw that his lip trembled, 
and could have counted the beating of his heart.  I forget how it 
came about, but some allusion was made to his having a wife.  He 
shook his head at the word, turned aside, and covered his face with 
his hands.

'But you are resigned now!' said one of the gentlemen after a short 
pause, during which he had resumed his former manner.  He answered 
with a sigh that seemed quite reckless in its hopelessness, 'Oh 
yes, oh yes!  I am resigned to it.'  'And are a better man, you 
think?'  'Well, I hope so:  I'm sure I hope I may be.'  'And time 
goes pretty quickly?'  'Time is very long gentlemen, within these 
four walls!'

He gazed about him - Heaven only knows how wearily! - as he said 
these words; and in the act of doing so, fell into a strange stare 
as if he had forgotten something.  A moment afterwards he sighed 
heavily, put on his spectacles, and went about his work again.

In another cell, there was a German, sentenced to five years' 
imprisonment for larceny, two of which had just expired.  With 
colours procured in the same manner, he had painted every inch of 
the walls and ceiling quite beautifully.  He had laid out the few 
feet of ground, behind, with exquisite neatness, and had made a 
little bed in the centre, that looked, by-the-bye, like a grave.  
The taste and ingenuity he had displayed in everything were most 
extraordinary; and yet a more dejected, heart-broken, wretched 
creature, it would be difficult to imagine.  I never saw such a 
picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind.  My heart bled 
for him; and when the tears ran down his cheeks, and he took one of 
the visitors aside, to ask, with his trembling hands nervously 
clutching at his coat to detain him, whether there was no hope of 
his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle was really too 
painful to witness.  I never saw or heard of any kind of misery 
that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man.

In a third cell, was a tall, strong black, a burglar, working at 
his proper trade of making screws and the like.  His time was 
nearly out.  He was not only a very dexterous thief, but was 
notorious for his boldness and hardihood, and for the number of his 
previous convictions.  He entertained us with a long account of his 
achievements, which he narrated with such infinite relish, that he 
actually seemed to lick his lips as he told us racy anecdotes of 
stolen plate, and of old ladies whom he had watched as they sat at 
windows in silver spectacles (he had plainly had an eye to their 
metal even from the other side of the street) and had afterwards 
robbed.  This fellow, upon the slightest encouragement, would have 
mingled with his professional recollections the most detestable 
cant; but I am very much mistaken if he could have surpassed the 
unmitigated hypocrisy with which he declared that he blessed the 
day on which he came into that prison, and that he never would 
commit another robbery as long as he lived.

There was one man who was allowed, as an indulgence, to keep 
rabbits.  His room having rather a close smell in consequence, they 
called to him at the door to come out into the passage.  He 
complied of course, and stood shading his haggard face in the 
unwonted sunlight of the great window, looking as wan and unearthly 
as if he had been summoned from the grave.  He had a white rabbit 
in his breast; and when the little creature, getting down upon the 
ground, stole back into the cell, and he, being dismissed, crept 
timidly after it, I thought it would have been very hard to say in 
what respect the man was the nobler animal of the two.

There was an English thief, who had been there but a few days out 
of seven years:  a villainous, low-browed, thin-lipped fellow, with 
a white face; who had as yet no relish for visitors, and who, but 
for the additional penalty, would have gladly stabbed me with his 
shoemaker's knife.  There was another German who had entered the 
jail but yesterday, and who started from his bed when we looked in, 
and pleaded, in his broken English, very hard for work.  There was 
a poet, who after doing two days' work in every four-and-twenty 
hours, one for himself and one for the prison, wrote verses about 
ships (he was by trade a mariner), and 'the maddening wine-cup,' 
and his friends at home.  There were very many of them.  Some 
reddened at the sight of visitors, and some turned very pale.  Some 
two or three had prisoner nurses with them, for they were very 
sick; and one, a fat old negro whose leg had been taken off within 
the jail, had for his attendant a classical scholar and an 
accomplished surgeon, himself a prisoner likewise.  Sitting upon 
the stairs, engaged in some slight work, was a pretty coloured boy.  
'Is there no refuge for young criminals in Philadelphia, then?' 
said I.  'Yes, but only for white children.'  Noble aristocracy in 
crime

There was a sailor who had been there upwards of eleven years, and 
who in a few months' time would be free.  Eleven years of solitary 
confinement!

'I am very glad to hear your time is nearly out.'  What does he 
say?  Nothing.  Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh 
upon his fingers, and raise his eyes for an instant, every now and 
then, to those bare walls which have seen his head turn grey?  It 
is a way he has sometimes.

Does he never look men in the face, and does he always pluck at 
those hands of his, as though he were bent on parting skin and 
bone?  It is his humour:  nothing more.

It is his humour too, to say that he does not look forward to going 
out; that he is not glad the time is drawing near; that he did look 
forward to it once, but that was very long ago; that he has lost 
all care for everything.  It is his humour to be a helpless, 
crushed, and broken man.  And, Heaven be his witness that he has 
his humour thoroughly gratified!

There were three young women in adjoining cells, all convicted at 
the same time of a conspiracy to rob their prosecutor.  In the 
silence and solitude of their lives they had grown to be quite 
beautiful.  Their looks were very sad, and might have moved the 
sternest visitor to tears, but not to that kind of sorrow which the 
contemplation of the men awakens.  One was a young girl; not 
twenty, as I recollect; whose snow-white room was hung with the 
work of some former prisoner, and upon whose downcast face the sun 
in all its splendour shone down through the high chink in the wall, 
where one narrow strip of bright blue sky was visible.  She was 
very penitent and quiet; had come to be resigned, she said (and I 
believe her); and had a mind at peace.  'In a word, you are happy 
here?' said one of my companions.  She struggled - she did struggle 
very hard - to answer, Yes; but raising her eyes, and meeting that 
glimpse of freedom overhead, she burst into tears, and said, 'She 
tried to be; she uttered no complaint; but it was natural that she 
should sometimes long to go out of that one cell:  she could not 
help THAT,' she sobbed, poor thing!

I went from cell to cell that day; and every face I saw, or word I 
heard, or incident I noted, is present to my mind in all its 
painfulness.  But let me pass them by, for one, more pleasant, 
glance of a prison on the same plan which I afterwards saw at 
Pittsburg.

When I had gone over that, in the same manner, I asked the governor 
if he had any person in his charge who was shortly going out.  He 
had one, he said, whose time was up next day; but he had only been 
a prisoner two years.

Two years!  I looked back through two years of my own life - out of 
jail, prosperous, happy, surrounded by blessings, comforts, good 
fortune - and thought how wide a gap it was, and how long those two 
years passed in solitary captivity would have been.  I have the 
face of this man, who was going to be released next day, before me 
now.  It is almost more memorable in its happiness than the other 
faces in their misery.  How easy and how natural it was for him to 
say that the system was a good one; and that the time went 'pretty 
quick - considering;' and that when a man once felt that he had 
offended the law, and must satisfy it, 'he got along, somehow:' and 
so forth!

'What did he call you back to say to you, in that strange flutter?' 
I asked of my conductor, when he had locked the door and joined me 
in the passage.

'Oh!  That he was afraid the soles of his boots were not fit for 
walking, as they were a good deal worn when he came in; and that he 
would thank me very much to have them mended, ready.'

Those boots had been taken off his feet, and put away with the rest 
of his clothes, two years before!

I took that opportunity of inquiring how they conducted themselves 
immediately before going out; adding that I presumed they trembled 
very much.

'Well, it's not so much a trembling,' was the answer - 'though they 
do quiver - as a complete derangement of the nervous system.  They 
can't sign their names to the book; sometimes can't even hold the 
pen; look about 'em without appearing to know why, or where they 
are; and sometimes get up and sit down again, twenty times in a 
minute.  This is when they're in the office, where they are taken 
with the hood on, as they were brought in.  When they get outside 
the gate, they stop, and look first one way and then the other; not 
knowing which to take.  Sometimes they stagger as if they were 
drunk, and sometimes are forced to lean against the fence, they're 
so bad:- but they clear off in course of time.'

As I walked among these solitary cells, and looked at the faces of 
the men within them, I tried to picture to myself the thoughts and 
feelings natural to their condition.  I imagined the hood just 
taken off, and the scene of their captivity disclosed to them in 
all its dismal monotony.

At first, the man is stunned.  His confinement is a hideous vision; 
and his old life a reality.  He throws himself upon his bed, and 
lies there abandoned to despair.  By degrees the insupportable 
solitude and barrenness of the place rouses him from this stupor, 
and when the trap in his grated door is opened, he humbly begs and 
prays for work.  'Give me some work to do, or I shall go raving 
mad!'

He has it; and by fits and starts applies himself to labour; but 
every now and then there comes upon him a burning sense of the 
years that must be wasted in that stone coffin, and an agony so 
piercing in the recollection of those who are hidden from his view 
and knowledge, that he starts from his seat, and striding up and 
down the narrow room with both hands clasped on his uplifted head, 
hears spirits tempting him to beat his brains out on the wall.

Again he falls upon his bed, and lies there, moaning.  Suddenly he 
starts up, wondering whether any other man is near; whether there 
is another cell like that on either side of him:  and listens 
keenly.

There is no sound, but other prisoners may be near for all that.  
He remembers to have heard once, when he little thought of coming 
here himself, that the cells were so constructed that the prisoners 
could not hear each other, though the officers could hear them.

Where is the nearest man - upon the right, or on the left? or is 
there one in both directions?  Where is he sitting now - with his 
face to the light? or is he walking to and fro?  How is he dressed?  
Has he been here long?  Is he much worn away?  Is he very white and 
spectre-like?  Does HE think of his neighbour too?

Scarcely venturing to breathe, and listening while he thinks, he 
conjures up a figure with his back towards him, and imagines it 
moving about in this next cell.  He has no idea of the face, but he 
is certain of the dark form of a stooping man.  In the cell upon 
the other side, he puts another figure, whose face is hidden from 
him also.  Day after day, and often when he wakes up in the middle 
of the night, he thinks of these two men until he is almost 
distracted.  He never changes them.  There they are always as he 
first imagined them - an old man on the right; a younger man upon 
the left - whose hidden features torture him to death, and have a 
mystery that makes him tremble.

The weary days pass on with solemn pace, like mourners at a 
funeral; and slowly he begins to feel that the white walls of the 
cell have something dreadful in them:  that their colour is 
horrible:  that their smooth surface chills his blood:  that there 
is one hateful corner which torments him.  Every morning when he 
wakes, he hides his head beneath the coverlet, and shudders to see 
the ghastly ceiling looking down upon him.  The blessed light of 
day itself peeps in, an ugly phantom face, through the unchangeable 
crevice which is his prison window.

By slow but sure degrees, the terrors of that hateful corner swell 
until they beset him at all times; invade his rest, make his dreams 
hideous, and his nights dreadful.  At first, he took a strange 
dislike to it; feeling as though it gave birth in his brain to 
something of corresponding shape, which ought not to be there, and 
racked his head with pains.  Then he began to fear it, then to 
dream of it, and of men whispering its name and pointing to it.  
Then he could not bear to look at it, nor yet to turn his back upon 
it.  Now, it is every night the lurking-place of a ghost:  a 
shadow:- a silent something, horrible to see, but whether bird, or 
beast, or muffled human shape, he cannot tell.

When he is in his cell by day, he fears the little yard without.  
When he is in the yard, he dreads to re-enter the cell.  When night 
comes, there stands the phantom in the corner.  If he have the 
courage to stand in its place, and drive it out (he had once:  
being desperate), it broods upon his bed.  In the twilight, and 
always at the same hour, a voice calls to him by name; as the 
darkness thickens, his Loom begins to live; and even that, his 
comfort, is a hideous figure, watching him till daybreak.

Again, by slow degrees, these horrible fancies depart from him one 
by one:  returning sometimes, unexpectedly, but at longer 
intervals, and in less alarming shapes.  He has talked upon 
religious matters with the gentleman who visits him, and has read 
his Bible, and has written a prayer upon his slate, and hung it up 
as a kind of protection, and an assurance of Heavenly 
companionship.  He dreams now, sometimes, of his children or his 
wife, but is sure that they are dead, or have deserted him.  He is 
easily moved to tears; is gentle, submissive, and broken-spirited.  
Occasionally, the old agony comes back:  a very little thing will 
revive it; even a familiar sound, or the scent of summer flowers in 
the air; but it does not last long, now:  for the world without, 
has come to be the vision, and this solitary life, the sad reality.

If his term of imprisonment be short - I mean comparatively, for 
short it cannot be - the last half year is almost worse than all; 
for then he thinks the prison will take fire and he be burnt in the 
ruins, or that he is doomed to die within the walls, or that he 
will be detained on some false charge and sentenced for another 
term:  or that something, no matter what, must happen to prevent 
his going at large.  And this is natural, and impossible to be 
reasoned against, because, after his long separation from human 
life, and his great suffering, any event will appear to him more 
probable in the contemplation, than the being restored to liberty 
and his fellow-creatures.

If his period of confinement have been very long, the prospect of 
release bewilders and confuses him.  His broken heart may flutter 
for a moment, when he thinks of the world outside, and what it 
might have been to him in all those lonely years, but that is all.  
The cell-door has been closed too long on all its hopes and cares.  
Better to have hanged him in the beginning than bring him to this 
pass, and send him forth to mingle with his kind, who are his kind 
no more.

On the haggard face of every man among these prisoners, the same 
expression sat.  I know not what to liken it to.  It had something 
of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind 
and deaf, mingled with a kind of horror, as though they had all 
been secretly terrified.  In every little chamber that I entered, 
and at every grate through which I looked, I seemed to see the same 
appalling countenance.  It lives in my memory, with the fascination 
of a remarkable picture.  Parade before my eyes, a hundred men, 
with one among them newly released from this solitary suffering, 
and I would point him out.

The faces of the women, as I have said, it humanises and refines.  
Whether this be because of their better nature, which is elicited 
in solitude, or because of their being gentler creatures, of 
greater patience and longer suffering, I do not know; but so it is.  
That the punishment is nevertheless, to my thinking, fully as cruel 
and as wrong in their case, as in that of the men, I need scarcely 
add.

My firm conviction is that, independent of the mental anguish it 
occasions - an anguish so acute and so tremendous, that all 
imagination of it must fall far short of the reality - it wears the 
mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough 
contact and busy action of the world.  It is my fixed opinion that 
those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society 
again morally unhealthy and diseased.  There are many instances on 
record, of men who have chosen, or have been condemned, to lives of 
perfect solitude, but I scarcely remember one, even among sages of 
strong and vigorous intellect, where its effect has not become 
apparent, in some disordered train of thought, or some gloomy 
hallucination.  What monstrous phantoms, bred of despondency and 
doubt, and born and reared in solitude, have stalked upon the 
earth, making creation ugly, and darkening the face of Heaven!

Suicides are rare among these prisoners:  are almost, indeed, 
unknown.  But no argument in favour of the system, can reasonably 
be deduced from this circumstance, although it is very often urged.  
All men who have made diseases of the mind their study, know 
perfectly well that such extreme depression and despair as will 
change the whole character, and beat down all its powers of 
elasticity and self-resistance, may be at work within a man, and 
yet stop short of self-destruction.  This is a common case.

That it makes the senses dull, and by degrees impairs the bodily 
faculties, I am quite sure.  I remarked to those who were with me 
in this very establishment at Philadelphia, that the criminals who 
had been there long, were deaf.  They, who were in the habit of 
seeing these men constantly, were perfectly amazed at the idea, 
which they regarded as groundless and fanciful.  And yet the very 
first prisoner to whom they appealed - one of their own selection 
confirmed my impression (which was unknown to him) instantly, and 
said, with a genuine air it was impossible to doubt, that he 
couldn't think how it happened, but he WAS growing very dull of 
hearing.

That it is a singularly unequal punishment, and affects the worst 
man least, there is no doubt.  In its superior efficiency as a 
means of reformation, compared with that other code of regulations 
which allows the prisoners to work in company without communicating 
together, I have not the smallest faith.  All the instances of 
reformation that were mentioned to me, were of a kind that might 
have been - and I have no doubt whatever, in my own mind, would 
have been - equally well brought about by the Silent System.  With 
regard to such men as the negro burglar and the English thief, even 
the most enthusiastic have scarcely any hope of their conversion.

It seems to me that the objection that nothing wholesome or good 
has ever had its growth in such unnatural solitude, and that even a 
dog or any of the more intelligent among beasts, would pine, and 
mope, and rust away, beneath its influence, would be in itself a 
sufficient argument against this system.  But when we recollect, in 
addition, how very cruel and severe it is, and that a solitary life 
is always liable to peculiar and distinct objections of a most 
deplorable nature, which have arisen here, and call to mind, 
moreover, that the choice is not between this system, and a bad or 
ill-considered one, but between it and another which has worked 
well, and is, in its whole design and practice, excellent; there is 
surely more than sufficient reason for abandoning a mode of 
punishment attended by so little hope or promise, and fraught, 
beyond dispute, with such a host of evils.

As a relief to its contemplation, I will close this chapter with a 
curious story arising out of the same theme, which was related to 
me, on the occasion of this visit, by some of the gentlemen 
concerned.

At one of the periodical meetings of the inspectors of this prison, 
a working man of Philadelphia presented himself before the Board, 
and earnestly requested to be placed in solitary confinement.  On 
being asked what motive could possibly prompt him to make this 
strange demand, he answered that he had an irresistible propensity 
to get drunk; that he was constantly indulging it, to his great 
misery and ruin; that he had no power of resistance; that he wished 
to be put beyond the reach of temptation; and that he could think 
of no better way than this.  It was pointed out to him, in reply, 
that the prison was for criminals who had been tried and sentenced 
by the law, and could not be made available for any such fanciful 
purposes; he was exhorted to abstain from intoxicating drinks, as 
he surely might if he would; and received other very good advice, 
with which he retired, exceedingly dissatisfied with the result of 
his application.

He came again, and again, and again, and was so very earnest and 
importunate, that at last they took counsel together, and said, 'He 
will certainly qualify himself for admission, if we reject him any 
more.  Let us shut him up.  He will soon be glad to go away, and 
then we shall get rid of him.'  So they made him sign a statement 
which would prevent his ever sustaining an action for false 
imprisonment, to the effect that his incarceration was voluntary, 
and of his own seeking; they requested him to take notice that the 
officer in attendance had orders to release him at any hour of the 
day or night, when he might knock upon his door for that purpose; 
but desired him to understand, that once going out, he would not be 
admitted any more.  These conditions agreed upon, and he still 
remaining in the same mind, he was conducted to the prison, and 
shut up in one of the cells.

In this cell, the man, who had not the firmness to leave a glass of 
liquor standing untasted on a table before him - in this cell, in 
solitary confinement, and working every day at his trade of 
shoemaking, this man remained nearly two years.  His health 
beginning to fail at the expiration of that time, the surgeon 
recommended that he should work occasionally in the garden; and as 
he liked the notion very much, he went about this new occupation 
with great cheerfulness.

He was digging here, one summer day, very industriously, when the 
wicket in the outer gate chanced to be left open:  showing, beyond, 
the well-remembered dusty road and sunburnt fields.  The way was as 
free to him as to any man living, but he no sooner raised his head 
and caught sight of it, all shining in the light, than, with the 
involuntary instinct of a prisoner, he cast away his spade, 
scampered off as fast as his legs would carry him, and never once 
looked back.



CHAPTER VIII - WASHINGTON.  THE LEGISLATURE.  AND THE PRESIDENT'S 
HOUSE



WE left Philadelphia by steamboat, at six o'clock one very cold 
morning, and turned our faces towards Washington.

In the course of this day's journey, as on subsequent occasions, we 
encountered some Englishmen (small farmers, perhaps, or country 
publicans at home) who were settled in America, and were travelling 
on their own affairs.  Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle 
one in the public conveyances of the States, these are often the 
most intolerable and the most insufferable companions.  United to 
every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American 
travellers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of 
insolent conceit and cool assumption of superiority, quite 
monstrous to behold.  In the coarse familiarity of their approach, 
and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which they are in 
great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon 
the decent old restraints of home), they surpass any native 
specimens that came within my range of observation:  and I often 
grew so patriotic when I saw and heard them, that I would 
cheerfully have submitted to a reasonable fine, if I could have 
given any other country in the whole world, the honour of claiming 
them for its children.

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured 
saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, 
that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and 
expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, 
and soon became most offensive and sickening.  In all the public 
places of America, this filthy custom is recognised.  In the courts 
of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, 
and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided 
for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit 
incessantly.  In the hospitals, the students of medicine are 
requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice 
into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the 
stairs.  In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the 
same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or 'plugs,' as I 
have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of 
sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of 
the marble columns.  But in some parts, this custom is inseparably 
mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the 
transactions of social life.  The stranger, who follows in the 
track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, 
luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington.  And let 
him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous 
tourists have exaggerated its extent.  The thing itself is an 
exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

On board this steamboat, there were two young gentlemen, with 
shirt-collars reversed as usual, and armed with very big walking-
sticks; who planted two seats in the middle of the deck, at a 
distance of some four paces apart; took out their tobacco-boxes; 
and sat down opposite each other, to chew.  In less than a quarter 
of an hour's time, these hopeful youths had shed about them on the 
clean boards, a copious shower of yellow rain; clearing, by that 
means, a kind of magic circle, within whose limits no intruders 
dared to come, and which they never failed to refresh and re-
refresh before a spot was dry.  This being before breakfast, rather 
disposed me, I confess, to nausea; but looking attentively at one 
of the expectorators, I plainly saw that he was young in chewing, 
and felt inwardly uneasy, himself.  A glow of delight came over me 
at this discovery; and as I marked his face turn paler and paler, 
and saw the ball of tobacco in his left cheek, quiver with his 
suppressed agony, while yet he spat, and chewed, and spat again, in 
emulation of his older friend, I could have fallen on his neck and 
implored him to go on for hours.

We all sat down to a comfortable breakfast in the cabin below, 
where there was no more hurry or confusion than at such a meal in 
England, and where there was certainly greater politeness exhibited 
than at most of our stage-coach banquets.  At about nine o'clock we 
arrived at the railroad station, and went on by the cars.  At noon 
we turned out again, to cross a wide river in another steamboat; 
landed at a continuation of the railroad on the opposite shore; and 
went on by other cars; in which, in the course of the next hour or 
so, we crossed by wooden bridges, each a mile in length, two 
creeks, called respectively Great and Little Gunpowder.  The water 
in both was blackened with flights of canvas-backed ducks, which 
are most delicious eating, and abound hereabouts at that season of 
the year.

These bridges are of wood, have no parapet, and are only just wide 
enough for the passage of the trains; which, in the event of the 
smallest accident, wound inevitably be plunged into the river.  
They are startling contrivances, and are most agreeable when 
passed.

We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were 
waited on, for the first time, by slaves.  The sensation of 
exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, 
and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is 
not an enviable one.  The institution exists, perhaps, in its least 
repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it IS 
slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its 
presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.

After dinner, we went down to the railroad again, and took our 
seats in the cars for Washington.  Being rather early, those men 
and boys who happened to have nothing particular to do, and were 
curious in foreigners, came (according to custom) round the 
carriage in which I sat; let down all the windows; thrust in their 
heads and shoulders; hooked themselves on conveniently, by their 
elbows; and fell to comparing notes on the subject of my personal 
appearance, with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed 
figure.  I never gained so much uncompromising information with 
reference to my own nose and eyes, and various impressions wrought 
by my mouth and chin on different minds, and how my head looks when 
it is viewed from behind, as on these occasions.  Some gentlemen 
were only satisfied by exercising their sense of touch; and the 
boys (who are surprisingly precocious in America) were seldom 
satisfied, even by that, but would return to the charge over and 
over again.  Many a budding president has walked into my room with 
his cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, and stared at me 
for two whole hours:  occasionally refreshing himself with a tweak 
of his nose, or a draught from the water-jug; or by walking to the 
windows and inviting other boys in the street below, to come up and 
do likewise:  crying, 'Here he is!'  'Come on!'  'Bring all your 
brothers!' with other hospitable entreaties of that nature.

We reached Washington at about half-past six that evening, and had 
upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine 
building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and 
commanding eminence.  Arrived at the hotel; I saw no more of the 
place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.

Breakfast over next morning, I walk about the streets for an hour 
or two, and, coming home, throw up the window in the front and 
back, and look out.  Here is Washington, fresh in my mind and under 
my eye.

Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the 
straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest, 
preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and 
dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by 
furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of 
birds.  Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster; 
widen it a little; throw in part of St. John's Wood; put green 
blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a 
white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great 
deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought NOT to be; erect 
three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the 
more entirely out of everybody's way the better; call one the Post 
Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it 
scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, 
with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field 
without the bricks, in all central places where a street may 
naturally be expected:  and that's Washington.

The hotel in which we live, is a long row of small houses fronting 
on the street, and opening at the back upon a common yard, in which 
hangs a great triangle.  Whenever a servant is wanted, somebody 
beats on this triangle from one stroke up to seven, according to 
the number of the house in which his presence is required; and as 
all the servants are always being wanted, and none of them ever 
come, this enlivening engine is in full performance the whole day 
through.  Clothes are drying in the same yard; female slaves, with 
cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads are running to and 
fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with 
dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of 
loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning 
up his stomach to the sun, and grunting 'that's comfortable!'; and 
neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any 
created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which 
is tingling madly all the time.

I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long, 
straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly 
opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste 
ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country 
that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself.  Standing 
anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric 
that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed 
kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flag-
staff as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger 
than a tea-chest.  Under the window is a small stand of coaches, 
whose slave-drivers are sunning themselves on the steps of our 
door, and talking idly together.  The three most obtrusive houses 
near at hand are the three meanest.  On one - a shop, which never 
has anything in the window, and never has the door open - is 
painted in large characters, 'THE CITY LUNCH.'  At another, which 
looks like a backway to somewhere else, but is an independent 
building in itself, oysters are procurable in every style.  At the 
third, which is a very, very little tailor's shop, pants are fixed 
to order; or in other words, pantaloons are made to measure.  And 
that is our street in Washington.

It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it 
might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent 
Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird's-eye view of it from 
the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast 
designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman.  Spacious avenues, 
that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that 
only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need 
but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, 
which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament - are its leading 
features.  One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses 
gone out of town for ever with their masters.  To the admirers of 
cities it is a Barmecide Feast:  a pleasant field for the 
imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project, 
with not even a legible inscription to record its departed 
greatness.

Such as it is, it is likely to remain.  It was originally chosen 
for the seat of Government, as a means of averting the conflicting 
jealousies and interests of the different States; and very 
probably, too, as being remote from mobs:  a consideration not to 
be slighted, even in America.  It has no trade or commerce of its 
own:  having little or no population beyond the President and his 
establishment; the members of the legislature who reside there 
during the session; the Government clerks and officers employed in 
the various departments; the keepers of the hotels and boarding-
houses; and the tradesmen who supply their tables.  It is very 
unhealthy.  Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who 
were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and 
speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely 
to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.

The principal features of the Capitol, are, of course, the two 
houses of Assembly.  But there is, besides, in the centre of the 
building, a fine rotunda, ninety-six feet in diameter, and ninety-
six high, whose circular wall is divided into compartments, 
ornamented by historical pictures.  Four of these have for their 
subjects prominent events in the revolutionary struggle.  They were 
painted by Colonel Trumbull, himself a member of Washington's staff 
at the time of their occurrence; from which circumstance they 
derive a peculiar interest of their own.  In this same hall Mr. 
Greenough's large statue of Washington has been lately placed.  It 
has great merits of course, but it struck me as being rather 
strained and violent for its subject.  I could wish, however, to 
have seen it in a better light than it can ever be viewed in, where 
it stands.

There is a very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol; and 
from a balcony in front, the bird's-eye view, of which I have just 
spoken, may be had, together with a beautiful prospect of the 
adjacent country.  In one of the ornamented portions of the 
building, there is a figure of Justice; whereunto the Guide Book 
says, 'the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but 
he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not 
admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the 
opposite extreme.'  Poor Justice! she has been made to wear much 
stranger garments in America than those she pines in, in the 
Capitol.  Let us hope that she has changed her dress-maker since 
they were fashioned, and that the public sentiment of the country 
did not cut out the clothes she hides her lovely figure in, just 
now.

The House of Representatives is a beautiful and spacious hall, of 
semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars.  One part of the 
gallery is appropriated to the ladies, and there they sit in front 
rows, and come in, and go out, as at a play or concert.  The chair 
is canopied, and raised considerably above the floor of the House; 
and every member has an easy chair and a writing desk to himself:  
which is denounced by some people out of doors as a most 
unfortunate and injudicious arrangement, tending to long sittings 
and prosaic speeches.  It is an elegant chamber to look at, but a 
singularly bad one for all purposes of hearing.  The Senate, which 
is smaller, is free from this objection, and is exceedingly well 
adapted to the uses for which it is designed.  The sittings, I need 
hardly add, take place in the day; and the parliamentary forms are 
modelled on those of the old country.

I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether 
I had not been very much impressed by the HEADS of the lawmakers at 
Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally 
their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and 
whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was 
expressed:  and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with 
indignant consternation by answering 'No, that I didn't remember 
being at all overcome.'  As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the 
avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this 
subject in as few words as possible.

In the first place - it may be from some imperfect development of 
my organ of veneration - I do not remember having ever fainted 
away, or having even been moved to tears of joyful pride, at sight 
of any legislative body.  I have borne the House of Commons like a 
man, and have yielded to no weakness, but slumber, in the House of 
Lords.  I have seen elections for borough and county, and have 
never been impelled (no matter which party won) to damage my hat by 
throwing it up into the air in triumph, or to crack my voice by 
shouting forth any reference to our Glorious Constitution, to the 
noble purity of our independent voters, or, the unimpeachable 
integrity of our independent members.  Having withstood such strong 
attacks upon my fortitude, it is possible that I may be of a cold 
and insensible temperament, amounting to iciness, in such matters; 
and therefore my impressions of the live pillars of the Capitol at 
Washington must be received with such grains of allowance as this 
free confession may seem to demand.

Did I see in this public body an assemblage of men, bound together 
in the sacred names of Liberty and Freedom, and so asserting the 
chaste dignity of those twin goddesses, in all their discussions, 
as to exalt at once the Eternal Principles to which their names are 
given, and their own character and the character of their 
countrymen, in the admiring eyes of the whole world?

It was but a week, since an aged, grey-haired man, a lasting honour 
to the land that gave him birth, who has done good service to his 
country, as his forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores 
upon scores of years after the worms bred in its corruption, are 
but so many grains of dust - it was but a week, since this old man 
had stood for days upon his trial before this very body, charged 
with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic, which has 
for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn 
children.  Yes.  And publicly exhibited in the same city all the 
while; gilded, framed and glazed hung up for general admiration; 
shown to strangers not with shame, but pride; its face not turned 
towards the wall, itself not taken down and burned; is the 
Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, 
which solemnly declares that All Men are created Equal; and are 
endowed by their Creator with the Inalienable Rights of Life, 
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness!

It was not a month, since this same body had sat calmly by, and 
heard a man, one of themselves, with oaths which beggars in their 
drink reject, threaten to cut another's throat from ear to ear.  
There he sat, among them; not crushed by the general feeling of the 
assembly, but as good a man as any.

There was but a week to come, and another of that body, for doing 
his duty to those who sent him there; for claiming in a Republic 
the Liberty and Freedom of expressing their sentiments, and making 
known their prayer; would be tried, found guilty, and have strong 
censure passed upon him by the rest.  His was a grave offence 
indeed; for years before, he had risen up and said, 'A gang of male 
and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked 
to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open 
street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality!  Look!'  But 
there are many kinds of hunters engaged in the Pursuit of 
Happiness, and they go variously armed.  It is the Inalienable 
Right of some among them, to take the field after THEIR Happiness 
equipped with cat and cartwhip, stocks, and iron collar, and to 
shout their view halloa! (always in praise of Liberty) to the music 
of clanking chains and bloody stripes.

Where sat the many legislators of coarse threats; of words and 
blows such as coalheavers deal upon each other, when they forget 
their breeding?  On every side.  Every session had its anecdotes of 
that kind, and the actors were all there.

Did I recognise in this assembly, a body of men, who, applying 
themselves in a new world to correct some of the falsehoods and 
vices of the old, purified the avenues to Public Life, paved the 
dirty ways to Place and Power, debated and made laws for the Common 
Good, and had no party but their Country?

I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of 
virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.  
Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with 
public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous 
newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful 
trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, 
that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal 
types, which are the dragon's teeth of yore, in everything but 
sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the 
popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences:  
such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most 
depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of 
the crowded hall.

Did I see among them, the intelligence and refinement:  the true, 
honest, patriotic heart of America?  Here and there, were drops of 
its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of 
desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay.  
It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to 
make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so 
destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and 
delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as 
they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.  And 
thus this lowest of all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in 
other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most 
aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the farthest from that 
degradation.

That there are, among the representatives of the people in both 
Houses, and among all parties, some men of high character and great 
abilities, I need not say.  The foremost among those politicians 
who are known in Europe, have been already described, and I see no 
reason to depart from the rule I have laid down for my guidance, of 
abstaining from all mention of individuals.  It will be sufficient 
to add, that to the most favourable accounts that have been written 
of them, I more than fully and most heartily subscribe; and that 
personal intercourse and free communication have bred within me, 
not the result predicted in the very doubtful proverb, but 
increased admiration and respect.  They are striking men to look 
at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy, Crichtons in 
varied accomplishments, Indians in fire of eye and gesture, 
Americans in strong and generous impulse; and they as well 
represent the honour and wisdom of their country at home, as the 
distinguished gentleman who is now its Minister at the British 
Court sustains its highest character abroad.

I visited both houses nearly every day, during my stay in 
Washington.  On my initiatory visit to the House of 
Representatives, they divided against a decision of the chair; but 
the chair won.  The second time I went, the member who was 
speaking, being interrupted by a laugh, mimicked it, as one child 
would in quarrelling with another, and added, 'that he would make 
honourable gentlemen opposite, sing out a little more on the other 
side of their mouths presently.'  But interruptions are rare; the 
speaker being usually heard in silence.  There are more quarrels 
than with us, and more threatenings than gentlemen are accustomed 
to exchange in any civilised society of which we have record:  but 
farm-yard imitations have not as yet been imported from the 
Parliament of the United Kingdom.  The feature in oratory which 
appears to be the most practised, and most relished, is the 
constant repetition of the same idea or shadow of an idea in fresh 
words; and the inquiry out of doors is not, 'What did he say?' but, 
'How long did he speak?'  These, however, are but enlargements of a 
principle which prevails elsewhere.

The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings 
are conducted with much gravity and order.  Both houses are 
handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are 
reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every 
honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary 
improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it 
in every direction, do not admit of being described.  I will merely 
observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the 
floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their 
purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.

It is somewhat remarkable too, at first, to say the least, to see 
so many honourable members with swelled faces; and it is scarcely 
less remarkable to discover that this appearance is caused by the 
quantity of tobacco they contrive to stow within the hollow of the 
cheek.  It is strange enough too, to see an honourable gentleman 
leaning back in his tilted chair with his legs on the desk before 
him, shaping a convenient 'plug' with his penknife, and when it is 
quite ready for use, shooting the old one from his mouth, as from a 
pop-gun, and clapping the new one in its place.

I was surprised to observe that even steady old chewers of great 
experience, are not always good marksmen, which has rather inclined 
me to doubt that general proficiency with the rifle, of which we 
have heard so much in England.  Several gentlemen called upon me 
who, in the course of conversation, frequently missed the spittoon 
at five paces; and one (but he was certainly short-sighted) mistook 
the closed sash for the open window, at three.  On another 
occasion, when I dined out, and was sitting with two ladies and 
some gentlemen round a fire before dinner, one of the company fell 
short of the fireplace, six distinct times.  I am disposed to 
think, however, that this was occasioned by his not aiming at that 
object; as there was a white marble hearth before the fender, which 
was more convenient, and may have suited his purpose better.

The Patent Office at Washington, furnishes an extraordinary example 
of American enterprise and ingenuity; for the immense number of 
models it contains are the accumulated inventions of only five 
years; the whole of the previous collection having been destroyed 
by fire.  The elegant structure in which they are arranged is one 
of design rather than execution, for there is but one side erected 
out of four, though the works are stopped.  The Post Office is a 
very compact and very beautiful building.  In one of the 
departments, among a collection of rare and curious articles, are 
deposited the presents which have been made from time to time to 
the American ambassadors at foreign courts by the various 
potentates to whom they were the accredited agents of the Republic; 
gifts which by the law they are not permitted to retain.  I confess 
that I looked upon this as a very painful exhibition, and one by no 
means flattering to the national standard of honesty and honour.  
That can scarcely be a high state of moral feeling which imagines a 
gentleman of repute and station, likely to be corrupted, in the 
discharge of his duty, by the present of a snuff-box, or a richly-
mounted sword, or an Eastern shawl; and surely the Nation who 
reposes confidence in her appointed servants, is likely to be 
better served, than she who makes them the subject of such very 
mean and paltry suspicions.

At George Town, in the suburbs, there is a Jesuit College; 
delightfully situated, and, so far as I had an opportunity of 
seeing, well managed.  Many persons who are not members of the 
Romish Church, avail themselves, I believe, of these institutions, 
and of the advantageous opportunities they afford for the education 
of their children.  The heights of this neighbourhood, above the 
Potomac River, are very picturesque:  and are free, I should 
conceive, from some of the insalubrities of Washington.  The air, 
at that elevation, was quite cool and refreshing, when in the city 
it was burning hot.

The President's mansion is more like an English club-house, both 
within and without, than any other kind of establishment with which 
I can compare it.  The ornamental ground about it has been laid out 
in garden walks; they are pretty, and agreeable to the eye; though 
they have that uncomfortable air of having been made yesterday, 
which is far from favourable to the display of such beauties.

My first visit to this house was on the morning after my arrival, 
when I was carried thither by an official gentleman, who was so 
kind as to charge himself with my presentation to the President.

We entered a large hall, and having twice or thrice rung a bell 
which nobody answered, walked without further ceremony through the 
rooms on the ground floor, as divers other gentlemen (mostly with 
their hats on, and their hands in their pockets) were doing very 
leisurely.  Some of these had ladies with them, to whom they were 
showing the premises; others were lounging on the chairs and sofas; 
others, in a perfect state of exhaustion from listlessness, were 
yawning drearily.  The greater portion of this assemblage were 
rather asserting their supremacy than doing anything else, as they 
had no particular business there, that anybody knew of.  A few were 
closely eyeing the movables, as if to make quite sure that the 
President (who was far from popular) had not made away with any of 
the furniture, or sold the fixtures for his private benefit.

After glancing at these loungers; who were scattered over a pretty 
drawing-room, opening upon a terrace which commanded a beautiful 
prospect of the river and the adjacent country; and who were 
sauntering, too, about a larger state-room called the Eastern 
Drawing-room; we went up-stairs into another chamber, where were 
certain visitors, waiting for audiences.  At sight of my conductor, 
a black in plain clothes and yellow slippers who was gliding 
noiselessly about, and whispering messages in the ears of the more 
impatient, made a sign of recognition, and glided off to announce 
him.

We had previously looked into another chamber fitted all round with 
a great, bare, wooden desk or counter, whereon lay files of 
newspapers, to which sundry gentlemen were referring.  But there 
were no such means of beguiling the time in this apartment, which 
was as unpromising and tiresome as any waiting-room in one of our 
public establishments, or any physician's dining-room during his 
hours of consultation at home.

There were some fifteen or twenty persons in the room.  One, a 
tall, wiry, muscular old man, from the west; sunburnt and swarthy; 
with a brown white hat on his knees, and a giant umbrella resting 
between his legs; who sat bolt upright in his chair, frowning 
steadily at the carpet, and twitching the hard lines about his 
mouth, as if he had made up his mind 'to fix' the President on what 
he had to say, and wouldn't bate him a grain.  Another, a Kentucky 
farmer, six-feet-six in height, with his hat on, and his hands 
under his coat-tails, who leaned against the wall and kicked the 
floor with his heel, as though he had Time's head under his shoe, 
and were literally 'killing' him.  A third, an oval-faced, bilious-
looking man, with sleek black hair cropped close, and whiskers and 
beard shaved down to blue dots, who sucked the head of a thick 
stick, and from time to time took it out of his mouth, to see how 
it was getting on.  A fourth did nothing but whistle.  A fifth did 
nothing but spit.  And indeed all these gentlemen were so very 
persevering and energetic in this latter particular, and bestowed 
their favours so abundantly upon the carpet, that I take it for 
granted the Presidential housemaids have high wages, or, to speak 
more genteelly, an ample amount of 'compensation:' which is the 
American word for salary, in the case of all public servants.

We had not waited in this room many minutes, before the black 
messenger returned, and conducted us into another of smaller 
dimensions, where, at a business-like table covered with papers, 
sat the President himself.  He looked somewhat worn and anxious, 
and well he might; being at war with everybody - but the expression 
of his face was mild and pleasant, and his manner was remarkably 
unaffected, gentlemanly, and agreeable.  I thought that in his 
whole carriage and demeanour, he became his station singularly 
well.

Being advised that the sensible etiquette of the republican court 
admitted of a traveller, like myself, declining, without any 
impropriety, an invitation to dinner, which did not reach me until 
I had concluded my arrangements for leaving Washington some days 
before that to which it referred, I only returned to this house 
once.  It was on the occasion of one of those general assemblies 
which are held on certain nights, between the hours of nine and 
twelve o'clock, and are called, rather oddly, Levees.

I went, with my wife, at about ten.  There was a pretty dense crowd 
of carriages and people in the court-yard, and so far as I could 
make out, there were no very clear regulations for the taking up or 
setting down of company.  There were certainly no policemen to 
soothe startled horses, either by sawing at their bridles or 
flourishing truncheons in their eyes; and I am ready to make oath 
that no inoffensive persons were knocked violently on the head, or 
poked acutely in their backs or stomachs; or brought to a 
standstill by any such gentle means, and then taken into custody 
for not moving on.  But there was no confusion or disorder.  Our 
carriage reached the porch in its turn, without any blustering, 
swearing, shouting, backing, or other disturbance:  and we 
dismounted with as much ease and comfort as though we had been 
escorted by the whole Metropolitan Force from A to Z inclusive.

The suite of rooms on the ground-floor were lighted up, and a 
military band was playing in the hall.  In the smaller drawing-
room, the centre of a circle of company, were the President and his 
daughter-in-law, who acted as the lady of the mansion; and a very 
interesting, graceful, and accomplished lady too.  One gentleman 
who stood among this group, appeared to take upon himself the 
functions of a master of the ceremonies.  I saw no other officers 
or attendants, and none were needed.

The great drawing-room, which I have already mentioned, and the 
other chambers on the ground-floor, were crowded to excess.  The 
company was not, in our sense of the term, select, for it 
comprehended persons of very many grades and classes; nor was there 
any great display of costly attire:  indeed, some of the costumes 
may have been, for aught I know, grotesque enough.  But the decorum 
and propriety of behaviour which prevailed, were unbroken by any 
rude or disagreeable incident; and every man, even among the 
miscellaneous crowd in the hall who were admitted without any 
orders or tickets to look on, appeared to feel that he was a part 
of the Institution, and was responsible for its preserving a 
becoming character, and appearing to the best advantage.

That these visitors, too, whatever their station, were not without 
some refinement of taste and appreciation of intellectual gifts, 
and gratitude to those men who, by the peaceful exercise of great 
abilities, shed new charms and associations upon the homes of their 
countrymen, and elevate their character in other lands, was most 
earnestly testified by their reception of Washington Irving, my 
dear friend, who had recently been appointed Minister at the court 
of Spain, and who was among them that night, in his new character, 
for the first and last time before going abroad.  I sincerely 
believe that in all the madness of American politics, few public 
men would have been so earnestly, devotedly, and affectionately 
caressed, as this most charming writer:  and I have seldom 
respected a public assembly more, than I did this eager throng, 
when I saw them turning with one mind from noisy orators and 
officers of state, and flocking with a generous and honest impulse 
round the man of quiet pursuits:  proud in his promotion as 
reflecting back upon their country:  and grateful to him with their 
whole hearts for the store of graceful fancies he had poured out 
among them.  Long may he dispense such treasures with unsparing 
hand; and long may they remember him as worthily!

* * * * * *

The term we had assigned for the duration of our stay in Washington 
was now at an end, and we were to begin to travel; for the railroad 
distances we had traversed yet, in journeying among these older 
towns, are on that great continent looked upon as nothing.

I had at first intended going South - to Charleston.  But when I 
came to consider the length of time which this journey would 
occupy, and the premature heat of the season, which even at 
Washington had been often very trying; and weighed moreover, in my 
own mind, the pain of living in the constant contemplation of 
slavery, against the more than doubtful chances of my ever seeing 
it, in the time I had to spare, stripped of the disguises in which 
it would certainly be dressed, and so adding any item to the host 
of facts already heaped together on the subject; I began to listen 
to old whisperings which had often been present to me at home in 
England, when I little thought of ever being here; and to dream 
again of cities growing up, like palaces in fairy tales, among the 
wilds and forests of the west.

The advice I received in most quarters when I began to yield to my 
desire of travelling towards that point of the compass was, 
according to custom, sufficiently cheerless:  my companion being 
threatened with more perils, dangers, and discomforts, than I can 
remember or would catalogue if I could; but of which it will be 
sufficient to remark that blowings-up in steamboats and breakings-
down in coaches were among the least.  But, having a western route 
sketched out for me by the best and kindest authority to which I 
could have resorted, and putting no great faith in these 
discouragements, I soon determined on my plan of action.

This was to travel south, only to Richmond in Virginia; and then to 
turn, and shape our course for the Far West; whither I beseech the 
reader's company, in a new chapter.



CHAPTER IX - A NIGHT STEAMER ON THE POTOMAC RIVER.  VIRGINIA ROAD, 
AND A BLACK DRIVER.  RICHMOND.  BALTIMORE.  THE HARRISBURG MAIL, 
AND A GLIMPSE OF THE CITY.  A CANAL BOAT



WE were to proceed in the first instance by steamboat; and as it is 
usual to sleep on board, in consequence of the starting-hour being 
four o'clock in the morning, we went down to where she lay, at that 
very uncomfortable time for such expeditions when slippers are most 
valuable, and a familiar bed, in the perspective of an hour or two, 
looks uncommonly pleasant.

It is ten o'clock at night:  say half-past ten:  moonlight, warm, 
and dull enough.  The steamer (not unlike a child's Noah's ark in 
form, with the machinery on the top of the roof) is riding lazily 
up and down, and bumping clumsily against the wooden pier, as the 
ripple of the river trifles with its unwieldy carcase.  The wharf 
is some distance from the city.  There is nobody down here; and one 
or two dull lamps upon the steamer's decks are the only signs of 
life remaining, when our coach has driven away.  As soon as our 
footsteps are heard upon the planks, a fat negress, particularly 
favoured by nature in respect of bustle, emerges from some dark 
stairs, and marshals my wife towards the ladies' cabin, to which 
retreat she goes, followed by a mighty bale of cloaks and great-
coats.  I valiantly resolve not to go to bed at all, but to walk up 
and down the pier till morning.

I begin my promenade - thinking of all kinds of distant things and 
persons, and of nothing near - and pace up and down for half-an-
hour.  Then I go on board again; and getting into the light of one 
of the lamps, look at my watch and think it must have stopped; and 
wonder what has become of the faithful secretary whom I brought 
along with me from Boston.  He is supping with our late landlord (a 
Field Marshal, at least, no doubt) in honour of our departure, and 
may be two hours longer.  I walk again, but it gets duller and 
duller:  the moon goes down:  next June seems farther off in the 
dark, and the echoes of my footsteps make me nervous.  It has 
turned cold too; and walking up and down without my companion in 
such lonely circumstances, is but poor amusement.  So I break my 
staunch resolution, and think it may be, perhaps, as well to go to 
bed.

I go on board again; open the door of the gentlemen's cabin and 
walk in.  Somehow or other - from its being so quiet, I suppose - I 
have taken it into my head that there is nobody there.  To my 
horror and amazement it is full of sleepers in every stage, shape, 
attitude, and variety of slumber:  in the berths, on the chairs, on 
the floors, on the tables, and particularly round the stove, my 
detested enemy.  I take another step forward, and slip on the 
shining face of a black steward, who lies rolled in a blanket on 
the floor.  He jumps up, grins, half in pain and half in 
hospitality; whispers my own name in my ear; and groping among the 
sleepers, leads me to my berth.  Standing beside it, I count these 
slumbering passengers, and get past forty.  There is no use in 
going further, so I begin to undress.  As the chairs are all 
occupied, and there is nothing else to put my clothes on, I deposit 
them upon the ground:  not without soiling my hands, for it is in 
the same condition as the carpets in the Capitol, and from the same 
cause.  Having but partially undressed, I clamber on my shelf, and 
hold the curtain open for a few minutes while I look round on all 
my fellow-travellers again.  That done, I let it fall on them, and 
on the world:  turn round:  and go to sleep.

I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good 
deal of noise.  The day is then just breaking.  Everybody wakes at 
the same time.  Some are self-possessed directly, and some are much 
perplexed to make out where they are until they have rubbed their 
eyes, and leaning on one elbow, looked about them.  Some yawn, some 
groan, nearly all spit, and a few get up.  I am among the risers:  
for it is easy to feel, without going into the fresh air, that the 
atmosphere of the cabin is vile in the last degree.  I huddle on my 
clothes, go down into the fore-cabin, get shaved by the barber, and 
wash myself.  The washing and dressing apparatus for the passengers 
generally, consists of two jack-towels, three small wooden basins, 
a keg of water and a ladle to serve it out with, six square inches 
of looking-glass, two ditto ditto of yellow soap, a comb and brush 
for the head, and nothing for the teeth.  Everybody uses the comb 
and brush, except myself.  Everybody stares to see me using my own; 
and two or three gentlemen are strongly disposed to banter me on my 
prejudices, but don't.  When I have made my toilet, I go upon the 
hurricane-deck, and set in for two hours of hard walking up and 
down.  The sun is rising brilliantly; we are passing Mount Vernon, 
where Washington lies buried; the river is wide and rapid; and its 
banks are beautiful.  All the glory and splendour of the day are 
coming on, and growing brighter every minute.

At eight o'clock, we breakfast in the cabin where I passed the 
night, but the windows and doors are all thrown open, and now it is 
fresh enough.  There is no hurry or greediness apparent in the 
despatch of the meal.  It is longer than a travelling breakfast 
with us; more orderly, and more polite.

Soon after nine o'clock we come to Potomac Creek, where we are to 
land; and then comes the oddest part of the journey.  Seven stage-
coaches are preparing to carry us on.  Some of them are ready, some 
of them are not ready.  Some of the drivers are blacks, some 
whites.  There are four horses to each coach, and all the horses, 
harnessed or unharnessed, are there.  The passengers are getting 
out of the steamboat, and into the coaches; the luggage is being 
transferred in noisy wheelbarrows; the horses are frightened, and 
impatient to start; the black drivers are chattering to them like 
so many monkeys; and the white ones whooping like so many drovers:  
for the main thing to be done in all kinds of hostlering here, is 
to make as much noise as possible.  The coaches are something like 
the French coaches, but not nearly so good.  In lieu of springs, 
they are hung on bands of the strongest leather.  There is very 
little choice or difference between them; and they may be likened 
to the car portion of the swings at an English fair, roofed, put 
upon axle-trees and wheels, and curtained with painted canvas.  
They are covered with mud from the roof to the wheel-tire, and have 
never been cleaned since they were first built.

The tickets we have received on board the steamboat are marked No. 
1, so we belong to coach No. 1.  I throw my coat on the box, and 
hoist my wife and her maid into the inside.  It has only one step, 
and that being about a yard from the ground, is usually approached 
by a chair:  when there is no chair, ladies trust in Providence.  
The coach holds nine inside, having a seat across from door to 
door, where we in England put our legs:  so that there is only one 
feat more difficult in the performance than getting in, and that 
is, getting out again.  There is only one outside passenger, and he 
sits upon the box.  As I am that one, I climb up; and while they 
are strapping the luggage on the roof, and heaping it into a kind 
of tray behind, have a good opportunity of looking at the driver.

He is a negro - very black indeed.  He is dressed in a coarse 
pepper-and-salt suit excessively patched and darned (particularly 
at the knees), grey stockings, enormous unblacked high-low shoes, 
and very short trousers.  He has two odd gloves:  one of parti-
coloured worsted, and one of leather.  He has a very short whip, 
broken in the middle and bandaged up with string.  And yet he wears 
a low-crowned, broad-brimmed, black hat:  faintly shadowing forth a 
kind of insane imitation of an English coachman!  But somebody in 
authority cries 'Go ahead!' as I am making these observations.  The 
mail takes the lead in a four-horse waggon, and all the coaches 
follow in procession:  headed by No. 1.

By the way, whenever an Englishman would cry 'All right!' an 
American cries 'Go ahead!' which is somewhat expressive of the 
national character of the two countries.

The first half-mile of the road is over bridges made of loose 
planks laid across two parallel poles, which tilt up as the wheels 
roll over them; and IN the river.  The river has a clayey bottom 
and is full of holes, so that half a horse is constantly 
disappearing unexpectedly, and can't be found again for some time.

But we get past even this, and come to the road itself, which is a 
series of alternate swamps and gravel-pits.  A tremendous place is 
close before us, the black driver rolls his eyes, screws his mouth 
up very round, and looks straight between the two leaders, as if he 
were saying to himself, 'We have done this often before, but NOW I 
think we shall have a crash.'  He takes a rein in each hand; jerks 
and pulls at both; and dances on the splashboard with both feet 
(keeping his seat, of course) like the late lamented Ducrow on two 
of his fiery coursers.  We come to the spot, sink down in the mire 
nearly to the coach windows, tilt on one side at an angle of forty-
five degrees, and stick there.  The insides scream dismally; the 
coach stops; the horses flounder; all the other six coaches stop; 
and their four-and-twenty horses flounder likewise:  but merely for 
company, and in sympathy with ours.  Then the following 
circumstances occur.

BLACK DRIVER (to the horses).  'Hi!'

Nothing happens.  Insides scream again.

BLACK DRIVER (to the horses).  'Ho!'

Horses plunge, and splash the black driver.

GENTLEMAN INSIDE (looking out).  'Why, what on airth -

Gentleman receives a variety of splashes and draws his head in 
again, without finishing his question or waiting for an answer.

BLACK DRIVER (still to the horses).  'Jiddy!  Jiddy!'

Horses pull violently, drag the coach out of the hole, and draw it 
up a bank; so steep, that the black driver's legs fly up into the 
air, and he goes back among the luggage on the roof.  But he 
immediately recovers himself, and cries (still to the horses),

'Pill!'

No effect.  On the contrary, the coach begins to roll back upon No. 
2, which rolls back upon No. 3, which rolls back upon No. 4, and so 
on, until No. 7 is heard to curse and swear, nearly a quarter of a 
mile behind.

BLACK DRIVER (louder than before).  'Pill!'

Horses make another struggle to get up the bank, and again the 
coach rolls backward.

BLACK DRIVER (louder than before).  'Pe-e-e-ill!'

Horses make a desperate struggle.

BLACK DRIVER (recovering spirits).  'Hi, Jiddy, Jiddy, Pill!'

Horses make another effort.

BLACK DRIVER (with great vigour).  'Ally Loo!  Hi.  Jiddy, Jiddy.  
Pill.  Ally Loo!'

Horses almost do it.

BLACK DRIVER (with his eyes starting out of his head).  'Lee, den.  
Lee, dere.  Hi.  Jiddy, Jiddy.  Pill.  Ally Loo.  Lee-e-e-e-e!'

They run up the bank, and go down again on the other side at a 
fearful pace.  It is impossible to stop them, and at the bottom 
there is a deep hollow, full of water.  The coach rolls 
frightfully.  The insides scream.  The mud and water fly about us.  
The black driver dances like a madman.  Suddenly we are all right 
by some extraordinary means, and stop to breathe.

A black friend of the black driver is sitting on a fence.  The 
black driver recognises him by twirling his head round and round 
like a harlequin, rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, and 
grinning from ear to ear.  He stops short, turns to me, and says:

'We shall get you through sa, like a fiddle, and hope a please you 
when we get you through sa.  Old 'ooman at home sa:' chuckling very 
much.  'Outside gentleman sa, he often remember old 'ooman at home 
sa,' grinning again.

'Ay ay, we'll take care of the old woman.  Don't be afraid.'

The black driver grins again, but there is another hole, and beyond 
that, another bank, close before us.  So he stops short:  cries (to 
the horses again) 'Easy.  Easy den.  Ease.  Steady.  Hi.  Jiddy.  
Pill.  Ally.  Loo,' but never 'Lee!' until we are reduced to the 
very last extremity, and are in the midst of difficulties, 
extrication from which appears to be all but impossible.

And so we do the ten miles or thereabouts in two hours and a half; 
breaking no bones, though bruising a great many; and in short 
getting through the distance, 'like a fiddle.'

This singular kind of coaching terminates at Fredericksburgh, 
whence there is a railway to Richmond.  The tract of country 
through which it takes its course was once productive; but the soil 
has been exhausted by the system of employing a great amount of 
slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land:  and 
it is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees.  
Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart 
to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible 
institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating 
the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation 
in the same place could possibly have afforded me.

In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, (I 
have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its 
warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which 
is inseparable from the system.  The barns and outhouses are 
mouldering away; the sheds are patched and half roofless; the log 
cabins (built in Virginia with external chimneys made of clay or 
wood) are squalid in the last degree.  There is no look of decent 
comfort anywhere.  The miserable stations by the railway side, the 
great wild wood-yards, whence the engine is supplied with fuel; the 
negro children rolling on the ground before the cabin doors, with 
dogs and pigs; the biped beasts of burden slinking past:  gloom and 
dejection are upon them all.

In the negro car belonging to the train in which we made this 
journey, were a mother and her children who had just been 
purchased; the husband and father being left behind with their old 
owner.  The children cried the whole way, and the mother was 
misery's picture.  The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit 
of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, 
every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe.  The 
black in Sinbad's Travels with one eye in the middle of his 
forehead which shone like a burning coal, was nature's aristocrat 
compared with this white gentleman.

It was between six and seven o'clock in the evening, when we drove 
to the hotel:  in front of which, and on the top of the broad 
flight of steps leading to the door, two or three citizens were 
balancing themselves on rocking-chairs, and smoking cigars.  We 
found it a very large and elegant establishment, and were as well 
entertained as travellers need desire to be.  The climate being a 
thirsty one, there was never, at any hour of the day, a scarcity of 
loungers in the spacious bar, or a cessation of the mixing of cool 
liquors:  but they were a merrier people here, and had musical 
instruments playing to them o' nights, which it was a treat to hear 
again.

The next day, and the next, we rode and walked about the town, 
which is delightfully situated on eight hills, overhanging James 
River; a sparkling stream, studded here and there with bright 
islands, or brawling over broken rocks.  Although it was yet but 
the middle of March, the weather in this southern temperature was 
extremely warm; the peech-trees and magnolias were in full bloom; 
and the trees were green.  In a low ground among the hills, is a 
valley known as 'Bloody Run,' from a terrible conflict with the 
Indians which once occurred there.  It is a good place for such a 
struggle, and, like every other spot I saw associated with any 
legend of that wild people now so rapidly fading from the earth, 
interested me very much.

The city is the seat of the local parliament of Virginia; and in 
its shady legislative halls, some orators were drowsily holding 
forth to the hot noon day.  By dint of constant repetition, 
however, these constitutional sights had very little more interest 
for me than so many parochial vestries; and I was glad to exchange 
this one for a lounge in a well-arranged public library of some ten 
thousand volumes, and a visit to a tobacco manufactory, where the 
workmen are all slaves.

I saw in this place the whole process of picking, rolling, 
pressing, drying, packing in casks, and branding.  All the tobacco 
thus dealt with, was in course of manufacture for chewing; and one 
would have supposed there was enough in that one storehouse to have 
filled even the comprehensive jaws of America.  In this form, the 
weed looks like the oil-cake on which we fatten cattle; and even 
without reference to its consequences, is sufficiently uninviting.

Many of the workmen appeared to be strong men, and it is hardly 
necessary to add that they were all labouring quietly, then.  After 
two o'clock in the day, they are allowed to sing, a certain number 
at a time.  The hour striking while I was there, some twenty sang a 
hymn in parts, and sang it by no means ill; pursuing their work 
meanwhile.  A bell rang as I was about to leave, and they all 
poured forth into a building on the opposite side of the street to 
dinner.  I said several times that I should like to see them at 
their meal; but as the gentleman to whom I mentioned this desire 
appeared to be suddenly taken rather deaf, I did not pursue the 
request.  Of their appearance I shall have something to say, 
presently.

On the following day, I visited a plantation or farm, of about 
twelve hundred acres, on the opposite bank of the river.  Here 
again, although I went down with the owner of the estate, to 'the 
quarter,' as that part of it in which the slaves live is called, I 
was not invited to enter into any of their huts.  All I saw of 
them, was, that they were very crazy, wretched cabins, near to 
which groups of half-naked children basked in the sun, or wallowed 
on the dusty ground.  But I believe that this gentleman is a 
considerate and excellent master, who inherited his fifty slaves, 
and is neither a buyer nor a seller of human stock; and I am sure, 
from my own observation and conviction, that he is a kind-hearted, 
worthy man.

The planter's house was an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought 
Defoe's description of such places strongly to my recollection.  
The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the 
windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through 
the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and 
heat without.  Before the windows was an open piazza, where, in 
what they call the hot weather - whatever that may be - they sling 
hammocks, and drink and doze luxuriously.  I do not know how their 
cool rejections may taste within the hammocks, but, having 
experience, I can report that, out of them, the mounds of ices and 
the bowls of mint-julep and sherry-cobbler they make in these 
latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in 
summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.

There are two bridges across the river:  one belongs to the 
railroad, and the other, which is a very crazy affair, is the 
private property of some old lady in the neighbourhood, who levies 
tolls upon the townspeople.  Crossing this bridge, on my way back, 
I saw a notice painted on the gate, cautioning all persons to drive 
slowly:  under a penalty, if the offender were a white man, of five 
dollars; if a negro, fifteen stripes.

The same decay and gloom that overhang the way by which it is 
approached, hover above the town of Richmond.  There are pretty 
villas and cheerful houses in its streets, and Nature smiles upon 
the country round; but jostling its handsome residences, like 
slavery itself going hand in hand with many lofty virtues, are 
deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into 
ruinous heaps.  Hinting gloomily at things below the surface, 
these, and many other tokens of the same description, force 
themselves upon the notice, and are remembered with depressing 
influence, when livelier features are forgotten.

To those who are happily unaccustomed to them, the countenances in 
the streets and labouring-places, too, are shocking.  All men who 
know that there are laws against instructing slaves, of which the 
pains and penalties greatly exceed in their amount the fines 
imposed on those who maim and torture them, must be prepared to 
find their faces very low in the scale of intellectual expression.  
But the darkness - not of skin, but mind - which meets the 
stranger's eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of 
all fairer characters traced by Nature's hand; immeasurably outdo 
his worst belief.  That travelled creation of the great satirist's 
brain, who fresh from living among horses, peered from a high 
casement down upon his own kind with trembling horror, was scarcely 
more repelled and daunted by the sight, than those who look upon 
some of these faces for the first time must surely be.

I left the last of them behind me in the person of a wretched 
drudge, who, after running to and fro all day till midnight, and 
moping in his stealthy winks of sleep upon the stairs 
betweenwhiles, was washing the dark passages at four o'clock in the 
morning; and went upon my way with a grateful heart that I was not 
doomed to live where slavery was, and had never had my senses 
blunted to its wrongs and horrors in a slave-rocked cradle.

It had been my intention to proceed by James River and Chesapeake 
Bay to Baltimore; but one of the steamboats being absent from her 
station through some accident, and the means of conveyance being 
consequently rendered uncertain, we returned to Washington by the 
way we had come (there were two constables on board the steamboat, 
in pursuit of runaway slaves), and halting there again for one 
night, went on to Baltimore next afternoon.

The most comfortable of all the hotels of which I had any 
experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is 
Barnum's, in that city:  where the English traveller will find 
curtains to his bed, for the first and probably the last time in 
America (this is a disinterested remark, for I never use them); and 
where he will be likely to have enough water for washing himself, 
which is not at all a common case.

This capital of the state of Maryland is a bustling, busy town, 
with a great deal of traffic of various kinds, and in particular of 
water commerce.  That portion of the town which it most favours is 
none of the cleanest, it is true; but the upper part is of a very 
different character, and has many agreeable streets and public 
buildings.  The Washington Monument, which is a handsome pillar 
with a statue on its summit; the Medical College; and the Battle 
Monument in memory of an engagement with the British at North 
Point; are the most conspicuous among them.

There is a very good prison in this city, and the State 
Penitentiary is also among its institutions.  In this latter 
establishment there were two curious cases.

One was that of a young man, who had been tried for the murder of 
his father.  The evidence was entirely circumstantial, and was very 
conflicting and doubtful; nor was it possible to assign any motive 
which could have tempted him to the commission of so tremendous a 
crime.  He had been tried twice; and on the second occasion the 
jury felt so much hesitation in convicting him, that they found a 
verdict of manslaughter, or murder in the second degree; which it 
could not possibly be, as there had, beyond all doubt, been no 
quarrel or provocation, and if he were guilty at all, he was 
unquestionably guilty of murder in its broadest and worst 
signification.

The remarkable feature in the case was, that if the unfortunate 
deceased were not really murdered by this own son of his, he must 
have been murdered by his own brother.  The evidence lay in a most 
remarkable manner, between those two.  On all the suspicious 
points, the dead man's brother was the witness:  all the 
explanations for the prisoner (some of them extremely plausible) 
went, by construction and inference, to inculcate him as plotting 
to fix the guilt upon his nephew.  It must have been one of them:  
and the jury had to decide between two sets of suspicions, almost 
equally unnatural, unaccountable, and strange.

The other case, was that of a man who once went to a certain 
distiller's and stole a copper measure containing a quantity of 
liquor.  He was pursued and taken with the property in his 
possession, and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.  On 
coming out of the jail, at the expiration of that term, he went 
back to the same distiller's, and stole the same copper measure 
containing the same quantity of liquor.  There was not the 
slightest reason to suppose that the man wished to return to 
prison:  indeed everything, but the commission of the offence, made 
directly against that assumption.  There are only two ways of 
accounting for this extraordinary proceeding.  One is, that after 
undergoing so much for this copper measure he conceived he had 
established a sort of claim and right to it.  The other that, by 
dint of long thinking about, it had become a monomania with him, 
and had acquired a fascination which he found it impossible to 
resist; swelling from an Earthly Copper Gallon into an Ethereal 
Golden Vat.

After remaining here a couple of days I bound myself to a rigid 
adherence to the plan I had laid down so recently, and resolved to 
set forward on our western journey without any more delay.  
Accordingly, having reduced the luggage within the smallest 
possible compass (by sending back to New York, to be afterwards 
forwarded to us in Canada, so much of it as was not absolutely 
wanted); and having procured the necessary credentials to banking-
houses on the way; and having moreover looked for two evenings at 
the setting sun, with as well-defined an idea of the country before 
us as if we had been going to travel into the very centre of that 
planet; we left Baltimore by another railway at half-past eight in 
the morning, and reached the town of York, some sixty miles off, by 
the early dinner-time of the Hotel which was the starting-place of 
the four-horse coach, wherein we were to proceed to Harrisburg.

This conveyance, the box of which I was fortunate enough to secure, 
had come down to meet us at the railroad station, and was as muddy 
and cumbersome as usual.  As more passengers were waiting for us at 
the inn-door, the coachman observed under his breath, in the usual 
self-communicative voice, looking the while at his mouldy harness 
as if it were to that he was addressing himself,

'I expect we shall want THE BIG coach.'

I could not help wondering within myself what the size of this big 
coach might be, and how many persons it might be designed to hold; 
for the vehicle which was too small for our purpose was something 
larger than two English heavy night coaches, and might have been 
the twin-brother of a French Diligence.  My speculations were 
speedily set at rest, however, for as soon as we had dined, there 
came rumbling up the street, shaking its sides like a corpulent 
giant, a kind of barge on wheels.  After much blundering and 
backing, it stopped at the door:  rolling heavily from side to side 
when its other motion had ceased, as if it had taken cold in its 
damp stable, and between that, and the having been required in its 
dropsical old age to move at any faster pace than a walk, were 
distressed by shortness of wind.

'If here ain't the Harrisburg mail at last, and dreadful bright and 
smart to look at too,' cried an elderly gentleman in some 
excitement, 'darn my mother!'

I don't know what the sensation of being darned may be, or whether 
a man's mother has a keener relish or disrelish of the process than 
anybody else; but if the endurance of this mysterious ceremony by 
the old lady in question had depended on the accuracy of her son's 
vision in respect to the abstract brightness and smartness of the 
Harrisburg mail, she would certainly have undergone its infliction.  
However, they booked twelve people inside; and the luggage 
(including such trifles as a large rocking-chair, and a good-sized 
dining-table) being at length made fast upon the roof, we started 
off in great state.

At the door of another hotel, there was another passenger to be 
taken up.

'Any room, sir?' cries the new passenger to the coachman.

'Well, there's room enough,' replies the coachman, without getting 
down, or even looking at him.

'There an't no room at all, sir,' bawls a gentleman inside.  Which 
another gentleman (also inside) confirms, by predicting that the 
attempt to introduce any more passengers 'won't fit nohow.'

The new passenger, without any expression of anxiety, looks into 
the coach, and then looks up at the coachman:  'Now, how do you 
mean to fix it?' says he, after a pause:  'for I MUST go.'

The coachman employs himself in twisting the lash of his whip into 
a knot, and takes no more notice of the question:  clearly 
signifying that it is anybody's business but his, and that the 
passengers would do well to fix it, among themselves.  In this 
state of things, matters seem to be approximating to a fix of 
another kind, when another inside passenger in a corner, who is 
nearly suffocated, cries faintly, 'I'll get out.'

This is no matter of relief or self-congratulation to the driver, 
for his immovable philosophy is perfectly undisturbed by anything 
that happens in the coach.  Of all things in the world, the coach 
would seem to be the very last upon his mind.  The exchange is 
made, however, and then the passenger who has given up his seat 
makes a third upon the box, seating himself in what he calls the 
middle; that is, with half his person on my legs, and the other 
half on the driver's.

'Go a-head, cap'en,' cries the colonel, who directs.

'Go-lang!' cries the cap'en to his company, the horses, and away we 
go.

We took up at a rural bar-room, after we had gone a few miles, an 
intoxicated gentleman who climbed upon the roof among the luggage, 
and subsequently slipping off without hurting himself, was seen in 
the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we had 
found him.  We also parted with more of our freight at different 
times, so that when we came to change horses, I was again alone 
outside.

The coachmen always change with the horses, and are usually as 
dirty as the coach.  The first was dressed like a very shabby 
English baker; the second like a Russian peasant:  for he wore a 
loose purple camlet robe, with a fur collar, tied round his waist 
with a parti-coloured worsted sash; grey trousers; light blue 
gloves:  and a cap of bearskin.  It had by this time come on to 
rain very heavily, and there was a cold damp mist besides, which 
penetrated to the skin.  I was glad to take advantage of a stoppage 
and get down to stretch my legs, shake the water off my great-coat, 
and swallow the usual anti-temperance recipe for keeping out the 
cold.

When I mounted to my seat again, I observed a new parcel lying on 
the coach roof, which I took to be a rather large fiddle in a brown 
bag.  In the course of a few miles, however, I discovered that it 
had a glazed cap at one end and a pair of muddy shoes at the other 
and further observation demonstrated it to be a small boy in a 
snuff-coloured coat, with his arms quite pinioned to his sides, by 
deep forcing into his pockets.  He was, I presume, a relative or 
friend of the coachman's, as he lay a-top of the luggage with his 
face towards the rain; and except when a change of position brought 
his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared to be asleep.  At 
last, on some occasion of our stopping, this thing slowly upreared 
itself to the height of three feet six, and fixing its eyes on me, 
observed in piping accents, with a complaisant yawn, half quenched 
in an obliging air of friendly patronage, 'Well now, stranger, I 
guess you find this a'most like an English arternoon, hey?'

The scenery, which had been tame enough at first, was, for the last 
ten or twelve miles, beautiful.  Our road wound through the 
pleasant valley of the Susquehanna; the river, dotted with 
innumerable green islands, lay upon our right; and on the left, a 
steep ascent, craggy with broken rock, and dark with pine trees.  
The mist, wreathing itself into a hundred fantastic shapes, moved 
solemnly upon the water; and the gloom of evening gave to all an 
air of mystery and silence which greatly enhanced its natural 
interest.

We crossed this river by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered in on 
all sides, and nearly a mile in length.  It was profoundly dark; 
perplexed, with great beams, crossing and recrossing it at every 
possible angle; and through the broad chinks and crevices in the 
floor, the rapid river gleamed, far down below, like a legion of 
eyes.  We had no lamps; and as the horses stumbled and floundered 
through this place, towards the distant speck of dying light, it 
seemed interminable.  I really could not at first persuade myself 
as we rumbled heavily on, filling the bridge with hollow noises, 
and I held down my head to save it from the rafters above, but that 
I was in a painful dream; for I have often dreamed of toiling 
through such places, and as often argued, even at the time, 'this 
cannot be reality.'

At length, however, we emerged upon the streets of Harrisburg, 
whose feeble lights, reflected dismally from the wet ground, did 
not shine out upon a very cheerful city.  We were soon established 
in a snug hotel, which though smaller and far less splendid than 
many we put up at, it raised above them all in my remembrance, by 
having for its landlord the most obliging, considerate, and 
gentlemanly person I ever had to deal with.

As we were not to proceed upon our journey until the afternoon, I 
walked out, after breakfast the next morning, to look about me; and 
was duly shown a model prison on the solitary system, just erected, 
and as yet without an inmate; the trunk of an old tree to which 
Harris, the first settler here (afterwards buried under it), was 
tied by hostile Indians, with his funeral pile about him, when he 
was saved by the timely appearance of a friendly party on the 
opposite shore of the river; the local legislature (for there was 
another of those bodies here again, in full debate); and the other 
curiosities of the town.

I was very much interested in looking over a number of treaties 
made from time to time with the poor Indians, signed by the 
different chiefs at the period of their ratification, and preserved 
in the office of the Secretary to the Commonwealth.  These 
signatures, traced of course by their own hands, are rough drawings 
of the creatures or weapons they were called after.  Thus, the 
Great Turtle makes a crooked pen-and-ink outline of a great turtle; 
the Buffalo sketches a buffalo; the War Hatchet sets a rough image 
of that weapon for his mark.  So with the Arrow, the Fish, the 
Scalp, the Big Canoe, and all of them.

I could not but think - as I looked at these feeble and tremulous 
productions of hands which could draw the longest arrow to the head 
in a stout elk-horn bow, or split a bead or feather with a rifle-
ball - of Crabbe's musings over the Parish Register, and the 
irregular scratches made with a pen, by men who would plough a 
lengthy furrow straight from end to end.  Nor could I help 
bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose 
hands and hearts were set there, in all truth and honesty; and who 
only learned in course of time from white men how to break their 
faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds.  I wonder, too, how many 
times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put 
his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had signed 
away, he knew not what, until it went and cast him loose upon the 
new possessors of the land, a savage indeed.

Our host announced, before our early dinner, that some members of 
the legislative body proposed to do us the honour of calling.  He 
had kindly yielded up to us his wife's own little parlour, and when 
I begged that he would show them in, I saw him look with painful 
apprehension at its pretty carpet; though, being otherwise occupied 
at the time, the cause of his uneasiness did not occur to me.

It certainly would have been more pleasant to all parties 
concerned, and would not, I think, have compromised their 
independence in any material degree, if some of these gentlemen had 
not only yielded to the prejudice in favour of spittoons, but had 
abandoned themselves, for the moment, even to the conventional 
absurdity of pocket-handkerchiefs.

It still continued to rain heavily, and when we went down to the 
Canal Boat (for that was the mode of conveyance by which we were to 
proceed) after dinner, the weather was as unpromising and 
obstinately wet as one would desire to see.  Nor was the sight of 
this canal boat, in which we were to spend three or four days, by 
any means a cheerful one; as it involved some uneasy speculations 
concerning the disposal of the passengers at night, and opened a 
wide field of inquiry touching the other domestic arrangements of 
the establishment, which was sufficiently disconcerting.

However, there it was - a barge with a little house in it, viewed 
from the outside; and a caravan at a fair, viewed from within:  the 
gentlemen being accommodated, as the spectators usually are, in one 
of those locomotive museums of penny wonders; and the ladies being 
partitioned off by a red curtain, after the manner of the dwarfs 
and giants in the same establishments, whose private lives are 
passed in rather close exclusiveness.

We sat here, looking silently at the row of little tables, which 
extended down both sides of the cabin, and listening to the rain as 
it dripped and pattered on the boat, and plashed with a dismal 
merriment in the water, until the arrival of the railway train, for 
whose final contribution to our stock of passengers, our departure 
was alone deferred.  It brought a great many boxes, which were 
bumped and tossed upon the roof, almost as painfully as if they had 
been deposited on one's own head, without the intervention of a 
porter's knot; and several damp gentlemen, whose clothes, on their 
drawing round the stove, began to steam again.  No doubt it would 
have been a thought more comfortable if the driving rain, which now 
poured down more soakingly than ever, had admitted of a window 
being opened, or if our number had been something less than thirty; 
but there was scarcely time to think as much, when a train of three 
horses was attached to the tow-rope, the boy upon the leader 
smacked his whip, the rudder creaked and groaned complainingly, and 
we had begun our journey.



CHAPTER X - SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE CANAL BOAT, ITS DOMESTIC 
ECONOMY, AND ITS PASSENGERS.  JOURNEY TO PITTSBURG ACROSS THE 
ALLEGHANY MOUNTAINS.  PITTSBURG



AS it continued to rain most perseveringly, we all remained below:  
the damp gentlemen round the stove, gradually becoming mildewed by 
the action of the fire; and the dry gentlemen lying at full length 
upon the seats, or slumbering uneasily with their faces on the 
tables, or walking up and down the cabin, which it was barely 
possible for a man of the middle height to do, without making bald 
places on his head by scraping it against the roof.  At about six 
o'clock, all the small tables were put together to form one long 
table, and everybody sat down to tea, coffee, bread, butter, 
salmon, shad, liver, steaks, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-
puddings, and sausages.

'Will you try,' said my opposite neighbour, handing me a dish of 
potatoes, broken up in milk and butter, 'will you try some of these 
fixings?'

There are few words which perform such various duties as this word 
'fix.'  It is the Caleb Quotem of the American vocabulary.  You 
call upon a gentleman in a country town, and his help informs you 
that he is 'fixing himself' just now, but will be down directly:  
by which you are to understand that he is dressing.  You inquire, 
on board a steamboat, of a fellow-passenger, whether breakfast will 
be ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was 
last below, they were 'fixing the tables:' in other words, laying 
the cloth.  You beg a porter to collect your luggage, and he 
entreats you not to be uneasy, for he'll 'fix it presently:' and if 
you complain of indisposition, you are advised to have recourse to 
Doctor So-and-so, who will 'fix you' in no time.

One night, I ordered a bottle of mulled wine at an hotel where I 
was staying, and waited a long time for it; at length it was put 
upon the table with an apology from the landlord that he feared it 
wasn't 'fixed properly.' And I recollect once, at a stage-coach 
dinner, overhearing a very stern gentleman demand of a waiter who 
presented him with a plate of underdone roast-beef, 'whether he 
called THAT, fixing God A'mighty's vittles?'

There is no doubt that the meal, at which the invitation was 
tendered to me which has occasioned this digression, was disposed 
of somewhat ravenously; and that the gentlemen thrust the broad-
bladed knives and the two-pronged forks further down their throats 
than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in the hands of 
a skilful juggler:  but no man sat down until the ladies were 
seated; or omitted any little act of politeness which could 
contribute to their comfort.  Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, 
anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the 
slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention.

By the time the meal was over, the rain, which seemed to have worn 
itself out by coming down so fast, was nearly over too; and it 
became feasible to go on deck:  which was a great relief, 
notwithstanding its being a very small deck, and being rendered 
still smaller by the luggage, which was heaped together in the 
middle under a tarpaulin covering; leaving, on either side, a path 
so narrow, that it became a science to walk to and fro without 
tumbling overboard into the canal.  It was somewhat embarrassing at 
first, too, to have to duck nimbly every five minutes whenever the 
man at the helm cried 'Bridge!' and sometimes, when the cry was 
'Low Bridge,' to lie down nearly flat.  But custom familiarises one 
to anything, and there were so many bridges that it took a very 
short time to get used to this.

As night came on, and we drew in sight of the first range of hills, 
which are the outposts of the Alleghany Mountains, the scenery, 
which had been uninteresting hitherto, became more bold and 
striking.  The wet ground reeked and smoked, after the heavy fall 
of rain, and the croaking of the frogs (whose noise in these parts 
is almost incredible) sounded as though a million of fairy teams 
with bells were travelling through the air, and keeping pace with 
us.  The night was cloudy yet, but moonlight too:  and when we 
crossed the Susquehanna river - over which there is an 
extraordinary wooden bridge with two galleries, one above the 
other, so that even there, two boat teams meeting, may pass without 
confusion - it was wild and grand.

I have mentioned my having been in some uncertainty and doubt, at 
first, relative to the sleeping arrangements on board this boat.  I 
remained in the same vague state of mind until ten o'clock or 
thereabouts, when going below, I found suspended on either side of 
the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves, designed 
apparently for volumes of the small octavo size.  Looking with 
greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such 
literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a 
sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to 
comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were 
to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning.

I was assisted to this conclusion by seeing some of them gathered 
round the master of the boat, at one of the tables, drawing lots 
with all the anxieties and passions of gamesters depicted in their 
countenances; while others, with small pieces of cardboard in their 
hands, were groping among the shelves in search of numbers 
corresponding with those they had drawn.  As soon as any gentleman 
found his number, he took possession of it by immediately 
undressing himself and crawling into bed.  The rapidity with which 
an agitated gambler subsided into a snoring slumberer, was one of 
the most singular effects I have ever witnessed.  As to the ladies, 
they were already abed, behind the red curtain, which was carefully 
drawn and pinned up the centre; though as every cough, or sneeze, 
or whisper, behind this curtain, was perfectly audible before it, 
we had still a lively consciousness of their society.

The politeness of the person in authority had secured to me a shelf 
in a nook near this red curtain, in some degree removed from the 
great body of sleepers:  to which place I retired, with many 
acknowledgments to him for his attention.  I found it, on after-
measurement, just the width of an ordinary sheet of Bath post 
letter-paper; and I was at first in some uncertainty as to the best 
means of getting into it.  But the shelf being a bottom one, I 
finally determined on lying upon the floor, rolling gently in, 
stopping immediately I touched the mattress, and remaining for the 
night with that side uppermost, whatever it might be.  Luckily, I 
came upon my back at exactly the right moment.  I was much alarmed 
on looking upward, to see, by the shape of his half-yard of sacking 
(which his weight had bent into an exceedingly tight bag), that 
there was a very heavy gentleman above me, whom the slender cords 
seemed quite incapable of holding; and I could not help reflecting 
upon the grief of my wife and family in the event of his coming 
down in the night.  But as I could not have got up again without a 
severe bodily struggle, which might have alarmed the ladies; and as 
I had nowhere to go to, even if I had; I shut my eyes upon the 
danger, and remained there.

One of two remarkable circumstances is indisputably a fact, with 
reference to that class of society who travel in these boats.  
Either they carry their restlessness to such a pitch that they 
never sleep at all; or they expectorate in dreams, which would be a 
remarkable mingling of the real and ideal.  All night long, and 
every night, on this canal, there was a perfect storm and tempest 
of spitting; and once my coat, being in the very centre of the 
hurricane sustained by five gentlemen (which moved vertically, 
strictly carrying out Reid's Theory of the Law of Storms), I was 
fain the next morning to lay it on the deck, and rub it down with 
fair water before it was in a condition to be worn again.

Between five and six o'clock in the morning we got up, and some of 
us went on deck, to give them an opportunity of taking the shelves 
down; while others, the morning being very cold, crowded round the 
rusty stove, cherishing the newly kindled fire, and filling the 
grate with those voluntary contributions of which they had been so 
liberal all night.  The washing accommodations were primitive.  
There was a tin ladle chained to the deck, with which every 
gentleman who thought it necessary to cleanse himself (many were 
superior to this weakness), fished the dirty water out of the 
canal, and poured it into a tin basin, secured in like manner.  
There was also a jack-towel.  And, hanging up before a little 
looking-glass in the bar, in the immediate vicinity of the bread 
and cheese and biscuits, were a public comb and hair-brush.

At eight o'clock, the shelves being taken down and put away and the 
tables joined together, everybody sat down to the tea, coffee, 
bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, 
chops, black-puddings, and sausages, all over again.  Some were 
fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on their plates 
at once.  As each gentleman got through his own personal amount of 
tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, 
pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages, he rose up and 
walked off.  When everybody had done with everything, the fragments 
were cleared away:  and one of the waiters appearing anew in the 
character of a barber, shaved such of the company as desired to be 
shaved; while the remainder looked on, or yawned over their 
newspapers.  Dinner was breakfast again, without the tea and 
coffee; and supper and breakfast were identical.

There was a man on board this boat, with a light fresh-coloured 
face, and a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, who was the most 
inquisitive fellow that can possibly be imagined.  He never spoke 
otherwise than interrogatively.  He was an embodied inquiry.  
Sitting down or standing up, still or moving, walking the deck or 
taking his meals, there he was, with a great note of interrogation 
in each eye, two in his cocked ears, two more in his turned-up nose 
and chin, at least half a dozen more about the corners of his 
mouth, and the largest one of all in his hair, which was brushed 
pertly off his forehead in a flaxen clump.  Every button in his 
clothes said, 'Eh?  What's that?  Did you speak?  Say that again, 
will you?'  He was always wide awake, like the enchanted bride who 
drove her husband frantic; always restless; always thirsting for 
answers; perpetually seeking and never finding.  There never was 
such a curious man.

I wore a fur great-coat at that time, and before we were well clear 
of the wharf, he questioned me concerning it, and its price, and 
where I bought it, and when, and what fur it was, and what it 
weighed, and what it cost.  Then he took notice of my watch, and 
asked me what THAT cost, and whether it was a French watch, and 
where I got it, and how I got it, and whether I bought it or had it 
given me, and how it went, and where the key-hole was, and when I 
wound it, every night or every morning, and whether I ever forgot 
to wind it at all, and if I did, what then?  Where had I been to 
last, and where was I going next, and where was I going after that, 
and had I seen the President, and what did he say, and what did I 
say, and what did he say when I had said that?  Eh?  Lor now! do 
tell!

Finding that nothing would satisfy him, I evaded his questions 
after the first score or two, and in particular pleaded ignorance 
respecting the name of the fur whereof the coat was made.  I am 
unable to say whether this was the reason, but that coat fascinated 
him afterwards; he usually kept close behind me as I walked, and 
moved as I moved, that he might look at it the better; and he 
frequently dived into narrow places after me at the risk of his 
life, that he might have the satisfaction of passing his hand up 
the back, and rubbing it the wrong way.

We had another odd specimen on board, of a different kind.  This 
was a thin-faced, spare-figured man of middle age and stature, 
dressed in a dusty drabbish-coloured suit, such as I never saw 
before.  He was perfectly quiet during the first part of the 
journey:  indeed I don't remember having so much as seen him until 
he was brought out by circumstances, as great men often are.  The 
conjunction of events which made him famous, happened, briefly, 
thus.

The canal extends to the foot of the mountain, and there, of 
course, it stops; the passengers being conveyed across it by land 
carriage, and taken on afterwards by another canal boat, the 
counterpart of the first, which awaits them on the other side.  
There are two canal lines of passage-boats; one is called The 
Express, and one (a cheaper one) The Pioneer.  The Pioneer gets 
first to the mountain, and waits for the Express people to come up; 
both sets of passengers being conveyed across it at the same time.  
We were the Express company; but when we had crossed the mountain, 
and had come to the second boat, the proprietors took it into their 
beads to draft all the Pioneers into it likewise, so that we were 
five-and-forty at least, and the accession of passengers was not at 
all of that kind which improved the prospect of sleeping at night.  
Our people grumbled at this, as people do in such cases; but 
suffered the boat to be towed off with the whole freight aboard 
nevertheless; and away we went down the canal.  At home, I should 
have protested lustily, but being a foreigner here, I held my 
peace.  Not so this passenger.  He cleft a path among the people on 
deck (we were nearly all on deck), and without addressing anybody 
whomsoever, soliloquised as follows:

'This may suit YOU, this may, but it don't suit ME.  This may be 
all very well with Down Easters, and men of Boston raising, but it 
won't suit my figure nohow; and no two ways about THAT; and so I 
tell you.  Now!  I'm from the brown forests of Mississippi, I am, 
and when the sun shines on me, it does shine - a little.  It don't 
glimmer where I live, the sun don't.  No.  I'm a brown forester, I 
am.  I an't a Johnny Cake.  There are no smooth skins where I live.  
We're rough men there.  Rather.  If Down Easters and men of Boston 
raising like this, I'm glad of it, but I'm none of that raising nor 
of that breed.  No.  This company wants a little fixing, IT does.  
I'm the wrong sort of man for 'em, I am.  They won't like me, THEY 
won't.  This is piling of it up, a little too mountainous, this 
is.'  At the end of every one of these short sentences he turned 
upon his heel, and walked the other way; checking himself abruptly 
when he had finished another short sentence, and turning back 
again.

It is impossible for me to say what terrific meaning was hidden in 
the words of this brown forester, but I know that the other 
passengers looked on in a sort of admiring horror, and that 
presently the boat was put back to the wharf, and as many of the 
Pioneers as could be coaxed or bullied into going away, were got 
rid of.

When we started again, some of the boldest spirits on board, made 
bold to say to the obvious occasion of this improvement in our 
prospects, 'Much obliged to you, sir;' whereunto the brown forester 
(waving his hand, and still walking up and down as before), 
replied, 'No you an't.  You're none o' my raising.  You may act for 
yourselves, YOU may.  I have pinted out the way.  Down Easters and 
Johnny Cakes can follow if they please.  I an't a Johnny Cake, I 
an't.  I am from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am' - and 
so on, as before.  He was unanimously voted one of the tables for 
his bed at night - there is a great contest for the tables - in 
consideration for his public services:  and he had the warmest 
corner by the stove throughout the rest of the journey.  But I 
never could find out that he did anything except sit there; nor did 
I hear him speak again until, in the midst of the bustle and 
turmoil of getting the luggage ashore in the dark at Pittsburg, I 
stumbled over him as he sat smoking a cigar on the cabin steps, and 
heard him muttering to himself, with a short laugh of defiance, 'I 
an't a Johnny Cake, - I an't.  I'm from the brown forests of the 
Mississippi, I am, damme!'  I am inclined to argue from this, that 
he had never left off saying so; but I could not make an affidavit 
of that part of the story, if required to do so by my Queen and 
Country.

As we have not reached Pittsburg yet, however, in the order of our 
narrative, I may go on to remark that breakfast was perhaps the 
least desirable meal of the day, as in addition to the many savoury 
odours arising from the eatables already mentioned, there were 
whiffs of gin, whiskey, brandy, and rum, from the little bar hard 
by, and a decided seasoning of stale tobacco.  Many of the 
gentlemen passengers were far from particular in respect of their 
linen, which was in some cases as yellow as the little rivulets 
that had trickled from the corners of their mouths in chewing, and 
dried there.  Nor was the atmosphere quite free from zephyr 
whisperings of the thirty beds which had just been cleared away, 
and of which we were further and more pressingly reminded by the 
occasional appearance on the table-cloth of a kind of Game, not 
mentioned in the Bill of Fare.

And yet despite these oddities - and even they had, for me at 
least, a humour of their own - there was much in this mode of 
travelling which I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look back upon 
with great pleasure.  Even the running up, bare-necked, at five 
o'clock in the morning, from the tainted cabin to the dirty deck; 
scooping up the icy water, plunging one's head into it, and drawing 
it out, all fresh and glowing with the cold; was a good thing.  The 
fast, brisk walk upon the towing-path, between that time and 
breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; 
the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came gleaming 
off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when one lay idly 
on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue sky; 
the gliding on at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills, 
sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red, burning 
spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the 
shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by noise of wheels or 
steam, or any other sound than the limpid rippling of the water as 
the boat went on:  all these were pure delights.

Then there were new settlements and detached log-cabins and frame-
houses, full of interest for strangers from an old country:  cabins 
with simple ovens, outside, made of clay; and lodgings for the pigs 
nearly as good as many of the human quarters; broken windows, 
patched with worn-out hats, old clothes, old boards, fragments of 
blankets and paper; and home-made dressers standing in the open air 
without the door, whereon was ranged the household store, not hard 
to count, of earthen jars and pots.  The eye was pained to see the 
stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat, and 
seldom to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of 
rotten trunks and twisted branches steeped in its unwholesome 
water.  It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon great tracts 
where settlers had been burning down the trees, and where their 
wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while 
here and there some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two 
withered arms, and seemed to call down curses on his foes.  
Sometimes, at night, the way wound through some lonely gorge, like 
a mountain pass in Scotland, shining and coldly glittering in the 
light of the moon, and so closed in by high steep hills all round, 
that there seemed to be no egress save through the narrower path by 
which we had come, until one rugged hill-side seemed to open, and 
shutting out the moonlight as we passed into its gloomy throat, 
wrapped our new course in shade and darkness.

We had left Harrisburg on Friday.  On Sunday morning we arrived at 
the foot of the mountain, which is crossed by railroad.  There are 
ten inclined planes; five ascending, and five descending; the 
carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the 
latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level 
spaces between, being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes 
by engine power, as the case demands.  Occasionally the rails are 
laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from 
the carriage window, the traveller gazes sheer down, without a 
stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below.  
The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages 
travelling together; and while proper precautions are taken, is not 
to be dreaded for its dangers.

It was very pretty travelling thus, at a rapid pace along the 
heights of the mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley 
full of light and softness; catching glimpses, through the tree-
tops, of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs 
bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing:  terrified 
pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude 
gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in 
their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning 
out to-morrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a 
whirlwind.  It was amusing, too, when we had dined, and rattled 
down a steep pass, having no other moving power than the weight of 
the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long after 
us, come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of green 
and gold so shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of 
wings and soared away, no one would have had occasion, as I 
fancied, for the least surprise.  But it stopped short of us in a 
very business-like manner when we reached the canal:  and, before 
we left the wharf, went panting up this hill again, with the 
passengers who had waited our arrival for the means of traversing 
the road by which we had come.

On the Monday evening, furnace fires and clanking hammers on the 
banks of the canal, warned us that we approached the termination of 
this part of our journey.  After going through another dreamy place 
- a long aqueduct across the Alleghany River, which was stranger 
than the bridge at Harrisburg, being a vast, low, wooden chamber 
full of water - we emerged upon that ugly confusion of backs of 
buildings and crazy galleries and stairs, which always abuts on 
water, whether it be river, sea, canal, or ditch:  and were at 
Pittsburg.

Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople 
say so.  Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, 
factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be.  It 
certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is 
famous for its iron-works.  Besides the prison to which I have 
already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other 
institutions.  It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany 
River, over which there are two bridges; and the villas of the 
wealthier citizens sprinkled about the high grounds in the 
neighbourhood, are pretty enough.  We lodged at a most excellent 
hotel, and were admirably served.  As usual it was full of 
boarders, was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story 
of the house.

We tarried here three days.  Our next point was Cincinnati:  and as 
this was a steamboat journey, and western steamboats usually blow 
up one or two a week in the season, it was advisable to collect 
opinions in reference to the comparative safety of the vessels 
bound that way, then lying in the river.  One called the Messenger 
was the best recommended.  She had been advertised to start 
positively, every day for a fortnight or so, and had not gone yet, 
nor did her captain seem to have any very fixed intention on the 
subject.  But this is the custom:  for if the law were to bind down 
a free and independent citizen to keep his word with the public, 
what would become of the liberty of the subject?  Besides, it is in 
the way of trade.  And if passengers be decoyed in the way of 
trade, and people be inconvenienced in the way of trade, what man, 
who is a sharp tradesman himself, shall say, 'We must put a stop to 
this?'

Impressed by the deep solemnity of the public announcement, I 
(being then ignorant of these usages) was for hurrying on board in 
a breathless state, immediately; but receiving private and 
confidential information that the boat would certainly not start 
until Friday, April the First, we made ourselves very comfortable 
in the mean while, and went on board at noon that day.



CHAPTER XI - FROM PITTSBURG TO CINCINNATI IN A WESTERN STEAMBOAT.  
CINCINNATI



THE Messenger was one among a crowd of high-pressure steamboats, 
clustered together by a wharf-side, which, looked down upon from 
the rising ground that forms the landing-place, and backed by the 
lofty bank on the opposite side of the river, appeared no larger 
than so many floating models.  She had some forty passengers on 
board, exclusive of the poorer persons on the lower deck; and in 
half an hour, or less, proceeded on her way.

We had, for ourselves, a tiny state-room with two berths in it, 
opening out of the ladies' cabin.  There was, undoubtedly, 
something satisfactory in this 'location,' inasmuch as it was in 
the stern, and we had been a great many times very gravely 
recommended to keep as far aft as possible, 'because the steamboats 
generally blew up forward.'  Nor was this an unnecessary caution, 
as the occurrence and circumstances of more than one such fatality 
during our stay sufficiently testified.  Apart from this source of 
self-congratulation, it was an unspeakable relief to have any 
place, no matter how confined, where one could be alone:  and as 
the row of little chambers of which this was one, had each a second 
glass-door besides that in the ladies' cabin, which opened on a 
narrow gallery outside the vessel, where the other passengers 
seldom came, and where one could sit in peace and gaze upon the 
shifting prospect, we took possession of our new quarters with much 
pleasure.

If the native packets I have already described be unlike anything 
we are in the habit of seeing on water, these western vessels are 
still more foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain 
of boats.  I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe 
them.

In the first place, they have no mast, cordage, tackle, rigging, or 
other such boat-like gear; nor have they anything in their shape at 
all calculated to remind one of a boat's head, stem, sides, or 
keel.  Except that they are in the water, and display a couple of 
paddle-boxes, they might be intended, for anything that appears to 
the contrary, to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a 
mountain top.  There is no visible deck, even:  nothing but a long, 
black, ugly roof covered with burnt-out feathery sparks; above 
which tower two iron chimneys, and a hoarse escape valve, and a 
glass steerage-house.  Then, in order as the eye descends towards 
the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state-
rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small 
street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men:  the whole is 
supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few 
inches above the water's edge:  and in the narrow space between 
this upper structure and this barge's deck, are the furnace fires 
and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and 
every storm of rain it drives along its path.

Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of 
fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars 
beneath the frail pile of painted wood:  the machinery, not warded 
off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the 
crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower 
deck:  under the management, too, of reckless men whose 
acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months' 
standing:  one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there 
should be so many fatal accidents, but that any journey should be 
safely made.

Within, there is one long narrow cabin, the whole length of the 
boat; from which the state-rooms open, on both sides.  A small 
portion of it at the stern is partitioned off for the ladies; and 
the bar is at the opposite extreme.  There is a long table down the 
centre, and at either end a stove.  The washing apparatus is 
forward, on the deck.  It is a little better than on board the 
canal boat, but not much.  In all modes of travelling, the American 
customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and 
wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I 
strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of 
illness is referable to this cause.

We are to be on board the Messenger three days:  arriving at 
Cincinnati (barring accidents) on Monday morning.  There are three 
meals a day.  Breakfast at seven, dinner at half-past twelve, 
supper about six.  At each, there are a great many small dishes and 
plates upon the table, with very little in them; so that although 
there is every appearance of a mighty 'spread,' there is seldom 
really more than a joint:  except for those who fancy slices of 
beet-root, shreds of dried beef, complicated entanglements of 
yellow pickle; maize, Indian corn, apple-sauce, and pumpkin.

Some people fancy all these little dainties together (and sweet 
preserves beside), by way of relish to their roast pig.  They are 
generally those dyspeptic ladies and gentlemen who eat unheard-of 
quantities of hot corn bread (almost as good for the digestion as a 
kneaded pin-cushion), for breakfast, and for supper.  Those who do 
not observe this custom, and who help themselves several times 
instead, usually suck their knives and forks meditatively, until 
they have decided what to take next:  then pull them out of their 
mouths:  put them in the dish; help themselves; and fall to work 
again.  At dinner, there is nothing to drink upon the table, but 
great jugs full of cold water.  Nobody says anything, at any meal, 
to anybody.  All the passengers are very dismal, and seem to have 
tremendous secrets weighing on their minds.  There is no 
conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in 
spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove, 
when the meal is over.  Every man sits down, dull and languid; 
swallows his fare as if breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, were 
necessities of nature never to be coupled with recreation or 
enjoyment; and having bolted his food in a gloomy silence, bolts 
himself, in the same state.  But for these animal observances, you 
might suppose the whole male portion of the company to be the 
melancholy ghosts of departed book-keepers, who had fallen dead at 
the desk:  such is their weary air of business and calculation.  
Undertakers on duty would be sprightly beside them; and a collation 
of funeral-baked meats, in comparison with these meals, would be a 
sparkling festivity.

The people are all alike, too.  There is no diversity of character.  
They travel about on the same errands, say and do the same things 
in exactly the same manner, and follow in the same dull cheerless 
round.  All down the long table, there is scarcely a man who is in 
anything different from his neighbour.  It is quite a relief to 
have, sitting opposite, that little girl of fifteen with the 
loquacious chin:  who, to do her justice, acts up to it, and fully 
identifies nature's handwriting, for of all the small chatterboxes 
that ever invaded the repose of drowsy ladies' cabin, she is the 
first and foremost.  The beautiful girl, who sits a little beyond 
her - farther down the table there - married the young man with the 
dark whiskers, who sits beyond HER, only last month.  They are 
going to settle in the very Far West, where he has lived four 
years, but where she has never been.  They were both overturned in 
a stage-coach the other day (a bad omen anywhere else, where 
overturns are not so common), and his head, which bears the marks 
of a recent wound, is bound up still.  She was hurt too, at the 
same time, and lay insensible for some days; bright as her eyes 
are, now.

Further down still, sits a man who is going some miles beyond their 
place of destination, to 'improve' a newly-discovered copper mine.  
He carries the village - that is to be - with him:  a few frame 
cottages, and an apparatus for smelting the copper.  He carries its 
people too.  They are partly American and partly Irish, and herd 
together on the lower deck; where they amused themselves last 
evening till the night was pretty far advanced, by alternately 
firing off pistols and singing hymns.

They, and the very few who have been left at table twenty minutes, 
rise, and go away.  We do so too; and passing through our little 
state-room, resume our seats in the quiet gallery without.

A fine broad river always, but in some parts much wider than in 
others:  and then there is usually a green island, covered with 
trees, dividing it into two streams.  Occasionally, we stop for a 
few minutes, maybe to take in wood, maybe for passengers, at some 
small town or village (I ought to say city, every place is a city 
here); but the banks are for the most part deep solitudes, 
overgrown with trees, which, hereabouts, are already in leaf and 
very green.  For miles, and miles, and miles, these solitudes are 
unbroken by any sign of human life or trace of human footstep; nor 
is anything seen to move about them but the blue jay, whose colour 
is so bright, and yet so delicate, that it looks like a flying 
flower.  At lengthened intervals a log cabin, with its little space 
of cleared land about it, nestles under a rising ground, and sends 
its thread of blue smoke curling up into the sky.  It stands in the 
corner of the poor field of wheat, which is full of great unsightly 
stumps, like earthy butchers'-blocks.  Sometimes the ground is only 
just now cleared:  the felled trees lying yet upon the soil:  and 
the log-house only this morning begun.  As we pass this clearing, 
the settler leans upon his axe or hammer, and looks wistfully at 
the people from the world.  The children creep out of the temporary 
hut, which is like a gipsy tent upon the ground, and clap their 
hands and shout.  The dog only glances round at us, and then looks 
up into his master's face again, as if he were rendered uneasy by 
any suspension of the common business, and had nothing more to do 
with pleasurers.  And still there is the same, eternal foreground.  
The river has washed away its banks, and stately trees have fallen 
down into the stream.  Some have been there so long, that they are 
mere dry, grizzly skeletons.  Some have just toppled over, and 
having earth yet about their roots, are bathing their green heads 
in the river, and putting forth new shoots and branches.  Some are 
almost sliding down, as you look at them.  And some were drowned so 
long ago, that their bleached arms start out from the middle of the 
current, and seem to try to grasp the boat, and drag it under 
water.

Through such a scene as this, the unwieldy machine takes its 
hoarse, sullen way:  venting, at every revolution of the paddles, a 
loud high-pressure blast; enough, one would think, to waken up the 
host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound yonder:  so old, 
that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck their roots 
into its earth; and so high, that it is a hill, even among the 
hills that Nature planted round it.  The very river, as though it 
shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who 
lived so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white 
existence, hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple 
near this mound:  and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles 
more brightly than in the Big Grave Creek.

All this I see as I sit in the little stern-gallery mentioned just 
now.  Evening slowly steals upon the landscape and changes it 
before me, when we stop to set some emigrants ashore.

Five men, as many women, and a little girl.  All their worldly 
goods are a bag, a large chest and an old chair:  one, old, high-
backed, rush-bottomed chair:  a solitary settler in itself.  They 
are rowed ashore in the boat, while the vessel stands a little off 
awaiting its return, the water being shallow.  They are landed at 
the foot of a high bank, on the summit of which are a few log 
cabins, attainable only by a long winding path.  It is growing 
dusk; but the sun is very red, and shines in the water and on some 
of the tree-tops, like fire.

The men get out of the boat first; help out the women; take out the 
bag, the chest, the chair; bid the rowers 'good-bye;' and shove the 
boat off for them.  At the first plash of the oars in the water, 
the oldest woman of the party sits down in the old chair, close to 
the water's edge, without speaking a word.  None of the others sit 
down, though the chest is large enough for many seats.  They all 
stand where they landed, as if stricken into stone; and look after 
the boat.  So they remain, quite still and silent:  the old woman 
and her old chair, in the centre the bag and chest upon the shore, 
without anybody heeding them all eyes fixed upon the boat.  It 
comes alongside, is made fast, the men jump on board, the engine is 
put in motion, and we go hoarsely on again.  There they stand yet, 
without the motion of a hand.  I can see them through my glass, 
when, in the distance and increasing darkness, they are mere specks 
to the eye:  lingering there still:  the old woman in the old 
chair, and all the rest about her:  not stirring in the least 
degree.  And thus I slowly lose them.

The night is dark, and we proceed within the shadow of the wooded 
bank, which makes it darker.  After gliding past the sombre maze of 
boughs for a long time, we come upon an open space where the tall 
trees are burning.  The shape of every branch and twig is expressed 
in a deep red glow, and as the light wind stirs and ruffles it, 
they seem to vegetate in fire.  It is such a sight as we read of in 
legends of enchanted forests:  saving that it is sad to see these 
noble works wasting away so awfully, alone; and to think how many 
years must come and go before the magic that created them will rear 
their like upon this ground again.  But the time will come; and 
when, in their changed ashes, the growth of centuries unborn has 
struck its roots, the restless men of distant ages will repair to 
these again unpeopled solitudes; and their fellows, in cities far 
away, that slumber now, perhaps, beneath the rolling sea, will read 
in language strange to any ears in being now, but very old to them, 
of primeval forests where the axe was never heard, and where the 
jungled ground was never trodden by a human foot.

Midnight and sleep blot out these scenes and thoughts:  and when 
the morning shines again, it gilds the house-tops of a lively city, 
before whose broad paved wharf the boat is moored; with other 
boats, and flags, and moving wheels, and hum of men around it; as 
though there were not a solitary or silent rood of ground within 
the compass of a thousand miles.

Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated.  
I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably 
and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does:  
with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and 
foot-ways of bright tile.  Nor does it become less prepossessing on 
a closer acquaintance.  The streets are broad and airy, the shops 
extremely good, the private residences remarkable for their 
elegance and neatness.  There is something of invention and fancy 
in the varying styles of these latter erections, which, after the 
dull company of the steamboat, is perfectly delightful, as 
conveying an assurance that there are such qualities still in 
existence.  The disposition to ornament these pretty villas and 
render them attractive, leads to the culture of trees and flowers, 
and the laying out of well-kept gardens, the sight of which, to 
those who walk along the streets, is inexpressibly refreshing and 
agreeable.  I was quite charmed with the appearance of the town, 
and its adjoining suburb of Mount Auburn:  from which the city, 
lying in an amphitheatre of hills, forms a picture of remarkable 
beauty, and is seen to great advantage.

There happened to be a great Temperance Convention held here on the 
day after our arrival; and as the order of march brought the 
procession under the windows of the hotel in which we lodged, when 
they started in the morning, I had a good opportunity of seeing it.  
It comprised several thousand men; the members of various 
'Washington Auxiliary Temperance Societies;' and was marshalled by 
officers on horseback, who cantered briskly up and down the line, 
with scarves and ribbons of bright colours fluttering out behind 
them gaily.  There were bands of music too, and banners out of 
number:  and it was a fresh, holiday-looking concourse altogether.

I was particularly pleased to see the Irishmen, who formed a 
distinct society among themselves, and mustered very strong with 
their green scarves; carrying their national Harp and their 
Portrait of Father Mathew, high above the people's heads.  They 
looked as jolly and good-humoured as ever; and, working (here) the 
hardest for their living and doing any kind of sturdy labour that 
came in their way, were the most independent fellows there, I 
thought.

The banners were very well painted, and flaunted down the street 
famously.  There was the smiting of the rock, and the gushing forth 
of the waters; and there was a temperate man with 'considerable of 
a hatchet' (as the standard-bearer would probably have said), 
aiming a deadly blow at a serpent which was apparently about to 
spring upon him from the top of a barrel of spirits.  But the chief 
feature of this part of the show was a huge allegorical device, 
borne among the ship-carpenters, on one side whereof the steamboat 
Alcohol was represented bursting her boiler and exploding with a 
great crash, while upon the other, the good ship Temperance sailed 
away with a fair wind, to the heart's content of the captain, crew, 
and passengers.

After going round the town, the procession repaired to a certain 
appointed place, where, as the printed programme set forth, it 
would be received by the children of the different free schools, 
'singing Temperance Songs.'  I was prevented from getting there, in 
time to hear these Little Warblers, or to report upon this novel 
kind of vocal entertainment:  novel, at least, to me:  but I found 
in a large open space, each society gathered round its own banners, 
and listening in silent attention to its own orator.  The speeches, 
judging from the little I could hear of them, were certainly 
adapted to the occasion, as having that degree of relationship to 
cold water which wet blankets may claim:  but the main thing was 
the conduct and appearance of the audience throughout the day; and 
that was admirable and full of promise.

Cincinnati is honourably famous for its free schools, of which it 
has so many that no person's child among its population can, by 
possibility, want the means of education, which are extended, upon 
an average, to four thousand pupils, annually.  I was only present 
in one of these establishments during the hours of instruction.  In 
the boys' department, which was full of little urchins (varying in 
their ages, I should say, from six years old to ten or twelve), the 
master offered to institute an extemporary examination of the 
pupils in algebra; a proposal, which, as I was by no means 
confident of my ability to detect mistakes in that science, I 
declined with some alarm.  In the girls' school, reading was 
proposed; and as I felt tolerably equal to that art, I expressed my 
willingness to hear a class.  Books were distributed accordingly, 
and some half-dozen girls relieved each other in reading paragraphs 
from English History.  But it seemed to be a dry compilation, 
infinitely above their powers; and when they had blundered through 
three or four dreary passages concerning the Treaty of Amiens, and 
other thrilling topics of the same nature (obviously without 
comprehending ten words), I expressed myself quite satisfied.  It 
is very possible that they only mounted to this exalted stave in 
the Ladder of Learning for the astonishment of a visitor; and that 
at other times they keep upon its lower rounds; but I should have 
been much better pleased and satisfied if I had heard them 
exercised in simpler lessons, which they understood.

As in every other place I visited, the judges here were gentlemen 
of high character and attainments.  I was in one of the courts for 
a few minutes, and found it like those to which I have already 
referred.  A nuisance cause was trying; there were not many 
spectators; and the witnesses, counsel, and jury, formed a sort of 
family circle, sufficiently jocose and snug.

The society with which I mingled, was intelligent, courteous, and 
agreeable.  The inhabitants of Cincinnati are proud of their city 
as one of the most interesting in America:  and with good reason:  
for beautiful and thriving as it is now, and containing, as it 
does, a population of fifty thousand souls, but two-and-fifty years 
have passed away since the ground on which it stands (bought at 
that time for a few dollars) was a wild wood, and its citizens were 
but a handful of dwellers in scattered log huts upon the river's 
shore.



CHAPTER XII - FROM CINCINNATI TO LOUISVILLE IN ANOTHER WESTERN 
STEAMBOAT; AND FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS IN ANOTHER.  ST. LOUIS



LEAVING Cincinnati at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, we embarked 
for Louisville in the Pike steamboat, which, carrying the mails, 
was a packet of a much better class than that in which we had come 
from Pittsburg.  As this passage does not occupy more than twelve 
or thirteen hours, we arranged to go ashore that night:  not 
coveting the distinction of sleeping in a state-room, when it was 
possible to sleep anywhere else.

There chanced to be on board this boat, in addition to the usual 
dreary crowd of passengers, one Pitchlynn, a chief of the Choctaw 
tribe of Indians, who SENT IN HIS CARD to me, and with whom I had 
the pleasure of a long conversation.

He spoke English perfectly well, though he had not begun to learn 
the language, he told me, until he was a young man grown.  He had 
read many books; and Scott's poetry appeared to have left a strong 
impression on his mind:  especially the opening of The Lady of the 
Lake, and the great battle scene in Marmion, in which, no doubt 
from the congeniality of the subjects to his own pursuits and 
tastes, he had great interest and delight.  He appeared to 
understand correctly all he had read; and whatever fiction had 
enlisted his sympathy in its belief, had done so keenly and 
earnestly.  I might almost say fiercely.  He was dressed in our 
ordinary everyday costume, which hung about his fine figure 
loosely, and with indifferent grace.  On my telling him that I 
regretted not to see him in his own attire, he threw up his right 
arm, for a moment, as though he were brandishing some heavy weapon, 
and answered, as he let it fall again, that his race were losing 
many things besides their dress, and would soon be seen upon the 
earth no more:  but he wore it at home, he added proudly.

He told me that he had been away from his home, west of the 
Mississippi, seventeen months:  and was now returning.  He had been 
chiefly at Washington on some negotiations pending between his 
Tribe and the Government:  which were not settled yet (he said in a 
melancholy way), and he feared never would be:  for what could a 
few poor Indians do, against such well-skilled men of business as 
the whites?  He had no love for Washington; tired of towns and 
cities very soon; and longed for the Forest and the Prairie.

I asked him what he thought of Congress?  He answered, with a 
smile, that it wanted dignity, in an Indian's eyes.

He would very much like, he said, to see England before he died; 
and spoke with much interest about the great things to be seen 
there.  When I told him of that chamber in the British Museum 
wherein are preserved household memorials of a race that ceased to 
be, thousands of years ago, he was very attentive, and it was not 
hard to see that he had a reference in his mind to the gradual 
fading away of his own people.

This led us to speak of Mr. Catlin's gallery, which he praised 
highly:  observing that his own portrait was among the collection, 
and that all the likenesses were 'elegant.'  Mr. Cooper, he said, 
had painted the Red Man well; and so would I, he knew, if I would 
go home with him and hunt buffaloes, which he was quite anxious I 
should do.  When I told him that supposing I went, I should not be 
very likely to damage the buffaloes much, he took it as a great 
joke and laughed heartily.

He was a remarkably handsome man; some years past forty, I should 
judge; with long black hair, an aquiline nose, broad cheek-bones, a 
sunburnt complexion, and a very bright, keen, dark, and piercing 
eye.  There were but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said, 
and their number was decreasing every day.  A few of his brother 
chiefs had been obliged to become civilised, and to make themselves 
acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance 
of existence.  But they were not many; and the rest were as they 
always had been.  He dwelt on this:  and said several times that 
unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, 
they must be swept away before the strides of civilised society.

When we shook hands at parting, I told him he must come to England, 
as he longed to see the land so much:  that I should hope to see 
him there, one day:  and that I could promise him he would be well 
received and kindly treated.  He was evidently pleased by this 
assurance, though he rejoined with a good-humoured smile and an 
arch shake of his head, that the English used to be very fond of 
the Red Men when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for 
them, since.

He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of Nature's 
making, as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat, 
another kind of being.  He sent me a lithographed portrait of 
himself soon afterwards; very like, though scarcely handsome 
enough; which I have carefully preserved in memory of our brief 
acquaintance.

There was nothing very interesting in the scenery of this day's 
journey, which brought us at midnight to Louisville.  We slept at 
the Galt House; a splendid hotel; and were as handsomely lodged as 
though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond 
the Alleghanies.

The city presenting no objects of sufficient interest to detain us 
on our way, we resolved to proceed next day by another steamboat, 
the Fulton, and to join it, about noon, at a suburb called 
Portland, where it would be delayed some time in passing through a 
canal.

The interval, after breakfast, we devoted to riding through the 
town, which is regular and cheerful:  the streets being laid out at 
right angles, and planted with young trees.  The buildings are 
smoky and blackened, from the use of bituminous coal, but an 
Englishman is well used to that appearance, and indisposed to 
quarrel with it.  There did not appear to be much business 
stirring; and some unfinished buildings and improvements seemed to 
intimate that the city had been overbuilt in the ardour of 'going-
a-head,' and was suffering under the re-action consequent upon such 
feverish forcing of its powers.

On our way to Portland, we passed a 'Magistrate's office,' which 
amused me, as looking far more like a dame school than any police 
establishment:  for this awful Institution was nothing but a little 
lazy, good-for-nothing front parlour, open to the street; wherein 
two or three figures (I presume the magistrate and his myrmidons) 
were basking in the sunshine, the very effigies of languor and 
repose.  It was a perfect picture of justice retired from business 
for want of customers; her sword and scales sold off; napping 
comfortably with her legs upon the table.

Here, as elsewhere in these parts, the road was perfectly alive 
with pigs of all ages; lying about in every direction, fast 
asleep.; or grunting along in quest of hidden dainties.  I had 
always a sneaking kindness for these odd animals, and found a 
constant source of amusement, when all others failed, in watching 
their proceedings.  As we were riding along this morning, I 
observed a little incident between two youthful pigs, which was so 
very human as to be inexpressibly comical and grotesque at the 
time, though I dare say, in telling, it is tame enough.

One young gentleman (a very delicate porker with several straws 
sticking about his nose, betokening recent investigations in a 
dung-hill) was walking deliberately on, profoundly thinking, when 
suddenly his brother, who was lying in a miry hole unseen by him, 
rose up immediately before his startled eyes, ghostly with damp 
mud.  Never was pig's whole mass of blood so turned.  He started 
back at least three feet, gazed for a moment, and then shot off as 
hard as he could go:  his excessively little tail vibrating with 
speed and terror like a distracted pendulum.  But before he had 
gone very far, he began to reason with himself as to the nature of 
this frightful appearance; and as he reasoned, he relaxed his speed 
by gradual degrees; until at last he stopped, and faced about.  
There was his brother, with the mud upon him glazing in the sun, 
yet staring out of the very same hole, perfectly amazed at his 
proceedings!  He was no sooner assured of this; and he assured 
himself so carefully that one may almost say he shaded his eyes 
with his hand to see the better; than he came back at a round trot, 
pounced upon him, and summarily took off a piece of his tail; as a 
caution to him to be careful what he was about for the future, and 
never to play tricks with his family any more.

We found the steamboat in the canal, waiting for the slow process 
of getting through the lock, and went on board, where we shortly 
afterwards had a new kind of visitor in the person of a certain 
Kentucky Giant whose name is Porter, and who is of the moderate 
height of seven feet eight inches, in his stockings.

There never was a race of people who so completely gave the lie to 
history as these giants, or whom all the chroniclers have so 
cruelly libelled.  Instead of roaring and ravaging about the world, 
constantly catering for their cannibal larders, and perpetually 
going to market in an unlawful manner, they are the meekest people 
in any man's acquaintance:  rather inclining to milk and vegetable 
diet, and bearing anything for a quiet life.  So decidedly are 
amiability and mildness their characteristics, that I confess I 
look upon that youth who distinguished himself by the slaughter of 
these inoffensive persons, as a false-hearted brigand, who, 
pretending to philanthropic motives, was secretly influenced only 
by the wealth stored up within their castles, and the hope of 
plunder.  And I lean the more to this opinion from finding that 
even the historian of those exploits, with all his partiality for 
his hero, is fain to admit that the slaughtered monsters in 
question were of a very innocent and simple turn; extremely 
guileless and ready of belief; lending a credulous ear to the most 
improbable tales; suffering themselves to be easily entrapped into 
pits; and even (as in the case of the Welsh Giant) with an excess 
of the hospitable politeness of a landlord, ripping themselves 
open, rather than hint at the possibility of their guests being 
versed in the vagabond arts of sleight-of-hand and hocus-pocus.

The Kentucky Giant was but another illustration of the truth of 
this position.  He had a weakness in the region of the knees, and a 
trustfulness in his long face, which appealed even to five-feet 
nine for encouragement and support.  He was only twenty-five years 
old, he said, and had grown recently, for it had been found 
necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles.  
At fifteen he was a short boy, and in those days his English father 
and his Irish mother had rather snubbed him, as being too small of 
stature to sustain the credit of the family.  He added that his 
health had not been good, though it was better now; but short 
people are not wanting who whisper that he drinks too hard.

I understand he drives a hackney-coach, though how he does it, 
unless he stands on the footboard behind, and lies along the roof 
upon his chest, with his chin in the box, it would be difficult to 
comprehend.  He brought his gun with him, as a curiosity.

Christened 'The Little Rifle,' and displayed outside a shop-window, 
it would make the fortune of any retail business in Holborn.  When 
he had shown himself and talked a little while, he withdrew with 
his pocket-instrument, and went bobbing down the cabin, among men 
of six feet high and upwards, like a light-house walking among 
lamp-posts.

Within a few minutes afterwards, we were out of the canal, and in 
the Ohio river again.

The arrangements of the boat were like those of the Messenger, and 
the passengers were of the same order of people.  We fed at the 
same times, on the same kind of viands, in the same dull manner, 
and with the same observances.  The company appeared to be 
oppressed by the same tremendous concealments, and had as little 
capacity of enjoyment or light-heartedness.  I never in my life did 
see such listless, heavy dulness as brooded over these meals:  the 
very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the 
moment, wretched.  Reading and writing on my knee, in our little 
cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to 
table; and was as glad to escape from it again, as if it had been a 
penance or a punishment.  Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits 
forming a part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the 
fountain with Le Sage's strolling player, and revel in their glad 
enjoyment:  but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward 
off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his 
Yahoo's trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away; 
to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere 
greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the 
grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these 
funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.

There was some relief in this boat, too, which there had not been 
in the other, for the captain (a blunt, good-natured fellow) had 
his handsome wife with him, who was disposed to be lively and 
agreeable, as were a few other lady-passengers who had their seats 
about us at the same end of the table.  But nothing could have made 
head against the depressing influence of the general body.  There 
was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the 
most facetious companion that the earth ever knew.  A jest would 
have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning 
horror.  Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, 
weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion 
in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or 
hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere since the world 
began.

Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and 
Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence.  The trees 
were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the 
settlements and log cabins fewer in number:  their inhabitants more 
wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet.  No songs of 
birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and 
shadows from swift passing clouds.  Hour after hour, the changeless 
glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous 
objects.  Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and 
slowly as the time itself.

At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot 
so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the 
forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full 
of interest.  At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat 
and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is 
inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, 
and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and 
speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many 
people's ruin.  A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot 
away:  cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and 
teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful 
shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and 
die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and 
eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy 
monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, 
a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise:  a place without one 
single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it:  such is 
this dismal Cairo.

But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of 
rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him!  
An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running 
liquid mud, six miles an hour:  its strong and frothy current 
choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest 
trees:  now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the 
interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float upon the 
water's top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled 
roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant 
leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some 
small whirlpool, like wounded snakes.  The banks low, the trees 
dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few 
and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather 
very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of 
the boat, mud and slime on everything:  nothing pleasant in its 
aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon 
the dark horizon.

For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly 
against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more 
dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden 
trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide.  When the 
nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the 
boat, knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be 
near at hand, and rings a bell beside him, which is the signal for 
the engine to be stopped:  but always in the night this bell has 
work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders 
it no easy matter to remain in bed.

The decline of day here was very gorgeous; tingeing the firmament 
deeply with red and gold, up to the very keystone of the arch above 
us.  As the sun went down behind the bank, the slightest blades of 
grass upon it seemed to become as distinctly visible as the 
arteries in the skeleton of a leaf; and when, as it slowly sank, 
the red and golden bars upon the water grew dimmer, and dimmer yet, 
as if they were sinking too; and all the glowing colours of 
departing day paled, inch by inch, before the sombre night; the 
scene became a thousand times more lonesome and more dreary than 
before, and all its influences darkened with the sky.

We drank the muddy water of this river while we were upon it.  It 
is considered wholesome by the natives, and is something more 
opaque than gruel.  I have seen water like it at the Filter-shops, 
but nowhere else.

On the fourth night after leaving Louisville, we reached St. Louis, 
and here I witnessed the conclusion of an incident, trifling enough 
in itself, but very pleasant to see, which had interested me during 
the whole journey.

There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both 
little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-
eyed, and fair to see.  The little woman had been passing a long 
time with her sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St. 
Louis, in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords 
desire to be.  The baby was born in her mother's house; and she had 
not seen her husband (to whom she was now returning), for twelve 
months:  having left him a month or two after their marriage.

Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope, 
and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this little woman was:  
and all day long she wondered whether 'He' would be at the wharf; 
and whether 'He' had got her letter; and whether, if she sent the 
baby ashore by somebody else, 'He' would know it, meeting it in the 
street:  which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his 
life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough, 
to the young mother.  She was such an artless little creature; and 
was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out all this 
matter clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the 
other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she; 
and the captain (who heard all about it from his wife) was wondrous 
sly, I promise you:  inquiring, every time we met at table, as in 
forgetfulness, whether she expected anybody to meet her at St. 
Louis, and whether she would want to go ashore the night we reached 
it (but he supposed she wouldn't), and cutting many other dry jokes 
of that nature.  There was one little weazen, dried-apple-faced old 
woman, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands in such 
circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a 
lap-dog) old enough to moralize on the lightness of human 
affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the 
baby, now and then, or laughing with the rest, when the little 
woman called it by its father's name, and asked it all manner of 
fantastic questions concerning him in the joy of her heart.

It was something of a blow to the little woman, that when we were 
within twenty miles of our destination, it became clearly necessary 
to put this baby to bed.  But she got over it with the same good 
humour; tied a handkerchief round her head; and came out into the 
little gallery with the rest.  Then, such an oracle as she became 
in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was 
displayed by the married ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by 
the single ones! and such peals of laughter as the little woman 
herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest 
with!

At last, there were the lights of St. Louis, and here was the 
wharf, and those were the steps:  and the little woman covering her 
face with her hands, and laughing (or seeming to laugh) more than 
ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up.  I have no doubt 
that in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped 
her ears, lest she should hear 'Him' asking for her:  but I did not 
see her do it.

Then, a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was 
not yet made fast, but was wandering about, among the other boats, 
to find a landing-place:  and everybody looked for the husband:  
and nobody saw him:  when, in the midst of us all - Heaven knows 
how she ever got there - there was the little woman clinging with 
both arms tight round the neck of a fine, good-looking, sturdy 
young fellow! and in a moment afterwards, there she was again, 
actually clapping her little hands for joy, as she dragged him 
through the small door of her small cabin, to look at the baby as 
he lay asleep!

We went to a large hotel, called the Planter's House:  built like 
an English hospital, with long passages and bare walls, and sky-
lights above the room-doors for the free circulation of air.  There 
were a great many boarders in it; and as many lights sparkled and 
glistened from the windows down into the street below, when we 
drove up, as if it had been illuminated on some occasion of 
rejoicing.  It is an excellent house, and the proprietors have most 
bountiful notions of providing the creature comforts.  Dining alone 
with my wife in our own room, one day, I counted fourteen dishes on 
the table at once.

In the old French portion of the town, the thoroughfares are narrow 
and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and 
picturesque:  being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries 
before the windows, approachable by stairs or rather ladders from 
the street.  There are queer little barbers' shops and drinking-
houses too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements 
with blinking casements, such as may be seen in Flanders.  Some of 
these ancient habitations, with high garret gable-windows perking 
into the roofs, have a kind of French shrug about them; and being 
lop-sided with age, appear to hold their heads askew, besides, as 
if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American 
Improvements.

It is hardly necessary to say, that these consist of wharfs and 
warehouses, and new buildings in all directions; and of a great 
many vast plans which are still 'progressing.'  Already, however, 
some very good houses, broad streets, and marble-fronted shops, 
have gone so far ahead as to be in a state of completion; and the 
town bids fair in a few years to improve considerably:  though it 
is not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with 
Cincinnati.

The Roman Catholic religion, introduced here by the early French 
settlers, prevails extensively.  Among the public institutions are 
a Jesuit college; a convent for 'the Ladies of the Sacred Heart;' 
and a large chapel attached to the college, which was in course of 
erection at the time of my visit, and was intended to be 
consecrated on the second of December in the next year.  The 
architect of this building, is one of the reverend fathers of the 
school, and the works proceed under his sole direction.  The organ 
will be sent from Belgium.

In addition to these establishments, there is a Roman Catholic 
cathedral, dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier; and a hospital, 
founded by the munificence of a deceased resident, who was a member 
of that church.  It also sends missionaries from hence among the 
Indian tribes.

The Unitarian church is represented, in this remote place, as in 
most other parts of America, by a gentleman of great worth and 
excellence.  The poor have good reason to remember and bless it; 
for it befriends them, and aids the cause of rational education, 
without any sectarian or selfish views.  It is liberal in all its 
actions; of kind construction; and of wide benevolence.

There are three free-schools already erected, and in full operation 
in this city.  A fourth is building, and will soon be opened.

No man ever admits the unhealthiness of the place he dwells in 
(unless he is going away from it), and I shall therefore, I have no 
doubt, be at issue with the inhabitants of St. Louis, in 
questioning the perfect salubrity of its climate, and in hinting 
that I think it must rather dispose to fever, in the summer and 
autumnal seasons.  Just adding, that it is very hot, lies among 
great rivers, and has vast tracts of undrained swampy land around 
it, I leave the reader to form his own opinion.

As I had a great desire to see a Prairie before turning back from 
the furthest point of my wanderings; and as some gentlemen of the 
town had, in their hospitable consideration, an equal desire to 
gratify me; a day was fixed, before my departure, for an expedition 
to the Looking-Glass Prairie, which is within thirty miles of the 
town.  Deeming it possible that my readers may not object to know 
what kind of thing such a gipsy party may be at that distance from 
home, and among what sort of objects it moves, I will describe the 
jaunt in another chapter.



CHAPTER XIII - A JAUNT TO THE LOOKING-GLASS PRAIRIE AND BACK



I MAY premise that the word Prairie is variously pronounced 
PARAAER, PAREARER, PAROARER.  The latter mode of pronunciation is 
perhaps the most in favour.

We were fourteen in all, and all young men:  indeed it is a 
singular though very natural feature in the society of these 
distant settlements, that it is mainly composed of adventurous 
persons in the prime of life, and has very few grey heads among it.  
There were no ladies:  the trip being a fatiguing one:  and we were 
to start at five o'clock in the morning punctually.

I was called at four, that I might be certain of keeping nobody 
waiting; and having got some bread and milk for breakfast, threw up 
the window and looked down into the street, expecting to see the 
whole party busily astir, and great preparations going on below.  
But as everything was very quiet, and the street presented that 
hopeless aspect with which five o'clock in the morning is familiar 
elsewhere, I deemed it as well to go to bed again, and went 
accordingly.

I woke again at seven o'clock, and by that time the party had 
assembled, and were gathered round, one light carriage, with a very 
stout axletree; one something on wheels like an amateur carrier's 
cart; one double phaeton of great antiquity and unearthly 
construction; one gig with a great hole in its back and a broken 
head; and one rider on horseback who was to go on before.  I got 
into the first coach with three companions; the rest bestowed 
themselves in the other vehicles; two large baskets were made fast 
to the lightest; two large stone jars in wicker cases, technically 
known as demi-johns, were consigned to the 'least rowdy' of the 
party for safe-keeping; and the procession moved off to the 
ferryboat, in which it was to cross the river bodily, men, horses, 
carriages, and all, as the manner in these parts is.

We got over the river in due course, and mustered again before a 
little wooden box on wheels, hove down all aslant in a morass, with 
'MERCHANT TAILOR' painted in very large letters over the door.  
Having settled the order of proceeding, and the road to be taken, 
we started off once more and began to make our way through an ill-
favoured Black Hollow, called, less expressively, the American 
Bottom.

The previous day had been - not to say hot, for the term is weak 
and lukewarm in its power of conveying an idea of the temperature.  
The town had been on fire; in a blaze.  But at night it had come on 
to rain in torrents, and all night long it had rained without 
cessation.  We had a pair of very strong horses, but travelled at 
the rate of little more than a couple of miles an hour, through one 
unbroken slough of black mud and water.  It had no variety but in 
depth.  Now it was only half over the wheels, now it hid the 
axletree, and now the coach sank down in it almost to the windows.  
The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping of the 
frogs, who, with the pigs (a coarse, ugly breed, as unwholesome-
looking as though they were the spontaneous growth of the country), 
had the whole scene to themselves.  Here and there we passed a log 
hut:  but the wretched cabins were wide apart and thinly scattered, 
for though the soil is very rich in this place, few people can 
exist in such a deadly atmosphere.  On either side of the track, if 
it deserve the name, was the thick 'bush;' and everywhere was 
stagnant, slimy, rotten, filthy water.

As it is the custom in these parts to give a horse a gallon or so 
of cold water whenever he is in a foam with heat, we halted for 
that purpose, at a log inn in the wood, far removed from any other 
residence.  It consisted of one room, bare-roofed and bare-walled 
of course, with a loft above.  The ministering priest was a swarthy 
young savage, in a shirt of cotton print like bed-furniture, and a 
pair of ragged trousers.  There were a couple of young boys, too, 
nearly naked, lying idle by the well; and they, and he, and THE 
traveller at the inn, turned out to look at us.

The traveller was an old man with a grey gristly beard two inches 
long, a shaggy moustache of the same hue, and enormous eyebrows; 
which almost obscured his lazy, semi-drunken glance, as he stood 
regarding us with folded arms:  poising himself alternately upon 
his toes and heels.  On being addressed by one of the party, he 
drew nearer, and said, rubbing his chin (which scraped under his 
horny hand like fresh gravel beneath a nailed shoe), that he was 
from Delaware, and had lately bought a farm 'down there,' pointing 
into one of the marshes where the stunted trees were thickest.  He 
was 'going,' he added, to St. Louis, to fetch his family, whom he 
had left behind; but he seemed in no great hurry to bring on these 
incumbrances, for when we moved away, he loitered back into the 
cabin, and was plainly bent on stopping there so long as his money 
lasted.  He was a great politician of course, and explained his 
opinions at some length to one of our company; but I only remember 
that he concluded with two sentiments, one of which was, Somebody 
for ever; and the other, Blast everybody else! which is by no means 
a bad abstract of the general creed in these matters.

When the horses were swollen out to about twice their natural 
dimensions (there seems to be an idea here, that this kind of 
inflation improves their going), we went forward again, through mud 
and mire, and damp, and festering heat, and brake and bush, 
attended always by the music of the frogs and pigs, until nearly 
noon, when we halted at a place called Belleville.

Belleville was a small collection of wooden houses, huddled 
together in the very heart of the bush and swamp.  Many of them had 
singularly bright doors of red and yellow; for the place had been 
lately visited by a travelling painter, 'who got along,' as I was 
told, 'by eating his way.'  The criminal court was sitting, and was 
at that moment trying some criminals for horse-stealing:  with whom 
it would most likely go hard:  for live stock of all kinds being 
necessarily very much exposed in the woods, is held by the 
community in rather higher value than human life; and for this 
reason, juries generally make a point of finding all men indicted 
for cattle-stealing, guilty, whether or no.

The horses belonging to the bar, the judge, and witnesses, were 
tied to temporary racks set up roughly in the road; by which is to 
be understood, a forest path, nearly knee-deep in mud and slime.

There was an hotel in this place, which, like all hotels in 
America, had its large dining-room for the public table.  It was an 
odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half-
kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces 
stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time.  The 
horseman had gone forward to have coffee and some eatables 
prepared, and they were by this time nearly ready.  He had ordered 
'wheat-bread and chicken fixings,' in preference to 'corn-bread and 
common doings.'  The latter kind of rejection includes only pork 
and bacon.  The former comprehends broiled ham, sausages, veal 
cutlets, steaks, and such other viands of that nature as may be 
supposed, by a tolerably wide poetical construction, 'to fix' a 
chicken comfortably in the digestive organs of any lady or 
gentleman.

On one of the door-posts at this inn, was a tin plate, whereon was 
inscribed in characters of gold, 'Doctor Crocus;' and on a sheet of 
paper, pasted up by the side of this plate, was a written 
announcement that Dr. Crocus would that evening deliver a lecture 
on Phrenology for the benefit of the Belleville public; at a 
charge, for admission, of so much a head.

Straying up-stairs, during the preparation of the chicken fixings, 
I happened to pass the doctor's chamber; and as the door stood wide 
open, and the room was empty, I made bold to peep in.

It was a bare, unfurnished, comfortless room, with an unframed 
portrait hanging up at the head of the bed; a likeness, I take it, 
of the Doctor, for the forehead was fully displayed, and great 
stress was laid by the artist upon its phrenological developments.  
The bed itself was covered with an old patch-work counterpane.  The 
room was destitute of carpet or of curtain.  There was a damp 
fireplace without any stove, full of wood ashes; a chair, and a 
very small table; and on the last-named piece of furniture was 
displayed, in grand array, the doctor's library, consisting of some 
half-dozen greasy old books.

Now, it certainly looked about the last apartment on the whole 
earth out of which any man would be likely to get anything to do 
him good.  But the door, as I have said, stood coaxingly open, and 
plainly said in conjunction with the chair, the portrait, the 
table, and the books, 'Walk in, gentlemen, walk in!  Don't be ill, 
gentlemen, when you may be well in no time.  Doctor Crocus is here, 
gentlemen, the celebrated Dr. Crocus!  Dr. Crocus has come all this 
way to cure you, gentlemen.  If you haven't heard of Dr. Crocus, 
it's your fault, gentlemen, who live a little way out of the world 
here:  not Dr. Crocus's.  Walk in, gentlemen, walk in!'

In the passage below, when I went down-stairs again, was Dr. Crocus 
himself.  A crowd had flocked in from the Court House, and a voice 
from among them called out to the landlord, 'Colonel! introduce 
Doctor Crocus.'

'Mr. Dickens,' says the colonel, 'Doctor Crocus.'

Upon which Doctor Crocus, who is a tall, fine-looking Scotchman, 
but rather fierce and warlike in appearance for a professor of the 
peaceful art of healing, bursts out of the concourse with his right 
arm extended, and his chest thrown out as far as it will possibly 
come, and says:

'Your countryman, sir!'

Whereupon Doctor Crocus and I shake hands; and Doctor Crocus looks 
as if I didn't by any means realise his expectations, which, in a 
linen blouse, and a great straw hat, with a green ribbon, and no 
gloves, and my face and nose profusely ornamented with the stings 
of mosquitoes and the bites of bugs, it is very likely I did not.

'Long in these parts, sir?' says I.

'Three or four months, sir,' says the Doctor.

'Do you think of soon returning to the old country?' says I.

Doctor Crocus makes no verbal answer, but gives me an imploring 
look, which says so plainly 'Will you ask me that again, a little 
louder, if you please?' that I repeat the question.

'Think of soon returning to the old country, sir!' repeats the 
Doctor.

'To the old country, sir,' I rejoin.

Doctor Crocus looks round upon the crowd to observe the effect he 
produces, rubs his hands, and says, in a very loud voice:

'Not yet awhile, sir, not yet.  You won't catch me at that just 
yet, sir.  I am a little too fond of freedom for THAT, sir.  Ha, 
ha!  It's not so easy for a man to tear himself from a free country 
such as this is, sir.  Ha, ha!  No, no!  Ha, ha!  None of that till 
one's obliged to do it, sir.  No, no!'

As Doctor Crocus says these latter words, he shakes his head, 
knowingly, and laughs again.  Many of the bystanders shake their 
heads in concert with the doctor, and laugh too, and look at each 
other as much as to say, 'A pretty bright and first-rate sort of 
chap is Crocus!' and unless I am very much mistaken, a good many 
people went to the lecture that night, who never thought about 
phrenology, or about Doctor Crocus either, in all their lives 
before.

From Belleville, we went on, through the same desolate kind of 
waste, and constantly attended, without the interval of a moment, 
by the same music; until, at three o'clock in the afternoon, we 
halted once more at a village called Lebanon to inflate the horses 
again, and give them some corn besides:  of which they stood much 
in need.  Pending this ceremony, I walked into the village, where I 
met a full-sized dwelling-house coming down-hill at a round trot, 
drawn by a score or more of oxen.

The public-house was so very clean and good a one, that the 
managers of the jaunt resolved to return to it and put up there for 
the night, if possible.  This course decided on, and the horses 
being well refreshed, we again pushed forward, and came upon the 
Prairie at sunset.

It would be difficult to say why, or how - though it was possibly 
from having heard and read so much about it - but the effect on me 
was disappointment.  Looking towards the setting sun, there lay, 
stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; 
unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted 
to a scratch upon the great blank; until it met the glowing sky, 
wherein it seemed to dip:  mingling with its rich colours, and 
mellowing in its distant blue.  There it lay, a tranquil sea or 
lake without water, if such a simile be admissible, with the day 
going down upon it:  a few birds wheeling here and there:  and 
solitude and silence reigning paramount around.  But the grass was 
not yet high; there were bare black patches on the ground; and the 
few wild flowers that the eye could see, were poor and scanty.  
Great as the picture was, its very flatness and extent, which left 
nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest.  
I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a 
Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken.  It was 
lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony.  I felt 
that in traversing the Prairies, I could never abandon myself to 
the scene, forgetful of all else; as I should do instinctively, 
were the heather underneath my feet, or an iron-bound coast beyond; 
but should often glance towards the distant and frequently-receding 
line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed.  It is not a 
scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one, I think (at all 
events, as I saw it), to remember with much pleasure, or to covet 
the looking-on again, in after-life.

We encamped near a solitary log-house, for the sake of its water, 
and dined upon the plain.  The baskets contained roast fowls, 
buffalo's tongue (an exquisite dainty, by the way), ham, bread, 
cheese, and butter; biscuits, champagne, sherry; lemons and sugar 
for punch; and abundance of rough ice.  The meal was delicious, and 
the entertainers were the soul of kindness and good humour.  I have 
often recalled that cheerful party to my pleasant recollection 
since, and shall not easily forget, in junketings nearer home with 
friends of older date, my boon companions on the Prairie.

Returning to Lebanon that night, we lay at the little inn at which 
we had halted in the afternoon.  In point of cleanliness and 
comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English 
alehouse, of a homely kind, in England.

Rising at five o'clock next morning, I took a walk about the 
village:  none of the houses were strolling about to-day, but it 
was early for them yet, perhaps:  and then amused myself by 
lounging in a kind of farm-yard behind the tavern, of which the 
leading features were, a strange jumble of rough sheds for stables; 
a rude colonnade, built as a cool place of summer resort; a deep 
well; a great earthen mound for keeping vegetables in, in winter 
time; and a pigeon-house, whose little apertures looked, as they do 
in all pigeon-houses, very much too small for the admission of the 
plump and swelling-breasted birds who were strutting about it, 
though they tried to get in never so hard.  That interest 
exhausted, I took a survey of the inn's two parlours, which were 
decorated with coloured prints of Washington, and President 
Madison, and of a white-faced young lady (much speckled by the 
flies), who held up her gold neck-chain for the admiration of the 
spectator, and informed all admiring comers that she was 'Just 
Seventeen:' although I should have thought her older.  In the best 
room were two oil portraits of the kit-cat size, representing the 
landlord and his infant son; both looking as bold as lions, and 
staring out of the canvas with an intensity that would have been 
cheap at any price.  They were painted, I think, by the artist who 
had touched up the Belleville doors with red and gold; for I seemed 
to recognise his style immediately.

After breakfast, we started to return by a different way from that 
which we had taken yesterday, and coming up at ten o'clock with an 
encampment of German emigrants carrying their goods in carts, who 
had made a rousing fire which they were just quitting, stopped 
there to refresh.  And very pleasant the fire was; for, hot though 
it had been yesterday, it was quite cold to-day, and the wind blew 
keenly.  Looming in the distance, as we rode along, was another of 
the ancient Indian burial-places, called The Monks' Mound; in 
memory of a body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded 
a desolate convent there, many years ago, when there were no 
settlers within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the 
pernicious climate:  in which lamentable fatality, few rational 
people will suppose, perhaps, that society experienced any very 
severe deprivation.

The track of to-day had the same features as the track of 
yesterday.  There was the swamp, the bush, and the perpetual chorus 
of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth.  
Here and there, and frequently too, we encountered a solitary 
broken-down waggon, full of some new settler's goods.  It was a 
pitiful sight to see one of these vehicles deep in the mire; the 
axle-tree broken; the wheel lying idly by its side; the man gone 
miles away, to look for assistance; the woman seated among their 
wandering household gods with a baby at her breast, a picture of 
forlorn, dejected patience; the team of oxen crouching down 
mournfully in the mud, and breathing forth such clouds of vapour 
from their mouths and nostrils, that all the damp mist and fog 
around seemed to have come direct from them.

In due time we mustered once again before the merchant tailor's, 
and having done so, crossed over to the city in the ferry-boat:  
passing, on the way, a spot called Bloody Island, the duelling-
ground of St. Louis, and so designated in honour of the last fatal 
combat fought there, which was with pistols, breast to breast.  
Both combatants fell dead upon the ground; and possibly some 
rational people may think of them, as of the gloomy madmen on the 
Monks' Mound, that they were no great loss to the community.



CHAPTER XIV - RETURN TO CINCINNATI.  A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT 
CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO SANDUSKY.  SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE 
FALLS OF NIAGARA



AS I had a desire to travel through the interior of the state of 
Ohio, and to 'strike the lakes,' as the phrase is, at a small town 
called Sandusky, to which that route would conduct us on our way to 
Niagara, we had to return from St. Louis by the way we had come, 
and to retrace our former track as far as Cincinnati.

The day on which we were to take leave of St. Louis being very 
fine; and the steamboat, which was to have started I don't know how 
early in the morning, postponing, for the third or fourth time, her 
departure until the afternoon; we rode forward to an old French 
village on the river, called properly Carondelet, and nicknamed 
Vide Poche, and arranged that the packet should call for us there.

The place consisted of a few poor cottages, and two or three 
public-houses; the state of whose larders certainly seemed to 
justify the second designation of the village, for there was 
nothing to eat in any of them.  At length, however, by going back 
some half a mile or so, we found a solitary house where ham and 
coffee were procurable; and there we tarried to wait the advent of 
the boat, which would come in sight from the green before the door, 
a long way off.

It was a neat, unpretending village tavern, and we took our repast 
in a quaint little room with a bed in it, decorated with some old 
oil paintings, which in their time had probably done duty in a 
Catholic chapel or monastery.  The fare was very good, and served 
with great cleanliness.  The house was kept by a characteristic old 
couple, with whom we had a long talk, and who were perhaps a very 
good sample of that kind of people in the West.

The landlord was a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow (not so very 
old either, for he was but just turned sixty, I should think), who 
had been out with the militia in the last war with England, and had 
seen all kinds of service, - except a battle; and he had been very 
near seeing that, he added:  very near.  He had all his life been 
restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change; 
and was still the son of his old self:  for if he had nothing to 
keep him at home, he said (slightly jerking his hat and his thumb 
towards the window of the room in which the old lady sat, as we 
stood talking in front of the house), he would clean up his musket, 
and be off to Texas to-morrow morning.  He was one of the very many 
descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seem destined 
from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army:  who 
gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving 
home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of 
their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering 
generation who succeed.

His wife was a domesticated, kind-hearted old soul, who had come 
with him, 'from the queen city of the world,' which, it seemed, was 
Philadelphia; but had no love for this Western country, and indeed 
had little reason to bear it any; having seen her children, one by 
one, die here of fever, in the full prime and beauty of their 
youth.  Her heart was sore, she said, to think of them; and to talk 
on this theme, even to strangers, in that blighted place, so far 
from her old home, eased it somewhat, and became a melancholy 
pleasure.

The boat appearing towards evening, we bade adieu to the poor old 
lady and her vagrant spouse, and making for the nearest landing-
place, were soon on board The Messenger again, in our old cabin, 
and steaming down the Mississippi.

If the coming up this river, slowly making head against the stream, 
be an irksome journey, the shooting down it with the turbid current 
is almost worse; for then the boat, proceeding at the rate of 
twelve or fifteen miles an hour, has to force its passage through a 
labyrinth of floating logs, which, in the dark, it is often 
impossible to see beforehand or avoid.  All that night, the bell 
was never silent for five minutes at a time; and after every ring 
the vessel reeled again, sometimes beneath a single blow, sometimes 
beneath a dozen dealt in quick succession, the lightest of which 
seemed more than enough to beat in her frail keel, as though it had 
been pie-crust.  Looking down upon the filthy river after dark, it 
seemed to be alive with monsters, as these black masses rolled upon 
the surface, or came starting up again, head first, when the boat, 
in ploughing her way among a shoal of such obstructions, drove a 
few among them for the moment under water.  Sometimes the engine 
stopped during a long interval, and then before her and behind, and 
gathering close about her on all sides, were so many of these ill-
favoured obstacles that she was fairly hemmed in; the centre of a 
floating island; and was constrained to pause until they parted, 
somewhere, as dark clouds will do before the wind, and opened by 
degrees a channel out.

In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the 
detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there to take in wood, 
lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held 
together.  It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted 
'Coffee House;' that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to 
which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a 
month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi.  But 
looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of 
seeing that intolerable river dragging its slimy length and ugly 
freight abruptly off towards New Orleans; and passing a yellow line 
which stretched across the current, were again upon the clear Ohio, 
never, I trust, to see the Mississippi more, saving in troubled 
dreams and nightmares.  Leaving it for the company of its sparkling 
neighbour, was like the transition from pain to ease, or the 
awakening from a horrible vision to cheerful realities.

We arrived at Louisville on the fourth night, and gladly availed 
ourselves of its excellent hotel.  Next day we went on in the Ben 
Franklin, a beautiful mail steamboat, and reached Cincinnati 
shortly after midnight.  Being by this time nearly tired of 
sleeping upon shelves, we had remained awake to go ashore 
straightway; and groping a passage across the dark decks of other 
boats, and among labyrinths of engine-machinery and leaking casks 
of molasses, we reached the streets, knocked up the porter at the 
hotel where we had stayed before, and were, to our great joy, 
safely housed soon afterwards.

We rested but one day at Cincinnati, and then resumed our journey 
to Sandusky.  As it comprised two varieties of stage-coach 
travelling, which, with those I have already glanced at, comprehend 
the main characteristics of this mode of transit in America, I will 
take the reader as our fellow-passenger, and pledge myself to 
perform the distance with all possible despatch.

Our place of destination in the first instance is Columbus.  It is 
distant about a hundred and twenty miles from Cincinnati, but there 
is a macadamised road (rare blessing!) the whole way, and the rate 
of travelling upon it is six miles an hour.

We start at eight o'clock in the morning, in a great mail-coach, 
whose huge cheeks are so very ruddy and plethoric, that it appears 
to be troubled with a tendency of blood to the head.  Dropsical it 
certainly is, for it will hold a dozen passengers inside.  But, 
wonderful to add, it is very clean and bright, being nearly new; 
and rattles through the streets of Cincinnati gaily.

Our way lies through a beautiful country, richly cultivated, and 
luxuriant in its promise of an abundant harvest.  Sometimes we pass 
a field where the strong bristling stalks of Indian corn look like 
a crop of walking-sticks, and sometimes an enclosure where the 
green wheat is springing up among a labyrinth of stumps; the 
primitive worm-fence is universal, and an ugly thing it is; but the 
farms are neatly kept, and, save for these differences, one might 
be travelling just now in Kent.

We often stop to water at a roadside inn, which is always dull and 
silent.  The coachman dismounts and fills his bucket, and holds it 
to the horses' heads.  There is scarcely ever any one to help him; 
there are seldom any loungers standing round; and never any stable-
company with jokes to crack.  Sometimes, when we have changed our 
team, there is a difficulty in starting again, arising out of the 
prevalent mode of breaking a young horse:  which is to catch him, 
harness him against his will, and put him in a stage-coach without 
further notice:  but we get on somehow or other, after a great many 
kicks and a violent struggle; and jog on as before again.

Occasionally, when we stop to change, some two or three half-
drunken loafers will come loitering out with their hands in their 
pockets, or will be seen kicking their heels in rocking-chairs, or 
lounging on the window-sill, or sitting on a rail within the 
colonnade:  they have not often anything to say though, either to 
us or to each other, but sit there idly staring at the coach and 
horses.  The landlord of the inn is usually among them, and seems, 
of all the party, to be the least connected with the business of 
the house.  Indeed he is with reference to the tavern, what the 
driver is in relation to the coach and passengers:  whatever 
happens in his sphere of action, he is quite indifferent, and 
perfectly easy in his mind.

The frequent change of coachmen works no change or variety in the 
coachman's character.  He is always dirty, sullen, and taciturn.  
If he be capable of smartness of any kind, moral or physical, he 
has a faculty of concealing it which is truly marvellous.  He never 
speaks to you as you sit beside him on the box, and if you speak to 
him, he answers (if at all) in monosyllables.  He points out 
nothing on the road, and seldom looks at anything:  being, to all 
appearance, thoroughly weary of it and of existence generally.  As 
to doing the honours of his coach, his business, as I have said, is 
with the horses.  The coach follows because it is attached to them 
and goes on wheels:  not because you are in it.  Sometimes, towards 
the end of a long stage, he suddenly breaks out into a discordant 
fragment of an election song, but his face never sings along with 
him:  it is only his voice, and not often that.

He always chews and always spits, and never encumbers himself with 
a pocket-handkerchief.  The consequences to the box passenger, 
especially when the wind blows towards him, are not agreeable.

Whenever the coach stops, and you can hear the voices of the inside 
passengers; or whenever any bystander addresses them, or any one 
among them; or they address each other; you will hear one phrase 
repeated over and over and over again to the most extraordinary 
extent.  It is an ordinary and unpromising phrase enough, being 
neither more nor less than 'Yes, sir;' but it is adapted to every 
variety of circumstance, and fills up every pause in the 
conversation.  Thus:-

The time is one o'clock at noon.  The scene, a place where we are 
to stay and dine, on this journey.  The coach drives up to the door 
of an inn.  The day is warm, and there are several idlers lingering 
about the tavern, and waiting for the public dinner.  Among them, 
is a stout gentleman in a brown hat, swinging himself to and fro in 
a rocking-chair on the pavement.

As the coach stops, a gentleman in a straw hat looks out of the 
window:

STRAW HAT.  (To the stout gentleman in the rocking-chair.)  I 
reckon that's Judge Jefferson, an't it?

BROWN HAT.  (Still swinging; speaking very slowly; and without any 
emotion whatever.)  Yes, sir.

STRAW HAT.  Warm weather, Judge.

BROWN HAT.  Yes, sir.

STRAW HAT.  There was a snap of cold, last week.

BROWN HAT.  Yes, sir.

STRAW HAT.  Yes, sir.

A pause.  They look at each other, very seriously.

STRAW HAT.  I calculate you'll have got through that case of the 
corporation, Judge, by this time, now?

BROWN HAT.  Yes, sir.

STRAW HAT.  How did the verdict go, sir?

BROWN HAT.  For the defendant, sir.

STRAW HAT.  (Interrogatively.)  Yes, sir?

BROWN HAT. (Affirmatively.)  Yes, sir.

BOTH.  (Musingly, as each gazes down the street.)  Yes, sir.

Another pause.  They look at each other again, still more seriously 
than before.

BROWN HAT.  This coach is rather behind its time to-day, I guess.

STRAW HAT.  (Doubtingly.)  Yes, sir.

BROWN HAT.  (Looking at his watch.)  Yes, sir; nigh upon two hours.

STRAW HAT.  (Raising his eyebrows in very great surprise.)  Yes, 
sir!

BROWN HAT.  (Decisively, as he puts up his watch.)  Yes, sir.

ALL THE OTHER INSIDE PASSENGERS.  (Among themselves.)  Yes, sir.

COACHMAN.  (In a very surly tone.)  No it an't.

STRAW HAT.  (To the coachman.)  Well, I don't know, sir.  We were a 
pretty tall time coming that last fifteen mile.  That's a fact.

The coachman making no reply, and plainly declining to enter into 
any controversy on a subject so far removed from his sympathies and 
feelings, another passenger says, 'Yes, sir;' and the gentleman in 
the straw hat in acknowledgment of his courtesy, says 'Yes, sir,' 
to him, in return.  The straw hat then inquires of the brown hat, 
whether that coach in which he (the straw hat) then sits, is not a 
new one?  To which the brown hat again makes answer, 'Yes, sir.'

STRAW HAT.  I thought so.  Pretty loud smell of varnish, sir?

BROWN HAT.  Yes, sir.

ALL THE OTHER INSIDE PASSENGERS.  Yes, sir.

BROWN HAT.  (To the company in general.)  Yes, sir.

The conversational powers of the company having been by this time 
pretty heavily taxed, the straw hat opens the door and gets out; 
and all the rest alight also.  We dine soon afterwards with the 
boarders in the house, and have nothing to drink but tea and 
coffee.  As they are both very bad and the water is worse, I ask 
for brandy; but it is a Temperance Hotel, and spirits are not to be 
had for love or money.  This preposterous forcing of unpleasant 
drinks down the reluctant throats of travellers is not at all 
uncommon in America, but I never discovered that the scruples of 
such wincing landlords induced them to preserve any unusually nice 
balance between the quality of their fare, and their scale of 
charges:  on the contrary, I rather suspected them of diminishing 
the one and exalting the other, by way of recompense for the loss 
of their profit on the sale of spirituous liquors.  After all, 
perhaps, the plainest course for persons of such tender 
consciences, would be, a total abstinence from tavern-keeping.

Dinner over, we get into another vehicle which is ready at the door 
(for the coach has been changed in the interval), and resume our 
journey; which continues through the same kind of country until 
evening, when we come to the town where we are to stop for tea and 
supper; and having delivered the mail bags at the Post-office, ride 
through the usual wide street, lined with the usual stores and 
houses (the drapers always having hung up at their door, by way of 
sign, a piece of bright red cloth), to the hotel where this meal is 
prepared.  There being many boarders here, we sit down, a large 
party, and a very melancholy one as usual.  But there is a buxom 
hostess at the head of the table, and opposite, a simple Welsh 
schoolmaster with his wife and child; who came here, on a 
speculation of greater promise than performance, to teach the 
classics:  and they are sufficient subjects of interest until the 
meal is over, and another coach is ready.  In it we go on once 
more, lighted by a bright moon, until midnight; when we stop to 
change the coach again, and remain for half an hour or so in a 
miserable room, with a blurred lithograph of Washington over the 
smoky fire-place, and a mighty jug of cold water on the table:  to 
which refreshment the moody passengers do so apply themselves that 
they would seem to be, one and all, keen patients of Dr. Sangrado.  
Among them is a very little boy, who chews tobacco like a very big 
one; and a droning gentleman, who talks arithmetically and 
statistically on all subjects, from poetry downwards; and who 
always speaks in the same key, with exactly the same emphasis, and 
with very grave deliberation.  He came outside just now, and told 
me how that the uncle of a certain young lady who had been spirited 
away and married by a certain captain, lived in these parts; and 
how this uncle was so valiant and ferocious that he shouldn't 
wonder if he were to follow the said captain to England, 'and shoot 
him down in the street wherever he found him;' in the feasibility 
of which strong measure I, being for the moment rather prone to 
contradiction, from feeling half asleep and very tired, declined to 
acquiesce:  assuring him that if the uncle did resort to it, or 
gratified any other little whim of the like nature, he would find 
himself one morning prematurely throttled at the Old Bailey:  and 
that he would do well to make his will before he went, as he would 
certainly want it before he had been in Britain very long.

On we go, all night, and by-and-by the day begins to break, and 
presently the first cheerful rays of the warm sun come slanting on 
us brightly.  It sheds its light upon a miserable waste of sodden 
grass, and dull trees, and squalid huts, whose aspect is forlorn 
and grievous in the last degree.  A very desert in the wood, whose 
growth of green is dank and noxious like that upon the top of 
standing water:  where poisonous fungus grows in the rare footprint 
on the oozy ground, and sprouts like witches' coral, from the 
crevices in the cabin wall and floor; it is a hideous thing to lie 
upon the very threshold of a city.  But it was purchased years ago, 
and as the owner cannot be discovered, the State has been unable to 
reclaim it.  So there it remains, in the midst of cultivation and 
improvement, like ground accursed, and made obscene and rank by 
some great crime.

We reached Columbus shortly before seven o'clock, and stayed there, 
to refresh, that day and night:  having excellent apartments in a 
very large unfinished hotel called the Neill House, which were 
richly fitted with the polished wood of the black walnut, and 
opened on a handsome portico and stone verandah, like rooms in some 
Italian mansion.  The town is clean and pretty, and of course is 
'going to be' much larger.  It is the seat of the State legislature 
of Ohio, and lays claim, in consequence, to some consideration and 
importance.

There being no stage-coach next day, upon the road we wished to 
take, I hired 'an extra,' at a reasonable charge to carry us to 
Tiffin; a small town from whence there is a railroad to Sandusky.  
This extra was an ordinary four-horse stage-coach, such as I have 
described, changing horses and drivers, as the stage-coach would, 
but was exclusively our own for the journey.  To ensure our having 
horses at the proper stations, and being incommoded by no 
strangers, the proprietors sent an agent on the box, who was to 
accompany us the whole way through; and thus attended, and bearing 
with us, besides, a hamper full of savoury cold meats, and fruit, 
and wine, we started off again in high spirits, at half-past six 
o'clock next morning, very much delighted to be by ourselves, and 
disposed to enjoy even the roughest journey.

It was well for us, that we were in this humour, for the road we 
went over that day, was certainly enough to have shaken tempers 
that were not resolutely at Set Fair, down to some inches below 
Stormy.  At one time we were all flung together in a heap at the 
bottom of the coach, and at another we were crushing our heads 
against the roof.  Now, one side was down deep in the mire, and we 
were holding on to the other.  Now, the coach was lying on the 
tails of the two wheelers; and now it was rearing up in the air, in 
a frantic state, with all four horses standing on the top of an 
insurmountable eminence, looking coolly back at it, as though they 
would say 'Unharness us.  It can't be done.'  The drivers on these 
roads, who certainly get over the ground in a manner which is quite 
miraculous, so twist and turn the team about in forcing a passage, 
corkscrew fashion, through the bogs and swamps, that it was quite a 
common circumstance on looking out of the window, to see the 
coachman with the ends of a pair of reins in his hands, apparently 
driving nothing, or playing at horses, and the leaders staring at 
one unexpectedly from the back of the coach, as if they had some 
idea of getting up behind.  A great portion of the way was over 
what is called a corduroy road, which is made by throwing trunks of 
trees into a marsh, and leaving them to settle there.  The very 
slightest of the jolts with which the ponderous carriage fell from 
log to log, was enough, it seemed, to have dislocated all the bones 
in the human body.  It would be impossible to experience a similar 
set of sensations, in any other circumstances, unless perhaps in 
attempting to go up to the top of St. Paul's in an omnibus.  Never, 
never once, that day, was the coach in any position, attitude, or 
kind of motion to which we are accustomed in coaches.  Never did it 
make the smallest approach to one's experience of the proceedings 
of any sort of vehicle that goes on wheels.

Still, it was a fine day, and the temperature was delicious, and 
though we had left Summer behind us in the west, and were fast 
leaving Spring, we were moving towards Niagara and home.  We 
alighted in a pleasant wood towards the middle of the day, dined on 
a fallen tree, and leaving our best fragments with a cottager, and 
our worst with the pigs (who swarm in this part of the country like 
grains of sand on the sea-shore, to the great comfort of our 
commissariat in Canada), we went forward again, gaily.

As night came on, the track grew narrower and narrower, until at 
last it so lost itself among the trees, that the driver seemed to 
find his way by instinct.  We had the comfort of knowing, at least, 
that there was no danger of his falling asleep, for every now and 
then a wheel would strike against an unseen stump with such a jerk, 
that he was fain to hold on pretty tight and pretty quick, to keep 
himself upon the box.  Nor was there any reason to dread the least 
danger from furious driving, inasmuch as over that broken ground 
the horses had enough to do to walk; as to shying, there was no 
room for that; and a herd of wild elephants could not have run away 
in such a wood, with such a coach at their heels.  So we stumbled 
along, quite satisfied.

These stumps of trees are a curious feature in American travelling.  
The varying illusions they present to the unaccustomed eye as it 
grows dark, are quite astonishing in their number and reality.  
Now, there is a Grecian urn erected in the centre of a lonely 
field; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb; now a very 
commonplace old gentleman in a white waistcoat, with a thumb thrust 
into each arm-hole of his coat; now a student poring on a book; now 
a crouching negro; now, a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man; a 
hunch-back throwing off his cloak and stepping forth into the 
light.  They were often as entertaining to me as so many glasses in 
a magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bidding, but 
seemed to force themselves upon me, whether I would or no; and 
strange to say, I sometimes recognised in them counterparts of 
figures once familiar to me in pictures attached to childish books, 
forgotten long ago.

It soon became too dark, however, even for this amusement, and the 
trees were so close together that their dry branches rattled 
against the coach on either side, and obliged us all to keep our 
heads within.  It lightened too, for three whole hours; each flash 
being very bright, and blue, and long; and as the vivid streaks 
came darting in among the crowded branches, and the thunder rolled 
gloomily above the tree tops, one could scarcely help thinking that 
there were better neighbourhoods at such a time than thick woods 
afforded.

At length, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, a few feeble 
lights appeared in the distance, and Upper Sandusky, an Indian 
village, where we were to stay till morning, lay before us.

They were gone to bed at the log Inn, which was the only house of 
entertainment in the place, but soon answered to our knocking, and 
got some tea for us in a sort of kitchen or common room, tapestried 
with old newspapers, pasted against the wall.  The bed-chamber to 
which my wife and I were shown, was a large, low, ghostly room; 
with a quantity of withered branches on the hearth, and two doors 
without any fastening, opposite to each other, both opening on the 
black night and wild country, and so contrived, that one of them 
always blew the other open:  a novelty in domestic architecture, 
which I do not remember to have seen before, and which I was 
somewhat disconcerted to have forced on my attention after getting 
into bed, as I had a considerable sum in gold for our travelling 
expenses, in my dressing-case.  Some of the luggage, however, piled 
against the panels, soon settled this difficulty, and my sleep 
would not have been very much affected that night, I believe, 
though it had failed to do so.

My Boston friend climbed up to bed, somewhere in the roof, where 
another guest was already snoring hugely.  But being bitten beyond 
his power of endurance, he turned out again, and fled for shelter 
to the coach, which was airing itself in front of the house.  This 
was not a very politic step, as it turned out; for the pigs 
scenting him, and looking upon the coach as a kind of pie with some 
manner of meat inside, grunted round it so hideously, that he was 
afraid to come out again, and lay there shivering, till morning.  
Nor was it possible to warm him, when he did come out, by means of 
a glass of brandy:  for in Indian villages, the legislature, with a 
very good and wise intention, forbids the sale of spirits by tavern 
keepers.  The precaution, however, is quite inefficacious, for the 
Indians never fail to procure liquor of a worse kind, at a dearer 
price, from travelling pedlars.

It is a settlement of the Wyandot Indians who inhabit this place.  
Among the company at breakfast was a mild old gentleman, who had 
been for many years employed by the United States Government in 
conducting negotiations with the Indians, and who had just 
concluded a treaty with these people by which they bound 
themselves, in consideration of a certain annual sum, to remove 
next year to some land provided for them, west of the Mississippi, 
and a little way beyond St. Louis.  He gave me a moving account of 
their strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, 
and in particular to the burial-places of their kindred; and of 
their great reluctance to leave them.  He had witnessed many such 
removals, and always with pain, though he knew that they departed 
for their own good.  The question whether this tribe should go or 
stay, had been discussed among them a day or two before, in a hut 
erected for the purpose, the logs of which still lay upon the 
ground before the inn.  When the speaking was done, the ayes and 
noes were ranged on opposite sides, and every male adult voted in 
his turn.  The moment the result was known, the minority (a large 
one) cheerfully yielded to the rest, and withdrew all kind of 
opposition.

We met some of these poor Indians afterwards, riding on shaggy 
ponies.  They were so like the meaner sort of gipsies, that if I 
could have seen any of them in England, I should have concluded, as 
a matter of course, that they belonged to that wandering and 
restless people.

Leaving this town directly after breakfast, we pushed forward 
again, over a rather worse road than yesterday, if possible, and 
arrived about noon at Tiffin, where we parted with the extra.  At 
two o'clock we took the railroad; the travelling on which was very 
slow, its construction being indifferent, and the ground wet and 
marshy; and arrived at Sandusky in time to dine that evening.  We 
put up at a comfortable little hotel on the brink of Lake Erie, lay 
there that night, and had no choice but to wait there next day, 
until a steamboat bound for Buffalo appeared.  The town, which was 
sluggish and uninteresting enough, was something like the back of 
an English watering-place, out of the season.

Our host, who was very attentive and anxious to make us 
comfortable, was a handsome middle-aged man, who had come to this 
town from New England, in which part of the country he was 
'raised.'  When I say that he constantly walked in and out of the 
room with his hat on; and stopped to converse in the same free-and-
easy state; and lay down on our sofa, and pulled his newspaper out 
of his pocket, and read it at his ease; I merely mention these 
traits as characteristic of the country:  not at all as being 
matter of complaint, or as having been disagreeable to me.  I 
should undoubtedly be offended by such proceedings at home, because 
there they are not the custom, and where they are not, they would 
be impertinencies; but in America, the only desire of a good-
natured fellow of this kind, is to treat his guests hospitably and 
well; and I had no more right, and I can truly say no more 
disposition, to measure his conduct by our English rule and 
standard, than I had to quarrel with him for not being of the exact 
stature which would qualify him for admission into the Queen's 
grenadier guards.  As little inclination had I to find fault with a 
funny old lady who was an upper domestic in this establishment, and 
who, when she came to wait upon us at any meal, sat herself down 
comfortably in the most convenient chair, and producing a large pin 
to pick her teeth with, remained performing that ceremony, and 
steadfastly regarding us meanwhile with much gravity and composure 
(now and then pressing us to eat a little more), until it was time 
to clear away.  It was enough for us, that whatever we wished done 
was done with great civility and readiness, and a desire to oblige, 
not only here, but everywhere else; and that all our wants were, in 
general, zealously anticipated.

We were taking an early dinner at this house, on the day after our 
arrival, which was Sunday, when a steamboat came in sight, and 
presently touched at the wharf.  As she proved to be on her way to 
Buffalo, we hurried on board with all speed, and soon left Sandusky 
far behind us.

She was a large vessel of five hundred tons, and handsomely fitted 
up, though with high-pressure engines; which always conveyed that 
kind of feeling to me, which I should be likely to experience, I 
think, if I had lodgings on the first-floor of a powder-mill.  She 
was laden with flour, some casks of which commodity were stored 
upon the deck.  The captain coming up to have a little 
conversation, and to introduce a friend, seated himself astride of 
one of these barrels, like a Bacchus of private life; and pulling a 
great clasp-knife out of his pocket, began to 'whittle' it as he 
talked, by paring thin slices off the edges.  And he whittled with 
such industry and hearty good will, that but for his being called 
away very soon, it must have disappeared bodily, and left nothing 
in its place but grist and shavings.

After calling at one or two flat places, with low dams stretching 
out into the lake, whereon were stumpy lighthouses, like windmills 
without sails, the whole looking like a Dutch vignette, we came at 
midnight to Cleveland, where we lay all night, and until nine 
o'clock next morning.

I entertained quite a curiosity in reference to this place, from 
having seen at Sandusky a specimen of its literature in the shape 
of a newspaper, which was very strong indeed upon the subject of 
Lord Ashburton's recent arrival at Washington, to adjust the points 
in dispute between the United States Government and Great Britain:  
informing its readers that as America had 'whipped' England in her 
infancy, and whipped her again in her youth, so it was clearly 
necessary that she must whip her once again in her maturity; and 
pledging its credit to all True Americans, that if Mr. Webster did 
his duty in the approaching negotiations, and sent the English Lord 
home again in double quick time, they should, within two years, 
sing 'Yankee Doodle in Hyde Park, and Hail Columbia in the scarlet 
courts of Westminster!'  I found it a pretty town, and had the 
satisfaction of beholding the outside of the office of the journal 
from which I have just quoted.  I did not enjoy the delight of 
seeing the wit who indited the paragraph in question, but I have no 
doubt he is a prodigious man in his way, and held in high repute by 
a select circle.

There was a gentleman on board, to whom, as I unintentionally 
learned through the thin partition which divided our state-room 
from the cabin in which he and his wife conversed together, I was 
unwittingly the occasion of very great uneasiness.  I don't know 
why or wherefore, but I appeared to run in his mind perpetually, 
and to dissatisfy him very much.  First of all I heard him say:  
and the most ludicrous part of the business was, that he said it in 
my very ear, and could not have communicated more directly with me, 
if he had leaned upon my shoulder, and whispered me:  'Boz is on 
board still, my dear.'  After a considerable pause, he added, 
complainingly, 'Boz keeps himself very close;' which was true 
enough, for I was not very well, and was lying down, with a book.  
I thought he had done with me after this, but I was deceived; for a 
long interval having elapsed, during which I imagine him to have 
been turning restlessly from side to side, and trying to go to 
sleep; he broke out again, with 'I suppose THAT Boz will be writing 
a book by-and-by, and putting all our names in it!' at which 
imaginary consequence of being on board a boat with Boz, he 
groaned, and became silent.

We called at the town of Erie, at eight o'clock that night, and lay 
there an hour.  Between five and six next morning, we arrived at 
Buffalo, where we breakfasted; and being too near the Great Falls 
to wait patiently anywhere else, we set off by the train, the same 
morning at nine o'clock, to Niagara.

It was a miserable day; chilly and raw; a damp mist falling; and 
the trees in that northern region quite bare and wintry.  Whenever 
the train halted, I listened for the roar; and was constantly 
straining my eyes in the direction where I knew the Falls must be, 
from seeing the river rolling on towards them; every moment 
expecting to behold the spray.  Within a few minutes of our 
stopping, not before, I saw two great white clouds rising up slowly 
and majestically from the depths of the earth.  That was all.  At 
length we alighted:  and then for the first time, I heard the 
mighty rush of water, and felt the ground tremble underneath my 
feet.

The bank is very steep, and was slippery with rain, and half-melted 
ice.  I hardly know how I got down, but I was soon at the bottom, 
and climbing, with two English officers who were crossing and had 
joined me, over some broken rocks, deafened by the noise, half-
blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin.  We were at the foot of 
the American Fall.  I could see an immense torrent of water tearing 
headlong down from some great height, but had no idea of shape, or 
situation, or anything but vague immensity.

When we were seated in the little ferry-boat, and were crossing the 
swollen river immediately before both cataracts, I began to feel 
what it was:  but I was in a manner stunned, and unable to 
comprehend the vastness of the scene.  It was not until I came on 
Table Rock, and looked - Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-
green water! - that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.

Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first 
effect, and the enduring one - instant and lasting - of the 
tremendous spectacle, was Peace.  Peace of Mind, tranquillity, calm 
recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and 
Happiness:  nothing of gloom or terror.  Niagara was at once 
stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, 
changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.

Oh, how the strife and trouble of daily life receded from my view, 
and lessened in the distance, during the ten memorable days we 
passed on that Enchanted Ground!  What voices spoke from out the 
thundering water; what faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon 
me from its gleaming depths; what Heavenly promise glistened in 
those angels' tears, the drops of many hues, that showered around, 
and twined themselves about the gorgeous arches which the changing 
rainbows made!

I never stirred in all that time from the Canadian side, whither I 
had gone at first.  I never crossed the river again; for I knew 
there were people on the other shore, and in such a place it is 
natural to shun strange company.  To wander to and fro all day, and 
see the cataracts from all points of view; to stand upon the edge 
of the great Horse-Shoe Fall, marking the hurried water gathering 
strength as it approached the verge, yet seeming, too, to pause 
before it shot into the gulf below; to gaze from the river's level 
up at the torrent as it came streaming down; to climb the 
neighbouring heights and watch it through the trees, and see the 
wreathing water in the rapids hurrying on to take its fearful 
plunge; to linger in the shadow of the solemn rocks three miles 
below; watching the river as, stirred by no visible cause, it 
heaved and eddied and awoke the echoes, being troubled yet, far 
down beneath the surface, by its giant leap; to have Niagara before 
me, lighted by the sun and by the moon, red in the day's decline, 
and grey as evening slowly fell upon it; to look upon it every day, 
and wake up in the night and hear its ceaseless voice:  this was 
enough.

I think in every quiet season now, still do those waters roll and 
leap, and roar and tumble, all day long; still are the rainbows 
spanning them, a hundred feet below.  Still, when the sun is on 
them, do they shine and glow like molten gold.  Still, when the day 
is gloomy, do they fall like snow, or seem to crumble away like the 
front of a great chalk cliff, or roll down the rock like dense 
white smoke.  But always does the mighty stream appear to die as it 
comes down, and always from its unfathomable grave arises that 
tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid:  which has 
haunted this place with the same dread solemnity since Darkness 
brooded on the deep, and that first flood before the Deluge - Light 
- came rushing on Creation at the word of God.



CHAPTER XV - IN CANADA; TORONTO; KINGSTON; MONTREAL; QUEBEC; ST. 
JOHN'S.  IN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN; LEBANON; THE SHAKER VILLAGE; 
WEST POINT



I wish to abstain from instituting any comparison, or drawing any 
parallel whatever, between the social features of the United States 
and those of the British Possessions in Canada.  For this reason, I 
shall confine myself to a very brief account of our journeyings in 
the latter territory.

But before I leave Niagara, I must advert to one disgusting 
circumstance which can hardly have escaped the observation of any 
decent traveller who has visited the Falls.

On Table Rock, there is a cottage belonging to a Guide, where 
little relics of the place are sold, and where visitors register 
their names in a book kept for the purpose.  On the wall of the 
room in which a great many of these volumes are preserved, the 
following request is posted:  'Visitors will please not copy nor 
extract the remarks and poetical effusions from the registers and 
albums kept here.'

But for this intimation, I should have let them lie upon the tables 
on which they were strewn with careful negligence, like books in a 
drawing-room:  being quite satisfied with the stupendous silliness 
of certain stanzas with an anti-climax at the end of each, which 
were framed and hung up on the wall.  Curious, however, after 
reading this announcement, to see what kind of morsels were so 
carefully preserved, I turned a few leaves, and found them scrawled 
all over with the vilest and the filthiest ribaldry that ever human 
hogs delighted in.

It is humiliating enough to know that there are among men brutes so 
obscene and worthless, that they can delight in laying their 
miserable profanations upon the very steps of Nature's greatest 
altar.  But that these should be hoarded up for the delight of 
their fellow-swine, and kept in a public place where any eyes may 
see them, is a disgrace to the English language in which they are 
written (though I hope few of these entries have been made by 
Englishmen), and a reproach to the English side, on which they are 
preserved.

The quarters of our soldiers at Niagara, are finely and airily 
situated.  Some of them are large detached houses on the plain 
above the Falls, which were originally designed for hotels; and in 
the evening time, when the women and children were leaning over the 
balconies watching the men as they played at ball and other games 
upon the grass before the door, they often presented a little 
picture of cheerfulness and animation which made it quite a 
pleasure to pass that way.

At any garrisoned point where the line of demarcation between one 
country and another is so very narrow as at Niagara, desertion from 
the ranks can scarcely fail to be of frequent occurrence:  and it 
may be reasonably supposed that when the soldiers entertain the 
wildest and maddest hopes of the fortune and independence that 
await them on the other side, the impulse to play traitor, which 
such a place suggests to dishonest minds, is not weakened.  But it 
very rarely happens that the men who do desert, are happy or 
contented afterwards; and many instances have been known in which 
they have confessed their grievous disappointment, and their 
earnest desire to return to their old service if they could but be 
assured of pardon, or lenient treatment.  Many of their comrades, 
notwithstanding, do the like, from time to time; and instances of 
loss of life in the effort to cross the river with this object, are 
far from being uncommon.  Several men were drowned in the attempt 
to swim across, not long ago; and one, who had the madness to trust 
himself upon a table as a raft, was swept down to the whirlpool, 
where his mangled body eddied round and round some days.

I am inclined to think that the noise of the Falls is very much 
exaggerated; and this will appear the more probable when the depth 
of the great basin in which the water is received, is taken into 
account.  At no time during our stay there, was the wind at all 
high or boisterous, but we never heard them, three miles off, even 
at the very quiet time of sunset, though we often tried.

Queenston, at which place the steamboats start for Toronto (or I 
should rather say at which place they call, for their wharf is at 
Lewiston, on the opposite shore), is situated in a delicious 
valley, through which the Niagara river, in colour a very deep 
green, pursues its course.  It is approached by a road that takes 
its winding way among the heights by which the town is sheltered; 
and seen from this point is extremely beautiful and picturesque.  
On the most conspicuous of these heights stood a monument erected 
by the Provincial Legislature in memory of General Brock, who was 
slain in a battle with the American forces, after having won the 
victory.  Some vagabond, supposed to be a fellow of the name of 
Lett, who is now, or who lately was, in prison as a felon, blew up 
this monument two years ago, and it is now a melancholy ruin, with 
a long fragment of iron railing hanging dejectedly from its top, 
and waving to and fro like a wild ivy branch or broken vine stem.  
It is of much higher importance than it may seem, that this statue 
should be repaired at the public cost, as it ought to have been 
long ago.  Firstly, because it is beneath the dignity of England to 
allow a memorial raised in honour of one of her defenders, to 
remain in this condition, on the very spot where he died.  
Secondly, because the sight of it in its present state, and the 
recollection of the unpunished outrage which brought it to this 
pass, is not very likely to soothe down border feelings among 
English subjects here, or compose their border quarrels and 
dislikes.

I was standing on the wharf at this place, watching the passengers 
embarking in a steamboat which preceded that whose coming we 
awaited, and participating in the anxiety with which a sergeant's 
wife was collecting her few goods together - keeping one distracted 
eye hard upon the porters, who were hurrying them on board, and the 
other on a hoopless washing-tub for which, as being the most 
utterly worthless of all her movables, she seemed to entertain 
particular affection - when three or four soldiers with a recruit 
came up and went on board.

The recruit was a likely young fellow enough, strongly built and 
well made, but by no means sober:  indeed he had all the air of a 
man who had been more or less drunk for some days.  He carried a 
small bundle over his shoulder, slung at the end of a walking-
stick, and had a short pipe in his mouth.  He was as dusty and 
dirty as recruits usually are, and his shoes betokened that he had 
travelled on foot some distance, but he was in a very jocose state, 
and shook hands with this soldier, and clapped that one on the 
back, and talked and laughed continually, like a roaring idle dog 
as he was.

The soldiers rather laughed at this blade than with him:  seeming 
to say, as they stood straightening their canes in their hands, and 
looking coolly at him over their glazed stocks, 'Go on, my boy, 
while you may! you'll know better by-and-by:' when suddenly the 
novice, who had been backing towards the gangway in his noisy 
merriment, fell overboard before their eyes, and splashed heavily 
down into the river between the vessel and the dock.

I never saw such a good thing as the change that came over these 
soldiers in an instant.  Almost before the man was down, their 
professional manner, their stiffness and constraint, were gone, and 
they were filled with the most violent energy.  In less time than 
is required to tell it, they had him out again, feet first, with 
the tails of his coat flapping over his eyes, everything about him 
hanging the wrong way, and the water streaming off at every thread 
in his threadbare dress.  But the moment they set him upright and 
found that he was none the worse, they were soldiers again, looking 
over their glazed stocks more composedly than ever.

The half-sobered recruit glanced round for a moment, as if his 
first impulse were to express some gratitude for his preservation, 
but seeing them with this air of total unconcern, and having his 
wet pipe presented to him with an oath by the soldier who had been 
by far the most anxious of the party, he stuck it in his mouth, 
thrust his hands into his moist pockets, and without even shaking 
the water off his clothes, walked on board whistling; not to say as 
if nothing had happened, but as if he had meant to do it, and it 
had been a perfect success.

Our steamboat came up directly this had left the wharf, and soon 
bore us to the mouth of the Niagara; where the stars and stripes of 
America flutter on one side and the Union Jack of England on the 
other:  and so narrow is the space between them that the sentinels 
in either fort can often hear the watchword of the other country 
given.  Thence we emerged on Lake Ontario, an inland sea; and by 
half-past six o'clock were at Toronto.

The country round this town being very flat, is bare of scenic 
interest; but the town itself is full of life and motion, bustle, 
business, and improvement.  The streets are well paved, and lighted 
with gas; the houses are large and good; the shops excellent.  Many 
of them have a display of goods in their windows, such as may be 
seen in thriving county towns in England; and there are some which 
would do no discredit to the metropolis itself.  There is a good 
stone prison here; and there are, besides, a handsome church, a 
court-house, public offices, many commodious private residences, 
and a government observatory for noting and recording the magnetic 
variations.  In the College of Upper Canada, which is one of the 
public establishments of the city, a sound education in every 
department of polite learning can be had, at a very moderate 
expense:  the annual charge for the instruction of each pupil, not 
exceeding nine pounds sterling.  It has pretty good endowments in 
the way of land, and is a valuable and useful institution.

The first stone of a new college had been laid but a few days 
before, by the Governor General.  It will be a handsome, spacious 
edifice, approached by a long avenue, which is already planted and 
made available as a public walk.  The town is well adapted for 
wholesome exercise at all seasons, for the footways in the 
thoroughfares which lie beyond the principal street, are planked 
like floors, and kept in very good and clean repair.

It is a matter of deep regret that political differences should 
have run high in this place, and led to most discreditable and 
disgraceful results.  It is not long since guns were discharged 
from a window in this town at the successful candidates in an 
election, and the coachman of one of them was actually shot in the 
body, though not dangerously wounded.  But one man was killed on 
the same occasion; and from the very window whence he received his 
death, the very flag which shielded his murderer (not only in the 
commission of his crime, but from its consequences), was displayed 
again on the occasion of the public ceremony performed by the 
Governor General, to which I have just adverted.  Of all the 
colours in the rainbow, there is but one which could be so 
employed:  I need not say that flag was orange.

The time of leaving Toronto for Kingston is noon.  By eight o'clock 
next morning, the traveller is at the end of his journey, which is 
performed by steamboat upon Lake Ontario, calling at Port Hope and 
Coburg, the latter a cheerful, thriving little town.  Vast 
quantities of flour form the chief item in the freight of these 
vessels.  We had no fewer than one thousand and eighty barrels on 
board, between Coburg and Kingston.

The latter place, which is now the seat of government in Canada, is 
a very poor town, rendered still poorer in the appearance of its 
market-place by the ravages of a recent fire.  Indeed, it may be 
said of Kingston, that one half of it appears to be burnt down, and 
the other half not to be built up.  The Government House is neither 
elegant nor commodious, yet it is almost the only house of any 
importance in the neighbourhood.

There is an admirable jail here, well and wisely governed, and 
excellently regulated, in every respect.  The men were employed as 
shoemakers, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, and 
stonecutters; and in building a new prison, which was pretty far 
advanced towards completion.  The female prisoners were occupied in 
needlework.  Among them was a beautiful girl of twenty, who had 
been there nearly three years.  She acted as bearer of secret 
despatches for the self-styled Patriots on Navy Island, during the 
Canadian Insurrection:  sometimes dressing as a girl, and carrying 
them in her stays; sometimes attiring herself as a boy, and 
secreting them in the lining of her hat.  In the latter character 
she always rode as a boy would, which was nothing to her, for she 
could govern any horse that any man could ride, and could drive 
four-in-hand with the best whip in those parts.  Setting forth on 
one of her patriotic missions, she appropriated to herself the 
first horse she could lay her hands on; and this offence had 
brought her where I saw her.  She had quite a lovely face, though, 
as the reader may suppose from this sketch of her history, there 
was a lurking devil in her bright eye, which looked out pretty 
sharply from between her prison bars.

There is a bomb-proof fort here of great strength, which occupies a 
bold position, and is capable, doubtless, of doing good service; 
though the town is much too close upon the frontier to be long 
held, I should imagine, for its present purpose in troubled times.  
There is also a small navy-yard, where a couple of Government 
steamboats were building, and getting on vigorously.

We left Kingston for Montreal on the tenth of May, at half-past 
nine in the morning, and proceeded in a steamboat down the St. 
Lawrence river.  The beauty of this noble stream at almost any 
point, but especially in the commencement of this journey when it 
winds its way among the thousand Islands, can hardly be imagined.  
The number and constant successions of these islands, all green and 
richly wooded; their fluctuating sizes, some so large that for half 
an hour together one among them will appear as the opposite bank of 
the river, and some so small that they are mere dimples on its 
broad bosom; their infinite variety of shapes; and the numberless 
combinations of beautiful forms which the trees growing on them 
present:  all form a picture fraught with uncommon interest and 
pleasure.

In the afternoon we shot down some rapids where the river boiled 
and bubbled strangely, and where the force and headlong violence of 
the current were tremendous.  At seven o'clock we reached 
Dickenson's Landing, whence travellers proceed for two or three 
hours by stage-coach:  the navigation of the river being rendered 
so dangerous and difficult in the interval, by rapids, that 
steamboats do not make the passage.  The number and length of those 
PORTAGES, over which the roads are bad, and the travelling slow, 
render the way between the towns of Montreal and Kingston, somewhat 
tedious.

Our course lay over a wide, uninclosed tract of country at a little 
distance from the river-side, whence the bright warning lights on 
the dangerous parts of the St. Lawrence shone vividly.  The night 
was dark and raw, and the way dreary enough.  It was nearly ten 
o'clock when we reached the wharf where the next steamboat lay; and 
went on board, and to bed.

She lay there all night, and started as soon as it was day.  The 
morning was ushered in by a violent thunderstorm, and was very wet, 
but gradually improved and brightened up.  Going on deck after 
breakfast, I was amazed to see floating down with the stream, a 
most gigantic raft, with some thirty or forty wooden houses upon 
it, and at least as many flag-masts, so that it looked like a 
nautical street.  I saw many of these rafts afterwards, but never 
one so large.  All the timber, or 'lumber,' as it is called in 
America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in 
this manner.  When the raft reaches its place of destination, it is 
broken up; the materials are sold; and the boatmen return for more.

At eight we landed again, and travelled by a stage-coach for four 
hours through a pleasant and well-cultivated country, perfectly 
French in every respect:  in the appearance of the cottages; the 
air, language, and dress of the peasantry; the sign-boards on the 
shops and taverns:  and the Virgin's shrines, and crosses, by the 
wayside.  Nearly every common labourer and boy, though he had no 
shoes to his feet, wore round his waist a sash of some bright 
colour:  generally red:  and the women, who were working in the 
fields and gardens, and doing all kinds of husbandry, wore, one and 
all, great flat straw hats with most capacious brims.  There were 
Catholic Priests and Sisters of Charity in the village streets; and 
images of the Saviour at the corners of cross-roads, and in other 
public places.

At noon we went on board another steamboat, and reached the village 
of Lachine, nine miles from Montreal, by three o'clock.  There, we 
left the river, and went on by land.

Montreal is pleasantly situated on the margin of the St. Lawrence, 
and is backed by some bold heights, about which there are charming 
rides and drives.  The streets are generally narrow and irregular, 
as in most French towns of any age; but in the more modern parts of 
the city, they are wide and airy.  They display a great variety of 
very good shops; and both in the town and suburbs there are many 
excellent private dwellings.  The granite quays are remarkable for 
their beauty, solidity, and extent.

There is a very large Catholic cathedral here, recently erected 
with two tall spires, of which one is yet unfinished.  In the open 
space in front of this edifice, stands a solitary, grim-looking, 
square brick tower, which has a quaint and remarkable appearance, 
and which the wiseacres of the place have consequently determined 
to pull down immediately.  The Government House is very superior to 
that at Kingston, and the town is full of life and bustle.  In one 
of the suburbs is a plank road - not footpath - five or six miles 
long, and a famous road it is too.  All the rides in the vicinity 
were made doubly interesting by the bursting out of spring, which 
is here so rapid, that it is but a day's leap from barren winter, 
to the blooming youth of summer.

The steamboats to Quebec perform the journey in the night; that is 
to say, they leave Montreal at six in the evening, and arrive at 
Quebec at six next morning.  We made this excursion during our stay 
in Montreal (which exceeded a fortnight), and were charmed by its 
interest and beauty.

The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America:  
its giddy heights; its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air; 
its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the 
splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn:  is at once 
unique and lasting.

It is a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with 
other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a 
traveller can recall.  Apart from the realities of this most 
picturesque city, there are associations clustering about it which 
would make a desert rich in interest.  The dangerous precipice 
along whose rocky front, Wolfe and his brave companions climbed to 
glory; the Plains of Abraham, where he received his mortal wound; 
the fortress so chivalrously defended by Montcalm; and his 
soldier's grave, dug for him while yet alive, by the bursting of a 
shell; are not the least among them, or among the gallant incidents 
of history.  That is a noble Monument too, and worthy of two great 
nations, which perpetuates the memory of both brave generals, and 
on which their names are jointly written.

The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches 
and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of 
the Old Government House, and from the Citadel, that its surpassing 
beauty lies.  The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and 
forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before 
the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white 
streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of 
gables, roofs, and chimney tops in the old hilly town immediately 
at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the 
sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, 
whose distant rigging looks like spiders' webs against the light, 
while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy 
mariners become so many puppets; all this, framed by a sunken 
window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within, 
forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures that the 
eye can rest upon.

In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly 
arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and 
Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of 
Canada.  If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it) 
to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them 
grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and 
boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger 
on one of these steamboats, and mingling with the concourse, see 
and hear them unobserved.

The vessel in which we returned from Quebec to Montreal was crowded 
with them, and at night they spread their beds between decks (those 
who had beds, at least), and slept so close and thick about our 
cabin door, that the passage to and fro was quite blocked up.  They 
were nearly all English; from Gloucestershire the greater part; and 
had had a long winter-passage out; but it was wonderful to see how 
clean the children had been kept, and how untiring in their love 
and self-denial all the poor parents were.

Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is 
very much harder for the poor to be virtuous than it is for the 
rich; and the good that is in them, shines the brighter for it.  In 
many a noble mansion lives a man, the best of husbands and of 
fathers, whose private worth in both capacities is justly lauded to 
the skies.  But bring him here, upon this crowded deck.  Strip from 
his fair young wife her silken dress and jewels, unbind her braided 
hair, stamp early wrinkles on her brow, pinch her pale cheek with 
care and much privation, array her faded form in coarsely patched 
attire, let there be nothing but his love to set her forth or deck 
her out, and you shall put it to the proof indeed.  So change his 
station in the world, that he shall see in those young things who 
climb about his knee:  not records of his wealth and name:  but 
little wrestlers with him for his daily bread; so many poachers on 
his scanty meal; so many units to divide his every sum of comfort, 
and farther to reduce its small amount.  In lieu of the endearments 
of childhood in its sweetest aspect, heap upon him all its pains 
and wants, its sicknesses and ills, its fretfulness, caprice, and 
querulous endurance:  let its prattle be, not of engaging infant 
fancies, but of cold, and thirst, and hunger:  and if his fatherly 
affection outlive all this, and he be patient, watchful, tender; 
careful of his children's lives, and mindful always of their joys 
and sorrows; then send him back to Parliament, and Pulpit, and to 
Quarter Sessions, and when he hears fine talk of the depravity of 
those who live from hand to mouth, and labour hard to do it, let 
him speak up, as one who knows, and tell those holders forth that 
they, by parallel with such a class, should be High Angels in their 
daily lives, and lay but humble siege to Heaven at last.

Which of us shall say what he would be, if such realities, with 
small relief or change all through his days, were his!  Looking 
round upon these people:  far from home, houseless, indigent, 
wandering, weary with travel and hard living:  and seeing how 
patiently they nursed and tended their young children:  how they 
consulted ever their wants first, then half supplied their own; 
what gentle ministers of hope and faith the women were; how the men 
profited by their example; and how very, very seldom even a 
moment's petulance or harsh complaint broke out among them:  I felt 
a stronger love and honour of my kind come glowing on my heart, and 
wished to God there had been many Atheists in the better part of 
human nature there, to read this simple lesson in the book of Life.

* * * * * *

We left Montreal for New York again, on the thirtieth of May, 
crossing to La Prairie, on the opposite shore of the St. Lawrence, 
in a steamboat; we then took the railroad to St. John's, which is 
on the brink of Lake Champlain.  Our last greeting in Canada was 
from the English officers in the pleasant barracks at that place (a 
class of gentlemen who had made every hour of our visit memorable 
by their hospitality and friendship); and with 'Rule Britannia' 
sounding in our ears, soon left it far behind.

But Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my 
remembrance.  Few Englishmen are prepared to find it what it is.  
Advancing quietly; old differences settling down, and being fast 
forgotten; public feeling and private enterprise alike in a sound 
and wholesome state; nothing of flush or fever in its system, but 
health and vigour throbbing in its steady pulse:  it is full of 
hope and promise.  To me - who had been accustomed to think of it 
as something left behind in the strides of advancing society, as 
something neglected and forgotten, slumbering and wasting in its 
sleep - the demand for labour and the rates of wages; the busy 
quays of Montreal; the vessels taking in their cargoes, and 
discharging them; the amount of shipping in the different ports; 
the commerce, roads, and public works, all made TO LAST; the 
respectability and character of the public journals; and the amount 
of rational comfort and happiness which honest industry may earn:  
were very great surprises.  The steamboats on the lakes, in their 
conveniences, cleanliness, and safety; in the gentlemanly character 
and bearing of their captains; and in the politeness and perfect 
comfort of their social regulations; are unsurpassed even by the 
famous Scotch vessels, deservedly so much esteemed at home.  The 
inns are usually bad; because the custom of boarding at hotels is 
not so general here as in the States, and the British officers, who 
form a large portion of the society of every town, live chiefly at 
the regimental messes:  but in every other respect, the traveller 
in Canada will find as good provision for his comfort as in any 
place I know.

There is one American boat - the vessel which carried us on Lake 
Champlain, from St. John's to Whitehall - which I praise very 
highly, but no more than it deserves, when I say that it is 
superior even to that in which we went from Queenston to Toronto, 
or to that in which we travelled from the latter place to Kingston, 
or I have no doubt I may add to any other in the world.  This 
steamboat, which is called the Burlington, is a perfectly exquisite 
achievement of neatness, elegance, and order.  The decks are 
drawing-rooms; the cabins are boudoirs, choicely furnished and 
adorned with prints, pictures, and musical instruments; every nook 
and corner in the vessel is a perfect curiosity of graceful comfort 
and beautiful contrivance.  Captain Sherman, her commander, to 
whose ingenuity and excellent taste these results are solely 
attributable, has bravely and worthily distinguished himself on 
more than one trying occasion:  not least among them, in having the 
moral courage to carry British troops, at a time (during the 
Canadian rebellion) when no other conveyance was open to them.  He 
and his vessel are held in universal respect, both by his own 
countrymen and ours; and no man ever enjoyed the popular esteem, 
who, in his sphere of action, won and wore it better than this 
gentleman.

By means of this floating palace we were soon in the United States 
again, and called that evening at Burlington; a pretty town, where 
we lay an hour or so.  We reached Whitehall, where we were to 
disembark, at six next morning; and might have done so earlier, but 
that these steamboats lie by for some hours in the night, in 
consequence of the lake becoming very narrow at that part of the 
journey, and difficult of navigation in the dark.  Its width is so 
contracted at one point, indeed, that they are obliged to warp 
round by means of a rope.

After breakfasting at Whitehall, we took the stage-coach for 
Albany:  a large and busy town, where we arrived between five and 
six o'clock that afternoon; after a very hot day's journey, for we 
were now in the height of summer again.  At seven we started for 
New York on board a great North River steamboat, which was so 
crowded with passengers that the upper deck was like the box lobby 
of a theatre between the pieces, and the lower one like Tottenham 
Court Road on a Saturday night.  But we slept soundly, 
notwithstanding, and soon after five o'clock next morning reached 
New York.

Tarrying here, only that day and night, to recruit after our late 
fatigues, we started off once more upon our last journey in 
America.  We had yet five days to spare before embarking for 
England, and I had a great desire to see 'the Shaker Village,' 
which is peopled by a religious sect from whom it takes its name.

To this end, we went up the North River again, as far as the town 
of Hudson, and there hired an extra to carry us to Lebanon, thirty 
miles distant:  and of course another and a different Lebanon from 
that village where I slept on the night of the Prairie trip.

The country through which the road meandered, was rich and 
beautiful; the weather very fine; and for many miles the Kaatskill 
mountains, where Rip Van Winkle and the ghostly Dutchmen played at 
ninepins one memorable gusty afternoon, towered in the blue 
distance, like stately clouds.  At one point, as we ascended a 
steep hill, athwart whose base a railroad, yet constructing, took 
its course, we came upon an Irish colony.  With means at hand of 
building decent cabins, it was wonderful to see how clumsy, rough, 
and wretched, its hovels were.  The best were poor protection from 
the weather the worst let in the wind and rain through wide 
breaches in the roofs of sodden grass, and in the walls of mud; 
some had neither door nor window; some had nearly fallen down, and 
were imperfectly propped up by stakes and poles; all were ruinous 
and filthy.  Hideously ugly old women and very buxom young ones, 
pigs, dogs, men, children, babies, pots, kettles, dung-hills, vile 
refuse, rank straw, and standing water, all wallowing together in 
an inseparable heap, composed the furniture of every dark and dirty 
hut.

Between nine and ten o'clock at night, we arrived at Lebanon which 
is renowned for its warm baths, and for a great hotel, well 
adapted, I have no doubt, to the gregarious taste of those seekers 
after health or pleasure who repair here, but inexpressibly 
comfortless to me.  We were shown into an immense apartment, 
lighted by two dim candles, called the drawing-room:  from which 
there was a descent by a flight of steps, to another vast desert, 
called the dining-room:  our bed-chambers were among certain long 
rows of little white-washed cells, which opened from either side of 
a dreary passage; and were so like rooms in a prison that I half 
expected to be locked up when I went to bed, and listened 
involuntarily for the turning of the key on the outside.  There 
need be baths somewhere in the neighbourhood, for the other washing 
arrangements were on as limited a scale as I ever saw, even in 
America:  indeed, these bedrooms were so very bare of even such 
common luxuries as chairs, that I should say they were not provided 
with enough of anything, but that I bethink myself of our having 
been most bountifully bitten all night.

The house is very pleasantly situated, however, and we had a good 
breakfast.  That done, we went to visit our place of destination, 
which was some two miles off, and the way to which was soon 
indicated by a finger-post, whereon was painted, 'To the Shaker 
Village.'

As we rode along, we passed a party of Shakers, who were at work 
upon the road; who wore the broadest of all broad-brimmed hats; and 
were in all visible respects such very wooden men, that I felt 
about as much sympathy for them, and as much interest in them, as 
if they had been so many figure-heads of ships.  Presently we came 
to the beginning of the village, and alighting at the door of a 
house where the Shaker manufactures are sold, and which is the 
headquarters of the elders, requested permission to see the Shaker 
worship.

Pending the conveyance of this request to some person in authority, 
we walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on 
grim pegs, and the time was grimly told by a grim clock which 
uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if it broke the grim 
silence reluctantly, and under protest.  Ranged against the wall 
were six or eight stiff, high-backed chairs, and they partook so 
strongly of the general grimness that one would much rather have 
sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to any of 
them.

Presently, there stalked into this apartment, a grim old Shaker, 
with eyes as hard, and dull, and cold, as the great round metal 
buttons on his coat and waistcoat; a sort of calm goblin.  Being 
informed of our desire, he produced a newspaper wherein the body of 
elders, whereof he was a member, had advertised but a few days 
before, that in consequence of certain unseemly interruptions which 
their worship had received from strangers, their chapel was closed 
to the public for the space of one year.

As nothing was to be urged in opposition to this reasonable 
arrangement, we requested leave to make some trifling purchases of 
Shaker goods; which was grimly conceded.  We accordingly repaired 
to a store in the same house and on the opposite side of the 
passage, where the stock was presided over by something alive in a 
russet case, which the elder said was a woman; and which I suppose 
WAS a woman, though I should not have suspected it.

On the opposite side of the road was their place of worship:  a 
cool, clean edifice of wood, with large windows and green blinds:  
like a spacious summer-house.  As there was no getting into this 
place, and nothing was to be done but walk up and down, and look at 
it and the other buildings in the village (which were chiefly of 
wood, painted a dark red like English barns, and composed of many 
stories like English factories), I have nothing to communicate to 
the reader, beyond the scanty results I gleaned the while our 
purchases were making,

These people are called Shakers from their peculiar form of 
adoration, which consists of a dance, performed by the men and 
women of all ages, who arrange themselves for that purpose in 
opposite parties:  the men first divesting themselves of their hats 
and coats, which they gravely hang against the wall before they 
begin; and tying a ribbon round their shirt-sleeves, as though they 
were going to be bled.  They accompany themselves with a droning, 
humming noise, and dance until they are quite exhausted, 
alternately advancing and retiring in a preposterous sort of trot.  
The effect is said to be unspeakably absurd:  and if I may judge 
from a print of this ceremony which I have in my possession; and 
which I am informed by those who have visited the chapel, is 
perfectly accurate; it must be infinitely grotesque.

They are governed by a woman, and her rule is understood to be 
absolute, though she has the assistance of a council of elders.  
She lives, it is said, in strict seclusion, in certain rooms above 
the chapel, and is never shown to profane eyes.  If she at all 
resemble the lady who presided over the store, it is a great 
charity to keep her as close as possible, and I cannot too strongly 
express my perfect concurrence in this benevolent proceeding.

All the possessions and revenues of the settlement are thrown into 
a common stock, which is managed by the elders.  As they have made 
converts among people who were well to do in the world, and are 
frugal and thrifty, it is understood that this fund prospers:  the 
more especially as they have made large purchases of land.  Nor is 
this at Lebanon the only Shaker settlement:  there are, I think, at 
least, three others.

They are good farmers, and all their produce is eagerly purchased 
and highly esteemed.  'Shaker seeds,' 'Shaker herbs,' and 'Shaker 
distilled waters,' are commonly announced for sale in the shops of 
towns and cities.  They are good breeders of cattle, and are kind 
and merciful to the brute creation.  Consequently, Shaker beasts 
seldom fail to find a ready market.

They eat and drink together, after the Spartan model, at a great 
public table.  There is no union of the sexes, and every Shaker, 
male and female, is devoted to a life of celibacy.  Rumour has been 
busy upon this theme, but here again I must refer to the lady of 
the store, and say, that if many of the sister Shakers resemble 
her, I treat all such slander as bearing on its face the strongest 
marks of wild improbability.  But that they take as proselytes, 
persons so young that they cannot know their own minds, and cannot 
possess much strength of resolution in this or any other respect, I 
can assert from my own observation of the extreme juvenility of 
certain youthful Shakers whom I saw at work among the party on the 
road.

They are said to be good drivers of bargains, but to be honest and 
just in their transactions, and even in horse-dealing to resist 
those thievish tendencies which would seem, for some undiscovered 
reason, to be almost inseparable from that branch of traffic.  In 
all matters they hold their own course quietly, live in their 
gloomy, silent commonwealth, and show little desire to interfere 
with other people.

This is well enough, but nevertheless I cannot, I confess, incline 
towards the Shakers; view them with much favour, or extend towards 
them any very lenient construction.  I so abhor, and from my soul 
detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be 
entertained, which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob 
youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their 
pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards 
the grave:  that odious spirit which, if it could have had full 
scope and sway upon the earth, must have blasted and made barren 
the imaginations of the greatest men, and left them, in their power 
of raising up enduring images before their fellow-creatures yet 
unborn, no better than the beasts:  that, in these very broad-
brimmed hats and very sombre coats - in stiff-necked, solemn-
visaged piety, in short, no matter what its garb, whether it have 
cropped hair as in a Shaker village, or long nails as in a Hindoo 
temple - I recognise the worst among the enemies of Heaven and 
Earth, who turn the water at the marriage feasts of this poor 
world, not into wine, but gall.  And if there must be people vowed 
to crush the harmless fancies and the love of innocent delights and 
gaieties, which are a part of human nature:  as much a part of it 
as any other love or hope that is our common portion:  let them, 
for me, stand openly revealed among the ribald and licentious; the 
very idiots know that THEY are not on the Immortal road, and will 
despise them, and avoid them readily.

Leaving the Shaker village with a hearty dislike of the old 
Shakers, and a hearty pity for the young ones:  tempered by the 
strong probability of their running away as they grow older and 
wiser, which they not uncommonly do:  we returned to Lebanon, and 
so to Hudson, by the way we had come upon the previous day.  There, 
we took the steamboat down the North River towards New York, but 
stopped, some four hours' journey short of it, at West Point, where 
we remained that night, and all next day, and next night too.

In this beautiful place:  the fairest among the fair and lovely 
Highlands of the North River:  shut in by deep green heights and 
ruined forts, and looking down upon the distant town of Newburgh, 
along a glittering path of sunlit water, with here and there a 
skiff, whose white sail often bends on some new tack as sudden 
flaws of wind come down upon her from the gullies in the hills:  
hemmed in, besides, all round with memories of Washington, and 
events of the revolutionary war:  is the Military School of 
America.

It could not stand on more appropriate ground, and any ground more 
beautiful can hardly be.  The course of education is severe, but 
well devised, and manly.  Through June, July, and August, the young 
men encamp upon the spacious plain whereon the college stands; and 
all the year their military exercises are performed there, daily.  
The term of study at this institution, which the State requires 
from all cadets, is four years; but, whether it be from the rigid 
nature of the discipline, or the national impatience of restraint, 
or both causes combined, not more than half the number who begin 
their studies here, ever remain to finish them.

The number of cadets being about equal to that of the members of 
Congress, one is sent here from every Congressional district:  its 
member influencing the selection.  Commissions in the service are 
distributed on the same principle.  The dwellings of the various 
Professors are beautifully situated; and there is a most excellent 
hotel for strangers, though it has the two drawbacks of being a 
total abstinence house (wines and spirits being forbidden to the 
students), and of serving the public meals at rather uncomfortable 
hours:  to wit, breakfast at seven, dinner at one, and supper at 
sunset.

The beauty and freshness of this calm retreat, in the very dawn and 
greenness of summer - it was then the beginning of June - were 
exquisite indeed.  Leaving it upon the sixth, and returning to New 
York, to embark for England on the succeeding day, I was glad to 
think that among the last memorable beauties which had glided past 
us, and softened in the bright perspective, were those whose 
pictures, traced by no common hand, are fresh in most men's minds; 
not easily to grow old, or fade beneath the dust of Time:  the 
Kaatskill Mountains, Sleepy Hollow, and the Tappaan Zee.



CHAPTER XVI - THE PASSAGE HOME



I NEVER had so much interest before, and very likely I shall never 
have so much interest again, in the state of the wind, as on the 
long-looked-for morning of Tuesday the Seventh of June.  Some 
nautical authority had told me a day or two previous, 'anything 
with west in it, will do;' so when I darted out of bed at daylight, 
and throwing up the window, was saluted by a lively breeze from the 
north-west which had sprung up in the night, it came upon me so 
freshly, rustling with so many happy associations, that I conceived 
upon the spot a special regard for all airs blowing from that 
quarter of the compass, which I shall cherish, I dare say, until my 
own wind has breathed its last frail puff, and withdrawn itself for 
ever from the mortal calendar.

The pilot had not been slow to take advantage of this favourable 
weather, and the ship which yesterday had been in such a crowded 
dock that she might have retired from trade for good and all, for 
any chance she seemed to have of going to sea, was now full sixteen 
miles away.  A gallant sight she was, when we, fast gaining on her 
in a steamboat, saw her in the distance riding at anchor:  her tall 
masts pointing up in graceful lines against the sky, and every rope 
and spar expressed in delicate and thread-like outline:  gallant, 
too, when, we being all aboard, the anchor came up to the sturdy 
chorus 'Cheerily men, oh cheerily!' and she followed proudly in the 
towing steamboat's wake:  but bravest and most gallant of all, when 
the tow-rope being cast adrift, the canvas fluttered from her 
masts, and spreading her white wings she soared away upon her free 
and solitary course.

In the after cabin we were only fifteen passengers in all, and the 
greater part were from Canada, where some of us had known each 
other.  The night was rough and squally, so were the next two days, 
but they flew by quickly, and we were soon as cheerful and snug a 
party, with an honest, manly-hearted captain at our head, as ever 
came to the resolution of being mutually agreeable, on land or 
water.

We breakfasted at eight, lunched at twelve, dined at three, and 
took our tea at half-past seven.  We had abundance of amusements, 
and dinner was not the least among them:  firstly, for its own 
sake; secondly, because of its extraordinary length:  its duration, 
inclusive of all the long pauses between the courses, being seldom 
less than two hours and a half; which was a subject of never-
failing entertainment.  By way of beguiling the tediousness of 
these banquets, a select association was formed at the lower end of 
the table, below the mast, to whose distinguished president modesty 
forbids me to make any further allusion, which, being a very 
hilarious and jovial institution, was (prejudice apart) in high 
favour with the rest of the community, and particularly with a 
black steward, who lived for three weeks in a broad grin at the 
marvellous humour of these incorporated worthies.

Then, we had chess for those who played it, whist, cribbage, books, 
backgammon, and shovelboard.  In all weathers, fair or foul, calm 
or windy, we were every one on deck, walking up and down in pairs, 
lying in the boats, leaning over the side, or chatting in a lazy 
group together.  We had no lack of music, for one played the 
accordion, another the violin, and another (who usually began at 
six o'clock A.M.) the key-bugle:  the combined effect of which 
instruments, when they all played different tunes in differents 
parts of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of each 
other, as they sometimes did (everybody being intensely satisfied 
with his own performance), was sublimely hideous.

When all these means of entertainment failed, a sail would heave in 
sight:  looming, perhaps, the very spirit of a ship, in the misty 
distance, or passing us so close that through our glasses we could 
see the people on her decks, and easily make out her name, and 
whither she was bound.  For hours together we could watch the 
dolphins and porpoises as they rolled and leaped and dived around 
the vessel; or those small creatures ever on the wing, the Mother 
Carey's chickens, which had borne us company from New York bay, and 
for a whole fortnight fluttered about the vessel's stern.  For some 
days we had a dead calm, or very light winds, during which the crew 
amused themselves with fishing, and hooked an unlucky dolphin, who 
expired, in all his rainbow colours, on the deck:  an event of such 
importance in our barren calendar, that afterwards we dated from 
the dolphin, and made the day on which he died, an era.

Besides all this, when we were five or six days out, there began to 
be much talk of icebergs, of which wandering islands an unusual 
number had been seen by the vessels that had come into New York a 
day or two before we left that port, and of whose dangerous 
neighbourhood we were warned by the sudden coldness of the weather, 
and the sinking of the mercury in the barometer.  While these 
tokens lasted, a double look-out was kept, and many dismal tales 
were whispered after dark, of ships that had struck upon the ice 
and gone down in the night; but the wind obliging us to hold a 
southward course, we saw none of them, and the weather soon grew 
bright and warm again.

The observation every day at noon, and the subsequent working of 
the vessel's course, was, as may be supposed, a feature in our 
lives of paramount importance; nor were there wanting (as there 
never are) sagacious doubters of the captain's calculations, who, 
so soon as his back was turned, would, in the absence of compasses, 
measure the chart with bits of string, and ends of pocket-
handkerchiefs, and points of snuffers, and clearly prove him to be 
wrong by an odd thousand miles or so.  It was very edifying to see 
these unbelievers shake their heads and frown, and hear them hold 
forth strongly upon navigation:  not that they knew anything about 
it, but that they always mistrusted the captain in calm weather, or 
when the wind was adverse.  Indeed, the mercury itself is not so 
variable as this class of passengers, whom you will see, when the 
ship is going nobly through the water, quite pale with admiration, 
swearing that the captain beats all captains ever known, and even 
hinting at subscriptions for a piece of plate; and who, next 
morning, when the breeze has lulled, and all the sails hang useless 
in the idle air, shake their despondent heads again, and say, with 
screwed-up lips, they hope that captain is a sailor - but they 
shrewdly doubt him.

It even became an occupation in the calm, to wonder when the wind 
WOULD spring up in the favourable quarter, where, it was clearly 
shown by all the rules and precedents, it ought to have sprung up 
long ago.  The first mate, who whistled for it zealously, was much 
respected for his perseverance, and was regarded even by the 
unbelievers as a first-rate sailor.  Many gloomy looks would be 
cast upward through the cabin skylights at the flapping sails while 
dinner was in progress; and some, growing bold in ruefulness, 
predicted that we should land about the middle of July.  There are 
always on board ship, a Sanguine One, and a Despondent One.  The 
latter character carried it hollow at this period of the voyage, 
and triumphed over the Sanguine One at every meal, by inquiring 
where he supposed the Great Western (which left New York a week 
after us) was NOW:  and where he supposed the 'Cunard' steam-packet 
was NOW:  and what he thought of sailing vessels, as compared with 
steamships NOW:  and so beset his life with pestilent attacks of 
that kind, that he too was obliged to affect despondency, for very 
peace and quietude.

These were additions to the list of entertaining incidents, but 
there was still another source of interest.  We carried in the 
steerage nearly a hundred passengers:  a little world of poverty:  
and as we came to know individuals among them by sight, from 
looking down upon the deck where they took the air in the daytime, 
and cooked their food, and very often ate it too, we became curious 
to know their histories, and with what expectations they had gone 
out to America, and on what errands they were going home, and what 
their circumstances were.  The information we got on these heads 
from the carpenter, who had charge of these people, was often of 
the strangest kind.  Some of them had been in America but three 
days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last 
voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home.  
Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had 
hardly rags to cover them; others had no food, and lived upon the 
charity of the rest:  and one man, it was discovered nearly at the 
end of the voyage, not before - for he kept his secret close, and 
did not court compassion - had had no sustenance whatever but the 
bones and scraps of fat he took from the plates used in the after-
cabin dinner, when they were put out to be washed.

The whole system of shipping and conveying these unfortunate 
persons, is one that stands in need of thorough revision.  If any 
class deserve to be protected and assisted by the Government, it is 
that class who are banished from their native land in search of the 
bare means of subsistence.  All that could be done for these poor 
people by the great compassion and humanity of the captain and 
officers was done, but they require much more.  The law is bound, 
at least upon the English side, to see that too many of them are 
not put on board one ship:  and that their accommodations are 
decent:  not demoralising, and profligate.  It is bound, too, in 
common humanity, to declare that no man shall be taken on board 
without his stock of provisions being previously inspected by some 
proper officer, and pronounced moderately sufficient for his 
support upon the voyage.  It is bound to provide, or to require 
that there be provided, a medical attendant; whereas in these ships 
there are none, though sickness of adults, and deaths of children, 
on the passage, are matters of the very commonest occurrence.  
Above all it is the duty of any Government, be it monarchy or 
republic, to interpose and put an end to that system by which a 
firm of traders in emigrants purchase of the owners the whole 
'tween-decks of a ship, and send on board as many wretched people 
as they can lay hold of, on any terms they can get, without the 
smallest reference to the conveniences of the steerage, the number 
of berths, the slightest separation of the sexes, or anything but 
their own immediate profit.  Nor is even this the worst of the 
vicious system:  for, certain crimping agents of these houses, who 
have a percentage on all the passengers they inveigle, are 
constantly travelling about those districts where poverty and 
discontent are rife, and tempting the credulous into more misery, 
by holding out monstrous inducements to emigration which can never 
be realised.

The history of every family we had on board was pretty much the 
same.  After hoarding up, and borrowing, and begging, and selling 
everything to pay the passage, they had gone out to New York, 
expecting to find its streets paved with gold; and had found them 
paved with very hard and very real stones.  Enterprise was dull; 
labourers were not wanted; jobs of work were to be got, but the 
payment was not.  They were coming back, even poorer than they 
went.  One of them was carrying an open letter from a young English 
artisan, who had been in New York a fortnight, to a friend near 
Manchester, whom he strongly urged to follow him.  One of the 
officers brought it to me as a curiosity.  'This is the country, 
Jem,' said the writer.  'I like America.  There is no despotism 
here; that's the great thing.  Employment of all sorts is going a-
begging, and wages are capital.  You have only to choose a trade, 
Jem, and be it.  I haven't made choice of one yet, but I shall 
soon.  AT PRESENT I HAVEN'T QUITE MADE UP MY MIND WHETHER TO BE A 
CARPENTER - OR A TAILOR.'

There was yet another kind of passenger, and but one more, who, in 
the calm and the light winds, was a constant theme of conversation 
and observation among us.  This was an English sailor, a smart, 
thorough-built, English man-of-war's-man from his hat to his shoes, 
who was serving in the American navy, and having got leave of 
absence was on his way home to see his friends.  When he presented 
himself to take and pay for his passage, it had been suggested to 
him that being an able seaman he might as well work it and save the 
money, but this piece of advice he very indignantly rejected:  
saying, 'He'd be damned but for once he'd go aboard ship, as a 
gentleman.'  Accordingly, they took his money, but he no sooner 
came aboard, than he stowed his kit in the forecastle, arranged to 
mess with the crew, and the very first time the hands were turned 
up, went aloft like a cat, before anybody.  And all through the 
passage there he was, first at the braces, outermost on the yards, 
perpetually lending a hand everywhere, but always with a sober 
dignity in his manner, and a sober grin on his face, which plainly 
said, 'I do it as a gentleman.  For my own pleasure, mind you!'

At length and at last, the promised wind came up in right good 
earnest, and away we went before it, with every stitch of canvas 
set, slashing through the water nobly.  There was a grandeur in the 
motion of the splendid ship, as overshadowed by her mass of sails, 
she rode at a furious pace upon the waves, which filled one with an 
indescribable sense of pride and exultation.  As she plunged into a 
foaming valley, how I loved to see the green waves, bordered deep 
with white, come rushing on astern, to buoy her upward at their 
pleasure, and curl about her as she stooped again, but always own 
her for their haughty mistress still!  On, on we flew, with 
changing lights upon the water, being now in the blessed region of 
fleecy skies; a bright sun lighting us by day, and a bright moon by 
night; the vane pointing directly homeward, alike the truthful 
index to the favouring wind and to our cheerful hearts; until at 
sunrise, one fair Monday morning - the twenty-seventh of June, I 
shall not easily forget the day - there lay before us, old Cape 
Clear, God bless it, showing, in the mist of early morning, like a 
cloud:  the brightest and most welcome cloud, to us, that ever hid 
the face of Heaven's fallen sister - Home.

Dim speck as it was in the wide prospect, it made the sunrise a 
more cheerful sight, and gave to it that sort of human interest 
which it seems to want at sea.  There, as elsewhere, the return of 
day is inseparable from some sense of renewed hope and gladness; 
but the light shining on the dreary waste of water, and showing it 
in all its vast extent of loneliness, presents a solemn spectacle, 
which even night, veiling it in darkness and uncertainty, does not 
surpass.  The rising of the moon is more in keeping with the 
solitary ocean; and has an air of melancholy grandeur, which in its 
soft and gentle influence, seems to comfort while it saddens.  I 
recollect when I was a very young child having a fancy that the 
reflection of the moon in water was a path to Heaven, trodden by 
the spirits of good people on their way to God; and this old 
feeling often came over me again, when I watched it on a tranquil 
night at sea.

The wind was very light on this same Monday morning, but it was 
still in the right quarter, and so, by slow degrees, we left Cape 
Clear behind, and sailed along within sight of the coast of 
Ireland.  And how merry we all were, and how loyal to the George 
Washington, and how full of mutual congratulations, and how 
venturesome in predicting the exact hour at which we should arrive 
at Liverpool, may be easily imagined and readily understood.  Also, 
how heartily we drank the captain's health that day at dinner; and 
how restless we became about packing up:  and how two or three of 
the most sanguine spirits rejected the idea of going to bed at all 
that night as something it was not worth while to do, so near the 
shore, but went nevertheless, and slept soundly; and how to be so 
near our journey's end, was like a pleasant dream, from which one 
feared to wake.

The friendly breeze freshened again next day, and on we went once 
more before it gallantly:  descrying now and then an English ship 
going homeward under shortened sail, while we, with every inch of 
canvas crowded on, dashed gaily past, and left her far behind.  
Towards evening, the weather turned hazy, with a drizzling rain; 
and soon became so thick, that we sailed, as it were, in a cloud.  
Still we swept onward like a phantom ship, and many an eager eye 
glanced up to where the Look-out on the mast kept watch for 
Holyhead.

At length his long-expected cry was heard, and at the same moment 
there shone out from the haze and mist ahead, a gleaming light, 
which presently was gone, and soon returned, and soon was gone 
again.  Whenever it came back, the eyes of all on board, brightened 
and sparkled like itself:  and there we all stood, watching this 
revolving light upon the rock at Holyhead, and praising it for its 
brightness and its friendly warning, and lauding it, in short, 
above all other signal lights that ever were displayed, until it 
once more glimmered faintly in the distance, far behind us.

Then, it was time to fire a gun, for a pilot; and almost before its 
smoke had cleared away, a little boat with a light at her masthead 
came bearing down upon us, through the darkness, swiftly.  And 
presently, our sails being backed, she ran alongside; and the 
hoarse pilot, wrapped and muffled in pea-coats and shawls to the 
very bridge of his weather-ploughed-up nose, stood bodily among us 
on the deck.  And I think if that pilot had wanted to borrow fifty 
pounds for an indefinite period on no security, we should have 
engaged to lend it to him, among us, before his boat had dropped 
astern, or (which is the same thing) before every scrap of news in 
the paper he brought with him had become the common property of all 
on board.

We turned in pretty late that night, and turned out pretty early 
next morning.  By six o'clock we clustered on the deck, prepared to 
go ashore; and looked upon the spires, and roofs, and smoke, of 
Liverpool.  By eight we all sat down in one of its Hotels, to eat 
and drink together for the last time.  And by nine we had shaken 
hands all round, and broken up our social company for ever.

The country, by the railroad, seemed, as we rattled through it, 
like a luxuriant garden.  The beauty of the fields (so small they 
looked!), the hedge-rows, and the trees; the pretty cottages, the 
beds of flowers, the old churchyards, the antique houses, and every 
well-known object; the exquisite delights of that one journey, 
crowding in the short compass of a summer's day, the joy of many 
years, with the winding up with Home and all that makes it dear; no 
tongue can tell, or pen of mine describe.



CHAPTER XVI - SLAVERY



THE upholders of slavery in America - of the atrocities of which 
system, I shall not write one word for which I have not had ample 
proof and warrant - may be divided into three great classes.

The first, are those more moderate and rational owners of human 
cattle, who have come into the possession of them as so many coins 
in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the 
Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society 
with which it is fraught:  dangers which however distant they may 
be, or howsoever tardy in their coming on, are as certain to fall 
upon its guilty head, as is the Day of Judgment.

The second, consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers 
and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a 
bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards:  
who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a 
mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject, 
and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense 
amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve 
America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its 
sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate 
slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by 
any human authority, and unassailed by any human power; who, when 
they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and 
to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his 
own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a 
sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun 
Alraschid in his angry robe of scarlet.

The third, and not the least numerous or influential, is composed 
of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, and 
cannot brook an equal; of that class whose Republicanism means, 'I 
will not tolerate a man above me:  and of those below, none must 
approach too near;' whose pride, in a land where voluntary 
servitude is shunned as a disgrace, must be ministered to by 
slaves; and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in 
negro wrongs.

It has been sometimes urged that, in the unavailing efforts which 
have been made to advance the cause of Human Freedom in the 
republic of America (strange cause for history to treat of!), 
sufficient regard has not been had to the existence of the first 
class of persons; and it has been contended that they are hardly 
used, in being confounded with the second.  This is, no doubt, the 
case; noble instances of pecuniary and personal sacrifice have 
already had their growth among them; and it is much to be regretted 
that the gulf between them and the advocates of emancipation should 
have been widened and deepened by any means:  the rather, as there 
are, beyond dispute, among these slave-owners, many kind masters 
who are tender in the exercise of their unnatural power.  Still, it 
is to be feared that this injustice is inseparable from the state 
of things with which humanity and truth are called upon to deal.  
Slavery is not a whit the more endurable because some hearts are to 
be found which can partially resist its hardening influences; nor 
can the indignant tide of honest wrath stand still, because in its 
onward course it overwhelms a few who are comparatively innocent, 
among a host of guilty.

The ground most commonly taken by these better men among the 
advocates of slavery, is this:  'It is a bad system; and for myself 
I would willingly get rid of it, if I could; most willingly.  But 
it is not so bad, as you in England take it to be.  You are 
deceived by the representations of the emancipationists.  The 
greater part of my slaves are much attached to me.  You will say 
that I do not allow them to be severely treated; but I will put it 
to you whether you believe that it can be a general practice to 
treat them inhumanly, when it would impair their value, and would 
be obviously against the interests of their masters.'

Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his 
health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear 
himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder?  No.  
All these are roads to ruin.  And why, then, do men tread them?  
Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of 
mankind.  Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of 
human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of 
irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult 
to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will 
inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the 
slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!

But again:  this class, together with that last one I have named, 
the miserable aristocracy spawned of a false republic, lift up 
their voices and exclaim 'Public opinion is all-sufficient to 
prevent such cruelty as you denounce.'  Public opinion!  Why, 
public opinion in the slave States IS slavery, is it not?  Public 
opinion, in the slave States, has delivered the slaves over, to the 
gentle mercies of their masters.  Public opinion has made the laws, 
and denied the slaves legislative protection.  Public opinion has 
knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and 
shielded the murderer.  Public opinion threatens the abolitionist 
with death, if he venture to the South; and drags him with a rope 
about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city 
in the East.  Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a 
slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis; and public 
opinion has to this day maintained upon the bench that estimable 
judge who charged the jury, impanelled there to try his murderers, 
that their most horrid deed was an act of public opinion, and being 
so, must not be punished by the laws the public sentiment had made.  
Public opinion hailed this doctrine with a howl of wild applause, 
and set the prisoners free, to walk the city, men of mark, and 
influence, and station, as they had been before.

Public opinion! what class of men have an immense preponderance 
over the rest of the community, in their power of representing 
public opinion in the legislature? the slave-owners.  They send 
from their twelve States one hundred members, while the fourteen 
free States, with a free population nearly double, return but a 
hundred and forty-two.  Before whom do the presidential candidates 
bow down the most humbly, on whom do they fawn the most fondly, and 
for whose tastes do they cater the most assiduously in their 
servile protestations?  The slave-owners always.

Public opinion! hear the public opinion of the free South, as 
expressed by its own members in the House of Representatives at 
Washington.  'I have a great respect for the chair,' quoth North 
Carolina, 'I have a great respect for the chair as an officer of 
the house, and a great respect for him personally; nothing but that 
respect prevents me from rushing to the table and tearing that 
petition which has just been presented for the abolition of slavery 
in the district of Columbia, to pieces.' - 'I warn the 
abolitionists,' says South Carolina, 'ignorant, infuriated 
barbarians as they are, that if chance shall throw any of them into 
our hands, he may expect a felon's death.' - 'Let an abolitionist 
come within the borders of South Carolina,' cries a third; mild 
Carolina's colleague; 'and if we can catch him, we will try him, 
and notwithstanding the interference of all the governments on 
earth, including the Federal government, we will HANG him.'

Public opinion has made this law. - It has declared that in 
Washington, in that city which takes its name from the father of 
American liberty, any justice of the peace may bind with fetters 
any negro passing down the street and thrust him into jail:  no 
offence on the black man's part is necessary.  The justice says, 'I 
choose to think this man a runaway:' and locks him up.  Public 
opinion impowers the man of law when this is done, to advertise the 
negro in the newspapers, warning his owner to come and claim him, 
or he will be sold to pay the jail fees.  But supposing he is a 
free black, and has no owner, it may naturally be presumed that he 
is set at liberty.  No:  HE IS SOLD TO RECOMPENSE HIS JAILER.  This 
has been done again, and again, and again.  He has no means of 
proving his freedom; has no adviser, messenger, or assistance of 
any sort or kind; no investigation into his case is made, or 
inquiry instituted.  He, a free man, who may have served for years, 
and bought his liberty, is thrown into jail on no process, for no 
crime, and on no pretence of crime:  and is sold to pay the jail 
fees.  This seems incredible, even of America, but it is the law.

Public opinion is deferred to, in such cases as the following:  
which is headed in the newspapers:-


'INTERESTING LAW-CASE.

'An interesting case is now on trial in the Supreme Court, arising 
out of the following facts.  A gentleman residing in Maryland had 
allowed an aged pair of his slaves, substantial though not legal 
freedom for several years.  While thus living, a daughter was born 
to them, who grew up in the same liberty, until she married a free 
negro, and went with him to reside in Pennsylvania.  They had 
several children, and lived unmolested until the original owner 
died, when his heir attempted to regain them; but the magistrate 
before whom they were brought, decided that he had no jurisdiction 
in the case.  THE OWNER SEIZED THE WOMAN AND HER CHILDREN ITS THE 
NIGHT, AND CARRIED THEM TO MARYLAND.'


'Cash for negroes,' 'cash for negroes,' 'cash for negroes,' is the 
heading of advertisements in great capitals down the long columns 
of the crowded journals.  Woodcuts of a runaway negro with manacled 
hands, crouching beneath a bluff pursuer in top boots, who, having 
caught him, grasps him by the throat, agreeably diversify the 
pleasant text.  The leading article protests against 'that 
abominable and hellish doctrine of abolition, which is repugnant 
alike to every law of God and nature.'  The delicate mamma, who 
smiles her acquiescence in this sprightly writing as she reads the 
paper in her cool piazza, quiets her youngest child who clings 
about her skirts, by promising the boy 'a whip to beat the little 
niggers with.' - But the negroes, little and big, are protected by 
public opinion.

Let us try this public opinion by another test, which is important 
in three points of view:  first, as showing how desperately timid 
of the public opinion slave-owners are, in their delicate 
descriptions of fugitive slaves in widely circulated newspapers; 
secondly, as showing how perfectly contented the slaves are, and 
how very seldom they run away; thirdly, as exhibiting their entire 
freedom from scar, or blemish, or any mark of cruel infliction, as 
their pictures are drawn, not by lying abolitionists, but by their 
own truthful masters.

The following are a few specimens of the advertisements in the 
public papers.  It is only four years since the oldest among them 
appeared; and others of the same nature continue to be published 
every day, in shoals.

'Ran away, Negress Caroline.  Had on a collar with one prong turned 
down.'

'Ran away, a black woman, Betsy.  Had an iron bar on her right 
leg.'

'Ran away, the negro Manuel.  Much marked with irons.'

'Ran away, the negress Fanny.  Had on an iron band about her neck.'

'Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old.  Had round his neck 
a chain dog-collar with "De Lampert" engraved on it.'

'Ran away, the negro Hown.  Has a ring of iron on his left foot.  
Also, Grise, HIS WIFE, having a ring and chain on the left leg.'

'Ran away, a negro boy named James.  Said boy was ironed when he 
left me.'

'Committed to jail, a man who calls his name John.  He has a clog 
of iron on his right foot which will weigh four or five pounds.'

'Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myra.  Has several 
marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet.'

'Ran away, a negro woman and two children.  A few days before she 
went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her 
face.  I tried to make the letter M.'

'Ran away, a negro man named Henry; his left eye out, some scars 
from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the 
whip.'

'One hundred dollars reward, for a negro fellow, Pompey, 40 years 
old.  He is branded on the left jaw.'

'Committed to jail, a negro man.  Has no toes on the left foot.'

'Ran away, a negro woman named Rachel.  Has lost all her toes 
except the large one.'

'Ran away, Sam.  He was shot a short time since through the hand, 
and has several shots in his left arm and side.'

'Ran away, my negro man Dennis.  Said negro has been shot in the 
left arm between the shoulder and elbow, which has paralysed the 
left hand.'

'Ran away, my negro man named Simon.  He has been shot badly, in 
his back and right arm.'

'Ran away, a negro named Arthur.  Has a considerable scar across 
his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the 
goodness of God.'

'Twenty-five dollars reward for my man Isaac.  He has a scar on his 
forehead, caused by a blow; and one on his back, made by a shot 
from a pistol.'

'Ran away, a negro girl called Mary.  Has a small scar over her 
eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A is branded on her 
cheek and forehead.'

'Ran away, negro Ben.  Has a scar on his right hand; his thumb and 
forefinger being injured by being shot last fall.  A part of the 
bone came out.  He has also one or two large scars on his back and 
hips.'

'Detained at the jail, a mulatto, named Tom.  Has a scar on the 
right cheek, and appears to have been burned with powder on the 
face.'

'Ran away, a negro man named Ned.  Three of his fingers are drawn 
into the palm of his hand by a cut.  Has a scar on the back of his 
neck, nearly half round, done by a knife.'

'Was committed to jail, a negro man.  Says his name is Josiah.  His 
back very much scarred by the whip; and branded on the thigh and 
hips in three or four places, thus (J M).  The rim of his right ear 
has been bit or cut off.'

'Fifty dollars reward, for my fellow Edward.  He has a scar on the 
corner of his mouth, two cuts on and under his arm, and the letter 
E on his arm.'

'Ran away, negro boy Ellie.  Has a scar on one of his arms from the 
bite of a dog.'

'Ran away, from the plantation of James Surgette, the following 
negroes:  Randal, has one ear cropped; Bob, has lost one eye; 
Kentucky Tom, has one jaw broken.'

'Ran away, Anthony.  One of his ears cut off, and his left hand cut 
with an axe.'

'Fifty dollars reward for the negro Jim Blake.  Has a piece cut out 
of each ear, and the middle finger of the left hand cut off to the 
second joint.'

'Ran away, a negro woman named Maria.  Has a scar on one side of 
her cheek, by a cut.  Some scars on her back.'

'Ran away, the Mulatto wench Mary.  Has a cut on the left arm, a 
scar on the left shoulder, and two upper teeth missing.'

I should say, perhaps, in explanation of this latter piece of 
description, that among the other blessings which public opinion 
secures to the negroes, is the common practice of violently 
punching out their teeth.  To make them wear iron collars by day 
and night, and to worry them with dogs, are practices almost too 
ordinary to deserve mention.

'Ran away, my man Fountain.  Has holes in his ears, a scar on the 
right side of his forehead, has been shot in the hind part of his 
legs, and is marked on the back with the whip.'

'Two hundred and fifty dollars reward for my negro man Jim.  He is 
much marked with shot in his right thigh.  The shot entered on the 
outside, halfway between the hip and knee joints.'

'Brought to jail, John.  Left ear cropt.'

'Taken up, a negro man.  Is very much scarred about the face and 
body, and has the left ear bit off.'

'Ran away, a black girl, named Mary.  Has a scar on her cheek, and 
the end of one of her toes cut off.'

'Ran away, my Mulatto woman, Judy.  She has had her right arm 
broke.'

'Ran away, my negro man, Levi.  His left hand has been burnt, and I 
think the end of his forefinger is off.'

'Ran away, a negro man, NAMED WASHINGTON.  Has lost a part of his 
middle finger, and the end of his little finger.'

'Twenty-five dollars reward for my man John.  The tip of his nose 
is bit off.'

'Twenty-five dollars reward for the negro slave, Sally.  Walks AS 
THOUGH crippled in the back.'

'Ran away, Joe Dennis.  Has a small notch in one of his ears.'

'Ran away, negro boy, Jack.  Has a small crop out of his left ear.'

'Ran away, a negro man, named Ivory.  Has a small piece cut out of 
the top of each ear.'

While upon the subject of ears, I may observe that a distinguished 
abolitionist in New York once received a negro's ear, which had 
been cut off close to the head, in a general post letter.  It was 
forwarded by the free and independent gentleman who had caused it 
to be amputated, with a polite request that he would place the 
specimen in his 'collection.'

I could enlarge this catalogue with broken arms, and broken legs, 
and gashed flesh, and missing teeth, and lacerated backs, and bites 
of dogs, and brands of red-hot irons innumerable:  but as my 
readers will be sufficiently sickened and repelled already, I will 
turn to another branch of the subject.

These advertisements, of which a similar collection might be made 
for every year, and month, and week, and day; and which are coolly 
read in families as things of course, and as a part of the current 
news and small-talk; will serve to show how very much the slaves 
profit by public opinion, and how tender it is in their behalf.  
But it may be worth while to inquire how the slave-owners, and the 
class of society to which great numbers of them belong, defer to 
public opinion in their conduct, not to their slaves but to each 
other; how they are accustomed to restrain their passions; what 
their bearing is among themselves; whether they are fierce or 
gentle; whether their social customs be brutal, sanguinary, and 
violent, or bear the impress of civilisation and refinement.

That we may have no partial evidence from abolitionists in this 
inquiry, either, I will once more turn to their own newspapers, and 
I will confine myself, this time, to a selection from paragraphs 
which appeared from day to day, during my visit to America, and 
which refer to occurrences happening while I was there.  The 
italics in these extracts, as in the foregoing, are my own.

These cases did not ALL occur, it will be seen, in territory 
actually belonging to legalised Slave States, though most, and 
those the very worst among them did, as their counterparts 
constantly do; but the position of the scenes of action in 
reference to places immediately at hand, where slavery is the law; 
and the strong resemblance between that class of outrages and the 
rest; lead to the just presumption that the character of the 
parties concerned was formed in slave districts, and brutalised by 
slave customs.


'HORRIBLE TRAGEDY.


'By a slip from THE SOUTHPORT TELEGRAPH, Wisconsin, we learn that 
the Hon. Charles C. P. Arndt, Member of the Council for Brown 
county, was shot dead ON THE FLOOR OF THE COUNCIL CHAMBER, by James 
R. Vinyard, Member from Grant county.  THE AFFAIR grew out of a 
nomination for Sheriff of Grant county.  Mr. E. S. Baker was 
nominated and supported by Mr. Arndt.  This nomination was opposed 
by Vinyard, who wanted the appointment to vest in his own brother.  
In the course of debate, the deceased made some statements which 
Vinyard pronounced false, and made use of violent and insulting 
language, dealing largely in personalities, to which Mr. A. made no 
reply.  After the adjournment, Mr. A. stepped up to Vinyard, and 
requested him to retract, which he refused to do, repeating the 
offensive words.  Mr. Arndt then made a blow at Vinyard, who 
stepped back a pace, drew a pistol, and shot him dead.

'The issue appears to have been provoked on the part of Vinyard, 
who was determined at all hazards to defeat the appointment of 
Baker, and who, himself defeated, turned his ire and revenge upon 
the unfortunate Arndt.'


'THE WISCONSIN TRAGEDY.


Public indignation runs high in the territory of Wisconsin, in 
relation to the murder of C. C. P. Arndt, in the Legislative Hall 
of the Territory.  Meetings have been held in different counties of 
Wisconsin, denouncing THE PRACTICE OF SECRETLY BEARING ARMS IN THE 
LEGISLATIVE CHAMBERS OF THE COUNTRY.  We have seen the account of 
the expulsion of James R. Vinyard, the perpetrator of the bloody 
deed, and are amazed to hear, that, after this expulsion by those 
who saw Vinyard kill Mr. Arndt in the presence of his aged father, 
who was on a visit to see his son, little dreaming that he was to 
witness his murder, JUDGE DUNN HAS DISCHARGED VINYARD ON BAIL.  The 
Miners' Free Press speaks IN TERMS OF MERITED REBUKE at the outrage 
upon the feelings of the people of Wisconsin.  Vinyard was within 
arm's length of Mr. Arndt, when he took such deadly aim at him, 
that he never spoke.  Vinyard might at pleasure, being so near, 
have only wounded him, but he chose to kill him.'


'MURDER.


By a letter in a St. Louis paper of the '4th, we notice a terrible 
outrage at Burlington, Iowa.  A Mr. Bridgman having had a 
difficulty with a citizen of the place, Mr. Ross; a brother-in-law 
of the latter provided himself with one of Colt's revolving 
pistols, met Mr. B. in the street, AND DISCHARGED THE CONTENTS OF 
FIVE OF THE BARRELS AT HIM:  EACH SHOT TAKING EFFECT.  Mr. B., 
though horribly wounded, and dying, returned the fire, and killed 
Ross on the spot.'


'TERRIBLE DEATH OF ROBERT POTTER.


'From the "Caddo Gazette," of the 12th inst., we learn the 
frightful death of Colonel Robert Potter. . . . He was beset in his 
house by an enemy, named Rose.  He sprang from his couch, seized 
his gun, and, in his night-clothes, rushed from the house.  For 
about two hundred yards his speed seemed to defy his pursuers; but, 
getting entangled in a thicket, he was captured.  Rose told him 
THAT HE INTENDED TO ACT A GENEROUS PART, and give him a chance for 
his life.  He then told Potter he might run, and he should not be 
interrupted till he reached a certain distance.  Potter started at 
the word of command, and before a gun was fired he had reached the 
lake.  His first impulse was to jump in the water and dive for it, 
which he did.  Rose was close behind him, and formed his men on the 
bank ready to shoot him as he rose.  In a few seconds he came up to 
breathe; and scarce had his head reached the surface of the water 
when it was completely riddled with the shot of their guns, and he 
sunk, to rise no more!'


'MURDER IN ARKANSAS.


'We understand THAT A SEVERE RENCONTRE CAME OFF a few days since in 
the Seneca Nation, between Mr. Loose, the sub-agent of the mixed 
band of the Senecas, Quapaw, and Shawnees, and Mr. James Gillespie, 
of the mercantile firm of Thomas G. Allison and Co., of Maysville, 
Benton, County Ark, in which the latter was slain with a bowie-
knife.  Some difficulty had for some time existed between the 
parties.  It is said that Major Gillespie brought on the attack 
with a cane.  A severe conflict ensued, during which two pistols 
were fired by Gillespie and one by Loose.  Loose then stabbed 
Gillespie with one of those never-failing weapons, a bowie-knife.  
The death of Major G. is much regretted, as he was a liberal-minded 
and energetic man.  Since the above was in type, we have learned 
that Major Allison has stated to some of our citizens in town that 
Mr. Loose gave the first blow.  We forbear to give any particulars, 
as THE MATTER WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF JUDICIAL INVESTIGATION.'


'FOUL DEED.


The steamer Thames, just from Missouri river, brought us a 
handbill, offering a reward of 500 dollars, for the person who 
assassinated Lilburn W. Baggs, late Governor of this State, at 
Independence, on the night of the 6th inst.  Governor Baggs, it is 
stated in a written memorandum, was not dead, but mortally wounded.

'Since the above was written, we received a note from the clerk of 
the Thames, giving the following particulars.  Gov. Baggs was shot 
by some villain on Friday, 6th inst., in the evening, while sitting 
in a room in his own house in Independence.  His son, a boy, 
hearing a report, ran into the room, and found the Governor sitting 
in his chair, with his jaw fallen down, and his head leaning back; 
on discovering the injury done to his father, he gave the alarm.  
Foot tracks were found in the garden below the window, and a pistol 
picked up supposed to have been overloaded, and thrown from the 
hand of the scoundrel who fired it.  Three buck shots of a heavy 
load, took effect; one going through his mouth, one into the brain, 
and another probably in or near the brain; all going into the back 
part of the neck and head.  The Governor was still alive on the 
morning of the 7th; but no hopes for his recovery by his friends, 
and but slight hopes from his physicians.

'A man was suspected, and the Sheriff most probably has possession 
of him by this time.

'The pistol was one of a pair stolen some days previous from a 
baker in Independence, and the legal authorities have the 
description of the other.'


'RENCONTRE.


'An unfortunate AFFAIR took place on Friday evening in Chatres 
Street, in which one of our most respectable citizens received a 
dangerous wound, from a poignard, in the abdomen.  From the Bee 
(New Orleans) of yesterday, we learn the following particulars.  It 
appears that an article was published in the French side of the 
paper on Monday last, containing some strictures on the Artillery 
Battalion for firing their guns on Sunday morning, in answer to 
those from the Ontario and Woodbury, and thereby much alarm was 
caused to the families of those persons who were out all night 
preserving the peace of the city.  Major C. Gally, Commander of the 
battalion, resenting this, called at the office and demanded the 
author's name; that of Mr. P. Arpin was given to him, who was 
absent at the time.  Some angry words then passed with one of the 
proprietors, and a challenge followed; the friends of both parties 
tried to arrange the affair, but failed to do so.  On Friday 
evening, about seven o'clock, Major Gally met Mr. P. Arpin in 
Chatres Street, and accosted him.  "Are you Mr. Arpin?"

'"Yes, sir."

'"Then I have to tell you that you are a - " (applying an 
appropriate epithet).

'"I shall remind you of your words, sir."

'"But I have said I would break my cane on your shoulders."

'"I know it, but I have not yet received the blow."

'At these words, Major Gally, having a cane in his hands, struck 
Mr. Arpin across the face, and the latter drew a poignard from his 
pocket and stabbed Major Gally in the abdomen.

'Fears are entertained that the wound will be mortal.  WE 
UNDERSTAND THAT MR. ARPIN HAS GIVEN SECURITY FOR HIS APPEARANCE AT 
THE CRIMINAL COURT TO ANSWER THE CHARGE.'


'AFFRAY IN MISSISSIPPI.


'On the 27th ult., in an affray near Carthage, Leake county, 
Mississippi, between James Cottingham and John Wilburn, the latter 
was shot by the former, and so horribly wounded, that there was no 
hope of his recovery.  On the 2nd instant, there was an affray at 
Carthage between A. C. Sharkey and George Goff, in which the latter 
was shot, and thought mortally wounded.  Sharkey delivered himself 
up to the authorities, BUT CHANGED HIS MIND AND ESCAPED!'


'PERSONAL ENCOUNTER.


'An encounter took place in Sparta, a few days since, between the 
barkeeper of an hotel, and a man named Bury.  It appears that Bury 
had become somewhat noisy, AND THAT THE BARKEEPER, DETERMINED TO 
PRESERVE ORDER, HAD THREATENED TO SHOOT BURY, whereupon Bury drew a 
pistol and shot the barkeeper down.  He was not dead at the last 
accounts, but slight hopes were entertained of his recovery.'


'DUEL.


'The clerk of the steamboat TRIBUNE informs us that another duel 
was fought on Tuesday last, by Mr. Robbins, a bank officer in 
Vicksburg, and Mr. Fall, the editor of the Vicksburg Sentinel.  
According to the arrangement, the parties had six pistols each, 
which, after the word "Fire!" THEY WERE TO DISCHARGE AS FAST AS 
THEY PLEASED.  Fall fired two pistols without effect.  Mr. Robbins' 
first shot took effect in Fall's thigh, who fell, and was unable to 
continue the combat.'


'AFFRAY IN CLARKE COUNTY.


'An UNFORTUNATE AFFRAY occurred in Clarke county (MO.), near 
Waterloo, on Tuesday the 19th ult., which originated in settling 
the partnership concerns of Messrs. M'Kane and M'Allister, who had 
been engaged in the business of distilling, and resulted in the 
death of the latter, who was shot down by Mr. M'Kane, because of 
his attempting to take possession of seven barrels of whiskey, the 
property of M'Kane, which had been knocked off to M'Allister at a 
sheriff's sale at one dollar per barrel.  M'Kane immediately fled 
AND AT THE LATEST DATES HAD NOT BEEN TAKEN.

'THIS UNFORTUNATE AFFRAY caused considerable excitement in the 
neighbourhood, as both the parties were men with large families 
depending upon them and stood well in the community.'


I will quote but one more paragraph, which, by reason of its 
monstrous absurdity, may be a relief to these atrocious deeds.


'AFFAIR OF HONOUR.


'We have just heard the particulars of a meeting which took place 
on Six Mile Island, on Tuesday, between two young bloods of our 
city:  Samuel Thurston, AGED FIFTEEN, and William Hine, AGED 
THIRTEEN years.  They were attended by young gentlemen of the same 
age.  The weapons used on the occasion, were a couple of Dickson's 
best rifles; the distance, thirty yards.  They took one fire, 
without any damage being sustained by either party, except the ball 
of Thurston's gun passing through the crown of Hine's hat.  THROUGH 
THE INTERCESSION OF THE BOARD OF HONOUR, the challenge was 
withdrawn, and the difference amicably adjusted.'

If the reader will picture to himself the kind of Board of Honour 
which amicably adjusted the difference between these two little 
boys, who in any other part of the world would have been amicably 
adjusted on two porters' backs and soundly flogged with birchen 
rods, he will be possessed, no doubt, with as strong a sense of its 
ludicrous character, as that which sets me laughing whenever its 
image rises up before me.

Now, I appeal to every human mind, imbued with the commonest of 
common sense, and the commonest of common humanity; to all 
dispassionate, reasoning creatures, of any shade of opinion; and 
ask, with these revolting evidences of the state of society which 
exists in and about the slave districts of America before them, can 
they have a doubt of the real condition of the slave, or can they 
for a moment make a compromise between the institution or any of 
its flagrant, fearful features, and their own just consciences?  
Will they say of any tale of cruelty and horror, however aggravated 
in degree, that it is improbable, when they can turn to the public 
prints, and, running, read such signs as these, laid before them by 
the men who rule the slaves:  in their own acts and under their own 
hands?

Do we not know that the worst deformity and ugliness of slavery are 
at once the cause and the effect of the reckless license taken by 
these freeborn outlaws?  Do we not know that the man who has been 
born and bred among its wrongs; who has seen in his childhood 
husbands obliged at the word of command to flog their wives; women, 
indecently compelled to hold up their own garments that men might 
lay the heavier stripes upon their legs, driven and harried by 
brutal overseers in their time of travail, and becoming mothers on 
the field of toil, under the very lash itself; who has read in 
youth, and seen his virgin sisters read, descriptions of runaway 
men and women, and their disfigured persons, which could not be 
published elsewhere, of so much stock upon a farm, or at a show of 
beasts:- do we not know that that man, whenever his wrath is 
kindled up, will be a brutal savage?  Do we not know that as he is 
a coward in his domestic life, stalking among his shrinking men and 
women slaves armed with his heavy whip, so he will be a coward out 
of doors, and carrying cowards' weapons hidden in his breast, will 
shoot men down and stab them when he quarrels?  And if our reason 
did not teach us this and much beyond; if we were such idiots as to 
close our eyes to that fine mode of training which rears up such 
men; should we not know that they who among their equals stab and 
pistol in the legislative halls, and in the counting-house, and on 
the marketplace, and in all the elsewhere peaceful pursuits of 
life, must be to their dependants, even though they were free 
servants, so many merciless and unrelenting tyrants?

What! shall we declaim against the ignorant peasantry of Ireland, 
and mince the matter when these American taskmasters are in 
question?  Shall we cry shame on the brutality of those who 
hamstring cattle:  and spare the lights of Freedom upon earth who 
notch the ears of men and women, cut pleasant posies in the 
shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the 
human face, rack their poetic fancies for liveries of mutilation 
which their slaves shall wear for life and carry to the grave, 
breaking living limbs as did the soldiery who mocked and slew the 
Saviour of the world, and set defenceless creatures up for targets!  
Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practised on each 
other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of 
Christian men!  Shall we, so long as these things last, exult above 
the scattered remnants of that race, and triumph in the white 
enjoyment of their possessions?  Rather, for me, restore the forest 
and the Indian village; in lieu of stars and stripes, let some poor 
feather flutter in the breeze; replace the streets and squares by 
wigwams; and though the death-song of a hundred haughty warriors 
fill the air, it will be music to the shriek of one unhappy slave.

On one theme, which is commonly before our eyes, and in respect of 
which our national character is changing fast, let the plain Truth 
be spoken, and let us not, like dastards, beat about the bush by 
hinting at the Spaniard and the fierce Italian.  When knives are 
drawn by Englishmen in conflict let it be said and known:  'We owe 
this change to Republican Slavery.  These are the weapons of 
Freedom.  With sharp points and edges such as these, Liberty in 
America hews and hacks her slaves; or, failing that pursuit, her 
sons devote them to a better use, and turn them on each other.'



CHAPTER XVIII - CONCLUDING REMARKS



THERE are many passages in this book, where I have been at some 
pains to resist the temptation of troubling my readers with my own 
deductions and conclusions:  preferring that they should judge for 
themselves, from such premises as I have laid before them.  My only 
object in the outset, was, to carry them with me faithfully 
wheresoever I went:  and that task I have discharged.

But I may be pardoned, if on such a theme as the general character 
of the American people, and the general character of their social 
system, as presented to a stranger's eyes, I desire to express my 
own opinions in a few words, before I bring these volumes to a 
close.

They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and 
affectionate.  Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their 
warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of 
these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders 
an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of 
friends.  I never was so won upon, as by this class; never yielded 
up my full confidence and esteem so readily and pleasurably, as to 
them; never can make again, in half a year, so many friends for 
whom I seem to entertain the regard of half a life.

These qualities are natural, I implicitly believe, to the whole 
people.  That they are, however, sadly sapped and blighted in their 
growth among the mass; and that there are influences at work which 
endanger them still more, and give but little present promise of 
their healthy restoration; is a truth that ought to be told.

It is an essential part of every national character to pique itself 
mightily upon its faults, and to deduce tokens of its virtue or its 
wisdom from their very exaggeration.  One great blemish in the 
popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable 
brood of evils, is Universal Distrust.  Yet the American citizen 
plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently 
dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce 
it, in spite of his own reason, as an instance of the great 
sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness 
and independence.

'You carry,' says the stranger, 'this jealousy and distrust into 
every transaction of public life.  By repelling worthy men from 
your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates 
for the suffrage, who, in their very act, disgrace your 
Institutions and your people's choice.  It has rendered you so 
fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed 
into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you 
are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments:  and this, 
because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you 
distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately apply 
yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in 
your acknowledgments, or he remiss in his deserts.  Any man who 
attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may 
date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any 
notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the 
character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, 
and is believed.  You will strain at a gnat in the way of 
trustfulness and confidence, however fairly won and well deserved; 
but you will swallow a whole caravan of camels, if they be laden 
with unworthy doubts and mean suspicions.  Is this well, think you, 
or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the 
governed, among you?'

The answer is invariably the same:  'There's freedom of opinion 
here, you know.  Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be 
easily overreached.  That's how our people come to be suspicious.'

Another prominent feature is the love of 'smart' dealing:  which 
gilds over many a swindle and gross breach of trust; many a 
defalcation, public and private; and enables many a knave to hold 
his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter; though it 
has not been without its retributive operation, for this smartness 
has done more in a few years to impair the public credit, and to 
cripple the public resources, than dull honesty, however rash, 
could have effected in a century.  The merits of a broken 
speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not 
gauged by its or his observance of the golden rule, 'Do as you 
would be done by,' but are considered with reference to their 
smartness.  I recollect, on both occasions of our passing that ill-
fated Cairo on the Mississippi, remarking on the bad effects such 
gross deceits must have when they exploded, in generating a want of 
confidence abroad, and discouraging foreign investment:  but I was 
given to understand that this was a very smart scheme by which a 
deal of money had been made:  and that its smartest feature was, 
that they forgot these things abroad, in a very short time, and 
speculated again, as freely as ever.  The following dialogue I have 
held a hundred times:  'Is it not a very disgraceful circumstance 
that such a man as So-and-so should be acquiring a large property 
by the most infamous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the 
crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted 
by your Citizens?  He is a public nuisance, is he not?'  'Yes, 
sir.'  'A convicted liar?'  'Yes, sir.'  'He has been kicked, and 
cuffed, and caned?'  'Yes, sir.'  'And he is utterly dishonourable, 
debased, and profligate?'  'Yes, sir.'  'In the name of wonder, 
then, what is his merit?'  'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'

In like manner, all kinds of deficient and impolitic usages are 
referred to the national love of trade; though, oddly enough, it 
would be a weighty charge against a foreigner that he regarded the 
Americans as a trading people.  The love of trade is assigned as a 
reason for that comfortless custom, so very prevalent in country 
towns, of married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of 
their own, and seldom meeting from early morning until late at 
night, but at the hasty public meals.  The love of trade is a 
reason why the literature of America is to remain for ever 
unprotected 'For we are a trading people, and don't care for 
poetry:' though we DO, by the way, profess to be very proud of our 
poets:  while healthful amusements, cheerful means of recreation, 
and wholesome fancies, must fade before the stern utilitarian joys 
of trade.

These three characteristics are strongly presented at every turn, 
full in the stranger's view.  But, the foul growth of America has a 
more tangled root than this; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its 
licentious Press.

Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be 
taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; 
colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be 
diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through 
the land with giant strides:  but while the newspaper press of 
America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral 
improvement in that country is hopeless.  Year by year, it must and 
will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink 
lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become 
of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory 
of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and 
more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.

Among the herd of journals which are published in the States, there 
are some, the reader scarcely need be told, of character and 
credit.  From personal intercourse with accomplished gentlemen 
connected with publications of this class, I have derived both 
pleasure and profit.  But the name of these is Few, and of the 
others Legion; and the influence of the good, is powerless to 
counteract the moral poison of the bad.

Among the gentry of America; among the well-informed and moderate:  
in the learned professions; at the bar and on the bench:  there is, 
as there can be, but one opinion, in reference to the vicious 
character of these infamous journals.  It is sometimes contended - 
I will not say strangely, for it is natural to seek excuses for 
such a disgrace - that their influence is not so great as a visitor 
would suppose.  I must be pardoned for saying that there is no 
warrant for this plea, and that every fact and circumstance tends 
directly to the opposite conclusion.

When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can 
climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, 
without first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee 
before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is 
safe from its attacks; when any social confidence is left unbroken 
by it, or any tie of social decency and honour is held in the least 
regard; when any man in that free country has freedom of opinion, 
and presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, without 
humble reference to a censorship which, for its rampant ignorance 
and base dishonesty, he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; 
when those who most acutely feel its infamy and the reproach it 
casts upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare 
to set their heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all 
men:  then, I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men 
are returning to their manly senses.  But while that Press has its 
evil eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in 
the state, from a president to a postman; while, with ribald 
slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature 
of an enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, 
or they will not read at all; so long must its odium be upon the 
country's head, and so long must the evil it works, be plainly 
visible in the Republic.

To those who are accustomed to the leading English journals, or to 
the respectable journals of the Continent of Europe; to those who 
are accustomed to anything else in print and paper; it would be 
impossible, without an amount of extract for which I have neither 
space nor inclination, to convey an adequate idea of this frightful 
engine in America.  But if any man desire confirmation of my 
statement on this head, let him repair to any place in this city of 
London, where scattered numbers of these publications are to be 
found; and there, let him form his own opinion. (1)

It would be well, there can be no doubt, for the American people as 
a whole, if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more.  
It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness 
of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, 
without being eminently and directly useful.  But here, I think the 
general remonstrance, 'we are a new country,' which is so often 
advanced as an excuse for defects which are quite unjustifiable, as 
being, of right, only the slow growth of an old one, may be very 
reasonably urged:  and I yet hope to hear of there being some other 
national amusement in the United States, besides newspaper 
politics.

They certainly are not a humorous people, and their temperament 
always impressed me is being of a dull and gloomy character.  In 
shrewdness of remark, and a certain cast-iron quaintness, the 
Yankees, or people of New England, unquestionably take the lead; as 
they do in most other evidences of intelligence.  But in travelling 
about, out of the large cities - as I have remarked in former parts 
of these volumes - I was quite oppressed by the prevailing 
seriousness and melancholy air of business:  which was so general 
and unvarying, that at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet 
the very same people whom I had left behind me, at the last.  Such 
defects as are perceptible in the national manners, seem, to me, to 
be referable, in a great degree, to this cause:  which has 
generated a dull, sullen persistence in coarse usages, and rejected 
the graces of life as undeserving of attention.  There is no doubt 
that Washington, who was always most scrupulous and exact on points 
of ceremony, perceived the tendency towards this mistake, even in 
his time, and did his utmost to correct it.

I cannot hold with other writers on these subjects that the 
prevalence of various forms of dissent in America, is in any way 
attributable to the non-existence there of an established church:  
indeed, I think the temper of the people, if it admitted of such an 
Institution being founded amongst them, would lead them to desert 
it, as a matter of course, merely because it WAS established.  But, 
supposing it to exist, I doubt its probable efficacy in summoning 
the wandering sheep to one great fold, simply because of the 
immense amount of dissent which prevails at home; and because I do 
not find in America any one form of religion with which we in 
Europe, or even in England, are unacquainted.  Dissenters resort 
thither in great numbers, as other people do, simply because it is 
a land of resort; and great settlements of them are founded, 
because ground can be purchased, and towns and villages reared, 
where there were none of the human creation before.  But even the 
Shakers emigrated from England; our country is not unknown to Mr. 
Joseph Smith, the apostle of Mormonism, or to his benighted 
disciples; I have beheld religious scenes myself in some of our 
populous towns which can hardly be surpassed by an American camp-
meeting; and I am not aware that any instance of superstitious 
imposture on the one hand, and superstitious credulity on the 
other, has had its origin in the United States, which we cannot 
more than parallel by the precedents of Mrs. Southcote, Mary Tofts 
the rabbit-breeder, or even Mr. Thorn of Canterbury:  which latter 
case arose, some time after the dark ages had passed away.

The Republican Institutions of America undoubtedly lead the people 
to assert their self-respect and their equality; but a traveller is 
bound to bear those Institutions in his mind, and not hastily to 
resent the near approach of a class of strangers, who, at home, 
would keep aloof.  This characteristic, when it was tinctured with 
no foolish pride, and stopped short of no honest service, never 
offended me; and I very seldom, if ever, experienced its rude or 
unbecoming display.  Once or twice it was comically developed, as 
in the following case; but this was an amusing incident, and not 
the rule, or near it.

I wanted a pair of boots at a certain town, for I had none to 
travel in, but those with the memorable cork soles, which were much 
too hot for the fiery decks of a steamboat.  I therefore sent a 
message to an artist in boots, importing, with my compliments, that 
I should be happy to see him, if he would do me the polite favour 
to call.  He very kindly returned for answer, that he would 'look 
round' at six o'clock that evening.

I was lying on the sofa, with a book and a wine-glass, at about 
that time, when the door opened, and a gentleman in a stiff cravat, 
within a year or two on either side of thirty, entered, in his hat 
and gloves; walked up to the looking-glass; arranged his hair; took 
off his gloves; slowly produced a measure from the uttermost depths 
of his coat-pocket; and requested me, in a languid tone, to 'unfix' 
my straps.  I complied, but looked with some curiosity at his hat, 
which was still upon his head.  It might have been that, or it 
might have been the heat - but he took it off.  Then, he sat 
himself down on a chair opposite to me; rested an arm on each knee; 
and, leaning forward very much, took from the ground, by a great 
effort, the specimen of metropolitan workmanship which I had just 
pulled off:  whistling, pleasantly, as he did so.  He turned it 
over and over; surveyed it with a contempt no language can express; 
and inquired if I wished him to fix me a boot like THAT?  I 
courteously replied, that provided the boots were large enough, I 
would leave the rest to him; that if convenient and practicable, I 
should not object to their bearing some resemblance to the model 
then before him; but that I would be entirely guided by, and would 
beg to leave the whole subject to, his judgment and discretion.  
'You an't partickler, about this scoop in the heel, I suppose 
then?' says he:  'we don't foller that, here.'  I repeated my last 
observation.  He looked at himself in the glass again; went closer 
to it to dash a grain or two of dust out of the corner of his eye; 
and settled his cravat.  All this time, my leg and foot were in the 
air.  'Nearly ready, sir?' I inquired.  'Well, pretty nigh,' he 
said; 'keep steady.'  I kept as steady as I could, both in foot and 
face; and having by this time got the dust out, and found his 
pencil-case, he measured me, and made the necessary notes.  When he 
had finished, he fell into his old attitude, and taking up the boot 
again, mused for some time.  'And this,' he said, at last, 'is an 
English boot, is it?  This is a London boot, eh?'  'That, sir,' I 
replied, 'is a London boot.'  He mused over it again, after the 
manner of Hamlet with Yorick's skull; nodded his head, as who 
should say, 'I pity the Institutions that led to the production of 
this boot!'; rose; put up his pencil, notes, and paper - glancing 
at himself in the glass, all the time - put on his hat - drew on 
his gloves very slowly; and finally walked out.  When he had been 
gone about a minute, the door reopened, and his hat and his head 
reappeared.  He looked round the room, and at the boot again, which 
was still lying on the floor; appeared thoughtful for a minute; and 
then said 'Well, good arternoon.'  'Good afternoon, sir,' said I:  
and that was the end of the interview.

There is but one other head on which I wish to offer a remark; and 
that has reference to the public health.  In so vast a country, 
where there are thousands of millions of acres of land yet 
unsettled and uncleared, and on every rood of which, vegetable 
decomposition is annually taking place; where there are so many 
great rivers, and such opposite varieties of climate; there cannot 
fail to be a great amount of sickness at certain seasons.  But I 
may venture to say, after conversing with many members of the 
medical profession in America, that I am not singular in the 
opinion that much of the disease which does prevail, might be 
avoided, if a few common precautions were observed.  Greater means 
of personal cleanliness, are indispensable to this end; the custom 
of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times 
a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must 
be changed; the gentler sex must go more wisely clad, and take more 
healthful exercise; and in the latter clause, the males must be 
included also.  Above all, in public institutions, and throughout 
the whole of every town and city, the system of ventilation, and 
drainage, and removal of impurities requires to be thoroughly 
revised.  There is no local Legislature in America which may not 
study Mr. Chadwick's excellent Report upon the Sanitary Condition 
of our Labouring Classes, with immense advantage.

* * * * * *

I HAVE now arrived at the close of this book.  I have little reason 
to believe, from certain warnings I have had since I returned to 
England, that it will be tenderly or favourably received by the 
American people; and as I have written the Truth in relation to the 
mass of those who form their judgments and express their opinions, 
it will be seen that I have no desire to court, by any adventitious 
means, the popular applause.

It is enough for me, to know, that what I have set down in these 
pages, cannot cost me a single friend on the other side of the 
Atlantic, who is, in anything, deserving of the name.  For the 
rest, I put my trust, implicitly, in the spirit in which they have 
been conceived and penned; and I can bide my time.

I have made no reference to my reception, nor have I suffered it to 
influence me in what I have written; for, in either case, I should 
have offered but a sorry acknowledgment, compared with that I bear 
within my breast, towards those partial readers of my former books, 
across the Water, who met me with an open hand, and not with one 
that closed upon an iron muzzle.


THE END



POSTSCRIPT



AT a Public Dinner given to me on Saturday the 18th of April, 1868, 
in the City of New York, by two hundred representatives of the 
Press of the United States of America, I made the following 
observations among others:

'So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I 
might have been contented with troubling you no further from my 
present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth 
charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, 
whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense 
of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony 
to the national generosity and magnanimity.  Also, to declare how 
astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me 
on every side, - changes moral, changes physical, changes in the 
amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new 
cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of 
recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes 
in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take 
place anywhere.  Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose 
that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and 
that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct 
when I was here first.  And this brings me to a point on which I 
have, ever since I landed in the United States last November, 
observed a strict silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, 
but in reference to which I will, with your good leave, take you 
into my confidence now.  Even the Press, being human, may be 
sometimes mistaken or misinformed, and I rather think that I have 
in one or two rare instances observed its information to be not 
strictly accurate with reference to myself.  Indeed, I have, now 
and again, been more surprised by printed news that I have read of 
myself, than by any printed news that I have ever read in my 
present state of existence.  Thus, the vigour and perseverance with 
which I have for some months past been collecting materials for, 
and hammering away at, a new book on America has much astonished 
me; seeing that all that time my declaration has been perfectly 
well known to my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, that no 
consideration on earth would induce me to write one.  But what I 
have intended, what I have resolved upon (and this is the 
confidence I seek to place in you) is, on my return to England, in 
my own person, in my own journal, to bear, for the behoof of my 
countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes in this country 
as I have hinted at to-night.  Also, to record that wherever I have 
been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been 
received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, 
hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the 
privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here 
and the state of my health.  This testimony, so long as I live, and 
so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall 
cause to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two 
books of mine in which I have referred to America.  And this I will 
do and cause to be done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but 
because I regard it as an act of plain justice and honour.'

I said these words with the greatest earnestness that I could lay 
upon them, and I repeat them in print here with equal earnestness.  
So long as this book shall last, I hope that they will form a part 
of it, and will be fairly read as inseparable from my experiences 
and impressions of America.

CHARLES DICKENS.

MAY, 1868.



Footnotes:

(1) NOTE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION. - Or let him refer to an able, 
and perfectly truthful article, in THE FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW, 
published in the present month of October; to which my attention 
has been attracted, since these sheets have been passing through 
the press.  He will find some specimens there, by no means 
remarkable to any man who has been in America, but sufficiently 
striking to one who has not.




End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of American Notes, by Charles Dickens

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The Battle of Life

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The Battle of Life by Charles Dickens
Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Battle of Life





CHAPTER I - Part The First



Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England, 
it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought.  It was fought 
upon a long summer day when the waving grass was green.  Many a 
wild flower formed by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for 
the dew, felt its enamelled cup filled high with blood that day, 
and shrinking dropped.  Many an insect deriving its delicate colour 
from harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying 
men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track.  The 
painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its 
wings.  The stream ran red.  The trodden ground became a quagmire, 
whence, from sullen pools collected in the prints of human feet and 
horses' hoofs, the one prevailing hue still lowered and glimmered 
at the sun.

Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld upon 
that field, when, coming up above the black line of distant rising-
ground, softened and blurred at the edge by trees, she rose into 
the sky and looked upon the plain, strewn with upturned faces that 
had once at mothers' breasts sought mothers' eyes, or slumbered 
happily.  Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the secrets whispered 
afterwards upon the tainted wind that blew across the scene of that 
day's work and that night's death and suffering!  Many a lonely 
moon was bright upon the battle-ground, and many a star kept 
mournful watch upon it, and many a wind from every quarter of the 
earth blew over it, before the traces of the fight were worn away.

They lurked and lingered for a long time, but survived in little 
things; for, Nature, far above the evil passions of men, soon 
recovered Her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as 
she had done before, when it was innocent.  The larks sang high 
above it; the swallows skimmed and dipped and flitted to and fro; 
the shadows of the flying clouds pursued each other swiftly, over 
grass and corn and turnip-field and wood, and over roof and church-
spire in the nestling town among the trees, away into the bright 
distance on the borders of the sky and earth, where the red sunsets 
faded.  Crops were sown, and grew up, and were gathered in; the 
stream that had been crimsoned, turned a watermill; men whistled at 
the plough; gleaners and haymakers were seen in quiet groups at 
work; sheep and oxen pastured; boys whooped and called, in fields, 
to scare away the birds; smoke rose from cottage chimneys; sabbath 
bells rang peacefully; old people lived and died; the timid 
creatures of the field, the simple flowers of the bush and garden, 
grew and withered in their destined terms:  and all upon the fierce 
and bloody battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been 
killed in the great fight.  But, there were deep green patches in 
the growing corn at first, that people looked at awfully.  Year 
after year they re-appeared; and it was known that underneath those 
fertile spots, heaps of men and horses lay buried, 
indiscriminately, enriching the ground.  The husbandmen who 
ploughed those places, shrunk from the great worms abounding there; 
and the sheaves they yielded, were, for many a long year, called 
the Battle Sheaves, and set apart; and no one ever knew a Battle 
Sheaf to be among the last load at a Harvest Home.  For a long 
time, every furrow that was turned, revealed some fragments of the 
fight.  For a long time, there were wounded trees upon the battle-
ground; and scraps of hacked and broken fence and wall, where 
deadly struggles had been made; and trampled parts where not a leaf 
or blade would grow.  For a long time, no village girl would dress 
her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of 
death:  and after many a year had come and gone, the berries 
growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon 
the hand that plucked them.

The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as lightly 
as the summer clouds themselves, obliterated, in the lapse of time, 
even these remains of the old conflict; and wore away such 
legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people carried in their 
minds, until they dwindled into old wives' tales, dimly remembered 
round the winter fire, and waning every year.  Where the wild 
flowers and berries had so long remained upon the stem untouched, 
gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at 
battles on the turf.  The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas 
logs, and blazed and roared away.  The deep green patches were no 
greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below.  The 
ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of 
metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and 
those who found them wondered and disputed.  An old dinted 
corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, 
that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make 
them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a 
baby.  If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a 
moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the 
spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly 
soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and 
window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and 
would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and 
would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and 
would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, 
and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the 
rickyard high with dying men.  So altered was the battle-ground, 
where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight.

Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in 
one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a 
honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn morning, there were 
sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily 
together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing 
on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their 
work to look down, and share their enjoyment.  It was a pleasant, 
lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the two 
girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and 
gaiety of their hearts.

If there were no such thing as display in the world, my private 
opinion is, and I hope you agree with me, that we might get on a 
great deal better than we do, and might be infinitely more 
agreeable company than we are.  It was charming to see how these 
girls danced.  They had no spectators but the apple-pickers on the 
ladders.  They were very glad to please them, but they danced to 
please themselves (or at least you would have supposed so); and you 
could no more help admiring, than they could help dancing.  How 
they did dance!

Not like opera-dancers.  Not at all.  And not like Madame Anybody's 
finished pupils.  Not the least.  It was not quadrille dancing, nor 
minuet dancing, nor even country-dance dancing.  It was neither in 
the old style, nor the new style, nor the French style, nor the 
English style:  though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in 
the Spanish style, which is a free and joyous one, I am told, 
deriving a delightful air of off-hand inspiration, from the 
chirping little castanets.  As they danced among the orchard trees, 
and down the groves of stems and back again, and twirled each other 
lightly round and round, the influence of their airy motion seemed 
to spread and spread, in the sun-lighted scene, like an expanding 
circle in the water.  Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, 
the elastic grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in 
the morning air - the flashing leaves, the speckled shadows on the 
soft green ground - the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, 
glad to turn the distant windmill, cheerily - everything between 
the two girls, and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of 
land, where they showed against the sky as if they were the last 
things in the world - seemed dancing too.

At last, the younger of the dancing sisters, out of breath, and 
laughing gaily, threw herself upon a bench to rest.  The other 
leaned against a tree hard by.  The music, a wandering harp and 
fiddle, left off with a flourish, as if it boasted of its 
freshness; though the truth is, it had gone at such a pace, and 
worked itself to such a pitch of competition with the dancing, that 
it never could have held on, half a minute longer.  The apple-
pickers on the ladders raised a hum and murmur of applause, and 
then, in keeping with the sound, bestirred themselves to work again 
like bees.

The more actively, perhaps, because an elderly gentleman, who was 
no other than Doctor Jeddler himself - it was Doctor Jeddler's 
house and orchard, you should know, and these were Doctor Jeddler's 
daughters - came bustling out to see what was the matter, and who 
the deuce played music on his property, before breakfast.  For he 
was a great philosopher, Doctor Jeddler, and not very musical.

'Music and dancing TO-DAY!' said the Doctor, stopping short, and 
speaking to himself.  'I thought they dreaded to-day.  But it's a 
world of contradictions.  Why, Grace, why, Marion!' he added, 
aloud, 'is the world more mad than usual this morning?'

'Make some allowance for it, father, if it be,' replied his younger 
daughter, Marion, going close to him, and looking into his face, 
'for it's somebody's birth-day.'

'Somebody's birth-day, Puss!' replied the Doctor.  'Don't you know 
it's always somebody's birth-day?  Did you never hear how many new 
performers enter on this - ha! ha! ha! - it's impossible to speak 
gravely of it - on this preposterous and ridiculous business called 
Life, every minute?'

'No, father!'

'No, not you, of course; you're a woman - almost,' said the Doctor.  
'By-the-by,' and he looked into the pretty face, still close to 
his, 'I suppose it's YOUR birth-day.'

'No!  Do you really, father?' cried his pet daughter, pursing up 
her red lips to be kissed.

'There!  Take my love with it,' said the Doctor, imprinting his 
upon them; 'and many happy returns of the - the idea! - of the day.  
The notion of wishing happy returns in such a farce as this,' said 
the Doctor to himself, 'is good!  Ha! ha! ha!'

Doctor Jeddler was, as I have said, a great philosopher, and the 
heart and mystery of his philosophy was, to look upon the world as 
a gigantic practical joke; as something too absurd to be considered 
seriously, by any rational man.  His system of belief had been, in 
the beginning, part and parcel of the battle-ground on which he 
lived, as you shall presently understand.

'Well!  But how did you get the music?' asked the Doctor.  
'Poultry-stealers, of course!  Where did the minstrels come from?'

'Alfred sent the music,' said his daughter Grace, adjusting a few 
simple flowers in her sister's hair, with which, in her admiration 
of that youthful beauty, she had herself adorned it half-an-hour 
before, and which the dancing had disarranged.

'Oh!  Alfred sent the music, did he?' returned the Doctor.

'Yes.  He met it coming out of the town as he was entering early.  
The men are travelling on foot, and rested there last night; and as 
it was Marion's birth-day, and he thought it would please her, he 
sent them on, with a pencilled note to me, saying that if I thought 
so too, they had come to serenade her.'

'Ay, ay,' said the Doctor, carelessly, 'he always takes your 
opinion.'

'And my opinion being favourable,' said Grace, good-humouredly; and 
pausing for a moment to admire the pretty head she decorated, with 
her own thrown back; 'and Marion being in high spirits, and 
beginning to dance, I joined her.  And so we danced to Alfred's 
music till we were out of breath.  And we thought the music all the 
gayer for being sent by Alfred.  Didn't we, dear Marion?'

'Oh, I don't know, Grace.  How you tease me about Alfred.'

'Tease you by mentioning your lover?' said her sister.

'I am sure I don't much care to have him mentioned,' said the 
wilful beauty, stripping the petals from some flowers she held, and 
scattering them on the ground.  'I am almost tired of hearing of 
him; and as to his being my lover - '

'Hush!  Don't speak lightly of a true heart, which is all your own, 
Marion,' cried her sister, 'even in jest.  There is not a truer 
heart than Alfred's in the world!'

'No-no,' said Marion, raising her eyebrows with a pleasant air of 
careless consideration, 'perhaps not.  But I don't know that 
there's any great merit in that.  I - I don't want him to be so 
very true.  I never asked him.  If he expects that I -  But, dear 
Grace, why need we talk of him at all, just now!'

It was agreeable to see the graceful figures of the blooming 
sisters, twined together, lingering among the trees, conversing 
thus, with earnestness opposed to lightness, yet, with love 
responding tenderly to love.  And it was very curious indeed to see 
the younger sister's eyes suffused with tears, and something 
fervently and deeply felt, breaking through the wilfulness of what 
she said, and striving with it painfully.

The difference between them, in respect of age, could not exceed 
four years at most; but Grace, as often happens in such cases, when 
no mother watches over both (the Doctor's wife was dead), seemed, 
in her gentle care of her young sister, and in the steadiness of 
her devotion to her, older than she was; and more removed, in 
course of nature, from all competition with her, or participation, 
otherwise than through her sympathy and true affection, in her 
wayward fancies, than their ages seemed to warrant.  Great 
character of mother, that, even in this shadow and faint reflection 
of it, purifies the heart, and raises the exalted nature nearer to 
the angels!

The Doctor's reflections, as he looked after them, and heard the 
purport of their discourse, were limited at first to certain merry 
meditations on the folly of all loves and likings, and the idle 
imposition practised on themselves by young people, who believed 
for a moment, that there could be anything serious in such bubbles, 
and were always undeceived - always!

But, the home-adorning, self-denying qualities of Grace, and her 
sweet temper, so gentle and retiring, yet including so much 
constancy and bravery of spirit, seemed all expressed to him in the 
contrast between her quiet household figure and that of his younger 
and more beautiful child; and he was sorry for her sake - sorry for 
them both - that life should be such a very ridiculous business as 
it was.

The Doctor never dreamed of inquiring whether his children, or 
either of them, helped in any way to make the scheme a serious one.  
But then he was a Philosopher.

A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled, by chance, over 
that common Philosopher's stone (much more easily discovered than 
the object of the alchemist's researches), which sometimes trips up 
kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold 
to dross and every precious thing to poor account.

'Britain!' cried the Doctor.  'Britain!  Holloa!'

A small man, with an uncommonly sour and discontented face, emerged 
from the house, and returned to this call the unceremonious 
acknowledgment of 'Now then!'

'Where's the breakfast table?' said the Doctor.

'In the house,' returned Britain.

'Are you going to spread it out here, as you were told last night?' 
said the Doctor.  'Don't you know that there are gentlemen coming?  
That there's business to be done this morning, before the coach 
comes by?  That this is a very particular occasion?'

'I couldn't do anything, Dr. Jeddler, till the women had done 
getting in the apples, could I?' said Britain, his voice rising 
with his reasoning, so that it was very loud at last.

'Well, have they done now?' replied the Doctor, looking at his 
watch, and clapping his hands.  'Come! make haste! where's 
Clemency?'

'Here am I, Mister,' said a voice from one of the ladders, which a 
pair of clumsy feet descended briskly.  'It's all done now.  Clear 
away, gals.  Everything shall be ready for you in half a minute, 
Mister.'

With that she began to bustle about most vigorously; presenting, as 
she did so, an appearance sufficiently peculiar to justify a word 
of introduction.

She was about thirty years old, and had a sufficiently plump and 
cheerful face, though it was twisted up into an odd expression of 
tightness that made it comical.  But, the extraordinary homeliness 
of her gait and manner, would have superseded any face in the 
world.  To say that she had two left legs, and somebody else's 
arms, and that all four limbs seemed to be out of joint, and to 
start from perfectly wrong places when they were set in motion, is 
to offer the mildest outline of the reality.  To say that she was 
perfectly content and satisfied with these arrangements, and 
regarded them as being no business of hers, and that she took her 
arms and legs as they came, and allowed them to dispose of 
themselves just as it happened, is to render faint justice to her 
equanimity.  Her dress was a prodigious pair of self-willed shoes, 
that never wanted to go where her feet went; blue stockings; a 
printed gown of many colours, and the most hideous pattern 
procurable for money; and a white apron.  She always wore short 
sleeves, and always had, by some accident, grazed elbows, in which 
she took so lively an interest, that she was continually trying to 
turn them round and get impossible views of them.  In general, a 
little cap placed somewhere on her head; though it was rarely to be 
met with in the place usually occupied in other subjects, by that 
article of dress; but, from head to foot she was scrupulously 
clean, and maintained a kind of dislocated tidiness.  Indeed, her 
laudable anxiety to be tidy and compact in her own conscience as 
well as in the public eye, gave rise to one of her most startling 
evolutions, which was to grasp herself sometimes by a sort of 
wooden handle (part of her clothing, and familiarly called a busk), 
and wrestle as it were with her garments, until they fell into a 
symmetrical arrangement.

Such, in outward form and garb, was Clemency Newcome; who was 
supposed to have unconsciously originated a corruption of her own 
Christian name, from Clementina (but nobody knew, for the deaf old 
mother, a very phenomenon of age, whom she had supported almost 
from a child, was dead, and she had no other relation); who now 
busied herself in preparing the table, and who stood, at intervals, 
with her bare red arms crossed, rubbing her grazed elbows with 
opposite hands, and staring at it very composedly, until she 
suddenly remembered something else she wanted, and jogged off to 
fetch it.

'Here are them two lawyers a-coming, Mister!' said Clemency, in a 
tone of no very great good-will.

'Ah!' cried the Doctor, advancing to the gate to meet them.  'Good 
morning, good morning!  Grace, my dear!  Marion!  Here are Messrs. 
Snitchey and Craggs.  Where's Alfred!'

'He'll be back directly, father, no doubt,' said Grace.  'He had so 
much to do this morning in his preparations for departure, that he 
was up and out by daybreak.  Good morning, gentlemen.'

'Ladies!' said Mr. Snitchey, 'for Self and Craggs,' who bowed, 
'good morning!  Miss,' to Marion, 'I kiss your hand.'  Which he 
did.  'And I wish you' - which he might or might not, for he didn't 
look, at first sight, like a gentleman troubled with many warm 
outpourings of soul, in behalf of other people, 'a hundred happy 
returns of this auspicious day.'

'Ha ha ha!' laughed the Doctor thoughtfully, with his hands in his 
pockets.  'The great farce in a hundred acts!'

'You wouldn't, I am sure,' said Mr. Snitchey, standing a small 
professional blue bag against one leg of the table, 'cut the great 
farce short for this actress, at all events, Doctor Jeddler.'

'No,' returned the Doctor.  'God forbid!  May she live to laugh at 
it, as long as she CAN laugh, and then say, with the French wit, 
"The farce is ended; draw the curtain."'

'The French wit,' said Mr. Snitchey, peeping sharply into his blue 
bag, 'was wrong, Doctor Jeddler, and your philosophy is altogether 
wrong, depend upon it, as I have often told you.  Nothing serious 
in life!  What do you call law?'

'A joke,' replied the Doctor.

'Did you ever go to law?' asked Mr. Snitchey, looking out of the 
blue bag.

'Never,' returned the Doctor.

'If you ever do,' said Mr. Snitchey, 'perhaps you'll alter that 
opinion.'

Craggs, who seemed to be represented by Snitchey, and to be 
conscious of little or no separate existence or personal 
individuality, offered a remark of his own in this place.  It 
involved the only idea of which he did not stand seized and 
possessed in equal moieties with Snitchey; but, he had some 
partners in it among the wise men of the world.

'It's made a great deal too easy,' said Mr. Craggs.

'Law is?' asked the Doctor.

'Yes,' said Mr. Craggs, 'everything is.  Everything appears to me 
to be made too easy, now-a-days.  It's the vice of these times.  If 
the world is a joke (I am not prepared to say it isn't), it ought 
to be made a very difficult joke to crack.  It ought to be as hard 
a struggle, sir, as possible.  That's the intention.  But, it's 
being made far too easy.  We are oiling the gates of life.  They 
ought to be rusty.  We shall have them beginning to turn, soon, 
with a smooth sound.  Whereas they ought to grate upon their 
hinges, sir.'

Mr. Craggs seemed positively to grate upon his own hinges, as he 
delivered this opinion; to which he communicated immense effect - 
being a cold, hard, dry, man, dressed in grey and white, like a 
flint; with small twinkles in his eyes, as if something struck 
sparks out of them.  The three natural kingdoms, indeed, had each a 
fanciful representative among this brotherhood of disputants; for 
Snitchey was like a magpie or raven (only not so sleek), and the 
Doctor had a streaked face like a winter-pippin, with here and 
there a dimple to express the peckings of the birds, and a very 
little bit of pigtail behind that stood for the stalk.

As the active figure of a handsome young man, dressed for a 
journey, and followed by a porter bearing several packages and 
baskets, entered the orchard at a brisk pace, and with an air of 
gaiety and hope that accorded well with the morning, these three 
drew together, like the brothers of the sister Fates, or like the 
Graces most effectually disguised, or like the three weird prophets 
on the heath, and greeted him.

'Happy returns, Alf!' said the Doctor, lightly.

'A hundred happy returns of this auspicious day, Mr. Heathfield!' 
said Snitchey, bowing low.

'Returns!' Craggs murmured in a deep voice, all alone.

'Why, what a battery!' exclaimed Alfred, stopping short, 'and one - 
two - three - all foreboders of no good, in the great sea before 
me.  I am glad you are not the first I have met this morning:  I 
should have taken it for a bad omen.  But, Grace was the first - 
sweet, pleasant Grace - so I defy you all!'

'If you please, Mister, I was the first you know,' said Clemency 
Newcome.  'She was walking out here, before sunrise, you remember.  
I was in the house.'

'That's true!  Clemency was the first,' said Alfred.  'So I defy 
you with Clemency.'

'Ha, ha, ha, - for Self and Craggs,' said Snitchey.  'What a 
defiance!'

'Not so bad a one as it appears, may be,' said Alfred, shaking 
hands heartily with the Doctor, and also with Snitchey and Craggs, 
and then looking round.  'Where are the - Good Heavens!'

With a start, productive for the moment of a closer partnership 
between Jonathan Snitchey and Thomas Craggs than the subsisting 
articles of agreement in that wise contemplated, he hastily betook 
himself to where the sisters stood together, and - however, I 
needn't more particularly explain his manner of saluting Marion 
first, and Grace afterwards, than by hinting that Mr. Craggs may 
possibly have considered it 'too easy.'

Perhaps to change the subject, Dr. Jeddler made a hasty move 
towards the breakfast, and they all sat down at table.  Grace 
presided; but so discreetly stationed herself, as to cut off her 
sister and Alfred from the rest of the company.  Snitchey and 
Craggs sat at opposite corners, with the blue bag between them for 
safety; the Doctor took his usual position, opposite to Grace.  
Clemency hovered galvanically about the table, as waitress; and the 
melancholy Britain, at another and a smaller board, acted as Grand 
Carver of a round of beef and a ham.

'Meat?' said Britain, approaching Mr. Snitchey, with the carving 
knife and fork in his hands, and throwing the question at him like 
a missile.

'Certainly,' returned the lawyer.

'Do YOU want any?' to Craggs.

'Lean and well done,' replied that gentleman.

Having executed these orders, and moderately supplied the Doctor 
(he seemed to know that nobody else wanted anything to eat), he 
lingered as near the Firm as he decently could, watching with an 
austere eye their disposition of the viands, and but once relaxing 
the severe expression of his face.  This was on the occasion of Mr. 
Craggs, whose teeth were not of the best, partially choking, when 
he cried out with great animation, 'I thought he was gone!'

'Now, Alfred,' said the Doctor, 'for a word or two of business, 
while we are yet at breakfast.'

'While we are yet at breakfast,' said Snitchey and Craggs, who 
seemed to have no present idea of leaving off.

Although Alfred had not been breakfasting, and seemed to have quite 
enough business on his hands as it was, he respectfully answered:

'If you please, sir.'

'If anything could be serious,' the Doctor began, 'in such a - '

'Farce as this, sir,' hinted Alfred.

'In such a farce as this,' observed the Doctor, 'it might be this 
recurrence, on the eve of separation, of a double birthday, which 
is connected with many associations pleasant to us four, and with 
the recollection of a long and amicable intercourse.  That's not to 
the purpose.'

'Ah! yes, yes, Dr. Jeddler,' said the young man.  'It is to the 
purpose.  Much to the purpose, as my heart bears witness this 
morning; and as yours does too, I know, if you would let it speak.  
I leave your house to-day; I cease to be your ward to-day; we part 
with tender relations stretching far behind us, that never can be 
exactly renewed, and with others dawning - yet before us,' he 
looked down at Marion beside him, 'fraught with such considerations 
as I must not trust myself to speak of now.  Come, come!' he added, 
rallying his spirits and the Doctor at once, 'there's a serious 
grain in this large foolish dust-heap, Doctor.  Let us allow to-
day, that there is One.'

'To-day!' cried the Doctor.  'Hear him!  Ha, ha, ha!  Of all days 
in the foolish year.  Why, on this day, the great battle was fought 
on this ground.  On this ground where we now sit, where I saw my 
two girls dance this morning, where the fruit has just been 
gathered for our eating from these trees, the roots of which are 
struck in Men, not earth, - so many lives were lost, that within my 
recollection, generations afterwards, a churchyard full of bones, 
and dust of bones, and chips of cloven skulls, has been dug up from 
underneath our feet here.  Yet not a hundred people in that battle 
knew for what they fought, or why; not a hundred of the 
inconsiderate rejoicers in the victory, why they rejoiced.  Not 
half a hundred people were the better for the gain or loss.  Not 
half-a-dozen men agree to this hour on the cause or merits; and 
nobody, in short, ever knew anything distinct about it, but the 
mourners of the slain.  Serious, too!' said the Doctor, laughing.  
'Such a system!'

'But, all this seems to me,' said Alfred, 'to be very serious.'

'Serious!' cried the Doctor.  'If you allowed such things to be 
serious, you must go mad, or die, or climb up to the top of a 
mountain, and turn hermit.'

'Besides - so long ago,' said Alfred.

'Long ago!' returned the Doctor.  'Do you know what the world has 
been doing, ever since?  Do you know what else it has been doing?  
I don't!'

'It has gone to law a little,' observed Mr. Snitchey, stirring his 
tea.

'Although the way out has been always made too easy,' said his 
partner.

'And you'll excuse my saying, Doctor,' pursued Mr. Snitchey, 
'having been already put a thousand times in possession of my 
opinion, in the course of our discussions, that, in its having gone 
to law, and in its legal system altogether, I do observe a serious 
side - now, really, a something tangible, and with a purpose and 
intention in it - '

Clemency Newcome made an angular tumble against the table, 
occasioning a sounding clatter among the cups and saucers.

'Heyday! what's the matter there?' exclaimed the Doctor.

'It's this evil-inclined blue bag,' said Clemency, 'always tripping 
up somebody!'

'With a purpose and intention in it, I was saying,' resumed 
Snitchey, 'that commands respect.  Life a farce, Dr. Jeddler?  With 
law in it?'

The Doctor laughed, and looked at Alfred.

'Granted, if you please, that war is foolish,' said Snitchey.  
'There we agree.  For example.  Here's a smiling country,' pointing 
it out with his fork, 'once overrun by soldiers - trespassers every 
man of 'em - and laid waste by fire and sword.  He, he, he!  The 
idea of any man exposing himself, voluntarily, to fire and sword!  
Stupid, wasteful, positively ridiculous; you laugh at your fellow-
creatures, you know, when you think of it!  But take this smiling 
country as it stands.  Think of the laws appertaining to real 
property; to the bequest and devise of real property; to the 
mortgage and redemption of real property; to leasehold, freehold, 
and copyhold estate; think,' said Mr. Snitchey, with such great 
emotion that he actually smacked his lips, 'of the complicated laws 
relating to title and proof of title, with all the contradictory 
precedents and numerous acts of parliament connected with them; 
think of the infinite number of ingenious and interminable chancery 
suits, to which this pleasant prospect may give rise; and 
acknowledge, Dr. Jeddler, that there is a green spot in the scheme 
about us!  I believe,' said Mr. Snitchey, looking at his partner, 
'that I speak for Self and Craggs?'

Mr. Craggs having signified assent, Mr. Snitchey, somewhat 
freshened by his recent eloquence, observed that he would take a 
little more beef and another cup of tea.

'I don't stand up for life in general,' he added, rubbing his hands 
and chuckling, 'it's full of folly; full of something worse.  
Professions of trust, and confidence, and unselfishness, and all 
that!  Bah, bah, bah!  We see what they're worth.  But, you mustn't 
laugh at life; you've got a game to play; a very serious game 
indeed!  Everybody's playing against you, you know, and you're 
playing against them.  Oh! it's a very interesting thing.  There 
are deep moves upon the board.  You must only laugh, Dr. Jeddler, 
when you win - and then not much.  He, he, he!  And then not much,' 
repeated Snitchey, rolling his head and winking his eye, as if he 
would have added, 'you may do this instead!'

'Well, Alfred!' cried the Doctor, 'what do you say now?'

'I say, sir,' replied Alfred, 'that the greatest favour you could 
do me, and yourself too, I am inclined to think, would be to try 
sometimes to forget this battle-field and others like it in that 
broader battle-field of Life, on which the sun looks every day.'

'Really, I'm afraid that wouldn't soften his opinions, Mr. Alfred,' 
said Snitchey.  'The combatants are very eager and very bitter in 
that same battle of Life.  There's a great deal of cutting and 
slashing, and firing into people's heads from behind.  There is 
terrible treading down, and trampling on.  It is rather a bad 
business.'

'I believe, Mr. Snitchey,' said Alfred, 'there are quiet victories 
and struggles, great sacrifices of self, and noble acts of heroism, 
in it - even in many of its apparent lightnesses and contradictions 
- not the less difficult to achieve, because they have no earthly 
chronicle or audience - done every day in nooks and corners, and in 
little households, and in men's and women's hearts - any one of 
which might reconcile the sternest man to such a world, and fill 
him with belief and hope in it, though two-fourths of its people 
were at war, and another fourth at law; and that's a bold word.'

Both the sisters listened keenly.

'Well, well!' said the Doctor, 'I am too old to be converted, even 
by my friend Snitchey here, or my good spinster sister, Martha 
Jeddler; who had what she calls her domestic trials ages ago, and 
has led a sympathising life with all sorts of people ever since; 
and who is so much of your opinion (only she's less reasonable and 
more obstinate, being a woman), that we can't agree, and seldom 
meet.  I was born upon this battle-field.  I began, as a boy, to 
have my thoughts directed to the real history of a battle-field.  
Sixty years have gone over my head, and I have never seen the 
Christian world, including Heaven knows how many loving mothers and 
good enough girls like mine here, anything but mad for a battle-
field.  The same contradictions prevail in everything.  One must 
either laugh or cry at such stupendous inconsistencies; and I 
prefer to laugh.'

Britain, who had been paying the profoundest and most melancholy 
attention to each speaker in his turn, seemed suddenly to decide in 
favour of the same preference, if a deep sepulchral sound that 
escaped him might be construed into a demonstration of risibility.  
His face, however, was so perfectly unaffected by it, both before 
and afterwards, that although one or two of the breakfast party 
looked round as being startled by a mysterious noise, nobody 
connected the offender with it.

Except his partner in attendance, Clemency Newcome; who rousing him 
with one of those favourite joints, her elbows, inquired, in a 
reproachful whisper, what he laughed at.

'Not you!' said Britain.

'Who then?'

'Humanity,' said Britain.  'That's the joke!'

'What between master and them lawyers, he's getting more and more 
addle-headed every day!' cried Clemency, giving him a lunge with 
the other elbow, as a mental stimulant.  'Do you know where you 
are?  Do you want to get warning?'

'I don't know anything,' said Britain, with a leaden eye and an 
immovable visage.  'I don't care for anything.  I don't make out 
anything.  I don't believe anything.  And I don't want anything.'

Although this forlorn summary of his general condition may have 
been overcharged in an access of despondency, Benjamin Britain - 
sometimes called Little Britain, to distinguish him from Great; as 
we might say Young England, to express Old England with a decided 
difference - had defined his real state more accurately than might 
be supposed.  For, serving as a sort of man Miles to the Doctor's 
Friar Bacon, and listening day after day to innumerable orations 
addressed by the Doctor to various people, all tending to show that 
his very existence was at best a mistake and an absurdity, this 
unfortunate servitor had fallen, by degrees, into such an abyss of 
confused and contradictory suggestions from within and without, 
that Truth at the bottom of her well, was on the level surface as 
compared with Britain in the depths of his mystification.  The only 
point he clearly comprehended, was, that the new element usually 
brought into these discussions by Snitchey and Craggs, never served 
to make them clearer, and always seemed to give the Doctor a 
species of advantage and confirmation.  Therefore, he looked upon 
the Firm as one of the proximate causes of his state of mind, and 
held them in abhorrence accordingly.

'But, this is not our business, Alfred,' said the Doctor.  'Ceasing 
to be my ward (as you have said) to-day; and leaving us full to the 
brim of such learning as the Grammar School down here was able to 
give you, and your studies in London could add to that, and such 
practical knowledge as a dull old country Doctor like myself could 
graft upon both; you are away, now, into the world.  The first term 
of probation appointed by your poor father, being over, away you go 
now, your own master, to fulfil his second desire.  And long before 
your three years' tour among the foreign schools of medicine is 
finished, you'll have forgotten us.  Lord, you'll forget us easily 
in six months!'

'If I do - But you know better; why should I speak to you!' said 
Alfred, laughing.

'I don't know anything of the sort,' returned the Doctor.  'What do 
you say, Marion?'

Marion, trifling with her teacup, seemed to say - but she didn't 
say it - that he was welcome to forget, if he could.  Grace pressed 
the blooming face against her cheek, and smiled.

'I haven't been, I hope, a very unjust steward in the execution of 
my trust,' pursued the Doctor; 'but I am to be, at any rate, 
formally discharged, and released, and what not this morning; and 
here are our good friends Snitchey and Craggs, with a bagful of 
papers, and accounts, and documents, for the transfer of the 
balance of the trust fund to you (I wish it was a more difficult 
one to dispose of, Alfred, but you must get to be a great man and 
make it so), and other drolleries of that sort, which are to be 
signed, sealed, and delivered.'

'And duly witnessed as by law required,' said Snitchey, pushing 
away his plate, and taking out the papers, which his partner 
proceeded to spread upon the table; 'and Self and Crags having been 
co-trustees with you, Doctor, in so far as the fund was concerned, 
we shall want your two servants to attest the signatures - can you 
read, Mrs. Newcome?'

'I an't married, Mister,' said Clemency.

'Oh!  I beg your pardon.  I should think not,' chuckled Snitchey, 
casting his eyes over her extraordinary figure.  'You CAN read?'

'A little,' answered Clemency.

'The marriage service, night and morning, eh?' observed the lawyer, 
jocosely.

'No,' said Clemency.  'Too hard.  I only reads a thimble.'

'Read a thimble!' echoed Snitchey.  'What are you talking about, 
young woman?'

Clemency nodded.  'And a nutmeg-grater.'

'Why, this is a lunatic! a subject for the Lord High Chancellor!' 
said Snitchey, staring at her.

- 'If possessed of any property,' stipulated Craggs.

Grace, however, interposing, explained that each of the articles in 
question bore an engraved motto, and so formed the pocket library 
of Clemency Newcome, who was not much given to the study of books.

'Oh, that's it, is it, Miss Grace!' said Snitchey.

'Yes, yes.  Ha, ha, ha!  I thought our friend was an idiot.  She 
looks uncommonly like it,' he muttered, with a supercilious glance.  
'And what does the thimble say, Mrs. Newcome?'

'I an't married, Mister,' observed Clemency.

'Well, Newcome.  Will that do?' said the lawyer.  'What does the 
thimble say, Newcome?'

How Clemency, before replying to this question, held one pocket 
open, and looked down into its yawning depths for the thimble which 
wasn't there, - and how she then held an opposite pocket open, and 
seeming to descry it, like a pearl of great price, at the bottom, 
cleared away such intervening obstacles as a handkerchief, an end 
of wax candle, a flushed apple, an orange, a lucky penny, a cramp 
bone, a padlock, a pair of scissors in a sheath more expressively 
describable as promising young shears, a handful or so of loose 
beads, several balls of cotton, a needle-case, a cabinet collection 
of curl-papers, and a biscuit, all of which articles she entrusted 
individually and separately to Britain to hold, - is of no 
consequence.

Nor how, in her determination to grasp this pocket by the throat 
and keep it prisoner (for it had a tendency to swing, and twist 
itself round the nearest corner), she assumed and calmly 
maintained, an attitude apparently inconsistent with the human 
anatomy and the laws of gravity.  It is enough that at last she 
triumphantly produced the thimble on her finger, and rattled the 
nutmeg-grater:  the literature of both those trinkets being 
obviously in course of wearing out and wasting away, through 
excessive friction.

'That's the thimble, is it, young woman?' said Mr. Snitchey, 
diverting himself at her expense.  'And what does the thimble say?'

'It says,' replied Clemency, reading slowly round as if it were a 
tower, 'For-get and For-give.'

Snitchey and Craggs laughed heartily.  'So new!' said Snitchey.  
'So easy!' said Craggs.  'Such a knowledge of human nature in it!' 
said Snitchey.  'So applicable to the affairs of life!' said 
Craggs.

'And the nutmeg-grater?' inquired the head of the Firm.

'The grater says,' returned Clemency, 'Do as you - wold - be - done 
by.'

'Do, or you'll be done brown, you mean,' said Mr. Snitchey.

'I don't understand,' retorted Clemency, shaking her head vaguely.  
'I an't no lawyer.'

'I am afraid that if she was, Doctor,' said Mr. Snitchey, turning 
to him suddenly, as if to anticipate any effect that might 
otherwise be consequent on this retort, 'she'd find it to be the 
golden rule of half her clients.  They are serious enough in that - 
whimsical as your world is - and lay the blame on us afterwards.  
We, in our profession, are little else than mirrors after all, Mr. 
Alfred; but, we are generally consulted by angry and quarrelsome 
people who are not in their best looks, and it's rather hard to 
quarrel with us if we reflect unpleasant aspects.  I think,' said 
Mr. Snitchey, 'that I speak for Self and Craggs?'

'Decidedly,' said Craggs.

'And so, if Mr. Britain will oblige us with a mouthful of ink,' 
said Mr. Snitchey, returning to the papers, 'we'll sign, seal, and 
deliver as soon as possible, or the coach will be coming past 
before we know where we are.'

If one might judge from his appearance, there was every probability 
of the coach coming past before Mr. Britain knew where HE was; for 
he stood in a state of abstraction, mentally balancing the Doctor 
against the lawyers, and the lawyers against the Doctor, and their 
clients against both, and engaged in feeble attempts to make the 
thimble and nutmeg-grater (a new idea to him) square with anybody's 
system of philosophy; and, in short, bewildering himself as much as 
ever his great namesake has done with theories and schools.  But, 
Clemency, who was his good Genius - though he had the meanest 
possible opinion of her understanding, by reason of her seldom 
troubling herself with abstract speculations, and being always at 
hand to do the right thing at the right time - having produced the 
ink in a twinkling, tendered him the further service of recalling 
him to himself by the application of her elbows; with which gentle 
flappers she so jogged his memory, in a more literal construction 
of that phrase than usual, that he soon became quite fresh and 
brisk.

How he laboured under an apprehension not uncommon to persons in 
his degree, to whom the use of pen and ink is an event, that he 
couldn't append his name to a document, not of his own writing, 
without committing himself in some shadowy manner, or somehow 
signing away vague and enormous sums of money; and how he 
approached the deeds under protest, and by dint of the Doctor's 
coercion, and insisted on pausing to look at them before writing 
(the cramped hand, to say nothing of the phraseology, being so much 
Chinese to him), and also on turning them round to see whether 
there was anything fraudulent underneath; and how, having signed 
his name, he became desolate as one who had parted with his 
property and rights; I want the time to tell.  Also, how the blue 
bag containing his signature, afterwards had a mysterious interest 
for him, and he couldn't leave it; also, how Clemency Newcome, in 
an ecstasy of laughter at the idea of her own importance and 
dignity, brooded over the whole table with her two elbows, like a 
spread eagle, and reposed her head upon her left arm as a 
preliminary to the formation of certain cabalistic characters, 
which required a deal of ink, and imaginary counterparts whereof 
she executed at the same time with her tongue.  Also, how, having 
once tasted ink, she became thirsty in that regard, as tame tigers 
are said to be after tasting another sort of fluid, and wanted to 
sign everything, and put her name in all kinds of places.  In 
brief, the Doctor was discharged of his trust and all its 
responsibilities; and Alfred, taking it on himself, was fairly 
started on the journey of life.

'Britain!' said the Doctor.  'Run to the gate, and watch for the 
coach.  Time flies, Alfred.'

'Yes, sir, yes,' returned the young man, hurriedly.  'Dear Grace! a 
moment!  Marion - so young and beautiful, so winning and so much 
admired, dear to my heart as nothing else in life is - remember!  I 
leave Marion to you!'

'She has always been a sacred charge to me, Alfred.  She is doubly 
so, now.  I will be faithful to my trust, believe me.'

'I do believe it, Grace.  I know it well.  Who could look upon your 
face, and hear your voice, and not know it!  Ah, Grace!  If I had 
your well-governed heart, and tranquil mind, how bravely I would 
leave this place to-day!'

'Would you?' she answered with a quiet smile.

'And yet, Grace - Sister, seems the natural word.'

'Use it!' she said quickly.  'I am glad to hear it.  Call me 
nothing else.'

'And yet, sister, then,' said Alfred, 'Marion and I had better have 
your true and steadfast qualities serving us here, and making us 
both happier and better.  I wouldn't carry them away, to sustain 
myself, if I could!'

'Coach upon the hill-top!' exclaimed Britain.

'Time flies, Alfred,' said the Doctor.

Marion had stood apart, with her eyes fixed upon the ground; but, 
this warning being given, her young lover brought her tenderly to 
where her sister stood, and gave her into her embrace.

'I have been telling Grace, dear Marion,' he said, 'that you are 
her charge; my precious trust at parting.  And when I come back and 
reclaim you, dearest, and the bright prospect of our married life 
lies stretched before us, it shall be one of our chief pleasures to 
consult how we can make Grace happy; how we can anticipate her 
wishes; how we can show our gratitude and love to her; how we can 
return her something of the debt she will have heaped upon us.'

The younger sister had one hand in his; the other rested on her 
sister's neck.  She looked into that sister's eyes, so calm, 
serene, and cheerful, with a gaze in which affection, admiration, 
sorrow, wonder, almost veneration, were blended.  She looked into 
that sister's face, as if it were the face of some bright angel.  
Calm, serene, and cheerful, the face looked back on her and on her 
lover.

'And when the time comes, as it must one day,' said Alfred, - 'I 
wonder it has never come yet, but Grace knows best, for Grace is 
always right - when SHE will want a friend to open her whole heart 
to, and to be to her something of what she has been to us - then, 
Marion, how faithful we will prove, and what delight to us to know 
that she, our dear good sister, loves and is loved again, as we 
would have her!'

Still the younger sister looked into her eyes, and turned not - 
even towards him.  And still those honest eyes looked back, so 
calm, serene, and cheerful, on herself and on her lover.

'And when all that is past, and we are old, and living (as we 
must!) together - close together - talking often of old times,' 
said Alfred - 'these shall be our favourite times among them - this 
day most of all; and, telling each other what we thought and felt, 
and hoped and feared at parting; and how we couldn't bear to say 
good bye - '

'Coach coming through the wood!' cried Britain.

'Yes!  I am ready - and how we met again, so happily in spite of 
all; we'll make this day the happiest in all the year, and keep it 
as a treble birth-day.  Shall we, dear?'

'Yes!' interposed the elder sister, eagerly, and with a radiant 
smile.  'Yes!  Alfred, don't linger.  There's no time.  Say good 
bye to Marion.  And Heaven be with you!'

He pressed the younger sister to his heart.  Released from his 
embrace, she again clung to her sister; and her eyes, with the same 
blended look, again sought those so calm, serene, and cheerful.

'Farewell, my boy!' said the Doctor.  'To talk about any serious 
correspondence or serious affections, and engagements and so forth, 
in such a - ha ha ha! - you know what I mean - why that, of course, 
would be sheer nonsense.  All I can say is, that if you and Marion 
should continue in the same foolish minds, I shall not object to 
have you for a son-in-law one of these days.'

'Over the bridge!' cried Britain.

'Let it come!' said Alfred, wringing the Doctor's hand stoutly.  
'Think of me sometimes, my old friend and guardian, as seriously as 
you can!  Adieu, Mr. Snitchey!  Farewell, Mr. Craggs!'

'Coming down the road!' cried Britain.

'A kiss of Clemency Newcome for long acquaintance' sake!  Shake 
hands, Britain!  Marion, dearest heart, good bye!  Sister Grace! 
remember!'

The quiet household figure, and the face so beautiful in its 
serenity, were turned towards him in reply; but Marion's look and 
attitude remained unchanged.

The coach was at the gate.  There was a bustle with the luggage.  
The coach drove away.  Marion never moved.

'He waves his hat to you, my love,' said Grace.  'Your chosen 
husband, darling.  Look!'

The younger sister raised her head, and, for a moment, turned it.  
Then, turning back again, and fully meeting, for the first time, 
those calm eyes, fell sobbing on her neck.

'Oh, Grace.  God bless you!  But I cannot bear to see it, Grace!  
It breaks my heart.'



CHAPTER II - Part The Second



SNITCHEY AND CRAGGS had a snug little office on the old Battle 
Ground, where they drove a snug little business, and fought a great 
many small pitched battles for a great many contending parties.  
Though it could hardly be said of these conflicts that they were 
running fights - for in truth they generally proceeded at a snail's 
pace - the part the Firm had in them came so far within the general 
denomination, that now they took a shot at this Plaintiff, and now 
aimed a chop at that Defendant, now made a heavy charge at an 
estate in Chancery, and now had some light skirmishing among an 
irregular body of small debtors, just as the occasion served, and 
the enemy happened to present himself.  The Gazette was an 
important and profitable feature in some of their fields, as in 
fields of greater renown; and in most of the Actions wherein they 
showed their generalship, it was afterwards observed by the 
combatants that they had had great difficulty in making each other 
out, or in knowing with any degree of distinctness what they were 
about, in consequence of the vast amount of smoke by which they 
were surrounded.

The offices of Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs stood convenient, with 
an open door down two smooth steps, in the market-place; so that 
any angry farmer inclining towards hot water, might tumble into it 
at once.  Their special council-chamber and hall of conference was 
an old back-room up-stairs, with a low dark ceiling, which seemed 
to be knitting its brows gloomily in the consideration of tangled 
points of law.  It was furnished with some high-backed leathern 
chairs, garnished with great goggle-eyed brass nails, of which, 
every here and there, two or three had fallen out - or had been 
picked out, perhaps, by the wandering thumbs and forefingers of 
bewildered clients.  There was a framed print of a great judge in 
it, every curl in whose dreadful wig had made a man's hair stand on 
end.  Bales of papers filled the dusty closets, shelves, and 
tables; and round the wainscot there were tiers of boxes, padlocked 
and fireproof, with people's names painted outside, which anxious 
visitors felt themselves, by a cruel enchantment, obliged to spell 
backwards and forwards, and to make anagrams of, while they sat, 
seeming to listen to Snitchey and Craggs, without comprehending one 
word of what they said.

Snitchey and Craggs had each, in private life as in professional 
existence, a partner of his own.  Snitchey and Craggs were the best 
friends in the world, and had a real confidence in one another; but 
Mrs. Snitchey, by a dispensation not uncommon in the affairs of 
life, was on principle suspicious of Mr. Craggs; and Mrs. Craggs 
was on principle suspicious of Mr. Snitchey.  'Your Snitcheys 
indeed,' the latter lady would observe, sometimes, to Mr. Craggs; 
using that imaginative plural as if in disparagement of an 
objectionable pair of pantaloons, or other articles not possessed 
of a singular number; 'I don't see what you want with your 
Snitcheys, for my part.  You trust a great deal too much to your 
Snitcheys, I think, and I hope you may never find my words come 
true.'  While Mrs. Snitchey would observe to Mr. Snitchey, of 
Craggs, 'that if ever he was led away by man he was led away by 
that man, and that if ever she read a double purpose in a mortal 
eye, she read that purpose in Craggs's eye.'  Notwithstanding this, 
however, they were all very good friends in general:  and Mrs. 
Snitchey and Mrs. Craggs maintained a close bond of alliance 
against 'the office,' which they both considered the Blue chamber, 
and common enemy, full of dangerous (because unknown) machinations.

In this office, nevertheless, Snitchey and Craggs made honey for 
their several hives.  Here, sometimes, they would linger, of a fine 
evening, at the window of their council-chamber overlooking the old 
battle-ground, and wonder (but that was generally at assize time, 
when much business had made them sentimental) at the folly of 
mankind, who couldn't always be at peace with one another and go to 
law comfortably.  Here, days, and weeks, and months, and years, 
passed over them:  their calendar, the gradually diminishing number 
of brass nails in the leathern chairs, and the increasing bulk of 
papers on the tables.  Here, nearly three years' flight had thinned 
the one and swelled the other, since the breakfast in the orchard; 
when they sat together in consultation at night.

Not alone; but, with a man of about thirty, or that time of life, 
negligently dressed, and somewhat haggard in the face, but well-
made, well-attired, and well-looking, who sat in the armchair of 
state, with one hand in his breast, and the other in his 
dishevelled hair, pondering moodily.  Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs 
sat opposite each other at a neighbouring desk.  One of the 
fireproof boxes, unpadlocked and opened, was upon it; a part of its 
contents lay strewn upon the table, and the rest was then in course 
of passing through the hands of Mr. Snitchey; who brought it to the 
candle, document by document; looked at every paper singly, as he 
produced it; shook his head, and handed it to Mr. Craggs; who 
looked it over also, shook his head, and laid it down.  Sometimes, 
they would stop, and shaking their heads in concert, look towards 
the abstracted client.  And the name on the box being Michael 
Warden, Esquire, we may conclude from these premises that the name 
and the box were both his, and that the affairs of Michael Warden, 
Esquire, were in a bad way.

'That's all,' said Mr. Snitchey, turning up the last paper.  
'Really there's no other resource.  No other resource.'

'All lost, spent, wasted, pawned, borrowed, and sold, eh?' said the 
client, looking up.

'All,' returned Mr. Snitchey.

'Nothing else to be done, you say?'

'Nothing at all.'

The client bit his nails, and pondered again.

'And I am not even personally safe in England?  You hold to that, 
do you?'

'In no part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,' 
replied Mr. Snitchey.

'A mere prodigal son with no father to go back to, no swine to 
keep, and no husks to share with them?  Eh?' pursued the client, 
rocking one leg over the other, and searching the ground with his 
eyes.

Mr. Snitchey coughed, as if to deprecate the being supposed to 
participate in any figurative illustration of a legal position.  
Mr. Craggs, as if to express that it was a partnership view of the 
subject, also coughed.

'Ruined at thirty!' said the client.  'Humph!'

'Not ruined, Mr. Warden,' returned Snitchey.  'Not so bad as that.  
You have done a good deal towards it, I must say, but you are not 
ruined.  A little nursing - '

'A little Devil,' said the client.

'Mr. Craggs,' said Snitchey, 'will you oblige me with a pinch of 
snuff?  Thank you, sir.'

As the imperturbable lawyer applied it to his nose with great 
apparent relish and a perfect absorption of his attention in the 
proceeding, the client gradually broke into a smile, and, looking 
up, said:

'You talk of nursing.  How long nursing?'

'How long nursing?' repeated Snitchey, dusting the snuff from his 
fingers, and making a slow calculation in his mind.  'For your 
involved estate, sir?  In good hands? S. and C.'s, say?  Six or 
seven years.'

'To starve for six or seven years!' said the client with a fretful 
laugh, and an impatient change of his position.

'To starve for six or seven years, Mr. Warden,' said Snitchey, 
'would be very uncommon indeed.  You might get another estate by 
showing yourself, the while.  But, we don't think you could do it - 
speaking for Self and Craggs - and consequently don't advise it.'

'What DO you advise?'

'Nursing, I say,' repeated Snitchey.  'Some few years of nursing by 
Self and Craggs would bring it round.  But to enable us to make 
terms, and hold terms, and you to keep terms, you must go away; you 
must live abroad.  As to starvation, we could ensure you some 
hundreds a-year to starve upon, even in the beginning - I dare say, 
Mr. Warden.'

'Hundreds,' said the client.  'And I have spent thousands!'

'That,' retorted Mr. Snitchey, putting the papers slowly back into 
the cast-iron box, 'there is no doubt about.  No doubt about,' he 
repeated to himself, as he thoughtfully pursued his occupation.

The lawyer very likely knew HIS man; at any rate his dry, shrewd, 
whimsical manner, had a favourable influence on the client's moody 
state, and disposed him to be more free and unreserved.  Or, 
perhaps the client knew HIS man, and had elicited such 
encouragement as he had received, to render some purpose he was 
about to disclose the more defensible in appearance.  Gradually 
raising his head, he sat looking at his immovable adviser with a 
smile, which presently broke into a laugh.

'After all,' he said, 'my iron-headed friend - '

Mr. Snitchey pointed out his partner.  'Self and - excuse me - 
Craggs.'

'I beg Mr. Craggs's pardon,' said the client.  'After all, my iron-
headed friends,' he leaned forward in his chair, and dropped his 
voice a little, 'you don't know half my ruin yet.'

Mr. Snitchey stopped and stared at him.  Mr. Craggs also stared.

'I am not only deep in debt,' said the client, 'but I am deep in - 
'

'Not in love!' cried Snitchey.

'Yes!' said the client, falling back in his chair, and surveying 
the Firm with his hands in his pockets.  'Deep in love.'

'And not with an heiress, sir?' said Snitchey.

'Not with an heiress.'

'Nor a rich lady?'

'Nor a rich lady that I know of - except in beauty and merit.'

'A single lady, I trust?' said Mr. Snitchey, with great expression.

'Certainly.'

'It's not one of Dr. Jeddler's daughters?' said Snitchey, suddenly 
squaring his elbows on his knees, and advancing his face at least a 
yard.

'Yes!' returned the client.

'Not his younger daughter?' said Snitchey.

'Yes!' returned the client.

'Mr. Craggs,' said Snitchey, much relieved, 'will you oblige me 
with another pinch of snuff?  Thank you!  I am happy to say it 
don't signify, Mr. Warden; she's engaged, sir, she's bespoke.  My 
partner can corroborate me.  We know the fact.'

'We know the fact,' repeated Craggs.

'Why, so do I perhaps,' returned the client quietly.  'What of 
that!  Are you men of the world, and did you never hear of a woman 
changing her mind?'

'There certainly have been actions for breach,' said Mr. Snitchey, 
'brought against both spinsters and widows, but, in the majority of 
cases - '

'Cases!' interposed the client, impatiently.  'Don't talk to me of 
cases.  The general precedent is in a much larger volume than any 
of your law books.  Besides, do you think I have lived six weeks in 
the Doctor's house for nothing?'

'I think, sir,' observed Mr. Snitchey, gravely addressing himself 
to his partner, 'that of all the scrapes Mr. Warden's horses have 
brought him into at one time and another - and they have been 
pretty numerous, and pretty expensive, as none know better than 
himself, and you, and I - the worst scrape may turn out to be, if 
he talks in this way, this having ever been left by one of them at 
the Doctor's garden wall, with three broken ribs, a snapped collar-
bone, and the Lord knows how many bruises.  We didn't think so much 
of it, at the time when we knew he was going on well under the 
Doctor's hands and roof; but it looks bad now, sir.  Bad?  It looks 
very bad.  Doctor Jeddler too - our client, Mr. Craggs.'

'Mr. Alfred Heathfield too - a sort of client, Mr. Snitchey,' said 
Craggs.

'Mr. Michael Warden too, a kind of client,' said the careless 
visitor, 'and no bad one either:  having played the fool for ten or 
twelve years.  However, Mr. Michael Warden has sown his wild oats 
now - there's their crop, in that box; and he means to repent and 
be wise.  And in proof of it, Mr. Michael Warden means, if he can, 
to marry Marion, the Doctor's lovely daughter, and to carry her 
away with him.'

'Really, Mr. Craggs,' Snitchey began.

'Really, Mr. Snitchey, and Mr. Craggs, partners both,' said the 
client, interrupting him; 'you know your duty to your clients, and 
you know well enough, I am sure, that it is no part of it to 
interfere in a mere love affair, which I am obliged to confide to 
you.  I am not going to carry the young lady off, without her own 
consent.  There's nothing illegal in it.  I never was Mr. 
Heathfield's bosom friend.  I violate no confidence of his.  I love 
where he loves, and I mean to win where he would win, if I can.'

'He can't, Mr. Craggs,' said Snitchey, evidently anxious and 
discomfited.  'He can't do it, sir.  She dotes on Mr. Alfred.'

'Does she?' returned the client.

'Mr. Craggs, she dotes on him, sir,' persisted Snitchey.

'I didn't live six weeks, some few months ago, in the Doctor's 
house for nothing; and I doubted that soon,' observed the client.  
'She would have doted on him, if her sister could have brought it 
about; but I watched them.  Marion avoided his name, avoided the 
subject:  shrunk from the least allusion to it, with evident 
distress.'

'Why should she, Mr. Craggs, you know?  Why should she, sir?' 
inquired Snitchey.

'I don't know why she should, though there are many likely 
reasons,' said the client, smiling at the attention and perplexity 
expressed in Mr. Snitchey's shining eye, and at his cautious way of 
carrying on the conversation, and making himself informed upon the 
subject; 'but I know she does.  She was very young when she made 
the engagement - if it may be called one, I am not even sure of 
that - and has repented of it, perhaps.  Perhaps - it seems a 
foppish thing to say, but upon my soul I don't mean it in that 
light - she may have fallen in love with me, as I have fallen in 
love with her.'

'He, he!  Mr. Alfred, her old playfellow too, you remember, Mr. 
Craggs,' said Snitchey, with a disconcerted laugh; 'knew her almost 
from a baby!'

'Which makes it the more probable that she may be tired of his 
idea,' calmly pursued the client, 'and not indisposed to exchange 
it for the newer one of another lover, who presents himself (or is 
presented by his horse) under romantic circumstances; has the not 
unfavourable reputation - with a country girl - of having lived 
thoughtlessly and gaily, without doing much harm to anybody; and 
who, for his youth and figure, and so forth - this may seem foppish 
again, but upon my soul I don't mean it in that light - might 
perhaps pass muster in a crowd with Mr. Alfred himself.'

There was no gainsaying the last clause, certainly; and Mr. 
Snitchey, glancing at him, thought so.  There was something 
naturally graceful and pleasant in the very carelessness of his 
air.  It seemed to suggest, of his comely face and well-knit 
figure, that they might be greatly better if he chose:  and that, 
once roused and made earnest (but he never had been earnest yet), 
he could be full of fire and purpose.  'A dangerous sort of 
libertine,' thought the shrewd lawyer, 'to seem to catch the spark 
he wants, from a young lady's eyes.'

'Now, observe, Snitchey,' he continued, rising and taking him by 
the button, 'and Craggs,' taking him by the button also, and 
placing one partner on either side of him, so that neither might 
evade him.  'I don't ask you for any advice.  You are right to keep 
quite aloof from all parties in such a matter, which is not one in 
which grave men like you could interfere, on any side.  I am 
briefly going to review in half-a-dozen words, my position and 
intention, and then I shall leave it to you to do the best for me, 
in money matters, that you can:  seeing, that, if I run away with 
the Doctor's beautiful daughter (as I hope to do, and to become 
another man under her bright influence), it will be, for the 
moment, more chargeable than running away alone.  But I shall soon 
make all that up in an altered life.'

'I think it will be better not to hear this, Mr. Craggs?' said 
Snitchey, looking at him across the client.

'I think not,' said Craggs. - Both listened attentively.

'Well!  You needn't hear it,' replied their client.  'I'll mention 
it, however.  I don't mean to ask the Doctor's consent, because he 
wouldn't give it me.  But I mean to do the Doctor no wrong or harm, 
because (besides there being nothing serious in such trifles, as he 
says) I hope to rescue his child, my Marion, from what I see - I 
KNOW - she dreads, and contemplates with misery:  that is, the 
return of this old lover.  If anything in the world is true, it is 
true that she dreads his return.  Nobody is injured so far.  I am 
so harried and worried here just now, that I lead the life of a 
flying-fish.  I skulk about in the dark, I am shut out of my own 
house, and warned off my own grounds; but, that house, and those 
grounds, and many an acre besides, will come back to me one day, as 
you know and say; and Marion will probably be richer - on your 
showing, who are never sanguine - ten years hence as my wife, than 
as the wife of Alfred Heathfield, whose return she dreads (remember 
that), and in whom or in any man, my passion is not surpassed.  Who 
is injured yet?  It is a fair case throughout.  My right is as good 
as his, if she decide in my favour; and I will try my right by her 
alone.  You will like to know no more after this, and I will tell 
you no more.  Now you know my purpose, and wants.  When must I 
leave here?'

'In a week,' said Snitchey.  'Mr. Craggs?'

'In something less, I should say,' responded Craggs.

'In a month,' said the client, after attentively watching the two 
faces.  'This day month.  To-day is Thursday.  Succeed or fail, on 
this day month I go.'

'It's too long a delay,' said Snitchey; 'much too long.  But let it 
be so.  I thought he'd have stipulated for three,' he murmured to 
himself.  'Are you going?  Good night, sir!'

'Good night!' returned the client, shaking hands with the Firm.

'You'll live to see me making a good use of riches yet.  Henceforth 
the star of my destiny is, Marion!'

'Take care of the stairs, sir,' replied Snitchey; 'for she don't 
shine there.  Good night!'

'Good night!'

So they both stood at the stair-head with a pair of office-candles, 
watching him down.  When he had gone away, they stood looking at 
each other.

'What do you think of all this, Mr. Craggs?' said Snitchey.

Mr. Craggs shook his head.

'It was our opinion, on the day when that release was executed, 
that there was something curious in the parting of that pair; I 
recollect,' said Snitchey.

'It was,' said Mr. Craggs.

'Perhaps he deceives himself altogether,' pursued Mr. Snitchey, 
locking up the fireproof box, and putting it away; 'or, if he 
don't, a little bit of fickleness and perfidy is not a miracle, Mr. 
Craggs.  And yet I thought that pretty face was very true.  I 
thought,' said Mr. Snitchey, putting on his great-coat (for the 
weather was very cold), drawing on his gloves, and snuffing out one 
candle, 'that I had even seen her character becoming stronger and 
more resolved of late.  More like her sister's.'

'Mrs. Craggs was of the same opinion,' returned Craggs.

'I'd really give a trifle to-night,' observed Mr. Snitchey, who was 
a good-natured man, 'if I could believe that Mr. Warden was 
reckoning without his host; but, light-headed, capricious, and 
unballasted as he is, he knows something of the world and its 
people (he ought to, for he has bought what he does know, dear 
enough); and I can't quite think that.  We had better not 
interfere:  we can do nothing, Mr. Craggs, but keep quiet.'

'Nothing,' returned Craggs.

'Our friend the Doctor makes light of such things,' said Mr. 
Snitchey, shaking his head.  'I hope he mayn't stand in need of his 
philosophy.  Our friend Alfred talks of the battle of life,' he 
shook his head again, 'I hope he mayn't be cut down early in the 
day.  Have you got your hat, Mr. Craggs?  I am going to put the 
other candle out.'  Mr. Craggs replying in the affirmative, Mr. 
Snitchey suited the action to the word, and they groped their way 
out of the council-chamber, now dark as the subject, or the law in 
general.


My story passes to a quiet little study, where, on that same night, 
the sisters and the hale old Doctor sat by a cheerful fireside.  
Grace was working at her needle.  Marion read aloud from a book 
before her.  The Doctor, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with 
his feet spread out upon the warm rug, leaned back in his easy-
chair, and listened to the book, and looked upon his daughters.

They were very beautiful to look upon.  Two better faces for a 
fireside, never made a fireside bright and sacred.  Something of 
the difference between them had been softened down in three years' 
time; and enthroned upon the clear brow of the younger sister, 
looking through her eyes, and thrilling in her voice, was the same 
earnest nature that her own motherless youth had ripened in the 
elder sister long ago.  But she still appeared at once the lovelier 
and weaker of the two; still seemed to rest her head upon her 
sister's breast, and put her trust in her, and look into her eyes 
for counsel and reliance.  Those loving eyes, so calm, serene, and 
cheerful, as of old.

'"And being in her own home,"' read Marion, from the book; '"her 
home made exquisitely dear by these remembrances, she now began to 
know that the great trial of her heart must soon come on, and could 
not be delayed.  O Home, our comforter and friend when others fall 
away, to part with whom, at any step between the cradle and the 
grave"'-

'Marion, my love!' said Grace.

'Why, Puss!' exclaimed her father, 'what's the matter?'

She put her hand upon the hand her sister stretched towards her, 
and read on; her voice still faltering and trembling, though she 
made an effort to command it when thus interrupted.

'"To part with whom, at any step between the cradle and the grave, 
is always sorrowful.  O Home, so true to us, so often slighted in 
return, be lenient to them that turn away from thee, and do not 
haunt their erring footsteps too reproachfully!  Let no kind looks, 
no well-remembered smiles, be seen upon thy phantom face.  Let no 
ray of affection, welcome, gentleness, forbearance, cordiality, 
shine from thy white head.  Let no old loving word, or tone, rise 
up in judgment against thy deserter; but if thou canst look harshly 
and severely, do, in mercy to the Penitent!"'

'Dear Marion, read no more to-night,' said Grace for she was 
weeping.

'I cannot,' she replied, and closed the book.  'The words seem all 
on fire!'

The Doctor was amused at this; and laughed as he patted her on the 
head.

'What! overcome by a story-book!' said Doctor Jeddler.  'Print and 
paper!  Well, well, it's all one.  It's as rational to make a 
serious matter of print and paper as of anything else.  But, dry 
your eyes, love, dry your eyes.  I dare say the heroine has got 
home again long ago, and made it up all round - and if she hasn't, 
a real home is only four walls; and a fictitious one, mere rags and 
ink.  What's the matter now?'

'It's only me, Mister,' said Clemency, putting in her head at the 
door.

'And what's the matter with YOU?' said the Doctor.

'Oh, bless you, nothing an't the matter with me,' returned Clemency 
- and truly too, to judge from her well-soaped face, in which there 
gleamed as usual the very soul of good-humour, which, ungainly as 
she was, made her quite engaging.  Abrasions on the elbows are not 
generally understood, it is true, to range within that class of 
personal charms called beauty-spots.  But, it is better, going 
through the world, to have the arms chafed in that narrow passage, 
than the temper:  and Clemency's was sound and whole as any 
beauty's in the land.

'Nothing an't the matter with me,' said Clemency, entering, 'but - 
come a little closer, Mister.'

The Doctor, in some astonishment, complied with this invitation.

'You said I wasn't to give you one before them, you know,' said 
Clemency.

A novice in the family might have supposed, from her extraordinary 
ogling as she said it, as well as from a singular rapture or 
ecstasy which pervaded her elbows, as if she were embracing 
herself, that 'one,' in its most favourable interpretation, meant a 
chaste salute.  Indeed the Doctor himself seemed alarmed, for the 
moment; but quickly regained his composure, as Clemency, having had 
recourse to both her pockets - beginning with the right one, going 
away to the wrong one, and afterwards coming back to the right one 
again - produced a letter from the Post-office.

'Britain was riding by on a errand,' she chuckled, handing it to 
the Doctor, 'and see the mail come in, and waited for it.  There's 
A. H. in the corner.  Mr. Alfred's on his journey home, I bet.  We 
shall have a wedding in the house - there was two spoons in my 
saucer this morning.  Oh Luck, how slow he opens it!'

All this she delivered, by way of soliloquy, gradually rising 
higher and higher on tiptoe, in her impatience to hear the news, 
and making a corkscrew of her apron, and a bottle of her mouth.  At 
last, arriving at a climax of suspense, and seeing the Doctor still 
engaged in the perusal of the letter, she came down flat upon the 
soles of her feet again, and cast her apron, as a veil, over her 
head, in a mute despair, and inability to bear it any longer.

'Here!  Girls!' cried the Doctor.  'I can't help it:  I never could 
keep a secret in my life.  There are not many secrets, indeed, 
worth being kept in such a - well! never mind that.  Alfred's 
coming home, my dears, directly.'

'Directly!' exclaimed Marion.

'What!  The story-book is soon forgotten!' said the Doctor, 
pinching her cheek.  'I thought the news would dry those tears.  
Yes.  "Let it be a surprise," he says, here.  But I can't let it be 
a surprise.  He must have a welcome.'

'Directly!' repeated Marion.

'Why, perhaps not what your impatience calls "directly,"' returned 
the doctor; 'but pretty soon too.  Let us see.  Let us see.  To-day 
is Thursday, is it not?  Then he promises to be here, this day 
month.'

'This day month!' repeated Marion, softly.

'A gay day and a holiday for us,' said the cheerful voice of her 
sister Grace, kissing her in congratulation.  'Long looked forward 
to, dearest, and come at last.'

She answered with a smile; a mournful smile, but full of sisterly 
affection.  As she looked in her sister's face, and listened to the 
quiet music of her voice, picturing the happiness of this return, 
her own face glowed with hope and joy.

And with a something else; a something shining more and more 
through all the rest of its expression; for which I have no name.  
It was not exultation, triumph, proud enthusiasm.  They are not so 
calmly shown.  It was not love and gratitude alone, though love and 
gratitude were part of it.  It emanated from no sordid thought, for 
sordid thoughts do not light up the brow, and hover on the lips, 
and move the spirit like a fluttered light, until the sympathetic 
figure trembles.

Dr. Jeddler, in spite of his system of philosophy - which he was 
continually contradicting and denying in practice, but more famous 
philosophers have done that - could not help having as much 
interest in the return of his old ward and pupil as if it had been 
a serious event.  So he sat himself down in his easy-chair again, 
stretched out his slippered feet once more upon the rug, read the 
letter over and over a great many times, and talked it over more 
times still.

'Ah!  The day was,' said the Doctor, looking at the fire, 'when you 
and he, Grace, used to trot about arm-in-arm, in his holiday time, 
like a couple of walking dolls.  You remember?'

'I remember,' she answered, with her pleasant laugh, and plying her 
needle busily.

'This day month, indeed!' mused the Doctor.  'That hardly seems a 
twelve month ago.  And where was my little Marion then!'

'Never far from her sister,' said Marion, cheerily, 'however 
little.  Grace was everything to me, even when she was a young 
child herself.'

'True, Puss, true,' returned the Doctor.  'She was a staid little 
woman, was Grace, and a wise housekeeper, and a busy, quiet, 
pleasant body; bearing with our humours and anticipating our 
wishes, and always ready to forget her own, even in those times.  I 
never knew you positive or obstinate, Grace, my darling, even then, 
on any subject but one.'

'I am afraid I have changed sadly for the worse, since,' laughed 
Grace, still busy at her work.  'What was that one, father?'

'Alfred, of course,' said the Doctor.  'Nothing would serve you but 
you must be called Alfred's wife; so we called you Alfred's wife; 
and you liked it better, I believe (odd as it seems now), than 
being called a Duchess, if we could have made you one.'

'Indeed?' said Grace, placidly.

'Why, don't you remember?' inquired the Doctor.

'I think I remember something of it,' she returned, 'but not much.  
It's so long ago.'  And as she sat at work, she hummed the burden 
of an old song, which the Doctor liked.

'Alfred will find a real wife soon,' she said, breaking off; 'and 
that will be a happy time indeed for all of us.  My three years' 
trust is nearly at an end, Marion.  It has been a very easy one.  I 
shall tell Alfred, when I give you back to him, that you have loved 
him dearly all the time, and that he has never once needed my good 
services.  May I tell him so, love?'

'Tell him, dear Grace,' replied Marion, 'that there never was a 
trust so generously, nobly, steadfastly discharged; and that I have 
loved YOU, all the time, dearer and dearer every day; and O! how 
dearly now!'

'Nay,' said her cheerful sister, returning her embrace, 'I can 
scarcely tell him that; we will leave my deserts to Alfred's 
imagination.  It will be liberal enough, dear Marion; like your 
own.'

With that, she resumed the work she had for a moment laid down, 
when her sister spoke so fervently:  and with it the old song the 
Doctor liked to hear.  And the Doctor, still reposing in his easy-
chair, with his slippered feet stretched out before him on the rug, 
listened to the tune, and beat time on his knee with Alfred's 
letter, and looked at his two daughters, and thought that among the 
many trifles of the trifling world, these trifles were agreeable 
enough.

Clemency Newcome, in the meantime, having accomplished her mission 
and lingered in the room until she had made herself a party to the 
news, descended to the kitchen, where her coadjutor, Mr. Britain, 
was regaling after supper, surrounded by such a plentiful 
collection of bright pot-lids, well-scoured saucepans, burnished 
dinner-covers, gleaming kettles, and other tokens of her 
industrious habits, arranged upon the walls and shelves, that he 
sat as in the centre of a hall of mirrors.  The majority did not 
give forth very flattering portraits of him, certainly; nor were 
they by any means unanimous in their reflections; as some made him 
very long-faced, others very broad-faced, some tolerably well-
looking, others vastly ill-looking, according to their several 
manners of reflecting:  which were as various, in respect of one 
fact, as those of so many kinds of men.  But they all agreed that 
in the midst of them sat, quite at his ease, an individual with a 
pipe in his mouth, and a jug of beer at his elbow, who nodded 
condescendingly to Clemency, when she stationed herself at the same 
table.

'Well, Clemmy,' said Britain, 'how are you by this time, and what's 
the news?'

Clemency told him the news, which he received very graciously.  A 
gracious change had come over Benjamin from head to foot.  He was 
much broader, much redder, much more cheerful, and much jollier in 
all respects.  It seemed as if his face had been tied up in a knot 
before, and was now untwisted and smoothed out.

'There'll be another job for Snitchey and Craggs, I suppose,' he 
observed, puffing slowly at his pipe.  'More witnessing for you and 
me, perhaps, Clemmy!'

'Lor!' replied his fair companion, with her favourite twist of her 
favourite joints.  'I wish it was me, Britain!'

'Wish what was you?'

'A-going to be married,' said Clemency.

Benjamin took his pipe out of his mouth and laughed heartily.  
'Yes! you're a likely subject for that!' he said.  'Poor Clem!'  
Clemency for her part laughed as heartily as he, and seemed as much 
amused by the idea.  'Yes,' she assented, 'I'm a likely subject for 
that; an't I?'

'YOU'LL never be married, you know,' said Mr. Britain, resuming his 
pipe.

'Don't you think I ever shall though?' said Clemency, in perfect 
good faith.

Mr. Britain shook his head.  'Not a chance of it!'

'Only think!' said Clemency.  'Well! - I suppose you mean to, 
Britain, one of these days; don't you?'

A question so abrupt, upon a subject so momentous, required 
consideration.  After blowing out a great cloud of smoke, and 
looking at it with his head now on this side and now on that, as if 
it were actually the question, and he were surveying it in various 
aspects, Mr. Britain replied that he wasn't altogether clear about 
it, but - ye-es - he thought he might come to that at last.

'I wish her joy, whoever she may be!' cried Clemency.

'Oh she'll have that,' said Benjamin, 'safe enough.'

'But she wouldn't have led quite such a joyful life as she will 
lead, and wouldn't have had quite such a sociable sort of husband 
as she will have,' said Clemency, spreading herself half over the 
table, and staring retrospectively at the candle, 'if it hadn't 
been for - not that I went to do it, for it was accidental, I am 
sure - if it hadn't been for me; now would she, Britain?'

'Certainly not,' returned Mr. Britain, by this time in that high 
state of appreciation of his pipe, when a man can open his mouth 
but a very little way for speaking purposes; and sitting 
luxuriously immovable in his chair, can afford to turn only his 
eyes towards a companion, and that very passively and gravely.  
'Oh!  I'm greatly beholden to you, you know, Clem.'

'Lor, how nice that is to think of!' said Clemency.

At the same time, bringing her thoughts as well as her sight to 
bear upon the candle-grease, and becoming abruptly reminiscent of 
its healing qualities as a balsam, she anointed her left elbow with 
a plentiful application of that remedy.

'You see I've made a good many investigations of one sort and 
another in my time,' pursued Mr. Britain, with the profundity of a 
sage, 'having been always of an inquiring turn of mind; and I've 
read a good many books about the general Rights of things and 
Wrongs of things, for I went into the literary line myself, when I 
began life.'

'Did you though!' cried the admiring Clemency.

'Yes,' said Mr. Britain:  'I was hid for the best part of two years 
behind a bookstall, ready to fly out if anybody pocketed a volume; 
and after that, I was light porter to a stay and mantua maker, in 
which capacity I was employed to carry about, in oilskin baskets, 
nothing but deceptions - which soured my spirits and disturbed my 
confidence in human nature; and after that, I heard a world of 
discussions in this house, which soured my spirits fresh; and my 
opinion after all is, that, as a safe and comfortable sweetener of 
the same, and as a pleasant guide through life, there's nothing 
like a nutmeg-grater.'

Clemency was about to offer a suggestion, but he stopped her by 
anticipating it.

'Com-bined,' he added gravely, 'with a thimble.'

'Do as you wold, you know, and cetrer, eh!' observed Clemency, 
folding her arms comfortably in her delight at this avowal, and 
patting her elbows.  'Such a short cut, an't it?'

'I'm not sure,' said Mr. Britain, 'that it's what would be 
considered good philosophy.  I've my doubts about that; but it 
wears well, and saves a quantity of snarling, which the genuine 
article don't always.'

'See how you used to go on once, yourself, you know!' said 
Clemency.

'Ah!' said Mr. Britain.  'But the most extraordinary thing, Clemmy, 
is that I should live to be brought round, through you.  That's the 
strange part of it.  Through you!  Why, I suppose you haven't so 
much as half an idea in your head.'

Clemency, without taking the least offence, shook it, and laughed 
and hugged herself, and said, 'No, she didn't suppose she had.'

'I'm pretty sure of it,' said Mr. Britain.

'Oh!  I dare say you're right,' said Clemency.  'I don't pretend to 
none.  I don't want any.'

Benjamin took his pipe from his lips, and laughed till the tears 
ran down his face.  'What a natural you are, Clemmy!' he said, 
shaking his head, with an infinite relish of the joke, and wiping 
his eyes.  Clemency, without the smallest inclination to dispute 
it, did the like, and laughed as heartily as he.

'I can't help liking you,' said Mr. Britain; 'you're a regular good 
creature in your way, so shake hands, Clem.  Whatever happens, I'll 
always take notice of you, and be a friend to you.'

'Will you?' returned Clemency.  'Well! that's very good of you.'

'Yes, yes,' said Mr. Britain, giving her his pipe to knock the 
ashes out of it; 'I'll stand by you.  Hark!  That's a curious 
noise!'

'Noise!' repeated Clemency.

'A footstep outside.  Somebody dropping from the wall, it sounded 
like,' said Britain.  'Are they all abed up-stairs?'

'Yes, all abed by this time,' she replied.

'Didn't you hear anything?'

'No.'

They both listened, but heard nothing.

'I tell you what,' said Benjamin, taking down a lantern.  'I'll 
have a look round, before I go to bed myself, for satisfaction's 
sake.  Undo the door while I light this, Clemmy.'

Clemency complied briskly; but observed as she did so, that he 
would only have his walk for his pains, that it was all his fancy, 
and so forth.  Mr. Britain said 'very likely;' but sallied out, 
nevertheless, armed with the poker, and casting the light of the 
lantern far and near in all directions.

'It's as quiet as a churchyard,' said Clemency, looking after him; 
'and almost as ghostly too!'

Glancing back into the kitchen, she cried fearfully, as a light 
figure stole into her view, 'What's that!'

'Hush!' said Marion in an agitated whisper.  'You have always loved 
me, have you not!'

'Loved you, child!  You may be sure I have.'

'I am sure.  And I may trust you, may I not?  There is no one else 
just now, in whom I CAN trust.'

'Yes,' said Clemency, with all her heart.

'There is some one out there,' pointing to the door, 'whom I must 
see, and speak with, to-night.  Michael Warden, for God's sake 
retire!  Not now!'

Clemency started with surprise and trouble as, following the 
direction of the speaker's eyes, she saw a dark figure standing in 
the doorway.

'In another moment you may be discovered,' said Marion.  'Not now!  
Wait, if you can, in some concealment.  I will come presently.'

He waved his hand to her, and was gone.  'Don't go to bed.  Wait 
here for me!' said Marion, hurriedly.  'I have been seeking to 
speak to you for an hour past.  Oh, be true to me!'

Eagerly seizing her bewildered hand, and pressing it with both her 
own to her breast - an action more expressive, in its passion of 
entreaty, than the most eloquent appeal in words, - Marion 
withdrew; as the light of the returning lantern flashed into the 
room.

'All still and peaceable.  Nobody there.  Fancy, I suppose,' said 
Mr. Britain, as he locked and barred the door.  'One of the effects 
of having a lively imagination.  Halloa!  Why, what's the matter?'

Clemency, who could not conceal the effects of her surprise and 
concern, was sitting in a chair:  pale, and trembling from head to 
foot.

'Matter!' she repeated, chafing her hands and elbows, nervously, 
and looking anywhere but at him.  'That's good in you, Britain, 
that is!  After going and frightening one out of one's life with 
noises and lanterns, and I don't know what all.  Matter!  Oh, yes!'

'If you're frightened out of your life by a lantern, Clemmy,' said 
Mr. Britain, composedly blowing it out and hanging it up again, 
'that apparition's very soon got rid of.  But you're as bold as 
brass in general,' he said, stopping to observe her; 'and were, 
after the noise and the lantern too.  What have you taken into your 
head?  Not an idea, eh?'

But, as Clemency bade him good night very much after her usual 
fashion, and began to bustle about with a show of going to bed 
herself immediately, Little Britain, after giving utterance to the 
original remark that it was impossible to account for a woman's 
whims, bade her good night in return, and taking up his candle 
strolled drowsily away to bed.

When all was quiet, Marion returned.

'Open the door,' she said; 'and stand there close beside me, while 
I speak to him, outside.'

Timid as her manner was, it still evinced a resolute and settled 
purpose, such as Clemency could not resist.  She softly unbarred 
the door:  but before turning the key, looked round on the young 
creature waiting to issue forth when she should open it.

The face was not averted or cast down, but looking full upon her, 
in its pride of youth and beauty.  Some simple sense of the 
slightness of the barrier that interposed itself between the happy 
home and honoured love of the fair girl, and what might be the 
desolation of that home, and shipwreck of its dearest treasure, 
smote so keenly on the tender heart of Clemency, and so filled it 
to overflowing with sorrow and compassion, that, bursting into 
tears, she threw her arms round Marion's neck.

'It's little that I know, my dear,' cried Clemency, 'very little; 
but I know that this should not be.  Think of what you do!'

'I have thought of it many times,' said Marion, gently.

'Once more,' urged Clemency.  'Till to-morrow.'  Marion shook her 
head.

'For Mr. Alfred's sake,' said Clemency, with homely earnestness.  
'Him that you used to love so dearly, once!'

She hid her face, upon the instant, in her hands, repeating 'Once!' 
as if it rent her heart.

'Let me go out,' said Clemency, soothing her.  'I'll tell him what 
you like.  Don't cross the door-step to-night.  I'm sure no good 
will come of it.  Oh, it was an unhappy day when Mr. Warden was 
ever brought here!  Think of your good father, darling - of your 
sister.'

'I have,' said Marion, hastily raising her head.  'You don't know 
what I do.  I MUST speak to him.  You are the best and truest 
friend in all the world for what you have said to me, but I must 
take this step.  Will you go with me, Clemency,' she kissed her on 
her friendly face, 'or shall I go alone?'

Sorrowing and wondering, Clemency turned the key, and opened the 
door.  Into the dark and doubtful night that lay beyond the 
threshold, Marion passed quickly, holding by her hand.

In the dark night he joined her, and they spoke together earnestly 
and long; and the hand that held so fast by Clemeney's, now 
trembled, now turned deadly cold, now clasped and closed on hers, 
in the strong feeling of the speech it emphasised unconsciously.  
When they returned, he followed to the door, and pausing there a 
moment, seized the other hand, and pressed it to his lips.  Then, 
stealthily withdrew.

The door was barred and locked again, and once again she stood 
beneath her father's roof.  Not bowed down by the secret that she 
brought there, though so young; but, with that same expression on 
her face for which I had no name before, and shining through her 
tears.

Again she thanked and thanked her humble friend, and trusted to 
her, as she said, with confidence, implicitly.  Her chamber safely 
reached, she fell upon her knees; and with her secret weighing on 
her heart, could pray!

Could rise up from her prayers, so tranquil and serene, and bending 
over her fond sister in her slumber, look upon her face and smile - 
though sadly:  murmuring as she kissed her forehead, how that Grace 
had been a mother to her, ever, and she loved her as a child!

Could draw the passive arm about her neck when lying down to rest - 
it seemed to cling there, of its own will, protectingly and 
tenderly even in sleep - and breathe upon the parted lips, God 
bless her!

Could sink into a peaceful sleep, herself; but for one dream, in 
which she cried out, in her innocent and touching voice, that she 
was quite alone, and they had all forgotten her.

A month soon passes, even at its tardiest pace.  The month 
appointed to elapse between that night and the return, was quick of 
foot, and went by, like a vapour.

The day arrived.  A raging winter day, that shook the old house, 
sometimes, as if it shivered in the blast.  A day to make home 
doubly home.  To give the chimney-corner new delights.  To shed a 
ruddier glow upon the faces gathered round the hearth, and draw 
each fireside group into a closer and more social league, against 
the roaring elements without.  Such a wild winter day as best 
prepares the way for shut-out night; for curtained rooms, and 
cheerful looks; for music, laughter, dancing, light, and jovial 
entertainment!

All these the Doctor had in store to welcome Alfred back.  They 
knew that he could not arrive till night; and they would make the 
night air ring, he said, as he approached.  All his old friends 
should congregate about him.  He should not miss a face that he had 
known and liked.  No!  They should every one be there!

So, guests were bidden, and musicians were engaged, and tables 
spread, and floors prepared for active feet, and bountiful 
provision made, of every hospitable kind.  Because it was the 
Christmas season, and his eyes were all unused to English holly and 
its sturdy green, the dancing-room was garlanded and hung with it; 
and the red berries gleamed an English welcome to him, peeping from 
among the leaves.

It was a busy day for all of them:  a busier day for none of them 
than Grace, who noiselessly presided everywhere, and was the 
cheerful mind of all the preparations.  Many a time that day (as 
well as many a time within the fleeting month preceding it), did 
Clemency glance anxiously, and almost fearfully, at Marion.  She 
saw her paler, perhaps, than usual; but there was a sweet composure 
on her face that made it lovelier than ever.

At night when she was dressed, and wore upon her head a wreath that 
Grace had proudly twined about it - its mimic flowers were Alfred's 
favourites, as Grace remembered when she chose them - that old 
expression, pensive, almost sorrowful, and yet so spiritual, high, 
and stirring, sat again upon her brow, enhanced a hundred-fold.

'The next wreath I adjust on this fair head, will be a marriage 
wreath,' said Grace; 'or I am no true prophet, dear.'

Her sister smiled, and held her in her arms.

'A moment, Grace.  Don't leave me yet.  Are you sure that I want 
nothing more?'

Her care was not for that.  It was her sister's face she thought 
of, and her eyes were fixed upon it, tenderly.

'My art,' said Grace, 'can go no farther, dear girl; nor your 
beauty.  I never saw you look so beautiful as now.'

'I never was so happy,' she returned.

'Ay, but there is a greater happiness in store.  In such another 
home, as cheerful and as bright as this looks now,' said Grace, 
'Alfred and his young wife will soon be living.'

She smiled again.  'It is a happy home, Grace, in your fancy.  I 
can see it in your eyes.  I know it WILL be happy, dear.  How glad 
I am to know it.'

'Well,' cried the Doctor, bustling in.  'Here we are, all ready for 
Alfred, eh?  He can't be here until pretty late - an hour or so 
before midnight - so there'll be plenty of time for making merry 
before he comes.  He'll not find us with the ice unbroken.  Pile up 
the fire here, Britain!  Let it shine upon the holly till it winks 
again.  It's a world of nonsense, Puss; true lovers and all the 
rest of it - all nonsense; but we'll be nonsensical with the rest 
of 'em, and give our true lover a mad welcome.  Upon my word!' said 
the old Doctor, looking at his daughters proudly, 'I'm not clear 
to-night, among other absurdities, but that I'm the father of two 
handsome girls.'

'All that one of them has ever done, or may do - may do, dearest 
father - to cause you pain or grief, forgive her,' said Marion, 
'forgive her now, when her heart is full.  Say that you forgive 
her.  That you will forgive her.  That she shall always share your 
love, and -,' and the rest was not said, for her face was hidden on 
the old man's shoulder.

'Tut, tut, tut,' said the Doctor gently.  'Forgive!  What have I to 
forgive?  Heyday, if our true lovers come back to flurry us like 
this, we must hold 'em at a distance; we must send expresses out to 
stop 'em short upon the road, and bring 'em on a mile or two a day, 
until we're properly prepared to meet 'em.  Kiss me, Puss.  
Forgive!  Why, what a silly child you are!  If you had vexed and 
crossed me fifty times a day, instead of not at all, I'd forgive 
you everything, but such a supplication.  Kiss me again, Puss.  
There!  Prospective and retrospective - a clear score between us.  
Pile up the fire here!  Would you freeze the people on this bleak 
December night!  Let us be light, and warm, and merry, or I'll not 
forgive some of you!'

So gaily the old Doctor carried it!  And the fire was piled up, and 
the lights were bright, and company arrived, and a murmuring of 
lively tongues began, and already there was a pleasant air of 
cheerful excitement stirring through all the house.

More and more company came flocking in.  Bright eyes sparkled upon 
Marion; smiling lips gave her joy of his return; sage mothers 
fanned themselves, and hoped she mightn't be too youthful and 
inconstant for the quiet round of home; impetuous fathers fell into 
disgrace for too much exaltation of her beauty; daughters envied 
her; sons envied him; innumerable pairs of lovers profited by the 
occasion; all were interested, animated, and expectant.

Mr. and Mrs. Craggs came arm in arm, but Mrs. Snitchey came alone.  
'Why, what's become of HIM?' inquired the Doctor.

The feather of a Bird of Paradise in Mrs. Snitchey's turban, 
trembled as if the Bird of Paradise were alive again, when she said 
that doubtless Mr. Craggs knew.  SHE was never told.

'That nasty office,' said Mrs. Craggs.

'I wish it was burnt down,' said Mrs. Snitchey.

'He's - he's - there's a little matter of business that keeps my 
partner rather late,' said Mr. Craggs, looking uneasily about him.

'Oh-h!  Business.  Don't tell me!' said Mrs. Snitchey.

'WE know what business means,' said Mrs. Craggs.

But their not knowing what it meant, was perhaps the reason why 
Mrs. Snitchey's Bird of Paradise feather quivered so portentously, 
and why all the pendant bits on Mrs. Craggs's ear-rings shook like 
little bells.

'I wonder YOU could come away, Mr. Craggs,' said his wife.

'Mr. Craggs is fortunate, I'm sure!' said Mrs. Snitchey.

'That office so engrosses 'em,' said Mrs. Craggs.

'A person with an office has no business to be married at all,' 
said Mrs. Snitchey.

Then, Mrs. Snitchey said, within herself, that that look of hers 
had pierced to Craggs's soul, and he knew it; and Mrs. Craggs 
observed to Craggs, that 'his Snitcheys' were deceiving him behind 
his back, and he would find it out when it was too late.

Still, Mr. Craggs, without much heeding these remarks, looked 
uneasily about until his eye rested on Grace, to whom he 
immediately presented himself.

'Good evening, ma'am,' said Craggs.  'You look charmingly.  Your - 
Miss - your sister, Miss Marion, is she - '

'Oh, she's quite well, Mr. Craggs.'

'Yes - I - is she here?' asked Craggs.

'Here!  Don't you see her yonder?  Going to dance?' said Grace.

Mr. Craggs put on his spectacles to see the better; looked at her 
through them, for some time; coughed; and put them, with an air of 
satisfaction, in their sheath again, and in his pocket.

Now the music struck up, and the dance commenced.  The bright fire 
crackled and sparkled, rose and fell, as though it joined the dance 
itself, in right good fellowship.  Sometimes, it roared as if it 
would make music too.  Sometimes, it flashed and beamed as if it 
were the eye of the old room:  it winked too, sometimes, like a 
knowing patriarch, upon the youthful whisperers in corners.  
Sometimes, it sported with the holly-boughs; and, shining on the 
leaves by fits and starts, made them look as if they were in the 
cold winter night again, and fluttering in the wind.  Sometimes its 
genial humour grew obstreperous, and passed all bounds; and then it 
cast into the room, among the twinkling feet, with a loud burst, a 
shower of harmless little sparks, and in its exultation leaped and 
bounded, like a mad thing, up the broad old chimney.

Another dance was near its close, when Mr. Snitchey touched his 
partner, who was looking on, upon the arm.

Mr. Craggs started, as if his familiar had been a spectre.

'Is he gone?' he asked.

'Hush!  He has been with me,' said Snitchey, 'for three hours and 
more.  He went over everything.  He looked into all our 
arrangements for him, and was very particular indeed.  He - Humph!'

The dance was finished.  Marion passed close before him, as he 
spoke.  She did not observe him, or his partner; but, looked over 
her shoulder towards her sister in the distance, as she slowly made 
her way into the crowd, and passed out of their view.

'You see!  All safe and well,' said Mr. Craggs.  'He didn't recur 
to that subject, I suppose?'

'Not a word.'

'And is he really gone?  Is he safe away?'

'He keeps to his word.  He drops down the river with the tide in 
that shell of a boat of his, and so goes out to sea on this dark 
night! - a dare-devil he is - before the wind.  There's no such 
lonely road anywhere else.  That's one thing.  The tide flows, he 
says, an hour before midnight - about this time.  I'm glad it's 
over.'  Mr. Snitchey wiped his forehead, which looked hot and 
anxious.

'What do you think,' said Mr. Craggs, 'about - '

'Hush!' replied his cautious partner, looking straight before him.  
'I understand you.  Don't mention names, and don't let us, seem to 
be talking secrets.  I don't know what to think; and to tell you 
the truth, I don't care now.  It's a great relief.  His self-love 
deceived him, I suppose.  Perhaps the young lady coquetted a 
little.  The evidence would seem to point that way.  Alfred not 
arrived?'

'Not yet,' said Mr. Craggs.  'Expected every minute.'

'Good.' Mr. Snitchey wiped his forehead again.  'It's a great 
relief.  I haven't been so nervous since we've been in partnership.  
I intend to spend the evening now, Mr. Craggs.'

Mrs. Craggs and Mrs. Snitchey joined them as he announced this 
intention.  The Bird of Paradise was in a state of extreme 
vibration, and the little bells were ringing quite audibly.

'It has been the theme of general comment, Mr. Snitchey,' said Mrs. 
Snitchey.  'I hope the office is satisfied.'

'Satisfied with what, my dear?' asked Mr. Snitchey.

'With the exposure of a defenceless woman to ridicule and remark,' 
returned his wife.  'That is quite in the way of the office, THAT 
is.'

'I really, myself,' said Mrs. Craggs, 'have been so long accustomed 
to connect the office with everything opposed to domesticity, that 
I am glad to know it as the avowed enemy of my peace.  There is 
something honest in that, at all events.'

'My dear,' urged Mr. Craggs, 'your good opinion is invaluable, but 
I never avowed that the office was the enemy of your peace.'

'No,' said Mrs. Craggs, ringing a perfect peal upon the little 
bells.  'Not you, indeed.  You wouldn't be worthy of the office, if 
you had the candour to.'

'As to my having been away to-night, my dear,' said Mr. Snitchey, 
giving her his arm, 'the deprivation has been mine, I'm sure; but, 
as Mr. Craggs knows - '

Mrs. Snitchey cut this reference very short by hitching her husband 
to a distance, and asking him to look at that man.  To do her the 
favour to look at him!

'At which man, my dear?' said Mr. Snitchey.

'Your chosen companion; I'M no companion to you, Mr. Snitchey.'

'Yes, yes, you are, my dear,' he interposed.

'No, no, I'm not,' said Mrs. Snitchey with a majestic smile.  'I 
know my station.  Will you look at your chosen companion, Mr. 
Snitchey; at your referee, at the keeper of your secrets, at the 
man you trust; at your other self, in short?'

The habitual association of Self with Craggs, occasioned Mr. 
Snitchey to look in that direction.

'If you can look that man in the eye this night,' said Mrs. 
Snitchey, 'and not know that you are deluded, practised upon, made 
the victim of his arts, and bent down prostrate to his will by some 
unaccountable fascination which it is impossible to explain and 
against which no warning of mine is of the least avail, all I can 
say is - I pity you!'

At the very same moment Mrs. Craggs was oracular on the cross 
subject.  Was it possible, she said, that Craggs could so blind 
himself to his Snitcheys, as not to feel his true position?  Did he 
mean to say that he had seen his Snitcheys come into that room, and 
didn't plainly see that there was reservation, cunning, treachery, 
in the man? Would he tell her that his very action, when he wiped 
his forehead and looked so stealthily about him, didn't show that 
there was something weighing on the conscience of his precious 
Snitcheys (if he had a conscience), that wouldn't bear the light?  
Did anybody but his Snitcheys come to festive entertainments like a 
burglar? - which, by the way, was hardly a clear illustration of 
the case, as he had walked in very mildly at the door.  And would 
he still assert to her at noon-day (it being nearly midnight), that 
his Snitcheys were to be justified through thick and thin, against 
all facts, and reason, and experience?

Neither Snitchey nor Craggs openly attempted to stem the current 
which had thus set in, but, both were content to be carried gently 
along it, until its force abated.  This happened at about the same 
time as a general movement for a country dance; when Mr. Snitchey 
proposed himself as a partner to Mrs. Craggs, and Mr. Craggs 
gallantly offered himself to Mrs. Snitchey; and after some such 
slight evasions as 'why don't you ask somebody else?' and 'you'll 
be glad, I know, if I decline,' and 'I wonder you can dance out of 
the office' (but this jocosely now), each lady graciously accepted, 
and took her place.

It was an old custom among them, indeed, to do so, and to pair off, 
in like manner, at dinners and suppers; for they were excellent 
friends, and on a footing of easy familiarity.  Perhaps the false 
Craggs and the wicked Snitchey were a recognised fiction with the 
two wives, as Doe and Roe, incessantly running up and down 
bailiwicks, were with the two husbands:  or, perhaps the ladies had 
instituted, and taken upon themselves, these two shares in the 
business, rather than be left out of it altogether.  But, certain 
it is, that each wife went as gravely and steadily to work in her 
vocation as her husband did in his, and would have considered it 
almost impossible for the Firm to maintain a successful and 
respectable existence, without her laudable exertions.

But, now, the Bird of Paradise was seen to flutter down the middle; 
and the little bells began to bounce and jingle in poussette; and 
the Doctor's rosy face spun round and round, like an expressive 
pegtop highly varnished; and breathless Mr. Craggs began to doubt 
already, whether country dancing had been made 'too easy,' like the 
rest of life; and Mr. Snitchey, with his nimble cuts and capers, 
footed it for Self and Craggs, and half-a-dozen more.

Now, too, the fire took fresh courage, favoured by the lively wind 
the dance awakened, and burnt clear and high.  It was the Genius of 
the room, and present everywhere.  It shone in people's eyes, it 
sparkled in the jewels on the snowy necks of girls, it twinkled at 
their ears as if it whispered to them slyly, it flashed about their 
waists, it flickered on the ground and made it rosy for their feet, 
it bloomed upon the ceiling that its glow might set off their 
bright faces, and it kindled up a general illumination in Mrs. 
Craggs's little belfry.

Now, too, the lively air that fanned it, grew less gentle as the 
music quickened and the dance proceeded with new spirit; and a 
breeze arose that made the leaves and berries dance upon the wall, 
as they had often done upon the trees; and the breeze rustled in 
the room as if an invisible company of fairies, treading in the 
foot-steps of the good substantial revellers, were whirling after 
them.  Now, too, no feature of the Doctor's face could be 
distinguished as he spun and spun; and now there seemed a dozen 
Birds of Paradise in fitful flight; and now there were a thousand 
little bells at work; and now a fleet of flying skirts was ruffled 
by a little tempest, when the music gave in, and the dance was 
over.

Hot and breathless as the Doctor was, it only made him the more 
impatient for Alfred's coming.

'Anything been seen, Britain?  Anything been heard?'

'Too dark to see far, sir.  Too much noise inside the house to 
hear.'

'That's right!  The gayer welcome for him.  How goes the time?'

'Just twelve, sir.  He can't be long, sir.'

'Stir up the fire, and throw another log upon it,' said the Doctor.  
'Let him see his welcome blazing out upon the night - good boy! - 
as he comes along!'

He saw it - Yes!  From the chaise he caught the light, as he turned 
the corner by the old church.  He knew the room from which it 
shone.  He saw the wintry branches of the old trees between the 
light and him.  He knew that one of those trees rustled musically 
in the summer time at the window of Marion's chamber.

The tears were in his eyes.  His heart throbbed so violently that 
he could hardly bear his happiness.  How often he had thought of 
this time - pictured it under all circumstances - feared that it 
might never come - yearned, and wearied for it - far away!

Again the light!  Distinct and ruddy; kindled, he knew, to give him 
welcome, and to speed him home.  He beckoned with his hand, and 
waved his hat, and cheered out, loud, as if the light were they, 
and they could see and hear him, as he dashed towards them through 
the mud and mire, triumphantly.

Stop!  He knew the Doctor, and understood what he had done.  He 
would not let it be a surprise to them.  But he could make it one, 
yet, by going forward on foot.  If the orchard-gate were open, he 
could enter there; if not, the wall was easily climbed, as he knew 
of old; and he would be among them in an instant.

He dismounted from the chaise, and telling the driver - even that 
was not easy in his agitation - to remain behind for a few minutes, 
and then to follow slowly, ran on with exceeding swiftness, tried 
the gate, scaled the wall, jumped down on the other side, and stood 
panting in the old orchard.

There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light 
of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead 
garlands.  Withered leaves crackled and snapped beneath his feet, 
as he crept softly on towards the house.  The desolation of a 
winter night sat brooding on the earth, and in the sky.  But, the 
red light came cheerily towards him from the windows; figures 
passed and repassed there; and the hum and murmur of voices greeted 
his ear sweetly.

Listening for hers:  attempting, as he crept on, to detach it from 
the rest, and half believing that he heard it:  he had nearly 
reached the door, when it was abruptly opened, and a figure coming 
out encountered his.  It instantly recoiled with a half-suppressed 
cry.

'Clemency,' he said, 'don't you know me?'

'Don't come in!' she answered, pushing him back.  'Go away.  Don't 
ask me why.  Don't come in.'

'What is the matter?' he exclaimed.

'I don't know.  I - I am afraid to think.  Go back.  Hark!'

There was a sudden tumult in the house.  She put her hands upon her 
ears.  A wild scream, such as no hands could shut out, was heard; 
and Grace - distraction in her looks and manner - rushed out at the 
door.

'Grace!'  He caught her in his arms.  'What is it!  Is she dead!'

She disengaged herself, as if to recognise his face, and fell down 
at his feet.

A crowd of figures came about them from the house.  Among them was 
her father, with a paper in his hand.

'What is it!' cried Alfred, grasping his hair with his hands, and 
looking in an agony from face to face, as he bent upon his knee 
beside the insensible girl.  'Will no one look at me?  Will no one 
speak to me?  Does no one know me?  Is there no voice among you 
all, to tell me what it is!'

There was a murmur among them.  'She is gone.'

'Gone!' he echoed.

'Fled, my dear Alfred!' said the Doctor, in a broken voice, and 
with his hands before his face.  'Gone from her home and us.  To-
night!  She writes that she has made her innocent and blameless 
choice - entreats that we will forgive her - prays that we will not 
forget her - and is gone.'

'With whom?  Where?'

He started up, as if to follow in pursuit; but, when they gave way 
to let him pass, looked wildly round upon them, staggered back, and 
sunk down in his former attitude, clasping one of Grace's cold 
hands in his own.

There was a hurried running to and fro, confusion, noise, disorder, 
and no purpose.  Some proceeded to disperse themselves about the 
roads, and some took horse, and some got lights, and some conversed 
together, urging that there was no trace or track to follow.  Some 
approached him kindly, with the view of offering consolation; some 
admonished him that Grace must be removed into the house, and that 
he prevented it.  He never heard them, and he never moved.

The snow fell fast and thick.  He looked up for a moment in the 
air, and thought that those white ashes strewn upon his hopes and 
misery, were suited to them well.  He looked round on the whitening 
ground, and thought how Marion's foot-prints would be hushed and 
covered up, as soon as made, and even that remembrance of her 
blotted out.  But he never felt the weather and he never stirred.



CHAPTER III - Part The Third



THE world had grown six years older since that night of the return.  
It was a warm autumn afternoon, and there had been heavy rain.  The 
sun burst suddenly from among the clouds; and the old battle-
ground, sparkling brilliantly and cheerfully at sight of it in one 
green place, flashed a responsive welcome there, which spread along 
the country side as if a joyful beacon had been lighted up, and 
answered from a thousand stations.

How beautiful the landscape kindling in the light, and that 
luxuriant influence passing on like a celestial presence, 
brightening everything!  The wood, a sombre mass before, revealed 
its varied tints of yellow, green, brown, red:  its different forms 
of trees, with raindrops glittering on their leaves and twinkling 
as they fell.  The verdant meadow-land, bright and glowing, seemed 
as if it had been blind, a minute since, and now had found a sense 
of sight where-with to look up at the shining sky.  Corn-fields, 
hedge-rows, fences, homesteads, and clustered roofs, the steeple of 
the church, the stream, the water-mill, all sprang out of the 
gloomy darkness smiling.  Birds sang sweetly, flowers raised their 
drooping heads, fresh scents arose from the invigorated ground; the 
blue expanse above extended and diffused itself; already the sun's 
slanting rays pierced mortally the sullen bank of cloud that 
lingered in its flight; and a rainbow, spirit of all the colours 
that adorned the earth and sky, spanned the whole arch with its 
triumphant glory.

At such a time, one little roadside Inn, snugly sheltered behind a 
great elm-tree with a rare seat for idlers encircling its capacious 
bole, addressed a cheerful front towards the traveller, as a house 
of entertainment ought, and tempted him with many mute but 
significant assurances of a comfortable welcome.  The ruddy sign-
board perched up in the tree, with its golden letters winking in 
the sun, ogled the passer-by, from among the green leaves, like a 
jolly face, and promised good cheer.  The horse-trough, full of 
clear fresh water, and the ground below it sprinkled with droppings 
of fragrant hay, made every horse that passed, prick up his ears.  
The crimson curtains in the lower rooms, and the pure white 
hangings in the little bed-chambers above, beckoned, Come in! with 
every breath of air.  Upon the bright green shutters, there were 
golden legends about beer and ale, and neat wines, and good beds; 
and an affecting picture of a brown jug frothing over at the top.  
Upon the window-sills were flowering plants in bright red pots, 
which made a lively show against the white front of the house; and 
in the darkness of the doorway there were streaks of light, which 
glanced off from the surfaces of bottles and tankards.

On the door-step, appeared a proper figure of a landlord, too; for, 
though he was a short man, he was round and broad, and stood with 
his hands in his pockets, and his legs just wide enough apart to 
express a mind at rest upon the subject of the cellar, and an easy 
confidence - too calm and virtuous to become a swagger - in the 
general resources of the Inn.  The superabundant moisture, 
trickling from everything after the late rain, set him off well.  
Nothing near him was thirsty.  Certain top-heavy dahlias, looking 
over the palings of his neat well-ordered garden, had swilled as 
much as they could carry - perhaps a trifle more - and may have 
been the worse for liquor; but the sweet-briar, roses, wall-
flowers, the plants at the windows, and the leaves on the old tree, 
were in the beaming state of moderate company that had taken no 
more than was wholesome for them, and had served to develop their 
best qualities.  Sprinkling dewy drops about them on the ground, 
they seemed profuse of innocent and sparkling mirth, that did good 
where it lighted, softening neglected corners which the steady rain 
could seldom reach, and hurting nothing.

This village Inn had assumed, on being established, an uncommon 
sign.  It was called The Nutmeg-Grater.  And underneath that 
household word, was inscribed, up in the tree, on the same flaming 
board, and in the like golden characters, By Benjamin Britain.

At a second glance, and on a more minute examination of his face, 
you might have known that it was no other than Benjamin Britain 
himself who stood in the doorway - reasonably changed by time, but 
for the better; a very comfortable host indeed.

'Mrs. B.,' said Mr. Britain, looking down the road, 'is rather 
late.  It's tea-time.'

As there was no Mrs. Britain coming, he strolled leisurely out into 
the road and looked up at the house, very much to his satisfaction.  
'It's just the sort of house,' said Benjamin, 'I should wish to 
stop at, if I didn't keep it.'

Then, he strolled towards the garden-paling, and took a look at the 
dahlias.  They looked over at him, with a helpless drowsy hanging 
of their heads:  which bobbed again, as the heavy drops of wet 
dripped off them.

'You must be looked after,' said Benjamin.  'Memorandum, not to 
forget to tell her so.  She's a long time coming!'

Mr. Britain's better half seemed to be by so very much his better 
half, that his own moiety of himself was utterly cast away and 
helpless without her.

'She hadn't much to do, I think,' said Ben.  'There were a few 
little matters of business after market, but not many.  Oh! here we 
are at last!'

A chaise-cart, driven by a boy, came clattering along the road:  
and seated in it, in a chair, with a large well-saturated umbrella 
spread out to dry behind her, was the plump figure of a matronly 
woman, with her bare arms folded across a basket which she carried 
on her knee, several other baskets and parcels lying crowded around 
her, and a certain bright good nature in her face and contented 
awkwardness in her manner, as she jogged to and fro with the motion 
of her carriage, which smacked of old times, even in the distance.  
Upon her nearer approach, this relish of by-gone days was not 
diminished; and when the cart stopped at the Nutmeg-Grater door, a 
pair of shoes, alighting from it, slipped nimbly through Mr. 
Britain's open arms, and came down with a substantial weight upon 
the pathway, which shoes could hardly have belonged to any one but 
Clemency Newcome.

In fact they did belong to her, and she stood in them, and a rosy 
comfortable-looking soul she was:  with as much soap on her glossy 
face as in times of yore, but with whole elbows now, that had grown 
quite dimpled in her improved condition.

'You're late, Clemmy!' said Mr. Britain.

'Why, you see, Ben, I've had a deal to do!' she replied, looking 
busily after the safe removal into the house of all the packages 
and baskets:  'eight, nine, ten - where's eleven?  Oh! my basket's 
eleven!  It's all right.  Put the horse up, Harry, and if he coughs 
again give him a warm mash to-night.  Eight, nine, ten.  Why, 
where's eleven?  Oh! forgot, it's all right.  How's the children, 
Ben?'

'Hearty, Clemmy, hearty.'

'Bless their precious faces!' said Mrs. Britain, unbonneting her 
own round countenance (for she and her husband were by this time in 
the bar), and smoothing her hair with her open hands.  'Give us a 
kiss, old man!'

Mr. Britain promptly complied.

'I think,' said Mrs. Britain, applying herself to her pockets and 
drawing forth an immense bulk of thin books and crumpled papers:  a 
very kennel of dogs'-ears:  'I've done everything.  Bills all 
settled - turnips sold - brewer's account looked into and paid - 
'bacco pipes ordered - seventeen pound four, paid into the Bank - 
Doctor Heathfield's charge for little Clem - you'll guess what that 
is - Doctor Heathfield won't take nothing again, Ben.'

'I thought he wouldn't,' returned Ben.

'No.  He says whatever family you was to have, Ben, he'd never put 
you to the cost of a halfpenny.  Not if you was to have twenty.'

Mr. Britain's face assumed a serious expression, and he looked hard 
at the wall.

'An't it kind of him?' said Clemency.

'Very,' returned Mr. Britain.  'It's the sort of kindness that I 
wouldn't presume upon, on any account.'

'No,' retorted Clemency.  'Of course not.  Then there's the pony - 
he fetched eight pound two; and that an't bad, is it?'

'It's very good,' said Ben.

'I'm glad you're pleased!' exclaimed his wife.  'I thought you 
would be; and I think that's all, and so no more at present from 
yours and cetrer, C. Britain.  Ha ha ha! There!  Take all the 
papers, and lock 'em up.  Oh!  Wait a minute.  Here's a printed 
bill to stick on the wall.  Wet from the printer's.  How nice it 
smells!'

'What's this?' said Ben, looking over the document.

'I don't know,' replied his wife.  'I haven't read a word of it.'

'"To be sold by Auction,"' read the host of the Nutmeg-Grater, 
'"unless previously disposed of by private contract."'

'They always put that,' said Clemency.

'Yes, but they don't always put this,' he returned.  'Look here, 
"Mansion," &c. - "offices," &c., "shrubberies," &c., "ring fence," 
&c. "Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs," &c., "ornamental portion of the 
unencumbered freehold property of Michael Warden, Esquire, 
intending to continue to reside abroad"!'

'Intending to continue to reside abroad!' repeated Clemency.

'Here it is,' said Britain.  'Look!'

'And it was only this very day that I heard it whispered at the old 
house, that better and plainer news had been half promised of her, 
soon!' said Clemency, shaking her head sorrowfully, and patting her 
elbows as if the recollection of old times unconsciously awakened 
her old habits.  'Dear, dear, dear!  There'll be heavy hearts, Ben, 
yonder.'

Mr. Britain heaved a sigh, and shook his head, and said he couldn't 
make it out:  he had left off trying long ago.  With that remark, 
he applied himself to putting up the bill just inside the bar 
window.  Clemency, after meditating in silence for a few moments, 
roused herself, cleared her thoughtful brow, and bustled off to 
look after the children.

Though the host of the Nutmeg-Grater had a lively regard for his 
good-wife, it was of the old patronising kind, and she amused him 
mightily.  Nothing would have astonished him so much, as to have 
known for certain from any third party, that it was she who managed 
the whole house, and made him, by her plain straightforward thrift, 
good-humour, honesty, and industry, a thriving man.  So easy it is, 
in any degree of life (as the world very often finds it), to take 
those cheerful natures that never assert their merit, at their own 
modest valuation; and to conceive a flippant liking of people for 
their outward oddities and eccentricities, whose innate worth, if 
we would look so far, might make us blush in the comparison!

It was comfortable to Mr. Britain, to think of his own 
condescension in having married Clemency.  She was a perpetual 
testimony to him of the goodness of his heart, and the kindness of 
his disposition; and he felt that her being an excellent wife was 
an illustration of the old precept that virtue is its own reward.

He had finished wafering up the bill, and had locked the vouchers 
for her day's proceedings in the cupboard - chuckling all the time, 
over her capacity for business - when, returning with the news that 
the two Master Britains were playing in the coach-house under the 
superintendence of one Betsey, and that little Clem was sleeping 
'like a picture,' she sat down to tea, which had awaited her 
arrival, on a little table.  It was a very neat little bar, with 
the usual display of bottles and glasses; a sedate clock, right to 
the minute (it was half-past five); everything in its place, and 
everything furbished and polished up to the very utmost.

'It's the first time I've sat down quietly to-day, I declare,' said 
Mrs. Britain, taking a long breath, as if she had sat down for the 
night; but getting up again immediately to hand her husband his 
tea, and cut him his bread-and-butter; 'how that bill does set me 
thinking of old times!'

'Ah!' said Mr. Britain, handling his saucer like an oyster, and 
disposing of its contents on the same principle.

'That same Mr. Michael Warden,' said Clemency, shaking her head at 
the notice of sale, 'lost me my old place.'

'And got you your husband,' said Mr. Britain.

'Well!  So he did,' retorted Clemency, 'and many thanks to him.'

'Man's the creature of habit,' said Mr. Britain, surveying her, 
over his saucer.  'I had somehow got used to you, Clem; and I found 
I shouldn't be able to get on without you.  So we went and got made 
man and wife.  Ha! ha!  We!  Who'd have thought it!'

'Who indeed!' cried Clemency.  'It was very good of you, Ben.'

'No, no, no,' replied Mr. Britain, with an air of self-denial.  
'Nothing worth mentioning.'

'Oh yes it was, Ben,' said his wife, with great simplicity; 'I'm 
sure I think so, and am very much obliged to you.  Ah!' looking 
again at the bill; 'when she was known to be gone, and out of 
reach, dear girl, I couldn't help telling - for her sake quite as 
much as theirs - what I knew, could I?'

'You told it, anyhow,' observed her husband.

'And Dr. Jeddler,' pursued Clemency, putting down her tea-cup, and 
looking thoughtfully at the bill, 'in his grief and passion turned 
me out of house and home!  I never have been so glad of anything in 
all my life, as that I didn't say an angry word to him, and hadn't 
any angry feeling towards him, even then; for he repented that 
truly, afterwards.  How often he has sat in this room, and told me 
over and over again he was sorry for it! - the last time, only 
yesterday, when you were out.  How often he has sat in this room, 
and talked to me, hour after hour, about one thing and another, in 
which he made believe to be interested! - but only for the sake of 
the days that are gone by, and because he knows she used to like 
me, Ben!'

'Why, how did you ever come to catch a glimpse of that, Clem?' 
asked her husband:  astonished that she should have a distinct 
perception of a truth which had only dimly suggested itself to his 
inquiring mind.

'I don't know, I'm sure,' said Clemency, blowing her tea, to cool 
it.  'Bless you, I couldn't tell you, if you was to offer me a 
reward of a hundred pound.'

He might have pursued this metaphysical subject but for her 
catching a glimpse of a substantial fact behind him, in the shape 
of a gentleman attired in mourning, and cloaked and booted like a 
rider on horseback, who stood at the bar-door.  He seemed attentive 
to their conversation, and not at all impatient to interrupt it.

Clemency hastily rose at this sight.  Mr. Britain also rose and 
saluted the guest.  'Will you please to walk up-stairs, sir?  
There's a very nice room up-stairs, sir.'

'Thank you,' said the stranger, looking earnestly at Mr. Britain's 
wife.  'May I come in here?'

'Oh, surely, if you like, sir,' returned Clemency, admitting him.

'What would you please to want, sir?'

The bill had caught his eye, and he was reading it.

'Excellent property that, sir,' observed Mr. Britain.

He made no answer; but, turning round, when he had finished 
reading, looked at Clemency with the same observant curiosity as 
before.  'You were asking me,' - he said, still looking at her, - 
'What you would please to take, sir,' answered Clemency, stealing a 
glance at him in return.

'If you will let me have a draught of ale,' he said, moving to a 
table by the window, 'and will let me have it here, without being 
any interruption to your meal, I shall be much obliged to you.'  He 
sat down as he spoke, without any further parley, and looked out at 
the prospect.  He was an easy, well-knit figure of a man in the 
prime of life.  His face, much browned by the sun, was shaded by a 
quantity of dark hair; and he wore a moustache.  His beer being set 
before him, he filled out a glass, and drank, good-humouredly, to 
the house; adding, as he put the tumbler down again:

'It's a new house, is it not?'

'Not particularly new, sir,' replied Mr. Britain.

'Between five and six years old,' said Clemency; speaking very 
distinctly.

'I think I heard you mention Dr. Jeddler's name, as I came in,' 
inquired the stranger.  'That bill reminds me of him; for I happen 
to know something of that story, by hearsay, and through certain 
connexions of mine. - Is the old man living?'

'Yes, he's living, sir,' said Clemency.

'Much changed?'

'Since when, sir?' returned Clemency, with remarkable emphasis and 
expression.

'Since his daughter - went away.'

'Yes! he's greatly changed since then,' said Clemency.  'He's grey 
and old, and hasn't the same way with him at all; but, I think he's 
happy now.  He has taken on with his sister since then, and goes to 
see her very often.  That did him good, directly.  At first, he was 
sadly broken down; and it was enough to make one's heart bleed, to 
see him wandering about, railing at the world; but a great change 
for the better came over him after a year or two, and then he began 
to like to talk about his lost daughter, and to praise her, ay and 
the world too! and was never tired of saying, with the tears in his 
poor eyes, how beautiful and good she was.  He had forgiven her 
then.  That was about the same time as Miss Grace's marriage.  
Britain, you remember?'

Mr. Britain remembered very well.

'The sister is married then,' returned the stranger.  He paused for 
some time before he asked, 'To whom?'

Clemency narrowly escaped oversetting the tea-board, in her emotion 
at this question.

'Did YOU never hear?' she said.

'I should like to hear,' he replied, as he filled his glass again, 
and raised it to his lips.

'Ah!  It would be a long story, if it was properly told,' said 
Clemency, resting her chin on the palm of her left hand, and 
supporting that elbow on her right hand, as she shook her head, and 
looked back through the intervening years, as if she were looking 
at a fire.  'It would be a long story, I am sure.'

'But told as a short one,' suggested the stranger.

Told as a short one,' repeated Clemency in the same thoughtful 
tone, and without any apparent reference to him, or consciousness 
of having auditors, 'what would there be to tell?  That they 
grieved together, and remembered her together, like a person dead; 
that they were so tender of her, never would reproach her, called 
her back to one another as she used to be, and found excuses for 
her!  Every one knows that.  I'm sure I do.  No one better,' added 
Clemency, wiping her eyes with her hand.

'And so,' suggested the stranger.

'And so,' said Clemency, taking him up mechanically, and without 
any change in her attitude or manner, 'they at last were married.  
They were married on her birth-day - it comes round again to-morrow 
- very quiet, very humble like, but very happy.  Mr. Alfred said, 
one night when they were walking in the orchard, "Grace, shall our 
wedding-day be Marion's birth-day?"  And it was.'

'And they have lived happily together?' said the stranger.

'Ay,' said Clemency.  'No two people ever more so.  They have had 
no sorrow but this.'

She raised her head as with a sudden attention to the circumstances 
under which she was recalling these events, and looked quickly at 
the stranger.  Seeing that his face was turned toward the window, 
and that he seemed intent upon the prospect, she made some eager 
signs to her husband, and pointed to the bill, and moved her mouth 
as if she were repeating with great energy, one word or phrase to 
him over and over again.  As she uttered no sound, and as her dumb 
motions like most of her gestures were of a very extraordinary 
kind, this unintelligible conduct reduced Mr. Britain to the 
confines of despair.  He stared at the table, at the stranger, at 
the spoons, at his wife - followed her pantomime with looks of deep 
amazement and perplexity - asked in the same language, was it 
property in danger, was it he in danger, was it she - answered her 
signals with other signals expressive of the deepest distress and 
confusion - followed the motions of her lips - guessed half aloud 
'milk and water,' 'monthly warning,' 'mice and walnuts' - and 
couldn't approach her meaning.

Clemency gave it up at last, as a hopeless attempt; and moving her 
chair by very slow degrees a little nearer to the stranger, sat 
with her eyes apparently cast down but glancing sharply at him now 
and then, waiting until he should ask some other question.  She had 
not to wait long; for he said, presently:

'And what is the after history of the young lady who went away?  
They know it, I suppose?'

Clemency shook her head.  'I've heard,' she said, 'that Doctor 
Jeddler is thought to know more of it than he tells.  Miss Grace 
has had letters from her sister, saying that she was well and 
happy, and made much happier by her being married to Mr. Alfred:  
and has written letters back.  But there's a mystery about her life 
and fortunes, altogether, which nothing has cleared up to this 
hour, and which - '

She faltered here, and stopped.

'And which' - repeated the stranger.

'Which only one other person, I believe, could explain,' said 
Clemency, drawing her breath quickly.

'Who may that be?' asked the stranger.

'Mr. Michael Warden!' answered Clemency, almost in a shriek:  at 
once conveying to her husband what she would have had him 
understand before, and letting Michael Warden know that he was 
recognised.

'You remember me, sir?' said Clemency, trembling with emotion; 'I 
saw just now you did!  You remember me, that night in the garden.  
I was with her!'

'Yes.  You were,' he said.

'Yes, sir,' returned Clemency.  'Yes, to be sure.  This is my 
husband, if you please.  Ben, my dear Ben, run to Miss Grace - run 
to Mr. Alfred - run somewhere, Ben!  Bring somebody here, 
directly!'

'Stay!' said Michael Warden, quietly interposing himself between 
the door and Britain.  'What would you do?'

'Let them know that you are here, sir,' answered Clemency, clapping 
her hands in sheer agitation.  'Let them know that they may hear of 
her, from your own lips; let them know that she is not quite lost 
to them, but that she will come home again yet, to bless her father 
and her loving sister - even her old servant, even me,' she struck 
herself upon the breast with both hands, 'with a sight of her sweet 
face.  Run, Ben, run!'  And still she pressed him on towards the 
door, and still Mr. Warden stood before it, with his hand stretched 
out, not angrily, but sorrowfully.

'Or perhaps,' said Clemency, running past her husband, and catching 
in her emotion at Mr. Warden's cloak, 'perhaps she's here now; 
perhaps she's close by.  I think from your manner she is.  Let me 
see her, sir, if you please.  I waited on her when she was a little 
child.  I saw her grow to be the pride of all this place.  I knew 
her when she was Mr. Alfred's promised wife.  I tried to warn her 
when you tempted her away.  I know what her old home was when she 
was like the soul of it, and how it changed when she was gone and 
lost.  Let me speak to her, if you please!'

He gazed at her with compassion, not unmixed with wonder:  but, he 
made no gesture of assent.

'I don't think she CAN know,' pursued Clemency, 'how truly they 
forgive her; how they love her; what joy it would be to them, to 
see her once more.  She may be timorous of going home.  Perhaps if 
she sees me, it may give her new heart.  Only tell me truly, Mr. 
Warden, is she with you?'

'She is not,' he answered, shaking his head.

This answer, and his manner, and his black dress, and his coming 
back so quietly, and his announced intention of continuing to live 
abroad, explained it all.  Marion was dead.

He didn't contradict her; yes, she was dead!  Clemency sat down, 
hid her face upon the table, and cried.

At that moment, a grey-headed old gentleman came running in:  quite 
out of breath, and panting so much that his voice was scarcely to 
be recognised as the voice of Mr. Snitchey.

'Good Heaven, Mr. Warden!' said the lawyer, taking him aside, 'what 
wind has blown - '  He was so blown himself, that he couldn't get 
on any further until after a pause, when he added, feebly, 'you 
here?'

'An ill-wind, I am afraid,' he answered.  'If you could have heard 
what has just passed - how I have been besought and entreated to 
perform impossibilities - what confusion and affliction I carry 
with me!'

'I can guess it all.  But why did you ever come here, my good sir?' 
retorted Snitchey.

'Come!  How should I know who kept the house?  When I sent my 
servant on to you, I strolled in here because the place was new to 
me; and I had a natural curiosity in everything new and old, in 
these old scenes; and it was outside the town.  I wanted to 
communicate with you, first, before appearing there.  I wanted to 
know what people would say to me.  I see by your manner that you 
can tell me.  If it were not for your confounded caution, I should 
have been possessed of everything long ago.'

'Our caution!' returned the lawyer, 'speaking for Self and Craggs - 
deceased,' here Mr. Snitchey, glancing at his hat-band, shook his 
head, 'how can you reasonably blame us, Mr. Warden?  It was 
understood between us that the subject was never to be renewed, and 
that it wasn't a subject on which grave and sober men like us (I 
made a note of your observations at the time) could interfere.  Our 
caution too!  When Mr. Craggs, sir, went down to his respected 
grave in the full belief - '

'I had given a solemn promise of silence until I should return, 
whenever that might be,' interrupted Mr. Warden; 'and I have kept 
it.'

'Well, sir, and I repeat it,' returned Mr. Snitchey, 'we were bound 
to silence too.  We were bound to silence in our duty towards 
ourselves, and in our duty towards a variety of clients, you among 
them, who were as close as wax.  It was not our place to make 
inquiries of you on such a delicate subject.  I had my suspicions, 
sir; but, it is not six months since I have known the truth, and 
been assured that you lost her.'

'By whom?' inquired his client.

'By Doctor Jeddler himself, sir, who at last reposed that 
confidence in me voluntarily.  He, and only he, has known the whole 
truth, years and years.'

'And you know it?' said his client.

'I do, sir!' replied Snitchey; 'and I have also reason to know that 
it will be broken to her sister to-morrow evening.  They have given 
her that promise.  In the meantime, perhaps you'll give me the 
honour of your company at my house; being unexpected at your own.  
But, not to run the chance of any more such difficulties as you 
have had here, in case you should be recognised - though you're a 
good deal changed; I think I might have passed you myself, Mr. 
Warden - we had better dine here, and walk on in the evening.  It's 
a very good place to dine at, Mr. Warden:  your own property, by-
the-bye.  Self and Craggs (deceased) took a chop here sometimes, 
and had it very comfortably served.  Mr. Craggs, sir,' said 
Snitchey, shutting his eyes tight for an instant, and opening them 
again, 'was struck off the roll of life too soon.'

'Heaven forgive me for not condoling with you,' returned Michael 
Warden, passing his hand across his forehead, 'but I'm like a man 
in a dream at present.  I seem to want my wits.  Mr. Craggs - yes - 
I am very sorry we have lost Mr. Craggs.'  But he looked at 
Clemency as he said it, and seemed to sympathise with Ben, 
consoling her.

'Mr. Craggs, sir,' observed Snitchey, 'didn't find life, I regret 
to say, as easy to have and to hold as his theory made it out, or 
he would have been among us now.  It's a great loss to me.  He was 
my right arm, my right leg, my right ear, my right eye, was Mr. 
Craggs.  I am paralytic without him.  He bequeathed his share of 
the business to Mrs. Craggs, her executors, administrators, and 
assigns.  His name remains in the Firm to this hour.  I try, in a 
childish sort of a way, to make believe, sometimes, he's alive.  
You may observe that I speak for Self and Craggs - deceased, sir - 
deceased,' said the tender-hearted attorney, waving his pocket-
handkerchief.

Michael Warden, who had still been observant of Clemency, turned to 
Mr. Snitchey when he ceased to speak, and whispered in his ear.

'Ah, poor thing!' said Snitchey, shaking his head.  'Yes.  She was 
always very faithful to Marion.  She was always very fond of her.  
Pretty Marion!  Poor Marion!  Cheer up, Mistress - you are married 
now, you know, Clemency.'

Clemency only sighed, and shook her head.

'Well, well!  Wait till to-morrow,' said the lawyer, kindly.

'To-morrow can't bring back' the dead to life, Mister,' said 
Clemency, sobbing.

'No.  It can't do that, or it would bring back Mr. Craggs, 
deceased,' returned the lawyer.  'But it may bring some soothing 
circumstances; it may bring some comfort.  Wait till to-morrow!'

So Clemency, shaking his proffered hand, said she would; and 
Britain, who had been terribly cast down at sight of his despondent 
wife (which was like the business hanging its head), said that was 
right; and Mr. Snitchey and Michael Warden went up-stairs; and 
there they were soon engaged in a conversation so cautiously 
conducted, that no murmur of it was audible above the clatter of 
plates and dishes, the hissing of the frying-pan, the bubbling of 
saucepans, the low monotonous waltzing of the jack - with a 
dreadful click every now and then as if it had met with some mortal 
accident to its head, in a fit of giddiness - and all the other 
preparations in the kitchen for their dinner.


To-morrow was a bright and peaceful day; and nowhere were the 
autumn tints more beautifully seen, than from the quiet orchard of 
the Doctor's house.  The snows of many winter nights had melted 
from that ground, the withered leaves of many summer times had 
rustled there, since she had fled.  The honey-suckle porch was 
green again, the trees cast bountiful and changing shadows on the 
grass, the landscape was as tranquil and serene as it had ever 
been; but where was she!

Not there.  Not there.  She would have been a stranger sight in her 
old home now, even than that home had been at first, without her.  
But, a lady sat in the familiar place, from whose heart she had 
never passed away; in whose true memory she lived, unchanging, 
youthful, radiant with all promise and all hope; in whose affection 
- and it was a mother's now, there was a cherished little daughter 
playing by her side - she had no rival, no successor; upon whose 
gentle lips her name was trembling then.

The spirit of the lost girl looked out of those eyes.  Those eyes 
of Grace, her sister, sitting with her husband in the orchard, on 
their wedding-day, and his and Marion's birth-day.

He had not become a great man; he had not grown rich; he had not 
forgotten the scenes and friends of his youth; he had not fulfilled 
any one of the Doctor's old predictions.  But, in his useful, 
patient, unknown visiting of poor men's homes; and in his watching 
of sick beds; and in his daily knowledge of the gentleness and 
goodness flowering the by-paths of this world, not to be trodden 
down beneath the heavy foot of poverty, but springing up, elastic, 
in its track, and making its way beautiful; he had better learned 
and proved, in each succeeding year, the truth of his old faith.  
The manner of his life, though quiet and remote, had shown him how 
often men still entertained angels, unawares, as in the olden time; 
and how the most unlikely forms - even some that were mean and ugly 
to the view, and poorly clad - became irradiated by the couch of 
sorrow, want, and pain, and changed to ministering spirits with a 
glory round their heads.

He lived to better purpose on the altered battle-ground, perhaps, 
than if he had contended restlessly in more ambitious lists; and he 
was happy with his wife, dear Grace.

And Marion.  Had HE forgotten her?

'The time has flown, dear Grace,' he said, 'since then;' they had 
been talking of that night; 'and yet it seems a long long while 
ago.  We count by changes and events within us.  Not by years.'

'Yet we have years to count by, too, since Marion was with us,' 
returned Grace.  'Six times, dear husband, counting to-night as 
one, we have sat here on her birth-day, and spoken together of that 
happy return, so eagerly expected and so long deferred.  Ah when 
will it be!  When will it be!'

Her husband attentively observed her, as the tears collected in her 
eyes; and drawing nearer, said:

'But, Marion told you, in that farewell letter which she left for 
you upon your table, love, and which you read so often, that years 
must pass away before it COULD be.  Did she not?'

She took a letter from her breast, and kissed it, and said 'Yes.'

'That through these intervening years, however happy she might be, 
she would look forward to the time when you would meet again, and 
all would be made clear; and that she prayed you, trustfully and 
hopefully to do the same.  The letter runs so, does it not, my 
dear?'

'Yes, Alfred.'

'And every other letter she has written since?'

'Except the last - some months ago - in which she spoke of you, and 
what you then knew, and what I was to learn to-night.'

He looked towards the sun, then fast declining, and said that the 
appointed time was sunset.

'Alfred!' said Grace, laying her hand upon his shoulder earnestly, 
'there is something in this letter - this old letter, which you say 
I read so often - that I have never told you.  But, to-night, dear 
husband, with that sunset drawing near, and all our life seeming to 
soften and become hushed with the departing day, I cannot keep it 
secret.'

'What is it, love?'

'When Marion went away, she wrote me, here, that you had once left 
her a sacred trust to me, and that now she left you, Alfred, such a 
trust in my hands:  praying and beseeching me, as I loved her, and 
as I loved you, not to reject the affection she believed (she knew, 
she said) you would transfer to me when the new wound was healed, 
but to encourage and return it.'

' - And make me a proud, and happy man again, Grace.  Did she say 
so?'

'She meant, to make myself so blest and honoured in your love,' was 
his wife's answer, as he held her in his arms.

'Hear me, my dear!' he said. - 'No.  Hear me so!' - and as he 
spoke, he gently laid the head she had raised, again upon his 
shoulder.  'I know why I have never heard this passage in the 
letter, until now.  I know why no trace of it ever showed itself in 
any word or look of yours at that time.  I know why Grace, although 
so true a friend to me, was hard to win to be my wife.  And knowing 
it, my own! I know the priceless value of the heart I gird within 
my arms, and thank GOD for the rich possession!'

She wept, but not for sorrow, as he pressed her to his heart.  
After a brief space, he looked down at the child, who was sitting 
at their feet playing with a little basket of flowers, and bade her 
look how golden and how red the sun was.

'Alfred,' said Grace, raising her head quickly at these words.  
'The sun is going down.  You have not forgotten what I am to know 
before it sets.'

'You are to know the truth of Marion's history, my love,' he 
answered.

'All the truth,' she said, imploringly.  'Nothing veiled from me, 
any more.  That was the promise.  Was it not?'

'It was,' he answered.

'Before the sun went down on Marion's birth-day.  And you see it, 
Alfred?  It is sinking fast.'

He put his arm about her waist, and, looking steadily into her 
eyes, rejoined:

'That truth is not reserved so long for me to tell, dear Grace.  It 
is to come from other lips.'

'From other lips!' she faintly echoed.

'Yes.  I know your constant heart, I know how brave you are, I know 
that to you a word of preparation is enough.  You have said, truly, 
that the time is come.  It is.  Tell me that you have present 
fortitude to bear a trial - a surprise - a shock:  and the 
messenger is waiting at the gate.'

'What messenger?' she said.  'And what intelligence does he bring?'

'I am pledged,' he answered her, preserving his steady look, 'to 
say no more.  Do you think you understand me?'

'I am afraid to think,' she said.

There was that emotion in his face, despite its steady gaze, which 
frightened her.  Again she hid her own face on his shoulder, 
trembling, and entreated him to pause - a moment.

'Courage, my wife!  When you have firmness to receive the 
messenger, the messenger is waiting at the gate.  The sun is 
setting on Marion's birth-day.  Courage, courage, Grace!'

She raised her head, and, looking at him, told him she was ready.  
As she stood, and looked upon him going away, her face was so like 
Marion's as it had been in her later days at home, that it was 
wonderful to see.  He took the child with him.  She called her back 
- she bore the lost girl's name - and pressed her to her bosom.  
The little creature, being released again, sped after him, and 
Grace was left alone.

She knew not what she dreaded, or what hoped; but remained there, 
motionless, looking at the porch by which they had disappeared.

Ah! what was that, emerging from its shadow; standing on its 
threshold!  That figure, with its white garments rustling in the 
evening air; its head laid down upon her father's breast, and 
pressed against it to his loving heart!  O God! was it a vision 
that came bursting from the old man's arms, and with a cry, and 
with a waving of its hands, and with a wild precipitation of itself 
upon her in its boundless love, sank down in her embrace!

'Oh, Marion, Marion!  Oh, my sister!  Oh, my heart's dear love!  
Oh, joy and happiness unutterable, so to meet again!'

It was no dream, no phantom conjured up by hope and fear, but 
Marion, sweet Marion!  So beautiful, so happy, so unalloyed by care 
and trial, so elevated and exalted in her loveliness, that as the 
setting sun shone brightly on her upturned face, she might have 
been a spirit visiting the earth upon some healing mission.

Clinging to her sister, who had dropped upon a seat and bent down 
over her - and smiling through her tears - and kneeling, close 
before her, with both arms twining round her, and never turning for 
an instant from her face - and with the glory of the setting sun 
upon her brow, and with the soft tranquillity of evening gathering 
around them - Marion at length broke silence; her voice, so calm, 
low, clear, and pleasant, well-tuned to the time.

'When this was my dear home, Grace, as it will be now again - '

'Stay, my sweet love!  A moment!  O Marion, to hear you speak 
again.'

She could not bear the voice she loved so well, at first.

'When this was my dear home, Grace, as it will be now again, I 
loved him from my soul.  I loved him most devotedly.  I would have 
died for him, though I was so young.  I never slighted his 
affection in my secret breast for one brief instant.  It was far 
beyond all price to me.  Although it is so long ago, and past, and 
gone, and everything is wholly changed, I could not bear to think 
that you, who love so well, should think I did not truly love him 
once.  I never loved him better, Grace, than when he left this very 
scene upon this very day.  I never loved him better, dear one, than 
I did that night when I left here.'

Her sister, bending over her, could look into her face, and hold 
her fast.

'But he had gained, unconsciously,' said Marion, with a gentle 
smile, 'another heart, before I knew that I had one to give him.  
That heart - yours, my sister! - was so yielded up, in all its 
other tenderness, to me; was so devoted, and so noble; that it 
plucked its love away, and kept its secret from all eyes but mine - 
Ah! what other eyes were quickened by such tenderness and 
gratitude! - and was content to sacrifice itself to me.  But, I 
knew something of its depths.  I knew the struggle it had made.  I 
knew its high, inestimable worth to him, and his appreciation of 
it, let him love me as he would.  I knew the debt I owed it.  I had 
its great example every day before me.  What you had done for me, I 
knew that I could do, Grace, if I would, for you.  I never laid my 
head down on my pillow, but I prayed with tears to do it.  I never 
laid my head down on my pillow, but I thought of Alfred's own words 
on the day of his departure, and how truly he had said (for I knew 
that, knowing you) that there were victories gained every day, in 
struggling hearts, to which these fields of battle were nothing.  
Thinking more and more upon the great endurance cheerfully 
sustained, and never known or cared for, that there must be, every 
day and hour, in that great strife of which he spoke, my trial 
seemed to grow light and easy.  And He who knows our hearts, my 
dearest, at this moment, and who knows there is no drop of 
bitterness or grief - of anything but unmixed happiness - in mine, 
enabled me to make the resolution that I never would be Alfred's 
wife.  That he should be my brother, and your husband, if the 
course I took could bring that happy end to pass; but that I never 
would (Grace, I then loved him dearly, dearly!) be his wife!'

'O Marion!  O Marion!'

'I had tried to seem indifferent to him;' and she pressed her 
sister's face against her own; 'but that was hard, and you were 
always his true advocate.  I had tried to tell you of my 
resolution, but you would never hear me; you would never understand 
me.  The time was drawing near for his return.  I felt that I must 
act, before the daily intercourse between us was renewed.  I knew 
that one great pang, undergone at that time, would save a 
lengthened agony to all of us.  I knew that if I went away then, 
that end must follow which HAS followed, and which has made us both 
so happy, Grace!  I wrote to good Aunt Martha, for a refuge in her 
house:  I did not then tell her all, but something of my story, and 
she freely promised it.  While I was contesting that step with 
myself, and with my love of you, and home, Mr. Warden, brought here 
by an accident, became, for some time, our companion.'

'I have sometimes feared of late years, that this might have been,' 
exclaimed her sister; and her countenance was ashy-pale.  'You 
never loved him - and you married him in your self-sacrifice to 
me!'

'He was then,' said Marion, drawing her sister closer to her, 'on 
the eve of going secretly away for a long time.  He wrote to me, 
after leaving here; told me what his condition and prospects really 
were; and offered me his hand.  He told me he had seen I was not 
happy in the prospect of Alfred's return.  I believe he thought my 
heart had no part in that contract; perhaps thought I might have 
loved him once, and did not then; perhaps thought that when I tried 
to seem indifferent, I tried to hide indifference - I cannot tell.  
But I wished that you should feel me wholly lost to Alfred - 
hopeless to him - dead.  Do you understand me, love?'

Her sister looked into her face, attentively.  She seemed in doubt.

'I saw Mr. Warden, and confided in his honour; charged him with my 
secret, on the eve of his and my departure.  He kept it.  Do you 
understand me, dear?'

Grace looked confusedly upon her.  She scarcely seemed to hear.

'My love, my sister!' said Marion, 'recall your thoughts a moment; 
listen to me.  Do not look so strangely on me.  There are 
countries, dearest, where those who would abjure a misplaced 
passion, or would strive, against some cherished feeling of their 
hearts and conquer it, retire into a hopeless solitude, and close 
the world against themselves and worldly loves and hopes for ever.  
When women do so, they assume that name which is so dear to you and 
me, and call each other Sisters.  But, there may be sisters, Grace, 
who, in the broad world out of doors, and underneath its free sky, 
and in its crowded places, and among its busy life, and trying to 
assist and cheer it and to do some good, - learn the same lesson; 
and who, with hearts still fresh and young, and open to all 
happiness and means of happiness, can say the battle is long past, 
the victory long won.  And such a one am I!  You understand me 
now?'

Still she looked fixedly upon her, and made no reply.

'Oh Grace, dear Grace,' said Marion, clinging yet more tenderly and 
fondly to that breast from which she had been so long exiled, 'if 
you were not a happy wife and mother - if I had no little namesake 
here - if Alfred, my kind brother, were not your own fond husband - 
from whence could I derive the ecstasy I feel to-night!  But, as I 
left here, so I have returned.  My heart has known no other love, 
my hand has never been bestowed apart from it.  I am still your 
maiden sister, unmarried, unbetrothed:  your own loving old Marion, 
in whose affection you exist alone and have no partner, Grace!'

She understood her now.  Her face relaxed:  sobs came to her 
relief; and falling on her neck, she wept and wept, and fondled her 
as if she were a child again.

When they were more composed, they found that the Doctor, and his 
sister good Aunt Martha, were standing near at hand, with Alfred.

'This is a weary day for me,' said good Aunt Martha, smiling 
through her tears, as she embraced her nieces; 'for I lose my dear 
companion in making you all happy; and what can you give me, in 
return for my Marion?'

'A converted brother,' said the Doctor.

'That's something, to be sure,' retorted Aunt Martha, 'in such a 
farce as - '

'No, pray don't,' said the doctor penitently.

'Well, I won't,' replied Aunt Martha.  'But, I consider myself ill 
used.  I don't know what's to become of me without my Marion, after 
we have lived together half-a-dozen years.'

'You must come and live here, I suppose,' replied the Doctor.  'We 
shan't quarrel now, Martha.'

'Or you must get married, Aunt,' said Alfred.

'Indeed,' returned the old lady, 'I think it might be a good 
speculation if I were to set my cap at Michael Warden, who, I hear, 
is come home much the better for his absence in all respects.  But 
as I knew him when he was a boy, and I was not a very young woman 
then, perhaps he mightn't respond.  So I'll make up my mind to go 
and live with Marion, when she marries, and until then (it will not 
be very long, I dare say) to live alone.  What do YOU say, 
Brother?'

'I've a great mind to say it's a ridiculous world altogether, and 
there's nothing serious in it,' observed the poor old Doctor.

'You might take twenty affidavits of it if you chose, Anthony,' 
said his sister; 'but nobody would believe you with such eyes as 
those.'

'It's a world full of hearts,' said the Doctor, hugging his 
youngest daughter, and bending across her to hug Grace - for he 
couldn't separate the sisters; 'and a serious world, with all its 
folly - even with mine, which was enough to have swamped the whole 
globe; and it is a world on which the sun never rises, but it looks 
upon a thousand bloodless battles that are some set-off against the 
miseries and wickedness of Battle-Fields; and it is a world we need 
be careful how we libel, Heaven forgive us, for it is a world of 
sacred mysteries, and its Creator only knows what lies beneath the 
surface of His lightest image!'


You would not be the better pleased with my rude pen, if it 
dissected and laid open to your view the transports of this family, 
long severed and now reunited.  Therefore, I will not follow the 
poor Doctor through his humbled recollection of the sorrow he had 
had, when Marion was lost to him; nor, will I tell how serious he 
had found that world to be, in which some love, deep-anchored, is 
the portion of all human creatures; nor, how such a trifle as the 
absence of one little unit in the great absurd account, had 
stricken him to the ground.  Nor, how, in compassion for his 
distress, his sister had, long ago, revealed the truth to him by 
slow degrees, and brought him to the knowledge of the heart of his 
self-banished daughter, and to that daughter's side.

Nor, how Alfred Heathfield had been told the truth, too, in the 
course of that then current year; and Marion had seen him, and had 
promised him, as her brother, that on her birth-day, in the 
evening, Grace should know it from her lips at last.

'I beg your pardon, Doctor,' said Mr. Snitchey, looking into the 
orchard, 'but have I liberty to come in?'

Without waiting for permission, he came straight to Marion, and 
kissed her hand, quite joyfully.

'If Mr. Craggs had been alive, my dear Miss Marion,' said Mr. 
Snitchey, 'he would have had great interest in this occasion.  It 
might have suggested to him, Mr. Alfred, that our life is not too 
easy perhaps:  that, taken altogether, it will bear any little 
smoothing we can give it; but Mr. Craggs was a man who could endure 
to be convinced, sir.  He was always open to conviction.  If he 
were open to conviction, now, I - this is weakness.  Mrs. Snitchey, 
my dear,' - at his summons that lady appeared from behind the door, 
'you are among old friends.'

Mrs. Snitchey having delivered her congratulations, took her 
husband aside.

'One moment, Mr. Snitchey,' said that lady.  'It is not in my 
nature to rake up the ashes of the departed.'

'No, my dear,' returned her husband.

'Mr. Craggs is - '

'Yes, my dear, he is deceased,' said Snitchey.

'But I ask you if you recollect,' pursued his wife, 'that evening 
of the ball?  I only ask you that.  If you do; and if your memory 
has not entirely failed you, Mr. Snitchey; and if you are not 
absolutely in your dotage; I ask you to connect this time with that 
- to remember how I begged and prayed you, on my knees - '

'Upon your knees, my dear?' said Mr. Snitchey.

'Yes,' said Mrs. Snitchey, confidently, 'and you know it - to 
beware of that man - to observe his eye - and now to tell me 
whether I was right, and whether at that moment he knew secrets 
which he didn't choose to tell.'

'Mrs. Snitchey,' returned her husband, in her ear, 'Madam.  Did you 
ever observe anything in MY eye?'

'No,' said Mrs. Snitchey, sharply.  'Don't flatter yourself.'

'Because, Madam, that night,' he continued, twitching her by the 
sleeve, 'it happens that we both knew secrets which we didn't 
choose to tell, and both knew just the same professionally.  And so 
the less you say about such things the better, Mrs. Snitchey; and 
take this as a warning to have wiser and more charitable eyes 
another time.  Miss Marion, I brought a friend of yours along with 
me.  Here!  Mistress!'

Poor Clemency, with her apron to her eyes, came slowly in, escorted 
by her husband; the latter doleful with the presentiment, that if 
she abandoned herself to grief, the Nutmeg-Grater was done for.

'Now, Mistress,' said the lawyer, checking Marion as she ran 
towards her, and interposing himself between them, 'what's the 
matter with YOU?'

'The matter!' cried poor Clemency. - When, looking up in wonder, 
and in indignant remonstrance, and in the added emotion of a great 
roar from Mr. Britain, and seeing that sweet face so well 
remembered close before her, she stared, sobbed, laughed, cried, 
screamed, embraced her, held her fast, released her, fell on Mr. 
Snitchey and embraced him (much to Mrs. Snitchey's indignation), 
fell on the Doctor and embraced him, fell on Mr. Britain and 
embraced him, and concluded by embracing herself, throwing her 
apron over her head, and going into hysterics behind it.

A stranger had come into the orchard, after Mr. Snitchey, and had 
remained apart, near the gate, without being observed by any of the 
group; for they had little spare attention to bestow, and that had 
been monopolised by the ecstasies of Clemency.  He did not appear 
to wish to be observed, but stood alone, with downcast eyes; and 
there was an air of dejection about him (though he was a gentleman 
of a gallant appearance) which the general happiness rendered more 
remarkable.

None but the quick eyes of Aunt Martha, however, remarked him at 
all; but, almost as soon as she espied him, she was in conversation 
with him.  Presently, going to where Marion stood with Grace and 
her little namesake, she whispered something in Marion's ear, at 
which she started, and appeared surprised; but soon recovering from 
her confusion, she timidly approached the stranger, in Aunt 
Martha's company, and engaged in conversation with him too.

'Mr. Britain,' said the lawyer, putting his hand in his pocket, and 
bringing out a legal-looking document, while this was going on, 'I 
congratulate you.  You are now the whole and sole proprietor of 
that freehold tenement, at present occupied and held by yourself as 
a licensed tavern, or house of public entertainment, and commonly 
called or known by the sign of the Nutmeg-Grater.  Your wife lost 
one house, through my client Mr. Michael Warden; and now gains 
another.  I shall have the pleasure of canvassing you for the 
county, one of these fine mornings.'

'Would it make any difference in the vote if the sign was altered, 
sir?' asked Britain.

'Not in the least,' replied the lawyer.

'Then,' said Mr. Britain, handing him back the conveyance, 'just 
clap in the words, "and Thimble," will you be so good; and I'll 
have the two mottoes painted up in the parlour instead of my wife's 
portrait.'

'And let me,' said a voice behind them; it was the stranger's - 
Michael Warden's; 'let me claim the benefit of those inscriptions.  
Mr. Heathfield and Dr. Jeddler, I might have deeply wronged you 
both.  That I did not, is no virtue of my own.  I will not say that 
I am six years wiser than I was, or better.  But I have known, at 
any rate, that term of self-reproach.  I can urge no reason why you 
should deal gently with me.  I abused the hospitality of this 
house; and learnt by my own demerits, with a shame I never have 
forgotten, yet with some profit too, I would fain hope, from one,' 
he glanced at Marion, 'to whom I made my humble supplication for 
forgiveness, when I knew her merit and my deep unworthiness.  In a 
few days I shall quit this place for ever.  I entreat your pardon.  
Do as you would be done by!  Forget and Forgive!'


TIME - from whom I had the latter portion of this story, and with 
whom I have the pleasure of a personal acquaintance of some five-
and-thirty years' duration - informed me, leaning easily upon his 
scythe, that Michael Warden never went away again, and never sold 
his house, but opened it afresh, maintained a golden means of 
hospitality, and had a wife, the pride and honour of that 
countryside, whose name was Marion.  But, as I have observed that 
Time confuses facts occasionally, I hardly know what weight to give 
to his authority.




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BLEAK HOUSE

by Charles Dickens




PREFACE


A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a 
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under 
any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the 
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought 
the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.  
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of 
progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to 
the "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, 
had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no 
means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believe 
by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.

This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of 
this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to 
Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have 
originated.  In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt 
quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

"My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!"

But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know 
what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I 
mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning 
the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth.  
The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual 
occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was 
professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong 
from beginning to end.  At the present moment (August, 1853) there 
is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years 
ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to 
appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount 
of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is 
(I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was 
begun.  There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet 
decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century 
and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds 
has been swallowed up in costs.  If I wanted other authorities for 
Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the 
shame of--a parsimonious public.

There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark.  
The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been 
denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes 
(quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have 
been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters 
to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that 
spontaneous combustion could not possibly be.  I have no need to 
observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers 
and that before I wrote that description I took pains to 
investigate the subject.  There are about thirty cases on record, 
of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi 
Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe 
Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in 
letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he 
afterwards republished at Rome.  The appearances, beyond all 
rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed 
in Mr. Krook's case.  The next most famous instance happened at 
Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat, 
one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France.  The subject 
was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having 
murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was 
acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died 
the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given.  I 
do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and that 
general reference to the authorities which will be found at page 
30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences of 
distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in 
more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not 
abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable 
spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences 
are usually received.

In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of 
familiar things.


1853


* Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at 
the town of Columbus, in the United States of America, quite 
recently.  The subject was a German who kept a liquor-shop aud was 
an inveterate drunkard.



CHAPTER I

In Chancery


London.  Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor 
sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.  Implacable November weather.  As 
much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from 
the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a 
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine 
lizard up Holborn Hill.  Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, 
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as 
full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for 
the death of the sun.  Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.  Horses, 
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.  Foot passengers, 
jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill 
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of 
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding 
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits 
to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points 
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere.  Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits 
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the 
tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and 
dirty) city.  Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.  
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on 
the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping 
on the gunwales of barges and small boats.  Fog in the eyes and 
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides 
of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of 
the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching 
the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.  
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a 
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a 
balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much 
as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by 
husbandman and ploughboy.  Most of the shops lighted two hours 
before their time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard 
and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the 
muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, 
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old 
corporation, Temple Bar.  And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn 
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor 
in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and 
mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition 
which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, 
holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be 
sitting her--as here he is--with a foggy glory round his head, 
softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a 
large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an 
interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to 
the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.  On such 
an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery 
bar ought to be--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the 
ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on 
slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running 
their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words 
and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players 
might.  On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, 
some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who 
made a fortune by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged in a 
line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth 
at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk 
gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, 
affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, 
mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.  Well may the 
court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog 
hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the 
stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day 
into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep 
in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance 
by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the 
roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into 
the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs 
are all stuck in a fog-bank!  This is the Court of Chancery, which 
has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, 
which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in 
every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod 
heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round 
of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means 
abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, 
patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the 
heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners 
who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer 
any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky 
afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, 
two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of 
solicitors before mentioned?  There is the registrar below the 
judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-
bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court 
suits.  These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls 
from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed 
dry years upon years ago.  The short-hand writers, the reporters of 
the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp 
with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on.  
Their places are a blank.  Standing on a seat at the side of the 
hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little 
mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its 
sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible 
judgment to be given in her favour.  Some say she really is, or 
was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one 
cares.  She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls 
her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry 
lavender.  A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-
dozenth time to make a personal application "to purge himself of 
his contempt," which, being a solitary surviving executor who has 
fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is 
not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all 
likely ever to do.  In the meantime his prospects in life are 
ended.  Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from 
Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at 
the close of the day's business and who can by no means be made to 
understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence 
after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself 
in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out 
"My Lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his 
rising.  A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by 
sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and 
enlivening the dismal weather a little.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on.  This scarecrow of a suit has, in 
course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what 
it means.  The parties to it understand it least, but it has been 
observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five 
minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the 
premises.  Innumerable children have been born into the cause; 
innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old 
people have died out of it.  Scores of persons have deliriously 
found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without 
knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds 
with the suit.  The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised 
a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled 
has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away 
into the other world.  Fair wards of court have faded into mothers 
and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and 
gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed 
into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left 
upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his 
brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, 
perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke.  That is the only 
good that has ever come of it.  It has been death to many, but it 
is a joke in the profession.  Every master in Chancery has had a 
reference out of it.  Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or 
other, when he was counsel at the bar.  Good things have been said 
about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-
wine committee after dinner in hall.  Articled clerks have been in 
the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it.  The last Lord 
Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the 
eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the 
sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce 
and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers"--a pleasantry that particularly tickled 
the maces, bags, and purses.

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched 
forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very 
wide question.  From the master upon whose impaling files reams of 
dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into 
many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office 
who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under 
that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it.  
In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, 
under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can 
never come to good.  The very solicitors' boys who have kept the 
wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. 
Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had 
appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and 
shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  The receiver 
in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has 
acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his 
own kind.  Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit 
of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that 
outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle--who 
was not well used--when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of 
the office.  Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have 
been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have 
contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil 
have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things 
alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the 
world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go 
right.

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the 
Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

"Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something 
restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.

"Mlud," says Mr. Tangle.  Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce than anybody.  He is famous for it--supposed never to have 
read anything else since he left school.

"Have you nearly concluded your argument?"

"Mlud, no--variety of points--feel it my duty tsubmit--ludship," is 
the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.

"Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says 
the Chancellor with a slight smile.

Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little 
summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in 
a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen 
places of obscurity.

"We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the 
Chancellor.  For the question at issue is only a question of costs, 
a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will 
come to a settlement one of these days.

The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought 
forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, "My lord!"  
Maces, bags, and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at 
the man from Shropshire.

"In reference," proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce, "to the young girl--" 

"Begludship's pardon--boy," says Mr. Tangle prematurely.  "In 
reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, "to 
the young girl and boy, the two young people"--Mr. Tangle crushed--
"whom I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my 
private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the 
expediency of making the order for their residing with their 
uncle."

Mr. Tangle on his legs again.  "Begludship's pardon--dead."

"With their"--Chancellor looking through his double eyeglass at the 
papers on his desk--"grandfather."

"Begludship's pardon--victim of rash action--brains."

Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises, 
fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, "Will 
your lordship allow me?  I appear for him.  He is a cousin, several 
times removed.  I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court 
in what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin.

Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing 
in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the 
fog knows him no more.  Everybody looks for him.  Nobody can see 
him.

"I will speak with both the young people," says the Chancellor 
anew, "and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with 
their cousin.  I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I 
take my seat."

The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is 
presented.  Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner's 
conglomeration but his being sent back to prison, which is soon 
done.  The man from Shropshire ventures another remonstrative "My 
lord!" but the Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously 
vanished.  Everybody else quickly vanishes too.  A battery of blue 
bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by 
clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents; 
the empty court is locked up.  If all the injustice it has 
committed and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up 
with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre--why so 
much the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce!



CHAPTER II

In Fashion


It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this 
same miry afternoon.  It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but 
that we may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow 
flies.  Both the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are 
things of precedent and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who 
have played at strange games through a deal of thundery weather; 
sleeping beauties whom the knight will wake one day, when all the 
stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to turn prodigiously!

It is not a large world.  Relatively even to this world of ours, 
which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have 
made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), 
it is a very little speck.  There is much good in it; there are 
many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place.  But 
the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much 
jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the 
larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.  
It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for 
want of air.

My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days 
previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to 
stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain.  The 
fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, 
and it knows all fashionable things.  To know things otherwise were 
to be unfashionable.  My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she 
calls, in familiar conversation, her "place" in Lincolnshire.  The 
waters are out in Lincolnshire.  An arch of the bridge in the park 
has been sapped and sopped away.  The adjacent low-lying ground for 
half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees 
for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, 
with falling rain.  My Lady Dedlock's place has been extremely 
dreary.  The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that 
the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of 
the woodman's axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall.  The 
deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass.  The shot of 
a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves 
in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, 
that makes a background for the falling rain.  The view from my 
Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and 
a view in Indian ink.  The vases on the stone terrace in the 
foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall--drip, 
drip, drip--upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time 
the Ghost's Walk, all night.  On Sundays the little church in the 
park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and 
there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in 
their graves.  My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in 
the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge and seeing 
the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from 
the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the 
rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through 
the gate, has been put quite out of temper.  My Lady Dedlock says 
she has been "bored to death."

Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in 
Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the 
rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants.  The 
pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into 
the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has 
passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters.  And when they 
will next come forth again, the fashionable intelligence--which, 
like the fiend, is omniscient of the past and present, but not the 
future--cannot yet undertake to say.

Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier 
baronet than he.  His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely 
more respectable.  He has a general opinion that the world might 
get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks.  He 
would on the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a little low, 
perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea 
dependent for its execution on your great county families.  He is a 
gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and 
meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may 
please to mention rather than give occasion for the least 
impeachment of his integrity.  He is an honourable, obstinate, 
truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly 
unreasonable man.

Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady.  
He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet 
sixty-seven.  He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a 
little stiffly.  He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey 
hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat, 
and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned.  He is 
ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and 
holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation.  His 
gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her, 
is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him.

Indeed, he married her for love.  A whisper still goes about that 
she had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family 
that perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more.  But 
she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough 
to portion out a legion of fine ladies.  Wealth and station, added 
to these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady 
Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and 
at the top of the fashionable tree.

How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody 
knows--or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having 
been rather frequently mentioned.  My Lady Dedlock, having 
conquered HER world, fell not into the melting, but rather into the 
freezing, mood.  An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an 
equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction, 
are the trophies of her victory.  She is perfectly well-bred.  
If she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be 
expected to ascend without any rapture.

She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet 
in its autumn.  She has a fine face--originally of a character that 
would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into 
classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state.  
Her figure is elegant and has the effect of being tall.  Not that 
she is so, but that "the most is made," as the Honourable Bob 
Stables has frequently asserted upon oath, "of all her points."  
The same authority observes that she is perfectly got up and 
remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is the 
best-groomed woman in the whole stud.

With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up 
from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable 
intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to 
her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some 
weeks, after which her movements are uncertain.  And at her house 
in town, upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-
fashioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the 
High Court of Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal 
adviser of the Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron boxes in his 
office with that name outside as if the present baronet were the 
coin of the conjuror's trick and were constantly being juggled 
through the whole set.  Across the hall, and up the stairs, and 
along the passages, and through the rooms, which are very brilliant 
in the season and very dismal out of it--fairy-land to visit, but a 
desert to live in--the old gentleman is conducted by a Mercury in 
powder to my Lady's presence.

The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made 
good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and 
aristocratic wills, and to be very rich.  He is surrounded by a 
mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be 
the silent depository.  There are noble mausoleums rooted for 
centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and 
the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad 
among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn.  He is of what 
is called the old school--a phrase generally meaning any school 
that seems never to have been young--and wears knee-breeches tied 
with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings.  One peculiarity of his 
black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, 
is that they never shine.  Mute, close, irresponsive to any 
glancing light, his dress is like himself.  He never converses when 
not professionaly consulted.  He is found sometimes, speechless but 
quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses 
and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable 
intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half 
the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?"  He 
receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with 
the rest of his knowledge.

Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr. 
Tulkinghorn.  There is an air of prescription about him which is 
always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of 
tribute.  He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's dress; there is a kind of 
tribute in that too.  It is eminently respectable, and likewise, in 
a general way, retainer-like.  It expresses, as it were, the 
steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of 
the Dedlocks.

Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself?  It may be so, or it 
may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in 
everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class--as 
one of the leaders and representatives of her little world.  She 
supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach 
and ken of ordinary mortals--seeing herself in her glass, where 
indeed she looks so.  Yet every dim little star revolving about 
her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her 
weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and 
lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her 
moral nature as her dressmaker takes of her physical proportions.  
Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new 
form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new 
anything, to be set up?  There are deferential people in a dozen 
callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration 
before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a 
baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly 
affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her 
whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them 
off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic 
Lilliput.  "If you want to address our people, sir," say Blaze and 
Sparkle, the jewellers--meaning by our people Lady Dedlock and the 
rest--"you must remember that you are not dealing with the general 
public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and their 
weakest place is such a place."  "To make this article go down, 
gentlemen," say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their friends the 
manufacturers, "you must come to us, because we know where to have 
the fashionable people, and we can make it fashionable."  "If you 
want to get this print upon the tables of my high connexion, sir," 
says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, "or if you want to get this dwarf 
or giant into the houses of my high connexion, sir, or if you want 
to secure to this entertainment the patronage of my high connexion, 
sir, you must leave it, if you please, to me, for I have been 
accustomed to study the leaders of my high connexion, sir, and I 
may tell you without vanity that I can turn them round my finger"--
in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does not exaggerate at 
all.

Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing in 
the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.

"My Lady's cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr. 
Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand.

"Yes.  It has been on again to-day," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, 
making one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the 
fire, shading her face with a hand-screen.

"It would be useless to ask," says my Lady with the dreariness of 
the place in Lincolnshire still upon her, "whether anything has 
been done."

"Nothing that YOU would call anything has been done to-day," 
replies Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Nor ever will be," says my Lady.

Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit.  
It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing.  To 
be sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in question, her 
part in which was the only property my Lady brought him; and he has 
a shadowy impression that for his name--the name of Dedlock--to be 
in a cause, and not in the title of that cause, is a most 
ridiculous accident.  But he regards the Court of Chancery, even if 
it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling 
amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction with a 
variety of other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom for 
the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything.  And he is 
upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his 
countenance to any complaints respecting it would be to encourage 
some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere--like Wat 
Tyler.

"As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file," says Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, "and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the 
troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with 
any new proceedings in a cause"--cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn, 
taking no more responsibility than necessary--"and further, as I 
see you are going to Paris, I have brought them in my pocket."

(Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by the by, but the delight 
of the fashionable intelligence was in his Lady.)

Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them 
on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts on his 
spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp.

"'In Chancery.  Between John Jarndyce--'"

My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the formal 
horrors as he can.

Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins again lower 
down.  My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention.  
Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the file and appears to 
have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as 
ranging among the national bulwarks.  It happens that the fire is 
hot where my Lady sits and that the hand-screen is more beautiful 
than useful, being priceless but small.  My Lady, changing her 
position, sees the papers on the table--looks at them nearer--looks 
at them nearer still--asks impulsively, "Who copied that?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation and 
her unusual tone.

"Is it what you people call law-hand?" she asks, looking full at 
him in her careless way again and toying with her screen.

"Not quite.  Probably"--Mr. Tulkinghorn examines it as he speaks--
"the legal character which it has was acquired after the original 
hand was formed.  Why do you ask?"

"Anything to vary this detestable monotony.  Oh, go on, do!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again.  The heat is greater; my Lady screens 
her face.  Sir Leicester dozes, starts up suddenly, and cries, "Eh?  
What do you say?"

"I say I am afraid," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who had risen hastily, 
"that Lady Dedlock is ill."

"Faint," my Lady murmurs with white lips, "only that; but it is 
like the faintness of death.  Don't speak to me.  Ring, and take me 
to my room!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn retires into another chamber; bells ring, feet 
shuffle and patter, silence ensues.  Mercury at last begs Mr. 
Tulkinghorn to return.

"Better now," quoth Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to sit down 
and read to him alone.  "I have been quite alarmed.  I never knew 
my Lady swoon before.  But the weather is extremely trying, and she 
really has been bored to death down at our place in Lincolnshire."



CHAPTER III

A Progress


I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion 
of these pages, for I know I am not clever.  I always knew that.  I 
can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say 
to my doll when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not 
clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a 
dear!"  And so she used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, 
with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at me--or not 
so much at me, I think, as at nothing--while I busily stitched away 
and told her every one of my secrets.

My dear old doll!  I was such a shy little thing that I seldom 
dared to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody 
else.  It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be 
to me when I came home from school of a day to run upstairs to my 
room and say, "Oh, you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be 
expecting me!" and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the 
elbow of her great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we 
parted.  I had always rather a noticing way--not a quick way, oh, 
no!--a silent way of noticing what passed before me and thinking I 
should like to understand it better.  I have not by any means a 
quick understanding.  When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it 
seems to brighten.  But even that may be my vanity.

I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance--like some of the 
princesses in the fairy stories, only I was not charming--by my 
godmother.  At least, I only knew her as such.  She was a good, 
good woman!  She went to church three times every Sunday, and to 
morning prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever 
there were lectures; and never missed.  She was handsome; and if 
she had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an 
angel--but she never smiled.  She was always grave and strict.  She 
was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other 
people made her frown all her life.  I felt so different from her, 
even making every allowance for the differences between a child and 
a woman; I felt so poor, so trifling, and so far off that I never 
could be unrestrained with her--no, could never even love her as I 
wished.  It made me very sorry to consider how good she was and how 
unworthy of her I was, and I used ardently to hope that I might 
have a better heart; and I talked it over very often with the dear 
old doll, but I never loved my godmother as I ought to have loved 
her and as I felt I must have loved her if I had been a better 
girl.

This made me, I dare say, more timid and retiring than I naturally 
was and cast me upon Dolly as the only friend with whom I felt at 
ease.  But something happened when I was still quite a little thing 
that helped it very much.

I had never heard my mama spoken of.  I had never heard of my papa 
either, but I felt more interested about my mama.  I had never worn 
a black frock, that I could recollect.  I had never been shown my 
mama's grave.  I had never been told where it was.  Yet I had never 
been taught to pray for any relation but my godmother.  I had more 
than once approached this subject of my thoughts with Mrs. Rachael, 
our only servant, who took my light away when I was in bed (another 
very good woman, but austere to me), and she had only said, 
"Esther, good night!" and gone away and left me.

Although there were seven girls at the neighbouring school where I 
was a day boarder, and although they called me little Esther 
Summerson, I knew none of them at home.  All of them were older 
than I, to be sure (I was the youngest there by a good deal), but 
there seemed to be some other separation between us besides that, 
and besides their being far more clever than I was and knowing much 
more than I did.  One of them in the first week of my going to the 
school (I remember it very well) invited me home to a little party, 
to my great joy.  But my godmother wrote a stiff letter declining 
for me, and I never went.  I never went out at all.

It was my birthday.  There were holidays at school on other 
birthdays--none on mine.  There were rejoicings at home on other 
birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the girls relate to one 
another--there were none on mine.  My birthday was the most 
melancholy day at home in the whole year.

I have mentioned that unless my vanity should deceive me (as I know 
it may, for I may be very vain without suspecting it, though indeed 
I don't), my comprehension is quickened when my affection is.  My 
disposition is very affectionate, and perhaps I might still feel 
such a wound if such a wound could be received more than once with 
the quickness of that birthday.

Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table 
before the fire.  The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not another 
sound had been heard in the room or in the house for I don't know 
how long.  I happened to look timidly up from my stitching, across 
the table at my godmother, and I saw in her face, looking gloomily 
at me, "It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had 
had no birthday, that you had never been born!"

I broke out crying and sobbing, and I said, "Oh, dear godmother, 
tell me, pray do tell me, did Mama die on my birthday?"

"No," she returned.  "Ask me no more, child!"

"Oh, do pray tell me something of her.  Do now, at last, dear 
godmother, if you please!  What did I do to her?  How did I lose 
her?  Why am I so different from other children, and why is it my 
fault, dear godmother?  No, no, no, don't go away.  Oh, speak to 
me!"

I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief, and I caught hold of her 
dress and was kneeling to her.  She had been saying all the while, 
"Let me go!"  But now she stood still.

Her darkened face had such power over me that it stopped me in the 
midst of my vehemence.  I put up my trembling little hand to clasp 
hers or to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but 
withdrew it as she looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering 
heart.  She raised me, sat in her chair, and standing me before 
her, said slowly in a cold, low voice--I see her knitted brow and 
pointed finger--"Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you 
were hers.  The time will come--and soon enough--when you will 
understand this better and will feel it too, as no one save a woman 
can.  I have forgiven her"--but her face did not relent--"the wrong 
she did to me, and I say no more of it, though it was greater than 
you will ever know--than any one will ever know but I, the 
sufferer.  For yourself, unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded 
from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray daily that the 
sins of others be not visited upon your head, according to what is 
written.  Forget your mother and leave all other people to forget 
her who will do her unhappy child that greatest kindness.  Now, 
go!"

She checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her--so 
frozen as I was!--and added this, "Submission, self-denial, 
diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a 
shadow on it.  You are different from other children, Esther, 
because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and 
wrath.  You are set apart."

I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek 
against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon 
my bosom, cried myself to sleep.  Imperfect as my understanding of 
my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to 
anybody's heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was 
to me.

Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together 
afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my 
birthday and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I 
could to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I 
confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent) and would strive as I 
grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do 
some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could.  I 
hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it.  
I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help 
their coming to my eyes.

There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again properly.

I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more 
after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her 
house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more 
difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my 
heart, than ever.  I felt in the same way towards my school 
companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a 
widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who 
came to see her once a fortnight!  I was very retired and quiet, 
and tried to be very diligent.

One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my books 
and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was 
gliding upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of 
the parlour-door and called me back.  Sitting with her, I found--
which was very unusual indeed--a stranger.  A portly, important-
looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large 
gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring 
upon his little finger.

"This," said my godmother in an undertone, "is the child."  Then 
she said in her naturally stern way of speaking, "This is Esther, 
sir."

The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said, "Come 
here, my dear!"  He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my 
bonnet, looking at me all the while.  When I had complied, he said, 
"Ah!" and afterwards "Yes!"  And then, taking off his eye-glasses 
and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, 
turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a 
nod.  Upon that, my godmother said, "You may go upstairs, Esther!"  
And I made him my curtsy and left him.

It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen, 
when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside.  I 
was reading aloud, and she was listening.  I had come down at nine 
o'clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading 
from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger 
in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.

"'So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said 
unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a 
stone at her!'"

I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her 
head, and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of 
the book, "'Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you 
sleeping.  And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!'"

In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she 
fell down on the floor.  I had no need to cry out; her voice had 
sounded through the house and been heard in the street.

She was laid upon her bed.  For more than a week she lay there, 
little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that 
I so well knew carved upon her face.  Many and many a time, in the 
day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my 
whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed 
for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her 
to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me.  No, no, no.  
Her face was immovable.  To the very last, and even afterwards, her 
frown remained unsoftened.

On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman 
in black with the white neckcloth reappeared.  I was sent for by 
Mrs. Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never 
gone away.

"My name is Kenge," he said; "you may remember it, my child; Kenge 
and Carboy, Lincoln's Inn."

I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before.

"Pray be seated--here near me.  Don't distress yourself; it's of no 
use.  Mrs. Rachael, I needn't inform you who were acquainted with 
the late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die with her and 
that this young lady, now her aunt is dead--"

"My aunt, sir!"

"It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is 
to be gained by it," said Mr. Kenge smoothly, "Aunt in fact, though 
not in law.  Don't distress yourself!  Don't weep!  Don't tremble!  
Mrs. Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of--the--a--
Jarndyce and Jarndyce."

"Never," said Mrs. Rachael.

"Is it possible," pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses, 
"that our young friend--I BEG you won't distress yourself!--never 
heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!"

I shook my head, wondering even what it was.

"Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" said Mr. Kenge, looking over his 
glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he 
were petting something.  "Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits 
known?  Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce--the--a--in itself a monument 
of Chancery practice.  In which (I would say) every difficulty, 
every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure 
known in that court, is represented over and over again?  It is a 
cause that could not exist out of this free and great country.  I 
should say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, 
Mrs. Rachael"--I was afraid he addressed himself to her because I 
appeared inattentive"--amounts at the present hour to from SIX-ty 
to SEVEN-ty THOUSAND POUNDS!" said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his 
chair.

I felt very ignorant, but what could I do?  I was so entirely 
unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it 
even then.

"And she really never heard of the cause!" said Mr. Kenge.  
"Surprising!"

"Miss Barbary, sir," returned Mrs. Rachael, "who is now among the 
Seraphim--"

"I hope so, I am sure," said Mr. Kenge politely.

"--Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her.  
And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more."

"Well!" said Mr. Kenge.  "Upon the whole, very proper.  Now to the 
point," addressing me.  "Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact 
that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being 
deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs. 
Rachael--"

"Oh, dear no!" said Mrs. Rachael quickly.

"Quite so," assented Mr. Kenge; "--that Mrs. Rachael should charge 
herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won't distress 
yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer 
which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago 
and which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable 
under the lamentable circumstances that have since occurred.  Now, 
if I avow that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, 
a highly humane, but at the same time singular, man, shall I 
compromise myself by any stretch of my professional caution?" said 
Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again and looking calmly at us 
both.

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice.  
I couldn't wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave 
great importance to every word he uttered.  He listened to himself 
with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own 
music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand.  I was 
very much impressed by him--even then, before I knew that he formed 
himself on the model of a great lord who was his client and that he 
was generally called Conversation Kenge.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he pursued, "being aware of the--I would say, 
desolate--position of our young friend, offers to place her at a 
first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed, 
where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants 
shall be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to 
discharge her duty in that station of life unto which it has 
pleased--shall I say Providence?--to call her."

My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his 
affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though 
I tried.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he went on, "makes no condition beyond expressing 
his expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove 
herself from the establishment in question without his knowledge 
and concurrence.  That she will faithfully apply herself to the 
acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which 
she will be ultimately dependent.  That she will tread in the paths 
of virtue and honour, and--the--a--so forth."

I was still less able to speak than before.

"Now, what does our young friend say?" proceeded Mr, Kenge.  "Take 
time, take time!  I pause for her reply.  But take time!"

What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I need 
not repeat.  What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were 
worth the telling.  What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour, 
I could never relate.

This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as 
I knew) my whole life.  On that day week, amply provided with all 
necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading.

Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was 
not so good, and wept bitterly.  I thought that I ought to have 
known her better after so many years and ought to have made myself 
enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then.  When she 
gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop 
from the stone porch--it was a very frosty day--I felt so miserable 
and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my 
fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!

"No, Esther!" she returned.  "It is your misfortune!"

The coach was at the little lawn-gate--we had not come out until we 
heard the wheels--and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart.  She 
went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the 
door.  As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from 
the window through my tears.  My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael 
all the little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; 
and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me 
the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside 
in the frost and snow.  A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear 
old doll in her own shawl and quietly laid her--I am half ashamed 
to tell it--in the garden-earth under the tree that shaded my old 
window.  I had no companion left but my bird, and him I carried 
with me in his cage.

When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the 
straw at my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high 
window, watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces 
of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night's 
snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, 
dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow 
away.  There was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite 
seat and looked very large in a quantity of wrappings, but he sat 
gazing out of the other window and took no notice of me.

I thought of my dead godmother, of the night when I read to her, of 
her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed, of the strange 
place I was going to, of the people I should find there, and what 
they would be like, and what they would say to me, when a voice in 
the coach gave me a terrible start.

It said, "What the de-vil are you crying for?"

I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a 
whisper, "Me, sir?"  For of course I knew it must have been the 
gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking 
out of his window.

"Yes, you," he said, turning round.

"I didn't know I was crying, sir," I faltered.

"But you are!" said the gentleman.  "Look here!"  He came quite 
opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of 
his large furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and 
showed me that it was wet.

"There!  Now you know you are," he said.  "Don't you?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"And what are you crying for?" said the genfleman, "Don't you want 
to go there?"

"Where, sir?"

"Where?  Why, wherever you are going," said the gentleman.

"I am very glad to go there, sir," I answered.

"Well, then!  Look glad!" said the gentleman.

I thought he was very strange, or at least that what I could see of 
him was very strange, for he was wrapped up to the chin, and his 
face was almost hidden in a fur cap with broad fur straps at the 
side of his head fastened under his chin; but I was composed again, 
and not afraid of him.  So I told him that I thought I must have 
been crying because of my godmother's death and because of Mrs. 
Rachael's not being sorry to part with me.

"Confound Mrs. Rachael!" said the gentleman.  "Let her fly away in 
a high wind on a broomstick!"

I began to be really afraid of him now and looked at him with the 
greatest astonishment.  But I thought that he had pleasant eyes, 
although he kept on muttering to himself in an angry manner and 
calling Mrs. Rachael names.

After a little while he opened his outer wrapper, which appeared to 
me large enough to wrap up the whole coach, and put his arm down 
into a deep pocket in the side.

"Now, look here!" he said.  "In this paper," which was nicely 
folded, "is a piece of the best plum-cake that can be got for 
money--sugar on the outside an inch thick, like fat on mutton 
chops.  Here's a little pie (a gem this is, both for size and 
quality), made in France.  And what do you suppose it's made of?  
Livers of fat geese.  There's a pie!  Now let's see you eat 'em."

"Thank you, sir," I replied; "thank you very much indeed, but I 
hope you won't be offended--they are too rich for me."

"Floored again!" said the gentleman, which I didn't at all 
understand, and threw them both out of window.

He did not speak to me any more until he got out of the coach a 
little way short of Reading, when he advised me to be a good girl 
and to be studious, and shook hands with me.  I must say I was 
relieved by his departure.  We left him at a milestone.  I often 
walked past it afterwards, and never for a long time without 
thinking of him and half expecting to meet him.  But I never did; 
and so, as time went on, he passed out of my mind.

When the coach stopped, a very neat lady looked up at the window 
and said, "Miss Donny."

"No, ma'am, Esther Summerson."

"That is quite right," said the lady, "Miss Donny."

I now understood that she introduced herself by that name, and 
begged Miss Donny's pardon for my mistake, and pointed out my boxes 
at her request.  Under the direction of a very neat maid, they were 
put outside a very small green carriage; and then Miss Donny, the 
maid, and I got inside and were driven away.

"Everything is ready for you, Esther," said Miss Donny, "and the 
scheme of your pursuits has been arranged in exact accordance with 
the wishes of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce."

"Of--did you say, ma'am?"

"Of your guardian, Mr. Jarndyce," said Miss Donny.

I was so bewildered that Miss Donny thought the cold had been too 
severe for me and lent me her smelling-bottle.

"Do you know my--guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, ma'am?" I asked after a 
good deal of hesitation.

"Not personally, Esther," said Miss Donny; "merely through his 
solicitors, Messrs. Kenge and Carboy, of London.  A very superior 
gentleman, Mr. Kenge.  Truly eloquent indeed.  Some of his periods 
quite majestic!"

I felt this to be very true but was too confused to attend to it.  
Our speedy arrival at our destination, before I had time to recover 
myself, increased my confusion, and I never shall forget the 
uncertain and the unreal air of everything at Greenleaf (Miss 
Donny's house) that afternoon!

But I soon became used to it.  I was so adapted to the routine of 
Greenleaf before long that I seemed to have been there a great 
while and almost to have dreamed rather than really lived my old 
life at my godmother's.  Nothing could be more precise, exact, and 
orderly than Greenleaf.  There was a time for everything all round 
the dial of the clock, and everything was done at its appointed 
moment.

We were twelve boarders, and there were two Miss Donnys, twins.  It 
was understood that I would have to depend, by and by, on my 
qualifications as a governess, and I was not only instructed in 
everything that was taught at Greenleaf, but was very soon engaged 
in helping to instruct others.  Although I was treated in every 
other respect like the rest of the school, this single difference 
was made in my case from the first.  As I began to know more, I 
taught more, and so in course of time I had plenty to do, which I 
was very fond of doing because it made the dear girls fond of me.  
At last, whenever a new pupil came who was a little downcast and 
unhappy, she was so sure--indeed I don't know why--to make a friend 
of me that all new-comers were confided to my care.  They said I 
was so gentle, but I am sure THEY were!  I often thought of the 
resolution I had made on my birthday to try to be industrious, 
contented, and true-hearted and to do some good to some one and win 
some love if I could; and indeed, indeed, I felt almost ashamed to 
have done so little and have won so much.

I passed at Greenleaf six happy, quiet years.  I never saw in any 
face there, thank heaven, on my birthday, that it would have been 
better if I had never been born.  When the day came round, it 
brought me so many tokens of affectionate remembrance that my room 
was beautiful with them from New Year's Day to Christmas.

In those six years I had never been away except on visits at 
holiday time in the neighbourhood.  After the first six months or 
so I had taken Miss Donny's advice in reference to the propriety of 
writing to Mr. Kenge to say that I was happy and grateful, and with 
her approval I had written such a letter.  I had received a formal 
answer acknowledging its receipt and saying, "We note the contents 
thereof, which shall be duly communicated to our client."  After 
that I sometimes heard Miss Donny and her sister mention how 
regular my accounts were paid, and about twice a year I ventured to 
write a similar letter.  I always received by return of post 
exactly the same answer in the same round hand, with the signature 
of Kenge and Carboy in another writing, which I supposed to be Mr. 
Kenge's.

It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about 
myself!  As if this narrative were the narrative of MY life!  But 
my little body will soon fall into the background now.

Six quiet years (I find I am saying it for the second time) I had 
passed at Greenleaf, seeing in those around me, as it might be in a 
looking-glass, every stage of my own growth and change there, when, 
one November morning, I received this letter.  I omit the date.


Old Square, Lincoln's Inn

Madam,

Jarndyce and Jarndyce

Our clt Mr. Jarndyce being abt to rece into his house, under an 
Order of the Ct of Chy, a Ward of the Ct in this cause, for whom he 
wishes to secure an elgble compn, directs us to inform you that he 
will be glad of your serces in the afsd capacity.

We have arrngd for your being forded, carriage free, pr eight 
o'clock coach from Reading, on Monday morning next, to White Horse 
Cellar, Piccadilly, London, where one of our clks will be in 
waiting to convey you to our offe as above.

We are, Madam, Your obedt Servts,

Kenge and Carboy

Miss Esther Summerson


Oh, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter 
caused in the house!  It was so tender in them to care so much for 
me, it was so gracious in that father who had not forgotten me to 
have made my orphan way so smooth and easy and to have inclined so 
many youthful natures towards me, that I could hardly bear it.  Not 
that I would have had them less sorry--I am afraid not; but the 
pleasure of it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, 
and the humble regret of it were so blended that my heart seemed 
almost breaking while it was full of rapture.

The letter gave me only five days' notice of my removal.  When 
every minute added to the proofs of love and kindness that were 
given me in those five days, and when at last the morning came and 
when they took me through all the rooms that I might see them for 
the last time, and when some cried, "Esther, dear, say good-bye to 
me here at my bedside, where you first spoke so kindly to me!" and 
when others asked me only to write their names, "With Esther's 
love," and when they all surrounded me with their parting presents 
and clung to me weeping and cried, "What shall we do when dear, 
dear Esther's gone!" and when I tried to tell them how forbearing 
and how good they had all been to me and how I blessed and thanked 
them every one, what a heart I had!

And when the two Miss Donnys grieved as much to part with me as the 
least among them, and when the maids said, "Bless you, miss, 
wherever you go!" and when the ugly lame old gardener, who I 
thought had hardly noticed me in all those years, came panting 
after the coach to give me a little nosegay of geraniums and told 
me I had been the light of his eyes--indeed the old man said so!--
what a heart I had then!

And could I help it if with all this, and the coming to the little 
school, and the unexpected sight of the poor children outside 
waving their hats and bonnets to me, and of a grey-haired gentleman 
and lady whose daughter I had helped to teach and at whose house I 
had visited (who were said to be the proudest people in all that 
country), caring for nothing but calling out, "Good-bye, Esther.  
May you be very happy!"--could I help it if I was quite bowed down 
in the coach by myself and said "Oh, I am so thankful, I am so 
thankful!" many times over!

But of course I soon considered that I must not take tears where I 
was going after all that had been done for me.  Therefore, of 
course, I made myself sob less and persuaded myself to be quiet by 
saying very often, "Esther, now you really must!  This WILL NOT 
do!" I cheered myself up pretty well at last, though I am afraid I 
was longer about it than I ought to have been; and when I had 
cooled my eyes with lavender water, it was time to watch for 
London.

I was quite persuaded that we were there when we were ten miles 
off, and when we really were there, that we should never get there.  
However, when we began to jolt upon a stone pavement, and 
particularly when every other conveyance seemed to be running into 
us, and we seemed to be running into every other conveyance, I 
began to believe that we really were approaching the end of our 
journey.  Very soon afterwards we stopped.

A young gentleman who had inked himself by accident addressed me 
from the pavement and said, "I am from Kenge and Carboy's, miss, of 
Lincoln's Inn."

"If you please, sir," said I.

He was very obliging, and as he handed me into a fly after 
superintending the removal of my boxes, I asked him whether there 
was a great fire anywhere?  For the streets were so full of dense 
brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.

"Oh, dear no, miss," he said.  "This is a London particular."

I had never heard of such a thing.

"A fog, miss," said the young gentleman.

"Oh, indeed!" said I.

We drove slowly through the dirtiest and darkest streets that ever 
were seen in the world (I thought) and in such a distracting state 
of confusion that I wondered how the people kept their senses, 
until we passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway and drove 
on through a silent square until we came to an odd nook in a 
corner, where there was an entrance up a steep, broad flight of 
stairs, like an entrance to a church.  And there really was a 
churchyard outside under some cloisters, for I saw the gravestones 
from the staircase window.

This was Kenge and Carboy's.  The young gentleman showed me through 
an outer office into Mr. Kenge's room--there was no one in it--and 
politely put an arm-chair for me by the fire.  He then called my 
attention to a little looking-glass hanging from a nail on one side 
of the chimney-piece.

"In case you should wish to look at yourself, miss, after the 
journey, as you're going before the Chancellor.  Not that it's 
requisite, I am sure," said the young gentleman civilly.

"Going before the Chancellor?" I said, startled for a moment.

"Only a matter of form, miss," returned the young gentleman.  "Mr. 
Kenge is in court now.  He left his compliments, and would you 
partake of some refreshment"--there were biscuits and a decanter of 
wine on a small table--"and look over the paper," which the young 
gentleman gave me as he spoke.  He then stirred the fire and left 
me.

Everything was so strange--the stranger from its being night in the 
day-time, the candles burning with a white flame, and looking raw 
and cold--that I read the words in the newspaper without knowing 
what they meant and found myself reading the same words repeatedly.  
As it was of no use going on in that way, I put the paper down, 
took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and 
looked at the room, which was not half lighted, and at the shabby, 
dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at a bookcase full 
of the most inexpressive-looking books that ever had anything to 
say for themselves.  Then I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking; 
and the fire went on, burning, burning, burning; and the candles 
went on flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers--until 
the young gentleman by and by brought a very dirty pair--for two 
hours.

At last Mr. Kenge came.  HE was not altered, but he was surprised 
to see how altered I was and appeared quite pleased.  "As you are 
going to be the companion of the young lady who is now in the 
Chancellor's private room, Miss Summerson," he said, "we thought it 
well that you should be in attendance also.  You will not be 
discomposed by the Lord Chancellor, I dare say?"

"No, sir," I said, "I don't think I shall," really not seeing on 
consideration why I should be.

So Mr. Kenge gave me his arm and we went round the corner, under a 
colonnade, and in at a side door.  And so we came, along a passage, 
into a comfortable sort of room where a young lady and a young 
gentleman were standing near a great, loud-roaring fire.  A screen 
was interposed between them and it, and they were leaning on the 
screen, talking.

They both looked up when I came in, and I saw in the young lady, 
with the fire shining upon her, such a beautiful girl!  With such 
rich golden hair, such soft blue eyes, and such a bright, innocent, 
trusting face!

"Miss Ada," said Mr. Kenge, "this is Miss Summerson."

She came to meet me with a smile of welcome and her hand extended, 
but seemed to change her mind in a moment and kissed me.  In short, 
she had such a natural, captivating, winning manner that in a few 
minutes we were sitting in the window-seat, with the light of the 
fire upon us, talking together as free and happy as could be.

What a load off my mind!  It was so delightful to know that she 
could confide in me and like me!  It was so good of her, and so 
encouraging to me!

The young gentleman was her distant cousin, she told me, and his 
name Richard Carstone.  He was a handsome youth with an ingenuous 
face and a most engaging laugh; and after she had called him up to 
where we sat, he stood by us, in the light of the fire, talking 
gaily, like a light-hearted boy.  He was very young, not more than 
nineteen then, if quite so much, but nearly two years older than 
she was.  They were both orphans and (what was very unexpected and 
curious to me) had never met before that day.  Our all three coming 
together for the first time in such an unusual place was a thing to 
talk about, and we talked about it; and the fire, which had left 
off roaring, winked its red eyes at us--as Richard said--like a 
drowsy old Chancery lion.

We conversed in a low tone because a full-dressed gentleman in a 
bag wig frequenfly came in and out, and when he did so, we could 
hear a drawling sound in the distance, which he said was one of the 
counsel in our case addressing the Lord Chancellor.  He told Mr. 
Kenge that the Chancellor would be up in five minutes; and 
presently we heard a bustle and a tread of feet, and Mr. Kenge said 
that the Court had risen and his lordship was in the next room.

The gentleman in the bag wig opened the door almost directly and 
requested Mr. Kenge to come in.  Upon that, we all went into the 
next room, Mr. Kenge first, with my darling--it is so natural to me 
now that I can't help writing it; and there, plainly dressed in 
black and sitting in an arm-chair at a table near the fire, was his 
lordship, whose robe, trimmed with beautiful gold lace, was thrown 
upon another chair.  He gave us a searching look as we entered, but 
his manner was both courtly and kind.

The gentleman in the bag wig laid bundles of papers on his 
lordship's table, and his lordship silently selected one and turned 
over the leaves.

"Miss Clare," said the Lord Chancellor.  "Miss Ada Clare?"

Mr. Kenge presented her, and his lordship begged her to sit down 
near him.  That he admired her and was interested by her even I 
could see in a moment.  It touched me that the home of such a 
beautiful young creature should be represented by that dry, 
official place.  The Lord High Chancellor, at his best, appeared so 
poor a substitute for the love and pride of parents.

"The Jarndyce in question," said the Lord Chancellor, still turning 
over leaves, "is Jarndyce of Bleak House."

"Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord," said Mr. Kenge.

"A dreary name," said the Lord Chancellor.

"But not a dreary place at present, my lord," said Mr. Kenge.

"And Bleak House," said his lordship, "is in--"

"Hertfordshire, my lord."

"Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House is not married?" said his lordship.

"He is not, my lord," said Mr. Kenge.

A pause.

"Young Mr. Richard Carstone is present?" said the Lord Chancellor, 
glancing towards him.

Richard bowed and stepped forward.

"Hum!" said the Lord Chancellor, turning over more leaves.

"Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord," Mr. Kenge observed in a low 
voice, "if I may venture to remind your lordship, provides a 
suitable companion for--"

"For Mr. Richard Carstone?" I thought (but I am not quite sure) I 
heard his lordship say in an equally low voice and with a smile.

"For Miss Ada Clare.  This is the young lady.  Miss Summerson."

His lordship gave me an indulgent look and acknowledged my curtsy 
very graciously.

"Miss Summerson is not related to any party in the cause, I think?"

"No, my lord."

Mr. Kenge leant over before it was quite said and whispered.  His 
lordship, with his eyes upon his papers, listened, nodded twice or 
thrice, turned over more leaves, and did not look towards me again 
until we were going away.

Mr. Kenge now retired, and Richard with him, to where I was, near 
the door, leaving my pet (it is so natural to me that again I can't 
help it!) sitting near the Lord Chancellor, with whom his lordship 
spoke a little part, asking her, as she told me afterwards, whether 
she had well reflected on the proposed arrangement, and if she 
thought she would be happy under the roof of Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak 
House, and why she thought so?  Presently he rose courteously and 
released her, and then he spoke for a minute or two with Richard 
Carstone, not seated, but standing, and altogether with more ease 
and less ceremony, as if he still knew, though he WAS Lord 
Chancellor, how to go straight to the candour of a boy.

"Very well!" said his lordship aloud.  "I shall make the order.  
Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House has chosen, so far as I may judge," and 
this was when he looked at me, "a very good companion for the young 
lady, and the arrangement altogether seems the best of which the 
circumstances admit."

He dismissed us pleasantly, and we all went out, very much obliged 
to him for being so affable and polite, by which he had certainly 
lost no dignity but seemed to us to have gained some.

When we got under the colonnade, Mr. Kenge remembered that he must 
go back for a moment to ask a question and left us in the fog, with 
the Lord Chancellor's carriage and servants waiting for him to come 
out.

"Well!" said Richard Carstone.  "THAT'S over!  And where do we go 
next, Miss Summerson?"

"Don't you know?" I said.

"Not in the least," said he.

"And don't YOU know, my love?" I asked Ada.

"No!" said she.  "Don't you?"

"Not at all!" said I.

We looked at one another, half laughing at our being like the 
children in the wood, when a curious little old woman in a squeezed 
bonnet and carrying a reticule came curtsying and smiling up to us 
with an air of great ceremony.

"Oh!" said she.  "The wards in Jarndyce!  Ve-ry happy, I am sure, 
to have the honour!  It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and 
beauty when they find themselves in this place, and don't know 
what's to come of it."

"Mad!" whispered Richard, not thinking she could hear him.

"Right!  Mad, young gentleman," she returned so quickly that he was 
quite abashed.  "I was a ward myself.  I was not mad at that time," 
curtsying low and smiling between every little sentence.  "I had 
youth and hope.  I believe, beauty.  It matters very little now.  
Neither of the three served or saved me.  I have the honour to 
attend court regularly.  With my documents.  I expect a judgment.  
Shortly.  On the Day of Judgment.  I have discovered that the sixth 
seal mentioned in the Revelations is the Great Seal.  It has been 
open a long time!  Pray accept my blessing."

As Ada was a little frightened, I said, to humour the poor old 
lady, that we were much obliged to her.

"Ye-es!" she said mincingly.  "I imagine so.  And here is 
Conversation Kenge.  With HIS documents!  How does your honourable 
worship do?"

"Quite well, quite well!  Now don't be troublesome, that's a good 
soul!" said Mr. Kenge, leading the way back.

"By no means," said the poor old lady, keeping up with Ada and me.  
"Anything but troublesome.  I shall confer estates on both--which 
is not being troublesome, I trust?  I expect a judgment.  Shortly.  
On the Day of Judgment.  This is a good omen for you.  Accept my 
blessing!"

She stopped at the bottom of the steep, broad flight of stairs; but 
we looked back as we went up, and she was still there, saying, 
still with a curtsy and a smile between every little sentence, 
"Youth.  And hope.  And beauty.  And Chancery.  And Conversation 
Kenge!  Ha!  Pray accept my blessing!"



CHAPTER IV

Telescopic Philanthropy


We were to pass the night, Mr. Kenge told us when we arrived in his 
room, at Mrs. Jellyby's; and then he turned to me and said he took 
it for granted I knew who Mrs. Jellyby was.

"I really don't, sir," I returned.  "Perhaps Mr. Carstone--or Miss 
Clare--"

But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby.  "In-deed!  
Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire 
and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. 
Jellyby's biography, "is a lady of very remarkable strength of 
character who devotes herself entirely to the public.  She has 
devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at 
various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) 
devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general 
cultivation of the coffee berry--AND the natives--and the happy 
settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our 
superabundant home population.  Mr. Jarndyce, who is desirous to 
aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work and who is 
much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a very high 
opinion of Mrs. Jellyby."

Mr. Kenge, adjusting his cravat, then looked at us.

"And Mr. Jellyby, sir?" suggested Richard.

"Ah!  Mr. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, "is--a--I don't know that I can 
describe him to you better than by saying that he is the husband of 
Mrs. Jellyby."

"A nonentity, sir?" said Richard with a droll look.

"I don't say that," returned Mr. Kenge gravely.  "I can't say that, 
indeed, for I know nothing whatever OF Mr. Jellyby.  I never, to my 
knowledge, had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Jellyby.  He may be a 
very superior man, but he is, so to speak, merged--merged--in the 
more shining qualities of his wife."  Mr. Kenge proceeded to tell 
us that as the road to Bleak House would have been very long, dark, 
and tedious on such an evening, and as we had been travelling 
already, Mr. Jarndyce had himself proposed this arrangement.  A 
carriage would be at Mrs. Jellyby's to convey us out of town early 
in the forenoon of to-morrow.

He then rang a little bell, and the young gentleman came in.  
Addressing him by the name of Guppy, Mr. Kenge inquired whether 
Miss Summerson's boxes and the rest of the baggage had been "sent 
round."  Mr. Guppy said yes, they had been sent round, and a coach 
was waiting to take us round too as soon as we pleased.

"Then it only remains," said Mr. Kenge, shaking hands with us, "for 
me to express my lively satisfaction in (good day, Miss Clare!) the 
arrangement this day concluded and my (GOOD-bye to you, Miss 
Summerson!) lively hope that it will conduce to the happiness, the 
(glad to have had the honour of making your acquaintance, Mr. 
Carstone!) welfare, the advantage in all points of view, of all 
concerned!  Guppy, see the party safely there."

"Where IS 'there,' Mr. Guppy?" said Richard as we went downstairs.

"No distance," said Mr. Guppy; "round in Thavies Inn, you know."

"I can't say I know where it is, for I come from Winchester and am 
strange in London."

"Only round the corner," said Mr. Guppy.  "We just twist up 
Chancery Lane, and cut along Holborn, and there we are in four 
minutes' time, as near as a toucher.  This is about a London 
particular NOW, ain't it, miss?"  He seemed quite delighted with it 
on my account.

"The fog is very dense indeed!" said I.

"Not that it affects you, though, I'm sure," said Mr. Guppy, 
putting up the steps.  "On the contrary, it seems to do you good, 
miss, judging from your appearance."

I knew he meant well in paying me this compliment, so I laughed at 
myself for blushing at it when he had shut the door and got upon 
the box; and we all three laughed and chatted about our 
inexperience and the strangeness of London until we turned up under 
an archway to our destination--a narrow street of high houses like 
an oblong cistern to hold the fog.  There was a confused little 
crowd of people, principally children, gathered about the house at 
which we stopped, which had a tarnished brass plate on the door 
with the inscription JELLYBY.

"Don't be frightened!" said Mr. Guppy, looking in at the coach-
window.  "One of the young Jellybys been and got his head through 
the area railings!"

"Oh, poor child," said I; "let me out, if you please!"

"Pray be careful of yourself, miss.  The young Jellybys are always 
up to something," said Mr. Guppy.

I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little 
unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened and 
crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a 
milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were 
endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general 
impression that his skull was compressible by those means.  As I 
found (after pacifying him) that he was a little boy with a 
naturally large head, I thought that perhaps where his head could 
go, his body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of 
extrication might be to push him forward.  This was so favourably 
received by the milkman and beadle that he would immediately have 
been pushed into the area if I had not held his pinafore while 
Richard and Mr. Guppy ran down through the kitchen to catch him 
when he should be released.  At last he was happily got down 
without any accident, and then he began to beat Mr. Guppy with a 
hoop-stick in quite a frantic manner.

Nobody had appeared belonging to the house except a person in 
pattens, who had been poking at the child from below with a broom; 
I don't know with what object, and I don't think she did.  I 
therefore supposed that Mrs. Jellyby was not at home, and was quite 
surprised when the person appeared in the passage without the 
pattens, and going up to the back room on the first floor before 
Ada and me, announced us as, "Them two young ladies, Missis 
Jellyby!"  We passed several more children on the way up, whom it 
was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into 
Mrs. Jellyby's presence, one of the poor little things fell 
downstairs--down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great 
noise.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we 
could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head 
recorded its passage with a bump on every stair--Richard afterwards 
said he counted seven, besides one for the landing--received us 
with perfect equanimity.  She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump 
woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a 
curious habit of seeming to look a long way off.  As if--I am 
quoting Richard again--they could see nothing nearer than Africa!

"I am very glad indeed," said Mrs. Jellyby in an agreeable voice, 
"to have the pleasure of receiving you.  I have a great respect for 
Mr. Jarndyce, and no one in whom he is interested can be an object 
of indifference to me."

We expressed our acknowledgments and sat down behind the door, 
where there was a lame invalid of a sofa.  Mrs. Jellyby had very 
good hair but was too much occupied with her African duties to 
brush it.  The shawl in which she had been loosely muffled dropped 
onto her chair when she advanced to us; and as she turned to resume 
her seat, we could not help noticing that her dress didn't nearly 
meet up the back and that the open space was railed across with a 
lattice-work of stay-lace--like a summer-house.

The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great 
writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not 
only very untidy but very dirty.  We were obliged to take notice of 
that with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of 
hearing, we followed the poor child who had tumbled downstairs: I 
think into the back kitchen, where somebody seemed to stifle him.

But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking 
though by no means plain girl at the writing-table, who sat biting 
the feather of her pen and staring at us.  I suppose nobody ever 
was in such a state of ink.  And from her tumbled hair to her 
pretty feet, which were disfigured with frayed and broken satin 
slippers trodden down at heel, she really seemed to have no article 
of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper 
condition or its right place.

"You find me, my dears," said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two great 
office candles in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste 
strongly of hot tallow (the fire had gone out, and there was 
nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), 
"you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will 
excuse.  The African project at present employs my whole time.  It 
involves me in correspondence with public bodies and with private 
individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the 
country.  I am happy to say it is advancing.  We hope by this time 
next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy 
families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of 
Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger."

As Ada said nothing, but looked at me, I said it must be very 
gratifying.

"It IS gratifying," said Mrs. Jellyby.  "It involves the devotion 
of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing, so that 
it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day.  Do you 
know, Miss Summerson, I almost wonder that YOU never turned your 
thoughts to Africa."

This application of the subject was really so unexpected to me that 
I was quite at a loss how to receive it.  I hinted that the 
climate--

"The finest climate in the world!" said Mrs. Jellyby.

"Indeed, ma'am?"

"Certainly.  With precaution," said Mrs. Jellyby.  "You may go into 
Holborn, without precaution, and be run over.  You may go into 
Holborn, with precaution, and never be run over.  Just so with 
Africa."

I said, "No doubt."  I meant as to Holborn.

"If you would like," said Mrs. Jellyby, putting a number of papers 
towards us, "to look over some remarks on that head, and on the 
general subject, which have been extensively circulated, while I 
finish a letter I am now dictating to my eldest daughter, who is my 
amanuensis--"

The girl at the table left off biting her pen and made a return to 
our recognition, which was half bashful and half sulky.

"--I shall then have finished for the present," proceeded Mrs. 
Jellyby with a sweet smile, "though my work is never done.  Where 
are you, Caddy?"

"'Presents her compliments to Mr. Swallow, and begs--'" said Caddy.

"'And begs,'" said Mrs. Jellyby, dictating, "'to inform him, in 
reference to his letter of inquiry on the African project--' No, 
Peepy!  Not on my account!"

Peepy (so self-named) was the unfortunate child who had fallen 
downstairs, who now interrupted the correspondence by presenting 
himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his 
wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity most--
the bruises or the dirt.  Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the 
serene composure with which she said everything, "Go along, you 
naughty Peepy!" and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again.

However, as she at once proceeded with her dictation, and as I 
interrupted nothing by doing it, I ventured quietly to stop poor 
Peepy as he was going out and to take him up to nurse.  He looked 
very much astonished at it and at Ada's kissing him, but soon fell 
fast asleep in my arms, sobbing at longer and longer intervals, 
until he was quiet.  I was so occupied with Peepy that I lost the 
letter in detail, though I derived such a general impression from 
it of the momentous importance of Africa, and the utter 
insignificance of all other places and things, that I felt quite 
ashamed to have thought so little about it.

"Six o'clock!" said Mrs. Jellyby.  "And our dinner hour is 
nominally (for we dine at all hours) five!  Caddy, show Miss Clare 
and Miss Summerson their rooms.  You will like to make some change, 
perhaps?  You will excuse me, I know, being so much occupied.  Oh, 
that very bad child!  Pray put him down, Miss Summerson!"

I begged permission to retain him, truly saying that he was not at 
all troublesome, and carried him upstairs and laid him on my bed.  
Ada and I had two upper rooms with a door of communication between.  
They were excessively bare and disorderly, and the curtain to my 
window was fastened up with a fork.

"You would like some hot water, wouldn't you?" said Miss Jellyby, 
looking round for a jug with a handle to it, but looking in vain.

"If it is not being troublesome," said we.

"Oh, it's not the trouble," returned Miss Jellyby; "the question 
is, if there IS any."

The evening was so very cold and the rooms had such a marshy smell 
that I must confess it was a little miserable, and Ada was half 
crying.  We soon laughed, however, and were busily unpacking when 
Miss Jellyby came back to say that she was sorry there was no hot 
water, but they couldn't find the kettle, and the boiler was out of 
order.

We begged her not to mention it and made all the haste we could to 
get down to the fire again.  But all the little children had come 
up to the landing outside to look at the phenomenon of Peepy lying 
on my bed, and our attention was distracted by the constant 
apparition of noses and fingers in situations of danger between the 
hinges of the doors.  It was impossible to shut the door of either 
room, for my lock, with no knob to it, looked as if it wanted to be 
wound up; and though the handle of Ada's went round and round with 
the greatest smoothness, it was attended with no effect whatever on 
the door.  Therefore I proposed to the children that they should 
come in and be very good at my table, and I would tell them the 
story of Little Red Riding Hood while I dressed; which they did, 
and were as quiet as mice, including Peepy, who awoke opportunely 
before the appearance of the wolf.

When we went downstairs we found a mug with "A Present from 
Tunbridge Wells" on it lighted up in the staircase window with a 
floating wick, and a young woman, with a swelled face bound up in a 
flannel bandage blowing the fire of the drawing-room (now connected 
by an open door with Mrs. Jellyby's room) and choking dreadfully.  
It smoked to that degree, in short, that we all sat coughing and 
crying with the windows open for half an hour, during which Mrs. 
Jellyby, with the same sweetness of temper, directed letters about 
Africa.  Her being so employed was, I must say, a great relief to 
me, for Richard told us that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish 
and that they had found the kettle on his dressing-table, and he 
made Ada laugh so that they made me laugh in the most ridiculous 
manner.

Soon after seven o'clock we went down to dinner, carefully, by Mrs. 
Jellyby's advice, for the stair-carpets, besides being very 
deficient in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute traps.  We 
had a fine cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and 
a pudding; an excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak 
of, but it was almost raw.  The young woman with the flannel 
bandage waited, and dropped everything on the table wherever it 
happened to go, and never moved it again until she put it on the 
stairs.  The person I had seen in pattens, who I suppose to have 
been the cook, frequently came and skirmished with her at the door, 
and there appeared to be ill will between them.

All through dinner--which was long, in consequence of such 
accidents as the dish of potatoes being mislaid in the coal skuttle 
and the handle of the corkscrew coming off and striking the young 
woman in the chin--Mrs. Jellyby preserved the evenness of her 
disposition.  She told us a great deal that was interesting about 
Borrioboola-Gha and the natives, and received so many letters that 
Richard, who sat by her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once.  
Some of the letters were proceedings of ladies' committees or 
resolutions of ladies' meetings, which she read to us; others were 
applications from people excited in various ways about the 
cultivation of coffee, and natives; others required answers, and 
these she sent her eldest daughter from the table three or four 
times to write.  She was full of business and undoubtedly was, as 
she had told us, devoted to the cause.

I was a little curious to know who a mild bald gentleman in 
spectacles was, who dropped into a vacant chair (there was no top 
or bottom in particular) after the fish was taken away and seemed 
passively to submit himself to Borriohoola-Gha but not to be 
actively interested in that settlement.  As he never spoke a word, 
he might have been a native but for his complexion.  It was not 
until we left the table and he remained alone with Richard that the 
possibility of his being Mr. Jellyby ever entered my head.  But he 
WAS Mr. Jellyby; and a loquacious young man called Mr. Quale, with 
large shining knobs for temples and his hair all brushed to the 
back of his head, who came in the evening, and told Ada he was a 
philanthropist, also informed her that he called the matrimonial 
alliance of Mrs. Jellyby with Mr. Jellyby the union of mind and 
matter.

This young man, besides having a great deal to say for himself 
about Africa and a project of his for teaching the coffee colonists 
to teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an 
export trade, delighted in drawing Mrs. Jellyby out by saving, "I 
believe now, Mrs. Jellyby, you have received as many as from one 
hundred and fifty to two hundred letters respecting Africa in a 
single day, have you not?" or, "If my memory does not deceive me, 
Mrs. Jellyby, you once mentioned that you had sent off five 
thousand circulars from one post-office at one time?"--always 
repeating Mrs. Jellyby's answer to us like an interpreter.  During 
the whole evening, Mr. Jellyby sat in a corner with his head 
against the wall as if he were subject to low spirits.  It seemed 
that he had several times opened his mouth when alone with Richard 
after dinner, as if he had something on his mind, but had always 
shut it again, to Richard's extreme confusion, without saying 
anything.

Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee 
all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter.  
She also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, of which the subject 
seemed to be--if I understood it--the brotherhood of humanity, and 
gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments.  I was not so 
attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for 
Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a 
corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down 
among them and told them in whispers "Puss in Boots" and I don't 
know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, 
sent them to bed.  As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I 
carried him upstairs, where the young woman with the flannel 
bandage charged into the midst of the little family like a dragon 
and overturned them into cribs.

After that I occupied myself in making our room a little tidy and 
in coaxing a very cross fire that had been lighted to burn, which 
at last it did, quite brightly.  On my return downstairs, I felt 
that Mrs. Jellyby looked down upon me rather for being so 
frivolous, and I was sorry for it, though at the same time I knew 
that I had no higher pretensions.

It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity of going to 
bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drinking 
coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen.

"What a strange house!" said Ada when we got upstairs.  "How 
curious of my cousin Jarndyce to send us here!"

"My love," said I, "it quite confuses me.  I want to understand it, 
and I can't understand it at all."

"What?" asked Ada with her pretty smile.

"All this, my dear," said I.  "It MUST be very good of Mrs. Jellyby 
to take such pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives--and 
yet--Peepy and the housekeeping!"

Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at the 
fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won 
her heart.  "You are so thoughtful, Esther," she said, "and yet so 
cheerful!  And you do so much, so unpretendingly!  You would make a 
home out of even this house."

My simple darling!  She was quite unconscious that she only praised 
herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she 
made so much of me!

"May I ask you a question?" said I when we had sat before the fire 
a little while.

"Five hundred," said Ada.

"Your cousin, Mr. Jarndyce.  I owe so much to him.  Would you mind 
describing him to me?"

Shaking her golden hair, Ada turned her eyes upon me with such 
laughing wonder that I was full of wonder too, partly at her 
beauty, partly at her surprise.

"Esther!" she cried.

"My dear!"

"You want a description of my cousin Jarndyce?"

"My dear, I never saw him."

"And I never saw him!" returned Ada.

Well, to be sure!

No, she had never seen him.  Young as she was when her mama died, 
she remembered how the tears would come into her eyes when she 
spoke of him and of the noble generosity of his character, which 
she had said was to be trusted above all earthly things; and Ada 
trusted it.  Her cousin Jarndyce had written to her a few months 
ago--"a plain, honest letter," Ada said--proposing the arrangement 
we were now to enter on and telling her that "in time it might heal 
some of the wounds made by the miserable Chancery suit."  She had 
replied, gratefully accepting his proposal.  Richard had received a 
similar letter and had made a similar response.  He HAD seen Mr. 
Jarndyce once, but only once, five years ago, at Winchester school.  
He had told Ada, when they were leaning on the screen before the 
fire where I found them, that he recollected him as "a bluff, rosy 
fellow."  This was the utmost description Ada could give me.

It set me thinking so that when Ada was asleep, I still remained 
before the fire, wondering and wondering about Bleak House, and 
wondering and wondering that yesterday morning should seem so long 
ago.  I don't know where my thoughts had wandered when they were 
recalled by a tap at the door.

I opened it softly and found Miss Jellyby shivering there with a 
broken candle in a broken candlestick in one hand and an egg-cup in 
the other.

"Good night!" she said very sulkily.

"Good night!" said I.

"May I come in?" she shortly and unexpectedly asked me in the same 
sulky way.

"Certainly," said I.  "Don't wake Miss Clare."

She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky 
middle finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing 
it over the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and 
looking very gloomy.

"I wish Africa was dead!" she said on a sudden.

I was going to remonstrate.

"I do!" she said "Don't talk to me, Miss Summerson.  I hate it and 
detest it.  It's a beast!"

I told her she was tired, and I was sorry.  I put my hand upon her 
head, and touched her forehead, and said it was hot now but would 
be cool tomorrow.  She still stood pouting and frowning at me, but 
presently put down her egg-cup and turned softly towards the bed 
where Ada lay.

"She is very pretty!" she said with the same knitted brow and in 
the same uncivil manner.

I assented with a smile.

"An orphan.  Ain't she?"

"Yes."

"But knows a quantity, I suppose?  Can dance, and play music, and 
sing?  She can talk French, I suppose, and do geography, and 
globes, and needlework, and everything?"

"No doubt," said I.

"I can't," she returned.  "I can't do anything hardly, except 
write.  I'm always writing for Ma.  I wonder you two were not 
ashamed of yourselves to come in this afternoon and see me able to 
do nothing else.  It was like your ill nature.  Yet you think 
yourselves very fine, I dare say!"

I could see that the poor girl was near crying, and I resumed my 
chair without speaking and looked at her (I hope) as mildly as I 
felt towards her.

"It's disgraceful," she said.  "You know it is.  The whole house is 
disgraceful.  The children are disgraceful.  I'M disgraceful.  Pa's 
miserable, and no wonder!  Priscilla drinks--she's always drinking.  
It's a great shame and a great story of you if you say you didn't 
smell her today.  It was as bad as a public-house, waiting at 
dinner; you know it was!"

"My dear, I don't know it," said I.

"You do," she said very shortly.  "You shan't say you don't.  You 
do!"

"Oh, my dear!" said I.  "If you won't let me speak--"

"You're speaking now.  You know you are.  Don't tell stories, Miss 
Summerson."

"My dear," said I, "as long as you won't hear me out--"

"I don't want to hear you out."

"Oh, yes, I think you do," said I, "because that would be so very 
unreasonable.  I did not know what you tell me because the servant 
did not come near me at dinner; but I don't doubt what you tell me, 
and I am sorry to hear it."

"You needn't make a merit of that," said she.

"No, my dear," said I.  "That would be very foolish."

She was still standing by the bed, and now stooped down (but still 
with the same discontented face) and kissed Ada.  That done, she 
came softly back and stood by the side of my chair.  Her bosom was 
heaving in a distressful manner that I greatly pitied, but I 
thought it better not to speak.

"I wish I was dead!" she broke out.  "I wish we were all dead.  It 
would be a great deal better for us.

In a moment afterwards, she knelt on the ground at my side, hid her 
face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept.  I 
comforted her and would have raised her, but she cried no, no; she 
wanted to stay there!

"You used to teach girls," she said, "If you could only have taught 
me, I could have learnt from you!  I am so very miserable, and I 
like you so much!"

I could not persuade her to sit by me or to do anything but move a 
ragged stool to where she was kneeling, and take that, and still 
hold my dress in the same manner.  By degrees the poor tired girl 
fell asleep, and then I contrived to raise her head so that it 
should rest on my lap, and to cover us both with shawls.  The fire 
went out, and all night long she slumbered thus before the ashy 
grate.  At first I was painfully awake and vainly tried to lose 
myself, with my eyes closed, among the scenes of the day.  At 
length, by slow degrees, they became indistinct and mingled.  I 
began to lose the identity of the sleeper resting on me.  Now it 
was Ada, now one of my old Reading friends from whom I could not 
believe I had so recently parted.  Now it was the little mad woman 
worn out with curtsying and smiling, now some one in authority at 
Bleak House.  Lastly, it was no one, and I was no one.

The purblind day was feebly struggling with the fog when I opened 
my eyes to encounter those of a dirty-faced little spectre fixed 
upon me.  Peepy had scaled his crib, and crept down in his bed-gown 
and cap, and was so cold that his teeth were chattering as if he 
had cut them all.



CHAPTER V

A Morning Adventure


Although the morning was raw, and although the fog still seemed 
heavy--I say seemed, for the windows were so encrusted with dirt 
that they would have made midsummer sunshine dim--I was 
sufficiently forewarned of the discomfort within doors at that 
early hour and sufficiently curious about London to think it a good 
idea on the part of Miss Jellyby when she proposed that we should 
go out for a walk.

"Ma won't be down for ever so long," she said, "and then it's a 
chance if breakfast's ready for an hour afterwards, they dawdle so.  
As to Pa, he gets what he can and goes to the office.  He never has 
what you would call a regular breakfast.  Priscilla leaves him out 
the loaf and some milk, when there is any, overnight.  Sometimes 
there isn't any milk, and sometimes the cat drinks it.  But I'm 
afraid you must be tired, Miss Summerson, and perhaps you would 
rather go to bed."

"I am not at all tired, my dear," said I, "and would much prefer to 
go out."

"If you're sure you would," returned Miss Jellyby, "I'll get my 
things on."

Ada said she would go too, and was soon astir.  I made a proposal 
to Peepy, in default of being able to do anything better for him, 
that he should let me wash him and afterwards lay him down on my 
bed again.  To this he submitted with the best grace possible, 
staring at me during the whole operation as if he never had been, 
and never could again be, so astonished in his life--looking very 
miserable also, certainly, but making no complaint, and going 
snugly to sleep as soon as it was over.  At first I was in two 
minds about taking such a liberty, but I soon reflected that nobody 
in the house was likely to notice it.

What with the bustle of dispatching Peepy and the bustle of getting 
myself ready and helping Ada, I was soon quite in a glow.  We found 
Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire in the writing-
room, which Priscilla was then lighting with a smutty parlour 
candlestick, throwing the candle in to make it burn better.  
Everything was just as we had left it last night and was evidently 
intended to remain so.  Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been 
taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast.  Crumbs, dust, 
and waste-paper were all over the house.  Some pewter pots and a 
milk-can hung on the area railings; the door stood open; and we met 
the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her 
mouth.  She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see 
what o'clock it was.

But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up and 
down Thavies Inn to warm his feet.  He was agreeably surprised to 
see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk.  
So he took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first.  I may 
mention that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and 
that I really should not have thought she liked me much unless she 
had told me so.

"Where would you wish to go?" she asked.

"Anywhere, my dear," I replied.

"Anywhere's nowhere," said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.

"Let us go somewhere at any rate," said I.

She then walked me on very fast.

"I don't care!" she said.  "Now, you are my witness, Miss 
Summerson, I say I don't care-but if he was to come to our house 
with his great, shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he 
was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn't have anything to say to him.  
Such ASSES as he and Ma make of themselves!"

"My dear!" I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the 
vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it.  "Your duty as a child--"

"Oh!  Don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's Ma's 
duty as a parent?  All made over to the public and Africa, I 
suppose!  Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's 
much more their affair than mine.  You are shocked, I dare say!  
Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there's 
an end of it!"

She walked me on faster yet.

"But for all that, I say again, he may come, and come, and come, 
and I won't have anything to say to him.  I can't bear him.  If 
there's any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it's the 
stuff he and Ma talk.  I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our 
house can have the patience to stay there and be a witness of such 
inconsistencies and contradictions as all that sounding nonsense, 
and Ma's management!"

I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young 
gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday.  I was saved the 
disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada 
coming up at a round pace, laughing and asking us if we meant to 
run a race.  Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became silent and 
walked moodily on at my side while I admired the long successions 
and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to 
and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy 
preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping 
out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags secretly 
groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse.

"So, cousin," said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada behind me.  
"We are never to get out of Chancery!  We have come by another way 
to our place of meeting yesterday, and--by the Great Seal, here's 
the old lady again!"

Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and 
smiling, and saying with her yesterday's air of patronage, "The 
wards in Jarndyce!  Ve-ry happy, I am sure!"

"You are out early, ma'am," said I as she curtsied to me.

"Ye-es!  I usually walk here early.  Before the court sits.  It's 
retired.  I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day," 
said the old lady mincingly.  "The business of the day requires a 
great deal of thought.  Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to 
follow."

"Who's this, Miss Summerson?" whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my 
arm tighter through her own.

The little old lady's hearing was remarkably quick.  She answered 
for herself directly.

"A suitor, my child.  At your service.  I have the honour to attend 
court regularly.  With my documents.  Have I the pleasure of 
addressing another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?" said the 
old lady, recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a 
very low curtsy.

Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday, 
good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with 
the suit.

"Ha!" said the old lady.  "She does not expect a judgment?  She 
will still grow old.  But not so old.  Oh, dear, no!  This is the 
garden of Lincoln's Inn.  I call it my garden.  It is quite a bower 
in the summer-time.  Where the birds sing melodiously.  I pass the 
greater part of the long vacation here.  In contemplation.  You 
find the long vacation exceedingly long, don't you?"

We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so.

"When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more 
flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor's 
court," said the old lady, "the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth 
seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails.  Pray come and 
see my lodging.  It will be a good omen for me.  Youth, and hope, 
and beauty are very seldom there.  It is a long, long time since I 
had a visit from either."

She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby away, 
beckoned Richard and Ada to come too.  I did not know how to excuse 
myself and looked to Richard for aid.  As he was half amused and 
half curious and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady 
without offence, she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada 
continued to follow, our strange conductress informing us all the 
time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by.

It was quite true, as it soon appeared.  She lived so close by that 
we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before 
she was at home.  Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old 
lady stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of 
some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the inn, and 
said, "This is my lodging.  Pray walk up!"

She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG AND 
BOTTLE WAREHOUSE.  Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN 
MARINE STORES.  In one part of the window was a picture of a red 
paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old 
rags.  In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT.  In another, 
KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT.  In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT.  In another, 
WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT.  In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES 
BOUGHT.  Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold 
there.  In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty 
bottles--blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-
water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am 
reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several 
little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of 
being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the 
law.  There were a great many ink bottles.  There was a little 
tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled 
"Law Books, all at 9d."  Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated 
were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and 
Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received from the 
firm.  Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to 
do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable 
man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with 
neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within.  
There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up.  A 
little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment 
scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers.  I could have 
fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been 
hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors 
of rooms or strong chests in lawyers' offices.  The litter of rags 
tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, 
hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been 
counsellors' bands and gowns torn up.  One had only to fancy, as 
Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that 
yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, 
were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.

As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides 
by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, intercepting the light within a 
couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted 
lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying 
about in the shop.  Turning towards the door, he now caught sight 
of us.  He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk 
sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible 
smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within.  His throat, 
chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled 
with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward 
like some old root in a fall of snow.

"Hi, hi!" said the old man, coming to the door.  "Have you anything 
to sell?"

We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been 
trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her 
pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the 
pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being 
pressed for time.  But she was not to be so easily left.  She 
became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties 
that we would walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was 
so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good 
omen she desired, that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing 
for it but to comply.  I suppose we were all more or less curious; 
at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers and 
said, "Aye, aye!  Please her!  It won't take a minute!  Come in, 
come in!  Come in through the shop if t'other door's out of order!" 
we all went in, stimulated by Richard's laughing encouragement and 
relying on his protection.

"My landlord, Krook," said the little old lady, condescending to 
him from her lofty station as she presented him to us.  "He is 
called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor.  His shop is 
called the Court of Chancery.  He is a very eccentric person.  He 
is very odd.  Oh, I assure you he is very odd!"

She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with 
her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to 
excuse him, "For he is a little--you know--M!" said the old lady 
with great stateliness.  The old man overheard, and laughed.

"It's true enough," he said, going before us with the lantern, 
"that they call me the lord chancellor and call my shop Chancery.  
And why do you think they call me the Lord Chancellor and my shop 
Chancery?"

"I don't know, I am sure!" said Richard rather carelessly.

"You see," said the old man, stopping and turning round, "they--Hi!  
Here's lovely hair!  I have got three sacks of ladies' hair below, 
but none so beautiful and fine as this.  What colour, and what 
texture!"

"That'll do, my good friend!" said Richard, strongly disapproving 
of his having drawn one of Ada's tresses through his yellow hand.  
"You can admire as the rest of us do without taking that liberty."

The old man darted at him a sudden look which even called my 
attention from Ada, who, startled and blushing, was so remarkably 
beautiful that she seemed to fix the wandering attention of the 
little old lady herself.  But as Ada interposed and laughingly said 
she could only feel proud of such genuine admiration, Mr. Krook 
shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.

"You see, I have so many things here," he resumed, holding up the 
lantern, "of so many kinds, and all as the neighbours think (but 
THEY know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that 
that's why they have given me and my place a christening.  And I 
have so many old parchmentses and papers in my stock.  And I have a 
liking for rust and must and cobwebs.  And all's fish that comes to 
my net.  And I can't abear to part with anything I once lay hold of 
(or so my neighbours think, but what do THEY know?) or to alter 
anything, or to have any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor 
repairing going on about me.  That's the way I've got the ill name 
of Chancery.  I don't mind.  I go to see my noble and learned 
brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn.  He don't 
notice me, but I notice him.  There's no great odds betwixt us.  We 
both grub on in a muddle.  Hi, Lady Jane!"

A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf on his 
shoulder and startled us all.

"Hi!  Show 'em how you scratch.  Hi!  Tear, my lady!" said her 
master.

The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her 
tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.

"She'd do as much for any one I was to set her on," said the old 
man.  "I deal in cat-skins among other general matters, and hers 
was offered to me.  It's a very fine skin, as you may see, but I 
didn't have it stripped off!  THAT warn't like Chancery practice 
though, says you!"

He had by this time led us across the shop, and now opened a door 
in the back part of it, leading to the house-entry.  As he stood 
with his hand upon the lock, the little old lady graciously 
observed to him before passing out, "That will do, Krook.  You mean 
well, but are tiresome.  My young friends are pressed for time.  I 
have none to spare myself, having to attend court very soon.  My 
young friends are the wards in Jarndyce."

"Jarndyce!" said the old man with a start.

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  The great suit, Krook," returned his 
lodger.

"Hi!" exclaimed the old man in a tone of thoughtful amazement and 
with a wider stare than before.  "Think of it!"

He seemed so rapt all in a moment and looked so curiously at us 
that Richard said, "Why, you appear to trouble yourself a good deal 
about the causes before your noble and learned brother, the other 
Chancellor!"

"Yes," said the old man abstractedly.  "Sure!  YOUR name now will 
be--"

"Richard Carstone."

"Carstone," he repeated, slowly checking off that name upon his 
forefinger; and each of the others he went on to mention upon a 
separate finger.  "Yes.  There was the name of Barbary, and the 
name of Clare, and the name of Dedlock, too, I think."

"He knows as much of the cause as the real salaried Chancellor!" 
said Richard, quite astonished, to Ada and me.

"Aye!" said the old man, coming slowly out of his abstraction.  
"Yes!  Tom Jarndyce--you'll excuse me, being related; but he was 
never known about court by any other name, and was as well known 
there as--she is now," nodding slightly at his lodger.  "Tom 
Jarndyce was often in here.  He got into a restless habit of 
strolling about when the cause was on, or expected, talking to the 
little shopkeepers and telling 'em to keep out of Chancery, 
whatever they did.  'For,' says he, 'it's being ground to bits in a 
slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to 
death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad 
by grains.'  He was as near making away with himself, just where 
the young lady stands, as near could be."

We listened with horror.

"He come in at the door," said the old man, slowly pointing an 
imaginary track along the shop, "on the day he did it--the whole 
neighbourhood had said for months before that he would do it, of a 
certainty sooner or later--he come in at the door that day, and 
walked along there, and sat himself on a bench that stood there, 
and asked me (you'll judge I was a mortal sight younger then) to 
fetch him a pint of wine.  'For,' says he, 'Krook, I am much 
depressed; my cause is on again, and I think I'm nearer judgment 
than I ever was.'  I hadn't a mind to leave him alone; and I 
persuaded him to go to the tavern over the way there, t'other side 
my lane (I mean Chancery Lane); and I followed and looked in at the 
window, and saw him, comfortable as I thought, in the arm-chair by 
the fire, and company with him.  I hadn't hardly got back here when 
I heard a shot go echoing and rattling right away into the inn.  I 
ran out--neighbours ran out--twenty of us cried at once, 'Tom 
Jarndyce!'"

The old man stopped, looked hard at us, looked down into the 
lantern, blew the light out, and shut the lantern up.

"We were right, I needn't tell the present hearers.  Hi!  To be 
sure, how the neighbourhood poured into court that afternoon while 
the cause was on!  How my noble and learned brother, and all the 
rest of 'em, grubbed and muddled away as usual and tried to look as 
if they hadn't heard a word of the last fact in the case or as if 
they had--Oh, dear me!--nothing at all to do with it if they had 
heard of it by any chance!"

Ada's colour had entirely left her, and Richard was scarcely less 
pale.  Nor could I wonder, judging even from my emotions, and I was 
no party in the suit, that to hearts so untried and fresh it was a 
shock to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery, attended 
in the minds of many people with such dreadful recollections.  I 
had another uneasiness, in the application of the painful story to 
the poor half-witted creature who had brought us there; but, to my 
surprise, she seemed perfectly unconscious of that and only led the 
way upstairs again, informing us with the toleration of a superior 
creature for the infirmities of a common mortal that her landlord 
was "a little M, you know!"

She lived at the top of the house, in a pretty large room, from 
which she had a glimpse of Lincoln's Inn Hall.  This seemed to have 
been her principal inducement, originally, for taking up her 
residence there.  She could look at it, she said, in the night, 
especially in the moonshine.  Her room was clean, but very, very 
bare.  I noticed the scantiest necessaries in the way of furniture; 
a few old prints from books, of Chancellors and barristers, wafered 
against the wall; and some half-dozen reticles and work-bags, 
"containing documents," as she informed us.  There were neither 
coals nor ashes in the grate, and I saw no articles of clothing 
anywhere, nor any kind of food.  Upon a shelf in an open cupboard 
were a plate or two, a cup or two, and so forth, but all dry and 
empty.  There was a more affecting meaning in her pinched 
appearance, I thought as I looked round, than I had understood 
before.

"Extremely honoured, I am sure," said our poor hostess with the 
greatest suavity, "by this visit from the wards in Jarndyce.  And 
very much indebted for the omen.  It is a retired situation.  
Considering.  I am limited as to situation.  In consequence of the 
necessity of attending on the Chancellor.  I have lived here many 
years.  I pass my days in court, my evenings and my nights here.  I 
find the nights long, for I sleep but little and think much.  That 
is, of course, unavoidable, being in Chancery.  I am sorry I cannot 
offer chocolate.  I expect a judgment shortly and shall then place 
my establishment on a superior footing.  At present, I don't mind 
confessing to the wards in Jarndyce (in strict confidence) that I 
sometimes find it difficult to keep up a genteel appearance.  I 
have felt the cold here.  I have felt something sharper than cold.  
It matters very little.  Pray excuse the introduction of such mean 
topics."

She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window 
and called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, 
some containing several birds.  There were larks, linnets, and 
goldfinches--I should think at least twenty.

"I began to keep the little creatures," she said, "with an object 
that the wards will readily comprehend.  With the intention of 
restoring them to liberty.  When my judgment should be given.  Ye-
es!  They die in prison, though.  Their lives, poor silly things, 
are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by 
one, the whole collection has died over and over again.  I doubt, 
do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will 
live to be free!  Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?"

Although she sometimes asked a question, she never seemed to expect 
a reply, but rambled on as if she were in the habit of doing so 
when no one but herself was present.

"Indeed," she pursued, "I positively doubt sometimes, I do assure 
you, whether while matters are still unsettled, and the sixth or 
Great Seal still prevails, I may not one day be found lying stark 
and senseless here, as I have found so many birds!"

Richard, answering what he saw in Ada's compassionate eyes, took 
the opportunity of laying some money, softly and unobserved, on the 
chimney-piece.  We all drew nearer to the cages, feigning to 
examine the birds.

"I can't allow them to sing much," said the little old lady, "for 
(you'll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea 
that they are singing while I am following the arguments in court.  
And my mind requires to be so very clear, you know!  Another time, 
I'll tell you their names.  Not at present.  On a day of such good 
omen, they shall sing as much as they like.  In honour of youth," a 
smile and curtsy, "hope," a smile and curtsy, "and beauty," a smile 
and curtsy.  "There!  We'll let in the full light."

The birds began to stir and chirp.

"I cannot admit the air freely," said the little old lady--the room 
was close, and would have been the better for it--"because the cat 
you saw downstairs, called Lady Jane, is greedy for their lives.  
She crouches on the parapet outside for hours and hours.  I have 
discovered," whispering mysteriously, "that her natural cruelty is 
sharpened by a jealous fear of their regaining their liberty.  In 
consequence of the judgment I expect being shortly given.  She is 
sly and full of malice.  I half believe, sometimes, that she is no 
cat, but the wolf of the old saying.  It is so very difficult to 
keep her from the door."

Some neighbouring bells, reminding the poor soul that it was half-
past nine, did more for us in the way of bringing our visit to an 
end than we could easily have done for ourselves.  She hurriedly 
took up her little bag of documents, which she had laid upon the 
table on coming in, and asked if we were also going into court.  On 
our answering no, and that we would on no account detain her, she 
opened the door to attend us downstairs.

"With such an omen, it is even more necessary than usual that I 
should be there before the Chancellor comes in," said she, "for he 
might mention my case the first thing.  I have a presentiment that 
he WILL mention it the first thing this morning"

She stopped to tell us in a whisper as we were going down that the 
whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had 
bought piecemeal and had no wish to sell, in consequence of being a 
little M.  This was on the first floor.  But she had made a 
previous stoppage on the second floor and had silently pointed at a 
dark door there.

"The only other lodger," she now whispered in explanation, "a law-
writer.  The children in the lanes here say he has sold himself to 
the devil.  I don't know what he can have done with the money.  
Hush!"

She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her even there, 
and repeating "Hush!" went before us on tiptoe as though even the 
sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said.

Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had passed through 
it on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of 
packets of waste-paper in a kind of well in the floor.  He seemed 
to be working hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, 
and had a piece of chalk by him, with which, as he put each 
separate package or bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the 
panelling of the wall.

Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone 
by him, and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me, 
and chalked the letter J upon the wall--in a very curious manner, 
beginning with the end of the letter and shaping it backward.  It 
was a capital letter, not a printed one, but just such a letter as 
any clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's office would have made.

"Can you read it?" he asked me with a keen glance.

"Surely," said I.  "It's very plain."

"What is it?"

"J."

With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he rubbed it 
out and turned an "a" in its place (not a capital letter this 
time), and said, "What's that?"

I told him.  He then rubbed that out and turned the letter "r," and 
asked me the same question.  He went on quickly until he had formed 
in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of 
the letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two letters on 
the wall together.

"What does that spell?" he asked me.

When I told him, he laughed.  In the same odd way, yet with the 
same rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the 
letters forming the words Bleak House.  These, in some 
astonishment, I also read; and he laughed again.

"Hi!" said the old man, laying aside the chalk.  "I have a turn for 
copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor 
write."

He looked so disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly at me, as 
if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite 
relieved by Richard's appearing at the door and saying, "Miss 
Summerson, I hope you are not bargaining for the sale of your hair.  
Don't be tempted.  Three sacks below are quite enough for Mr. Krook!"

I lost no time in wishing Mr. Krook good morning and joining my 
friends outside, where we parted with the little old lady, who gave 
us her blessing with great ceremony and renewed her assurance of 
yesterday in reference to her intention of settling estates on Ada 
and me.  Before we finally turned out of those lanes, we looked 
back and saw Mr. Krook standing at his shop-door, in his 
spectacles, looking after us, with his cat upon his shoulder, and 
her tail sticking up on one side of his hairy cap like a tall 
feather.

"Quite an adventure for a morning in London!" said Richard with a 
sigh.  "Ah, cousin, cousin, it's a weary word this Chancery!"

"It is to me, and has been ever since I can remember," returned 
Ada.  "I am grieved that I should be the enemy---as I suppose I am
--of a great number of relations and others, and that they should be 
my enemies--as I suppose they are--and that we should all be 
ruining one another without knowing how or why and be in constant 
doubt and discord all our lives.  It seems very strange, as there 
must be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has 
not been able to find out through all these years where it is."

"Ah, cousin!" said Richard.  "Strange, indeed!  All this wasteful, 
wanton chess-playing IS very strange.  To see that composed court 
yesterday jogging on so serenely and to think of the wretchedness 
of the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache 
both together.  My head ached with wondering how it happened, if 
men were neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think 
they could possibly be either.  But at all events, Ada--I may call 
you Ada?"

"Of course you may, cousin Richard."

"At all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences on 
US.  We have happily been brought together, thanks to our good 
kinsman, and it can't divide us now!"

"Never, I hope, cousin Richard!" said Ada gently.

Miss Jellyby gave my arm a squeeze and me a very significant look.  
I smiled in return, and we made the rest of the way back very 
pleasantly.

In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in 
the course of an hour the various things necessary for breakfast 
straggled one by one into the dining-room.  I do not doubt that 
Mrs. Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but 
she presented no appearance of having changed her dress.  She was 
greatly occupied during breakfast, for the morning's post brought a 
heavy correspondence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would 
occasion her (she said) to pass a busy day.  The children tumbled 
about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, 
which were perfect little calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost 
for an hour and a half, and brought home from Newgate market by a 
policeman.  The equable manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both 
his absence and his restoration to the family circle surprised us 
all.

She was by that time perseveringly dictating to Caddy, and Caddy 
was fast relapsing into the inky condition in which we had found 
her.  At one o'clock an open carriage arrived for us, and a cart 
for our luggage.  Mrs. Jellyby charged us with many remembrances to 
her good friend Mr. Jarndyce; Caddy left her desk to see us depart, 
kissed me in the passage, and stood biting her pen and sobbing on 
the steps; Peepy, I am happy to say, was asleep and spared the pain 
of separation (I was not without misgivings that he had gone to 
Newgate market in search of me); and all the other children got up 
behind the barouche and fell off, and we saw them, with great 
concern, scattered over the surface of Thavies Inn as we rolled out 
of its precincts.



CHAPTER VI

Quite at Home


The day had brightened very much, and still brightened as we went 
westward.  We went our way through the sunshine and the fresh air, 
wondering more and more at the extent of the streets, the 
brilliancy of the shops, the great traffic, and the crowds of 
people whom the pleasanter weather seemed to have brought out like 
many-coloured flowers.  By and by we began to leave the wonderful 
city and to proceed through suburbs which, of themselves, would 
have made a pretty large town in my eyes; and at last we got into a 
real country road again, with windmills, rick-yards, milestones, 
farmers' waggons, scents of old hay, swinging signs, and horse 
troughs: trees, fields, and hedge-rows.  It was delightful to see 
the green landscape before us and the immense metropolis behind; 
and when a waggon with a train of beautiful horses, furnished with 
red trappings and clear-sounding bells, came by us with its music, 
I believe we could all three have sung to the bells, so cheerful 
were the influences around.

"The whole road has been reminding me of my name-sake Whittington," 
said Richard, "and that waggon is the finishing touch.  Halloa!  
What's the matter?"

We had stopped, and the waggon had stopped too.  Its music changed 
as the horses came to a stand, and subsided to a gentle tinkling, 
except when a horse tossed his head or shook himself and sprinkled 
off a little shower of bell-ringing.

"Our postilion is looking after the waggoner," said Richard, "and 
the waggoner is coming back after us.  Good day, friend!"  The 
waggoner was at our coach-door.  "Why, here's an extraordinary 
thing!" added Richard, looking closely at the man.  "He has got 
your name, Ada, in his hat!"

He had all our names in his hat.  Tucked within the band were three 
small notes--one addressed to Ada, one to Richard, one to me.  
These the waggoner delivered to each of us respectively, reading 
the name aloud first.  In answer to Richard's inquiry from whom 
they came, he briefly answered, "Master, sir, if you please"; and 
putting on his hat again (which was like a soft bowl), cracked his 
whip, re-awakened his music, and went melodiously away.

"Is that Mr. Jarndyce's waggon?" said Richard, calling to our post-
boy.

"Yes, sir," he replied.  "Going to London."

We opened the notes.  Each was a counterpart of the other and 
contained these words in a solid, plain hand.


"I look forward, my dear, to our meeting easily and without 
constraint on either side.  I therefore have to propose that we 
meet as old friends and take the past for granted.  It will be a 
relief to you possibly, and to me certainly, and so my love to you.

John Jarndyce"


I had perhaps less reason to be surprised than either of my 
companions, having never yet enjoyed an opportunity of thanking one 
who had been my benefactor and sole earthly dependence through so 
many years.  I had not considered how I could thank him, my 
gratitude lying too deep in my heart for that; but I now began to 
consider how I could meet him without thanking him, and felt it 
would be very difficult indeed.

The notes revived in Richard and Ada a general impression that they 
both had, without quite knowing how they came by it, that their 
cousin Jarndyce could never bear acknowledgments for any kindness 
he performed and that sooner than receive any he would resort to 
the most singular expedients and evasions or would even run away.  
Ada dimly remembered to have heard her mother tell, when she was a 
very little child, that he had once done her an act of uncommon 
generosity and that on her going to his house to thank him, he 
happened to see her through a window coming to the door, and 
immediately escaped by the back gate, and was not heard of for 
three months.  This discourse led to a great deal more on the same 
theme, and indeed it lasted us all day, and we talked of scarcely 
anything else.  If we did by any chance diverge into another 
subject, we soon returned to this, and wondered what the house 
would be like, and when we should get there, and whether we should 
see Mr. Jarndyce as soon as we arrived or after a delay, and what 
he would say to us, and what we should say to him.  All of which we 
wondered about, over and over again.

The roads were very heavy for the horses, but the pathway was 
generally good, so we alighted and walked up all the hills, and 
liked it so well that we prolonged our walk on the level ground 
when we got to the top.  At Barnet there were other horses waiting 
for us, but as they had only just been fed, we had to wait for them 
too, and got a long fresh walk over a common and an old battle-
field before the carriage came up.  These delays so protracted the 
journey that the short day was spent and the long night had closed 
in before we came to St. Albans, near to which town Bleak House 
was, we knew.

By that time we were so anxious and nervous that even Richard 
confessed, as we rattled over the stones of the old street, to 
feeling an irrational desire to drive back again.  As to Ada and 
me, whom he had wrapped up with great care, the night being sharp 
and frosty, we trembled from head to foot.  When we turned out of 
the town, round a corner, and Richard told us that the post-boy, 
who had for a long time sympathized with our heightened 
expectation, was looking back and nodding, we both stood up in the 
carriage (Richard holding Ada lest she should be jolted down) and 
gazed round upon the open country and the starlight night for our 
destination.  There was a light sparkling on the top of a hill 
before us, and the driver, pointing to it with his whip and crying, 
"That's Bleak House!" put his horses into a canter and took us 
forward at such a rate, uphill though it was, that the wheels sent 
the road drift flying about our heads like spray from a water-mill.  
Presently we lost the light, presently saw it, presently lost it, 
presently saw it, and turned into an avenue of trees and cantered 
up towards where it was beaming brightly.  It was in a window of 
what seemed to be an old-fashioned house with three peaks in the 
roof in front and a circular sweep leading to the porch.  A bell 
was rung as we drew up, and amidst the sound of its deep voice in 
the still air, and the distant barking of some dogs, and a gush of 
light from the opened door, and the smoking and steaming of the 
heated horses, and the quickened beating of our own hearts, we 
alighted in no inconsiderable confusion.

"Ada, my love, Esther, my dear, you are welcome.  I rejoice to see 
you!  Rick, if I had a hand to spare at present, I would give it 
you!"

The gentleman who said these words in a clear, bright, hospitable 
voice had one of his arms round Ada's waist and the other round 
mine, and kissed us both in a fatherly way, and bore us across the 
hall into a ruddy little room, all in a glow with a blazing fire.  
Here he kissed us again, and opening his arms, made us sit down 
side by side on a sofa ready drawn out near the hearth.  I felt 
that if we had been at all demonstrative, he would have run away in 
a moment.

"Now, Rick!" said he.  "I have a hand at liberty.  A word in 
earnest is as good as a speech.  I am heartily glad to see you.  
You are at home.  Warm yourself!"

Richard shook him by both hands with an intuitive mixture of 
respect and frankness, and only saying (though with an earnestness 
that rather alarmed me, I was so afraid of Mr. Jarndyce's suddenly 
disappearing), "You are very kind, sir!  We are very much obliged 
to you!" laid aside his hat and coat and came up to the fire.

"And how did you like the ride?  And how did you like Mrs. Jellyby, 
my dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce to Ada.

While Ada was speaking to him in reply, I glanced (I need not say 
with how much interest) at his face.  It was a handsome, lively, 
quick face, full of change and motion; and his hair was a silvered 
iron-grey.  I took him to be nearer sixty than fifty, but he was 
upright, hearty, and robust.  From the moment of his first speaking 
to us his voice had connected itself with an association in my mind 
that I could not define; but now, all at once, a something sudden 
in his manner and a pleasant expression in his eyes recalled the 
gentleman in the stagecoach six years ago on the memorable day of 
my journey to Reading.  I was certain it was he.  I never was so 
frightened in my life as when I made the discovery, for he caught 
my glance, and appearing to read my thoughts, gave such a look at 
the door that I thought we had lost him.

However, I am happy to say he remained where he was, and asked me 
what I thought of Mrs. Jellyby.

"She exerts herself very much for Africa, sir," I said.

"Nobly!" returned Mr. Jarndyce.  "But you answer like Ada."  Whom I 
had not heard.  "You all think something else, I see."

"We rather thought," said I, glancing at Richard and Ada, who 
entreated me with their eyes to speak, "that perhaps she was a 
little unmindful of her home."

"Floored!" cried Mr. Jarndyce.

I was rather alarmed again.

"Well!  I want to know your real thoughts, my dear.  I may have 
sent you there on purpose."

"We thought that, perhaps," said I, hesitating, "it is right to 
begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while 
those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be 
substituted for them."

"The little Jellybys," said Richard, coming to my relief, "are 
really--I can't help expressing myself strongly, sir--in a devil of 
a state."

"She means well," said Mr. Jarndyce hastily.  "The wind's in the 
east."

"It was in the north, sir, as we came down," observed Richard.

"My dear Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, poking the fire, "I'll take an 
oath it's either in the east or going to be.  I am always conscious 
of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing 
in the east."

"Rheumatism, sir?" said Richard.

"I dare say it is, Rick.  I believe it is.  And so the little Jell
--I had my doubts about 'em--are in a--oh, Lord, yes, it's 
easterly!" said Mr. Jarndyce.

He had taken two or three undecided turns up and down while 
uttering these broken sentences, retaining the poker in one hand 
and rubbing his hair with the other, with a good-natured vexation 
at once so whimsical and so lovable that I am sure we were more 
delighted with him than we could possibly have expressed in any 
words.  He gave an arm to Ada and an arm to me, and bidding Richard 
bring a candle, was leading the way out when he suddenly turned us 
all back again.

"Those little Jellybys.  Couldn't you--didn't you--now, if it had 
rained sugar-plums, or three-cornered raspberry tarts, or anything 
of that sort!" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Oh, cousin--" Ada hastily began.

"Good, my pretty pet.  I like cousin.  Cousin John, perhaps, is 
better."

"Then, cousin John--" Ada laughingly began again.

"Ha, ha!  Very good indeed!" said Mr. Jarndyce with great 
enjoyment.  "Sounds uncommonly natural.  Yes, my dear?"

"It did better than that.  It rained Esther."

"Aye?" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "What did Esther do?"

"Why, cousin John," said Ada, clasping her hands upon his arm and 
shaking her head at me across him--for I wanted her to be quiet--
"Esther was their friend directly.  Esther nursed them, coaxed them 
to sleep, washed and dressed them, told them stories, kept them 
quiet, bought them keepsakes"--My dear girl!  I had only gone out 
with Peepy after he was found and given him a little, tiny horse!--
"and, cousin John, she softened poor Caroline, the eldest one, so 
much and was so thoughtful for me and so amiable!  No, no, I won't 
be contradicted, Esther dear!  You know, you know, it's true!"

The warm-hearted darling leaned across her cousin John and kissed 
me, and then looking up in his face, boldly said, "At all events, 
cousin John, I WILL thank you for the companion you have given me."  
I felt as if she challenged him to run away.  But he didn't.

"Where did you say the wind was, Rick?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"In the north as we came down, sir."

"You are right.  There's no east in it.  A mistake of mine.  Come, 
girls, come and see your home!"

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up 
and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come 
upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and 
where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, 
and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places 
with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them.  Mine, 
which we entered first, was of this kind, with an up-and-down roof 
that had more corners in it than I ever counted afterwards and a 
chimney (there was a wood fire on the hearth) paved all around with 
pure white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the 
fire was blazing.  Out of this room, you went down two steps into a 
charming little sitting-room looking down upon a flower-garden, 
which room was henceforth to belong to Ada and me.  Out of this you 
went up three steps into Ada's bedroom, which had a fine broad 
window commanding a beautiful view (we saw a great expanse of 
darkness lying underneath the stars), to which there was a hollow 
window-seat, in which, with a spring-lock, three dear Adas might 
have been lost at once.  Out of this room you passed into a little 
gallery, with which the other best rooms (only two) communicated, 
and so, by a little staircase of shallow steps with a number of 
corner stairs in it, considering its length, down into the hall.  
But if instead of going out at Ada's door you came back into my 
room, and went out at the door by which you had entered it, and 
turned up a few crooked steps that branched off in an unexpected 
manner from the stairs, you lost yourself in passages, with mangles 
in them, and three-cornered tables, and a native Hindu chair, which 
was also a sofa, a box, and a bedstead, and looked in every form 
something between a bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage, and had 
been brought from India nobody knew by whom or when.  From these 
you came on Richard's room, which was part library, part sitting-
room, part bedroom, and seemed indeed a comfortable compound of 
many rooms.  Out of that you went straight, with a little interval 
of passage, to the plain room where Mr. Jarndyce slept, all the 
year round, with his window open, his bedstead without any 
furniture standing in the middle of the floor for more air, and his 
cold bath gaping for him in a smaller room adjoining.  Out of that 
you came into another passage, where there were back-stairs and 
where you could hear the horses being rubbed down outside the 
stable and being told to "Hold up" and "Get over," as they slipped 
about very much on the uneven stones.  Or you might, if you came 
out at another door (every room had at least two doors), go 
straight down to the hall again by half-a-dozen steps and a low 
archway, wondering how you got back there or had ever got out of 
it.

The furniture, old-fashioned rather than old, like the house, was 
as pleasantly irregular.  Ada's sleeping-room was all flowers--in 
chintz and paper, in velvet, in needlework, in the brocade of two 
stiff courtly chairs which stood, each attended by a little page of 
a stool for greater state, on either side of the fire-place.  Our 
sitting-room was green and had framed and glazed upon the walls 
numbers of surprising and surprised birds, staring out of pictures 
at a real trout in a case, as brown and shining as if it had been 
served with gravy; at the death of Captain Cook; and at the whole 
process of preparing tea in China, as depicted by Chinese artists.  
In my room there were oval engravings of the months--ladies 
haymaking in short waists and large hats tied under the chin, for 
June; smooth-legged noblemen pointing with cocked-hats to village 
steeples, for October.  Half-length portraits in crayons abounded 
all through the house, but were so dispersed that I found the 
brother of a youthful officer of mine in the china-closet and the 
grey old age of my pretty young bride, with a flower in her bodice, 
in the breakfast-room.  As substitutes, I had four angels, of Queen 
Anne's reign, taking a complacent gentleman to heaven, in festoons, 
with some difficulty; and a composition in needlework representing 
fruit, a kettle, and an alphabet.  All the movables, from the 
wardrobes to the chairs and tables, hangings, glasses, even to the 
pincushions and scent-bottles on the dressing-tables, displayed the 
same quaint variety.  They agreed in nothing but their perfect 
neatness, their display of the whitest linen, and their storing-up, 
wheresoever the existence of a drawer, small or large, rendered it 
possible, of quantities of rose-leaves and sweet lavender.  Such, 
with its illuminated windows, softened here and there by shadows of 
curtains, shining out upon the starlight night; with its light, and 
warmth, and comfort; with its hospitable jingle, at a distance, of 
preparations for dinner; with the face of its generous master 
brightening everything we saw; and just wind enough without to 
sound a low accompaniment to everything we heard, were our first 
impressions of Bleak House.

"I am glad you like it," said Mr. Jarndyce when he had brought us 
round again to Ada's sitting-room.  "It makes no pretensions, but 
it is a comfortable little place, I hope, and will be more so with 
such bright young looks in it.  You have barely half an hour before 
dinner.  There's no one here but the finest creature upon earth--a 
child."

"More children, Esther!" said Ada.

"I don't mean literally a child," pursued Mr. Jarndyce; "not a 
child in years.  He is grown up--he is at least as old as I am--but 
in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless 
inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child."

We felt that he must be very interesting.

"He knows Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Jarndyce.  "He is a musical man, 
an amateur, but might have been a professional.  He is an artist 
too, an amateur, but might have been a professional.  He is a man 
of attainments and of captivating manners.  He has been unfortunate 
in his affairs, and unfortunate in his pursuits, and unfortunate in 
his family; but he don't care--he's a child!"

"Did you imply that he has children of his own, sir?" inquired 
Richard.

"Yes, Rick!  Half-a-dozen.  More!  Nearer a dozen, I should think.  
But he has never looked after them.  How could he?  He wanted 
somebody to look after HIM.  He is a child, you know!" said Mr. 
Jarndyce.

"And have the children looked after themselves at all, sir?" 
inquired Richard.

"Why, just as you may suppose," said Mr. Jarndyce, his countenance 
suddenly falling.  "It is said that the children of the very poor 
are not brought up, but dragged up.  Harold Skimpole's children 
have tumbled up somehow or other.  The wind's getting round again, 
I am afraid.  I feel it rather!"

Richard observed that the situation was exposed on a sharp night.

"It IS exposed," said Mr. Jarndyce.  "No doubt that's the cause.  
Bleak House has an exposed sound.  But you are coming my way.  Come 
along!"

Our luggage having arrived and being all at hand, I was dressed in 
a few minutes and engaged in putting my worldly goods away when a 
maid (not the one in attendance upon Ada, but another, whom I had 
not seen) brought a basket into my room with two bunches of keys in 
it, all labelled.

"For you, miss, if you please," said she.

"For me?" said I.

"The housekeeping keys, miss."

I showed my surprise, for she added with some little surprise on 
her own part, "I was told to bring them as soon as you was alone, 
miss.  Miss Summerson, if I don't deceive myself?"

"Yes," said I.  "That is my name."

"The large bunch is the housekeeping, and the little bunch is the 
cellars, miss.  Any time you was pleased to appoint tomorrow 
morning, I was to show you the presses and things they belong to."

I said I would be ready at half-past six, and after she was gone, 
stood looking at the basket, quite lost in the magnitude of my 
trust.  Ada found me thus and had such a delightful confidence in 
me when I showed her the keys and told her about them that it would 
have been insensibility and ingratitude not to feel encouraged.  I 
knew, to be sure, that it was the dear girl's kindness, but I liked 
to be so pleasantly cheated.

When we went downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole, who was 
standing before the fire telling Richard how fond he used to be, in 
his school-time, of football.  He was a little bright creature with 
a rather large head, but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and 
there was a perfect charm in him.  All he said was so free from 
effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety 
that it was fascinating to hear him talk.  Being of a more slender 
figure than Mr. Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with 
browner hair, he looked younger.  Indeed, he had more the 
appearance in all respects of a damaged young man than a well-
preserved elderly one.  There was an easy negligence in his manner 
and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his 
neckkerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their 
own portraits) which I could not separate from the idea of a 
romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of 
depreciation.  It struck me as being not at all like the manner or 
appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of 
years, cares, and experiences.

I gathered from the conversation that Mr. Skimpole had been 
educated for the medical profession and had once lived, in his 
professional capacity, in the household of a German prince.  He 
told us, however, that as he had always been a mere child in point 
of weights and measures and had never known anything about them 
(except that they disgusted him), he had never been able to 
prescribe with the requisite accuracy of detail.  In fact, he said, 
he had no head for detail.  And he told us, with great humour, that 
when he was wanted to bleed the prince or physic any of his people, 
he was generally found lying on his back in bed, reading the 
newspapers or making fancy-sketches in pencil, and couldn't come.  
The prince, at last, objecting to this, "in which," said Mr. 
Skimpole, in the frankest manner, "he was perfectly right," the 
engagement terminated, and Mr. Skimpole having (as he added with 
delightful gaiety) "nothing to live upon but love, fell in love, 
and married, and surrounded himself with rosy cheeks."  His good 
friend Jarndyce and some other of his good friends then helped him, 
in quicker or slower succession, to several openings in life, but 
to no purpose, for he must confess to two of the oldest infirmities 
in the world: one was that he had no idea of time, the other that 
he had no idea of money.  In consequence of which he never kept an 
appointment, never could transact any business, and never knew the 
value of anything!  Well!  So he had got on in life, and here he 
was!  He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of making 
fancy-sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of 
art.  All he asked of society was to let him live.  THAT wasn't 
much.  His wants were few.  Give him the papers, conversation, 
music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets 
of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more.  He 
was a mere child in the world, but he didn't cry for the moon.  He 
said to the world, "Go your several ways in peace!  Wear red coats, 
blue coats, lawn sleeves; put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; 
go after glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; 
only--let Harold Skimpole live!"

All this and a great deal more he told us, not only with the utmost 
brilliancy and enjoyment, but with a certain vivacious candour--
speaking of himself as if he were not at all his own affair, as if 
Skimpole were a third person, as if he knew that Skimpole had his 
singularities but still had his claims too, which were the general 
business of the community and must not be slighted.  He was quite 
enchanting.  If I felt at all confused at that early time in 
endeavouring to reconcile anything he said with anything I had 
thought about the duties and accountabilities of life (which I am 
far from sure of), I was confused by not exactly understanding why 
he was free of them.  That he WAS free of them, I scarcely doubted; 
he was so very clear about it himself.

"I covet nothing," said Mr. Skimpole in the same light way.  
"Possession is nothing to me.  Here is my friend Jarndyce's 
excellent house.  I feel obliged to him for possessing it.  I can 
sketch it and alter it.  I can set it to music.  When I am here, I 
have sufficient possession of it and have neither trouble, cost, 
nor responsibility.  My steward's name, in short, is Jarndyce, and 
he can't cheat me.  We have been mentioning Mrs. Jellyby.  There is 
a bright-eyed woman, of a strong will and immense power of business 
detail, who throws herself into objects with surprising ardour!  I 
don't regret that I have not a strong will and an immense power of 
business detail to throw myself into objects with surprising 
ardour.  I can admire her without envy.  I can sympathize with the 
objects.  I can dream of them.  I can lie down on the grass--in 
fine weather--and float along an African river, embracing all the 
natives I meet, as sensible of the deep silence and sketching the 
dense overhanging tropical growth as accurately as if I were there.  
I don't know that it's of any direct use my doing so, but it's all 
I can do, and I do it thoroughly.  Then, for heaven's sake, having 
Harold Skimpole, a confiding child, petitioning you, the world, an 
agglomeration of practical people of business habits, to let him 
live and admire the human family, do it somehow or other, like good 
souls, and suffer him to ride his rocking-horse!"

It was plain enough that Mr. Jarndyce had not been neglectful of 
the adjuration.  Mr. Skimpole's general position there would have 
rendered it so without the addition of what he presently said.

"It's only you, the generous creatures, whom I envy," said Mr. 
Skimpole, addressing us, his new friends, in an impersonal manner.  
"I envy you your power of doing what you do.  It is what I should 
revel in myself.  I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you.  I 
almost feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the 
opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity.  I know you like 
it.  For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world 
expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness.  I 
may have been born to be a benefactor to you by sometimes giving 
you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities.  Why 
should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs when 
it leads to such pleasant consequences?  I don't regret it 
therefore."

Of all his playful speeches (playful, yet always fully meaning what 
they expressed) none seemed to be more to the taste of Mr. Jarndyce 
than this.  I had often new temptations, afterwards, to wonder 
whether it was really singular, or only singular to me, that he, 
who was probably the most grateful of mankind upon the least 
occasion, should so desire to escape the gratitude of others.

We were all enchanted.  I felt it a merited tribute to the engaging 
qualities of Ada and Richard that Mr. Skimpole, seeing them for the 
first time, should he so unreserved and should lay himself out to 
be so exquisitely agreeable.  They (and especially Richard) were 
naturally pleased; for similar reasons, and considered it no common 
privilege to be so freely confided in by such an attractive man.  
The more we listened, the more gaily Mr. Skimpole talked.  And what 
with his fine hilarious manner and his engaging candour and his 
genial way of lightly tossing his own weaknesses about, as if he 
had said, "I am a child, you know!  You are designing people 
compared with me" (he really made me consider myself in that light) 
"but I am gay and innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with 
me!" the effect was absolutely dazzling.

He was so full of feeling too and had such a delicate sentiment for 
what was beautiful or tender that he could have won a heart by that 
alone.  In the evening, when I was preparing to make tea and Ada 
was touching the piano in the adjoining room and softly humming a 
tune to her cousin Richard, which they had happened to mention, he 
came and sat down on the sofa near me and so spoke of Ada that I 
almost loved him.

"She is like the morning," he said.  "With that golden hair, those 
blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the 
summer morning.  The birds here will mistake her for it.  We will 
not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all 
mankind, an orphan.  She is the child of the universe."

Mr. Jarndyce, I found, was standing near us with his hands behind 
him and an attentive smile upon his face.

"The universe," he observed, "makes rather an indifferent parent, I 
am afraid."

"Oh! I don't know!" cried Mr. Skimpole buoyantly.

"I think I do know," said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Well!" cried Mr. Skimpole.  "You know the world (which in your 
sense is the universe), and I know nothing of it, so you shall have 
your way.  But if I had mine," glancing at the cousins, "there 
should be no brambles of sordid realities in such a path as that.  
It should be strewn with roses; it should lie through bowers, where 
there was no spring, autumn, nor winter, but perpetual summer.  Age 
or change should never wither it.  The base word money should never 
be breathed near it!"

Mr. Jarndyce patted him on the head with a smile, as if he had been 
really a child, and passing a step or two on, and stopping a 
moment, glanced at the young cousins.  His look was thoughtful, but 
had a benignant expression in it which I often (how often!) saw 
again, which has long been engraven on my heart.  The room in which 
they were, communicating with that in which he stood, was only 
lighted by the fire.  Ada sat at the piano; Richard stood beside 
her, bending down.  Upon the wall, their shadows blended together, 
surrounded by strange forms, not without a ghostly motion caught 
from the unsteady fire, though reflecting from motionless objects.  
Ada touched the notes so softly and sang so low that the wind, 
sighing away to the distant hills, was as audible as the music.  
The mystery of the future and the little clue afforded to it by the 
voice of the present seemed expressed in the whole picture.

But it is not to recall this fancy, well as I remember it, that I 
recall the scene.  First, I was not quite unconscious of the 
contrast in respect of meaning and intention between the silent 
look directed that way and the flow of words that had preceded it.  
Secondly, though Mr. Jarndyce's glance as he withdrew it rested for 
but a moment on me, I felt as if in that moment he confided to me--
and knew that he confided to me and that I received the confidence
--his hope that Ada and Richard might one day enter on a dearer 
relationship.

Mr. Skimpole could play on the piano and the violoncello, and he 
was a composer--had composed half an opera once, but got tired of 
it--and played what he composed with taste.  After tea we had quite 
a little concert, in which Richard--who was enthralled by Ada's 
singing and told me that she seemed to know all the songs that ever 
were written--and Mr. Jarndyce, and I were the audience.  After a 
little while I missed first Mr. Skimpole and afterwards Richard, 
and while I was thinking how could Richard stay away so long and 
lose so much, the maid who had given me the keys looked in at the 
door, saying, "If you please, miss, could you spare a minute?"

When I was shut out with her in the hall, she said, holding up her 
hands, "Oh, if you please, miss, Mr. Carstone says would you come 
upstairs to Mr. Skimpole's room.  He has been took, miss!"

"Took?" said I. 

"Took, miss.  Sudden," said the maid.

I was apprehensive that his illness might be of a dangerous kind, 
but of course I begged her to be quiet and not disturb any one and 
collected myself, as I followed her quickly upstairs, sufficiently 
to consider what were the best remedies to be applied if it should 
prove to be a fit.  She threw open a door and I went into a 
chamber, where, to my unspeakable surprise, instead of finding Mr. 
Skimpole stretched upon the bed or prostrate on the floor, I found 
him standing before the fire smiling at Richard, while Richard, 
with a face of great embarrassment, looked at a person on the sofa, 
in a white great-coat, with smooth hair upon his head and not much 
of it, which he was wiping smoother and making less of with a 
pocket-handkerchief.

"Miss Summerson," said Richard hurriedly, "I am glad you are come.  
You will be able to advise us.  Our friend Mr. Skimpole--don't be 
alarmed!--is arrested for debt."

"And really, my dear Miss Summerson," said Mr. Skimpole with his 
agreeable candour, "I never was in a situation in which that 
excellent sense and quiet habit of method and usefulness, which 
anybody must observe in you who has the happiness of being a 
quarter of an hour in your society, was more needed."

The person on the sofa, who appeared to have a cold in his head, 
gave such a very loud snort that he startled me.

"Are you arrested for much, sir?" I inquired of Mr. Skimpole.

"My dear Miss Summerson," said he, shaking his head pleasantly, "I 
don't know.  Some pounds, odd shillings, and halfpence, I think, 
were mentioned."

"It's twenty-four pound, sixteen, and sevenpence ha'penny," 
observed the stranger.  "That's wot it is."

"And it sounds--somehow it sounds," said Mr. Skimpole, "like a 
small sum?"

The strange man said nothing but made another snort.  It was such a 
powerful one that it seemed quite to lift him out of his seat.

"Mr. Skimpole," said Richard to me, "has a delicacy in applying to 
my cousin Jarndyce because he has lately--I think, sir, I 
understood you that you had lately--"

"Oh, yes!" returned Mr. Skimpole, smiling.  "Though I forgot how 
much it was and when it was.  Jarndyce would readily do it again, 
but I have the epicure-like feeling that I would prefer a novelty 
in help, that I would rather," and he looked at Richard and me, 
"develop generosity in a new soil and in a new form of flower."

"What do you think will be best, Miss Summerson?" said Richard, 
aside.

I ventured to inquire, generally, before replying, what would 
happen if the money were not produced.

"Jail," said the strange man, coolly putting his handkerchief into 
his hat, which was on the floor at his feet.  "Or Coavinses."

"May I ask, sir, what is--"

"Coavinses?" said the strange man.  "A 'ouse."

Richard and I looked at one another again.  It was a most singular 
thing that the arrest was our embarrassment and not Mr. Skimpole's.  
He observed us with a genial interest, but there seemed, if I may 
venture on such a contradiction, nothing selfish in it.  He had 
entirely washed his hands of the difficulty, and it had become 
ours.

"I thought," he suggested, as if good-naturedly to help us out, 
"that being parties in a Chancery suit concerning (as people say) a 
large amount of property, Mr. Richard or his beautiful cousin, or 
both, could sign something, or make over something, or give some 
sort of undertaking, or pledge, or bond?  I don't know what the 
business name of it may be, but I suppose there is some instrument 
within their power that would settle this?"

"Not a bit on it," said the strange man.

"Really?" returned Mr. Skimpole.  "That seems odd, now, to one who 
is no judge of these things!"

"Odd or even," said the stranger gruffly, "I tell you, not a bit on 
it!"

"Keep your temper, my good fellow, keep your temper!" Mr. Skimpole 
gently reasoned with him as he made a little drawing of his head on 
the fly-leaf of a book.  "Don't be ruffled by your occupation.  We 
can separate you from your office; we can separate the individual 
from the pursuit.  We are not so prejudiced as to suppose that in 
private life you are otherwise than a very estimable man, with a 
great deal of poetry in your nature, of which you may not be 
conscious.

The stranger only answered with another violent snort, whether in 
acceptance of the poetry-tribute or in disdainful rejection of it, 
he did not express to me.

"Now, my dear Miss Summerson, and my dear Mr. Richard," said Mr. 
Skimpole gaily, innocently, and confidingly as he looked at his 
drawing with his head on one side, "here you see me utterly 
incapable of helping myself, and entirely in your hands!  I only 
ask to be free.  The butterflies are free.  Mankind will surely not 
deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!"

"My dear Miss Summerson," said Richard in a whisper, "I have ten 
pounds that I received from Mr. Kenge.  I must try what that will 
do."

I possessed fifteen pounds, odd shillings, which I had saved from 
my quarterly allowance during several years.  I had always thought 
that some accident might happen which would throw me suddenly, 
without any relation or any property, on the world and had always 
tried to keep some little money by me that I might not be quite 
penniless.  I told Richard of my having this little store and 
having no present need of it, and I asked him delicately to inform 
Mr. Skimpole, while I should be gone to fetch it, that we would 
have the pleasure of paying his debt.

When I came back, Mr. Skimpole kissed my hand and seemed quite 
touched.  Not on his own account (I was again aware of that 
perplexing and extraordinary contradiction), but on ours, as if 
personal considerations were impossible with him and the 
contemplation of our happiness alone affected him.  Richard, 
begging me, for the greater grace of the transaction, as he said, 
to settle with Coavinses (as Mr. Skimpole now jocularly called 
him), I counted out the money and received the necessary 
acknowledgment.  This, too, delighted Mr. Skimpole.

His compliments were so delicately administered that I blushed less 
than I might have done and settled with the stranger in the white 
coat without making any mistakes.  He put the money in his pocket 
and shortly said, "Well, then, I'll wish you a good evening, miss.

"My friend," said Mr. Skimpole, standing with his back to the fire 
after giving up the sketch when it was half finished, "I should 
like to ask you something, without offence."

I think the reply was, "Cut away, then!"

"Did you know this morning, now, that you were coming out on this 
errand?" said Mr. Skimpole.

"Know'd it yes'day aft'noon at tea-time," said Coavinses.

"It didn't affect your appetite?  Didn't make you at all uneasy?"

"Not a hit," said Coavinses.  "I know'd if you wos missed to-day, 
you wouldn't be missed to-morrow.  A day makes no such odds."

"But when you came down here," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "it was a 
fine day.  The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the lights 
and shadows were passing across the fields, the birds were 
singing."

"Nobody said they warn't, in MY hearing," returned Coavinses.

"No," observed Mr. Skimpole.  "But what did you think upon the 
road?"

"Wot do you mean?" growled Coavinses with an appearance of strong 
resentment.  "Think!  I've got enough to do, and little enough to 
get for it without thinking.  Thinking!" (with profound contempt).

"Then you didn't think, at all events," proceeded Mr. Skimpole, "to 
this effect: 'Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine, loves to 
hear the wind blow, loves to watch the changing lights and shadows, 
loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature's great 
cathedral.  And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive 
Harold Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his 
only birthright!'  You thought nothing to that effect?"

"I--certainly--did--NOT," said Coavinses, whose doggedness in 
utterly renouncing the idea was of that intense kind that he could 
only give adequate expression to it by putting a long interval 
between each word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might 
have dislocated his neck.

"Very odd and very curious, the mental process is, in you men of 
business!" said Mr. Skimpole thoughtfully.  "Thank you, my friend.  
Good night."

As our absence had been long enough already to seem strange 
downstairs, I returned at once and found Ada sitting at work by the 
fireside talking to her cousin John.  Mr. Skimpole presently 
appeared, and Richard shortly after him.  I was sufficiently 
engaged during the remainder of the evening in taking my first 
lesson in backgammon from Mr. Jarndyce, who was very fond of the 
game and from whom I wished of course to learn it as quickly as I 
could in order that I might be of the very small use of being able 
to play when he had no better adversary.  But I thought, 
occasionally, when Mr. Skimpole played some fragments of his own 
compositions or when, both at the piano and the violoncello, and at 
our table, he preserved with an absence of all effort his 
delightful spirits and his easy flow of conversation, that Richard 
and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having been 
arrested since dinner and that it was very curious altogether.

It was late before we separated, for when Ada was going at eleven 
o'clock, Mr. Skimpole went to the piano and rattled hilariously 
that the best of all ways to lengthen our days was to steal a few 
hours from night, my dear!  It was past twelve before he took his 
candle and his radiant face out of the room, and I think he might 
have kept us there, if he had seen fit, until daybreak.  Ada and 
Richard were lingering for a few moments by the fire, wondering 
whether Mrs. Jellyby had yet finished her dictation for the day, 
when Mr. Jarndyce, who had been out of the room, returned.

"Oh, dear me, what's this, what's this!" he said, rubbing his head 
and walking about with his good-humoured vexation.  "What's this 
they tell me?  Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been 
doing?  Why did you do it?  How could you do it?  How much apiece 
was it?  The wind's round again.  I feel it all over me!"

We neither of us quite knew what to answer.

"Come, Rick, come!  I must settle this before I sleep.  How much 
are you out of pocket?  You two made the money up, you know!  Why 
did you?  How could you?  Oh, Lord, yes, it's due east--must be!"

"Really, sir," said Richard, "I don't think it would be honourable 
in me to tell you.  Mr. Skimpole relied upon us--"

"Lord bless you, my dear boy!  He relies upon everybody!" said Mr. 
Jarndyce, giving his head a great rub and stopping short.

"Indeed, sir?"

"Everybody!  And he'll be in the same scrape again next week!" said 
Mr. Jarndyce, walking again at a great pace, with a candle in his 
hand that had gone out.  "He's always in the same scrape.  He was 
born in the same scrape.  I verily believe that the announcement in 
the newspapers when his mother was confined was 'On Tuesday last, 
at her residence in Botheration Buildings, Mrs. Skimpole of a son 
in difficulties.'"

Richard laughed heartily but added, "Still, sir, I don't want to 
shake his confidence or to break his confidence, and if I submit to 
your better knowledge again, that I ought to keep his secret, I 
hope you will consider before you press me any more.  Of course, if 
you do press me, sir, I shall know I am wrong and will tell you."

"Well!" cried Mr. Jarndyce, stopping again, and making several 
absent endeavours to put his candlestick in his pocket.  "I--here!  
Take it away, my dear.  I don't know what I am about with it; it's 
all the wind--invariably has that effect--I won't press you, Rick; 
you may be right.  But really--to get hold of you and Esther--and 
to squeeze you like a couple of tender young Saint Michael's 
oranges!  It'll blow a gale in the course of the night!"

He was now alternately putting his hands into his pockets as if he 
were going to keep them there a long time, and taking them out 
again and vehemently rubbing them all over his head.

I ventured to take this opportunity of hinting that Mr. Skimpole, 
being in all such matters quite a child--

"Eh, my dear?" said Mr. Jarndyce, catching at the word.

Being quite a child, sir," said I, "and so different from other 
people--"

"You are right!" said Mr. Jarndyce, brightening.  "Your woman's wit 
hits the mark.  He is a child--an absolute child.  I told you he 
was a child, you know, when I first mentioned him."

Certainly! Certainly! we said.

"And he IS a child.  Now, isn't he?" asked Mr. Jarndyce, 
brightening more and more.

He was indeed, we said.

"When you come to think of it, it's the height of childishness in 
you--I mean me--" said Mr. Jarodyce, "to regard him for a moment as 
a man.  You can't make HIM responsible.  The idea of Harold 
Skimpole with designs or plans, or knowledge of consequences!  Ha, 
ha, ha!"

It was so delicious to see the clouds about his bright face 
clearing, and to see him so heartily pleased, and to know, as it 
was impossible not to know, that the source of his pleasure was the 
goodness which was tortured by condemning, or mistrusting, or 
secretly accusing any one, that I saw the tears in Ada's eyes, 
while she echoed his laugh, and felt them in my own.

"Why, what a cod's head and shoulders I am," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to 
require reminding of it!  The whole business shows the child from 
beginning to end.  Nobody but a child would have thought of 
singling YOU two out for parties in the affair!  Nobody but a child 
would have thought of YOUR having the money!  If it had been a 
thousand pounds, it would have been just the same!" said Mr. 
Jarndyce with his whole face in a glow.

We all confirmed it from our night's experience.

"To be sure, to be sure!" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "However, Rick, 
Esther, and you too, Ada, for I don't know that even your little 
purse is safe from his inexperience--I must have a promise all 
round that nothing of this sort shall ever be done any more.  No 
advances!  Not even sixpences."

We all promised faithfully, Richard with a merry glance at me 
touching his pocket as if to remind me that there was no danger of 
OUR transgressing.

"As to Skimpole," said Mr. Jarndyce, "a habitable doll's house with 
good board and a few tin people to get into debt with and borrow 
money of would set the boy up in life.  He is in a child's sleep by 
this time, I suppose; it's time I should take my craftier head to 
my more worldly pillow.  Good night, my dears.  God bless you!"

He peeped in again, with a smiling face, before we had lighted our 
candles, and said, "Oh! I have been looking at the weather-cock.  I 
find it was a false alarm about the wind.  It's in the south!" And 
went away singing to himself.

Ada and I agreed, as we talked together for a little while 
upstairs, that this caprice about the wind was a fiction and that 
he used the pretence to account for any disappointment he could not 
conceal, rather than he would blame the real cause of it or 
disparage or depreciate any one.  We thought this very 
characteristic of his eccentric gentleness and of the difference 
between him and those petulant people who make the weather and the 
winds (particularly that unlucky wind which he had chosen for such 
a different purpose) the stalking-horses of their splenetic and 
gloomy humours.

Indeed, so much affection for him had been added in this one 
evening to my gratitude that I hoped I already began to understand 
him through that mingled feeling.  Any seeming inconsistencies in 
Mr. Skimpole or in Mrs. Jellyby I could not expect to be able to 
reconcile, having so little experience or practical knowledge.  
Neither did I try, for my thoughts were busy when I was alone, with 
Ada and Richard and with the confidence I had seemed to receive 
concerning them.  My fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps, 
would not consent to be all unselfish, either, though I would have 
persuaded it to be so if I could.  It wandered back to my 
godmother's house and came along the intervening track, raising up 
shadowy speculations which had sometimes trembled there in the dark 
as to what knowledge Mr. Jarndyce had of my earliest history--even 
as to the possibility of his being my father, though that idle 
dream was quite gone now.

It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire.  It was 
not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit 
and a grateful heart.  So I said to myself, "Esther, Esther, Esther!  
Duty, my dear!" and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such 
a shake that they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to 
bed.



CHAPTER VII

The Ghost's Walk


While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather 
down at the place in Lincolnshire.  The rain is ever falling--drip, 
drip, drip--by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-
pavement, the Ghost's Walk.  The weather is so very bad down in 
Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend 
its ever being fine again.  Not that there is any superabundant life 
of imagination on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and, 
truly, even if he were, would not do much for it in that 
particular), but is in Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky 
wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold.

There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at 
Chesney Wold.  The horses in the stables--the long stables in a 
barren, red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in a 
turret, and a clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live 
near it and who love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always 
consulting--THEY may contemplate some mental pictures of fine 
weather on occasions, and may be better artists at them than the 
grooms.  The old roan, so famous for cross-country work, turning his 
large eyeball to the grated window near his rack, may remember the 
fresh leaves that glisten there at other times and the scents that 
stream in, and may have a fine run with the hounds, while the human 
helper, clearing out the next stall, never stirs beyond his 
pitchfork and birch-broom.  The grey, whose place is opposite the 
door and who with an impatient rattle of his halter pricks his ears 
and turns his head so wistfully when it is opened, and to whom the 
opener says, "'Woa grey, then, steady!  Noabody wants you to-day!" 
may know it quite as well as the man.  The whole seemingly 
monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen, stabled together, may 
pass the long wet hours when the door is shut in livelier 
communication than is held in the servants' hall or at the Dedlock 
Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps corrupting) 
the pony in the loose-box in the corner.

So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his 
large head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine when the 
shadows of the stable-buildings tire his patience out by changing 
and leave him at one time of the day no broader refuge than the 
shadow of his own house, where he sits on end, panting and growling 
short, and very much wanting something to worry besides himself and 
his chain.  So now, half-waking and all-winking, he may recall the 
house full of company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the 
stables fall of horses, and the out-buildings full of attendants 
upon horses, until he is undecided about the present and comes forth 
to see how it is.  Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he 
may growl in the spirit, "Rain, rain, rain!  Nothing but rain--and 
no family here!" as he goes in again and lies down with a gloomy 
yawn.

So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across the park, who have 
their resfless fits and whose doleful voices when the wind has been 
very obstinate have even made it known in the house itself--
upstairs, downstairs, and in my Lady's chamber.  They may hunt the 
whole country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their 
inactivity.  So the rabbits with their self-betraying tails, 
frisking in and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with 
ideas of the breezy days when their ears are blown about or of those 
seasons of interest when there are sweet young plants to gnaw.  The 
turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance 
(probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning 
wrongfully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled 
trees, where there was a barn and barley.  The discontented goose, 
who stoops to pass under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may 
gabble out, if we only knew it, a waddling preference for weather 
when the gateway casts its shadow on the ground.

Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at 
Chesney Wold.  If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, 
like a little noise in that old echoing place, a long way and 
usually leads off to ghosts and mystery.

It has rained so hard and rained so long down in Lincolnshire that 
Mrs. Rouncewell, the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold, has several 
times taken off her spectacles and cleaned them to make certain 
that the drops were not upon the glasses.  Mrs. Rouncewell might 
have been sufficiently assured by hearing the rain, but that she is 
rather deaf, which nothing will induce her to believe.  She is a 
fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a 
back and such a stomacher that if her stays should turn out when 
she dies to have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate, 
nobody who knows her would have cause to be surprised.  Weather 
affects Mrs. Rouncewell little.  The house is there in all 
weathers, and the house, as she expresses it, "is what she looks 
at."  She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor, 
with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at 
regular intervals with smooth round trees and smooth round blocks 
of stone, as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the 
stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind.  She can open it 
on occasion and be busy and fluttered, but it is shut up now and 
lies on the breadth of Mrs. Rouncewell's iron-bound bosom in a 
majestic sleep.

It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine 
Chesney Wold without Mrs. Rouncewell, but she has only been here 
fifty years.  Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall 
answer "fifty year, three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing 
of heaven, if I live till Tuesday."  Mr. Rouncewell died some time 
before the decease of the pretty fashion of pig-tails, and modestly 
hid his own (if he took it with him) in a corner of the churchyard 
in the park near the mouldy porch.  He was born in the market-town, 
and so was his young widow.  Her progress in the family began in 
the time of the last Sir Leicester and originated in the still-room.

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.  
He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual 
characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was 
born to supersede the necessity of their having any.  If he were to 
make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned--would 
never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.  But he 
is an excellent master still, holding it a part of his state to be 
so.  He has a great liking for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a 
most respectable, creditable woman.  He always shakes hands with 
her when he comes down to Chesney Wold and when he goes away; and 
if he were very ill, or if he were knocked down by accident, or run 
over, or placed in any situation expressive of a Dedlock at a 
disadvantage, he would say if he could speak, "Leave me, and send 
Mrs. Rouncewell here!" feeling his dignity, at such a pass, safer 
with her than with anybody else.

Mrs. Rouncewell has known trouble.  She has had two sons, of whom 
the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back.  
Even to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell's calm hands lose their 
composure when she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from her 
stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner as she says what a 
likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever lad 
he was!  Her second son would have been provided for at Chesney 
Wold and would have been made steward in due season, but he took, 
when he was a schoolboy, to constructing steam-engines out of 
saucepans and setting birds to draw their own water with the least 
possible amount of labour, so assisting them with artful 
contrivance of hydraulic pressure that a thirsty canary had only, 
in a literal sense, to put his shoulder to the wheel and the job 
was done.  This propensity gave Mrs. Rouncewell great uneasiness.  
She felt it with a mother's anguish to be a move in the Wat Tyler 
direction, well knowing that Sir Leicester had that general 
impression of an aptitude for any art to which smoke and a tall 
chimney might be considered essential.  But the doomed young rebel 
(otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering), showing no sign of 
grace as he got older but, on the contrary, constructing a model of 
a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to mention his 
backslidings to the baronet.  "Mrs. Rouncewell," said Sir 
Leicester, "I can never consent to argue, as you know, with any one 
on any subject.  You had better get rid of your boy; you had better 
get him into some Works.  The iron country farther north is, I 
suppose, the congenial direction for a boy with these tendencies."  
Farther north he went, and farther north he grew up; and if Sir 
Leicester Dedlock ever saw him when he came to Chesney Wold to 
visit his mother, or ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain 
that he only regarded him as one of a body of some odd thousand 
conspirators, swarthy and grim, who were in the habit of turning 
out by torchlight two or three nights in the week for unlawful 
purposes.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Rouncewell's son has, in the course of nature 
and art, grown up, and established himself, and married, and called 
unto him Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson, who, being out of his 
apprenticeship, and home from a journey in far countries, whither 
he was sent to enlarge his knowledge and complete his preparations 
for the venture of this life, stands leaning against the chimney-
piece this very day in Mrs. Rouncewell's room at Chesney Wold.

"And, again and again, I am glad to see you, Watt!  And, once 
again, I am glad to see you, Watt!" says Mrs. Rouncewell.  "You are 
a fine young fellow.  You are like your poor uncle George.  Ah!"  
Mrs. Rouncewell's hands unquiet, as usual, on this reference.

"They say I am like my father, grandmother."

"Like him, also, my dear--but most like your poor uncle George!  
And your dear father."  Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again.  "He 
is well?"

"Thriving, grandmother, in every way."

"I am thankful!"  Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a 
plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable 
soldier who had gone over to the enemy.

"He is quite happy?" says she.

"Quite."

"I am thankful!  So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and 
has sent you into foreign countries and the like?  Well, he knows 
best.  There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don't 
understand.  Though I am not young, either.  And I have seen a 
quantity of good company too!"

"Grandmother," says the young man, changing the subject, "what a 
very pretty girl that was I found with you just now.  You called 
her Rosa?"

"Yes, child.  She is daughter of a widow in the village.  Maids are 
so hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me young.  
She's an apt scholar and will do well.  She shows the house 
already, very pretty.  She lives with me at my table here."

"I hope I have not driven her away?"

"She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say.  
She is very modest.  It is a fine quality in a young woman.  And 
scarcer," says Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its 
utmost limits, "than it formerly was!"

The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the precepts 
of experience.  Mrs. Rouncewell listens.

"Wheels!" says she.  They have long been audible to the younger 
ears of her companion.  "What wheels on such a day as this, for 
gracious sake?"

After a short interval, a tap at the door.  "Come in!"  A dark-
eyed, dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in--so fresh in her 
rosy and yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have 
beaten on her hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered.

"What company is this, Rosa?" says Mrs. Rouncewell.

"It's two young men in a gig, ma'am, who want to see the house--
yes, and if you please, I told them so!" in quick reply to a 
gesture of dissent from the housekeeper.  "I went to the hall-door 
and told them it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the 
young man who was driving took off his hat in the wet and begged me 
to bring this card to you."

"Read it, my dear Watt," says the housekeeper.

Rosa is so shy as she gives it to him that they drop it between 
them and almost knock their foreheads together as they pick it up.  
Rosa is shyer than before.

"Mr. Guppy" is all the information the card yields.

"Guppy!" repeats Mrs. Rouncewell, "MR. Guppy!  Nonsense, I never 
heard of him!"

"If you please, he told ME that!" says Rosa.  "But he said that he 
and the other young gentleman came from London only last night by 
the mail, on business at the magistrates' meeting, ten miles off, 
this morning, and that as their business was soon over, and they 
had heard a great deal said of Chesney Wold, and really didn't know 
what to do with themselves, they had come through the wet to see 
it.  They are lawyers.  He says he is not in Mr. Tulkinghorn's 
office, but he is sure he may make use of Mr. Tulkinghorn's name if 
necessary."  Finding, now she leaves off, that she has been making 
quite a long speech, Rosa is shyer than ever.

Now, Mr. Tulkinghorn is, in a manner, part and parcel of the place, 
and besides, is supposed to have made Mrs. Rouncewell's will.  The 
old lady relaxes, consents to the admission of the visitors as a 
favour, and dismisses Rosa.  The grandson, however, being smitten 
by a sudden wish to see the house himself, proposes to join the 
party.  The grandmother, who is pleased that he should have that 
interest, accompanies him--though to do him justice, he is 
exceedingly unwilling to trouble her.

"Much obliged to you, ma'am!" says Mr. Guppy, divesting himself of 
his wet dreadnought in the hall.  "Us London lawyers don't often 
get an out, and when we do, we like to make the most of it, you 
know."

The old housekeeper, with a gracious severity of deportment, waves 
her hand towards the great staircase.  Mr. Guppy and his friend 
follow Rosa; Mrs. Rouncewell and her grandson follow them; a young 
gardener goes before to open the shutters.

As is usually the case with people who go over houses, Mr. Guppy 
and his friend are dead beat before they have well begun.  They 
straggle about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don't care 
for the right things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit 
profound depression of spirits, and are clearly knocked up.  In 
each successive chamber that they enter, Mrs. Rouncewell, who is as 
upright as the house itself, rests apart in a window-seat or other 
such nook and listens with stately approval to Rosa's exposition.  
Her grandson is so attentive to it that Rosa is shyer than ever--
and prettier.  Thus they pass on from room to room, raising the 
pictured Dedlocks for a few brief minutes as the young gardener 
admits the light, and reconsigning them to their graves as he shuts 
it out again.  It appears to the afflicted Mr. Guppy and his 
inconsolable friend that there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose 
family greatness seems to consist in their never having done 
anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years.

Even the long drawing-room of Chesney Wold cannot revive Mr. 
Guppy's spirits.  He is so low that he droops on the threshold and 
has hardly strength of mind to enter.  But a portrait over the 
chimney-piece, painted by the fashionable artist of the day, acts 
upon him like a charm.  He recovers in a moment.  He stares at it 
with uncommon interest; he seems to be fixed and fascinated by it.

"Dear me!" says Mr. Guppy.  "Who's that?"

"The picture over the fire-place," says Rosa, "is the portrait of 
the present Lady Dedlock.  It is considered a perfect likeness, and 
the best work of the master."

"'Blest," says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of dismay at his 
friend, "if I can ever have seen her.  Yet I know her!  Has the 
picture been engraved, miss?"

"The picture has never been engraved.  Sir Leicester has always 
refused permission."

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy in a low voice.  "I'll be shot if it ain't 
very curious how well I know that picture!  So that's Lady Dedlock, 
is it!"

"The picture on the right is the present Sir Leicester Dedlock.  
The picture on the left is his father, the late Sir Leicester."

Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates.  "It's 
unaccountable to me," he says, still staring at the portrait, "how 
well I know that picture!  I'm dashed," adds Mr. Guppy, looking 
round, "if I don't think I must have had a dream of that picture, 
you know!"

As no one present takes any especial interest in Mr. Guppy's 
dreams, the probability is not pursued.  But he still remains so 
absorbed by the portrait that he stands immovable before it until 
the young gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of 
the room in a dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient 
substitute for interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with 
a confused stare, as if he were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock 
again.

He sees no more of her.  He sees her rooms, which are the last 
shown, as being very elegant, and he looks out of the windows from 
which she looked out, not long ago, upon the weather that bored her 
to death.  All things have an end, even houses that people take 
infinite pains to see and are tired of before they begin to see 
them.  He has come to the end of the sight, and the fresh village 
beauty to the end of her description; which is always this: "The 
terrace below is much admired.  It is called, from an old story in 
the family, the Ghost's Walk."

"No?" says Mr. Guppy, greedily curious.  "What's the story, miss?  
Is it anything about a picture?"

"Pray tell us the story," says Watt in a half whisper.

"I don't know it, sir."  Rosa is shyer than ever.

"It is not related to visitors; it is almost forgotten," says the 
housekeeper, advancing.  "It has never been more than a family 
anecdote."

"You'll excuse my asking again if it has anything to do with a 
picture, ma'am," observes Mr. Guppy, "because I do assure you that 
the more I think of that picture the better I know it, without 
knowing how I know it!"

The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can 
guarantee that.  Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information 
and is, moreover, generally obliged.  He retires with his friend, 
guided down another staircase by the young gardener, and presently 
is heard to drive away.  It is now dusk.  Mrs. Rouncewell can trust 
to the discretion of her two young hearers and may tell THEM how 
the terrace came to have that ghostly name.

She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and 
tells them: "In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the 
First--I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who 
leagued themselves against that excellent king--Sir Morbury Dedlock 
was the owner of Chesney Wold.  Whether there was any account of a 
ghost in the family before those days, I can't say.  I should think 
it very likely indeed."

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a 
family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost.  
She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, 
a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

"Sir Morbury Dedlock," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "was, I have no 
occasion to say, on the side of the blessed martyr.  But it IS 
supposed that his Lady, who had none of the family blood in her 
veins, favoured the bad cause.  It is said that she had relations 
among King Charles's enemies, that she was in correspondence with 
them, and that she gave them information.  When any of the country 
gentlemen who followed his Majesty's cause met here, it is said 
that my Lady was always nearer to the door of their council-room 
than they supposed.  Do you hear a sound like a footstep passing 
along the terrace, Watt?"

Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper.

"I hear the rain-drip on the stones," replies the young man, "and I 
hear a curious echo--I suppose an echo--which is very like a 
halting step."

The housekeeper gravely nods and continues: "Partly on account of 
this division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir 
Morbury and his Lady led a troubled life.  She was a lady of a 
haughty temper.  They were not well suited to each other in age or 
character, and they had no children to moderate between them.  
After her favourite brother, a young gentleman, was killed in the 
civil wars (by Sir Morbury's near kinsman), her feeling was so 
violent that she hated the race into which she had married.  When 
the Dedlocks were about to ride out from Chesney Wold in the king's 
cause, she is supposed to have more than once stolen down into the 
stables in the dead of night and lamed their horses; and the story 
is that once at such an hour, her husband saw her gliding down the 
stairs and followed her into the stall where his own favourite 
horse stood.  There he seized her by the wrist, and in a struggle 
or in a fall or through the horse being frightened and lashing out, 
she was lamed in the hip and from that hour began to pine away."

The housekeeper has dropped her voice to a little more than a 
whisper.

"She had been a lady of a handsome figure and a noble carriage.  
She never complained of the change; she never spoke to any one of 
being crippled or of being in pain, but day by day she tried to 
walk upon the terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade, 
went up and down, up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with 
greater difficulty every day.  At last, one afternoon her husband 
(to whom she had never, on any persuasion, opened her lips since 
that night), standing at the great south window, saw her drop upon 
the pavement.  He hastened down to raise her, but she repulsed him 
as he bent over her, and looking at him fixedly and coldly, said, 
'I will die here where I have walked.  And I will walk here, though 
I am in my grave.  I will walk here until the pride of this house 
is humbled.  And when calamity or when disgrace is coming to it, 
let the Dedlocks listen for my step!'

Watt looks at Rosa.  Rosa in the deepening gloom looks down upon 
the ground, half frightened and half shy.

"There and then she died.  And from those days," says Mrs. 
Rouncewell, "the name has come down--the Ghost's Walk.  If the 
tread is an echo, it is an echo that is only heard after dark, and 
is often unheard for a long while together.  But it comes back from 
time to time; and so sure as there is sickness or death in the 
family, it will be heard then."

"And disgrace, grandmother--" says Watt.

"Disgrace never comes to Chesney Wold," returns the housekeeper.

Her grandson apologizes with "True.  True."

"That is the story.  Whatever the sound is, it is a worrying 
sound," says Mrs. Rouncewell, getting up from her chair; "and what 
is to be noticed in it is that it MUST BE HEARD.  My Lady, who is 
afraid of nothing, admits that when it is there, it must be heard.  
You cannot shut it out.  Watt, there is a tall French clock behind 
you (placed there, 'a purpose) that has a loud beat when it is in 
motion and can play music.  You understand how those things are 
managed?"

"Pretty well, grandmother, I think."

"Set it a-going."

Watt sets it a-going--music and all.

"Now, come hither," says the housekeeper.  "Hither, child, towards 
my Lady's pillow.  I am not sure that it is dark enough yet, but 
listen!  Can you hear the sound upon the terrace, through the 
music, and the beat, and everything?"

"I certainly can!"

"So my Lady says."



CHAPTER VIII

Covering a Multitude of Sins


It was interesting when I dressed before daylight to peep out of 
window, where my candles were reflected in the black panes like two 
beacons, and finding all beyond still enshrouded in the 
indistinctness of last night, to watch how it turned out when the 
day came on.  As the prospect gradually revealed itself and 
disclosed the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, 
like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the 
unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep.  At first they 
were faintly discernible in the mist, and above them the later 
stars still glimmered.  That pale interval over, the picture began 
to enlarge and fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have 
found enough to look at for an hour.  Imperceptibly my candles 
became the only incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in 
my room all melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful 
landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its 
massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than 
seemed compatible with its rugged character.  But so from rough 
outsides (I hope I have learnt), serene and gentle influences often 
proceed.

Every part of the house was in such order, and every one was so 
attentive to me, that I had no trouble with my two bunches of keys, 
though what with trying to remember the contents of each little 
store-room drawer and cupboard; and what with making notes on a 
slate about jams, and pickles, and preserves, and bottles, and 
glass, and china, and a great many other things; and what with 
being generally a methodical, old-maidish sort of foolish little 
person, I was so busy that I could not believe it was breakfast-
time when I heard the bell ring.  Away I ran, however, and made 
tea, as I had already been installed into the responsibility of the 
tea-pot; and then, as they were all rather late and nobody was down 
yet, I thought I would take a peep at the garden and get some 
knowledge of that too.  I found it quite a delightful place--in 
front, the pretty avenue and drive by which we had approached (and 
where, by the by, we had cut up the gravel so terribly with our 
wheels that I asked the gardener to roll it); at the back, the 
flower-garden, with my darling at her window up there, throwing it 
open to smile out at me, as if she would have kissed me from that 
distance.  Beyond the flower-garden was a kitchen-garden, and then 
a paddock, and then a snug little rick-yard, and then a dear little 
farm-yard.  As to the house itself, with its three peaks in the 
roof; its various-shaped windows, some so large, some so small, and 
all so pretty; its trellis-work, against the southfront for roses 
and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable, welcoming look--it 
was, as Ada said when she came out to meet me with her arm through 
that of its master, worthy of her cousin John, a bold thing to say, 
though he only pinched her dear cheek for it.

Mr. Skimpole was as agreeable at breakfast as he had been 
overnight.  There was honey on the table, and it led him into a 
discourse about bees.  He had no objection to honey, he said (and I 
should think he had not, for he seemed to like it), but he 
protested against the overweening assumptions of bees.  He didn't 
at all see why the busy bee should be proposed as a model to him; 
he supposed the bee liked to make honey, or he wouldn't do it--
nobody asked him.  It was not necessary for the bee to make such a 
merit of his tastes.  If every confectioner went buzzing about the 
world banging against everything that came in his way and 
egotistically calling upon everybody to take notice that he was 
going to his work and must not be interrupted, the world would be 
quite an unsupportable place.  Then, after all, it was a ridiculous 
position to be smoked out of your fortune with brimstone as soon as 
you had made it.  You would have a very mean opinion of a 
Manchester man if he spun cotton for no other purpose.  He must say 
he thought a drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea.  
The drone said unaffectedly, "You will excuse me; I really cannot 
attend to the shop!  I find myself in a world in which there is so 
much to see and so short a time to see it in that I must take the 
liberty of looking about me and begging to be provided for by 
somebody who doesn't want to look about him."  This appeared to Mr. 
Skimpole to be the drone philosophy, and he thought it a very good 
philosophy, always supposing the drone to be willing to be on good 
terms with the bee, which, so far as he knew, the easy fellow 
always was, if the consequential creature would only let him, and 
not be so conceited about his honey!

He pursued this fancy with the lightest foot over a variety of 
ground and made us all merry, though again he seemed to have as 
serious a meaning in what he said as he was capable of having.  I 
left them still listening to him when I withdrew to attend to my 
new duties.  They had occupied me for some time, and I was passing 
through the passages on my return with my basket of keys on my arm 
when Mr. Jarndyce called me into a small room next his bed-chamber, 
which I found to be in part a little library of books and papers 
and in part quite a little museum of his boots and shoes and hat-
boxes.

"Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce.  "This, you must know, is 
the growlery.  When I am out of humour, I come and growl here."

"You must be here very seldom, sir," said I.

"Oh, you don't know me!" he returned.  "When I am deceived or 
disappointed in--the wind, and it's easterly, I take refuge here.  
The growlery is the best-used room in the house.  You are not aware 
of half my humours yet.  My dear, how you are trembling!"

I could not help it; I tried very hard, but being alone with that 
benevolent presence, and meeting his kind eyes, and feeling so 
happy and so honoured there, and my heart so full--

I kissed his hand.  I don't know what I said, or even that I spoke.  
He was disconcerted and walked to the window; I almost believed 
with an intention of jumping out, until he turned and I was 
reassured by seeing in his eyes what he had gone there to hide.  He 
gently patted me on the head, and I sat down.

"There!  There!" he said.  "That's over.  Pooh!  Don't be foolish."

"It shall not happen again, sir," I returned, "but at first it is 
difficult--"

"Nonsense!" he said.  "It's easy, easy.  Why not?  I hear of a good 
little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head 
to be that protector.  She grows up, and more than justifies my 
good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend.  What is 
there in all this?  So, so!  Now, we have cleared off old scores, 
and I have before me thy pleasant, trusting, trusty face again."

I said to myself, "Esther, my dear, you surprise me!  This really 
is not what I expected of you!"  And it had such a good effect that 
I folded my hands upon my basket and quite recovered myself.  Mr. 
Jarndyce, expressing his approval in his face, began to talk to me 
as confidentially as if I had been in the habit of conversing with 
him every morning for I don't know how long.  I almost felt as if I 
had.

"Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery 
business?"

And of course I shook my head.

"I don't know who does," he returned.  "The lawyers have twisted it 
into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the 
case have long disappeared from the face of the earth.  It's about 
a will and the trusts under a will--or it was once.  It's about 
nothing but costs now.  We are always appearing, and disappearing, 
and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and 
arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, 
and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and 
equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs.  
That's the great question.  All the rest, by some extraordinary 
means, has melted away."

"But it was, sir," said I, to bring him back, for he began to rub 
his head, "about a will?"

"Why, yes, it was about a will when it was about anything," he 
returned.   "A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great 
fortune, and made a great will.  In the question how the trusts 
under that will are to be administered, the fortune left by the 
will is squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to 
such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished 
if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them, 
and the will itself is made a dead letter.  All through the 
deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it, except one man, 
knows already is referred to that only one man who don't know it to 
find out--all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have 
copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated 
about it in the way of cartloads of papers (or must pay for them 
without having them, which is the usual course, for nobody wants 
them) and must go down the middle and up again through such an 
infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and 
corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a 
witch's Sabbath.  Equity sends questions to law, law sends 
questions back to equity; law finds it can't do this, equity finds 
it can't do that; neither can so much as say it can't do anything, 
without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for 
A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; 
and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the apple 
pie.  And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, 
everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and 
nothing ever ends.  And we can't get out of the suit on any terms, 
for we are made parties to it, and MUST BE parties to it, whether 
we like it or not.  But it won't do to think of it!  When my great 
uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the 
beginning of the end!"

"The Mr. Jarndyce, sir, whose story I have heard?"

He nodded gravely.  "I was his heir, and this was his house, 
Esther.  When I came here, it was bleak indeed.  He had left the 
signs of his misery upon it."

"How changed it must be now!" I said.

"It had been called, before his time, the Peaks.  He gave it its 
present name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the 
wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to 
disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close.  In 
the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled 
through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, 
the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door.  When I brought 
what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have 
been blown out of the house too, it was so shattered and ruined."

He walked a little to and fro after saying this to himself with a 
shudder, and then looked at me, and brightened, and came and sat 
down again with his hands in his pockets.

"I told you this was the growlery, my dear.  Where was I?"

I reminded him, at the hopeful change he had made in Bleak House.

"Bleak House; true.  There is, in that city of London there, some 
property of ours which is much at this day what Bleak House was 
then; I say property of ours, meaning of the suit's, but I ought to 
call it the property of costs, for costs is the only power on earth 
that will ever get anything out of it now or will ever know it for 
anything but an eyesore and a heartsore.  It is a street of 
perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out, without a pane 
of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank 
shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder, the iron 
rails peeling away in flakes of rust, the chimneys sinking in, the 
stone steps to every door (and every door might be death's door) 
turning stagnant green, the very crutches on which the ruins are 
propped decaying.  Although Bleak House was not in Chancery, its 
master was, and it was stamped with the same seal.  These are the 
Great Seal's impressions, my dear, all over England--the children 
know them!"

"How changed it is!" I said again.

"Why, so it is," he answered much more cheerfully; "and it is 
wisdom in you to keep me to the bright side of the picture."  (The 
idea of my wisdom!)  "These are things I never talk about or even 
think about, excepting in the growlery here.  If you consider it 
right to mention them to Rick and Ada," looking seriously at me, 
"you can.  I leave it to your discretion, Esther."

"I hope, sir--" said I.

"I think you had better call me guardian, my dear."

I felt that I was choking again--I taxed myself with it, "Esther, 
now, you know you are!"--when he feigned to say this slightly, as 
if it were a whim instead of a thoughtful tenderness.  But I gave 
the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world as a reminder to 
myself, and folding my hands in a still more determined manner on 
the basket, looked at him quietly.

"I hope, guardian," said I, "that you may not trust too much to my 
discretion.  I hope you may not mistake me.  I am afraid it will be 
a disappointment to you to know that I am not clever, but it really 
is the truth, and you would soon find it out if I had not the 
honesty to confess it."

He did not seem at all disappointed; quite the contrary.  He told 
me, with a smile all over his face, that he knew me very well 
indeed and that I was quite clever enough for him.

"I hope I may turn out so," said I, "but I am much afraid of it, 
guardian."

"You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives 
here, my dear," he returned playfully; "the little old woman of the 
child's (I don't mean Skimpole's) rhyme:


     'Little old woman, and whither so high?'
     'To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.'


You will sweep them so neatly out of OUR sky in the course of your 
housekeeping, Esther, that one of these days we shall have to 
abandon the growlery and nail up the door."

This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old 
Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame 
Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became 
quite lost among them.

"However," said Mr. Jarndyce, "to return to our gossip.  Here's 
Rick, a fine young fellow full of promise.  What's to be done with 
him?"

Oh, my goodness, the idea of asking my advice on such a point!

"Here he is, Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his 
hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs.  "He must have 
a profession; he must make some choice for himself.  There will be 
a world more wiglomeration about it, I suppose, but it must be 
done."

"More what, guardian?" said I.

"More wiglomeration," said he.  "It's the only name I know for the 
thing.  He is a ward in Chancery, my dear.  Kenge and Carboy will 
have something to say about it; Master Somebody--a sort of 
ridiculous sexton, digging graves for the merits of causes in a 
back room at the end of Quality Court, Chancery Lane--will have 
something to say about it; counsel will have something to say about 
it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it; the 
satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have 
to be handsomely feed, all round, about it; the whole thing will be 
vastly ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I 
call it, in general, wiglomeration.  How mankind ever came to be 
afflicted with wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people 
ever fell into a pit of it, I don't know; so it is."

He began to rub his head again and to hint that he felt the wind.  
But it was a delightful instance of his kindness towards me that 
whether he rubbed his head, or walked about, or did both, his face 
was sure to recover its benignant expression as it looked at mine; 
and he was sure to turn comfortable again and put his hands in his 
pockets and stretch out his legs.

"Perhaps it would be best, first of all," said I, "to ask Mr. 
Richard what he inclines to himself."

"Exactly so," he returned.  "That's what I mean!  You know, just 
accustom yourself to talk it over, with your tact and in your quiet 
way, with him and Ada, and see what you all make of it.  We are 
sure to come at the heart of the matter by your means, little 
woman."

I really was frightened at the thought of the importance I was 
attaining and the number of things that were being confided to me.  
I had not meant this at all; I had meant that he should speak to 
Richard.  But of course I said nothing in reply except that I would 
do my best, though I feared (I realty felt it necessary to repeat 
this) that he thought me much more sagacious than I was.  At which 
my guardian only laughed the pleasantest laugh I ever heard.

"Come!" he said, rising and pushing back his chair.  "I think we 
may have done with the growlery for one day!  Only a concluding 
word.  Esther, my dear, do you wish to ask me anything?"

He looked so attentively at me that I looked attentively at him and 
felt sure I understood him.

"About myself, sir?" said I.

"Yes."

"Guardian," said I, venturing to put my hand, which was suddenly 
colder than I could have wished, in his, "nothing!  I am quite sure 
that if there were anything I ought to know or had any need to 
know, I should not have to ask you to tell it to me.  If my whole 
reliance and confidence were not placed in you, I must have a hard 
heart indeed.  I have nothing to ask you, nothing in the world."

He drew my hand through his arm and we went away to look for Ada.  
From that hour I felt quite easy with him, quite unreserved, quite 
content to know no more, quite happy.

We lived, at first, rather a busy life at Bleak House, for we had 
to become acquainted with many residents in and out of the 
neighbourhood who knew Mr. Jarndyce.  It seemed to Ada and me that 
everybody knew him who wanted to do anything with anybody else's 
money.  It amazed us when we began to sort his letters and to 
answer some of them for him in the growlery of a morning to find 
how the great object of the lives of nearly all his correspondents 
appeared to be to form themselves into committees for getting in 
and laying out money.  The ladies were as desperate as the 
gentlemen; indeed, I think they were even more so.  They threw 
themselves into committees in the most impassioned manner and 
collected subscriptions with a vehemence quite extraordinary.  It 
appeared to us that some of them must pass their whole lives in 
dealing out subscription-cards to the whole post-office directory--
shilling cards, half-crown cards, half-sovereign cards, penny 
cards.  They wanted everything.  They wanted wearing apparel, they 
wanted linen rags, they wanted money, they wanted coals, they 
wanted soup, they wanted interest, they wanted autographs, they 
wanted flannel, they wanted whatever Mr. Jarndyce had--or had not.  
Their objects were as various as their demands.  They were going to 
raise new buildings, they were going to pay off debts on old 
buildings, they were going to establish in a picturesque building 
(engraving of proposed west elevation attached) the Sisterhood of 
Mediaeval Marys, they were going to give a testimonial to Mrs. 
Jellyby, they were going to have their secretary's portrait painted 
and presented to his mother-in-law, whose deep devotion to him was 
well known, they were going to get up everything, I really believe, 
from five hundred thousand tracts to an annuity and from a marble 
monument to a silver tea-pot.  They took a multitude of titles.  
They were the Women of England, the Daughters of Britain, the 
Sisters of all the cardinal virtues separately, the Females of 
America, the Ladies of a hundred denominations.  They appeared to 
be always excited about canvassing and electing.  They seemed to 
our poor wits, and according to their own accounts, to be 
constantly polling people by tens of thousands, yet never bringing 
their candidates in for anything.  It made our heads ache to think, 
on the whole, what feverish lives they must lead.

Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious 
benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who 
seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, 
to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself.  
We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became 
the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. 
Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked 
that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people 
who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the 
people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.  We were 
therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a 
type of the former class, and were glad when she called one day 
with her five young sons.

She was a formidable style of lady with spectacles, a prominent 
nose, and a loud voice, who had the effect of wanting a great deal 
of room.  And she really did, for she knocked down little chairs 
with her skirts that were quite a great way off.  As only Ada and I 
were at home, we received her timidly, for she seemed to come in 
like cold weather and to make the little Pardiggles blue as they 
followed.

"These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility 
after the first salutations, "are my five boys.  You may have seen 
their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) 
in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce.  Egbert, my 
eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the 
amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians.  Oswald, 
my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and 
nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial.  Francis, my 
third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), 
eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), 
has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is 
pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form."

We had never seen such dissatisfied children.  It was not merely 
that they were weazened and shrivelled--though they were certainly 
that to--but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent.  At 
the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed 
Eghert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave 
me such a savage frown.  The face of each child, as the amount of 
his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive 
manner, but his was by far the worst.  I must except, however, the 
little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and 
evenly miserable.

"You have been visiting, I understand," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "at 
Mrs. Jellyby's?"

We said yes, we had passed one night there.

"Mrs. Jellyby," pursued the lady, always speaking in the same 
demonstrative, loud, hard tone, so that her voice impressed my 
fancy as if it had a sort of spectacles on too--and I may take the 
opportunity of remarking that her spectacles were made the less 
engaging by her eyes being what Ada called "choking eyes," meaning 
very prominent--"Mrs. Jellyby is a benefactor to society and 
deserves a helping hand.  My boys have contributed to the African 
project--Egbert, one and six, being the entire allowance of nine 
weeks; Oswald, one and a penny halfpenny, being the same; the rest, 
according to their little means.  Nevertheless, I do not go with 
Mrs. Jellyby in all things.  I do not go with Mrs. Jellyby in her 
treatment of her young family.  It has been noticed.  It has been 
observed that her young family are excluded from participation in 
the objects to which she is devoted.  She may be right, she may be 
wrong; but, right or wrong, this is not my course with MY young 
family.  I take them everywhere."

I was afterwards convinced (and so was Ada) that from the ill-
conditioned eldest child, these words extorted a sharp yell.  He 
turned it off into a yawn, but it began as a yell.

"They attend matins with me (very prettily done) at half-past six 
o'clock in the morning all the year round, including of course the 
depth of winter," said Mrs. Pardiggle rapidly, "and they are with 
me during the revolving duties of the day.  I am a School lady, I 
am a Visiting lady, I am a Reading lady, I am a Distributing lady; 
I am on the local Linen Box Committee and many general committees; 
and my canvassing alone is very extensive--perhaps no one's more 
so.  But they are my companions everywhere; and by these means they 
acquire that knowledge of the poor, and that capacity of doing 
charitable business in general--in short, that taste for the sort 
of thing--which will render them in after life a service to their 
neighbours and a satisfaction to themselves.  My young family are 
not frivolous; they expend the entire amount of their allowance in 
subscriptions, under my direction; and they have attended as many 
public meetings and listened to as many lectures, orations, and 
discussions as generally fall to the lot of few grown people.  
Alfred (five), who, as I mentioned, has of his own election joined 
the Infant Bonds of Joy, was one of the very few children who 
manifested consciousness on that occasion after a fervid address of 
two hours from the chairman of the evening."

Alfred glowered at us as if he never could, or would, forgive the 
injury of that night.

"You may have observed, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "in 
some of the lists to which I have referred, in the possession of 
our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce, that the names of my young family 
are concluded with the name of O. A. Pardiggle, F.R.S., one pound.  
That is their father.  We usually observe the same routine.  I put 
down my mite first; then my young family enrol their contributions, 
according to their ages and their little means; and then Mr. 
Pardiggle brings up the rear.  Mr. Pardiggle is happy to throw in 
his limited donation, under my direction; and thus things are made 
not only pleasant to ourselves, but, we trust, improving to 
others."

Suppose Mr. Pardiggle were to dine with Mr. Jellyby, and suppose 
Mr. Jellyby were to relieve his mind after dinner to Mr. Pardiggle, 
would Mr. Pardiggle, in return, make any confidential communication 
to Mr. Jellyby?  I was quite confused to find myself thinking this, 
but it came into my head.

"You are very pleasantly situated here!" said Mrs. Pardiggle.

We were glad to change the subject, and going to the window, 
pointed out the beauties of the prospect, on which the spectacles 
appeared to me to rest with curious indifference.

"You know Mr. Gusher?" said our visitor.

We were obliged to say that we had not the pleasure of Mr. Gusher's 
acquaintance.

"The loss is yours, I assure you," said Mrs. Pardiggle with her 
commanding deportment.  "He is a very fervid, impassioned speaker-
full of fire!  Stationed in a waggon on this lawn, now, which, from 
the shape of the land, is naturally adapted to a public meeting, he 
would improve almost any occasion you could mention for hours and 
hours!  By this time, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle, moving 
back to her chair and overturning, as if by invisible agency, a 
little round table at a considerable distance with my work-basket 
on it, "by this time you have found me out, I dare say?"

This was really such a confusing question that Ada looked at me in 
perfect dismay.  As to the guilty nature of my own consciousness 
after what I had been thinking, it must have been expressed in the 
colour of my cheeks.

"Found out, I mean," said Mrs. Pardiggle, "the prominent point in 
my character.  I am aware that it is so prominent as to be 
discoverable immediately.  I lay myself open to detection, I know.  
Well!  I freely admit, I am a woman of business.  I love hard work; 
I enjoy hard work.  The excitement does me good.  I am so 
accustomed and inured to hard work that I don't know what fatigue 
is."

We murmured that it was very astonishing and very gratifying, or 
something to that effect.  I don't think we knew what it was 
either, but this is what our politeness expressed.

"I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if 
you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle.  "The quantity of exertion (which is 
no exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as 
nothing), that I go through sometimes astonishes myself.  I have 
seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with 
witnessing it, when I may truly say I have been as fresh as a 
lark!"

If that dark-visaged eldest boy could look more malicious than he 
had already looked, this was the time when he did it.  I observed 
that he doubled his right fist and delivered a secret blow into the 
crown of his cap, which was under his left arm.

"This gives me a great advantage when I am making my rounds," said 
Mrs. Pardiggle.  "If I find a person unwilling to hear what I have 
to say, I tell that person directly, 'I am incapable of fatigue, my 
good friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have 
done.'  It answers admirably!  Miss Summerson, I hope I shall have 
your assistance in my visiting rounds immediately, and Miss Clare's 
very soon."

At first I tried to excuse myself for the present on the general 
ground of having occupations to attend to which I must not neglect.  
But as this was an ineffectual protest, I then said, more 
particularly, that I was not sure of my qualifications.  That I was 
inexperienced in the art of adapting my mind to minds very 
differently situated, and addressing them from suitable points of 
view.  That I had not that delicate knowledge of the heart which 
must be essential to such a work.  That I had much to learn, 
myself, before I could teach others, and that I could not confide 
in my good intentions alone.  For these reasons I thought it best 
to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I 
could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle 
of duty gradually and naturally expand itself.  All this I said 
with anything but confidence, because Mrs. Pardiggle was much older 
than I, and had great experience, and was so very military in her 
manners.

"You are wrong, Miss Summerson," said she, "but perhaps you are not 
equal to hard work or the excitement of it, and that makes a vast 
difference.  If you would like to see how I go through my work, I 
am now about--with my young family--to visit a brickmaker in the 
neighbourhood (a very bad character) and shall be glad to take you 
with me.  Miss Clare also, if she will do me the favour."

Ada and I interchanged looks, and as we were going out in any case, 
accepted the offer.  When we hastily returned from putting on our 
bonnets, we found the young family languishing in a corner and Mrs. 
Pardiggle sweeping about the room, knocking down nearly all the 
light objects it contained.  Mrs. Pardiggle took possession of Ada, 
and I followed with the family.

Ada told me afterwards that Mrs. Pardiggle talked in the same loud 
tone (that, indeed, I overheard) all the way to the brickmaker's 
about an exciting contest which she had for two or three years 
waged against another lady relative to the bringing in of their 
rival candidates for a pension somewhere.  There had been a 
quantity of printing, and promising, and proxying, and polling, and 
it appeared to have imparted great liveliness to all concerned, 
except the pensioners--who were not elected yet.

I am very fond of being confided in by children and am happy in 
being usually favoured in that respect, but on this occasion it 
gave me great uneasiness.  As soon as we were out of doors, Egbert, 
with the manner of a little footpad, demanded a shilling of me on 
the ground that his pocket-money was "boned" from him.  On my 
pointing out the great impropriety of the word, especially in 
connexion with his parent (for he added sulkily "By her!"), he 
pinched me and said, "Oh, then!  Now!  Who are you!  YOU wouldn't 
like it, I think?  What does she make a sham for, and pretend to 
give me money, and take it away again?  Why do you call it my 
allowance, and never let me spend it?"  These exasperating 
questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of Oswald and Francis 
that they all pinched me at once, and in a dreadfully expert way--
screwing up such little pieces of my arms that I could hardly 
forbear crying out.  Felix, at the same time, stamped upon my toes.  
And the Bond of Joy, who on account of always having the whole of 
his little income anticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain from 
cakes as well as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we 
passed a pastry-cook's shop that he terrified me by becoming 
purple.  I never underwent so much, both in body and mind, in the 
course of a walk with young people as from these unnaturally 
constrained children when they paid me the compliment of being 
natural.

I was glad when we came to the brickmaker's house, though it was 
one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties 
close to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the 
doors growing nothing but stagnant pools.  Here and there an old 
tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or 
they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-
pie.  At the doors and windows some men and women lounged or 
prowled about, and took little notice of us except to laugh to one 
another or to say something as we passed about gentlefolks minding 
their own business and not troubling their heads and muddying their 
shoes with coming to look after other people's.

Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral 
determination and talking with much volubility about the untidy 
habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have 
been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the 
farthest corner, the ground-floor room of which we nearly filled.  
Besides ourselves, there were in this damp, offensive room a woman 
with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a 
man, all stained with clay and mud and looking very dissipated, 
lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful 
young man fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl doing some 
kind of washing in very dirty water.  They all looked up at us as 
we came in, and the woman seemed to turn her face towards the fire 
as if to hide her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome.

"Well, my friends," said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a 
friendly sound, I thought; it was much too businesslike and 
systematic.  "How do you do, all of you?  I am here again.  I told 
you, you couldn't tire me, you know.  I am fond of hard work, and 
am true to my word."

"There an't," growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on 
his hand as he stared at us, "any more on you to come in, is 
there?"

"No, my friend," said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool 
and knocking down another.  "We are all here."

"Because I thought there warn't enough of you, perhaps?" said the 
man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.

The young man and the girl both laughed.  Two friends of the young 
man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with 
their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.

"You can't tire me, good people," said Mrs. Pardiggle to these 
latter.  "I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the 
better I like it."

"Then make it easy for her!" growled the man upon the floor.  "I 
wants it done, and over.  I wants a end of these liberties took 
with my place.  I wants an end of being drawed like a badger.  Now 
you're a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom--I know 
what you're a-going to be up to.  Well!  You haven't got no 
occasion to be up to it.  I'll save you the trouble.  Is my 
daughter a-washin?  Yes, she IS a-washin.  Look at the water.  
Smell it!  That's wot we drinks.  How do you like it, and what do 
you think of gin instead!  An't my place dirty?  Yes, it is dirty--
it's nat'rally dirty, and it's nat'rally onwholesome; and we've had 
five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so 
much the better for them, and for us besides.  Have I read the 
little book wot you left?  No, I an't read the little book wot you 
left.  There an't nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there 
wos, it wouldn't be suitable to me.  It's a book fit for a babby, 
and I'm not a babby.  If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn't 
nuss it.  How have I been conducting of myself?  Why, I've been 
drunk for three days; and I'da been drunk four if I'da had the 
money.  Don't I never mean for to go to church?  No, I don't never 
mean for to go to church.  I shouldn't be expected there, if I did; 
the beadle's too gen-teel for me.  And how did my wife get that 
black eye?  Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn't, she's a 
lie!"

He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now 
turned over on his other side and smoked again.  Mrs. Pardiggle, 
who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible 
composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his 
antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable's 
staff and took the whole family into custody.  I mean into 
religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were 
an inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station-
house.

Ada and I were very uncomfortable.  We both felt intrusive and out 
of place, and we both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on 
infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of 
taking possession of people.  The children sulked and stared; the 
family took no notice of us whatever, except when the young man 
made the dog bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was 
most emphatic.  We both felt painfully sensible that between us and 
these people there was an iron barrier which could not be removed 
by our new friend.  By whom or how it could be removed, we did not 
know, but we knew that.  Even what she read and said seemed to us 
to be ill-chosen for such auditors, if it had been imparted ever so 
modestly and with ever so much tact.  As to the little book to 
which the man on the floor had referred, we acqulred a knowledge of 
it afterwards, and Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe 
could have read it, though he had had no other on his desolate 
island.

We were much relieved, under these circumstances, when Mrs. 
Pardiggle left off.

The man on the floor, then turning his bead round again, said 
morosely, "Well!  You've done, have you?"

"For to-day, I have, my friend.  But I am never fatigued.  I shall 
come to you again in your regular order," returned Mrs. Pardiggle 
with demonstrative cheerfulness.

"So long as you goes now," said he, folding his arms and shutting 
his eyes with an oath, "you may do wot you like!"

Mrs. Pardiggle accordingly rose and made a little vortex in the 
confined room from which the pipe itself very narrowly escaped.  
Taking one of her young family in each hand, and telling the others 
to follow closely, and expressing her hope that the brickmaker and 
all his house would be improved when she saw them next, she then 
proceeded to another cottage.  I hope it is not unkind in me to say 
that she certainly did make, in this as in everything else, a show 
that was not conciliatory of doing charity by wholesale and of 
dealing in it to a large extent.

She supposed that we were following her, but as soon as the space 
was left clear, we approached the woman sitting by the fire to ask 
if the baby were ill.

She only looked at it as it lay on her lap.  We had observed before 
that when she looked at it she covered her discoloured eye with her 
hand, as though she wished to separate any association with noise 
and violence and ill treatment from the poor little child.

Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by its appearance, bent down to 
touch its little face.  As she did so, I saw what happened and drew 
her back.  The child died.

"Oh, Esther!" cried Ada, sinking on her knees beside it.  "Look 
here!  Oh, Esther, my love, the little thing!  The suffering, 
quiet, pretty little thing!  I am so sorry for it.  I am so sorry 
for the mother.  I never saw a sight so pitiful as this before!  
Oh, baby, baby!"

Such compassion, such gentleness, as that with which she bent down 
weeping and put her hand upon the mother's might have softened any 
mother's heart that ever beat.  The woman at first gazed at her in 
astonishment and then burst into tears.

Presently I took the light burden from her lap, did what I could to 
make the baby's rest the prettier and gentler, laid it on a shelf, 
and covered it with my own handkerchief.  We tried to comfort the 
mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children.  
She answered nothing, but sat weeping--weeping very much.

When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog and 
was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but 
quiet.  The girl was quiet too and sat in a corner looking on the 
ground.  The man had risen.  He still smoked his pipe with an air 
of defiance, but he was silent.

An ugly woman, very poorly clothed, hurried in while I was glancing 
at them, and coming straight up to the mother, said, "Jenny!  
Jenny!"  The mother rose on being so addressed and fell upon the 
woman's neck.

She also had upon her face and arms the marks of ill usage.  She 
had no kind of grace about her, but the grace of sympathy; but when 
she condoled with the woman, and her own tears fell, she wanted no 
beauty.  I say condoled, but her only words were "Jenny!  Jenny!"  
All the rest was in the tone in which she said them.

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and 
shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one 
another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of 
each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives.  I 
think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us.  What 
the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves 
and God.

We felt it better to withdraw and leave them uninterrupted.  We 
stole out quietly and without notice from any one except the man.  
He was leaning against the wall near the door, and finding that 
there was scarcely room for us to pass, went out before us.  He 
seemed to want to hide that he did this on our account, but we 
perceived that be did, and thanked him.  He made no answer.

Ada was so full of grief all the way home, and Richard, whom we 
found at home, was so distressed to see her in tears (though he 
said to me, when she was not present, how beautiful it was too!), 
that we arranged to return at night with some little comforts and 
repeat our visit at the brick-maker's house.  We said as little as 
we could to Mr. Jarndyce, but the wind changed directly.

Richard accompanied us at night to the scene of our morning 
expedition.  On our way there, we had to pass a noisy drinking-
house, where a number of men were flocking about the door.  Among 
them, and prominent in some dispute, was the father of the little 
child.  At a short distance, we passed the young man and the dog, 
in congenial company.  The sister was standing laughing and talking 
with some other young women at the corner of the row of cottages, 
but she seemed ashamed and turned away as we went by.

We left our escort within sight of the brickmaker's dwelling and 
proceeded by ourselves.  When we came to the door, we found the 
woman who had brought such consolation with her standing there 
looking anxiously out.

"It's you, young ladies, is it?" she said in a whisper.  "I'm a-
watching for my master.  My heart's in my mouth.  If he was to 
catch me away from home, he'd pretty near murder me."

"Do you mean your husband?" said I.

"Yes, miss, my master.  Jennys asleep, quite worn out.  She's 
scarcely had the child off her lap, poor thing, these seven days 
and nights, except when I've been able to take it for a minute or 
two."

As she gave way for us, she went softly in and put what we had 
brought near the miserable bed on which the mother slept.  No 
effort had been made to clean the room--it seemed in its nature 
almost hopeless of being clean; but the small waxen form from which 
so much solemnity diffused itself had been composed afresh, and 
washed, and neatly dressed in some fragments of white linen; and on 
my handkerchief, which still covered the poor baby, a little bunch 
of sweet herbs had been laid by the same rough, scarred hands, so 
lightly, so tenderly!

"May heaven reward you!" we said to her.  "You are a good woman."

"Me, young ladies?" she returned with surprise.  "Hush!  Jenny, 
Jenny!"

The mother had moaned in her sleep and moved.  The sound of the 
familiar voice seemed to calm her again.  She was quiet once more.

How little I thought, when I raised my handkerchief to look upon 
the tiny sleeper underneath and seemed to see a halo shine around 
the child through Ada's drooping hair as her pity bent her head--
how little I thought in whose unquiet bosom that handkerchief would 
come to lie after covering the motionless and peaceful breast!  I 
only thought that perhaps the Angel of the child might not be all 
unconscious of the woman who replaced it with so compassionate a 
hand; not all unconscious of her presently, when we had taken 
leave, and left her at the door, by turns looking, and listening in 
terror for herself, and saying in her old soothing manner, "Jenny, 
Jenny!"



CHAPTER IX

Signs and Tokens


I don't know how it is I seem to be always writing about myself.  I 
mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think 
about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find 
myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, 
"Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn't!" 
but it is all of no use.  I hope any one who may read what I write 
will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me, 
I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do 
with them and can't be kept out.

My darling and I read together, and worked, and practised, and 
found so much employment for our time that the winter days flew by 
us like bright-winged birds.  Generally in the afternoons, and 
always in the evenings, Richard gave us his company.  Although he 
was one of the most restless creatures in the world, he certainly 
was very fond of our society.

He was very, very, very fond of Ada.  I mean it, and I had better 
say it at once.  I had never seen any young people falling in love 
before, but I found them out quite soon.  I could not say so, of 
course, or show that I knew anything about it.  On the contrary, I 
was so demure and used to seem so unconscious that sometimes I 
considered within myself while I was sitting at work whether I was 
not growing quite deceitful.

But there was no help for it.  All I had to do was to be quiet, and 
I was as quiet as a mouse.  They were as quiet as mice too, so far 
as any words were concerned, but the innocent manner in which they 
relied more and more upon me as they took more and more to one 
another was so charming that I had great difficulty in not showing 
how it interested me.

"Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman," Richard 
would say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his 
pleasant laugh and perhaps the least tinge of a blush, "that I 
can't get on without her.  Before I begin my harum-scarum day--
grinding away at those books and instruments and then galloping up 
hill and down dale, all the country round, like a highwayman--it 
does me so much good to come and have a steady walk with our 
comfortable friend, that here I am again!"

"You know, Dame Durden, dear," Ada would say at night, with her 
head upon my shoulder and the firelight shining in her thoughtful 
eyes, "I don't want to talk when we come upstairs here.  Only to 
sit a little while thinking, with your dear face for company, and 
to hear the wind and remember the poor sailors at sea--"

Ah!  Perhaps Richard was going to be a sailor.  We had talked it 
over very often now, and there was some talk of gratifying the 
inclination of his childhood for the sea.  Mr. Jarndyce had written 
to a relation of the family, a great Sir Leicester Dedlock, for his 
interest in Richard's favour, generally; and Sir Leicester had 
replied in a gracious manner that he would be happy to advance the 
prospects of the young gentleman if it should ever prove to be 
within his power, which was not at all probable, and that my Lady 
sent her compliments to the young gentleman (to whom she perfectly 
remembered that she was allied by remote consanguinity) and trusted 
that he would ever do his duty in any honourable profession to 
which he might devote himself.

"So I apprehend it's pretty clear," said Richard to me, "that I 
shall have to work my own way.  Never mind!  Plenty of people have 
had to do that before now, and have done it.  I only wish I had the 
command of a clipping privateer to begin with and could carry off 
the Chancellor and keep him on short allowance until he gave 
judgment in our cause.  He'd find himself growing thin, if he 
didn't look sharp!"

With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever 
flagged, Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite 
perplexed me, principally because he mistook it, in such a very odd 
way, for prudence.  It entered into all his calculations about 
money in a singular manner which I don't think I can better explain 
than by reverting for a moment to our loan to Mr. Skimpole.

Mr. Jarndyce had ascertained the amount, either from Mr. Skimpole 
himself or from Coavinses, and had placed the money in my hands 
with instructions to me to retain my own part of it and hand the 
rest to Richard.  The number of little acts of thoughtless 
expenditure which Richard justified by the recovery of his ten 
pounds, and the number of times he talked to me as if he had saved 
or realized that amount, would form a sum in simple addition.

"My prudent Mother Hubbard, why not?" he said to me when he wanted, 
without the least consideration, to bestow five pounds on the 
brickmaker.  "I made ten pounds, clear, out of Coavinses' 
business."

"How was that?" said I.

"Why, I got rid of ten pounds which I was quite content to get rid 
of and never expected to see any more.  You don't deny that?"

"No," said I.

"Very well!  Then I came into possession of ten pounds--"

"The same ten pounds," I hinted.

"That has nothing to do with it!" returned Richard.  "I have got 
ten pounds more than I expected to have, and consequently I can 
afford to spend it without being particular."

In exactly the same way, when he was persuaded out of the sacrifice 
of these five pounds by being convinced that it would do no good, 
he carried that sum to his credit and drew upon it.

"Let me see!" he would say.  "I saved five pounds out of the 
brickmaker's affair, so if I have a good rattle to London and back 
in a post-chaise and put that down at four pounds, I shall have 
saved one.  And it's a very good thing to save one, let me tell 
you: a penny saved is a penny got!"

I believe Richard's was as frank and generous a nature as there 
possibly can be.  He was ardent and brave, and in the midst of all 
his wild restlessness, was so gentle that I knew him like a brother 
in a few weeks.  His gentleness was natural to him and would have 
shown itself abundantly even without Ada's influence; but with it, 
he became one of the most winning of companions, always so ready to 
be interested and always so happy, sanguine, and light-hearted.  I 
am sure that I, sitting with them, and walking with them, and 
talking with them, and noticing from day to day how they went on, 
falling deeper and deeper in love, and saying nothing about it, and 
each shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets, 
perhaps not yet suspected even by the other--I am sure that I was 
scarcely less enchanted than they were and scarcely less pleased 
with the pretty dream.

We were going on in this way, when one morning at breakfast Mr. 
Jarndyce received a letter, and looking at the superscription, 
said, "From Boythorn?  Aye, aye!" and opened and read it with 
evident pleasure, announcing to us in a parenthesis when he was 
about half-way through, that Boythorn was "coming down" on a visit.  
Now who was Boythorn, we all thought.  And I dare say we all 
thought too--I am sure I did, for one--would Boythorn at all 
interfere with what was going forward?

"I went to school with this fellow, Lawrence Boythorn," said Mr. 
Jarndyce, tapping the letter as he laid it on the table, "more than 
five and forty years ago.  He was then the most impetuous boy in 
the world, and he is now the most impetuous man.  He was then the 
loudest boy in the world, and he is now the loudest man.  He was 
then the heartiest and sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now 
the heartiest and sturdiest man.  He is a tremendous fellow."

"In stature, sir?" asked Richard.

"Pretty well, Rick, in that respect," said Mr. Jarndyce; "being 
some ten years older than I and a couple of inches taller, with his 
head thrown back like an old soldier, his stalwart chest squared, 
his hands like a clean blacksmith's, and his lungs!  There's no 
simile for his lungs.  Talking, laughing, or snoring, they make the 
beams of the house shake."

As Mr. Jarndyce sat enjoying the image of his friend Boythorn, we 
observed the favourable omen that there was not the least 
indication of any change in the wind.

"But it's the inside of the man, the warm heart of the man, the 
passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man, Rick--and Ada, and 
little Cobweb too, for you are all interested in a visitor--that I 
speak of," he pursued.  "His language is as sounding as his voice.  
He is always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree.  
In his condemnation he is all ferocity.  You might suppose him to 
be an ogre from what he says, and I believe he has the reputation 
of one with some people.  There!  I tell you no more of him 
beforehand.  You must not be surprised to see him take me under his 
protection, for he has never forgotten that I was a low boy at 
school and that our friendship began in his knocking two of my head 
tyrant's teeth out (he says six) before breakfast.  Boythorn and 
his man," to me, "will be here this afternoon, my dear."

I took care that the necessary preparations were made for Mr. 
Boythorn's reception, and we looked forward to his arrival with 
some curiosity.  The afternoon wore away, however, and he did not 
appear.  The dinner-hour arrived, and still he did not appear.  The 
dinner was put back an hour, and we were sitting round the fire 
with no light but the blaze when the hall-door suddenly burst open 
and the hall resounded with these words, uttered with the greatest 
vehemence and in a stentorian tone: "We have been misdirected, 
Jarndyce, by a most abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the 
turning to the right instead of to the left.  He is the most 
intolerable scoundrel on the face of the earth.  His father must 
have been a most consummate villain, ever to have such a son.  I 
would have had that fellow shot without the least remorse!"

"Did he do it on purpose?" Mr. Jarndyce inquired.

"I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his 
whole existence in misdirecting travellers!" returned the other.  
"By my soul, I thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld 
when he was telling me to take the turning to the right.  And yet I 
stood before that fellow face to face and didn't knock his brains 
out!"

"Teeth, you mean?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, really making the 
whole house vibrate.  "What, you have not forgotten it yet!  Ha, 
ha, ha!  And that was another most consummate vagabond!  By my 
soul, the countenance of that fellow when he was a boy was the 
blackest image of perfidy, cowardice, and cruelty ever set up as a 
scarecrow in a field of scoundrels.  If I were to meet that most 
unparalleled despot in the streets to-morrow, I would fell him like 
a rotten tree!"

"I have no doubt of it," said Mr. Jarndyce.  "Now, will you come 
upstairs?"

"By my soul, Jarndyce," returned his guest, who seemed to refer to 
his watch, "if you had been married, I would have turned back at 
the garden-gate and gone away to the remotest summits of the 
Himalaya Mountains sooner than I would have presented myself at 
this unseasonable hour."

"Not quite so far, I hope?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"By my life and honour, yes!" cried the visitor.  "I wouldn't be 
guilty of the audacious insolence of keeping a lady of the house 
waiting all this time for any earthly consideration.  I would 
infinitely rather destroy myself--infinitely rather!"

Talking thus, they went upstairs, and presently we heard him in his 
bedroom thundering "Ha, ha, ha!" and again "Ha, ha, ha!" until the 
flattest echo in the neighbourhood seemed to catch the contagion 
and to laugh as enjoyingly as he did or as we did when we heard him 
laugh.

We all conceived a prepossession in his favour, for there was a 
sterling quality in this laugh, and in his vigorous, healthy voice, 
and in the roundness and fullness with which he uttered every word 
he spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to 
go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing.  But we were hardly 
prepared to have it so confirmed by his appearance when Mr. 
Jarndyce presented him.  He was not only a very handsome old 
gentleman--upright and stalwart as he had been described to us--
with a massive grey head, a fine composure of face when silent, a 
figure that might have become corpulent but for his being so 
continually in earnest that he gave it no rest, and a chin that 
might have subsided into a double chin but for the vehement 
emphasis in which it was constantly required to assist; but he was 
such a true gentleman in his manner, so chivalrously polite, his 
face was lighted by a smile of so much sweetness and tenderness, 
and it seemed so plain that he had nothing to hide, but showed 
himself exactly as he was--incapable, as Richard said, of anything 
on a limited scale, and firing away with those blank great guns 
because he carried no small arms whatever--that really I could not 
help looking at him with equal pleasure as he sat at dinner, 
whether he smilingly conversed with Ada and me, or was led by Mr. 
Jarndyce into some great volley of superlatives, or threw up his 
head like a bloodhound and gave out that tremendous "Ha, ha, ha!"

"You have brought your bird with you, I suppose?" said Mr. 
Jarndyce.

"By heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe!" replied the 
other.  "He IS the most wonderful creature!  I wouldn't take ten 
thousand guineas for that bird.  I have left an annuity for his 
sole support in case he should outlive me.  He is, in sense and 
attachment, a phenomenon.  And his father before him was one of the 
most astonishing birds that ever lived!"

The subject of this laudation was a very little canary, who was so 
tame that he was brought down by Mr. Boythorn's man, on his 
forefinger, and after taking a gentle flight round the room, 
alighted on his master's head.  To hear Mr. Boythorn presently 
expressing the most implacable and passionate sentiments, with this 
fragile mite of a creature quietly perched on his forehead, was to 
have a good illustration of his character, I thought.

"By my soul, Jarndyce," he said, very gently holding up a bit of 
bread to the canary to peck at, "if I were in your place I would 
seize every master in Chancery by the throat tomorrow morning and 
shake him until his money rolled out of his pockets and his bones 
rattled in his skin.  I would have a settlement out of somebody, by 
fair means or by foul.  If you would empower me to do it, I would 
do it for you with the greatest satisfaction!"  (All this time the 
very small canary was eating out of his hand.)

"I thank you, Lawrence, but the suit is hardly at such a point at 
present," returned Mr. Jarndyce, laughing, "that it would be 
greatly advanced even by the legal process of shaking the bench and 
the whole bar."

"There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery on the 
face of the earth!" said Mr. Boythorn.  "Nothing but a mine below 
it on a busy day in term time, with all its records, rules, and 
precedents collected in it and every functionary belonging to it 
also, high and low, upward and downward, from its son the 
Accountant-General to its father the Devil, and the whole blown to 
atoms with ten thousand hundredweight of gunpowder, would reform it 
in the least!"

It was impossible not to laugh at the energetic gravity with which 
he recommended this strong measure of reform.  When we laughed, he 
threw up his head and shook his broad chest, and again the whole 
country seemed to echo to his "Ha, ha, ha!"  It had not the least 
effect in disturbing the bird, whose sense of security was complete 
and who hopped about the table with its quick head now on this side 
and now on that, turning its bright sudden eye on its master as if 
he were no more than another bird.

"But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed right 
of way?" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "You are not free from the toils of 
the law yourself!"

"The fellow has brought actions against ME for trespass, and I have 
brought actions against HIM for trespass," returned Mr. Boythorn.  
"By heaven, he is the proudest fellow breathing.  It is morally 
impossible that his name can be Sir Leicester.  It must be Sir 
Lucifer."

"Complimentary to our distant relation!" said my guardian 
laughingly to Ada and Richard.

"I would beg Miss Clare's pardon and Mr. Carstone's pardon," 
resumed our visitor, "if I were not reassured by seeing in the fair 
face of the lady and the smile of the gentleman that it is quite 
unnecessary and that they keep their distant relation at a 
comfortable distance."

"Or he keeps us," suggested Richard.

"By my soul," exclaimed Mr. Boythorn, suddenly firing another 
volley, "that fellow is, and his father was, and his grandfather 
was, the most stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pig-headed numskull, 
ever, by some inexplicable mistake of Nature, born in any station 
of life but a walking-stick's!  The whole of that family are the 
most solemnly conceited and consummate blockheads!  But it's no 
matter; he should not shut up my path if he were fifty baronets 
melted into one and living in a hundred Chesney Wolds, one within 
another, like the ivory balls in a Chinese carving.  The fellow, by 
his agent, or secretary, or somebody, writes to me 'Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet, presents his compliments to Mr. Lawrence 
Boythorn, and has to call his attention to the fact that the green 
pathway by the old parsonage-house, now the property of Mr. 
Lawrence Boythorn, is Sir Leicester's right of way, being in fact a 
portion of the park of chesney Wold, and that Sir Leicester finds 
it convenient to close up the same.'  I write to the fellow, 'Mr. 
Lawrence Boythorn presents his compliments to Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet, and has to call HIS attention to the fact that he 
totally denies the whole of Sir Leicester Dedlock's positions on 
every possible subject and has to add, in reference to closing up 
the pathway, that he will be glad to see the man who may undertake 
to do it.'  The fellow sends a most abandoned villain with one eye 
to construct a gateway.  I play upon that execrable scoundrel with 
a fire-engine until the breath is nearly driven out of his body.  
The fellow erects a gate in the night.  I chop it down and burn it 
in the morning.  He sends his myrmidons to come over the fence and 
pass and repass.  I catch them in humane man traps, fire split peas 
at their legs, play upon them with the engine--resolve to free 
mankind from the insupportable burden of the existence of those 
lurking ruffians.  He brings actions for trespass; I bring actions 
for trespass.  He brings actions for assault and battery; I defend 
them and continue to assault and batter.  Ha, ha, ha!"

To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have 
thought him the angriest of mankind.  To see him at the very same 
time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb and softly 
smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought 
him the gentlest.  To hear him laugh and see the broad good nature 
of his face then, one might have supposed that he had not a care in 
the world, or a dispute, or a dislike, but that his whole existence 
was a summer joke.

"No, no," he said, "no closing up of my paths by any Dedlock!  
Though I willingly confess," here he softened in a moment, "that 
Lady Dedlock is the most accomplished lady in the world, to whom I 
would do any homage that a plain gentleman, and no baronet with a 
head seven hundred years thick, may.  A man who joined his regiment 
at twenty and within a week challenged the most imperious and 
presumptuous coxcomb of a commanding officer that ever drew the 
breath of life through a tight waist--and got broke for it--is not 
the man to be walked over by all the Sir Lucifers, dead or alive, 
locked or unlocked.  Ha, ha, ha!"

"Nor the man to allow his junior to be walked over either?" said my 
guardian.

"Most assuredly not!" said Mr. Boythorn, clapping him on the 
shoulder with an air of protection that had something serious in 
it, though he laughed.  "He will stand by the low boy, always.  
Jarndyce, you may rely upon him!  But speaking of this trespass--
with apologies to Miss Clare and Miss Summerson for the length at 
which I have pursued so dry a subject--is there nothing for me from 
your men Kenge and Carboy?"

"I think not, Esther?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Nothing, guardian."

"Much obliged!" said Mr. Boythorn.  "Had no need to ask, after even 
my slight experience of Miss Summerson's forethought for every one 
about her."  (They all encouraged me; they were determined to do 
it.)  "I inquired because, coming from Lincolnshire, I of course 
have not yet been in town, and I thought some letters might have 
been sent down here.  I dare say they will report progress to-
morrow morning."

I saw him so often in the course of the evening, which passed very 
pleasantly, contemplate Richard and Ada with an interest and a 
satisfaction that made his fine face remarkably agreeable as he sat 
at a little distance from the piano listening to the music--and he 
had small occasion to tell us that he was passionately fond of 
music, for his face showed it--that I asked my guardian as we sat 
at the backgammon board whether Mr. Boythorn had ever been married.

"No," said he.  "No."

"But he meant to be!" said I.

"How did you find out that?" he returned with a smile.  "Why, 
guardian," I explained, not without reddening a little at hazarding 
what was in my thoughts, "there is something so tender in his 
manner, after all, and he is so very courtly and gentle to us, and
--"

Mr. Jarndyce directed his eyes to where he was sitting as I have 
just described him.

I said no more.

"You are right, little woman," he answered.  "He was all but 
married once.  Long ago.  And once."

"Did the lady die?"

"No--but she died to him.  That time has had its influence on all 
his later life.  Would you suppose him to have a head and a heart 
full of romance yet?"

"I think, guardian, I might have supposed so.  But it is easy to 
say that when you have told me so."

"He has never since been what he might have been," said Mr. 
Jarndyce, "and now you see him in his age with no one near him but 
his servant and his little yellow friend.  It's your throw, my 
dear!"

I felt, from my guardian's manner, that beyond this point I could 
not pursue the subject without changing the wind.  I therefore 
forbore to ask any further questions.  I was interested, but not 
curious.  I thought a little while about this old love story in the 
night, when I was awakened by Mr. Boythorn's lusty snoring; and I 
tried to do that very difficult thing, imagine old people young 
again and invested with the graces of youth.  But I fell asleep 
before I had succeeded, and dreamed of the days when I lived in my 
godmother's house.  I am not sufficiently acquainted with such 
subjects to know whether it is at all remarkable that I almost 
always dreamed of that period of my life.

With the morning there came a letter from Messrs. Kenge and Carboy 
to Mr. Boythorn informing him that one of their clerks would wait 
upon him at noon.  As it was the day of the week on which I paid the 
bills, and added up my books, and made all the household affairs as 
compact as possible, I remained at home while Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and 
Richard took advantage of a very fine day to make a little 
excursion, Mr. Boythorn was to wait for Kenge and Carboy's clerk and 
then was to go on foot to meet them on their return.

Well!  I was full of business, examining tradesmen's books, adding 
up columns, paying money, filing receipts, and I dare say making a 
great bustle about it when Mr. Guppy was announced and shown in.  I 
had had some idea that the clerk who was to be sent down might be 
the young gentleman who had met me at the coach-office, and I was 
glad to see him, because he was associated with my present 
happiness.

I scarcely knew him again, he was so uncommonly smart.  He had an 
entirely new suit of glossy clothes on, a shining hat, lilac-kid 
gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house 
flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little 
finger.  Besides which, he quite scented the dining-room with 
bear's-grease and other perfumery.  He looked at me with an 
attention that quite confused me when I begged him to take a seat 
until the servant should return; and as he sat there crossing and 
uncrossing his legs in a corner, and I asked him if he had had a 
pleasant ride, and hoped that Mr. Kenge was well, I never looked at 
him, but I found him looking at me in the same scrutinizing and 
curious way.

When the request was brought to him that he would go up-stairs to 
Mr. Boythorn's room, I mentioned that he would find lunch prepared 
for him when he came down, of which Mr. Jarndyce hoped he would 
partake.  He said with some embarrassment, holding the handle of the 
door, '"Shall I have the honour of finding you here, miss?"  I 
replied yes, I should be there; and he went out with a bow and 
another look.

I thought him only awkward and shy, for he was evidently much 
embarrassed; and I fancied that the best thing I could do would be 
to wait until I saw that he had everything he wanted and then to 
leave him to himself.  The lunch was soon brought, but it remained 
for some time on the table.  The interview with Mr. Boythorn was a 
long one, and a stormy one too, I should think, for although his 
room was at some distance I heard his loud voice rising every now 
and then like a high wind, and evidently blowing perfect broadsides 
of denunciation.

At last Mr. Guppy came back, looking something the worse for the 
conference.  "My eye, miss," he said in a low voice, "he's a 
Tartar!"

"Pray take some refreshment, sir," said I.

Mr. Guppy sat down at the table and began nervously sharpening the 
carving-knife on the carving-fork, still looking at me (as I felt 
quite sure without looking at him) in the same unusual manner.  The 
sharpening lasted so long that at last I felt a kind of obligation 
on me to raise my eyes in order that I might break the spell under 
which he seemed to labour, of not being able to leave off.

He immediately looked at the dish and began to carve.

"What will you take yourself, miss?  You'll take a morsel of 
something?"

"No, thank you," said I.

"Shan't I give you a piece of anything at all, miss?" said Mr. 
Guppy, hurriedly drinking off a glass of wine.

"Nothing, thank you," said I.  "I have only waited to see that you 
have everything you want.  Is there anything I can order for you?"

"No, I am much obliged to you, miss, I'm sure.  I've everything that 
I can require to make me comfortable--at least I--not comfortable--
I'm never that."  He drank off two more glasses of wine, one after 
another.

I thought I had better go.

"I beg your pardon, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, rising when he saw me 
rise.  "But would you allow me the favour of a minute's private 
conversation?"

Not knowing what to say, I sat down again.

"What follows is without prejudice, miss?" said Mr. Guppy, anxiously 
bringing a chair towards my table.

"I don't understand what you mean," said I, wondering.

"It's one of our law terms, miss.  You won't make any use of it to 
my detriment at Kenge and Carboy's or elsewhere.  If our 
conversation shouldn't lead to anything, I am to be as I was and am 
not to be prejudiced in my situation or worldly prospects.  In 
short, it's in total confidence."

"I am at a loss, sir," said I, "to imagine what you can have to 
communicate in total confidence to me, whom you have never seen but 
once; but I should be very sorry to do you any injury."

"Thank you, miss.  I'm sure of it--that's quite sufficient."  All 
this time Mr. Guppy was either planing his forehead with his 
handkerchief or tightly rubbing the palm of his left hand with the 
palm of his right.  "If you would excuse my taking another glass of 
wine, miss, I think it might assist me in getting on without a 
continual choke that cannot fail to be mutually unpleasant."

He did so, and came back again.  I took the opportunity of moving 
well behind my table.

"You wouldn't allow me to offer you one, would you miss?" said Mr. 
Guppy, apparently refreshed.

"Not any," said I.

"Not half a glass?" said Mr. Guppy.  "Quarter?  No!  Then, to 
proceed.  My present salary, Miss Summerson, at Kenge and Carboy's, 
is two pound a week.  When I first had the happiness of looking upon 
you, it was one fifteen, and had stood at that figure for a 
lengthened period.  A rise of five has since taken place, and a 
further rise of five is guaranteed at the expiration of a term not 
exceeding twelve months from the present date.  My mother has a 
little property, which takes the form of a small life annuity, upon 
which she lives in an independent though unassuming manner in the 
Old Street Road.  She is eminently calculated for a mother-in-law.  
She never interferes, is all for peace, and her disposition easy.  
She has her failings--as who has not?--but I never knew her do it 
when company was present, at which time you may freely trust her 
with wines, spirits, or malt liquors.  My own abode is lodgings at 
Penton Place, Pentonville.  It is lowly, but airy, open at the back, 
and considered one of the 'ealthiest outlets.  Miss Summerson!  In 
the mildest language, I adore you.  Would you be so kind as to allow 
me (as I may say) to file a declaration--to make an offer!"

Mr. Guppy went down on his knees.  I was well behind my table and 
not much frightened.  I said, "Get up from that ridiculous position 
lmmediately, sir, or you will oblige me to break my implied promise 
and ring the bell!"

"Hear me out, miss!" said Mr. Guppy, folding his hands.

"I cannot consent to hear another word, sir," I returned, "Unless 
you get up from the carpet directly and go and sit down at the table 
as you ought to do if you have any sense at all."

He looked piteously, but slowly rose and did so.

"Yet what a mockery it is, miss," he said with his hand upon his 
heart and shaking his head at me in a melancholy manner over the 
tray, "to be stationed behind food at such a moment.  The soul 
recoils from food at such a moment, miss."

"I beg you to conclude," said I; "you have asked me to hear you out, 
and I beg you to conclude."

"I will, miss," said Mr. Guppy.  "As I love and honour, so likewise 
I obey.  Would that I could make thee the subject of that vow before 
the shrine!"

"That is quite impossible," said I, "and entirely out of the 
question."

"I am aware," said Mr. Guppy, leaning forward over the tray and 
regarding me, as I again strangely felt, though my eyes were not 
directed to him, with his late intent look, "I am aware that in a 
worldly point of view, according to all appearances, my offer is a 
poor one.  But, Miss Summerson!  Angel!  No, don't ring--I have been 
brought up in a sharp school and am accustomed to a variety of 
general practice.  Though a young man, I have ferreted out evidence, 
got up cases, and seen lots of life.  Blest with your hand, what 
means might I not find of advancing your interests and pushing your 
fortunes!  What might I not get to know, nearly concerning you?  I 
know nothing now, certainly; but what MIGHT I not if I had your 
confidence, and you set me on?"

I told him that he addressed my interest or what he supposed to be 
my interest quite as unsuccessfully as he addressed my inclination, 
and he would now understand that I requested him, if he pleased, to 
go away immediately.

"Cruel miss," said Mr. Guppy, "hear but another word!  I think you 
must have seen that I was struck with those charms on the day when I 
waited at the Whytorseller.  I think you must have remarked that I 
could not forbear a tribute to those charms when I put up the steps 
of the 'ackney-coach.  It was a feeble tribute to thee, but it was 
well meant.  Thy image has ever since been fixed in my breast.  I 
have walked up and down of an evening opposite Jellyby's house only 
to look upon the bricks that once contained thee.  This out of to-
day, quite an unnecessary out so far as the attendance, which was 
its pretended object, went, was planned by me alone for thee alone.  
If I speak of interest, it is only to recommend myself and my 
respectful wretchedness.  Love was before it, and is before it."

"I should be pained, Mr. Guppy," said I, rising and putting my hand 
upon the bell-rope, "to do you or any one who was sincere the 
injustice of slighting any honest feeling, however disagreeably 
expressed.  If you have really meant to give me a proof of your good 
opinion, though ill-timed and misplaced, I feel that I ought to 
thank you.  I have very little reason to be proud, and I am not 
proud.  I hope," I think I added, without very well knowing what I 
said, "that you will now go away as if you had never been so 
exceedingly foolish and attend to Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's 
business."

"Half a minute, miss!" cried Mr. Guppy, checking me as I was about 
to ring.  "This has been without prejudice?"

"I will never mention it," said I, "unless you should give me future 
occasion to do so."

"A quarter of a minute, miss!  In case you should think better at 
any time, however distant--THAT'S no consequence, for my feelings 
can never alter--of anything I have said, particularly what might I 
not do, Mr. William Guppy, eighty-seven, Penton Place, or if 
removed, or dead (of blighted hopes or anything of that sort), care 
of Mrs. Guppy, three hundred and two, Old Street Road, will be 
sufficient."

I rang the bell, the servant came, and Mr. Guppy, laying his written 
card upon the table and making a dejected bow, departed.  Raising my 
eyes as he went out, I once more saw him looking at me after he had 
passed the door.

I sat there for another hour or more, finishing my books and 
payments and getting through plenty of business.  Then I arranged my 
desk, and put everything away, and was so composed and cheerful that 
I thought I had quite dismissed this unexpected incident.  But, when 
I went upstairs to my own room, I surprised myself by beginning to 
laugh about it and then surprised myself still more by beginning to 
cry about it.  In short, I was in a flutter for a little while and 
felt as if an old chord had been more coarsely touched than it ever 
had been since the days of the dear old doll, long buried in the 
garden.



CHAPTER X

The Law-Writer


On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more 
particularly in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby, law-
stationer, pursues his lawful calling.  In the shade of Cook's 
Court, at most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all 
sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of 
parchment; in paper--foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-
brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-
rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape 
and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists; 
in string boxes, rulers, inkstands--glass and leaden--pen-knives, 
scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in 
articles too numerous to mention, ever since he was out of his time 
and went into partnership with Peffer.  On that occasion, Cook's 
Court was in a manner revolutionized by the new inscription in fresh 
paint, PEFFER AND SNAGSBY, displacing the time-honoured and not 
easily to be deciphered legend PEFFER only.  For smoke, which is the 
London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer's name and clung to 
his dwelling-place that the affectionate parasite quite overpowered 
the parent tree.

Peffer is never seen in Cook's Court now.  He is not expected there, 
for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the 
churchyard of St. Andrews, Holborn, with the waggons and hackney-
coaches roaring past him all the day and half the night like one 
great dragon.  If he ever steal forth when the dragon is at rest to 
air himself again in Cook's Court until admonished to return by the 
crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in 
Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to 
ascertain, since he knows from his personal observation next to 
nothing about it--if Peffer ever do revisit the pale glimpses of 
Cook's Court, which no law-stationer in the trade can positively 
deny, he comes invisibly, and no one is the worse or wiser.

In his lifetime, and likewise in the period of Snagsby's "time" of 
seven long years, there dwelt with Peffer in the same law-
stationering premises a niece--a short, shrewd niece, something too 
violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like a 
sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end.  The 
Cook's Courtiers had a rumour flying among them that the mother of 
this niece did, in her daughter's childhood, moved by too jealous a 
solicitude that her figure should approach perfection, lace her up 
every morning with her maternal foot against the bed-post for a 
stronger hold and purchase; and further, that she exhibited 
internally pints of vinegar and lemon-juice, which acids, they held, 
had mounted to the nose and temper of the patient.  With whichsoever 
of the many tongues of Rumour this frothy report originated, it 
either never reached or never influenced the ears of young Snagsby, 
who, having wooed and won its fair subject on his arrival at man's 
estate, entered into two partnerships at once.  So now, in Cook's 
Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby and the niece are one; and the 
niece still cherishes her figure, which, however tastes may differ, 
is unquestionably so far precious that there is mighty little of it.

Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to 
the neighbours' thinking, one voice too.  That voice, appearing to 
proceed from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook's Court very 
often.  Mr. Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through 
these dulcet tones, is rarely heard.  He is a mild, bald, timid man 
with a shining head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out 
at the back.  He tends to meekness and obesity.  As he stands at his 
door in Cook's Court in his grey shop-coat and black calico sleeves, 
looking up at the clouds, or stands behind a desk in his dark shop 
with a heavy flat ruler, snipping and slicing at sheepskin in 
company with his two 'prentices, he is emphatically a retiring and 
unassuming man.  From beneath his feet, at such times, as from a 
shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently arise 
complainings and lamentations in the voice already mentioned; and 
haply, on some occasions when these reach a sharper pitch than 
usual, Mr. Snagsby mentions to the 'prentices, "I think my little 
woman is a-giving it to Guster!"

This proper name, so used by Mr. Snagsby, has before now sharpened 
the wit of the Cook's Courtiers to remark that it ought to be the 
name of Mrs. Snagsby, seeing that she might with great force and 
expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her stormy 
character.  It is, however, the possession, and the only possession 
except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box indifferently 
filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by 
some supposed to have been christened Augusta) who, although she was 
farmed or contracted for during her growing time by an amiable 
benefactor of his species resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to 
have been developed under the most favourable circumstances, "has 
fits," which the parish can't account for.

Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round 
ten years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of 
fits, and is so apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her 
patron saint that except when she is found with her head in the 
pail, or the sink, or the copper, or the dinner, or anything else 
that happens to be near her at the time of her seizure, she is 
always at work.  She is a satisfaction to the parents and guardians 
of the 'prentices, who feel that there is little danger of her 
inspiring tender emotions in the breast of youth; she is a 
satisfaction to Mrs. Snagsby, who can always find fault with her; 
she is a satisfaction to Mr. Snagsby, who thinks it a charity to 
keep her.  The law-stationer's establishment is, in Guster's eyes, a 
temple of plenty and splendour.  She believes the little drawing-
room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with its hair in papers 
and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in 
Christendom.  The view it commands of Cook's Court at one end (not 
to mention a squint into Cursitor Street) and of Coavinses' the 
sheriff's officer's backyard at the other she regards as a prospect 
of unequalled beauty.  The portraits it displays in oil--and plenty 
of it too--of Mr. Snagsby looking at Mrs. Snagsby and of Mrs. 
Snagsby looking at Mr. Snagsby are in her eyes as achievements of 
Raphael or Titian.  Guster has some recompenses for her many 
privations.

Mr. Snagsby refers everything not in the practical mysteries of the 
business to Mrs. Snagsby.  She manages the money, reproaches the 
tax-gatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on Sundays, 
licenses Mr. Snagsby's entertainments, and acknowledges no 
responsibility as to what she thinks fit to provide for dinner, 
insomuch that she is the high standard of comparison among the 
neighbouring wives a long way down Chancery Lane on both sides, and 
even out in Holborn, who in any domestic passages of arms habitually 
call upon their husbands to look at the difference between their 
(the wives') position and Mrs. Snagsby's, and their (the husbands') 
behaviour and Mr. Snagsby's.  Rumour, always flying bat-like about 
Cook's Court and skimming in and out at everybody's windows, does 
say that Mrs. Snagsby is jealous and inquisitive and that Mr. 
Snagsby is sometimes worried out of house and home, and that if he 
had the spirit of a mouse he wouldn't stand it.  It is even observed 
that the wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a 
shining example in reality look down upon him and that nobody does 
so with greater superciliousness than one particular lady whose lord 
is more than suspected of laying his umbrella on her as an 
instrument of correction.  But these vague whisperings may arise 
from Mr. Snagsby's being in his way rather a meditative and poetical 
man, loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer-time and to observe 
how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are, also to lounge 
about the Rolls Yard of a Sunday afternoon and to remark (if in good 
spirits) that there were old times once and that you'd find a stone 
coffin or two now under that chapel, he'll be bound, if you was to 
dig for it.  He solaces his imagination, too, by thinking of the 
many Chancellors and Vices, and Masters of the Rolls who are 
deceased; and he gets such a flavour of the country out of telling 
the two 'prentices how he HAS heard say that a brook "as clear as 
crystial" once ran right down the middle of Holborn, when Turnstile 
really was a turnstile, leading slap away into the meadows--gets 
such a flavour of the country out of this that he never wants to go 
there.

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but is not yet fully 
effective, for it is not quite dark.  Mr. Snagsby standing at his 
shop-door looking up at the clouds sees a crow who is out late skim 
westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook's Court.  The crow 
flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln's Inn Garden into 
Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr. 
Tulkinghorn.  It is let off in sets of chambers now, and in those 
shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in 
nuts.  But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers still 
remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman 
helmet and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars, 
flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache--as 
would seem to be Allegory's object always, more or less.  Here, 
among his many boxes labelled with transcendent names, lives Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, when not speechlessly at home in country-houses where 
the great ones of the earth are bored to death.  Here he is to-day, 
quiet at his table.  An oyster of the old school whom nobody can 
open.

Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the 
present afternoon.  Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention, 
able to afford it.  Heavy, broad-backed, old-fashioned, mahogany-
and-horsehair chairs, not easily lifted; obsolete tables with 
spindle-legs and dusty baize covers; presentation prints of the 
holders of great titles in the last generation or the last but one, 
environ him.  A thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor 
where he sits, attended by two candles in old-fashioned silver 
candlesticks that give a very insufficient light to his large room.  
The titles on the backs of his books have retired into the binding; 
everything that can have a lock has got one; no key is visible.  
Very few loose papers are about.  He has some manuscript near him, 
but is not referring to it.  With the round top of an inkstand and 
two broken bits of sealing-wax he is silently and slowly working out 
whatever train of indecision is in his mind.  Now tbe inkstand top 
is in the middle, now the red bit of sealing-wax, now the black bit.  
That's not it.  Mr. Tulkinghorn must gather them all up and begin 
again.

Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory 
staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and 
he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and 
office.  He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a 
little out at elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is 
rarely overburdened with business.  Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a 
common way.  He wants no clerks.  He is a great reservoir of 
confidences, not to be so tapped.  His clients want HIM; he is all 
in all.  Drafts that he requires to be drawn are drawn by special-
pleaders in the temple on mysterious instructions; fair copies that 
he requires to be made are made at the stationers', expense being no 
consideration.  The middle-aged man in the pew knows scarcely more 
of the affairs of the peerage than any crossing-sweeper in Holborn.

The red bit, the black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand 
top, the little sand-box.  So!  You to the middle, you to the right, 
you to the left.  This train of indecision must surely be worked out 
now or never.  Now!  Mr. Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts his 
spectacles, puts on his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes 
out, tells the middle-aged man out at elbows, "I shall be back 
presently."  Very rarely tells him anything more explicit.

Mr. Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow came--not quite so straight, but 
nearly--to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street.  To Snagsby's, Law-
Stationer's, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed in all 
its branches, &c., &c., &c.

It is somewhere about five or six o'clock in the afternoon, and a 
balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook's Court.  It hovers about 
Snagsby's door.  The hours are early there: dinner at half-past one 
and supper at half-past nine.  Mr. Snagsby was about to descend into 
the subterranean regions to take tea when he looked out of his door 
just now and saw the crow who was out late.

"Master at home?"

Guster is minding the shop, for the 'prentices take tea in the 
kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; consequently, the robe-maker's 
two daughters, combing their curls at the two glasses in the two 
second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving the two 
'prentices to distraction as they fondly suppose, but are merely 
awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose hair won't 
grow, and never would, and it is confidently thought, never will.

"Master at home?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

Master is at home, and Guster will fetch him.  Guster disappears, 
glad to get out of the shop, which she regards with mingled dread 
and veneration as a storehouse of awful implements of the great 
torture of the law--a place not to be entered after the gas is 
turned off.

Mr. Snagsby appears, greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing.  Bolts a 
bit of bread and butter.  Says, "Bless my soul, sir!  Mr. 
Tulkinghorn!"

"I want half a word with you, Snagsby."

"Certainly, sir!  Dear me, sir, why didn't you send your young man 
round for me?  Pray walk into the back shop, sir."  Snagsby has 
brightened in a moment.

The confined room, strong of parchment-grease, is warehouse, 
counting-house, and copying-office.  Mr. Tulkinghorn sits, facing 
round, on a stool at the desk.

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby."

"Yes, sir."  Mr. Snagsby turns up the gas and coughs behind his 
hand, modestly anticipating profit.  Mr. Snagsby, as a timid man, is 
accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions, and so to save 
words.

"You copied some affidavits in that cause for me lately."

"Yes, sir, we did."

"There was one of them," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, carelessly feeling--
tight, unopenable oyster of the old school!--in the wrong coat-
pocket, "the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather like.  
As I happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I looked 
in to ask you--but I haven't got it.  No matter, any other time will 
do.  Ah! here it is!  I looked in to ask you who copied this."

'"Who copied this, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat 
on the desk, and separating all the sheets at once with a twirl and 
a twist of the left hand peculiar to lawstationers.  "We gave this 
out, sir.  We were giving out rather a large quantity of work just 
at that time.  I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by 
referring to my book."

Mr. Snagsby takes his book down from the safe, makes another bolt of 
the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped short, eyes 
the affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger travelling down 
a page of the book, "Jewby--Packer--Jarndyce."

"Jarndyce!  Here we are, sir," says Mr. Snagsby.  "To be sure!  I 
might have remembered it.  This was given out, sir, to a writer who 
lodges just over on the opposite side of the lane."

Mr. Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the law-
stationer, read it while the forefinger was coming down the hill.

"WHAT do you call him?  Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "Nemo, sir.  
Here it is.  Forty-two folio.  Given out on the Wednesday night at 
eight o'clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after 
nine."

"Nemo!" repeats Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "Nemo is Latin for no one."

"It must be English for some one, sir, I think," Mr. Snagsby submits 
with his deferential cough.  "It is a person's name.  Here it is, 
you see, sir!  Forty-two folio.  Given out Wednesday night, eight 
o'clock; brought in Thursday morning, half after nine."

The tail of Mr. Snagsby's eye becomes conscious of the head of Mrs. 
Snagsby looking in at the shop-door to know what he means by 
deserting his tea.  Mr. Snagsby addresses an explanatory cough to 
Mrs. Snagsby, as who should say, "My dear, a customer!"

"Half after nine, sir," repeats Mr. Snagsby.  "Our law-writers, who 
live by job-work, are a queer lot; and this may not be his name, but 
it's the name he goes by.  I remember now, sir, that he gives it in 
a written advertisement he sticks up down at the Rule Office, and 
the King's Bench Office, and the Judges' Chambers, and so forth.  
You know the kind of document, sir--wanting employ?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn glances through the little window at the back of 
Coavinses', the sheriff's officer's, where lights shine in 
Coavinses' windows.  Coavinses' coffee-room is at the back, and the 
shadows of several gentlemen under a cloud loom cloudily upon the 
blinds.  Mr. Snagsby takes the opportunity of slightly turning his 
head to glance over his shoulder at his little woman and to make 
apologetic motions with his mouth to this effect: "Tul-king-horn--
rich--in-flu-en-tial!"

"Have you given this man work before?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Oh, dear, yes, sir!  Work of yours."

"Thinking of more important matters, I forget where you said he 
lived?"

"Across the lane, sir.  In fact, he lodges at a--" Mr. Snagsby makes 
another bolt, as if the bit of bread and buffer were insurmountable 
"--at a rag and bottle shop."

"Can you show me the place as I go back?"

"With the greatest pleasure, sir!"

Mr. Snagsby pulls off his sleeves and his grey coat, pulls on his 
black coat, takes his hat from its peg.  "Oh! Here is my little 
woman!" he says aloud.  "My dear, will you be so kind as to tell one 
of the lads to look after the shop while I step across the lane with 
Mr. Tulkinghorn?  Mrs. Snagsby, sir--I shan't be two minutes, my 
love!"

Mrs. Snagsby bends to the lawyer, retires behind the counter, peeps 
at them through the window-blind, goes softly into the back office, 
refers to the entries in the book still lying open.  Is evidently 
curious.

"You will find that the place is rough, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, 
walking deferentially in the road and leaving the narrow pavement to 
the lawyer; "and the party is very rough.  But they're a wild lot in 
general, sir.  The advantage of this particular man is that he never 
wants sleep.  He'll go at it right on end if you want him to, as 
long as ever you like."

It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their full 
effect.  Jostling against clerks going to post the day's letters, 
and against counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against 
plaintiffs and defendants and suitors of all sorts, and against the 
general crowd, in whose way the forensic wisdom of ages has 
interposed a million of obstacles to the transaction of the 
commonest business of life; diving through law and equity, and 
through that kindred mystery, the street mud, which is made of 
nobody knows what and collects about us nobody knows whence or how--
we only knowing in general that when there is too much of it we find 
it necessary to shovel it away--the lawyer and the law-stationer 
come to a rag and bottle shop and general emporium of much 
disregarded merchandise, lying and being in the shadow of the wall 
of Lincoln's Inn, and kept, as is announced in paint, to all whom it 
may concern, by one Krook.

"This is where he lives, sir," says the law-stationer.

"This is where he lives, is it?" says the lawyer unconcernedly.  
"Thank you."

"Are you not going in, sir?"

"No, thank you, no; I am going on to the Fields at present.  Good 
evening.  Thank you!"  Mr. Snagsby lifts his hat and returns to his 
little woman and his tea.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present.  He 
goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr. Krook, 
and enters it straight.  It is dim enough, with a blot-headed candle 
or so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the back 
part by a fire.  The old man rises and comes forward, with another 
blot-headed candle in his hand.

"Pray is your lodger within?"

"Male or female, sir?" says Mr. Krook.

"Male.  The person who does copying."

Mr. Krook has eyed his man narrowly.  Knows him by sight.  Has an 
indistinct impression of his aristocratic repute.

"Did you wish to see him, sir?"

"Yes."

"It's what I seldom do myself," says Mr. Krook with a grin.  "Shall 
I call him down?  But it's a weak chance if he'd come, sir!"

"I'll go up to him, then," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Second floor, sir.  Take the candle.  Up there!"  Mr. Krook, with 
his cat beside him, stands at the bottom of the staircase, looking 
after Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "Hi-hi!" he says when Mr. Tulkinghorn has 
nearly disappeared.  The lawyer looks down over the hand-rail.  The 
cat expands her wicked mouth and snarls at him.

"Order, Lady Jane!  Behave yourself to visitors, my lady!  You know 
what they say of my lodger?" whispers Krook, going up a step or two.

"What do they say of him?"

"They say he has sold himself to the enemy, but you and I know 
better--he don't buy.  I'll tell you what, though; my lodger is so 
black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he'd as soon make that 
bargain as any other.  Don't put him out, sir.  That's my advice!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way.  He comes to the dark 
door on the second floor.  He knocks, receives no answer, opens it, 
and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.

The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it if 
he had not.  It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, 
and dirt.  In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle 
as if poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low.  In the 
corner by the chimney stand a deal table and a broken desk, a 
wilderness marked with a rain of ink.  In another corner a ragged 
old portmanteau on one of the two chairs serves for cabinet or 
wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks 
of a starved man.  The floor is bare, except that one old mat, 
trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth.  No 
curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discoloured 
shutters are drawn together, and through the two gaunt holes pierced 
in them, famine might be staring in--the banshee of the man upon the 
bed.

For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, 
lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just 
within the doorway, sees a man.  He lies there, dressed in shirt and 
trousers, with bare feet.  He has a yellow look in the spectral 
darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length 
of its wick (still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of 
winding-sheet above it.  His hair is ragged, mingling with his 
whiskers and his beard--the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the 
scum and mist around him, in neglect.  Foul and filthy as the room 
is, foul and filthy as the air is, it is not easy to perceive what 
fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the 
general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco, 
there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of 
opium.

"Hallo, my friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick 
against the door.

He thinks he has awakened his friend.  He lies a little turned away, 
but his eyes are surely open.

"Hallo, my friend!" he cries again.  "Hallo!  Hallo!"

As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long goes 
out and leaves him in the dark, with the gaunt eyes in the shutters 
staring down upon the bed.



CHAPTER XI

Our Dear Brother


A touch on the lawyer's wrinkled hand as he stands in the dark room, 
irresolute, makes him start and say, "What's that?"

"It's me," returns the old man of the house, whose breath is in his 
ear.  "Can't you wake him?"

"No."

"What have you done with your candle?"

"It's gone out.  Here it is."

Krook takes it, goes to the fire, stoops over the red embers, and 
tries to get a light.  The dying ashes have no light to spare, and 
his endeavours are vain.  Muttering, after an ineffectual call to 
his lodger, that he will go downstairs and bring a lighted candle 
from the shop, the old man departs.  Mr. Tulkinghorn, for some new 
reason that he has, does not await his return in the room, but on 
the stairs outside.

The welcome light soon shines upon the wall, as Krook comes slowly 
up with his green-eyed cat following at his heels.  "Does the man 
generally sleep like this?" inquired the lawyer in a low voice.  
"Hi!  I don't know," says Krook, shaking his head and lifting his 
eyebrows.  "I know next to nothing of his habits except that he 
keeps himself very close."

Thus whispering, they both go in together.  As the light goes in, 
the great eyes in the shutters, darkening, seem to close.  Not so 
the eyes upon the bed.

"God save us!" exclaims Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "He is dead!"  Krook drops 
the heavy hand he has taken up so suddenly that the arm swings over 
the bedside.

They look at one another for a moment.

"Send for some doctor!  Call for Miss Flite up the stairs, sir.  
Here's poison by the bed!  Call out for Flite, will you?" says 
Krook, with his lean hands spread out above the body like a 
vampire's wings.

Mr. Tulkinghorn hurries to the landing and calls, "Miss Flite!  
Flite!  Make haste, here, whoever you are!  Flite!"  Krook follows 
him with his eyes, and while he is calling, finds opportunity to 
steal to the old portmanteau and steal back again.

"Run, Flite, run!  The nearest doctor!  Run!"  So Mr. Krook 
addresses a crazy little woman who is his female lodger, who appears 
and vanishes in a breath, who soon returns accompanied by a testy 
medical man brought from his dinner, with a broad, snuffy upper lip 
and a broad Scotch tongue.

"Ey!  Bless the hearts o' ye," says the medical man, looking up at 
them after a moment's examination.  "He's just as dead as Phairy!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn (standing by the old portmanteau) inquires if he has 
been dead any time.

"Any time, sir?" says the medical gentleman.  "It's probable he wull 
have been dead aboot three hours."

"About that time, I should say," observes a dark young man on the 
other side of the bed.

"Air you in the maydickle prayfession yourself, sir?" inquires the 
first.

The dark young man says yes.

"Then I'll just tak' my depairture," replies the other, "for I'm nae 
gude here!"  With which remark he finishes his brief attendance and 
returns to finish his dinner.

The dark young surgeon passes the candle across and across the face 
and carefully examines the law-writer, who has established his 
pretensions to his name by becoming indeed No one.

"I knew this person by sight very well," says he.  "He has purchased 
opium of me for the last year and a half.  Was anybody present 
related to him?" glancing round upon the three bystanders.

"I was his landlord," grimly answers Krook, taking the candle from 
the surgeon's outstretched hand.  "He told me once I was the nearest 
relation he had."

"He has died," says the surgeon, "of an over-dose of opium, there is 
no doubt.  The room is strongly flavoured with it.  There is enough 
here now," taking an old teapot from Mr. Krook, "to kill a dozen 
people."

"Do you think he did it on purpose?" asks Krook.

"Took the over-dose?"

"Yes!"  Krook almost smacks his lips with the unction of a horrible 
interest.

"I can't say.  I should think it unlikely, as he has been in the 
habit of taking so much.  But nobody can tell.  He was very poor, I 
suppose?"

"I suppose he was.  His room--don't look rich," says Krook, who 
might have changed eyes with his cat, as he casts his sharp glance 
around.  "But I have never been in it since he had it, and he was 
too close to name his circumstances to me."

"Did he owe you any rent?"

"Six weeks."

"He will never pay it!" says the young man, resuming his 
examination.  "It is beyond a doubt that he is indeed as dead as 
Pharaoh; and to judge from his appearance and condition, I should 
think it a happy release.  Yet he must have been a good figure when 
a youth, and I dare say, good-looking."  He says this, not 
unfeelingly, while sitting on the bedstead's edge with his face 
towards that other face and his hand upon the region of the heart.  
"I recollect once thinking there was something in his manner, 
uncouth as it was, that denoted a fall in life.  Was that so?" he 
continues, looking round.

Krook replies, "You might as well ask me to describe the ladies 
whose heads of hair I have got in sacks downstairs.  Than that he 
was my lodger for a year and a half and lived--or didn't live--by 
law-writing, I know no more of him."

During this dialogue Mr. Tulkinghorn has stood aloof by the old 
portmanteau, with his hands behind him, equally removed, to all 
appearance, from all three kinds of interest exhibited near the 
bed--from the young surgeon's professional interest in death, 
noticeable as being quite apart from his remarks on the deceased as 
an individual; from the old man's unction; and the little crazy 
woman's awe.  His imperturbable face has been as inexpressive as 
his rusty clothes.  One could not even say he has been thinking all 
this while.  He has shown neither patience nor impatience, nor 
attention nor abstraction.  He has shown nothing but his shell.  As 
easily might the tone of a delicate musical instrument be inferred 
from its case, as the tone of Mr. Tulkinghorn from his case.

He now interposes, addressing the young surgeon in his unmoved, 
professional way.

"I looked in here," he observes, "just before you, with the 
intention of giving this deceased man, whom I never saw alive, some 
employment at his trade of copying.  I had heard of him from my 
stationer--Snagsby of Cook's Court.  Since no one here knows 
anything about him, it might be as well to send for Snagsby.  Ah!" 
to the little crazy woman, who has often seen him in court, and 
whom he has often seen, and who proposes, in frightened dumb-show, 
to go for the law-stationer.  "Suppose you do!"

While she is gone, the surgeon abandons his hopeless investigation 
and covers its subject with the patchwork counterpane.  Mr. Krook 
and he interchange a word or two.  Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, 
but stands, ever, near the old portmanteau.

Mr. Snagsby arrives hastily in his grey coat and his black sleeves.  
"Dear me, dear me," he says; "and it has come to this, has it!  
Bless my soul!"

"Can you give the person of the house any information about this 
unfortunate creature, Snagsby?" inquires Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "He was 
in arrears with his rent, it seems.  And he must be buried, you 
know."

"Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, coughing his apologetic cough behind 
his hand, "I really don't know what advice I could offer, except 
sending for the beadle."

"I don't speak of advice," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "I could 
advise--"

"No one better, sir, I am sure," says Mr. Snagsby, with his 
deferential cough.

"I speak of affording some clue to his connexions, or to where he 
came from, or to anything concerning him."

"I assure you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby after prefacing his reply 
with his cough of general propitiation, "that I no more know where 
he came from than I know--"

"Where he has gone to, perhaps," suggests the surgeon to help him 
out.

A pause.  Mr. Tulkinghorn looking at the law-stationer.  Mr. Krook, 
with his mouth open, looking for somebody to speak next.

"As to his connexions, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "if a person was to 
say to me, "Snagsby, here's twenty thousand pound down, ready for 
you in the Bank of England if you'll only name one of 'em,' I 
couldn't do it, sir!  About a year and a half ago--to the best of my 
belief, at the time when he first came to lodge at the present rag 
and bottle shop--"

"That was the time!" says Krook with a nod.

"About a year and a half ago," says Mr. Snagsby, strengthened, "he 
came into our place one morning after breakfast, and finding my 
little woman (which I name Mrs. Snagsby when I use that appellation) 
in our shop, produced a specimen of his handwriting and gave her to 
understand that he was in want of copying work to do and was, not to 
put too fine a point upon it," a favourite apology for plain 
speaking with Mr. Snagsby, which he always offers with a sort of 
argumentative frankness, "hard up!  My little woman is not in 
general partial to strangers, particular--not to put too fine a 
point upon it--when they want anything.  But she was rather took by 
something about this person, whether by his being unshaved, or by 
his hair being in want of attention, or by what other ladies' 
reasons, I leave you to judge; and she accepted of the specimen, and 
likewise of the address.  My little woman hasn't a good ear for 
names," proceeds Mr. Snagsby after consulting his cough of 
consideration behind his hand, "and she considered Nemo equally the 
same as Nimrod.  In consequence of which, she got into a habit of 
saying to me at meals, 'Mr. Snagsby, you haven't found Nimrod any 
work yet!' or 'Mr. Snagsby, why didn't you give that eight and 
thirty Chancery folio in Jarndyce to Nimrod?' or such like.  And 
that is the way he gradually fell into job-work at our place; and 
that is the most I know of him except that he was a quick hand, and 
a hand not sparing of night-work, and that if you gave him out, say, 
five and forty folio on the Wednesday night, you would have it 
brought in on the Thursday morning.  All of which--" Mr. Snagsby 
concludes by politely motioning with his hat towards the bed, as 
much as to add, "I have no doubt my honourable friend would confirm 
if he were in a condition to do it."

"Hadn't you better see," says Mr. Tulkinghorn to Krook, "whether he 
had any papers that may enlighten you?  There will be an inquest, 
and you will be asked the question.  You can read?"

"No, I can't," returns the old man with a sudden grin.

"Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "look over the room for him.  He 
will get into some trouble or difficulty otherwise.  Being here, 
I'll wait if you make haste, and then I can testify on his behalf, 
if it should ever be necessary, that all was fair and right.  If you 
will hold the candle for Mr. Snagsby, my friend, he'll soon see 
whether there is anything to help you."

"In the first place, here's an old portmanteau, sir," says Snagsby.

Ah, to be sure, so there is!  Mr. Tulkinghorn does not appear to 
have seen it before, though he is standing so close to it, and 
though there is very little else, heaven knows.

The marine-store merchant holds the light, and the law-stationer 
conducts the search.  The surgeon leans against the corner of the 
chimney-piece; Miss Flite peeps and trembles just within the door.  
The apt old scholar of the old school, with his dull black breeches 
tied with ribbons at the knees, his large black waistcoat, his long-
sleeved black coat, and his wisp of limp white neckerchief tied in 
the bow the peerage knows so well, stands in exactly the same place 
and attitude.

There are some worthless articles of clothing in the old 
portmanteau; there is a bundle of pawnbrokers' duplicates, those 
turnpike tickets on the road of poverty; there is a crumpled paper, 
smelling of opium, on which are scrawled rough memoranda--as, took, 
such a day, so many grains; took, such another day, so many more--
begun some time ago, as if with the intention of being regularly 
continued, but soon left off.  There are a few dirty scraps of 
newspapers, all referring to coroners' inquests; there is nothing 
else.  They search the cupboard and the drawer of the ink-splashed 
table.  There is not a morsel of an old letter or of any other 
writing in either.  The young surgeon examines the dress on the law-
writer.  A knife and some odd halfpence are all he finds.  Mr. 
Snagsby's suggestion is the practical suggestion after all, and the 
beadle must be called in.

So the little crazy lodger goes for the beadle, and the rest come 
out of the room.  "Don't leave the cat there!" says the surgeon; 
"that won't do!"  Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him, and 
she goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking 
her lips.

"Good night!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, and goes home to Allegory and 
meditation.

By this time the news has got into the court.  Groups of its 
inhabitants assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the 
army of observation (principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr. 
Krook's window, which they closely invest.  A policeman has already 
walked up to the room, and walked down again to the door, where he 
stands like a tower, only condescending to see the boys at his base 
occasionally; but whenever he does see them, they quail and fall 
back.  Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking 
terms with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness 
originating in young Perkins' having "fetched" young Piper "a 
crack," renews her friendly intercourse on this auspicious occasion.  
The potboy at the corner, who is a privileged amateur, as possessing 
official knowledge of life and having to deal with drunken men 
occasionally, exchanges confidential communications with the 
policeman and has the appearance of an impregnable youth, 
unassailable by truncheons and unconfinable in station-houses.  
People talk across the court out of window, and bare-headed scouts 
come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to know what's the matter.  The 
general feeling seems to be that it's a blessing Mr. Krook warn't 
made away with first, mingled with a little natural disappointment 
that he was not.  In the midst of this sensation, the beadle 
arrives.

The beadle, though generally understood in the neighbourhood to be a 
ridiculous institution, is not without a certain popularity for the 
moment, if it were only as a man who is going to see the body.  The 
policeman considers him an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the 
barbarous watchmen times, but gives him admission as something that 
must be borne with until government shall abolish him.  The 
sensation is heightened as the tidings spread from mouth to mouth 
that the beadle is on the ground and has gone in.

By and by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the 
sensation, which has rather languished in the interval.  He is 
understood to be in want of witnesses for the inquest to-morrow who 
can tell the coroner and jury anything whatever respecting the 
deceased.  Is immediately referred to innumerable people who can 
tell nothing whatever.  Is made more imbecile by being constantly 
informed that Mrs. Green's son "was a law-writer his-self and knowed 
him better than anybody," which son of Mrs. Green's appears, on 
inquiry, to be at the present time aboard a vessel bound for China, 
three months out, but considered accessible by telegraph on 
application to the Lords of the Admiralty.  Beadle goes into various 
shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants, always shutting the 
door first, and by exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy 
exasperating the public.  Policeman seen to smile to potboy.  Public 
loses interest and undergoes reaction.  Taunts the beadle in shrill 
youthful voices with having boiled a boy, choruses fragments of a 
popular song to that effect and importing that the boy was made into 
soup for the workhouse.  Policeman at last finds it necessary to 
support the law and seize a vocalist, who is released upon the 
flight of the rest on condition of his getting out of this then, 
come, and cutting it--a condition he immediately observes.  So the 
sensation dies off for the time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom 
a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with his shining hat, 
stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all 
things fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating 
the palms of his white gloves one against the other and stopping now 
and then at a street-corner to look casually about for anything 
between a lost child and a murder.

Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting 
about Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every juror's name 
is wrongly spelt, and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle's own 
name, which nobody can read or wants to know.  The summonses served 
and his witnesses forewarned, the beadle goes to Mr. Krook's to keep 
a small appointment he has made with certain paupers, who, presently 
arriving, are conducted upstairs, where they leave the great eyes in 
the shutter something new to stare at, in that last shape which 
earthly lodgings take for No one--and for Every one.

And all that night the coffin stands ready by the old portmanteau; 
and the lonely figure on the bed, whose path in life has lain 
through five and forty years, lies there with no more track behind 
him that any one can trace than a deserted infant.

Next day the court is all alive--is like a fair, as Mrs. Perkins, 
more than reconciled to Mrs. Piper, says in amicable conversation 
with that excellent woman.  The coroner is to sit in the first-floor 
room at the Sol's Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice 
a week and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional 
celebrity, faced by Little Swills, the comic vocalist, who hopes 
(according to the bill in the window) that his friends will rally 
round him and support first-rate talent.  The Sol's Arms does a 
brisk stroke of business all the morning.  Even children so require 
sustaining under the general excitement that a pieman who has 
established himself for the occasion at the corner of the court says 
his brandy-balls go off like smoke.  What time the beadle, hovering 
between the door of Mr. Krook's establishment and the door of the 
Sol's Arms, shows the curiosity in his keeping to a few discreet 
spirits and accepts the compliment of a glass of ale or so in 
return.

At the appointed hour arrives the coroner, for whom the jurymen are 
waiting and who is received with a salute of skittles from the good 
dry skittle-ground attached to the Sol's Arms.  The coroner 
frequents more public-houses than any man alive.  The smell of 
sawdust, beer, tobacco-smoke, and spirits is inseparable in his 
vocation from death in its most awful shapes.  He is conducted by 
the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, where he 
puts his hat on the piano and takes a Windsor-chair at the head of a 
long table formed of several short tables put together and 
ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by pots 
and glasses.  As many of the jury as can crowd together at the table 
sit there.  The rest get among the spittoons and pipes or lean 
against the piano.  Over the coroner's head is a small iron garland, 
the pendant handle of a bell, which rather gives the majesty of the 
court the appearance of going to be hanged presently.

Call over and swear the jury!  While the ceremony is in progress, 
sensation is created by the entrance of a chubby little man in a 
large shirt-collar, with a moist eye and an inflamed nose, who 
modestly takes a position near the door as one of the general 
public, but seems familiar with the room too.  A whisper circulates 
that this is Little Swills.  It is considered not unlikely that he 
will get up an imitation of the coroner and make it the principal 
feature of the Harmonic Meeting in the evenlng.

"Well, gentlemen--" the coroner begins.

"Silence there, will you!" says the beadle.  Not to the coroner, 
though it might appear so.

"Well, gentlemen," resumes the coroner.  "You are impanelled here to 
inquire into the death of a certain man.  Evidence will be given 
before you as to the circumstances attending that death, and you 
will give your verdict according to the--skittles; they must be 
stopped, you know, beadle!--evidence, and not according to anything 
else.  The first thing to be done is to view the body."

"Make way there!" cries the beadle.

So they go out in a loose procession, something after the manner of 
a straggling funeral, and make their inspection in Mr. Krook's back 
second floor, from which a few of the jurymen retire pale and 
precipitately.  The beadle is very careful that two gentlemen not 
very neat about the cuffs and buttons (for whose accommodation he 
has provided a special little table near the coroner in the Harmonic 
Meeting Room) should see all that is to be seen.  For they are the 
public chroniclers of such inquiries by the line; and he is not 
superior to the universal human infirmity, but hopes to read in 
print what "Mooney, the active and intelligent beadle of the 
district," said and did and even aspires to see the name of Mooney 
as familiarly and patronizingly mentioned as the name of the hangman 
is, according to the latest examples.

Little Swills is waiting for the coroner and jury on their return.  
Mr. Tulkinghorn, also.  Mr. Tulkinghorn is received with distinction 
and seated near the coroner between that high judicial officer, a 
bagatelle-board, and the coal-box.  The inquiry proceeds.  The jury 
learn how the subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about 
him.  "A very eminent solicitor is in attendance, gentlemen," says 
the coroner, "who, I am informed, was accidentally present when 
discovery of the death was made, but he could only repeat the 
evidence you have already heard from the surgeon, the landlord, the 
lodger, and the law-stationer, and it is not necessary to trouble 
him.  Is anybody in attendance who knows anything more?"

Mrs. Piper pushed forward by Mrs. Perkins.  Mrs. Piper sworn.

Anastasia Piper, gentlemen.  Married woman.  Now, Mrs. Piper, what 
have you got to say about this?

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and 
without punctuation, but not much to tell.  Mrs. Piper lives in the 
court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been 
well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but 
one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen 
months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live 
such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the 
plaintive--so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased--was 
reported to have sold himself.  Thinks it was the plaintive's air in 
which that report originatinin.  See the plaintive often and 
considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go 
about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins 
may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her 
husband and herself and family).  Has seen the plaintive wexed and 
worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you 
cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be 
Methoozellers which you was not yourself).  On accounts of this and 
his dark looks has often dreamed as she see him take a pick-axe from 
his pocket and split Johnny's head (which the child knows not fear 
and has repeatually called after him close at his eels).  Never 
however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far 
from it.  Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if 
not partial to children and never see him speak to neither child nor 
grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing 
down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was here 
would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent).

Says the coroner, is that boy here?  Says the beadle, no, sir, he is 
not here.  Says the coroner, go and fetch him then.  In the absence 
of the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr. 
Tulkinghorn.

Oh! Here's the boy, gentlemen!

Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged.  Now, boy!  But 
stop a minute.  Caution.  This boy must be put through a few 
preliminary paces.

Name, Jo.  Nothing else that he knows on.  Don't know that everybody 
has two names.  Never heerd of sich a think.  Don't know that Jo is 
short for a longer name.  Thinks it long enough for HIM.  HE don't 
find no fault with it.  Spell it?  No.  HE can't spell it.  No 
father, no mother, no friends.  Never been to school.  What's home?  
Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie.  Don't 
recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows 
both.  Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if 
he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it'll be 
something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll 
tell the truth.

"This won't do, gentlemen!" says the coroner with a melancholy shake 
of the head.

"Don't you think you can receive his evidence, sir?" asks an 
attentive juryman.

"Out of the question," says the coroner.  "You have heard the boy.  
'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know.  We can't take THAT in a 
court of justice, gentlemen.  It's terrible depravity.  Put the boy 
aside."

Boy put aside, to the great edification of the audience, especially 
of Little Swills, the comic vocalist.

Now.  Is there any other witness?  No other witness.

Very well, gentlemen!  Here's a man unknown, proved to have been in 
the habit of taking opium in large quantities for a year and a half, 
found dead of too much opium.  If you think you have any evidence to 
lead you to the conclusion that he committed suicide, you will come 
to that conclusion.  If you think it is a case of accidental death, 
you will find a verdict accordingly.

Verdict accordingly.  Accidental death.  No doubt.  Gentlemen, you 
are discharged.  Good afternoon.

While the coroner buttons his great-coat, Mr. Tulkinghorn and he 
give private audience to the rejected witness in a corner.

That graceless creature only knows that the dead man (whom he 
recognized just now by his yellow face and black hair) was sometimes 
hooted and pursued about the streets.  That one cold winter night 
when he, the boy, was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, the 
man turned to look at him, and came back, and having questioned him 
and found that he had not a friend in the world, said, "Neither have 
I.  Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a night's 
lodging.  That the man had often spoken to him since and asked him 
whether he slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger, 
and whether he ever wished to die, and similar strange questions.  
That when the man had no money, he would say in passing, "I am as 
poor as you to-day, Jo," but that when he had any, he had always (as 
the boy most heartily believes) been glad to give him some.

"He was wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his 
wretched sleeve.  "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, 
I wished he could have heerd me tell him so.  He wos wery good to 
me, he wos!"

As he shuffles downstairs, Mr. Snagsby, lying in wait for him, puts 
a half-crown in his hand.  "If you ever see me coming past your 
crossing with my little woman--I mean a lady--" says Mr. Snagsby 
with his finger on his nose, "don't allude to it!"

For some little time the jurymen hang about the Sol's Arms 
colloquially.  In the sequel, half-a-dozen are caught up in a cloud 
of pipe-smoke that pervades the parlour of the Sol's Arms; two 
stroll to Hampstead; and four engage to go half-price to the play at 
night, and top up with oysters.  Little Swills is treated on several 
hands.  Being asked what he thinks of the proceedings, characterizes 
them (his strength lying in a slangular direction) as "a rummy 
start."  The landlord of the Sol's Arms, finding Little Swills so 
popular, commends him highly to the jurymen and public, observing 
that for a song in character he don't know his equal and that that 
man's character-wardrobe would fill a cart.

Thus, gradually the Sol's Arms melts into the shadowy night and then 
flares out of it strong in gas.  The Harmonic Meeting hour arriving, 
the gentleman of professional celebrity takes the chair, is faced 
(red-faced) by Little Swills; their friends rally round them and 
support first-rate talent.  In the zenith of the evening, Little 
Swills says, "Gentlemen, if you'll permit me, I'll attempt a short 
description of a scene of real life that came off here to-day."  Is 
much applauded and encouraged; goes out of the room as Swills; comes 
in as the coroner (not the least in the world like him); describes 
the inquest, with recreative intervals of piano-forte accompaniment, 
to the refrain: With his (the coroner's) tippy tol li doll, tippy 
tol lo doll, tippy tol li doll, Dee!

The jingling piano at last is silent, and the Harmonic friends rally 
round their pillows.  Then there is rest around the lonely figure, 
now laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the 
gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night.  If 
this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by 
the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes 
upraised to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to 
close upon the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the 
vision would have seemed!  Oh, if in brighter days the now-
extinguished fire within him ever burned for one woman who held him 
in her heart, where is she, while these ashes are above the ground!

It is anything but a night of rest at Mr. Snagsby's, in Cook's 
Court, where Guster murders sleep by going, as Mr. Snagsby himself 
allows--not to put too fine a point upon it--out of one fit into 
twenty.  The occasion of this seizure is that Guster has a tender 
heart and a susceptible something that possibly might have been 
imagination, but for Tooting and her patron saint.  Be it what it 
may, now, it was so direfully impressed at tea-time by Mr. Snagsby's 
account of the inquiry at which he had assisted that at supper-time 
she projected herself into the kitchen, preceded by a flying Dutch 
cheese, and fell into a fit of unusual duration, which she only came 
out of to go into another, and another, and so on through a chain of 
fits, with short intervals between, of which she has pathetically 
availed herself by consuming them in entreaties to Mrs. Snagsby not 
to give her warning "when she quite comes to," and also in appeals 
to the whole establishment to lay her down on the stones and go to 
bed.  Hence, Mr. Snagsby, at last hearing the cock at the little 
dairy in Cursitor Street go into that disinterested ecstasy of his 
on the subject of daylight, says, drawing a long breath, though the 
most patient of men, "I thought you was dead, I am sure!"

What question this enthusiastic fowl supposes he settles when he 
strains himself to such an extent, or why he should thus crow (so 
men crow on various triumphant public occasions, however) about what 
cannot be of any moment to him, is his affair.  It is enough that 
daylight comes, morning comes, noon comes.

Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers 
as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr. Krook's and bears off 
the body of our dear brother here departed to a hemmed-in 
churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are 
communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have 
not departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about 
official back-stairs--would to heaven they HAD departed!--are very 
complacent and agreeable.  Into a beastly scrap of ground which a 
Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder 
at, they bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian 
burial.

With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little 
tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy 
of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of 
death in action close on life--here they lower our dear brother down 
a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in 
corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful 
testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this 
boastful island together.

Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too 
long by such a place as this!  Come, straggling lights into the 
windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it 
at least with this dread scene shut out!  Come, flame of gas, 
burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air 
deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch!  It is well that you 
should call to every passerby, "Look here!"

With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court to 
the outside of the iron gate.  It holds the gate with its hands and 
looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while.

It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and 
makes the archway clean.  It does so very busily and trimly, looks 
in again a little while, and so departs.

Jo, is it thou?  Well, well!  Though a rejected witness, who "can't 
exactly say" what will be done to him in greater hands than men's, 
thou art not quite in outer darkness.  There is something like a 
distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: "He wos wery 
good to me, he wos!"



CHAPTER XII

On the Watch


It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last, and Chesney 
Wold has taken heart.  Mrs. Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares, 
for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris.  The 
fashionable intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad 
tidings to benighted England.  It has also found out that they will 
entertain a brilliant and distinguished circle of the ELITE of the 
BEAU MONDE (the fashionable intelligence is weak in English, but a 
giant refreshed in French) at the ancient and hospitable family seat 
in Lincolnshire.

For the greater honour of the brilliant and distinguished circle, 
and of Chesney Wold into the bargain, the broken arch of the bridge 
in the park is mended; and the water, now retired within its proper 
limits and again spanned gracefully, makes a figure in the prospect 
from the house.  The clear, cold sunshine glances into the brittle 
woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves 
and drying the moss.  It glides over the park after the moving 
shadows of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all 
day.  It looks in at the windows and touches the ancestral portraits 
with bars and patches of brightness never contemplated by the 
painters.  Athwart the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-
piece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down 
crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it.

Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and 
Sir Leicester, in their travelling chariot (my Lady's woman and Sir 
Leicester's man affectionate in the rumble), start for home.  With a 
considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking, and many plunging 
demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed horses and two 
centaurs with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, 
they rattle out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place 
Vendome and canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of 
the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a 
headless king and queen, off by the Place of Concord, and the 
Elysian Fields, and the Gate of the Star, out of Paris.

Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even here my Lady 
Dedlock has been bored to death.  Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, 
drive, nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens.  Only 
last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay--within the walls playing 
with children among the clipped trees and the statues in the Palace 
Garden; walking, a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more 
Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between whiles 
filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to say a 
word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little 
gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing 
Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, 
tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, 
and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate--only last Sunday, 
my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant 
Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in spirits.

She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris.  Weariness of soul 
lies before her, as it lies behind--her Ariel has put a girdle of it 
round the whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped--but the imperfect 
remedy is always to fly from the last place where it has been 
experienced.  Fling Paris back into the distance, then, exchanging 
it for endless avenues and cross-avenues of wintry trees!  And, when 
next beheld, let it be some leagues away, with the Gate of the Star 
a white speck glittering in the sun, and the city a mere mound in a 
plain--two dark square towers rising out of it, and light and shadow 
descending on it aslant, like the angels in Jacob's dream!

Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored.  
When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own 
greatness.  It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so 
inexhaustible a subject.  After reading his letters, he leans back 
in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance 
to society.

"You have an unusual amount of correspondence this morning?" says my 
Lady after a long time.  She is fatigued with reading.  Has almost 
read a page in twenty miles.

"Nothing in it, though.  Nothing whatever."

"I saw one of Mr. Tulkinghorn's long effusions, I think?"

"You see everything," says Sir Leicester with admiration.

"Ha!" sighs my Lady.  "He is the most tiresome of men!"

"He sends--I really beg your pardon--he sends," says Sir Leicester, 
selecting the letter and unfolding it, "a message to you.  Our 
stopping to change horses as I came to his postscript drove it out 
of my memory.  I beg you'll excuse me.  He says--"  Sir Leicester is 
so long in taking out his eye-glass and adjusting it that my Lady 
looks a little irritated.  "He says 'In the matter of the right of 
way--'  I beg your pardon, that's not the place.  He says--yes!  
Here I have it!  He says, 'I beg my respectful compliments to my 
Lady, who, I hope, has benefited by the change.  Will you do me the 
favour to mention (as it may interest her) that I have something to 
tell her on her return in reference to the person who copied the 
affidavit in the Chancery suit, which so powerfully stimulated her 
curiosity.  I have seen him.'"

My Lady, leaning forward, looks out of her window.

"That's the message," observes Sir Leicester.

"I should like to walk a little," says my Lady, still looking out of 
her window.

"Walk?" repeats Sir Leicester in a tone of surprise.

"I should like to walk a little," says my Lady with unmistakable 
distinctness.  "Please to stop the carriage."

The carriage is stopped, the affectionate man alights from the 
rumble, opens the door, and lets down the steps, obedient to an 
impatient motion of my Lady's hand.  My Lady alights so quickly and 
walks away so quickly that Sir Leicester, for all his scrupulous 
politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind.  A space of 
a minute or two has elapsed before he comes up with her.  She 
smiles, looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a 
quarter of a mile, is very much bored, and resumes her seat in the 
carriage.

The rattle and clatter continue through the greater part of three 
days, with more or less of bell-jingling and whip-cracking, and more 
or less plunging of centaurs and bare-backed horses.  Their courtly 
politeness to each other at the hotels where they tarry is the theme 
of general admiration.  Though my Lord IS a little aged for my Lady, 
says Madame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be 
her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each 
other.  One observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in 
hand, to help my Lady to and from the carriage.  One observes my 
Lady, how recognisant of my Lord's politeness, with an inclination 
of her gracious head and the concession of her so-genteel fingers!  
It is ravishing!

The sea has no appreciation of great men, but knocks them about like 
the small fry.  It is habitually hard upon Sir Leicester, whose 
countenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese and in 
whose aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution.  It is the 
Radical of Nature to him.  Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it 
after stopping to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney 
Wold, lying only one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire.

Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and 
through the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare 
trees gloom together in the woods, and as the Ghost's Walk, touched 
at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself 
to coming night, they drive into the park.  The rooks, swinging in 
their lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the 
question of the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, 
some agreeing that Sir Leicester and my Lady are come down, some 
arguing with malcontents who won't admit it, now all consenting to 
consider the question disposed of, now all breaking out again in 
violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who will 
persist in putting in a last contradictory croak.  Leaving them to 
swing and caw, the travelling chariot rolls on to the house, where 
fires gleam warmly through some of the windows, though not through 
so many as to give an inhabited expression to the darkening mass of 
front.  But the brilliant and distinguished circle will soon do 
that.

Mrs. Rouncewell is in attendance and receives Sir Leicester's 
customary shake of the hand with a profound curtsy.

"How do you do, Mrs. Rouncewell?  I am glad to see you."

"I hope I have the honour of welcoming you in good health, Sir 
Leicester?"

"In excellent health, Mrs. Rouncewell."

"My Lady is looking charmingly well," says Mrs. Rouncewell with 
another curtsy.

My Lady signifies, without profuse expenditure of words, that she is 
as wearily well as she can hope to be.

But Rosa is in the distance, behind the housekeeper; and my Lady, 
who has not subdued the quickness of her observation, whatever else 
she may have conquered, asks, "Who is that girl?"

"A young scholar of mine, my Lady.  Rosa."

"Come here, Rosa!"  Lady Dedlock beckons her, with even an 
appearance of interest.  "Why, do you know how pretty you are, 
child?" she says, touching her shoulder with her two forefingers.

Rosa, very much abashed, says, "No, if you please, my Lady!" and 
glances up, and glances down, and don't know where to look, but 
looks all the prettier.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen, my Lady."

"Nineteen," repeats my Lady thoughtfully.  "Take care they don't 
spoil you by flattery."

"Yes, my Lady."

My Lady taps her dimpled cheek with the same delicate gloved fingers 
and goes on to the foot of the oak staircase, where Sir Leicester 
pauses for her as her knightly escort.  A staring old Dedlock in a 
panel, as large as life and as dull, looks as if he didn't know what 
to make of it, which was probably his general state of mind in the 
days of Queen Elizabeth.

That evening, in the housekeeper's room, Rosa can do nothing but 
murmur Lady Dedlock's praises.  She is so affable, so graceful, so 
beautiful, so elegant; has such a sweet voice and such a thrilling 
touch that Rosa can feel it yet!  Mrs. Rouncewell confirms all this, 
not without personal pride, reserving only the one point of 
affability.  Mrs. Rouncewell is not quite sure as to that.  Heaven 
forbid that she should say a syllable in dispraise of any member of 
that excellent family, above all, of my Lady, whom the whole world 
admires; but if my Lady would only be "a little more free," not 
quite so cold and distant, Mrs. Rounceweil thinks she would be more 
affable.

"'Tis almost a pity," Mrs. Rouncewell adds--only "almost" because it 
borders on impiety to suppose that anything could be better than it 
is, in such an express dispensation as the Dedlock affairs--"that my 
Lady has no family.  If she had had a daughter now, a grown young 
lady, to interest her, I think she would have had the only kind of 
excellence she wants."

"Might not that have made her still more proud, grandmother?" says 
Watt, who has been home and come back again, he is such a good 
grandson.

"More and most, my dear," returns the housekeeper with dignity, "are 
words it's not my place to use--nor so much as to hear--applied to 
any drawback on my Lady."

"I beg your pardon, grandmother.  But she is proud, is she not?"

"If she is, she has reason to be.  The Dedlock family have always 
reason to be."

"Well," says Watt, "it's to be hoped they line out of their prayer-
books a certain passage for the common people about pride and 
vainglory.  Forgive me, grandmother!  Only a joke!"

"Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for 
joking."

"Sir Leicester is no joke by any means," says Watt, "and I humbly 
ask his pardon.  I suppose, grandmother, that even with the family 
and their guests down here, there is no ojection to my prolonging my 
stay at the Dedlock Arms for a day or two, as any other traveller 
might?"

"Surely, none in the world, child."

"I am glad of that," says Watt, "because I have an inexpressible 
desire to extend my knowledge of this beautiful neighbourhood."

He happens to glance at Rosa, who looks down and is very shy indeed.  
But according to the old superstition, it should be Rosa's ears that 
burn, and not her fresh bright cheeks, for my Lady's maid is holding 
forth about her at this moment with surpassing energy.

My Lady's maid is a Frenchwoman of two and thirty, from somewhere in 
the southern country about Avignon and Marseilles, a large-eyed 
brown woman with black hair who would be handsome but for a certain 
feline mouth and general uncomfortable tightness of face, rendering 
the jaws too eager and the skull too prominent.  There is something 
indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful 
way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her 
head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she 
is in an ill humour and near knives.  Through all the good taste of 
her dress and little adornments, these objections so express 
themselves that she seems to go about like a very neat she-wolf 
imperfectly tamed.  Besides being accomplished in all the knowledge 
appertaining to her post, she is almost an Englishwoman in her 
acquaintance with the language; consequently, she is in no want of 
words to shower upon Rosa for having attracted my Lady's attention, 
and she pours them out with such grim ridicule as she sits at dinner 
that her companion, the affectionate man, is rather relieved when 
she arrives at the spoon stage of that performance.

Ha, ha, ha!  She, Hortense, been in my Lady's service since five 
years and always kept at the distance, and this doll, this puppet, 
caressed--absolutely caressed--by my Lady on the moment of her 
arriving at the house!  Ha, ha, ha!  "And do you know how pretty you 
are, child?"  "No, my Lady."  You are right there!  "And how old are 
you, child!  And take care they do not spoil you by flattery, 
child!"  Oh, how droll!  It is the BEST thing altogether.

In short, it is such an admirable thing that Mademoiselle Hortense 
can't forget it; but at meals for days afterwards, even among her 
countrywomen and others attached in like capacity to the troop of 
visitors, relapses into silent enjoyment of the joke--an enjoyment 
expressed, in her own convivial manner, by an additional tightness 
of face, thin elongation of compressed lips, and sidewise look, 
which intense appreciation of humour is frequently reflected in my 
Lady's mirrors when my Lady is not among them.

All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now, many of 
them after a long blank.  They reflect handsome faces, simpering 
faces, youthful faces, faces of threescore and ten that will not 
submit to be old; the entire collection of faces that have come to 
pass a January week or two at Chesney Wold, and which the 
fashionable intelligence, a mighty hunter before the Lord, hunts 
with a keen scent, from their breaking cover at the Court of St. 
James's to their being run down to death.  The place in Lincolnshire 
is all alive.  By day guns and voices are heard ringing in the 
woods, horsemen and carriages enliven the park roads, servants and 
hangers-on pervade the village and the Dedlock Arms.  Seen by night 
from distant openings in the trees, the row of windows in the long 
drawing-room, where my Lady's picture hangs over the great chimney-
piece, is like a row of jewels set in a black frame.  On Sunday the 
chill little church is almost warmed by so much gallant company, and 
the general flavour of the Dedlock dust is quenched in delicate 
perfumes.

The brilliant and distinguished circle comprehends within it no 
contracted amount of education, sense, courage, honour, beauty, and 
virtue.  Yet there is something a little wrong about it in despite 
of its immense advantages.  What can it be?

Dandyism?  There is no King George the Fourth now (more the pity) to 
set the dandy fashion; there are no clear-starched jack-towel 
neckcloths, no short-waisted coats, no false calves, no stays.  
There are no caricatures, now, of effeminate exquisites so arrayed, 
swooning in opera boxes with excess of delight and being revived by 
other dainty creatures poking long-necked scent-bottles at their 
noses.  There is no beau whom it takes four men at once to shake 
into his buckskins, or who goes to see all the executions, or who is 
troubled with the self-reproach of having once consumed a pea.  But 
is there dandyism in the brilliant and distinguished circle 
notwithstanding, dandyism of a more mischievous sort, that has got 
below the surface and is doing less harmless things than jack-
towelling itself and stopping its own digestion, to which no 
rational person need particularly object?

Why, yes.  It cannot be disguised.  There ARE at Chesney Wold this 
January week some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who 
have set up a dandyism--in religion, for instance.  Who in mere 
lackadaisical want of an emotion have agreed upon a little dandy 
talk about the vulgar wanting faith in things in general, meaning in 
the things that have been tried and found wanting, as though a low 
fellow should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling after 
finding it out!  Who would make the vulgar very picturesque and 
faithful by putting back the hands upon the clock of time and 
cancelling a few hundred years of history.

There are also ladies and gentlemen of another fashion, not so new, 
but very elegant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world 
and to keep down all its realities.  For whom everything must be 
languid and pretty.  Who have found out the perpetual stoppage.  Who 
are to rejoice at nothing and be sorry for nothing.  Who are not to 
be disturbed by ideas.  On whom even the fine arts, attending in 
powder and walking backward like the Lord Chamberlain, must array 
themselves in the milliners' and tailors' patterns of past 
generations and be particularly careful not to be in earnest or to 
receive any impress from the moving age.

Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his 
party, who has known what office is and who tells Sir Leicester 
Dedlock with much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see 
to what the present age is tending.  A debate is not what a debate 
used to be; the House is not what the House used to be; even a 
Cabinet is not what it formerly was.  He perceives with astonishment 
that supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited 
choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie 
between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle--supposing it to be 
impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be 
assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of 
that affair with Hoodle.  Then, giving the Home Department and the 
leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to 
Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, 
what are you to do with Noodle?  You can't offer him the Presidency 
of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle.  You can't put him in 
the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle.  What 
follows?  That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces 
(as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock) 
because you can't provide for Noodle!

On the other hand, the Right Honourable William Buffy, M.P., 
contends across the table with some one else that the shipwreck of 
the country--about which there is no doubt; it is only the manner of 
it that is in question--is attributable to Cuffy.  If you had done 
with Cuffy what you ought to have done when he first came into 
Parliament, and had prevented him from going over to Duffy, you 
would have got him into alliance with Fuffy, you would have had with 
you the weight attaching as a smart debater to Guffy, you would have 
brought to bear upon the elections the wealth of Huffy, you would 
have got in for three counties Juffy, Kuffy, and Luffy, and you 
would have strengthened your administration by the official 
knowledge and the business habits of Muffy.  All this, instead of 
being as you now are, dependent on the mere caprice of Puffy!

As to this point, and as to some minor topics, there are differences 
of opinion; but it is perfectly clear to the brilliant and 
distinguished circle, all round, that nobody is in question but 
Boodle and his retinue, and Buffy and HIS retinue.  These are the 
great actors for whom the stage is reserved.  A People there are, no 
doubt--a certain large number of supernumeraries, who are to be 
occasionally addressed, and relied upon for shouts and choruses, as 
on the theatrical stage; but Boodle and Buffy, their followers and 
families, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns, are 
the born first-actors, managers, and leaders, and no others can 
appear upon the scene for ever and ever.

In this, too, there is perhaps more dandyism at Chesney Wold than 
the brilliant and distinguished circle will find good for itself in 
the long run.  For it is, even with the stillest and politest 
circles, as with the circle the necromancer draws around him--very 
strange appearances may be seen in active motion outside.  With this 
difference, that being realities and not phantoms, there is the 
greater danger of their breaking in.

Chesney Wold is quite full anyhow, so full that a burning sense of 
injury arises in the breasts of ill-lodged ladies'-maids, and is not 
to he extinguished.  Only one room is empty.  It is a turret chamber 
of the third order of merit, plainly but comfortably furnished and 
having an old-fashioned business air.  It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's room, 
and is never bestowed on anybody else, for he may come at any time.  
He is not come yet.  It is his quiet habit to walk across the park 
from the village in fine weather, to drop into this room as if he 
had never been out of it since he was last seen there, to request a 
servant to inform Sir Leicester that he is arrived in case he should 
be wanted, and to appear ten minutes before dinner in the shadow of 
the library-door.  He sleeps in his turret with a complaining flag-
staff over his head, and has some leads outside on which, any fine 
morning when he is down here, his black figure may be seen walking 
before breakfast like a larger species of rook.

Every day before dinner, my Lady looks for him in the dusk of the 
library, but he is not there.  Every day at dinner, my Lady glances 
down the table for the vacant place that would be waiting to receive 
him if he had just arrived, but there is no vacant place.  Every 
night my Lady casually asks her maid, "Is Mr. Tulkinghorn come?"

Every night the answer is, "No, my Lady, not yet."

One night, while having her hair undressed, my Lady loses herself in 
deep thought after this reply until she sees her own brooding face 
in the opposite glass, and a pair of black eyes curiously observing 
her.

"Be so good as to attend," says my Lady then, addressing the 
reflection of Hortense, "to your business.  You can contemplate your 
beauty at another time."

"Pardon!  It was your Ladyship's beauty."

"That," says my Lady, "you needn't contemplate at all."

At length, one afternoon a little before sunset, when the bright 
groups of figures which have for the last hour or two enlivened the 
Ghost's Walk are all dispersed and only Sir Leicester and my Lady 
remain upon the terrace, Mr. Tulkinghorn appears.  He comes towards 
them at his usual methodical pace, which is never quickened, never 
slackened.  He wears his usual expressionless mask--if it be a mask
--and carries family secrets in every limb of his body and every 
crease of his dress.  Whether his whole soul is devoted to the great 
or whether he yields them nothing beyond the services he sells is 
his personal secret.  He keeps it, as he keeps the secrets of his 
clients; he is his own client in that matter, and will never betray 
himself.

"How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his 
hand.

Mr. Tulkinghorn is quite well.  Sir Leicester is quite well.  My 
Lady is quite well.  All highly satisfactory.  The lawyer, with his 
hands behind him, walks at Sir Leicester's side along the terrace.  
My Lady walks upon the other side.

"We expected you before," says Sir Leicester.  A gracious 
observation.  As much as to say, "Mr. Tulkinghorn, we remember your 
existence when you are not here to remind us of it by your presence.  
We bestow a fragment of our minds upon you, sir, you see!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn, comprehending it, inclines his head and says he is 
much obliged.

"I should have come down sooner," he explains, "but that I have been 
much engaged with those matters in the several suits between 
yourself and Boythorn."

"A man of a very ill-regulated mind," observes Sir Leicester with 
severity.  "An extremely dangerous person in any community.  A man 
of a very low character of mind."

"He is obstinate," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"It is natural to such a man to be so," says Sir Leicester, looking 
most profoundly obstinate himself.  "I am not at all surprised to 
hear it."

"The only question is," pursues the lawyer, "whether you will give 
up anything."

"No, sir," replies Sir Leicester.  "Nothing.  I give up?"

"I don't mean anything of importance.  That, of course, I know you 
would not abandon.  I mean any minor point."

"Mr. Tulkinghorn," returns Sir Leicester, "there can be no minor 
point between myself and Mr. Boythorn.  If I go farther, and observe 
that I cannot readily conceive how ANY right of mine can be a minor 
point, I speak not so much in reference to myself as an individual 
as in reference to the family position I have it in charge to 
maintain."

Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head again.  "I have now my 
instructions," he says.  "Mr. Boythorn will give us a good deal of 
trouble--"

"It is the character of such a mind, Mr. Tulkinghorn," Sir Leicester 
interrupts him, "TO give trouble.  An exceedingly ill-conditioned, 
levelling person.  A person who, fifty years ago, would probably 
have been tried at the Old Bailey for some demagogue proceeding, and 
severely punished--if not," adds Sir Leicester after a moment's 
pause, "if not hanged, drawn, and quartered."

Sir Leicester appears to discharge his stately breast of a burden in 
passing this capital sentence, as if it were the next satisfactory 
thing to having the sentence executed.

"But night is coming on," says he, "and my Lady will take cold.  My 
dear, let us go in."

As they turn towards the hall-door, Lady Dedlock addresses Mr. 
Tulkinghorn for the first time.

"You sent me a message respecting the person whose writing I 
happened to inquire about.  It was like you to remember the 
circumstance; I had quite forgotten it.  Your message reminded me of 
it again.  I can't imagine what association I had with a hand like 
that, but I surely had some."

"You had some?" Mr. Tulkinghorn repeats.

"Oh, yes!" returns my Lady carelessly.  "I think I must have had 
some.  And did you really take the trouble to find out the writer of 
that actual thing--what is it!--affidavit?"

"Yes."

"How very odd!"

They pass into a sombre breakfast-room on the ground floor, lighted 
in the day by two deep windows.  It is now twilight.  The fire glows 
brightly on the panelled wall and palely on the window-glass, where, 
through the cold reflection of the blaze, the colder landscape 
shudders in the wind and a grey mist creeps along, the only 
traveller besides the waste of clouds.

My Lady lounges in a great chair in the chimney-corner, and Sir 
Leicester takes another great chair opposite.  The lawyer stands 
before the fire with his hand out at arm's length, shading his face.  
He looks across his arm at my Lady.

"Yes," he says, "I inquired about the man, and found him.  And, what 
is very strange, I found him--"

"Not to be any out-of-the-way person, I am afraid!" Lady Dedlock 
languidly anticipates.

"I found him dead."

"Oh, dear me!" remonstrated Sir Leicester.  Not so much shocked by 
the fact as by the fact of the fact being mentioned.

"I was directed to his lodging--a miserable, poverty-stricken place
--and I found him dead."

"You will excuse me, Mr. Tulkinghorn," observes Sir Leicester.  "I 
think the less said--"

"Pray, Sir Leicester, let me hear the story out" (it is my Lady 
speaking).  "It is quite a story for twilight.  How very shocking!  
Dead?"

Mr, Tulkinghorn re-asserts it by another inclination of his head.  
"Whether by his own hand--"

"Upon my honour!" cries Sir Leicester.  "Really!"

"Do let me hear the story!" says my Lady.

"Whatever you desire, my dear.  But, I must say--"

"No, you mustn't say!  Go on, Mr. Tulkinghorn."

Sir Leicester's gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels 
that to bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is 
really--really--

"I was about to say," resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness, 
"that whether he had died by his own hand or not, it was beyond my 
power to tell you.  I should amend that phrase, however, by saying 
that he had unquestionably died of his own act, though whether by 
his own deliberate intention or by mischance can never certainly be 
known.  The coroner's jury found that he took the poison 
accidentally."

"And what kind of man," my Lady asks, "was this deplorable 
creature?"

"Very difficult to say," returns the lawyer, shaking his bead.  "He 
had lived so wretchedly and was so neglected, with his gipsy colour 
and his wild black hair and beard, that I should have considered him 
the commonest of the common.  The surgeon had a notion that he had 
once been something better, both in appearance and condition."

"What did they call the wretched being?"

"They called him what he had called himself, but no one knew his 
name."

"Not even any one who had attended on him?"

"No one had attended on him.  He was found dead.  In fact, I found 
him."

"Without any clue to anything more?"

"Without any; there was," says the lawyer meditatively, "an old 
portmanteau, but--  No, there were no papers."

During the utterance of every word of this short dialogue, Lady 
Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, without any other alteration in their 
customary deportment, have looked very steadily at one another--as 
was natural, perhaps, in the discussion of so unusual a subject.  
Sir Leicester has looked at the fire, with the general expression of 
the Dedlock on the staircase.  The story being told, he renews his 
stately protest, saying that as it is quite clear that no 
association in my Lady's mind can possibly be traceable to this poor 
wretch (unless he was a begging-letter writer), he trusts to hear no 
more about a subject so far removed from my Lady's station.

"Certainly, a collection of horrors," says my Lady, gathering up her 
mantles and furs, "but they interest one for the moment!  Have the 
kindness, Mr. Tulkinghorn, to open the door for me."

Mr. Tulkinghorn does so with deference and holds it open while she 
passes out.  She passes close to him, with her usual fatigued manner 
and insolent grace.  They meet again at dinner--again, next day--
again, for many days in succession.  Lady Dedlock is always the same 
exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to 
be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine.  Mr. 
Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble 
confidences, so oddly but of place and yet so perfectly at home.  
They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people 
enclosed within the same walls could.  But whether each evermore 
watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great 
reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the 
other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know 
how much the other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their 
own hearts.



CHAPTER XIII

Esther's Narrative


We held many consultations about what Richard was to be, first 
without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him, 
but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress.  Richard 
said he was ready for anything.  When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether 
he might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he 
had thought of that, and perhaps he was.  When Mr. Jarndyce asked 
him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of 
that, too, and it wasn't a bad idea.  When Mr. Jarndyce advised him 
to try and decide within himself whether his old preference for the 
sea was an ordinary boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard 
answered, Well he really HAD tried very often, and he couldn't make 
out.

"How much of this indecision of character," Mr. Jarndyce said to me, 
"is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and 
procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don't 
pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is 
responsible for some of it, I can plainly see.  It has engendered or 
confirmed in him a habit of putting off--and trusting to this, that, 
and the other chance, without knowing what chance--and dismissing 
everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused.  The character of 
much older and steadier people may be even changed by the 
circumstances surrounding them.  It would be too much to expect that 
a boy's, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences 
and escape them."

I felt this to be true; though if I may venture to mention what I 
thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard's 
education had not counteracted those influences or directed his 
character.  He had been eight years at a public school and had 
learnt, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the 
most admirable manner.  But I never heard that it had been anybody's 
business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his 
failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to HIM.  HE had been 
adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such 
perfection that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I 
suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again 
unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it.  
Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and 
very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of 
life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether 
Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, 
instead of his studying them quite so much.

To be sure, I knew nothing of the subject and do not even now know 
whether the young gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to 
the same extent--or whether the young gentlemen of any country ever 
did.

"I haven't the least idea," said Richard, musing, "what I had better 
be.  Except that I am quite sure I don't want to go into the Church, 
it's a toss-up."

"You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge's way?" suggested Mr. 
Jarndyce.

"I don't know that, sir!" replied Richard.  "I am fond of boating.  
Articled clerks go a good deal on the water.  It's a capital 
profession!"

"Surgeon--" suggested Mr. Jarndyce.

"That's the thing, sir!" cried Richard.

I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.

"That's the thing, sir," repeated Richard with the greatest 
enthusiasm.  "We have got it at last.  M.R.C.S.!"

He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it 
heartily.  He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he 
thought of it, the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art 
of healing was the art of all others for him.  Mistrusting that he 
only came to this conclusion because, having never had much chance 
of finding out for himself what he was fitted for and having never 
been guided to the discovery, he was taken by the newest idea and 
was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration, I wondered 
whether the Latin verses often ended in this or whether Richard's 
was a solitary case.

Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to put 
it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a 
matter.  Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but 
invariably told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to 
talk about something else.

"By heaven!" cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly in 
the subject--though I need not say that, for he could do nothing 
weakly; "I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry 
devoting himself to that noble profession!  The more spirit there is 
in it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary 
task-masters and low tricksters who delight in putting that 
illustrious art at a disadvantage in the world.  By all that is base 
and despicable," cried Mr. Boythorn, "the treatment of surgeons 
aboard ship is such that I would submit the legs--both legs--of 
every member of the Admiralty Board to a compound fracture and 
render it a transportable offence in any qualified practitioner to 
set them if the system were not wholly changed in eight and forty 
hours!"

"Wouldn't you give them a week?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"No!" cried Mr. Boythorn firmly.  "Not on any consideration!  Eight 
and forty hours!  As to corporations, parishes, vestry-boards, and 
similar gatherings of jolter-headed clods who assemble to exchange 
such speeches that, by heaven, they ought to be worked in 
quicksilver mines for the short remainder of their miserable 
existence, if it were only to prevent their detestable English from 
contaminating a language spoken in the presence of the sun--as to 
those fellows, who meanly take advantage of the ardour of gentlemen 
in the pursuit of knowledge to recompense the inestimable services 
of the best years of their lives, their long study, and their 
expensive education with pittances too small for the acceptance of 
clerks, I would have the necks of every one of them wrung and their 
skulls arranged in Surgeons' Hall for the contemplation of the whole 
profession in order that its younger members might understand from 
actual measurement, in early life, HOW thick skulls may become!"

He wound up this vehement declaration by looking round upon us with 
a most agreeable smile and suddenly thundering, "Ha, ha, ha!" over 
and over again, until anybody else might have been expected to be 
quite subdued by the exertion.

As Richard still continued to say that he was fixed in his choice 
after repeated periods for consideration had been recommended by Mr. 
Jarndyce and had expired, and he still continued to assure Ada and 
me in the same final manner that it was "all right," it became 
advisable to take Mr. Kenge into council.  Mr. Kenge, therefore, 
came down to dinner one day, and leaned back in his chair, and 
turned his eye-glasses over and over, and spoke in a sonorous voice, 
and did exactly what I remembered to have seen him do when I was a 
little girl.

"Ah!" said Mr. Kenge.  "Yes.  Well!  A very good profession, Mr. 
Jarndyce, a very good profession."

"The course of study and preparation requires to be diligently 
pursued," observed my guardian with a glance at Richard.

"Oh, no doubt," said Mr. Kenge.  "Diligently."

"But that being the case, more or less, with all pursuits that are 
worth much," said Mr. Jarndyce, "it is not a special consideration 
which another choice would be likely to escape."

"Truly," said Mr. Kenge.  "And Mr. Richard Carstone, who has so 
meritoriously acquitted himself in the--shall I say the classic 
shades?--in which his youth had been passed, will, no doubt, apply 
the habits, if not the principles and practice, of versification in 
that tongue in which a poet was said (unless I mistake) to be born, 
not made, to the more eminently practical field of action on which 
he enters."

"You may rely upon it," said Richard in his off-hand manner, "that I 
shall go at it and do my best."

"Very well, Mr. Jarndyce!" said Mr. Kenge, gently nodding his head.  
"Really, when we are assured by Mr. Richard that he means to go at 
it and to do his best," nodding feelingly and smoothly over those 
expressions, "I would submit to you that we have only to inquire 
into the best mode of carrying out the object of his ambition.  Now, 
with reference to placing Mr. Richard with some sufficiently eminent 
practitioner.  Is there any one in view at present?"

"No one, Rick, I think?" said my guardian.

"No one, sir," said Richard.

"Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge.  "As to situation, now.  Is there 
any particular feeling on that head?"

"N--no," said Richard.

"Quite so!" observed Mr. Kenge again.

"I should like a little variety," said Richard; "I mean a good range 
of experience."

"Very requisite, no doubt," returned Mr. Kenge.  "I think this may 
be easily arranged, Mr. Jarndyce?  We have only, in the first place, 
to discover a sufficiently eligible practitioner; and as soon as we 
make our want--and shall I add, our ability to pay a premium?--
known, our only difficulty will be in the selection of one from a 
large number.  We have only, in the second place, to observe those 
little formalities which are rendered necessary by our time of life 
and our being under the guardianship of the court.  We shall soon 
be--shall I say, in Mr. Richard's own light-hearted manner, 'going 
at it'--to our heart's content.  It is a coincidence," said Mr. 
Kenge with a tinge of melancholy in his smile, "one of those 
coincidences which may or may not require an explanation beyond our 
present limited faculties, that I have a cousin in the medical 
profession.  He might be deemed eligible by you and might be 
disposed to respond to this proposal.  I can answer for him as 
little as for you, but he MIGHT!"

As this was an opening in the prospect, it was arranged that Mr. 
Kenge should see his cousin.  And as Mr. Jarndyce had before 
proposed to take us to London for a few weeks, it was settled next 
day that we should make our visit at once and combine Richard's 
business with it.

Mr. Boythorn leaving us within a week, we took up our abode at a 
cheerful lodging near Oxford Street over an upholsterer's shop.  
London was a great wonder to us, and we were out for hours and hours 
at a time, seeing the sights, which appeared to be less capable of 
exhaustion than we were.  We made the round of the principal 
theatres, too, with great delight, and saw all the plays that were 
worth seeing.  I mention this because it was at the theatre that I 
began to be made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy.

I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada, and Richard 
was in the place he liked best, behind Ada's chair, when, happening 
to look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened 
down upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at me.  
I felt all through the performance that he never looked at the 
actors but constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully 
prepared expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest 
dejection.

It quite spoiled my pleasure for that night because it was so very 
embarrassing and so very ridiculous.  But from that time forth, we 
never went to the play without my seeing Mr. Guppy in the pit, 
always with his hair straight and flat, his shirt-collar turned 
down, and a general feebleness about him.  If he were not there when 
we went in, and I began to hope he would not come and yielded myself 
for a little while to the interest of the scene, I was certain to 
encounter his languishing eyes when I least expected it and, from 
that time, to be quite sure that they were fixed upon me all the 
evening.

I really cannot express how uneasy this made me.  If he would only 
have brushed up his hair or turned up his collar, it would have been 
bad enough; but to know that that absurd figure was always gazing at 
me, and always in that demonstrative state of despondency, put such 
a constraint upon me that I did not like to laugh at the play, or to 
cry at it, or to move, or to speak.  I seemed able to do nothing 
naturally.  As to escaping Mr. Guppy by going to the back of the 
box, I could not bear to do that because I knew Richard and Ada 
relied on having me next them and that they could never have talked 
together so happily if anybody else had been in my place.  So there 
I sat, not knowing where to look--for wherever I looked, I knew Mr. 
Guppy's eyes were following me--and thinking of the dreadful expense 
to which this young man was putting himself on my account.

Sometimes I thought of telling Mr. Jarndyce.  Then I feared that the 
young man would lose his situation and that I might ruin him.  
Sometimes I thought of confiding in Richard, but was deterred by the 
possibility of his fighting Mr. Guppy and giving him black eyes.  
Sometimes I thought, should I frown at him or shake my head.  Then I 
felt I could not do it.  Sometimes I considered whether I should 
write to his mother, but that ended in my being convinced that to 
open a correspondence would he to make the matter worse.  I always 
came to the conclusion, finally, that I could do nothing.  Mr. 
Guppy's perseverance, all this time, not only produced him regularly 
at any theatre to which we went, but caused him to appear in the 
crowd as we were coming out, and even to get up behind our fly--
where I am sure I saw him, two or three times, struggling among the 
most dreadful spikes.  After we got home, he haunted a post opposite 
our house.  The upholsterer's where we lodged being at the corner of 
two streets, and my bedroom window being opposite the post, I was 
afraid to go near the window when I went upstairs, lest I should see 
him (as I did one moonlight night) leaning against the post and 
evidenfly catching cold.  If Mr. Guppy had not been, fortunately for 
me, engaged in the daytime, I really should have had no rest from 
him.

While we were making this round of gaieties, in which Mr. Guppy so 
extraordinarily participated, the business which had helped to bring 
us to town was not neglected.  Mr. Kenge's cousin was a Mr. Bayham 
Badger, who had a good practice at Chelsea and attended a large 
public institution besides.  He was quite willing to receive Richard 
into his house and to superintend his studies, and as it seemed that 
those could be pursued advantageously under Mr. Badger's roof, and 
Mr. Badger liked Richard, and as Richard said he liked Mr. Badger 
"well enough," an agreement was made, the Lord Chancellor's consent 
was obtained, and it was all settled.

On the day when matters were concluded between Richard and Mr. 
Badger, we were all under engagement to dine at Mr. Badger's house.  
We were to be "merely a family party," Mrs. Badger's note said; and 
we found no lady there but Mrs. Badger herself.  She was surrounded 
in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a 
little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, 
playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, 
reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little.  
She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, 
and of a very fine complexion.  If I add to the little list of her 
accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there 
was any harm in it.

Mr. Bayham Badger himself was a pink, fresh-faced, crisp-looking 
gentleman with a weak voice, white teeth, light hair, and surprised 
eyes, some years younger, I should say, than Mrs. Bayham Badger.  He 
admired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the 
curious ground (as it seemed to us) of her having had three 
husbands.  We had barely taken our seats when he said to Mr. 
Jarndyce quite triumphantly, "You would hardly suppose that I am 
Mrs. Bayham Badger's third!"

"Indeed?" said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Her third!" said Mr. Badger.  "Mrs. Bayham Badger has not the 
appearance, Miss Summerson, of a lady who has had two former 
husbands?"

I said "Not at all!"

"And most remarkable men!" said Mr. Badger in a tone of confidence.  
"Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy, who was Mrs. Badger's first 
husband, was a very distinguished officer indeed.  The name of 
Professor Dingo, my immediate predecessor, is one of European 
reputation."

Mrs. Badger overheard him and smiled.

"Yes, my dear!" Mr. Badger replied to the smile, "I was observing to 
Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson that you had had two former 
husbands--both very distinguished men.  And they found it, as people 
generally do, difficult to believe."

"I was barely twenty," said Mrs. Badger, "when I married Captain 
Swosser of the Royal Navy.  I was in the Mediterranean with him; I 
am quite a sailor.  On the twelfth anniversary of my wedding-day, I 
became the wife of Professor Dingo."

"Of European reputation," added Mr. Badger in an undertone.

"And when Mr. Badger and myself were married," pursued Mrs. Badger, 
"we were married on the same day of the year.  I had become attached 
to the day."

"So that Mrs. Badger has been married to three husbands--two of them 
highly distinguished men," said Mr. Badger, summing up the facts, 
"and each time upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the 
forenoon!"

We all expressed our admiration.

"But for Mr. Badger's modesty," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I would take 
leave to correct him and say three distinguished men."

"Thank you, Mr. Jarndyce!  What I always tell him!" observed Mrs. 
Badger.

"And, my dear," said Mr. Badger, "what do I always tell you?  That 
without any affectation of disparaging such professional distinction 
as I may have attained (which our friend Mr. Carstone will have many 
opportunities of estimating), I am not so weak--no, really," said 
Mr. Badger to us generally, "so unreasonable--as to put my 
reputation on the same footing with such first-rate men as Captain 
Swosser and Professor Dingo.  Perhaps you may be interested, Mr. 
Jarndyce," continued Mr. Bayham Badger, leading the way into the 
next drawing-room, "in this portrait of Captain Swosser.  It was 
taken on his return home from the African station, where he had 
suffered from the fever of the country.  Mrs. Badger considers it 
too yellow.  But it's a very fine head.  A very fine head!"

We all echoed, "A very fine head!"

"I feel when I look at it," said Mr. Badger, "'That's a man I should 
like to have seen!'  It strikingly bespeaks the first-class man that 
Captain Swosser pre-eminently was.  On the other side, Professor 
Dingo.  I knew him well--attended him in his last illness--a 
speaking likeness!  Over the piano, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. 
Swosser.  Over the sofa, Mrs. Bayham Badger when Mrs. Dingo.  Of 
Mrs. Bayham Badger IN ESSE, I possess the original and have no 
copy."

Dinner was now announced, and we went downstairs.  It was a very 
genteel entertainment, very handsomely served.  But the captain and 
the professor still ran in Mr. Badger's head, and as Ada and I had 
the honour of being under his particular care, we had the full 
benefit of them.

"Water, Miss Summerson?  Allow me!  Not in that tumbler, pray.  
Bring me the professor's goblet, James!"

Ada very much admired some artificial flowers under a glass.

"Astonishing how they keep!" said Mr. Badger.  "They were presented 
to Mrs. Bayham Badger when she was in the Mediterranean."

He invited Mr. Jarndyce to take a glass of claret.

"Not that claret!" he said.  "Excuse me!  This is an occasion, and 
ON an occasion I produce some very special claret I happen to have.  
(James, Captain Swosser's wine!)  Mr. Jarndyce, this is a wine that 
was imported by the captain, we will not say how many years ago.  
You will find it very curious.  My dear, I shall he happy to take 
some of this wine with you.  (Captain Swosser's claret to your 
mistress, James!)  My love, your health!"

After dinner, when we ladies retired, we took Mrs. Badger's first 
and second husband with us.  Mrs. Badger gave us in the drawing-room 
a biographical sketch of the life and services of Captain Swosser 
before his marriage and a more minute account of him dating from the 
time when he fell in love with her at a ball on board the Crippler, 
given to the officers of that ship when she lay in Plymouth Harbour.

"The dear old Crippler!" said Mrs. Badger, shaking her head.  "She 
was a noble vessel.  Trim, ship-shape, all a taunto, as Captain 
Swosser used to say.  You must excuse me if I occasionally introduce 
a nautical expression; I was quite a sailor once.  Captain Swosser 
loved that craft for my sake.  When she was no longer in commission, 
he frequently said that if he were rich enough to buy her old hulk, 
he would have an inscription let into the timbers of the quarter-
deck where we stood as partners in the dance to mark the spot where 
he fell--raked fore and aft (Captain Swosser used to say) by the 
fire from my tops.  It was his naval way of mentioning my eyes."

Mrs. Badger shook her head, sighed, and looked in the glass.

"It was a great change from Captain Swosser to Professor Dingo," she 
resumed with a plaintive smile.  "I felt it a good deal at first.  
Such an entire revolution in my mode of life!  But custom, combined 
with science--particularly science--inured me to it.  Being the 
professor's sole companion in his botanical excursions, I almost 
forgot that I had ever been afloat, and became quite learned.  It is 
singular that the professor was the antipodes of Captain Swosser and 
that Mr. Badger is not in the least like either!"

We then passed into a narrative of the deaths of Captain Swosser and 
Professor Dingo, both of whom seem to have had very bad complaints.  
In the course of it, Mrs. Badger signified to us that she had never 
madly loved but once and that the object of that wild affection, 
never to be recalled in its fresh enthusiasm, was Captain Swosser.  
The professor was yet dying by inches in the most dismal manner, and 
Mrs. Badger was giving us imitations of his way of saying, with 
great difficulty, "Where is Laura?  Let Laura give me my toast and 
water!" when the entrance of the gentlemen consigned him to the 
tomb.

Now, I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days past, 
that Ada and Richard were more than ever attached to each other's 
society, which was but natural, seeing that they were going to be 
separated so soon.  I was therefore not very much surprised when we 
got home, and Ada and I retired upstairs, to find Ada more silent 
than usual, though I was not quite prepared for her coming into my 
arms and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden.

"My darling Esther!" murmured Ada.  "I have a great secret to tell 
you!"

A mighty secret, my pretty one, no doubt!

"What is it, Ada?"

"Oh, Esther, you would never guess!"

"Shall I try to guess?" said I.

"Oh, no!  Don't!  Pray don't!" cried Ada, very much startled by the 
idea of my doing so.

"Now, I wonder who it can be about?" said I, pretending to consider.

"It's about--" said Ada in a whisper.  "It's about--my cousin 
Richard!"

"Well, my own!" said I, kissing her bright hair, which was all I 
could see.  "And what about him?"

"Oh, Esther, you would never guess!"

It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her 
face, and to know that she was not crying in sorrow but in a little 
glow of joy, and pride, and hope, that I would not help her just 
yet.

"He says--I know it's very foolish, we are both so young--but he 
says," with a burst of tears, "that he loves me dearly, Esther."

"Does he indeed?" said I.  "I never heard of such a thing!  Why, my 
pet of pets, I could have told you that weeks and weeks ago!"

To see Ada lift up her flushed face in joyful surprise, and hold me 
round the neck, and laugh, and cry, and blush, was so pleasant!

"Why, my darling," said I, "what a goose you must take me for!  Your 
cousin Richard has been loving you as plainly as he could for I 
don't know how long!"

"And yet you never said a word about it!" cried Ada, kissing me.

"No, my love," said I.  "I waited to be told."

"But now I have told you, you don't think it wrong of me, do you?" 
returned Ada.  She might have coaxed me to say no if I had been the 
hardest-hearted duenna in the world.  Not being that yet, I said no 
very freely.

"And now," said I, "I know the worst of it."

"Oh, that's not quite the worst of it, Esther dear!" cried Ada, 
holding me tighter and laying down her face again upon my breast.

"No?" said I.  "Not even that?"

"No, not even that!" said Ada, shaking her head.

"Why, you never mean to say--" I was beginning in joke.

But Ada, looking up and smiling through her tear's, cried, "Yes, I 
do!  You know, you know I do!" And then sobbed out, "With all my 
heart I do!  With all my whole heart, Esther!"

I told her, laughing, why I had known that, too, just as well as I 
had known the other!  And we sat before the fire, and I had all the 
talking to myself for a little while (though there was not much of 
it); and Ada was soon quiet and happy.

"Do you think my cousin John knows, dear Dame Durden?" she asked.

"Unless my cousin John is blind, my pet," said I, "I should think my 
cousin John knows pretty well as much as we know."

"We want to speak to him before Richard goes," said Ada timidly, 
"and we wanted you to advise us, and to tell him so.  Perhaps you 
wouldn't mind Richard's coming in, Dame Durden?"

"Oh!  Richard is outside, is he, my dear?" said I.

"I am not quite certain," returned Ada with a bashful simplicity 
that would have won my heart if she had not won it long before, "but 
I think he's waiting at the door."

There he was, of course.  They brought a chair on either side of me, 
and put me between them, and really seemed to have fallen in love 
with me instead of one another, they were so confiding, and so 
trustful, and so fond of me.  They went on in their own wild way for 
a little while--I never stopped them; I enjoyed it too much myself--
and then we gradually fell to considering how young they were, and 
how there must be a lapse of several years before this early love 
could come to anything, and how it could come to happiness only if 
it were real and lasting and inspired them with a steady resolution 
to do their duty to each other, with constancy, fortitude, and 
perseverance, each always for the other's sake.  Well!  Richard said 
that he would work his fingers to the bone for Ada, and Ada said 
that she would work her fingers to the bone for Richard, and they 
called me all sorts of endearing and sensible names, and we sat 
there, advising and talking, half the night.  Finally, before we 
parted, I gave them my promise to speak to their cousin John to-
morrow.

So, when to-morrow came, I went to my guardian after breakfast, in 
the room that was our town-substitute for the growlery, and told him 
that I had it in trust to tell him something.

"Well, little woman," said he, shutting up his book, "if you have 
accepted the trust, there can be no harm in it."

"I hope not, guardian," said I.  "I can guarantee that there is no 
secrecy in it.  For it only happened yesterday."

"Aye?  And what is it, Esther?"

"Guardian," said I, "you remember the happy night when first we came 
down to Bleak House?  When Ada was singing in the dark room?"

I wished to call to his remembrance the look he had given me then.  
Unless I am much mistaken, I saw that I did so.

"Because--" said I with a little hesitation.

"Yes, my dear!" said he.  "Don't hurry."

"Because," said I, "Ada and Richard have fallen in love.  And have 
told each other so."

"Already!" cried my guardian, quite astonished.

"Yes!" said I.  "And to tell you the truth, guardian, I rather 
expected it."

"The deuce you did!" said he.

He sat considering for a minute or two, with his smile, at once so 
handsome and so kind, upon his changing face, and then requested me 
to let them know that he wished to see them.  When they came, he 
encircled Ada with one arm in his fatherly way and addressed himself 
to Richard with a cheerful gravity.

"Rick," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am glad to have won your confidence.  
I hope to preserve it.  When I contemplated these relations between 
us four which have so brightened my life and so invested it with new 
interests and pleasures, I certainly did contemplate, afar off, the 
possibility of you and your pretty cousin here (don't be shy, Ada, 
don't be shy, my dear!) being in a mind to go through life together.  
I saw, and do see, many reasons to make it desirable.  But that was 
afar off, Rick, afar off!"

"We look afar off, sir," returned Richard.

"Well!" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "That's rational.  Now, hear me, my 
dears!  I might tell you that you don't know your own minds yet, 
that a thousand things may happen to divert you from one another, 
that it is well this chain of flowers you have taken up is very 
easily broken, or it might become a chain of lead.  But I will not 
do that.  Such wisdom will come soon enough, I dare say, if it is to 
come at all.  I will assume that a few years hence you will be in 
your hearts to one another what you are to-day.  All I say before 
speaking to you according to that assumption is, if you DO change--
if you DO come to find that you are more commonplace cousins to each 
other as man and woman than you were as boy and girl (your manhood 
will excuse me, Rick!)--don't be ashamed still to confide in me, for 
there will be nothing monstrous or uncommon in it.  I am only your 
friend and distant kinsman.  I have no power over you whatever.  But 
I wish and hope to retain your confidence if I do nothing to forfeit 
it."

"I am very sure, sir," returned Richard, "that I speak for Ada too 
when I say that you have the strongest power over us both--rooted in 
respect, gratitude, and affection--strengthening every day."

"Dear cousin John," said Ada, on his shoulder, "my father's place 
can never be empty again.  All the love and duty I could ever have 
rendered to him is transferred to you."

"Come!" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "Now for our assumption.  Now we lift 
our eyes up and look hopefully at the distance!  Rick, the world is 
before you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will 
receive you.  Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own 
efforts.  Never separate the two, like the heathen waggoner.  
Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is 
nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort.  If you had the 
abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do 
nothing well without sincerely meaning it and setting about it.  If 
you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things 
or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from 
Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave your 
cousin Ada here."

"I will leave IT here, sir," replied Richard smiling, "if I brought 
it here just now (but I hope I did not), and will work my way on to 
my cousin Ada in the hopeful distance."

"Right!" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "If you are not to make her happy, why 
should you pursue her?"

"I wouldn't make her unhappy--no, not even for her love," retorted 
Richard proudly.

"Well said!" cried Mr. Jarndyce.  "That's well said!  She remains 
here, in her home with me.  Love her, Rick, in your active life, no 
less than in her home when you revisit it, and all will go well.  
Otherwise, all will go ill.  That's the end of my preaching.  I 
think you and Ada had better take a walk."

Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook hands with 
him, and then the cousins went out of the room, looking back again 
directly, though, to say that they would wait for me.

The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes as 
they passed down the adjoining room, on which the sun was shining, 
and out at its farther end.  Richard with his head bent, and her 
hand drawn through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly; and 
she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing 
else.  So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they 
went on lightly through the sunlight as their own happy thoughts 
might then be traversing the years to come and making them all 
years of brightness.  So they passed away into the shadow and were 
gone.  It was only a burst of light that had been so radiant.  The 
room darkened as they went out, and the sun was clouded over.

"Am I right, Esther?" said my guardian when they were gone.

He was so good and wise to ask ME whether he was right!

"Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants.  Wants, at the 
core of so much that is good!" said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his head.  
"I have said nothing to Ada, Esther.  She has her friend and 
counsellor always near."  And he laid his hand lovingly upon my 
head.

I could not help showing that I was a little moved, though I did 
all I could to conceal it.

"Tut tut!" said he.  "But we must take care, too, that our little 
woman's life is not all consumed in care for others."

"Care?  My dear guardian, I believe I am the happiest creature in 
the world!"

"I believe so, too," said he.  "But some one may find out what 
Esther never will--that the little woman is to be held in 
remembrance above all other people!"

I have omitted to mention in its place that there was some one else 
at the family dinner party.  It was not a lady.  It was a 
gentleman.  It was a gentleman of a dark complexion--a young 
surgeon.  He was rather reserved, but I thought him very sensible 
and agreeable.  At least, Ada asked me if I did not, and I said 
yes.



CHAPTER XIV

Deportment


Richard left us on the very next evening to begin his new career, 
and committed Ada to my charge with great love for her and great 
trust in me.  It touched me then to reflect, and it touches me now, 
more nearly, to remember (having what I have to tell) how they both 
thought of me, even at that engrossing time.  I was a part of all 
their plans, for the present and the future, I was to write Richard 
once a week, making my faithful report of Ada, who was to write to 
him every alternate day.  I was to be informed, under his own hand, 
of all his labours and successes; I was to observe how resolute and 
persevering he would be; I was to be Ada's bridesmaid when they 
were married; I was to live with them afterwards; I was to keep all 
the keys of their house; I was to be made happy for ever and a day.

"And if the suit SHOULD make us rich, Esther--which it may, you 
know!" said Richard to crown all.

A shade crossed Ada's face.

"My dearest Ada," asked Richard, "why not?"

"It had better declare us poor at once," said Ada.

"Oh! I don't know about that," returned Richard, "but at all 
events, it won't declare anything at once.  It hasn't declared 
anything in heaven knows how many years."

"Too true," said Ada.

"Yes, but," urged Richard, answering what her look suggested rather 
than her words, "the longer it goes on, dcar cousin, the nearer it 
must be to a settlement one way or other.  Now, is not that 
reasonable?"

"You know best, Richard.  But I am afraid if we trust to it, it 
will make us unhappy."

"But, my Ada, we are not going to trust to it!" cried Richard 
gaily.  "We know it better than to trust to it.  We only say that 
if it SHOULD make us rich, we have no constitutional objection to 
being rich.  The court is, by solemn settlement of law, our grim 
old guardian, and we are to suppose that what it gives us (when it 
gives us anything) is our right.  It is not necessary to quarrel 
with our right."

"No," Said Ada, "but it may be better to forget all about it."

"Well, well," cried Richard, "then we will forget all about it!  We 
consign the whole thing to oblivion.  Dame Durden puts on her 
approving face, and it's done!"

"Dame Durden's approving face," said I, looking out of the box in 
which I was packing his books, "was not very visible when you 
called it by that name; but it does approve, and she thinks you 
can't do better."

So, Richard said there was an end of it, and immediately began, on 
no other foundation, to build as many castles in the air as would 
man the Great Wall of China.  He went away in high spirits.  Ada 
and I, prepared to miss him very much, commenced our quieter 
career.

On our arrival in London, we had called with Mr. Jarndyce at Mrs. 
Jellyby's but had not been so fortunate as to find her at home.  It 
appeared that she had gone somewhere to a tea-drinking and had 
taken Miss Jellyby with her.  Besides the tea-drinking, there was 
to be some considerable speech-making and letter-writing on the 
general merits of the cultivation of coffee, conjointly with 
natives, at the Settlement of Borrioboola-Gha.  All this involved, 
no doubt, sufficient active exercise of pen and ink to make her 
daughter's part in the proceedings anything but a holiday.

It being now beyond the time appointed for Mrs. Jellyby's return, 
we called again.  She was in town, but not at home, having gone to 
Mile End directly after breakfast on some Borrioboolan business, 
arising out of a society called the East London Branch Aid 
Ramification.  As I had not seen Peepy on the occasion of our last 
call (when he was not to be found anywhere, and when the cook 
rather thought he must have strolled away with the dustman's cart), 
I now inquired for him again.  The oyster shells he had been 
building a house with were still in the passage, but he was nowhere 
discoverable, and the cook supposed that he had "gone after the 
sheep."  When we repeated, with some surprise, "The sheep?" she 
said, Oh, yes, on market days he sometimes followed them quite out 
of town and came back in such a state as never was!

I was sitting at the window with my guardian on the following 
morning, and Ada was busy writing-of course to Richard--when Miss 
Jellyby was announced, and entered, leading the identical Peepy, 
whom she had made some endeavours to render presentable by wiping 
the dirt into corners of his face and hands and making his hair 
very wet and then violently frizzling it with her fingers.  
Everything the dear child wore was either too large for him or too 
small.  Among his other contradictory decorations he had the hat of 
a bishop and the little gloves of a baby.  His boots were, on a 
small scale, the boots of a ploughman, while his legs, so crossed 
and recrossed with scratches that they looked like maps, were bare 
below a very short pair of plaid drawers finished off with two 
frills of perfectly different patterns.  The deficient buttons on 
his plaid frock had evidently been supplied from one of Mr. 
Jellyby's coats, they were so extremely brazen and so much too 
large.  Most extraordinary specimens of needlework appeared on 
several parts of his dress, where it had been hastily mended, and I 
recognized the same hand on Miss Jellyby's.  She was, however, 
unaccountably improved in her appearance and looked very pretty.  
She was conscious of poor little Peepy being but a failure after 
all her trouble, and she showed it as she came in by the way in 
which she glanced first at him and then at us.

"Oh, dear me!" said my guardian.  "Due east!"

Ada and I gave her a cordial welcome and presented her to Mr. 
Jarndyce, to whom she said as she sat down, "Ma's compliments, and 
she hopes you'll excuse her, because she's correcting proofs of the 
plan.  She's going to put out five thousand new circulars, and she 
knows you'll be interested to hear that.  I have brought one of 
them with me.  Ma's compliments."  With which she presented it 
sulkily enough.

"Thank you," said my guardian.  "I am much obliged to Mrs. Jellyby.  
Oh, dear me!  This is a very trying wind!"

We were busy with Peepy, taking off his clerical hat, asking him if 
he remembered us, and so on.  Peepy retired behind his elbow at 
first, but relented at the sight of sponge-cake and allowed me to 
take him on my lap, where he sat munching quietly.  Mr. Jarndyce 
then withdrawing into the temporary growlery, Miss Jellyby opened a 
conversation with her usual abruptness.

"We are going on just as bad as ever in Thavies Inn," said she.  "I 
have no peace of my life.  Talk of Africa!  I couldn't be worse off 
if I was a what's-his-name--man and a brother!"

I tried to say something soothing.

"Oh, it's of no use, Miss Summerson," exclaimed Miss Jellyby, 
"though I thank you for the kind intention all the same.  I know 
how I am used, and I am not to be talked over.  YOU wouldn't be 
talked over if you were used so.  Peepy, go and play at Wild Beasts 
under the piano!"

"I shan't!" said Peepy.

"Very well, you ungrateful, naughty, hard-hearted boy!" returned 
Miss Jellyby with tears in her eyes.  "I'll never take pains to 
dress you any more."

"Yes, I will go, Caddy!" cried Peepy, who was really a good child 
and who was so moved by his sister's vexation that he went at once.

"It seems a little thing to cry about," said poor Miss Jellyby 
apologetically, "but I am quite worn out.  I was directing the new 
circulars till two this morning.  I detest the whole thing so that 
that alone makes my head ache till I can't see out of my eyes.  And 
look at that poor unfortunate child!  Was there ever such a fright 
as he is!"

Peepy, happily unconscious of the defects in his appearance, sat on 
the carpet behind one of the legs of the piano, looking calmly out 
of his den at us while he ate his cake.

"I have sent him to the other end of the room," observed Miss 
Jellyby, drawing her chair nearer ours, "because I don't want him 
to hear the conversation.  Those little things are so sharp!  I was 
going to say, we really are going on worse than ever.  Pa will be a 
bankrupt before long, and then I hope Ma will be satisfied.  
There'll he nobody but Ma to thank for it."

We said we hoped Mr. Jellyby's affairs were not in so bad a state 
as that.

"It's of no use hoping, though it's very kind of you," returned 
Miss Jellyby, shaking her head.  "Pa told me only yesterday morning 
(and dreadfully unhappy he is) that he couldn't weather the storm.  
I should be surprised if he could.  When all our tradesmen send 
into our house any stuff they like, and the servants do what they 
like with it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, 
and Ma don't care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa 
is to weather the storm.  I declare if I was Pa, I'd run away."

"My dear!" said I, smiling.  "Your papa, no doubt, considers his 
family."

"Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied 
Miss Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him?  His family 
is nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, 
confusion, and wretchedness.  His scrambling home, from week's end 
to week's end, is like one great washing-day--only nothing's 
washed!"

Miss Jellyby tapped her foot upon the floor and wiped her eyes.

"I am sure I pity Pa to that degree," she said, "and am so angry 
with Ma that I can't find words to express myself!  However, I am 
not going to bear it, I am determined.  I won't be a slave all my 
life, and I won't submit to be proposed to by Mr. Quale.  A pretty 
thing, indeed, to marry a philanthropist. As if I hadn't had enough 
of THAT!" said poor Miss Jellyby.

I must confess that I could not help feeling rather angry with Mrs. 
Jellyby myself, seeing and hearing this neglected girl and knowing 
how much of bitterly satirical truth there was in what she said.

"If it wasn't that we had been intimate when you stopped at our 
house," pursued Miss Jellyby, "I should have been ashamed to come 
here to-day, for I know what a figure I must seem to you two.  But 
as it is, I made up my mind to call, especially as I am not likely 
to see you again the next time you come to town."

She said this with such great significance that Ada and I glanced 
at one another, foreseeing something more.

"No!" said Miss Jellyby, shaking her head.  "Not at all likely!  I 
know I may trust you two.  I am sure you won't betray me.  I am 
engaged."

"Without their knowledge at home?" said I.

"Why, good gracious me, Miss Summerson," she returned, justifying 
herself in a fretful but not angry manner, "how can it be 
otherwise?  You know what Ma is--and I needn't make poor Pa more 
miserable by telling HIM."

"But would it not he adding to his unhappiness to marry without his 
knowledge or consent, my dear?" said I.

"No," said Miss Jellyby, softening.  ""I hope not.  I should try to 
make him happy and comfortable when he came to see me, and Peepy 
and the others should take it in turns to come and stay with me, 
and they should have some care taken of them then."

There was a good deal of affection in poor Caddy.  She softened 
more and more while saying this and cried so much over the unwonted 
little home-picture she had raised in her mind that Peepy, in his 
cave under the piano, was touched, and turned himself over on his 
back with loud lamentations.  It was not until I had brought him to 
kiss his sister, and had restored him to his place on my lap, and 
had shown him that Caddy was laughing (she laughed expressly for 
the purpose), that we could recall his peace of mind; even then it 
was for some time conditional on his taking us in turns by the chin 
and smoothing our faces all over with his hand.  At last, as his 
spirits were not equal to the piano, we put him on a chair to look 
out of window; and Miss Jellyby, holding him by one leg, resumed 
her confidence.

"It began in your coming to our house," she said.

We naturally asked how.

"I felt I was so awkward," she replied, "that I made up my mind to 
be improved in that respect at all events and to learn to dance.  I 
told Ma I was ashamed of myself, and I must be taught to dance.  Ma 
looked at me in that provoking way of hers as if I wasn't in sight, 
but I was quite determined to be taught to dance, and so I went to 
Mr. Turveydrop's Academy in Newman Street."

"And was it there, my dear--" I began.

"Yes, it was there," said Caddy, "and I am engaged to Mr. 
Turveydrop.  There are two Mr. Turveydrops, father and son.  My Mr. 
Turveydrop is the son, of course.  I only wish I had been better 
brought up and was likely to make him a better wife, for I am very 
fond of him."

"I am sorry to hear this," said I, "I must confess."

"I don't know why you should be sorry," she retorted a little 
anxiously, "but I am engaged to Mr. Turveydrop, whether or no, and 
he is very fond of me.  It's a secret as yet, even on his side, 
because old Mr. Turveydrop has a share in the connexion and it 
might break his heart or give him some other shock if he was told 
of it abruptly.  Old Mr. Turveydrop is a very gentlemanly man 
indeed--very gentlemanly."

"Does his wife know of it?" asked Ada.

"Old Mr. Turveydrop's wife, Miss Clare?" returned Miss Jellyby, 
opening her eyes.  "There's no such person.  He is a widower."

We were here interrupted by Peepy, whose leg had undergone so much 
on account of his sister's unconsciously jerking it like a bell-
rope whenever she was emphatic that the afflicted child now 
bemoaned his sufferings with a very low-spirited noise.  As he 
appealed to me for compassion, and as I was only a listener, I 
undertook to hold him.  Miss Jellyby proceeded, after begging 
Peepy's pardon with a kiss and assuring him that she hadn't meant 
to do it.

"That's the state of the case," said Caddy.  "If I ever blame 
myself, I still think it's Ma's fault.  We are to be married 
whenever we can, and then I shall go to Pa at the office and write 
to Ma.  It won't much agitate Ma; I am only pen and ink to HER.  
One great comfort is," said Caddy with a sob, "that I shall never 
hear of Africa after I am married.  Young Mr. Turveydrop hates it 
for my sake, and if old Mr. Turveydrop knows there is such a place, 
it's as much as he does."

"It was he who was very gentlemanly, I think!" said I.

"Very gentlemanly indeed," said Caddy.  "He is celebrated almost 
everywhere for his deportment."

"Does he teach?" asked Ada.

"No, he don't teach anything in particular," replied Caddy.  "But 
his deportment is beautiful."

Caddy went on to say with considerable hesitation and reluctance 
that there was one thing more she wished us to know, and felt we 
ought to know, and which she hoped would not offend us.  It was 
that she had improved her acquaintance with Miss Flite, the little 
crazy old lady, and that she frequently went there early in the 
morning and met her lover for a few minutes before breakfast--only 
for a few minutes.  "I go there at other times," said Caddy, "but 
Prince does not come then.  Young Mr. Turveydrop's name is Prince; 
I wish it wasn't, because it sounds like a dog, but of course be 
didn't christen himself.  Old Mr. Turveydrop had him christened 
Prince in remembrance of the Prince Regent.  Old Mr. Turveydrop 
adored the Prince Regent on account of his deportment.  I hope you 
won't think the worse of me for having made these little 
appointments at Miss Flite's, where I first went with you, because 
I like the poor thing for her own sake and I believe she likes me.  
If you could see young Mr. Turveydrop, I am sure you would think 
well of him--at least, I am sure you couldn't possibly think any 
ill of him.  I am going there now for my lesson.  I couldn't ask 
you to go with me, Miss Summerson; but if you would," said Caddy, 
who had said all this earnestly and tremblingly, "I should be very 
glad--very glad."

It happened that we had arranged with my guardian to go to Miss 
Flite's that day.  We had told him of our former visit, and our 
account had interested him; but something had always happened to 
prevent our going there again.  As I trusted that I might have 
sufficient influence with Miss Jellyby to prevent her taking any 
very rash step if I fully accepted the confidence she was so 
willing to place in me, poor girl, I proposed that she and I and 
Peepy should go to the academy and afterwards meet my guardian and 
Ada at Miss Flite's, whose name I now learnt for the first time.  
This was on condition that Miss Jellyby and Peepy should come back 
with us to dinner.  The last article of the agreement being 
joyfully acceded to by both, we smartened Peepy up a little with 
the assistance of a few pins, some soap and water, and a hair-
brush, and went out, bending our steps towards Newman Street, which 
was very near.

I found the academy established in a sufficiently dingy house at 
the corner of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows.  
In the same house there were also established, as I gathered from 
the plates on the door, a drawing-master, a coal-merchant (there 
was, certainly, no room for his coals), and a lithographic artist.  
On the plate which, in size and situation, took precedence of all 
the rest, I read, MR. TURVEYDROP.  The door was open, and the hall 
was blocked up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical 
instruments in cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking 
rakish in the daylight.  Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy 
had been lent, last night, for a concert.

We went upstairs--it had been quite a fine house once, when it was 
anybody's business to keep it clean and fresh, and nobody's 
business to smoke in it all day--and into Mr. Turveydrop's great 
room, which was built out into a mews at the back and was lighted 
by a skylight.  It was a bare, resounding room smelling of stables, 
with cane forms along the walls, and the walls ornamented at 
regular intervals with painted lyres and little cut-glass branches 
for candles, which seemed to be shedding their old-fashioned drops 
as other branches might shed autumn leaves.  Several young lady 
pupils, ranging from thirteen or fourteen years of age to two or 
three and twenty, were assembled; and I was looking among them for 
their instructor when Caddy, pinching my arm, repeated the ceremony 
of introduction.  "Miss Summerson, Mr. Prince Turveydrop!"

I curtsied to a little blue-eyed fair man of youthful appearance 
with flaxen hair parted in the middle and curling at the ends all 
round his head.  He had a little fiddle, which we used to call at 
school a kit, under his left arm, and its little bow in the same 
hand.  His little dancing-shoes were particularly diminutive, and 
he had a little innocent, feminine manner which not only appealed 
to me in an amiable way, but made this singular effect upon me, 
that I received the impression that he was like his mother and that 
his mother had not been much considered or well used.

"I am very happy to see Miss Jellyby's friend," he said, bowing low 
to me.  "I began to fear," with timid tenderness, "as it was past 
the usual time, that Miss Jellyby was not coming."

"I beg you will have the goodness to attribute that to me, who have 
detained her, and to receive my excuses, sir," said I.

"Oh, dear!" said he.

"And pray," I entreated, "do not allow me to be the cause of any 
more delay."

With that apology I withdrew to a seat between Peepy (who, being 
well used to it, had already climbed into a corner place) and an 
old lady of a censorious countenance whose two nieces were in the 
class and who was very indignant with Peepy's boots.  Prince 
Turveydrop then tinkled the strings of his kit with his fingers, 
and the young ladies stood up to dance.  Just then there appeared 
from a side-door old Mr. Turveydrop, in the full lustre of his 
deportment.

He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, 
false whiskers, and a wig.  He had a fur collar, and he had a 
padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue 
ribbon to be complete.  He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got 
up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.  He had 
such a neckcloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural 
shape), and his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that it 
seemed as though be must inevitably double up if it were cast 
loose.  He had under his arm a hat of great size and weight, 
shelving downward from the crown to the brim, and in his hand a 
pair of white gloves with which he flapped it as he stood poised on 
one leg in a high-shouldered, round-elbowed state of elegance not 
to be surpassed.  He had a cane, he had an eye-glass, he had a 
snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but 
any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he 
was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment.

"Father!  A visitor.  Miss Jellyby's friend, Miss Summerson."

"Distinguished," said Mr. Turveydrop, "by Miss Summerson's 
presence."  As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe 
I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes.

"My father," said the son, aside, to me with quite an affecting 
belief in him, "is a celebrated character.  My father is greatly 
admired."

"Go on, Prince!  Go on!" said Mr. Turveydrop, standing with his 
back to the fire and waving his gloves condescendingly.  "Go on, my 
son!"

At this command, or by this gracious permission, the lesson went 
on.  Prince Turveydrop sometimes played the kit, dancing; sometimes 
played the piano, standing; sometimes hummed the tune with what 
little breath he could spare, while he set a pupil right; always 
conscientiously moved with the least proficient through every step 
and every part of the figure; and never rested for an instant.  His 
distinguished father did nothing whatever but stand before the 
fire, a model of deportment.

"And he never does anything else," said the old lady of the 
censorious countenance.  "Yet would you believe that it's HIS name 
on the door-plate?"

"His son's name is the same, you know," said I.

"He wouldn't let his son have any name if he could take it from 
him," returned the old lady.  "Look at the son's dress!"  It 
certainly was plain--threadbare--almost shabby.  "Yet the father 
must be garnished and tricked out," said the old lady, "because of 
his deportment.  I'd deport him!  Transport him would be better!"

I felt curious to know more concerning this person.  I asked, "Does 
he give lessons in deportment now?"

"Now!" returned the old lady shortly.  "Never did."

After a moment's consideration, I suggested that perhaps fencing 
had been his accomplishment.

"I don't believe he can fence at all, ma'am," said the old lady.

I looked surprised and inquisitive.  The old lady, becoming more 
and more incensed against the master of deportment as she dwelt 
upon the subject, gave me some particulars of his career, with 
strong assurances that they were mildly stated.

He had married a meek little dancing-mistress, with a tolerable 
connexion (having never in his life before done anything but deport 
himself), and had worked her to death, or had, at the best, 
suffered her to work herself to death, to maintain him in those 
expenses which were indispensable to his position.  At once to 
exhibit his deportment to the best models and to keep the best 
models constantly before himself, he had found it necessary to 
frequent all public places of fashionable and lounging resort, to 
be seen at Brighton and elsewhere at fashionable times, and to lead 
an idle life in the very best clothes.  To enable him to do this, 
the affectionate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured 
and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had 
lasted so long.  For the mainspring of the story was that in spite 
of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his 
deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her 
death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son as 
one who had an inextinguishable claim upon him and whom he could 
never regard with too much pride and deference.  The son, 
inheriting his mother's belief, and having the deportment always 
before him, had lived and grown in the same faith, and now, at 
thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a day and 
looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle.

"The airs the fellow gives himself!" said my informant, shaking her 
head at old Mr. Turveydrop with speechless indignation as he drew 
on his tight gloves, of course unconscious of the homage she was 
rendering.  "He fully believes he is one of the aristocracy!  And 
he is so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes that 
you might suppose him the most virtuous of parents.  Oh!" said the 
old lady, apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence.  "I could 
bite you!"

I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with 
feelings of real concern.  It was difficult to doubt her with the 
father and son before me.  What I might have thought of them 
without the old lady's account, or what I might have thought of the 
old lady's account without them, I cannot say.  There was a fitness 
of things in the whole that carried conviction with it.

My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so 
hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when 
the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation.

He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a 
distinction on London by residing in it?  I did not think it 
necessary to reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, 
in any case, but merely told him where I did reside.

"A lady so graceful and accomplished," he said, kissing his right 
glove and afterwards extending it towards the pupils, "will look 
leniently on the deficiencies here.  We do our best to polish--
polish--polish!"

He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form.  I 
thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the 
sofa.  And really he did look very like it.

"To polish--polish--polish!" he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff 
and gently fluttering his fingers.  "But we are not, if I may say 
so to one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art--" with the 
high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make 
without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes "--we are not 
what we used to be in point of deportment."

"Are we not, sir?" said I.

"We have degenerated," he returned, shaking his head, which he 
could do to a very limited extent in his cravat.  "A levelling age 
is not favourable to deportment.  It develops vulgarity.  Perhaps I 
speak with some little partiality.  It may not be for me to say 
that I have been called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, 
or that his Royal Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to 
inquire, on my removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at 
Brighton (that fine building), 'Who is he?  Who the devil is he?  
Why don't I know him?  Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?'  But 
these are little matters of anecdote--the general property, ma'am--
still repeated occasionally among the upper classes."

"Indeed?" said I.

He replied with the high-shouldered bow.  "Where what is left among 
us of deportment," he added, "still lingers.  England--alas, my 
country!--has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day.  
She has not many gentlemen left.  We are few.  I see nothing to 
succeed us but a race of weavers."

"One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetuated 
here," said I.

"You are very good."  He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again.  
"You flatter me.  But, no--no!  I have never been able to imbue my 
poor boy with that part of his art.  Heaven forbid that I should 
disparage my dear child, but he has--no deportment."

"He appears to be an excellent master," I observed.

"Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master.  All that 
can be acquired, he has acquired.  All that can be imparted, he can 
impart.  But there ARE things--"  He took another pinch of snuff 
and made the bow again, as if to add, "This kind of thing, for 
instance."

I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's 
lover, now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater 
drudgery than ever.

"My amiable child," murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat.

"Your son is indefatigable," said I.

"It is my reward," said Mr. Turveydrop, "to hear you say so.  In 
some respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother.  
She was a devoted creature.  But wooman, lovely wooman," said Mr. 
Turveydrop with very disagreeable gallantry, "what a sex you are!"

I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her 
bonnet.  The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there 
was a general putting on of bonnets.  When Miss Jellyby and the 
unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don't 
know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a 
dozen words.

"My dear," said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, "do you know 
the hour?"

"No, father."  The son had no watch.  The father had a handsome 
gold one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to 
mankind.

"My son," said he, "it's two o'clock.  Recollect your school at 
Kensington at three."

"That's time enough for me, father," said Prince.  "I can take a 
morsel of dinner standing and be off."

"My dear boy," returned his father, "you must be very quick.  You 
will find the cold mutton on the table."

"Thank you, father.  Are YOU off now, father?"

"Yes, my dear.  I suppose," said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes 
and lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, "that I 
must show myself, as usual, about town."

"You had better dine out comfortably somewhere," said his son.

"My dear child, I intend to.  I shall take my little meal, I think, 
at the French house, in the Opera Colonnade."

"That's right.  Good-bye, father!" said Prince, shaking hands.

"Good-bye, my son.  Bless you!"

Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to 
do his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with him, 
so dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it 
were an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe 
implicitly in the elder.  The few moments that were occupied by 
Prince in taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I 
saw, being in the secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his 
almost childish character.  I felt a liking for him and a 
compassion for him as he put his little kit in his pocket--and with 
it his desire to stay a little while with Caddy--and went away 
good-humouredly to his cold mutton and his school at Kensington, 
that made me scarcely less irate with his father than the 
censorious old lady.

The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a 
manner, I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original.  In the 
same style he presently passed us on the other side of the street, 
on his way to the aristocratic part of the town, where he was going 
to show himself among the few other gentlemen left.  For some 
moments, I was so lost in reconsidering what I had heard and seen 
in Newman Street that I was quite unable to talk to Caddy or even 
to fix my attention on what she said to me, especially when I began 
to inquire in my mind whether there were, or ever had been, any 
other gentlemen, not in the dancing profession, who lived and 
founded a reputation entirely on their deportment.  This became so 
bewildering and suggested the possibility of so many Mr. 
Turveydrops that I said, "Esther, you must make up your mind to 
abandon this subject altogether and attend to Caddy."  I 
accordingly did so, and we chatted all the rest of the way to 
Lincoln's Inn.

Caddy told me that her lover's education had been so neglected that 
it was not always easy to read his notes.  She said if he were not 
so anxious about his spelling and took less pains to make it clear, 
he would do better; but he put so many unnecessary letters into 
short words that they sometimes quite lost their English 
appearance.  "He does it with the best intention," observed Caddy, 
"but it hasn't the effect he means, poor fellow!"  Caddy then went 
on to reason, how could he be expected to be a scholar when he had 
passed his whole life in the dancing-school and had done nothing 
but teach and fag, fag and teach, morning, noon, and night!  And 
what did it matter?  She could write letters enough for both, as 
she knew to her cost, and it was far better for him to be amiable 
than learned.  "Besides, it's not as if I was an accomplished girl 
who had any right to give herself airs," said Caddy.  "I know 
little enough, I am sure, thanks to Ma!

"There's another thing I want to tell you, now we are alone," 
continued Caddy, "which I should not have liked to mention unless 
you had seen Prince, Miss Summerson.  You know what a house ours 
is.  It's of no use my trying to learn anything that it would be 
useful for Prince's wife to know in OUR house.  We live in such a 
state of muddle that it's impossible, and I have only been more 
disheartened whenever I have tried.  So I get a little practice 
with--who do you think?  Poor Miss Flite!  Early in the morning I 
help her to tidy her room and clean her birds, and I make her cup 
of coffee for her (of course she taught me), and I have learnt to 
make it so well that Prince says it's the very best coffee he ever 
tasted, and would quite delight old Mr. Turveydrop, who is very 
particular indeed about his coffee.  I can make little puddings 
too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and tea, and sugar, and 
butter, and a good many housekeeping things.  I am not clever at my 
needle, yet," said Caddy, glancing at the repairs on Peepy's frock, 
"but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been engaged to 
Prince and have been doing all this, I have felt better-tempered, I 
hope, and more forgiving to Ma.  It rather put me out at first this 
morning to see you and Miss Clare looking so neat and pretty and to 
feel ashamed of Peepy and myself too, but on the whole I hope I am 
better-tempered than I was and more forgiving to Ma."

The poor girl, trying so hard, said it from her heart, and touched 
mine.  "Caddy, my love," I replied, "I begin to have a great 
affection for you, and I hope we shall become friends."

"Oh, do you?" cried Caddy.  "How happy that would make me!"

"My dear Caddy," said I, "let us be friends from this time, and let 
us often have a chat about these matters and try to find the right 
way through them."  Caddy was overjoyed.  I said everything I could 
in my old-fashioned way to comfort and encourage her, and I would 
not have objected to old Mr. Turveydrop that day for any smaller 
consideration than a settlement on his daughter-in-law.

By this time we were come to Mr. Krook's, whose private door stood 
open.  There was a bill, pasted on the door-post, announcing a room 
to let on the second floor.  It reminded Caddy to tell me as we 
proceeded upstairs that there had been a sudden death there and an 
inquest and that our little friend had been ill of the fright.  The 
door and window of the vacant room being open, we looked in.  It 
was the room with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly 
directed my attention when I was last in the house.  A sad and 
desolate place it was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a 
strange sensation of mournfulness and even dread.  "You look pale," 
said Caddy when we came out, "and cold!"  I felt as if the room had 
chilled me.

We had walked slowly while we were talking, and my guardian and Ada 
were here before us.  We found them in Miss Flite's garret.  They 
were looking at the birds, while a medical gentleman who was so 
good as to attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion 
spoke with her cheerfully by the fire.

"I have finished my professional visit," he said, coming forward.  
"Miss Flite is much better and may appear in court (as her mind is 
set upon it) to-morrow.  She has been greatly missed there, I 
understand."

Miss Flite received the compliment with complacency and dropped a 
general curtsy to us.

"Honoured, indeed," said she, "by another visit from the wards in 
Jarndyce!  Ve-ry happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath 
my humble roof!" with a special curtsy.  "Fitz-Jarndyce, my dear"--
she had bestowed that name on Caddy, it appeared, and always called 
her by it--"a double welcome!"

"Has she been very ill?" asked Mr. Jarndyce of the gentleman whom 
we had found in attendance on her.  She answered for herself 
directly, though he had put the question in a whisper.

"Oh, decidedly unwell!  Oh, very unwell indeed," she said 
confidentially.  "Not pain, you know--trouble.  Not bodily so much 
as nervous, nervous!  The truth is," in a subdued voice and 
trembling, "we have had death here.  There was poison in the house.  
I am very susceptible to such horrid things.  It frightened me.  
Only Mr. Woodcourt knows how much.  My physician, Mr, Woodcourt!" 
with great stateliness.  "The wards in Jarndyce--Jarndyce of Bleak 
House--Fitz-Jarndyce!"

"Miss Flite," said Mr. Woodcourt in a grave kind of voice, as if he 
were appealing to her while speaking to us, and laying his hand 
gently on her arm, "Miss Flite describes her illness with her usual 
accuracy.  She was alarmed by an occurrence in the house which 
might have alarmed a stronger person, and was made ill by the 
distress and agitation.  She brought me here in the first hurry of 
the discovery, though too late for me to be of any use to the 
unfortunate man.  I have compensated myself for that disappointment 
by coming here since and being of some small use to her."

"The kindest physician in the college," whispered Miss Flite to me.  
"I expect a judgment.  On the day of judgment.  And shall then 
confer estates."

"She will be as well in a day or two," said Mr. Woodcourt, looking 
at her with an observant smile, "as she ever will be.  In other 
words, quite well of course.  Have you heard of her good fortune?"

"Most extraordinary!" said Miss Flite, smiling brightly.  "You 
never heard of such a thing, my dear!  Every Saturday, Conversation 
Kenge or Guppy (clerk to Conversation K.) places in my hand a paper 
of shillings.  Shillings.  I assure you!  Always the same number in 
the paper.  Always one for every day in the week.  Now you know, 
really!  So well-timed, is it not?  Ye-es!  From whence do these 
papers come, you say?  That is the great question.  Naturally.  
Shall I tell you what I think?  I think," said Miss Flite, drawing 
herself back with a very shrewd look and shaking her right 
forefinger in a most significant manner, "that the Lord Chancellor, 
aware of the length of time during which the Great Seal has been 
open (for it has been open a long time!), forwards them.  Until the 
judgment I expect is given.  Now that's very creditable, you know.  
To confess in that way that he IS a little slow for human life.  So 
delicate!  Attending court the other day--I attend it regularly, 
with my documents--I taxed him with it, and he almost confessed.  
That is, I smiled at him from my bench, and HE smiled at me from 
his bench.  But it's great good fortune, is it not?  And Fitz-
Jarndyce lays the money out for me to great advantage.  Oh, I 
assure you to the greatest advantage!"

I congratulated her (as she addressed herself to me) upon this 
fortunate addition to her income and wished her a long continuance 
of it.  I did not speculate upon the source from which it came or 
wonder whose humanity was so considerate.  My guardian stood before 
me, contemplating the birds, and I had no need to look beyond him.

"And what do you call these little fellows, ma'am?" said he in his 
pleasant voice.  "Have they any names?"

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

Ada remembered very well.

"Did I?" said Miss Elite.  "Who's that at my door?  What are you 
listening at my door for, Krook?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well?" returned Miss Elite.  "What of that?"

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

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

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

"If you like," she answered hurriedly.

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

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

"This is a bitter wind!" muttered my guardian.

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

"If ever the wind was in the east," said my guardian, pretending to 
look out of the window for a weathercock, "I think it's there to-
day!"

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

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

"What are you doing here?" asked my guardian.

"Trying to learn myself to read and write," said Krook.

"And how do you get on?"

"Slow.  Bad," returned the old man impatiently.  "It's hard at my 
time of life."

"It would be easier to be taught by some one," said my guardian.

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

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

"I don't know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!" replied the old man, 
turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands.  
"I don't suppose as anybody would, but I'd rather trust my own self 
than another!"

These answers and his manner were strange enough to cause my 
guardian to inquire of Mr. Woodcourt, as we all walked across 
Lincoln's Inn together, whether Mr. Krook were really, as his 
lodger represented him, deranged.  The young surgeon replied, no, 
he had seen no reason to think so.  He was exceedingly distrustful, 
as ignorance usually was, and he was always more or less under the 
influence of raw gin, of which he drank great quantities and of 
which he and his back-shop, as we might have observed, smelt 
strongly; but he did not think him mad as yet.

On our way home, I so conciliated Peepy's affections by buying him 
a windmill and two flour-sacks that he would suffer nobody else to 
take off his hat and gloves and would sit nowhere at dinner but at 
my side.  Caddy sat upon the other side of me, next to Ada, to whom 
we imparted the whole history of the engagement as soon as we got 
back.  We made much of Caddy, and Peepy too; and Caddy brightened 
exceedingly; and my guardian was as merry as we were; and we were 
all very happy indeed until Caddy went home at night in a hackney-
coach, with Peepy fast asleep, but holding tight to the windmill.

I have forgotten to mention--at least I have not mentioned--that 
Mr. Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at 
Mr. Badger's.  Or that Mr. Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day.  
Or that he came.  Or that when they were all gone and I said to 
Ada, "Now, my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!"  
Ada laughed and said--

But I don't think it matters what my darling said.  She was always 
merry.



CHAPTER XV

Bell Yard


While we were in London Mr. Jarndyce was constantly beset by the 
crowd of excitable ladies and gentlemen whose proceedings had so 
much astonished us.  Mr. Quale, who presented himself soon after 
our arrival, was in all such excitements.  He seemed to project 
those two shining knobs of temples of his into everything that went 
on and to brush his hair farther and farther back, until the very 
roots were almost ready to fly out of his head in inappeasable 
philanthropy.  All objects were alike to him, but he was always 
particularly ready for anything in the way of a testimonial to any 
one.  His great power seemed to be his power of indiscriminate 
admiration.  He would sit for any length of time, with the utmost 
enjoyment, bathing his temples in the light of any order of 
luminary.  Having first seen him perfectly swallowed up in 
admiration of Mrs. Jellyby, I had supposed her to be the absorbing 
object of his devotion.  I soon discovered my mistake and found him 
to be train-bearer and organ-blower to a whole procession of 
people.

Mrs. Pardiggle came one day for a subscription to something, and 
with her, Mr. Quale.  Whatever Mrs. Pardiggle said, Mr. Quale 
repeated to us; and just as he had drawn Mrs. Jellyby out, he drew 
Mrs. Pardiggle out.  Mrs. Pardiggle wrote a letter of introduction 
to my guardian in behalf of her eloquent friend Mr. Gusher.  With 
Mr. Gusher appeared Mr. Quale again.  Mr. Gusher, being a flabby 
gentleman with a moist surface and eyes so much too small for his 
moon of a face that they seemed to have been originally made for 
somebody else, was not at first sight prepossessing; yet he was 
scarcely seated before Mr. Quale asked Ada and me, not inaudibly, 
whether he was not a great creature--which he certainly was, 
flabbily speaking, though Mr. Quale meant in intellectual beauty--
and whether we were not struck by his massive configuration of 
brow.  In short, we heard of a great many missions of various sorts 
among this set of people, but nothing respecting them was half so 
clear to us as that it was Mr. Quale's mission to be in ecstasies 
with everybody else's mission and that it was the most popular 
mission of all.

Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company in the tenderness of his 
heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but 
that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where 
benevolence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a 
regular uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap 
notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, 
servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of 
one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to 
help the weak from failing rather than with a great deal of bluster 
and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were 
down, he plainly told us.  When a testimonial was originated to Mr. 
Quale by Mr. Gusher (who had already got one, originated by Mr. 
Quale), and when Mr. Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the 
subject to a meeting, including two charity schools of small boys 
and girls, who were specially reminded of the widow's mite, and 
requested to come forward with halfpence and be acceptable 
sacrifices, I think the wind was in the east for three whole weeks.

I mention this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again.  It 
seemed to me that his off-hand professions of childishness and 
carelessness were a great relief to my guardian, by contrast with 
such things, and were the more readily believed in since to find 
one perfectly undesigning and candid man among many opposites could 
not fail to give him pleasure.  I should be sorry to imply that Mr. 
Skimpole divined this and was politic; I really never understood 
him well enough to know.  What he was to my guardian, he certainly 
was to the rest of the world.

He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London, we 
had seen nothing of him until now.  He appeared one morning in his 
usual agreeable way and as full of pleasant spirits as ever.

Well, he said, here he was!  He had been bilious, but rich men were 
often bilious, and therefore he had been persuading himself that he 
was a man of property.  So he was, in a certain point of view--in 
his expansive intentions.  He had been enriching his medical 
attendant in the most lavish manner.  He had always doubled, and 
sometimes quadrupled, his fees.  He had said to the doctor, "Now, 
my dear doctor, it is quite a delusion on your part to suppose that 
you attend me for nothing.  I am overwhelming you with money--in my 
expansive intentions--if you only knew it!"  And really (he said) 
he meant it to that degree that he thought it much the same as 
doing it.  If he had had those bits of metal or thin paper to which 
mankind attached so much importance to put in the doctor's hand, he 
would have put them in the doctor's hand.  Not having them, he 
substituted the will for the deed.  Very well!  If he really meant 
it--if his will were genuine and real, which it was--it appeared to 
him that it was the same as coin, and cancelled the obligation.

"It may be, partly, because I know nothing of the value of money," 
said Mr. Skimpole, "but I often feel this.  It seems so reasonable!  
My butcher says to me he wants that little bill.  It's a part of 
the pleasant unconscious poetry of the man's nature that he always 
calls it a 'little' bill--to make the payment appear easy to both 
of us.  I reply to the butcher, 'My good friend, if you knew it, 
you are paid.  You haven't had the trouble of coming to ask for the 
little bill.  You are paid.  I mean it.'"

"But, suppose," said my guardian, laughing, "he had meant the meat 
in the bill, instead of providing it?"

"My dear Jarndyce," he returned, "you surprise me.  You take the 
butcher's position.  A butcher I once dealt with occupied that very 
ground.  Says he, 'Sir, why did you eat spring lamb at eighteen 
pence a pound?'  'Why did I eat spring lamb at eighteen-pence a 
pound, my honest friend?' said I, naturally amazed by the question.  
'I like spring lamb!'  This was so far convincing.  'Well, sir,' 
says he, 'I wish I had meant the lamb as you mean the money!'  'My 
good fellow,' said I, 'pray let us reason like intellectual beings.  
How could that be?  It was impossible.  You HAD got the lamb, and I 
have NOT got the money.  You couldn't really mean the lamb without 
sending it in, whereas I can, and do, really mean the money without 
paying it!'  He had not a word.  There was an end of the subject."

"Did he take no legal proceedings?" inquired my guardian.

"Yes, he took legal proceedings," said Mr. Skimpole.  "But in that 
he was influenced by passion, not by reason.  Passion reminds me of 
Boythorn.  He writes me that you and the ladies have promised him a 
short visit at his bachelor-house in Lincolnshire."

"He is a great favourite with my girls," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and I 
have promised for them."

"Nature forgot to shade him off, I think," observed Mr. Skimpole to 
Ada and me.  "A little too boisterous--like the sea.  A little too 
vehement--like a bull who has made up his mind to consider every 
colour scarlet.  But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in 
him!"

I should have been surprised if those two could have thought very 
highly of one another, Mr. Boythorn attaching so much importance to 
many things and Mr. Skimpole caring so little for anything.  
Besides which, I had noticed Mr. Boythorn more than once on the 
point of breaking out into some strong opinion when Mr. Skimpole 
was referred to.  Of course I merely joined Ada in saying that we 
had been greatly pleased with him.

"He has invited me," said Mr. Skimpole; "and if a child may trust 
himself in such hands--which the present child is encouraged to do, 
with the united tenderness of two angels to guard him--I shall go.  
He proposes to frank me down and back again.  I suppose it will 
cost money?  Shillings perhaps?  Or pounds?  Or something of that 
sort?  By the by, Coavinses.  You remember our friend Coavinses, 
Miss Summerson?"

He asked me as the subject arose in his mind, in his graceful, 
light-hearted manner and without the least embarrassment.

"Oh, yes!" said I.

"Coavinses has been arrested by the Great Bailiff," said Mr. 
Skimpole.  "He will never do violence to the sunshine any more."

It quite shocked me to hear it, for I had already recalled with 
anything but a serious association the image of the man sitting on 
the sofa that night wiping his head.

"His successor informed me of it yesterday," said Mr. Skimpole.  
"His successor is in my house now--in possession, I think he calls 
it.  He came yesterday, on my blue-eyed daughter's birthday.  I put 
it to him, 'This is unreasonable and inconvenient.  If you had a 
blue-eyed daughter you wouldn't like ME to come, uninvited, on HER 
birthday?'  But he stayed."

Mr. Skimpole laughed at the pleasant absurdity and lightly touched 
the piano by which he was seated.

"And he told me," he said, playing little chords where I shall put 
full stops, "The Coavinses had left.  Three children.  No mother.  
And that Coavinses' profession.  Being unpopular.  The rising 
Coavinses.  Were at a considerable disadvantage."

Mr. Jarndyce got up, rubbing his head, and began to walk about.  
Mr. Skimpole played the melody of one of Ada's favourite songs.  
Ada and I both looked at Mr. Jarndyce, thinking that we knew what 
was passing in his mind.

After walking and stopping, and several times leaving off rubbing 
his head, and beginning again, my guardian put his hand upon the 
keys and stopped Mr. Skimpole's playing.  "I don't like this, 
Skimpole," he said thoughtfully.

Mr. Skimpole, who had quite forgotten the subject, looked up 
surprised.

"The man was necessary," pursued my guardian, walking backward and 
forward in the very short space between the piano and the end of 
the room and rubbing his hair up from the back of his head as if a 
high east wind had blown it into that form.  "If we make such men 
necessary by our faults and follies, or by our want of worldly 
knowledge, or by our misfortunes, we must not revenge ourselves 
upon them.  There was no harm in his trade.  He maintained his 
children.  One would like to know more about this."

"Oh!  Coavinses?" cried Mr. Skimpole, at length perceiving what he 
meant.  "Nothing easier.  A walk to Coavinses' headquarters, and 
you can know what you will."

Mr. Jarndyce nodded to us, who were only waiting for the signal.  
"Come!  We will walk that way, my dears.  Why not that way as soon 
as another!"  We were quickly ready and went out.  Mr. Skimpole 
went with us and quite enjoyed the expedition.  It was so new and 
so refreshing, he said, for him to want Coavinses instead of 
Coavinses wanting him!

He took us, first, to Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, where there 
was a house with barred windows, which he called Coavinses' Castle.  
On our going into the entry and ringing a bell, a very hideous boy 
came out of a sort of office and looked at us over a spiked wicket.

"Who did you want?" said the boy, fitting two of the spikes into 
his chin.

"There was a follower, or an officer, or something, here," said Mr. 
Jarndyce, "who is dead."

"Yes?" said the boy.  "Well?"

"I want to know his name, if you please?"

"Name of Neckett," said the boy.

"And his address?"

"Bell Yard," said the boy.  "Chandler's shop, left hand side, name 
of Blinder."

"Was he--I don't know how to shape the question--" murmured my 
guardian, "industrious?"

"Was Neckett?" said the boy.  "Yes, wery much so.  He was never 
tired of watching.  He'd set upon a post at a street corner eight 
or ten hours at a stretch if he undertook to do it."

"He might have done worse," I heard my guardian soliloquize.  "He 
might have undertaken to do it and not done it.  Thank you.  That's 
all I want."

We left the boy, with his head on one side and his arms on the 
gate, fondling and sucking the spikes, and went back to Lincoln's 
Inn, where Mr. Skimpole, who had not cared to remain nearer 
Coavinses, awaited us.  Then we all went to Bell Yard, a narrow 
alley at a very short distance.  We soon found the chandler's shop.  
In it was a good-natured-looking old woman with a dropsy, or an 
asthma, or perhaps both.

"Neckett's children?" said she in reply to my inquiry.  "Yes, 
Surely, miss.  Three pair, if you please.  Door right opposite the 
stairs."  And she handed me the key across the counter.

I glanced at the key and glanced at her, but she took it for 
granted that I knew what to do with it.  As it could only be 
intended for the children's door, I came out without askmg any more 
questions and led the way up the dark stairs.  We went as quietly 
as we could, but four of us made some noise on the aged boards, and 
when we came to the second story we found we had disturbed a man 
who was standing there looking out of his room.

"Is it Gridley that's wanted?" he said, fixing his eyes on me with 
an angry stare.

"No, sir," said I; "I am going higher up."

He looked at Ada, and at Mr. Jarndyce, and at Mr. Skimpole, fixing 
the same angry stare on each in succession as they passed and 
followed me.  Mr. Jarndyce gave him good day.  "Good day!" he said 
abruptly and fiercely.  He was a tall, sallow man with a careworn 
head on which but little hair remained, a deeply lined face, and 
prominent eyes.  He had a combative look and a chafing, irritable 
manner which, associated with his figure--still large and powerful, 
though evidently in its decline--rather alarmed me.  He had a pen 
in his hand, and in the glimpse I caught of his room in passing, I 
saw that it was covered with a litter of papers.

Leaving him standing there, we went up to the top room.  I tapped 
at the door, and a little shrill voice inside said, "We are locked 
in.  Mrs. Blinder's got the key!"

I applied the key on hearing this and opened the door.  In a poor 
room with a sloping ceiling and containing very little furniture 
was a mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and 
hushing a heavy child of eighteen months.  There was no fire, 
though the weather was cold; both children were wrapped in some 
poor shawls and tippets as a substitute.  Their clothing was not so 
warm, however, but that their noses looked red and pinched and 
their small figures shrunken as the boy walked up and down nursing 
and hushing the child with its head on his shoulder.

"Who has locked you up here alone?" we naturally asked.

"Charley," said the boy, standing still to gaze at us.

"Is Charley your brother?"

"No.  She's my sister, Charlotte.  Father called her Charley."

"Are there any more of you besides Charley?"

"Me," said the boy, "and Emma," patting the limp bonnet of the 
child he was nursing.  "And Charley."

"Where is Charley now?"

"Out a-washing," said the boy, beginning to walk up and down again 
and taking the nankeen bonnet much too near the bedstead by trying 
to gaze at us at the same time.

We were looking at one another and at these two children when there 
came into the room a very little girl, childish in figure but 
shrewd and older-looking in the face--pretty-faced too--wearing a 
womanly sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying her bare 
arms on a womanly sort of apron.  Her fingers were white and 
wrinkled with washing, and the soap-suds were yet smoking which she 
wiped off her arms.  But for this, she might have been a child 
playing at washing and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick 
observation of the truth.

She had come running from some place in the neighbourhood and had 
made all the haste she could.  Consequently, though she was very 
light, she was out of breath and could not speak at first, as she 
stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly at us.

"Oh, here's Charley!" said the boy.

The child he was nursing stretched forth its arms and cried out to 
be taken by Charley.  The little girl took it, in a womanly sort of 
manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at 
us over the burden that clung to her most affectionately.

"Is it possible," whispered my guardian as we put a chair for the 
little creature and got her to sit down with her load, the boy 
keeping close to her, holding to her apron, "that this child works 
for the rest?  Look at this!  For God's sake, look at this!"

It was a thing to look at.  The three children close together, and 
two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and 
yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the 
childish figure.

"Charley, Charley!" said my guardian.  "How old are you?"

"Over thirteen, sir," replied the child.

"Oh! What a great age," said my guardian.  "What a great age, 
Charley!"

I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her, half 
playfully yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.

"And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?" said my 
guardian.

"Yes, sir," returned the child, looking up into his face with 
perfect confidence, "since father died."

"And how do you live, Charley?  Oh! Charley," said my guardian, 
turning his face away for a moment, "how do you live?"

"Since father died, sir, I've gone out to work.  I'm out washing 
to-day."

"God help you, Charley!" said my guardian.  "You're not tall enough 
to reach the tub!"

"In pattens I am, sir," she said quickly.  "I've got a high pair as 
belonged to mother."

"And when did mother die?  Poor mother!"

"Mother died just after Emma was born," said the child, glancing at 
the face upon her bosom.  "Then father said I was to be as good a 
mother to her as I could.  And so I tried.  And so I worked at home 
and did cleaning and nursing and washing for a long time before I 
began to go out.  And that's how I know how; don't you see, sir?"

"And do you often go out?"

"As often as I can," said Charley, opening her eyes and smiling, 
"because of earning sixpences and shillings!"

"And do you always lock the babies up when you go out?"

'To keep 'em safe, sir, don't you see?" said Charley.  "Mrs. 
Blinder comes up now and then, and Mr. Gridley comes up sometimes, 
and perhaps I can run in sometimes, and they can play you know, and 
Tom an't afraid of being locked up, are you, Tom?"

'"No-o!" said Tom stoutly.

"When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, 
and they show up here quite bright--almost quite bright.  Don't 
they, Tom?"

"Yes, Charley," said Tom, "almost quite bright."

"Then he's as good as gold," said the little creature--Oh, in such 
a motherly, womanly way!  "And when Emma's tired, he puts her to 
bed.  And when he's tired he goes to bed himself.  And when I come 
home and light the candle and has a bit of supper, he sits up again 
and has it with me.  Don't you, Tom?"

"Oh, yes, Charley!" said Tom.  "That I do!"  And either in this 
glimpse of the great pleasure of his life or in gratitude and love 
for Charley, who was all in all to him, he laid his face among the 
scanty folds of her frock and passed from laughing into crying.

It was the first time since our entry that a tear had been shed 
among these children.  The little orphan girl had spoken of their 
father and their mother as if all that sorrow were subdued by the 
necessity of taking courage, and by her childish importance in 
being able to work, and by her bustling busy way.  But now, when 
Tom cried, although she sat quite tranquil, looking quietly at us, 
and did not by any movement disturb a hair of the head of either of 
her little charges, I saw two silent tears fall down her face.

I stood at the window with Ada, pretending to look at the 
housetops, and the blackened stack of chimneys, and the poor 
plants, and the birds in little cages belonging to the neighbours, 
when I found that Mrs. Blinder, from the shop below, had come in 
(perhaps it had taken her all this time to get upstairs) and was 
talking to my guardian.

"It's not much to forgive 'em the rent, sir," she said; "who could 
take it from them!"

'"Well, well!" said my guardian to us two.  "It is enough that the 
time will come when this good woman will find that it WAS much, and 
that forasmuch as she did it unto the least of these--This child," 
he added after a few moments, "could she possibly continue this?"

"Really, sir, I think she might," said Mrs. Blinder, getting her 
heavy breath by painful degrees.  "She's as handy as it's possible 
to be.  Bless you, sir, the way she tended them two children after 
the mother died was the talk of the yard!  And it was a wonder to 
see her with him after he was took ill, it really was!  'Mrs. 
Blinder,' he said to me the very last he spoke--he was lying there
--'Mrs. Blinder, whatever my calling may have been, I see a angel 
sitting in this room last night along with my child, and I trust 
her to Our Father!'"

"He had no other calling?" said my guardian.

"No, sir," returned Mrs. Blinder, "he was nothing but a follerers.  
When he first came to lodge here, I didn't know what he was, and I 
confess that when I found out I gave him notice.  It wasn't liked 
in the yard.  It wasn't approved by the other lodgers.  It is NOT a 
genteel calling," said Mrs. Blinder, "and most people do object to 
it.  Mr. Gridley objected to it very strong, and he is a good 
lodger, though his temper has been hard tried."

"So you gave him notice?" said my guardian.

"So I gave him notice," said Mrs. Blinder.  "But really when the 
time came, and I knew no other ill of him, I was in doubts.  He was 
punctual and diligent; he did what he had to do, sir," said Mrs. 
Blinder, unconsciously fixing Mr. Skimpole with her eye, "and it's 
something in this world even to do that."

"So you kept him after all?"

"Why, I said that if he could arrange with Mr. Gridley, I could 
arrange it with the other lodgers and should not so much mind its 
being liked or disliked in the yard.  Mr. Gridley gave his consent 
gruff--but gave it.  He was always gruff with him, but he has been 
kind to the children since.  A person is never known till a person 
is proved."

"Have many people been kind to the children?" asked Mr. Jarndyce.

"Upon the whole, not so bad, sir," said Mrs. Blinder; "but 
certainly not so many as would have been if their father's calling 
had been different.  Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers 
made up a little purse.  Some neighbours in the yard that had 
always joked and tapped their shoulders when he went by came 
forward with a little subscription, and--in general--not so bad.  
Similarly with Charlotte.  Some people won't employ her because she 
was a follerer's child; some people that do employ her cast it at 
her; some make a merit of having her to work for them, with that 
and all her draw-backs upon her, and perhaps pay her less and put 
upon her more.  But she's patienter than others would be, and is 
clever too, and always willing, up to the full mark of her strength 
and over.  So I should say, in general, not so bad, sir, but might 
be better."

Mrs. Blinder sat down to give herself a more favourable opportunity 
of recovering her breath, exhausted anew by so much talking before 
it was fully restored.  Mr. Jarndyce was turning to speak to us 
when his attention was attracted by the abrupt entrance into the 
room of the Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and whom we had seen 
on our way up.

"I don't know what you may be doing here, ladies and gentlemen," he 
said, as if he resented our presence, "but you'll excuse my coming 
in.  I don't come in to stare about me.  Well, Charley!  Well, Tom!  
Well, little one!  How is it with us all to-day?"

He bent over the group in a caressing way and clearly was regarded 
as a friend by the children, though his face retained its stern 
character and his manner to us was as rude as it could be.  My 
guardian noticed it and respected it.

"No one, surely, would come here to stare about him," he said 
mildly.

"May be so, sir, may be so," returned the other, taking Tom upon 
his knee and waving him off impatiently.  "I don't want to argue 
with ladies and gentlemen.  I have had enough of arguing to last 
one man his life."

"You have sufficient reason, I dare say," said Mr. Jarndyce, "for 
being chafed and irritated--"

"There again!" exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry.  "I am 
of a quarrelsome temper.  I am irascible.  I am not polite!"

"Not very, I think."

"Sir," said Gridley, putting down the child and going up to him as 
if he meant to strike him, "do you know anything of Courts of 
Equity?"

"Perhaps I do, to my sorrow."

"To your sorrow?" said the man, pausing in his wrath.  "if so, I 
beg your pardon.  I am not polite, I know.  I beg your pardon!  
Sir," with renewed violence, "I have been dragged for five and 
twenty years over burning iron, and I have lost the habit of 
treading upon velvet.  Go into the Court of Chancery yonder and ask 
what is one of the standing jokes that brighten up their business 
sometimes, and they will tell you that the best joke they have is 
the man from Shropshire.  I," he said, beating one hand on the 
other passionately, "am the man from Shropshire."

"I believe I and my family have also had the honour of furnishing 
some entertainment in the same grave place," said my guardian 
composedly.  "You may have heard my name--Jarndyce."

"Mr. Jarndyce," said Gridley with a rough sort of salutation, "you 
bear your wrongs more quietly than I can bear mine.  More than 
that, I tell you--and I tell this gentleman, and these young 
ladies, if they are friends of yours--that if I took my wrongs in 
any other way, I should be driven mad!  It is only by resenting 
them, and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding 
the justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together.  
It is only that!" he said, speaking in a homely, rustic way and 
with great vehemence.  "You may tell me that I over-excite myself.  
I answer that it's in my nature to do it, under wrong, and I must 
do it.  There's nothing between doing it, and sinking into the 
smiling state of the poor little mad woman that haunts the court.  
If I was once to sit down under it, I should become imbecile."

The passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his 
face worked, and the violent gestures with which he accompanied 
what he said, were most painful to see.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he said, "consider my case.  As true as there is a 
heaven above us, this is my case.  I am one of two brothers.  My 
father (a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so 
forth to my mother for her life.  After my mother's death, all was 
to come to me except a legacy of three hundred pounds that I was 
then to pay my brother.  My mother died.  My brother some time 
afterwards claimed his legacy.  I and some of my relations said 
that he had had a part of it already in board and lodging and some 
other things.  Now mind!  That was the question, and nothing else.  
No one disputed the will; no one disputed anything but whether part 
of that three hundred pounds had been already paid or not.  To 
settle that question, my brother filing a bill, I was obliged to go 
into this accursed Chancery; I was forced there because the law 
forced me and would let me go nowhere else.  Seventeen people were 
made defendants to that simple suit!  It first came on after two 
years.  It was then stopped for another two years while the master 
(may his head rot off!) inquired whether I was my father's son, 
about which there was no dispute at all with any mortal creature.  
He then found out that there were not defendants enough--remember, 
there were only seventeen as yet!--but that we must have another 
who had been left out and must begin all over again.  The costs at 
that time--before the thing was begun!--were three times the 
legacy.  My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to 
escape more costs.  My whole estate, left to me in that will of my 
father's, has gone in costs.  The suit, still undecided, has fallen 
into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else--and here I 
stand, this day!  Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are 
thousands and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds.  
Is mine less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole 
living was in it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?"

Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and 
that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by 
this monstrous system.

"There again!" said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage.  
"The system!  I am told on all hands, it's the system.  I mustn't 
look to individuals.  It's the system.  I mustn't go into court and 
say, 'My Lord, I beg to know this from you--is this right or wrong?  
Have you the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore 
am dismissed?'  My Lord knows nothing of it.  He sits there to 
administer the system.  I mustn't go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the 
solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me 
furious by being so cool and satisfied--as they all do, for I know 
they gain by it while I lose, don't I?--I mustn't say to him, 'I 
will have something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or 
foul!'  HE is not responsible.  It's the system.  But, if I do no 
violence to any of them, here--I may!  I don't know what may happen 
if I am carried beyond myself at last!  I will accuse the 
individual workers of that system against me, face to face, before 
the great eternal bar!"

His passion was fearful.  I could not have believed in such rage 
without seeing it.

"I have done!" he said, sitting down and wiping his face.  "Mr. 
Jarndyce, I have done!  I am violent, I know.  I ought to know it.  
I have been in prison for contempt of court.  I have been in prison 
for threatening the solicitor.  I have been in this trouble, and 
that trouble, and shall be again.  I am the man from Shropshire, 
and I sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it 
amusing, too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in 
custody and all that.  It would be better for me, they tell me, if 
I restrained myself.  I tell them that if I did restrain myself I 
should become imbecile.  I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I 
believe.  People in my part of the country say they remember me so, 
but now I must have this vent under my sense of injury or nothing 
could hold my wits together.  It would be far better for you, Mr. 
Gridley,' the Lord Chancellor told me last week, 'not to waste your 
time here, and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.'  
'My Lord, my Lord, I know it would,' said I to him, 'and it would 
have been far better for me never to have heard the name of your 
high office, but unhappily for me, I can't undo the past, and the 
past drives me here!'  Besides," he added, breaking fiercely out, 
"I'll shame them.  To the last, I'll show myself in that court to 
its shame.  If I knew when I was going to die, and could be carried 
there, and had a voice to speak with, I would die there, saying, 
'You have brought me here and sent me from here many and many a 
time.  Now send me out feet foremost!'"

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its 
contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was 
quiet.

"I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour," he said, 
going to them again, "and let them play about.  I didn't mean to 
say all this, but it don't much signify.  You're not afraid of me, 
Tom, are you?"

"No!" said Tom.  "You ain't angry with ME."

"You are right, my child.  You're going back, Charley?  Aye?  Come 
then, little one!"  He took the youngest child on his arm, where 
she was willing enough to be carried.  "I shouldn't wonder if we 
found a ginger-bread soldier downstairs.  Let's go and look for 
him!"

He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in a 
certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went 
downstairs to his room.

Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since our 
arrival, in his usual gay strain.  He said, Well, it was really 
very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to 
purposes.  Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and 
surprising energy--intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious 
blacksmith--and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, 
years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his 
superfluous combativeness upon--a sort of Young Love among the 
thorns--when the Court of Chancery came in his way and accommodated 
him with the exact thing he wanted.  There they were, matched, ever 
afterwards!  Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing 
up all sorts of towns, or he might have been a great politician, 
dealing in all sorts of parliamentary rhetoric; but as it was, he 
and the Court of Chancery had fallen upon each other in the 
pleasantest way, and nobody was much the worse, and Gridley was, so 
to speak, from that hour provided for.  Then look at Coavinses!  
How delightfully poor Coavinses (father of these charming children) 
illustrated the same principle!  He, Mr. Skimpole, himself, had 
sometimes repined at the existence of Coavinses.  He had found 
Coavinses in his way.  He could had dispensed with Coavinses.  
There had been times when, if he had been a sultan, and his grand 
vizier had said one morning, "What does the Commander of the 
Faithful require at the hands of his slave?" he might have even 
gone so far as to reply, "The head of Coavinses!"  But what turned 
out to be the case?  That, all that time, he had been giving 
employment to a most deserving man, that he had been a benefactor 
to Coavinses, that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring 
up these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these 
social virtues!  Insomuch that his heart had just now swelled and 
the tears had come into his eyes when he had looked round the room 
and thought, "I was the great patron of Coavinses, and his little 
comforts were MY work!"

There was something so captivating in his light way of touching 
these fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the 
side of the graver childhood we had seen, that he made my guardian 
smile even as he turned towards us from a little private talk with 
Mrs. Blinder.  We kissed Charley, and took her downstairs with us, 
and stopped outside the house to see her run away to her work.  I 
don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, 
little creature in her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered 
way at the bottom of the court and melt into the city's strife and 
sound like a dewdrop in an ocean.



CHAPTER XVI

Tom-all-Alone's


My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless.  The astonished 
fashionable intelligence hardly knows where to have her.  To-day 
she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-
morrow she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence 
can with confidence predict.  Even Sir Leicester's gallantry has 
some trouble to keep pace with her.  It would have more but that 
his other faithful ally, for better and for worse--the gout--darts 
into the old oak bedchamber at Chesney Wold and grips him by both 
legs.

Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a 
demon of the patrician order.  All the Dedlocks, in the direct male 
line, through a course of time during and beyond which the memory 
of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout.  It can be 
proved, sir.  Other men's fathers may have died of the rheumatism 
or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick 
vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something 
exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by dying of their 
own family gout.  It has come down through the illustrious line 
like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire.  It 
is among their dignities.  Sir Leicester is perhaps not wholly 
without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, 
that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties 
may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, "My lords and 
gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock 
certified to have arrived per the family gout."

Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the family 
disorder as if he held his name and fortune on that feudal tenure.  
He feels that for a Dedlock to be laid upon his back and 
spasmodically twitched and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty 
taken somewhere, but he thinks, "We have all yielded to this; it 
belongs to us; it has for some hundreds of years been understood 
that we are not to make the vaults in the park interesting on more 
ignoble terms; and I submit myself to the compromise.

And a goodly show he makes, lying in a flush of crimson and gold in 
the midst of the great drawing-room before his favourite picture of 
my Lady, with broad strips of sunlight shining in, down the long 
perspective, through the long line of windows, and alternating with 
soft reliefs of shadow.  Outside, the stately oaks, rooted for ages 
in the green ground which has never known ploughshare, but was 
still a chase when kings rode to battle with sword and shield and 
rode a-hunting with bow and arrow, bear witness to his greatness.  
Inside, his forefathers, looking on him from the walls, say, "Each 
of us was a passing reality here and left this coloured shadow of 
himself and melted into remembrance as dreamy as the distant voices 
of the rooks now lulling you to rest," and hear their testimony to 
his greatness too.  And he is very great this day.  And woe to 
Boythorn or other daring wight who shall presumptuously contest an 
inch with him!

My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her 
portrait.  She has flitted away to town, with no intention of 
remaining there, and will soon flit hither again, to the confusion 
of the fashionable intelligence.  The house in town is not prepared 
for her reception.  It is muffled and dreary.  Only one Mercury in 
powder gapes disconsolate at the hall-window; and he mentioned last 
night to another Mercury of his acquaintance, also accustomed to 
good society, that if that sort of thing was to last--which it 
couldn't, for a man of his spirits couldn't bear it, and a man of 
his figure couldn't be expected to bear it--there would be no 
resource for him, upon his honour, but to cut his throat!

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the 
house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the 
outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him 
when he swept the churchyard-step?  What connexion can there have 
been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world 
who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been 
very curiously brought together!

Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if 
any link there be.  He sums up his mental condition when asked a 
question by replying that he "don't know nothink."  He knows that 
it's hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and 
harder still to live by doing it.  Nobody taught him even that 
much; he found it out.

Jo lives--that is to say, Jo has not yet died--in a ruinous place 
known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's.  It is a 
black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the 
crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, 
by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession 
took to letting them out in lodgings.  Now, these tumbling 
tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery.  As on the ruined 
human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have 
bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in 
walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, 
where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying 
fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, 
and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine 
gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five 
hundred years--though born expressly to do it.

Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the 
springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone's; and each time a house has 
fallen.  These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers 
and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital.  The gaps 
remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish.  As 
several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-
all-Alone's may be expected to be a good one.

This desirable property is in Chancery, of course.  It would be an 
insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him 
so.  Whether "Tom" is the popular representative of the original 
plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom 
lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, 
until other settlers came to join him, or whether the traditional 
title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest 
company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows.  
Certainly Jo don't know.

"For I don't," says Jo, "I don't know nothink."

It must be a strange state to be like Jo!  To shuffle through the 
streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to 
the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the 
shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the 
windows!  To see people read, and to see people write, and to see 
the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all 
that language--to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!  
It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the 
churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think 
(for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and 
if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing 
to me?  To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to 
feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no 
business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by 
the consideration that I AM here somehow, too, and everybody 
overlooked me until I became the creature that I am!  It must be a 
strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as 
in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of 
my own knowledge all my life!  To see the horses, dogs, and cattle 
go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to 
the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!  Jo's 
ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a govemment, 
or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the 
Constitution, should be strange!  His whole material and immaterial 
life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all.

Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone's, meeting the tardy morning which is 
always late in getting down there, and munches his dirty bit of 
bread as he comes along.  His way lying through many streets, and 
the houses not yet being open, he sits down to breakfast on the 
door-step of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 
Foreign Parts and gives it a brush when he has finished as an 
acknowledgment of the accommodation.  He admires the size of the 
edifice and wonders what it's all about.  He has no idea, poor 
wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific 
or what it costs to look up the precious souls among the coco-nuts 
and bread-fruit.

He goes to his crossing and begins to lay it out for the day.  The 
town awakes; the great tee-totum is set up for its daily spin and 
whirl; all that unaccountable reading and writing, which has been 
suspended for a few hours, recommences.  Jo and the other lower 
animals get on in the unintelligible mess as they can.  It is 
market-day.  The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never 
guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-
eyed and foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the 
innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves.  Very like Jo and his 
order; very, very like!

A band of music comes and plays.  Jo listens to it.  So does a dog
--a drover's dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher's shop, 
and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind 
for some hours and is happily rid of.  He seems perplexed 
respecting three or four, can't remember where he left them, looks 
up and down the street as half expecting to see them astray, 
suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it.  A 
thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-
houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over 
their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, 
improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows 
how to discharge them.  He and Jo listen to the music, probably 
with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to 
awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful 
reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a 
par.  But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the 
brute!

Turn that dog's descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years 
they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark--but 
not their bite.

The day changes as it wears itself away and becomes dark and 
drizzly.  Jo fights it out at his crossing among the mud and 
wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas, and gets but a scanty sum 
to pay for the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone's.  Twilight 
comes on; gas begins to start up in the shops; the lamplighter, 
with his ladder, runs along the margin of the pavement.  A wretched 
evening is beginning to close in.

In his chambers Mr. Tulkinghorn sits meditating an application to 
the nearest magistrate to-morrow morning for a warrant.  Gridley, a 
disappointed suitor, has been here to-day and has been alarming.  
We are not to be put in bodily fear, and that ill-conditioned 
fellow shall be held to bail again.  From the ceiling, 
foreshortened Allegory, in the person of one impossible Roman 
upside down, points with the arm of Samson (out of joint, and an 
odd one) obtrusively toward the window.  Why should Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, for such no reason, look out of window?  Is the hand 
not always pointing there?  So he does not look out of window.

And if he did, what would it be to see a woman going by?  There are 
women enough in the world, Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks--too many; they 
are at the bottom of all that goes wrong in it, though, for the 
matter of that, they create business for lawyers.  What would it be 
to see a woman going by, even though she were going secretly?  They 
are all secret.  Mr. Tulkinghorn knows that very well.

But they are not all like the woman who now leaves him and his 
house behind, between whose plain dress and her refined manner 
there is something exceedingly inconsistent.  She should be an 
upper servant by her attire, yet in her air and step, though both 
are hurried and assumed--as far as she can assume in the muddy 
streets, which she treads with an unaccustomed foot--she is a lady.  
Her face is veiled, and still she sufficiently betrays herself to 
make more than one of those who pass her look round sharply.

She never turns her head.  Lady or servant, she has a purpose in 
her and can follow it.  She never turns her head until she comes to 
the crossing where Jo plies with his broom.  He crosses with her 
and begs.  Still, she does not turn her head until she has landed 
on the other side.  Then she slightly beckons to him and says, 
"Come here!"

Jo follows her a pace or two into a quiet court.

"Are you the boy I've read of in the papers?" she asked behind her 
veil.

"I don't know," says Jo, staring moodily at the veil, "nothink 
about no papers.  I don't know nothink about nothink at all."

"Were you examined at an inquest?"

"I don't know nothink about no--where I was took by the beadle, do 
you mean?" says Jo.  "Was the boy's name at the inkwhich Jo?"

"Yes."

"That's me!" says Jo.

"Come farther up."

"You mean about the man?" says Jo, following.  "Him as wos dead?"

"Hush!  Speak in a whisper!  Yes.  Did he look, when he was living, 
so very ill and poor?"

"Oh, jist!" says Jo.

"Did he look like--not like YOU?" says the woman with abhorrence.

"Oh, not so bad as me," says Jo.  "I'm a reg'lar one I am!  You 
didn't know him, did you?"

"How dare you ask me if I knew him?"

"No offence, my lady," says Jo with much humility, for even he has 
got at the suspicion of her being a lady.

"I am not a lady.  I am a servant."

"You are a jolly servant!" says Jo without the least idea of saying 
anything offensive, merely as a tribute of admiration.

"Listen and be silent.  Don't talk to me, and stand farther from 
me!  Can you show me all those places that were spoken of in the 
account I read?  The place he wrote for, the place he died at, the 
place where you were taken to, and the place where he was buried?  
Do you know the place where he was buried?"

Jo answers with a nod, having also nodded as each other place was 
mentioned.

"Go before me and show me all those dreadful places.  Stop opposite 
to each, and don't speak to me unless I speak to you.  Don't look 
back.  Do what I want, and I will pay you well."

Jo attends closely while the words are being spoken; tells them off 
on his broom-handle, finding them rather hard; pauses to consider 
their meaning; considers it satisfactory; and nods his ragged head.

"I'm fly," says Jo.  "But fen larks, you know.  Stow hooking it!"

"What does the horrible creature mean?" exclaims the servant, 
recoiling from him.

"Stow cutting away, you know!" says Jo.

"I don't understand you.  Go on before!  I will give you more money 
than you ever had in your life."

Jo screws up his mouth into a whistle, gives his ragged head a rub, 
takes his broom under his arm, and leads the way, passing deftly 
with his bare feet over the hard stones and through the mud and 
mire.

Cook's Court.  Jo stops.  A pause.

"Who lives here?"

"Him wot give him his writing and give me half a bull," says Jo in 
a whisper without looking over his shoulder.

"Go on to the next."

Krook's house.  Jo stops again.  A longer pause.

"Who lives here?"

"HE lived here," Jo answers as before.

After a silence he is asked, "In which room?"

"In the back room up there.  You can see the winder from this 
corner.  Up there!  That's where I see him stritched out.  This is 
the public-ouse where I was took to."

"Go on to the next!"

It is a longer walk to the next, but Jo, relieved of his first 
suspicions, sticks to the forms imposed upon him and does not look 
round.  By many devious ways, reeking with offence of many kinds, 
they come to the little tunnel of a court, and to the gas-lamp 
(lighted now), and to the iron gate.

"He was put there," says Jo, holding to the bars and looking in.

"Where?  Oh, what a scene of horror!"

"There!" says Jo, pointing.  "Over yinder.  Arnong them piles of 
bones, and close to that there kitchin winder!  They put him wery 
nigh the top.  They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in.  I 
could unkiver it for you with my broom if the gate was open.  
That's why they locks it, I s'pose," giving it a shake.  "It's 
always locked.  Look at the rat!" cries Jo, excited.  "Hi!  Look!  
There he goes!  Ho!  Into the ground!"

The servant shrinks into a corner, into a corner of that hideous 
archway, with its deadly stains contaminating her dress; and 
putting out her two hands and passionately telling him to keep away 
from her, for he is loathsome to her, so remains for some moments.  
Jo stands staring and is still staring when she recovers herself.

"Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?"

"I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, still 
staring.

"Is it blessed?"

"Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed.

"Is it blessed?"

"I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever; "but I 
shouldn't think it warn't.  Blest?" repeats Jo, something troubled 
in his mind.  "It an't done it much good if it is.  Blest?  I 
should think it was t'othered myself.  But I don't know nothink!"

The servant takes as little heed of what he says as she seems to 
take of what she has said herself.  She draws off her glove to get 
some money from her purse.  Jo silently notices how white and small 
her hand is and what a jolly servant she must be to wear such 
sparkling rings.

She drops a piece of money in his hand without touching it, and 
shuddering as their hands approach.  "Now," she adds, "show me the 
spot again!"

Jo thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, 
and with his utmost power of elaboration, points it out.  At 
length, looking aside to see if he has made himself intelligible, 
he finds that he is alone.

His first proceeding is to hold the piece of money to the gas-light 
and to be overpowered at finding that it is yellow--gold.  His next 
is to give it a one-sided bite at the edge as a test of its 
quality.  His next, to put it in his mouth for safety and to sweep 
the step and passage with great care.  His job done, he sets off 
for Tom-all-Alone's, stopping in the light of innumerable gas-lamps 
to produce the piece of gold and give it another one-sided bite as 
a reassurance of its being genuine.

The Mercury in powder is in no want of society to-night, for my 
Lady goes to a grand dinner and three or four balls.  Sir Leicester 
is fidgety down at Chesney Wold, with no better company than the 
goat; he complains to Mrs. Rouncewell that the rain makes such a 
monotonous pattering on the terrace that he can't read the paper 
even by the fireside in his own snug dressing-room.

"Sir Leicester would have done better to try the other side of the 
house, my dear," says Mrs. Rouncewell to Rosa.  "His dressing-room 
is on my Lady's side.  And in all these years I never heard the 
step upon the Ghost's Walk more distinct than it is to-night!"



CHAPTER XVII

Esther's Narrative


Richard very often came to see us while we remained in London 
(though he soon failed in his letter-writing), and with his quick 
abilities, his good spirits, his good temper, his gaiety and 
freshness, was always delightful.  But though I liked him more and 
more the better I knew him, I still felt more and more how much it 
was to be regretted that he had been educated in no habits of 
application and concentration.  The system which had addressed him 
in exactly the same manner as it had addressed hundreds of other 
boys, all varying in character and capacity, had enabled him to 
dash through his tasks, always with fair credit and often with 
distinction, but in a fitful, dazzling way that had confirmed his 
reliance on those very qualities in himself which it had been most 
desirable to direct and train.  They were good qualities, without 
which no high place can be meritoriously won, but like fire and 
water, though excellent servants, they were very bad masters.  If 
they had been under Richard's direction, they would have been his 
friends; but Richard being under their direction, they became his 
enemies.

I write down these opinions not because I believe that this or any 
other thing was so because I thought so, but only because I did 
think so and I want to be quite candid about all I thought and did.  
These were my thoughts about Richard.  I thought I often observed 
besides how right my guardian was in what he had said, and that the 
uncertainties and delays of the Chancery suit had imparted to his 
nature something of the careless spirit of a gamester who felt that 
he was part of a great gaming system.

Mr. and Mrs. Bayham Badger coming one afternoon when my guardian 
was not at home, in the course of conversation I naturally inquired 
after Richard.

"Why, Mr. Carstone," said Mrs. Badger, "is very well and is, I 
assure you, a great acquisition to our society.  Captain Swosser 
used to say of me that I was always better than land a-head and a 
breeze a-starn to the midshipmen's mess when the purser's junk had 
become as tough as the fore-topsel weather earings.  It was his 
naval way of mentioning generally that I was an acquisition to any 
society.  I may render the same tribute, I am sure, to Mr. 
Carstone.  But I--you won't think me premature if I mention it?"

I said no, as Mrs. Badger's insinuating tone seemed to require such 
an answer.

"Nor Miss Clare?" said Mrs. Bayham Badger sweetly.

Ada said no, too, and looked uneasy.

"Why, you see, my dears," said Mrs. Badger, "--you'll excuse me 
calling you my dears?"

We entreated Mrs. Badger not to mention it.

"Because you really are, if I may take the liberty of saying so," 
pursued Mrs. Badger, "so perfectly charming.  You see, my dears, 
that although I am still young--or Mr. Bayham Badger pays me the 
compliment of saying so--"

"No," Mr. Badger called out like some one contradicting at a public 
meeting.  "Not at all!"

"Very well," smiled Mrs. Badger, "we will say still young."

"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Badger.

"My dears, though still young, I have had many opportunities of 
observing young men.  There were many such on board the dear old 
Crippler, I assure you.  After that, when I was with Captain 
Swosser in the Mediterranean, I embraced every opportunity of 
knowing and befriending the midshipmen under Captain Swosser's 
command.  YOU never heard them called the young gentlemen, my 
dears, and probably wonld not understand allusions to their pipe-
claying their weekly accounts, but it is otherwise with me, for 
blue water has been a second home to me, and I have been quite a 
sailor.  Again, with Professor Dingo."

"A man of European reputation," murmured Mr. Badger.

"When I lost my dear first and became the wife of my dear second," 
said Mrs. Badger, speaking of her former husbands as if they were 
parts of a charade, "I still enjoyed opportunities of observing 
youth.  The class attendant on Professor Dingo's lectures was a 
large one, and it became my pride, as the wife of an eminent 
scientific man seeking herself in science the utmost consolation it 
could impart, to throw our house open to the students as a kind of 
Scientific Exchange.  Every Tuesday evening there was lemonade and 
a mixed biscuit for all who chose to partake of those refreshments.  
And there was science to an unlimited extent."

"Remarkable assemblies those, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Badger 
reverentially.  "There must have been great intellectual friction 
going on there under the auspices of such a man!"

"And now," pursued Mrs. Badger, "now that I am the wife of my dear 
third, Mr. Badger, I still pursue those habits of observation which 
were formed during the lifetime of Captain Swosser and adapted to 
new and unexpected purposes during the lifetime of Professor Dingo.  
I therefore have not come to the consideration of Mr. Carstone as a 
neophyte.  And yet I am very much of the opinion, my dears, that he 
has not chosen his profession advisedly."

Ada looked so very anxious now that I asked Mrs. Badger on what she 
founded her supposition.

"My dear Miss Summerson," she replied, "on Mr. Carstone's character 
and conduct.  He is of such a very easy disposition that probably 
he would never think it worthwhile to mention how he really feels, 
but he feels languid about the profession.  He has not that 
positive interest in it which makes it his vocation.  If he has any 
decided impression in reference to it, I should say it was that it 
is a tiresome pursuit.  Now, this is not promising.  Young men like 
Mr. Allan Woodcourt who take it from a strong interest in all that 
it can do will find some reward in it through a great deal of work 
for a very little money and through years of considerable endurance 
and disappointment.  But I am quite convinced that this would never 
be the case with Mr. Carstone."

"Does Mr. Badger think so too?" asked Ada timidly.

"Why," said Mr. Badger, "to tell the truth, Miss Clare, this view 
of the matter had not occurred to me until Mrs. Badger mentioned 
it.  But when Mrs. Badger put it in that light, I naturally gave 
great consideration to it, knowing that Mrs. Badger's mind, in 
addition to its natural advantages, has had the rare advantage of 
being formed by two such very distinguished (I will even say 
illustrious) public men as Captain Swosser of the Royal Navy and 
Professor Dingo.  The conclusion at which I have arrived is--in 
short, is Mrs. Badger's conclusion."

"It was a maxim of Captain Swosser's," said Mrs. Badger, "speaking 
in his figurative naval manner, that when you make pitch hot, you 
cannot make it too hot; and that if you only have to swab a plank, 
you should swab it as if Davy Jones were after you.  It appears to 
me that this maxim is applicable to the medical as well as to the 
nautical profession.

"To all professions," observed Mr. Badger.  "It was admirably said 
by Captain Swosser.  Beautifully said."

"People objected to Professor Dingo when we were staying in the 
north of Devon after our marriage," said Mrs. Badger, "that he 
disfigured some of the houses and other buildings by chipping off 
fragments of those edifices with his little geological hammer.  But 
the professor replied that he knew of no building save the Temple 
of Science.  The principle is the same, I think?"

"Precisely the same," said Mr. Badger.  "Finely expressed!  The 
professor made the same remark, Miss Summerson, in his last 
illness, when (his mind wandering) he insisted on keeping his 
little hammer under the pillow and chipping at the countenances of 
the attendants.  The ruling passion!"

Although we could have dispensed with the length at which Mr. and 
Mrs. Badger pursued the conversation, we both felt that it was 
disinterested in them to express the opinion they had communicated 
to us and that there was a great probability of its being sound.  
We agreed to say nothing to Mr. Jarndyce until we had spoken to 
Richard; and as he was coming next evening, we resolved to have a 
very serious talk with him.

So after he had been a little while with Ada, I went in and found 
my darling (as I knew she would be) prepared to consider him 
thoroughly right in whatever he said.

"And how do you get on, Richard?" said I.  I always sat down on the 
other side of him.  He made quite a sister of me.

"Oh! Well enough!" said Richard.

"He can't say better than that, Esther, can he?" cried my pet 
triumphantly.

I tried to look at my pet in the wisest manner, but of course I 
couldn't.

"Well enough?" I repeated.

"Yes," said Richard, "well enough.  It's rather jog-trotty and 
humdrum.  But it'll do as well as anything else!"

"Oh! My dear Richard!" I remonstrated.

"What's the matter?" said Richard.

"Do as well as anything else!"

"I don't think there's any harm in that, Dame Durden," said Ada, 
looking so confidingly at me across him; "because if it will do as 
well as anything else, it will do very well, I hope."

"Oh, yes, I hope so," returned Richard, carelessly tossing his hair 
from his forehead.  "After all, it may be only a kind of probation 
till our suit is--I forgot though.  I am not to mention the suit.  
Forbidden ground!  Oh, yes, it's all right enough.  Let us talk 
about something else."

Ada would have done so willingly, and with a full persuasion that 
we had brought the question to a most satisfactory state.  But I 
thought it would be useless to stop there, so I began again.

"No, but Richard," said I, "and my dear Ada!  Consider how 
important it is to you both, and what a point of honour it is 
towards your cousin, that you, Richard, should be quite in earnest 
without any reservation.  I think we had better talk about this, 
really, Ada.  It will be too late very soon."

"Oh, yes!  We must talk about it!" said Ada.  "But I think Richard 
is right."

What was the use of my trying to look wise when she was so pretty, 
and so engaging, and so fond of him!

"Mr. and Mrs. Badger were here yesterday, Richard," said I, "and 
they seemed disposed to think that you had no great liking for the 
profession."

"Did they though?" said Richard.  "Oh! Well, that rather alters the 
case, because I had no idea that they thought so, and I should not 
have liked to disappoint or inconvenience them.  The fact is, I 
don't care much about it.  But, oh, it don't matter!  It'll do as 
well as anything else!"

"You hear him, Ada!" said I.

"The fact is," Richard proceeded, half thoughtfully and half 
jocosely, "it is not quite in my way.  I don't take to it.  And I 
get too much of Mrs. Bayham Badger's first and second."

"I am sure THAT'S very natural!" cried Ada, quite delighted.  "The 
very thing we both said yesterday, Esther!"

"Then," pursued Richard, "it's monotonous, and to-day is too like 
yesterday, and to-morrow is too like to-day."

"But I am afraid," said I, "this is an objection to all kinds of 
application--to life itself, except under some very uncommon 
circumstances."

"Do you think so?" returned Richard, still considering.  "Perhaps!  
Ha!  Why, then, you know," he added, suddenly becoming gay again, 
"we travel outside a circle to what I said just now.  It'll do as 
well as anything else.  Oh, it's all right enough!  Let us talk 
about something else."

But even Ada, with her loving face--and if it had seemed innocent 
and trusting when I first saw it in that memorable November fog, 
how much more did it seem now when I knew her innocent and trusting 
heart--even Ada shook her head at this and looked serious.  So I 
thought it a good opportunity to hint to Richard that if he were 
sometimes a little careless of himself, I was very sure he never 
meant to be careless of Ada, and that it was a part of his 
affectionate consideration for her not to slight the importance of 
a step that might influence both their lives.  This made him almost 
grave.

"My dear Mother Hubbard," he said, "that's the very thing!  I have 
thought of that several times and have been quite angry with myself 
for meaning to be so much in earnest and--somehow--not exactly 
being so.  I don't know how it is; I seem to want something or 
other to stand by.  Even you have no idea how fond I am of Ada (my 
darling cousin, I love you, so much!), but I don't settle down to 
constancy in other things.  It's such uphill work, and it takes 
such a time!" said Richard with an air of vexation.

"That may be," I suggested, "because you don't like what you have 
chosen."

"Poor fellow!" said Ada.  "I am sure I don't wonder at it!"

No.  It was not of the least use my trying to look wise.  I tried 
again, but how could I do it, or how could it have any effect if I 
could, while Ada rested her clasped hands upon his shoulder and 
while he looked at her tender blue eyes, and while they looked at 
him!

"You see, my precious girl," said Richard, passing her golden curls 
through and through his hand, "I was a little hasty perhaps; or I 
misunderstood my own inclinations perhaps.  They don't seem to lie 
in that direction.  I couldn't tell till I tried.  Now the question 
is whether it's worth-while to undo all that has been done.  It 
seems like making a great disturbance about nothing particular."

"My dear Richard," said I, "how CAN you say about nothing 
particular?"

"I don't mean absolutely that," he returned.  "I mean that it MAY 
be nothing particular because I may never want it."

Both Ada and I urged, in reply, not only that it was decidedly 
worth-while to undo what had been done, but that it must be undone.  
I then asked Richard whether he had thought of any more congenial 
pursuit.

"There, my dear Mrs. Shipton," said Richard, "you touch me home.  
Yes, I have.  I have been thinking that the law is the boy for me."

"The law!" repeated Ada as if she were afraid of the name.

"If I went into Kenge's office," said Richard, "and if I were 
placed under articles to Kenge, I should have my eye on the--hum!--
the forbidden ground--and should be able to study it, and master 
it, and to satisfy myself that it was not neglected and was being 
properly conducted.  I should be able to look after Ada's interests 
and my own interests (the same thing!); and I should peg away at 
Blackstone and all those fellows with the most tremendous ardour."

I was not by any means so sure of that, and I saw how his hankering 
after the vague things yet to come of those long-deferred hopes 
cast a shade on Ada's face.  But I thought it best to encourage him 
in any project of continuous exertion, and only advised him to be 
quite sure that his mind was made up now.

"My dear Minerva," said Richard, "I am as steady as you are.  I 
made a mistake; we are all liable to mistakes; I won't do so any 
more, and I'll become such a lawyer as is not often seen.  That is, 
you know," said Richard, relapsing into doubt, "if it really is 
worth-while, after all, to make such a disturbance about nothing 
particular!"

This led to our saying again, with a great deal of gravity, all 
that we had said already and to our coming to much the same 
conclusion afterwards.  But we so strongly advised Richard to be 
frank and open with Mr. Jarndyce, without a moment's delay, and his 
disposition was naturally so opposed to concealment that he sought 
him out at once (taking us with him) and made a full avowal.  
"Rick," said my guardian, after hearing him attentively, "we can 
retreat with honour, and we will.  But we must he careful--for our 
cousin s sake, Rick, for our cousin's sake--that we make no more 
such mistakes.  Therefore, in the matter of the law, we will have a 
good trial before we decide.  We will look before we leap, and take 
plenty of time about it."

Richard's energy was of such an impatient and fitful kind that he 
would have liked nothing better than to have gone to Mr. Kenge's 
office in that hour and to have entered into articles with him on 
the spot.  Submitting, however, with a good grace to the caution 
that we had shown to be so necessary, he contented himself with 
sitting down among us in his lightest spirits and talking as if his 
one unvarying purpose in life from childhood had been that one 
which now held possession of him.  My guardian was very kind and 
cordial with him, but rather grave, enough so to cause Ada, when he 
had departed and we were going upstairs to bed, to say, "Cousin 
John, I hope you don't think the worse of Richard?"

"No, my love," said he.

"Because it was very natural that Richard should be mistaken in 
such a difficult case.  It is not uncommon."

"No, no, my love," said he.  "Don't look unhappy."

"Oh, I am not unhappy, cousin John!" said Ada, smiling cheerfully, 
with her hand upon his shoulder, where she had put it in bidding 
him good night.  "But I should be a little so if you thought at all 
the worse of Richard."

"My dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I should think the worse of him only 
if you were ever in the least unhappy through his means.  I should 
be more disposed to quarrel with myself even then, than with poor 
Rick, for I brought you together.  But, tut, all this is nothing!  
He has time before him, and the race to run.  I think the worse of 
him?  Not I, my loving cousin!  And not you, I swear!"

"No, indeed, cousin John," said Ada, "I am sure I could not--I am 
sure I would not--think any ill of Richard if the whole world did.  
I could, and I would, think better of him then than at any other 
time!"

So quietly and honestly she said it, with her hands upon his 
shoulders--both hands now--and looking up into his face, like the 
picture of truth!

"I think," said my guardian, thoughtfully regarding her, "I think 
it must be somewhere written that the virtues of the mothers shall 
occasionally be visited on the children, as well as the sins of the 
father.  Good night, my rosebud.  Good night, little woman.  
Pleasant slumbers!  Happy dreams!"

This was the first time I ever saw him follow Ada with his eyes 
with something of a shadow on their benevolent expression.  I well 
remembered the look with which he had contemplated her and Richard 
when she was singing in the firelight; it was but a very little 
while since he had watched them passing down the room in which the 
sun was shining, and away into the shade; but his glance was 
changed, and even the silent look of confidence in me which now 
followed it once more was not quite so hopeful and untroubled as it 
had originally been.

Ada praised Richard more to me that night than ever she had praised 
him yet.  She went to sleep with a little bracelet he had given her 
clasped upon her arm.  I fancied she was dreaming of him when I 
kissed her cheek after she had slept an hour and saw how tranquil 
and happy she looked.

For I was so little inclined to sleep myself that night that I sat 
up working.  It would not be worth mentioning for its own sake, but 
I was wakeful and rather low-spirited.  I don't know why.  At least 
I don't think I know why.  At least, perhaps I do, but I don't 
think it matters.

At any rate, I made up my mind to be so dreadfully industrious that 
I would leave myself not a moment's leisure to be low-spirited.  
For I naturally said, "Esther!  You to be low-spirited.  YOU!"  And 
it really was time to say so, for I--yes, I really did see myself 
in the glass, almost crying.  "As if you had anything to make you 
unhappy, instead of everything to make you happy, you ungrateful 
heart!" said I.

If I could have made myself go to sleep, I would have done it 
directly, but not being able to do that, I took out of my basket 
some ornamental work for our house (I mean Bleak House) that I was 
busy with at that time and sat down to it with great determination.  
It was necessary to count all the stitches in that work, and I 
resolved to go on with it until I couldn't keep my eyes open, and 
then to go to bed.

I soon found myself very busy.  But I had left some silk downstairs 
in a work-table drawer in the temporary growlery, and coming to a 
stop for want of it, I took my candle and went softly down to get 
it.  To my great surprise, on going in I found my guardian still 
there, and sitting looking at the ashes.  He was lost in thought, 
his book lay unheeded by his side, his silvered iron-grey hair was 
scattered confusedly upon his forehead as though his hand had been 
wandering among it while his thoughts were elsewhere, and his face 
looked worn.  Almost frightened by coming upon him so unexpectedly, 
I stood still for a moment and should have retired without speaking 
had he not, in again passing his hand abstractedly through his 
hair, seen me and started.

"Esther!"

I told him what I had come for.

"At work so late, my dear?"

"I am working late to-night," said I, "because I couldn't sleep and 
wished to tire myself.  But, dear guardian, you are late too, and 
look weary.  You have no trouble, I hope, to keep you waking?"

"None, little woman, that YOU would readily understand," said he.

He spoke in a regretful tone so new to me that I inwardly repeated, 
as if that would help me to his meaning, "That I could readily 
understand!"

"Remain a moment, Esther," said he, "You were in my thoughts."

"I hope I was not the trouble, guardian?"

He slightly waved his hand and fell into his usual manner.  The 
change was so remarkable, and he appeared to make it by dint of so 
much self-command, that I found myself again inwardly repeating, 
"None that I could understand!"

"Little woman," said my guardian, "I was thinking--that is, I have 
been thinking since I have been sitting here--that you ought to 
know of your own history all I know.  It is very little.  Next to 
nothing."

"Dear guardian," I replied, "when you spoke to me before on that 
subject--"

"But since then," he gravely interposed, anticipating what I meant 
to say, "I have reflected that your having anything to ask me, and 
my having anything to tell you, are different considerations, 
Esther.  It is perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I know."

"If you think so, guardian, it is right."

"I think so," he returned very gently, and kindly, and very 
distinctly.  "My dear, I think so now.  If any real disadvantage 
can attach to your position in the mind of any man or woman worth a 
thought, it is right that you at least of all the world should not 
magnify it to yourself by having vague impressions of its nature."

I sat down and said after a little effort to be as calm as I ought 
to be, "One of my earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these 
words: 'Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.  
The time will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this 
better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.'"  I had 
covered my face with my hands in repeating the words, but I took 
them away now with a better kind of shame, I hope, and told him 
that to him I owed the blessing that I had from my childhood to 
that hour never, never, never felt it.  He put up his hand as if to 
stop me.  I well knew that he was never to be thanked, and said no 
more.

"Nine years, my dear," he said after thinking for a little while, 
"have passed since I received a letter from a lady living in 
seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered it 
unlike all other letters I have ever read.  It was written to me 
(as it told me in so many words), perhaps because it was the 
writer's idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me, perhaps because it 
was mine to justify it.  It told me of a child, an orphan girl then 
twelve years old, in some such cruel words as those which live in 
your remembrance.  It told me that the writer had bred her in 
secrecy from her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence, 
and that if the writer were to die before the child became a woman, 
she would be left entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown.  It 
asked me to consider if I would, in that case, finish what the 
writer had begun."

I listened in silence and looked attentively at him.

"Your early recollection, my dear, will supply the gloomy medium 
through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer, and 
the distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of 
the need there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she 
was quite innocent.  I felt concerned for the little creature, in 
her darkened life, and replied to the letter."

I took his hand and kissed it.

"It laid the injunction on me that I should never propose to see 
the writer, who had long been estranged from all intercourse with 
the world, but who would see a confidential agent if I would 
appoint one.  I accredited Mr. Kenge.  The lady said, of her own 
accord and not of his seeking, that her name was an assumed one.  
That she was, if there were any ties of blood in such a case, the 
child's aunt.  That more than this she would never (and he was well 
persuaded of the steadfastness of her resolution) for any human 
consideration disclose.  My dear, I have told you all."

I held his hand for a little while in mine.

"I saw my ward oftener than she saw me," he added, cheerily making 
light of it, "and I always knew she was beloved, useful, and happy.  
She repays me twenty-thousandfold, and twenty more to that, every 
hour in every day!"

"And oftener still," said I, '"she blesses the guardian who is a 
father to her!"

At the word father, I saw his former trouble come into his face.  
He subdued it as before, and it was gone in an instant; but it had 
been there and it had come so swiftly upon my words that I felt as 
if they had given him a shock.  I again inwardly repeated, 
wondering, "That I could readily understand.  None that I could 
readily understand!"  No, it was true.  I did not understand it.  
Not for many and many a day.

"Take a fatherly good night, my dear," said he, kissing me on the 
forehead, "and so to rest.  These are late hours for working and 
thinking.  You do that for all of us, all day long, little 
housekeeper!"

I neither worked nor thought any more that night.  I opened my 
grateful heart to heaven in thankfulness for its providence to me 
and its care of me, and fell asleep.

We had a visitor next day.  Mr. Allan Woodcourt came.  He came to 
take leave of us; he had settled to do so beforehand.  He was going 
to China and to India as a surgeon on board ship.  He was to be 
away a long, long time.

I believe--at least I know--that he was not rich.  All his widowed 
mother could spare had been spent in qualifying him for his 
profession.  It was not lucrative to a young practitioner, with 
very little influence in London; and although he was, night and 
day, at the service of numbers of poor people and did wonders of 
gentleness and skill for them, he gained very little by it in 
money.  He was seven years older than I.  Not that I need mention 
it, for it hardly seems to belong to anything.

I think--I mean, he told us--that he had been in practice three or 
four years and that if he could have hoped to contend through three 
or four more, he would not have made the voyage on which he was 
bound.  But he had no fortune or private means, and so he was going 
away.  He had been to see us several times altogether.  We thought 
it a pity he should go away.  Because he was distinguished in his 
art among those who knew it best, and some of the greatest men 
belonging to it had a high opinion of him.

When he came to bid us good-bye, he brought his mother with him for 
the first time.  She was a pretty old lady, with bright black eyes, 
but she seemed proud.  She came from Wales and had had, a long time 
ago, an eminent person for an ancestor, of the name of Morgan ap-
Kerrig--of some place that sounded like Gimlet--who was the most 
illustrious person that ever was known and all of whose relations 
were a sort of royal family.  He appeared to have passed his life 
in always getting up into mountains and fighting somebody; and a 
bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his praises 
in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it, 
Mewlinnwillinwodd.

Mrs. Woodcourt, after expatiating to us on the fame of her great 
kinsman, said that no doubt wherever her son Allan went he would 
remember his pedigree and would on no account form an alliance 
below it.  She told him that there were many handsome English 
ladies in India who went out on speculation, and that there were 
some to be picked up with property, but that neither charms nor 
wealth would suffice for the descendant from such a line without 
birth, which must ever be the first consideration.  She talked so 
much about birth that for a moment I half fancied, and with pain--  
But what an idle fancy to suppose that she could think or care what 
MINE was!

Mr. Woodcourt seemed a little distressed by her prolixity, but he 
was too considerate to let her see it and contrived delicately to 
bring the conversation round to making his acknowledgments to my 
guardian for his hospitality and for the very happy hours--he 
called them the very happy hours--he had passed with us.  The 
recollection of them, he said, would go with him wherever he went 
and would be always treasured.  And so we gave him our hands, one 
after another--at least, they did--and I did; and so he put his 
lips to Ada's hand--and to mine; and so he went away upon his long, 
long voyage!

I was very busy indeed all day and wrote directions home to the 
servants, and wrote notes for my guardian, and dusted his books and 
papers, and jingled my housekeeping keys a good deal, one way and 
another.  I was still busy between the lights, singing and working 
by the window, when who should come in but Caddy, whom I had no 
expectation of seeing!

"Why, Caddy, my dear," said I, "what beautiful flowers!"

She had such an exquisite little nosegay in her hand.

"Indeed, I think so, Esther," replied Caddy.  "They are the 
loveliest I ever saw."

"Prince, my dear?" said I in a whisper.

"No," answered Caddy, shaking her head and holding them to me to 
smell.  "Not Prince."

"Well, to be sure, Caddy!" said I.  "You must have two lovers!"

"What?  Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Caddy.

"Do they look like that sort of thing?" I repeated, pinching her 
cheek.

Caddy only laughed in return, and telling me that she had come for 
half an hour, at the expiration of which time Prince would be 
waiting for her at the corner, sat chatting with me and Ada in the 
window, every now and then handing me the flowers again or trying 
how they looked against my hair.  At last, when she was going, she 
took me into my room and put them in my dress.

"For me?" said I, surprised.

"For you," said Caddy with a kiss.  "They were left behind by 
somebody."

"Left behind?"

"At poor Miss Flite's," said Caddy.  "Somebody who has been very 
good to her was hurrying away an hour ago to join a ship and left 
these flowers behind.  No, no!  Don't take them out.  Let the 
pretty little things lie here," said Caddy, adjusting them with a 
careful hand, "because I was present myself, and I shouldn't wonder 
if somebody left them on purpose!"

"Do they look like that sort of thing?" said Ada, coming laughingly 
behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist.  "Oh, yes, 
indeed they do, Dame Durden!  They look very, very like that sort 
of thing.  Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!"



CHAPTER XVIII

Lady Dedlock


It was not so easy as it had appeared at first to arrange for 
Richard's making a trial of Mr. Kenge's office.  Richard himself 
was the chief impediment.  As soon as he had it in his power to 
leave Mr. Badger at any moment, he began to doubt whether he wanted 
to leave him at all.  He didn't know, he said, really.  It wasn't a 
bad profession; he couldn't assert that he disliked it; perhaps he 
liked it as well as he liked any other--suppose he gave it one more 
chance!  Upon that, he shut himself up for a few weeks with some 
books and some bones and seemed to acquire a considerable fund of 
information with great rapidity.  His fervour, after lasting about 
a month, began to cool, and when it was quite cooled, began to grow 
warm again.  His vacillations between law and medicine lasted so 
long that midsummer arrived before he finally separated from Mr. 
Badger and entered on an experimental course of Messrs. Kenge and 
Carboy.  For all his waywardness, he took great credit to himself 
as being determined to be in earnest "this time."  And he was so 
good-natured throughout, and in such high spirits, and so fond of 
Ada, that it was very difficult indeed to be otherwise than pleased 
with him.

"As to Mr. Jarndyce," who, I may mention, found the wind much 
given, during this period, to stick in the east; "As to Mr. 
Jarndyce," Richard would say to me, "he is the finest fellow in the 
world, Esther!  I must be particularly careful, if it were only for 
his satisfaction, to take myself well to task and have a regular 
wind-up of this business now."

The idea of his taking himself well to task, with that laughing 
face and heedless manner and with a fancy that everything could 
catch and nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous.  However, 
he told us between-whiles that he was doing it to such an extent 
that he wondered his hair didn't turn grey.  His regular wind-up of 
the business was (as I have said) that he went to Mr. Kenge's about 
midsummer to try how he liked it.

All this time he was, in money affairs, what I have described him 
in a former illustration--generous, profuse, wildly careless, but 
fully persuaded that he was rather calculating and prudent.  I 
happened to say to Ada, in his presence, half jestingly, half 
seriously, about the time of his going to Mr. Kenge's, that he 
needed to have Fortunatus' purse, he made so light of money, which 
he answered in this way, "My jewel of a dear cousin, you hear this 
old woman!  Why does she say that?  Because I gave eight pounds odd 
(or whatever it was) for a certain neat waistcoat and buttons a few 
days ago.  Now, if I had stayed at Badger's I should have been 
obliged to spend twelve pounds at a blow for some heart-breaking 
lecture-fees.  So I make four pounds--in a lump--by the 
transaction!"

It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian what 
arrangements should be made for his living in London while he 
experimented on the law, for we had long since gone back to Bleak 
House, and it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener 
than once a week.  My guardian told me that if Richard were to 
settle down at Mr. Kenge's he would take some apartments or 
chambers where we too could occasionally stay for a few days at a 
time; "but, little woman," he added, rubbing his head very 
significantly, "he hasn't settled down there yet!"  The discussions 
ended in our hiring for him, by the month, a neat little furnished 
lodging in a quiet old house near Queen Square.  He immediately 
began to spend all the money he had in buying the oddest little 
ornaments and luxuries for this lodging; and so often as Ada and I 
dissuaded him from making any purchase that he had in contemplation 
which was particularly unnecessary and expensive, he took credit 
for what it would have cost and made out that to spend anything 
less on something else was to save the difference.

While these affairs were in abeyance, our visit to Mr. Boythorn's 
was postponed.  At length, Richard having taken possession of his 
lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure.  He could have 
gone with us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the 
full novelty of his new position and was making most energetic 
attempts to unravel the mysteries of the fatal suit.  Consequently 
we went without him, and my darling was delighted to praise him for 
being so busy.

We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach and 
had an entertaining companion in Mr. Skimpole.  His furniture had 
been all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took 
possession of it on his blue-eyed daughter's birthday, but he 
seemed quite relieved to think that it was gone.  Chairs and table, 
he said, were wearisome objects; they were monotonous ideas, they 
had no variety of expression, they looked you out of countenance, 
and you looked them out of countenance.  How pleasant, then, to be 
bound to no particular chairs and tables, but to sport like a 
butterfly among all the furniture on hire, and to flit from 
rosewood to mahogany, and from mahogany to walnut, and from this 
shape to that, as the humour took one!

"The oddity of the thing is," said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened 
sense of the ludicrous, "that my chairs and tables were not paid 
for, and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as 
possible.  Now, that seems droll!  There is something grotesque in 
it.  The chair and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord 
my rent.  Why should my landlord quarrel with HIM?  If I have a 
pimple on my nose which is disagreeable to my landlord's peculiar 
ideas of beauty, my landlord has no business to scratch my chair 
and table merchant's nose, which has no pimple on it.  His 
reasoning seems defective!"

"Well," said my guardian good-humouredly, "it's pretty clear that 
whoever became security for those chairs and tables will have to 
pay for them."

"Exactly!" returned Mr. Skimpole.  "That's the crowning point of 
unreason in the business!  I said to my landlord, 'My good man, you 
are not aware that my excellent friend Jarndyce will have to pay 
for those things that you are sweeping off in that indelicate 
manner.  Have you no consideration for HIS property?' He hadn't the 
least."

"And refused all proposals," said my guardian.

"Refused all proposals," returned Mr. Skimpole.  "I made him 
business proposals.  I had him into my room.  I said, 'You are a 
man of business, I believe?'  He replied, 'I am,'  'Very well,' 
said I, 'now let us be business-like.  Here is an inkstand, here 
are pens and paper, here are wafers.  What do you want?  I have 
occupied your house for a considerable period, I believe to our 
mutual satisfaction until this unpleasant misunderstanding arose; 
let us be at once friendly and business-like.  What do you want?'  
In reply to this, he made use of the figurative expression--which 
has something Eastern about it--that he had never seen the colour 
of my money.  'My amiable friend,' said I, 'I never have any money.  
I never know anything about money.'  'Well, sir,' said he, 'what do 
you offer if I give you time?'  'My good fellow,' said I, 'I have 
no idea of time; but you say you are a man of business, and 
whatever you can suggest to be done in a business-like way with 
pen, and ink, and paper--and wafers--I am ready to do.  Don't pay 
yourself at another man's expense (which is foolish), but be 
business-like!'  However, he wouldn't be, and there was an end of 
it."

If these were some of the inconveniences of Mr. Skimpole's 
childhood, it assuredly possessed its advantages too.  On the 
journey he had a very good appetite for such refreshment as came in 
our way (including a basket of choice hothouse peaches), but never 
thought of paying for anything.  So when the coachman came round 
for his fee, he pleasantly asked him what he considered a very good 
fee indeed, now--a liberal one--and on his replying half a crown 
for a single passenger, said it was little enough too, all things 
considered, and left Mr. Jarndyce to give it him.

It was delightful weather.  The green corn waved so beautifully, 
the larks sang so joyfully, the hedges were so full of wild 
flowers, the trees were so thickly out in leaf, the bean-fields, 
with a light wind blowing over them, filled the air with such a 
delicious fragrance!  Late in the afternoon we came to the market-
town where we were to alight from the coach--a dull little town 
with a church-spire, and a marketplace, and a market-cross, and one 
intensely sunny street, and a pond with an old horse cooling his 
legs in it, and a very few men sleepily lying and standing about in 
narrow little bits of shade.  After the rustling of the leaves and 
the waving of the corn all along the road, it looked as still, as 
hot, as motionless a little town as England could produce.

At the inn we found Mr. Boythorn on horseback, waiting with an open 
carriage to take us to his house, which was a few miles off.  He 
was over-joyed to see us and dismounted with great alacrity.

"By heaven!" said he after giving us a courteous greeting.  This a 
most infamous coach.  It is the most flagrant example of an 
abominable public vehicle that ever encumbered the face of the 
earth.  It is twenty-five minutes after its time this afternoon.  
The coachman ought to be put to death!"

"IS he after his time?" said Mr. Skimpole, to whom he happened to 
address himself.  "You know my infirmity."

"Twenty-five minutes!  Twenty-six minutes!" replied Mr. Boythorn, 
referring to his watch.  "With two ladies in the coach, this 
scoundrel has deliberately delayed his arrival six and twenty 
minutes.  Deliberately!  It is impossible that it can be 
accidental!  But his father--and his uncle--were the most 
profligate coachmen that ever sat upon a box."

While he said this in tones of the greatest indignation, he handed 
us into the little phaeton with the utmost gentleness and was all 
smiles and pleasure.

"I am sorry, ladies," he said, standing bare-headed at the 
carriage-door when all was ready, "that I am obliged to conduct you 
nearly two miles out of the way.  But our direct road lies through 
Sir Leicester Dedlock's park, and in that fellow's property I have 
sworn never to set foot of mine, or horse's foot of mine, pending 
the present relations between us, while I breathe the breath of 
life!"  And here, catching my guardian's eye, he broke into one of 
his tremendous laughs, which seemed to shake even the motionless 
little market-town.

"Are the Dedlocks down here, Lawrence?" said my guardian as we 
drove along and Mr. Boythorn trotted on the green turf by the 
roadside.

"Sir Arrogant Numskull is here," replied Mr. Boythorn.  "Ha ha ha!  
Sir Arrogant is here, and I am glad to say, has been laid by the 
heels here.  My Lady," in naming whom he always made a courtly 
gesture as if particularly to exclude her from any part in the 
quarrel, "is expected, I believe, daily.  I am not in the least 
surprised that she postpones her appearance as long as possible.  
Whatever can have induced that transcendent woman to marry that 
effigy and figure-head of a baronet is one of the most impenetrable 
mysteries that ever baffled human inquiry.  Ha ha ha ha!"

"I suppose, said my guardian, laughing, "WE may set foot in the 
park while we are here?  The prohibition does not extend to us, 
does it?"

"I can lay no prohibition on my guests," he said, bending his head 
to Ada and me with the smiling politeness which sat so gracefully 
upon him, "except in the matter of their departure.  I am only 
sorry that I cannot have the happiness of being their escort about 
Chesney Wold, which is a very fine place!  But by the light of this 
summer day, Jarndyce, if you call upon the owner while you stay 
with me, you are likely to have but a cool reception.  He carries 
himself like an eight-day clock at all times, like one of a race of 
eight-day clocks in gorgeous cases that never go and never went--Ha 
ha ha!--but he will have some extra stiffness, I can promise you, 
for the friends of his friend and neighbour Boythorn!"

"I shall not put him to the proof," said my guardian.  "He is as 
indifferent to the honour of knowing me, I dare say, as I am to the 
honour of knowing him.  The air of the grounds and perhaps such a 
view of the house as any other sightseer might get are quite enough 
for me."

"Well!" said Mr. Boythorn.  "I am glad of it on the whole.  It's in 
better keeping.  I am looked upon about here as a second Ajax 
defying the lightning.  Ha ha ha ha!  When I go into our little 
church on a Sunday, a considerable part of the inconsiderable 
congregation expect to see me drop, scorched and withered, on the 
pavement under the Dedlock displeasure.  Ha ha ha ha!  I have no 
doubt he is surprised that I don't.  For he is, by heaven, the most 
self-satisfied, and the shallowest, and the most coxcombical and 
utterly brainless ass!"

Our coming to the ridge of a hill we had been ascending enabled our 
friend to point out Chesney Wold itself to us and diverted his 
attention from its master.

It was a picturesque old house in a fine park richly wooded.  Among 
the trees and not far from the residence he pointed out the spire 
of the little church of which he had spoken.  Oh, the solemn woods 
over which the light and shadow travelled swiftly, as if heavenly 
wings were sweeping on benignant errands through the summer air; 
the smooth green slopes, the glittering water, the garden where the 
flowers were so symmetrically arranged in clusters of the richest 
colours, how beautiful they looked!  The house, with gable and 
chimney, and tower, and turret, and dark doorway, and broad 
terrace-walk, twining among the balustrades of which, and lying 
heaped upon the vases, there was one great flush of roses, seemed 
scarcely real in its light solidity and in the serene and peaceful 
hush that rested on all around it.  To Ada and to me, that above 
all appeared the pervading influence.  On everything, house, 
garden, terrace, green slopes, water, old oaks, fern, moss, woods 
again, and far away across the openings in the prospect to the 
distance lying wide before us with a purple bloom upon it, there 
seemed to be such undisturbed repose.

When we came into the little village and passed a small inn with 
the sign of the Dedlock Arms swinging over the road in front, Mr. 
Boythorn interchanged greetings with a young gentleman sitting on a 
bench outside the inn-door who had some fishing-tackle lying beside 
him.

"That's the housekeeper's grandson, Mr. Rouncewell by name," said, 
he, "and he is in love with a pretty girl up at the house.  Lady 
Dedlock has taken a fancy to the pretty girl and is going to keep 
her about her own fair person--an honour which my young friend 
himself does not at all appreciate.  However, he can't marry just 
yet, even if his Rosebud were willing; so he is fain to make the 
best of it.  In the meanwhile, he comes here pretty often for a day 
or two at a time to--fish.  Ha ha ha ha!"

"Are he and the pretty girl engaged, Mr. Boythorn?" asked Ada.

"Why, my dear Miss Clare," he returned, "I think they may perhaps 
understand each other; but you will see them soon, I dare say, and 
I must learn from you on such a point--not you from me."

Ada blushed, and Mr. Boythorn, trotting forward on his comely grey 
horse, dismounted at his own door and stood ready with extended arm 
and uncovered head to welcome us when we arrived.

He lived in a pretty house, formerly the parsonage house, with a 
lawn in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well-
stocked orchard and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a 
venerable wall that had of itself a ripened ruddy look.  But, 
indeed, everything about the place wore an aspect of maturity and 
abundance.  The old lime-tree walk was like green cloisters, the 
very shadows of the cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy with 
fruit, the gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches 
arched and rested on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries 
grew in like profusion, and the peaches basked by the hundred on 
the wall.  Tumbled about among the spread nets and the glass frames 
sparkling and winking in the sun there were such heaps of drooping 
pods, and marrows, and cucumbers, that every foot of ground 
appeared a vegetable treasury, while the smell of sweet herbs and 
all kinds of wholesome growth (to say nothing of the neighbouring 
meadows where the hay was carrying) made the whole air a great 
nosegay.  Such stillness and composure reigned within the orderly 
precincts of the old red wall that even the feathers hung in 
garlands to scare the birds hardly stirred; and the wall had such a 
ripening influence that where, here and there high up, a disused 
nail and scrap of list still clung to it, it was easy to fancy that 
they had mellowed with the changing seasons and that they had 
rusted and decayed according to the common fate.

The house, though a little disorderly in comparison with the 
garden, was a real old house with settles in the chimney of the 
brick-floored kitchen and great beams across the ceilings.  On one 
side of it was the terrible piece of ground in dispute, where Mr. 
Boythorn maintained a sentry in a smock-frock day and night, whose 
duty was supposed to be, in cases of aggression, immediately to 
ring a large bell hung up there for the purpose, to unchain a great 
bull-dog established in a kennel as his ally, and generally to deal 
destruction on the enemy.  Not content with these precautions, Mr. 
Boythorn had himself composed and posted there, on painted boards 
to which his name was attached in large letters, the following 
solemn warnings: "Beware of the bull-dog.  He is most ferocious.  
Lawrence Boythorn."  "The blunderbus is loaded with slugs.  
Lawrence Boythorn."  "Man-traps and spring-guns are set here at all 
times of the day and night.  Lawrence Boythorn."  "Take notice.  
That any person or persons audaciously presuming to trespass on 
this property will be punished with the utmost severity of private 
chastisement and prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law.  
Lawrence Boythorn."  These he showed us from the drawing-room 
window, while his bird was hopping about his head, and he laughed, 
"Ha ha ha ha!  Ha ha ha ha!" to that extent as he pointed them out 
that I really thought he would have hurt himself.

"But this is taking a good deal of trouble," said Mr. Skimpole in 
his light way, "when you are not in earnest after all."

"Not in earnest!" returned Mr. Boythorn with unspeakable warmth.  
"Not in earnest!  If I could have hoped to train him, I would have 
bought a lion instead of that dog and would have turned him loose 
upon the first intolerable robber who should dare to make an 
encroachment on my rights.  Let Sir Leicester Dedlock consent to 
come out and decide this question by single combat, and I will meet 
him with any weapon known to mankind in any age or country.  I am 
that much in earnest.  Not more!"

We arrived at his house on a Saturday.  On the Sunday morning we 
all set forth to walk to the little church in the park.  Entering 
the park, almost immediately by the disputed ground, we pursued a 
pleasant footpath winding among the verdant turf and the beautiful 
trees until it brought us to the church-porch.

The congregation was extremely small and quite a rustic one with 
the exception of a large muster of servants from the house, some of 
whom were already in their seats, while others were yet dropping 
in.  There were some stately footmen, and there was a perfect 
picture of an old coachman, who looked as if he were the official 
representative of all the pomps and vanities that had ever been put 
into his coach.  There was a very pretty show of young women, and 
above them, the handsome old face and fine responsible portly 
figure of the housekeeper towered pre-eminent.  The pretty girl of 
whom Mr. Boythorn had told us was close by her.  She was so very 
pretty that I might have known her by her beauty even if I had not 
seen how blushingly conscious she was of the eyes of the young 
fisherman, whom I discovered not far off.  One face, and not an 
agreeable one, though it was handsome, seemed maliciously watchful 
of this pretty girl, and indeed of every one and everything there.  
It was a Frenchwoman's.

As the bell was yet ringing and the great people were not yet come, 
I had leisure to glance over the church, which smelt as earthy as a 
grave, and to think what a shady, ancient, solemn little church it 
was.  The windows, heavily shaded by trees, admitted a subdued 
light that made the faces around me pale, and darkened the old 
brasses in the pavement and the time and damp-worn monuments, and 
rendered the sunshine in the little porch, where a monotonous 
ringer was working at the bell, inestimably bright.  But a stir in 
that direction, a gathering of reverential awe in the rustic faces, 
and a blandly ferocious assumption on the part of Mr. Boythorn of 
being resolutely unconscious of somebody's existence forewarned me 
that the great people were come and that the service was going to 
begin.

"'Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy 
sight--'"

Shall I ever forget the rapid beating at my heart, occasioned by 
the look I met as I stood up!  Shall I ever forget the manner in 
which those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of their 
languor and to hold mine!  It was only a moment before I cast mine 
down--released again, if I may say so--on my book; but I knew the 
beautiful face quite well in that short space of time.

And, very strangely, there was something quickened within me, 
associated with the lonely days at my godmother's; yes, away even 
to the days when I had stood on tiptoe to dress myself at my little 
glass after dressing my doll.  And this, although I had never seen 
this lady's face before in all my life--I was quite sure of it--
absolutely certain.

It was easy to know that the ceremonious, gouty, grey-haired 
gentleman, the only other occupant of the great pew, was Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, and that the lady was Lady Dedlock.  But why her 
face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in 
which I saw scraps of old remembrances, and why I should be so 
fluttered and troubled (for I was still) by having casually met her 
eyes, I could not think.

I felt it to be an unmeaning weakness in me and tried to overcome 
it by attending to the words I heard.  Then, very strangely, I 
seemed to hear them, not in the reader's voice, but in the well-
remembered voice of my godmother.  This made me think, did Lady 
Dedlock's face accidentally resemble my godmother's?  It might be 
that it did, a little; but the expression was so different, and the 
stern decision which had worn into my godmother's face, like 
weather into rocks, was so completely wanting in the face before me 
that it could not be that resemblance which had struck me.  Neither 
did I know the loftiness and haughtiness of Lady Dedlock's face, at 
all, in any one.  And yet I--I, little Esther Summerson, the child 
who lived a life apart and on whose birthday there was no 
rejoicing--seemed to arise before my own eyes, evoked out of the 
past by some power in this fashionable lady, whom I not only 
entertained no fancy that I had ever seen, but whom I perfectly 
well knew I had never seen until that hour.

It made me tremble so to be thrown into this unaccountable 
agitation that I was conscious of being distressed even by the 
observation of the French maid, though I knew she had been looking 
watchfully here, and there, and everywhere, from the moment of her 
coming into the church.  By degrees, though very slowly, I at last 
overcame my strange emotion.  After a long time, I looked towards 
Lady Dedlock again.  It was while they were preparing to sing, 
before the sermon.  She took no heed of me, and the beating at my 
heart was gone.  Neither did it revive for more than a few moments 
when she once or twice afterwards glanced at Ada or at me through 
her glass.

The service being concluded, Sir Leicester gave his arm with much 
taste and gallantry to Lady Dedlock--though he was obliged to walk 
by the help of a thick stick--and escorted her out of church to the 
pony carriage in which they had come.  The servants then dispersed, 
and so did the congregation, whom Sir Leicester had contemplated 
all along (Mr. Skimpole said to Mr. Boythorn's infinite delight) as 
if he were a considerable landed proprietor in heaven.

"He believes he is!" said Mr. Boythorn.  "He firmly believes it.  
So did his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather!"

"Do you know," pursued Mr. Skimpole very unexpectedly to Mr. 
Boythorn, "it's agreeable to me to see a man of that sort."

"IS it!" said Mr. Boytborn.

"Say that he wants to patronize me," pursued Mr. Skimpole.  "Very 
well!  I don't object."

"I do," said Mr. Boythorn with great vigour.

"Do you really?" returned Mr. Skimpole in his easy light vein.  
"But that's taking trouble, surely.  And why should you take 
trouble?  Here am I, content to receive things childishly as they 
fall out, and I never take trouble!  I come down here, for 
instance, and I find a mighty potentate exacting homage.  Very 
well!  I say 'Mighty potentate, here IS my homage!  It's easier to 
give it than to withhold it.  Here it is.  If you have anything of 
an agreeable nature to show me, I shall be happy to see it; if you 
have anything of an agreeable nature to give me, I shall be happy 
to accept it.'  Mighty potentate replies in effect, 'This is a 
sensible fellow.  I find him accord with my digestion and my 
bilious system.  He doesn't impose upon me the necessity of rolling 
myself up like a hedgehog with my points outward.  I expand, I 
open, I turn my silver lining outward like Milton's cloud, and it's 
more agreeable to both of us.'  That's my view of such things, 
speaking as a child!"

"But suppose you went down somewhere else to-morrow," said Mr. 
Boythorn, "where there was the opposite of that fellow--or of this 
fellow.  How then?"

"How then?" said Mr. Skimpole with an appearance of the utmost 
simplicity and candour.  "Just the same then!  I should say, 'My 
esteemed Boythorn'--to make you the personification of our 
imaginary friend--'my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty 
potentate?  Very good.  So do I.  I take it that my business in the 
social system is to be agreeable; I take it that everybody's 
business in the social system is to be agreeable.  It's a system of 
harmony, in short.  Therefore if you object, I object.  Now, 
excellent Boythorn, let us go to dinner!'"

"But excellent Boythorn might say," returned our host, swelling and 
growing very red, "I'll be--"

"I understand," said Mr. Skimpole.  "Very likely he would."

"--if I WILL go to dinner!" cried Mr. Boythorn in a violent burst 
and stopping to strike his stick upon the ground.  "And he would 
probably add, 'Is there such a thing as principle, Mr. Harold 
Skimpole?'"

"To which Harold Skimpole would reply, you know," he returned in 
his gayest manner and with his most ingenuous smile, "'Upon my life 
I have not the least idea!  I don't know what it is you call by 
that name, or where it is, or who possesses it.  If you possess it 
and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted and congratulate you 
heartily.  But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a 
mere child, and I lay no claim to it, and I don't want it!'  So, 
you see, excellent Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!"

This was one of many little dialogues between them which I always 
expected to end, and which I dare say would have ended under other 
circumstances, in some violent explosion on the part of our host.  
But he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible 
position as our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely 
at and with Mr. Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke 
them all day long, that matters never went beyond this point.  Mr. 
Skimpole, who always seemed quite unconscious of having been on 
delicate ground, then betook himself to beginning some sketch in 
the park which be never finished, or to playing fragments of airs 
on the piano, or to singing scraps of songs, or to lying down on 
his back under a tree and looking at the sky--which he couldn't 
help thinking, he said, was what he was meant for; it suited him so 
exactly.

"Enterprise and effort," he would say to us (on his back), are 
delightful to me.  I believe I am truly cosmopolitan.  I have the 
deepest sympathy with them.  I lie in a shady place like this and 
think of adventurous spirits going to the North Pole or penetrating 
to the heart of the Torrid Zone with admiration.  Mercenary 
creatures ask, 'What is the use of a man's going to the North Pole?  
What good does it do?'  I can't say; but, for anything I CAN say, 
he may go for the purpose--though he don't know it--of employing my 
thoughts as I lie here.  Take an extreme case.  Take the case of 
the slaves on American plantations.  I dare say they are worked 
hard, I dare say they don't altogether like it.  I dare say theirs 
is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the 
landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is 
one of the pleasanter objects of their existence.  I am very 
sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn't wonder if it were!"

I always wondered on these occasions whether he ever thought of 
Mrs. Skimpole and the children, and in what point of view they 
presented themselves to his cosmopolitan mind.  So far as I could 
understand, they rarely presented themselves at all.

The week had gone round to the Saturday following that beating of 
my heart in the church; and every day had been so bright and blue 
that to ramble in the woods, and to see the light striking down 
among the transparent leaves and sparkling in the beautiful 
interlacings of the shadows of the trees, while the birds poured 
out their songs and the air was drowsy with the hum of insects, had 
been most delightful.  We had one favourite spot, deep in moss and 
last year's leaves, where there were some felled trees from which 
the bark was all stripped off.  Seated among these, we looked 
through a green vista supported by thousands of natural columns, 
the whitened stems of trees, upon a distant prospect made so 
radiant by its contrast with the shade in which we sat and made so 
precious by the arched perspective through which we saw it that it 
was like a glimpse of the better land.  Upon the Saturday we sat 
here, Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and I, until we heard thunder muttering in 
the distance and felt the large raindrops rattle through the 
leaves.

The weather had been all the week extremely sultry, but the storm 
broke so suddenly--upon us, at least, in that sheltered spot--that 
before we reached the outskirts of the wood the thunder and 
lightning were frequent and the rain came plunging through the 
leaves as if every drop were a great leaden bead.  As it was not a 
time for standing among trees, we ran out of the wood, and up and 
down the moss-grown steps which crossed the plantation-fence like 
two broad-staved ladders placed back to back, and made for a 
keeper's lodge which was close at hand.  We had often noticed the 
dark beauty of this lodge standing in a deep twilight of trees, and 
how the ivy clustered over it, and how there was a steep hollow 
near, where we had once seen the keeper's dog dive down into the 
fern as if it were water.

The lodge was so dark within, now the sky was overcast, that we 
only clearly saw the man who came to the door when we took shelter 
there and put two chairs for Ada and me.  The lattice-windows were 
all thrown open, and we sat just within the doorway watching the 
storm.  It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, 
and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the 
solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with 
awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are 
encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the 
smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from 
all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

"Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?"

"Oh, no, Esther dear!" said Ada quietly.

Ada said it to me, but I had not spoken.

The beating of my heart came back again.  I had never heard the 
voice, as I had never seen the face, but it affected me in the same 
strange way.  Again, in a moment, there arose before my mind 
innumerable pictures of myself.

Lady Dedlock had taken shelter in the lodge before our arrival 
there and had come out of the gloom within.  She stood behind my 
chair with her hand upon it.  I saw her with her hand close to my 
shoulder when I turned my head.

"I have frightened you?" she said.

No.  It was not fright.  Why should I be frightened!

"I believe," said Lady Dedlock to my guardian, "I have the pleasure 
of speaking to Mr. Jarndyce."

"Your remembrance does me more honour than I had supposed it would, 
Lady Dedlock," he returned.

"I recognized you in church on Sunday.  I am sorry that any local 
disputes of Sir Leicester's--they are not of his seeking, however, 
I believe--should render it a matter of some absurd difficulty to 
show you any attention here."

"I am aware of the circumstances," returned my guardian with a 
smile, "and am sufficiently obliged."

She had given him her hand in an indifferent way that seemed 
habitual to her and spoke in a correspondingly indifferent manner, 
though in a very pleasant voice.  She was as graceful as she was 
beautiful, perfectly self-possessed, and had the air, I thought, of 
being able to attract and interest any one if she had thought it 
worth her while.  The keeper had brought her a chair on which she 
sat in the middle of the porch between us.

"Is the young gentleman disposed of whom you wrote to Sir Leicester 
about and whose wishes Sir Leicester was sorry not to have it in 
his power to advance in any way?" she said over her shoulder to my 
guardian.

"I hope so," said he.

She seemed to respect him and even to wish to conciliate him.  
There was something very winning in her haughty manner, and it 
became more familiar--I was going to say more easy, but that could 
hardly be--as she spoke to him over her shoulder.

"I presume this is your other ward, Miss Clare?"

He presented Ada, in form.

"You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote 
character," said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce over her shoulder 
again, "if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this.  But 
present me," and she turned full upon me, "to this young lady too!"

"Miss Summerson really is my ward," said Mr. Jarndyce.  "I am 
responsible to no Lord Chancellor in her case."

"Has Miss Summerson lost both her parents?" said my Lady.

"Yes."

"She is very fortunate in her guardian."

Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her and said I was 
indeed.  All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost 
expressive of displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her 
shoulder again.

"Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr. 
Jarndyce."

"A long time.  At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw 
you last Sunday," he returned.

"What!  Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become 
one to me!" she said with some disdain.  "I have achieved that 
reputation, I suppose."

"You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock," said my guardian, "that 
you pay some little penalty, I dare say.  But none to me."

"So much!" she repeated, slightly laughing.  "Yes!"

With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know 
not what, she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than 
children.  So, as she slightly laughed and afterwards sat looking 
at the rain, she was as self-possessed and as free to occupy 
herself with her own thoughts as if she had been alone.

"I think you knew my sister when we were abroad together better 
than you know me?" she said, looking at him again.

"Yes, we happened to meet oftener," he returned.

"We went our several ways," said Lady Dedlock, "and had little in 
common even before we agreed to differ.  It is to be regretted, I 
suppose, but it could not be helped."

Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the rain.  The storm soon began 
to pass upon its way.  The shower greatly abated, the lightning 
ceased, the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun 
began to glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain.  As we sat 
there, silently, we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at 
a merry pace.

"The messenger is coming back, my Lady," said the keeper, "with the 
carriage."

As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside.  There 
alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the 
Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church, and secondly the pretty 
girl, the Frenchwoman with a defiant confidence, the pretty girl 
confused and hesitating.

"What now?" said Lady Dedlock.  "Two!"

"I am your maid, my Lady, at the present," said the Frenchwoman.  
"The message was for the attendant."

"I was afraid you might mean me, my Lady," said the pretty girl.

"I did mean you, child," replied her mistress calmly.  "Put that 
shawl on me."

She slightly stooped her shoulders to receive it, and the pretty 
girl lightly dropped it in its place.  The Frenchwoman stood 
unnoticed, looking on with her lips very tightly set.

"I am sorry," said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, "that we are not 
likely to renew our former acquaintance.  You will allow me to send 
the carriage back for your two wards.  It shall be here directly."

But as he would on no account accept this offer, she took a 
graceful leave of Ada--none of me--and put her hand upon his 
proffered arm, and got into the carriage, which was a little, low, 
park carriage with a hood.

"Come in, child," she said to the pretty girl; "I shall want you.  
Go on!"

The carriage rolled away, and the Frenchwoman, with the wrappers 
she had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she 
had alighted.

I suppose there is nothing pride can so little bear with as pride 
itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner.  Her 
retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined.  She 
remained perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the 
drive, and then, without the least discomposure of countenance, 
slipped off her shoes, left them on the ground, and walked 
deliberately in the same direction through the wettest of the wet 
grass.

"Is that young woman mad?" said my guardian.

"Oh, no, sir!" said the keeper, who, with his wife, was looking 
after her.  "Hortense is not one of that sort.  She has as good a 
head-piece as the best.  But she's mortal high and passionate--
powerful high and passionate; and what with having notice to leave, 
and having others put above her, she don't take kindly to it."

"But why should she walk shoeless through all that water?" said my 
guardian.

"Why, indeed, sir, unless it is to cool her down!" said the man.

"Or unless she fancies it's blood," said the woman.  "She'd as soon 
walk through that as anything else, I think, when her own's up!"

We passed not far from the house a few minutes afterwards.  
Peaceful as it had looked when we first saw it, it looked even more 
so now, with a diamond spray glittering all about it, a light wind 
blowing, the birds no longer hushed but singing strongly, 
everything refreshed by the late rain, and the little carriage 
shining at the doorway like a fairy carriage made of silver.  
Still, very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful 
figure too in the landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, 
through the wet grass.



CHAPTER XIX

Moving On


It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane.  The good 
ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-
fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers 
are laid up in ordinary.  The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of 
ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse 
their papers, has drifted, for the time being, heaven knows where.  
The courts are all shut up; the public offices lie in a hot sleep.  
Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales 
might sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found 
there, walk.

The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants' Inn, and Lincoln's Inn even 
unto the Fields are like tidal harbours at low water, where 
stranded proceedings, offices at anchor, idle clerks lounging on 
lop-sided stools that will not recover their perpendicular until 
the current of Term sets in, lie high and dry upon the ooze of the 
long vacation.  Outer doors of chambers are shut up by the score, 
messages and parcels are to be left at the Porter's Lodge by the 
bushel.  A crop of grass would grow in the chinks of the stone 
pavement outside Lincoln's Inn Hall, but that the ticket-porters, 
who have nothing to do beyond sitting in the shade there, with 
their white aprons over their heads to keep the flies off, grub it 
up and eat it thoughtfully.

There is only one judge in town.  Even he only comes twice a week 
to sit in chambers.  If the country folks of those assize towns on 
his circuit could see him now!  No full-bottomed wig, no red 
petticoats, no fur, no javelin-men, no white wands.  Merely a 
close-shaved gentleman in white trousers and a white hat, with sea-
bronze on the judicial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by 
the solar rays from the judicial nose, who calls in at the shell-
fish shop as he comes along and drinks iced ginger-beer!

The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth.  How 
England can get on through four long summer months without its bar
--which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity and its only 
legitimate triumph in prosperity--is beside the question; assuredly 
that shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear.  The 
learned gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the 
unprecedented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by 
the opposite party that he never seems likely to recover it is 
doing infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland.  The 
learned gentleman who does the withering business and who blights 
all opponents with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a 
French watering-place.  The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint 
on the smallest provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks.  
The very learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his 
gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law until he has 
become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the 
drowsy bench with legal "chaff," inexplicable to the uninitiated 
and to most of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic 
delight in aridity and dust, about Constantinople.  Other dispersed 
fragments of the same great palladium are to be found on the canals 
of Venice, at the second cataract of the Nile, in the baths of 
Germany, and sprinkled on the sea-sand all over the English coast.  
Scarcely one is to be encountered in the deserted region of 
Chancery Lane.  If such a lonely member of the bar do flit across 
the waste and come upon a prowling suitor who is unable to leave 
off haunting the scenes of his anxiety, they frighten one another 
and retreat into opposite shades.

It is the hottest long vacation known for many years.  All the 
young clerks are madly in love, and according to their various 
degrees, pine for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate, 
Ramsgate, or Gravesend.  All the middle-aged clerks think their 
families too large.  All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns 
of Court and pant about staircases and other dry places seeking 
water give short howls of aggravation.  All the blind men's dogs in 
the streets draw their masters against pumps or trip them over 
buckets.  A shop with a sun-blind, and a watered pavement, and a 
bowl of gold and silver fish in the window, is a sanctuary.  Temple 
Bar gets so hot that it is, to the adjacent Strand and Fleet 
Street, what a heater is in an urn, and keeps them simmering all 
night.

There are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be 
cool, if any coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in 
dullness; but the little thoroughfares immediately outside those 
retirements seem to blaze.  In Mr. Krook's court, it is so hot that 
the people turn their houses inside out and sit in chairs upon the 
pavement--Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his studies, with 
his cat (who never is too hot) by his side.  The Sol's Arms has 
discontinued the Harmonic Meetings for the season, and Little 
Swills is engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he 
comes out in quite an innocent manner and sings comic ditties of a 
juvenile complexion calculated (as the bill says) not to wound the 
feelings of the most fastidious mind.

Over all the legal neighbourhood there hangs, like some great veil 
of rust or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the 
long vacation.  Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer of Cook's Court, 
Cursitor Street, is sensible of the influence not only in his mind 
as a sympathetic and contemplative man, but also in his business as 
a law-stationer aforesaid.  He has more leisure for musing in 
Staple Inn and in the Rolls Yard during the long vacation than at 
other seasons, and he says to the two 'prentices, what a thing it 
is in such hot weather to think that you live in an island with the 
sea a-rolling and a-bowling right round you.

Guster is busy in the little drawing-room on this present afternoon 
in the long vacation, when Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby have it in 
contemplation to receive company.  The expected guests are rather 
select than numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband and no more.  
From Mr. Chadband's being much given to describe himself, both 
verbally and in writing, as a vessel, he is occasionally mistaken 
by strangers for a gentleman connected with navigation, but he is, 
as he expresses it, "in the ministry."  Mr. Chadband is attached to 
no particular denomination and is considered by his persecutors to 
have nothing so very remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects 
as to render his volunteering, on his own account, at all incumbent 
on his conscience; but he has his followers, and Mrs. Snagsby is of 
the number.  Mrs. Snagsby has but recently taken a passage upward 
by the vessel, Chadband; and her attention was attracted to that 
Bark A 1 when she was something flushed by the hot weather.

"My little woman," says Mr. Snagsby to the sparrows in Staple Inn, 
"likes to have her religion rather sharp, you see!"

So Guster, much impressed by regarding herself for the time as the 
handmaid of Chadband, whom she knows to be endowed with the gift of 
holding forth for four hours at a stretch, prepares the little 
drawing-room for tea.  All the furniture is shaken and dusted, the 
portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are touched up with a wet cloth, 
the best tea-service is set forth, and there is excellent provision 
made of dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin 
slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, and delicate little rows 
of anchovies nestling in parsley, not to mention new-laid eggs, to 
be brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast.  For 
Chadband is rather a consuming vessel--the persecutors say a 
gorging vessel--and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife 
and fork remarkably well.

Mr. Snagsby in his best coat, looking at all the preparations when 
they are completed and coughing his cough of deference behind his 
hand, says to Mrs. Snagsby, "At what time did you expect Mr. and 
Mrs. Chadband, my love?"

"At six," says Mrs. Snagsby.

Mr. Snagsby observes in a mild and casual way that "it's gone 
that."

"Perhaps you'd like to begin without them," is Mrs. Snagsby's 
reproachful remark.

Mr. Snagsby does look as if he would like it very much, but he 
says, with his cough of mildness, "No, my dear, no.  I merely named 
the time."

"What's time," says Mrs. Snagsby, "to eternity?"

"Very true, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby.  "Only when a person lays 
in victuals for tea, a person does it with a view--perhaps--more to 
time.  And when a time is named for having tea, it's better to come 
up to it."

"To come up to it!" Mrs. Snagsby repeats with severity.  "Up to it!  
As if Mr. Chadband was a fighter!"

"Not at all, my dear," says Mr. Snagsby.

Here, Guster, who had been looking out of the bedroom window, comes 
rustling and scratching down the little staircase like a popular 
ghost, and falling flushed into the drawing-room, announces that 
Mr. and Mrs. Chadband have appeared in the court.  The bell at the 
inner door in the passage immediately thereafter tinkling, she is 
admonished by Mrs. Snagsby, on pain of instant reconsignment to her 
patron saint, not to omit the ceremony of announcement.  Much 
discomposed in her nerves (which were previously in the best order) 
by this threat, she so fearfully mutilates that point of state as 
to announce "Mr. and Mrs. Cheeseming, least which, Imeantersay, 
whatsername!" and retires conscience-stricken from the presence.

Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man with a fat smile and a general 
appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system.  Mrs. 
Chadband is a stern, severe-looking, silent woman.  Mr. Chadband 
moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught 
to walk upright.  He is very much embarrassed about the arms, as if 
they were inconvenient to him and he wanted to grovel, is very much 
in a perspiration about the head, and never speaks without first 
putting up his great hand, as delivering a token to his hearers 
that he is going to edify them.

"My friends," says Mr. Chadband, "peace be on this house!  On the 
master thereof, on the mistress thereof, on the young maidens, and 
on the young men!  My friends, why do I wish for peace?  What is 
peace?  Is it war?  No.  Is it strife?  No.  Is it lovely, and 
gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful?  Oh, 
yes!  Therefore, my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon 
yours."

In consequence of Mrs. Snagsby looking deeply edified, Mr. Snagsby 
thinks it expedient on the whole to say amen, which is well 
received.

"Now, my friends," proceeds Mr. Chadband, "since I am upon this 
theme--"

Guster presents herself.  Mrs. Snagsby, in a spectral bass voice 
and without removing her eyes from Chadband, says with dreadful 
distinctness, "Go away!"

"Now, my friends," says Chadband, "since I am upon this theme, and 
in my lowly path improving it--"

Guster is heard unaccountably to murmur "one thousing seven hundred 
and eighty-two."  The spectral voice repeats more solemnly, "Go 
away!"

"Now, my friends," says Mr. Chadband, "we will inquire in a spirit 
of love--"

Still Guster reiterates "one thousing seven hundred and eighty-
two."

Mr. Chadband, pausing with the resignation of a man accustomed to 
be persecuted and languidly folding up his chin into his fat smile, 
says, "Let us hear the maiden!  Speak, maiden!"

"One thousing seven hundred and eighty-two, if you please, sir.  
Which he wish to know what the shilling ware for," says Guster, 
breathless.

"For?" returns Mrs. Chadband.  "For his fare!"

Guster replied that "he insistes on one and eightpence or on 
summonsizzing the party."  Mrs. Snagsby and Mrs. Chadband are 
proceeding to grow shrill in indignation when Mr. Chadband quiets 
the tumult by lifting up his hand.

"My friends," says he, "I remember a duty unfulfilled yesterday.  
It is right that I should be chastened in some penalty.  I ought 
not to murmur.  Rachael, pay the eightpence!"

While Mrs. Snagsby, drawing her breath, looks hard at Mr. Snagsby, 
as who should say, "You hear this apostle!" and while Mr. Chadband 
glows with humility and train oil, Mrs. Chadband pays the money.  
It is Mr. Chadband's habit--it is the head and front of his 
pretensions indeed--to keep this sort of debtor and creditor 
account in the smallest items and to post it publicly on the most 
trivial occasions.

"My friends," says Chadband, "eightpence is not much; it might 
justly have been one and fourpence; it might justly have been half 
a crown.  O let us be joyful, joyful!  O let us be joyful!"

With which remark, which appears from its sound to be an extract in 
verse, Mr. Chadband stalks to the table, and before taking a chair, 
lifts up his admonitory hand.

"My friends," says he, "what is this which we now behold as being 
spread before us?  Refreshment.  Do we need refreshment then, my 
friends?  We do.  And why do we need refreshment, my friends?  
Because we are but mortal, because we are but sinful, because we 
are but of the earth, because we are not of the air.  Can we fly, 
my friends?  We cannot.  Why can we not fly, my friends?"

Mr. Snagsby, presuming on the success of his last point, ventures 
to observe in a cheerful and rather knowing tone, "No wings."  But 
is immediately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby.

"I say, my friends," pursues Mr. Chadband, utterly rejecting and 
obliterating Mr. Snagsby's suggestion, "why can we not fly?  Is it 
because we are calculated to walk?  It is.  Could we walk, my 
friends, without strength?  We could not.  What should we do 
without strength, my friends?  Our legs would refuse to bear us, 
our knees would double up, our ankles would turn over, and we 
should come to the ground.  Then from whence, my friends, in a 
human point of view, do we derive the strength that is necessary to 
our limbs?  Is it," says Chadband, glancing over the table, "from 
bread in various forms, from butter which is churned from the milk 
which is yielded unto us by the cow, from the eggs which are laid 
by the fowl, from ham, from tongue, from sausage, and from such 
like?  It is.  Then let us partake of the good things which are set 
before us!"

The persecutors denied that there was any particular gift in Mr. 
Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one upon another, 
after this fashion.  But this can only be received as a proof of 
their determination to persecute, since it must be within 
everybody's experience that the Chadband style of oratory is widely 
received and much admired.

Mr. Chadband, however, having concluded for the present, sits down 
at Mr. Snagsby's table and lays about him prodigiously.  The 
conversion of nutriment of any sort into oil of the quality already 
mentioned appears to be a process so inseparable from the 
constitution of this exemplary vessel that in beginning to eat and 
drink, he may be described as always becoming a kind of 
considerable oil mills or other large factory for the production of 
that article on a wholesale scale.  On the present evening of the 
long vacation, in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, he does such a 
powerful stroke of business that the warehouse appears to be quite 
full when the works cease.

At this period of the entertainment, Guster, who has never 
recovered her first failure, but has neglected no possible or 
impossible means of bringing the establishment and herself into 
contempt--among which may be briefly enumerated her unexpectedly 
performing clashing military music on Mr. Chadband's head with 
plates, and afterwards crowning that gentleman with muffins--at 
which period of the entertainment, Guster whispers Mr. Snagsby that 
he is wanted.

"And being wanted in the--not to put too fine a point upon it--in 
the shop," says Mr. Snagsby, rising, "perhaps this good company 
will excuse me for half a minute."

Mr. Snagsby descends and finds the two 'prentices intently 
contemplating a police constable, who holds a ragged boy by the 
arm.

"Why, bless my heart," says Mr. Snagsby, "what's the matter!"

"This boy," says the constable, "although he's repeatedly told to, 
won't move on--"

"I'm always a-moving on, sar, cries the boy, wiping away his grimy 
tears with his arm.  "I've always been a-moving and a-moving on, 
ever since I was born.  Where can I possibly move to, sir, more nor 
I do move!"

"He won't move on," says the constable calmly, with a slight 
professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in 
his stiff stock, "although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and 
therefore I am obliged to take him into custody.  He's as obstinate 
a young gonoph as I know.  He WON'T move on."

"Oh, my eye!  Where can I move to!" cries the boy, clutching quite 
desperately at his hair and beating his bare feet upon the floor of 
Mr. Snagsby's passage.

"Don't you come none of that or I shall make blessed short work of 
you!" says the constable, giving him a passionless shake.  "My 
instructions are that you are to move on.  I have told you so five 
hundred times."

"But where?" cries the boy.

"Well!  Really, constable, you know," says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, 
and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and 
doubt, "really, that does seem a question.  Where, you know?"

"My instructions don't go to that," replies the constable.  "My 
instructions are that this boy is to move on."

Do you hear, Jo?  It is nothing to you or to any one else that the 
great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few 
years in this business to set you the example of moving on.  The 
one grand recipe remains for you--the profound philosophical 
prescription--the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence 
upon earth.  Move on!  You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the 
great lights can't at all agree about that.  Move on!

Mr. Snagsby says nothing to this effect, says nothing at all 
indeed, but coughs his forlornest cough, expressive of no 
thoroughfare in any direction.  By this time Mr. and Mrs. Chadband 
and Mrs. Snagsby, hearing the altercation, have appeared upon the 
stairs.  Guster having never left the end of the passage, the whole 
household are assembled.

"The simple question is, sir," says the constable, "whether you 
know this boy.  He says you do."

Mrs. Snagsby, from her elevation, instantly cries out, "No he 
don't!"

"My lit-tle woman!" says Mr. Snagsby, looking up the staircase.  
"My love, permit me!  Pray have a moment's patience, my dear.  I do 
know something of this lad, and in what I know of him, I can't say 
that there's any harm; perhaps on the contrary, constable."  To 
whom the law-stationer relates his Joful and woful experience, 
suppressing the half-crown fact.

"Well!" says the constable, "so far, it seems, he had grounds for 
what he said.  When I took him into custody up in Holborn, he said 
you knew him.  Upon that, a young man who was in the crowd said he 
was acquainted with you, and you were a respectable housekeeper, 
and if I'd call and make the inquiry, he'd appear.  The young man 
don't seem inclined to keep his word, but--  Oh! Here IS the young 
man!"

Enter Mr. Guppy, who nods to Mr. Snagsby and touches his hat with 
the chivalry of clerkship to the ladies on the stairs.

"I was strolling away from the office just now when I found this 
row going on," says Mr. Guppy to the law-stationer, "and as your 
name was mentioned, I thought it was right the thing should be 
looked into."

"It was very good-natured of you, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I am 
obliged to you."  And Mr. Snagsby again relates his experience, 
again suppressing the half-crown fact.

"Now, I know where you live," says the constable, then, to Jo.  
"You live down in Tom-all-Alone's.  That's a nice innocent place to 
live in, ain't it?"

"I can't go and live in no nicer place, sir," replies Jo.  "They 
wouldn't have nothink to say to me if I wos to go to a nice 
innocent place fur to live.  Who ud go and let a nice innocent 
lodging to such a reg'lar one as me!"

"You are very poor, ain't you?" says the constable.

"Yes, I am indeed, sir, wery poor in gin'ral," replies Jo.  "I 
leave you to judge now!  I shook these two half-crowns out of him," 
says the constable, producing them to the company, "in only putting 
my hand upon him!"

"They're wot's left, Mr. Snagsby," says Jo, "out of a sov-ring as 
wos give me by a lady in a wale as sed she wos a servant and as 
come to my crossin one night and asked to be showd this 'ere ouse 
and the ouse wot him as you giv the writin to died at, and the 
berrin-ground wot he's berrid in.  She ses to me she ses 'are you 
the boy at the inkwhich?' she ses.  I ses 'yes' I ses.  She ses to 
me she ses 'can you show me all them places?'  I ses 'yes I can' I 
ses.  And she ses to me 'do it' and I dun it and she giv me a 
sov'ring and hooked it.  And I an't had much of the sov'ring 
neither," says Jo, with dirty tears, "fur I had to pay five bob, 
down in Tom-all-Alone's, afore they'd square it fur to give me 
change, and then a young man he thieved another five while I was 
asleep and another boy he thieved ninepence and the landlord he 
stood drains round with a lot more on it."

"You don't expect anybody to believe this, about the lady and the 
sovereign, do you?" says the constable, eyeing him aside with 
ineffable disdain.

"I don't know as I do, sir," replies Jo.  "I don't expect nothink 
at all, sir, much, but that's the true hist'ry on it."

"You see what he is!" the constable observes to the audience.  
"Well, Mr. Snagsby, if I don't lock him up this time, will you 
engage for his moving on?"

"No!" cries Mrs. Snagsby from the stairs.

"My little woman!" pleads her husband.  "Constable, I have no doubt 
he'll move on.  You know you really must do it," says Mr. Snagsby.

"I'm everyways agreeable, sir," says the hapless Jo.

"Do it, then," observes the constable.  "You know what you have got 
to do.  Do it!  And recollect you won't get off so easy next time.  
Catch hold of your money.  Now, the sooner you're five mile off, 
the better for all parties."

With this farewell hint and pointing generally to the setting sun 
as a likely place to move on to, the constable bids his auditors 
good afternoon and makes the echoes of Cook's Court perform slow 
music for him as he walks away on the shady side, carrying his 
iron-bound hat in his hand for a little ventilation.

Now, Jo's improbable story concerning the lady and the sovereign 
has awakened more or less the curiosity of all the company.  Mr. 
Guppy, who has an inquiring mind in matters of evidence and who has 
been suffering severely from the lassitude of the long vacation, 
takes that interest in the case that he enters on a regular cross-
examination of the witness, which is found so interesting by the 
ladies that Mrs. Snagsby politely invites him to step upstairs and 
drink a cup of tea, if he will excuse the disarranged state of the 
tea-table, consequent on their previous exertions.  Mr. Guppy 
yielding his assent to this proposal, Jo is requested to follow 
into the drawing-room doorway, where Mr. Guppy takes him in hand as 
a witness, patting him into this shape, that shape, and the other 
shape like a butterman dealing with so much butter, and worrying 
him according to the best models.  Nor is the examination unlike 
many such model displays, both in respect of its eliciting nothing 
and of its being lengthy, for Mr. Guppy is sensible of his talent, 
and Mrs. Snagsby feels not only that it gratifies her inquisitive 
disposition, but that it lifts her husband's establishment higher 
up in the law.  During the progress of this keen encounter, the 
vessel Chadband, being merely engaged in the oil trade, gets 
aground and waits to be floated off.

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy.  "Either this boy sticks to it like 
cobbler's-wax or there is something out of the common here that 
beats anything that ever came into my way at Kenge and Carboy's."

Mrs. Chadband whispers Mrs. Snagsby, who exclaims, "You don't say 
so!"

"For years!" replied Mrs. Chadband.

"Has known Kenge and Carboy's office for years," Mrs. Snagsby 
triumphantly explains to Mr. Guppy.  "Mrs. Chadband--this 
gentleman's wife--Reverend Mr. Chadband."

"Oh, indeed!" says Mr. Guppy.

"Before I married my present husband," says Mrs. Chadband.

"Was you a party in anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy, transferring 
his cross-examination.

"No."

"NOT a party in anything, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy.

Mrs. Chadband shakes her head.

"Perhaps you were acquainted with somebody who was a party in 
something, ma'am?" says Mr. Guppy, who likes nothing better than to 
model his conversation on forensic principles.

"Not exactly that, either," replies Mrs. Chadband, humouring the 
joke with a hard-favoured smile.

"Not exactly that, either!" repeats Mr. Guppy.  "Very good.  Pray, 
ma'am, was it a lady of your acquaintance who had some transactions 
(we will not at present say what transactions) with Kenge and 
Carboy's office, or was it a gentleman of your acquaintance?  Take 
time, ma'am.  We shall come to it presently.  Man or woman, ma'am?"

"Neither," says Mrs. Chadband as before.

"Oh!  A child!" says Mr. Guppy, throwing on the admiring Mrs. 
Snagsby the regular acute professional eye which is thrown on 
British jurymen.  "Now, ma'am, perhaps you'll have the kindness to 
tell us WHAT child."

"You have got it at last, sir," says Mrs. Chadband with another 
hard-favoured smile.  "Well, sir, it was before your time, most 
likely, judging from your appearance.  I was left in charge of a 
child named Esther Summerson, who was put out in life by Messrs. 
Kenge and Carboy."

"Miss Summerson, ma'am!" cries Mr. Guppy, excited.

"I call her Esther Summerson," says Mrs. Chadband with austerity.  
"There was no Miss-ing of the girl in my time.  It was Esther.  
'Esther, do this!  Esther, do that!' and she was made to do it."

"My dear ma'am," returns Mr. Guppy, moving across the small 
apartment, "the humble individual who now addresses you received 
that young lady in London when she first came here from the 
establishment to which you have alluded.  Allow me to have the 
pleasure of taking you by the hand."

Mr. Chadband, at last seeing his opportunity, makes his accustomed 
signal and rises with a smoking head, which he dabs with his 
pocket-handkerchief.  Mrs. Snagsby whispers "Hush!"

"My friends," says Chadband, "we have partaken in moderation" 
(which was certainly not the case so far as he was concerned) "of 
the comforts which have been provided for us.  May this house live 
upon the fatness of the land; may corn and wine be plentiful 
therein; may it grow, may it thrive, may it prosper, may it 
advance, may it proceed, may it press forward!  But, my friends, 
have we partaken of any-hing else?  We have.  My friends, of what 
else have we partaken?  Of spiritual profit?  Yes.  From whence 
have we derived that spiritual profit?  My young friend, stand 
forth!"

Jo, thus apostrophized, gives a slouch backward, and another slouch 
forward, and another slouch to each side, and confronts the 
eloquent Chadband with evident doubts of his intentions.

"My young friend," says Chadband, "you are to us a pearl, you are 
to us a diamond, you are to us a gem, you are to us a jewel.  And 
why, my young friend?"

"I don't know," replies Jo.  "I don't know nothink."

"My young friend," says Chadband, "it is because you know nothing 
that you are to us a gem and jewel.  For what are you, my young 
friend?  Are you a beast of the field?  No.  A bird of the air?  
No.  A fish of the sea or river?  No.  You are a human boy, my 
young friend.  A human boy.  O glorious to be a human boy!  And why 
glorious, my young friend?  Because you are capable of receiving 
the lessons of wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this 
discourse which I now deliver for your good, because you are not a 
stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar.


     O running stream of sparkling joy
     To be a soaring human boy!


And do you cool yourself in that stream now, my young friend?  No.  
Why do you not cool yourself in that stream now?  Because you are 
in a state of darkness, because you are in a state of obscurity, 
because you are in a state of sinfulness, because you are in a 
state of bondage.  My young friend, what is bondage?  Let us, in a 
spirit of love, inquire."

At this threatening stage of the discourse, Jo, who seems to have 
been gradually going out of his mind, smears his right arm over his 
face and gives a terrible yawn.  Mrs. Snagsby indignantly expresses 
her belief that he is a limb of the arch-fiend.

"My friends," says Mr. Chadband with his persecuted chin folding 
itself into its fat smile again as he looks round, "it is right 
that I should be humbled, it is right that I should be tried, it is 
right that I should be mortified, it is right that I should be 
corrected.  I stumbled, on Sabbath last, when I thought with pride 
of my three hours' improving.  The account is now favourably 
balanced: my creditor has accepted a composition.  O let us be 
joyful, joyful!  O let us be joyful!"

Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby.

"My friends," says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion, "I 
will not proceed with my young friend now.  Will you come to-
morrow, my young friend, and inquire of this good lady where I am 
to be found to deliver a discourse unto you, and will you come like 
the thirsty swallow upon the next day, and upon the day after that, 
and upon the day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear 
discourses?"  (This with a cow-like lightness.)

Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away on any terms, 
gives a shuffling nod.  Mr. Guppy then throws him a penny, and Mrs. 
Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely out of the house.  But 
before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with some broken 
meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms.

So, Mr. Chadband--of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder 
he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable 
nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave 
off, having once the audacity to begin--retires into private life 
until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade.  Jo 
moves on, through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge, 
where he finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to his 
repast.

And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the 
great cross on the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above 
a red-and-violet-tinted cloud of smoke.  From the boy's face one 
might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning 
confusion of the great, confused city--so golden, so high up, so 
far out of his reach.  There he sits, the sun going down, the river 
running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams--everything 
moving on to some purpose and to one end--until he is stirred up 
and told to "move on" too.



CHAPTER XX

A New Lodger


The long vacation saunters on towards term-time like an idle river 
very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea.  Mr. Guppy 
saunters along with it congenially.  He has blunted the blade of 
his penknife and broken the point off by sticking that instrument 
into his desk in every direction.  Not that he bears the desk any 
ill will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an 
unexciting nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his 
intellectual energies under too heavy contribution.  He finds that 
nothing agrees with him so well as to make little gyrations on one 
leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape.

Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken 
out a shooting license and gone down to his father's, and Mr. 
Guppy's two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave.  Mr. Guppy and 
Mr. Richard Carstone divide the dignity of the office.  But Mr. 
Carstone is for the time being established in Kenge's room, whereat 
Mr. Guppy chafes.  So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm 
informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with 
her off a lobster and lettuce in the Old Street Road, that he is 
afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he 
had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted.

Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a 
stool in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of 
course, sinister designs upon him.  He is clear that every such 
person wants to depose him.  If he be ever asked how, why, when, or 
wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head.  On the 
strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner 
takes infinite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and 
plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary.

It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to 
find the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce 
and Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and 
failure can come of that.  His satisfaction communicates itself to 
a third saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy's 
office, to wit, Young Smallweed.

Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick 
Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy 
is much doubted in Lincoln's Inn.  He is now something under 
fifteen and an old limb of the law.  He is facetiously understood 
to entertain a passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the 
neighbourhood of Chancery Lane and for her sake to have broken off 
a contract with another lady, to whom he had been engaged some 
years.  He is a town-made article, of small stature and weazen 
features, but may be perceived from a considerable distance by 
means of his very tall hat.  To become a Guppy is the object of his 
ambition.  He dresses at that gentleman (by whom he is patronized), 
talks at him, walks at him, founds himself entirely on him.  He is 
honoured with Mr. Guppy's particular confidence and occasionally 
advises him, from the deep wells of his experience, on difficult 
points in private life.

Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after 
trying all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, 
and after several times putting his head into the iron safe with a 
notion of cooling it.  Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for 
effervescent drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official 
tumblers and stirred them up with the ruler.  Mr. Guppy propounds 
for Mr. Smallweed's consideration the paradox that the more you 
drink the thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-
sill in a state of hopeless languor.

While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln's Inn, 
surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes 
conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk 
below and turning itself up in the direction of his face.  At the 
same time, a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed 
voice cries, "Hip!  Gup-py!"

"Why, you don't mean it!" says Mr. Guppy, aroused.  "Small!  Here's 
Jobling!"  Small's head looks out of window too and nods to 
Jobling.

"Where have you sprung up from?" inquires Mr. Guppy.

"From the market-gardens down by Deptford.  I can't stand it any 
longer.  I must enlist.  I say!  I wish you'd lend me half a crown.  
Upon my soul, I'm hungry."

Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to 
seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.

"I say!  Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare.  
I want to get some dinner."

"Will you come and dine with me?" says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the 
coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.

"How long should I have to hold out?" says Jobling.

"Not half an hour.  I am only waiting here till the enemy goes, 
returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.

"What enemy?"

"A new one.  Going to be articled.  Will you wait?"

"Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?" says Mr 
Jobling.

Smallweed suggests the law list.  But Mr. Jobling declares with 
much earnestness that he "can't stand it."

"You shall have the paper," says Mr. Guppy.  "He shall bring it 
down.  But you had better not be seen about here.  Sit on our 
staircase and read.  It's a quiet place."

Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence.  The sagacious 
Smallweed supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops 
his eye upon him from the landing as a precaution against his 
becoming disgusted with waiting and making an untimely departure.  
At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling 
up.

"Well, and how are you?" says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.

"So, so.  How are you?"

Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling 
ventures on the question, "How is SHE?"  This Mr. Guppy resents as 
a liberty, retorting, "Jobling, there ARE chords in the human 
mind--"  Jobling begs pardon.

"Any subject but that!" says Mr. Guppy with a gloomy enjoyment of 
his injury.  "For there ARE chords, Jobling--"

Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.

During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the 
dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper, 
"Return immediately."  This notification to all whom it may 
concern, he inserts in the letter-box, and then putting on the tall 
hat at the angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, 
informs his patron that they may now make themselves scarce.

Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, 
of the class known among its frequenters by the denomination slap-
bang, where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is 
supposed to have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed, 
of whom it may be remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom 
years are nothing.  He stands precociously possessed of centuries 
of owlish wisdom.  If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he 
must have lain there in a tail-coat.  He has an old, old eye, has 
Smallweed; and he drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his 
neck is stiff in his collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he 
knows all about it, whatever it is.  In short, in his bringing up 
he has been so nursed by Law and Equity that he has become a kind 
of fossil imp, to account for whose terrestrial existence it is 
reported at the public offices that his father was John Doe and his 
mother the only female member of the Roe family, also that his 
first long-clothes were made from a blue bag.

Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the 
window of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant 
baskets of peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for 
the spit, Mr. Smallweed leads the way.  They know him there and 
defer to him.  He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the 
papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than 
ten minutes afterwards.  It is of no use trying him with anything 
less than a full-sized "bread" or proposing to him any joint in cut 
unless it is in the very best cut.  In the matter of gravy he is 
adamant.

Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread 
experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's 
banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress 
repeats the catalogue of viands and saying "What do YOU take, 
Chick?"  Chick, out of the profundity of his artfulness, preferring 
"veal and ham and French beans--and don't you forget the stuffing, 
Polly" (with an unearthly cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and 
Mr. Jobling give the like order.  Three pint pots of half-and-half 
are superadded.  Quickly the waitress returns bearing what is 
apparently a model of the Tower of Babel but what is really a pile 
of plates and flat tin dish-covers.  Mr. Smallweed, approving of 
what is set before him, conveys intelligent benignity into his 
ancient eye and winks upon her.  Then, amid a constant coming in, 
and going out, and running about, and a clatter of crockery, and a 
rumbling up and down of the machine which brings the nice cuts from 
the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more nice cuts down the 
speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost of nice cuts that 
have been disposed of, and a general flush and steam of hot joints, 
cut and uncut, and a considerably heated atmosphere in which the 
soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break out spontaneously into 
eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the legal triumvirate 
appease their appetites.

Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might 
require.  His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a 
glistening nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade.  
The same phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and 
particularly at the seams.  He has the faded appearance of a 
gentleman in embarrassed circumstances; even his light whiskers 
droop with something of a shabby air.

His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare living for some 
little time back.  He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal 
and ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway 
in theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another.  "Thank you, Guppy," 
says Mr. Jobling, "I really don't know but what I WILL take 
another."

Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.

Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half 
way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at 
his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his 
legs and rubs his hands.  Beholding him in which glow of 
contentment, Mr. Guppy says, "You are a man again, Tony!"

"Well, not quite yet," says Mr. Jobling.  "Say, just born."

"Will you take any other vegetables?  Grass?  Peas?  Summer 
cabbage?"

"Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling.  "I really don't know but 
what I WILL take summer cabbage."

Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of 
"Without slugs, Polly!"  And cabbage produced.

"I am growing up, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and 
fork with a relishing steadiness.

"Glad to hear it."

"In fact, I have just turned into my teens," says Mr. Jobling.

He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves 
as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the 
ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by 
a veal and ham and a cabbage.

"Now, Small," says Mr. Guppy, "what would you recommend about 
pastry?"

"Marrow puddings," says Mr. Smallweed instantly.

"Aye, aye!" cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look.  "You're there, 
are you?  Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take a 
marrow pudding."

Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a 
pleasant humour that he is coming of age fast.  To these succeed, 
by command of Mr. Smallweed, "three Cheshires," and to those "three 
small rums."  This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. 
Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side 
of the box to himself), leans against the wall, and says, "I am 
grown up now, Guppy.  I have arrived at maturity."

"What do you think, now," says Mr. Guppy, "about--you don't mind 
Smallweed?"

"Not the least in the worid.  I have the pleasure of drinking his 
good health."

"Sir, to you!" says Mr. Smallweed.

"I was saying, what do you think NOW," pursues Mr. Guppy, "of 
enlisting?"

"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one 
thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another 
thing.  Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What 
am I to do?  How am I to live?  Ill fo manger, you know," says Mr. 
Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture 
in an English stable.  "Ill fo manger.  That's the French saying, 
and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman.  Or 
more so."

Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion "much more so."

"If any man had told me," pursues Jobling, "even so lately as when 
you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over 
to see that house at Castle Wold--"

Mr. Smallweed corrects him--Chesney Wold.

"Chesney Wold.  (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If 
any man had told me then that I should be as hard up at the present 
time as I literally find myself, I should have--well, I should have 
pitched into him," says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water 
with an air of desperate resignation; "I should have let fly at his 
head."

"Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then," 
remonstrates Mr. Guppy.  "You were talking about nothing else in 
the gig."

"Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, "I will not deny it.  I was on the wrong 
side of the post.  But I trusted to things coming round."

That very popular trust in flat things coming round!  Not in their 
being beaten round, or worked round, but in their "coming" round!  
As though a lunatic should trust in the world's "coming" 
triangular!

"I had confident expectations that things would come round and be 
all square," says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and 
perhaps of meaning too.  "But I was disappointed.  They never did.  
And when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to 
people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty 
trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion.  
And of any new professional connexion too, for if I was to give a 
reference to-morrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up.  
Then what's a fellow to do?  I have been keeping out of the way and 
living cheap down about the market-gardens, but what's the use of 
living cheap when you have got no money?  You might as well live 
dear."

"Better," Mr. Smallweed thinks.

"Certainly.  It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers 
have been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it," says Mr. 
Jobling.  "They are great weaknesses--Damme, sir, they are great.  
Well," proceeds Mr. Jobling after a defiant visit to his rum-and-
water, "what can a fellow do, I ask you, BUT enlist?"

Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what, in 
his opinion, a fellow can do.  His manner is the gravely impressive 
manner of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise 
than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.

"Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, "myself and our mutual friend Smallweed--"

Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, "Gentlemen both!" and drinks.

"--Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once 
since you--"

"Say, got the sack!" cries Mr. Jobling bitterly.  "Say it, Guppy.  
You mean it."

"No-o-o!  Left the Inn," Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.

"Since you left the Inn, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy; "and I have 
mentioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately 
thought of proposing.  You know Snagsby the stationer?"

"I know there is such a stationer," returns Mr. Jobling.  "He was 
not ours, and I am not acquainted with him."

"He IS ours, Jobling, and I AM acquainted with him," Mr. Guppy 
retorts.  "Well, sir!  I have lately become better acquainted with 
him through some accidental circumstances that have made me a 
visitor of his in private life.  Those circumstances it is not 
necessary to offer in argument.  They may--or they may not--have 
some reference to a subject which may--or may not--have cast its 
shadow on my existence."

As it is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt 
his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch 
it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords 
in the human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the 
pitfall by remaining silent.

"Such things may be," repeats Mr. Guppy, "or they may not be.  They 
are no part of the case.  It is enough to mention that both Mr. and 
Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me and that Snagsby has, in 
busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out.  He has all 
Tulkinghorn's, and an excellent business besides.  I believe if our 
mutual friend Smallweed were put into the box, he could prove 
this?"

Mr. Smallweed nods and appears greedy to be sworn.

"Now, gentlemen of the jury," says Mr. Guppy, "--I mean, now, 
Jobling--you may say this is a poor prospect of a living.  Granted.  
But it's better than nothing, and better than enlistment.  You want 
time.  There must be time for these late affairs to blow over.  You 
might live through it on much worse terms than by writing for 
Snagsby."

Mr. Jobling is about to interrupt when the sagacious Smallweed 
checks him with a dry cough and the words, "Hem!  Shakspeare!"

"There are two branches to this subject, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy.  
"That is the first.  I come to the second.  You know Krook, the 
Chancellor, across the lane.  Come, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy in his 
encouraging cross-examination-tone, "I think you know Krook, the 
Chancellor, across the lane?"

"I know him by sight," says Mr. Jobling.

"You know him by sight.  Very well.  And you know little Flite?"

"Everybody knows her," says Mr. Jobling.

"Everybody knows her.  VERY well.  Now it has been one of my duties 
of late to pay Flite a certain weekly allowance, deducting from it 
the amount of her weekly rent, which I have paid (in consequence of 
instructions I have received) to Krook himself, regularly in her 
presence.  This has brought me into communication with Krook and 
into a knowledge of his house and his habits.  I know he has a room 
to let.  You may live there at a very low charge under any name you 
like, as quietly as if you were a hundred miles off.  He'll ask no 
questions and would accept you as a tenant at a word from me--
before the clock strikes, if you chose.  And I tell you another 
thing, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, who has suddenly lowered his voice 
and become familiar again, "he's an extraordinary old chap--always 
rummaging among a litter of papers and grubbing away at teaching 
himself to read and write, without getting on a bit, as it seems to 
me.  He is a most extraordinary old chap, sir.  I don't know but 
what it might be worth a fellow's while to look him up a bit."

"You don't mean--" Mr. Jobling begins.

"I mean," returns Mr. Guppy, shrugging his shoulders with becoming 
modesty, "that I can't make him out.  I appeal to our mutual friend 
Smallweed whether he has or has not heard me remark that I can't 
make him out."

Mr. Smallweed bears the concise testimony, "A few!"

"I have seen something of the profession and something of life, 
Tony," says Mr. Guppy, "and it's seldom I can't make a man out, 
more or less.  But such an old card as this, so deep, so sly, and 
secret (though I don't believe he is ever sober), I never came 
across.  Now, he must be precious old, you know, and he has not a 
soul about him, and he is reported to be immensely rich; and 
whether he is a smuggler, or a receiver, or an unlicensed 
pawnbroker, or a money-lender--all of which I have thought likely 
at different times--it might pay you to knock up a sort of 
knowledge of him.  I don't see why you shouldn't go in for it, when 
everything else suits."

Mr. Jobling, Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Smallweed all lean their elbows on 
the table and their chins upon their hands, and look at the 
ceiling.  After a time, they all drink, slowly lean back, put their 
hands in their pockets, and look at one another.

"If I had the energy I once possessed, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy with a 
sigh.  "But there are chords in the human mind--"

Expressing the remainder of the desolate sentiment in rum-and-
water, Mr. Guppy concludes by resigning the adventure to Tony 
Jobling and informing him that during the vacation and while things 
are slack, his purse, "as far as three or four or even five pound 
goes," will be at his disposal.  "For never shall it be said," Mr. 
Guppy adds with emphasis, "that William Guppy turned his back upon 
his friend!"

The latter part of the proposal is so directly to the purpose that 
Mr. Jobling says with emotion, "Guppy, my trump, your fist!"  Mr. 
Guppy presents it, saying, "Jobling, my boy, there it is!"  Mr. 
Jobling returns, "Guppy, we have been pals now for some years!"  
Mr. Guppy replies, "Jobling, we have."

They then shake hands, and Mr. Jobling adds in a feeling manner, 
"Thank you, Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take another glass 
for old acquaintance sake."

"Krook's last lodger died there," observes Mr. Guppy in an 
incidental way.

"Did he though!" says Mr. Jobling.

"There was a verdict.  Accidental death.  You don't mind that?"

"No," says Mr. Jobling, "I don't mind it; but he might as well have 
died somewhere else.  It's devilish odd that he need go and die at 
MY place!"  Mr. Jobling quite resents this liberty, several times 
returning to it with such remarks as, "There are places enough to 
die in, I should think!" or, "He wouldn't have liked my dying at 
HIS place, I dare say!"

However, the compact being virtually made, Mr. Guppy proposes to 
dispatch the trusty Smallweed to ascertain if Mr. Krook is at home, 
as in that case they may complete the negotiation without delay.  
Mr. Jobling approving, Smallweed puts himself under the tall hat 
and conveys it out of the dining-rooms in the Guppy manner.  He 
soon returns with the intelligence that Mr. Krook is at home and 
that he has seen him through the shop-door, sitting in the back 
premises, sleeping "like one o'clock."

"Then I'll pay," says Mr. Guppy, "and we'll go and see him.  Small, 
what will it be?"

Mr. Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with one 
hitch of his eyelash, instantly replies as follows: "Four veals and 
hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer 
cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and 
six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four 
half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums 
is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six.  Eight and 
six in half a sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!"

Not at all excited by these stupendous calculations, Smallweed 
dismisses his friends with a cool nod and remains behind to take a 
little admiring notice of Polly, as opportunity may serve, and to 
read the daily papers, which are so very large in proportion to 
himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up the Times to run 
his eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night 
and to have disappeared under the bedclothes.

Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling repair to the rag and bottle shop, where 
they find Krook still sleeping like one o'clock, that is to say, 
breathing stertorously with his chin upon his breast and quite 
insensible to any external sounds or even to gentle shaking.  On 
the table beside him, among the usual lumber, stand an empty gin-
bottle and a glass.  The unwholesome air is so stained with this 
liquor that even the green eyes of the cat upon her shelf, as they 
open and shut and glimmer on the visitors, look drunk.

"Hold up here!" says Mr. Guppy, giving the relaxed figure of the 
old man another shake.  "Mr. Krook!  Halloa, sir!"

But it would seem as easy to wake a bundle of old clothes with a 
spirituous heat smouldering in it.  "Did you ever see such a stupor 
as he falls into, between drink and sleep?" says Mr. Guppy.

"If this is his regular sleep," returns Jobling, rather alarmed, 
"it'll last a long time one of these days, I am thinking."

"It's always more like a fit than a nap," says Mr. Guppy, shaking 
him again.  "Halloa, your lordship!  Why, he might be robbed fifty 
times over!  Open your eyes!"

After much ado, he opens them, but without appearing to see his 
visitors or any other objects.  Though he crosses one leg on 
another, and folds his hands, and several times closes and opens 
his parched lips, he seems to all intents and purposes as 
insensible as before.

"He is alive, at any rate," says Mr. Guppy.  "How are you, my Lord 
Chancellor.  I have brought a friend of mine, sir, on a little 
matter of business."

The old man still sits, often smacking his dry lips without the 
least consciousness.  After some minutes he makes an attempt to 
rise.  They help him up, and he staggers against the wall and 
stares at them.

"How do you do, Mr. Krook?" says Mr. Guppy in some discomfiture.  
"How do you do, sir?  You are looking charming, Mr. Krook.  I hope 
you are pretty well?"

The old man, in aiming a purposeless blow at Mr. Guppy, or at 
nothing, feebly swings himself round and comes with his face 
against the wall.  So he remains for a minute or two, heaped up 
against it, and then staggers down the shop to the front door.  The 
air, the movement in the court, the lapse of time, or the 
combination of these things recovers him.  He comes back pretty 
steadily, adjusting his fur cap on his head and looking keenly at 
them.

"Your servant, gentlemen; I've been dozing.  Hi! I am hard to wake, 
odd times."

"Rather so, indeed, sir," responds Mr. Guppy.

"What?  You've been a-trying to do it, have you?" says the 
suspicious Krook.

"Only a little," Mr. Guppy explains.

The old man's eye resting on the empty bottle, he takes it up, 
examines it, and slowly tilts it upside down.

"I say!" he cries like the hobgoblin in the story.  "Somebody's 
been making free here!"

"I assure you we found it so," says Mr. Guppy.  "Would you allow me 
to get it filled for you?"

"Yes, certainly I would!" cries Krook in high glee.  "Certainly I 
would!  Don't mention it!  Get it filled next door--Sol's Arms--the 
Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny.  Bless you, they know ME!"

He so presses the empty bottle upon Mr. Guppy that that gentleman, 
with a nod to his friend, accepts the trust and hurries out and 
hurries in again with the bottle filled.  The old man receives it 
in his arms like a beloved grandchild and pats it tenderly.

"But, I say," he whispers, with his eyes screwed up, after tasting 
it, "this ain't the Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny.  This is 
eighteenpenny!"

"I thought you might like that better," says Mr. Guppy.

"You're a nobleman, sir," returns Krook with another taste, and his 
hot breath seems to come towards them like a flame.  "You're a 
baron of the land."

Taking advantage of this auspicious moment, Mr. Guppy presents his 
friend under the impromptu name of Mr. Weevle and states the object 
of their visit.  Krook, with his bottle under his arm (he never 
gets beyond a certain point of either drunkenness or sobriety), 
takes time to survey his proposed lodger and seems to approve of 
him.  "You'd like to see the room, young man?" he says.  "Ah!  It's 
a good room!  Been whitewashed.  Been cleaned down with soft soap 
and soda.  Hi!  It's worth twice the rent, letting alone my company 
when you want it and such a cat to keep the mice away."

Commending the room after this manner, the old man takes them 
upstairs, where indeed they do find it cleaner than it used to be 
and also containing some old articles of furniture which he has dug 
up from his inexhaustible stores.  The terms are easily concluded--
for the Lord Chancellor cannot be hard on Mr. Guppy, associated as 
he is with Kenge and Carboy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and other 
famous claims on his professional consideration--and it is agreed 
that Mr. Weevle shall take possession on the morrow.  Mr. Weevle 
and Mr. Guppy then repair to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, where 
the personal introduction of the former to Mr. Snagsby is effected 
and (more important) the vote and interest of Mrs. Snagsby are 
secured.  They then report progress to the eminent Smallweed, 
waiting at the office in his tall hat for that purpose, and 
separate, Mr. Guppy explaining that he would terminate his little 
entertainment by standing treat at the play but that there are 
chords in the human mind which would render it a hollow mockery.

On the morrow, in the dusk of evening, Mr. Weevle modestly appears 
at Krook's, by no means incommoded with luggage, and establishes 
himself in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters 
stare at him in his sleep, as if they were full of wonder.  On the 
following day Mr. Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of 
young fellow, borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a 
hammer of his landlord and goes to work devising apologies for 
window-curtains, and knocking up apologies for shelves, and hanging 
up his two teacups, milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth 
of little hooks, like a shipwrecked sailor making the best of it.

But what Mr. Weevle prizes most of all his few possessions (next 
after his light whiskers, for which he has an attachment that only 
whiskers can awaken in the breast of man) is a choice collection of 
copper-plate impressions from that truly national work The 
Divinities of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, 
representing ladies of title and fashion in every variety of smirk 
that art, combined with capital, is capable of producing.  With 
these magnificent portraits, unworthily confined in a band-box 
during his seclusion among the market-gardens, he decorates his 
apartment; and as the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears every 
variety of fancy dress, plays every variety of musical instrument, 
fondles every variety of dog, ogles every variety of prospect, and 
is backed up by every variety of flower-pot and balustrade, the 
result is very imposing.

But fashion is Mr. Weevle's, as it was Tony Jobling's, weakness.  
To borrow yesterday's paper from the Sol's Arms of an evening and 
read about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are 
shooting across the fashionable sky in every direction is 
unspeakable consolation to him.  To know what member of what 
brilliant and distinguished circle accomplished the brilliant and 
distinguished feat of joining it yesterday or contemplates the no 
less brilliant and distinguished feat of leaving it to-morrow gives 
him a thrill of joy.  To be informed what the Galaxy Gallery of 
British Beauty is about, and means to be about, and what Galaxy 
marriages are on the tapis, and what Galaxy rumours are in 
circulation, is to become acquainted with the most glorious 
destinies of mankind.  Mr. Weevle reverts from this intelligence to 
the Galaxy portraits implicated, and seems to know the originals, 
and to be known of them.

For the rest he is a quiet lodger, full of handy shifts and devices 
as before mentioned, able to cook and clean for himself as well as 
to carpenter, and developing social inclinations after the shades 
of evening have fallen on the court.  At those times, when he is 
not visited by Mr. Guppy or by a small light in his likeness 
quenched in a dark hat, he comes out of his dull room--where he has 
inherited the deal wilderness of desk bespattered with a rain of 
ink--and talks to Krook or is "very free," as they call it in the 
court, commendingly, with any one disposed for conversation.  
Wherefore, Mrs. Piper, who leads the court, is impelled to offer 
two remarks to Mrs. Perkins: firstly, that if her Johnny was to 
have whiskers, she could wish 'em to be identically like that young 
man's; and secondly, "Mark my words, Mrs. Perkins, ma'am, and don't 
you be surprised, Lord bless you, if that young man comes in at 
last for old Krook's money!"



CHAPTER XXI

The Smallweed Family


In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one 
of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, the Elfin 
Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the domestic hearth 
as Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the 
office and its contingencies have no claim.  He dwells in a little 
narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in 
on all sides like a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of 
an old forest tree whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as 
the Smallweed smack of youth.

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several 
generations.  Little old men and women there have been, but no 
child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak 
in her intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish 
state.  With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, 
memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to 
fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother 
has undoubtedly brightened the family.

Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is likewise of the party.  He is in a 
helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper, 
limbs, but his mind is unimpaired.  It holds, as well as it ever 
held, the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small 
collection of the hardest facts.  In respect of ideality, 
reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is 
no worse off than it used to be.  Everything that Mr. Smallweed's 
grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a 
grub at last.  In all his life he has never bred a single 
butterfly.

The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of 
Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting 
species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired 
into holes until they were entrapped.  The name of this old pagan's 
god was Compound Interest.  He lived for it, married it, died of 
it.  Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in 
which all the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he 
broke something--something necessary to his existence, therefore it 
couldn't have been his heart--and made an end of his career.  As 
his character was not good, and he had been bred at a charity 
school in a complete course, according to question and answer, of 
those ancient people the Amorites and Hittites, he was frequently 
quoted as an example of the failure of education.

His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of 
"going out" early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp 
scrivener's office at twelve years old.  There the young gentleman 
improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and 
developing the family gifts, gradually elevated himself into the 
discounting profession.  Going out early in life and marrying late, 
as his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and anxious-
minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and marrying 
late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed, twins.  
During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family 
tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to 
marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has 
discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-
tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever.  
Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and 
that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have 
been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something 
depressing on their minds.

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below 
the level of the street--a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only 
ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest 
of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character 
no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed's mind--
seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each side of 
the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away 
the rosy hours.  On the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots 
and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation to 
watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a sort 
of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when it 
is in action.  Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed's seat and guarded 
by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain 
property to a fabulous amount.  Beside him is a spare cushion with 
which he is always provided in order that he may have something to 
throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she 
makes an allusion to money--a subject on which he is particularly 
sensitive.

"And where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's 
twin sister.

"He an't come in yet," says Judy.

"It's his tea-time, isn't it?"

"No."

"How much do you mean to say it wants then?"

"Ten minutes."

"Hey?"

"Ten minutes." (Loud on the part of Judy.)

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed.  "Ten minutes."

Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head 
at the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money 
and screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten 
ten-pound notes!"

Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.

"Drat you, be quiet!" says the good old man.

The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold.  It not only 
doubles up Mrs. Smallweed's head against the side of her porter's 
chair and causes her to present, when extricated by her 
granddaughter, a highly unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary 
exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into 
HIS porter's chair like a broken puppet.  The excellent old 
gentleman being at these times a mere clothes-bag with a black 
skull-cap on the top of it, does not present a very animated 
appearance until he has undergone the two operations at the hands 
of his granddaughter of being shaken up like a great bottle and 
poked and punched like a great bolster.  Some indication of a neck 
being developed in him by these means, he and the sharer of his 
life's evening again fronting one another in their two porter's 
chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten on their post by 
the Black Serjeant, Death.

Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates.  She is so 
indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two 
kneaded into one would hardly make a young person of average 
proportions, while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned 
family likeness to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe 
and cap she might walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-
organ without exciting much remark as an unusual specimen.  Under 
existing circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare 
gown of brown stuff.

Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at 
any game.  She once or twice fell into children's company when she 
was about ten years old, but the children couldn't get on with 
Judy, and Judy couldn't get on with them.  She seemed like an 
animal of another species, and there was instinctive repugnance on 
both sides.  It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh.  
She has so rarely seen the thing done that the probabilities are 
strong the other way.  Of anything like a youthful laugh, she 
certainly can have no conception.  If she were to try one, she 
would find her teeth in her way, modelling that action of her face, 
as she has unconsciously modelled all its other expressions, on her 
pattern of sordid age.  Such is Judy.

And her twin brother couldn't wind up a top for his life.  He knows 
no more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he 
knows of the people in the stars.  He could as soon play at leap-
frog or at cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself.  But 
he is so much the better off than his sister that on his narrow 
world of fact an opening has dawned into such broader regions as 
lie within the ken of Mr. Guppy.  Hence his admiration and his 
emulation of that shining enchanter.

Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-
iron tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers.  The 
bread she puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much 
of it) in a small pewter plate.  Grandfather Smallweed looks hard 
after the tea as it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is.

"Charley, do you mean?" says Judy.

"Hey?" from Grandfather Smallweed.

"Charley, do you mean?"

This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as 
usual at the trivets, cries, "Over the water!  Charley over the 
water, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley 
over the water, over the water to Charley!" and becomes quite 
energetic about it.  Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not 
sufficiently recovered his late exertion.

"Ha!" he says when there is silence.  "If that's her name.  She 
eats a deal.  It would be better to allow her for her keep."

Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head and purses up her 
mouth into no without saying it.

"No?" returns the old man.  "Why not?"

"She'd want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less," says Judy.

"Sure?"

Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she 
scrapes the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste 
and cuts it into slices, "You, Charley, where are you?"  Timidly 
obedient to the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large 
bonnet, with her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing 
brush in one of them, appears, and curtsys.

"What work are you about now?" says Judy, making an ancient snap at 
her like a very sharp old beldame.

"I'm a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley.

"Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter.  Shirking won't do 
for me.  Make haste!  Go along!" cries Judy with a stamp upon the 
ground.  "You girls are more trouble than you're worth, by half."

On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the 
butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother, 
looking in at the window.  For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she 
opens the street-door.

"Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed.  "Here you are, hey?"

"Here I am," says Bart.

"Been along with your friend again, Bart?"

Small nods.

"Dining at his expense, Bart?"

Small nods again.

"That's right.  Live at his expense as much as you can, and take 
warning by his foolish example.  That's the use of such a friend.  
The only use you can put him to," says the venerable sage.

His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as 
he might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a 
slight wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table.  The four 
old faces then hover over teacups like a company of ghastly 
cherubim, Mrs. Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and 
chattering at the trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be 
repeatedly shaken up like a large black draught.

"Yes, yes," says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of 
wisdom.  "That's such advice as your father would have given you, 
Bart.  You never saw your father.  More's the pity.  He was my true 
son."  Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was 
particularly pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear.

"He was my true son," repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread 
and butter on his knee, "a good accountant, and died fifteen years 
ago."

Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with 
"Fifteen hundred pound.  Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, 
fifteen hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and 
hid!"  Her worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, 
immediately discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the 
side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered.  His 
appearance, after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these 
admonitions, is particularly impressive and not wholly 
prepossessing, firstly because the exertion generally twists his 
black skull-cap over one eye and gives him an air of goblin 
rakishness, secondly because he mutters violent imprecations 
against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the contrast between 
those powerful expressions and his powerless figure is suggestive 
of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if he could.  
All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family circle that 
it produces no impression.  The old gentleman is merely shaken and 
has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored to its 
usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps with her cap 
adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again, ready to 
be bowled down like a ninepin.

Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman 
is sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he 
mixes it up with several edifying expletives addressed to the 
unconscious partner of his bosom, who holds communication with 
nothing on earth but the trivets.  As thus: "If your father, Bart, 
had lived longer, he might have been worth a deal of money--you 
brimstone chatterer!--but just as he was beginning to build up the 
house that he had been making the foundations for, through many a 
year--you jade of a magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you 
mean!--he took ill and died of a low fever, always being a sparing 
and a spare man, fule been a good son, and I think I meant to 
have been one.  But I wasn't.  I was a thundering bad son, that's 
the long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody."

"Surprising!" cries the old man.

"However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said about it, the better 
now.  Come! You know the agreement.  Always a pipe out of the two 
months' interest!  (Bosh! It's all correct.  You needn't be afraid 
to order the pipe.  Here's the new bill, and here's the two months' 
interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it 
together in my business.)"

Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the 
parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two 
black leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he 
secures the document he has just received, and from the other takes 
another similar document which hl of business care--I should like to throw a 
cat at you instead of a cushion, and I will too if you make such a 
confounded fool of yourself!--and your mother, who was a prudent 
woman as dry as a chip, just dwindled away like touchwood after you 
and Judy were born--you are an old pig.  You are a brimstone pig.  
You're a head of swine!"

Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect 
in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of 
cups and saucers and from the bottom of the teapot for the little 
charwoman's evening meal.  In like manner she gets together, in the 
iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of 
loaves as the rigid economy of the house has left in existence.

"But your father and me were partners, Bart," says the old 
gentleman, "and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there 
is.  It's rare for you both that you went out early in life--Judy 
to the flower business, and you to the law.  You won't want to 
spend it.  You'll get your living without it, and put more to it.  
When I am gone, Judy will go back to the flower business and you'll 
still stick to the law."

One might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay 
with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been 
apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making.  A 
close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her 
brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being 
gone, some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some 
resentful opinion that it is time he went.

"Now, if everybody has done," says Judy, completing her 
preparations, "I'll have that girl in to her tea.  She would never 
leave off if she took it by herself in the kitchen."

Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes, 
sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter.  
In the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed 
appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the 
remotest periods.  Her systematic manner of flying at her and 
pouncing on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is 
wonderful, evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving 
seldom reached by the oldest practitioners.

"Now, don't stare about you all the afternoon," cries Judy, shaking 
her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the glance 
which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, "but take your 
victuals and get back to your work."

"Yes, miss," says Charley.

"Don't say yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls 
are.  Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe 
you."

Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission and so 
disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss Smallweed charges her not 
to gormandize, which "in you girls," she observes, is disgusting.  
Charley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on the 
general subject of girls but for a knock at the door.

"See who it is, and don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy.

The object of her attentions withdrawing for the purpose, Miss 
Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling the remainder of the 
bread and butter together and launching two or three dirty tea-cups 
into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she considers 
the eating and drinking terminated.

"Now!  Who is it, and what's wanted?" says the snappish Judy.

It is one Mr. George, it appears.  Without other announcement or 
ceremony, Mr. George walks in.

"Whew!" says Mr. George.  "You are hot here.  Always a fire, eh?  
Well!  Perhaps you do right to get used to one."  Mr. George makes 
the latter remark to himself as he nods to Grandfather Smallweed.

"Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman.  "How de do?  How de do?"

"Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair.  "Your 
granddaughter I have had the honour of seeing before; my service to 
you, miss."

"This is my grandson," says Grandfather Smallweed.  "You ha'n't 
seen him before.  He is in the law and not much at home."

"My service to him, too!  He is like his sister.  He is very like 
his sister.  He is devilish like his sister," says Mr. George, 
laying a great and not altogether complimentary stress on his last 
adjective.

"And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather Smallweed 
inquires, slowly rubbing his legs.

"Pretty much as usual.  Like a football."

He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking, 
with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest.  His sinewy 
and powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been 
used to a pretty rough life.  What is curious about him is that he 
sits forward on his chair as if he were, from long habit, allowing 
space for some dress or accoutrements that he has altogether laid 
aside.  His step too is measured and heavy and would go well with a 
weighty clash and jingle of spurs.  He is close-shaved now, but his 
mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a 
great moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open 
palm of his broad brown hand upon it is to the same effect.  
Altogether one might guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once 
upon a time.

A special contrast Mr. George makes to the Smallweed family.  
Trooper was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him.  
It is a broadsword to an oyster-knife.  His developed figure and 
their stunted forms, his large manner filling any amount of room 
and their little narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their 
sharp spare tones, are in the strongest and the strangest 
opposition.  As he sits in the middle of the grim parlour, leaning 
a little forward, with his hands upon his thighs and his elbows 
squared, he looks as though, if he remained there long, he would 
absorb into himself the whole family and the whole four-roomed 
house, extra little back-kitchen and all.

"Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he asks of Grandfather 
Smallweed after looking round the room.

"Why, it's partly a habit, Mr. George, and--yes--it partly helps 
the circulation," he replies.

"The cir-cu-la-tion!" repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his 
chest and seeming to become two sizes larger.  "Not much of that, I 
should think."

"Truly I'm old, Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed.  "But I 
can carry my years.  I'm older than HER," nodding at his wife, "and 
see what she is?  You're a brimstone chatterer!" with a sudden 
revival of his late hostility.

"Unlucky old soul!" says Mr. George, turning his head in that 
direction.  "Don't scold the old lady.  Look at her here, with her 
poor cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle.  Hold 
up, ma'am.  That's better.  There we are!  Think of your mother, 
Mr. Smallweed," says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from 
assisting her, "if your wife an't enough."

"I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?" the old man 
hints with a leer.

The colour of Mr. George's face rather deepens as he replies, "Why 
no.  I wasn't."

"I am astonished at it."

"So am I.  I ought to have hands to Mr. George, who twists 
it up for a pipelight.  As the old man inspects, through his 
glasses, every up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before 
he releases them from their leathern prison, and as he counts the 
money three times over and requires Judy to say every word she 
utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and 
action as it is possible to be, this business is a long time in 
progress.  When it is quite concluded, and not before, he 
disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it and answers Mr. 
George's last remark by saying, "Afraid to order the pipe?  We are 
not so mercenary as that, sir.  Judy, see directly to the pipe and 
the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George."

The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all 
this time except when they have been engrossed by the black 
leathern cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the 
visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might 
leave a traveller to the parental bear.

"And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?" says Mr. 
George with folded arms.

"Just so, just so," the old man nods.

"And don't you occupy yourself at all?"

"I watch the fire--and the boiling and the roasting--"

"When there is any," says Mr. George with great expression.

"Just so.  When there is any."

"Don't you read or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph.  "No, no.  We 
have never been readers in our family.  It don't pay.  Stuff.  
Idleness.  Folly.  No, no!"

"There's not much to choose between your two states," says the 
visitor in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing as he looks 
from him to the old woman and back again.  "I say!" in a louder 
voice.

"I hear you."

"You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear."

"My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both 
hands to embrace him.  "Never!  Never, my dear friend!  But my 
friend in the city that I got to lend you the money--HE might!"

"Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr. George, finishing the 
inquiry in his lower key with the words "You lying old rascal!"

"My dear friend, he is not to be depended on.  I wouldn't trust 
him.  He will have his bond, my dear friend."

"Devil doubt him," says Mr. George.  Charley appearing with a tray, 
on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-
and-water, he asks her, "How do you come here!  You haven't got the 
family face."

"I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley.

The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, 
with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head.  
"You give the house almost a wholesome look.  It wants a bit of 
youth as much as it wants fresh air."  Then he dismisses her, 
lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city--
the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's 
imagination.

"So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?"

"I think he might--I am afraid he would.  I have known him do it," 
says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, "twenty times."

Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing 
over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers 
"Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, 
twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty--" and is 
then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom 
this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her 
face as it crushes her in the usual manner.

"You're a brimstone idiot.  You're a scorpion--a brimstone 
scorpion!  You're a sweltering toad.  You're a chattering 
clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old 
man, prostrate in his chair.  "My dear friend, will you shake me up 
a little?"

Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at 
the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance 
by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright 
in his chalr as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds 
whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him 
and shake him into his grave.  Resisting the temptation, but 
agitating him violently enough to make his head roll like a 
harlequin's, he puts him smartly down in his chair again and 
adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub that the old man winks with 
both eyes for a minute afterwards.

"O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed.  "That'll do.  Thank you, my dear 
friend, that'll do.  Oh, dear me, I'm out of breath.  O Lord!"  And 
Mr. Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear 
friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.

The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair 
and falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the 
philosophical reflection, "The name of your friend in the city 
begins with a D, comrade, and you're about right respecting the 
bond."

"Did you speak, Mr. George?" inquires the old man.

The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right 
elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while 
his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in 
a martial manner, continues to smoke.  Meanwhile he looks at Mr. 
Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of 
smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.

"I take it," he says, making just as much and as little change in 
his position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with 
a round, full action, "that I am the only man alive (or dead 
either) that gets the value of a pipe out of YOU?"

"Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see company, 
Mr. George, and that I don't treat.  I can't afford to it.  But as 
you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition--"

"Why, it's not for the value of it; that's no great thing.  It was 
a fancy to get it out of you.  To have something in for my money."

"Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, 
rubbing his legs.

"Very.  I always was."  Puff.  "It's a sure sign of my prudence 
that I ever found the way here."  Puff.  "Also, that I am what I 
am."  Puff.  "I am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George, 
composedly smoking.  "I rose in life that way."

"Don't he down-hearted, sir.  You may rise yet."

Mr. George laughs and drinks.

"Ha'n't you no relations, now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a 
twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay off this little principal or 
who would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my 
friend in the city to make you a further advance upon?  Two good 
names would be sufficient for my friend in the city.  Ha'n't you no 
such relations, Mr. George?"

Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, "If I had, I 
shouldn't trouble them.  I have been trouble enough to my 
belongings in my day.  It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a 
vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then 
to decent people that he never was a credit to and live upon them, 
but it's not my sort.  The best kind of amends then for having gone 
away is to keep away, in my opinion."

"But natural affection, Mr. George," hints Grandfather Smallweed.

"For two good names, hey?" says Mr. George, shaking his head and 
still composedly smoking.  "No.  That's not my sort either."

Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair 
since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a 
voice in it calling for Judy.  That houri, appearing, shakes him up 
in the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain 
near him.  For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble 
of repeating his late attentions.

"Ha!" he observes when he is in trim again.  "If you could have 
traced out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making 
of you.  If when you first came here, in consequence of our 
advertisement in the newspapers--when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to 
the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others 
who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly 
towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance--
if at that time you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have 
been the making of you."

"I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it," says Mr. 
George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the 
entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a 
fascination, not of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at 
her as she stands by her grandfather's chair, "but on the whole, I 
am glad I wasn't now."

"Why, Mr. George?  In the name of--of brimstone, why?" says 
Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation.  
(Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. 
Smallweed in her slumber.)

"For two reasons, comrade."

"And what two reasons, Mr. George?  In the name of the--"

"Of our friend in the city?" suggests Mr. George, composedly 
drinking.

"Aye, if you like.  What two reasons?"

"In the first place," returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy 
as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is 
indifferent which of the two he addresses, "you gentlemen took me 
in.  You advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to 
the saying 'Once a captain, always a captain') was to hear of 
something to his advantage."

"Well?" returns the old man shrilly and sharply.

"Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on.  "It wouldn't have been much 
to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill 
and judgment trade of London."

"How do you know that?  Some of his rich relations might have paid 
his debts or compounded for 'em.  Besides, he had taken US in.  He 
owed us immense sums all round.  I would sooner have strangled him 
than had no return.  If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old 
man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him 
now."  And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the 
unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of 
her chair.

"I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe 
from his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from 
following the progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is 
burning low, "that he carried on heavily and went to ruin.  I have 
been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin 
full-gallop.  I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and 
poor.  I laid this hand upon him after he had run through 
everything and broken down everything beneath him--when he held a 
pistol to his head."

"I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown 
his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!"

"That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly; 
"any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone 
by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead 
to a result so much to his advantage.  That's reason number one."

"I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man.

"Why, no.  It's more of a selfish reason.  If I had found him, I 
must have gone to the other world to look.  He was there."

"How do you know he was there?"

"He wasn't here."

"How do you know he wasn't here?"

"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George, 
calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe.  "He was drowned long 
before.  I am convinced of it.  He went over a ship's side.  
Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don't know.  Perhaps your 
friend in the city does.  Do you know what that tune is, Mr. 
Smallweed?" he adds after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied 
on the table with the empty pipe.

"Tune!" replied the old man.  "No.  We never have tunes here."

"That's the Dead March in Saul.  They bury soldiers to it, so it's 
the natural end of the subject.  Now, if your pretty granddaughter
--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this pipe for two 
months, we shall save the cost of one next time.  Good evening, Mr. 
Smallweed!"

"My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands.

"So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I 
fall in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a 
giant.

"My dear friend, I am afraid he will," returns the old man, looking 
up at him like a pygmy.

Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting 
salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour, 
clashing imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he 
goes.

"You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous 
grimace at the door as he shuts it.  "But I'll lime you, you dog, 
I'll lime you!"

After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting 
regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened 
to it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, 
two unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black 
Serjeant.

While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides 
through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-
enough face.  It is eight o'clock now, and the day is fast drawing 
in.  He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides 
to go to Astley's Theatre.  Being there, is much delighted with the 
horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a 
critical eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of 
unskilful swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments.  In 
the last scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and 
condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with 
the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.

The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes 
his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and 
Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent 
foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-
men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, 
and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight.  
Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court and 
a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of 
bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of 
which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S 
SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.

Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are 
gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for 
rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances, 
and all necessaries for the British art of boxing.  None of these 
sports or exercises being pursued in George's Shooting Gallery to-
night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man 
with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the 
floor.

The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-
baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with 
gunpowder and begrimed with the loading of guns.  As he lies in the 
light before a glaring white target, the black upon him shines 
again.  Not far off is the strong, rough, primitive table with a 
vice upon it at which he has been working.  He is a little man with 
a face all crushed together, who appears, from a certain blue and 
speckled appearance that one of his cheeks presents, to have been 
blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times.

"Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice.

"All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.

"Anything been doing?"

"Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil.  "Five dozen rifle and a 
dozen pistol.  As to aim!"  Phil gives a howl at the recollection.

"Shut up shop, Phil!"

As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is 
lame, though able to move very quickly.  On the speckled side of 
his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy 
black one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and 
rather sinister appearance.  Everything seems to have happened to 
his hands that could possibly take place consistently with the 
retention of all the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and 
crumpled all over.  He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy 
benches about as if he had no idea what weight was.  He has a 
curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against 
the wall and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of instead 
of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round the 
four walls, conventionally called "Phil's mark."

This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence concludes 
his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out 
all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out 
from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding.  These 
being drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his 
own bed and Phil makes his.

"Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and 
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces.  
"You were found in a doorway, weren't you?"

"Gutter," says Phil.  "Watchman tumbled over me."

"Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning."

"As nat'ral as possible," says Phil.

"Good night!"

"Good night, guv'ner."

Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to 
shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his 
mattress.  The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the rifle-
distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the 
skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes 
to bed too.



CHAPTER XXII

Mr. Bucket


Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln's Inn Fields, though the 
evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows are wide open, 
and the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy.  These may not be 
desirable characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or 
January with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry 
long vacation weather.  They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks 
like peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy 
swellings for calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look 
tolerably cool to-night.

Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows, and plenty 
more has generated among his furniture and papers.  It lies thick 
everywhere.  When a breeze from the country that has lost its way 
takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings 
as much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law-or Mr. Tulkinghorn, 
one of its trustiest representatives--may scatter, on occasion, in 
the eyes of the laity.

In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which 
his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of 
earth, animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits 
at one of the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port.  Though a 
hard-grained man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine 
with the best.  He has a priceless bin of port in some artful 
cellar under the Fields, which is one of his many secrets.  When he 
dines alone in chambers, as he has dined to-day, and has his bit of 
fish and his steak or chicken brought in from the coffee-house, he 
descends with a candle to the echoing regions below the deserted 
mansion, and heralded by a remote reverberation of thundering 
doors, comes gravely back encircled by an earthy atmosphere and 
carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant nectar, two score 
and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to find itself so 
famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of southern 
grapes.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys 
his wine.  As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence 
and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer.  More impenetrable than 
ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, 
pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows, 
associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank 
shut-up houses in town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for 
himself, and his family history, and his money, and his will--all a 
mystery to every one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of 
the same mould and a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life 
until he was seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving 
(as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave 
his gold watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked 
leisurely home to the Temple and hanged himself.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual 
length.  Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly 
and uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild, 
shining man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer 
bids him fill his glass.

"Now, Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "to go over this odd story 
again."

"If you please, sir."

"You told me when you were so good as to step round here last 
night--"

"For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir; 
but I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that 
person, and I thought it possible that you might--just--wish--to--"

Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to 
admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself.  So Mr. 
Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, "I must ask 
you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure."

"Not at all," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "You told me, Snagsby, that 
you put on your hat and came round without mentioning your 
intention to your wife.  That was prudent I think, because it's not 
a matter of such importance that it requires to be mentioned."

"Well, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby, "you see, my little woman is--not 
to put too fine a point upon it--inquisitive.  She's inquisitive.  
Poor little thing, she's liable to spasms, and it's good for her to 
have her mind employed.  In consequence of which she employs it--I 
should say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether 
it concerns her or not--especially not.  My little woman has a very 
active mind, sir."

Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind his 
hand, "Dear me, very fine wine indeed!"

"Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?" says Mr. 
Tulkinghorn.  "And to-night too?"

"Yes, sir, and to-night, too.  My little woman is at present in--
not to put too fine a point on it--in a pious state, or in what she 
considers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the 
name they go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband.  He 
has a great deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am 
not quite favourable to his style myself.  That's neither here nor 
there.  My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier 
for me to step round in a quiet manner."

Mr. Tulkinghorn assents.  "Fill your glass, Snagsby."

"Thank you, sir, I am sure," returns the stationer with his cough 
of deference.  "This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!"

"It is a rare wine now," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "It is fifty years 
old."

"Is it indeed, sir?  But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure.  
It might be--any age almost."  After rendering this general tribute 
to the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind 
his hand for drinking anything so precious.

"Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?" asks Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty 
smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.

"With pleasure, sir."

Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer 
repeats Jo's statement made to the assembled guests at his house.  
On coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and 
breaks off with, "Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other 
gentleman present!"

Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face 
between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, 
a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he 
himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either 
of the windows.  There is a press in the room, but its hinges have 
not creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor.  Yet this 
third person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and 
stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet 
listener.  He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in 
black, of about the middle-age.  Except that he looks at Mr. 
Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait, there is nothing 
remarkable about him at first sight but his ghostly manner of 
appearing.

"Don't mind this gentleman," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way.  
"This is only Mr. Bucket."

"Oh, indeed, sir?" returns the stationer, expressing by a cough 
that he is quite in the dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be.

"I wanted him to hear this story," says the lawyer, "because I have 
half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he is very 
intelligent in such things.  What do you say to this, Bucket?"

"It's very plain, sir.  Since our people have moved this boy on, 
and he's not to be found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don't 
object to go down with me to Tom-all-Alone's and point him out, we 
can have him here in less than a couple of hours' time.  I can do 
it without Mr. Snagsby, of course, but this is the shortest way."

"Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby," says the lawyer in 
explanation.

"Is he indeed, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency in his 
clump of hair to stand on end.

"And if you have no real objection to accompany Mr. Bucket to the 
place in question," pursues the lawyer, "I shall feel obliged to 
you if you will do so."

In a moment's hesitation on the part of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips 
down to the bottom of his mind.

"Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy," he says.  "You won't do 
that.  It's all right as far as the boy's concerned.  We shall only 
bring him here to ask him a question or so I want to put to him, 
and he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away again.  It'll be a 
good job for him.  I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the 
boy sent away all right.  Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you 
an't going to do that."

"Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully.  And 
reassured, "Since that's the case--"

"Yes!  And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby," resumes Bucket, taking him 
aside by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and 
speaking in a confidential tone.  "You're a man of the world, you 
know, and a man of business, and a man of sense.  That's what YOU 
are."

"I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns 
the stationer with his cough of modesty, "but--"

"That's what YOU are, you know," says Bucket.  "Now, it an't 
necessary to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which 
is a business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and 
have his senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an 
uncle in your business once)--it an't necessary to say to a man 
like you that it's the best and wisest way to keep little matters 
like this quiet.  Don't you see?  Quiet!"

"Certainly, certainly," returns the other.

"I don't mind telling YOU," says Bucket with an engaging appearance 
of frankness, "that as far as I can understand it, there seems to 
be a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little 
property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games 
respecting that property, don't you see?"

"Oh!" says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.

"Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on 
the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, "is that every 
person should have their rights according to justice.  That's what 
YOU want."

"To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.

"On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a--do you call 
it, in your business, customer or client?  I forget how my uncle 
used to call it."

"Why, I generally say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby.

"You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite 
affectionately.  "--On account of which, and at the same time to 
oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in 
confidence, to Tom-all-Alone's and to keep the whole thing quiet 
ever afterwards and never mention it to any one.  That's about your 
intentions, if I understand you?"

"You are right, sir.  You are right," says Mr. Snagsby.

"Then here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate 
with it as if he had made it; "and if you're ready, I am."

They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his 
unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the 
streets.

"You don't happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of 
Gridley, do you?" says Bucket in friendly converse as they descend 
the stairs.

"No," says Mr. Snagsby, considering, "I don't know anybody of that 
name.  Why?"

"Nothing particular," says Bucket; "only having allowed his temper 
to get a little the better of him and having been threatening some 
respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I 
have got against him--which it's a pity that a man of sense should 
do."

As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that 
however quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some 
undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is 
going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed 
purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, 
sharply, at the very last moment.  Now and then, when they pass a 
police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the 
constable and his guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come 
towards each other, and appear entirely to overlook each other, and 
to gaze into space.  In a few instances, Mr. Bucket, coming behind 
some under-sized young man with a shining hat on, and his sleek 
hair twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost 
without glancing at him touches him with his stick, upon which the 
young man, looking round, instantly evaporates.  For the most part 
Mr. Bucket notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as 
the great mourning ring on his little finger or the brooch, 
composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he 
wears in his shirt.

When they come at last to Tom-all-Alone's, Mr. Bucket stops for a 
moment at the corner and takes a lighted bull's-eye from the 
constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his own 
particular bull's-eye at his waist.  Between his two conductors, 
Mr. Snagsby passes along the middle of a villainous street, 
undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water--
though the roads are dry elsewhere--and reeking with such smells 
and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can 
scarce believe his senses.  Branching from this street and its 
heaps of ruins are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr. 
Snagsby sickens in body and mind and feels as if he were going 
every moment deeper down into the infernal gulf.

"Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby," says Bucket as a kind of shabby 
palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd.  
"Here's the fever coming up the street!"

As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of 
attraction, hovers round the three visitors like a dream of 
horrible faces and fades away up alleys and into ruins and behind 
walls, and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, 
thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place.

"Are those the fever-houses, Darby?"  Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he 
turns his bull's-eye on a line of stinking ruins.

Darby replies that "all them are," and further that in all, for 
months and months, the people "have been down by dozens" and have 
been carried out dead and dying "like sheep with the rot."  Bucket 
observing to Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little 
poorly, Mr. Snagsby answers that he feels as if he couldn't breathe 
the dreadful air.

There is inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo.  As few 
people are known in Tom-all-Alone's by any Christian sign, there is 
much reference to Mr. Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the 
Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or 
the Brick.  Mr. Snagsby describes over and over again.  There are 
conflicting opinions respecting the original of his picture.  Some 
think it must be Carrots, some say the Brick.  The Colonel is 
produced, but is not at all near the thing.  Whenever Mr. Snagsby 
and his conductors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from 
its squalid depths obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket.  
Whenever they move, and the angry bull's-eyes glare, it fades away 
and flits about them up the alleys, and in the ruins, and behind 
the walls, as before.

At last there is a lair found out where Toughy, or the Tough 
Subject, lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough 
Subject may be Jo.  Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and the 
proprietress of the house--a drunken face tied up in a black 
bundle, and flaring out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog-
hutch which is her private apartment--leads to the establishment of 
this conclusion.  Toughy has gone to the doctor's to get a bottle 
of stuff for a sick woman but will be here anon.

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

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

"Brickmakers, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"What are you doing here?  You don't belong to London."

"No, sir.  We belong to Hertfordshire."

"Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?"

"Saint Albans."

"Come up on the tramp?"

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

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

"It an't indeed," replies the woman with a sigh.  "Jenny and me 
knows it full well."

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

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

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

"Is he your child?"

"Mine."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There, there!" says Jenny.  "Liz, you're tired and ill.  Let me 
take him."

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

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

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

"That's Jo," says Mr. Snagsby.

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

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

First, Jo has to complete his errand of good nature by handing over 
the physic he has been to get, which he delivers with the laconic 
verbal direction that "it's to be all took d'rectly."  Secondly, 
Mr. Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown, his usual 
panacea for an immense variety of afflictions.  Thirdly, Mr. Bucket 
has to take Jo by the arm a little above the elbow and walk him on 
before him, without which observance neither the Tough Subject nor 
any other Subject could be professionally conducted to Lincoln's 
Inn Fields.  These arrangements completed, they give the women good 
night and come out once more into black and foul Tom-all-Alone's.

By the noisome ways through which they descended into that pit, 
they gradually emerge from it, the crowd flitting, and whistling, 
and skulking about them until they come to the verge, where 
restoration of the bull's-eyes is made to Darby.  Here the crowd, 
like a concourse of imprisoned demons, turns back, yelling, and is 
seen no more.  Through the clearer and fresher streets, never so 
clear and fresh to Mr. Snagsby's mind as now, they walk and ride 
until they come to Mr. Tulkinghorn's gate.

As they ascend the dim stairs (Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers being on 
the first floor), Mr. Bucket mentions that he has the key of the 
outer door in his pocket and that there is no need to ring.  For a 
man so expert in most things of that kind, Bucket takes time to 
open the door and makes some noise too.  It may be that he sounds a 
note of preparation.

Howbeit, they come at last into the hall, where a lamp is burning, 
and so into Mr. Tulkinghorn's usual room--the room where he drank 
his old wine to-night.  He is not there, but his two old-fashioned 
candlesticks are, and the room is tolerably light.

Mr. Bucket, still having his professional hold of Jo and appearing 
to Mr. Snagsby to possess an unlimited number of eyes, makes a 
little way into this room, when Jo starts and stops.

"What's the matter?" says Bucket in a whisper.

"There she is!" cries Jo.

"Who!"

"The lady!"

A female figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room, 
where the light falls upon it.  It is quite still and silent.  The 
front of the figure is towards them, but it takes no notice of 
their entrance and remains like a statue.

"Now, tell me," says Bucket aloud, "how you know that to be the 
lady."

"I know the wale," replies Jo, staring, "and the bonnet, and the 
gownd."

"Be quite sure of what you say, Tough," returns Bucket, narrowly 
observant of him.  "Look again."

"I am a-looking as hard as ever I can look," says Jo with starting 
eyes, "and that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd."

"What about those rings you told me of?" asks Bucket.

"A-sparkling all over here," says Jo, rubbing the fingers of his 
left hand on the knuckles of his right without taking his eyes from 
the figure.

The figure removes the right-hand glove and shows the hand.

"Now, what do you say to that?" asks Bucket.

Jo shakes his head.  "Not rings a bit like them.  Not a hand like 
that."

"What are you talking of?" says Bucket, evidently pleased though, 
and well pleased too.

"Hand was a deal whiter, a deal delicater, and a deal smaller," 
returns Jo.

"Why, you'll tell me I'm my own mother next," says Mr. Bucket.  "Do 
you recollect the lady's voice?"

"I think I does," says Jo.

The figure speaks.  "Was it at all like this?  I will speak as long 
as you like if you are not sure.  Was it this voice, or at all like 
this voice?"

Jo looks aghast at Mr. Bucket.  "Not a bit!"

"Then, what," retorts that worthy, pointing to the figure, "did you 
say it was the lady for?"

"Cos," says Jo with a perplexed stare but without being at all 
shaken in his certainty, "cos that there's the wale, the bonnet, 
and the gownd.  It is her and it an't her.  It an't her hand, nor 
yet her rings, nor yet her woice.  But that there's the wale, the 
bonnet, and the gownd, and they're wore the same way wot she wore 
'em, and it's her height wot she wos, and she giv me a sov'ring and 
hooked it."

"Well!" says Mr. Bucket slightly, "we haven't got much good out of 
YOU.  But, however, here's five shillings for you.  Take care how 
you spend it, and don't get yourself into trouble."  Bucket 
stealthily tells the coins from one hand into the other like 
counters--which is a way he has, his principal use of them being in 
these games of skill--and then puts them, in a little pile, into 
the boy's hand and takes him out to the door, leaving Mr. Snagsby, 
not by any means comfortable under these mysterious circumstances, 
alone with the veiled figure.  But on Mr. Tulkinghorn's coming into 
the room, the veil is raised and a sufficiently good-looking 
Frenchwoman is revealed, though her expression is something of the 
intensest.

"Thank you, Mademoiselle Hortense," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with his 
usual equanimity.  "I will give you no further trouble about this 
little wager."

"You will do me the kindness to remember, sir, that I am not at 
present placed?" says mademoiselle.

"Certainly, certainly!"

"And to confer upon me the favour of your distinguished 
recommendation?"

"By all means, Mademoiselle Hortense."

"A word from Mr. Tulkinghorn is so powerful."

"It shall not be wanting, mademoiselle."

"Receive the assurance of my devoted gratitude, dear sir."

"Good night."

Mademoiselle goes out with an air of native gentility; and Mr. 
Bucket, to whom it is, on an emergency, as natural to be groom of 
the ceremonies as it is to be anything else, shows her downstairs, 
not without gallantry.

"Well, Bucket?" quoth Mr. Tulkinghorn on his return.

"It's all squared, you see, as I squared it myself, sir.  There 
an't a doubt that it was the other one with this one's dress on.  
The boy was exact respecting colours and everything.  Mr. Snagsby, 
I promised you as a man that he should be sent away all right.  
Don't say it wasn't done!"

"You have kept your word, sir," returns the stationer; "and if I 
can be of no further use, Mr. Tulkinghorn, I think, as my little 
woman will be getting anxious--"

"Thank you, Snagsby, no further use," says Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "I am 
quite indebted to you for the trouble you have taken already."

"Not at all, sir.  I wish you good night."

"You see, Mr. Snagsby," says Mr. Bucket, accompanying him to the 
door and shaking hands with him over and over again, "what I like 
in you is that you're a man it's of no use pumping; that's what YOU 
are.  When you know you have done a right thing, you put it away, 
and it's done with and gone, and there's an end of it.  That's what 
YOU do."

"That is certainly what I endeavour to do, sir," returns Mr. 
Snagsby.

"No, you don't do yourself justice.  It an't what you endeavour to 
do," says Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him and blessing him in 
the tenderest manner, "it's what you DO.  That's what I estimate in 
a man in your way of business."

Mr. Snagsby makes a suitable response and goes homeward so confused 
by the events of the evening that he is doubtful of his being awake 
and out--doubtful of the reality of the streets through which he 
goes--doubtful of the reality of the moon that shines above him.  
He is presently reassured on these subjects by the unchallengeable 
reality of Mrs. Snagsby, sitting up with her head in a perfect 
beehive of curl-papers and night-cap, who has dispatched Guster to 
the police-station with official intelligence of her husband's 
being made away with, and who within the last two hours has passed 
through every stage of swooning with the greatest decorum.  But as 
the little woman feelingly says, many thanks she gets for it!



CHAPTER XXIII

Esther's Narrative


We came home from Mr. Boythorn's after six pleasant weeks.  We were 
often in the park and in the woods and seldom passed the lodge 
where we had taken shelter without looking in to speak to the 
keeper's wife; but we saw no more of Lady Dedlock, except at church 
on Sundays.  There was company at Chesney Wold; and although 
several beautiful faces surrounded her, her face retained the same 
influence on me as at first.  I do not quite know even now whether 
it was painful or pleasurable, whether it drew me towards her or 
made me shrink from her.  I think I admired her with a kind of 
fear, and I know that in her presence my thoughts always wandered 
back, as they had done at first, to that old time of my life.

I had a fancy, on more than one of these Sundays, that what this 
lady so curiously was to me, I was to her--I mean that I disturbed 
her thoughts as she influenced mine, though in some different way.  
But when I stole a glance at her and saw her so composed and 
distant and unapproachable, I felt this to be a foolish weakness.  
Indeed, I felt the whole state of my mind in reference to her to be 
weak and unreasonable, and I remonstrated with myself about it as 
much as I could.

One incident that occurred before we quitted Mr. Boythorn's house, 
I had better mention in this place.

I was walking in the garden with Ada and when I was told that some 
one wished to see me.  Going into the breakfast-room where this 
person was waiting, I found it to be the French maid who had cast 
off her shoes and walked through the wet grass on the day when it 
thundered and lightened.

"Mademoiselle," she began, looking fixedly at me with her too-eager 
eyes, though otherwise presenting an agreeable appearance and 
speaking neither with boldness nor servility, "I have taken a great 
liberty in coming here, but you know how to excuse it, being so 
amiable, mademoiselle."

"No excuse is necessary," I returned, "if you wish to speak to me."

"That is my desire, mademoiselle.  A thousand thanks for the 
permission.  I have your leave to speak.  Is it not?" she said in a 
quick, natural way.

"Certainly," said I.

"Mademoiselle, you are so amiable!  Listen then, if you please.  I 
have left my Lady.  We could not agree.  My Lady is so high, so 
very high.  Pardon!  Mademoiselle, you are right!"  Her quickness 
anticipated what I might have said presently but as yet had only 
thought.  "It is not for me to come here to complain of my Lady.  
But I say she is so high, so very high.  I will not say a word 
more.  All the world knows that."

"Go on, if you please," said I.

"Assuredly; mademoiselle, I am thankful for your politeness.  
Mademoiselle, I have an inexpressible desire to find service with a 
young lady who is good, accomplished, beautiful.  You are good, 
accomplished, and beautiful as an angel.  Ah, could I have the 
honour of being your domestic!"

"I am sorry--" I began.

"Do not dismiss me so soon, mademoiselle!" she said with an 
involuntary contraction of her fine black eyebrows.  "Let me hope a 
moment!  Mademoiselle, I know this service would be more retired 
than that which I have quitted.  Well! I wish that.  I know this 
service would be less distinguished than that which I have quitted.  
Well! I wish that, I know that I should win less, as to wages here.  
Good.  I am content."

"I assure you," said I, quite embarrassed by the mere idea of 
having such an attendant, "that I keep no maid--"

"Ah, mademoiselle, but why not?  Why not, when you can have one so 
devoted to you!  Who would be enchanted to serve you; who would be 
so true, so zealous, and so faithful every day!  Mademoiselle, I 
wish with all my heart to serve you.  Do not speak of money at 
present.  Take me as I am.  For nothing!"

She was so singularly earnest that I drew back, almost afraid of 
her.  Without appearing to notice it, in her ardour she still 
pressed herself upon me, speaking in a rapid subdued voice, though 
always with a certain grace and propriety.

"Mademoiselle, I come from the South country where we are quick and 
where we like and dislike very strong.  My Lady was too high for 
me; I was too high for her.  It is done--past--finlshed!  Receive 
me as your domestic, and I will serve you well.  I will do more for 
you than you figure to yourself now.  Chut!  Mademoiselle, I will--
no matter, I will do my utmost possible in all things.  If you 
accept my service, you will not repent it.  Mademoiselle, you will 
not repent it, and I will serve you well.  You don't know how 
well!"

There was a lowering energy in her face as she stood looking at me 
while I explained the impossibility of my engagmg her (without 
thinking it necessary to say how very little I desired to do so), 
which seemed to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets 
of Paris in the reign of terror.

She heard me out without interruption and then said with her pretty 
accent and in her mildest voice, "Hey, mademoiselle, I have 
received my answer!  I am sorry of it.  But I must go elsewhere and 
seek what I have not found here.  Will you graciously let me kiss 
your hand?"

She looked at me more intently as she took it, and seemed to take 
note, with her momentary touch, of every vein in it.  "I fear I 
surprised you, mademoiselle, on the day of the storm?" she said 
with a parting curtsy.

I confessed that she had surprised us all.

"I took an oath, mademoiselle," she said, smiling, "and I wanted to 
stamp it on my mind so that I might keep it faithfully.  And I 
will!  Adieu, mademoiselle!"

So ended our conference, which I was very glad to bring to a close.  
I supposed she went away from the village, for I saw her no more; 
and nothing else occurred to disturb our tranquil summer pleasures 
until six weeks were out and we returned home as I began just now 
by saying.

At that time, and for a good many weeks after that time, Richard 
was constant in his visits.  Besides coming every Saturday or 
Sunday and remaining with us until Monday morning, he sometimes 
rode out on horseback unexpectedly and passed the evening with us 
and rode back again early next day.  He was as vivacious as ever 
and told us he was very industrious, but I was not easy in my mind 
about him.  It appeared to me that his industry was all 
misdirected.  I could not find that it led to anything but the 
formation of delusive hopes in connexion with the suit already the 
pernicious cause of so much sorrow and ruin.  He had got at the 
core of that mystery now, he told us, and nothing could be plainer 
than that the will under which he and Ada were to take I don't know 
how many thousands of pounds must be finally established if there 
were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery--but oh, what a 
great IF that sounded in my ears--and that this happy conclusion 
could not be much longer delayed.  He proved this to himself by all 
the weary arguments on that side he had read, and every one of them 
sunk him deeper in the infatuation.  He had even begun to haunt the 
court.  He told us how he saw Miss Flite there daily, how they 
talked together, and how he did her little kindnesses, and how, 
while he laughed at her, he pitied her from his heart.  But he 
never thought--never, my poor, dear, sanguine Richard, capable of 
so much happiness then, and with such better things before him--
what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her 
faded age, between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her 
hungry garret, and her wandering mind.

Ada loved him too well to mistrust him much in anything he said or 
did, and my guardian, though he frequently complained of the east 
wind and read more than usual in the growlery, preserved a strict 
silence on the subject.  So I thought one day when I went to London 
to meet Caddy Jellyby, at her solicitation, I would ask Richard to 
be in waiting for me at the coach-office, that we might have a 
little talk together.  I found him there when I arrived, and we 
walked away arm in arm.

"Well, Richard," said I as soon as I could begin to be grave with 
him, "are you beginning to feel more settled now?"

"Oh, yes, my dear!" returned Richard.  "I'm all right enough."

"But settled?" said I.

"How do you mean, settled?" returned Richard with his gay laugh.

"Settled in the law," said I.

"Oh, aye," replied Richard, "I'm all right enough."

"You said that before, my dear Richard."

"And you don't think it's an answer, eh?  Well! Perhaps it's not.  
Settled?  You mean, do I feel as if I were settling down?"

"Yes."

"Why, no, I can't say I am settling down," said Richard, strongly 
emphasizing "down," as if that expressed the difficulty, "because 
one can't settle down while this business remains in such an 
unsettled state.  When I say this business, of course I mean the--
forbidden subject."

"Do you think it will ever be in a settled state?" said I.

"Not the least doubt of it," answered Richard.

We walked a little way without speaking, and presently Richard 
addressed me in his frankest and most feeling manner, thus: "My 
dear Esther, I understand you, and I wish to heaven I were a more 
constant sort of fellow.  I don't mean constant to Ada, for I love 
her dearly--better and better every day--but constant to myself.  
(Somehow, I mean something that I can't very well express, but 
you'll make it out.)  If I were a more constant sort of fellow, I 
should have held on either to Badger or to Kenge and Carboy like 
grim death, and should have begun to be steady and systematic by 
this time, and shouldn't be in debt, and--"

"ARE you in debt, Richard?"

"Yes," said Richard, "I am a little so, my dear.  Also, I have 
taken rather too much to billiards and that sort of thing.  Now the 
murder's out; you despise me, Esther, don't you?"

"You know I don't," said I.

"You are kinder to me than I often am to myself," he returned.  "My 
dear Esther, I am a very unfortunate dog not to be more settled, 
but how CAN I be more settled?  If you lived in an unfinished 
house, you couldn't settle down in it; if you were condemned to 
leave everything you undertook unfinished, you would find it hard 
to apply yourself to anything; and yet that's my unhappy case.  I 
was born into this unfinished contention with all its chances and 
changes, and it began to unsettle me before I quite knew the 
difference between a suit at law and a suit of clothes; and it has 
gone on unsettling me ever since; and here I am now, conscious 
sometimes that I am but a worthless fellow to love my confiding 
cousin Ada."

We were in a solitary place, and he put his hands before his eyes 
and sobbed as he said the words.

"Oh, Richard!" said I.  "Do not be so moved.  You have a noble 
nature, and Ada's love may make you worthier every day."

"I know, my dear," he replied, pressing my arm, "I know all that.  
You mustn't mind my being a little soft now, for I have had all 
this upon my mind for a long time, and have often meant to speak to 
you, and have sometimes wanted opportunity and sometimes courage.  
I know what the thought of Ada ought to do for me, but it doesn't 
do it.  I am too unsettled even for that.  I love her most 
devotedly, and yet I do her wrong, in doing myself wrong, every day 
and hour.  But it can't last for ever.  We shall come on for a 
final hearing and get judgment in our favour, and then you and Ada 
shall see what I can really be!"

It had given me a pang to hear him sob and see the tears start out 
between his fingers, but that was infinitely less affecting to me 
than the hopeful animation with which he said these words.

"I have looked well into the papers, Esther.  I have been deep in 
them for months," he continued, recovering his cheerfulness in a 
moment, "and you may rely upon it that we shall come out 
triumphant.  As to years of delay, there has been no want of them, 
heaven knows!  And there is the greater probability of our bringing 
the matter to a speedy close; in fact, it's on the paper now.  It 
will be all right at last, and then you shall see!"

Recalling how he had just now placed Messrs. Kenge and Carboy in 
the same category with Mr. Badger, I asked him when he intended to 
be articled in Lincoln's Inn.

"There again!  I think not at all, Esther," he returned with an 
effort.  "I fancy I have had enough of it.  Having worked at 
Jarndyce and Jarndyce like a galley slave, I have slaked my thirst 
for the law and satisfied myself that I shouldn't like it.  
Besides, I find it unsettles me more and more to be so constantly 
upon the scene of action.  So what," continued Richard, confident 
again by this time, "do I naturally turn my thoughts to?"

"I can't imagine," said I.

"Don't look so serious," returned Richard, "because it's the best 
thing I can do, my dear Esther, I am certain.  It's not as if I 
wanted a profession for life.  These proceedings will come to a 
termination, and then I am provided for.  No.  I look upon it as a 
pursuit which is in its nature more or less unsettled, and 
therefore suited to my temporary condition--I may say, precisely 
suited.  What is it that I naturally turn my thoughts to?"

I looked at him and shook my head.

"What," said Richard, in a tone of perfect conviction, "but the 
army!"

"The army?" said I.

"The army, of course.  What I have to do is to get a commission; 
and--there I am, you know!" said Richard.

And then he showed me, proved by elaborate calculations in his 
pocket-book, that supposing he had contracted, say, two hundred 
pounds of debt in six months out of the army; and that he 
contracted no debt at all within a corresponding period in the 
army--as to which he had quite made up his mind; this step must 
involve a saving of four hundred pounds in a year, or two thousand 
pounds in five years, which was a considerable sum.  And then he 
spoke so ingenuously and sincerely of the sacrifice he made in 
withdrawing himself for a time from Ada, and of the earnestness 
with which he aspired--as in thought he always did, I know full 
well--to repay her love, and to ensure her happiness, and to 
conquer what was amiss in himself, and to acquire the very soul of 
decision, that he made my heart ache keenly, sorely.  For, I 
thought, how would this end, how could this end, when so soon and 
so surely all his manly qualities were touched by the fatal blight 
that ruined everything it rested on!

I spoke to Richard with all the earnestness I felt, and all the 
hope I could not quite feel then, and implored him for Ada's sake 
not to put any trust in Chancery.  To all I said, Richard readily 
assented, riding over the court and everything else in his easy way 
and drawing the brightest pictures of the character he was to 
settle into--alas, when the grievous suit should loose its hold 
upon him!  We had a long talk, but it always came back to that, in 
substance.

At last we came to Soho Square, where Caddy Jellyby had appointed 
to wait for me, as a quiet place in the neighbourhood of Newman 
Street.  Caddy was in the garden in the centre and hurried out as 
soon as I appeared.  After a few cheerful words, Richard left us 
together.

"Prince has a pupil over the way, Esther," said Caddy, "and got the 
key for us.  So if you will walk round and round here with me, we 
can lock ourselves in and I can tell you comfortably what I wanted 
to see your dear good face about."

"Very well, my dear," said I.  "Nothing could be better."  So 
Caddy, after affectionately squeezing the dear good face as she 
called it, locked the gate, and took my arm, and we began to walk 
round the garden very cosily.

"You see, Esther," said Caddy, who thoroughly enjoyed a little 
confidence, "after you spoke to me about its being wrong to marry 
without Ma's knowledge, or even to keep Ma long in the dark 
respecting our engagement--though I don't believe Ma cares much for 
me, I must say--I thought it right to mention your opinions to 
Prince.  In the first place because I want to profit by everything 
you tell me, and in the second place because I have no secrets from 
Prince."

"I hope he approved, Caddy?"

"Oh, my dear!  I assure you he would approve of anything you could 
say.  You have no idea what an opimon he has of you!"

"Indeed!"

"Esther, it's enough to make anybody but me jealous," said Caddy, 
laughing and shaking her head; "but it only makes me joyful, for 
you are the first friend I ever had, and the best friend I ever can 
have, and nobody can respect and love you too much to please me."

"Upon my word, Caddy," said I, "you are in the general conspiracy 
to keep me in a good humour.  Well, my dear?"

"Well! I am going to tell you," replied Caddy, crossing her hands 
confidentially upon my arm.  "So we talked a good deal about it, 
and so I said to Prince, 'Prince, as Miss Summerson--"

"I hope you didn't say 'Miss Summerson'?"

"No.  I didn't!" cried Caddy, greatly pleased and with the 
brightest of faces.  "I said, 'Esther.'  I said to Prince, 'As 
Esther is decidedly of that opinion, Prince, and has expressed it 
to me, and always hints it when she writes those kind notes, which 
you are so fond of hearing me read to you, I am prepared to 
disclose the truth to Ma whenever you think proper.  And I think, 
Prince,' said I, 'that Esther thinks that I should be in a better, 
and truer, and more honourable position altogether if you did the 
same to your papa.'"

"Yes, my dear," said I.  "Esther certainly does think so."

"So I was right, you see!" exclaimed Caddy.  "Well! This troubled 
Prince a good deal, not because he had the least doubt about it, 
but because he is so considerate of the feelings of old Mr. 
Turveydrop; and he had his apprehensions that old Mr. Turveydrop 
might break his heart, or faint away, or be very much overcome in 
some affecting manner or other if he made such an announcement.  He 
feared old Mr. Turveydrop might consider it undutiful and might 
receive too great a shock.  For old Mr. Turveydrop's deportment is 
very beautiful, you know, Esther," said Caddy, "and his feelings 
are extremely sensitive."

"Are they, my dear?"

"Oh, extremely sensitive.  Prince says so.  Now, this has caused my 
darling child--I didn't mean to use the expression to you, Esther," 
Caddy apologized, her face suffused with blushes, "but I generally 
call Prince my darling child."

I laughed; and Caddy laughed and blushed, and went on'

"This has caused him, Esther--"

"Caused whom, my dear?"

"Oh, you tiresome thing!" said Caddy, laughing, with her pretty 
face on fire.  "My darling child, if you insist upon it!  This has 
caused him weeks of uneasiness and has made him delay, from day to 
day, in a very anxious manner.  At last he said to me, 'Caddy, if 
Miss Summerson, who is a great favourite with my father, could be 
prevailed upon to be present when I broke the subject, I think I 
could do it.'  So I promised I would ask you.  And I made up my 
mind, besides," said Caddy, looking at me hopefully but timidly, 
"that if you consented, I would ask you afterwards to come with me 
to Ma.  This is what I meant when I said in my note that I had a 
great favour and a great assistance to beg of you.  And if you 
thought you could grant it, Esther, we should both be very 
grateful."

"Let me see, Caddy," said I, pretending to consider.  "Really, I 
think I could do a greater thing than that if the need were 
pressing.  I am at your service and the darling child's, my dear, 
whenever you like."

Caddy was quite transported by this reply of mine, being, I 
believe, as susceptible to the least kindness or encouragement as 
any tender heart that ever beat in this world; and after another 
turn or two round the garden, during which she put on an entirely 
new pair of gloves and made herself as resplendent as possible that 
she might do no avoidable discredit to the Master of Deportment, we 
went to Newman Street direct.

Prince was teaching, of course.  We found him engaged with a not 
very hopeful pupil--a stubborn little girl with a sulky forehead, a 
deep voice, and an inanimate, dissatisfied mama--whose case was 
certainly not rendered more hopeful by the confusion into which we 
threw her preceptor.  The lesson at last came to an end, after 
proceeding as discordantly as possible; and when the little girl 
had changed her shoes and had had her white muslin extinguished in 
shawls, she was taken away.  After a few words of preparation, we 
then went in search of Mr. Turveydrop, whom we found, grouped with 
his hat and gloves, as a model of deportment, on the sofa in his 
private apartment--the only comfortable room in the house.  He 
appeared to have dressed at his leisure in the intervals of a light 
collation, and his dressing-case, brushes, and so forth, all of 
quite an elegant kind, lay about.

"Father, Miss Summerson; Miss Jellyby."

"Charmed!  Enchanted!" said Mr. Turveydrop, rising with his high-
shouldered bow.  "Permit me!"  Handing chairs.  "Be seated!"  
Kissing the tips of his left fingers.  "Overjoyed!"  Shutting his 
eyes and rolling.  "My little retreat is made a paradise."  
Recomposing himself on the sofa like the second gentleman in 
Europe.

"Again you find us, Miss Summerson," said he, "using our little 
arts to polish, polish!  Again the sex stimulates us and rewards us 
by the condescension of its lovely presence.  It is much in these 
times (and we have made an awfully degenerating business of it 
since the days of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent--my patron, 
if I may presume to say so) to experience that deportment is not 
wholly trodden under foot by mechanics.  That it can yet bask in 
the smile of beauty, my dear madam."

I said nothing, which I thought a suitable reply; and he took a 
pinch of snuff.

"My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "you have four schools this 
afternoon.  I would recommend a hasty sandwich."

"Thank you, father," returned Prince, "I will be sure to be 
punctual.  My dear father, may I beg you to prepare your mind for 
what I am going to say?"

"Good heaven!" exclaimed the model, pale and aghast as Prince and 
Caddy, hand in hand, bent down before him.  "What is this?  Is this 
lunacy!  Or what is this?"

"Father," returned Prince with great submission, "I love this young 
lady, and we are engaged."

"Engaged!" cried Mr. Turveydrop, reclining on the sofa and shutting 
out the sight with his hand.  "An arrow launched at my brain by my 
own child!"

"We have been engaged for some time, father," faltered Prince, "and 
Miss Summerson, hearing of it, advised that we should declare the 
fact to you and was so very kind as to attend on the present 
occasion.  Miss Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you, 
father."

Mr. Turveydrop uttered a groan.

"No, pray don't!  Pray don't, father," urged his son.  "Miss 
Jellyby is a young lady who deeply respects you, and our first 
desire is to consider your comfort."

Mr. Turveydrop sobbed.

"No, pray don't, father!" cried his son.

"Boy," said Mr. Turveydrop, "it is well that your sainted mother is 
spared this pang.  Strike deep, and spare not.  Strike home, sir, 
strike home!"

"Pray don't say so, father," implored Prince, in tears.  "It goes 
to my heart.  I do assure you, father, that our first wish and 
intention is to consider your comfort.  Caroline and I do not 
forget our duty--what is my duty is Caroline's, as we have often 
said together--and with your approval and consent, father, we will 
devote ourselves to making your life agreeable."

"Strike home," murmured Mr. Turveydrop.  "Strike home!"  But he 
seemed to listen, I thought, too.

"My dear father," returned Prince, "we well know what little 
comforts you are accustomed to and have a right to, and it will 
always be our study and our pride to provide those before anything.  
If you will bless us with your approval and consent, father, we 
shall not think of being married until it is quite agreeable to 
you; and when we ARE married, we shall always make you--of course--
our first consideration.  You must ever be the head and master 
here, father; and we feel how truly unnatural it would be in us if 
we failed to know it or if we failed to exert ourselves in every 
possible way to please you."

Mr. Turveydrop underwent a severe internal struggle and came 
upright on the sofa again with his cheeks puffing over his stiff 
cravat, a perfect model of parental deportment.

"My son!" said Mr. Turveydrop.  "My children!  I cannot resist your 
prayer.  Be happy!"

His benignity as he raised his future daughter-in-law and stretched 
out his hand to his son (who kissed it with affectionate respect 
and gratitude) was the most confusing sight I ever saw.

"My children," said Mr. Turveydrop, paternally encircling Caddy 
with his left arm as she sat beside him, and putting his right hand 
gracefully on his hip.  "My son and daughter, your happiness shall 
be my care.  I will watch over you.  You shall always live with 
me"--meaning, of course, I will always live with you--"this house 
is henceforth as much yours as mine; consider it your home.  May 
you long live to share it with me!"

The power of his deportment was such that they really were as much 
overcome with thankfulness as if, instead of quartering himself 
upon them for the rest of his life, he were making some munificent 
sacrifice in their favour.

"For myself, my children," said Mr. Turveydrop, "I am falling into 
the sear and yellow leaf, and it is impossible to say how long the 
last feeble traces of gentlemanly deportment may linger in this 
weaving and spinning age.  But, so long, I will do my duty to 
society and will show myself, as usual, about town.  My wants are 
few and simple.  My little apartment here, my few essentials for 
the toilet, my frugal morning meal, and my little dinner will 
suffice.  I charge your dutiful affection with the supply of these 
requirements, and I charge myself with all the rest."

They were overpowered afresh by his uncommon generosity.

"My son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "for those little points in which 
you are deficient--points of deportment, which are born with a man, 
which may be improved by cultivation, but can never be originated--
you may still rely on me.  I have been faithful to my post since 
the days of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, and I will not 
desert it now.  No, my son.  If you have ever contemplated your 
father's poor position with a feeling of pride, you may rest 
assured that he will do nothing to tarnish it.  For yourself, 
Prince, whose character is different (we cannot be all alike, nor 
is it advisable that we should), work, be industrious, earn money, 
and extend the connexion as much as possible."

"That you may depend I will do, dear father, with all my heart," 
replied Prince.

"I have no doubt of it," said Mr. Turveydrop.  "Your qualities are 
not shining, my dear child, but they are steady and useful.  And to 
both of you, my children, I would merely observe, in the spirit of 
a sainted wooman on whose path I had the happiness of casting, I 
believe, SOME ray of light, take care of the establishment, take 
care of my simple wants, and bless you both!"

Old Mr. Turveydrop then became so very gallant, in honour of the 
occasion, that I told Caddy we must really go to Thavies Inn at 
once if we were to go at all that day.  So we took our departure 
after a very loving farewell between Caddy and her betrothed, and 
during our walk she was so happy and so full of old Mr. 
Turveydrop's praises that I would not have said a word in his 
disparagement for any consideration.

The house in Thavies Inn had bills in the windows annoucing that it 
was to let, and it looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than 
ever.  The name of poor Mr. Jellyby had appeared in the list of 
bankrupts but a day or two before, and he was shut up in the 
dining-room with two gentlemen and a heap of blue bags, account-
books, and papers, making the most desperate endeavours to 
understand his affairs.  They appeared to me to be quite beyond his 
comprehension, for when Caddy took me into the dining-room by 
mistake and we came upon Mr. Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly 
fenced into a corner by the great dining-table and the two 
gentlemen, he seemed to have given up the whole thing and to be 
speechless and insensible.

Going upstairs to Mrs. Jellyby's room (the children were all 
screaming in the kitchen, and there was no servant to be seen), we 
found that lady in the midst of a voluminous correspondence, 
opening, reading, and sorting letters, with a great accumulation of 
torn covers on the floor.  She was so preoccupied that at first she 
did not know me, though she sat looking at me with that curious, 
bright-eyed, far-off look of hers.

"Ah! Miss Summerson!" she said at last.  "I was thinking of 
something so different!  I hope you are well.  I am happy to see 
you.  Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Clare quite well?"

I hoped in return that Mr. Jellyby was quite well.

"Why, not quite, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby in the calmest manner.  
"He has been unfortunate in his affairs and is a little out of 
spirits.  Happily for me, I am so much engaged that I have no time 
to think about it.  We have, at the present moment, one hundred and 
seventy families, Miss Summerson, averaging five persons in each, 
either gone or going to the left bank of the Niger."

I thought of the one family so near us who were neither gone nor 
going to the left bank of the Niger, and wondered how she could be 
so placid.

"You have brought Caddy back, I see," observed Mrs. Jellyby with a 
glance at her daughter.  "It has become quite a novelty to see her 
here.  She has almost deserted her old employment and in fact 
obliges me to employ a boy."

"I am sure, Ma--" began Caddy.

"Now you know, Caddy," her mother mildly interposed, "that I DO 
employ a boy, who is now at his dinner.  What is the use of your 
contradicting?"

"I was not going to contradict, Ma," returned Caddy.  "I was only 
going to say that surely you wouldn't have me be a mere drudge all 
my life."

"I believe, my dear," said Mrs. Jellyby, still opening her letters, 
casting her bright eyes smilingly over them, and sorting them as 
she spoke, "that you have a business example before you in your 
mother.  Besides.  A mere drudge?  If you had any sympathy with the 
destinies of the human race, it would raise you high above any such 
idea.  But you have none.  I have often told you, Caddy, you have 
no such sympathy."

"Not if it's Africa, Ma, I have not."

"Of course you have not.  Now, if I were not happily so much 
engaged, Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her 
eyes for a moment on me and considering where to put the particular 
letter she had just opened, "this would distress and disappoint me.  
But I have so much to think of, in connexion with Borrioboola-Gha 
and it is so necessary I should concentrate myself that there is my 
remedy, you see."

As Caddy gave me a glance of entreaty, and as Mrs. Jellyby was 
looking far away into Africa straight through my bonnet and head, I 
thought it a good opportunity to come to the subject of my visit 
and to attract Mrs. Jellyby's attention.

"Perhaps," I began, "you will wonder what has brought me here to 
interrupt you."

"I am always delighted to see Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, 
pursuing her employment with a placid smile.  "Though I wish," and 
she shook her head, "she was more interested in the Borrioboolan 
project."

"I have come with Caddy," said I, "because Caddy justly thinks she 
ought not to have a secret from her mother and fancies I shall 
encourage and aid her (though I am sure I don't know how) in 
imparting one."

"Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, pausing for a moment in her occupation 
and then serenely pursuing it after shaking her head, "you are 
going to tell me some nonsense."

Caddy untied the strings of her bonnet, took her bonnet off, and 
letting it dangle on the floor by the strings, and crying heartily, 
said, "Ma, I am engaged."

"Oh, you ridiculous child!" observed Mrs. Jellyby with an 
abstracted air as she looked over the dispatch last opened; "what a 
goose you are!"

"I am engaged, Ma," sobbed Caddy, "to young Mr. Turveydrop, at the 
academy; and old Mr. Turveydrop (who is a very gentlemanly man 
indeed) has given his consent, and I beg and pray you'll give us 
yours, Ma, because I never could be happy without it.  I never, 
never could!" sobbed Caddy, quite forgetful of her general 
complainings and of everything but her natural affection.

"You see again, Miss Summerson," observed Mrs. Jellyby serenely, 
"what a happiness it is to be so much occupied as I am and to have 
this necessity for self-concentration that I have.  Here is Caddy 
engaged to a dancing-master's son--mixed up with people who have no 
more sympathy with the destinies of the human race than she has 
herself!  This, too, when Mr. Quale, one of the first 
philanthropists of our time, has mentioned to me that he was really 
disposed to be interested in her!"

"Ma, I always hated and detested Mr. Quale!" sobbed Caddy.

"Caddy, Caddy!" returned Mrs. Jellyby, opening another letter with 
the greatest complacency.  "I have no doubt you did.  How could you 
do otherwise, being totally destitute of the sympathies with which 
he overflows!  Now, if my public duties were not a favourite child 
to me, if I were not occupied with large measures on a vast scale, 
these petty details might grieve me very much, Miss Summerson.  But 
can I permit the film of a silly proceeding on the part of Caddy 
(from whom I expect nothing else) to interpose between me and the 
great African continent?  No.  No," repeated Mrs. Jellyby in a calm 
clear voice, and with an agreeable smile, as she opened more 
letters and sorted them.  "No, indeed."

I was so unprepared for the perfect coolness of this reception, 
though I might have expected it, that I did not know what to say.  
Caddy seemed equally at a loss.  Mrs. Jellyby continued to open and 
sort letters and to repeat occasionally in quite a charming tone of 
voice and with a smile of perfect composure, "No, indeed."

"I hope, Ma," sobbed poor Caddy at last, "you are not angry?"

"Oh, Caddy, you really are an absurd girl," returned Mrs. Jellyby, 
"to ask such questions after what I have said of the preoccupation 
of my mind."

"And I hope, Ma, you give us your consent and wish us well?" said 
Caddy.

"You are a nonsensical child to have done anything of this kind," 
said Mrs. Jellyby; "and a degenerate child, when you might have 
devoted yourself to the great public measure.  But the step is 
taken, and I have engaged a boy, and there is no more to be said.  
Now, pray, Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, for Caddy was kissing her, 
"don't delay me in my work, but let me clear off this heavy batch 
of papers before the afternoon post comes in!"

I thought I could not do better than take my leave; I was detained 
for a moment by Caddy's saying, "You won't object to my bringing 
him to see you, Ma?"

"Oh, dear me, Caddy," cried Mrs. Jellyby, who had relapsed into 
that distant contemplation, "have you begun again?  Bring whom?"

"Him, Ma."

"Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby, quite weary of such little 
matters.  "Then you must bring him some evening which is not a 
Parent Society night, or a Branch night, or a Ramification night.  
You must accommodate the visit to the demands upon my time.  My 
dear Miss Summerson, it was very kind of you to come here to help 
out this silly chit.  Good-bye!  When I tell you that I have fifty-
eight new letters from manufacturing families anxious to understand 
the details of the native and coffee-cultivation question this 
morning, I need not apologize for having very little leisure."

I was not surprised by Caddy's being in low spirits when we went 
downstairs, or by her sobbing afresh on my neck, or by her saying 
she would far rather have been scolded than treated with such 
indifference, or by her confiding to me that she was so poor in 
clothes that how she was ever to be married creditably she didn't 
know.  I gradually cheered her up by dwelling on the many things 
she would do for her unfortunate father and for Peepy when she had 
a home of her own; and finally we went downstairs into the damp 
dark kitchen, where Peepy and his little brothers and sisters were 
grovelling on the stone floor and where we had such a game of play 
with them that to prevent myself from being quite torn to pieces I 
was obliged to fall back on my fairy-tales.  From time to time I 
heard loud voices in the parlour overhead, and occasionally a 
violent tumbling about of the furniture.  The last effect I am 
afraid was caused by poor Mr. Jellyby's breaking away from the 
dining-table and making rushes at the window with the intention of 
throwing himself into the area whenever he made any new attempt to 
understand his affairs.

As I rode quietly home at night after the day's bustle, I thought a 
good deal of Caddy's engagement and felt confirmed in my hopes (in 
spite of the elder Mr. Turveydrop) that she would be the happier 
and better for it.  And if there seemed to be but a slender chance 
of her and her husband ever finding out what the model of 
deportment really was, why that was all for the best too, and who 
would wish them to be wiser?  I did not wish them to be any wiser 
and indeed was half ashamed of not entirely believing in him 
myself.  And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers 
in distant countries and the stars THEY saw, and hoped I might 
always be so blest and happy as to be useful to some one in my 
small way.

They were so glad to see me when I got home, as they always were, 
that I could have sat down and cried for joy if that had not been a 
method of making myself disagreeable.  Everybody in the house, from 
the lowest to the highest, showed me such a bright face of welcome, 
and spoke so cheerily, and was so happy to do anything for me, that 
I suppose there never was such a fortunate little creature in the 
world.

We got into such a chatty state that night, through Ada and my 
guardian drawing me out to tell them all about Caddy, that I went 
on prose, prose, prosing for a length of time.  At last I got up to 
my own room, quite red to think how I had been holding forth, and 
then I heard a soft tap at my door.  So I said, "Come in!" and 
there came in a pretty little girl, neatly dressed in mourning, who 
dropped a curtsy.

"If you please, miss," said the little girl in a soft voice, "I am 
Charley."

"Why, so you are," said I, stooping down in astonishment and giving 
her a kiss.  "How glad am I to see you, Charley!"

"If you please, miss," pursued Charley in the same soft voice, "I'm 
your maid."

"Charley?"

"If you please, miss, I'm a present to you, with Mr. Jarndyce's 
love."

I sat down with my hand on Charley's neck and looked at Charley.

"And oh, miss," says Charley, clapping her hands, with the tears 
starting down her dimpled cheeks, "Tom's at school, if you please, 
and learning so good!  And little Emma, she's with Mrs. Blinder, 
miss, a-being took such care of!  And Tom, he would have been at 
school--and Emma, she would have been left with Mrs. Blinder--and 
me, I should have been here--all a deal sooner, miss; only Mr. 
Jarndyce thought that Tom and Emma and me had better get a little 
used to parting first, we was so small.  Don't cry, if you please, 
miss!"

"I can't help it, Charley."

"No, miss, nor I can't help it," says Charley.  "And if you please, 
miss, Mr. Jarndyce's love, and he thinks you'll like to teach me 
now and then.  And if you please, Tom and Emma and me is to see 
each other once a month.  And I'm so happy and so thankful, miss," 
cried Charley with a heaving heart, "and I'll try to be such a good 
maid!"

"Oh, Charley dear, never forget who did all this!"

"No, miss, I never will.  Nor Tom won't.  Nor yet Emma.  It was all 
you, miss."

"I have known nothing of it.  It was Mr. Jarndyce, Charley."

"Yes, miss, but it was all done for the love of you and that you 
might be my mistress.  If you please, miss, I am a little present 
with his love, and it was all done for the love of you.  Me and Tom 
was to be sure to remember it."

Charley dried her eyes and entered on her functions, going in her 
matronly little way about and about the room and folding up 
everything she could lay her hands upon.  Presently Charley came 
creeping back to my side and said, "Oh, don't cry, if you please, 
miss."

And I said again, "I can't help it, Charley."

And Charley said again, "No, miss, nor I can't help it."  And so, 
after all, I did cry for joy indeed, and so did she.



CHAPTER XXIV

An Appeal Case


As soon as Richard and I had held the conversation of which I have 
given an account, Richard communicated the state of his mind to Mr. 
Jarndyce.  I doubt if my guardian were altogether taken by surprise 
when he received the representation, though it caused him much 
uneasiness and disappointment.  He and Richard were often closeted 
together, late at night and early in the morning, and passed whole 
days in London, and had innumerable appointments with Mr. Kenge, 
and laboured through a quantity of disagreeable business.  While 
they were thus employed, my guardian, though he underwent 
considerable inconvenience from the state of the wind and rubbed 
his head so constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested 
in its right place, was as genial with Ada and me as at any other 
time, but maintained a steady reserve on these matters.  And as our 
utmost endeavours could only elicit from Richard himself sweeping 
assurances that everything was going on capitally and that it 
really was all right at last, our anxiety was not much relieved by 
him.

We learnt, however, as the time went on, that a new application was 
made to the Lord Chancellor on Richard's behalf as an infant and a 
ward, and I don't know what, and that there was a quantity of 
talking, and that the Lord Chancellor described him in open court 
as a vexatious and capricious infant, and that the matter was 
adjourned and readjourned, and referred, and reported on, and 
petitioned about until Richard began to doubt (as he told us) 
whether, if he entered the army at all, it would not be as a 
veteran of seventy or eighty years of age.  At last an appointment 
was made for him to see the Lord Chancellor again in his private 
room, and there the Lord Chancellor very seriously reproved him for 
trifling with time and not knowing his mind--"a pretty good joke, I 
think," said Richard, "from that quarter!"--and at last it was 
settled that his application should be granted.  His name was 
entered at the Horse Guards as an applicant for an ensign's 
commission; the purchase-money was deposited at an agent's; and 
Richard, in his usual characteristic way, plunged into a violent 
course of military study and got up at five o'clock every morning 
to practise the broadsword exercise.

Thus, vacation succeeded term, and term succeeded vacation.  We 
sometimes heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce as being in the paper or 
out of the paper, or as being to be mentioned, or as being to be 
spoken to; and it came on, and it went off.  Richard, who was now 
in a professor's house in London, was able to be with us less 
frequently than before; my guardian still maintained the same 
reserve; and so time passed until the commission was obtained and 
Richard received directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland.

He arrived post-haste with the intelligence one evening, and had a 
long conference with my guardian.  Upwards of an hour elapsed 
before my guardian put his head into the room where Ada and I were 
sitting and said, "Come in, my dears!"  We went in and found 
Richard, whom we had last seen in high spirits, leaning on the 
chimney-piece looking mortified and angry.

"Rick and I, Ada," said Mr. Jarndyce, "are not quite of one mind.  
Come, come, Rick, put a brighter face upon it!"

"You are very hard with me, sir," said Richard.  "The harder 
because you have been so considerate to me in all other respects 
and have done me kindnesses that I can never acknowledge.  I never 
could have been set right without you, sir."

"Well, well!" said Mr. Jarndyce.  "I want to set you more right 
yet.  I want to set you more right with yourself."

"I hope you will excuse my saying, sir," returned Richard in a 
fiery way, but yet respectfully, "that I think I am the best judge 
about myself."

"I hope you will excuse my saying, my dear Rick," observed Mr. 
Jarndyce with the sweetest cheerfulness and good humour, "that's 
it's quite natural in you to think so, but I don't think so.  I 
must do my duty, Rick, or you could never care for me in cool 
blood; and I hope you will always care for me, cool and hot."

Ada had turned so pale that he made her sit down in his reading-
chair and sat beside her.

"It's nothing, my dear," he said, "it's nothing.  Rick and I have 
only had a friendly difference, which we must state to you, for you 
are the theme.  Now you are afraid of what's coming."

"I am not indeed, cousin John," replied Ada with a smile, "if it is 
to come from you."

"Thank you, my dear.  Do you give me a minute's calm attention, 
without looking at Rick.  And, little woman, do you likewise.  My 
dear girl," putting his hand on hers as it lay on the side of the 
easy-chair, "you recollect the talk we had, we four when the little 
woman told me of a little love affair?"

"It is not likely that either Richard or I can ever forget your 
kindness that day, cousin John."

"I can never forget it," said Richard.

"And I can never forget it," said Ada.

"So much the easier what I have to say, and so much the easier for 
us to agree," returned my guardian, his face irradiated by the 
gentleness and honour of his heart.  "Ada, my bird, you should know 
that Rick has now chosen his profession for the last time.  All 
that he has of certainty will be expended when he is fully 
equipped.  He has exhausted his resources and is bound henceforward 
to the tree he has planted."

"Quite true that I have exhausted my present resources, and I am 
quite content to know it.  But what I have of certainty, sir," said 
Richard, "is not all I have."

"Rick, Rick!" cried my guardian with a sudden terror in his manner, 
and in an altered voice, and putting up his hands as if he would 
have stopped his ears.  "For the love of God, don't found a hope or 
expectation on the family curse!  Whatever you do on this side the 
grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phantom 
that has haunted us so many years.  Better to borrow, better to 
beg, better to die!"

We were all startled by the fervour of this warning.  Richard bit 
his lip and held his breath, and glanced at me as if he felt, and 
knew that I felt too, how much he needed it.

"Ada, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce, recovering his cheerfulness, 
"these are strong words of advice, but I live in Bleak House and 
have seen a sight here.  Enough of that.  All Richard had to start 
him in the race of life is ventured.  I recommend to him and you, 
for his sake and your own, that he should depart from us with the 
understanding that there is no sort of contract between you.  I 
must go further.  1 will be plain with you both.  You were to 
confide freely in me, and I will confide freely in you.  I ask you 
wholly to relinquish, for the present, any tie but your 
relationship."

"Better to say at once, sir," returned Richard, "that you renounce 
all confidence in me and that you advise Ada to do the same."

"Better to say nothing of the sort, Rick, because I don't mean it."

"You think I have begun ill, sir," retorted Richard.  "I HAVE, I 
know."

"How I hoped you would begin, and how go on, I told you when we 
spoke of these things last," said Mr. Jarndyce in a cordial and 
encouraging manner.  "You have not made that beginning yet, but 
there is a time for all things, and yours is not gone by; rather, 
it is just now fully come.  Make a clear beginning altogether.  You 
two (very young, my dears) are cousins.  As yet, you are nothing 
more.  What more may come must come of being worked out, Rick, and 
no sooner."

"You are very hard with me, sir," said Richard.  "Harder than I 
could have supposed you would be."

"My dear boy," said Mr. Jarndyce, "I am harder with myself when I 
do anything that gives you pain.  You have your remedy in your own 
hands.  Ada, it is better for him that he should be free and that 
there should be no youthful engagement between you.  Rick, it is 
better for her, much better; you owe it to her.  Come!  Each of you 
will do what is best for the other, if not what is best for 
yourselves."

"Why is it best, sir?" returned Richard hastily.  "It was not when 
we opened our hearts to you.  You did not say so then."

"I have had experience since.  I don't blame you, Rick, but I have 
had experience since."

"You mean of me, sir."

"Well!  Yes, of both of you," said Mr. Jarndyce kindly.  "The time 
is not come for your standing pledged to one another.  It is not 
right, and I must not recognize it.  Come, come, my young cousins, 
begin afresh!  Bygones shall be bygones, and a new page turned for 
you to write your lives in."

Richard gave an anxious glance at Ada but said nothing.

"I have avoided saying one word to either of you or to Esther," 
said Mr. Jarndyce, "until now, in order that we might be open as 
the day, and all on equal terms.  I now affectionately advise, I 
now most earnestly entreat, you two to part as you came here.  
Leave all else to time, truth, and steadfastness.  If you do 
otherwise, you will do wrong, and you will have made me do wrong in 
ever bringing you together."

A long silence succeeded.

"Cousin Richard," said Ada then, raising her blue eyes tenderly to 
his face, "after what our cousin John has said, I think no choice 
is left us.  Your mind may he quite at ease about me, for you will 
leave me here under his care and will be sure that I can have 
nothing to wish for--quite sure if I guide myself by his advice.  
I--I don't doubt, cousin Richard," said Ada, a little confused, 
"that you are very fond of me, and I--I don't think you will fall 
in love with anybody else.  But I should like you to consider well 
about it too, as I should like you to be in all things very happy.  
You may trust in me, cousin Richard.  I am not at all changeable; 
but I am not unreasonable, and should never blame you.  Even 
cousins may be sorry to part; and in truth I am very, very sorry, 
Richard, though I know it's for your welfare.  I shall always think 
of you affectionately, and often talk of you with Esther, and--and 
perhaps you will sometimes think a little of me, cousin Richard.  
So now," said Ada, going up to him and giving him her trembling 
hand, "we are only cousins again, Richard--for the time perhaps--
and I pray for a blessing on my dear cousin, wherever he goes!"

It was strange to me that Richard should not be able to forgive my 
guardian for entertaining the very same opinion of him which he 
himself had expressed of himself in much stronger terms to me.  But 
it was certainly the case.  I observed with great regret that from 
this hour he never was as free and open with Mr. Jarndyce as he had 
been before.  He had every reason given him to be so, but he was 
not; and solely on his side, an estrangement began to arise between 
them.

In the business of preparation and equipment he soon lost himself, 
and even his grief at parting from Ada, who remained in 
Hertfordshire while he, Mr. Jarndyce, and I went up to London for a 
week.  He remembered her by fits and starts, even with bursts of 
tears, and at such times would confide to me the heaviest self-
reproaches.  But in a few minutes he would recklessly conjure up 
some undefinable means by which they were both to be made rich and 
happy for ever, and would become as gay as possible.

It was a busy time, and I trotted about with him all day long, 
buying a variety of things of which he stood in need.  Of the 
things he would have bought if he had been left to his own ways I 
say nothing.  He was perfectly confidential with me, and often 
talked so sensibly and feelingly about his faults and his vigorous 
resolutions, and dwelt so much upon the encouragement he derived 
from these conversations that I could never have been tired if I 
had tried.

There used, in that week, to come backward and forward to our 
lodging to fence with Richard a person who had formerly been a 
cavalry soldier; he was a fine bluff-looking man, of a frank free 
bearing, with whom Richard had practised for some months.  I heard 
so much about him, not only from Richard, but from my guardian too, 
that I was purposely in the room with my work one morning after 
breakfast when he came.

"Good morning, Mr. George," said my guardian, who happened to be 
alone with me.  "Mr. Carstone will be here directly.  Meanwhile, 
Miss Summerson is very happy to see you, I know.  Sit down."

He sat down, a little disconcerted by my presence, I thought, and 
without looking at me, drew his heavy sunburnt hand across and 
across his upper lip.

"You are as punctual as the sun," said Mr. Jarndyce.

"Military time, sir," he replied.  "Force of habit.  A mere habit 
in me, sir.  I am not at all business-like."

"Yet you have a large establishment, too, I am told?" said Mr. 
Jarndyce.

"Not much of a one, sir.  I keep a shooting gallery, but not much 
of a one."

"And what kind of a shot and what kind of a swordsman do you make 
of Mr. Carstone?" said my guardian.

"Pretty good, sir," he replied, folding his arms upon his broad 
chest and looking very large.  "If Mr. Carstone was to give his 
full mind to it, he would come out very good."

"But he don't, I suppose?" said my guardian.

"He did at first, sir, but not afterwards.  Not his full mind.  
Perhaps he has something else upon it--some young lady, perhaps."  
His bright dark eyes glanced at me for the first time.

"He has not me upon his mind, I assure you, Mr. George," said I, 
laughing, "though you seem to suspect me."

He reddened a little through his brown and made me a trooper's bow.  
"No offence, I hope, miss.  I am one of the roughs."

"Not at all," said I.  "I take it as a compliment."

If he had not looked at me before, he looked at me now in three or 
four quick successive glances.  "I beg your pardon, sir," he said 
to my guardian with a manly kind of diffidence, "but you did me the 
honour to mention the young lady's name--"

"Miss Summerson."

"Miss Summerson," he repeated, and looked at me again.

"Do you know the name?" I asked.

"No, miss.  To my knowledge I never heard it.  I thought I had seen 
you somewhere."

"I think not," I returned, raising my head from my work to look at 
him; and there was something so genuine in his speech and manner 
that I was glad of the opportunity.  "I remember faces very well."

"So do I, miss!" he returned, meeting my look with the fullness of 
his dark eyes and broad forehead.  "Humph!  What set me off, now, 
upon that!"

His once more reddening through his brown and being disconcerted by 
his efforts to remember the association brought my guardian to his 
relief.

"Have you many pupils, Mr. George?"

"They vary in their number, sir.  Mostly they're but a small lot to 
live by."

"And what classes of chance people come to practise at your 
gallery?"

"All sorts, sir.  Natives and foreigners.  From gentlemen to 
'prentices.  I have had Frenchwomen come, before now, and show 
themselves dabs at pistol-shooting.  Mad people out of number, of 
course, but THEY go everywhere where the doors stand open."

"People don't come with grudges and schemes of finishing their 
practice with live targets, I hope?" said my guardian, smiling.

"Not much of that, sir, though that HAS happened.  Mostly they come 
for skill--or idleness.  Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other.  
I beg your pardon," said Mr. George, sitting stiffly upright and 
squaring an elbow on each knee, "but I believe you're a Chancery 
suitor, if I have heard correct?"

"I am sorry to say I am."

"I have had one of YOUR compatriots in my time, sir."

"A Chancery suitor?" returned my guardian.  "How was that?"

"Why, the man was so badgered and worried and tortured by being 
knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post," said 
Mr. George, "that he got out of sorts.  I don't believe he had any 
idea of taking aim at anybody, but he was in that condition of 
resentment and violence that he would come and pay for fifty shots 
and fire away till he was red hot.  One day I said to him when 
there was nobody by and he had been talking to me angrily about his 
wrongs, 'If this practice is a safety-valve, comrade, well and 
good; but I don't altogether like your being so bent upon it in 
your present state of mind; I'd rather you took to something else.'  
I was on my guard for a blow, he was that passionate; but he 
received it in very good part and left off directly.  We shook 
hands and struck up a sort of friendship."

"What was that man?" asked my guardian in a new tone of interest.

"Why, he began by being a small Shropshire farmer before they made 
a baited bull of him," said Mr. George.

"Was his name Gridley?"

"It was, sir."

Mr. George directed another succession of quick bright glances at 
me as my guardian and I exchanged a word or two of surprise at the 
coincidence, and I therefore explained to him how we knew the name.  
He made me another of his soldierly bows in acknowledgment of what 
he called my condescension.

"I don't know," he said as he looked at me, "what it is that sets 
me off again--but--bosh!  What's my head running against!"  He 
passed one of his heavy hands over his crisp dark hair as if to 
sweep the broken thoughts out of his mind and sat a little forward, 
with one arm akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a 
brown study at the ground.

"I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind has got this 
Gridley into new troubles and that he is in hiding," said my 
guardian.

"So I am told, sir," returned Mr. George, still musing and looking 
on the ground.  "So I am told."

"You don't know where?"

"No, sir," returned the trooper, lifting up his eyes and coming out 
of his reverie.  "I can't say anything about him.  He will be worn 
out soon, I expect.  You may file a strong man's heart away for a 
good many years, but it will tell all of a sudden at last."

Richard's entrance stopped the conversation.  Mr. George rose, made 
me another of his soldierly bows, wished my guardian a good day, 
and strode heavily out of the room.

This was the morning of the day appointed for Richard's departure.  
We had no more purchases to make now; I had completed all his 
packing early in the afternoon; and our time was disengaged until 
night, when he was to go to Liverpool for Holyhead.  Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce being again expected to come on that day, Richard proposed 
to me that we should go down to the court and hear what passed.  As 
it was his last day, and he was eager to go, and I had never been 
there, I gave my consent and we walked down to Westminster, where 
the court was then sitting.  We beguiled the way with arrangements 
concerning the letters that Richard was to write to me and the 
letters that I was to write to him and with a great many hopeful 
projects.  My guardian knew where we were going and therefore was 
not with us.

When we came to the court, there was the Lord Chancellor--the same 
whom I had seen in his private room in Lincoln's Inn--sitting in 
great state and gravity on the bench, with the mace and seals on a 
red table below him and an immense flat nosegay, like a little 
garden, which scented the whole court.  Below the table, again, was 
a long row of solicitors, with bundles of papers on the matting at 
their feet; and then there were the gentlemen of the bar in wigs 
and gowns--some awake and some asleep, and one talking, and nobody 
paying much attention to what he said.  The Lord Chancellor leaned 
back in his very easy chair with his elbow on the cushioned arm and 
his forehead resting on his hand; some of those who were present 
dozed; some read the newspapers; some walked about or whispered in 
groups: all seemed perfectly at their ease, by no means in a hurry, 
very unconcerned, and extremely comfortable.

To see everything going on so smoothly and to think of the 
roughness of the suitors' lives and deaths; to see all that full 
dress and ceremony and to think of the waste, and want, and 
beggared misery it represented; to consider that while the sickness 
of hope deferred was raging in so many hearts this polite show went 
calmly on from day to day, and year to year, in such good order and 
composure; to behold the Lord Chancellor and the whole array of 
practitioners under him looking at one another and at the 
spectators as if nobody had ever heard that all over England the 
name in which they were assembled was a bitter jest, was held in 
universal horror, contempt, and indignation, was known for 
something so flagrant and bad that little short of a miracle could 
bring any good out of it to any one--this was so curious and self-
contradictory to me, who had no experience of it, that it was at 
first incredible, and I could not comprehend it.  I sat where 
Richard put me, and tried to listen, and looked about me; but there 
seemed to be no reality in the whole scene except poor little Miss 
Flite, the madwoman, standing on a bench and nodding at it.

Miss Flite soon espied us and came to where we sat.  She gave me a 
gracious welcome to her domain and indicated, with much 
gratification and pride, its principal attractions.  Mr. Kenge also 
came to speak to us and did the honours of the place in much the 
same way, with the bland modesty of a proprietor.  It was not a 
very good day for a visit, he said; he would have preferred the 
first day of term; but it was imposing, it was imposing.

When we had been there half an hour or so, the case in progress--if 
I may use a phrase so ridiculous in such a connexion--seemed to die 
out of its own vapidity, without coming, or being by anybody 
expected to come, to any resuIt.  The Lord Chancellor then threw 
down a bundle of papers from his desk to the gentlemen below him, 
and somebody said, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce."  Upon this there was a 
buzz, and a laugh, and a general withdrawal of the bystanders, and 
a bringing in of great heaps, and piles, and bags and bags full of 
papers.

I think it came on "for further directions"--about some bill of 
costs, to the best of my understanding, which was confused enough.  
But I counted twenty-three gentlemen in wigs who said they were "in 
it," and none of them appeared to understand it much better than I.  
They chatted about it with the Lord Chancellor, and contradicted 
and explained among themselves, and some of them said it was this 
way, and some of them said it was that way, and some of them 
jocosely proposed to read huge volumes of affidavits, and there was 
more buzzing and laughing, and everybody concerned was in a state 
of idle entertainment, and nothing could be made of it by anybody.  
After an hour or so of this, and a good many speeches being begun 
and cut short, it was "referred back for the present," as Mr. Kenge 
said, and the papers were bundled up again before the clerks had 
finished bringing them in.

I glanced at Richard on the termination of these hopeless 
proceedings and was shocked to see the worn look of his handsome 
young face.  "It can't last for ever, Dame Durden.  Better luck 
next time!" was all he said.

I had seen Mr. Guppy bringing in papers and arranging them for Mr. 
Kenge; and he had seen me and made me a forlorn bow, which rendered 
me desirous to get out of the court.  Richard had given me his arm 
and was taking me away when Mr. Guppy came up.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Carstone," said he in a whisper, "and Miss 
Summerson's also, but there's a lady here, a friend of mine, who 
knows her and wishes to have the pleasure of shaking hands."  As he 
spoke, I saw before me, as if she had started into bodily shape 
from my remembrance, Mrs. Rachael of my godmother's house.

"How do you do, Esther?" said she.  "Do you recollect me?"

I gave her my hand and told her yes and that she was very little 
altered.

"I wonder you remember those times, Esther," she returned with her 
old asperity.  "They are changed now.  Well! I am glad to see you, 
and glad you are not too proud to know me."  But indeed she seemed 
disappointed that I was not.

"Proud, Mrs. Rachael!" I remonstrated.

"I am married, Esther," she returned, coldly correcting me, "and am 
Mrs. Chadband.  Well! I wish you good day, and I hope you'll do 
well."

Mr. Guppy, who had been attentive to this short dialogue, heaved a 
sigh in my ear and elbowed his own and Mrs. Rachael's way through 
the confused little crowd of people coming in and going out, which 
we were in the midst of and which the change in the business had 
brought together.  Richard and I were making our way through it, 
and I was yet in the first chill of the late unexpected recognition 
when I saw, coming towards us, but not seeing us, no less a person 
than Mr. George.  He made nothing of the people about him as he 
tramped on, staring over their heads into the body of the court.

"George!" said Richard as I called his attention to him.

"You are well met, sir," he returned.  "And you, miss.  Could you 
point a person out for me, I want?  I don't understand these 
places."

Turning as he spoke and making an easy way for us, he stopped when 
we were out of the press in a corner behind a great red curtain.

"There's a little cracked old woman," he began, "that--"

I put up my finger, for Miss Flite was close by me, having kept 
beside me all the time and having called the attention of several 
of her legal acquaintance to me (as I had overheard to my 
confusion) by whispering in their ears, "Hush!  Fitz Jarndyce on my 
left!"

"Hem!" said Mr. George.  "You remember, miss, that we passed some 
conversation on a certain man this morning?  Gridley," in a low 
whisper behind his hand.

"Yes," said I.

"He is hiding at my place.  I couldn't mention it.  Hadn't his 
authority.  He is on his last march, miss, and has a whim to see 
her.  He says they can feel for one another, and she has been 
almost as good as a friend to him here.  I came down to look for 
her, for when I sat by Gridley this afternoon, I seemed to hear the 
roll of the muffled drums."

"Shall I tell her?" said I.

"Would you be so good?" he returned with a glance of something like 
apprehension at Miss Flite.  "It's a providence I met you, miss; I 
doubt if I should have known how to get on with that lady."  And he 
put one hand in his breast and stood upright in a martial attitude 
as I informed little Miss Flite, in her ear, of the purport of his 
kind errand.

"My angry friend from Shropshire!  Almost as celebrated as myself!" 
she exclaimed.  "Now really!  My dear, I will wait upon him with 
the greatest pleasure."

"He is living concealed at Mr. George's," said I.  "Hush!  This is 
Mr. George."

"In--deed!" returned Miss Flite.  "Very proud to have the honour!  
A military man, my dear.  You know, a perfect general!" she 
whispered to me.

Poor Miss Flite deemed it necessary to be so courtly and polite, as 
a mark of her respect for the army, and to curtsy so very often 
that it was no easy matter to get her out of the court.  When this 
was at last done, and addressing Mr. George as "General," she gave 
him her arm, to the great entertainment of some idlers who were 
looking on, he was so discomposed and begged me so respectfully 
"not to desert him" that I could not make up my mind to do it, 
especially as Miss Flite was always tractable with me and as she 
too said, "Fitz Jarndyce, my dear, you will accompany us, of 
course."  As Richard seemed quite willing, and even anxious, that 
we should see them safely to their destination, we agreed to do so.  
And as Mr. George informed us that Gridley's mind had run on Mr. 
Jarndyce all the afternoon after hearing of their interview in the 
morning, I wrote a hasty note in pencil to my guardian to say where 
we were gone and why.  Mr. George sealed it at a coffee-house, that 
it might lead to no discovery, and we sent it off by a ticket-
porter.

We then took a hackney-coach and drove away to the neighbourhood of 
Leicester Square.  We walked through some narrow courts, for which 
Mr. George apologized, and soon came to the shooting gallery, the 
door of which was closed.  As he pulled a bell-handle which hung by 
a chain to the door-post, a very respectable old gentleman with 
grey hair, wearing spectacles, and dressed in a black spencer and 
gaiters and a broad-brimmed hat, and carrying a large gold-beaded 
cane, addressed him.

"I ask your pardon, my good friend," said he, "but is this George's 
Shooting Gallery?"

"It is, sir," returned Mr. George, glancing up at the great letters 
in which that inscription was painted on the whitewashed wall.

"Oh! To be sure!" said the old gentleman, following his eyes.  
"Thank you.  Have you rung the bell?"

"My name is George, sir, and I have rung the bell."

"Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman.  "Your name is George?  Then 
I am here as soon as you, you see.  You came for me, no doubt?"

"No, sir.  You have the advantage of me."

"Oh, indeed?" said the old gentleman.  "Then it was your young man 
who came for me.  I am a physician and was requested--five minutes 
ago--to come and visit a sick man at George's Shooting Gallery."

"The muffled drums," said Mr. George, turning to Richard and me and 
gravely shaking his head.  "It's quite correct, sir.  Will you 
please to walk in."

The door being at that moment opened by a very singular-looking 
little man in a green-baize cap and apron, whose face and hands and 
dress were blackened all over, we passed along a dreary passage 
into a large building with bare brick walls where there were 
targets, and guns, and swords, and other things of that kind.  When 
we had all arrived here, the physician stopped, and taking off his 
hat, appeared to vanish by magic and to leave another and quite a 
different man in his place.

"Now lookee here, George," said the man, turning quickly round upon 
him and tapping him on the breast with a large forefinger.  "You 
know me, and I know you.  You're a man of the world, and I'm a man 
of the world.  My name's Bucket, as you are aware, and I have got a 
peace-warrant against Gridley.  You have kept him out of the way a 
long time, and you have been artful in it, and it does you credit."

Mr. George, looking hard at him, bit his lip and shook his head.

"Now, George," said the other, keeping close to him, "you're a 
sensible man and a well-conducted man; that's what YOU are, beyond 
a doubt.  And mind you, I don't talk to you as a common character, 
because you have served your country and you know that when duty 
calls we must obey.  Consequently you're very far from wanting to 
give trouble.  If I required assistance, you'd assist me; that's 
what YOU'D do.  Phil Squod, don't you go a-sidling round the 
gallery like that"--the dirty little man was shuffling about with 
his shoulder against the wall, and his eyes on the intruder, in a 
manner that looked threatening--"because I know you and won't have 
it."

"Phil!" said Mr. George.

"Yes, guv'ner."

"Be quiet."

The little man, with a low growl, stood still.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Bucket, "you'll excuse anything 
that may appear to be disagreeable in this, for my name's Inspector 
Bucket of the Detective, and I have a duty to perform.  George, I 
know where my man is because I was on the roof last night and saw 
him through the skylight, and you along with him.  He is in there, 
you know," pointing; "that's where HE is--on a sofy.  Now I must 
see my man, and I must tell my man to consider himself in custody; 
but you know me, and you know I don't want to take any 
uncomfortable measures.  You give me your word, as from one man to 
another (and an old soldier, mind you, likewise), that it's 
honourable between us two, and I'll accommodate you to the utmost 
of my power."

"I give it," was the reply.  '"But it wasn't handsome in you, Mr. 
Bucket."

"Gammon, George!  Not handsome?" said Mr. Bucket, tapping him on 
his broad breast again and shaking hands with him.  "I don't say it 
wasn't handsome in you to keep my man so close, do I?  Be equally 
good-tempered to me, old boy!  Old William Tell, Old Shaw, the Life 
Guardsman!  Why, he's a model of the whole British army in himself, 
ladies and gentlemen.  I'd give a fifty-pun' note to be such a 
figure of a man!"

The affair being brought to this head, Mr. George, after a little 
consideration, proposed to go in first to his comrade (as he called 
him), taking Miss Flite with him.  Mr. Bucket agreeing, they went 
away to the further end of the gallery, leaving us sitting and 
standing by a table covered with guns.  Mr. Bucket took this 
opportunity of entering into a little light conversation, asking me 
if I were afraid of fire-arms, as most young ladies were; asking 
Richard if he were a good shot; asking Phil Squod which he 
considered the best of those rifles and what it might be worth 
first-hand, telling him in return that it was a pity he ever gave 
way to his temper, for he was naturally so amiable that he might 
have been a young woman, and making himself generally agreeable.

After a time he followed us to the further end of the gallery, and 
Richard and I were going quietly away when Mr. George came after 
us.  He said that if we had no objection to see his comrade, he 
would take a visit from us very kindly.  The words had hardly 
passed his lips when the bell was rung and my guardian appeared, 
"on the chance," he slightly observed, "of being able to do any 
little thing for a poor fellow involved in the same misfortune as 
himself."  We all four went back together and went into the place 
where Gridley was.

It was a bare room, partitioned off from the gallery with unpainted 
wood.  As the screening was not more than eight or ten feet high 
and only enclosed the sides, not the top, the rafters of the high 
gallery roof were overhead, and the skylight through which Mr. 
Bucket had looked down.  The sun was low--near setting--and its 
light came redly in above, without descending to the ground.  Upon 
a plain canvas-covered sofa lay the man from Shropshire, dressed 
much as we had seen him last, but so changed that at first I 
recognized no likeness in his colourless face to what I 
recollected.

He had been still writing in his hiding-place, and still dwelling 
on his grievances, hour after hour.  A table and some shelves were 
covered with manuscript papers and with worn pens and a medley of 
such tokens.  Touchingly and awfully drawn together, he and the 
little mad woman were side by side and, as it were, alone.  She sat 
on a chair holding his hand, and none of us went close to them.

His voice had faded, with the old expression of his face, with his 
strength, with his anger, with his resistance to the wrongs that 
had at last subdued him.  The faintest shadow of an object full of 
form and colour is such a picture of it as he was of the man from 
Shropshire whom we had spoken with before.

He inclined his head to Richard and me and spoke to my guardian.

"Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me.  I am not 
long to be seen, I think.  I am very glad to take your hand, sir.  
You are a good man, superior to injustice, and God knows I honour 
you."

They shook hands earnestly, and my guardian said some words of 
comfort to him.

"It may seem strange to you, sir," returned Gridley; "I should not 
have liked to see you if this had been the flrst time of our 
meeting.  But you know I made a fight for it, you know I stood up 
with my single hand against them all, you know I told them the 
truth to the last, and told them what they were, and what they had 
done to me; so I don't mind your seeing me, this wreck."

"You have been courageous with them many and many a time," returned 
my guardian.

"Sir, I have been," with a faint smile.  "I told you what would 
come of it when I ceased to be so, and see here!  Look at us--look 
at us!"  He drew the hand Miss Flite held through her arm and 
brought her something nearer to him.

"This ends it.  Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits 
and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul 
alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for.  There is a tie of 
many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever 
had on earth that Chancery has not broken."

"Accept my blessing, Gridley," said Miss Flite in tears.  "Accept 
my blessing!"

"I thought, boastfully, that they never could break my heart, Mr. 
Jarndyce.  I was resolved that they should not.  I did believe that 
I could, and would, charge them with being the mockery they were 
until I died of some bodily disorder.  But I am worn out.  How long 
I have been wearing out, I don't know; I seemed to break down in an 
hour.  I hope they may never come to hear of it.  I hope everybody 
here will lead them to believe that I died defying them, 
consistently and perseveringly, as I did through so many years."

Here Mr. Bucket, who was sitting in a corner by the door, good-
naturedly offered such consolation as he could administer.

"Come, come!" he said from his corner.  "Don't go on in that way, 
Mr. Gridley.  You are only a little low.  We are all of us a little 
low sometimes.  I am.  Hold up, hold up!  You'll lose your temper 
with the whole round of 'em, again and again; and I shall take you 
on a score of warrants yet, if I have luck."

He only shook his head.

"Don't shake your head," said Mr. Bucket.  "Nod it; that's what I 
want to see you do.  Why, Lord bless your soul, what times we have 
had together!  Haven't I seen you in the Fleet over and over again 
for contempt?  Haven't I come into court, twenty afternoons for no 
other purpose than to see you pin the Chancellor like a bull-dog?  
Don't you remember when you first began to threaten the lawyers, 
and the peace was sworn against you two or three times a week?  Ask 
the little old lady there; she has been always present.  Hold up, 
Mr. Gridley, hold up, sir!"

"What are you going to do about him?" asked George in a low voice.

"I don't know yet," said Bucket in the same tone.  Then resuming 
his encouragement, he pursued aloud: "Worn out, Mr. Gridley?  After 
dodging me for all these weeks and forcing me to climb the roof 
here like a tom cat and to come to see you as a doctor?  That ain't 
like being worn out.  I should think not!  Now I tell you what you 
want.  You want excitement, you know, to keep YOU up; that's what 
YOU want.  You're used to it, and you can't do without it.  I 
couldn't myself.  Very well, then; here's this warrant got by Mr. 
Tulkinghorn of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and backed into half-a-dozen 
counties since.  What do you say to coming along with me, upon this 
warrant, and having a good angry argument before the magistrates?  
It'll do you good; it'll freshen you up and get you into training 
for another turn at the Chancellor.  Give in?  Why, I am surprised 
to hear a man of your energy talk of giving in.  You mustn't do 
that.  You're half the fun of the fair in the Court of Chancery.  
George, you lend Mr. Gridley a hand, and let's see now whether he 
won't be better up than down."

"He is very weak," said the trooper in a low voice.

"Is he?" returned Bucket anxiously.  "I only want to rouse him.  I 
don't like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this.  It 
would cheer him up more than anything if I could make him a little 
waxy with me.  He's welcome to drop into me, right and left, if he 
likes.  I shall never take advantage of it."

The roof rang with a scream from Miss Flite, which still rings in 
my ears.

"Oh, no, Gridley!" she cried as he fell heavily and calmly back 
from before her.  "Not without my blessing.  After so many years!"

The sun was down, the light had gradually stolen from the roof, and 
the shadow had crept upward.  But to me the shadow of that pair, 
one living and one dead, fell heavier on Richard's departure than 
the darkness of the darkest night.  And through Richard's farewell 
words I heard it echoed: "Of all my old associations, of all my old 
pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one 
poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for.  There is a 
tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie 
I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken!"



CHAPTER XXV

Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All


There is disquietude in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street.  Black 
suspicion hides in that peaceful region.  The mass of Cook's 
Courtiers are in their usual state of mind, no better and no worse; 
but Mr. Snagsby is changed, and his little woman knows it.

For Tom-all-Alone's and Lincoln's Inn Fields persist in harnessing 
themselves, a pair of ungovernable coursers, to the chariot of Mr. 
Snagsby's imagination; and Mr. Bucket drives; and the passengers 
are Jo and Mr. Tulkinghorn; and the complete equipage whirls though 
the law-stationery business at wild speed all round the clock.  
Even in the little front kitchen where the family meals are taken, 
it rattles away at a smoking pace from the dinner-table, when Mr. 
Snagsby pauses in carving the first slice of the leg of mutton 
baked with potatoes and stares at the kitchen wall.

Mr. Snagsby cannot make out what it is that he has had to do with.  
Something is wrong somewhere, but what something, what may come of 
it, to whom, when, and from which unthought of and unheard of 
quarter is the puzzle of his life.  His remote impressions of the 
robes and coronets, the stars and garters, that sparkle through the 
surface-dust of Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers; his veneration for the 
mysteries presided over by that best and closest of his customers, 
whom all the Inns of Court, all Chancery Lane, and all the legal 
neighbourhood agree to hold in awe; his remembrance of Detective 
Mr. Bucket with his forefinger and his confidential manner, 
impossible to be evaded or declined, persuade him that he is a 
party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is.  And it 
is the fearful peculiarity of this condition that, at any hour of 
his daily life, at any opening of the shop-door, at any pull of the 
bell, at any entrance of a messenger, or any delivery of a letter, 
the secret may take air and fire, explode, and blow up--Mr. Bucket 
only knows whom.

For which reason, whenever a man unknown comes into the shop (as 
many men unknown do) and says, "Is Mr. Snagsby in?" or words to 
that innocent effect, Mr. Snagsby's heart knocks hard at his guilty 
breast.  He undergoes so much from such inquiries that when they 
are made by boys he revenges himself by flipping at their ears over 
the counter and asking the young dogs what they mean by it and why 
they can't speak out at once?  More impracticable men and boys 
persist in walking into Mr. Snagsby's sleep and terrifying him with 
unaccountable questions, so that often when the cock at the little 
dairy in Cursitor Street breaks out in his usual absurd way about 
the morning, Mr. Snagsby finds himself in a crisis of nightmare, 
with his little woman shaking him and saying "What's the matter 
with the man!"

The little woman herself is not the least item in his difficulty.  
To know that he is always keeping a secret from her, that he has 
under all circumstances to conceal and hold fast a tender double 
tooth, which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head, 
gives Mr. Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of 
a dog who has a reservation from his master and will look anywhere 
rather than meet his eye.

These various signs and tokens, marked by the little woman, are not 
lost upon her.  They impel her to say, "Snagsby has something on 
his mind!"  And thus suspicion gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor 
Street.  From suspicion to jealousy, Mrs. Snagsby finds the road as 
natural and short as from Cook's Court to Chancery Lane.  And thus 
jealousy gets into Cook's Court, Cursitor Street.  Once there (and 
it was always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in 
Mrs. Snagsby's breast, prompting her to nocturnal examinations of 
Mr. Snagsby's pockets; to secret perusals of Mr. Snagsby's letters; 
to private researches in the day book and ledger, till, cash-box, 
and iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors, 
and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end.

Mrs. Snagsby is so perpetually on the alert that the house becomes 
ghostly with creaking boards and rustling garments.  The 'prentices 
think somebody may have been murdered there in bygone times.  
Guster holds certain loose atoms of an idea (picked up at Tooting, 
where they were found floating among the orphans) that there is 
buried money underneath the cellar, guarded by an old man with a 
white beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years because he 
said the Lord's Prayer backwards.

"Who was Nimrod?" Mrs. Snagsby repeatedly inquires of herself.  
"Who was that lady--that creature?  And who is that boy?"  Now, 
Nimrod being as dead as the mighty hunter whose name Mrs. Snagsby 
has appropriated, and the lady being unproducible, she directs her 
mental eye, for the present, with redoubled vigilance to the boy.  
"And who," quoth Mrs. Snagsby for the thousand and first time, "is 
that boy?  Who is that--!"  And there Mrs. Snagsby is seized with 
an inspiration.

He has no respect for Mr. Chadband.  No, to be sure, and he 
wouldn't have, of course.  Naturally he wouldn't, under those 
contagious circumstances.  He was invited and appointed by Mr. 
Chadband--why, Mrs. Snagsby heard it herself with her own ears!--to 
come back, and be told where he was to go, to be addressed by Mr. 
Chadband; and he never came!  Why did he never come?  Because he 
was told not to come.  Who told him not to come?  Who?  Ha, ha!  
Mrs. Snagsby sees it all.

But happily (and Mrs. Snagsby tightly shakes her head and tightly 
smiles) that boy was met by Mr. Chadband yesterday in the streets; 
and that boy, as affording a subject which Mr. Chadband desires to 
improve for the spiritual delight of a select congregation, was 
seized by Mr. Chadband and threatened with being delivered over to 
the police unless he showed the reverend gentleman where he lived 
and unless he entered into, and fulfilled, an undertaking to appear 
in Cook's Court to-morrow night, "'to--mor--row--night," Mrs. 
Snagsby repeats for mere emphasis with another tight smile and 
another tight shake of her head; and to-morrow night that boy will 
be here, and to-morrow night Mrs. Snagsby will have her eye upon 
him and upon some one else; and oh, you may walk a long while in 
your secret ways (says Mrs. Snagsby with haughtiness and scorn), 
but you can't blind ME!

Mrs. Snagsby sounds no timbrel in anybody's ears, but holds her 
purpose quietly, and keeps her counsel.  To-morrow comes, the 
savoury preparations for the Oil Trade come, the evening comes.  
Comes Mr. Snagsby in his black coat; come the Chadbands; come (when 
the gorging vessel is replete) the 'prentices and Guster, to be 
edified; comes at last, with his slouching head, and his shuflle 
backward, and his shuffle forward, and his shuffle to the right, 
and his shuffle to the left, and his bit of fur cap in his muddy 
hand, which he picks as if it were some mangy bird he had caught 
and was plucking before eating raw, Jo, the very, very tough 
subject Mr. Chadband is to improve.

Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo as he is brought into 
the little drawing-room by Guster.  He looks at Mr. Snagsby the 
moment he comes in.  Aha!  Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby?  Mr. 
Snagsby looks at him.  Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby 
sees it all?  Why else should that look pass between them, why else 
should Mr. Snagsby be confused and cough a signal cough behind his 
hand?  It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy's 
father.

'"Peace, my friends," says Chadband, rising and wiping the oily 
exudations from his reverend visage.  "Peace be with us!  My 
friends, why with us?  Because," with his fat smile, "it cannot be 
against us, because it must be for us; because it is not hardening, 
because it is softening; because it does not make war like the 
hawk, but comes home unto us like the dove.  Therefore, my friends, 
peace be with us!  My human boy, come forward!"

Stretching forth his flabby paw, Mr. Chadband lays the same on Jo's 
arm and considers where to station him.  Jo, very doubtful of his 
reverend friend's intentions and not at all clear but that 
something practical and painful is going to be done to him, 
mutters, "You let me alone.  I never said nothink to you.  You let 
me alone."

"No, my young friend," says Chadband smoothly, "I will not let you 
alone.  And why?  Because I am a harvest-labourer, because I am a 
toiler and a moiler, because you are delivered over unto me and are 
become as a precious instrument in my hands.  My friends, may I so 
employ this instrument as to use it to your advantage, to your 
profit, to your gain, to your welfare, to your enrichment!  My 
young friend, sit upon this stool."

Jo, apparently possessed by an impression that the reverend 
gentleman wants to cut his hair, shields his head with both arms 
and is got into the required position with great difficulty and 
every possible manifestation of reluctance.

When he is at last adjusted like a lay-figure, Mr. Chadband, 
retiring behind the table, holds up his bear's-paw and says, "My 
friends!"  This is the signal for a general settlement of the 
audience.  The 'prentices giggle internally and nudge each other.  
Guster falls into a staring and vacant state, compounded of a 
stunned admiration of Mr. Chadband and pity for the friendless 
outcast whose condition touches her nearly.  Mrs. Snagsby silently 
lays trains of gunpowder.  Mrs. Chadband composes herself grimly by 
the fire and warms her knees, finding that sensation favourable to 
the reception of eloquence.

It happens that Mr. Chadband has a pulpit habit of fixing some 
member of his congregation with his eye and fatly arguing his 
points with that particular person, who is understood to be 
expected to be moved to an occasional grunt, groan, gasp, or other 
audible expression of inward working, which expression of inward 
working, being echoed by some elderly lady in the next pew and so 
communicated like a game of forfeits through a circle of the more 
fermentable sinners present, serves the purpose of parliamentary 
cheering and gets Mr. Chadband's steam up.  From mere force of 
habit, Mr. Chadband in saying "My friends!" has rested his eye on 
Mr. Snagsby and proceeds to make that ill-starred stationer, 
already sufficiently confused, the immediate recipient of his 
discourse.

"We have here among us, my friends," says Chadband, "a Gentile and 
a heathen, a dweller in the tents of Tom-all-Alone's and a mover-on 
upon the surface of the earth.  We have here among us, my friends," 
and Mr. Chadband, untwisting the point with his dirty thumb-nail, 
bestows an oily smile on Mr. Snagsby, signifying that he will throw 
him an argumentative back-fall presently if he be not already down, 
"a brother and a boy.  Devoid of parents, devoid of relations, 
devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold and silver and of 
precious stones.  Now, my friends, why do I say he is devoid of 
these possessions?  Why?  Why is he?"  Mr. Chadband states the 
question as if he were propoundlng an entirely new riddle of much 
ingenuity and merit to Mr. Snagsby and entreating him not to give 
it up.

Mr. Snagsby, greatly perplexed by the mysterious look he received 
just now from his little woman--at about the period when Mr. 
Chadband mentioned the word parents--is tempted into modestly 
remarking, "I don't know, I'm sure, sir."  On which interruption 
Mrs. Chadband glares and Mrs. Snagsby says, "For shame!"

"I hear a voice," says Chadband; "is it a still small voice, my 
friends?  I fear not, though I fain would hope so--"

"Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby.

"Which says, 'I don't know.'  Then I will tell you why.  I say this 
brother present here among us is devoid of parents, devoid of 
relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold, of silver, 
and of precious stones because he is devoid of the light that 
shines in upon some of us.  What is that light?  What is it?  I ask 
you, what is that light?"

Mr. Chadband draws back his head and pauses, but Mr. Snagsby is not 
to be lured on to his destruction again.  Mr. Chadband, leaning 
forward over the table, pierces what he has got to follow directly 
into Mr. Snagsby with the thumb-nail already mentioned.

"It is," says Chadband, "the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon 
of moons, the star of stars.  It is the light of Terewth."

Mr. Chadband draws himself up again and looks triumphantly at Mr. 
Snagsby as if he would be glad to know how he feels after that.

"Of Terewth," says Mr. Chadband, hitting him again.  "Say not to me 
that it is NOT the lamp of lamps.  I say to you it is.  I say to 
you, a million of times over, it is.  It is!  I say to you that I 
will proclaim it to you, whether you like it or not; nay, that the 
less you like it, the more I will proclaim it to you.  With a 
speaking-trumpet!  I say to you that if you rear yourself against 
it, you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be battered, 
you shall be flawed, you shall be smashed."

The present effect of this flight of oratory--much admired for its 
general power by Mr. Chadband's followers--being not only to make 
Mr. Chadband unpleasantly warm, but to represent the innocent Mr. 
Snagsby in the light of a determined enemy to virtue, with a 
forehead of brass and a heart of adamant, that unfortunate 
tradesman becomes yet more disconcerted and is in a very advanced 
state of low spirits and false position when Mr. Chadband 
accidentally finishes him.

"My friends," he resumes after dabbing his fat head for some time--
and it smokes to such an extent that he seems to light his pocket-
handkerchief at it, which smokes, too, after every dab--"to pursue 
the subject we are endeavouring with our lowly gifts to improve, 
let us in a spirit of love inquire what is that Terewth to which I 
have alluded.  For, my young friends," suddenly addressing the 
'prentices and Guster, to their consternation, "if I am told by the 
doctor that calomel or castor-oil is good for me, I may naturally 
ask what is calomel, and what is castor-oil.  I may wish to be 
informed of that before I dose myself with either or with both.  
Now, my young friends, what is this Terewth then?  Firstly (in a 
spirit of love), what is the common sort of Terewth--the working 
clothes--the every-day wear, my young friends?  Is it deception?"

"Ah--h!" from Mrs. Snagsby.

"Is it suppression?"

A shiver in the negative from Mrs. Snagsby.

"Is it reservation?"

A shake of the head from Mrs. Snagsby--very long and very tight.

"No, my friends, it is neither of these.  Neither of these names 
belongs to it.  When this young heathen now among us--who is now, 
my friends, asleep, the seal of indifference and perdition being 
set upon his eyelids; but do not wake him, for it is right that I 
should have to wrestle, and to combat and to struggle, and to 
conquer, for his sake--when this young hardened heathen told us a 
story of a cock, and of a bull, and of a lady, and of a sovereign, 
was THAT the Terewth?  No.  Or if it was partly, was it wholly and 
entirely?  No, my friends, no!"

If Mr. Snagsby could withstand his little woman's look as it enters 
at his eyes, the windows of his soul, and searches the whole 
tenement, he were other than the man he is.  He cowers and droops.

"Or, my juvenile friends," says Chadband, descending to the level 
of their comprehension with a very obtrusive demonstration in his 
greasily meek smile of coming a long way downstairs for the 
purpose, "if the master of this house was to go forth into the city 
and there see an eel, and was to come back, and was to call unto 
him the mistress of this house, and was to say, 'Sarah, rejoice 
with me, for I have seen an elephant!' would THAT be Terewth?"

Mrs. Snagsby in tears.

"Or put it, my juvenile friends, that he saw an elephant, and 
returning said 'Lo, the city is barren, I have seen but an eel,' 
would THAT be Terewth?"

Mrs. Snagsby sobbing loudly.

"Or put it, my juvenile friends," said Chadband, stimulated by the 
sound, "that the unnatural parents of this slumbering heathen--for 
parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a doubt--after casting 
him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild dogs and the 
young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings and 
had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their 
dancings, and their malt liquors, and their butcher's meat and 
poultry, would THAT be Terewth?"

Mrs. Snagsby replies by delivering herself a prey to spasms, not an 
unresisting prey, but a crying and a tearing one, so that Cook's 
Court re-echoes with her shrieks.  Finally, becoming cataleptic, 
she has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano.  
After unspeakable suffering, productive of the utmost 
consternation, she is pronounced, by expresses from the bedroom, 
free from pain, though much exhausted, in which state of affairs 
Mr. Snagsby, trampled and crushed in the piano-forte removal, and 
extremely timid and feeble, ventures to come out from behind the 
door in the drawing-room.

All this time Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, 
ever picking his cap and putting bits of fur in his mouth.  He 
spits them out with a remorseful air, for he feels that it is in 
his nature to be an unimprovable reprobate and that it's no good 
HIS trying to keep awake, for HE won't never know nothink.  Though 
it may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting 
even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on 
this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their 
own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple 
reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as 
being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee 
awake, and thou might learn from it yet!

Jo never heard of any such book.  Its compilers and the Reverend 
Chadband are all one to him, except that he knows the Reverend 
Chadband and would rather run away from him for an hour than hear 
him talk for five minutes.  "It an't no good my waiting here no 
longer," thinks Jo.  "Mr. Snagsby an't a-going to say nothink to me 
to-night."  And downstairs he shuffles.

But downstairs is the charitable Guster, holding by the handrail of 
the kitchen stairs and warding off a fit, as yet doubtfully, the 
same having been induced by Mrs. Snagsby's screaming.  She has her 
own supper of bread and cheese to hand to Jo, with whom she 
ventures to interchange a word or so for the first time.

"Here's something to eat, poor boy," says Guster.

"Thank'ee, mum," says Jo.

"Are you hungry?"

"Jist!" says Jo.

"What's gone of your father and your mother, eh?"

Jo stops in the middle of a bite and looks petrified.  For this 
orphan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting 
has patted him on the shoulder, and it is the first time in his 
life that any decent hand has been so laid upon him.

"I never know'd nothink about 'em," says Jo.

"No more didn't I of mine," cries Guster.  She is repressing 
symptoms favourable to the fit when she seems to take alarm at 
something and vanishes down the stairs.

"Jo," whispers the law-stationer softly as the boy lingers on the 
step.

"Here I am, Mr. Snagsby!"

"I didn't know you were gone--there's another half-crown, Jo.  It 
was quite right of you to say nothing about the lady the other 
night when we were out together.  It would breed trouble.  You 
can't be too quiet, Jo."

"I am fly, master!"

And so, good night.

A ghostly shade, frilled and night-capped, follows the law-
stationer to the room he came from and glides higher up.  And 
henceforth he begins, go where he will, to be attended by another 
shadow than his own, hardly less constant than his own, hardly less 
quiet than his own.  And into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his 
own shadow may pass, let all concerned in the secrecy beware!  For 
the watchful Mrs. Snagsby is there too--bone of his bone, flesh of 
his flesh, shadow of his shadow.



CHAPTER XXVI

Sharpshooters


Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the 
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling 
to get out of bed.  Many of them are not early risers at the 
brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is 
high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out.  
Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking 
more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false 
jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their 
first sleep.  Gentlemen of the green-baize road who could discourse 
from personal experience of foreign galleys and home treadmills; 
spies of strong governments that eternally quake with weakness and 
miserable fear, broken traitors, cowards, bullies, gamesters, 
shufflers, swindlers, and false witnesses; some not unmarked by the 
branding-iron beneath their dirty braid; all with more cruelty in 
them than was in Nero, and more crime than is in Newgate.  For 
howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he 
can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and 
intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls 
himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a game or so of 
billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes than 
in any other form he wears.  And in such form Mr. Bucket shall find 
him, when he will, still pervading the tributary channels of 
Leicester Square.

But the wintry morning wants him not and wakes him not.  It wakes 
Mr. George of the shooting gallery and his familiar.  They arise, 
roll up and stow away their mattresses.  Mr. George, having shaved 
himself before a looking-glass of minute proportions, then marches 
out, bare-headed and bare-chested, to the pump in the little yard 
and anon comes back shining with yellow soap, friction, drifting 
rain, and exceedingly cold water.  As he rubs himself upon a large 
jack-towel, blowing like a military sort of diver just come up, his 
hair curling tighter and tighter on his sunburnt temples the more 
he rubs it so that it looks as if it never could be loosened by any 
less coercive instrument than an iron rake or a curry-comb--as he 
rubs, and puffs, and polishes, and blows, turning his head from 
side to side the more conveniently to excoriate his throat, and 
standing with his body well bent forward to keep the wet from his 
martial legs, Phil, on his knees lighting a fire, looks round as if 
it were enough washing for him to see all that done, and sufficient 
renovation for one day to take in the superfluous health his master 
throws off.

When Mr. George is dry, he goes to work to brush his head with two 
hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil, 
shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it, 
winks with sympathy.  This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr. 
George's toilet is soon performed.  He fills his pipe, lights it, 
and marches up and down smoking, as his custom is, while Phil, 
raising a powerful odour of hot rolls and coffee, prepares 
breakfast.  He smokes gravely and marches in slow time.  Perhaps 
this morning's pipe is devoted to the memory of Gridley in his 
grave.

"And so, Phil," says George of the shooting gallery after several 
turns in silence, "you were dreaming of the country last night?"

Phil, by the by, said as much in a tone of surprise as he scrambled 
out of bed.

"Yes, guv'ner."

"What was it like?"

"I hardly know what it was like, guv'ner," said Phil, considering.

"How did you know it was the country?"

"On account of the grass, I think.  And the swans upon it," says 
Phil after further consideration.

"What were the swans doing on the grass?"

"They was a-eating of it, I expect," says Phil.

The master resumes his march, and the man resumes his preparation 
of breakfast.  It is not necessarily a lengthened preparation, 
being limited to the setting forth of very simple breakfast 
requisites for two and the broiling of a rasher of bacon at the 
fire in the rusty grate; but as Phil has to sidle round a 
considerable part of the gallery for every object he wants, and 
never brings two objects at once, it takes time under the 
circumstances.  At length the breakfast is ready.  Phil announcing 
it, Mr. George knocks the ashes out of his pipe on the hob, stands 
his pipe itself in the chimney corner, and sits down to the meal.  
When he has helped himself, Phil follows suit, sitting at the 
extreme end of the little oblong table and taking his plate on his 
knees.  Either in humility, or to hide his blackened hands, or 
because it is his natural manner of eating.

"The country," says Mr. George, plying his knife and fork; "why, I 
suppose you never clapped your eyes on the country, Phil?"

"I see the marshes once," says Phil, contentedly eating his 
breakfast.

"What marshes?"

"THE marshes, commander," returns Phil.

"Where are they?"

"I don't know where they are," says Phil; "but I see 'em, guv'ner.  
They was flat.  And miste."

Governor and commander are interchangeable terms with Phil, 
expressive of the same respect and deference and applicable to 
nobody but Mr. George.

"I was born in the country, Phil."

"Was you indeed, commander?"

"Yes.  And bred there."

Phil elevates his one eyebrow, and after respectfully staring at 
his master to express interest, swallows a great gulp of coffee, 
still staring at him.

"There's not a bird's note that I don't know," says Mr. George.  
"Not many an English leaf or berry that I couldn't name.  Not many 
a tree that I couldn't climb yet if I was put to it.  I was a real 
country boy, once.  My good mother lived in the country."

"She must have been a fine old lady, guv'ner," Phil observes.

"Aye! And not so old either, five and thirty years ago," says Mr. 
George.  "But I'll wager that at ninety she would be near as 
upright as me, and near as broad across the shoulders."

"Did she die at ninety, guv'ner?" inquires Phil.

"No.  Bosh! Let her rest in peace, God bless her!" says the 
trooper.  "What set me on about country boys, and runaways, and 
good-for-nothings?  You, to be sure!  So you never clapped your 
eyes upon the country--marshes and dreams excepted.  Eh?"

Phil shakes his head.

"Do you want to see it?"

"N-no, I don't know as I do, particular," says Phil.

"The town's enough for you, eh?"

"Why, you see, commander," says Phil, "I ain't acquainted with 
anythink else, and I doubt if I ain't a-getting too old to take to 
novelties."

"How old ARE you, Phil?" asks the trooper, pausing as he conveys 
his smoking saucer to his lips.

"I'm something with a eight in it," says Phil.  "It can't be 
eighty.  Nor yet eighteen.  It's betwixt 'em, somewheres."

Mr. George, slowly putting down his saucer without tasting its 
contents, is laughingly beginning, "Why, what the deuce, Phil--" 
when he stops, seeing that Phil is counting on his dirty fingers.

"I was just eight," says Phil, "agreeable to the parish 
calculation, when I went with the tinker.  I was sent on a errand, 
and I see him a-sittin under a old buildin with a fire all to 
himself wery comfortable, and he says, 'Would you like to come 
along a me, my man?'  I says 'Yes,' and him and me and the fire 
goes home to Clerkenwell together.  That was April Fool Day.  I was 
able to count up to ten; and when April Fool Day come round again, 
I says to myself, 'Now, old chap, you're one and a eight in it.'  
April Fool Day after that, I says, 'Now, old chap, you're two and a 
eight in it.'  In course of time, I come to ten and a eight in it; 
two tens and a eight in it.  When it got so high, it got the upper 
hand of me, but this is how I always know there's a eight in it."

"Ah!" says Mr. George, resuming his breakfast.  "And where's the 
tinker?"

"Drink put him in the hospital, guv'ner, and the hospital put him--
in a glass-case, I HAVE heerd," Phil replies mysteriously.

"By that means you got promotion?  Took the business, Phil?"

"Yes, commander, I took the business.  Such as it was.  It wasn't 
much of a beat--round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, 
Smiffeld, and there--poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the 
kettles till they're past mending.  Most of the tramping tinkers 
used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my 
master's earnings.  But they didn't come to me.  I warn't like him.  
He could sing 'em a good song.  I couldn't!  He could play 'em a 
tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin.  
I never could do nothing with a pot but mend it or bile it--never 
had a note of music in me.  Besides, I was too ill-looking, and 
their wives complained of me."

"They were mighty particular.  You would pass muster in a crowd, 
Phil!" says the trooper with a pleasant smile.

"No, guv'ner," returns Phil, shaking his head.  "No, I shouldn't.  
I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing 
to boast of then; but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when 
I was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, 
and swallering the smoke, and what with being nat'rally unfort'nate 
in the way of running against hot metal and marking myself by sich 
means, and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got 
older, almost whenever he was too far gone in drink--which was 
almost always--my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time.  
As to since, what with a dozen years in a dark forge where the men 
was given to larking, and what with being scorched in a accident at 
a gas-works, and what with being blowed out of winder case-filling 
at the firework business, I am ugly enough to be made a show on!"

Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied 
manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee.  While 
drinking it, he says, "It was after the case-filling blow-up when I 
first see you, commander.  You remember?"

"I remember, Phil.  You were walking along in the sun."

"Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall--"

"True, Phil--shouldering your way on--"

"In a night-cap!" exclaims Phil, excited.

"In a night-cap--"

"And hobbling with a couple of sticks!" cries Phil, still more 
excited.

"With a couple of sticks.  When--"

"When you stops, you know," cries Phil, putting down his cup and 
saucer and hastily removing his plate from his knees, "and says to 
me, 'What, comrade!  You have been in the wars!'  I didn't say much 
to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person 
so strong and healthy and bold as you was should stop to speak to 
such a limping bag of bones as I was.  But you says to me, says 
you, delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that 
it was like a glass of something hot, 'What accident have you met 
with?  You have been badly hurt.  What's amiss, old boy?  Cheer up, 
and tell us about it!'  Cheer up!  I was cheered already!  I says 
as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says 
more to me, and here I am, commander!  Here I am, commander!" cries 
Phil, who has started from his chair and unaccountably begun to 
sidle away.  "If a mark's wanted, or if it will improve the 
business, let the customers take aim at me.  They can't spoil MY 
beauty.  I'M all right.  Come on!  If they want a man to box at, 
let 'em box at me.  Let 'em knock me well about the head.  I don't 
mind.  If they want a light-weight to be throwed for practice, 
Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire, let 'em throw me.  They won't 
hurt ME.  I have been throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!"

With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered and 
accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises 
referred to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the 
gallery, and abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at 
him with his head, intended to express devotion to his service.  He 
then begins to clear away the breakfast.

Mr. George, after laughing cheerfully and clapping him on the 
shoulder, assists in these arrangements and helps to get the 
gallery into business order.  That done, he takes a turn at the 
dumb-bells, and afterwards weighing himself and opining that he is 
getting "too fleshy," engages with great gravity in solitary 
broadsword practice.  Meanwhile Phil has fallen to work at his 
usual table, where he screws and unscrews, and cleans, and files, 
and whistles into small apertures, and blackens himself more and 
more, and seems to do and undo everything that can be done and 
undone about a gun.

Master and man are at length disturbed by footsteps in the passage, 
where they make an unusual sound, denoting the arrival of unusual 
company.  These steps, advancing nearer and nearer to the gallery, 
bring into it a group at first sight scarcely reconcilable with any 
day in the year but the fifth of November.

It consists of a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two 
bearers and attended by a lean female with a face like a pinched 
mask, who might be expected immediately to recite the popular 
verses commemorative of the time when they did contrive to blow Old 
England up alive but for her keeping her lips tightly and defiantly 
closed as the chair is put down.  At which point the figure in it 
gasping, "O Lord!  Oh, dear me!  I am shaken!" adds, "How de do, my 
dear friend, how de do?"  Mr. George then descries, in the 
procession, the venerable Mr. Smallweed out for an airing, attended 
by his granddaughter Judy as body-guard.

"Mr. George, my dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed, removing 
his right arm from the neck of one of his bearers, whom he has 
nearly throttled coming along, "how de do?  You're surprised to see 
me, my dear friend."

"I should hardly have been more surprised to have seen your friend 
in the city," returns Mr. George.

"I am very seldom out," pants Mr. Smallweed.  "I haven't been out 
for many months.  It's inconvenient--and it comes expensive.  But I 
longed so much to see you, my dear Mr. George.  How de do, sir?"

"I am well enough," says Mr. George.  "I hope you are the same."

"You can't be too well, my dear friend."  Mr. Smallweed takes him 
by both hands.  "I have brought my granddaughter Judy.  I couldn't 
keep her away.  She longed so much to see you."

"Hum!  She hears it calmly!" mutters Mr. George.

"So we got a hackney-cab, and put a chair in it, and just round the 
corner they lifted me out of the cab and into the chair, and 
carried me here that I might see my dear friend in his own 
establishment!  This," says Grandfather Smallweed, alluding to the 
bearer, who has been in danger of strangulation and who withdraws 
adjusting his windpipe, "is the driver of the cab.  He has nothing 
extra.  It is by agreement included in his fare.  This person," the 
other bearer, "we engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer.  
Which is twopence.  Judy, give the person twopence.  I was not sure 
you had a workman of your own here, my dear friend, or we needn't 
have employed this person."

Grandfather Smallweed refers to Phil with a glance of considerable 
terror and a half-subdued "O Lord!  Oh, dear me!"  Nor in his 
apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason, for 
Phil, who has never beheld the apparition in the black-velvet cap 
before, has stopped short with a gun in his hand with much of the 
air of a dead shot intent on picking Mr. Smallweed off as an ugly 
old bird of the crow species.

"Judy, my child," says Grandfather Smallweed, "give the person his 
twopence.  It's a great deal for what he has done."

The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human 
fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of 
London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a "mission" for 
holding horses and calling coaches, received his twopence with 
anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it 
over-handed, and retires.

"My dear Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed, "would you be so 
kind as help to carry me to the fire?  I am accustomed to a fire, 
and I am an old man, and I soon chill.  Oh, dear me!"

His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by 
the suddenness with which Mr. Squod, like a genie, catches him up, 
chair and all, and deposits him on the hearth-stone.

"O Lord!" says Mr. Smallweed, panting.  "Oh, dear me!  Oh, my 
stars!  My dear friend, your workman is very strong--and very 
prompt.  O Lord, he is very prompt!  Judy, draw me back a little.  
I'm being scorched in the legs," which indeed is testified to the 
noses of all present by the smell of his worsted stockings.

The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from 
the fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released 
his overshadowed eye from its black-velvet extinguisher, Mr. 
Smallweed again says, "Oh, dear me!  O Lord!" and looking about and 
meeting Mr. George's glance, again stretches out both hands.

"My dear friend!  So happy in this meeting!  And this is your 
establishment?  It's a delightful place.  It's a picture!  You 
never find that anything goes off here accidentally, do you, my 
dear friend?" adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease.

"No, no.  No fear of that."

"And your workman.  He--Oh, dear me!--he never lets anything off 
without meaning it, does he, my dear friend?"

"He has never hurt anybody but himself," says Mr. George, smiling.

"But he might, you know.  He seems to have hurt himself a good 
deal, and he might hurt somebody else," the old gentleman returns.  
"He mightn't mean it--or he even might.  Mr. George, will you order 
him to leave his infernal firearms alone and go away?"

Obedient to a nod from the trooper, Phil retires, empty-handed, to 
the other end of the gallery.  Mr. Smallweed, reassured, falls to 
rubbing his legs.

"And you're doing well, Mr. George?" he says to the trooper, 
squarely standing faced about towards him with his broadsword in 
his hand.  "You are prospering, please the Powers?"

Mr. George answers with a cool nod, adding, "Go on.  You have not 
come to say that, I know."

"You are so sprightly, Mr. George," returns the venerable 
grandfather.  "You are such good company."

"Ha ha!  Go on!" says Mr. George.

"My dear friend!  But that sword looks awful gleaming and sharp.  
It might cut somebody, by accident.  It makes me shiver, Mr. 
George.  Curse him!" says the excellent old gentleman apart to Judy 
as the trooper takes a step or two away to lay it aside.  "He owes 
me money, and might think of paying off old scores in this 
murdering place.  I wish your brimstone grandmother was here, and 
he'd shave her head off."

Mr. George, returning, folds his arms, and looking down at the old 
man, sliding every moment lower and lower in his chair, says 
quietly, "Now for it!"

"Ho!" cries Mr. Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful 
chuckle.  "Yes.  Now for it.  Now for what, my dear friend?"

"For a pipe," says Mr. George, who with great composure sets his 
chair in the chimney-corner, takes his pipe from the grate, fills 
it and lights it, and falls to smoking peacefully.

This tends to the discomfiture of Mr. Smallweed, who finds it so 
difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes 
exasperated and secretly claws the air with an impotent 
vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the 
visage of Mr. George.  As the excellent old gentleman's nails are 
long and leaden, and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green 
and watery; and, over and above this, as he continues, while he 
claws, to slide down in his chair and to collapse into a shapeless 
bundle, he becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in the accustomed 
eyes of Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with something 
more than the ardour of affection and so shakes him up and pats and 
pokes him in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that 
part which the science of self-defence would call his wind, that in 
his grievous distress he utters enforced sounds like a paviour's 
rammer.

When Judy has by these means set him up again in his chair, with a 
white face and a frosty nose (but still clawing), she stretches out 
her weazen forefinger and gives Mr. George one poke in the back.  
The trooper raising his head, she makes another poke at her 
esteemed grandfather, and having thus brought them together, stares 
rigidly at the fire.

"Aye, aye!  Ho, ho!  U--u--u--ugh!" chatters Grandfather Smallweed, 
swallowing his rage.  "My dear friend!"  (still clawing).

"I tell you what," says Mr. George.  "If you want to converse with 
me, you must speak out.  I am one of the roughs, and I can't go 
about and about.  I haven't the art to do it.  I am not clever 
enough.  It don't suit me.  When you go winding round and round 
me," says the trooper, putting his pipe between his lips again, 
"damme, if I don't feel as if I was being smothered!"

And he inflates his broad chest to its utmost extent as if to 
assure himself that he is not smothered yet.

"If you have come to give me a friendly call," continues Mr. 
George, "I am obliged to you; how are you?  If you have come to see 
whether there's any property on the premises, look about you; you 
are welcome.  If you want to out with something, out with it!"

The blooming Judy, without removing her gaze from the fire, gives 
her grandfather one ghostly poke.

"You see!  It's her opinion too.  And why the devil that young 
woman won't sit down like a Christian," says Mr. George with his 
eyes musingly fixed on Judy, "I can't comprehend."

"She keeps at my side to attend to me, sir," says Grandfather 
Smallweed.  "I am an old man, my dear Mr. George, and I need some 
attention.  I can carry my years; I am not a brimstone poll-parrot" 
(snarling and looking unconsciously for the cushion), "but I need 
attention, my dear friend."

"Well!" returns the trooper, wheeling his chair to face the old 
man.  "Now then?"

"My friend in the city, Mr. George, has done a little business with 
a pupil of yours."

"Has he?" says Mr. George.  "I am sorry to hear it."

"Yes, sir." Grandfather Smallweed rubs his legs.  "He is a fine 
young soldier now, Mr. George, by the name of Carstone.  Friends 
came forward and paid it all up, honourable."

"Did they?" returns Mr. George.  "Do you think your friend in the 
city would like a piece of advice?"

"I think he would, my dear friend.  From you."

"I advise him, then, to do no more business in that quarter.  
There's no more to be got by it.  The young gentleman, to my 
knowledge, is brought to a dead halt."

"No, no, my dear friend.  No, no, Mr. George.  No, no, no, sir," 
remonstrates Grandfather Smallweed, cunningly rubbing his spare 
legs.  "Not quite a dead halt, I think.  He has good friends, and 
he is good for his pay, and he is good for the selling price of his 
commission, and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit, and he is 
good for his chance in a wife, and--oh, do you know, Mr. George, I 
think my friend would consider the young gentleman good for 
something yet?" says Grandfather Smallweed, turning up his velvet 
cap and scratching his ear like a monkey.

Mr. George, who has put aside his pipe and sits with an arm on his 
chair-back, beats a tattoo on the ground with his right foot as if 
he were not particularly pleased with the turn the conversation has 
taken.

"But to pass from one subject to another," resumes Mr. Smallweed.  
"'To promote the conversation, as a joker might say.  To pass, Mr. 
George, from the ensign to the captain."

"What are you up to, now?" asks Mr. George, pausing with a frown in 
stroking the recollection of his moustache.  "What captain?"

"Our captain.  The captain we know of.  Captain Hawdon."

"Oh! That's it, is it?" says Mr. George with a low whistle as he 
sees both grandfather and granddaughter looking hard at him.  "You 
are there!  Well?  What about it?  Come, I won't be smothered any 
more.  Speak!"

"My dear friend," returns the old man, "I was applied--Judy, shake 
me up a little!--I was applied to yesterday about the captain, and 
my opinion still is that the captain is not dead."

"Bosh!" observes Mr. George.

"What was your remark, my dear friend?" inquires the old man with 
his hand to his ear.

"Bosh!"

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed.  "Mr. George, of my opinion you 
can judge for yourself according to the questions asked of me and 
the reasons given for asking 'em.  Now, what do you think the 
lawyer making the inquiries wants?"

"A job," says Mr. George.

"Nothing of the kind!"

"Can't be a lawyer, then," says Mr. George, folding his arms with 
an air of confirmed resolution.

"My dear friend, he is a lawyer, and a famous one.  He wants to see 
some fragment in Captain Hawdon's writing.  He don't want to keep 
it.  He only wants to see it and compare it with a writing in his 
possession."

"Well?"

"Well, Mr. George.  Happening to remember the advertisement 
concerning Captain Hawdon and any information that could be given 
respecting him, he looked it up and came to me--just as you did, my 
dear friend.  WILL you shake hands?  So glad you came that day!  I 
should have missed forming such a friendship if you hadn't come!"

"Well, Mr. Smallweed?" says Mr. George again after going through 
the ceremony with some stiffness.

"I had no such thing.  I have nothing but his signature.  Plague 
pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him," 
says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances 
of a prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry 
hands, "I have half a million of his signatures, I think!  But 
you," breathlessly recovering his mildness of speech as Judy re-
adjusts the cap on his skittle-ball of a head, "you, my dear Mr. 
George, are likely to have some letter or paper that would suit the 
purpose.  Anything would suit the purpose, written in the hand."

"Some writing in that hand," says the trooper, pondering; "may be, 
I have."

"My dearest friend!"

"May be, I have not."

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed, crest-fallen.

"But if I had bushels of it, I would not show as much as would make 
a cartridge without knowing why."

"Sir, I have told you why.  My dear Mr. George, I have told you 
why."

"Not enough," says the trooper, shaking his head.  "I must know 
more, and approve it."

"Then, will you come to the lawyer?  My dear friend, will you come 
and see the gentleman?" urges Grandfather Smallweed, pulling out a 
lean old silver watch with hands like the leg of a skeleton.  "I 
told him it was probable I might call upon him between ten and 
eleven this forenoon, and it's now half after ten.  Will you come 
and see the gentleman, Mr. George?"

"Hum!" says he gravely.  "I don't mind that.  Though why this 
should concern you so much, I don't know."

"Everything concerns me that has a chance in it of bringing 
anything to light about him.  Didn't he take us all in?  Didn't he 
owe us immense sums, all round?  Concern me?  Who can anything 
about him concern more than me?  Not, my dear friend," says 
Grandfather Smallweed, lowering his tone, "that I want YOU to 
betray anything.  Far from it.  Are you ready to come, my dear 
friend?"

"Aye! I'll come in a moment.  I promise nothing, you know."

"No, my dear Mr. George; no."

"And you mean to say you're going to give me a lift to this place, 
wherever it is, without charging for it?" Mr. George inquires, 
getting his hat and thick wash-leather gloves.

This pleasantry so tickles Mr. Smallweed that he laughs, long and 
low, before the fire.  But ever while he laughs, he glances over 
his paralytic shoulder at Mr. George and eagerly watches him as he 
unlocks the padlock of a homely cupboard at the distant end of the 
gallery, looks here and there upon the higher shelves, and 
ultimately takes something out with a rustling of paper, folds it, 
and puts it in his breast.  Then Judy pokes Mr. Smallweed once, and 
Mr. Smallweed pokes Judy once.

"I am ready," says the trooper, coming back.  "Phil, you can carry 
this old gentleman to his coach, and make nothing of him."

"Oh, dear me!  O Lord!  Stop a moment!" says Mr. Smallweed.  "He's 
so very prompt!  Are you sure you can do it carefully, my worthy 
man?"

Phil makes no reply, but seizing the chair and its load, sidles 
away, tightly bugged by the now speechless Mr. Smallweed, and bolts 
along the passage as if he had an acceptable commission to carry 
the old gentleman to the nearest volcano.  His shorter trust, 
however, terminating at the cab, he deposits him there; and the 
fair Judy takes her place beside him, and the chair embellishes the 
roof, and Mr. George takes the vacant place upon the box.

Mr. George is quite confounded by the spectacle he beholds from 
time to time as he peeps into the cab through the window behind 
him, where the grim Judy is always motionless, and the old 
gentleman with his cap over one eye is always sliding off the seat 
into the straw and looking upward at him out of his other eye with 
a helpless expression of being jolted in the back.



CHAPTER XXVII

More Old Soldiers Than One


Mr. George has not far to ride with folded arms upon the box, for 
their destination is Lincoln's Inn Fields.  When the driver stops 
his horses, Mr. George alights, and looking in at the window, says, 
"What, Mr. Tulkinghorn's your man, is he?"

"Yes, my dear friend.  Do you know him, Mr. George?"

"Why, I have heard of him--seen him too, I think.  But I don't know 
him, and he don't know me."

There ensues the carrying of Mr. Smallweed upstairs, which is done 
to perfection with the trooper's help.  He is borne into Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's great room and deposited on the Turkey rug before the 
fire.  Mr. Tulkinghorn is not within at the present moment but will 
be back directly.  The occupant of the pew in the hall, having said 
thus much, stirs the fire and leaves the triumvirate to warm 
themselves.

Mr. George is mightily curious in respect of the room.  He looks up 
at the painted ceiling, looks round at the old law-books, 
contemplates the portraits of the great clients, reads aloud the 
names on the boxes.

"'Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,'" Mr. George reads thoughtfully.  
"Ha!  'Manor of Chesney Wold.'  Humph!"  Mr. George stands looking 
at these boxes a long while--as if they were pictures--and comes 
back to the fire repeating, "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and 
Manor of Chesney Wold, hey?"

"Worth a mint of money, Mr. George!" whispers Grandfather 
Smallweed, rubbing his legs.  "Powerfully rich!"

"Who do you mean?  This old gentleman, or the Baronet?"

"This gentleman, this gentleman."

"So I have heard; and knows a thing or two, I'll hold a wager.  Not 
bad quarters, either," says Mr. George, looking round again.  "See 
the strong-box yonder!"

This reply is cut short by Mr. Tulkinghorn's arrival.  There is no 
change in him, of course.  Rustily drest, with his spectacles in 
his hand, and their very case worn threadbare.  In manner, close 
and dry.  In voice, husky and low.  In face, watchful behind a 
blind; habitually not uncensorious and contemptuous perhaps.  The 
peerage may have warmer worshippers and faithfuller believers than 
Mr. Tulkinghorn, after all, if everything were known.

"Good morning, Mr. Smallweed, good morning!" he says as he comes 
in.  "You have brought the sergeant, I see.  Sit down, sergeant."

As Mr. Tulkinghorn takes off his gloves and puts them in his hat, 
he looks with half-closed eyes across the room to where the trooper 
stands and says within himself perchance, "You'll do, my friend!"

"Sit down, sergeant," he repeats as he comes to his table, which is 
set on one side of the fire, and takes his easy-chair.  "Cold and 
raw this morning, cold and raw!"  Mr. Tulkinghorn warms before the 
bars, alternately, the palms and knuckles of his hands and looks 
(from behind that blind which is always down) at the trio sitting 
in a little semicircle before him.

"Now, I can feel what I am about" (as perhaps he can in two 
senses), "Mr. Smallweed."  The old gentleman is newly shaken up by 
Judy to bear his part in the conversation.  "You have brought our 
good friend the sergeant, I see."

"Yes, sir," returns Mr. Smallweed, very servile to the lawyer's 
wealth and influence.

"And what does the sergeant say about this business?"

"Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed with a tremulous wave of 
his shrivelled hand, "this is the gentleman, sir."

Mr. George salutes the gentleman but otherwise sits bolt upright 
and profoundly silent--very forward in his chair, as if the full 
complement of regulation appendages for a field-day hung about him.

Mr. Tulkinghorn proceeds, "Well, George--I believe your name is 
George?"

"It is so, Sir."

"What do you say, George?"

"I ask your pardon, sir," returns the trooper, "but I should wish 
to know what YOU say?"

"Do you mean in point of reward?"

"I mean in point of everything, sir."

This is so very trying to Mr. Smallweed's temper that he suddenly 
breaks out with "You're a brimstone beast!" and as suddenly asks 
pardon of Mr. Tulkinghorn, excusing himself for this slip of the 
tongue by saying to Judy, "I was thinking of your grandmother, my 
dear."

"I supposed, sergeant," Mr. Tulkinghorn resumes as he leans on one 
side of his chair and crosses his legs, "that Mr. Smallweed might 
have sufficiently explained the matter.  It lies in the smallest 
compass, however.  You served under Captain Hawdon at one time, and 
were his attendant in illness, and rendered him many little 
services, and were rather in his confidence, I am told.  That is 
so, is it not?"

"Yes, sir, that is so," says Mr. George with military brevity.

"Therefore you may happen to have in your possession something--
anything, no matter what; accounts, instructions, orders, a letter, 
anything--in Captain Hawdon's writing.  I wish to compare his 
writing with some that I have.  If you can give me the opportunity, 
you shall be rewarded for your trouble.  Three, four, five, 
guineas, you would consider handsome, I dare say."

"Noble, my dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, screwing up 
his eyes.

"If not, say how much more, in your conscience as a soldier, you 
can demand.  There is no need for you to part with the writing, 
against your inclination--though I should prefer to have it."

Mr. George sits squared in exactly the same attitude, looks at the 
painted ceiling, and says never a word.  The irascible Mr. 
Smallweed scratches the air.

"The question is," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his methodical, subdued, 
uninterested way, "first, whether you have any of Captain Hawdon's 
writing?"

"First, whether I have any of Captain Hawdon's writing, sir," 
repeats Mr. George.

"Secondly, what will satisfy you for the trouble of producing it?"

"Secondly, what will satisfy me for the trouble of producing it, 
sir," repeats Mr. George.

"Thirdly, you can judge for yourself whether it is at all like 
that," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, suddenly handing him some sheets of 
written paper tied together.

"Whether it is at all like that, sir.  Just so," repeats Mr. 
George.

All three repetitions Mr. George pronounces in a mechanical manner, 
looking straight at Mr. Tulkinghorn; nor does he so much as glance 
at the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has been given to 
him for his inspection (though he still holds it in his hand), but 
continues to look at the lawyer with an air of troubled meditation.

"Well?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "What do you say?"

"Well, sir," replies Mr. George, rising erect and looking immense, 
"I would rather, if you'll excuse me, have nothing to do with 
this."

Mr. Tulkinghorn, outwardly quite undisturbed, demands, "Why not?"

"Why, sir," returns the trooper.  "Except on military compulsion, I 
am not a man of business.  Among civilians I am what they call in 
Scotland a ne'er-do-weel.  I have no head for papers, sir.  I can 
stand any fire better than a fire of cross questions.  I mentioned 
to Mr. Smallweed, only an hour or so ago, that when I come into 
things of this kind I feel as if I was being smothered.  And that 
is my sensation," says Mr. George, looking round upon the company, 
"at the present moment."

With that, he takes three strides forward to replace the papers on 
the lawyer's table and three strides backward to resume his former 
station, where he stands perfectly upright, now looking at the 
ground and now at the painted ceillhg, with his hands behind him as 
if to prevent himself from accepting any other document whatever.

Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed's favourite adjective of 
disparagement is so close to his tongue that he begins the words 
"my dear friend" with the monosyllable "brim," thus converting the 
possessive pronoun into brimmy and appearing to have an impediment 
in his speech.  Once past this difficulty, however, he exhorts his 
dear friend in the tenderest manner not to be rash, but to do what 
so eminent a gentleman requires, and to do it with a good grace, 
confident that it must be unobjectionable as well as profitable.  
Mr. Tulkinghorn merely utters an occasional sentence, as, "You are 
the best judge of your own interest, sergeant."  "Take care you do 
no harm by this."  "Please yourself, please yourself."  "If you 
know what you mean, that's quite enough."  These he utters with an 
appearance of perfect indifference as he looks over the papers on 
his table and prepares to write a letter.

Mr. George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the 
ground, from the ground to Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn to the painted ceiling again, 
often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests.

"I do assure you, sir," says Mr. George, "not to say it 
offensively, that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am 
being smothered fifty times over.  I really am, sir.  I am not a 
match for you gentlemen.  Will you allow me to ask why you want to 
see the captain's hand, in the case that I could find any specimen 
of it?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes his head.  "No.  If you were a man 
of business, sergeant, you would not need to be informed that there 
are confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves, for many 
such wants in the profession to which I belong.  But if you are 
afraid of doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind 
at rest about that."

"Aye!  He is dead, sir."

"IS he?"  Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to write.

"Well, sir," says the trooper, looking into his hat after another 
disconcerted pause, "I am sorry not to have given you more 
satisfaction.  If it would be any satisfaction to any one that I 
should be confirmed in my judgment that I would rather have nothing 
to do with this by a friend of mine who has a better head for 
business than I have, and who is an old soldier, I am willing to 
consult with him.  I--I really am so completely smothered myself at 
present," says Mr. George, passing his hand hopelessly across his 
brow, "that I don't know but what it might be a satisfaction to 
me."

Mr. Smallweed, hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so 
strongly inculcates the expediency of the trooper's taking counsel 
with him, and particularly informing him of its being a question of 
five guineas or more, that Mr. George engages to go and see him.  
Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing either way.

"I'll consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir," says the 
trooper, "and I'll take the liberty of looking in again with the 
final answer in the course of the day.  Mr. Smallweed, if you wish 
to be carried downstairs--"

"In a moment, my dear friend, in a moment.  Will you first let me 
speak half a word with this gentleman in private?"

"Certainly, sir.  Don't hurry yourself on my account."  The trooper 
retires to a distant part of the room and resumes his curious 
inspection of the boxes, strong and otherwise.

"If I wasn't as weak as a brimstone baby, sir," whispers 
Grandfather Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down to his level by the 
lapel of his coat and flashing some half-quenched green fire out of 
his angry eyes, "I'd tear the writing away from him.  He's got it 
buttoned in his breast.  I saw him put it there.  Judy saw him put 
it there.  Speak up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-
stick shop, and say you saw him put it there!"

This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies with such a 
thrust at his granddaughter that it is too much for his strength, 
and he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with 
him, until he is arrested by Judy, and well shaken.

"Violence will not do for me, my friend," Mr. Tulkinghorn then 
remarks coolly.

"No, no, I know, I know, sir.  But it's chafing and galling--it's--
it's worse than your smattering chattering magpie of a grandmother," 
to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks at the fire, "to know he 
has got what's wanted and won't give it up.  He, not to give it up!  
HE!  A vagabond!  But never mind, sir, never mind.  At the most, he 
has only his own way for a little while.  I have him periodically 
in a vice.  I'll twist him, sir.  I'll screw him, sir.  If he won't 
do it with a good grace, I'll make him do it with a bad one, sir!  
Now, my dear Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed, winking at 
the lawyer hideously as he releases him, "I am ready for your kind 
assistance, my excellent friend!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn, with some shadowy sign of amusement manifesting 
itself through his self-possession, stands on the hearth-rug with 
his back to the fire, watching the disappearance of Mr. Smallweed 
and acknowledging the trooper's parting salute with one slight nod.

It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George 
finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs, for when he 
is replaced in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject 
of the guineas and retains such an affectionate hold of his button
--having, in truth, a secret longing to rip his coat open and rob 
him--that some degree of force is necessary on the trooper's part 
to effect a separation.  It is accomplished at last, and he 
proceeds alone in quest of his adviser.

By the cloisterly Temple, and by Whitefriars (there, not without a 
glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which would seem to be something in 
his way), and by Blackfriars Bridge, and Blackfriars Road, Mr. 
George sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere 
in that ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from 
the bridges of London, centring in the far-famed elephant who has 
lost his castle formed of a thousand four-horse coaches to a 
stronger iron monster than he, ready to chop him into mince-meat 
any day he dares.  To one of the little shops in this street, which 
is a musician's shop, having a few fiddles in the window, and some 
Pan's pipes and a tambourine, and a triangle, and certain elongated 
scraps of music, Mr. George directs his massive tread.  And halting 
at a few paces from it, as he sees a soldierly looking woman, with 
her outer skirts tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and 
in that tub commence a-whisking and a-splashing on the margin of 
the pavement, Mr. George says to himself, "She's as usual, washing 
greens.  I never saw her, except upon a baggage-waggon, when she 
wasn't washing greens!"

The subject of this reflection is at all events so occupied in 
washing greens at present that she remains unsuspicious of Mr. 
George's approach until, lifting up herself and her tub together 
when she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds him 
standing near her.  Her reception of him is not flattering.

"George, I never see you but I wish you was a hundred mile away!"

The trooper, without remarking on this welcome, follows into the 
musical-instrument shop, where the lady places her tub of greens 
upon the counter, and having shaken hands with him, rests her arms 
upon it.

"I never," she says, "George, consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute 
when you're near him.  You are that resfless and that roving--"

"Yes!  I know I am, Mrs. Bagnet.  I know I am."

"You know you are!" says Mrs. Bagnet.  "What's the use of that?  
WHY are you?"

"The nature of the animal, I suppose," returns the trooper good-
humouredly.

"Ah!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, something shrilly.  "But what satisfaction 
will the nature of the animal be to me when the animal shall have 
tempted my Mat away from the musical business to New Zealand or 
Australey?"

Mrs. Bagnet is not at all an ill-looking woman.  Rather large-
boned, a little coarse in the grain, and freckled by the sun and 
wind which have tanned her hair upon the forehead, but healthy, 
wholesome, and bright-eyed.  A strong, busy, active, honest-faced 
woman of from forty-five to fifty.  Clean, hardy, and so 
economically dressed (though substantially) that the only article 
of ornament of which she stands possessed appear's to be her 
wedding-ring, around which her finger has grown to be so large 
since it was put on that it will never come off again until it 
shall mingle with Mrs. Bagnet's dust.

"Mrs. Bagnet," says the trooper, "I am on my parole with you.  Mat 
will get no harm from me.  You may trust me so far."

"Well, I think I may.  But the very looks of you are unsettling," 
Mrs. Bagnet rejoins.  "Ah, George, George!  If you had only settled 
down and married Joe Pouch's widow when he died in North America, 
SHE'D have combed your hair for you."

"It was a chance for me, certainly," returns the trooper half 
laughingly, half seriously, "but I shall never settle down into a 
respectable man now.  Joe Pouch's widow might have done me good--
there was something in her, and something of her--but I couldn't 
make up my mind to it.  If I had had the luck to meet with such a 
wife as Mat found!"

Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve 
with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow 
herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr. 
George in the face with a head of greens and taking her tub into 
the little room behind the shop.

"Why, Quebec, my poppet," says George, following, on invitation, 
into that department.  "And little Malta, too!  Come and kiss your 
Bluffy!"

These young ladies--not supposed to have been actually christened 
by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family 
from the places of their birth in barracks--are respectively 
employed on three-legged stools, the younger (some five or six 
years old) in learning her letters out of a penny primer, the elder 
(eight or nine perhaps) in teaching her and sewing with great 
assiduity.  Both hail Mr. George with acclamations as an old friend 
and after some kissing and romping plant their stools beside him.

"And how's young Woolwich?" says Mr. George.

"Ah!  There now!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning about from her 
saucepans (for she is cooking dinner) with a bright flush on her 
face.  "Would you believe it?  Got an engagement at the theayter, 
with his father, to play the fife in a military piece."

"Well done, my godson!" cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh.

"I believe you!" says Mrs. Bagnet.  "He's a Briton.  That's what 
Woolwich is.  A Briton!"

"And Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you're respectable 
civilians one and all," says Mr. George.  "Family people.  Children 
growing up.  Mat's old mother in Scotland, and your old father 
somewhere else, corresponded with, and helped a little, and--well, 
well!  To be sure, I don't know why I shouldn't be wished a hundred 
mile away, for I have not much to do with all this!"

Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting before the fire in the 
whitewashed room, which has a sanded floor and a barrack smell and 
contains nothing superfluous and has not a visible speck of dirt or 
dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin 
pots and pannikins upon the dresser shelves--Mr. George is becoming 
thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet 
and young Woolwich opportunely come home.  Mr. Bagnet is an ex-
artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows and whiskers 
like the fibres of a coco-nut, not a hair upon his head, and a 
torrid complexion.  His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at 
all unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted.  
Indeed there may be generally observed in him an unbending, 
unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of 
the human orchestra.  Young Woolwich is the type and model of a 
young drummer.

Both father and son salute the trooper heartily.  He saying, in due 
season, that he has come to advise with Mr. Bagnet, Mr. Bagnet 
hospitably declares that he will hear of no business until after 
dinner and that his friend shall not partake of his counsel without 
first partaking of boiled pork and greens.  The trooper yielding to 
this invitation, he and Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the domestic 
preparations, go forth to take a turn up and down the little 
street, which they promenade with measured tread and folded arms, 
as if it were a rampart.

"George," says Mr. Bagnet.  "You know me.  It's my old girl that 
advises.  She has the head.  But I never own to it before her.  
Discipline must be maintained.  Wait till the greens is off her 
mind.  Then we'll consult.  Whatever the old girl says, do--do it!"

"I intend to, Mat," replies the other.  "I would sooner take her 
opinion than that of a college."

"College," returns Mr. Bagnet in short sentences, bassoon-like.  
"What college could you leave--in another quarter of the world--
with nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella--to make its way home 
to Europe?  The old girl would do it to-morrow.  Did it once!"

"You are right," says Mr. George.

"What college," pursues Bagnet, "could you set up in life--with two 
penn'orth of white lime--a penn'orth of fuller's earth--a ha'porth 
of sand--and the rest of the change out of sixpence in money?  
That's what the old girl started on.  In the present business."

"I am rejoiced to hear it's thriving, Mat."

"The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, acquiescing, "saves.  Has a 
stocking somewhere.  With money in it.  I never saw it.  But I know 
she's got it.  Wait till the greens is off her mind.  Then she'll 
set you up."

"She is a treasure!" exclaims Mr. George.

"She's more.  But I never own to it before her.  Discipline must be 
maintained.  It was the old girl that brought out my musical 
abilities.  I should have been in the artillery now but for the old 
girl.  Six years I hammered at the fiddle.  Ten at the flute.  The 
old girl said it wouldn't do; intention good, but want of 
flexibility; try the bassoon.  The old girl borrowed a bassoon from 
the bandmaster of the Rifle Regiment.  I practised in the trenches.  
Got on, got another, get a living by it!"

George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose and as sound as an 
apple.

"The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet in reply, "is a thoroughly fine 
woman.  Consequently she is like a thoroughly fine day.  Gets finer 
as she gets on.  I never saw the old girl's equal.  But I never own 
to it before her.  Discipline must be maintained!"

Proceeding to converse on indifferent matters, they walk up and 
down the little street, keeping step and time, until summoned by 
Quebec and Malta to do justice to the pork and greens, over which 
Mrs. Bagnet, like a military chaplain, says a short grace.  In the 
distribution of these comestibles, as in every other household 
duty, Mrs. Bagnet developes an exact system, sitting with every 
dish before her, allotting to every portion of pork its own portion 
of pot-liquor, greens, potatoes, and even mustard, and serving it 
out complete.  Having likewise served out the beer from a can and 
thus supplied the mess with all things necessary, Mrs. Bagnet 
proceeds to satisfy her own hunger, which is in a healthy state.  
The kit of the mess, if the table furniture may be so denominated, 
is chiefly composed of utensils of horn and tin that have done duty 
in several parts of the world.  Young Woolwich's knife, in 
particular, which is of the oyster kind, with the additional 
feature of a strong shutting-up movement which frequently balks the 
appetite of that young musician, is mentioned as having gone in 
various hands the complete round of foreign service.

The dinner done, Mrs. Bagnet, assisted by the younger branches (who 
polish their own cups and platters, knives and forks), makes all 
the dinner garniture shine as brightly as before and puts it all 
away, first sweeping the hearth, to the end that Mr. Bagnet and the 
visitor may not be retarded in the smoking of their pipes.  These 
household cares involve much pattening and counter-pattening in the 
backyard and considerable use of a pail, which is finally so happy 
as to assist in the ablutions of Mrs. Bagnet herself.  That old 
girl reappearing by and by, quite fresh, and sitting down to her 
needlework, then and only then--the greens being only then to be 
considered as entirely off her mind--Mr. Bagnet requests the 
trooper to state his case.

This Mr. George does with great discretion, appearing to address 
himself to Mr. Bagnet, but having an eye solely on the old girl all 
the time, as Bagnet has himself.  She, equally discreet, busies 
herself with her needlework.  The case fully stated, Mr. Bagnet 
resorts to his standard artifice for the maintenance of discipline.

"That's the whole of it, is it, George?" says he.

"That's the whole of it."

"You act according to my opinion?"

"I shall be guided," replies George, "entirely by it."

"Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "give him my opinion.  You know it.  
Tell him what it is."

It is that he cannot have too little to do with people who are too 
deep for him and cannot be too careful of interference with matters 
he does not understand--that the plain rule is to do nothing in the 
dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never 
to put his foot where he cannot see the ground.  This, in effect, 
is Mr. Bagnet's opinion, as delivered through the old girl, and it 
so relieves Mr. George's mind by confirming his own opinion and 
banishing his doubts that he composes himself to smoke another pipe 
on that exceptional occasion and to have a talk over old times with 
the whole Bagnet family, according to their various ranges of 
experience.

Through these means it comes to pass that Mr. George does not again 
rise to his full height in that parlour until the time is drawing 
on when the bassoon and fife are expected by a British public at 
the theatre; and as it takes time even then for Mr. George, in his 
domestic character of Bluffy, to take leave of Quebec and Malta and 
insinuate a sponsorial shilling into the pocket of his godson with 
felicitations on his success in life, it is dark when Mr. George 
again turns his face towards Lincoln's Inn Fields.

"A family home," he ruminates as he marches along, "however small 
it is, makes a man like me look lonely.  But it's well I never made 
that evolution of matrimony.  I shouldn't have been fit for it.  I 
am such a vagabond still, even at my present time of life, that I 
couldn't hold to the gallery a month together if it was a regular 
pursuit or if I didn't camp there, gipsy fashion.  Come!  I 
disgrace nobody and cumber nobody; that's something.  I have not 
done that for many a long year!"

So he whistles it off and marches on.

Arrived in Lincoln's Inn Fields and mounting Mr. Tulkinghorn's 
stair, he finds the outer door closed and the chambers shut, but 
the trooper not knowing much about outer doors, and the staircase 
being dark besides, he is yet fumbling and groping about, hoping to 
discover a bell-handle or to open the door for himself, when Mr. 
Tulkinghorn comes up the stairs (quietly, of course) and angrily 
asks, "Who is that?  What are you doing there?"

"I ask your pardon, sir.  It's George.  The sergeant."

"And couldn't George, the sergeant, see that my door was locked?"

"Why, no, sir, I couldn't.  At any rate, I didn't," says the 
trooper, rather nettled.

"Have you changed your mind?  Or are you in the same mind?" Mr. 
Tulkinghorn demands.  But he knows well enough at a glance.

"In the same mind, sir."

"I thought so.  That's sufficient.  You can go.  So you are the 
man," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, opening his door with the key, "in 
whose hiding-place Mr. Gridley was found?"

"Yes, I AM the man," says the trooper, stopping two or three stairs 
down.  "What then, sir?"

"What then?  I don't like your associates.  You should not have 
seen the inside of my door this morning if I had thought of your 
being that man.  Gridley?  A threatening, murderous, dangerous 
fellow."

With these words, spoken in an unusually high tone for him, the 
lawyer goes into his rooms and shuts the door with a thundering 
noise.

Mr. George takes his dismissal in great dudgeon, the greater 
because a clerk coming up the stairs has heard the last words of 
all and evidently applies them to him.  "A pretty character to 
bear," the trooper growls with a hasty oath as he strides 
downstairs.  "A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow!"  And 
looking up, he sees the clerk looking down at him and marking him 
as he passes a lamp.  This so intensifies his dudgeon that for five 
minutes he is in an ill humour.  But he whistles that off like the 
rest of it and marches home to the shooting gallery.



CHAPTER XXVIII

The Ironmaster


Sir Leicester Dedlock has got the better, for the time being, of 
the family gout and is once more, in a literal no less than in a 
figurative point of view, upon his legs.  He is at his place in 
Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying 
grounds, and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well 
defended, and eke into Sir Leicester's bones.  The blazing fires of 
faggot and coal--Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest--that blaze 
upon the broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the 
frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not 
exclude the enemy.  The hot-water pipes that trail themselves all 
over the house, the cushioned doors and windows, and the screens 
and curtains fail to supply the fires' deficiencies and to satisfy 
Sir Leicester's need.  Hence the fashionable intelligence proclaims 
one morning to the listening earth that Lady Dedlock is expected 
shortly to return to town for a few weeks.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor 
relations.  Indeed great men have often more than their fair share 
of poor relations, inasmuch as very red blood of the superior 
quality, like inferior blood unlawfully shed, WILL cry aloud and 
WILL be heard.  Sir Leicester's cousins, in the remotest degree, 
are so many murders in the respect that they "will out."  Among 
whom there are cousins who are so poor that one might almost dare 
to think it would have been the happier for them never to have been 
plated links upon the Dedlock chain of gold, but to have been made 
of common iron at first and done base service.

Service, however (with a few limited reservations, genteel but not 
profitable), they may not do, being of the Dedlock dignity.  So 
they visit their richer cousins, and get into debt when they can, 
and live but shabbily when they can't, and find--the women no 
husbands, and the men no wives--and ride in borrowed carriages, and 
sit at feasts that are never of their own making, and so go through 
high life.  The rich family sum has been divided by so many 
figures, and they are the something over that nobody knows what to 
do with.

Everybody on Sir Leicester Dedlock's side of the question and of 
his way of thinking would appear to be his cousin more or less.  
From my Lord Boodle, through the Duke of Foodle, down to Noodle, 
Sir Leicester, like a glorious spider, stretches his threads of 
relationship.  But while he is stately in the cousinship of the 
Everybodys, he is a kind and generous man, according to his 
dignified way, in the cousinship of the Nobodys; and at the present 
time, in despite of the damp, he stays out the visit of several 
such cousins at Chesney Wold with the constancy of a martyr.

Of these, foremost in the front rank stands Volumnia Dedlock, a 
young lady (of sixty) who is doubly highly related, having the 
honour to be a poor relation, by the mother's side, to another 
great family.  Miss Volumnia, displaying in early life a pretty 
talent for cutting ornaments out of coloured paper, and also for 
singing to the guitar in the Spanish tongue, and propounding French 
conundrums in country houses, passed the twenty years of her 
existence between twenty and forty in a sufficiently agreeable 
manner.  Lapsing then out of date and being considered to bore 
mankind by her vocal performances in the Spanish language, she 
retired to Bath, where she lives slenderly on an annual present 
from Sir Leicester and whence she makes occasional resurrections in 
the country houses of her cousins.  She has an extensive 
acquaintance at Bath among appalling old gentlemen with thin legs 
and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that dreary city.  
But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of an 
indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an 
obsolete pearl necklace like a rosary of little bird's-eggs.

In any country in a wholesome state, Volumnia would be a clear case 
for the pension list.  Efforts have been made to get her on it, and 
when William Buffy came in, it was fully expected that her name 
would be put down for a couple of hundred a year.  But William 
Buffy somehow discovered, contrary to all expectation, that these 
were not the times when it could be done, and this was the first 
clear indication Sir Leicester Dedlock had conveyed to him that the 
country was going to pieces.

There is likewise the Honourable Bob Stables, who can make warm 
mashes with the skill of a veterinary surgeon and is a better shot 
than most gamekeepers.  He has been for some time particularly 
desirous to serve his country in a post of good emoluments, 
unaccompanied by any trouble or responsibility.  In a well-
regulated body politic this natural desire on the part of a 
spirited young gentleman so highly connected would be speedily 
recognized, but somehow William Buffy found when he came in that 
these were not times in which he could manage that little matter 
either, and this was the second indication Sir Leicester Dedlock 
had conveyed to him that the country was going to pieces.

The rest of the cousins are ladies and gentlemen of various ages 
and capacities, the major part amiable and sensible and likely to 
have done well enough in life if they could have overcome their 
cousinship; as it is, they are almost all a little worsted by it, 
and lounge in purposeless and listless paths, and seem to be quite 
as much at a loss how to dispose of themselves as anybody else can 
be how to dispose of them.

In this society, and where not, my Lady Dedlock reigns supreme.  
Beautiful, elegant, accomplished, and powerful in her little world 
(for the world of fashion does not stretch ALL the way from pole to 
pole), her influence in Sir Leicester's house, however haughty and 
indifferent her manner, is greatly to improve it and refine it.  
The cousins, even those older cousins who were paralysed when Sir 
Leicester married her, do her feudal homage; and the Honourable Bob 
Stables daily repeats to some chosen person between breakfast and 
lunch his favourite original remark, that she is the best-groomed 
woman in the whole stud.

Such the guests in the long drawing-room at Chesney Wold this 
dismal night when the step on the Ghost's Walk (inaudible here, 
however) might be the step of a deceased cousin shut out in the 
cold.  It is near bed-time.  Bedroom fires blaze brightly all over 
the house, raising ghosts of grim furniture on wall and ceiling.  
Bedroom candlesticks bristle on the distant table by the door, and 
cousins yawn on ottomans.  Cousins at the piano, cousins at the 
soda-water tray, cousins rising from the card-table, cousins 
gathered round the fire.  Standing on one side of his own peculiar 
fire (for there are two), Sir Leicester.  On the opposite side of 
the broad hearth, my Lady at her table.  Volumnia, as one of the 
more privileged cousins, in a luxurious chair between them.  Sir 
Leicester glancing, with magnificent displeasure, at the rouge and 
the pearl necklace.

"I occasionally meet on my staircase here," drawls Volumnia, whose 
thoughts perhaps are already hopping up it to bed, after a long 
evening of very desultory talk, "one of the prettiest girls, I 
think, that I ever saw in my life."

"A PROTEGEE of my Lady's," observes Sir Leicester.

"I thought so.  I felt sure that some uncommon eye must have picked 
that girl out.  She really is a marvel.  A dolly sort of beauty 
perhaps," says Miss Volumnia, reserving her own sort, "but in its 
way, perfect; such bloom I never saw!"

Sir Leicester, with his magnificent glance of displeasure at the 
rouge, appears to say so too.

"Indeed," remarks my Lady languidly, "if there is any uncommon eye 
in the case, it is Mrs. Rouncewell's, and not mine.  Rosa is her 
discovery."

"Your maid, I suppose?"

"No.  My anything; pet--secretary--messenger--I don't know what."

"You like to have her about you, as you would like to have a 
flower, or a bird, or a picture, or a poodle--no, not a poodle, 
though--or anything else that was equally pretty?" says Volumnia, 
sympathizing.  "Yes, how charming now!  And how well that 
delightful old soul Mrs. Rouncewell is looking.  She must be an 
immense age, and yet she is as active and handsome!  She is the 
dearest friend I have, positively!"

Sir Leicester feels it to be right and fitting that the housekeeper 
of Chesney Wold should be a remarkable person.  Apart from that, he 
has a real regard for Mrs. Rouncewell and likes to hear her 
praised.  So he says, "You are right, Volumnia," which Volumnia is 
extremely glad to hear.

"She has no daughter of her own, has she?"

"Mrs. Rouncewell?  No, Volumnia.  She has a son.  Indeed, she had 
two."

My Lady, whose chronic malady of boredom has been sadly aggravated 
by Volumnia this evening, glances wearily towards the candlesticks 
and heaves a noiseless sigh.

"And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which the 
present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the 
opening of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions," says Sir 
Leicester with stately gloom, "that I have been informed by Mr. 
Tulkinghorn that Mrs. Rouncewell's son has been invited to go into 
Parliament."

Miss Volumnia utters a little sharp scream.

"Yes, indeed," repeats Sir Leicester.  "Into Parliament."

"I never heard of such a thing!  Good gracious, what is the man?" 
exclaims Volumnia.

"He is called, I believe--an--ironmaster."  Sir Leicester says it 
slowly and with gravity and doubt, as not being sure but that he is 
called a lead-mistress or that the right word may be some other 
word expressive of some other relationship to some other metal.

Volumnia utters another little scream.

"He has declined the proposal, if my information from Mr. 
Tulkinghorn be correct, as I have no doubt it is.  Mr. Tulkinghorn 
being always correct and exact; still that does not," says Sir 
Leicester, "that does not lessen the anomaly, which is fraught with 
strange considerations--startling considerations, as it appears to 
me."

Miss Volumnia rising with a look candlestick-wards, Sir Leicester 
politely performs the grand tour of the drawing-room, brings one, 
and lights it at my Lady's shaded lamp.

"I must beg you, my Lady," he says while doing so, "to remain a few 
moments, for this individual of whom I speak arrived this evening 
shortly before dinner and requested in a very becoming note"--Sir 
Leicester, with his habitual regard to truth, dwells upon it--"I am 
bound to say, in a very becoming and well-expressed note, the 
favour of a short interview with yourself and MYself on the subject 
of this young girl.  As it appeared that he wished to depart to-
night, I replied that we would see him before retiring."

Miss Volumnia with a third little scream takes flight, wishing her 
hosts--O Lud!--well rid of the--what is it?--ironmaster!

The other cousins soon disperse, to the last cousin there.  Sir 
Leicester rings the bell, "Make my compliments to Mr. Rouncewell, 
in the housekeeper's apartments, and say I can receive him now."

My Lady, who has beard all this with slight attention outwardly, 
looks towards Mr. Rouncewell as he comes in.  He is a little over 
fifty perhaps, of a good figure, like his mother, and has a clear 
voice, a broad forehead from which his dark hair has retired, and a 
shrewd though open face.  He is a responsible-looking gentleman 
dressed in black, portly enough, but strong and active.  Has a 
perfectly natural and easy air and is not in the least embarrassed 
by the great presence into which he comes.

"Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, as I have already apologized for 
intruding on you, I cannot do better than be very brief.  I thank 
you, Sir Leicester."

The head of the Dedlocks has motioned towards a sofa between 
himself and my Lady.  Mr. Rouncewell quietly takes his seat there.

"In these busy times, when so many great undertakings are in 
progress, people like myself have so many workmen in so many places 
that we are always on the flight."

Sir Leicester is content enough that the ironmaster should feel 
that there is no hurry there; there, in that ancient house, rooted 
in that quiet park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to 
mature, and the gnarled and warted elms and the umbrageous oaks 
stand deep in the fern and leaves of a hundred years; and where the 
sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly recorded for centuries that time 
which was as much the property of every Dedlock--while he lasted--
as the house and lands.  Sir Leicester sits down in an easy-chair, 
opposing his repose and that of Chesney Wold to the restless 
flights of ironmasters.

"Lady Dedlock has been so kind," proceeds Mr. Rouncewell with a 
respectful glance and a bow that way, "as to place near her a young 
beauty of the name of Rosa.  Now, my son has fallen in love with 
Rosa and has asked my consent to his proposing marriage to her and 
to their becoming engaged if she will take him--which I suppose she 
will.  I have never seen Rosa until to-day, but I have some 
confidence in my son's good sense--even in love.  I find her what 
he represents her, to the best of my judgment; and my mother speaks 
of her with great commendation."

"She in all respects deserves it," says my Lady.

"I am happy, Lady Dedlock, that you say so, and I need not comment 
on the value to me of your kind opinion of her."

"That," observes Sir Leicester with unspeakable grandeur, for he 
thinks the ironmaster a little too glib, "must be quite 
unnecessary."

"Quite unnecessary, Sir Leicester.  Now, my son is a very young 
man, and Rosa is a very young woman.  As I made my way, so my son 
must make his; and his being married at present is out of the 
question.  But supposing I gave my consent to his engaging himself 
to this pretty girl, if this pretty girl will engage herself to 
him, I think it a piece of candour to say at once--I am sure, Sir 
Leicester and Lady Dedlock, you will understand and excuse me--I 
should make it a condition that she did not remain at Chesney Wold.  
Therefore, before communicating further with my son, I take the 
liberty of saying that if her removal would be in any way 
inconvenient or objectionable, I will hold the matter over with him 
for any reasonable time and leave it precisely where it is."

Not remain at Chesney Wold!  Make it a condition!  All Sir 
Leicester's old misgivings relative to Wat Tyler and the people in 
the iron districts who do nothing but turn out by torchlight come 
in a shower upon his head, the fine grey hair of which, as well as 
of his whiskers, actually stirs with indignation.

"Am I to understand, sir," says Sir Leicester, "and is my Lady to 
understand"--he brings her in thus specially, first as a point of 
gallantry, and next as a point of prudence, having great reliance 
on her sense--"am I to understand, Mr. Rouncewell, and is my Lady 
to understand, sir, that you consider this young woman too good for 
Chesney Wold or likely to be injured by remaining here?"

"Certainly not, Sir Leicester,"

"I am glad to hear it."  Sir Leicester very lofty indeed.

"Pray, Mr. Rouncewell," says my Lady, warning Sir Leicester off 
with the slightest gesture of her pretty hand, as if he were a fly, 
"explain to me what you mean."

"Willingly, Lady Dedlock.  There is nothing I could desire more."

Addressing her composed face, whose intelligence, however, is too 
quick and active to be concealed by any studied impassiveness, 
however habitual, to the strong Saxon face of the visitor, a 
picture of resolution and perseverance, my Lady listens with 
attention, occasionally slightly bending her head.

"I am the son of your housekeeper, Lady Dedlock, and passed my 
childhood about this house.  My mother has lived here half a 
century and will die here I have no doubt.  She is one of those 
examples--perhaps as good a one as there is--of love, and 
attachment, and fidelity in such a nation, which England may well 
be proud of, but of which no order can appropriate the whole pride 
or the whole merit, because such an instance bespeaks high worth on 
two sides--on the great side assuredly, on the small one no less 
assuredly."

Sir Leicester snorts a little to hear the law laid down in this 
way, but in his honour and his love of truth, he freely, though 
silently, admits the justice of the ironmaster's proposition.

"Pardon me for saying what is so obvious, but I wouldn't have it 
hastily supposed," with the least turn of his eyes towards Sir 
Leicester, "that I am ashamed of my mother's position here, or 
wanting in all just respect for Chesney Wold and the family.  I 
certainly may have desired--I certainly have desired, Lady Dedlock
--that my mother should retire after so many years and end her days 
with me.  But as I have found that to sever this strong bond would 
be to break her heart, I have long abandoned that idea."

Sir Leicester very magnificent again at the notion of Mrs. 
Rouncewell being spirited off from her natural home to end her days 
with an ironmaster.

"I have been," proceeds the visitor in a modest, clear way, "an 
apprentice and a workman.  I have lived on workman's wages, years 
and years, and beyond a certain point have had to educate myself.  
My wife was a foreman's daughter, and plainly brought up.  We have 
three daughters besides this son of whom I have spoken, and being 
fortunately able to give them greater advantages than we have had 
ourselves, we have educated them well, very well.  It has been one 
of our great cares and pleasures to make them worthy of any 
station."

A little boastfulness in his fatherly tone here, as if he added in 
his heart, "even of the Chesney Wold station."  Not a little more 
magnificence, therefore, on the part of Sir Leicester.

"All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live, and among the 
class to which I belong, that what would be generally called 
unequal marriages are not of such rare occurrence with us as 
elsewhere.  A son will sometimes make it known to his father that 
he has fallen in love, say, with a young woman in the factory.  The 
father, who once worked in a factory himself, will be a little 
disappointed at first very possibly.  It may be that he had other 
views for his son.  However, the chances are that having 
ascertained the young woman to be of unblemished character, he will 
say to his son, 'I must be quite sure you are in earnest here.  
This is a serious matter for both of you.  Therefore I shall have 
this girl educated for two years,' or it may be, 'I shall place 
this girl at the same school with your sisters for such a time, 
during which you will give me your word and honour to see her only 
so often.  If at the expiration of that time, when she has so far 
profited by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair equality, 
you are both in the same mind, I will do my part to make you 
happy.'  I know of several cases such as I describe, my Lady, and I 
think they indicate to me my own course now."

Sir Leicester's magnificence explodes.  Calmly, but terribly.

"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with his right hand in the 
breast of his blue coat, the attitude of state in which he is 
painted in the gallery, "do you draw a parallel between Chesney 
Wold and a--"  Here he resists a disposition to choke, "a factory?"

"I need not reply, Sir Leicester, that the two places are very 
different; but for the purposes of this case, I think a parallel 
may be justly drawn between them."

Sir Leicester directs his majestic glance down one side of the long 
drawing-room and up the other before he can believe that he is 
awake.

"Are you aware, sir, that this young woman whom my Lady--my Lady--
has placed near her person was brought up at the village school 
outside the gates?"

"Sir Leicester, I am quite aware of it.  A very good school it is, 
and handsomely supported by this family."

"Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir Leicester, "the application of 
what you have said is, to me, incomprehensible."

"Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say," the 
ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village 
school as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's 
wife?"

From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this 
minute, to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework 
of society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks 
in consequence of people (iron-masters, lead-mistresses, and what 
not) not minding their catechism, and getting out of the station 
unto which they are called--necessarily and for ever, according to 
Sir Leicester's rapid logic, the first station in which they happen 
to find themselves; and from that, to their educating other people 
out of THEIR stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and 
opening the floodgates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift 
progress of the Dedlock mind.

"My Lady, I beg your pardon.  Permit me, for one moment!"  She has 
given a faint indication of intending to speak.  "Mr. Rouncewell, 
our views of duty, and our views of station, and our views of 
education, and our views of--in short, ALL our views--are so 
diametrically opposed, that to prolong this discussion must be 
repellent to your feelings and repellent to my own.  This young 
woman is honoured with my Lady's notice and favour.  If she wishes 
to withdraw herself from that notice and favour or if she chooses 
to place herself under the influence of any one who may in his 
peculiar opinions--you will allow me to say, in his peculiar 
opinions, though I readily admit that he is not accountable for 
them to me--who may, in his peculiar opinions, withdraw her from 
that notice and favour, she is at any time at liberty to do so.  We 
are obliged to you for the plainness with which you have spoken.  
It will have no effect of itself, one way or other, on the young 
woman's position here.  Beyond this, we can make no terms; and here 
we beg--if you will be so good--to leave the subject."

The visitor pauses a moment to give my Lady an opportunity, but she 
says nothing.  He then rises and replies, "Sir Leicester and Lady 
Dedlock, allow me to thank you for your attention and only to 
observe that I shall very seriously recommend my son to conquer his 
present inclinations.  Good night!"

"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester with all the nature of a 
gentleman shining in him, "it is late, and the roads are dark.  I 
hope your time is not so precious but that you will allow my Lady 
and myself to offer you the hospitality of Chesney Wold, for to-
night at least."

"I hope so," adds my Lady.

"I am much obliged to you, but I have to travel all night in order 
to reach a distant part of the country punctually at an appointed 
time in the morning."

Therewith the ironmaster takes his departure, Sir Leicester ringing 
the bell and my Lady rising as he leaves the room.

When my Lady goes to her boudoir, she sits down thoughtfully by the 
fire, and inattentive to the Ghost's Walk, looks at Rosa, writing 
in an inner room.  Presently my Lady calls her.

"Come to me, child.  Tell me the truth.  Are you in love?"

"Oh! My Lady!"

My Lady, looking at the downcast and blushing face, says smiling, 
"Who is it?  Is it Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson?"

"Yes, if you please, my Lady.  But I don't know that I am in love 
with him--yet."

"Yet, you silly little thing!  Do you know that he loves YOU, yet?"

"I think he likes me a little, my Lady."  And Rosa bursts into 
tears.

Is this Lady Dedlock standing beside the village beauty, smoothing 
her dark hair with that motherly touch, and watching her with eyes 
so full of musing interest?  Aye, indeed it is!

"Listen to me, child.  You are young and true, and I believe you 
are attached to me."

"Indeed I am, my Lady.  Indeed there is nothing in the world I 
wouldn't do to show how much."

"And I don't think you would wish to leave me just yet, Rosa, even 
for a lover?"

"No, my Lady!  Oh, no!"  Rosa looks up for the first time, quite 
frightened at the thought.

"Confide in me, my child.  Don't fear me.  I wish you to be happy, 
and will make you so--if I can make anybody happy on this earth."

Rosa, with fresh tears, kneels at her feet and kisses her hand.  My 
Lady takes the hand with which she has caught it, and standing with 
her eyes fixed on the fire, puts it about and about between her own 
two hands, and gradually lets it fall.  Seeing her so absorbed, 
Rosa softly withdraws; but still my Lady's eyes are on the fire.

In search of what?  Of any hand that is no more, of any hand that 
never was, of any touch that might have magically changed her life?  
Or does she listen to the Ghost's Walk and think what step does it 
most resemble?  A man's?  A woman's?  The pattering of a little 
child's feet, ever coming on--on--on?  Some melancholy influence is 
upon her, or why should so proud a lady close the doors and sit 
alone upon the hearth so desolate?

Volumnia is away next day, and all the cousins are scattered before 
dinner.  Not a cousin of the batch but is amazed to hear from Sir 
Leicester at breakfast-time of the obliteration of landmarks, and 
opening of floodgates, and cracking of the framework of society, 
manifested through Mrs. Rouncewell's son.  Not a cousin of the 
batch but is really indignant, and connects it with the feebleness 
of William Buffy when in office, and really does feel deprived of a 
stake in the country--or the pension list--or something--by fraud 
and wrong.  As to Volumnia, she is handed down the great staircase 
by Sir Leicester, as eloquent upon the theme as if there were a 
general rising in the north of England to obtain her rouge-pot and 
pearl necklace.  And thus, with a clatter of maids and valets--for 
it is one appurtenance of their cousinship that however difficult 
they may find it to keep themselves, they MUST keep maids and 
valets--the cousins disperse to the four winds of heaven; and the 
one wintry wind that blows to-day shakes a shower from the trees 
near the deserted house, as if all the cousins had been changed 
into leaves.



CHAPTER XXIX

The Young Man


Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in 
corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown 
holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock 
ancestors retire from the light of day again.  Around and around 
the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come 
circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.  Let 
the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the 
leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-
deep.  Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain 
beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl.  Mists hide in 
the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise 
across the rising grounds.  On all the house there is a cold, blank 
smell like the smell of a little church, though something dryer, 
suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in the long 
nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them.

But the house in town, which is rarely in the same mind as Chesney 
Wold at the same time, seldom rejoicing when it rejoices or 
mourning when it mourns, expecting when a Dedlock dies--the house 
in town shines out awakened.  As warm and bright as so much state 
may be, as delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear no 
trace of winter as hothouse flowers can make it, soft and hushed so 
that the ticking of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires 
alone disturb the stillness in the rooms, it seems to wrap those 
chilled bones of Sir Leicester's in rainbow-coloured wool.  And Sir 
Leicester is glad to repose in dignified contentment before the 
great fire in the library, condescendingly perusing the backs of 
his books or honouring the fine arts with a glance of approbation.  
For he has his pictures, ancient and modern.  Some of the Fancy 
Ball School in which art occasionally condescends to become a 
master, which would be best catalogued like the miscellaneous 
articles in a sale.  As '"Three high-backed chairs, a table and 
cover, long-necked bottle (containing wine), one flask, one Spanish 
female's costume, three-quarter face portrait of Miss Jogg the 
model, and a suit of armour containing Don Quixote."  Or "One stone 
terrace (cracked), one gondola in distance, one Venetian senator's 
dress complete, richly embroidered white satin costume with profile 
portrait of Miss Jogg the model, one Scimitar superbly mounted in 
gold with jewelled handle, elaborate Moorish dress (very rare), and 
Othello."

Mr. Tulkinghorn comes and goes pretty often, there being estate 
business to do, leases to be renewed, and so on.  He sees my Lady 
pretty often, too; and he and she are as composed, and as 
indifferent, and take as little heed of one another, as ever.  Yet 
it may be that my Lady fears this Mr. Tulkinghorn and that he knows 
it.  It may be that he pursues her doggedly and steadily, with no 
touch of compunction, remorse, or pity.  It may be that her beauty 
and all the state and brilliancy surrounding her only gives him the 
greater zest for what he is set upon and makes him the more 
inflexible in it.  Whether he be cold and cruel, whether immovable 
in what he has made his duty, whether absorbed in love of power, 
whether determined to have nothing hidden from him in ground where 
he has burrowed among secrets all his life, whether he in his heart 
despises the splendour of which he is a distant beam, whether he is 
always treasuring up slights and offences in the affability of his 
gorgeous clients--whether he be any of this, or all of this, it may 
be that my Lady had better have five thousand pairs of fashionahle 
eyes upon her, in distrustful vigilance, than the two eyes of this 
rusty lawyer with his wisp of neckcloth and his dull black breeches 
tied with ribbons at the knees.

Sir Leicester sits in my Lady's room--that room in which Mr. 
Tulkinghorn read the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce--
particularly complacent.  My Lady, as on that day, sits before the 
fire with her screen in her hand.  Sir Leicester is particularly 
complacent because he has found in his newspaper some congenial 
remarks bearing directly on the floodgates and the framework of 
society.  They apply so happily to the late case that Sir Leicester 
has come from the library to my Lady's room expressly to read them 
aloud.  "The man who wrote this article," he observes by way of 
preface, nodding at the fire as if he were nodding down at the man 
from a mount, "has a well-balanced mind."

The man's mind is not so well balanced but that he bores my Lady, 
who, after a languid effort to listen, or rather a languid 
resignation of herself to a show of listening, becomes distraught 
and falls into a contemplation of the fire as if it were her fire 
at Chesney Wold, and she had never left it.  Sir Leicester, quite 
unconscious, reads on through his double eye-glass, occasionally 
stopping to remove his glass and express approval, as "Very true 
indeed," "Very properly put," "I have frequently made the same 
remark myself," invariably losing his place after each observation, 
and going up and down the column to find it again.

Sir Leicester is reading with infinite gravity and state when the 
door opens, and the Mercury in powder makes this strange 
announcement, "The young man, my Lady, of the name of Guppy."

Sir Leicester pauses, stares, repeats in a killing voice, "The 
young man of the name of Guppy?"

Looking round, he beholds the young man of the name of Guppy, much 
discomfited and not presenting a very impressive letter of 
introduction in his manner and appearance.

"Pray," says Sir Leicester to Mercury, "what do you mean by 
announcing with this abruptness a young man of the name of Guppy?"

"I beg your pardon, Sir Leicester, but my Lady said she would see 
the young man whenever he called.  I was not aware that you were 
here, Sir Leicester."

With this apology, Mercury directs a scornful and indignant look at 
the young man of the name of Guppy which plainly says, "What do you 
come calling here for and getting ME into a row?"

"It's quite right.  I gave him those directions," says my Lady.  
"Let the young man wait."

"By no means, my Lady.  Since he has your orders to come, I will 
not interrupt you."  Sir Leicester in his gallantry retires, rather 
declining to accept a bow from the young man as he goes out and 
majestically supposing him to be some shoemaker of intrusive 
appearance.

Lady Dedlock looks imperiously at her visitor when the servant has 
left the room, casting her eyes over him from head to foot.  She 
suffers him to stand by the door and asks him what he wants.

"That your ladyship would have the kindness to oblige me with a 
little conversation," returns Mr. Guppy, embarrassed.

"You are, of course, the person who has written me so many 
letters?"

"Several, your ladyship.  Several before your ladyship condescended 
to favour me with an answer."

"And could you not take the same means of rendering a Conversation 
unnecessary?  Can you not still?"

Mr. Guppy screws his mouth into a silent "No!" and shakes his head.

"You have been strangely importunate.  If it should appear, after 
all, that what you have to say does not concern me--and I don't 
know how it can, and don't expect that it will--you will allow me 
to cut you short with but little ceremony.  Say what you have to 
say, if you please."

My Lady, with a careless toss of her screen, turns herself towards 
the fire again, sitting almost with her back to the young man of 
the name of Guppy.

"With your ladyship's permission, then," says the young man, "I 
will now enter on my business.  Hem!  I am, as I told your ladyship 
in my first letter, in the law.  Being in the law, I have learnt 
the habit of not committing myself in writing, and therefore I did 
not mention to your ladyship the name of the firm with which I am 
connected and in which my standing--and I may add income--is 
tolerably good.  I may now state to your ladyship, in confidence, 
that the name of that firm is Kenge and Carboy, of Lincoln's Inn, 
which may not be altogether unknown to your ladyship in connexion 
with the case in Chancery of Jarndyce and Jarndyce."

My Lady's figure begins to be expressive of some attention.  She 
has ceased to toss the screen and holds it as if she were 
listening.

"Now, I may say to your ladyship at once," says Mr. Guppy, a little 
emboldened, "it is no matter arising out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce 
that made me so desirous to speak to your ladyship, which conduct I 
have no doubt did appear, and does appear, obtrusive--in fact, 
almost blackguardly."

After waiting for a moment to receive some assurance to the 
contrary, and not receiving any, Mr. Guppy proceeds, "If it had 
been Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I should have gone at once to your 
ladyship's solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, of the Fields.  I have the 
pleasure of being acquainted with Mr. Tulkinghorn--at least we move 
when we meet one another--and if it had been any business of that 
sort, I should have gone to him."

My Lady turns a little round and says, "You had better sit down."

"Thank your ladyship."  Mr. Guppy does so.  "Now, your ladyship"--
Mr. Guppy refers to a little slip of paper on which he has made 
small notes of his line of argument and which seems to involve him 
in the densest obscurity whenever he looks at it--"I--Oh, yes!--I 
place myself entirely in your ladyship's hands.  If your ladyship 
was to make any complaint to Kenge and Carboy or to Mr. Tulkinghorn 
of the present visit, I should be placed in a very disagreeable 
situation.  That, I openly admit.  Consequently, I rely upon your 
ladyship's honour."

My Lady, with a disdainful gesture of the hand that holds the 
screen, assures him of his being worth no complaint from her.

"Thank your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy; "quite satisfactory.  Now--
I--dash it!--The fact is that I put down a head or two here of the 
order of the points I thought of touching upon, and they're written 
short, and I can't quite make out what they mean.  If your ladyship 
will excuse me taking it to the window half a moment, I--"

Mr. Guppy, going to the window, tumbles into a pair of love-birds, 
to whom he says in his confusion, "I beg your pardon, I am sure."  
This does not tend to the greater legibility of his notes.  He 
murmurs, growing warm and red and holding the slip of paper now 
close to his eyes, now a long way off, "C.S.  What's C.S. for?  Oh!  
C.S.!  Oh, I know!  Yes, to be sure!"  And comes back enlightened.

"I am not aware," says Mr. Guppy, standing midway between my Lady 
and his chair, "whether your ladyship ever happened to hear of, or 
to see, a young lady of the name of Miss Esther Summerson."

My Lady's eyes look at him full.  "I saw a young lady of that name 
not long ago.  This past autumn."

"Now, did it strike your ladyship that she was like anybody?" asks 
Mr. Guppy, crossing his arms, holding his head on one side, and 
scratching the corner of his mouth with his memoranda.

My Lady removes her eyes from him no more.

"No."

"Not like your ladyship's family?"

"No."

"I think your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "can hardly remember Miss 
Summerson's face?"

"I remember the young lady very well.  What has this to do with 
me?"

"Your ladyship, I do assure you that having Miss Summerson's image 
imprinted on my 'eart--which I mention in confidence--I found, when 
I had the honour of going over your ladyship's mansion of Chesney 
Wold while on a short out in the county of Lincolnshire with a 
friend, such a resemblance between Miss Esther Summerson and your 
ladyship's own portrait that it completely knocked me over, so much 
so that I didn't at the moment even know what it WAS that knocked 
me over.  And now I have the honour of beholding your ladyship near 
(I have often, since that, taken the liberty of looking at your 
ladyship in your carriage in the park, when I dare say you was not 
aware of me, but I never saw your ladyship so near), it's really 
more surprising than I thought it."

Young man of the name of Guppy!  There have been times, when ladies 
lived in strongholds and had unscrupulous attendants within call, 
when that poor life of yours would NOT have been worth a minute's 
purchase, with those beautiful eyes looking at you as they look at 
this moment.

My Lady, slowly using her little hand-screen as a fan, asks him 
again what he supposes that his taste for likenesses has to do with 
her.

"Your ladyship," replies Mr. Guppy, again referring to his paper, 
"I am coming to that.  Dash these notes!  Oh!  'Mrs. Chadband.'  
Yes."  Mr. Guppy draws his chair a little forward and seats himself 
again.  My Lady reclines in her chair composedly, though with a 
trifle less of graceful ease than usual perhaps, and never falters 
in her steady gaze.  "A--stop a minute, though!"  Mr. Guppy refers 
again.  "E.S. twice?  Oh, yes!  Yes, I see my way now, right on."

Rolling up the slip of paper as an instrument to point his speech 
with, Mr. Guppy proceeds.

"Your ladyship, there is a mystery about Miss Esther Summerson's 
birth and bringing up.  I am informed of that fact because--which I 
mention in confidence--I know it in the way of my profession at 
Kenge and Carboy's.  Now, as I have already mentioned to your 
ladyship, Miss Summerson's image is imprinted on my 'eart.  If I 
could clear this mystery for her, or prove her to be well related, 
or find that having the honour to be a remote branch of your 
ladyship's family she had a right to be made a party in Jarndyce 
and Jarndyce, why, I might make a sort of a claim upon Miss 
Summerson to look with an eye of more dedicated favour on my 
proposals than she has exactly done as yet.  In fact, as yet she 
hasn't favoured them at all."

A kind of angry smile just dawns upon my Lady's face.

"Now, it's a very singular circumstance, your ladyship," says Mr. 
Guppy, "though one of those circumstances that do fall in the way 
of us professional men--which I may call myself, for though not 
admitted, yet I have had a present of my articles made to me by 
Kenge and Carboy, on my mother's advancing from the principal of 
her little income the money for the stamp, which comes heavy--that 
I have encountered the person who lived as servant with the lady 
who brought Miss Summerson up before Mr. Jarndyce took charge of 
her.  That lady was a Miss Barbary, your ladyship."

Is the dead colour on my Lady's face reflected from the screen 
which has a green silk ground and which she holds in her raised 
hand as if she had forgotten it, or is it a dreadful paleness that 
has fallen on her?

"Did your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "ever happen to hear of Miss 
Barbary?"

"I don't know.  I think so.  Yes."

"Was Miss Barbary at all connected with your ladyship's family?"

My Lady's lips move, but they utter nothing.  She shakes her head.

"NOT connected?" says Mr. Guppy.  "Oh! Not to your ladyship's 
knowledge, perhaps?  Ah! But might be?  Yes."  After each of these 
interrogatories, she has inclined her head.  "Very good!  Now, this 
Miss Barbary was extremely close--seems to have been 
extraordinarily close for a female, females being generally (in 
common life at least) rather given to conversation--and my witness 
never had an idea whether she possessed a single relative.  On one 
occasion, and only one, she seems to have been confidential to my 
witness on a single point, and she then told her that the little 
girl's real name was not Esther Summerson, but Esther Hawdon."

"My God!"

Mr. Guppy stares.  Lady Dedlock sits before him looking him 
through, with the same dark shade upon her face, in the same 
attitude even to the holding of the screen, with her lips a little 
apart, her brow a little contracted, but for the moment dead.  He 
sees her consciousness return, sees a tremor pass across her frame 
like a ripple over water, sees her lips shake, sees her compose 
them by a great effort, sees her force herself back to the 
knowledge of his presence and of what he has said.  All this, so 
quickly, that her exclamation and her dead condition seem to have 
passed away like the features of those long-preserved dead bodies 
sometimes opened up in tombs, which, struck by the air like 
lightning, vanish in a breath.

"Your ladyship is acquainted with the name of Hawdon?"

"I have heard it before."

"Name of any collateral or remote branch of your ladyship's 
family?"

"No."

"Now, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy, "I come to the last point of 
the case, so far as I have got it up.  It's going on, and I shall 
gather it up closer and closer as it goes on.  Your ladyship must 
know--if your ladyship don't happen, by any chance, to know 
already--that there was found dead at the house of a person named 
Krook, near Chancery Lane, some time ago, a law-writer in great 
distress.  Upon which law-writer there was an inquest, and which 
law-writer was an anonymous character, his name being unknown.  
But, your ladyship, I have discovered very lately that that law-
writer's name was Hawdon."

"And what is THAT to me?"

"Aye, your ladyship, that's the question!  Now, your ladyship, a 
queer thing happened after that man's death.  A lady started up, a 
disguised lady, your ladyship, who went to look at the scene of 
action and went to look at his grave.  She hired a crossing-
sweeping boy to show it her.  If your ladyship would wish to have 
the boy produced in corroboration of this statement, I can lay my 
hand upon him at any time."

The wretched boy is nothing to my Lady, and she does NOT wish to 
have him produced.

"Oh, I assure your ladyship it's a very queer start indeed," says 
Mr. Guppy.  "If you was to hear him tell about the rings that 
sparkled on her fingers when she took her glove off, you'd think it 
quite romantic."

There are diamonds glittering on the hand that holds the screen.  
My Lady trifles with the screen and makes them glitter more, again 
with that expression which in other times might have been so 
dangerous to the young man of the name of Guppy.

"It was supposed, your ladyship, that he left no rag or scrap 
behind him by which he could be possibly identified.  But he did.  
He left a bundle of old letters."

The screen still goes, as before.  All this time her eyes never 
once release him.

"They were taken and secreted.  And to-morrow night, your ladyship, 
they will come into my possession."

"Still I ask you, what is this to me?"

"Your ladyship, I conclude with that."  Mr. Guppy rises.  "If you 
think there's enough in this chain of circumstances put together--
in the undoubted strong likeness of this young lady to your 
ladyship, which is a positive fact for a jury; in her having been 
brought up by Miss Barbary; in Miss Barbary stating Miss 
Summerson's real name to be Hawdon; in your ladyship's knowing both 
these names VERY WELL; and in Hawdon's dying as he did--to give 
your ladyship a family interest in going further into the case, I 
will bring these papers here.  I don't know what they are, except 
that they are old letters: I have never had them in my posession 
yet.  I will bring those papers here as soon as I get them and go 
over them for the first time with your ladyship.  I have told your 
ladyship my object.  I have told your ladyship that I should be 
placed in a very disagreeable situation if any complaint was made, 
and all is in strict confidence."

Is this the full purpose of the young man of the name of Guppy, or 
has he any other?  Do his words disclose the length, breadth, 
depth, of his object and suspicion in coming here; or if not, what 
do they hide?  He is a match for my Lady there.  She may look at 
him, but he can look at the table and keep that witness-box face of 
his from telling anything.

"You may bring the letters," says my Lady, "if you choose."

"Your ladyship is not very encouraging, upon my word and honour," 
says Mr. Guppy, a little injured.

"You may bring the letters," she repeats in the same tone, "if you
--please."

"It shall he done.  I wish your ladyship good day."

On a table near her is a rich bauble of a casket, barred and 
clasped like an old strong-chest.  She, looking at him still, takes 
it to her and unlocks it.

"Oh! I assure your ladyship I am not actuated by any motives of 
that sort," says Mr. Guppy, "and I couldn't accept anything of the 
kind.  I wish your ladyship good day, and am much obliged to you 
all the same."

So the young man makes his bow and goes downstairs, where the 
supercilious Mercury does not consider himself called upon to leave 
his Olympus by the hall-fire to let the young man out.

As Sir Leicester basks in his library and dozes over his newspaper, 
is there no influence in the house to startle him, not to say to 
make the very trees at Chesney Wold fling up their knotted arms, 
the very portraits frown, the very armour stir?

No.  Words, sobs, and cries are but air, and air is so shut in and 
shut out throughout the house in town that sounds need be uttered 
trumpet-tongued indeed by my Lady in her chamber to carry any faint 
vibration to Sir Leicester's ears; and yet this cry is in the 
house, going upward from a wild figure on its knees.

"O my child, my child!  Not dead in the first hours of her life, as 
my cruel sister told me, but sternly nurtured by her, after she had 
renounced me and my name!  O my child, O my child!"



CHAPTER XXX

Esther's Narrative


Richard had been gone away some time when a visitor came to pass a 
few days with us.  It was an elderly lady.  It was Mrs. Woodcourt, 
who, having come from Wales to stay with Mrs. Bayham Badger and 
having written to my guardian, "by her son Allan's desire," to 
report that she had heard from him and that he was well "and sent 
his kind remembrances to all of us," had been invited by my 
guardian to make a visit to Bleak House.  She stayed with us nearly 
three weeks.  She took very kindly to me and was extremely 
confidential, so much so that sometimes she almost made me 
uncomfortable.  I had no right, I knew very well, to be 
uncomfortable because she confided in me, and I felt it was 
unreasonable; still, with all I could do, I could not quite help it.

She was such a sharp little lady and used to sit with her hands 
folded in each other looking so very watchful while she talked to 
me that perhaps I found that rather irksome.  Or perhaps it was her 
being so upright and trim, though I don't think it was that, 
because I thought that quaintly pleasant.  Nor can it have been the 
general expression of her face, which was very sparkling and pretty 
for an old lady.  I don't know what it was.  Or at least if I do 
now, I thought I did not then.  Or at least--but it don't matter.

Of a night when I was going upstairs to bed, she would invite me 
into her room, where she sat before the fire in a great chair; and, 
dear me, she would tell me about Morgan ap-Kerrig until I was quite 
low-spirited!  Sometimes she recited a few verses from 
Crumlinwallinwer and the Mewlinn-willinwodd (if those are the right 
names, which I dare say they are not), and would become quite fiery 
with the sentiments they expressed.  Though I never knew what they 
were (being in Welsh), further than that they were highly 
eulogistic of the lineage of Morgan ap-Kerrig.

"So, Miss Summerson," she would say to me with stately triumph, 
"this, you see, is the fortune inherited by my son.  Wherever my 
son goes, he can claim kindred with Ap-Kerrig.  He may not have 
money, but he always has what is much better--family, my dear."

I had my doubts of their caring so very much for Morgan ap-Kerrig 
in India and China, but of course I never expressed them.  I used 
to say it was a great thing to be so highly connected.

"It IS, my dear, a great thing," Mrs. Woodcourt would reply.  "It 
has its disadvantages; my son's choice of a wife, for instance, is 
limited by it, but the matrimonial choice of the royal family is 
limited in much the same manner."

Then she would pat me on the arm and smooth my dress, as much as to 
assure me that she had a good opinion of me, the distance between 
us notwithstanding.

"Poor Mr. Woodcourt, my dear," she would say, and always with some 
emotion, for with her lofty pedigree she had a very affectionate 
heart, "was descended from a great Highland family, the MacCoorts 
of MacCoort.  He served his king and country as an officer in the 
Royal Highlanders, and he died on the field.  My son is one of the 
last representatives of two old families.  With the blessing of 
heaven he will set them up again and unite them with another old 
family."

It was in vain for me to try to change the subject, as I used to 
try, only for the sake of novelty or perhaps because--but I need 
not be so particular.  Mrs. Woodcourt never would let me change it.

"My dear," she said one night, "you have so much sense and you look 
at the world in a quiet manner so superior to your time of life 
that it is a comfort to me to talk to you about these family 
matters of mine.  You don't know much of my son, my dear; but you 
know enough of him, I dare say, to recollect him?"

"Yes, ma'am.  I recollect him."

"Yes, my dear.  Now, my dear, I think you are a judge of character, 
and I should like to have your opinion of him."

"Oh, Mrs. Woodcourt," said I, "that is so difficult!"

"Why is it so difficult, my dear?" she returned.  "I don't see it 
myself."

"To give an opinion--"

"On so slight an acquaintance, my dear.  THAT'S true."

I didn't mean that, because Mr. Woodcourt had been at our house a 
good deal altogether and had become quite intimate with my 
guardian.  I said so, and added that he seemed to be very clever in 
his profession--we thought--and that his kindness and gentleness to 
Miss Flite were above all praise.

"You do him justice!" said Mrs. Woodcourt, pressing my hand.  "You 
define him exactly.  Allan is a dear fellow, and in his profession 
faultless.  I say it, though I am his mother.  Still, I must 
confess he is not without faults, love."

"None of us are," said I.

"Ah! But his really are faults that he might correct, and ought to 
correct," returned the sharp old lady, sharply shaking her head.  
"I am so much attached to you that I may confide in you, my dear, 
as a third party wholly disinterested, that he is fickleness 
itself."

I said I should have thought it hardly possible that he could have 
been otherwise than constant to his profession and zealous in the 
pursuit of it, judging from the reputation he had earned.

"You are right again, my dear," the old lady retorted, "but I don't 
refer to his profession, look you."

"Oh!" said I.

"No," said she.  "I refer, my dear, to his social conduct.  He is 
always paying trivial attentions to young ladies, and always has 
been, ever since he was eighteen.  Now, my dear, he has never 
really cared for any one of them and has never meant in doing this 
to do any harm or to express anything but politeness and good 
nature.  Still, it's not right, you know; is it?"

"No," said I, as she seemed to wait for me.

"And it might lead to mistaken notions, you see, my dear."

I supposed it might.

"Therefore, I have told him many times that he really should be 
more careful, both in justice to himself and in justice to others.  
And he has always said, 'Mother, I will be; but you know me better 
than anybody else does, and you know I mean no harm--in short, mean 
nothing.'  All of which is very true, my dear, but is no 
justification.  However, as he is now gone so far away and for an 
indefinite time, and as he will have good opportunities and 
introductions, we may consider this past and gone.  And you, my 
dear," said the old lady, who was now all nods and smiles, 
"regarding your dear self, my love?"

"Me, Mrs. Woodcourt?"

"Not to be always selfish, talking of my son, who has gone to seek 
his fortune and to find a wife--when do you mean to seek YOUR 
fortune and to find a husband, Miss Summerson?  Hey, look you!  Now 
you blush!"

I don't think I did blush--at all events, it was not important if I 
did--and I said my present fortune perfectly contented me and I had 
no wish to change it.

"Shall I tell you what I always think of you and the fortune yet to 
come for you, my love?" said Mrs. Woodcourt.

"If you believe you are a good prophet," said I. 

"Why, then, it is that you will marry some one very rich and very 
worthy, much older--five and twenty years, perhaps--than yourself.  
And you will be an excellent wife, and much beloved, and very 
happy."

"That is a good fortune," said I.  "But why is it to be mine?"

"My dear," she returned, "there's suitability in it--you are so 
busy, and so neat, and so peculiarly situated altogether that 
there's suitability in it, and it will come to pass.  And nobody, 
my love, will congratulate you more sincerely on such a marriage 
than I shall."

It was curious that this should make me uncomfortable, but I think 
it did.  I know it did.  It made me for some part of that night 
uncomfortable.  I was so ashamed of my folly that I did not like to 
confess it even to Ada, and that made me more uncomfortable still.  
I would have given anything not to have been so much in the bright 
old lady's confidence if I could have possibly declined it.  It 
gave me the most inconsistent opinions of her.  At one time I 
thought she was a story-teller, and at another time that she was 
the pink of truth.  Now I suspected that she was very cunning, next 
moment I believed her honest Welsh heart to be perfectly innocent 
and simple.  And after all, what did it matter to me, and why did 
it matter to me?  Why could not I, going up to bed with my basket 
of keys, stop to sit down by her fire and accommodate myself for a 
little while to her, at least as well as to anybody else, and not 
trouble myself about the harmless things she said to me?  Impelled 
towards her, as I certainly was, for I was very anxious that she 
should like me and was very glad indeed that she did, why should I 
harp afterwards, with actual distress and pain, on every word she 
said and weigh it over and over again in twenty scales?  Why was it 
so worrying to me to have her in our house, and confidential to me 
every night, when I yet felt that it was better and safer somehow 
that she should be there than anywhere else?  These were 
perplexities and contradictions that I could not account for.  At 
least, if I could--but I shall come to all that by and by, and it 
is mere idleness to go on about it now.

So when Mrs. Woodcourt went away, I was sorry to lose her but was 
relieved too.  And then Caddy Jellyby came down, and Caddy brought 
such a packet of domestic news that it gave us abundant occupation.

First Caddy declared (and would at first declare nothing else) that 
I was the best adviser that ever was known.  This, my pet said, was 
no news at all; and this, I said, of course, was nonsense.  Then 
Caddy told us that she was going to be married in a month and that 
if Ada and I would be her bridesmaids, she was the happiest girl in 
the world.  To be sure, this was news indeed; and I thought we 
never should have done talking about it, we had so much to say to 
Caddy, and Caddy had so much to say to us.

It seemed that Caddy's unfortunate papa had got over his 
bankruptcy--"gone through the Gazette," was the expression Caddy 
used, as if it were a tunnel--with the general clemency and 
commiseration of his creditors, and had got rid of his affairs in 
some blessed manner without succeeding in understanding them, and 
had given up everything he possessed (which was not worth much, I 
should think, to judge from the state of the furniture), and had 
satisfied every one concerned that he could do no more, poor man.  
So, he had been honourably dismissed to "the office" to begin the 
world again.  What he did at the office, I never knew; Caddy said 
he was a "custom-house and general agent," and the only thing I 
ever understood about that business was that when he wanted money 
more than usual he went to the docks to look for it, and hardly 
ever found it.

As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this 
shorn lamb, and they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton 
Garden (where I found the children, when I afterwards went there, 
cutting the horse hair out of the seats of the chairs and choking 
themselves with it), Caddy had brought about a meeting between him 
and old Mr. Turveydrop; and poor Mr. Jellyby, being very humble and 
meek, had deferred to Mr. Turveydrop's deportment so submissively 
that they had become excellent friends.  By degrees, old Mr. 
Turveydrop, thus familiarized with the idea of his son's marriage, 
had worked up his parental feelings to the height of contemplating 
that event as being near at hand and had given his gracious consent 
to the young couple commencing housekeeping at the academy in 
Newman Street when they would.

"And your papa, Caddy.  What did he say?"

"Oh! Poor Pa," said Caddy, "only cried and said he hoped we might 
get on better than he and Ma had got on.  He didn't say so before 
Prince, he only said so to me.  And he said, 'My poor girl, you 
have not been very well taught how to make a home for your husband, 
but unless you mean with all your heart to strive to do it, you bad 
better murder him than marry him--if you really love him.'"

"And how did you reassure him, Caddy?"

"Why, it was very distressing, you know, to see poor Pa so low and 
hear him say such terrible things, and I couldn't help crying 
myself.  But I told him that I DID mean it with all my heart and 
that I hoped our house would be a place for him to come and find 
some comfort in of an evening and that I hoped and thought I could 
be a better daughter to him there than at home.  Then I mentioned 
Peepy's coming to stay with me, and then Pa began to cry again and 
said the children were Indians."

"Indians, Caddy?"

"Yes," said Caddy, "wild Indians.  And Pa said"--here she began to 
sob, poor girl, not at all like the happiest girl in the world--
"that he was sensible the best thing that could happen to them was 
their being all tomahawked together."

Ada suggested that it was comfortable to know that Mr. Jellyby did 
not mean these destructive sentiments.

"No, of course I know Pa wouldn't like his family to be weltering 
in their blood," said Caddy, "but he means that they are very 
unfortunate in being Ma's children and that he is very unfortunate 
in being Ma's husband; and I am sure that's true, though it seems 
unnatural to say so."

I asked Caddy if Mrs. Jellyby knew that her wedding-day was fixed.

"Oh! You know what Ma is, Esther," she returned.  "It's impossible 
to say whether she knows it or not.  She has been told it often 
enough; and when she IS told it, she only gives me a placid look, 
as if I was I don't know what--a steeple in the distance," said 
Caddy with a sudden idea; "and then she shakes her head and says 
'Oh, Caddy, Caddy, what a tease you are!' and goes on with the 
Borrioboola letters."

"And about your wardrobe, Caddy?" said I.  For she was under no 
restraint with us.

"Well, my dear Esther,'' she returned, drying her eyes, "I must do 
the best I can and trust to my dear Prince never to have an unkind 
remembrance of my coming so shabbily to him.  If the question 
concerned an outfit for Borrioboola, Ma would know all about it and 
would be quite excited.  Being what it is, she neither knows nor 
cares."

Caddy was not at all deficient in natural affection for her mother, 
but mentioned this with tears as an undeniable fact, which I am 
afraid it was.  We were sorry for the poor dear girl and found so 
much to admire in the good disposition which had survived under 
such discouragement that we both at once (I mean Ada and I) 
proposed a little scheme that made her perfectly joyful.  This was 
her staying with us for three weeks, my staying with her for one, 
and our all three contriving and cutting out, and repairing, and 
sewing, and saving, and doing the very best we could think of to 
make the most of her stock.  My guardian being as pleased with the 
idea as Caddy was, we took her home next day to arrange the matter 
and brought her out again in triumph with her boxes and all the 
purchases that could be squeezed out of a ten-pound note, which Mr. 
Jellyby had found in the docks I suppose, but which he at all 
events gave her.  What my guardian would not have given her if we 
had encouraged him, it would be difficult to say, but we thought it 
right to compound for no more than her wedding-dress and bonnet.  
He agreed to this compromise, and if Caddy had ever been happy in 
her life, she was happy when we sat down to work.

She was clumsy enough with her needle, poor girl, and pricked her 
fingers as much as she had been used to ink them.  She could not 
help reddening a little now and then, partly with the smart and 
partly with vexation at being able to do no better, but she soon 
got over that and began to improve rapidly.  So day after day she, 
and my darling, and my little maid Charley, and a milliner out of 
the town, and I, sat hard at work, as pleasantly as possible.

Over and above this, Caddy was very anxious "to learn 
housekeeping," as she said.  Now, mercy upon us!  The idea of her 
learning housekeeping of a person of my vast experience was such a 
joke that I laughed, and coloured up, and fell into a comical 
confusion when she proposed it.  However, I said, "Caddy, I am sure 
you are very welcome to learn anything that you can learn of ME, my 
dear," and I showed her all my books and methods and all my fidgety 
ways.  You would have supposed that I was showing her some 
wonderful inventions, by her study of them; and if you had seen 
her, whenever I jingled my housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, 
certainly you might have thought that there never was a greater 
imposter than I with a blinder follower than Caddy Jellyby.

So what with working and housekeeping, and lessons to Charley, and 
backgammon in the evening with my guardian, and duets with Ada, the 
three weeks slipped fast away.  Then I went home with Caddy to see 
what could be done there, and Ada and Charley remained behind to 
take care of my guardian.

When I say I went home with Caddy, I mean to the furnished lodging 
in Hatton Garden.  We went to Newman Street two or three times, 
where preparations were in progress too--a good many, I observed, 
for enhancing the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few for 
putting the newly married couple away cheaply at the top of the 
house--but our great point was to make the furnished lodging decent 
for the wedding-breakfast and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby beforehand with 
some faint sense of the occasion.

The latter was the more difficult thing of the two because Mrs. 
Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front sitting-room (the 
back one was a mere closet), and it was littered down with waste-
paper and Borrioboolan documents, as an untidy stable might be 
littered with straw.  Mrs. Jellyby sat there all day drinking 
strong coffee, dictating, and holding Borrioboolan interviews by 
appointment.  The unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going 
into a decline, took his meals out of the house.  When Mr. Jellyby 
came home, he usually groaned and went down into the kitchen.  
There he got something to eat if the servant would give him 
anything, and then, feeling that he was in the way, went out and 
walked about Hatton Garden in the wet.  The poor children scrambled 
up and tumbled down the house as they had always been accustomed to 
do.

The production of these devoted little sacrifices in any 
presentable condition being quite out of the question at a week's 
notice, I proposed to Caddy that we should make them as happy as we 
could on her marriage morning in the attic where they all slept, 
and should confine our greatest efforts to her mama and her mama's 
room, and a clean breakfast.  In truth Mrs. Jellyby required a good 
deal of attention, the lattice-work up her back having widened 
considerably since I first knew her and her hair looking like the 
mane of a dustman's horse.

Thinking that the display of Caddy's wardrobe would be the best 
means of approaching the subject, I invited Mrs. Jellyby to come 
and look at it spread out on Caddy's bed in the evening after the 
unwholesome boy was gone.

"My dear Miss Summerson," said she, rising from her desk with her 
usual sweetness of temper, "these are really ridiculous 
preparations, though your assisting them is a proof of your 
kindness.  There is something so inexpressibly absurd to me in the 
idea of Caddy being married!  Oh, Caddy, you silly, silly, silly 
puss!"

She came upstairs with us notwithstanding and looked at the clothes 
in her customary far-off manner.  They suggested one distinct idea 
to her, for she said with her placid smile, and shaking her head, 
"My good Miss Summerson, at half the cost, this weak child might 
have been equipped for Africa!"

On our going downstairs again, Mrs. Jellyby asked me whether this 
troublesome business was really to take place next Wednesday.  And 
on my replying yes, she said, "Will my room be required, my dear 
Miss Summerson?  For it's quite impossible that I can put my papers 
away."

I took the liberty of saying that the room would certainly be 
wanted and that I thought we must put the papers away somewhere.  
"Well, my dear Miss Summerson," said Mrs. Jellyby, "you know best, 
I dare say.  But by obliging me to employ a boy, Caddy has 
embarrassed me to that extent, overwhelmed as I am with public 
business, that I don't know which way to turn.  We have a 
Ramification meeting, too, on Wednesday afternoon, and the 
inconvenience is very serious."

"It is not likely to occur again," said I, smiling.  "Caddy will be 
married but once, probably."

"That's true," Mrs. Jellyby replied; "that's true, my dear.  I 
suppose we must make the best of it!"

The next question was how Mrs. Jellyby should be dressed on the 
occasion.  I thought it very curious to see her looking on serenely 
from her writing-table while Caddy and I discussed it, occasionally 
shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile like a 
superior spirit who could just bear with our trifling.

The state in which her dresses were, and the extraordinary 
confusion in which she kept them, added not a little to our 
difficulty; but at length we devised something not very unlike what 
a common-place mother might wear on such an occasion.  The 
abstracted manner in which Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to 
having this attire tried on by the dressmaker, and the sweetness 
with which she would then observe to me how sorry she was that I 
had not turned my thoughts to Africa, were consistent with the rest 
of her behaviour.

The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if 
Mrs. Jellyby's household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul's 
or Saint Peter's, the sole advantage they would have found in the 
size of the building would have been its affording a great deal of 
room to be dirty in.  I believe that nothing belonging to the 
family which it had been possible to break was unbroken at the time 
of those preparations for Caddy's marriage, that nothing which it 
had been possible to spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no 
domestic object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear 
child's knee to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could 
well accumulate upon it.

Poor Mr. Jellyby, who very seldom spoke and almost always sat when 
he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested 
when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some 
order among all this waste and ruin and took off his coat to help.  
But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when 
they were opened--bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby's 
caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, 
firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of 
paper bags, footstools, blacklead brushes, bread, Mrs. Jellyby's 
bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle 
ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks, 
nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-
grounds, umbrellas--that he looked frightened, and left off again.  
But he came regularly every evening and sat without his coat, with 
his head against the wall, as though he would have helped us if he 
had known how.

"Poor Pa!" said Caddy to me on the night before the great day, when 
we really had got things a little to rights.  "It seems unkind to 
leave him, Esther.  But what could I do if I stayed!  Since I first 
knew you, I have tidied and tidied over and over again, but it's 
useless.  Ma and Africa, together, upset the whole house directly.  
We never have a servant who don't drink.  Ma's ruinous to 
everything."

Mr. Jellyby could not hear what she said, but he seemed very low 
indeed and shed tears, I thought.

"My heart aches for him; that it does!" sobbed Caddy.  "I can't 
help thinking to-night, Esther, how dearly I hope to be happy with 
Prince, and how dearly Pa hoped, I dare say, to be happy with Ma.  
What a disappointed life!"

"My dear Caddy!" said Mr. Jellyby, looking slowly round from the 
wail.  It was the first time, I think, I ever heard him say three 
words together.

"Yes, Pa!" cried Caddy, going to him and embracing him 
affectionately.

"My dear Caddy," said Mr. Jellyby.  "Never have--"

"Not Prince, Pa?" faltered Caddy.  "Not have Prince?"

"Yes, my dear," said Mr. Jellyby.  "Have him, certainly.  But, 
never have--"

I mentioned in my account of our first visit in Thavies Inn that 
Richard described Mr. Jellyby as frequently opening his mouth after 
dinner without saying anything.  It was a habit of his.  He opened 
his mouth now a great many times and shook his head in a melancholy 
manner.

"What do you wish me not to have?  Don't have what, dear Pa?" asked 
Caddy, coaxing him, with her arms round his neck.

"Never have a mission, my dear child."

Mr. Jellyby groaned and laid his head against the wall again, and 
this was the only time I ever heard him make any approach to 
expressing his sentiments on the Borrioboolan question.  I suppose 
he had been more talkative and lively once, but he seemed to have 
been completely exhausted long before I knew him.

I thought Mrs. Jellyby never would have left off serenely looking 
over her papers and drinking coffee that night.  It was twelve 
o'clock before we could obtain possession of the room, and the 
clearance it required then was so discouraging that Caddy, who was 
almost tired out, sat down in the middle of the dust and cried.  
But she soon cheered up, and we did wonders with it before we went 
to bed.

In the morning it looked, by the aid of a few flowers and a 
quantity of soap and water and a little arrangement, quite gay.  
The plain breakfast made a cheerful show, and Caddy was perfectly 
charming.  But when my darling came, I thought--and I think now--
that I never had seen such a dear face as my beautiful pet's.

We made a little feast for the children upstairs, and we put Peepy 
at the head of the table, and we showed them Caddy in her bridal 
dress, and they clapped their hands and hurrahed, and Caddy cried 
to think that she was going away from them and hugged them over and 
over again until we brought Prince up to fetch her away--when, I am 
sorry to say, Peepy bit him.  Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop 
downstairs, in a state of deportment not to be expressed, benignly 
blessing Caddy and giving my guardian to understand that his son's 
happiness was his own parental work and that he sacrificed personal 
considerations to ensure it.  "My dear sir," said Mr. Turveydrop, 
"these young people will live with me; my house is large enough for 
their accommodation, and they shall not want the shelter of my 
roof.  I could have wished--you will understand the allusion, Mr. 
Jarndyce, for you remember my illustrious patron the Prince Regent
--I could have wished that my son had married into a family where 
there was more deportment, but the will of heaven be done!"

Mr. and Mrs. Pardiggle were of the party--Mr. Pardiggle, an 
obstinate-looking man with a large waistcoat and stubbly hair, who 
was always talking in a loud bass voice about his mite, or Mrs. 
Pardiggle's mite, or their five boys' mites.  Mr. Quale, with his 
hair brushed back as usual and his knobs of temples shining very 
much, was also there, not in the character of a disappointed lover, 
but as the accepted of a young--at least, an unmarried--lady, a 
Miss Wisk, who was also there.  Miss Wisk's mission, my guardian 
said, was to show the world that woman's mission was man's mission 
and that the only genuine mission of both man and woman was to be 
always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at 
public meetings.  The guests were few, but were, as one might 
expect at Mrs. Jellyby's, all devoted to public objects only.  
Besides those I have mentioned, there was an extremely dirty lady 
with her bonnet all awry and the ticketed price of her dress still 
sticking on it, whose neglected home, Caddy told me, was like a 
filthy wilderness, but whose church was like a fancy fair.  A very 
contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be 
everybody's brother but who appeared to be on terms of coolness 
with the whole of his large family, completed the party.

A party, having less in common with such an occasion, could hardly 
have been got together by any ingenuity.  Such a mean mission as 
the domestic mission was the very last thing to be endured among 
them; indeed, Miss Wisk informed us, with great indignation, before 
we sat down to breakfast, that the idea of woman's mission lying 
chiefly in the narrow sphere of home was an outrageous slander on 
the part of her tyrant, man.  One other singularity was that nobody 
with a mission--except Mr. Quale, whose mission, as I think I have 
formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody's mission--
cared at all for anybody's mission.  Mrs. Pardiggle being as clear 
that the only one infallible course was her course of pouncing upon 
the poor and applying benevolence to them like a strait-waistcoat; 
as Miss Wisk was that the only practical thing for the world was 
the emancipation of woman from the thraldom of her tyrant, man.  
Mrs. Jellyby, all the while, sat smiling at the limited vision that 
could see anything but Borrioboola-Gha.

But I am anticipating now the purport of our conversation on the 
ride home instead of first marrying Caddy.  We all went to church, 
and Mr. Jellyby gave her away.  Of the air with which old Mr. 
Turveydrop, with his hat under his left arm (the inside presented 
at the clergyman like a cannon) and his eyes creasing themselves up 
into his wig, stood stiff and high-shouldered behind us bridesmaids 
during the ceremony, and afterwards saluted us, I could never say 
enough to do it justice.  Miss Wisk, whom I cannot report as 
prepossessing in appearance, and whose manner was grim, listened to 
the proceedings, as part of woman's wrongs, with a disdainful face.  
Mrs. Jellyby, with her calm smile and her bright eyes, looked the 
least concerned of all the company.

We duly came back to breakfast, and Mrs. Jellyby sat at the head of 
the table and Mr. Jellyby at the foot.  Caddy had previously stolen 
upstairs to hug the children again and tell them that her name was 
Turveydrop.  But this piece of information, instead of being an 
agreeable surprise to Peepy, threw him on his back in such 
transports of kicking grief that I could do nothing on being sent 
for but accede to the proposal that he should be admitted to the 
breakfast table.  So he came down and sat in my lap; and Mrs. 
Jellyby, after saying, in reference to the state of his pinafore, 
"Oh, you naughty Peepy, what a shocking little pig you are!" was 
not at all discomposed.  He was very good except that he brought 
down Noah with him (out of an ark I had given him before we went to 
church) and WOULD dip him head first into the wine-glasses and then 
put him in his mouth.

My guardian, with his sweet temper and his quick perception and his 
amiable face, made something agreeable even out of the ungenial 
company.  None of them seemed able to talk about anything but his, 
or her, own one subject, and none of them seemed able to talk about 
even that as part of a world in which there was anything else; but 
my guardian turned it all to the merry encouragement of Caddy and 
the honour of the occasion, and brought us through the breakfast 
nobly.  What we should have done without him, I am afraid to think, 
for all the company despising the bride and bridegroom and old Mr. 
Turveydrop--and old Mr. Thrveydrop, in virtue of his deportment, 
considering himself vastly superior to all the company--it was a 
very unpromising case.

At last the time came when poor Caddy was to go and when all her 
property was packed on the hired coach and pair that was to take 
her and her husband to Gravesend.  It affected us to see Caddy 
clinging, then, to her deplorable home and hanging on her mother's 
neck with the greatest tenderness.

"I am very sorry I couldn't go on writing from dictation, Ma," 
sobbed Caddy.  "I hope you forgive me now."

"Oh, Caddy, Caddy!" said Mrs. Jellyby.  "I have told you over and 
over again that I have engaged a boy, and there's an end of it."

"You are sure you are not the least angry with me, Ma?  Say you are 
sure before I go away, Ma?"

"You foolish Caddy," returned Mrs. Jellyby, "do I look angry, or 
have I inclination to be angry, or time to be angry?  How CAN you?"

"Take a little care of Pa while I am gone, Mama!"

Mrs. Jellyby positively laughed at the fancy.  "You romantic 
child," said she, lightly patting Caddy's back.  "Go along.  I am 
excellent friends with you.  Now, good-bye, Caddy, and be very 
happy!"

Then Caddy hung upon her father and nursed his cheek against hers 
as if he were some poor dull child in pain.  All this took place in 
the hall.  Her father released her, took out his pocket 
handkerchief, and sat down on the stairs with his head against the 
wall.  I hope he found some consolation in walls.  I almost think 
he did.

And then Prince took her arm in his and turned with great emotion 
and respect to his father, whose deportment at that moment was 
overwhelming.

"Thank you over and over again, father!" said Prince, kissing his 
hand.  "I am very grateful for all your kindness and consideration 
regarding our marriage, and so, I can assure you, is Caddy."

"Very," sobbed Caddy.  "Ve-ry!"

"My dear son," said Mr. Turveydrop, "and dear daughter, I have done 
my duty.  If the spirit of a sainted wooman hovers above us and 
looks down on the occasion, that, and your constant affection, will 
be my recompense.  You will not fail in YOUR duty, my son and 
daughter, I believe?"

"Dear father, never!" cried Prince.

"Never, never, dear Mr. Turveydrop!" said Caddy.

"This," returned Mr. Turveydrop, "is as it should be.  My children, 
my home is yours, my heart is yours, my all is yours.  I will never 
leave you; nothing but death shall part us.  My dear son, you 
contemplate an absence of a week, I think?"

"A week, dear father.  We shall return home this day week."

"My dear child," said Mr. Turveydrop, "let me, even under the 
present exceptional circumstances, recommend strict punctuality.  
It is highly important to keep the connexion together; and schools, 
if at all neglected, are apt to take offence."

"This day week, father, we shall be sure to be home to dinner."

"Good!" said Mr. Turveydrop.  "You will find fires, my dear 
Caroline, in your own room, and dinner prepared in my apartment.  
Yes, yes, Prince!" anticipating some self-denying objection on his 
son's part with a great air.  "You and our Caroline will be strange 
in the upper part of the premises and will, therefore, dine that 
day in my apartment.  Now, bless ye!"

They drove away, and whether I wondered most at Mrs. Jellyby or at 
Mr. Turveydrop, I did not know.  Ada and my guardian were in the 
same condition when we came to talk it over.  But before we drove 
away too, I received a most unexpected and eloquent compliment from 
Mr. Jellyby.  He came up to me in the hall, took both my hands, 
pressed them earnestly, and opened his mouth twice.  I was so sure 
of his meaning that I said, quite flurried, "You are very welcome, 
sir.  Pray don't mention it!"

"I hope this marriage is for the best, guardian," said I when we 
three were on our road home.

"I hope it is, little woman.  Patience.  We shall see."

"Is the wind in the east to-day?" I ventured to ask him.

He laughed heartily and answered, "No."

"But it must have been this morning, I think," said I.

He answered "No" again, and this time my dear girl confidently 
answered "No" too and shook the lovely head which, with its 
blooming flowers against the golden hair, was like the very spring.  
"Much YOU know of east winds, my ugly darling," said I, kissing her 
in my admiration--I couldn't help it.

Well!  It was only their love for me, I know very well, and it is a 
long time ago.  I must write it even if I rub it out again, because 
it gives me so much pleasure.  They said there could be no east 
wind where Somebody was; they said that wherever Dame Durden went, 
there was sunshine and summer air.



CHAPTER XXXI

Nurse and Patient


I had not been at home again many days when one evening I went 
upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley's shoulder 
and see how she was getting on with her copy-book.  Writing was a 
trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power 
over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become 
perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and 
splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey.  It was very 
odd to see what old letters Charley's young hand had made, they so 
wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round.  
Yet Charley was uncommonly expert at other things and had as nimble 
little fingers as I ever watched.

"Well, Charley," said I, looking over a copy of the letter O in 
which it was represented as square, triangular, pear-shaped, and 
collapsed in all kinds of ways, "we are improving.  If we only get 
to make it round, we shall be perfect, Charley."

Then I made one, and Charley made one, and the pen wouldn't join 
Charley's neatly, but twisted it up into a knot.

"Never mind, Charley.  We shall do it in time."

Charley laid down her pen, the copy being finished, opened and shut 
her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page, half in pride 
and half in doubt, and got up, and dropped me a curtsy.

"Thank you, miss.  If you please, miss, did you know a poor person 
of the name of Jenny?"

"A brickmaker's wife, Charley?  Yes."

"She came and spoke to me when I was out a little while ago, and 
said you knew her, miss.  She asked me if I wasn't the young lady's 
little maid--meaning you for the young lady, miss--and I said yes, 
miss."

"I thought she had left this neighbourhood altogether, Charley."

"So she had, miss, but she's come back again to where she used to 
live--she and Liz.  Did you know another poor person of the name of 
Liz, miss?"

"I think I do, Charley, though not by name."

"That's what she said!" returned Chariey.  "They have both come 
back, miss, and have been tramping high and low."

"Tramping high and low, have they, Charley?"

"Yes, miss."  If Charley could only have made the letters in her 
copy as round as the eyes with which she looked into my face, they 
would have been excellent.  "And this poor person came about the 
house three or four days, hoping to get a glimpse of you, miss--all 
she wanted, she said--but you were away.  That was when she saw me.  
She saw me a-going about, miss," said Charley with a short laugh of 
the greatest delight and pride, "and she thought I looked like your 
maid!"

"Did she though, really, Charley?"

"Yes, miss!" said Charley.  "Really and truly."  And Charley, with 
another short laugh of the purest glee, made her eyes very round 
again and looked as serious as became my maid.  I was never tired 
of seeing Charley in the full enjoyment of that great dignity, 
standing before me with her youthful face and figure, and her 
steady manner, and her childish exultation breaking through it now 
and then in the pleasantest way.

"And where did you see her, Charley?" said I.

My little maid's countenance fell as she replied, "By the doctor's 
shop, miss."  For Charley wore her black frock yet.

I asked if the brickmaker's wife were ill, but Charley said no.  It 
was some one else.  Some one in her cottage who had tramped down to 
Saint Albans and was tramping he didn't know where.  A poor boy, 
Charley said.  No father, no mother, no any one.  "Like as Tom 
might have been, miss, if Emma and me had died after father," said 
Charley, her round eyes filling with tears.

"And she was getting medicine for him, Charley?"

"She said, miss," returned Charley, "how that he had once done as 
much for her."

My little maid's face was so eager and her quiet hands were folded 
so closely in one another as she stood looking at me that I had no 
great difficulty in reading her thoughts.  "Well, Charley," said I, 
"it appears to me that you and I can do no better than go round to 
Jenny's and see what's the matter."

The alacrity with which Charley brought my bonnet and veil, and 
having dressed me, quaintly pinned herself into her warm shawl and 
made herself look like a little old woman, sufficiently expressed 
her readiness.  So Charley and I, without saying anything to any 
one, went out.

It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind.  
The rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little 
intermission for many days.  None was falling just then, however.  
The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy--even above us, 
where a few stars were shining.  In the north and north-west, where 
the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light 
both beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud 
waved up like a sea stricken immovable as it was heaving.  Towards 
London a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste, and the 
contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder 
light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen 
buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many thousands of 
wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be.

I had no thought that night--none, I am quite sure--of what was 
soon to happen to me.  But I have always remembered since that when 
we had stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when 
we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression 
of myself as being something different from what I then was.  I 
know it was then and there that I had it.  I have ever since 
connected the feeling with that spot and time and with everything 
associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the 
town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the 
miry hill.

It was Saturday night, and most of the people belonging to the 
place where we were going were drinking elsewhere.  We found it 
quieter than I had previously seen it, though quite as miserable.  
The kilns were burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a 
pale-blue glare.

We came to the cottage, where there was a feeble candle in the 
patched window.  We tapped at the door and went in.  The mother of 
the little child who had died was sitting in a chair on one side of 
the poor fire by the bed; and opposite to her, a wretched boy, 
supported by the chimney-piece, was cowering on the floor.  He held 
under his arm, like a little bundle, a fragment of a fur cap; and 
as he tried to warm himself, he shook until the crazy door and 
window shook.  The place was closer than before and had an 
unhealthy and a very peculiar smell.

I had not lifted by veil when I first spoke to the woman, which was 
at the moment of our going in.  The boy staggered up instantly and 
stared at me with a remarkable expression of surprise and terror.

His action was so quick and my being the cause of it was so evident 
that I stood still instead of advancing nearer.

"I won't go no more to the berryin ground," muttered the boy; "I 
ain't a-going there, so I tell you!"

I lifted my veil and spoke to the woman.  She said to me in a low 
voice, "Don't mind him, ma'am.  He'll soon come back to his head," 
and said to him, "Jo, Jo, what's the matter?"

"I know wot she's come for!" cried the boy.

"Who?"

"The lady there.  She's come to get me to go along with her to the 
berryin ground.  I won't go to the berryin ground.  I don't like 
the name on it.  She might go a-berryin ME."  His shivering came on 
again, and as he leaned against the wall, he shook the hovel.

"He has been talking off and on about such like all day, ma'am," 
said Jenny softly.  "Why, how you stare!  This is MY lady, Jo."

"Is it?" returned the boy doubtfully, and surveying me with his arm 
held out above his burning eyes.  "She looks to me the t'other one.  
It ain't the bonnet, nor yet it ain't the gownd, but she looks to 
me the t'other one."

My little Charley, with her premature experience of illness and 
trouble, had pulled off her bonnet and shawl and now went quietly 
up to him with a chair and sat him down in it like an old sick 
nurse.  Except that no such attendant could have shown him 
Charley's youthful face, which seemed to engage his confidence.

"I say!" said the boy.  "YOU tell me.  Ain't the lady the t'other 
lady?"

Charley shook her head as she methodically drew his rags about him 
and made him as warm as she could.

"Oh!" the boy muttered.  "Then I s'pose she ain't."

"I came to see if I could do you any good," said I.  "What is the 
matter with you?"

"I'm a-being froze," returned the boy hoarsely, with his haggard 
gaze wandering about me, "and then burnt up, and then froze, and 
then burnt up, ever so many times in a hour.  And my head's all 
sleepy, and all a-going mad-like--and I'm so dry--and my bones 
isn't half so much bones as pain.

"When did he come here?" I asked the woman.

"This morning, ma'am, I found him at the corner of the town.  I had 
known him up in London yonder.  Hadn't I, Jo?"

"Tom-all-Alone's," the boy replied.

Whenever he fixed his attention or his eyes, it was only for a very 
little while.  He soon began to droop his head again, and roll it 
heavily, and speak as if he were half awake.

"When did he come from London?" I asked.

"I come from London yes'day," said the boy himself, now flushed and 
hot.  "I'm a-going somewheres."

"Where is he going?" I asked.

"Somewheres," repeated the boy in a louder tone.  "I have been 
moved on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the 
t'other one give me the sov'ring.  Mrs. Snagsby, she's always a-
watching, and a-driving of me--what have I done to her?--and 
they're all a-watching and a-driving of me.  Every one of 'em's 
doing of it, from the time when I don't get up, to the time when I 
don't go to bed.  And I'm a-going somewheres.  That's where I'm a-
going.  She told me, down in Tom-all-Alone's, as she came from 
Stolbuns, and so I took the Stolbuns Road.  It's as good as 
another."

He always concluded by addressing Charley.

"What is to be done with him?" said I, taking the woman aside.  "He 
could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew 
where he was going!"

"I know no more, ma'am, than the dead," she replied, glancing 
compassionately at him.  "Perhaps the dead know better, if they 
could only tell us.  I've kept him here all day for pity's sake, 
and I've given him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any 
one will take him in (here's my pretty in the bed--her child, but I 
call it mine); but I can't keep him long, for if my husband was to 
come home and find him here, he'd be rough in putting him out and 
might do him a hurt.  Hark! Here comes Liz back!"

The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up 
with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going.  When 
the little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it 
out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don't know.  
There she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she 
were living in Mrs. Blinder's attic with Tom and Emma again.

The friend had been here and there, and had been played about from 
hand to hand, and had come back as she went.  At first it was too 
early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at 
last it was too late.  One official sent her to another, and the 
other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and 
forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been 
appointed for their skill in evading their duties instead of 
performing them.  And now, after all, she said, breathing quickly, 
for she had been running and was frightened too, "Jenny, your 
master's on the road home, and mine's not far behind, and the Lord 
help the boy, for we can do no more for him!"  They put a few 
halfpence together and hurried them into his hand, and so, in an 
oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled out of 
the house.

"Give me the child, my dear," said its mother to Charley, "and 
thank you kindly too!  Jenny, woman dear, good night!

Young lady, if my master don't fall out with me, I'll look down by 
the kiln by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in 
the morning!"  She hurried off, and presenfty we passed her hushing 
and singing to her child at her own door and looking anxiously 
along the road for her drunken husband.

I was afraid of staying then to speak to either woman, lest I 
should bring her into trouble.  But I said to Charley that we must 
not leave the boy to die.  Charley, who knew what to do much better 
than I did, and whose quickness equalled her presence of mind, 
glided on before me, and presently we came up with Jo, just short 
of the brick-kiln.

I think he must have begun his journey with some small bundle under 
his arm and must have had it stolen or lost it.  For he still 
carried his wretched fragment of fur cap like a bundle, though he 
went bareheaded through the rain, which now fell fast.  He stopped 
when we called to him and again showed a dread of me when I came 
up, standing with his lustrous eyes fixed upon me, and even 
arrested in his shivering fit.

I asked him to come with us, and we would take care that he had 
some shelter for the night.

"I don't want no shelter," he said; "I can lay amongst the warm 
bricks."

"But don't you know that people die there?" replied Charley.

"They dies everywheres," said the boy.  "They dies in their 
lodgings--she knows where; I showed her--and they dies down in Tom-
all-Alone's in heaps.  They dies more than they lives, according to 
what I see."  Then he hoarsely whispered Charley, "If she ain't the 
t'other one, she ain't the forrenner.  Is there THREE of 'em then?"

Charley looked at me a little frightened.  I felt half frightened 
at myself when the boy glared on me so.

But he turned and followed when I beckoned to him, and finding that 
he acknowledged that influence in me, I led the way straight home.  
It was not far, only at the summit of the hill.  We passed but one 
man.  I doubted if we should have got home without assistance, the 
boy's steps were so uncertain and tremulous.  He made no complaint, 
however, and was strangely unconcerned about himself, if I may say 
so strange a thing.

Leaving him in the hall for a moment, shrunk into the corner of the 
window-seat and staring with an indifference that scarcely could be 
called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him, I went into 
the drawing-room to speak to my guardian.  There I found Mr. 
Skimpole, who had come down by the coach, as he frequently did 
without notice, and never bringing any clothes with him, but always 
borrowing everything he wanted.

They came out with me directly to look at the boy.  The servants 
had gathered in the hall too, and he shivered in the window-seat 
with Charley standing by him, like some wounded animal that had 
been found in a ditch.

"This is a sorrowful case," said my guardian after asking him a 
question or two and touching him and examining his eyes.  "What do 
you say, Harold?"

"You had better turn him out," said Mr. Skimpole.

"What do you mean?" inquired my guardian, almost sternly.

"My dear Jarndyce," said Mr. Skimpole, "you know what I am: I am a 
child.  Be cross to me if I deserve it.  But I have a 
constitutional objection to this sort of thing.  I always had, when 
I was a medical man.  He's not safe, you know.  There's a very bad 
sort of fever about him."

Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again 
and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we 
stood by.

"You'll say it's childish," observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at 
us.  "Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never 
pretend to be anything else.  If you put him out in the road, you 
only put him where he was before.  He will be no worse off than he 
was, you know.  Even make him better off, if you like.  Give him 
sixpence, or five shillings, or five pound ten--you are 
arithmeticians, and I am not--and get rid of him!"

"And what is he to do then?" asked my guardian.

"Upon my life," said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his 
engaging smile, "I have not the least idea what he is to do then.  
But I have no doubt he'll do it."

"Now, is it not a horrible reflection," said my guardian, to whom I 
had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, "is 
it not a horrible reflection," walking up and down and rumpling his 
hair, "that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, 
his hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well 
taken care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?"

"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "you'll pardon the 
simplicity of the question, coming as it does from a creature who 
is perfectly simple in worldly matters, but why ISN'T he a prisoner 
then?"

My guardian stopped and looked at him with a whimsical mixture of 
amusement and indignation in his face.

"Our young friend is not to be suspected of any delicacy, I should 
imagine," said Mr. Skimpole, unabashed and candid.  "It seems to me 
that it would be wiser, as well as in a certain kind of way more 
respectable, if he showed some misdirected energy that got him into 
prison.  There would be more of an adventurous spirit in it, and 
consequently more of a certain sort of poetry."

"I believe," returned my guardian, resuming his uneasy walk, "that 
there is not such another child on earth as yourself."

"Do you really?" said Mr. Skimpole.  "I dare say!  But I confess I 
don't see why our young friend, in his degree, should not seek to 
invest himself with such poetry as is open to him.  He is no doubt 
born with an appetite--probably, when he is in a safer state of 
health, he has an excellent appetite.  Very well.  At our young 
friend's natural dinner hour, most likely about noon, our young 
friend says in effect to society, 'I am hungry; will you have the 
goodness to produce your spoon and feed me?'  Society, which has 
taken upon itself the general arrangement of the whole system of 
spoons and professes to have a spoon for our young friend, does NOT 
produce that spoon; and our young friend, therefore, says 'You 
really must excuse me if I seize it.'  Now, this appears to me a 
case of misdirected energy, which has a certain amount of reason in 
it and a certain amount of romance; and I don't know but what I 
should be more interested in our young friend, as an illustration 
of such a case, than merely as a poor vagabond--which any one can 
be."

"In the meantime," I ventured to observe, "he is getting worse."

"In the meantime," said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, "as Miss 
Summerson, with her practical good sense, observes, he is getting 
worse.  Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets 
still worse."

The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never 
forget.

"Of course, little woman," observed my guardian, tuming to me, "I 
can ensure his admission into the proper place by merely going 
there to enforce it, though it's a bad state of things when, in his 
condition, that is necessary.  But it's growing late, and is a very 
bad night, and the boy is worn out already.  There is a bed in the 
wholesome loft-room by the stable; we had better keep him there 
till morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed.  We'll do 
that."

"Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole, with his hands upon the keys of the piano 
as we moved away.  "Are you going back to our young friend?"

"Yes," said my guardian.

"How I envy you your constitution, Jarndyce!" returned Mr. Skimpole 
with playful admiration.  "You don't mind these things; neither 
does Miss Summerson.  You are ready at all times to go anywhere, 
and do anything.  Such is will!  I have no will at all--and no 
won't--simply can't."

"You can't recommend anything for the boy, I suppose?" said my 
guardian, looking back over his shoulder half angrily; only half 
angrily, for he never seemed to consider Mr. Skimpole an 
accountable being.

"My dear Jarndyce, I observed a bottle of cooling medicine in his 
pocket, and it's impossible for him to do better than take it.  You 
can tell them to sprinkle a little vinegar about the place where he 
sleeps and to keep it moderately cool and him moderately warm.  But 
it is mere impertinence in me to offer any recommendation.  Miss 
Summerson has such a knowledge of detail and such a capacity for 
the administration of detail that she knows all about it."

We went back into the hall and explained to Jo what we proposed to 
do, which Charley explained to him again and which he received with 
the languid unconcern I had already noticed, wearily looking on at 
what was done as if it were for somebody else.  The servants 
compassionating his miserable state and being very anxious to help, 
we soon got the loft-room ready; and some of the men about the 
house carried him across the wet yard, well wrapped up.  It was 
pleasant to observe how kind they were to him and how there 
appeared to be a general impression among them that frequently 
calling him "Old Chap" was likely to revive his spirits.  Charley 
directed the operations and went to and fro between the loft-room 
and the house with such little stimulants and comforts as we 
thought it safe to give him.  My guardian himself saw him before he 
was left for the night and reported to me when he returned to the 
growlery to write a letter on the boy's behalf, which a messenger 
was charged to deliver at day-light in the morning, that he seemed 
easier and inclined to sleep.  They had fastened his door on the 
outside, he said, in case of his being delirious, but had so 
arranged that he could not make any noise without being heard.

Ada being in our room with a cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all 
this time and entertained himself by playing snatches of pathetic 
airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard at a distance) with 
great expression and feeling.  When we rejoined him in the drawing-
room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come into 
his head "apropos of our young friend," and he sang one about a 
peasant boy,


   "Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam,
    Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home."


quite exquisitely.  It was a song that always made him cry, he told 
us.

He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely 
chirped--those were his delighted words--when he thought by what a 
happy talent for business he was surrounded.  He gave us, in his 
glass of negus, "Better health to our young friend!" and supposed 
and gaily pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington 
to become Lord Mayor of London.  In that event, no doubt, he would 
establish the Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses, 
and a little annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans.  He had 
no doubt, he said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in 
his way, but his way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold 
Skimpole was, Harold Skimpole had found himself, to his 
considerable surprise, when he first made his own acquaintance; he 
had accepted himself with all his failings and had thought it sound 
philosophy to make the best of the bargain; and he hoped we would 
do the same.

Charley's last report was that the boy was quiet.  I could see, 
from my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and 
I went to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered.

There was more movement and more talking than usual a little before 
daybreak, and it awoke me.  As I was dressing, I looked out of my 
window and asked one of our men who had been among the active 
sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about the 
house.  The lantern was still burning in the loft-window.

"It's the boy, miss," said he.

"Is he worse?" I inquired.

"Gone, miss.

"Dead!"

"Dead, miss?  No.  Gone clean off."

At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed 
hopeless ever to divine.  The door remaining as it had been left, 
and the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed 
that he had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with 
an empty cart-house below.  But he had shut it down again, if that 
were so; and it looked as if it had not been raised.  Nothing of 
any kind was missing.  On this fact being clearly ascertained, we 
all yielded to the painful belief that delirium had come upon him 
in the night and that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued 
by some imaginary horror, he had strayed away in that worse than 
helpless state; all of us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who 
repeatedly suggested, in his usual easy light style, that it had 
occurred to our young friend that he was not a safe inmate, having 
a bad kind of fever upon him, and that he had with great natural 
politeness taken himself off.

Every possible inquiry was made, and every place was searched.  The 
brick-kilns were examined, the cottages were visited, the two women 
were particularly questioned, but they knew nothing of him, and 
nobody could doubt that their wonder was genuine.  The weather had 
for some time been too wet and the night itself had been too wet to 
admit of any tracing by footsteps.  Hedge and ditch, and wall, and 
rick and stack, were examined by our men for a long distance round, 
lest the boy should be lying in such a place insensible or dead; 
but nothing was seen to indicate that he had ever been near.  From 
the time when he was left in the loft-room, he vanished.

The search continued for five days.  I do not mean that it ceased 
even then, but that my attention was then diverted into a current 
very memorable to me.

As Charley was at her writing again in my room in the evening, and 
as I sat opposite to her at work, I felt the table tremble.  
Looking up, I saw my little maid shivering from head to foot.

"Charley," said I, "are you so cold?"

"I think I am, miss," she replied.  "I don't know what it is.  I 
can't hold myself still.  I felt so yesterday at about this same 
time, miss.  Don't be uneasy, I think I'm ill."

I heard Ada's voice outside, and I hurried to the door of 
communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and 
locked it.  Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was 
yet upon the key.

Ada called to me to let her in, but I said, "Not now, my dearest.  
Go away.  There's nothing the matter; I will come to you 
presently."  Ah! It was a long, long time before my darling girl 
and I were companions again.

Charley fell ill.  In twelve hours she was very ill.  I moved her 
to my room, and laid her in my bed, and sat down quietly to nurse 
her.  I told my guardian all about it, and why I felt it was 
necessary that I should seclude myself, and my reason for not 
seeing my darling above all.  At first she came very often to the 
door, and called to me, and even reproached me with sobs and tears; 
but I wrote her a long letter saying that she made me anxious and 
unhappy and imploring her, as she loved me and wished my mind to be 
at peace, to come no nearer than the garden.  After that she came 
beneath the window even oftener than she had come to the door, and 
if I had learnt to love her dear sweet voice before when we were 
hardly ever apart, how did I learn to love it then, when I stood 
behind the window-curtain listening and replying, but not so much 
as looking out!  How did I learn to love it afterwards, when the 
harder time came!

They put a bed for me in our sitting-room; and by keeping the door 
wide open, I turned the two rooms into one, now that Ada had 
vacated that part of the house, and kept them always fresh and 
airy.  There was not a servant in or about the house but was so 
good that they would all most gladly have come to me at any hour of 
the day or night without the least fear or unwillingness, but I 
thought it best to choose one worthy woman who was never to see Ada 
and whom I could trust to come and go with all precaution.  Through 
her means I got out to take the air with my guardian when there was 
no fear of meeting Ada, and wanted for nothing in the way of 
attendance, any more than in any other respect.

And thus poor Charley sickened and grew worse, and fell into heavy 
danger of death, and lay severely ill for many a long round of day 
and night.  So patient she was, so uncomplaining, and inspired by 
such a gentle fortitude that very often as I sat by Charley holding 
her head in my arms--repose would come to her, so, when it would 
come to her in no other attitude--I silently prayed to our Father 
in heaven that I might not forget the lesson which this little 
sister taught me.

I was very sorrowful to think that Charley's pretty looks would 
change and be disfigured, even if she recovered--she was such a 
child with her dimpled face--but that thought was, for the greater 
part, lost in her greater peril.  When she was at the worst, and 
her mind rambled again to the cares of her father's sick bed and 
the little children, she still knew me so far as that she would be 
quiet in my arms when she could lie quiet nowhere else, and murmur 
out the wanderings of her mind less restlessly.  At those times I 
used to think, how should I ever tell the two remaining babies that 
the baby who had learned of her faithful heart to be a mother to 
them in their need was dead!

There were other times when Charley knew me well and talked to me, 
telling me that she sent her love to Tom and Emma and that she was 
sure Tom would grow up to be a good man.  At those times Charley 
would speak to me of what she had read to her father as well as she 
could to comfort him, of that young man carried out to be buried 
who was the only son of his mother and she was a widow, of the 
ruler's daughter raised up by the gracious hand upon her bed of 
death.  And Charley told me that when her father died she had 
kneeled down and prayed in her first sorrow that he likewise might 
be raised up and given back to his poor children, and that if she 
should never get better and should die too, she thought it likely 
that it might come into Tom's mind to offer the same prayer for 
her.  Then would I show Tom how these people of old days had been 
brought back to life on earth, only that we might know our hope to 
be restored to heaven!

But of all the various times there were in Charley's illness, there 
was not one when she lost the gentle qualities I have spoken of.  
And there were many, many when I thought in the night of the last 
high belief in the watching angel, and the last higher trust in 
God, on the part of her poor despised father.

And Charley did not die.  She flutteringiy and slowly turned the 
dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to 
mend.  The hope that never had been given, from the first, of 
Charley being in outward appearance Charley any more soon began to 
be encouraged; and even that prospered, and I saw her growing into 
her old childish likeness again.

It was a great morning when I could tell Ada all this as she stood 
out in the garden; and it was a great evening when Charley and I at 
last took tea together in the next room.  But on that same evening, 
I felt that I was stricken cold.

Happily for both of us, it was not until Charley was safe in bed 
again and placidly asleep that I began to think the contagion of 
her illness was upon me.  I had been able easily to hide what I 
felt at tea-time, but I was past that already now, and I knew that 
I was rapidly following in Charley's steps.

I was well enough, however, to be up early in the morning, and to 
return my darling's cheerful blessing from the garden, and to talk 
with her as long as usual.  But I was not free from an impression 
that I had been walking about the two rooms in the night, a little 
beside myself, though knowing where I was; and I felt confused at 
times--with a curious sense of fullness, as if I were becoming too 
large altogether.

In the evening I was so much worse that I resolved to prepare 
Charley, with which view I said, "You're getting quite strong, 
Charley, are you not?'

"Oh, quite!" said Charley.

"Strong enough to be told a secret, I think, Charley?"

"Quite strong enough for that, miss!" cried Charley.  But Charley's 
face fell in the height of her delight, for she saw the secret in 
MY face; and she came out of the great chair, and fell upon my 
bosom, and said "Oh, miss, it's my doing!  It's my doing!" and a 
great deal more out of the fullness of her grateful heart.

"Now, Charley," said I after letting her go on for a little while, 
"if I am to be ill, my great trust, humanly speaking, is in you.  
And unless you are as quiet and composed for me as you always were 
for yourself, you can never fulfil it, Charley."

"If you'll let me cry a little longer, miss," said Charley.  "Oh, 
my dear, my dear!  If you'll only let me cry a little longer.  Oh, 
my dear!"--how affectionately and devotedly she poured this out as 
she clung to my neck, I never can remember without tears--"I'll be 
good."

So I let Charley cry a little longer, and it did us both good.

"Trust in me now, if you please, miss," said Charley quietly.  "I 
am listening to everything you say."

"It's very little at present, Charley.  I shall tell your doctor 
to-night that I don't think I am well and that you are going to 
nurse me."

For that the poor child thanked me with her whole heart.  "And in 
the morning, when you hear Miss Ada in the garden, if I should not 
be quite able to go to the window-curtain as usual, do you go, 
Charley, and say I am asleep--that I have rather tired myself, and 
am asleep.  At all times keep the room as I have kept it, Charley, 
and let no one come."

Charley promised, and I lay down, for I was very heavy.  I saw the 
doctor that night and asked the favour of him that I wished to ask 
relative to his saying nothing of my illness in the house as yet.  
I have a very indistinct remembrance of that night melting into 
day, and of day melting into night again; but I was just able on 
the first morning to get to the window and speak to my darling.

On the second morning I heard her dear voice--Oh, how dear now!--
outside; and I asked Charley, with some difficulty (speech being 
painful to me), to go and say I was asleep.  I heard her answer 
softly, "Don't disturb her, Charley, for the world!"

"How does my own Pride look, Charley?" I inquired.

"Disappointed, miss," said Charley, peeping through the curtain.

"But I know she is very beautiful this morning."

"She is indeed, miss," answered Charley, peeping.  "Still looking 
up at the window."

With her blue clear eyes, God bless them, always loveliest when 
raised like that!

I called Charley to me and gave her her last charge.

"Now, Charley, when she knows I am ill, she will try to make her 
way into the room.  Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to 
the last!  Charley, if you let her in but once, only to look upon 
me for one moment as I lie here, I shall die."

"I never will!  I never will!" she promised me.

"I believe it, my dear Charley.  And now come and sit beside me for 
a little while, and touch me with your hand.  For I cannot see you, 
Charley; I am blind."



CHAPTER XXXII

The Appointed Time


It is night in Lincoln's Inn--perplexed and troublous valley of the 
shadow of the law, where suitors generally find but little day--and 
fat candles are snuffed out in offices, and clerks have rattled 
down the crazy wooden stairs and dispersed.  The bell that rings at 
nine o'clock has ceased its doleful clangour about nothing; the 
gates are shut; and the night-porter, a solemn warder with a mighty 
power of sleep, keeps guard in his lodge.  From tiers of staircase 
windows clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a 
fathomless pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at 
the stars.  In dirty upper casements, here and there, hazy little 
patches of candlelight reveal where some wise draughtsman and 
conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of real estate in meshes 
of sheep-skin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of sheep to an 
acre of land.  Over which bee-like industry these benefactors of 
their species linger yet, though office-hours be past, that they 
may give, for every day, some good account at last.

In the neighbouring court, where the Lord Chancellor of the rag and 
bottle shop dwells, there is a general tendency towards beer and 
supper.  Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, whose respective sons, 
engaged with a circle of acquaintance in the game of hide and seek, 
have been lying in ambush about the by-ways of Chancery Lane for 
some hours and scouring the plain of the same thoroughfare to the 
confusion of passengers--Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins have but now 
exchanged congratulations on the children being abed, and they 
still linger on a door-step over a few parting words.  Mr. Krook 
and his lodger, and the fact of Mr. Krook's being "continually in 
liquor," and the testamentary prospects of the young man are, as 
usual, the staple of their conversation.  But they have something 
to say, likewise, of the Harmonic Meeting at the Sol's Arms, where 
the sound of the piano through the partly opened windows jingles 
out into the court, and where Little Swills, after keeping the 
lovers of harmony in a roar like a very Yorick, may now be heard 
taking the gruff line in a concerted piece and sentimentally 
adjuring his friends and patrons to "Listen, listen, listen, tew 
the wa-ter fall!"  Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Piper compare opinions on 
the subject of the young lady of professional celebrity who assists 
at the Harmonic Meetings and who has a space to herself in the 
manuscript announcement in the window, Mrs. Perkins possessing 
information that she has been married a year and a half, though 
announced as Miss M. Melvilleson, the noted siren, and that her 
baby is clandestinely conveyed to the Sol's Arms every night to 
receive its natural nourishment during the entertainments.  "Sooner 
than which, myself," says Mrs. Perkins, "I would get my living by 
selling lucifers."  Mrs. Piper, as in duty bound, is of the same 
opinion, holding that a private station is better than public 
applause, and thanking heaven for her own (and, by implication, 
Mrs. Perkins') respectability.  By this time the pot-boy of the 
Sol's Arms appearing with her supper-pint well frothed, Mrs. Piper 
accepts that tankard and retires indoors, first giving a fair good 
night to Mrs. Perkins, who has had her own pint in her hand ever 
since it was fetched from the same hostelry by young Perkins before 
he was sent to bed.  Now there is a sound of putting up shop-
shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and 
shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating 
retirement to rest.  Now, too, the policeman begins to push at 
doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to 
administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either 
robbing or being robbed.

It is a close night, though the damp cold is searching too, and 
there is a laggard mist a little way up in the air.  It is a fine 
steaming night to turn the slaughter-houses, the unwholesome 
trades, the sewerage, bad water, and burial-grounds to account, and 
give the registrar of deaths some extra business.  It may be 
something in the air--there is plenty in it--or it may be something 
in himself that is in fault; but Mr. Weevle, otherwise Jobling, is 
very ill at ease.  He comes and goes between his own room and the 
open street door twenty times an hour.  He has been doing so ever 
since it fell dark.  Since the Chancellor shut up his shop, which 
he did very early to-night, Mr. Weevle has been down and up, and 
down and up (with a cheap tight velvet skull-cap on his head, 
making his whiskers look out of all proportion), oftener than 
before.

It is no phenomenon that Mr. Snagsby should be ill at ease too, for 
he always is so, more or less, under the oppressive influence of 
the secret that is upon him.  Impelled by the mystery of which he 
is a partaker and yet in which he is not a sharer, Mr. Snagsby 
haunts what seems to be its fountain-head--the rag and bottle shop 
in the court.  It has an irresistible attraction for him.  Even 
now, coming round by the Sol's Arms with the intention of passing 
down the court, and out at the Chancery Lane end, and so 
terminating his unpremeditated after-supper stroll of ten minutes' 
long from his own door and back again, Mr. Snagsby approaches.

"What, Mr. Weevle?" says the stationer, stopping to speak.  "Are 
YOU there?"

"Aye!" says Weevle, "Here I am, Mr. Snagsby."

"Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to bed?" the 
stationer inquires.

"Why, there's not much air to be got here; and what there is, is 
not very freshening," Weevle answers, glancing up and down the 
court.

"Very true, sir.  Don't you observe," says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to 
sniff and taste the air a little, "don't you observe, Mr. Weevle, 
that you're--not to put too fine a point upon it--that you're 
rather greasy here, sir?"

"Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour 
in the place to-night," Mr. Weevle rejoins.  "I suppose it's chops 
at the Sol's Arms."

"Chops, do you think?  Oh! Chops, eh?"  Mr. Snagsby sniffs and 
tastes again.  "Well, sir, I suppose it is.  But I should say their 
cook at the Sol wanted a little looking after.  She has been 
burning 'em, sir!  And I don't think"--Mr. Snagsby sniffs and 
tastes again and then spits and wipes his mouth--"I don't think--
not to put too fine a point upon it--that they were quite fresh 
when they were shown the gridiron."

"That's very likely.  It's a tainting sort of weather."

"It IS a tainting sort of weather," says Mr. Snagsby, "and I find 
it sinking to the spirits."

"By George!  I find it gives me the horrors," returns Mr. Weevle.

"Then, you see, you live in a lonesome way, and in a lonesome room, 
with a black circumstance hanging over it," says Mr. Snagsby, 
looking in past the other's shoulder along the dark passage and 
then falling back a step to look up at the house.  "I couldn't live 
in that room alone, as you do, sir.  I should get so fidgety and 
worried of an evening, sometimes, that I should be driven to come 
to the door and stand here sooner than sit there.  But then it's 
very true that you didn't see, in your room, what I saw there.  
That makes a difference."

"I know quite enough about it," returns Tony.

"It's not agreeable, is it?" pursues Mr. Snagsby, coughing his 
cough of mild persuasion behind his hand.  "Mr. Krook ought to 
consider it in the rent.  I hope he does, I am sure."

"I hope he does," says Tony.  "But I doubt it."

"You find the rent too high, do you, sir?" returns the stationer.  
"Rents ARE high about here.  I don't know how it is exactly, but 
the law seems to put things up in price.  Not," adds Mr. Snagsby 
with his apologetic cough, "that I mean to say a word against the 
profession I get my living by."

Mr. Weevle again glances up and down the court and then looks at 
the stationer.  Mr. Snagsby, blankly catching his eye, looks upward 
for a star or so and coughs a cough expressive of not exactly 
seeing his way out of this conversation.

"It's a curious fact, sir," he observes, slowly rubbing his hands, 
"that he should have been--"

"Who's he?" interrupts Mr. Weevle.

"The deceased, you know," says Mr. Snagsby, twitching his head and 
right eyebrow towards the staircase and tapping his acquaintance on 
the button.

"Ah, to be sure!" returns the other as if he were not over-fond of 
the subject.  "I thought we had done with him."

"I was only going to say it's a curious fact, sir, that he should 
have come and lived here, and been one of my writers, and then that 
you should come and live here, and be one of my writers too.  Which 
there is nothing derogatory, but far from it in the appellation," 
says Mr. Snagsby, breaking off with a mistrust that he may have 
unpolitely asserted a kind of proprietorship in Mr. Weevle, 
"because I have known writers that have gone into brewers' houses 
and done really very respectable indeed.  Eminently respectable, 
sir," adds Mr. Snagsby with a misgiving that he has not improved 
the matter.

"It's a curious coincidence, as you say," answers Weevle, once more 
glancing up and down the court.

"Seems a fate in it, don't there?" suggests the stationer.

"There does."

"Just so," observes the stationer with his confirmatory cough.  
"Quite a fate in it.  Quite a fate.  Well, Mr. Weevle, I am afraid 
I must bid you good night"--Mr. Snagsby speaks as if it made him 
desolate to go, though he has been casting about for any means of 
escape ever since he stopped to speak--"my little woman will be 
looking for me else.  Good night, sir!"

If Mr. Snagsby hastens home to save his little woman the trouble of 
looking for him, he might set his mind at rest on that score.  His 
little woman has had her eye upon him round the Sol's Arms all this 
time and now glides after him with a pocket handkerchief wrapped 
over her head, honourmg Mr. Weevle and his doorway with a searching 
glance as she goes past.

"You'll know me again, ma'am, at all events," says Mr. Weevle to 
himself; "and I can't compliment you on your appearance, whoever 
you are, with your head tied up in a bundle.  Is this fellow NEVER 
coming!"

This fellow approaches as he speaks.  Mr. Weevle softly holds up 
his finger, and draws him into the passage, and closes the street 
door.  Then they go upstairs, Mr. Weevle heavily, and Mr. Guppy 
(for it is he) very lightly indeed.  When they are shut into the 
back room, they speak low.

"I thought you had gone to Jericho at least instead of coming 
here," says Tony.

"Why, I said about ten."

"You said about ten," Tony repeats.  "Yes, so you did say about 
ten.  But according to my count, it's ten times ten--it's a hundred 
o'clock.  I never had such a night in my life!"

"What has been the matter?"

"That's it!" says Tony.  "Nothing has been the matter.  But here 
have I been stewing and fuming in this jolly old crib till I have 
had the horrors falling on me as thick as hail.  THERE'S a blessed-
looking candle!" says Tony, pointing to the heavily burning taper 
on his table with a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.

"That's easily improved," Mr. Guppy observes as he takes the 
snuffers in hand.

"IS it?" returns his friend.  "Not so easily as you think.  It has 
been smouldering like that ever since it was lighted."

"Why, what's the matter with you, Tony?" inquires Mr. Guppy, 
looking at him, snuffers in hand, as he sits down with his elbow on 
the table.

"William Guppy," replies the other, "I am in the downs.  It's this 
unbearably dull, suicidal room--and old Boguey downstairs, I 
suppose."  Mr. Weevle moodily pushes the snuffers-tray from him 
with his elbow, leans his head on his hand, puts his feet on the 
fender, and looks at the fire.  Mr. Guppy, observing him, slightly 
tosses his head and sits down on the other side of the table in an 
easy attitude.

"Wasn't that Snagsby talking to you, Tony?"

"Yes, and he--yes, it was Snagsby," said Mr. Weevle, altering the 
construction of his sentence.

"On business?"

"No.  No business.  He was only sauntering by and stopped to 
prose."

"I thought it was Snagsby," says Mr. Guppy, "and thought it as well 
that he shouldn't see me, so I waited till he was gone."

"There we go again, William G.!" cried Tony, looking up for an 
instant.  "So mysterious and secret!  By George, if we were going 
to commit a murder, we couldn't have more mystery about it!"

Mr. Guppy affects to smile, and with the view of changing the 
conversation, looks with an admiration, real or pretended, round 
the room at the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, terminating his 
survey with the portrait of Lady Dedlock over the mantelshelf, in 
which she is represented on a terrace, with a pedestal upon the 
terrace, and a vase upon the pedestal, and her shawl upon the vase, 
and a prodigious piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on the 
prodigious piece of fur, and a bracelet on her arm.

"That's very like Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Guppy.  "It's a speaking 
likeness."

"I wish it was," growls Tony, without changing his position.  "I 
should have some fashionable conversation, here, then."

Finding by this time that his friend is not to be wheedled into a 
more sociable humour, Mr. Guppy puts about upon the ill-used tack 
and remonstrates with him.

"Tony," says he, "I can make allowances for lowness of spirits, for 
no man knows what it is when it does come upon a man better than I 
do, and no man perhaps has a better right to know it than a man who 
has an unrequited image imprinted on his 'eart.  But there are 
bounds to these things when an unoffending party is in question, 
and I will acknowledge to you, Tony, that I don't think your manner 
on the present occasion is hospitable or quite gentlemanly."

"This is strong language, William Guppy," returns Mr. Weevle.

"Sir, it may be," retorts Mr. William Guppy, "but I feel strongly 
when I use it."

Mr. Weevle admits that he has been wrong and begs Mr. William Guppy 
to think no more about it.  Mr. William Guppy, however, having got 
the advantage, cannot quite release it without a little more 
injured remonstrance.

"No!  Dash it, Tony," says that gentleman, "you really ought to be 
careful how you wound the feelings of a man who has an unrequited 
image imprinted on his 'eart and who is NOT altogether happy in 
those chords which vibrate to the tenderest emotions.  You, Tony, 
possess in yourself all that is calculated to charm the eye and 
allure the taste.  It is not--happily for you, perhaps, and I may 
wish that I could say the same--it is not your character to hover 
around one flower.  The ole garden is open to you, and your airy 
pinions carry you through it.  Still, Tony, far be it from me, I am 
sure, to wound even your feelings without a cause!"

Tony again entreats that the subject may be no longer pursued, 
saying emphatically, "William Guppy, drop it!"  Mr. Guppy 
acquiesces, with the reply, "I never should have taken it up, Tony, 
of my own accord."

"And now," says Tony, stirring the fire, "touching this same bundle 
of letters.  Isn't it an extraordinary thing of Krook to have 
appointed twelve o'clock to-night to hand 'em over to me?"

"Very.  What did he do it for?"

"What does he do anything for?  HE don't know.  Said to-day was his 
birthday and he'd hand 'em over to-night at twelve o'clock.  He'll 
have drunk himself blind by that time.  He has been at it all day."

"He hasn't forgotten the appointment, I hope?"

"Forgotten?  Trust him for that.  He never forgets anything.  I saw 
him to-night, about eight--helped him to shut up his shop--and he 
had got the letters then in his hairy cap.  He pulled it off and 
showed 'em me.  When the shop was closed, he took them out of his 
cap, hung his cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over 
before the fire.  I heard him a little while afterwards, through 
the floor here, humming like the wind, the only song he knows--
about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or 
something or other.  He has been as quiet since as an old rat 
asleep in his hole."

"And you are to go down at twelve?"

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

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs 
crossed, "he can't read yet, can he?"

"Read!  He'll never read.  He can make all the letters separately, 
and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got 
on that much, under me; but he can't put them together.  He's too 
old to acquire the knack of it now--and too drunk."

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, "how do 
you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?"

"He never spelt it out.  You know what a curious power of eye he 
has and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by 
eye alone.  He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a 
letter, and asked me what it meant."

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again, 
"should you say that the original was a man's writing or a 
woman's?"

"A woman's.  Fifty to one a lady's--slopes a good deal, and the end 
of the letter 'n,' long and hasty."

Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue, 
generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg.  As 
he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve.  
It takes his attention.  He stares at it, aghast.

"Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night?  Is 
there a chimney on fire?"

"Chimney on fire!"

"Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy.  "See how the soot's falling.  See here, 
on my arm!  See again, on the table here!  Confound the stuff, it 
won't blow off--smears like black fat!"

They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and 
a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs.  Comes back and 
says it's all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately 
made to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol's Arms.

"And it was then," resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with 
remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their 
conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the 
table, with their heads very near together, "that he told you of 
his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger's 
portmanteau?"

"That was the time, sir," answers Tony, faintly adjusting his 
whiskers.  "Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable 
William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and 
advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots."

The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually 
assumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he 
abandons that and his whiskers together, and after looking over his 
shoulder, appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again.

"You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and 
to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them.  That's 
the arrangement, isn't it, Tony?" asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting 
his thumb-nail.

"You can't speak too low.  Yes.  That's what he and I agreed."

"I tell you what, Tony--"

"You can't speak too low," says Tony once more.  Mr. Guppy nods his 
sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper.

"I tell you what.  The first thing to be done is to make another 
packet like the real one so that if he should ask to see the real 
one while it's in my possession, you can show him the dummy."

"And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees it, which with 
his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more likely 
than not," suggests Tony.

"Then we'll face it out.  They don't belong to him, and they never 
did.  You found that, and you placed them in my hands--a legal 
friend of yours--for security.  If he forces us to it, they'll be 
producible, won't they?"

"Ye-es," is Mr. Weevle's reluctant admission.

"Why, Tony," remonstrates his friend, "how you look!  You don't 
doubt William Guppy?  You don't suspect any harm?"

"I don't suspect anything more than I know, William," returns the 
other gravely.

"And what do you know?" urges Mr. Guppy, raising his voice a 
little; but on his friend's once more warning him, "I tell you, you 
can't speak too low," he repeats his question without any sound at 
all, forming with his lips only the words, "What do you know?"

"I know three things.  First, I know that here we are whispering in 
secrecy, a pair of conspirators."

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy.  "And we had better be that than a pair of 
noodles, which we should be if we were doing anything else, for 
it's the only way of doing what we want to do.  Secondly?"

"Secondly, it's not made out to me how it's likely to be 
profitable, after all."

Mr. Guppy casts up his eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over 
the mantelshelf and replies, "Tony, you are asked to leave that to 
the honour of your friend.  Besides its being calculated to serve 
that friend in those chords of the human mind which--which need not 
be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion--your 
friend is no fool.  What's that?"

"It's eleven o'clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul's.  Listen 
and you'll hear all the bells in the city jangling."

Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant, 
resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various 
than their situations.  When these at length cease, all seems more 
mysterious and quiet than before.  One disagreeable result of 
whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, 
haunted by the ghosts of sound--strange cracks and tickings, the 
rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread 
of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the 
winter snow.  So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the 
air is full of these phantoms, and the two look over their 
shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut.

"Yes, Tony?" says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting 
his unsteady thumb-nail.  "You were going to say, thirdly?"

"It's far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in 
the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it."

"But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony."

"May be not, still I don't like it.  Live here by yourself and see 
how YOU like it."

"As to dead men, Tony," proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal, 
"there have been dead men in most rooms."

"I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and--and 
they let you alone," Tony answers.

The two look at each other again.  Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark 
to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that 
he hopes so.  There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by 
stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart 
had been stirred instead.

"Fah! Here's more of this hateful soot hanging about," says he.  
"Let us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air.  It's too 
close."

He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in 
and half out of the room.  The neighbouring houses are too near to 
admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and 
looking up, but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the 
rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is 
of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable.  Mr. Guppy, 
noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whisperirig in 
quite a light-comedy tone.

"By the by, Tony, don't forget old Smallweed," meaning the younger 
of that name.  "I have not let him into this, you know.  That 
grandfather of his is too keen by half.  It runs in the family."

"I remember," says Tony.  "I am up to all that."

"And as to Krook," resumes Mr. Guppy.  "Now, do you suppose he 
really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has 
boasted to you, since you have been such allies?"

Tony shakes his head.  "I don't know.  Can't Imagine.  If we get 
through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be 
better informed, no doubt.  How can I know without seeing them, 
when he don't know himself?  He is always spelling out words from 
them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and 
asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from 
beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for 
anything I can say.  It's a monomania with him to think he is 
possessed of documents.  He has been going to learn to read them 
this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells 
me."

"How did he first come by that idea, though?  That's the question," 
Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic 
meditation.  "He may have found papers in something he bought, 
where papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it into his 
shrewd head from the manner and place of their concealment that 
they are worth something."

"Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain.  Or he 
may have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he HAS 
got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor's Court 
and hearing of documents for ever," returns Mr. Weevle.

Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and 
balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues 
thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, 
until he hastily draws his hand away.

"What, in the devil's name," he says, "is this!  Look at my 
fingers!"

A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the 
touch and sight and more offensive to the smell.  A stagnant, 
sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them 
both shudder.

"What have you been doing here?  What have you been pouring out of 
window?"

"I pouring out of window!  Nothing, I swear!  Never, since I have 
been here!" cries the lodger.

And yet look here--and look here!  When he brings the candle here, 
from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away 
down the bricks, here lies in a little thick nauseous pool.

"This is a horrible house," says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the 
window.  "Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off."

He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells, and washes, that he 
has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy and stood 
silently before the fire when Saint Paul's bell strikes twelve and 
all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various 
heights in the dark air, and in their many tones.  When all is 
quiet again, the lodger says, "It's the appointed time at last.  
Shall I go?"

Mr. Guppy nods and gives him a "lucky touch" on the back, but not 
with the washed hand, though it is his right hand.

He goes downstairs, and Mr. Guppy tries to compose himself before 
the fire for waiting a long time.  But in no more than a minute or 
two the stairs creak and Tony comes swiftly back.

"Have you got them?"

"Got them!  No.  The old man's not there."

He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his 
terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly, 
"What's the matter?"

"I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked 
in.  And the burning smell is there--and the soot is there, and the 
oil is there--and he is not there!"  Tony ends this with a groan.

Mr. Guppy takes the light.  They go down, more dead than alive, and 
holding one another, push open the door of the back shop.  The cat 
has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at 
something on the ground before the fire.  There is a very little 
fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating 
vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and 
ceiling.  The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent 
from the table, all stand as usual.  On one chair-back hang the old 
man's hairy cap and coat.

"Look!" whispers the lodger, pointing his friend's attention to 
these objects with a trembling finger.  "I told you so.  When I saw 
him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old 
letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair--his coat was there 
already, for he had pulled that off before he went to put the 
shutters up--and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, 
standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor."

Is he hanging somewhere?  They look up.  No.

"See!" whispers Tony.  "At the foot of the same chair there lies a 
dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with.  That went 
round the letters.  He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me, 
before he began to turn them over, and threw it there.  I saw it 
fall."

"What's the matter with the cat?" says Mr. Guppy.  "Look at her!"

"Mad, I think.  And no wonder in this evil place."

They advance slowly, looking at all these things.  The cat remains 
where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground 
before the fire and between the two chairs.  What is it?  Hold up 
the light.

Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a 
little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to 
be steeped in something; and here is--is it the cinder of a small 
charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it 
coal?  Oh, horror, he IS here!  And this from which we run away, 
striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, 
is all that represents him.

Help, help, help!  Come into this house for heaven's sake!  Plenty 
will come in, but none can help.  The Lord Chancellor of that 
court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all 
lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places 
under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where 
injustice is done.  Call the death by any name your Highness will, 
attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented 
how you will, it is the same death eternally--inborn, inbred, 
engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and 
that only--spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths 
that can be died.



CHAPTER XXXIII

Interlopers


Now do those two gentlemen not very neat about the cuffs and 
buttons who attended the last coroner's inquest at the Sol's Arms 
reappear in the precincts with surprising swiftness (being, in 
fact, breathlessly fetched by the active and intelligent beadle), 
and institute perquisitions through the court, and dive into the 
Sol's parlour, and write with ravenous little pens on tissue-paper.  
Now do they note down, in the watches of the night, how the 
neighbourhood of Chancery Lane was yesterday, at about midnight, 
thrown into a state of the most intense agitation and excitement by 
the following alarming and horrible discovery.  Now do they set 
forth how it will doubtless be remembered that some time back a 
painful sensation was created in the public mind by a case of 
mysterious death from opium occurring in the first floor of the 
house occupied as a rag, bottle, and general marine store shop, by 
an eccentric individual of intemperate habits, far advanced in 
life, named Krook; and how, by a remarkable coincidence, Krook was 
examined at the inquest, which it may be recollected was held on 
that occasion at the Sol's Arms, a well-conducted tavern 
immediately adjoining the premises in question on the west side and 
licensed to a highly respectable landlord, Mr. James George Bogsby.  
Now do they show (in as many words as possible) how during some 
hours of yesterday evening a very peculiar smell was observed by 
the inhabitants of the court, in which the tragical occurrence 
which forms the subject of that present account transpired; and 
which odour was at one time so powerful that Mr. Swills, a comic 
vocalist professionally engaged by Mr. J. G. Bogsby, has himself 
stated to our reporter that he mentioned to Miss M. Melvilleson, a 
lady of some pretensions to musical ability, likewise engaged by 
Mr. J. G. Bogsby to sing at a series of concerts called Harmonic 
Assemblies, or Meetings, which it would appear are held at the 
Sol's Arms under Mr. Bogsby's direction pursuant to the Act of 
George the Second, that he (Mr. Swills) found his voice seriously 
affected by the impure state of the atmosphere, his jocose 
expression at the time being that he was like an empty post-office, 
for he hadn't a single note in him.  How this account of Mr. Swills 
is entirely corroborated by two intelligent married females 
residing in the same court and known respectively by the names of 
Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, both of whom observed the foetid 
effluvia and regarded them as being emitted from the premises in 
the occupation of Krook, the unfortunate deceased.  All this and a 
great deal more the two gentlemen who have formed an amicable 
partnership in the melancholy catastrophe write down on the spot; 
and the boy population of the court (out of bed in a moment) swarm 
up the shutters of the Sol's Arms parlour, to behold the tops of 
their heads while they are about it.

The whole court, adult as well as boy, is sleepless for that night, 
and can do nothing but wrap up its many heads, and talk of the ill-
fated house, and look at it.  Miss Flite has been bravely rescued 
from her chamber, as if it were in flames, and accommodated with a 
bed at the Sol's Arms.  The Sol neither turns off its gas nor shuts 
its door all night, for any kind of public excitement makes good 
for the Sol and causes the court to stand in need of comfort.  The 
house has not done so much in the stomachic article of cloves or in 
brandy-and-water warm since the inquest.  The moment the pot-boy 
heard what had happened, he rolled up his shirt-sleeves tight to 
his shoulders and said, "There'll be a run upon us!"  In the first 
outcry, young Piper dashed off for the fire-engines and returned in 
triumph at a jolting gallop perched up aloft on the Phoenix and 
holding on to that fabulous creature with all his might in the 
midst of helmets and torches.  One helmet remains behind after 
careful investigation of all chinks and crannies and slowly paces 
up and down before the house in company with one of the two 
policemen who have likewise been left in charge thereof.  To this 
trio everybody in the court possessed of sixpence has an insatiate 
desire to exhibit hospitality in a liquid form.

Mr. Weevle and his friend Mr. Guppy are within the bar at the Sol 
and are worth anything to the Sol that the bar contains if they 
will only stay there.  "This is not a time, says Mr. Bogsby, "to 
haggle about money," though he looks something sharply after it, 
over the counter; "give your orders, you two gentlemen, and you're 
welcome to whatever you put a name to."

Thus entreated, the two gentlemen (Mr. Weevle especially) put names 
to so many things that in course of time they find it difficult to 
put a name to anything quite distinctly, though they still relate 
to all new-comers some version of the night they have had of it, 
and of what they said, and what they thought, and what they saw.  
Meanwhile, one or other of the policemen often flits about the 
door, and pushing it open a little way at the full length of his 
arm, looks in from outer gloom.  Not that he has any suspicions, 
but that he may as well know what they are up to in there.

Thus night pursues its leaden course, finding the court still out 
of bed through the unwonted hours, still treating and being 
treated, still conducting itself similarly to a court that has had 
a little money left it unexpectedly.  Thus night at length with 
slow-retreating steps departs, and the lamp-lighter going his 
rounds, like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the 
little heads of fire that have aspired to lessen the darkness.  
Thus the day cometh, whether or no.

And the day may discern, even with its dim London eye, that the 
court has been up all night.  Over and above the faces that have 
fallen drowsily on tables and the heels that lie prone on hard 
floors instead of beds, the brick and mortar physiognomy of the 
very court itself looks worn and jaded.  And now the neighbourhood, 
waking up and beginning to hear of what has happened, comes 
streaming in, half dressed, to ask questions; and the two policemen 
and the helmet (who are far less impressible externally than the 
court) have enough to do to keep the door.

"Good gracious, gentlemen!" says Mr. Snagsby, coming up.  "What's 
this I hear!"

"Why, it's true," returns one of the policemen.  "That's what it 
is.  Now move on here, come!"

"Why, good gracious, gentlemen," says Mr. Snagsby, somewhat 
promptly backed away, "I was at this door last night betwixt ten 
and eleven o'clock in conversation with the young man who lodges 
here."

"Indeed?" returns the policeman.  "You will find the young man next 
door then.  Now move on here, some of you,"

"Not hurt, I hope?" says Mr. Snagsby.

"Hurt?  No.  What's to hurt him!"

Mr. Snagsby, wholly unable to answer this or any question in his 
troubled mind, repairs to the Sol's Arms and finds Mr. Weevle 
languishing over tea and toast with a considerable expression on 
him of exhausted excitement and exhausted tobacco-smoke.

"And Mr. Guppy likewise!" quoth Mr. Snagsby.  "Dear, dear, dear!  
What a fate there seems in all this!  And my lit--"

Mr. Snagsby's power of speech deserts him in the formation of the 
words "my little woman."  For to see that injured female walk into 
the Sol's Arms at that hour of the morning and stand before the 
beer-engine, with her eyes fixed upon him like an accusing spirit, 
strikes him dumb.

"My dear," says Mr. Snagsby when his tongue is loosened, "will you 
take anything?  A little--not to put too fine a point upon it--drop 
of shrub?"

"No," says Mrs. Snagsby.

"My love, you know these two gentlemen?"

"Yes!" says Mrs. Snagsby, and in a rigid manner acknowledges their 
presence, still fixing Mr. Snagsby with her eye.

The devoted Mr. Snagsby cannot bear this treatment.  He takes Mrs. 
Snagsby by the hand and leads her aside to an adjacent cask.

"My little woman, why do you look at me in that way?  Pray don't do 
it."

"I can't help my looks," says Mrs. Snagsby, "and if I could I 
wouldn't."

Mr. Snagsby, with his cough of meekness, rejoins, "Wouldn't you 
really, my dear?" and meditates.  Then coughs his cough of trouble 
and says, "This is a dreadful mystery, my love!" still fearfully 
disconcerted by Mrs. Snagsby's eye.

"It IS," returns Mrs. Snagsby, shaking her head, "a dreadful 
mystery."

"My little woman," urges Mr. Snagsby in a piteous manner, "don't 
for goodness' sake speak to me with that bitter expression and look 
at me in that searching way!  I beg and entreat of you not to do 
it.  Good Lord, you don't suppose that I would go spontaneously 
combusting any person, my dear?"

"I can't say," returns Mrs. Snagsby.

On a hasty review of his unfortunate position, Mr. Snagsby "can't 
say" either.  He is not prepared positively to deny that he may 
have had something to do with it.  He has had something--he don't 
know what--to do with so much in this connexion that is mysterious 
that it is possible he may even be implicated, without knowing it, 
in the present transaction.  He faintly wipes his forehead with his 
handkerchief and gasps.

"My life," says the unhappy stationer, "would you have any 
objections to mention why, being in general so delicately 
circumspect in your conduct, you come into a wine-vaults before 
breakfast?"

"Why do YOU come here?" inquires Mrs. Snagsby.

"My dear, merely to know the rights of the fatal accident which has 
happened to the venerable party who has been--combusted."  Mr. 
Snagsby has made a pause to suppress a groan.  "I should then have 
related them to you, my love, over your French roll."

"I dare say you would!  You relate everything to me, Mr. Snagsby."

"Every--my lit--"

"I should be glad," says Mrs. Snagsby after contemplating his 
increased confusion with a severe and sinister smile, "if you would 
come home with me; I think you may be safer there, Mr. Snagsby, 
than anywhere else."

"My love, I don't know but what I may be, I am sure.  I am ready to 
go."

Mr. Snagsby casts his eye forlornly round the bar, gives Messrs. 
Weevle and Guppy good morning, assures them of the satisfaction 
with which he sees them uninjured, and accompanies Mrs. Snagsby 
from the Sol's Arms.  Before night his doubt whether he may not be 
responsible for some inconceivable part in the catastrophe which is 
the talk of the whole neighbourhood is almost resolved into 
certainty by Mrs. Snagsby's pertinacity in that fixed gaze.  His 
mental sufferings are so great that he entertains wandering ideas 
of delivering himself up to justice and requiring to be cleared if 
innocent and punished with the utmost rigour of the law if guilty.

Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, having taken their breakfast, step into 
Lincoln's Inn to take a little walk about the square and clear as 
many of the dark cobwebs out of their brains as a little walk may.

"There can be no more favourable time than the present, Tony," says 
Mr. Guppy after they have broodingly made out the four sides of the 
square, "for a word or two between us upon a point on which we 
must, with very little delay, come to an understanding."

"Now, I tell you what, William G.!" returns the other, eyeing his 
companion with a bloodshot eye.  "If it's a point of conspiracy, 
you needn't take the trouble to mention it.  I have had enough of 
that, and I ain't going to have any more.  We shall have YOU taking 
fire next or blowing up with a bang."

This supposititious phenomenon is so very disagreeable to Mr. Guppy 
that his voice quakes as he says in a moral way, "Tony, I should 
have thought that what we went through last night would have been a 
lesson to you never to be personal any more as long as you lived."  
To which Mr. Weevle returns, "William, I should have thought it 
would have been a lesson to YOU never to conspire any more as long 
as you lived."  To which Mr. Guppy says, "Who's conspiring?"  To 
which Mr. Jobling replies, "Why, YOU are!"  To which Mr. Guppy 
retorts, "No, I am not."  To which Mr. Jobling retorts again, "Yes, 
you are!"  To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Who says so?"  To which Mr. 
Jobling retorts, "I say so!"  To which Mr. Guppy retorts, "Oh, 
indeed?"  To which Mr. Jobling retorts, "Yes, indeed!"  And both 
being now in a heated state, they walk on silently for a while to 
cool down again.

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy then, "if you heard your friend out instead 
of flying at him, you wouldn't fall into mistakes.  But your temper 
is hasty and you are not considerate.  Possessing in yourself, 
Tony, all that is calculated to charm the eye--"

"Oh! Blow the eye!" cries Mr. Weevle, cutting him short.  "Say what 
you have got to say!"

Finding his friend in this morose and material condition, Mr. Guppy 
only expresses the finer feelings of his soul through the tone of 
injury in which he recommences, "Tony, when I say there is a point 
on which we must come to an understanding pretty soon, I say so 
quite apart from any kind of conspiring, however innocent.  You 
know it is professionally arranged beforehand in all cases that are 
tried what facts the witnesses are to prove.  Is it or is it not 
desirable that we should know what facts we are to prove on the 
inquiry into the death of this unfortunate old mo--gentleman?"  
(Mr. Guppy was going to say "mogul," but thinks "gentleman" better 
suited to the circumstances.)

"What facts?  THE facts."

"The facts bearing on that inquiry.  Those are"--Mr. Guppy tells 
them off on his fingers--"what we knew of his habits, when you saw 
him last, what his condition was then, the discovery that we made, 
and how we made it."

"Yes," says Mr. Weevle.  "Those are about the facts."

"We made the discovery in consequence of his having, in his 
eccentric way, an appointment with you at twelve o'clock at night, 
when you were to explain some writing to him as you had often done 
before on account of his not being able to read.  I, spending the 
evening with you, was called down--and so forth.  The inquiry being 
only into the circumstances touching the death of the deceased, 
it's not necessary to go beyond these facts, I suppose you'll 
agree?"

"No!" returns Mr. Weevle.  "I suppose not."

"And this is not a conspiracy, perhaps?" says the injured Guppy.

"No," returns his friend; "if it's nothing worse than this, I 
withdraw the observation."

"Now, Tony," says Mr. Guppy, taking his arm again and walking him 
slowly on, "I should like to know, in a friendly way, whether you 
have yet thought over the many advantages of your continuing to 
live at that place?"

"What do you mean?" says Tony, stopping.

"Whether you have yet thought over the many advantages of your 
continuing to live at that place?" repeats Mr. Guppy, walking him 
on again.

"At what place?  THAT place?" pointing in the direction of the rag 
and bottle shop.

Mr. Guppy nods.

"Why, I wouldn't pass another night there for any consideration 
that you could offer me," says Mr. Weevle, haggardly staring.

"Do you mean it though, Tony?"

"Mean it!  Do I look as if I mean it?  I feel as if I do; I know 
that," says Mr. Weevle with a very genuine shudder.

"Then the possibility or probability--for such it must be 
considered--of your never being disturbed in possession of those 
effects lately belonging to a lone old man who seemed to have no 
relation in the world, and the certainty of your being able to find 
out what he really had got stored up there, don't weigh with you at 
all against last night, Tony, if I understand you?" says Mr. Guppy, 
biting his thumb with the appetite of vexation.

"Certainly not.  Talk in that cool way of a fellow's living there?" 
cries Mr. Weevle indignantly.  "Go and live there yourself."

"Oh! I, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy, soothing him.  "I have never lived 
there and couldn't get a lodging there now, whereas you have got 
one."

"You are welcome to it," rejoins his friend, "and--ugh!--you may 
make yourself at home in it."

"Then you really and truly at this point," says Mr. Guppy, "give up 
the whole thing, if I understand you, Tony?"

"You never," returns Tony with a most convincing steadfastness, 
"said a truer word in all your life.  I do!"

While they are so conversing, a hackney-coach drives into the 
square, on the box of which vehicle a very tall hat makes itself 
manifest to the public.  Inside the coach, and consequently not so 
manifest to the multitude, though sufficiently so to the two 
friends, for the coach stops almost at their feet, are the 
venerable Mr. Smallweed and Mrs. Smallweed, accompanied by their 
granddaughter Judy.

An air of haste and excitement pervades the party, and as the tall 
hat (surmounting Mr. Smallweed the younger) alights, Mr. Smallweed 
the elder pokes his head out of window and bawls to Mr. Guppy, "How 
de do, sir!  How de do!"

"What do Chick and his family want here at this time of the 
morning, I wonder!" says Mr. Guppy, nodding to his familiar.

"My dear sir," cries Grandfather Smallweed, "would you do me a 
favour?  Would you and your friend be so very obleeging as to carry 
me into the public-house in the court, while Bart and his sister 
bring their grandmother along?  Would you do an old man that good 
turn, sir?"

Mr. Guppy looks at his friend, repeating inquiringly, "The public-
house in the court?"  And they prepare to bear the venerable burden 
to the Sol's Arms.

"There's your fare!" says the patriarch to the coachman with a 
fierce grin and shaking his incapable fist at him.  "Ask me for a 
penny more, and I'll have my lawful revenge upon you.  My dear 
young men, be easy with me, if you please.  Allow me to catch you 
round the neck.  I won't squeeze you tighter than I can help.  Oh, 
Lord!  Oh, dear me!  Oh, my bones!"

It is well that the Sol is not far off, for Mr. Weevle presents an 
apoplectic appearance before half the distance is accomplished.  
With no worse aggravation of his symptoms, however, than the 
utterance of divers croaking sounds expressive of obstructed 
respiration, he fulils his share of the porterage and the 
benevolent old gentleman is deposited by his own desire in the 
parlour of the Sol's Arms.

"Oh, Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed, looking about him, breathless, 
from an arm-chair.  "Oh, dear me!  Oh, my bones and back!  Oh, my 
aches and pains!  Sit down, you dancing, prancing, shambling, 
scrambling poll-parrot!  Sit down!"

This little apostrophe to Mrs. Smallweed is occasioned by a 
propensity on the part of that unlucky old lady whenever she finds 
herself on her feet to amble about and "set" to inanimate objects, 
accompanying herself with a chattering noise, as in a witch dance.  
A nervous affection has probably as much to do with these 
demonstrations as any imbecile intention in the poor old woman, but 
on the present occasion they are so particularly lively in 
connexion with the Windsor arm-chair, fellow to that in which Mr. 
Smallweed is seated, that she only quite desists when her 
grandchildren have held her down in it, her lord in the meanwhile 
bestowing upon her, with great volubility, the endearing epithet of 
"a pig-headed jackdaw," repeated a surprising number of times.

"My dear sir," Grandfather Smallweed then proceeds, addressing Mr. 
Guppy, "there has been a calamity here.  Have you heard of it, 
either of you?"

"Heard of it, sir!  Why, we discovered it."

"You discovered it.  You two discovered it!  Bart, THEY discovered 
it!"

The two discoverers stare at the Smallweeds, who return the 
compliment.

"My dear friends," whines Grandfather Smallweed, putting out both 
his hands, "I owe you a thousand thanks for discharging the 
melancholy office of discovering the ashes of Mrs. Smallweed's 
brother."

"Eh?" says Mr. Guppy.

"Mrs. Smallweed's brother, my dear friend--her only relation.  We 
were not on terms, which is to be deplored now, but he never WOULD 
be on terms.  He was not fond of us.  He was eccentric--he was very 
eccentric.  Unless he has left a will (which is not at all likely) 
I shall take out letters of administration.  I have come down to 
look after the property; it must be sealed up, it must be 
protected.  I have come down," repeats Grandfather Smallweed, 
hooking the air towards him with all his ten fingers at once, "to 
look after the property."

"I think, Small," says the disconsolate Mr. Guppy, "you might have 
mentioned that the old man was your uncle."

"You two were so close about him that I thought you would like me 
to be the same," returns that old bird with a secretly glistening 
eye.  "Besides, I wasn't proud of him."

"Besides which, it was nothing to you, you know, whether he was or 
not," says Judy.  Also with a secretly glistening eye.

"He never saw me in his life to know me," observed Small; "I don't 
know why I should introduce HIM, I am sure!"

"No, he never communicated with us, which is to be deplored," the 
old gentleman strikes in, "but I have come to look after the 
property--to look over the papers, and to look after the property.  
We shall make good our title.  It is in the hands of my solicitor.  
Mr. Tulkinghorn, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, over the way there, is so 
good as to act as my solicitor; and grass don't grow under HIS 
feet, I can tell ye.  Krook was Mrs. Smallweed's only brother; she 
had no relation but Krook, and Krook had no relation but Mrs. 
Smallweed.  I am speaking of your brother, you brimstone black-
beetle, that was seventy-six years of age."

Mrs. Smallweed instantly begins to shake her head and pipe up, 
"Seventy-six pound seven and sevenpence!  Seventysix thousand bags 
of money!  Seventy-six hundred thousand million of parcels of bank-
notes!"

"Will somebody give me a quart pot?" exclaims her exasperated 
husband, looking helplessly about him and finding no missile within 
his reach.  "Will somebody obleege me with a spittoon?  Will 
somebody hand me anything hard and bruising to pelt at her?  You 
hag, you cat, you dog, you brimstone barker!"  Here Mr. Smallweed, 
wrought up to the highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually 
throws Judy at her grandmother in default of anything else, by 
butting that young virgin at the old lady with such force as he can 
muster and then dropping into his chair in a heap.

"Shake me up, somebody, if you'll he so good," says the voice from 
within the faintly struggling bundle into which he has collapsed.  
"I have come to look after the property.  Shake me up, and call in 
the police on duty at the next house to be explained to about the 
property.  My solicitor will be here presently to protect the 
property.  Transportation or the gallows for anybody who shall 
touch the property!"  As his dutiful grandchildren set him up, 
panting, and putting him through the usual restorative process of 
shaking and punching, he still repeats like an echo, "The--the 
property!  The property!  Property!"

Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy look at each other, the former as having 
relinquished the whole affair, the latter with a discomfited 
countenance as having entertained some lingering expectations yet.  
But there is nothing to be done in opposition to the Smallweed 
interest.  Mr. Tulkinghorn's clerk comes down from his official pew 
in the chambers to mention to the police that Mr. Tulkinghorn is 
answerable for its being all correct about the next of kin and that 
the papers and effects will be formally taken possession of in due 
time and course.  Mr. Smallweed is at once permitted so far to 
assert his supremacy as to be carried on a visit of sentiment into 
the next house and upstairs into Miss Flite's deserted room, where 
he looks like a hideous bird of prey newly added to her aviary.

The arrival of this unexpected heir soon taking wind in the court 
still makes good for the Sol and keeps the court upon its mettle.  
Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins think it hard upon the young man if 
there really is no will, and consider that a handsome present ought 
to be made him out of the estate.  Young Piper and young Perkins, 
as members of that restless juvenile circle which is the terror of 
the foot-passengers in Chancery Lane, crumble into ashes behind the 
pump and under the archway all day long, where wild yells and 
hootings take place over their remains.  Little Swills and Miss M. 
Melvilleson enter into affable conversation with their patrons, 
feeling that these unusual occurrences level the barriers between 
professionals and non-professionals.  Mr. Bogsby puts up "The 
popular song of King Death, with chorus by the whole strength of 
the company," as the great Harmonic feature of the week and 
announces in the bill that "J. G. B. is induced to do so at a 
considerable extra expense in consequence of a wish which has been 
very generally expressed at the bar by a large body of respectable 
individuals and in homage to a late melancholy event which has 
aroused so much sensation."  There is one point connected with the 
deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that 
the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though 
there is so little to put in it.  Upon the undertaker's stating in 
the Sol's bar in the course of the day that he has received orders 
to construct "a six-footer," the general solicitude is much 
relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed's conduct does 
him great honour.

Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable 
excitement too, for men of science and philosophy come to look, and 
carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same 
intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and 
phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined.  Some of 
these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that 
the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and 
being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the 
evidence for such deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the 
Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown on 
English medical jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of 
the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one 
Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so 
and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of 
reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and 
Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who WOULD investigate the subject; 
and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a 
rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the 
unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred and even 
to write an account of it--still they regard the late Mr. Krook's 
obstinacy in going out of the world by any such by-way as wholly 
unjustifiable and personally offensive.  The less the court 
understands of all this, the more the court likes it, and the 
greater enjoyment it has in the stock in trade of the Sol's Arms.  
Then there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a 
foreground and figures ready drawn for anything from a wreck on the 
Cornish coast to a review in Hyde Park or a meeting in Manchester, 
and in Mrs. Perkins' own room, memorable evermore, he then and 
there throws in upon the block Mr. Krook's house, as large as life; 
in fact, considerably larger, making a very temple of it.  
Similarly, being permitted to look in at the door of the fatal 
chamber, he depicts that apartment as three-quarters of a mile long 
by fifty yards high, at which the court is particularly charmed.  
All this time the two gentlemen before mentioned pop in and out of 
every house and assist at the philosophical disputations--go 
everywhere and listen to everybody--and yet are always diving into 
the Sol's parlour and writing with the ravenous little pens on the 
tissue-paper.

At last come the coroner and his inquiry, like as before, except 
that the coroner cherishes this case as being out of the common way 
and tells the gentlemen of the jury, in his private capacity, that 
"that would seem to be an unlucky house next door, gentlemen, a 
destined house; but so we sometimes find it, and these are 
mysteries we can't account for!"  After which the six-footer comes 
into action and is much admired.

In all these proceedings Mr. Guppy has so slight a part, except 
when he gives his evidence, that he is moved on like a private 
individual and can only haunt the secret house on the outside, 
where he has the mortification of seeing Mr. Smallweed padlocking 
the door, and of bitterly knowing himself to be shut out.  But 
before these proceedings draw to a close, that is to say, on the 
night next after the catastrophe, Mr. Guppy has a thing to say that 
must be said to Lady Dedlock.

For which reason, with a sinking heart and with that hang-dog sense 
of guilt upon him which dread and watching enfolded in the Sol's 
Arms have produced, the young man of the name of Guppy presents 
himself at the town mansion at about seven o'clock in the evening 
and requests to see her ladyship.  Mercury replies that she is 
going out to dinner; don't he see the carriage at the door?  Yes, 
he does see the carriage at the door; but he wants to see my Lady 
too.

Mercury is disposed, as he will presently declare to a fellow-
gentleman in waiting, "to pitch into the young man"; but his 
instructions are positive.  Therefore he sulkily supposes that the 
young man must come up into the library.  There he leaves the young 
man in a large room, not over-light, while he makes report of him.

Mr. Guppy looks into the shade in all directions, discovering 
everywhere a certain charred and whitened little heap of coal or 
wood.  Presently he hears a rustling.  Is it--?  No, it's no ghost, 
but fair flesh and blood, most brilliantly dressed.

"I have to beg your ladyship's pardon," Mr. Guppy stammers, very 
downcast.  "This is an inconvenient time--"

"I told you, you could come at any time."  She takes a chair, 
looking straight at him as on the last occasion.

"Thank your ladyship.  Your ladyship is very affable."

"You can sit down."  There is not much affability in her tone.

"I don't know, your ladyship, that it's worth while my sitting down 
and detaining you, for I--I have not got the letters that I 
mentioned when I had the honour of waiting on your ladyship."

"Have you come merely to say so?"

"Merely to say so, your ladyship."  Mr. Guppy besides being 
depressed, disappointed, and uneasy, is put at a further 
disadvantage by the splendour and beauty of her appearance.

She knows its influence perfectly, has studied it too well to miss 
a grain of its effect on any one.  As she looks at him so steadily 
and coldly, he not only feels conscious that he has no guide in the 
least perception of what is really the complexion of her thoughts, 
but also that he is being every moment, as it were, removed further 
and further from her.

She will not speak, it is plain.  So he must.

"In short, your ladyship," says Mr. Guppy like a meanly penitent 
thief, "the person I was to have had the letters of, has come to a 
sudden end, and--"  He stops.  Lady Dedlock calmly finishes the 
sentence.

"And the letters are destroyed with the person?"

Mr. Guppy would say no if he could--as he is unable to hide.

"I believe so, your ladyship."

If he could see the least sparkle of relief in her face now?  No, 
he could see no such thing, even if that brave outside did not 
utterly put him away, and he were not looking beyond it and about 
it.

He falters an awkward excuse or two for his failure.

"Is this all you have to say?" inquires Lady Dedlock, having heard 
him out--or as nearly out as he can stumble.

Mr. Guppy thinks that's all.

"You had better be sure that you wish to say nothing more to me, 
this being the last time you will have the opportunity."

Mr. Guppy is quite sure.  And indeed he has no such wish at 
present, by any means.

"That is enough.  I will dispense with excuses.  Good evening to 
you!"  And she rings for Mercury to show the young man of the name 
of Guppy out.

But in that house, in that same moment, there happens to be an old 
man of the name of Tulkinghorn.  And that old man, coming with his 
quiet footstep to the library, has his hand at that moment on the 
handle of the door--comes in--and comes face to face with the young 
man as he is leaving the room.

One glance between the old man and the lady, and for an instant the 
blind that is always down flies up.  Suspicion, eager and sharp, 
looks out.  Another instant, close again.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock.  I beg your pardon a thousand 
times.  It is so very unusual to find you here at this hour.  I 
supposed the room was empty.  I beg your pardon!"

"Stay!"  She negligently calls him back.  "Remain here, I beg.  I 
am going out to dinner.  I have nothing more to say to this young 
man!"

The disconcerted young man bows, as he goes out, and cringingly 
hopes that Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields is well.

"Aye, aye?" says the lawyer, looking at him from under his bent 
brows, though he has no need to look again--not he.  "From Kenge 
and Carboy's, surely?"

"Kenge and Carboy's, Mr. Tulkinghorn.  Name of Guppy, sir."

"To be sure.  Why, thank you, Mr. Guppy, I am very well!"

"Happy to hear it, sir.  You can't be too well, sir, for the credit 
of the profession."

"Thank you, Mr. Guppy!"

Mr. Guppy sneaks away.  Mr. Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his old-
fashioned rusty black to Lady Dedlock's brightness, hands her down 
the staircase to her carriage.  He returns rubbing his chin, and 
rubs it a good deal in the course of the evening.



CHAPTER XXXIV

A Turn of the Screw


"Now, what," says Mr. George, "may this be?  Is it blank cartridge 
or ball?  A flash in the pan or a shot?"

An open letter is the subject of the trooper's speculations, and it 
seems to perplex him mightily.  He looks at it at arm's length, 
brings it close to him, holds it in his right hand, holds it in his 
left hand, reads it with his head on this side, with his head on 
that side, contracts his eyebrows, elevates them, still cannot 
satisfy himself.  He smooths it out upon the table with his heavy 
palm, and thoughtfully walking up and down the gallery, makes a 
halt before it every now and then to come upon it with a fresh eye.  
Even that won't do.  "Is it," Mr. George still muses, "blank 
cartridge or ball?"

Phil Squod, with the aid of a brush and paint-pot, is employed in 
the distance whitening the targets, softly whistling in quick-march 
time and in drum-and-fife manner that he must and will go back 
again to the girl he left behind him.

"Phil!"  The trooper beckons as he calls him.

Phil approaches in his usual way, sidling off at first as if he 
were going anywhere else and then bearing down upon his commander 
like a bayonet-charge.  Certain splashes of white show in high 
relief upon his dirty face, and he scrapes his one eyebrow with the 
handle of the brush.

"Attention, Phil!  Listen to this."

"Steady, commander, steady."

"'Sir.  Allow me to remind you (though there is no legal necessity 
for my doing so, as you are aware) that the bill at two months' 
date drawn on yourself by Mr. Matthew Bagnet, and by you accepted, 
for the sum of ninety-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence, 
will become due to-morrow, when you will please be prepared to take 
up the same on presentation.  Yours, Joshua Smallweed.'  What do 
you make of that, Phil?"

"Mischief, guv'ner."

"Why?"

"I think," replies Phil after pensively tracing out a cross-wrinkle 
in his forehead with the brush-handle, "that mischeevious 
consequences is always meant when money's asked for."

"Lookye, Phil," says the trooper, sitting on the table.  "First and 
last, I have paid, I may say, half as much again as this principal 
in interest and one thing and another."

Phil intimates by sidling back a pace or two, with a very 
unaccountable wrench of his wry face, that he does not regard the 
transaction as being made more promising by this incident.

"And lookye further, Phil," says the trooper, staying his premature 
conclusions with a wave of his hand.  "There has always been an 
understanding that this bill was to be what they call renewed.  And 
it has been renewed no end of times.  What do you say now?"

"I say that I think the times is come to a end at last."

"You do?  Humph!  I am much of the same mind myself."

"Joshua Smallweed is him that was brought here in a chair?"

"The same."

"Guv'ner," says Phil with exceeding gravity, "he's a leech in his 
dispositions, he's a screw and a wice in his actions, a snake in 
his twistings, and a lobster in his claws."

Having thus expressively uttered his sentiments, Mr. Squod, after 
waiting a little to ascertain if any further remark be expected of 
him, gets back by his usual series of movements to the target he 
has in hand and vigorously signifies through his former musical 
medium that he must and he will return to that ideal young lady.  
George, having folded the letter, walks in that direction.

"There IS a way, commander," says Phil, looking cunningly at him, 
"of settling this."

"Paying the money, I suppose?  I wish I could."

Phil shakes his head.  "No, guv'ner, no; not so bad as that.  There 
IS a way," says Phil with a highly artistic turn of his brush; 
"what I'm a-doing at present."

"Whitewashing."

Phil nods.

"A pretty way that would be!  Do you know what would become of the 
Bagnets in that case?  Do you know they would be ruined to pay off 
my old scores?  YOU'RE a moral character," says the trooper, eyeing 
him in his large way with no small indignation; "upon my life you 
are, Phil!"

Phil, on one knee at the target, is in course of protesting 
earnestly, though not without many allegorical scoops of his brush 
and smoothings of the white surface round the rim with his thumb, 
that he had forgotten the Bagnet responsibility and would not so 
much as injure a hair of the head of any member of that worthy 
family when steps are audible in the long passage without, and a 
cheerful voice is heard to wonder whether George is at home.  Phil, 
with a look at his master, hobbles up, saying, "Here's the guv'ner, 
Mrs. Bagnet!  Here he is!" and the old girl herself, accompanied by 
Mr. Bagnet, appears.

The old girl never appears in walking trim, in any season of the 
year, without a grey cloth cloak, coarse and much worn but very 
clean, which is, undoubtedly, the identical garment rendered so 
interesting to Mr. Bagnet by having made its way home to Europe 
from another quarter of the globe in company with Mrs. Bagnet and 
an umbrella.  The latter faithful appendage is also invariably a 
part of the old girl's presence out of doors.  It is of no colour 
known in this life and has a corrugated wooden crook for a handle, 
with a metallic object let into its prow, or beak, resembling a 
little model of a fanlight over a street door or one of the oval 
glasses out of a pair of spectacles, which ornamental object has 
not that tenacious capacity of sticking to its post that might be 
desired in an article long associated with the British army.  The 
old girl's umbrella is of a flabby habit of waist and seems to be 
in need of stays--an appearance that is possibly referable to its 
having served through a series of years at home as a cupboard and 
on journeys as a carpet bag.  She never puts it up, having the 
greatest reliance on her well-proved cloak with its capacious hood, 
but generally uses the instrument as a wand with which to point out 
joints of meat or bunches of greens in marketing or to arrest the 
attention of tradesmen by a friendly poke.  Without her market-
basket, which is a sort of wicker well with two flapping lids, she 
never stirs abroad.  Attended by these her trusty companions, 
therefore, her honest sunburnt face looking cheerily out of a rough 
straw bonnet, Mrs. Bagnet now arrives, fresh-coloured and bright, 
in George's Shooting Gallery.

"Well, George, old fellow," says she, "and how do YOU do, this 
sunshiny morning?"

Giving him a friendly shake of the hand, Mrs. Bagnet draws a long 
breath after her walk and sits down to enjoy a rest.  Having a 
faculty, matured on the tops of baggage-waggons and in other such 
positions, of resting easily anywhere, she perches on a rough 
bench, unties her bonnet-strings, pushes back her bonnet, crosses 
her arms, and looks perfectly comfortable.

Mr. Bagnet in the meantime has shaken hands with his old comrade 
and with Phil, on whom Mrs. Bagnet likewise bestows a good-humoured 
nod and smile.

"Now, George," said Mrs. Bagnet briskly, "here we are, Lignum and 
myself"--she often speaks of her husband by this appellation, on 
account, as it is supposed, of Lignum Vitae having been his old 
regimental nickname when they first became acquainted, in 
compliment to the extreme hardness and toughness of his 
physiognomy--"just looked in, we have, to make it all correct as 
usual about that security.  Give him the new bill to sign, George, 
and he'll sign it like a man."

"I was coming to you this morning," observes the trooper 
reluctantly.

"Yes, we thought you'd come to us this morning, but we turned out 
early and left Woolwich, the best of boys, to mind his sisters and 
came to you instead--as you see!  For Lignum, he's tied so close 
now, and gets so little exercise, that a walk does him good.  But 
what's the matter, George?" asks Mrs. Bagnet, stopping in her 
cheerful talk.  "You don't look yourself."

"I am not quite myself," returns the trooper; "I have been a little 
put out, Mrs. Bagnet."

Her bright quick eye catches the truth directly.  "George!" holding 
up her forefinger.  "Don't tell me there's anything wrong about 
that security of Lignum's!  Don't do it, George, on account of the 
children!"

The trooper looks at her with a troubled visage.

"George," says Mrs. Bagnet, using both her arms for emphasis and 
occasionally bringing down her open hands upon her knees.  "If you 
have allowed anything wrong to come to that security of Lignum's, 
and if you have let him in for it, and if you have put us in danger 
of being sold up--and I see sold up in your face, George, as plain 
as print--you have done a shameful action and have deceived us 
cruelly.  I tell you, cruelly, George.  There!"

Mr. Bagnet, otherwise as immovable as a pump or a lamp-post, puts 
his large right hand on the top of his bald head as if to defend it 
from a shower-bath and looks with great uneasiness at Mrs. Bagnet.

"George," says that old girl, "I wonder at you!  George, I am 
ashamed of you!  George, I couldn't have believed you would have 
done it!  I always knew you to be a rolling sone that gathered no 
moss, but I never thought you would have taken away what little 
moss there was for Bagnet and the children to lie upon.  You know 
what a hard-working, steady-going chap he is.  You know what Quebec 
and Malta and Woolwich are, and I never did think you would, or 
could, have had the heart to serve us so.  Oh, George!"  Mrs. 
Bagnet gathers up her cloak to wipe her eyes on in a very genuine 
manner, "How could you do it?"

Mrs. Bagnet ceasing, Mr. Bagnet removes his hand from his head as 
if the shower-bath were over and looks disconsolately at Mr. 
George, who has turned quite white and looks distressfully at the 
grey cloak and straw bonnet.

"Mat," says the trooper in a subdued voice, addressing him but 
still looking at his wife, "I am sorry you take it so much to 
heart, because I do hope it's not so bad as that comes to.  I 
certainly have, this morning, received this letter"--which he reads 
aloud--"but I hope it may be set right yet.  As to a rolling stone, 
why, what you say is true.  I AM a rolling stone, and I never 
rolled in anybody's way, I fully believe, that I rolled the least 
good to.  But it's impossible for an old vagabond comrade to like 
your wife and family better than I like 'em, Mat, and I trust 
you'll look upon me as forgivingly as you can.  Don't think I've 
kept anything from you.  I haven't had the letter more than a 
quarter of an hour."

"Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet after a short silence, "will you 
tell him my opinion?"

"Oh! Why didn't he marry," Mrs. Bagnet answers, half laughing and 
half crying, "Joe Pouch's widder in North America?  Then he 
wouldn't have got himself into these troubles."

"The old girl," says Mr. Baguet, "puts it correct--why didn't you?"

"Well, she has a better husband by this time, I hope," returns the 
trooper.  "Anyhow, here I stand, this present day, NOT married to 
Joe Pouch's widder.  What shall I do?  You see all I have got about 
me.  It's not mine; it's yours.  Give the word, and I'll sell off 
every morsel.  If I could have hoped it would have brought in 
nearly the sum wanted, I'd have sold all long ago.  Don't believe 
that I'll leave you or yours in the lurch, Mat.  I'd sell myself 
first.  I only wish," says the trooper, giving himself a 
disparaging blow in the chest, "that I knew of any one who'd buy 
such a second-hand piece of old stores."

"Old girl," murmurs Mr. Bagnet, "give him another bit of my mind."

"George," says the old girl, "you are not so much to be blamed, on 
full consideration, except for ever taking this business without 
the means."

"And that was like me!" observes the penitent trooper, shaking his 
head.  "Like me, I know."

"Silence!  The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "is correct--in her way 
of giving my opinions--hear me out!"

"That was when you never ought to have asked for the security, 
George, and when you never ought to have got it, all things 
considered.  But what's done can't be undone.  You are always an 
honourable and straightforward fellow, as far as lays in your 
power, though a little flighty.  On the other hand, you can't admit 
but what it's natural in us to be anxious with such a thing hanging 
over our heads.  So forget and forgive all round, George.  Come!  
Forget and forgive all round!"

Mrs. Bagnet, giving him one of her honest hands and giving her 
husband the other, Mr. George gives each of them one of his and 
holds them while he speaks.

"I do assure you both, there's nothing I wouldn't do to discharge 
this obligation.  But whatever I have been able to scrape together 
has gone every two months in keeping it up.  We have lived plainly 
enough here, Phil and I.  But the gallery don't quite do what was 
expected of it, and it's not--in short, it's not the mint.  It was 
wrong in me to take it?  Well, so it was.  But I was in a manner 
drawn into that step, and I thought it might steady me, and set me 
up, and you'll try to overlook my having such expectations, and 
upon my soul, I am very much obliged to you, and very much ashamed 
of myself."  With these concluding words, Mr. George gives a shake 
to each of the hands he holds, and relinquishing them, backs a pace 
or two in a broad-chested, upright attitude, as if he had made a 
final confession and were immediately going to be shot with all 
military honours.

"George, hear me out!" says Mr. Bagnet, glancing at his wife.  "Old 
girl, go on!"

Mr. Bagnet, being in this singular manner heard out, has merely to 
observe that the letter must be attended to without any delay, that 
it is advisable that George and he should immediately wait on Mr. 
Smallweed in person, and that the primary object is to save and 
hold harmless Mr. Bagnet, who had none of the money.  Mr. George, 
entirely assenting, puts on his hat and prepares to march with Mr. 
Bagnet to the enemy's camp.

"Don't you mind a woman's hasty word, George," says Mrs. Bagnet, 
patting him on the shoulder.  "I trust my old Lignum to you, and I 
am sure you'll bring him through it."

The trooper returns that this is kindly said and that he WILL bring 
Lignum through it somehow.  Upon which Mrs. Bagnet, with her cloak, 
basket, and umbrella, goes home, bright-eyed again, to the rest of 
her family, and the comrades sally forth on the hopeful errand of 
mollifying Mr. Smallweed.

Whether there are two people in England less likely to come 
satisfactorily out of any negotiation with Mr. Smallweed than Mr. 
George and Mr. Matthew Bagnet may be very reasonably questioned.  
Also, notwithstanding their martial appearance, broad square 
shoulders, and heavy tread, whether there are within the same 
limits two more simple and unaccustomed children in all the 
Smallweedy affairs of life.  As they proceed with great gravity 
through the streets towards the region of Mount Pleasant, Mr. 
Bagnet, observing his companion to be thoughtful, considers it a 
friendly part to refer to Mrs. Bagnet's late sally.

"George, you know the old girl--she's as sweet and as mild as milk.  
But touch her on the children--or myself--and she's off like 
gunpowder."

"It does her credit, Mat!"

"George," says Mr. Bagnet, looking straight before him, "the old 
girl--can't do anything--that don't do her credit.  More or less.  
I never say so.  Discipline must he maintained."

"She's worth her weight in gold," says the trooper.

"In gold?" says Mr. Bagnet.  "I'll tell you what.  The old girl's 
weight--is twelve stone six.  Would I take that weight--in any 
metal--for the old girl?  No.  Why not?  Because the old girl's 
metal is far more precious---than the preciousest metal.  And she's 
ALL metal!"

"You are right, Mat!"

"When she took me--and accepted of the ring--she 'listed under me 
and the children--heart and head, for life.  She's that earnest," 
says Mr. Bagnet, "and true to her colours--that, touch us with a 
finger--and she turns out--and stands to her arms.  If the old girl 
fires wide--once in a way--at the call of duty--look over it, 
George.  For she's loyal!"

"Why, bless her, Mat," returns the trooper, "I think the higher of 
her for it!"

"You are right!" says Mr. Bagnet with the warmest enthusiasm, 
though without relaxing the rigidity of a single muscle.  "Think as 
high of the old girl--as the rock of Gibraltar--and still you'll be 
thinking low--of such merits.  But I never own to it before her.  
Discipline must be maintained."

These encomiums bring them to Mount Pleasant and to Grandfather 
Smallweed's house.  The door is opened by the perennial Judy, who, 
having surveyed them from top to toe with no particular favour, but 
indeed with a malignant sneer, leaves them standing there while she 
consults the oracle as to their admission.  The oracle may be 
inferred to give consent from the circumstance of her returning 
with the words on her honey lips that they can come in if they want 
to it.  Thus privileged, they come in and find Mr. Smallweed with 
his feet in the drawer of his chair as if it were a paper foot-bath 
and Mrs. Smallweed obscured with the cushion like a bird that is 
not to sing.

"My dear friend," says Grandfather Smallweed with those two lean 
affectionate arms of his stretched forth.  "How de do?  How de do?  
Who is our friend, my dear friend?"

"Why this," returns George, not able to be very conciliatory at 
first, "is Matthew Bagnet, who has obliged me in that matter of 
ours, you know."

"Oh! Mr. Bagnet?  Surely!"  The old man looks at him under his 
hand.

"Hope you're well, Mr. Bagnet?  Fine man, Mr. George!  Military 
air, sir!"

No chairs being offered, Mr. George brings one forward for Bagnet 
and one for himself.  They sit down, Mr. Bagnet as if he had no 
power of bending himself, except at the hips, for that purpose.

"Judy," says Mr. Smallweed, "bring the pipe."

"Why, I don't know," Mr. George interposes, "that the young woman 
need give herself that trouble, for to tell you the truth, I am not 
inclined to smoke it to-day."

"Ain't you?" returns the old man.  "Judy, bring the pipe."

"The fact is, Mr. Smallweed," proceeds George, "that I find myself 
in rather an unpleasant state of mind.  It appears to me, sir, that 
your friend in the city has been playing tricks."

"Oh, dear no!" says Grandfather Smallweed.  "He never does that!"

"Don't he?  Well, I am glad to hear it, because I thought it might 
be HIS doing.  This, you know, I am speaking of.  This letter."

Grandfather Smallweed smiles in a very ugly way in recognition of 
the letter.

"What does it mean?" asks Mr. George.

"Judy," says the old man.  "Have you got the pipe?  Give it to me.  
Did you say what does it mean, my good friend?"

"Aye!  Now, come, come, you know, Mr. Smallweed," urges the 
trooper, constraining himself to speak as smoothly and 
confidentially as he can, holding the open letter in one hand and 
resting the broad knuckles of the other on his thigh, "a good lot 
of money has passed between us, and we are face to face at the 
present moment, and are both well aware of the understanding there 
has always been.  I am prepared to do the usual thing which I have 
done regularly and to keep this matter going.  I never got a letter 
like this from you before, and I have been a little put about by it 
this morning, because here's my friend Matthew Bagnet, who, you 
know, had none of the money--"

"I DON'T know it, you know," says the old man quietly.

"Why, con-found you--it, I mean--I tell you so, don't I?"

"Oh, yes, you tell me so," returns Grandfather Smallweed.  "But I 
don't know it."

"Well!" says the trooper, swallowing his fire.  "I know it."

Mr. Smallweed replies with excellent temper, "Ah!  That's quite 
another thing!"  And adds, "But it don't matter.  Mr. Bagnet's 
situation is all one, whether or no."

The unfortunate George makes a great effort to arrange the affair 
comfortably and to propitiate Mr. Smallweed by taking him upon his 
own terms.

"That's just what I mean.  As you say, Mr. Smallweed, here's 
Matthew Bagnet liable to be fixed whether or no.  Now, you see, 
that makes his good lady very uneasy in her mind, and me too, for 
whereas I'm a harurn-scarum sort of a good-for-nought that more 
kicks than halfpence come natural to, why he's a steady family man, 
don't you see?  Now, Mr. Smallweed," says the trooper, gaining 
confidence as he proceeds in his soldierly mode of doing business, 
"although you and I are good friends enough in a certain sort of a 
way, I am well aware that I can't ask you to let my friend Bagnet 
off entirely."

"Oh, dear, you are too modest.  You can ASK me anything, Mr. 
George."  (There is an ogreish kind of jocularity in Grandfather 
Smallweed to-day.)

"And you can refuse, you mean, eh?  Or not you so much, perhaps, as 
your friend in the city?  Ha ha ha!"

"Ha ha ha!" echoes Grandfather Smallweed.  In such a very hard 
manner and with eyes so particularly green that Mr. Bagnet's 
natural gravity is much deepened by the contemplation of that 
venerable man.

"Come!" says the sanguine George.  "I am glad to find we can be 
pleasant, because I want to arrange this pleasantly.  Here's my 
friend Bagnet, and here am I.  We'll settle the matter on the spot, 
if you please, Mr. Smallweed, in the usual way.  And you'll ease my 
friend Bagnet's mind, and his family's mind, a good deal if you'll 
just mention to him what our understanding is."

Here some shrill spectre cries out in a mocking manner, "Oh, good 
gracious!  Oh!"  Unless, indeed, it be the sportive Judy, who is 
found to be silent when the startled visitors look round, but whose 
chin has received a recent toss, expressive of derision and 
contempt.  Mr. Bagnet's gravity becomes yet more profound.

"But I think you asked me, Mr. George"--old Smallweed, who all this 
time has had the pipe in his hand, is the speaker now--"I think you 
asked me, what did the letter mean?"

"Why, yes, I did," returns the trooper in his off-hand way, "but I 
don't care to know particularly, if it's all correct and pleasant."

Mr. Smallweed, purposely balking himself in an aim at the trooper's 
head, throws the pipe on the ground and breaks it to pieces.

"That's what it means, my dear friend.  I'll smash you.  I'll 
crumble you.  I'll powder you.  Go to the devil!"

The two friends rise and look at one another.  Mr. Bagnet's gravity 
has now attained its profoundest point.

"Go to the devil!" repeats the old man.  "I'll have no more of your 
pipe-smokings and swaggerings.  What?  You're an independent 
dragoon, too!  Go to my lawyer (you remember where; you have been 
there before) and show your independeuce now, will you?  Come, my 
dear friend, there's a chance for you.  Open the street door, Judy; 
put these blusterers out!  Call in help if they don't go.  Put 'em 
out!"

He vociferates this so loudly that Mr. Bagnet, laying his hands on 
the shoulders of his comrade before the latter can recover from his 
amazement, gets him on the outside of the street door, which is 
instantly slammed by the triumphant Judy.  Utterly confounded, Mr. 
George awhile stands looking at the knocker.  Mr. Bagnet, in a 
perfect abyss of gravity, walks up and down before the little 
parlour window like a sentry and looks in every time he passes, 
apparently revolving something in his mind.

"Come, Mat," says Mr. George when he has recovered himself, "we 
must try the lawyer.  Now, what do you think of this rascal?"

Mr. Bagnet, stopping to take a farewell look into the parlour, 
replies with one shake of his head directed at the interior, "If my 
old girl had been here--I'd have told him!"  Having so discharged 
himself of the subject of his cogitations, he falls into step and 
marches off with the trooper, shoulder to shoulder.

When they present themselves in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. 
Tulkinghorn is engaged and not to be seen.  He is not at all 
willing to see them, for when they have waited a full hour, and the 
clerk, on his bell being rung, takes the opportunity of mentioning 
as much, he brings forth no more encouraging message than that Mr. 
Tulkinghorn has nothing to say to them and they had better not 
wait.  They do wait, however, with the perseverance of military 
tactics, and at last the bell rings again and the client in 
possession comes out of Mr. Tulkinghorn's room.

The client is a handsome old lady, no other than Mrs. Rouncewell, 
housekeeper at Chesney Wold.  She comes out of the sanctuary with a 
fair old-fashioned curtsy and softly shuts the door.  She is 
treated with some distinction there, for the clerk steps out of his 
pew to show her through the outer office and to let her out.  The 
old lady is thanking him for his attention when she observes the 
comrades in waiting.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are military?"

The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr. 
George not turning round from the almanac over the fire-place.  Mr. 
Bagnet takes upon himself to reply, "Yes, ma'am.  Formerly."

"I thought so.  I was sure of it.  My heart warms, gentlemen, at 
the sight of you.  It always does at the sight of such.  God bless 
you, gentlemen!  You'll excuse an old woman, but I had a son once 
who went for a soldier.  A fine handsome youth he was, and good in 
his bold way, though some people did disparage him to his poor 
mother.  I ask your pardon for troubling you, sir.  God bless you, 
gentlemen!"

"Same to you, ma'am!" returns Mr. Bagnet with right good will.

There is something very touching in the earnestness of the old 
lady's voice and in the tremble that goes through her quaint old 
figure.  But Mr. George is so occupied with the almanac over the 
fireplace (calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that he 
does not look round until she has gone away and the door is closed 
upon her.

"George," Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers when he does turn from the 
almanac at last.  "Don't be cast down!  'Why, soldiers, why--should 
we be melancholy, boys?'  Cheer up, my hearty!"

The clerk having now again gone in to say that they are still there 
and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some irascibility, 
"Let 'em come in then!" they pass into the great room with the 
painted ceiling and find him standing before the fire.

"Now, you men, what do you want?  Sergeant, I told you the last 
time I saw you that I don't desire your company here."

Sergeant replies--dashed within the last few minutes as to his 
usual manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage--that he 
has received this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and 
has been referred there.

"I have nothing to say to you," rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "If you 
get into debt, you must pay your debts or take the consequences.  
You have no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?"

Sergeant is sorry to say that he is not prepared with the money.

"Very well!  Then the other man--this man, if this is he--must pay 
it for you."

Sergeant is sorry to add that the other man is not prepared with 
the money either.

"Very well!  Then you must pay it between you or you must both be 
sued for it and both suffer.  You have had the money and must 
refund it.  You are not to pocket other people's pounds, shillings, 
and pence and escape scot-free."

The lawyer sits down in his easy-chair and stirs the fire.  Mr. 
George hopes he will have the goodness to--

"I tell you, sergeant, I have nothing to say to you.  I don't like 
your associates and don't want you here.  This matter is not at all 
in my course of practice and is not in my office.  Mr. Smallweed is 
good enough to offer these affairs to me, but they are not in my 
way.  You must go to Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn."

"I must make an apology to you, sir," says Mr. George, "for 
pressing myself upon you with so little encouragement--which is 
almost as unpleasant to me as it can be to you--but would you let 
me say a private word to you?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets and walks into 
one of the window recesses.  "Now!  I have no time to waste."  In 
the midst of his perfect assumption of indifference, he directs a 
sharp look at the trooper, taking care to stand with his own back 
to the light and to have the other with his face towards it.

"Well, sir," says Mr. George, "this man with me is the other party 
implicated in this unfortunate affair--nominally, only nominally--
and my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my 
account.  He is a most respectable man with a wife and family, 
formerly in the Royal Artillery--"

"My friend, I don't care a pinch of snuff for the whole Royal 
Artillery establishment--officers, men, tumbrils, waggons, horses, 
guns, and ammunition."

"'Tis likely, sir.  But I care a good deal for Bagnet and his wife 
and family being injured on my account.  And if I could bring them 
through this matter, I should have no help for it but to give up 
without any other consideration what you wanted of me the other 
day."

"Have you got it here?"

"I have got it here, sir."

"Sergeant," the lawyer proceeds in his dry passionless manner, far 
more hopeless in the dealing with than any amount of vehemence, 
"make up your mind while I speak to you, for this is final.  After 
I have finished speaking I have closed the subject, and I won't re-
open it.  Understand that.  You can leave here, for a few days, 
what you say you have brought here if you choose; you can take it 
away at once if you choose.  In case you choose to leave it here, I 
can do this for you--I can replace this matter on its old footing, 
and I can go so far besides as to give you a written undertaking 
that this man Bagnet shall never be troubled in any way until you 
have been proceeded against to the utmost, that your means shall be 
exhausted before the creditor looks to his.  This is in fact all 
but freeing him.  Have you decided?"

The trooper puts his hand into his breast and answers with a long 
breath, "I must do it, sir."

So Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting on his spectacles, sits down and writes 
the undertaking, which he slowly reads and explains to Bagnet, who 
has all this time been staring at the ceiling and who puts his hand 
on his bald head again, under this new verbal shower-bath, and 
seems exceedingly in need of the old girl through whom to express 
his sentiments.  The trooper then takes from his breast-pocket a 
folded paper, which he lays with an unwilling hand at the lawyer's 
elbow.  "'Tis ouly a letter of instructions, sir.  The last I ever 
had from him."

Look at a millstone, Mr. George, for some change in its expression, 
and you will find it quite as soon as in the face of Mr. 
Tulkinghorn when he opens and reads the letter!  He refolds it and 
lays it in his desk with a countenance as unperturbable as death.

Nor has he anything more to say or do but to nod once in the same 
frigid and discourteous manner and to say briefly, "You can go.  
Show these men out, there!"  Being shown out, they repair to Mr. 
Bagnet's residence to dine.

Boiled beef and greens constitute the day's variety on the former 
repast of boiled pork and greens, and Mrs. Bagnet serves out the 
meal in the same way and seasons it with the best of temper, being 
that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms 
without a hint that it might be Better and catches light from any 
little spot of darkness near her.  The spot on this occasion is the 
darkened brow of Mr. George; he is unusually thoughtful and 
depressed.  At first Mrs. Bagnet trusts to the combined endearments 
of Quebec and Malta to restore him, but finding those young ladies 
sensible that their existing Bluffy is not the Bluffy of their 
usual frolicsome acquaintance, she winks off the light infantry and 
leaves him to deploy at leisure on the open ground of the domestic 
hearth.

But he does not.  He remains in close order, clouded and depressed.  
During the lengthy cleaning up and pattening process, when he and 
Mr. Bagnet are supplied with their pipes, he is no better than he 
was at dinner.  He forgets to smoke, looks at the fire and ponders, 
lets his pipe out, fills the breast of Mr. Bagnet with perturbation 
and dismay by showing that he has no enjoyment of tobacco.

Therefore when Mrs. Bagnet at last appears, rosy from the 
invigorating pail, and sits down to her work, Mr. Bagnet growls, 
"Old girl!" and winks monitions to her to find out what's the 
matter.

"Why, George!" says Mrs. Bagnet, quietly threading her needle.  
"How low you are!"

"Am I?  Not good company?  Well, I am afraid I am not."

"He ain't at all like Blulfy, mother!" cries little Malta.

"Because he ain't well, I think, mother," adds Quebec.

"Sure that's a bad sign not to be like Bluffy, too!" returns the 
trooper, kissing the young damsels.  "But it's true," with a sigh, 
"true, I am afraid.  These little ones are always right!"

"George," says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, "if I thought you cross 
enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier's wife--who 
could have bitten her tongue off afterwards and ought to have done 
it almost--said this morning, I don't know what I shouldn't say to 
you now."

"My kind soul of a darling," returns the trooper.  "Not a morsel of 
it."

"Because really and truly, George, what I said and meant to say was 
that I trusted Lignum to you and was sure you'd bring him through 
it.  And you HAVE brought him through it, noble!"

"Thankee, my dear!" says George.  "I am glad of your good opinion."

In giving Mrs. Bagnet's hand, with her work in it, a friendly 
shake--for she took her seat beside him--the trooper's attention is 
attracted to her face.  After looking at it for a little while as 
she plies her needle, he looks to young Woolwich, sitting on his 
stool in the corner, and beckons that fifer to him.

"See there, my boy," says George, very gently smoothing the 
mother's hair with his hand, "there's a good loving forehead for 
you!  All bright with love of you, my boy.  A little touched by the 
sun and the weather through following your father about and taking 
care of you, but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe apple on a tree."

Mr. Bagnet's face expresses, so far as in its wooden material lies, 
the highest approbation and acquiescence.

"The time will come, my boy," pursues the trooper, "when this hair 
of your mother's will be grey, and this forehead all crossed and 
re-crossed with wrinkles, and a fine old lady she'll be then.  Take 
care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, 'I 
never whitened a hair of her dear head--I never marked a sorrowful 
line in her face!'  For of all the many things that you can think 
of when you are a man, you had better have THAT by you, Woolwich!"

Mr. George concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy 
beside his mother in it, and saying, with something of a hurry 
about him, that he'll smoke his pipe in the street a bit.



CHAPTER XXXV

Esther's Narrative


I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life 
became like an old remembrance.  But this was not the effect of 
time so much as of the change in all my habits made by the 
helplessness and inaction of a sick-room.  Before I had been 
confined to it many days, everything else seemed to have retired 
into a remote distance where there was little or no separation 
between the various stages of my life which had been really divided 
by years.  In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake and 
to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great 
distance, on the healthy shore.

My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety 
to think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the 
oldest of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when 
I went home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my 
childish shadow at my side, to my godmother's house.  I had never 
known before how short life really was and into how small a space 
the mind could put it.

While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time 
became confused with one another distressed my mind exceedingly.  
At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so 
happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties 
adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly 
trying to reconcile them.  I suppose that few who have not been in 
such a condition can quite understand what I mean or what painful 
unrest arose from this source.

For the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my 
disorder--it seemed one long night, but I believe there were both 
nights and days in it--when I laboured up colossal staircases, ever 
striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm 
in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again.  I knew 
perfectly at intervals, and I think vaguely at most times, that I 
was in my bed; and I talked with Charley, and felt her touch, and 
knew her very well; yet I would find myself complaining, "Oh, more 
of these never-ending stairs, Charley--more and more--piled up to 
the sky', I think!" and labouring on again.

Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in 
great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry 
circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads!  And when my 
only prayer was to be taken off from the rest and when it was such 
inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?

Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious 
and the more intelligible I shall be.  I do not recall them to make 
others unhappy or because I am now the least unhappy in remembering 
them.  It may be that if we knew more of such strange afflictions 
we might be the better able to alleviate their intensity.

The repose that succeeded, the long delicious sleep, the blissful 
rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for 
myself and could have heard (or so I think now) that I was dying, 
with no other emotion than with a pitying love for those I left 
behind--this state can be perhaps more widely understood.  I was in 
this state when I first shrunk from the light as it twinkled on me 
once more, and knew with a boundless joy for which no words are 
rapturous enough that I should see again.

I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard 
her calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had 
heard her praying and imploring to be let in to nurse and comfort 
me and to leave my bedside no more; but I had only said, when I 
could speak, "Never, my sweet girl, never!" and I had over and over 
again reminded Charley that she was to keep my darling from the 
room whether I lived or died.  Charley had been true to me in that 
time of need, and with her little hand and her great heart had kept 
the door fast.

But now, my sight strengthening and the glorious light coming every 
day more fully and brightly on me, I could read the letters that my 
dear wrote to me every morning and evening and could put them to my 
lips and lay my cheek upon them with no fear of hurting her.  I 
could see my little maid, so tender and so careful, going about the 
two rooms setting everything in order and speaking cheerfully to 
Ada from the open window again.  I could understand the stillness 
in the house and the thoughtfulness it expressed on the part of all 
those who had always been so good to me.  I could weep in the 
exquisite felicity of my heart and be as happy in my weakness as 
ever I had been in my strength.

By and by my strength began to be restored.  Instead of lying, with 
so strange a calmness, watching what was done for me, as if it were 
done for some one else whom I was quietly sorry for, I helped it a 
little, and so on to a little more and much more, until I became 
useful to myself, and interested, and attached to life again.

How well I remember the pleasant afternoon when I was raised in bed 
with pillows for the first time to enjoy a great tea-drinking with 
Charley!  The little creature--sent into the world, surely, to 
minister to the weak and sick--was so happy, and so busy, and 
stopped so often in her preparations to lay her head upon my bosom, 
and fondle me, and cry with joyful tears she was so glad, she was 
so glad, that I was obliged to say, "Charley, if you go on in this 
way, I must lie down again, my darling, for I am weaker than I 
thought I was!"  So Charley became as quiet as a mouse and took her 
bright face here and there across and across the two rooms, out of 
the shade into the divine sunshine, and out of the sunshine into 
the shade, while I watched her peacefully.  When all her 
preparations were concluded and the pretty tea-table with its 
little delicacies to tempt me, and its white cloth, and its 
flowers, and everything so lovingly and beautifully arranged for me 
by Ada downstairs, was ready at the bedside, I felt sure I was 
steady enough to say something to Charley that was not new to my 
thoughts.

First I complimented Charley on the room, and indeed it was so 
fresh and airy, so spotless and neat, that I could scarce believe I 
had been lying there so long.  This delighted Charley, and her face 
was brighter than before.

"Yet, Charley," said I, looking round, "I miss something, surely, 
that I am accustomed to?"

Poor little Charley looked round too and pretended to shake her 
head as if there were nothing absent.

"Are the pictures all as they used to be?" I asked her.

"Every one of them, miss," said Charley.

"And the furniture, Charley?"

"Except where I have moved it about to make more room, miss."

"And yet," said I, "I miss some familiar object.  Ah, I know what 
it is, Charley!  It's the looking-glass."

Charley got up from the table, making as if she had forgotten 
something, and went into the next room; and I heard her sob there.

I had thought of this very often.  I was now certain of it.  I 
could thank God that it was not a shock to me now.  I called 
Charley back, and when she came--at first pretending to smile, but 
as she drew nearer to me, looking grieved--I took her in my arms 
and said, "It matters very little, Charley.  I hope I can do 
without my old face very well."

I was presently so far advanced as to be able to sit up in a great 
chair and even giddily to walk into the adjoining room, leaning on 
Charley.  The mirror was gone from its usual place in that room 
too, but what I had to bear was none the harder to bear for that.

My guardian had throughout been earnest to visit me, and there was 
now no good reason why I should deny myself that happiness.  He 
came one morning, and when he first came in, could only hold me in 
his embrace and say, "My dear, dear girl!"  I had long known--who 
could know better?--what a deep fountain of affection and 
generosity his heart was; and was it not worth my trivial suffering 
and change to fill such a place in it?  "Oh, yes!" I thought.  "He 
has seen me, and he loves me better than he did; he has seen me and 
is even fonder of me than he was before; and what have I to mourn 
for!"

He sat down by me on the sofa, supporting me with his arm.  For a 
little while he sat with his hand over his face, but when he 
removed it, fell into his usual manner.  There never can have been, 
there never can be, a pleasanter manner.

"My little woman," said he, "what a sad time this has been.  Such 
an inflexible little woman, too, through all!"

"Only for the best, guardian," said I.

"For the best?" he repeated tenderly.  "Of course, for the best.  
But here have Ada and I been perfectly forlorn and miserable; here 
has your friend Caddy been coming and going late and early; here 
has every one about the house been utterly lost and dejected; here 
has even poor Rick been writing--to ME too--in his anxiety for 
you!"

I had read of Caddy in Ada's letters, but not of Richard.  I told 
him so.

"Why, no, my dear," he replied.  "I have thought it better not to 
mention it to her."

"And you speak of his writing to YOU," said I, repeating his 
emphasis.  "As if it were not natural for him to do so, guardian; 
as if he could write to a better friend!"

"He thinks he could, my love," returned my guardian, "and to many a 
better.  The truth is, he wrote to me under a sort of protest while 
unable to write to you with any hope of an answer--wrote coldly, 
haughtily, distantly, resentfully.  Well, dearest little woman, we 
must look forbearingly on it.  He is not to blame.  Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce has warped him out of himself and perverted me in his 
eyes.  I have known it do as bad deeds, and worse, many a time.  If 
two angels could be concerned in it, I believe it would change 
their nature."

"It has not changed yours, guardian."

"Oh, yes, it has, my dear," he said laughingly.  "It has made the 
south wind easterly, I don't know how often.  Rick mistrusts and 
suspects me--goes to lawyers, and is taught to mistrust and suspect 
me.  Hears I have conflicting interests, claims clashing against 
his and what not.  Whereas, heaven knows that if I could get out of 
the mountains of wiglomeration on which my unfortunate name has 
been so long bestowed (which I can't) or could level them by the 
extinction of my own original right (which I can't either, and no 
human power ever can, anyhow, I believe, to such a pass have we 
got), I would do it this hour.  I would rather restore to poor Rick 
his proper nature than be endowed with all the money that dead 
suitors, broken, heart and soul, upon the wheel of Chancery, have 
left unclaimed with the Accountant-General--and that's money 
enough, my dear, to be cast into a pyramid, in memory of Chancery's 
transcendent wickedness."

"IS it possible, guardian," I asked, amazed, "that Richard can be 
suspicious of you?"

"Ah, my love, my love," he said, "it is in the subtle poison of 
such abuses to breed such diseases.  His blood is infected, and 
objects lose their natural aspects in his sight.  It is not HIS 
fault."

"But it is a terrible misfortune, guardian."

"It is a terrible misfortune, little woman, to be ever drawn within 
the influences of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  I know none greater.  By 
little and little he has been induced to trust in that rotten reed, 
and it communicates some portion of its rottenness to everything 
around him.  But again I say with all my soul, we must be patient 
with poor Rick and not blame him.  What a troop of fine fresh 
hearts like his have I seen in my time turned by the same means!"

I could not help expressing something of my wonder and regret that 
his benevolent, disinterested intentions had prospered so little.

"We must not say so, Dame Durden," he cheerfully rephed; "Ada is 
the happier, I hope, and that is much.  I did think that I and both 
these young creatures might be friends instead of distrustful foes 
and that we might so far counter-act the suit and prove too strong 
for it.  But it was too much to expect.  Jarndyce and Jarndyce was 
the curtain of Rick's cradle."

"But, guardian, may we not hope that a little experience will teach 
him what a false and wretched thing it is?"

"We WILL hope so, my Esther," said Mr. Jarndyce, "and that it may 
not teach him so too late.  In any case we must not be hard on him.  
There are not many grown and matured men living while we speak, 
good men too, who if they were thrown into this same court as 
suitors would not be vitally changed and depreciated within three 
years--within two--within one.  How can we stand amazed at poor 
Rick?  A young man so unfortunate," here he fell into a lower tone, 
as if he were thinking aloud, "cannot at first believe (who could?) 
that Chancery is what it is.  He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, 
to do something with his interests and bring them to some 
settlement.  It procrastinates, disappoints, tries, tortures him; 
wears out his sanguine hopes and patience, thread by thread; but he 
still looks to it, and hankers after it, and finds his whole world 
treacherous and hollow.  Well, well, well!  Enough of this, my 
dear!"

He had supported me, as at first, all this time, and his tenderness 
was so precious to me that I leaned my head upon his shoulder and 
loved him as if he had been my father.  I resolved in my own mind 
in this little pause, by some means, to see Richard when I grew 
strong and try to set him right.

"There are better subjects than these," said my guardian, "for such 
a joyful time as the time of our dear girl's recovery.  And I had a 
commission to broach one of them as soon as I should begin to talk.  
When shall Ada come to see you, my love?"

I had been thinking of that too.  A little in connexion with the 
absent mirrors, but not much, for I knew my loving girl would be 
changed by no change in my looks.

"Dear guardian," said I, "as I have shut her out so long--though 
indeed, indeed, she is like the light to me--"

"I know it well, Dame Durden, well."

He was so good, his touch expressed such endearing compassion and 
affection, and the tone of his voice carried such comfort into my 
heart that I stopped for a little while, quite unable to go on.  
"Yes, yes, you are tired," said he, "Rest a little."

"As I have kept Ada out so long," I began afresh after a short 
while, "I think I should like to have my own way a little longer, 
guardian.  It would be best to be away from here before I see her.  
If Charley and I were to go to some country lodging as soon as I 
can move, and if I had a week there in which to grow stronger and 
to be revived by the sweet air and to look forward to the happiness 
of having Ada with me again, I think it would be better for us."

I hope it was not a poor thing in me to wish to be a little more 
used to my altered self before I met the eyes of the dear girl I 
longed so ardently to see, but it is the truth.  I did.  He 
understood me, I was sure; but I was not afraid of that.  If it 
were a poor thing, I knew he would pass it over.

"Our spoilt little woman," said my guardian, "shall have her own 
way even in her inflexibility, though at the price, I know, of 
tears downstairs.  And see here!  Here is Boythorn, heart of 
chivalry, breathing such ferocious vows as never were breathed on 
paper before, that if you don't go and occupy his whole house, he 
having already turned out of it expressly for that purpose, by 
heaven and by earth he'll pull it down and not leave one brick 
standing on another!"

And my guardian put a letter in my hand, without any ordinary 
beginning such as "My dear Jarndyce," but rushing at once into the 
words, "I swear if Miss Summerson do not come down and take 
possession of my house, which I vacate for her this day at one 
o'clock, P.M.," and then with the utmost seriousness, and in the 
most emphatic terms, going on to make the extraordinary declaration 
he had quoted.  We did not appreciate the writer the less for 
laughing heartily over it, and we settled that I should send him a 
letter of thanks on the morrow and accept his offer.  It was a most 
agreeable one to me, for all the places I could have thought of, I 
should have liked to go to none so well as Chesney Wold.

"Now, little housewife," said my guardian, looking at his watch, "I 
was strictly timed before I came upstairs, for you must not be 
tired too soon; and my time has waned away to the last minute.  I 
have one other petition.  Little Miss Flite, hearing a rumour that 
you were ill, made nothing of walking down here--twenty miles, poor 
soul, in a pair of dancing shoes--to inquire.  It was heaven's 
mercy we were at home, or she would have walked back again."

The old conspiracy to make me happy!  Everybody seemed to be in it!

"Now, pet," said my guardian, "if it would not be irksome to you to 
admit the harmless little creature one afternoon before you save 
Boythorn's otherwise devoted house from demolition, I believe you 
would make her prouder and better pleased with herself than I--
though my eminent name is Jarndyce--could do in a lifetime."

I have no doubt he knew there would be something in the simple 
image of the poor afflicted creature that would fall like a gentle 
lesson on my mind at that time.  I felt it as he spoke to me.  I 
could not tell him heartily enough how ready I was to receive her.  
I had always pitied her, never so much as now.  I had always been 
glad of my little power to soothe her under her calamity, but 
never, never, half so glad before.

We arranged a time for Miss Flite to come out by the coach and 
share my early dinner.  When my guardian left me, I turned my face 
away upon my couch and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by 
such blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial that I had 
to undergo.  The childish prayer of that old birthday when I had 
aspired to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted and to do 
good to some one and win some love to myself if I could came back 
into my mind with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had 
since enjoyed and all the affectionate hearts that had been turned 
towards me.  If I were weak now, what had I profited by those 
mercies?  I repeated the old childish prayer in its old childish 
words and found that its old peace had not departed from it.

My guardian now came every day.  In a week or so more I could walk 
about our rooms and hold long talks with Ada from behind the 
window-curtain.  Yet I never saw her, for I had not as yet the 
courage to look at the dear face, though I could have done so 
easily without her seeing me.

On the appointed day Miss Flite arrived.  The poor little creature 
ran into my room quite forgetful of her usual dignity, and crying 
from her very heart of hearts, "My dear Fitz Jarndyce!" fell upon 
my neck and kissed me twenty times.

"Dear me!" said she, putting her hand into her reticule, "I have 
nothing here but documents, my dear Fitz Jarndyce; I must borrow a 
pocket handkerchief."

Charley gave her one, and the good creature certainly made use of 
it, for she held it to her eyes with both hands and sat so, 
shedding tears for the next ten minutes.

"With pleasure, my dear Fitz Jarndyce," she was careful to explain.  
"Not the least pain.  Pleasure to see you well again.  Pleasure at 
having the honour of being admitted to see you.  I am so much 
fonder of you, my love, than of the Chancellor.  Though I DO attend 
court regularly.  By the by, my dear, mentioning pocket 
handkerchiefs--"

Miss Flite here looked at Charley, who had been to meet her at the 
place where the coach stopped.  Charley glanced at me and looked 
unwilling to pursue the suggestion.

"Ve-ry right!" said Miss Flite, "Ve-ry correct.  Truly!  Highly 
indiscreet of me to mention it; but my dear Miss Fitz Jarndyce, I 
am afraid I am at times (between ourselves, you wouldn't think it) 
a little--rambling you know," said Miss Flite, touching her 
forehead.  "Nothing more,"

"What were you going to tell me?" said I, smiling, for I saw she 
wanted to go on.  "You have roused my curiosity, and now you must 
gratify it."

Miss Flite looked at Charley for advice in this important crisis, 
who said, "If you please, ma'am, you had better tell then," and 
therein gratified Miss Flite beyond measure.

"So sagacious, our young friend," said she to me in her mysterious 
way.  "Diminutive.  But ve-ry sagacious!  Well, my dear, it's a 
pretty anecdote.  Nothing more.  Still I think it charming.  Who 
should follow us down the road from the coach, my dear, but a poor 
person in a very ungenteel bonnet--"

"Jenny, if you please, miss," said Charley.

"Just so!" Miss Flite acquiesced with the greatest suavity.  
"Jenny.  Ye-es!  And what does she tell our young friend but that 
there has been a lady with a veil inquiring at her cottage after my 
dear Fitz Jarndyce's health and taking a handkerchief away with her 
as a little keepsake merely because it was my amiable Fitz 
Jarndyce's!  Now, you know, so very prepossessing in the lady with 
the veil!"

"If you please, miss," said Charley, to whom I looked in some 
astonishment, "Jenny says that when her baby died, you left a 
handkerchief there, and that she put it away and kept it with the 
baby's little things.  I think, if you please, partly because it 
was yours, miss, and partly because it had covered the baby."

"Diminutive," whispered Miss Flite, making a variety of motions 
about her own forehead to express intellect in Charley.  "But ex-
ceedingly sagacious!  And so dear!  My love, she's clearer than any 
counsel I ever heard!"

"Yes, Charley," I returned.  "I remember it.  Well?"

"Well, miss," said Charley, "and that's the handkerchief the lady 
took.  And Jenny wants you to know that she wouldn't have made away 
with it herself for a heap of money but that the lady took it and 
left some money instead.  Jenny don't know her at all, if you 
please, miss!"

"Why, who can she be?" said I.

"My love," Miss Flite suggested, advancing her lips to my ear with 
her most mysterious look, "in MY opinion--don't mention this to our 
diminutive friend--she's the Lord Chancellor's wife.  He's married, 
you know.  And I understand she leads him a terrible life.  Throws 
his lordship's papers into the fire, my dear, if he won't pay the 
jeweller!"

I did not think very much about this lady then, for I had an 
impression that it might be Caddy.  Besides, my attention was 
diverted by my visitor, who was cold after her ride and looked 
hungry and who, our dinner being brought in, required some little 
assistance in arraying herself with great satisfaction in a 
pitiable old scarf and a much-worn and often-mended pair of gloves, 
which she had brought down in a paper parcel.  I had to preside, 
too, over the entertainment, consisting of a dish of fish, a roast 
fowl, a sweetbread, vegetables, pudding, and Madeira; and it was so 
pleasant to see how she enjoyed it, and with what state and 
ceremony she did honour to it, that I was soon thinking of nothing 
else.

When we had finished and had our little dessert before us, 
embellished by the hands of my dear, who would yield the 
superintendence of everything prepared for me to no one, Miss Flite 
was so very chatty and happy that I thought I would lead her to her 
own history, as she was always pleased to talk about herself.  I 
began by saying "You have attended on the Lord Chancellor many 
years, Miss Flite?"

"Oh, many, many, many years, my dear.  But I expect a judgment.  
Shortly."

There was an anxiety even in her hopefulness that made me doubtful 
if I had done right in approaching the subject.  I thought I would 
say no more about it.

"My father expected a judgment," said Miss Flite.  "My brother.  My 
sister.  They all expected a judgment.  The same that I expect."

"They are all--"

"Ye-es.  Dead of course, my dear," said she.

As I saw she would go on, I thought it best to try to be 
serviceable to her by meeting the theme rather than avoiding it.

"Would it not be wiser," said I, "to expect this judgment no more?"

"Why, my dear," she answered promptly, "of course it would!"

"And to attend the court no more?"

"Equally of course," said she.  "Very wearing to be always in 
expectation of what never comes, my dear Fitz Jarndyce!  Wearing, I 
assure you, to the bone!"

She slightly showed me her arm, and it was fearfully thin indeed.

"But, my dear," she went on in her mysterious way, "there's a 
dreadful attraction in the place.  Hush!  Don't mention it to our 
diminutive friend when she comes in.  Or it may frighten her.  With 
good reason.  There's a cruel attraction in the place.  You CAN'T 
leave it.  And you MUST expect."

I tried to assure her that this was not so.  She heard me patiently 
and smilingly, but was ready with her own answer.

"Aye, aye, aye!  You think so because I am a little rambling.  Ve-
ry absurd, to be a little rambling, is it not?  Ve-ry confusing, 
too.  To the head.  I find it so.  But, my dear, I have been there 
many years, and I have noticed.  It's the mace and seal upon the 
table."

What could they do, did she think?  I mildly asked her.

"Draw," returned Miss Flite.  "Draw people on, my dear.  Draw peace 
out of them.  Sense out of them.  Good looks out of them.  Good 
qualities out of them.  I have felt them even drawing my rest away 
in the night.  Cold and glittering devils!"

She tapped me several times upon the arm and nodded good-humouredly 
as if she were anxious I should understand that I had no cause to 
fear her, though she spoke so gloomily, and confided these awful 
secrets to me.

"Let me see," said she.  "I'll tell you my own case.  Before they 
ever drew me--before I had ever seen them--what was it I used to 
do?  Tambourine playing?  No.  Tambour work.  I and my sister 
worked at tambour work.  Our father and our brother had a builder's 
business.  We all lived together.  Ve-ry respectably, my dear!  
First, our father was drawn--slowly.  Home was drawn with him.  In 
a few years he was a fierce, sour, angry bankrupt without a kind 
word or a kind look for any one.  He had been so different, Fitz 
Jarndyce.  He was drawn to a debtors' prison.  There he died.  Then 
our brother was drawn--swiftly--to drunkenness.  And rags.  And 
death.  Then my sister was drawn.  Hush!  Never ask to what!  Then 
I was ill and in misery, and heard, as I had often heard before, 
that this was all the work of Chancery.  When I got better, I went 
to look at the monster.  And then I found out how it was, and I was 
drawn to stay there."

Having got over her own short narrative, in the delivery of which 
she had spoken in a low, strained voice, as if the shock were fresh 
upon her, she gradually resumed her usual air of amiable 
importance.

"You don't quite credit me, my dear!  Well, well!  You will, some 
day.  I am a little rambling.  But I have noticed.  I have seen 
many new faces come, unsuspicious, within the influence of the mace 
and seal in these many years.  As my father's came there.  As my 
brother's.  As my sister's.  As my own.  I hear Conversation Kenge 
and the rest of them say to the new faces, 'Here's little Miss 
Flite.  Oh, you are new here; and you must come and be presented to 
little Miss Flite!'  Ve-ry good.  Proud I am sure to have the 
honour!  And we all laugh.  But, Fitz Jarndyce, I know what will 
happen.  I know, far better than they do, when the attraction has 
begun.  I know the signs, my dear.  I saw them begin in Gridley.  
And I saw them end.  Fitz Jarndyce, my love," speaking low again, 
"I saw them beginning in our friend the ward in Jarndyce.  Let some 
one hold him back.  Or he'll be drawn to ruin.

She looked at me in silence for some moments, with her face 
gradually softening into a smile.  Seeming to fear that she had 
been too gloomy, and seeming also to lose the connexion in her 
mind, she said politely as she sipped her glass of wine, "Yes, my 
dear, as I was saying, I expect a judgment shortly.  Then I shall 
release my birds, you know, and confer estates."

I was much impressed by her allusion to Richard and by the sad 
meaning, so sadly illustrated in her poor pinched form, that made 
its way through all her incoherence.  But happily for her, she was 
quite complacent again now and beamed with nods and smiles.

"But, my dear," she said, gaily, reaching another hand to put it 
upon mine.  "You have not congratulated me on my physician.  
Positively not once, yet!"

I was obliged to confess that I did not quite know what she meant.

"My physician, Mr. Woodcourt, my dear, who was so exceedingly 
attentive to me.  Though his services were rendered quite 
gratuitously.  Until the Day of Judgment.  I mean THE judgment that 
will dissolve the spell upon me of the mace and seal."

"Mr. Woodcourt is so far away, now," said I, "that I thought the 
time for such congratulation was past, Miss Flite."

"But, my child," she returned, "is it possible that you don't know 
what has happened?"

"No," said I.

"Not what everybody has been talking of, my beloved Fitz Jarndyce!"

"No," said I.  "You forget how long I have been here."

"True!  My dear, for the moment--true.  I blame myself.  But my 
memory has been drawn out of me, with everything else, by what I 
mentioned.  Ve-ry strong influence, is it not?  Well, my dear, 
there has been a terrible shipwreck over in those East Indian 
seas."

"Mr. Woodcourt shipwrecked!"

"Don't be agitated, my dear.  He is safe.  An awful scene.  Death 
in all shapes.  Hundreds of dead and dying.  Fire, storm, and 
darkness.  Numbers of the drowning thrown upon a rock.  There, and 
through it all, my dear physician was a hero.  Calm and brave 
through everything.  Saved many lives, never complained in hunger 
and thirst, wrapped naked people in his spare clothes, took the 
lead, showed them what to do, governed them, tended the sick, 
buried the dead, and brought the poor survivors safely off at last!  
My dear, the poor emaciated creatures all but worshipped him.  They 
fell down at his feet when they got to the land and blessed him.  
The whole country rings with it.  Stay!  Where's my bag of 
documents?  I have got it there, and you shall read it, you shall 
read it!"

And I DID read all the noble history, though very slowly and 
imperfectly then, for my eyes were so dimmed that I could not see 
the words, and I cried so much that I was many times obliged to lay 
down the long account she had cut out of the newspaper.  I felt so 
triumphant ever to have known the man who had done such generous 
and gallant deeds, I felt such glowing exultation in his renown, I 
so admired and loved what he had done, that I envied the storm-worn 
people who had fallen at his feet and blessed him as their 
preserver.  I could myself have kneeled down then, so far away, and 
blessed him in my rapture that he should be so truly good and 
brave.  I felt that no one--mother, sister, wife--could honour him 
more than I.  I did, indeed!

My poor little visitor made me a present of the account, and when 
as the evening began to close in she rose to take her leave, lest 
she should miss the coach by which she was to return, she was still 
full of the shipwreck, which I had not yet sufflciently composed 
myself to understand in all its details.

"My dear," said she as she carefully folded up her scarf and 
gloves, "my brave physician ought to have a title bestowed upon 
him.  And no doubt he will.  You are of that opinlon?"

That he well deserved one, yes.  That he would ever have one, no.

"Why not, Fitz Jarndyce?" she asked rather sharply.

I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men 
distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great, unless 
occasionally when they consisted of the accumulation of some very 
large amount of money.

"Why, good gracious," said Miss Flite, "how can you say that?  
Surely you know, my dear, that all the greatest ornaments of 
England in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement 
of every sort are added to its nobility!  Look round you, my dear, 
and consider.  YOU must be rambling a little now, I think, if you 
don't know that this is the great reason why titles will always 
last in the land!"

I am afraid she believed what she said, for there were moments when 
she was very mad indeed.

And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to 
keep.  I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me and 
that if he had been richer he would perhaps have told me that he 
loved me before he went away.  I had thought, sometimes, that if he 
had done so, I should have been glad of it.  But how much better it 
was now that this had never happened!  What should I have suffered 
if I had had to write to him and tell him that the poor face he had 
known as mine was quite gone from me and that I freely released him 
from his bondage to one whom he had never seen!

Oh, it was so much better as it was!  With a great pang mercifully 
spared me, I could take back to my heart my childish prayer to be 
all he had so brightly shown himself; and there was nothing to be 
undone: no chain for me to break or for him to drag; and I could 
go, please God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he could 
go his nobler way upon its broader road; and though we were apart 
upon the journey, I might aspire to meet him, unselfishly, 
innocently, better far than he had thought me when I found some 
favour in his eyes, at the journey's end.



CHAPTER XXXVI

Chesney Wold


Charley and I did not set off alone upon our expedition into 
Lincolnshire.  My guardian had made up his mind not to lose sight 
of me until I was safe in Mr. Boythorn's house, so he accompanied 
us, and we were two days upon the road.  I found every breath of 
air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, 
and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful 
and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet.  This was my 
first gain from my illness.  How little I had lost, when the wide 
world was so full of delight for me.

My guardian intending to go back immediately, we appointed, on our 
way down, a day when my dear girl should come.  I wrote her a 
letter, of which he took charge, and he left us within half an hour 
of our arrival at our destination, on a delightful evening in the 
early summer-time.

If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of her wand, 
and I had been a princess and her favoured god-child, I could not 
have been more considered in it.  So many preparations were made 
for me and such an endearing remembrance was shown of all my little 
tastes and likings that I could have sat down, overcome, a dozen 
times before I had revisited half the rooms.  I did better than 
that, however, by showing them all to Charley instead.  Charley's 
delight calmed mine; and after we had had a walk in the garden, and 
Charley had exhausted her whole vocabulary of admiring expressions, 
I was as tranquilly happy as I ought to have been.  It was a great 
comfort to be able to say to myself after tea, "Esther, my dear, I 
think you are quite sensible enough to sit down now and write a 
note of thanks to your host."  He had left a note of welcome for 
me, as sunny as his own face, and had confided his bird to my care, 
which I knew to be his highest mark of confidence.  Accordingly I 
wrote a little note to him in London, telling him how all his 
favourite plants and trees were looking, and how the most 
astonishing of birds had chirped the honours of the house to me in 
the most hospitable manner, and how, after singing on my shoulder, 
to the inconceivable rapture of my little maid, he was then at 
roost in the usual corner of his cage, but whether dreaming or no I 
could not report.  My note finished and sent off to the post, I 
made myself very busy in unpacking and arranging; and I sent 
Charley to bed in good time and told her I should want her no more 
that night.

For I had not yet looked in the glass and had never asked to have 
my own restored to me.  I knew this to be a weakness which must be 
overcome, but I had always said to myself that I would begin afresh 
when I got to where I now was.  Therefore I had wanted to be alone, 
and therefore I said, now alone, in my own room, "Esther, if you 
are to be happy, if you are to have any right to pray to be true-
hearted, you must keep your word, my dear."  I was quite resolved 
to keep it, but I sat down for a little while first to reflect upon 
all my blessings.  And then I said my prayers and thought a little 
more.

My hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more 
than once.  It was long and thick.  I let it down, and shook it 
out, and went up to the glass upon the dressing-table.  There was a 
little muslin curtain drawn across it.  I drew it back and stood 
for a moment looking through such a veil of my own hair that I 
could see nothing else.  Then I put my hair aside and looked at the 
reflection in the mirror, encouraged by seeing how placidly it 
looked at me.  I was very much changed--oh, very, very much.  At 
first my face was so strange to me that I think I should have put 
my hands before it and started back but for the encouragement I 
have mentioned.  Very soon it became more familiar, and then I knew 
the extent of the alteration in it better than I had done at first.  
It was not like what I had expected, but I had expected nothing 
definite, and I dare say anything definite would have surprised me.

I had never been a beauty and had never thought myself one, but I 
had been very different from this.  It was all gone now.  Heaven 
was so good to me that I could let it go with a few not bitter 
tears and could stand there arranging my hair for the night quite 
thankfully.

One thing troubled me, and I considered it for a long time before I 
went to sleep.  I had kept Mr. Woodcourt's flowers.  When they were 
withered I had dried them and put them in a book that I was fond 
of.  Nobody knew this, not even Ada.  I was doubtful whether I had 
a right to preserve what he had sent to one so different--whether 
it was generous towards him to do it.  I wished to be generous to 
him, even in the secret depths of my heart, which he would never 
know, because I could have loved him--could have been devoted to 
him.  At last I came to the conclusion that I might keep them if I 
treasured them only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past 
and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light.  
I hope this may not seem trivial.  I was very much in earnest.

I took care to be up early in the morning and to be before the 
glass when Charley came in on tiptoe.

"Dear, dear, miss!" cried Charley, starting.  "Is that you?"

"Yes, Charley," said I, quietly putting up my hair.  "And I am very 
well indeed, and very happy."

I saw it was a weight off Charley's mind, but it was a greater 
weight off mine.  I knew the worst now and was composed to it.  I 
shall not conceal, as I go on, the weaknesses I could not quite 
conquer, but they always passed from me soon and the happier frame 
of mind stayed by me faithfully.

Wishing to be fully re-established in my strength and my good 
spirits before Ada came, I now laid down a little series of plans 
with Charley for being in the fresh air all day long.  We were to 
be out before breakfast, and were to dine early, and were to be out 
again before and after dinner, and were to talk in the garden after 
tea, and were to go to rest betimes, and were to climb every hill 
and explore every road, lane, and field in the neighbourhood.  As 
to restoratives and strengthening delicacies, Mr. Boythorn's good 
housekeeper was for ever trotting about with something to eat or 
drink in her hand; I could not even be heard of as resting in the 
park but she would come trotting after me with a basket, her 
cheerful face shining with a lecture on the importance of frequent 
nourishment.  Then there was a pony expressly for my riding, a 
chubby pony with a short neck and a mane all over his eyes who 
could canter--when he would--so easily and quietly that he was a 
treasure.  In a very few days he would come to me in the paddock 
when I called him, and eat out of my hand, and follow me about.  We 
arrived at such a capital understanding that when he was jogging 
with me lazily, and rather obstinately, down some shady lane, if I 
patted his neck and said, "Stubbs, I am surprised you don't canter 
when you know how much I like it; and I think you might oblige me, 
for you are only getting stupid and going to sleep," he would give 
his head a comical shake or two and set off directly, while Charley 
would stand still and laugh with such enjoyment that her laughter 
was like music.  I don't know who had given Stubbs his name, but it 
seemed to belong to him as naturally as his rough coat.  Once we 
put him in a little chaise and drove him triumphantly through the 
green lanes for five miles; but all at once, as we were extolling 
him to the skies, he seemed to take it ill that he should have been 
accompanied so far by the circle of tantalizing little gnats that 
had been hovering round and round his ears the whole way without 
appearing to advance an inch, and stopped to think about it.  I 
suppose he came to the decision that it was not to be borne, for he 
steadily refused to move until I gave the reins to Charley and got 
out and walked, when he followed me with a sturdy sort of good 
humour, putting his head under my arm and rubbing his ear against 
my sleeve.  It was in vain for me to say, "Now, Stubbs, I feel 
quite sure from what I know of you that you will go on if I ride a 
little while," for the moment I left him, he stood stock still 
again.  Consequently I was obliged to lead the way, as before; and 
in this order we returned home, to the great delight of the 
village.

Charley and I had reason to call it the most friendly of villages, 
I am sure, for in a week's time the people were so glad to see us 
go by, though ever so frequently in the course of a day, that there 
were faces of greeting in every cottage.  I had known many of the 
grown people before and almost all the children, but now the very 
steeple began to wear a familiar and affectionate look.  Among my 
new friends was an old old woman who lived in such a little 
thatched and whitewashed dwelling that when the outside shutter was 
turned up on its hinges, it shut up the whole house-front.  This 
old lady had a grandson who was a sailor, and I wrote a letter to 
him for her and drew at the top of it the chimney-corner in which 
she had brought him up and where his old stool yet occupied its old 
place.  This was considered by the whole village the most wonderful 
achievement in the world, but when an answer came back all the way 
from Plymouth, in which he mentioned that he was going to take the 
picture all the way to America, and from America would write again, 
I got all the credit that ought to have been given to the post-
office and was invested with the merit of the whole system.

Thus, what with being so much in the air, playing with so many 
children, gossiping with so many people, sitting on invitation in 
so many cottages, going on with Charley's education, and writing 
long letters to Ada every day, I had scarcely any time to think 
about that little loss of mine and was almost always cheerful.  If 
I did think of it at odd moments now and then, I had only to be 
busy and forget it.  I felt it more than I had hoped I should once 
when a child said, "Mother, why is the lady not a pretty lady now 
like she used to be?"  But when I found the child was not less fond 
of me, and drew its soft hand over my face with a kind of pitying 
protection in its touch, that soon set me up again.  There were 
many little occurrences which suggested to me, with great 
consolation, how natural it is to gentle hearts to be considerate 
and delicate towards any inferiority.  One of these particularly 
touched me.  I happened to stroll into the little church when a 
marriage was just concluded, and the young couple had to sign the 
register.

The bridegroom, to whom the pen was handed first, made a rude cross 
for his mark; the bride, who came next, did the same.  Now, I had 
known the bride when I was last there, not only as the prettiest 
girl in the place, but as having quite distinguished herself in the 
school, and I could not help looking at her with some surprise.  
She came aside and whispered to me, while tears of honest love and 
admiration stood in her bright eyes, "He's a dear good fellow, 
miss; but he can't write yet--he's going to learn of me--and I 
wouldn't shame him for the world!"  Why, what had I to fear, I 
thought, when there was this nobility in the soul of a labouring 
man's daughter!

The air blew as freshly and revivingly upon me as it had ever 
blown, and the healthy colour came into my new face as it had come 
into my old one.  Charley was wonderful to see, she was so radiant 
and so rosy; and we both enjoyed the whole day and slept soundly 
the whole night.

There was a favourite spot of mine in the park-woods of Chesney 
Wold where a seat had been erected commanding a lovely view.  The 
wood had been cleared and opened to improve this point of sight, 
and the bright sunny landscape beyond was so beautiful that I 
rested there at least once every day.  A picturesque part of the 
Hall, called the Ghost's Walk, was seen to advantage from this 
higher ground; and the startling name, and the old legend in the 
Dedlock family which I had heard from Mr. Boythorn accounting for 
it, mingled with the view and gave it something of a mysterious 
interest in addition to its real charms.  There was a bank here, 
too, which was a famous one for violets; and as it was a daily 
delight of Charley's to gather wild flowers, she took as much to 
the spot as I did.

It would be idle to inquire now why I never went close to the house 
or never went inside it.  The family were not there, I had heard on 
my arrival, and were not expected.  I was far from being incurious 
or uninterested about the building; on the contrary, I often sat in 
this place wondering how the rooms ranged and whether any echo like 
a footstep really did resound at times, as the story said, upon the 
lonely Ghost's Walk.  The indefinable feeling with which Lady 
Dedlock had impressed me may have had some influence in keeping me 
from the house even when she was absent.  I am not sure.  Her face 
and figure were associated with it, naturally; but I cannot say 
that they repelled me from it, though something did.  For whatever 
reason or no reason, I had never once gone near it, down to the day 
at which my story now arrives.

I was resting at my favourite point after a long ramble, and 
Charley was gathering violets at a little distance from me.  I had 
been looking at the Ghost's Walk lying in a deep shade of masonry 
afar off and picturing to myself the female shape that was said to 
haunt it when I became aware of a figure approaching through the 
wood.  The perspective was so long and so darkened by leaves, and 
the shadows of the branches on the ground made it so much more 
intricate to the eye, that at first I could not discern what figure 
it was.  By little and little it revealed itself to be a woman's--a 
lady's--Lady Dedlock's.  She was alone and coming to where I sat 
with a much quicker step, I observed to my surprise, than was usual 
with her.

I was fluttered by her being unexpectedly so near (she was almost 
within speaking distance before I knew her) and would have risen to 
continue my walk.  But I could not.  I was rendered motionless.  
Not so much by her hurried gesture of entreaty, not so much by her 
quick advance and outstretched hands, not so much by the great 
change in her manner and the absence of her haughty self-restraint, 
as by a something in her face that I had pined for and dreamed of 
when I was a little child, something I had never seen in any face, 
something I had never seen in hers before.

A dread and faintness fell upon me, and I called to Charley.  Lady 
Dedlock stopped upon the instant and changed back almost to what I 
had known her.

"Miss Summerson, I am afraid I have startled you," she said, now 
advancing slowly.  "You can scarcely be strong yet.  You have been 
very ill, I know.  I have been much concerned to hear it."

I could no more have removed my eyes from her pale face than I 
could have stirred from the bench on which I sat.  She gave me her 
hand, and its deadly coldness, so at variance with the enforced 
composure of her features, deepened the fascination that 
overpowered me.  I cannot say what was in my whirling thoughts.

"You are recovering again?" she asked kindly.

"I was quite well but a moment ago, Lady Dedlock."

"Is this your young attendant?"

"Yes."

"Will you send her on before and walk towards your house with me?"

"Charley," said I, "take your flowers home, and I will follow you 
directly."

Charley, with her best curtsy, blushingly tied on her bonnet and 
went her way.  When she was gone, Lady Dedlock sat down on the seat 
beside me.

I cannot tell in any words what the state of my mind was when I saw 
in her hand my handkerchief with which I had covered the dead baby.

I looked at her, but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I 
could not draw my breath.  The beating of my heart was so violent 
and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me.  But when 
she caught me to her breast, kissed me, wept over me, 
compassionated me, and called me back to myself; when she fell down 
on her knees and cried to me, "Oh, my child, my child, I am your 
wicked and unhappy mother!  Oh, try to forgive me!"--when I saw her 
at my feet on the bare earth in her great agony of mind, I felt, 
through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the 
providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could 
disgrace her by any trace of likeness, as that nobody could ever 
now look at me and look at her and remotely think of any near tie 
between us.

I raised my mother up, praying and beseeching her not to stoop 
before me in such affliction and humiliation.  I did so in broken, 
incoherent words, for besides the trouble I was in, it frightened 
me to see her at MY feet.  I told her--or I tried to tell her--that 
if it were for me, her child, under any circumstances to take upon 
me to forgive her, I did it, and had done it, many, many years.  I 
told her that my heart overflowed with love for her, that it was 
natural love which nothing in the past had changed or could change.  
That it was not for me, then resting for the first time on my 
mother's bosom, to take her to account for having given me life, 
but that my duty was to bless her and receive her, though the whole 
world turned from her, and that I only asked her leave to do it.  I 
held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers, and among 
the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed to be 
nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace.

"To bless and receive me," groaned my mother, "it is far too late.  
I must travel my dark road alone, and it will lead me where it 
will.  From day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, I do not see 
the way before my guilty feet.  This is the earthly punishment I 
have brought upon myself.  I bear it, and I hide it."

Even in the thinking of her endurance, she drew her habitual air of 
proud indifference about her like a veil, though she soon cast it 
off again.

"I must keep this secret, if by any means it can be kept, not 
wholly for myself.  I have a husband, wretched and dishonouring 
creature that I am!"

These words she uttered with a suppressed cry of despair, more 
terrible in its sound than any shriek.  Covering her face with her 
hands, she shrank down in my embrace as if she were unwilling that 
I should touch her; nor could I, by my utmost persuasions or by any 
endearments I could use, prevail upon her to rise.  She said, no, 
no, no, she could only speak to me so; she must be proud and 
disdainful everywhere else; she would be humbled and ashamed there, 
in the only natural moments of her life.

My unhappy mother told me that in my illness she had been nearly 
frantic.  She had but then known that her child was living.  She 
could not have suspected me to be that child before.  She had 
followed me down here to speak to me but once in all her life.  We 
never could associate, never could communicate, never probably from 
that time forth could interchange another word on earth.  She put 
into my hands a letter she had written for my reading only and said 
when I had read it and destroyed it--but not so much for her sake, 
since she asked nothing, as for her husband's and my own--I must 
evermore consider her as dead.  If I could believe that she loved 
me, in this agony in which I saw her, with a mother's love, she 
asked me to do that, for then I might think of her with a greater 
pity, imagining what she suffered.  She had put herself beyond all 
hope and beyond all help.  Whether she preserved her secret until 
death or it came to be discovered and she brought dishonour and 
disgrace upon the name she had taken, it was her solitary struggle 
always; and no affection could come near her, and no human creature 
could render her any aid.

"But is the secret safe so far?" I asked.  "Is it safe now, dearest 
mother?"

"No," replied my mother.  "It has been very near discovery.  It was 
saved by an accident.  It may be lost by another accident--to-
morrow, any day."

"Do you dread a particular person?"

"Hush!  Do not tremble and cry so much for me.  I am not worthy of 
these tears," said my mother, kissing my hands.  "I dread one 
person very much."

"An enemy?"

"Not a friend.  One who is too passionless to be either.  He is Sir 
Leicester Dedlock's lawyer, mechanically faithful without 
attachment, and very jealous of the profit, privilege, and 
reputation of being master of the mysteries of great houses."

"Has he any suspicions?"

"Many."

"Not of you?" I said alarmed.

"Yes!  He is always vigilant and always near me.  I may keep him at 
a standstill, but I can never shake him off."

"Has he so little pity or compunction?"

"He has none, and no anger.  He is indifferent to everything but 
his calling.  His calling is the acquisition of secrets and the 
holding possession of such power as they give him, with no sharer 
or opponent in it."

"Could you trust in him?"

"I shall never try.  The dark road I have trodden for so many years 
will end where it will.  I follow it alone to the end, whatever the 
end be.  It may be near, it may be distant; while the road lasts, 
nothing turns me."

"Dear mother, are you so resolved?"

"I AM resolved.  I have long outbidden folly with folly, pride with 
pride, scorn with scorn, insolence with insolence, and have 
outlived many vanities with many more.  I will outlive this danger, 
and outdie it, if I can.  It has closed around me almost as awfully 
as if these woods of Chesney Wold had closed around the house, but 
my course through it is the same.  I have but one; I can have but 
one."

"Mr. Jarndyce--"  I was beginning when my mother hurriedly 
inquired, "Does HE suspect?"

"No," said I.  "No, indeed!  Be assured that he does not!"  And I 
told her what he had related to me as his knowledge of my story.  
"But he is so good and sensible," said I, "that perhaps if he knew--"

My mother, who until this time had made no change in her position, 
raised her hand up to my lips and stopped me.

"Confide fully in him," she said after a little while.  "You have 
my free consent--a small gift from such a mother to her injured 
child!- -but do not tell me of it.  Some pride is left in me even 
yet."

I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now--for my 
agitation and distress throughout were so great that I scarcely 
understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the 
mother's voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me, which in my 
childhood I had never learned to love and recognize, had never been 
sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had 
a hope inspired by, made an enduring impression on my memory--I say 
I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. 
Jarndyce, who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to 
afford some counsel and support to her.  But my mother answered no, 
it was impossible; no one could help her.  Through the desert that 
lay before her, she must go alone.

"My child, my child!" she said.  "For the last time!  These kisses 
for the last time!  These arms upon my neck for the last time!  We 
shall meet no more.  To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be 
what I have been so long.  Such is my reward and doom.  If you hear 
of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of 
your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask!  
Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, 
in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which 
it is capable!  And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven 
to forgive her, which it never can!"

We held one another for a little space yet, but she was so firm 
that she took my hands away, and put them back against my breast, 
and with a last kiss as she held them there, released them, and 
went from me into the wood.  I was alone, and calm and quiet below 
me in the sun and shade lay the old house, with its terraces and 
turrets, on which there had seemed to me to be such complete repose 
when I first saw it, but which now looked like the obdurate and 
unpitying watcher of my mother's misery.

Stunned as I was, as weak and helpless at first as I had ever been 
in my sick chamber, the necessity of guarding against the danger of 
discovery, or even of the remotest suspicion, did me service.  I 
took such precautions as I could to hide from Charley that I had 
been crying, and I constrained myself to think of every sacred 
obligation that there was upon me to be careful and collected.  It 
was not a little while before I could succeed or could even 
restrain bursts of grief, but after an hour or so I was better and 
felt that I might return.  I went home very slowly and told 
Charley, whom I found at the gate looking for me, that I had been 
tempted to extend my walk after Lady Dedlock had left me and that I 
was over-tired and would lie down.  Safe in my own room, I read the 
letter.  I clearly derived from it--and that was much then--that I 
had not been abandoned by my mother.  Her elder and only sister, 
the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when 
I had been laid aside as dead, had in her stern sense of duty, with 
no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid 
secrecy and had never again beheld my mother's face from within a 
few hours of my birth.  So strangely did I hold my place in this 
world that until within a short time back I had never, to my own 
mother's knowledge, breathed--had been buried--had never been 
endowed with life--had never borne a name.  When she had first seen 
me in the church she had been startled and had thought of what 
would have been like me if it had ever lived, and had lived on, but 
that was all then.

What more the letter told me needs not to be repeated here.  It has 
its own times and places in my story.

My first care was to burn what my mother had written and to consume 
even its ashes.  I hope it may not appear very unnatural or bad in 
me that I then became heavily sorrowful to think I had ever been 
reared.  That I felt as if I knew it would have been better and 
happier for many people if indeed I had never breathed.  That I had 
a terror of myself as the danger and the possible disgrace of my 
own mother and of a proud family name.  That I was so confused and 
shaken as to be possessed by a belief that it was right and had 
been intended that I should die in my birth, and that it was wrong 
and not intended that I should be then alive.

These are the real feelings that I had.  I fell asleep worn out, 
and when I awoke I cried afresh to think that I was back in the 
world with my load of trouble for others.  I was more than ever 
frightened of myself, thinking anew of her against whom I was a 
witness, of the owner of Chesney Wold, of the new and terrible 
meaning of the old words now moaning in my ear like a surge upon 
the shore, "Your mother, Esther, was your disgrace, and you are 
hers.  The time will come--and soon enough--when you will 
understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a 
woman can."  With them, those other words returned, "Pray daily 
that the sins of others be not visited upon your head."  I could 
not disentangle all that was about me, and I felt as if the blame 
and the shame were all in me, and the visitation had come down.

The day waned into a gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still 
contended with the same distress.  I went out alone, and after 
walking a little in the park, watching the dark shades falling on 
the trees and the fitful flight of the bats, which sometimes almost 
touched me, was attracted to the house for the first time.  Perhaps 
I might not have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of 
mind.  As it was, I took the path that led close by it.

I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the 
terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and 
its well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and 
grave it was, and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and 
wide flights of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and 
how the trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old 
stone pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling.  
Then the way went by long lines of dark windows diversified by 
turreted towers and porches of eccentric shapes, where old stone 
lions and grotesque monsters bristled outside dens of shadow and 
snarled at the evening gloom over the escutcheons they held in 
their grip.  Thence the path wound underneath a gateway, and 
through a court-yard where the principal entrance was (I hurried 
quickly on), and by the stables where none but deep voices seemed 
to be, whether in the murmuring of the wind through the strong mass 
of ivy holding to a high red wall, or in the low complaining of the 
weathercock, or in the barking of the dogs, or in the slow striking 
of a clock.  So, encountering presently a sweet smell of limes, 
whose rustling I could hear, I turned with the turning of the path 
to the south front, and there above me were the balustrades of the 
Ghost's Walk and one lighted window that might be my mother's.

The way was paved here, like the terrace overhead, and my footsteps 
from being noiseless made an echoing sound upon the flags.  
Stopping to look at nothing, but seeing all I did see as I went, I 
was passing quickly on, and in a few moments should have passed the 
lighted window, when my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into 
my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the 
Ghost's Walk, that it was I who was to bring calamity upon the 
stately house and that my warning feet were haunting it even then.  
Seized with an augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I 
ran from myself and everything, retraced the way by which I had 
come, and never paused until I had gained the lodge-gate, and the 
park lay sullen and black behind me.

Not before I was alone in my own room for the night and had again 
been dejected and unhappy there did I begin to know how wrong and 
thankless this state was.  But from my darling who was coming on 
the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving 
anticipation that I must have been of marble if it had not moved 
me; from my guardian, too, I found another letter, asking me to 
tell Dame Durden, if I should see that little woman anywhere, that 
they had moped most pitiably without her, that the housekeeping was 
going to rack and ruin, that nobody else could manage the keys, and 
that everybody in and about the house declared it was not the same 
house and was becoming rebellious for her return.  Two such letters 
together made me think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved and 
how happy I ought to be.  That made me think of all my past life; 
and that brought me, as it ought to have done before, into a better 
condition.

For I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or 
I should never have lived; not to say should never have been 
reserved for such a happy life.  I saw very well how many things 
had worked together for my welfare, and that if the sins of the 
fathers were sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did 
not mean what I had in the morning feared it meant.  I knew I was 
as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers and that before my 
Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth nor a queen 
rewarded for it.  I had had experience, in the shock of that very 
day, that I could, even thus soon, find comforting reconcilements 
to the change that had fallen on me.  I renewed my resolutions and 
prayed to be strengthened in them, pouring out my heart for myself 
and for my unhappy mother and feeling that the darkness of the 
morning was passing away.  It was not upon my sleep; and when the 
next day's light awoke me, it was gone.

My dear girl was to arrive at five o'clock in the afternoon.  How 
to help myself through the intermediate time better than by taking 
a long walk along the road by which she was to come, I did not 
know; so Charley and I and Stubbs--Stubbs saddled, for we never 
drove him after the one great occasion--made a long expedition 
along that road and back.  On our return, we held a great review of 
the house and garden and saw that everything was in its prettiest 
condition, and had the bird out ready as an important part of the 
establishment.

There were more than two full hours yet to elapse before she could 
come, and in that interval, which seemed a long one, I must confess 
I was nervously anxious about my altered looks.  I loved my darling 
so well that I was more concerned for their effect on her than on 
any one.  I was not in this slight distress because I at all 
repined--I am quite certain I did not, that day--but, I thought, 
would she be wholly prepared?  When she first saw me, might she not 
be a little shocked and disappointed?  Might it not prove a little 
worse than she expected?  Might she not look for her old Esther and 
not find her?  Might she not have to grow used to me and to begin 
all over again?

I knew the various expressions of my sweet girl's face so well, and 
it was such an honest face in its loveliness, that I was sure 
beforehand she could not hide that first look from me.  And I 
considered whether, if it should signify any one of these meanings, 
which was so very likely, could I quite answer for myself?

Well, I thought I could.  After last night, I thought I could.  But 
to wait and wait, and expect and expect, and think and think, was 
such bad preparation that I resolved to go along the road again and 
meet her.

So I said to Charley, '"Charley, I will go by myself and walk along 
the road until she comes."  Charley highly approving of anything 
that pleased me, I went and left her at home.

But before I got to the second milestone, I had been in so many 
palpitations from seeing dust in the distance (though I knew it was 
not, and could not, be the coach yet) that I resolved to turn back 
and go home again.  And when I had turned, I was in such fear of 
the coach coming up behind me (though I still knew that it neither 
would, nor could, do any such thing) that I ran the greater part of 
the way to avoid being overtaken.

Then, I considered, when I had got safe back again, this was a nice 
thing to have done!  Now I was hot and had made the worst of it 
instead of the best.

At last, when I believed there was at least a quarter of an hour 
more yet, Charley all at once cried out to me as I was trembling in 
the garden, "Here she comes, miss!  Here she is!"

I did not mean to do it, but I ran upstairs into my room and hid 
myself behind the door.  There I stood trembling, even when I heard 
my darling calling as she came upstairs, "Esther, my dear, my love, 
where are you?  Little woman, dear Dame Durden!"

She ran in, and was running out again when she saw me.  Ah, my 
angel girl!  The old dear look, all love, all fondness, all 
affection.  Nothing else in it--no, nothing, nothing!

Oh, how happy I was, down upon the floor, with my sweet beautiful 
girl down upon the floor too, holding my scarred face to her lovely 
cheek, bathing it with tears and kisses, rocking me to and fro like 
a child, calling me by every tender name that she could think of, 
and pressing me to her faithful heart.



CHAPTER XXXVII

Jarndyce and Jarndyce


If the secret I had to keep had been mine, I must have confided it 
to Ada before we had been long together.  But it was not mine, and 
I did not feel that I had a right to tell it, even to my guardian, 
unless some great emergency arose.  It was a weight to bear alone; 
still my present duty appeared to be plain, and blest in the 
attachment of my dear, I did not want an impulse and encouragement 
to do it.  Though often when she was asleep and all was quiet, the 
remembrance of my mother kept me waking and made the night 
sorrowful, I did not yield to it at another time; and Ada found me 
what I used to be--except, of course, in that particular of which I 
have said enough and which I have no intention of mentioning any 
more just now, if I can help it.

The difficulty that I felt in being quite composed that first 
evening when Ada asked me, over our work, if the family were at the 
house, and when I was obliged to answer yes, I believed so, for 
Lady Dedlock had spoken to me in the woods the day before 
yesterday, was great.  Greater still when Ada asked me what she had 
said, and when I replied that she had been kind and interested, and 
when Ada, while admitting her beauty and elegance, remarked upon 
her proud manner and her imperious chilling air.  But Charley 
helped me through, unconsciously, by telling us that Lady Dedlock 
had only stayed at the house two nights on her way from London to 
visit at some other great house in the next county and that she had 
left early on the morning after we had seen her at our view, as we 
called it.  Charley verified the adage about little pitchers, I am 
sure, for she heard of more sayings and doings in a day than would 
have come to my ears in a month.

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

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

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

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

"Whose compliments, Charley?"

"His'n, miss," returned Charley, whose grammatical education was 
advancing, but not very rapidly.

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

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

"And who is W. Grubble, Charley?"

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

"Aye?  The landlord, Charley?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put my veil up, but not quite.

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

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

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

"And I want you, Richard," said I, shaking my head, "to understand 
some one else."

"Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce," said Richard, "
--I suppose you mean him?"

"Of course I do."

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him how he liked his profession.

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

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

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

"Indeed?"

"Yes.  I have run over to look after my--my Chancery interests 
before the long vacation," said Richard, forcing a careless laugh.  
"We are beginning to spin along with that old suit at last, I 
promise you."

No wonder that I shook my head!

"As you say, it's not a pleasant subject."  Richard spoke with the 
same shade crossing his face as before.  "Let it go to the four 
winds for to-night.  Puff!  Gone!  Who do you suppose is with me?"

"Was it Mr. Skimpole's voice I heard?"

"That's the man!  He does me more good than anybody.  What a 
fascinating child it is!"

I asked Richard if any one knew of their coming down together.  He 
answered, no, nobody.  He had been to call upon the dear old 
infant--so he called Mr. Skimpole--and the dear old infant had told 
him where we were, and he had told the dear old infant he was bent 
on coming to see us, and the dear old infant had directly wanted to 
come too; and so he had brought him.  "And he is worth--not to say 
his sordid expenses--but thrice his weight in gold," said Richard.  
"He is such a cheery fellow.  No worldliness about him.  Fresh and 
green-hearted!"

I certainly did not see the proof of Mr. Skimpole's worldliness in 
his having his expenses paid by Richard, but I made no remark about 
that.  Indeed, he came in and turned our conversation.  He was 
charmed to see me, said he had been shedding delicious tears of joy 
and sympathy at intervals for six weeks on my account, had never 
been so happy as in hearing of my progress, began to understand the 
mixture of good and evil in the world now, felt that he appreciated 
health the more when somebody else was ill, didn't know but what it 
might be in the scheme of things that A should squint to make B 
happier in looking straight or that C should carry a wooden leg to 
make D better satisfied with his flesh and blood in a silk 
stocking.

"My dear Miss Summerson, here is our friend Richard," said Mr. 
Skimpole, "full of the brightest visions of the future, which he 
evokes out of the darkness of Chancery.  Now that's delightful, 
that's inspiriting, that's full of poetry!  In old times the woods 
and solitudes were made joyous to the shepherd by the imaginary 
piping and dancing of Pan and the nymphs.  This present shepherd, 
our pastoral Richard, brightens the dull Inns of Court by making 
Fortune and her train sport through them to the melodious notes of 
a judgment from the bench.  That's very pleasant, you know!  Some 
ill-conditioned growling fellow may say to me, 'What's the use of 
these legal and equitable abuses?  How do you defend them?'  I 
reply, 'My growling friend, I DON'T defend them, but they are very 
agreeable to me.  There is a shepherd--youth, a friend of mine, who 
transmutes them into something highly fascinating to my simplicity.  
I don't say it is for this that they exist--for I am a child among 
you worldly grumblers, and not called upon to account to you or 
myself for anything--but it may be so.'"

I began seriously to think that Richard could scarcely have found a 
worse friend than this.  It made me uneasy that at such a time when 
he most required some right principle and purpose he should have 
this captivating looseness and putting-off of everything, this airy 
dispensing with all principle and purpose, at his elbow.  I thought 
I could understand how such a nature as my guardian's, experienced 
in the world and forced to contemplate the miserable evasions and 
contentions of the family misfortune, found an immense relief in 
Mr. Skimpole's avowal of his weaknesses and display of guileless 
candour; but I could not satisfy myself that it was as artless as 
it seemed or that it did not serve Mr. Skimpole's idle turn quite 
as well as any other part, and with less trouble.

They both walked back with me, and Mr. Skimpole leaving us at the 
gate, I walked softly in with Richard and said, "Ada, my love, I 
have brought a gentleman to visit you."  It was not difficult to 
read the blushing, startled face.  She loved him dearly, and he 
knew it, and I knew it.  It was a very transparent business, that 
meeting as cousins only.

I almost mistrusted myself as growing quite wicked in my 
suspicions, but I was not so sure that Richard loved her dearly.  
He admired her very much--any one must have done that--and I dare 
say would have renewed their youthful engagement with great pride 
and ardour but that he knew how she would respect her promise to my 
guardian.  Still I had a tormenting idea that the influence upon 
him extended even here, that he was postponing his best truth and 
earnestness in this as in all things until Jarndyce and Jarndyce 
should be off his mind.  Ah me!  What Richard would have been 
without that blight, I never shall know now!

He told Ada, in his most ingenuous way, that he had not come to 
make any secret inroad on the terms she had accepted (rather too 
implicitly and confidingly, he thought) from Mr. Jarndyce, that he 
had come openly to see her and to see me and to justify himself for 
the present terms on which he stood with Mr. Jarndyce.  As the dear 
old infant would be with us directly, he begged that I would make 
an appointment for the morning, when he might set himself right 
through the means of an unreserved conversation with me.  I 
proposed to walk with him in the park at seven o'clock, and this 
was arranged.  Mr. Skimpole soon afterwards appeared and made us 
merry for an hour.  He particularly requested to see little 
Coavinses (meaning Charley) and told her, with a patriarchal air, 
that he had given her late father all the business in his power and 
that if one of her little brothers would make haste to get set up 
in the same profession, he hoped he should still be able to put a 
good deal of employment in his way.

"For I am constantly being taken in these nets," said Mr. Skimpole, 
looking beamingly at us over a glass of wine-and-water, "and am 
constantly being bailed out--like a boat.  Or paid off--like a 
ship's company.  Somebody always does it for me.  I can't do it, 
you know, for I never have any money.  But somebody does it.  I get 
out by somebody's means; I am not like the starling; I get out.  If 
you were to ask me who somebody is, upon my word I couldn't tell 
you.  Let us drink to somebody.  God bless him!"

Richard was a little late in the morning, but I had not to wait for 
him long, and we turned into the park.  The air was bright and dewy 
and the sky without a cloud.  The birds sang delightfully; the 
sparkles in the fern, the grass, and trees, were exquisite to see; 
the richness of the woods seemed to have increased twenty-fold 
since yesterday, as if, in the still night when they had looked so 
massively hushed in sleep, Nature, through all the minute details 
of every wonderful leaf, had been more wakeful than usual for the 
glory of that day.

"This is a lovely place," said Richard, looking round.  "None of 
the jar and discord of law-suits here!"

But there was other trouble.

"I tell you what, my dear girl," said Richard, "when I get affairs 
in general settled, I shall come down here, I think, and rest."

"Would it not be better to rest now?" I asked.

"Oh, as to resting NOW," said Richard, "or as to doing anything 
very definite NOW, that's not easy.  In short, it can't be done; I 
can't do it at least."

"Why not?" said I.

"You know why not, Esther.  If you were living in an unfinished 
house, liable to have the roof put on or taken off--to be from top 
to bottom pulled down or built up--to-morrow, next day, next week, 
next month, next year--you would find it hard to rest or settle.  
So do I.  Now?  There's no now for us suitors."

I could almost have believed in the attraction on which my poor 
little wandering friend had expatiated when I saw again the 
darkened look of last night.  Terrible to think it bad in it also a 
shade of that unfortunate man who had died.

"My dear Richard," said I, "this is a bad beginning of our 
conversation."

"I knew you would tell me so, Dame Durden."

"And not I alone, dear Richard.  It was not I who cautioned you 
once never to found a hope or expectation on the family curse."

"There you come back to John Jarndyce!" said Richard impatiently.  
"Well! We must approach him sooner or later, for he is the staple 
of what I have to say, and it's as well at once.  My dear Esther, 
how can you be so blind?  Don't you see that he is an interested 
party and that it may be very well for him to wish me to know 
nothing of the suit, and care nothing about it, but that it may not 
be quite so well for me?"

"Oh, Richard," I remonstrated, "is it possible that you can ever 
have seen him and heard him, that you can ever have lived under his 
roof and known him, and can yet breathe, even to me in this 
solitary place where there is no one to hear us, such unworthy 
suspicions?"

He reddened deeply, as if his natural generosity felt a pang of 
reproach.  He was silent for a little while before he replied in a 
subdued voice, "Esther, I am sure you know that I am not a mean 
fellow and that I have some sense of suspicion and distrust being 
poor qualities in one of my years."

"I know it very well," said I.  "I am not more sure of anything."

"That's a dear girl," retorted Richard, "and like you, because it 
gives me comfort.  I had need to get some scrap of comfort out of 
all this business, for it's a bad one at the best, as I have no 
occasion to tell you."

"I know perfectly," said I.  "I know as well, Richard--what shall I 
say? as well as you do--that such misconstructions are foreign to 
your nature.  And I know, as well as you know, what so changes it."

"Come, sister, come," said Richard a little more gaily, "you will 
be fair with me at all events.  If I have the misfortune to be 
under that influence, so has he.  If it has a little twisted me, it 
may have a little twisted him too.  I don't say that he is not an 
honourable man, out of all this complication and uncertainty; I am 
sure he is.  But it taints everybody.  You know it taints 
everybody.  You have heard him say so fifty times.  Then why should 
HE escape?"

"Because," said I, "his is an uncommon character, and he has 
resolutely kept himself outside the circle, Richard."

"Oh, because and because!" replied Richard in his vivacious way.  
"I am not sure, my dear girl, but that it may be wise and specious 
to preserve that outward indifference.  It may cause other parties 
interested to become lax about their interests; and people may die 
off, and points may drag themselves out of memory, and many things 
may smoothly happen that are convenient enough."

I was so touched with pity for Richard that I could not reproach 
him any more, even by a look.  I remembered my guardian's 
gentleness towards his errors and with what perfect freedom from 
resentment he had spoken of them.

"Esther," Richard resumed, "you are not to suppose that I have come 
here to make underhanded charges against John Jarndyce.  I have 
only come to justify myself.  What I say is, it was all very well 
and we got on very well while I was a boy, utterly regardless of 
this same suit; but as soon as I began to take an interest in it 
and to look into it, then it was quite another thing.  Then John 
Jarndyce discovers that Ada and I must break off and that if I 
don't amend that very objectionable course, I am not fit for her.  
Now, Esther, I don't mean to amend that very objectionable course: 
I will not hold John Jarndyce's favour on those unfair terms of 
compromise, which he has no right to dictate.  Whether it pleases 
him or displeases him, I must maintain my rights and Ada's.  I have 
been thinking about it a good deal, and this is the conclusion I 
have come to."

Poor dear Richard!  He had indeed been thinking about it a good 
deal.  His face, his voice, his manner, all showed that too 
plainly.

"So I tell him honourably (you are to know I have written to him 
about all this) that we are at issue and that we had better be at 
issue openly than covertly.  I thank him for his goodwill and his 
protection, and he goes his road, and I go mine.  The fact is, our 
roads are not the same.  Under one of the wills in dispute, I 
should take much more than he.  I don't mean to say that it is the 
one to be established, but there it is, and it has its chance."

"I have not to learn from you, my dear Richard," said I, "of your 
letter.  I had heard of it already without an offended or angry 
word."

"Indeed?" replied Richard, softening.  "I am glad I said he was an 
honourable man, out of all this wretched affair.  But I always say 
that and have never doubted it.  Now, my dear Esther, I know these 
views of mine appear extremely harsh to you, and will to Ada when 
you tell her what has passed between us.  But if you had gone into 
the case as I have, if you had only applied yourself to the papers 
as I did when I was at Kenge's, if you only knew what an 
accumulation of charges and counter-charges, and suspicions and 
cross-suspicions, they involve, you would think me moderate in 
comparison."

"Perhaps so," said I.  "But do you think that, among those many 
papers, there is much truth and justice, Richard?"

"There is truth and justice somewhere in the case, Esther--"

"Or was once, long ago," said I.

"Is--is--must be somewhere," pursued Richard impetuously, "and must 
be brought out.  To allow Ada to be made a bribe and hush-money of 
is not the way to bring it out.  You say the suit is changing me; 
John Jarndyce says it changes, has changed, and will change 
everybody who has any share in it.  Then the greater right I have 
on my side when I resolve to do all I can to bring it to an end."

"All you can, Richard!  Do you think that in these many years no 
others have done all they could?  Has the difficulty grown easier 
because of so many failures?"

"It can't last for ever," returned Richard with a fierceness 
kindling in him which again presented to me that last sad reminder.  
"I am young and earnest, and energy and determination have done 
wonders many a time.  Others have only half thrown themselves into 
it.  I devote myself to it.  I make it the object of my life."

"Oh, Richard, my dear, so much the worse, so much the worse!"

"No, no, no, don't you be afraid for me," he returned 
affectionately.  "You're a dear, good, wise, quiet, blessed girl; 
but you have your prepossessions.  So I come round to John 
Jarndyce.  I tell you, my good Esther, when he and I were on those 
terms which he found so convenient, we were not on natural terms."

"Are division and animosity your natural terms, Richard?"

"No, I don't say that.  I mean that all this business puts us on 
unnatural terms, with which natural relations are incompatible.  
See another reason for urging it on!  I may find out when it's over 
that I have been mistaken in John Jarndyce.  My head may be clearer 
when I am free of it, and I may then agree with what you say to-
day.  Very well.  Then I shall acknowledge it and make him 
reparation."

Everything postponed to that imaginary time!  Everything held in 
confusion and indecision until then!

"Now, my best of confidantes," said Richard, "I want my cousin Ada 
to understand that I am not captious, fickle, and wilful about John 
Jarndyce, but that I have this purpose and reason at my back.  I 
wish to represent myself to her through you, because she has a 
great esteem and respect for her cousin John; and I know you will 
soften the course I take, even though you disapprove of it; and--
and in short," said Richard, who had been hesitating through these 
words, "I--I don't like to represent myself in this litigious, 
contentious, doubting character to a confiding girl like Ada,"

I told him that he was more like himself in those latter words than 
in anything he had said yet.

"Why," acknowledged Richard, "that may be true enough, my love.  I 
rather feel it to be so.  But I shall be able to give myself fair-
play by and by.  I shall come all right again, then, don't you be 
afraid."

I asked him if this were all he wished me to tell Ada.

"Not quite," said Richard.  "I am bound not to withhold from her 
that John Jarndyce answered my letter in his usual manner, 
addressing me as 'My dear Rick,' trying to argue me out of my 
opinions, and telling me that they should make no difference in 
him.  (All very well of course, but not altering the case.)  I also 
want Ada to know that if I see her seldom just now, I am looking 
after her interests as well as my own--we two being in the same 
boat exactly--and that I hope she will not suppose from any flying 
rumours she may hear that I am at all light-headed or imprudent; on 
the contrary, I am always looking forward to the termination of the 
suit, and always planning in that direction.  Being of age now and 
having taken the step I have taken, I consider myself free from any 
accountability to John Jarndyce; but Ada being still a ward of the 
court, I don't yet ask her to renew our engagement.  When she is 
free to act for herself, I shall be myself once more and we shall 
both be in very different worldly circumstances, I believe.  If you 
tell her all this with the advantage of your considerate way, you 
will do me a very great and a very kind service, my dear Esther; 
and I shall knock Jarndyce and Jarndyce on the head with greater 
vigour.  Of course I ask for no secrecy at Bleak House."

"Richard," said I, "you place great confidence in me, but I fear 
you will not take advice from me?"

"It's impossible that I can on this subject, my dear girl.  On any 
other, readily."

As if there were any other in his life!  As if his whole career and 
character were not being dyed one colour!

"But I may ask you a question, Richard?"

"I think so," said he, laughing.  "I don't know who may not, if you 
may not."

"You say, yourself, you are not leading a very settled life."

"How can I, my dear Esther, with nothing settled!"

"Are you in debt again?"

"Why, of course I am," said Richard, astonished at my simplicity.

"Is it of course?"

"My dear child, certainly.  I can't throw myself into an object so 
completely without expense.  You forget, or perhaps you don't know, 
that under either of the wills Ada and I take something.  It's only 
a question between the larger sum and the smaller.  I shall be 
within the mark any way.  Bless your heart, my excellent girl," 
said Richard, quite amused with me, "I shall be all right!  I shall 
pull through, my dear!"

I felt so deeply sensible of the danger in which he stood that I 
tried, in Ada's name, in my guardian's, in my own, by every fervent 
means that I could think of, to warn him of it and to show him some 
of his mistakes.  He received everything I said with patience and 
gentleness, but it all rebounded from him without taking the least 
effect.  I could not wonder at this after the reception his 
preoccupied mind had given to my guardian's letter, but I 
determined to try Ada's influence yet.

So when our walk brought us round to the village again, and I went 
home to breakfast, I prepared Ada for the account I was going to 
give her and told her exactly what reason we had to dread that 
Richard was losing himself and scattering his whole life to the 
winds.  It made her very unhappy, of course, though she had a far, 
far greater reliance on his correcting his errors than I could 
have--which was so natural and loving in my dear!--and she 
presently wrote him this little letter:


My dearest cousin,

Esther has told me all you said to her this morning.  I write this 
to repeat most earnestly for myself all that she said to you and to 
let you know how sure I am that you will sooner or later find our 
cousin John a pattern of truth, sincerity, and goodness, when you 
will deeply, deeply grieve to have done him (without intending it) 
so much wrong.

I do not quite know how to write what I wish to say next, but I 
trust you will understand it as I mean it.  I have some fears, my 
dearest cousin, that it may be partly for my sake you are now 
laying up so much unhappiness for yourself--and if for yourself, 
for me.  In case this should be so, or in case you should entertain 
much thought of me in what you are doing, I most earnestly entreat 
and beg you to desist.  You can do nothing for my sake that will 
make me half so happy as for ever turning your back upon the shadow 
in which we both were born.  Do not be angry with me for saying 
this.  Pray, pray, dear Richard, for my sake, and for your own, and 
in a natural repugnance for that source of trouble which had its 
share in making us both orphans when we were very young, pray, 
pray, let it go for ever.  We have reason to know by this time that 
there is no good in it and no hope, that there is nothing to be got 
from it but sorrow.

My dearest cousin, it is needless for me to say that you are quite 
free and that it is very likely you may find some one whom you will 
love much better than your first fancy.  I am quite sure, if you 
will let me say so, that the object of your choice would greatly 
prefer to follow your fortunes far and wide, however moderate or 
poor, and see you happy, doing your duty and pursuing your chosen 
way, than to have the hope of being, or even to be, very rich with 
you (if such a thing were possible) at the cost of dragging years 
of procrastination and anxiety and of your indifference to other 
aims.  You may wonder at my saying this so confidently with so 
little knowledge or experience, but I know it for a certainty from 
my own heart.

Ever, my dearest cousin, your most affectionate

Ada


This note brought Richard to us very soon, but it made little 
change in him if any.  We would fairly try, he said, who was right 
and who was wrong--he would show us--we should see!  He was 
animated and glowing, as if Ada's tenderness had gratified him; but 
I could only hope, with a sigh, that the letter might have some 
stronger effect upon his mind on re-perusal than it assuredly had 
then.

As they were to remain with us that day and had taken their places 
to return by the coach next morning, I sought an opportunity of 
speaking to Mr. Skimpole.  Our out-of-door life easily threw one in 
my way, and I delicately said that there was a responsibility in 
encouraging Richard.

"Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?" he repeated, catching at 
the word with the pleasantest smile.  "I am the last man in the 
world for such a thing.  I never was responsible in my life--I 
can't be."

"I am afraid everybody is obliged to be," said I timidly enough, he 
being so much older and more clever than I.

"No, really?" said Mr. Skimpole, receiving this new light with a 
most agreeable jocularity of surprise.  "But every man's not 
obliged to be solvent?  I am not.  I never was.  See, my dear Miss 
Summerson," he took a handful of loose silver and halfpence from 
his pocket, "there's so much money.  I have not an idea how much.  
I have not the power of counting.  Call it four and ninepence--call 
it four pound nine.  They tell me I owe more than that.  I dare say 
I do.  I dare say I owe as much as good-natured people will let me 
owe.  If they don't stop, why should I?  There you have Harold 
Skimpole in little.  If that's responsibility, I am responsible."

The perfect ease of manner with which he put the money up again and 
looked at me with a smile on his refined face, as if he had been 
mentioning a curious little fact about somebody else, almost made 
me feel as if he really had nothing to do with it.

"Now, when you mention responsibility," he resumed, "I am disposed 
to say that I never had the happiness of knowing any one whom I 
should consider so refreshingly responsible as yourself.  You 
appear to me to be the very touchstone of responsibility.  When I 
see you, my dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of 
the whole little orderly system of which you are the centre, I feel 
inclined to say to myself--in fact I do say to myself very often--
THAT'S responsibility!"

It was difficult, after this, to explain what I meant; but I 
persisted so far as to say that we all hoped he would check and not 
confirm Richard in the sanguine views he entertained just then.

"Most willingly," he retorted, "if I could.  But, my dear Miss 
Summerson, I have no art, no disguise.  If he takes me by the hand 
and leads me through Westminster Hall in an airy procession after 
fortune, I must go.  If he says, 'Skimpole, join the dance!'  I 
must join it.  Common sense wouldn't, I know, but I have NO common 
sense."

It was very unfortunate for Richard, I said.

"Do you think so!" returned Mr. Skimpole.  "Don't say that, don't 
say that.  Let us suppose him keeping company with Common Sense--an 
excellent man--a good deal wrinkled--dreadfully practical--change 
for a ten-pound note in every pocket--ruled account-book in his 
hand--say, upon the whole, resembling a tax-gatherer.  Our dear 
Richard, sanguine, ardent, overleaping obstacles, bursting with 
poetry like a young bud, says to this highly respectable companion, 
'I see a golden prospect before me; it's very bright, it's very 
beautiful, it's very joyous; here I go, bounding over the landscape 
to come at it!'  The respectable companion instantly knocks him 
down with the ruled account-book; tells him in a literal, prosaic 
way that he sees no such thing; shows him it's nothing but fees, 
fraud, horsehair wigs, and black gowns.  Now you know that's a 
painful change--sensible in the last degree, I have no doubt, but 
disagreeable.  I can't do it.  I haven't got the ruled account-
book, I have none of the tax-gatherlng elements in my composition, 
I am not at all respectable, and I don't want to be.  Odd perhaps, 
but so it is!"

It was idle to say more, so I proposed that we should join Ada and 
Richard, who were a little in advance, and I gave up Mr. Skimpole 
in despair.  He had been over the Hall in the course of the morning 
and whimsically described the family pictures as we walked.  There 
were such portentous shepherdesses among the Ladies Dedlock dead 
and gone, he told us, that peaceful crooks became weapons of 
assault in their hands.  They tended their flocks severely in 
buckram and powder and put their sticking-plaster patches on to 
terrify commoners as the chiefs of some other tribes put on their 
war-paint.  There was a Sir Somebody Dedlock, with a battle, a 
sprung-mine, volumes of smoke, flashes of lightning, a town on 
fire, and a stormed fort, all in full action between his horse's 
two hind legs, showing, he supposed, how little a Dedlock made of 
such trifles.  The whole race he represented as having evidently 
been, in life, what he called "stuffed people"--a large collection, 
glassy eyed, set up in the most approved manner on their various 
twigs and perches, very correct, perfectly free from animation, and 
always in glass cases.

I was not so easy now during any reference to the name but that I 
felt it a relief when Richard, with an exclamation of surprise, 
hurried away to meet a stranger whom he first descried coming 
slowly towards us.

"Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole.  "Vholes!"

We asked if that were a friend of Richard's.

"Friend and legal adviser," said Mr. Skimpole.  "Now, my dear Miss 
Summerson, if you want common sense, responsibility, and 
respectability, all united--if you want an exemplary man--Vholes is 
THE man."

We had not known, we said, that Richard was assisted by any 
gentleman of that name.

"When he emerged from legal infancy," returned Mr. Skimpole, "he 
parted from our conversational friend Kenge and took up, I believe, 
with Vholes.  Indeed, I know he did, because I introduced him to 
Vholes."

"Had you known him long?" asked Ada.

"Vholes?  My dear Miss Clare, I had had that kind of acquaintance 
with him which I have had with several gentlemen of his profession.  
He had done something or other in a very agreeable, civil manner--
taken proceedings, I think, is the expression--which ended in the 
proceeding of his taking ME.  Somebody was so good as to step in 
and pay the money--something and fourpence was the amount; I forget 
the pounds and shillings, but I know it ended with fourpence, 
because it struck me at the time as being so odd that I could owe 
anybody fourpence--and after that I brought them together.  Vholes 
asked me for the introduction, and I gave it.  Now I come to think 
of it," he looked inquiringly at us with his frankest smile as he 
made the discovery, "Vholes bribed me, perhaps?  He gave me 
something and called it commission.  Was it a five-pound note?  Do 
you know, I think it MUST have been a five-pound note!"

His further consideration of the point was prevented by Richard's 
coming back to us in an excited state and hastily representing Mr. 
Vholes--a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were 
cold, a red eruption here and there upon his face, tall and thin, 
about fifty years of age, high-shouldered, and stooping.  Dressed 
in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing 
so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner and a slow, fixed way he 
had of looking at Richard.

"I hope I don't disturb you, ladies," said Mr. Vholes, and now I 
observed that he was further remarkable for an inward manner of 
speaking.  "I arranged with Mr. Carstone that he should always know 
when his cause was in the Chancelor's paper, and being informed by 
one of my clerks last night after post time that it stood, rather 
unexpectedly, in the paper for to-morrow, I put myself into the 
coach early this morning and came down to confer with him."

"Yes," said Richard, flushed, and looking triumphantly at Ada and 
me, "we don't do these things in the old slow way now.  We spin 
along now!  Mr. Vholes, we must hire something to get over to the 
post town in, and catch the mail to-night, and go up by it!"

"Anything you please, sir," returned Mr. Vholes.  "I am quite at 
your service."

"Let me see," said Richard, looking at his watch.  "If I run down 
to the Dedlock, and get my portmanteau fastened up, and order a 
gig, or a chaise, or whatever's to be got, we shall have an hour 
then before starting.  I'll come back to tea.  Cousin Ada, will you 
and Esther take care of Mr. Vholes when I am gone?"

He was away directly, in his heat and hurry, and was soon lost in 
the dusk of evening.  We who were left walked on towards the house.

"Is Mr. Carstone's presence necessary to-morrow, Sir?" said I.  
"Can it do any good?"

"No, miss," Mr. Vholes replied.  "I am not aware that it can."

Both Ada and I expressed our regret that he should go, then, only 
to be disappointed.

"Mr. Carstone has laid down the principle of watching his own 
interests," said Mr. Vholes, "and when a client lays down his own 
principle, and it is not immoral, it devolves upon me to carry it 
out.  I wish in business to be exact and open.  I am a widower with 
three daughters--Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my desire is so to 
discharge the duties of life as to leave them a good name.  This 
appears to be a pleasant spot, miss."

The remark being made to me in consequence of my being next him as 
we walked, I assented and enumerated its chief attractions.

"Indeed?" said Mr. Vholes.  "I have the privilege of supporting an 
aged father in the Vale of Taunton--his native place--and I admire 
that country very much.  I had no idea there was anything so 
attractive here."

To keep up the conversation, I asked Mr. Vholes if he would like to 
live altogether in the country.

"There, miss," said he, "you touch me on a tender string.  My 
health is not good (my digestion being much impaired), and if I had 
only myself to consider, I should take refuge in rural habits, 
especially as the cares of business have prevented me from ever 
coming much into contact with general society, and particularly 
with ladies' society, which I have most wished to mix in.  But with 
my three daughters, Emma, Jane, and Caroline--and my aged father--I 
cannot afford to be selfish.  It is true I have no longer to 
maintain a dear grandmother who died in her hundred and second 
year, but enough remains to render it indispensable that the mill 
should be always going."

It required some attention to hear him on account of his inward 
speaking and his lifeless manner.

"You will excuse my having mentioned my daughters," he said.  "They 
are my weak point.  I wish to leave the poor girls some little 
independence, as well as a good name."

We now arrived at Mr. Boythorn's house, where the tea-table, all 
prepared, was awaiting us.  Richard came in restless and hurried 
shortly afterwards, and leaning over Mr. Vholes's chair, whispered 
something in his ear.  Mr. Vholes replied aloud--or as nearly aloud 
I suppose as he had ever replied to anything--"You will drive me, 
will you, sir?  It is all the same to me, sir.  Anything you 
please.  I am quite at your service."

We understood from what followed that Mr. Skimpole was to be left 
until the morning to occupy the two places which had been already 
paid for.  As Ada and I were both in low spirits concerning Richard 
and very sorry so to part with him, we made it as plain as we 
politely could that we should leave Mr. Skimpole to the Dedlock 
Arms and retire when the night-travellers were gone.

Richard's high spirits carrying everything before them, we all went 
out together to the top of the hill above the village, where he had 
ordered a gig to wait and where we found a man with a lantern 
standing at the head of the gaunt pale horse that had been 
harnessed to it.

I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern's 
light, Richard all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in 
his hand; Mr. Vholes quite still, black-gloved, and buttoned up, 
looking at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it.  
I have before me the whole picture of the warm dark night, the 
summer lightning, the dusty track of road closed in by hedgerows 
and high trees, the gaunt pale horse with his ears pricked up, and 
the driving away at speed to Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

My dear girl told me that night how Richard's being thereafter 
prosperous or ruined, befriended or deserted, could only make this 
difference to her, that the more he needed love from one unchanging 
heart, the more love that unchanging heart would have to give him; 
how he thought of her through his present errors, and she would 
think of him at all times--never of herself if she could devote 
herself to him, never of her own delights if she could minister to 
his.

And she kept her word?

I look along the road before me, where the distance already 
shortens and the journey's end is growing visible; and true and 
good above the dead sea of the Chancery suit and all the ashy fruit 
it cast ashore, I think I see my darling.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

A Struggle


When our time came for returning to Bleak House again, we were 
punctual to the day and were received with an overpowering welcome.  
I was perfectly restored to health and strength, and finding my 
housekeeping keys laid ready for me in my room, rang myself in as 
if I had been a new year, with a merry little peal.  "Once more, 
duty, duty, Esther," said I; "and if you are not overjoyed to do 
it, more than cheerfully and contentedly, through anything and 
everything, you ought to be.  That's all I have to say to you, my 
dear!"

The first few mornings were mornings of so much bustle and 
business, devoted to such settlements of accounts, such repeated 
journeys to and fro between the growlery and all other parts of the 
house, so many rearrangements of drawers and presses, and such a 
general new beginning altogether, that I had not a moment's 
leisure.  But when these arrangements were completed and everything 
was in order, I paid a visit of a few hours to London, which 
something in the letter I had destroyed at Chesney Wold had induced 
me to decide upon in my own mind.

I made Caddy Jellyby--her maiden name was so natural to me that I 
always called her by it--the pretext for this visit and wrote her a 
note previously asking the favour of her company on a little 
business expedition.  Leaving home very early in the morning, I got 
to London by stage-coach in such good time that I got to Newman 
Street with the day before me.

Caddy, who had not seen me since her wedding-day, was so glad and 
so affectionate that I was half inclined to fear I should make her 
husband jealous.  But he was, in his way, just as bad--I mean as 
good; and in short it was the old story, and nobody would leave me 
any possibility of doing anything meritorious.

The elder Mr. Turveydrop was in bed, I found, and Caddy was milling 
his chocolate, which a melancholy little boy who was an apprentice
--it seemed such a curious thing to be apprenticed to the trade of 
dancing--was waiting to carry upstairs.  Her father-in-law was 
extremely kind and considerate, Caddy told me, and they lived most 
happily together.  (When she spoke of their living together, she 
meant that the old gentleman had all the good things and all the 
good lodging, while she and her husband had what they could get, 
and were poked into two corner rooms over the Mews.)

"And how is your mama, Caddy?" said I.

"Why, I hear of her, Esther," replied Caddy, "through Pa, but I see 
very little of her.  We are good friends, I am glad to say, but Ma 
thinks there is something absurd in my having married a dancing-
master, and she is rather afraid of its extending to her."

It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural 
duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a 
telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best 
precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe 
that I kept this to myself.

"And your papa, Caddy?"

"He comes here every evening," returned Caddy, "and is so fond of 
sitting in the corner there that it's a treat to see him."

Looking at the corner, I plainly perceived the mark of Mr. 
Jellyby's head against the wall.  It was consolatory to know that 
he had found such a resting-place for it.

"And you, Caddy," said I, "you are always busy, I'll be bound?"

"Well, my dear," returned Caddy, "I am indeed, for to tell you a 
grand secret, I am qualifying myself to give lessons.  Prince's 
health is not strong, and I want to be able to assist him.  What 
with schools, and classes here, and private pupils, AND the 
apprentices, he really has too much to do, poor fellow!"

The notion of the apprentices was still so odd to me that I asked 
Caddy if there were many of them.

"Four," said Caddy.  "One in-door, and three out.  They are very 
good children; only when they get together they WILL play--
children-like--instead of attending to their work.  So the little 
boy you saw just now waltzes by himself in the empty kitchen, and 
we distribute the others over the house as well as we can."

"That is only for their steps, of course?" said I.

"Only for their steps," said Caddy.  "In that way they practise, so 
many hours at a time, whatever steps they happen to be upon.  They 
dance in the academy, and at this time of year we do figures at 
five every morning."

"Why, what a laborious life!" I exclaimed.

"I assure you, my dear," returned Caddy, smiling, "when the out-
door apprentices ring us up in the morning (the bell rings into our 
room, not to disturb old Mr. Turveydrop), and when I put up the 
window and see them standing on the door-step with their little 
pumps under their arms, I am actually reminded of the Sweeps."

All this presented the art to me in a singular light, to be sure.  
Caddy enjoyed the effect of her communication and cheerfully 
recounted the particulars of her own studies.

"You see, my dear, to save expense I ought to know something of the 
piano, and I ought to know something of the kit too, and 
consequently I have to practise those two instruments as well as 
the details of our profession.  If Ma had been like anybody else, I 
might have had some little musical knowledge to begin upon.  
However, I hadn't any; and that part of the work is, at first, a 
little discouraging, I must allow.  But I have a very good ear, and 
I am used to drudgery--I have to thank Ma for that, at all events--
and where there's a will there's a way, you know, Esther, the world 
over."  Saying these words, Caddy laughingly sat down at a little 
jingling square piano and really rattled off a quadrille with great 
spirit.  Then she good-humouredly and blushingly got up again, and 
while she still laughed herself, said, "Don't laugh at me, please; 
that's a dear girl!"

I would sooner have cried, but I did neither.  I encouraged her and 
praised her with all my heart.  For I conscientiously believed, 
dancing-master's wife though she was, and dancing-mistress though 
in her limited ambition she aspired to be, she had struck out a 
natural, wholesome, loving course of industry and perseverance that 
was quite as good as a mission.

"My dear," said Caddy, delighted, "you can't think how you cheer 
me.  I shall owe you, you don't know how much.  What changes, 
Esther, even in my small world!  You recollect that first night, 
when I was so unpolite and inky?  Who would have thought, then, of 
my ever teaching people to dance, of all other possibilities and 
impossibilities!"

Her husband, who had left us while we had this chat, now coming 
back, preparatory to exercising the apprentices in the ball-room, 
Caddy informed me she was quite at my disposal.  But it was not my 
time yet, I was glad to tell her, for I should have been vexed to 
take her away then.  Therefore we three adjourned to the 
apprentices together, and I made one in the dance.

The apprentices were the queerest little people.  Besides the 
melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing 
alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty 
little limp girl in a gauzy dress.  Such a precocious little girl, 
with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who 
brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule.  
Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and 
marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs 
and feet--and heels particularly.

I asked Caddy what had made their parents choose this profession 
for them.  Caddy said she didn't know; perhaps they were designed 
for teachers, perhaps for the stage.  They were all people in 
humble circumstances, and the melancholy boy's mother kept a 
ginger-beer shop.

We danced for an hour with great gravity, the melancholy child 
doing wonders with his lower extremities, in which there appeared 
to be some sense of enjoyment though it never rose above his waist.  
Caddy, while she was observant of her husband and was evidently 
founded upon him, had acquired a grace and self-possession of her 
own, which, united to her pretty face and figure, was uncommonly 
agreeable.  She already relieved him of much of the instruction of 
these young people, and he seldom interfered except to walk his 
part in the figure if he had anything to do in it.  He always 
played the tune.  The affectation of the gauzy child, and her 
condescension to the boys, was a sight.  And thus we danced an hour 
by the clock.

When the practice was concluded, Caddy's husband made himself ready 
to go out of town to a school, and Caddy ran away to get ready to 
go out with me.  I sat in the ball-room in the interval, 
contemplating the apprentices.  The two out-door boys went upon the 
staircase to put on their half-boots and pull the in-door boy's 
hair, as I judged from the nature of his objections.  Returning 
with their jackets buttoned and their pumps stuck in them, they 
then produced packets of cold bread and meat and bivouacked under a 
painted lyre on the wall.  The little gauzy child, having whisked 
her sandals into the reticule and put on a trodden-down pair of 
shoes, shook her head into the dowdy bonnet at one shake, and 
answering my inquiry whether she liked dancing by replying, "Not 
with boys," tied it across her chin, and went home contemptuous.

"Old Mr. Turveydrop is so sorry," said Caddy, "that he has not 
finished dressing yet and cannot have the pleasure of seeing you 
before you go.  You are such a favourite of his, Esther."

I expressed myself much obliged to him, but did not think it 
necessary to add that I readily dispensed with this attention.

"It takes him a long time to dress," said Caddy, "because he is 
very much looked up to in such things, you know, and has a 
reputation to support.  You can't think how kind he is to Pa.  He 
talks to Pa of an evening about the Prince Regent, and I never saw 
Pa so interested."

There was something in the picture of Mr. Turveydrop bestowing his 
deportment on Mr. Jellyby that quite took my fancy.  I asked Caddy 
if he brought her papa out much.

"No," said Caddy, "I don't know that he does that, but he talks to 
Pa, and Pa greatly admires him, and listens, and likes it.  Of 
course I am aware that Pa has hardly any claims to deportment, but 
they get on together delightfully.  You can't think what good 
companions they make.  I never saw Pa take snuff before in my life, 
but he takes one pinch out of Mr. Turveydrop's box regularly and 
keeps putting it to his nose and taking it away again all the 
evening."

That old Mr. Turveydrop should ever, in the chances and changes of 
life, have come to the rescue of Mr. Jellyby from Borrioboola-Gha 
appeared to me to be one of the pleasantest of oddities.

"As to Peepy," said Caddy with a little hesitation, "whom I was 
most afraid of--next to having any family of my own, Esther--as an 
inconvenience to Mr. Turveydrop, the kindness of the old gentleman 
to that child is beyond everything.  He asks to see him, my dear!  
He lets him take the newspaper up to him in bed; he gives him the 
crusts of his toast to eat; he sends him on little errands about 
the house; he tells him to come to me for sixpences.  In short," 
said Caddy cheerily, "and not to prose, I am a very fortunate girl 
and ought to be very grateful.  Where are we going, Esther?"

"To the Old Street Road," said I, "where I have a few words to say 
to the solicitor's clerk who was sent to meet me at the coach-
office on the very day when I came to London and first saw you, my 
dear.  Now I think of it, the gentleman who brought us to your 
house."

"Then, indeed, I seem to be naturally the person to go with you," 
returned Caddy.

To the Old Street Road we went and there inquired at Mrs. Guppy's 
residence for Mrs. Guppy.  Mrs. Guppy, occupying the parlours and 
having indeed been visibly in danger of cracking herself like a nut 
in the front-parlour door by peeping out before she was asked for, 
immediately presented herself and requested us to walk in.  She was 
an old lady in a large cap, with rather a red nose and rather an 
unsteady eye, but smiling all over.  Her close little sitting-room 
was prepared for a visit, and there was a portrait of her son in it 
which, I had almost written here, was more like than life: it 
insisted upon him with such obstinacy, and was so determined not to 
let him off.

Not only was the portrait there, but we found the original there 
too.  He was dressed in a great many colours and was discovered at 
a table reading law-papers with his forefinger to his forehead.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, rising, "this is indeed an oasis.  
Mother, will you be so good as to put a chair for the other lady 
and get out of the gangway."

Mrs. Guppy, whose incessant smiling gave her quite a waggish 
appearance, did as her son requested and then sat down in a corner, 
holding her pocket handkerchief to her chest, like a fomentation, 
with both hands.

I presented Caddy, and Mr. Guppy said that any friend of mine was 
more than welcome.  I then proceeded to the object of my visit.

"I took the liberty of sending you a note, sir," said I.

Mr. Guppy acknowledged the receipt by taking it out of his breast-
pocket, putting it to his lips, and returning it to his pocket with 
a bow.  Mr. Guppy's mother was so diverted that she rolled her head 
as she smiled and made a silent appeal to Caddy with her elbow.

"Could I speak to you alone for a moment?" said I.

Anything like the jocoseness of Mr. Guppy's mother just now, I 
think I never saw.  She made no sound of laughter, but she rolled 
her head, and shook it, and put her handkerchief to her mouth, and 
appealed to Caddy with her elbow, and her hand, and her shoulder, 
and was so unspeakably entertained altogether that it was with some 
difficulty she could marshal Caddy through the little folding-door 
into her bedroom adjoining.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "you will excuse the waywardness 
of a parent ever mindful of a son's appiness.  My mother, though 
highly exasperating to the feelings, is actuated by maternal 
dictates."

I could hardly have believed that anybody could in a moment have 
turned so red or changed so much as Mr. Guppy did when I now put up 
my veil.

"I asked the favour of seeing you for a few moments here," said I, 
"in preference to calling at Mr. Kenge's because, remembering what 
you said on an occasion when you spoke to me in confidence, I 
feared I might otherwise cause you some embarrassment, Mr. Guppy."

I caused him embarrassment enough as it was, I am sure.  I never 
saw such faltering, such confusion, such amazement and 
apprehension.

"Miss Summerson," stammered Mr. Guppy, "I--I--beg your pardon, but 
in our profession--we--we--find it necessary to be explicit.  You 
have referred to an occasion, miss, when I--when I did myself the 
honour of making a declaration which--"

Something seemed to rise in his throat that he could not possibly 
swallow.  He put his hand there, coughed, made faces, tried again 
to swallow it, coughed again, made faces again, looked all round 
the room, and fluttered his papers.

"A kind of giddy sensation has come upon me, miss," he explained, 
"which rather knocks me over.  I--er--a little subject to this sort 
of thing--er--by George!"

I gave him a little time to recover.  He consumed it in putting his 
hand to his forehead and taking it away again, and in backing his 
chair into the corner behind him.

"My intention was to remark, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "dear me--
something bronchial, I think--hem!--to remark that you was so good 
on that occasion as to repel and repudiate that declaration.  You--
you wouldn't perhaps object to admit that?  Though no witnesses are 
present, it might be a satisfaction to--to your mind--if you was to 
put in that admission."

"There can be no doubt," said I, "that I declined your proposal 
without any reservation or qualification whatever, Mr. Guppy."

"Thank you, miss," he returned, measuring the table with his 
troubled hands.  "So far that's satisfactory, and it does you 
credit.  Er--this is certainly bronchial!--must be in the tubes--
er--you wouldn't perhaps be offended if I was to mention--not that 
it's necessary, for your own good sense or any person's sense must 
show 'em that--if I was to mention that such declaration on my part 
was final, and there terminated?"

"I quite understand that," said I.

"Perhaps--er--it may not be worth the form, but it might be a 
satisfaction to your mind--perhaps you wouldn't object to admit 
that, miss?" said Mr. Guppy.

"I admit it most fully and freely," said I.

"Thank you," returned Mr. Guppy.  "Very honourable, I am sure.  I 
regret that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances 
over which I have no control, will put it out of my power ever to 
fall back upon that offer or to renew it in any shape or form 
whatever, but it will ever be a retrospect entwined--er--with 
friendship's bowers."  Mr. Guppy's bronchitis came to his relief 
and stopped his measurement of the table.

"I may now perhaps mention what I wished to say to you?" I began.

"I shall be honoured, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy.  "I am so 
persuaded that your own good sense and right feeling, miss, will--
will keep you as square as possible--that I can have nothing but 
pleasure, I am sure, in hearing any observations you may wish to 
offer."

"You were so good as to imply, on that occasion--"

"Excuse me, miss," said Mr. Guppy, "but we had better not travel 
out of the record into implication.  I cannot admit that I implied 
anything."

"You said on that occasion," I recommenced, "that you might 
possibly have the means of advancing my interests and promoting my 
fortunes by making discoveries of which I should be the subject.  I 
presume that you founded that belief upon your general knowledge of 
my being an orphan girl, indebted for everything to the benevolence 
of Mr. Jarndyce.  Now, the beginning and the end of what I have 
come to beg of you is, Mr. Guppy, that you will have the kindness 
to relinquish all idea of so serving me.  I have thought of this 
sometimes, and I have thought of it most lately--since I have been 
ill.  At length I have decided, in case you should at any time 
recall that purpose and act upon it in any way, to come to you and 
assure you that you are altogether mistaken.  You could make no 
discovery in reference to me that would do me the least service or 
give me the least pleasure.  I am acquainted with my personal 
history, and I have it in my power to assure you that you never can 
advance my welfare by such means.  You may, perhaps, have abandoned 
this project a long time.  If so, excuse my giving you unnecessary 
trouble.  If not, I entreat you, on the assurance I have given you, 
henceforth to lay it aside.  I beg you to do this, for my peace."

"I am bound to confess," said Mr. Guppy, "that you express 
yourself, miss, with that good sense and right feeling for which I 
gave you credit.  Nothing can be more satisfactory than such right 
feeling, and if I mistook any intentions on your part just now, I 
am prepared to tender a full apology.  I should wish to be 
understood, miss, as hereby offering that apology--limiting it, as 
your own good sense and right feeling will point out the necessity 
of, to the present proceedings."

I must say for Mr. Guppy that the snuffling manner he had had upon 
him improved very much.  He seemed truly glad to be able to do 
something I asked, and he looked ashamed.

"If you will allow me to finish what I have to say at once so that 
I may have no occasion to resume," I went on, seeing him about to 
speak, "you will do me a kindness, sir.  I come to you as privately 
as possible because you announced this impression of yours to me in 
a confidence which I have really wished to respect--and which I 
always have respected, as you remember.  I have mentioned my 
illness.  There really is no reason why I should hesitate to say 
that I know very well that any little delicacy I might have had in 
making a request to you is quite removed.  Therefore I make the 
entreaty I have now preferred, and I hope you will have sufficient 
consideration for me to accede to it."

I must do Mr. Guppy the further justice of saying that he had 
looked more and more ashamed and that he looked most ashamed and 
very earnest when he now replied with a burning face, "Upon my word 
and honour, upon my life, upon my soul, Miss Summerson, as I am a 
living man, I'll act according to your wish!  I'll never go another 
step in opposition to it.  I'll take my oath to it if it will be 
any satisfaction to you.  In what I promise at this present time 
touching the matters now in question," continued Mr. Guppy rapidly, 
as if he were repeating a familiar form of words, "I speak the 
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so--"

"I am quite satisfied," said I, rising at this point, "and I thank 
you very much.  Caddy, my dear, I am ready!"

Mr. Guppy's mother returned with Caddy (now making me the recipient 
of her silent laughter and her nudges), and we took our leave.  Mr. 
Guppy saw us to the door with the air of one who was either 
imperfectly awake or walking in his sleep; and we left him there, 
staring.

But in a minute he came after us down the street without any hat, 
and with his long hair all blown about, and stopped us, saying 
fervently, "Miss Summerson, upon my honour and soul, you may depend 
upon me!"

"I do," said I, "quite confidently."

"I beg your pardon, miss," said Mr. Guppy, going with one leg and 
staying with the other, "but this lady being present--your own 
witness--it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I should 
wish to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions."

"Well, Caddy," said I, turning to her, "perhaps you will not be 
surprised when I tell you, my dear, that there never has been any 
engagement--"

"No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever," suggested Mr. 
Guppy.

"No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever," said I, "between 
this gentleman--"

"William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of 
Middlesex," he murmured.

"Between this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place, 
Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex, and myself."

"Thank you, miss," said Mr. Guppy.  "Very full--er--excuse me--
lady's name, Christian and surname both?"

I gave them.

"Married woman, I believe?" said Mr. Guppy.  "Married woman.  Thank 
you.  Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, 
within the city of London, but extra-parochial; now of Newman 
Street, Oxford Street.  Much obliged."

He ran home and came running back again.

"Touching that matter, you know, I really and truly am very sorry 
that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over 
which I have no control, should prevent a renewal of what was 
wholly terminated some time back," said Mr. Guppy to me forlornly 
and despondently, "but it couldn't be.  Now COULD it, you know!  I 
only put it to you."

I replied it certainly could not.  The subject did not admit of a 
doubt.  He thanked me and ran to his mother's again--and back 
again.

"It's very honourable of you, miss, I am sure," said Mr. Guppy.  
"If an altar could be erected in the bowers of friendship--but, 
upon my soul, you may rely upon me in every respect save and except 
the tender passion only!"

The struggle in Mr. Guppy's breast and the numerous oscillations it 
occasioned him between his mother's door and us were sufficiently 
conspicuous in the windy street (particularly as his hair wanted 
cutting) to make us hurry away.  I did so with a lightened heart; 
but when we last looked back, Mr. Guppy was still oscillating in 
the same troubled state of mind.



CHAPTER XXXIX

Attorney and Client


The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is 
inscribed upon a door-post in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane--a 
little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of 
two compartments and a sifter.  It looks as if Symond were a 
sparing man in his way and constructed his inn of old building 
materials which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all 
things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with 
congenial shabbiness.  Quartered in this dingy hatchment 
commemorative of Symond are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.

Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation 
retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall.  
Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. 
Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the 
brightest midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of 
cellarage staircase against which belated civilians generally 
strike their brows.  Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale 
that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool, 
while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal 
facilities for poking the fire.  A smell as of unwholesome sheep 
blending with the smell of must and dust is referable to the 
nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles and 
to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers.  
The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close.  The place was last 
painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two 
chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot 
evervwhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have 
but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be 
always dirty and always shut unless coerced.  This accounts for the 
phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of 
firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.

Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man.  He has not a large business, 
but he is a very respectable man.  He is allowed by the greater 
attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a 
most respectable man.  He never misses a chance in his practice, 
which is a mark of respectability.  He never takes any pleasure, 
which is another mark of respectability.  He is reserved and 
serious, which is another mark of respectability.  His digestion is 
impaired, which is highly respectable.  And he is making hay of the 
grass which is flesh, for his three daughters.  And his father is 
dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for 
itself.  There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and 
consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.  Viewed by 
this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze 
the laity are apt to think it.  Let them but once clearly perceive 
that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their 
expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

But not perceiving this quite plainly--only seeing it by halves in 
a confused way--the laity sometimes suffer in peace and pocket, 
with a bad grace, and DO grumble very much.  Then this 
respectability of Mr. Vholes is brought into powerful play against 
them.  "Repeal this statute, my good sir?" says Mr. Kenge to a 
smarting client.  "Repeal it, my dear sir?  Never, with my consent.  
Alter this law, sir, and what will be the effect of your rash 
proceeding on a class of practitioners very worthily represented, 
allow me to say to you, by the opposite attorney in the case, Mr. 
Vholes?  Sir, that class of practitioners would be swept from the 
face of the earth.  Now you cannot afford--I will say, the social 
system cannot afford--to lose an order of men like Mr. Vholes.  
Diligent, persevering, steady, acute in business.  My dear sir, I 
understand your present feelings against the existing state of 
things, which I grant to be a little hard in your case; but I can 
never raise my voice for the demolition of a class of men like Mr. 
Vholes."  The respectability of Mr. Vholes has even been cited with 
crushing effect before Parliamentary committees, as in the 
following blue minutes of a distinguished attorney's evidence.   
"Question (number five hundred and seventeen thousand eight hundred 
and sixty-nine): If I understand you, these forms of practice 
indisputably occasion delay?  Answer: Yes, some delay.  Question: 
And great expense?  Answer: Most assuredly they cannot be gone 
through for nothing.  Question: And unspeakable vexation?  Answer: 
I am not prepared to say that.  They have never given ME any 
vexation; quite the contrary.  Question: But you think that their 
abolition would damage a class of practitioners?  Answer: I have no 
doubt of it.  Question: Can you instance any type of that class?  
Answer: Yes.  I would unhesitatingly mention Mr. Vholes.  He would 
be ruined.  Question: Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, 
a respectable man?  Answer: "--which proved fatal to the inquiry 
for ten years--"Mr. Vholes is considered, in the profession, a MOST 
respectable man."

So in familiar conversation, private authorities no less 
disinterested will remark that they don't know what this age is 
coming to, that we are plunging down precipices, that now here is 
something else gone, that these changes are death to people like 
Vholes--a man of undoubted respectability, with a father in the 
Vale of Taunton, and three daughters at home.  Take a few steps 
more in this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes's 
father?  Is he to perish?  And of Vholes's daughters?  Are they to 
be shirt-makers, or governesses?  As though, Mr. Vholes and his 
relations being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to 
abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: 
Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!

In a word, Mr. Vholes, with his three daughters and his father in 
the Vale of Taunton, is continually doing duty, like a piece of 
timber, to shore up some decayed foundation that has become a 
pitfall and a nuisance.  And with a great many people in a great 
many instances, the question is never one of a change from wrong to 
right (which is quite an extraneous consideration), but is always 
one of injury or advantage to that eminently respectable legion, 
Vholes.

The Chancellor is, within these ten minutes, "up" for the long 
vacation.  Mr. Vholes, and his young client, and several blue bags 
hastily stuffed out of all regularity of form, as the larger sort 
of serpents are in their first gorged state, have returned to the 
official den.  Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much 
respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if 
he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were 
scalping himself, and sits down at his desk.  The client throws his 
hat and gloves upon the ground--tosses them anywhere, without 
looking after them or caring where they go; flings himself into a 
chair, half sighing and half groaning; rests his aching head upon 
his hand and looks the portrait of young despair.

"Again nothing done!" says Richard.  "Nothing, nothing done!"

"Don't say nothing done, sir," returns the placid Vholes.  "That is 
scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!"

"Why, what IS done?" says Richard, turning gloomily upon him.

"That may not be the whole question," returns Vholes, "The question 
may branch off into what is doing, what is doing?"

"And what is doing?" asks the moody client.

Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the 
tips of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left 
fingers, and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly 
looking at his client, replies, "A good deal is doing, sir.  We 
have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is 
going round."

"Yes, with Ixion on it.  How am I to get through the next four or 
five accursed months?" exclaims the young man, rising from his 
chair and walking about the room.

"Mr. C.," returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes 
wherever he goes, "your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on 
your account.  Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, 
not to be so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so.  You should 
have more patience.  You should sustain yourself better."

"I ought to imitate you, in fact, Mr. Vholes?" says Richard, 
sitting down again with an impatient laugh and beating the devil's 
tattoo with his boot on the patternless carpet.

"Sir," returns Vholes, always looking at the client as if he were 
making a lingering meal of him with his eyes as well as with his 
professional appetite.  "Sir," returns Vholes with his inward 
manner of speech and his bloodless quietude, "I should not have had 
the presumption to propose myself as a model for your imitation or 
any man's.  Let me but leave the good name to my three daughters, 
and that is enough for me; I am not a self-seeker.  But since you 
mention me so pointedly, I will acknowledge that I should like to 
impart to you a little of my--come, sir, you are disposed to call 
it insensibility, and I am sure I have no objection--say 
insensibility--a little of my insensibility."

"Mr. Vholes," explains the client, somewhat abashed, "I had no 
intention to accuse you of insensibility."

"I think you had, sir, without knowing it," returns the equable 
Vholes.  "Very naturally.  It is my duty to attend to your 
interests with a cool head, and I can quite understand that to your 
excited feelings I may appear, at such times as the present, 
insensible.  My daughters may know me better; my aged father may 
know me better.  But they have known me much longer than you have, 
and the confiding eye of affection is not the distrustful eye of 
business.  Not that I complain, sir, of the eye of business being 
distrustful; quite the contrary.  In attending to your interests, I 
wish to have all possible checks upon me; it is right that I should 
have them; I court inquiry.  But your interests demand that I 
should be cool and methodical, Mr. Carstone; and I cannot be 
otherwise--no, sir, not even to please you."

Mr. Vholes, after glancing at the official cat who is patiently 
watching a mouse's hole, fixes his charmed gaze again on his young 
client and proceeds in his buttoned-up, half-audible voice as if 
there were an unclean spirit in him that will neither come out nor 
speak out, "What are you to do, sir, you inquire, during the 
vacation.  I should hope you gentlemen of the army may find many 
means of amusing yourselves if you give your minds to it.  If you 
had asked me what I was to do during the vacation, I could have 
answered you more readily.  I am to attend to your interests.  I am 
to be found here, day by day, attending to your interests.  That is 
my duty, Mr. C., and term-time or vacation makes no difference to 
me.  If you wish to consult me as to your interests, you will find 
me here at all times alike.  Other professional men go out of town.  
I don't.  Not that I blame them for going; I merely say I don't go.  
This desk is your rock, sir!"

Mr. Vholes gives it a rap, and it sounds as hollow as a coffin.  
Not to Richard, though.  There is encouragement in the sound to 
him.  Perhaps Mr. Vholes knows there is.

"I am perfectly aware, Mr. Vholes," says Richard, more familiarly 
and good-humouredly, "that you are the most reliable fellow in the 
world and that to have to do with you is to have to do with a man 
of business who is not to be hoodwinked.  But put yourself in my 
case, dragging on this dislocated life, sinking deeper and deeper 
into difficulty every day, continually hoping and continually 
disappointed, conscious of change upon change for the worse in 
myself, and of no change for the better in anything else, and you 
will find it a dark-looking case sometimes, as I do."

"You know," says Mr. Vholes, "that I never give hopes, sir.  I told 
you from the first, Mr. C., that I never give hopes.  Particularly 
in a case like this, where the greater part of the costs comes out 
of the estate, I should not be considerate of my good name if I 
gave hopes.  It might seem as if costs were my object.  Still, when 
you say there is no change for the better, I must, as a bare matter 
of fact, deny that."

"Aye?" returns Richard, brightening.  "But how do you make it out?"

"Mr. Carstone, you are represented by--"

"You said just now--a rock."

"Yes, sir," says Mr. Vholes, gently shaking his head and rapping 
the hollow desk, with a sound as if ashes were falling on ashes, 
and dust on dust, "a rock.  That's something.  You are separately 
represented, and no longer hidden and lost in the interests of 
others.  THAT'S something.  The suit does not sleep; we wake it up, 
we air it, we walk it about.  THAT'S something.  It's not all 
Jarndyce, in fact as well as in name.  THAT'S something.  Nobody 
has it all his own way now, sir.  And THAT'S something, surely."

Richard, his face flushing suddenly, strikes the desk with his 
clenched hand.

"Mr. Vholes!  If any man had told me when I first went to John 
Jarndyce's house that he was anything but the disinterested friend 
he seemed--that he was what he has gradually turned out to be--I 
could have found no words strong enough to repel the slander; I 
could not have defended him too ardently.  So little did I know of 
the world!  Whereas now I do declare to you that he becomes to me 
the embodiment of the suit; that in place of its being an 
abstraction, it is John Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more 
indignant I am with him; that every new delay and every new 
disappointment is only a new injury from John Jarndyce's hand."

"No, no," says vholes.  "Don't say so.  We ought to have patience, 
all of us.  Besides, I never disparage, sir.  I never disparage."

"Mr. Vholes," returns the angry client.  "You know as well as I 
that he would have strangled the suit if he could."

"He was not active in it," Mr. Vholes admits with an appearance of 
reluctance.  "He certainly was not active in it.  But however, but 
however, he might have had amiable intentions.  Who can read the 
heart, Mr. C.!"

"You can," returns Richard.

"I, Mr. C.?"

"Well enough to know what his intentions were.  Are or are not our 
interests conflicting?  Tell--me--that!" says Richard, accompanying 
his last three words with three raps on his rock of trust.

"Mr. C.," returns Vholes, immovable in attitude and never winking 
his hungry eyes, "I should be wanting in my duty as your 
professional adviser, I should be departing from my fidelity to 
your interests, if I represented those interests as identical with 
the interests of Mr. Jarndyce.  They are no such thing, sir.  I 
never impute motives; I both have and am a father, and I never 
impute motives.  But I must not shrink from a professional duty, 
even if it sows dissensions in families.  I understand you to be 
now consulting me professionally as to your interests?  You are so?  
I reply, then, they are not identical with those of Mr. Jarndyce."

"Of course they are not!" cries Richard.  "You found that out long 
ago."

"Mr. C.," returns Vholes, "I wish to say no more of any third party 
than is necessary.  I wish to leave my good name unsullied, 
together with any little property of which I may become possessed 
through industry and perseverance, to my daughters Emma, Jane, and 
Caroline.  I also desire to live in amity with my professional 
brethren.  When Mr. Skimpole did me the honour, sir--I will not say 
the very high honour, for I never stoop to flattery--of bringing us 
together in this room, I mentioned to you that I could offer no 
opinion or advice as to your interests while those interests were 
entrusted to another member of the profession.  And I spoke in such 
terms as I was bound to speak of Kenge and Carboy's office, which 
stands high.  You, sir, thought fit to withdraw your interests from 
that keeping nevertheless and to offer them to me.  You brought 
them with clean hands, sir, and I accepted them with clean hands.  
Those interests are now paramount in this office.  My digestive 
functions, as you may have heard me mention, are not in a good 
state, and rest might improve them; but I shall not rest, sir, 
while I am your representative.  Whenever you want me, you will 
find me here.  Summon me anywhere, and I will come.  During the 
long vacation, sir, I shall devote my leisure to studying your 
interests more and more closely and to making arrangements for 
moving heaven and earth (including, of course, the Chancellor) 
after Michaelmas term; and when I ultimately congratulate you, 
sir," says Mr. Vholes with the severity of a determined man, "when 
I ultimately congratulate you, sir, with all my heart, on your 
accession to fortune--which, but that I never give hopes, I might 
say something further about--you will owe me nothing beyond 
whatever little balance may be then outstanding of the costs as 
between solicitor and client not included in the taxed costs 
allowed out of the estate.  I pretend to no claim upon you, Mr. C., 
but for the zealous and active discharge--not the languid and 
routine discharge, sir: that much credit I stipulate for--of my 
professional duty.  My duty prosperously ended, all between us is 
ended."

Vholes finally adds, by way of rider to this declaration of his 
principles, that as Mr. Carstone is about to rejoin his regiment, 
perhaps Mr. C. will favour him with an order on his agent for 
twenty pounds on account.

"For there have been many little consultations and attendances of 
late, sir," observes Vholes, turning over the leaves of his diary, 
"and these things mount up, and I don't profess to be a man of 
capital.  When we first entered on our present relations I stated 
to you openly--it is a principle of mine that there never can be 
too much openness between solicitor and client--that I was not a 
man of capital and that if capital was your object you had better 
leave your papers in Kenge's office.  No, Mr. C., you will find 
none of the advantages or disadvantages of capital here, sir.  
This," Vholes gives the desk one hollow blow again, "is your rock; 
it pretends to be nothing more."

The client, with his dejection insensibly relieved and his vague 
hopes rekindled, takes pen and ink and writes the draft, not 
without perplexed consideration and calculation of the date it may 
bear, implying scant effects in the agent's hands.  All the while, 
Vholes, buttoned up in body and mind, looks at him attentively.  
All the while, Vholes's official cat watches the mouse's hole.

Lastly, the client, shaking hands, beseeches Mr. Vholes, for 
heaven's sake and earth's sake, to do his utmost to "pull him 
through" the Court of Chancery.  Mr. Vholes, who never gives hopes, 
lays his palm upon the client's shoulder and answers with a smile, 
"Always here, sir.  Personally, or by letter, you will always find 
me here, sir, with my shoulder to the wheel."  Thus they part, and 
Vholes, left alone, employs himself in carrying sundry little 
matters out of his diary into his draft bill book for the ultimate 
behoof of his three daughters.  So might an industrious fox or bear 
make up his account of chickens or stray travellers with an eye to 
his cubs, not to disparage by that word the three raw-visaged, 
lank, and buttoned-up maidens who dwell with the parent Vholes in 
an earthy cottage situated in a damp garden at Kennington.

Richard, emerging from the heavy shade of Symond's Inn into the 
sunshine of Chancery Lane--for there happens to be sunshine there 
to-day--walks thoughtfully on, and turns into Lincoln's Inn, and 
passes under the shadow of the Lincoln's Inn trees.  On many such 
loungers have the speckled shadows of those trees often fallen; on 
the like bent head, the bitten nail, the lowering eye, the 
lingering step, the purposeless and dreamy air, the good consuming 
and consumed, the life turned sour.  This lounger is not shabby 
yet, but that may come.  Chancery, which knows no wisdom but in 
precedent, is very rich in such precedents; and why should one be 
different from ten thousand?

Yet the time is so short since his depreciation began that as he 
saunters away, reluctant to leave the spot for some long months 
together, though he hates it, Richard himself may feel his own case 
as if it were a startling one.  While his heart is heavy with 
corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt, it may have room for 
some sorrowful wonder when he recalls how different his first visit 
there, how different he, how different all the colours of his mind.  
But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being 
defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to 
combat; from the impalpable suit which no man alive can understand, 
the time for that being long gone by, it has become a gloomy relief 
to turn to the palpable figure of the friend who would have saved 
him from this ruin and make HIM his enemy.  Richard has told Vholes 
the truth.  Is he in a hardened or a softened mood, he still lays 
his injuries equally at that door; he was thwarted, in that 
quarter, of a set purpose, and that purpose could only originate in 
the one subject that is resolving his existence into itself; 
besides, it is a justification to him in his own eyes to have an 
embodied antagonist and oppressor.

Is Richard a monster in all this, or would Chancery be found rich 
in such precedents too if they could be got for citation from the 
Recording Angel?

Two pairs of eyes not unused to such people look after him, as, 
biting his nails and brooding, he crosses the square and is 
swallowed up by the shadow of the southern gateway.  Mr. Guppy and 
Mr. Weevle are the possessors of those eyes, and they have been 
leaning in conversation against the low stone parapet under the 
trees.  He passes close by them, seeing nothing but the ground.

"William," says Mr. Weevle, adjusting his whiskers, "there's 
combustion going on there!  It's not a case of spontaneous, but 
it's smouldering combustion it is."

"Ah!" says Mr. Guppy.  "He wouldn't keep out of Jarndyce, and I 
suppose he's over head and ears in debt.  I never knew much of him.  
He was as high as the monument when he was on trial at our place.  
A good riddance to me, whether as clerk or client!  Well, Tony, 
that as I was mentioning is what they're up to."

Mr. Guppy, refolding his arms, resettles himself against the 
parapet, as resuming a conversation of interest.

"They are still up to it, sir," says Mr. Guppy, "still taking 
stock, still examining papers, still going over the heaps and heaps 
of rubbish.  At this rate they'll be at it these seven years."

"And Small is helping?"

"Small left us at a week's notice.  Told Kenge his grandfather's 
business was too much for the old gentleman and he could better 
himself by undertaking it.  There had been a coolness between 
myself and Small on account of his being so close.  But he said you 
and I began it, and as he had me there--for we did--I put our 
acquaintance on the old footing.  That's how I come to know what 
they're up to."

"You haven't looked in at all?"

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy, a little disconcerted, "to be unreserved 
with you, I don't greatly relish the house, except in your company, 
and therefore I have not; and therefore I proposed this little 
appointment for our fetching away your things.  There goes the hour 
by the clock!  Tony"--Mr. Guppy becomes mysteriously and tenderly 
eloquent--"it is necessary that I should impress upon your mind 
once more that circumstances over which I have no control have made 
a melancholy alteration in my most cherished plans and in that 
unrequited image which I formerly mentioned to you as a friend.  
That image is shattered, and that idol is laid low.  My only wish 
now in connexion with the objects which I had an idea of carrying 
out in the court with your aid as a friend is to let 'em alone and 
bury 'em in oblivion.  Do you think it possible, do you think it at 
all likely (I put it to you, Tony, as a friend), from your 
knowledge of that capricious and deep old character who fell a prey 
to the--spontaneous element, do you, Tony, think it at all likely 
that on second thoughts he put those letters away anywhere, after 
you saw him alive, and that they were not destroyed that night?"

Mr. Weevle reflects for some time.  Shakes his head.  Decidedly 
thinks not.

"Tony," says Mr. Guppy as they walk towards the court, "once again 
understand me, as a friend.  Without entering into further 
explanations, I may repeat that the idol is down.  I have no 
purpose to serve now but burial in oblivion.  To that I have 
pledged myself.  I owe it to myself, and I owe it to the shattered 
image, as also to the circumstances over which I have no control.  
If you was to express to me by a gesture, by a wink, that you saw 
lying anywhere in your late lodgings any papers that so much as 
looked like the papers in question, I would pitch them into the 
fire, sir, on my own responsibility."

Mr. Weevle nods.  Mr. Guppy, much elevated in his own opinion by 
having delivered these observations, with an air in part forensic 
and in part romantic--this gentleman having a passion for 
conducting anything in the form of an examination, or delivering 
anything in the form of a summing up or a speech--accompanies his 
friend with dignity to the court.

Never since it has been a court has it had such a Fortunatus' purse 
of gossip as in the proceedings at the rag and bottle shop.  
Regularly, every morning at eight, is the elder Mr. Smallweed 
brought down to the corner and carried in, accompanied by Mrs. 
Smallweed, Judy, and Bart; and regularly, all day, do they all 
remain there until nine at night, solaced by gipsy dinners, not 
abundant in quantity, from the cook's shop, rummaging and 
searching, digging, delving, and diving among the treasures of the 
late lamented.  What those treasures are they keep so secret that 
the court is maddened.  In its delirium it imagines guineas pouring 
out of tea-pots, crown-pieces overflowing punch-bowls, old chairs 
and mattresses stuffed with Bank of England notes.  It possesses 
itself of the sixpenny history (with highly coloured folding 
frontispiece) of Mr. Daniel Dancer and his sister, and also of Mr. 
Elwes, of Suffolk, and transfers all the facts from those authentic 
narratives to Mr. Krook.  Twice when the dustman is called in to 
carry off a cartload of old paper, ashes, and broken bottles, the 
whole court assembles and pries into the baskets as they come 
forth.  Many times the two gentlemen who write with the ravenous 
little pens on the tissue-paper are seen prowling in the 
neighbourhood--shy of each other, their late partnership being 
dissolved.  The Sol skilfully carries a vein of the prevailing 
interest through the Harmonic nights.  Little Swills, in what are 
professionally known as "patter" allusions to the subject, is 
received with loud applause; and the same vocalist "gags" in the 
regular business like a man inspired.  Even Miss M. Melvilleson, in 
the revived Caledonian melody of "We're a-Nodding," points the 
sentiment that "the dogs love broo" (whatever the nature of that 
refreshment may be) with such archness and such a turn of the head 
towards next door that she is immediately understood to mean Mr. 
Smallweed loves to find money, and is nightly honoured with a 
double encore.  For all this, the court discovers nothing; and as 
Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins now communicate to the late lodger whose 
appearance is the signal for a general rally, it is in one 
continual ferment to discover everything, and more.

Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy, with every eye in the court's head upon 
them, knock at the closed door of the late lamented's house, in a 
high state of popularity.  But being contrary to the court's 
expectation admitted, they immediately become unpopular and are 
considered to mean no good.

The shutters are more or less closed all over the house, and the 
ground-floor is sufficiently dark to require candles.  Introduced 
into the back shop by Mr. Smallweed the younger, they, fresh from 
the sunlight, can at first see nothing save darkness and shadows; 
but they gradually discern the elder Mr. Smallweed seated in his 
chair upon the brink of a well or grave of waste-paper, the 
virtuous Judy groping therein like a female sexton, and Mrs. 
Smallweed on the level ground in the vicinity snowed up in a heap 
of paper fragments, print, and manuscript which would appear to be 
the accumulated compliments that have been sent flying at her in 
the course of the day.  The whole party, Small included, are 
blackened with dust and dirt and present a fiendish appearance not 
relieved by the general aspect of the room.  There is more litter 
and lumber in it than of old, and it is dirtier if possible; 
likewise, it is ghostly with traces of its dead inhabitant and even 
with his chalked writing on the wall.

On the entrance of visitors, Mr. Smallweed and Judy simultaneously 
fold their arms and stop in their researches.

"Aha!" croaks the old gentleman.  "How de do, gentlemen, how de do!  
Come to fetch your property, Mr. Weevle?  That's well, that's well.  
Ha! Ha!  We should have been forced to sell you up, sir, to pay 
your warehouse room if you had left it here much longer.  You feel 
quite at home here again, I dare say?  Glad to see you, glad to see 
you!"

Mr. Weevle, thanking him, casts an eye about.  Mr. Guppy's eye 
follows Mr. Weevle's eye.  Mr. Weevle's eye comes back without any 
new intelligence in it.  Mr. Guppy's eye comes back and meets Mr. 
Smallweed's eye.  That engaging old gentleman is still murmuring, 
like some wound-up instrument running down, "How de do, sir--how 
de--how--"  And then having run down, he lapses into grinning 
silence, as Mr. Guppy starts at seeing Mr. Tulkinghorn standing in 
the darkness opposite with his hands behind him.

"Gentleman so kind as to act as my solicitor," says Grandfather 
Smallweed.  "I am not the sort of client for a gentleman of such 
note, but he is so good!"

Mr. Guppy, slightly nudging his friend to take another look, makes 
a shuffling bow to Mr. Tulkinghorn, who returns it with an easy 
nod.  Mr. Tulkinghorn is looking on as if he had nothing else to do 
and were rather amused by the novelty.

"A good deal of property here, sir, I should say," Mr. Guppy 
observes to Mr. Smallweed.

"Principally rags and rubbish, my dear friend!  Rags and rubbish!  
Me and Bart and my granddaughter Judy are endeavouring to make out 
an inventory of what's worth anything to sell.  But we haven't come 
to much as yet; we--haven't--come--to--hah!"

Mr. Smallweed has run down again, while Mr. Weevle's eye, attended 
by Mr. Guppy's eye, has again gone round the room and come back.

"Well, sir," says Mr. Weevle.  "We won't intrude any longer if 
you'll allow us to go upstairs."

"Anywhere, my dear sir, anywhere!  You're at home.  Make yourself 
so, pray!"

As they go upstairs, Mr. Guppy lifts his eyebrows inquiringly and 
looks at Tony.  Tony shakes his head.  They find the old room very 
dull and dismal, with the ashes of the fire that was burning on 
that memorable night yet in the discoloured grate.  They have a 
great disinclination to touch any object, and carefully blow the 
dust from it first.  Nor are they desirous to prolong their visit, 
packing the few movables with all possible speed and never speaking 
above a whisper.

"Look here," says Tony, recoiling.  "Here's that horrible cat 
coming in!"

Mr. Guppy retreats behind a chair.  "Small told me of her.  She 
went leaping and bounding and tearing about that night like a 
dragon, and got out on the house-top, and roamed about up there for 
a fortnight, and then came tumbling down the chimney very thin.  
Did you ever see such a brute?  Looks as if she knew all about it, 
don't she?  Almost looks as if she was Krook.  Shoohoo!  Get out, 
you goblin!"

Lady Jane, in the doorway, with her tiger snarl from ear to ear and 
her club of a tail, shows no intention of obeying; but Mr. 
Tulkinghorn stumbling over her, she spits at his rusty legs, and 
swearing wrathfully, takes her arched back upstairs.  Possibly to 
roam the house-tops again and return by the chimney.

"Mr. Guppy," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "could I have a word with you?"

Mr. Guppy is engaged in collecting the Galaxy Gallery of British 
Beauty from the wall and depositing those works of art in their old 
ignoble band-box.  "Sir," he returns, reddening, "I wish to act 
with courtesy towards every member of the profession, and 
especially, I am sure, towards a member of it so well known as 
yourself--I will truly add, sir, so distinguished as yourself.  
Still, Mr. Tulkinghorn, sir, I must stipulate that if you have any 
word with me, that word is spoken in the presence of my friend."

"Oh, indeed?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Yes, sir.  My reasons are not of a personal nature at all, but 
they are amply sufficient for myself."

"No doubt, no doubt."  Mr. Tulkinghorn is as imperturbable as the 
hearthstone to which he has quietly walked.  "The matter is not of 
that consequence that I need put you to the trouble of making any 
conditions, Mr. Guppy."  He pauses here to smile, and his smile is 
as dull and rusty as his pantaloons.  "You are to be congratulated, 
Mr. Guppy; you are a fortunate young man, sir."

"Pretty well so, Mr. Tulkinghorn; I don't complain."

"Complain?  High friends, free admission to great houses, and 
access to elegant ladies!  Why, Mr. Guppy, there are people in 
London who would give their ears to be you."

Mr. Guppy, looking as if he would give his own reddening and still 
reddening ears to be one of those people at present instead of 
himself, replies, "Sir, if I attend to my profession and do what is 
right by Kenge and Carboy, my friends and acquaintances are of no 
consequence to them nor to any member of the profession, not 
excepting Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields.  I am not under any 
obligation to explain myself further; and with all respect for you, 
sir, and without offence--I repeat, without offence--"

"Oh, certainly!"

"--I don't intend to do it."

"Quite so," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a calm nod.  "Very good; I 
see by these portraits that you take a strong interest in the 
fashionable great, sir?"

He addresses this to the astounded Tony, who admits the soft 
impeachment.

"A virtue in which few Englishmen are deficient," observes Mr. 
Tulkinghorn.  He has been standing on the hearthstone with his back 
to the smoked chimney-piece, and now turns round with his glasses 
to his eyes.  "Who is this?  'Lady Dedlock.'  Ha!  A very good 
likeness in its way, but it wants force of character.  Good day to 
you, gentlemen; good day!"

When he has walked out, Mr. Guppy, in a great perspiration, nerves 
himself to the hasty completion of the taking down of the Galaxy 
Gallery, concluding with Lady Dedlock.

"Tony," he says hurriedly to his astonished companion, "let us be 
quick in putting the things together and in getting out of this 
place.  It were in vain longer to conceal from you, Tony, that 
between myself and one of the members of a swan-like aristocracy 
whom I now hold in my hand, there has been undivulged communication 
and association.  The time might have been when I might have 
revealed it to you.  It never will be more.  It is due alike to the 
oath I have taken, alike to the shattered idol, and alike to 
circumstances over which I have no control, that the whole should 
be buried in oblivion.  I charge you as a friend, by the interest 
you have ever testified in the fashionable intelligence, and by any 
little advances with which I may have been able to accommodate you, 
so to bury it without a word of inquiry!"

This charge Mr. Guppy delivers in a state little short of forensic 
lunacy, while his friend shows a dazed mind in his whole head of 
hair and even in his cultivated whiskers.



CHAPTER XL

National and Domestic


England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks.  Lord Coodle 
would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in, and there being 
nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, 
there has been no government.  It is a mercy that the hostile 
meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed 
inevitable, did not come off, because if both pistols had taken 
effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be 
presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young 
Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were 
grown up.  This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted 
by Lord Coodle's making the timely discovery that if in the heat of 
debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble 
career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party 
differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute 
of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on 
the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom 
expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror 
of virtue and honour.  Still England has been some weeks in the 
dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir 
Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of 
the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about 
it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in 
marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood.  But 
Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the danger, and all their 
followers and hangers-on had the clearest possible perception of 
the danger.  At last Sir Thomas Doodle has not only condescended to 
come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in with him all his 
nephews, all his male cousins, and all his brothers-in-law.  So 
there is hope for the old ship yet.

Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country, 
chiefly in the form of sovereigns and beer.  In this metamorphosed 
state he is available in a good many places simultaneously and can 
throw himself upon a considerable portion of the country at one 
time.  Britannia being much occupied in pocketing Doodle in the 
form of sovereigns, and swallowing Doodle in the form of beer, and 
in swearing herself black in the face that she does neither--
plainly to the advancement of her glory and morality--the London 
season comes to a sudden end, through all the Doodleites and 
Coodleites dispersing to assist Britannia in those religious 
exercises.

Hence Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold, foresees, 
though no instructions have yet come down, that the family may 
shortly be expected, together with a pretty large accession of 
cousins and others who can in any way assist the great 
Constitutional work.  And hence the stately old dame, taking Time 
by the forelock, leads him up and down the staircases, and along 
the galleries and passages, and through the rooms, to witness 
before he grows any older that everything is ready, that floors are 
rubbed bright, carpets spread, curtains shaken out, beds puffed and 
patted, still-room and kitchen cleared for action--all things 
prepared as beseems the Dedlock dignity.

This present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations 
are complete.  Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many 
appliances of habitation and with no inhabitants except the 
pictured forms upon the walls.  So did these come and go, a Dedlock 
in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see 
this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I 
think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they 
were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it 
could be without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from 
theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to 
miss them, and so die.

Through some of the fiery windows beautiful from without, and set, 
at this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a glorious house 
of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich, lavish, 
overflowing like the summer plenty in the land.  Then do the frozen 
Dedlocks thaw.  Strange movements come upon their features as the 
shadows of leaves play there.  A dense justice in a corner is 
beguiled into a wink.  A staring baronet, with a truncheon, gets a 
dimple in his chin.  Down into the bosom of a stony shepherdess 
there steals a fleck of light and warmth that would have done it 
good a hundred years ago.  One ancestress of Volumnia, in high-
heeled shoes, very like her--casting the shadow of that virgin 
event before her full two centuries--shoots out into a halo and 
becomes a saint.  A maid of honour of the court of Charles the 
Second, with large round eyes (and other charms to correspond), 
seems to bathe in glowing water, and it ripples as it glows.

But the fire of the sun is dying.  Even now the floor is dusky, and 
shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age 
and death.  And now, upon my Lady's picture over the great chimney-
piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, 
and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, 
watching an opportunity to draw it over her.  Higher and darker 
rises shadow on the wall--now a red gloom on the ceiling--now the 
fire is out.

All that prospect, which from the terrace looked so near, has moved 
solemnly away and changed--not the first nor the last of beautiful 
things that look so near and will so change--into a distant 
phantom.  Light mists arise, and the dew falls, and all the sweet 
scents in the garden are heavv in the air.  Now the woods settle 
into great masses as if they were each one profound tree.  And now 
the moon rises to separate them, and to glimmer here and there in 
horizontal lines behind their stems, and to make the avenue a 
pavement of light among high cathedral arches fantastically broken.

Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more 
than ever, is like a body without life.  Now it is even awful, 
stealing through it, to think of the live people who have slept in 
the solitary bedrooms, to say nothing of the dead.  Now is the time 
for shadow, when every corner is a cavern and every downward step a 
pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues 
upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the 
heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the 
armour has dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from 
stealthy movement, and when barred helmets are frightfully 
suggestive of heads inside.  But of all the shadows in Chesney 
Wold, the shadow in the long drawing-room upon my Lady's picture is 
the first to come, the last to be disturbed.  At this hour and by 
this light it changes into threatening hands raised up and menacing 
the handsome face with every breath that stirs.

"She is not well, ma'am," says a groom in Mrs. Rouncewell's 
audience-chamber.

"My Lady not well!  What's the matter?"

"Why, my Lady has been but poorly, ma'am, since she was last here--
I don't mean with the family, ma'am, but when she was here as a 
bird of passage like.  My Lady has not been out much for her and 
has kept her room a good deal."

"Chesney Wold, Thomas," rejoins the housekeeper with proud 
complacency, "will set my Lady up!  There is no finer air and no 
healthier soil in the world!"

Thomas may have his own personal opinions on this subject, probably 
hints them in his manner of smoothing his sleek head from the nape 
of his neck to his temples, but he forbears to express them further 
and retires to the servants' hall to regale on cold meat-pie and 
ale.

This groom is the pilot-fish before the nobler shark.  Next 
evening, down come Sir Leicester and my Lady with their largest 
retinue, and down come the cousins and others from all the points 
of the compass.  Thenceforth for some weeks backward and forward 
rush mysterious men with no names, who fly about all those 
particular parts of the country on which Doodle is at present 
throwing himself in an auriferous and malty shower, but who are 
merely persons of a restless disposition and never do anything 
anywhere.

On these national occasions Sir Leicester finds the cousins useful.  
A better man than the Honourable Bob Stables to meet the Hunt at 
dinner, there could not possibly be.  Better got up gentlemen than 
the other cousins to ride over to polling-booths and hustings here 
and there, and show themselves on the side of England, it would be 
hard to find.  Volumnia is a little dim, but she is of the true 
descent; and there are many who appreciate her sprightly 
conversation, her French conundrums so old as to have become in the 
cycles of time almost new again, the honour of taking the fair 
Dedlock in to dinner, or even the privilege of her hand in the 
dance.  On these national occasions dancing may be a patriotic 
service, and Volumnia is constantly seen hopping about for the good 
of an ungrateful and unpensioning country.

My Lady takes no great pains to entertain the numerous guests, and 
being still unwell, rarely appears until late in the day.  But at 
all the dismal dinners, leaden lunches, basilisk balls, and other 
melancholy pageants, her mere appearance is a relief.  As to Sir 
Leicester, he conceives it utterly impossible that anything can be 
wanting, in any direction, by any one who has the good fortune to 
be received under that roof; and in a state of sublime 
satisfaction, he moves among the company, a magnificent 
refrigerator.

Daily the cousins trot through dust and canter over roadside turf, 
away to hustings and polling-booths (with leather gloves and 
hunting-whips for the counties and kid gloves and riding-canes for 
the boroughs), and daily bring back reports on which Sir Leicester 
holds forth after dinner.  Daily the restless men who have no 
occupation in life present the appearance of being rather busy.  
Daily Volumnia has a little cousinly talk with Sir Leicester on the 
state of the nation, from which Sir Leicester is disposed to 
conclude that Volumnia is a more reflecting woman than he had 
thought her.

"How are we getting on?" says Miss Volumnia, clasping her hands.  
"ARE we safe?"

The mighty business is nearly over by this time, and Doodle will 
throw himself off the country in a few days more.  Sir Leicester 
has just appeared in the long drawing-room after dinner, a bright 
particular star surrounded by clouds of cousins.

"Volumnia," replies Sir Leicester, who has a list in his hand, "we 
are doing tolerably."

"Only tolerably!"

Although it is summer weather, Sir Leicester always has his own 
particular fire in the evening.  He takes his usual screened seat 
near it and repeats with much firmness and a little displeasure, as 
who should say, I am not a common man, and when I say tolerably, it 
must not be understood as a common expression, "Volumnia, we are 
doing tolerably."

"At least there is no opposition to YOU," Volumnia asserts with 
confidence.

"No, Volumnia.  This distracted country has lost its senses in many 
respects, I grieve to say, but--"

"It is not so mad as that.  I am glad to hear it!"

Volumnia's finishing the sentence restores her to favour.  Sir 
Leicester, with a gracious inclination of his head, seems to say to 
himself, "A sensible woman this, on the whole, though occasionally 
precipitate."

In fact, as to this question of opposition, the fair Dedlock's 
observation was superfluous, Sir Leicester on these occasions 
always delivering in his own candidateship, as a kind of handsome 
wholesale order to be promptly executed.  Two other little seats 
that belong to him he treats as retail orders of less importance, 
merely sending down the men and signifying to the tradespeople, 
"You will have the goodness to make these materials into two 
members of Parliament and to send them home when done."

"I regret to say, Volumnia, that in many places the people have 
shown a bad spirit, and that this opposition to the government has 
been of a most determined and most implacable description."

"W-r-retches!" says Volumnia.

"Even," proceeds Sir Leicester, glancing at the circumjacent 
cousins on sofas and ottomans, "even in many--in fact, in most--of 
those places in which the government has carried it against a 
faction--"

(Note, by the way, that the Coodleites are always a faction with 
the Doodleites, and that the Doodleites occupy exactly the same 
position towards the Coodleites.)

"--Even in them I am shocked, for the credit of Englishmen, to be 
constrained to inform you that the party has not triumphed without 
being put to an enormous expense.  Hundreds," says Sir Leicester, 
eyeing the cousins with increasing dignity and swelling 
indignation, "hundreds of thousands of pounds!"

If Volumnia have a fault, it is the fault of being a trifle too 
innocent, seeing that the innocence which would go extremely well 
with a sash and tucker is a little out of keeping with the rouge 
and pearl necklace.  Howbeit, impelled by innocence, she asks, 
"What for?"

"Volumnia," remonstrates Sir Leicester with his utmost severity.  
"Volumnia!"

"No, no, I don't mean what for," cries Volumnia with her favourite 
little scream.  "How stupid I am!  I mean what a pity!"

"I am glad," returns Sir Leicester, "that you do mean what a pity."

Volumnia hastens to express her opinion that the shocking people 
ought to be tried as traitors and made to support the party.

"I am glad, Volumnia," repeats Sir Leicester, unmindful of these 
mollifying sentiments, "that you do mean what a pity.  It is 
disgraceful to the electors.  But as you, though inadvertently and 
without intending so unreasonable a question, asked me 'what for?' 
let me reply to you.  For necessary expenses.  And I trust to your 
good sense, Volumnia, not to pursue the subject, here or 
elsewhere."

Sir Leicester feels it incumbent on him to observe a crushing 
aspect towards Volumnia because it is whispered abroad that these 
necessary expenses will, in some two hundred election petitions, be 
unpleasantly connected with the word bribery, and because some 
graceless jokers have consequently suggested the omission from the 
Church service of the ordinary supplication in behalf of the High 
Court of Parliament and have recommended instead that the prayers 
of the congregation be requested for six hundred and fifty-eight 
gentlemen in a very unhealthy state.

"I suppose," observes Volumnia, having taken a little time to 
recover her spirits after her late castigation, "I suppose Mr. 
Tulkinghorn has been worked to death."

"I don't know," says Sir Leicester, opening his eyes, "why Mr. 
Tulkinghorn should be worked to death.  I don't know what Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's engagements may be.  He is not a candidate."

Volumnia had thought he might have been employed.  Sir Leicester 
could desire to know by whom, and what for.  Volumnia, abashed 
again, suggests, by somebody--to advise and make arrangements.  Sir 
Leicester is not aware that any client of Mr. Tulkinghorn has been 
in need of his assistance.

Lady Dedlock, seated at an open window with her arm upon its 
cushioned ledge and looking out at the evening shadows falling on 
the park, has seemed to attend since the lawyer's name was 
mentioned.

A languid cousin with a moustache in a state of extreme debility 
now observes from his couch that man told him ya'as'dy that 
Tulkinghorn had gone down t' that iron place t' give legal 'pinion 
'bout something, and that contest being over t' day, 'twould be 
highly jawlly thing if Tulkinghorn should 'pear with news that 
Coodle man was floored.

Mercury in attendance with coffee informs Sir Leicester, hereupon, 
that Mr. Tulkinghorn has arrived and is taking dinner.  My Lady 
turns her head inward for the moment, then looks out again as 
before.

Volumnia is charmed to hear that her delight is come.  He is so 
original, such a stolid creature, such an immense being for knowing 
all sorts of things and never telling them!  Volumnia is persuaded 
that he must be a Freemason.  Is sure he is at the head of a lodge, 
and wears short aprons, and is made a perfect idol of with 
candlesticks and trowels.  These lively remarks the fair Dedlock 
delivers in her youthful manner, while making a purse.

"He has not been here once," she adds, "since I came.  I really had 
some thoughts of breaking my heart for the inconstant creature.  I 
had almost made up my mind that he was dead."

It may be the gathering gloom of evening, or it may be the darker 
gloom within herself, but a shade is on my Lady's face, as if she 
thought, "I would he were!"

"Mr. Tulkinghorn," says Sir Leicester, "is always welcome here and 
always discreet wheresoever he is.  A very valuable person, and 
deservedly respected."

The debilitated cousin supposes he is "'normously rich fler."

"He has a stake in the country," says Sir Leicester, "I have no 
doubt.  He is, of course, handsomely paid, and he associates almost 
on a footing of equality with the highest society."

Everybody starts.  For a gun is fired close by.

"Good gracious, what's that?" cries Volumnia with her little 
withered scream.

"A rat," says my Lady.  "And they have shot him."

Enter Mr. Tulkinghorn, followed by Mercuries with lamps and 
candles.

"No, no," says Sir Leicester, "I think not.  My Lady, do you object 
to the twilight?"

On the contrary, my Lady prefers it.

"Volumnia?"

Oh!  Nothing is so delicious to Volumnia as to sit and talk in the 
dark.

"Then take them away," says Sir Leicester.  "Tulkinghorn, I beg 
your pardon.  How do you do?"

Mr. Tulkinghorn with his usual leisurely ease advances, renders his 
passing homage to my Lady, shakes Sir Leicester's hand, and 
subsides into the chair proper to him when he has anything to 
communicate, on the opposite side of the Baronet's little 
newspaper-table.  Sir Leicester is apprehensive that my Lady, not 
being very well, will take cold at that open window.  My Lady is 
obliged to him, but would rather sit there for the air.  Sir 
Leicester rises, adjusts her scarf about her, and returns to his 
seat.  Mr. Tulkinghorn in the meanwhile takes a pinch of snuff.

"Now," says Sir Leicester.  "How has that contest gone?"

"Oh, hollow from the beginning.  Not a chance.  They have brought 
in both their people.  You are beaten out of all reason.  Three to 
one."

It is a part of Mr. Tulkinghorn's policy and mastery to have no 
political opinions; indeed, NO opinions.  Therefore he says "you" 
are beaten, and not "we."

Sir Leicester is majestically wroth.  Volumnia never heard of such 
a thing.  'The debilitated cousin holds that it's sort of thing 
that's sure tapn slongs votes--giv'n--Mob.

"It's the place, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn goes on to say in the 
fast-increasing darkness when there is silence again, "where they 
wanted to put up Mrs. Rouncewell's son."

"A proposal which, as you correctly informed me at the time, he had 
the becoming taste and perception," observes Sir Leicester, "to 
decline.  I cannot say that I by any means approve of the 
sentiments expressed by Mr. Rouncewell when he was here for some 
half-hour in this room, but there was a sense of propriety in his 
decision which I am glad to acknowledge."

"Ha!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.  "It did not prevent him from being 
very active in this election, though."

Sir Leicester is distinctly heard to gasp before speaking.  "Did I 
understand you?  Did you say that Mr. Rouncewell had been very 
active in this election?"

"Uncommonly active."

"Against--"

"Oh, dear yes, against you.  He is a very good speaker.  Plain and 
emphatic.  He made a damaging effect, and has great influence.  In 
the business part of the proceedings he carried all before him."

It is evident to the whole company, though nobody can see him, that 
Sir Leicester is staring majestically.

"And he was much assisted," says Mr. Tulkinghorn as a wind-up, "by 
his son."

"By his son, sir?" repeats Sir Leicester with awful politeness.

"By his son."

"The son who wished to marry the young woman in my Lady's service?"

"That son.  He has but one."

"Then upon my honour," says Sir Leicester after a terrific pause 
during which he has been heard to snort and felt to stare, "then 
upon my honour, upon my life, upon my reputation and principles, 
the floodgates of society are burst open, and the waters have--a--
obliterated the landmarks of the framework of the cohesion by which 
things are held together!"

General burst of cousinly indignation.  Volumnia thinks it is 
really high time, you know, for somebody in power to step in and do 
something strong.  Debilitated cousin thinks--country's going--
Dayvle--steeple-chase pace.

"I beg," says Sir Leicester in a breathless condition, "that we may 
not comment further on this circumstance.  Comment is superfluous.  
My Lady, let me suggest in reference to that young woman--"

"I have no intention," observes my Lady from her window in a low 
but decided tone, "of parting with her."

"That was not my meaning," returns Sir Leicester.  "I am glad to 
hear you say so.  I would suggest that as you think her worthy of 
your patronage, you should exert your influence to keep her from 
these dangerous hands.  You might show her what violence would be 
done in such association to her duties and principles, and you 
might preserve her for a better fate.  You might point out to her 
that she probably would, in good time, find a husband at Chesney 
Wold by whom she would not be--"  Sir Leicester adds, after a 
moment's consideration, "dragged from the altars of her 
forefathers."

These remarks he offers with his unvarying politeness and deference 
when he addresses himself to his wife.  She merely moves her head 
in reply.  The moon is rising, and where she sits there is a little 
stream of cold pale light, in which her head is seen.

"It is worthy of remark," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "however, that 
these people are, in their way, very proud."

"Proud?"  Sir Leicester doubts his hearing.

"I should not be surprised if they all voluntarily abandoned the 
girl--yes, lover and all--instead of her abandoning them, supposing 
she remained at Chesney Wold under such circumstances."

"Well!" says Sir Leicester tremulously.  "Well! You should know, 
Mr. Tulkinghorn.  You have been among them."

"Really, Sir Leicester," returns the lawyer, "I state the fact.  
Why, I could tell you a story--with Lady Dedlock's permission."

Her head concedes it, and Volumnia is enchanted.  A story!  Oh, he 
is going to tell something at last!  A ghost in it, Volumnia hopes?

"No.  Real flesh and blood."  Mr. Tulkinghorn stops for an instant 
and repeats with some little emphasis grafted upon his usual 
monotony, "Real flesh and blood, Miss Dedlock.  Sir Leicester, 
these particulars have only lately become known to me.  They are 
very brief.  They exemplify what I have said.  I suppress names for 
the present.  Lady Dedlock will not think me ill-bred, I hope?"

By the light of the fire, which is low, he can be seen looking 
towards the moonlight.  By the light of the moon Lady Dedlock can 
be seen, perfecfly still.

"A townsman of this Mrs. Rouncewell, a man in exactly parallel 
circumstances as I am told, had the good fortune to have a daughter 
who attracted the notice of a great lady.  I speak of really a 
great lady, not merely great to him, but married to a gentleman of 
your condition, Sir Leicester."

Sir Leicester condescendingly says, "Yes, Mr. Tulkinghorn," 
implying that then she must have appeared of very considerable 
moral dimensions indeed in the eyes of an iron-master.

"The lady was wealthy and beautiful, and had a liking for the girl, 
and treated her with great kindness, and kept her always near her.  
Now this lady preserved a secret under all her greatness, which she 
had preserved for many years.  In fact, she had in early life been 
engaged to marry a young rake--he was a captain in the army--
nothing connected with whom came to any good.  She never did marry 
him, but she gave birth to a child of which he was the father."

By the light of the fire he can be seen looking towards the 
moonlight.  By the moonlight, Lady Dedlock can be seen in profile, 
perfectly still.

"The captain in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but 
a train of circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to 
discovery.  As I received the story, they began in an imprudence on 
her own part one day when she was taken by surprise, which shows 
how difficult it is for the firmest of us (she was very firm) to be 
always guarded.  There was great domestic trouble and amazement, 
you may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the 
husband's grief.  But that is not the present point.  When Mr. 
Rouncewell's townsman heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed 
the girl to be patronized and honoured than he would have suffered 
her to be trodden underfoot before his eyes.  Such was his pride, 
that he indignantly took her away, as if from reproach and 
disgrace.  He had no sense of the honour done him and his daughter 
by the lady's condescension; not the least.  He resented the girl's 
position, as if the lady had been the commonest of commoners.  That 
is the story.  I hope Lady Dedlock will excuse its painful nature."

There are various opinions on the merits, more or less conflicting 
with Volumnia's.  That fair young creature cannot believe there 
ever was any such lady and rejects the whole history on the 
threshold.  The majority incline to the debilitated cousin's 
sentiment, which is in few words--"no business--Rouncewell's fernal 
townsman."  Sir Leicester generally refers back in his mind to Wat 
Tyler and arranges a sequence of events on a plan of his own.

There is not much conversation in all, for late hours have been 
kept at Chesney Wold since the necessary expenses elsewhere began, 
and this is the first night in many on which the family have been 
alone.  It is past ten when Sir Leicester begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to 
ring for candles.  Then the stream of moonlight has swelled into a 
lake, and then Lady Dedlock for the first time moves, and rises, 
and comes forward to a table for a glass of water.  Winking 
cousins, bat-like in the candle glare, crowd round to give it; 
Volumnia (always ready for something better if procurable) takes 
another, a very mild sip of which contents her; Lady Dedlock, 
graceful, self-possessed, looked after by admiring eyes, passes 
away slowly down the long perspective by the side of that nymph, 
not at all improving her as a question of contrast.



CHAPTER XLI

In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room


Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by the 
journey up, though leisurely performed.  There is an expression on 
his face as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter and 
were, in his close way, satisfied.  To say of a man so severely and 
strictly self-repressed that he is triumphant would be to do him as 
great an injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or 
sentiment or any romantic weakness.  He is sedately satisfied.  
Perhaps there is a rather increased sense of power upon him as he 
loosely grasps one of his veinous wrists with his other hand and 
holding it behind his back walks noiselessly up and down.

There is a capacious writing-table in the room on which is a pretty 
large accumulation of papers.  The green lamp is lighted, his 
reading-glasses lie upon the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up to 
it, and it would seem as though he had intended to bestow an hour 
or so upon these claims on his attention before going to bed.  But 
he happens not to be in a business mind.  After a glance at the 
documents awaiting his notice--with his head bent low over the 
table, the old man's sight for print or writing being defective at 
night--he opens the French window and steps out upon the leads.  
There he again walks slowly up and down in the same attitude, 
subsiding, if a man so cool may have any need to subside, from the 
story he has related downstairs.

The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk 
on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read 
their fortunes there.  Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though 
their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon.  If he 
be seeking his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the 
leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily represented 
below.  If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in 
other characters nearer to his hand.

As he paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his 
thoughts as they are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped 
in passing the window by two eyes that meet his own.  The ceiling 
of his room is rather low; and the upper part of the door, which is 
opposite the window, is of glass.  There is an inner baize door, 
too, but the night being warm he did not close it when he came 
upstairs.  These eyes that meet his own are looking in through the 
glass from the corridor outside.  He knows them well.  The blood 
has not flushed into his face so suddenly and redly for many a long 
year as when he recognizes Lady Dedlock.

He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the 
doors behind her.  There is a wild disturbance--is it fear or 
anger?--in her eyes.  In her carriage and all else she looks as she 
looked downstairs two hours ago.

Is it fear or is it anger now?  He cannot be sure.  Both might be 
as pale, both as intent.

"Lady Dedlock?"

She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped 
into the easy-chair by the table.  They look at each other, like 
two pictures.

"Why have you told my story to so many persons?"

"Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew 
it."

"How long have you known it?"

"I have suspected it a long while--fully known it a little while."

"Months?"

"Days."

He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the other in 
his old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has 
stood before her at any time since her marriage.  The same formal 
politeness, the same composed deference that might as well be 
defiance; the whole man the same dark, cold object, at the same 
distance, which nothing has ever diminished.

"Is this true concerning the poor girl?"

He slightly inclines and advances his head as not quite 
understanding the question.

"You know what you related.  Is it true?  Do her friends know my 
story also?  Is it the town-talk yet?  Is it chalked upon the walls 
and cried in the streets?"

So!  Anger, and fear, and shame.  All three contending.  What power 
this woman has to keep these raging passions down!  Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his 
ragged grey eyebrows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual 
under her gaze.

"No, Lady Dedlock.  That was a hypothetical case, arising out of 
Sir Leicester's unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a 
hand.  But it would be a real case if they knew--what we know."

"Then they do not know it yet?"

"No."

"Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?"

"Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a 
satisfactory opinion on that point."

And he thinks, with the interest of attentive curiosity, as he 
watches the struggle in her breast, "The power and force of this 
woman are astonishing!"

"Sir," she says, for the moment obliged to set her lips with all 
the energy she has, that she may speak distinctly, "I will make it 
plainer.  I do not dispute your hypothetical case.  I anticipated 
it, and felt its truth as strongly as you can do, when I saw Mr. 
Rouncewell here.  I knew very well that if he could have had the 
power of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl 
tarnished by having for a moment been, although most innocently, 
the subject of my great and distinguished patronage.  But I have an 
interest in her, or I should rather say--no longer belonging to 
this place--I had, and if you can find so much consideration for 
the woman under your foot as to remember that, she will be very 
sensible of your mercy."

Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug 
of self-depreciation and contracts his eyebrows a little more.

"You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that 
too.  Is there anything that you require of me?  Is there any claim 
that I can release or any charge or trouble that I can spare my 
husband in obtaining HIS release by certifying to the exactness of 
your discovery?  I will write anything, here and now, that you will 
dictate.  I am ready to do it."

And she would do it, thinks the lawver, watchful of the firm hand 
with which she takes the pen!

"I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock.  Pray spare yourself."

"I have long expected this, as you know.  I neither wish to spare 
myself nor to be spared.  You can do nothing worse to me than you 
have done.  Do what remains now."

"Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done.  I will take leave to 
say a few words when you have finished."

Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do 
it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened 
window.  Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and 
the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one.  The narrow one!  
Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined 
to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn 
existence?  Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet?  Curious 
questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under 
the watching stars upon a summer night.

"Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock 
presently proceeds, "I say not a word.  If I were not dumb, you 
would be deaf.  Let that go by.  It is not for your ears."

He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with 
her disdainful hand.

"Of other and very different things I come to speak to you.  My 
jewels are all in their proper places of keeping.  They will be 
found there.  So, my dresses.  So, all the valuables I have.  Some 
ready money I had with me, please to say, but no large amount.  I 
did not wear my own dress, in order that I might avoid observation.  
I went to be henceforward lost.  Make this known.  I leave no other 
charge with you."

"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved.  "I 
am not sure that I understand you.  You want--"

"To be lost to all here.  I leave Chesney Wold to-night.  I go this 
hour."

Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head.  She rises, but he, without moving 
hand from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-
frill, shakes his head.

"What?  Not go as I have said?"

"No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly replies.

"Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be?  Have you 
forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and 
who it is?"

"No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means."

Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it 
in her hand when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or 
foot or raising his voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop 
and hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the 
alarm-bell and rouse the house.  And then I must speak out before 
every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it."

He has conquered her.  She falters, trembles, and puts her hand 
confusedly to her head.  Slight tokens these in any one else, but 
when so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision for a 
moment in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value.

He promptly says again, "Have the goodness to hear me, Lady 
Dedlock," and motions to the chair from which she has risen.  She 
hesitates, but he motions again, and she sits down.

"The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady 
Dedlock; but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for 
them.  The position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well 
known to you that I can hardly imagine but that I must long have 
appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery."

"Sir," she returns without looking up from the ground on which her 
eyes are now fixed, "I had better have gone.  It would have been 
far better not to have detained me.  I have no more to say."

"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear."

"I wish to hear it at the window, then.  I can't breathe where I 
am."

His jealous glance as she walks that way betrays an instant's 
misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and 
dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon the 
terrace below.  But a moment's observation of her figure as she 
stands in the window without any support, looking out at the stars
--not up-gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens, 
reassures him.  By facing round as she has moved, he stands a 
little behind her.

"Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision 
satisfactory to myself on the course before me.  I am not clear 
what to do or how to act next.  I must request you, in the 
meantime, to keep your secret as you have kept it so long and not 
to wonder that I keep it too."

He pauses, but she makes no reply.

"Pardon me, Lady Dedlock.  This is an important subject.  You are 
honouring me with your attention?"

"I am."

"'Thank you.  I might have known it from what I have seen of your 
strength of character.  I ought not to have asked the question, but 
I have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go 
on.  The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester."

"'Then why," she asks in a low voice and without removing her 
gloomy look from those distant stars, "do you detain me in his 
house?"

"Because he IS the consideration.  Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion 
to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his 
reliance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of 
the sky would not amaze him more than your fall from your high 
position as his wife."

She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly 
as ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.

"I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this 
case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of 
my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as 
to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester's trust and 
confidence in you.  And even now, with this case, I hesitate.  Not 
that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that 
nothing can prepare him for the blow."

"Not my flight?" she returned.  "Think of it again."

"Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a 
hundred times the whole truth, far and wide.  It would be 
impossible to save the family credit for a day.  It is not to be 
thought of."

There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no 
remonstrance.

"When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and 
the family credit are one.  Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir 
Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his 
patrimony"--Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here--"are, I need not say to 
you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable."

"Go on!"

"Therefore," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-
trot style, "I have much to consider.  This is to be hushed up if 
it can be.  How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his 
wits or laid upon a death-bed?  If I inflicted this shock upon him 
to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change in him be 
accounted for?  What could have caused it?  What could have divided 
you?  Lady Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would 
come on directly, and you are to remember that it would not affect 
you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business) but 
your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband."

He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or 
animated.

"There is another point of view," he continues, "in which the case 
presents itself.  Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to 
infatuation.  He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, 
even knowing what we know.  I am putting an extreme case, but it 
might be so.  If so, it were better that he knew nothing.  Better 
for common sense, better for him, better for me.  I must take all 
this into account, and it combines to render a decision very 
difficult."

She stands looking out at the same stars without a word.  They are 
beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.

"My experience teaches me," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by this 
time got his hands in his pockets and is going on in his business 
consideration of the matter like a machine.  "My experience teaches 
me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far 
better to leave marriage alone.  It is at the bottom of three 
fourths of their troubles.  So I thought when Sir Leicester 
married, and so I always have thought since.  No more about that.  
I must now be guided by circumstances.  In the meanwhile I must beg 
you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine."

"I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your 
pleasure, day by day?" she asks, still looking at the distant sky.

"Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock."

"It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the 
stake?"

"I am sure that what I recommend is necessary."

"I am to remain on this gaudy platforna on which my miserable 
deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when 
you give the signal?" she said slowly.

"Not without notice, Lady Dedlock.  I shall take no step without 
forewarning you."

She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from 
memory or calling them over in her sleep.

"We are to meet as usual?"

"Precisely as usual, if you please."

"And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?"

"As you have done so many years.  I should not have made that 
reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your 
secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no 
better than it was.  I know it certainly, but I believe we have 
never wholly trusted each other."

She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time 
before asking, "Is there anything more to be sald to-night?"

"Why," Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he softly rubs his 
hands, "I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my 
arrangements, Lady Dedlock."

"You may be assured of it."

"Good.  And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business 
precaution, in case it should be necessary to recall the fact in 
any communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview 
I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's 
feelings and honour and the family reputation.  I should have been 
happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if 
the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not."

"I can attest your fidelity, sir."

Both before and after saving it she remains absorbed, but at length 
moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence, 
towards the door.  Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as 
he would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years 
ago, and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out.  It is not 
an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes 
into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a 
very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy.  But as he 
reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no 
common constraint upon herself.

He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her own 
rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her 
hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain.  
He would think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up 
and down for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed 
by the faithful step upon the Ghost's Walk.  But he shuts out the 
now chilled air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls 
asleep.  And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into 
the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the 
digger and the spade were both commissioned and would soon be 
digging.

The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant 
country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins 
entering on various public employments, principally receipt of 
salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty 
thousand pounds upon a hideous old general with a mouth of false 
teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of 
Bath and the terror of every other commuuity.  Also into rooms high 
in the roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, 
where humbler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers' lodges, and in 
holy matrimony with Will or Sally.  Up comes the bright sun, 
drawing everything up with it--the Wills and Sallys, the latent 
vapour in the earth, the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and 
beasts and creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf 
and unfold emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the 
great kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the 
lightsome air.  Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's 
unconscious head cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady 
Dedlock are in their happy home and that there is hospitality at 
the place in Lincolnshire.



CHAPTER XLII

In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Chambers


From the verdant undulations and the spreading oaks of the Dedlock 
property, Mr. Tulkinghorn transfers himself to the stale heat and 
dust of London.  His manner of coming and going between the two 
places is one of his impenetrabilities.  He walks into Chesney Wold 
as if it were next door to his chambers and returns to his chambers 
as if he had never been out of Lincoln's Inn Fields.  He neither 
changes his dress before the journey nor talks of it afterwards.  
He melted out of his turret-room this morning, just as now, in the 
late twilight, he melts into his own square.

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant 
fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into 
wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and 
faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged 
without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his 
cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has 
forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home.  In 
the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked 
himself dryer than usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his 
mellowed port-wine half a century old.

The lamplighter is skipping up and down his ladder on Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's side of the Fields when that high-priest of noble 
mysteries arrives at his own dull court-yard.  He ascends the door-
steps and is gliding into the dusky hall when he encounters, on the 
top step, a bowing and propitiatory little man.

"Is that Snagsby?"

"Yes, sir.  I hope you are well, sir.  I was just giving you up, 
sir, and going home."

"Aye?  What is it?  What do you want with me?"

"Well, sir," says Mr. Snagsby, holding his hat at the side of his 
head in his deference towards his best customer, "I was wishful to 
say a word to you, sir."

"Can you say it here?"

"Perfectly, sir."

"Say it then."  The lawyer turns, leans his arms on the iron 
railing at the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter 
lighting the court-yard.

"It is relating," says Mr. Snagsby in a mysterious low voice, "it 
is relating--not to put too fine a point upon it--to the foreigner, 
sir!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn eyes him with some surprise.  "What foreigner?"

"The foreign female, sir.  French, if I don't mistake?  I am not 
acquainted with that language myself, but I should judge from her 
manners and appearance that she was French; anyways, certainly 
foreign.  Her that was upstairs, sir, when Mr. Bucket and me had 
the honour of waiting upon you with the sweeping-boy that night."

"Oh! Yes, yes.  Mademoiselle Hortense."

"Indeed, sir?" Mr. Snagsby coughs his cough of submission behind 
his hat.  "I am not acquainted myself with the names of foreigners 
in general, but I have no doubt it WOULD be that."  Mr. Snagsby 
appears to have set out in this reply with some desperate design of 
repeating the name, but on reflection coughs again to excuse 
himself.

"And what can you have to say, Snagsby," demands Mr. Tulkinghorn, 
"about her?"

"Well, sir," returns the stationer, shading his communication with 
his hat, "it falls a little hard upon me.  My domestic happiness is 
very great--at least, it's as great as can be expected, I'm sure--
but my little woman is rather given to jealousy.  Not to put too 
fine a point upon it, she is very much given to jealousy.  And you 
see, a foreign female of that genteel appearance coming into the 
shop, and hovering--I should be the last to make use of a strong 
expression if I could avoid it, but hovering, sir--in the court--
you know it is--now ain't it?  I only put it to yourself, sir.

Mr. Snagsby, having said this in a very plaintive manner, throws in 
a cough of general application to fill up all the blanks.

"Why, what do you mean?" asks Mr. Tulkinghorn.

"Just so, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby; "I was sure you would feel it 
yourself and would excuse the reasonableness of MY feelings when 
coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman.  You see, 
the foreign female--which you mentioned her name just now, with 
quite a native sound I am sure--caught up the word Snagsby that 
night, being uncommon quick, and made inquiry, and got the 
direction and come at dinner-time.  Now Guster, our young woman, is 
timid and has fits, and she, taking fright at the foreigner's 
looks--which are fierce--and at a grinding manner that she has of 
speaking--which is calculated to alarm a weak mind--gave way to it, 
instead of bearing up against it, and tumbled down the kitchen 
stairs out of one into another, such fits as I do sometimes think 
are never gone into, or come out of, in any house but ours.  
Consequently there was by good fortune ample occupation for my 
little woman, and only me to answer the shop.  When she DID say 
that Mr. Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his employer 
(which I had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of viewing a 
clerk), she would do herself the pleasure of continually calling at 
my place until she was let in here.  Since then she has been, as I 
began by saying, hovering, hovering, sir"--Mr. Snagsby repeats the 
word with pathetic emphasis--"in the court.  The effects of which 
movement it is impossible to calculate.  I shouldn't wonder if it 
might have already given rise to the painfullest mistakes even in 
the neighbours' minds, not mentioning (if such a thing was 
possible) my little woman.  Whereas, goodness knows," says Mr. 
Snagsby, shaking his head, "I never had an idea of a foreign 
female, except as being formerly connected with a bunch of brooms 
and a baby, or at the present time with a tambourine and earrings.  
I never had, I do assure you, sir!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn had listened gravely to this complaint and inquires 
when the stationer has finished, "And that's all, is it, Snagsby?"

"Why yes, sir, that's all," says Mr. Snagsby, ending with a cough 
that plainly adds, "and it's enough too--for me."

"I don't know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless 
she is mad," says the lawyer.

"Even if she was, you know, sir," Mr. Snagsby pleads, "it wouldn't 
be a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a 
foreign dagger planted in the family."

"No," says the other.  "Well, well!  This shall be stopped.  I am 
sorry you have been inconvenienced.  If she comes again, send her 
here."

Mr. Snagsby, with much bowing and short apologetic coughing, takes 
his leave, lightened in heart.  Mr. Tulkinghorn goes upstairs, 
saying to himself, "These women were created to give trouble the 
whole earth over.  The mistress not being enough to deal with, 
here's the maid now!  But I will be short with THIS jade at least!"

So saying, he unlocks his door, gropes his way into his murky 
rooms, lights his candles, and looks about him.  It is too dark to 
see much of the Allegory over-head there, but that importunate 
Roman, who is for ever toppling out of the clouds and pointing, is 
at his old work pretty distinctly.  Not honouring him with much 
attention, Mr. Tulkinghorn takes a small key from his pocket, 
unlocks a drawer in which there is another key, which unlocks a 
chest in which there is another, and so comes to the cellar-key, 
with which he prepares to descend to the regions of old wine.  He 
is going towards the door with a candle in his hand when a knock 
comes.

"Who's this?  Aye, aye, mistress, it's you, is it?  You appear at a 
good time.  I have just been hearing of you.  Now! What do you 
want?"

He stands the candle on the chimney-piece in the clerk's hall and 
taps his dry cheek with the key as he addresses these words of 
welcome to Mademoiselle Hortense.  That feline personage, with her 
lips tightly shut and her eyes looking out at him sideways, softly 
closes the door before replying.

"I have had great deal of trouble to find you, sir."

"HAVE you!"

"I have been here very often, sir.  It has always been said to me, 
he is not at home, he is engage, he is this and that, he is not for 
you."

"Quite right, and quite true."

"Not true.  Lies!"

At times there is a suddenness in the manner of Mademoiselle 
Hortense so like a bodily spring upon the subject of it that such 
subject involuntarily starts and fails back.  It is Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's case at present, though Mademoiselle Hortense, with 
her eyes almost shut up (but still looking out sideways), is only 
smiling contemptuously and shaking her head.

"Now, mistress," says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the 
chimney-piece.  "If you have anything to say, say it, say it."

"Sir, you have not use me well.  You have been mean and shabby."

"Mean and shabby, eh?" returns the lawyer, rubbing his nose with 
the key.

"Yes.  What is it that I tell you?  You know you have.  You have 
attrapped me--catched me--to give you information; you have asked 
me to show you the dress of mine my Lady must have wore that night, 
you have prayed me to come in it here to meet that boy.  Say! Is it 
not?"  Mademoiselle Hortense makes another spring.

"You are a vixen, a vixen!"  Mr. Tulkinghorn seems to meditate as 
he looks distrustfully at her, then he replies, "Well, wench, well.  
I paid you."

"You paid me!" she repeats with fierce disdain.  "Two sovereign!  I 
have not change them, I re-fuse them, I des-pise them, I throw them 
from me!"  Which she literally does, taking them out of her bosom 
as she speaks and flinging them with such violence on the floor 
that they jerk up again into the light before they roll away into 
corners and slowly settle down there after spinning vehemently.

"Now!" says Mademoiselle Hortense, darkening her large eyes again.  
"You have paid me?  Eh, my God, oh yes!"

Mr. Tulkinghorn rubs his head with the key while she entertains 
herself with a sarcastic laugh.

"You must be rich, my fair friend," he composedly observes, "to 
throw money about in that way!"

"I AM rich," she returns.  "I am very rich in hate.  I hate my 
Lady, of all my heart.  You know that."

"Know it?  How should I know it?"

"Because you have known it perfectly before you prayed me to give 
you that information.  Because you have known perfectly that I was 
en-r-r-r-raged!"  It appears impossible for mademoiselle to roll 
the letter "r" sufficiently in this word, notwithstanding that she 
assists her energetic delivery by clenching both her hands and 
setting all her teeth.

"Oh! I knew that, did I?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn, examining the wards 
of the key.

"Yes, without doubt.  I am not blind.  You have made sure of me 
because you knew that.  You had reason!  I det-est her."  
Mademoiselle folds her arms and throws this last remark at him over 
one of her shoulders.

"Having said this, have you anything else to say, mademoiselle?"

"I am not yet placed.  Place me well.  Find me a good condition!  
If you cannot, or do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue 
her, to chase her, to disgrace and to dishonour her.  I will help 
you well, and with a good will.  It is what YOU do.  Do I not know 
that?"

"You appear to know a good deal," Mr. Tulkinghorn retorts.

"Do I not?  Is it that I am so weak as to believe, like a child, 
that I come here in that dress to rec-cive that boy only to decide 
a little bet, a wager?  Eh, my God, oh yes!"  In this reply, down 
to the word "wager" inclusive, mademoiselle has been ironically 
polite and tender, then as suddenly dashed into the bitterest and 
most defiant scorn, with her black eyes in one and the same moment 
very nearly shut and staringly wide open.

"Now, let us see," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, tapping his chin with the 
key and looking imperturbably at her, "how this matter stands."

"Ah! Let us see," mademoiselle assents, with many angry and tight 
nods of her head.

"You come here to make a remarkably modest demand, which you have 
just stated, and it not being conceded, you will come again."

"And again," says mademoiselle with more tight and angry nods.  
"And yet again.  And yet again.  And many times again.  In effect, 
for ever!"

"And not only here, but you will go to Mr, Snagsby's too, perhaps?  
That visit not succeeding either, you will go again perhaps?"

"And again," repeats mademoiselle, cataleptic with determination.  
"And yet again.  And yet again.  And many times again.  In effect, 
for ever!"

"Very well.  Now, Mademoiselle Hortense, let me recommend you to 
take the candle and pick up that money of yours.  I think you will 
find it behind the clerk's partition in the corner yonder."

She merely throws a laugh over her shoulder and stands her ground 
with folded arms.

"You will not, eh?"

"No, I will not!"

"So much the poorer you; so much the richer I!  Look, mistress, 
this is the key of my wine-cellar.  It is a large key, but the keys 
of prisons are larger.  In this city there are houses of correction 
(where the treadmills are, for women), the gates of which are very 
strong and heavy, and no doubt the keys too.  I am afraid a lady of 
your spirit and activity would find it an inconvenience to have one 
of those keys turned upon her for any length of time.  What do you 
think?"

"I think," mademoiselle replies without any action and in a clear, 
obliging voice, "that you are a miserable wretch."

"Probably," returns Mr. Tulkinghorn, quietly blowing his nose.  
"But I don't ask what you think of myself; I ask what you think of 
the prison."

"Nothing.  What does it matter to me?"

"Why, it matters this much, mistress," says the lawyer, 
deliberately putting away his handkerchief and adjusting his frill; 
"the law is so despotic here that it interferes to prevent any of 
our good English citizens from being troubled, even by a lady's 
visits against his desire.  And on his complaining that he is so 
troubled, it takes hold of the troublesome lady and shuts her up in 
prison under hard discipline.  Turns the key upon her, mistress."  
Illustrating with the cellar-key.

"Truly?" returns mademoiselle in the same pleasant voice.  "That is 
droll!  But--my faith! --still what does it matter to me?"

"My fair friend," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "make another visit here, 
or at Mr. Snagsby's, and you shall learn."

"In that case you will send me to the prison, perhaps?"

"Perhaps."

It would be contradictory for one in mademoiselle's state of 
agreeable jocularity to foam at the mouth, otherwise a tigerish 
expansion thereabouts might look as if a very little more would 
make her do it.

"In a word, mistress," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "I am sorry to be 
unpolite, but if you ever present yourself uninvited here--or 
there--again, I will give you over to the police.  Their gallantry 
is great, but they carry troublesome people through the streets in 
an ignominious manner, strapped down on a board, my good wench."

"I will prove you," whispers mademoiselle, stretching out her hand, 
"I will try if you dare to do it!"

"And if," pursues the lawyer without minding her, "I place you in 
that good condition of being locked up in jail, it will be some 
time before you find yourself at liberty again."

"I will prove you," repeats mademoiselle in her former whisper.

"And now," proceeds the lawyer, still without minding her, "you had 
better go.  Think twice before you come here again."

"Think you," she answers, "twice two hundred times!"

"You were dismissed by your lady, you know," Mr. Tulkinghorn 
observes, following her out upon the staircase, "as the most 
implacable and unmanageable of women.  Now turn over a new leaf and 
take warning by what I say to you.  For what I say, I mean; and 
what I threaten, I will do, mistress."

She goes down without answering or looking behind her.  When she is 
gone, he goes down too, and returning with his cobweb-covered 
bottle, devotes himself to a leisurely enjoyment of its contents, 
now and then, as he throws his head back in his chair, catching 
sight of the pertinacious Roman pointing from the ceiling.



CHAPTER XLIII

Esther's Narrative


It matters little now how much I thought of my living mother who 
had told me evermore to consider her dead.  I could not venture to 
approach her or to communicate with her in writing, for my sense of 
the peril in which her life was passed was only to be equalled by 
my fears of increasing it.  Knowing that my mere existence as a 
living creature was an unforeseen danger in her way, I could not 
always conquer that terror of myself which had seized me when I 
first knew the secret.  At no time did I dare to utter her name.  I 
felt as if I did not even dare to hear it.  If the conversation 
anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it sometimes 
naturally did, I tried not to hear: I mentally counted, repeated 
something that I knew, or went out of the room.  I am conscious now 
that I often did these things when there can have been no danger of 
her being spoken of, but I did them in the dread I had of hearing 
anything that might lead to her betrayal, and to her betrayal 
through me.

It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother's 
voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed 
to do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should 
be so new to me.  It matters little that I watched for every public 
mention of my mother's name; that I passed and repassed the door of 
her house in town, loving it, but afraid to look at it; that I once 
sat in the theatre when my mother was there and saw me, and when we 
were so wide asunder before the great company of all degrees that 
any link or confidence between us seemed a dream.  It is all, all 
over.  My lot has been so blest that I can relate little of myself 
which is not a story of goodness and generosity in others.  I may 
well pass that little and go on.

When we were settled at home again, Ada and I had many 
conversations with my guardian of which Richard was the theme.  My 
dear girl was deeply grieved that he should do their kind cousin so 
much wrong, but she was so faithful to Richard that she could not 
bear to blame him even for that.  My guardian was assured of it, 
and never coupled his name with a word of reproof.  "Rick is 
mistaken, my dear," he would say to her.  "Well, well!  We have all 
been mistaken over and over again.  We must trust to you and time 
to set him right."

We knew afterwards what we suspected then, that he did not trust to 
time until he had often tried to open Richard's eyes.  That he had 
written to him, gone to him, talked with him, tried every gentle 
and persuasive art his kindness could devise.  Our poor devoted 
Richard was deaf and blind to all.  If he were wrong, he would make 
amends when the Chancery suit was over.  If he were groping in the 
dark, he could not do better than do his utmost to clear away those 
clouds in which so much was confused and obscured.  Suspicion and 
misunderstanding were the fault of the suit?  Then let him work the 
suit out and come through it to his right mind.  This was his 
unvarying reply.  Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such 
possession of his whole nature that it was impossible to place any 
consideration before him which he did not, with a distorted kind of 
reason, make a new argument in favour of his doing what he did.  
"So that it is even more mischievous," said my guardian once to me, 
"to remonstrate with the poor dear fellow than to leave him alone."

I took one of these opportunities of mentioning my doubts of Mr. 
Skimpole as a good adviser for Richard.

"Adviser!" returned my guardian, laughing, "My dear, who would 
advise with Skimpole?"

"Encourager would perhaps have been a better word," said I.

"Encourager!" returned my guardian again.  "Who could be encouraged 
by Skimpole?"

"Not Richard?" I asked.

"No," he replied.  "Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer 
creature is a relief to him and an amusement.  But as to advising 
or encouraging or occupying a serious station towards anybody or 
anything, it is simply not to be thought of in such a child as 
Skimpole."

"Pray, cousin John," said Ada, who had just joined us and now 
looked over my shoulder, "what made him such a child?"

"What made him such a child?" inquired my guardian, rubbing his 
head, a little at a loss.

"Yes, cousin John."

"Why," he slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, "he is 
all sentiment, and--and susceptibility, and--and sensibility, and--
and imagination.  And these qualities are not regulated in him, 
somehow.  I suppose the people who admired him for them in his 
youth attached too much importance to them and too little to any 
training that would have balanced and adjusted them, and so he 
became what he is.  Hey?" said my guardian, stopping short and 
looking at us hopefully.  "What do you think, you two?"

Ada, glancing at me, said she thought it was a pity he should be an 
expense to Richard.

"So it is, so it is," returned my guardian hurriedly.  "That must 
not be.  We must arrange that.  I must prevent it.  That will never 
do."

And I said I thought it was to be regretted that he had ever 
introduced Richard to Mr. Vholes for a present of five pounds.

"Did he?" said my guardian with a passing shade of vexation on his 
face.  "But there you have the man.  There you have the man!  There 
is nothing mercenary in that with him.  He has no idea of the value 
of money.  He introduces Rick, and then he is good friends with Mr. 
Vholes and borrows five pounds of him.  He means nothing by it and 
thinks nothing of it.  He told you himself, I'll be bound, my 
dear?"

"Oh, yes!" said I.

"Exactly!" cried my guardian, quite triumphant.  "There you have 
the man!  If he had meant any harm by it or was conscious of any 
harm in it, he wouldn't tell it.  He tells it as he does it in mere 
simplicity.  But you shall see him in his own home, and then you'll 
understand him better.  We must pay a visit to Harold Skimpole and 
caution him on these points.  Lord bless you, my dears, an infant, 
an infant!"

In pursuance of this plan, we went into London on an early day and 
presented ourselves at Mr. Skimpole's door.

He lived in a place called the Polygon, in Somers Town, where there 
were at that time a number of poor Spanish refugees walking about 
in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars.  Whether he was a better 
tenant than one might have supposed, in consequence of his friend 
Somebody always paying his rent at last, or whether his inaptitude 
for business rendered it particularly difficult to turn him out, I 
don't know; but he had occupied the same house some years.  It was 
in a state of dilapidation quite equal to our expectation.  Two or 
three of the area railings were gone, the water-butt was broken, 
the knocker was loose, the bell-handle had been pulled off a long 
time to judge from the rusty state of the wire, and dirty 
footprints on the steps were the only signs of its being inhabited.

A slatternly full-blown girl who seemed to be bursting out at the 
rents in her gown and the cracks in her shoes like an over-ripe 
berry answered our knock by opening the door a very little way and 
stopping up the gap with her figure.  As she knew Mr. Jarndyce 
(indeed Ada and I both thought that she evidently associated him 
with the receipt of her wages), she immediately relented and 
allowed us to pass in.  The lock of the door being in a disabled 
condition, she then applied herself to securing it with the chain, 
which was not in good action either, and said would we go upstairs?

We went upstairs to the first floor, still seeing no other 
furniture than the dirty footprints.  Mr. Jarndyce without further 
ceremony entered a room there, and we followed.  It was dingy 
enough and not at all clean, but furnished with an odd kind of 
shabby luxury, with a large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of 
cushions, an easy-chair, and plenty of pillows, a piano, books, 
drawing materials, music, newspapers, and a few sketches and 
pictures.  A broken pane of glass in one of the dirty windows was 
papered and wafered over, but there was a little plate of hothouse 
nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and 
another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine.  Mr. 
Skimpole himself reclined upon the sofa in a dressing-gown, 
drinking some fragrant coffee from an old china cup--it was then 
about mid-day--and looking at a collection of wallflowers in the 
balcony.

He was not in the least disconcerted by our appearance, but rose 
and received us in his usual airy manner.

"Here I am, you see!" he said when we were seated, not without some 
little difficulty, the greater part of the chairs being broken.  
"Here I am!  This is my frugal breakfast.  Some men want legs of 
beef and mutton for breakfast; I don't.  Give me my peach, my cup 
of coffee, and my claret; I am content.  I don't want them for 
themselves, but they remind me of the sun.  There's nothing solar 
about legs of beef and mutton.  Mere animal satisfaction!"

"This is our friend's consulting-room (or would be, if he ever 
prescribed), his sanctum, his studio," said my guardian to us.

"Yes," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright face about, "this is 
the bird's cage.  This is where the bird lives and sings.  They 
pluck his feathers now and then and clip his wings, but he sings, 
he sings!"

He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, "He sings!  
Not an ambitious note, but still he sings."

"These are very fine," said my guardian.  "A present?"

"No," he answered.  "No! Some amiable gardener sells them.  His man 
wanted to know, when he brought them last evening, whether he 
should wait for the money.  'Really, my friend,' I said, 'I think 
not--if your time is of any value to you.'  I suppose it was, for 
he went away."

My guardian looked at us with a smile, as though he asked us, "Is 
it possible to be worldly with this baby?"

"This is a day," said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a little claret in 
a tumbler, "that will ever be remembered here.  We shall call it 
Saint Clare and Saint Summerson day.  You must see my daughters.  I 
have a blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter, I have a 
Sentiment daughter, and I have a Comedy daughter.  You must see 
them all.  They'll be enchanted."

He was going to summon them when my guardian interposed and asked 
him to pause a moment, as he wished to say a word to him first.  
"My dear Jarndyce," he cheerfully replied, going back to his sofa, 
"as many moments as you please.  Time is no object here.  We never 
know what o'clock it is, and we never care.  Not the way to get on 
in life, you'll tell me?  Certainly.  But we DON'T get on in life.  
We don't pretend to do it."

My guardian looked at us again, plainly saying, "You hear him?"

"Now, Harold," he began, "the word I have to say relates to Rick."

"The dearest friend I have!" returned Mr. Skimpole cordially.  "I 
suppose he ought not to be my dearest friend, as he is not on terms 
with you.  But he is, I can't help it; he is full of youthful 
poetry, and I love him.  If you don't like it, I can't help it.  I 
love him."

The engaging frankness with which he made this declaration really 
had a disinterested appearance and captivated my guardian, if not, 
for the moment, Ada too.

"You are welcome to love him as much as you like," returned Mr. 
Jarndyce, "but we must save his pocket, Harold."

"Oh!" said Mr. Skimpole.  "His pocket?  Now you are coming to what 
I don't understand."  Taking a little more claret and dipping one 
of the cakes in it, he shook his head and smiled at Ada and me with 
an ingenuous foreboding that he never could be made to understand.

"If you go with him here or there," said my guardian plainly, "you 
must not let him pay for both."

"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, his genial face 
irradiated by the comicality of this idea, "what am I to do?  If he 
takes me anywhere, I must go.  And how can I pay?  I never have any 
money.  If I had any money, I don't know anything about it.  
Suppose I say to a man, how much?  Suppose the man says to me seven 
and sixpence?  I know nothing about seven and sixpence.  It is 
impossible for me to pursue the subject with any consideration for 
the man.  I don't go about asking busy people what seven and 
sixpence is in Moorish--which I don't understand.  Why should I go 
about asking them what seven and sixpence is in Money--which I 
don't understand?"

"Well," said my guardian, by no means displeased with this artless 
reply, "if you come to any kind of journeying with Rick, you must 
borrow the money of me (never breathing the least allusion to that 
circumstance), and leave the calculation to him."

"My dear Jarndyce," returned Mr. Skimpole, "I will do anything to 
give you pleasure, but it seems an idle form--a superstition.  
Besides, I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, 
I thought Mr. Carstone was immensely rich.  I thought he had only 
to make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque, 
or a bill, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a 
shower of money."

"Indeed it is not so, sir," said Ada.  "He is poor."

"No, really?" returned Mr. Skimpole with his bright smile.  "You 
surprise me.

"And not being the richer for trusting in a rotten reed," said my 
guardian, laying his hand emphatically on the sleeve of Mr. 
Skimpole's dressing-gown, "be you very careful not to encourage him 
in that reliance, Harold."

"My dear good friend," returned Mr. Skimpole, "and my dear Miss 
Siunmerson, and my dear Miss Clare, how can I do that?  It's 
business, and I don't know business.  It is he who encourages me.  
He emerges from great feats of business, presents the brightest 
prospects before me as their result, and calls upon me to admire 
them.  I do admire them--as bright prospects.  But I know no more 
about them, and I tell him so."

The helpless kind of candour with which he presented this before 
us, the light-hearted manner in which he was amused by his 
innocence, the fantastic way in which he took himself under his own 
protection and argued about that curious person, combined with the 
delightful ease of everything he said exactly to make out my 
guardian's case.  The more I saw of him, the more unlikely it 
seemed to me, when he was present, that he could design, conceal, 
or influence anything; and yet the less likely that appeared when 
he was not present, and the less agreeable it was to think of his 
having anything to do with any one for whom I cared.

Hearing that his examination (as he called it) was now over, Mr. 
Skimpole left the room with a radiant face to fetch his daughters 
(his sons had run away at various times), leaving my guardian quite 
delighted by the manner in which he had vindicated his childish 
character.  He soon came back, bringing with him the three young 
ladies and Mrs. Skimpole, who had once been a beauty but was now a 
delicate high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of 
disorders.

"This," said Mr. Skimpole, "is my Beauty daughter, Arethusa--plays 
and sings odds and ends like her father.  This is my Sentiment 
daughter, Laura--plays a little but don't sing.  This is my Comedy 
daughter, Kitty--sings a little but don't play.  We all draw a 
little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time 
or money."

Mrs. Skimpole sighed, I thought, as if she would have been glad to 
strike out this item in the family attainments.  I also thought 
that she rather impressed her sigh upon my guardian and that she 
took every opportunity of throwing in another.

"It is pleasant," said Mr. Skimpole, turning his sprightly eyes 
from one to the other of us, "and it is whimsically interesting to 
trace peculiarities in families.  In this family we are all 
children, and I am the youngest."

The daughters, who appeared to be very fond of him, were amused by 
this droll fact, particularly the Comedy daughter.

"My dears, it is true," said Mr. Skimpole, "is it not?  So it is, 
and so it must be, because like the dogs in the hymn, 'it is our 
nature to.'  Now, here is Miss Summerson with a fine administrative 
capacity and a knowledge of details perfectly surprising.  It will 
sound very strange in Miss Summerson's ears, I dare say, that we 
know nothing about chops in this house.  But we don't, not the 
least.  We can't cook anything whatever.  A needle and thread we 
don't know how to use.  We admire the people who possess the 
practical wisdom we want, but we don't quarrel with them.  Then why 
should they quarrel with us?  Live and let live, we say to them.  
Live upon your practical wisdom, and let us live upon you!"

He laughed, but as usual seemed quite candid and really to mean 
what he said.

"We have sympathy, my roses," said Mr. Skimpole, "sympathy for 
everything.  Have we not?"

"Oh, yes, papa!" cried the three daughters.

"In fact, that is our family department," said Mr. Skimpole, "in 
this hurly-burly of life.  We are capable of looking on and of 
being interested, and we DO look on, and we ARE interested.  What 
more can we do?  Here is my Beauty daughter, married these three 
years.  Now I dare say her marrying another child, and having two 
more, was all wrong in point of political economy, but it was very 
agreeable.  We had our little festivities on those occasions and 
exchanged social ideas.  She brought her young husband home one 
day, and they and their young fledglings have their nest upstairs.  
I dare say at some time or other Sentiment and Comedy will bring 
THEIR husbands home and have THEIR nests upstairs too.  So we get 
on, we don't know how, but somehow."

She looked very young indeed to be the mother of two children, and 
I could not help pitying both her and them.  It was evident that 
the three daughters had grown up as they could and had had just as 
little haphazard instruction as qualified them to be their father's 
playthings in his idlest hours.  His pictorial tastes were 
consulted, I observed, in their respective styles of wearing their 
hair, the Beauty daughter being in the classic manner, the 
Sentiment daughter luxuriant and flowing, and the Comedy daughter 
in the arch style, with a good deal of sprightly forehead, and 
vivacious little curls dotted about the corners of her eyes.  They 
were dressed to correspond, though in a most untidy and negligent 
way.

Ada and I conversed with these young ladies and found them 
wonderfully like their father.  In the meanwhile Mr. Jarndyce (who 
had been rubbing his head to a great extent, and hinted at a change 
in the wind) talked with Mrs. Skimpole in a corner, where we could 
not help hearing the chink of money.  Mr. Skimpole had previously 
volunteered to go home with us and had withdrawn to dress himself 
for the purpose.

"My roses," he said when he came back, "take care of mama.  She is 
poorly to-day.  By going home with Mr. Jarndyce for a day or two, I 
shall hear the larks sing and preserve my amiability.  It has been 
tried, you know, and would be tried again if I remained at home."

"That bad man!" said the Comedy daughter.

"At the very time when he knew papa was lying ill by his 
wallflowers, looking at the blue sky," Laura complained.

"And when the smell of hay was in the air!" said Arethusa.

"It showed a want of poetry in the man," Mr. Skimpole assented, but 
with perfect good humour.  "It was coarse.  There was an absence of 
the finer touches of humanity in it!  My daughters have taken great 
offence," he explained to us, "at an honest man--"

"Not honest, papa.  Impossible!" they all three protested.

"At a rough kind of fellow--a sort of human hedgehog rolled up," 
said Mr. Skimpole, "who is a baker in this neighbourhood and from 
whom we borrowed a couple of armchairs.  We wanted a couple of arm-
chairs, and we hadn't got them, and therefore of course we looked 
to a man who HAD got them, to lend them.  Well! This morose person 
lent them, and we wore them out.  When they were worn out, he 
wanted them back.  He had them back.  He was contented, you will 
say.  Not at all.  He objected to their being worn.  I reasoned 
with him, and pointed out his mistake.  I said, 'Can you, at your 
time of life, be so headstrong, my friend, as to persist that an 
arm-chair is a thing to put upon a shelf and look at?  That it is 
an object to contemplate, to survey from a distance, to consider 
from a point of sight?  Don't you KNOW that these arm-chairs were 
borrowed to be sat upon?'  He was unreasonable and unpersuadable 
and used intemperate language.  Being as patient as I am at this 
minute, I addressed another appeal to him.  I said, 'Now, my good 
man, however our business capacities may vary, we are all children 
of one great mother, Nature.  On this blooming summer morning here 
you see me' (I was on the sofa) 'with flowers before me, fruit upon 
the table, the cloudless sky above me, the air full of fragrance, 
contemplating Nature.  I entreat you, by our common brotherhood, 
not to interpose between me and a subject so sublime, the absurd 
figure of an angry baker!'  But he did," said Mr. Skimpole, raising 
his laughing eyes in playful astonishinent; "he did interpose that 
ridiculous figure, and he does, and he will again.  And therefore I 
am very glad to get out of his way and to go home with my friend 
Jarndyce."

It seemed to escape his consideration that Mrs. Skimpole and the 
daughters remained behind to encounter the baker, but this was so 
old a story to all of them that it had become a matter of course.  
He took leave of his family with a tenderness as airy and graceful 
as any other aspect in which he showed himself and rode away with 
us in perfect harmony of mind.  We had an opportunity of seeing 
through some open doors, as we went downstairs, that his own 
apartment was a palace to the rest of the house.

I could have no anticipation, and I had none, that something very 
startling to me at the moment, and ever memorable to me in what 
ensued from it, was to happen before this day was out.  Our guest 
was in such spirits on the way home that I could do nothing but 
listen to him and wonder at him; nor was I alone in this, for Ada 
yielded to the same fascination.  As to my guardian, the wind, 
which had threatened to become fixed in the east when we left 
Somers Town, veered completely round before we were a couple of 
miles from it.

Whether of questionable childishness or not in any other matters, 
Mr. Skimpole had a child's enjoyment of change and bright weather.  
In no way wearied by his sallies on the road, he was in the 
drawing-room before any of us; and I heard him at the piano while I 
was yet looking after my housekeeping, singing refrains of 
barcaroles and drinking songs, Italian and German, by the score.

We were all assembled shortly before dinner, and he was still at 
the piano idly picking out in his luxurious way little strains of 
music, and talking between whiles of finishing some sketches of the 
ruined old Verulam wall to-morrow, which he had begun a year or two 
ago and had got tired of, when a card was brought in and my 
guardian read aloud in a surprised voice, "Sir Leicester Dedlock!"

The visitor was in the room while it was yet turning round with me 
and before I had the power to stir.  If I had had it, I should have 
hurried away.  I had not even the presence of mind, in my 
giddiness, to retire to Ada in the window, or to see the window, or 
to know where it was.  I heard my name and found that my guardian 
was presenting me before I could move to a chair.

"Pray be seated, Sir Leicester."

"Mr. Jarndyce," said Sir Leicester in reply as he bowed and seated 
himself, "I do myself the honour of calling here--"

"You do ME the honour, Sir Leicester."

"Thank you--of calling here on my road from Lincolnshire to express 
my regret that any cause of complaint, however strong, that I may 
have against a gentleman who--who is known to you and has been your 
host, and to whom therefore I will make no farther reference, 
should have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort and 
charge, from seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a 
polite and refined taste at my house, Chesney Wold."

"You are exceedingly obliging, Sir Leicester, and on behalf of 
those ladies (who are present) and for myself, I thank you very 
much."

"It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the 
reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion--
it is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me 
the honour so far to misapprehend my character as to induce you to 
believe that you would not have been received by my local 
establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy, 
which its members are instructed to show to all ladies and 
gentlemen who present themselves at that house.  I merely beg to 
observe, sir, that the fact is the reverse."

My guardian delicately dismissed this remark without making any 
verbal answer.

"It has given me pain, Mr. Jarndyce," Sir Leicester weightily 
proceeded.  "I assure you, sir, it has given--me--pain--to learn 
from the housekeeper at Chesney Wold that a gentleman who was in 
your company in that part of the county, and who would appear to 
possess a cultivated taste for the fine arts, was likewise deterred 
by some such cause from examining the family pictures with that 
leisure, that attention, that care, which he might have desired to 
bestow upon them and which some of them might possibly have 
repaid."  Here he produced a card and read, with much gravity and a 
little trouble, through his eye-glass, "Mr. Hirrold--Herald--
Harold--Skampling--Skumpling--I beg your pardon--Skimpole."

"This is Mr. Harold Skimpole," said my guardian, evidently 
surprised.

"Oh!" exclaimed Sir Leicester, "I am happy to meet Mr. Skimpole and 
to have the opportunity of tendering my personal regrets.  I hope, 
sir, that when you again find yourself in my part of the county, 
you will be under no similar sense of restraint."

"You are very obliging, Sir Leicester Dedlock.  So encouraged, I 
shall certainly give myself the pleasure and advantage of another 
visit to your beautiful house.  The owners of such places as 
Chesney Wold," said Mr. Skimpole with his usual happy and easy air, 
"are public benefactors.  They are good enough to maintain a number 
of delightful objects for the admiration and pleasure of us poor 
men; and not to reap all the admiration and pleasure that they 
yield is to be ungrateful to our benefactors."

Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this sentiment highly.  "An 
artist, sir?"

"No," returned Mr. Skimpole.  "A perfectly idle man.  A mere 
amateur."

Sir Leicester seemed to approve of this even more.  He hoped he 
might have the good fortune to be at Chesney Wold when Mr. Skimpole 
next came down into Lincolnshire.  Mr. Skimpole professed himself 
much flattered and honoured.

"Mr. Skimpole mentioned," pursued Sir Leicester, addressing himself 
again to my guardian, "mentioned to the house-keeper, who, as he 
may have observed, is an old and attached retainer of the family--"

("That is, when I walked through the house the other day, on the 
occasion of my going down to visit Miss Summerson and Miss Clare," 
Mr. Skimpole airily explained to us.)

"--That the friend with whom he had formerly been staying there was 
Mr. Jarndyce."  Sir Leicester bowed to the bearer of that name.  
"And hence I became aware of the circumstance for which I have 
professed my regret.  That this should have occurred to any 
gentleman, Mr. Jarndyce, but especially a gentleman formerly known 
to Lady Dedlock, and indeed claiming some distant connexion with 
her, and for whom (as I learn from my Lady herself) she entertains 
a high respect, does, I assure you, give--me--pain."

"Pray say no more about it, Sir Leicester," returned my guardian.  
"I am very sensible, as I am sure we all are, of your 
consideration.  Indeed the mistake was mine, and I ought to 
apologize for it."

I had not once looked up.  I had not seen the visitor and had not 
even appeared to myself to hear the conversation.  It surprises me 
to find that I can recall it, for it seemed to make no impression 
on me as it passed.  I heard them speaking, but my mind was so 
confused and my instinctive avoidance of this gentleman made his 
presence so distressing to me that I thought I understood nothing, 
through the rushing in my head and the beating of my heart.

"I mentioned the subject to Lady Dedlock," said Sir Leicester, 
rising, "and my Lady informed me that she had had the pleasure of 
exchanging a few words with Mr. Jarndyce and his wards on the 
occasion of an accidental meeting during their sojourn in the 
vicinity.  Permit me, Mr. Jarndyce, to repeat to yourself, and to 
these ladies, the assurance I have already tendered to Mr. 
Skimpole.  Circumstances undoubtedly prevent my saying that it 
would afford me any gratification to hear that Mr. Boythorn had 
favoured my house with his presence, but those circumstances are 
confined to that gentleman himself and do not extend beyond him."

"You know my old opinion of him," said Mr. Skimpole, lightly 
appealing to us.  "An amiable bull who is detenined to make every 
colour scarlet!"

Sir Leicester Dedlock coughed as if he could not possibly hear 
another word in reference to such an individual and took his leave 
with great ceremony and politeness.  I got to my own room with all 
possible speed and remained there until I had recovered my self-
command.  It had been very much disturbed, but I was thankful to 
find when I went downstairs again that they only rallied me for 
having been shy and mute before the great Lincolnshire baronet.

By that time I had made up my mind that the period was come when I 
must tell my guardian what I knew.  The possibility of my being 
brought into contact with my mother, of my being taken to her 
house, even of Mr. Skimpole's, however distantly associated with 
me, receiving kindnesses and obligations from her husband, was so 
painful that I felt I could no longer guide myself without his 
assistance.

When we had retired for the night, and Ada and I had had our usual 
talk in our pretty room, I went out at my door again and sought my 
guardian among his books.  I knew he always read at that hour, and 
as I drew near I saw the light shining out into the passage from 
his reading-lamp.

"May I come in, guardian?"

"Surely, little woman.  What's the matter?"

"Nothing is the matter.  I thought I would like to take this quiet 
time of saying a word to you about myself."

He put a chair for me, shut his book, and put it by, and turned his 
kind attentive face towards me.  I could not help observing that it 
wore that curious expression I had observed in it once before--on 
that night when he had said that he was in no trouble which I could 
readily understand.

"What concerns you, my dear Esther," said he, "concerns us all.  
You cannot be more ready to speak than I am to hear."

"I know that, guardian.  But I have such need of your advice and 
support.  Oh! You don't know how much need I have to-night."

He looked unprepared for my being so earnest, and even a little 
alarmed.

"Or how anxious I have been to speak to you," said I, "ever since 
the visitor was here to-day."

"The visitor, my dear!  Sir Leicester Dedlock?"

"Yes."

He folded his arms and sat looking at me with an air of the 
profoundest astonishment, awaiting what I should say next.  I did 
not know how to prepare him.

"Why, Esther," said he, breaking into a smile, "our visitor and you 
are the two last persons on earth I should have thought of 
connecting together!"

"Oh, yes, guardian, I know it.  And I too, but a little while ago."

The smile passed from his face, and he became graver than before.  
He crossed to the door to see that it was shut (but I had seen to 
that) and resumed his seat before me.

"Guardian," said I, "do you remensher, when we were overtaken by 
the thunder-storm, Lady Dedlock's speaking to you of her sister?"

"Of course.  Of course I do."

"And reminding you that she and her sister had differed, had gone 
their several ways?"

"Of course."

"Why did they separate, guardian?"

His face quite altered as he looked at me.  "My child, what 
questions are these!  I never knew.  No one but themselves ever did 
know, I believe.  Who could tell what the secrets of those two 
handsome and proud women were!  You have seen Lady Dedlock.  If you 
had ever seen her sister, you would know her to have been as 
resolute and haughty as she."

"Oh, guardian, I have seen her many and many a time!"

"Seen her?"

He paused a little, biting his lip.  "Then, Esther, when you spoke 
to me long ago of Boythorn, and when I told you that he was all but 
married once, and that the lady did not die, but died to him, and 
that that time had had its influence on his later life--did you 
know it all, and know who the lady was?"

"No, guardian," I returned, fearful of the light that dimly broke 
upon me.  "Nor do I know yet."

"Lady Dedlock's sister."

"And why," I could scarcely ask him, "why, guardian, pray tell me 
why were THEY parted?"

"It was her act, and she kept its motives in her inflexible heart.  
He afterwards did conjecture (but it was mere conjecture) that some 
injury which her haughty spirit had received in her cause of 
quarrel with her sister had wounded her beyond all reason, but she 
wrote him that from the date of that letter she died to him--as in 
literal truth she did--and that the resolution was exacted from her 
by her knowledge of his proud temper and his strained sense of 
honour, which were both her nature too.  In consideration for those 
master points in him, and even in consideration for them in 
herself, she made the sacrifice, she said, and would live in it and 
die in it.  She did both, I fear; certainly he never saw her, never 
heard of her from that hour.  Nor did any one."

"Oh, guardian, what have I done!" I cried, giving way to my grief; 
"what sorrow have I innocently caused!"

"You caused, Esther?"

"Yes, guardian.  Innocently, but most surely.  That secluded sister 
is my first remembrance."

"No, no!" he cried, starting.

"Yes, guardian, yes!  And HER sister is my mother!"

I would have told him all my mother's letter, but he would not hear 
it then.  He spoke so tenderly and wisely to me, and he put so 
plainly before me all I had myself imperfectly thought and hoped in 
my better state of mind, that, penetrated as I had been with 
fervent gratitude towards him through so many years, I believed I 
had never loved him so dearly, never thanked him in my heart so 
fully, as I did that night.  And when he had taken me to my room 
and kissed me at the door, and when at last I lay down to sleep, my 
thought was how could I ever be busy enough, how could I ever be 
good enough, how in my little way could I ever hope to be forgetful 
enough of myself, devoted enough to him, and useful enough to 
others, to show him how I blessed and honoured him.



CHAPTER XLIV

The Letter and the Answer


My guardian called me into his room next morning, and then I told 
him what had been left untold on the previous night.  There was 
nothing to be done, he said, but to keep the secret and to avoid 
another such encounter as that of yesterday.  He understood my 
feeling and entirely shared it.  He charged himself even with 
restraining Mr. Skimpole from improving his opportunity.  One 
person whom he need not name to me, it was not now possible for him 
to advise or help.  He wished it were, but no such thing could be.  
If her mistrust of the lawyer whom she had mentioned were well-
founded, which he scarcely doubted, he dreaded discovery.  He knew 
something of him, both by sight and by reputation, and it was 
certain that he was a dangerous man.  Whatever happened, he 
repeatedly impressed upon me with anxious affection and kindness, I 
was as innocent of as himself and as unable to influence.

"Nor do I understand," said he, "that any doubts tend towards you, 
my dear.  Much suspicion may exist without that connexion."

"With the lawyer," I returned.  "But two other persons have come 
into my mind since I have been anxious.  Then I told him all about 
Mr. Guppy, who I feared might have had his vague surmises when I 
little understood his meaning, but in whose silence after our last 
interview I expressed perfect confidence.

"Well," said my guardian.  "Then we may dismiss him for the 
present.  Who is the other?"

I called to his recollection the French maid and the eager offer of 
herself she had made to me.

"Ha!" he returned thoughtfully.  "That is a more alarming person 
than the clerk.  But after all, my dear, it was but seeking for a 
new service.  She had seen you and Ada a little while before, and 
it was natural that you should come into her head.  She merely 
proposed herself for your maid, you know.  She did nothing more."

"Her manner was strange," said I.

"Yes, and her manner was strange when she took her shoes off and 
showed that cool relish for a walk that might have ended in her 
death-bed," said my guardian.  "It would be useless self-distress 
and torment to reckon up such chances and possibilities.  There are 
very few harmless circumstances that would not seem full of 
perilous meaning, so considered.  Be hopeful, little woman.  You 
can be nothing better than yourself; be that, through this 
knowledge, as you were before you had it.  It is the best you can 
do for everybody's sake.  I, sharing the secret with you--"

"And lightening it, guardian, so much," said I.

"--will be attentive to what passes in that family, so far as I can 
observe it from my distance.  And if the time should come when I 
can stretch out a hand to render the least service to one whom it 
is better not to name even here, I will not fail to do it for her 
dear daughter's sake."

I thanked him with my whole heart.  What could I ever do but thank 
him!  I was going out at the door when he asked me to stay a 
moment.  Quickly turning round, I saw that same expression on his 
face again; and all at once, I don't know how, it flashed upon me 
as a new and far-off possibility that I understood it.

"My dear Esther," said my guardian, "I have long had something in 
my thoughts that I have wished to say to you."

"Indeed?"

"I have had some difficulty in approaching it, and I still have.  I 
should wish it to be so deliberately said, and so deliberately 
considered.  Would you object to my writing it?"

"Dear guardian, how could I object to your writing anything for ME 
to read?"

"Then see, my love," said he with his cheery smile, "am I at this 
moment quite as plain and easy--do I seem as open, as honest and 
old-fashioned--as I am at any time?"

I answered in all earnestness, "Quite."  With the strictest truth, 
for his momentary hesitation was gone (it had not lasted a minute), 
and his fine, sensible, cordial, sterling manner was restored.

"Do I look as if I suppressed anything, meant anything but what I 
said, had any reservation at all, no matter what?" said he with his 
bright clear eyes on mine.

I answered, most assuredly he did not.

"Can you fully trust me, and thoroughly rely on what I profess, 
Esther?"

"Most thoroughly," said I with my whole heart.

"My dear girl," returned my guardian, "give me your hand."

He took it in his, holding me lightly with his arm, and looking 
down into my face with the same genuine freshness and faithfulness 
of manner--the old protecting manner which had made that house my 
home in a moment--said, "You have wrought changes in me, little 
woman, since the winter day in the stage-coach.  First and last you 
have done me a world of good since that time."

"Ah, guardian, what have you done for me since that time!"

"But," said he, "that is not to be remembered now."

"It never can be forgotten."

"Yes, Esther," said he with a gentle seriousness, "it is to be 
forgotten now, to be forgotten for a while.  You are only to 
remember now that nothing can change me as you know me.  Can you 
feel quite assured of that, my dear?"

"I can, and I do," I said.

"That's much," he answered.  "That's everything.  But I must not 
take that at a word.  I will not write this something in my 
thoughts until you have quite resolved within yourself that nothing 
can change me as you know me.  If you doubt that in the least 
degree, I will never write it.  If you are sure of that, on good 
consideration, send Charley to me this night week--'for the 
letter.'  But if you are not quite certain, never send.  Mind, I 
trust to your truth, in this thing as in everything.  If you are 
not quite certain on that one point, never send!"

"Guardian," said I, "I am already certain, I can no more be changed 
in that conviction than you can be changed towards me.  I shall 
send Charley for the letter."

He shook my hand and said no more.  Nor was any more said in 
reference to this conversation, either by him or me, through the 
whole week.  When the appointed night came, I said to Charley as 
soon as I was alone, "Go and knock at Mr. Jarndyce's door, Charley, 
and say you have come from me--'for the letter.'"  Charley went up 
the stairs, and down the stairs, and along the passages--the zig-
zag way about the old-fashioned house seemed very long in my 
listening ears that night--and so came back, along the passages, 
and down the stairs, and up the stairs, and brought the letter.  
"Lay it on the table, Charley," said I.  So Charley laid it on the 
table and went to bed, and I sat looking at it without taking it 
up, thinking of many things.

I began with my overshadowed childhood, and passed through those 
timid days to the heavy time when my aunt lay dead, with her 
resolute face so cold and set, and when I was more solitary with 
Mrs. Rachael than if I had had no one in the world to speak to or 
to look at.  I passed to the altered days when I was so blest as to 
find friends in all around me, and to be beloved.  I came to the 
time when I first saw my dear girl and was received into that 
sisterly affection which was the grace and beauty of my life.  I 
recalled the first bright gleam of welcome which had shone out of 
those very windows upon our expectant faces on that cold bright 
night, and which had never paled.  I lived my happy life there over 
again, I went through my illness and recovery, I thought of myself 
so altered and of those around me so unchanged; and all this 
happiness shone like a light from one central figure, represented 
before me by the letter on the table.

I opened it and read it.  It was so impressive in its love for me, 
and in the unselfish caution it gave me, and the consideration it 
showed for me in every word, that my eyes were too often blinded to 
read much at a time.  But I read it through three times before I 
laid it down.  I had thought beforehand that I knew its purport, 
and I did.  It asked me, would I be the mistress of Bleak House.

It was not a love letter, though it expressed so much love, but was 
written just as he would at any time have spoken to me.  I saw his 
face, and heard his voice, and felt the influence of his kind 
protecting manner in every line.  It addressed me as if our places 
were reversed, as if all the good deeds had been mine and all the 
feelings they had awakened his.  It dwelt on my being young, and he 
past the prime of life; on his having attained a ripe age, while I 
was a child; on his writing to me with a silvered head, and knowing 
all this so well as to set it in full before me for mature 
deliberation.  It told me that I would gain nothing by such a 
marriage and lose nothing by rejecting it, for no new relation 
could enhance the tenderness in which he held me, and whatever my 
decision was, he was certain it would be right.  But he had 
considered this step anew since our late confidence and had decided 
on taking it, if it only served to show me through one poor 
instance that the whole world would readily unite to falsify the 
stern prediction of my childhood.  I was the last to know what 
happiness I could bestow upon him, but of that he said no more, for 
I was always to remember that I owed him nothing and that he was my 
debtor, and for very much.  He had often thought of our future, and 
foreseeing that the time must come, and fearing that it might come 
soon, when Ada (now very nearly of age) would leave us, and when 
our present mode of life must be broken up, had become accustomed 
to reflect on this proposal.  Thus he made it.  If I felt that I 
could ever give him the best right he could have to be my 
protector, and if I felt that I could happily and justly become the 
dear companion of his remaining life, superior to all lighter 
chances and changes than death, even then he could not have me bind 
myself irrevocably while this letter was yet so new to me, but even 
then I must have ample time for reconsideration.  In that case, or 
in the opposite case, let him be unchanged in his old relation, in 
his old manner, in the old name by which I called him.  And as to 
his bright Dame Durden and little housekeeper, she would ever be 
the same, he knew.

This was the substance of the letter, written throughout with a 
justice and a dignity as if he were indeed my responsible guardian 
impartially representing the proposal of a friend against whom in 
his integrity he stated the full case.

But he did not hint to me that when I had been better looking he 
had had this same proceeding in his thoughts and had refrained from 
it.  That when my old face was gone from me, and I had no 
attractions, he could love me just as well as in my fairer days.  
That the discovery of my birth gave him no shock.  That his 
generosity rose above my disfigurement and my inheritance of shame.  
That the more I stood in need of such fidelity, the more firmly I 
might trust in him to the last.

But I knew it, I knew it well now.  It came upon me as the close of 
the benignant history I had been pursuing, and I felt that I had 
but one thing to do.  To devote my life to his happiness was to 
thank him poorly, and what had I wished for the other night but 
some new means of thanking him?

Still I cried very much, not only in the fullness of my heart after 
reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect--
for it was strange though I had expected the contents--but as if 
something for which there was no name or distinct idea were 
indefinitely lost to me.  I was very happy, very thankful, very 
hopeful; but I cried very much.

By and by I went to my old glass.  My eyes were red and swollen, 
and I said, "Oh, Esther, Esther, can that be you!"  I am afraid the 
face in the glass was going to cry again at this reproach, but I 
held up my finger at it, and it stopped.

"That is more like the composed look you comforted me with, my 
dear, when you showed me such a change!" said I, beginning to let 
down my hair.  "When you are mistress of Bleak House, you are to be 
as cheerful as a bird.  In fact, you are always to be cheerful; so 
let us begin for once and for all."

I went on with my hair now, quite comfortably.  I sobbed a little 
still, but that was because I had been crying, not because I was 
crying then.

"And so Esther, my dear, you are happy for life.  Happy with your 
best friends, happy in your old home, happy in the power of doing a 
great deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of the best of 
men."

I thought, all at once, if my guardian had married some one else, 
how should I have felt, and what should I have done!  That would 
have been a change indeed.  It presented my life in such a new and 
blank form that I rang my housekeeping keys and gave them a kiss 
before I laid them down in their basket again.

Then I went on to think, as I dressed my hair before the glass, how 
often had I considered within myself that the deep traces of my 
illness and the circumstances of my birth were only new reasons why 
I should be busy, busy, busy--useful, amiable, serviceable, in all 
honest, unpretending ways.  This was a good time, to be sure, to 
sit down morbidly and cry!  As to its seeming at all strange to me 
at first (if that were any excuse for crying, which it was not) 
that I was one day to be the mistress of Bleak House, why should it 
seem strange?  Other people had thought of such things, if I had 
not.  "Don't you remember, my plain dear," I asked myself, looking 
at the glass, "what Mrs. Woodcourt said before those scars were 
there about your marrying--"

Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance.  The dried remains 
of the flowers.  It would be better not to keep them now.  They had 
only been preserved in memory of something wholly past and gone, 
but it would be better not to keep them now.

They were in a book, and it happened to be in the next room--our 
sitting-room, dividing Ada's chamber from mine.  I took a candle 
and went softly in to fetch it from its shelf.  After I had it in 
my hand, I saw my beautiful darling, through the open door, lying 
asleep, and I stole in to kiss her.

It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no reason for crying; 
but I dropped a tear upon her dear face, and another, and another.  
Weaker than that, I took the withered flowers out and put them for 
a moment to her lips.  I thought about her love for Richard, 
though, indeed, the flowers had nothing to do with that.  Then I 
took them into my own room and burned them at the candle, and they 
were dust in an instant.

On entering the breakfast-room next morning, I found my guardian 
just as usual, quite as frank, as open, and free.  There being not 
the least constraint in his manner, there was none (or I think 
there was none) in mine.  I was with him several times in the 
course of the morning, in and out, when there was no one there, and 
I thought it not unlikely that he might speak to me about the 
letter, but he did not say a word.

So, on the next morning, and the next, and for at least a week, 
over which time Mr. Skimpole prolonged his stay.  I expected, every 
day, that my guardian might speak to me about the letter, but he 
never did.

I thought then, growing uneasy, that I ought to write an answer.  I 
tried over and over again in my own room at night, but I could not 
write an answer that at all began like a good answer, so I thought 
each night I would wait one more day.  And I waited seven more 
days, and he never said a word.

At last, Mr. Skimpole having departed, we three were one afternoon 
going out for a ride; and I, being dressed before Ada and going 
down, came upon my guardian, with his back towards me, standing at 
the drawing-room window looking out.

He turned on my coming in and said, smiling, "Aye, it's you, little 
woman, is it?" and looked out again.

I had made up my mind to speak to him now.  In short, I had come 
down on purpose.  "Guardian," I said, rather hesitating and 
trembling, "when would you like to have the answer to the letter 
Charley came for?"

"When it's ready, my dear," he replied.

"I think it is ready," said I.

"Is Charley to bring it?" he asked pleasantly.

"No.  I have brought it myself, guardian," I returned.

I put my two arms round his neck and kissed him, and he said was 
this the mistress of Bleak House, and I said yes; and it made no 
difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said 
nothing to my precious pet about it.



CHAPTER XLV

In Trust


One morning when I had done jingling about with my baskets of keys, 
as my beauty and I were walking round and round the garden I 
happened to turn my eyes towards the house and saw a long thin 
shadow going in which looked like Mr. Vholes.  Ada had been telling 
me only that morning of her hopes that Richard might exhaust his 
ardour in the Chancery suit by being so very earnest in it; and 
therefore, not to damp my dear girl's spirits, I said nothing about 
Mr. Vholes's shadow.

Presently came Charley, lightly winding among the bushes and 
tripping along the paths, as rosy and pretty as one of Flora's 
attendants instead of my maid, saying, "Oh, if you please, miss, 
would you step and speak to Mr. Jarndyce!"

It was one of Charley's peculiarities that whenever she was charged 
with a message she always began to deliver it as soon as she 
beheld, at any distance, the person for whom it was intended.  
Therefore I saw Charley asking me in her usual form of words to 
"step and speak" to Mr. Jarndyce long before I heard her.  And when 
I did hear her, she had said it so often that she was out of 
breath.

I told Ada I would make haste back and inquired of Charley as we 
went in whether there was not a gentleman with Mr. Jarndyce.  To 
which Charley, whose grammar, I confess to my shame, never did any 
credit to my educational powers, replied, "Yes, miss.  Him as come 
down in the country with Mr. Richard."

A more complete contrast than my guardian and Mr. Vholes I suppose 
there could not be.  I found them looking at one another across a 
table, the one so open and the other so close, the one so broad and 
upright and the other so narrow and stooping, the one giving out 
what he had to say in such a rich ringing voice and the other 
keeping it in in such a cold-blooded, gasping, fish-like manner 
that I thought I never had seen two people so unmatched.

"You know Mr. Vholes, my dear," said my guardian.  Not with the 
greatest urbanity, I must say.

Mr. Vholes rose, gloved and buttoned up as usual, and seated 
himself again, just as he had seated himself beside Richard in the 
gig.  Not having Richard to look at, he looked straight before him.

"Mr. Vholes," said my guardian, eyeing his black figure as if he 
were a bird of ill omen, "has brought an ugly report of our most 
unfortunate Rick."  Laying a marked emphasis on "most unfortunate" 
as if the words were rather descriptive of his connexion with Mr. 
Vholes.

I sat down between them; Mr. Vholes remained immovable, except that 
he secretly picked at one of the red pimples on his yellow face 
with his black glove.

"And as Rick and you are happily good friends, I should like to 
know," said my guardian, "what you think, my dear.  Would you be so 
good as to--as to speak up, Mr. Vholes?"

Doing anything but that, Mr. Vholes observed, "I have been saying 
that I have reason to know, Miss Summerson, as Mr. C.'s 
professional adviser, that Mr. C.'s circumstances are at the 
present moment in an embarrassed state.  Not so much in point of 
amount as owing to the peculiar and pressing nature of liabilities 
Mr. C. has incurred and the means he has of liquidating or meeting 
the same.  I have staved off many little matters for Mr. C., but 
there is a limit to staving off, and we have reached it.  I have 
made some advances out of pocket to accommodate these 
unpleasantnesses, but I necessarily look to being repaid, for I do 
not pretend to be a man of capital, and I have a father to support 
in the Vale of Taunton, besides striving to realize some little 
independence for three dear girls at home.  My apprehension is, Mr. 
C.'s circumstances being such, lest it should end in his obtaining 
leave to part with his commission, which at all events is desirable 
to be made known to his connexions."

Mr. Vholes, who had looked at me while speaking, here emerged into 
the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was 
his tone, and looked before him again.

"Imagine the poor fellow without even his present resource," said 
my guardian to me.  "Yet what can I do?  You know him, Esther.  He 
would never accept of help from me now.  To offer it or hint at it 
would be to drive him to an extremity, if nothing else did."

Mr. Vholes hereupon addressed me again.

"What Mr. Jarndyce remarks, miss, is no doubt the case, and is the 
difficulty.  I do not see that anything is to be done, I do not say 
that anything is to be done.  Far from it.  I merely come down here 
under the seal of confidence and mention it in order that 
everything may be openly carried on and that it may not be said 
afterwards that everything was not openly carried on.  My wish is 
that everything should be openly carried on.  I desire to leave a 
good name behind me.  If I consulted merely my own interests with 
Mr. C., I should not be here.  So insurmountable, as you must well 
know, would be his objections.  This is not a professional 
attendance.  This can he charged to nobody.  I have no interest in 
it except as a member of society and a father--AND a son," said Mr. 
Vholes, who had nearly forgotten that point.

It appeared to us that Mr. Vholes said neither more nor less than 
the truth in intimating that he sought to divide the 
responsibility, such as it was, of knowing Richard's situation.  I 
could only suggest that I should go down to Deal, where Richard was 
then stationed, and see him, and try if it were possible to avert 
the worst.  Without consulting Mr. Vholes on this point, I took my 
guardian aside to propose it, while Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to 
the fire and warmed his funeral gloves.

The fatigue of the journey formed an immediate objection on my 
guardian's part, but as I saw he had no other, and as I was only 
too happy to go, I got his consent.  We had then merely to dispose 
of Mr. Vholes.

"Well, sir," said Mr. Jarndyce, "Miss Summerson will communicate 
with Mr. Carstone, and you can only hope that his position may be 
yet retrievable.  You will allow me to order you lunch after your 
journey, sir."

"I thank you, Mr. Jarndyce," said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long 
black sleeve to check the ringing of the bell, "not any.  I thank 
you, no, not a morsel.  My digestion is much impaired, and I am but 
a poor knife and fork at any time.  If I was to partake of solid 
food at this period of the day, I don't know what the consequences 
might be.  Everything having been openly carried on, sir, I will 
now with your permission take my leave."

"And I would that you could take your leave, and we could all take 
our leave, Mr. Vholes," returned my guardian bitterly, "of a cause 
you know of."

Mr. Vholes, whose black dye was so deep from head to foot that it 
had quite steamed before the fire, diffusing a very unpleasant 
perfume, made a short one-sided inclination of his head from the 
neck and slowly shook it.

"We whose ambition it is to be looked upon in the light of 
respectable practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the 
wheel.  We do it, sir.  At least, I do it myself; and I wish to 
think well of my professional brethren, one and all.  You are 
sensible of an obligation not to refer to me, miss, in 
communicating with Mr. C.?"

I said I would be careful not to do it.

"Just so, miss.  Good morning.  Mr. Jarndyce, good morning, sir."  
Mr. Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any 
hand in it, on my fingers, and then on my guardian's fingers, and 
took his long thin shadow away.  I thought of it on the outside of 
the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and 
London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along.

Of course it became necessary to tell Ada where I was going and why 
I was going, and of course she was anxious and distressed.  But she 
was too true to Richard to say anything but words of pity and words 
of excuse, and in a more loving spirit still--my dear devoted 
girl!--she wrote him a long letter, of which I took charge.

Charley was to be my travelling companion, though I am sure I 
wanted none and would willingly have left her at home.  We all went 
to London that afternoon, and finding two places in the mail, 
secured them.  At our usual bed-time, Charley and I were rolling 
away seaward with the Kentish letters.

It was a night's journey in those coach times, but we had the mail 
to ourselves and did not find the night very tedious.  It passed 
with me as I suppose it would with most people under such 
circumstances.  At one while my journey looked hopeful, and at 
another hopeless.  Now I thought I should do some good, and now I 
wondered how I could ever have supposed so.  Now it seemed one of 
the most reasonable things in the world that I should have come, 
and now one of the most unreasonable.  In what state I should find 
Richard, what I should say to him, and what he would say to me 
occupied my mind by turns with these two states of feeling; and the 
wheels seemed to play one tune (to which the burden of my 
guardian's letter set itself) over and over again all night.

At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal, and very gloomy 
they were upon a raw misty morning.  The long flat beach, with its 
little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of 
capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with 
tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with 
grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever 
saw.  The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else 
was moving but a few early ropemakers, who, with the yarn twisted 
round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of 
existence, they were spinning themselves into cordage.

But when we got into a warm room in an excellent hotel and sat 
down, comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it 
was too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more 
cheerful.  Our little room was like a ship's cabin, and that 
delighted Charley very much.  Then the fog began to rise like a 
curtain, and numbers of ships that we had had no idea were near 
appeared.  I don't know how many sail the waiter told us were then 
lying in the downs.  Some of these vessels were of grand size--one 
was a large Indiaman just come home; and when the sun shone through 
the clouds, maktng silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which 
these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of 
boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the 
shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything 
around them, was most beautiful.

The large Indiaman was our great attraction because she had come 
into the downs in the night.  She was surrounded by boats, and we 
said how glad the people on board of her must be to come ashore.  
Charley was curious, too, about the voyage, and about the heat in 
India, and the serpents and the tigers; and as she picked up such 
information much faster than grammar, I told her what I knew on 
those points.  I told her, too, how people in such voyages were 
sometimes wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the 
intrepidity and humanity of one man.  And Charley asking how that 
could be, I told her how we knew at home of such a case.

I had thought of sending Richard a note saying I was there, but it 
seemed so much better to go to him without preparation.  As he 
lived in barracks I was a little doubtful whether this was 
feasible, but we went out to reconnoitre.  Peeping in at the gate 
of the barrack-yard, we found everything very quiet at that time in 
the morning, and I asked a sergeant standing on the guardhouse-
steps where he lived.  He sent a man before to show me, who went up 
some bare stairs, and knocked with his knuckles at a door, and left 
us.

"Now then!" cried Richard from within.  So I left Charley in the 
little passage, and going on to the half-open door, said, "Can I 
come in, Richard?  It's only Dame Durden."

He was writing at a table, with a great confusion of clothes, tin 
cases, books, boots, brushes, and portmanteaus strewn all about the 
floor.  He was only half dressed--in plain clothes, I observed, not 
in uniform--and his hair was unbrushed, and he looked as wild as 
his room.  All this I saw after he had heartily welcomed me and I 
was seated near him, for he started upon hearing my voice and 
caught me in his arms in a moment.  Dear Richard!  He was ever the 
same to me.  Down to--ah, poor poor fellow!--to the end, he never 
received me but with something of his old merry boyish manner.

"Good heaven, my dear little woman," said he, "how do you come 
here?  Who could have thought of seeing you!  Nothing the matter?  
Ada is well?"

"Quite well.  Lovelier than ever, Richard!"

"Ah!" he said, lenning back in his chair.  "My poor cousin!  I was 
writing to you, Esther."

So worn and haggard as he looked, even in the fullness of his 
handsome youth, leaning back in his chair and crushing the closely 
written sheet of paper in his hand!

"Have you been at the trouble of writing all that, and am I not to 
read it after all?" I asked.

"Oh, my dear," he returned with a hopeless gesture.  "You may read 
it in the whole room.  It is all over here."

I mildly entreated him not to be despondent.  I told him that I had 
heard by chance of his being in difficulty and had come to consult 
with him what could best be done.

"Like you, Esther, but useless, and so NOT like you!" said he with 
a melancholy smile.  "I am away on leave this day--should have been 
gone in another hour--and that is to smooth it over, for my selling 
out.  Well! Let bygones be bygones.  So this calling follows the 
rest.  I only want to have been in the church to have made the 
round of all the professions."

"Richard," I urged, "it is not so hopeless as that?"

"Esther," he returned, "it is indeed.  I am just so near disgrace 
as that those who are put in authority over me (as the catechism 
goes) would far rather be without me than with me.  And they are 
right.  Apart from debts and duns and all such drawbacks, I am not 
fit even for this employment.  I have no care, no mind, no heart, 
no soul, but for one thing.  Why, if this bubble hadn't broken 
now," he said, tearing the letter he had written into fragments and 
moodily casting them away, by driblets, "how could I have gone 
abroad?  I must have been ordered abroad, but how could I have 
gone?  How could I, with my experience of that thing, trust even 
Vholes unless I was at his back!"

I suppose he knew by my face what I was about to say, but he caught 
the hand I had laid upon his arm and touched my own lips with it to 
prevent me from going on.

"No, Dame Durden!  Two subjects I forbid--must forbid.  The first 
is John Jarndyce.  The second, you know what.  Call it madness, and 
I tell you I can't help it now, and can't be sane.  But it is no 
such thing; it is the one object I have to pursue.  It is a pity I 
ever was prevailed upon to turn out of my road for any other.  It 
would be wisdom to abandon it now, after all the time, anxiety, and 
pains I have bestowed upon it!  Oh, yes, true wisdom.  It would be 
very agreeable, too, to some people; but I never will."

He was in that mood in which I thought it best not to increase his 
determination (if anything could increase it) by opposing him.  I 
took out Ada's letter and put it in his hand.

"Am I to read it now?" he asked.

As I told him yes, he laid it on the table, and resting his head 
upon his hand, began.  He had not read far when he rested his head 
upon his two hands--to hide his face from me.  In a little while he 
rose as if the light were bad and went to the window.  He finished 
reading it there, with his back towards me, and after he had 
finished and had folded it up, stood there for some minutes with 
the letter in his hand.  When he came back to his chair, I saw 
tears in his eyes.

"Of course, Esther, you know what she says here?"  He spoke in a 
softened voice and kissed the letter as he asked me.

"Yes, Richard."

"Offers me," he went on, tapping his foot upon the floor, "the 
little inheritance she is certain of so soon--just as little and as 
much as I have wasted--and begs and prays me to take it, set myself 
right with it, and remain in the service."

"I know your welfare to be the dearest wish of her heart," said I.  
"And, oh, my dear Richard, Ada's is a noble heart."

"I am sure it is.  I--I wish I was dead!"

He went back to the window, and laying his arm across it, leaned 
his head down on his arm.  It greatly affected me to see him so, 
but I hoped he might become more yielding, and I remained silent.  
My experience was very limited; I was not at all prepared for his 
rousing himself out of this emotion to a new sense of injury.

"And this is the heart that the same John Jarndyce, who is not 
otherwise to be mentioned between us, stepped in to estrange from 
me," said he indignantly.  "And the dear girl makes me this 
generous offer from under the same John Jarndyce's roof, and with 
the same John Jarndyce's gracious consent and connivance, I dare 
say, as a new means of buying me off."

"Richard!" I cried out, rising hastily.  "I will not hear you say 
such shameful words!"  I was very angry with him indeed, for the 
first time in my life, but it only lasted a moment.  When I saw his 
worn young face looking at me as if he were sorry, I put my hand on 
his shoulder and said, "If you please, my dear Richard, do not 
speak in such a tone to me.  Consider!"

He blamed himself exceedingly and told me in the most generous 
manner that he had been very wrong and that he begged my pardon a 
thousand times.  At that I laughed, but trembled a little too, for 
I was rather fluttered after being so fiery.

"To accept this offer, my dear Esther," said he, sitting down 
beside me and resuming our conversation, "--once more, pray, pray 
forgive me; I am deeply grieved--to accept my dearest cousin's 
offer is, I need not say, impossible.  Besides, I have letters and 
papers that I could show you which would convince you it is all 
over here.  I have done with the red coat, believe me.  But it is 
some satisfaction, in the midst of my troubles and perplexities, to 
know that I am pressing Ada's interests in pressing my own.  Vholes 
has his shoulder to the wheel, and he cannot help urging it on as 
much for her as for me, thank God!"

His sanguine hopes were rising within him and lighting up his 
features, but they made his face more sad to me than it had been 
before.

"No, no!" cried Richard exultingly.  "If every farthing of Ada's 
little fortune were mine, no part of it should be spent in 
retaining me in what I am not fit for, can take no interest in, and 
am weary of.  It should be devoted to what promises a better 
return, and should be used where she has a larger stake.  Don't be 
uneasy for me!  I shall now have only one thing on my mind, and 
Vholes and I will work it.  I shall not be without means.  Free of 
my commission, I shall be able to compound with some small usurers 
who will hear of nothing but their bond now--Vholes says so.  I 
should have a balance in my favour anyway, but that would swell it.  
Come, come!  You shall carry a letter to Ada from me, Esther, and 
you must both of you be more hopeful of me and not believe that I 
am quite cast away just yet, my dear."

I will not repeat what I said to Richard.  I know it was tiresome, 
and nobody is to suppose for a moment that it was at all wise.  It 
only came from my heart.  He heard it patiently and feelingly, but 
I saw that on the two subjects he had reserved it was at present 
hopeless to make any representation to him.  I saw too, and had 
experienced in this very interview, the sense of my guardian's 
remark that it was even more mischievous to use persuasion with him 
than to leave him as he was.

Therefore I was driven at last to asking Richard if he would mind 
convincing me that it really was all over there, as he had said, 
and that it was not his mere impression.  He showed me without 
hesitation a correspondence making it quite plain that his 
retirement was arranged.  I found, from what he told me, that Mr. 
Vholes had copies of these papers and had been in consultation with 
him throughout.  Beyond ascertaining this, and having been the 
bearer of Ada's letter, and being (as I was going to be) Richard's 
companion back to London, I had done no good by coming down.  
Admitting this to myself with a reluctant heart, I said I would 
return to the hotel and wait until he joined me there, so he threw 
a cloak over his shoulders and saw me to the gate, and Charley and 
I went back along the beach.

There was a concourse of people in one spot, surrounding some naval 
officers who were landing from a boat, and pressing about them with 
unusual interest.  I said to Charley this would be one of the great 
Indiaman's boats now, and we stopped to look.

The gentlemen came slowly up from the waterside, speaking good-
humouredly to each other and to the people around and glancing 
about them as if they were glad to be in England again.  "Charley, 
Charley," said I, "come away!"  And I hurried on so swiftly that my 
little maid was surprised.

It was not until we were shut up in our cabin-room and I had had 
time to take breath that I began to think why I had made such 
haste.  In one of the sunburnt faces I had recognized Mr. Allan 
Woodcourt, and I had been afraid of his recognizing me.  I had been 
unwilling that he should see my altered looks.  I had been taken by 
surprise, and my courage had quite failed me.

But I knew this would not do, and I now said to myself, "My dear, 
there is no reason--there is and there can be no reason at all--why 
it should be worse for you now than it ever has been.  What you 
were last month, you are to-day; you are no worse, you are no 
better.  This is not your resolution; call it up, Esther, call it 
up!"  I was in a great tremble--with running--and at first was 
quite unable to calm myself; but I got better, and I was very glad 
to know it.

The party came to the hotel.  I heard them speaking on the 
staircase.  I was sure it was the same gentlemen because I knew 
their voices again--I mean I knew Mr. Woodcourt's.  It would still 
have been a great relief to me to have gone away without making 
myself known, but I was determined not to do so.  "No, my dear, no.  
No, no, no!"

I untied my bonnet and put my veil half up--I think I mean half 
down, but it matters very little--and wrote on one of my cards that 
I happened to be there with Mr. Richard Carstone, and I sent it in 
to Mr. Woodcourt.  He came immediately.  I told him I was rejoiced 
to be by chance among the first to welcome him home to England.  
And I saw that he was very sorry for me.

"You have been in shipwreck and peril since you left us, Mr. 
Woodcourt," said I, "but we can hardly call that a misfortune which 
enabled you to be so useful and so brave.  We read of it with the 
truest interest.  It first came to my knowledge through your old 
patient, poor Miss Flite, when I was recovering from my severe 
illness."

"Ah! Little Miss Flite!" he said.  "She lives the same life yet?"

"Just the same."

I was so comfortable with myself now as not to mind the veil and to 
be able to put it aside.

"Her gratitude to you, Mr. Woodcourt, is delightful.  She is a most 
affectionate creature, as I have reason to say."

"You--you have found her so?" he returned.  "I--I am glad of that."  
He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak.

"I assure you," said I, "that I was deeply touched by her sympathy 
and pleasure at the time I have referred to."

"I was grieved to hear that you had been very ill."

"I was very ill."

"But you have quite recovered?"

"I have quite recovered my health and my cheerfulness," said I.  
"You know how good my guardian is and what a happy life we lead, 
and I have everything to be thankful for and nothing in the world 
to desire."

I felt as if he had greater commiseration for me than I had ever 
had for myself.  It inspired me with new fortitude and new calmness 
to find that it was I who was under the necessity of reassuring 
him.  I spoke to him of his voyage out and home, and of his future 
plans, and of his probable return to India.  He said that was very 
doubtful.  He had not found himself more favoured by fortune there 
than here.  He had gone out a poor ship's surgeon and had come home 
nothing better.  While we were talking, and when I was glad to 
believe that I had alleviated (if I may use such a term) the shock 
he had had in seeing me, Richard came in.  He had heard downstairs 
who was with me, and they met with cordial pleasure.

I saw that after their first greetings were over, and when they 
spoke of Richard's career, Mr. Woodcourt had a perception that all 
was not going well with him.  He frequently glanced at his face as 
if there were something in it that gave him pain, and more than 
once he looked towards me as though he sought to ascertain whether 
I knew what the truth was.  Yet Richard was in one of his sanguine 
states and in good spirits and was thoroughly pleased to see Mr. 
Woodcourt again, whom he had always liked.

Richard proposed that we all should go to London together; but Mr. 
Woodcourt, having to remain by his ship a little longer, could not 
join us.  He dined with us, however, at an early hour, and became 
so much more like what he used to be that I was still more at peace 
to think I had been able to soften his regrets.  Yet his mind was 
not relieved of Richard.  When the coach was almost ready and 
Richard ran down to look after his luggage, he spoke to me about 
him.

I was not sure that I had a right to lay his whole story open, but 
I referred in a few words to his estrangement from Mr Jarndyce and 
to his being entangled in the ill-fated Chancery suit.  Mr. 
Woodcourt listened with interest and expressed his regret.

"I saw you observe him rather closely," said I, "Do you think him 
so changed?"

"He is changed," he returned, shaking his head.

I felt the blood rush into my face for the first time, but it was 
only an instantaneous emotion.  I turned my head aside, and it was 
gone.

"It is not," said Mr. Woodcourt, "his being so much younger or 
older, or thinner or fatter, or paler or ruddier, as there being 
upon his face such a singular expression.  I never saw so 
remarkable a look in a young person.  One cannot say that it is all 
anxiety or all weariness; yet it is both, and like ungrown 
despair."

"You do not think he is ill?" said I.

No.  He looked robust in body.

"That he cannot be at peace in mind, we have too much reason to 
know," I proceeded.  "Mr. Woodcourt, you are going to London?"

"To-morrow or the next day."

"There is nothing Richard wants so much as a friend.  He always 
liked you.  Pray see him when you get there.  Pray help him 
sometimes with your companionship if you can.  You do not know of 
what service it might be.  You cannot think how Ada, and Mr. 
Jarndyce, and even I--how we should all thank you, Mr. Woodcourt!"

"Miss Summerson," he said, more moved than he had been from the 
first, "before heaven, I will be a true friend to him!  I will 
accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!"

"God bless you!" said I, with my eyes filling fast; but I thought 
they might, when it was not for myself.  "Ada loves him--we all 
love him, but Ada loves him as we cannot.  I will tell her what you 
say.  Thank you, and God bless you, in her name!"

Richard came back as we finished exchanging these hurried words and 
gave me his arm to take me to the coach.

"Woodcourt," he said, unconscious with what application, "pray let 
us meet in London!"

"Meet?" returned the other.  "I have scarcely a friend there now 
but you.  Where shall I find you?"

"Why, I must get a lodging of some sort," said Richard, pondering.  
"Say at Vholes's, Symond's Inn."

"Good!  Without loss of time."

They shook hands heartily.  When I was seated in the coach and 
Richard was yet standing in the street, Mr. Woodcourt laid his 
friendly hand on Richard's shoulder and looked at me.  I understood 
him and waved mine in thanks.

And in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry 
for me.  I was glad to see it.  I felt for my old self as the dead 
may feel if they ever revisit these scenes.  I was glad to be 
tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite 
forgotten.



CHAPTER XLVI

Stop Him!


Darkness rests upon Tom-All-Alone's.  Dilating and dilating since 
the sun went down last night, it has gradually swelled until it 
fills every void in the place.  For a time there were some dungeon 
lights burning, as the lamp of life hums in Tom-all-Alone's, 
heavily, heavily, in the nauseous air, and winking--as that lamp, 
too, winks in Tom-all-Alone's--at many horrible things.  But they 
are blotted out.  The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as 
admitting some puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit 
for life and blasted by volcanic fires; but she has passed on and 
is gone.  The blackest nightmare in the infernal stables grazes on 
Tom-all-Alone's, and Tom is fast asleep.

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of 
Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom 
shall be got right.  Whether he shall be put into the main road by 
constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of 
figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or 
by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to 
splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his 
mind or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead.  In the 
midst of which dust and noise there is but one thing perfectly 
clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be 
reclaimed according to somebody's theory but nobody's practice.  
And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in 
his old determined spirit.

But he has his revenge.  Even the winds are his messengers, and 
they serve him in these hours of darkness.  There is not a drop of 
Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion 
somewhere.  It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream 
(in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of 
a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say nay to the 
infamous alliance.  There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a 
cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one 
obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a 
wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its 
retribution through every order of society up to the proudest of 
the proud and to the highest of the high.  Verily, what with 
tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge.

It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by 
night, but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the 
more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the 
imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day 
carries it.  The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be 
better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes 
set upon the British dominions than that it should ever rise upon 
so vile a wonder as Tom.

A brown sunburnt gentleman, who appears in some inaptitude for 
sleep to be wandering abroad rather than counting the hours on a 
restless pillow, strolls hitherward at this quiet time.  Attracted 
by curiosity, he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the 
miserable by-ways.  Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright 
dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and 
there, he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied 
it before.

On the banks of the stagnant channel of mud which is the main 
street of Tom-all-Alone's, nothing is to be seen but the crazy 
houses, shut up and silent.  No waking creature save himself 
appears except in one direction, where he sees the solitary figure 
of a woman sitting on a door-step.  He walks that way.  
Approaching, he observes that she has journeyed a long distance and 
is footsore and travel-stained.  She sits on the door-step in the 
manner of one who is waiting, with her elbow on her knee and her 
head upon her hand.  Beside her is a canvas bag, or bundle, she has 
carried.  She is dozing probably, for she gives no heed to his 
steps as he comes toward her.

The broken footway is so narrow that when Allan Woodcourt comes to 
where the woman sits, he has to turn into the road to pass her.  
Looking down at her face, his eye meets hers, and he stops.

"What is the matter?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Can't you make them hear?  Do you want to be let in?"

"I'm walting till they get up at another house--a lodging-house--
not here," the woman patiently returns.  "I'm waiting here because 
there will be sun here presently to warm me."

"I am afraid you are tired.  I am sorry to see you sitting in the 
street."

"Thank you, sir.  It don't matter."

A habit in him of speaking to the poor and of avoiding patronage or 
condescension or childishness (which is the favourite device, many 
people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little 
spelling books) has put him on good terms with the woman easily.

"Let me look at your forehead," he says, bending down.  "I am a 
doctor.  Don't be afraid.  I wouldn't hurt you for the world."

He knows that by touching her with his skilful and accustomed hand 
he can soothe her yet more readily.  She makes a slight objection, 
saying, "It's nothing"; but he has scarcely laid his fingers on the 
wounded place when she lifts it up to the light.

"Aye! A bad bruise, and the skin sadly broken.  This must be very 
sore."

"It do ache a little, sir," returns the woman with a started tear 
upon her cheek.

"Let me try to make it more comfortable.  My handkerchief won't 
hurt you."

"Oh, dear no, sir, I'm sure of that!"

He cleanses the injured place and dries it, and having carefully 
examined it and gently pressed it with the palm of his hand, takes 
a small case from his pocket, dresses it, and binds it up.  While 
he is thus employed, he says, after laughing at his establishing a 
surgery in the street, "And so your husband is a brickmaker?"

"How do you know that, sir?" asks the woman, astonished.

"Why, I suppose so from the colour of the clay upon your bag and on 
your dress.  And I know brickmakers go about working at piecework 
in different places.  And I am sorry to say I have known them cruel 
to their wives too."

The woman hastily lifts up her eyes as if she would deny that her 
injury is referable to such a cause.  But feeling the hand upon her 
forehead, and seeing his busy and composed face, she quietly drops 
them again.

"Where is he now?" asks the surgeon.

"He got into trouble last night, sir; but he'll look for me at the 
lodging-house."

"He will get into worse trouble if he often misuses his large and 
heavy hand as he has misused it here.  But you forgive him, brutal 
as he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved 
it.  You have no young child?"

The woman shakes her head.  "One as I calls mine, sir, but it's 
Liz's."

"Your own is dead.  I see!  Poor little thing!"

By this time he has finished and is putting up his case.  "I 
suppose you have some settled home.  Is it far from here?" he asks, 
good-humouredly making light of what he has done as she gets up and 
curtsys.

"It's a good two or three and twenty mile from here, sir.  At Saint 
Albans.  You know Saint Albans, sir?  I thought you gave a start 
like, as if you did."

"Yes, I know something of it.  And now I will ask you a question in 
return.  Have you money for your lodging?"

"Yes, sir," she says, "really and truly."  And she shows it.  He 
tells her, in acknowledgment of her many subdued thanks, that she 
is very welcome, gives her good day, and walks away.  Tom-all-
Alone's is still asleep, and nothing is astir.

Yes, something is!  As he retraces his way to the point from which 
he descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a 
ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the 
soiled walls--which the wretchedest figure might as well avoid--and 
furtively thrusting a hand before it.  It is the figure of a youth 
whose face is hollow and whose eyes have an emaciated glare.  He is 
so intent on getting along unseen that even the apparition of a 
stranger in whole garments does not tempt him to look back.  He 
shades his face with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other 
side of the way, and goes shrinking and creeping on with his 
anxious hand before him and his shapeless clothes hanging in 
shreds.  Clothes made for what purpose, or of what material, it 
would be impossible to say.  They look, in colour and in substance, 
like a bundle of rank leaves of swampy growth that rotted long ago.

Allan Woodcourt pauses to look after him and note all this, with a 
shadowy belief that he has seen the boy before.  He cannot recall 
how or where, but there is some association in his mind with such a 
form.  He imagines that he must have seen it in some hospital or 
refuge, still, cannot make out why it comes with any special force 
on his remembrance.

He is gradually emerging from Tom-all-Alone's in the morning light, 
thinking about it, when he hears running feet behind him, and 
looking round, sees the boy scouring towards him at great speed, 
followed by the woman.

"Stop him, stop him!" cries the woman, almost breath less.  "Stop 
him, sir!"

He darts across the road into the boy's path, but the boy is 
quicker than he, makes a curve, ducks, dives under his hands, comes 
up half-a-dozen yards beyond him, and scours away again.  Still the 
woman follows, crying, "Stop him, sir, pray stop him!"  Allan, not 
knowing but that he has just robbed her of her money, follows in 
chase and runs so hard that he runs the boy down a dozen times, but 
each time he repeats the curve, the duck, the dive, and scours away 
again.  To strike at him on any of these occasions would be to fell 
and disable him, but the pursuer cannot resolve to do that, and so 
the grimly ridiculous pursuit continues.  At last the fugitive, 
hard-pressed, takes to a narrow passage and a court which has no 
thoroughfare.  Here, against a hoarding of decaying timber, he is 
brought to bay and tumbles down, lying gasping at his pursuer, who 
stands and gasps at him until the woman comes up.

"Oh, you, Jo!" cries the woman.  "What?  I have found you at last!"

"Jo," repeats Allan, looking at him with attention, "Jo!  Stay.  To 
be sure!  I recollect this lad some time ago being brought before 
the coroner."

"Yes, I see you once afore at the inkwhich," whimpers Jo.  "What of 
that?  Can't you never let such an unfortnet as me alone?  An't I 
unfortnet enough for you yet?  How unfortnet do you want me fur to 
be?  I've been a-chivied and a-chivied, fust by one on you and nixt 
by another on you, till I'm worritted to skins and bones.  The 
inkwhich warn't MY fault.  I done nothink.  He wos wery good to me, 
he wos; he wos the only one I knowed to speak to, as ever come 
across my crossing.  It ain't wery likely I should want him to be 
inkwhiched.  I only wish I wos, myself.  I don't know why I don't 
go and make a hole in the water, I'm sure I don't."

He says it with such a pitiable air, and his grimy tears appear so 
real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so like a 
growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in 
neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him.  
He says to the woman, "Miserable creature, what has he done?"

To which she only replies, shaking her head at the prostrate figure 
more amazedly than angrily, "Oh, you Jo, you Jo.  I have found you 
at last!"

"What has he done?" says Allan.  "Has he robbed you?"

"No, sir, no.  Robbed me?  He did nothing but what was kind-hearted 
by me, and that's the wonder of it."

Allan looks from Jo to the woman, and from the woman to Jo, waiting 
for one of them to unravel the riddle.

"But he was along with me, sir," says the woman.  "Oh, you Jo!  He 
was along with me, sir, down at Saint Albans, ill, and a young 
lady, Lord bless her for a good friend to me, took pity on him when 
I durstn't, and took him home--"

Allan shrinks back from him with a sudden horror.

"Yes, sir, yes.  Took him home, and made him comfortable, and like 
a thankless monster he ran away in the night and never has been 
seen or heard of since till I set eyes on him just now.  And that 
young lady that was such a pretty dear caught his illness, lost her 
beautiful looks, and wouldn't hardly be known for the same young 
lady now if it wasn't for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, 
and her sweet voice.  Do you know it?  You ungrateful wretch, do 
you know that this is all along of you and of her goodness to you?" 
demands the woman, beginning to rage at him as she recalls it and 
breaking into passionate tears.

The boy, in rough sort stunned by what he hears, falls to smearing 
his dirty forehead with his dirty palm, and to staring at the 
ground, and to shaking from head to foot until the crazy hoarding 
against which he leans rattles.

Allan restrains the woman, merely by a quiet gesture, but 
effectually.

"Richard told me--"  He falters.  "I mean, I have heard of this--
don't mind me for a moment, I will speak presently."

He turns away and stands for a while looking out at the covered 
passage.  When he comes back, he has recovered his composure, 
except that he contends against an avoidance of the boy, which is 
so very remarkable that it absorbs the woman's attention.

"You hear what she says.  But get up, get up!"

Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises and stands, after the 
manner of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, 
resting one of his high shoulders against it and covertly rubbing 
his right hand over his left and his left foot over his right.

"You hear what she says, and I know it's true.  Have you been here 
ever since?"

"Wishermaydie if I seen Tom-all-Alone's till this blessed morning," 
replies Jo hoarsely.

"Why have you come here now?"

Jo looks all round the confined court, looks at his questioner no 
higher than the knees, and finally answers, "I don't know how to do 
nothink, and I can't get nothink to do.  I'm wery poor and ill, and 
I thought I'd come back here when there warn't nobody about, and 
lay down and hide somewheres as I knows on till arter dark, and 
then go and beg a trifle of Mr. Snagsby.  He wos allus willin fur 
to give me somethink he wos, though Mrs. Snagsby she was allus a-
chivying on me--like everybody everywheres."

"Where have you come from?"

Jo looks all round the court again, looks at his questioner's knees 
again, and concludes by laying his profile against the hoarding in 
a sort of resignation.

"Did you hear me ask you where you have come from?"

"Tramp then," says Jo.

"Now tell me," proceeds Allan, making a strong effort to overcome 
his repugnance, going very near to him, and leaning over him with 
an expression of confidence, "tell me how it came about that you 
left that house when the good young lady had been so unfortunate as 
to pity you and take you home."

Jo suddenly comes out of his resignation and excitedly declares, 
addressing the woman, that he never known about the young lady, 
that he never heern about it, that he never went fur to hurt her, 
that he would sooner have hurt his own self, that he'd sooner have 
had his unfortnet ed chopped off than ever gone a-nigh her, and 
that she wos wery good to him, she wos.  Conducting himself 
throughout as if in his poor fashion he really meant it, and 
winding up with some very miserable sobs.

Allan Woodcourt sees that this is not a sham.  He constrains 
himself to touch him.  "Come, Jo.  Tell me."

"No.  I dustn't," says Jo, relapsing into the profile state.  "I 
dustn't, or I would."

"But I must know," returns the other, "all the same.  Come, Jo."

After two or three such adjurations, Jo lifts up his head again, 
looks round the court again, and says in a low voice, "Well, I'll 
tell you something.  I was took away.  There!"

"Took away?  In the night?"

"Ah!"  Very apprehensive of being overheard, Jo looks about him and 
even glances up some ten feet at the top of the hoarding and 
through the cracks in it lest the object of his distrust should be 
looking over or hidden on the other side.

"Who took you away?"

"I dustn't name him," says Jo.  "I dustn't do it, sir.

"But I want, in the young lady's name, to know.  You may trust me.  
No one else shall hear."

"Ah, but I don't know," replies Jo, shaking his head fearfulty, "as 
he DON'T hear."

"Why, he is not in this place."

"Oh, ain't he though?" says Jo.  "He's in all manner of places, all 
at wanst."

Allan looks at him in perplexity, but discovers some real meaning 
and good faith at the bottom of this bewildering reply.  He 
patiently awaits an explicit answer; and Jo, more baffled by his 
patience than by anything else, at last desperately whispers a name 
in his ear.

"Aye!" says Allan.  "Why, what had you been doing?"

"Nothink, sir.  Never done nothink to get myself into no trouble, 
'sept in not moving on and the inkwhich.  But I'm a-moving on now.  
I'm a-moving on to the berryin ground--that's the move as I'm up 
to."

"No, no, we will try to prevent that.  But what did he do with 
you?"

"Put me in a horsepittle," replied Jo, whispering, "till I was 
discharged, then giv me a little money--four half-bulls, wot you 
may call half-crowns--and ses 'Hook it!  Nobody wants you here,' he 
ses.  'You hook it.  You go and tramp,' he ses.  'You move on,' he 
ses.  'Don't let me ever see you nowheres within forty mile of 
London, or you'll repent it.'  So I shall, if ever he doos see me, 
and he'll see me if I'm above ground," concludes Jo, nervously 
repeating all his former precautions and investigations.

Allan considers a little, then remarks, turning to the woman but 
keeping an encouraging eye on Jo, "He is not so ungrateful as you 
supposed.  He had a reason for going away, though it was an 
insufficient one."

"Thankee, sir, thankee!" exclaims Jo.  "There now!  See how hard 
you wos upon me.  But ony you tell the young lady wot the genlmn 
ses, and it's all right.  For YOU wos wery good to me too, and I 
knows it."

"Now, Jo," says Allan, keeping his eye upon him, "come with me and 
I will find you a better place than this to lie down and hide in.  
If I take one side of the way and you the other to avoid 
observation, you will not run away, I know very well, if you make 
me a promise."

"I won't, not unless I wos to see HIM a-coming, sir."

"Very well.  I take your word.  Half the town is getting up by this 
time, and the whole town will be broad awake in another hour.  Come 
along.  Good day again, my good woman."

"Good day again, sir, and I thank you kindly many times again."

She has been sitting on her bag, deeply attentive, and now rises 
and takes it up.  Jo, repeating, "Ony you tell the young lady as I 
never went fur to hurt her and wot the genlmn ses!" nods and 
shambles and shivers, and smears and blinks, and half laughs and 
half cries, a farewell to her, and takes his creeping way along 
after Allan Woodcourt, close to the houses on the opposite side of 
the street.  In this order, the two come up out of Tom-all-Alone's 
into the broad rays of the sunlight and the purer air.



CHAPTER XLVII

Jo's Will


As Allan Woodcourt and Jo proceed along the streets where the high 
church spires and the distances are so near and clear in the 
morning light that the city itself seems renewed by rest, Allan 
revolves in his mind how and where he shall bestow his companion.  
"It surely is a strange fact," he considers, "that in the heart of 
a civilized world this creature in human form should be more 
difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog."  But it is none the 
less a fact because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains.

At first he looks behind him often to assure himself that Jo is 
still really following.  But look where he will, he still beholds 
him close to the opposite houses, making his way with his wary hand 
from brick to brick and from door to door, and often, as he creeps 
along, glancing over at him watchfully.  Soon satisfied that the 
last thing in his thoughts is to give him the slip, Allan goes on, 
considering with a less divided attention what he shall do.

A breakfast-stall at a street-corner suggests the first thing to be 
done.  He stops there, looks round, and beckons Jo.  Jo crosses and 
comes halting and shuffling up, slowly scooping the knuckles of his 
right hand round and round in the hollowed palm of his left, 
kneading dirt with a natural pestle and mortar.  What is a dainty 
repast to Jo is then set before him, and he begins to gulp the 
coffee and to gnaw the bread and butter, looking anxiously about 
him in all directions as he eats and drinks, like a scared animal.

But he is so sick and miserable that even hunger has abandoned him.  
"I thought I was amost a-starvin, sir," says Jo, soon putting down 
his food, "but I don't know nothink--not even that.  I don't care 
for eating wittles nor yet for drinking on 'em."  And Jo stands 
shivering and looking at the breakfast wonderingly.

Allan Woodcourt lays his hand upon his pulse and on his chest.  
"Draw breath, Jo!"  "It draws," says Jo, "as heavy as a cart."  He 
might add, "And rattles like it," but he only mutters, "I'm a-
moving on, sir."

Allan looks about for an apothecary's shop.  There is none at hand, 
but a tavern does as well or better.  He obtains a little measure 
of wine and gives the lad a portion of it very carefully.  He 
begins to revive almost as soon as it passes his lips.  "We may 
repeat that dose, Jo," observes Allan after watching him with his 
attentive face.  "So!  Now we will take five minutes' rest, and 
then go on again."

Leaving the boy sitting on the bench of the breakfast-stall, with 
his back against an iron railing, Allan Woodcourt paces up and down 
in the early sunshine, casting an occasional look towards him 
without appearing to watch him.  It requires no discernment to 
perceive that he is warmed and refreshed.  If a face so shaded can 
brighten, his face brightens somewhat; and by little and little he 
eats the slice of bread he had so hopelessly laid down.  Observant 
of these signs of improvement, Allan engages him in conversation 
and elicits to his no small wonder the adventure of the lady in the 
veil, with all its consequences.  Jo slowly munches as he slowly 
tells it.  When he has finished his story and his bread, they go on 
again.

Intending to refer his difficulty in finding a temporary place of 
refuge for the boy to his old patient, zealous little Miss Flite, 
Allan leads the way to the court where he and Jo first 
foregathered.  But all is changed at the rag and bottle shop; Miss 
Flite no longer lodges there; it is shut up; and a hard-featured 
female, much obscured by dust, whose age is a problem, but who is 
indeed no other than the interesting Judy, is tart and spare in her 
replies.  These sufficing, however, to inform the visitor that Miss 
Flite and her birds are domiciled with a Mrs. Blinder, in Bell 
Yard, he repairs to that neighbouring place, where Miss Flite (who 
rises early that she may be punctual at the divan of justice held 
by her excellent friend the Chancellor) comes running downstairs 
with tears of welcome and with open arms.

"My dear physician!" cries Miss Flite.  "My meritorious, 
distinguished, honourable officer!"  She uses some odd expressions, 
but is as cordial and full of heart as sanity itself can be--more 
so than it often is.  Allan, very patient with her, waits until she 
has no more raptures to express, then points out Jo, trembling in a 
doorway, and tells her how he comes there.

"Where can I lodge him hereabouts for the present?  Now, you have a 
fund of knowledge and good sense and can advise me.

Miss Flite, mighty proud of the compliment, sets herself to 
consider; but it is long before a bright thought occurs to her.  
Mrs. Blinder is entirely let, and she herself occupies poor 
Gridley's room.  "Gridley!" exclaims Miss Flite, clapping her hands 
after a twentieth repetition of this remark.  "Gridley!  To be 
sure!  Of course!  My dear physician!  General George will help us 
out."

It is hopeless to ask for any information about General George, and 
would be, though Miss Flite had not akeady run upstairs to put on 
her pinched bonnet and her poor little shawl and to arm herself 
with her reticule of documents.  But as she informs her physician 
in her disjointed manner on coming down in full array that General 
George, whom she often calls upon, knows her dear Fitz Jarndyce and 
takes a great interest in all connected with her, Allan is induced 
to think that they may be in the right way.  So he tells Jo, for 
his encouragement, that this walking about will soon be over now; 
and they repair to the general's.  Fortunately it is not far.

From the exterior of George's Shooting Gallery, and the long entry, 
and the bare perspective beyond it, Allan Woodcourt augurs well.  
He also descries promise in the figure of Mr. George himself, 
striding towards them in his mornmg exercise with his pipe in his 
mouth, no stock on, and his muscular arms, developed by broadsword 
and dumbbell, weightily asserting themselves through his light 
shirt-sleeves.

"Your servant, sir," says Mr. George with a military salute.  Good-
humouredly smiling all over his broad forehead up into his crisp 
hair, he then defers to Miss Flite, as, with great stateliness, and 
at some length, she performs the courtly ceremony of presentation.  
He winds it up with another "Your servant, sir!" and another 
salute.

"Excuse me, sir.  A sailor, I believe?" says Mr. George.

"I am proud to find I have the air of one," returns Allan; "but I 
am only a sea-going doctor."

"Indeed, sir!  I should have thought you was a regular blue-jacket 
myself."

Allan hopes Mr. George will forgive his intrusion the more readily 
on that account, and particularly that he will not lay aside his 
pipe, which, in his politeness, he has testifled some intention of 
doing.  "You are very good, sir," returns the trooper.  "As I know 
by experience that it's not disagreeable to Miss Flite, and since 
it's equally agreeable to yourself--" and finishes the sentence by 
putting it between his lips again.  Allan proceeds to tell him all 
he knows about Jo, unto which the trooper listens with a grave 
face.

"And that's the lad, sir, is it?" he inquires, looking along the 
entry to where Jo stands staring up at the great letters on the 
whitewashed front, which have no meaning in his eyes.

"That's he," says Allan.  "And, Mr. George, I am in this difficulty 
about him.  I am unwilling to place him in a hospital, even if I 
could procure him immediate admission, because I foresee that he 
would not stay there many hours if he could be so much as got 
there.  The same objection applies to a workhouse, supposing I had 
the patience to be evaded and shirked, and handed about from post 
to pillar in trying to get him into one, which is a system that I 
don't take kindly to."

"No man does, sir," returns Mr. George.

"I am convinced that he would not remain in either place, because 
he is possessed by an extraordinary terror of this person who 
ordered him to keep out of the way; in his ignorance, he believes 
this person to be everywhere, and cognizant of everything."

"I ask your pardon, sir," says Mr. George.  "But you have not 
mentioned that party's name.  Is it a secret, sir?"

"The boy makes it one.  But his name is Bucket."

"Bucket the detective, sir?"

"The same man."

"The man is known to me, sir," returns the trooper after blowing 
out a cloud of smoke and squaring his chest, "and the boy is so far 
correct that he undoubtedly is a--rum customer."  Mr. George smokes 
with a profound meaning after this and surveys Miss Flite in 
silence.

"Now, I wish Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson at least to know that 
this Jo, who tells so strange a story, has reappeared, and to have 
it in their power to speak with him if they should desire to do so.  
Therefore I want to get him, for the present moment, into any poor 
lodging kept by decent people where he would be admitted.  Decent 
people and Jo, Mr. George," says Allan, following the direction of 
the trooper's eyes along the entry, "have not been much acquainted, 
as you see.  Hence the difficulty.  Do you happen to know any one 
in this neighbourhood who would receive him for a while on my 
paying for him beforehand?"

As he puts the question, he becomes aware of a dirty-faced little 
man standing at the trooper's elbow and looking up, with an oddly 
twisted figure and countenance, into the trooper's face.  After a 
few more puffs at his pipe, the trooper looks down askant at the 
little man, and the little man winks up at the trooper.

"Well, sir," says Mr. George, "I can assure you that I would 
willingiy be knocked on the head at any time if it would be at all 
agreeable to Miss Summerson, and consequently I esteem it a 
privilege to do that young lady any service, however small.  We are 
naturally in the vagabond way here, sir, both myself and Phil.  You 
see what the place is.  You are welcome to a quiet corner of it for 
the boy if the same would meet your views.  No charge made, except 
for rations.  We are not in a flourishing state of circumstances 
here, sir.  We are liable to be tumbled out neck and crop at a 
moment's notice.  However, sir, such as the place is, and so long 
as it lasts, here it is at your service."

With a comprehensive wave of his pipe, Mr. George places the whole 
building at his visitor's disposal.

"I take it for granted, sir," he adds, "you being one of the 
medical staff, that there is no present infection about this 
unfortunate subject?"

Allan is quite sure of it.

"Because, sir," says Mr. George, shaking his head sorrowfully, "we 
have had enough of that."

His tone is no less sorrowfully echoed by his new acquaintance.  
'Still I am bound to tell you," observes Allan after repeating his 
former assurance, "that the boy is deplorably low and reduced and 
that he may be--I do not say that he is--too far gone to recover."

"Do you consider him in present danger, sir?" inquires the trooper.

"Yes, I fear so."

"Then, sir," returns the trooper in a decisive manner, "it appears 
to me--being naturally in the vagabond way myself--that the sooner 
he comes out of the street, the better.  You, Phil!  Bring him in!"

Mr. Squod tacks out, all on one side, to execute the word of 
command; and the trooper, having smoked his pipe, lays it by.  Jo 
is brought in.  He is not one of Mrs. Pardiggle's Tockahoopo 
Indians; he is not one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs, being wholly 
unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance 
and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is 
the ordinary home-made article.  Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all 
the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only 
in soul a heathen.  Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites 
devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him; native 
ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his 
immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish.  Stand forth, 
Jo, in uncompromising colours!  From the sole of thy foot to the 
crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee.

He shuffles slowly into Mr. George's gallery and stands huddled 
together in a bundle, looking all about the floor.  He seems to 
know that they have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for 
what he is and partly for what he has caused.  He, too, shrinks 
from them.  He is not of the same order of things, not of the same 
place in creation.  He is of no order and no place, neither of the 
beasts nor of humanity.

"Look here, Jo!" says Allan.  "This is Mr. George."

Jo searches the floor for some time longer, then looks up for a 
moment, and then down again.

"He is a kind friend to you, for he is going to give you lodging 
room here."

Jo makes a scoop with one hand, which is supposed to be a bow.  
After a little more consideration and some backing and changing of 
the foot on which he rests, he mutters that he is "wery thankful."

"You are quite safe here.  All you have to do at present is to be 
obedient and to get strong.  And mind you tell us the truth here, 
whatever you do, Jo."

"Wishermaydie if I don't, sir," says Jo, reverting to his favourite 
declaration.  "I never done nothink yit, but wot you knows on, to 
get myself into no trouble.  I never was in no other trouble at 
all, sir, 'sept not knowin' nothink and starwation."

"I believe it, now attend to Mr. George.  I see he is going to 
speak to you."

"My intention merely was, sir," observes Mr. George, amazingly 
broad and upright, "to point out to him where he can lie down and 
get a thorough good dose of sleep.  Now, look here."  As the 
trooper speaks, he conducts them to the other end of the gallery 
and opens one of the little cabins.  "There you are, you see!  Here 
is a mattress, and here you may rest, on good behaviour, as long as 
Mr., I ask your pardon, sir"--he refers apologetically to the card 
Allan has given him--"Mr. Woodcourt pleases.  Don't you be alarmed 
if you hear shots; they'll be aimed at the target, and not you.  
Now, there's another thing I would recommend, sir," says the 
trooper, turning to his visitor.  "Phil, come here!"

Phil bears down upon them according to his usual tactics.  "Here is 
a man, sir, who was found, when a baby, in the gutter.  
Consequently, it is to be expected that he takes a natural interest 
in this poor creature.  You do, don't you, Phil?"

"Certainly and surely I do, guv'ner," is Phil's reply.

"Now I was thinking, sir," says Mr. George in a martial sort of 
confidence, as if he were giving his opinion in a council of war at 
a drum-head, "that if this man was to take him to a bath and was to 
lay out a few shillings in getting him one or two coarse articles--"

"Mr. George, my considerate friend," returns Allan, taking out his 
purse, "it is the very favour I would have asked."

Phil Squod and Jo are sent out immediately on this work of 
improvement.  Miss Flite, quite enraptured by her success, makes 
the best of her way to court, having great fears that otherwise her 
friend the Chancellor may be uneasy about her or may give the 
judgment she has so long expected in her absence, and observing 
"which you know, my dear physician, and general, after so many 
years, would be too absurdly unfortunate!"  Allan takes the 
opportunity of going out to procure some restorative medicines, and 
obtaining them near at hand, soon returns to find the trooper 
walking up and down the gallery, and to fall into step and walk 
with him.

"I take it, sir," says Mr. George, "that you know Miss Summerson 
pretty well?"

Yes, it appears.

"Not related to her, sir?"

No, it appears.

"Excuse the apparent curiosity," says Mr. George.  "It seemed to me 
probable that you might take more than a common interest in this 
poor creature because Miss Summerson had taken that unfortunate 
interest in him.  'Tis MY case, sir, I assure you."

"And mine, Mr. George."

The trooper looks sideways at Allan's sunburnt cheek and bright 
dark eye, rapidly measures his height and build, and seems to 
approve of him.

"Since you have been out, sir, I have been thinking that I 
unquestionably know the rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Bucket 
took the lad, according to his account.  Though he is not 
acquainted with the name, I can help you to it.  It's Tulkinghorn.  
That's what it is."

Allan looks at him inquiringly, repeating the name.

"Tulkinghorn.  That's the name, sir.  I know the man, and know him 
to have been in communication with Bucket before, respecting a 
deceased person who had given him offence.  I know the man, sir.  
To my sorrow."

Allan naturally asks what kind of man he is.

"What kind of man!  Do you mean to look at?"

"I think I know that much of him.  I mean to deal with.  Generally, 
what kind of man?"

"Why, then I'll tell you, sir," returns the trooper, stopping short 
and folding his arms on his square chest so angrily that his face 
fires and flushes all over; "he is a confoundedly bad kind of man.  
He is a slow-torturing kind of man.  He is no more like flesh and 
blood than a rusty old carbine is.  He is a kind of man--by 
George!--that has caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, 
and more dissatisfaction with myself than all other men put 
together.  That's the kind of man Mr. Tulkinghorn is!"

"I am sorry," says Allan, "to have touched so sore a place."

"Sore?"  The trooper plants his legs wider apart, wets the palm of 
his broad right hand, and lays it on the imaginary moustache.  
"It's no fault of yours, sir; but you shall judge.  He has got a 
power over me.  He is the man I spoke of just now as being able to 
tumble me out of this place neck and crop.  He keeps me on a 
constant see-saw.  He won't hold off, and he won't come on.  If I 
have a payment to make him, or time to ask him for, or anything to 
go to him about, he don't see me, don't hear me--passes me on to 
Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn, Melchisedech's in Clifford's Inn 
passes me back again to him--he keeps me prowling and dangling 
about him as if I was made of the same stone as himself.  Why, I 
spend half my life now, pretty well, loitering and dodging about 
his door.  What does he care?  Nothing.  Just as much as the rusty 
old carbine I have compared him to.  He chafes and goads me till--  
Bah!  Nonsense!  I am forgetting myself.  Mr. Woodcourt," the 
trooper resumes his march, "all I say is, he is an old man; but I 
am glad I shall never have the chance of setting spurs to my horse 
and riding at him in a fair field.  For if I had that chance, in 
one of the humours he drives me into--he'd go down, sir!"

Mr. George has been so excited that he finds it necessary to wipe 
his forehead on his shirt-sleeve.  Even while he whistles his 
impetuosity away with the national anthem, some involuntary 
shakings of his head and heavings of his chest still linger behind, 
not to mention an occasional hasty adjustment with both hands of 
his open shirt-collar, as if it were scarcely open enough to 
prevent his being troubled by a choking sensation.  In short, Allan 
Woodcourt has not much doubt about the going down of Mr. 
Tulkinghorn on the field referred to.

Jo and his conductor presently return, and Jo is assisted to his 
mattress by the careful Phil, to whom, after due administration of 
medicine by his own hands, Allan confides all needful means and 
instructions.  The morning is by this time getting on apace.  He 
repairs to his lodgings to dress and breakfast, and then, without 
seeking rest, goes away to Mr. Jarndyce to communicate his 
discovery.

With him Mr. Jarndyce returns alone, confidentially telling him 
that there are reasons for keeping this matter very quiet indeed 
and showing a serious interest in it.  To Mr. Jarndyce, Jo repeats 
in substance what he said in the morning, without any material 
variation.  Only that cart of his is heavier to draw, and draws 
with a hollower sound.

"Let me lay here quiet and not be chivied no more," falters Jo, 
"and be so kind any person as is a-passin nigh where I used fur to 
sleep, as jist to say to Mr. Sangsby that Jo, wot he known once, is 
a-moving on right forards with his duty, and I'll be wery thankful.  
I'd be more thankful than I am aready if it wos any ways possible 
for an unfortnet to be it."

He makes so many of these references to the law-stationer in the 
course of a day or two that Allan, after conferring with Mr. 
Jarndyce, good-naturedly resolves to call in Cook's Court, the 
rather, as the cart seems to be breaking down.

To Cook's Court, therefore, he repairs.  Mr. Snagsby is behind his 
counter in his grey coat and sleeves, inspecting an indenture of 
several skins which has just come in from the engrosser's, an 
immense desert of law-hand and parchment, with here and there a 
resting-place of a few large letters to break the awful monotony 
and save the traveller from despair.  Mr Snagsby puts up at one of 
these inky wells and greets the stranger with his cough of general 
preparation for business.

"You don't remember me, Mr. Snagsby?"

The stationer's heart begins to thump heavily, for his old 
apprehensions have never abated.  It is as much as he can do to 
answer, "No, sir, I can't say I do.  I should have considered--not 
to put too fine a point upon it--that I never saw you before, sir."

"Twice before," says Allan Woodcourt.  "Once at a poor bedside, and 
once--"

"It's come at last!" thinks the afflicted stationer, as 
recollection breaks upon him.  "It's got to a head now and is going 
to burst!"  But he has sufficient presence of mind to conduct his 
visitor into the little counting-house and to shut the door.

"Are you a married man, sir?"

"No, I am not."

"Would you make the attempt, though single," says Mr. Snagsby in a 
melancholy whisper, "to speak as low as you can?  For my little 
woman is a-listening somewheres, or I'll forfeit the business and 
five hundred pound!"

In deep dejection Mr. Snagsby sits down on his stool, with his back 
against his desk, protesting, "I never had a secret of my own, sir.  
I can't charge my memory with ever having once attempted to deceive 
my little woman on my own account since she named the day.  I 
wouldn't have done it, sir.  Not to put too fine a point upon it, I 
couldn't have done it, I dursn't have done it.  Whereas, and 
nevertheless, I find myself wrapped round with secrecy and mystery, 
till my life is a burden to me."

His visitor professes his regret to bear it and asks him does he 
remember Jo.  Mr. Snagsby answers with a suppressed groan, oh, 
don't he!

"You couldn't name an individual human being--except myself--that 
my little woman is more set and determined against than Jo," says 
Mr. Snagsby.

Allan asks why.

"Why?" repeats Mr. Snagsby, in his desperation clutching at the 
clump of hair at the back of his bald head.  "How should 1 know 
why?  But you are a single person, sir, and may you long be spared 
to ask a married person such a question!"

With this beneficent wish, Mr. Snagsby coughs a cough of dismal 
resignation and submits himself to hear what the visitor has to 
communicate.

"There again!" says Mr. Snagsby, who, between the earnestness of 
his feelings and the suppressed tones of his voice is discoloured 
in the face.  "At it again, in a new direction!  A certain person 
charges me, in the solemnest way, not to talk of Jo to any one, 
even my little woman.  Then comes another certain person, in the 
person of yourself, and charges me, in an equally solemn way, not 
to mention Jo to that other certain person above all other persons.  
Why, this is a private asylum!  Why, not to put too fine a point 
upon it, this is Bedlam, sir!" says Mr. Snagsby.

But it is better than he expected after all, being no explosion of 
the mine below him or deepening of the pit into which he has 
fallen.  And being tender-hearted and affected by the account he 
hears of Jo's condition, he readily engages to "look round" as 
early in the evening as he can manage it quietly.  He looks round 
very quietly when the evening comes, but it may turn out that Mrs. 
Snagsby is as quiet a manager as he.

Jo is very glad to see his old friend and says, when they are left 
alone, that he takes it uncommon kind as Mr. Sangsby should come so 
far out of his way on accounts of sich as him.  Mr. Snagsby, 
touched by the spectacle before him, immediately lays upon the 
table half a crown, that magic balsam of his for all kinds of 
wounds.

"And how do you find yourself, my poor lad?" inquires the stationer 
with his cough of sympathy.

"I am in luck, Mr. Sangsby, I am," returns Jo, "and don't want for 
nothink.  I'm more cumfbler nor you can't think.  Mr. Sangsby!  I'm 
wery sorry that I done it, but I didn't go fur to do it, sir."

The stationer softly lays down another half-crown and asks him what 
it is that he is sorry for having done.

"Mr. Sangsby," says Jo, "I went and giv a illness to the lady as 
wos and yit as warn't the t'other lady, and none of 'em never says 
nothink to me for having done it, on accounts of their being ser 
good and my having been s'unfortnet.  The lady come herself and see 
me yesday, and she ses, 'Ah, Jo!' she ses.  'We thought we'd lost 
you, Jo!' she ses.  And she sits down a-smilin so quiet, and don't 
pass a word nor yit a look upon me for having done it, she don't, 
and I turns agin the wall, I doos, Mr. Sangsby.  And Mr. Jarnders, 
I see him a-forced to turn away his own self.  And Mr. Woodcot, he 
come fur to giv me somethink fur to ease me, wot he's allus a-doin' 
on day and night, and wen he come a-bending over me and a-speakin 
up so bold, I see his tears a-fallin, Mr. Sangsby."

The softened stationer deposits another half-crown on the table.  
Nothing less than a repetition of that infallible remedy will 
relieve his feelings.

"Wot I was a-thinkin on, Mr. Sangsby," proceeds Jo, "wos, as you 
wos able to write wery large, p'raps?"

"Yes, Jo, please God," returns the stationer.

"Uncommon precious large, p'raps?" says Jo with eagerness.

"Yes, my poor boy."

Jo laughs with pleasure.  "Wot I wos a-thinking on then, Mr. 
Sangsby, wos, that when I wos moved on as fur as ever I could go 
and couldn't he moved no furder, whether you might be so good 
p'raps as to write out, wery large so that any one could see it 
anywheres, as that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and 
that I never went fur to do it, and that though I didn't know 
nothink at all, I knowd as Mr. Woodcot once cried over it and wos 
allus grieved over it, and that I hoped as he'd be able to forgive 
me in his mind.  If the writin could be made to say it wery large, 
he might."

"It shall say it, Jo.  Very large."

Jo laughs again.  "Thankee, Mr. Sangsby.  It's wery kind of you, 
sir, and it makes me more cumfbler nor I was afore."

The meek little stationer, with a broken and unfinished cough, 
slips down his fourth half-crown--he has never been so close to a 
case requiring so many--and is fain to depart.  And Jo and he, upon 
this little earth, shall meet no more.  No more.

For the cart so hard to draw is near its journey's end and drags 
over stony ground.  All round the clock it labours up the broken 
steps, shattered and worn.  Not many times can the sun rise and 
behold it still upon its weary road.

Phil Squod, with his smoky gunpowder visage, at once acts as nurse 
and works as armourer at his little table in a corner, often 
looking round and saying with a nod of his green-baize cap and an 
encouraging elevation of his one eyebrow, "Hold up, my boy!  Hold 
up!"  There, too, is Mr. Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt 
almost always, both thinking, much, how strangely fate has 
entangled this rough outcast in the web of very different lives.  
There, too, the trooper is a frequent visitor, filling the doorway 
with his athletic figure and, from his superfluity of life and 
strength, seeming to shed down temporary vigour upon Jo, who never 
fails to speak more robustly in answer to his cheerful words.

Jo is in a sleep or in a stupor to-day, and Allan Woodcourt, newly 
arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form.  After a 
while he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face 
towards him--just as he sat in the law-writer's room--and touches 
his chest and heart.  The cart had very nearly given up, but 
labours on a little more.

The trooper stands in the doorway, still and silent.  Phil has 
stopped in a low clinking noise, with his little hammer in his 
hand.  Mr. Woodcourt looks round with that grave professional 
interest and attention on his face, and glancing significantly at 
the trooper, signs to Phil to carry his table out.  When the little 
hammer is next used, there will be a speck of rust upon it.

"Well, Jo!  What is the matter?  Don't be frightened."

"I thought," says Jo, who has started and is looking round, "I 
thought I was in Tom-all-Alone's agin.  Ain't there nobody here but 
you, Mr. Woodcot?"

"Nobody."

"And I ain't took back to Tom-all-Alone's.  Am I, sir?"

"No."  Jo closes his eyes, muttering, "I'm wery thankful."

After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth 
very near his ear and says to him in a low, distinct voice, "Jo!  
Did you ever know a prayer?"

"Never knowd nothink, sir."

"Not so much as one short prayer?"

"No, sir.  Nothink at all.  Mr. Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at 
Mr. Sangsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-
speakin to hisself, and not to me.  He prayed a lot, but I couldn't 
make out nothink on it.  Different times there was other genlmen 
come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the 
t'other 'wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talking 
to theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t'others, and not a-
talkin to us.  WE never knowd nothink.  I never knowd what it wos 
all about."

It takes him a long time to say this, and few but an experienced 
and attentive listener could hear, or, hearing, understand him.  
After a short relapse into sleep or stupor, he makes, of a sudden, 
a strong effort to get out of bed.

"Stay, Jo!  What now?"

"It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir," he 
returns with a wild look.

"Lie down, and tell me.  What burying ground, Jo?"

"Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me 
indeed, he wos.  It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin 
ground, sir, and ask to be put along with him.  I wants to go there 
and be berried.  He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-
day, Jo,' he ses.  I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now 
and have come there to be laid along with him."

"By and by, Jo.  By and by."

"Ah!  P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself.  But will 
you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?"

"I will, indeed."

"Thankee, sir.  Thankee, sir.  They'll have to get the key of the 
gate afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked.  And there's 
a step there, as I used for to clean with my broom.  It's turned 
wery dark, sir.  Is there any light a-comin?"

"It is coming fast, Jo."

Fast.  The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is 
very near its end.

"Jo, my poor fellow!"

"I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin--a-gropin--let me 
catch hold of your hand."

"Jo, can you say what I say?"

"I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good."

"Our Father."

"Our Father!  Yes, that's wery good, sir."

"Which art in heaven."

"Art in heaven--is the light a-comin, sir?"

"It is close at hand.  Hallowed by thy name!"

"Hallowed be--thy--"

The light is come upon the dark benighted way.  Dead!

Dead, your Majesty.  Dead, my lords and gentlemen.  Dead, right 
reverends and wrong reverends of every order.  Dead, men and women, 
born with heavenly compassion in your hearts.  And dying thus 
around us every day.



CHAPTER XLVIII

Closing in


The place in Lincolnshire has shut its many eyes again, and the 
house in town is awake.  In Lincolnshire the Dedlocks of the past 
doze in their picture-frames, and the low wind murmurs through the 
long drawing-room as if they were breathing pretty regularly.  In 
town the Dedlocks of the present rattle in their fire-eyed 
carriages through the darkness of the night, and the Dedlock 
Mercuries, with ashes (or hair-powder) on their heads, symptomatic 
of their great humility, loll away the drowsy mornings in the 
little windows of the hall.  The fashionable world--tremendous orb, 
nearly five miles round--is in full swing, and the solar system 
works respectfully at its appointed distances.

Where the throng is thickest, where the lights are brightest, where 
all the senses are ministered to with the greatest delicacy and 
refinement, Lady Dedlock is.  From the shining heights she has 
scaled and taken, she is never absent.  Though the belief she of 
old reposed in herself as one able to reserve whatsoever she would 
under her mantle of pride is beaten down, though she has no 
assurance that what she is to those around her she will remain 
another day, it is not in her nature when envious eyes are looking 
on to yield or to droop.  They say of her that she has lately grown 
more handsome and more haughty.  The debilitated cousin says of 
her that she's beauty nough--tsetup shopofwomen--but rather 
larming kind--remindingmanfact--inconvenient woman--who WILL 
getoutofbedandbawthstahlishment--Shakespeare.

Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing, looks nothing.  Now, as heretofore, 
he is to be found in doorways of rooms, with his limp white cravat 
loosely twisted into its old-fashioned tie, receiving patronage 
from the peerage and making no sign.  Of all men he is still the 
last who might be supposed to have any influence upon my Lady.  Of 
all woman she is still the last who might be supposed to have any 
dread of him.

One thing has been much on her mind since their late interview in 
his turret-room at Chesney Wold.  She is now decided, and prepared 
to throw it off.

It is morning in the great world, afternoon according to the little 
sun.  The Mercuries, exhausted by looking out of window, are 
reposing in the hall and hang their heavy heads, the gorgeous 
creatures, like overblown sunflowers.  Like them, too, they seem to 
run to a deal of seed in their tags and trimmings.  Sir Leicester, 
in the library, has fallen asleep for the good of the country over 
the report of a Parliamentary committee.  My Lady sits in the room 
in which she gave audience to the young man of the name of Guppy.  
Rosa is with her and has been writing for her and reading to her.  
Rosa is now at work upon embroidery or some such pretty thing, and 
as she bends her head over it, my Lady watches her in silence.  Not 
for the first time to-day.

"Rosa."

The pretty village face looks brightly up.  Then, seeing how 
serious my Lady is, looks puzzled and surprised.

"See to the door.  Is it shut?"

Yes.  She goes to it and returns, and looks yet more surprised.

"I am about to place confidence in you, child, for I know I may 
trust your attachment, if not your judgment.  In what I am going to 
do, I will not disguise myself to you at least.  But I confide in 
you.  Say nothing to any one of what passes between us."

The timid little beauty promises in all earnestness to be 
trustworthy.

"Do you know," Lady Dedlock asks her, signing to her to bring her 
chair nearer, "do you know, Rosa, that I am different to you from 
what I am to any one?"

"Yes, my Lady.  Much kinder.  But then I often think I know you as 
you really are."

"You often think you know me as I really am?  Poor child, poor 
child!"

She says it with a kind of scorn--though not of Rosa--and sits 
brooding, looking dreamily at her.

"Do you think, Rosa, you are any relief or comfort to me?  Do you 
suppose your being young and natural, and fond of me and grateful 
to me, makes it any pleasure to me to have you near me?"

"I don't know, my Lady; I can scarcely hope so.  But with all my 
heart, I wish it was so."

"It is so, little one."

The pretty face is checked in its flush of pleasure by the dark 
expression on the handsome face before it.  It looks timidly for an 
explanation.

"And if I were to say to-day, 'Go! Leave me!' I should say what 
would give me great pain and disquiet, child, and what would leave 
me very solitary."

"My Lady!  Have I offended you?"

"In nothing.  Come here."

Rosa bends down on the footstool at my Lady's feet.  My Lady, with 
that motherly touch of the famous ironmaster night, lays her hand 
upon her dark hair and gently keeps it there.

"I told you, Rosa, that I wished you to be happy and that I would 
make you so if I could make anybody happy on this earth.  I cannot.  
There are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have no 
part, rendering it far better for you that you should not remain 
here.  You must not remain here.  I have determined that you shall 
not.  I have written to the father of your lover, and he will be 
here to-day.  All this I have done for your sake."

The weeping girl covers her hand with kisses and says what shall 
she do, what shall she do, when they are separated!  Her mistress 
kisses her on the cheek and makes no other answer.

"Now, be happy, child, under better circumstances.  Be beloved and 
happy!"

"Ah, my Lady, I have sometimes thought--forgive my being so free--
that YOU are not happy."

"I!"

"Will you be more so when you have sent me away?  Pray, pray, think 
again.  Let me stay a little while!"

"I have said, my child, that what I do, I do for your sake, not my 
own.  It is done.  What I am towards you, Rosa, is what I am now--
not what I shall be a little while hence.  Remember this, and keep 
my confidence.  Do so much for my sake, and thus all ends between 
us!"

She detaches herself from her simple-hearted companion and leaves 
the room.  Late in the afternoon, when she next appears upon the 
staircase, she is in her haughtiest and coldest state.  As 
indifferent as if all passion, feeling, and interest had been worn 
out in the earlier ages of the world and had perished from its 
surface with its other departed monsters.

Mercury has announced Mr. Rouncewell, which is the cause of her 
appearance.  Mr. Rouncewell is not in the library, but she repairs 
to the library.  Sir Leicester is there, and she wishes to speak to 
him first.

"Sir Leicester, I am desirous--but you are engaged."

Oh, dear no!  Not at all.  Only Mr. Tulkinghorn.

Always at hand.  Haunting every place.  No relief or security from 
him for a moment.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock.  Will you allow me to retire?"

With a look that plainly says, "You know you have the power to 
remain if you will," she tells him it is not necessary and moves 
towards a chair.  Mr. Tulkinghorn brings it a little forward for 
her with his clumsy bow and retires into a window opposite.  
Interposed between her and the fading light of day in the now quiet 
street, his shadow falls upon her, and he darkens all before her.  
Even so does he darken her life.

It is a dull street under the best conditions, where the two long 
rows of houses stare at each other with that severity that half-a-
dozen of its greatest mansions seem to have been slowly stared into 
stone rather than originally built in that material.  It is a 
street of such dismal grandeur, so determined not to condescend to 
liveliness, that the doors and windows hold a gloomy state of their 
own in black paint and dust, and the echoing mews behind have a dry 
and massive appearance, as if they were reserved to stable the 
stone chargers of noble statues.  Complicated garnish of iron-work 
entwines itself over the flights of steps in this awful street, and 
from these petrified bowers, extinguishers for obsolete flambeaux 
gasp at the upstart gas.  Here and there a weak little iron hoop, 
through which bold boys aspire to throw their friends' caps (its 
only present use), retains its place among the rusty foliage, 
sacred to the memory of departed oil.  Nay, even oil itself, yet 
lingering at long intervals in a little absurd glass pot, with a 
knob in the bottom like an oyster, blinks and sulks at newer lights 
every night, like its high and dry master in the House of Lords.

Therefore there is not much that Lady Dedlock, seated in her chair, 
could wish to see through the window in which Mr. Tulkinghorn 
stands.  And yet--and yet--she sends a look in that direction as if 
it were her heart's desire to have that figure moved out of the 
way.

Sir Leicester begs his Lady's pardon.  She was about to say?

"Only that Mr. Rouncewell is here (he has called by my appointment) 
and that we had better make an end of the question of that girl.  I 
am tired to death of the matter."

"What can I do--to--assist?" demands Sir Leicester in some 
considerable doubt.

"Let us see him here and have done with it.  Will you tell them to 
send him up?"

"Mr. Tulkinghorn, be so good as to ring.  Thank you.  Request," 
says Sir Leicester to Mercury, not immediately remembering the 
business term, "request the iron gentleman to walk this way."

Mercury departs in search of the iron gentleman, finds, and 
produces him.  Sir Leicester receives that ferruginous person 
graciously.

"I hope you are well, Mr. Rouncewell.  Be seated.  (My solicitor, 
Mr. Tulkinghorn.)  My Lady was desirous, Mr. Rouncewell," Sir 
Leicester skilfully transfers him with a solemn wave of his hand, 
"was desirous to speak with you.  Hem!"

"I shall be very happy," returns the iron gentleman, "to give my 
best attention to anything Lady Dedlock does me the honour to say."

As he turns towards her, he finds that the impression she makes 
upon him is less agreeable than on the former occasion.  A distant 
supercilious air makes a cold atmosphere about her, and there is 
nothing in her bearing, as there was before, to encourage openness.

"Pray, sir," says Lady Dedlock listlessly, "may I be allowed to 
inquire whether anything has passed between you and your son 
respecting your son's fancy?"

It is almost too troublesome to her languid eyes to bestow a look 
upon him as she asks this question.

"If my memory serves me, Lady Dedlock, I said, when I had the 
pleasure of seeing you before, that I should seriously advise my 
son to conquer that--fancy."  The ironmaster repeats her expression 
with a little emphasis.

"And did you?"

"Oh! Of course I did."

Sir Leicester gives a nod, approving and confirmatory.  Very 
proper.  The iron gentleman, having said that he would do it, was 
bound to do it.  No difference in this respect between the base 
metals and the precious.  Highly proper.

"And pray has he done so?"

"Really, Lady Dedlock, I cannot make you a definite reply.  I fear 
not.  Probably not yet.  In our condition of life, we sometimes 
couple an intention with our--our fancies which renders them not 
altogether easy to throw off.  I think it is rather our way to be 
in earnest."

Sir Leicester has a misgiving that there may be a hidden Wat 
Tylerish meaning in this expression, and fumes a little.  Mr. 
Rouncewell is perfectly good-humoured and polite, but within such 
limits, evidently adapts his tone to his reception.

"Because," proceeds my Lady, "I have been thinking of the subject, 
which is tiresome to me."

"I am very sorry, I am sure."

"And also of what Sir Leicester said upon it, in which I quite 
concur"--Sir Leicester flattered--"and if you cannot give us the 
assurance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the 
conclusion that the girl had better leave me."

"I can give no such assurance, Lady Dedlock.  Nothing of the kind."

"Then she had better go."

"Excuse me, my Lady," Sir Leicester considerately interposes, "but 
perhaps this may be doing an injury to the young woman which she 
has not merited.  Here is a young woman," says Sir Leicester, 
magnificently laying out the matter with his right hand like a 
service of plate, "whose good fortune it is to have attracted the 
notice and favour of an eminent lady and to live, under the 
protection of that eminent lady, surrounded by the various 
advantages which such a position confers, and which are 
unquestionably very great--I believe unquestionably very great, 
sir--for a young woman in that station of life.  The question then 
arises, should that young woman be deprived of these many 
advantages and that good fortune simply because she has"--Sir 
Leicester, with an apologetic but dignified inclination of his head 
towards the ironmaster, winds up his sentence--"has attracted the 
notice of Mr Rouncewell's son?  Now, has she deserved this 
punishment?  Is this just towards her?  Is this our previous 
understanding?"

"I beg your pardon," interposes Mr. Rouncewell's son's father.  
"Sir Leicester, will you allow me?  I think I may shorten the 
subject.  Pray dismiss that from your consideration.  If you 
remember anything so unimportant--which is not to be expected--you 
would recollect that my first thought in the affair was directly 
opposed to her remaining here."

Dismiss the Dedlock patronage from consideration?  Oh! Sir 
Leicester is bound to believe a pair of ears that have been handed 
down to him through such a family, or he really might have 
mistrusted their report of the iron gentleman's observations.

"It is not necessary," observes my Lady in her coldest manner 
before he can do anything but breathe amazedly, "to enter into 
these matters on either side.  The girl is a very good girl; I have 
nothing whatever to say against her, but she is so far insensible 
to her many advantages and her good fortune that she is in love--or 
supposes she is, poor little fool--and unable to appreciate them."

Sir Leicester begs to observe that wholly alters the case.  He 
might have been sure that my Lady had the best grounds and reasons 
in support of her view.  He entirely agrees with my Lady.  The 
young woman had better go.

"As Sir Leicester observed, Mr. Rouncewell, on the last occasion 
when we were fatigued by this business," Lady Dedlock languidly 
proceeds, "we cannot make conditions with you.  Without conditions, 
and under present circumstances, the girl is quite misplaced here 
and had better go.  I have told her so.  Would you wish to have her 
sent back to the village, or would you like to take her with you, 
or what would you prefer?"

"Lady Dedlock, if I may speak plainly--"

"By all means."

"--I should prefer the course which will the soonest relieve you of 
the incumbrance and remove her from her present position."

"And to speak as plainly," she returns with the same studied 
carelessness, "so should I.  Do I understand that you will take her 
with you?"

The iron gentleman makes an iron bow.

"Sir Leicester, will you ring?"  Mr. Tulkinghorn steps forward from 
his window and pulls the bell.  "I had forgotten you.  Thank you."  
He makes his usual bow and goes quietly back again.  Mercury, 
swift-responsive, appears, receives instructions whom to produce, 
skims away, produces the aforesaid, and departs.

Rosa has been crying and is yet in distress.  On her coming in, the 
ironmaster leaves his chair, takes her arm in his, and remains with 
her near the door ready to depart.

"You are taken charge of, you see," says my Lady in her weary 
manner, "and are going away well protected.  I have mentioned that 
you are a very good girl, and you have nothing to cry for."

"She seems after all," observes Mr. Tulkinghorn, loitering a little 
forward with his hands behind him, "as if she were crying at going 
away."

"Why, she is not well-bred, you see," returns Mr. Rouncewell with 
some quickness in his manner, as if he were glad to have the lawyer 
to retort upon, "and she is an inexperienced little thing and knows 
no better.  If she had remained here, sir, she would have improved, 
no doubt."

"No doubt," is Mr. Tulkinghorn's composed reply.

Rosa sobs out that she is very sorry to leave my Lady, and that she 
was happy at Chesney Wold, and has been happy with my Lady, and 
that she thanks my Lady over and over again.  "Out, you silly 
little puss!" says the ironmaster, checking her in a low voice, 
though not angrily.  "Have a spirit, if you're fond of Watt!"  My 
Lady merely waves her off with indifference, saying, "There, there, 
child!  You are a good girl.  Go away!"  Sir Leicester has 
magnificently disengaged himself from the subject and retired into 
the sanctuary of his blue coat.  Mr. Tulkinghorn, an indistinct 
form against the dark street now dotted with lamps, looms in my 
Lady's view, bigger and blacker than before.

"Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Rouncewell after a pause 
of a few moments, "I beg to take my leave, with an apology for 
having again troubled you, though not of my own act, on this 
tiresome subject.  I can very well understand, I assure you, how 
tiresome so small a matter must have become to Lady Dedlock.  If I 
am doubtful of my dealing with it, it is only because I did not at 
first quietly exert my influence to take my young friend here away 
without troubling you at all.  But it appeared to me--I dare say 
magnifying the importance of the thing--that it was respectful to 
explain to you how the matter stood and candid to consult your 
wishes and convenience.  I hope you will excuse my want of 
acquaintance with the polite world."

Sir Leicester considers himself evoked out of the sanctuary by 
these remarks.  "Mr. Rouncewell," he returns, "do not menfion it.  
Justifications are unnecessary, I hope, on either side."

"I am glad to hear it, Sir Leicester; and if I may, by way of a 
last word, revert to what I said before of my mother's long 
connexion with the family and the worth it bespeaks on both sides, 
I would point out this little instance here on my arm who shows 
herself so affectionate and faithful in parting and in whom my 
mother, I dare say, has done something to awaken such feelings--
though of course Lady Dedlock, by her heartfelt interest and her 
genial condescension, has done much more.

If he mean this ironically, it may be truer than he thinks.  He 
points it, however, by no deviation from his straightforward manner 
of speech, though in saying it he turns towards that part of the 
dim room where my Lady sits.  Sir Leicester stands to return his 
parting salutation, Mr. Tulkinghorn again rings, Mercury takes 
another flight, and Mr. Rouncewell and Rosa leave the house.

Then lights are brought in, discovering Mr. Tulkinghorn still 
standing in his window with his hands behind him and my Lady still 
sitting with his figure before her, closing up her view of the 
night as well as of the day.  She is very pale.  Mr. Tulkinghorn, 
observing it as she rises to retire, thinks, "Well she may be!  The 
power of this woman is astonishing.  She has been acting a part the 
whole time."  But he can act a part too--his one unchanging 
character--and as he holds the door open for this woman, fifty 
pairs of eyes, each fifty times sharper than Sir Leicester's pair, 
should find no flaw in him.

Lady Dedlock dines alone in her own room to-day.  Sir Leicester is 
whipped in to the rescue of the Doodle Party and the discomfiture 
of the Coodle Faction.  Lady Dedlock asks on sitting down to 
dinner, still deadly pale (and quite an illustration of the 
debilitated cousin's text), whether he is gone out?  Yes.  Whether 
Mr. Tulkinghorn is gone yet?  No.  Presently she asks again, is he 
gone YET?  No.  What is he doing?  Mercury thinks he is writing 
letters in the library.  Would my Lady wish to see him?  Anything 
but that.

But he wishes to see my Lady.  Within a few more minutes he is 
reported as sending his respects, and could my Lady please to 
receive him for a word or two after her dinner?  My Lady will 
receive him now.  He comes now, apologizing for intruding, even by 
her permission, while she is at table.  When they are alone, my 
Lady waves her hand to dispense with such mockeries.

"What do you want, sir?"

"Why, Lady Dedlock," says the lawyer, taking a chair at a little 
distance from her and slowly rubbing his rusty legs up and down, up 
and down, up and down, "I am rather surprised by the course you 
have taken."

"Indeed?"

"Yes, decidedly.  I was not prepared for it.  I consider it a 
departure from our agreement and your promise.  It puts us in a new 
position, Lady Dedlock.  I feel myself under the necessity of 
saying that I don't approve of it."

He stops in his rubbing and looks at her, with his hands on his 
knees.  Imperturbable and unchangeable as he is, there is still an 
indefinable freedom in his manner which is new and which does not 
escape this woman's observation.

"I do not quite understand you."

"Oh, yes you do, I think.  I think you do.  Come, come, Lady 
Dedlock, we must not fence and parry now.  You know you like this 
girl."

"Well, sir?"

"And you know--and I know--that you have not sent her away for the 
reasons you have assigned, but for the purpose of separating her as 
much as possible from--excuse my mentioning it as a matter of 
business--any reproach and exposure that impend over yourself."

"Well, sir?"

"Well, Lady Dedlock," returns the lawyer, crossing his legs and 
nursing the uppermost knee.  "I object to that.  I consider that a 
dangerous proceeding.  I know it to be unnecessary and calculated 
to awaken speculation, doubt, rumour, I don't know what, in the 
house.  Besides, it is a violation of our agreement.  You were to 
be exactly what you were before.  Whereas, it must be evident to 
yourself, as it is to me, that you have been this evening very 
different from what you were before.  Why, bless my soul, Lady 
Dedlock, transparenfly so!"

"If, sir," she begins, "in my knowledge of my secret--"  But he 
interrupts her.

"Now, Lady Dedlock, this is a matter of business, and in a matter 
of business the ground cannot be kept too clear.  It is no longer 
your secret.  Excuse me.  That is just the mistake.  It is my 
secret, in trust for Sir Leicester and the family.  If it were your 
secret, Lady Dedlock, we should not be here holding this 
conversation."

"That is very true.  If in my knowledge of THE secret I do what I 
can to spare an innocent girl (especially, remembering your own 
reference to her when you told my story to the assembled guests at 
Chesney Wold) from the taint of my impending shame, I act upon a 
resolution I have taken.  Nothing in the world, and no one in the 
world, could shake it or could move me."  This she says with great 
deliberation and distinctness and with no more outward passion than 
himself.  As for him, he methodically discusses his matter of 
business as if she were any insensible instrument used in business.

"Really?  Then you see, Lady Dedlock," he returns, "you are not to 
be trusted.  You have put the case in a perfecfly plain way, and 
according to the literal fact; and that being the case, you are not 
to be trusted."

"Perhaps you may remember that I expressed some anxiety on this 
same point when we spoke at night at Chesney Wold?"

"Yes," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, coolly getting up and standing on the 
hearth.  "Yes.  I recollect, Lady Dedlock, that you certainly 
referred to the girl, but that was before we came to our 
arrangement, and both the letter and the spirit of our arrangement 
altogether precluded any action on your part founded upon my 
discovery.  There can be no doubt about that.  As to sparing the 
girl, of what importance or value is she?  Spare!  Lady Dedlock, 
here is a family name compromised.  One might have supposed that 
the course was straight on--over everything, neither to the right 
nor to the left, regardless of all considerations in the way, 
sparing nothing, treading everything under foot."

She has been looking at the table.  She lifts up her eyes and looks 
at him.  There is a stern expression on her face and a part of her 
lower lip is compressed under her teeth.  "This woman understands 
me," Mr. Tulkinghorn thinks as she lets her glance fall again.  
"SHE cannot be spared.  Why should she spare others?"

For a little while they are silent.  Lady Dedlock has eaten no 
dinner, but has twice or thrice poured out water with a steady hand 
and drunk it.  She rises from table, takes a lounging-chair, and 
reclines in it, shading her face.  There is nothing in her manner 
to express weakness or excite compassion.  It is thoughtful, 
gloomy, concentrated.  "This woman," thinks Mr. Tulkinghorn, 
standing on the hearth, again a dark object closing up her view, 
"is a study."

He studies her at his leisure, not speaking for a time.  She too 
studies something at her leisure.  She is not the first to speak, 
appearing indeed so unlikely to be so, though he stood there until 
midnight, that even he is driven upon breaking silence.

"Lady Dedlock, the most disagreeable part of this business 
interview remains, but it is business.  Our agreement is broken.  A 
lady of your sense and strength of character will be prepared for 
my now declaring it void and taking my own course."

"I am quite prepared."

Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head.  "That is all I have to trouble 
you with, Lady Dedlock."

She stops him as he is moving out of the room by asking, "This is 
the notice I was to receive?  I wish not to misapprehend you."

"Not exactly the notice you were to receive, Lady Dedlock, because 
the contemplated notice supposed the agreement to have been 
observed.  But virtually the same, virtually the same.  The 
difference is merely in a lawyer's mind."

"You intend to give me no other notice?"

"You are right.  No."

"Do you contemplate undeceiving Sir Leicester to-night?"

"A home question!" says Mr. Tulkinghorn with a slight smile and 
cautiously shaking his head at the shaded face.  "No, not to-
night."

"To-morrow?"

"All things considered, I had better decline answering that 
question, Lady Dedlock.  If I were to say I don't know when, 
exactly, you would not believe me, and it would answer no purpose.  
It may be to-morrow.  I would rather say no more.  You are 
prepared, and I hold out no expectations which circumstances might 
fail to justify.  I wish you good evening."

She removes her hand, turns her pale face towards him as he walks 
silently to the door, and stops him once again as he is about to 
open it.

"Do you intend to remain in the house any time?  I heard you were 
writing in the library.  Are you going to return there?"

"Only for my hat.  I am going home."

She bows her eyes rather than her head, the movement is so slight 
and curious, and he withdraws.  Clear of the room he looks at his 
watch but is inclined to doubt it by a minute or thereabouts.  
There is a splendid clock upon the staircase, famous, as splendid 
clocks not often are, for its accuracy.  "And what do YOU say," Mr. 
Tulkinghorn inquires, referring to it.  "What do you say?"

If it said now, "Don't go home!"  What a famous clock, hereafter, 
if it said to-night of all the nights that it has counted off, to 
this old man of all the young and old men who have ever stood 
before it, "Don't go home!"  With its sharp clear bell it strikes 
three quarters after seven and ticks on again.  "Why, you are worse 
than I thought you," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, muttering reproof to his 
watch.  "Two minutes wrong?  At this rate you won't last my time."  
What a watch to return good for evil if it ticked in answer, "Don't 
go home!"

He passes out into the streets and walks on, with his hands behind 
him, under the shadow of the lofty houses, many of whose mysteries, 
difficulties, mortgages, delicate affairs of all kinds, are 
treasured up within his old black satin waistcoat.  He is in the 
confidence of the very bricks and mortar.  The high chimney-stacks 
telegraph family secrets to him.  Yet there is not a voice in a 
mile of them to whisper, "Don't go home!"

Through the stir and motion of the commoner streets; through the 
roar and jar of many vehicles, many feet, many voices; with the 
blazing shop-lights lighting him on, the west wind blowing him on, 
and the crowd pressing him on, he is pitilessly urged upon his way, 
and nothing meets him murmuring, "Don't go home!"  Arrived at last 
in his dull room to light his candles, and look round and up, and 
see the Roman pointing from the ceiling, there is no new 
significance in the Roman's hand to-night or in the flutter of the 
attendant groups to give him the late warning, "Don't come here!"

It is a moonlight night, but the moon, being past the full, is only 
now rising over the great wilderness of London.  The stars are 
shining as they shone above the turret-leads at Chesney Wold.  This 
woman, as he has of late been so accustomed to call her, looks out 
upon them.  Her soul is turbulent within her; she is sick at heart 
and restless.  The large rooms are too cramped and close.  She 
cannot endure their restraint and will walk alone in a neighbouring 
garden.

Too capricious and imperious in all she does to be the cause of 
much surprise in those about her as to anything she does, this 
woman, loosely muffled, goes out into the moonlight.  Mercury 
attends with the key.  Having opened the garden-gate, he delivers 
the key into his Lady's hands at her request and is bidden to go 
back.  She will walk there some time to ease her aching head.  She 
may be an hour, she may be more.  She needs no further escort.  The 
gate shuts upon its spring with a clash, and he leaves her passing 
on into the dark shade of some trees.

A fine night, and a bright large moon, and multitudes of stars.  
Mr. Tulkinghorn, in repairing to his cellar and in opening and 
shutting those resounding doors, has to cross a little prison-like 
yard.  He looks up casually, thinking what a fine night, what a 
bright large moon, what multitudes of stars!  A quiet night, too.

A very quiet night.  When the moon shines very brilliantly, a 
solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even 
crowded places full of life.  Not only is it a still night on dusty 
high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country 
may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into 
a fringe of trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom 
upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, 
and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and 
the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and 
whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it 
flows where houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected 
in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it 
winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons 
stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the 
bolder region of rising grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and 
steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only 
is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watcher 
stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of 
light that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this 
stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest.  Its steeples 
and towers and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky 
house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises 
that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the 
footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away.  In these 
fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on 
Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold 
by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, 
every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing 
hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.

What's that?  Who fired a gun or pistol?  Where was it?

The few foot-passengers start, stop, and stare about them.  Some 
windows and doors are opened, and people come out to look.  It was 
a loud report and echoed and rattled heavily.  It shook one house, 
or so a man says who was passing.  It has aroused all the dogs in 
the neighbourhood, who bark vehemently.  Terrified cats scamper 
across the road.  While the dogs are yet barking and howling--there 
is one dog howling like a demon--the church-clocks, as if they were 
startled too, begin to strike.  The hum from the streets, likewise, 
seems to swell into a shout.  But it is soon over.  Before the last 
clock begins to strike ten, there is a lull.  When it has ceased, 
the fine night, the bright large moon, and multitudes of stars, are 
left at peace again.

Has Mr. Tulkinghorn been disturbed?  His windows are dark and 
quiet, and his door is shut.  It must be something unusual indeed 
to bring him out of his shell.  Nothing is heard of him, nothing is 
seen of him.  What power of cannon might it take to shake that 
rusty old man out of his immovable composure?

For many years the persistent Roman has been pointing, with no 
particular meaning, from that ceiling.  It is not likely that he 
has any new meaning in him to-night.  Once pointing, always 
pointing--like any Roman, or even Briton, with a single idea.  
There he is, no doubt, in his impossible attitude, pointing, 
unavailingly, all night long.  Moonlight, darkness, dawn, sunrise, 
day.  There he is still, eagerly pointing, and no one minds him.

But a little after the coming of the day come people to clean the 
rooms.  And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not 
expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild, for looking up 
at his outstretched hand and looking down at what is below it, that 
person shrieks and flies.  The others, looking in as the first one 
looked, shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street.

What does it mean?  No light is admitted into the darkened chamber, 
and people unaccustomed to it enter, and treading softly but 
heavily, carry a weight into the bedroom and lay it down.  There is 
whispering and wondering all day, strict search of every corner, 
careful tracing of steps, and careful noting of the disposition of 
every article of furniture.  All eyes look up at the Roman, and all 
voices murmur, "If he could only tell what he saw!"

He is pointing at a table with a bottle (nearly full of wine) and a 
glass upon it and two candles that were blown out suddenly soon 
after being lighted.  He is pointing at an empty chair and at a 
stain upon the ground before it that might be almost covered with a 
hand.  These objects lie directly within his range.  An excited 
imagination might suppose that there was something in them so 
terrific as to drive the rest of the composition, not only the 
attendant big-legged boys, but the clouds and flowers and pillars 
too--in short, the very body and soul of Allegory, and all the 
brains it has--stark mad.  It happens surely that every one who 
comes into the darkened room and looks at these things looks up at 
the Roman and that he is invested in all eyes with mystery and awe, 
as if he were a paralysed dumb witness.

So it shall happen surely, through many years to come, that ghostly 
stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be 
covered, so hard to be got out, and that the Roman, pointing from 
the ceiling shall point, so long as dust and damp and spiders spare 
him, with far greater significance than he ever had in Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's time, and with a deadly meaning.  For Mr. 
Tulkinghorn's time is over for evermore, and the Roman pointed at 
the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed 
helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on 
the floor, shot through the heart.



CHAPTER XLIX

Dutiful Friendship


A great annual occasion has come round in the establishment of Mr. 
Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae, ex-artilleryman and present 
bassoon-player.  An occasion of feasting and festival.  The 
celebration of a birthday in the family.

It is not Mr. Bagnet's birthday.  Mr. Bagnet merely distinguishes 
that epoch in the musical instrument business by kissing the 
children with an extra smack before breakfast, smoking an 
additional pipe after dinner, and wondering towards evening what 
his poor old mother is thinking about it--a subject of infinite 
speculation, and rendered so by his mother having departed this 
life twenty years.  Some men rarely revert to their father, but 
seem, in the bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred 
all the stock of filial affection into their mother's name.  Mr. 
Bagnet is one of like his trade the better for that.  If I had kept 
clear of his old girl causes him usually to make the noun-
substantive "goodness" of the feminine gender.

It is not the birthday of one of the three children.  Those 
occasions are kept with some marks of distinction, but they rarely 
overleap the bounds of happy returns and a pudding.  On young 
Woolwich's last birthday, Mr. Bagnet certainly did, after observing 
on his growth and general advancement, proceed, in a moment of 
profound reflection on the changes wrought by time, to examine him 
in the catechism, accomplishing with extreme accuracy the questions 
number one and two, "What is your name?" and "Who gave you that 
name?" but there failing in the exact precision of his memory and 
substituting for number three the question "And how do you like 
that name?" which he propounded with a sense of its importance, in 
itself so edifying and improving as to give it quite an orthodox 
air.  This, however, was a speciality on that particular birthday, 
and not a general solemnity.

It is the old girl's birthday, and that is the greatest holiday and 
reddest-letter day in Mr. Bagnet's calendar.  The auspicious event 
is always commemorated according to certain forms settled and 
prescribed by Mr. Bagnet some years since.  Mr. Bagnet, being 
deeply convinced that to have a pair of fowls for dinner is to 
attain the highest pitch of imperial luxury, invariably goes forth 
himself very early in the morning of this day to buy a pair; he is, 
as invariably, taken in by the vendor and installed in the 
possession of the oldest inhabitants of any coop in Europe.  
Returning with these triumphs of toughness tied up in a clean blue 
and white cotton handkerchief (essential to the arrangements), he 
in a casual manner invites Mrs. Bagnet to declare at breakfast what 
she would like for dinner.  Mrs. Bagnet, by a coincidence never 
known to fail, replying fowls, Mr. Bagnet instantly produces his 
bundle from a place of concealment amidst general amazement and 
rejoicing.  He further requires that the old girl shall do nothing 
all day long but sit in her very best gown and be served by himself 
and the young people.  As he is not illustrious for his cookery, 
this may be supposed to be a matter of state rather than enjoyment 
on the old girl's part, but she keeps her state with all imaginable 
cheerfulness.

On this present birthday, Mr. Bagnet has accomplished the usual 
preliminaries.  He has bought two specimens of poultry, which, if 
there be any truth in adages, were certainly not caught with chaff, 
to be prepared for the spit; he has amazed and rejoiced the family 
by their unlooked-for production; he is himself directing the 
roasting of the poultry; and Mrs. Bagnet, with her wholesome brown 
fingers itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her 
gown of ceremony, an honoured guest.

Quebec and Malta lay the cloth for dinner, while Woolwich, serving, 
as beseems him, under his father, keeps the fowls revolving.  To 
these young scullions Mrs. Bagnet occasionally imparts a wink, or a 
shake of the head, or a crooked face, as they made mistakes.

"At half after one."  Says Mr. Bagnet.  "To the minute.  They'll be 
done."

Mrs. Bagnet, with anguish, beholds one of them at a standstill 
before the fire and beginning to burn.

"You shall have a dinner, old girl," says Mr. Bagnet.  "Fit for a 
queen."

Mrs. Bagnet shows her white teeth cheerfully, but to the perception 
of her son, betrays so much uneasiness of spirit that he is 
impelled by the dictates of affection to ask her, with his eyes, 
what is the matter, thus standing, with his eyes wide open, more 
oblivious of the fowls than before, and not affording the least 
hope of a return to consciousness.  Fortunately his elder sister 
perceives the cause of the agitation in Mrs. Bagnet's breast and 
with an admonitory poke recalls him.  The stopped fowls going round 
again, Mrs. Bagnet closes her eyes in the intensity of her relief.

"George will look us up," says Mr. Bagnet.  "At half after four.  
To the moment.  How many years, old girl.  Has George looked us up.  
This afternoon?"

"Ah, Lignum, Lignum, as many as make an old woman of a young one, I 
begin to think.  Just about that, and no less," returns Mrs. 
Bagnet, laughing and shaking her head.

"Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet, "never mind.  You'd be as young as 
ever you was.  If you wasn't younger.  Which you are.  As everybody 
knows."

Quebec and Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy 
is sure to bring mother something, and begin to speculate on what 
it will be.

"Do you know, Lignum," says Mrs. Bagnet, casting a glance on the 
table-cloth, and winking "salt!" at Malta with her right eye, and 
shaking the pepper away from Quebec with her head, "I begin to 
think George is in the roving way again.

"George," returns Mr. Bagnet, "will never desert.  And leave his 
old comrade.  In the lurch.  Don't be afraid of it."

"No, Lignum.  No.  I don't say he will.  I don't think he will.  
But if he could get over this money trouble of his, I believe he 
would be off."

Mr. Bagnet asks why.

"Well," returns his wife, considering, "George seems to me to be 
getting not a little impatient and restless.  I don't say but what 
he's as free as ever.  Of course he must be free or he wouldn't be 
George, but he smarts and seems put out."

"He's extra-drilled," says Mr. Bagnet.  "By a lawyer.  Who would 
put the devil out."

"There's something in that," his wife assents; "but so it is, 
Lignum."

Further conversation is prevented, for the time, by the necessity 
under which Mr. Bagnet finds himself of directing the whole force 
of his mind to the dinner, which is a little endangered by the dry 
humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also by the made 
gravy acquiring no flavour and turning out of a flaxen complexion.  
With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the 
process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every 
direction, as if they were subject to earthquakes.  The legs of the 
fowls, too, are longer than could be desired, and extremely scaly.  
Overcoming these disadvantages to the best of his ability, Mr. 
Bagnet at last dishes and they sit down at table, Mrs. Bagnet 
occupying the guest's place at his right hand.

It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a 
year, for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious.  
Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that is in the nature of 
poultry to possess is developed in these specimens in the singular 
form of guitar-strings.  Their limbs appear to have struck roots 
into their breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the 
earth.  Their legs are so hard as to encourage the idea that they 
must have devoted the greater part of their long and arduous lives 
to pedestrian exercises and the walking of matches.  But Mr. 
Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs. 
Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; 
and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment's 
disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any 
consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully.  How young 
Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks without being of ostrich descent, 
his anxious mother is at a loss to understand.

The old girl has another trial to undergo after the conclusion of 
the repast in sitting in state to see the room cleared, the hearth 
swept, and the dinner-service washed up and polished in the 
backyard.  The great delight and energy with which the two young 
ladies apply themselves to these duties, turning up their skirts in 
imitation of their mother and skating in and out on little 
scaffolds of pattens, inspire the highest hopes for the future, but 
some anxiety for the present.  The same causes lead to confusion of 
tongues, a clattering of crockery, a rattling of tin mugs, a 
whisking of brooms, and an expenditure of water, all in excess, 
while the saturation of the young ladies themselves is almost too 
moving a spectacle for Mrs. Bagnet to look upon with the calmness 
proper to her position.  At last the various cleansing processes 
are triumphantly completed; Quebec and Malta appear in fresh 
attire, smiling and dry; pipes, tobacco, and something to drink are 
placed upon the table; and the old girl enjoys the first peace of 
mind she ever knows on the day of this delightful entertainment.

When Mr. Bagnet takes his usual seat, the hands of the clock are 
very near to half-past four; as they mark it accurately, Mr. Bagnet 
announces, "George!  Military time."

It is George, and he has hearty congratulations for the old girl 
(whom he kisses on the great occasion), and for the children, and 
for Mr. Bagnet.  "Happy returns to all!" says Mr. George.

"But, George, old man!" cries Mrs. Bagnet, looking at him 
curiously.  "What's come to you?"

"Come to me?"

"Ah! You are so white, George--for you--and look so shocked.  Now 
don't he, Lignum?"

"George," says Mr. Bagnet, "tell the old girl.  What's the matter."

"I didn't know I looked white," says the trooper, passing his hand 
over his brow, "and I didn't know I looked shocked, and I'm sorry I 
do.  But the truth is, that boy who was taken in at my place died 
yesterday afternoon, and it has rather knocked me over."

"Poor creetur!" says Mrs. Bagnet with a mother's pity.  "Is he 
gone?  Dear, dear!"

"I didn't mean to say anything about it, for it's not birthday 
talk, but you have got it out of me, you see, before I sit down.  I 
should have roused up in a minute," says the trooper, making 
himself speak more gaily, "but you're so quick, Mrs. Bagnet."

"You're right.  The old girl," says Mr. Bagnet.  "Is as quick.  As 
powder."

"And what's more, she's the subject of the day, and we'll stick to 
her," cries Mr. George.  "See here, I have brought a little brooch 
along with me.  It's a poor thing, you know, but it's a keepsake.  
That's all the good it is, Mrs. Bagnet."

Mr. George produces his present, which is greeted with admiring 
leapings and clappings by the young family, and with a species of 
reverential admiration by Mr. Bagnet.  "Old girl," says Mr. Bagnet.  
"Tell him my opinion of it."

"Why, it's a wonder, George!" Mrs. Bagnet exclaims.  "It's the 
beautifullest thing that ever was seen!"

"Good!" says Mr. Bagnet.  "My opinion."

"It's so pretty, George," cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning it on all 
sides and holding it out at arm's length, "that it seems too choice 
for me."

"Bad!" says Mr. Bagnet.  "Not my opinlon."

"But whatever it is, a hundred thousand thanks, old fellow," says 
Mrs. Bagnet, her eyes sparkling with pleasure and her hand 
stretched out to him; "and though I have been a crossgrained 
soldier's wife to you sometimes, George, we are as strong friends, 
I am sure, in reality, as ever can be.  Now you shall fasten it on 
yourself, for good luck, if you will, George."

The children close up to see it done, and Mr. Bagnet looks over 
young Woolwich's head to see it done with an interest so maturely 
wooden, yet pleasantly childish, that Mrs. Bagnet cannot help 
laughing in her airy way and saying, "Oh, Lignum, Lignum, what a 
precious old chap you are!"  But the trooper fails to fasten the 
brooch.  His hand shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off.  "Would 
any one believe this?" says he, catching it as it drops and looking 
round.  "I am so out of sorts that I bungle at an easy job like 
this!"

Mrs. Bagnet concludes that for such a case there is no remedy like 
a pipe, and fastening the brooch herself in a twinkling, causes the 
trooper to be inducted into his usual snug place and the pipes to 
be got into action.  "If that don't bring you round, George," says 
she, "just throw your eye across here at your present now and then, 
and the two together MUST do it."

"You ought to do it of yourself," George answers; "I know that very 
well, Mrs. Bagnet.  I'll tell you how, one way and another, the 
blues have got to be too many for me.  Here was this poor lad.  
'Twas dull work to see him dying as he did, and not be able to help 
him."

"What do you mean, George?  You did help him.  You took him under 
your roof."

"I helped him so far, but that's little.  I mean, Mrs. Bagnet, 
there he was, dying without ever having been taught much more than 
to know his right hand from his left.  And he was too far gone to 
be helped out of that."

"Ah, poor creetur!" says Mrs. Bagnet.

"Then," says the trooper, not yet lighting his pipe, and passing 
his heavy hand over his hair, "that brought up Gridley in a man's 
mind.  His was a bad case too, in a different way.  Then the two 
got mixed up in a man's mind with a flinty old rascal who had to do 
with both.  And to think of that rusty carbine, stock and barrel, 
standing up on end in his corner, hard, indifferent, taking 
everything so evenly--it made flesh and blood tingle, I do assure 
you."

"My advice to you," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "is to light your pipe and 
tingle that way.  It's wholesomer and comfortabler, and better for 
the health altogether."

"You're right," says the trooper, "and I'll do it."

So he does it, though still with an indignant gravity that 
impresses the young Bagnets, and even causes Mr. Bagnet to defer 
the ceremony of drinking Mrs. Bagnet's health, always given by 
himself on these occasions in a speech of exemplary terseness.  But 
the young ladies having composed what Mr. Bagnet is in the habit of 
calling "the mixtur," and George's pipe being now in a glow, Mr. 
Bagnet considers it his duty to proceed to the toast of the 
evening.  He addresses the assembled company in the following 
terms.

"George.  Woolwich.  Quebec.  Malta.  This is her birthday.  Take a 
day's march.  And you won't find such another.  Here's towards 
her!"

The toast having been drunk with enthusiasm, Mrs. Bagnet returns 
thanks in a neat address of corresponding brevity.  This model 
composition is limited to the three words "And wishing yours!" 
which the old girl follows up with a nod at everybody in succession 
and a well-regulated swig of the mixture.  This she again follows 
up, on the present occasion, by the wholly unexpected exclamation, 
"Here's a man!"

Here IS a man, much to the astonishment of the little company, 
looking in at the parlour-door.  He is a sharp-eyed man--a quick 
keen man--and he takes in everybody's look at him, all at once, 
individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a 
remarkable man.

"George," says the man, nodding, "how do you find yourself?"

"Why, it's Bucket!" cries Mr. George.

"Yes," says the man, coming in and closing the door.  "I was going 
down the street here when I happened to stop and look in at the 
musical instruments in the shop-window--a friend of mine is in want 
of a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone--and I saw a party 
enjoying themselves, and I thought it was you in the corner; I 
thought I couldn't be mistaken.  How goes the world with you, 
George, at the present moment?  Pretty smooth?  And with you, 
ma'am?  And with you, governor?  And Lord," says Mr. Bucket, 
opening his arms, "here's children too!  You may do anything with 
me if you only show me children.  Give us a kiss, my pets.  No 
occasion to inquire who YOUR father and mother is.  Never saw such 
a likeness in my life!"

Mr. Bucket, not unwelcome, has sat himself down next to Mr. George 
and taken Quebec and Malta on his knees.  "You pretty dears," says 
Mr. Bucket, "give us another kiss; it's the only thing I'm greedy 
in.  Lord bless you, how healthy you look!  And what may be the 
ages of these two, ma'am?  I should put 'em down at the figures of 
about eight and ten."

"You're very near, sir," says Mrs. Bagnet.

"I generally am near," returns Mr. Bucket, "being so fond of 
children.  A friend of mine has had nineteen of 'em, ma'am, all by 
one mother, and she's still as fresh and rosy as the morning.  Not 
so much so as yourself, but, upon my soul, she comes near you!  And 
what do you call these, my darling?" pursues Mr. Bucket, pinching 
Malta's cheeks.  "These are peaches, these are.  Bless your heart!  
And what do you think about father?  Do you think father could 
recommend a second-hand wiolinceller of a good tone for Mr. 
Bucket's friend, my dear?  My name's Bucket.  Ain't that a funny 
name?"

These blandishments have entirely won the family heart.  Mrs. 
Bagnet forgets the day to the extent of filling a pipe and a glass 
for Mr. Bucket and waiting upon him hospitably.  She would be glad 
to receive so pleasant a character under any circumstances, but she 
tells him that as a friend of George's she is particularly glad to 
see him this evening, for George has not been in his usual spirits.

"Not in his usual spirits?" exclaims Mr. Bucket.  "Why, I never 
heard of such a thing!  What's the matter, George?  You don't 
intend to tell me you've been out of spirits.  What should you be 
out of spirits for?  You haven't got anything on your mind, you 
know."

"Nothing particular," returns the trooper.

"I should think not," rejoins Mr. Bucket.  "What could you have on 
your mind, you know!  And have these pets got anything on THEIR 
minds, eh?  Not they, but they'll be upon the minds of some of the 
young fellows, some of these days, and make 'em precious low-
spirited.  I ain't much of a prophet, but I can tell you that, 
ma'am."

Mrs. Bagnet, quite charmed, hopes Mr. Bucket has a family of his 
own.

"There, ma'am!" says Mr. Bucket.  "Would you believe it?  No, I 
haven't.  My wife and a lodger constitute my family.  Mrs. Bucket 
is as fond of children as myself and as wishful to have 'em, but 
no.  So it is.  Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must 
not repine.  What a very nice backyard, ma'am!  Any way out of that 
yard, now?"

There is no way out of that yard.

"Ain't there really?" says Mr. Bucket.  "I should have thought 
there might have been.  Well, I don't know as I ever saw a backyard 
that took my fancy more.  Would you allow me to look at it?  Thank 
you.  No, I see there's no way out.  But what a very good-
proportioned yard it is!"

Having cast his sharp eye all about it, Mr. Bucket returns to his 
chair next his friend Mr. George and pats Mr. George affectionately 
on the shoulder.

"How are your spirits now, George?"

"All right now," returns the trooper.

"That's your sort!" says Mr. Bucket.  "Why should you ever have 
been otherwise?  A man of your fine figure and constitution has no 
right to be out of spirits.  That ain't a chest to be out of 
spirits, is it, ma'am?  And you haven't got anything on your mind, 
you know, George; what could you have on your mind!"

Somewhat harping on this phrase, considering the extent and variety 
of his conversational powers, Mr. Bucket twice or thrice repeats it 
to the pipe he lights, and with a listening face that is 
particularly his own.  But the sun of his sociality soon recovers 
from this brief eclipse and shines again.

"And this is brother, is it, my dears?" says Mr. Bucket, referring 
to Quebec and Malta for information on the subject of young 
Woolwich.  "And a nice brother he is--half-brother I mean to say.  
For he's too old to be your boy, ma'am."

"I can certify at all events that he is not anybody else's," 
returns Mrs. Bagnet, laughing.

"Well, you do surprise me!  Yet he's like you, there's no denying.  
Lord, he's wonderfully like you!  But about what you may call the 
brow, you know, THERE his father comes out!"  Mr. Bucket compares 
the faces with one eye shut up, while Mr. Bagnet smokes in stolid 
satisfaction.

This is an opportunity for Mrs. Bagnet to inform him that the boy 
is George's godson.

"George's godson, is he?" rejoins Mr. Bucket with extreme 
cordiality.  "I must shake hands over again with George's godson.  
Godfather and godson do credit to one another.  And what do you 
intend to make of him, ma'am?  Does he show any turn for any 
musical instrument?"

Mr. Bagnet suddenly interposes, "Plays the fife.  Beautiful."

"Would you believe it, governor," says Mr. Bucket, struck by the 
coincidence, "that when I was a boy I played the fife myself?  Not 
in a scientific way, as I expect he does, but by ear.  Lord bless 
you!  'British Grenadiers'--there's a tune to warm an Englishman 
up!  COULD you give us 'British Grenadiers,' my fine fellow?"

Nothing could be more acceptable to the little circle than this 
call upon young Woolwich, who immediately fetches his fife and 
performs the stirring melody, during which performance Mr. Bucket, 
much enlivened, beats time and never falls to come in sharp with 
the burden, "British Gra-a-anadeers!"  In short, he shows so much 
musical taste that Mr. Bagnet actually takes his pipe from his lips 
to express his conviction that he is a singer.  Mr. Bucket receives 
the harmonious impeachment so modestly, confessing how that he did 
once chaunt a little, for the expression of the feelings of his own 
bosom, and with no presumptuous idea of entertaining his friends, 
that he is asked to sing.  Not to be behindhand in the sociality of 
the evening, he complies and gives them "Believe Me, if All Those 
Endearing Young Charms."  This ballad, he informs Mrs. Bagnet, he 
considers to have been his most powerful ally in moving the heart 
of Mrs. Bucket when a maiden, and inducing her to approach the 
altar--Mr. Bucket's own words are "to come up to the scratch."

This sparkling stranger is such a new and agreeable feature in the 
evening that Mr. George, who testified no great emotions of 
pleasure on his entrance, begins, in spite of himself, to be rather 
proud of him.  He is so friendly, is a man of so many resources, 
and so easy to get on with, that it is something to have made him 
known there.  Mr. Bagnet becomes, after another pipe, so sensible 
of the value of his acquaintance that he solicits the honour of his 
company on the old girl's next birthday.  If anything can more 
closely cement and consolidate the esteem which Mr. Bucket has 
formed for the family, it is the discovery of the nature of the 
occasion.  He drinks to Mrs. Bagnet with a warmth approaching to 
rapture, engages himself for that day twelvemonth more than 
thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day in a large black pocket-
book with a girdle to it, and breathes a hope that Mrs. Bucket and 
Mrs. Bagnet may before then become, in a manner, sisters.  As he 
says himself, what is public life without private ties?  He is in 
his humble way a public man, but it is not in that sphere that he 
finds happiness.  No, it must be sought within the confines of 
domestic bliss.

It is natural, under these circumstances, that he, in his turn, 
should remember the friend to whom he is indebted for so promising 
an acquaintance.  And he does.  He keeps very close to him.  
Whatever the subject of the conversation, he keeps a tender eye 
upon him.  He waits to walk home with him.  He is interested in his 
very boots and observes even them attentively as Mr. George sits 
smoking cross-legged in the chimney-corner.

At length Mr. George rises to depart.  At the same moment Mr. 
Bucket, with the secret sympathy of friendship, also rises.  He 
dotes upon the children to the last and remembers the commission he 
has undertaken for an absent friend.

"Respecting that second-hand wiolinceller, governor--could you 
recommend me such a thing?"

"Scores," says Mr. Bagnet.

"I am obliged to you," returns Mr. Bucket, squeezing his hand.  
"You're a friend in need.  A good tone, mind you!  My friend is a 
regular dab at it.  Ecod, he saws away at Mozart and Handel and the 
rest of the big-wigs like a thorough workman.  And you needn't," 
says Mr. Bucket in a considerate and private voice, "you needn't 
commit yourself to too low a figure, governor.  I don't want to pay 
too large a price for my friend, but I want you to have your proper 
percentage and be remunerated for your loss of time.  That is but 
fair.  Every man must live, and ought to it."

Mr. Bagnet shakes his head at the old girl to the effect that they 
have found a jewel of price.

"Suppose I was to give you a look in, say, at half arter ten to-
morrow morning.  Perhaps you could name the figures of a few 
wiolincellers of a good tone?" says Mr. Bucket.

Nothing easier.  Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet both engage to have the 
requisite information ready and even hint to each other at the 
practicability of having a small stock collected there for 
approval.

"Thank you," says Mr. Bucket, "thank you.  Good night, ma'am.  Good 
night, governor.  Good night, darlings.  I am much obliged to you 
for one of the pleasantest evenings I ever spent in my life."

They, on the contrary, are much obliged to him for the pleasure he 
has given them in his company; and so they part with many 
expressions of goodwill on both sides.  "Now George, old boy," says 
Mr. Bucket, taking his arm at the shop-door, "come along!"  As they 
go down the little street and the Bagnets pause for a minute 
looking after them, Mrs. Bagnet remarks to the worthy Lignum that 
Mr. Bucket "almost clings to George like, and seems to be really 
fond of him."

The neighbouring streets being narrow and ill-paved, it is a little 
inconvenient to walk there two abreast and arm in arm.  Mr. George 
therefore soon proposes to walk singly.  But Mr. Bucket, who cannot 
make up his mind to relinquish his friendly hold, replies, "Wait 
half a minute, George.  I should wish to speak to you first."  
Immediately afterwards, he twists him into a public-house and into 
a parlour, where he confronts him and claps his own back against 
the door.

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, "duty is duty, and friendship is 
friendship.  I never want the two to clash if I can help it.  I 
have endeavoured to make things pleasant to-night, and I put it to 
you whether I have done it or not.  You must consider yourself in 
custody, George."

"Custody?  What for?" returns the trooper, thunderstruck.

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, urging a sensible view of the case 
upon him with his fat forefinger, "duty, as you know very well, is 
one thing, and conversation is another.  It's my duty to inform you 
that any observations you may make will be liable to be used 
against you.  Therefore, George, be careful what you say.  You 
don't happen to have heard of a murder?"

"Murder!"

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger in an 
impressive state of action, "bear in mind what I've said to you.  I 
ask you nothing.  You've been in low spirits this afternoon.  I 
say, you don't happen to have heard of a murder?"

"No.  Where has there been a murder?"

"Now, George," says Mr. Bucket, "don't you go and commit yourself.  
I'm a-going to tell you what I want you for.  There has been a 
murder in Lincoln's Inn Fields--gentleman of the name of 
Tulkinghorn.  He was shot last night.  I want you for that."

The trooper sinks upon a seat behind him, and great drops start out 
upon his forehead, and a deadly pallor overspreads his face.

"Bucket!  It's not possible that Mr. Tulkinghorn has been killed 
and that you suspect ME?"

"George," returns Mr. Bucket, keeping his forefinger going, "it is 
certainly possible, because it's the case.  This deed was done last 
night at ten o'clock.  Now, you know where you were last night at 
ten o'clock, and you'll be able to prove it, no doubt."

"Last night!  Last night?" repeats the trooper thoughtfully.  Then 
it flashes upon him.  "Why, great heaven, I was there last night!"

"So I have understood, George," returns Mr. Bucket with great 
deliberation.  "So I have understood.  Likewise you've been very 
often there.  You've been seen hanging about the place, and you've 
been heard more than once in a wrangle with him, and it's possible
--I don't say it's certainly so, mind you, but it's possible--that 
he may have been heard to call you a threatening, murdering, 
dangerous fellow."

The trooper gasps as if he would admit it all if he could speak.

"Now, George," continues Mr. Bucket, putting his hat upon the table 
with an air of business rather in the upholstery way than 
otherwise, "my wish is, as it has been all the evening, to make 
things pleasant.  I tell you plainly there's a reward out, of a 
hundred guineas, offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.  You 
and me have always been pleasant together; but I have got a duty to 
discharge; and if that hundred guineas is to be made, it may as 
well be made by me as any other man.  On all of which accounts, I 
should hope it was clear to you that I must have you, and that I'm 
damned if I don't have you.  Am I to call in any assistance, or is 
the trick done?"

Mr. George has recovered himself and stands up like a soldier.  
"Come," he says; "I am ready."

"George," continues Mr. Bucket, "wait a bit!"  With his upholsterer 
manner, as if the trooper were a window to be fitted up, he takes 
from his pocket a pair of handcuffs.  "This is a serious charge, 
George, and such is my duty."

The trooper flushes angrily and hesitates a moment, but holds out 
his two hands, clasped together, and says, "There!  Put them on!"

Mr. Bucket adjusts them in a moment.  "How do you find them?  Are 
they comfortable?  If not, say so, for I wish to make things as 
pleasant as is consistent with my duty, and I've got another pair 
in my pocket."  This remark he offers like a most respectable 
tradesman anxious to execute an order neatly and to the perfect 
satisfaction of his customer.  "They'll do as they are?  Very well!  
Now, you see, George"--he takes a cloak from a corner and begins 
adjusting it about the trooper's neck--"I was mindful of your 
feelings when I come out, and brought this on purpose.  There!  
Who's the wiser?"

"Only I," returns the trooper, "but as I know it, do me one more 
good turn and pull my hat over my eyes."

"Really, though!  Do you mean it?  Ain't it a pity?  It looks so."

"I can't look chance men in the face with these things on," Mr. 
George hurriedly replies.  "Do, for God's sake, pull my hat 
forward."

So strongly entreated, Mr. Bucket complies, puts his own hat on, 
and conducts his prize into the streets, the trooper marching on as 
steadily as usual, though with his head less erect, and Mr. Bucket 
steering him with his elbow over the crossings and up the turnings.



CHAPTER L

Esther's Narrative


It happened that when I came home from Deal I found a note from 
Caddy Jellyby (as we always continued to call her), informing me 
that her health, which had been for some time very delicate, was 
worse and that she would be more glad than she could tell me if I 
would go to see her.  It was a note of a few lines, written from 
the couch on which she lay and enclosed to me in another from her 
husband, in which he seconded her entreaty with much solicitude.  
Caddy was now the mother, and I the godmother, of such a poor 
little baby--such a tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance that 
seemed to be scarcely anything but cap-border, and a little lean, 
long-fingered hand, always clenched under its chin.  It would lie 
in this attitude all day, with its bright specks of eyes open, 
wondering (as I used to imagine) how it came to be so small and 
weak.  Whenever it was moved it cried, but at all other times it 
was so patient that the sole desire of its life appeared to be to 
lie quiet and think.  It had curious little dark veins in its face 
and curious little dark marks under its eyes like faint 
remembrances of poor Caddy's inky days, and altogether, to those 
who were not used to it, it was quite a piteous little sight.

But it was enough for Caddy that SHE was used to it.  The projects 
with which she beguiled her illness, for little Esther's education, 
and little Esther's marriage, and even for her own old age as the 
grandmother of little Esther's little Esthers, was so prettily 
expressive of devotion to this pride of her life that I should be 
tempted to recall some of them but for the timely remembrance that 
I am getting on irregularly as it is.

To return to the letter.  Caddy had a superstition about me which 
had been strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago 
when she had lain asleep with her head in my lap.  She almost--I 
think I must say quite--believed that I did her good whenever I was 
near her.  Now although this was such a fancy of the affectionate 
girl's that I am almost ashamed to mention it, still it might have 
all the force of a fact when she was really ill.  Therefore I set 
off to Caddy, with my guardian's consent, post-haste; and she and 
Prince made so much of me that there never was anything like it.

Next day I went again to sit with her, and next day I went again.  
It was a very easy journey, for I had only to rise a little earlier 
in the morning, and keep my accounts, and attend to housekeeping 
matters before leaving home.

But when I had made these three visits, my guardian said to me, on 
my return at night, "Now, little woman, little woman, this will 
never do.  Constant dropping will wear away a stone, and constant 
coaching will wear out a Dame Durden.  We will go to London for a 
while and take possession of our old lodgings."

"Not for me, dear guardian," said I, "for I never feel tired," 
which was strictly true.  I was only too happy to be in such 
request.

"For me then," returned my guardian, "or for Ada, or for both of 
us.  It is somebody's birthday to-morrow, I think."

"Truly I think it is," said I, kissing my darling, who would be 
twenty-one to-morrow.

"Well," observed my guardian, half pleasantly, half seriously, 
"that's a great occasion and will give my fair cousin some 
necessary business to transact in assertion of her independence, 
and will make London a more convenient place for all of us.  So to 
London we will go.  That being settled, there is another thing--how 
have you left Caddy?"

"Very unwell, guardian.  I fear it will be some time before she 
regains her health and strength."

"What do you call some time, now?" asked my guardian thoughtfully.

"Some weeks, I am afraid."

"Ah!"   He began to walk about the room with his hands in his 
pockets, showing that he had been thinking as much.  "Now, what do 
you say about her doctor?  Is he a good doctor, my love?"

I felt obliged to confess that I knew nothing to the contrary but 
that Prince and I had agreed only that evening that we would like 
his opinion to be confirmed by some one.

"Well, you know," returned my guardian quickly, "there's 
Woodcourt."

I had not meant that, and was rather taken by surprise.  For a 
moment all that I had had in my mind in connexion with Mr. 
Woodcourt seemed to come back and confuse me.

"You don't object to him, little woman?"

"Object to him, guardian?  Oh no!"

"And you don't think the patient would object to him?"

So far from that, I had no doubt of her being prepared to have a 
great reliance on him and to like him very much.  I said that he 
was no stranger to her personally, for she had seen him often in 
his kind attendance on Miss Flite.

"Very good," said my guardian.  "He has been here to-day, my dear, 
and I will see him about it to-morrow."

I felt in this short conversation--though I did not know how, for 
she was quiet, and we interchanged no look--that my dear girl well 
remembered how merrily she had clasped me round the waist when no 
other hands than Caddy's had brought me the little parting token.  
This caused me to feel that I ought to tell her, and Caddy too, 
that I was going to be the mistress of Bleak House and that if I 
avoided that disclosure any longer I might become less worthy in my 
own eyes of its master's love.  Therefore, when we went upstairs 
and had waited listening until the clock struck twelve in order 
that only I might be the first to wish my darling all good wishes 
on her birthday and to take her to my heart, I set before her, just 
as I had set before myself, the goodness and honour of her cousin 
John and the happy life that was in store for for me.  If ever my 
darling were fonder of me at one time than another in all our 
intercourse, she was surely fondest of me that night.  And I was so 
rejoiced to know it and so comforted by the sense of having done 
right in casting this last idle reservation away that I was ten 
times happier than I had been before.  I had scarcely thought it a 
reservation a few hours ago, but now that it was gone I felt as if 
I understood its nature better.

Next day we went to London.  We found our old lodging vacant, and 
in half an hour were quietly established there, as if we had never 
gone away.  Mr. Woodcourt dined with us to celebrate my darling's 
birthday, and we were as pleasant as we could be with the great 
blank among us that Richard's absence naturally made on such an 
occasion.  After that day I was for some weeks--eight or nine as I 
remember--very much with Caddy, and thus it fell out that I saw 
less of Ada at this time than any other since we had first come 
together, except the time of my own illness.  She often came to 
Caddy's, but our function there was to amuse and cheer her, and we 
did not talk in our usual confidential manner.  Whenever I went 
home at night we were together, but Caddy's rest was broken by 
pain, and I often remained to nurse her.

With her husband and her poor little mite of a baby to love and 
their home to strive for, what a good creature Caddy was!  So self-
denying, so uncomplaining, so anxious to get well on their account, 
so afraid of giving trouble, and so thoughtful of the unassisted 
labours of her husband and the comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop; I 
had never known the best of her until now.  And it seemed so 
curious that her pale face and helpless figure should be lying 
there day after day where dancing was the business of life, where 
the kit and the apprentices began early every morning in the ball-
room, and where the untidy little boy waltzed by himself in the 
kitchen all the afternoon.

At Caddy's request I took the supreme direction of her apartment, 
trimmed it up, and pushed her, couch and all, into a lighter and 
more airy and more cheerful corner than she had yet occupied; then, 
every day, when we were in our neatest array, I used to lay my 
small small namesake in her arms and sit down to chat or work or 
read to her.  It was at one of the first of these quiet times that 
I told Caddy about Bleak House.

We had other visitors besides Ada.  First of all we had Prince, who 
in his hurried intervals of teaching used to come softly in and sit 
softly down, with a face of loving anxiety for Caddy and the very 
little child.  Whatever Caddy's condition really was, she never 
failed to declare to Prince that she was all but well--which I, 
heaven forgive me, never failed to confirm.  This would put Prince 
in such good spirits that he would sometimes take the kit from his 
pocket and play a chord or two to astonish the baby, which I never 
knew it to do in the least degree, for my tiny namesake never 
noticed it at all.

Then there was Mrs. Jellyby.  She would come occasionally, with her 
usual distraught manner, and sit calmly looking miles beyond her 
grandchild as if her attention were absorbed by a young 
Borrioboolan on its native shores.  As bright-eyed as ever, as 
serene, and as untidy, she would say, "Well, Caddy, child, and how 
do you do to-day?"  And then would sit amiably smiling and taking 
no notice of the reply or would sweetly glide off into a 
calculation of the number of letters she had lately received and 
answered or of the coffee-bearing power of Borrioboola-Gha.  This 
she would always do with a serene contempt for our limited sphere 
of action, not to be disguised.

Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop, who was from morning to night 
and from night to morning the subject of innumerable precautions.  
If the baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make 
him uncomfortable.  If the fire wanted stirring in the night, it 
was surreptitiously done lest his rest should be broken.  If Caddy 
required any little comfort that the house contained, she first 
carefully discussed whether he was likely to require it too.  In 
return for this consideration he would come into the room once a 
day, all but blessing it--showing a condescension, and a patronage, 
and a grace of manner in dispensing the light of his high-
shouldered presence from which I might have supposed him (if I had 
not known better) to have been the benefactor of Caddy's life.

"My Caroline," he would say, making the nearest approach that he 
could to bending over her.  "Tell me that you are better to-day."

"Oh, much better, thank you, Mr. Turveydrop," Caddy would reply.

"Delighted!  Enchanted!  And our dear Miss Summerson.  She is not 
qulte prostrated by fatigue?"  Here he would crease up his eyelids 
and kiss his fingers to me, though I am happy to say he had ceased 
to be particular in his attentions since I had been so altered.

"Not at all," I would assure him.

"Charming!  We must take care of our dear Caroline, Miss Summerson.  
We must spare nothing that will restore her.  We must nourish her.  
My dear Caroline"--he would turn to his daughter-in-law with 
infinite generosity and protection--"want for nothing, my love.  
Frame a wish and gratify it, my daughter.  Everything this house 
contains, everything my room contains, is at your service, my dear.  
Do not," he would sometimes add in a burst of deportment, "even 
allow my simple requirements to be considered if they should at any 
time interfere with your own, my Caroline.  Your necessities are 
greater than mine."

He had established such a long prescriptive right to this 
deportment (his son's inheritance from his mother) that I several 
times knew both Caddy and her husband to be melted to tears by 
these affectionate self-sacrifices.

"Nay, my dears," he would remonstrate; and when I saw Caddy's thin 
arm about his fat neck as he said it, I would be melted too, though 
not by the same process.  "Nay, nay!  I have promised never to 
leave ye.  Be dutiful and affectionate towards me, and I ask no 
other return.  Now, bless ye!  I am going to the Park."

He would take the air there presently and get an appetite for his 
hotel dinner.  I hope I do old Mr. Turveydrop no wrong, but I never 
saw any better traits in him than these I faithfully record, except 
that he certainly conceived a liking for Peepy and would take the 
child out walking with great pomp, always on those occasions 
sending him home before he went to dinner himself, and occasionally 
with a halfpenny in his pocket.  But even this disinterestedness 
was attended with no inconsiderable cost, to my knowledge, for 
before Peepy was sufficiently decorated to walk hand in hand with 
the professor of deportment, he had to be newly dressed, at the 
expense of Caddy and her husband, from top to toe.

Last of our visitors, there was Mr. Jellyby.  Really when he used 
to come in of an evening, and ask Caddy in his meek voice how she 
was, and then sit down with his head against the wall, and make no 
attempt to say anything more, I liked him very much.  If he found 
me bustling about doing any little thing, he sometimes half took 
his coat off, as if with an intention of helping by a great 
exertion; but he never got any further.  His sole occupation was to 
sit with his head against the wall, looking hard at the thoughtful 
baby; and I could not quite divest my mind of a fancy that they 
understood one another.

I have not counted Mr. Woodcourt among our visitors because he was 
now Caddy's regular attendant.  She soon began to improve under his 
care, but he was so gentle, so skilful, so unwearying in the pains 
he took that it is not to be wondered at, I am sure.  I saw a good 
deal of Mr. Woodcourt during this time, though not so much as might 
be supposed, for knowing Caddy to be safe in his hands, I often 
slipped home at about the hours when he was expected.  We 
frequently met, notwithstanding.  I was quite reconciled to myself 
now, but I still felt glad to think that he was sorry for me, and 
he still WAS sorry for me I believed.  He helped Mr. Badger in his 
professional engagements, which were numerous, and had as yet no 
settled projects for the future.

It was when Caddy began to recover that I began to notice a change 
in my dear girl.  I cannot say how it first presented itself to me, 
because I observed it in many slight particulars which were nothing 
in themselves and only became something when they were pieced 
together.  But I made it out, by putting them together, that Ada 
was not so frankly cheerful with me as she used to be.  Her 
tenderness for me was as loving and true as ever; I did not for a 
moment doubt that; but there was a quiet sorrow about her which she 
did not confide to me, and in which I traced some hidden regret.

Now, I could not understand this, and I was so anxious for the 
happiness of my own pet that it caused me some uneasiness and set 
me thinking often.  At length, feeling sure that Ada suppressed 
this something from me lest it should make me unhappy too, it came 
into my head that she was a little grieved--for me--by what I had 
told her about Bleak House.

How I persuaded myself that this was likely, I don't know.  I had 
no idea that there was any selfish reference in my doing so.  I was 
not grieved for myself: I was quite contented and quite happy.  
Still, that Ada might be thinking--for me, though I had abandoned 
all such thoughts--of what once was, but was now all changed, 
seemed so easy to believe that I believed it.

What could I do to reassure my darling (I considered then) and show 
her that I had no such feelings?  Well! I could only be as brisk 
and busy as possible, and that I had tried to be all along.  
However, as Caddy's illness had certainly interfered, more or less, 
with my home duties--though I had always been there in the morning 
to make my guardian's breakfast, and he had a hundred times laughed 
and said there must be two little women, for his little woman was 
never missing--I resolved to be doubly diligent and gay.  So I went 
about the house humming all the tunes I knew, and I sat working and 
working in a desperate manner, and I talked and talked, morning, 
noon, and night.

And still there was the same shade between me and my darling.

"So, Dame Trot," observed my guardian, shutting up his book one 
night when we were all three together, "so Woodcourt has restored 
Caddy Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?"

"Yes," I said; "and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers is to be 
made rich, guardian."

"I wish it was," he returned, "with all my heart."

So did I too, for that matter.  I said so.

"Aye! We would make him as rich as a Jew if we knew how.  Would we 
not, little woman?"

I laughed as I worked and replied that I was not sure about that, 
for it might spoil him, and he might not be so useful, and there 
might be many who could ill spare him.  As Miss Flite, and Caddy 
herself, and many others.

"True," said my guardian.  "I had forgotten that.  But we would 
agree to make him rich enough to live, I suppose?  Rich enough to 
work with tolerable peace of mind?  Rich enough to have his own 
happy home and his own household gods--and household goddess, too, 
perhaps?"

That was quite another thing, I said.  We must all agree in that.

"To be sure," said my guardian.  "All of us.  I have a great regard 
for Woodcourt, a high esteem for him; and I have been sounding him 
delicately about his plans.  It is difficult to offer aid to an 
independent man with that just kind of pride which he possesses.  
And yet I would be glad to do it if I might or if I knew how.  He 
seems half inclined for another voyage.  But that appears like 
casting such a man away."

"It might open a new world to him," said I.

''So it might, little woman," my guardian assented.  ''I doubt if 
he expects much of the old world.  Do you know I have fancied that 
he sometimes feels some particular disappointment or misfortune 
encountered in it.  You never heard of anything of that sort?"

I shook my head.

"Humph," said my guardian.  "I am mistaken, I dare say."  As there 
was a little pause here, which I thought, for my dear girl's 
satisfaction, had better be filled up, I hummed an air as I worked 
which was a favourite with my guardian.

"And do you think Mr. Woodcourt will make another voyage?" I asked 
him when I had hummed it quietly all through.

"I don't quite know what to think, my dear, but I should say it was 
likely at present that he will give a long trip to another 
country."

"I am sure he will take the best wishes of all our hearts with him 
wherever he goes," said I; "and though they are not riches, he will 
never be the poorer for them, guardian, at least."

"Never, little woman," he replied.

I was sitting in my usual place, which was now beside my guardian's 
chair.  That had not been my usual place before the letter, but it 
was now.  I looked up to Ada, who was sitting opposite, and I saw, 
as she looked at me, that her eyes were filled with tears and that 
tears were falling down her face.  I felt that I had only to be 
placid and merry once for all to undeceive my dear and set her 
loving heart at rest.  I really was so, and I had nothing to do but 
to be myself.

So I made my sweet girl lean upon my shoulder--how little thinking 
what was heavy on her mind!--and I said she was not quite well, and 
put my arm about her, and took her upstairs.  When we were in our 
own room, and when she might perhaps have told me what I was so 
unprepared to hear, I gave her no encouragement to confide in me; I 
never thought she stood in need of it.

"Oh, my dear good Esther," said Ada, "if I could only make up my 
mind to speak to you and my cousin John when you are together!"

"Why, my love!" I remonstrated.  "Ada, why should you not speak to 
us!"

Ada only dropped her head and pressed me closer to her heart.

"You surely don't forget, my beauty," said I, smiling, "what quiet, 
old-fashioned people we are and how I have settled down to be the 
discreetest of dames?  You don't forget how happily and peacefully 
my life is all marked out for me, and by whom?  I am certain that 
you don't forget by what a noble character, Ada.  That can never 
be."

"No, never, Esther."

"Why then, my dear," said I, "there can be nothing amiss--and why 
should you not speak to us?"

"Nothing amiss, Esther?" returned Ada.  "Oh, when I think of all 
these years, and of his fatherly care and kindness, and of the old 
relations among us, and of you, what shall I do, what shall I do!"

I looked at my child in some wonder, but I thought it better not to 
answer otherwise than by cheering her, and so I turned off into 
many little recollections of our life together and prevented her 
from saying more.  When she lay down to sleep, and not before, I 
returned to my guardian to say good night, and then I came back to 
Ada and sat near her for a little while.

She was asleep, and I thought as I looked at her that she was a 
little changed.  I had thought so more than once lately.  I could 
not decide, even looking at her while she was unconscious, how she 
was changed, but something in the familiar beauty of her face 
looked different to me.  My guardian's old hopes of her and Richard 
arose sorrowfully in my mind, and I said to myself, "She has been 
anxious about him," and I wondered how that love would end.

When I had come home from Caddy's while she was ill, I had often 
found Ada at work, and she had always put her work away, and I had 
never known what it was.  Some of it now lay in a drawer near her, 
which was not quite closed.  I did not open the drawer, but I still 
rather wondered what the work could he, for it was evidently 
nothing for herself.

And I noticed as I kissed my dear that she lay with one hand under 
her pillow so that it was hidden.

How much less amiable I must have been than they thought me, how 
much less amiable than I thought myself, to be so preoccupied with 
my own cheerfulness and contentment as to think that it only rested 
with me to put my dear girl right and set her mind at peace!

But I lay down, self-deceived, in that belief.  And I awoke in it 
next day to find that there was still the same shade between me and 
my darling.



CHAPTER LI

Enlightened


When Mr. Woodcourt arrived in London, he went, that very same day, 
to Mr. Vholes's in Symond's Inn.  For he never once, from the 
moment when I entreated him to be a friend to Richard, neglected or 
forgot his promise.  He had told me that he accepted the charge as 
a sacred trust, and he was ever true to it in that spirit.

He found Mr. Vholes in his office and informed Mr. Vholes of his 
agreement with Richard that he should call there to learn his 
address.

"Just so, sir," said Mr. Vholes.  "Mr. C.'s address is not a 
hundred miles from here, sir, Mr. C.'s address is not a hundred 
miles from here.  Would you take a seat, sir?"

Mr. Woodcourt thanked Mr. Vholes, but he had no business with him 
beyond what he had mentioned.

"Just so, sir.  I believe, sir," said Mr. Vholes, still quietly 
insisting on the seat by not giving the address, "that you have 
influence with Mr. C.  Indeed I am aware that you have."

"I was not aware of it myself," returned Mr. Woodcourt; "but I 
suppose you know best."

"Sir," rejoined Mr. Vholes, self-contained as usual, voice and all, 
"it is a part of my professional duty to know best.  It is a part 
of my professional duty to study and to understand a gentleman who 
confides his interests to me.  In my professional duty I shall not 
be wanting, sir, if I know it.  I may, with the best intentions, be 
wanting in it without knowing it; but not if I know it, sir."

Mr. Woodcourt again mentioned the address.

"Give me leave, sir," said Mr. Vholes.  "Bear with me for a moment.  
Sir, Mr. C. is playing for a considerable stake, and cannot play 
without--need I say what?"

"Money, I presume?"

"Sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to be honest with you (honesty being my 
golden rule, whether I gain by it or lose, and I find that I 
generally lose), money is the word.  Now, sir, upon the chances of 
Mr. C.'s game I express to you no opinion, NO opinion.  It might be 
highly impolitic in Mr. C., after playing so long and so high, to 
leave off; it might be the reverse; I say nothing.  No, sir," said 
Mr. Vholes, bringing his hand flat down upon his desk in a positive 
manner, "nothing."

"You seem to forget," returned Mr, Woodcourt, "that I ask you to 
say nothing and have no interest in anything you say."

"Pardon me, sir!" retorted Mr. Vholes.  "You do yourself an 
injustice.  No, sir!  Pardon me!  You shall not--shall not in my 
office, if I know it--do yourself an injustice.  You are interested 
in anything, and in everything, that relates to your friend.  I 
know human nature much better, sir, than to admit for an instant 
that a gentleman of your appearance is not interested in whatever 
concerns his friend."

"Well," replied Mr. Woodcourt, "that may be.  I am particularly 
interested in his address."

"The number, sir," said Mr. Vholes parenthetically, "I believe I 
have already mentioned.  If Mr. C. is to continue to play for this 
considerable stake, sir, he must have funds.  Understand me!  There 
are funds in hand at present.  I ask for nothing; there are funds 
in hand.  But for the onward play, more funds must be provided, 
unless Mr. C. is to throw away what he has already ventured, which 
is wholly and solely a point for his consideration.  This, sir, I 
take the opportunity of stating openly to you as the friend of Mr. 
C.  Without funds I shall always be happy to appear and act for Mr. 
C. to the extent of all such costs as are safe to be allowed out of 
the estate, not beyond that.  I could not go beyond that, sir, 
without wronging some one.  I must either wrong my three dear girls 
or my venerable father, who is entirely dependent on me, in the 
Vale of Taunton; or some one.  Whereas, sir, my resolution is (call 
it weakness or folly if you please) to wrong no one."

Mr. Woodcourt rather sternly rejoined that he was glad to hear it.

"I wish, sir," said Mr. Vholes, "to leave a good name behind me.  
Therefore I take every opportunity of openly stating to a friend of 
Mr. C. how Mr. C. is situated.  As to myself, sir, the labourer is 
worthy of his hire.  If I undertake to put my shoulder to the 
wheel, I do it, and I earn what I get.  I am here for that purpose.  
My name is painted on the door outside, with that object."

"And Mr. Carstone's address, Mr. Vholes?"

"Sir," returned Mr. Vholes, "as I believe I have already mentioned, 
it is next door.  On the second story you will find Mr. C.'s 
apartments.  Mr. C. desires to be near his professional adviser, 
and I am far from objecting, for I court inquiry."

Upon this Mr. Woodcourt wished Mr. Vholes good day and went in 
search of Richard, the change in whose appearance he began to 
understand now but too well.

He found him in a dull room, fadedly furnished, much as I had found 
him in his barrack-room but a little while before, except that he 
was not writing but was sitting with a book before him, from which 
his eyes and thoughts were far astray.  As the door chanced to be 
standing open, Mr. Woodcourt was in his presence for some moments 
without being perceived, and he told me that he never could forget 
the haggardness of his face and the dejection of his manner before 
he was aroused from his dream.

"Woodcourt, my dear fellow," cried Richard, starting up with 
extended hands, "you come upon my vision like a ghost."

"A friendly one," he replied, "and only waiting, as they say ghosts 
do, to be addressed.  How does the mortal world go?"  They were 
seated now, near together.

"Badly enough, and slowly enough," said Richard, "speaking at least 
for my part of it."

"What part is that?"

"The Chancery part."

"I never heard," returned Mr. Woodcourt, shaking his head, "of its 
going well yet."

"Nor I," said Richard moodily.  "Who ever did?"  He brightened 
again in a moment and said with his natural openness, "Woodcourt, I 
should be sorry to be misunderstood by you, even if I gained by it 
in your estimation.  You must know that I have done no good this 
long time.  I have not intended to do much harm, but I seem to have 
been capable of nothing else.  It may be that I should have done 
better by keeping out of the net into which my destiny has worked 
me, but I think not, though I dare say you will soon hear, if you 
have not already heard, a very different opinion.  To make short of 
a long story, I am afraid I have wanted an object; but I have an 
object now--or it has me--and it is too late to discuss it.  Take 
me as I am, and make the best of me."

"A bargain," said Mr. Woodcourt.  "Do as much by me in return."

"Oh!  You," returned Richard, "you can pursue your art for its own 
sake, and can put your hand upon the plough and never turn, and can 
strike a purpose out of anything.  You and I are very different 
creatures."

He spoke regretfully and lapsed for a moment into his weary 
condition.

"Well, well!" he cried, shaking it off.  "Everything has an end.  
We shall see!  So you will take me as I am, and make the best of 
me?"

"Aye!  Indeed I will."  They shook hands upon it laughingly, but in 
deep earnestness.  I can answer for one of them with my heart of 
hearts.

"You come as a godsend," said Richard, "for I have seen nobody here 
yet but Vholes.  Woodcourt, there is one subject I should like to 
mention, for once and for all, in the beginning of our treaty.  You 
can hardly make the best of me if I don't.  You know, I dare say, 
that I have an attachment to my cousin Ada?"

Mr. Woodcourt replied that I had hinted as much to him.  "Now 
pray," returned Richard, "don't think me a heap of selfishness.  
Don't suppose that I am splitting my head and half breaking my 
heart over this miserable Chancery suit for my own rights and 
interests alone.  Ada's are bound up with mine; they can't be 
separated; Vholes works for both of us.  Do think of that!"

He was so very solicitous on this head that Mr. Woodcourt gave him 
the strongest assurances that he did him no injustice.

"You see," said Richard, with something pathetic in his manner of 
lingering on the point, though it was off-hand and unstudied, "to 
an upright fellow like you, bringing a friendly face like yours 
here, I cannot bear the thought of appearing selfish and mean.  I 
want to see Ada righted, Woodcourt, as well as myself; I want to do 
my utmost to right her, as well as myself; I venture what I can 
scrape together to extricate her, as well as myself.  Do, I beseech 
you, think of that!"

Afterwards, when Mr. Woodcourt came to reflect on what had passed, 
he was so very much impressed by the strength of Richard's anxiety 
on this point that in telling me generally of his first visit to 
Symond's Inn he particularly dwelt upon it.  It revived a fear I 
had had before that my dear girl's little property would be 
absorbed by Mr. Vholes and that Richard's justification to himself 
would be sincerely this.  It was just as I began to take care of 
Caddy that the interview took place, and I now return to the time 
when Caddy had recovered and the shade was still between me and my 
darling.

I proposed to Ada that morning that we should go and see Richard.  
It a little surprised me to find that she hesitated and was not so 
radiantly willing as I had expected.

"My dear," said I, "you have not had any difference with Richard 
since I have been so much away?"

"No, Esther."

"Not heard of him, perhaps?" said I.

"Yes, I have heard of him," said Ada.

Such tears in her eyes, and such love in her face.  I could not 
make my darling out.  Should I go to Richard's by myself? I said.  
No, Ada thought I had better not go by myself.  Would she go with 
me?  Yes, Ada thought she had better go with me.  Should we go now?  
Yes, let us go now.  Well, I could not understand my darling, with 
the tears in her eyes and the love in her face!

We were soon equipped and went out.  It was a sombre day, and drops 
of chill rain fell at intervals.  It was one of those colourless 
days when everything looks heavy and harsh.  The houses frowned at 
us, the dust rose at us, the smoke swooped at us, nothing made any 
compromise about itself or wore a softened aspect.  I fancied my 
beautiful girl quite out of place in the rugged streets, and I 
thought there were more funerals passing along the dismal pavements 
than I had ever seen before.

We had first to find out Symond's Inn.  We were going to inquire in 
a shop when Ada said she thought it was near Chancery Lane.  "We 
are not likely to be far out, my love, if we go in that direction," 
said I.  So to Chancery Lane we went, and there, sure enough, we 
saw it written up.  Symond's Inn.

We had next to find out the number.  "Or Mr. Vholes's office will 
do," I recollected, "for Mr. Vholes's office is next door."  Upon 
which Ada said, perhaps that was Mr. Vholes's office in the corner 
there.  And it really was.

Then came the question, which of the two next doors?  I was going 
for the one, and my darling was going for the other; and my darling 
was right again.  So up we went to the second story, when we came 
to Richard's name in great white letters on a hearse-like panel.

I should have knocked, but Ada said perhaps we had better turn the 
handle and go in.  Thus we came to Richard, poring over a table 
covered with dusty bundles of papers which seemed to me like dusty 
mirrors reflecting his own mind.  Wherever I looked I saw the 
ominous words that ran in it repeated.  Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

He received us very affectionately, and we sat down.  "If you had 
come a little earlier," he said, "you would have found Woodcourt 
here.  There never was such a good fellow as Woodcourt is.  He 
finds time to look in between-whiles, when anybody else with half 
his work to do would be thinking about not being able to come.  And 
he is so cheery, so fresh, so sensible, so earnest, so--everything 
that I am not, that the place brightens whenever he comes, and 
darkens whenever he goes again."

"God bless him," I thought, "for his truth to me!"

"He is not so sanguine, Ada," continued Richard, casting his 
dejected look over the bundles of papers, "as Vholes and I are 
usually, but he is only an outsider and is not in the mysteries.  
We have gone into them, and he has not.  He can't be expected to 
know much of such a labyrinth."

As his look wandered over the papers again and he passed his two 
hands over his head, I noticed how sunken and how large his eyes 
appeared, how dry his lips were, and how his finger-nails were all 
bitten away.

"Is this a healthy place to live in, Richard, do you think?" said I.

"Why, my dear Minerva," answered Richard with his old gay laugh, 
"it is neither a rural nor a cheerful place; and when the sun 
shines here, you may lay a pretty heavy wager that it is shining 
brightly in an open spot.  But it's well enough for the time.  It's 
near the offices and near Vholes."

"Perhaps," I hinted, "a change from both--"

"Might do me good?" said Richard, forcing a laugh as he finished 
the sentence.  "I shouldn't wonder!  But it can only come in one 
way now--in one of two ways, I should rather say.  Either the suit 
must be ended, Esther, or the suitor.  But it shall be the suit, my 
dear girl, the suit, my dear girl!"

These latter words were addressed to Ada, who was sitting nearest 
to him.  Her face being turned away from me and towards him, I 
could not see it.

"We are doing very well," pursued Richard.  "Vholes will tell you 
so.  We are really spinning along.  Ask Vholes.  We are giving them 
no rest.  Vholes knows all their windings and turnings, and we are 
upon them everywhere.  We have astonished them already.  We shall 
rouse up that nest of sleepers, mark my words!"

His hopefulness had long been more painful to me than his 
despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce 
in its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so 
conscious of being forced and unsustainable that it had long 
touched me to the heart.  But the commentary upon it now indelibly 
written in his handsome face made it far more distressing than it 
used to be.  I say indelibly, for I felt persuaded that if the 
fatal cause could have been for ever terminated, according to his 
brightest visions, in that same hour, the traces of the premature 
anxiety, self-reproach, and disappointment it had occasioned him 
would have remained upon his features to the hour of his death.

"The sight of our dear little woman," said Richard, Ada still 
remaining silent and quiet, "is so natural to me, and her 
compassionate face is so like the face of old days--"

Ah!  No, no.  I smiled and shook my head.

"--So exactly like the face of old days," said Richard in his 
cordial voice, and taking my hand with the brotherly regard which 
nothing ever changed, "that I can't make pretences with her.  I 
fluctuate a little; that's the truth.  Sometimes I hope, my dear, 
and sometimes I--don't quite despair, but nearly.  I get," said 
Richard, relinquishing my hand gently and walking across the room, 
"so tired!"

He took a few turns up and down and sunk upon the sofa.  "I get," 
he repeated gloomily, "so tired.  It is such weary, weary work!"

He was leaning on his arm saying these words in a meditative voice 
and looking at the ground when my darling rose, put off her bonnet, 
kneeled down beside him with her golden hair falling like sunlight 
on his head, clasped her two arms round his neck, and turned her 
face to me.  Oh, what a loving and devoted face I saw!

"Esther, dear," she said very quietly, "I am not going home again."

A light shone in upon me all at once.

"Never any more.  I am going to stay with my dear husband.  We have 
been married above two months.  Go home without me, my own Esther; 
I shall never go home any more!"  With those words my darling drew 
his head down on her breast and held it there.  And if ever in my 
life I saw a love that nothing but death could change, I saw it 
then before me.

"Speak to Esther, my dearest," said Richard, breaking the silence 
presently.  "Tell her how it was."

I met her before she could come to me and folded her in my arms.  
We neither of us spoke, but with her cheek against my own I wanted 
to hear nothing.  "My pet," said I.  "My love.  My poor, poor 
girl!"  I pitied her so much.  I was very fond of Richard, but the 
impulse that I had upon me was to pity her so much.

"Esther, will you forgive me?  Will my cousin John forgive me?"

"My dear," said I, "to doubt it for a moment is to do him a great 
wrong.  And as to me!"  Why, as to me, what had I to forgive!

I dried my sobbing darling's eyes and sat beside her on the sofa, 
and Richard sat on my other side; and while I was reminded of that 
so different night when they had first taken me into their 
confidence and had gone on in their own wild happy way, they told 
me between them how it was.

"All I had was Richard's," Ada said; "and Richard would not take 
it, Esther, and what could I do but be his wife when I loved him 
dearly!"

"And you were so fully and so kindly occupied, excellent Dame 
Durden," said Richard, "that how could we speak to you at such a 
time!  And besides, it was not a long-considered step.  We went out 
one morning and were married."

"And when it was done, Esther," said my darling, "I was always 
thinking how to tell you and what to do for the best.  And 
sometimes I thought you ought to know it directly, and sometimes I 
thought you ought not to know it and keep it from my cousin John; 
and I could not tell what to do, and I fretted very much."

How selfish I must have been not to have thought of this before!  I 
don't know what I said now.  I was so sorry, and yet I was so fond 
of them and so glad that they were fond of me; I pitied them so 
much, and yet I felt a kind of pride in their loving one another.  
I never had experienced such painful and pleasurable emotion at one 
time, and in my own heart I did not know which predominated.  But I 
was not there to darken their way; I did not do that.

When I was less foolish and more composed, my darling took her 
wedding-ring from her bosom, and kissed it, and put it on.  Then I 
remembered last night and told Richard that ever since her marriage 
she had worn it at night when there was no one to see.  Then Ada 
blushingly asked me how did I know that, my dear.  Then I told Ada 
how I had seen her hand concealed under her pillow and had little 
thought why, my dear.  Then they began telling me how it was all 
over again, and I began to be sorry and glad again, and foolish 
again, and to hide my plain old face as much as I could lest I 
should put them out of heart.

Thus the time went on until it became necessary for me to think of 
returning.  When that time arrived it was the worst of all, for 
then my darling completely broke down.  She clung round my neck, 
calling me by every dear name she could think of and saying what 
should she do without me!  Nor was Richard much better; and as for 
me, I should have been the worst of the three if I had not severely 
said to myself, "Now Esther, if you do, I'll never speak to you 
again!"

"Why, I declare," said I, "I never saw such a wife.  I don't think 
she loves her husband at all.  Here, Richard, take my child, for 
goodness' sake."  But I held her tight all the while, and could 
have wept over her I don't know how long.

"I give this dear young couple notice," said I, "that I am only 
going away to come back to-morrow and that I shall be always coming 
backwards and forwards until Symond's Inn is tired of the sight of 
me.  So I shall not say good-bye, Richard.  For what would be the 
use of that, you know, when I am coming back so soon!"

I had given my darling to him now, and I meant to go; but I 
lingered for one more look of the precious face which it seemed to 
rive my heart to turn from.

So I said (in a merry, bustling manner) that unless they gave me 
some encouragement to come back, I was not sure that I could take 
that liberty, upon which my dear girl looked up, faintly smiling 
through her tears, and I folded her lovely face between my hands, 
and gave it one last kiss, and laughed, and ran away.

And when I got downstairs, oh, how I cried!  It almost seemed to me 
that I had lost my Ada for ever.  I was so lonely and so blank 
without her, and it was so desolate to be going home with no hope 
of seeing her there, that I could get no comfort for a little while 
as I walked up and down in a dim corner sobbing and crying.

I came to myself by and by, after a little scolding, and took a 
coach home.  The poor boy whom I had found at St. Albans had 
reappeared a short time before and was lying at the point of death; 
indeed, was then dead, though I did not know it.  My guardian had 
gone out to inquire about him and did not return to dinner.  Being 
quite alone, I cried a little again, though on the whole I don't 
think I behaved so very, very ill.

It was only natural that I should not be quite accustomed to the 
loss of my darling yet.  Three or four hours were not a long time 
after years.  But my mind dwelt so much upon the uncongenial scene 
in which I had left her, and I pictured it as such an overshadowed 
stony-hearted one, and I so longed to be near her and taking some 
sort of care of her, that I determined to go back in the evening 
only to look up at her windows.

It was foolish, I dare say, but it did not then seem at all so to 
me, and it does not seem quite so even now.  I took Charley into my 
confidence, and we went out at dusk.  It was dark when we came to 
the new strange home of my dear girl, and there was a light behind 
the yellow blinds.  We walked past cautiously three or four times, 
looking up, and narrowly missed encountering Mr. Vholes, who came 
out of his office while we were there and turned his head to look 
up too before going home.  The sight of his lank black figure and 
the lonesome air of that nook in the dark were favourable to the 
state of my mind.  I thought of the youth and love and beauty of my 
dear girl, shut up in such an ill-assorted refuge, almost as if it 
were a cruel place.

It was very solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I 
might safely steal upstairs.  I left Charley below and went up with 
a light foot, not distressed by any glare from the feeble oil 
lanterns on the way.  I listened for a few moments, and in the 
musty rotting silence of the house believed that I could hear the 
murmur of their young voices.  I put my lips to the hearse-like 
panel of the door as a kiss for my dear and came quietly down 
again, thinking that one of these days I would confess to the 
visit.

And it really did me good, for though nobody but Charley and I knew 
anything about it, I somehow felt as if it had diminished the 
separation between Ada and me and had brought us together again for 
those moments.  I went back, not quite accustomed yet to the 
change, but all the better for that hovering about my darling.

My guardian had come home and was standing thoughtfully by the dark 
window.  When I went in, his face cleared and he came to his seat, 
but he caught the light upon my face as I took mine.

"Little woman," said he, "You have been crying."

"Why, yes, guardian," said I, "I am afraid I have been, a little.  
Ada has been in such distress, and is so very sorry, guardian."

I put my arm on the back of his chair, and I saw in his glance that 
my words and my look at her empty place had prepared him.

"Is she married, my dear?"

I told him all about it and how her first entreaties had referred 
to his forgiveness.

"She has no need of it," said he.  "Heaven bless her and her 
husband!"  But just as my first impulse had been to pity her, so 
was his.  "Poor girl, poor girl!  Poor Rick!  Poor Ada!"

Neither of us spoke after that, until he said with a sigh, "Well, 
well, my dear!  Bleak House is thinning fast."

"But its mistress remains, guardian."  Though I was timid about 
saying it, I ventured because of the sorrowful tone in which he had 
spoken.  "She will do all she can to make it happy," said I.

"She will succeed, my love!"

The letter had made no difference between us except that the seat 
by his side had come to be mine; it made none now.  He turned his 
old bright fatherly look upon me, laid his hand on my hand in his 
old way, and said again, "She will succeed, my dear.  Nevertheless, 
Bleak House is thinning fast, O little woman!"

I was sorry presently that this was all we said about that.  I was 
rather disappointed.  I feared I might not quite have been all I 
had meant to be since the letter and the answer.



CHAPTER LII

Obstinacy


But one other day had intervened when, early in the morning as we 
were going to breakfast, Mr. Woodcourt came in haste with the 
astounding news that a terrible murder had been committed for which 
Mr. George had been apprehended and was in custody.  When he told 
us that a large reward was offered by Sir Leicester Dedlock for the 
murderer's apprehension, I did not in my first consternation 
understand why; but a few more words explained to me that the 
murdered person was Sir Leicester's lawyer, and immediately my 
mother's dread of him rushed into my remembrance.

This unforeseen and violent removal of one whom she had long 
watched and distrusted and who had long watched and distrusted her, 
one for whom she could have had few intervals of kindness, always 
dreading in him a dangerous and secret enemy, appeared so awful 
that my first thoughts were of her.  How appalling to hear of such 
a death and be able to feel no pity!  How dreadful to remember, 
perhaps, that she had sometimes even wished the old man away who 
was so swiftly hurried out of life!

Such crowding reflections, increasing the distress and fear I 
always felt when the name was mentioned, made me so agitated that I 
could scarcely hold my place at the table.  I was quite unable to 
follow the conversation until I had had a little time to recover.  
But when I came to myself and saw how shocked my guardian was and 
found that they were earnestly speaking of the suspected man and 
recalling every favourable impression we had formed of him out of 
the good we had known of him, my interest and my fears were so 
strongly aroused in his behalf that I was quite set up again.

"Guardian, you don't think it possible that he is justly accused?"

"My dear, I CAN'T think so.  This man whom we have seen so open-
hearted and compassionate, who with the might of a giant has the 
gentleness of a child, who looks as brave a fellow as ever lived 
and is so simple and quiet with it, this man justly accused of such 
a crime?  I can't believe it.  It's not that I don't or I won't.  I 
can't!"

"And I can't," said Mr. Woodcourt.  "Still, whatever we believe or 
know of him, we had better not forget that some appearances are 
against him.  He bore an animosity towards the deceased gentleman.  
He has openly mentioned it in many places.  He is said to have 
expressed himself violently towards him, and he certainly did about 
him, to my knowledge.  He admits that he was alone on the scene of 
the murder within a few minutes of its commission.  I sincerely 
believe him to be as innocent of any participation in it as I am, 
but these are all reasons for suspicion falling upon him."

"True," said my guardian.  And he added, turning to me, "It would 
be doing him a very bad service, my dear, to shut our eyes to the 
truth in any of these respects."

I felt, of course, that we must admit, not only to ourselves but to 
others, the full force of the circumstances against him.  Yet I 
knew withal (I could not help saying) that their weight would not 
induce us to desert him in his need.

"Heaven forbid!" returned my guardian.  "We will stand by him, as 
he himself stood by the two poor creatures who are gone."  He meant 
Mr. Gridley and the boy, to both of whom Mr. George had given 
shelter.

Mr. Woodcourt then told us that the trooper's man had been with him 
before day, after wandering about the streets all night like a 
distracted creature.  That one of the trooper's first anxieties was 
that we should not suppose him guilty.  That he had charged his 
messenger to represent his perfect innocence with every solemn 
assurance be could send us.  That Mr. Woodcourt had only quieted 
the man by undertaking to come to our house very early in the 
morning with these representations.  He added that he was now upon 
his way to see the prisoner himself.

My guardian said directly he would go too.  Now, besides that I 
liked the retired soldier very much and that he liked me, I had 
that secret interest in what had happened which was only known to 
my guardian.  I felt as if it came close and near to me.  It seemed 
to become personally important to myself that the truth should be 
discovered and that no innocent people should be suspected, for 
suspicion, once run wild, might run wilder.

In a word, I felt as if it were my duty and obligation to go with 
them.  My guardian did not seek to dissuade me, and I went.

It was a large prison with many courts and passages so like one 
another and so uniformly paved that I seemed to gain a new 
comprehension, as I passed along, of the fondness that solitary 
prisoners, shut up among the same staring walls from year to year, 
have had--as I have read--for a weed or a stray blade of grass.  In 
an arched room by himself, like a cellar upstairs, with walls so 
glaringly white that they made the massive iron window-bars and 
iron-bound door even more profoundly black than they were, we found 
the trooper standing in a corner.  He had been sitting on a bench 
there and had risen when he heard the locks and bolts turn.

When he saw us, he came forward a step with his usual heavy tread, 
and there stopped and made a slight bow.  But as I still advanced, 
putting out my hand to him, he understood us in a moment.

"This is a load off my mind, I do assure you, miss and gentlemen," 
said he, saluting us with great heartiness and drawing a long 
breath.  "And now I don't so much care how it ends."

He scarcely seemed to be the prisoner.  What with his coolness and 
his soldierly bearing, he looked far more like the prison guard.

"This is even a rougher place than my gallery to receive a lady 
in," said Mr. George, "but I know Miss Summerson will make the best 
of it."  As he handed me to the bench on which he had been sitting, 
I sat down, which seemed to give him great satisfaction.

"I thank you, miss," said he.

"Now, George," observed my guardian, "as we require no new 
assurances on your part, so I believe we need give you none on 
ours."

"Not at all, sir.  I thank you with all my heart.  If I was not 
innocent of this crime, I couldn't look at you and keep my secret 
to myself under the condescension of the present visit.  I feel the 
present visit very much.  I am not one of the eloquent sort, but I 
feel it, Miss Summerson and gentlemen, deeply."

He laid his hand for a moment on his broad chest and bent his bead 
to us.  Although he squared himself again directly, he expressed a 
great amount of natural emotion by these simple means.

"First," said my guardian, "can we do anything for your personal 
comfort, George?"

"For which, sir?" he inquired, clearing his throat.

"For your personal comfort.  Is there anything you want that would 
lessen the hardship of this confinement?"

"Well, sir," replied George, after a little cogitation, "I am 
equally obliged to you, but tobacco being against the rules, I 
can't say that there is."

"You will think of many little things perhaps, by and by.  
'Whenever you do, George, let us know."

"Thank you, sir.  Howsoever," observed Mr. George with one of his 
sunburnt smiles, "a man who has been knocking about the world in a 
vagabond kind of a way as long as I have gets on well enough in a 
place like the present, so far as that goes."

"Next, as to your case," observed my guardian.

"Exactly so, sir," returned Mr. George, folding his arms upon his 
breast with perfect self-possession and a little curiosity.

"How does it stand now?"

"Why, sir, it is under remand at present.  Bucket gives me to 
understand that he will probably apply for a series of remands from 
time to time until the case is more complete.  How it is to be made 
more complete I don't myself see, but I dare say Bucket will manage 
it somehow."

"Why, heaven save us, man," exclaimed my guardian, surprised into 
his old oddity and vehemence, "you talk of yourself as if you were 
somebody else!"

"No offence, sir," said Mr. George.  "I am very sensible of your 
kindness.  But I don't see how an innocent man is to make up his 
mind to this kind of thing without knocking his head against the 
walls unless he takes it in that point of view.

"That is true enough to a certain extent," returned my guardian, 
softened.  "But my good fellow, even an innocent man must take 
ordinary precautions to defend himself."

"Certainly, sir.  And I have done so.  I have stated to the 
magistrates, 'Gentlemen, I am as innocent of this charge as 
yourselves; what has been stated against me in the way of facts is 
perfectly true; I know no more about it.'  I intend to continue 
stating that, sir.  What more can I do?  It's the truth."

"But the mere truth won't do," rejoined my guardian.

"Won't it indeed., sir?  Rather a bad look-out for me!" Mr. George 
good-humouredly observed.

"You must have a lawyer," pursued my guardian.  "We must engage a 
good one for you."

"I ask your pardon, sir," said Mr. George with a step backward.  "I 
am equally obliged.  But I must decidedly beg to be excused from 
anything of that sort."

"You won't have a lawyer?"

"No, sir."  Mr. George shook his head in the most emphatic manner.  
"I thank you all the same, sir, but--no lawyer!"

"Why not?"

"I don't take kindly to the breed," said Mr. George.  "Gridley 
didn't.  And--if you'll excuse my saying so much--I should hardly 
have thought you did yourself, sir."

"That's equity," my guardian explained, a little at a loss; "that's 
equity, George."

"Is it, indeed, sir?" returned the trooper in his off-hand manner.  
"I am not acquainted with those shades of names myself, but in a 
general way I object to the breed."

Unfolding his arms and changing his position, he stood with one 
massive hand upon the table and the other on his hip, as complete a 
picture of a man who was not to be moved from a fixed purpose as 
ever I saw.  It was in vain that we all three talked to him and 
endeavoured to persuade him; he listened with that gentleness which 
went so well with his bluff bearing, but was evidently no more 
shaken by our representations that his place of confinement was.

"Pray think, once more, Mr. George," said I.  "Have you no wish in 
reference to your case?"

"I certainly could wish it to be tried, miss," he returned, "by 
court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I am well aware.  
If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for a 
couple of minutes, miss, not more, I'll endeavour to explain myself 
as clearly as I can."

He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little as if he 
were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and 
after a moment's reflection went on.

"You see, miss, I have been handcuffed and taken into custody and 
brought here.  I am a marked and disgraced man, and here I am.  My 
shooting gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such 
property as I have--'tis small--is turned this way and that till it 
don't know itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am!  I don't 
particular complain of that.  Though I am in these present quarters 
through no immediately preceding fault of mine, I can very well 
understand that if I hadn't gone into the vagabond way in my youth, 
this wouldn't have happened.  It HAS happened.  Then comes the 
question how to meet it"

He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment with a good-humoured 
look and said apologetically, "I am such a short-winded talker that 
I must think a bit."  Having thought a bit, he looked up again and 
resumed.

"How to meet it.  Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a 
lawyer and had a pretty tight hold of me.  I don't wish to rake up 
his ashes, but he had, what I should call if he was living, a devil 
of a tight hold of me.  I don't like his trade the better for that.  
If I had kept clear of his trade, I should have kept outside this 
place.  But that's not what I mean.  Now, suppose I had killed him.  
Suppose I really had discharged into his body any one of those 
pistols recently fired off that Bucket has found at my place, and 
dear me, might have found there any day since it has been my place.  
What should I have done as soon as I was hard and fast here?  Got a 
lawyer."

He stopped on hearing some one at the locks and bolts and did not 
resume until the door had been opened and was shut again.  For what 
purpose opened, I will mention presently.

"I should have got a lawyer, and he would have said (as I have 
often read in the newspapers), 'My client says nothing, my client 
reserves his defence': my client this, that, and t'other.  Well, 
'tis not the custom of that breed to go straight, according to my 
opinion, or to think that other men do.  Say I am innocent and I 
get a lawyer.  He would be as likely to believe me guilty as not; 
perhaps more.  What would he do, whether or not?  Act as if I was--
shut my mouth up, tell me not to commit myself, keep circumstances 
back, chop the evidence small, quibble, and get me off perhaps!  
But, Miss Summerson, do I care for getting off in that way; or 
would I rather be hanged in my own way--if you'll excuse my 
mentioning anything so disagreeable to a lady?"

He had warmed into his subject now, and was under no further 
necessity to wait a bit.

"I would rather be hanged in my own way.  And I mean to be!  I 
don't intend to say," looking round upon us with his powerful arms 
akimbo and his dark eyebrows raised, "that I am more partial to 
being hanged than another man.  What I say is, I must come off 
clear and full or not at all.  Therefore, when I hear stated 
against me what is true, I say it's true; and when they tell me, 
'whatever you say will be used,' I tell them I don't mind that; I 
mean it to be used.  If they can't make me innocent out of the 
whole truth, they are not likely to do it out of anything less, or 
anything else.  And if they are, it's worth nothing to me."

Taking a pace or two over the stone floor, he came back to the 
table and finished what he had to say.

"I thank you, miss and gentlemen both, many times for your 
attention, and many times more for your interest.  That's the plain 
state of the matter as it points itself out to a mere trooper with 
a blunt broadsword kind of a mind.  I have never done well in life 
beyond my duty as a soldier, and if the worst comes after all, I 
shall reap pretty much as I have sown.  When I got over the first 
crash of being seized as a murderer--it don't take a rover who has 
knocked about so much as myself so very long to recover from a 
crash--I worked my way round to what you find me now.  As such I 
shall remain.  No relations will be disgraced by me or made unhappy 
for me, and--and that's all I've got to say."

The door had been opened to admit another soldier-looking man of 
less prepossessing appearance at first sight and a weather-tanned, 
bright-eyed wholesome woman with a basket, who, from her entrance, 
had been exceedingly attentive to all Mr. George had said.  Mr. 
George had received them with a familiar nod and a friendly look, 
but without any more particular greeting in the midst of his 
address.  He now shook them cordially by the hand and said, "Miss 
Summerson and gentlemen, this is an old comrade of mine, Matthew 
Bagnet.  And this is his wife, Mrs. Bagnet."

Mr. Bagnet made us a stiff military bow, and Mrs. Bagnet dropped us 
a curtsy.

"Real good friends of mine, they are," sald Mr. George.  "It was at 
their house I was taken."

"With a second-hand wiolinceller," Mr. Bagnet put in, twitching his 
head angrily.  "Of a good tone.  For a friend.  That money was no 
object to."

"Mat," said Mr. George, "you have heard pretty well all I have been 
saying to this lady and these two gentlemen.  I know it meets your 
approval?"

Mr. Bagnet, after considering, referred the point to his wife.  
"Old girl," said he.  "Tell him.  Whether or not.  It meets my 
approval."

"Why, George," exclaimed Mrs. Bagnet, who had been unpacking her 
basket, in which there was a piece of cold pickled pork, a little 
tea and sugar, and a brown loaf, "you ought to know it don't.  You 
ought to know it's enough to drive a person wild to hear you.  You 
won't be got off this way, and you won't be got off that way--what 
do you mean by such picking and choosing?  It's stuff and nonsense, 
George."

"Don't be severe upon me in my misfortunes, Mrs. Bagnet," said the 
trooper lightly.

"Oh! Bother your misfortunes," cried Mrs. Bagnet, "if they don't 
make you more reasonable than that comes to.  I never was so 
ashamed in my life to hear a man talk folly as I have been to hear 
you talk this day to the present company.  Lawyers?  Why, what but 
too many cooks should hinder you from having a dozen lawyers if the 
gentleman recommended them to you"

"This is a very sensible woman," said my guardian.  "I hope you 
will persuade him, Mrs. Bagnet."

"Persuade him, sir?" she returned.  "Lord bless you, no.  You don't 
know George.  Now, there!"  Mrs. Bagnet left her basket to point 
him out with both her bare brown hands.  "There he stands!  As 
self-willed and as determined a man, in the wrong way, as ever put 
a human creature under heaven out of patience!  You could as soon 
take up and shoulder an eight and forty pounder by your own 
strength as turn that man when he has got a thing into his head and 
fixed it there.  Why, don't I know him!" cried Mrs. Bagnet.  "Don't 
I know you, George!  You don't mean to set up for a new character 
with ME after all these years, I hope?"

Her friendly indignation had an exemplary effect upon her husband, 
who shook his head at the trooper several times as a silent 
recommendation to him to yield.  Between whiles, Mrs. Bagnet looked 
at me; and I understood from the play of her eyes that she wished 
me to do something, though I did not comprehend what.

"But I have given up talking to you, old fellow, years and years," 
said Mrs. Bagnet as she blew a little dust off the pickled pork, 
looking at me again; "and when ladies and gentlemen know you as 
well as I do, they'll give up talking to you too.  If you are not 
too headstrong to accept of a bit of dinner, here it is."

"I accept it with many thanks," returned the trooper.

"Do you though, indeed?" said Mrs. Bagnet, continuing to grumble on 
good-humouredly.  "I'm sure I'm surprised at that I wonder you 
don't starve in your own way also.  It would only be like you.  
Perhaps you'll set your mind upon THAT next."  Here she again 
looked at me, and I now perceived from her glances at the door and 
at me, by turns, that she wished us to retire and to await her 
following us outside the prison.  Communicating this by similar 
means to my guardian and Mr. Woodcourt, I rose.

"We hope you will think better of it, Mr. George," said I, "and we 
shall come to see you again, trusting to find you more reasonable."

"More grateful, Miss Summerson, you can't find me," he returned.

"But more persuadable we can, I hope," said I.  "And let me entreat 
you to consider that the clearing up of this mystery and the 
discovery of the real perpetrator of this deed may be of the last 
importance to others besides yourself."

He heard me respectfully but without much heeding these words, 
which I spoke a little turned from him, already on my way to the 
door; he was observing (this they afterwards told me) my height and 
figure, which seemed to catch his attention all at once.

"'Tis curious," said he.  "And yet I thought so at the time!"

My guardian asked him what he meant.

"Why, sir," he answered, "when my ill fortune took me to the dead 
man's staircase on the night of his murder, I saw a shape so like 
Miss Summerson's go by me in the dark that I had half a mind to 
speak to it."

For an instant I felt such a shudder as I never felt before or 
since and hope I shall never feel again.

"It came downstairs as I went up," said the trooper, "and crossed 
the moonlighted window with a loose black mantle on; I noticed a 
deep fringe to it.  However, it has nothing to do with the present 
subject, excepting that Miss Summerson looked so like it at the 
moment that it came into my head."

I cannot separate and define the feelings that arose in me after 
this; it is enough that the vague duty and obligation I had felt 
upon me from the first of following the investigation was, without 
my distinctly daring to ask myself any question, increased, and 
that I was indignantly sure of there being no possibility of a 
reason for my being afraid.

We three went out of the prison and walked up and down at some short 
distance from the gate, which was in a retired place.  We had not 
waited long when Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet came out too and quickly 
joined us.

There was a tear in each of Mrs. Bagnet's eyes, and her face was 
flushed and hurried.  "I didn't let George see what I thought about 
it, you know, miss," was her first remark when she came up, "but 
he's in a bad way, poor old fellow!"

"Not with care and prudence and good help," said my guardian.

"A gentleman like you ought to know best, sir," returned Mrs. 
Bagnet, hurriedly drying her eyes on the hem of her grey cloak, 
"but I am uneasy for him.  He has been so careless and said so much 
that he never meant.  The gentlemen of the juries might not 
understand him as Lignum and me do.  And then such a number of 
circumstances have happened bad for him, and such a number of 
people will be brought forward to speak against him, and Bucket is 
so deep."

"With a second-hand wiolinceller.  And said he played the fife.  
When a boy," Mr. Bagnet added with great solemnity.

"Now, I tell you, miss," said Mrs. Bagnet; "and when I say miss, I 
mean all!  Just come into the corner of the wall and I'll tell 
you!"

Mrs. Bagnet hurried us into a more secluded place and was at first 
too breathless to proceed, occasioning Mr. Bagnet to say, "Old 
girl!  Tell 'em!"

"Why, then, miss," the old girl proceeded, untying the strings of 
her bonnet for more air, "you could as soon move Dover Castle as 
move George on this point unless you had got a new power to move 
him with.  And I have got it!"

"You are a jewel of a woman," said my guardian.  "Go on!"

"Now, I tell you, miss," she proceeded, clapping her hands in her 
hurry and agitation a dozen times in every sentence, "that what he 
says concerning no relations is all bosh.  They don't know of him, 
but he does know of them.  He has said more to me at odd times than 
to anybody else, and it warn't for nothing that he once spoke to my 
Woolwich about whitening and wrinkling mothers' heads.  For fifty 
pounds he had seen his mother that day.  She's alive and must be 
brought here straight!"

Instantly Mrs. Bagnet put some pins into her mouth and began 
pinning up her skirts all round a little higher than the level of 
her grey cloak, which she accomplished with surpassing dispatch and 
dexterity.

"Lignum," said Mrs. Bagnet, "you take care of the children, old 
man, and give me the umbrella!  I'm away to Lincolnshire to bring 
that old lady here."

"But, bless the woman," cried my guardian with his hand in his 
pocket, "how is she going?  What money has she got?"

Mrs. Bagnet made another application to her skirts and brought 
forth a leathern purse in which she hastily counted over a few 
shillings and which she then shut up with perfect satisfaction.

"Never you mind for me, miss.  I'm a soldier's wife and accustomed 
to travel my own way.  Lignum, old boy," kissing him, "one for 
yourself, three for the children.  Now I'm away into Lincolnshire 
after George's mother!"

And she actually set off while we three stood looking at one 
another lost in amazement.  She actually trudged away in her grey 
cloak at a sturdy pace, and turned the corner, and was gone.

"Mr. Bagnet," said my guardian.  "Do you mean to let her go in that 
way?"

"Can't help it," he returned.  "Made her way home once from another 
quarter of the world.  With the same grey cloak.  And same 
umbrella.  Whatever the old girl says, do.  Do it!  Whenever the 
old girl says, I'LL do it.  She does it."

"Then she is as honest and genuine as she looks," rejoined my 
guardian, "and it is impossible to say more for her."

"She's Colour-Sergeant of the Nonpareil battalion," said Mr. 
Bagnet, looking at us over his shoulder as he went his way also.  
"And there's not such another.  But I never own to it before her.  
Discipline must be maintained."



CHAPTER LIII

The Track


Mr. Bucket and his fat forefinger are much in consultation together 
under existing circumstances.  When Mr. Bucket has a matter of this 
pressing interest under his consideration, the fat forefinger seems 
to rise, to the dignity of a familiar demon.  He puts it to his 
ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it 
enjoins him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens 
his scent; he shakes it before a guilty man, and it charms him to 
his destruction.  The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably 
predict that when Mr. Bucket and that finger are in much 
conference, a terrible avenger will be heard of before long.

Otherwise mildly studious in his observation of human nature, on 
the whole a benignant philosopher not disposed to be severe upon 
the follies of mankind, Mr. Bucket pervades a vast number of houses 
and strolls about an infinity of streets, to outward appearance 
rather languishing for want of an object.  He is in the friendliest 
condition towards his species and will drink with most of them.  He 
is free with his money, affable in his manners, innocent in his 
conversation--but through the placid stream of his life there 
glides an under-current of forefinger.

Time and place cannot bind Mr. Bucket.  Like man in the abstract, 
he is here to-day and gone to-morrow--but, very unlike man indeed, 
he is here again the next day.  This evening he will be casually 
looking into the iron extinguishers at the door of Sir Leicester 
Dedlock's house in town; and to-morrow morning he will be walking 
on the leads at Chesney Wold, where erst the old man walked whose 
ghost is propitiated with a hundred guineas.  Drawers, desks, 
pockets, all things belonging to him, Mr. Bucket examines.  A few 
hours afterwards, he and the Roman will be alone together comparing 
forefingers.

It is likely that these occupations are irreconcilable with home 
enjoyment, but it is certain that Mr. Bucket at present does not go 
home.  Though in general he highly appreciates the society of Mrs. 
Bucket--a lady of a natural detective genius, which if it had been 
improved by professional exercise, might have done great things, 
but which has paused at the level of a clever amateur--he holds 
himself aloof from that dear solace.  Mrs. Bucket is dependent on 
their lodger (fortunately an amiable lady in whom she takes an 
interest) for companionship and conversation.

A great crowd assembles in Lincoln's Inn Fields on the day of the 
funeral.  Sir Leicester Dedlock attends the ceremony in person; 
strictly speaking, there are only three other human followers, that 
is to say, Lord Doodle, William Buffy, and the debilitated cousin 
(thrown in as a make-weight), but the amount of inconsolable 
carriages is immense.  The peerage contributes more four-wheeled 
affliction than has ever been seen in that neighbourhood.  Such is 
the assemblage of armorial bearings on coach panels that the 
Herald's College might be supposed to have lost its father and 
mother at a blow.  The Duke of Foodle sends a splendid pile of dust 
and ashes, with silver wheel-boxes, patent axles, all the last 
improvements, and three bereaved worms, six feet high, holding on 
behind, in a bunch of woe.  All the state coachmen in London seem 
plunged into mourning; and if that dead old man of the rusty garb 
be not beyond a taste in horseflesh (which appears impossible), it 
must be highly gratified this day.

Quiet among the undertakers and the equipages and the calves of so 
many legs all steeped in grief, Mr. Bucket sits concealed in one of 
the inconsolable carriages and at his ease surveys the crowd 
through the lattice blinds.  He has a keen eye for a crowd--as for 
what not?--and looking here and there, now from this side of the 
carriage, now from the other, now up at the house windows, now 
along the people's heads, nothing escapes him.

"And there you are, my partner, eh?" says Mr. Bucket to himself, 
apostrophizing Mrs. Bucket, stationed, by his favour, on the steps 
of the deceased's house.  "And so you are.  And so you are!  And 
very well indeed you are looking, Mrs. Bucket!"

The procession has not started yet, but is waiting for the cause of 
its assemblage to be brought out.  Mr. Bucket, in the foremost 
emblazoned carriage, uses his two fat forefingers to hold the 
lattice a hair's breadth open while he looks.

And it says a great deal for his attachment, as a husband, that he 
is still occupied with Mrs. B.  "There you are, my partner, eh?" he 
murmuringly repeats.  "And our lodger with you.  I'm taking notice 
of you, Mrs. Bucket; I hope you're all right in your health, my 
dear!"

Not another word does Mr. Bucket say, but sits with most attentive 
eyes until the sacked depository of noble secrets is brought down--
Where are all those secrets now?  Does he keep them yet?  Did they 
fly with him on that sudden journey?--and until the procession 
moves, and Mr. Bucket's view is changed.  After which he composes 
himself for an easy ride and takes note of the fittings of the 
carriage in case he should ever find such knowledge useful.

Contrast enough between Mr. Tulkinghorn shut up in his dark 
carriage and Mr. Bucket shut up in HIS.  Between the immeasurable 
track of space beyond the little wound that has thrown the one into 
the fixed sleep which jolts so heavily over the stones of the 
streets, and the narrow track of blood which keeps the other in the 
watchful state expressed in every hair of his head!  But it is all 
one to both; neither is troubled about that.

Mr. Bucket sits out the procession in his own easy manner and 
glides from the carriage when the opportunity he has settled with 
himself arrives.  He makes for Sir Leicester Dedlock's, which is at 
present a sort of home to him, where he comes and goes as he likes 
at all hours', where he is always welcome and made much of, where 
he knows the whole establishment, and walks in an atmosphere of 
mysterious greatness.

No knocking or ringing for Mr. Bucket.  He has caused himself to be 
provided with a key and can pass in at his pleasure.  As he is 
crossing the hall, Mercury informs him, "Here's another letter for 
you, Mr. Bucket, come by post," and gives it him.

"Another one, eh?" says Mr. Bucket.

If Mercury should chance to be possessed by any lingering curiosity 
as to Mr. Bucket's letters, that wary person is not the man to 
gratify it.  Mr. Bucket looks at him as if his face were a vista of 
some miles in length and he were leisurely contemplating the same.

"Do you happen to carry a box?" says Mr. Bucket.

Unfortunately Mercury is no snuff-taker.

"Could you fetch me a pinch from anywheres?" says Mr. Bucket.  
"Thankee.  It don't matter what it is; I'm not particular as to the 
kind.  Thankee!"

Having leisurely helped himself from a canister borrowed from 
somebody downstairs for the purpose, and having made a considerable 
show of tasting it, first with one side of his nose and then with 
the other, Mr. Bucket, with much deliberation, pronounces it of the 
right sort and goes on, letter in hand.

Now although Mr. Bucket walks upstairs to the little library within 
the larger one with the face of a man who receives some scores of 
letters every day, it happens that much correspondence is not 
incidental to his life.  He is no great scribe, rather handling his 
pen like the pocket-staff he carries about with him always 
convenient to his grasp, and discourages correspondence with 
himself in others as being too artless and direct a way of doing 
delicate business.  Further, he often sees damaging letters 
produced in evidence and has occasion to reflect that it was a 
green thing to write them.  For these reasons he has very little to 
do with letters, either as sender or receiver.  And yet he has 
received a round half-dozen within the last twenty-four hours.

"And this," says Mr. Bucket, spreading it out on the table, "is in 
the same hand, and consists of the same two words."

What two words?

He turns the key in the door, ungirdles his black pocket-book (book 
of fate to many), lays another letter by it, and reads, boldly 
written in each, "Lady Dedlock."

"Yes, yes," says Mr. Bucket.  "But I could have made the money 
without this anonymous information."

Having put the letters in his book of fate and girdled it up again, 
he unlocks the door just in time to admit his dinner, which is 
brought upon a goodly tray with a decanter of sherry.  Mr. Bucket 
frequently observes, in friendly circles where there is no 
restraint, that he likes a toothful of your fine old brown East 
Inder sherry better than anything you can offer him.  Consequently 
he fills and empties his glass with a smack of his lips and is 
proceeding with his refreshment when an idea enters his mind.

Mr. Bucket softly opens the door of communication between that room 
and the next and looks in.  The library is deserted, and the fire 
is sinking low.  Mr. Bucket's eye, after taking a pigeon-flight 
round the room, alights upon a table where letters are usually put 
as they arrive.  Several letters for Sir Leicester are upon it.  
Mr. Bucket draws near and examines the directions.  "No," he says, 
"there's none in that hand.  It's only me as is written to.  I can 
break it to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to-morrow."

With that he returns to finish his dinner with a good appetite, and 
after a light nap, is summoned into the drawing-room.  Sir 
Leicester has received him there these several evenings past to 
know whether he has anything to report.  The debilitated cousin 
(much exhausted by the funeral) and Volumnia are in attendance.

Mr. Bucket makes three distinctly different bows to these three 
people.  A bow of homage to Sir Leicester, a bow of gallantry to 
Volumnia, and a bow of recognition to the debilitated Cousin, to 
whom it airily says, "You are a swell about town, and you know me, 
and I know you."  Having distributed these little specimens of his 
tact, Mr. Bucket rubs his hands.

"Have you anything new to communicate, officer?" inquires Sir 
Leicester.  "Do you wish to hold any conversation with me in 
private?"

"Why--not tonight, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."

"Because my time," pursues Sir Leicester, "is wholly at your 
disposal with a view to the vindication of the outraged majesty of 
the law."

Mr. Bucket coughs and glances at Volumnia, rouged and necklaced, as 
though he would respectfully observe, "I do assure you, you're a 
pretty creetur.  I've seen hundreds worse looking at your time of 
life, I have indeed."

The fair Volumnia, not quite unconscious perhaps of the humanizing 
influence of her charms, pauses in the writing of cocked-hat notes 
and meditatively adjusts the pearl necklace.  Mr. Bucket prices 
that decoration in his mind and thinks it as likely as not that 
Volumnia is writing poetry.

"If I have not," pursues Sir Leicester, "in the most emphatic 
manner, adjured you, officer, to exercise your utmost skill in this 
atrocious case, I particularly desire to take the present 
opportunity of rectifying any omission I may have made.  Let no 
expense be a consideration.  I am prepared to defray all charges.  
You can incur none in pursuit of the object you have undertaken 
that I shall hesitate for a moment to bear."

Mr. Bucket made Sir Leicester's bow again as a response to this 
liberality.

"My mind," Sir Leicester adds with a generous warmth, "has not, as 
may be easily supposed, recovered its tone since the late 
diabolical occurrence.  It is not likely ever to recover its tone.  
But it is full of indignation to-night after undergoing the ordeal 
of consigning to the tomb the remains of a faithful, a zealous, a 
devoted adherent."

Sir Leicester's voice trembles and his grey hair stirs upon his 
head.  Tears are in his eyes; the best part of his nature is 
aroused.

"I declare," he says, "I solemnly declare that until this crime is 
discovered and, in the course of justice, punished, I almost feel 
as if there were a stain upon my name.  A gentleman who has devoted 
a large portion of his life to me, a gentleman who has devoted the 
last day of his life to me, a gentleman who has constantly sat at 
my table and slept under my roof, goes from my house to his own, 
and is struck down within an hour of his leaving my house.  I 
cannot say but that he may have been followed from my house, 
watched at my house, even first marked because of his association 
with my house--which may have suggested his possessing greater 
wealth and being altogether of greater importance than his own 
retiring demeanour would have indicated.  If I cannot with my means 
and influence and my position bring all the perpetrators of such a 
crime to light, I fail in the assertion of my respect for that 
gentleman's memory and of my fidelity towards one who was ever 
faithful to me."

While he makes this protestation with great emotion and 
earnestness, looking round the room as if he were addressing an 
assembly, Mr. Bucket glances at him with an observant gravity in 
which there might be, but for the audacity of the thought, a touch 
of compassion.

"The ceremony of to-day," continues Sir Leicester, "strikingly 
illustrative of the respect in which my deceased friend"--he lays a 
stress upon the word, for death levels all distinctions--"was held 
by the flower of the land, has, I say, aggravated the shock I have 
received from this most horrible and audacious crime.  If it were 
my brother who had committed it, I would not spare him."

Mr. Bucket looks very grave.  Volumnia remarks of the deceased that 
he was the trustiest and dearest person!

"You must feel it as a deprivation to you, miss, replies Mr. Bucket 
soothingly, "no doubt.  He was calculated to BE a deprivation, I'm 
sure he was."

Volumnia gives Mr. Bucket to understand, in reply, that her 
sensitive mind is fully made up never to get the better of it as 
long as she lives, that her nerves are unstrung for ever, and that 
she has not the least expectation of ever smiling again.  Meanwhile 
she folds up a cocked hat for that redoubtable old general at Bath, 
descriptive of her melancholy condition.

"It gives a start to a delicate female," says Mr. Bucket 
sympathetically, "but it'll wear off."

Volumnia wishes of all things to know what is doing?  Whether they 
are going to convict, or whatever it is, that dreadful soldier?  
Whether he had any accomplices, or whatever the thing is called in 
the law?  And a great deal more to the like artless purpose.

"Why you see, miss," returns Mr. Bucket, bringing the finger into 
persuasive action--and such is his natural gallantry that he had 
almost said "my dear"--"it ain't easy to answer those questions at 
the present moment.  Not at the present moment.  I've kept myself 
on this case, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," whom Mr. Bucket 
takes into the conversation in right of his importance, "morning, 
noon, and night.  But for a glass or two of sherry, I don't think I 
could have had my mind so much upon the stretch as it has been.  I 
COULD answer your questions, miss, but duty forbids it.  Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, will very soon be made acquainted with 
all that has been traced.  And I hope that he may find it"--Mr. 
Bucket again looks grave--"to his satisfaction."

The debilitated cousin only hopes some fler'll be executed--zample.  
Thinks more interest's wanted--get man hanged presentime--than get 
man place ten thousand a year.  Hasn't a doubt--zample--far better 
hang wrong fler than no fler.

"YOU know life, you know, sir," says Mr. Bucket with a 
complimentary twinkle of his eye and crook of his finger, "and you 
can confirm what I've mentioned to this lady.  YOU don't want to be 
told that from information I have received I have gone to work.  
You're up to what a lady can't be expected to be up to.  Lord!  
Especially in your elevated station of society, miss," says Mr. 
Bucket, quite reddening at another narrow escape from "my dear."

"The officer, Volumnia," observes Sir Leicester, "is faithful to 
his duty, and perfectly right."

Mr. Bucket murmurs, "Glad to have the honour of your approbation, 
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."

"In fact, Volumnia," proceeds Sir Leicester, "it is not holding up 
a good model for imitation to ask the officer any such questions as 
you have put to him.  He is the best judge of his own 
responsibility; he acts upon his responsibility.  And it does not 
become us, who assist in making the laws, to impede or interfere 
with those who carry them into execution.  Or," says Sir Leicester 
somewhat sternly, for Volumnia was going to cut in before he had 
rounded his sentence, "or who vindicate their outraged majesty."

Volumnia with all humility explains that she had not merely the 
plea of curiosity to urge (in common with the giddy youth of her 
sex in general) but that she is perfectly dying with regret and 
interest for the darling man whose loss they all deplore.

"Very well, Volumnia," returns Sir Leicester.  "Then you cannot be 
too discreet."

Mr. Bucket takes the opportunity of a pause to be heard again.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I have no objections to telling 
this lady, with your leave and among ourselves, that I look upon 
the case as pretty well complete.  It is a beautiful case--a 
beautiful case--and what little is wanting to complete it, I expect 
to be able to supply in a few hours."

"I am very glad indeed to hear it," says Sir Leicester.  "Highly 
creditable to you."

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket very 
seriously, "I hope it may at one and the same time do me credit and 
prove satisfactory to all.  When I depict it as a beautiful case, 
you see, miss," Mr. Bucket goes on, glancing gravely at Sir 
Leicester, "I mean from my point of view.  As considered from other 
points of view, such cases will always involve more or less 
unpleasantness.  Very strange things comes to our knowledge in 
families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be 
phenomenons, quite."

Volumnia, with her innocent little scream, supposes so.

"Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great 
families," says Mr. Bucket, again gravely eyeing Sir Leicester 
aside.  "I have had the honour of being employed in high families 
before, and you have no idea--come, I'll go so far as to say not 
even YOU have any idea, sir," this to the debilitated cousin, "what 
games goes on!"

The cousin, who has been casting sofa-pillows on his head, in a 
prostration of boredom yawns, "Vayli," being the used-up for "very 
likely."

Sir Leicester, deeming it time to dismiss the officer, here 
majestically interposes with the words, "Very good.  Thank you!" 
and also with a wave of his hand, implying not only that there is 
an end of the discourse, but that if high families fall into low 
habits they must take the consequences.  "You will not forget, 
officer," he adds with condescension, "that I am at your disposal 
when you please."

Mr. Bucket (still grave) inquires if to-morrow morning, now, would 
suit, in case he should be as for'ard as he expects to be.  Sir 
Leicester replies, "All times are alike to me."  Mr. Bucket makes 
his three bows and is withdrawing when a forgotten point occurs to 
him.

"Might I ask, by the by," he says in a low voice, cautiously 
returning, "who posted the reward-bill on the staircase."

"I ordered it to be put up there," replies Sir Leicester.

"Would it be considered a liberty, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, 
if I was to ask you why?"

"Not at all.  I chose it as a conspicuous part of the house.  I 
think it cannot be too prominently kept before the whole 
establishment.  I wish my people to be impressed with the enormity 
of the crime, the determination to punish it, and the hopelessness 
of escape.  At the same time, officer, if you in your better 
knowledge of the subject see any objection--"

Mr. Bucket sees none now; the bill having been put up, had better 
not be taken down.  Repeating his three bows he withdraws, closing 
the door on Volumnia's little scream, which is a preliminary to her 
remarking that that charmingly horrible person is a perfect Blue 
Chamber.

In his fondness for society and his adaptability to all grades, Mr. 
Bucket is presently standing before the hall-fire--bright and warm 
on the early winter night--admiring Mercury.

"Why, you're six foot two, I suppose?" says Mr. Bucket.

"Three," says Mercury.

"Are you so much?  But then, you see, you're broad in proportion 
and don't look it.  You're not one of the weak-legged ones, you 
ain't.  Was you ever modelled now?"  Mr. Bucket asks, conveying the 
expression of an artist into the turn of his eye and head.

Mercury never was modelled.

"Then you ought to be, you know," says Mr. Bucket; "and a friend of 
mine that you'll hear of one day as a Royal Academy sculptor would 
stand something handsome to make a drawing of your proportions for 
the marble.  My Lady's out, ain't she?"

"Out to dinner."

"Goes out pretty well every day, don't she?"

"Yes."

"Not to be wondered at!" says Mr. Bucket.  "Such a fine woman as 
her, so handsome and so graceful and so elegant, is like a fresh 
lemon on a dinner-table, ornamental wherever she goes.  Was your 
father in the same way of life as yourself?"

Answer in the negative.

"Mine was," says Mr. Bucket.  "My father was first a page, then a 
footman, then a butler, then a steward, then an inn-keeper.  Lived 
universally respected, and died lamented.  Said with his last 
breath that he considered service the most honourable part of his 
career, and so it was.  I've a brother in service, AND a brother-
in-law.  My Lady a good temper?"

Mercury replies, "As good as you can expect."

"Ah!" says Mr. Bucket.  "A little spoilt?  A little capricious?  
Lord!  What can you anticipate when they're so handsome as that?  
And we like 'em all the better for it, don't we?"

Mercury, with his hands in the pockets of his bright peach-blossom 
small-clothes, stretches his symmetrical silk legs with the air of 
a man of gallantry and can't deny it.  Come the roll of wheels and 
a violent ringing at the bell.  "Talk of the angels," says Mr. 
Bucket.  "Here she is!"

The doors are thrown open, and she passes through the hall.  Still 
very pale, she is dressed in slight mourning and wears two 
beautiful bracelets.  Either their beauty or the beauty of her arms 
is particularly attractive to Mr. Bucket.  He looks at them with an 
eager eye and rattles something in his pocket--halfpence perhaps.

Noticing him at his distance, she turns an inquiring look on the 
other Mercury who has brought her home.

"Mr. Bucket, my Lady."

Mr. Bucket makes a leg and comes forward, passing his familiar 
demon over the region of his mouth.

"Are you waiting to see Sir Leicester?"

"No, my Lady, I've seen him!"

"Have you anything to say to me?"

"Not just at present, my Lady."

"Have you made any new discoveries?"

"A few, my Lady."

This is merely in passing.  She scarcely makes a stop, and sweeps 
upstairs alone.  Mr. Bucket, moving towards the staircase-foot, 
watches her as she goes up the steps the old man came down to his 
grave, past murderous groups of statuary repeated with their 
shadowy weapons on the wall, past the printed bill, which she looks 
at going by, out of view.

"She's a lovely woman, too, she really is," says Mr. Bucket, coming 
back to Mercury.  "Don't look quite healthy though."

Is not quite healthy, Mercury informs him.  Suffers much from 
headaches.

Really?  That's a pity!  Walking, Mr. Bucket would recommend for 
that.  Well, she tries walking, Mercury rejoins.  Walks sometimes 
for two hours when she has them bad.  By night, too.

"Are you sure you're quite so much as six foot three?" asks Mr. 
Bucket.  "Begging your pardon for interrupting you a moment?"

Not a doubt about it.

"You're so well put together that I shouldn't have thought it.  But 
the household troops, though considered fine men, are built so 
straggling.  Walks by night, does she?  When it's moonlight, 
though?"

Oh, yes.  When it's moonlight!  Of course.  Oh, of course!  
Conversational and acquiescent on both sides.

"I suppose you ain't in the habit of walking yourself?" says Mr. 
Bucket.  "Not much time for it, I should say?"

Besides which, Mercury don't like it.  Prefers carriage exercise.

"To be sure," says Mr. Bucket.  "That makes a difference.  Now I 
think of it," says Mr. Bucket, warming his hands and looking 
pleasantly at the blaze, "she went out walking the very night of 
this business."

"To be sure she did!  I let her into the garden over the way.

"And left her there.  Certainly you did.  I saw you doing it."

"I didn't see YOU," says Mercury.

"I was rather in a hurry," returns Mr. Bucket, "for I was going to 
visit a aunt of mine that lives at Chelsea--next door but two to 
the old original Bun House--ninety year old the old lady is, a 
single woman, and got a little property.  Yes, I chanced to be 
passing at the time.  Let's see.  What time might it be?  It wasn't 
ten."

"Half-past nine."

"You're right.  So it was.  And if I don't deceive myself, my Lady 
was muffled in a loose black mantle, with a deep fringe to it?"

"Of course she was."

Of course she was.  Mr. Bucket must return to a little work he has 
to get on with upstairs, but he must shake hands with Mercury in 
acknowledgment of his agreeable conversation, and will he--this is 
all he asks--will he, when he has a leisure half-hour, think of 
bestowing it on that Royal Academy sculptor, for the advantage of 
both parties?



CHAPTER LIV

Springing a Mine


Refreshed by sleep, Mr. Bucket rises betimes in the morning and 
prepares for a field-day.  Smartened up by the aid of a clean shirt 
and a wet hairbrush, with which instrument, on occasions of 
ceremony, he lubricates such thin locks as remain to him after his 
life of severe study, Mr. Bucket lays in a breakfast of two mutton 
chops as a foundation to work upon, together with tea, eggs, toast, 
and marmalade on a corresponding scale.  Having much enjoyed these 
strengthening matters and having held subtle conference with his 
familiar demon, he confidently instructs Mercury "just to mention 
quietly to Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, that whenever he's ready 
for me, I'm ready for him."  A gracious message being returned that 
Sir Leicester will expedite his dressing and join Mr. Bucket in the 
library within ten minutes, Mr. Bucket repairs to that apartment 
and stands before the fire with his finger on his chin, looking at 
the blazing coals.

Thoughtful Mr. Bucket is, as a man may be with weighty work to do, 
but composed, sure, confident.  From the expression of his face he 
might be a famous whist-player for a large stake--say a hundred 
guineas certain--with the game in his hand, but with a high 
reputation involved in his playing his hand out to the last card in 
a masterly way.  Not in the least anxious or disturbed is Mr. 
Bucket when Sir Leicester appears, but he eyes the baronet aside as 
he comes slowly to his easy-chair with that observant gravity of 
yesterday in which there might have been yesterday, but for the 
audacity of the idea, a touch of compassion.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, officer, but I am rather 
later than my usual hour this morning.  I am not well.  The 
agitation and the indignation from which I have recently suffered 
have been too much for me.  I am subject to--gout"--Sir Leicester 
was going to say indisposition and would have said it to anybody 
else, but Mr. Bucket palpably knows all about it--"and recent 
circumstances have brought it on."

As he takes his seat with some difficulty and with an air of pain, 
Mr. Bucket draws a little nearer, standing with one of his large 
hands on the library-table.

"I am not aware, officer," Sir Leicester observes; raising his eyes 
to his face, "whether you wish us to be alone, but that is entirely 
as you please.  If you do, well and good.  If not, Miss Dedlock 
would be interested--"

"Why, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket with his 
head persuasively on one side and his forefinger pendant at one ear 
like an earring, "we can't be too private just at present.  You 
will presently see that we can't be too private.  A lady, under the 
circumstances, and especially in Miss Dedlock's elevated station of 
society, can't but be agreeable to me, but speaking without a view 
to myself, I will take the liberty of assuring you that I know we 
can't be too private."

"That is enough."

"So much so, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket resumes, 
"that I was on the point of asking your permission to turn the key 
in the door."

"By all means."  Mr. Bucket skilfully and softly takes that 
precaution, stooping on his knee for a moment from mere force of 
habit so to adjust the key in the lock as that no one shall peep in 
from the outerside.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I mentioned yesterday evening that 
I wanted but a very little to complete this case.  I have now 
completed it and collected proof against the person who did this 
crime."

"Against the soldier?"

"No, Sir Leicester Dedlock; not the soldier."

Sir Leicester looks astounded and inquires, "Is the man in 
custody?"

Mr. Bucket tells him, after a pause, "It was a woman."

Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates, 
"Good heaven!"

"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," Mr. Bucket begins, standing 
over him with one hand spread out on the library-table and the 
forefinger of the other in impressive use, "it's my duty to prepare 
you for a train of circumstances that may, and I go so far as to 
say that will, give you a shock.  But Sir Leicester Dedlock, 
Baronet, you are a gentleman, and I know what a gentleman is and 
what a gentleman is capable of.  A gentleman can bear a shock when 
it must come, boldly and steadily.  A gentleman can make up his 
mind to stand up against almost any blow.  Why, take yourself, Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.  If there's a blow to be inflicted on 
you, you naturally think of your family.  You ask yourself, how 
would all them ancestors of yours, away to Julius Caesar--not to go 
beyond him at present--have borne that blow; you remember scores of 
them that would have borne it well; and you bear it well on their 
accounts, and to maintain the family credit.  That's the way you 
argue, and that's the way you act, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet."

Sir Leicester, leaning back in his chair and grasping the elbows, 
sits looking at him with a stony face.

"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket, "thus preparing 
you, let me beg of you not to trouble your mind for a moment as to 
anything having come to MY knowledge.  I know so much about so many 
characters, high and low, that a piece of information more or less 
don't signify a straw.  I don't suppose there's a move on the board 
that would surprise ME, and as to this or that move having taken 
place, why my knowing it is no odds at all, any possible move 
whatever (provided it's in a wrong direction) being a probable move 
according to my experience.  Therefore, what I say to you, Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, is, don't you go and let yourself be 
put out of the way because of my knowing anything of your family 
affairs."

"I thank you for your preparation," returns Sir Leicester after a 
silence, without moving hand, foot, or feature, "which I hope is 
not necessary; though I give it credit for being well intended.  Be 
so good as to go on.  Also"--Sir Leicester seems to shrink in the 
shadow of his figure--"also, to take a seat, if you have no 
objection."

None at all.  Mr. Bucket brings a chair and diminishes his shadow.  
"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with this short preface I 
come to the point.  Lady Dedlock--"

Sir Leicester raises himself in his seat and stares at him 
fiercely.  Mr. Bucket brings the finger into play as an emollient.

"Lady Dedlock, you see she's universally admired.  That's what her 
ladyship is; she's universally admired," says Mr. Bucket.

"I would greatly prefer, officer," Sir Leicester returns stiffly, 
"my Lady's name being entirely omitted from this discussion."

"So would I, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, but--it's impossible."

"Impossible?"

Mr. Bucket shakes his relentless head.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's altogether impossible.  What 
I have got to say is about her ladyship.  She is the pivot it all 
turns on."

"Officer," retorts Sir Leicester with a fiery eye and a quivering 
lip, "you know your duty.  Do your duty, but be careful not to 
overstep it.  I would not suffer it.  I would not endure it.  You 
bring my Lady's name into this communication upon your 
responsibility--upon your responsibility.  My Lady's name is not a 
name for common persons to trifle with!"

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I say what I must say, and no 
more."

"I hope it may prove so.  Very well.  Go on.  Go on, sir!"  
Glancing at the angry eyes which now avoid him and at the angry 
figure trembling from head to foot, yet striving to be still, Mr. 
Bucket feels his way with his forefinger and in a low voice 
proceeds.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it becomes my duty to tell you 
that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn long entertained mistrusts and 
suspicions of Lady Dedlock."

"If he had dared to breathe them to me, sir--which he never did--I 
would have killed him myself!" exclaims Sir Leicester, striking his 
hand upon the table.  But in the very heat and fury of the act he 
stops, fixed by the knowing eyes of Mr. Bucket, whose forefinger is 
slowly going and who, with mingled confidence and patience, shakes 
his head.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was deep and 
close, and what he fully had in his mind in the very beginning I 
can't quite take upon myself to say.  But I know from his lips that 
he long ago suspected Lady Dedlock of having discovered, through 
the sight of some handwriting--in this very house, and when you 
yourself, Sir Leicester Dedlock, were present--the existence, in 
great poverty, of a certain person who had been her lover before 
you courted her and who ought to have been her husband."  Mr. 
Bucket stops and deliberately repeats, "Ought to have been her 
husband, not a doubt about it.  I know from his lips that when that 
person soon afterwards died, he suspected Lady Dedlock of visiting 
his wretched lodging and his wretched grave, alone and in secret.  
I know from my own inquiries and through my eyes and ears that Lady 
Dedlock did make such visit in the dress of her own maid, for the 
deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn employed me to reckon up her ladyship--if 
you'll excuse my making use of the term we commonly employ--and I 
reckoned her up, so far, completely.  I confronted the maid in the 
chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields with a witness who had been Lady 
Dedlock's guide, and there couldn't be the shadow of a doubt that 
she had worn the young woman's dress, unknown to her.  Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I did endeavour to pave the way a 
little towards these unpleasant disclosures yesterday by saying 
that very strange things happened even in high families sometimes.  
All this, and more, has happened in your own family, and to and 
through your own Lady.  It's my belief that the deceased Mr. 
Tulkinghorn followed up these inquiries to the hour of his death 
and that he and Lady Dedlock even had bad blood between them upon 
the matter that very night.  Now, only you put that to Lady 
Dedlock, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and ask her ladyship 
whether, even after he had left here, she didn't go down to his 
chambers with the intention of saying something further to him, 
dressed in a loose black mantle with a deep fringe to it."

Sir Leicester sits like a statue, gazing at the cruel finger that 
is probing the life-blood of his heart.

"You put that to her ladyship, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, from 
me, Inspector Bucket of the Detective.  And if her ladyship makes 
any difficulty about admitting of it, you tell her that it's no 
use, that Inspector Bucket knows it and knows that she passed the 
soldier as you called him (though he's not in the army now) and 
knows that she knows she passed him on the staircase.  Now, Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, why do I relate all this?"

Sir Leicester, who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a 
single groan, requests him to pause for a moment.  By and by he 
takes his hands away, and so preserves his dignity and outward 
calmness, though there is no more colour in his face than in his 
white hair, that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him.  Something 
frozen and fixed is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell 
of haughtiness, and Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in 
his speech, with now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which 
occasions him to utter inarticulate sounds.  With such sounds he 
now breaks silence, soon, however, controlling himself to say that 
he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as 
the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of 
this painful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this 
overwhelming, this incredible intelligence.

"Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," returns Mr. Bucket, "put 
it to her ladyship to clear that up.  Put it to her ladyship, if 
you think it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective.  You'll 
find, or I'm much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had 
the intention of communicating the whole to you as soon as he 
considered it ripe, and further, that he had given her ladyship so 
to understand.  Why, he might have been going to reveal it the very 
morning when I examined the body!  You don't know what I'm going to 
say and do five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet; and supposing I was to be picked off now, you 
might wonder why I hadn't done it, don't you see?"

True.  Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some trouble those obtrusive 
sounds, says, "True."  At this juncture a considerable noise of 
voices is heard in the hall.  Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to 
the library-door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again.  
Then he draws in his head and whispers hurriedly but composedly, 
"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has 
taken air, as I expected it might, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn 
being cut down so sudden.  The chance to hush it is to let in these 
people now in a wrangle with your footmen.  Would you mind sitting 
quiet--on the family account--while I reckon 'em up?  And would you 
just throw in a nod when I seem to ask you for it?"

Sir Leicester indistinctly answers, "Officer.  The best you can, 
the best you can!" and Mr. Bucket, with a nod and a sagacious crook 
of the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where the voices 
quickly die away.  He is not long in returning; a few paces ahead 
of Mercury and a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed 
smalls, who bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old 
man.  Another man and two women come behind.  Directing the 
pitching of the chair in an affable and easy manner, Mr. Bucket 
dismisses the Mercuries and locks the door again.  Sir Leicester 
looks on at this invasion of the sacred precincts with an icy 
stare.

"Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen," says Mr. 
Bucket in a confidential voice.  "I am Inspector Bucket of the 
Detective, I am; and this," producing the tip of his convenient 
little staff from his breast-pocket, "is my authority.  Now, you 
wanted to see Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.  Well! You do see 
him, and mind you, it ain't every one as is admitted to that 
honour.  Your name, old gentleman, is Smallweed; that's what your 
name is; I know it well."

"Well, and you never heard any harm of it!" cries Mr. Smallweed in 
a shrill loud voice.

"You don't happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?" retorts 
Mr. Bucket with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper.

"No!"

"Why, they killed him," says Mr. Bucket, "on account of his having 
so much cheek.  Don't YOU get into the same position, because it 
isn't worthy of you.  You ain't in the habit of conversing with a 
deaf person, are you?"

"Yes," snarls Mr. Smallweed, "my wife's deaf."

"That accounts for your pitching your voice so high.  But as she 
ain't here; just pitch it an octave or two lower, will you, and 
I'll not only be obliged to you, but it'll do you more credit," 
says Mr. Bucket.  "This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I 
think?"

"Name of Chadband," Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking henceforth in a 
much lower key.

"Once had a friend and brother serjeant of the same name," says Mr. 
Bucket, offering his hand, "and consequently feel a liking for it.  
Mrs. Chadband, no doubt?"

"And Mrs. Snagsby," Mr. Smallweed introduces.

"Husband a law-stationer and a friend of my own," says Mr. Bucket.  
"Love him like a brother!  Now, what's up?"

"Do you mean what business have we come upon?" Mr. Smallweed asks, 
a little dashed by the suddenness of this turn.

"Ah! You know what I mean.  Let us hear what it's all about in 
presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.  Come."

Mr. Smallweed, beckoning Mr. Chadband, takes a moment's counsel 
with him in a whisper.  Mr. Chadband, expressing a considerable 
amount of oil from the pores of his forehead and the palms of his 
hands, says aloud, "Yes.  You first!" and retires to his former 
place.

"I was the client and friend of Mr. Tulkinghorn," pipes Grandfather 
Smallweed then; "I did business with him.  I was useful to him, and 
he was useful to me.  Krook, dead and gone, was my brother-in-law.  
He was own brother to a brimstone magpie--leastways Mrs. Smallweed.  
I come into Krook's property.  I examined all his papers and all 
his effects.  They was all dug out under my eyes.  There was a 
bundle of letters belonging to a dead and gone lodger as was hid 
away at the back of a shelf in the side of Lady Jane's bed--his 
cat's bed.  He hid all manner of things away, everywheres.  Mr. 
Tulkinghorn wanted 'em and got 'em, but I looked 'em over first.  
I'm a man of business, and I took a squint at 'em.  They was 
letters from the lodger's sweetheart, and she signed Honoria.  Dear 
me, that's not a common name, Honoria, is it?  There's no lady in 
this house that signs Honoria is there?  Oh, no, I don't think so!  
Oh, no, I don't think so!  And not in the same hand, perhaps?  Oh, 
no, I don't think so!"

Here Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of 
his triumph, breaks off to ejaculate, "Oh, dear me!  Oh, Lord!  I'm 
shaken all to pieces!"

"Now, when you're ready," says Mr. Bucket after awaiting his 
recovery, "to come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock, 
Baronet, here the gentleman sits, you know."

"Haven't I come to it, Mr. Bucket?" cries Grandfather Smallweed.  
"Isn't the gentleman concerned yet?  Not with Captain Hawdon, and 
his ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain?  
Come, then, I want to know where those letters are.  That concerns 
me, if it don't concern Sir Leicester Dedlock.  I will know where 
they are.  I won't have 'em disappear so quietly.  I handed 'em 
over to my friend and solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, not to anybody 
else."

"Why, he paid you for them, you know, and handsome too," says Mr. 
Bucket.

"I don't care for that.  I want to know who's got 'em.  And I tell 
you what we want--what we all here want, Mr. Bucket.  We want more 
painstaking and search-making into this murder.  We know where the 
interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough.  If 
George the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an 
accomplice, and was set on.  You know what I mean as well as any 
man."

"Now I tell you what," says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering 
his manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordinary 
fascination to the forefinger, "I am damned if I am a-going to have 
my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as 
half a second of time by any human being in creation.  YOU want 
more painstaking and search-making!  YOU do?  Do you see this hand, 
and do you think that I don't know the right time to stretch it out 
and put it on the arm that fired that shot?"

Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is 
that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to 
apologize.  Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him.

"The advice I give you is, don't you trouble your head about the 
murder.  That's my affair.  You keep half an eye on the newspapers, 
and I shouldn't wonder if you was to read something about it before 
long, if you look sharp.  I know my business, and that's all I've 
got to say to you on that subject.  Now about those letters.  You 
want to know who's got 'em.  I don't mind telling you.  I have got 
'em.  Is that the packet?"

Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr. 
Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifles 
it as the same.

"What have you got to say next?" asks Mr. Bucket.  "Now, don't open 
your mouth too wide, because you don't look handsome when you do 
it."

"I want five hundred pound."

"No, you don't; you mean fifty," says Mr. Bucket humorously.

It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred.

"That is, I am deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to 
consider (without admitting or promising anything) this bit of 
business," says Mr. Bucket--Sir Leicester mechanically bows his 
head--"and you ask me to consider a proposal of five hundred 
pounds.  Why, it's an unreasonable proposal!  Two fifty would be 
bad enough, but better than that.  Hadn't you better say two 
fifty?"

Mr. Smallweed is quite clear that he had better not.

"Then," says Mr. Bucket, "let's hear Mr. Chadband.  Lord!  Many a 
time I've heard my old fellow-serjeant of that name; and a moderate 
man he was in all respects, as ever I come across!"

Thus invited, Mr. Chadband steps forth, and after a little sleek 
smiling and a little oil-grinding with the palms of his hands, 
delivers himself as follows, "My friends, we are now--Rachael, my 
wife, and I--in the mansions of the rich and great.  Why are we now 
in the mansions of the rich and great, my friends?  Is it because 
we are invited?  Because we are bidden to feast with them, because 
we are bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play 
the lute with them, because we are bidden to dance with them?  No.  
Then why are we here, my friends?  Air we in possession of a sinful 
secret, and do we require corn, and wine, and oil, or what is much 
the same thing, money, for the keeping thereof?  Probably so, my 
friends."

"You're a man of business, you are," returns Mr. Bucket, very 
attentive, "and consequently you're going on to mention what the 
nature of your secret is.  You are right.  You couldn't do better."

"Let us then, my brother, in a spirit of love," says Mr. Chadband 
with a cunning eye, "proceed unto it. Rachael, my wife, advance!"

Mrs. Chadband, more than ready, so advances as to jostle her 
husband into the background and confronts Mr. Bucket with a hard, 
frowning smile.

"Since you want to know what we know," says she, "I'll tell you.  I 
helped to bring up Miss Hawdon, her ladyship's daughter.  I was in 
the service of her ladyship's sister, who was very sensitive to the 
disgrace her ladyship brought upon her, and gave out, even to her 
ladyship, that the child was dead--she WAS very nearly so--when she 
was born.  But she's alive, and I know her."  With these words, and 
a laugh, and laying a bitter stress on the word "ladyship," Mrs. 
Chadband folds her arms and looks implacably at Mr. Bucket.

"I suppose now," returns that officer, "YOU will he expecting a 
twenty-pound note or a present of about that figure?"

Mrs. Chadband merely laughs and contemptuously tells him he can 
"offer" twenty pence.

"My friend the law-stationer's good lady, over there," says Mr. 
Bucket, luring Mrs. Snagsby forward with the finger.  "What may 
YOUR game be, ma'am?"

Mrs. Snagsby is at first prevented, by tears and lamentations, from 
stating the nature of her game, but by degrees it confusedly comes 
to light that she is a woman overwhelmed with injuries and wrongs, 
whom Mr. Snagsby has habitually deceived, abandoned, and sought to 
keep in darkness, and whose chief comfort, under her afflictions, 
has been the sympathy of the late Mr. Tulkinghorn, who showed so 
much commiseration for her on one occasion of his calling in Cook's 
Court in the absence of her perjured husband that she has of late 
habitually carried to him all her woes.  Everybody it appears, the 
present company excepted, has plotted against Mrs. Snagsby's peace.  
There is Mr. Guppy, clerk to Kenge and Carboy, who was at first as 
open as the sun at noon, but who suddenly shut up as close as 
midnight, under the influence--no doubt--of Mr. Snagsby's suborning 
and tampering.  There is Mr. Weevle, friend of Mr. Guppy, who lived 
mysteriously up a court, owing to the like coherent causes.  There 
was Krook, deceased; there was Nimrod, deceased; and there was Jo, 
deceased; and they were "all in it."  In what, Mrs. Snagsby does 
not with particularity express, but she knows that Jo was Mr. 
Snagsby's son, "as well as if a trumpet had spoken it," and she 
followed Mr. Snagsby when he went on his last visit to the boy, and 
if he was not his son why did he go?  The one occupation of her 
life has been, for some time back, to follow Mr. Snagsby to and 
fro, and up and down, and to piece suspicious circumstances 
together--and every circumstance that has happened has been most 
suspicious; and in this way she has pursued her object of detecting 
and confounding her false husband, night and day.  Thus did it come 
to pass that she brought the Chadbands and Mr. Tulkinghorn 
together, and conferred with Mr. Tulkinghorn on the change in Mr. 
Guppy, and helped to turn up the circumstances in which the present 
company are interested, casually, by the wayside, being still and 
ever on the great high road that is to terminate in Mr. Snagsby's 
full exposure and a matrimonial separation.  All this, Mrs. 
Snagsby, as an injured woman, and the friend of Mrs. Chadband, and 
the follower of Mr. Chadband, and the mourner of the late Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, is here to certify under the seal of confidence, with 
every possible confusion and involvement possible and impossible, 
having no pecuniary motive whatever, no scheme or project but the 
one mentioned, and bringing here, and taking everywhere, her own 
dense atmosphere of dust, arising from the ceaseless working of her 
mill of jealousy.

While this exordium is in hand--and it takes some time--Mr. Bucket, 
who has seen through the transparency of Mrs. Snagsby's vinegar at 
a glance, confers with his familiar demon and bestows his shrewd 
attention on the Chadbands and Mr. Smallweed.  Sir Leicester 
Dedlock remains immovable, with the same icy surface upon him, 
except that he once or twice looks towards Mr. Bucket, as relying 
on that officer alone of all mankind.

"Very good," says Mr. Bucket.  "Now I understand you, you know, and 
being deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to look into this 
little matter," again Sir Leicester mechanically bows in 
confirmation of the statement, "can give it my fair and full 
attention.  Now I won't allude to conspiring to extort money or 
anything of that sort, because we are men and women of the world 
here, and our object is to make things pleasant.  But I tell you 
what I DO wonder at; I am surprised that you should think of making 
a noise below in the hall.  It was so opposed to your interests.  
That's what I look at."

"We wanted to get in," pleads Mr. Smallweed.

"Why, of course you wanted to get in," Mr. Bucket asserts with 
cheerfulness; "but for a old gentleman at your time of life--what I 
call truly venerable, mind you!--with his wits sharpened, as I have 
no doubt they are, by the loss of the use of his limbs, which 
occasions all his animation to mount up into his head, not to 
consider that if he don't keep such a business as the present as 
close as possible it can't be worth a mag to him, is so curious!  
You see your temper got the better of you; that's where you lost 
ground," says Mr. Bucket in an argumentative and friendly way.

"I only said I wouldn't go without one of the servants came up to 
Sir Leicester Dedlock," returns Mr. Smallweed.

"That's it!  That's where your temper got the better of you. Now, 
you keep it under another time and you'll make money by it.  Shall 
I ring for them to carry you down?"

"When are we to hear more of this?" Mrs. Chadband sternly demands.

"Bless your heart for a true woman!  Always curious, your 
delightful sex is!" replies Mr. Bucket with gallantry.  "I shall 
have the pleasure of giving you a call to-morrow or next day--not 
forgetting Mr. Smallweed and his proposal of two fifty."

"Five hundred!" exclaims Mr. Smallweed.

"All right!  Nominally five hundred."  Mr. Bucket has his hand on 
the bell-rope.  "SHALL I wish you good day for the present on the 
part of myself and the gentleman of the house?" he asks in an 
insinuating tone.

Nobody having the hardihood to object to his doing so, he does it, 
and the party retire as they came up.  Mr. Bucket follows them to 
the door, and returning, says with an air of serious business, "Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it's for you to consider whether or not 
to buy this up.  I should recommend, on the whole, it's being 
bought up myself; and I think it may be bought pretty cheap.  You 
see, that little pickled cowcumber of a Mrs. Snagsby has been used 
by all sides of the speculation and has done a deal more harm in 
bringing odds and ends together than if she had meant it.  Mr. 
Tulkinghorn, deceased, he held all these horses in his hand and 
could have drove 'em his own way, I haven't a doubt; but he was 
fetched off the box head-foremost, and now they have got their legs 
over the traces, and are all dragging and pulling their own ways.  
So it is, and such is life.  The cat's away, and the mice they 
play; the frost breaks up, and the water runs.  Now, with regard to 
the party to be apprehended."

Sir Leicester seems to wake, though his eyes have been wide open, 
and he looks intently at Mr. Bucket as Mr. Bucket refers to his 
watch.

"The party to be apprehended is now in this house," proceeds Mr. 
Bucket, putting up his watch with a steady hand and with rising 
spirits, "and I'm about to take her into custody in your presence.  
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, don't you say a word nor yet stir.  
There'll be no noise and no disturbance at all.  I'll come back in 
the course of the evening, if agreeable to you, and endeavour to 
meet your wishes respecting this unfortunate family matter and the 
nobbiest way of keeping it quiet.  Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, 
Baronet, don't you be nervous on account of the apprehension at 
present coming off.  You shall see the whole case clear, from first 
to last."

Mr. Bucket rings, goes to the door, briefly whispers Mercury, shuts 
the door, and stands behind it with his arms folded.  After a 
suspense of a minute or two the door slowly opens and a Frenchwoman 
enters.  Mademoiselle Hortense.

The moment she is in the room Mr. Bucket claps the door to and puts 
his back against it.  The suddenness of the noise occasions her to 
turn, and then for the first time she sees Sir Leicester Dedlock in 
his chair.

"I ask you pardon," she mutters hurriedly.  "They tell me there was 
no one here."

Her step towards the door brings her front to front with Mr. 
Bucket.  Suddenly a spasm shoots across her face and she turns 
deadly pale.

"This is my lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock," says Mr. Bucket, 
nodding at her.  "This foreign young woman has been my lodger for 
some weeks back."

"What do Sir Leicester care for that, you think, my angel?" returns 
mademoiselle in a jocular strain.

"Why, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket, "we shall see."

Mademoiselle Hortense eyes him with a scowl upon her tight face, 
which gradually changes into a smile of scorn, "You are very 
mysterieuse.  Are you drunk?"

"Tolerable sober, my angel," returns Mr. Bucket.

"I come from arriving at this so detestable house with your wife.  
Your wife have left me since some minutes.  They tell me downstairs 
that your wife is here.  I come here, and your wife is not here.  
What is the intention of this fool's play, say then?" mademoiselle 
demands, with her arms composedly crossed, but with something in 
her dark cheek beating like a clock.

Mr. Bucket merely shakes the finger at her.

"Ah, my God, you are an unhappy idiot!" cries mademoiselle with a 
toss of her head and a laugh.  "Leave me to pass downstairs, great 
pig."  With a stamp of her foot and a menace.

"Now, mademoiselle," says Mr. Bucket in a cool determined way, "you 
go and sit down upon that sofy."

"I will not sit down upon nothing," she replies with a shower of 
nods.

"Now, mademoiselle," repeats Mr. Bucket, making no demonstration 
except with the finger, "you sit down upon that sofy."

"Why?"

"Because I take you into custody on a charge of murder, and you 
don't need to be told it.  Now, I want to be polite to one of your 
sex and a foreigner if I can.  If I can't, I must be rough, and 
there's rougher ones outside.  What I am to be depends on you.  So 
I recommend you, as a friend, afore another half a blessed moment 
has passed over your head, to go and sit down upon that sofy."

Mademoiselle complies, saying in a concentrated voice while that 
something in her cheek beats fast and hard, "You are a devil."

"Now, you see," Mr. Bucket proceeds approvingly, "you're 
comfortable and conducting yourself as I should expect a foreign 
young woman of your sense to do.  So I'll give you a piece of 
advice, and it's this, don't you talk too much.  You're not 
expected to say anything here, and you can't keep too quiet a 
tongue in your head.  In short, the less you PARLAY, the better, 
you know."  Mr. Bucket is very complacent over this French 
explanation.

Mademoiselle, with that tigerish expansion of the mouth and her 
black eyes darting fire upon him, sits upright on the sofa in a 
rigid state, with her hands clenched--and her feet too, one might 
suppose--muttering, "Oh, you Bucket, you are a devil!"

"Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," says Mr. Bucket, and from 
this time forth the finger never rests, "this young woman, my 
lodger, was her ladyship's maid at the time I have mentioned to 
you; and this young woman, besides being extraordinary vehement and 
passionate against her ladyship after being discharged--"

"Lie!" cries mademoiselle.  "I discharge myself."

"Now, why don't you take my advice?" returns Mr. Bucket in an 
impressive, almost in an imploring, tone.  "I'm surprised at the 
indiscreetness you commit.  You'll say something that'll be used 
against you, you know.  You're sure to come to it.  Never you mind 
what I say till it's given in evidence.  It is not addressed to 
you."

"Discharge, too," cries mademoiselle furiously, "by her ladyship!  
Eh, my faith, a pretty ladyship!  Why, I r-r-r-ruin my character hy 
remaining with a ladyship so infame!"

"Upon my soul I wonder at you!" Mr. Bucket remonstrates.  "I 
thought the French were a polite nation, I did, really.  Yet to 
hear a female going on like that before Sir Leicester Dedlock, 
Baronet!"

"He is a poor abused!" cries mademoiselle.  "I spit upon his house, 
upon his name, upon his imbecility," all of which she makes the 
carpet represent.  "Oh, that he is a great man!  Oh, yes, superb!  
Oh, heaven!  Bah!"

"Well, Sir Leicester Dedlock," proceeds Mr. Bucket, "this 
intemperate foreigner also angrily took it into her head that she 
had established a claim upon Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, by 
attending on the occasion I told you of at his chambers, though she 
was liberally paid for her time and trouble."

"Lie!" cries mademoiselle.  "I ref-use his money all togezzer."

"If you WILL PARLAY, you know," says Mr. Bucket parenthetically, 
"you must take the consequences.  Now, whether she became my 
lodger, Sir Leicester Dedlock, with any deliberate intention then 
of doing this deed and blinding me, I give no opinion on; but she 
lived in my house in that capacity at the time that she was 
hovering about the chambers of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn with a 
view to a wrangle, and likewise persecuting and half frightening 
the life out of an unfortunate stationer."

"Lie!" cries mademoiselle.  "All lie!"

"The murder was commttted, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and you 
know under what circumstances.  Now, I beg of you to follow me 
close with your attention for a minute or two.  I was sent for, and 
the case was entrusted to me.  I examined the place, and the body, 
and the papers, and everything.  From information I received (from 
a clerk in the same house) I took George into custody as having 
been seen hanging about there on the night, and at very nigh the 
time of the murder, also as having been overheard in high words 
with the deceased on former occasions--even threatening him, as the 
witness made out.  If you ask me, Sir Leicester Dedlock, whether 
from the first I believed George to be the murderer, I tell you 
candidly no, but he might be, notwithstanding, and there was enough 
against him to make it my duty to take him and get him kept under 
remand.  Now, observe!"

As Mr. Bucket bends forward in some excitement--for him--and 
inaugurates what he is going to say with one ghostly beat of his 
forefinger in the air, Mademoiselle Hortense fixes her black eyes 
upon him with a dark frown and sets her dry lips closely and firmly 
together.

"I went home, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, at night and found 
this young woman having supper with my wife, Mrs. Bucket.  She had 
made a mighty show of being fond of Mrs. Bucket from her first 
offering herself as our lodger, but that night she made more than 
ever--in fact, overdid it.  Likewise she overdid her respect, and 
all that, for the lamented memory of the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn.  
By the living Lord it flashed upon me, as I sat opposite to her at 
the table and saw her with a knife in her hand, that she had done 
it!"

Mademoiselle is hardly audible in straining through her teeth and 
lips the words, "You are a devil."

"Now where," pursues Mr. Bucket, "had she been on the night of the 
murder?  She had been to the theayter.  (She really was there, I 
have since found, both before the deed and after it.)  I knew I had 
an artful customer to deal with and that proof would be very 
difficult; and I laid a trap for her--such a trap as I never laid 
yet, and such a venture as I never made yet.  I worked it out in my 
mind while I was talking to her at supper.  When I went upstairs to 
bed, our house being small and this young woman's ears sharp, I 
stuffed the sheet into Mrs. Bucket's mouth that she shouldn't say a 
word of surprise and told her all about it.  My dear, don't you 
give your mind to that again, or I shall link your feet together at 
the ankles."  Mr. Bucket, breaking off, has made a noiseless 
descent upon mademoiselle and laid his heavy hand upon her 
shoulder.

"What is the matter with you now?" she asks him.

"Don't you think any more," returns Mr. Bucket with admonitory 
finger, "of throwing yourself out of window.  That's what's the 
matter with me.  Come!  Just take my arm.  You needn't get up; I'll 
sit down by you.  Now take my arm, will you?  I'm a married man, 
you know; you're acquainted with my wife.  Just take my arm."

Vaiuly endeavouring to moisten those dry lips, with a painful sound 
she struggles with herself and complies.

"Now we're all right again.  Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this 
case could never have been the case it is but for Mrs. Bucket, who 
is a woman in fifty thousand--in a hundred and fifty thousand!  To 
throw this young woman off her guard, I have never set foot in our 
house since, though I've communicated with Mrs. Bucket in the 
baker's loaves and in the milk as often as required.  My whispered 
words to Mrs. Bucket when she had the sheet in her mouth were, 'My 
dear, can you throw her off continually with natural accounts of my 
suspicions against George, and this, and that, and t'other?  Can 
you do without rest and keep watch upon her night and day?  Can you 
undertake to say, "She shall do nothing without my knowledge, she 
shall be my prisoner without suspecting it, she shall no more 
escape from me than from death, and her life shall be my life, and 
her soul my soul, till I have got her, if she did this murder?"'   
Mrs. Bucket says to me, as well as she could speak on account of 
the sheet, 'Bucket, I can!'  And she has acted up to it glorious!"

"Lies!" mademoiselle interposes.  "All lies, my friend!"

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, how did my calculations come out 
under these circumstances?  When I calculated that this impetuous 
young woman would overdo it in new directions, was I wrong or 
right?  I was right.  What does she try to do?  Don't let it give 
you a turn?  To throw the murder on her ladyship."

Sir Leicester rises from his chair and staggers down again.

"And she got encouragement in it from hearing that I was always 
here, which was done a-purpose.  Now, open that pocket-book of 
mine, Sir Leicester Dedlock, if I may take the liberty of throwing 
it towards you, and look at the letters sent to me, each with the 
two words 'Lady Dedlock' in it.  Open the one directed to yourself, 
which I stopped this very morning, and read the three words 'Lady 
Dedlock, Murderess' in it.  These letters have been falling about 
like a shower of lady-birds.  What do you say now to Mrs. Bucket, 
from her spy-place having seen them all 'written by this young 
woman?  What do you say to Mrs. Bucket having, within this half-
hour, secured the corresponding ink and paper, fellow half-sheets 
and what not?  What do you say to Mrs. Bucket having watched the 
posting of 'em every one by this young woman, Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet?"  Mr. Bucket asks, triumphant in his admiration 
of his lady's genius.

Two things are especially observable as Mr. Bucket proceeds to a 
conclusion.  First, that he seems imperceptibly to establish a 
dreadful right of property in mademoiselle.  Secondly, that the 
very atmosphere she breathes seems to narrow and contract about her 
as if a close net or a pall were being drawn nearer and yet nearer 
around her breathless figure.

"There is no doubt that her ladyship was on the spot at the 
eventful period," says Mr. Bucket, "and my foreign friend here saw 
her, I believe, from the upper part of the staircase.  Her ladyship 
and George and my foreign friend were all pretty close on one 
another's heels.  But that don't signify any more, so I'll not go 
into it.  I found the wadding of the pistol with which the deceased 
Mr. Tulkinghorn was shot.  It was a bit of the printed description 
of your house at Chesney Wold.  Not much in that, you'll say, Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet.  No.  But when my foreign friend here 
is so thoroughly off her guard as to think it a safe time to tear 
up the rest of that leaf, and when Mrs. Bucket puts the pieces 
together and finds the wadding wanting, it begins to look like 
Queer Street."

"These are very long lies," mademoiselle interposes.  "You prose 
great deal.  Is it that you have almost all finished, or are you 
speaking always?"

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet," proceeds Mr. Bucket, who delights 
in a full title and does violence to himself when he dispenses with 
any fragment of it, "the last point in the case which I am now 
going to mention shows the necessity of patience in our business, 
and never doing a thing in a hurry.  I watched this young woman 
yesterday without her knowledge when she was looking at the 
funeral, in company with my wife, who planned to take her there; 
and I had so much to convict her, and I saw such an expression in 
her face, and my mind so rose against her malice towards her 
ladyship, and the time was altogether such a time for bringing down 
what you may call retribution upon her, that if I had been a 
younger hand with less experience, I should have taken her, 
certain.  Equally, last night, when her ladyship, as is so 
universally admired I am sure, come home looking--why, Lord, a man 
might almost say like Venus rising from the ocean--it was so 
unpleasant and inconsistent to think of her being charged with a 
murder of which she was innocent that I felt quite to want to put 
an end to the job.  What should I have lost?  Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet, I should have lost the weapon.  My prisoner here 
proposed to Mrs. Bucket, after the departure of the funeral, that 
they should go per bus a little ways into the country and take tea 
at a very decent house of entertainment.  Now, near that house of 
entertainment there's a piece of water.  At tea, my prisoner got up 
to fetch her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the bonnets 
was; she was rather a long time gone and came back a little out of 
wind.  As soon as they came home this was reported to me by Mrs. 
Bucket, along with her observations and suspicions.  I had the 
piece of water dragged by moonlight, in presence of a couple of our 
men, and the pocket pistol was brought up before it had been there 
half-a-dozen hours.  Now, my dear, put your arm a little further 
through mine, and hold it steady, and I shan't hurt you!"

In a trice Mr. Bucket snaps a handcuff on her wrist.  "That's one," 
says Mr. Bucket.  "Now the other, darling.  Two, and all told!"

He rises; she rises too.  "Where," she asks him, darkening her 
large eyes until their drooping lids almost conceal them--and yet 
they stare, "where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed 
wife?"

"She's gone forrard to the Police Office," returns Mr. Bucket.  
"You'll see her there, my dear."

"I would like to kiss her!" exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting 
tigress-like.

"You'd bite her, I suspect," says Mr. Bucket.

"I would!" making her eyes very large.  "I would love to tear her 
limb from limb."

"Bless you, darling," says Mr. Bucket with the greatest composure, 
"I'm fully prepared to hear that.  Your sex have such a surprising 
animosity against one another when you do differ.  You don't mind 
me half so much, do you?"

"No.  Though you are a devil still."

"Angel and devil by turns, eh?" cries Mr. Bucket.  "But I am in my 
regular employment, you must consider.  Let me put your shawl tidy.  
I've been lady's maid to a good many before now.  Anything wanting 
to the bonnet?  There's a cab at the door."

Mademoiselle Hortense, casting an indignant eye at the glass, 
shakes herself perfectly neat in one shake and looks, to do her 
justice, uncommonly genteel.

"Listen then, my angel," says she after several sarcastic nods.  
"You are very spiritual.  But can you restore him back to life?"

Mr. Bucket answers, "Not exactly."

"That is droll.  Listen yet one time.  You are very spiritual.  Can 
you make a honourahle lady of her?"

"Don't be so malicious," says Mr. Bucket.

"Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?" cries mademoiselle, referring to 
Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain.  "Eh!  Oh, then regard him!  
The poor infant!  Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Come, come, why this is worse PARLAYING than the other," says Mr. 
Bucket.  "Come along!"

"You cannot do these things?  Then you can do as you please with 
me.  It is but the death, it is all the same.  Let us go, my angel.  
Adieu, you old man, grey.  I pity you, and I despise you!"

With these last words she snaps her teeth together as if her mouth 
closed with a spring.  It is impossible to describe how Mr. Bucket 
gets her out, but he accomplishes that feat in a manner so peculiar 
to himself, enfolding and pervading her like a cloud, and hovering 
away with her as if he were a homely Jupiter and she the object of 
his affections.

Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though 
he were still listening and his attention were still occupied.  At 
length he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted, 
rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a 
few steps, supporting himself by the table.  Then he stops, and 
with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems 
to stare at something.

Heaven knows what he sees.  The green, green woods of Chesney Wold, 
the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers 
defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most 
precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands 
of faces sneering at him.  But if such shadows flit before him to 
his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with 
something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he 
addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.

It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for 
years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has 
never had a selfish thought.  It is she whom he has loved, admired, 
honoured, and set up for the world to respect.  It is she who, at 
the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities 
of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, 
susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he 
feels.  He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot 
bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced 
so well.

And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of 
his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like 
distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone 
of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.



CHAPTER LV

Flight


Inspector Bucket of the Detective has not yet struck his great 
blow, as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with 
sleep preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and 
along the freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of 
Lincolnshire, making its way towards London.

Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle 
and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the 
wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such 
things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly 
unexpected.  Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground 
is staked out.  Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers 
desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick 
and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of 
embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of 
rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles 
appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything 
looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness.  Along the 
freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its 
way without a railroad on its mind.

Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits 
within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey 
cloak and umbrella.  The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as 
being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in 
accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell 
is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it.  The 
old lady cannot make enough of the old girl.  She sits, in her 
stately manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness, 
puts it often to her lips.  "You are a mother, my dear soul," says 
she many times, "and you found out my George's mother!"

"Why, George," returns Mrs. Bagnet, "was always free with me, 
ma'am, and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all the 
things my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a man, 
the comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful 
line into his mother's face or turned a hair of her head grey, then 
I felt sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his own 
mother into his mind.  I had often known him say to me, in past 
times, that he had behaved bad to her."

"Never, my dear!" returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears.  
"My blessing on him, never!  He was always fond of me, and loving 
to me, was my George!  But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a 
little wild and went for a soldier.  And I know he waited at first, 
in letting us know about himself, till he should rise to be an 
officer; and when he didn't rise, I know he considered himself 
beneath us, and wouldn't be a disgrace to us.  For he had a lion 
heart, had my George, always from a baby!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be 
alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed.  The old 
housekeeper looks at him, and those wandering hands of hers are 
quite enough for Mrs. Bagnet's confirmation, even if she could see 
the mother and the son together, knowing what she knows, and doubt 
their relationship.

Not a rustle of the housekeeper's dress, not a gesture, not a word 
betrays her.  She stands looking at him as he writes on, all 
unconscious, and only her fluttering hands give utterance to her 
emotions.  But they are very eloquent, very, very eloquent.  Mrs. 
Bagnet understands them.  They speak of gratitude, of joy, of 
grief, of hope; of inextinguishable affection, cherished with no 
return since this stalwart man was a stripling; of a better son 
loved less, and this son loved so fondly and so proudly; and they 
speak in such touching language that Mrs. Bagnet's eyes brim up 
with tears and they run glistening down her sun-brown face.

"George Rouncewell!  Oh, my dear child, turn and look at me!"

The trooper starts up, clasps his mother round the neck, and falls 
down on his knees before her.  Whether in a late repentance, 
whether in the first association that comes back upon him, he puts 
his hands together as a child does when it says its prayers, and 
raising them towards her breast, bows down his head, and cries.

"My George, my dearest son!  Always my favourite, and my favourite 
still, where have you been these cruel years and years?  Grown such 
a man too, grown such a fine strong man.  Grown so like what I knew 
he must be, if it pleased God he was alive!"

She can ask, and he can answer, nothing connected for a time.  All 
that time the old girl, turned away, leans one arm against the 
whitened wall, leans her honest forehead upon it, wipes her eyes 
with her serviceable grey cloak, and quite enjoys herself like the 
best of old girls as she is.

"Mother," says the trooper when they are more composed, "forgive me 
first of all, for I know my need of it."

Forgive him!  She does it with all her heart and soul.  She always 
has done it.  She tells him how she has had it written in her will, 
these many years, that he was her beloved son George.  She has 
never believed any ill of him, never.  If she had died without this 
happiness--and she is an old woman now and can't look to live very 
long--she would have blessed him with her last breath, if she had 
had her senses, as her beloved son George.

"Mother, I have been an undutiful trouble to you, and I have my 
reward; but of late years I have had a kind of glimmering of a 
purpose in me too.  When I left home I didn't care much, mother--I 
am afraid not a great deal--for leaving; and went away and 'listed, 
harum-scarum, making believe to think that I cared for nobody, no 
not I, and that nobody cared for me."

The trooper has dried his eyes and put away his handkerchief, but 
there is an extraordinary contrast between his habitual manner of 
expressing himself and carrying himself and the softened tone in 
which he speaks, interrupted occasionally by a half-stifled sob.

"So I wrote a line home, mother, as you too well know, to say I had 
'listed under another name, and I went abroad.  Abroad, at one time 
I thought I would write home next year, when I might be better off; 
and when that year was out, I thought I would write home next year, 
when I might be better off; and when that year was out again, 
perhaps I didn't think much about it.  So on, from year to year, 
through a service of ten years, till I began to get older, and to 
ask myself why should I ever write."

"I don't find any fault, child--but not to ease my mind, George?  
Not a word to your loving mother, who was growing older too?"

This almost overturns the trooper afresh, but he sets himself up 
with a great, rough, sounding clearance of his throat.

"Heaven forgive me, mother, but I thought there would be small 
consolation then in hearing anything about me.  There were you, 
respected and esteemed.  There was my brother, as I read in chance 
North Country papers now and then, rising to be prosperous and 
famous.  There was I a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made 
like him, but self-unmade--all my earlier advantages thrown away, 
all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what 
unfitted me for most things that I could think of.  What business 
had I to make myself known?  After letting all that time go by me, 
what good could come of it?  The worst was past with you, mother.  
I knew by that time (being a man) how you had mourned for me, and 
wept for me, and prayed for me; and the pain was over, or was 
softened down, and I was better in your mind as it was."

The old lady sorrowfully shakes her head, and taking one of his 
powerful hands, lays it lovingly upon her shoulder.

"No, I don't say that it was so, mother, but that I made it out to 
be so.  I said just now, what good could come of it?  Well, my dear 
mother, some good might have come of it to myself--and there was 
the meanness of it.  You would have sought me out; you would have 
purchased my discharge; you would have taken me down to Chesney 
Wold; you would have brought me and my brother and my brother's 
family together; you would all have considered anxiously how to do 
something for me and set me up as a respectable civilian.  But how 
could any of you feel sure of me when I couldn't so much as feel 
sure of myself?  How could you help regarding as an incumbrance and 
a discredit to you an idle dragooning chap who was an incumbrance 
and a discredit to himself, excepting under discipline?  How could 
I look my brother's children in the face and pretend to set them an 
example--I, the vagabond boy who had run away from home and been 
the grief and unhappiness of my mother's life?  'No, George.'  Such 
were my words, mother, when I passed this in review before me: 'You 
have made your bed.  Now, lie upon it.'"

Mrs. Rouncewell, drawing up her stately form, shakes her head at 
the old girl with a swelling pride upon her, as much as to say, "I 
told you so!"  The old girl relieves her feelings and testifies her 
interest in the conversation by giving the trooper a great poke 
between the shoulders with her umbrella; this action she afterwards 
repeats, at intervals, in a species of affectionate lunacy, never 
failing, after the administration of each of these remonstrances, 
to resort to the whitened wall and the grey cloak again.

"This was the way I brought myself to think, mother, that my best 
amends was to lie upon that bed I had made, and die upon it.  And I 
should have done it (though I have been to see you more than once 
down at Chesney Wold, when you little thought of me) but for my old 
comrade's wife here, who I find has been too many for me.  But I 
thank her for it.  I thank you for it, Mrs. Bagnet, with all my 
heart and might."

To which Mrs. Bagnet responds with two pokes.

And now the old lady impresses upon her son George, her own dear 
recovered boy, her joy and pride, the light of her eyes, the happy 
close of her life, and every fond name she can think of, that he 
must be governed by the best advice obtainable by money and 
influence, that he must yield up his case to the greatest lawyers 
that can be got, that he must act in this serious plight as he 
shall be advised to act and must not be self-willed, however right, 
but must promise to think only of his poor old mother's anxiety and 
suffering until he is released, or he will break her heart.

"Mother, 'tis little enough to consent to," returns the trooper, 
stopping her with a kiss; "tell me what I shall do, and I'll make a 
late beginning and do it.  Mrs. Bagnet, you'll take care of my 
mother, I know?"

A very hard poke from the old girl's umbrella.

"If you'll bring her acquainted with Mr. Jarndyce and Miss 
Summerson, she will find them of her way of thinking, and they will 
give her the best advice and assistance."

"And, George," says the old lady, "we must send with all haste for 
your brother.  He is a sensible sound man as they tell me--out in 
the world beyond Chesney Wold, my dear, though I don't know much of 
it myself--and will be of great service."

"Mother," returns the trooper, "is it too soon to ask a favour?"

"Surely not, my dear."

"Then grant me this one great favour.  Don't let my brother know."

"Not know what, my dear?"

"Not know of me.  In fact, mother, I can't bear it; I can't make up 
my mmd to it.  He has proved himself so different from me and has 
done so much to raise himself while I've been soldiering that I 
haven't brass enough in my composition to see him in this place and 
under this charge.  How could a man like him be expected to have 
any pleasure in such a discovery?  It's impossible.  No, keep my 
secret from him, mother; do me a greater kindness than I deserve 
and keep my secret from my brother, of all men."

"But not always, dear George?"

"Why, mother, perhaps not for good and all--though I may come to 
ask that too--but keep it now, I do entreat you.  If it's ever 
broke to him that his rip of a brother has turned up, I could 
wish," says the trooper, shaking his head very doubtfully, "to 
break it myself and be governed as to advancing or retreating by 
the way in which he seems to take it."

As he evidently has a rooted feeling on this point, and as the 
depth of it is recognized in Mrs. Bagnet's face, his mother yields 
her implicit assent to what he asks.  For this he thanks her 
kindly.

"In all other respects, my dear mother, I'll be as tractable and 
obedient as you can wish; on this one alone, I stand out.  So now I 
am ready even for the lawyers.  I have been drawing up," he glances 
at his writing on the table, "an exact account of what I knew of 
the deceased and how I came to be involved in this unfortunate 
affair.  It's entered, plain and regular, like an orderly-book; not 
a word in it but what's wanted for the facts.  I did intend to read 
it, straight on end, whensoever I was called upon to say anything 
in my defence.  I hope I may be let to do it still; but I have no 
longer a will of my own in this case, and whatever is said or done, 
I give my promise not to have any."

Matters being brought to this so far satisfactory pass, and time 
being on the wane, Mrs. Bagnet proposes a departure.  Again and 
again the old lady hangs upon her son's neck, and again and again 
the trooper holds her to his broad chest.

"Where are you going to take my mother, Mrs. Bagnet?"

"I am going to the town house, my dear, the family house.  I have 
some business there that must be looked to directly," Mrs. 
Rouncewell answers.

"Will you see my mother safe there in a coach, Mrs. Bagnet?  But of 
course I know you will.  Why should I ask it!"

Why indeed, Mrs. Bagnet expresses with the umbrella.

"Take her, my old friend, and take my gratitude along with you.  
Kisses to Quebec and Malta, love to my godson, a hearty shake of 
the hand to Lignum, and this for yourself, and I wish it was ten 
thousand pound in gold, my dear!"  So saying, the trooper puts his 
lips to the old girl's tanned forehead, and the door shuts upon him 
in his cell.

No entreaties on the part of the good old housekeeper will induce 
Mrs. Bagnet to retain the coach for her own conveyance home.  
Jumping out cheerfully at the door of the Dedlock mansion and 
handing Mrs. Rouncewell up the steps, the old girl shakes hands and 
trudges off, arriving soon afterwards in the bosom of the Bagnet 
family and falling to washing the greens as if nothing had 
happened.

My Lady is in that room in which she held her last conference with 
the murdered man, and is sitting where she sat that night, and is 
looking at the spot where he stood upon the hearth studying her so 
leisurely, when a tap comes at the door.  Who is it?  Mrs. 
Rouncewell.  What has brought Mrs. Rouncewell to town so 
unexpectedly?

"Trouble, my Lady.  Sad trouble.  Oh, my Lady, may I beg a word 
with you?"

What new occurrence is it that makes this tranquil old woman 
tremble so?  Far happier than her Lady, as her Lady has often 
thought, why does she falter in this manner and look at her with 
such strange mistrust?

"What is the matter?  Sit down and take your breath."

"Oh, my Lady, my Lady.  I have found my son--my youngest, who went 
away for a soldier so long ago.  And he is in prison."

"For debt?"

"Oh, no, my Lady; I would have paid any debt, and joyful."

"For what is he in prison then?"

"Charged with a murder, my Lady, of which he is as innocent as--as 
I am.  Accused of the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn."

What does she mean by this look and this imploring gesture?  Why 
does she come so close?  What is the letter that she holds?

"Lady Dedlock, my dear Lady, my good Lady, my kind Lady!  You must 
have a heart to feel for me, you must have a heart to forgive me.  
I was in this family before you were born.  I am devoted to it.  
But think of my dear son wrongfully accused."

"I do not accuse him."

"No, my Lady, no.  But others do, and he is in prison and in 
danger.  Oh, Lady Dedlock, if you can say but a word to help to 
clear him, say it!"

What delusion can this be?  What power does she suppose is in the 
person she petitions to avert this unjust suspicion, if it be 
unjust?  Her Lady's handsome eyes regard her with astonishment, 
almost with fear.

"My Lady, I came away last night from Chesney Wold to find my son 
in my old age, and the step upon the Ghost's Walk was so constant 
and so solemn that I never heard the like in all these years.  
Night after night, as it has fallen dark, the sound has echoed 
through your rooms, but last night it was awfullest.  And as it 
fell dark last night, my Lady, I got this letter."

"What letter is it?"

"Hush!  Hush!"  The housekeeper looks round and answers in a 
frightened whisper, "My Lady, I have not breathed a word of it, I 
don't believe what's written in it, I know it can't be true, I am 
sure and certain that it is not true.  But my son is in danger, and 
you must have a heart to pity me.  If you know of anything that is 
not known to others, if you have any suspicion, if you have any 
clue at all, and any reason for keeping it in your own breast, oh, 
my dear Lady, think of me, and conquer that reason, and let it be 
known!  This is the most I consider possible.  I know you are not a 
hard lady, but you go your own way always without help, and you are 
not familiar with your friends; and all who admire you--and all do
--as a beautiful and elegant lady, know you to be one far away from 
themselves who can't be approached close.  My Lady, you may have 
some proud or angry reasons for disdaining to utter something that 
you know; if so, pray, oh, pray, think of a faithful servant whose 
whole life has been passed in this family which she dearly loves, 
and relent, and help to clear my son!  My Lady, my good Lady," the 
old housekeeper pleads with genuine simplicity, "I am so humble in 
my place and you are by nature so high and distant that you may not 
think what I feel for my child, but I feel so much that I have come 
here to make so bold as to beg and pray you not to be scornful of 
us if you can do us any right or justice at this fearful time!"

Lady Dedlock raises her without one word, until she takes the 
letter from her hand.

"Am I to read this?"

"When I am gone, my Lady, if you please, and then remembering the 
most that I consider possible."

"I know of nothing I can do.  I know of nothing I reserve that can 
affect your son.  I have never accused him."

"My Lady, you may pity him the more under a false accusation after 
reading the letter."

The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand.  In 
truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when 
the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong 
earnestness would have moved her to great compassion.  But so long 
accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long 
schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which 
shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and 
spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the 
feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had 
subdued even her wonder until now.

She opens the letter.  Spread out upon the paper is a printed 
account of the discovery of the body as it lay face downward on the 
floor, shot through the heart; and underneath is written her own 
name, with the word "murderess" attached.

It falls out of her hand.  How long it may have lain upon the 
ground she knows not, but it lies where it fell when a servant 
stands before her announcing the young man of the name of Guppy.  
The words have probably been repeated several times, for they are 
ringing in her head before she begins to understand them.

"Let him come in!"

He comes in.  Holding the letter in her hand, which she has taken 
from the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts.  In the eyes of 
Mr. Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared, 
proud, chilling state.

"Your ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit 
from one who has never been welcome to your ladyship"--which he 
don't complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has 
been any particular reason on the face of things why he should be--
"but I hope when I mention my motives to your ladyship you will not 
find fault with me," says Mr. Guppy.

"Do so."

"Thank your ladyship.  I ought first to explain to your ladyship," 
Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his hat on the 
carpet at his feet, "that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I 
formerly mentioned to your ladyship, was at one period of my life 
imprinted on my 'eart until erased by circumstances over which I 
had no control, communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of 
waiting on your ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to 
take no steps whatever in any manner at all relating to her.  And 
Miss Summerson's wishes being to me a law (except as connected with 
circumstances over which I have no control), I consequently never 
expected to have the distinguished honour of waiting on your 
ladyship again."

And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him.

"And yet I am here now," Mr. Guppy admits.  "My object being to 
communicate to your ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I 
am here."

He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly.  "Nor 
can I," Mr. Guppy returns with a sense of injury upon him, "too 
particularly request your ladyship to take particular notice that 
it's no personal affair of mine that brings me here.  I have no 
interested views of my own to serve in coming here.  If it was not 
for my promise to Miss Summerson and my keeping of it sacred--I, in 
point of fact, shouldn't have darkened these doors again, but 
should have seen 'em further first."

Mr. Guppy considers this a favourable moment for sticking up his 
hair with both hands.

"Your ladyship will remember when I mention it that the last time I 
was here I run against a party very eminent in our profession and 
whose loss we all deplore.  That party certainly did from that time 
apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call 
sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely 
difficult for me to be sure that I hadn't inadvertently led up to 
something contrary to Miss Summerson's wishes.  Self-praise is no 
recommendation, but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man 
of business neither."

Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry.  Mr. Guppy immediately 
withdraws his eyes from her face and looks anywhere else.

"Indeed, it has been made so hard," he goes on, "to have any idea 
what that party was up to in combination with others that until the 
loss which we all deplore I was gravelled--an expression which your 
ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to 
consider tantamount to knocked over.  Small likewise--a name by 
which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your ladyship 
is not acquainted with--got to be so close and double-faced that at 
times it wasn't easy to keep one's hands off his 'ead.  However, 
what with the exertion of my humble abilities, and what with the 
help of a mutual friend by the name of Mr. Tony Weevle (who is of a 
high aristocratic turn and has your ladyship's portrait always 
hanging up in his room), I have now reasons for an apprehension as 
to which I come to put your ladyship upon your guard.  First, will 
your ladyship allow me to ask you whether you have had any strange 
visitors this morning?  I don't mean fashionable visitors, but such 
visitors, for instance, as Miss Barbary's old servant, or as a 
person without the use of his lower extremities, carried upstairs 
similarly to a guy?"

"No!"

"Then I assure your ladyship that such visitors have been here and 
have been received here.  Because I saw them at the door, and 
waited at the corner of the square till they came out, and took 
half an hour's turn afterwards to avoid them."

"What have I to do with that, or what have you?  I do not 
understand you.  What do you mean?"

"Your ladyship, I come to put you on your guard.  There may be no 
occasion for it.  Very well.  Then I have only done my best to keep 
my promise to Miss Summerson.  I strongly suspect (from what Small 
has dropped, and from what we have corkscrewed out of him) that 
those letters I was to have brought to your ladyship were not 
destroyed when I supposed they were.  That if there was anything to 
be blown upon, it IS blown upon.  That the visitors I have alluded 
to have been here this morning to make money of it.  And that the 
money is made, or making."

Mr. Guppy picks up his hat and rises.

"Your ladyship, you know best whether there's anything in what I 
say or whether there's nothing.  Something or nothing, I have acted 
up to Miss Summerson's wishes in letting things alone and in 
undoing what I had begun to do, as far as possible; that's 
sufficient for me.  In case I should be taking a liberty in putting 
your ladyship on your guard when there's no necessity for it, you 
will endeavour, I should hope, to outlive my presumption, and I 
shall endeavour to outlive your disapprobation.  I now take my 
farewell of your ladyship, and assure you that there's no danger of 
your ever being waited on by me again."

She scarcely acknowledges these parting words by any look, but when 
he has been gone a little while, she rings her bell.

"Where is Sir Leicester?"

Mercury reports that he is at present shut up in the library alone.

"Has Sir Leicester had any visitors this morning?"

Several, on business.  Mercury proceeds to a description of them, 
which has been anticipated by Mr. Guppy.  Enough; he may go.

So!  All is broken down.  Her name is in these many mouths, her 
husband knows his wrongs, her shame will be published--may be 
spreading while she thinks about it--and in addition to the 
thunderbolt so long foreseen by her, so unforeseen by him, she is 
denounced by an invisible accuser as the murderess of her enemy.

Her enemy he was, and she has often, often, often wished him dead.  
Her enemy he is, even in his grave.  This dreadful accusation comes 
upon her like a new torment at his lifeless hand.  And when she 
recalls how she was secretly at his door that night, and how she 
may be represented to have sent her favourite girl away so soon 
before merely to release herself from observation, she shudders as 
if the hangman's hands were at her neck.

She has thrown herself upon the floor and lies with her hair all 
wildly scattered and her face buried in the cushions of a couch.  
She rises up, hurries to and fro, flings herself down again, and 
rocks and moans.  The horror that is upon her is unutterable.  If 
she really were the murderess, it could hardly be, for the moment, 
more intense.

For as her murderous perspective, before the doing of the deed, 
however subtle the precautions for its commission, would have been 
closed up by a gigantic dilatation of the hateful figure, 
preventing her from seeing any consequences beyond it; and as those 
consequences would have rushed in, in an unimagined flood, the 
moment the figure was laid low--which always happens when a murder 
is done; so, now she sees that when he used to be on the watch 
before her, and she used to think, "if some mortal stroke would but 
fall on this old man and take him from my way!" it was but wishing 
that all he held against her in his hand might be flung to the 
winds and chance-sown in many places.  So, too, with the wicked 
relief she has felt in his death.  What was his death but the key-
stone of a gloomy arch removed, and now the arch begins to fall in 
a thousand fragments, each crushing and mangling piecemeal!

Thus, a terrible impression steals upon and overshadows her that 
from this pursuer, living or dead--obdurate and imperturbable 
before her in his well-remembered shape, or not more obdurate and 
imperturbable in his coffin-bed--there is no escape but in death.  
Hunted, she flies.  The complication of her shame, her dread, 
remorse, and misery, overwhelms her at its height; and even her 
strength of self-reliance is overturned and whirled away like a 
leaf before a mighty wind.

She hurriedly addresses these lines to her husband, seals, and 
leaves them on her table:


If I am sought for, or accused of, his murder, believe that I am 
wholly innocent.  Believe no other good of me, for I am innocent of 
nothing else that you have heard, or will hear, laid to my charge.  
He prepared me, on that fatal night, for his disclosure of my guilt 
to you.  After he had left me, I went out on pretence of walking in 
the garden where I sometimes walk, but really to follow him and 
make one last petition that he would not protract the dreadful 
suspense on which I have been racked by him, you do not know how 
long, but would mercifully strike next morning.

I found his house dark and silent.  I rang twice at his door, but 
there was no reply, and I came home.

I have no home left.  I will encumber you no more.  May you, in 
your just resentment, be able to forget the unworthy woman on whom 
you have wasted a most generous devotion--who avoids you only with 
a deeper shame than that with which she hurries from herself--and 
who writes this last adieu.


She veils and dresses quickly, leaves all her jewels and her money, 
listens, goes downstairs at a moment when the hall is empty, opens 
and shuts the great door, flutters away in the shrill frosty wind.


CHAPTER LVI

Pursuit


Impassive, as behoves its high breeding, the Dedlock town house 
stares at the other houses in the street of dismal grandeur and 
gives no outward sign of anything going wrong within.  Carriages 
rattle, doors are battered at, the world exchanges calls; ancient 
charmers with skeleton throats and peachy cheeks that have a rather 
ghastly bloom upon them seen by daylight, when indeed these 
fascinating creatures look like Death and the Lady fused together, 
dazzle the eyes of men.  Forth from the frigid mews come easily 
swinging carriages guided by short-legged coachmen in flaxen wigs, 
deep sunk into downy hammercloths, and up behind mount luscious 
Mercuries bearing sticks of state and wearing cocked hats 
broadwise, a spectacle for the angels.

The Dedlock town house changes not externally, and hours pass 
before its exalted dullness is disturbed within.  But Volumnia the 
fair, being subject to the prevalent complaint of boredom and 
finding that disorder attacking her spirits with some virulence, 
ventures at length to repair to the library for change of scene.  
Her gentle tapping at the door producing no response, she opens it 
and peeps in; seeing no one there, takes possession.

The sprightly Dedlock is reputed, in that grass-grown city of the 
ancients, Bath, to be stimulated by an urgent curiosity which 
impels her on all convenient and inconvenient occasions to sidle 
about with a golden glass at her eye, peering into objects of every 
description.  Certain it is that she avails herself of the present 
opportunity of hovering over her kinsman's letters and papers like 
a bird, taking a short peck at this document and a blink with her 
head on one side at that document, and hopping about from table to 
table with her glass at her eye in an inquisitive and restless 
manner.  In the course of these researches she stumbles over 
something, and turning her glass in that direction, sees her 
kinsman lying on the ground like a felled tree.

Volumnia's pet little scream acquires a considerable augmentation 
of reality from this surprise, and the house is quickly in 
commotion.  Servants tear up and down stairs, bells are violently 
rung, doctors are sent for, and Lady Dedlock is sought in all 
directions, but not found.  Nobody has seen or heard her since she 
last rang her bell.  Her letter to Sir Leicester is discovered on 
her table, but it is doubtful yet whether he has not received 
another missive from another world requiring to be personally 
answered, and all the living languages, and all the dead, are as 
one to him.

They lay him down upon his bed, and chafe, and rub, and fan, and 
put ice to his head, and try every means of restoration.  Howbeit, 
the day has ebbed away, and it is night in his room before his 
stertorous breathing lulls or his fixed eyes show any consciousness 
of the candle that is occasionally passed before them.  But when 
this change begins, it goes on; and by and by he nods or moves his 
eyes or even his hand in token that he hears and comprehends.

He fell down, this morning, a handsome stately gentleman, somewhat 
infirm, but of a fine presence, and with a well-filled face.  He 
lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit 
shadow of himself.  His voice was rich and mellow and he had so 
long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind 
of any word he said that his words really had come to sound as if 
there were something in them.  But now he can only whisper, and 
what he whispers sounds like what it is--mere jumble and jargon.

His favourite and faithful housekeeper stands at his bedside.  It 
is the first act he notices, and he clearly derives pleasure from 
it.  After vainly trying to make himself understood in speech, he 
makes signs for a pencil.  So inexpressively that they cannot at 
first understand him; it is his old housekeeper who makes out what 
he wants and brings in a slate.

After pausing for some time, he slowly scrawls upon it in a hand 
that is not his, "Chesney Wold?"

No, she tells him; he is in London.  He was taken ill in the 
library this morning.  Right thankful she is that she happened to 
come to London and is able to attend upon him.

"It is not an illness of any serious consequence, Sir Leicester.  
You will be much better to-morrow, Sir Leicester.  All the 
gentlemen say so."  This, with the tears coursing down her fair old 
face.

After making a survey of the room and looking with particular 
attention all round the bed where the doctors stand, he writes, "My 
Lady."

"My Lady went out, Sir Leicester, before you were taken ill, and 
don't know of your illness yet."

He points again, in great agitation, at the two words.  They all 
try to quiet him, but he points again with increased agitation.  On 
their looking at one another, not knowing what to say, he takes the 
slate once more and writes "My Lady.  For God's sake, where?"  And 
makes an imploring moan.

It is thought better that his old housekeeper should give him Lady 
Dedlock's letter, the contents of which no one knows or can 
surmise.  She opens it for him and puts it out for his perusal.  
Having read it twice by a great effort, he turns it down so that it 
shall not be seen and lies moaning.  He passes into a kind of 
relapse or into a swoon, and it is an hour before he opens his 
eyes, reclining on his faithful and attached old servant's arm.  
The doctors know that he is best with her, and when not actively 
engaged about him, stand aloof.

The slate comes into requisition again, but the word he wants to 
write he cannot remember.  His anxiety, his eagerness, and 
affliction at this pass are pitiable to behold.  It seems as if he 
must go mad in the necessity he feels for haste and the inability 
under which he labours of expressing to do what or to fetch whom.  
He has written the letter B, and there stopped.  Of a sudden, in 
the height of his misery, he puts Mr. before it.  The old 
housekeeper suggests Bucket.  Thank heaven!  That's his meaning.

Mr. Bucket is found to be downstairs, by appointment.  Shall he 
come up?

There is no possibility of misconstruing Sir Leicester's burning 
wish to see him or the desire he signifies to have the room cleared 
of every one but the housekeeper.  It is speedily done, and Mr. 
Bucket appears.  Of all men upon earth, Sir Leicester seems fallen 
from his high estate to place his sole trust and reliance upon this 
man.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'm sorry to see you like this.  I 
hope you'll cheer up.  I'm sure you will, on account of the family 
credit."

Leicester puts her letter in his hands and looks intently in his 
face while he reads it.  A new intelligence comes into Mr. Bucket's 
eye as he reads on; with one hook of his finger, while that eye is 
still glancing over the words, he indicates, "Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet, I understand you."

Sir Leicester writes upon the slate.  "Full forgiveness.  Find--"  
Mr. Bucket stops his hand.

"Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I'll find her.  But my search 
after her must be begun out of hand.  Not a minute must be lost."

With the quickness of thought, he follows Sir Leicester Dedlock's 
look towards a little box upon a table.

"Bring it here, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet?  Certainly.  Open 
it with one of these here keys?  Certainly.  The littlest key?  TO 
be sure.  Take the notes out?  So I will.  Count 'em?  That's soon 
done.  Twenty and thirty's fifty, and twenty's seventy, and fifty's 
one twenty, and forty's one sixty.  Take 'em for expenses?  That 
I'll do, and render an account of course.  Don't spare money?  No I 
won't."

The velocity and certainty of Mr. Bucket's interpretation on all 
these heads is little short of miraculous.  Mrs. Rouncewell, who 
holds the light, is giddy with the swiftness of his eyes and hands 
as he starts up, furnished for his journey.

"You're George's mother, old lady; that's about what you are, I 
believe?" says Mr. Bucket aside, with his hat already on and 
buttoning his coat.

"Yes, sir, I am his distressed mother."

"So I thought, according to what he mentioned to me just now.  
Well, then, I'll tell you something.  You needn't be distressed no 
more.  Your son's all right.  Now, don't you begin a-crying, 
because what you've got to do is to take care of Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet, and you won't do that by crying.  As to your son, 
he's all right, I tell you; and he sends his loving duty, and 
hoping you're the same.  He's discharged honourable; that's about 
what HE is; with no more imputation on his character than there is 
on yours, and yours is a tidy one, I'LL bet a pound.  You may trust 
me, for I took your son.  He conducted himself in a game way, too, 
on that occasion; and he's a fine-made man, and you're a fine-made 
old lady, and you're a mother and son, the pair of you, as might be 
showed for models in a caravan.  Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, 
what you've trusted to me I'll go through with.  Don't you be 
afraid of my turing out of my way, right or left, or taking a 
sleep, or a wash, or a shave till I have found what I go in search 
of.  Say everything as is kind and forgiving on your part?  Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I will.  And I wish you better, and 
these family affairs smoothed over--as, Lord, many other family 
affairs equally has been, and equally wlll be, to the end of time."

With this peroration, Mr. Bucket, buttoned up, goes quietly out, 
looking steadily before him as if he were already piercing the 
night in quest of the fugitive.

His first step is to take himself to Lady Dedlock's rooms and look 
all over them for any trifling indication that may help him.  The 
rooms are in darkness now; and to see Mr. Bucket with a wax-light 
in his hand, holding it above his head and taking a sharp mental 
inventory of the many delicate objects so curiously at variance 
with himself, would be to see a sight--which nobody DOES see, as he 
is particular to lock himself in.

"A spicy boudoir, this," says Mr. Bucket, who feels in a manner 
furbished up in his French by the blow of the morning.  "Must have 
cost a sight of money.  Rum articles to cut away from, these; she 
must have been hard put to it!"

Opening and shutting table-drawers and looking into caskets and 
jewel-cases, he sees the reflection of himself in various mirrors, 
and moralizes thereon.

"One might suppose I was a-moving in the fashionable circles and 
getting myself up for almac's," says Mr. Bucket.  "I begin to think 
I must be a swell in the Guards without knowing it."

Ever looking about, he has opened a dainty little chest in an inner 
drawer.  His great hand, turning over some gloves which it can 
scarcely feel, they are so light and soft within it, comes upon a 
white handkerchief.

"Hum!  Let's have a look at YOU," says Mr. Bucket, putting down the 
light.  "What should YOU be kept by yourself for?  What's YOUR 
motive?  Are you her ladyship's property, or somebody else's?  
You've got a mark upon you somewheres or another, I suppose?"

He finds it as he speaks, "Esther Summerson."

"Oh!" says Mr. Bucket, pausing, with his finger at his ear.  "Come, 
I'll take YOU."

He completes his observations as quietly and carefully as he has 
carried them on, leaves everything else precisely as he found it, 
glides away after some five minutes in all, and passes into the 
street.  With a glance upward at the dimly lighted windows of Sir 
Leicester's room, he sets off, full-swing, to the nearest coach-
stand, picks out the horse for his money, and directs to be driven 
to the shooting gallery.  Mr. Bucket does not claim to be a 
scientific judge of horses, but he lays out a little money on the 
principal events in that line, and generally sums up his knowledge 
of the subject in the remark that when he sees a horse as can go, 
he knows him.

His knowledge is not at fault in the present instance.  Clattering 
over the stones at a dangerous pace, yet thoughtfully bringing his 
keen eyes to bear on every slinking creature whom he passes in the 
midnight streets, and even on the lights in upper windows where 
people are going or gone to bed, and on all the turnings that he 
rattles by, and alike on the heavy sky, and on the earth where the 
snow lies thin--for something may present itself to assist him, 
anywhere--he dashes to his destination at such a speed that when he 
stops the horse half smothers him in a cloud of steam.

"Unbear him half a moment to freshen him up, and I'll be back."

He runs up the long wooden entry and finds the trooper smoking his 
pipe.

"I thought I should, George, after what you have gone through, my 
lad.  I haven't a word to spare.  Now, honour!  All to save a 
woman.  Miss Summerson that was here when Gridley died--that was 
the name, I know--all right--where does she live?"

The trooper has just come from there and gives him the address, 
near Oxford Street.

"You won't repent it, George.  Good night!"

He is off again, with an impression of having seen Phil sitting by 
the frosty fire staring at him open-mouthed, and gallops away 
again, and gets out in a cloud of steam again.

Mr. Jarndyce, the only person up in the house, is just going to 
bed, rises from his book on hearing the rapid ringing at the bell, 
and comes down to the door in his dressing-gown.

"Don't be alarmed, sir."  In a moment his visitor is confidential 
with him in the hall, has shut the door, and stands with his hand 
upon the lock.  "I've had the pleasure of seeing you before.  
Inspector Bucket.  Look at that handkerchief, sir, Miss Esther 
Summerson's.  Found it myself put away in a drawer of Lady 
Dedlock's, quarter of an hour ago.  Not a moment to lose.  Matter 
of life or death.  You know Lady Dedlock?"

"Yes."

"There has been a discovery there to-day.  Family affairs have come 
out.  Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has had a fit--apoplexy or 
paralysis--and couldn't be brought to, and precious time has been 
lost.  Lady Dedlock disappeared this afternoon and left a letter 
for him that looks bad.  Run your eye over it.  Here it is!"

Mr. Jarndyce, having read it, asks him what he thinks.

"I don't know.  It looks like suicide.  Anyways, there's more and 
more danger, every minute, of its drawing to that.  I'd give a 
hundred pound an hour to have got the start of the present time.  
Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I am employed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, 
to follow her and find her, to save her and take her his 
forgiveness.  I have money and full power, but I want something 
else.  I want Miss Summerson."

Mr. Jarndyce in a troubled voice repeats, "Miss Summerson?"

"Now, Mr. Jarndyce"--Mr. Bucket has read his face with the greatest 
attention all along--"I speak to you as a gentleman of a humane 
heart, and under such pressing circumstances as don't often happen.  
If ever delay was dangerous, it's dangerous now; and if ever you 
couldn't afterwards forgive yourself for causing it, this is the 
time.  Eight or ten hours, worth, as I tell you, a hundred pound 
apiece at least, have been lost since Lady Dedlock disappeared.  I 
am charged to find her.  I am Inspector Bucket.  Besides all the 
rest that's heavy on her, she has upon her, as she believes, 
suspicion of murder.  If I follow her alone, she, being in 
ignorance of what Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has communicated 
to me, may be driven to desperation.  But if I follow her in 
company with a young lady, answering to the description of a young 
lady that she has a tenderness for--I ask no question, and I say no 
more than that--she will give me credit for being friendly.  Let me 
come up with her and be able to have the hold upon her of putting 
that young lady for'ard, and I'll save her and prevail with her if 
she is alive.  Let me come up with her alone--a hard matter--and 
I'll do my best, but I don't answer for what the best may be.  Time 
flies; it's getting on for one o'clock.  When one strikes, there's 
another hour gone, and it's worth a thousand pound now instead of a 
hundred."

This is all true, and the pressing nature of the case cannot be 
questioned.  Mr. Jarndyce begs him to remain there while he speaks 
to Miss Summerson.  Mr. Bucket says he will, but acting on his 
usual principle, does no such thing, following upstairs instead and 
keeping his man in sight.  So he remains, dodging and lurking about 
in the gloom of the staircase while they confer.  In a very little 
time Mr. Jarndyce comes down and tells him that Miss Summerson will 
join him directly and place herself under his protection to 
accompany him where he pleases.  Mr. Bucket, satisfied, expresses 
high approval and awaits her coming at the door.

There he mounts a high tower in his mind and looks out far and 
wide.  Many solitary figures he perceives creeping through the 
streets; many solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and lying 
under haystacks.  But the figure that he seeks is not among them.  
Other solitaries he perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking over; 
and in shadowed places down by the river's level; and a dark, dark, 
shapeless object drifting with the tide, more solitary than all, 
clings with a drowning hold on his attention.

Where is she?  Living or dead, where is she?  If, as he folds the 
handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able with an 
enchanted power to bring before him the place where she found it 
and the night-landscape near the cottage where it covered the 
little child, would he descry her there?  On the waste where the 
brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare, where the straw-
roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks are made are being 
scattered by the wind, where the clay and water are hard frozen and 
the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day looks 
like an instrument of human torture--traversing this deserted, 
blighted spot there is a lonely figure with the sad world to 
itself, pelted by the snow and driven by the wind, and cast out, it 
would seem, from all companionship.  It is the figure of a woman, 
too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such clothes ever came 
through the hall and out at the great door of the Dedlock mansion.



CHAPTER LVII

Esther's Narrative


I had gone to bed and fallen asleep when my guardian knocked at the 
door of my room and begged me to get up directly.  On my hurrying 
to speak to him and learn what had happened, he told me, after a 
word or two of preparation, that there had been a discovery at Sir 
Leicester Dedlock's.  That my mother had fled, that a person was 
now at our door who was empowered to convey to her the fullest 
assurances of affectionate protection and forgiveness if he could 
possibly find her, and that I was sought for to accompany him in 
the hope that my entreaties might prevail upon her if his failed.  
Something to this general purpose I made out, but I was thrown into 
such a tumult of alarm, and hurry and distress, that in spite of 
every effort I could make to subdue my agitation, I did not seem, 
to myself, fully to recover my right mind until hours had passed.

But I dressed and wrapped up expeditiously without waking Charley 
or any one and went down to Mr. Bucket, who was the person 
entrusted with the secret.  In taking me to him my guardian told me 
this, and also explained how it was that he had come to think of 
me.  Mr. Bucket, in a low voice, by the light of my guardian's 
candle, read to me in the hall a letter that my mother had left 
upon her table; and I suppose within ten minutes of my having been 
aroused I was sitting beside him, rolling swiftly through the 
streets.

His manner was very keen, and yet considerate when he explained to 
me that a great deal might depend on my being able to answer, 
without confusion, a few questions that he wished to ask me.  These 
were, chiefly, whether I had had much communication with my mother 
(to whom he only referred as Lady Dedlock), when and where I had 
spoken with her last, and how she had become possessed of my 
handkerchief.  When I had satisfied him on these points, he asked 
me particularly to consider--taking time to think--whether within 
my knowledge there was any one, no matter where, in whom she might 
be at all likely to confide under circumstances of the last 
necessity.  I could think of no one but my guardian.  But by and by 
I mentioned Mr. Boythorn.  He came into my mind as connected with 
his old chivalrous manner of mentioning my mother's name and with 
what my guardian had informed me of his engagement to her sister 
and his unconscious connexion with her unhappy story.

My companion had stopped the driver while we held this 
conversation, that we might the better hear each other.  He now 
told him to go on again and said to me, after considering within 
himself for a few moments, that he had made up his mind how to 
proceed.  He was quite willing to tell me what his plan was, but I 
did not feel clear enough to understand it.

We had not driven very far from our lodgings when we stopped in a 
by-street at a public-looking place lighted up with gas.  Mr. 
Bucket took me in and sat me in an armchair by a bright fire.  It 
was now past one, as I saw by the clock against the wall.  Two 
police officers, looking in their perfectly neat uniform not at all 
like people who were up all night, were quietly writing at a desk; 
and the place seemed very quiet altogether, except for some beating 
and calling out at distant doors underground, to which nobody paid 
any attention.

A third man in uniform, whom Mr. Bucket called and to whom he 
whispered his instructions, went out; and then the two others 
advised together while one wrote from Mr. Bucket's subdued 
dictation.  It was a description of my mother that they were busy 
with, for Mr. Bucket brought it to me when it was done and read it 
in a whisper.  It was very accurate indeed.

The second officer, who had attended to it closely, then copied it 
out and called in another man in uniform (there were several in an 
outer room), who took it up and went away with it.  All this was 
done with the greatest dispatch and without the waste of a moment; 
yet nobody was at all hurried.  As soon as the paper was sent out 
upon its travels, the two officers resumed their former quiet work 
of writing with neatness and care.  Mr. Bucket thoughtfully came 
and warmed the soles of his boots, first one and then the other, at 
the fire.

"Are you well wrapped up, Miss Summerson?" he asked me as his eyes 
met mine.  "It's a desperate sharp night for a young lady to be out 
in."

I told him I cared for no weather and was warmly clothed.

"It may be a long job," he observed; "but so that it ends well, 
never mind, miss."

"I pray to heaven it may end well!" said I.

He nodded comfortingly.  "You see, whatever you do, don't you go 
and fret yourself.  You keep yourself cool and equal for anything 
that may happen, and it'll be the better for you, the better for 
me, the better for Lady Dedlock, and the better for Sir Leicester 
Dedlock, Baronet."

He was really very kind and gentle, and as he stood before the fire 
warming his boots and rubbing his face with his forefinger, I felt 
a confidence in his sagacity which reassured me.  It was not yet a 
quarter to two when I heard horses' feet and wheels outside.  "Now, 
Miss Summerson," said he, "we are off, if you please!"

He gave me his arm, and the two officers courteously bowed me out, 
and we found at the door a phaeton or barouche with a postilion and 
post horses.  Mr. Bucket handed me in and took his own seat on the 
box.  The man in uniform whom he had sent to fetch this equipage 
then handed him up a dark lantern at his request, and when he had 
given a few directions to the driver, we rattled away.

I was far from sure that I was not in a dream.  We rattled with 
great rapidity through such a labyrinth of streets that I soon lost 
all idea where we were, except that we had crossed and re-crossed 
the river, and still seemed to be traversing a low-lying, 
waterside, dense neighbourhood of narrow thoroughfares chequered by 
docks and basins, high piles of warehouses, swing-bridges, and 
masts of ships.  At length we stopped at the corner of a little 
slimy turning, which the wind from the river, rushing up it, did 
not purify; and I saw my companion, by the light of his lantern, in 
conference with several men who looked like a mixture of police and 
sailors.  Against the mouldering wall by which they stood, there 
was a bill, on which I could discern the words, "Found Drowned"; 
and this and an inscription about drags possessed me with the awful 
suspicion shadowed forth in our visit to that place.

I had no need to remind myself that I was not there by the 
indulgence of any feeling of mine to increase the difficulties of 
the search, or to lessen its hopes, or enhance its delays.  I 
remained quiet, but what I suffered in that dreadful spot I never 
can forget.  And still it was like the horror of a dream.  A man 
yet dark and muddy, in long swollen sodden boots and a hat like 
them, was called out of a boat and whispered with Mr. Bucket, who 
went away with him down some slippery steps--as if to look at 
something secret that he had to show.  They came back, wiping their 
hands upon their coats, after turning over something wet; but thank 
God it was not what I feared!

After some further conference, Mr. Bucket (whom everybody seemed to 
know and defer to) went in with the others at a door and left me in 
the carriage, while the driver walked up and down by his horses to 
warm himself.  The tide was coming in, as I judged from the sound 
it made, and I could hear it break at the end of the alley with a 
little rush towards me.  It never did so--and I thought it did so, 
hundreds of times, in what can have been at the most a quarter of 
an hour, and probably was less--but the thought shuddered through 
me that it would cast my mother at the horses' feet.

Mr. Bucket came out again, exhorting the others to be vigilant, 
darkened his lantern, and once more took his seat.  "Don't you be 
alarmed, Miss Summerson, on account of our coming down here," he 
said, turning to me.  "I only want to have everything in train and 
to know that it is in train by looking after it myself.  Get on, my 
lad!"

We appeared to retrace the way we had come.  Not that I had taken 
note of any particular objects in my perturbed state of mind, but 
judging from the general character of the streets.  We called at 
another office or station for a minute and crossed the river again.  
During the whole of this time, and during the whole search, my 
companion, wrapped up on the box, never relaxed in his vigilance a 
single moment; but when we crossed the bridge he seemed, if 
possible, to be more on the alert than before.  He stood up to look 
over the parapet, he alighted and went back after a shadowy female 
figure that flitted past us, and he gazed into the profound black 
pit of water with a face that made my heart die within me.  The 
river had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, creeping away so 
fast between the low flat lines of shore--so heavy with indistinct 
and awful shapes, both of substance and shadow; so death-like and 
mysterious.  I have seen it many times since then, by sunlight and 
by moonlight, but never free from the impressions of that journey.  
In my memory the lights upon the bridge are always burning dim, the 
cutting wind is eddying round the homeless woman whom we pass, the 
monotonous wheels are whirling on, and the light of the carriage-
lamps reflected back looks palely in upon me--a face rising out of 
the dreaded water.

Clattering and clattering through the empty streets, we came at 
length from the pavement on to dark smooth roads and began to leave 
the houses behind us.  After a while I recognized the familiar way 
to Saint Albans.  At Barnet fresh horses were ready for us, and we 
changed and went on.  It was very cold indeed, and the open country 
was white with snow, though none was falling then.

"An old acquaintance of yours, this road, Miss Summerson," said Mr. 
Bucket cheerfully.

"Yes," I returned.  "Have you gathered any intelligence?"

"None that can be quite depended on as yet," he answered, "but it's 
early times as yet."

He had gone into every late or early public-house where there was a 
light (they were not a few at that time, the road being then much 
frequented by drovers) and had got down to talk to the turnpike-
keepers.  I had heard him ordering drink, and chinking money, and 
making himself agreeable and merry everywhere; but whenever he took 
his seat upon the box again, his face resumed its watchful steady 
look, and he always said to the driver in the same business tone, 
"Get on, my lad!"

With all these stoppages, it was between five and six o'clock and 
we were yet a few miles short of Saint Albans when he came out of 
one of these houses and handed me in a cup of tea.

"Drink it, Miss Summerson, it'll do you good.  You're beginning to 
get more yourself now, ain't you?"

I thanked him and said I hoped so.

"You was what you may call stunned at first," he returned; "and 
Lord, no wonder!  Don't speak loud, my dear.  It's all right.  
She's on ahead."

I don't know what joyful exclamation I made or was going to make, 
but he put up his finger and I stopped myself.

"Passed through here on foot this evening about eight or nine.  I 
heard of her first at the archway toll, over at Highgate, but 
couldn't make quite sure.  Traced her all along, on and off.  
Picked her up at one place, and dropped her at another; but she's 
before us now, safe.  Take hold of this cup and saucer, ostler.  
Now, if you wasn't brought up to the butter trade, look out and see 
if you can catch half a crown in your t'other hand.  One, two, 
three, and there you are!  Now, my lad, try a gallop!"

We were soon in Saint Albans and alighted a little before day, when 
I was just beginning to arrange and comprehend the occurrences of 
the night and really to believe that they were not a dream.  
Leaving the carriage at the posting-house and ordering fresh horses 
to be ready, my companion gave me his arm, and we went towards 
home.

"As this is your regular abode, Miss Summerson, you see," he 
observed, "I should like to know whether you've been asked for by 
any stranger answering the description, or whether Mr. Jarndyce 
has.  I don't much expect it, but it might be."

As we ascended the hill, he looked about him with a sharp eye--the 
day was now breaking--and reminded me that I had come down it one 
night, as I had reason for remembering, with my little servant and 
poor Jo, whom he called Toughey.

I wondered how he knew that.

"When you passed a man upon the road, just yonder, you know," said 
Mr. Bucket.

Yes, I remembered that too, very well.

"That was me," said Mr. Bucket.

Seeing my surprise, he went on, "I drove down in a gig that 
afternoon to look after that boy.  You might have heard my wheels 
when you came out to look after him yourself, for I was aware of 
you and your little maid going up when I was walking the horse 
down.  Making an inquiry or two about him in the town, I soon heard 
what company he was in and was coming among the brick-fields to 
look for him when I observed you bringing him home here."

"Had he committed any crime?" I asked.

"None was charged against him," said Mr. Bucket, coolly lifting off 
his hat, "but I suppose he wasn't over-particular.  No.  What I 
wanted him for was in connexion with keeping this very matter of 
Lady Dedlock quiet.  He had been making his tongue more free than 
welcome as to a small accidental service he had been paid for by 
the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn; and it wouldn't do, at any sort of 
price, to have him playing those games.  So having warned him out 
of London, I made an afternoon of it to warn him to keep out of it 
now he WAS away, and go farther from it, and maintain a bright 
look-out that I didn't catch him coming back again."

"Poor creature!" said I.

"Poor enough," assented Mr. Bucket, "and trouble enough, and well 
enough away from London, or anywhere else.  I was regularly turned 
on my back when I found him taken up by your establishment, I do 
assure you.

I asked him why.  "Why, my dear?" said Mr. Bucket.  "Naturally 
there was no end to his tongue then.  He might as well have been 
born with a yard and a half of it, and a remnant over."

Although I remember this conversation now, my head was in confusion 
at the time, and my power of attention hardly did more than enable 
me to understand that he entered into these particulars to divert 
me.  With the same kind intention, manifestly, he often spoke to me 
of indifferent things, while his face was busy with the one object 
that we had in view.  He still pursued this subject as we turned in 
at the garden-gate.

"Ah!" said Mr. Bucket.  "Here we are, and a nice retired place it 
is.  Puts a man in mind of the country house in the Woodpecker-
tapping, that was known by the smoke which so gracefully curled.  
They're early with the kitchen fire, and that denotes good 
servants.  But what you've always got to be careful of with 
servants is who comes to see 'em; you never know what they're up to 
if you don't know that.  And another thing, my dear.  Whenever you 
find a young man behind the kitchen-door, you give that young man 
in charge on suspicion of being secreted in a dwelling-house with 
an unlawful purpose."

We were now in front of the house; he looked attentively and 
closely at the gravel for footprints before he raised his eyes to 
the windows.

"Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same room 
when he's on a visit here, Miss Summerson?" he inquired, glancing 
at Mr. Skimpole's usual chamber.

"You know Mr. Skimpole!" said I.

"What do you call him again?" returned Mr. Bucket, bending down his 
ear.  "Skimpole, is it?  I've often wondered what his name might 
be.  Skimpole.  Not John, I should say, nor yet Jacob?"

"Harold," I told him.

"Harold.  Yes.  He's a queer bird is Harold," said Mr. Bucket, 
eyeing me with great expression.

"He is a singular character," said I.

"No idea of money," observed Mr. Bucket.  "He takes it, though!"

I involuntarily returned for answer that I perceived Mr. Bucket 
knew him.

"Why, now I'll tell you, Miss Summerson," he replied.  "Your mind 
will be all the better for not running on one point too 
continually, and I'll tell you for a change.  It was him as pointed 
out to me where Toughey was.  I made up my mind that night to come 
to the door and ask for Toughey, if that was all; but willing to 
try a move or so first, if any such was on the board, I just 
pitched up a morsel of gravel at that window where I saw a shadow.  
As soon as Harold opens it and I have had a look at him, thinks I, 
you're the man for me.  So I smoothed him down a bit about not 
wanting to disturb the family after they was gone to bed and about 
its being a thing to be regretted that charitable young ladies 
should harbour vagrants; and then, when I pretty well understood 
his ways, I said I should consider a fypunnote well bestowed if I 
could relieve the premises of Toughey without causing any noise or 
trouble.  Then says he, lifting up his eyebrows in the gayest way, 
'It's no use menfioning a fypunnote to me, my friend, because I'm a 
mere child in such matters and have no idea of money.'  Of course I 
understood what his taking it so easy meant; and being now quite 
sure he was the man for me, I wrapped the note round a little stone 
and threw it up to him.  Well! He laughs and beams, and looks as 
innocent as you like, and says, 'But I don't know the value of 
these things.  What am I to DO with this?'  'Spend it, sir,' says 
I.  'But I shall be taken in,' he says, 'they won't give me the 
right change, I shall lose it, it's no use to me.'  Lord, you never 
saw such a face as he carried it with!  Of course he told me where 
to find Toughey, and I found him."

I regarded this as very treacherous on the part of Mr. Skimpole 
towards my guardian and as passing the usual bounds of his childish 
innocence.

"Bounds, my dear?" returned Mr. Bucket.  "Bounds?  Now, Miss 
Summerson, I'll give you a piece of advice that your husband will 
find useful when you are happily married and have got a family 
about you.  Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent 
as can be in all concerning money, look well after your own money, 
for they are dead certain to collar it if they can.  Whenever a 
person proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you 
consider that that person is only a-crying off from being held 
accountable and that you have got that person's number, and it's 
Number One.  Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal 
way when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and 
that's my experience.  So's this rule.  Fast and loose in one 
thing, fast and loose in everything.  I never knew it fail.  No 
more will you.  Nor no one.  With which caution to the unwary, my 
dear, I take the liberty of pulling this here bell, and so go back 
to our business."

I believe it had not been for a moment out of his mind, any more 
than it had been out of my mind, or out of his face.  The whole 
household were amazed to see me, without any notice, at that time 
in the morning, and so accompanied; and their surprise was not 
diminished by my inquiries.  No one, however, had been there.  It 
could not be doubted that this was the truth.

"Then, Miss Summerson," said my companion, "we can't be too soon at 
the cottage where those brickmakers are to be found.  Most 
inquiries there I leave to you, if you'll be so good as to make 
'em.  The naturalest way is the best way, and the naturalest way is 
your own way."

We set off again immediately.  On arriving at the cottage, we found 
it shut up and apparently deserted, but one of the neighbours who 
knew me and who came out when I was trying to make some one hear 
informed me that the two women and their husbands now lived 
together in another house, made of loose rough bricks, which stood 
on the margin of the piece of ground where the kilns were and where 
the long rows of bricks were drying.  We lost no time in repairing 
to this place, which was within a few hundred yards; and as the 
door stood ajar, I pushed it open.

There were only three of them sitting at breakfast, the child lying 
asleep on a bed in the corner.  It was Jenny, the mother of the 
dead child, who was absent.  The other woman rose on seeing me; and 
the men, though they were, as usual, sulky and silent, each gave me 
a morose nod of recognition.  A look passed between them when Mr. 
Bucket followed me in, and I was surprised to see that the woman 
evidently knew him.

I had asked leave to enter of course.  Liz (the only name by which 
I knew her) rose to give me her own chair, but I sat down on a 
stool near the fire, and Mr. Bucket took a corner of the bedstead.  
Now that I had to speak and was among people with whom I was not 
familiar, I became conscious of being hurried and giddy.  It was 
very difficult to begin, and I could not help bursting into tears.

"Liz," said I, "I have come a long way in the night and through the 
snow to inquire after a lady--"

"Who has been here, you know," Mr. Bucket struck in, addressing the 
whole group with a composed propitiatory face; "that's the lady the 
young lady means.  The lady that was here last night, you know."

"And who told YOU as there was anybody here?" inquired Jenny's 
husband, who had made a surly stop in his eating to listen and now 
measured him with his eye.

"A person of the name of Michael Jackson, with a blue welveteen 
waistcoat with a double row of mother of pearl buttons," Mr. Bucket 
immediately answered.

"He had as good mind his own business, whoever he is," growled the 
man.

"He's out of employment, I believe," said Mr. Bucket apologetically 
for Michael Jackson, "and so gets talking."

The woman had not resumed her chair, but stood faltering with her 
hand upon its broken back, looking at me.  I thought she would have 
spoken to me privately if she had dared.  She was still in this 
attitude of uncertainty when her husband, who was eating with a 
lump of bread and fat in one hand and his clasp-knife in the other, 
struck the handle of his knife violently on the table and told her 
with an oath to mind HER own business at any rate and sit down.

"I should like to have seen Jenny very much," said I, "for I am 
sure she would have told me all she could about this lady, whom I 
am very anxious indeed--you cannot think how anxious--to overtake.  
Will Jenny be here soon?  Where is she?"

The woman had a great desire to answer, but the man, with another 
oath, openly kicked at her foot with his heavy boot.  He left it to 
Jenny's husband to say what he chose, and after a dogged silence 
the latter turned his shaggy head towards me.

"I'm not partial to gentlefolks coming into my place, as you've 
heerd me say afore now, I think, miss.  I let their places be, and 
it's curious they can't let my place be.  There'd be a pretty shine 
made if I was to go a-wisitin THEM, I think.  Howsoever, I don't so 
much complain of you as of some others, and I'm agreeable to make 
you a civil answer, though I give notice that I'm not a-going to be 
drawed like a badger.  Will Jenny be here soon?  No she won't.  
Where is she?  She's gone up to Lunnun."

"Did she go last night?" I asked.

"Did she go last night?  Ah! She went last night," he answered with 
a sulky jerk of his head.

"But was she here when the lady came?  And what did the lady say to 
her?  And where is the lady gone?  I beg and pray you to be so kind 
as to tell me," said I, "for I am in great distress to know."

"If my master would let me speak, and not say a word of harm--" the 
woman timidly began.

"Your master," said her husband, muttering an imprecation with slow 
emphasis, "will break your neck if you meddle with wot don't 
concern you."

After another silence, the husband of the absent woman, turning to 
me again, answered me with his usual grumbling unwillingness.

"Wos Jenny here when the lady come?  Yes, she wos here when the 
lady come.  Wot did the lady say to her?  Well, I'll tell you wot 
the lady said to her.  She said, 'You remember me as come one time 
to talk to you about the young lady as had been a-wisiting of you?  
You remember me as give you somethink handsome for a handkercher 
wot she had left?'  Ah, she remembered.  So we all did.  Well, 
then, wos that young lady up at the house now?  No, she warn't up 
at the house now.  Well, then, lookee here.  The lady was upon a 
journey all alone, strange as we might think it, and could she rest 
herself where you're a setten for a hour or so.  Yes she could, and 
so she did.  Then she went--it might be at twenty minutes past 
eleven, and it might be at twenty minutes past twelve; we ain't got 
no watches here to know the time by, nor yet clocks.  Where did she 
go?  I don't know where she go'd.  She went one way, and Jenny went 
another; one went right to Lunnun, and t'other went right from it.  
That's all about it.  Ask this man.  He heerd it all, and see it 
all.  He knows."

The other man repeated, "That's all about it."

"Was the lady crying?" I inquired.

"Devil a bit," returned the first man.  "Her shoes was the worse, 
and her clothes was the worse, but she warn't--not as I see."

The woman sat with her arms crossed and her eyes upon the ground.  
Her husband had turned his seat a little so as to face her and kept 
his hammer-like hand upon the table as if it were in readiness to 
execute his threat if she disobeyed him.

"I hope you will not object to my asking your wife," said I, "how 
the lady looked."

"Come, then!" he gruffly cried to her.  "You hear what she says.  
Cut it short and tell her."

"Bad," replied the woman.  "Pale and exhausted.  Very bad."

"Did she speak much?"

"Not much, but her voice was hoarse."

She answered, looking all the while at her husband for leave.

"Was she faint?" said I.  "Did she eat or drink here?"

"Go on!" said the husband in answer to her look.  "Tell her and cut 
it short."

"She had a little water, miss, and Jenny fetched her some bread and 
tea.  But she hardly touched it."

"And when she went from here," I was proceeding, when Jenny's 
husband impatiently took me up.

"When she went from here, she went right away nor'ard by the high 
road.  Ask on the road if you doubt me, and see if it warn't so.  
Now, there's the end.  That's all about it."

I glanced at my companion, and finding that he had already risen 
and was ready to depart, thanked them for what they had told me, 
and took my leave.  The woman looked full at Mr. Bucket as he went 
out, and he looked full at her.

"Now, Miss Summerson," he said to me as we walked quickly away.  
"They've got her ladyship's watch among 'em.  That's a positive 
fact."

"You saw it?" I exclaimed.

"Just as good as saw it," he returned.  "Else why should he talk 
about his 'twenty minutes past' and about his having no watch to 
tell the time by?  Twenty minutes!  He don't usually cut his time 
so fine as that.  If he comes to half-hours, it's as much as HE 
does.  Now, you see, either her ladyship gave him that watch or he 
took it.  I think she gave it him.  Now, what should she give it 
him for?  What should she give it him for?"

He repeated this question to himself several times as we hurried 
on, appearing to balance between a variety of answers that arose in 
his mind.

"If time could be spared," said Mr. Bucket, "which is the only 
thing that can't be spared in this case, I might get it out of that 
woman; but it's too doubtful a chance to trust to under present 
circumstances.  They are up to keeping a close eye upon her, and 
any fool knows that a poor creetur like her, beaten and kicked and 
scarred and bruised from head to foot, will stand by the husband 
that ill uses her through thick and thin.  There's something kept 
back.  It's a pity but what we had seen the other woman."

I regretted it exceedingly, for she was very grateful, and I felt 
sure would have resisted no entreaty of mine.

"It's possible, Miss Summerson," said Mr. Bucket, pondering on it, 
"that her ladyship sent her up to London with some word for you, 
and it's possible that her husband got the watch to let her go.  It 
don't come out altogether so plain as to please me, but it's on the 
cards.  Now, I don't take kindly to laying out the money of Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, on these roughs, and I don't see my way 
to the usefulness of it at present.  No!  So far our road, Miss 
Summerson, is for'ard--straight ahead--and keeping everything 
quiet!"

We called at home once more that I might send a hasty note to my 
guardian, and then we hurried back to where we had left the 
carriage.  The horses were brought out as soon as we were seen 
coming, and we were on the road again in a few minutes.

It had set in snowing at daybreak, and it now snowed hard.  The air 
was so thick with the darkness of the day and the density of the 
fall that we could see but a very little way in any direction.  
Although it was extremely cold, the snow was but partially frozen, 
and it churned--with a sound as if it were a beach of small shells
--under the hoofs of the horses into mire and water.  They sometimes 
slipped and floundered for a mile together, and we were obliged to 
come to a standstill to rest them.  One horse fell three times in 
this first stage, and trembled so and was so shaken that the driver 
had to dismount from his saddle and lead him at last.

I could eat nothing and could not sleep, and I grew so nervous 
under those delays and the slow pace at which we travelled that I 
had an unreasonable desire upon me to get out and walk.  Yielding 
to my companion's better sense, however, I remained where I was.  
All this time, kept fresh by a certain enjoyment of the work in 
which he was engaged, he was up and down at every house we came to, 
addressing people whom he had never beheld before as old 
acquaintances, running in to warm himself at every fire he saw, 
talking and drinking and shaking hands at every bar and tap, 
friendly with every waggoner, wheelwright, blacksmith, and toll-
taker, yet never seeming to lose time, and always mounting to the 
box again with his watchful, steady face and his business-like "Get 
on, my lad!"

When we were changing horses the next time, he came from the 
stable-yard, with the wet snow encrusted upon him and dropping off 
him--plashing and crashing through it to his wet knees as he had 
been doing frequently since we left Saint Albans--and spoke to me 
at the carriage side.

"Keep up your spirits.  It's certainly true that she came on here, 
Miss Summerson.  There's not a doubt of the dress by this time, and 
the dress has been seen here."

"Still on foot?" said I.

"Still on foot.  I think the gentleman you mentioned must be the 
point she's aiming at, and yet I don't like his living down in her 
own part of the country neither."

"I know so little," said I.  "There may be some one else nearer 
here, of whom I never heard."

"That's true.  But whatever you do, don't you fall a-crying, my 
dear; and don't you worry yourself no more than you can help.  Get 
on, my lad!"

The sleet fell all that day unceasingly, a thick mist came on 
early, and it never rose or lightened for a moment.  Such roads I 
had never seen.  I sometimes feared we had missed the way and got 
into the ploughed grounds or the marshes.  If I ever thought of the 
time I had been out, it presented itself as an indefinite period of 
great duration, and I seemed, in a strange way, never to have been 
free from the anxiety under which I then laboured.

As we advanced, I began to feel misgivings that my companion lost 
confidence.  He was the same as before with all the roadside 
people, but he looked graver when he sat by himself on the box.  I 
saw his finger uneasily going across and across his mouth during 
the whole of one long weary stage.  I overheard that he began to 
ask the drivers of coaches and other vehicles coming towards us 
what passengers they had seen in other coaches and vehicles that 
were in advance.  Their replies did not encourage him.  He always 
gave me a reassuring beck of his finger and lift of his eyelid as 
he got upon the box again, but he seemed perplexed now when he 
said, "Get on, my lad!"

At last, when we were changing, he told me that he had lost the 
track of the dress so long that he began to be surprised.  It was 
nothing, he said, to lose such a track for one while, and to take 
it up for another while, and so on; but it had disappeared here in 
an unaccountable manner, and we had not come upon it since.  This 
corroborated the apprehensions I had formed, when he began to look 
at direction-posts, and to leave the carriage at cross roads for a 
quarter of an hour at a time while he explored them.  But I was not 
to be down-hearted, he told me, for it was as likely as not that 
the next stage might set us right again.

The next stage, however, ended as that one ended; we had no new 
clue.  There was a spacious inn here, solitary, but a comfortable 
substantial building, and as we drove in under a large gateway 
before I knew it, where a landlady and her pretty daughters came to 
the carriage-door, entreating me to alight and refresh myself while 
the horses were making ready, I thought it would be uncharitable to 
refuse.  They took me upstairs to a warm room and left me there.

It was at the corner of the house, I remember, looking two ways.  
On one side to a stable-yard open to a by-road, where the ostlers 
were unharnessing the splashed and tired horses from the muddy 
carriage, and beyond that to the by-road itself, across which the 
sign was heavily swinging; on the other side to a wood of dark 
pine-trees.  Their branches were encumbered with snow, and it 
silently dropped off in wet heaps while I stood at the window.  
Night was setting in, and its bleakness was enhanced by the 
contrast of the pictured fire glowing and gleaming in the window-
pane.  As I looked among the stems of the trees and followed the 
discoloured marks in the snow where the thaw was sinking into it 
and undermining it, I thought of the motherly face brightly set off 
by daughters that had just now welcomed me and of MY mother lying 
down in such a wood to die.

I was frightened when I found them all about me, but I remembered 
that before I fainted I tried very hard not to do it; and that was 
some little comfort.  They cushioned me up on a large sofa by the 
fire, and then the comely landlady told me that I must travel no 
further to-night, but must go to bed.  But this put me into such a 
tremble lest they should detain me there that she soon recalled her 
words and compromised for a rest of half an hour.

A good endearing creature she was.  She and her three fair girls, 
all so busy about me.  I was to take hot soup and broiled fowl, 
while Mr. Bucket dried himself and dined elsewhere; but I could not 
do it when a snug round table was presently spread by the fireside, 
though I was very unwilling to disappoint them.  However, I could 
take some toast and some hot negus, and as I really enjoyed that 
refreshment, it made some recompense.

Punctual to the time, at the half-hour's end the carriage came 
rumbling under the gateway, and they took me down, warmed, 
refreshed, comforted by kindness, and safe (I assured them) not to 
faint any more.  After I had got in and had taken a grateful leave 
of them all, the youngest daughter--a blooming girl of nineteen, 
who was to be the first married, they had told me--got upon the 
carriage step, reached in, and kissed me.  I have never seen her, 
from that hour, but I think of her to this hour as my friend.

The transparent windows with the fire and light, looking so bright 
and warm from the cold darkness out of doors, were soon gone, and 
again we were crushing and churning the loose snow.  We went on 
with toil enough, but the dismal roads were not much worse than 
they had been, and the stage was only nine miles.  My companion 
smoking on the box--I had thought at the last inn of begging him to 
do so when I saw him standing at a great fire in a comfortable 
cloud of tobacco--was as vigilant as ever and as quickly down and 
up again when we came to any human abode or any human creature.  He 
had lighted his little dark lantern, which seemed to be a favourite 
with him, for we had lamps to the carriage; and every now and then 
he turned it upon me to see that I was doing well.  There was a 
folding-window to the carriage-head, but I never closed it, for it 
seemed like shutting out hope.

We came to the end of the stage, and still the lost trace was not 
recovered.  I looked at him anxiously when we stopped to change, 
but I knew by his yet graver face as he stood watching the ostlers 
that he had heard nothing.  Almost in an instant afterwards, as I 
leaned back in my seat, he looked in, with his lighted lantern in 
his hand, an excited and quite different man.

"What is it?" said I, starting.  "Is she here?"

"No, no.  Don't deceive yourself, my dear.  Nobody's here.  But 
I've got it!"

The crystallized snow was in his eyelashes, in his hair, lying in 
ridges on his dress.  He had to shake it from his face and get his 
breath before he spoke to me.

"Now, Miss Summerson," said he, beating his finger on the apron, 
"don't you be disappointed at what I'm a-going to do.  You know me.  
I'm Inspector Bucket, and you can trust me.  We've come a long way; 
never mind.  Four horses out there for the next stage up!  Quick!"

There was a commotion in the yard, and a man came running out of 
the stables to know if he meant up or down.

"Up, I tell you!  Up!  Ain't it English?  Up!"

"Up?" said I, astonished.  "To London!  Are we going back?"

"Miss Summerson," he answered, "back.  Straight back as a die.  You 
know me.  Don't be afraid.  I'll follow the other, by G--"

"The other?" I repeated.  "Who?"

"You called her Jenny, didn't you?  I'll follow her.  Bring those 
two pair out here for a crown a man.  Wake up, some of you!"

"You will not desert this lady we are in search of; you will not 
abandon her on such a night and in such a state of mind as I know 
her to be in!" said I, in an agony, and grasping his hand.

"You are right, my dear, I won't.  But I'll follow the other.  Look 
alive here with them horses.  Send a man for'ard in the saddle to 
the next stage, and let him send another for'ard again, and order 
four on, up, right through.  My darling, don't you be afraid!"

These orders and the way in which he ran about the yard urging them 
caused a general excitement that was scarcely less bewildering to 
me than the sudden change.  But in the height of the confusion, a 
mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and our horses were 
put to with great speed.

"My dear," said Mr. Bucket, jumping to his seat and looking in 
again, "--you'll excuse me if I'm too familiar--don't you fret and 
worry yourself no more than you can help.  I say nothing else at 
present; but you know me, my dear; now, don't you?"

I endeavoured to say that I knew he was far more capable than I of 
deciding what we ought to do, but was he sure that this was right?  
Could I not go forward by myself in search of--I grasped his hand 
again in my distress and whispered it to him--of my own mother.

"My dear," he answered, "I know, I know, and would I put you wrong, 
do you think?  Inspector Bucket.  Now you know me, don't you?"

What could I say but yes!

"Then you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely upon me 
for standing by you, no less than by Sir Leicester Dedlock, 
Baronet.  Now, are you right there?"

"All right, sir!"

"Off she goes, then.  And get on, my lads!"

We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come, 
tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow as if they were torn up 
by a waterwheel.



CHAPTER LVIII

A Wintry Day and Night


Still impassive, as behoves its breeding, the Dedlock town house 
carries itself as usual towards the street of dismal grandeur.  
There are powdered heads from time to time in the little windows of 
the hall, looking out at the untaxed powder falling all day from 
the sky; and in the same conservatory there is peach blossom 
turning itself exotically to the great hall fire from the nipping 
weather out of doors.  It is given out that my Lady has gone down 
into Lincolnshire, but is expected to return presently.

Rumour, busy overmuch, however, will not go down into Lincolnshire.  
It persists in flitting and chattering about town.  It knows that 
that poor unfortunate man, Sir Leicester, has been sadly used.  It 
hears, my dear child, all sorts of shocking things.  It makes the 
world of five miles round quite merry.  Not to know that there is 
something wrong at the Dedlocks' is to augur yourself unknown.  One 
of the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats is already 
apprised of all the principal circumstances that will come out 
before the Lords on Sir Leicester's application for a bill of 
divorce.

At Blaze and Sparkle's the jewellers and at Sheen and Gloss's the 
mercers, it is and will be for several hours the topic of the age, 
the feature of the century.  The patronesses of those 
establishments, albeit so loftily inscrutable, being as nicely 
weighed and measured there as any other article of the stock-in-
trade, are perfectly understood in this new fashion by the rawest 
hand behind the counter.  "Our people, Mr. Jones," said Blaze and 
Sparkle to the hand in question on engaging him, "our people, sir, 
are sheep--mere sheep.  Where two or three marked ones go, all the 
rest follow.  Keep those two or three in your eye, Mr. Jones, and 
you have the flock."  So, likewise, Sheen and Gloss to THEIR Jones, 
in reference to knowing where to have the fashionable people and 
how to bring what they (Sheen and Gloss) choose into fashion.  On 
similar unerring principles, Mr. Sladdery the librarian, and indeed 
the great farmer of gorgeous sheep, admits this very day, "Why yes, 
sir, there certainly ARE reports concerning Lady Dedlock, very 
current indeed among my high connexion, sir.  You see, my high 
connexion must talk about something, sir; and it's only to get a 
subject into vogue with one or two ladies I could name to make it 
go down with the whole.  Just what I should have done with those 
ladies, sir, in the case of any novelty you had left to me to bring 
in, they have done of themselves in this case through knowing Lady 
Dedlock and being perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too, 
sir.  You'll find, sir, that this topic will be very popular among 
my high connexion.  If it had been a speculation, sir, it would 
have brought money.  And when I say so, you may trust to my being 
right, sir, for I have made it my business to study my high 
connexion and to be able to wind it up like a clock, sir."

Thus rumour thrives in the capital, and will not go down into 
Lincolnshire.  By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards' 
time, it has even elicited a new remark from the Honourable Mr. 
Stables, which bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has 
so long rested his colloquial reputation.  This sparkling sally is 
to the effect that although he always knew she was the best-groomed 
woman in the stud, he had no idea she was a bolter.  It is 
immensely received in turf-circles.

At feasts and festivals also, in firmaments she has often graced, 
and among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still 
the prevalent subject.  What is it?  Who is it?  When was it?  
Where was it?  How was it?  She is discussed by her dear friends 
with all the genteelest slang in vogue, with the last new word, the 
last new manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of polite 
indifference.  A remarkable feature of the theme is that it is 
found to be so inspiring that several people come out upon it who 
never came out before--positively say things!  William Buffy 
carries one of these smartnesses from the place where he dines down 
to the House, where the Whip for his party hands it about with his 
snuff-box to keep men together who want to be off, with such effect 
that the Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into his own 
ear under the corner of his wig) cries, "Order at the bar!" three 
times without making an impression.

And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being 
vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of 
Mr. Sladdery's high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did 
know nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to 
pretend that she is their topic too, and to retail her at second-
hand with the last new word and the last new manner, and the last 
new drawl, and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest 
of it, all at second-hand but considered equal to new in inferior 
systems and to fainter stars.  If there be any man of letters, art, 
or science among these little dealers, how noble in him to support 
the feeble sisters on such majestic crutches!

So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion.  How within it?

Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little, though with 
difficulty and indistinctness.  He is enjoined to silence and to 
rest, and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his 
old enemy is very hard with him.  He is never asleep, though 
sometimes he seems to fall into a dull waking doze.  He caused his 
bedstead to be moved out nearer to the window when he heard it was 
such inclement weather, and his head to be so adjusted that he 
could see the driving snow and sleet.  He watches it as it falls, 
throughout the whole wintry day.

Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand 
is at the pencil.  The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what 
he would write and whispers, "No, he has not come back yet, Sir 
Leicester.  It was late last night when he went.  He has been but a 
little time gone yet."

He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and snow 
again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick 
and fast that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the 
giddy whirl of white flakes and icy blots.

He began to look at them as soon as it was light.  The day is not 
yet far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms 
should be prepared for her.  It is very cold and wet.  Let there be 
good fires.  Let them know that she is expected.  Please see to it 
yourself.  He writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. 
Rouncewell with a heavy heart obeys.

"For I dread, George," the old lady says to her son, who waits 
below to keep her company when she has a little leisure, "I dread, 
my dear, that my Lady will never more set foot within these walls."

"That's a bad presentiment, mother."

"Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear."

"That's worse.  But why, mother?"

"When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me--and I may 
say at me too--as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked 
her down."

"Come, come!  You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother."

"No I don't, my dear.  No I don't.  It's going on for sixty year 
that I have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it 
before.  But it's breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock 
family is breaking up."

"I hope not, mother."

"I am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in 
this illness and trouble, for I know I am not too old nor too 
useless to be a welcomer sight to him than anybody else in my place 
would be.  But the step on the Ghost's Walk will walk my Lady down, 
George; it has been many a day behind her, and now it will pass her 
and go on."

"Well, mother dear, I say again, I hope not."

"Ah, so do I, George," the old lady returns, shaking her head and 
parting her folded hands.  "But if my fears come true, and he has 
to know it, who will tell him!"

"Are these her rooms?"

"These are my Lady's rooms, just as she left them."

"Why, now," says the trooper, glancing round him and speaking in a 
lower voice, "I begin to understand how you come to think as you do 
think, mother.  Rooms get an awful look about them when they are 
fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them, 
and that person is away under any shadow, let alone being God knows 
where."

He is not far out.  As all partings foreshadow the great final one, 
so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper 
what your room and what mine must one day be.  My Lady's state has 
a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner 
apartment, where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret 
perquisition, the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the 
mirrors accustomed to reflect them when they were a portion of 
herself, have a desolate and vacant air.  Dark and cold as the 
wintry day is, it is darker and colder in these deserted chambers 
than in many a hut that will barely exclude the weather; and though 
the servants heap fires in the grates and set the couches and the 
chairs within the warm glass screens that let their ruddy light 
shoot through to the furthest corners, there is a heavy cloud upon 
the rooms which no light will dispel.

The old housekeeper and her son remain until the preparations are 
complete, and then she returns upstairs.  Volumnia has taken Mrs. 
Rouncewell's place in the meantime, though pearl necklaces and 
rouge pots, however calculated to embellish Bath, are but 
indifferent comforts to the invalid under present circumstances.  
Volumnia, not being supposed to know (and indeed not knowing) what 
is the matter, has found it a ticklish task to offer appropriate 
observations and consequently has supplied their place with 
distracting smoothings of the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on 
tiptoe, vigilant peeping at her kinsman's eyes, and one 
exasperating whisper to herself of, "He is asleep."  In disproof of 
which superfluous remark Sir Leicester has indignantly written on 
the slate, "I am not."

Yielding, therefore, the chair at the bedside to the quaint old 
housekeeper, Volumnia sits at a table a little removed, 
sympathetically sighing.  Sir Leicester watches the sleet and snow 
and listens for the returning steps that he expects.  In the ears 
of his old servant, looking as if she had stepped out of an old 
picture-frame to attend a summoned Dedlock to another world, the 
silence is fraught with echoes of her own words, "who will tell 
him!"

He has been under his valet's hands this morning to be made 
presentable and is as well got up as the circumstances will allow.  
He is propped with pillows, his grey hair is brushed in its usual 
manner, his linen is arranged to a nicety, and he is wrapped in a 
responsible dressing-gown.  His eye-glass and his watch are ready 
to his hand.  It is necessary--less to his own dignity now perhaps 
than for her sake--that he should be seen as little disturbed and 
as much himself as may be.  Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a 
Dedlock, is no exceptional case.  He keeps her here, there is 
little doubt, to prevent her talking somewhere else.  He is very 
ill, but he makes his present stand against distress of mind and 
body most courageously.

The fair Volumnia, being one of those sprightly girls who cannot 
long continue silent without imminent peril of seizure by the 
dragon Boredom, soon indicates the approach of that monster with a 
series of undisguisable yawns.  Finding it impossible to suppress 
those yawns by any other process than conversation, she compliments 
Mrs. Rouncewell on her son, declaring that he positively is one of 
the finest figures she ever saw and as soldierly a looking person, 
she should think, as what's his name, her favourite Life Guardsman
--the man she dotes on, the dearest of creatures--who was killed at 
Waterloo.

Sir Leicester hears this tribute with so much surprise and stares 
about him in such a confused way that Mrs. Rouncewell feels it 
necesary to explain.

"Miss Dedlock don't speak of my eldest son, Sir Leicester, but my 
youngest.  I have found him.  He has come home."

Sir Leicester breaks silence with a harsh cry.  "George?  Your son 
George come home, Mrs. Rouncewell?"

The old housekeeper wipes her eyes.  "Thank God.  Yes, Sir 
Leicester."

Does this discovery of some one lost, this return of some one so 
long gone, come upon him as a strong confirmation of his hopes?  
Does he think, "Shall I not, with the aid I have, recall her safely 
after this, there being fewer hours in her case than there are 
years in his?"

It is of no use entreating him; he is determined to speak now, and 
he does.  In a thick crowd of sounds, but still intelligibly enough 
to be understood.

"Why did you not tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?"

"It happened only yesterday, Sir Leicester, and I doubted your 
being well enough to be talked to of such things."

Besides, the giddy Volumnia now remembers with her little scream 
that nobody was to have known of his being Mrs. Rouncewell's son 
and that she was not to have told.  But Mrs. Rouncewell protests, 
with warmth enough to swell the stomacher, that of course she would 
have told Sir Leicester as soon as he got better.

"Where is your son George, Mrs. Rouncewell?" asks Sir Leicester,

Mrs. Rouncewell, not a little alarmed by his disregard of the 
doctor's injunctions, replies, in London.

"Where in London?"

Mrs. Rouncewell is constrained to admit that he is in the house.

"Bring him here to my room.  Bring him directly."

The old lady can do nothing but go in search of him.  Sir 
Leicester, with such power of movement as he has, arranges himself 
a little to receive him.  When he has done so, he looks out again 
at the falling sleet and snow and listens again for the returning 
steps.  A quantity of straw has been tumbled down in the street to 
deaden the noises there, and she might be driven to the door 
perhaps without his hearing wheels.

He is lying thus, apparently forgetful of his newer and minor 
surprise, when the housekeeper returns, accompanied by her trooper 
son.  Mr. George approaches softly to the bedside, makes his bow, 
squares his chest, and stands, with his face flushed, very heartily 
ashamed of himself.

"Good heaven, and it is really George Rouncewell!" exclaims Sir 
Leicester.  "Do you remember me, George?"

The trooper needs to look at him and to separate this sound from 
that sound before he knows what he has said, but doing this and 
being a little helped by his mother, he replies, "I must have a 
very bad memory, indeed, Sir Leicester, if I failed to remember 
you."

"When I look at you, George Rouncewell," Sir Leicester observes 
with difficulty, "I see something of a boy at Chesney Wold--I 
remember well--very well."

He looks at the trooper until tears come into his eyes, and then he 
looks at the sleet and snow again.

"I ask your pardon, Sir Leicester," says the trooper, "but would 
you accept of my arms to raise you up?  You would lie easier, Sir 
Leicester, if you would allow me to move you."

"If you please, George Rouncewell; if you will be so good."

The trooper takes him in his arms like a child, lightly raises him, 
and turns him with his face more towards the window.  "Thank you.  
You have your mother's gentleness," returns Sir Leicester, "and 
your own strength.  Thank you."

He signs to him with his hand not to go away.  George quietly 
remains at the bedside, waiting to be spoken to.

"Why did you wish for secrecy?"  It takes Sir Leicester some time 
to ask this.

"Truly I am not much to boast of, Sir Leicester, and I--I should 
still, Sir Leicester, if you was not so indisposed--which I hope 
you will not be long--I should still hope for the favour of being 
allowed to remain unknown in general.  That involves explanations 
not very hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not 
very creditable to myself.  However opinions may differ on a 
variety of subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed, 
Sir Leicester, that I am not much to boast of."

"You have been a soldier," observes Sir Leicester, "and a faithful 
one."

George makes his military how.  "As far as that goes, Sir 
Leicester, I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the 
least I could do."

"You find me," says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted 
towards him, "far from well, George Rouncewell."

"I am very sorry both to hear it and to see it, Sir Leicester."

"I am sure you are.  No.  In addition to my older malady, I have 
had a sudden and bad attack.  Something that deadens," making an 
endeavour to pass one hand down one side, "and confuses," touching 
his lips.

George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow.  The 
different times when they were both young men (the trooper much the 
younger of the two) and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold 
arise before them both and soften both.

Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in his 
own manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into 
silence, tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more.  
George, observant of the action, takes him in his arms again and 
places him as he desires to be.  "Thank you, George.  You are 
another self to me.  You have often carried my spare gun at Chesney 
Wold, George.  You are familiar to me in these strange 
circumstances, very familiar."  He has put Sir Leicester's sounder 
arm over his shoulder in lifting him up, and Sir Leicester is slow 
in drawing it away again as he says these words.

"I was about to add," he presently goes on, "I was about to add, 
respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous with 
a slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself.  I do not 
mean that there was any difference between us (for there has been 
none), but that there was a misunderstanding of certain 
circumstances important only to ourselves, which deprives me, for a 
little while, of my Lady's society.  She has found it necessary to 
make a journey--I trust will shortly return.  Volumnia, do I make 
myself intelligible?  The words are not quite under my command in 
the manner of pronouncing them."

Volumnia understands him perfectly, and in truth be delivers 
himself with far greater plainness than could have been supposed 
possible a minute ago.  The effort by which he does so is written 
in the anxious and labouring expression of his face.  Nothing but 
the strength of his purpose enables him to make it.

"Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your presence--and in the 
presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose 
truth and fidelity no one can question, and in the presence of her 
son George, who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth 
in the home of my ancestors at Chesney Wold--in case I should 
relapse, in case I should not recover, in case I should lose both 
my speech and the power of writing, though I hope for better 
things--"

The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in the greatest 
agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper with 
his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive.

"Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness--
beginning, Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly--that I am on 
unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock.  That I assert no cause whatever 
of complaint against her.  That I have ever had the strongest 
affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished.  Say this to 
herself, and to every one.  If you ever say less than this, you 
will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me."

Volumnia tremblingly protests that she will observe his injunctions 
to the letter.

"My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished, 
too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is 
surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say.  Let 
it be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound 
mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have 
made in her favour.  I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon 
her.  I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recall--having the 
full power to do it if I were so disposed, as you see--no act I 
have done for her advantage and happiness."

His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has 
often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is 
serious and affecting.  His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his 
gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong 
and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and 
true.  Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such 
qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be 
seen in the best-born gentleman.  In such a light both aspire 
alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.

Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows 
and closes his eyes for not more than a minute, when he again 
resumes his watching of the weather and his attention to the 
muffled sounds.  In the rendering of those little services, and in 
the manner of their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as 
necessary to him.  Nothing has been said, but it is quite 
understood.  He falls a step or two backward to be out of sight and 
mounts guard a little behind his mother's chair.

The day is now beginning to decline.  The mist and the sleet into 
which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze 
begins to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture.  The 
gloom augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the 
pertinacious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with 
their source of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly 
like fiery fish out of water--as they are.  The world, which has 
been rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell, "to inquire," 
begins to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear 
friend with all the last new modes, as already mentioned.

Now does Sir Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great 
pain.  Volumnia, lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for 
doing something objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for 
it is not yet dark enough.  Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it 
will be all night.  By and by she tries again.  No!  Put it out.  
It is not dark enough yet.

His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving 
to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late.

"Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master," she softly whispers, "I 
must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging 
and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness 
watching and waiting and dragging through the time.  Let me draw 
the curtains, and light the candles, and make things more 
comfortable about you.  The church-clocks will strike the hours 
just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass away just the 
same.  My Lady will come back, just the same."

"I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak--and he has been so long 
gone."

"Not so very long, Sir Leicester.  Not twenty-four hours yet."

"But that is a long time.  Oh, it is a long time!"

He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.

She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light 
upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her.  
Therefore she sits in the darkness for a while without a word, then 
gently begins to move about, now stirring the fire, now standing at 
the dark window looking out.  Finally he tells her, with recovered 
self-command, "As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for 
being confessed.  It is getting late, and they are not come.  Light 
the room!"  When it is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only 
left to him to listen.

But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens 
when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms 
and being sure that everything is ready to receive her.  Poor 
pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up 
hope within him.

Midnight comes, and with it the same blank.  The carriages in the 
streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there 
are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into 
the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement.  
Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense 
silence is like looking at intense darkness.  If any distant sound 
be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble 
light in that, and all is heavier than before.

The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to 
go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and 
George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room.  As the night lags 
tardily on--or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between 
two and three o'clock--they find a restless craving on him to know 
more about the weather, now he cannot see it.  Hence George, 
patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully 
looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, 
and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, 
the sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle-
deep in icy sludge.

Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the stair-case--the 
second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly 
room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester 
banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard 
planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black 
tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds.  Not last nor least among 
them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in 
the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir 
Leicester.  Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and 
that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any 
baronet in the known world.

An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to 
bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must 
come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and 
her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a 
ghost, particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, 
prepared for one who still does not return.  Solitude under such 
circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by 
her maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose, 
extremely cold, very sleepy, and generally an injured maid as 
condemned by circumstances to take office with a cousin, when she 
had resolved to be maid to nothing less than ten thousand a year, 
has not a sweet expression of countenance.

The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in 
the course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and 
company both to mistress and maid, which renders them very 
acceptable in the small hours of the night.  Whenever he is heard 
advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to 
receive him; at other times they divide their watches into short 
scraps of oblivion and dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as 
to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was 
or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great 
displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid.

"How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?" inquires Volumnia, 
adjusting her cowl over her head.

"Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss.  He is very low and 
ill, and he even wanders a little sometimes."

"Has he asked for me?" inquires Volumnia tenderly.

"Why, no, I can't say he has, miss.  Not within my hearing, that is 
to say."

"This is a truly sad time, Mr. George."

"It is indeed, miss.  Hadn't you better go to bed?"

"You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock," quoth the maid 
sharply.

But Volumnia answers No! No!  She may be asked for, she may be 
wanted at a moment's notice.  She never should forgive herself "if 
anything was to happen" and she was not on the spot.  She declines 
to enter on the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to 
be there, and not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's), 
but staunchly declares that on the spot she will remain.  Volumnia 
further makes a merit of not having "closed an eye"--as if she had 
twenty or thirty--though it is hard to reconcile this statement 
with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes.

But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank, 
Volumnia's constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to 
strengthen, for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready 
for the morrow, when much may be expected of her, that, in fact, 
howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of 
her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot.  So when the 
trooper reappears with his, "Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?" 
and when the maid protests, more sharply than before, "You had a 
deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock!" she meekly rises and says, 
"Do with me what you think best!"

Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to 
the door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly 
thinks it best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony.  
Accordingly, these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his 
rounds, has the house to himself.

There is no improvement in the weather.  From the portico, from the 
eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, 
drips the thawed snow.  It has crept, as if for shelter, into the 
lintels of the great door--under it, into the corners of the 
windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes 
and dies.  It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, 
even through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the 
regularity of the Ghost's Walk, on the stone floor below.

The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary 
grandeur of a great house--no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold--
goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his 
light at arm's length.  Thinking of his varied fortunes within the 
last few weeks, and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods 
of his life so strangely brought together across the wide 
intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man whose image is 
fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared from 
these very rooms and the tokens of whose recent presence are all 
here; thinking of the master of the house upstairs and of the 
foreboding, "Who will tell him!" he looks here and looks there, and 
reflects how he MIGHT see something now, which it would tax his 
boldness to walk up to, lay his hand upon, and prove to be a fancy.  
But it is all blank, blank as the darkness above and below, while 
he goes up the great staircase again, blank as the oppressive 
silence.

"All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?"

"Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester."

"No word of any kind?"

The trooper shakes his head.

"No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?"

But he knows there is no such hope as that and lays his head down 
without looking for an answer.

Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George 
Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long 
remainder of the blank wintry night, and equally familiar with his 
unexpressed wish, extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains 
at the first late break of day.  The day comes like a phantom.  
Cold, colourless, and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of 
a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, "Look what I am bringing you 
who watch there!  Who will tell him!"



CHAPTER LIX

Esther's Narrative


It was three o'clock in the morning when the houses outside London 
did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with 
streets.  We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition 
than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the 
thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never 
slackened.  It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than 
the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them.  They had 
stopped exhausted halfway up hills, they had been driven through 
streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become 
entangled with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been 
always ready, and when the mishap was set right, I had never heard 
any variation in his cool, "Get on, my lads!"

The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our 
journey back I could not account for.  Never wavering, he never 
even stopped to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of 
London.  A very few words, here and there, were then enough for 
him; and thus we came, at between three and four o'clock in the 
morning, into Islington.

I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected 
all this time that we were leaving my mother farther and farther 
behind every minute.  I think I had some strong hope that he must 
be right and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in 
following this woman, but I tormented myself with questioning it 
and discussing it during the whole journey.  What was to ensue when 
we found her and what could compensate us for this loss of time 
were questions also that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was 
quite tortured by long dwelling on such reflections when we 
stopped.

We stopped in a high-street where there was a coach-stand.  My 
companion paid our two drivers, who were as completely covered with 
splashes as if they had been dragged along the roads like the 
carriage itself, and giving them some brief direction where to take 
it, lifted me out of it and into a hackney-coach he had chosen from 
the rest.

"Why, my dear!" he said as he did this.  "How wet you are!"

I had not been conscious of it.  But the melted snow had found its 
way into the carriage, and I had got out two or three times when a 
fallen horse was plunging and had to be got up, and the wet had 
penetrated my dress.  I assured him it was no matter, but the 
driver, who knew him, would not be dissuaded by me from running 
down the street to his stable, whence he brought an armful of clean 
dry straw.  They shook it out and strewed it well about me, and I 
found it warm and comfortable.

"Now, my dear," said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the window 
after I was shut up.  "We're a-going to mark this person down.  It 
may take a little time, but you don't mind that.  You're pretty 
sure that I've got a motive.  Ain't you?"

I little thought what it was, little thought in how short a time I 
should understand it better, but I assured him that I had 
confidence in him.

"So you may have, my dear," he returned.  "And I tell you what!  If 
you only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you 
after what I've experienced of you, that'll do.  Lord!  You're no 
trouble at all.  I never see a young woman in any station of 
society--and I've seen many elevated ones too--conduct herself like 
you have conducted yourself since you was called out of your bed.  
You're a pattern, you know, that's what you are," said Mr. Bucket 
warmly; "you're a pattern."

I told him I was very glad, as indeed I was, to have been no 
hindrance to him, and that I hoped I should be none now.

"My dear," he returned, "when a young lady is as mild as she's 
game, and as game as she's mild, that's all I ask, and more than I 
expect.  She then becomes a queen, and that's about what you are 
yourself."

With these encouraging words--they really were encouraging to me 
under those lonely and anxious circumstances--he got upon the box, 
and we once more drove away.  Where we drove I neither knew then 
nor have ever known since, but we appeared to seek out the 
narrowest and worst streets in London.  Whenever I saw him 
directing the driver, I was prepared for our descending into a 
deeper complication of such streets, and we never failed to do so.

Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare or came to a larger 
building than the generality, well lighted.  Then we stopped at 
offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I 
saw him in consultation with others.  Sometimes he would get down 
by an archway or at a street corner and mysteriously show the light 
of his little lantern.  This would attract similar lights from 
various dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh 
consultation would be held.  By degrees we appeared to contract our 
search within narrower and easier limits.  Single police-officers 
on duty could now tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know and point 
to him where to go.  At last we stopped for a rather long 
conversation between him and one of these men, which I supposed to 
be satisfactory from his manner of nodding from time to time.  When 
it was finished he came to me looking very busy and very attentive.

"Now, Miss Summerson, he said to me, "you won't be alarmed whatever 
comes off, I know.  It's not necessary for me to give you any 
further caution than to tell you that we have marked this person 
down and that you may be of use to me before I know it myself.  I 
don't like to ask such a thing, my dear, but would you walk a 
little way?"

Of course I got out directly and took his arm.

"It ain't so easy to keep your feet," said Mr. Bucket, "but take 
time."

Although I looked about me confusedly and hurriedly as we crossed 
the street, I thought I knew the place.  "Are we in Holborn?" I 
asked him.

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket.  "Do you know this turning?"

"It looks like Chancery Lane."

"And was christened so, my dear," said Mr. Bucket.

We turned down it, and as we went shuffling through the sleet, I 
heard the clocks strike half-past five.  We passed on in silence 
and as quickly as we could with such a foothold, when some one 
coming towards us on the narrow pavement, wrapped in a cloak, 
stopped and stood aside to give me room.  In the same moment I 
heard an exclamation of wonder and my own name from Mr. Woodcourt.  
I knew his voice very well.

It was so unexpected and so--I don't know what to call it, whether 
pleasant or painful--to come upon it after my feverish wandering 
journey, and in the midst of the night, that I could not keep back 
the tears from my eyes.  It was like hearing his voice in a strange 
country.

"My dear Miss Summerson, that you should be out at this hour, and 
in such weather!"

He had heard from my guardian of my having been called away on some 
uncommon business and said so to dispense with any explanation.  I 
told him that we had but just left a coach and were going--but then 
I was obliged to look at my companion.

"Why, you see, Mr. Woodcourt"--he had caught the name from me--"we 
are a-going at present into the next street.  Inspector Bucket."

Mr. Woodcourt, disregarding my remonstrances, had hurriedly taken 
off his cloak and was putting it about me.  "That's a good move, 
too," said Mr. Bucket, assisting, "a very good move."

"May I go with you?" said Mr. Woodcourt.  I don't know whether to 
me or to my companion.

"Why, Lord!" exclaimed Mr. Bucket, taking the answer on himself.  
"Of course you may."

It was all said in a moment, and they took me between them, wrapped 
in the cloak.

"I have just left Richard," said Mr. Woodcourt.  "I have been 
sitting with him since ten o'clock last night."

"Oh, dear me, he is ill!"

"No, no, believe me; not ill, but not quite well.  He was depressed 
and faint--you know he gets so worried and so worn sometimes--and 
Ada sent to me of course; and when I came home I found her note and 
came straight here.  Well! Richard revived so much after a little 
while, and Ada was so happy and so convinced of its being my doing, 
though God knows I had little enough to do with it, that I remained 
with him until he had been fast asleep some hours.  As fast asleep 
as she is now, I hope!"

His friendly and familiar way of speaking of them, his unaffected 
devotion to them, the grateful confidence with which I knew he had 
inspired my darling, and the comfort he was to her; could I 
separate all this from his promise to me?  How thankless I must 
have been if it had not recalled the words he said to me when he 
was so moved by the change in my appearance: "I will accept him as 
a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!"

We now turned into another narrow street.  "Mr. Woodcourt," said 
Mr. Bucket, who had eyed him closely as we came along, "our 
business takes us to a law-stationer's here, a certain Mr. 
Snagsby's.  What, you know him, do you?"  He was so quick that he 
saw it in an instant.

"Yes, I know a little of him and have called upon him at this 
place."

"Indeed, sir?" said Mr. Bucket.  "Then you will be so good as to 
let me leave Miss Summerson with you for a moment while I go and 
have half a word with him?"

The last police-officer with whom he had conferred was standing 
silently behind us.  I was not aware of it until he struck in on my 
saying I heard some one crying.

"Don't be alarmed, miss," he returned.  "It's Snagsby's servant."

"Why, you see," said Mr. Bucket, "the girl's subject to fits, and 
has 'em bad upon her to-night.  A most contrary circumstance it is, 
for I want certain information out of that girl, and she must be 
brought to reason somehow."

"At all events, they wouldn't be up yet if it wasn't for her, Mr. 
Bucket," said the other man.  "She's been at it pretty well all 
night, sir."

"Well, that's true," he returned.  "My light's burnt out.  Show 
yours a moment."

All this passed in a whisper a door or two from the house in which 
I could faintly hear crying and moaning.  In the little round of 
light produced for the purpose, Mr. Bucket went up to the door and 
knocked.  The door was opened after he had knocked twice, and he 
went in, leaving us standing in the street.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Woodcourt, "if without obtruding myself 
on your confidence I may remain near you, pray let me do so."

"You are truly kind," I answered.  "I need wish to keep no secret 
of my own from you; if I keep any, it is another's."

"I quite understand.  Trust me, I will remain near you only so long 
as I can fully respect it."

"I trust implicitly to you," I said.  "I know and deeply feel how 
sacredly you keep your promise.

After a short time the little round of light shone out again, and 
Mr. Bucket advanced towards us in it with his earnest face.  
"Please to come in, Miss Summerson," he said, "and sit down by the 
fire.  Mr. Woodcourt, from information I have received I understand 
you are a medical man.  Would you look to this girl and see if 
anything can be done to bring her round.  She has a letter 
somewhere that I particularly want.  It's not in her box, and I 
think it must be about her; but she is so twisted and clenched up 
that she is difficult to handle without hurting."

We all three went into the house together; although it was cold and 
raw, it smelt close too from being up all night.  In the passage 
behind the door stood a scared, sorrowful-looking little man in a 
grey coat who seemed to have a naturally polite manner and spoke 
meekly.

"Downstairs, if you please, Mr. Bucket," said he.  "The lady will 
excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room.  
The back is Guster's bedroom, and in it she's a-carrying on, poor 
thing, to a frightful extent!"

We went downstairs, followed by Mr. Snagsby, as I soon found the 
little man to be.  In the front kitchen, sitting by the fire, was 
Mrs. Snagsby, with very red eyes and a very severe expression of 
face.

"My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, entering behind us, "to wave--
not to put too fine a point upon it, my dear--hostilities for one 
single moment in the course of this prolonged night, here is 
Inspector Bucket, Mr. Woodcourt, and a lady."

She looked very much astonished, as she had reason for doing, and 
looked particularly hard at me.

"My little woman," said Mr. Snagsby, sitting down in the remotest 
corner by the door, as if he were taking a liberty, "it is not 
unlikely that you may inquire of me why Inspector Bucket, Mr. 
Woodcourt, and a lady call upon us in Cook's Court, Cursitor 
Street, at the present hour.  I don't know.  I have not the least 
idea.  If I was to be informed, I should despair of understanding, 
and I'd rather not be told."

He appeared so miserable, sitting with his head upon his hand, and 
I appeared so unwelcome, that I was going to offer an apology when 
Mr. Bucket took the matter on himself.

"Now, Mr. Snagsby," said he, "the best thing you can do is to go 
along with Mr. Woodcourt to look after your Guster--"

"My Guster, Mr. Bucket!" cried Mr. Snagsby.  "Go on, sir, go on.  I 
shall be charged with that next."

"And to hold the candle," pursued Mr. Bucket without correcting 
himself, "or hold her, or make yourself useful in any way you're 
asked.  Which there's not a man alive more ready to do, for you're 
a man of urbanity and suavity, you know, and you've got the sort of 
heart that can feel for another.  Mr. Woodcourt, would you be so 
good as see to her, and if you can get that letter from her, to let 
me have it as soon as ever you can?"

As they went out, Mr. Bucket made me sit down in a corner by the 
fire and take off my wet shoes, which he turned up to dry upon the 
fender, talking all the time.

"Don't you be at all put out, miss, by the want of a hospitable 
look from Mrs. Snagsby there, because she's under a mistake 
altogether.  She'll find that out sooner than will be agreeable to 
a lady of her generally correct manner of forming her thoughts, 
because I'm a-going to explain it to her."  Here, standing on the 
hearth with his wet hat and shawls in his hand, himself a pile of 
wet, he turned to Mrs. Snagsby.  "Now, the first thing that I say 
to you, as a married woman possessing what you may call charms, you 
know--'Believe Me, if All Those Endearing,' and cetrer--you're well 
acquainted with the song, because it's in vain for you to tell me 
that you and good society are strangers--charms--attractions, mind 
you, that ought to give you confidence in yourself--is, that you've 
done it."

Mrs. Snagsby looked rather alarmed, relented a little and faltered, 
what did Mr. Bucket mean.

"What does Mr. Bucket mean?" he repeated, and I saw by his face 
that all the time he talked he was listening for the discovery of 
the letter, to my own great agitation, for I knew then how 
important it must be; "I'll tell you what he means, ma'am.  Go and 
see Othello acted.  That's the tragedy for you."

Mrs. Snagsby consciously asked why.

"Why?" said Mr. Bucket.  "Because you'll come to that if you don't 
look out.  Why, at the very moment while I speak, I know what your 
mind's not wholly free from respecting this young lady.  But shall 
I tell you who this young lady is?  Now, come, you're what I call 
an intellectual woman--with your soul too large for your body, if 
you come to that, and chafing it--and you know me, and you 
recollect where you saw me last, and what was talked of in that 
circle.  Don't you?  Yes!  Very well.  This young lady is that 
young lady."

Mrs. Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better than I did 
at the time.

"And Toughey--him as you call Jo--was mixed up in the same 
business, and no other; and the law-writer that you know of was 
mixed up in the same business, and no other; and your husband, with 
no more knowledge of it than your great grandfather, was mixed up 
(by Mr. Tulkinghorn, deceased, his best customer) in the same 
business, and no other; and the whole bileing of people was mixed 
up in the same business, and no other.  And yet a married woman, 
possessing your attractions, shuts her eyes (and sparklers too), 
and goes and runs her delicate-formed head against a wall.  Why, I 
am ashamed of you!  (I expected Mr. Woodcourt might have got it by 
this time.)"

Mrs. Snagsby shook her head and put her handkerchief to her eyes.

"Is that all?" said Mr. Bucket excitedly.  "No.  See what happens.  
Another person mixed up in that business and no other, a person in 
a wretched state, comes here to-night and is seen a-speaking to 
your maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant there 
passes a paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down.  What 
do you do?  You hide and you watch 'em, and you pounce upon that 
maid-servant--knowing what she's subject to and what a little thing 
will bring 'em on--in that surprising manner and with that severity 
that, by the Lord, she goes off and keeps off, when a life may be 
hanging upon that girl's words!"

He so thoroughly meant what he said now that I involuntarily 
clasped my hands and felt the room turning away from me.  But it 
stopped.  Mr. Woodcourt came in, put a paper into his hand, and 
went away again.

"Now, Mrs, Snagsby, the only amends you can make," said Mr. Bucket, 
rapidly glancing at it, "is to let me speak a word to this young 
lady in private here.  And if you know of any help that you can 
give to that gentleman in the next kitchen there or can think of 
any one thing that's likelier than another to bring the girl round, 
do your swiftest and best!"  In an instant she was gone, and he had 
shut the door.  "Now my dear, you're steady and quite sure of 
yourself?"

"Quite," said I.

"Whose writing is that?"

It was my mother's.  A pencil-writing, on a crushed and torn piece 
of paper, blotted with wet.  Folded roughly like a letter, and 
directed to me at my guardian's.

"You know the hand," he said, "and if you are firm enough to read 
it to me, do!  But be particular to a word."

It had been written in portions, at different times.  I read what 
follows:


"I came to the cottage with two objects.  First, to see the dear 
one, if I could, once more--but only to see her--not to speak to 
her or let her know that I was near.  The other object, to elude 
pursuit and to be lost.  Do not blame the mother for her share.  
The assistance that she rendered me, she rendered on my strongest 
assurance that it was for the dear one's good.  You remember her 
dead child.  The men's consent I bought, but her help was freely 
given."


"'I came.'  That was written," said my companion, "when she rested 
there.  It bears out what I made of it.  I was right."

The next was written at another time:


"I have wandered a long distance, and for many hours, and I know 
that I must soon die.  These streets!  I have no purpose but to 
die.  When I left, I had a worse, but I am saved from adding that 
guilt to the rest.  Cold, wet, and fatigue are sufficient causes 
for my being found dead, but I shall die of others, though I suffer 
from these.  It was right that all that had sustained me should 
give way at once and that I should die of terror and my conscience.


"Take courage," said Mr. Bucket.  "There's only a few words more."

Those, too, were written at another time.  To all appearance, 
almost in the dark:


"I have done all I could do to be lost.  I shall be soon forgotten 
so, and shall disgrace him least.  I have nothing about me by which 
I can be recognized.  This paper I part with now.  The place where 
I shall lie down, if I can get so far, has been often in my mind.  
Farewell.  Forgive."


Mr. Bucket, supporting me with his arm, lowered me gently into my 
chair.  "Cheer up!  Don't think me hard with you, my dear, but as 
soon as ever you feel equal to it, get your shoes on and be ready."

I did as he required, but I was left there a long time, praying for 
my unhappy mother.  They were all occupied with the poor girl, and 
I heard Mr. Woodcourt directing them and speaking to her often.  At 
length he came in with Mr. Bucket and said that as it was important 
to address her gently, he thought it best that I should ask her for 
whatever information we desired to obtain.  There was no doubt that 
she could now reply to questions if she were soothed and not 
alarmed.  The questions, Mr. Bucket said, were how she came by the 
letter, what passed between her and the person who gave her the 
letter, and where the person went.  Holding my mind as steadily as 
I could to these points, I went into the next room with them.  Mr. 
Woodcourt would have remained outside, but at my solicitation went 
in with us.

The poor girl was sitting on the floor where they had laid her 
down.  They stood around her, though at a little distance, that she 
might have air.  She was not pretty and looked weak and poor, but 
she had a plaintive and a good face, though it was still a little 
wild.  I kneeled on the ground beside her and put her poor head 
upon my shoulder, whereupon she drew her arm round my neck and 
burst into tears.

"My poor girl," said I, laying my face against her forehead, for 
indeed I was crying too, and trembling, "it seems cruel to trouble 
you now, but more depends on our knowing something about this 
letter than I could tell you in an hour."

She began piteously declaring that she didn't mean any harm, she 
didn't mean any harm, Mrs. Snagsby!

"We are all sure of that," said I.  "But pray tell me how you got 
it."

"Yes, dear lady, I will, and tell you true.  I'll tell true, 
indeed, Mrs. Snagsby."

"I am sure of that," said I.  "And how was it?"

"I had been out on an errand, dear lady--long after it was dark--
quite late; and when I came home, I found a common-looking person, 
all wet and muddy, looking up at our house.  When she saw me coming 
in at the door, she called me back and said did I live here.  And I 
said yes, and she said she knew only one or two places about here, 
but had lost her way and couldn't find them.  Oh, what shall I do, 
what shall I do!  They won't believe me!  She didn't say any harm 
to me, and I didn't say any harm to her, indeed, Mrs. Snagsby!"

It was necessary for her mistress to comfort her--which she did, I 
must say, with a good deal of contrition--before she could be got 
beyond this.

"She could not find those places," said I.

"No!" cried the girl, shaking her head.  "No!  Couldn't find them.  
And she was so faint, and lame, and miserable, Oh so wretched, that 
if you had seen her, Mr. Snagsby, you'd have given her half a 
crown, I know!"

"Well, Guster, my girl," said he, at first not knowing what to say.  
"I hope I should."

"And yet she was so well spoken," said the girl, looking at me with 
wide open eyes, "that it made a person's heart bleed.  And so she 
said to me, did I know the way to the burying ground?  And I asked 
her which burying ground.  And she said, the poor burying ground.  
And so I told her I had been a poor child myself, and it was 
according to parishes.  But she said she meant a poor burying 
ground not very far from here, where there was an archway, and a 
step, and an iron gate."

As I watched her face and soothed her to go on, I saw that Mr. 
Bucket received this with a look which I could not separate from 
one of alarm.

"Oh, dear, dear!" cried the girl, pressing her hair back with her 
hands.  "What shall I do, what shall I do!  She meant the burying 
ground where the man was buried that took the sleeping-stuff--that 
you came home and told us of, Mr. Snagsby--that frightened me so, 
Mrs. Snagsby.  Oh, I am frightened again.  Hold me!"

"You are so much better now," sald I.  "Pray, pray tell me more."

"Yes I will, yes I will!  But don't be angry with me, that's a dear 
lady, because I have been so ill."

Angry with her, poor soul!

"There!  Now I will, now I will.  So she said, could I tell her how 
to find it, and I said yes, and I told her; and she looked at me 
with eyes like almost as if she was blind, and herself all waving 
back.  And so she took out the letter, and showed it me, and said 
if she was to put that in the post-office, it would be rubbed out 
and not minded and never sent; and would I take it from her, and 
send it, and the messenger would be paid at the house.  And so I 
said yes, if it was no harm, and she said no--no harm.  And so I 
took it from her, and she said she had nothing to give me, and I 
said I was poor myself and consequently wanted nothing.  And so she 
said God bless you, and went."

"And did she go--"

"Yes," cried the girl, anticipating the inquiry.  "Yes!  She went 
the way I had shown her.  Then I came in, and Mrs. Snagsby came 
behind me from somewhere and laid hold of me, and I was 
frightened."

Mr. Woodcourt took her kindly from me.  Mr. Bucket wrapped me up, 
and immediately we were in the street.  Mr. Woodcourt hesitated, 
but I said, "Don't leave me now!" and Mr. Bucket added, "You'll be 
better with us, we may want you; don't lose time!"

I have the most confused impressions of that walk.  I recollect 
that it was neither night nor day, that morning was dawning but the 
street-lamps were not yet put out, that the sleet was still falling 
and that all the ways were deep with it.  I recollect a few chilled 
people passing in the streets.  I recollect the wet house-tops, the 
clogged and bursting gutters and water-spouts, the mounds of 
blackened ice and snow over which we passed, the narrowness of the 
courts by which we went.  At the same time I remember that the poor 
girl seemed to be yet telling her story audibly and plainly in my 
hearing, that I could feel her resting on my arm, that the stained 
house-fronts put on human shapes and looked at me, that great 
water-gates seemed to be opening and closing in my head or in the 
air, and that the unreal things were more substantial than the 
real.

At last we stood under a dark and miserable covered way, where one 
lamp was burning over an iron gate and where the morning faintly 
struggled in.  The gate was closed.  Beyond it was a burial ground
--a dreadful spot in which the night was very slowly stirring, but 
where I could dimly see heaps of dishonoured graves and stones, 
hemmed in by filthy houses with a few dull lights in their windows 
and on whose walls a thick humidity broke out like a disease.  On 
the step at the gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, 
which oozed and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity 
and horror, a woman lying--Jenny, the mother of the dead child.

I ran forward, but they stopped me, and Mr. Woodcourt entreated me 
with the greatest earnestness, even with tears, before I went up to 
the figure to listen for an instant to what Mr. Bucket said.  I did 
so, as I thought.  I did so, as I am sure.

"Miss Summerson, you'll understand me, if you think a moment.  They 
changed clothes at the cottage."

They changed clothes at the cottage.  I could repeat the words in 
my mind, and I knew what they meant of themselves, but I attached 
no meaning to them in any other connexion.

"And one returned," said Mr. Bucket, "and one went on.  And the one 
that went on only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive and 
then turned across country and went home.  Think a moment!"

I could repeat this in my mind too, but I had not the least idea 
what it meant.  I saw before me, lying on the step, the mother of 
the dead child.  She lay there with one arm creeping round a bar of 
the iron gate and seeming to embrace it.  She lay there, who had so 
lately spoken to my mother.  She lay there, a distressed, 
unsheltered, senseless creature.  She who had brought my mother's 
letter, who could give me the only clue to where my mother was; 
she, who was to guide us to rescue and save her whom we had sought 
so far, who had come to this condition by some means connected with 
my mother that I could not follow, and might be passing beyond our 
reach and help at that moment; she lay there, and they stopped me!  
I saw but did not comprehend the solemn and compassionate look in 
Mr. Woodcourt's face.  I saw but did not comprehend his touching 
the other on the breast to keep him back.  I saw him stand 
uncovered in the bitter air, with a reverence for something.  But 
my understanding for all this was gone.

I even heard it said between them, "Shall she go?"

"She had better go.  Her hands should be the first to touch her.  
They have a higher right than ours."

I passed on to the gate and stooped down.  I lifted the heavy head, 
put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face.  And it was my 
mother, cold and dead.



CHAPTER LX

Perspective


I proceed to other passages of my narrative.  From the goodness of 
all about me I derived such consolation as I can never think of 
unmoved.  I have already said so much of myself, and so much still 
remains, that I will not dwell upon my sorrow.  I had an illness, 
but it was not a long one; and I would avoid even this mention of 
it if I could quite keep down the recollection of their sympathy.

I proceed to other passages of my narrative.

During the time of my illness, we were still in London, where Mrs. 
Woodcourt had come, on my guardian's invitation, to stay with us.  
When my guardian thought me well and cheerful enough to talk with 
him in our old way--though I could have done that sooner if he 
would have believed me--I resumed my work and my chair beside his.  
He had appointed the time himself, and we were alone.

"Dame Trot," said he, receiving me with a kiss, "welcome to the 
growlery again, my dear.  I have a scheme to develop, little woman.  
I propose to remain here, perhaps for six months, perhaps for a 
longer time--as it may be.  Quite to settle here for a while, in 
short."

"And in the meanwhile leave Bleak House?" said I.

"Aye, my dear?  Bleak House," he returned, "must learn to take care 
of itself."

I thought his tone sounded sorrowful, but looking at him, I saw his 
kind face lighted up by its pleasantest smile.

"Bleak House," he repeated--and his tone did NOT sound sorrowful, I 
found--"must learn to take care of itself.  It is a long way from 
Ada, my dear, and Ada stands much in need of you."

"It's like you, guardian," said I, "to have been taking that into 
consideration for a happy surprise to both of us."

"Not so disinterested either, my dear, if you mean to extol me for 
that virtue, since if you were generally on the road, you could be 
seldom with me.  And besides, I wish to hear as much and as often 
of Ada as I can in this condition of estrangement from poor Rick.  
Not of her alone, but of him too, poor fellow."

"Have you seen Mr. Woodcourt, this morning, guardian?"

"I see Mr. Woodcourt every morning, Dame Durden."

"Does he still say the same of Richard?"

"Just the same.  He knows of no direct bodily illness that he has; 
on the contrary, he believes that he has none.  Yet he is not easy 
about him; who CAN be?"

My dear girl had been to see us lately every day, some times twice 
in a day.  But we had foreseen, all along, that this would only 
last until I was quite myself.  We knew full well that her fervent 
heart was as full of affection and gratitude towards her cousin 
John as it had ever been, and we acquitted Richard of laying any 
injunctions upon her to stay away; but we knew on the other hand 
that she felt it a part of her duty to him to be sparing of her 
visits at our house.  My guardian's delicacy had soon perceived 
this and had tried to convey to her that he thought she was right.

"Dear, unfortunate, mistaken Richard," said I.  "When will he awake 
from his delusion!"

"He is not in the way to do so now, my dear," replied my guardian.  
"The more he suffers, the more averse he will be to me, having made 
me the principal representative of the great occasion of his 
suffering."

I could not help adding, "So unreasonably!"

"Ah, Dame Trot, Dame Trot," returned my guardian, "what shall we 
find reasonable in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!  Unreason and injustice 
at the top, unreason and injustice at the heart and at the bottom, 
unreason and injustice from beginning to end--if it ever has an 
end--how should poor Rick, always hovering near it, pluck reason 
out of it?  He no more gathers grapes from thorns or figs from 
thistles than older men did in old times."

His gentleness and consideration for Richard whenever we spoke of 
him touched me so that I was always silent on this subject very 
soon.

"I suppose the Lord Chancellor, and the Vice Chancellors, and the 
whole Chancery battery of great guns would be infinitely astonished 
by such unreason and injustice in one of their suitors," pursued my 
guardian.  "When those learned gentlemen begin to raise moss-roses 
from the powder they sow in their wigs, I shall begin to be 
astonished too!"

He checked himself in glancing towards the window to look where the 
wind was and leaned on the back of my chair instead.

"Well, well, little woman!  To go on, my dear.  This rock we must 
leave to time, chance, and hopeful circumstance.  We must not 
shipwreck Ada upon it.  She cannot afford, and he cannot afford, 
the remotest chance of another separation from a friend.  Therefore 
I have particularly begged of Woodcourt, and I now particularly beg 
of you, my dear, not to move this subject with Rick.  Let it rest.  
Next week, next month, next year, sooner or later, he will see me 
with clearer eyes.  I can wait."

But I had already discussed it with him, I confessed; and so, I 
thought, had Mr. Woodcourt.

"So he tells me," returned my guardian.  "Very good.  He has made 
his protest, and Dame Durden has made hers, and there is nothing 
more to be said about it.  Now I come to Mrs. Woodcourt.  How do 
you like her, my dear?"

In answer to this question, which was oddly abrupt, I said I liked 
her very much and thought she was more agreeable than she used to 
be.

"I think so too," said my guardian.  "Less pedigree?  Not so much 
of Morgan ap--what's his name?"

That was what I meant, I acknowledged, though he was a very 
harmless person, even when we had had more of him.

"Still, upon the whole, he is as well in his native mountains," 
said my guardian.  "I agree with you.  Then, little woman, can I do 
better for a time than retain Mrs. Woodcourt here?"

No.  And yet--

My guardian looked at me, waiting for what I had to say.

I had nothing to say.  At least I had nothing in my mind that I 
could say.  I had an undefined impression that it might have been 
better if we had had some other inmate, but I could hardly have 
explained why even to myself.  Or, if to myself, certainly not to 
anybody else.

"You see," said my guardian, "our neighbourhood is in Woodcourt's 
way, and he can come here to see her as often as he likes, which is 
agreeable to them both; and she is familiar to us and fond of you."

Yes.  That was undeniable.  I had nothing to say against it.  I 
could not have suggested a better arrangement, but I was not quite 
easy in my mind.  Esther, Esther, why not?  Esther, think!

"It is a very good plan indeed, dear guardian, and we could not do 
better."

"Sure, little woman?"

Quite sure.  I had had a moment's time to think, since I had urged 
that duty on myself, and I was quite sure.

"Good," said my guardian.  "It shall be done.  Carried 
unanimously."

"Carried unanimously," I repeated, going on with my work.

It was a cover for his book-table that I happened to be 
ornamenting.  It had been laid by on the night preceding my sad 
journey and never resumed.  I showed it to him now, and he admired 
it highly.  After I had explained the pattern to him and all the 
great effects that were to come out by and by, I thought I would go 
back to our last theme.

"You said, dear guardian, when we spoke of Mr. Woodcourt before Ada 
left us, that you thought he would give a long trial to another 
country.  Have you been advising him since?"

"Yes, little woman, pretty often."

"Has he decided to do so?"

"I rather think not."

"Some other prospect has opened to him, perhaps?" said I.

"Why--yes--perhaps," returned my guardian, beginning his answer in 
a very deliberate manner.  "About half a year hence or so, there is 
a medical attendant for the poor to be appointed at a certain place 
in Yorkshire.  It is a thriving place, pleasantly situated--streams 
and streets, town and country, mill and moor--and seems to present 
an opening for such a man.  I mean a man whose hopes and aims may 
sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the 
ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough 
after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good 
service leading to no other.  All generous spirits are ambitious, I 
suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, 
instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I 
care for.  It is Woodcourt's kind."

"And will he get this appointment?" I asked.

"Why, little woman," returned my guardian, smiling, "not being an 
oracle, I cannot confidently say, but I think so.  His reputation 
stands very high; there were people from that part of the country 
in the shipwreck; and strange to say, I believe the best man has 
the best chance.  You must not suppose it to be a fine endowment.  
It is a very, very commonplace affair, my dear, an appointment to a 
great amount of work and a small amount of pay; but better things 
will gather about it, it may be fairly hoped."

"The poor of that place will have reason to bless the choice if it 
falls on Mr. Woodcourt, guardian."

"You are right, little woman; that I am sure they will."

We said no more about it, nor did he say a word about the future of 
Bleak House.  But it was the first time I had taken my seat at his 
side in my mourning dress, and that accounted for it, I considered.

I now began to visit my dear girl every day in the dull dark corner 
where she lived.  The morning was my usual time, but whenever I 
found I had an hour or so to spare, I put on my bonnet and bustled 
off to Chancery Lane.  They were both so glad to see me at all 
hours, and used to brighten up so when they heard me opening the 
door and coming in (being quite at home, I never knocked), that I 
had no fear of becoming troublesome just yet.

On these occasions I frequently found Richard absent.  At other 
times he would be writing or reading papers in the cause at that 
table of his, so covered with papers, which was never disturbed.  
Sometimes I would come upon him lingering at the door of Mr. 
Vholes's office.  Sometimes I would meet him in the neighbourhood 
lounging about and biting his nails.  I often met him wandering in 
Lincoln's Inn, near the place where I had first seen him, oh how 
different, how different!

That the money Ada brought him was melting away with the candles I 
used to see burning after dark in Mr. Vholes's office I knew very 
well.  It was not a large amount in the beginning, he had married 
in debt, and I could not fail to understand, by this time, what was 
meant by Mr. Vholes's shoulder being at the wheel--as I still heard 
it was.  My dear made the best of housekeepers and tried hard to 
save, but I knew that they were getting poorer and poorer every 
day.

She shone in the miserable corner like a beautiful star.  She 
adorned and graced it so that it became another place.  Paler than 
she had been at home, and a little quieter than I had thought 
natural when she was yet so cheerful and hopeful, her face was so 
unshadowed that I half believed she was blinded by her love for 
Richard to his ruinous career.

I went one day to dine with them while I was under this impression.  
As I turned into Symond's Inn, I met little Miss Flite coming out.  
She had been to make a stately call upon the wards in Jarndyce, as 
she still called them, and had derived the highest gratification 
from that ceremony.  Ada had already told me that she called every 
Monday at five o'clock, with one little extra white bow in her 
bonnet, which never appeared there at any other time, and with her 
largest reticule of documents on her arm.

"My dear!" she began.  "So delighted!  How do you do!  So glad to 
see you.  And you are going to visit our interesting Jarndyce 
wards?  TO be sure!  Our beauty is at home, my dear, and will be 
charmed to see you."

"Then Richard is not come in yet?" said I.  "I am glad of that, for 
I was afraid of being a little late."

"No, he is not come in," returned Miss Flite.  "He has had a long 
day in court.  I left him there with Vholes.  You don't like 
Vholes, I hope?  DON'T like Vholes.  Dan-gerous man!"

"I am afraid you see Richard oftener than ever now," said I.

"My dearest," returned Miss Flite, "daily and hourly.  You know 
what I told you of the attraction on the Chancellor's table?  My 
dear, next to myself he is the most constant suitor in court.  He 
begins quite to amuse our little party.  Ve-ry friendly little 
party, are we not?"

It was miserable to hear this from her poor mad lips, though it was 
no surprise.

"In short, my valued friend," pursued Miss Flite, advancing her 
lips to my ear with an air of equal patronage and mystery, "I must 
tell you a secret.  I have made him my executor.  Nominated, 
constituted, and appointed him.  In my will.  Ye-es."

"Indeed?" said I.

"Ye-es," repeated Miss Flite in her most genteel accents, "my 
executor, administrator, and assign.  (Our Chancery phrases, my 
love.)  I have reflected that if I should wear out, he will be able 
to watch that judgment.  Being so very regular in his attendance."

It made me sigh to think of him.

"I did at one time mean," said Miss Flite, echoing the sigh, "to 
nominate, constitute, and appoint poor Gridley.  Also very regular, 
my charming girl.  I assure you, most exemplary!  But he wore out, 
poor man, so I have appointed his successor.  Don't mention it.  
This is in confidence."

She carefully opened her reticule a little way and showed me a 
folded piece of paper inside as the appointment of which she spoke.

"Another secret, my dear.  I have added to my collection of birds."

"Really, Miss Flite?" said I, knowing how it pleased her to have 
her confidence received with an appearance of interest.

She nodded several times, and her face became overcast and gloomy.  
"Two more.  I call them the Wards in Jarndyce.  They are caged up 
with all the others.  With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, 
Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, 
Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, 
Gammon, and Spinach!"

The poor soul kissed me with the most troubled look I had ever seen 
in her and went her way.  Her manner of running over the names of 
her birds, as if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own 
lips, quite chilled me.

This was not a cheering preparation for my visit, and I could have 
dispensed with the company of Mr. Vholes, when Richard (who arrived 
within a minute or two after me) brought him to share our dinner.  
Although it was a very plain one, Ada and Richard were for some 
minutes both out of the room together helping to get ready what we 
were to eat and drink.  Mr. Vholes took that opportunity of holding 
a little conversation in a low voice with me.  He came to the 
window where I was sitting and began upon Symond's Inn.

"A dull place, Miss Summerson, for a life that is not an official 
one," said Mr. Vholes, smearing the glass with his black glove to 
make it clearer for me.

"There is not much to see here," said I.

"Nor to hear, miss," returned Mr. Vholes.  "A little music does 
occasionally stray in, but we are not musical in the law and soon 
eject it.  I hope Mr. Jarndyce is as well as his friends could wish 
him?"

I thanked Mr. Vholes and said he was quite well.

"I have not the pleasure to be admitted among the number of his 
friends myself," said Mr. Vholes, "and I am aware that the 
gentlemen of our profession are sometimes regarded in such quarters 
with an unfavourable eye.  Our plain course, however, under good 
report and evil report, and all kinds of prejudice (we are the 
victims of prejudice), is to have everything openly carried on.  
How do you find Mr. C. looking, Miss Summerson?"

"He looks very ill.  Dreadfully anxious."

"Just so," said Mr. Vholes.

He stood behind me with his long black figure reaching nearly to 
the ceiling of those low rooms, feeling the pimples on his face as 
if they were ornaments and speaking inwardly and evenly as though 
there were not a human passion or emotion in his nature.

"Mr. Woodcourt is in attendance upon Mr. C., I believe?" he 
resumed.

"Mr. Woodcourt is his disinterested friend," I answered.

"But I mean in professional attendance, medical attendance."

"That can do little for an unhappy mind," said I.

"Just so," said Mr. Vholes.

So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard 
were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser and there were 
something of the vampire in him.

"Miss Summerson," said Mr. Vholes, very slowly rubbing his gloved 
hands, as if, to his cold sense of touch, they were much the same 
in black kid or out of it, "this was an ill-advised marriage of Mr. 
C.'s."

I begged he would excuse me from discussing it.  They had been 
engaged when they were both very young, I told him (a little 
indignantly) and when the prospect before them was much fairer and 
brighter.  When Richard had not yielded himself to the unhappy 
influence which now darkened his life.

"Just so," assented Mr. Vholes again.  "Still, with a view to 
everything being openly carried on, I will, with your permission, 
Miss Summerson, observe to you that I consider this a very ill-
advised marriage indeed.  I owe the opinion not only to Mr. C.'s 
connexions, against whom I should naturally wish to protect myself, 
but also to my own reputation--dear to myself as a professional man 
aiming to keep respectable; dear to my three girls at home, for 
whom I am striving to realize some little independence; dear, I 
will even say, to my aged father, whom it is my privilege to 
support."

"It would become a very different marriage, a much happier and 
better marriage, another marriage altogether, Mr. Vholes," said I, 
"if Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in 
which you are engaged with him."

Mr. Vholes, with a noiseless cough--or rather gasp--into one of his 
black gloves, inclined his head as if he did not wholly dispute 
even that.

"Miss Summerson," he said, "it may be so; and I freely admit that 
the young lady who has taken Mr. C.'s name upon herself in so ill-
advised a manner--you will I am sure not quarrel with me for 
throwing out that remark again, as a duty I owe to Mr. C.'s 
connexions--is a highly genteel young lady.  Business has prevented 
me from mixing much with general society in any but a professional 
character; still I trust I am competent to perceive that she is a 
highly genteel young lady.  As to beauty, I am not a judge of that 
myself, and I never did give much attention to it from a boy, but I 
dare say the young lady is equally eligible in that point of view.  
She is considered so (I have heard) among the clerks in the Inn, 
and it is a point more in their way than in mine.  In reference to 
Mr. C.'s pursult of his interests--"

"Oh! His interests, Mr. Vholes!"

"Pardon me," returned Mr. Vholes, going on in exactly the same 
inward and dispassionate manner.  "Mr. C. takes certain interests 
under certain wills disputed in the suit.  It is a term we use.  In 
reference to Mr. C,'s pursuit of his interests, I mentioned to you, 
Miss Summerson, the first time I had the pleasure of seeing you, in 
my desire that everything should he openly carried on--I used those 
words, for I happened afterwards to note them in my diary, which is 
producible at any time--I mentioned to you that Mr. C. had laid 
down the principle of watching his own interests, and that when a 
client of mine laid down a principle which was not of an immoral 
(that is to say, unlawful) nature, it devolved upon me to carry it 
out.  I HAVE carried it out; I do carry it out.  But I will not 
smooth things over to any connexion of Mr. C.'s on any account.  As 
open as I was to Mr. Jarndyce, I am to you.  I regard it in the 
light of a professional duty to be so, though it can be charged to 
no one.  I openly say, unpalatable as it may be, that I consider 
Mr. C.'s affairs in a very bad way, that I consider Mr. C. himself 
in a very bad way, and that I regard this as an exceedingly ill-
advised marriage.  Am I here, sir?  Yes, I thank you; I am here, 
Mr. C., and enjoying the pleasure of some agreeable conversation 
with Miss Summerson, for which I have to thank you very much, sir!"

He broke off thus in answer to Richard, who addressed him as he 
came into the room.  By this time I too well understood Mr. 
Vholes's scrupulous way of saving himself and his respectability 
not to feel that our worst fears did but keep pace with his 
client's progress.

We sat down to dinner, and I had an opportunity of observing 
Richard, anxiously.  I was not disturbed by Mr. Vholes (who took 
off his gloves to dine), though he sat opposite to me at the small 
table, for I doubt if, looking up at all, he once removed his eyes 
from his host's face.  I found Richard thin and languid, slovenly 
in his dress, abstracted in his manner, forcing his spirits now and 
then, and at other intervals relapsing into a dull thoughtfulness.  
About his large bright eyes that used to be so merry there was a 
wanness and a restlessness that changed them altogether.  1 cannot 
use the expression that he looked old.  There is a ruin of youth 
which is not like age, and into such a ruin Richard's youth and 
youthful beauty had all fallen away.

He ate little and seemed indifferent what it was, showed himself to 
be much more impatient than he used to be, and was quick even with 
Ada.  I thought at first that his old light-hearted manner was all 
gone, but it shone out of him sometimes as I had occasionally known 
little momentary glimpses of my own old face to look out upon me 
from the glass.  His laugh had not quite left him either, but it 
was like the echo of a joyful sound, and that is always sorrowful.

Yet he was as glad as ever, in his old affectionate way, to have me 
there, and we talked of the old times pleasantly.  These did not 
appear to be interesting to Mr. Vholes, though he occasionally made 
a gasp which I believe was his smile.  He rose shortly after dinner 
and said that with the permission of the ladies he would retire to 
his office.

"Always devoted to business, Vholes!" cried Richard.

"Yes, Mr. C.," he returned, "the interests of clients are never to 
be neglected, sir.  They are paramount in the thoughts of a 
professional man like myself, who wishes to preserve a good name 
among his fellow-practitioners and society at large.  My denying 
myself the pleasure of the present agreeable conversation may not 
be wholly irrespective of your own interests, Mr. C."

Richard expressed himself quite sure of that and lighted Mr. Vholes 
out.  On his return he told us, more than once, that Vholes was a 
good fellow, a safe fellow, a man who did what he pretended to do, 
a very good fellow indeed!  He was so defiant about it that it 
struck me he had begun to doubt Mr. Vholes.

Then he threw himself on the sofa, tired out; and Ada and I put 
things to rights, for they had no other servant than the woman who 
attended to the chambers.  My dear girl had a cottage piano there 
and quietly sat down to sing some of Richard's favourites, the lamp 
being first removed into the next room, as he complained of its 
hurting his eyes.

I sat between them, at my dear girl's side, and felt very 
melancholy listening to her sweet voice.  I think Richard did too; 
I think he darkened the room for that reason.  She had been singing 
some time, rising between whiles to bend over him and speak to him, 
when Mr. Woodcourt came in.  Then he sat down by Richard and half 
playfully, half earnestly, quite naturally and easily, found out 
how he felt and where he had been all day.  Presently he proposed 
to accompany him in a short walk on one of the bridges, as it was a 
moonlight airy night; and Richard readily consenting, they went out 
together.

They left my dear girl still sitting at the piano and me still 
sitting beside her.  When they were gone out, I drew my arm round 
her waist.  She put her left hand in mine (I was sitting on that 
side), but kept her right upon the keys, going over and over them 
without striking any note.

"Esther, my dearest," she said, breaking silence, "Richard is never 
so well and I am never so easy about him as when he is with Allan 
Woodcourt.  We have to thank you for that."

I pointed out to my darling how this could scarcely be, because Mr. 
Woodcourt had come to her cousin John's house and had known us all 
there, and because he had always liked Richard, and Richard had 
always liked him, and--and so forth.

"All true," said Ada, "but that he is such a devoted friend to us 
we owe to you."

I thought it best to let my dear girl have her way and to say no 
more about it.  So I said as much.  I said it lightly, because I 
felt her trembling.

"Esther, my dearest, I want to be a good wife, a very, very good 
wife indeed.  You shall teach me."

I teach!  I said no more, for I noticed the hand that was 
fluttering over the keys, and I knew that it was not I who ought to 
speak, that it was she who had something to say to me.

"When I married Richard I was not insensible to what was before 
him.  I had been perfectly happy for a long time with you, and I 
had never known any trouble or anxiety, so loved and cared for, but 
I understood the danger he was in, dear Esther."

"I know, I know, my darling."

"When we were married I had some little hope that I might be able 
to convince him of his mistake, that he might come to regard it in 
a new way as my husband and not pursue it all the more desperately 
for my sake--as he does.  But if I had not had that hope, I would 
have married him just the same, Esther.  Just the same!"

In the momentary firmness of the hand that was never still--a 
firmness inspired by the utterance of these last words, and dying 
away with them--I saw the confirmation of her earnest tones.

"You are not to think, my dearest Esther, that I fail to see what 
you see and fear what you fear.  No one can understand him better 
than I do.  The greatest wisdom that ever lived in the world could 
scarcely know Richard better than my love does."

She spoke so modestly and softly and her trembling hand expressed 
such agitation as it moved to and fro upon the silent notes!  My 
dear, dear girl!

"I see him at his worst every day.  I watch him in his sleep.  I 
know every change of his face.  But when I married Richard I was 
quite determined, Esther, if heaven would help me, never to show 
him that I grieved for what he did and so to make him more unhappy.  
I want him, when he comes home, to find no trouble in my face.  I 
want him, when he looks at me, to see what he loved in me.  I 
married him to do this, and this supports me."

I felt her trembling more.  I waited for what was yet to come, and 
I now thought I began to know what it was.

"And something else supports me, Esther."

She stopped a minute.  Stopped speaking only; her hand was still in 
motion.

"I look forward a little while, and I don't know what great aid may 
come to me.  When Richard turns his eyes upon me then, there may be 
something lying on my breast more eloquent than I have been, with 
greater power than mine to show him his true course and win him 
back."

Her hand stopped now.  She clasped me in her arms, and I clasped 
her in mine.

"If that little creature should fail too, Esther, I still look 
forward.  I look forward a long while, through years and years, and 
think that then, when I am growing old, or when I am dead perhaps, 
a beautiful woman, his daughter, happily married, may be proud of 
him and a blessing to him.  Or that a generous brave man, as 
handsome as he used to be, as hopeful, and far more happy, may walk 
in the sunshine with him, honouring his grey head and saying to 
himself, 'I thank God this is my father!  Ruined by a fatal 
inheritance, and restored through me!'"

Oh, my sweet girl, what a heart was that which beat so fast against 
me!

"These hopes uphold me, my dear Esther, and I know they will.  
Though sometimes even they depart from me before a dread that 
arises when I look at Richard."

I tried to cheer my darling, and asked her what it was.  Sobbing 
and weeping, she replied, "That he may not live to see his child."



CHAPTER LXI

A Discovery


The days when I frequented that miserable corner which my dear girl 
brightened can never fade in my remembrance.  I never see it, and I 
never wish to see it now; I have been there only once since, but in 
my memory there is a mournful glory shining on the place which will 
shine for ever.

Not a day passed without my going there, of course.  At first I 
found Mr. Skimpole there, on two or three occasions, idly playing 
the piano and talking in his usual vivacious strain.  Now, besides 
my very much mistrusting the probability of his being there without 
making Richard poorer, I felt as if there were something in his 
careless gaiety too inconsistent with what I knew of the depths of 
Ada's life.  I clearly perceived, too, that Ada shared my feelings.  
I therefore resolved, after much thinking of it, to make a private 
visit to Mr. Skimpole and try delicately to explain myself.  My 
dear girl was the great consideration that made me bold.

I set off one morning, accompanied by Charley, for Somers Town.  As 
I approached the house, I was strongly inclined to turn back, for I 
felt what a desperate attempt it was to make an impression on Mr. 
Skimpole and how extremely likely it was that he would signally 
defeat me.  However, I thought that being there, I would go through 
with it.  I knocked with a trembling hand at Mr. Skimpole's door--
literally with a hand, for the knocker was gone--and after a long 
parley gained admission from an Irishwoman, who was in the area 
when I knocked, breaking up the lid of a water-butt with a poker to 
light the fire with.

Mr. Skimpole, lying on the sofa in his room, playing the flute a 
little, was enchanted to see me.  Now, who should receive me, he 
asked.  Who would I prefer for mistress of the ceremonies?  Would I 
have his Comedy daughter, his Beauty daughter, or his Sentiment 
daughter?  Or would I have all the daughters at once in a perfect 
nosegay?

I replied, half defeated already, that I wished to speak to himself 
only if he would give me leave.

'My dear Miss Summerson, most joyfully!  Of course," he said, 
bringing his chair nearer mine and breaking into his fascinating 
smile, of course it's not business.  Then it's pleasure!"

I said it certainly was not business that I came upon, but it was 
not quite a pleasant matter.

"Then, my dear Miss Summerson," said he with the frankest gaiety, 
"don't allude to it.  Why should you allude to anything that is NOT 
a pleasant matter?  I never do.  And you are a much pleasanter 
creature, in every point of view, than I.  You are perfectly 
pleasant; I am imperfectly pleasant; then, if I never allude to an 
unpleasant matter, how much less should you!  So that's disposed 
of, and we will talk of something else."

Although I was embarrassed, I took courage to intimate that I still 
wished to pursue the subject.

"I should think it a mistake," said Mr. Skimpole with his airy 
laugh, "if I thought Miss Summerson capable of making one.  But I 
don't!"

"Mr. Skimpole," said I, raising my eyes to his, "I have so often 
heard you say that you are unacquainted with the common affairs of 
life--"

"Meaning our three banking-house friends, L, S, and who's the 
junior partner?  D?" said Mr. Skimpole, brightly.  "Not an idea of 
them!"

"--That perhaps," I went on, "you will excuse my boldness on that 
account.  I think you ought most seriously to know that Richard is 
poorer than he was."

"Dear me!" said Mr. Skimpole.  "So am I, they tell me."

"And in very embarrassed circumstances."

"Parallel case, exactly!" said Mr. Skimpole with a delighted 
countenance.

"This at present naturally causes Ada much secret anxiety, and as I 
think she is less anxious when no claims are made upon her by 
visitors, and as Richard has one uneasiness always heavy on his 
mind, it has occurred to me to take the liberty of saying that--if 
you would--not--"

I was coming to the point with great difficulty when he took me by 
both hands and with a radiant face and in the liveliest way 
anticipated it.

"Not go there?  Certainly not, my dear Miss Summerson, most 
assuredly not.  Why SHOULD I go there?  When I go anywhere, I go 
for pleasure.  I don't go anywhere for pain, because I was made for 
pleasure.  Pain comes to ME when it wants me.  Now, I have had very 
little pleasure at our dear Richard's lately, and your practical 
sagacity demonstrates why.  Our young friends, losing the youthful 
poetry which was once so captivating in them, begin to think, 'This 
is a man who wants pounds.'  So I am; I always want pounds; not for 
myself, but because tradespeople always want them of me.  Next, our 
young friends begin to think, becoming mercenary, 'This is the man 
who HAD pounds, who borrowed them,' which I did.  I always borrow 
pounds.  So our young friends, reduced to prose (which is much to 
be regretted), degenerate in their power of imparting pleasure to 
me.  Why should I go to see them, therefore?  Absurd!"

Through the beaming smile with which he regarded me as he reasoned 
thus, there now broke forth a look of disinterested benevolence 
quite astonishing.

"Besides," he said, pursuing his argument in his tone of light-
hearted conviction, "if I don't go anywhere for pain--which would 
be a perversion of the intention of my being, and a monstrous thing 
to do--why should I go anywhere to be the cause of pain?  If I went 
to see our young friends in their present ill-regulated state of 
mind, I should give them pain.  The associations with me would be 
disagreeable.  They might say, 'This is the man who had pounds and 
who can't pay pounds,' which I can't, of course; nothing could be 
more out of the question!  Then kindness requires that I shouldn't 
go near them--and I won't."

He finished by genially kissing my hand and thanking me.  Nothing 
but Miss Summerson's fine tact, he said, would have found this out 
for him.

I was much disconcerted, but I reflected that if the main point 
were gained, it mattered little how strangely he perverted 
everything leading to it.  I had determined to mention something 
else, however, and I thought I was not to be put off in that.

"Mr. Skimpole," said I, "I must take the liberty of saying before I 
conclude my visit that I was much surprised to learn, on the best 
authority, some little time ago, that you knew with whom that poor 
boy left Bleak House and that you accepted a present on that 
occasion.  I have not mentioned it to my guardian, for I fear it 
would hurt him unnecessarily; but I may say to you that I was much 
surprised."

"No?  Really surprised, my dear Miss Summerson?" he returned 
inquiringly, raising his pleasant eyebrows.

"Greatly surprised."

He thought about it for a little while with a highly agreeable and 
whimsical expression of face, then quite gave it up and said in his 
most engaging manner, "You know what a child I am.  Why surprised?"

I was reluctant to enter minutely into that question, but as he 
begged I would, for he was really curious to know, I gave him to 
understand in the gentlest words I could use that his conduct 
seemed to involve a disregard of several moral obligations.  He was 
much amused and interested when he heard this and said, "No, 
really?" with ingenuous simplicity.

"You know I don't intend to be responsible.  I never could do it.  
Responsibility is a thing that has always been above me--or below 
me," said Mr. Skimpole.  "I don't even know which; but as I 
understand the way in which my dear Miss Summerson (always 
remarkable for her practical good sense and clearness) puts this 
case, I should imagine it was chiefly a question of money, do you 
know?"

I incautiously gave a qualified assent to this.

"Ah!  Then you see," said Mr. Skimpole, shaking his head, "I am 
hopeless of understanding it."

I suggested, as I rose to go, that it was not right to betray my 
guardian's confidence for a bribe.

"My dear Miss Summerson," he returned with a candid hilarity that 
was all his own, "I can't be bribed."

"Not by Mr. Bucket?" said I.

"No," said he.  "Not by anybody.  I don't attach any value to 
money.  I don't care about it, I don't know about it, I don't want 
it, I don't keep it--it goes away from me directly.  How can I be 
bribed?"

I showed that I was of a different opinion, though I had not the 
capacity for arguing the question.

"On the contrary," said Mr. Skimpole, "I am exactly the man to be 
placed in a superior position in such a case as that.  I am above 
the rest of mankind in such a case as that.  I can act with 
philosophy in such a case as that.  I am not warped by prejudices, 
as an Italian baby is by bandages.  I am as free as the air.  I 
feel myself as far above suspicion as Caesar's wife."

Anything to equal the lightness of his manner and the playful 
impartiality with which he seemed to convince himself, as he tossed 
the matter about like a ball of feathers, was surely never seen in 
anybody else!

"Observe the case, my dear Miss Summerson.  Here is a boy received 
into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to.  
The boy being in bed, a man arrives--like the house that Jack 
built.  Here is the man who demands the boy who is received into 
the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to.  
Here is a bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is 
received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly 
object to.  Here is the Skimpole who accepts the bank-note produced 
by the man who demands the boy who is received into the house and 
put to bed in a state that I strongly object to.  Those are the 
facts.  Very well.  Should the Skimpole have refused the note?  WHY 
should the Skimpole have refused the note?  Skimpole protests to 
Bucket, 'What's this for?  I don't understand it, it is of no use 
to me, take it away.'  Bucket still entreats Skimpole to accept it.  
Are there reasons why Skimpole, not being warped by prejudices, 
should accept it?  Yes.  Skimpole perceives them.  What are they?  
Skimpole reasons with himself, this is a tamed lynx, an active 
police-officer, an intelligent man, a person of a peculiarly 
directed energy and great subtlety both of conception and 
execution, who discovers our friends and enemies for us when they 
run away, recovers our property for us when we are robbed, avenges 
us comfortably when we are murdered.  This active police-officer 
and intelligent man has acquired, in the exercise of his art, a 
strong faith in money; he finds it very useful to him, and he makes 
it very useful to society.  Shall I shake that faith in Bucket 
because I want it myself; shall I deliberately blunt one of 
Bucket's weapons; shall I positively paralyse Bucket in his next 
detective operation?  And again.  If it is blameable in Skimpole to 
take the note, it is blameable in Bucket to offer the note--much 
more blameable in Bucket, because he is the knowing man.  Now, 
Skimpole wishes to think well of Bucket; Skimpole deems it 
essential, in its little place, to the general cohesion of things, 
that he SHOULD think well of Bucket.  The state expressly asks him 
to trust to Bucket.  And he does.  And that's all he does!"

I had nothing to offer in reply to this exposition and therefore 
took my leave.  Mr. Skimpole, however, who was in excellent 
spirits, would not hear of my returning home attended only by 
"Little Coavinses," and accompanied me himself.  He entertained me 
on the way with a variety of delightful conversation and assured 
me, at parting, that he should never forget the fine tact with 
which I had found that out for him about our young friends.

As it so happened that I never saw Mr. Skimpole again, I may at 
once finish what I know of his history.  A coolness arose between 
him and my guardian, based principally on the foregoing grounds and 
on his having heartlessly disregarded my guardian's entreaties (as 
we afterwards learned from Ada) in reference to Richard.  His being 
heavily in my guardian's debt had nothing to do with their 
separation.  He died some five years afterwards and left a diary 
behind him, with letters and other materials towards his life, 
which was published and which showed him to have been the victim of 
a combination on the part of mankind against an amiable child.  It 
was considered very pleasant reading, but I never read more of it 
myself than the sentence on which I chanced to light on opening the 
book.  It was this: "Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have 
known, is the incarnation of selfishness."

And now I come to a part of my story touching myself very nearly 
indeed, and for which I was quite unprepared when the circumstance 
occurred.  Whatever little lingerings may have now and then revived 
in my mind associated with my poor old face had only revived as 
belonging to a part of my life that was gone--gone like my infancy 
or my childhood.  I have suppressed none of my many weaknesses on 
that subject, but have written them as faithfully as my memory has 
recalled them.  And I hope to do, and mean to do, the same down to 
the last words of these pages, which I see now not so very far 
before me.

The months were gliding away, and my dear girl, sustained by the 
hopes she had confided in me, was the same beautiful star in the 
miserable corner.  Richard, more worn and haggard, haunted the 
court day after day, listlessly sat there the whole day long when 
he knew there was no remote chance of the suit being mentioned, and 
became one of the stock sights of the place.  I wonder whether any 
of the gentlemen remembered him as he was when he first went there.

So completely was he absorbed in his fixed idea that he used to 
avow in his cheerful moments that he should never have breathed the 
fresh air now "but for Woodcourt."  It was only Mr. Woodcourt who 
could occasionally divert his attention for a few hours at a time 
and rouse him, even when he sunk into a lethargy of mind and body 
that alarmed us greatly, and the returns of which became more 
frequent as the months went on.  My dear girl was right in saying 
that he only pursued his errors the more desperately for her sake.  
I have no doubt that his desire to retrieve what he had lost was 
rendered the more intense by his grief for his young wife, and 
became like the madness of a gamester.

I was there, as I have mentioned, at all hours.  When I was there 
at night, I generally went home with Charley in a coach; sometimes 
my guardian would meet me in the neighbourhood, and we would walk 
home together.  One evening he had arranged to meet me at eight 
o'clock.  I could not leave, as I usually did, quite punctually at 
the time, for I was working for my dear girl and had a few stitches 
more to do to finish what I was about; but it was within a few 
minutes of the hour when I bundled up my little work-basket, gave 
my darling my last kiss for the night, and hurried downstairs.  Mr. 
Woodcourt went with me, as it was dusk.

When we came to the usual place of meeting--it was close by, and 
Mr. Woodcourt had often accompanied me before--my guardian was not 
there.  We waited half an hour, walking up and down, but there were 
no signs of him.  We agreed that he was either prevented from 
coming or that he had come and gone away, and Mr. Woodcourt 
proposed to walk home with me.

It was the first walk we had ever taken together, except that very 
short one to the usual place of meeting.  We spoke of Richard and 
Ada the whole way.  I did not thank him in words for what he had 
done--my appreciation of it had risen above all words then--but I 
hoped he might not be without some understanding of what I felt so 
strongly.

Arriving at home and going upstairs, we found that my guardian was 
out and that Mrs. Woodcourt was out too.  We were in the very same 
room into which I had brought my blushing girl when her youthful 
lover, now her so altered husband, was the choice of her young 
heart, the very same room from which my guardian and I had watched 
them going away through the sunlight in the fresh bloom of their 
hope and promise.

We were standing by the opened window looking down into the street 
when Mr. Woodcourt spoke to me.  I learned in a moment that he 
loved me.  I learned in a moment that my scarred face was all 
unchanged to him.  I learned in a moment that what I had thought 
was pity and compassion was devoted, generous, faithful love.  Oh, 
too late to know it now, too late, too late.  That was the first 
ungrateful thought I had.  Too late.

"When I returned," he told me, "when I came back, no richer than 
when I went away, and found you newly risen from a sick bed, yet so 
inspired by sweet consideration for others and so free from a 
selfish thought--"

"Oh, Mr. Woodcourt, forbear, forbear!" I entreated him.  "I do not 
deserve your high praise.  I had many selfish thoughts at that 
time, many!"

"Heaven knows, beloved of my life," said he, "that my praise is not 
a lover's praise, but the truth.  You do not know what all around 
you see in Esther Summerson, how many hearts she touches and 
awakens, what sacred admiration and what love she wins."

"Oh, Mr. Woodcourt," cried I, "it is a great thing to win love, it 
is a great thing to win love!  I am proud of it, and honoured by 
it; and the hearing of it causes me to shed these tears of mingled 
joy and sorrow--joy that I have won it, sorrow that I have not 
deserved it better; but I am not free to think of yours."

I said it with a stronger heart, for when he praised me thus and 
when I heard his voice thrill with his belief that what he said was 
true, I aspired to be more worthy of it.  It was not too late for 
that.  Although I closed this unforeseen page in my life to-night, 
I could be worthier of it all through my life.  And it was a 
comfort to me, and an impulse to me, and I felt a dignity rise up 
within me that was derived from him when I thought so.

He broke the silence.

"I should poorly show the trust that I have in the dear one who 
will evermore be as dear to me as now"--and the deep earnestness 
with which he said it at once strengthened me and made me weep--
"if, after her assurance that she is not free to think of my love, 
I urged it.  Dear Esther, let me only tell you that the fond idea 
of you which I took abroad was exalted to the heavens when I came 
home.  I have always hoped, in the first hour when I seemed to 
stand in any ray of good fortune, to tell you this.  I have always 
feared that I should tell it you in vain.  My hopes and fears are 
both fulfilled to-night.  I distress you.  I have said enough."

Something seemed to pass into my place that was like the angel he 
thought me, and I felt so sorrowful for the loss he had sustained!  
I wished to help him in his trouble, as I had wished to do when he 
showed that first commiseration for me.

"Dear Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "before we part to-night, something 
is left for me to say.  I never could say it as I wish--I never 
shall--but--"

I had to think again of being more deserving of his love and his 
affliction before I could go on.

"--I am deeply sensible of your generosity, and I shall treasure 
its remembrance to my dying hour.  I know full well how changed I 
am, I know you are not unacquainted with my history, and I know 
what a noble love that is which is so faithful.  What you have said 
to me could have affected me so much from no other lips, for there 
are none that could give it such a value to me.  It shall not be 
lost.  It shall make me better."

He covered his eyes with his hand and turned away his head.  How 
could I ever be worthy of those tears?

"If, in the unchanged intercourse we shall have together--in 
tending Richard and Ada, and I hope in many happier scenes of life
--you ever find anything in me which you can honestly think is 
better than it used to be, believe that it will have sprung up from 
to-night and that I shall owe it to you.  And never believe, dear 
dear Mr. Woodcourt, never believe that I forget this night or that 
while my heart beats it can be insensible to the pride and joy of 
having been beloved by you."

He took my hand and kissed it.  He was like himself again, and I 
felt still more encouraged.

"I am induced by what you said just now," said I, "to hope that you 
have succeeded in your endeavour."

"I have," he answered.  "With such help from Mr. Jarndyce as you 
who know him so well can imagine him to have rendered me, I have 
succeeded."

"Heaven bless him for it," said I, giving him my hand; "and heaven 
bless you in all you do!"

"I shall do it better for the wish," he answered; "it will make me 
enter on these new duties as on another sacred trust from you."

"Ah!  Richard!" I exclaimed involuntarily, "What will he do when 
you are gone!"

"I am not required to go yet; I would not desert him, dear Miss 
Summerson, even if I were."

One other thing I felt it needful to touch upon before he left me.  
I knew that I should not be worthier of the love I could not take 
if I reserved it.

"Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "you will be glad to know from my lips 
before I say good night that in the future, which is clear and 
bright before me, I am most happy, most fortunate, have nothing to 
regret or desire."

It was indeed a glad hearing to him, he replied.

"From my childhood I have been," said I, "the object of the 
untiring goodness of the best of human beings, to whom I am so 
bound by every tie of attachment, gratitude, and love, that nothing 
I could do in the compass of a life could express the feelings of a 
single day."

"I share those feelings," he returned.  "You speak of Mr. 
Jarndyce."

"You know his virtues well," said I, "but few can know the 
greatness of his character as I know it.  All its highest and best 
qualities have been revealed to me in nothing more brightly than in 
the shaping out of that future in which I am so happy.  And if your 
highest homage and respect had not been his already--which I know 
they are--they would have been his, I think, on this assurance and 
in the feeling it would have awakened in you towards him for my 
sake."

He fervently replied that indeed indeed they would have been.  I 
gave him my hand again.

"Good night," I said, "Good-bye."

"The first until we meet to-morrow, the second as a farewell to 
this theme between us for ever."

"Yes."

"Good night; good-bye."

He left me, and I stood at the dark window watching the street.  
His love, in all its constancy and generosity, had come so suddenly 
upon me that he had not left me a minute when my fortitude gave way 
again and the street was blotted out by my rushing tears.

But they were not tears of regret and sorrow.  No.  He had called 
me the beloved of his life and had said I would be evermore as dear 
to him as I was then, and I felt as if my heart would not hold the 
triumph of having heard those words.  My first wild thought had 
died away.  It was not too late to hear them, for it was not too 
late to be animated by them to be good, true, grateful, and 
contented.  How easy my path, how much easier than his!



CHAPTER LXII

Another Discovery


I had not the courage to see any one that night.  I had not even 
the courage to see myself, for I was afraid that my tears might a 
little reproach me.  I went up to my room in the dark, and prayed 
in the dark, and lay down in the dark to sleep.  I had no need of 
any light to read my guardian's letter by, for I knew it by heart.  
I took it from the place where I kept it, and repeated its contents 
by its own clear light of integrity and love, and went to sleep 
with it on my pillow.

I was up very early in the morning and called Charley to come for a 
walk.  We bought flowers for the breakfast-table, and came back and 
arranged them, and were as busy as possible.  We were so early that 
I had a good time still for Charley's lesson before breakfast; 
Charley (who was not in the least improved in the old defective 
article of grammar) came through it with great applause; and we 
were altogether very notable.  When my guardian appeared he said, 
"Why, little woman, you look fresher than your flowers!"  And Mrs. 
Woodcourt repeated and translated a passage from the 
Mewlinnwillinwodd expressive of my being like a mountain with the 
sun upon it.

This was all so pleasant that I hope it made me still more like the 
mountain than I had been before.  After breakfast I waited my 
opportunity and peeped about a little until I saw my guardian in 
his own room--the room of last night--by himself.  Then I made an 
excuse to go in with my housekeeping keys, shutting the door after 
me.

"Well, Dame Durden?" said my guardian; the post had brought him 
several letters, and he was writing.  "You want money?"

"No, indeed, I have plenty in hand."

"There never was such a Dame Durden," said my guardian, "for making 
money last."

He had laid down his pen and leaned back in his chair looking at 
me.  I have often spoken of his bright face, but I thought I had 
never seen it look so bright and good.  There was a high happiness 
upon it which made me think, "He has been doing some great kindness 
this morning."

"There never was," said my guardian, musing as he smiled upon me, 
"such a Dame Durden for making money last."

He had never yet altered his old manner.  I loved it and him so 
much that when I now went up to him and took my usual chair, which 
was always put at his side--for sometimes I read to him, and 
sometimes I talked to him, and sometimes I silently worked by him--
I hardly liked to disturb it by laying my hand on his breast.  But 
I found I did not disturb it at all.

"Dear guardian," said I, "I want to speak to you.  Have I been 
remiss in anything?"

"Remiss in anything, my dear!"

"Have I not been what I have meant to be since--I brought the 
answer to your letter, guardian?"

"You have been everything I could desire, my love."

"I am very glad indeed to hear that," I returned.  "You know, you 
said to me, was this the mistress of Bleak House.  And I said, 
yes."

"Yes," said my guardian, nodding his head.  He had put his arm 
about me as if there were something to protect me from and looked 
in my face, smiling.

"Since then," said I, "we have never spoken on the subject except 
once."

"And then I said Bleak House was thinning fast; and so it was, my 
dear."

"And I said," I timidly reminded him, "but its mistress remained."

He still held me in the same protecting manner and with the same 
bright goodness in his face.

"Dear guardian," said I, "I know how you have felt all that has 
happened, and how considerate you have been.  As so much time has 
passed, and as you spoke only this morning of my being so well 
again, perhaps you expect me to renew the subject.  Perhaps I ought 
to do so.  I will be the mistress of Bleak House when you please."

"See," he returned gaily, "what a sympathy there must be between 
us!  I have had nothing else, poor Rick excepted--it's a large 
exception--in my mind.  When you came in, I was full of it.  When 
shall we give Bleak House its mistress, little woman?"

"When you please."

"Next month?"

"Next month, dear guardian."

"The day on which I take the happiest and best step of my life--the 
day on which I shall be a man more exulting and more enviable than 
any other man in the world--the day on which I give Bleak House its 
little mistress--shall be next month then," said my guardian.

I put my arms round his neck and kissed him just as I had done on 
the day when I brought my answer.

A servant came to the door to announce Mr. Bucket, which was quite 
unnecessary, for Mr. Bucket was already looking in over the 
servant's shoulder.  "Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Summerson," said he, 
rather out of breath, "with all apologies for intruding, WILL you 
allow me to order up a person that's on the stairs and that objects 
to being left there in case of becoming the subject of observations 
in his absence?  Thank you.  Be so good as chair that there member 
in this direction, will you?" said Mr. Bucket, beckoning over the 
banisters.

This singular request produced an old man in a black skull-cap, 
unable to walk, who was carried up by a couple of bearers and 
deposited in the room near the door.  Mr. Bucket immediately got 
rid of the bearers, mysteriously shut the door, and bolted it.

"Now you see, Mr. Jarndyce," he then began, putting down his hat 
and opening his subject with a flourish of his well-remembered 
finger, "you know me, and Miss Summerson knows me.  This gentleman 
likewise knows me, and his name is Smallweed.  The discounting line 
is his line principally, and he's what you may call a dealer in 
bills.  That's about what YOU are, you know, ain't you?" said Mr. 
Bucket, stopping a little to address the gentleman in question, who 
was exceedingly suspicious of him.

He seemed about to dispute this designation of himself when he was 
seized with a violent fit of coughing.

"Now, moral, you know!" said Mr. Bucket, improving the accident.  
"Don't you contradict when there ain't no occasion, and you won't 
be took in that way.  Now, Mr. Jarndyce, I address myself to you.  
I've been negotiating with this gentleman on behalf of Sir 
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, and one way and another I've been in 
and out and about his premises a deal.  His premises are the 
premises formerly occupied by Krook, marine store dealer--a 
relation of this gentleman's that you saw in his life-time if I 
don't mistake?"

My guardian replied, "Yes."

"Well! You are to understand," said Mr. Bucket, "that this 
gentleman he come into Krook's property, and a good deal of magpie 
property there was.  Vast lots of waste-paper among the rest.  Lord 
bless you, of no use to nobody!"

The cunning of Mr. Bucket's eye and the masterly manner in which he 
contrived, without a look or a word against which his watchful 
auditor could protest, to let us know that he stated the case 
according to previous agreement and could say much more of Mr. 
Smallweed if he thought it advisable, deprived us of any merit in 
quite understanding him.  His difficulty was increased by Mr. 
Smallweed's being deaf as well as suspicious and watching his face 
with the closest attention.

"Among them odd heaps of old papers, this gentleman, when he comes 
into the property, naturally begins to rummage, don't you see?" 
said Mr. Bucket.

"To which?  Say that again," cried Mr. Smallweed in a shrill, sharp 
voice.

"To rummage," repeated Mr. Bucket.  "Being a prudent man and 
accustomed to take care of your own affairs, you begin to rummage 
among the papers as you have come into; don't you?"

"Of course I do," cried Mr. Smallweed.

"Of course you do," said Mr. Bucket conversationally, "and much to 
blame you would be if you didn't.  And so you chance to find, you 
know," Mr. Bucket went on, stooping over him with an air of 
cheerful raillery which Mr. Smallweed by no means reciprocated, 
"and so you chance to find, you know, a paper with the signature of 
Jarndyce to it.  Don't you?"

Mr. Smallweed glanced with a troubled eye at us and grudgingly 
nodded assent.

"And coming to look at that paper at your full leisure and 
convenience--all in good time, for you're not curious to read it, 
and why should you be?--what do you find it to be but a will, you 
see.  That's the drollery of it," said Mr. Bucket with the same 
lively air of recalling a joke for the enjoyment of Mr. Smallweed, 
who still had the same crest-fallen appearance of not enjoying it 
at all; "what do you find it to be but a will?"

"I don't know that it's good as a will or as anything else," 
snarled Mr. Smallweed.

Mr. Bucket eyed the old man for a moment--he had slipped and shrunk 
down in his chair into a mere bundle--as if he were much disposed 
to pounce upon him; nevertheless, he continued to bend over him 
with the same agreeable air, keeping the corner of one of his eyes 
upon us.

"Notwithstanding which," said Mr. Bucket, "you get a little 
doubtful and uncomfortable in your mind about it, having a very 
tender mind of your own."

"Eh?  What do you say I have got of my own?" asked Mr. Smallweed 
with his hand to his ear.

"A very tender mind."

"Ho!  Well, go on," said Mr. Smallweed.

"And as you've heard a good deal mentioned regarding a celebrated 
Chancery will case of the same name, and as you know what a card 
Krook was for buying all manner of old pieces of furniter, and 
books, and papers, and what not, and never liking to part with 'em, 
and always a-going to teach himself to read, you begin to think--
and you never was more correct in your born days--'Ecod, if I don't 
look about me, I may get into trouble regarding this will.'"

"Now, mind how you put it, Bucket," cried the old man anxiously 
with his hand at his ear.  "Speak up; none of your brimstone 
tricks.  Pick me up; I want to hear better.  Oh, Lord, I am shaken 
to bits!"

Mr. Bucket had certainly picked him up at a dart.  However, as soon 
as he could be heard through Mr. Smallweed's coughing and his 
vicious ejaculations of "Oh, my bones!  Oh, dear!  I've no breath 
in my body!  I'm worse than the chattering, clattering, brimstone 
pig at home!" Mr. Bucket proceeded in the same convivial manner as 
before.

"So, as I happen to be in the habit of coming about your premises, 
you take me into your confidence, don't you?"

I think it would be impossible to make an admission with more ill 
will and a worse grace than Mr. Smallweed displayed when he 
admitted this, rendering it perfectly evident that Mr. Bucket was 
the very last person he would have thought of taking into his 
confidence if he could by any possibility have kept him out of it.

"And I go into the business with you--very pleasant we are over it; 
and I confirm you in your well-founded fears that you will get 
yourself into a most precious line if you don't come out with that 
there will," said Mr. Bucket emphatically; "and accordingly you 
arrange with me that it shall be delivered up to this present Mr. 
Jarndyce, on no conditions.  If it should prove to be valuable, you 
trusting yourself to him for your reward; that's about where it is, 
ain't it?"

"That's what was agreed," Mr. Smallweed assented with the same bad 
grace.

"In consequence of which," said Mr. Bucket, dismissing his 
agreeable manner all at once and becoming strictly businesslike, 
"you've got that will upon your person at the present time, and the 
only thing that remains for you to do is just to out with it!"

Having given us one glance out of the watching corner of his eye, 
and having given his nose one triumphant rub with his forefinger, 
Mr. Bucket stood with his eyes fastened on his confidential friend 
and his hand stretched forth ready to take the paper and present it 
to my guardian.  It was not produced without much reluctance and 
many declarations on the part of Mr. Smallweed that he was a poor 
industrious man and that he left it to Mr. Jarndyce's honour not to 
let him lose by his honesty.  Little by little he very slowly took 
from a breast-pocket a stained, discoloured paper which was much 
singed upon the outside and a little burnt at the edges, as if it 
had long ago been thrown upon a fire and hastily snatched off 
again.  Mr. Bucket lost no time in transferring this paper, with 
the dexterity of a conjuror, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Jarndyce.  
As he gave it to my guardian, he whispered behind his fingers, 
"Hadn't settled how to make their market of it.  Quarrelled and 
hinted about it.  I laid out twenty pound upon it.  First the 
avaricious grandchildren split upon him on account of their 
objections to his living so unreasonably long, and then they split 
on one another.  Lord!  There ain't one of the family that wouldn't 
sell the other for a pound or two, except the old lady--and she's 
only out of it because she's too weak in her mind to drive a 
bargain."

"Mr Bucket," said my guardian aloud, "whatever the worth of this 
paper may be to any one, my obligations are great to you; and if it 
be of any worth, I hold myself bound to see Mr. Smallweed 
remunerated accordingly."

"Not according to your merits, you know," said Mr. Bucket in 
friendly explanation to Mr. Smallweed.  "Don't you be afraid of 
that.  According to its value."

"That is what I mean," said my guardian.  "You may observe, Mr. 
Bucket, that I abstain from examining this paper myself.  The plain 
truth is, I have forsworn and abjured the whole business these many 
years, and my soul is sick of it.  But Miss Summerson and I will 
immediately place the paper in the hands of my solicitor in the 
cause, and its existence shall be made known without delay to all 
other parties interested."

"Mr. Jarndyce can't say fairer than that, you understand," observed 
Mr. Bucket to his fellow-visitor.  "And it being now made clear to 
you that nobody's a-going to be wronged--which must be a great 
relief to YOUR mind--we may proceed with the ceremony of chairing 
you home again."

He unbolted the door, called in the bearers, wished us good 
morning, and with a look full of meaning and a crook of his finger 
at parting went his way.

We went our way too, which was to Lincoln's Inn, as quickly as 
possible.  Mr. Kenge was disengaged, and we found him at his table 
in his dusty room with the inexpressive-looking books and the piles 
of papers.  Chairs having been placed for us by Mr. Guppy, Mr. 
Kenge expressed the surprise and gratification he felt at the 
unusual sight of Mr. Jarndyce in his office.  He turned over his 
double eye-glass as he spoke and was more Conversation Kenge than 
ever.

"I hope," said Mr. Kenge, "that the genial influence of Miss 
Summerson," he bowed to me, "may have induced Mr. Jarndyce," he 
bowed to him, "to forego some little of his animosity towards a 
cause and towards a court which are--shall I say, which take their 
place in the stately vista of the pillars of our profession?"

"I am inclined to think," returned my guardian, "that Miss 
Summerson has seen too much of the effects of the court and the 
cause to exert any influence in their favour.  Nevertheless, they 
are a part of the occasion of my being here.  Mr. Kenge, before I 
lay this paper on your desk and have done with it, let me tell you 
how it has come into my hands."

He did so shortly and distinctly.

"It could not, sir," said Mr. Kenge, "have been stated more plainly 
and to the purpose if it had been a case at law."

"Did you ever know English law, or equity either, plain and to the 
purpose?" said my guardian.

"Oh, fie!" said Mr. Kenge.

At first he had not seemed to attach much importance to the paper, 
but when he saw it he appeared more interested, and when he had 
opened and read a little of it through his eye-glass, he became 
amazed.  "Mr. Jarndyce," he said, looking off it, "you have perused 
this?"

"Not I!" returned my guardian.

"But, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, "it is a will of later date 
than any in the suit.  It appears to be all in the testator's 
handwriting.  It is duly executed and attested.  And even if 
intended to be cancelled, as might possibly be supposed to be 
denoted by these marks of fire, it is NOT cancelled.  Here it is, a 
perfect instrument!"

"Well!" said my guardian.  "What is that to me?"

"Mr. Guppy!" cried Mr. Kenge, raising his voice.  "I beg your 
pardon, Mr. Jarndyce."

"Sir."

"Mr. Vholes of Symond's Inn.  My compliments.  Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce.  Glad to speak with him."

Mr. Guppy disappeared.

"You ask me what is this to you, Mr. Jarndyce.  If you had perused 
this document, you would have seen that it reduces your interest 
considerably, though still leaving it a very handsome one, still 
leaving it a very handsome one," said Mr. Kenge, waving his hand 
persuasively and blandly.  "You would further have seen that the 
interests of Mr. Richard Carstone and of Miss Ada Clare, now Mrs. 
Richard Carstone, are very materially advanced by it."

"Kenge," said my guardian, "if all the flourishing wealth that the 
suit brought into this vile court of Chancery could fall to my two 
young cousins, I should be well contented.  But do you ask ME to 
believe that any good is to come of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?"

"Oh, really, Mr. Jarndyce!  Prejudice, prejudice.  My dear sir, 
this is a very great country, a very great country.  Its system of 
equity is a very great system, a very great system.  Really, 
really!"

My guardian said no more, and Mr. Vholes arrived.  He was modestly 
impressed by Mr. Kenge's professional eminence.

"How do you do, Mr. Vholes?  Willl you be so good as to take a 
chair here by me and look over this paper?"

Mr. Vholes did as he was asked and seemed to read it every word.  
He was not excited by it, but he was not excited by anything.  When 
he had well examined it, he retired with Mr. Kenge into a window, 
and shading his mouth with his black glove, spoke to him at some 
length.  I was not surprised to observe Mr. Kenge inclined to 
dispute what he said before he had said much, for I knew that no 
two people ever did agree about anything in Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  
But he seemed to get the better of Mr. Kenge too in a conversation 
that sounded as if it were almost composed of the words "Receiver-
General," "Accountant-General," "report," "estate," and "costs."  
When they had finished, they came back to Mr. Kenge's table and 
spoke aloud.

"Well!  But this is a very remarkable document, Mr. Vholes," said 
Mr. Kenge.

Mr. Vholes said, "Very much so."

"And a very important document, Mr. Vholes," said Mr. Kenge.

Again Mr. Vholes said, "Very much so."

"And as you say, Mr. Vholes, when the cause is in the paper next 
term, this document will be an unexpected and interesting feature 
in it," said Mr. Kenge, looking loftily at my guardian.

Mr. Vholes was gratified, as a smaller practitioner striving to 
keep respectable, to be confirmed in any opinion of his own by such 
an authority.

"And when," asked my guardian, rising after a pause, during which 
Mr. Kenge had rattled his money and Mr. Vholes had picked his 
pimples, "when is next term?"

"Next term, Mr. Jarndyce, will be next month," said Mr. Kenge.  "Of 
course we shall at once proceed to do what is necessary with this 
document and to collect the necessary evidence concerning it; and 
of course you will receive our usual notification of the cause 
being in the paper."

"To which I shall pay, of course, my usual attention."

"Still bent, my dear sir," said Mr. Kenge, showing us through the 
outer office to the door, "still bent, even with your enlarged 
mind, on echoing a popular prejudice?  We are a prosperous 
community, Mr. Jarndyce, a very prosperous community.  We are a 
great country, Mr. Jarndyce, we are a very great country.  This is 
a great system, Mr. Jarndyce, and would you wish a great country to 
have a little system?  Now, really, really!"

He said this at the stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if 
it were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his 
words on the structure of the system and consolidate it for a 
thousand ages.



CHAPTER LXIII

Steel and Iron


George's Shooting Gallery is to let, and the stock is sold off, and 
George himself is at Chesney Wold attending on Sir Leicester in his 
rides and riding very near his bridle-rein because of the uncertain 
hand with which he guides his horse.  But not to-day is George so 
occupied.  He is journeying to-day into the iron country farther 
north to look about him.

As he comes into the iron country farther north, such fresh green 
woods as those of Chesney Wold are left behind; and coal pits and 
ashes, high chimneys and red bricks, blighted verdure, scorching 
fires, and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke become the 
features of the scenery.  Among such objects rides the trooper, 
looking about him and always looking for something he has come to 
find.

At last, on the black canal bridge of a busy town, with a clang of 
iron in it, and more fires and more smoke than he has seen yet, the 
trooper, swart with the dust of the coal roads, checks his horse 
and asks a workman does he know the name of Rouncewell thereabouts.

"Why, master," quoth the workman, "do I know my own name?"

"'Tis so well known here, is it, comrade?" asks the trooper.

"Rouncewell's?  Ah!  You're right."

"And where might it be now?" asks the trooper with a glance before 
him.

"The bank, the factory, or the house?" the workman wants to know.

"Hum!  Rouncewell's is so great apparently," mutters the trooper, 
stroking his chin, "that I have as good as half a mind to go back 
again.  Why, I don't know which I want.  Should I find Mr. 
Rouncewell at the factory, do you think?"

"Tain't easy to say where you'd find him--at this time of the day 
you might find either him or his son there, if he's in town; but 
his contracts take him away."

And which is the factory?  Why, he sees those chimneys--the tallest 
ones!  Yes, he sees THEM.  Well!  Let him keep his eye on those 
chimneys, going on as straight as ever he can, and presently he'll 
see 'em down a turning on the left, shut in by a great brick wall 
which forms one side of the street.  That's Rouncewell's.

The trooper thanks his informant and rides slowly on, looking about 
him.  He does not turn back, but puts up his horse (and is much 
disposed to groom him too) at a public-house where some of 
Rouncewell's hands are dining, as the ostler tells him.  Some of 
Rouncewell's hands have just knocked off for dinner-time and seem 
to be invading the whole town.  They are very sinewy and strong, 
are Rouncewell's hands--a little sooty too.

He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great 
perplexity of iron lying about in every stage and in a vast variety 
of shapes--in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in 
axles, in wheels, in cogs, in cranks, in rails; twisted and 
wrenched into eccentric and perverse forms as separate parts of 
machinery; mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age; distant 
furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks 
of it showering about under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot 
iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron 
smell, and a Babel of iron sounds.

"This is a place to make a man's head ache too!" says the trooper, 
looking about him for a counting-house.  "Who comes here?  This is 
very like me before I was set up.  This ought to be my nephew, if 
likenesses run in families.  Your servant, sir."

"Yours, sir.  Are you looking for any one?"

"Excuse me.  Young Mr. Rouncewell, I believe?"

"Yes."

"I was looking for your father, sir.  I wish to have a word with 
him."

The young man, telling him he is fortunate in his choice of a time, 
for his father is there, leads the way to the office where he is to 
be found.  "Very like me before I was set up--devilish like me!" 
thinks the trooper as he follows.  They come to a building in the 
yard with an office on an upper floor.  At sight of the gentleman 
in the office, Mr. George turns very red.

"What name shall I say to my father?" asks the young man.

George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers "Steel," 
and is so presented.  He is left alone with the gentleman in the 
office, who sits at a table with account-books before him and some 
sheets of paper blotted with hosts of figures and drawings of 
cunning shapes.  It is a bare office, with bare windows, looking on 
the iron view below.  Tumbled together on the table are some pieces 
of iron, purposely broken to be tested at various periods of their 
service, in various capacities.  There is iron-dust on everything; 
and the smoke is seen through the windows rolling heavily out of 
the tall chimneys to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon 
of other chimneys.

"I am at your service, Mr. Steel," says the gentleman when his 
visitor has taken a rusty chair.

"Well, Mr. Rouncewell," George replies, leaning forward with his 
left arm on his knee and his hat in his hand, and very chary of 
meeting his brother's eye, "I am not without my expectations that 
in the present visit I may prove to be more free than welcome.  I 
have served as a dragoon in my day, and a comrade of mine that I 
was once rather partial to was, if I don't deceive myself, a 
brother of yours.  I believe you had a brother who gave his family 
some trouble, and ran away, and never did any good but in keeping 
away?"

"Are you quite sure," returns the ironmaster in an altered voice, 
"that your name is Steel?"

The trooper falters and looks at him.  His brother starts up, calls 
him by his name, and grasps him by both hands.

"You are too quick for me!" cries the trooper with the tears 
springing out of his eyes.  "How do you do, my dear old fellow?  I 
never could have thought you would have been half so glad to see me 
as all this.  How do you do, my dear old fellow, how do you do!"

They shake hands and embrace each other over and over again, the 
trooper still coupling his "How do you do, my dear old fellow!" 
with his protestation that he never thought his brother would have 
been half so glad to see him as all this!

"So far from it," he declares at the end of a full account of what 
has preceded his arrival there, "I had very little idea of making 
myself known.  I thought if you took by any means forgivingly to my 
name I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing a 
letter.  But I should not have been surprised, brother, if you had 
considered it anything but welcome news to hear of me."

"We will show you at home what kind of news we think it, George," 
returns his brother.  "This is a great day at home, and you could 
not have arrived, you bronzed old soldier, on a better.  I make an 
agreement with my son Watt to-day that on this day twelvemonth he 
shall marry as pretty and as good a girl as you have seen in all 
your travels.  She goes to Germany to-morrow with one of your 
nieces for a little polishing up in her education.  We make a feast 
of the event, and you will be made the hero of it."

Mr. George is so entirely overcome at first by this prospect that 
he resists the proposed honour with great earnestness.  Being 
overborne, however, by his brother and his nephew--concerning whom 
he renews his protestations that he never could have thought they 
would have been half so glad to see him--he is taken home to an 
elegant house in all the arrangements of which there is to be 
observed a pleasant mixture of the originally simple habits of the 
father and mother with such as are suited to their altered station 
and the higher fortunes of their children.  Here Mr. George is much 
dismayed by the graces and accomplishments of his nieces that are 
and by the beauty of Rosa, his niece that is to be, and by the 
affectionate salutations of these young ladies, which he receives 
in a sort of dream.  He is sorely taken aback, too, by the dutiful 
behaviour of his nephew and has a woeful consciousness upon him of 
being a scapegrace.  However, there is great rejoicing and a very 
hearty company and infinite enjoyment, and Mr. George comes bluff 
and martial through it all, and his pledge to be present at the 
marriage and give away the bride is received with universal favour.  
A whirling head has Mr. George that night when he lies down in the 
state-bed of his brother's house to think of all these things and 
to see the images of his nieces (awful all the evening in their 
floating muslins) waltzing, after the German manner, over his 
counterpane.

The brothers are closeted next morning in the ironmaster's room, 
where the elder is proceeding, in his clear sensible way, to show 
how he thinks he may best dispose of George in his business, when 
George squeezes his hand and stops him.

"Brother, I thank you a million times for your more than brotherly 
welcome, and a million times more to that for your more than 
brotherly intentions.  But my plans are made.  Before I say a word 
as to them, I wish to consult you upon one family point.  How," 
says the trooper, folding his arms and looking with indomitable 
firmness at his brother, "how is my mother to be got to scratch 
me?"

"I am not sure that I understand you, George," replies the 
ironmaster.

"I say, brother, how is my mother to be got to scratch me?  She 
must be got to do it somehow."

"Scratch you out of her will, I think you mean?"

"Of course I do.  In short," says the trooper, folding his arms 
more resolutely yet, "I mean--TO--scratch me!"

"My dear George," returns his brother, "is it so indispensable that 
you should undergo that process?"

"Quite!  Absolutely!  I couldn't be guilty of the meanness of 
coming back without it.  I should never be safe not to be off 
again.  I have not sneaked home to rob your children, if not 
yourself, brother, of your rights.  I, who forfeited mine long ago!  
If I am to remain and hold up my head, I must be scratched.  Come.  
You are a man of celebrated penetration and intelligence, and you 
can tell me how it's to be brought about."

"I can tell you, George," replies the ironmaster deliberately, "how 
it is not to be brought about, which I hope may answer the purpose 
as well.  Look at our mother, think of her, recall her emotion when 
she recovered you.  Do you believe there is a consideration in the 
world that would induce her to take such a step against her 
favourite son?  Do you believe there is any chance of her consent, 
to balance against the outrage it would be to her (loving dear old 
lady!) to propose it?  If you do, you are wrong.  No, George!  You 
must make up your mind to remain UNscratched, I think."  There is 
an amused smile on the ironmaster's face as he watches his brother, 
who is pondering, deeply disappointed.  "I think you may manage 
almost as well as if the thing were done, though."

"How, brother?"

"Being bent upon it, you can dispose by will of anything you have 
the misfortune to inherit in any way you like, you know."

"That's true!" says the trooper, pondering again.  Then he 
wistfully asks, with his hand on his brother's, "Would you mind 
mentioning that, brother, to your wife and family?"

"Not at all."

"Thank you.  You wouldn't object to say, perhaps, that although an 
undoubted vagabond, I am a vagabond of the harum-scarum order, and 
not of the mean sort?"

The ironmaster, repressing his amused smile, assents.

"Thank you.  Thank you.  It's a weight off my mind," says the 
trooper with a heave of his chest as he unfolds his arms and puts a 
hand on each leg, "though I had set my heart on being scratched, 
too!"

The brothers are very like each other, sitting face to face; but a 
certain massive simplicity and absence of usage in the ways of the 
world is all on the trooper's side.

"Well," he proceeds, throwing off his disappointment, "next and 
last, those plans of mine.  You have been so brotherly as to 
propose to me to fall in here and take my place among the products 
of your perseverance and sense.  I thank you heartily.  It's more 
than brotherly, as I said before, and I thank you heartily for it," 
shaking him a long time by the hand.  "But the truth is, brother, I 
am a--I am a kind of a weed, and it's too late to plant me in a 
regular garden."

"My dear George," returns the elder, concentrating his strong 
steady brow upon him and smiling confidently, "leave that to me, 
and let me try."

George shakes his head.  "You could do it, I have not a doubt, if 
anybody could; but it's not to be done.  Not to be done, sir!  
Whereas it so falls out, on the other hand, that I am able to be of 
some trifle of use to Sir Leicester Dedlock since his illness--
brought on by family sorrows--and that he would rather have that 
help from our mother's son than from anybody else."

"Well, my dear George," returns the other with a very slight shade 
upon his open face, "if you prefer to serve in Sir Leicester 
Dedlock's household brigade--"

"There it is, brother," cries the trooper, checking him, with his 
hand upon his knee again; "there it is!  You don't take kindly to 
that idea; I don't mind it.  You are not used to being officered; I 
am.  Everything about you is in perfect order and discipline; 
everything about me requires to be kept so.  We are not accustomed 
to carry things with the same hand or to look at 'em from the same 
point.  I don't say much about my garrison manners because I found 
myself pretty well at my ease last night, and they wouldn't be 
noticed here, I dare say, once and away.  But I shall get on best 
at Chesney Wold, where there's more room for a weed than there is 
here; and the dear old lady will be made happy besides.  Therefore 
I accept of Sir Leicester Dedlock's proposals.  When I come over 
next year to give away the bride, or whenever I come, I shall have 
the sense to keep the household brigade in ambuscade and not to 
manoeuvre it on your ground.  I thank you heartily again and am 
proud to think of the Rouncewells as they'll be founded by you."

"You know yourself, George," says the elder brother, returning the 
grip of his hand, "and perhaps you know me better than I know 
myself.  Take your way.  So that we don't quite lose one another 
again, take your way."

"No fear of that!" returns the trooper.  "Now, before I turn my 
horse's head homewards, brother, I will ask you--if you'll be so 
good--to look over a letter for me.  I brought it with me to send 
from these parts, as Chesney Wold might be a painful name just now 
to the person it's written to.  I am not much accustomed to 
correspondence myself, and I am particular respecting this present 
letter because I want it to be both straightforward and delicate."

Herewith he hands a letter, closely written in somewhat pale ink 
but in a neat round hand, to the ironmaster, who reads as follows:


Miss Esther Summerson, 

A communication having been made to me by Inspector Bucket of a 
letter to myself being found among the papers of a certain person, 
I take the liberty to make known to you that it was but a few lines 
of instruction from abroad, when, where, and how to deliver an 
enclosed letter to a young and beautiful lady, then unmarried, in 
England.  I duly observed the same.

I further take the liberty to make known to you that it was got 
from me as a proof of handwriting only and that otherwise I would 
not have given it up, as appearing to be the most harmless in my 
possession, without being previously shot through the heart.

I further take the liberty to mention that if I could have supposed 
a certain unfortunate gentleman to have been in existence, I never 
could and never would have rested until I had discovered his 
retreat and shared my last farthing with him, as my duty and my 
inclination would have equally been.  But he was (officially) 
reported drowned, and assuredly went over the side of a transport-
ship at night in an Irish harbour within a few hours of her arrival 
from the West Indies, as I have myself heard both from officers and 
men on board, and know to have been (officially) confirmed.

I further take the liberty to state that in my humble quality as 
one of the rank and file, I am, and shall ever continue to be, your 
thoroughly devoted and admiring servant and that I esteem the 
qualities you possess above all others far beyond the limits of the 
present dispatch.

I have the honour to be,

GEORGE


"A little formal," observes the elder brother, refolding it with a 
puzzled face.

"But nothing that might not be sent to a pattern young lady?" asks 
the younger.

"Nothing at all."

Therefore it is sealed and deposited for posting among the iron 
correspondence of the day.  This done, Mr. George takes a hearty 
farewell of the family party and prepares to saddle and mount.  His 
brother, however, unwilling to part with him so soon, proposes to 
ride with him in a light open carriage to the place where he will 
bait for the night, and there remain with him until morning, a 
servant riding for so much of the journey on the thoroughbred old 
grey from Chesney Wold.  The offer, being gladly accepted, is 
followed by a pleasant ride, a pleasant dinner, and a pleasant 
breakfast, all in brotherly communion.  Then they once more shake 
hands long and heartily and part, the ironmaster turning his face 
to the smoke and fires, and the trooper to the green country.  
Early in the afternoon the subdued sound of his heavy military trot 
is heard on the turf in the avenue as he rides on with imaginary 
clank and jingle of accoutrements under the old elm-trees.



CHAPTER LXIV

Esther's Narrative


Soon after I had that convertion with my guardian, he put a sealed 
paper in my hand one morning and said, "This is for next month, my 
dear."  I found in it two hundred pounds.

I now began very quietly to make such preparations as I thought 
were necessary.  Regulating my purchases by my guardian's taste, 
which I knew very well of course, I arranged my wardrobe to please 
him and hoped I should be highly successful.  I did it all so 
quietly because I was not quite free from my old apprehension that 
Ada would be rather sorry and because my guardian was so quiet 
himself.  I had no doubt that under all the circumstances we should 
be married in the most private and simple manner.  Perhaps I should 
only have to say to Ada, "Would you like to come and see me married 
to-morrow, my pet?"  Perhaps our wedding might even be as 
unpretending as her own, and I might not find it necessary to say 
anything about it until it was over.  I thought that if I were to 
choose, I would like this best.

The only exception I made was Mrs. Woodcourt.  I told her that I 
was going to be married to my guardian and that we had been engaged 
some time.  She highly approved.  She could never do enough for me 
and was remarkably softened now in comparison with what she had 
been when we first knew her.  There was no trouble she would not 
have taken to have been of use to me, but I need hardly say that I 
only allowed her to take as little as gratified her kindness 
without tasking it.

Of course this was not a time to neglect my guardian, and of course 
it was not a time for neglecting my darling.  So I had plenty of 
occupation, which I was glad of; and as to Charley, she was 
absolutely not to be seen for needlework.  To surround herself with 
great heaps of it--baskets full and tables full--and do a little, 
and spend a great deal of time in staring with her round eyes at 
what there was to do, and persuade herself that she was going to do 
it, were Charley's great dignities and delights.

Meanwhile, I must say, I could not agree with my guardian on the 
subject of the will, and I had some sanguine hopes of Jarndyce and 
Jarndyce.  Which of us was right will soon appear, but I certainly 
did encourage expectations.  In Richard, the discovery gave 
occasion for a burst of business and agitation that buoyed him up 
for a little time, but he had lost the elasticity even of hope now 
and seemed to me to retain only its feverish anxieties.  From 
something my guardian said one day when we were talking about this, 
I understood that my marriage would not take place until after the 
term-time we had been told to look forward to; and I thought the 
more, for that, how rejoiced I should be if I could be married when 
Richard and Ada were a little more prosperous.

The term was very near indeed when my guardian was called out of 
town and went down into Yorkshire on Mr. Woodcourt's business.  He 
had told me beforehand that his presence there would be necessary.  
I had just come in one night from my dear girl's and was sitting in 
the midst of all my new clothes, looking at them all around me and 
thinking, when a letter from my guardian was brought to me.  It 
asked me to join him in the country and mentioned by what stage-
coach my place was taken and at what time in the morning I should 
have to leave town.  It added in a postscript that I would not be 
many hours from Ada.

I expected few things less than a journey at that tinae, but I was 
ready for it in half an hour and set off as appointed early next 
morning.  I travelled all day, wondering all day what I could be 
wanted for at such a distance; now I thought it might be for this 
purpose, and now I thought it might be for that purpose, but I was 
never, never, never near the truth.

It was night when I came to my journey's end and found my guardian 
waiting for me.  This was a great relief, for towards evening I had 
begun to fear (the more so as his letter was a very short one) that 
he might be ill.  However, there he was, as well as it was possible 
to be; and when I saw his genial face again at its brightest and 
best, I said to myself, he has been doing some other great 
kindness.  Not that it required much penetration to say that, 
because I knew that his being there at all was an act of kindness.

Supper was ready at the hotel, and when we were alone at table he 
said, "Full of curiosity, no doubt, little woman, to know why I 
have brought you here?"

"Well, guardian," said I, "without thinking myself a Fatima or you 
a Blue Beard, I am a little curious about it."

"Then to ensure your night's rest, my love," he returned gaily, "I 
won't wait until to-morrow to tell you.  I have very much wished to 
express to Woodcourt, somehow, my sense of his humanity to poor 
unfortunate Jo, his inestimable services to my young cousins, and 
his value to us all.  When it was decided that he should settle 
here, it came into my head that I might ask his acceptance of some 
unpretending and suitable little place to lay his own head in.  I 
therefore caused such a place to be looked out for, and such a 
place was found on very easy terms, and I have been touching it up 
for him and making it habitable.  However, when I walked over it 
the day before yesterday and it was reported ready, I found that I 
was not housekeeper enough to know whether things were all as they 
ought to be.  So I sent off for the best little housekeeper that 
could possibly be got to come and give me her advice and opinion.  
And here she is," said my guardian, "laughing and crying both 
together!"

Because he was so dear, so good, so admirable.  I tried to tell him 
what I thought of him, but I could not articulate a word.

"Tut, tut!" said my guardian.  "You make too much of it, little 
woman.  Why, how you sob, Dame Durden, how you sob!"

"It is with exquisite pleasure, guardian--with a heart full of 
thanks."

"Well, well," said he.  "I am delighted that you approve.  I 
thought you would.  I meant it as a pleasant surprise for the 
little mistress of Bleak House."

I kissed him and dried my eyes.  "I know now!" said I.  "I have 
seen this in your face a long while."

"No; have you really, my dear?" said he.  "What a Dame Durden it is 
to read a face!"

He was so quaintly cheerful that I could not long be otherwise, and 
was almost ashamed of having been otherwise at all.  When I went to 
bed, I cried.  I am bound to confess that I cried; but I hope it 
was with pleasure, though I am not quite sure it was with pleasure.  
I repeated every word of the letter twice over.

A most beautiful summer morning succeeded, and after breakfast we 
went out arm in arm to see the house of which I was to give my 
mighty housekeeping opinion.  We entered a flower-garden by a gate 
in a side wall, of which he had the key, and the first thing I saw 
was that the beds and flowers were all laid out according to the 
manner of my beds and flowers at home.

"You see, my dear," observed my guardian, standing still with a 
delighted face to watch my looks, "knowing there could be no better 
plan, I borrowed yours."

We went on by a pretty little orchard, where the cherries were 
nestling among the green leaves and the shadows of the apple-trees 
were sporting on the grass, to the house itself--a cottage, quite a 
rustic cottage of doll's rooms; but such a lovely place, so 
tranquil and so beautiful, with such a rich and smiling country 
spread around it; with water sparkling away into the distance, here 
all overhung with summer-growth, there turning a humming mill; at 
its nearest point glancing through a meadow by the cheerful town, 
where cricket-players were assembling in bright groups and a flag 
was flying from a white tent that rippled in the sweet west wind.  
And still, as we went through the pretty rooms, out at the little 
rustic verandah doors, and underneath the tiny wooden colonnades 
garlanded with woodbine, jasmine, and honey-suckle, I saw in the 
papering on the walls, in the colours of the furniture, in the 
arrangement of all the pretty objects, MY little tastes and 
fancies, MY little methods and inventions which they used to laugh 
at while they praised them, my odd ways everywhere.

I could not say enough in admiration of what was all so beautiful, 
but one secret doubt arose in my mind when I saw this, I thought, 
oh, would he be the happier for it!  Would it not have been better 
for his peace that I should not have been so brought before him?  
Because although I was not what he thought me, still he loved me 
very dearly, and it might remind him mournfully of what be believed 
he had lost.  I did not wish him to forget me--perhaps he might not 
have done so, without these aids to his memory--but my way was 
easier than his, and I could have reconciled myself even to that so 
that he had been the happier for it.

"And now, little woman," said my guardian, whom I had never seen so 
proud and joyful as in showing me these things and watching my 
appreciation of them, "now, last of all, for the name of this 
house."

"What is it called, dear guardian?"

"My child," said he, "come and see,"

He took me to the porch, which he had hitherto avoided, and said, 
pausing before we went out, "My dear child, don't you guess the 
name?"

"No!" said I.

We went out of the porch and he showed me written over it, Bleak 
House.

He led me to a seat among the leaves close by, and sitting down 
beside me and taking my hand in his, spoke to me thus, "My darling 
girl, in what there has been between us, I have, I hope, been 
really solicitous for your happiness.  When I wrote you the letter 
to which you brought the answer," smiling as he referred to it, "I 
had my own too much in view; but I had yours too.  Whether, under 
different circumstances, I might ever have renewed the old dream I 
sometimes dreamed when you were very young, of making you my wife 
one day, I need not ask myself.  I did renew it, and I wrote my 
letter, and you brought your answer.  You are following what I say, 
my child?"

I was cold, and I trembled violently, but not a word he uttered was 
lost.  As I sat looking fixedly at him and the sun's rays 
descended, softly shining through the leaves upon his bare head, I 
felt as if the brightness on him must be like the brightness of the 
angels.

"Hear me, my love, but do not speak.  It is for me to speak now.  
When it was that I began to doubt whether what I had done would 
really make you happy is no matter.  Woodcourt came home, and I 
soon had no doubt at all."

I clasped him round the neck and hung my bead upon his breast and 
wept.  "Lie lightly, confidently here, my child," said he, pressing 
me gently to him.  "I am your guardian and your father now.  Rest 
confidently here."

Soothingly, like the gentle rustling of the leaves; and genially, 
like the ripening weather; and radiantly and beneficently, like the 
sunshine, he went on.

"Understand me, my dear girl.  I had no doubt of your being 
contented and happy with me, being so dutiful and so devoted; but I 
saw with whom you would be happier.  That I penetrated his secret 
when Dame Durden was blind to it is no wonder, for I knew the good 
that could never change in her better far than she did.  Well! I 
have long been in Allan Woodcourt's confidence, although he was 
not, until yesterday, a few hours before you came here, in mine.  
But I would not have my Esther's bright example lost; I would not 
have a jot of my dear girl's virtues unobserved and unhonoured; I 
would not have her admitted on sufferance into the line of Morgan 
ap-Kerrig, no, not for the weight in gold of all the mountains in 
Wales!"

He stopped to kiss me on the forehead, and I sobbed and wept 
afresh.  For I felt as if I could not bear the painful delight of 
his praise.

"Hush, little woman!  Don't cry; this is to be a day of joy.  I 
have looked forward to it," he said exultingly, "for months on 
months!  A few words more, Dame Trot, and I have said my say.  
Determined not to throw away one atom of my Esther's worth, I took 
Mrs. Woodcourt into a separate confidence.  'Now, madam,' said I, 
'I clearly perceive--and indeed I know, to boot--that your son 
loves my ward.  I am further very sure that my ward loves your son, 
but will sacrifice her love to a sense of duty and affection, and 
will sacrifice it so completely, so entirely, so religiously, that 
you should never suspect it though you watched her night and day.'  
Then I told her all our story--ours--yours and mine.  'Now, madam,' 
said I, 'come you, knowing this, and live with us.  Come you, and 
see my child from hour to hour; set what you see against her 
pedigree, which is this, and this'--for I scorned to mince it--'and 
tell me what is the true legitimacy when you shall have quite made 
up your mind on that subject.'  Why, honour to her old Welsh blood, 
my dear," cried my guardian with enthusiasm, "I believe the heart 
it animates beats no less warmly, no less admiringly, no less 
lovingly, towards Dame Durden than my own!"

He tenderly raised my head, and as I clung to him, kissed me in his 
old fatherly way again and again.  What a light, now, on the 
protecting manner I had thought about!

"One more last word.  When Allan Woodcourt spoke to you, my dear, 
he spoke with my knowledge and consent--but I gave him no 
encouragement, not I, for these surprises were my great reward, and 
I was too miserly to part with a scrap of it.  He was to come and 
tell me all that passed, and he did.  I have no more to say.  My 
dearest, Allan Woodcourt stood beside your father when he lay dead
--stood beside your mother.  This is Bleak House.  This day I give 
this house its little mistress; and before God, it is the brightest 
day in all my life!"

He rose and raised me with him.  We were no longer alone.  My 
husband--I have called him by that name full seven happy years now
--stood at my side.

"Allan," said my guardian, "take from me a willing gift, the best 
wife that ever man had.  What more can I say for you than that I 
know you deserve her!  Take with her the little home she brings 
you.  You know what she will make it, Allan; you know what she has 
made its namesake.  Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what 
do I sacrifice?  Nothing, nothing."

He kissed me once again, and now the tears were in his eyes as he 
said more softly, "Esther, my dearest, after so many years, there 
is a kind of parting in this too.  I know that my mistake has 
caused you some distress.  Forgive your old guardian, in restoring 
him to his old place in your affections; and blot it out of your 
memory.  Allan, take my dear."

He moved away from under the green roof of leaves, and stopping in 
the sunlight outside and turning cheerfully towards us, said, "I 
shall be found about here somewhere.  It's a west wind, little 
woman, due west!  Let no one thank me any more, for I am going to 
revert to my bachelor habits, and if anybody disregards this 
warning, I'll run away and never come back!"

What happiness was ours that day, what joy, what rest, what hope, 
what gratitude, what bliss!  We were to be married before the month 
was out, but when we were to come and take possession of our own 
house was to depend on Richard and Ada.

We all three went home together next day.  As soon as we arrived in 
town, Allan went straight to see Richard and to carry our joyful 
news to him and my darling.  Late as it was, I meant to go to her 
for a few minutes before lying down to sleep, but I went home with 
my guardian first to make his tea for him and to occupy the old 
chair by his side, for I did not like to think of its being empty 
so soon.

When we came home we found that a young man had called three times 
in the course of that one day to see me and that having been told 
on the occasion of his third call that I was not expected to return 
before ten o'clock at night, he had left word that he would call 
about then.  He had left his card three times.  Mr. Guppy.

As I naturally speculated on the object of these visits, and as I 
always associated something ludicrous with the visitor, it fell out 
that in laughing about Mr. Guppy I told my guardian of his old 
proposal and his subsequent retraction.  "After that," said my 
guardian, "we will certainly receive this hero."  So instructions 
were given that Mr. Guppy should be shown in when he came again, 
and they were scarcely given when he did come again.

He was embarrassed when he found my guardian with me, but recovered 
himself and said, "How de do, sir?"

"How do you do, sir?" returned my guardian.

"Thank you, sir, I am tolerable," returned Mr. Guppy.  "Will you 
allow me to introduce my mother, Mrs. Guppy of the Old Street Road, 
and my particular friend, Mr. Weevle.  That is to say, my friend 
has gone by the name of Weevle, but his name is really and truly 
Jobling."

My guardian begged them to be seated, and they all sat down.

"Tony," said Mr. Guppy to his friend after an awkward silence.  
"Will you open the case?"

"Do it yourself," returned the friend rather tartly.

"Well, Mr. Jarndyce, sir," Mr. Guppy, after a moment's 
consideration, began, to the great diversion of his mother, which 
she displayed by nudging Mr. Jobling with her elbow and winking at 
me in a most remarkable manner, "I had an idea that I should see 
Miss Summerson by herself and was not quite prepared for your 
esteemed presence.  But Miss Summerson has mentioned to you, 
perhaps, that something has passed between us on former occasions?"

"Miss Summerson," returned my guardian, smiling, "has made a 
communication to that effect to me."

"That," said Mr. Guppy, "makes matters easier.  Sir, I have come 
out of my articles at Kenge and Carboy's, and I believe with 
satisfaction to all parties.  I am now admitted (after undergoing 
an examination that's enough to badger a man blue, touching a pack 
of nonsense that he don't want to know) on the roll of attorneys 
and have taken out my certificate, if it would be any satisfaction 
to you to see it."

"Thank you, Mr. Guppy," returned my guardian.  "I am quite willing
--I believe I use a legal phrase--to admit the certificate."

Mr. Guppy therefore desisted from taking something out of his 
pocket and proceeded without it.

I have no capital myself, but my mother has a little property which 
takes the form of an annuity"--here Mr. Guppy's mother rolled her 
head as if she never could sufficiently enjoy the observation, and 
put her handkerchief to her mouth, and again winked at me--"and a 
few pounds for expenses out of pocket in conducting business will 
never be wanting, free of interest, which is an advantage, you 
know," said Mr. Guppy feelingly.

"Certainly an advantage," returned my guardian.

"I HAVE some connexion," pursued Mr. Guppy, "and it lays in the 
direction of Walcot Square, Lambeth.  I have therefore taken a 
'ouse in that locality, which, in the opinion of my friends, is a 
hollow bargain (taxes ridiculous, and use of fixtures included in 
the rent), and intend setting up professionally for myself there 
forthwith."

Here Mr. Guppy's mother fell into an extraordinary passion of 
rolling her head and smiling waggishly at anybody who would look at 
her.

"It's a six-roomer, exclusive of kitchens," said Mr. Guppy, "and in 
the opinion of my friends, a commodious tenement.  When I mention 
my friends, I refer principally to my friend Jobling, who I believe 
has known me," Mr. Guppy looked at him with a sentimental air, 
"from boyhood's hour."

Mr. Jobling confirmed this with a sliding movement of his legs.

"My friend Jobling will render me his assistance in the capacity of 
clerk and will live in the 'ouse," said Mr. Guppy.  "My mother will 
likewise live in the 'ouse when her present quarter in the Old 
Street Road shall have ceased and expired; and consequently there 
will be no want of society.  My friend Jobling is naturally 
aristocratic by taste, and besides being acquainted with the 
movements of the upper circles, fully backs me in the intentions I 
am now developing."

Mr. Jobling said "Certainly" and withdrew a little from the elbow 
of Mr Guppy's mother.

"Now, I have no occasion to mention to you, sir, you being in the 
confidence of Miss Summerson," said Mr. Guppy, "(mother, I wish 
you'd be so good as to keep still), that Miss Summerson's image was 
formerly imprinted on my 'eart and that I made her a proposal of 
marriage."

"That I have heard," returned my guardian.

"Circumstances," pursued Mr. Guppy, "over which I had no control, 
but quite the contrary, weakened the impression of that image for a 
time.  At which time Miss Summerson's conduct was highly genteel; I 
may even add, magnanimous."

My guardian patted me on the shoulder and seemed much amused.

"Now, sir," said Mr. Guppy, "I have got into that state of mind 
myself that I wish for a reciprocity of magnanimous behaviour.  I 
wish to prove to Miss Summerson that I can rise to a heighth of 
which perhaps she hardly thought me capable.  I find that the image 
which I did suppose had been eradicated from my 'eart is NOT 
eradicated.  Its influence over me is still tremenjous, and 
yielding to it, I am willing to overlook the circumstances over 
which none of us have had any control and to renew those proposals 
to Miss Summerson which I had the honour to make at a former 
period.  I beg to lay the 'ouse in Walcot Square, the business, and 
myself before Miss Summerson for her acceptance."

"Very magnanimous indeed, sir," observed my guardian.

"Well, sir," replied Mr. Guppy with candour, "my wish is to BE 
magnanimous.  I do not consider that in making this offer to Miss 
Summerson I am by any means throwing myself away; neither is that 
the opinion of my friends.  Still, there are circumstances which I 
submit may be taken into account as a set off against any little 
drawbacks of mine, and so a fair and equitable balance arrived at."

"I take upon myself, sir," said my guardian, laughing as he rang 
the bell, "to reply to your proposals on behalf of Miss Summerson.  
She is very sensible of your handsome intentions, and wishes you 
good evening, and wishes you well."

"Oh!" said Mr. Guppy with a blank look.  "Is that tantamount, sir, 
to acceptance, or rejection, or consideration?"

"To decided rejection, if you please," returned my guardian.

Mr. Guppy looked incredulously at his friend, and at his mother, 
who suddenly turned very angry, and at the floor, and at the 
ceiling.

"Indeed?" said he.  "Then, Jobling, if you was the friend you 
represent yourself, I should think you might hand my mother out of 
the gangway instead of allowing her to remain where she ain't 
wanted."

But Mrs. Guppy positively refused to come out of the gangway.  She 
wouldn't hear of it.  "Why, get along with you," said she to my 
guardian, "what do you mean?  Ain't my son good enough for you?  
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  Get out with you!"

"My good lady," returned my guardian, "it is hardly reasonable to 
ask me to get out of my own room."

"I don't care for that," said Mrs. Guppy.  "Get out with you.  If 
we ain't good enough for you, go and procure somebody that is good 
enough.  Go along and find 'em."

I was quite unprepared for the rapid manner in which Mrs. Guppy's 
power of jocularity merged into a power of taking the profoundest 
offence.

"Go along and find somebody that's good enough for you," repeated 
Mrs. Guppy.  "Get out!"  Nothing seemed to astonish Mr. Guppy's 
mother so much and to make her so very indignant as our not getting 
out.  "Why don't you get out?" said Mrs. Guppy.  "What are you 
stopping here for?"

"Mother," interposed her son, always getting before her and pushing 
her back with one shoulder as she sidled at my guardian, "WILL you 
hold your tongue?"

"No, William," she returned, "I won't!  Not unless he gets out, I 
won't!"

However, Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling together closed on Mr. Guppy's 
mother (who began to be quite abusive) and took her, very much 
against her will, downstairs, her voice rising a stair higher every 
time her figure got a stair lower, and insisting that we should 
immediately go and find somebody who was good enough for us, and 
above all things that we should get out.



CHAPTER LXV

Beginning the World


The term had commenced, and my guardian found an intimation from 
Mr. Kenge that the cause would come on in two days.  As I had 
sufficient hopes of the will to be in a flutter about it, Allan and 
I agreed to go down to the court that morning.  Richard was 
extremely agitated and was so weak and low, though his illness was 
still of the mind, that my dear girl indeed had sore occasion to be 
supported.  But she looked forward--a very little way now--to the 
help that was to come to her, and never drooped.

It was at Westminster that the cause was to come on.  It had come 
on there, I dare say, a hundred times before, but I could not 
divest myself of an idea that it MIGHT lead to some result now.  We 
left home directly after breakfast to be at Westminster Hall in 
good time and walked down there through the lively streets--so 
happily and strangely it seemed!--together.

As we were going along, planning what we should do for Richard and 
Ada, I heard somebody calling "Esther!  My dear Esther!  Esther!"  
And there was Caddy Jellyby, with her head out of the window of a 
little carriage which she hired now to go about in to her pupils 
(she had so many), as if she wanted to embrace me at a hundred 
yards' distance.  I had written her a note to tell her of all that 
my guardian had done, but had not had a moment to go and see her.  
Of course we turned back, and the affectionate girl was in that 
state of rapture, and was so overjoyed to talk about the night when 
she brought me the flowers, and was so determined to squeeze my 
face (bonnet and all) between her hands, and go on in a wild manner 
altogether, calling me all kinds of precious names, and telling 
Allan I had done I don't know what for her, that I was just obliged 
to get into the little carriage and caln her down by letting her 
say and do exactly what she liked.  Allan, standing at the window, 
was as pleased as Caddy; and I was as pleased as either of them; 
and I wonder that I got away as I did, rather than that I came off 
laughing, and red, and anything but tidy, and looking after Caddy, 
who looked after us out of the coach-window as long as she could 
see us.

This made us some quarter of an hour late, and when we came to 
Westminster Hall we found that the day's business was begun.  Worse 
than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chancery 
that it was full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear 
what was passing within.  It appeared to be something droll, for 
occasionally there was a laugh and a cry of "Silence!"  It appeared 
to be something interesting, for every one was pushing and striving 
to get nearer.  It appeared to be something that made the 
professional gentlemen very merry, for there were several young 
counsellors in wigs and whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and 
when one of them told the others about it, they put their hands in 
their pockets, and quite doubled themselves up with laughter, and 
went stamping about the pavement of the Hall.

We asked a gentleman by us if he knew what cause was on.  He told 
us Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  We asked him if he knew what was doing 
in it.  He said really, no he did not, nobody ever did, but as well 
as he could make out, it was over.  Over for the day? we asked him.  
No, he said, over for good.

Over for good!

When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another 
quite lost in amazement.  Could it be possible that the will had 
set things right at last and that Richard and Ada were going to be 
rich?  It seemed too good to be true.  Alas it was!

Our suspense was short, for a break-up soon took place in the 
crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot 
and bringing a quantity of bad air with them.  Still they were all 
exceedingly amused and were more like people coming out from a 
farce or a juggler than from a court of justice.  We stood aside, 
watching for any countenance we knew, and presently great bundles 
of paper began to be carried out--bundles in bags, bundles too 
large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all 
shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw 
down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they 
went back to bring out more.  Even these clerks were laughing.  We 
glanced at the papers, and seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, 
asked an official-looking person who was standing in the midst of 
them whether the cause was over.  Yes, he said, it was all up with 
it at last, and burst out laughing too.

At this juncture we perceived Mr. Kenge coming out of court with an 
affable dignity upon him, listening to Mr. Vholes, who was 
deferential and carried his own bag.  Mr. Vholes was the first to 
see us.  "Here is Miss Summerson, sir," he said.  "And Mr. 
Woodcourt."

"Oh, indeed!  Yes.  Truly!" said Mr. Kenge, raising his hat to me 
with polished politeness.  "How do you do?  Glad to see you.  Mr. 
Jarndyce is not here?"

No.  He never came there, I reminded him.

"Really," returned Mr. Kenge, "it is as well that he is NOT here 
to-day, for his--shall I say, in my good friend's absence, his 
indomitable singularity of opinion?--might have been strengthened, 
perhaps; not reasonably, but might have been strengthened."

"Pray what has been done to-day?" asked Allan.

"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Kenge with excessive urbanity.

"What has been done to-day?"

"What has been done," repeated Mr. Kenge.  "Quite so.  Yes.  Why, 
not much has been done; not much.  We have been checked--brought up 
suddenly, I would say--upon the--shall I term it threshold?"

"Is this will considered a genuine document, sir?" said Allan.  
"Will you tell us that?"

"Most certainly, if I could," said Mr. Kenge; "but we have not gone 
into that, we have not gone into that."

"We have not gone into that," repeated Mr. Vholes as if his low 
inward voice were an echo.

"You are to reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," observed Mr. Kenge, using his 
silver trowel persuasively and smoothingly, "that this has been a 
great cause, that this has been a protracted cause, that this has 
been a complex cause.  Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been termed, not 
inaptly, a monument of Chancery practice."

"And patience has sat upon it a long time," said Allan.

"Very well indeed, sir," returned Mr. Kenge with a certain 
condeseending laugh he had.  "Very well!  You are further to 
reflect, Mr. Woodcourt," becoming dignified almost to severity, 
"that on the numerous difficulties, contingencies, masterly 
fictions, and forms of procedure in this great cause, there has 
been expended study, ability, eloquence, knowledge, intellect, Mr. 
Woodcourt, high intellect.  For many years, the--a--I would say the 
flower of the bar, and the--a--I would presume to add, the matured 
autumnal fruits of the woolsack--have been lavished upon Jarndyce 
and Jarndyce.  If the public have the benefit, and if the country 
have the adornment, of this great grasp, it must be paid for in 
money or money's worth, sir."

"Mr. Kenge," said Allan, appearing enlightened all in a moment.  
"Excuse me, our time presses.  Do I understand that the whole 
estate is found to have been absorbed in costs?"

"Hem!  I believe so," returned Mr. Kenge.  "Mr. Vholes, what do YOU 
say?"

"I believe so," said Mr. Vholes.

"And that thus the suit lapses and melts away?"

"Probably," returned Mr. Kenge.  "Mr. Vholes?"

"Probably," said Mr. Vholes.

"My dearest life," whispered Allan, "this will break Richard's 
heart!"

There was such a shock of apprehension in his face, and he knew 
Richard so perfectly, and I too had seen so much of his gradual 
decay, that what my dear girl had said to me in the fullness of her 
foreboding love sounded like a knell in my ears.

"In case you should be wanting Mr. C., sir," said Mr. Vholes, 
coming after us, "you'll find him in court.  I left him there 
resting himself a little.  Good day, sir; good day, Miss 
Summerson."  As he gave me that slowly devouring look of his, while 
twisting up the strings of his bag before he hastened with it after 
Mr. Kenge, the benignant shadow of whose conversational presence he 
seemed afraid to leave, he gave one gasp as if he had swallowed the 
last morsel of his client, and his black buttoned-up unwholesome 
figure glided away to the low door at the end of the Hall.

"My dear love," said Allan, "leave to me, for a little while, the 
charge you gave me.  Go home with this intelligence and come to 
Ada's by and by!"

I would not let him take me to a coach, but entreated him to go to 
Richard without a moment's delay and leave me to do as he wished.  
Hurrying home, I found my guardian and told him gradually with what 
news I had returned.  "Little woman," said he, quite unmoved for 
himself, "to have done with the suit on any terms is a greater 
blessing than I had looked for.  But my poor young cousins!"

We talked about them all the morning and discussed what it was 
possible to do.  In the afternoon my guardian walked with me to 
Symond's Inn and left me at the door.  I went upstairs.  When my 
darling heard my footsteps, she came out into the small passage and 
threw her arms round my neck, but she composed herself direcfly and 
said that Richard had asked for me several times.  Allan had found 
him sitting in the corner of the court, she told me, like a stone 
figure.  On being roused, he had broken away and made as if he 
would have spoken in a fierce voice to the judge.  He was stopped 
by his mouth being full of blood, and Allan had brought him home.

He was lying on a sofa with his eyes closed when I went in.  There 
were restoratives on the table; the room was made as airy as 
possible, and was darkened, and was very orderly and quiet.  Allan 
stood behind him watching him gravely.  His face appeared to me to 
be quite destitute of colour, and now that I saw him without his 
seeing me, I fully saw, for the first time, how worn away he was.  
But he looked handsomer than I had seen him look for many a day.

I sat down by his side in silence.  Opening his eyes by and by, he 
said in a weak voice, but with his old smile, "Dame Durden, kiss 
me, my dear!"

It was a great comfort and surprise to me to find him in his low 
state cheerful and looking forward.  He was happier, he said, in 
our intended marriage than he could find words to tell me.  My 
husband had been a guardian angel to him and Ada, and he blessed us 
both and wished us all the joy that life could yield us.  I almost 
felt as if my own heart would have broken when I saw him take my 
husband's hand and hold it to his breast.

We spoke of the future as much as possible, and he said several 
times that he must be present at our marriage if he could stand 
upon his feet.  Ada would contrive to take him, somehow, he said.  
"Yes, surely, dearest Richard!"  But as my darling answered him 
thus hopefully, so serene and beautiful, with the help that was to 
come to her so near--I knew--I knew!

It was not good for him to talk too much, and when he was silent, 
we were silent too.  Sitting beside him, I made a pretence of 
working for my dear, as he had always been used to joke about my 
being busy.  Ada leaned upon his pillow, holding his head upon her 
arm.  He dozed often, and whenever he awoke without seeing him, 
said first of all, "Where is Woodcourt?"

Evening had come on when I lifted up my eyes and saw my guardian 
standing in the little hall.  "Who is that, Dame Durden?" Richard 
asked me.  The door was behind him, but he had observed in my face 
that some one was there.

I looked to Allan for advice, and as he nodded "Yes," bent over 
Richard and told him.  My guardian saw what passed, came softly by 
me in a moment, and laid his hand on Richard's.  "Oh, sir," said 
Richard, "you are a good man, you are a good man!" and burst into 
tears for the first time.

My guardian, the picture of a good man, sat down in my place, 
keeping his hand on Richard's.

"My dear Rick," said he, "the clouds have cleared away, and it is 
bright now.  We can see now.  We were all bewildered, Rick, more or 
less.  What matters!  And how are you, my dear boy?"

"I am very weak, sir, but I hope I shall be stronger.  I have to 
begin the world."

"Aye, truly; well said!" cried my guardian.

"I will not begin it in the old way now," said Richard with a sad 
smile.  "I have learned a lesson now, sir.  It was a hard one, but 
you shall be assured, indeed, that I have learned it."

"Well, well," said my guardian, comforting him; "well, well, well, 
dear boy!"

"I was thinking, sir," resumed Richard, "that there is nothing on 
earth I should so much like to see as their house--Dame Durden's 
and Woodcourt's house.  If I could be removed there when I begin to 
recover my strength, I feel as if I should get well there sooner 
than anywhere."

"Why, so have I been thinking too, Rick," said my guardian, "and 
our little woman likewise; she and I have been talking of it this 
very day.  I dare say her husband won't object.  What do you 
think?"

Richard smiled and lifted up his arm to touch him as he stood 
behind the head of the couch.

"I say nothing of Ada," said Richard, "but I think of her, and have 
thought of her very much.  Look at her!  See her here, sir, bending 
over this pillow when she has so much need to rest upon it herself, 
my dear love, my poor girl!"

He clasped her in his arms, and none of us spoke.  He gradually 
released her, and she looked upon us, and looked up to heaven, and 
moved her lips.

"When I get down to Bleak House," said Richard, "I shall have much 
to tell you, sir, and you will have much to show me.  You will go, 
won't you?"

"Undoubtedly, dear Rick."

"Thank you; like you, like you," said Richard.  "But it's all like 
you.  They have been telling me how you planned it and how you 
remembered all Esther's familiar tastes and ways.  It will be like 
coming to the old Bleak House again."

"And you will come there too, I hope, Rick.  I am a solitary man 
now, you know, and it will be a charity to come to me.  A charity 
to come to me, my love!" he repeated to Ada as he gently passed his 
hand over her golden hair and put a lock of it to his lips.  (I 
think he vowed within himself to cherish her if she were left 
alone.)

"It was a troubled dream?" said Richard, clasping both my 
guardian's hands eagerly.

"Nothing more, Rick; nothing more."

"And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and 
pity the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?"

"Indeed I can.  What am I but another dreamer, Rick?"

"I will begin the world!" said Richard with a light in his eyes.

My husband drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him solemnly 
lift up his hand to warn my guardian.

"When shall I go from this place to that pleasant country where the 
old times are, where I shall have strength to tell what Ada has 
been to me, where I shall be able to recall my many faults and 
blindnesses, where I shall prepare myself to be a guide to my 
unborn child?" said Richard.  "When shall I go?"

"Dear Rick, when you are strong enough," returned my guardian.

"Ada, my darling!"

He sought to raise himself a little.  Allan raised him so that she 
could hold him on her bosom, which was what he wanted.

"I have done you many wrongs, my own.  I have fallen like a poor 
stray shadow on your way, I have married you to poverty and 
trouble, I have scattered your means to the winds.  You will 
forgive me all this, my Ada, before I begin the world?"

A smile irradiated his face as she bent to kiss him.  He slowly 
laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her 
neck, and with one parting sob began the world.  Not this world, 
oh, not this!  The world that sets this right.

When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came 
weeping to me and told me she had given her birds their liberty.



CHAPTER LXVI

Down in Lincolnshire


There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days, as there 
is upon a portion of the family history.  The story goes that Sir 
Leicester paid some who could have spoken out to hold their peace; 
but it is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about, and 
any brighter spark of life it shows soon dies away.  It is known 
for certain that the handsome Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in 
the park, where the trees arch darkly overhead, and the owl is 
heard at night making the woods ring; but whence she was brought 
home to be laid among the echoes of that solitary place, or how she 
died, is all mystery.  Some of her old friends, principally to be 
found among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, 
did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with 
large fans--like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death, 
after losing all their other beaux--did once occasionally say, when 
the world assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the 
Dedlocks, entombed in the mausoleum, never rose against the 
profanation of her company.  But the dead-and-gone Dedlocks take it 
very calmly and have never been known to object.

Up from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the bridle-
road among the trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot the sound 
of horses' hoofs.  Then may be seen Sir Leicester--invalided, bent, 
and almost blind, but of worthy presence yet--riding with a 
stalwart man beside him, constant to his bridle-rein.  When they 
come to a certain spot before the mausoleum-door, Sir Leicester's 
accustomed horse stops of his own accord, and Sir Leicester, 
pulling off his hat, is still for a few moments before they ride 
away.

War rages yet with the audacious Boythorn, though at uncertain 
intervals, and now hotly, and now coolly, flickering like an 
unsteady fire.  The truth is said to be that when Sir Leicester 
came down to Lincolnshire for good, Mr. Boythorn showed a manifest 
desire to abandon his right of way and do whatever Sir Leicester 
would, which Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a condescension to his 
illness or misfortune, took in such high dudgeon, and was so 
magnificently aggrieved by, that Mr. Boythorn found himself under 
the necessity of committing a flagrant trespass to restore his 
neighbour to himself.  Similarly, Mr. Boythorn continues to post 
tremendous placards on the disputed thoroughfare and (with his bird 
upon his head) to hold forth vehemently against Sir Leicester in 
the sanctuary of his own home; similarly, also, he defies him as of 
old in the little church by testifying a bland unconsciousness of 
his existence.  But it is whispered that when he is most ferocious 
towards his old foe, he is really most considerate, and that Sir 
Leicester, in the dignity of being implacable, little supposes how 
much he is humoured.  As little does he think how near together he 
and his antagonist have suffered in the fortunes of two sisters, 
and his antagonist, who knows it now, is not the man to tell him.  
So the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both.

In one of the lodges of the park--that lodge within sight of the 
house where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in 
Lincolnshire, my Lady used to see the keeper's child--the stalwart 
man, the trooper formerly, is housed.  Some relics of his old 
calling hang upon the walls, and these it is the chosen recreation 
of a little lame man about the stable-yard to keep gleaming bright.  
A busy little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-house 
doors, of stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness bosses, 
anything in the way of a stable-yard that will take a polish, 
leading a life of friction.  A shaggy little damaged man, withal, 
not unlike an old dog of some mongrel breed, who has been 
considerably knocked about.  He answers to the name of Phil.

A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of 
hearing now) going to church on the arm of her son and to observe--
which few do, for the house is scant of company in these times--the 
relations of both towards Sir Leicester, and his towards them.  
They have visitors in the high summer weather, when a grey cloak 
and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other periods, are seen 
among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally found 
gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park; and 
when the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening 
air from the trooper's door.  Then is a fife heard trolling within 
the lodge on the inspiring topic of the "British Grenadiers"; and 
as the evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say, 
while two men pace together up and down, "But I never own to it 
before the old girl.  Discipline must be maintained."

The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no 
longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long 
drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my 
Lady's picture.  Closed in by night with broad screens, and 
illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems 
gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more.  A 
little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir 
Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, 
and looks so obdurate, will have opened and received him.

Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in 
her face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in 
the long evenings and is driven to various artifices to conceal her 
yawns, of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of 
the pearl necklace between her rosy lips.  Long-winded treatises on 
the Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and 
Boodle villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle 
and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be 
one of the two, and cannot be anything else), are the staple of her 
reading.  Sir Leicester is not particular what it is and does not 
appear to follow it very closely, further than that he always comes 
broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to leave off, and 
sonorously repeating her last words, begs with some displeasure to 
know if she finds herself fatigued.  However, Volumnia, in the 
course of her bird-like hopping about and pecking at papers, has 
alighted on a memorandum concerning herself in the event of 
"anything happening" to her kinsman, which is handsome compensation 
for an extensive course of reading and holds even the dragon 
Boredom at bay.

The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its 
dullness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns 
are heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and 
keepers wait at the old places of appointment for low-spirited twos 
and threes of cousins.  The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by 
the dreariness of the place, gets into a fearful state of 
depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless 
hours and protesting that such fernal old jail's--nough t'sew fler 
up--frever.

The only great occasions for Volumnia in this changed aspect of the 
place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely 
separated, when something is to be done for the county or the 
country in the way of gracing a public ball.  Then, indeed, does 
the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form and proceed with joy 
under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen 
heavy miles off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days 
and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber-
room full of old chairs and tables upside down.  Then, indeed, does 
she captivate all hearts by her condescension, by her girlish 
vivacity, and by her skipping about as in the days when the hideous 
old general with the mouth too full of teeth had not cut one of 
them at two guineas each.  Then does she twirl and twine, a 
pastoral nymph of good family, through the mazes of the dance.  
Then do the swains appear with tea, with lemonade, with sandwiches, 
with homage.  Then is she kind and cruel, stately and unassuming, 
various, beautifully wilful.  Then is there a singular kind of 
parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of another 
age embellishing that assembly-room, which, with their meagre 
stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs where no 
drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs and drops have 
both departed, and their little feeble prismatic twinkling, all 
seem Volumnias.

For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of 
overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their 
hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window-
panes in monotonous depressions.  A labyrinth of grandeur, less the 
property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly 
likenesses than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which 
start out of their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding 
through the building.  A waste of unused passages and staircases in 
which to drop a comb upon a bedroom floor at night is to send a 
stealthy footfall on an errand through the house.  A place where 
few people care to go about alone, where a maid screams if an ash 
drops from the fire, takes to crying at all times and seasons, 
becomes the victim of a low disorder of the spirits, and gives 
warning and departs.

Thus Chesney Wold.  With so much of itself abandoned to darkness 
and vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the 
wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless always--no flag flying 
now by day, no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to 
come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of 
rooms, no stir of life about it--passion and pride, even to the 
stranger's eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire and 
yielded it to dull repose.



CHAPTER LXVII

The Close of Esther's Narrative


Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak House.  
The few words that I have to add to what I have written are soon 
penned; then I and the unknown friend to whom I write will part for 
ever.  Not without much dear remembrance on my side.  Not without 
some, I hope, on his or hers.

They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never 
left her.  The little child who was to have done so much was born 
before the turf was planted on its father's grave.  It was a boy; 
and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father's name.

The help that my dear counted on did come to her, though it came, 
in the eternal wisdom, for another purpose.  Though to bless and 
restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, 
its power was mighty to do it.  When I saw the strength of the weak 
little hand and how its touch could heal my darling's heart and 
raised hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the 
tenderness of God.

They throve, and by degrees I saw my dear girl pass into my country 
garden and walk there with her infant in her arms.  I was married 
then.  I was the happiest of the happy.

It was at this time that my guardian joined us and asked Ada when 
she would come home.

"Both houses are your home, my dear," said he, "but the older Bleak 
House claims priority.  When you and my boy are strong enough to do 
it, come and take possession of your home."

Ada called him "her dearest cousin, John."  But he said, no, it 
must be guardian now.  He was her guardian henceforth, and the 
boy's; and he had an old association with the name.  So she called 
him guardian, and has called him guardian ever since.  The children 
know him by no other name.  I say the children; I have two little 
daughters.

It is difficult to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not 
at all grammatical) is married to a miller in our neighbourhood; 
yet so it is; and even now, looking up from my desk as I write 
early in the morning at my summer window, I see the very mill 
beginning to go round.  I hope the miller will not spoil Charley; 
but he is very fond of her, and Charley is rather vain of such a 
match, for he is well to do and was in great request.  So far as my 
small maid is concerned, I might suppose time to have stood for 
seven years as still as the mill did half an hour ago, since little 
Emma, Charley's sister, is exactly what Charley used to be.  As to 
Tom, Charley's brother, I am really afraid to say what he did at 
school in ciphering, but I think it was decimals.  He is 
apprenticed to the miller, whatever it was, and is a good bashful 
fellow, always falling in love with somebody and being ashamed of 
it.

Caddy Jellyby passed her very last holidays with us and was a 
dearer creature than ever, perpetually dancing in and out of the 
house with the children as if she had never given a dancing-lesson 
in her life.  Caddy keeps her own little carriage now instead of 
hiring one, and lives full two miles further westward than Newman 
Street.  She works very hard, her husband (an excellent one) being 
lame and able to do very little.  Still, she is more than contented 
and does all she has to do with all her heart.  Mr. Jellyby spends 
his evenings at her new house with his head against the wall as he 
used to do in her old one.  I have heard that Mrs. Jellyby was 
understood to suffer great mortification from her daughter's 
ignoble marriage and pursuits, but I hope she got over it in time.  
She has been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a 
failure in consequence of the king of Boorioboola wanting to sell 
everybody--who survived the climate--for rum, but she has taken up 
with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me 
it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one.  I 
had almost forgotten Caddy's poor little girl.  She is not such a 
mite now, but she is deaf and dumb.  I believe there never was a 
better mother than Caddy, who learns, in her scanty intervals of 
leisure, innumerable deaf and dumb arts to soften the affliction of 
her child.

As if I were never to have done with Caddy, I am reminded here of 
Peepy and old Mr. Turveydrop.  Peepy is in the Custom House, and 
doing extremely well.  Old Mr. Turveydrop, very apoplectic, still 
exhibits his deportment about town, still enjoys himself in the old 
manner, is still believed in in the old way.  He is constant in his 
patronage of Peepy and is understood to have bequeathed him a 
favourite French clock in his dressing-room--which is not his 
property.

With the first money we saved at home, we added to our pretty house 
by throwing out a little growlery expressly for my guardian, which 
we inaugurated with great splendour the next time he came down to 
see us.  I try to write all this lightly, because my heart is full 
in drawing to an end, but when I write of him, my tears will have 
their way.

I never look at him but I hear our poor dear Richard calling him a 
good man.  To Ada and her pretty boy, he is the fondest father; to 
me he is what he has ever been, and what name can I give to that?  
He is my husband's best and dearest friend, he is our children's 
darling, he is the object of our deepest love and veneration.  Yet 
while I feel towards him as if he were a superior being, I am so 
familiar with him and so easy with him that I almost wonder at 
myself.  I have never lost my old names, nor has he lost his; nor 
do I ever, when he is with us, sit in any other place than in my 
old chair at his side, Dame Trot, Dame Durden, Little Woman--all 
just the same as ever; and I answer, "Yes, dear guardian!" just the 
same.

I have never known the wind to be in the east for a single moment 
since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name.  I 
remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the east now, 
and he said, no, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter 
on that very day.

I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever.  The sorrow 
that has been in her face--for it is not there now--seems to have 
purified even its innocent expression and to have given it a 
diviner quality.  Sometimes when I raise my eyes and see her in the 
black dress that she still wears, teaching my Richard, I feel--it 
is difficult to express--as if it were so good to know that she 
remembers her dear Esther in her prayers.

I call him my Richard!  But he says that he has two mamas, and I am 
one.

We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we 
have quite enough.  I never walk out with my husband but I hear the 
people bless him.  I never go into a house of any degree but I hear 
his praises or see them in grateful eyes.  I never lie down at 
night but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated 
pain and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need.  I know 
that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have 
often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient 
ministration.  Is not this to be rich?

The people even praise me as the doctor's wife.  The people even 
like me as I go about, and make so much of me that I am quite 
abashed.  I owe it all to him, my love, my pride!  They like me for 
his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake.

A night or two ago, after bustling about preparing for my darling 
and my guardian and little Richard, who are coming to-morrow, I was 
sitting out in the porch of all places, that dearly memorable 
porch, when Allan came home.  So he said, "My precious little 
woman, what are you doing here?"  And I said, "The moon is shining 
so brightly, Allan, and the night is so delicious, that I have been 
sitting here thinking."

"What have you been thinking about, my dear?" said Allan then.

"How curious you are!" said I.  "I am almost ashamed to tell you, 
but I will.  I have been thinking about my old looks--such as they 
were."

"And what have you been thinking about THEM, my busy bee?" said 
Allan.

"I have been thinking that I thought it was impossible that you 
COULD have loved me any better, even if I had retained them."

"'Such as they were'?" said Allan, laughing.

"Such as they were, of course."

"My dear Dame Durden," said Allan, drawing my arm through his, "do 
you ever look in the glass?"

"You know I do; you see me do it."

"And don't you know that you are prettier than you ever were?"

"I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now.  But I 
know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my 
darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, 
and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face 
that ever was seen, and that they can very well do without much 
beauty in me--even supposing--.





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A CHRISTMAS CAROL

by Charles Dickens






I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, 
to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my 
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, 
with the season, or with me.  May it haunt their houses
pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, 
                                   C. D. 
December, 1843.






Stave 1:  Marley's Ghost

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that. The register of his burial was
signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker,
and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And
Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he 
chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to
regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery 
in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors 
is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that
Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did.
How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were
partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge
was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole
assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and
sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully 
cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent 
man of business on the very day of the funeral,
and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.
The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to
the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley 
was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or
nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going
to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that
Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there
would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a
stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, 
than there would be in any other middle-aged
gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy
spot -- say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance -- 
literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name.
There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse
door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as
Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the
business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, 
but he answered to both names. It was all the
same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-
stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping,
scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and
sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out
generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary
as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, 
nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek,
stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue;
and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty
rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his
wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always
about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and
didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on
Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather
chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he,
no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no
pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't
know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and
snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage
over him in only one respect. They often `came down'
handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with
gladsome looks, `My dear Scrooge, how are you?
When will you come to see me?' No beggars implored 
him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him
what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all
his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of
Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to
know him; and when they saw him coming on, would
tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and
then would wag their tails as though they said, `No
eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!'

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing
he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths
of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, 
was what the knowing ones call `nuts' to Scrooge.

Once upon a time -- of all the good days in the year,
on Christmas Eve -- old Scrooge sat busy in his 
counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy
withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, 
go wheezing up and down, beating their hands
upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the
pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had
only just gone three, but it was quite dark already --
it had not been light all day -- and candles were flaring 
in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like
ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog
came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was
so dense without, that although the court was of the
narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.
To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring
everything, one might have thought that Nature
lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open
that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a
dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying
letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's
fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one
coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept
the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the
clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted
that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore 
the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to
warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being 
a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

`A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!' cried
a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's
nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was
the first intimation he had of his approach.

`Bah!' said Scrooge, `Humbug!'

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the
fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was
all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his
eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
`Christmas a humbug, uncle!' said Scrooge's
nephew. `You don't mean that, I am sure?'

`I do,' said Scrooge. `Merry Christmas! What
right have you to be merry? What reason have you
to be merry? You're poor enough.'

`Come, then,' returned the nephew gaily. `What
right have you to be dismal? What reason have you
to be morose? You're rich enough.'

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur
of the moment, said `Bah!' again; and followed it up
with `Humbug.'

`Don't be cross, uncle!' said the nephew.

`What else can I be,' returned the uncle, `when I
live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! 
Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas 
time to you but a time for paying bills without
money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but
not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books
and having every item in 'em through a round dozen
of months presented dead against you? If I could
work my will,' said Scrooge indignantly, `every idiot
who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips,
should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!'

`Uncle!' pleaded the nephew.

`Nephew!' returned the uncle sternly, `keep Christmas 
in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.'

`Keep it!' repeated Scrooge's nephew. `But you
don't keep it.'

`Let me leave it alone, then,' said Scrooge. `Much
good may it do you! Much good it has ever done
you!'

`There are many things from which I might have
derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare
say,' returned the nephew. `Christmas among the
rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas 
time, when it has come round -- apart from the
veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything
belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a
good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar
of the year, when men and women seem by one consent 
to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think
of people below them as if they really were 
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race 
of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore,
uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or
silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me
good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!'

The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded.
Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety,
he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark
for ever.

`Let me hear another sound from you,' said
Scrooge, `and you'll keep your Christmas by losing
your situation! You're quite a powerful speaker,
sir,' he added, turning to his nephew. `I wonder you
don't go into Parliament.'

`Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.'

Scrooge said that he would see him -- yes, indeed he
did. He went the whole length of the expression,
and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

`But why?' cried Scrooge's nephew. `Why?'

`Why did you get married?' said Scrooge.

`Because I fell in love.'

`Because you fell in love!' growled Scrooge, as if
that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous 
than a merry Christmas. `Good afternoon!'

`Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before
that happened. Why give it as a reason for not
coming now?'

`Good afternoon,' said Scrooge.

`I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you;
why cannot we be friends?'

`Good afternoon,' said Scrooge.

`I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so 
resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I
have been a party. But I have made the trial in
homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas
humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!'

`Good afternoon,' said Scrooge.

`And A Happy New Year!'

`Good afternoon,' said Scrooge.

His nephew left the room without an angry word,
notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to
bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who
cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned 
them cordially.

`There's another fellow,' muttered Scrooge; who
overheard him: `my clerk, with fifteen shillings a
week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry
Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam.'

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had
let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen,
pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off,
in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in
their hands, and bowed to him.

`Scrooge and Marley's, I believe,' said one of the
gentlemen, referring to his list. `Have I the pleasure
of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?'

`Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,'
Scrooge replied. `He died seven years ago, this very
night.'

`We have no doubt his liberality is well represented
by his surviving partner,' said the gentleman, presenting 
his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred
spirits. At the ominous word `liberality,' Scrooge
frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials 
back.

`At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,'
said the gentleman, taking up a pen, `it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight
provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer
greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in
want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands
are in want of common comforts, sir.'

`Are there no prisons?' asked Scrooge.

`Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down
the pen again.

`And the Union workhouses?' demanded Scrooge.
`Are they still in operation?'

`They are. Still,' returned the gentleman, `I wish
I could say they were not.'

`The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour,
then?' said Scrooge.

`Both very busy, sir.'

`Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first,
that something had occurred to stop them in their
useful course,' said Scrooge. `I'm very glad to
hear it.'

`Under the impression that they scarcely furnish
Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,'
returned the gentleman, `a few of us are endeavouring
to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink.
and means of warmth. We choose this time, because
it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt,
and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down
for?'

`Nothing!' Scrooge replied.

`You wish to be anonymous?'

`I wish to be left alone,' said Scrooge. `Since you
ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.
I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't
afford to make idle people merry. I help to support 
the establishments I have mentioned -- they cost
enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'

`Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'

`If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, `they had
better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that.'

`But you might know it,' observed the gentleman.

`It's not my business,' Scrooge returned. `It's
enough for a man to understand his own business, and
not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies
me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!'

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue
their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge returned 
his labours with an improved opinion of himself, 
and in a more facetious temper than was usual
with him.

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that
people ran about with flaring links, proffering their
services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct
them on their way. The ancient tower of a church,
whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down
at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became
invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the
clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if
its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.
The cold became intense. In the main street at the
corner of the court, some labourers were repairing
the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier,
round which a party of ragged men and boys were
gathered: warming their hands and winking their
eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug
being left in solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed, 
and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness 
of the shops where holly sprigs and berries
crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale
faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers'
trades became a splendid joke; a glorious pageant,
with which it was next to impossible to believe that
such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything
to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the
mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks
and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's
household should; and even the little tailor, whom he
had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for
being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up
to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean
wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting 
cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped
the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather
as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then
indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The
owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled
by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs,
stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with
a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

`God bless you, merry gentleman!
May nothing you dismay!'

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action,
that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to
the fog and even more congenial frost.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-
house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted
from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the
expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed
his candle out, and put on his hat.

`You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?' said
Scrooge.

`If quite convenient, sir.'

`It's not convenient,' said Scrooge, `and it's not
fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think
yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?'

The clerk smiled faintly.

`And yet,' said Scrooge, `you don't think me ill-used,
when I pay a day's wages for no work.'

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

`A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every
twenty-fifth of December!' said Scrooge, buttoning
his great-coat to the chin. `But I suppose you must
have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next
morning.'

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge
walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a
twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his
white comforter dangling below his waist (for he
boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, 
at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in
honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home
to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play
at blindman's-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual
melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and
beguiled the rest of the evening with his
banker's-book, went home to bed. He lived in
chambers which had once belonged to his deceased
partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a
lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so
little business to be, that one could scarcely help
fancying it must have run there when it was a young
house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses,
and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough
now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but
Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.
The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew
its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.
The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway 
of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of
the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the
threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all 
particular about the knocker on the door, except that it
was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had
seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what
is called fancy about him as any man in the city of
London, even including -- which is a bold word -- the
corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be
borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one
thought on Marley, since his last mention of his
seven years' dead partner that afternoon. And then
let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened
that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door,
saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate
process of change -- not a knocker, but Marley's face.

Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow
as the other objects in the yard were, but had a
dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark
cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked
at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly
spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The
hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air;
and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly
motionless. That, and its livid colour, made
it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the
face and beyond its control, rather than a part or
its own expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it
was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood
was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it
had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue.
But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished,
turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before
he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind
it first, as if he half-expected to be terrified with the
sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall.
But there was nothing on the back of the door, except
the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he
said `Pooh, pooh!' and closed it with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder. 
Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's 
cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal 
of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to
be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and
walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too:
trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six 
up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad
young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you
might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken
it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall
and the door towards the balustrades: and done it
easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room
to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge
thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before
him in the gloom. Half a dozen gas-lamps out of
the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well,
so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with
Scrooge's dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before
he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms
to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection 
of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they
should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under
the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin
ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had
a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the
bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, 
which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude
against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guards, 
old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three 
legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked 
himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his
custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off
his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and
his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take
his gruel.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a
bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and
brood over it, before he could extract the least 
sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. 
The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch 
merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint 
Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures.
There were Cains and Abels, Pharaohs' daughters;
Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending
through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams,
Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats,
hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts --
and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came
like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the
whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first,
with power to shape some picture on its surface from
the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would
have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.

`Humbug!' said Scrooge; and walked across the
room.

After several turns, he sat down again. As he
threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened
to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the
room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten 
with a chamber in the highest story of the
building. It was with great astonishment, and with
a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he
saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in
the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it
rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute,
but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had
begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking 
noise, deep down below; as if some person were
dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine
merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have
heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described
as dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound,
and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors
below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight
towards his door.

`It's humbug still!' said Scrooge. `I won't believe it.'

His colour changed though, when, without a pause,
it came on through the heavy door, and passed into
the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the
dying flame leaped up, as though it cried `I know
him; Marley's Ghost!' and fell again.

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, 
usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on
the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts,
and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was
clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound
about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge
observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks,
ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, 
and looking through his waistcoat, could see
the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no
bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he
looked the phantom through and through, and saw
it standing before him; though he felt the chilling
influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very
texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head
and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before;
he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

`How now!' said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.
`What do you want with me?'

`Much!' -- Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

`Who are you?'

`Ask me who I was.'

`Who were you then?' said Scrooge, raising his
voice. `You're particular, for a shade.' He was going
to say `to a shade,' but substituted this, as more
appropriate.

`In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.'

`Can you -- can you sit down?' asked Scrooge, looking
doubtfully at him.

`I can.'

`Do it, then.'

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know
whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in
a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event
of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity
of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat
down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he
were quite used to it.

`You don't believe in me,' observed the Ghost.

`I don't.' said Scrooge.

`What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of
your senses?'

`I don't know,' said Scrooge.

`Why do you doubt your senses?'

`Because,' said Scrooge, `a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may 
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of 
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking
jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means
waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be
smart, as a means of distracting his own attention,
and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice
disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence
for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very
deuce with him. There was something very awful,
too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal
atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it
himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the
Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts,
and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour
from an oven.

`You see this toothpick?' said Scrooge, returning
quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned;
and wishing, though it were only for a second, to
divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.

`I do,' replied the Ghost.

`You are not looking at it,' said Scrooge.

`But I see it,' said the Ghost, `notwithstanding.'

`Well!' returned Scrooge, `I have but to swallow
this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a
legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug,
I tell you! humbug!'

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook
its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that
Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself
from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was
his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage
round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors,
its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands
before his face.

`Mercy!' he said. `Dreadful apparition, why do
you trouble me?'

`Man of the worldly mind!' replied the Ghost, `do
you believe in me or not?'

`I do,' said Scrooge. `I must. But why do spirits
walk the earth, and why do they come to me?'

`It is required of every man,' the Ghost returned,
`that the spirit within him should walk abroad among
his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that
spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so
after death. It is doomed to wander through the
world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot
share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to
happiness!'

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain
and wrung its shadowy hands.

`You are fettered,' said Scrooge, trembling. `Tell
me why?'

`I wear the chain I forged in life,' replied the Ghost.
`I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded
it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I
wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?'

Scrooge trembled more and more.

`Or would you know,' pursued the Ghost, `the
weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? 
It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven
Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since.
It is a ponderous chain!'

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the 
expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty
or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see
nothing.

`Jacob,' he said, imploringly. `Old Jacob Marley,
tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!'

`I have none to give,' the Ghost replied. `It comes
from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed
by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor
can I tell you what I would. A very little more, is
all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I
cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked
beyond our counting-house -- mark me! -- in life my
spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our
money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before
me!'

It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became
thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.
Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now,
but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his
knees.

`You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,'
Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though
with humility and deference.

`Slow!' the Ghost repeated.

`Seven years dead,' mused Scrooge. `And travelling
all the time!'

`The whole time,' said the Ghost. `No rest, no
peace. Incessant torture of remorse.'

`You travel fast?' said Scrooge.

`On the wings of the wind,' replied the Ghost.

`You might have got over a great quantity of
ground in seven years,' said Scrooge.

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and
clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of
the night, that the Ward would have been justified in
indicting it for a nuisance.

`Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,' cried the
phantom, `not to know, that ages of incessant labour,
by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into
eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is
all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit
working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may
be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast
means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of
regret can make amends for one life's opportunity
misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!'

`But you were always a good man of business,
Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this
to himself.

`Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands
again. `Mankind was my business. The common
welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance,
and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings 
of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business!'

It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were
the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it
heavily upon the ground again.

`At this time of the rolling year,' the spectre said
`I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of
fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never
raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise
Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to
which its light would have conducted me!'

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the
spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake
exceedingly.

`Hear me!' cried the Ghost. `My time is nearly
gone.'

`I will,' said Scrooge. `But don't be hard upon
me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!'     
`How it is that I appear before you in a shape that
you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible
beside you many and many a day.'

It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered,
and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

`That is no light part of my penance,' pursued 
the Ghost. `I am here to-night to warn you, that you
have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A
chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.'

`You were always a good friend to me,' said
Scrooge. `Thank 'ee!'

`You will be haunted,' resumed the Ghost, `by
Three Spirits.'

Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the
Ghost's had done.

`Is that the chance and hope you mentioned,
Jacob?' he demanded, in a faltering voice.

`It is.'

`I -- I think I'd rather not,' said Scrooge.

`Without their visits,' said the Ghost, `you cannot
hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first tomorrow, 
when the bell tolls One.'

`Couldn't I take `em all at once, and have it over,
Jacob?' hinted Scrooge.

`Expect the second on the next night at the same
hour. The third upon the next night when the last
stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see
me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you
remember what has passed between us!'

When it had said these words, the spectre took its
wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head,
as before. Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its
teeth made, when the jaws were brought together
by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again,
and found his supernatural visitor confronting him
in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and
about its arm.

The apparition walked backward from him; and at
every step it took, the window raised itself a little,
so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.
It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did.
When they were within two paces of each other,
Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to
come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear:
for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible
of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of
lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and
self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment,
joined in the mournful dirge;
and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his
curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither
and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they
went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's
Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments)
were linked together; none were free. Many had
been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He
had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white
waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to
its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist
a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below,
upon a door-step. The misery with them all was,
clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in
human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist
enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and
their spirit voices faded together; and the night became 
as it had been when he walked home.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door
by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked, 
as he had locked it with his own hands, and
the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say `Humbug!' 
but stopped at the first syllable. And being,
from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues
of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or
the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of
the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to
bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the
instant.


Stave 2:  The First of the Three Spirits

When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed,
he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from
the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to
pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a
neighbouring church struck the four quarters. So he listened
for the hour.

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from
six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to
twelve; then stopped. Twelve. It was past two when he
went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have
got into the works. Twelve.

He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most
preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve:
and stopped.

`Why, it isn't possible,' said Scrooge, `that I can have
slept through a whole day and far into another night. It
isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and
this is twelve at noon.'

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed,
and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub
the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he
could see anything; and could see very little then. All he
could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely
cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro,
and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been
if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the
world.  This was a great relief, because "Three days after sight
of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge on his
order," and so forth, would have become a mere United States
security if there were no days to count by.

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought
it over and over, and could make nothing of it.  The more he
thought, the more perplexed he was; and, the more he endeavoured
not to think, the more he thought.

Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved
within himself, after mature inquiry that it was all a dream, his
mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first
position, andpresented the same problem to be worked all through,
"Was it a dream or not?"

Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three-quarters
more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost hadwarned
him of a visitation when the bell tolled one.  He resolved to lie
awake until the hour
was passed; and, considering that he could no more go to sleep
than go to heaven, this was, perhaps, the wisest resolution in
his power.

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he
must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock. 
At length it broke upon his listening ear.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter past," said Scrooge, counting.

"Ding, dong!"

"Half past," said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter to it," said Scrooge.
"Ding, dong!"

"The hour itself," said Scrooge triumphantly, "and nothing else!"

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a
deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE.  Light flashed up in the room
upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a
hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his
back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains
of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a
half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the
unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now 
to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure -- like a child: yet not so like a
child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural
medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded
from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions.
Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was
white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in
it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were
very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold
were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately
formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic
of the purest white, and round its waist was bound
a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held
a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular
contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed
with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was,
that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear
jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was
doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a
great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing
steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt
sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another,
and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so
the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a
thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs,
now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a
body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible
in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the
very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and
clear as ever.

`Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to
me.' asked Scrooge.

`I am.'

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if
instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

`Who, and what are you.' Scrooge demanded.

`I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.'

`Long Past.' inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish
stature.

`No. Your past.'

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if
anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire
to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

`What.' exclaimed the Ghost, `would you so soon put out,
with worldly hands, the light I give. Is it not enough
that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and
force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon
my brow.' 

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend 
or any knowledge of having wilfully bonneted the Spirit at 
any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what
business brought him there.

`Your welfare.' said the Ghost.

Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not
help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been
more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard
him thinking, for it said immediately:

`Your reclamation, then. Take heed.'

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him
gently by the arm.

`Rise. and walk with me.'

It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the
weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes;
that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below
freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers,
dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at
that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand, 
was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit
made towards the window, clasped his robe in supplication.

`I am mortal,' Scrooge remonstrated, `and liable to fall.'

`Bear but a touch of my hand there,' said the Spirit,
laying it upon his heart,' and you shall be upheld in more
than this.'

As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall,
and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either
hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it
was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished
with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon
the ground.

`Good Heaven!' said Scrooge, clasping his hands together,
as he looked about him. `I was bred in this place. I was
a boy here.' 

The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch,
though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still
present to the old man's sense of feeling. He was conscious
of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected
with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares
long, long, forgotten.

`Your lip is trembling,' said the Ghost. `And what is
that upon your cheek.' 

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice,
that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him
where he would.

`You recollect the way.' inquired the Spirit.

`Remember it.' cried Scrooge with fervour; `I could
walk it blindfold.' 

`Strange to have forgotten it for so many years.' observed
the Ghost. `Let us go on.' 

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every
gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared
in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.
Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them
with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in
country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys
were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the
broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air
laughed to hear it.

`These are but shadows of the things that have been,' said
the Ghost. `They have no consciousness of us.' 

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge
knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond
all bounds to see them. Why did his cold eye glisten, and
his heart leap up as they went past. Why was he filled
with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry
Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for
their several homes. What was merry Christmas to Scrooge.
Out upon merry Christmas. What good had it ever done
to him.

`The school is not quite deserted,' said the Ghost. `A
solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.' 

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane, and
soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little
weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell
hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken
fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls
were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their
gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables;
and the coach-houses and sheds were over-run with grass.
Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state, within; for
entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open
doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished,
cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in the air, a
chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow
with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too
much to eat. 

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a
door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and
disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by
lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely
boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down
upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he
used to be.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle
from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the
half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among
the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle
swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in
the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening
influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his
younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in
foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at:
stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and
leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

`Why, it's Ali Baba.' Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. `It's
dear old honest Ali Baba. Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas
time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone,
he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy. And
Valentine,' said Scrooge,' and his wild brother, Orson; there
they go. And what's his name, who was put down in his
drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see him.
And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii;
there he is upon his head. Serve him right. I'm glad of it.
What business had he to be married to the Princess.' 

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature
on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between
laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited
face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in
the city, indeed.

`There's the Parrot.' cried Scrooge. `Green body and
yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the
top of his head; there he is. Poor Robin Crusoe, he called
him, when he came home again after sailing round the
island. `Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin
Crusoe.'  The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't.
It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running
for his life to the little creek. Halloa. Hoop. Hallo.' 

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his
usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, `Poor
boy.' and cried again.

`I wish,' Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his
pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his
cuff: `but it's too late now.' 

`What is the matter.' asked the Spirit.

`Nothing,' said Scrooge. `Nothing. There was a boy
singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should
like to have given him something: that's all.' 

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand:
saying as it did so, `Let us see another Christmas.' 

Scrooge's former self grew larger at the words, and the 
room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk,
the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the
ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how
all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you
do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything
had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all
the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

He was not reading now, but walking up and down
despairingly.

Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful 
shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy,
came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and
often kissing him, addressed him as her `Dear, dear
brother.'

`I have come to bring you home, dear brother.' said the
child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh.
`To bring you home, home, home.' 

`Home, little Fan.' returned the boy.

`Yes.' said the child, brimful of glee. `Home, for good
and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder
than he used to be, that home's like Heaven. He spoke so
gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that
I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come
home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach
to bring you. And you're to be a man.' said the child,
opening her eyes,' and are never to come back here; but
first, we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have
the merriest time in all the world.' 

`You are quite a woman, little Fan.' exclaimed the boy.

She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his
head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on
tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her
childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing loth to
go, accompanied her.

A terrible voice in the hall cried. `Bring down Master
Scrooge's box, there.' and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster
himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious
condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind
by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his
sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that
ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial
and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold.
Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a
block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments
of those dainties to the young people: at the same time,
sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of something
to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman,
but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had
rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied
on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster
good-bye right willingly; and getting into it, drove
gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels dashing the
hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens
like spray.

`Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have
withered,' said the Ghost. `But she had a large heart.' 

`So she had,' cried Scrooge. `You're right. I will not
gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid.' 

`She died a woman,' said the Ghost, `and had, as I think,
children.' 

`One child,' Scrooge returned.

`True,' said the Ghost. `Your nephew.' 

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly,
`Yes.' 

Although they had but that moment left the school behind
them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city,
where shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy
carts and coaches battle for the way, and all the strife and
tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by
the dressing of the shops, that here too it was Christmas
time again; but it was evening, and the streets were
lighted up.

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked
Scrooge if he knew it.

`Know it.' said Scrooge. `I was apprenticed here.' 

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh 
wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two
inches taller he must have knocked his head against the
ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:

`Why, it's old Fezziwig. Bless his heart; it's Fezziwig
alive again.' 

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the
clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his
hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over
himself, from his shows to his organ of benevolence; and
called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

`Yo ho, there. Ebenezer. Dick.' 

Scrooge's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly
in, accompanied by his fellow-prentice.

`Dick Wilkins, to be sure.' said Scrooge to the Ghost.
`Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached
to me, was Dick. Poor Dick. Dear, dear.' 

`Yo ho, my boys.' said Fezziwig. `No more work to-night.
Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer. Let's
have the shutters up,' cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap
of his hands,' before a man can say Jack Robinson.' 

You wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it.
They charged into the street with the shutters -- one, two,
three -- had them up in their places -- four, five, six -- barred
them and pinned then -- seven, eight, nine -- and came back
before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

`Hilli-ho!' cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the
high desk, with wonderful agility. `Clear away, my lads,
and let's have lots of room here. Hilli-ho, Dick. Chirrup,
Ebenezer.' 

Clear away. There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared
away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking
on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if
it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was
swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon
the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and
bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter's
night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the
lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty
stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial
smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and
lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they
broke. In came all the young men and women employed in
the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the
baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend,
the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was
suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying
to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who
was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress.
In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly,
some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling;
in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went,
twenty couples at once; hands half round and back again
the other way; down the middle and up again; round
and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old
top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top
couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top
couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When
this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his
hands to stop the dance, cried out,' Well done.' and the
fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially
provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his
reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no
dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, 
exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man
resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more
dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there
was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece
of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.
But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast
and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort
of man who knew his business better than you or I could
have told it him.) struck up Sir Roger de Coverley.'  Then
old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top
couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them;
three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were
not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no
notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many -- ah, four times --
old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would
Mrs Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner
in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me
higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue
from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the
dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given
time, what would have become of them next. And when old
Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had gone all through the dance;
advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and
curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to
your place; Fezziwig cut -- cut so deftly, that he appeared
to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without
a stagger.

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up.
Mr and Mrs Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side
of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually
as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.
When everybody had retired but the two prentices, they did
the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away,
and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a
counter in the back-shop.

During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a
man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene,
and with his former self. He corroborated everything,
remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent
the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the
bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from
them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious
that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its
head burnt very clear.

`A small matter,' said the Ghost, `to make these silly
folks so full of gratitude.'

`Small.' echoed Scrooge.

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices,
who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig:
and when he had done so, said,

`Why. Is it not. He has spent but a few pounds of
your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so
much that he deserves this praise.' 

`It isn't that,' said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and
speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self.
`It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy
or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a
pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and
looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is
impossible
to add and count them up: what then. The happiness
he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.' 

He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.

`What is the matter.' asked the Ghost.

`Nothing in particular,' said Scrooge. 

`Something, I think.' the Ghost insisted.

`No,' said Scrooge,' No. I should like to be able to say
a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all.' 

His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance
to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by
side in the open air.

`My time grows short,' observed the Spirit. `Quick.' 

This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he
could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again
Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime
of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later
years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice.
There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which
showed the passion that had taken root, and where the
shadow of the growing tree would fall.

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young
girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears,
which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of
Christmas Past.

`It matters little,' she said, softly. `To you, very little.
Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort
you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have
no just cause to grieve.' 

`What Idol has displaced you.' he rejoined.

`A golden one.' 

`This is the even-handed dealing of the world.' he said.
`There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and
there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity
as the pursuit of wealth.' 

`You fear the world too much,' she answered, gently.
`All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being
beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your
nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion,
Gain, engrosses you. Have I not.' 

`What then.' he retorted. `Even if I have grown so
much wiser, what then. I am not changed towards you.' 

She shook her head.

`Am I.' 

`Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were
both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could
improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You
are changed. When it was made, you were another man.' 

`I was a boy,' he said impatiently.

`Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you
are,' she returned. `I am. That which promised happiness
when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that
we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of
this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it,
and can release you.' 

`Have I ever sought release.' 

`In words. No. Never.' 

`In what, then.' 

`In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another
atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In
everything that made my love of any worth or value in your
sight. If this had never been between us,' said the girl,
looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him;' tell me,
would you seek me out and try to win me now. Ah, no.' 

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in
spite of himself. But he said with a struggle,' You think
not.' 

`I would gladly think otherwise if I could,' she answered,
`Heaven knows. When I have learned a Truth like this,
I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you
were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe
that you would choose a dowerless girl -- you who, in your
very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or,
choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your
one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your
repentance and regret would surely follow. I do; and I
release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you
once were.' 

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from
him, she resumed.

`You may -- the memory of what is past half makes me
hope you will -- have pain in this. A very, very brief time,
and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an
unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you
awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen.' 

She left him, and they parted.

`Spirit.' said Scrooge,' show me no more. Conduct
me home. Why do you delight to torture me.' 

`One shadow more.' exclaimed the Ghost.

`No more.' cried Scrooge. `No more, I don't wish to
see it. Show me no more.' 

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms,
and forced him to observe what happened next.

They were in another scene and place; a room, not very
large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter
fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge
believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely
matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this
room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children
there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count;
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not
forty children conducting themselves like one, but every
child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences
were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care;
on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily,
and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to
mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands
most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to one of
them. Though I never could have been so rude, no, no. I
wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have crushed that
braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little
shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul. to
save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they
did, bold young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should
have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment,
and never come straight again. And yet I should
have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have
questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have
looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never
raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of
which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should
have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence
of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its
value.

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a
rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and
plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed
and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who
came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys
and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and
the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter.
The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his
pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight
by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back,
and kick his legs in irrepressible affection. The shouts of
wonder and delight with which the development of every
package was received. The terrible announcement that the
baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan
into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having
swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter.
The immense relief of finding this a false alarm. The joy, 
and gratitude, and ecstasy. They are all indescribable alike.
It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions
got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the
top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever,
when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning
fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his
own fireside; and when he thought that such another
creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might
have called him father, and been a spring-time in the
haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

`Belle,' said the husband, turning to his wife with a
smile,' I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.' 

`Who was it.' 

`Guess.' 

`How can I. Tut, don't I know.' she added in the
same breath, laughing as he laughed. `Mr Scrooge.' 

`Mr Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as
it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could
scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point
of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in
the world, I do believe.' 

`Spirit.' said Scrooge in a broken voice,' remove me
from this place.' 

`I told you these were shadows of the things that have
been,' said the Ghost. `That they are what they are, do
not blame me.' 

`Remove me.' Scrooge exclaimed,' I cannot bear it.' 

He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon
him with a face, in which in some strange way there were
fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.

`Leave me. Take me back. Haunt me no longer.' 

In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which
the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was
undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed
that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly
connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the
extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down
upon its head.

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher
covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down
with all his force, he could not hide the light, which streamed
from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an
irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own
bedroom.  He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand
relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank
into a heavy sleep.


Stave 3:  The Second of the Three Spirits

Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and
sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had
no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the
stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness
in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding
a conference with the second messenger despatched to him
through Jacob Marley's intervention. But, finding that he
turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which
of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put
them every one aside with his own hands, and lying down
again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For,
he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its
appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and
made nervous.

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves
on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually
equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their 
capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for
anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which
opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and
comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for
Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you
to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of
strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and
rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by
any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the
Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a
violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter
of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay
upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy
light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the
hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than
a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it
meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive
that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of
spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of
knowing it. At last, however, he began to think -- as you or
I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not
in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done
in it, and would unquestionably have done it too -- at last, I
say, he began to think that the source and secret of this
ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence,
on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking
full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in
his slippers to the door.

The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange
voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He
obeyed.

It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.
But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls
and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a
perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming
berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and
ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had
been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring
up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had
never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and
many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form
a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn,
great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages,
mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,
cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears,
immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that
made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy
state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to
see, who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's
horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge,
as he came peeping round the door.

`Come in.' exclaimed the Ghost. `Come in, and know
me better, man.'

Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this
Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and
though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like
to meet them.

`I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,' said the Spirit.
`Look upon me.'

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple
green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment
hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was
bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any
artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the 
garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other
covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining
icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its
genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice,
its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded
round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword
was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.

`You have never seen the like of me before.' exclaimed
the Spirit.

`Never,' Scrooge made answer to it.

`Have never walked forth with the younger members of
my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers
born in these later years.' pursued the Phantom.

`I don't think I have,' said Scrooge. `I am afraid I have
not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit.' 

`More than eighteen hundred,' said the Ghost.

`A tremendous family to provide for.' muttered Scrooge.

The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.

`Spirit,' said Scrooge submissively,' conduct me where
you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt
a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have aught
to teach me, let me profit by it.' 

`Touch my robe.' 

Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game,
poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings,
fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room,
the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood
in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the
weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and
not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the
pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of
their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see
it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting
into artificial little snow-storms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows
blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow
upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground;
which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by
the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed
and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace
in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy,
and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist,
half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended
in shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great
Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away
to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful
in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest
summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops
were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another
from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious
snowball -- better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest --
laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it
went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the
fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats
of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out
into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were
ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in
the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking
from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went
by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were
pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there
were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence
to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might
water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy
and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among
the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered
leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting
off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great
compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and
beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after
dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among
these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and
stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was
something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and
round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'. oh the Grocers'. nearly closed, with perhaps
two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such
glimpses. It was not alone that the scales descending on the
counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller
parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled
up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended
scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even
that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so
extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight,
the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and
spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on
feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs
were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in
modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that
everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but
the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful
promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other
at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left
their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to
fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in
the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people
were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which
they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own,
worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws
to peck at if they chose.

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and
chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in
their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the
same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and
nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners
to the baker' shops. The sight of these poor revellers
appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with
Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and taking off the
covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their
dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind
of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words
between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he
shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good
humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame
to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was. God love
it, so it was.

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and
yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners
and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of
wet above each baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as
if its stones were cooking too. 

`Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from
your torch.' asked Scrooge.

`There is. My own.' 

`Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day.' 
asked Scrooge.

`To any kindly given. To a poor one most.' 

`Why to a poor one most.' asked Scrooge.

`Because it needs it most.' 

`Spirit,' said Scrooge, after a moment's thought,' I wonder
you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should
desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent
enjoyment.' 

`I.' cried the Spirit.

`You would deprive them of their means of dining every
seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said
to dine at all,' said Scrooge. `Wouldn't you.' 

`I.' cried the Spirit.

`You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day.' said
Scrooge. `And it comes to the same thing.' 

`I seek.' exclaimed the Spirit.

`Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your
name, or at least in that of your family,' said Scrooge.

`There are some upon this earth of yours,' returned the Spirit,'
who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion,
pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness
in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and
kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge
their doings on themselves, not us.' 

Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on,
invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the
town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which
Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that notwithstanding
his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place
with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as
gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible
he could have done in any lofty hall.

And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in
showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind,
generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor
men, that led him straight to Scrooge's clerk's; for there he
went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe; and
on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped
to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinkling of his
torch. Think of that. Bob had but fifteen bob a-week
himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his
Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present
blessed his four-roomed house.

Then up rose Mrs Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out
but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons,
which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and
she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of
her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter
Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and
getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private
property, conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the
day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly
attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.
And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing
in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the
goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious
thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced
about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the
skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked
him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up,
knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and
peeled.

`What has ever got your precious father then.' said Mrs 
Cratchit. `And your brother, Tiny Tim. And Martha
warn't as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour.' 


`Here's Martha, mother.' said a girl, appearing as she
spoke.

`Here's Martha, mother.' cried the two young Cratchits.
`Hurrah. There's such a goose, Martha.' 

`Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are.' 
said Mrs Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off
her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.

`We'd a deal of work to finish up last night,' replied the
girl,' and had to clear away this morning, mother.' 

`Well. Never mind so long as you are come,' said Mrs
Cratchit. `Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have
a warm, Lord bless ye.' 

`No, no. There's father coming,' cried the two young
Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. `Hide, Martha,
hide.' 

So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father,
with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe,
hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned
up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his
shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and
had his limbs supported by an iron frame.

`Why, where's our Martha.' cried Bob Cratchit, looking
round.

`Not coming,' said Mrs Cratchit.

`Not coming.' said Bob, with a sudden declension in his
high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way
from church, and had come home rampant. `Not coming
upon Christmas Day.' 

Martha didn't like to see him disappointed, if it were only
in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet
door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits
hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house,
that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.

`And how did little Tim behave. asked Mrs Cratchit,
when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had
hugged his daughter to his heart's content.

`As good as gold,' said Bob,' and better. Somehow he
gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the
strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home,
that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he
was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember
upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind
men see.' 

Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and
trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing
strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back
came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by
his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while
Bob, turning up his cuffs -- as if, poor fellow, they were
capable of being made more shabby -- compounded some hot
mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round
and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter,
and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the
goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose
the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a
black swan was a matter of course -- and in truth it was
something very like it in that house. Mrs Cratchit made
the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot;
Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour;
Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted
the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny
corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for
everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard 
upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest
they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be
helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was
said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs
Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared
to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the
long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of
delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim,
excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with
the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah.

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe
there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and
flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal
admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes,
it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as
Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small
atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at
last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest
Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to
the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed by Miss
Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone -- too nervous to
bear witnesses -- to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough. Suppose it should
break in turning out. Suppose somebody should have got
over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they
were merry with the goose -- a supposition at which the two
young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of horrors were
supposed.

Hallo. A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of
the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the
cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next
door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that.
That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit
entered -- flushed, but smiling proudly -- with the pudding,
like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half
of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with
Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding. Bob Cratchit said, and calmly
too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by
Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that
now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had
had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had
something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it
was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have
been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed
to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the
hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the
jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges
were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the
fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in
what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and
at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass.
Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as
golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with
beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and
cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

`A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us.' 

Which all the family re-echoed.

`God bless us every one.' said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father's side upon his little
stool.
Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the 
child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that
he might be taken from him.

`Spirit,' said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt
before, `tell me if Tiny Tim will live.' 

`I see a vacant seat,' replied the Ghost, `in the poor
chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully
preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future,
the child will die.' 

`No, no,' said Scrooge. `Oh, no, kind Spirit. say he
will be spared.' 

`If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none
other of my race,' returned the Ghost, `will find him here.
What then. If he be like to die, he had better do it, and
decrease the surplus population.' 

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by
the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
`Man,' said the Ghost, `if man you be in heart, not
adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered
What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what
men shall live, what men shall die. It may be, that in the
sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live
than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God. to hear
the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life
among his hungry brothers in the dust.' 

Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast
his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on
hearing his own name.

`Mr Scrooge.' said Bob; `I'll give you Mr Scrooge, the
Founder of the Feast.' 

`The Founder of the Feast indeed.' cried Mrs Cratchit,
reddening. `I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece
of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good
appetite for it.' 

`My dear,' said Bob, `the children. Christmas Day.' 

`It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,' said she, `on
which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard,
unfeeling man as Mr Scrooge. You know he is, Robert.
Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow.' 

`My dear,' was Bob's mild answer, `Christmas Day.' 

`I'll drink his health for your sake and the Day's,' said
Mrs Cratchit, `not for his. Long life to him. A merry
Christmas and a happy new year. He'll be very merry and
very happy, I have no doubt.' 

The children drank the toast after her. It was the first of
their proceedings which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank
it last of all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge
was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast
a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for full
five minutes.

After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier than
before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done
with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his
eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full
five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed
tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of business;
and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from
between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular
investments he should favour when he came into the receipt
of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor
apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work
she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch,
and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a
good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at
home. Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some
days before, and how the lord was much about as tall as
Peter; at which Peter pulled up his collars so high that you 
couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All this
time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and
by-and-bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in
the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice,
and sang it very well indeed.

There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not
a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes
were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty;
and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside
of a pawnbroker's. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased
with one another, and contented with the time; and when
they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings
of the Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon
them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty
heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets,
the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and
all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of
the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot
plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep
red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness.
There all the children of the house were running out
into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins,
uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. Here, again,
were shadows on the window-blind of guests assembling; and
there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted,
and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near
neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single man who saw
them enter -- artful witches, well they knew it -- in a glow.

But, if you had judged from the numbers of people on
their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought
that no one was at home to give them welcome when they
got there, instead of every house expecting company, and
piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how
the Ghost exulted. How it bared its breadth of breast, and
opened its capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with
a generous hand, its bright and harmless mirth on everything
within its reach. The very lamplighter, who ran on before,
dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was
dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly
as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter
that he had any company but Christmas.

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they
stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses
of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place
of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed,
or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner;
and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass.
Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery
red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a
sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in
the thick gloom of darkest night.

`What place is this.' asked Scrooge.

`A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of
the earth,' returned the Spirit. `But they know me. See.' 

A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they
advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and
stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a
glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their
children and their children's children, and another generation
beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire.
The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling
of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a 
Christmas song -- it had been a very old song when he was a
boy -- and from time to time they all joined in the chorus.
So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite
blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour
sank again.

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his
robe, and passing on above the moor, sped -- whither. Not
to sea. To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw
the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them;
and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it
rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it
had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league
or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,
the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse.
Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds
-- born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the
water -- rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made
a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed
out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their
horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they
wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and
one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and
scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship
might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in
itself.

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea
-- on, on -- until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any
shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman
at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who
had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations;
but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his
companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward
hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or
sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another
on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared
to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those
he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted
to remember him.

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the
moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it
was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown
abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death: it
was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear
a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge
to recognise it as his own nephew's and to find himself in a
bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling
by his side, and looking at that same nephew with approving
affability.

`Ha, ha.' laughed Scrooge's nephew. `Ha, ha, ha.' 

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a
man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can
say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me,
and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that
while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing
in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and
good-humour. When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way: holding
his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the
most extravagant contortions: Scrooge's niece, by marriage,
laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends being
not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.

`Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha.' 

`He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live.' cried
Scrooge's nephew. `He believed it too.' 

`More shame for him, Fred.' said Scrooge's niece, 
indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything by
halves. They are always in earnest.

She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled,
surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that
seemed made to be kissed -- as no doubt it was; all kinds of
good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another
when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever
saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what
you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory.

`He's a comical old fellow,' said Scrooge's nephew,' that's
the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However,
his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing
to say against him.' 

`I'm sure he is very rich, Fred,' hinted Scrooge's niece.
`At least you always tell me so.' 

`What of that, my dear.' said Scrooge's nephew. `His
wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good with it.
He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the
satisfaction of thinking -- ha, ha, ha. -- that he is ever going
to benefit us with it.' 

`I have no patience with him,' observed Scrooge's niece.
Scrooge's niece's sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed
the same opinion.

`Oh, I have.' said Scrooge's nephew. `I am sorry for
him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers
by his ill whims. Himself, always. Here, he takes it into
his head to dislike us, and he won't come and dine with us.
What's the consequence. He don't lose much of a dinner.' 

`Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner,' interrupted
Scrooge's niece. Everybody else said the same, and they
must be allowed to have been competent judges, because
they had just had dinner; and, with the dessert upon the
table, were clustered round the fire, by lamplight.

`Well. I'm very glad to hear it,' said Scrooge's nephew,
`because I haven't great faith in these young housekeepers.
What do you say, Topper.' 

Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's
sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast,
who had no right to express an opinion on the subject.
Whereat Scrooge's niece's sister -- the plump one with the lace
tucker: not the one with the roses -- blushed.

`Do go on, Fred,' said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands.
`He never finishes what he begins to say. He is such a
ridiculous fellow.' 

Scrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh, and as it was
impossible to keep the infection off; though the plump sister
tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar; his example was
unanimously followed.

`I was only going to say,' said Scrooge's nephew,' that
the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making
merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant
moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses
pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts,
either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty chambers. I
mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he
likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas
till he dies, but he can't help thinking better of it -- I defy
him -- if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after
year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you. If it only
puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds,
that's something; and I think I shook him yesterday.' 

It was their turn to laugh now at the notion of his shaking
Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much
caring what they laughed at, so that they laughed at any
rate, he encouraged them in their merriment, and passed the
bottle joyously.

After tea. they had some music. For they were a musical
family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a
Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who
could growl away in the bass like a good one, and never
swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face
over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and
played among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing:
you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had
been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the
boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of
Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the
things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he
softened more and more; and thought that if he could have
listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the
kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands,
without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob
Marley.

But they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After
a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children
sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its
mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop. There was first
a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was. And I
no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he
had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done
thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the
Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after
that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the
credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons,
tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano,
smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went,
there went he. He always knew where the plump sister was.
He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up
against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would
have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would
have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly
have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister.
She often cried out that it wasn't fair; and it really was not.
But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her
silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got
her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his
conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to
know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her
head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by
pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain
about her neck; was vile, monstrous. No doubt she told
him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in
office, they were so very confidential together, behind the
curtains.

Scrooge's niece was not one of the blind-man's buff party,
but was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool,
in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close
behind her. But she joined in the forfeits, and loved her
love to admiration with all the letters of the alphabet.
Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was
very great, and to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat
her sisters hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as
could have told you. There might have been twenty people there,
young and old, but they all played, and so did Scrooge, for,
wholly forgetting the interest he had in what was going on, that
his voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with
his guess quite loud, and very often guessed quite right, too;
for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut
in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in
his head to be.

The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood,
and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like
a boy to be allowed to stay until the guests departed. But
this the Spirit said could not be done.

`Here is a new game,' said Scrooge. `One half hour,
Spirit, only one.' 

It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew
had to think of something, and the rest must find out what;
he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case
was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he was exposed,
elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live
animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes,
and lived in London, and walked about the streets,
and wasn't made a show of, and wasn't led by anybody, and
didn't live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market,
and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a
tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh
question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a
fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that
he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last
the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:

`I have found it out. I know what it is, Fred. I know
what it is.' 

`What is it.' cried Fred.

`It's your Uncle Scrooge.' 

Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal
sentiment, though some objected that the reply to `Is it a
bear.' ought to have been `Yes;' inasmuch as an answer
in the negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts
from Mr Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any tendency
that way.

`He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure,' said
Fred,' and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health.
Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the
moment; and I say, "Uncle Scrooge."'

`Well. Uncle Scrooge.' they cried.

`A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old
man, whatever he is.' said Scrooge's nephew. `He wouldn't
take it from me, but may he have it, nevertheless. Uncle
Scrooge.' 

Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light
of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious
company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech,
if the Ghost had given him time. But the whole scene
passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his
nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they
visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood
beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands,
and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they
were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was
rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery's every
refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not
made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his
blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.

It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge
had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared
to be condensed into the space of time they passed
together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained
unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly
older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of 
it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when,
looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place,
he noticed that its hair was grey.

`Are spirits' lives so short.' asked Scrooge.

`My life upon this globe, is very brief,' replied the Ghost.
`It ends to-night.' 

`To-night.' cried Scrooge.

`To-night at midnight. Hark. The time is drawing
near.' 

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at
that moment.

`Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,' said
Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe,' but I see
something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding
from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw.' 

`It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,' was
the Spirit's sorrowful reply. `Look here.' 

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

`Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed
the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged,
scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where
graceful youth should have filled their features out, and
touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled
hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and
pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No
change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any
grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has
monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to
him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but
the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie
of such enormous magnitude.

`Spirit. are they yours.' Scrooge could say no more.

`They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon
them. `And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,
and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for
on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching out
its hand towards the city. `Slander those who tell it ye.
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.
And abide the end.' 

`Have they no refuge or resource.' cried Scrooge.

`Are there no prisons.' said the Spirit, turning on him
for the last time with his own words. `Are there no workhouses.' 
The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it 
not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the
prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting
up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and
hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards
him.


Stave 4:  The Last of the Spirits

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When
it came, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in
the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to
scatter gloom and mystery.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed
its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible 
save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been
difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it
from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside
him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a 
solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither
spoke nor moved.

`I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To
Come.' said Scrooge.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its
hand.

`You are about to show me shadows of the things that
have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,' 
Scrooge pursued. `Is that so, Spirit.' 

The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an
instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head.
That was the only answer he received.

Although well used to ghostly company by this time,
Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled
beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when
he prepared to follow it. The Spirit pauses a moment, as
observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him
with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the
dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon
him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost,
could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap
of black.

`Ghost of the Future.' he exclaimed,' I fear you more
than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose
is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another
man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company,
and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak
to me.' 

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight
before them.

`Lead on.' said Scrooge. `Lead on. The night is
waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead
on, Spirit.' 

The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him.
Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him
up, he thought, and carried him along.

They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather
seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its
own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on
Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down,
and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in
groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully
with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had
seen them often.

The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men.
Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge
advanced to listen to their talk.

`No,' said a great fat man with a monstrous chin,' I
don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's
dead.' 

`When did he die.' inquired another.

`Last night, I believe.' 

`Why, what was the matter with him.' asked a third,
taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box.
`I thought he'd never die.' 

`God knows,' said the first, with a yawn.

`What has he done with his money.' asked a red-faced
gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his
nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.

`I haven't heard,' said the man with the large chin, 
yawning again. `Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't
left it to me. That's all I know.' 

This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.

`It's likely to be a very cheap funeral,' said the same
speaker;' for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go
to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer.' 

`I don't mind going if a lunch is provided,' observed the
gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. `But I must
be fed, if I make one.' 

Another laugh.

`Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,' 
said the first speaker,' for I never wear black gloves, and I
never eat lunch. But I'll offer to go, if anybody else will.
When I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that I wasn't
his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak
whenever we met. Bye, bye.' 

Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with 
other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the
Spirit for an explanation.

The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed
to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking
that the explanation might lie here.

He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of aye
business:  very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made
a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business
point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.

`How are you.' said one.

`How are you.' returned the other.

`Well.' said the first. `Old Scratch has got his own at
last, hey.' 

`So I am told,' returned the second. `Cold, isn't it.' 

`Seasonable for Christmas time. You're not a skater, I
suppose.' 

`No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning.' 

Not another word. That was their meeting, their
conversation, and their parting.

Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the
Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so
trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden
purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be.
They could scarcely be supposed to have any bearing on the
death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past, and this
Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of any
one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could
apply them. But nothing doubting that to whomsoever
they applied they had some latent moral for his own improvement,
he resolved to treasure up every word he heard,
and everything he saw; and especially to observe the
shadow of himself when it appeared. For he had an expectation
that the conduct of his future self would give him
the clue he missed, and would render the solution of these
riddles easy.

He looked about in that very place for his own image; but
another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the
clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he
saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured
in through the Porch. It gave him little surprise, however;
for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and
thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried
out in this.

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its
outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his
thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and
its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes
were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and feel
very cold.

They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part
of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before,
although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The
ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched;
the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and
archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the
whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.

Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed,
beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags,
bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor 
within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges,
files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets
that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in
mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and
sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a
charcoal stove, made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal,
nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the
cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous
tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury
of calm retirement.

Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this
man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the
shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another woman,
similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely followed by
a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight
of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each
other. After a short period of blank astonishment, in which
the old man with the pipe had joined them, they all three
burst into a laugh.

`Let the charwoman alone to be the first.' cried she who
had entered first. `Let the laundress alone to be the second;
and let the undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look
here, old Joe, here's a chance. If we haven't all three met
here without meaning it.' 

`You couldn't have met in a better place,' said old Joe,
removing his pipe from his mouth. `Come into the parlour.
You were made free of it long ago, you know; and the other
two an't strangers. Stop till I shut the door of the shop.
Ah. How it skreeks. There an't such a rusty bit of metal
in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and I'm sure there's
no such old bones here, as mine. Ha, ha. We're all suitable
to our calling, we're well matched. Come into the
parlour. Come into the parlour.' 

The parlour was the space behind the screen of rags. The
old man raked the fire together with an old stair-rod, and
having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night), with the
stem of his pipe, put it in his mouth again.

While he did this, the woman who had already spoken
threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting
manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and
looking with a bold defiance at the other two.

`What odds then. What odds, Mrs Dilber.' said the
woman. `Every person has a right to take care of themselves.
He always did.' 

`That's true, indeed.' said the laundress. `No man
more so.' 

`Why then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid,
woman; who's the wiser. We're not going to pick holes in
each other's coats, I suppose.' 

`No, indeed.' said Mrs Dilber and the man together.
`We should hope not.' 

`Very well, then.' cried the woman. `That's enough.
Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like these.
Not a dead man, I suppose.' 

`No, indeed,' said Mrs Dilber, laughing.

`If he wanted to keep them after he was dead, a wicked old
screw,' pursued the woman,' why wasn't he natural in his
lifetime. If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look
after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying
gasping out his last there, alone by himself.' 

`It's the truest word that ever was spoke,' said Mrs
Dilber. `It's a judgment on him.' 

`I wish it was a little heavier judgment,' replied the
woman;' and it should have been, you may depend upon it,
if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that
bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. Speak out 
plain. I'm not afraid to be the first, nor afraid for them to
see it. We know pretty well that we were helping ourselves,
before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the bundle,
Joe.' 

But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this;
and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first,
produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two,
a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no
great value, were all. They were severally examined and
appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed
to give for each, upon the wall, and added them up into a
total when he found there was nothing more to come.

`That's your account,' said Joe,' and I wouldn't give
another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it.
Who's next.' 

Mrs Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing
apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of
sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall
in the same manner.

`I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine,
and that's the way I ruin myself,' said old Joe. `That's
your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made
it an open question, I'd repent of being so liberal and knock
off half-a-crown.' 

`And now undo my bundle, Joe,' said the first woman.

Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience
of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots,
dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff.

`What do you call this.' said Joe. `Bed-curtains.' 

`Ah.' returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward
on her crossed arms. `Bed-curtains.' 

`You don't mean to say you took them down, rings and
all, with him lying there.' said Joe.

`Yes I do,' replied the woman. `Why not.' 

`You were born to make your fortune,' said Joe,' and
you'll certainly do it.' 

`I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything
in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as he
was, I promise you, Joe,' returned the woman coolly. `Don't
drop that oil upon the blankets, now.' 

`His blankets.' asked Joe.

`Whose else's do you think.' replied the woman. `He
isn't likely to take cold without them, I dare say.' 

`I hope he didn't die of any thing catching. Eh.' said
old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.

`Don't you be afraid of that,' returned the woman. `I
an't so fond of his company that I'd loiter about him for
such things, if he did. Ah. you may look through that
shirt till your eyes ache; but you won't find a hole in it, nor
a threadbare place. It's the best he had, and a fine one too.
They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me.' 

`What do you call wasting of it.' asked old Joe.

`Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure,' replied
the woman with a laugh. `Somebody was fool enough to
do it, but I took it off again. If calico an't good enough for
such a purpose, it isn't good enough for anything. It's quite
as becoming to the body. He can't look uglier than he did
in that one.' 

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat
grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by
the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and
disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though the
demons, marketing the corpse itself.

`Ha, ha.' laughed the same woman, when old Joe,
producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their
several gains upon the ground. `This is the end of it, you
see. He frightened every one away from him when he was 
alive, to profit us when he was dead. Ha, ha, ha.' 

`Spirit.' said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. `I
see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own.
My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is
this.' 

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now
he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which,
beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up,
which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful
language.

The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with
any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience
to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it
was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon
the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept,
uncared for, was the body of this man.

Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand
was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted
that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon
Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the face. He thought
of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it;
but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss
the spectre at his side.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar
here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy
command: for this is thy dominion. But of the loved,
revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair
to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is
not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released;
it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the
hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm,
and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike.
And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow
the world with life immortal.

No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and
yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He
thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be
his foremost thoughts. Avarice, hard-dealing, griping cares.
They have brought him to a rich end, truly.

He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a
woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this
or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be
kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was
a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What
they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so
restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.

`Spirit.' he said,' this is a fearful place. In leaving it,
I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go.' 

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the
head.

`I understand you,' Scrooge returned,' and I would do
it, if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have
not the power.' 

Again it seemed to look upon him.

`If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion
caused by this man's death,' said Scrooge quite agonised,
`show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you.' 

The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a
moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room
by daylight, where a mother and her children were.

She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness;
for she walked up and down the room; started at every
sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock;
tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly
bear the voices of the children in their play.

At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried
to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was 
careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was
a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight
of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.

He sat down to the dinner that had been boarding for
him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news
(which was not until after a long silence), he appeared
embarrassed how to answer.

`Is it good.' she said, `or bad?' -- to help him.

`Bad,' he answered.

`We are quite ruined.' 

`No. There is hope yet, Caroline.' 

`If he relents,' she said, amazed, `there is. Nothing is
past hope, if such a miracle has happened.' 

`He is past relenting,' said her husband. `He is dead.' 

She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke
truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she
said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next
moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of
her heart.

`What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of last
night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a
week's delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid
me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not only
very ill, but dying, then.' 

`To whom will our debt be transferred.' 

`I don't know. But before that time we shall be ready
with the money; and even though we were not, it would be
a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his
successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline.' 

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter.
The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what
they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier
house for this man's death. The only emotion that the
Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of
pleasure.

`Let me see some tenderness connected with a death,' said
Scrooge;' or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just
now, will be for ever present to me.' 

The Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar
to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and
there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They
entered poor Bob Cratchit's house; the dwelling he had
visited before; and found the mother and the children seated
round the fire.

Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as
still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter,
who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters
were engaged in sewing. But surely they were very quiet.

`And he took a child, and set him in the midst of
them.'

Where had Scrooge heard those words. He had not
dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he
and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not
go on.

The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her
hand up to her face.

`The colour hurts my eyes,' she said.

The colour. Ah, poor Tiny Tim.

`They're better now again,' said Cratchit's wife. `It
makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn't show weak
eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world. It
must be near his time.' 

`Past it rather,' Peter answered, shutting up his book.
`But I think he has walked a little slower than he used,
these few last evenings, mother.' 

They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a
steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:

`I have known him walk with -- I have known him walk
with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed.' 

`And so have I,' cried Peter. `Often.' 

`And so have I,' exclaimed another. So had all.

`But he was very light to carry,' she resumed, intent upon
her work,' and his father loved him so, that it was no
trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the door.' 

She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter
-- he had need of it, poor fellow -- came in. His tea
was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried who should
help him to it most. Then the two young Cratchits got
upon his knees and laid, each child a little cheek, against
his face, as if they said,' Don't mind it, father. Don't be
grieved.' 

Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to
all the family. He looked at the work upon the table, and
praised the industry and speed of Mrs Cratchit and the girls.
They would be done long before Sunday, he said.

`Sunday. You went to-day, then, Robert.' said his
wife.

`Yes, my dear,' returned Bob. `I wish you could have
gone. It would have done you good to see how green a
place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I
would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child.' 
cried Bob. `My little child.' 

He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he
could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther
apart perhaps than they were.

He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above,
which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas.
There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were
signs of some one having been there, lately. Poor Bob sat
down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed
himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what
had happened, and went down again quite happy.

They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother
working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness
of Mr Scrooge's nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but
once, and who, meeting him in the street that day, and seeing
that he looked a little -' just a little down you know,' said
Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him. `On
which,' said Bob,' for he is the pleasantest-spoken gentleman
you ever heard, I told him. `I am heartily sorry for it, Mr
Cratchit,' he said,' and heartily sorry for your good wife.' 
By the bye, how he ever knew that, I don't know.' 

`Knew what, my dear.' 

`Why, that you were a good wife,' replied Bob.

`Everybody knows that.' said Peter.

`Very well observed, my boy.' cried Bob. `I hope they
do. `Heartily sorry,' he said,' for your good wife. If I
can be of service to you in any way,' he said, giving me
his card,' that's where I live. Pray come to me.'  Now, it
wasn't,' cried Bob,' for the sake of anything he might be
able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was
quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known our
Tiny Tim, and felt with us.' 

`I'm sure he's a good soul.' said Mrs Cratchit.

`You would be surer of it, my dear,' returned Bob,' if
you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn't be at all surprised
- mark what I say. -- if he got Peter a better situation.' 

`Only hear that, Peter,' said Mrs Cratchit.

`And then,' cried one of the girls,' Peter will be keeping
company with some one, and setting up for himself.' 

`Get along with you.' retorted Peter, grinning.

`It's just as likely as not,' said Bob,' one of these days;
though there's plenty of time for that, my dear. But however
and when ever we part from one another, I am sure we
shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim -- shall we -- or this
first parting that there was among us.' 

`Never, father.' cried they all.

`And I know,' said Bob,' I know, my dears, that when
we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he
was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among
ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.' 

`No, never, father.' they all cried again.

`I am very happy,' said little Bob,' I am very happy.' 

Mrs Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the
two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook
hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from
God.

`Spectre,' said Scrooge,' something informs me that our
parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not
how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead.' 

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as
before -- though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there
seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were
in the Future -- into the resorts of business men, but showed
him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything,
but went straight on, as to the end just now desired,
until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.

`This courts,' said Scrooge,' through which we hurry now,
is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length
of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be,
in days to come.' 

The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.

`The house is yonder,' Scrooge exclaimed. `Why do you
point away.' 

The inexorable finger underwent no change.

Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked
in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was
not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself.
The Phantom pointed as before.

He joined it once again, and wondering why and whither
he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate.
He paused to look round before entering.

A churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man whose name
he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a
worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and
weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up
with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A
worthy place.

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to
One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was
exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new
meaning in its solemn shape.

`Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,' 
said Scrooge, `answer me one question. Are these the
shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of
things that May be, only.' 

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which
it stood.

`Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if
persevered in, they must lead,' said Scrooge. `But if the
courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is
thus with what you show me.' 

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and
following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected
grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge.

`Am I that man who lay upon the bed.' he cried, upon
his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

`No, Spirit. Oh no, no.' 

The finger still was there.

`Spirit.' he cried, tight clutching at its robe,' hear me.
I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must
have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I
am past all hope.' 

For the first time the hand appeared to shake. 

`Good Spirit,' he pursued, as down upon the ground he
fell before it:' Your nature intercedes for me, and pities
me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you
have shown me, by an altered life.' 

The kind hand trembled.

`I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it
all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the
Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I
will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I
may sponge away the writing on this stone.' 

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to
free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it.
The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate aye
reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress.
It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.


Stave 5:  The End of It

Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own,
the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time
before him was his own, to make amends in!

`I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.' 
Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. `The Spirits
of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley.
Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this. I say
it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees.' 

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions,
that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his
call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the
Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.

`They are not torn down.' cried Scrooge, folding one of
his bed-curtains in his arms,' they are not torn down, rings
and all. They are here -- I am here -- the shadows of the
things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will
be. I know they will.' 

His hands were busy with his garments all this time;
turning them inside out, putting them on upside down,
tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every
kind of extravagance.

`I don't know what to do.' cried Scrooge, laughing and
crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of
himself with his stockings. `I am as light as a feather, I
am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I
am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to
everybody. A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo
here. Whoop. Hallo.' 

He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing
there: perfectly winded.

`There's the saucepan that the gruel was in.' cried
Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
`There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley
entered. There's the corner where the Ghost of Christmas
Present, sat. There's the window where I saw the wandering
Spirits. It's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
Ha ha ha.' 

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so
many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.

`I don't know what day of the month it is.' said
Scrooge. `I don't know how long I've been among the
Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never
mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo. Whoop.
Hallo here.' 

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing
out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang,
hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang,
clash. Oh, glorious, glorious.

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his
head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold;
cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight;
Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious.
Glorious.

`What's to-day.' cried Scrooge, calling downward to a
boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look
about him.

`Eh.' returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

`What's to-day, my fine fellow.' said Scrooge.

`To-day.' replied the boy. `Why, Christmas Day.' 

`It's Christmas Day.' said Scrooge to himself. `I
haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night.
They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of
course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow.' 

`Hallo.' returned the boy.

`Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one,
at the corner.' Scrooge inquired.

`I should hope I did,' replied the lad.

`An intelligent boy.' said Scrooge. `A remarkable boy.
Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that
was hanging up there -- Not the little prize Turkey: the
big one.' 

`What, the one as big as me.' returned the boy.

`What a delightful boy.' said Scrooge. `It's a pleasure
to talk to him. Yes, my buck.' 

`It's hanging there now,' replied the boy.

`Is it.' said Scrooge. `Go and buy it.' 

`Walk-er.' exclaimed the boy.

`No, no,' said Scrooge, `I am in earnest. Go and buy
it, and tell them to bring it here, that I may give them the
direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and
I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than
five minutes and I'll give you half-a-crown.' 

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady
hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

`I'll send it to Bon Cratchit's.' whispered Scrooge,
rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. `He shan't
know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe
Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's
will be.' 

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady
one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to
open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's
man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker
caught his eye.

`I shall love it, as long as I live.' cried Scrooge, patting
it with his hand. `I scarcely ever looked at it before.
What an honest expression it has in its face. It's a
wonderful knocker. -- Here's the Turkey. Hallo. Whoop.
How are you. Merry Christmas.' 

It was a Turkey. He never could have stood upon his
legs, that bird. He would have snapped them short off in a
minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

`Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,' 
said Scrooge. `You must have a cab.' 

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with
which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which
he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed
the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle
with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and
chuckled till he cried.

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to
shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when
you don't dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the
end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of
sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.

He dressed himself all in his best, and at last got out
into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, 
as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present;
and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded
every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly
pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows
said,' Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to you.' 
And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe
sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.

He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he
beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his
counting-house the day before, and said,' Scrooge and Marley's, I
believe.'  It sent a pang across his heart to think how this
old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but he
knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.

`My dear sir,' said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and
taking the old gentleman by both his hands. `How do you
do. I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of
you. A merry Christmas to you, sir.' 

`Mr Scrooge.' 

`Yes,' said Scrooge. `That is my name, and I fear it
may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon.
And will you have the goodness' -- here Scrooge whispered in
his ear.

`Lord bless me.' cried the gentleman, as if his breath
were taken away. `My dear Mr Scrooge, are you serious.' 

`If you please,' said Scrooge. `Not a farthing less. A
great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.
Will you do me that favour.' 

`My dear sir,' said the other, shaking hands with him.
`I don't know what to say to such munificence.'

`Don't say anything please,' retorted Scrooge. `Come
and see me. Will you come and see me.' 

`I will.' cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he
meant to do it.

`Thank you,' said Scrooge. `I am much obliged to you.
I thank you fifty times. Bless you.' 

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and
watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children
on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into
the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found
that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never
dreamed that any walk -- that anything -- could give him so
much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps
towards his nephew's house.

He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the
courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and
did it:

`Is your master at home, my dear.' said Scrooge to the
girl. Nice girl. Very.

`Yes, sir.' 

`Where is he, my love.' said Scrooge.

`He's in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I'll
show you up-stairs, if you please.' 

`Thank you. He knows me,' said Scrooge, with his hand
already on the dining-room lock. `I'll go in here, my dear.' 

He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door.
They were looking at the table (which was spread out in
great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous
on such points, and like to see that everything is right.

`Fred.' said Scrooge.

Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started.
Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting
in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done
it, on any account.

`Why bless my soul.' cried Fred,' who's that.' 

`It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner.
Will you let me in, Fred.' 

Let him in. It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.
He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier.
His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he 
came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did
every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful
games, wonderful unanimity, wonderful happiness.

But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was
early there. If he could only be there first, and catch Bob
Cratchit coming late. That was the thing he had set his
heart upon.

And he did it; yes, he did. The clock struck nine. No
Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen
minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his
door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.

His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter
too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his
pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.

`Hallo.' growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as
near as he could feign it. `What do you mean by coming
here at this time of day.' 

`I am very sorry, sir,' said Bob. `I am behind my time.' 

`You are.' repeated Scrooge. `Yes. I think you are.
Step this way, sir, if you please.' 

`It's only once a year, sir,' pleaded Bob, appearing from
the Tank. `It shall not be repeated. I was making rather
merry yesterday, sir.' 

`Now, I'll tell you what, my friend,' said Scrooge,' I
am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And
therefore,' he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving
Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into
the Tank again;' and therefore I am about to raise your
salary.' 

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He
had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it,
holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help
and a strait-waistcoat.

`A merry Christmas, Bob,' said Scrooge, with an earnestness
that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the
back. `A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I
have given you for many a year. I'll raise your salary, and
endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss
your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of
smoking bishop, Bob. Make up the fires, and buy another
coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit.' 

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and
infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was
a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a
master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or
any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old
world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him,
but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was
wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this
globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill
of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these
would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they
should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in
less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was
quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon
the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was
always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas
well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that
be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim
observed, God bless Us, Every One!



End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Christmas Carol.

Project Gutenberg Etext of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
#14 in our series by Charles Dickens


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David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens

December, 1996  [Etext #766]


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DAVID COPPERFIELD


by CHARLES DICKENS



AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED TO
THE HON.  Mr. AND Mrs. RICHARD WATSON,
OF ROCKINGHAM, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE.



CONTENTS


I.      I Am Born
II.     I Observe
III.    I Have a Change
IV.     I Fall into Disgrace
V.      I Am Sent Away
VI.     I Enlarge My Circle of Acquaintance
VII.    My 'First Half' at Salem House
VIII.   My Holidays.  Especially One Happy Afternoon
IX.     I Have a Memorable Birthday
X.      I Become Neglected, and Am Provided For
XI.     I Begin Life on My Own Account, and Don't Like It
XII.    Liking Life on My Own Account No Better, I Form a Great Resolution
XIII.   The Sequel of My Resolution
XIV.    My Aunt Makes up Her Mind About Me
XV.     I Make Another Beginning
XVI.    I Am a New Boy in More Senses Than One
XVII.   Somebody Turns Up
XVIII.  A Retrospect
XIX.    I Look About Me and Make a Discovery
XX.     Steerforth's Home
XXI.    Little Em'ly
XXII.   Some Old Scenes, and Some New People
XXIII.  I Corroborate Mr. Dick, and Choose a Profession
XXIV.   My First Dissipation
XXV.    Good and Bad Angels
XXVI.   I Fall into Captivity
XXVII.  Tommy Traddles
XXVIII. Mr. Micawber's Gauntlet
XXIX.   I Visit Steerforth at His Home, Again
XXX.    A Loss
XXXI.   A Greater Loss
XXXII.  The Beginning of a Long Journey
XXXIII. Blissful
XXXIV.  My Aunt Astonishes Me
XXXV.   Depression
XXXVI.  Enthusiasm
XXXVII.  A Little Cold Water
XXXVIII. A Dissolution of Partnership
XXXIX.   Wickfield and Heep
XL.      The Wanderer
XLI.     Dora's Aunts
XLII.    Mischief
XLIII.   Another Retrospect
XLIV.    Our Housekeeping
XLV.     Mr. Dick Fulfils My Aunt's Predictions
XLVI.    Intelligence
XLVII.   Martha
XLVIII.  Domestic
XLIX.    I Am Involved in Mystery
L.       Mr. Peggotty's Dream Comes True
LI.      The Beginning of a Longer Journey
LII.     I Assist at an Explosion
LIII.    Another Retrospect
LIV.     Mr. Micawber's Transactions
LV.      Tempest
LVI.     The New Wound, and the Old
LVII.    The Emigrants
LVIII.   Absence
LIX.     Return
LX.      Agnes
LXI.     I Am Shown Two Interesting Penitents
LXII.    A Light Shines on My Way
LXIII.   A Visitor
LXIV.    A Last Retrospect




PREFACE TO 1850 EDITION


I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book,
in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with
the composure which this formal heading would seem to require.  My
interest in it, is so recent and strong; and my mind is so divided
between pleasure and regret - pleasure in the achievement of a long
design, regret in the separation from many companions - that I am
in danger of wearying the reader whom I love, with personal
confidences, and private emotions.

Besides which, all that I could say of the Story, to any purpose,
I have endeavoured to say in it.

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know, how
sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years'
imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the
creatures of his brain are going from him for ever.  Yet, I have
nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which
might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this
Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the
writing.

Instead of looking back, therefore, I will look forward.  I cannot
close this Volume more agreeably to myself, than with a hopeful
glance towards the time when I shall again put forth my two green
leaves once a month, and with a faithful remembrance of the genial
sun and showers that have fallen on these leaves of David
Copperfield, and made me happy.
     London, October, 1850.


PREFACE TO
THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION


I REMARKED in the original Preface to this Book, that I did not
find it easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the first
sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure
which this formal heading would seem to require.  My interest in it
was so recent and strong, and my mind was so divided between
pleasure and regret - pleasure in the achievement of a long design,
regret in the separation from many companions - that I was in
danger of wearying the reader with personal confidences and private
emotions.

Besides which, all that I could have said of the Story to any
purpose, I had endeavoured to say in it.

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how
sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years'
imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the
creatures of his brain are going from him for ever.  Yet, I had
nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which
might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this
Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.

So true are these avowals at the present day, that I can now only
take the reader into one confidence more.  Of all my books, I like
this the best.  It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent
to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that
family as dearly as I love them.  But, like many fond parents, I
have in my heart of hearts a favourite child.  And his name is
DAVID COPPERFIELD.
     1869




THE PERSONAL HISTORY AND
EXPERIENCE OF
DAVID COPPERFIELD THE YOUNGER



CHAPTER 1
I AM BORN



Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether
that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. 
To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was
born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve
o'clock at night.  It was remarked that the clock began to strike,
and I began to cry, simultaneously.

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared
by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had
taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any
possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I
was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was
privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably
attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either
gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.

I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can
show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or
falsified by the result.  On the second branch of the question, I
will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my
inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. 
But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this
property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of
it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.

I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the
newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas.  Whether sea-going
people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith
and preferred cork jackets, I don't know; all I know is, that there
was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney
connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in
cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from
drowning on any higher bargain.  Consequently the advertisement was
withdrawn at a dead loss - for as to sherry, my poor dear mother's
own sherry was in the market then - and ten years afterwards, the
caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of the country, to
fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five
shillings.  I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite
uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself being disposed of
in that way.  The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a
hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated
five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short - as
it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to
endeavour without any effect to prove to her.  It is a fact which
will be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was
never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two.  I have
understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she
never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and
that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the
last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and
others, who had the presumption to go 'meandering' about the world. 
It was in vain to represent to her that some conveniences, tea
perhaps included, resulted from this objectionable practice.  She
always returned, with greater emphasis and with an instinctive
knowledge of the strength of her objection, 'Let us have no
meandering.'

Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.

I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or 'there by', as they say
in Scotland.  I was a posthumous child.  My father's eyes had
closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on
it.  There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection
that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy
remembrance that I have of my first childish associations with his
white grave-stone in the churchyard, and of the indefinable
compassion I used to feel for it lying out alone there in the dark
night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and
candle, and the doors of our house were - almost cruelly, it seemed
to me sometimes - bolted and locked against it.

An aunt of my father's, and consequently a great-aunt of mine, of
whom I shall have more to relate by and by, was the principal
magnate of our family.  Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor
mother always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread
of this formidable personage to mention her at all (which was
seldom), had been married to a husband younger than herself, who
was very handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage,
'handsome is, that handsome does' - for he was strongly suspected
of having beaten Miss Betsey, and even of having once, on a
disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined
arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs' window. 
These evidences of an incompatibility of temper induced Miss Betsey
to pay him off, and effect a separation by mutual consent.  He went
to India with his capital, and there, according to a wild legend in
our family, he was once seen riding on an elephant, in company with
a Baboon; but I think it must have been a Baboo - or a Begum. 
Anyhow, from India tidings of his death reached home, within ten
years.  How they affected my aunt, nobody knew; for immediately
upon the separation, she took her maiden name again, bought a
cottage in a hamlet on the sea-coast a long way off, established
herself there as a single woman with one servant, and was
understood to live secluded, ever afterwards, in an inflexible
retirement.

My father had once been a favourite of hers, I believe; but she was
mortally affronted by his marriage, on the ground that my mother
was 'a wax doll'.  She had never seen my mother, but she knew her
to be not yet twenty.  My father and Miss Betsey never met again. 
He was double my mother's age when he married, and of but a
delicate constitution.  He died a year afterwards, and, as I have
said, six months before I came into the world.

This was the state of matters, on the afternoon of, what I may be
excused for calling, that eventful and important Friday.  I can
make no claim therefore to have known, at that time, how matters
stood; or to have any remembrance, founded on the evidence of my
own senses, of what follows.

My mother was sitting by the fire, but poorly in health, and very
low in spirits, looking at it through her tears, and desponding
heavily about herself and the fatherless little stranger, who was
already welcomed by some grosses of prophetic pins, in a drawer
upstairs, to a world not at all excited on the subject of his
arrival; my mother, I say, was sitting by the fire, that bright,
windy March afternoon, very timid and sad, and very doubtful of
ever coming alive out of the trial that was before her, when,
lifting her eyes as she dried them, to the window opposite, she saw
a strange lady coming up the garden.

MY mother had a sure foreboding at the second glance, that it was
Miss Betsey.  The setting sun was glowing on the strange lady, over
the garden-fence, and she came walking up to the door with a fell
rigidity of figure and composure of countenance that could have
belonged to nobody else.

When she reached the house, she gave another proof of her identity. 
My father had often hinted that she seldom conducted herself like
any ordinary Christian; and now, instead of ringing the bell, she
came and looked in at that identical window, pressing the end of
her nose against the glass to that extent, that my poor dear mother
used to say it became perfectly flat and white in a moment.

She gave my mother such a turn, that I have always been convinced
I am indebted to Miss Betsey for having been born on a Friday.

My mother had left her chair in her agitation, and gone behind it
in the corner.  Miss Betsey, looking round the room, slowly and
inquiringly, began on the other side, and carried her eyes on, like
a Saracen's Head in a Dutch clock, until they reached my mother. 
Then she made a frown and a gesture to my mother, like one who was
accustomed to be obeyed, to come and open the door.  My mother
went.

'Mrs. David Copperfield, I think,' said Miss Betsey; the emphasis
referring, perhaps, to my mother's mourning weeds, and her
condition.

'Yes,' said my mother, faintly.

'Miss Trotwood,' said the visitor.  'You have heard of her, I dare
say?'

My mother answered she had had that pleasure.  And she had a
disagreeable consciousness of not appearing to imply that it had
been an overpowering pleasure.

'Now you see her,' said Miss Betsey.  My mother bent her head, and
begged her to walk in.

They went into the parlour my mother had come from, the fire in the
best room on the other side of the passage not being lighted - not
having been lighted, indeed, since my father's funeral; and when
they were both seated, and Miss Betsey said nothing, my mother,
after vainly trying to restrain herself, began to cry.
'Oh tut, tut, tut!' said Miss Betsey, in a hurry.  'Don't do that!
Come, come!'

My mother couldn't help it notwithstanding, so she cried until she
had had her cry out.

'Take off your cap, child,' said Miss Betsey, 'and let me see you.'

MY mother was too much afraid of her to refuse compliance with this
odd request, if she had any disposition to do so.  Therefore she
did as she was told, and did it with such nervous hands that her
hair (which was luxuriant and beautiful) fell all about her face.

'Why, bless my heart!' exclaimed Miss Betsey.  'You are a very
Baby!'

My mother was, no doubt, unusually youthful in appearance even for
her years; she hung her head, as if it were her fault, poor thing,
and said, sobbing, that indeed she was afraid she was but a
childish widow, and would be but a childish mother if she lived. 
In a short pause which ensued, she had a fancy that she felt Miss
Betsey touch her hair, and that with no ungentle hand; but, looking
at her, in her timid hope, she found that lady sitting with the
skirt of her dress tucked up, her hands folded on one knee, and her
feet upon the fender, frowning at the fire.

'In the name of Heaven,' said Miss Betsey, suddenly, 'why Rookery?'

'Do you mean the house, ma'am?' asked my mother.

'Why Rookery?' said Miss Betsey.  'Cookery would have been more to
the purpose, if you had had any practical ideas of life, either of
you.'

'The name was Mr. Copperfield's choice,' returned my mother.  'When
he bought the house, he liked to think that there were rooks about
it.'

The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall
old elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother
nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way.  As the elms bent
to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after
a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing
their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too
wicked for their peace of mind, some weatherbeaten ragged old
rooks'-nests, burdening their higher branches, swung like wrecks
upon a stormy sea.

'Where are the birds?' asked Miss Betsey.

'The -? ' My mother had been thinking of something else.

'The rooks - what has become of them?' asked Miss Betsey.

'There have not been any since we have lived here,' said my mother. 
'We thought - Mr. Copperfield thought - it was quite a large
rookery; but the nests were very old ones, and the birds have
deserted them a long while.'

'David Copperfield all over!' cried Miss Betsey.  'David
Copperfield from head to foot!  Calls a house a rookery when
there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because
he sees the nests!'

'Mr. Copperfield,' returned my mother, 'is dead, and if you dare to
speak unkindly of him to me -'

My poor dear mother, I suppose, had some momentary intention of
committing an assault and battery upon my aunt, who could easily
have settled her with one hand, even if my mother had been in far
better training for such an encounter than she was that evening. 
But it passed with the action of rising from her chair; and she sat
down again very meekly, and fainted.

When she came to herself, or when Miss Betsey had restored her,
whichever it was, she found the latter standing at the window.  The
twilight was by this time shading down into darkness; and dimly as
they saw each other, they could not have done that without the aid
of the fire.

'Well?' said Miss Betsey, coming back to her chair, as if she had
only been taking a casual look at the prospect; 'and when do you
expect -'

'I am all in a tremble,' faltered my mother.  'I don't know what's
the matter.  I shall die, I am sure!'

'No, no, no,' said Miss Betsey.  'Have some tea.'

'Oh dear me, dear me, do you think it will do me any good?' cried
my mother in a helpless manner.

'Of course it will,' said Miss Betsey.  'It's nothing but fancy. 
What do you call your girl?'

'I don't know that it will be a girl, yet, ma'am,' said my mother
innocently.

'Bless the Baby!' exclaimed Miss Betsey, unconsciously quoting the
second sentiment of the pincushion in the drawer upstairs, but
applying it to my mother instead of me, 'I don't mean that.  I mean
your servant-girl.'

'Peggotty,' said my mother.

'Peggotty!' repeated Miss Betsey, with some indignation.  'Do you
mean to say, child, that any human being has gone into a Christian
church, and got herself named Peggotty?'
'It's her surname,' said my mother, faintly.  'Mr. Copperfield
called her by it, because her Christian name was the same as mine.'

'Here!  Peggotty!' cried Miss Betsey, opening the parlour door. 
'Tea.  Your mistress is a little unwell.  Don't dawdle.'

Having issued this mandate with as much potentiality as if she had
been a recognized authority in the house ever since it had been a
house, and having looked out to confront the amazed Peggotty coming
along the passage with a candle at the sound of a strange voice,
Miss Betsey shut the door again, and sat down as before: with her
feet on the fender, the skirt of her dress tucked up, and her hands
folded on one knee.

'You were speaking about its being a girl,' said Miss Betsey.  'I
have no doubt it will be a girl.  I have a presentiment that it
must be a girl.  Now child, from the moment of the birth of this
girl -'

'Perhaps boy,' my mother took the liberty of putting in.

'I tell you I have a presentiment that it must be a girl,' returned
Miss Betsey.  'Don't contradict.  From the moment of this girl's
birth, child, I intend to be her friend.  I intend to be her
godmother, and I beg you'll call her Betsey Trotwood Copperfield. 
There must be no mistakes in life with THIS Betsey Trotwood.  There
must be no trifling with HER affections, poor dear.  She must be
well brought up, and well guarded from reposing any foolish
confidences where they are not deserved.  I must make that MY
care.'

There was a twitch of Miss Betsey's head, after each of these
sentences, as if her own old wrongs were working within her, and
she repressed any plainer reference to them by strong constraint. 
So my mother suspected, at least, as she observed her by the low
glimmer of the fire: too much scared by Miss Betsey, too uneasy in
herself, and too subdued and bewildered altogether, to observe
anything very clearly, or to know what to say.

'And was David good to you, child?' asked Miss Betsey, when she had
been silent for a little while, and these motions of her head had
gradually ceased.  'Were you comfortable together?'

'We were very happy,' said my mother.  'Mr. Copperfield was only
too good to me.'

'What, he spoilt you, I suppose?' returned Miss Betsey.

'For being quite alone and dependent on myself in this rough world
again, yes, I fear he did indeed,' sobbed my mother.

'Well!  Don't cry!' said Miss Betsey.  'You were not equally
matched, child - if any two people can be equally matched - and so
I asked the question.  You were an orphan, weren't you?'
'Yes.'

'And a governess?'

'I was nursery-governess in a family where Mr. Copperfield came to
visit.  Mr. Copperfield was very kind to me, and took a great deal
of notice of me, and paid me a good deal of attention, and at last
proposed to me.  And I accepted him.  And so we were married,' said
my mother simply.

'Ha!  Poor Baby!' mused Miss Betsey, with her frown still bent upon
the fire.  'Do you know anything?'

'I beg your pardon, ma'am,' faltered my mother.

'About keeping house, for instance,' said Miss Betsey.

'Not much, I fear,' returned my mother.  'Not so much as I could
wish.  But Mr. Copperfield was teaching me -'

('Much he knew about it himself!') said Miss Betsey in a
parenthesis.

- 'And I hope I should have improved, being very anxious to learn,
and he very patient to teach me, if the great misfortune of his
death' - my mother broke down again here, and could get no farther.

'Well, well!' said Miss Betsey.

-'I kept my housekeeping-book regularly, and balanced it with Mr.
Copperfield every night,' cried my mother in another burst of
distress, and breaking down again.

'Well, well!' said Miss Betsey.  'Don't cry any more.'

- 'And I am sure we never had a word of difference respecting it,
except when Mr. Copperfield objected to my threes and fives being
too much like each other, or to my putting curly tails to my sevens
and nines,' resumed my mother in another burst, and breaking down
again.

'You'll make yourself ill,' said Miss Betsey, 'and you know that
will not be good either for you or for my god-daughter.  Come!  You
mustn't do it!'

This argument had some share in quieting my mother, though her
increasing indisposition had a larger one.  There was an interval
of silence, only broken by Miss Betsey's occasionally ejaculating
'Ha!' as she sat with her feet upon the fender.

'David had bought an annuity for himself with his money, I know,'
said she, by and by.  'What did he do for you?'

'Mr. Copperfield,' said my mother, answering with some difficulty,
'was so considerate and good as to secure the reversion of a part
of it to me.'

'How much?' asked Miss Betsey.

'A hundred and five pounds a year,' said my mother.

'He might have done worse,' said my aunt.

The word was appropriate to the moment.  My mother was so much
worse that Peggotty, coming in with the teaboard and candles, and
seeing at a glance how ill she was, - as Miss Betsey might have
done sooner if there had been light enough, - conveyed her upstairs
to her own room with all speed; and immediately dispatched Ham
Peggotty, her nephew, who had been for some days past secreted in
the house, unknown to my mother, as a special messenger in case of
emergency, to fetch the nurse and doctor.

Those allied powers were considerably astonished, when they arrived
within a few minutes of each other, to find an unknown lady of
portentous appearance, sitting before the fire, with her bonnet
tied over her left arm, stopping her ears with jewellers' cotton. 
Peggotty knowing nothing about her, and my mother saying nothing
about her, she was quite a mystery in the parlour; and the fact of
her having a magazine of jewellers' cotton in her pocket, and
sticking the article in her ears in that way, did not detract from
the solemnity of her presence.

The doctor having been upstairs and come down again, and having
satisfied himself, I suppose, that there was a probability of this
unknown lady and himself having to sit there, face to face, for
some hours, laid himself out to be polite and social.  He was the
meekest of his sex, the mildest of little men.  He sidled in and
out of a room, to take up the less space.  He walked as softly as
the Ghost in Hamlet, and more slowly.  He carried his head on one
side, partly in modest depreciation of himself, partly in modest
propitiation of everybody else.  It is nothing to say that he
hadn't a word to throw at a dog.  He couldn't have thrown a word at
a mad dog.  He might have offered him one gently, or half a one, or
a fragment of one; for he spoke as slowly as he walked; but he
wouldn't have been rude to him, and he couldn't have been quick
with him, for any earthly consideration.

Mr. Chillip, looking mildly at my aunt with his head on one side,
and making her a little bow, said, in allusion to the jewellers'
cotton, as he softly touched his left ear:

'Some local irritation, ma'am?'

'What!' replied my aunt, pulling the cotton out of one ear like a
cork.

Mr. Chillip was so alarmed by her abruptness - as he told my mother
afterwards - that it was a mercy he didn't lose his presence of
mind.  But he repeated sweetly:

'Some local irritation, ma'am?'

'Nonsense!' replied my aunt, and corked herself again, at one blow.

Mr. Chillip could do nothing after this, but sit and look at her
feebly, as she sat and looked at the fire, until he was called
upstairs again.  After some quarter of an hour's absence, he
returned.

'Well?' said my aunt, taking the cotton out of the ear nearest to
him.

'Well, ma'am,' returned Mr. Chillip, 'we are- we are progressing
slowly, ma'am.'

'Ba--a--ah!' said my aunt, with a perfect shake on the contemptuous
interjection.  And corked herself as before.

Really - really - as Mr. Chillip told my mother, he was almost
shocked; speaking in a professional point of view alone, he was
almost shocked.  But he sat and looked at her, notwithstanding, for
nearly two hours, as she sat looking at the fire, until he was
again called out.  After another absence, he again returned.

'Well?' said my aunt, taking out the cotton on that side again.

'Well, ma'am,' returned Mr. Chillip, 'we are - we are progressing

slowly, ma'am.'

'Ya--a--ah!' said my aunt.  With such a snarl at him, that Mr.
Chillip absolutely could not bear it.  It was really calculated to
break his spirit, he said afterwards.  He preferred to go and sit
upon the stairs, in the dark and a strong draught, until he was
again sent for.

Ham Peggotty, who went to the national school, and was a very
dragon at his catechism, and who may therefore be regarded as a
credible witness, reported next day, that happening to peep in at
the parlour-door an hour after this, he was instantly descried by
Miss Betsey, then walking to and fro in a state of agitation, and
pounced upon before he could make his escape.  That there were now
occasional sounds of feet and voices overhead which he inferred the
cotton did not exclude, from the circumstance of his evidently
being clutched by the lady as a victim on whom to expend her
superabundant agitation when the sounds were loudest.  That,
marching him constantly up and down by the collar (as if he had
been taking too much laudanum), she, at those times, shook him,
rumpled his hair, made light of his linen, stopped his ears as if
she confounded them with her own, and otherwise tousled and
maltreated him.  This was in part confirmed by his aunt, who saw
him at half past twelve o'clock, soon after his release, and
affirmed that he was then as red as I was.

The mild Mr. Chillip could not possibly bear malice at such a time,
if at any time.  He sidled into the parlour as soon as he was at
liberty, and said to my aunt in his meekest manner:

'Well, ma'am, I am happy to congratulate you.'

'What upon?' said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip was fluttered again, by the extreme severity of my
aunt's manner; so he made her a little bow and gave her a little
smile, to mollify her.

'Mercy on the man, what's he doing!' cried my aunt, impatiently.
'Can't he speak?'

'Be calm, my dear ma'am,' said Mr. Chillip, in his softest accents.

'There is no longer any occasion for uneasiness, ma'am.  Be calm.'

It has since been considered almost a miracle that my aunt didn't
shake him, and shake what he had to say, out of him.  She only
shook her own head at him, but in a way that made him quail.

'Well, ma'am,' resumed Mr. Chillip, as soon as he had courage, 'I
am happy to congratulate you.  All is now over, ma'am, and well
over.'

During the five minutes or so that Mr. Chillip devoted to the
delivery of this oration, my aunt eyed him narrowly.

'How is she?' said my aunt, folding her arms with her bonnet still
tied on one of them.

'Well, ma'am, she will soon be quite comfortable, I hope,' returned
Mr. Chillip.  'Quite as comfortable as we can expect a young mother
to be, under these melancholy domestic circumstances.  There cannot
be any objection to your seeing her presently, ma'am.  It may do
her good.'

'And SHE.  How is SHE?' said my aunt, sharply.

Mr. Chillip laid his head a little more on one side, and looked at
my aunt like an amiable bird.

'The baby,' said my aunt.  'How is she?'

'Ma'am,' returned Mr. Chillip, 'I apprehended you had known.  It's
a boy.'

My aunt said never a word, but took her bonnet by the strings, in
the manner of a sling, aimed a blow at Mr. Chillip's head with it,
put it on bent, walked out, and never came back.  She vanished like
a discontented fairy; or like one of those supernatural beings,
whom it was popularly supposed I was entitled to see; and never
came back any more.

No.  I lay in my basket, and my mother lay in her bed; but Betsey
Trotwood Copperfield was for ever in the land of dreams and
shadows, the tremendous region whence I had so lately travelled;
and the light upon the window of our room shone out upon the
earthly bourne of all such travellers, and the mound above the
ashes and the dust that once was he, without whom I had never been.



CHAPTER 2
I OBSERVE


The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I
look far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her
pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at all,
and eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their whole
neighbourhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard and red that
I wondered the birds didn't peck her in preference to apples.

I believe I can remember these two at a little distance apart,
dwarfed to my sight by stooping down or kneeling on the floor, and
I going unsteadily from the one to the other.  I have an impression
on my mind which I cannot distinguish from actual remembrance, of
the touch of Peggotty's forefinger as she used to hold it out to
me, and of its being roughened by needlework, like a pocket
nutmeg-grater.

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go
farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I
believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children
to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy.  Indeed, I
think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may
with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than
to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to
retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being
pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from
their childhood.

I might have a misgiving that I am 'meandering' in stopping to say
this, but that it brings me to remark that I build these
conclusions, in part upon my own experience of myself; and if it
should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative that
I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a
strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of
these characteristics.

Looking back, as I was saying, into the blank of my infancy, the
first objects I can remember as standing out by themselves from a
confusion of things, are my mother and Peggotty.  What else do I
remember?  Let me see.


There comes out of the cloud, our house - not new to me, but quite
familiar, in its earliest remembrance.  On the ground-floor is
Peggotty's kitchen, opening into a back yard; with a pigeon-house
on a pole, in the centre, without any pigeons in it; a great dog-
kennel in a corner, without any dog; and a quantity of fowls that
look terribly tall to me, walking about, in a menacing and
ferocious manner.  There is one cock who gets upon a post to crow,
and seems to take particular notice of me as I look at him through
the kitchen window, who makes me shiver, he is so fierce.  Of the
geese outside the side-gate who come waddling after me with their
long necks stretched out when I go that way, I dream at night: as
a man environed by wild beasts might dream of lions.

Here is a long passage - what an enormous perspective I make of it! 
- leading from Peggotty's kitchen to the front door.  A dark
store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at
night; for I don't know what may be among those tubs and jars and
old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly-burning
light, letting a mouldy air come out of the door, in which there is
the smell of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee, all at one
whiff.  Then there are the two parlours: the parlour in which we
sit of an evening, my mother and I and Peggotty - for Peggotty is
quite our companion, when her work is done and we are alone - and
the best parlour where we sit on a Sunday; grandly, but not so
comfortably.  There is something of a doleful air about that room
to me, for Peggotty has told me - I don't know when, but apparently
ages ago - about my father's funeral, and the company having their
black cloaks put on.  One Sunday night my mother reads to Peggotty
and me in there, how Lazarus was raised up from the dead.  And I am
so frightened that they are afterwards obliged to take me out of
bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window,
with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn
moon.

There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass
of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing
half so quiet as its tombstones.  The sheep are feeding there, when
I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet
within my mother's room, to look out at it; and I see the red light
shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, 'Is the sun-dial
glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?'

Here is our pew in the church.  What a high-backed pew!  With a
window near it, out of which our house can be seen, and IS seen
many times during the morning's service, by Peggotty, who likes to
make herself as sure as she can that it's not being robbed, or is
not in flames.  But though Peggotty's eye wanders, she is much
offended if mine does, and frowns to me, as I stand upon the seat,
that I am to look at the clergyman.  But I can't always look at him
- I know him without that white thing on, and I am afraid of his
wondering why I stare so, and perhaps stopping the service to
inquire - and what am I to do?  It's a dreadful thing to gape, but
I must do something.  I look at my mother, but she pretends not to
see me.  I look at a boy in the aisle, and he makes faces at me. 
I look at the sunlight coming in at the open door through the
porch, and there I see a stray sheep - I don't mean a sinner, but
mutton - half making up his mind to come into the church.  I feel
that if I looked at him any longer, I might be tempted to say
something out loud; and what would become of me then!  I look up at
the monumental tablets on the wall, and try to think of Mr. Bodgers
late of this parish, and what the feelings of Mrs. Bodgers must
have been, when affliction sore, long time Mr. Bodgers bore, and
physicians were in vain.  I wonder whether they called in Mr.
Chillip, and he was in vain; and if so, how he likes to be reminded
of it once a week.  I look from Mr. Chillip, in his Sunday
neckcloth, to the pulpit; and think what a good place it would be
to play in, and what a castle it would make, with another boy
coming up the stairs to attack it, and having the velvet cushion
with the tassels thrown down on his head.  In time my eyes
gradually shut up; and, from seeming to hear the clergyman singing
a drowsy song in the heat, I hear nothing, until I fall off the
seat with a crash, and am taken out, more dead than alive, by
Peggotty.

And now I see the outside of our house, with the latticed
bedroom-windows standing open to let in the sweet-smelling air, and
the ragged old rooks'-nests still dangling in the elm-trees at the
bottom of the front garden.  Now I am in the garden at the back,
beyond the yard where the empty pigeon-house and dog-kennel are -
a very preserve of butterflies, as I remember it, with a high
fence, and a gate and padlock; where the fruit clusters on the
trees, riper and richer than fruit has ever been since, in any
other garden, and where my mother gathers some in a basket, while
I stand by, bolting furtive gooseberries, and trying to look
unmoved.  A great wind rises, and the summer is gone in a moment. 
We are playing in the winter twilight, dancing about the parlour. 
When my mother is out of breath and rests herself in an
elbow-chair, I watch her winding her bright curls round her
fingers, and straitening her waist, and nobody knows better than I
do that she likes to look so well, and is proud of being so pretty.

That is among my very earliest impressions.  That, and a sense that
we were both a little afraid of Peggotty, and submitted ourselves
in most things to her direction, were among the first opinions - if
they may be so called - that I ever derived from what I saw.

Peggotty and I were sitting one night by the parlour fire, alone. 
I had been reading to Peggotty about crocodiles.  I must have read
very perspicuously, or the poor soul must have been deeply
interested, for I remember she had a cloudy impression, after I had
done, that they were a sort of vegetable.  I was tired of reading,
and dead sleepy; but having leave, as a high treat, to sit up until
my mother came home from spending the evening at a neighbour's, I
would rather have died upon my post (of course) than have gone to
bed.  I had reached that stage of sleepiness when Peggotty seemed
to swell and grow immensely large.  I propped my eyelids open with
my two forefingers, and looked perseveringly at her as she sat at
work; at the little bit of wax-candle she kept for her thread - how
old it looked, being so wrinkled in all directions! - at the little
house with a thatched roof, where the yard-measure lived; at her
work-box with a sliding lid, with a view of St. Paul's Cathedral
(with a pink dome) painted on the top; at the brass thimble on her
finger; at herself, whom I thought lovely.  I felt so sleepy, that
I knew if I lost sight of anything for a moment, I was gone.

'Peggotty,' says I, suddenly, 'were you ever married?'

'Lord, Master Davy,' replied Peggotty.  'What's put marriage in
your head?'

She answered with such a start, that it quite awoke me.  And then
she stopped in her work, and looked at me, with her needle drawn
out to its thread's length.

'But WERE you ever married, Peggotty?' says I.  'You are a very
handsome woman, an't you?'

I thought her in a different style from my mother, certainly; but
of another school of beauty, I considered her a perfect example. 
There was a red velvet footstool in the best parlour, on which my
mother had painted a nosegay.  The ground-work of that stool, and
Peggotty's complexion appeared to me to be one and the same thing. 
The stool was smooth, and Peggotty was rough, but that made no
difference.

'Me handsome, Davy!' said Peggotty.  'Lawk, no, my dear!  But what
put marriage in your head?'

'I don't know! - You mustn't marry more than one person at a time,
may you, Peggotty?'

'Certainly not,' says Peggotty, with the promptest decision.

'But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may
marry another person, mayn't you, Peggotty?'

'YOU MAY,' says Peggotty, 'if you choose, my dear.  That's a matter
of opinion.'

'But what is your opinion, Peggotty?' said I.

I asked her, and looked curiously at her, because she looked so
curiously at me.

'My opinion is,' said Peggotty, taking her eyes from me, after a
little indecision and going on with her work, 'that I never was
married myself, Master Davy, and that I don't expect to be.  That's
all I know about the subject.'

'You an't cross, I suppose, Peggotty, are you?' said I, after
sitting quiet for a minute.

I really thought she was, she had been so short with me; but I was
quite mistaken: for she laid aside her work (which was a stocking
of her own), and opening her arms wide, took my curly head within
them, and gave it a good squeeze.  I know it was a good squeeze,
because, being very plump, whenever she made any little exertion
after she was dressed, some of the buttons on the back of her gown
flew off.  And I recollect two bursting to the opposite side of the
parlour, while she was hugging me.

'Now let me hear some more about the Crorkindills,' said Peggotty,
who was not quite right in the name yet, 'for I an't heard half
enough.'

I couldn't quite understand why Peggotty looked so queer, or why
she was so ready to go back to the crocodiles.  However, we
returned to those monsters, with fresh wakefulness on my part, and
we left their eggs in the sand for the sun to hatch; and we ran
away from them, and baffled them by constantly turning, which they
were unable to do quickly, on account of their unwieldy make; and
we went into the water after them, as natives, and put sharp pieces
of timber down their throats; and in short we ran the whole
crocodile gauntlet.  I did, at least; but I had my doubts of
Peggotty, who was thoughtfully sticking her needle into various
parts of her face and arms, all the time.

We had exhausted the crocodiles, and begun with the alligators,
when the garden-bell rang.  We went out to the door; and there was
my mother, looking unusually pretty, I thought, and with her a
gentleman with beautiful black hair and whiskers, who had walked
home with us from church last Sunday.

As my mother stooped down on the threshold to take me in her arms
and kiss me, the gentleman said I was a more highly privileged
little fellow than a monarch - or something like that; for my later
understanding comes, I am sensible, to my aid here.

'What does that mean?' I asked him, over her shoulder.

He patted me on the head; but somehow, I didn't like him or his
deep voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch my
mother's in touching me - which it did.  I put it away, as well as
I could.

'Oh, Davy!' remonstrated my mother.

'Dear boy!' said the gentleman.  'I cannot wonder at his devotion!'

I never saw such a beautiful colour on my mother's face before. 
She gently chid me for being rude; and, keeping me close to her
shawl, turned to thank the gentleman for taking so much trouble as
to bring her home.  She put out her hand to him as she spoke, and,
as he met it with his own, she glanced, I thought, at me.

'Let us say "good night", my fine boy,' said the gentleman, when he
had bent his head - I saw him! - over my mother's little glove.

'Good night!' said I.

'Come!  Let us be the best friends in the world!' said the
gentleman, laughing.  'Shake hands!'

My right hand was in my mother's left, so I gave him the other.

'Why, that's the Wrong hand, Davy!' laughed the gentleman.

MY mother drew my right hand forward, but I was resolved, for my
former reason, not to give it him, and I did not.  I gave him the
other, and he shook it heartily, and said I was a brave fellow, and
went away.

At this minute I see him turn round in the garden, and give us a
last look with his ill-omened black eyes, before the door was shut.

Peggotty, who had not said a word or moved a finger, secured the
fastenings instantly, and we all went into the parlour.  My mother,
contrary to her usual habit, instead of coming to the elbow-chair
by the fire, remained at the other end of the room, and sat singing
to herself.

- 'Hope you have had a pleasant evening, ma'am,' said Peggotty,
standing as stiff as a barrel in the centre of the room, with a
candlestick in her hand.

'Much obliged to you, Peggotty,' returned my mother, in a cheerful
voice, 'I have had a VERY pleasant evening.'

'A stranger or so makes an agreeable change,' suggested Peggotty.

'A very agreeable change, indeed,' returned my mother.

Peggotty continuing to stand motionless in the middle of the room,
and my mother resuming her singing, I fell asleep, though I was not
so sound asleep but that I could hear voices, without hearing what
they said.  When I half awoke from this uncomfortable doze, I found
Peggotty and my mother both in tears, and both talking.

'Not such a one as this, Mr. Copperfield wouldn't have liked,' said
Peggotty.  'That I say, and that I swear!'

'Good Heavens!' cried my mother, 'you'll drive me mad!  Was ever
any poor girl so ill-used by her servants as I am!  Why do I do
myself the injustice of calling myself a girl?  Have I never been
married, Peggotty?'

'God knows you have, ma'am,' returned Peggotty.
'Then, how can you dare,' said my mother - 'you know I don't mean
how can you dare, Peggotty, but how can you have the heart - to
make me so uncomfortable and say such bitter things to me, when you
are well aware that I haven't, out of this place, a single friend
to turn to?'

'The more's the reason,' returned Peggotty, 'for saying that it
won't do.  No!  That it won't do.  No!  No price could make it do. 
No!' - I thought Peggotty would have thrown the candlestick away,
she was so emphatic with it.

'How can you be so aggravating,' said my mother, shedding more
tears than before, 'as to talk in such an unjust manner!  How can
you go on as if it was all settled and arranged, Peggotty, when I
tell you over and over again, you cruel thing, that beyond the
commonest civilities nothing has passed!  You talk of admiration. 
What am I to do?  If people are so silly as to indulge the
sentiment, is it my fault?  What am I to do, I ask you?  Would you
wish me to shave my head and black my face, or disfigure myself
with a burn, or a scald, or something of that sort?  I dare say you
would, Peggotty.  I dare say you'd quite enjoy it.'

Peggotty seemed to take this aspersion very much to heart, I
thought.

'And my dear boy,' cried my mother, coming to the elbow-chair in
which I was, and caressing me, 'my own little Davy!  Is it to be
hinted to me that I am wanting in affection for my precious
treasure, the dearest little fellow that ever was!'

'Nobody never went and hinted no such a thing,' said Peggotty.

'You did, Peggotty!' returned my mother.  'You know you did.  What
else was it possible to infer from what you said, you unkind
creature, when you know as well as I do, that on his account only
last quarter I wouldn't buy myself a new parasol, though that old
green one is frayed the whole way up, and the fringe is perfectly
mangy?  You know it is, Peggotty.  You can't deny it.'  Then,
turning affectionately to me, with her cheek against mine, 'Am I a
naughty mama to you, Davy?  Am I a nasty, cruel, selfish, bad mama? 
Say I am, my child; say "yes", dear boy, and Peggotty will love
you; and Peggotty's love is a great deal better than mine, Davy. 
I don't love you at all, do I?'

At this, we all fell a-crying together.  I think I was the loudest
of the party, but I am sure we were all sincere about it.  I was
quite heart-broken myself, and am afraid that in the first
transports of wounded tenderness I called Peggotty a 'Beast'.  That
honest creature was in deep affliction, I remember, and must have
become quite buttonless on the occasion; for a little volley of
those explosives went off, when, after having made it up with my
mother, she kneeled down by the elbow-chair, and made it up with
me.

We went to bed greatly dejected.  My sobs kept waking me, for a
long time; and when one very strong sob quite hoisted me up in bed,
I found my mother sitting on the coverlet, and leaning over me.  I
fell asleep in her arms, after that, and slept soundly.

Whether it was the following Sunday when I saw the gentleman again,
or whether there was any greater lapse of time before he
reappeared, I cannot recall.  I don't profess to be clear about
dates.  But there he was, in church, and he walked home with us
afterwards.  He came in, too, to look at a famous geranium we had,
in the parlour-window.  It did not appear to me that he took much
notice of it, but before he went he asked my mother to give him a
bit of the blossom.  She begged him to choose it for himself, but
he refused to do that - I could not understand why - so she plucked
it for him, and gave it into his hand.  He said he would never,
never part with it any more; and I thought he must be quite a fool
not to know that it would fall to pieces in a day or two.

Peggotty began to be less with us, of an evening, than she had
always been.  My mother deferred to her very much - more than
usual, it occurred to me - and we were all three excellent friends;
still we were different from what we used to be, and were not so
comfortable among ourselves.  Sometimes I fancied that Peggotty
perhaps objected to my mother's wearing all the pretty dresses she
had in her drawers, or to her going so often to visit at that
neighbour's; but I couldn't, to my satisfaction, make out how it
was.

Gradually, I became used to seeing the gentleman with the black
whiskers.  I liked him no better than at first, and had the same
uneasy jealousy of him; but if I had any reason for it beyond a
child's instinctive dislike, and a general idea that Peggotty and
I could make much of my mother without any help, it certainly was
not THE reason that I might have found if I had been older.  No
such thing came into my mind, or near it.  I could observe, in
little pieces, as it were; but as to making a net of a number of
these pieces, and catching anybody in it, that was, as yet, beyond
me.

One autumn morning I was with my mother in the front garden, when
Mr. Murdstone - I knew him by that name now - came by, on
horseback.  He reined up his horse to salute my mother, and said he
was going to Lowestoft to see some friends who were there with a
yacht, and merrily proposed to take me on the saddle before him if
I would like the ride.

The air was so clear and pleasant, and the horse seemed to like the
idea of the ride so much himself, as he stood snorting and pawing
at the garden-gate, that I had a great desire to go.  So I was sent
upstairs to Peggotty to be made spruce; and in the meantime Mr.
Murdstone dismounted, and, with his horse's bridle drawn over his
arm, walked slowly up and down on the outer side of the sweetbriar
fence, while my mother walked slowly up and down on the inner to
keep him company.  I recollect Peggotty and I peeping out at them
from my little window; I recollect how closely they seemed to be
examining the sweetbriar between them, as they strolled along; and
how, from being in a perfectly angelic temper, Peggotty turned
cross in a moment, and brushed my hair the wrong way, excessively
hard.

Mr. Murdstone and I were soon off, and trotting along on the green
turf by the side of the road.  He held me quite easily with one
arm, and I don't think I was restless usually; but I could not make
up my mind to sit in front of him without turning my head
sometimes, and looking up in his face.  He had that kind of shallow
black eye - I want a better word to express an eye that has no
depth in it to be looked into - which, when it is abstracted, seems
from some peculiarity of light to be disfigured, for a moment at a
time, by a cast.  Several times when I glanced at him, I observed
that appearance with a sort of awe, and wondered what he was
thinking about so closely.  His hair and whiskers were blacker and
thicker, looked at so near, than even I had given them credit for
being.  A squareness about the lower part of his face, and the
dotted indication of the strong black beard he shaved close every
day, reminded me of the wax-work that had travelled into our
neighbourhood some half-a-year before.  This, his regular eyebrows,
and the rich white, and black, and brown, of his complexion -
confound his complexion, and his memory! - made me think him, in
spite of my misgivings, a very handsome man.  I have no doubt that
my poor dear mother thought him so too.

We went to an hotel by the sea, where two gentlemen were smoking
cigars in a room by themselves.  Each of them was lying on at least
four chairs, and had a large rough jacket on.  In a corner was a
heap of coats and boat-cloaks, and a flag, all bundled up together.

They both rolled on to their feet in an untidy sort of manner, when
we came in, and said, 'Halloa, Murdstone!  We thought you were
dead!'

'Not yet,' said Mr. Murdstone.

'And who's this shaver?' said one of the gentlemen, taking hold of
me.

'That's Davy,' returned Mr. Murdstone.

'Davy who?' said the gentleman.  'Jones?'

'Copperfield,' said Mr. Murdstone.

'What!  Bewitching Mrs. Copperfield's encumbrance?' cried the
gentleman.  'The pretty little widow?'

'Quinion,' said Mr. Murdstone, 'take care, if you please. 
Somebody's sharp.'

'Who is?' asked the gentleman, laughing.
I looked up, quickly; being curious to know.

'Only Brooks of Sheffield,' said Mr. Murdstone.

I was quite relieved to find that it was only Brooks of Sheffield;
for, at first, I really thought it was I.

There seemed to be something very comical in the reputation of Mr.
Brooks of Sheffield, for both the gentlemen laughed heartily when
he was mentioned, and Mr. Murdstone was a good deal amused also. 
After some laughing, the gentleman whom he had called Quinion,
said:

'And what is the opinion of Brooks of Sheffield, in reference to
the projected business?'

'Why, I don't know that Brooks understands much about it at
present,' replied Mr. Murdstone; 'but he is not generally
favourable, I believe.'

There was more laughter at this, and Mr. Quinion said he would ring
the bell for some sherry in which to drink to Brooks.  This he did;
and when the wine came, he made me have a little, with a biscuit,
and, before I drank it, stand up and say, 'Confusion to Brooks of
Sheffield!'  The toast was received with great applause, and such
hearty laughter that it made me laugh too; at which they laughed
the more.  In short, we quite enjoyed ourselves.

We walked about on the cliff after that, and sat on the grass, and
looked at things through a telescope - I could make out nothing
myself when it was put to my eye, but I pretended I could - and
then we came back to the hotel to an early dinner.  All the time we
were out, the two gentlemen smoked incessantly - which, I thought,
if I might judge from the smell of their rough coats, they must
have been doing, ever since the coats had first come home from the
tailor's.  I must not forget that we went on board the yacht, where
they all three descended into the cabin, and were busy with some
papers.  I saw them quite hard at work, when I looked down through
the open skylight.  They left me, during this time, with a very
nice man with a very large head of red hair and a very small shiny
hat upon it, who had got a cross-barred shirt or waistcoat on, with
'Skylark' in capital letters across the chest.  I thought it was
his name; and that as he lived on board ship and hadn't a street
door to put his name on, he put it there instead; but when I called
him Mr. Skylark, he said it meant the vessel.

I observed all day that Mr. Murdstone was graver and steadier than
the two gentlemen.  They were very gay and careless.  They joked
freely with one another, but seldom with him.  It appeared to me
that he was more clever and cold than they were, and that they
regarded him with something of my own feeling.  I remarked that,
once or twice when Mr. Quinion was talking, he looked at Mr.
Murdstone sideways, as if to make sure of his not being displeased;
and that once when Mr. Passnidge (the other gentleman) was in high
spirits, he trod upon his foot, and gave him a secret caution with
his eyes, to observe Mr. Murdstone, who was sitting stern and
silent.  Nor do I recollect that Mr. Murdstone laughed at all that
day, except at the Sheffield joke - and that, by the by, was his
own.

We went home early in the evening.  It was a very fine evening, and
my mother and he had another stroll by the sweetbriar, while I was
sent in to get my tea.  When he was gone, my mother asked me all
about the day I had had, and what they had said and done.  I
mentioned what they had said about her, and she laughed, and told
me they were impudent fellows who talked nonsense - but I knew it
pleased her.  I knew it quite as well as I know it now.  I took the
opportunity of asking if she was at all acquainted with Mr. Brooks
of Sheffield, but she answered No, only she supposed he must be a
manufacturer in the knife and fork way.

Can I say of her face - altered as I have reason to remember it,
perished as I know it is - that it is gone, when here it comes
before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may
choose to look on in a crowded street?  Can I say of her innocent
and girlish beauty, that it faded, and was no more, when its breath
falls on my cheek now, as it fell that night?  Can I say she ever
changed, when my remembrance brings her back to life, thus only;
and, truer to its loving youth than I have been, or man ever is,
still holds fast what it cherished then?

I write of her just as she was when I had gone to bed after this
talk, and she came to bid me good night.  She kneeled down
playfully by the side of the bed, and laying her chin upon her
hands, and laughing, said:

'What was it they said, Davy?  Tell me again.  I can't believe it.'

'"Bewitching -"' I began.

My mother put her hands upon my lips to stop me.

'It was never bewitching,' she said, laughing.  'It never could
have been bewitching, Davy.  Now I know it wasn't!'

'Yes, it was.  "Bewitching Mrs. Copperfield",' I repeated stoutly. 
'And, "pretty."'

'No, no, it was never pretty.  Not pretty,' interposed my mother,
laying her fingers on my lips again.

'Yes it was.  "Pretty little widow."'

'What foolish, impudent creatures!' cried my mother, laughing and
covering her face.  'What ridiculous men!  An't they?  Davy dear -'

'Well, Ma.'

'Don't tell Peggotty; she might be angry with them.  I am
dreadfully angry with them myself; but I would rather Peggotty
didn't know.'

I promised, of course; and we kissed one another over and over
again, and I soon fell fast asleep.

It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if it were the next
day when Peggotty broached the striking and adventurous proposition
I am about to mention; but it was probably about two months
afterwards.

We were sitting as before, one evening (when my mother was out as
before), in company with the stocking and the yard-measure, and the
bit of wax, and the box with St. Paul's on the lid, and the
crocodile book, when Peggotty, after looking at me several times,
and opening her mouth as if she were going to speak, without doing
it - which I thought was merely gaping, or I should have been
rather alarmed - said coaxingly:

'Master Davy, how should you like to go along with me and spend a
fortnight at my brother's at Yarmouth?  Wouldn't that be a treat?'

'Is your brother an agreeable man, Peggotty?' I inquired,
provisionally.

'Oh, what an agreeable man he is!' cried Peggotty, holding up her
hands.  'Then there's the sea; and the boats and ships; and the
fishermen; and the beach; and Am to play with -'

Peggotty meant her nephew Ham, mentioned in my first chapter; but
she spoke of him as a morsel of English Grammar.

I was flushed by her summary of delights, and replied that it would
indeed be a treat, but what would my mother say?

'Why then I'll as good as bet a guinea,' said Peggotty, intent upon
my face, 'that she'll let us go.  I'll ask her, if you like, as
soon as ever she comes home.  There now!'

'But what's she to do while we're away?' said I, putting my small
elbows on the table to argue the point.  'She can't live by
herself.'

If Peggotty were looking for a hole, all of a sudden, in the heel
of that stocking, it must have been a very little one indeed, and
not worth darning.

'I say!  Peggotty!  She can't live by herself, you know.'

'Oh, bless you!' said Peggotty, looking at me again at last. 
'Don't you know?  She's going to stay for a fortnight with Mrs.
Grayper.  Mrs. Grayper's going to have a lot of company.'

Oh!  If that was it, I was quite ready to go.  I waited, in the
utmost impatience, until my mother came home from Mrs. Grayper's
(for it was that identical neighbour), to ascertain if we could get
leave to carry out this great idea.  Without being nearly so much
surprised as I had expected, my mother entered into it readily; and
it was all arranged that night, and my board and lodging during the
visit were to be paid for.

The day soon came for our going.  It was such an early day that it
came soon, even to me, who was in a fever of expectation, and half
afraid that an earthquake or a fiery mountain, or some other great
convulsion of nature, might interpose to stop the expedition.  We
were to go in a carrier's cart, which departed in the morning after
breakfast.  I would have given any money to have been allowed to
wrap myself up over-night, and sleep in my hat and boots.

It touches me nearly now, although I tell it lightly, to recollect
how eager I was to leave my happy home; to think how little I
suspected what I did leave for ever.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier's cart was at the
gate, and my mother stood there kissing me, a grateful fondness for
her and for the old place I had never turned my back upon before,
made me cry.  I am glad to know that my mother cried too, and that
I felt her heart beat against mine.

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier began to move, my
mother ran out at the gate, and called to him to stop, that she
might kiss me once more.  I am glad to dwell upon the earnestness
and love with which she lifted up her face to mine, and did so.

As we left her standing in the road, Mr. Murdstone came up to where
she was, and seemed to expostulate with her for being so moved.  I
was looking back round the awning of the cart, and wondered what
business it was of his.  Peggotty, who was also looking back on the
other side, seemed anything but satisfied; as the face she brought
back in the cart denoted.

I sat looking at Peggotty for some time, in a reverie on this
supposititious case: whether, if she were employed to lose me like
the boy in the fairy tale, I should be able to track my way home
again by the buttons she would shed.



CHAPTER 3
I HAVE A CHANGE


The carrier's horse was the laziest horse in the world, I should
hope, and shuffled along, with his head down, as if he liked to
keep people waiting to whom the packages were directed.  I fancied,
indeed, that he sometimes chuckled audibly over this reflection,
but the carrier said he was only troubled with a cough.
The carrier had a way of keeping his head down, like his horse, and
of drooping sleepily forward as he drove, with one of his arms on
each of his knees.  I say 'drove', but it struck me that the cart
would have gone to Yarmouth quite as well without him, for the
horse did all that; and as to conversation, he had no idea of it
but whistling.

Peggotty had a basket of refreshments on her knee, which would have
lasted us out handsomely, if we had been going to London by the
same conveyance.  We ate a good deal, and slept a good deal. 
Peggotty always went to sleep with her chin upon the handle of the
basket, her hold of which never relaxed; and I could not have
believed unless I had heard her do it, that one defenceless woman
could have snored so much.

We made so many deviations up and down lanes, and were such a long
time delivering a bedstead at a public-house, and calling at other
places, that I was quite tired, and very glad, when we saw
Yarmouth.  It looked rather spongy and soppy, I thought, as I
carried my eye over the great dull waste that lay across the river;
and I could not help wondering, if the world were really as round
as my geography book said, how any part of it came to be so flat. 
But I reflected that Yarmouth might be situated at one of the
poles; which would account for it.

As we drew a little nearer, and saw the whole adjacent prospect
lying a straight low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that
a mound or so might have improved it; and also that if the land had
been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and the
tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast and water, it
would have been nicer.  But Peggotty said, with greater emphasis
than usual, that we must take things as we found them, and that,
for her part, she was proud to call herself a Yarmouth Bloater.

When we got into the street (which was strange enough to me) and
smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tar, and saw the sailors
walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones,
I felt that I had done so busy a place an injustice; and said as
much to Peggotty, who heard my expressions of delight with great
complacency, and told me it was well known (I suppose to those who
had the good fortune to be born Bloaters) that Yarmouth was, upon
the whole, the finest place in the universe.

'Here's my Am!' screamed Peggotty, 'growed out of knowledge!'

He was waiting for us, in fact, at the public-house; and asked me
how I found myself, like an old acquaintance.  I did not feel, at
first, that I knew him as well as he knew me, because he had never
come to our house since the night I was born, and naturally he had
the advantage of me.  But our intimacy was much advanced by his
taking me on his back to carry me home.  He was, now, a huge,
strong fellow of six feet high, broad in proportion, and
round-shouldered; but with a simpering boy's face and curly light
hair that gave him quite a sheepish look.  He was dressed in a
canvas jacket, and a pair of such very stiff trousers that they
would have stood quite as well alone, without any legs in them. 
And you couldn't so properly have said he wore a hat, as that he
was covered in a-top, like an old building, with something pitchy.

Ham carrying me on his back and a small box of ours under his arm,
and Peggotty carrying another small box of ours, we turned down
lanes bestrewn with bits of chips and little hillocks of sand, and
went past gas-works, rope-walks, boat-builders' yards, shipwrights'
yards, ship-breakers' yards, caulkers' yards, riggers' lofts,
smiths' forges, and a great litter of such places, until we came
out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a distance; when Ham
said,

'Yon's our house, Mas'r Davy!'

I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the
wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no
house could I make out.  There was a black barge, or some other
kind of superannuated boat, not far off, high and dry on the
ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney and
smoking very cosily; but nothing else in the way of a habitation
that was visible to me.

'That's not it?' said I.  'That ship-looking thing?'

'That's it, Mas'r Davy,' returned Ham.

If it had been Aladdin's palace, roc's egg and all, I suppose I
could not have been more charmed with the romantic idea of living
in it.  There was a delightful door cut in the side, and it was
roofed in, and there were little windows in it; but the wonderful
charm of it was, that it was a real boat which had no doubt been
upon the water hundreds of times, and which had never been intended
to be lived in, on dry land.  That was the captivation of it to me. 
If it had ever been meant to be lived in, I might have thought it
small, or inconvenient, or lonely; but never having been designed
for any such use, it became a perfect abode.

It was beautifully clean inside, and as tidy as possible.  There
was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on the
chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it of a
lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military-looking child
who was trundling a hoop.  The tray was kept from tumbling down, by
a bible; and the tray, if it had tumbled down, would have smashed
a quantity of cups and saucers and a teapot that were grouped
around the book.  On the walls there were some common coloured
pictures, framed and glazed, of scripture subjects; such as I have
never seen since in the hands of pedlars, without seeing the whole
interior of Peggotty's brother's house again, at one view.  Abraham
in red going to sacrifice Isaac in blue, and Daniel in yellow cast
into a den of green lions, were the most prominent of these.  Over
the little mantelshelf, was a picture of the 'Sarah Jane' lugger,
built at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on to
it; a work of art, combining composition with carpentry, which I
considered to be one of the most enviable possessions that the
world could afford.  There were some hooks in the beams of the
ceiling, the use of which I did not divine then; and some lockers
and boxes and conveniences of that sort, which served for seats and
eked out the chairs.

All this I saw in the first glance after I crossed the threshold -
child-like, according to my theory - and then Peggotty opened a
little door and showed me my bedroom.  It was the completest and
most desirable bedroom ever seen - in the stern of the vessel; with
a little window, where the rudder used to go through; a little
looking-glass, just the right height for me, nailed against the
wall, and framed with oyster-shells; a little bed, which there was
just room enough to get into; and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue
mug on the table.  The walls were whitewashed as white as milk, and
the patchwork counterpane made my eyes quite ache with its
brightness.  One thing I particularly noticed in this delightful
house, was the smell of fish; which was so searching, that when I
took out my pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it smelt
exactly as if it had wrapped up a lobster.  On my imparting this
discovery in confidence to Peggotty, she informed me that her
brother dealt in lobsters, crabs, and crawfish; and I afterwards
found that a heap of these creatures, in a state of wonderful
conglomeration with one another, and never leaving off pinching
whatever they laid hold of, were usually to be found in a little
wooden outhouse where the pots and kettles were kept.

We were welcomed by a very civil woman in a white apron, whom I had
seen curtseying at the door when I was on Ham's back, about a
quarter of a mile off.  Likewise by a most beautiful little girl
(or I thought her so) with a necklace of blue beads on, who
wouldn't let me kiss her when I offered to, but ran away and hid
herself.  By and by, when we had dined in a sumptuous manner off
boiled dabs, melted butter, and potatoes, with a chop for me, a
hairy man with a very good-natured face came home.  As he called
Peggotty 'Lass', and gave her a hearty smack on the cheek, I had no
doubt, from the general propriety of her conduct, that he was her
brother; and so he turned out - being presently introduced to me as
Mr. Peggotty, the master of the house.

'Glad to see you, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'You'll find us rough,
sir, but you'll find us ready.'

I thanked him, and replied that I was sure I should be happy in
such a delightful place.

'How's your Ma, sir?' said Mr. Peggotty.  'Did you leave her pretty
jolly?'

I gave Mr. Peggotty to understand that she was as jolly as I could
wish, and that she desired her compliments - which was a polite
fiction on my part.

'I'm much obleeged to her, I'm sure,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'Well,
sir, if you can make out here, fur a fortnut, 'long wi' her,'
nodding at his sister, 'and Ham, and little Em'ly, we shall be
proud of your company.'

Having done the honours of his house in this hospitable manner, Mr.
Peggotty went out to wash himself in a kettleful of hot water,
remarking that 'cold would never get his muck off'.  He soon
returned, greatly improved in appearance; but so rubicund, that I
couldn't help thinking his face had this in common with the
lobsters, crabs, and crawfish, - that it went into the hot water
very black, and came out very red.

After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug (the nights
being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most delicious
retreat that the imagination of man could conceive.  To hear the
wind getting up out at sea, to know that the fog was creeping over
the desolate flat outside, and to look at the fire, and think that
there was no house near but this one, and this one a boat, was like
enchantment.  Little Em'ly had overcome her shyness, and was
sitting by my side upon the lowest and least of the lockers, which
was just large enough for us two, and just fitted into the chimney
corner.  Mrs. Peggotty with the white apron, was knitting on the
opposite side of the fire.  Peggotty at her needlework was as much
at home with St. Paul's and the bit of wax-candle, as if they had
never known any other roof.  Ham, who had been giving me my first
lesson in all-fours, was trying to recollect a scheme of telling
fortunes with the dirty cards, and was printing off fishy
impressions of his thumb on all the cards he turned.  Mr. Peggotty
was smoking his pipe.  I felt it was a time for conversation and
confidence.

'Mr. Peggotty!' says I.

'Sir,' says he.

'Did you give your son the name of Ham, because you lived in a sort
of ark?'

Mr. Peggotty seemed to think it a deep idea, but answered:

'No, sir.  I never giv him no name.'

'Who gave him that name, then?' said I, putting question number two
of the catechism to Mr. Peggotty.

'Why, sir, his father giv it him,' said Mr. Peggotty.

'I thought you were his father!'

'My brother Joe was his father,' said Mr. Peggotty.

'Dead, Mr. Peggotty?' I hinted, after a respectful pause.

'Drowndead,' said Mr. Peggotty.

I was very much surprised that Mr. Peggotty was not Ham's father,
and began to wonder whether I was mistaken about his relationship
to anybody else there.  I was so curious to know, that I made up my
mind to have it out with Mr. Peggotty.

'Little Em'ly,' I said, glancing at her.  'She is your daughter,
isn't she, Mr. Peggotty?'

'No, sir.  My brother-in-law, Tom, was her father.'

I couldn't help it.  '- Dead, Mr. Peggotty?' I hinted, after
another respectful silence.

'Drowndead,' said Mr. Peggotty.

I felt the difficulty of resuming the subject, but had not got to
the bottom of it yet, and must get to the bottom somehow.  So I
said:

'Haven't you ANY children, Mr. Peggotty?'

'No, master,' he answered with a short laugh.  'I'm a bacheldore.'

'A bachelor!' I said, astonished.  'Why, who's that, Mr. Peggotty?'
pointing to the person in the apron who was knitting.

'That's Missis Gummidge,' said Mr. Peggotty.

'Gummidge, Mr. Peggotty?'

But at this point Peggotty - I mean my own peculiar Peggotty - made
such impressive motions to me not to ask any more questions, that
I could only sit and look at all the silent company, until it was
time to go to bed.  Then, in the privacy of my own little cabin,
she informed me that Ham and Em'ly were an orphan nephew and niece,
whom my host had at different times adopted in their childhood,
when they were left destitute: and that Mrs. Gummidge was the widow
of his partner in a boat, who had died very poor.  He was but a
poor man himself, said Peggotty, but as good as gold and as true as
steel - those were her similes.  The only subject, she informed me,
on which he ever showed a violent temper or swore an oath, was this
generosity of his; and if it were ever referred to, by any one of
them, he struck the table a heavy blow with his right hand (had
split it on one such occasion), and swore a dreadful oath that he
would be 'Gormed' if he didn't cut and run for good, if it was ever
mentioned again.  It appeared, in answer to my inquiries, that
nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb
passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it as constituting
a most solemn imprecation.

I was very sensible of my entertainer's goodness, and listened to
the women's going to bed in another little crib like mine at the
opposite end of the boat, and to him and Ham hanging up two
hammocks for themselves on the hooks I had noticed in the roof, in
a very luxurious state of mind, enhanced by my being sleepy.  As
slumber gradually stole upon me, I heard the wind howling out at
sea and coming on across the flat so fiercely, that I had a lazy
apprehension of the great deep rising in the night.  But I
bethought myself that I was in a boat, after all; and that a man
like Mr. Peggotty was not a bad person to have on board if anything
did happen.

Nothing happened, however, worse than morning.  Almost as soon as
it shone upon the oyster-shell frame of my mirror I was out of bed,
and out with little Em'ly, picking up stones upon the beach.

'You're quite a sailor, I suppose?' I said to Em'ly.  I don't know
that I supposed anything of the kind, but I felt it an act of
gallantry to say something; and a shining sail close to us made
such a pretty little image of itself, at the moment, in her bright
eye, that it came into my head to say this.

'No,' replied Em'ly, shaking her head, 'I'm afraid of the sea.'

'Afraid!' I said, with a becoming air of boldness, and looking very
big at the mighty ocean.  'I an't!'

'Ah! but it's cruel,' said Em'ly.  'I have seen it very cruel to
some of our men.  I have seen it tear a boat as big as our house,
all to pieces.'

'I hope it wasn't the boat that -'

'That father was drownded in?' said Em'ly.  'No.  Not that one, I
never see that boat.'

'Nor him?' I asked her.

Little Em'ly shook her head.  'Not to remember!'

Here was a coincidence!  I immediately went into an explanation how
I had never seen my own father; and how my mother and I had always
lived by ourselves in the happiest state imaginable, and lived so
then, and always meant to live so; and how my father's grave was in
the churchyard near our house, and shaded by a tree, beneath the
boughs of which I had walked and heard the birds sing many a
pleasant morning.  But there were some differences between Em'ly's
orphanhood and mine, it appeared.  She had lost her mother before
her father; and where her father's grave was no one knew, except
that it was somewhere in the depths of the sea.

'Besides,' said Em'ly, as she looked about for shells and pebbles,
'your father was a gentleman and your mother is a lady; and my
father was a fisherman and my mother was a fisherman's daughter,
and my uncle Dan is a fisherman.'

'Dan is Mr. Peggotty, is he?' said I.

'Uncle Dan - yonder,' answered Em'ly, nodding at the boat-house.

'Yes.  I mean him.  He must be very good, I should think?'

'Good?' said Em'ly.  'If I was ever to be a lady, I'd give him a
sky-blue coat with diamond buttons, nankeen trousers, a red velvet
waistcoat, a cocked hat, a large gold watch, a silver pipe, and a
box of money.'

I said I had no doubt that Mr. Peggotty well deserved these
treasures.  I must acknowledge that I felt it difficult to picture
him quite at his ease in the raiment proposed for him by his
grateful little niece, and that I was particularly doubtful of the
policy of the cocked hat; but I kept these sentiments to myself.

Little Em'ly had stopped and looked up at the sky in her
enumeration of these articles, as if they were a glorious vision. 
We went on again, picking up shells and pebbles.

'You would like to be a lady?' I said.

Emily looked at me, and laughed and nodded 'yes'.

'I should like it very much.  We would all be gentlefolks together,
then.  Me, and uncle, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge.  We wouldn't mind
then, when there comes stormy weather.  - Not for our own sakes, I
mean.  We would for the poor fishermen's, to be sure, and we'd help
'em with money when they come to any hurt.'  This seemed to me to
be a very satisfactory and therefore not at all improbable picture. 
I expressed my pleasure in the contemplation of it, and little
Em'ly was emboldened to say, shyly,

'Don't you think you are afraid of the sea, now?'

It was quiet enough to reassure me, but I have no doubt if I had
seen a moderately large wave come tumbling in, I should have taken
to my heels, with an awful recollection of her drowned relations. 
However, I said 'No,' and I added, 'You don't seem to be either,
though you say you are,' - for she was walking much too near the
brink of a sort of old jetty or wooden causeway we had strolled
upon, and I was afraid of her falling over.

'I'm not afraid in this way,' said little Em'ly.  'But I wake when
it blows, and tremble to think of Uncle Dan and Ham and believe I
hear 'em crying out for help.  That's why I should like so much to
be a lady.  But I'm not afraid in this way.  Not a bit.  Look
here!'

She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which
protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water
at some height, without the least defence.  The incident is so
impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could
draw its form here, I dare say, accurately as it was that day, and
little Em'ly springing forward to her destruction (as it appeared
to me), with a look that I have never forgotten, directed far out
to sea.

The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe
to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had
uttered; fruitlessly in any case, for there was no one near.  But
there have been times since, in my manhood, many times there have
been, when I have thought, Is it possible, among the possibilities
of hidden things, that in the sudden rashness of the child and her
wild look so far off, there was any merciful attraction of her into
danger, any tempting her towards him permitted on the part of her
dead father, that her life might have a chance of ending that day? 
There has been a time since when I have wondered whether, if the
life before her could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so
revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it, and if her
preservation could have depended on a motion of my hand, I ought to
have held it up to save her.  There has been a time since - I do
not say it lasted long, but it has been - when I have asked myself
the question, would it have been better for little Em'ly to have
had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight; and
when I have answered Yes, it would have been.

This may be premature.  I have set it down too soon, perhaps.  But
let it stand.

We strolled a long way, and loaded ourselves with things that we
thought curious, and put some stranded starfish carefully back into
the water - I hardly know enough of the race at this moment to be
quite certain whether they had reason to feel obliged to us for
doing so, or the reverse - and then made our way home to Mr.
Peggotty's dwelling.  We stopped under the lee of the
lobster-outhouse to exchange an innocent kiss, and went in to
breakfast glowing with health and pleasure.

'Like two young mavishes,' Mr. Peggotty said.  I knew this meant,
in our local dialect, like two young thrushes, and received it as
a compliment.

Of course I was in love with little Em'ly.  I am sure I loved that
baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and
more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a
later time of life, high and ennobling as it is.  I am sure my
fancy raised up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child,
which etherealized, and made a very angel of her.  If, any sunny
forenoon, she had spread a little pair of wings and flown away
before my eyes, I don't think I should have regarded it as much
more than I had had reason to expect.

We used to walk about that dim old flat at Yarmouth in a loving
manner, hours and hours.  The days sported by us, as if Time had
not grown up himself yet, but were a child too, and always at play. 
I told Em'ly I adored her, and that unless she confessed she adored
me I should be reduced to the necessity of killing myself with a
sword.  She said she did, and I have no doubt she did.

As to any sense of inequality, or youthfulness, or other difficulty
in our way, little Em'ly and I had no such trouble, because we had
no future.  We made no more provision for growing older, than we
did for growing younger.  We were the admiration of Mrs. Gummidge
and Peggotty, who used to whisper of an evening when we sat,
lovingly, on our little locker side by side, 'Lor! wasn't it
beautiful!'  Mr. Peggotty smiled at us from behind his pipe, and
Ham grinned all the evening and did nothing else.  They had
something of the sort of pleasure in us, I suppose, that they might
have had in a pretty toy, or a pocket model of the Colosseum.

I soon found out that Mrs. Gummidge did not always make herself so
agreeable as she might have been expected to do, under the
circumstances of her residence with Mr. Peggotty.  Mrs. Gummidge's
was rather a fretful disposition, and she whimpered more sometimes
than was comfortable for other parties in so small an
establishment.  I was very sorry for her; but there were moments
when it would have been more agreeable, I thought, if Mrs. Gummidge
had had a convenient apartment of her own to retire to, and had
stopped there until her spirits revived.

Mr. Peggotty went occasionally to a public-house called The Willing
Mind.  I discovered this, by his being out on the second or third
evening of our visit, and by Mrs. Gummidge's looking up at the
Dutch clock, between eight and nine, and saying he was there, and
that, what was more, she had known in the morning he would go
there.

Mrs. Gummidge had been in a low state all day, and had burst into
tears in the forenoon, when the fire smoked.  'I am a lone lorn
creetur',' were Mrs. Gummidge's words, when that unpleasant
occurrence took place, 'and everythink goes contrary with me.'

'Oh, it'll soon leave off,' said Peggotty - I again mean our
Peggotty - 'and besides, you know, it's not more disagreeable to
you than to us.'

'I feel it more,' said Mrs. Gummidge.

It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind.  Mrs.
Gummidge's peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be the
warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly the
easiest, but it didn't suit her that day at all.  She was
constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a
visitation in her back which she called 'the creeps'.  At last she
shed tears on that subject, and said again that she was 'a lone
lorn creetur' and everythink went contrary with her'.

'It is certainly very cold,' said Peggotty.  'Everybody must feel
it so.'

'I feel it more than other people,' said Mrs. Gummidge.

So at dinner; when Mrs. Gummidge was always helped immediately
after me, to whom the preference was given as a visitor of
distinction.  The fish were small and bony, and the potatoes were
a little burnt.  We all acknowledged that we felt this something of
a disappointment; but Mrs. Gummidge said she felt it more than we
did, and shed tears again, and made that former declaration with
great bitterness.

Accordingly, when Mr. Peggotty came home about nine o'clock, this
unfortunate Mrs. Gummidge was knitting in her corner, in a very
wretched and miserable condition.  Peggotty had been working
cheerfully.  Ham had been patching up a great pair of waterboots;
and I, with little Em'ly by my side, had been reading to them. 
Mrs. Gummidge had never made any other remark than a forlorn sigh,
and had never raised her eyes since tea.

'Well, Mates,' said Mr. Peggotty, taking his seat, 'and how are
you?'

We all said something, or looked something, to welcome him, except
Mrs. Gummidge, who only shook her head over her knitting.

'What's amiss?' said Mr. Peggotty, with a clap of his hands. 
'Cheer up, old Mawther!'  (Mr. Peggotty meant old girl.)

Mrs. Gummidge did not appear to be able to cheer up.  She took out
an old black silk handkerchief and wiped her eyes; but instead of
putting it in her pocket, kept it out, and wiped them again, and
still kept it out, ready for use.

'What's amiss, dame?' said Mr. Peggotty.

'Nothing,' returned Mrs. Gummidge.  'You've come from The Willing
Mind, Dan'l?'

'Why yes, I've took a short spell at The Willing Mind tonight,'
said Mr. Peggotty.

'I'm sorry I should drive you there,' said Mrs. Gummidge.

'Drive!  I don't want no driving,' returned Mr. Peggotty with an
honest laugh.  'I only go too ready.'

'Very ready,' said Mrs. Gummidge, shaking her head, and wiping her
eyes.  'Yes, yes, very ready.  I am sorry it should be along of me
that you're so ready.'

'Along o' you!  It an't along o' you!' said Mr. Peggotty.  'Don't
ye believe a bit on it.'

'Yes, yes, it is,' cried Mrs. Gummidge.  'I know what I am.  I know
that I am a lone lorn creetur', and not only that everythink goes
contrary with me, but that I go contrary with everybody.  Yes, yes. 
I feel more than other people do, and I show it more.  It's my
misfortun'.'

I really couldn't help thinking, as I sat taking in all this, that
the misfortune extended to some other members of that family
besides Mrs. Gummidge.  But Mr. Peggotty made no such retort, only
answering with another entreaty to Mrs. Gummidge to cheer up.

'I an't what I could wish myself to be,' said Mrs. Gummidge.  'I am
far from it.  I know what I am.  My troubles has made me contrary. 
I feel my troubles, and they make me contrary.  I wish I didn't
feel 'em, but I do.  I wish I could be hardened to 'em, but I an't. 
I make the house uncomfortable.  I don't wonder at it.  I've made
your sister so all day, and Master Davy.'

Here I was suddenly melted, and roared out, 'No, you haven't, Mrs.
Gummidge,' in great mental distress.

'It's far from right that I should do it,' said Mrs. Gummidge.  'It
an't a fit return.  I had better go into the house and die.  I am
a lone lorn creetur', and had much better not make myself contrary
here.  If thinks must go contrary with me, and I must go contrary
myself, let me go contrary in my parish.  Dan'l, I'd better go into
the house, and die and be a riddance!'

Mrs. Gummidge retired with these words, and betook herself to bed. 
When she was gone, Mr. Peggotty, who had not exhibited a trace of
any feeling but the profoundest sympathy, looked round upon us, and
nodding his head with a lively expression of that sentiment still
animating his face, said in a whisper:

'She's been thinking of the old 'un!'

I did not quite understand what old one Mrs. Gummidge was supposed
to have fixed her mind upon, until Peggotty, on seeing me to bed,
explained that it was the late Mr. Gummidge; and that her brother
always took that for a received truth on such occasions, and that
it always had a moving effect upon him.  Some time after he was in
his hammock that night, I heard him myself repeat to Ham, 'Poor
thing!  She's been thinking of the old 'un!'  And whenever Mrs.
Gummidge was overcome in a similar manner during the remainder of
our stay (which happened some few times), he always said the same
thing in extenuation of the circumstance, and always with the
tenderest commiseration.

So the fortnight slipped away, varied by nothing but the variation
of the tide, which altered Mr. Peggotty's times of going out and
coming in, and altered Ham's engagements also.  When the latter was
unemployed, he sometimes walked with us to show us the boats and
ships, and once or twice he took us for a row.  I don't know why
one slight set of impressions should be more particularly
associated with a place than another, though I believe this obtains
with most people, in reference especially to the associations of
their childhood.  I never hear the name, or read the name, of
Yarmouth, but I am reminded of a certain Sunday morning on the
beach, the bells ringing for church, little Em'ly leaning on my
shoulder, Ham lazily dropping stones into the water, and the sun,
away at sea, just breaking through the heavy mist, and showing us
the ships, like their own shadows.

At last the day came for going home.  I bore up against the
separation from Mr. Peggotty and Mrs. Gummidge, but my agony of
mind at leaving little Em'ly was piercing.  We went arm-in-arm to
the public-house where the carrier put up, and I promised, on the
road, to write to her.  (I redeemed that promise afterwards, in
characters larger than those in which apartments are usually
announced in manuscript, as being to let.) We were greatly overcome
at parting; and if ever, in my life, I have had a void made in my
heart, I had one made that day.

Now, all the time I had been on my visit, I had been ungrateful to
my home again, and had thought little or nothing about it.  But I
was no sooner turned towards it, than my reproachful young
conscience seemed to point that way with a ready finger; and I
felt, all the more for the sinking of my spirits, that it was my
nest, and that my mother was my comforter and friend.

This gained upon me as we went along; so that the nearer we drew,
the more familiar the objects became that we passed, the more
excited I was to get there, and to run into her arms.  But
Peggotty, instead of sharing in those transports, tried to check
them (though very kindly), and looked confused and out of sorts.

Blunderstone Rookery would come, however, in spite of her, when the
carrier's horse pleased - and did.  How well I recollect it, on a
cold grey afternoon, with a dull sky, threatening rain!

The door opened, and I looked, half laughing and half crying in my
pleasant agitation, for my mother.  It was not she, but a strange
servant.

'Why, Peggotty!' I said, ruefully, 'isn't she come home?'

'Yes, yes, Master Davy,' said Peggotty.  'She's come home.  Wait a
bit, Master Davy, and I'll - I'll tell you something.'

Between her agitation, and her natural awkwardness in getting out
of the cart, Peggotty was making a most extraordinary festoon of
herself, but I felt too blank and strange to tell her so.  When she
had got down, she took me by the hand; led me, wondering, into the
kitchen; and shut the door.

'Peggotty!' said I, quite frightened.  'What's the matter?'

'Nothing's the matter, bless you, Master Davy dear!' she answered,
assuming an air of sprightliness.

'Something's the matter, I'm sure.  Where's mama?'

'Where's mama, Master Davy?' repeated Peggotty.

'Yes.  Why hasn't she come out to the gate, and what have we come
in here for?  Oh, Peggotty!'  My eyes were full, and I felt as if
I were going to tumble down.

'Bless the precious boy!' cried Peggotty, taking hold of me.  'What
is it?  Speak, my pet!'

'Not dead, too!  Oh, she's not dead, Peggotty?'

Peggotty cried out No! with an astonishing volume of voice; and
then sat down, and began to pant, and said I had given her a turn.

I gave her a hug to take away the turn, or to give her another turn
in the right direction, and then stood before her, looking at her
in anxious inquiry.

'You see, dear, I should have told you before now,' said Peggotty,
'but I hadn't an opportunity.  I ought to have made it, perhaps,
but I couldn't azackly' - that was always the substitute for
exactly, in Peggotty's militia of words - 'bring my mind to it.'

'Go on, Peggotty,' said I, more frightened than before.

'Master Davy,' said Peggotty, untying her bonnet with a shaking
hand, and speaking in a breathless sort of way.  'What do you
think?  You have got a Pa!'

I trembled, and turned white.  Something - I don't know what, or
how - connected with the grave in the churchyard, and the raising
of the dead, seemed to strike me like an unwholesome wind.

'A new one,' said Peggotty.

'A new one?' I repeated.

Peggotty gave a gasp, as if she were swallowing something that was
very hard, and, putting out her hand, said:

'Come and see him.'

'I don't want to see him.'

- 'And your mama,' said Peggotty.

I ceased to draw back, and we went straight to the best parlour,
where she left me.  On one side of the fire, sat my mother; on the
other, Mr. Murdstone.  My mother dropped her work, and arose
hurriedly, but timidly I thought.

'Now, Clara my dear,' said Mr. Murdstone.  'Recollect! control
yourself, always control yourself!  Davy boy, how do you do?'

I gave him my hand.  After a moment of suspense, I went and kissed
my mother: she kissed me, patted me gently on the shoulder, and sat
down again to her work.  I could not look at her, I could not look
at him, I knew quite well that he was looking at us both; and I
turned to the window and looked out there, at some shrubs that were
drooping their heads in the cold.

As soon as I could creep away, I crept upstairs.  My old dear
bedroom was changed, and I was to lie a long way off.  I rambled
downstairs to find anything that was like itself, so altered it all
seemed; and roamed into the yard.  I very soon started back from
there, for the empty dog-kennel was filled up with a great dog -
deep mouthed and black-haired like Him - and he was very angry at
the sight of me, and sprang out to get at me.



CHAPTER 4
I FALL INTO DISGRACE


If the room to which my bed was removed were a sentient thing that
could give evidence, I might appeal to it at this day - who sleeps
there now, I wonder! - to bear witness for me what a heavy heart I
carried to it.  I went up there, hearing the dog in the yard bark
after me all the way while I climbed the stairs; and, looking as
blank and strange upon the room as the room looked upon me, sat
down with my small hands crossed, and thought.

I thought of the oddest things.  Of the shape of the room, of the
cracks in the ceiling, of the paper on the walls, of the flaws in
the window-glass making ripples and dimples on the prospect, of the
washing-stand being rickety on its three legs, and having a
discontented something about it, which reminded me of Mrs. Gummidge
under the influence of the old one.  I was crying all the time,
but, except that I was conscious of being cold and dejected, I am
sure I never thought why I cried.  At last in my desolation I began
to consider that I was dreadfully in love with little Em'ly, and
had been torn away from her to come here where no one seemed to
want me, or to care about me, half as much as she did.  This made
such a very miserable piece of business of it, that I rolled myself
up in a corner of the counterpane, and cried myself to sleep.

I was awoke by somebody saying 'Here he is!' and uncovering my hot
head.  My mother and Peggotty had come to look for me, and it was
one of them who had done it.

'Davy,' said my mother.  'What's the matter?'

I thought it was very strange that she should ask me, and answered,
'Nothing.'  I turned over on my face, I recollect, to hide my
trembling lip, which answered her with greater truth.
'Davy,' said my mother.  'Davy, my child!'

I dare say no words she could have uttered would have affected me
so much, then, as her calling me her child.  I hid my tears in the
bedclothes, and pressed her from me with my hand, when she would
have raised me up.

'This is your doing, Peggotty, you cruel thing!' said my mother. 
'I have no doubt at all about it.  How can you reconcile it to your
conscience, I wonder, to prejudice my own boy against me, or
against anybody who is dear to me?  What do you mean by it,
Peggotty?'

Poor Peggotty lifted up her hands and eyes, and only answered, in
a sort of paraphrase of the grace I usually repeated after dinner,
'Lord forgive you, Mrs. Copperfield, and for what you have said
this minute, may you never be truly sorry!'

'It's enough to distract me,' cried my mother.  'In my honeymoon,
too, when my most inveterate enemy might relent, one would think,
and not envy me a little peace of mind and happiness.  Davy, you
naughty boy!  Peggotty, you savage creature!  Oh, dear me!' cried
my mother, turning from one of us to the other, in her pettish
wilful manner, 'what a troublesome world this is, when one has the
most right to expect it to be as agreeable as possible!'

I felt the touch of a hand that I knew was neither hers nor
Peggotty's, and slipped to my feet at the bed-side.  It was Mr.
Murdstone's hand, and he kept it on my arm as he said:

'What's this?  Clara, my love, have you forgotten? - Firmness, my
dear!'

'I am very sorry, Edward,' said my mother.  'I meant to be very
good, but I am so uncomfortable.'

'Indeed!' he answered.  'That's a bad hearing, so soon, Clara.'

'I say it's very hard I should be made so now,' returned my mother,
pouting; 'and it is - very hard - isn't it?'

He drew her to him, whispered in her ear, and kissed her.  I knew
as well, when I saw my mother's head lean down upon his shoulder,
and her arm touch his neck - I knew as well that he could mould her
pliant nature into any form he chose, as I know, now, that he did
it.

'Go you below, my love,' said Mr. Murdstone.  'David and I will
come down, together.  My friend,' turning a darkening face on
Peggotty, when he had watched my mother out, and dismissed her with
a nod and a smile; 'do you know your mistress's name?'

'She has been my mistress a long time, sir,' answered Peggotty, 'I
ought to know it.'
'That's true,' he answered.  'But I thought I heard you, as I came
upstairs, address her by a name that is not hers.  She has taken
mine, you know.  Will you remember that?'

Peggotty, with some uneasy glances at me, curtseyed herself out of
the room without replying; seeing, I suppose, that she was expected
to go, and had no excuse for remaining.  When we two were left
alone, he shut the door, and sitting on a chair, and holding me
standing before him, looked steadily into my eyes.  I felt my own
attracted, no less steadily, to his.  As I recall our being opposed
thus, face to face, I seem again to hear my heart beat fast and
high.

'David,' he said, making his lips thin, by pressing them together,
'if I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you
think I do?'

'I don't know.'

'I beat him.'

I had answered in a kind of breathless whisper, but I felt, in my
silence, that my breath was shorter now.

'I make him wince, and smart.  I say to myself, "I'll conquer that
fellow"; and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should
do it.  What is that upon your face?'

'Dirt,' I said.

He knew it was the mark of tears as well as I.  But if he had asked
the question twenty times, each time with twenty blows, I believe
my baby heart would have burst before I would have told him so.

'You have a good deal of intelligence for a little fellow,' he
said, with a grave smile that belonged to him, 'and you understood
me very well, I see.  Wash that face, sir, and come down with me.'

He pointed to the washing-stand, which I had made out to be like
Mrs. Gummidge, and motioned me with his head to obey him directly. 
I had little doubt then, and I have less doubt now, that he would
have knocked me down without the least compunction, if I had
hesitated.

'Clara, my dear,' he said, when I had done his bidding, and he
walked me into the parlour, with his hand still on my arm; 'you
will not be made uncomfortable any more, I hope.  We shall soon
improve our youthful humours.'

God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might
have been made another creature perhaps, for life, by a kind word
at that season.  A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity
for my childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me
that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart
henceforth, instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have
made me respect instead of hate him.  I thought my mother was sorry
to see me standing in the room so scared and strange, and that,
presently, when I stole to a chair, she followed me with her eyes
more sorrowfully still - missing, perhaps, some freedom in my
childish tread - but the word was not spoken, and the time for it
was gone.

We dined alone, we three together.  He seemed to be very fond of my
mother - I am afraid I liked him none the better for that - and she
was very fond of him.  I gathered from what they said, that an
elder sister of his was coming to stay with them, and that she was
expected that evening.  I am not certain whether I found out then,
or afterwards, that, without being actively concerned in any
business, he had some share in, or some annual charge upon the
profits of, a wine-merchant's house in London, with which his
family had been connected from his great-grandfather's time, and in
which his sister had a similar interest; but I may mention it in
this place, whether or no.

After dinner, when we were sitting by the fire, and I was
meditating an escape to Peggotty without having the hardihood to
slip away, lest it should offend the master of the house, a coach
drove up to the garden-gate and he went out to receive the visitor. 
My mother followed him.  I was timidly following her, when she
turned round at the parlour door, in the dusk, and taking me in her
embrace as she had been used to do, whispered me to love my new
father and be obedient to him.  She did this hurriedly and
secretly, as if it were wrong, but tenderly; and, putting out her
hand behind her, held mine in it, until we came near to where he
was standing in the garden, where she let mine go, and drew hers
through his arm.

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady
she was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face
and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her
large nose, as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from
wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account.  She
brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her
initials on the lids in hard brass nails.  When she paid the
coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept
the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a
heavy chain, and shut up like a bite.  I had never, at that time,
seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

She was brought into the parlour with many tokens of welcome, and
there formally recognized my mother as a new and near relation. 
Then she looked at me, and said:

'Is that your boy, sister-in-law?'

My mother acknowledged me.

'Generally speaking,' said Miss Murdstone, 'I don't like boys.  How
d'ye do, boy?'

Under these encouraging circumstances, I replied that I was very
well, and that I hoped she was the same; with such an indifferent
grace, that Miss Murdstone disposed of me in two words:

'Wants manner!'

Having uttered which, with great distinctness, she begged the
favour of being shown to her room, which became to me from that
time forth a place of awe and dread, wherein the two black boxes
were never seen open or known to be left unlocked, and where (for
I peeped in once or twice when she was out) numerous little steel
fetters and rivets, with which Miss Murdstone embellished herself
when she was dressed, generally hung upon the looking-glass in
formidable array.

As well as I could make out, she had come for good, and had no
intention of ever going again.  She began to 'help' my mother next
morning, and was in and out of the store-closet all day, putting
things to rights, and making havoc in the old arrangements.  Almost
the first remarkable thing I observed in Miss Murdstone was, her
being constantly haunted by a suspicion that the servants had a man
secreted somewhere on the premises.  Under the influence of this
delusion, she dived into the coal-cellar at the most untimely
hours, and scarcely ever opened the door of a dark cupboard without
clapping it to again, in the belief that she had got him.

Though there was nothing very airy about Miss Murdstone, she was a
perfect Lark in point of getting up.  She was up (and, as I believe
to this hour, looking for that man) before anybody in the house was
stirring.  Peggotty gave it as her opinion that she even slept with
one eye open; but I could not concur in this idea; for I tried it
myself after hearing the suggestion thrown out, and found it
couldn't be done.

On the very first morning after her arrival she was up and ringing
her bell at cock-crow.  When my mother came down to breakfast and
was going to make the tea, Miss Murdstone gave her a kind of peck
on the cheek, which was her nearest approach to a kiss, and said:

'Now, Clara, my dear, I am come here, you know, to relieve you of
all the trouble I can.  You're much too pretty and thoughtless' -
my mother blushed but laughed, and seemed not to dislike this
character - 'to have any duties imposed upon you that can be
undertaken by me.  If you'll be so good as give me your keys, my
dear, I'll attend to all this sort of thing in future.'

From that time, Miss Murdstone kept the keys in her own little jail
all day, and under her pillow all night, and my mother had no more
to do with them than I had.

My mother did not suffer her authority to pass from her without a
shadow of protest.  One night when Miss Murdstone had been
developing certain household plans to her brother, of which he
signified his approbation, my mother suddenly began to cry, and
said she thought she might have been consulted.

'Clara!' said Mr. Murdstone sternly.  'Clara!  I wonder at you.'

'Oh, it's very well to say you wonder, Edward!' cried my mother,
'and it's very well for you to talk about firmness, but you
wouldn't like it yourself.'

Firmness, I may observe, was the grand quality on which both Mr.
and Miss Murdstone took their stand.  However I might have
expressed my comprehension of it at that time, if I had been called
upon, I nevertheless did clearly comprehend in my own way, that it
was another name for tyranny; and for a certain gloomy, arrogant,
devil's humour, that was in them both.  The creed, as I should
state it now, was this.  Mr. Murdstone was firm; nobody in his
world was to be so firm as Mr. Murdstone; nobody else in his world
was to be firm at all, for everybody was to be bent to his
firmness.  Miss Murdstone was an exception.  She might be firm, but
only by relationship, and in an inferior and tributary degree.  My
mother was another exception.  She might be firm, and must be; but
only in bearing their firmness, and firmly believing there was no
other firmness upon earth.

'It's very hard,' said my mother, 'that in my own house -'

'My own house?' repeated Mr. Murdstone.  'Clara!'

'OUR own house, I mean,' faltered my mother, evidently frightened
- 'I hope you must know what I mean, Edward - it's very hard that
in YOUR own house I may not have a word to say about domestic
matters.  I am sure I managed very well before we were married. 
There's evidence,' said my mother, sobbing; 'ask Peggotty if I
didn't do very well when I wasn't interfered with!'

'Edward,' said Miss Murdstone, 'let there be an end of this.  I go
tomorrow.'

'Jane Murdstone,' said her brother, 'be silent!  How dare you to
insinuate that you don't know my character better than your words
imply?'

'I am sure,' my poor mother went on, at a grievous disadvantage,
and with many tears, 'I don't want anybody to go.  I should be very
miserable and unhappy if anybody was to go.  I don't ask much.  I
am not unreasonable.  I only want to be consulted sometimes.  I am
very much obliged to anybody who assists me, and I only want to be
consulted as a mere form, sometimes.  I thought you were pleased,
once, with my being a little inexperienced and girlish, Edward - I
am sure you said so - but you seem to hate me for it now, you are
so severe.'

'Edward,' said Miss Murdstone, again, 'let there be an end of this. 
I go tomorrow.'

'Jane Murdstone,' thundered Mr. Murdstone.  'Will you be silent? 
How dare you?'

Miss Murdstone made a jail-delivery of her pocket-handkerchief, and
held it before her eyes.

'Clara,' he continued, looking at my mother, 'you surprise me!  You
astound me!  Yes, I had a satisfaction in the thought of marrying
an inexperienced and artless person, and forming her character, and
infusing into it some amount of that firmness and decision of which
it stood in need.  But when Jane Murdstone is kind enough to come
to my assistance in this endeavour, and to assume, for my sake, a
condition something like a housekeeper's, and when she meets with
a base return -'

'Oh, pray, pray, Edward,' cried my mother, 'don't accuse me of
being ungrateful.  I am sure I am not ungrateful.  No one ever said
I was before.  I have many faults, but not that.  Oh, don't, my
dear!'

'When Jane Murdstone meets, I say,' he went on, after waiting until
my mother was silent, 'with a base return, that feeling of mine is
chilled and altered.'

'Don't, my love, say that!' implored my mother very piteously. 
'Oh, don't, Edward!  I can't bear to hear it.  Whatever I am, I am
affectionate.  I know I am affectionate.  I wouldn't say it, if I
wasn't sure that I am.  Ask Peggotty.  I am sure she'll tell you
I'm affectionate.'

'There is no extent of mere weakness, Clara,' said Mr. Murdstone in
reply, 'that can have the least weight with me.  You lose breath.'

'Pray let us be friends,' said my mother, 'I couldn't live under
coldness or unkindness.  I am so sorry.  I have a great many
defects, I know, and it's very good of you, Edward, with your
strength of mind, to endeavour to correct them for me.  Jane, I
don't object to anything.  I should be quite broken-hearted if you
thought of leaving -' My mother was too much overcome to go on.

'Jane Murdstone,' said Mr. Murdstone to his sister, 'any harsh
words between us are, I hope, uncommon.  It is not my fault that so
unusual an occurrence has taken place tonight.  I was betrayed into
it by another.  Nor is it your fault.  You were betrayed into it by
another.  Let us both try to forget it.  And as this,' he added,
after these magnanimous words, 'is not a fit scene for the boy -
David, go to bed!'

I could hardly find the door, through the tears that stood in my
eyes.  I was so sorry for my mother's distress; but I groped my way
out, and groped my way up to my room in the dark, without even
having the heart to say good night to Peggotty, or to get a candle
from her.  When her coming up to look for me, an hour or so
afterwards, awoke me, she said that my mother had gone to bed
poorly, and that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were sitting alone.

Going down next morning rather earlier than usual, I paused outside
the parlour door, on hearing my mother's voice.  She was very
earnestly and humbly entreating Miss Murdstone's pardon, which that
lady granted, and a perfect reconciliation took place.  I never
knew my mother afterwards to give an opinion on any matter, without
first appealing to Miss Murdstone, or without having first
ascertained by some sure means, what Miss Murdstone's opinion was;
and I never saw Miss Murdstone, when out of temper (she was infirm
that way), move her hand towards her bag as if she were going to
take out the keys and offer to resign them to my mother, without
seeing that my mother was in a terrible fright.

The gloomy taint that was in the Murdstone blood, darkened the
Murdstone religion, which was austere and wrathful.  I have
thought, since, that its assuming that character was a necessary
consequence of Mr. Murdstone's firmness, which wouldn't allow him
to let anybody off from the utmost weight of the severest penalties
he could find any excuse for.  Be this as it may, I well remember
the tremendous visages with which we used to go to church, and the
changed air of the place.  Again, the dreaded Sunday comes round,
and I file into the old pew first, like a guarded captive brought
to a condemned service.  Again, Miss Murdstone, in a black velvet
gown, that looks as if it had been made out of a pall, follows
close upon me; then my mother; then her husband.  There is no
Peggotty now, as in the old time.  Again, I listen to Miss
Murdstone mumbling the responses, and emphasizing all the dread
words with a cruel relish.  Again, I see her dark eyes roll round
the church when she says 'miserable sinners', as if she were
calling all the congregation names.  Again, I catch rare glimpses
of my mother, moving her lips timidly between the two, with one of
them muttering at each ear like low thunder.  Again, I wonder with
a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman can
be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the angels
in Heaven can be destroying angels.  Again, if I move a finger or
relax a muscle of my face, Miss Murdstone pokes me with her
prayer-book, and makes my side ache.

Yes, and again, as we walk home, I note some neighbours looking at
my mother and at me, and whispering.  Again, as the three go on
arm-in-arm, and I linger behind alone, I follow some of those
looks, and wonder if my mother's step be really not so light as I
have seen it, and if the gaiety of her beauty be really almost
worried away.  Again, I wonder whether any of the neighbours call
to mind, as I do, how we used to walk home together, she and I; and
I wonder stupidly about that, all the dreary dismal day.

There had been some talk on occasions of my going to boarding-
school.  Mr. and Miss Murdstone had originated it, and my mother
had of course agreed with them.  Nothing, however, was concluded on
the subject yet.  In the meantime, I learnt lessons at home.
Shall I ever forget those lessons!  They were presided over
nominally by my mother, but really by Mr. Murdstone and his sister,
who were always present, and found them a favourable occasion for
giving my mother lessons in that miscalled firmness, which was the
bane of both our lives.  I believe I was kept at home for that
purpose.  I had been apt enough to learn, and willing enough, when
my mother and I had lived alone together.  I can faintly remember
learning the alphabet at her knee.  To this day, when I look upon
the fat black letters in the primer, the puzzling novelty of their
shapes, and the easy good-nature of O and Q and S, seem to present
themselves again before me as they used to do.  But they recall no
feeling of disgust or reluctance.  On the contrary, I seem to have
walked along a path of flowers as far as the crocodile-book, and to
have been cheered by the gentleness of my mother's voice and manner
all the way.  But these solemn lessons which succeeded those, I
remember as the death-blow of my peace, and a grievous daily
drudgery and misery.  They were very long, very numerous, very hard
- perfectly unintelligible, some of them, to me - and I was
generally as much bewildered by them as I believe my poor mother
was herself.

Let me remember how it used to be, and bring one morning back
again.

I come into the second-best parlour after breakfast, with my books,
and an exercise-book, and a slate.  My mother is ready for me at
her writing-desk, but not half so ready as Mr. Murdstone in his
easy-chair by the window (though he pretends to be reading a book),
or as Miss Murdstone, sitting near my mother stringing steel beads. 
The very sight of these two has such an influence over me, that I
begin to feel the words I have been at infinite pains to get into
my head, all sliding away, and going I don't know where.  I wonder
where they do go, by the by?

I hand the first book to my mother.  Perhaps it is a grammar,
perhaps a history, or geography.  I take a last drowning look at
the page as I give it into her hand, and start off aloud at a
racing pace while I have got it fresh.  I trip over a word.  Mr.
Murdstone looks up.  I trip over another word.  Miss Murdstone
looks up.  I redden, tumble over half-a-dozen words, and stop.  I
think my mother would show me the book if she dared, but she does
not dare, and she says softly:

'Oh, Davy, Davy!'

'Now, Clara,' says Mr. Murdstone, 'be firm with the boy.  Don't
say, "Oh, Davy, Davy!"  That's childish.  He knows his lesson, or
he does not know it.'

'He does NOT know it,' Miss Murdstone interposes awfully.

'I am really afraid he does not,' says my mother.

'Then, you see, Clara,' returns Miss Murdstone, 'you should just
give him the book back, and make him know it.'

'Yes, certainly,' says my mother; 'that is what I intend to do, my
dear Jane.  Now, Davy, try once more, and don't be stupid.'

I obey the first clause of the injunction by trying once more, but
am not so successful with the second, for I am very stupid.  I
tumble down before I get to the old place, at a point where I was
all right before, and stop to think.  But I can't think about the
lesson.  I think of the number of yards of net in Miss Murdstone's
cap, or of the price of Mr. Murdstone's dressing-gown, or any such
ridiculous problem that I have no business with, and don't want to
have anything at all to do with.  Mr. Murdstone makes a movement of
impatience which I have been expecting for a long time.  Miss
Murdstone does the same.  My mother glances submissively at them,
shuts the book, and lays it by as an arrear to be worked out when
my other tasks are done.

There is a pile of these arrears very soon, and it swells like a
rolling snowball.  The bigger it gets, the more stupid I get.  The
case is so hopeless, and I feel that I am wallowing in such a bog
of nonsense, that I give up all idea of getting out, and abandon
myself to my fate.  The despairing way in which my mother and I
look at each other, as I blunder on, is truly melancholy.  But the
greatest effect in these miserable lessons is when my mother
(thinking nobody is observing her) tries to give me the cue by the
motion of her lips.  At that instant, Miss Murdstone, who has been
lying in wait for nothing else all along, says in a deep warning
voice:

'Clara!'

My mother starts, colours, and smiles faintly.  Mr. Murdstone comes
out of his chair, takes the book, throws it at me or boxes my ears
with it, and turns me out of the room by the shoulders.

Even when the lessons are done, the worst is yet to happen, in the
shape of an appalling sum.  This is invented for me, and delivered
to me orally by Mr. Murdstone, and begins, 'If I go into a
cheesemonger's shop, and buy five thousand double-Gloucester
cheeses at fourpence-halfpenny each, present payment' - at which I
see Miss Murdstone secretly overjoyed.  I pore over these cheeses
without any result or enlightenment until dinner-time, when, having
made a Mulatto of myself by getting the dirt of the slate into the
pores of my skin, I have a slice of bread to help me out with the
cheeses, and am considered in disgrace for the rest of the evening.

It seems to me, at this distance of time, as if my unfortunate
studies generally took this course.  I could have done very well if
I had been without the Murdstones; but the influence of the
Murdstones upon me was like the fascination of two snakes on a
wretched young bird.  Even when I did get through the morning with
tolerable credit, there was not much gained but dinner; for Miss
Murdstone never could endure to see me untasked, and if I rashly
made any show of being unemployed, called her brother's attention
to me by saying, 'Clara, my dear, there's nothing like work - give
your boy an exercise'; which caused me to be clapped down to some
new labour, there and then.  As to any recreation with other
children of my age, I had very little of that; for the gloomy
theology of the Murdstones made all children out to be a swarm of
little vipers (though there WAS a child once set in the midst of
the Disciples), and held that they contaminated one another.

The natural result of this treatment, continued, I suppose, for
some six months or more, was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. 
I was not made the less so by my sense of being daily more and more
shut out and alienated from my mother.  I believe I should have
been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.

It was this.  My father had left a small collection of books in a
little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my
own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled.  From that
blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey
Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,
and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. 
They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that
place and time, - they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of
the Genii, - and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of
them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it.  It is astonishing
to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and
blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.  It
is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my
small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating
my favourite characters in them - as I did - and by putting Mr. and
Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones - which I did too.  I have
been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a
week together.  I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for
a month at a stretch, I verily believe.  I had a greedy relish for
a few volumes of Voyages and Travels - I forget what, now - that
were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have
gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out
of an old set of boot-trees - the perfect realization of Captain
Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by
savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price.  The
Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the
Latin Grammar.  I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in
despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead
or alive.

This was my only and my constant comfort.  When I think of it, the
picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at
play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for
life.  Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church,
and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own,
in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality
made famous in them.  I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the
church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his
back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know
that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the
parlour of our little village alehouse.

The reader now understands, as well as I do, what I was when I came
to that point of my youthful history to which I am now coming
again.

One morning when I went into the parlour with my books, I found my
mother looking anxious, Miss Murdstone looking firm, and Mr.
Murdstone binding something round the bottom of a cane - a lithe
and limber cane, which he left off binding when I came in, and
poised and switched in the air.

'I tell you, Clara,' said Mr. Murdstone, 'I have been often flogged
myself.'

'To be sure; of course,' said Miss Murdstone.

'Certainly, my dear Jane,' faltered my mother, meekly.  'But - but
do you think it did Edward good?'

'Do you think it did Edward harm, Clara?' asked Mr. Murdstone,
gravely.

'That's the point,' said his sister.

To this my mother returned, 'Certainly, my dear Jane,' and said no
more.

I felt apprehensive that I was personally interested in this
dialogue, and sought Mr. Murdstone's eye as it lighted on mine.

'Now, David,' he said - and I saw that cast again as he said it -
'you must be far more careful today than usual.'  He gave the cane
another poise, and another switch; and having finished his
preparation of it, laid it down beside him, with an impressive
look, and took up his book.

This was a good freshener to my presence of mind, as a beginning. 
I felt the words of my lessons slipping off, not one by one, or
line by line, but by the entire page; I tried to lay hold of them;
but they seemed, if I may so express it, to have put skates on, and
to skim away from me with a smoothness there was no checking.

We began badly, and went on worse.  I had come in with an idea of
distinguishing myself rather, conceiving that I was very well
prepared; but it turned out to be quite a mistake.  Book after book
was added to the heap of failures, Miss Murdstone being firmly
watchful of us all the time.  And when we came at last to the five
thousand cheeses (canes he made it that day, I remember), my mother
burst out crying.

'Clara!' said Miss Murdstone, in her warning voice.

'I am not quite well, my dear Jane, I think,' said my mother.

I saw him wink, solemnly, at his sister, as he rose and said,
taking up the cane:

'Why, Jane, we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect
firmness, the worry and torment that David has occasioned her
today.  That would be stoical.  Clara is greatly strengthened and
improved, but we can hardly expect so much from her.  David, you
and I will go upstairs, boy.'

As he took me out at the door, my mother ran towards us.  Miss
Murdstone said, 'Clara! are you a perfect fool?' and interfered. 
I saw my mother stop her ears then, and I heard her crying.

He walked me up to my room slowly and gravely - I am certain he had
a delight in that formal parade of executing justice - and when we
got there, suddenly twisted my head under his arm.

'Mr. Murdstone!  Sir!' I cried to him.  'Don't!  Pray don't beat
me!  I have tried to learn, sir, but I can't learn while you and
Miss Murdstone are by.  I can't indeed!'

'Can't you, indeed, David?' he said.  'We'll try that.'

He had my head as in a vice, but I twined round him somehow, and
stopped him for a moment, entreating him not to beat me.  It was
only a moment that I stopped him, for he cut me heavily an instant
afterwards, and in the same instant I caught the hand with which he
held me in my mouth, between my teeth, and bit it through.  It sets
my teeth on edge to think of it.

He beat me then, as if he would have beaten me to death.  Above all
the noise we made, I heard them running up the stairs, and crying
out - I heard my mother crying out - and Peggotty.  Then he was
gone; and the door was locked outside; and I was lying, fevered and
hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in my puny way, upon the floor.

How well I recollect, when I became quiet, what an unnatural
stillness seemed to reign through the whole house!  How well I
remember, when my smart and passion began to cool, how wicked I
began to feel!

I sat listening for a long while, but there was not a sound.  I
crawled up from the floor, and saw my face in the glass, so
swollen, red, and ugly that it almost frightened me.  My stripes
were sore and stiff, and made me cry afresh, when I moved; but they
were nothing to the guilt I felt.  It lay heavier on my breast than
if I had been a most atrocious criminal, I dare say.

It had begun to grow dark, and I had shut the window (I had been
lying, for the most part, with my head upon the sill, by turns
crying, dozing, and looking listlessly out), when the key was
turned, and Miss Murdstone came in with some bread and meat, and
milk.  These she put down upon the table without a word, glaring at
me the while with exemplary firmness, and then retired, locking the
door after her.

Long after it was dark I sat there, wondering whether anybody else
would come.  When this appeared improbable for that night, I
undressed, and went to bed; and, there, I began to wonder fearfully
what would be done to me.  Whether it was a criminal act that I had
committed?  Whether I should be taken into custody, and sent to
prison?  Whether I was at all in danger of being hanged?

I never shall forget the waking, next morning; the being cheerful
and fresh for the first moment, and then the being weighed down by
the stale and dismal oppression of remembrance.  Miss Murdstone
reappeared before I was out of bed; told me, in so many words, that
I was free to walk in the garden for half an hour and no longer;
and retired, leaving the door open, that I might avail myself of
that permission.

I did so, and did so every morning of my imprisonment, which lasted
five days.  If I could have seen my mother alone, I should have
gone down on my knees to her and besought her forgiveness; but I
saw no one, Miss Murdstone excepted, during the whole time - except
at evening prayers in the parlour; to which I was escorted by Miss
Murdstone after everybody else was placed; where I was stationed,
a young outlaw, all alone by myself near the door; and whence I was
solemnly conducted by my jailer, before any one arose from the
devotional posture.  I only observed that my mother was as far off
from me as she could be, and kept her face another way so that I
never saw it; and that Mr. Murdstone's hand was bound up in a large
linen wrapper.

The length of those five days I can convey no idea of to any one. 
They occupy the place of years in my remembrance.  The way in which
I listened to all the incidents of the house that made themselves
audible to me; the ringing of bells, the opening and shutting of
doors, the murmuring of voices, the footsteps on the stairs; to any
laughing, whistling, or singing, outside, which seemed more dismal
than anything else to me in my solitude and disgrace - the
uncertain pace of the hours, especially at night, when I would wake
thinking it was morning, and find that the family were not yet gone
to bed, and that all the length of night had yet to come - the
depressed dreams and nightmares I had - the return of day, noon,
afternoon, evening, when the boys played in the churchyard, and I
watched them from a distance within the room, being ashamed to show
myself at the window lest they should know I was a prisoner - the
strange sensation of never hearing myself speak - the fleeting
intervals of something like cheerfulness, which came with eating
and drinking, and went away with it - the setting in of rain one
evening, with a fresh smell, and its coming down faster and faster
between me and the church, until it and gathering night seemed to
quench me in gloom, and fear, and remorse - all this appears to
have gone round and round for years instead of days, it is so
vividly and strongly stamped on my remembrance.
On the last night of my restraint, I was awakened by hearing my own
name spoken in a whisper.  I started up in bed, and putting out my
arms in the dark, said:

'Is that you, Peggotty?'

There was no immediate answer, but presently I heard my name again,
in a tone so very mysterious and awful, that I think I should have
gone into a fit, if it had not occurred to me that it must have
come through the keyhole.

I groped my way to the door, and putting my own lips to the
keyhole, whispered: 'Is that you, Peggotty dear?'

'Yes, my own precious Davy,' she replied.  'Be as soft as a mouse,
or the Cat'll hear us.'

I understood this to mean Miss Murdstone, and was sensible of the
urgency of the case; her room being close by.

'How's mama, dear Peggotty?  Is she very angry with me?'

I could hear Peggotty crying softly on her side of the keyhole, as
I was doing on mine, before she answered.  'No.  Not very.'

'What is going to be done with me, Peggotty dear?  Do you know?'

'School.  Near London,' was Peggotty's answer.  I was obliged to
get her to repeat it, for she spoke it the first time quite down my
throat, in consequence of my having forgotten to take my mouth away
from the keyhole and put my ear there; and though her words tickled
me a good deal, I didn't hear them.

'When, Peggotty?'

'Tomorrow.'

'Is that the reason why Miss Murdstone took the clothes out of my
drawers?' which she had done, though I have forgotten to mention
it.

'Yes,' said Peggotty.  'Box.'

'Shan't I see mama?'

'Yes,' said Peggotty.  'Morning.'

Then Peggotty fitted her mouth close to the keyhole, and delivered
these words through it with as much feeling and earnestness as a
keyhole has ever been the medium of communicating, I will venture
to assert: shooting in each broken little sentence in a convulsive
little burst of its own.

'Davy, dear.  If I ain't been azackly as intimate with you. 
Lately, as I used to be.  It ain't because I don't love you.  just
as well and more, my pretty poppet.  It's because I thought it
better for you.  And for someone else besides.  Davy, my darling,
are you listening?  Can you hear?'

'Ye-ye-ye-yes, Peggotty!' I sobbed.

'My own!' said Peggotty, with infinite compassion.  'What I want to
say, is.  That you must never forget me.  For I'll never forget
you.  And I'll take as much care of your mama, Davy.  As ever I
took of you.  And I won't leave her.  The day may come when she'll
be glad to lay her poor head.  On her stupid, cross old Peggotty's
arm again.  And I'll write to you, my dear.  Though I ain't no
scholar.  And I'll - I'll -' Peggotty fell to kissing the keyhole,
as she couldn't kiss me.

'Thank you, dear Peggotty!' said I.  'Oh, thank you!  Thank you! 
Will you promise me one thing, Peggotty?  Will you write and tell
Mr. Peggotty and little Em'ly, and Mrs. Gummidge and Ham, that I am
not so bad as they might suppose, and that I sent 'em all my love
- especially to little Em'ly?  Will you, if you please, Peggotty?'

The kind soul promised, and we both of us kissed the keyhole with
the greatest affection - I patted it with my hand, I recollect, as
if it had been her honest face - and parted.  From that night there
grew up in my breast a feeling for Peggotty which I cannot very
well define.  She did not replace my mother; no one could do that;
but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and
I felt towards her something I have never felt for any other human
being.  It was a sort of comical affection, too; and yet if she had
died, I cannot think what I should have done, or how I should have
acted out the tragedy it would have been to me.

In the morning Miss Murdstone appeared as usual, and told me I was
going to school; which was not altogether such news to me as she
supposed.  She also informed me that when I was dressed, I was to
come downstairs into the parlour, and have my breakfast.  There, I
found my mother, very pale and with red eyes: into whose arms I
ran, and begged her pardon from my suffering soul.

'Oh, Davy!' she said.  'That you could hurt anyone I love!  Try to
be better, pray to be better!  I forgive you; but I am so grieved,
Davy, that you should have such bad passions in your heart.'

They had persuaded her that I was a wicked fellow, and she was more
sorry for that than for my going away.  I felt it sorely.  I tried
to eat my parting breakfast, but my tears dropped upon my bread-
and-butter, and trickled into my tea.  I saw my mother look at me
sometimes, and then glance at the watchful Miss Murdstone, and than
look down, or look away.

'Master Copperfield's box there!' said Miss Murdstone, when wheels
were heard at the gate.

I looked for Peggotty, but it was not she; neither she nor Mr.
Murdstone appeared.  My former acquaintance, the carrier, was at
the door.  the box was taken out to his cart, and lifted in.

'Clara!' said Miss Murdstone, in her warning note.

'Ready, my dear Jane,' returned my mother.  'Good-bye, Davy.  You
are going for your own good.  Good-bye, my child.  You will come
home in the holidays, and be a better boy.'

'Clara!' Miss Murdstone repeated.

'Certainly, my dear Jane,' replied my mother, who was holding me. 
'I forgive you, my dear boy.  God bless you!'

'Clara!' Miss Murdstone repeated.

Miss Murdstone was good enough to take me out to the cart, and to
say on the way that she hoped I would repent, before I came to a
bad end; and then I got into the cart, and the lazy horse walked
off with it.



CHAPTER 5
I AM SENT AWAY FROM HOME


We might have gone about half a mile, and my pocket-handkerchief
was quite wet through, when the carrier stopped short.  Looking out
to ascertain for what, I saw, to MY amazement, Peggotty burst from
a hedge and climb into the cart.  She took me in both her arms, and
squeezed me to her stays until the pressure on my nose was
extremely painful, though I never thought of that till afterwards
when I found it very tender.  Not a single word did Peggotty speak. 
Releasing one of her arms, she put it down in her pocket to the
elbow, and brought out some paper bags of cakes which she crammed
into my pockets, and a purse which she put into my hand, but not
one word did she say.  After another and a final squeeze with both
arms, she got down from the cart and ran away; and, my belief is,
and has always been, without a solitary button on her gown.  I
picked up one, of several that were rolling about, and treasured it
as a keepsake for a long time.

The carrier looked at me, as if to inquire if she were coming back. 
I shook my head, and said I thought not.  'Then come up,' said the
carrier to the lazy horse; who came up accordingly.

Having by this time cried as much as I possibly could, I began to
think it was of no use crying any more, especially as neither
Roderick Random, nor that Captain in the Royal British Navy, had
ever cried, that I could remember, in trying situations.  The
carrier, seeing me in this resolution, proposed that my pocket-
handkerchief should be spread upon the horse's back to dry.  I
thanked him, and assented; and particularly small it looked, under
those circumstances.

I had now leisure to examine the purse.  It was a stiff leather
purse, with a snap, and had three bright shillings in it, which
Peggotty had evidently polished up with whitening, for my greater
delight.  But its most precious contents were two half-crowns
folded together in a bit of paper, on which was written, in my
mother's hand, 'For Davy.  With my love.'  I was so overcome by
this, that I asked the carrier to be so good as to reach me my
pocket-handkerchief again; but he said he thought I had better do
without it, and I thought I really had, so I wiped my eyes on my
sleeve and stopped myself.

For good, too; though, in consequence of my previous emotions, I
was still occasionally seized with a stormy sob.  After we had
jogged on for some little time, I asked the carrier if he was going
all the way.

'All the way where?' inquired the carrier.

'There,' I said.

'Where's there?' inquired the carrier.

'Near London,' I said.

'Why that horse,' said the carrier, jerking the rein to point him
out, 'would be deader than pork afore he got over half the ground.'

'Are you only going to Yarmouth then?' I asked.

'That's about it,' said the carrier.  'And there I shall take you
to the stage-cutch, and the stage-cutch that'll take you to -
wherever it is.'

As this was a great deal for the carrier (whose name was Mr.
Barkis) to say - he being, as I observed in a former chapter, of a
phlegmatic temperament, and not at all conversational - I offered
him a cake as a mark of attention, which he ate at one gulp,
exactly like an elephant, and which made no more impression on his
big face than it would have done on an elephant's.

'Did SHE make 'em, now?' said Mr. Barkis, always leaning forward,
in his slouching way, on the footboard of the cart with an arm on
each knee.

'Peggotty, do you mean, sir?'

'Ah!' said Mr. Barkis.  'Her.'

'Yes.  She makes all our pastry, and does all our cooking.'

'Do she though?' said Mr. Barkis.
He made up his mouth as if to whistle, but he didn't whistle.  He
sat looking at the horse's ears, as if he saw something new there;
and sat so, for a considerable time.  By and by, he said:

'No sweethearts, I b'lieve?'

'Sweetmeats did you say, Mr. Barkis?'  For I thought he wanted
something else to eat, and had pointedly alluded to that
description of refreshment.

'Hearts,' said Mr. Barkis.  'Sweet hearts; no person walks with
her!'

'With Peggotty?'

'Ah!' he said.  'Her.'

'Oh, no.  She never had a sweetheart.'

'Didn't she, though!' said Mr. Barkis.

Again he made up his mouth to whistle, and again he didn't whistle,
but sat looking at the horse's ears.

'So she makes,' said Mr. Barkis, after a long interval of
reflection, 'all the apple parsties, and doos all the cooking, do
she?'

I replied that such was the fact.

'Well.  I'll tell you what,' said Mr. Barkis.  'P'raps you might be
writin' to her?'

'I shall certainly write to her,' I rejoined.

'Ah!' he said, slowly turning his eyes towards me.  'Well!  If you
was writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis was
willin'; would you?'

'That Barkis is willing,' I repeated, innocently.  'Is that all the
message?'

'Ye-es,' he said, considering.  'Ye-es.  Barkis is willin'.'

'But you will be at Blunderstone again tomorrow, Mr. Barkis,' I
said, faltering a little at the idea of my being far away from it
then, and could give your own message so much better.'

As he repudiated this suggestion, however, with a jerk of his head,
and once more confirmed his previous request by saying, with
profound gravity, 'Barkis is willin'.  That's the message,' I
readily undertook its transmission.  While I was waiting for the
coach in the hotel at Yarmouth that very afternoon, I procured a
sheet of paper and an inkstand, and wrote a note to Peggotty, which
ran thus: 'My dear Peggotty.  I have come here safe.  Barkis is
willing.  My love to mama.  Yours affectionately.  P.S.  He says he
particularly wants you to know - BARKIS IS WILLING.'

When I had taken this commission on myself prospectively, Mr.
Barkis relapsed into perfect silence; and I, feeling quite worn out
by all that had happened lately, lay down on a sack in the cart and
fell asleep.  I slept soundly until we got to Yarmouth; which was
so entirely new and strange to me in the inn-yard to which we
drove, that I at once abandoned a latent hope I had had of meeting
with some of Mr. Peggotty's family there, perhaps even with little
Em'ly herself.

The coach was in the yard, shining very much all over, but without
any horses to it as yet; and it looked in that state as if nothing
was more unlikely than its ever going to London.  I was thinking
this, and wondering what would ultimately become of my box, which
Mr. Barkis had put down on the yard-pavement by the pole (he having
driven up the yard to turn his cart), and also what would
ultimately become of me, when a lady looked out of a bow-window
where some fowls and joints of meat were hanging up, and said:

'Is that the little gentleman from Blunderstone?'

'Yes, ma'am,' I said.

'What name?' inquired the lady.

'Copperfield, ma'am,' I said.

'That won't do,' returned the lady.  'Nobody's dinner is paid for
here, in that name.'

'Is it Murdstone, ma'am?' I said.

'If you're Master Murdstone,' said the lady, 'why do you go and
give another name, first?'

I explained to the lady how it was, who than rang a bell, and
called out, 'William! show the coffee-room!' upon which a waiter
came running out of a kitchen on the opposite side of the yard to
show it, and seemed a good deal surprised when he was only to show
it to me.

It was a large long room with some large maps in it.  I doubt if I
could have felt much stranger if the maps had been real foreign
countries, and I cast away in the middle of them.  I felt it was
taking a liberty to sit down, with my cap in my hand, on the corner
of the chair nearest the door; and when the waiter laid a cloth on
purpose for me, and put a set of castors on it, I think I must have
turned red all over with modesty.

He brought me some chops, and vegetables, and took the covers off
in such a bouncing manner that I was afraid I must have given him
some offence.  But he greatly relieved my mind by putting a chair
for me at the table, and saying, very affably, 'Now, six-foot! come
on!'

I thanked him, and took my seat at the board; but found it
extremely difficult to handle my knife and fork with anything like
dexterity, or to avoid splashing myself with the gravy, while he
was standing opposite, staring so hard, and making me blush in the
most dreadful manner every time I caught his eye.  After watching
me into the second chop, he said:

'There's half a pint of ale for you.  Will you have it now?'

I thanked him and said, 'Yes.'  Upon which he poured it out of a
jug into a large tumbler, and held it up against the light, and
made it look beautiful.

'My eye!' he said.  'It seems a good deal, don't it?'

'It does seem a good deal,' I answered with a smile.  For it was
quite delightful to me, to find him so pleasant.  He was a
twinkling-eyed, pimple-faced man, with his hair standing upright
all over his head; and as he stood with one arm a-kimbo, holding up
the glass to the light with the other hand, he looked quite
friendly.

'There was a gentleman here, yesterday,' he said - 'a stout
gentleman, by the name of Topsawyer - perhaps you know him?'

'No,' I said, 'I don't think -'

'In breeches and gaiters, broad-brimmed hat, grey coat, speckled
choker,' said the waiter.

'No,' I said bashfully, 'I haven't the pleasure -'

'He came in here,' said the waiter, looking at the light through
the tumbler, 'ordered a glass of this ale - WOULD order it - I told
him not - drank it, and fell dead.  It was too old for him.  It
oughtn't to be drawn; that's the fact.'

I was very much shocked to hear of this melancholy accident, and
said I thought I had better have some water.

'Why you see,' said the waiter, still looking at the light through
the tumbler, with one of his eyes shut up, 'our people don't like
things being ordered and left.  It offends 'em.  But I'll drink it,
if you like.  I'm used to it, and use is everything.  I don't think
it'll hurt me, if I throw my head back, and take it off quick. 
Shall I?'

I replied that he would much oblige me by drinking it, if he
thought he could do it safely, but by no means otherwise.  When he
did throw his head back, and take it off quick, I had a horrible
fear, I confess, of seeing him meet the fate of the lamented Mr.
Topsawyer, and fall lifeless on the carpet.  But it didn't hurt
him.  On the contrary, I thought he seemed the fresher for it.

'What have we got here?' he said, putting a fork into my dish. 
'Not chops?'

'Chops,' I said.

'Lord bless my soul!' he exclaimed, 'I didn't know they were chops. 
Why, a chop's the very thing to take off the bad effects of that
beer!  Ain't it lucky?'

So he took a chop by the bone in one hand, and a potato in the
other, and ate away with a very good appetite, to my extreme
satisfaction.  He afterwards took another chop, and another potato;
and after that, another chop and another potato.  When we had done,
he brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to
ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.

'How's the pie?' he said, rousing himself.

'It's a pudding,' I made answer.

'Pudding!' he exclaimed.  'Why, bless me, so it is!  What!' looking
at it nearer.  'You don't mean to say it's a batter-pudding!'

'Yes, it is indeed.'

'Why, a batter-pudding,' he said, taking up a table-spoon, 'is my
favourite pudding!  Ain't that lucky?  Come on, little 'un, and
let's see who'll get most.'

The waiter certainly got most.  He entreated me more than once to
come in and win, but what with his table-spoon to my tea-spoon, his
dispatch to my dispatch, and his appetite to my appetite, I was
left far behind at the first mouthful, and had no chance with him. 
I never saw anyone enjoy a pudding so much, I think; and he
laughed, when it was all gone, as if his enjoyment of it lasted
still.

Finding him so very friendly and companionable, it was then that I
asked for the pen and ink and paper, to write to Peggotty.  He not
only brought it immediately, but was good enough to look over me
while I wrote the letter.  When I had finished it, he asked me
where I was going to school.

I said, 'Near London,' which was all I knew.

'Oh! my eye!' he said, looking very low-spirited, 'I am sorry for
that.'

'Why?' I asked him.

'Oh, Lord!' he said, shaking his head, 'that's the school where
they broke the boy's ribs - two ribs - a little boy he was.  I
should say he was - let me see - how old are you, about?'

I told him between eight and nine.

'That's just his age,' he said.  'He was eight years and six months
old when they broke his first rib; eight years and eight months old
when they broke his second, and did for him.'

I could not disguise from myself, or from the waiter, that this was
an uncomfortable coincidence, and inquired how it was done.  His
answer was not cheering to my spirits, for it consisted of two
dismal words, 'With whopping.'

The blowing of the coach-horn in the yard was a seasonable
diversion, which made me get up and hesitatingly inquire, in the
mingled pride and diffidence of having a purse (which I took out of
my pocket), if there were anything to pay.

'There's a sheet of letter-paper,' he returned.  'Did you ever buy
a sheet of letter-paper?'

I could not remember that I ever had.

'It's dear,' he said, 'on account of the duty.  Threepence.  That's
the way we're taxed in this country.  There's nothing else, except
the waiter.  Never mind the ink.  I lose by that.'

'What should you - what should I - how much ought I to - what would
it be right to pay the waiter, if you please?' I stammered,
blushing.

'If I hadn't a family, and that family hadn't the cowpock,' said
the waiter, 'I wouldn't take a sixpence.  If I didn't support a
aged pairint, and a lovely sister,' - here the waiter was greatly
agitated - 'I wouldn't take a farthing.  If I had a good place, and
was treated well here, I should beg acceptance of a trifle, instead
of taking of it.  But I live on broken wittles - and I sleep on the
coals' - here the waiter burst into tears.

I was very much concerned for his misfortunes, and felt that any
recognition short of ninepence would be mere brutality and hardness
of heart.  Therefore I gave him one of my three bright shillings,
which he received with much humility and veneration, and spun up
with his thumb, directly afterwards, to try the goodness of.

It was a little disconcerting to me, to find, when I was being
helped up behind the coach, that I was supposed to have eaten all
the dinner without any assistance.  I discovered this, from
overhearing the lady in the bow-window say to the guard, 'Take care
of that child, George, or he'll burst!' and from observing that the
women-servants who were about the place came out to look and giggle
at me as a young phenomenon.  My unfortunate friend the waiter, who
had quite recovered his spirits, did not appear to be disturbed by
this, but joined in the general admiration without being at all
confused.  If I had any doubt of him, I suppose this half awakened
it; but I am inclined to believe that with the simple confidence of
a child, and the natural reliance of a child upon superior years
(qualities I am very sorry any children should prematurely change
for worldly wisdom), I had no serious mistrust of him on the whole,
even then.

I felt it rather hard, I must own, to be made, without deserving
it, the subject of jokes between the coachman and guard as to the
coach drawing heavy behind, on account of my sitting there, and as
to the greater expediency of my travelling by waggon.  The story of
my supposed appetite getting wind among the outside passengers,
they were merry upon it likewise; and asked me whether I was going
to be paid for, at school, as two brothers or three, and whether I
was contracted for, or went upon the regular terms; with other
pleasant questions.  But the worst of it was, that I knew I should
be ashamed to eat anything, when an opportunity offered, and that,
after a rather light dinner, I should remain hungry all night - for
I had left my cakes behind, at the hotel, in my hurry.  My
apprehensions were realized.  When we stopped for supper I couldn't
muster courage to take any, though I should have liked it very
much, but sat by the fire and said I didn't want anything.  This
did not save me from more jokes, either; for a husky-voiced
gentleman with a rough face, who had been eating out of a
sandwich-box nearly all the way, except when he had been drinking
out of a bottle, said I was like a boa-constrictor who took enough
at one meal to last him a long time; after which, he actually
brought a rash out upon himself with boiled beef.

We had started from Yarmouth at three o'clock in the afternoon, and
we were due in London about eight next morning.  It was Mid-summer
weather, and the evening was very pleasant.  When we passed through
a village, I pictured to myself what the insides of the houses were
like, and what the inhabitants were about; and when boys came
running after us, and got up behind and swung there for a little
way, I wondered whether their fathers were alive, and whether they
Were happy at home.  I had plenty to think of, therefore, besides
my mind running continually on the kind of place I was going to -
which was an awful speculation.  Sometimes, I remember, I resigned
myself to thoughts of home and Peggotty; and to endeavouring, in a
confused blind way, to recall how I had felt, and what sort of boy
I used to be, before I bit Mr. Murdstone: which I couldn't satisfy
myself about by any means, I seemed to have bitten him in such a
remote antiquity.

The night was not so pleasant as the evening, for it got chilly;
and being put between two gentlemen (the rough-faced one and
another) to prevent my tumbling off the coach, I was nearly
smothered by their falling asleep, and completely blocking me up. 
They squeezed me so hard sometimes, that I could not help crying
out, 'Oh!  If you please!' - which they didn't like at all, because
it woke them.  Opposite me was an elderly lady in a great fur
cloak, who looked in the dark more like a haystack than a lady, she
was wrapped up to such a degree.  This lady had a basket with her,
and she hadn't known what to do with it, for a long time, until she
found that on account of my legs being short, it could go
underneath me.  It cramped and hurt me so, that it made me
perfectly miserable; but if I moved in the least, and made a glass
that was in the basket rattle against something else (as it was
sure to do), she gave me the cruellest poke with her foot, and
said, 'Come, don't YOU fidget.  YOUR bones are young enough, I'm
sure!'

At last the sun rose, and then my companions seemed to sleep
easier.  The difficulties under which they had laboured all night,
and which had found utterance in the most terrific gasps and
snorts, are not to be conceived.  As the sun got higher, their
sleep became lighter, and so they gradually one by one awoke.  I
recollect being very much surprised by the feint everybody made,
then, of not having been to sleep at all, and by the uncommon
indignation with which everyone repelled the charge.  I labour
under the same kind of astonishment to this day, having invariably
observed that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our common
nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is
the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach.

What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in the
distance, and how I believed all the adventures of all my favourite
heroes to be constantly enacting and re-enacting there, and how I
vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and
wickedness than all the cities of the earth, I need not stop here
to relate.  We approached it by degrees, and got, in due time, to
the inn in the Whitechapel district, for which we were bound.  I
forget whether it was the Blue Bull, or the Blue Boar; but I know
it was the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted up on
the back of the coach.

The guard's eye lighted on me as he was getting down, and he said
at the booking-office door:

'Is there anybody here for a yoongster booked in the name of
Murdstone, from Bloonderstone, Sooffolk, to be left till called
for?'

Nobody answered.

'Try Copperfield, if you please, sir,' said I, looking helplessly
down.

'Is there anybody here for a yoongster, booked in the name of
Murdstone, from Bloonderstone, Sooffolk, but owning to the name of
Copperfield, to be left till called for?' said the guard.  'Come!
IS there anybody?'

No.  There was nobody.  I looked anxiously around; but the inquiry
made no impression on any of the bystanders, if I except a man in
gaiters, with one eye, who suggested that they had better put a
brass collar round my neck, and tie me up in the stable.

A ladder was brought, and I got down after the lady, who was like
a haystack: not daring to stir, until her basket was removed.  The
coach was clear of passengers by that time, the luggage was very
soon cleared out, the horses had been taken out before the luggage,
and now the coach itself was wheeled and backed off by some
hostlers, out of the way.  Still, nobody appeared, to claim the
dusty youngster from Blunderstone, Suffolk.

More solitary than Robinson Crusoe, who had nobody to look at him
and see that he was solitary, I went into the booking-office, and,
by invitation of the clerk on duty, passed behind the counter, and
sat down on the scale at which they weighed the luggage.  Here, as
I sat looking at the parcels, packages, and books, and inhaling the
smell of stables (ever since associated with that morning), a
procession of most tremendous considerations began to march through
my mind.  Supposing nobody should ever fetch me, how long would
they consent to keep me there?  Would they keep me long enough to
spend seven shillings?  Should I sleep at night in one of those
wooden bins, with the other luggage, and wash myself at the pump in
the yard in the morning; or should I be turned out every night, and
expected to come again to be left till called for, when the office
opened next day?  Supposing there was no mistake in the case, and
Mr. Murdstone had devised this plan to get rid of me, what should
I do?  If they allowed me to remain there until my seven shillings
were spent, I couldn't hope to remain there when I began to starve. 
That would obviously be inconvenient and unpleasant to the
customers, besides entailing on the Blue Whatever-it-was, the risk
of funeral expenses.  If I started off at once, and tried to walk
back home, how could I ever find my way, how could I ever hope to
walk so far, how could I make sure of anyone but Peggotty, even if
I got back?  If I found out the nearest proper authorities, and
offered myself to go for a soldier, or a sailor, I was such a
little fellow that it was most likely they wouldn't take me in. 
These thoughts, and a hundred other such thoughts, turned me
burning hot, and made me giddy with apprehension and dismay.  I was
in the height of my fever when a man entered and whispered to the
clerk, who presently slanted me off the scale, and pushed me over
to him, as if I were weighed, bought, delivered, and paid for.

As I went out of the office, hand in hand with this new
acquaintance, I stole a look at him.  He was a gaunt, sallow young
man, with hollow cheeks, and a chin almost as black as Mr.
Murdstone's; but there the likeness ended, for his whiskers were
shaved off, and his hair, instead of being glossy, was rusty and
dry.  He was dressed in a suit of black clothes which were rather
rusty and dry too, and rather short in the sleeves and legs; and he
had a white neck-kerchief on, that was not over-clean.  I did not,
and do not, suppose that this neck-kerchief was all the linen he
wore, but it was all he showed or gave any hint of.

'You're the new boy?' he said.
'Yes, sir,' I said.

I supposed I was.  I didn't know.

'I'm one of the masters at Salem House,' he said.

I made him a bow and felt very much overawed.  I was so ashamed to
allude to a commonplace thing like my box, to a scholar and a
master at Salem House, that we had gone some little distance from
the yard before I had the hardihood to mention it.  We turned back,
on my humbly insinuating that it might be useful to me hereafter;
and he told the clerk that the carrier had instructions to call for
it at noon.

'If you please, sir,' I said, when we had accomplished about the
same distance as before, 'is it far?'

'It's down by Blackheath,' he said.

'Is that far, sir?' I diffidently asked.

'It's a good step,' he said.  'We shall go by the stage-coach. 
It's about six miles.'

I was so faint and tired, that the idea of holding out for six
miles more, was too much for me.  I took heart to tell him that I
had had nothing all night, and that if he would allow me to buy
something to eat, I should be very much obliged to him.  He
appeared surprised at this - I see him stop and look at me now -
and after considering for a few moments, said he wanted to call on
an old person who lived not far off, and that the best way would be
for me to buy some bread, or whatever I liked best that was
wholesome, and make my breakfast at her house, where we could get
some milk.

Accordingly we looked in at a baker's window, and after I had made
a series of proposals to buy everything that was bilious in the
shop, and he had rejected them one by one, we decided in favour of
a nice little loaf of brown bread, which cost me threepence.  Then,
at a grocer's shop, we bought an egg and a slice of streaky bacon;
which still left what I thought a good deal of change, out of the
second of the bright shillings, and made me consider London a very
cheap place.  These provisions laid in, we went on through a great
noise and uproar that confused my weary head beyond description,
and over a bridge which, no doubt, was London Bridge (indeed I
think he told me so, but I was half asleep), until we came to the
poor person's house, which was a part of some alms-houses, as I
knew by their look, and by an inscription on a stone over the gate
which said they were established for twenty-five poor women.

The Master at Salem House lifted the latch of one of a number of
little black doors that were all alike, and had each a little
diamond-paned window on one side, and another little diamond- paned
window above; and we went into the little house of one of these
poor old women, who was blowing a fire to make a little saucepan
boil.  On seeing the master enter, the old woman stopped with the
bellows on her knee, and said something that I thought sounded like
'My Charley!' but on seeing me come in too, she got up, and rubbing
her hands made a confused sort of half curtsey.

'Can you cook this young gentleman's breakfast for him, if you
please?' said the Master at Salem House.

'Can I?' said the old woman.  'Yes can I, sure!'

'How's Mrs. Fibbitson today?' said the Master, looking at another
old woman in a large chair by the fire, who was such a bundle of
clothes that I feel grateful to this hour for not having sat upon
her by mistake.

'Ah, she's poorly,' said the first old woman.  'It's one of her bad
days.  If the fire was to go out, through any accident, I verily
believe she'd go out too, and never come to life again.'

As they looked at her, I looked at her also.  Although it was a
warm day, she seemed to think of nothing but the fire.  I fancied
she was jealous even of the saucepan on it; and I have reason to
know that she took its impressment into the service of boiling my
egg and broiling my bacon, in dudgeon; for I saw her, with my own
discomfited eyes, shake her fist at me once, when those culinary
operations were going on, and no one else was looking.  The sun
streamed in at the little window, but she sat with her own back and
the back of the large chair towards it, screening the fire as if
she were sedulously keeping IT warm, instead of it keeping her
warm, and watching it in a most distrustful manner.  The completion
of the preparations for my breakfast, by relieving the fire, gave
her such extreme joy that she laughed aloud - and a very
unmelodious laugh she had, I must say.

I sat down to my brown loaf, my egg, and my rasher of bacon, with
a basin of milk besides, and made a most delicious meal.  While I
was yet in the full enjoyment of it, the old woman of the house
said to the Master:

'Have you got your flute with you?'

'Yes,' he returned.

'Have a blow at it,' said the old woman, coaxingly.  'Do!'

The Master, upon this, put his hand underneath the skirts of his
coat, and brought out his flute in three pieces, which he screwed
together, and began immediately to play.  My impression is, after
many years of consideration, that there never can have been anybody
in the world who played worse.  He made the most dismal sounds I
have ever heard produced by any means, natural or artificial.  I
don't know what the tunes were - if there were such things in the
performance at all, which I doubt - but the influence of the strain
upon me was, first, to make me think of all my sorrows until I
could hardly keep my tears back; then to take away my appetite; and
lastly, to make me so sleepy that I couldn't keep my eyes open. 
They begin to close again, and I begin to nod, as the recollection
rises fresh upon me.  Once more the little room, with its open
corner cupboard, and its square-backed chairs, and its angular
little staircase leading to the room above, and its three peacock's
feathers displayed over the mantelpiece - I remember wondering when
I first went in, what that peacock would have thought if he had
known what his finery was doomed to come to - fades from before me,
and I nod, and sleep.  The flute becomes inaudible, the wheels of
the coach are heard instead, and I am on my journey.  The coach
jolts, I wake with a start, and the flute has come back again, and
the Master at Salem House is sitting with his legs crossed, playing
it dolefully, while the old woman of the house looks on delighted. 
She fades in her turn, and he fades, and all fades, and there is no
flute, no Master, no Salem House, no David Copperfield, no anything
but heavy sleep.

I dreamed, I thought, that once while he was blowing into this
dismal flute, the old woman of the house, who had gone nearer and
nearer to him in her ecstatic admiration, leaned over the back of
his chair and gave him an affectionate squeeze round the neck,
which stopped his playing for a moment.  I was in the middle state
between sleeping and waking, either then or immediately afterwards;
for, as he resumed - it was a real fact that he had stopped playing
- I saw and heard the same old woman ask Mrs. Fibbitson if it
wasn't delicious (meaning the flute), to which Mrs. Fibbitson
replied, 'Ay, ay! yes!' and nodded at the fire: to which, I am
persuaded, she gave the credit of the whole performance.

When I seemed to have been dozing a long while, the Master at Salem
House unscrewed his flute into the three pieces, put them up as
before, and took me away.  We found the coach very near at hand,
and got upon the roof; but I was so dead sleepy, that when we
stopped on the road to take up somebody else, they put me inside
where there were no passengers, and where I slept profoundly, until
I found the coach going at a footpace up a steep hill among green
leaves.  Presently, it stopped, and had come to its destination.

A short walk brought us - I mean the Master and me - to Salem
House, which was enclosed with a high brick wall, and looked very
dull.  Over a door in this wall was a board with SALEM HousE upon
it; and through a grating in this door we were surveyed when we
rang the bell by a surly face, which I found, on the door being
opened, belonged to a stout man with a bull-neck, a wooden leg,
overhanging temples, and his hair cut close all round his head.

'The new boy,' said the Master.

The man with the wooden leg eyed me all over - it didn't take long,
for there was not much of me - and locked the gate behind us, and
took out the key.  We were going up to the house, among some dark
heavy trees, when he called after my conductor.
'Hallo!'

We looked back, and he was standing at the door of a little lodge,
where he lived, with a pair of boots in his hand.

'Here!  The cobbler's been,' he said, 'since you've been out, Mr.
Mell, and he says he can't mend 'em any more.  He says there ain't
a bit of the original boot left, and he wonders you expect it.'

With these words he threw the boots towards Mr. Mell, who went back
a few paces to pick them up, and looked at them (very
disconsolately, I was afraid), as we went on together.  I observed
then, for the first time, that the boots he had on were a good deal
the worse for wear, and that his stocking was just breaking out in
one place, like a bud.

Salem House was a square brick building with wings; of a bare and
unfurnished appearance.  All about it was so very quiet, that I
said to Mr. Mell I supposed the boys were out; but he seemed
surprised at my not knowing that it was holiday-time.  That all the
boys were at their several homes.  That Mr. Creakle, the
proprietor, was down by the sea-side with Mrs. and Miss Creakle;
and that I was sent in holiday-time as a punishment for my
misdoing, all of which he explained to me as we went along.

I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me, as the most
forlorn and desolate place I had ever seen.  I see it now.  A long
room with three long rows of desks, and six of forms, and bristling
all round with pegs for hats and slates.  Scraps of old copy-books
and exercises litter the dirty floor.  Some silkworms' houses, made
of the same materials, are scattered over the desks.  Two miserable
little white mice, left behind by their owner, are running up and
down in a fusty castle made of pasteboard and wire, looking in all
the corners with their red eyes for anything to eat.  A bird, in a
cage very little bigger than himself, makes a mournful rattle now
and then in hopping on his perch, two inches high, or dropping from
it; but neither sings nor chirps.  There is a strange unwholesome
smell upon the room, like mildewed corduroys, sweet apples wanting
air, and rotten books.  There could not well be more ink splashed
about it, if it had been roofless from its first construction, and
the skies had rained, snowed, hailed, and blown ink through the
varying seasons of the year.

Mr. Mell having left me while he took his irreparable boots
upstairs, I went softly to the upper end of the room, observing all
this as I crept along.  Suddenly I came upon a pasteboard placard,
beautifully written, which was lying on the desk, and bore these
words: 'TAKE CARE OF HIM.  HE BITES.'

I got upon the desk immediately, apprehensive of at least a great
dog underneath.  But, though I looked all round with anxious eyes,
I could see nothing of him.  I was still engaged in peering about,
when Mr. Mell came back, and asked me what I did up there?

'I beg your pardon, sir,' says I, 'if you please, I'm looking for
the dog.'

'Dog?' he says.  'What dog?'

'Isn't it a dog, sir?'

'Isn't what a dog?'

'That's to be taken care of, sir; that bites.'

'No, Copperfield,' says he, gravely, 'that's not a dog.  That's a
boy.  My instructions are, Copperfield, to put this placard on your
back.  I am sorry to make such a beginning with you, but I must do
it.'  With that he took me down, and tied the placard, which was
neatly constructed for the purpose, on my shoulders like a
knapsack; and wherever I went, afterwards, I had the consolation of
carrying it.

What I suffered from that placard, nobody can imagine.  Whether it
was possible for people to see me or not, I always fancied that
somebody was reading it.  It was no relief to turn round and find
nobody; for wherever my back was, there I imagined somebody always
to be.  That cruel man with the wooden leg aggravated my
sufferings.  He was in authority; and if he ever saw me leaning
against a tree, or a wall, or the house, he roared out from his
lodge door in a stupendous voice, 'Hallo, you sir!  You
Copperfield!  Show that badge conspicuous, or I'll report you!' 
The playground was a bare gravelled yard, open to all the back of
the house and the offices; and I knew that the servants read it,
and the butcher read it, and the baker read it; that everybody, in
a word, who came backwards and forwards to the house, of a morning
when I was ordered to walk there, read that I was to be taken care
of, for I bit, I recollect that I positively began to have a dread
of myself, as a kind of wild boy who did bite.

There was an old door in this playground, on which the boys had a
custom of carving their names.  It was completely covered with such
inscriptions.  In my dread of the end of the vacation and their
coming back, I could not read a boy's name, without inquiring in
what tone and with what emphasis HE would read, 'Take care of him. 
He bites.'  There was one boy - a certain J. Steerforth - who cut
his name very deep and very often, who, I conceived, would read it
in a rather strong voice, and afterwards pull my hair.  There was
another boy, one Tommy Traddles, who I dreaded would make game of
it, and pretend to be dreadfully frightened of me.  There was a
third, George Demple, who I fancied would sing it.  I have looked,
a little shrinking creature, at that door, until the owners of all
the names - there were five-and-forty of them in the school then,
Mr. Mell said - seemed to send me to Coventry by general
acclamation, and to cry out, each in his own way, 'Take care of
him.  He bites!'

It was the same with the places at the desks and forms.  It was the
same with the groves of deserted bedsteads I peeped at, on my way
to, and when I was in, my own bed.  I remember dreaming night after
night, of being with my mother as she used to be, or of going to a
party at Mr. Peggotty's, or of travelling outside the stage-coach,
or of dining again with my unfortunate friend the waiter, and in
all these circumstances making people scream and stare, by the
unhappy disclosure that I had nothing on but my little night-shirt,
and that placard.

In the monotony of my life, and in my constant apprehension of the
re-opening of the school, it was such an insupportable affliction!
I had long tasks every day to do with Mr. Mell; but I did them,
there being no Mr. and Miss Murdstone here, and got through them
without disgrace.  Before, and after them, I walked about -
supervised, as I have mentioned, by the man with the wooden leg. 
How vividly I call to mind the damp about the house, the green
cracked flagstones in the court, an old leaky water-butt, and the
discoloured trunks of some of the grim trees, which seemed to have
dripped more in the rain than other trees, and to have blown less
in the sun!  At one we dined, Mr. Mell and I, at the upper end of
a long bare dining-room, full of deal tables, and smelling of fat. 
Then, we had more tasks until tea, which Mr. Mell drank out of a
blue teacup, and I out of a tin pot.  All day long, and until seven
or eight in the evening, Mr. Mell, at his own detached desk in the
schoolroom, worked hard with pen, ink, ruler, books, and writing-
paper, making out the bills (as I found) for last half-year.  When
he had put up his things for the night he took out his flute, and
blew at it, until I almost thought he would gradually blow his
whole being into the large hole at the top, and ooze away at the
keys.

I picture my small self in the dimly-lighted rooms, sitting with my
head upon my hand, listening to the doleful performance of Mr.
Mell, and conning tomorrow's lessons.  I picture myself with my
books shut up, still listening to the doleful performance of Mr.
Mell, and listening through it to what used to be at home, and to
the blowing of the wind on Yarmouth flats, and feeling very sad and
solitary.  I picture myself going up to bed, among the unused
rooms, and sitting on my bed-side crying for a comfortable word
from Peggotty.  I picture myself coming downstairs in the morning,
and looking through a long ghastly gash of a staircase window at
the school-bell hanging on the top of an out-house with a
weathercock above it; and dreading the time when it shall ring J.
Steerforth and the rest to work: which is only second, in my
foreboding apprehensions, to the time when the man with the wooden
leg shall unlock the rusty gate to give admission to the awful Mr.
Creakle.  I cannot think I was a very dangerous character in any of
these aspects, but in all of them I carried the same warning on my
back.

Mr. Mell never said much to me, but he was never harsh to me.  I
suppose we were company to each other, without talking.  I forgot
to mention that he would talk to himself sometimes, and grin, and
clench his fist, and grind his teeth, and pull his hair in an
unaccountable manner.  But he had these peculiarities: and at first
they frightened me, though I soon got used to them.



CHAPTER 6
I ENLARGE MY CIRCLE OF ACQUAINTANCE


I HAD led this life about a month, when the man with the wooden leg
began to stump about with a mop and a bucket of water, from which
I inferred that preparations were making to receive Mr. Creakle and
the boys.  I was not mistaken; for the mop came into the schoolroom
before long, and turned out Mr. Mell and me, who lived where we
could, and got on how we could, for some days, during which we were
always in the way of two or three young women, who had rarely shown
themselves before, and were so continually in the midst of dust
that I sneezed almost as much as if Salem House had been a great
snuff-box.

One day I was informed by Mr. Mell that Mr. Creakle would be home
that evening.  In the evening, after tea, I heard that he was come. 
Before bedtime, I was fetched by the man with the wooden leg to
appear before him.

Mr. Creakle's part of the house was a good deal more comfortable
than ours, and he had a snug bit of garden that looked pleasant
after the dusty playground, which was such a desert in miniature,
that I thought no one but a camel, or a dromedary, could have felt
at home in it.  It seemed to me a bold thing even to take notice
that the passage looked comfortable, as I went on my way,
trembling, to Mr. Creakle's presence: which so abashed me, when I
was ushered into it, that I hardly saw Mrs. Creakle or Miss Creakle
(who were both there, in the parlour), or anything but Mr. Creakle,
a stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain and seals, in an
arm-chair, with a tumbler and bottle beside him.

'So!' said Mr. Creakle.  'This is the young gentleman whose teeth
are to be filed!  Turn him round.'

The wooden-legged man turned me about so as to exhibit the placard;
and having afforded time for a full survey of it, turned me about
again, with my face to Mr. Creakle, and posted himself at Mr.
Creakle's side.  Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and his eyes were
small, and deep in his head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a
little nose, and a large chin.  He was bald on the top of his head;
and had some thin wet-looking hair that was just turning grey,
brushed across each temple, so that the two sides interlaced on his
forehead.  But the circumstance about him which impressed me most,
was, that he had no voice, but spoke in a whisper.  The exertion
this cost him, or the consciousness of talking in that feeble way,
made his angry face so much more angry, and his thick veins so much
thicker, when he spoke, that I am not surprised, on looking back,
at this peculiarity striking me as his chief one.
'Now,' said Mr. Creakle.  'What's the report of this boy?'

'There's nothing against him yet,' returned the man with the wooden
leg.  'There has been no opportunity.'

I thought Mr. Creakle was disappointed.  I thought Mrs. and Miss
Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were,
both, thin and quiet) were not disappointed.

'Come here, sir!' said Mr. Creakle, beckoning to me.

'Come here!' said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the
gesture.

'I have the happiness of knowing your father-in-law,' whispered Mr.
Creakle, taking me by the ear; 'and a worthy man he is, and a man
of a strong character.  He knows me, and I know him.  Do YOU know
me?  Hey?' said Mr. Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious
playfulness.

'Not yet, sir,' I said, flinching with the pain.

'Not yet?  Hey?' repeated Mr. Creakle.  'But you will soon.  Hey?'

'You will soon.  Hey?' repeated the man with the wooden leg.  I
afterwards found that he generally acted, with his strong voice, as
Mr. Creakle's interpreter to the boys.

I was very much frightened, and said, I hoped so, if he pleased. 
I felt, all this while, as if my ear were blazing; he pinched it so
hard.

'I'll tell you what I am,' whispered Mr. Creakle, letting it go at
last, with a screw at parting that brought the water into my eyes. 
'I'm a Tartar.'

'A Tartar,' said the man with the wooden leg.

'When I say I'll do a thing, I do it,' said Mr. Creakle; 'and when
I say I will have a thing done, I will have it done.'

'- Will have a thing done, I will have it done,' repeated the man
with the wooden leg.

'I am a determined character,' said Mr. Creakle.  'That's what I
am.  I do my duty.  That's what I do.  My flesh and blood' - he
looked at Mrs. Creakle as he said this - 'when it rises against me,
is not my flesh and blood.  I discard it.  Has that fellow' - to
the man with the wooden leg -'been here again?'

'No,' was the answer.

'No,' said Mr. Creakle.  'He knows better.  He knows me.  Let him
keep away.  I say let him keep away,' said Mr. Creakle, striking
his hand upon the table, and looking at Mrs. Creakle, 'for he knows
me.  Now you have begun to know me too, my young friend, and you
may go.  Take him away.'

I was very glad to be ordered away, for Mrs. and Miss Creakle were
both wiping their eyes, and I felt as uncomfortable for them as I
did for myself.  But I had a petition on my mind which concerned me
so nearly, that I couldn't help saying, though I wondered at my own
courage:

'If you please, sir -'

Mr. Creakle whispered, 'Hah!  What's this?' and bent his eyes upon
me, as if he would have burnt me up with them.

'If you please, sir,' I faltered, 'if I might be allowed (I am very
sorry indeed, sir, for what I did) to take this writing off, before
the boys come back -'

Whether Mr. Creakle was in earnest, or whether he only did it to
frighten me, I don't know, but he made a burst out of his chair,
before which I precipitately retreated, without waiting for the
escort Of the man with the wooden leg, and never once stopped until
I reached my own bedroom, where, finding I was not pursued, I went
to bed, as it was time, and lay quaking, for a couple of hours.

Next morning Mr. Sharp came back.  Mr. Sharp was the first master,
and superior to Mr. Mell.  Mr. Mell took his meals with the boys,
but Mr. Sharp dined and supped at Mr. Creakle's table.  He was a
limp, delicate-looking gentleman, I thought, with a good deal of
nose, and a way of carrying his head on one side, as if it were a
little too heavy for him.  His hair was very smooth and wavy; but
I was informed by the very first boy who came back that it was a
wig (a second-hand one HE said), and that Mr. Sharp went out every
Saturday afternoon to get it curled.

It was no other than Tommy Traddles who gave me this piece of
intelligence.  He was the first boy who returned.  He introduced
himself by informing me that I should find his name on the right-
hand corner of the gate, over the top-bolt; upon that I said,
'Traddles?' to which he replied, 'The same,' and then he asked me
for a full account of myself and family.

It was a happy circumstance for me that Traddles came back first. 
He enjoyed my placard so much, that he saved me from the
embarrassment of either disclosure or concealment, by presenting me
to every other boy who came back, great or small, immediately on
his arrival, in this form of introduction, 'Look here!  Here's a
game!'  Happily, too, the greater part of the boys came back
low-spirited, and were not so boisterous at my expense as I had
expected.  Some of them certainly did dance about me like wild
Indians, and the greater part could not resist the temptation of
pretending that I was a dog, and patting and soothing me, lest I
should bite, and saying, 'Lie down, sir!' and calling me Towzer. 
This was naturally confusing, among so many strangers, and cost me
some tears, but on the whole it was much better than I had
anticipated.

I was not considered as being formally received into the school,
however, until J. Steerforth arrived.  Before this boy, who was
reputed to be a great scholar, and was very good-looking, and at
least half-a-dozen years my senior, I was carried as before a
magistrate.  He inquired, under a shed in the playground, into the
particulars of my punishment, and was pleased to express his
opinion that it was 'a jolly shame'; for which I became bound to
him ever afterwards.

'What money have you got, Copperfield?' he said, walking aside with
me when he had disposed of my affair in these terms.  I told him
seven shillings.

'You had better give it to me to take care of,' he said.  'At
least, you can if you like.  You needn't if you don't like.'

I hastened to comply with his friendly suggestion, and opening
Peggotty's purse, turned it upside down into his hand.

'Do you want to spend anything now?' he asked me.

'No thank you,' I replied.

'You can, if you like, you know,' said Steerforth.  'Say the word.'

'No, thank you, sir,' I repeated.

'Perhaps you'd like to spend a couple of shillings or so, in a
bottle of currant wine by and by, up in the bedroom?' said
Steerforth.  'You belong to my bedroom, I find.'

It certainly had not occurred to me before, but I said, Yes, I
should like that.

'Very good,' said Steerforth.  'You'll be glad to spend another
shilling or so, in almond cakes, I dare say?'

I said, Yes, I should like that, too.

'And another shilling or so in biscuits, and another in fruit, eh?'
said Steerforth.  'I say, young Copperfield, you're going it!'

I smiled because he smiled, but I was a little troubled in my mind,
too.

'Well!' said Steerforth.  'We must make it stretch as far as we
can; that's all.  I'll do the best in my power for you.  I can go
out when I like, and I'll smuggle the prog in.'  With these words
he put the money in his pocket, and kindly told me not to make
myself uneasy; he would take care it should be all right.
He was as good as his word, if that were all right which I had a
secret misgiving was nearly all wrong - for I feared it was a waste
of my mother's two half-crowns - though I had preserved the piece
of paper they were wrapped in: which was a precious saving.  When
we went upstairs to bed, he produced the whole seven
shillings'worth, and laid it out on my bed in the moonlight,
saying:

'There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread you've got.'

I couldn't think of doing the honours of the feast, at my time of
life, while he was by; my hand shook at the very thought of it.  I
begged him to do me the favour of presiding; and my request being
seconded by the other boys who were in that room, he acceded to it,
and sat upon my pillow, handing round the viands - with perfect
fairness, I must say - and dispensing the currant wine in a little
glass without a foot, which was his own property.  As to me, I sat
on his left hand, and the rest were grouped about us, on the
nearest beds and on the floor.

How well I recollect our sitting there, talking in whispers; or
their talking, and my respectfully listening, I ought rather to
say; the moonlight falling a little way into the room, through the
window, painting a pale window on the floor, and the greater part
of us in shadow, except when Steerforth dipped a match into a
phosphorus-box, when he wanted to look for anything on the board,
and shed a blue glare over us that was gone directly!  A certain
mysterious feeling, consequent on the darkness, the secrecy of the
revel, and the whisper in which everything was said, steals over me
again, and I listen to all they tell me with a vague feeling of
solemnity and awe, which makes me glad that they are all so near,
and frightens me (though I feign to laugh) when Traddles pretends
to see a ghost in the corner.

I heard all kinds of things about the school and all belonging to
it.  I heard that Mr. Creakle had not preferred his claim to being
a Tartar without reason; that he was the sternest and most severe
of masters; that he laid about him, right and left, every day of
his life, charging in among the boys like a trooper, and slashing
away, unmercifully.  That he knew nothing himself, but the art of
slashing, being more ignorant (J. Steerforth said) than the lowest
boy in the school; that he had been, a good many years ago, a small
hop-dealer in the Borough, and had taken to the schooling business
after being bankrupt in hops, and making away with Mrs. Creakle's
money.  With a good deal more of that sort, which I wondered how
they knew.

I heard that the man with the wooden leg, whose name was Tungay,
was an obstinate barbarian who had formerly assisted in the hop
business, but had come into the scholastic line with Mr. Creakle,
in consequence, as was supposed among the boys, of his having
broken his leg in Mr. Creakle's service, and having done a deal of
dishonest work for him, and knowing his secrets.  I heard that with
the single exception of Mr. Creakle, Tungay considered the whole
establishment, masters and boys, as his natural enemies, and that
the only delight of his life was to be sour and malicious.  I heard
that Mr. Creakle had a son, who had not been Tungay's friend, and
who, assisting in the school, had once held some remonstrance with
his father on an occasion when its discipline was very cruelly
exercised, and was supposed, besides, to have protested against his
father's usage of his mother.  I heard that Mr. Creakle had turned
him out of doors, in consequence; and that Mrs. and Miss Creakle
had been in a sad way, ever since.

But the greatest wonder that I heard of Mr. Creakle was, there
being one boy in the school on whom he never ventured to lay a
hand, and that boy being J. Steerforth.  Steerforth himself
confirmed this when it was stated, and said that he should like to
begin to see him do it.  On being asked by a mild boy (not me) how
he would proceed if he did begin to see him do it, he dipped a
match into his phosphorus-box on purpose to shed a glare over his
reply, and said he would commence by knocking him down with a blow
on the forehead from the seven-and-sixpenny ink-bottle that was
always on the mantelpiece.  We sat in the dark for some time,
breathless.

I heard that Mr. Sharp and Mr. Mell were both supposed to be
wretchedly paid; and that when there was hot and cold meat for
dinner at Mr. Creakle's table, Mr. Sharp was always expected to say
he preferred cold; which was again corroborated by J. Steerforth,
the only parlour-boarder.  I heard that Mr. Sharp's wig didn't fit
him; and that he needn't be so 'bounceable' - somebody else said
'bumptious' - about it, because his own red hair was very plainly
to be seen behind.

I heard that one boy, who was a coal-merchant's son, came as a
set-off against the coal-bill, and was called, on that account,
'Exchange or Barter' - a name selected from the arithmetic book as
expressing this arrangement.  I heard that the table beer was a
robbery of parents, and the pudding an imposition.  I heard that
Miss Creakle was regarded by the school in general as being in love
with Steerforth; and I am sure, as I sat in the dark, thinking of
his nice voice, and his fine face, and his easy manner, and his
curling hair, I thought it very likely.  I heard that Mr. Mell was
not a bad sort of fellow, but hadn't a sixpence to bless himself
with; and that there was no doubt that old Mrs. Mell, his mother,
was as poor as job.  I thought of my breakfast then, and what had
sounded like 'My Charley!' but I was, I am glad to remember, as
mute as a mouse about it.

The hearing of all this, and a good deal more, outlasted the
banquet some time.  The greater part of the guests had gone to bed
as soon as the eating and drinking were over; and we, who had
remained whispering and listening half-undressed, at last betook
ourselves to bed, too.

'Good night, young Copperfield,' said Steerforth.  'I'll take care
of you.'
'You're very kind,' I gratefully returned.  'I am very much obliged
to you.'

'You haven't got a sister, have you?' said Steerforth, yawning.

'No,' I answered.

'That's a pity,' said Steerforth.  'If you had had one, I should
think she would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort
of girl.  I should have liked to know her.  Good night, young
Copperfield.'

'Good night, sir,' I replied.

I thought of him very much after I went to bed, and raised myself,
I recollect, to look at him where he lay in the moonlight, with his
handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm. 
He was a person of great power in my eyes; that was, of course, the
reason of my mind running on him.  No veiled future dimly glanced
upon him in the moonbeams.  There was no shadowy picture of his
footsteps, in the garden that I dreamed of walking in all night.



CHAPTER 7
MY 'FIRST HALF' AT SALEM HOUSE


School began in earnest next day.  A profound impression was made
upon me, I remember, by the roar of voices in the schoolroom
suddenly becoming hushed as death when Mr. Creakle entered after
breakfast, and stood in the doorway looking round upon us like a
giant in a story-book surveying his captives.

Tungay stood at Mr. Creakle's elbow.  He had no occasion, I
thought, to cry out 'Silence!' so ferociously, for the boys were
all struck speechless and motionless.

Mr. Creakle was seen to speak, and Tungay was heard, to this
effect.

'Now, boys, this is a new half.  Take care what you're about, in
this new half.  Come fresh up to the lessons, I advise you, for I
come fresh up to the punishment.  I won't flinch.  It will be of no
use your rubbing yourselves; you won't rub the marks out that I
shall give you.  Now get to work, every boy!'

When this dreadful exordium was over, and Tungay had stumped out
again, Mr. Creakle came to where I sat, and told me that if I were
famous for biting, he was famous for biting, too.  He then showed
me the cane, and asked me what I thought of THAT, for a tooth?  Was
it a sharp tooth, hey?  Was it a double tooth, hey?  Had it a deep
prong, hey?  Did it bite, hey?  Did it bite?  At every question he
gave me a fleshy cut with it that made me writhe; so I was very
soon made free of Salem House (as Steerforth said), and was very
soon in tears also.

Not that I mean to say these were special marks of distinction,
which only I received.  On the contrary, a large majority of the
boys (especially the smaller ones) were visited with similar
instances of notice, as Mr. Creakle made the round of the
schoolroom.  Half the establishment was writhing and crying, before
the day's work began; and how much of it had writhed and cried
before the day's work was over, I am really afraid to recollect,
lest I should seem to exaggerate.

I should think there never can have been a man who enjoyed his
profession more than Mr. Creakle did.  He had a delight in cutting
at the boys, which was like the satisfaction of a craving appetite. 
I am confident that he couldn't resist a chubby boy, especially;
that there was a fascination in such a subject, which made him
restless in his mind, until he had scored and marked him for the
day.  I was chubby myself, and ought to know.  I am sure when I
think of the fellow now, my blood rises against him with the
disinterested indignation I should feel if I could have known all
about him without having ever been in his power; but it rises
hotly, because I know him to have been an incapable brute, who had
no more right to be possessed of the great trust he held, than to
be Lord High Admiral, or Commander-in-Chief - in either of which
capacities it is probable that he would have done infinitely less
mischief.

Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we
were to him!  What a launch in life I think it now, on looking
back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and
pretensions!

Here I sit at the desk again, watching his eye - humbly watching
his eye, as he rules a ciphering-book for another victim whose
hands have just been flattened by that identical ruler, and who is
trying to wipe the sting out with a pocket-handkerchief.  I have
plenty to do.  I don't watch his eye in idleness, but because I am
morbidly attracted to it, in a dread desire to know what he will do
next, and whether it will be my turn to suffer, or somebody else's. 
A lane of small boys beyond me, with the same interest in his eye,
watch it too.  I think he knows it, though he pretends he don't. 
He makes dreadful mouths as he rules the ciphering-book; and now he
throws his eye sideways down our lane, and we all droop over our
books and tremble.  A moment afterwards we are again eyeing him. 
An unhappy culprit, found guilty of imperfect exercise, approaches
at his command.  The culprit falters excuses, and professes a
determination to do better tomorrow.  Mr. Creakle cuts a joke
before he beats him, and we laugh at it, - miserable little dogs,
we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts
sinking into our boots.

Here I sit at the desk again, on a drowsy summer afternoon.  A buzz
and hum go up around me, as if the boys were so many bluebottles. 
A cloggy sensation of the lukewarm fat of meat is upon me (we dined
an hour or two ago), and my head is as heavy as so much lead.  I
would give the world to go to sleep.  I sit with my eye on Mr.
Creakle, blinking at him like a young owl; when sleep overpowers me
for a minute, he still looms through my slumber, ruling those
ciphering-books, until he softly comes behind me and wakes me to
plainer perception of him, with a red ridge across my back.

Here I am in the playground, with my eye still fascinated by him,
though I can't see him.  The window at a little distance from which
I know he is having his dinner, stands for him, and I eye that
instead.  If he shows his face near it, mine assumes an imploring
and submissive expression.  If he looks out through the glass, the
boldest boy (Steerforth excepted) stops in the middle of a shout or
yell, and becomes contemplative.  One day, Traddles (the most
unfortunate boy in the world) breaks that window accidentally, with
a ball.  I shudder at this moment with the tremendous sensation of
seeing it done, and feeling that the ball has bounded on to Mr.
Creakle's sacred head.

Poor Traddles!  In a tight sky-blue suit that made his arms and
legs like German sausages, or roly-poly puddings, he was the
merriest and most miserable of all the boys.  He was always being
caned - I think he was caned every day that half-year, except one
holiday Monday when he was only ruler'd on both hands - and was
always going to write to his uncle about it, and never did.  After
laying his head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer up,
somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw skeletons all over his
slate, before his eyes were dry.  I used at first to wonder what
comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons; and for some time
looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those
symbols of mortality that caning couldn't last for ever.  But I
believe he only did it because they were easy, and didn't want any
features.

He was very honourable, Traddles was, and held it as a solemn duty
in the boys to stand by one another.  He suffered for this on
several occasions; and particularly once, when Steerforth laughed
in church, and the Beadle thought it was Traddles, and took him
out.  I see him now, going away in custody, despised by the
congregation.  He never said who was the real offender, though he
smarted for it next day, and was imprisoned so many hours that he
came forth with a whole churchyard-full of skeletons swarming all
over his Latin Dictionary.  But he had his reward.  Steerforth said
there was nothing of the sneak in Traddles, and we all felt that to
be the highest praise.  For my part, I could have gone through a
good deal (though I was much less brave than Traddles, and nothing
like so old) to have won such a recompense.

To see Steerforth walk to church before us, arm-in-arm with Miss
Creakle, was one of the great sights of my life.  I didn't think
Miss Creakle equal to little Em'ly in point of beauty, and I didn't
love her (I didn't dare); but I thought her a young lady of
extraordinary attractions, and in point of gentility not to be
surpassed.  When Steerforth, in white trousers, carried her parasol
for her, I felt proud to know him; and believed that she could not
choose but adore him with all her heart.  Mr. Sharp and Mr. Mell
were both notable personages in my eyes; but Steerforth was to them
what the sun was to two stars.

Steerforth continued his protection of me, and proved a very useful
friend; since nobody dared to annoy one whom he honoured with his
countenance.  He couldn't - or at all events he didn't - defend me
from Mr. Creakle, who was very severe with me; but whenever I had
been treated worse than usual, he always told me that I wanted a
little of his pluck, and that he wouldn't have stood it himself;
which I felt he intended for encouragement, and considered to be
very kind of him.  There was one advantage, and only one that I
know of, in Mr. Creakle's severity.  He found my placard in his way
when he came up or down behind the form on which I sat, and wanted
to make a cut at me in passing; for this reason it was soon taken
off, and I saw it no more.

An accidental circumstance cemented the intimacy between Steerforth
and me, in a manner that inspired me with great pride and
satisfaction, though it sometimes led to inconvenience.  It
happened on one occasion, when he was doing me the honour of
talking to me in the playground, that I hazarded the observation
that something or somebody - I forget what now - was like something
or somebody in Peregrine Pickle.  He said nothing at the time; but
when I was going to bed at night, asked me if I had got that book?

I told him no, and explained how it was that I had read it, and all
those other books of which I have made mention.

'And do you recollect them?' Steerforth said.

'Oh yes,' I replied; I had a good memory, and I believed I
recollected them very well.

'Then I tell you what, young Copperfield,' said Steerforth, 'you
shall tell 'em to me.  I can't get to sleep very early at night,
and I generally wake rather early in the morning.  We'll go over
'em one after another.  We'll make some regular Arabian Nights of
it.'

I felt extremely flattered by this arrangement, and we commenced
carrying it into execution that very evening.  What ravages I
committed on my favourite authors in the course of my
interpretation of them, I am not in a condition to say, and should
be very unwilling to know; but I had a profound faith in them, and
I had, to the best of my belief, a simple, earnest manner of
narrating what I did narrate; and these qualities went a long way.

The drawback was, that I was often sleepy at night, or out of
spirits and indisposed to resume the story; and then it was rather
hard work, and it must be done; for to disappoint or to displease
Steerforth was of course out of the question.  In the morning, too,
when I felt weary, and should have enjoyed another hour's repose
very much, it was a tiresome thing to be roused, like the Sultana
Scheherazade, and forced into a long story before the getting-up
bell rang; but Steerforth was resolute; and as he explained to me,
in return, my sums and exercises, and anything in my tasks that was
too hard for me, I was no loser by the transaction.  Let me do
myself justice, however.  I was moved by no interested or selfish
motive, nor was I moved by fear of him.  I admired and loved him,
and his approval was return enough.  It was so precious to me that
I look back on these trifles, now, with an aching heart.

Steerforth was considerate, too; and showed his consideration, in
one particular instance, in an unflinching manner that was a little
tantalizing, I suspect, to poor Traddles and the rest.  Peggotty's
promised letter - what a comfortable letter it was! - arrived
before 'the half' was many weeks old; and with it a cake in a
perfect nest of oranges, and two bottles of cowslip wine.  This
treasure, as in duty bound, I laid at the feet of Steerforth, and
begged him to dispense.

'Now, I'll tell you what, young Copperfield,' said he: 'the wine
shall be kept to wet your whistle when you are story-telling.'

I blushed at the idea, and begged him, in my modesty, not to think
of it.  But he said he had observed I was sometimes hoarse - a
little roopy was his exact expression - and it should be, every
drop, devoted to the purpose he had mentioned.  Accordingly, it was
locked up in his box, and drawn off by himself in a phial, and
administered to me through a piece of quill in the cork, when I was
supposed to be in want of a restorative.  Sometimes, to make it a
more sovereign specific, he was so kind as to squeeze orange juice
into it, or to stir it up with ginger, or dissolve a peppermint
drop in it; and although I cannot assert that the flavour was
improved by these experiments, or that it was exactly the compound
one would have chosen for a stomachic, the last thing at night and
the first thing in the morning, I drank it gratefully and was very
sensible of his attention.

We seem, to me, to have been months over Peregrine, and months more
over the other stories.  The institution never flagged for want of
a story, I am certain; and the wine lasted out almost as well as
the matter.  Poor Traddles - I never think of that boy but with a
strange disposition to laugh, and with tears in my eyes - was a
sort of chorus, in general; and affected to be convulsed with mirth
at the comic parts, and to be overcome with fear when there was any
passage of an alarming character in the narrative.  This rather put
me out, very often.  It was a great jest of his, I recollect, to
pretend that he couldn't keep his teeth from chattering, whenever
mention was made of an Alguazill in connexion with the adventures
of Gil Blas; and I remember that when Gil Blas met the captain of
the robbers in Madrid, this unlucky joker counterfeited such an
ague of terror, that he was overheard by Mr. Creakle, who was
prowling about the passage, and handsomely flogged for disorderly
conduct in the bedroom.
Whatever I had within me that was romantic and dreamy, was
encouraged by so much story-telling in the dark; and in that
respect the pursuit may not have been very profitable to me.  But
the being cherished as a kind of plaything in my room, and the
consciousness that this accomplishment of mine was bruited about
among the boys, and attracted a good deal of notice to me though I
was the youngest there, stimulated me to exertion.  In a school
carried on by sheer cruelty, whether it is presided over by a dunce
or not, there is not likely to be much learnt.  I believe our boys
were, generally, as ignorant a set as any schoolboys in existence;
they were too much troubled and knocked about to learn; they could
no more do that to advantage, than any one can do anything to
advantage in a life of constant misfortune, torment, and worry. 
But my little vanity, and Steerforth's help, urged me on somehow;
and without saving me from much, if anything, in the way of
punishment, made me, for the time I was there, an exception to the
general body, insomuch that I did steadily pick up some crumbs of
knowledge.

In this I was much assisted by Mr. Mell, who had a liking for me
that I am grateful to remember.  It always gave me pain to observe
that Steerforth treated him with systematic disparagement, and
seldom lost an occasion of wounding his feelings, or inducing
others to do so.  This troubled me the more for a long time,
because I had soon told Steerforth, from whom I could no more keep
such a secret, than I could keep a cake or any other tangible
possession, about the two old women Mr. Mell had taken me to see;
and I was always afraid that Steerforth would let it out, and twit
him with it.

We little thought, any one of us, I dare say, when I ate my
breakfast that first morning, and went to sleep under the shadow of
the peacock's feathers to the sound of the flute, what consequences
would come of the introduction into those alms-houses of my
insignificant person.  But the visit had its unforeseen
consequences; and of a serious sort, too, in their way.

One day when Mr. Creakle kept the house from indisposition, which
naturally diffused a lively joy through the school, there was a
good deal of noise in the course of the morning's work.  The great
relief and satisfaction experienced by the boys made them difficult
to manage; and though the dreaded Tungay brought his wooden leg in
twice or thrice, and took notes of the principal offenders' names,
no great impression was made by it, as they were pretty sure of
getting into trouble tomorrow, do what they would, and thought it
wise, no doubt, to enjoy themselves today.

It was, properly, a half-holiday; being Saturday.  But as the noise
in the playground would have disturbed Mr. Creakle, and the weather
was not favourable for going out walking, we were ordered into
school in the afternoon, and set some lighter tasks than usual,
which were made for the occasion.  It was the day of the week on
which Mr. Sharp went out to get his wig curled; so Mr. Mell, who
always did the drudgery, whatever it was, kept school by himself.
If I could associate the idea of a bull or a bear with anyone so
mild as Mr. Mell, I should think of him, in connexion with that
afternoon when the uproar was at its height, as of one of those
animals, baited by a thousand dogs.  I recall him bending his
aching head, supported on his bony hand, over the book on his desk,
and wretchedly endeavouring to get on with his tiresome work,
amidst an uproar that might have made the Speaker of the House of
Commons giddy.  Boys started in and out of their places, playing at
puss in the corner with other boys; there were laughing boys,
singing boys, talking boys, dancing boys, howling boys; boys
shuffled with their feet, boys whirled about him, grinning, making
faces, mimicking him behind his back and before his eyes; mimicking
his poverty, his boots, his coat, his mother, everything belonging
to him that they should have had consideration for.

'Silence!' cried Mr. Mell, suddenly rising up, and striking his
desk with the book.  'What does this mean!  It's impossible to bear
it.  It's maddening.  How can you do it to me, boys?'

It was my book that he struck his desk with; and as I stood beside
him, following his eye as it glanced round the room, I saw the boys
all stop, some suddenly surprised, some half afraid, and some sorry
perhaps.

Steerforth's place was at the bottom of the school, at the opposite
end of the long room.  He was lounging with his back against the
wall, and his hands in his pockets, and looked at Mr. Mell with his
mouth shut up as if he were whistling, when Mr. Mell looked at him.

'Silence, Mr. Steerforth!' said Mr. Mell.

'Silence yourself,' said Steerforth, turning red.  'Whom are you
talking to?'

'Sit down,' said Mr. Mell.

'Sit down yourself,' said Steerforth, 'and mind your business.'

There was a titter, and some applause; but Mr. Mell was so white,
that silence immediately succeeded; and one boy, who had darted out
behind him to imitate his mother again, changed his mind, and
pretended to want a pen mended.

'If you think, Steerforth,' said Mr. Mell, 'that I am not
acquainted with the power you can establish over any mind here' -
he laid his hand, without considering what he did (as I supposed),
upon my head - 'or that I have not observed you, within a few
minutes, urging your juniors on to every sort of outrage against
me, you are mistaken.'

'I don't give myself the trouble of thinking at all about you,'
said Steerforth, coolly; 'so I'm not mistaken, as it happens.'

'And when you make use of your position of favouritism here, sir,'
pursued Mr. Mell, with his lip trembling very much, 'to insult a
gentleman -'

'A what? - where is he?' said Steerforth.

Here somebody cried out, 'Shame, J. Steerforth!  Too bad!'  It was
Traddles; whom Mr. Mell instantly discomfited by bidding him hold
his tongue.

- 'To insult one who is not fortunate in life, sir, and who never
gave you the least offence, and the many reasons for not insulting
whom you are old enough and wise enough to understand,' said Mr.
Mell, with his lips trembling more and more, 'you commit a mean and
base action.  You can sit down or stand up as you please, sir. 
Copperfield, go on.'

'Young Copperfield,' said Steerforth, coming forward up the room,
'stop a bit.  I tell you what, Mr. Mell, once for all.  When you
take the liberty of calling me mean or base, or anything of that
sort, you are an impudent beggar.  You are always a beggar, you
know; but when you do that, you are an impudent beggar.'

I am not clear whether he was going to strike Mr. Mell, or Mr. Mell
was going to strike him, or there was any such intention on either
side.  I saw a rigidity come upon the whole school as if they had
been turned into stone, and found Mr. Creakle in the midst of us,
with Tungay at his side, and Mrs. and Miss Creakle looking in at
the door as if they were frightened.  Mr. Mell, with his elbows on
his desk and his face in his hands, sat, for some moments, quite
still.

'Mr. Mell,' said Mr. Creakle, shaking him by the arm; and his
whisper was so audible now, that Tungay felt it unnecessary to
repeat his words; 'you have not forgotten yourself, I hope?'

'No, sir, no,' returned the Master, showing his face, and shaking
his head, and rubbing his hands in great agitation.  'No, sir.  No. 
I have remembered myself, I - no, Mr. Creakle, I have not forgotten
myself, I - I have remembered myself, sir.  I - I - could wish you
had remembered me a little sooner, Mr. Creakle.  It - it - would
have been more kind, sir, more just, sir.  It would have saved me
something, sir.'

Mr. Creakle, looking hard at Mr. Mell, put his hand on Tungay's
shoulder, and got his feet upon the form close by, and sat upon the
desk.  After still looking hard at Mr. Mell from his throne, as he
shook his head, and rubbed his hands, and remained in the same
state of agitation, Mr. Creakle turned to Steerforth, and said:

'Now, sir, as he don't condescend to tell me, what is this?'

Steerforth evaded the question for a little while; looking in scorn
and anger on his opponent, and remaining silent.  I could not help
thinking even in that interval, I remember, what a noble fellow he
was in appearance, and how homely and plain Mr. Mell looked opposed
to him.

'What did he mean by talking about favourites, then?' said
Steerforth at length.

'Favourites?' repeated Mr. Creakle, with the veins in his forehead
swelling quickly.  'Who talked about favourites?'

'He did,' said Steerforth.

'And pray, what did you mean by that, sir?' demanded Mr. Creakle,
turning angrily on his assistant.

'I meant, Mr. Creakle,' he returned in a low voice, 'as I said;
that no pupil had a right to avail himself of his position of
favouritism to degrade me.'

'To degrade YOU?' said Mr. Creakle.  'My stars!  But give me leave
to ask you, Mr. What's-your-name'; and here Mr. Creakle folded his
arms, cane and all, upon his chest, and made such a knot of his
brows that his little eyes were hardly visible below them;
'whether, when you talk about favourites, you showed proper respect
to me?  To me, sir,' said Mr. Creakle, darting his head at him
suddenly, and drawing it back again, 'the principal of this
establishment, and your employer.'

'It was not judicious, sir, I am willing to admit,' said Mr. Mell. 
'I should not have done so, if I had been cool.'

Here Steerforth struck in.

'Then he said I was mean, and then he said I was base, and then I
called him a beggar.  If I had been cool, perhaps I shouldn't have
called him a beggar.  But I did, and I am ready to take the
consequences of it.'

Without considering, perhaps, whether there were any consequences
to be taken, I felt quite in a glow at this gallant speech.  It
made an impression on the boys too, for there was a low stir among
them, though no one spoke a word.

'I am surprised, Steerforth - although your candour does you
honour,' said Mr. Creakle, 'does you honour, certainly - I am
surprised, Steerforth, I must say, that you should attach such an
epithet to any person employed and paid in Salem House, sir.'

Steerforth gave a short laugh.

'That's not an answer, sir,' said Mr. Creakle, 'to my remark.  I
expect more than that from you, Steerforth.'

If Mr. Mell looked homely, in my eyes, before the handsome boy, it
would be quite impossible to say how homely Mr. Creakle looked.
'Let him deny it,' said Steerforth.

'Deny that he is a beggar, Steerforth?' cried Mr. Creakle.  'Why,
where does he go a-begging?'

'If he is not a beggar himself, his near relation's one,' said
Steerforth.  'It's all the same.'

He glanced at me, and Mr. Mell's hand gently patted me upon the
shoulder.  I looked up with a flush upon my face and remorse in my
heart, but Mr. Mell's eyes were fixed on Steerforth.  He continued
to pat me kindly on the shoulder, but he looked at him.

'Since you expect me, Mr. Creakle, to justify myself,' said
Steerforth, 'and to say what I mean, - what I have to say is, that
his mother lives on charity in an alms-house.'

Mr. Mell still looked at him, and still patted me kindly on the
shoulder, and said to himself, in a whisper, if I heard right:
'Yes, I thought so.'

Mr. Creakle turned to his assistant, with a severe frown and
laboured politeness:

'Now, you hear what this gentleman says, Mr. Mell.  Have the
goodness, if you please, to set him right before the assembled
school.'

'He is right, sir, without correction,' returned Mr. Mell, in the
midst of a dead silence; 'what he has said is true.'

'Be so good then as declare publicly, will you,' said Mr. Creakle,
putting his head on one side, and rolling his eyes round the
school, 'whether it ever came to my knowledge until this moment?'

'I believe not directly,' he returned.

'Why, you know not,' said Mr. Creakle.  'Don't you, man?'

'I apprehend you never supposed my worldly circumstances to be very
good,' replied the assistant.  'You know what my position is, and
always has been, here.'

'I apprehend, if you come to that,' said Mr. Creakle, with his
veins swelling again bigger than ever, 'that you've been in a wrong
position altogether, and mistook this for a charity school.  Mr.
Mell, we'll part, if you please.  The sooner the better.'

'There is no time,' answered Mr. Mell, rising, 'like the present.'

'Sir, to you!' said Mr. Creakle.

'I take my leave of you, Mr. Creakle, and all of you,' said Mr.
Mell, glancing round the room, and again patting me gently on the
shoulders.  'James Steerforth, the best wish I can leave you is
that you may come to be ashamed of what you have done today.  At
present I would prefer to see you anything rather than a friend, to
me, or to anyone in whom I feel an interest.'

Once more he laid his hand upon my shoulder; and then taking his
flute and a few books from his desk, and leaving the key in it for
his successor, he went out of the school, with his property under
his arm.  Mr. Creakle then made a speech, through Tungay, in which
he thanked Steerforth for asserting (though perhaps too warmly) the
independence and respectability of Salem House; and which he wound
up by shaking hands with Steerforth, while we gave three cheers -
I did not quite know what for, but I supposed for Steerforth, and
so joined in them ardently, though I felt miserable.  Mr. Creakle
then caned Tommy Traddles for being discovered in tears, instead of
cheers, on account of Mr. Mell's departure; and went back to his
sofa, or his bed, or wherever he had come from.

We were left to ourselves now, and looked very blank, I recollect,
on one another.  For myself, I felt so much self-reproach and
contrition for my part in what had happened, that nothing would
have enabled me to keep back my tears but the fear that Steerforth,
who often looked at me, I saw, might think it unfriendly - or, I
should rather say, considering our relative ages, and the feeling
with which I regarded him, undutiful - if I showed the emotion
which distressed me.  He was very angry with Traddles, and said he
was glad he had caught it.

Poor Traddles, who had passed the stage of lying with his head upon
the desk, and was relieving himself as usual with a burst of
skeletons, said he didn't care.  Mr. Mell was ill-used.

'Who has ill-used him, you girl?' said Steerforth.

'Why, you have,' returned Traddles.

'What have I done?' said Steerforth.

'What have you done?' retorted Traddles.  'Hurt his feelings, and
lost him his situation.'

'His feelings?' repeated Steerforth disdainfully.  'His feelings
will soon get the better of it, I'll be bound.  His feelings are
not like yours, Miss Traddles.  As to his situation - which was a
precious one, wasn't it? - do you suppose I am not going to write
home, and take care that he gets some money?  Polly?'

We thought this intention very noble in Steerforth, whose mother
was a widow, and rich, and would do almost anything, it was said,
that he asked her.  We were all extremely glad to see Traddles so
put down, and exalted Steerforth to the skies: especially when he
told us, as he condescended to do, that what he had done had been
done expressly for us, and for our cause; and that he had conferred
a great boon upon us by unselfishly doing it.
But I must say that when I was going on with a story in the dark
that night, Mr. Mell's old flute seemed more than once to sound
mournfully in my ears; and that when at last Steerforth was tired,
and I lay down in my bed, I fancied it playing so sorrowfully
somewhere, that I was quite wretched.

I soon forgot him in the contemplation of Steerforth, who, in an
easy amateur way, and without any book (he seemed to me to know
everything by heart), took some of his classes until a new master
was found.  The new master came from a grammar school; and before
he entered on his duties, dined in the parlour one day, to be
introduced to Steerforth.  Steerforth approved of him highly, and
told us he was a Brick.  Without exactly understanding what learned
distinction was meant by this, I respected him greatly for it, and
had no doubt whatever of his superior knowledge: though he never
took the pains with me - not that I was anybody - that Mr. Mell had
taken.

There was only one other event in this half-year, out of the daily
school-life, that made an impression upon me which still survives. 
It survives for many reasons.

One afternoon, when we were all harassed into a state of dire
confusion, and Mr. Creakle was laying about him dreadfully, Tungay
came in, and called out in his usual strong way: 'Visitors for
Copperfield!'

A few words were interchanged between him and Mr. Creakle, as, who
the visitors were, and what room they were to be shown into; and
then I, who had, according to custom, stood up on the announcement
being made, and felt quite faint with astonishment, was told to go
by the back stairs and get a clean frill on, before I repaired to
the dining-room.  These orders I obeyed, in such a flutter and
hurry of my young spirits as I had never known before; and when I
got to the parlour door, and the thought came into my head that it
might be my mother - I had only thought of Mr. or Miss Murdstone
until then - I drew back my hand from the lock, and stopped to have
a sob before I went in.

At first I saw nobody; but feeling a pressure against the door, I
looked round it, and there, to my amazement, were Mr. Peggotty and
Ham, ducking at me with their hats, and squeezing one another
against the wall.  I could not help laughing; but it was much more
in the pleasure of seeing them, than at the appearance they made. 
We shook hands in a very cordial way; and I laughed and laughed,
until I pulled out my pocket-handkerchief and wiped my eyes.

Mr. Peggotty (who never shut his mouth once, I remember, during the
visit) showed great concern when he saw me do this, and nudged Ham
to say something.

'Cheer up, Mas'r Davy bor'!' said Ham, in his simpering way.  'Why,
how you have growed!'

'Am I grown?' I said, drying my eyes.  I was not crying at anything
in particular that I know of; but somehow it made me cry, to see
old friends.

'Growed, Mas'r Davy bor'?  Ain't he growed!' said Ham.

'Ain't he growed!' said Mr. Peggotty.

They made me laugh again by laughing at each other, and then we all
three laughed until I was in danger of crying again.

'Do you know how mama is, Mr. Peggotty?' I said.  'And how my dear,
dear, old Peggotty is?'

'Oncommon,' said Mr. Peggotty.

'And little Em'ly, and Mrs. Gummidge?'

'On - common,' said Mr. Peggotty.

There was a silence.  Mr. Peggotty, to relieve it, took two
prodigious lobsters, and an enormous crab, and a large canvas bag
of shrimps, out of his pockets, and piled them up in Ham's arms.

'You see,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'knowing as you was partial to a
little relish with your wittles when you was along with us, we took
the liberty.  The old Mawther biled 'em, she did.  Mrs. Gummidge
biled 'em.  Yes,' said Mr. Peggotty, slowly, who I thought appeared
to stick to the subject on account of having no other subject
ready, 'Mrs. Gummidge, I do assure you, she biled 'em.'

I expressed my thanks; and Mr. Peggotty, after looking at Ham, who
stood smiling sheepishly over the shellfish, without making any
attempt to help him, said:

'We come, you see, the wind and tide making in our favour, in one
of our Yarmouth lugs to Gravesen'.  My sister she wrote to me the
name of this here place, and wrote to me as if ever I chanced to
come to Gravesen', I was to come over and inquire for Mas'r Davy
and give her dooty, humbly wishing him well and reporting of the
fam'ly as they was oncommon toe-be-sure.  Little Em'ly, you see,
she'll write to my sister when I go back, as I see you and as you
was similarly oncommon, and so we make it quite a merry-
go-rounder.'

I was obliged to consider a little before I understood what Mr.
Peggotty meant by this figure, expressive of a complete circle of
intelligence.  I then thanked him heartily; and said, with a
consciousness of reddening, that I supposed little Em'ly was
altered too, since we used to pick up shells and pebbles on the
beach?

'She's getting to be a woman, that's wot she's getting to be,' said
Mr. Peggotty.  'Ask HIM.'
He meant Ham, who beamed with delight and assent over the bag of
shrimps.

'Her pretty face!' said Mr. Peggotty, with his own shining like a
light.

'Her learning!' said Ham.

'Her writing!' said Mr. Peggotty.  'Why it's as black as jet!  And
so large it is, you might see it anywheres.'

It was perfectly delightful to behold with what enthusiasm Mr.
Peggotty became inspired when he thought of his little favourite. 
He stands before me again, his bluff hairy face irradiating with a
joyful love and pride, for which I can find no description.  His
honest eyes fire up, and sparkle, as if their depths were stirred
by something bright.  His broad chest heaves with pleasure.  His
strong loose hands clench themselves, in his earnestness; and he
emphasizes what he says with a right arm that shows, in my pigmy
view, like a sledge-hammer.

Ham was quite as earnest as he.  I dare say they would have said
much more about her, if they had not been abashed by the unexpected
coming in of Steerforth, who, seeing me in a corner speaking with
two strangers, stopped in a song he was singing, and said: 'I
didn't know you were here, young Copperfield!' (for it was not the
usual visiting room) and crossed by us on his way out.

I am not sure whether it was in the pride of having such a friend
as Steerforth, or in the desire to explain to him how I came to
have such a friend as Mr. Peggotty, that I called to him as he was
going away.  But I said, modestly - Good Heaven, how it all comes
back to me this long time afterwards! -

'Don't go, Steerforth, if you please.  These are two Yarmouth
boatmen - very kind, good people - who are relations of my nurse,
and have come from Gravesend to see me.'

'Aye, aye?' said Steerforth, returning.  'I am glad to see them. 
How are you both?'

There was an ease in his manner - a gay and light manner it was,
but not swaggering - which I still believe to have borne a kind of
enchantment with it.  I still believe him, in virtue of this
carriage, his animal spirits, his delightful voice, his handsome
face and figure, and, for aught I know, of some inborn power of
attraction besides (which I think a few people possess), to have
carried a spell with him to which it was a natural weakness to
yield, and which not many persons could withstand.  I could not but
see how pleased they were with him, and how they seemed to open
their hearts to him in a moment.

'You must let them know at home, if you please, Mr. Peggotty,' I
said, 'when that letter is sent, that Mr. Steerforth is very kind
to me, and that I don't know what I should ever do here without
him.'

'Nonsense!' said Steerforth, laughing.  'You mustn't tell them
anything of the sort.'

'And if Mr. Steerforth ever comes into Norfolk or Suffolk, Mr.
Peggotty,' I said, 'while I am there, you may depend upon it I
shall bring him to Yarmouth, if he will let me, to see your house. 
You never saw such a good house, Steerforth.  It's made out of a
boat!'

'Made out of a boat, is it?' said Steerforth.  'It's the right sort
of a house for such a thorough-built boatman.'

'So 'tis, sir, so 'tis, sir,' said Ham, grinning.  'You're right,
young gen'l'm'n!  Mas'r Davy bor', gen'l'm'n's right.  A thorough-
built boatman!  Hor, hor!  That's what he is, too!'

Mr. Peggotty was no less pleased than his nephew, though his
modesty forbade him to claim a personal compliment so vociferously.

'Well, sir,' he said, bowing and chuckling, and tucking in the ends
of his neckerchief at his breast: 'I thankee, sir, I thankee!  I do
my endeavours in my line of life, sir.'

'The best of men can do no more, Mr. Peggotty,' said Steerforth. 
He had got his name already.

'I'll pound it, it's wot you do yourself, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty,
shaking his head, 'and wot you do well - right well!  I thankee,
sir.  I'm obleeged to you, sir, for your welcoming manner of me. 
I'm rough, sir, but I'm ready - least ways, I hope I'm ready, you
unnerstand.  My house ain't much for to see, sir, but it's hearty
at your service if ever you should come along with Mas'r Davy to
see it.  I'm a reg'lar Dodman, I am,' said Mr. Peggotty, by which
he meant snail, and this was in allusion to his being slow to go,
for he had attempted to go after every sentence, and had somehow or
other come back again; 'but I wish you both well, and I wish you
happy!'

Ham echoed this sentiment, and we parted with them in the heartiest
manner.  I was almost tempted that evening to tell Steerforth about
pretty little Em'ly, but I was too timid of mentioning her name,
and too much afraid of his laughing at me.  I remember that I
thought a good deal, and in an uneasy sort of way, about Mr.
Peggotty having said that she was getting on to be a woman; but I
decided that was nonsense.

We transported the shellfish, or the 'relish' as Mr. Peggotty had
modestly called it, up into our room unobserved, and made a great
supper that evening.  But Traddles couldn't get happily out of it. 
He was too unfortunate even to come through a supper like anybody
else.  He was taken ill in the night - quite prostrate he was - in
consequence of Crab; and after being drugged with black draughts
and blue pills, to an extent which Demple (whose father was a
doctor) said was enough to undermine a horse's constitution,
received a caning and six chapters of Greek Testament for refusing
to confess.

The rest of the half-year is a jumble in my recollection of the
daily strife and struggle of our lives; of the waning summer and
the changing season; of the frosty mornings when we were rung out
of bed, and the cold, cold smell of the dark nights when we were
rung into bed again; of the evening schoolroom dimly lighted and
indifferently warmed, and the morning schoolroom which was nothing
but a great shivering-machine; of the alternation of boiled beef
with roast beef, and boiled mutton with roast mutton; of clods of
bread-and-butter, dog's-eared lesson-books, cracked slates,
tear-blotted copy-books, canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy
Sundays, suet-puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of ink, surrounding
all.

I well remember though, how the distant idea of the holidays, after
seeming for an immense time to be a stationary speck, began to come
towards us, and to grow and grow.  How from counting months, we
came to weeks, and then to days; and how I then began to be afraid
that I should not be sent for and when I learnt from Steerforth
that I had been sent for, and was certainly to go home, had dim
forebodings that I might break my leg first.  How the breaking-up
day changed its place fast, at last, from the week after next to
next week, this week, the day after tomorrow, tomorrow, today,
tonight - when I was inside the Yarmouth mail, and going home.

I had many a broken sleep inside the Yarmouth mail, and many an
incoherent dream of all these things.  But when I awoke at
intervals, the ground outside the window was not the playground of
Salem House, and the sound in my ears was not the sound of Mr.
Creakle giving it to Traddles, but the sound of the coachman
touching up the horses.



CHAPTER 8
MY HOLIDAYS.  ESPECIALLY ONE HAPPY AFTERNOON


When we arrived before day at the inn where the mail stopped, which
was not the inn where my friend the waiter lived, I was shown up to
a nice little bedroom, with DOLPHIN painted on the door.  Very cold
I was, I know, notwithstanding the hot tea they had given me before
a large fire downstairs; and very glad I was to turn into the
Dolphin's bed, pull the Dolphin's blankets round my head, and go to
sleep.

Mr. Barkis the carrier was to call for me in the morning at nine
o'clock.  I got up at eight, a little giddy from the shortness of
my night's rest, and was ready for him before the appointed time. 
He received me exactly as if not five minutes had elapsed since we
were last together, and I had only been into the hotel to get
change for sixpence, or something of that sort.

As soon as I and my box were in the cart, and the carrier seated,
the lazy horse walked away with us all at his accustomed pace.

'You look very well, Mr. Barkis,' I said, thinking he would like to
know it.

Mr. Barkis rubbed his cheek with his cuff, and then looked at his
cuff as if he expected to find some of the bloom upon it; but made
no other acknowledgement of the compliment.

'I gave your message, Mr. Barkis,' I said: 'I wrote to Peggotty.'

'Ah!' said Mr. Barkis.

Mr. Barkis seemed gruff, and answered drily.

'Wasn't it right, Mr. Barkis?' I asked, after a little hesitation.

'Why, no,' said Mr. Barkis.

'Not the message?'

'The message was right enough, perhaps,' said Mr. Barkis; 'but it
come to an end there.'

Not understanding what he meant, I repeated inquisitively: 'Came to
an end, Mr. Barkis?'

'Nothing come of it,' he explained, looking at me sideways.  'No
answer.'

'There was an answer expected, was there, Mr. Barkis?' said I,
opening my eyes.  For this was a new light to me.

'When a man says he's willin',' said Mr. Barkis, turning his glance
slowly on me again, 'it's as much as to say, that man's a-waitin'
for a answer.'

'Well, Mr. Barkis?'

'Well,' said Mr. Barkis, carrying his eyes back to his horse's
ears; 'that man's been a-waitin' for a answer ever since.'

'Have you told her so, Mr. Barkis?'

'No - no,' growled Mr. Barkis, reflecting about it.  'I ain't got
no call to go and tell her so.  I never said six words to her
myself, I ain't a-goin' to tell her so.'

'Would you like me to do it, Mr. Barkis?' said I, doubtfully.
'You might tell her, if you would,' said Mr. Barkis, with another
slow look at me, 'that Barkis was a-waitin' for a answer.  Says you
- what name is it?'

'Her name?'

'Ah!' said Mr. Barkis, with a nod of his head.

'Peggotty.'

'Chrisen name?  Or nat'ral name?' said Mr. Barkis.

'Oh, it's not her Christian name.  Her Christian name is Clara.'

'Is it though?' said Mr. Barkis.

He seemed to find an immense fund of reflection in this
circumstance, and sat pondering and inwardly whistling for some
time.

'Well!' he resumed at length.  'Says you, "Peggotty!  Barkis is
waitin' for a answer."  Says she, perhaps, "Answer to what?"  Says
you, "To what I told you."  "What is that?" says she.  "Barkis is
willin'," says you.'

This extremely artful suggestion Mr. Barkis accompanied with a
nudge of his elbow that gave me quite a stitch in my side.  After
that, he slouched over his horse in his usual manner; and made no
other reference to the subject except, half an hour afterwards,
taking a piece of chalk from his pocket, and writing up, inside the
tilt of the cart, 'Clara Peggotty' - apparently as a private
memorandum.

Ah, what a strange feeling it was to be going home when it was not
home, and to find that every object I looked at, reminded me of the
happy old home, which was like a dream I could never dream again!
The days when my mother and I and Peggotty were all in all to one
another, and there was no one to come between us, rose up before me
so sorrowfully on the road, that I am not sure I was glad to be
there - not sure but that I would rather have remained away, and
forgotten it in Steerforth's company.  But there I was; and soon I
was at our house, where the bare old elm-trees wrung their many
hands in the bleak wintry air, and shreds of the old rooks'-nests
drifted away upon the wind.

The carrier put my box down at the garden-gate, and left me.  I
walked along the path towards the house, glancing at the windows,
and fearing at every step to see Mr. Murdstone or Miss Murdstone
lowering out of one of them.  No face appeared, however; and being
come to the house, and knowing how to open the door, before dark,
without knocking, I went in with a quiet, timid step.

God knows how infantine the memory may have been, that was awakened
within me by the sound of my mother's voice in the old parlour,
when I set foot in the hall.  She was singing in a low tone.  I
think I must have lain in her arms, and heard her singing so to me
when I was but a baby.  The strain was new to me, and yet it was so
old that it filled my heart brim-full; like a friend come back from
a long absence.

I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my mother
murmured her song, that she was alone.  And I went softly into the
room.  She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny
hand she held against her neck.  Her eyes were looking down upon
its face, and she sat singing to it.  I was so far right, that she
had no other companion.

I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out.  But seeing me, she
called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the
room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and
laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was
nestling there, and put its hand to my lips.

I wish I had died.  I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my
heart!  I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have
been since.

'He is your brother,' said my mother, fondling me.  'Davy, my
pretty boy!  My poor child!'  Then she kissed me more and more, and
clasped me round the neck.  This she was doing when Peggotty came
running in, and bounced down on the ground beside us, and went mad
about us both for a quarter of an hour.

It seemed that I had not been expected so soon, the carrier being
much before his usual time.  It seemed, too, that Mr. and Miss
Murdstone had gone out upon a visit in the neighbourhood, and would
not return before night.  I had never hoped for this.  I had never
thought it possible that we three could be together undisturbed,
once more; and I felt, for the time, as if the old days were come
back.

We dined together by the fireside.  Peggotty was in attendance to
wait upon us, but my mother wouldn't let her do it, and made her
dine with us.  I had my own old plate, with a brown view of a
man-of-war in full sail upon it, which Peggotty had hoarded
somewhere all the time I had been away, and would not have had
broken, she said, for a hundred pounds.  I had my own old mug with
David on it, and my own old little knife and fork that wouldn't
cut.

While we were at table, I thought it a favourable occasion to tell
Peggotty about Mr. Barkis, who, before I had finished what I had to
tell her, began to laugh, and throw her apron over her face.

'Peggotty,' said my mother.  'What's the matter?'

Peggotty only laughed the more, and held her apron tight over her
face when my mother tried to pull it away, and sat as if her head
were in a bag.

'What are you doing, you stupid creature?' said my mother,
laughing.

'Oh, drat the man!' cried Peggotty.  'He wants to marry me.'

'It would be a very good match for you; wouldn't it?' said my
mother.

'Oh!  I don't know,' said Peggotty.  'Don't ask me.  I wouldn't
have him if he was made of gold.  Nor I wouldn't have anybody.'

'Then, why don't you tell him so, you ridiculous thing?' said my
mother.

'Tell him so,' retorted Peggotty, looking out of her apron.  'He
has never said a word to me about it.  He knows better.  If he was
to make so bold as say a word to me, I should slap his face.'

Her own was as red as ever I saw it, or any other face, I think;
but she only covered it again, for a few moments at a time, when
she was taken with a violent fit of laughter; and after two or
three of those attacks, went on with her dinner.

I remarked that my mother, though she smiled when Peggotty looked
at her, became more serious and thoughtful.  I had seen at first
that she was changed.  Her face was very pretty still, but it
looked careworn, and too delicate; and her hand was so thin and
white that it seemed to me to be almost transparent.  But the
change to which I now refer was superadded to this: it was in her
manner, which became anxious and fluttered.  At last she said,
putting out her hand, and laying it affectionately on the hand of
her old servant,

'Peggotty, dear, you are not going to be married?'

'Me, ma'am?' returned Peggotty, staring.  'Lord bless you, no!'

'Not just yet?' said my mother, tenderly.

'Never!' cried Peggotty.

My mother took her hand, and said:

'Don't leave me, Peggotty.  Stay with me.  It will not be for long,
perhaps.  What should I ever do without you!'

'Me leave you, my precious!' cried Peggotty.  'Not for all the
world and his wife.  Why, what's put that in your silly little
head?' - For Peggotty had been used of old to talk to my mother
sometimes like a child.

But my mother made no answer, except to thank her, and Peggotty
went running on in her own fashion.

'Me leave you?  I think I see myself.  Peggotty go away from you? 
I should like to catch her at it!  No, no, no,' said Peggotty,
shaking her head, and folding her arms; 'not she, my dear.  It
isn't that there ain't some Cats that would be well enough pleased
if she did, but they sha'n't be pleased.  They shall be aggravated. 
I'll stay with you till I am a cross cranky old woman.  And when
I'm too deaf, and too lame, and too blind, and too mumbly for want
of teeth, to be of any use at all, even to be found fault with,
than I shall go to my Davy, and ask him to take me in.'

'And, Peggotty,' says I, 'I shall be glad to see you, and I'll make
you as welcome as a queen.'

'Bless your dear heart!' cried Peggotty.  'I know you will!'  And
she kissed me beforehand, in grateful acknowledgement of my
hospitality.  After that, she covered her head up with her apron
again and had another laugh about Mr. Barkis.  After that, she took
the baby out of its little cradle, and nursed it.  After that, she
cleared the dinner table; after that, came in with another cap on,
and her work-box, and the yard-measure, and the bit of wax-candle,
all just the same as ever.

We sat round the fire, and talked delightfully.  I told them what
a hard master Mr. Creakle was, and they pitied me very much.  I
told them what a fine fellow Steerforth was, and what a patron of
mine, and Peggotty said she would walk a score of miles to see him. 
I took the little baby in my arms when it was awake, and nursed it
lovingly.  When it was asleep again, I crept close to my mother's
side according to my old custom, broken now a long time, and sat
with my arms embracing her waist, and my little red cheek on her
shoulder, and once more felt her beautiful hair drooping over me -
like an angel's wing as I used to think, I recollect - and was very
happy indeed.

While I sat thus, looking at the fire, and seeing pictures in the
red-hot coals, I almost believed that I had never been away; that
Mr. and Miss Murdstone were such pictures, and would vanish when
the fire got low; and that there was nothing real in all that I
remembered, save my mother, Peggotty, and I.

Peggotty darned away at a stocking as long as she could see, and
then sat with it drawn on her left hand like a glove, and her
needle in her right, ready to take another stitch whenever there
was a blaze.  I cannot conceive whose stockings they can have been
that Peggotty was always darning, or where such an unfailing supply
of stockings in want of darning can have come from.  From my
earliest infancy she seems to have been always employed in that
class of needlework, and never by any chance in any other.

'I wonder,' said Peggotty, who was sometimes seized with a fit of
wondering on some most unexpected topic, 'what's become of Davy's
great-aunt?'
'Lor, Peggotty!' observed my mother, rousing herself from a
reverie, 'what nonsense you talk!'

'Well, but I really do wonder, ma'am,' said Peggotty.

'What can have put such a person in your head?' inquired my mother. 
'Is there nobody else in the world to come there?'

'I don't know how it is,' said Peggotty, 'unless it's on account of
being stupid, but my head never can pick and choose its people. 
They come and they go, and they don't come and they don't go, just
as they like.  I wonder what's become of her?'

'How absurd you are, Peggotty!' returned my mother.  'One would
suppose you wanted a second visit from her.'

'Lord forbid!' cried Peggotty.

'Well then, don't talk about such uncomfortable things, there's a
good soul,' said my mother.  'Miss Betsey is shut up in her cottage
by the sea, no doubt, and will remain there.  At all events, she is
not likely ever to trouble us again.'

'No!' mused Peggotty.  'No, that ain't likely at all.  - I wonder,
if she was to die, whether she'd leave Davy anything?'

'Good gracious me, Peggotty,' returned my mother, 'what a
nonsensical woman you are! when you know that she took offence at
the poor dear boy's ever being born at all.'

'I suppose she wouldn't be inclined to forgive him now,' hinted
Peggotty.

'Why should she be inclined to forgive him now?' said my mother,
rather sharply.

'Now that he's got a brother, I mean,' said Peggotty.

MY mother immediately began to cry, and wondered how Peggotty dared
to say such a thing.

'As if this poor little innocent in its cradle had ever done any
harm to you or anybody else, you jealous thing!' said she.  'You
had much better go and marry Mr. Barkis, the carrier.  Why don't
you?'

'I should make Miss Murdstone happy, if I was to,' said Peggotty.

'What a bad disposition you have, Peggotty!' returned my mother. 
'You are as jealous of Miss Murdstone as it is possible for a
ridiculous creature to be.  You want to keep the keys yourself, and
give out all the things, I suppose?  I shouldn't be surprised if
you did.  When you know that she only does it out of kindness and
the best intentions!  You know she does, Peggotty - you know it
well.'

Peggotty muttered something to the effect of 'Bother the best
intentions!' and something else to the effect that there was a
little too much of the best intentions going on.

'I know what you mean, you cross thing,' said my mother.  'I
understand you, Peggotty, perfectly.  You know I do, and I wonder
you don't colour up like fire.  But one point at a time.  Miss
Murdstone is the point now, Peggotty, and you sha'n't escape from
it.  Haven't you heard her say, over and over again, that she
thinks I am too thoughtless and too - a - a -'

'Pretty,' suggested Peggotty.

'Well,' returned my mother, half laughing, 'and if she is so silly
as to say so, can I be blamed for it?'

'No one says you can,' said Peggotty.

'No, I should hope not, indeed!' returned my mother.  'Haven't you
heard her say, over and over again, that on this account she wished
to spare me a great deal of trouble, which she thinks I am not
suited for, and which I really don't know myself that I AM suited
for; and isn't she up early and late, and going to and fro
continually - and doesn't she do all sorts of things, and grope
into all sorts of places, coal-holes and pantries and I don't know
where, that can't be very agreeable - and do you mean to insinuate
that there is not a sort of devotion in that?'

'I don't insinuate at all,' said Peggotty.

'You do, Peggotty,' returned my mother.  'You never do anything
else, except your work.  You are always insinuating.  You revel in
it.  And when you talk of Mr. Murdstone's good intentions -'

'I never talked of 'em,' said Peggotty.

'No, Peggotty,' returned my mother, 'but you insinuated.  That's
what I told you just now.  That's the worst of you.  You WILL
insinuate.  I said, at the moment, that I understood you, and you
see I did.  When you talk of Mr. Murdstone's good intentions, and
pretend to slight them (for I don't believe you really do, in your
heart, Peggotty), you must be as well convinced as I am how good
they are, and how they actuate him in everything.  If he seems to
have been at all stern with a certain person, Peggotty - you
understand, and so I am sure does Davy, that I am not alluding to
anybody present - it is solely because he is satisfied that it is
for a certain person's benefit.  He naturally loves a certain
person, on my account; and acts solely for a certain person's good. 
He is better able to judge of it than I am; for I very well know
that I am a weak, light, girlish creature, and that he is a firm,
grave, serious man.  And he takes,' said my mother, with the tears
which were engendered in her affectionate nature, stealing down her
face, 'he takes great pains with me; and I ought to be very
thankful to him, and very submissive to him even in my thoughts;
and when I am not, Peggotty, I worry and condemn myself, and feel
doubtful of my own heart, and don't know what to do.'

Peggotty sat with her chin on the foot of the stocking, looking
silently at the fire.

'There, Peggotty,' said my mother, changing her tone, 'don't let us
fall out with one another, for I couldn't bear it.  You are my true
friend, I know, if I have any in the world.  When I call you a
ridiculous creature, or a vexatious thing, or anything of that
sort, Peggotty, I only mean that you are my true friend, and always
have been, ever since the night when Mr. Copperfield first brought
me home here, and you came out to the gate to meet me.'

Peggotty was not slow to respond, and ratify the treaty of
friendship by giving me one of her best hugs.  I think I had some
glimpses of the real character of this conversation at the time;
but I am sure, now, that the good creature originated it, and took
her part in it, merely that my mother might comfort herself with
the little contradictory summary in which she had indulged.  The
design was efficacious; for I remember that my mother seemed more
at ease during the rest of the evening, and that Peggotty observed
her less.

When we had had our tea, and the ashes were thrown up, and the
candles snuffed, I read Peggotty a chapter out of the Crocodile
Book, in remembrance of old times - she took it out of her pocket:
I don't know whether she had kept it there ever since - and then we
talked about Salem House, which brought me round again to
Steerforth, who was my great subject.  We were very happy; and that
evening, as the last of its race, and destined evermore to close
that volume of my life, will never pass out of my memory.

It was almost ten o'clock before we heard the sound of wheels.  We
all got up then; and my mother said hurriedly that, as it was so
late, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone approved of early hours for young
people, perhaps I had better go to bed.  I kissed her, and went
upstairs with my candle directly, before they came in.  It appeared
to my childish fancy, as I ascended to the bedroom where I had been
imprisoned, that they brought a cold blast of air into the house
which blew away the old familiar feeling like a feather.

I felt uncomfortable about going down to breakfast in the morning,
as I had never set eyes on Mr. Murdstone since the day when I
committed my memorable offence.  However, as it must be done, I
went down, after two or three false starts half-way, and as many
runs back on tiptoe to my own room, and presented myself in the
parlour.

He was standing before the fire with his back to it, while Miss
Murdstone made the tea.  He looked at me steadily as I entered, but
made no sign of recognition whatever.
I went up to him, after a moment of confusion, and said: 'I beg
your pardon, sir.  I am very sorry for what I did, and I hope you
will forgive me.'

'I am glad to hear you are sorry, David,' he replied.

The hand he gave me was the hand I had bitten.  I could not
restrain my eye from resting for an instant on a red spot upon it;
but it was not so red as I turned, when I met that sinister
expression in his face.

'How do you do, ma'am?' I said to Miss Murdstone.

'Ah, dear me!' sighed Miss Murdstone, giving me the tea-caddy scoop
instead of her fingers.  'How long are the holidays?'

'A month, ma'am.'

'Counting from when?'

'From today, ma'am.'

'Oh!' said Miss Murdstone.  'Then here's one day off.'

She kept a calendar of the holidays in this way, and every morning
checked a day off in exactly the same manner.  She did it gloomily
until she came to ten, but when she got into two figures she became
more hopeful, and, as the time advanced, even jocular.

It was on this very first day that I had the misfortune to throw
her, though she was not subject to such weakness in general, into
a state of violent consternation.  I came into the room where she
and my mother were sitting; and the baby (who was only a few weeks
old) being on my mother's lap, I took it very carefully in my arms. 
Suddenly Miss Murdstone gave such a scream that I all but dropped
it.

'My dear Jane!' cried my mother.

'Good heavens, Clara, do you see?' exclaimed Miss Murdstone.

'See what, my dear Jane?' said my mother; 'where?'

'He's got it!' cried Miss Murdstone.  'The boy has got the baby!'

She was limp with horror; but stiffened herself to make a dart at
me, and take it out of my arms.  Then, she turned faint; and was so
very ill that they were obliged to give her cherry brandy.  I was
solemnly interdicted by her, on her recovery, from touching my
brother any more on any pretence whatever; and my poor mother, who,
I could see, wished otherwise, meekly confirmed the interdict, by
saying: 'No doubt you are right, my dear Jane.'

On another occasion, when we three were together, this same dear
baby - it was truly dear to me, for our mother's sake - was the
innocent occasion of Miss Murdstone's going into a passion.  My
mother, who had been looking at its eyes as it lay upon her lap,
said:

'Davy! come here!' and looked at mine.

I saw Miss Murdstone lay her beads down.

'I declare,' said my mother, gently, 'they are exactly alike.  I
suppose they are mine.  I think they are the colour of mine.  But
they are wonderfully alike.'

'What are you talking about, Clara?' said Miss Murdstone.

'My dear Jane,' faltered my mother, a little abashed by the harsh
tone of this inquiry, 'I find that the baby's eyes and Davy's are
exactly alike.'

'Clara!' said Miss Murdstone, rising angrily, 'you are a positive
fool sometimes.'

'My dear Jane,' remonstrated my mother.

'A positive fool,' said Miss Murdstone.  'Who else could compare my
brother's baby with your boy?  They are not at all alike.  They are
exactly unlike.  They are utterly dissimilar in all respects.  I
hope they will ever remain so.  I will not sit here, and hear such
comparisons made.'  With that she stalked out, and made the door
bang after her.

In short, I was not a favourite with Miss Murdstone.  In short, I
was not a favourite there with anybody, not even with myself; for
those who did like me could not show it, and those who did not,
showed it so plainly that I had a sensitive consciousness of always
appearing constrained, boorish, and dull.

I felt that I made them as uncomfortable as they made me.  If I
came into the room where they were, and they were talking together
and my mother seemed cheerful, an anxious cloud would steal over
her face from the moment of my entrance.  If Mr. Murdstone were in
his best humour, I checked him.  If Miss Murdstone were in her
worst, I intensified it.  I had perception enough to know that my
mother was the victim always; that she was afraid to speak to me or
to be kind to me, lest she should give them some offence by her
manner of doing so, and receive a lecture afterwards; that she was
not only ceaselessly afraid of her own offending, but of my
offending, and uneasily watched their looks if I only moved. 
Therefore I resolved to keep myself as much out of their way as I
could; and many a wintry hour did I hear the church clock strike,
when I was sitting in my cheerless bedroom, wrapped in my little
great-coat, poring over a book.

In the evening, sometimes, I went and sat with Peggotty in the
kitchen.  There I was comfortable, and not afraid of being myself. 
But neither of these resources was approved of in the parlour.  The
tormenting humour which was dominant there stopped them both.  I
was still held to be necessary to my poor mother's training, and,
as one of her trials, could not be suffered to absent myself.

'David,' said Mr. Murdstone, one day after dinner when I was going
to leave the room as usual; 'I am sorry to observe that you are of
a sullen disposition.'

'As sulky as a bear!' said Miss Murdstone.

I stood still, and hung my head.

'Now, David,' said Mr. Murdstone, 'a sullen obdurate disposition
is, of all tempers, the worst.'

'And the boy's is, of all such dispositions that ever I have seen,'
remarked his sister, 'the most confirmed and stubborn.  I think, my
dear Clara, even you must observe it?'

'I beg your pardon, my dear Jane,' said my mother, 'but are you
quite sure - I am certain you'll excuse me, my dear Jane - that you
understand Davy?'

'I should be somewhat ashamed of myself, Clara,' returned Miss
Murdstone, 'if I could not understand the boy, or any boy.  I don't
profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.'

'No doubt, my dear Jane,' returned my mother, 'your understanding
is very vigorous -'

'Oh dear, no!  Pray don't say that, Clara,' interposed Miss
Murdstone, angrily.

'But I am sure it is,' resumed my mother; 'and everybody knows it
is.  I profit so much by it myself, in many ways - at least I ought
to - that no one can be more convinced of it than myself; and
therefore I speak with great diffidence, my dear Jane, I assure
you.'

'We'll say I don't understand the boy, Clara,' returned Miss
Murdstone, arranging the little fetters on her wrists.  'We'll
agree, if you please, that I don't understand him at all.  He is
much too deep for me.  But perhaps my brother's penetration may
enable him to have some insight into his character.  And I believe
my brother was speaking on the subject when we - not very decently
- interrupted him.'

'I think, Clara,' said Mr. Murdstone, in a low grave voice, 'that
there may be better and more dispassionate judges of such a
question than you.'

'Edward,' replied my mother, timidly, 'you are a far better judge
of all questions than I pretend to be.  Both you and Jane are.  I
only said -'

'You only said something weak and inconsiderate,' he replied.  'Try
not to do it again, my dear Clara, and keep a watch upon yourself.'

MY mother's lips moved, as if she answered 'Yes, my dear Edward,'
but she said nothing aloud.

'I was sorry, David, I remarked,' said Mr. Murdstone, turning his
head and his eyes stiffly towards me, 'to observe that you are of
a sullen disposition.  This is not a character that I can suffer to
develop itself beneath my eyes without an effort at improvement. 
You must endeavour, sir, to change it.  We must endeavour to change
it for you.'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' I faltered.  'I have never meant to be
sullen since I came back.'

'Don't take refuge in a lie, sir!' he returned so fiercely, that I
saw my mother involuntarily put out her trembling hand as if to
interpose between us.  'You have withdrawn yourself in your
sullenness to your own room.  You have kept your own room when you
ought to have been here.  You know now, once for all, that I
require you to be here, and not there.  Further, that I require you
to bring obedience here.  You know me, David.  I will have it
done.'

Miss Murdstone gave a hoarse chuckle.

'I will have a respectful, prompt, and ready bearing towards
myself,' he continued, 'and towards Jane Murdstone, and towards
your mother.  I will not have this room shunned as if it were
infected, at the pleasure of a child.  Sit down.'

He ordered me like a dog, and I obeyed like a dog.

'One thing more,' he said.  'I observe that you have an attachment
to low and common company.  You are not to associate with servants. 
The kitchen will not improve you, in the many respects in which you
need improvement.  Of the woman who abets you, I say nothing -
since you, Clara,' addressing my mother in a lower voice, 'from old
associations and long-established fancies, have a weakness
respecting her which is not yet overcome.'

'A most unaccountable delusion it is!' cried Miss Murdstone.

'I only say,' he resumed, addressing me, 'that I disapprove of your
preferring such company as Mistress Peggotty, and that it is to be
abandoned.  Now, David, you understand me, and you know what will
be the consequence if you fail to obey me to the letter.'

I knew well - better perhaps than he thought, as far as my poor
mother was concerned - and I obeyed him to the letter.  I retreated
to my own room no more; I took refuge with Peggotty no more; but
sat wearily in the parlour day after day, looking forward to night,
and bedtime.

What irksome constraint I underwent, sitting in the same attitude
hours upon hours, afraid to move an arm or a leg lest Miss
Murdstone should complain (as she did on the least pretence) of my
restlessness, and afraid to move an eye lest she should light on
some look of dislike or scrutiny that would find new cause for
complaint in mine!  What intolerable dulness to sit listening to
the ticking of the clock; and watching Miss Murdstone's little
shiny steel beads as she strung them; and wondering whether she
would ever be married, and if so, to what sort of unhappy man; and
counting the divisions in the moulding of the chimney-piece; and
wandering away, with my eyes, to the ceiling, among the curls and
corkscrews in the paper on the wall!

What walks I took alone, down muddy lanes, in the bad winter
weather, carrying that parlour, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone in it,
everywhere: a monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare
that there was no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded
on my wits, and blunted them!

What meals I had in silence and embarrassment, always feeling that
there were a knife and fork too many, and that mine; an appetite
too many, and that mine; a plate and chair too many, and those
mine; a somebody too many, and that I!

What evenings, when the candles came, and I was expected to employ
myself, but, not daring to read an entertaining book, pored over
some hard-headed, harder-hearted treatise on arithmetic; when the
tables of weights and measures set themselves to tunes, as 'Rule
Britannia', or 'Away with Melancholy'; when they wouldn't stand
still to be learnt, but would go threading my grandmother's needle
through my unfortunate head, in at one ear and out at the other! 
What yawns and dozes I lapsed into, in spite of all my care; what
starts I came out of concealed sleeps with; what answers I never
got, to little observations that I rarely made; what a blank space
I seemed, which everybody overlooked, and yet was in everybody's
way; what a heavy relief it was to hear Miss Murdstone hail the
first stroke of nine at night, and order me to bed!

Thus the holidays lagged away, until the morning came when Miss
Murdstone said: 'Here's the last day off!' and gave me the closing
cup of tea of the vacation.

I was not sorry to go.  I had lapsed into a stupid state; but I was
recovering a little and looking forward to Steerforth, albeit Mr.
Creakle loomed behind him.  Again Mr. Barkis appeared at the gate,
and again Miss Murdstone in her warning voice, said: 'Clara!' when
my mother bent over me, to bid me farewell.

I kissed her, and my baby brother, and was very sorry then; but not
sorry to go away, for the gulf between us was there, and the
parting was there, every day.  And it is not so much the embrace
she gave me, that lives in my mind, though it was as fervent as
could be, as what followed the embrace.

I was in the carrier's cart when I heard her calling to me.  I
looked out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding her
baby up in her arms for me to see.  It was cold still weather; and
not a hair of her head, nor a fold of her dress, was stirred, as
she looked intently at me, holding up her child.

So I lost her.  So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at school - a
silent presence near my bed - looking at me with the same intent
face - holding up her baby in her arms.



CHAPTER 9
I HAVE A MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY


I PASS over all that happened at school, until the anniversary of
my birthday came round in March.  Except that Steerforth was more
to be admired than ever, I remember nothing.  He was going away at
the end of the half-year, if not sooner, and was more spirited and
independent than before in my eyes, and therefore more engaging
than before; but beyond this I remember nothing.  The great
remembrance by which that time is marked in my mind, seems to have
swallowed up all lesser recollections, and to exist alone.

It is even difficult for me to believe that there was a gap of full
two months between my return to Salem House and the arrival of that
birthday.  I can only understand that the fact was so, because I
know it must have been so; otherwise I should feel convinced that
there was no interval, and that the one occasion trod upon the
other's heels.

How well I recollect the kind of day it was!  I smell the fog that
hung about the place; I see the hoar frost, ghostly, through it; I
feel my rimy hair fall clammy on my cheek; I look along the dim
perspective of the schoolroom, with a sputtering candle here and
there to light up the foggy morning, and the breath of the boys
wreathing and smoking in the raw cold as they blow upon their
fingers, and tap their feet upon the floor.  It was after
breakfast, and we had been summoned in from the playground, when
Mr. Sharp entered and said:

'David Copperfield is to go into the parlour.'

I expected a hamper from Peggotty, and brightened at the order. 
Some of the boys about me put in their claim not to be forgotten in
the distribution of the good things, as I got out of my seat with
great alacrity.

'Don't hurry, David,' said Mr. Sharp.  'There's time enough, my
boy, don't hurry.'

I might have been surprised by the feeling tone in which he spoke,
if I had given it a thought; but I gave it none until afterwards. 
I hurried away to the parlour; and there I found Mr. Creakle,
sitting at his breakfast with the cane and a newspaper before him,
and Mrs. Creakle with an opened letter in her hand.  But no hamper.

'David Copperfield,' said Mrs. Creakle, leading me to a sofa, and
sitting down beside me.  'I want to speak to you very particularly. 
I have something to tell you, my child.'

Mr. Creakle, at whom of course I looked, shook his head without
looking at me, and stopped up a sigh with a very large piece of
buttered toast.

'You are too young to know how the world changes every day,' said
Mrs. Creakle, 'and how the people in it pass away.  But we all have
to learn it, David; some of us when we are young, some of us when
we are old, some of us at all times of our lives.'

I looked at her earnestly.

'When you came away from home at the end of the vacation,' said
Mrs. Creakle, after a pause, 'were they all well?'  After another
pause, 'Was your mama well?'

I trembled without distinctly knowing why, and still looked at her
earnestly, making no attempt to answer.

'Because,' said she, 'I grieve to tell you that I hear this morning
your mama is very ill.'

A mist rose between Mrs. Creakle and me, and her figure seemed to
move in it for an instant.  Then I felt the burning tears run down
my face, and it was steady again.

'She is very dangerously ill,' she added.

I knew all now.

'She is dead.'

There was no need to tell me so.  I had already broken out into a
desolate cry, and felt an orphan in the wide world.

She was very kind to me.  She kept me there all day, and left me
alone sometimes; and I cried, and wore myself to sleep, and awoke
and cried again.  When I could cry no more, I began to think; and
then the oppression on my breast was heaviest, and my grief a dull
pain that there was no ease for.

And yet my thoughts were idle; not intent on the calamity that
weighed upon my heart, but idly loitering near it.  I thought of
our house shut up and hushed.  I thought of the little baby, who,
Mrs. Creakle said, had been pining away for some time, and who,
they believed, would die too.  I thought of my father's grave in
the churchyard, by our house, and of my mother lying there beneath
the tree I knew so well.  I stood upon a chair when I was left
alone, and looked into the glass to see how red my eyes were, and
how sorrowful my face.  I considered, after some hours were gone,
if my tears were really hard to flow now, as they seemed to be,
what, in connexion with my loss, it would affect me most to think
of when I drew near home - for I was going home to the funeral.  I
am sensible of having felt that a dignity attached to me among the
rest of the boys, and that I was important in my affliction.

If ever child were stricken with sincere grief, I was.  But I
remember that this importance was a kind of satisfaction to me,
when I walked in the playground that afternoon while the boys were
in school.  When I saw them glancing at me out of the windows, as
they went up to their classes, I felt distinguished, and looked
more melancholy, and walked slower.  When school was over, and they
came out and spoke to me, I felt it rather good in myself not to be
proud to any of them, and to take exactly the same notice of them
all, as before.

I was to go home next night; not by the mail, but by the heavy
night-coach, which was called the Farmer, and was principally used
by country-people travelling short intermediate distances upon the
road.  We had no story-telling that evening, and Traddles insisted
on lending me his pillow.  I don't know what good he thought it
would do me, for I had one of my own: but it was all he had to
lend, poor fellow, except a sheet of letter-paper full of
skeletons; and that he gave me at parting, as a soother of my
sorrows and a contribution to my peace of mind.

I left Salem House upon the morrow afternoon.  I little thought
then that I left it, never to return.  We travelled very slowly all
night, and did not get into Yarmouth before nine or ten o'clock in
the morning.  I looked out for Mr. Barkis, but he was not there;
and instead of him a fat, short-winded, merry-looking, little old
man in black, with rusty little bunches of ribbons at the knees of
his breeches, black stockings, and a broad-brimmed hat, came
puffing up to the coach window, and said:

'Master Copperfield?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Will you come with me, young sir, if you please,' he said, opening
the door, 'and I shall have the pleasure of taking you home.'

I put my hand in his, wondering who he was, and we walked away to
a shop in a narrow street, on which was written OMER, DRAPER,
TAILOR, HABERDASHER, FUNERAL FURNISHER, &c.  It was a close and
stifling little shop; full of all sorts of clothing, made and
unmade, including one window full of beaver-hats and bonnets.  We
went into a little back-parlour behind the shop, where we found
three young women at work on a quantity of black materials, which
were heaped upon the table, and little bits and cuttings of which
were littered all over the floor.  There was a good fire in the
room, and a breathless smell of warm black crape - I did not know
what the smell was then, but I know now.

The three young women, who appeared to be very industrious and
comfortable, raised their heads to look at me, and then went on
with their work.  Stitch, stitch, stitch.  At the same time there
came from a workshop across a little yard outside the window, a
regular sound of hammering that kept a kind of tune: RAT - tat-tat,
RAT - tat-tat, RAT - tat-tat, without any variation.

'Well,' said my conductor to one of the three young women.  'How do
you get on, Minnie?'

'We shall be ready by the trying-on time,' she replied gaily,
without looking up.  'Don't you be afraid, father.'

Mr. Omer took off his broad-brimmed hat, and sat down and panted. 
He was so fat that he was obliged to pant some time before he could
say:

'That's right.'

'Father!' said Minnie, playfully.  'What a porpoise you do grow!'

'Well, I don't know how it is, my dear,' he replied, considering
about it.  'I am rather so.'

'You are such a comfortable man, you see,' said Minnie.  'You take
things so easy.'

'No use taking 'em otherwise, my dear,' said Mr. Omer.

'No, indeed,' returned his daughter.  'We are all pretty gay here,
thank Heaven!  Ain't we, father?'

'I hope so, my dear,' said Mr. Omer.  'As I have got my breath now,
I think I'll measure this young scholar.  Would you walk into the
shop, Master Copperfield?'

I preceded Mr. Omer, in compliance with his request; and after
showing me a roll of cloth which he said was extra super, and too
good mourning for anything short of parents, he took my various
dimensions, and put them down in a book.  While he was recording
them he called my attention to his stock in trade, and to certain
fashions which he said had 'just come up', and to certain other
fashions which he said had 'just gone out'.

'And by that sort of thing we very often lose a little mint of
money,' said Mr. Omer.  'But fashions are like human beings.  They
come in, nobody knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody
knows when, why, or how.  Everything is like life, in my opinion,
if you look at it in that point of view.'

I was too sorrowful to discuss the question, which would possibly
have been beyond me under any circumstances; and Mr. Omer took me
back into the parlour, breathing with some difficulty on the way.

He then called down a little break-neck range of steps behind a
door: 'Bring up that tea and bread-and-butter!' which, after some
time, during which I sat looking about me and thinking, and
listening to the stitching in the room and the tune that was being
hammered across the yard, appeared on a tray, and turned out to be
for me.

'I have been acquainted with you,' said Mr. Omer, after watching me
for some minutes, during which I had not made much impression on
the breakfast, for the black things destroyed my appetite, 'I have
been acquainted with you a long time, my young friend.'

'Have you, sir?'

'All your life,' said Mr. Omer.  'I may say before it.  I knew your
father before you.  He was five foot nine and a half, and he lays
in five-and-twen-ty foot of ground.'

'RAT - tat-tat, RAT - tat-tat, RAT - tat-tat,' across the yard.

'He lays in five and twen-ty foot of ground, if he lays in a
fraction,' said Mr. Omer, pleasantly.  'It was either his request
or her direction, I forget which.'

'Do you know how my little brother is, sir?' I inquired.

Mr. Omer shook his head.

'RAT - tat-tat, RAT - tat-tat, RAT - tat-tat.'

'He is in his mother's arms,' said he.

'Oh, poor little fellow!  Is he dead?'

'Don't mind it more than you can help,' said Mr. Omer.  'Yes.  The
baby's dead.'

My wounds broke out afresh at this intelligence.  I left the
scarcely-tasted breakfast, and went and rested my head on another
table, in a corner of the little room, which Minnie hastily
cleared, lest I should spot the mourning that was lying there with
my tears.  She was a pretty, good-natured girl, and put my hair
away from my eyes with a soft, kind touch; but she was very
cheerful at having nearly finished her work and being in good time,
and was so different from me!

Presently the tune left off, and a good-looking young fellow came
across the yard into the room.  He had a hammer in his hand, and
his mouth was full of little nails, which he was obliged to take
out before he could speak.

'Well, Joram!' said Mr. Omer.  'How do you get on?'

'All right,' said Joram.  'Done, sir.'

Minnie coloured a little, and the other two girls smiled at one
another.

'What! you were at it by candle-light last night, when I was at the
club, then?  Were you?' said Mr. Omer, shutting up one eye.

'Yes,' said Joram.  'As you said we could make a little trip of it,
and go over together, if it was done, Minnie and me - and you.'

'Oh!  I thought you were going to leave me out altogether,' said
Mr. Omer, laughing till he coughed.

'- As you was so good as to say that,' resumed the young man, 'why
I turned to with a will, you see.  Will you give me your opinion of
it?'

'I will,' said Mr. Omer, rising.  'My dear'; and he stopped and
turned to me: 'would you like to see your -'

'No, father,' Minnie interposed.

'I thought it might be agreeable, my dear,' said Mr. Omer.  'But
perhaps you're right.'

I can't say how I knew it was my dear, dear mother's coffin that
they went to look at.  I had never heard one making; I had never
seen one that I know of.- but it came into my mind what the noise
was, while it was going on; and when the young man entered, I am
sure I knew what he had been doing.

The work being now finished, the two girls, whose names I had not
heard, brushed the shreds and threads from their dresses, and went
into the shop to put that to rights, and wait for customers. 
Minnie stayed behind to fold up what they had made, and pack it in
two baskets.  This she did upon her knees, humming a lively little
tune the while.  Joram, who I had no doubt was her lover, came in
and stole a kiss from her while she was busy (he didn't appear to
mind me, at all), and said her father was gone for the chaise, and
he must make haste and get himself ready.  Then he went out again;
and then she put her thimble and scissors in her pocket, and stuck
a needle threaded with black thread neatly in the bosom of her
gown, and put on her outer clothing smartly, at a little glass
behind the door, in which I saw the reflection of her pleased face.

All this I observed, sitting at the table in the corner with my
head leaning on my hand, and my thoughts running on very different
things.  The chaise soon came round to the front of the shop, and
the baskets being put in first, I was put in next, and those three
followed.  I remember it as a kind of half chaise-cart, half
pianoforte-van, painted of a sombre colour, and drawn by a black
horse with a long tail.  There was plenty of room for us all.

I do not think I have ever experienced so strange a feeling in my
life (I am wiser now, perhaps) as that of being with them,
remembering how they had been employed, and seeing them enjoy the
ride.  I was not angry with them; I was more afraid of them, as if
I were cast away among creatures with whom I had no community of
nature.  They were very cheerful.  The old man sat in front to
drive, and the two young people sat behind him, and whenever he
spoke to them leaned forward, the one on one side of his chubby
face and the other on the other, and made a great deal of him. 
They would have talked to me too, but I held back, and moped in my
corner; scared by their love-making and hilarity, though it was far
from boisterous, and almost wondering that no judgement came upon
them for their hardness of heart.

So, when they stopped to bait the horse, and ate and drank and
enjoyed themselves, I could touch nothing that they touched, but
kept my fast unbroken.  So, when we reached home, I dropped out of
the chaise behind, as quickly as possible, that I might not be in
their company before those solemn windows, looking blindly on me
like closed eyes once bright.  And oh, how little need I had had to
think what would move me to tears when I came back - seeing the
window of my mother's room, and next it that which, in the better
time, was mine!

I was in Peggotty's arms before I got to the door, and she took me
into the house.  Her grief burst out when she first saw me; but she
controlled it soon, and spoke in whispers, and walked softly, as if
the dead could be disturbed.  She had not been in bed, I found, for
a long time.  She sat up at night still, and watched.  As long as
her poor dear pretty was above the ground, she said, she would
never desert her.

Mr. Murdstone took no heed of me when I went into the parlour where
he was, but sat by the fireside, weeping silently, and pondering in
his elbow-chair.  Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk,
which was covered with letters and papers, gave me her cold
finger-nails, and asked me, in an iron whisper, if I had been
measured for my mourning.

I said: 'Yes.'

'And your shirts,' said Miss Murdstone; 'have you brought 'em
home?'

'Yes, ma'am.  I have brought home all my clothes.'

This was all the consolation that her firmness administered to me. 
I do not doubt that she had a choice pleasure in exhibiting what
she called her self-command, and her firmness, and her strength of
mind, and her common sense, and the whole diabolical catalogue of
her unamiable qualities, on such an occasion.  She was particularly
proud of her turn for business; and she showed it now in reducing
everything to pen and ink, and being moved by nothing.  All the
rest of that day, and from morning to night afterwards, she sat at
that desk, scratching composedly with a hard pen, speaking in the
same imperturbable whisper to everybody; never relaxing a muscle of
her face, or softening a tone of her voice, or appearing with an
atom of her dress astray.

Her brother took a book sometimes, but never read it that I saw. 
He would open it and look at it as if he were reading, but would
remain for a whole hour without turning the leaf, and then put it
down and walk to and fro in the room.  I used to sit with folded
hands watching him, and counting his footsteps, hour after hour. 
He very seldom spoke to her, and never to me.  He seemed to be the
only restless thing, except the clocks, in the whole motionless
house.

In these days before the funeral, I saw but little of Peggotty,
except that, in passing up or down stairs, I always found her close
to the room where my mother and her baby lay, and except that she
came to me every night, and sat by my bed's head while I went to
sleep.  A day or two before the burial - I think it was a day or
two before, but I am conscious of confusion in my mind about that
heavy time, with nothing to mark its progress - she took me into
the room.  I only recollect that underneath some white covering on
the bed, with a beautiful cleanliness and freshness all around it,
there seemed to me to lie embodied the solemn stillness that was in
the house; and that when she would have turned the cover gently
back, I cried: 'Oh no!  oh no!' and held her hand.

If the funeral had been yesterday, I could not recollect it better. 
The very air of the best parlour, when I went in at the door, the
bright condition of the fire, the shining of the wine in the
decanters, the patterns of the glasses and plates, the faint sweet
smell of cake, the odour of Miss Murdstone's dress, and our black
clothes.  Mr. Chillip is in the room, and comes to speak to me.

'And how is Master David?' he says, kindly.

I cannot tell him very well.  I give him my hand, which he holds in
his.

'Dear me!' says Mr. Chillip, meekly smiling, with something shining
in his eye.  'Our little friends grow up around us.  They grow out
of our knowledge, ma'am?'  This is to Miss Murdstone, who makes no
reply.

'There is a great improvement here, ma'am?' says Mr. Chillip.

Miss Murdstone merely answers with a frown and a formal bend: Mr.
Chillip, discomfited, goes into a corner, keeping me with him, and
opens his mouth no more.

I remark this, because I remark everything that happens, not
because I care about myself, or have done since I came home.  And
now the bell begins to sound, and Mr. Omer and another come to make
us ready.  As Peggotty was wont to tell me, long ago, the followers
of my father to the same grave were made ready in the same room.

There are Mr. Murdstone, our neighbour Mr. Grayper, Mr. Chillip,
and I.  When we go out to the door, the Bearers and their load are
in the garden; and they move before us down the path, and past the
elms, and through the gate, and into the churchyard, where I have
so often heard the birds sing on a summer morning.

We stand around the grave.  The day seems different to me from
every other day, and the light not of the same colour - of a sadder
colour.  Now there is a solemn hush, which we have brought from
home with what is resting in the mould; and while we stand
bareheaded, I hear the voice of the clergyman, sounding remote in
the open air, and yet distinct and plain, saying: 'I am the
Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord!'  Then I hear sobs; and,
standing apart among the lookers-on, I see that good and faithful
servant, whom of all the people upon earth I love the best, and
unto whom my childish heart is certain that the Lord will one day
say: 'Well done.'

There are many faces that I know, among the little crowd; faces
that I knew in church, when mine was always wondering there; faces
that first saw my mother, when she came to the village in her
youthful bloom.  I do not mind them - I mind nothing but my grief
- and yet I see and know them all; and even in the background, far
away, see Minnie looking on, and her eye glancing on her
sweetheart, who is near me.

It is over, and the earth is filled in, and we turn to come away. 
Before us stands our house, so pretty and unchanged, so linked in
my mind with the young idea of what is gone, that all my sorrow has
been nothing to the sorrow it calls forth.  But they take me on;
and Mr. Chillip talks to me; and when we get home, puts some water
to my lips; and when I ask his leave to go up to my room, dismisses
me with the gentleness of a woman.

All this, I say, is yesterday's event.  Events of later date have
floated from me to the shore where all forgotten things will
reappear, but this stands like a high rock in the ocean.

I knew that Peggotty would come to me in my room.  The Sabbath
stillness of the time (the day was so like Sunday!  I have
forgotten that) was suited to us both.  She sat down by my side
upon my little bed; and holding my hand, and sometimes putting it
to her lips, and sometimes smoothing it with hers, as she might
have comforted my little brother, told me, in her way, all that she
had to tell concerning what had happened.

'She was never well,' said Peggotty, 'for a long time.  She was
uncertain in her mind, and not happy.  When her baby was born, I
thought at first she would get better, but she was more delicate,
and sunk a little every day.  She used to like to sit alone before
her baby came, and then she cried; but afterwards she used to sing
to it - so soft, that I once thought, when I heard her, it was like
a voice up in the air, that was rising away.

'I think she got to be more timid, and more frightened-like, of
late; and that a hard word was like a blow to her.  But she was
always the same to me.  She never changed to her foolish Peggotty,
didn't my sweet girl.'

Here Peggotty stopped, and softly beat upon my hand a little while.

'The last time that I saw her like her own old self, was the night
when you came home, my dear.  The day you went away, she said to
me, "I never shall see my pretty darling again.  Something tells me
so, that tells the truth, I know."

'She tried to hold up after that; and many a time, when they told
her she was thoughtless and light-hearted, made believe to be so;
but it was all a bygone then.  She never told her husband what she
had told me - she was afraid of saying it to anybody else - till
one night, a little more than a week before it happened, when she
said to him: "My dear, I think I am dying."

'"It's off my mind now, Peggotty," she told me, when I laid her in
her bed that night.  "He will believe it more and more, poor
fellow, every day for a few days to come; and then it will be past. 
I am very tired.  If this is sleep, sit by me while I sleep: don't
leave me.  God bless both my children!  God protect and keep my
fatherless boy!"

'I never left her afterwards,' said Peggotty.  'She often talked to
them two downstairs - for she loved them; she couldn't bear not to
love anyone who was about her - but when they went away from her
bed-side, she always turned to me, as if there was rest where
Peggotty was, and never fell asleep in any other way.

'On the last night, in the evening, she kissed me, and said: "If my
baby should die too, Peggotty, please let them lay him in my arms,
and bury us together."  (It was done; for the poor lamb lived but
a day beyond her.) "Let my dearest boy go with us to our
resting-place," she said, "and tell him that his mother, when she
lay here, blessed him not once, but a thousand times."'

Another silence followed this, and another gentle beating on my
hand.

'It was pretty far in the night,' said Peggotty, 'when she asked me
for some drink; and when she had taken it, gave me such a patient
smile, the dear! - so beautiful!

'Daybreak had come, and the sun was rising, when she said to me,
how kind and considerate Mr. Copperfield had always been to her,
and how he had borne with her, and told her, when she doubted
herself, that a loving heart was better and stronger than wisdom,
and that he was a happy man in hers.  "Peggotty, my dear," she said
then, "put me nearer to you," for she was very weak.  "Lay your
good arm underneath my neck," she said, "and turn me to you, for
your face is going far off, and I want it to be near."  I put it as
she asked; and oh Davy! the time had come when my first parting
words to you were true - when she was glad to lay her poor head on
her stupid cross old Peggotty's arm - and she died like a child
that had gone to sleep!'


Thus ended Peggotty's narration.  From the moment of my knowing of
the death of my mother, the idea of her as she had been of late had
vanished from me.  I remembered her, from that instant, only as the
young mother of my earliest impressions, who had been used to wind
her bright curls round and round her finger, and to dance with me
at twilight in the parlour.  What Peggotty had told me now, was so
far from bringing me back to the later period, that it rooted the
earlier image in my mind.  It may be curious, but it is true.  In
her death she winged her way back to her calm untroubled youth, and
cancelled all the rest.

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the
little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed
for ever on her bosom.



CHAPTER 10
I BECOME NEGLECTED, AND AM PROVIDED FOR


The first act of business Miss Murdstone performed when the day of
the solemnity was over, and light was freely admitted into the
house, was to give Peggotty a month's warning.  Much as Peggotty
would have disliked such a service, I believe she would have
retained it, for my sake, in preference to the best upon earth. 
She told me we must part, and told me why; and we condoled with one
another, in all sincerity.

As to me or my future, not a word was said, or a step taken.  Happy
they would have been, I dare say, if they could have dismissed me
at a month's warning too.  I mustered courage once, to ask Miss
Murdstone when I was going back to school; and she answered dryly,
she believed I was not going back at all.  I was told nothing more. 
I was very anxious to know what was going to be done with me, and
so was Peggotty; but neither she nor I could pick up any
information on the subject.

There was one change in my condition, which, while it relieved me
of a great deal of present uneasiness, might have made me, if I had
been capable of considering it closely, yet more uncomfortable
about the future.  It was this.  The constraint that had been put
upon me, was quite abandoned.  I was so far from being required to
keep my dull post in the parlour, that on several occasions, when
I took my seat there, Miss Murdstone frowned to me to go away.  I
was so far from being warned off from Peggotty's society, that,
provided I was not in Mr. Murdstone's, I was never sought out or
inquired for.  At first I was in daily dread of his taking my
education in hand again, or of Miss Murdstone's devoting herself to
it; but I soon began to think that such fears were groundless, and
that all I had to anticipate was neglect.

I do not conceive that this discovery gave me much pain then.  I
was still giddy with the shock of my mother's death, and in a kind
of stunned state as to all tributary things.  I can recollect,
indeed, to have speculated, at odd times, on the possibility of my
not being taught any more, or cared for any more; and growing up to
be a shabby, moody man, lounging an idle life away, about the
village; as well as on the feasibility of my getting rid of this
picture by going away somewhere, like the hero in a story, to seek
my fortune: but these were transient visions, daydreams I sat
looking at sometimes, as if they were faintly painted or written on
the wall of my room, and which, as they melted away, left the wall
blank again.

'Peggotty,' I said in a thoughtful whisper, one evening, when I was
warming my hands at the kitchen fire, 'Mr. Murdstone likes me less
than he used to.  He never liked me much, Peggotty; but he would
rather not even see me now, if he can help it.'

'Perhaps it's his sorrow,' said Peggotty, stroking my hair.

'I am sure, Peggotty, I am sorry too.  If I believed it was his
sorrow, I should not think of it at all.  But it's not that; oh,
no, it's not that.'

'How do you know it's not that?' said Peggotty, after a silence.

'Oh, his sorrow is another and quite a different thing.  He is
sorry at this moment, sitting by the fireside with Miss Murdstone;
but if I was to go in, Peggotty, he would be something besides.'

'What would he be?' said Peggotty.

'Angry,' I answered, with an involuntary imitation of his dark
frown.  'If he was only sorry, he wouldn't look at me as he does. 
I am only sorry, and it makes me feel kinder.'

Peggotty said nothing for a little while; and I warmed my hands, as
silent as she.

'Davy,' she said at length.

'Yes, Peggotty?'
'I have tried, my dear, all ways I could think of - all the ways
there are, and all the ways there ain't, in short - to get a
suitable service here, in Blunderstone; but there's no such a
thing, my love.'

'And what do you mean to do, Peggotty,' says I, wistfully.  'Do you
mean to go and seek your fortune?'

'I expect I shall be forced to go to Yarmouth,' replied Peggotty,
'and live there.'

'You might have gone farther off,' I said, brightening a little,
'and been as bad as lost.  I shall see you sometimes, my dear old
Peggotty, there.  You won't be quite at the other end of the world,
will you?'

'Contrary ways, please God!' cried Peggotty, with great animation. 
'As long as you are here, my pet, I shall come over every week of
my life to see you.  One day, every week of my life!'

I felt a great weight taken off my mind by this promise: but even
this was not all, for Peggotty went on to say:

'I'm a-going, Davy, you see, to my brother's, first, for another
fortnight's visit - just till I have had time to look about me, and
get to be something like myself again.  Now, I have been thinking
that perhaps, as they don't want you here at present, you might be
let to go along with me.'

If anything, short of being in a different relation to every one
about me, Peggotty excepted, could have given me a sense of
pleasure at that time, it would have been this project of all
others.  The idea of being again surrounded by those honest faces,
shining welcome on me; of renewing the peacefulness of the sweet
Sunday morning, when the bells were ringing, the stones dropping in
the water, and the shadowy ships breaking through the mist; of
roaming up and down with little Em'ly, telling her my troubles, and
finding charms against them in the shells and pebbles on the beach;
made a calm in my heart.  It was ruffled next moment, to be sure,
by a doubt of Miss Murdstone's giving her consent; but even that
was set at rest soon, for she came out to take an evening grope in
the store-closet while we were yet in conversation, and Peggotty,
with a boldness that amazed me, broached the topic on the spot.

'The boy will be idle there,' said Miss Murdstone, looking into a
pickle-jar, 'and idleness is the root of all evil.  But, to be
sure, he would be idle here - or anywhere, in my opinion.'

Peggotty had an angry answer ready, I could see; but she swallowed
it for my sake, and remained silent.

'Humph!' said Miss Murdstone, still keeping her eye on the pickles;
'it is of more importance than anything else - it is of paramount
importance - that my brother should not be disturbed or made
uncomfortable.  I suppose I had better say yes.'

I thanked her, without making any demonstration of joy, lest it
should induce her to withdraw her assent.  Nor could I help
thinking this a prudent course, since she looked at me out of the
pickle-jar, with as great an access of sourness as if her black
eyes had absorbed its contents.  However, the permission was given,
and was never retracted; for when the month was out, Peggotty and
I were ready to depart.

Mr. Barkis came into the house for Peggotty's boxes.  I had never
known him to pass the garden-gate before, but on this occasion he
came into the house.  And he gave me a look as he shouldered the
largest box and went out, which I thought had meaning in it, if
meaning could ever be said to find its way into Mr. Barkis's
visage.

Peggotty was naturally in low spirits at leaving what had been her
home so many years, and where the two strong attachments of her
life - for my mother and myself - had been formed.  She had been
walking in the churchyard, too, very early; and she got into the
cart, and sat in it with her handkerchief at her eyes.

So long as she remained in this condition, Mr. Barkis gave no sign
of life whatever.  He sat in his usual place and attitude like a
great stuffed figure.  But when she began to look about her, and to
speak to me, he nodded his head and grinned several times.  I have
not the least notion at whom, or what he meant by it.

'It's a beautiful day, Mr. Barkis!' I said, as an act of
politeness.

'It ain't bad,' said Mr. Barkis, who generally qualified his
speech, and rarely committed himself.

'Peggotty is quite comfortable now, Mr. Barkis,' I remarked, for
his satisfaction.

'Is she, though?' said Mr. Barkis.

After reflecting about it, with a sagacious air, Mr. Barkis eyed
her, and said:

'ARE you pretty comfortable?'

Peggotty laughed, and answered in the affirmative.

'But really and truly, you know.  Are you?' growled Mr. Barkis,
sliding nearer to her on the seat, and nudging her with his elbow. 
'Are you?  Really and truly pretty comfortable?  Are you?  Eh?'

At each of these inquiries Mr. Barkis shuffled nearer to her, and
gave her another nudge; so that at last we were all crowded
together in the left-hand corner of the cart, and I was so squeezed
that I could hardly bear it.

Peggotty calling his attention to my sufferings, Mr. Barkis gave me
a little more room at once, and got away by degrees.  But I could
not help observing that he seemed to think he had hit upon a
wonderful expedient for expressing himself in a neat, agreeable,
and pointed manner, without the inconvenience of inventing
conversation.  He manifestly chuckled over it for some time.  By
and by he turned to Peggotty again, and repeating, 'Are you pretty
comfortable though?' bore down upon us as before, until the breath
was nearly edged out of my body.  By and by he made another descent
upon us with the same inquiry, and the same result.  At length, I
got up whenever I saw him coming, and standing on the foot-board,
pretended to look at the prospect; after which I did very well.

He was so polite as to stop at a public-house, expressly on our
account, and entertain us with broiled mutton and beer.  Even when
Peggotty was in the act of drinking, he was seized with one of
those approaches, and almost choked her.  But as we drew nearer to
the end of our journey, he had more to do and less time for
gallantry; and when we got on Yarmouth pavement, we were all too
much shaken and jolted, I apprehend, to have any leisure for
anything else.

Mr. Peggotty and Ham waited for us at the old place.  They received
me and Peggotty in an affectionate manner, and shook hands with Mr.
Barkis, who, with his hat on the very back of his head, and a
shame-faced leer upon his countenance, and pervading his very legs,
presented but a vacant appearance, I thought.  They each took one
of Peggotty's trunks, and we were going away, when Mr. Barkis
solemnly made a sign to me with his forefinger to come under an
archway.

'I say,' growled Mr. Barkis, 'it was all right.'

I looked up into his face, and answered, with an attempt to be very
profound: 'Oh!'

'It didn't come to a end there,' said Mr. Barkis, nodding
confidentially.  'It was all right.'

Again I answered, 'Oh!'

'You know who was willin',' said my friend.  'It was Barkis, and
Barkis only.'

I nodded assent.

'It's all right,' said Mr. Barkis, shaking hands; 'I'm a friend of
your'n.  You made it all right, first.  It's all right.'

In his attempts to be particularly lucid, Mr. Barkis was so
extremely mysterious, that I might have stood looking in his face
for an hour, and most assuredly should have got as much information
out of it as out of the face of a clock that had stopped, but for
Peggotty's calling me away.  As we were going along, she asked me
what he had said; and I told her he had said it was all right.

'Like his impudence,' said Peggotty, 'but I don't mind that!  Davy
dear, what should you think if I was to think of being married?'

'Why - I suppose you would like me as much then, Peggotty, as you
do now?' I returned, after a little consideration.

Greatly to the astonishment of the passengers in the street, as
well as of her relations going on before, the good soul was obliged
to stop and embrace me on the spot, with many protestations of her
unalterable love.

'Tell me what should you say, darling?' she asked again, when this
was over, and we were walking on.

'If you were thinking of being married - to Mr. Barkis, Peggotty?'

'Yes,' said Peggotty.

'I should think it would be a very good thing.  For then you know,
Peggotty, you would always have the horse and cart to bring you
over to see me, and could come for nothing, and be sure of coming.'

'The sense of the dear!' cried Peggotty.  'What I have been
thinking of, this month back!  Yes, my precious; and I think I
should be more independent altogether, you see; let alone my
working with a better heart in my own house, than I could in
anybody else's now.  I don't know what I might be fit for, now, as
a servant to a stranger.  And I shall be always near my pretty's
resting-place,' said Peggotty, musing, 'and be able to see it when
I like; and when I lie down to rest, I may be laid not far off from
my darling girl!'

We neither of us said anything for a little while.

'But I wouldn't so much as give it another thought,' said Peggotty,
cheerily 'if my Davy was anyways against it - not if I had been
asked in church thirty times three times over, and was wearing out
the ring in my pocket.'

'Look at me, Peggotty,' I replied; 'and see if I am not really
glad, and don't truly wish it!'  As indeed I did, with all my
heart.

'Well, my life,' said Peggotty, giving me a squeeze, 'I have
thought of it night and day, every way I can, and I hope the right
way; but I'll think of it again, and speak to my brother about it,
and in the meantime we'll keep it to ourselves, Davy, you and me. 
Barkis is a good plain creature,' said Peggotty, 'and if I tried to
do my duty by him, I think it would be my fault if I wasn't - if I
wasn't pretty comfortable,' said Peggotty, laughing heartily.
This quotation from Mr. Barkis was so appropriate, and tickled us
both so much, that we laughed again and again, and were quite in a
pleasant humour when we came within view of Mr. Peggotty's cottage.

It looked just the same, except that it may, perhaps, have shrunk
a little in my eyes; and Mrs. Gummidge was waiting at the door as
if she had stood there ever since.  All within was the same, down
to the seaweed in the blue mug in my bedroom.  I went into the
out-house to look about me; and the very same lobsters, crabs, and
crawfish possessed by the same desire to pinch the world in
general, appeared to be in the same state of conglomeration in the

same old corner.

But there was no little Em'ly to be seen, so I asked Mr. Peggotty
where she was.

'She's at school, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty, wiping the heat
consequent on the porterage of Peggotty's box from his forehead;
'she'll be home,' looking at the Dutch clock, 'in from twenty
minutes to half-an-hour's time.  We all on us feel the loss of her,
bless ye!'

Mrs. Gummidge moaned.

'Cheer up, Mawther!' cried Mr. Peggotty.

'I feel it more than anybody else,' said Mrs. Gummidge; 'I'm a lone
lorn creetur', and she used to be a'most the only thing that didn't
go contrary with me.'

Mrs. Gummidge, whimpering and shaking her head, applied herself to
blowing the fire.  Mr. Peggotty, looking round upon us while she
was so engaged, said in a low voice, which he shaded with his hand:
'The old 'un!'  From this I rightly conjectured that no improvement
had taken place since my last visit in the state of Mrs. Gummidge's
spirits.

Now, the whole place was, or it should have been, quite as
delightful a place as ever; and yet it did not impress me in the
same way.  I felt rather disappointed with it.  Perhaps it was
because little Em'ly was not at home.  I knew the way by which she
would come, and presently found myself strolling along the path to
meet her.

A figure appeared in the distance before long, and I soon knew it
to be Em'ly, who was a little creature still in stature, though she
was grown.  But when she drew nearer, and I saw her blue eyes
looking bluer, and her dimpled face looking brighter, and her whole
self prettier and gayer, a curious feeling came over me that made
me pretend not to know her, and pass by as if I were looking at
something a long way off.  I have done such a thing since in later
life, or I am mistaken.

Little Em'ly didn't care a bit.  She saw me well enough; but
instead of turning round and calling after me, ran away laughing. 
This obliged me to run after her, and she ran so fast that we were
very near the cottage before I caught her.

'Oh, it's you, is it?' said little Em'ly.

'Why, you knew who it was, Em'ly,' said I.

'And didn't YOU know who it was?' said Em'ly.  I was going to kiss
her, but she covered her cherry lips with her hands, and said she
wasn't a baby now, and ran away, laughing more than ever, into the
house.

She seemed to delight in teasing me, which was a change in her I
wondered at very much.  The tea table was ready, and our little
locker was put out in its old place, but instead of coming to sit
by me, she went and bestowed her company upon that grumbling Mrs.
Gummidge: and on Mr. Peggotty's inquiring why, rumpled her hair all
over her face to hide it, and could do nothing but laugh.

'A little puss, it is!' said Mr. Peggotty, patting her with his
great hand.

'So sh' is!  so sh' is!' cried Ham.  'Mas'r Davy bor', so sh' is!'
and he sat and chuckled at her for some time, in a state of mingled
admiration and delight, that made his face a burning red.

Little Em'ly was spoiled by them all, in fact; and by no one more
than Mr. Peggotty himself, whom she could have coaxed into
anything, by only going and laying her cheek against his rough
whisker.  That was my opinion, at least, when I saw her do it; and
I held Mr. Peggotty to be thoroughly in the right.  But she was so
affectionate and sweet-natured, and had such a pleasant manner of
being both sly and shy at once, that she captivated me more than
ever.

She was tender-hearted, too; for when, as we sat round the fire
after tea, an allusion was made by Mr. Peggotty over his pipe to
the loss I had sustained, the tears stood in her eyes, and she
looked at me so kindly across the table, that I felt quite thankful
to her.

'Ah!' said Mr. Peggotty, taking up her curls, and running them over
his hand like water, 'here's another orphan, you see, sir.  And
here,' said Mr. Peggotty, giving Ham a backhanded knock in the
chest, 'is another of 'em, though he don't look much like it.'

'If I had you for my guardian, Mr. Peggotty,' said I, shaking my
head, 'I don't think I should FEEL much like it.'

'Well said, Mas'r Davy bor'!' cried Ham, in an ecstasy.  'Hoorah! 
Well said!  Nor more you wouldn't!  Hor!  Hor!' - Here he returned
Mr. Peggotty's back-hander, and little Em'ly got up and kissed Mr.
Peggotty.  'And how's your friend, sir?' said Mr. Peggotty to me.

'Steerforth?' said I.

'That's the name!' cried Mr. Peggotty, turning to Ham.  'I knowed
it was something in our way.'

'You said it was Rudderford,' observed Ham, laughing.

'Well!' retorted Mr. Peggotty.  'And ye steer with a rudder, don't
ye?  It ain't fur off.  How is he, sir?'

'He was very well indeed when I came away, Mr. Peggotty.'

'There's a friend!' said Mr. Peggotty, stretching out his pipe. 
'There's a friend, if you talk of friends!  Why, Lord love my heart
alive, if it ain't a treat to look at him!'

'He is very handsome, is he not?' said I, my heart warming with
this praise.

'Handsome!' cried Mr. Peggotty.  'He stands up to you like - like
a - why I don't know what he don't stand up to you like.  He's so
bold!'

'Yes!  That's just his character,' said I.  'He's as brave as a
lion, and you can't think how frank he is, Mr. Peggotty.'

'And I do suppose, now,' said Mr. Peggotty, looking at me through
the smoke of his pipe, 'that in the way of book-larning he'd take
the wind out of a'most anything.'

'Yes,' said I, delighted; 'he knows everything.  He is
astonishingly clever.'

'There's a friend!' murmured Mr. Peggotty, with a grave toss of his
head.

'Nothing seems to cost him any trouble,' said I.  'He knows a task
if he only looks at it.  He is the best cricketer you ever saw.  He
will give you almost as many men as you like at draughts, and beat
you easily.'

Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say: 'Of
course he will.'

'He is such a speaker,' I pursued, 'that he can win anybody over;
and I don't know what you'd say if you were to hear him sing, Mr.
Peggotty.'

Mr. Peggotty gave his head another toss, as much as to say: 'I have
no doubt of it.'

'Then, he's such a generous, fine, noble fellow,' said I, quite
carried away by my favourite theme, 'that it's hardly possible to
give him as much praise as he deserves.  I am sure I can never feel
thankful enough for the generosity with which he has protected me,
so much younger and lower in the school than himself.'

I was running on, very fast indeed, when my eyes rested on little
Em'ly's face, which was bent forward over the table, listening with
the deepest attention, her breath held, her blue eyes sparkling
like jewels, and the colour mantling in her cheeks.  She looked so
extraordinarily earnest and pretty, that I stopped in a sort of
wonder; and they all observed her at the same time, for as I
stopped, they laughed and looked at her.

'Em'ly is like me,' said Peggotty, 'and would like to see him.'

Em'ly was confused by our all observing her, and hung down her
head, and her face was covered with blushes.  Glancing up presently
through her stray curls, and seeing that we were all looking at her
still (I am sure I, for one, could have looked at her for hours),
she ran away, and kept away till it was nearly bedtime.

I lay down in the old little bed in the stern of the boat, and the
wind came moaning on across the flat as it had done before.  But I
could not help fancying, now, that it moaned of those who were
gone; and instead of thinking that the sea might rise in the night
and float the boat away, I thought of the sea that had risen, since
I last heard those sounds, and drowned my happy home.  I recollect,
as the wind and water began to sound fainter in my ears, putting a
short clause into my prayers, petitioning that I might grow up to
marry little Em'ly, and so dropping lovingly asleep.

The days passed pretty much as they had passed before, except - it
was a great exception- that little Em'ly and I seldom wandered on
the beach now.  She had tasks to learn, and needle-work to do; and
was absent during a great part of each day.  But I felt that we
should not have had those old wanderings, even if it had been
otherwise.  Wild and full of childish whims as Em'ly was, she was
more of a little woman than I had supposed.  She seemed to have got
a great distance away from me, in little more than a year.  She
liked me, but she laughed at me, and tormented me; and when I went
to meet her, stole home another way, and was laughing at the door
when I came back, disappointed.  The best times were when she sat
quietly at work in the doorway, and I sat on the wooden step at her
feet, reading to her.  It seems to me, at this hour, that I have
never seen such sunlight as on those bright April afternoons; that
I have never seen such a sunny little figure as I used to see,
sitting in the doorway of the old boat; that I have never beheld
such sky, such water, such glorified ships sailing away into golden
air.

On the very first evening after our arrival, Mr. Barkis appeared in
an exceedingly vacant and awkward condition, and with a bundle of
oranges tied up in a handkerchief.  As he made no allusion of any
kind to this property, he was supposed to have left it behind him
by accident when he went away; until Ham, running after him to
restore it, came back with the information that it was intended for
Peggotty.  After that occasion he appeared every evening at exactly
the same hour, and always with a little bundle, to which he never
alluded, and which he regularly put behind the door and left there. 
These offerings of affection were of a most various and eccentric
description.  Among them I remember a double set of pigs' trotters,
a huge pin-cushion, half a bushel or so of apples, a pair of jet
earrings, some Spanish onions, a box of dominoes, a canary bird and
cage, and a leg of pickled pork.

Mr. Barkis's wooing, as I remember it, was altogether of a peculiar
kind.  He very seldom said anything; but would sit by the fire in
much the same attitude as he sat in his cart, and stare heavily at
Peggotty, who was opposite.  One night, being, as I suppose,
inspired by love, he made a dart at the bit of wax-candle she kept
for her thread, and put it in his waistcoat-pocket and carried it
off.  After that, his great delight was to produce it when it was
wanted, sticking to the lining of his pocket, in a partially melted
state, and pocket it again when it was done with.  He seemed to
enjoy himself very much, and not to feel at all called upon to
talk.  Even when he took Peggotty out for a walk on the flats, he
had no uneasiness on that head, I believe; contenting himself with
now and then asking her if she was pretty comfortable; and I
remember that sometimes, after he was gone, Peggotty would throw
her apron over her face, and laugh for half-an-hour.  Indeed, we
were all more or less amused, except that miserable Mrs. Gummidge,
whose courtship would appear to have been of an exactly parallel
nature, she was so continually reminded by these transactions of
the old one.

At length, when the term of my visit was nearly expired, it was
given out that Peggotty and Mr. Barkis were going to make a day's
holiday together, and that little Em'ly and I were to accompany
them.  I had but a broken sleep the night before, in anticipation
of the pleasure of a whole day with Em'ly.  We were all astir
betimes in the morning; and while we were yet at breakfast, Mr.
Barkis appeared in the distance, driving a chaise-cart towards the
object of his affections.

Peggotty was dressed as usual, in her neat and quiet mourning; but
Mr. Barkis bloomed in a new blue coat, of which the tailor had
given him such good measure, that the cuffs would have rendered
gloves unnecessary in the coldest weather, while the collar was so
high that it pushed his hair up on end on the top of his head.  His
bright buttons, too, were of the largest size.  Rendered complete
by drab pantaloons and a buff waistcoat, I thought Mr. Barkis a
phenomenon of respectability.

When we were all in a bustle outside the door, I found that Mr.
Peggotty was prepared with an old shoe, which was to be thrown
after us for luck, and which he offered to Mrs. Gummidge for that
purpose.

'No.  It had better be done by somebody else, Dan'l,' said Mrs.
Gummidge.  'I'm a lone lorn creetur' myself, and everythink that
reminds me of creetur's that ain't lone and lorn, goes contrary
with me.'

'Come, old gal!' cried Mr. Peggotty.  'Take and heave it.'

'No, Dan'l,' returned Mrs. Gummidge, whimpering and shaking her
head.  'If I felt less, I could do more.  You don't feel like me,
Dan'l; thinks don't go contrary with you, nor you with them; you
had better do it yourself.'

But here Peggotty, who had been going about from one to another in
a hurried way, kissing everybody, called out from the cart, in
which we all were by this time (Em'ly and I on two little chairs,
side by side), that Mrs. Gummidge must do it.  So Mrs. Gummidge did
it; and, I am sorry to relate, cast a damp upon the festive
character of our departure, by immediately bursting into tears, and
sinking subdued into the arms of Ham, with the declaration that she
knowed she was a burden, and had better be carried to the House at
once.  Which I really thought was a sensible idea, that Ham might
have acted on.

Away we went, however, on our holiday excursion; and the first
thing we did was to stop at a church, where Mr. Barkis tied the
horse to some rails, and went in with Peggotty, leaving little
Em'ly and me alone in the chaise.  I took that occasion to put my
arm round Em'ly's waist, and propose that as I was going away so
very soon now, we should determine to be very affectionate to one
another, and very happy, all day.  Little Em'ly consenting, and
allowing me to kiss her, I became desperate; informing her, I
recollect, that I never could love another, and that I was prepared
to shed the blood of anybody who should aspire to her affections.

How merry little Em'ly made herself about it!  With what a demure
assumption of being immensely older and wiser than I, the fairy
little woman said I was 'a silly boy'; and then laughed so
charmingly that I forgot the pain of being called by that
disparaging name, in the pleasure of looking at her.

Mr. Barkis and Peggotty were a good while in the church, but came
out at last, and then we drove away into the country.  As we were
going along, Mr. Barkis turned to me, and said, with a wink, - by
the by, I should hardly have thought, before, that he could wink:

'What name was it as I wrote up in the cart?'

'Clara Peggotty,' I answered.

'What name would it be as I should write up now, if there was a
tilt here?'

'Clara Peggotty, again?' I suggested.

'Clara Peggotty BARKIS!' he returned, and burst into a roar of
laughter that shook the chaise.

In a word, they were married, and had gone into the church for no
other purpose.  Peggotty was resolved that it should be quietly
done; and the clerk had given her away, and there had been no
witnesses of the ceremony.  She was a little confused when Mr.
Barkis made this abrupt announcement of their union, and could not
hug me enough in token of her unimpaired affection; but she soon
became herself again, and said she was very glad it was over.

We drove to a little inn in a by-road, where we were expected, and
where we had a very comfortable dinner, and passed the day with
great satisfaction.  If Peggotty had been married every day for the
last ten years, she could hardly have been more at her ease about
it; it made no sort of difference in her: she was just the same as
ever, and went out for a stroll with little Em'ly and me before
tea, while Mr. Barkis philosophically smoked his pipe, and enjoyed
himself, I suppose, with the contemplation of his happiness.  If
so, it sharpened his appetite; for I distinctly call to mind that,
although he had eaten a good deal of pork and greens at dinner, and
had finished off with a fowl or two, he was obliged to have cold
boiled bacon for tea, and disposed of a large quantity without any
emotion.

I have often thought, since, what an odd, innocent, out-of-the-way
kind of wedding it must have been!  We got into the chaise again
soon after dark, and drove cosily back, looking up at the stars,
and talking about them.  I was their chief exponent, and opened Mr.
Barkis's mind to an amazing extent.  I told him all I knew, but he
would have believed anything I might have taken it into my head to
impart to him; for he had a profound veneration for my abilities,
and informed his wife in my hearing, on that very occasion, that I
was 'a young Roeshus' - by which I think he meant prodigy.

When we had exhausted the subject of the stars, or rather when I
had exhausted the mental faculties of Mr. Barkis, little Em'ly and
I made a cloak of an old wrapper, and sat under it for the rest of
the journey.  Ah, how I loved her!  What happiness (I thought) if
we were married, and were going away anywhere to live among the
trees and in the fields, never growing older, never growing wiser,
children ever, rambling hand in hand through sunshine and among
flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night, in a sweet
sleep of purity and peace, and buried by the birds when we were
dead!  Some such picture, with no real world in it, bright with the
light of our innocence, and vague as the stars afar off, was in my
mind all the way.  I am glad to think there were two such guileless
hearts at Peggotty's marriage as little Em'ly's and mine.  I am
glad to think the Loves and Graces took such airy forms in its
homely procession.

Well, we came to the old boat again in good time at night; and
there Mr. and Mrs. Barkis bade us good-bye, and drove away snugly
to their own home.  I felt then, for the first time, that I had
lost Peggotty.  I should have gone to bed with a sore heart indeed
under any other roof but that which sheltered little Em'ly's head.

Mr. Peggotty and Ham knew what was in my thoughts as well as I did,
and were ready with some supper and their hospitable faces to drive
it away.  Little Em'ly came and sat beside me on the locker for the
only time in all that visit; and it was altogether a wonderful
close to a wonderful day.

It was a night tide; and soon after we went to bed, Mr. Peggotty
and Ham went out to fish.  I felt very brave at being left alone in
the solitary house, the protector of Em'ly and Mrs. Gummidge, and
only wished that a lion or a serpent, or any ill-disposed monster,
would make an attack upon us, that I might destroy him, and cover
myself with glory.  But as nothing of the sort happened to be
walking about on Yarmouth flats that night, I provided the best
substitute I could by dreaming of dragons until morning.

With morning came Peggotty; who called to me, as usual, under my
window as if Mr. Barkis the carrier had been from first to last a
dream too.  After breakfast she took me to her own home, and a
beautiful little home it was.  Of all the moveables in it, I must
have been impressed by a certain old bureau of some dark wood in
the parlour (the tile-floored kitchen was the general
sitting-room), with a retreating top which opened, let down, and
became a desk, within which was a large quarto edition of Foxe's
Book of Martyrs.  This precious volume, of which I do not recollect
one word, I immediately discovered and immediately applied myself
to; and I never visited the house afterwards, but I kneeled on a
chair, opened the casket where this gem was enshrined, spread my
arms over the desk, and fell to devouring the book afresh.  I was
chiefly edified, I am afraid, by the pictures, which were numerous,
and represented all kinds of dismal horrors; but the Martyrs and
Peggotty's house have been inseparable in my mind ever since, and
are now.

I took leave of Mr. Peggotty, and Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge, and
little Em'ly, that day; and passed the night at Peggotty's, in a
little room in the roof (with the Crocodile Book on a shelf by the
bed's head) which was to be always mine, Peggotty said, and should
always be kept for me in exactly the same state.

'Young or old, Davy dear, as long as I am alive and have this house
over my head,' said Peggotty, 'you shall find it as if I expected
you here directly minute.  I shall keep it every day, as I used to
keep your old little room, my darling; and if you was to go to
China, you might think of it as being kept just the same, all the
time you were away.'

I felt the truth and constancy of my dear old nurse, with all my
heart, and thanked her as well as I could.  That was not very well,
for she spoke to me thus, with her arms round my neck, in the
morning, and I was going home in the morning, and I went home in
the morning, with herself and Mr. Barkis in the cart.  They left me
at the gate, not easily or lightly; and it was a strange sight to
me to see the cart go on, taking Peggotty away, and leaving me
under the old elm-trees looking at the house, in which there was no
face to look on mine with love or liking any more.

And now I fell into a state of neglect, which I cannot look back
upon without compassion.  I fell at once into a solitary condition,
- apart from all friendly notice, apart from the society of all
other boys of my own age, apart from all companionship but my own
spiritless thoughts, - which seems to cast its gloom upon this
paper as I write.

What would I have given, to have been sent to the hardest school
that ever was kept! - to have been taught something, anyhow,
anywhere!  No such hope dawned upon me.  They disliked me; and they
sullenly, sternly, steadily, overlooked me.  I think Mr.
Murdstone's means were straitened at about this time; but it is
little to the purpose.  He could not bear me; and in putting me
from him he tried, as I believe, to put away the notion that I had
any claim upon him - and succeeded.

I was not actively ill-used.  I was not beaten, or starved; but the
wrong that was done to me had no intervals of relenting, and was
done in a systematic, passionless manner.  Day after day, week
after week, month after month, I was coldly neglected.  I wonder
sometimes, when I think of it, what they would have done if I had
been taken with an illness; whether I should have lain down in my
lonely room, and languished through it in my usual solitary way, or
whether anybody would have helped me out.

When Mr. and Miss Murdstone were at home, I took my meals with
them; in their absence, I ate and drank by myself.  At all times I
lounged about the house and neighbourhood quite disregarded, except
that they were jealous of my making any friends: thinking, perhaps,
that if I did, I might complain to someone.  For this reason,
though Mr. Chillip often asked me to go and see him (he was a
widower, having, some years before that, lost a little small
light-haired wife, whom I can just remember connecting in my own
thoughts with a pale tortoise-shell cat), it was but seldom that I
enjoyed the happiness of passing an afternoon in his closet of a
surgery; reading some book that was new to me, with the smell of
the whole Pharmacopoeia coming up my nose, or pounding something in
a mortar under his mild directions.

For the same reason, added no doubt to the old dislike of her, I
was seldom allowed to visit Peggotty.  Faithful to her promise, she
either came to see me, or met me somewhere near, once every week,
and never empty-handed; but many and bitter were the
disappointments I had, in being refused permission to pay a visit
to her at her house.  Some few times, however, at long intervals,
I was allowed to go there; and then I found out that Mr. Barkis was
something of a miser, or as Peggotty dutifully expressed it, was 'a
little near', and kept a heap of money in a box under his bed,
which he pretended was only full of coats and trousers.  In this
coffer, his riches hid themselves with such a tenacious modesty,
that the smallest instalments could only be tempted out by
artifice; so that Peggotty had to prepare a long and elaborate
scheme, a very Gunpowder Plot, for every Saturday's expenses.

All this time I was so conscious of the waste of any promise I had
given, and of my being utterly neglected, that I should have been
perfectly miserable, I have no doubt, but for the old books.  They
were my only comfort; and I was as true to them as they were to me,
and read them over and over I don't know how many times more.

I now approach a period of my life, which I can never lose the
remembrance of, while I remember anything: and the recollection of
which has often, without my invocation, come before me like a
ghost, and haunted happier times.

I had been out, one day, loitering somewhere, in the listless,
meditative manner that my way of life engendered, when, turning the
corner of a lane near our house, I came upon Mr. Murdstone walking
with a gentleman.  I was confused, and was going by them, when the
gentleman cried:

'What!  Brooks!'

'No, sir, David Copperfield,' I said.

'Don't tell me.  You are Brooks,' said the gentleman.  'You are
Brooks of Sheffield.  That's your name.'

At these words, I observed the gentleman more attentively.  His
laugh coming to my remembrance too, I knew him to be Mr. Quinion,
whom I had gone over to Lowestoft with Mr. Murdstone to see, before
- it is no matter - I need not recall when.

'And how do you get on, and where are you being educated, Brooks?'
said Mr. Quinion.

He had put his hand upon my shoulder, and turned me about, to walk
with them.  I did not know what to reply, and glanced dubiously at
Mr. Murdstone.

'He is at home at present,' said the latter.  'He is not being
educated anywhere.  I don't know what to do with him.  He is a
difficult subject.'

That old, double look was on me for a moment; and then his eyes
darkened with a frown, as it turned, in its aversion, elsewhere.

'Humph!' said Mr. Quinion, looking at us both, I thought.  'Fine
weather!'

Silence ensued, and I was considering how I could best disengage my
shoulder from his hand, and go away, when he said:

'I suppose you are a pretty sharp fellow still?  Eh, Brooks?'

'Aye!  He is sharp enough,' said Mr. Murdstone, impatiently.  'You
had better let him go.  He will not thank you for troubling him.'

On this hint, Mr. Quinion released me, and I made the best of my
way home.  Looking back as I turned into the front garden, I saw
Mr. Murdstone leaning against the wicket of the churchyard, and Mr.
Quinion talking to him.  They were both looking after me, and I
felt that they were speaking of me.

Mr. Quinion lay at our house that night.  After breakfast, the next
morning, I had put my chair away, and was going out of the room,
when Mr. Murdstone called me back.  He then gravely repaired to
another table, where his sister sat herself at her desk.  Mr.
Quinion, with his hands in his pockets, stood looking out of
window; and I stood looking at them all.

'David,' said Mr. Murdstone, 'to the young this is a world for
action; not for moping and droning in.'  

- 'As you do,' added his sister.

'Jane Murdstone, leave it to me, if you please.  I say, David, to
the young this is a world for action, and not for moping and
droning in.  It is especially so for a young boy of your
disposition, which requires a great deal of correcting; and to
which no greater service can be done than to force it to conform to
the ways of the working world, and to bend it and break it.'

'For stubbornness won't do here,' said his sister 'What it wants
is, to be crushed.  And crushed it must be.  Shall be, too!'

He gave her a look, half in remonstrance, half in approval, and
went on:

'I suppose you know, David, that I am not rich.  At any rate, you
know it now.  You have received some considerable education
already.  Education is costly; and even if it were not, and I could
afford it, I am of opinion that it would not be at all advantageous
to you to be kept at school.  What is before you, is a fight with
the world; and the sooner you begin it, the better.'

I think it occurred to me that I had already begun it, in my poor
way: but it occurs to me now, whether or no.

'You have heard the "counting-house" mentioned sometimes,' said Mr.
Murdstone.

'The counting-house, sir?' I repeated.
'Of Murdstone and Grinby, in the wine trade,' he replied.

I suppose I looked uncertain, for he went on hastily:

'You have heard the "counting-house" mentioned, or the business, or
the cellars, or the wharf, or something about it.'

'I think I have heard the business mentioned, sir,' I said,
remembering what I vaguely knew of his and his sister's resources. 
'But I don't know when.'

'It does not matter when,' he returned.  'Mr. Quinion manages that
business.'

I glanced at the latter deferentially as he stood looking out of
window.

'Mr. Quinion suggests that it gives employment to some other boys,
and that he sees no reason why it shouldn't, on the same terms,
give employment to you.'

'He having,' Mr. Quinion observed in a low voice, and half turning
round, 'no other prospect, Murdstone.'

Mr. Murdstone, with an impatient, even an angry gesture, resumed,
without noticing what he had said:

'Those terms are, that you will earn enough for yourself to provide
for your eating and drinking, and pocket-money.  Your lodging
(which I have arranged for) will be paid by me.  So will your
washing -'

'- Which will be kept down to my estimate,' said his sister.

'Your clothes will be looked after for you, too,' said Mr.
Murdstone; 'as you will not be able, yet awhile, to get them for
yourself.  So you are now going to London, David, with Mr. Quinion,
to begin the world on your own account.'

'In short, you are provided for,' observed his sister; 'and will
please to do your duty.'

Though I quite understood that the purpose of this announcement was
to get rid of me, I have no distinct remembrance whether it pleased
or frightened me.  My impression is, that I was in a state of
confusion about it, and, oscillating between the two points,
touched neither.  Nor had I much time for the clearing of my
thoughts, as Mr. Quinion was to go upon the morrow.

Behold me, on the morrow, in a much-worn little white hat, with a
black crape round it for my mother, a black jacket, and a pair of
hard, stiff corduroy trousers - which Miss Murdstone considered the
best armour for the legs in that fight with the world which was now
to come off.  behold me so attired, and with my little worldly all
before me in a small trunk, sitting, a lone lorn child (as Mrs.
Gummidge might have said), in the post-chaise that was carrying Mr.
Quinion to the London coach at Yarmouth!  See, how our house and
church are lessening in the distance; how the grave beneath the
tree is blotted out by intervening objects; how the spire points
upwards from my old playground no more, and the sky is empty!



CHAPTER 11
I BEGIN LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT, AND DON'T LIKE IT


I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of
being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise
to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such
an age.  A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of
observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or
mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any
sign in my behalf.  But none was made; and I became, at ten years
old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and
Grinby.

Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse was at the waterside.  It was down
in Blackfriars.  Modern improvements have altered the place; but it
was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down
hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took
boat.  It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting
on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was
out, and literally overrun with rats.  Its panelled rooms,
discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say;
its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and scuffling of
the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness
of the place; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but of
the present instant.  They are all before me, just as they were in
the evil hour when I went among them for the first time, with my
trembling hand in Mr. Quinion's.

Murdstone and Grinby's trade was among a good many kinds of people,
but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits
to certain packet ships.  I forget now where they chiefly went, but
I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the
East and West Indies.  I know that a great many empty bottles were
one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and
boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject
those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them.  When the empty
bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or
corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or
finished bottles to be packed in casks.  All this work was my work,
and of the boys employed upon it I was one.

There were three or four of us, counting me.  My working place was
established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could
see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool
in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the
desk.  Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning
life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned
to show me my business.  His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a
ragged apron and a paper cap.  He informed me that his father was
a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord
Mayor's Show.  He also informed me that our principal associate
would be another boy whom he introduced by the - to me -
extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes.  I discovered, however, that
this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had
been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his
complexion, which was pale or mealy.  Mealy's father was a
waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman,
and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some
young relation of Mealy's - I think his little sister - did Imps in
the Pantomimes.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into
this companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates
with those of my happier childhood - not to say with Steerforth,
Traddles, and the rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing
up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom.  The
deep remembrance of the sense I had, of being utterly without hope
now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my
young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and
thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up
by, would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought
back any more; cannot be written.  As often as Mick Walker went
away in the course of that forenoon, I mingled my tears with the
water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if there
were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of bursting.

The counting-house clock was at half past twelve, and there was
general preparation for going to dinner, when Mr. Quinion tapped at
the counting-house window, and beckoned to me to go in.  I went in,
and found there a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout
and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which
was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and
with a very extensive face, which he turned full upon me.  His
clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing shirt-collar on.  He
carried a jaunty sort of a stick, with a large pair of rusty
tassels to it; and a quizzing-glass hung outside his coat, - for
ornament, I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it,
and couldn't see anything when he did.

'This,' said Mr. Quinion, in allusion to myself, 'is he.'

'This,' said the stranger, with a certain condescending roll in his
voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel,
which impressed me very much, 'is Master Copperfield.  I hope I see
you well, sir?'

I said I was very well, and hoped he was.  I was sufficiently ill
at ease, Heaven knows; but it was not in my nature to complain much
at that time of my life, so I said I was very well, and hoped he
was.

'I am,' said the stranger, 'thank Heaven, quite well.  I have
received a letter from Mr. Murdstone, in which he mentions that he
would desire me to receive into an apartment in the rear of my
house, which is at present unoccupied - and is, in short, to be let
as a - in short,' said the stranger, with a smile and in a burst of
confidence, 'as a bedroom - the young beginner whom I have now the
pleasure to -' and the stranger waved his hand, and settled his
chin in his shirt-collar.

'This is Mr. Micawber,' said Mr. Quinion to me.

'Ahem!' said the stranger, 'that is my name.'

'Mr. Micawber,' said Mr. Quinion, 'is known to Mr. Murdstone.  He
takes orders for us on commission, when he can get any.  He has
been written to by Mr. Murdstone, on the subject of your lodgings,
and he will receive you as a lodger.'

'My address,' said Mr. Micawber, 'is Windsor Terrace, City Road. 
I - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, with the same genteel air, and in
another burst of confidence - 'I live there.'

I made him a bow.

'Under the impression,' said Mr. Micawber, 'that your
peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive,
and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana
of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road, - in
short,' said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of confidence, 'that
you might lose yourself - I shall be happy to call this evening,
and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.'

I thanked him with all my heart, for it was friendly in him to
offer to take that trouble.

'At what hour,' said Mr. Micawber, 'shall I -'

'At about eight,' said Mr. Quinion.

'At about eight,' said Mr. Micawber.  'I beg to wish you good day,
Mr. Quinion.  I will intrude no longer.'

So he put on his hat, and went out with his cane under his arm:
very upright, and humming a tune when he was clear of the
counting-house.

Mr. Quinion then formally engaged me to be as useful as I could in
the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, at a salary, I think, of six
shillings a week.  I am not clear whether it was six or seven.  I
am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it
was six at first and seven afterwards.  He paid me a week down
(from his own pocket, I believe), and I gave Mealy sixpence out of
it to get my trunk carried to Windsor Terrace that night: it being
too heavy for my strength, small as it was.  I paid sixpence more
for my dinner, which was a meat pie and a turn at a neighbouring
pump; and passed the hour which was allowed for that meal, in
walking about the streets.

At the appointed time in the evening, Mr. Micawber reappeared.  I
washed my hands and face, to do the greater honour to his
gentility, and we walked to our house, as I suppose I must now call
it, together; Mr. Micawber impressing the name of streets, and the
shapes of corner houses upon me, as we went along, that I might
find my way back, easily, in the morning.

Arrived at this house in Windsor Terrace (which I noticed was
shabby like himself, but also, like himself, made all the show it
could), he presented me to Mrs. Micawber, a thin and faded lady,
not at all young, who was sitting in the parlour (the first floor
was altogether unfurnished, and the blinds were kept down to delude
the neighbours), with a baby at her breast.  This baby was one of
twins; and I may remark here that I hardly ever, in all my
experience of the family, saw both the twins detached from Mrs.
Micawber at the same time.  One of them was always taking
refreshment.

There were two other children; Master Micawber, aged about four,
and Miss Micawber, aged about three.  These, and a
dark-complexioned young woman, with a habit of snorting, who was
servant to the family, and informed me, before half an hour had
expired, that she was 'a Orfling', and came from St. Luke's
workhouse, in the neighbourhood, completed the establishment.  My
room was at the top of the house, at the back: a close chamber;
stencilled all over with an ornament which my young imagination
represented as a blue muffin; and very scantily furnished.

'I never thought,' said Mrs. Micawber, when she came up, twin and
all, to show me the apartment, and sat down to take breath, 'before
I was married, when I lived with papa and mama, that I should ever
find it necessary to take a lodger.  But Mr. Micawber being in
difficulties, all considerations of private feeling must give way.'

I said: 'Yes, ma'am.'

'Mr. Micawber's difficulties are almost overwhelming just at
present,' said Mrs. Micawber; 'and whether it is possible to bring
him through them, I don't know.  When I lived at home with papa and
mama, I really should have hardly understood what the word meant,
in the sense in which I now employ it, but experientia does it, -
as papa used to say.'

I cannot satisfy myself whether she told me that Mr. Micawber had
been an officer in the Marines, or whether I have imagined it.  I
only know that I believe to this hour that he WAS in the Marines
once upon a time, without knowing why.  He was a sort of town
traveller for a number of miscellaneous houses, now; but made
little or nothing of it, I am afraid.

'If Mr. Micawber's creditors will not give him time,' said Mrs.
Micawber, 'they must take the consequences; and the sooner they
bring it to an issue the better.  Blood cannot be obtained from a
stone, neither can anything on account be obtained at present (not
to mention law expenses) from Mr. Micawber.'

I never can quite understand whether my precocious self-dependence
confused Mrs. Micawber in reference to my age, or whether she was
so full of the subject that she would have talked about it to the
very twins if there had been nobody else to communicate with, but
this was the strain in which she began, and she went on accordingly
all the time I knew her.

Poor Mrs. Micawber!  She said she had tried to exert herself, and
so, I have no doubt, she had.  The centre of the street door was
perfectly covered with a great brass-plate, on which was engraved
'Mrs. Micawber's Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies': but I
never found that any young lady had ever been to school there; or
that any young lady ever came, or proposed to come; or that the
least preparation was ever made to receive any young lady.  The
only visitors I ever saw, or heard of, were creditors.  THEY used
to come at all hours, and some of them were quite ferocious.  One
dirty-faced man, I think he was a boot-maker, used to edge himself
into the passage as early as seven o'clock in the morning, and call
up the stairs to Mr. Micawber - 'Come!  You ain't out yet, you
know.  Pay us, will you?  Don't hide, you know; that's mean.  I
wouldn't be mean if I was you.  Pay us, will you?  You just pay us,
d'ye hear?  Come!'  Receiving no answer to these taunts, he would
mount in his wrath to the words 'swindlers' and 'robbers'; and
these being ineffectual too, would sometimes go to the extremity of
crossing the street, and roaring up at the windows of the second
floor, where he knew Mr. Micawber was.  At these times, Mr.
Micawber would be transported with grief and mortification, even to
the length (as I was once made aware by a scream from his wife) of
making motions at himself with a razor; but within half-an-hour
afterwards, he would polish up his shoes with extraordinary pains,
and go out, humming a tune with a greater air of gentility than
ever.  Mrs. Micawber was quite as elastic.  I have known her to be
thrown into fainting fits by the king's taxes at three o'clock, and
to eat lamb chops, breaded, and drink warm ale (paid for with two
tea-spoons that had gone to the pawnbroker's) at four.  On one
occasion, when an execution had just been put in, coming home
through some chance as early as six o'clock, I saw her lying (of
course with a twin) under the grate in a swoon, with her hair all
torn about her face; but I never knew her more cheerful than she
was, that very same night, over a veal cutlet before the kitchen
fire, telling me stories about her papa and mama, and the company
they used to keep.

In this house, and with this family, I passed my leisure time.  My
own exclusive breakfast of a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk,
I provided myself.  I kept another small loaf, and a modicum of
cheese, on a particular shelf of a particular cupboard, to make my
supper on when I came back at night.  This made a hole in the six
or seven shillings, I know well; and I was out at the warehouse all
day, and had to support myself on that money all the week.  From
Monday morning until Saturday night, I had no advice, no counsel,
no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any
kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to
heaven!

I was so young and childish, and so little qualified - how could I
be otherwise? - to undertake the whole charge of my own existence,
that often, in going to Murdstone and Grinby's, of a morning, I
could not resist the stale pastry put out for sale at half-price at
the pastrycooks' doors, and spent in that the money I should have
kept for my dinner.  Then, I went without my dinner, or bought a
roll or a slice of pudding.  I remember two pudding shops, between
which I was divided, according to my finances.  One was in a court
close to St. Martin's Church - at the back of the church, - which
is now removed altogether.  The pudding at that shop was made of
currants, and was rather a special pudding, but was dear,
twopennyworth not being larger than a pennyworth of more ordinary
pudding.  A good shop for the latter was in the Strand - somewhere
in that part which has been rebuilt since.  It was a stout pale
pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it, stuck
in whole at wide distances apart.  It came up hot at about my time
every day, and many a day did I dine off it.  When I dined
regularly and handsomely, I had a saveloy and a penny loaf, or a
fourpenny plate of red beef from a cook's shop; or a plate of bread
and cheese and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house
opposite our place of business, called the Lion, or the Lion and
something else that I have forgotten.  Once, I remember carrying my
own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my
arm, wrapped in a piece of paper, like a book, and going to a
famous alamode beef-house near Drury Lane, and ordering a 'small
plate' of that delicacy to eat with it.  What the waiter thought of
such a strange little apparition coming in all alone, I don't know;
but I can see him now, staring at me as I ate my dinner, and
bringing up the other waiter to look.  I gave him a halfpenny for
himself, and I wish he hadn't taken it.

We had half-an-hour, I think, for tea.  When I had money enough, I
used to get half-a-pint of ready-made coffee and a slice of bread
and butter.  When I had none, I used to look at a venison shop in
Fleet Street; or I have strolled, at such a time, as far as Covent
Garden Market, and stared at the pineapples.  I was fond of
wandering about the Adelphi, because it was a mysterious place,
with those dark arches.  I see myself emerging one evening from
some of these arches, on a little public-house close to the river,
with an open space before it, where some coal-heavers were dancing;
to look at whom I sat down upon a bench.  I wonder what they
thought of me!

I was such a child, and so little, that frequently when I went into
the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter, to
moisten what I had had for dinner, they were afraid to give it me. 
I remember one hot evening I went into the bar of a public-house,
and said to the landlord:
'What is your best - your very best - ale a glass?'  For it was a
special occasion.  I don't know what.  It may have been my
birthday.

'Twopence-halfpenny,' says the landlord, 'is the price of the
Genuine Stunning ale.'

'Then,' says I, producing the money, 'just draw me a glass of the
Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.'

The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to
foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the
beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife.  She
came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him
in surveying me.  Here we stand, all three, before me now.  The
landlord in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar
window-frame; his wife looking over the little half-door; and I, in
some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. 
They asked me a good many questions; as, what my name was, how old
I was, where I lived, how I was employed, and how I came there.  To
all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented, I am afraid,
appropriate answers.  They served me with the ale, though I suspect
it was not the Genuine Stunning; and the landlord's wife, opening
the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave me my money
back, and gave me a kiss that was half admiring and half
compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
scantiness of my resources or the difficulties of my life.  I know
that if a shilling were given me by Mr. Quinion at any time, I
spent it in a dinner or a tea.  I know that I worked, from morning
until night, with common men and boys, a shabby child.  I know that
I lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily
fed.  I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have
been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a
little vagabond.

Yet I held some station at Murdstone and Grinby's too.  Besides
that Mr. Quinion did what a careless man so occupied, and dealing
with a thing so anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a
different footing from the rest, I never said, to man or boy, how
it was that I came to be there, or gave the least indication of
being sorry that I was there.  That I suffered in secret, and that
I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I.  How much I
suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond my power to
tell.  But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work.  I knew from
the first, that, if I could not do my work as well as any of the
rest, I could not hold myself above slight and contempt.  I soon
became at least as expeditious and as skilful as either of the
other boys.  Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and
manner were different enough from theirs to place a space between
us.  They and the men generally spoke of me as 'the little gent',
or 'the young Suffolker.'  A certain man named Gregory, who was
foreman of the packers, and another named Tipp, who was the carman,
and wore a red jacket, used to address me sometimes as 'David': but
I think it was mostly when we were very confidential, and when I
had made some efforts to entertain them, over our work, with some
results of the old readings; which were fast perishing out of my
remembrance.  Mealy Potatoes uprose once, and rebelled against my
being so distinguished; but Mick Walker settled him in no time.

My rescue from this kind of existence I considered quite hopeless,
and abandoned, as such, altogether.  I am solemnly convinced that
I never for one hour was reconciled to it, or was otherwise than
miserably unhappy; but I bore it; and even to Peggotty, partly for
the love of her and partly for shame, never in any letter (though
many passed between us) revealed the truth.

Mr. Micawber's difficulties were an addition to the distressed
state of my mind.  In my forlorn state I became quite attached to
the family, and used to walk about, busy with Mrs. Micawber's
calculations of ways and means, and heavy with the weight of Mr.
Micawber's debts.  On a Saturday night, which was my grand treat,
- partly because it was a great thing to walk home with six or
seven shillings in my pocket, looking into the shops and thinking
what such a sum would buy, and partly because I went home early, -
Mrs. Micawber would make the most heart-rending confidences to me;
also on a Sunday morning, when I mixed the portion of tea or coffee
I had bought over-night, in a little shaving-pot, and sat late at
my breakfast.  It was nothing at all unusual for Mr. Micawber to
sob violently at the beginning of one of these Saturday night
conversations, and sing about jack's delight being his lovely Nan,
towards the end of it.  I have known him come home to supper with
a flood of tears, and a declaration that nothing was now left but
a jail; and go to bed making a calculation of the expense of
putting bow-windows to the house, 'in case anything turned up',
which was his favourite expression.  And Mrs. Micawber was just the
same.

A curious equality of friendship, originating, I suppose, in our
respective circumstances, sprung up between me and these people,
notwithstanding the ludicrous disparity in our years.  But I never
allowed myself to be prevailed upon to accept any invitation to eat
and drink with them out of their stock (knowing that they got on
badly with the butcher and baker, and had often not too much for
themselves), until Mrs. Micawber took me into her entire
confidence.  This she did one evening as follows:

'Master Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'I make no stranger of
you, and therefore do not hesitate to say that Mr. Micawber's
difficulties are coming to a crisis.'

It made me very miserable to hear it, and I looked at Mrs.
Micawber's red eyes with the utmost sympathy.

'With the exception of the heel of a Dutch cheese - which is not
adapted to the wants of a young family' - said Mrs. Micawber,
'there is really not a scrap of anything in the larder.  I was
accustomed to speak of the larder when I lived with papa and mama,
and I use the word almost unconsciously.  What I mean to express
is, that there is nothing to eat in the house.'

'Dear me!' I said, in great concern.

I had two or three shillings of my week's money in my pocket - from
which I presume that it must have been on a Wednesday night when we
held this conversation - and I hastily produced them, and with
heartfelt emotion begged Mrs. Micawber to accept of them as a loan. 
But that lady, kissing me, and making me put them back in my
pocket, replied that she couldn't think of it.

'No, my dear Master Copperfield,' said she, 'far be it from my
thoughts!  But you have a discretion beyond your years, and can
render me another kind of service, if you will; and a service I
will thankfully accept of.'

I begged Mrs. Micawber to name it.

'I have parted with the plate myself,' said Mrs. Micawber.  'Six
tea, two salt, and a pair of sugars, I have at different times
borrowed money on, in secret, with my own hands.  But the twins are
a great tie; and to me, with my recollections, of papa and mama,
these transactions are very painful.  There are still a few trifles
that we could part with.  Mr. Micawber's feelings would never allow
him to dispose of them; and Clickett' - this was the girl from the
workhouse - 'being of a vulgar mind, would take painful liberties
if so much confidence was reposed in her.  Master Copperfield, if
I might ask you -'

I understood Mrs. Micawber now, and begged her to make use of me to
any extent.  I began to dispose of the more portable articles of
property that very evening; and went out on a similar expedition
almost every morning, before I went to Murdstone and Grinby's.

Mr. Micawber had a few books on a little chiffonier, which he
called the library; and those went first.  I carried them, one
after another, to a bookstall in the City Road - one part of which,
near our house, was almost all bookstalls and bird shops then - and
sold them for whatever they would bring.  The keeper of this
bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy
every night, and to be violently scolded by his wife every morning. 
More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in
a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye,
bearing witness to his excesses over-night (I am afraid he was
quarrelsome in his drink), and he, with a shaking hand,
endeavouring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the
pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife,
with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off
rating him.  Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask
me to call again; but his wife had always got some - had taken his,
I dare say, while he was drunk - and secretly completed the bargain
on the stairs, as we went down together.
At the pawnbroker's shop, too, I began to be very well known.  The
principal gentleman who officiated behind the counter, took a good
deal of notice of me; and often got me, I recollect, to decline a
Latin noun or adjective, or to conjugate a Latin verb, in his ear,
while he transacted my business.  After all these occasions Mrs.
Micawber made a little treat, which was generally a supper; and
there was a peculiar relish in these meals which I well remember.

At last Mr. Micawber's difficulties came to a crisis, and he was
arrested early one morning, and carried over to the King's Bench
Prison in the Borough.  He told me, as he went out of the house,
that the God of day had now gone down upon him - and I really
thought his heart was broken and mine too.  But I heard,
afterwards, that he was seen to play a lively game at skittles,
before noon.

On the first Sunday after he was taken there, I was to go and see
him, and have dinner with him.  I was to ask my way to such a
place, and just short of that place I should see such another
place, and just short of that I should see a yard, which I was to
cross, and keep straight on until I saw a turnkey.  All this I did;
and when at last I did see a turnkey (poor little fellow that I
was!), and thought how, when Roderick Random was in a debtors'
prison, there was a man there with nothing on him but an old rug,
the turnkey swam before my dimmed eyes and my beating heart.

Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to
his room (top story but one), and cried very much.  He solemnly
conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to
observe that if a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and
spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be
happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be
miserable.  After which he borrowed a shilling of me for porter,
gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for the amount, and put
away his pocket-handkerchief, and cheered up.

We sat before a little fire, with two bricks put within the rusted
grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals;
until another debtor, who shared the room with Mr. Micawber, came
in from the bakehouse with the loin of mutton which was our
joint-stock repast.  Then I was sent up to 'Captain Hopkins' in the
room overhead, with Mr. Micawber's compliments, and I was his young
friend, and would Captain Hopkins lend me a knife and fork.

Captain Hopkins lent me the knife and fork, with his compliments to
Mr. Micawber.  There was a very dirty lady in his little room, and
two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair.  I thought
it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork, than
Captain Hopkins's comb.  The Captain himself was in the last
extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown
great-coat with no other coat below it.  I saw his bed rolled up in
a corner; and what plates and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf;
and I divined (God knows how) that though the two girls with the
shock heads of hair were Captain Hopkins's children, the dirty lady
was not married to Captain Hopkins.  My timid station on his
threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes at most;
but I came down again with all this in my knowledge, as surely as
the knife and fork were in my hand.

There was something gipsy-like and agreeable in the dinner, after
all.  I took back Captain Hopkins's knife and fork early in the
afternoon, and went home to comfort Mrs. Micawber with an account
of my visit.  She fainted when she saw me return, and made a little
jug of egg-hot afterwards to console us while we talked it over.

I don't know how the household furniture came to be sold for the
family benefit, or who sold it, except that I did not.  Sold it
was, however, and carried away in a van; except the bed, a few
chairs, and the kitchen table.  With these possessions we encamped,
as it were, in the two parlours of the emptied house in Windsor
Terrace; Mrs. Micawber, the children, the Orfling, and myself; and
lived in those rooms night and day.  I have no idea for how long,
though it seems to me for a long time.  At last Mrs. Micawber
resolved to move into the prison, where Mr. Micawber had now
secured a room to himself.  So I took the key of the house to the
landlord, who was very glad to get it; and the beds were sent over
to the King's Bench, except mine, for which a little room was hired
outside the walls in the neighbourhood of that Institution, very
much to my satisfaction, since the Micawbers and I had become too
used to one another, in our troubles, to part.  The Orfling was
likewise accommodated with an inexpensive lodging in the same
neighbourhood.  Mine was a quiet back-garret with a sloping roof,
commanding a pleasant prospect of a timberyard; and when I took
possession of it, with the reflection that Mr. Micawber's troubles
had come to a crisis at last, I thought it quite a paradise.

All this time I was working at Murdstone and Grinby's in the same
common way, and with the same common companions, and with the same
sense of unmerited degradation as at first.  But I never, happily
for me no doubt, made a single acquaintance, or spoke to any of the
many boys whom I saw daily in going to the warehouse, in coming
from it, and in prowling about the streets at meal-times.  I led
the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same lonely,
self-reliant manner.  The only changes I am conscious of are,
firstly, that I had grown more shabby, and secondly, that I was now
relieved of much of the weight of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber's cares;
for some relatives or friends had engaged to help them at their
present pass, and they lived more comfortably in the prison than
they had lived for a long while out of it.  I used to breakfast
with them now, in virtue of some arrangement, of which I have
forgotten the details.  I forget, too, at what hour the gates were
opened in the morning, admitting of my going in; but I know that I
was often up at six o'clock, and that my favourite lounging-place
in the interval was old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in
one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look
over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting
up the golden flame on the top of the Monument.  The Orfling met me
here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting the
wharves and the Tower; of which I can say no more than that I hope
I believed them myself.  In the evening I used to go back to the
prison, and walk up and down the parade with Mr. Micawber; or play
casino with Mrs. Micawber, and hear reminiscences of her papa and
mama.  Whether Mr. Murdstone knew where I was, I am unable to say. 
I never told them at Murdstone and Grinby's.

Mr. Micawber's affairs, although past their crisis, were very much
involved by reason of a certain 'Deed', of which I used to hear a
great deal, and which I suppose, now, to have been some former
composition with his creditors, though I was so far from being
clear about it then, that I am conscious of having confounded it
with those demoniacal parchments which are held to have, once upon
a time, obtained to a great extent in Germany.  At last this
document appeared to be got out of the way, somehow; at all events
it ceased to be the rock-ahead it had been; and Mrs. Micawber
informed me that 'her family' had decided that Mr. Micawber should
apply for his release under the Insolvent Debtors Act, which would
set him free, she expected, in about six weeks.

'And then,' said Mr. Micawber, who was present, 'I have no doubt I
shall, please Heaven, begin to be beforehand with the world, and to
live in a perfectly new manner, if - in short, if anything turns
up.'

By way of going in for anything that might be on the cards, I call
to mind that Mr. Micawber, about this time, composed a petition to
the House of Commons, praying for an alteration in the law of
imprisonment for debt.  I set down this remembrance here, because
it is an instance to myself of the manner in which I fitted my old
books to my altered life, and made stories for myself, out of the
streets, and out of men and women; and how some main points in the
character I shall unconsciously develop, I suppose, in writing my
life, were gradually forming all this while.

There was a club in the prison, in which Mr. Micawber, as a
gentleman, was a great authority.  Mr. Micawber had stated his idea
of this petition to the club, and the club had strongly approved of
the same.  Wherefore Mr. Micawber (who was a thoroughly
good-natured man, and as active a creature about everything but his
own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy
about something that could never be of any profit to him) set to
work at the petition, invented it, engrossed it on an immense sheet
of paper, spread it out on a table, and appointed a time for all
the club, and all within the walls if they chose, to come up to his
room and sign it.

When I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see
them all come in, one after another, though I knew the greater part
of them already, and they me, that I got an hour's leave of absence
from Murdstone and Grinby's, and established myself in a corner for
that purpose.  As many of the principal members of the club as
could be got into the small room without filling it, supported Mr.
Micawber in front of the petition, while my old friend Captain
Hopkins (who had washed himself, to do honour to so solemn an
occasion) stationed himself close to it, to read it to all who were
unacquainted with its contents.  The door was then thrown open, and
the general population began to come in, in a long file: several
waiting outside, while one entered, affixed his signature, and went
out.  To everybody in succession, Captain Hopkins said: 'Have you
read it?' - 'No.'  - 'Would you like to hear it read?'  If he
weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Hopkins, in
a loud sonorous voice, gave him every word of it.  The Captain
would have read it twenty thousand times, if twenty thousand people
would have heard him, one by one.  I remember a certain luscious
roll he gave to such phrases as 'The people's representatives in
Parliament assembled,' 'Your petitioners therefore humbly approach
your honourable house,' 'His gracious Majesty's unfortunate
subjects,' as if the words were something real in his mouth, and
delicious to taste; Mr. Micawber, meanwhile, listening with a
little of an author's vanity, and contemplating (not severely) the
spikes on the opposite wall.

As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and
lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which
may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish
feet, I wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd
that used to come filing before me in review again, to the echo of
Captain Hopkins's voice!  When my thoughts go back, now, to that
slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I
invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over
well-remembered facts!  When I tread the old ground, I do not
wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent
romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange
experiences and sordid things!



CHAPTER 12
LIKING LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT NO BETTER,
     I FORM A GREAT RESOLUTION


In due time, Mr. Micawber's petition was ripe for hearing; and that
gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the Act, to my great
joy.  His creditors were not implacable; and Mrs. Micawber informed
me that even the revengeful boot-maker had declared in open court
that he bore him no malice, but that when money was owing to him he
liked to be paid.  He said he thought it was human nature.

M r Micawber returned to the King's Bench when his case was over,
as some fees were to be settled, and some formalities observed,
before he could be actually released.  The club received him with
transport, and held an harmonic meeting that evening in his honour;
while Mrs. Micawber and I had a lamb's fry in private, surrounded
by the sleeping family.

'On such an occasion I will give you, Master Copperfield,' said
Mrs. Micawber, 'in a little more flip,' for we had been having some
already, 'the memory of my papa and mama.'

'Are they dead, ma'am?' I inquired, after drinking the toast in a
wine-glass.

'My mama departed this life,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'before Mr.
Micawber's difficulties commenced, or at least before they became
pressing.  My papa lived to bail Mr. Micawber several times, and
then expired, regretted by a numerous circle.'

Mrs. Micawber shook her head, and dropped a pious tear upon the
twin who happened to be in hand.

As I could hardly hope for a more favourable opportunity of putting
a question in which I had a near interest, I said to Mrs. Micawber:

'May I ask, ma'am, what you and Mr. Micawber intend to do, now that
Mr. Micawber is out of his difficulties, and at liberty?  Have you
settled yet?'

'My family,' said Mrs. Micawber, who always said those two words
with an air, though I never could discover who came under the
denomination, 'my family are of opinion that Mr. Micawber should
quit London, and exert his talents in the country.  Mr. Micawber is
a man of great talent, Master Copperfield.'

I said I was sure of that.

'Of great talent,' repeated Mrs. Micawber.  'My family are of
opinion, that, with a little interest, something might be done for
a man of his ability in the Custom House.  The influence of my
family being local, it is their wish that Mr. Micawber should go
down to Plymouth.  They think it indispensable that he should be
upon the spot.'

'That he may be ready?' I suggested.

'Exactly,' returned Mrs. Micawber.  'That he may be ready - in case
of anything turning up.'

'And do you go too, ma'am?'

The events of the day, in combination with the twins, if not with
the flip, had made Mrs. Micawber hysterical, and she shed tears as
she replied:

'I never will desert Mr. Micawber.  Mr. Micawber may have concealed
his difficulties from me in the first instance, but his sanguine
temper may have led him to expect that he would overcome them.  The
pearl necklace and bracelets which I inherited from mama, have been
disposed of for less than half their value; and the set of coral,
which was the wedding gift of my papa, has been actually thrown
away for nothing.  But I never will desert Mr. Micawber.  No!'
cried Mrs. Micawber, more affected than before, 'I never will do
it!  It's of no use asking me!'

I felt quite uncomfortable - as if Mrs. Micawber supposed I had
asked her to do anything of the sort! - and sat looking at her in
alarm.

'Mr. Micawber has his faults.  I do not deny that he is
improvident.  I do not deny that he has kept me in the dark as to
his resources and his liabilities both,' she went on, looking at
the wall; 'but I never will desert Mr. Micawber!'

Mrs. Micawber having now raised her voice into a perfect scream, I
was so frightened that I ran off to the club-room, and disturbed
Mr. Micawber in the act of presiding at a long table, and leading
the chorus of

     Gee up, Dobbin,
     Gee ho, Dobbin,
     Gee up, Dobbin,
     Gee up, and gee ho - o - o!

with the tidings that Mrs. Micawber was in an alarming state, upon
which he immediately burst into tears, and came away with me with
his waistcoat full of the heads and tails of shrimps, of which he
had been partaking.

'Emma, my angel!' cried Mr. Micawber, running into the room; 'what
is the matter?'

'I never will desert you, Micawber!' she exclaimed.

'My life!' said Mr. Micawber, taking her in his arms.  'I am
perfectly aware of it.'

'He is the parent of my children!  He is the father of my twins!
He is the husband of my affections,' cried Mrs. Micawber,
struggling; 'and I ne - ver - will - desert Mr. Micawber!'

Mr. Micawber was so deeply affected by this proof of her devotion
(as to me, I was dissolved in tears), that he hung over her in a
passionate manner, imploring her to look up, and to be calm.  But
the more he asked Mrs. Micawber to look up, the more she fixed her
eyes on nothing; and the more he asked her to compose herself, the
more she wouldn't.  Consequently Mr. Micawber was soon so overcome,
that he mingled his tears with hers and mine; until he begged me to
do him the favour of taking a chair on the staircase, while he got
her into bed.  I would have taken my leave for the night, but he
would not hear of my doing that until the strangers' bell should
ring.  So I sat at the staircase window, until he came out with
another chair and joined me.

'How is Mrs. Micawber now, sir?' I said.

'Very low,' said Mr. Micawber, shaking his head; 'reaction.  Ah,
this has been a dreadful day!  We stand alone now - everything is
gone from us!'

Mr. Micawber pressed my hand, and groaned, and afterwards shed
tears.  I was greatly touched, and disappointed too, for I had
expected that we should be quite gay on this happy and
long-looked-for occasion.  But Mr. and Mrs. Micawber were so used
to their old difficulties, I think, that they felt quite
shipwrecked when they came to consider that they were released from
them.  All their elasticity was departed, and I never saw them half
so wretched as on this night; insomuch that when the bell rang, and
Mr. Micawber walked with me to the lodge, and parted from me there
with a blessing, I felt quite afraid to leave him by himself, he
was so profoundly miserable.

But through all the confusion and lowness of spirits in which we
had been, so unexpectedly to me, involved, I plainly discerned that
Mr. and Mrs. Micawber and their family were going away from London,
and that a parting between us was near at hand.  It was in my walk
home that night, and in the sleepless hours which followed when I
lay in bed, that the thought first occurred to me - though I don't
know how it came into my head - which afterwards shaped itself into
a settled resolution.

I had grown to be so accustomed to the Micawbers, and had been so
intimate with them in their distresses, and was so utterly
friendless without them, that the prospect of being thrown upon
some new shift for a lodging, and going once more among unknown
people, was like being that moment turned adrift into my present
life, with such a knowledge of it ready made as experience had
given me.  All the sensitive feelings it wounded so cruelly, all
the shame and misery it kept alive within my breast, became more
poignant as I thought of this; and I determined that the life was
unendurable.

That there was no hope of escape from it, unless the escape was my
own act, I knew quite well.  I rarely heard from Miss Murdstone,
and never from Mr. Murdstone: but two or three parcels of made or
mended clothes had come up for me, consigned to Mr. Quinion, and in
each there was a scrap of paper to the effect that J. M. trusted D.
C. was applying himself to business, and devoting himself wholly to
his duties - not the least hint of my ever being anything else than
the common drudge into which I was fast settling down.

The very next day showed me, while my mind was in the first
agitation of what it had conceived, that Mrs. Micawber had not
spoken of their going away without warrant.  They took a lodging in
the house where I lived, for a week; at the expiration of which
time they were to start for Plymouth.  Mr. Micawber himself came
down to the counting-house, in the afternoon, to tell Mr. Quinion
that he must relinquish me on the day of his departure, and to give
me a high character, which I am sure I deserved.  And Mr. Quinion,
calling in Tipp the carman, who was a married man, and had a room
to let, quartered me prospectively on him - by our mutual consent,
as he had every reason to think; for I said nothing, though my
resolution was now taken.

I passed my evenings with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, during the
remaining term of our residence under the same roof; and I think we
became fonder of one another as the time went on.  On the last
Sunday, they invited me to dinner; and we had a loin of pork and
apple sauce, and a pudding.  I had bought a spotted wooden horse
over-night as a parting gift to little Wilkins Micawber - that was
the boy - and a doll for little Emma.  I had also bestowed a
shilling on the Orfling, who was about to be disbanded.

We had a very pleasant day, though we were all in a tender state
about our approaching separation.

'I shall never, Master Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'revert to
the period when Mr. Micawber was in difficulties, without thinking
of you.  Your conduct has always been of the most delicate and
obliging description.  You have never been a lodger.  You have been
a friend.'

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber; 'Copperfield,' for so he had been
accustomed to call me, of late, 'has a heart to feel for the
distresses of his fellow-creatures when they are behind a cloud,
and a head to plan, and a hand to - in short, a general ability to
dispose of such available property as could be made away with.'

I expressed my sense of this commendation, and said I was very
sorry we were going to lose one another.

'My dear young friend,' said Mr. Micawber, 'I am older than you; a
man of some experience in life, and - and of some experience, in
short, in difficulties, generally speaking.  At present, and until
something turns up (which I am, I may say, hourly expecting), I
have nothing to bestow but advice.  Still my advice is so far worth
taking, that - in short, that I have never taken it myself, and am
the' - here Mr. Micawber, who had been beaming and smiling, all
over his head and face, up to the present moment, checked himself
and frowned - 'the miserable wretch you behold.'

'My dear Micawber!' urged his wife.

'I say,' returned Mr. Micawber, quite forgetting himself, and
smiling again, 'the miserable wretch you behold.  My advice is,
never do tomorrow what you can do today.  Procrastination is the
thief of time.  Collar him!'

'My poor papa's maxim,' Mrs. Micawber observed.

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber, 'your papa was very well in his way,
and Heaven forbid that I should disparage him.  Take him for all in
all, we ne'er shall - in short, make the acquaintance, probably, of
anybody else possessing, at his time of life, the same legs for
gaiters, and able to read the same description of print, without
spectacles.  But he applied that maxim to our marriage, my dear;
and that was so far prematurely entered into, in consequence, that
I never recovered the expense.'  Mr. Micawber looked aside at Mrs.
Micawber, and added: 'Not that I am sorry for it.  Quite the
contrary, my love.'  After which, he was grave for a minute or so.

'My other piece of advice, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'you
know.  Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen
nineteen and six, result happiness.  Annual income twenty pounds,
annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.  The
blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down
upon the dreary scene, and - and in short you are for ever floored. 
As I am!'

To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber drank a glass
of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and
whistled the College Hornpipe.

I did not fail to assure him that I would store these precepts in
my mind, though indeed I had no need to do so, for, at the time,
they affected me visibly.  Next morning I met the whole family at
the coach office, and saw them, with a desolate heart, take their
places outside, at the back.

'Master Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'God bless you!  I never
can forget all that, you know, and I never would if I could.'

'Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'farewell!  Every happiness and
prosperity!  If, in the progress of revolving years, I could
persuade myself that my blighted destiny had been a warning to you,
I should feel that I had not occupied another man's place in
existence altogether in vain.  In case of anything turning up (of
which I am rather confident), I shall be extremely happy if it
should be in my power to improve your prospects.'

I think, as Mrs. Micawber sat at the back of the coach, with the
children, and I stood in the road looking wistfully at them, a mist
cleared from her eyes, and she saw what a little creature I really
was.  I think so, because she beckoned to me to climb up, with
quite a new and motherly expression in her face, and put her arm
round my neck, and gave me just such a kiss as she might have given
to her own boy.  I had barely time to get down again before the
coach started, and I could hardly see the family for the
handkerchiefs they waved.  It was gone in a minute.  The Orfling
and I stood looking vacantly at each other in the middle of the
road, and then shook hands and said good-bye; she going back, I
suppose, to St. Luke's workhouse, as I went to begin my weary day
at Murdstone and Grinby's.

But with no intention of passing many more weary days there.  No. 
I had resolved to run away.  - To go, by some means or other, down
into the country, to the only relation I had in the world, and tell
my story to my aunt, Miss Betsey.
I have already observed that I don't know how this desperate idea
came into my brain.  But, once there, it remained there; and
hardened into a purpose than which I have never entertained a more
determined purpose in my life.  I am far from sure that I believed
there was anything hopeful in it, but my mind was thoroughly made
up that it must be carried into execution.

Again, and again, and a hundred times again, since the night when
the thought had first occurred to me and banished sleep, I had gone
over that old story of my poor mother's about my birth, which it
had been one of my great delights in the old time to hear her tell,
and which I knew by heart.  My aunt walked into that story, and
walked out of it, a dread and awful personage; but there was one
little trait in her behaviour which I liked to dwell on, and which
gave me some faint shadow of encouragement.  I could not forget how
my mother had thought that she felt her touch her pretty hair with
no ungentle hand; and though it might have been altogether my
mother's fancy, and might have had no foundation whatever in fact,
I made a little picture, out of it, of my terrible aunt relenting
towards the girlish beauty that I recollected so well and loved so
much, which softened the whole narrative.  It is very possible that
it had been in my mind a long time, and had gradually engendered my
determination.

As I did not even know where Miss Betsey lived, I wrote a long
letter to Peggotty, and asked her, incidentally, if she remembered;
pretending that I had heard of such a lady living at a certain
place I named at random, and had a curiosity to know if it were the
same.  In the course of that letter, I told Peggotty that I had a
particular occasion for half a guinea; and that if she could lend
me that sum until I could repay it, I should be very much obliged
to her, and would tell her afterwards what I had wanted it for.

Peggotty's answer soon arrived, and was, as usual, full of
affectionate devotion.  She enclosed the half guinea (I was afraid
she must have had a world of trouble to get it out of Mr. Barkis's
box), and told me that Miss Betsey lived near Dover, but whether at
Dover itself, at Hythe, Sandgate, or Folkestone, she could not say. 
One of our men, however, informing me on my asking him about these
places, that they were all close together, I deemed this enough for
my object, and resolved to set out at the end of that week.

Being a very honest little creature, and unwilling to disgrace the
memory I was going to leave behind me at Murdstone and Grinby's, I
considered myself bound to remain until Saturday night; and, as I
had been paid a week's wages in advance when I first came there,
not to present myself in the counting-house at the usual hour, to
receive my stipend.  For this express reason, I had borrowed the
half-guinea, that I might not be without a fund for my
travelling-expenses.  Accordingly, when the Saturday night came,
and we were all waiting in the warehouse to be paid, and Tipp the
carman, who always took precedence, went in first to draw his
money, I shook Mick Walker by the hand; asked him, when it came to
his turn to be paid, to say to Mr. Quinion that I had gone to move
my box to Tipp's; and, bidding a last good night to Mealy Potatoes,
ran away.

My box was at my old lodging, over the water, and I had written a
direction for it on the back of one of our address cards that we
nailed on the casks: 'Master David, to be left till called for, at
the Coach Office, Dover.'  This I had in my pocket ready to put on
the box, after I should have got it out of the house; and as I went
towards my lodging, I looked about me for someone who would help me
to carry it to the booking-office.

There was a long-legged young man with a very little empty
donkey-cart, standing near the Obelisk, in the Blackfriars Road,
whose eye I caught as I was going by, and who, addressing me as
'Sixpenn'orth of bad ha'pence,' hoped 'I should know him agin to
swear to' - in allusion, I have no doubt, to my staring at him.  I
stopped to assure him that I had not done so in bad manners, but
uncertain whether he might or might not like a job.

'Wot job?' said the long-legged young man.

'To move a box,' I answered.

'Wot box?' said the long-legged young man.

I told him mine, which was down that street there, and which I
wanted him to take to the Dover coach office for sixpence.

'Done with you for a tanner!' said the long-legged young man, and
directly got upon his cart, which was nothing but a large wooden
tray on wheels, and rattled away at such a rate, that it was as
much as I could do to keep pace with the donkey.

There was a defiant manner about this young man, and particularly
about the way in which he chewed straw as he spoke to me, that I
did not much like; as the bargain was made, however, I took him
upstairs to the room I was leaving, and we brought the box down,
and put it on his cart.  Now, I was unwilling to put the
direction-card on there, lest any of my landlord's family should
fathom what I was doing, and detain me; so I said to the young man
that I would be glad if he would stop for a minute, when he came to
the dead-wall of the King's Bench prison.  The words were no sooner
out of my mouth, than he rattled away as if he, my box, the cart,
and the donkey, were all equally mad; and I was quite out of breath
with running and calling after him, when I caught him at the place
appointed.

Being much flushed and excited, I tumbled my half-guinea out of my
pocket in pulling the card out.  I put it in my mouth for safety,
and though my hands trembled a good deal, had just tied the card on
very much to my satisfaction, when I felt myself violently chucked
under the chin by the long-legged young man, and saw my half-guinea
fly out of my mouth into his hand.

'Wot!' said the young man, seizing me by my jacket collar, with a
frightful grin.  'This is a pollis case, is it?  You're a-going to
bolt, are you?  Come to the pollis, you young warmin, come to the
pollis!'

'You give me my money back, if you please,' said I, very much
frightened; 'and leave me alone.'

'Come to the pollis!' said the young man.  'You shall prove it
yourn to the pollis.'

'Give me my box and money, will you,' I cried, bursting into tears.

The young man still replied: 'Come to the pollis!' and was dragging
me against the donkey in a violent manner, as if there were any
affinity between that animal and a magistrate, when he changed his
mind, jumped into the cart, sat upon my box, and, exclaiming that
he would drive to the pollis straight, rattled away harder than
ever.

I ran after him as fast as I could, but I had no breath to call out
with, and should not have dared to call out, now, if I had.  I
narrowly escaped being run over, twenty times at least, in half a
mile.  Now I lost him, now I saw him, now I lost him, now I was cut
at with a whip, now shouted at, now down in the mud, now up again,
now running into somebody's arms, now running headlong at a post. 
At length, confused by fright and heat, and doubting whether half
London might not by this time be turning out for my apprehension,
I left the young man to go where he would with my box and money;
and, panting and crying, but never stopping, faced about for
Greenwich, which I had understood was on the Dover Road: taking
very little more out of the world, towards the retreat of my aunt,
Miss Betsey, than I had brought into it, on the night when my
arrival gave her so much umbrage.



CHAPTER 13
THE SEQUEL OF MY RESOLUTION


For anything I know, I may have had some wild idea of running all
the way to Dover, when I gave up the pursuit of the young man with
the donkey-cart, and started for Greenwich.  My scattered senses
were soon collected as to that point, if I had; for I came to a
stop in the Kent Road, at a terrace with a piece of water before
it, and a great foolish image in the middle, blowing a dry shell. 
Here I sat down on a doorstep, quite spent and exhausted with the
efforts I had already made, and with hardly breath enough to cry
for the loss of my box and half-guinea.

It was by this time dark; I heard the clocks strike ten, as I sat
resting.  But it was a summer night, fortunately, and fine weather. 
When I had recovered my breath, and had got rid of a stifling
sensation in my throat, I rose up and went on.  In the midst of my
distress, I had no notion of going back.  I doubt if I should have
had any, though there had been a Swiss snow-drift in the Kent Road.

But my standing possessed of only three-halfpence in the world (and
I am sure I wonder how they came to be left in my pocket on a
Saturday night!) troubled me none the less because I went on.  I
began to picture to myself, as a scrap of newspaper intelligence,
my being found dead in a day or two, under some hedge; and I
trudged on miserably, though as fast as I could, until I happened
to pass a little shop, where it was written up that ladies' and
gentlemen's wardrobes were bought, and that the best price was
given for rags, bones, and kitchen-stuff.  The master of this shop
was sitting at the door in his shirt-sleeves, smoking; and as there
were a great many coats and pairs of trousers dangling from the low
ceiling, and only two feeble candles burning inside to show what
they were, I fancied that he looked like a man of a revengeful
disposition, who had hung all his enemies, and was enjoying
himself.

My late experiences with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber suggested to me that
here might be a means of keeping off the wolf for a little while. 
I went up the next by-street, took off my waistcoat, rolled it
neatly under my arm, and came back to the shop door.

'If you please, sir,' I said, 'I am to sell this for a fair price.'

Mr. Dolloby - Dolloby was the name over the shop door, at least -
took the waistcoat, stood his pipe on its head, against the
door-post, went into the shop, followed by me, snuffed the two
candles with his fingers, spread the waistcoat on the counter, and
looked at it there, held it up against the light, and looked at it
there, and ultimately said:

'What do you call a price, now, for this here little weskit?'

'Oh! you know best, sir,' I returned modestly.

'I can't be buyer and seller too,' said Mr. Dolloby.  'Put a price
on this here little weskit.'

'Would eighteenpence be?'- I hinted, after some hesitation.

Mr. Dolloby rolled it up again, and gave it me back.  'I should rob
my family,' he said, 'if I was to offer ninepence for it.'

This was a disagreeable way of putting the business; because it
imposed upon me, a perfect stranger, the unpleasantness of asking
Mr. Dolloby to rob his family on my account.  My circumstances
being so very pressing, however, I said I would take ninepence for
it, if he pleased.  Mr. Dolloby, not without some grumbling, gave
ninepence.  I wished him good night, and walked out of the shop the
richer by that sum, and the poorer by a waistcoat.  But when I
buttoned my jacket, that was not much.
Indeed, I foresaw pretty clearly that my jacket would go next, and
that I should have to make the best of my way to Dover in a shirt
and a pair of trousers, and might deem myself lucky if I got there
even in that trim.  But my mind did not run so much on this as
might be supposed.  Beyond a general impression of the distance
before me, and of the young man with the donkey-cart having used me
cruelly, I think I had no very urgent sense of my difficulties when
I once again set off with my ninepence in my pocket.

A plan had occurred to me for passing the night, which I was going
to carry into execution.  This was, to lie behind the wall at the
back of my old school, in a corner where there used to be a
haystack.  I imagined it would be a kind of company to have the
boys, and the bedroom where I used to tell the stories, so near me:
although the boys would know nothing of my being there, and the
bedroom would yield me no shelter.

I had had a hard day's work, and was pretty well jaded when I came
climbing out, at last, upon the level of Blackheath.  It cost me
some trouble to find out Salem House; but I found it, and I found
a haystack in the corner, and I lay down by it; having first walked
round the wall, and looked up at the windows, and seen that all was
dark and silent within.  Never shall I forget the lonely sensation
of first lying down, without a roof above my head!

Sleep came upon me as it came on many other outcasts, against whom
house-doors were locked, and house-dogs barked, that night - and I
dreamed of lying on my old school-bed, talking to the boys in my
room; and found myself sitting upright, with Steerforth's name upon
my lips, looking wildly at the stars that were glistening and
glimmering above me.  When I remembered where I was at that
untimely hour, a feeling stole upon me that made me get up, afraid
of I don't know what, and walk about.  But the fainter glimmering
of the stars, and the pale light in the sky where the day was
coming, reassured me: and my eyes being very heavy, I lay down
again and slept - though with a knowledge in my sleep that it was
cold - until the warm beams of the sun, and the ringing of the
getting-up bell at Salem House, awoke me.  If I could have hoped
that Steerforth was there, I would have lurked about until he came
out alone; but I knew he must have left long since.  Traddles still
remained, perhaps, but it was very doubtful; and I had not
sufficient confidence in his discretion or good luck, however
strong my reliance was on his good nature, to wish to trust him
with my situation.  So I crept away from the wall as Mr. Creakle's
boys were getting up, and struck into the long dusty track which I
had first known to be the Dover Road when I was one of them, and
when I little expected that any eyes would ever see me the wayfarer
I was now, upon it.

What a different Sunday morning from the old Sunday morning at
Yarmouth!  In due time I heard the church-bells ringing, as I
plodded on; and I met people who were going to church; and I passed
a church or two where the congregation were inside, and the sound
of singing came out into the sunshine, while the beadle sat and
cooled himself in the shade of the porch, or stood beneath the
yew-tree, with his hand to his forehead, glowering at me going by. 
But the peace and rest of the old Sunday morning were on
everything, except me.  That was the difference.  I felt quite
wicked in my dirt and dust, with my tangled hair.  But for the
quiet picture I had conjured up, of my mother in her youth and
beauty, weeping by the fire, and my aunt relenting to her, I hardly
think I should have had the courage to go on until next day.  But
it always went before me, and I followed.

I got, that Sunday, through three-and-twenty miles on the straight
road, though not very easily, for I was new to that kind of toil. 
I see myself, as evening closes in, coming over the bridge at
Rochester, footsore and tired, and eating bread that I had bought
for supper.  One or two little houses, with the notice, 'Lodgings
for Travellers', hanging out, had tempted me; but I was afraid of
spending the few pence I had, and was even more afraid of the
vicious looks of the trampers I had met or overtaken.  I sought no
shelter, therefore, but the sky; and toiling into Chatham, - which,
in that night's aspect, is a mere dream of chalk, and drawbridges,
and mastless ships in a muddy river, roofed like Noah's arks, -
crept, at last, upon a sort of grass-grown battery overhanging a
lane, where a sentry was walking to and fro.  Here I lay down, near
a cannon; and, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps,
though he knew no more of my being above him than the boys at Salem
House had known of my lying by the wall, slept soundly until
morning.

Very stiff and sore of foot I was in the morning, and quite dazed
by the beating of drums and marching of troops, which seemed to hem
me in on every side when I went down towards the long narrow
street.  Feeling that I could go but a very little way that day, if
I were to reserve any strength for getting to my journey's end, I
resolved to make the sale of my jacket its principal business. 
Accordingly, I took the jacket off, that I might learn to do
without it; and carrying it under my arm, began a tour of
inspection of the various slop-shops.

It was a likely place to sell a jacket in; for the dealers in
second-hand clothes were numerous, and were, generally speaking, on
the look-out for customers at their shop doors.  But as most of
them had, hanging up among their stock, an officer's coat or two,
epaulettes and all, I was rendered timid by the costly nature of
their dealings, and walked about for a long time without offering
my merchandise to anyone.

This modesty of mine directed my attention to the marine-store
shops, and such shops as Mr. Dolloby's, in preference to the
regular dealers.  At last I found one that I thought looked
promising, at the corner of a dirty lane, ending in an enclosure
full of stinging-nettles, against the palings of which some
second-hand sailors' clothes, that seemed to have overflowed the
shop, were fluttering among some cots, and rusty guns, and oilskin
hats, and certain trays full of so many old rusty keys of so many
sizes that they seemed various enough to open all the doors in the
world.

Into this shop, which was low and small, and which was darkened
rather than lighted by a little window, overhung with clothes, and
was descended into by some steps, I went with a palpitating heart;
which was not relieved when an ugly old man, with the lower part of
his face all covered with a stubbly grey beard, rushed out of a
dirty den behind it, and seized me by the hair of my head.  He was
a dreadful old man to look at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and
smelling terribly of rum.  His bedstead, covered with a tumbled and
ragged piece of patchwork, was in the den he had come from, where
another little window showed a prospect of more stinging-nettles,
and a lame donkey.

'Oh, what do you want?' grinned this old man, in a fierce,
monotonous whine.  'Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want?  Oh,
my lungs and liver, what do you want?  Oh, goroo, goroo!'

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the
repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in
his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man,
still holding me by the hair, repeated:

'Oh, what do you want?  Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? 
Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want?  Oh, goroo!' - which he
screwed out of himself, with an energy that made his eyes start in
his head.

'I wanted to know,' I said, trembling, 'if you would buy a jacket.'

'Oh, let's see the jacket!' cried the old man.  'Oh, my heart on
fire, show the jacket to us!  Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the
jacket out!'

With that he took his trembling hands, which were like the claws of
a great bird, out of my hair; and put on a pair of spectacles, not
at all ornamental to his inflamed eyes.

'Oh, how much for the jacket?' cried the old man, after examining
it.  'Oh - goroo! - how much for the jacket?'

'Half-a-crown,' I answered, recovering myself.

'Oh, my lungs and liver,' cried the old man, 'no!  Oh, my eyes, no! 
Oh, my limbs, no!  Eighteenpence.  Goroo!'

Every time he uttered this ejaculation, his eyes seemed to be in
danger of starting out; and every sentence he spoke, he delivered
in a sort of tune, always exactly the same, and more like a gust of
wind, which begins low, mounts up high, and falls again, than any
other comparison I can find for it.

'Well,' said I, glad to have closed the bargain, 'I'll take
eighteenpence.'

'Oh, my liver!' cried the old man, throwing the jacket on a shelf. 
'Get out of the shop!  Oh, my lungs, get out of the shop!  Oh, my
eyes and limbs - goroo! - don't ask for money; make it an
exchange.'  I never was so frightened in my life, before or since;
but I told him humbly that I wanted money, and that nothing else
was of any use to me, but that I would wait for it, as he desired,
outside, and had no wish to hurry him.  So I went outside, and sat
down in the shade in a corner.  And I sat there so many hours, that
the shade became sunlight, and the sunlight became shade again, and
still I sat there waiting for the money.

There never was such another drunken madman in that line of
business, I hope.  That he was well known in the neighbourhood, and
enjoyed the reputation of having sold himself to the devil, I soon
understood from the visits he received from the boys, who
continually came skirmishing about the shop, shouting that legend,
and calling to him to bring out his gold.  'You ain't poor, you
know, Charley, as you pretend.  Bring out your gold.  Bring out
some of the gold you sold yourself to the devil for.  Come!  It's
in the lining of the mattress, Charley.  Rip it open and let's have
some!'  This, and many offers to lend him a knife for the purpose,
exasperated him to such a degree, that the whole day was a
succession of rushes on his part, and flights on the part of the
boys.  Sometimes in his rage he would take me for one of them, and
come at me, mouthing as if he were going to tear me in pieces;
then, remembering me, just in time, would dive into the shop, and
lie upon his bed, as I thought from the sound of his voice, yelling
in a frantic way, to his own windy tune, the 'Death of Nelson';
with an Oh! before every line, and innumerable Goroos interspersed. 
As if this were not bad enough for me, the boys, connecting me with
the establishment, on account of the patience and perseverance with
which I sat outside, half-dressed, pelted me, and used me very ill
all day.

He made many attempts to induce me to consent to an exchange; at
one time coming out with a fishing-rod, at another with a fiddle,
at another with a cocked hat, at another with a flute.  But I
resisted all these overtures, and sat there in desperation; each
time asking him, with tears in my eyes, for my money or my jacket. 
At last he began to pay me in halfpence at a time; and was full two
hours getting by easy stages to a shilling.

'Oh, my eyes and limbs!' he then cried, peeping hideously out of
the shop, after a long pause, 'will you go for twopence more?'

'I can't,' I said; 'I shall be starved.'

'Oh, my lungs and liver, will you go for threepence?'

'I would go for nothing, if I could,' I said, 'but I want the money
badly.'

'Oh, go-roo!' (it is really impossible to express how he twisted
this ejaculation out of himself, as he peeped round the door-post
at me, showing nothing but his crafty old head); 'will you go for
fourpence?'

I was so faint and weary that I closed with this offer; and taking
the money out of his claw, not without trembling, went away more
hungry and thirsty than I had ever been, a little before sunset. 
But at an expense of threepence I soon refreshed myself completely;
and, being in better spirits then, limped seven miles upon my road.

My bed at night was under another haystack, where I rested
comfortably, after having washed my blistered feet in a stream, and
dressed them as well as I was able, with some cool leaves.  When I
took the road again next morning, I found that it lay through a
succession of hop-grounds and orchards.  It was sufficiently late
in the year for the orchards to be ruddy with ripe apples; and in
a few places the hop-pickers were already at work.  I thought it
all extremely beautiful, and made up my mind to sleep among the
hops that night: imagining some cheerful companionship in the long
perspectives of poles, with the graceful leaves twining round them.

The trampers were worse than ever that day, and inspired me with a
dread that is yet quite fresh in my mind.  Some of them were most
ferocious-looking ruffians, who stared at me as I went by; and
stopped, perhaps, and called after me to come back and speak to
them, and when I took to my heels, stoned me.  I recollect one
young fellow - a tinker, I suppose, from his wallet and brazier -
who had a woman with him, and who faced about and stared at me
thus; and then roared to me in such a tremendous voice to come
back, that I halted and looked round.

'Come here, when you're called,' said the tinker, 'or I'll rip your
young body open.'

I thought it best to go back.  As I drew nearer to them, trying to
propitiate the tinker by my looks, I observed that the woman had a
black eye.

'Where are you going?' said the tinker, gripping the bosom of my
shirt with his blackened hand.

'I am going to Dover,' I said.

'Where do you come from?' asked the tinker, giving his hand another
turn in my shirt, to hold me more securely.

'I come from London,' I said.

'What lay are you upon?' asked the tinker.  'Are you a prig?'

'N-no,' I said.

'Ain't you, by G--?  If you make a brag of your honesty to me,'
said the tinker, 'I'll knock your brains out.'

With his disengaged hand he made a menace of striking me, and then
looked at me from head to foot.

'Have you got the price of a pint of beer about you?' said the
tinker.  'If you have, out with it, afore I take it away!'

I should certainly have produced it, but that I met the woman's
look, and saw her very slightly shake her head, and form 'No!' with
her lips.

'I am very poor,' I said, attempting to smile, 'and have got no
money.'

'Why, what do you mean?' said the tinker, looking so sternly at me,
that I almost feared he saw the money in my pocket.

'Sir!' I stammered.

'What do you mean,' said the tinker, 'by wearing my brother's silk
handkerchief!  Give it over here!'  And he had mine off my neck in
a moment, and tossed it to the woman.

The woman burst into a fit of laughter, as if she thought this a
joke, and tossed it back to me, nodded once, as slightly as before,
and made the word 'Go!' with her lips.  Before I could obey,
however, the tinker seized the handkerchief out of my hand with a
roughness that threw me away like a feather, and putting it loosely
round his own neck, turned upon the woman with an oath, and knocked
her down.  I never shall forget seeing her fall backward on the
hard road, and lie there with her bonnet tumbled off, and her hair
all whitened in the dust; nor, when I looked back from a distance,
seeing her sitting on the pathway, which was a bank by the
roadside, wiping the blood from her face with a corner of her
shawl, while he went on ahead.

This adventure frightened me so, that, afterwards, when I saw any
of these people coming, I turned back until I could find a
hiding-place, where I remained until they had gone out of sight;
which happened so often, that I was very seriously delayed.  But
under this difficulty, as under all the other difficulties of my
journey, I seemed to be sustained and led on by my fanciful picture
of my mother in her youth, before I came into the world.  It always
kept me company.  It was there, among the hops, when I lay down to
sleep; it was with me on my waking in the morning; it went before
me all day.  I have associated it, ever since, with the sunny
street of Canterbury, dozing as it were in the hot light; and with
the sight of its old houses and gateways, and the stately, grey
Cathedral, with the rooks sailing round the towers.  When I came,
at last, upon the bare, wide downs near Dover, it relieved the
solitary aspect of the scene with hope; and not until I reached
that first great aim of my journey, and actually set foot in the
town itself, on the sixth day of my flight, did it desert me.  But
then, strange to say, when I stood with my ragged shoes, and my
dusty, sunburnt, half-clothed figure, in the place so long desired,
it seemed to vanish like a dream, and to leave me helpless and
dispirited.

I inquired about my aunt among the boatmen first, and received
various answers.  One said she lived in the South Foreland Light,
and had singed her whiskers by doing so; another, that she was made
fast to the great buoy outside the harbour, and could only be
visited at half-tide; a third, that she was locked up in Maidstone
jail for child-stealing; a fourth, that she was seen to mount a
broom in the last high wind, and make direct for Calais.  The
fly-drivers, among whom I inquired next, were equally jocose and
equally disrespectful; and the shopkeepers, not liking my
appearance, generally replied, without hearing what I had to say,
that they had got nothing for me.  I felt more miserable and
destitute than I had done at any period of my running away.  My
money was all gone, I had nothing left to dispose of; I was hungry,
thirsty, and worn out; and seemed as distant from my end as if I
had remained in London.

The morning had worn away in these inquiries, and I was sitting on
the step of an empty shop at a street corner, near the
market-place, deliberating upon wandering towards those other
places which had been mentioned, when a fly-driver, coming by with
his carriage, dropped a horsecloth.  Something good-natured in the
man's face, as I handed it up, encouraged me to ask him if he could
tell me where Miss Trotwood lived; though I had asked the question
so often, that it almost died upon my lips.

'Trotwood,' said he.  'Let me see.  I know the name, too.  Old
lady?'

'Yes,' I said, 'rather.'

'Pretty stiff in the back?' said he, making himself upright.

'Yes,' I said.  'I should think it very likely.'

'Carries a bag?' said he - 'bag with a good deal of room in it - is
gruffish, and comes down upon you, sharp?'

My heart sank within me as I acknowledged the undoubted accuracy of
this description.

'Why then, I tell you what,' said he.  'If you go up there,'
pointing with his whip towards the heights, 'and keep right on till
you come to some houses facing the sea, I think you'll hear of her. 
My opinion is she won't stand anything, so here's a penny for you.'

I accepted the gift thankfully, and bought a loaf with it. 
Dispatching this refreshment by the way, I went in the direction my
friend had indicated, and walked on a good distance without coming
to the houses he had mentioned.  At length I saw some before me;
and approaching them, went into a little shop (it was what we used
to call a general shop, at home), and inquired if they could have
the goodness to tell me where Miss Trotwood lived.  I addressed
myself to a man behind the counter, who was weighing some rice for
a young woman; but the latter, taking the inquiry to herself,
turned round quickly.

'My mistress?' she said.  'What do you want with her, boy?'

'I want,' I replied, 'to speak to her, if you please.'

'To beg of her, you mean,' retorted the damsel.

'No,' I said, 'indeed.'  But suddenly remembering that in truth I
came for no other purpose, I held my peace in confusion, and felt
my face burn.

MY aunt's handmaid, as I supposed she was from what she had said,
put her rice in a little basket and walked out of the shop; telling
me that I could follow her, if I wanted to know where Miss Trotwood
lived.  I needed no second permission; though I was by this time in
such a state of consternation and agitation, that my legs shook
under me.  I followed the young woman, and we soon came to a very
neat little cottage with cheerful bow-windows: in front of it, a
small square gravelled court or garden full of flowers, carefully
tended, and smelling deliciously.

'This is Miss Trotwood's,' said the young woman.  'Now you know;
and that's all I have got to say.'  With which words she hurried
into the house, as if to shake off the responsibility of my
appearance; and left me standing at the garden-gate, looking
disconsolately over the top of it towards the parlour window, where
a muslin curtain partly undrawn in the middle, a large round green
screen or fan fastened on to the windowsill, a small table, and a
great chair, suggested to me that my aunt might be at that moment
seated in awful state.

My shoes were by this time in a woeful condition.  The soles had
shed themselves bit by bit, and the upper leathers had broken and
burst until the very shape and form of shoes had departed from
them.  My hat (which had served me for a night-cap, too) was so
crushed and bent, that no old battered handleless saucepan on a
dunghill need have been ashamed to vie with it.  My shirt and
trousers, stained with heat, dew, grass, and the Kentish soil on
which I had slept - and torn besides - might have frightened the
birds from my aunt's garden, as I stood at the gate.  My hair had
known no comb or brush since I left London.  My face, neck, and
hands, from unaccustomed exposure to the air and sun, were burnt to
a berry-brown.  From head to foot I was powdered almost as white
with chalk and dust, as if I had come out of a lime-kiln.  In this
plight, and with a strong consciousness of it, I waited to
introduce myself to, and make my first impression on, my formidable
aunt.

The unbroken stillness of the parlour window leading me to infer,
after a while, that she was not there, I lifted up my eyes to the
window above it, where I saw a florid, pleasant-looking gentleman,
with a grey head, who shut up one eye in a grotesque manner, nodded
his head at me several times, shook it at me as often, laughed, and
went away.

I had been discomposed enough before; but I was so much the more
discomposed by this unexpected behaviour, that I was on the point
of slinking off, to think how I had best proceed, when there came
out of the house a lady with her handkerchief tied over her cap,
and a pair of gardening gloves on her hands, wearing a gardening
pocket like a toll-man's apron, and carrying a great knife.  I knew
her immediately to be Miss Betsey, for she came stalking out of the
house exactly as my poor mother had so often described her stalking
up our garden at Blunderstone Rookery.

'Go away!' said Miss Betsey, shaking her head, and making a distant
chop in the air with her knife.  'Go along!  No boys here!'

I watched her, with my heart at my lips, as she marched to a corner
of her garden, and stooped to dig up some little root there.  Then,
without a scrap of courage, but with a great deal of desperation,
I went softly in and stood beside her, touching her with my finger.

'If you please, ma'am,' I began.

She started and looked up.

'If you please, aunt.'

'EH?' exclaimed Miss Betsey, in a tone of amazement I have never
heard approached.

'If you please, aunt, I am your nephew.'

'Oh, Lord!' said my aunt.  And sat flat down in the garden-path.

'I am David Copperfield, of Blunderstone, in Suffolk - where you
came, on the night when I was born, and saw my dear mama.  I have
been very unhappy since she died.  I have been slighted, and taught
nothing, and thrown upon myself, and put to work not fit for me. 
It made me run away to you.  I was robbed at first setting out, and
have walked all the way, and have never slept in a bed since I
began the journey.'  Here my self-support gave way all at once; and
with a movement of my hands, intended to show her my ragged state,
and call it to witness that I had suffered something, I broke into
a passion of crying, which I suppose had been pent up within me all
the week.

My aunt, with every sort of expression but wonder discharged from
her countenance, sat on the gravel, staring at me, until I began to
cry; when she got up in a great hurry, collared me, and took me
into the parlour.  Her first proceeding there was to unlock a tall
press, bring out several bottles, and pour some of the contents of
each into my mouth.  I think they must have been taken out at
random, for I am sure I tasted aniseed water, anchovy sauce, and
salad dressing.  When she had administered these restoratives, as
I was still quite hysterical, and unable to control my sobs, she
put me on the sofa, with a shawl under my head, and the
handkerchief from her own head under my feet, lest I should sully
the cover; and then, sitting herself down behind the green fan or
screen I have already mentioned, so that I could not see her face,
ejaculated at intervals, 'Mercy on us!' letting those exclamations
off like minute guns.

After a time she rang the bell.  'Janet,' said my aunt, when her
servant came in.  'Go upstairs, give my compliments to Mr. Dick,
and say I wish to speak to him.'

Janet looked a little surprised to see me lying stiffly on the sofa
(I was afraid to move lest it should be displeasing to my aunt),
but went on her errand.  My aunt, with her hands behind her, walked
up and down the room, until the gentleman who had squinted at me
from the upper window came in laughing.

'Mr. Dick,' said my aunt, 'don't be a fool, because nobody can be
more discreet than you can, when you choose.  We all know that.  So
don't be a fool, whatever you are.'

The gentleman was serious immediately, and looked at me, I thought,
as if he would entreat me to say nothing about the window.

'Mr. Dick,' said my aunt, 'you have heard me mention David
Copperfield?  Now don't pretend not to have a memory, because you
and I know better.'

'David Copperfield?' said Mr. Dick, who did not appear to me to
remember much about it.  'David Copperfield?  Oh yes, to be sure. 
David, certainly.'

'Well,' said my aunt, 'this is his boy - his son.  He would be as
like his father as it's possible to be, if he was not so like his
mother, too.'

'His son?' said Mr. Dick.  'David's son?  Indeed!'

'Yes,' pursued my aunt, 'and he has done a pretty piece of
business.  He has run away.  Ah!  His sister, Betsey Trotwood,
never would have run away.'  My aunt shook her head firmly,
confident in the character and behaviour of the girl who never was
born.

'Oh! you think she wouldn't have run away?' said Mr. Dick.

'Bless and save the man,' exclaimed my aunt, sharply, 'how he
talks!  Don't I know she wouldn't?  She would have lived with her
god-mother, and we should have been devoted to one another.  Where,
in the name of wonder, should his sister, Betsey Trotwood, have run
from, or to?'

'Nowhere,' said Mr. Dick.

'Well then,' returned my aunt, softened by the reply, 'how can you
pretend to be wool-gathering, Dick, when you are as sharp as a
surgeon's lancet?  Now, here you see young David Copperfield, and
the question I put to you is, what shall I do with him?'

'What shall you do with him?' said Mr. Dick, feebly, scratching his
head.  'Oh! do with him?'

'Yes,' said my aunt, with a grave look, and her forefinger held up. 
'Come!  I want some very sound advice.'

'Why, if I was you,' said Mr. Dick, considering, and looking
vacantly at me, 'I should -' The contemplation of me seemed to
inspire him with a sudden idea, and he added, briskly, 'I should
wash him!'

'Janet,' said my aunt, turning round with a quiet triumph, which I
did not then understand, 'Mr. Dick sets us all right.  Heat the
bath!'

Although I was deeply interested in this dialogue, I could not help
observing my aunt, Mr. Dick, and Janet, while it was in progress,
and completing a survey I had already been engaged in making of the
room.

MY aunt was a tall, hard-featured lady, but by no means
ill-looking.  There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice,
in her gait and carriage, amply sufficient to account for the
effect she had made upon a gentle creature like my mother; but her
features were rather handsome than otherwise, though unbending and
austere.  I particularly noticed that she had a very quick, bright
eye.  Her hair, which was grey, was arranged in two plain
divisions, under what I believe would be called a mob-cap; I mean
a cap, much more common then than now, with side-pieces fastening
under the chin.  Her dress was of a lavender colour, and perfectly
neat; but scantily made, as if she desired to be as little
encumbered as possible.  I remember that I thought it, in form,
more like a riding-habit with the superfluous skirt cut off, than
anything else.  She wore at her side a gentleman's gold watch, if
I might judge from its size and make, with an appropriate chain and
seals; she had some linen at her throat not unlike a shirt-collar,
and things at her wrists like little shirt-wristbands.

Mr. Dick, as I have already said, was grey-headed, and florid: I
should have said all about him, in saying so, had not his head been
curiously bowed - not by age; it reminded me of one of Mr.
Creakle's boys' heads after a beating - and his grey eyes prominent
and large, with a strange kind of watery brightness in them that
made me, in combination with his vacant manner, his submission to
my aunt, and his childish delight when she praised him, suspect him
of being a little mad; though, if he were mad, how he came to be
there puzzled me extremely.  He was dressed like any other ordinary
gentleman, in a loose grey morning coat and waistcoat, and white
trousers; and had his watch in his fob, and his money in his
pockets: which he rattled as if he were very proud of it.

Janet was a pretty blooming girl, of about nineteen or twenty, and
a perfect picture of neatness.  Though I made no further
observation of her at the moment, I may mention here what I did not
discover until afterwards, namely, that she was one of a series of
protegees whom my aunt had taken into her service expressly to
educate in a renouncement of mankind, and who had generally
completed their abjuration by marrying the baker.

The room was as neat as Janet or my aunt.  As I laid down my pen,
a moment since, to think of it, the air from the sea came blowing
in again, mixed with the perfume of the flowers; and I saw the
old-fashioned furniture brightly rubbed and polished, my aunt's
inviolable chair and table by the round green fan in the
bow-window, the drugget-covered carpet, the cat, the kettle-holder,
the two canaries, the old china, the punchbowl full of dried
rose-leaves, the tall press guarding all sorts of bottles and pots,
and, wonderfully out of keeping with the rest, my dusty self upon
the sofa, taking note of everything.

Janet had gone away to get the bath ready, when my aunt, to my
great alarm, became in one moment rigid with indignation, and had
hardly voice to cry out, 'Janet!  Donkeys!'

Upon which, Janet came running up the stairs as if the house were
in flames, darted out on a little piece of green in front, and
warned off two saddle-donkeys, lady-ridden, that had presumed to
set hoof upon it; while my aunt, rushing out of the house, seized
the bridle of a third animal laden with a bestriding child, turned
him, led him forth from those sacred precincts, and boxed the ears
of the unlucky urchin in attendance who had dared to profane that
hallowed ground.

To this hour I don't know whether my aunt had any lawful right of
way over that patch of green; but she had settled it in her own
mind that she had, and it was all the same to her.  The one great
outrage of her life, demanding to be constantly avenged, was the
passage of a donkey over that immaculate spot.  In whatever
occupation she was engaged, however interesting to her the
conversation in which she was taking part, a donkey turned the
current of her ideas in a moment, and she was upon him straight. 
Jugs of water, and watering-pots, were kept in secret places ready
to be discharged on the offending boys; sticks were laid in ambush
behind the door; sallies were made at all hours; and incessant war
prevailed.  Perhaps this was an agreeable excitement to the
donkey-boys; or perhaps the more sagacious of the donkeys,
understanding how the case stood, delighted with constitutional
obstinacy in coming that way.  I only know that there were three
alarms before the bath was ready; and that on the occasion of the
last and most desperate of all, I saw my aunt engage,
single-handed, with a sandy-headed lad of fifteen, and bump his
sandy head against her own gate, before he seemed to comprehend
what was the matter.  These interruptions were of the more
ridiculous to me, because she was giving me broth out of a
table-spoon at the time (having firmly persuaded herself that I was
actually starving, and must receive nourishment at first in very
small quantities), and, while my mouth was yet open to receive the
spoon, she would put it back into the basin, cry 'Janet!  Donkeys!'
and go out to the assault.

The bath was a great comfort.  For I began to be sensible of acute
pains in my limbs from lying out in the fields, and was now so
tired and low that I could hardly keep myself awake for five
minutes together.  When I had bathed, they (I mean my aunt and
Janet) enrobed me in a shirt and a pair of trousers belonging to
Mr. Dick, and tied me up in two or three great shawls.  What sort
of bundle I looked like, I don't know, but I felt a very hot one. 
Feeling also very faint and drowsy, I soon lay down on the sofa
again and fell asleep.

It might have been a dream, originating in the fancy which had
occupied my mind so long, but I awoke with the impression that my
aunt had come and bent over me, and had put my hair away from my
face, and laid my head more comfortably, and had then stood looking
at me.  The words, 'Pretty fellow,' or 'Poor fellow,' seemed to be
in my ears, too; but certainly there was nothing else, when I
awoke, to lead me to believe that they had been uttered by my aunt,
who sat in the bow-window gazing at the sea from behind the green
fan, which was mounted on a kind of swivel, and turned any way.

We dined soon after I awoke, off a roast fowl and a pudding; I
sitting at table, not unlike a trussed bird myself, and moving my
arms with considerable difficulty.  But as my aunt had swathed me
up, I made no complaint of being inconvenienced.  All this time I
was deeply anxious to know what she was going to do with me; but
she took her dinner in profound silence, except when she
occasionally fixed her eyes on me sitting opposite, and said,
'Mercy upon us!' which did not by any means relieve my anxiety.

The cloth being drawn, and some sherry put upon the table (of which
I had a glass), my aunt sent up for Mr. Dick again, who joined us,
and looked as wise as he could when she requested him to attend to
my story, which she elicited from me, gradually, by a course of
questions.  During my recital, she kept her eyes on Mr. Dick, who
I thought would have gone to sleep but for that, and who,
whensoever he lapsed into a smile, was checked by a frown from my
aunt.

'Whatever possessed that poor unfortunate Baby, that she must go
and be married again,' said my aunt, when I had finished, 'I can't
conceive.'

'Perhaps she fell in love with her second husband,' Mr. Dick
suggested.

'Fell in love!' repeated my aunt.  'What do you mean?  What
business had she to do it?'

'Perhaps,' Mr. Dick simpered, after thinking a little, 'she did it
for pleasure.'

'Pleasure, indeed!' replied my aunt.  'A mighty pleasure for the
poor Baby to fix her simple faith upon any dog of a fellow, certain
to ill-use her in some way or other.  What did she propose to
herself, I should like to know!  She had had one husband.  She had
seen David Copperfield out of the world, who was always running
after wax dolls from his cradle.  She had got a baby - oh, there
were a pair of babies when she gave birth to this child sitting
here, that Friday night! - and what more did she want?'

Mr. Dick secretly shook his head at me, as if he thought there was
no getting over this.

'She couldn't even have a baby like anybody else,' said my aunt. 
'Where was this child's sister, Betsey Trotwood?  Not forthcoming. 
Don't tell me!'

Mr. Dick seemed quite frightened.

'That little man of a doctor, with his head on one side,' said my
aunt, 'Jellips, or whatever his name was, what was he about?  All
he could do, was to say to me, like a robin redbreast - as he is -
"It's a boy."  A boy!  Yah, the imbecility of the whole set of
'em!'

The heartiness of the ejaculation startled Mr. Dick exceedingly;
and me, too, if I am to tell the truth.

'And then, as if this was not enough, and she had not stood
sufficiently in the light of this child's sister, Betsey Trotwood,'
said my aunt, 'she marries a second time - goes and marries a
Murderer - or a man with a name like it - and stands in THIS
child's light!  And the natural consequence is, as anybody but a
baby might have foreseen, that he prowls and wanders.  He's as like
Cain before he was grown up, as he can be.'

Mr. Dick looked hard at me, as if to identify me in this character.

'And then there's that woman with the Pagan name,' said my aunt,
'that Peggotty, she goes and gets married next.  Because she has
not seen enough of the evil attending such things, she goes and
gets married next, as the child relates.  I only hope,' said my
aunt, shaking her head, 'that her husband is one of those Poker
husbands who abound in the newspapers, and will beat her well with
one.'

I could not bear to hear my old nurse so decried, and made the
subject of such a wish.  I told my aunt that indeed she was
mistaken.  That Peggotty was the best, the truest, the most
faithful, most devoted, and most self-denying friend and servant in
the world; who had ever loved me dearly, who had ever loved my
mother dearly; who had held my mother's dying head upon her arm, on
whose face my mother had imprinted her last grateful kiss.  And my
remembrance of them both, choking me, I broke down as I was trying
to say that her home was my home, and that all she had was mine,
and that I would have gone to her for shelter, but for her humble
station, which made me fear that I might bring some trouble on her
- I broke down, I say, as I was trying to say so, and laid my face
in my hands upon the table.

'Well, well!' said my aunt, 'the child is right to stand by those
who have stood by him - Janet!  Donkeys!'

I thoroughly believe that but for those unfortunate donkeys, we
should have come to a good understanding; for my aunt had laid her
hand on my shoulder, and the impulse was upon me, thus emboldened,
to embrace her and beseech her protection.  But the interruption,
and the disorder she was thrown into by the struggle outside, put
an end to all softer ideas for the present, and kept my aunt
indignantly declaiming to Mr. Dick about her determination to
appeal for redress to the laws of her country, and to bring actions
for trespass against the whole donkey proprietorship of Dover,
until tea-time.

After tea, we sat at the window - on the look-out, as I imagined,
from my aunt's sharp expression of face, for more invaders - until
dusk, when Janet set candles, and a backgammon-board, on the table,
and pulled down the blinds.

'Now, Mr. Dick,' said my aunt, with her grave look, and her
forefinger up as before, 'I am going to ask you another question. 
Look at this child.'

'David's son?' said Mr. Dick, with an attentive, puzzled face.

'Exactly so,' returned my aunt.  'What would you do with him, now?'

'Do with David's son?' said Mr. Dick.

'Ay,' replied my aunt, 'with David's son.'

'Oh!' said Mr. Dick.  'Yes.  Do with - I should put him to bed.'

'Janet!' cried my aunt, with the same complacent triumph that I had
remarked before.  'Mr. Dick sets us all right.  If the bed is
ready, we'll take him up to it.'

Janet reporting it to be quite ready, I was taken up to it; kindly,
but in some sort like a prisoner; my aunt going in front and Janet
bringing up the rear.  The only circumstance which gave me any new
hope, was my aunt's stopping on the stairs to inquire about a smell
of fire that was prevalent there; and janet's replying that she had
been making tinder down in the kitchen, of my old shirt.  But there
were no other clothes in my room than the odd heap of things I
wore; and when I was left there, with a little taper which my aunt
forewarned me would burn exactly five minutes, I heard them lock my
door on the outside.  Turning these things over in my mind I deemed
it possible that my aunt, who could know nothing of me, might
suspect I had a habit of running away, and took precautions, on
that account, to have me in safe keeping.

The room was a pleasant one, at the top of the house, overlooking
the sea, on which the moon was shining brilliantly.  After I had
said my prayers, and the candle had burnt out, I remember how I
still sat looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope
to read my fortune in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother
with her child, coming from Heaven, along that shining path, to
look upon me as she had looked when I last saw her sweet face.  I
remember how the solemn feeling with which at length I turned my
eyes away, yielded to the sensation of gratitude and rest which the
sight of the white-curtained bed - and how much more the lying
softly down upon it, nestling in the snow-white sheets! - inspired. 
I remember how I thought of all the solitary places under the night
sky where I had slept, and how I prayed that I never might be
houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless.  I
remember how I seemed to float, then, down the melancholy glory of
that track upon the sea, away into the world of dreams.



CHAPTER 14
MY AUNT MAKES UP HER MIND ABOUT ME


On going down in the morning, I found my aunt musing so profoundly
over the breakfast table, with her elbow on the tray, that the
contents of the urn had overflowed the teapot and were laying the
whole table-cloth under water, when my entrance put her meditations
to flight.  I felt sure that I had been the subject of her
reflections, and was more than ever anxious to know her intentions
towards me.  Yet I dared not express my anxiety, lest it should
give her offence.

My eyes, however, not being so much under control as my tongue,
were attracted towards my aunt very often during breakfast.  I
never could look at her for a few moments together but I found her
looking at me - in an odd thoughtful manner, as if I were an
immense way off, instead of being on the other side of the small
round table.  When she had finished her breakfast, my aunt very
deliberately leaned back in her chair, knitted her brows, folded
her arms, and contemplated me at her leisure, with such a fixedness
of attention that I was quite overpowered by embarrassment.  Not
having as yet finished my own breakfast, I attempted to hide my
confusion by proceeding with it; but my knife tumbled over my fork,
my fork tripped up my knife, I chipped bits of bacon a surprising
height into the air instead of cutting them for my own eating, and
choked myself with my tea, which persisted in going the wrong way
instead of the right one, until I gave in altogether, and sat
blushing under my aunt's close scrutiny.

'Hallo!' said my aunt, after a long time.

I looked up, and met her sharp bright glance respectfully.

'I have written to him,' said my aunt.

'To -?'

'To your father-in-law,' said my aunt.  'I have sent him a letter
that I'll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I
can tell him!'

'Does he know where I am, aunt?' I inquired, alarmed.

'I have told him,' said my aunt, with a nod.

'Shall I - be - given up to him?' I faltered.

'I don't know,' said my aunt.  'We shall see.'

'Oh! I can't think what I shall do,' I exclaimed, 'if I have to go
back to Mr. Murdstone!'

'I don't know anything about it,' said my aunt, shaking her head. 
'I can't say, I am sure.  We shall see.'

My spirits sank under these words, and I became very downcast and
heavy of heart.  My aunt, without appearing to take much heed of
me, put on a coarse apron with a bib, which she took out of the
press; washed up the teacups with her own hands; and, when
everything was washed and set in the tray again, and the cloth
folded and put on the top of the whole, rang for Janet to remove
it.  She next swept up the crumbs with a little broom (putting on
a pair of gloves first), until there did not appear to be one
microscopic speck left on the carpet; next dusted and arranged the
room, which was dusted and arranged to a hair'sbreadth already. 
When all these tasks were performed to her satisfaction, she took
off the gloves and apron, folded them up, put them in the
particular corner of the press from which they had been taken,
brought out her work-box to her own table in the open window, and
sat down, with the green fan between her and the light, to work.

'I wish you'd go upstairs,' said my aunt, as she threaded her
needle, 'and give my compliments to Mr. Dick, and I'll be glad to
know how he gets on with his Memorial.'

I rose with all alacrity, to acquit myself of this commission.

'I suppose,' said my aunt, eyeing me as narrowly as she had eyed
the needle in threading it, 'you think Mr. Dick a short name, eh?'

'I thought it was rather a short name, yesterday,' I confessed.

'You are not to suppose that he hasn't got a longer name, if he
chose to use it,' said my aunt, with a loftier air.  'Babley - Mr.
Richard Babley - that's the gentleman's true name.'

I was going to suggest, with a modest sense of my youth and the
familiarity I had been already guilty of, that I had better give
him the full benefit of that name, when my aunt went on to say:

'But don't you call him by it, whatever you do.  He can't bear his
name.  That's a peculiarity of his.  Though I don't know that it's
much of a peculiarity, either; for he has been ill-used enough, by
some that bear it, to have a mortal antipathy for it, Heaven knows. 
Mr. Dick is his name here, and everywhere else, now - if he ever
went anywhere else, which he don't.  So take care, child, you don't
call him anything BUT Mr. Dick.'

I promised to obey, and went upstairs with my message; thinking, as
I went, that if Mr. Dick had been working at his Memorial long, at
the same rate as I had seen him working at it, through the open
door, when I came down, he was probably getting on very well
indeed.  I found him still driving at it with a long pen, and his
head almost laid upon the paper.  He was so intent upon it, that I
had ample leisure to observe the large paper kite in a corner, the
confusion of bundles of manuscript, the number of pens, and, above
all, the quantity of ink (which he seemed to have in, in
half-gallon jars by the dozen), before he observed my being
present.

'Ha! Phoebus!' said Mr. Dick, laying down his pen.  'How does the
world go?  I'll tell you what,' he added, in a lower tone, 'I
shouldn't wish it to be mentioned, but it's a -' here he beckoned
to me, and put his lips close to my ear - 'it's a mad world.  Mad
as Bedlam, boy!' said Mr. Dick, taking snuff from a round box on
the table, and laughing heartily.

Without presuming to give my opinion on this question, I delivered
my message.

'Well,' said Mr. Dick, in answer, 'my compliments to her, and I -
I believe I have made a start.  I think I have made a start,' said
Mr. Dick, passing his hand among his grey hair, and casting
anything but a confident look at his manuscript.  'You have been to
school?'

'Yes, sir,' I answered; 'for a short time.'

'Do you recollect the date,' said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at
me, and taking up his pen to note it down, 'when King Charles the
First had his head cut off?'
I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and
forty-nine.

'Well,' returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and
looking dubiously at me.  'So the books say; but I don't see how
that can be.  Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people
about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out
of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?'

I was very much surprised by the inquiry; but could give no
information on this point.

'It's very strange,' said Mr. Dick, with a despondent look upon his
papers, and with his hand among his hair again, 'that I never can
get that quite right.  I never can make that perfectly clear.  But
no matter, no matter!' he said cheerfully, and rousing himself,
'there's time enough!  My compliments to Miss Trotwood, I am
getting on very well indeed.'

I was going away, when he directed my attention to the kite.

'What do you think of that for a kite?' he said.

I answered that it was a beautiful one.  I should think it must
have been as much as seven feet high.

'I made it.  We'll go and fly it, you and I,' said Mr. Dick.  'Do
you see this?'

He showed me that it was covered with manuscript, very closely and
laboriously written; but so plainly, that as I looked along the
lines, I thought I saw some allusion to King Charles the First's
head again, in one or two places.

'There's plenty of string,' said Mr. Dick, 'and when it flies high,
it takes the facts a long way.  That's my manner of diffusing 'em. 
I don't know where they may come down.  It's according to
circumstances, and the wind, and so forth; but I take my chance of
that.'

His face was so very mild and pleasant, and had something so
reverend in it, though it was hale and hearty, that I was not sure
but that he was having a good-humoured jest with me.  So I laughed,
and he laughed, and we parted the best friends possible.

'Well, child,' said my aunt, when I went downstairs.  'And what of
Mr. Dick, this morning?'

I informed her that he sent his compliments, and was getting on
very well indeed.

'What do you think of him?' said my aunt.

I had some shadowy idea of endeavouring to evade the question, by
replying that I thought him a very nice gentleman; but my aunt was
not to be so put off, for she laid her work down in her lap, and
said, folding her hands upon it:

'Come!  Your sister Betsey Trotwood would have told me what she
thought of anyone, directly.  Be as like your sister as you can,
and speak out!'

'Is he - is Mr. Dick - I ask because I don't know, aunt - is he at
all out of his mind, then?' I stammered; for I felt I was on
dangerous ground.

'Not a morsel,' said my aunt.

'Oh, indeed!' I observed faintly.

'If there is anything in the world,' said my aunt, with great
decision and force of manner, 'that Mr. Dick is not, it's that.'

I had nothing better to offer, than another timid, 'Oh, indeed!'

'He has been CALLED mad,' said my aunt.  'I have a selfish pleasure
in saying he has been called mad, or I should not have had the
benefit of his society and advice for these last ten years and
upwards - in fact, ever since your sister, Betsey Trotwood,
disappointed me.'

'So long as that?' I said.

'And nice people they were, who had the audacity to call him mad,'
pursued my aunt.  'Mr. Dick is a sort of distant connexion of mine
- it doesn't matter how; I needn't enter into that.  If it hadn't
been for me, his own brother would have shut him up for life. 
That's all.'

I am afraid it was hypocritical in me, but seeing that my aunt felt
strongly on the subject, I tried to look as if I felt strongly too.

'A proud fool!' said my aunt.  'Because his brother was a little
eccentric - though he is not half so eccentric as a good many
people - he didn't like to have him visible about his house, and
sent him away to some private asylum-place: though he had been left
to his particular care by their deceased father, who thought him
almost a natural.  And a wise man he must have been to think so!
Mad himself, no doubt.'

Again, as my aunt looked quite convinced, I endeavoured to look
quite convinced also.

'So I stepped in,' said my aunt, 'and made him an offer.  I said,
"Your brother's sane - a great deal more sane than you are, or ever
will be, it is to be hoped.  Let him have his little income, and
come and live with me.  I am not afraid of him, I am not proud, I
am ready to take care of him, and shall not ill-treat him as some
people (besides the asylum-folks) have done."  After a good deal of
squabbling,' said my aunt, 'I got him; and he has been here ever
since.  He is the most friendly and amenable creature in existence;
and as for advice! - But nobody knows what that man's mind is,
except myself.'

My aunt smoothed her dress and shook her head, as if she smoothed
defiance of the whole world out of the one, and shook it out of the
other.

'He had a favourite sister,' said my aunt, 'a good creature, and
very kind to him.  But she did what they all do - took a husband. 
And HE did what they all do - made her wretched.  It had such an
effect upon the mind of Mr. Dick (that's not madness, I hope!)
that, combined with his fear of his brother, and his sense of his
unkindness, it threw him into a fever.  That was before he came to
me, but the recollection of it is oppressive to him even now.  Did
he say anything to you about King Charles the First, child?'

'Yes, aunt.'

'Ah!' said my aunt, rubbing her nose as if she were a little vexed. 
'That's his allegorical way of expressing it.  He connects his
illness with great disturbance and agitation, naturally, and that's
the figure, or the simile, or whatever it's called, which he
chooses to use.  And why shouldn't he, if he thinks proper!'

I said: 'Certainly, aunt.'

'It's not a business-like way of speaking,' said my aunt, 'nor a
worldly way.  I am aware of that; and that's the reason why I
insist upon it, that there shan't be a word about it in his
Memorial.'

'Is it a Memorial about his own history that he is writing, aunt?'

'Yes, child,' said my aunt, rubbing her nose again.  'He is
memorializing the Lord Chancellor, or the Lord Somebody or other -
one of those people, at all events, who are paid to be memorialized
- about his affairs.  I suppose it will go in, one of these days. 
He hasn't been able to draw it up yet, without introducing that
mode of expressing himself; but it don't signify; it keeps him
employed.'

In fact, I found out afterwards that Mr. Dick had been for upwards
of ten years endeavouring to keep King Charles the First out of the
Memorial; but he had been constantly getting into it, and was there
now.

'I say again,' said my aunt, 'nobody knows what that man's mind is
except myself; and he's the most amenable and friendly creature in
existence.  If he likes to fly a kite sometimes, what of that!
Franklin used to fly a kite.  He was a Quaker, or something of that
sort, if I am not mistaken.  And a Quaker flying a kite is a much
more ridiculous object than anybody else.'

If I could have supposed that my aunt had recounted these
particulars for my especial behoof, and as a piece of confidence in
me, I should have felt very much distinguished, and should have
augured favourably from such a mark of her good opinion.  But I
could hardly help observing that she had launched into them,
chiefly because the question was raised in her own mind, and with
very little reference to me, though she had addressed herself to me
in the absence of anybody else.

At the same time, I must say that the generosity of her
championship of poor harmless Mr. Dick, not only inspired my young
breast with some selfish hope for myself, but warmed it unselfishly
towards her.  I believe that I began to know that there was
something about my aunt, notwithstanding her many eccentricities
and odd humours, to be honoured and trusted in.  Though she was
just as sharp that day as on the day before, and was in and out
about the donkeys just as often, and was thrown into a tremendous
state of indignation, when a young man, going by, ogled Janet at a
window (which was one of the gravest misdemeanours that could be
committed against my aunt's dignity), she seemed to me to command
more of my respect, if not less of my fear.

The anxiety I underwent, in the interval which necessarily elapsed
before a reply could be received to her letter to Mr. Murdstone,
was extreme; but I made an endeavour to suppress it, and to be as
agreeable as I could in a quiet way, both to my aunt and Mr. Dick. 
The latter and I would have gone out to fly the great kite; but
that I had still no other clothes than the anything but ornamental
garments with which I had been decorated on the first day, and
which confined me to the house, except for an hour after dark, when
my aunt, for my health's sake, paraded me up and down on the cliff
outside, before going to bed.  At length the reply from Mr.
Murdstone came, and my aunt informed me, to my infinite terror,
that he was coming to speak to her herself on the next day.  On the
next day, still bundled up in my curious habiliments, I sat
counting the time, flushed and heated by the conflict of sinking
hopes and rising fears within me; and waiting to be startled by the
sight of the gloomy face, whose non-arrival startled me every
minute.

MY aunt was a little more imperious and stern than usual, but I
observed no other token of her preparing herself to receive the
visitor so much dreaded by me.  She sat at work in the window, and
I sat by, with my thoughts running astray on all possible and
impossible results of Mr. Murdstone's visit, until pretty late in
the afternoon.  Our dinner had been indefinitely postponed; but it
was growing so late, that my aunt had ordered it to be got ready,
when she gave a sudden alarm of donkeys, and to my consternation
and amazement, I beheld Miss Murdstone, on a side-saddle, ride
deliberately over the sacred piece of green, and stop in front of
the house, looking about her.

'Go along with you!' cried my aunt, shaking her head and her fist
at the window.  'You have no business there.  How dare you
trespass?  Go along!  Oh! you bold-faced thing!'

MY aunt was so exasperated by the coolness with which Miss
Murdstone looked about her, that I really believe she was
motionless, and unable for the moment to dart out according to
custom.  I seized the opportunity to inform her who it was; and
that the gentleman now coming near the offender (for the way up was
very steep, and he had dropped behind), was Mr. Murdstone himself.

'I don't care who it is!' cried my aunt, still shaking her head and
gesticulating anything but welcome from the bow-window.  'I won't
be trespassed upon.  I won't allow it.  Go away!  Janet, turn him
round.  Lead him off!' and I saw, from behind my aunt, a sort of
hurried battle-piece, in which the donkey stood resisting
everybody, with all his four legs planted different ways, while
Janet tried to pull him round by the bridle, Mr. Murdstone tried to
lead him on, Miss Murdstone struck at Janet with a parasol, and
several boys, who had come to see the engagement, shouted
vigorously.  But my aunt, suddenly descrying among them the young
malefactor who was the donkey's guardian, and who was one of the
most inveterate offenders against her, though hardly in his teens,
rushed out to the scene of action, pounced upon him, captured him,
dragged him, with his jacket over his head, and his heels grinding
the ground, into the garden, and, calling upon Janet to fetch the
constables and justices, that he might be taken, tried, and
executed on the spot, held him at bay there.  This part of the
business, however, did not last long; for the young rascal, being
expert at a variety of feints and dodges, of which my aunt had no
conception, soon went whooping away, leaving some deep impressions
of his nailed boots in the flower-beds, and taking his donkey in
triumph with him.

Miss Murdstone, during the latter portion of the contest, had
dismounted, and was now waiting with her brother at the bottom of
the steps, until my aunt should be at leisure to receive them.  My
aunt, a little ruffled by the combat, marched past them into the
house, with great dignity, and took no notice of their presence,
until they were announced by Janet.

'Shall I go away, aunt?' I asked, trembling.

'No, sir,' said my aunt.  'Certainly not!'  With which she pushed
me into a corner near her, and fenced Me in with a chair, as if it
were a prison or a bar of justice.  This position I continued to
occupy during the whole interview, and from it I now saw Mr. and
Miss Murdstone enter the room.

'Oh!' said my aunt, 'I was not aware at first to whom I had the
pleasure of objecting.  But I don't allow anybody to ride over that
turf.  I make no exceptions.  I don't allow anybody to do it.'

'Your regulation is rather awkward to strangers,' said Miss
Murdstone.

'Is it!' said my aunt.

Mr. Murdstone seemed afraid of a renewal of hostilities, and
interposing began:

'Miss Trotwood!'

'I beg your pardon,' observed my aunt with a keen look.  'You are
the Mr. Murdstone who married the widow of my late nephew, David
Copperfield, of Blunderstone Rookery! - Though why Rookery, I don't
know!'

'I am,' said Mr. Murdstone.

'You'll excuse my saying, sir,' returned my aunt, 'that I think it
would have been a much better and happier thing if you had left
that poor child alone.'

'I so far agree with what Miss Trotwood has remarked,' observed
Miss Murdstone, bridling, 'that I consider our lamented Clara to
have been, in all essential respects, a mere child.'

'It is a comfort to you and me, ma'am,' said my aunt, 'who are
getting on in life, and are not likely to be made unhappy by our
personal attractions, that nobody can say the same of us.'

'No doubt!' returned Miss Murdstone, though, I thought, not with a
very ready or gracious assent.  'And it certainly might have been,
as you say, a better and happier thing for my brother if he had
never entered into such a marriage.  I have always been of that
opinion.'

'I have no doubt you have,' said my aunt.  'Janet,' ringing the
bell, 'my compliments to Mr. Dick, and beg him to come down.'

Until he came, my aunt sat perfectly upright and stiff, frowning at
the wall.  When he came, my aunt performed the ceremony of
introduction.

'Mr. Dick.  An old and intimate friend.  On whose judgement,' said
my aunt, with emphasis, as an admonition to Mr. Dick, who was
biting his forefinger and looking rather foolish, 'I rely.'

Mr. Dick took his finger out of his mouth, on this hint, and stood
among the group, with a grave and attentive expression of face.

My aunt inclined her head to Mr. Murdstone, who went on:

'Miss Trotwood: on the receipt of your letter, I considered it an
act of greater justice to myself, and perhaps of more respect to
you-'

'Thank you,' said my aunt, still eyeing him keenly.  'You needn't
mind me.'

'To answer it in person, however inconvenient the journey,' pursued
Mr. Murdstone, 'rather than by letter.  This unhappy boy who has
run away from his friends and his occupation -'

'And whose appearance,' interposed his sister, directing general
attention to me in my indefinable costume, 'is perfectly scandalous
and disgraceful.'

'Jane Murdstone,' said her brother, 'have the goodness not to
interrupt me.  This unhappy boy, Miss Trotwood, has been the
occasion of much domestic trouble and uneasiness; both during the
lifetime of my late dear wife, and since.  He has a sullen,
rebellious spirit; a violent temper; and an untoward, intractable
disposition.  Both my sister and myself have endeavoured to correct
his vices, but ineffectually.  And I have felt - we both have felt,
I may say; my sister being fully in my confidence - that it is
right you should receive this grave and dispassionate assurance
from our lips.'

'It can hardly be necessary for me to confirm anything stated by my
brother,' said Miss Murdstone; 'but I beg to observe, that, of all
the boys in the world, I believe this is the worst boy.'

'Strong!' said my aunt, shortly.

'But not at all too strong for the facts,' returned Miss Murdstone.

'Ha!' said my aunt.  'Well, sir?'

'I have my own opinions,' resumed Mr. Murdstone, whose face
darkened more and more, the more he and my aunt observed each
other, which they did very narrowly, 'as to the best mode of
bringing him up; they are founded, in part, on my knowledge of him,
and in part on my knowledge of my own means and resources.  I am
responsible for them to myself, I act upon them, and I say no more
about them.  It is enough that I place this boy under the eye of a
friend of my own, in a respectable business; that it does not
please him; that he runs away from it; makes himself a common
vagabond about the country; and comes here, in rags, to appeal to
you, Miss Trotwood.  I wish to set before you, honourably, the
exact consequences - so far as they are within my knowledge - of
your abetting him in this appeal.'

'But about the respectable business first,' said my aunt.  'If he
had been your own boy, you would have put him to it, just the same,
I suppose?'

'If he had been my brother's own boy,' returned Miss Murdstone,
striking in, 'his character, I trust, would have been altogether
different.'

'Or if the poor child, his mother, had been alive, he would still
have gone into the respectable business, would he?' said my aunt.

'I believe,' said Mr. Murdstone, with an inclination of his head,
'that Clara would have disputed nothing which myself and my sister
Jane Murdstone were agreed was for the best.'

Miss Murdstone confirmed this with an audible murmur.

'Humph!' said my aunt.  'Unfortunate baby!'

Mr. Dick, who had been rattling his money all this time, was
rattling it so loudly now, that my aunt felt it necessary to check
him with a look, before saying:

'The poor child's annuity died with her?'

'Died with her,' replied Mr. Murdstone.

'And there was no settlement of the little property - the house and
garden - the what's-its-name Rookery without any rooks in it - upon
her boy?'

'It had been left to her, unconditionally, by her first husband,'
Mr. Murdstone began, when my aunt caught him up with the greatest
irascibility and impatience.

'Good Lord, man, there's no occasion to say that.  Left to her
unconditionally!  I think I see David Copperfield looking forward
to any condition of any sort or kind, though it stared him
point-blank in the face!  Of course it was left to her
unconditionally.  But when she married again - when she took that
most disastrous step of marrying you, in short,' said my aunt, 'to
be plain - did no one put in a word for the boy at that time?'

'My late wife loved her second husband, ma'am,' said Mr. Murdstone,
'and trusted implicitly in him.'

'Your late wife, sir, was a most unworldly, most unhappy, most
unfortunate baby,' returned my aunt, shaking her head at him. 
'That's what she was.  And now, what have you got to say next?'

'Merely this, Miss Trotwood,' he returned.  'I am here to take
David back - to take him back unconditionally, to dispose of him as
I think proper, and to deal with him as I think right.  I am not
here to make any promise, or give any pledge to anybody.  You may
possibly have some idea, Miss Trotwood, of abetting him in his
running away, and in his complaints to you.  Your manner, which I
must say does not seem intended to propitiate, induces me to think
it possible.  Now I must caution you that if you abet him once, you
abet him for good and all; if you step in between him and me, now,
you must step in, Miss Trotwood, for ever.  I cannot trifle, or be
trifled with.  I am here, for the first and last time, to take him
away.  Is he ready to go?  If he is not - and you tell me he is
not; on any pretence; it is indifferent to me what - my doors are
shut against him henceforth, and yours, I take it for granted, are
open to him.'

To this address, my aunt had listened with the closest attention,
sitting perfectly upright, with her hands folded on one knee, and
looking grimly on the speaker.  When he had finished, she turned
her eyes so as to command Miss Murdstone, without otherwise
disturbing her attitude, and said:

'Well, ma'am, have YOU got anything to remark?'

'Indeed, Miss Trotwood,' said Miss Murdstone, 'all that I could say
has been so well said by my brother, and all that I know to be the
fact has been so plainly stated by him, that I have nothing to add
except my thanks for your politeness.  For your very great
politeness, I am sure,' said Miss Murdstone; with an irony which no
more affected my aunt, than it discomposed the cannon I had slept
by at Chatham.

'And what does the boy say?' said my aunt.  'Are you ready to go,
David?'

I answered no, and entreated her not to let me go.  I said that
neither Mr. nor Miss Murdstone had ever liked me, or had ever been
kind to me.  That they had made my mama, who always loved me
dearly, unhappy about me, and that I knew it well, and that
Peggotty knew it.  I said that I had been more miserable than I
thought anybody could believe, who only knew how young I was.  And
I begged and prayed my aunt - I forget in what terms now, but I
remember that they affected me very much then - to befriend and
protect me, for my father's sake.

'Mr. Dick,' said my aunt, 'what shall I do with this child?'

Mr. Dick considered, hesitated, brightened, and rejoined, 'Have him
measured for a suit of clothes directly.'

'Mr. Dick,' said my aunt triumphantly, 'give me your hand, for your
common sense is invaluable.'  Having shaken it with great
cordiality, she pulled me towards her and said to Mr. Murdstone:

'You can go when you like; I'll take my chance with the boy.  If
he's all you say he is, at least I can do as much for him then, as
you have done.  But I don't believe a word of it.'

'Miss Trotwood,' rejoined Mr. Murdstone, shrugging his shoulders,
as he rose, 'if you were a gentleman -'

'Bah!  Stuff and nonsense!' said my aunt.  'Don't talk to me!'

'How exquisitely polite!' exclaimed Miss Murdstone, rising. 
'Overpowering, really!'

'Do you think I don't know,' said my aunt, turning a deaf ear to
the sister, and continuing to address the brother, and to shake her
head at him with infinite expression, 'what kind of life you must
have led that poor, unhappy, misdirected baby?  Do you think I
don't know what a woeful day it was for the soft little creature
when you first came in her way - smirking and making great eyes at
her, I'll be bound, as if you couldn't say boh! to a goose!'

'I never heard anything so elegant!' said Miss Murdstone.

'Do you think I can't understand you as well as if I had seen you,'
pursued my aunt, 'now that I DO see and hear you - which, I tell
you candidly, is anything but a pleasure to me?  Oh yes, bless us!
who so smooth and silky as Mr. Murdstone at first!  The poor,
benighted innocent had never seen such a man.  He was made of
sweetness.  He worshipped her.  He doted on her boy - tenderly
doted on him!  He was to be another father to him, and they were
all to live together in a garden of roses, weren't they?  Ugh!  Get
along with you, do!' said my aunt.

'I never heard anything like this person in my life!' exclaimed
Miss Murdstone.

'And when you had made sure of the poor little fool,' said my aunt
- 'God forgive me that I should call her so, and she gone where YOU
won't go in a hurry - because you had not done wrong enough to her
and hers, you must begin to train her, must you? begin to break
her, like a poor caged bird, and wear her deluded life away, in
teaching her to sing YOUR notes?'

'This is either insanity or intoxication,' said Miss Murdstone, in
a perfect agony at not being able to turn the current of my aunt's
address towards herself; 'and my suspicion is that it's
intoxication.'

Miss Betsey, without taking the least notice of the interruption,
continued to address herself to Mr. Murdstone as if there had been
no such thing.

'Mr. Murdstone,' she said, shaking her finger at him, 'you were a
tyrant to the simple baby, and you broke her heart.  She was a
loving baby - I know that; I knew it, years before you ever saw her
- and through the best part of her weakness you gave her the wounds
she died of.  There is the truth for your comfort, however you like
it.  And you and your instruments may make the most of it.'

'Allow me to inquire, Miss Trotwood,' interposed Miss Murdstone,
'whom you are pleased to call, in a choice of words in which I am
not experienced, my brother's instruments?'

'It was clear enough, as I have told you, years before YOU ever saw
her - and why, in the mysterious dispensations of Providence, you
ever did see her, is more than humanity can comprehend - it was
clear enough that the poor soft little thing would marry somebody,
at some time or other; but I did hope it wouldn't have been as bad
as it has turned out.  That was the time, Mr. Murdstone, when she
gave birth to her boy here,' said my aunt; 'to the poor child you
sometimes tormented her through afterwards, which is a disagreeable
remembrance and makes the sight of him odious now.  Aye, aye! you
needn't wince!' said my aunt.  'I know it's true without that.'

He had stood by the door, all this while, observant of her with a
smile upon his face, though his black eyebrows were heavily
contracted.  I remarked now, that, though the smile was on his face
still, his colour had gone in a moment, and he seemed to breathe as
if he had been running.

'Good day, sir,' said my aunt, 'and good-bye!  Good day to you,
too, ma'am,' said my aunt, turning suddenly upon his sister.  'Let
me see you ride a donkey over my green again, and as sure as you
have a head upon your shoulders, I'll knock your bonnet off, and
tread upon it!'

It would require a painter, and no common painter too, to depict my
aunt's face as she delivered herself of this very unexpected
sentiment, and Miss Murdstone's face as she heard it.  But the
manner of the speech, no less than the matter, was so fiery, that
Miss Murdstone, without a word in answer, discreetly put her arm
through her brother's, and walked haughtily out of the cottage; my
aunt remaining in the window looking after them; prepared, I have
no doubt, in case of the donkey's reappearance, to carry her threat
into instant execution.

No attempt at defiance being made, however, her face gradually
relaxed, and became so pleasant, that I was emboldened to kiss and
thank her; which I did with great heartiness, and with both my arms
clasped round her neck.  I then shook hands with Mr. Dick, who
shook hands with me a great many times, and hailed this happy close
of the proceedings with repeated bursts of laughter.

'You'll consider yourself guardian, jointly with me, of this child,
Mr. Dick,' said my aunt.

'I shall be delighted,' said Mr. Dick, 'to be the guardian of
David's son.'

'Very good,' returned my aunt, 'that's settled.  I have been
thinking, do you know, Mr. Dick, that I might call him Trotwood?'

'Certainly, certainly.  Call him Trotwood, certainly,' said Mr.
Dick.  'David's son's Trotwood.'

'Trotwood Copperfield, you mean,' returned my aunt.

'Yes, to be sure.  Yes.  Trotwood Copperfield,' said Mr. Dick, a
little abashed.

My aunt took so kindly to the notion, that some ready-made clothes,
which were purchased for me that afternoon, were marked 'Trotwood
Copperfield', in her own handwriting, and in indelible marking-ink,
before I put them on; and it was settled that all the other clothes
which were ordered to be made for me (a complete outfit was bespoke
that afternoon) should be marked in the same way.

Thus I began my new life, in a new name, and with everything new
about me.  Now that the state of doubt was over, I felt, for many
days, like one in a dream.  I never thought that I had a curious
couple of guardians, in my aunt and Mr. Dick.  I never thought of
anything about myself, distinctly.  The two things clearest in my
mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone
life - which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance;
and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and
Grinby's.  No one has ever raised that curtain since.  I have
lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant
hand, and dropped it gladly.  The remembrance of that life is
fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and
want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how
long I was doomed to lead it.  Whether it lasted for a year, or
more, or less, I do not know.  I only know that it was, and ceased
to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.



CHAPTER 15
I MAKE ANOTHER BEGINNING


Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often,
when his day's work was done, went out together to fly the great
kite.  Every day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial,
which never made the least progress, however hard he laboured, for
King Charles the First always strayed into it, sooner or later, and
then it was thrown aside, and another one begun.  The patience and
hope with which he bore these perpetual disappointments, the mild
perception he had that there was something wrong about King Charles
the First, the feeble efforts he made to keep him out, and the
certainty with which he came in, and tumbled the Memorial out of
all shape, made a deep impression on me.  What Mr. Dick supposed
would come of the Memorial, if it were completed; where he thought
it was to go, or what he thought it was to do; he knew no more than
anybody else, I believe.  Nor was it at all necessary that he
should trouble himself with such questions, for if anything were
certain under the sun, it was certain that the Memorial never would
be finished.  It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to
see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. 
What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its
disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but
old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him
sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the
sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand.  He never looked so
serene as he did then.  I used to fancy, as I sat by him of an
evening, on a green slope, and saw him watch the kite high in the
quiet air, that it lifted his mind out of its confusion, and bore
it (such was my boyish thought) into the skies.  As he wound the
string in and it came lower and lower down out of the beautiful
light, until it fluttered to the ground, and lay there like a dead
thing, he seemed to wake gradually out of a dream; and I remember
to have seen him take it up, and look about him in a lost way, as
if they had both come down together, so that I pitied him with all
my heart.

While I advanced in friendship and intimacy with Mr. Dick, I did
not go backward in the favour of his staunch friend, my aunt.  She
took so kindly to me, that, in the course of a few weeks, she
shortened my adopted name of Trotwood into Trot; and even
encouraged me to hope, that if I went on as I had begun, I might
take equal rank in her affections with my sister Betsey Trotwood.

'Trot,' said my aunt one evening, when the backgammon-board was
placed as usual for herself and Mr. Dick, 'we must not forget your
education.'

This was my only subject of anxiety, and I felt quite delighted by
her referring to it.

'Should you like to go to school at Canterbury?' said my aunt.

I replied that I should like it very much, as it was so near her.

'Good,' said my aunt.  'Should you like to go tomorrow?'

Being already no stranger to the general rapidity of my aunt's
evolutions, I was not surprised by the suddenness of the proposal,
and said: 'Yes.'

'Good,' said my aunt again.  'Janet, hire the grey pony and chaise
tomorrow morning at ten o'clock, and pack up Master Trotwood's
clothes tonight.'

I was greatly elated by these orders; but my heart smote me for my
selfishness, when I witnessed their effect on Mr. Dick, who was so
low-spirited at the prospect of our separation, and played so ill
in consequence, that my aunt, after giving him several admonitory
raps on the knuckles with her dice-box, shut up the board, and
declined to play with him any more.  But, on hearing from my aunt
that I should sometimes come over on a Saturday, and that he could
sometimes come and see me on a Wednesday, he revived; and vowed to
make another kite for those occasions, of proportions greatly
surpassing the present one.  In the morning he was downhearted
again, and would have sustained himself by giving me all the money
he had in his possession, gold and silver too, if my aunt had not
interposed, and limited the gift to five shillings, which, at his
earnest petition, were afterwards increased to ten.  We parted at
the garden-gate in a most affectionate manner, and Mr. Dick did not
go into the house until my aunt had driven me out of sight of it.

My aunt, who was perfectly indifferent to public opinion, drove the
grey pony through Dover in a masterly manner; sitting high and
stiff like a state coachman, keeping a steady eye upon him wherever
he went, and making a point of not letting him have his own way in
any respect.  When we came into the country road, she permitted him
to relax a little, however; and looking at me down in a valley of
cushion by her side, asked me whether I was happy?

'Very happy indeed, thank you, aunt,' I said.

She was much gratified; and both her hands being occupied, patted
me on the head with her whip.

'Is it a large school, aunt?' I asked.

'Why, I don't know,' said my aunt.  'We are going to Mr.
Wickfield's first.'

'Does he keep a school?' I asked.

'No, Trot,' said my aunt.  'He keeps an office.'

I asked for no more information about Mr. Wickfield, as she offered
none, and we conversed on other subjects until we came to
Canterbury, where, as it was market-day, my aunt had a great
opportunity of insinuating the grey pony among carts, baskets,
vegetables, and huckster's goods.  The hair-breadth turns and
twists we made, drew down upon us a variety of speeches from the
people standing about, which were not always complimentary; but my
aunt drove on with perfect indifference, and I dare say would have
taken her own way with as much coolness through an enemy's country.

At length we stopped before a very old house bulging out over the
road; a house with long low lattice-windows bulging out still
farther, and beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out too,
so that I fancied the whole house was leaning forward, trying to
see who was passing on the narrow pavement below.  It was quite
spotless in its cleanliness.  The old-fashioned brass knocker on
the low arched door, ornamented with carved garlands of fruit and
flowers, twinkled like a star; the two stone steps descending to
the door were as white as if they had been covered with fair linen;
and all the angles and corners, and carvings and mouldings, and
quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little windows, though
as old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever fell upon
the hills.

When the pony-chaise stopped at the door, and my eyes were intent
upon the house, I saw a cadaverous face appear at a small window on
the ground floor (in a little round tower that formed one side of
the house), and quickly disappear.  The low arched door then
opened, and the face came out.  It was quite as cadaverous as it
had looked in the window, though in the grain of it there was that
tinge of red which is sometimes to be observed in the skins of
red-haired people.  It belonged to a red-haired person - a youth of
fifteen, as I take it now, but looking much older - whose hair was
cropped as close as the closest stubble; who had hardly any
eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered
and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep.  He
was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white
wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a long,
lank, skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my attention, as
he stood at the pony's head, rubbing his chin with it, and looking
up at us in the chaise.

'Is Mr. Wickfield at home, Uriah Heep?' said my aunt.

'Mr. Wickfield's at home, ma'am,' said Uriah Heep, 'if you'll
please to walk in there' - pointing with his long hand to the room
he meant.

We got out; and leaving him to hold the pony, went into a long low
parlour looking towards the street, from the window of which I
caught a glimpse, as I went in, of Uriah Heep breathing into the
pony's nostrils, and immediately covering them with his hand, as if
he were putting some spell upon him.  Opposite to the tall old
chimney-piece were two portraits: one of a gentleman with grey hair
(though not by any means an old man) and black eyebrows, who was
looking over some papers tied together with red tape; the other, of
a lady, with a very placid and sweet expression of face, who was
looking at me.

I believe I was turning about in search of Uriah's picture, when,
a door at the farther end of the room opening, a gentleman entered,
at sight of whom I turned to the first-mentioned portrait again, to
make quite sure that it had not come out of its frame.  But it was
stationary; and as the gentleman advanced into the light, I saw
that he was some years older than when he had had his picture
painted.

'Miss Betsey Trotwood,' said the gentleman, 'pray walk in.  I was
engaged for a moment, but you'll excuse my being busy.  You know my
motive.  I have but one in life.'

Miss Betsey thanked him, and we went into his room, which was
furnished as an office, with books, papers, tin boxes, and so
forth.  It looked into a garden, and had an iron safe let into the
wall; so immediately over the mantelshelf, that I wondered, as I
sat down, how the sweeps got round it when they swept the chimney.

'Well, Miss Trotwood,' said Mr. Wickfield; for I soon found that it
was he, and that he was a lawyer, and steward of the estates of a
rich gentleman of the county; 'what wind blows you here?  Not an
ill wind, I hope?'

'No,' replied my aunt.  'I have not come for any law.'

'That's right, ma'am,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'You had better come
for anything else.'
His hair was quite white now, though his eyebrows were still black. 
He had a very agreeable face, and, I thought, was handsome.  There
was a certain richness in his complexion, which I had been long
accustomed, under Peggotty's tuition, to connect with port wine;
and I fancied it was in his voice too, and referred his growing
corpulency to the same cause.  He was very cleanly dressed, in a
blue coat, striped waistcoat, and nankeen trousers; and his fine
frilled shirt and cambric neckcloth looked unusually soft and
white, reminding my strolling fancy (I call to mind) of the plumage
on the breast of a swan.

'This is my nephew,' said my aunt.

'Wasn't aware you had one, Miss Trotwood,' said Mr. Wickfield.

'My grand-nephew, that is to say,' observed my aunt.

'Wasn't aware you had a grand-nephew, I give you my word,' said Mr.
Wickfield.

'I have adopted him,' said my aunt, with a wave of her hand,
importing that his knowledge and his ignorance were all one to her,
'and I have brought him here, to put to a school where he may be
thoroughly well taught, and well treated.  Now tell me where that
school is, and what it is, and all about it.'

'Before I can advise you properly,' said Mr. Wickfield - 'the old
question, you know.  What's your motive in this?'

'Deuce take the man!' exclaimed my aunt.  'Always fishing for
motives, when they're on the surface!  Why, to make the child happy
and useful.'

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr. Wickfield, shaking
his head and smiling incredulously.

'A mixed fiddlestick,' returned my aunt.  'You claim to have one
plain motive in all you do yourself.  You don't suppose, I hope,
that you are the only plain dealer in the world?'

'Ay, but I have only one motive in life, Miss Trotwood,' he
rejoined, smiling.  'Other people have dozens, scores, hundreds. 
I have only one.  There's the difference.  However, that's beside
the question.  The best school?  Whatever the motive, you want the
best?'

My aunt nodded assent.

'At the best we have,' said Mr. Wickfield, considering, 'your
nephew couldn't board just now.'

'But he could board somewhere else, I suppose?' suggested my aunt.

Mr. Wickfield thought I could.  After a little discussion, he
proposed to take my aunt to the school, that she might see it and
judge for herself; also, to take her, with the same object, to two
or three houses where he thought I could be boarded.  My aunt
embracing the proposal, we were all three going out together, when
he stopped and said:

'Our little friend here might have some motive, perhaps, for
objecting to the arrangements.  I think we had better leave him
behind?'

My aunt seemed disposed to contest the point; but to facilitate
matters I said I would gladly remain behind, if they pleased; and
returned into Mr. Wickfield's office, where I sat down again, in
the chair I had first occupied, to await their return.

It so happened that this chair was opposite a narrow passage, which
ended in the little circular room where I had seen Uriah Heep's
pale face looking out of the window.  Uriah, having taken the pony
to a neighbouring stable, was at work at a desk in this room, which
had a brass frame on the top to hang paper upon, and on which the
writing he was making a copy of was then hanging.  Though his face
was towards me, I thought, for some time, the writing being between
us, that he could not see me; but looking that way more
attentively, it made me uncomfortable to observe that, every now
and then, his sleepless eyes would come below the writing, like two
red suns, and stealthily stare at me for I dare say a whole minute
at a time, during which his pen went, or pretended to go, as
cleverly as ever.  I made several attempts to get out of their way
- such as standing on a chair to look at a map on the other side of
the room, and poring over the columns of a Kentish newspaper - but
they always attracted me back again; and whenever I looked towards
those two red suns, I was sure to find them, either just rising or
just setting.

At length, much to my relief, my aunt and Mr. Wickfield came back,
after a pretty long absence.  They were not so successful as I
could have wished; for though the advantages of the school were
undeniable, my aunt had not approved of any of the boarding-houses
proposed for me.

'It's very unfortunate,' said my aunt.  'I don't know what to do,
Trot.'

'It does happen unfortunately,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'But I'll tell
you what you can do, Miss Trotwood.'

'What's that?' inquired my aunt.

'Leave your nephew here, for the present.  He's a quiet fellow.  He
won't disturb me at all.  It's a capital house for study.  As quiet
as a monastery, and almost as roomy.  Leave him here.'

My aunt evidently liked the offer, though she was delicate of
accepting it.  So did I.
'Come, Miss Trotwood,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'This is the way out of
the difficulty.  It's only a temporary arrangement, you know.  If
it don't act well, or don't quite accord with our mutual
convenience, he can easily go to the right-about.  There will be
time to find some better place for him in the meanwhile.  You had
better determine to leave him here for the present!'

'I am very much obliged to you,' said my aunt; 'and so is he, I
see; but -'

'Come! I know what you mean,' cried Mr. Wickfield.  'You shall not
be oppressed by the receipt of favours, Miss Trotwood.  You may pay
for him, if you like.  We won't be hard about terms, but you shall
pay if you will.'

'On that understanding,' said my aunt, 'though it doesn't lessen
the real obligation, I shall be very glad to leave him.'

'Then come and see my little housekeeper,' said Mr. Wickfield.

We accordingly went up a wonderful old staircase; with a balustrade
so broad that we might have gone up that, almost as easily; and
into a shady old drawing-room, lighted by some three or four of the
quaint windows I had looked up at from the street: which had old
oak seats in them, that seemed to have come of the same trees as
the shining oak floor, and the great beams in the ceiling.  It was
a prettily furnished room, with a piano and some lively furniture
in red and green, and some flowers.  It seemed to be all old nooks
and corners; and in every nook and corner there was some queer
little table, or cupboard, or bookcase, or seat, or something or
other, that made me think there was not such another good corner in
the room; until I looked at the next one, and found it equal to it,
if not better.  On everything there was the same air of retirement
and cleanliness that marked the house outside.

Mr. Wickfield tapped at a door in a corner of the panelled wall,
and a girl of about my own age came quickly out and kissed him.  On
her face, I saw immediately the placid and sweet expression of the
lady whose picture had looked at me downstairs.  It seemed to my
imagination as if the portrait had grown womanly, and the original
remained a child.  Although her face was quite bright and happy,
there was a tranquillity about it, and about her - a quiet, good,
calm spirit - that I never have forgotten; that I shall never
forget.  This was his little housekeeper, his daughter Agnes, Mr.
Wickfield said.  When I heard how he said it, and saw how he held
her hand, I guessed what the one motive of his life was.

She had a little basket-trifle hanging at her side, with keys in
it; and she looked as staid and as discreet a housekeeper as the
old house could have.  She listened to her father as he told her
about me, with a pleasant face; and when he had concluded, proposed
to my aunt that we should go upstairs and see my room.  We all went
together, she before us: and a glorious old room it was, with more
oak beams, and diamond panes; and the broad balustrade going all
the way up to it.

I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I had seen a
stained glass window in a church.  Nor do I recollect its subject. 
But I know that when I saw her turn round, in the grave light of
the old staircase, and wait for us, above, I thought of that
window; and I associated something of its tranquil brightness with
Agnes Wickfield ever afterwards.

My aunt was as happy as I was, in the arrangement made for me; and
we went down to the drawing-room again, well pleased and gratified. 
As she would not hear of staying to dinner, lest she should by any
chance fail to arrive at home with the grey pony before dark; and
as I apprehend Mr. Wickfield knew her too well to argue any point
with her; some lunch was provided for her there, and Agnes went
back to her governess, and Mr. Wickfield to his office.  So we were
left to take leave of one another without any restraint.

She told me that everything would be arranged for me by Mr.
Wickfield, and that I should want for nothing, and gave me the
kindest words and the best advice.

'Trot,' said my aunt in conclusion, 'be a credit to yourself, to
me, and Mr. Dick, and Heaven be with you!'

I was greatly overcome, and could only thank her, again and again,
and send my love to Mr. Dick.

'Never,' said my aunt, 'be mean in anything; never be false; never
be cruel.  Avoid those three vices, Trot, and I can always be
hopeful of you.'

I promised, as well as I could, that I would not abuse her kindness
or forget her admonition.

'The pony's at the door,' said my aunt, 'and I am off! Stay here.'
With these words she embraced me hastily, and went out of the room,
shutting the door after her.  At first I was startled by so abrupt
a departure, and almost feared I had displeased her; but when I
looked into the street, and saw how dejectedly she got into the
chaise, and drove away without looking up, I understood her better
and did not do her that injustice.

By five o'clock, which was Mr. Wickfield's dinner-hour, I had
mustered up my spirits again, and was ready for my knife and fork. 
The cloth was only laid for us two; but Agnes was waiting in the
drawing-room before dinner, went down with her father, and sat
opposite to him at table.  I doubted whether he could have dined
without her.

We did not stay there, after dinner, but came upstairs into the
drawing-room again: in one snug corner of which, Agnes set glasses
for her father, and a decanter of port wine.  I thought he would
have missed its usual flavour, if it had been put there for him by
any other hands.

There he sat, taking his wine, and taking a good deal of it, for
two hours; while Agnes played on the piano, worked, and talked to
him and me.  He was, for the most part, gay and cheerful with us;
but sometimes his eyes rested on her, and he fell into a brooding
state, and was silent.  She always observed this quickly, I
thought, and always roused him with a question or caress.  Then he
came out of his meditation, and drank more wine.

Agnes made the tea, and presided over it; and the time passed away
after it, as after dinner, until she went to bed; when her father
took her in his arms and kissed her, and, she being gone, ordered
candles in his office.  Then I went to bed too.

But in the course of the evening I had rambled down to the door,
and a little way along the street, that I might have another peep
at the old houses, and the grey Cathedral; and might think of my
coming through that old city on my journey, and of my passing the
very house I lived in, without knowing it.  As I came back, I saw
Uriah Heep shutting up the office; and feeling friendly towards
everybody, went in and spoke to him, and at parting, gave him my
hand.  But oh, what a clammy hand his was! as ghostly to the touch
as to the sight!  I rubbed mine afterwards, to warm it, AND TO RUB
HIS OFF.

It was such an uncomfortable hand, that, when I went to my room, it
was still cold and wet upon my memory.  Leaning out of the window,
and seeing one of the faces on the beam-ends looking at me
sideways, I fancied it was Uriah Heep got up there somehow, and
shut him out in a hurry.



CHAPTER 16
I AM A NEW BOY IN MORE SENSES THAN ONE


Next morning, after breakfast, I entered on school life again.  I
went, accompanied by Mr. Wickfield, to the scene of my future
studies - a grave building in a courtyard, with a learned air about
it that seemed very well suited to the stray rooks and jackdaws who
came down from the Cathedral towers to walk with a clerkly bearing
on the grass-plot - and was introduced to my new master, Doctor
Strong.

Doctor Strong looked almost as rusty, to my thinking, as the tall
iron rails and gates outside the house; and almost as stiff and
heavy as the great stone urns that flanked them, and were set up,
on the top of the red-brick wall, at regular distances all round
the court, like sublimated skittles, for Time to play at.  He was
in his library (I mean Doctor Strong was), with his clothes not
particularly well brushed, and his hair not particularly well
combed; his knee-smalls unbraced; his long black gaiters
unbuttoned; and his shoes yawning like two caverns on the
hearth-rug.  Turning upon me a lustreless eye, that reminded me of
a long-forgotten blind old horse who once used to crop the grass,
and tumble over the graves, in Blunderstone churchyard, he said he
was glad to see me: and then he gave me his hand; which I didn't
know what to do with, as it did nothing for itself.

But, sitting at work, not far from Doctor Strong, was a very pretty
young lady - whom he called Annie, and who was his daughter, I
supposed - who got me out of my difficulty by kneeling down to put
Doctor Strong's shoes on, and button his gaiters, which she did
with great cheerfulness and quickness.  When she had finished, and
we were going out to the schoolroom, I was much surprised to hear
Mr. Wickfield, in bidding her good morning, address her as 'Mrs.
Strong'; and I was wondering could she be Doctor Strong's son's
wife, or could she be Mrs. Doctor Strong, when Doctor Strong
himself unconsciously enlightened me.

'By the by, Wickfield,' he said, stopping in a passage with his
hand on my shoulder; 'you have not found any suitable provision for
my wife's cousin yet?'

'No,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'No.  Not yet.'

'I could wish it done as soon as it can be done, Wickfield,' said
Doctor Strong, 'for Jack Maldon is needy, and idle; and of those
two bad things, worse things sometimes come.  What does Doctor
Watts say,' he added, looking at me, and moving his head to the
time of his quotation, '"Satan finds some mischief still, for idle
hands to do."'

'Egad, Doctor,' returned Mr. Wickfield, 'if Doctor Watts knew
mankind, he might have written, with as much truth, "Satan finds
some mischief still, for busy hands to do." The busy people achieve
their full share of mischief in the world, you may rely upon it. 
What have the people been about, who have been the busiest in
getting money, and in getting power, this century or two?  No
mischief?'

'Jack Maldon will never be very busy in getting either, I expect,'
said Doctor Strong, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

'Perhaps not,' said Mr. Wickfield; 'and you bring me back to the
question, with an apology for digressing.  No, I have not been able
to dispose of Mr. Jack Maldon yet.  I believe,' he said this with
some hesitation, 'I penetrate your motive, and it makes the thing
more difficult.'

'My motive,' returned Doctor Strong, 'is to make some suitable
provision for a cousin, and an old playfellow, of Annie's.'

'Yes, I know,' said Mr. Wickfield; 'at home or abroad.'

'Aye!' replied the Doctor, apparently wondering why he emphasized
those words so much.  'At home or abroad.'

'Your own expression, you know,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'Or abroad.'

'Surely,' the Doctor answered.  'Surely.  One or other.'

'One or other?  Have you no choice?' asked Mr. Wickfield.

'No,' returned the Doctor.

'No?' with astonishment.

'Not the least.'

'No motive,' said Mr. Wickfield, 'for meaning abroad, and not at
home?'

'No,' returned the Doctor.

'I am bound to believe you, and of course I do believe you,' said
Mr. Wickfield.  'It might have simplified my office very much, if
I had known it before.  But I confess I entertained another
impression.'

Doctor Strong regarded him with a puzzled and doubting look, which
almost immediately subsided into a smile that gave me great
encouragement; for it was full of amiability and sweetness, and
there was a simplicity in it, and indeed in his whole manner, when
the studious, pondering frost upon it was got through, very
attractive and hopeful to a young scholar like me.  Repeating 'no',
and 'not the least', and other short assurances to the same
purport, Doctor Strong jogged on before us, at a queer, uneven
pace; and we followed: Mr. Wickfield, looking grave, I observed,
and shaking his head to himself, without knowing that I saw him.

The schoolroom was a pretty large hall, on the quietest side of the
house, confronted by the stately stare of some half-dozen of the
great urns, and commanding a peep of an old secluded garden
belonging to the Doctor, where the peaches were ripening on the
sunny south wall.  There were two great aloes, in tubs, on the turf
outside the windows; the broad hard leaves of which plant (looking
as if they were made of painted tin) have ever since, by
association, been symbolical to me of silence and retirement. 
About five-and-twenty boys were studiously engaged at their books
when we went in, but they rose to give the Doctor good morning, and
remained standing when they saw Mr. Wickfield and me.

'A new boy, young gentlemen,' said the Doctor; 'Trotwood
Copperfield.'

One Adams, who was the head-boy, then stepped out of his place and
welcomed me.  He looked like a young clergyman, in his white
cravat, but he was very affable and good-humoured; and he showed me
my place, and presented me to the masters, in a gentlemanly way
that would have put me at my ease, if anything could.

It seemed to me so long, however, since I had been among such boys,
or among any companions of my own age, except Mick Walker and Mealy
Potatoes, that I felt as strange as ever I have done in my life. 
I was so conscious of having passed through scenes of which they
could have no knowledge, and of having acquired experiences foreign
to my age, appearance, and condition as one of them, that I half
believed it was an imposture to come there as an ordinary little
schoolboy.  I had become, in the Murdstone and Grinby time, however
short or long it may have been, so unused to the sports and games
of boys, that I knew I was awkward and inexperienced in the
commonest things belonging to them.  Whatever I had learnt, had so
slipped away from me in the sordid cares of my life from day to
night, that now, when I was examined about what I knew, I knew
nothing, and was put into the lowest form of the school.  But,
troubled as I was, by my want of boyish skill, and of book-learning
too, I was made infinitely more uncomfortable by the consideration,
that, in what I did know, I was much farther removed from my
companions than in what I did not.  My mind ran upon what they
would think, if they knew of my familiar acquaintance with the
King's Bench Prison?  Was there anything about me which would
reveal my proceedings in connexion with the Micawber family - all
those pawnings, and sellings, and suppers - in spite of myself? 
Suppose some of the boys had seen me coming through Canterbury,
wayworn and ragged, and should find me out?  What would they say,
who made so light of money, if they could know how I had scraped my
halfpence together, for the purchase of my daily saveloy and beer,
or my slices of pudding?  How would it affect them, who were so
innocent of London life, and London streets, to discover how
knowing I was (and was ashamed to be) in some of the meanest phases
of both?  All this ran in my head so much, on that first day at
Doctor Strong's, that I felt distrustful of my slightest look and
gesture; shrunk within myself whensoever I was approached by one of
my new schoolfellows; and hurried off the minute school was over,
afraid of committing myself in my response to any friendly notice
or advance.

But there was such an influence in Mr. Wickfield's old house, that
when I knocked at it, with my new school-books under my arm, I
began to feel my uneasiness softening away.  As I went up to my
airy old room, the grave shadow of the staircase seemed to fall
upon my doubts and fears, and to make the past more indistinct.  I
sat there, sturdily conning my books, until dinner-time (we were
out of school for good at three); and went down, hopeful of
becoming a passable sort of boy yet.

Agnes was in the drawing-room, waiting for her father, who was
detained by someone in his office.  She met me with her pleasant
smile, and asked me how I liked the school.  I told her I should
like it very much, I hoped; but I was a little strange to it at
first.

'You have never been to school,' I said, 'have you?'
'Oh yes!  Every day.'

'Ah, but you mean here, at your own home?'

'Papa couldn't spare me to go anywhere else,' she answered, smiling
and shaking her head.  'His housekeeper must be in his house, you
know.'

'He is very fond of you, I am sure,' I said.

She nodded 'Yes,' and went to the door to listen for his coming up,
that she might meet him on the stairs.  But, as he was not there,
she came back again.

'Mama has been dead ever since I was born,' she said, in her quiet
way.  'I only know her picture, downstairs.  I saw you looking at
it yesterday.  Did you think whose it was?'

I told her yes, because it was so like herself.

'Papa says so, too,' said Agnes, pleased.  'Hark!  That's papa
now!'

Her bright calm face lighted up with pleasure as she went to meet
him, and as they came in, hand in hand.  He greeted me cordially;
and told me I should certainly be happy under Doctor Strong, who
was one of the gentlest of men.

'There may be some, perhaps - I don't know that there are - who
abuse his kindness,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'Never be one of those,
Trotwood, in anything.  He is the least suspicious of mankind; and
whether that's a merit, or whether it's a blemish, it deserves
consideration in all dealings with the Doctor, great or small.'

He spoke, I thought, as if he were weary, or dissatisfied with
something; but I did not pursue the question in my mind, for dinner
was just then announced, and we went down and took the same seats
as before.

We had scarcely done so, when Uriah Heep put in his red head and
his lank hand at the door, and said:

'Here's Mr. Maldon begs the favour of a word, sir.'

'I am but this moment quit of Mr. Maldon,' said his master.

'Yes, sir,' returned Uriah; 'but Mr. Maldon has come back, and he
begs the favour of a word.'

As he held the door open with his hand, Uriah looked at me, and
looked at Agnes, and looked at the dishes, and looked at the
plates, and looked at every object in the room, I thought, - yet
seemed to look at nothing; he made such an appearance all the while
of keeping his red eyes dutifully on his master.
'I beg your pardon.  It's only to say, on reflection,' observed a
voice behind Uriah, as Uriah's head was pushed away, and the
speaker's substituted - 'pray excuse me for this intrusion - that
as it seems I have no choice in the matter, the sooner I go abroad
the better.  My cousin Annie did say, when we talked of it, that
she liked to have her friends within reach rather than to have them
banished, and the old Doctor -'

'Doctor Strong, was that?' Mr. Wickfield interposed, gravely.

'Doctor Strong, of course,' returned the other; 'I call him the old
Doctor; it's all the same, you know.'

'I don't know,' returned Mr. Wickfield.

'Well, Doctor Strong,' said the other - 'Doctor Strong was of the
same mind, I believed.  But as it appears from the course you take
with me he has changed his mind, why there's no more to be said,
except that the sooner I am off, the better.  Therefore, I thought
I'd come back and say, that the sooner I am off the better.  When
a plunge is to be made into the water, it's of no use lingering on
the bank.'

'There shall be as little lingering as possible, in your case, Mr.
Maldon, you may depend upon it,' said Mr. Wickfield.

'Thank'ee,' said the other.  'Much obliged.  I don't want to look
a gift-horse in the mouth, which is not a gracious thing to do;
otherwise, I dare say, my cousin Annie could easily arrange it in
her own way.  I suppose Annie would only have to say to the old
Doctor -'

'Meaning that Mrs. Strong would only have to say to her husband -
do I follow you?' said Mr. Wickfield.

'Quite so,' returned the other, '- would only have to say, that she
wanted such and such a thing to be so and so; and it would be so
and so, as a matter of course.'

'And why as a matter of course, Mr. Maldon?' asked Mr. Wickfield,
sedately eating his dinner.

'Why, because Annie's a charming young girl, and the old Doctor -
Doctor Strong, I mean - is not quite a charming young boy,' said
Mr. Jack Maldon, laughing.  'No offence to anybody, Mr. Wickfield. 
I only mean that I suppose some compensation is fair and reasonable
in that sort of marriage.'

'Compensation to the lady, sir?' asked Mr. Wickfield gravely.

'To the lady, sir,' Mr. Jack Maldon answered, laughing.  But
appearing to remark that Mr. Wickfield went on with his dinner in
the same sedate, immovable manner, and that there was no hope of
making him relax a muscle of his face, he added:
'However, I have said what I came to say, and, with another apology
for this intrusion, I may take myself off.  Of course I shall
observe your directions, in considering the matter as one to be
arranged between you and me solely, and not to be referred to, up
at the Doctor's.'

'Have you dined?' asked Mr. Wickfield, with a motion of his hand
towards the table.

'Thank'ee.  I am going to dine,' said Mr. Maldon, 'with my cousin
Annie.  Good-bye!'

Mr. Wickfield, without rising, looked after him thoughtfully as he
went out.  He was rather a shallow sort of young gentleman, I
thought, with a handsome face, a rapid utterance, and a confident,
bold air.  And this was the first I ever saw of Mr. Jack Maldon;
whom I had not expected to see so soon, when I heard the Doctor
speak of him that morning.

When we had dined, we went upstairs again, where everything went on
exactly as on the previous day.  Agnes set the glasses and
decanters in the same corner, and Mr. Wickfield sat down to drink,
and drank a good deal.  Agnes played the piano to him, sat by him,
and worked and talked, and played some games at dominoes with me. 
In good time she made tea; and afterwards, when I brought down my
books, looked into them, and showed me what she knew of them (which
was no slight matter, though she said it was), and what was the
best way to learn and understand them.  I see her, with her modest,
orderly, placid manner, and I hear her beautiful calm voice, as I
write these words.  The influence for all good, which she came to
exercise over me at a later time, begins already to descend upon my
breast.  I love little Em'ly, and I don't love Agnes - no, not at
all in that way - but I feel that there are goodness, peace, and
truth, wherever Agnes is; and that the soft light of the coloured
window in the church, seen long ago, falls on her always, and on me
when I am near her, and on everything around.

The time having come for her withdrawal for the night, and she
having left us, I gave Mr. Wickfield my hand, preparatory to going
away myself.  But he checked me and said: 'Should you like to stay
with us, Trotwood, or to go elsewhere?'

'To stay,' I answered, quickly.

'You are sure?'

'If you please.  If I may!'

'Why, it's but a dull life that we lead here, boy, I am afraid,' he
said.

'Not more dull for me than Agnes, sir.  Not dull at all!'

'Than Agnes,' he repeated, walking slowly to the great
chimney-piece, and leaning against it.  'Than Agnes!'

He had drank wine that evening (or I fancied it), until his eyes
were bloodshot.  Not that I could see them now, for they were cast
down, and shaded by his hand; but I had noticed them a little while
before.

'Now I wonder,' he muttered, 'whether my Agnes tires of me.  When
should I ever tire of her!  But that's different, that's quite
different.'

He was musing, not speaking to me; so I remained quiet.

'A dull old house,' he said, 'and a monotonous life; but I must
have her near me.  I must keep her near me.  If the thought that I
may die and leave my darling, or that my darling may die and leave
me, comes like a spectre, to distress my happiest hours, and is
only to be drowned in -'

He did not supply the word; but pacing slowly to the place where he
had sat, and mechanically going through the action of pouring wine
from the empty decanter, set it down and paced back again.

'If it is miserable to bear, when she is here,' he said, 'what
would it be, and she away?  No, no, no.  I cannot try that.'

He leaned against the chimney-piece, brooding so long that I could
not decide whether to run the risk of disturbing him by going, or
to remain quietly where I was, until he should come out of his
reverie.  At length he aroused himself, and looked about the room
until his eyes encountered mine.

'Stay with us, Trotwood, eh?' he said in his usual manner, and as
if he were answering something I had just said.  'I am glad of it. 
You are company to us both.  It is wholesome to have you here. 
Wholesome for me, wholesome for Agnes, wholesome perhaps for all of
us.'

'I am sure it is for me, sir,' I said.  'I am so glad to be here.'

'That's a fine fellow!' said Mr. Wickfield.  'As long as you are
glad to be here, you shall stay here.'  He shook hands with me upon
it, and clapped me on the back; and told me that when I had
anything to do at night after Agnes had left us, or when I wished
to read for my own pleasure, I was free to come down to his room,
if he were there and if I desired it for company's sake, and to sit
with him.  I thanked him for his consideration; and, as he went
down soon afterwards, and I was not tired, went down too, with a
book in my hand, to avail myself, for half-an-hour, of his
permission.

But, seeing a light in the little round office, and immediately
feeling myself attracted towards Uriah Heep, who had a sort of
fascination for me, I went in there instead.  I found Uriah reading
a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank
forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy
tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail.

'You are working late tonight, Uriah,' says I.

'Yes, Master Copperfield,' says Uriah.

As I was getting on the stool opposite, to talk to him more
conveniently, I observed that he had not such a thing as a smile
about him, and that he could only widen his mouth and make two hard
creases down his cheeks, one on each side, to stand for one.

'I am not doing office-work, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah.

'What work, then?' I asked.

'I am improving my legal knowledge, Master Copperfield,' said
Uriah.  'I am going through Tidd's Practice.  Oh, what a writer Mr.
Tidd is, Master Copperfield!'

My stool was such a tower of observation, that as I watched him
reading on again, after this rapturous exclamation, and following
up the lines with his forefinger, I observed that his nostrils,
which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a
singular and most uncomfortable way of expanding and contracting
themselves - that they seemed to twinkle instead of his eyes, which
hardly ever twinkled at all.

'I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?' I said, after looking at
him for some time.

'Me, Master Copperfield?' said Uriah.  'Oh, no!  I'm a very umble
person.'

It was no fancy of mine about his hands, I observed; for he
frequently ground the palms against each other as if to squeeze
them dry and warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy way, on
his pocket-handkerchief.

'I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,' said Uriah
Heep, modestly; 'let the other be where he may.  My mother is
likewise a very umble person.  We live in a numble abode, Master
Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for.  My father's former
calling was umble.  He was a sexton.'

'What is he now?' I asked.

'He is a partaker of glory at present, Master Copperfield,' said
Uriah Heep.  'But we have much to be thankful for.  How much have
I to be thankful for in living with Mr. Wickfield!'

I asked Uriah if he had been with Mr. Wickfield long?

'I have been with him, going on four year, Master Copperfield,'
said Uriah; shutting up his book, after carefully marking the place
where he had left off.  'Since a year after my father's death.  How
much have I to be thankful for, in that!  How much have I to be
thankful for, in Mr. Wickfield's kind intention to give me my
articles, which would otherwise not lay within the umble means of
mother and self!'

'Then, when your articled time is over, you'll be a regular lawyer,
I suppose?' said I.

'With the blessing of Providence, Master Copperfield,' returned
Uriah.

'Perhaps you'll be a partner in Mr. Wickfield's business, one of
these days,' I said, to make myself agreeable; 'and it will be
Wickfield and Heep, or Heep late Wickfield.'

'Oh no, Master Copperfield,' returned Uriah, shaking his head, 'I
am much too umble for that!'

He certainly did look uncommonly like the carved face on the beam
outside my window, as he sat, in his humility, eyeing me sideways,
with his mouth widened, and the creases in his cheeks.

'Mr.  Wickfield is a most excellent man, Master Copperfield,' said
Uriah.  'If you have known him long, you know it, I am sure, much
better than I can inform you.'

I replied that I was certain he was; but that I had not known him
long myself, though he was a friend of my aunt's.

'Oh, indeed, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah.  'Your aunt is a
sweet lady, Master Copperfield!'

He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm,
which was very ugly; and which diverted my attention from the
compliment he had paid my relation, to the snaky twistings of his
throat and body.

'A sweet lady, Master Copperfield!' said Uriah Heep.  'She has a
great admiration for Miss Agnes, Master Copperfield, I believe?'

I said, 'Yes,' boldly; not that I knew anything about it, Heaven
forgive me!

'I hope you have, too, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah.  'But I am
sure you must have.'

'Everybody must have,' I returned.

'Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah Heep, 'for that
remark!  It is so true!  Umble as I am, I know it is so true!  Oh,
thank you, Master Copperfield!'
He writhed himself quite off his stool in the excitement of his
feelings, and, being off, began to make arrangements for going
home.

'Mother will be expecting me,' he said, referring to a pale,
inexpressive-faced watch in his pocket, 'and getting uneasy; for
though we are very umble, Master Copperfield, we are much attached
to one another.  If you would come and see us, any afternoon, and
take a cup of tea at our lowly dwelling, mother would be as proud
of your company as I should be.'

I said I should be glad to come.

'Thank you, Master Copperfield,' returned Uriah, putting his book
away upon the shelf - 'I suppose you stop here, some time, Master
Copperfield?'

I said I was going to be brought up there, I believed, as long as
I remained at school.

'Oh, indeed!' exclaimed Uriah.  'I should think YOU would come into
the business at last, Master Copperfield!'

I protested that I had no views of that sort, and that no such
scheme was entertained in my behalf by anybody; but Uriah insisted
on blandly replying to all my assurances, 'Oh, yes, Master
Copperfield, I should think you would, indeed!' and, 'Oh, indeed,
Master Copperfield, I should think you would, certainly!' over and
over again.  Being, at last, ready to leave the office for the
night, he asked me if it would suit my convenience to have the
light put out; and on my answering 'Yes,' instantly extinguished
it.  After shaking hands with me - his hand felt like a fish, in
the dark - he opened the door into the street a very little, and
crept out, and shut it, leaving me to grope my way back into the
house: which cost me some trouble and a fall over his stool.  This
was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for
what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other
things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty's house on a piratical
expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the
inscription 'Tidd's Practice', under which diabolical ensign he was
carrying me and little Em'ly to the Spanish Main, to be drowned.

I got a little the better of my uneasiness when I went to school
next day, and a good deal the better next day, and so shook it off
by degrees, that in less than a fortnight I was quite at home, and
happy, among my new companions.  I was awkward enough in their
games, and backward enough in their studies; but custom would
improve me in the first respect, I hoped, and hard work in the
second.  Accordingly, I went to work very hard, both in play and in
earnest, and gained great commendation.  And, in a very little
while, the Murdstone and Grinby life became so strange to me that
I hardly believed in it, while my present life grew so familiar,
that I seemed to have been leading it a long time.

Doctor Strong's was an excellent school; as different from Mr.
Creakle's as good is from evil.  It was very gravely and decorously
ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to
the honour and good faith of the boys, and an avowed intention to
rely on their possession of those qualities unless they proved
themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders.  We all felt that
we had a part in the management of the place, and in sustaining its
character and dignity.  Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it
- I am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any
other boy being otherwise - and learnt with a good will, desiring
to do it credit.  We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of
liberty; but even then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in
the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our appearance or manner,
to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor Strong's boys.

Some of the higher scholars boarded in the Doctor's house, and
through them I learned, at second hand, some particulars of the
Doctor's history - as, how he had not yet been married twelve
months to the beautiful young lady I had seen in the study, whom he
had married for love; for she had not a sixpence, and had a world
of poor relations (so our fellows said) ready to swarm the Doctor
out of house and home.  Also, how the Doctor's cogitating manner
was attributable to his being always engaged in looking out for
Greek roots; which, in my innocence and ignorance, I supposed to be
a botanical furor on the Doctor's part, especially as he always
looked at the ground when he walked about, until I understood that
they were roots of words, with a view to a new Dictionary which he
had in contemplation.  Adams, our head-boy, who had a turn for
mathematics, had made a calculation, I was informed, of the time
this Dictionary would take in completing, on the Doctor's plan, and
at the Doctor's rate of going.  He considered that it might be done
in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the
Doctor's last, or sixty-second, birthday.

But the Doctor himself was the idol of the whole school: and it
must have been a badly composed school if he had been anything
else, for he was the kindest of men; with a simple faith in him
that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the
wall.  As he walked up and down that part of the courtyard which
was at the side of the house, with the stray rooks and jackdaws
looking after him with their heads cocked slyly, as if they knew
how much more knowing they were in worldly affairs than he, if any
sort of vagabond could only get near enough to his creaking shoes
to attract his attention to one sentence of a tale of distress,
that vagabond was made for the next two days.  It was so notorious
in the house, that the masters and head-boys took pains to cut
these marauders off at angles, and to get out of windows, and turn
them out of the courtyard, before they could make the Doctor aware
of their presence; which was sometimes happily effected within a
few yards of him, without his knowing anything of the matter, as he
jogged to and fro.  Outside his own domain, and unprotected, he was
a very sheep for the shearers.  He would have taken his gaiters off
his legs, to give away.  In fact, there was a story current among
us (I have no idea, and never had, on what authority, but I have
believed it for so many years that I feel quite certain it is
true), that on a frosty day, one winter-time, he actually did
bestow his gaiters on a beggar-woman, who occasioned some scandal
in the neighbourhood by exhibiting a fine infant from door to door,
wrapped in those garments, which were universally recognized, being
as well known in the vicinity as the Cathedral.  The legend added
that the only person who did not identify them was the Doctor
himself, who, when they were shortly afterwards displayed at the
door of a little second-hand shop of no very good repute, where
such things were taken in exchange for gin, was more than once
observed to handle them approvingly, as if admiring some curious
novelty in the pattern, and considering them an improvement on his
own.

It was very pleasant to see the Doctor with his pretty young wife. 
He had a fatherly, benignant way of showing his fondness for her,
which seemed in itself to express a good man.  I often saw them
walking in the garden where the peaches were, and I sometimes had
a nearer observation of them in the study or the parlour.  She
appeared to me to take great care of the Doctor, and to like him
very much, though I never thought her vitally interested in the
Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of which work the Doctor always
carried in his pockets, and in the lining of his hat, and generally
seemed to be expounding to her as they walked about.

I saw a good deal of Mrs. Strong, both because she had taken a
liking for me on the morning of my introduction to the Doctor, and
was always afterwards kind to me, and interested in me; and because
she was very fond of Agnes, and was often backwards and forwards at
our house.  There was a curious constraint between her and Mr.
Wickfield, I thought (of whom she seemed to be afraid), that never
wore off.  When she came there of an evening, she always shrunk
from accepting his escort home, and ran away with me instead.  And
sometimes, as we were running gaily across the Cathedral yard
together, expecting to meet nobody, we would meet Mr. Jack Maldon,
who was always surprised to see us.

Mrs. Strong's mama was a lady I took great delight in.  Her name
was Mrs. Markleham; but our boys used to call her the Old Soldier,
on account of her generalship, and the skill with which she
marshalled great forces of relations against the Doctor.  She was
a little, sharp-eyed woman, who used to wear, when she was dressed,
one unchangeable cap, ornamented with some artificial flowers, and
two artificial butterflies supposed to be hovering above the
flowers.  There was a superstition among us that this cap had come
from France, and could only originate in the workmanship of that
ingenious nation: but all I certainly know about it, is, that it
always made its appearance of an evening, wheresoever Mrs.
Markleham made HER appearance; that it was carried about to
friendly meetings in a Hindoo basket; that the butterflies had the
gift of trembling constantly; and that they improved the shining
hours at Doctor Strong's expense, like busy bees.

I observed the Old Soldier - not to adopt the name disrespectfully
- to pretty good advantage, on a night which is made memorable to
me by something else I shall relate.  It was the night of a little
party at the Doctor's, which was given on the occasion of Mr. Jack
Maldon's departure for India, whither he was going as a cadet, or
something of that kind: Mr. Wickfield having at length arranged the
business.  It happened to be the Doctor's birthday, too.  We had
had a holiday, had made presents to him in the morning, had made a
speech to him through the head-boy, and had cheered him until we
were hoarse, and until he had shed tears.  And now, in the evening,
Mr. Wickfield, Agnes, and I, went to have tea with him in his
private capacity.

Mr. Jack Maldon was there, before us.  Mrs. Strong, dressed in
white, with cherry-coloured ribbons, was playing the piano, when we
went in; and he was leaning over her to turn the leaves.  The clear
red and white of her complexion was not so blooming and flower-like
as usual, I thought, when she turned round; but she looked very
pretty, Wonderfully pretty.

'I have forgotten, Doctor,' said Mrs. Strong's mama, when we were
seated, 'to pay you the compliments of the day - though they are,
as you may suppose, very far from being mere compliments in my
case.  Allow me to wish you many happy returns.'

'I thank you, ma'am,' replied the Doctor.

'Many, many, many, happy returns,' said the Old Soldier.  'Not only
for your own sake, but for Annie's, and John Maldon's, and many
other people's.  It seems but yesterday to me, John, when you were
a little creature, a head shorter than Master Copperfield, making
baby love to Annie behind the gooseberry bushes in the
back-garden.'

'My dear mama,' said Mrs. Strong, 'never mind that now.'

'Annie, don't be absurd,' returned her mother.  'If you are to
blush to hear of such things now you are an old married woman, when
are you not to blush to hear of them?'

'Old?' exclaimed Mr. Jack Maldon.  'Annie?  Come!'

'Yes, John,' returned the Soldier.  'Virtually, an old married
woman.  Although not old by years - for when did you ever hear me
say, or who has ever heard me say, that a girl of twenty was old by
years! - your cousin is the wife of the Doctor, and, as such, what
I have described her.  It is well for you, John, that your cousin
is the wife of the Doctor.  You have found in him an influential
and kind friend, who will be kinder yet, I venture to predict, if
you deserve it.  I have no false pride.  I never hesitate to admit,
frankly, that there are some members of our family who want a
friend.  You were one yourself, before your cousin's influence
raised up one for you.'

The Doctor, in the goodness of his heart, waved his hand as if to
make light of it, and save Mr. Jack Maldon from any further
reminder.  But Mrs. Markleham changed her chair for one next the
Doctor's, and putting her fan on his coat-sleeve, said:

'No, really, my dear Doctor, you must excuse me if I appear to
dwell on this rather, because I feel so very strongly.  I call it
quite my monomania, it is such a subject of mine.  You are a
blessing to us.  You really are a Boon, you know.'

'Nonsense, nonsense,' said the Doctor.

'No, no, I beg your pardon,' retorted the Old Soldier.  'With
nobody present, but our dear and confidential friend Mr. Wickfield,
I cannot consent to be put down.  I shall begin to assert the
privileges of a mother-in-law, if you go on like that, and scold
you.  I am perfectly honest and outspoken.  What I am saying, is
what I said when you first overpowered me with surprise - you
remember how surprised I was? - by proposing for Annie.  Not that
there was anything so very much out of the way, in the mere fact of
the proposal - it would be ridiculous to say that! - but because,
you having known her poor father, and having known her from a baby
six months old, I hadn't thought of you in such a light at all, or
indeed as a marrying man in any way, - simply that, you know.'

'Aye, aye,' returned the Doctor, good-humouredly.  'Never mind.'

'But I DO mind,' said the Old Soldier, laying her fan upon his
lips.  'I mind very much.  I recall these things that I may be
contradicted if I am wrong.  Well!  Then I spoke to Annie, and I
told her what had happened.  I said, "My dear, here's Doctor Strong
has positively been and made you the subject of a handsome
declaration and an offer." Did I press it in the least?  No.  I
said, "Now, Annie, tell me the truth this moment; is your heart
free?"  "Mama," she said crying, "I am extremely young" - which was
perfectly true - "and I hardly know if I have a heart at all." 
"Then, my dear," I said, "you may rely upon it, it's free.  At all
events, my love," said I, "Doctor Strong is in an agitated state of
mind, and must be answered.  He cannot be kept in his present state
of suspense."  "Mama," said Annie, still crying, "would he be
unhappy without me?  If he would, I honour and respect him so much,
that I think I will have him." So it was settled.  And then, and
not till then, I said to Annie, "Annie, Doctor Strong will not only
be your husband, but he will represent your late father: he will
represent the head of our family, he will represent the wisdom and
station, and I may say the means, of our family; and will be, in
short, a Boon to it." I used the word at the time, and I have used
it again, today.  If I have any merit it is consistency.'

The daughter had sat quite silent and still during this speech,
with her eyes fixed on the ground; her cousin standing near her,
and looking on the ground too.  She now said very softly, in a
trembling voice:

'Mama, I hope you have finished?'
'No, my dear Annie,' returned the Old Soldier, 'I have not quite
finished.  Since you ask me, my love, I reply that I have not.  I
complain that you really are a little unnatural towards your own
family; and, as it is of no use complaining to you.  I mean to
complain to your husband.  Now, my dear Doctor, do look at that
silly wife of yours.'

As the Doctor turned his kind face, with its smile of simplicity
and gentleness, towards her, she drooped her head more.  I noticed
that Mr. Wickfield looked at her steadily.

'When I happened to say to that naughty thing, the other day,'
pursued her mother, shaking her head and her fan at her, playfully,
'that there was a family circumstance she might mention to you -
indeed, I think, was bound to mention - she said, that to mention
it was to ask a favour; and that, as you were too generous, and as
for her to ask was always to have, she wouldn't.'

'Annie, my dear,' said the Doctor.  'That was wrong.  It robbed me
of a pleasure.'

'Almost the very words I said to her!' exclaimed her mother.  'Now
really, another time, when I know what she would tell you but for
this reason, and won't, I have a great mind, my dear Doctor, to
tell you myself.'

'I shall be glad if you will,' returned the Doctor.

'Shall I?'

'Certainly.'

'Well, then, I will!' said the Old Soldier.  'That's a bargain.'
And having, I suppose, carried her point, she tapped the Doctor's
hand several times with her fan (which she kissed first), and
returned triumphantly to her former station.

Some more company coming in, among whom were the two masters and
Adams, the talk became general; and it naturally turned on Mr. Jack
Maldon, and his voyage, and the country he was going to, and his
various plans and prospects.  He was to leave that night, after
supper, in a post-chaise, for Gravesend; where the ship, in which
he was to make the voyage, lay; and was to be gone - unless he came
home on leave, or for his health - I don't know how many years.  I
recollect it was settled by general consent that India was quite a
misrepresented country, and had nothing objectionable in it, but a
tiger or two, and a little heat in the warm part of the day.  For
my own part, I looked on Mr. Jack Maldon as a modern Sindbad, and
pictured him the bosom friend of all the Rajahs in the East,
sitting under canopies, smoking curly golden pipes - a mile long,
if they could be straightened out.

Mrs. Strong was a very pretty singer: as I knew, who often heard
her singing by herself.  But, whether she was afraid of singing
before people, or was out of voice that evening, it was certain
that she couldn't sing at all.  She tried a duet, once, with her
cousin Maldon, but could not so much as begin; and afterwards, when
she tried to sing by herself, although she began sweetly, her voice
died away on a sudden, and left her quite distressed, with her head
hanging down over the keys.  The good Doctor said she was nervous,
and, to relieve her, proposed a round game at cards; of which he
knew as much as of the art of playing the trombone.  But I remarked
that the Old Soldier took him into custody directly, for her
partner; and instructed him, as the first preliminary of
initiation, to give her all the silver he had in his pocket.

We had a merry game, not made the less merry by the Doctor's
mistakes, of which he committed an innumerable quantity, in spite
of the watchfulness of the butterflies, and to their great
aggravation.  Mrs. Strong had declined to play, on the ground of
not feeling very well; and her cousin Maldon had excused himself
because he had some packing to do.  When he had done it, however,
he returned, and they sat together, talking, on the sofa.  From
time to time she came and looked over the Doctor's hand, and told
him what to play.  She was very pale, as she bent over him, and I
thought her finger trembled as she pointed out the cards; but the
Doctor was quite happy in her attention, and took no notice of
this, if it were so.

At supper, we were hardly so gay.  Everyone appeared to feel that
a parting of that sort was an awkward thing, and that the nearer it
approached, the more awkward it was.  Mr. Jack Maldon tried to be
very talkative, but was not at his ease, and made matters worse. 
And they were not improved, as it appeared to me, by the Old
Soldier: who continually recalled passages of Mr. Jack Maldon's
youth.

The Doctor, however, who felt, I am sure, that he was making
everybody happy, was well pleased, and had no suspicion but that we
were all at the utmost height of enjoyment.

'Annie, my dear,' said he, looking at his watch, and filling his
glass, 'it is past your cousin jack's time, and we must not detain
him, since time and tide - both concerned in this case - wait for
no man.  Mr. Jack Maldon, you have a long voyage, and a strange
country, before you; but many men have had both, and many men will
have both, to the end of time.  The winds you are going to tempt,
have wafted thousands upon thousands to fortune, and brought
thousands upon thousands happily back.'

'It's an affecting thing,' said Mrs. Markleham - 'however it's
viewed, it's affecting, to see a fine young man one has known from
an infant, going away to the other end of the world, leaving all he
knows behind, and not knowing what's before him.  A young man
really well deserves constant support and patronage,' looking at
the Doctor, 'who makes such sacrifices.'

'Time will go fast with you, Mr. Jack Maldon,' pursued the Doctor,
'and fast with all of us.  Some of us can hardly expect, perhaps,
in the natural course of things, to greet you on your return.  The
next best thing is to hope to do it, and that's my case.  I shall
not weary you with good advice.  You have long had a good model
before you, in your cousin Annie.  Imitate her virtues as nearly as
you can.'

Mrs. Markleham fanned herself, and shook her head.

'Farewell, Mr. Jack,' said the Doctor, standing up; on which we all
stood up.  'A prosperous voyage out, a thriving career abroad, and
a happy return home!'

We all drank the toast, and all shook hands with Mr. Jack Maldon;
after which he hastily took leave of the ladies who were there, and
hurried to the door, where he was received, as he got into the
chaise, with a tremendous broadside of cheers discharged by our
boys, who had assembled on the lawn for the purpose.  Running in
among them to swell the ranks, I was very near the chaise when it
rolled away; and I had a lively impression made upon me, in the
midst of the noise and dust, of having seen Mr. Jack Maldon rattle
past with an agitated face, and something cherry-coloured in his
hand.

After another broadside for the Doctor, and another for the
Doctor's wife, the boys dispersed, and I went back into the house,
where I found the guests all standing in a group about the Doctor,
discussing how Mr. Jack Maldon had gone away, and how he had borne
it, and how he had felt it, and all the rest of it.  In the midst
of these remarks, Mrs. Markleham cried: 'Where's Annie?'

No Annie was there; and when they called to her, no Annie replied. 
But all pressing out of the room, in a crowd, to see what was the
matter, we found her lying on the hall floor.  There was great
alarm at first, until it was found that she was in a swoon, and
that the swoon was yielding to the usual means of recovery; when
the Doctor, who had lifted her head upon his knee, put her curls
aside with his hand, and said, looking around:

'Poor Annie!  She's so faithful and tender-hearted!  It's the
parting from her old playfellow and friend - her favourite cousin
- that has done this.  Ah!  It's a pity!  I am very sorry!'

When she opened her eyes, and saw where she was, and that we were
all standing about her, she arose with assistance: turning her
head, as she did so, to lay it on the Doctor's shoulder - or to
hide it, I don't know which.  We went into the drawing-room, to
leave her with the Doctor and her mother; but she said, it seemed,
that she was better than she had been since morning, and that she
would rather be brought among us; so they brought her in, looking
very white and weak, I thought, and sat her on a sofa.

'Annie, my dear,' said her mother, doing something to her dress. 
'See here!  You have lost a bow.  Will anybody be so good as find
a ribbon; a cherry-coloured ribbon?'

It was the one she had worn at her bosom.  We all looked for it; I
myself looked everywhere, I am certain - but nobody could find it.

'Do you recollect where you had it last, Annie?' said her mother.

I wondered how I could have thought she looked white, or anything
but burning red, when she answered that she had had it safe, a
little while ago, she thought, but it was not worth looking for.

Nevertheless, it was looked for again, and still not found.  She
entreated that there might be no more searching; but it was still
sought for, in a desultory way, until she was quite well, and the
company took their departure.

We walked very slowly home, Mr. Wickfield, Agnes, and I - Agnes and
I admiring the moonlight, and Mr. Wickfield scarcely raising his
eyes from the ground.  When we, at last, reached our own door,
Agnes discovered that she had left her little reticule behind. 
Delighted to be of any service to her, I ran back to fetch it.

I went into the supper-room where it had been left, which was
deserted and dark.  But a door of communication between that and
the Doctor's study, where there was a light, being open, I passed
on there, to say what I wanted, and to get a candle.

The Doctor was sitting in his easy-chair by the fireside, and his
young wife was on a stool at his feet.  The Doctor, with a
complacent smile, was reading aloud some manuscript explanation or
statement of a theory out of that interminable Dictionary, and she
was looking up at him.  But with such a face as I never saw.  It
was so beautiful in its form, it was so ashy pale, it was so fixed
in its abstraction, it was so full of a wild, sleep-walking, dreamy
horror of I don't know what.  The eyes were wide open, and her
brown hair fell in two rich clusters on her shoulders, and on her
white dress, disordered by the want of the lost ribbon.  Distinctly
as I recollect her look, I cannot say of what it was expressive, I
cannot even say of what it is expressive to me now, rising again
before my older judgement.  Penitence, humiliation, shame, pride,
love, and trustfulness - I see them all; and in them all, I see
that horror of I don't know what.

My entrance, and my saying what I wanted, roused her.  It disturbed
the Doctor too, for when I went back to replace the candle I had
taken from the table, he was patting her head, in his fatherly way,
and saying he was a merciless drone to let her tempt him into
reading on; and he would have her go to bed.

But she asked him, in a rapid, urgent manner, to let her stay - to
let her feel assured (I heard her murmur some broken words to this
effect) that she was in his confidence that night.  And, as she
turned again towards him, after glancing at me as I left the room
and went out at the door, I saw her cross her hands upon his knee,
and look up at him with the same face, something quieted, as he
resumed his reading.

It made a great impression on me, and I remembered it a long time
afterwards; as I shall have occasion to narrate when the time
comes.



CHAPTER 17
SOMEBODY TURNS UP


It has not occurred to me to mention Peggotty since I ran away;
but, of course, I wrote her a letter almost as soon as I was housed
at Dover, and another, and a longer letter, containing all
particulars fully related, when my aunt took me formally under her
protection.  On my being settled at Doctor Strong's I wrote to her
again, detailing my happy condition and prospects.  I never could
have derived anything like the pleasure from spending the money Mr.
Dick had given me, that I felt in sending a gold half-guinea to
Peggotty, per post, enclosed in this last letter, to discharge the
sum I had borrowed of her: in which epistle, not before, I
mentioned about the young man with the donkey-cart.

To these communications Peggotty replied as promptly, if not as
concisely, as a merchant's clerk.  Her utmost powers of expression
(which were certainly not great in ink) were exhausted in the
attempt to write what she felt on the subject of my journey.  Four
sides of incoherent and interjectional beginnings of sentences,
that had no end, except blots, were inadequate to afford her any
relief.  But the blots were more expressive to me than the best
composition; for they showed me that Peggotty had been crying all
over the paper, and what could I have desired more?

I made out, without much difficulty, that she could not take quite
kindly to my aunt yet.  The notice was too short after so long a
prepossession the other way.  We never knew a person, she wrote;
but to think that Miss Betsey should seem to be so different from
what she had been thought to be, was a Moral! - that was her word. 
She was evidently still afraid of Miss Betsey, for she sent her
grateful duty to her but timidly; and she was evidently afraid of
me, too, and entertained the probability of my running away again
soon: if I might judge from the repeated hints she threw out, that
the coach-fare to Yarmouth was always to be had of her for the
asking.

She gave me one piece of intelligence which affected me very much,
namely, that there had been a sale of the furniture at our old
home, and that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were gone away, and the house
was shut up, to be let or sold.  God knows I had no part in it
while they remained there, but it pained me to think of the dear
old place as altogether abandoned; of the weeds growing tall in the
garden, and the fallen leaves lying thick and wet upon the paths. 
I imagined how the winds of winter would howl round it, how the
cold rain would beat upon the window-glass, how the moon would make
ghosts on the walls of the empty rooms, watching their solitude all
night.  I thought afresh of the grave in the churchyard, underneath
the tree: and it seemed as if the house were dead too, now, and all
connected with my father and mother were faded away.

There was no other news in Peggotty's letters.  Mr. Barkis was an
excellent husband, she said, though still a little near; but we all
had our faults, and she had plenty (though I am sure I don't know
what they were); and he sent his duty, and my little bedroom was
always ready for me.  Mr. Peggotty was well, and Ham was well, and
Mrs..  Gummidge was but poorly, and little Em'ly wouldn't send her
love, but said that Peggotty might send it, if she liked.

All this intelligence I dutifully imparted to my aunt, only
reserving to myself the mention of little Em'ly, to whom I
instinctively felt that she would not very tenderly incline.  While
I was yet new at Doctor Strong's, she made several excursions over
to Canterbury to see me, and always at unseasonable hours: with the
view, I suppose, of taking me by surprise.  But, finding me well
employed, and bearing a good character, and hearing on all hands
that I rose fast in the school, she soon discontinued these visits. 
I saw her on a Saturday, every third or fourth week, when I went
over to Dover for a treat; and I saw Mr. Dick every alternate
Wednesday, when he arrived by stage-coach at noon, to stay until
next morning.

On these occasions Mr. Dick never travelled without a leathern
writing-desk, containing a supply of stationery and the Memorial;
in relation to which document he had a notion that time was
beginning to press now, and that it really must be got out of hand.

Mr. Dick was very partial to gingerbread.  To render his visits the
more agreeable, my aunt had instructed me to open a credit for him
at a cake shop, which was hampered with the stipulation that he
should not be served with more than one shilling's-worth in the
course of any one day.  This, and the reference of all his little
bills at the county inn where he slept, to my aunt, before they
were paid, induced me to suspect that he was only allowed to rattle
his money, and not to spend it.  I found on further investigation
that this was so, or at least there was an agreement between him
and my aunt that he should account to her for all his
disbursements.  As he had no idea of deceiving her, and always
desired to please her, he was thus made chary of launching into
expense.  On this point, as well as on all other possible points,
Mr. Dick was convinced that my aunt was the wisest and most
wonderful of women; as he repeatedly told me with infinite secrecy,
and always in a whisper.

'Trotwood,' said Mr. Dick, with an air of mystery, after imparting
this confidence to me, one Wednesday; 'who's the man that hides
near our house and frightens her?'

'Frightens my aunt, sir?'

Mr. Dick nodded.  'I thought nothing would have frightened her,' he
said, 'for she's -' here he whispered softly, 'don't mention it -
the wisest and most wonderful of women.'  Having said which, he
drew back, to observe the effect which this description of her made
upon me.

'The first time he came,' said Mr. Dick, 'was- let me see- sixteen
hundred and forty-nine was the date of King Charles's execution. 
I think you said sixteen hundred and forty-nine?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I don't know how it can be,' said Mr. Dick, sorely puzzled and
shaking his head.  'I don't think I am as old as that.'

'Was it in that year that the man appeared, sir?' I asked.

'Why, really' said Mr. Dick, 'I don't see how it can have been in
that year, Trotwood.  Did you get that date out of history?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I suppose history never lies, does it?' said Mr. Dick, with a
gleam of hope.

'Oh dear, no, sir!' I replied, most decisively.  I was ingenuous
and young, and I thought so.

'I can't make it out,' said Mr. Dick, shaking his head.  'There's
something wrong, somewhere.  However, it was very soon after the
mistake was made of putting some of the trouble out of King
Charles's head into my head, that the man first came.  I was
walking out with Miss Trotwood after tea, just at dark, and there
he was, close to our house.'

'Walking about?' I inquired.

'Walking about?' repeated Mr. Dick.  'Let me see, I must recollect
a bit.  N-no, no; he was not walking about.'

I asked, as the shortest way to get at it, what he WAS doing.

'Well, he wasn't there at all,' said Mr. Dick, 'until he came up
behind her, and whispered.  Then she turned round and fainted, and
I stood still and looked at him, and he walked away; but that he
should have been hiding ever since (in the ground or somewhere), is
the most extraordinary thing!'

'HAS he been hiding ever since?' I asked.

'To be sure he has,' retorted Mr. Dick, nodding his head gravely. 
'Never came out, till last night!  We were walking last night, and
he came up behind her again, and I knew him again.'

'And did he frighten my aunt again?'

'All of a shiver,' said Mr. Dick, counterfeiting that affection and
making his teeth chatter.  'Held by the palings.  Cried.  But,
Trotwood, come here,' getting me close to him, that he might
whisper very softly; 'why did she give him money, boy, in the
moonlight?'

'He was a beggar, perhaps.'

Mr. Dick shook his head, as utterly renouncing the suggestion; and
having replied a great many times, and with great confidence, 'No
beggar, no beggar, no beggar, sir!' went on to say, that from his
window he had afterwards, and late at night, seen my aunt give this
person money outside the garden rails in the moonlight, who then
slunk away - into the ground again, as he thought probable - and
was seen no more: while my aunt came hurriedly and secretly back
into the house, and had, even that morning, been quite different
from her usual self; which preyed on Mr. Dick's mind.

I had not the least belief, in the outset of this story, that the
unknown was anything but a delusion of Mr. Dick's, and one of the
line of that ill-fated Prince who occasioned him so much
difficulty; but after some reflection I began to entertain the
question whether an attempt, or threat of an attempt, might have
been twice made to take poor Mr. Dick himself from under my aunt's
protection, and whether my aunt, the strength of whose kind feeling
towards him I knew from herself, might have been induced to pay a
price for his peace and quiet.  As I was already much attached to
Mr. Dick, and very solicitous for his welfare, my fears favoured
this supposition; and for a long time his Wednesday hardly ever
came round, without my entertaining a misgiving that he would not
be on the coach-box as usual.  There he always appeared, however,
grey-headed, laughing, and happy; and he never had anything more to
tell of the man who could frighten my aunt.

These Wednesdays were the happiest days of Mr. Dick's life; they
were far from being the least happy of mine.  He soon became known
to every boy in the school; and though he never took an active part
in any game but kite-flying, was as deeply interested in all our
sports as anyone among us.  How often have I seen him, intent upon
a match at marbles or pegtop, looking on with a face of unutterable
interest, and hardly breathing at the critical times!  How often,
at hare and hounds, have I seen him mounted on a little knoll,
cheering the whole field on to action, and waving his hat above his
grey head, oblivious of King Charles the Martyr's head, and all
belonging to it!  How many a summer hour have I known to be but
blissful minutes to him in the cricket-field!  How many winter days
have I seen him, standing blue-nosed, in the snow and east wind,
looking at the boys going down the long slide, and clapping his
worsted gloves in rapture!

He was an universal favourite, and his ingenuity in little things
was transcendent.  He could cut oranges into such devices as none
of us had an idea of.  He could make a boat out of anything, from
a skewer upwards.  He could turn cramp-bones into chessmen; fashion
Roman chariots from old court cards; make spoked wheels out of
cotton reels, and bird-cages of old wire.  But he was greatest of
all, perhaps, in the articles of string and straw; with which we
were all persuaded he could do anything that could be done by
hands.

Mr. Dick's renown was not long confined to us.  After a few
Wednesdays, Doctor Strong himself made some inquiries of me about
him, and I told him all my aunt had told me; which interested the
Doctor so much that he requested, on the occasion of his next
visit, to be presented to him.  This ceremony I performed; and the
Doctor begging Mr. Dick, whensoever he should not find me at the
coach office, to come on there, and rest himself until our
morning's work was over, it soon passed into a custom for Mr. Dick
to come on as a matter of course, and, if we were a little late, as
often happened on a Wednesday, to walk about the courtyard, waiting
for me.  Here he made the acquaintance of the Doctor's beautiful
young wife (paler than formerly, all this time; more rarely seen by
me or anyone, I think; and not so gay, but not less beautiful), and
so became more and more familiar by degrees, until, at last, he
would come into the school and wait.  He always sat in a particular
corner, on a particular stool, which was called 'Dick', after him;
here he would sit, with his grey head bent forward, attentively
listening to whatever might be going on, with a profound veneration
for the learning he had never been able to acquire.

This veneration Mr. Dick extended to the Doctor, whom he thought
the most subtle and accomplished philosopher of any age.  It was
long before Mr. Dick ever spoke to him otherwise than bareheaded;
and even when he and the Doctor had struck up quite a friendship,
and would walk together by the hour, on that side of the courtyard
which was known among us as The Doctor's Walk, Mr. Dick would pull
off his hat at intervals to show his respect for wisdom and
knowledge.  How it ever came about that the Doctor began to read
out scraps of the famous Dictionary, in these walks, I never knew;
perhaps he felt it all the same, at first, as reading to himself. 
However, it passed into a custom too; and Mr. Dick, listening with
a face shining with pride and pleasure, in his heart of hearts
believed the Dictionary to be the most delightful book in the
world.

As I think of them going up and down before those schoolroom
windows - the Doctor reading with his complacent smile, an
occasional flourish of the manuscript, or grave motion of his head;
and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits
calmly wandering God knows where, upon the wings of hard words - I
think of it as one of the pleasantest things, in a quiet way, that
I have ever seen.  I feel as if they might go walking to and fro
for ever, and the world might somehow be the better for it - as if
a thousand things it makes a noise about, were not one half so good
for it, or me.

Agnes was one of Mr. Dick's friends, very soon; and in often coming
to the house, he made acquaintance with Uriah.  The friendship
between himself and me increased continually, and it was maintained
on this odd footing: that, while Mr. Dick came professedly to look
after me as my guardian, he always consulted me in any little
matter of doubt that arose, and invariably guided himself by my
advice; not only having a high respect for my native sagacity, but
considering that I inherited a good deal from my aunt.

One Thursday morning, when I was about to walk with Mr. Dick from
the hotel to the coach office before going back to school (for we
had an hour's school before breakfast), I met Uriah in the street,
who reminded me of the promise I had made to take tea with himself
and his mother: adding, with a writhe, 'But I didn't expect you to
keep it, Master Copperfield, we're so very umble.'

I really had not yet been able to make up my mind whether I liked
Uriah or detested him; and I was very doubtful about it still, as
I stood looking him in the face in the street.  But I felt it quite
an affront to be supposed proud, and said I only wanted to be
asked.

' Oh, if that's all, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah, 'and it
really isn't our umbleness that prevents you, will you come this
evening?  But if it is our umbleness, I hope you won't mind owning
to it, Master Copperfield; for we are well aware of our condition.'

I said I would mention it to Mr. Wickfield, and if he approved, as
I had no doubt he would, I would come with pleasure.  So, at six
o'clock that evening, which was one of the early office evenings,
I announced myself as ready, to Uriah.

'Mother will be proud, indeed,' he said, as we walked away
together.  'Or she would be proud, if it wasn't sinful, Master
Copperfield.'

'Yet you didn't mind supposing I was proud this morning,' I
returned.

'Oh dear, no, Master Copperfield!' returned Uriah.  'Oh, believe
me, no!  Such a thought never came into my head!  I shouldn't have
deemed it at all proud if you had thought US too umble for you. 
Because we are so very umble.'

'Have you been studying much law lately?' I asked, to change the
subject.

'Oh, Master Copperfield,' he said, with an air of self-denial, 'my
reading is hardly to be called study.  I have passed an hour or two
in the evening, sometimes, with Mr. Tidd.'

'Rather hard, I suppose?' said I.
'He is hard to me sometimes,' returned Uriah.  'But I don't know
what he might be to a gifted person.'

After beating a little tune on his chin as he walked on, with the
two forefingers of his skeleton right hand, he added:

'There are expressions, you see, Master Copperfield - Latin words
and terms - in Mr. Tidd, that are trying to a reader of my umble
attainments.'

'Would you like to be taught Latin?' I said briskly.  'I will teach
it you with pleasure, as I learn it.'

'Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,' he answered, shaking his head. 
'I am sure it's very kind of you to make the offer, but I am much
too umble to accept it.'

'What nonsense, Uriah!'

'Oh, indeed you must excuse me, Master Copperfield!  I am greatly
obliged, and I should like it of all things, I assure you; but I am
far too umble.  There are people enough to tread upon me in my
lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by
possessing learning.  Learning ain't for me.  A person like myself
had better not aspire.  If he is to get on in life, he must get on
umbly, Master Copperfield!'

I never saw his mouth so wide, or the creases in his cheeks so
deep, as when he delivered himself of these sentiments: shaking his
head all the time, and writhing modestly.

'I think you are wrong, Uriah,' I said.  'I dare say there are
several things that I could teach you, if you would like to learn
them.'

'Oh, I don't doubt that, Master Copperfield,' he answered; 'not in
the least.  But not being umble yourself, you don't judge well,
perhaps, for them that are.  I won't provoke my betters with
knowledge, thank you.  I'm much too umble.  Here is my umble
dwelling, Master Copperfield!'

We entered a low, old-fashioned room, walked straight into from the
street, and found there Mrs. Heep, who was the dead image of Uriah,
only short.  She received me with the utmost humility, and
apologized to me for giving her son a kiss, observing that, lowly
as they were, they had their natural affections, which they hoped
would give no offence to anyone.  It was a perfectly decent room,
half parlour and half kitchen, but not at all a snug room.  The
tea-things were set upon the table, and the kettle was boiling on
the hob.  There was a chest of drawers with an escritoire top, for
Uriah to read or write at of an evening; there was Uriah's blue bag
lying down and vomiting papers; there was a company of Uriah's
books commanded by Mr. Tidd; there was a corner cupboard: and there
were the usual articles of furniture.  I don't remember that any
individual object had a bare, pinched, spare look; but I do
remember that the whole place had.

It was perhaps a part of Mrs. Heep's humility, that she still wore
weeds.  Notwithstanding the lapse of time that had occurred since
Mr. Heep's decease, she still wore weeds.  I think there was some
compromise in the cap; but otherwise she was as weedy as in the
early days of her mourning.

'This is a day to be remembered, my Uriah, I am sure,' said Mrs.
Heep, making the tea, 'when Master Copperfield pays us a visit.'

'I said you'd think so, mother,' said Uriah.

'If I could have wished father to remain among us for any reason,'
said Mrs. Heep, 'it would have been, that he might have known his
company this afternoon.'

I felt embarrassed by these compliments; but I was sensible, too,
of being entertained as an honoured guest, and I thought Mrs. Heep
an agreeable woman.

'My Uriah,' said Mrs. Heep, 'has looked forward to this, sir, a
long while.  He had his fears that our umbleness stood in the way,
and I joined in them myself.  Umble we are, umble we have been,
umble we shall ever be,' said Mrs. Heep.

'I am sure you have no occasion to be so, ma'am,' I said, 'unless
you like.'

'Thank you, sir,' retorted Mrs. Heep.  'We know our station and are
thankful in it.'

I found that Mrs. Heep gradually got nearer to me, and that Uriah
gradually got opposite to me, and that they respectfully plied me
with the choicest of the eatables on the table.  There was nothing
particularly choice there, to be sure; but I took the will for the
deed, and felt that they were very attentive.  Presently they began
to talk about aunts, and then I told them about mine; and about
fathers and mothers, and then I told them about mine; and then Mrs.
Heep began to talk about fathers-in-law, and then I began to tell
her about mine - but stopped, because my aunt had advised me to
observe a silence on that subject.  A tender young cork, however,
would have had no more chance against a pair of corkscrews, or a
tender young tooth against a pair of dentists, or a little
shuttlecock against two battledores, than I had against Uriah and
Mrs. Heep.  They did just what they liked with me; and wormed
things out of me that I had no desire to tell, with a certainty I
blush to think of.  the more especially, as in my juvenile
frankness, I took some credit to myself for being so confidential
and felt that I was quite the patron of my two respectful
entertainers.

They were very fond of one another: that was certain.  I take it,
that had its effect upon me, as a touch of nature; but the skill
with which the one followed up whatever the other said, was a touch
of art which I was still less proof against.  When there was
nothing more to be got out of me about myself (for on the Murdstone
and Grinby life, and on my journey, I was dumb), they began about
Mr. Wickfield and Agnes.  Uriah threw the ball to Mrs. Heep, Mrs.
Heep caught it and threw it back to Uriah, Uriah kept it up a
little while, then sent it back to Mrs. Heep, and so they went on
tossing it about until I had no idea who had got it, and was quite
bewildered.  The ball itself was always changing too.  Now it was
Mr. Wickfield, now Agnes, now the excellence of Mr. Wickfield, now
my admiration of Agnes; now the extent of Mr. Wickfield's business
and resources, now our domestic life after dinner; now, the wine
that Mr. Wickfield took, the reason why he took it, and the pity
that it was he took so much; now one thing, now another, then
everything at once; and all the time, without appearing to speak
very often, or to do anything but sometimes encourage them a
little, for fear they should be overcome by their humility and the
honour of my company, I found myself perpetually letting out
something or other that I had no business to let out and seeing the
effect of it in the twinkling of Uriah's dinted nostrils.

I had begun to be a little uncomfortable, and to wish myself well
out of the visit, when a figure coming down the street passed the
door - it stood open to air the room, which was warm, the weather
being close for the time of year - came back again, looked in, and
walked in, exclaiming loudly, 'Copperfield!  Is it possible?'

It was Mr. Micawber!  It was Mr. Micawber, with his eye-glass, and
his walking-stick, and his shirt-collar, and his genteel air, and
the condescending roll in his voice, all complete!

'My dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, putting out his hand,
'this is indeed a meeting which is calculated to impress the mind
with a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all human - in
short, it is a most extraordinary meeting.  Walking along the
street, reflecting upon the probability of something turning up (of
which I am at present rather sanguine), I find a young but valued
friend turn up, who is connected with the most eventful period of
my life; I may say, with the turning-point of my existence. 
Copperfield, my dear fellow, how do you do?'

I cannot say - I really cannot say - that I was glad to see Mr.
Micawber there; but I was glad to see him too, and shook hands with
him, heartily, inquiring how Mrs. Micawber was.

'Thank you,' said Mr. Micawber, waving his hand as of old, and
settling his chin in his shirt-collar.  'She is tolerably
convalescent.  The twins no longer derive their sustenance from
Nature's founts - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, in one of his
bursts of confidence, 'they are weaned - and Mrs. Micawber is, at
present, my travelling companion.  She will be rejoiced,
Copperfield, to renew her acquaintance with one who has proved
himself in all respects a worthy minister at the sacred altar of
friendship.'

I said I should be delighted to see her.

'You are very good,' said Mr. Micawber.

Mr. Micawber then smiled, settled his chin again, and looked about
him.

'I have discovered my friend Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber
genteelly, and without addressing himself particularly to anyone,
'not in solitude, but partaking of a social meal in company with a
widow lady, and one who is apparently her offspring - in short,'
said Mr. Micawber, in another of his bursts of confidence, 'her
son.  I shall esteem it an honour to be presented.'

I could do no less, under these circumstances, than make Mr.
Micawber known to Uriah Heep and his mother; which I accordingly
did.  As they abased themselves before him, Mr. Micawber took a
seat, and waved his hand in his most courtly manner.

'Any friend of my friend Copperfield's,' said Mr. Micawber, 'has a
personal claim upon myself.'

'We are too umble, sir,' said Mrs. Heep, 'my son and me, to be the
friends of Master Copperfield.  He has been so good as take his tea
with us, and we are thankful to him for his company, also to you,
sir, for your notice.'

'Ma'am,' returned Mr. Micawber, with a bow, 'you are very obliging:
and what are you doing, Copperfield?  Still in the wine trade?'

I was excessively anxious to get Mr. Micawber away; and replied,
with my hat in my hand, and a very red face, I have no doubt, that
I was a pupil at Doctor Strong's.

'A pupil?' said Mr. Micawber, raising his eyebrows.  'I am
extremely happy to hear it.  Although a mind like my friend
Copperfield's' - to Uriah and Mrs. Heep - 'does not require that
cultivation which, without his knowledge of men and things, it
would require, still it is a rich soil teeming with latent
vegetation - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, smiling, in another
burst of confidence, 'it is an intellect capable of getting up the
classics to any extent.'

Uriah, with his long hands slowly twining over one another, made a
ghastly writhe from the waist upwards, to express his concurrence
in this estimation of me.

'Shall we go and see Mrs. Micawber, sir?' I said, to get Mr.
Micawber away.

'If you will do her that favour, Copperfield,' replied Mr.
Micawber, rising.  'I have no scruple in saying, in the presence of
our friends here, that I am a man who has, for some years,
contended against the pressure of pecuniary difficulties.'  I knew
he was certain to say something of this kind; he always would be so
boastful about his difficulties.  'Sometimes I have risen superior
to my difficulties.  Sometimes my difficulties have - in short,
have floored me.  There have been times when I have administered a
succession of facers to them; there have been times when they have
been too many for me, and I have given in, and said to Mrs.
Micawber, in the words of Cato, "Plato, thou reasonest well.  It's
all up now.  I can show fight no more." But at no time of my life,'
said Mr. Micawber, 'have I enjoyed a higher degree of satisfaction
than in pouring my griefs (if I may describe difficulties, chiefly
arising out of warrants of attorney and promissory notes at two and
four months, by that word) into the bosom of my friend
Copperfield.'

Mr. Micawber closed this handsome tribute by saying, 'Mr. Heep!
Good evening.  Mrs. Heep!  Your servant,' and then walking out with
me in his most fashionable manner, making a good deal of noise on
the pavement with his shoes, and humming a tune as we went.

It was a little inn where Mr. Micawber put up, and he occupied a
little room in it, partitioned off from the commercial room, and
strongly flavoured with tobacco-smoke.  I think it was over the
kitchen, because a warm greasy smell appeared to come up through
the chinks in the floor, and there was a flabby perspiration on the
walls.  I know it was near the bar, on account of the smell of
spirits and jingling of glasses.  Here, recumbent on a small sofa,
underneath a picture of a race-horse, with her head close to the
fire, and her feet pushing the mustard off the dumb-waiter at the
other end of the room, was Mrs. Micawber, to whom Mr. Micawber
entered first, saying, 'My dear, allow me to introduce to you a
pupil of Doctor Strong's.'

I noticed, by the by, that although Mr. Micawber was just as much
confused as ever about my age and standing, he always remembered,
as a genteel thing, that I was a pupil of Doctor Strong's.

Mrs. Micawber was amazed, but very glad to see me.  I was very glad
to see her too, and, after an affectionate greeting on both sides,
sat down on the small sofa near her.

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber, 'if you will mention to Copperfield
what our present position is, which I have no doubt he will like to
know, I will go and look at the paper the while, and see whether
anything turns up among the advertisements.'

'I thought you were at Plymouth, ma'am,' I said to Mrs. Micawber,
as he went out.

'My dear Master Copperfield,' she replied, 'we went to Plymouth.'

'To be on the spot,' I hinted.

'Just so,' said Mrs. Micawber.  'To be on the spot.  But, the truth
is, talent is not wanted in the Custom House.  The local influence
of my family was quite unavailing to obtain any employment in that
department, for a man of Mr. Micawber's abilities.  They would
rather NOT have a man of Mr. Micawber's abilities.  He would only
show the deficiency of the others.  Apart from which,' said Mrs.
Micawber, 'I will not disguise from you, my dear Master
Copperfield, that when that branch of my family which is settled in
Plymouth, became aware that Mr. Micawber was accompanied by myself,
and by little Wilkins and his sister, and by the twins, they did
not receive him with that ardour which he might have expected,
being so newly released from captivity.  In fact,' said Mrs.
Micawber, lowering her voice, - 'this is between ourselves - our
reception was cool.'

'Dear me!' I said.

'Yes,' said Mrs. Micawber.  'It is truly painful to contemplate
mankind in such an aspect, Master Copperfield, but our reception
was, decidedly, cool.  There is no doubt about it.  In fact, that
branch of my family which is settled in Plymouth became quite
personal to Mr. Micawber, before we had been there a week.'

I said, and thought, that they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

'Still, so it was,' continued Mrs. Micawber.  'Under such
circumstances, what could a man of Mr. Micawber's spirit do?  But
one obvious course was left.  To borrow, of that branch of my
family, the money to return to London, and to return at any
sacrifice.'

'Then you all came back again, ma'am?' I said.

'We all came back again,' replied Mrs. Micawber.  'Since then, I
have consulted other branches of my family on the course which it
is most expedient for Mr. Micawber to take - for I maintain that he
must take some course, Master Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber,
argumentatively.  'It is clear that a family of six, not including
a domestic, cannot live upon air.'

'Certainly, ma'am,' said I.

'The opinion of those other branches of my family,' pursued Mrs.
Micawber, 'is, that Mr. Micawber should immediately turn his
attention to coals.'

'To what, ma'am?'

'To coals,' said Mrs. Micawber.  'To the coal trade.  Mr. Micawber
was induced to think, on inquiry, that there might be an opening
for a man of his talent in the Medway Coal Trade.  Then, as Mr.
Micawber very properly said, the first step to be taken clearly
was, to come and see the Medway.  Which we came and saw.  I say
"we", Master Copperfield; for I never will,' said Mrs. Micawber
with emotion, 'I never will desert Mr. Micawber.'

I murmured my admiration and approbation.

'We came,' repeated Mrs. Micawber, 'and saw the Medway.  My opinion
of the coal trade on that river is, that it may require talent, but
that it certainly requires capital.  Talent, Mr. Micawber has;
capital, Mr. Micawber has not.  We saw, I think, the greater part
of the Medway; and that is my individual conclusion.  Being so near
here, Mr. Micawber was of opinion that it would be rash not to come
on, and see the Cathedral.  Firstly, on account of its being so
well worth seeing, and our never having seen it; and secondly, on
account of the great probability of something turning up in a
cathedral town.  We have been here,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'three
days.  Nothing has, as yet, turned up; and it may not surprise you,
my dear Master Copperfield, so much as it would a stranger, to know
that we are at present waiting for a remittance from London, to
discharge our pecuniary obligations at this hotel.  Until the
arrival of that remittance,' said Mrs. Micawber with much feeling,
'I am cut off from my home (I allude to lodgings in Pentonville),
from my boy and girl, and from my twins.'

I felt the utmost sympathy for Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in this
anxious extremity, and said as much to Mr. Micawber, who now
returned: adding that I only wished I had money enough, to lend
them the amount they needed.  Mr. Micawber's answer expressed the
disturbance of his mind.  He said, shaking hands with me,
'Copperfield, you are a true friend; but when the worst comes to
the worst, no man is without a friend who is possessed of shaving
materials.'  At this dreadful hint Mrs. Micawber threw her arms
round Mr. Micawber's neck and entreated him to be calm.  He wept;
but so far recovered, almost immediately, as to ring the bell for
the waiter, and bespeak a hot kidney pudding and a plate of shrimps
for breakfast in the morning.

When I took my leave of them, they both pressed me so much to come
and dine before they went away, that I could not refuse.  But, as
I knew I could not come next day, when I should have a good deal to
prepare in the evening, Mr. Micawber arranged that he would call at
Doctor Strong's in the course of the morning (having a presentiment
that the remittance would arrive by that post), and propose the day
after, if it would suit me better.  Accordingly I was called out of
school next forenoon, and found Mr. Micawber in the parlour; who
had called to say that the dinner would take place as proposed. 
When I asked him if the remittance had come, he pressed my hand and
departed.

As I was looking out of window that same evening, it surprised me,
and made me rather uneasy, to see Mr. Micawber and Uriah Heep walk
past, arm in arm: Uriah humbly sensible of the honour that was done
him, and Mr. Micawber taking a bland delight in extending his
patronage to Uriah.  But I was still more surprised, when I went to
the little hotel next day at the appointed dinner-hour, which was
four o'clock, to find, from what Mr. Micawber said, that he had
gone home with Uriah, and had drunk brandy-and-water at Mrs.
Heep's.

'And I'll tell you what, my dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber,
'your friend Heep is a young fellow who might be attorney-general. 
If I had known that young man, at the period when my difficulties
came to a crisis, all I can say is, that I believe my creditors
would have been a great deal better managed than they were.'

I hardly understood how this could have been, seeing that Mr.
Micawber had paid them nothing at all as it was; but I did not like
to ask.  Neither did I like to say, that I hoped he had not been
too communicative to Uriah; or to inquire if they had talked much
about me.  I was afraid of hurting Mr. Micawber's feelings, or, at
all events, Mrs. Micawber's, she being very sensitive; but I was
uncomfortable about it, too, and often thought about it afterwards.

We had a beautiful little dinner.  Quite an elegant dish of fish;
the kidney-end of a loin of veal, roasted; fried sausage-meat; a
partridge, and a pudding.  There was wine, and there was strong
ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made us a bowl of hot punch
with her own hands.

Mr. Micawber was uncommonly convivial.  I never saw him such good
company.  He made his face shine with the punch, so that it looked
as if it had been varnished all over.  He got cheerfully
sentimental about the town, and proposed success to it; observing
that Mrs. Micawber and himself had been made extremely snug and
comfortable there and that he never should forget the agreeable
hours they had passed in Canterbury.  He proposed me afterwards;
and he, and Mrs. Micawber, and I, took a review of our past
acquaintance, in the course of which we sold the property all over
again.  Then I proposed Mrs. Micawber: or, at least, said,
modestly, 'If you'll allow me, Mrs. Micawber, I shall now have the
pleasure of drinking your health, ma'am.'  On which Mr. Micawber
delivered an eulogium on Mrs. Micawber's character, and said she
had ever been his guide, philosopher, and friend, and that he would
recommend me, when I came to a marrying time of life, to marry such
another woman, if such another woman could be found.

As the punch disappeared, Mr. Micawber became still more friendly
and convivial.  Mrs. Micawber's spirits becoming elevated, too, we
sang 'Auld Lang Syne'.  When we came to 'Here's a hand, my trusty
frere', we all joined hands round the table; and when we declared
we would 'take a right gude Willie Waught', and hadn't the least
idea what it meant, we were really affected.

In a word, I never saw anybody so thoroughly jovial as Mr. Micawber
was, down to the very last moment of the evening, when I took a
hearty farewell of himself and his amiable wife.  Consequently, I
was not prepared, at seven o'clock next morning, to receive the
following communication, dated half past nine in the evening; a
quarter of an hour after I had left him: -

'My DEAR YOUNG FRIEND,

'The die is cast - all is over.  Hiding the ravages of care with a
sickly mask of mirth, I have not informed you, this evening, that
there is no hope of the remittance!  Under these circumstances,
alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and
humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability
contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand, made
payable fourteen days after date, at my residence, Pentonville,
London.  When it becomes due, it will not be taken up.  The result
is destruction.  The bolt is impending, and the tree must fall.

'Let the wretched man who now addresses you, my dear Copperfield,
be a beacon to you through life.  He writes with that intention,
and in that hope.  If he could think himself of so much use, one
gleam of day might, by possibility, penetrate into the cheerless
dungeon of his remaining existence - though his longevity is, at
present (to say the least of it), extremely problematical.

'This is the last communication, my dear Copperfield, you will ever
receive

                         'From

                              'The

                                   'Beggared Outcast,

                                        'WILKINS MICAWBER.'


I was so shocked by the contents of this heart-rending letter, that
I ran off directly towards the little hotel with the intention of
taking it on my way to Doctor Strong's, and trying to soothe Mr.
Micawber with a word of comfort.  But, half-way there, I met the
London coach with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber up behind; Mr. Micawber,
the very picture of tranquil enjoyment, smiling at Mrs. Micawber's
conversation, eating walnuts out of a paper bag, with a bottle
sticking out of his breast pocket.  As they did not see me, I
thought it best, all things considered, not to see them.  So, with
a great weight taken off my mind, I turned into a by-street that
was the nearest way to school, and felt, upon the whole, relieved
that they were gone; though I still liked them very much,
nevertheless.



CHAPTER 18
A RETROSPECT


My school-days!  The silent gliding on of my existence - the
unseen, unfelt progress of my life - from childhood up to youth!
Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry
channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along
its course, by which I can remember how it ran.

A moment, and I occupy my place in the Cathedral, where we all went
together, every Sunday morning, assembling first at school for that
purpose.  The earthy smell, the sunless air, the sensation of the
world being shut out, the resounding of the organ through the black
and white arched galleries and aisles, are wings that take me back,
and hold me hovering above those days, in a half-sleeping and
half-waking dream.

I am not the last boy in the school.  I have risen in a few months,
over several heads.  But the first boy seems to me a mighty
creature, dwelling afar off, whose giddy height is unattainable. 
Agnes says 'No,' but I say 'Yes,' and tell her that she little
thinks what stores of knowledge have been mastered by the wonderful
Being, at whose place she thinks I, even I, weak aspirant, may
arrive in time.  He is not my private friend and public patron, as
Steerforth was, but I hold him in a reverential respect.  I chiefly
wonder what he'll be, when he leaves Doctor Strong's, and what
mankind will do to maintain any place against him.

But who is this that breaks upon me?  This is Miss Shepherd, whom
I love.

Miss Shepherd is a boarder at the Misses Nettingalls'
establishment.  I adore Miss Shepherd.  She is a little girl, in a
spencer, with a round face and curly flaxen hair.  The Misses
Nettingalls' young ladies come to the Cathedral too.  I cannot look
upon my book, for I must look upon Miss Shepherd.  When the
choristers chaunt, I hear Miss Shepherd.  In the service I mentally
insert Miss Shepherd's name - I put her in among the Royal Family. 
At home, in my own room, I am sometimes moved to cry out, 'Oh, Miss
Shepherd!' in a transport of love.

For some time, I am doubtful of Miss Shepherd's feelings, but, at
length, Fate being propitious, we meet at the dancing-school.  I
have Miss Shepherd for my partner.  I touch Miss Shepherd's glove,
and feel a thrill go up the right arm of my jacket, and come out at
my hair.  I say nothing to Miss Shepherd, but we understand each
other.  Miss Shepherd and myself live but to be united.

Why do I secretly give Miss Shepherd twelve Brazil nuts for a
present, I wonder?  They are not expressive of affection, they are
difficult to pack into a parcel of any regular shape, they are hard
to crack, even in room doors, and they are oily when cracked; yet
I feel that they are appropriate to Miss Shepherd.  Soft, seedy
biscuits, also, I bestow upon Miss Shepherd; and oranges
innumerable.  Once, I kiss Miss Shepherd in the cloak-room. 
Ecstasy!  What are my agony and indignation next day, when I hear
a flying rumour that the Misses Nettingall have stood Miss Shepherd
in the stocks for turning in her toes!

Miss Shepherd being the one pervading theme and vision of my life,
how do I ever come to break with her?  I can't conceive.  And yet
a coolness grows between Miss Shepherd and myself.  Whispers reach
me of Miss Shepherd having said she wished I wouldn't stare so, and
having avowed a preference for Master Jones - for Jones! a boy of
no merit whatever!  The gulf between me and Miss Shepherd widens. 
At last, one day, I meet the Misses Nettingalls' establishment out
walking.  Miss Shepherd makes a face as she goes by, and laughs to
her companion.  All is over.  The devotion of a life - it seems a
life, it is all the same - is at an end; Miss Shepherd comes out of
the morning service, and the Royal Family know her no more.

I am higher in the school, and no one breaks my peace.  I am not at
all polite, now, to the Misses Nettingalls' young ladies, and
shouldn't dote on any of them, if they were twice as many and
twenty times as beautiful.  I think the dancing-school a tiresome
affair, and wonder why the girls can't dance by themselves and
leave us alone.  I am growing great in Latin verses, and neglect
the laces of my boots.  Doctor Strong refers to me in public as a
promising young scholar.  Mr. Dick is wild with joy, and my aunt
remits me a guinea by the next post.

The shade of a young butcher rises, like the apparition of an armed
head in Macbeth.  Who is this young butcher?  He is the terror of
the youth of Canterbury.  There is a vague belief abroad, that the
beef suet with which he anoints his hair gives him unnatural
strength, and that he is a match for a man.  He is a broad-faced,
bull-necked, young butcher, with rough red cheeks, an
ill-conditioned mind, and an injurious tongue.  His main use of
this tongue, is, to disparage Doctor Strong's young gentlemen.  He
says, publicly, that if they want anything he'll give it 'em.  He
names individuals among them (myself included), whom he could
undertake to settle with one hand, and the other tied behind him. 
He waylays the smaller boys to punch their unprotected heads, and
calls challenges after me in the open streets.  For these
sufficient reasons I resolve to fight the butcher.

It is a summer evening, down in a green hollow, at the corner of a
wall.  I meet the butcher by appointment.  I am attended by a
select body of our boys; the butcher, by two other butchers, a
young publican, and a sweep.  The preliminaries are adjusted, and
the butcher and myself stand face to face.  In a moment the butcher
lights ten thousand candles out of my left eyebrow.  In another
moment, I don't know where the wall is, or where I am, or where
anybody is.  I hardly know which is myself and which the butcher,
we are always in such a tangle and tussle, knocking about upon the
trodden grass.  Sometimes I see the butcher, bloody but confident;
sometimes I see nothing, and sit gasping on my second's knee;
sometimes I go in at the butcher madly, and cut my knuckles open
against his face, without appearing to discompose him at all.  At
last I awake, very queer about the head, as from a giddy sleep, and
see the butcher walking off, congratulated by the two other
butchers and the sweep and publican, and putting on his coat as he
goes; from which I augur, justly, that the victory is his.

I am taken home in a sad plight, and I have beef-steaks put to my
eyes, and am rubbed with vinegar and brandy, and find a great puffy
place bursting out on my upper lip, which swells immoderately.  For
three or four days I remain at home, a very ill-looking subject,
with a green shade over my eyes; and I should be very dull, but
that Agnes is a sister to me, and condoles with me, and reads to
me, and makes the time light and happy.  Agnes has my confidence
completely, always; I tell her all about the butcher, and the
wrongs he has heaped upon me; she thinks I couldn't have done
otherwise than fight the butcher, while she shrinks and trembles at
my having fought him.

Time has stolen on unobserved, for Adams is not the head-boy in the
days that are come now, nor has he been this many and many a day. 
Adams has left the school so long, that when he comes back, on a
visit to Doctor Strong, there are not many there, besides myself,
who know him.  Adams is going to be called to the bar almost
directly, and is to be an advocate, and to wear a wig.  I am
surprised to find him a meeker man than I had thought, and less
imposing in appearance.  He has not staggered the world yet,
either; for it goes on (as well as I can make out) pretty much the
same as if he had never joined it.

A blank, through which the warriors of poetry and history march on
in stately hosts that seem to have no end - and what comes next! 
I am the head-boy, now!  I look down on the line of boys below me,
with a condescending interest in such of them as bring to my mind
the boy I was myself, when I first came there.  That little fellow
seems to be no part of me; I remember him as something left behind
upon the road of life - as something I have passed, rather than
have actually been - and almost think of him as of someone else.

And the little girl I saw on that first day at Mr. Wickfield's,
where is she?  Gone also.  In her stead, the perfect likeness of
the picture, a child likeness no more, moves about the house; and
Agnes - my sweet sister, as I call her in my thoughts, my
counsellor and friend, the better angel of the lives of all who
come within her calm, good, self-denying influence - is quite a
woman.

What other changes have come upon me, besides the changes in my
growth and looks, and in the knowledge I have garnered all this
while?  I wear a gold watch and chain, a ring upon my little
finger, and a long-tailed coat; and I use a great deal of bear's
grease - which, taken in conjunction with the ring, looks bad.  Am
I in love again?  I am.  I worship the eldest Miss Larkins.

The eldest Miss Larkins is not a little girl.  She is a tall, dark,
black-eyed, fine figure of a woman.  The eldest Miss Larkins is not
a chicken; for the youngest Miss Larkins is not that, and the
eldest must be three or four years older.  Perhaps the eldest Miss
Larkins may be about thirty.  My passion for her is beyond all
bounds.

The eldest Miss Larkins knows officers.  It is an awful thing to
bear.  I see them speaking to her in the street.  I see them cross
the way to meet her, when her bonnet (she has a bright taste in
bonnets) is seen coming down the pavement, accompanied by her
sister's bonnet.  She laughs and talks, and seems to like it.  I
spend a good deal of my own spare time in walking up and down to
meet her.  If I can bow to her once in the day (I know her to bow
to, knowing Mr. Larkins), I am happier.  I deserve a bow now and
then.  The raging agonies I suffer on the night of the Race Ball,
where I know the eldest Miss Larkins will be dancing with the
military, ought to have some compensation, if there be even-handed
justice in the world.

My passion takes away my appetite, and makes me wear my newest silk
neckerchief continually.  I have no relief but in putting on my
best clothes, and having my boots cleaned over and over again.  I
seem, then, to be worthier of the eldest Miss Larkins.  Everything
that belongs to her, or is connected with her, is precious to me. 
Mr. Larkins (a gruff old gentleman with a double chin, and one of
his eyes immovable in his head) is fraught with interest to me. 
When I can't meet his daughter, I go where I am likely to meet him. 
To say 'How do you do, Mr. Larkins?  Are the young ladies and all
the family quite well?' seems so pointed, that I blush.

I think continually about my age.  Say I am seventeen, and say that
seventeen is young for the eldest Miss Larkins, what of that? 
Besides, I shall be one-and-twenty in no time almost.  I regularly
take walks outside Mr. Larkins's house in the evening, though it
cuts me to the heart to see the officers go in, or to hear them up
in the drawing-room, where the eldest Miss Larkins plays the harp. 
I even walk, on two or three occasions, in a sickly, spoony manner,
round and round the house after the family are gone to bed,
wondering which is the eldest Miss Larkins's chamber (and pitching,
I dare say now, on Mr. Larkins's instead); wishing that a fire
would burst out; that the assembled crowd would stand appalled;
that I, dashing through them with a ladder, might rear it against
her window, save her in my arms, go back for something she had left
behind, and perish in the flames.  For I am generally disinterested
in my love, and think I could be content to make a figure before
Miss Larkins, and expire.

Generally, but not always.  Sometimes brighter visions rise before
me.  When I dress (the occupation of two hours), for a great ball
given at the Larkins's (the anticipation of three weeks), I indulge
my fancy with pleasing images.  I picture myself taking courage to
make a declaration to Miss Larkins.  I picture Miss Larkins sinking
her head upon my shoulder, and saying, 'Oh, Mr. Copperfield, can I
believe my ears!' I picture Mr. Larkins waiting on me next morning,
and saying, 'My dear Copperfield, my daughter has told me all. 
Youth is no objection.  Here are twenty thousand pounds.  Be
happy!' I picture my aunt relenting, and blessing us; and Mr. Dick
and Doctor Strong being present at the marriage ceremony.  I am a
sensible fellow, I believe - I believe, on looking back, I mean -
and modest I am sure; but all this goes on notwithstanding.
I repair to the enchanted house, where there are lights,
chattering, music, flowers, officers (I am sorry to see), and the
eldest Miss Larkins, a blaze of beauty.  She is dressed in blue,
with blue flowers in her hair - forget-me-nots - as if SHE had any
need to wear forget-me-nots.  It is the first really grown-up party
that I have ever been invited to, and I am a little uncomfortable;
for I appear not to belong to anybody, and nobody appears to have
anything to say to me, except Mr. Larkins, who asks me how my
schoolfellows are, which he needn't do, as I have not come there to
be insulted.

But after I have stood in the doorway for some time, and feasted my
eyes upon the goddess of my heart, she approaches me - she, the
eldest Miss Larkins! - and asks me pleasantly, if I dance?

I stammer, with a bow, 'With you, Miss Larkins.'

'With no one else?' inquires Miss Larkins.

'I should have no pleasure in dancing with anyone else.'

Miss Larkins laughs and blushes (or I think she blushes), and says,
'Next time but one, I shall be very glad.'

The time arrives.  'It is a waltz, I think,' Miss Larkins
doubtfully observes, when I present myself.  'Do you waltz?  If
not, Captain Bailey -'

But I do waltz (pretty well, too, as it happens), and I take Miss
Larkins out.  I take her sternly from the side of Captain Bailey. 
He is wretched, I have no doubt; but he is nothing to me.  I have
been wretched, too.  I waltz with the eldest Miss Larkins!  I don't
know where, among whom, or how long.  I only know that I swim about
in space, with a blue angel, in a state of blissful delirium, until
I find myself alone with her in a little room, resting on a sofa. 
She admires a flower (pink camellia japonica, price half-a-crown),
in my button-hole.  I give it her, and say:

'I ask an inestimable price for it, Miss Larkins.'

'Indeed!  What is that?' returns Miss Larkins.

'A flower of yours, that I may treasure it as a miser does gold.'

'You're a bold boy,' says Miss Larkins.  'There.'

She gives it me, not displeased; and I put it to my lips, and then
into my breast.  Miss Larkins, laughing, draws her hand through my
arm, and says, 'Now take me back to Captain Bailey.'

I am lost in the recollection of this delicious interview, and the
waltz, when she comes to me again, with a plain elderly gentleman
who has been playing whist all night, upon her arm, and says:

'Oh! here is my bold friend!  Mr. Chestle wants to know you, Mr.
Copperfield.'

I feel at once that he is a friend of the family, and am much
gratified.

'I admire your taste, sir,' says Mr. Chestle.  'It does you credit. 
I suppose you don't take much interest in hops; but I am a pretty
large grower myself; and if you ever like to come over to our
neighbourhood - neighbourhood of Ashford - and take a run about our
place, -we shall be glad for you to stop as long as you like.'

I thank Mr. Chestle warmly, and shake hands.  I think I am in a
happy dream.  I waltz with the eldest Miss Larkins once again.  She
says I waltz so well!  I go home in a state of unspeakable bliss,
and waltz in imagination, all night long, with my arm round the
blue waist of my dear divinity.  For some days afterwards, I am
lost in rapturous reflections; but I neither see her in the street,
nor when I call.  I am imperfectly consoled for this disappointment
by the sacred pledge, the perished flower.

'Trotwood,' says Agnes, one day after dinner.  'Who do you think is
going to be married tomorrow?  Someone you admire.'

'Not you, I suppose, Agnes?'

'Not me!' raising her cheerful face from the music she is copying. 
'Do you hear him, Papa? - The eldest Miss Larkins.'

'To - to Captain Bailey?' I have just enough power to ask.

'No; to no Captain.  To Mr. Chestle, a hop-grower.'

I am terribly dejected for about a week or two.  I take off my
ring, I wear my worst clothes, I use no bear's grease, and I
frequently lament over the late Miss Larkins's faded flower. 
Being, by that time, rather tired of this kind of life, and having
received new provocation from the butcher, I throw the flower away,
go out with the butcher, and gloriously defeat him.

This, and the resumption of my ring, as well as of the bear's
grease in moderation, are the last marks I can discern, now, in my
progress to seventeen.



CHAPTER 19
I LOOK ABOUT ME, AND MAKE A DISCOVERY


I am doubtful whether I was at heart glad or sorry, when my
school-days drew to an end, and the time came for my leaving Doctor
Strong's.  I had been very happy there, I had a great attachment
for the Doctor, and I was eminent and distinguished in that little
world.  For these reasons I was sorry to go; but for other reasons,
unsubstantial enough, I was glad.  Misty ideas of being a young man
at my own disposal, of the importance attaching to a young man at
his own disposal, of the wonderful things to be seen and done by
that magnificent animal, and the wonderful effects he could not
fail to make upon society, lured me away.  So powerful were these
visionary considerations in my boyish mind, that I seem, according
to my present way of thinking, to have left school without natural
regret.  The separation has not made the impression on me, that
other separations have.  I try in vain to recall how I felt about
it, and what its circumstances were; but it is not momentous in my
recollection.  I suppose the opening prospect confused me.  I know
that my juvenile experiences went for little or nothing then; and
that life was more like a great fairy story, which I was just about
to begin to read, than anything else.

MY aunt and I had held many grave deliberations on the calling to
which I should be devoted.  For a year or more I had endeavoured to
find a satisfactory answer to her often-repeated question, 'What I
would like to be?'  But I had no particular liking, that I could
discover, for anything.  If I could have been inspired with a
knowledge of the science of navigation, taken the command of a
fast-sailing expedition, and gone round the world on a triumphant
voyage of discovery, I think I might have considered myself
completely suited.  But, in the absence of any such miraculous
provision, my desire was to apply myself to some pursuit that would
not lie too heavily upon her purse; and to do my duty in it,
whatever it might be.

Mr. Dick had regularly assisted at our councils, with a meditative
and sage demeanour.  He never made a suggestion but once; and on
that occasion (I don't know what put it in his head), he suddenly
proposed that I should be 'a Brazier'.  My aunt received this
proposal so very ungraciously, that he never ventured on a second;
but ever afterwards confined himself to looking watchfully at her
for her suggestions, and rattling his money.

'Trot, I tell you what, my dear,' said my aunt, one morning in the
Christmas season when I left school: 'as this knotty point is still
unsettled, and as we must not make a mistake in our decision if we
can help it, I think we had better take a little breathing-time. 
In the meanwhile, you must try to look at it from a new point of
view, and not as a schoolboy.'

'I will, aunt.'

'It has occurred to me,' pursued my aunt, 'that a little change,
and a glimpse of life out of doors, may be useful in helping you to
know your own mind, and form a cooler judgement.  Suppose you were
to go down into the old part of the country again, for instance,
and see that - that out-of-the-way woman with the savagest of
names,' said my aunt, rubbing her nose, for she could never
thoroughly forgive Peggotty for being so called.

'Of all things in the world, aunt, I should like it best!'

'Well,' said my aunt, 'that's lucky, for I should like it too.  But
it's natural and rational that you should like it.  And I am very
well persuaded that whatever you do, Trot, will always be natural
and rational.'

'I hope so, aunt.'

'Your sister, Betsey Trotwood,' said my aunt, 'would have been as
natural and rational a girl as ever breathed.  You'll be worthy of
her, won't you?'

'I hope I shall be worthy of YOU, aunt.  That will be enough for
me.'

'It's a mercy that poor dear baby of a mother of yours didn't
live,' said my aunt, looking at me approvingly, 'or she'd have been
so vain of her boy by this time, that her soft little head would
have been completely turned, if there was anything of it left to
turn.'  (My aunt always excused any weakness of her own in my
behalf, by transferring it in this way to my poor mother.) 'Bless
me, Trotwood, how you do remind me of her!'

'Pleasantly, I hope, aunt?' said I.

'He's as like her, Dick,' said my aunt, emphatically, 'he's as like
her, as she was that afternoon before she began to fret - bless my
heart, he's as like her, as he can look at me out of his two eyes!'

'Is he indeed?' said Mr. Dick.

'And he's like David, too,' said my aunt, decisively.

'He is very like David!' said Mr. Dick.

'But what I want you to be, Trot,' resumed my aunt, '- I don't mean
physically, but morally; you are very well physically - is, a firm
fellow.  A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own.  With
resolution,' said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clenching her
hand.  'With determination.  With character, Trot - with strength
of character that is not to be influenced, except on good reason,
by anybody, or by anything.  That's what I want you to be.  That's
what your father and mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and
been the better for it.'

I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.

'That you may begin, in a small way, to have a reliance upon
yourself, and to act for yourself,' said my aunt, 'I shall send you
upon your trip, alone.  I did think, once, of Mr. Dick's going with
you; but, on second thoughts, I shall keep him to take care of me.'

Mr. Dick, for a moment, looked a little disappointed; until the
honour and dignity of having to take care of the most wonderful
woman in the world, restored the sunshine to his face.

'Besides,' said my aunt, 'there's the Memorial -'

'Oh, certainly,' said Mr. Dick, in a hurry, 'I intend, Trotwood, to
get that done immediately - it really must be done immediately! 
And then it will go in, you know - and then -' said Mr. Dick, after
checking himself, and pausing a long time, 'there'll be a pretty
kettle of fish!'

In pursuance of my aunt's kind scheme, I was shortly afterwards
fitted out with a handsome purse of money, and a portmanteau, and
tenderly dismissed upon my expedition.  At parting, my aunt gave me
some good advice, and a good many kisses; and said that as her
object was that I should look about me, and should think a little,
she would recommend me to stay a few days in London, if I liked it,
either on my way down into Suffolk, or in coming back.  In a word,
I was at liberty to do what I would, for three weeks or a month;
and no other conditions were imposed upon my freedom than the
before-mentioned thinking and looking about me, and a pledge to
write three times a week and faithfully report myself.

I went to Canterbury first, that I might take leave of Agnes and
Mr. Wickfield (my old room in whose house I had not yet
relinquished), and also of the good Doctor.  Agnes was very glad to
see me, and told me that the house had not been like itself since
I had left it.

'I am sure I am not like myself when I am away,' said I.  'I seem
to want my right hand, when I miss you.  Though that's not saying
much; for there's no head in my right hand, and no heart.  Everyone
who knows you, consults with you, and is guided by you, Agnes.'

'Everyone who knows me, spoils me, I believe,' she answered,
smiling.

'No.  it's because you are like no one else.  You are so good, and
so sweet-tempered.  You have such a gentle nature, and you are
always right.'

'You talk,' said Agnes, breaking into a pleasant laugh, as she sat
at work, 'as if I were the late Miss Larkins.'

'Come!  It's not fair to abuse my confidence,' I answered,
reddening at the recollection of my blue enslaver.  'But I shall
confide in you, just the same, Agnes.  I can never grow out of
that.  Whenever I fall into trouble, or fall in love, I shall
always tell you, if you'll let me - even when I come to fall in
love in earnest.'

'Why, you have always been in earnest!' said Agnes, laughing again.

'Oh! that was as a child, or a schoolboy,' said I, laughing in my
turn, not without being a little shame-faced.  'Times are altering
now, and I suppose I shall be in a terrible state of earnestness
one day or other.  My wonder is, that you are not in earnest
yourself, by this time, Agnes.'

Agnes laughed again, and shook her head.

'Oh, I know you are not!' said I, 'because if you had been you
would have told me.  Or at least' - for I saw a faint blush in her
face, 'you would have let me find it out for myself.  But there is
no one that I know of, who deserves to love you, Agnes.  Someone of
a nobler character, and more worthy altogether than anyone I have
ever seen here, must rise up, before I give my consent.  In the
time to come, I shall have a wary eye on all admirers; and shall
exact a great deal from the successful one, I assure you.'

We had gone on, so far, in a mixture of confidential jest and
earnest, that had long grown naturally out of our familiar
relations, begun as mere children.  But Agnes, now suddenly lifting
up her eyes to mine, and speaking in a different manner, said:

'Trotwood, there is something that I want to ask you, and that I
may not have another opportunity of asking for a long time, perhaps
- something I would ask, I think, of no one else.  Have you
observed any gradual alteration in Papa?'

I had observed it, and had often wondered whether she had too.  I
must have shown as much, now, in my face; for her eyes were in a
moment cast down, and I saw tears in them.

'Tell me what it is,' she said, in a low voice.

'I think - shall I be quite plain, Agnes, liking him so much?'

'Yes,' she said.

'I think he does himself no good by the habit that has increased
upon him since I first came here.  He is often very nervous - or I
fancy so.'

'It is not fancy,' said Agnes, shaking her head.

'His hand trembles, his speech is not plain, and his eyes look
wild.  I have remarked that at those times, and when he is least
like himself, he is most certain to be wanted on some business.'

'By Uriah,' said Agnes.

'Yes; and the sense of being unfit for it, or of not having
understood it, or of having shown his condition in spite of
himself, seems to make him so uneasy, that next day he is worse,
and next day worse, and so he becomes jaded and haggard.  Do not be
alarmed by what I say, Agnes, but in this state I saw him, only the
other evening, lay down his head upon his desk, and shed tears like
a child.'

Her hand passed softly before my lips while I was yet speaking, and
in a moment she had met her father at the door of the room, and was
hanging on his shoulder.  The expression of her face, as they both
looked towards me, I felt to be very touching.  There was such deep
fondness for him, and gratitude to him for all his love and care,
in her beautiful look; and there was such a fervent appeal to me to
deal tenderly by him, even in my inmost thoughts, and to let no
harsh construction find any place against him; she was, at once, so
proud of him and devoted to him, yet so compassionate and sorry,
and so reliant upon me to be so, too; that nothing she could have
said would have expressed more to me, or moved me more.

We were to drink tea at the Doctor's.  We went there at the usual
hour; and round the study fireside found the Doctor, and his young
wife, and her mother.  The Doctor, who made as much of my going
away as if I were going to China, received me as an honoured guest;
and called for a log of wood to be thrown on the fire, that he
might see the face of his old pupil reddening in the blaze.

'I shall not see many more new faces in Trotwood's stead,
Wickfield,' said the Doctor, warming his hands; 'I am getting lazy,
and want ease.  I shall relinquish all my young people in another
six months, and lead a quieter life.'

'You have said so, any time these ten years, Doctor,' Mr. Wickfield
answered.

'But now I mean to do it,' returned the Doctor.  'My first master
will succeed me - I am in earnest at last - so you'll soon have to
arrange our contracts, and to bind us firmly to them, like a couple
of knaves.'

'And to take care,' said Mr. Wickfield, 'that you're not imposed
on, eh?  As you certainly would be, in any contract you should make
for yourself.  Well!  I am ready.  There are worse tasks than that,
in my calling.'

'I shall have nothing to think of then,' said the Doctor, with a
smile, 'but my Dictionary; and this other contract-bargain -
Annie.'

As Mr. Wickfield glanced towards her, sitting at the tea table by
Agnes, she seemed to me to avoid his look with such unwonted
hesitation and timidity, that his attention became fixed upon her,
as if something were suggested to his thoughts.

'There is a post come in from India, I observe,' he said, after a
short silence.

'By the by! and letters from Mr. Jack Maldon!' said the Doctor.

'Indeed!'
'Poor dear Jack!' said Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head.  'That
trying climate! - like living, they tell me, on a sand-heap,
underneath a burning-glass!  He looked strong, but he wasn't.  My
dear Doctor, it was his spirit, not his constitution, that he
ventured on so boldly.  Annie, my dear, I am sure you must
perfectly recollect that your cousin never was strong - not what
can be called ROBUST, you know,' said Mrs. Markleham, with
emphasis, and looking round upon us generally, '- from the time
when my daughter and himself were children together, and walking
about, arm-in-arm, the livelong day.'

Annie, thus addressed, made no reply.

'Do I gather from what you say, ma'am, that Mr. Maldon is ill?'
asked Mr.  Wickfield.

'Ill!' replied the Old Soldier.  'My dear sir, he's all sorts of
things.'

'Except well?' said Mr. Wickfield.

'Except well, indeed!' said the Old Soldier.  'He has had dreadful
strokes of the sun, no doubt, and jungle fevers and agues, and
every kind of thing you can mention.  As to his liver,' said the
Old Soldier resignedly, 'that, of course, he gave up altogether,
when he first went out!'

'Does he say all this?' asked Mr. Wickfield.

'Say?  My dear sir,' returned Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head and
her fan, 'you little know my poor Jack Maldon when you ask that
question.  Say?  Not he.  You might drag him at the heels of four
wild horses first.'

'Mama!' said Mrs. Strong.

'Annie, my dear,' returned her mother, 'once for all, I must really
beg that you will not interfere with me, unless it is to confirm
what I say.  You know as well as I do that your cousin Maldon would
be dragged at the heels of any number of wild horses - why should
I confine myself to four!  I WON'T confine myself to four - eight,
sixteen, two-and-thirty, rather than say anything calculated to
overturn the Doctor's plans.'

'Wickfield's plans,' said the Doctor, stroking his face, and
looking penitently at his adviser.  'That is to say, our joint
plans for him.  I said myself, abroad or at home.'

'And I said' added Mr. Wickfield gravely, 'abroad.  I was the means
of sending him abroad.  It's my responsibility.'

'Oh!  Responsibility!' said the Old Soldier.  'Everything was done
for the best, my dear Mr. Wickfield; everything was done for the
kindest and best, we know.  But if the dear fellow can't live
there, he can't live there.  And if he can't live there, he'll die
there, sooner than he'll overturn the Doctor's plans.  I know him,'
said the Old Soldier, fanning herself, in a sort of calm prophetic
agony, 'and I know he'll die there, sooner than he'll overturn the
Doctor's plans.'

'Well, well, ma'am,' said the Doctor cheerfully, 'I am not bigoted
to my plans, and I can overturn them myself.  I can substitute some
other plans.  If Mr. Jack Maldon comes home on account of ill
health, he must not be allowed to go back, and we must endeavour to
make some more suitable and fortunate provision for him in this
country.'

Mrs. Markleham was so overcome by this generous speech - which, I
need not say, she had not at all expected or led up to - that she
could only tell the Doctor it was like himself, and go several
times through that operation of kissing the sticks of her fan, and
then tapping his hand with it.  After which she gently chid her
daughter Annie, for not being more demonstrative when such
kindnesses were showered, for her sake, on her old playfellow; and
entertained us with some particulars concerning other deserving
members of her family, whom it was desirable to set on their
deserving legs.

All this time, her daughter Annie never once spoke, or lifted up
her eyes.  All this time, Mr. Wickfield had his glance upon her as
she sat by his own daughter's side.  It appeared to me that he
never thought of being observed by anyone; but was so intent upon
her, and upon his own thoughts in connexion with her, as to be
quite absorbed.  He now asked what Mr. Jack Maldon had actually
written in reference to himself, and to whom he had written?

'Why, here,' said Mrs. Markleham, taking a letter from the
chimney-piece above the Doctor's head, 'the dear fellow says to the
Doctor himself - where is it?  Oh! - "I am sorry to inform you that
my health is suffering severely, and that I fear I may be reduced
to the necessity of returning home for a time, as the only hope of
restoration." That's pretty plain, poor fellow!  His only hope of
restoration!  But Annie's letter is plainer still.  Annie, show me
that letter again.'

'Not now, mama,' she pleaded in a low tone.

'My dear, you absolutely are, on some subjects, one of the most
ridiculous persons in the world,' returned her mother, 'and perhaps
the most unnatural to the claims of your own family.  We never
should have heard of the letter at all, I believe, unless I had
asked for it myself.  Do you call that confidence, my love, towards
Doctor Strong?  I am surprised.  You ought to know better.'

The letter was reluctantly produced; and as I handed it to the old
lady, I saw how the unwilling hand from which I took it, trembled.

'Now let us see,' said Mrs. Markleham, putting her glass to her
eye, 'where the passage is.  "The remembrance of old times, my
dearest Annie" - and so forth - it's not there.  "The amiable old
Proctor" - who's he?  Dear me, Annie, how illegibly your cousin
Maldon writes, and how stupid I am!  "Doctor," of course.  Ah!
amiable indeed!' Here she left off, to kiss her fan again, and
shake it at the Doctor, who was looking at us in a state of placid
satisfaction.  'Now I have found it.  "You may not be surprised to
hear, Annie," - no, to be sure, knowing that he never was really
strong; what did I say just now? - "that I have undergone so much
in this distant place, as to have decided to leave it at all
hazards; on sick leave, if I can; on total resignation, if that is
not to be obtained.  What I have endured, and do endure here, is
insupportable." And but for the promptitude of that best of
creatures,' said Mrs. Markleham, telegraphing the Doctor as before,
and refolding the letter, 'it would be insupportable to me to think
of.'

Mr. Wickfield said not one word, though the old lady looked to him
as if for his commentary on this intelligence; but sat severely
silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground.  Long after the subject
was dismissed, and other topics occupied us, he remained so; seldom
raising his eyes, unless to rest them for a moment, with a
thoughtful frown, upon the Doctor, or his wife, or both.

The Doctor was very fond of music.  Agnes sang with great sweetness
and expression, and so did Mrs. Strong.  They sang together, and
played duets together, and we had quite a little concert.  But I
remarked two things: first, that though Annie soon recovered her
composure, and was quite herself, there was a blank between her and
Mr. Wickfield which separated them wholly from each other;
secondly, that Mr. Wickfield seemed to dislike the intimacy between
her and Agnes, and to watch it with uneasiness.  And now, I must
confess, the recollection of what I had seen on that night when Mr.
Maldon went away, first began to return upon me with a meaning it
had never had, and to trouble me.  The innocent beauty of her face
was not as innocent to me as it had been; I mistrusted the natural
grace and charm of her manner; and when I looked at Agnes by her
side, and thought how good and true Agnes was, suspicions arose
within me that it was an ill-assorted friendship.

She was so happy in it herself, however, and the other was so happy
too, that they made the evening fly away as if it were but an hour. 
It closed in an incident which I well remember.  They were taking
leave of each other, and Agnes was going to embrace her and kiss
her, when Mr. Wickfield stepped between them, as if by accident,
and drew Agnes quickly away.  Then I saw, as though all the
intervening time had been cancelled, and I were still standing in
the doorway on the night of the departure, the expression of that
night in the face of Mrs. Strong, as it confronted his.

I cannot say what an impression this made upon me, or how
impossible I found it, when I thought of her afterwards, to
separate her from this look, and remember her face in its innocent
loveliness again.  It haunted me when I got home.  I seemed to have
left the Doctor's roof with a dark cloud lowering on it.  The
reverence that I had for his grey head, was mingled with
commiseration for his faith in those who were treacherous to him,
and with resentment against those who injured him.  The impending
shadow of a great affliction, and a great disgrace that had no
distinct form in it yet, fell like a stain upon the quiet place
where I had worked and played as a boy, and did it a cruel wrong. 
I had no pleasure in thinking, any more, of the grave old
broad-leaved aloe-trees, which remained shut up in themselves a
hundred years together, and of the trim smooth grass-plot, and the
stone urns, and the Doctor's walk, and the congenial sound of the
Cathedral bell hovering above them all.  It was as if the tranquil
sanctuary of my boyhood had been sacked before my face, and its
peace and honour given to the winds.

But morning brought with it my parting from the old house, which
Agnes had filled with her influence; and that occupied my mind
sufficiently.  I should be there again soon, no doubt; I might
sleep again - perhaps often - in my old room; but the days of my
inhabiting there were gone, and the old time was past.  I was
heavier at heart when I packed up such of my books and clothes as
still remained there to be sent to Dover, than I cared to show to
Uriah Heep; who was so officious to help me, that I uncharitably
thought him mighty glad that I was going.

I got away from Agnes and her father, somehow, with an indifferent
show of being very manly, and took my seat upon the box of the
London coach.  I was so softened and forgiving, going through the
town, that I had half a mind to nod to my old enemy the butcher,
and throw him five shillings to drink.  But he looked such a very
obdurate butcher as he stood scraping the great block in the shop,
and moreover, his appearance was so little improved by the loss of
a front tooth which I had knocked out, that I thought it best to
make no advances.

The main object on my mind, I remember, when we got fairly on the
road, was to appear as old as possible to the coachman, and to
speak extremely gruff.  The latter point I achieved at great
personal inconvenience; but I stuck to it, because I felt it was a
grown-up sort of thing.

'You are going through, sir?' said the coachman.

'Yes, William,' I said, condescendingly (I knew him); 'I am going
to London.  I shall go down into Suffolk afterwards.'

'Shooting, sir?' said the coachman.

He knew as well as I did that it was just as likely, at that time
of year, I was going down there whaling; but I felt complimented,
too.

'I don't know,' I said, pretending to be undecided, 'whether I
shall take a shot or not.'
'Birds is got wery shy, I'm told,' said William.

'So I understand,' said I.

'Is Suffolk your county, sir?' asked William.

'Yes,' I said, with some importance.  'Suffolk's my county.'

'I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there,' said William.

I was not aware of it myself, but I felt it necessary to uphold the
institutions of my county, and to evince a familiarity with them;
so I shook my head, as much as to say, 'I believe you!'

'And the Punches,' said William.  'There's cattle!  A Suffolk
Punch, when he's a good un, is worth his weight in gold.  Did you
ever breed any Suffolk Punches yourself, sir?'

'N-no,' I said, 'not exactly.'

'Here's a gen'lm'n behind me, I'll pound it,' said William, 'as has
bred 'em by wholesale.'

The gentleman spoken of was a gentleman with a very unpromising
squint, and a prominent chin, who had a tall white hat on with a
narrow flat brim, and whose close-fitting drab trousers seemed to
button all the way up outside his legs from his boots to his hips. 
His chin was cocked over the coachman's shoulder, so near to me,
that his breath quite tickled the back of my head; and as I looked
at him, he leered at the leaders with the eye with which he didn't
squint, in a very knowing manner.

'Ain't you?' asked William.

'Ain't I what?' said the gentleman behind.

'Bred them Suffolk Punches by wholesale?'

'I should think so,' said the gentleman.  'There ain't no sort of
orse that I ain't bred, and no sort of dorg.  Orses and dorgs is
some men's fancy.  They're wittles and drink to me - lodging, wife,
and children - reading, writing, and Arithmetic - snuff, tobacker,
and sleep.'

'That ain't a sort of man to see sitting behind a coach-box, is it
though?' said William in my ear, as he handled the reins.

I construed this remark into an indication of a wish that he should
have my place, so I blushingly offered to resign it.

'Well, if you don't mind, sir,' said William, 'I think it would be
more correct.'

I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life. 
When I booked my place at the coach office I had had 'Box Seat'
written against the entry, and had given the book-keeper
half-a-crown.  I was got up in a special great-coat and shawl,
expressly to do honour to that distinguished eminence; had
glorified myself upon it a good deal; and had felt that I was a
credit to the coach.  And here, in the very first stage, I was
supplanted by a shabby man with a squint, who had no other merit
than smelling like a livery-stables, and being able to walk across
me, more like a fly than a human being, while the horses were at a
canter!

A distrust of myself, which has often beset me in life on small
occasions, when it would have been better away, was assuredly not
stopped in its growth by this little incident outside the
Canterbury coach.  It was in vain to take refuge in gruffness of
speech.  I spoke from the pit of my stomach for the rest of the
journey, but I felt completely extinguished, and dreadfully young.

It was curious and interesting, nevertheless, to be sitting up
there behind four horses: well educated, well dressed, and with
plenty of money in my pocket; and to look out for the places where
I had slept on my weary journey.  I had abundant occupation for my
thoughts, in every conspicuous landmark on the road.  When I looked
down at the trampers whom we passed, and saw that well-remembered
style of face turned up, I felt as if the tinker's blackened hand
were in the bosom of my shirt again.  When we clattered through the
narrow street of Chatham, and I caught a glimpse, in passing, of
the lane where the old monster lived who had bought my jacket, I
stretched my neck eagerly to look for the place where I had sat, in
the sun and in the shade, waiting for my money.  When we came, at
last, within a stage of London, and passed the veritable Salem
House where Mr. Creakle had laid about him with a heavy hand, I
would have given all I had, for lawful permission to get down and
thrash him, and let all the boys out like so many caged sparrows.

We went to the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, then a mouldy sort of
establishment in a close neighbourhood.  A waiter showed me into
the coffee-room; and a chambermaid introduced me to my small
bedchamber, which smelt like a hackney-coach, and was shut up like
a family vault.  I was still painfully conscious of my youth, for
nobody stood in any awe of me at all: the chambermaid being utterly
indifferent to my opinions on any subject, and the waiter being
familiar with me, and offering advice to my inexperience.

'Well now,' said the waiter, in a tone of confidence, 'what would
you like for dinner?  Young gentlemen likes poultry in general:
have a fowl!'

I told him, as majestically as I could, that I wasn't in the humour
for a fowl.

'Ain't you?' said the waiter.  'Young gentlemen is generally tired
of beef and mutton: have a weal cutlet!'

I assented to this proposal, in default of being able to suggest
anything else.

'Do you care for taters?' said the waiter, with an insinuating
smile, and his head on one side.  'Young gentlemen generally has
been overdosed with taters.'

I commanded him, in my deepest voice, to order a veal cutlet and
potatoes, and all things fitting; and to inquire at the bar if
there were any letters for Trotwood Copperfield, Esquire - which I
knew there were not, and couldn't be, but thought it manly to
appear to expect.

He soon came back to say that there were none (at which I was much
surprised) and began to lay the cloth for my dinner in a box by the
fire.  While he was so engaged, he asked me what I would take with
it; and on my replying 'Half a pint of sherry,'thought it a
favourable opportunity, I am afraid, to extract that measure of
wine from the stale leavings at the bottoms of several small
decanters.  I am of this opinion, because, while I was reading the
newspaper, I observed him behind a low wooden partition, which was
his private apartment, very busy pouring out of a number of those
vessels into one, like a chemist and druggist making up a
prescription.  When the wine came, too, I thought it flat; and it
certainly had more English crumbs in it, than were to be expected
in a foreign wine in anything like a pure state, but I was bashful
enough to drink it, and say nothing.

Being then in a pleasant frame of mind (from which I infer that
poisoning is not always disagreeable in some stages of the
process), I resolved to go to the play.  It was Covent Garden
Theatre that I chose; and there, from the back of a centre box, I
saw Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime.  To have all those noble
Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my
entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been
at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.  But the mingled
reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the
poetry, the lights, the music, the company, the smooth stupendous
changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, were so dazzling, and
opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out
into the rainy street, at twelve o'clock at night, I felt as if I
had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life
for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted,
umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking,
muddy, miserable world.

I had emerged by another door, and stood in the street for a little
while, as if I really were a stranger upon earth: but the
unceremonious pushing and hustling that I received, soon recalled
me to myself, and put me in the road back to the hotel; whither I
went, revolving the glorious vision all the way; and where, after
some porter and oysters, I sat revolving it still, at past one
o'clock, with my eyes on the coffee-room fire.

I was so filled with the play, and with the past - for it was, in
a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my
earlier life moving along - that I don't know when the figure of a
handsome well-formed young man dressed with a tasteful easy
negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a real
presence to me.  But I recollect being conscious of his company
without having noticed his coming in - and my still sitting,
musing, over the coffee-room fire.

At last I rose to go to bed, much to the relief of the sleepy
waiter, who had got the fidgets in his legs, and was twisting them,
and hitting them, and putting them through all kinds of contortions
in his small pantry.  In going towards the door, I passed the
person who had come in, and saw him plainly.  I turned directly,
came back, and looked again.  He did not know me, but I knew him in
a moment.

At another time I might have wanted the confidence or the decision
to speak to him, and might have put it off until next day, and
might have lost him.  But, in the then condition of my mind, where
the play was still running high, his former protection of me
appeared so deserving of my gratitude, and my old love for him
overflowed my breast so freshly and spontaneously, that I went up
to him at once, with a fast-beating heart, and said:

'Steerforth! won't you speak to me?'

He looked at me - just as he used to look, sometimes -but I saw no
recognition in his face.

'You don't remember me, I am afraid,' said I.

'My God!' he suddenly exclaimed.  'It's little Copperfield!'

I grasped him by both hands, and could not let them go.  But for
very shame, and the fear that it might displease him, I could have
held him round the neck and cried.

'I never, never, never was so glad!  My dear Steerforth, I am so
overjoyed to see you!'

'And I am rejoiced to see you, too!' he said, shaking my hands
heartily.  'Why, Copperfield, old boy, don't be overpowered!' And
yet he was glad, too, I thought, to see how the delight I had in
meeting him affected me.

I brushed away the tears that my utmost resolution had not been
able to keep back, and I made a clumsy laugh of it, and we sat down
together, side by side.

'Why, how do you come to be here?' said Steerforth, clapping me on
the shoulder.

'I came here by the Canterbury coach, today.  I have been adopted
by an aunt down in that part of the country, and have just finished
my education there.  How do YOU come to be here, Steerforth?'

'Well, I am what they call an Oxford man,' he returned; 'that is to
say, I get bored to death down there, periodically - and I am on my
way now to my mother's.  You're a devilish amiable-looking fellow,
Copperfield.  just what you used to be, now I look at you!  Not
altered in the least!'

'I knew you immediately,' I said; 'but you are more easily
remembered.'

He laughed as he ran his hand through the clustering curls of his
hair, and said gaily:

'Yes, I am on an expedition of duty.  My mother lives a little way
out of town; and the roads being in a beastly condition, and our
house tedious enough, I remained here tonight instead of going on. 
I have not been in town half-a-dozen hours, and those I have been
dozing and grumbling away at the play.'

'I have been at the play, too,' said I.  'At Covent Garden.  What
a delightful and magnificent entertainment, Steerforth!'

Steerforth laughed heartily.

'My dear young Davy,' he said, clapping me on the shoulder again,
'you are a very Daisy.  The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not
fresher than you are.  I have been at Covent Garden, too, and there
never was a more miserable business.  Holloa, you sir!'

This was addressed to the waiter, who had been very attentive to
our recognition, at a distance, and now came forward deferentially.

'Where have you put my friend, Mr. Copperfield?' said Steerforth.

'Beg your pardon, sir?'

'Where does he sleep?  What's his number?  You know what I mean,'
said Steerforth.

'Well, sir,' said the waiter, with an apologetic air.  'Mr.
Copperfield is at present in forty-four, sir.'

'And what the devil do you mean,' retorted Steerforth, 'by putting
Mr. Copperfield into a little loft over a stable?'

'Why, you see we wasn't aware, sir,' returned the waiter, still
apologetically, 'as Mr. Copperfield was anyways particular.  We can
give Mr. Copperfield seventy-two, sir, if it would be preferred. 
Next you, sir.'

'Of course it would be preferred,' said Steerforth.  'And do it at
once.'
The waiter immediately withdrew to make the exchange.  Steerforth,
very much amused at my having been put into forty-four, laughed
again, and clapped me on the shoulder again, and invited me to
breakfast with him next morning at ten o'clock - an invitation I
was only too proud and happy to accept.  It being now pretty late,
we took our candles and went upstairs, where we parted with
friendly heartiness at his door, and where I found my new room a
great improvement on my old one, it not being at all musty, and
having an immense four-post bedstead in it, which was quite a
little landed estate.  Here, among pillows enough for six, I soon
fell asleep in a blissful condition, and dreamed of ancient Rome,
Steerforth, and friendship, until the early morning coaches,
rumbling out of the archway underneath, made me dream of thunder
and the gods.



CHAPTER 20
STEERFORTH'S HOME


When the chambermaid tapped at my door at eight o'clock, and
informed me that my shaving-water was outside, I felt severely the
having no occasion for it, and blushed in my bed.  The suspicion
that she laughed too, when she said it, preyed upon my mind all the
time I was dressing; and gave me, I was conscious, a sneaking and
guilty air when I passed her on the staircase, as I was going down
to breakfast.  I was so sensitively aware, indeed, of being younger
than I could have wished, that for some time I could not make up my
mind to pass her at all, under the ignoble circumstances of the
case; but, hearing her there with a broom, stood peeping out of
window at King Charles on horseback, surrounded by a maze of
hackney-coaches, and looking anything but regal in a drizzling rain
and a dark-brown fog, until I was admonished by the waiter that the
gentleman was waiting for me.

It was not in the coffee-room that I found Steerforth expecting me,
but in a snug private apartment, red-curtained and Turkey-carpeted,
where the fire burnt bright, and a fine hot breakfast was set forth
on a table covered with a clean cloth; and a cheerful miniature of
the room, the fire, the breakfast, Steerforth, and all, was shining
in the little round mirror over the sideboard.  I was rather
bashful at first, Steerforth being so self-possessed, and elegant,
and superior to me in all respects (age included); but his easy
patronage soon put that to rights, and made me quite at home.  I
could not enough admire the change he had wrought in the Golden
Cross; or compare the dull forlorn state I had held yesterday, with
this morning's comfort and this morning's entertainment.  As to the
waiter's familiarity, it was quenched as if it had never been.  He
attended on us, as I may say, in sackcloth and ashes.

'Now, Copperfield,' said Steerforth, when we were alone, 'I should
like to hear what you are doing, and where you are going, and all
about you.  I feel as if you were my property.'
Glowing with pleasure to find that he had still this interest in
me, I told him how my aunt had proposed the little expedition that
I had before me, and whither it tended.

'As you are in no hurry, then,' said Steerforth, 'come home with me
to Highgate, and stay a day or two.  You will be pleased with my
mother - she is a little vain and prosy about me, but that you can
forgive her - and she will be pleased with you.'

'I should like to be as sure of that, as you are kind enough to say
you are,' I answered, smiling.

'Oh!' said Steerforth, 'everyone who likes me, has a claim on her
that is sure to be acknowledged.'

'Then I think I shall be a favourite,' said I.

'Good!' said Steerforth.  'Come and prove it.  We will go and see
the lions for an hour or two - it's something to have a fresh
fellow like you to show them to, Copperfield - and then we'll
journey out to Highgate by the coach.'

I could hardly believe but that I was in a dream, and that I should
wake presently in number forty-four, to the solitary box in the
coffee-room and the familiar waiter again.  After I had written to
my aunt and told her of my fortunate meeting with my admired old
schoolfellow, and my acceptance of his invitation, we went out in
a hackney-chariot, and saw a Panorama and some other sights, and
took a walk through the Museum, where I could not help observing
how much Steerforth knew, on an infinite variety of subjects, and
of how little account he seemed to make his knowledge.

'You'll take a high degree at college, Steerforth,' said I, 'if you
have not done so already; and they will have good reason to be
proud of you.'

'I take a degree!' cried Steerforth.  'Not I! my dear Daisy - will
you mind my calling you Daisy?'

'Not at all!' said I.

'That's a good fellow!  My dear Daisy,' said Steerforth, laughing. 
'I have not the least desire or intention to distinguish myself in
that way.  I have done quite sufficient for my purpose.  I find
that I am heavy company enough for myself as I am.'

'But the fame -' I was beginning.

'You romantic Daisy!' said Steerforth, laughing still more
heartily: 'why should I trouble myself, that a parcel of
heavy-headed fellows may gape and hold up their hands?  Let them do
it at some other man.  There's fame for him, and he's welcome to
it.'

I was abashed at having made so great a mistake, and was glad to
change the subject.  Fortunately it was not difficult to do, for
Steerforth could always pass from one subject to another with a
carelessness and lightness that were his own.

Lunch succeeded to our sight-seeing, and the short winter day wore
away so fast, that it was dusk when the stage-coach stopped with us
at an old brick house at Highgate on the summit of the hill.  An
elderly lady, though not very far advanced in years, with a proud
carriage and a handsome face, was in the doorway as we alighted;
and greeting Steerforth as 'My dearest James,' folded him in her
arms.  To this lady he presented me as his mother, and she gave me
a stately welcome.

It was a genteel old-fashioned house, very quiet and orderly.  From
the windows of my room I saw all London lying in the distance like
a great vapour, with here and there some lights twinkling through
it.  I had only time, in dressing, to glance at the solid
furniture, the framed pieces of work (done, I supposed, by
Steerforth's mother when she was a girl), and some pictures in
crayons of ladies with powdered hair and bodices, coming and going
on the walls, as the newly-kindled fire crackled and sputtered,
when I was called to dinner.

There was a second lady in the dining-room, of a slight short
figure, dark, and not agreeable to look at, but with some
appearance of good looks too, who attracted my attention: perhaps
because I had not expected to see her; perhaps because I found
myself sitting opposite to her; perhaps because of something really
remarkable in her.  She had black hair and eager black eyes, and
was thin, and had a scar upon her lip.  It was an old scar - I
should rather call it seam, for it was not discoloured, and had
healed years ago - which had once cut through her mouth, downward
towards the chin, but was now barely visible across the table,
except above and on her upper lip, the shape of which it had
altered.  I concluded in my own mind that she was about thirty
years of age, and that she wished to be married.  She was a little
dilapidated - like a house - with having been so long to let; yet
had, as I have said, an appearance of good looks.  Her thinness
seemed to be the effect of some wasting fire within her, which
found a vent in her gaunt eyes.

She was introduced as Miss Dartle, and both Steerforth and his
mother called her Rosa.  I found that she lived there, and had been
for a long time Mrs. Steerforth's companion.  It appeared to me
that she never said anything she wanted to say, outright; but
hinted it, and made a great deal more of it by this practice.  For
example, when Mrs. Steerforth observed, more in jest than earnest,
that she feared her son led but a wild life at college, Miss Dartle
put in thus:

'Oh, really?  You know how ignorant I am, and that I only ask for
information, but isn't it always so?  I thought that kind of life
was on all hands understood to be - eh?'
'It is education for a very grave profession, if you mean that,
Rosa,' Mrs. Steerforth answered with some coldness.

'Oh!  Yes!  That's very true,' returned Miss Dartle.  'But isn't
it, though? - I want to be put right, if I am wrong - isn't it,
really?'

'Really what?' said Mrs. Steerforth.

'Oh!  You mean it's not!' returned Miss Dartle.  'Well, I'm very
glad to hear it!  Now, I know what to do!  That's the advantage of
asking.  I shall never allow people to talk before me about
wastefulness and profligacy, and so forth, in connexion with that
life, any more.'

'And you will be right,' said Mrs. Steerforth.  'My son's tutor is
a conscientious gentleman; and if I had not implicit reliance on my
son, I should have reliance on him.'

'Should you?' said Miss Dartle.  'Dear me!  Conscientious, is he? 
Really conscientious, now?'

'Yes, I am convinced of it,' said Mrs. Steerforth.

'How very nice!' exclaimed Miss Dartle.  'What a comfort!  Really
conscientious?  Then he's not - but of course he can't be, if he's
really conscientious.  Well, I shall be quite happy in my opinion
of him, from this time.  You can't think how it elevates him in my
opinion, to know for certain that he's really conscientious!'

Her own views of every question, and her correction of everything
that was said to which she was opposed, Miss Dartle insinuated in
the same way: sometimes, I could not conceal from myself, with
great power, though in contradiction even of Steerforth.  An
instance happened before dinner was done.  Mrs. Steerforth speaking
to me about my intention of going down into Suffolk, I said at
hazard how glad I should be, if Steerforth would only go there with
me; and explaining to him that I was going to see my old nurse, and
Mr. Peggotty's family, I reminded him of the boatman whom he had
seen at school.

'Oh!  That bluff fellow!' said Steerforth.  'He had a son with him,
hadn't he?'

'No.  That was his nephew,' I replied; 'whom he adopted, though, as
a son.  He has a very pretty little niece too, whom he adopted as
a daughter.  In short, his house - or rather his boat, for he lives
in one, on dry land - is full of people who are objects of his
generosity and kindness.  You would be delighted to see that
household.'

'Should I?' said Steerforth.  'Well, I think I should.  I must see
what can be done.  It would be worth a journey (not to mention the
pleasure of a journey with you, Daisy), to see that sort of people
together, and to make one of 'em.'

My heart leaped with a new hope of pleasure.  But it was in
reference to the tone in which he had spoken of 'that sort of
people', that Miss Dartle, whose sparkling eyes had been watchful
of us, now broke in again.

'Oh, but, really?  Do tell me.  Are they, though?' she said.

'Are they what?  And are who what?' said Steerforth.

'That sort of people.  - Are they really animals and clods, and
beings of another order?  I want to know SO much.'

'Why, there's a pretty wide separation between them and us,' said
Steerforth, with indifference.  'They are not to be expected to be
as sensitive as we are.  Their delicacy is not to be shocked, or
hurt easily.  They are wonderfully virtuous, I dare say - some
people contend for that, at least; and I am sure I don't want to
contradict them - but they have not very fine natures, and they may
be thankful that, like their coarse rough skins, they are not
easily wounded.'

'Really!' said Miss Dartle.  'Well, I don't know, now, when I have
been better pleased than to hear that.  It's so consoling!  It's
such a delight to know that, when they suffer, they don't feel!
Sometimes I have been quite uneasy for that sort of people; but now
I shall just dismiss the idea of them, altogether.  Live and learn. 
I had my doubts, I confess, but now they're cleared up.  I didn't
know, and now I do know, and that shows the advantage of asking -
don't it?'

I believed that Steerforth had said what he had, in jest, or to
draw Miss Dartle out; and I expected him to say as much when she
was gone, and we two were sitting before the fire.  But he merely
asked me what I thought of her.

'She is very clever, is she not?' I asked.

'Clever!  She brings everything to a grindstone,' said Steerforth,
and sharpens it, as she has sharpened her own face and figure these
years past.  She has worn herself away by constant sharpening.  She
is all edge.'

'What a remarkable scar that is upon her lip!' I said.

Steerforth's face fell, and he paused a moment.

'Why, the fact is,' he returned, 'I did that.'

'By an unfortunate accident!'

'No.  I was a young boy, and she exasperated me, and I threw a
hammer at her.  A promising young angel I must have been!'
I was deeply sorry to have touched on such a painful theme, but
that was useless now.

'She has borne the mark ever since, as you see,' said Steerforth;
'and she'll bear it to her grave, if she ever rests in one - though
I can hardly believe she will ever rest anywhere.  She was the
motherless child of a sort of cousin of my father's.  He died one
day.  My mother, who was then a widow, brought her here to be
company to her.  She has a couple of thousand pounds of her own,
and saves the interest of it every year, to add to the principal. 
There's the history of Miss Rosa Dartle for you.'

'And I have no doubt she loves you like a brother?' said I.

'Humph!' retorted Steerforth, looking at the fire.  'Some brothers
are not loved over much; and some love - but help yourself,
Copperfield!  We'll drink the daisies of the field, in compliment
to you; and the lilies of the valley that toil not, neither do they
spin, in compliment to me - the more shame for me!' A moody smile
that had overspread his features cleared off as he said this
merrily, and he was his own frank, winning self again.

I could not help glancing at the scar with a painful interest when
we went in to tea.  It was not long before I observed that it was
the most susceptible part of her face, and that, when she turned
pale, that mark altered first, and became a dull, lead-coloured
streak, lengthening out to its full extent, like a mark in
invisible ink brought to the fire.  There was a little altercation
between her and Steerforth about a cast of the dice at back gammon
- when I thought her, for one moment, in a storm of rage; and then
I saw it start forth like the old writing on the wall.

It was no matter of wonder to me to find Mrs. Steerforth devoted to
her son.  She seemed to be able to speak or think about nothing
else.  She showed me his picture as an infant, in a locket, with
some of his baby-hair in it; she showed me his picture as he had
been when I first knew him; and she wore at her breast his picture
as he was now.  All the letters he had ever written to her, she
kept in a cabinet near her own chair by the fire; and she would
have read me some of them, and I should have been very glad to hear
them too, if he had not interposed, and coaxed her out of the
design.

'It was at Mr. Creakle's, my son tells me, that you first became
acquainted,' said Mrs. Steerforth, as she and I were talking at one
table, while they played backgammon at another.  'Indeed, I
recollect his speaking, at that time, of a pupil younger than
himself who had taken his fancy there; but your name, as you may
suppose, has not lived in my memory.'

'He was very generous and noble to me in those days, I assure you,
ma'am,' said I, 'and I stood in need of such a friend.  I should
have been quite crushed without him.'

'He is always generous and noble,' said Mrs. Steerforth, proudly.

I subscribed to this with all my heart, God knows.  She knew I did;
for the stateliness of her manner already abated towards me, except
when she spoke in praise of him, and then her air was always lofty.

'It was not a fit school generally for my son,' said she; 'far from
it; but there were particular circumstances to be considered at the
time, of more importance even than that selection.  My son's high
spirit made it desirable that he should be placed with some man who
felt its superiority, and would be content to bow himself before
it; and we found such a man there.'

I knew that, knowing the fellow.  And yet I did not despise him the
more for it, but thought it a redeeming quality in him if he could
be allowed any grace for not resisting one so irresistible as
Steerforth.

'My son's great capacity was tempted on, there, by a feeling of
voluntary emulation and conscious pride,' the fond lady went on to
say.  'He would have risen against all constraint; but he found
himself the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be
worthy of his station.  It was like himself.'

I echoed, with all my heart and soul, that it was like himself.

'So my son took, of his own will, and on no compulsion, to the
course in which he can always, when it is his pleasure, outstrip
every competitor,' she pursued.  'My son informs me, Mr.
Copperfield, that you were quite devoted to him, and that when you
met yesterday you made yourself known to him with tears of joy.  I
should be an affected woman if I made any pretence of being
surprised by my son's inspiring such emotions; but I cannot be
indifferent to anyone who is so sensible of his merit, and I am
very glad to see you here, and can assure you that he feels an
unusual friendship for you, and that you may rely on his
protection.'

Miss Dartle played backgammon as eagerly as she did everything
else.  If I had seen her, first, at the board, I should have
fancied that her figure had got thin, and her eyes had got large,
over that pursuit, and no other in the world.  But I am very much
mistaken if she missed a word of this, or lost a look of mine as I
received it with the utmost pleasure, and honoured by Mrs.
Steerforth's confidence, felt older than I had done since I left
Canterbury.

When the evening was pretty far spent, and a tray of glasses and
decanters came in, Steerforth promised, over the fire, that he
would seriously think of going down into the country with me. 
There was no hurry, he said; a week hence would do; and his mother
hospitably said the same.  While we were talking, he more than once
called me Daisy; which brought Miss Dartle out again.

'But really, Mr. Copperfield,' she asked, 'is it a nickname?  And
why does he give it you?  Is it - eh? - because he thinks you young
and innocent?  I am so stupid in these things.'

I coloured in replying that I believed it was.

'Oh!' said Miss Dartle.  'Now I am glad to know that!  I ask for
information, and I am glad to know it.  He thinks you young and
innocent; and so you are his friend.  Well, that's quite
delightful!'

She went to bed soon after this, and Mrs. Steerforth retired too. 
Steerforth and I, after lingering for half-an-hour over the fire,
talking about Traddles and all the rest of them at old Salem House,
went upstairs together.  Steerforth's room was next to mine, and I
went in to look at it.  It was a picture of comfort, full of
easy-chairs, cushions and footstools, worked by his mother's hand,
and with no sort of thing omitted that could help to render it
complete.  Finally, her handsome features looked down on her
darling from a portrait on the wall, as if it were even something
to her that her likeness should watch him while he slept.

I found the fire burning clear enough in my room by this time, and
the curtains drawn before the windows and round the bed, giving it
a very snug appearance.  I sat down in a great chair upon the
hearth to meditate on my happiness; and had enjoyed the
contemplation of it for some time, when I found a likeness of Miss
Dartle looking eagerly at me from above the chimney-piece.

It was a startling likeness, and necessarily had a startling look. 
The painter hadn't made the scar, but I made it; and there it was,
coming and going; now confined to the upper lip as I had seen it at
dinner, and now showing the whole extent of the wound inflicted by
the hammer, as I had seen it when she was passionate.

I wondered peevishly why they couldn't put her anywhere else
instead of quartering her on me.  To get rid of her, I undressed
quickly, extinguished my light, and went to bed.  But, as I fell
asleep, I could not forget that she was still there looking, 'Is it
really, though?  I want to know'; and when I awoke in the night, I
found that I was uneasily asking all sorts of people in my dreams
whether it really was or not - without knowing what I meant.



CHAPTER 21
LITTLE EM'LY


There was a servant in that house, a man who, I understood, was
usually with Steerforth, and had come into his service at the
University, who was in appearance a pattern of respectability.  I
believe there never existed in his station a more
respectable-looking man.  He was taciturn, soft-footed, very quiet
in his manner, deferential, observant, always at hand when wanted,
and never near when not wanted; but his great claim to
consideration was his respectability.  He had not a pliant face, he
had rather a stiff neck, rather a tight smooth head with short hair
clinging to it at the sides, a soft way of speaking, with a
peculiar habit of whispering the letter S so distinctly, that he
seemed to use it oftener than any other man; but every peculiarity
that he had he made respectable.  If his nose had been upside-down,
he would have made that respectable.  He surrounded himself with an
atmosphere of respectability, and walked secure in it.  It would
have been next to impossible to suspect him of anything wrong, he
was so thoroughly respectable.  Nobody could have thought of
putting him in a livery, he was so highly respectable.  To have
imposed any derogatory work upon him, would have been to inflict a
wanton insult on the feelings of a most respectable man.  And of
this, I noticed- the women-servants in the household were so
intuitively conscious, that they always did such work themselves,
and generally while he read the paper by the pantry fire.

Such a self-contained man I never saw.  But in that quality, as in
every other he possessed, he only seemed to be the more
respectable.  Even the fact that no one knew his Christian name,
seemed to form a part of his respectability.  Nothing could be
objected against his surname, Littimer, by which he was known. 
Peter might have been hanged, or Tom transported; but Littimer was
perfectly respectable.

It was occasioned, I suppose, by the reverend nature of
respectability in the abstract, but I felt particularly young in
this man's presence.  How old he was himself, I could not guess -
and that again went to his credit on the same score; for in the
calmness of respectability he might have numbered fifty years as
well as thirty.

Littimer was in my room in the morning before I was up, to bring me
that reproachful shaving-water, and to put out my clothes.  When I
undrew the curtains and looked out of bed, I saw him, in an equable
temperature of respectability, unaffected by the east wind of
January, and not even breathing frostily, standing my boots right
and left in the first dancing position, and blowing specks of dust
off my coat as he laid it down like a baby.

I gave him good morning, and asked him what o'clock it was.  He
took out of his pocket the most respectable hunting-watch I ever
saw, and preventing the spring with his thumb from opening far,
looked in at the face as if he were consulting an oracular oyster,
shut it up again, and said, if I pleased, it was half past eight.

'Mr. Steerforth will be glad to hear how you have rested, sir.'

'Thank you,' said I, 'very well indeed.  Is Mr. Steerforth quite
well?'

'Thank you, sir, Mr. Steerforth is tolerably well.'  Another of his
characteristics - no use of superlatives.  A cool calm medium
always.

'Is there anything more I can have the honour of doing for you,
sir?  The warning-bell will ring at nine; the family take breakfast
at half past nine.'

'Nothing, I thank you.'

'I thank YOU, sir, if you please'; and with that, and with a little
inclination of his head when he passed the bed-side, as an apology
for correcting me, he went out, shutting the door as delicately as
if I had just fallen into a sweet sleep on which my life depended.

Every morning we held exactly this conversation: never any more,
and never any less: and yet, invariably, however far I might have
been lifted out of myself over-night, and advanced towards maturer
years, by Steerforth's companionship, or Mrs. Steerforth's
confidence, or Miss Dartle's conversation, in the presence of this
most respectable man I became, as our smaller poets sing, 'a boy
again'.

He got horses for us; and Steerforth, who knew everything, gave me
lessons in riding.  He provided foils for us, and Steerforth gave
me lessons in fencing - gloves, and I began, of the same master, to
improve in boxing.  It gave me no manner of concern that Steerforth
should find me a novice in these sciences, but I never could bear
to show my want of skill before the respectable Littimer.  I had no
reason to believe that Littimer understood such arts himself; he
never led me to suppose anything of the kind, by so much as the
vibration of one of his respectable eyelashes; yet whenever he was
by, while we were practising, I felt myself the greenest and most
inexperienced of mortals.

I am particular about this man, because he made a particular effect
on me at that time, and because of what took place thereafter.

The week passed away in a most delightful manner.  It passed
rapidly, as may be supposed, to one entranced as I was; and yet it
gave me so many occasions for knowing Steerforth better, and
admiring him more in a thousand respects, that at its close I
seemed to have been with him for a much longer time.  A dashing way
he had of treating me like a plaything, was more agreeable to me
than any behaviour he could have adopted.  It reminded me of our
old acquaintance; it seemed the natural sequel of it; it showed me
that he was unchanged; it relieved me of any uneasiness I might
have felt, in comparing my merits with his, and measuring my claims
upon his friendship by any equal standard; above all, it was a
familiar, unrestrained, affectionate demeanour that he used towards
no one else.  As he had treated me at school differently from all
the rest, I joyfully believed that he treated me in life unlike any
other friend he had.  I believed that I was nearer to his heart
than any other friend, and my own heart warmed with attachment to
him.
He made up his mind to go with me into the country, and the day
arrived for our departure.  He had been doubtful at first whether
to take Littimer or not, but decided to leave him at home.  The
respectable creature, satisfied with his lot whatever it was,
arranged our portmanteaux on the little carriage that was to take
us into London, as if they were intended to defy the shocks of
ages, and received my modestly proffered donation with perfect
tranquillity.

We bade adieu to Mrs. Steerforth and Miss Dartle, with many thanks
on my part, and much kindness on the devoted mother's.  The last
thing I saw was Littimer's unruffled eye; fraught, as I fancied,
with the silent conviction that I was very young indeed.

What I felt, in returning so auspiciously to the old familiar
places, I shall not endeavour to describe.  We went down by the
Mail.  I was so concerned, I recollect, even for the honour of
Yarmouth, that when Steerforth said, as we drove through its dark
streets to the inn, that, as well as he could make out, it was a
good, queer, out-of-the-way kind of hole, I was highly pleased.  We
went to bed on our arrival (I observed a pair of dirty shoes and
gaiters in connexion with my old friend the Dolphin as we passed
that door), and breakfasted late in the morning.  Steerforth, who
was in great spirits, had been strolling about the beach before I
was up, and had made acquaintance, he said, with half the boatmen
in the place.  Moreover, he had seen, in the distance, what he was
sure must be the identical house of Mr. Peggotty, with smoke coming
out of the chimney; and had had a great mind, he told me, to walk
in and swear he was myself grown out of knowledge.

'When do you propose to introduce me there, Daisy?' he said.  'I am
at your disposal.  Make your own arrangements.'

'Why, I was thinking that this evening would be a good time,
Steerforth, when they are all sitting round the fire.  I should
like you to see it when it's snug, it's such a curious place.'

'So be it!' returned Steerforth.  'This evening.'

'I shall not give them any notice that we are here, you know,' said
I, delighted.  'We must take them by surprise.'

'Oh, of course!  It's no fun,' said Steerforth, 'unless we take
them by surprise.  Let us see the natives in their aboriginal
condition.'

'Though they ARE that sort of people that you mentioned,' I
returned.

'Aha!  What! you recollect my skirmishes with Rosa, do you?' he
exclaimed with a quick look.  'Confound the girl, I am half afraid
of her.  She's like a goblin to me.  But never mind her.  Now what
are you going to do?  You are going to see your nurse, I suppose?'

'Why, yes,' I said, 'I must see Peggotty first of all.'

'Well,' replied Steerforth, looking at his watch.  'Suppose I
deliver you up to be cried over for a couple of hours.  Is that
long enough?'

I answered, laughing, that I thought we might get through it in
that time, but that he must come also; for he would find that his
renown had preceded him, and that he was almost as great a
personage as I was.

'I'll come anywhere you like,' said Steerforth, 'or do anything you
like.  Tell me where to come to; and in two hours I'll produce
myself in any state you please, sentimental or comical.'

I gave him minute directions for finding the residence of Mr.
Barkis, carrier to Blunderstone and elsewhere; and, on this
understanding, went out alone.  There was a sharp bracing air; the
ground was dry; the sea was crisp and clear; the sun was diffusing
abundance of light, if not much warmth; and everything was fresh
and lively.  I was so fresh and lively myself, in the pleasure of
being there, that I could have stopped the people in the streets
and shaken hands with them.

The streets looked small, of course.  The streets that we have only
seen as children always do, I believe, when we go back to them. 
But I had forgotten nothing in them, and found nothing changed,
until I came to Mr. Omer's shop.  OMER AND Joram was now written
up, where OMER used to be; but the inscription, DRAPER, TAILOR,
HABERDASHER, FUNERAL FURNISHER, &c., remained as it was.

My footsteps seemed to tend so naturally to the shop door, after I
had read these words from over the way, that I went across the road
and looked in.  There was a pretty woman at the back of the shop,
dancing a little child in her arms, while another little fellow
clung to her apron.  I had no difficulty in recognizing either
Minnie or Minnie's children.  The glass door of the parlour was not
open; but in the workshop across the yard I could faintly hear the
old tune playing, as if it had never left off.

'Is Mr. Omer at home?' said I, entering.  'I should like to see
him, for a moment, if he is.'

'Oh yes, sir, he is at home,' said Minnie; 'the weather don't suit
his asthma out of doors.  Joe, call your grandfather!'

The little fellow, who was holding her apron, gave such a lusty
shout, that the sound of it made him bashful, and he buried his
face in her skirts, to her great admiration.  I heard a heavy
puffing and blowing coming towards us, and soon Mr. Omer,
shorter-winded than of yore, but not much older-looking, stood
before me.

'Servant, sir,' said Mr. Omer.  'What can I do for you, sir?'
'You can shake hands with me, Mr. Omer, if you please,' said I,
putting out my own.  'You were very good-natured to me once, when
I am afraid I didn't show that I thought so.'

'Was I though?' returned the old man.  'I'm glad to hear it, but I
don't remember when.  Are you sure it was me?'

'Quite.'

'I think my memory has got as short as my breath,' said Mr. Omer,
looking at me and shaking his head; 'for I don't remember you.'

'Don't you remember your coming to the coach to meet me, and my
having breakfast here, and our riding out to Blunderstone together:
you, and I, and Mrs. Joram, and Mr. Joram too - who wasn't her
husband then?'

'Why, Lord bless my soul!' exclaimed Mr. Omer, after being thrown
by his surprise into a fit of coughing, 'you don't say so!  Minnie,
my dear, you recollect?  Dear me, yes; the party was a lady, I
think?'

'My mother,' I rejoined.

'To - be - sure,' said Mr. Omer, touching my waistcoat with his
forefinger, 'and there was a little child too!  There was two
parties.  The little party was laid along with the other party. 
Over at Blunderstone it was, of course.  Dear me!  And how have you
been since?'

Very well, I thanked him, as I hoped he had been too.

'Oh! nothing to grumble at, you know,' said Mr. Omer.  'I find my
breath gets short, but it seldom gets longer as a man gets older. 
I take it as it comes, and make the most of it.  That's the best
way, ain't it?'

Mr. Omer coughed again, in consequence of laughing, and was
assisted out of his fit by his daughter, who now stood close beside
us, dancing her smallest child on the counter.

'Dear me!' said Mr. Omer.  'Yes, to be sure.  Two parties!  Why, in
that very ride, if you'll believe me, the day was named for my
Minnie to marry Joram.  "Do name it, sir," says Joram.  "Yes, do,
father," says Minnie.  And now he's come into the business.  And
look here!  The youngest!'

Minnie laughed, and stroked her banded hair upon her temples, as
her father put one of his fat fingers into the hand of the child
she was dancing on the counter.

'Two parties, of course!' said Mr. Omer, nodding his head
retrospectively.  'Ex-actly so!  And Joram's at work, at this
minute, on a grey one with silver nails, not this measurement' -
the measurement of the dancing child upon the counter - 'by a good
two inches.  - Will you take something?'

I thanked him, but declined.

'Let me see,' said Mr. Omer.  'Barkis's the carrier's wife -
Peggotty's the boatman's sister - she had something to do with your
family?  She was in service there, sure?'

My answering in the affirmative gave him great satisfaction.

'I believe my breath will get long next, my memory's getting so
much so,' said Mr. Omer.  'Well, sir, we've got a young relation of
hers here, under articles to us, that has as elegant a taste in the
dress-making business - I assure you I don't believe there's a
Duchess in England can touch her.'

'Not little Em'ly?' said I, involuntarily.

'Em'ly's her name,' said Mr. Omer, 'and she's little too.  But if
you'll believe me, she has such a face of her own that half the
women in this town are mad against her.'

'Nonsense, father!' cried Minnie.

'My dear,' said Mr. Omer, 'I don't say it's the case with you,'
winking at me, 'but I say that half the women in Yarmouth - ah! and
in five mile round - are mad against that girl.'

'Then she should have kept to her own station in life, father,'
said Minnie, 'and not have given them any hold to talk about her,
and then they couldn't have done it.'

'Couldn't have done it, my dear!' retorted Mr. Omer.  'Couldn't
have done it!  Is that YOUR knowledge of life?  What is there that
any woman couldn't do, that she shouldn't do - especially on the
subject of another woman's good looks?'

I really thought it was all over with Mr. Omer, after he had
uttered this libellous pleasantry.  He coughed to that extent, and
his breath eluded all his attempts to recover it with that
obstinacy, that I fully expected to see his head go down behind the
counter, and his little black breeches, with the rusty little
bunches of ribbons at the knees, come quivering up in a last
ineffectual struggle.  At length, however, he got better, though he
still panted hard, and was so exhausted that he was obliged to sit
on the stool of the shop-desk.

'You see,' he said, wiping his head, and breathing with difficulty,
'she hasn't taken much to any companions here; she hasn't taken
kindly to any particular acquaintances and friends, not to mention
sweethearts.  In consequence, an ill-natured story got about, that
Em'ly wanted to be a lady.  Now my opinion is, that it came into
circulation principally on account of her sometimes saying, at the
school, that if she was a lady she would like to do so-and-so for
her uncle - don't you see? - and buy him such-and-such fine
things.'

'I assure you, Mr. Omer, she has said so to me,' I returned
eagerly, 'when we were both children.'

Mr. Omer nodded his head and rubbed his chin.  'Just so.  Then out
of a very little, she could dress herself, you see, better than
most others could out of a deal, and that made things unpleasant. 
Moreover, she was rather what might be called wayward - I'll go so
far as to say what I should call wayward myself,' said Mr. Omer; '-
didn't know her own mind quite - a little spoiled - and couldn't,
at first, exactly bind herself down.  No more than that was ever
said against her, Minnie?'

'No, father,' said Mrs. Joram.  'That's the worst, I believe.'

'So when she got a situation,' said Mr. Omer, 'to keep a fractious
old lady company, they didn't very well agree, and she didn't stop.
At last she came here, apprenticed for three years.  Nearly two of
'em are over, and she has been as good a girl as ever was.  Worth
any six!  Minnie, is she worth any six, now?'

'Yes, father,' replied Minnie.  'Never say I detracted from her!'

'Very good,' said Mr. Omer.  'That's right.  And so, young
gentleman,' he added, after a few moments' further rubbing of his
chin, 'that you may not consider me long-winded as well as
short-breathed, I believe that's all about it.'

As they had spoken in a subdued tone, while speaking of Em'ly, I
had no doubt that she was near.  On my asking now, if that were not
so, Mr. Omer nodded yes, and nodded towards the door of the
parlour.  My hurried inquiry if I might peep in, was answered with
a free permission; and, looking through the glass, I saw her
sitting at her work.  I saw her, a most beautiful little creature,
with the cloudless blue eyes, that had looked into my childish
heart, turned laughingly upon another child of Minnie's who was
playing near her; with enough of wilfulness in her bright face to
justify what I had heard; with much of the old capricious coyness
lurking in it; but with nothing in her pretty looks, I am sure, but
what was meant for goodness and for happiness, and what was on a
good and

happy course.

The tune across the yard that seemed as if it never had left off -
alas! it was the tune that never DOES leave off - was beating,
softly, all the while.

'Wouldn't you like to step in,' said Mr. Omer, 'and speak to her? 
Walk in and speak to her, sir!  Make yourself at home!'

I was too bashful to do so then - I was afraid of confusing her,
and I was no less afraid of confusing myself.- but I informed
myself of the hour at which she left of an evening, in order that
our visit might be timed accordingly; and taking leave of Mr. Omer,
and his pretty daughter, and her little children, went away to my
dear old Peggotty's.

Here she was, in the tiled kitchen, cooking dinner!  The moment I
knocked at the door she opened it, and asked me what I pleased to
want.  I looked at her with a smile, but she gave me no smile in
return.  I had never ceased to write to her, but it must have been
seven years since we had met.

'Is Mr. Barkis at home, ma'am?' I said, feigning to speak roughly
to her.

'He's at home, sir,' returned Peggotty, 'but he's bad abed with the
rheumatics.'

'Don't he go over to Blunderstone now?' I asked.

'When he's well he do,' she answered.

'Do YOU ever go there, Mrs. Barkis?'

She looked at me more attentively, and I noticed a quick movement
of her hands towards each other.

'Because I want to ask a question about a house there, that they
call the - what is it? - the Rookery,' said I.

She took a step backward, and put out her hands in an undecided
frightened way, as if to keep me off.

'Peggotty!' I cried to her.

She cried, 'My darling boy!' and we both burst into tears, and were
locked in one another's arms.

What extravagances she committed; what laughing and crying over me;
what pride she showed, what joy, what sorrow that she whose pride
and joy I might have been, could never hold me in a fond embrace;
I have not the heart to tell.  I was troubled with no misgiving
that it was young in me to respond to her emotions.  I had never
laughed and cried in all my life, I dare say - not even to her -
more freely than I did that morning.

'Barkis will be so glad,' said Peggotty, wiping her eyes with her
apron, 'that it'll do him more good than pints of liniment.  May I
go and tell him you are here?  Will you come up and see him, my
dear?'

Of course I would.  But Peggotty could not get out of the room as
easily as she meant to, for as often as she got to the door and
looked round at me, she came back again to have another laugh and
another cry upon my shoulder.  At last, to make the matter easier,
I went upstairs with her; and having waited outside for a minute,
while she said a word of preparation to Mr. Barkis, presented
myself before that invalid.

He received me with absolute enthusiasm.  He was too rheumatic to
be shaken hands with, but he begged me to shake the tassel on the
top of his nightcap, which I did most cordially.  When I sat down
by the side of the bed, he said that it did him a world of good to
feel as if he was driving me on the Blunderstone road again.  As he
lay in bed, face upward, and so covered, with that exception, that
he seemed to be nothing but a face - like a conventional cherubim
- he looked the queerest object I ever beheld.

'What name was it, as I wrote up in the cart, sir?' said Mr.
Barkis, with a slow rheumatic smile.

'Ah! Mr. Barkis, we had some grave talks about that matter, hadn't
we?'

'I was willin' a long time, sir?' said Mr. Barkis.

'A long time,' said I.

'And I don't regret it,' said Mr. Barkis.  'Do you remember what
you told me once, about her making all the apple parsties and doing
all the cooking?'

'Yes, very well,' I returned.

'It was as true,' said Mr. Barkis, 'as turnips is.  It was as
true,' said Mr. Barkis, nodding his nightcap, which was his only
means of emphasis, 'as taxes is.  And nothing's truer than them.'

Mr. Barkis turned his eyes upon me, as if for my assent to this
result of his reflections in bed; and I gave it.

'Nothing's truer than them,' repeated Mr. Barkis; 'a man as poor as
I am, finds that out in his mind when he's laid up.  I'm a very
poor man, sir!'

'I am sorry to hear it, Mr. Barkis.'

'A very poor man, indeed I am,' said Mr. Barkis.

Here his right hand came slowly and feebly from under the
bedclothes, and with a purposeless uncertain grasp took hold of a
stick which was loosely tied to the side of the bed.  After some
poking about with this instrument, in the course of which his face
assumed a variety of distracted expressions, Mr. Barkis poked it
against a box, an end of which had been visible to me all the time. 
Then his face became composed.

'Old clothes,' said Mr. Barkis.

'Oh!' said I.

'I wish it was Money, sir,' said Mr. Barkis.

'I wish it was, indeed,' said I.

'But it AIN'T,' said Mr. Barkis, opening both his eyes as wide as
he possibly could.

I expressed myself quite sure of that, and Mr. Barkis, turning his
eyes more gently to his wife, said:

'She's the usefullest and best of women, C. P.  Barkis.  All the
praise that anyone can give to C. P.  Barkis, she deserves, and
more! My dear, you'll get a dinner today, for company; something
good to eat and drink, will you?'

I should have protested against this unnecessary demonstration in
my honour, but that I saw Peggotty, on the opposite side of the
bed, extremely anxious I should not.  So I held my peace.

'I have got a trifle of money somewhere about me, my dear,' said
Mr. Barkis, 'but I'm a little tired.  If you and Mr. David will
leave me for a short nap, I'll try and find it when I wake.'

We left the room, in compliance with this request.  When we got
outside the door, Peggotty informed me that Mr. Barkis, being now
'a little nearer' than he used to be, always resorted to this same
device before producing a single coin from his store; and that he
endured unheard-of agonies in crawling out of bed alone, and taking
it from that unlucky box.  In effect, we presently heard him
uttering suppressed groans of the most dismal nature, as this
magpie proceeding racked him in every joint; but while Peggotty's
eyes were full of compassion for him, she said his generous impulse
would do him good, and it was better not to check it.  So he
groaned on, until he had got into bed again, suffering, I have no
doubt, a martyrdom; and then called us in, pretending to have just
woke up from a refreshing sleep, and to produce a guinea from under
his pillow.  His satisfaction in which happy imposition on us, and
in having preserved the impenetrable secret of the box, appeared to
be a sufficient compensation to him for all his tortures.

I prepared Peggotty for Steerforth's arrival and it was not long
before he came.  I am persuaded she knew no difference between his
having been a personal benefactor of hers, and a kind friend to me,
and that she would have received him with the utmost gratitude and
devotion in any case.  But his easy, spirited good humour; his
genial manner, his handsome looks, his natural gift of adapting
himself to whomsoever he pleased, and making direct, when he cared
to do it, to the main point of interest in anybody's heart; bound
her to him wholly in five minutes.  His manner to me, alone, would
have won her.  But, through all these causes combined, I sincerely
believe she had a kind of adoration for him before he left the
house that night.

He stayed there with me to dinner - if I were to say willingly, I
should not half express how readily and gaily.  He went into Mr.
Barkis's room like light and air, brightening and refreshing it as
if he were healthy weather.  There was no noise, no effort, no
consciousness, in anything he did; but in everything an
indescribable lightness, a seeming impossibility of doing anything
else, or doing anything better, which was so graceful, so natural,
and agreeable, that it overcomes me, even now, in the remembrance.

We made merry in the little parlour, where the Book of Martyrs,
unthumbed since my time, was laid out upon the desk as of old, and
where I now turned over its terrific pictures, remembering the old
sensations they had awakened, but not feeling them.  When Peggotty
spoke of what she called my room, and of its being ready for me at
night, and of her hoping I would occupy it, before I could so much
as look at Steerforth, hesitating, he was possessed of the whole
case.

'Of course,' he said.  'You'll sleep here, while we stay, and I
shall sleep at the hotel.'

'But to bring you so far,' I returned, 'and to separate, seems bad
companionship, Steerforth.'

'Why, in the name of Heaven, where do you naturally belong?' he
said.  'What is "seems", compared to that?'  It was settled at
once.

He maintained all his delightful qualities to the last, until we
started forth, at eight o'clock, for Mr. Peggotty's boat.  Indeed,
they were more and more brightly exhibited as the hours went on;
for I thought even then, and I have no doubt now, that the
consciousness of success in his determination to please, inspired
him with a new delicacy of perception, and made it, subtle as it
was, more easy to him.  If anyone had told me, then, that all this
was a brilliant game, played for the excitement of the moment, for
the employment of high spirits, in the thoughtless love of
superiority, in a mere wasteful careless course of winning what was
worthless to him, and next minute thrown away - I say, if anyone
had told me such a lie that night, I wonder in what manner of
receiving it my indignation would have found a vent!  Probably only
in an increase, had that been possible, of the romantic feelings of
fidelity and friendship with which I walked beside him, over the
dark wintry sands towards the old boat; the wind sighing around us
even more mournfully, than it had sighed and moaned upon the night
when I first darkened Mr. Peggotty's door.

'This is a wild kind of place, Steerforth, is it not?'

'Dismal enough in the dark,' he said: 'and the sea roars as if it
were hungry for us.  Is that the boat, where I see a light yonder?'
'That's the boat,' said I.

'And it's the same I saw this morning,' he returned.  'I came
straight to it, by instinct, I suppose.'

We said no more as we approached the light, but made softly for the
door.  I laid my hand upon the latch; and whispering Steerforth to
keep close to me, went in.

A murmur of voices had been audible on the outside, and, at the
moment of our entrance, a clapping of hands: which latter noise, I
was surprised to see, proceeded from the generally disconsolate
Mrs. Gummidge.  But Mrs. Gummidge was not the only person there who
was unusually excited.  Mr. Peggotty, his face lighted up with
uncommon satisfaction, and laughing with all his might, held his
rough arms wide open, as if for little Em'ly to run into them; Ham,
with a mixed expression in his face of admiration, exultation, and
a lumbering sort of bashfulness that sat upon him very well, held
little Em'ly by the hand, as if he were presenting her to Mr.
Peggotty; little Em'ly herself, blushing and shy, but delighted
with Mr. Peggotty's delight, as her joyous eyes expressed, was
stopped by our entrance (for she saw us first) in the very act of
springing from Ham to nestle in Mr. Peggotty's embrace.  In the
first glimpse we had of them all, and at the moment of our passing
from the dark cold night into the warm light room, this was the way
in which they were all employed: Mrs. Gummidge in the background,
clapping her hands like a madwoman.

The little picture was so instantaneously dissolved by our going
in, that one might have doubted whether it had ever been.  I was in
the midst of the astonished family, face to face with Mr. Peggotty,
and holding out my hand to him, when Ham shouted:

'Mas'r Davy!  It's Mas'r Davy!'

In a moment we were all shaking hands with one another, and asking
one another how we did, and telling one another how glad we were to
meet, and all talking at once.  Mr. Peggotty was so proud and
overjoyed to see us, that he did not know what to say or do, but
kept over and over again shaking hands with me, and then with
Steerforth, and then with me, and then ruffling his shaggy hair all
over his head, and laughing with such glee and triumph, that it was
a treat to see him.

'Why, that you two gent'lmen - gent'lmen growed - should come to
this here roof tonight, of all nights in my life,' said Mr.
Peggotty, 'is such a thing as never happened afore, I do rightly
believe!  Em'ly, my darling, come here!  Come here, my little
witch!  There's Mas'r Davy's friend, my dear!  There's the
gent'lman as you've heerd on, Em'ly.  He comes to see you, along
with Mas'r Davy, on the brightest night of your uncle's life as
ever was or will be, Gorm the t'other one, and horroar for it!'

After delivering this speech all in a breath, and with
extraordinary animation and pleasure, Mr. Peggotty put one of his
large hands rapturously on each side of his niece's face, and
kissing it a dozen times, laid it with a gentle pride and love upon
his broad chest, and patted it as if his hand had been a lady's. 
Then he let her go; and as she ran into the little chamber where I
used to sleep, looked round upon us, quite hot and out of breath
with his uncommon satisfaction.

'If you two gent'lmen - gent'lmen growed now, and such gent'lmen -'
said Mr. Peggotty.

'So th' are, so th' are!' cried Ham.  'Well said!  So th' are. 
Mas'r Davy bor' - gent'lmen growed - so th' are!'

'If you two gent'lmen, gent'lmen growed,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'don't
ex-cuse me for being in a state of mind, when you understand
matters, I'll arks your pardon.  Em'ly, my dear! - She knows I'm a
going to tell,' here his delight broke out again, 'and has made
off.  Would you be so good as look arter her, Mawther, for a
minute?'

Mrs. Gummidge nodded and disappeared.

'If this ain't,' said Mr. Peggotty, sitting down among us by the
fire, 'the brightest night o' my life, I'm a shellfish - biled too
- and more I can't say.  This here little Em'ly, sir,' in a low
voice to Steerforth, '- her as you see a blushing here just now -'

Steerforth only nodded; but with such a pleased expression of
interest, and of participation in Mr. Peggotty's feelings, that the
latter answered him as if he had spoken.

'To be sure,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'That's her, and so she is. 
Thankee, sir.'

Ham nodded to me several times, as if he would have said so too.

'This here little Em'ly of ours,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'has been, in
our house, what I suppose (I'm a ignorant man, but that's my
belief) no one but a little bright-eyed creetur can be in a house. 
She ain't my child; I never had one; but I couldn't love her more. 
You understand!  I couldn't do it!'

'I quite understand,' said Steerforth.

'I know you do, sir,' returned Mr. Peggotty, 'and thankee again. 
Mas'r Davy, he can remember what she was; you may judge for your
own self what she is; but neither of you can't fully know what she
has been, is, and will be, to my loving art.  I am rough, sir,'
said Mr. Peggotty, 'I am as rough as a Sea Porkypine; but no one,
unless, mayhap, it is a woman, can know, I think, what our little
Em'ly is to me.  And betwixt ourselves,' sinking his voice lower
yet, 'that woman's name ain't Missis Gummidge neither, though she
has a world of merits.'
Mr. Peggotty ruffled his hair again, with both hands, as a further
preparation for what he was going to say, and went on, with a hand
upon each of his knees:

'There was a certain person as had know'd our Em'ly, from the time
when her father was drownded; as had seen her constant; when a
babby, when a young gal, when a woman.  Not much of a person to
look at, he warn't,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'something o' my own build
- rough - a good deal o' the sou'-wester in him - wery salt - but,
on the whole, a honest sort of a chap, with his art in the right
place.'

I thought I had never seen Ham grin to anything like the extent to
which he sat grinning at us now.

'What does this here blessed tarpaulin go and do,' said Mr.
Peggotty, with his face one high noon of enjoyment, 'but he loses
that there art of his to our little Em'ly.  He follers her about,
he makes hisself a sort o' servant to her, he loses in a great
measure his relish for his wittles, and in the long-run he makes it
clear to me wot's amiss.  Now I could wish myself, you see, that
our little Em'ly was in a fair way of being married.  I could wish
to see her, at all ewents, under articles to a honest man as had a
right to defend her.  I don't know how long I may live, or how soon
I may die; but I know that if I was capsized, any night, in a gale
of wind in Yarmouth Roads here, and was to see the town-lights
shining for the last time over the rollers as I couldn't make no
head against, I could go down quieter for thinking "There's a man
ashore there, iron-true to my little Em'ly, God bless her, and no
wrong can touch my Em'ly while so be as that man lives."'

Mr. Peggotty, in simple earnestness, waved his right arm, as if he
were waving it at the town-lights for the last time, and then,
exchanging a nod with Ham, whose eye he caught, proceeded as
before.

'Well! I counsels him to speak to Em'ly.  He's big enough, but he's
bashfuller than a little un, and he don't like.  So I speak. 
"What!  Him!" says Em'ly.  "Him that I've know'd so intimate so
many years, and like so much.  Oh, Uncle!  I never can have him. 
He's such a good fellow!" I gives her a kiss, and I says no more to
her than, "My dear, you're right to speak out, you're to choose for
yourself, you're as free as a little bird." Then I aways to him,
and I says, "I wish it could have been so, but it can't.  But you
can both be as you was, and wot I say to you is, Be as you was with
her, like a man." He says to me, a-shaking of my hand, "I will!" he
says.  And he was - honourable and manful - for two year going on,
and we was just the same at home here as afore.'

Mr. Peggotty's face, which had varied in its expression with the
various stages of his narrative, now resumed all its former
triumphant delight, as he laid a hand upon my knee and a hand upon
Steerforth's (previously wetting them both, for the greater
emphasis of the action), and divided the following speech between
us:

'All of a sudden, one evening - as it might be tonight - comes
little Em'ly from her work, and him with her!  There ain't so much
in that, you'll say.  No, because he takes care on her, like a
brother, arter dark, and indeed afore dark, and at all times.  But
this tarpaulin chap, he takes hold of her hand, and he cries out to
me, joyful, "Look here!  This is to be my little wife!" And she
says, half bold and half shy, and half a laughing and half a
crying, "Yes, Uncle!  If you please." - If I please!' cried Mr.
Peggotty, rolling his head in an ecstasy at the idea; 'Lord, as if
I should do anythink else! - "If you please, I am steadier now, and
I have thought better of it, and I'll be as good a little wife as
I can to him, for he's a dear, good fellow!" Then Missis Gummidge,
she claps her hands like a play, and you come in.  Theer! the
murder's out!' said Mr. Peggotty - 'You come in!  It took place
this here present hour; and here's the man that'll marry her, the
minute she's out of her time.'

Ham staggered, as well he might, under the blow Mr. Peggotty dealt
him in his unbounded joy, as a mark of confidence and friendship;
but feeling called upon to say something to us, he said, with much
faltering and great difficulty:

'She warn't no higher than you was, Mas'r Davy - when you first
come - when I thought what she'd grow up to be.  I see her grown up
- gent'lmen - like a flower.  I'd lay down my life for her - Mas'r
Davy - Oh! most content and cheerful!  She's more to me - gent'lmen
- than - she's all to me that ever I can want, and more than ever
I - than ever I could say.  I - I love her true.  There ain't a
gent'lman in all the land - nor yet sailing upon all the sea - that
can love his lady more than I love her, though there's many a
common man - would say better - what he meant.'

I thought it affecting to see such a sturdy fellow as Ham was now,
trembling in the strength of what he felt for the pretty little
creature who had won his heart.  I thought the simple confidence
reposed in us by Mr. Peggotty and by himself, was, in itself,
affecting.  I was affected by the story altogether.  How far my
emotions were influenced by the recollections of my childhood, I
don't know.  Whether I had come there with any lingering fancy that
I was still to love little Em'ly, I don't know.  I know that I was
filled with pleasure by all this; but, at first, with an
indescribably sensitive pleasure, that a very little would have
changed to pain.

Therefore, if it had depended upon me to touch the prevailing chord
among them with any skill, I should have made a poor hand of it. 
But it depended upon Steerforth; and he did it with such address,
that in a few minutes we were all as easy and as happy as it was
possible to be.

'Mr. Peggotty,' he said, 'you are a thoroughly good fellow, and
deserve to be as happy as you are tonight.  My hand upon it!  Ham,
I give you joy, my boy.  My hand upon that, too!  Daisy, stir the
fire, and make it a brisk one! and Mr. Peggotty, unless you can
induce your gentle niece to come back (for whom I vacate this seat
in the corner), I shall go.  Any gap at your fireside on such a
night - such a gap least of all - I wouldn't make, for the wealth
of the Indies!'

So Mr. Peggotty went into my old room to fetch little Em'ly.  At
first little Em'ly didn't like to come, and then Ham went. 
Presently they brought her to the fireside, very much confused, and
very shy, - but she soon became more assured when she found how
gently and respectfully Steerforth spoke to her; how skilfully he
avoided anything that would embarrass her; how he talked to Mr.
Peggotty of boats, and ships, and tides, and fish; how he referred
to me about the time when he had seen Mr. Peggotty at Salem House;
how delighted he was with the boat and all belonging to it; how
lightly and easily he carried on, until he brought us, by degrees,
into a charmed circle, and we were all talking away without any
reserve.

Em'ly, indeed, said little all the evening; but she looked, and
listened, and her face got animated, and she was charming. 
Steerforth told a story of a dismal shipwreck (which arose out of
his talk with Mr. Peggotty), as if he saw it all before him - and
little Em'ly's eyes were fastened on him all the time, as if she
saw it too.  He told us a merry adventure of his own, as a relief
to that, with as much gaiety as if the narrative were as fresh to
him as it was to us - and little Em'ly laughed until the boat rang
with the musical sounds, and we all laughed (Steerforth too), in
irresistible sympathy with what was so pleasant and light-hearted. 
He got Mr. Peggotty to sing, or rather to roar, 'When the stormy
winds do blow, do blow, do blow'; and he sang a sailor's song
himself, so pathetically and beautifully, that I could have almost
fancied that the real wind creeping sorrowfully round the house,
and murmuring low through our unbroken silence, was there to
listen.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, he roused that victim of despondency with a
success never attained by anyone else (so Mr. Peggotty informed
me), since the decease of the old one.  He left her so little
leisure for being miserable, that she said next day she thought she
must have been bewitched.

But he set up no monopoly of the general attention, or the
conversation.  When little Em'ly grew more courageous, and talked
(but still bashfully) across the fire to me, of our old wanderings
upon the beach, to pick up shells and pebbles; and when I asked her
if she recollected how I used to be devoted to her; and when we
both laughed and reddened, casting these looks back on the pleasant
old times, so unreal to look at now; he was silent and attentive,
and observed us thoughtfully.  She sat, at this time, and all the
evening, on the old locker in her old little corner by the fire -
Ham beside her, where I used to sit.  I could not satisfy myself
whether it was in her own little tormenting way, or in a maidenly
reserve before us, that she kept quite close to the wall, and away
from him; but I observed that she did so, all the evening.

As I remember, it was almost midnight when we took our leave.  We
had had some biscuit and dried fish for supper, and Steerforth had
produced from his pocket a full flask of Hollands, which we men (I
may say we men, now, without a blush) had emptied.  We parted
merrily; and as they all stood crowded round the door to light us
as far as they could upon our road, I saw the sweet blue eyes of
little Em'ly peeping after us, from behind Ham, and heard her soft
voice calling to us to be careful how we went.

'A most engaging little Beauty!' said Steerforth, taking my arm. 
'Well!  It's a quaint place, and they are quaint company, and it's
quite a new sensation to mix with them.'

'How fortunate we are, too,' I returned, 'to have arrived to
witness their happiness in that intended marriage!  I never saw
people so happy.  How delightful to see it, and to be made the
sharers in their honest joy, as we have been!'

'That's rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl; isn't he?'
said Steerforth.

He had been so hearty with him, and with them all, that I felt a
shock in this unexpected and cold reply.  But turning quickly upon
him, and seeing a laugh in his eyes, I answered, much relieved:

'Ah, Steerforth!  It's well for you to joke about the poor!  You
may skirmish with Miss Dartle, or try to hide your sympathies in
jest from me, but I know better.  When I see how perfectly you
understand them, how exquisitely you can enter into happiness like
this plain fisherman's, or humour a love like my old nurse's, I
know that there is not a joy or sorrow, not an emotion, of such
people, that can be indifferent to you.  And I admire and love you
for it, Steerforth, twenty times the more!'

He stopped, and, looking in my face, said, 'Daisy, I believe you
are in earnest, and are good.  I wish we all were!' Next moment he
was gaily singing Mr. Peggotty's song, as we walked at a round pace
back to Yarmouth.



CHAPTER 22
SOME OLD SCENES, AND SOME NEW PEOPLE


Steerforth and I stayed for more than a fortnight in that part of
the country.  We were very much together, I need not say; but
occasionally we were asunder for some hours at a time.  He was a
good sailor, and I was but an indifferent one; and when he went out
boating with Mr. Peggotty, which was a favourite amusement of his,
I generally remained ashore.  My occupation of Peggotty's
spare-room put a constraint upon me, from which he was free: for,
knowing how assiduously she attended on Mr. Barkis all day, I did
not like to remain out late at night; whereas Steerforth, lying at
the Inn, had nothing to consult but his own humour.  Thus it came
about, that I heard of his making little treats for the fishermen
at Mr. Peggotty's house of call, 'The Willing Mind', after I was in
bed, and of his being afloat, wrapped in fishermen's clothes, whole
moonlight nights, and coming back when the morning tide was at
flood.  By this time, however, I knew that his restless nature and
bold spirits delighted to find a vent in rough toil and hard
weather, as in any other means of excitement that presented itself
freshly to him; so none of his proceedings surprised me.

Another cause of our being sometimes apart, was, that I had
naturally an interest in going over to Blunderstone, and revisiting
the old familiar scenes of my childhood; while Steerforth, after
being there once, had naturally no great interest in going there
again.  Hence, on three or four days that I can at once recall, we
went our several ways after an early breakfast, and met again at a
late dinner.  I had no idea how he employed his time in the
interval, beyond a general knowledge that he was very popular in
the place, and had twenty means of actively diverting himself where
another man might not have found one.

For my own part, my occupation in my solitary pilgrimages was to
recall every yard of the old road as I went along it, and to haunt
the old spots, of which I never tired.  I haunted them, as my
memory had often done, and lingered among them as my younger
thoughts had lingered when I was far away.  The grave beneath the
tree, where both my parents lay - on which I had looked out, when
it was my father's only, with such curious feelings of compassion,
and by which I had stood, so desolate, when it was opened to
receive my pretty mother and her baby - the grave which Peggotty's
own faithful care had ever since kept neat, and made a garden of,
I walked near, by the hour.  It lay a little off the churchyard
path, in a quiet corner, not so far removed but I could read the
names upon the stone as I walked to and fro, startled by the sound
of the church-bell when it struck the hour, for it was like a
departed voice to me.  My reflections at these times were always
associated with the figure I was to make in life, and the
distinguished things I was to do.  My echoing footsteps went to no
other tune, but were as constant to that as if I had come home to
build my castles in the air at a living mother's side.

There were great changes in my old home.  The ragged nests, so long
deserted by the rooks, were gone; and the trees were lopped and
topped out of their remembered shapes.  The garden had run wild,
and half the windows of the house were shut up.  It was occupied,
but only by a poor lunatic gentleman, and the people who took care
of him.  He was always sitting at my little window, looking out
into the churchyard; and I wondered whether his rambling thoughts
ever went upon any of the fancies that used to occupy mine, on the
rosy mornings when I peeped out of that same little window in my
night-clothes, and saw the sheep quietly feeding in the light of
the rising sun.

Our old neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Grayper, were gone to South
America, and the rain had made its way through the roof of their
empty house, and stained the outer walls.  Mr. Chillip was married
again to a tall, raw-boned, high-nosed wife; and they had a weazen
little baby, with a heavy head that it couldn't hold up, and two
weak staring eyes, with which it seemed to be always wondering why
it had ever been born.

It was with a singular jumble of sadness and pleasure that I used
to linger about my native place, until the reddening winter sun
admonished me that it was time to start on my returning walk.  But,
when the place was left behind, and especially when Steerforth and
I were happily seated over our dinner by a blazing fire, it was
delicious to think of having been there.  So it was, though in a
softened degree, when I went to my neat room at night; and, turning
over the leaves of the crocodile-book (which was always there, upon
a little table), remembered with a grateful heart how blest I was
in having such a friend as Steerforth, such a friend as Peggotty,
and such a substitute for what I had lost as my excellent and
generous aunt.

MY nearest way to Yarmouth, in coming back from these long walks,
was by a ferry.  It landed me on the flat between the town and the
sea, which I could make straight across, and so save myself a
considerable circuit by the high road.  Mr. Peggotty's house being
on that waste-place, and not a hundred yards out of my track, I
always looked in as I went by.  Steerforth was pretty sure to be
there expecting me, and we went on together through the frosty air
and gathering fog towards the twinkling lights of the town.

One dark evening, when I was later than usual - for I had, that
day, been making my parting visit to Blunderstone, as we were now
about to return home - I found him alone in Mr. Peggotty's house,
sitting thoughtfully before the fire.  He was so intent upon his
own reflections that he was quite unconscious of my approach. 
This, indeed, he might easily have been if he had been less
absorbed, for footsteps fell noiselessly on the sandy ground
outside; but even my entrance failed to rouse him.  I was standing
close to him, looking at him; and still, with a heavy brow, he was
lost in his meditations.

He gave such a start when I put my hand upon his shoulder, that he
made me start too.

'You come upon me,' he said, almost angrily, 'like a reproachful
ghost!'

'I was obliged to announce myself, somehow,' I replied.  'Have I
called you down from the stars?'

'No,' he answered.  'No.'

'Up from anywhere, then?' said I, taking my seat near him.

'I was looking at the pictures in the fire,' he returned.

'But you are spoiling them for me,' said I, as he stirred it
quickly with a piece of burning wood, striking out of it a train of
red-hot sparks that went careering up the little chimney, and
roaring out into the air.

'You would not have seen them,' he returned.  'I detest this
mongrel time, neither day nor night.  How late you are!  Where have
you been?'

'I have been taking leave of my usual walk,' said I.

'And I have been sitting here,' said Steerforth, glancing round the
room, 'thinking that all the people we found so glad on the night
of our coming down, might - to judge from the present wasted air of
the place - be dispersed, or dead, or come to I don't know what
harm.  David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last
twenty years!'

'My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?'

'I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!' he exclaimed. 
'I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!'

There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed
me.  He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed
possible.

'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a
nephew,' he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the
chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself,
twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to
myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the
last half-hour!'

I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I could
only observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head upon his
hand, and looking gloomily down at the fire.  At length I begged
him, with all the earnestness I felt, to tell me what had occurred
to cross him so unusually, and to let me sympathize with him, if I
could not hope to advise him.  Before I had well concluded, he
began to laugh - fretfully at first, but soon with returning
gaiety.

'Tut, it's nothing, Daisy! nothing!' he replied.  'I told you at
the inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes.  I
have been a nightmare to myself, just now - must have had one, I
think.  At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory,
unrecognized for what they are.  I believe I have been confounding
myself with the bad boy who "didn't care", and became food for
lions - a grander kind of going to the dogs, I suppose.  What old
women call the horrors, have been creeping over me from head to
foot.  I have been afraid of myself.'

'You are afraid of nothing else, I think,' said I.

'Perhaps not, and yet may have enough to be afraid of too,' he
answered.  'Well!  So it goes by!  I am not about to be hipped
again, David; but I tell you, my good fellow, once more, that it
would have been well for me (and for more than me) if I had had a
steadfast and judicious father!'

His face was always full of expression, but I never saw it express
such a dark kind of earnestness as when he said these words, with
his glance bent on the fire.

'So much for that!' he said, making as if he tossed something light
into the air, with his hand.  "'Why, being gone, I am a man again,"
like Macbeth.  And now for dinner!  If I have not (Macbeth-like)
broken up the feast with most admired disorder, Daisy.'

'But where are they all, I wonder!' said I.

'God knows,' said Steerforth.  'After strolling to the ferry
looking for you, I strolled in here and found the place deserted. 
That set me thinking, and you found me thinking.'

The advent of Mrs. Gummidge with a basket, explained how the house
had happened to be empty.  She had hurried out to buy something
that was needed, against Mr. Peggotty's return with the tide; and
had left the door open in the meanwhile, lest Ham and little Em'ly,
with whom it was an early night, should come home while she was
gone.  Steerforth, after very much improving Mrs. Gummidge's
spirits by a cheerful salutation and a jocose embrace, took my arm,
and hurried me away.

He had improved his own spirits, no less than Mrs. Gummidge's, for
they were again at their usual flow, and he was full of vivacious
conversation as we went along.

'And so,' he said, gaily, 'we abandon this buccaneer life tomorrow,
do we?'

'So we agreed,' I returned.  'And our places by the coach are
taken, you know.'

'Ay! there's no help for it, I suppose,' said Steerforth.  'I have
almost forgotten that there is anything to do in the world but to
go out tossing on the sea here.  I wish there was not.'

'As long as the novelty should last,' said I, laughing.

'Like enough,' he returned; 'though there's a sarcastic meaning in
that observation for an amiable piece of innocence like my young
friend.  Well! I dare say I am a capricious fellow, David.  I know
I am; but while the iron is hot, I can strike it vigorously too. 
I could pass a reasonably good examination already, as a pilot in
these waters, I think.'

'Mr. Peggotty says you are a wonder,' I returned.

'A nautical phenomenon, eh?' laughed Steerforth.

'Indeed he does, and you know how truly; I know how ardent you are
in any pursuit you follow, and how easily you can master it.  And
that amazes me most in you, Steerforth- that you should be
contented with such fitful uses of your powers.'

'Contented?' he answered, merrily.  'I am never contented, except
with your freshness, my gentle Daisy.  As to fitfulness, I have
never learnt the art of binding myself to any of the wheels on
which the Ixions of these days are turning round and round.  I
missed it somehow in a bad apprenticeship, and now don't care about
it.  - You know I have bought a boat down here?'

'What an extraordinary fellow you are, Steerforth!' I exclaimed,
stopping - for this was the first I had heard of it.  'When you may
never care to come near the place again!'

'I don't know that,' he returned.  'I have taken a fancy to the
place.  At all events,' walking me briskly on, 'I have bought a
boat that was for sale - a clipper, Mr. Peggotty says; and so she
is - and Mr. Peggotty will be master of her in my absence.'

'Now I understand you, Steerforth!' said I, exultingly.  'You
pretend to have bought it for yourself, but you have really done so
to confer a benefit on him.  I might have known as much at first,
knowing you.  My dear kind Steerforth, how can I tell you what I
think of your generosity?'

'Tush!' he answered, turning red.  'The less said, the better.'

'Didn't I know?' cried I, 'didn't I say that there was not a joy,
or sorrow, or any emotion of such honest hearts that was
indifferent to you?'

'Aye, aye,' he answered, 'you told me all that.  There let it rest. 
We have said enough!'

Afraid of offending him by pursuing the subject when he made so
light of it, I only pursued it in my thoughts as we went on at even
a quicker pace than before.

'She must be newly rigged,' said Steerforth, 'and I shall leave
Littimer behind to see it done, that I may know she is quite
complete.  Did I tell you Littimer had come down?'

' No.'

'Oh yes! came down this morning, with a letter from my mother.'

As our looks met, I observed that he was pale even to his lips,
though he looked very steadily at me.  I feared that some
difference between him and his mother might have led to his being
in the frame of mind in which I had found him at the solitary
fireside.  I hinted so.

'Oh no!' he said, shaking his head, and giving a slight laugh. 
'Nothing of the sort!  Yes.  He is come down, that man of mine.'

'The same as ever?' said I.

'The same as ever,' said Steerforth.  'Distant and quiet as the
North Pole.  He shall see to the boat being fresh named.  She's the
"Stormy Petrel" now.  What does Mr. Peggotty care for Stormy
Petrels!  I'll have her christened again.'

'By what name?' I asked.

'The "Little Em'ly".'

As he had continued to look steadily at me, I took it as a reminder
that he objected to being extolled for his consideration.  I could
not help showing in my face how much it pleased me, but I said
little, and he resumed his usual smile, and seemed relieved.

'But see here,' he said, looking before us, 'where the original
little Em'ly comes!  And that fellow with her, eh?  Upon my soul,
he's a true knight.  He never leaves her!'

Ham was a boat-builder in these days, having improved a natural
ingenuity in that handicraft, until he had become a skilled
workman.  He was in his working-dress, and looked rugged enough,
but manly withal, and a very fit protector for the blooming little
creature at his side.  Indeed, there was a frankness in his face,
an honesty, and an undisguised show of his pride in her, and his
love for her, which were, to me, the best of good looks.  I
thought, as they came towards us, that they were well matched even
in that particular.

She withdrew her hand timidly from his arm as we stopped to speak
to them, and blushed as she gave it to Steerforth and to me.  When
they passed on, after we had exchanged a few words, she did not
like to replace that hand, but, still appearing timid and
constrained, walked by herself.  I thought all this very pretty and
engaging, and Steerforth seemed to think so too, as we looked after
them fading away in the light of a young moon.

Suddenly there passed us - evidently following them - a young woman
whose approach we had not observed, but whose face I saw as she
went by, and thought I had a faint remembrance of.  She was lightly
dressed; looked bold, and haggard, and flaunting, and poor; but
seemed, for the time, to have given all that to the wind which was
blowing, and to have nothing in her mind but going after them.  As
the dark distant level, absorbing their figures into itself, left
but itself visible between us and the sea and clouds, her figure
disappeared in like manner, still no nearer to them than before.

'That is a black shadow to be following the girl,' said Steerforth,
standing still; 'what does it mean?'

He spoke in a low voice that sounded almost strange to Me.

'She must have it in her mind to beg of them, I think,' said I.

'A beggar would be no novelty,' said Steerforth; 'but it is a
strange thing that the beggar should take that shape tonight.'

'Why?' I asked.

'For no better reason, truly, than because I was thinking,' he
said, after a pause, 'of something like it, when it came by.  Where
the Devil did it come from, I wonder!'

'From the shadow of this wall, I think,' said I, as we emerged upon
a road on which a wall abutted.

'It's gone!' he returned, looking over his shoulder.  'And all ill
go with it.  Now for our dinner!'

But he looked again over his shoulder towards the sea-line
glimmering afar off, and yet again.  And he wondered about it, in
some broken expressions, several times, in the short remainder of
our walk; and only seemed to forget it when the light of fire and
candle shone upon us, seated warm and merry, at table.

Littimer was there, and had his usual effect upon me.  When I said
to him that I hoped Mrs. Steerforth and Miss Dartle were well, he
answered respectfully (and of course respectably), that they were
tolerably well, he thanked me, and had sent their compliments. 
This was all, and yet he seemed to me to say as plainly as a man
could say: 'You are very young, sir; you are exceedingly young.'

We had almost finished dinner, when taking a step or two towards
the table, from the corner where he kept watch upon us, or rather
upon me, as I felt, he said to his master:

'I beg your pardon, sir.  Miss Mowcher is down here.'

'Who?' cried Steerforth, much astonished.

'Miss Mowcher, sir.'

'Why, what on earth does she do here?' said Steerforth.

'It appears to be her native part of the country, sir.  She informs
me that she makes one of her professional visits here, every year,
sir.  I met her in the street this afternoon, and she wished to
know if she might have the honour of waiting on you after dinner,
sir.'

'Do you know the Giantess in question, Daisy?' inquired Steerforth.

I was obliged to confess - I felt ashamed, even of being at this
disadvantage before Littimer - that Miss Mowcher and I were wholly
unacquainted.

'Then you shall know her,' said Steerforth, 'for she is one of the
seven wonders of the world.  When Miss Mowcher comes, show her in.'

I felt some curiosity and excitement about this lady, especially as
Steerforth burst into a fit of laughing when I referred to her, and
positively refused to answer any question of which I made her the
subject.  I remained, therefore, in a state of considerable
expectation until the cloth had been removed some half an hour, and
we were sitting over our decanter of wine before the fire, when the
door opened, and Littimer, with his habitual serenity quite
undisturbed, announced:

'Miss Mowcher!'

I looked at the doorway and saw nothing.  I was still looking at
the doorway, thinking that Miss Mowcher was a long while making her
appearance, when, to my infinite astonishment, there came waddling
round a sofa which stood between me and it, a pursy dwarf, of about
forty or forty-five, with a very large head and face, a pair of
roguish grey eyes, and such extremely little arms, that, to enable
herself to lay a finger archly against her snub nose, as she ogled
Steerforth, she was obliged to meet the finger half-way, and lay
her nose against it.  Her chin, which was what is called a double
chin, was so fat that it entirely swallowed up the strings of her
bonnet, bow and all.  Throat she had none; waist she had none; legs
she had none, worth mentioning; for though she was more than
full-sized down to where her waist would have been, if she had had
any, and though she terminated, as human beings generally do, in a
pair of feet, she was so short that she stood at a common-sized
chair as at a table, resting a bag she carried on the seat.  This
lady - dressed in an off-hand, easy style; bringing her nose and
her forefinger together, with the difficulty I have described;
standing with her head necessarily on one side, and, with one of
her sharp eyes shut up, making an uncommonly knowing face - after
ogling Steerforth for a few moments, broke into a torrent of words.

'What!  My flower!' she pleasantly began, shaking her large head at
him.  'You're there, are you!  Oh, you naughty boy, fie for shame,
what do you do so far away from home?  Up to mischief, I'll be
bound.  Oh, you're a downy fellow, Steerforth, so you are, and I'm
another, ain't I?  Ha, ha, ha!  You'd have betted a hundred pound
to five, now, that you wouldn't have seen me here, wouldn't you? 
Bless you, man alive, I'm everywhere.  I'm here and there, and
where not, like the conjurer's half-crown in the lady's
handkercher.  Talking of handkerchers - and talking of ladies -
what a comfort you are to your blessed mother, ain't you, my dear
boy, over one of my shoulders, and I don't say which!'

Miss Mowcher untied her bonnet, at this passage of her discourse,
threw back the strings, and sat down, panting, on a footstool in
front of the fire - making a kind of arbour of the dining table,
which spread its mahogany shelter above her head.

'Oh my stars and what's-their-names!' she went on, clapping a hand
on each of her little knees, and glancing shrewdly at me, 'I'm of
too full a habit, that's the fact, Steerforth.  After a flight of
stairs, it gives me as much trouble to draw every breath I want, as
if it was a bucket of water.  If you saw me looking out of an upper
window, you'd think I was a fine woman, wouldn't you?'

'I should think that, wherever I saw you,' replied Steerforth.

'Go along, you dog, do!' cried the little creature, making a whisk
at him with the handkerchief with which she was wiping her face,
'and don't be impudent!  But I give you my word and honour I was at
Lady Mithers's last week - THERE'S a woman!  How SHE wears! - and
Mithers himself came into the room where I was waiting for her -
THERE'S a man!  How HE wears! and his wig too, for he's had it
these ten years - and he went on at that rate in the complimentary
line, that I began to think I should be obliged to ring the bell. 
Ha! ha! ha!  He's a pleasant wretch, but he wants principle.'

'What were you doing for Lady Mithers?' asked Steerforth.

'That's tellings, my blessed infant,' she retorted, tapping her
nose again, screwing up her face, and twinkling her eyes like an
imp of supernatural intelligence.  'Never YOU mind!  You'd like to
know whether I stop her hair from falling off, or dye it, or touch
up her complexion, or improve her eyebrows, wouldn't you?  And so
you shall, my darling - when I tell you!  Do you know what my great
grandfather's name was?'

'No,' said Steerforth.

'It was Walker, my sweet pet,' replied Miss Mowcher, 'and he came
of a long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the Hookey estates
from.'

I never beheld anything approaching to Miss Mowcher's wink except
Miss Mowcher's self-possession.  She had a wonderful way too, when
listening to what was said to her, or when waiting for an answer to
what she had said herself, of pausing with her head cunningly on
one side, and one eye turned up like a magpie's.  Altogether I was
lost in amazement, and sat staring at her, quite oblivious, I am
afraid, of the laws of politeness.

She had by this time drawn the chair to her side, and was busily
engaged in producing from the bag (plunging in her short arm to the
shoulder, at every dive) a number of small bottles, sponges, combs,
brushes, bits of flannel, little pairs of curling-irons, and other
instruments, which she tumbled in a heap upon the chair.  From this
employment she suddenly desisted, and said to Steerforth, much to
my confusion:

'Who's your friend?'

'Mr. Copperfield,' said Steerforth; 'he wants to know you.'

'Well, then, he shall!  I thought he looked as if he did!' returned
Miss Mowcher, waddling up to me, bag in hand, and laughing on me as
she came.  'Face like a peach!' standing on tiptoe to pinch my
cheek as I sat.  'Quite tempting!  I'm very fond of peaches.  Happy
to make your acquaintance, Mr. Copperfield, I'm sure.'

I said that I congratulated myself on having the honour to make
hers, and that the happiness was mutual.

'Oh, my goodness, how polite we are!' exclaimed Miss Mowcher,
making a preposterous attempt to cover her large face with her
morsel of a hand.  'What a world of gammon and spinnage it is,
though, ain't it!'

This was addressed confidentially to both of us, as the morsel of
a hand came away from the face, and buried itself, arm and all, in
the bag again.

'What do you mean, Miss Mowcher?' said Steerforth.

'Ha! ha! ha!  What a refreshing set of humbugs we are, to be sure,
ain't we, my sweet child?' replied that morsel of a woman, feeling
in the bag with her head on one side and her eye in the air.  'Look
here!' taking something out.  'Scraps of the Russian Prince's
nails.  Prince Alphabet turned topsy-turvy, I call him, for his
name's got all the letters in it, higgledy-piggledy.'

'The Russian Prince is a client of yours, is he?' said Steerforth.

'I believe you, my pet,' replied Miss Mowcher.  'I keep his nails
in order for him.  Twice a week!  Fingers and toes.'

'He pays well, I hope?' said Steerforth.

'Pays, as he speaks, my dear child - through the nose,' replied
Miss Mowcher.  'None of your close shavers the Prince ain't.  You'd
say so, if you saw his moustachios.  Red by nature, black by art.'

'By your art, of course,' said Steerforth.

Miss Mowcher winked assent.  'Forced to send for me.  Couldn't help
it.  The climate affected his dye; it did very well in Russia, but
it was no go here.  You never saw such a rusty Prince in all your
born days as he was.  Like old iron!'
'Is that why you called him a humbug, just now?' inquired
Steerforth.

'Oh, you're a broth of a boy, ain't you?' returned Miss Mowcher,
shaking her head violently.  'I said, what a set of humbugs we were
in general, and I showed you the scraps of the Prince's nails to
prove it.  The Prince's nails do more for me in private families of
the genteel sort, than all my talents put together.  I always carry
'em about.  They're the best introduction.  If Miss Mowcher cuts
the Prince's nails, she must be all right.  I give 'em away to the
young ladies.  They put 'em in albums, I believe.  Ha!  ha! ha! 
Upon my life, "the whole social system" (as the men call it when
they make speeches in Parliament) is a system of Prince's nails!'
said this least of women, trying to fold her short arms, and
nodding her large head.

Steerforth laughed heartily, and I laughed too.  Miss Mowcher
continuing all the time to shake her head (which was very much on
one side), and to look into the air with one eye, and to wink with
the other.

'Well, well!' she said, smiting her small knees, and rising, 'this
is not business.  Come, Steerforth, let's explore the polar
regions, and have it over.'

She then selected two or three of the little instruments, and a
little bottle, and asked (to my surprise) if the table would bear. 
On Steerforth's replying in the affirmative, she pushed a chair
against it, and begging the assistance of my hand, mounted up,
pretty nimbly, to the top, as if it were a stage.

'If either of you saw my ankles,' she said, when she was safely
elevated, 'say so, and I'll go home and destroy myself!'

'I did not,' said Steerforth.

'I did not,' said I.

'Well then,' cried Miss Mowcher,' I'll consent to live.  Now,
ducky, ducky, ducky, come to Mrs. Bond and be killed.'

This was an invocation to Steerforth to place himself under her
hands; who, accordingly, sat himself down, with his back to the
table, and his laughing face towards me, and submitted his head to
her inspection, evidently for no other purpose than our
entertainment.  To see Miss Mowcher standing over him, looking at
his rich profusion of brown hair through a large round magnifying
glass, which she took out of her pocket, was a most amazing
spectacle.

'You're a pretty fellow!' said Miss Mowcher, after a brief
inspection.  'You'd be as bald as a friar on the top of your head
in twelve months, but for me.  just half a minute, my young friend,
and we'll give you a polishing that shall keep your curls on for
the next ten years!'

With this, she tilted some of the contents of the little bottle on
to one of the little bits of flannel, and, again imparting some of
the virtues of that preparation to one of the little brushes, began
rubbing and scraping away with both on the crown of Steerforth's
head in the busiest manner I ever witnessed, talking all the time.

'There's Charley Pyegrave, the duke's son,' she said.  'You know
Charley?' peeping round into his face.

'A little,' said Steerforth.

'What a man HE is!  THERE'S a whisker!  As to Charley's legs, if
they were only a pair (which they ain't), they'd defy competition. 
Would you believe he tried to do without me - in the Life-Guards,
too?'

'Mad!' said Steerforth.

'It looks like it.  However, mad or sane, he tried,' returned Miss
Mowcher.  'What does he do, but, lo and behold you, he goes into a
perfumer's shop, and wants to buy a bottle of the Madagascar
Liquid.'

'Charley does?' said Steerforth.

'Charley does.  But they haven't got any of the Madagascar Liquid.'

'What is it?  Something to drink?' asked Steerforth.

'To drink?' returned Miss Mowcher, stopping to slap his cheek.  'To
doctor his own moustachios with, you know.  There was a woman in
the shop - elderly female - quite a Griffin - who had never even
heard of it by name.  "Begging pardon, sir," said the Griffin to
Charley, "it's not - not - not ROUGE, is it?"  "Rouge," said
Charley to the Griffin.  "What the unmentionable to ears polite, do
you think I want with rouge?"  "No offence, sir," said the Griffin;
"we have it asked for by so many names, I thought it might be." Now
that, my child,' continued Miss Mowcher, rubbing all the time as
busily as ever, 'is another instance of the refreshing humbug I was
speaking of.  I do something in that way myself - perhaps a good
deal - perhaps a little - sharp's the word, my dear boy - never
mind!'

'In what way do you mean?  In the rouge way?' said Steerforth.

'Put this and that together, my tender pupil,' returned the wary
Mowcher, touching her nose, 'work it by the rule of Secrets in all
trades, and the product will give you the desired result.  I say I
do a little in that way myself.  One Dowager, SHE calls it
lip-salve.  Another, SHE calls it gloves.  Another, SHE calls it
tucker-edging.  Another, SHE calls it a fan.  I call it whatever
THEY call it.  I supply it for 'em, but we keep up the trick so, to
one another, and make believe with such a face, that they'd as soon
think of laying it on, before a whole drawing-room, as before me. 
And when I wait upon 'em, they'll say to me sometimes - WITH IT ON
- thick, and no mistake - "How am I looking, Mowcher?  Am I pale?"
Ha! ha! ha! ha!  Isn't THAT refreshing, my young friend!'

I never did in my days behold anything like Mowcher as she stood
upon the dining table, intensely enjoying this refreshment, rubbing
busily at Steerforth's head, and winking at me over it.

'Ah!' she said.  'Such things are not much in demand hereabouts. 
That sets me off again!  I haven't seen a pretty woman since I've
been here, jemmy.'

'No?' said Steerforth.

'Not the ghost of one,' replied Miss Mowcher.

'We could show her the substance of one, I think?' said Steerforth,
addressing his eyes to mine.  'Eh, Daisy?'

'Yes, indeed,' said I.

'Aha?' cried the little creature, glancing sharply at my face, and
then peeping round at Steerforth's.  'Umph?'

The first exclamation sounded like a question put to both of us,
and the second like a question put to Steerforth only.  She seemed
to have found no answer to either, but continued to rub, with her
head on one side and her eye turned up, as if she were looking for
an answer in the air and were confident of its appearing presently.

'A sister of yours, Mr. Copperfield?' she cried, after a pause, and
still keeping the same look-out.  'Aye, aye?'

'No,' said Steerforth, before I could reply.  'Nothing of the sort. 
On the contrary, Mr. Copperfield used - or I am much mistaken - to
have a great admiration for her.'

'Why, hasn't he now?' returned Miss Mowcher.  'Is he fickle?  Oh,
for shame!  Did he sip every flower, and change every hour, until
Polly his passion requited? - Is her name Polly?'

The Elfin suddenness with which she pounced upon me with this
question, and a searching look, quite disconcerted me for a moment.

'No, Miss Mowcher,' I replied.  'Her name is Emily.'

'Aha?' she cried exactly as before.  'Umph?  What a rattle I am!
Mr. Copperfield, ain't I volatile?'

Her tone and look implied something that was not agreeable to me in
connexion with the subject.  So I said, in a graver manner than any
of us had yet assumed:
'She is as virtuous as she is pretty.  She is engaged to be married
to a most worthy and deserving man in her own station of life.  I
esteem her for her good sense, as much as I admire her for her good
looks.'

'Well said!' cried Steerforth.  'Hear, hear, hear!  Now I'll quench
the curiosity of this little Fatima, my dear Daisy, by leaving her
nothing to guess at.  She is at present apprenticed, Miss Mowcher,
or articled, or whatever it may be, to Omer and Joram,
Haberdashers, Milliners, and so forth, in this town.  Do you
observe?  Omer and Joram.  The promise of which my friend has
spoken, is made and entered into with her cousin; Christian name,
Ham; surname, Peggotty; occupation, boat-builder; also of this
town.  She lives with a relative; Christian name, unknown; surname,
Peggotty; occupation, seafaring; also of this town.  She is the
prettiest and most engaging little fairy in the world.  I admire
her - as my friend does - exceedingly.  If it were not that I might
appear to disparage her Intended, which I know my friend would not
like, I would add, that to me she seems to be throwing herself
away; that I am sure she might do better; and that I swear she was
born to be a lady.'

Miss Mowcher listened to these words, which were very slowly and
distinctly spoken, with her head on one side, and her eye in the
air as if she were still looking for that answer.  When he ceased
she became brisk again in an instant, and rattled away with
surprising volubility.

'Oh!  And that's all about it, is it?' she exclaimed, trimming his
whiskers with a little restless pair of scissors, that went
glancing round his head in all directions.  'Very well: very well!
Quite a long story.  Ought to end "and they lived happy ever
afterwards"; oughtn't it?  Ah!  What's that game at forfeits?  I
love my love with an E, because she's enticing; I hate her with an
E, because she's engaged.  I took her to the sign of the exquisite,
and treated her with an elopement, her name's Emily, and she lives
in the east?  Ha! ha! ha!  Mr. Copperfield, ain't I volatile?'

Merely looking at me with extravagant slyness, and not waiting for
any reply, she continued, without drawing breath:

'There!  If ever any scapegrace was trimmed and touched up to
perfection, you are, Steerforth.  If I understand any noddle in the
world, I understand yours.  Do you hear me when I tell you that, my
darling?  I understand yours,' peeping down into his face.  'Now
you may mizzle, jemmy (as we say at Court), and if Mr. Copperfield
will take the chair I'll operate on him.'

'What do you say, Daisy?' inquired Steerforth, laughing, and
resigning his seat.  'Will you be improved?'

'Thank you, Miss Mowcher, not this evening.'

'Don't say no,' returned the little woman, looking at me with the
aspect of a connoisseur; 'a little bit more eyebrow?'

'Thank you,' I returned, 'some other time.'

'Have it carried half a quarter of an inch towards the temple,'
said Miss Mowcher.  'We can do it in a fortnight.'

'No, I thank you.  Not at present.'

'Go in for a tip,' she urged.  'No?  Let's get the scaffolding up,
then, for a pair of whiskers.  Come!'

I could not help blushing as I declined, for I felt we were on my
weak point, now.  But Miss Mowcher, finding that I was not at
present disposed for any decoration within the range of her art,
and that I was, for the time being, proof against the blandishments
of the small bottle which she held up before one eye to enforce her
persuasions, said we would make a beginning on an early day, and
requested the aid of my hand to descend from her elevated station. 
Thus assisted, she skipped down with much agility, and began to tie
her double chin into her bonnet.

'The fee,' said Steerforth, 'is -'

'Five bob,' replied Miss Mowcher, 'and dirt cheap, my chicken. 
Ain't I volatile, Mr. Copperfield?'

I replied politely: 'Not at all.'  But I thought she was rather so,
when she tossed up his two half-crowns like a goblin pieman, caught
them, dropped them in her pocket, and gave it a loud slap.

'That's the Till!' observed Miss Mowcher, standing at the chair
again, and replacing in the bag a miscellaneous collection of
little objects she had emptied out of it.  'Have I got all my
traps?  It seems so.  It won't do to be like long Ned Beadwood,
when they took him to church "to marry him to somebody", as he
says, and left the bride behind.  Ha! ha! ha!  A wicked rascal,
Ned, but droll!  Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I
am forced to leave you.  You must call up all your fortitude, and
try to bear it.  Good-bye, Mr. Copperfield!  Take care of yourself,
jockey of Norfolk!  How I have been rattling on!  It's all the
fault of you two wretches.  I forgive you!  "Bob swore!" - as the
Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and
thought it so like English.  "Bob swore," my ducks!'

With the bag slung over her arm, and rattling as she waddled away,
she waddled to the door, where she stopped to inquire if she should
leave us a lock of her hair.  'Ain't I volatile?' she added, as a
commentary on this offer, and, with her finger on her nose,
departed.

Steerforth laughed to that degree, that it was impossible for me to
help laughing too; though I am not sure I should have done so, but
for this inducement.  When we had had our laugh quite out, which
was after some time, he told me that Miss Mowcher had quite an
extensive connexion, and made herself useful to a variety of people
in a variety of ways.  Some people trifled with her as a mere
oddity, he said; but she was as shrewdly and sharply observant as
anyone he knew, and as long-headed as she was short-armed.  He told
me that what she had said of being here, and there, and everywhere,
was true enough; for she made little darts into the provinces, and
seemed to pick up customers everywhere, and to know everybody.  I
asked him what her disposition was: whether it was at all
mischievous, and if her sympathies were generally on the right side
of things: but, not succeeding in attracting his attention to these
questions after two or three attempts, I forbore or forgot to
repeat them.  He told me instead, with much rapidity, a good deal
about her skill, and her profits; and about her being a scientific
cupper, if I should ever have occasion for her service in that
capacity.

She was the principal theme of our conversation during the evening:
and when we parted for the night Steerforth called after me over
the banisters, 'Bob swore!' as I went downstairs.

I was surprised, when I came to Mr. Barkis's house, to find Ham
walking up and down in front of it, and still more surprised to
learn from him that little Em'ly was inside.  I naturally inquired
why he was not there too, instead of pacing the streets by himself?

'Why, you see, Mas'r Davy,' he rejoined, in a hesitating manner,
'Em'ly, she's talking to some 'un in here.'

'I should have thought,' said I, smiling, 'that that was a reason
for your being in here too, Ham.'

'Well, Mas'r Davy, in a general way, so 't would be,' he returned;
'but look'ee here, Mas'r Davy,' lowering his voice, and speaking
very gravely.  'It's a young woman, sir - a young woman, that Em'ly
knowed once, and doen't ought to know no more.'

When I heard these words, a light began to fall upon the figure I
had seen following them, some hours ago.

'It's a poor wurem, Mas'r Davy,' said Ham, 'as is trod under foot
by all the town.  Up street and down street.  The mowld o' the
churchyard don't hold any that the folk shrink away from, more.'

'Did I see her tonight, Ham, on the sand, after we met you?'

'Keeping us in sight?' said Ham.  'It's like you did, Mas'r Davy. 
Not that I know'd then, she was theer, sir, but along of her
creeping soon arterwards under Em'ly's little winder, when she see
the light come, and whispering "Em'ly, Em'ly, for Christ's sake,
have a woman's heart towards me.  I was once like you!" Those was
solemn words, Mas'r Davy, fur to hear!'

'They were indeed, Ham.  What did Em'ly do?'
'Says Em'ly, "Martha, is it you?  Oh, Martha, can it be you?" - for
they had sat at work together, many a day, at Mr. Omer's.'

'I recollect her now!' cried I, recalling one of the two girls I
had seen when I first went there.  'I recollect her quite well!'

'Martha Endell,' said Ham.  'Two or three year older than Em'ly,
but was at the school with her.'

'I never heard her name,' said I.  'I didn't mean to interrupt
you.'

'For the matter o' that, Mas'r Davy,' replied Ham, 'all's told
a'most in them words, "Em'ly, Em'ly, for Christ's sake, have a
woman's heart towards me.  I was once like you!" She wanted to
speak to Em'ly.  Em'ly couldn't speak to her theer, for her loving
uncle was come home, and he wouldn't - no, Mas'r Davy,' said Ham,
with great earnestness, 'he couldn't, kind-natur'd, tender-hearted
as he is, see them two together, side by side, for all the
treasures that's wrecked in the sea.'

I felt how true this was.  I knew it, on the instant, quite as well
as Ham.

'So Em'ly writes in pencil on a bit of paper,' he pursued, 'and
gives it to her out o' winder to bring here.  "Show that," she
says, "to my aunt, Mrs. Barkis, and she'll set you down by her
fire, for the love of me, till uncle is gone out, and I can come."
By and by she tells me what I tell you, Mas'r Davy, and asks me to
bring her.  What can I do?  She doen't ought to know any such, but
I can't deny her, when the tears is on her face.'

He put his hand into the breast of his shaggy jacket, and took out
with great care a pretty little purse.

'And if I could deny her when the tears was on her face, Mas'r
Davy,' said Ham, tenderly adjusting it on the rough palm of his
hand, 'how could I deny her when she give me this to carry for her
- knowing what she brought it for?  Such a toy as it is!' said Ham,
thoughtfully looking on it.  'With such a little money in it, Em'ly
my dear.'

I shook him warmly by the hand when he had put it away again - for
that was more satisfactory to me than saying anything - and we
walked up and down, for a minute or two, in silence.  The door
opened then, and Peggotty appeared, beckoning to Ham to come in. 
I would have kept away, but she came after me, entreating me to
come in too.  Even then, I would have avoided the room where they
all were, but for its being the neat-tiled kitchen I have mentioned
more than once.  The door opening immediately into it, I found
myself among them before I considered whither I was going.

The girl - the same I had seen upon the sands - was near the fire. 
She was sitting on the ground, with her head and one arm lying on
a chair.  I fancied, from the disposition of her figure, that Em'ly
had but newly risen from the chair, and that the forlorn head might
perhaps have been lying on her lap.  I saw but little of the girl's
face, over which her hair fell loose and scattered, as if she had
been disordering it with her own hands; but I saw that she was
young, and of a fair complexion.  Peggotty had been crying.  So had
little Em'ly.  Not a word was spoken when we first went in; and the
Dutch clock by the dresser seemed, in the silence, to tick twice as
loud as usual.  Em'ly spoke first.

'Martha wants,' she said to Ham, 'to go to London.'

'Why to London?' returned Ham.

He stood between them, looking on the prostrate girl with a mixture
of compassion for her, and of jealousy of her holding any
companionship with her whom he loved so well, which I have always
remembered distinctly.  They both spoke as if she were ill; in a
soft, suppressed tone that was plainly heard, although it hardly
rose above a whisper.

'Better there than here,' said a third voice aloud - Martha's,
though she did not move.  'No one knows me there.  Everybody knows
me here.'

'What will she do there?' inquired Ham.

She lifted up her head, and looked darkly round at him for a
moment; then laid it down again, and curved her right arm about her
neck, as a woman in a fever, or in an agony of pain from a shot,
might twist herself.

'She will try to do well,' said little Em'ly.  'You don't know what
she has said to us.  Does he - do they - aunt?'

Peggotty shook her head compassionately.

'I'll try,' said Martha, 'if you'll help me away.  I never can do
worse than I have done here.  I may do better.  Oh!' with a
dreadful shiver, 'take me out of these streets, where the whole
town knows me from a child!'

As Em'ly held out her hand to Ham, I saw him put in it a little
canvas bag.  She took it, as if she thought it were her purse, and
made a step or two forward; but finding her mistake, came back to
where he had retired near me, and showed it to him.

'It's all yourn, Em'ly,' I could hear him say.  'I haven't nowt in
all the wureld that ain't yourn, my dear.  It ain't of no delight
to me, except for you!'

The tears rose freshly in her eyes, but she turned away and went to
Martha.  What she gave her, I don't know.  I saw her stooping over
her, and putting money in her bosom.  She whispered something, as
she asked was that enough?  'More than enough,' the other said, and
took her hand and kissed it.

Then Martha arose, and gathering her shawl about her, covering her
face with it, and weeping aloud, went slowly to the door.  She
stopped a moment before going out, as if she would have uttered
something or turned back; but no word passed her lips.  Making the
same low, dreary, wretched moaning in her shawl, she went away.

As the door closed, little Em'ly looked at us three in a hurried
manner and then hid her face in her hands, and fell to sobbing.

'Doen't, Em'ly!' said Ham, tapping her gently on the shoulder. 
'Doen't, my dear!  You doen't ought to cry so, pretty!'

'Oh, Ham!' she exclaimed, still weeping pitifully, 'I am not so
good a girl as I ought to be!  I know I have not the thankful
heart, sometimes, I ought to have!'

'Yes, yes, you have, I'm sure,' said Ham.

'No! no! no!' cried little Em'ly, sobbing, and shaking her head. 
'I am not as good a girl as I ought to be.  Not near! not near!'
And still she cried, as if her heart would break.

'I try your love too much.  I know I do!' she sobbed.  'I'm often
cross to you, and changeable with you, when I ought to be far
different.  You are never so to me.  Why am I ever so to you, when
I should think of nothing but how to be grateful, and to make you
happy!'

'You always make me so,' said Ham, 'my dear!  I am happy in the
sight of you.  I am happy, all day long, in the thoughts of you.'

'Ah! that's not enough!' she cried.  'That is because you are good;
not because I am!  Oh, my dear, it might have been a better fortune
for you, if you had been fond of someone else - of someone steadier
and much worthier than me, who was all bound up in you, and never
vain and changeable like me!'

'Poor little tender-heart,' said Ham, in a low voice.  'Martha has
overset her, altogether.'

'Please, aunt,' sobbed Em'ly, 'come here, and let me lay my head
upon you.  Oh, I am very miserable tonight, aunt!  Oh, I am not as
good a girl as I ought to be.  I am not, I know!'

Peggotty had hastened to the chair before the fire.  Em'ly, with
her arms around her neck, kneeled by her, looking up most earnestly
into her face.

'Oh, pray, aunt, try to help me!  Ham, dear, try to help me!  Mr.
David, for the sake of old times, do, please, try to help me!  I
want to be a better girl than I am.  I want to feel a hundred times
more thankful than I do.  I want to feel more, what a blessed thing
it is to be the wife of a good man, and to lead a peaceful life. 
Oh me, oh me!  Oh my heart, my heart!'

She dropped her face on my old nurse's breast, and, ceasing this
supplication, which in its agony and grief was half a woman's, half
a child's, as all her manner was (being, in that, more natural, and
better suited to her beauty, as I thought, than any other manner
could have been), wept silently, while my old nurse hushed her like
an infant.

She got calmer by degrees, and then we soothed her; now talking
encouragingly, and now jesting a little with her, until she began
to raise her head and speak to us.  So we got on, until she was
able to smile, and then to laugh, and then to sit up, half ashamed;
while Peggotty recalled her stray ringlets, dried her eyes, and
made her neat again, lest her uncle should wonder, when she got
home, why his darling had been crying.

I saw her do, that night, what I had never seen her do before.  I
saw her innocently kiss her chosen husband on the cheek, and creep
close to his bluff form as if it were her best support.  When they
went away together, in the waning moonlight, and I looked after
them, comparing their departure in my mind with Martha's, I saw
that she held his arm with both her hands, and still kept close to
him.



CHAPTER 23
I CORROBORATE Mr. DICK, AND CHOOSE A PROFESSION


When I awoke in the morning I thought very much of little Em'ly,
and her emotion last night, after Martha had left.  I felt as if I
had come into the knowledge of those domestic weaknesses and
tendernesses in a sacred confidence, and that to disclose them,
even to Steerforth, would be wrong.  I had no gentler feeling
towards anyone than towards the pretty creature who had been my
playmate, and whom I have always been persuaded, and shall always
be persuaded, to my dying day, I then devotedly loved.  The
repetition to any ears - even to Steerforth's - of what she had
been unable to repress when her heart lay open to me by an
accident, I felt would be a rough deed, unworthy of myself,
unworthy of the light of our pure childhood, which I always saw
encircling her head.  I made a resolution, therefore, to keep it in
my own breast; and there it gave her image a new grace.

While we were at breakfast, a letter was delivered to me from my
aunt.  As it contained matter on which I thought Steerforth could
advise me as well as anyone, and on which I knew I should be
delighted to consult him, I resolved to make it a subject of
discussion on our journey home.  For the present we had enough to
do, in taking leave of all our friends.  Mr. Barkis was far from
being the last among them, in his regret at our departure; and I
believe would even have opened the box again, and sacrificed
another guinea, if it would have kept us eight-and-forty hours in
Yarmouth.  Peggotty and all her family were full of grief at our
going.  The whole house of Omer and Joram turned out to bid us
good-bye; and there were so many seafaring volunteers in attendance
on Steerforth, when our portmanteaux went to the coach, that if we
had had the baggage of a regiment with us, we should hardly have
wanted porters to carry it.  In a word, we departed to the regret
and admiration of all concerned, and left a great many people very
sorry behind US.

Do you stay long here, Littimer?' said I, as he stood waiting to
see the coach start.

'No, sir,' he replied; 'probably not very long, sir.'

'He can hardly say, just now,' observed Steerforth, carelessly. 
'He knows what he has to do, and he'll do it.'

'That I am sure he will,' said I.

Littimer touched his hat in acknowledgement of my good opinion, and
I felt about eight years old.  He touched it once more, wishing us
a good journey; and we left him standing on the pavement, as
respectable a mystery as any pyramid in Egypt.

For some little time we held no conversation, Steerforth being
unusually silent, and I being sufficiently engaged in wondering,
within myself, when I should see the old places again, and what new
changes might happen to me or them in the meanwhile.  At length
Steerforth, becoming gay and talkative in a moment, as he could
become anything he liked at any moment, pulled me by the arm:

'Find a voice, David.  What about that letter you were speaking of
at breakfast?'

'Oh!' said I, taking it out of my pocket.  'It's from my aunt.'

'And what does she say, requiring consideration?'

'Why, she reminds me, Steerforth,' said I, 'that I came out on
this expedition to look about me, and to think a little.'

'Which, of course, you have done?'

'Indeed I can't say I have, particularly.  To tell you the truth,
I am afraid I have forgotten it.'

'Well! look about you now, and make up for your negligence,' said
Steerforth.  'Look to the right, and you'll see a flat country,
with a good deal of marsh in it; look to the left, and you'll see
the same.  Look to the front, and you'll find no difference; look
to the rear, and there it is still.'
I laughed, and replied that I saw no suitable profession in the
whole prospect; which was perhaps to be attributed to its flatness.

'What says our aunt on the subject?' inquired Steerforth, glancing
at the letter in my hand.  'Does she suggest anything?'

'Why, yes,' said I.  'She asks me, here, if I think I should like
to be a proctor?  What do you think of it?'

'Well, I don't know,' replied Steerforth, coolly.  'You may as well
do that as anything else, I suppose?'

I could not help laughing again, at his balancing all callings and
professions so equally; and I told him so.

'What is a proctor, Steerforth?' said I.

'Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney,' replied Steerforth.  'He
is, to some faded courts held in Doctors' Commons, - a lazy old
nook near St. Paul's Churchyard - what solicitors are to the courts
of law and equity.  He is a functionary whose existence, in the
natural course of things, would have terminated about two hundred
years ago.  I can tell you best what he is, by telling you what
Doctors' Commons is.  It's a little out-of-the-way place, where
they administer what is called ecclesiastical law, and play all
kinds of tricks with obsolete old monsters of acts of Parliament,
which three-fourths of the world know nothing about, and the other
fourth supposes to have been dug up, in a fossil state, in the days
of the Edwards.  It's a place that has an ancient monopoly in suits
about people's wills and people's marriages, and disputes among
ships and boats.'

'Nonsense, Steerforth!' I exclaimed.  'You don't mean to say that
there is any affinity between nautical matters and ecclesiastical
matters?'

'I don't, indeed, my dear boy,' he returned; 'but I mean to say
that they are managed and decided by the same set of people, down
in that same Doctors' Commons.  You shall go there one day, and
find them blundering through half the nautical terms in Young's
Dictionary, apropos of the "Nancy" having run down the "Sarah
Jane", or Mr. Peggotty and the Yarmouth boatmen having put off in
a gale of wind with an anchor and cable to the "Nelson" Indiaman in
distress; and you shall go there another day, and find them deep in
the evidence, pro and con, respecting a clergyman who has
misbehaved himself; and you shall find the judge in the nautical
case, the advocate in the clergyman's case, or contrariwise.  They
are like actors: now a man's a judge, and now he is not a judge;
now he's one thing, now he's another; now he's something else,
change and change about; but it's always a very pleasant,
profitable little affair of private theatricals, presented to an
uncommonly select audience.'

'But advocates and proctors are not one and the same?' said I, a
little puzzled.  'Are they?'

'No,' returned Steerforth, 'the advocates are civilians - men who
have taken a doctor's degree at college - which is the first reason
of my knowing anything about it.  The proctors employ the
advocates.  Both get very comfortable fees, and altogether they
make a mighty snug little party.  On the whole, I would recommend
you to take to Doctors' Commons kindly, David.  They plume them-
selves on their gentility there, I can tell you, if that's any
satisfaction.'

I made allowance for Steerforth's light way of treating the
subject, and, considering it with reference to the staid air of
gravity and antiquity which I associated with that 'lazy old nook
near St. Paul's Churchyard', did not feel indisposed towards my
aunt's suggestion; which she left to my free decision, making no
scruple of telling me that it had occurred to her, on her lately
visiting her own proctor in Doctors' Commons for the purpose of
settling her will in my favour.

'That's a laudable proceeding on the part of our aunt, at all
events,' said Steerforth, when I mentioned it; 'and one deserving
of all encouragement.  Daisy, my advice is that you take kindly to
Doctors' Commons.'

I quite made up my mind to do so.  I then told Steerforth that my
aunt was in town awaiting me (as I found from her letter), and that
she had taken lodgings for a week at a kind of private hotel at
Lincoln's Inn Fields, where there was a stone staircase, and a
convenient door in the roof; my aunt being firmly persuaded that
every house in London was going to be burnt down every night.

We achieved the rest of our journey pleasantly, sometimes recurring
to Doctors' Commons, and anticipating the distant days when I
should be a proctor there, which Steerforth pictured in a variety
of humorous and whimsical lights, that made us both merry.  When we
came to our journey's end, he went home, engaging to call upon me
next day but one; and I drove to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I
found my aunt up, and waiting supper.

If I had been round the world since we parted, we could hardly have
been better pleased to meet again.  My aunt cried outright as she
embraced me; and said, pretending to laugh, that if my poor mother
had been alive, that silly little creature would have shed tears,
she had no doubt.

'So you have left Mr. Dick behind, aunt?' said I.  'I am sorry for
that.  Ah, Janet, how do you do?'

As Janet curtsied, hoping I was well, I observed my aunt's visage
lengthen very much.

'I am sorry for it, too,' said my aunt, rubbing her nose.  'I have
had no peace of mind, Trot, since I have been here.'
Before I could ask why, she told me.

'I am convinced,' said my aunt, laying her hand with melancholy
firmness on the table, 'that Dick's character is not a character to
keep the donkeys off.  I am confident he wants strength of purpose. 
I ought to have left Janet at home, instead, and then my mind might
perhaps have been at ease.  If ever there was a donkey trespassing
on my green,' said my aunt, with emphasis, 'there was one this
afternoon at four o'clock.  A cold feeling came over me from head
to foot, and I know it was a donkey!'

I tried to comfort her on this point, but she rejected consolation.

'It was a donkey,' said my aunt; 'and it was the one with the
stumpy tail which that Murdering sister of a woman rode, when she
came to my house.'  This had been, ever since, the only name my
aunt knew for Miss Murdstone.  'If there is any Donkey in Dover,
whose audacity it is harder to me to bear than another's, that,'
said my aunt, striking the table, 'is the animal!'

Janet ventured to suggest that my aunt might be disturbing herself
unnecessarily, and that she believed the donkey in question was
then engaged in the sand-and-gravel line of business, and was not
available for purposes of trespass.  But my aunt wouldn't hear of
it.

Supper was comfortably served and hot, though my aunt's rooms were
very high up - whether that she might have more stone stairs for
her money, or might be nearer to the door in the roof, I don't know
- and consisted of a roast fowl, a steak, and some vegetables, to
all of which I did ample justice, and which were all excellent. 
But my aunt had her own ideas concerning London provision, and ate
but little.

'I suppose this unfortunate fowl was born and brought up in a
cellar,' said my aunt, 'and never took the air except on a hackney
coach-stand.  I hope the steak may be beef, but I don't believe it. 
Nothing's genuine in the place, in my opinion, but the dirt.'

'Don't you think the fowl may have come out of the country, aunt?'
I hinted.

'Certainly not,' returned my aunt.  'It would be no pleasure to a
London tradesman to sell anything which was what he pretended it
was.'

I did not venture to controvert this opinion, but I made a good
supper, which it greatly satisfied her to see me do.  When the
table was cleared, Janet assisted her to arrange her hair, to put
on her nightcap, which was of a smarter construction than usual
('in case of fire', my aunt said), and to fold her gown back over
her knees, these being her usual preparations for warming herself
before going to bed.  I then made her, according to certain
established regulations from which no deviation, however slight,
could ever be permitted, a glass of hot wine and water, and a slice
of toast cut into long thin strips.  With these accompaniments we
were left alone to finish the evening, my aunt sitting opposite to
me drinking her wine and water; soaking her strips of toast in it,
one by one, before eating them; and looking benignantly on me, from
among the borders of her nightcap.

'Well, Trot,' she began, 'what do you think of the proctor plan? 
Or have you not begun to think about it yet?'

'I have thought a good deal about it, my dear aunt, and I have
talked a good deal about it with Steerforth.  I like it very much
indeed.  I like it exceedingly.'

'Come!' said my aunt.  'That's cheering!'

'I have only one difficulty, aunt.'

'Say what it is, Trot,' she returned.

'Why, I want to ask, aunt, as this seems, from what I understand,
to be a limited profession, whether my entrance into it would not
be very expensive?'

'It will cost,' returned my aunt, 'to article you, just a thousand
pounds.'

'Now, my dear aunt,' said I, drawing my chair nearer, 'I am uneasy
in my mind about that.  It's a large sum of money.  You have
expended a great deal on my education, and have always been as
liberal to me in all things as it was possible to be.  You have
been the soul of generosity.  Surely there are some ways in which
I might begin life with hardly any outlay, and yet begin with a
good hope of getting on by resolution and exertion.  Are you sure
that it would not be better to try that course?  Are you certain
that you can afford to part with so much money, and that it is
right that it should be so expended?  I only ask you, my second
mother, to consider.  Are you certain?'

My aunt finished eating the piece of toast on which she was then
engaged, looking me full in the face all the while; and then
setting her glass on the chimney-piece, and folding her hands upon
her folded skirts, replied as follows:

'Trot, my child, if I have any object in life, it is to provide for
your being a good, a sensible, and a happy man.  I am bent upon it
- so is Dick.  I should like some people that I know to hear Dick's
conversation on the subject.  Its sagacity is wonderful.  But no
one knows the resources of that man's intellect, except myself!'

She stopped for a moment to take my hand between hers, and went on:

'It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some
influence upon the present.  Perhaps I might have been better
friends with your poor father.  Perhaps I might have been better
friends with that poor child your mother, even after your sister
Betsey Trotwood disappointed me.  When you came to me, a little
runaway boy, all dusty and way-worn, perhaps I thought so.  From
that time until now, Trot, you have ever been a credit to me and a
pride and a pleasure.  I have no other claim upon my means; at
least' - here to my surprise she hesitated, and was confused - 'no,
I have no other claim upon my means - and you are my adopted child. 
Only be a loving child to me in my age, and bear with my whims and
fancies; and you will do more for an old woman whose prime of life
was not so happy or conciliating as it might have been, than ever
that old woman did for you.'

It was the first time I had heard my aunt refer to her past
history.  There was a magnanimity in her quiet way of doing so, and
of dismissing it, which would have exalted her in my respect and
affection, if anything could.

'All is agreed and understood between us, now, Trot,' said my aunt,
'and we need talk of this no more.  Give me a kiss, and we'll go to
the Commons after breakfast tomorrow.'

We had a long chat by the fire before we went to bed.  I slept in
a room on the same floor with my aunt's, and was a little disturbed
in the course of the night by her knocking at my door as often as
she was agitated by a distant sound of hackney-coaches or
market-carts, and inquiring, 'if I heard the engines?'  But towards
morning she slept better, and suffered me to do so too.

At about mid-day, we set out for the office of Messrs Spenlow and
Jorkins, in Doctors' Commons.  My aunt, who had this other general
opinion in reference to London, that every man she saw was a
pickpocket, gave me her purse to carry for her, which had ten
guineas in it and some silver.

We made a pause at the toy shop in Fleet Street, to see the giants
of Saint Dunstan's strike upon the bells - we had timed our going,
so as to catch them at it, at twelve o'clock - and then went on
towards Ludgate Hill, and St. Paul's Churchyard.  We were crossing
to the former place, when I found that my aunt greatly accelerated
her speed, and looked frightened.  I observed, at the same time,
that a lowering ill-dressed man who had stopped and stared at us in
passing, a little before, was coming so close after us as to brush
against her.

'Trot!  My dear Trot!' cried my aunt, in a terrified whisper, and
pressing my arm.  'I don't know what I am to do.'

'Don't be alarmed,' said I.  'There's nothing to be afraid of. 
Step into a shop, and I'll soon get rid of this fellow.'

'No, no, child!' she returned.  'Don't speak to him for the world. 
I entreat, I order you!'

'Good Heaven, aunt!' said I.  'He is nothing but a sturdy
beggar.'

'You don't know what he is!' replied my aunt.  'You don't know who
he is!  You don't know what you say!'

We had stopped in an empty door-way, while this was passing, and he
had stopped too.

'Don't look at him!' said my aunt, as I turned my head indignantly,
'but get me a coach, my dear, and wait for me in St. Paul's
Churchyard.'

'Wait for you?' I replied.

'Yes,' rejoined my aunt.  'I must go alone.  I must go with him.'

'With him, aunt?  This man?'

'I am in my senses,' she replied, 'and I tell you I must.  Get mea
coach!'

However much astonished I might be, I was sensible that I had no
right to refuse compliance with such a peremptory command.  I
hurried away a few paces, and called a hackney-chariot which was
passing empty.  Almost before I could let down the steps, my aunt
sprang in, I don't know how, and the man followed.  She waved her
hand to me to go away, so earnestly, that, all confounded as I was,
I turned from them at once.  In doing so, I heard her say to the
coachman, 'Drive anywhere!  Drive straight on!' and presently the
chariot passed me, going up the hill.

What Mr. Dick had told me, and what I had supposed to be a delusion
of his, now came into my mind.  I could not doubt that this person
was the person of whom he had made such mysterious mention, though
what the nature of his hold upon my aunt could possibly be, I was
quite unable to imagine.  After half an hour's cooling in the
churchyard, I saw the chariot coming back.  The driver stopped
beside me, and my aunt was sitting in it alone.

She had not yet sufficiently recovered from her agitation to be
quite prepared for the visit we had to make.  She desired me to get
into the chariot, and to tell the coachman to drive slowly up and
down a little while.  She said no more, except, 'My dear child,
never ask me what it was, and don't refer to it,' until she had
perfectly regained her composure, when she told me she was quite
herself now, and we might get out.  On her giving me her purse to
pay the driver, I found that all the guineas were gone, and only
the loose silver remained.

Doctors' Commons was approached by a little low archway.  Before we
had taken many paces down the street beyond it, the noise of the
city seemed to melt, as if by magic, into a softened distance.  A
few dull courts and narrow ways brought us to the sky-lighted
offices of Spenlow and Jorkins; in the vestibule of which temple,
accessible to pilgrims without the ceremony of knocking, three or
four clerks were at work as copyists.  One of these, a little dry
man, sitting by himself, who wore a stiff brown wig that looked as
if it were made of gingerbread, rose to receive my aunt, and show
us into Mr. Spenlow's room.

'Mr. Spenlow's in Court, ma'am,' said the dry man; 'it's an Arches
day; but it's close by, and I'll send for him directly.'

As we were left to look about us while Mr. Spenlow was fetched, I
availed myself of the opportunity.  The furniture of the room was
old-fashioned and dusty; and the green baize on the top of the
writing-table had lost all its colour, and was as withered and pale
as an old pauper.  There were a great many bundles of papers on it,
some endorsed as Allegations, and some (to my surprise) as Libels,
and some as being in the Consistory Court, and some in the Arches
Court, and some in the Prerogative Court, and some in the Admiralty
Court, and some in the Delegates' Court; giving me occasion to
wonder much, how many Courts there might be in the gross, and how
long it would take to understand them all.  Besides these, there
were sundry immense manuscript Books of Evidence taken on
affidavit, strongly bound, and tied together in massive sets, a set
to each cause, as if every cause were a history in ten or twenty
volumes.  All this looked tolerably expensive, I thought, and gave
me an agreeable notion of a proctor's business.  I was casting my
eyes with increasing complacency over these and many similar
objects, when hasty footsteps were heard in the room outside, and
Mr. Spenlow, in a black gown trimmed with white fur, came hurrying
in, taking off his hat as he came.

He was a little light-haired gentleman, with undeniable boots, and
the stiffest of white cravats and shirt-collars.  He was buttoned
up, mighty trim and tight, and must have taken a great deal of
pains with his whiskers, which were accurately curled.  His gold
watch-chain was so massive, that a fancy came across me, that he
ought to have a sinewy golden arm, to draw it out with, like those
which are put up over the goldbeaters' shops.  He was got up with
such care, and was so stiff, that he could hardly bend himself;
being obliged, when he glanced at some papers on his desk, after
sitting down in his chair, to move his whole body, from the bottom
of his spine, like Punch.

I had previously been presented by my aunt, and had been
courteously received.  He now said:

'And so, Mr. Copperfield, you think of entering into our
profession?  I casually mentioned to Miss Trotwood, when I had the
pleasure of an interview with her the other day,' - with another
inclination of his body - Punch again - 'that there was a vacancy
here.  Miss Trotwood was good enough to mention that she had a
nephew who was her peculiar care, and for whom she was seeking to
provide genteelly in life.  That nephew, I believe, I have now the
pleasure of' - Punch again.
I bowed my acknowledgements, and said, my aunt had mentioned to me
that there was that opening, and that I believed I should like it
very much.  That I was strongly inclined to like it, and had taken
immediately to the proposal.  That I could not absolutely pledge
myself to like it, until I knew something more about it.  That
although it was little else than a matter of form, I presumed I
should have an opportunity of trying how I liked it, before I bound
myself to it irrevocably.

'Oh surely! surely!' said Mr. Spenlow.  'We always, in this house,
propose a month - an initiatory month.  I should be happy, myself,
to propose two months - three - an indefinite period, in fact - but
I have a partner.  Mr. Jorkins.'

'And the premium, sir,' I returned, 'is a thousand pounds?'

'And the premium, Stamp included, is a thousand pounds,' said Mr.
Spenlow.  'As I have mentioned to Miss Trotwood, I am actuated by
no mercenary considerations; few men are less so, I believe; but
Mr. Jorkins has his opinions on these subjects, and I am bound to
respect Mr. Jorkins's opinions.  Mr. Jorkins thinks a thousand
pounds too little, in short.'

'I suppose, sir,' said I, still desiring to spare my aunt, 'that it
is not the custom here, if an articled clerk were particularly
useful, and made himself a perfect master of his profession' - I
could not help blushing, this looked so like praising myself - 'I
suppose it is not the custom, in the later years of his time, to
allow him any -'

Mr. Spenlow, by a great effort, just lifted his head far enough out
of his cravat to shake it, and answered, anticipating the word
'salary':

'No.  I will not say what consideration I might give to that point
myself, Mr. Copperfield, if I were unfettered.  Mr. Jorkins is
immovable.'

I was quite dismayed by the idea of this terrible Jorkins.  But I
found out afterwards that he was a mild man of a heavy temperament,
whose place in the business was to keep himself in the background,
and be constantly exhibited by name as the most obdurate and
ruthless of men.  If a clerk wanted his salary raised, Mr. Jorkins
wouldn't listen to such a proposition.  If a client were slow to
settle his bill of costs, Mr. Jorkins was resolved to have it paid;
and however painful these things might be (and always were) to the
feelings of Mr. Spenlow, Mr. Jorkins would have his bond.  The
heart and hand of the good angel Spenlow would have been always
open, but for the restraining demon Jorkins.  As I have grown
older, I think I have had experience of some other houses doing
business on the principle of Spenlow and Jorkins!

It was settled that I should begin my month's probation as soon as
I pleased, and that my aunt need neither remain in town nor return
at its expiration, as the articles of agreement, of which I was to
be the subject, could easily be sent to her at home for her
signature.  When we had got so far, Mr. Spenlow offered to take me
into Court then and there, and show me what sort of place it was. 
As I was willing enough to know, we went out with this object,
leaving my aunt behind; who would trust herself, she said, in no
such place, and who, I think, regarded all Courts of Law as a sort
of powder-mills that might blow up at any time.

Mr. Spenlow conducted me through a paved courtyard formed of grave
brick houses, which I inferred, from the Doctors' names upon the
doors, to be the official abiding-places of the learned advocates
of whom Steerforth had told me; and into a large dull room, not
unlike a chapel to my thinking, on the left hand.  The upper part
of this room was fenced off from the rest; and there, on the two
sides of a raised platform of the horse-shoe form, sitting on easy
old-fashioned dining-room chairs, were sundry gentlemen in red
gowns and grey wigs, whom I found to be the Doctors aforesaid. 
Blinking over a little desk like a pulpit-desk, in the curve of the
horse-shoe, was an old gentleman, whom, if I had seen him in an
aviary, I should certainly have taken for an owl, but who, I
learned, was the presiding judge.  In the space within the
horse-shoe, lower than these, that is to say, on about the level of
the floor, were sundry other gentlemen, of Mr. Spenlow's rank, and
dressed like him in black gowns with white fur upon them, sitting
at a long green table.  Their cravats were in general stiff, I
thought, and their looks haughty; but in this last respect I
presently conceived I had done them an injustice, for when two or
three of them had to rise and answer a question of the presiding
dignitary, I never saw anything more sheepish.  The public,
represented by a boy with a comforter, and a shabby-genteel man
secretly eating crumbs out of his coat pockets, was warming itself
at a stove in the centre of the Court.  The languid stillness of
the place was only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the
voice of one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a
perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to
time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey. 
Altogether, I have never, on any occasion, made one at such a
cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little
family-party in all my life; and I felt it would be quite a
soothing opiate to belong to it in any character - except perhaps
as a suitor.

Very well satisfied with the dreamy nature of this retreat, I
informed Mr. Spenlow that I had seen enough for that time, and we
rejoined my aunt; in company with whom I presently departed from
the Commons, feeling very young when I went out of Spenlow and
Jorkins's, on account of the clerks poking one another with their
pens to point me out.

We arrived at Lincoln's Inn Fields without any new adventures,
except encountering an unlucky donkey in a costermonger's cart, who
suggested painful associations to my aunt.  We had another long
talk about my plans, when we were safely housed; and as I knew she
was anxious to get home, and, between fire, food, and pickpockets,
could never be considered at her ease for half-an-hour in London,
I urged her not to be uncomfortable on my account, but to leave me
to take care of myself.

'I have not been here a week tomorrow, without considering that
too, my dear,' she returned.  'There is a furnished little set of
chambers to be let in the Adelphi, Trot, which ought to suit you to
a marvel.'

With this brief introduction, she produced from her pocket an
advertisement, carefully cut out of a newspaper, setting forth that
in Buckingham Street in the Adelphi there was to be let furnished,
with a view of the river, a singularly desirable, and compact set
of chambers, forming a genteel residence for a young gentleman, a
member of one of the Inns of Court, or otherwise, with immediate
possession.  Terms moderate, and could be taken for a month only,
if required.

'Why, this is the very thing, aunt!' said I, flushed with the
possible dignity of living in chambers.

'Then come,' replied my aunt, immediately resuming the bonnet she
had a minute before laid aside.  'We'll go and look at 'em.'

Away we went.  The advertisement directed us to apply to Mrs. Crupp
on the premises, and we rung the area bell, which we supposed to
communicate with Mrs. Crupp.  It was not until we had rung three or
four times that we could prevail on Mrs. Crupp to communicate with
us, but at last she appeared, being a stout lady with a flounce of
flannel petticoat below a nankeen gown.

'Let us see these chambers of yours, if you please, ma'am,' said my
aunt.

'For this gentleman?' said Mrs. Crupp, feeling in her pocket for
her keys.

'Yes, for my nephew,' said my aunt.

'And a sweet set they is for sich!' said Mrs. Crupp.

So we went upstairs.

They were on the top of the house - a great point with my aunt,
being near the fire-escape - and consisted of a little half-blind
entry where you could see hardly anything, a little stone-blind
pantry where you could see nothing at all, a sitting-room, and a
bedroom.  The furniture was rather faded, but quite good enough for
me; and, sure enough, the river was outside the windows.

As I was delighted with the place, my aunt and Mrs. Crupp withdrew
into the pantry to discuss the terms, while I remained on the
sitting-room sofa, hardly daring to think it possible that I could
be destined to live in such a noble residence.  After a single
combat of some duration they returned, and I saw, to my joy, both
in Mrs. Crupp's countenance and in my aunt's, that the deed was
done.

'Is it the last occupant's furniture?' inquired my aunt.

'Yes, it is, ma'am,' said Mrs. Crupp.

'What's become of him?' asked my aunt.

Mrs. Crupp was taken with a troublesome cough, in the midst of
which she articulated with much difficulty.  'He was took ill here,
ma'am, and - ugh! ugh! ugh! dear me! - and he died!'

'Hey!  What did he die of?' asked my aunt.

'Well, ma'am, he died of drink,' said Mrs. Crupp, in confidence. 
'And smoke.'

'Smoke?  You don't mean chimneys?' said my aunt.

'No, ma'am,' returned Mrs. Crupp.  'Cigars and pipes.'

'That's not catching, Trot, at any rate,' remarked my aunt, turning
to me.

'No, indeed,' said I.

In short, my aunt, seeing how enraptured I was with the premises,
took them for a month, with leave to remain for twelve months when
that time was out.  Mrs. Crupp was to find linen, and to cook;
every other necessary was already provided; and Mrs. Crupp
expressly intimated that she should always yearn towards me as a
son.  I was to take possession the day after tomorrow, and Mrs.
Crupp said, thank Heaven she had now found summun she could care
for!

On our way back, my aunt informed me how she confidently trusted
that the life I was now to lead would make me firm and
self-reliant, which was all I wanted.  She repeated this several
times next day, in the intervals of our arranging for the
transmission of my clothes and books from Mr. Wickfield's; relative
to which, and to all my late holiday, I wrote a long letter to
Agnes, of which my aunt took charge, as she was to leave on the
succeeding day.  Not to lengthen these particulars, I need only
add, that she made a handsome provision for all my possible wants
during my month of trial; that Steerforth, to my great
disappointment and hers too, did not make his appearance before she
went away; that I saw her safely seated in the Dover coach,
exulting in the coming discomfiture of the vagrant donkeys, with
Janet at her side; and that when the coach was gone, I turned my
face to the Adelphi, pondering on the old days when I used to roam
about its subterranean arches, and on the happy changes which had
brought me to the surface.



CHAPTER 24
MY FIRST DISSIPATION


It was a wonderfully fine thing to have that lofty castle to
myself, and to feel, when I shut my outer door, like Robinson
Crusoe, when he had got into his fortification, and pulled his
ladder up after him.  It was a wonderfully fine thing to walk about
town with the key of my house in my pocket, and to know that I
could ask any fellow to come home, and make quite sure of its being
inconvenient to nobody, if it were not so to me.  It was a
wonderfully fine thing to let myself in and out, and to come and go
without a word to anyone, and to ring Mrs. Crupp up, gasping, from
the depths of the earth, when I wanted her - and when she was
disposed to come.  All this, I say, was wonderfully fine; but I
must say, too, that there were times when it was very dreary.

It was fine in the morning, particularly in the fine mornings.  It
looked a very fresh, free life, by daylight: still fresher, and
more free, by sunlight.  But as the day declined, the life seemed
to go down too.  I don't know how it was; it seldom looked well by
candle-light.  I wanted somebody to talk to, then.  I missed Agnes. 
I found a tremendous blank, in the place of that smiling repository
of my confidence.  Mrs. Crupp appeared to be a long way off.  I
thought about my predecessor, who had died of drink and smoke; and
I could have wished he had been so good as to live, and not bother
me with his decease.

After two days and nights, I felt as if I had lived there for a
year, and yet I was not an hour older, but was quite as much
tormented by my own youthfulness as ever.

Steerforth not yet appearing, which induced me to apprehend that he
must be ill, I left the Commons early on the third day, and walked
out to Highgate.  Mrs. Steerforth was very glad to see me, and said
that he had gone away with one of his Oxford friends to see another
who lived near St. Albans, but that she expected him to return
tomorrow.  I was so fond of him, that I felt quite jealous of his
Oxford friends.

As she pressed me to stay to dinner, I remained, and I believe we
talked about nothing but him all day.  I told her how much the
people liked him at Yarmouth, and what a delightful companion he
had been.  Miss Dartle was full of hints and mysterious questions,
but took a great interest in all our proceedings there, and said,
'Was it really though?' and so forth, so often, that she got
everything out of me she wanted to know.  Her appearance was
exactly what I have described it, when I first saw her; but the
society of the two ladies was so agreeable, and came so natural to
me, that I felt myself falling a little in love with her.  I could
not help thinking, several times in the course of the evening, and
particularly when I walked home at night, what delightful company
she would be in Buckingham Street.

I was taking my coffee and roll in the morning, before going to the
Commons - and I may observe in this place that it is surprising how
much coffee Mrs. Crupp used, and how weak it was, considering -
when Steerforth himself walked in, to my unbounded joy.

'My dear Steerforth,' cried I, 'I began to think I should never see
you again!'

'I was carried off, by force of arms,' said Steerforth, 'the very
next morning after I got home.  Why, Daisy, what a rare old
bachelor you are here!'

I showed him over the establishment, not omitting the pantry, with
no little pride, and he commended it highly.  'I tell you what, old
boy,' he added, 'I shall make quite a town-house of this place,
unless you give me notice to quit.'

This was a delightful hearing.  I told him if he waited for that,
he would have to wait till doomsday.

'But you shall have some breakfast!' said I, with my hand on the
bell-rope, 'and Mrs. Crupp shall make you some fresh coffee, and
I'll toast you some bacon in a bachelor's Dutch-oven, that I have
got here.'

'No, no!' said Steerforth.  'Don't ring!  I can't!  I am going to
breakfast with one of these fellows who is at the Piazza Hotel, in
Covent Garden.'

'But you'll come back to dinner?' said I.

'I can't, upon my life.  There's nothing I should like better, but
I must remain with these two fellows.  We are all three off
together tomorrow morning.'

'Then bring them here to dinner,' I returned.  'Do you think they
would come?'

'Oh! they would come fast enough,' said Steerforth; 'but we should
inconvenience you.  You had better come and dine with us
somewhere.'

I would not by any means consent to this, for it occurred to me
that I really ought to have a little house-warming, and that there
never could be a better opportunity.  I had a new pride in my rooms
after his approval of them, and burned with a desire to develop
their utmost resources.  I therefore made him promise positively in
the names of his two friends, and we appointed six o'clock as the
dinner-hour.

When he was gone, I rang for Mrs. Crupp, and acquainted her with my
desperate design.  Mrs. Crupp said, in the first place, of course
it was well known she couldn't be expected to wait, but she knew a
handy young man, who she thought could be prevailed upon to do it,
and whose terms would be five shillings, and what I pleased.  I
said, certainly we would have him.  Next Mrs. Crupp said it was
clear she couldn't be in two places at once (which I felt to be
reasonable), and that 'a young gal' stationed in the pantry with a
bedroom candle, there never to desist from washing plates, would be
indispensable.  I said, what would be the expense of this young
female? and Mrs. Crupp said she supposed eighteenpence would
neither make me nor break me.  I said I supposed not; and THAT was
settled.  Then Mrs. Crupp said, Now about the dinner.

It was a remarkable instance of want of forethought on the part of
the ironmonger who had made Mrs. Crupp's kitchen fireplace, that it
was capable of cooking nothing but chops and mashed potatoes.  As
to a fish-kittle, Mrs. Crupp said, well! would I only come and look
at the range?  She couldn't say fairer than that.  Would I come and
look at it?  As I should not have been much the wiser if I HAD
looked at it, I declined, and said, 'Never mind fish.'  But Mrs.
Crupp said, Don't say that; oysters was in, why not them?  So THAT
was settled.  Mrs. Crupp then said what she would recommend would
be this.  A pair of hot roast fowls - from the pastry-cook's; a
dish of stewed beef, with vegetables - from the pastry-cook's; two
little corner things, as a raised pie and a dish of kidneys - from
the pastrycook's; a tart, and (if I liked) a shape of jelly - from
the pastrycook's.  This, Mrs. Crupp said, would leave her at full
liberty to concentrate her mind on the potatoes, and to serve up
the cheese and celery as she could wish to see it done.

I acted on Mrs. Crupp's opinion, and gave the order at the
pastry-cook's myself.  Walking along the Strand, afterwards, and
observing a hard mottled substance in the window of a ham and beef
shop, which resembled marble, but was labelled 'Mock Turtle', I
went in and bought a slab of it, which I have since seen reason to
believe would have sufficed for fifteen people.  This preparation,
Mrs. Crupp, after some difficulty, consented to warm up; and it
shrunk so much in a liquid state, that we found it what Steerforth
called 'rather a tight fit' for four.

These preparations happily completed, I bought a little dessert in
Covent Garden Market, and gave a rather extensive order at a retail
wine-merchant's in that vicinity.  When I came home in the
afternoon, and saw the bottles drawn up in a square on the pantry
floor, they looked so numerous (though there were two missing,
which made Mrs. Crupp very uncomfortable), that I was absolutely
frightened at them.

One of Steerforth's friends was named Grainger, and the other
Markham.  They were both very gay and lively fellows; Grainger,
something older than Steerforth; Markham, youthful-looking, and I
should say not more than twenty.  I observed that the latter always
spoke of himself indefinitely, as 'a man', and seldom or never in
the first person singular.

'A man might get on very well here, Mr. Copperfield,' said Markham
- meaning himself.

'It's not a bad situation,' said I, 'and the rooms are really
commodious.'

'I hope you have both brought appetites with you?' said Steerforth.

'Upon my honour,' returned Markham, 'town seems to sharpen a man's
appetite.  A man is hungry all day long.  A man is perpetually
eating.'

Being a little embarrassed at first, and feeling much too young to
preside, I made Steerforth take the head of the table when dinner
was announced, and seated myself opposite to him.  Everything was
very good; we did not spare the wine; and he exerted himself so
brilliantly to make the thing pass off well, that there was no
pause in our festivity.  I was not quite such good company during
dinner as I could have wished to be, for my chair was opposite the
door, and my attention was distracted by observing that the handy
young man went out of the room very often, and that his shadow
always presented itself, immediately afterwards, on the wall of the
entry, with a bottle at its mouth.  The 'young gal' likewise
occasioned me some uneasiness: not so much by neglecting to wash
the plates, as by breaking them.  For being of an inquisitive
disposition, and unable to confine herself (as her positive
instructions were) to the pantry, she was constantly peering in at
us, and constantly imagining herself detected; in which belief, she
several times retired upon the plates (with which she had carefully
paved the floor), and did a great deal of destruction.

These, however, were small drawbacks, and easily forgotten when the
cloth was cleared, and the dessert put on the table; at which
period of the entertainment the handy young man was discovered to
be speechless.  Giving him private directions to seek the society
of Mrs. Crupp, and to remove the 'young gal' to the basement also,
I abandoned myself to enjoyment.

I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted; all sorts
of half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into my mind,
and made me hold forth in a most unwonted manner.  I laughed
heartily at my own jokes, and everybody else's; called Steerforth
to order for not passing the wine; made several engagements to go
to Oxford; announced that I meant to have a dinner-party exactly
like that, once a week, until further notice; and madly took so
much snuff out of Grainger's box, that I was obliged to go into the
pantry, and have a private fit of sneezing ten minutes long.

I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and
continually starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine, long
before any was needed.  I proposed Steerforth's health.  I said he
was my dearest friend, the protector of my boyhood, and the
companion of my prime.  I said I was delighted to propose his
health.  I said I owed him more obligations than I could ever
repay, and held him in a higher admiration than I could ever
express.  I finished by saying, 'I'll give you Steerforth!  God
bless him!  Hurrah!' We gave him three times three, and another,
and a good one to finish with.  I broke my glass in going round the
table to shake hands with him, and I said (in two words)
'Steerforth - you'retheguidingstarofmyexistence.'

I went on, by finding suddenly that somebody was in the middle of
a song.  Markham was the singer, and he sang 'When the heart of a
man is depressed with care'.  He said, when he had sung it, he
would give us 'Woman!' I took objection to that, and I couldn't
allow it.  I said it was not a respectful way of proposing the
toast, and I would never permit that toast to be drunk in my house
otherwise than as 'The Ladies!' I was very high with him, mainly I
think because I saw Steerforth and Grainger laughing at me - or at
him - or at both of us.  He said a man was not to be dictated to. 
I said a man was.  He said a man was not to be insulted, then.  I
said he was right there - never under my roof, where the Lares were
sacred, and the laws of hospitality paramount.  He said it was no
derogation from a man's dignity to confess that I was a devilish
good fellow.  I instantly proposed his health.

Somebody was smoking.  We were all smoking.  I was smoking, and
trying to suppress a rising tendency to shudder.  Steerforth had
made a speech about me, in the course of which I had been affected
almost to tears.  I returned thanks, and hoped the present company
would dine with me tomorrow, and the day after - each day at five
o'clock, that we might enjoy the pleasures of conversation and
society through a long evening.  I felt called upon to propose an
individual.  I would give them my aunt.  Miss Betsey Trotwood, the
best of her sex!

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his
forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air
upon his face.  It was myself.  I was addressing myself as
'Copperfield', and saying, 'Why did you try to smoke?  You might
have known you couldn't do it.'  Now, somebody was unsteadily
contemplating his features in the looking-glass.  That was I too. 
I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant
appearance; and my hair - only my hair, nothing else - looked
drunk.

Somebody said to me, 'Let us go to the theatre, Copperfield!' There
was no bedroom before me, but again the jingling table covered with
glasses; the lamp; Grainger on my right hand, Markham on my left,
and Steerforth opposite - all sitting in a mist, and a long way
off.  The theatre?  To be sure.  The very thing.  Come along!  But
they must excuse me if I saw everybody out first, and turned the
lamp off - in case of fire.

Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone.  I was
feeling for it in the window-curtains, when Steerforth, laughing,
took me by the arm and led me out.  We went downstairs, one behind
another.  Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. 
Somebody else said it was Copperfield.  I was angry at that false
report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to
think there might be some foundation for it.

A very foggy night, with great rings round the lamps in the
streets!  There was an indistinct talk of its being wet.  I
considered it frosty.  Steerforth dusted me under a lamp-post, and
put my hat into shape, which somebody produced from somewhere in a
most extraordinary manner, for I hadn't had it on before. 
Steerforth then said, 'You are all right, Copperfield, are you
not?' and I told him, 'Neverberrer.'

A man, sitting in a pigeon-hole-place, looked out of the fog, and
took money from somebody, inquiring if I was one of the gentlemen
paid for, and appearing rather doubtful (as I remember in the
glimpse I had of him) whether to take the money for me or not. 
Shortly afterwards, we were very high up in a very hot theatre,
looking down into a large pit, that seemed to me to smoke; the
people with whom it was crammed were so indistinct.  There was a
great stage, too, looking very clean and smooth after the streets;
and there were people upon it, talking about something or other,
but not at all intelligibly.  There was an abundance of bright
lights, and there was music, and there were ladies down in the
boxes, and I don't know what more.  The whole building looked to me
as if it were learning to swim; it conducted itself in such an
unaccountable manner, when I tried to steady it.

On somebody's motion, we resolved to go downstairs to the
dress-boxes, where the ladies were.  A gentleman lounging, full
dressed, on a sofa, with an opera-glass in his hand, passed before
my view, and also my own figure at full length in a glass.  Then I
was being ushered into one of these boxes, and found myself saying
something as I sat down, and people about me crying 'Silence!' to
somebody, and ladies casting indignant glances at me, and - what!
yes! - Agnes, sitting on the seat before me, in the same box, with
a lady and gentleman beside her, whom I didn't know.  I see her
face now, better than I did then, I dare say, with its indelible
look of regret and wonder turned upon me.

'Agnes!' I said, thickly, 'Lorblessmer!  Agnes!'

'Hush!  Pray!' she answered, I could not conceive why.  'You
disturb the company.  Look at the stage!'

I tried, on her injunction, to fix it, and to hear something of
what was going on there, but quite in vain.  I looked at her again
by and by, and saw her shrink into her corner, and put her gloved
hand to her forehead.

'Agnes!' I said.  'I'mafraidyou'renorwell.'

'Yes, yes.  Do not mind me, Trotwood,' she returned.  'Listen!  Are
you going away soon?'

'Amigoarawaysoo?' I repeated.

'Yes.'

I had a stupid intention of replying that I was going to wait, to
hand her downstairs.  I suppose I expressed it, somehow; for after
she had looked at me attentively for a little while, she appeared
to understand, and replied in a low tone:

'I know you will do as I ask you, if I tell you I am very earnest
in it.  Go away now, Trotwood, for my sake, and ask your friends to
take you home.'

She had so far improved me, for the time, that though I was angry
with her, I felt ashamed, and with a short 'Goori!' (which I
intended for 'Good night!') got up and went away.  They followed,
and I stepped at once out of the box-door into my bedroom, where
only Steerforth was with me, helping me to undress, and where I was
by turns telling him that Agnes was my sister, and adjuring him to
bring the corkscrew, that I might open another bottle of wine.

How somebody, lying in my bed, lay saying and doing all this over
again, at cross purposes, in a feverish dream all night - the bed
a rocking sea that was never still!  How, as that somebody slowly
settled down into myself, did I begin to parch, and feel as if my
outer covering of skin were a hard board; my tongue the bottom of
an empty kettle, furred with long service, and burning up over a
slow fire; the palms of my hands, hot plates of metal which no ice
could cool!

But the agony of mind, the remorse, and shame I felt when I became
conscious next day!  My horror of having committed a thousand
offences I had forgotten, and which nothing could ever expiate - my
recollection of that indelible look which Agnes had given me - the
torturing impossibility of communicating with her, not knowing,
Beast that I was, how she came to be in London, or where she stayed
- my disgust of the very sight of the room where the revel had been
held - my racking head - the smell of smoke, the sight of glasses,
the impossibility of going out, or even getting up!  Oh, what a day
it was!

Oh, what an evening, when I sat down by my fire to a basin of
mutton broth, dimpled all over with fat, and thought I was going
the way of my predecessor, and should succeed to his dismal story
as well as to his chambers, and had half a mind to rush express to
Dover and reveal all!  What an evening, when Mrs. Crupp, coming in
to take away the broth-basin, produced one kidney on a cheese-plate
as the entire remains of yesterday's feast, and I was really
inclined to fall upon her nankeen breast and say, in heartfelt
penitence, 'Oh, Mrs. Crupp, Mrs. Crupp, never mind the broken
meats!  I am very miserable!' - only that I doubted, even at that
pass, if Mrs. Crupp were quite the sort of woman to confide in!


CHAPTER 25
GOOD AND BAD ANGELS


I was going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable day
of headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd confusion in my
mind relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if a body of
Titans had taken an enormous lever and pushed the day before
yesterday some months back, when I saw a ticket-porter coming
upstairs, with a letter in his hand.  He was taking his time about
his errand, then; but when he saw me on the top of the staircase,
looking at him over the banisters, he swung into a trot, and came
up panting as if he had run himself into a state of exhaustion.

'T. Copperfield, Esquire,' said the ticket-porter, touching his hat
with his little cane.

I could scarcely lay claim to the name: I was so disturbed by the
conviction that the letter came from Agnes.  However, I told him I
was T. Copperfield, Esquire, and he believed it, and gave me the
letter, which he said required an answer.  I shut him out on the
landing to wait for the answer, and went into my chambers again, in
such a nervous state that I was fain to lay the letter down on my
breakfast table, and familiarize myself with the outside of it a
little, before I could resolve to break the seal.

I found, when I did open it, that it was a very kind note,
containing no reference to my condition at the theatre.  All it
said was, 'My dear Trotwood.  I am staying at the house of papa's
agent, Mr. Waterbrook, in Ely Place, Holborn.  Will you come and
see me today, at any time you like to appoint?  Ever yours
affectionately, AGNES.  '

It took me such a long time to write an answer at all to my
satisfaction, that I don't know what the ticket-porter can have
thought, unless he thought I was learning to write.  I must have
written half-a-dozen answers at least.  I began one, 'How can I
ever hope, my dear Agnes, to efface from your remembrance the
disgusting impression' - there I didn't like it, and then I tore it
up.  I began another, 'Shakespeare has observed, my dear Agnes, how
strange it is that a man should put an enemy into his mouth' - that
reminded me of Markham, and it got no farther.  I even tried
poetry.  I began one note, in a six-syllable line, 'Oh, do not
remember' - but that associated itself with the fifth of November,
and became an absurdity.  After many attempts, I wrote, 'My dear
Agnes.  Your letter is like you, and what could I say of it that
would be higher praise than that?  I will come at four o'clock. 
Affectionately and sorrowfully, T.C.'  With this missive (which I
was in twenty minds at once about recalling, as soon as it was out
of my hands), the ticket-porter at last departed.

If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional
gentleman in Doctors' Commons as it was to me, I sincerely believe
he made some expiation for his share in that rotten old
ecclesiastical cheese.  Although I left the office at half past
three, and was prowling about the place of appointment within a few
minutes afterwards, the appointed time was exceeded by a full
quarter of an hour, according to the clock of St. Andrew's,
Holborn, before I could muster up sufficient desperation to pull
the private bell-handle let into the left-hand door-post of Mr.
Waterbrook's house.

The professional business of Mr. Waterbrook's establishment was
done on the ground-floor, and the genteel business (of which there
was a good deal) in the upper part of the building.  I was shown
into a pretty but rather close drawing-room, and there sat Agnes,
netting a purse.

She looked so quiet and good, and reminded me so strongly of my
airy fresh school days at Canterbury, and the sodden, smoky, stupid
wretch I had been the other night, that, nobody being by, I yielded
to my self-reproach and shame, and - in short, made a fool of
myself.  I cannot deny that I shed tears.  To this hour I am
undecided whether it was upon the whole the wisest thing I could
have done, or the most ridiculous.

'If it had been anyone but you, Agnes,' said I, turning away my
head, 'I should not have minded it half so much.  But that it
should have been you who saw me!  I almost wish I had been dead,
first.'

She put her hand - its touch was like no other hand - upon my arm
for a moment; and I felt so befriended and comforted, that I could
not help moving it to my lips, and gratefully kissing it.

'Sit down,' said Agnes, cheerfully.  'Don't be unhappy, Trotwood. 
If you cannot confidently trust me, whom will you trust?'

'Ah, Agnes!' I returned.  'You are my good Angel!'

She smiled rather sadly, I thought, and shook her head.

'Yes, Agnes, my good Angel!  Always my good Angel!'

'If I were, indeed, Trotwood,' she returned, 'there is one thing
that I should set my heart on very much.'

I looked at her inquiringly; but already with a foreknowledge of
her meaning.

'On warning you,' said Agnes, with a steady glance, 'against your
bad Angel.'

'My dear Agnes,' I began, 'if you mean Steerforth -'

'I do, Trotwood,' she returned.
'Then, Agnes, you wrong him very much.  He my bad Angel, or
anyone's!  He, anything but a guide, a support, and a friend to me!
My dear Agnes!  Now, is it not unjust, and unlike you, to judge him
from what you saw of me the other night?'

'I do not judge him from what I saw of you the other night,' she
quietly replied.

'From what, then?'

'From many things - trifles in themselves, but they do not seem to
me to be so, when they are put together.  I judge him, partly from
your account of him, Trotwood, and your character, and the
influence he has over you.'

There was always something in her modest voice that seemed to touch
a chord within me, answering to that sound alone.  It was always
earnest; but when it was very earnest, as it was now, there was a
thrill in it that quite subdued me.  I sat looking at her as she
cast her eyes down on her work; I sat seeming still to listen to
her; and Steerforth, in spite of all my attachment to him, darkened
in that tone.

'It is very bold in me,' said Agnes, looking up again, 'who have
lived in such seclusion, and can know so little of the world, to
give you my advice so confidently, or even to have this strong
opinion.  But I know in what it is engendered, Trotwood, - in how
true a remembrance of our having grown up together, and in how true
an interest in all relating to you.  It is that which makes me
bold.  I am certain that what I say is right.  I am quite sure it
is.  I feel as if it were someone else speaking to you, and not I,
when I caution you that you have made a dangerous friend.'

Again I looked at her, again I listened to her after she was
silent, and again his image, though it was still fixed in my heart,
darkened.

'I am not so unreasonable as to expect,' said Agnes, resuming her
usual tone, after a little while, 'that you will, or that you can,
at once, change any sentiment that has become a conviction to you;
least of all a sentiment that is rooted in your trusting
disposition.  You ought not hastily to do that.  I only ask you,
Trotwood, if you ever think of me - I mean,' with a quiet smile,
for I was going to interrupt her, and she knew why, 'as often as
you think of me - to think of what I have said.  Do you forgive me
for all this?'

'I will forgive you, Agnes,' I replied, 'when you come to do
Steerforth justice, and to like him as well as I do.'

'Not until then?' said Agnes.

I saw a passing shadow on her face when I made this mention of him,
but she returned my smile, and we were again as unreserved in our
mutual confidence as of old.

'And when, Agnes,' said I, 'will you forgive me the other night?'

'When I recall it,' said Agnes.

She would have dismissed the subject so, but I was too full of it
to allow that, and insisted on telling her how it happened that I
had disgraced myself, and what chain of accidental circumstances
had had the theatre for its final link.  It was a great relief to
me to do this, and to enlarge on the obligation that I owed to
Steerforth for his care of me when I was unable to take care of
myself.

'You must not forget,' said Agnes, calmly changing the conversation
as soon as I had concluded, 'that you are always to tell me, not
only when you fall into trouble, but when you fall in love.  Who
has succeeded to Miss Larkins, Trotwood?'

'No one, Agnes.'

'Someone, Trotwood,' said Agnes, laughing, and holding up her
finger.

'No, Agnes, upon my word!  There is a lady, certainly, at Mrs.
Steerforth's house, who is very clever, and whom I like to talk to
- Miss Dartle - but I don't adore her.'

Agnes laughed again at her own penetration, and told me that if I
were faithful to her in my confidence she thought she should keep
a little register of my violent attachments, with the date,
duration, and termination of each, like the table of the reigns of
the kings and queens, in the History of England.  Then she asked me
if I had seen Uriah.

'Uriah Heep?' said I.  'No.  Is he in London?'

'He comes to the office downstairs, every day,' returned Agnes. 
'He was in London a week before me.  I am afraid on disagreeable
business, Trotwood.'

'On some business that makes you uneasy, Agnes, I see,' said I. 
'What can that be?'

Agnes laid aside her work, and replied, folding her hands upon one
another, and looking pensively at me out of those beautiful soft
eyes of hers:

'I believe he is going to enter into partnership with papa.'

'What?  Uriah?  That mean, fawning fellow, worm himself into such
promotion!' I cried, indignantly.  'Have you made no remonstrance
about it, Agnes?  Consider what a connexion it is likely to be. 
You must speak out.  You must not allow your father to take such a
mad step.  You must prevent it, Agnes, while there's time.'

Still looking at me, Agnes shook her head while I was speaking,
with a faint smile at my warmth: and then replied:

'You remember our last conversation about papa?  It was not long
after that - not more than two or three days - when he gave me the
first intimation of what I tell you.  It was sad to see him
struggling between his desire to represent it to me as a matter of
choice on his part, and his inability to conceal that it was forced
upon him.  I felt very sorry.'

'Forced upon him, Agnes!  Who forces it upon him?'

'Uriah,' she replied, after a moment's hesitation, 'has made
himself indispensable to papa.  He is subtle and watchful.  He has
mastered papa's weaknesses, fostered them, and taken advantage of
them, until - to say all that I mean in a word, Trotwood, - until
papa is afraid of him.'

There was more that she might have said; more that she knew, or
that she suspected; I clearly saw.  I could not give her pain by
asking what it was, for I knew that she withheld it from me, to
spare her father.  It had long been going on to this, I was
sensible: yes, I could not but feel, on the least reflection, that
it had been going on to this for a long time.  I remained silent.

'His ascendancy over papa,' said Agnes, 'is very great.  He
professes humility and gratitude - with truth, perhaps: I hope so
- but his position is really one of power, and I fear he makes a
hard use of his power.'

I said he was a hound, which, at the moment, was a great
satisfaction to me.

'At the time I speak of, as the time when papa spoke to me,'
pursued Agnes, 'he had told papa that he was going away; that he
was very sorry, and unwilling to leave, but that he had better
prospects.  Papa was very much depressed then, and more bowed down
by care than ever you or I have seen him; but he seemed relieved by
this expedient of the partnership, though at the same time he
seemed hurt by it and ashamed of it.'

'And how did you receive it, Agnes?'

'I did, Trotwood,' she replied, 'what I hope was right.  Feeling
sure that it was necessary for papa's peace that the sacrifice
should be made, I entreated him to make it.  I said it would
lighten the load of his life - I hope it will! - and that it would
give me increased opportunities of being his companion.  Oh,
Trotwood!' cried Agnes, putting her hands before her face, as her
tears started on it, 'I almost feel as if I had been papa's enemy,
instead of his loving child.  For I know how he has altered, in his
devotion to me.  I know how he has narrowed the circle of his
sympathies and duties, in the concentration of his whole mind upon
me.  I know what a multitude of things he has shut out for my sake,
and how his anxious thoughts of me have shadowed his life, and
weakened his strength and energy, by turning them always upon one
idea.  If I could ever set this right!  If I could ever work out
his restoration, as I have so innocently been the cause of his
decline!'

I had never before seen Agnes cry.  I had seen tears in her eyes
when I had brought new honours home from school, and I had seen
them there when we last spoke about her father, and I had seen her
turn her gentle head aside when we took leave of one another; but
I had never seen her grieve like this.  It made me so sorry that I
could only say, in a foolish, helpless manner, 'Pray, Agnes, don't!
Don't, my dear sister!'

But Agnes was too superior to me in character and purpose, as I
know well now, whatever I might know or not know then, to be long
in need of my entreaties.  The beautiful, calm manner, which makes
her so different in my remembrance from everybody else, came back
again, as if a cloud had passed from a serene sky.

'We are not likely to remain alone much longer,' said Agnes, 'and
while I have an opportunity, let me earnestly entreat you,
Trotwood, to be friendly to Uriah.  Don't repel him.  Don't resent
(as I think you have a general disposition to do) what may be
uncongenial to you in him.  He may not deserve it, for we know no
certain ill of him.  In any case, think first of papa and me!'

Agnes had no time to say more, for the room door opened, and Mrs.
Waterbrook, who was a large lady - or who wore a large dress: I
don't exactly know which, for I don't know which was dress and
which was lady - came sailing in.  I had a dim recollection of
having seen her at the theatre, as if I had seen her in a pale
magic lantern; but she appeared to remember me perfectly, and still
to suspect me of being in a state of intoxication.

Finding by degrees, however, that I was sober, and (I hope) that I
was a modest young gentleman, Mrs. Waterbrook softened towards me
considerably, and inquired, firstly, if I went much into the parks,
and secondly, if I went much into society.  On my replying to both
these questions in the negative, it occurred to me that I fell
again in her good opinion; but she concealed the fact gracefully,
and invited me to dinner next day.  I accepted the invitation, and
took my leave, making a call on Uriah in the office as I went out,
and leaving a card for him in his absence.

When I went to dinner next day, and on the street door being
opened, plunged into a vapour-bath of haunch of mutton, I divined
that I was not the only guest, for I immediately identified the
ticket-porter in disguise, assisting the family servant, and
waiting at the foot of the stairs to carry up my name.  He looked,
to the best of his ability, when he asked me for it confidentially,
as if he had never seen me before; but well did I know him, and
well did he know me.  Conscience made cowards of us both.

I found Mr. Waterbrook to be a middle-aged gentleman, with a short
throat, and a good deal of shirt-collar, who only wanted a black
nose to be the portrait of a pug-dog.  He told me he was happy to
have the honour of making my acquaintance; and when I had paid my
homage to Mrs. Waterbrook, presented me, with much ceremony, to a
very awful lady in a black velvet dress, and a great black velvet
hat, whom I remember as looking like a near relation of Hamlet's -
say his aunt.

Mrs. Henry Spiker was this lady's name; and her husband was there
too: so cold a man, that his head, instead of being grey, seemed to
be sprinkled with hoar-frost.  Immense deference was shown to the
Henry Spikers, male and female; which Agnes told me was on account
of Mr. Henry Spiker being solicitor to something Or to Somebody, I
forget what or which, remotely connected with the Treasury.

I found Uriah Heep among the company, in a suit of black, and in
deep humility.  He told me, when I shook hands with him, that he
was proud to be noticed by me, and that he really felt obliged to
me for my condescension.  I could have wished he had been less
obliged to me, for he hovered about me in his gratitude all the
rest of the evening; and whenever I said a word to Agnes, was sure,
with his shadowless eyes and cadaverous face, to be looking gauntly
down upon us from behind.

There were other guests - all iced for the occasion, as it struck
me, like the wine.  But there was one who attracted my attention
before he came in, on account of my hearing him announced as Mr.
Traddles!  My mind flew back to Salem House; and could it be Tommy,
I thought, who used to draw the skeletons!

I looked for Mr. Traddles with unusual interest.  He was a sober,
steady-looking young man of retiring manners, with a comic head of
hair, and eyes that were rather wide open; and he got into an
obscure corner so soon, that I had some difficulty in making him
out.  At length I had a good view of him, and either my vision
deceived me, or it was the old unfortunate Tommy.

I made my way to Mr. Waterbrook, and said, that I believed I had
the pleasure of seeing an old schoolfellow there.

'Indeed!' said Mr. Waterbrook, surprised.  'You are too young to
have been at school with Mr. Henry Spiker?'

'Oh, I don't mean him!' I returned.  'I mean the gentleman named
Traddles.'

'Oh!  Aye, aye!  Indeed!' said my host, with much diminished
interest.  'Possibly.'

'If it's really the same person,' said I, glancing towards him, 'it
was at a place called Salem House where we were together, and he
was an excellent fellow.'

'Oh yes.  Traddles is a good fellow,' returned my host nodding his
head with an air of toleration.  'Traddles is quite a good fellow.'

'It's a curious coincidence,' said I.

'It is really,' returned my host, 'quite a coincidence, that
Traddles should be here at all: as Traddles was only invited this
morning, when the place at table, intended to be occupied by Mrs.
Henry Spiker's brother, became vacant, in consequence of his
indisposition.  A very gentlemanly man, Mrs. Henry Spiker's
brother, Mr. Copperfield.'

I murmured an assent, which was full of feeling, considering that
I knew nothing at all about him; and I inquired what Mr. Traddles
was by profession.

'Traddles,' returned Mr. Waterbrook, 'is a young man reading for
the bar.  Yes.  He is quite a good fellow - nobody's enemy but his
own.'

'Is he his own enemy?' said I, sorry to hear this.

'Well,' returned Mr. Waterbrook, pursing up his mouth, and playing
with his watch-chain, in a comfortable, prosperous sort of way.  'I
should say he was one of those men who stand in their own light. 
Yes, I should say he would never, for example, be worth five
hundred pound.  Traddles was recommended to me by a professional
friend.  Oh yes.  Yes.  He has a kind of talent for drawing briefs,
and stating a case in writing, plainly.  I am able to throw
something in Traddles's way, in the course of the year; something
- for him - considerable.  Oh yes.  Yes.'

I was much impressed by the extremely comfortable and satisfied
manner in which Mr. Waterbrook delivered himself of this little
word 'Yes', every now and then.  There was wonderful expression in
it.  It completely conveyed the idea of a man who had been born,
not to say with a silver spoon, but with a scaling-ladder, and had
gone on mounting all the heights of life one after another, until
now he looked, from the top of the fortifications, with the eye of
a philosopher and a patron, on the people down in the trenches.

My reflections on this theme were still in progress when dinner was
announced.  Mr. Waterbrook went down with Hamlet's aunt.  Mr. Henry
Spiker took Mrs. Waterbrook.  Agnes, whom I should have liked to
take myself, was given to a simpering fellow with weak legs. 
Uriah, Traddles, and I, as the junior part of the company, went
down last, how we could.  I was not so vexed at losing Agnes as I
might have been, since it gave me an opportunity of making myself
known to Traddles on the stairs, who greeted me with great fervour;
while Uriah writhed with such obtrusive satisfaction and
self-abasement, that I could gladly have pitched him over the
banisters.
Traddles and I were separated at table, being billeted in two
remote corners: he in the glare of a red velvet lady; I, in the
gloom of Hamlet's aunt.  The dinner was very long, and the
conversation was about the Aristocracy - and Blood.  Mrs.
Waterbrook repeatedly told us, that if she had a weakness, it was
Blood.

It occurred to me several times that we should have got on better,
if we had not been quite so genteel.  We were so exceedingly
genteel, that our scope was very limited.  A Mr. and Mrs. Gulpidge
were of the party, who had something to do at second-hand (at
least, Mr. Gulpidge had) with the law business of the Bank; and
what with the Bank, and what with the Treasury, we were as
exclusive as the Court Circular.  To mend the matter, Hamlet's aunt
had the family failing of indulging in soliloquy, and held forth in
a desultory manner, by herself, on every topic that was introduced. 
These were few enough, to be sure; but as we always fell back upon
Blood, she had as wide a field for abstract speculation as her
nephew himself.

We might have been a party of Ogres, the conversation assumed such
a sanguine complexion.

'I confess I am of Mrs. Waterbrook's opinion,' said Mr. Waterbrook,
with his wine-glass at his eye.  'Other things are all very well in
their way, but give me Blood!'

'Oh!  There is nothing,' observed Hamlet's aunt, 'so satisfactory
to one!  There is nothing that is so much one's beau-ideal of - of
all that sort of thing, speaking generally.  There are some low
minds (not many, I am happy to believe, but there are some) that
would prefer to do what I should call bow down before idols. 
Positively Idols!  Before service, intellect, and so on.  But these
are intangible points.  Blood is not so.  We see Blood in a nose,
and we know it.  We meet with it in a chin, and we say, "There it
is!  That's Blood!" It is an actual matter of fact.  We point it
out.  It admits of no doubt.'

The simpering fellow with the weak legs, who had taken Agnes down,
stated the question more decisively yet, I thought.

'Oh, you know, deuce take it,' said this gentleman, looking round
the board with an imbecile smile, 'we can't forego Blood, you know. 
We must have Blood, you know.  Some young fellows, you know, may be
a little behind their station, perhaps, in point of education and
behaviour, and may go a little wrong, you know, and get themselves
and other people into a variety of fixes - and all that - but deuce
take it, it's delightful to reflect that they've got Blood in 'em!
Myself, I'd rather at any time be knocked down by a man who had got
Blood in him, than I'd be picked up by a man who hadn't!'

This sentiment, as compressing the general question into a
nutshell, gave the utmost satisfaction, and brought the gentleman
into great notice until the ladies retired.  After that, I observed
that Mr. Gulpidge and Mr. Henry Spiker, who had hitherto been very
distant, entered into a defensive alliance against us, the common
enemy, and exchanged a mysterious dialogue across the table for our
defeat and overthrow.

'That affair of the first bond for four thousand five hundred
pounds has not taken the course that was expected, Spiker,' said
Mr. Gulpidge.

'Do you mean the D. of A.'s?' said Mr. Spiker.

'The C. of B.'s!' said Mr. Gulpidge.

Mr. Spiker raised his eyebrows, and looked much concerned.

'When the question was referred to Lord - I needn't name him,' said
Mr. Gulpidge, checking himself -

'I understand,' said Mr. Spiker, 'N.'

Mr. Gulpidge darkly nodded - 'was referred to him, his answer was,
"Money, or no release."'

'Lord bless my soul!' cried Mr. Spiker.

"'Money, or no release,"' repeated Mr. Gulpidge, firmly.  'The next
in reversion - you understand me?'

'K.,' said Mr. Spiker, with an ominous look.

'- K. then positively refused to sign.  He was attended at
Newmarket for that purpose, and he point-blank refused to do it.'

Mr. Spiker was so interested, that he became quite stony.

'So the matter rests at this hour,' said Mr. Gulpidge, throwing
himself back in his chair.  'Our friend Waterbrook will excuse me
if I forbear to explain myself generally, on account of the
magnitude of the interests involved.'

Mr. Waterbrook was only too happy, as it appeared to me, to have
such interests, and such names, even hinted at, across his table. 
He assumed an expression of gloomy intelligence (though I am
persuaded he knew no more about the discussion than I did), and
highly approved of the discretion that had been observed.  Mr.
Spiker, after the receipt of such a confidence, naturally desired
to favour his friend with a confidence of his own; therefore the
foregoing dialogue was succeeded by another, in which it was Mr.
Gulpidge's turn to be surprised, and that by another in which the
surprise came round to Mr. Spiker's turn again, and so on, turn and
turn about.  All this time we, the outsiders, remained oppressed by
the tremendous interests involved in the conversation; and our host
regarded us with pride, as the victims of a salutary awe and
astonishment.
I was very glad indeed to get upstairs to Agnes, and to talk with
her in a corner, and to introduce Traddles to her, who was shy, but
agreeable, and the same good-natured creature still.  As he was
obliged to leave early, on account of going away next morning for
a month, I had not nearly so much conversation with him as I could
have wished; but we exchanged addresses, and promised ourselves the
pleasure of another meeting when he should come back to town.  He
was greatly interested to hear that I knew Steerforth, and spoke of
him with such warmth that I made him tell Agnes what he thought of
him.  But Agnes only looked at me the while, and very slightly
shook her head when only I observed her.

As she was not among people with whom I believed she could be very
much at home, I was almost glad to hear that she was going away
within a few days, though I was sorry at the prospect of parting
from her again so soon.  This caused me to remain until all the
company were gone.  Conversing with her, and hearing her sing, was
such a delightful reminder to me of my happy life in the grave old
house she had made so beautiful, that I could have remained there
half the night; but, having no excuse for staying any longer, when
the lights of Mr. Waterbrook's society were all snuffed out, I took
my leave very much against my inclination.  I felt then, more than
ever, that she was my better Angel; and if I thought of her sweet
face and placid smile, as though they had shone on me from some
removed being, like an Angel, I hope I thought no harm.

I have said that the company were all gone; but I ought to have
excepted Uriah, whom I don't include in that denomination, and who
had never ceased to hover near us.  He was close behind me when I
went downstairs.  He was close beside me, when I walked away from
the house, slowly fitting his long skeleton fingers into the still
longer fingers of a great Guy Fawkes pair of gloves.

It was in no disposition for Uriah's company, but in remembrance of
the entreaty Agnes had made to me, that I asked him if he would
come home to my rooms, and have some coffee.

'Oh, really, Master Copperfield,' he rejoined - 'I beg your pardon,
Mister Copperfield, but the other comes so natural, I don't like
that you should put a constraint upon yourself to ask a numble
person like me to your ouse.'

'There is no constraint in the case,' said I.  'Will you come?'

'I should like to, very much,' replied Uriah, with a writhe.

'Well, then, come along!' said I.

I could not help being rather short with him, but he appeared not
to mind it.  We went the nearest way, without conversing much upon
the road; and he was so humble in respect of those scarecrow
gloves, that he was still putting them on, and seemed to have made
no advance in that labour, when we got to my place.

I led him up the dark stairs, to prevent his knocking his head
against anything, and really his damp cold hand felt so like a frog
in mine, that I was tempted to drop it and run away.  Agnes and
hospitality prevailed, however, and I conducted him to my fireside. 
When I lighted my candles, he fell into meek transports with the
room that was revealed to him; and when I heated the coffee in an
unassuming block-tin vessel in which Mrs. Crupp delighted to
prepare it (chiefly, I believe, because it was not intended for the
purpose, being a shaving-pot, and because there was a patent
invention of great price mouldering away in the pantry), he
professed so much emotion, that I could joyfully have scalded him.

'Oh, really, Master Copperfield, - I mean Mister Copperfield,' said
Uriah, 'to see you waiting upon me is what I never could have
expected!  But, one way and another, so many things happen to me
which I never could have expected, I am sure, in my umble station,
that it seems to rain blessings on my ed.  You have heard
something, I des-say, of a change in my expectations, Master
Copperfield, - I should say, Mister Copperfield?'

As he sat on my sofa, with his long knees drawn up under his
coffee-cup, his hat and gloves upon the ground close to him, his
spoon going softly round and round, his shadowless red eyes, which
looked as if they had scorched their lashes off, turned towards me
without looking at me, the disagreeable dints I have formerly
described in his nostrils coming and going with his breath, and a
snaky undulation pervading his frame from his chin to his boots, I
decided in my own mind that I disliked him intensely.  It made me
very uncomfortable to have him for a guest, for I was young then,
and unused to disguise what I so strongly felt.

'You have heard something, I des-say, of a change in my
expectations, Master Copperfield, - I should say, Mister
Copperfield?' observed Uriah.

'Yes,' said I, 'something.'

'Ah! I thought Miss Agnes would know of it!' he quietly returned. 
'I'm glad to find Miss Agnes knows of it.  Oh, thank you, Master -
Mister Copperfield!'

I could have thrown my bootjack at him (it lay ready on the rug),
for having entrapped me into the disclosure of anything concerning
Agnes, however immaterial.  But I only drank my coffee.

'What a prophet you have shown yourself, Mister Copperfield!'
pursued Uriah.  'Dear me, what a prophet you have proved yourself
to be!  Don't you remember saying to me once, that perhaps I should
be a partner in Mr. Wickfield's business, and perhaps it might be
Wickfield and Heep?  You may not recollect it; but when a person is
umble, Master Copperfield, a person treasures such things up!'

'I recollect talking about it,' said I, 'though I certainly did not
think it very likely then.'
'Oh! who would have thought it likely, Mister Copperfield!'
returned Uriah, enthusiastically.  'I am sure I didn't myself.  I
recollect saying with my own lips that I was much too umble.  So I
considered myself really and truly.'

He sat, with that carved grin on his face, looking at the fire, as
I looked at him.

'But the umblest persons, Master Copperfield,' he presently
resumed, 'may be the instruments of good.  I am glad to think I
have been the instrument of good to Mr. Wickfield, and that I may
be more so.  Oh what a worthy man he is, Mister Copperfield, but
how imprudent he has been!'

'I am sorry to hear it,' said I.  I could not help adding, rather
pointedly, 'on all accounts.'

'Decidedly so, Mister Copperfield,' replied Uriah.  'On all
accounts.  Miss Agnes's above all!  You don't remember your own
eloquent expressions, Master Copperfield; but I remember how you
said one day that everybody must admire her, and how I thanked you
for it!  You have forgot that, I have no doubt, Master
Copperfield?'

'No,' said I, drily.

'Oh how glad I am you have not!' exclaimed Uriah.  'To think that
you should be the first to kindle the sparks of ambition in my
umble breast, and that you've not forgot it!  Oh! - Would you
excuse me asking for a cup more coffee?'

Something in the emphasis he laid upon the kindling of those
sparks, and something in the glance he directed at me as he said
it, had made me start as if I had seen him illuminated by a blaze
of light.  Recalled by his request, preferred in quite another tone
of voice, I did the honours of the shaving-pot; but I did them with
an unsteadiness of hand, a sudden sense of being no match for him,
and a perplexed suspicious anxiety as to what he might be going to
say next, which I felt could not escape his observation.

He said nothing at all.  He stirred his coffee round and round, he
sipped it, he felt his chin softly with his grisly hand, he looked
at the fire, he looked about the room, he gasped rather than smiled
at me, he writhed and undulated about, in his deferential
servility, he stirred and sipped again, but he left the renewal of
the conversation to me.

'So, Mr. Wickfield,' said I, at last, 'who is worth five hundred of
you - or me'; for my life, I think, I could not have helped
dividing that part of the sentence with an awkward jerk; 'has been
imprudent, has he, Mr. Heep?'

'Oh, very imprudent indeed, Master Copperfield,' returned Uriah,
sighing modestly.  'Oh, very much so!  But I wish you'd call me
Uriah, if you please.  It's like old times.'

'Well! Uriah,' said I, bolting it out with some difficulty.

'Thank you,' he returned, with fervour.  'Thank you, Master
Copperfield!  It's like the blowing of old breezes or the ringing
of old bellses to hear YOU say Uriah.  I beg your pardon.  Was I
making any observation?'

'About Mr. Wickfield,' I suggested.

'Oh!  Yes, truly,' said Uriah.  'Ah!  Great imprudence, Master
Copperfield.  It's a topic that I wouldn't touch upon, to any soul
but you.  Even to you I can only touch upon it, and no more.  If
anyone else had been in my place during the last few years, by this
time he would have had Mr. Wickfield (oh, what a worthy man he is,
Master Copperfield, too!) under his thumb.  Un--der--his thumb,'
said Uriah, very slowly, as he stretched out his cruel-looking hand
above my table, and pressed his own thumb upon it, until it shook,
and shook the room.

If I had been obliged to look at him with him splay foot on Mr.
Wickfield's head, I think I could scarcely have hated him more.

'Oh, dear, yes, Master Copperfield,' he proceeded, in a soft voice,
most remarkably contrasting with the action of his thumb, which did
not diminish its hard pressure in the least degree, 'there's no
doubt of it.  There would have been loss, disgrace, I don't know
what at all.  Mr. Wickfield knows it.  I am the umble instrument of
umbly serving him, and he puts me on an eminence I hardly could
have hoped to reach.  How thankful should I be!' With his face
turned towards me, as he finished, but without looking at me, he
took his crooked thumb off the spot where he had planted it, and
slowly and thoughtfully scraped his lank jaw with it, as if he were
shaving himself.

I recollect well how indignantly my heart beat, as I saw his crafty
face, with the appropriately red light of the fire upon it,
preparing for something else.

'Master Copperfield,' he began - 'but am I keeping you up?'

'You are not keeping me up.  I generally go to bed late.'

'Thank you, Master Copperfield!  I have risen from my umble station
since first you used to address me, it is true; but I am umble
still.  I hope I never shall be otherwise than umble.  You will not
think the worse of my umbleness, if I make a little confidence to
you, Master Copperfield?  Will you?'

'Oh no,' said I, with an effort.

'Thank you!' He took out his pocket-handkerchief, and began wiping
the palms of his hands.  'Miss Agnes, Master Copperfield -'
'Well, Uriah?'

'Oh, how pleasant to be called Uriah, spontaneously!' he cried; and
gave himself a jerk, like a convulsive fish.  'You thought her
looking very beautiful tonight, Master Copperfield?'

'I thought her looking as she always does: superior, in all
respects, to everyone around her,' I returned.

'Oh, thank you!  It's so true!' he cried.  'Oh, thank you very much
for that!'

'Not at all,' I said, loftily.  'There is no reason why you should
thank me.'

'Why that, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah, 'is, in fact, the
confidence that I am going to take the liberty of reposing.  Umble
as I am,' he wiped his hands harder, and looked at them and at the
fire by turns, 'umble as my mother is, and lowly as our poor but
honest roof has ever been, the image of Miss Agnes (I don't mind
trusting you with my secret, Master Copperfield, for I have always
overflowed towards you since the first moment I had the pleasure of
beholding you in a pony-shay) has been in my breast for years.  Oh,
Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground
my Agnes walks on!'

I believe I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out
of the fire, and running him through with it.  It went from me with
a shock, like a ball fired from a rifle: but the image of Agnes,
outraged by so much as a thought of this red-headed animal's,
remained in my mind when I looked at him, sitting all awry as if
his mean soul griped his body, and made me giddy.  He seemed to
swell and grow before my eyes; the room seemed full of the echoes
of his voice; and the strange feeling (to which, perhaps, no one is
quite a stranger) that all this had occurred before, at some
indefinite time, and that I knew what he was going to say next,
took possession of me.

A timely observation of the sense of power that there was in his
face, did more to bring back to my remembrance the entreaty of
Agnes, in its full force, than any effort I could have made.  I
asked him, with a better appearance of composure than I could have
thought possible a minute before, whether he had made his feelings
known to Agnes.

'Oh no, Master Copperfield!' he returned; 'oh dear, no!  Not to
anyone but you.  You see I am only just emerging from my lowly
station.  I rest a good deal of hope on her observing how useful I
am to her father (for I trust to be very useful to him indeed,
Master Copperfield), and how I smooth the way for him, and keep him
straight.  She's so much attached to her father, Master Copperfield
(oh, what a lovely thing it is in a daughter!), that I think she
may come, on his account, to be kind to me.'

I fathomed the depth of the rascal's whole scheme, and understood
why he laid it bare.

'If you'll have the goodness to keep my secret, Master
Copperfield,' he pursued, 'and not, in general, to go against me,
I shall take it as a particular favour.  You wouldn't wish to make
unpleasantness.  I know what a friendly heart you've got; but
having only known me on my umble footing (on my umblest I should
say, for I am very umble still), you might, unbeknown, go against
me rather, with my Agnes.  I call her mine, you see, Master
Copperfield.  There's a song that says, "I'd crowns resign, to call
her mine!" I hope to do it, one of these days.'

Dear Agnes!  So much too loving and too good for anyone that I
could think of, was it possible that she was reserved to be the
wife of such a wretch as this!

'There's no hurry at present, you know, Master Copperfield,' Uriah
proceeded, in his slimy way, as I sat gazing at him, with this
thought in my mind.  'My Agnes is very young still; and mother and
me will have to work our way upwards, and make a good many new
arrangements, before it would be quite convenient.  So I shall have
time gradually to make her familiar with my hopes, as opportunities
offer.  Oh, I'm so much obliged to you for this confidence!  Oh,
it's such a relief, you can't think, to know that you understand
our situation, and are certain (as you wouldn't wish to make
unpleasantness in the family) not to go against me!'

He took the hand which I dared not withhold, and having given it a
damp squeeze, referred to his pale-faced watch.

'Dear me!' he said, 'it's past one.  The moments slip away so, in
the confidence of old times, Master Copperfield, that it's almost
half past one!'

I answered that I had thought it was later.  Not that I had really
thought so, but because my conversational powers were effectually
scattered.

'Dear me!' he said, considering.  'The ouse that I am stopping at
- a sort of a private hotel and boarding ouse, Master Copperfield,
near the New River ed - will have gone to bed these two hours.'

'I am sorry,' I returned, 'that there is only one bed here, and
that I -'

'Oh, don't think of mentioning beds, Master Copperfield!' he
rejoined ecstatically, drawing up one leg.  'But would you have any
objections to my laying down before the fire?'

'If it comes to that,' I said, 'pray take my bed, and I'll lie down
before the fire.'

His repudiation of this offer was almost shrill enough, in the
excess of its surprise and humility, to have penetrated to the ears
of Mrs. Crupp, then sleeping, I suppose, in a distant chamber,
situated at about the level of low-water mark, soothed in her
slumbers by the ticking of an incorrigible clock, to which she
always referred me when we had any little difference on the score
of punctuality, and which was never less than three-quarters of an
hour too slow, and had always been put right in the morning by the
best authorities.  As no arguments I could urge, in my bewildered
condition, had the least effect upon his modesty in inducing him to
accept my bedroom, I was obliged to make the best arrangements I
could, for his repose before the fire.  The mattress of the sofa
(which was a great deal too short for his lank figure), the sofa
pillows, a blanket, the table-cover, a clean breakfast-cloth, and
a great-coat, made him a bed and covering, for which he was more
than thankful.  Having lent him a night-cap, which he put on at
once, and in which he made such an awful figure, that I have never
worn one since, I left him to his rest.

I never shall forget that night.  I never shall forget how I turned
and tumbled; how I wearied myself with thinking about Agnes and
this creature; how I considered what could I do, and what ought I
to do; how I could come to no other conclusion than that the best
course for her peace was to do nothing, and to keep to myself what
I had heard.  If I went to sleep for a few moments, the image of
Agnes with her tender eyes, and of her father looking fondly on
her, as I had so often seen him look, arose before me with
appealing faces, and filled me with vague terrors.  When I awoke,
the recollection that Uriah was lying in the next room, sat heavy
on me like a waking nightmare; and oppressed me with a leaden
dread, as if I had had some meaner quality of devil for a lodger.

The poker got into my dozing thoughts besides, and wouldn't come
out.  I thought, between sleeping and waking, that it was still red
hot, and I had snatched it out of the fire, and run him through the
body.  I was so haunted at last by the idea, though I knew there
was nothing in it, that I stole into the next room to look at him. 
There I saw him, lying on his back, with his legs extending to I
don't know where, gurglings taking place in his throat, stoppages
in his nose, and his mouth open like a post-office.  He was so much
worse in reality than in my distempered fancy, that afterwards I
was attracted to him in very repulsion, and could not help
wandering in and out every half-hour or so, and taking another look
at him.  Still, the long, long night seemed heavy and hopeless as
ever, and no promise of day was in the murky sky.

When I saw him going downstairs early in the morning (for, thank
Heaven! he would not stay to breakfast), it appeared to me as if
the night was going away in his person.  When I went out to the
Commons, I charged Mrs. Crupp with particular directions to leave
the windows open, that my sitting-room might be aired, and purged
of his presence.



CHAPTER 26
I FALL INTO CAPTIVITY


I saw no more of Uriah Heep, until the day when Agnes left town. 
I was at the coach office to take leave of her and see her go; and
there was he, returning to Canterbury by the same conveyance.  It
was some small satisfaction to me to observe his spare,
short-waisted, high-shouldered, mulberry-coloured great-coat
perched up, in company with an umbrella like a small tent, on the
edge of the back seat on the roof, while Agnes was, of course,
inside; but what I underwent in my efforts to be friendly with him,
while Agnes looked on, perhaps deserved that little recompense.  At
the coach window, as at the dinner-party, he hovered about us
without a moment's intermission, like a great vulture: gorging
himself on every syllable that I said to Agnes, or Agnes said to
me.

In the state of trouble into which his disclosure by my fire had
thrown me, I had thought very much of the words Agnes had used in
reference to the partnership.  'I did what I hope was right. 
Feeling sure that it was necessary for papa's peace that the
sacrifice should be made, I entreated him to make it.'  A miserable
foreboding that she would yield to, and sustain herself by, the
same feeling in reference to any sacrifice for his sake, had
oppressed me ever since.  I knew how she loved him.  I knew what
the devotion of her nature was.  I knew from her own lips that she
regarded herself as the innocent cause of his errors, and as owing
him a great debt she ardently desired to pay.  I had no consolation
in seeing how different she was from this detestable Rufus with the
mulberry-coloured great-coat, for I felt that in the very
difference between them, in the self-denial of her pure soul and
the sordid baseness of his, the greatest danger lay.  All this,
doubtless, he knew thoroughly, and had, in his cunning, considered
well.

Yet I was so certain that the prospect of such a sacrifice afar
off, must destroy the happiness of Agnes; and I was so sure, from
her manner, of its being unseen by her then, and having cast no
shadow on her yet; that I could as soon have injured her, as given
her any warning of what impended.  Thus it was that we parted
without explanation: she waving her hand and smiling farewell from
the coach window; her evil genius writhing on the roof, as if he
had her in his clutches and triumphed.

I could not get over this farewell glimpse of them for a long time. 
When Agnes wrote to tell me of her safe arrival, I was as miserable
as when I saw her going away.  Whenever I fell into a thoughtful
state, this subject was sure to present itself, and all my
uneasiness was sure to be redoubled.  Hardly a night passed without
my dreaming of it.  It became a part of my life, and as inseparable
from my life as my own head.

I had ample leisure to refine upon my uneasiness: for Steerforth
was at Oxford, as he wrote to me, and when I was not at the
Commons, I was very much alone.  I believe I had at this time some
lurking distrust of Steerforth.  I wrote to him most affectionately
in reply to his, but I think I was glad, upon the whole, that he
could not come to London just then.  I suspect the truth to be,
that the influence of Agnes was upon me, undisturbed by the sight
of him; and that it was the more powerful with me, because she had
so large a share in my thoughts and interest.

In the meantime, days and weeks slipped away.  I was articled to
Spenlow and Jorkins.  I had ninety pounds a year (exclusive of my
house-rent and sundry collateral matters) from my aunt.  My rooms
were engaged for twelve months certain: and though I still found
them dreary of an evening, and the evenings long, I could settle
down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to
coffee; which I seem, on looking back, to have taken by the gallon
at about this period of my existence.  At about this time, too, I
made three discoveries: first, that Mrs. Crupp was a martyr to a
curious disorder called 'the spazzums', which was generally
accompanied with inflammation of the nose, and required to be
constantly treated with peppermint; secondly, that something
peculiar in the temperature of my pantry, made the brandy-bottles
burst; thirdly, that I was alone in the world, and much given to
record that circumstance in fragments of English versification.

On the day when I was articled, no festivity took place, beyond my
having sandwiches and sherry into the office for the clerks, and
going alone to the theatre at night.  I went to see The Stranger,
as a Doctors' Commons sort of play, and was so dreadfully cut up,
that I hardly knew myself in my own glass when I got home.  Mr.
Spenlow remarked, on this occasion, when we concluded our business,
that he should have been happy to have seen me at his house at
Norwood to celebrate our becoming connected, but for his domestic
arrangements being in some disorder, on account of the expected
return of his daughter from finishing her education at Paris.  But,
he intimated that when she came home he should hope to have the
pleasure of entertaining me.  I knew that he was a widower with one
daughter, and expressed my acknowledgements.

Mr. Spenlow was as good as his word.  In a week or two, he referred
to this engagement, and said, that if I would do him the favour to
come down next Saturday, and stay till Monday, he would be
extremely happy.  Of course I said I would do him the favour; and
he was to drive me down in his phaeton, and to bring me back.

When the day arrived, my very carpet-bag was an object of
veneration to the stipendiary clerks, to whom the house at Norwood
was a sacred mystery.  One of them informed me that he had heard
that Mr. Spenlow ate entirely off plate and china; and another
hinted at champagne being constantly on draught, after the usual
custom of table-beer.  The old clerk with the wig, whose name was
Mr. Tiffey, had been down on business several times in the course
of his career, and had on each occasion penetrated to the
breakfast-parlour.  He described it as an apartment of the most
sumptuous nature, and said that he had drunk brown East India
sherry there, of a quality so precious as to make a man wink.  We
had an adjourned cause in the Consistory that day - about
excommunicating a baker who had been objecting in a vestry to a
paving-rate - and as the evidence was just twice the length of
Robinson Crusoe, according to a calculation I made, it was rather
late in the day before we finished.  However, we got him
excommunicated for six weeks, and sentenced in no end of costs; and
then the baker's proctor, and the judge, and the advocates on both
sides (who were all nearly related), went out of town together, and
Mr. Spenlow and I drove away in the phaeton.

The phaeton was a very handsome affair; the horses arched their
necks and lifted up their legs as if they knew they belonged to
Doctors' Commons.  There was a good deal of competition in the
Commons on all points of display, and it turned out some very
choice equipages then; though I always have considered, and always
shall consider, that in my time the great article of competition
there was starch: which I think was worn among the proctors to as
great an extent as it is in the nature of man to bear.

We were very pleasant, going down, and Mr. Spenlow gave me some
hints in reference to my profession.  He said it was the genteelest
profession in the world, and must on no account be confounded with
the profession of a solicitor: being quite another sort of thing,
infinitely more exclusive, less mechanical, and more profitable. 
We took things much more easily in the Commons than they could be
taken anywhere else, he observed, and that set us, as a privileged
class, apart.  He said it was impossible to conceal the
disagreeable fact, that we were chiefly employed by solicitors; but
he gave me to understand that they were an inferior race of men,
universally looked down upon by all proctors of any pretensions.

I asked Mr. Spenlow what he considered the best sort of
professional business?  He replied, that a good case of a disputed
will, where there was a neat little estate of thirty or forty
thousand pounds, was, perhaps, the best of all.  In such a case, he
said, not only were there very pretty pickings, in the way of
arguments at every stage of the proceedings, and mountains upon
mountains of evidence on interrogatory and counter-interrogatory
(to say nothing of an appeal lying, first to the Delegates, and
then to the Lords), but, the costs being pretty sure to come out of
the estate at last, both sides went at it in a lively and spirited
manner, and expense was no consideration.  Then, he launched into
a general eulogium on the Commons.  What was to be particularly
admired (he said) in the Commons, was its compactness.  It was the
most conveniently organized place in the world.  It was the
complete idea of snugness.  It lay in a nutshell.  For example: You
brought a divorce case, or a restitution case, into the Consistory. 
Very good.  You tried it in the Consistory.  You made a quiet
little round game of it, among a family group, and you played it
out at leisure.  Suppose you were not satisfied with the
Consistory, what did you do then?  Why, you went into the Arches. 
What was the Arches?  The same court, in the same room, with the
same bar, and the same practitioners, but another judge, for there
the Consistory judge could plead any court-day as an advocate. 
Well, you played your round game out again.  Still you were not
satisfied.  Very good.  What did you do then?  Why, you went to the
Delegates.  Who were the Delegates?  Why, the Ecclesiastical
Delegates were the advocates without any business, who had looked
on at the round game when it was playing in both courts, and had
seen the cards shuffled, and cut, and played, and had talked to all
the players about it, and now came fresh, as judges, to settle the
matter to the satisfaction of everybody!  Discontented people might
talk of corruption in the Commons, closeness in the Commons, and
the necessity of reforming the Commons, said Mr. Spenlow solemnly,
in conclusion; but when the price of wheat per bushel had been
highest, the Commons had been busiest; and a man might lay his hand
upon his heart, and say this to the whole world, - 'Touch the
Commons, and down comes the country!'

I listened to all this with attention; and though, I must say, I
had my doubts whether the country was quite as much obliged to the
Commons as Mr. Spenlow made out, I respectfully deferred to his
opinion.  That about the price of wheat per bushel, I modestly felt
was too much for my strength, and quite settled the question.  I
have never, to this hour, got the better of that bushel of wheat. 
It has reappeared to annihilate me, all through my life, in
connexion with all kinds of subjects.  I don't know now, exactly,
what it has to do with me, or what right it has to crush me, on an
infinite variety of occasions; but whenever I see my old friend the
bushel brought in by the head and shoulders (as he always is, I
observe), I give up a subject for lost.

This is a digression.  I was not the man to touch the Commons, and
bring down the country.  I submissively expressed, by my silence,
my acquiescence in all I had heard from my superior in years and
knowledge; and we talked about The Stranger and the Drama, and the
pairs of horses, until we came to Mr. Spenlow's gate.

There was a lovely garden to Mr. Spenlow's house; and though that
was not the best time of the year for seeing a garden, it was so
beautifully kept, that I was quite enchanted.  There was a charming
lawn, there were clusters of trees, and there were perspective
walks that I could just distinguish in the dark, arched over with
trellis-work, on which shrubs and flowers grew in the growing
season.  'Here Miss Spenlow walks by herself,' I thought.  'Dear
me!'

We went into the house, which was cheerfully lighted up, and into
a hall where there were all sorts of hats, caps, great-coats,
plaids, gloves, whips, and walking-sticks.  'Where is Miss Dora?'
said Mr. Spenlow to the servant.  'Dora!' I thought.  'What a
beautiful name!'

We turned into a room near at hand (I think it was the identical
breakfast-room, made memorable by the brown East Indian sherry),
and I heard a voice say, 'Mr. Copperfield, my daughter Dora, and my
daughter Dora's confidential friend!' It was, no doubt, Mr.
Spenlow's voice, but I didn't know it, and I didn't care whose it
was.  All was over in a moment.  I had fulfilled my destiny.  I was
a captive and a slave.  I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction!

She was more than human to me.  She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don't
know what she was - anything that no one ever saw, and everything
that everybody ever wanted.  I was swallowed up in an abyss of love
in an instant.  There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down,
or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a
word to her.

'I,' observed a well-remembered voice, when I had bowed and
murmured something, 'have seen Mr. Copperfield before.'

The speaker was not Dora.  No; the confidential friend, Miss
Murdstone!

I don't think I was much astonished.  To the best of my judgement,
no capacity of astonishment was left in me.  There was nothing
worth mentioning in the material world, but Dora Spenlow, to be
astonished about.  I said, 'How do you do, Miss Murdstone?  I hope
you are well.'  She answered, 'Very well.'  I said, 'How is Mr.
Murdstone?' She replied, 'My brother is robust, I am obliged to
you.'

Mr. Spenlow, who, I suppose, had been surprised to see us recognize
each other, then put in his word.

'I am glad to find,' he said, 'Copperfield, that you and Miss
Murdstone are already acquainted.'

'Mr. Copperfield and myself,' said Miss Murdstone, with severe
composure, 'are connexions.  We were once slightly acquainted.  It
was in his childish days.  Circumstances have separated us since. 
I should not have known him.'

I replied that I should have known her, anywhere.  Which was true
enough.

'Miss Murdstone has had the goodness,' said Mr. Spenlow to me, 'to
accept the office - if I may so describe it - of my daughter Dora's
confidential friend.  My daughter Dora having, unhappily, no
mother, Miss Murdstone is obliging enough to become her companion
and protector.'

A passing thought occurred to me that Miss Murdstone, like the
pocket instrument called a life-preserver, was not so much designed
for purposes of protection as of assault.  But as I had none but
passing thoughts for any subject save Dora, I glanced at her,
directly afterwards, and was thinking that I saw, in her prettily
pettish manner, that she was not very much inclined to be
particularly confidential to her companion and protector, when a
bell rang, which Mr. Spenlow said was the first dinner-bell, and so
carried me off to dress.

The idea of dressing one's self, or doing anything in the way of
action, in that state of love, was a little too ridiculous.  I
could only sit down before my fire, biting the key of my
carpet-bag, and think of the captivating, girlish, bright-eyed
lovely Dora.  What a form she had, what a face she had, what a
graceful, variable, enchanting manner!

The bell rang again so soon that I made a mere scramble of my
dressing, instead of the careful operation I could have wished
under the circumstances, and went downstairs.  There was some
company.  Dora was talking to an old gentleman with a grey head. 
Grey as he was - and a great-grandfather into the bargain, for he
said so - I was madly jealous of him.

What a state of mind I was in!  I was jealous of everybody.  I
couldn't bear the idea of anybody knowing Mr. Spenlow better than
I did.  It was torturing to me to hear them talk of occurrences in
which I had had no share.  When a most amiable person, with a
highly polished bald head, asked me across the dinner table, if
that were the first occasion of my seeing the grounds, I could have
done anything to him that was savage and revengeful.

I don't remember who was there, except Dora.  I have not the least
idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora.  My impression is, that
I dined off Dora, entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates
untouched.  I sat next to her.  I talked to her.  She had the most
delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest
and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into
hopeless slavery.  She was rather diminutive altogether.  So much
the more precious, I thought.

When she went out of the room with Miss Murdstone (no other ladies
were of the party), I fell into a reverie, only disturbed by the
cruel apprehension that Miss Murdstone would disparage me to her. 
The amiable creature with the polished head told me a long story,
which I think was about gardening.  I think I heard him say, 'my
gardener', several times.  I seemed to pay the deepest attention to
him, but I was wandering in a garden of Eden all the while, with
Dora.

My apprehensions of being disparaged to the object of my engrossing
affection were revived when we went into the drawing-room, by the
grim and distant aspect of Miss Murdstone.  But I was relieved of
them in an unexpected manner.

'David Copperfield,' said Miss Murdstone, beckoning me aside into
a window.  'A word.'

I confronted Miss Murdstone alone.

'David Copperfield,' said Miss Murdstone, 'I need not enlarge upon
family circumstances.  They are not a tempting subject.'
'Far from it, ma'am,' I returned.

'Far from it,' assented Miss Murdstone.  'I do not wish to revive
the memory of past differences, or of past outrages.  I have
received outrages from a person - a female I am sorry to say, for
the credit of my sex - who is not to be mentioned without scorn and
disgust; and therefore I would rather not mention her.'

I felt very fiery on my aunt's account; but I said it would
certainly be better, if Miss Murdstone pleased, not to mention her. 
I could not hear her disrespectfully mentioned, I added, without
expressing my opinion in a decided tone.

Miss Murdstone shut her eyes, and disdainfully inclined her head;
then, slowly opening her eyes, resumed:

'David Copperfield, I shall not attempt to disguise the fact, that
I formed an unfavourable opinion of you in your childhood.  It may
have been a mistaken one, or you may have ceased to justify it. 
That is not in question between us now.  I belong to a family
remarkable, I believe, for some firmness; and I am not the creature
of circumstance or change.  I may have my opinion of you.  You may
have your opinion of me.'

I inclined my head, in my turn.

'But it is not necessary,' said Miss Murdstone, 'that these
opinions should come into collision here.  Under existing
circumstances, it is as well on all accounts that they should not. 
As the chances of life have brought us together again, and may
bring us together on other occasions, I would say, let us meet here
as distant acquaintances.  Family circumstances are a sufficient
reason for our only meeting on that footing, and it is quite
unnecessary that either of us should make the other the subject of
remark.  Do you approve of this?'

'Miss Murdstone,' I returned, 'I think you and Mr. Murdstone used
me very cruelly, and treated my mother with great unkindness.  I
shall always think so, as long as I live.  But I quite agree in
what you propose.'

Miss Murdstone shut her eyes again, and bent her head.  Then, just
touching the back of my hand with the tips of her cold, stiff
fingers, she walked away, arranging the little fetters on her
wrists and round her neck; which seemed to be the same set, in
exactly the same state, as when I had seen her last.  These
reminded me, in reference to Miss Murdstone's nature, of the
fetters over a jail door; suggesting on the outside, to all
beholders, what was to be expected within.

All I know of the rest of the evening is, that I heard the empress
of my heart sing enchanted ballads in the French language,
generally to the effect that, whatever was the matter, we ought
always to dance, Ta ra la, Ta ra la! accompanying herself on a
glorified instrument, resembling a guitar.  That I was lost in
blissful delirium.  That I refused refreshment.  That my soul
recoiled from punch particularly.  That when Miss Murdstone took
her into custody and led her away, she smiled and gave me her
delicious hand.  That I caught a view of myself in a mirror,
looking perfectly imbecile and idiotic.  That I retired to bed in
a most maudlin state of mind, and got up in a crisis of feeble
infatuation.

It was a fine morning, and early, and I thought I would go and take
a stroll down one of those wire-arched walks, and indulge my
passion by dwelling on her image.  On my way through the hall, I
encountered her little dog, who was called Jip - short for Gipsy. 
I approached him tenderly, for I loved even him; but he showed his
whole set of teeth, got under a chair expressly to snarl, and
wouldn't hear of the least familiarity.

The garden was cool and solitary.  I walked about, wondering what
my feelings of happiness would be, if I could ever become engaged
to this dear wonder.  As to marriage, and fortune, and all that, I
believe I was almost as innocently undesigning then, as when I
loved little Em'ly.  To be allowed to call her 'Dora', to write to
her, to dote upon and worship her, to have reason to think that
when she was with other people she was yet mindful of me, seemed to
me the summit of human ambition - I am sure it was the summit of
mine.  There is no doubt whatever that I was a lackadaisical young
spooney; but there was a purity of heart in all this, that prevents
my having quite a contemptuous recollection of it, let me laugh as
I may.

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner, and met her. 
I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that
corner, and my pen shakes in my hand.

'You - are - out early, Miss Spenlow,' said I.

'It's so stupid at home,' she replied, 'and Miss Murdstone is so
absurd!  She talks such nonsense about its being necessary for the
day to be aired, before I come out.  Aired!' (She laughed, here, in
the most melodious manner.) 'On a Sunday morning, when I don't
practise, I must do something.  So I told papa last night I must
come out.  Besides, it's the brightest time of the whole day. 
Don't you think so?'

I hazarded a bold flight, and said (not without stammering) that it
was very bright to me then, though it had been very dark to me a
minute before.

'Do you mean a compliment?' said Dora, 'or that the weather has
really changed?'

I stammered worse than before, in replying that I meant no
compliment, but the plain truth; though I was not aware of any
change having taken place in the weather.  It was in the state of
my own feelings, I added bashfully: to clench the explanation.

I never saw such curls - how could I, for there never were such
curls! - as those she shook out to hide her blushes.  As to the
straw hat and blue ribbons which was on the top of the curls, if I
could only have hung it up in my room in Buckingham Street, what a
priceless possession it would have been!

'You have just come home from Paris,' said I.

'Yes,' said she.  'Have you ever been there?'

'No.'

'Oh! I hope you'll go soon!  You would like it so much!'

Traces of deep-seated anguish appeared in my countenance.  That she
should hope I would go, that she should think it possible I could
go, was insupportable.  I depreciated Paris; I depreciated France. 
I said I wouldn't leave England, under existing circumstances, for
any earthly consideration.  Nothing should induce me.  In short,
she was shaking the curls again, when the little dog came running
along the walk to our relief.

He was mortally jealous of me, and persisted in barking at me.  She
took him up in her arms - oh my goodness! - and caressed him, but
he persisted upon barking still.  He wouldn't let me touch him,
when I tried; and then she beat him.  It increased my sufferings
greatly to see the pats she gave him for punishment on the bridge
of his blunt nose, while he winked his eyes, and licked her hand,
and still growled within himself like a little double-bass.  At
length he was quiet - well he might be with her dimpled chin upon
his head! - and we walked away to look at a greenhouse.

'You are not very intimate with Miss Murdstone, are you?' said
Dora.  -'My pet.'

(The two last words were to the dog.  Oh, if they had only been to
me!)

'No,' I replied.  'Not at all so.'

'She is a tiresome creature,' said Dora, pouting.  'I can't think
what papa can have been about, when he chose such a vexatious thing
to be my companion.  Who wants a protector?  I am sure I don't want
a protector.  Jip can protect me a great deal better than Miss
Murdstone, - can't you, Jip, dear?'

He only winked lazily, when she kissed his ball of a head.

'Papa calls her my confidential friend, but I am sure she is no
such thing - is she, Jip?  We are not going to confide in any such
cross people, Jip and I.  We mean to bestow our confidence where we
like, and to find out our own friends, instead of having them found
out for us - don't we, Jip?'

jip made a comfortable noise, in answer, a little like a tea-kettle
when it sings.  As for me, every word was a new heap of fetters,
riveted above the last.

'It is very hard, because we have not a kind Mama, that we are to
have, instead, a sulky, gloomy old thing like Miss Murdstone,
always following us about - isn't it, Jip?  Never mind, Jip.  We
won't be confidential, and we'll make ourselves as happy as we can
in spite of her, and we'll tease her, and not please her - won't
we, Jip?'

If it had lasted any longer, I think I must have gone down on my
knees on the gravel, with the probability before me of grazing
them, and of being presently ejected from the premises besides. 
But, by good fortune the greenhouse was not far off, and these
words brought us to it.

It contained quite a show of beautiful geraniums.  We loitered
along in front of them, and Dora often stopped to admire this one
or that one, and I stopped to admire the same one, and Dora,
laughing, held the dog up childishly, to smell the flowers; and if
we were not all three in Fairyland, certainly I was.  The scent of
a geranium leaf, at this day, strikes me with a half comical half
serious wonder as to what change has come over me in a moment; and
then I see a straw hat and blue ribbons, and a quantity of curls,
and a little black dog being held up, in two slender arms, against
a bank of blossoms and bright leaves.

Miss Murdstone had been looking for us.  She found us here; and
presented her uncongenial cheek, the little wrinkles in it filled
with hair powder, to Dora to be kissed.  Then she took Dora's arm
in hers, and marched us into breakfast as if it were a soldier's
funeral.

How many cups of tea I drank, because Dora made it, I don't know. 
But, I perfectly remember that I sat swilling tea until my whole
nervous system, if I had had any in those days, must have gone by
the board.  By and by we went to church.  Miss Murdstone was
between Dora and me in the pew; but I heard her sing, and the
congregation vanished.  A sermon was delivered - about Dora, of
course - and I am afraid that is all I know of the service.

We had a quiet day.  No company, a walk, a family dinner of four,
and an evening of looking over books and pictures; Miss Murdstone
with a homily before her, and her eye upon us, keeping guard
vigilantly.  Ah! little did Mr. Spenlow imagine, when he sat
opposite to me after dinner that day, with his pocket-handkerchief
over his head, how fervently I was embracing him, in my fancy, as
his son-in-law!  Little did he think, when I took leave of him at
night, that he had just given his full consent to my being engaged
to Dora, and that I was invoking blessings on his head!

We departed early in the morning, for we had a Salvage case coming
on in the Admiralty Court, requiring a rather accurate knowledge of
the whole science of navigation, in which (as we couldn't be
expected to know much about those matters in the Commons) the judge
had entreated two old Trinity Masters, for charity's sake, to come
and help him out.  Dora was at the breakfast-table to make the tea
again, however; and I had the melancholy pleasure of taking off my
hat to her in the phaeton, as she stood on the door-step with Jip
in her arms.

What the Admiralty was to me that day; what nonsense I made of our
case in my mind, as I listened to it; how I saw 'DORA' engraved
upon the blade of the silver oar which they lay upon the table, as
the emblem of that high jurisdiction; and how I felt when Mr.
Spenlow went home without me (I had had an insane hope that he
might take me back again), as if I were a mariner myself, and the
ship to which I belonged had sailed away and left me on a desert
island; I shall make no fruitless effort to describe.  If that
sleepy old court could rouse itself, and present in any visible
form the daydreams I have had in it about Dora, it would reveal my
truth.

I don't mean the dreams that I dreamed on that day alone, but day
after day, from week to week, and term to term.  I went there, not
to attend to what was going on, but to think about Dora.  If ever
I bestowed a thought upon the cases, as they dragged their slow
length before me, it was only to wonder, in the matrimonial cases
(remembering Dora), how it was that married people could ever be
otherwise than happy; and, in the Prerogative cases, to consider,
if the money in question had been left to me, what were the
foremost steps I should immediately have taken in regard to Dora. 
Within the first week of my passion, I bought four sumptuous
waistcoats - not for myself; I had no pride in them; for Dora - and
took to wearing straw-coloured kid gloves in the streets, and laid
the foundations of all the corns I have ever had.  If the boots I
wore at that period could only be produced and compared with the
natural size of my feet, they would show what the state of my heart
was, in a most affecting manner.

And yet, wretched cripple as I made myself by this act of homage to
Dora, I walked miles upon miles daily in the hope of seeing her. 
Not only was I soon as well known on the Norwood Road as the
postmen on that beat, but I pervaded London likewise.  I walked
about the streets where the best shops for ladies were, I haunted
the Bazaar like an unquiet spirit, I fagged through the Park again
and again, long after I was quite knocked up.  Sometimes, at long
intervals and on rare occasions, I saw her.  Perhaps I saw her
glove waved in a carriage window; perhaps I met her, walked with
her and Miss Murdstone a little way, and spoke to her.  In the
latter case I was always very miserable afterwards, to think that
I had said nothing to the purpose; or that she had no idea of the
extent of my devotion, or that she cared nothing about me.  I was
always looking out, as may be supposed, for another invitation to
Mr. Spenlow's house.  I was always being disappointed, for I got
none.

Mrs. Crupp must have been a woman of penetration; for when this
attachment was but a few weeks old, and I had not had the courage
to write more explicitly even to Agnes, than that I had been to Mr.
Spenlow's house, 'whose family,' I added, 'consists of one
daughter'; - I say Mrs. Crupp must have been a woman of
penetration, for, even in that early stage, she found it out.  She
came up to me one evening, when I was very low, to ask (she being
then afflicted with the disorder I have mentioned) if I could
oblige her with a little tincture of cardamums mixed with rhubarb,
and flavoured with seven drops of the essence of cloves, which was
the best remedy for her complaint; - or, if I had not such a thing
by me, with a little brandy, which was the next best.  It was not,
she remarked, so palatable to her, but it was the next best.  As I
had never even heard of the first remedy, and always had the second
in the closet, I gave Mrs. Crupp a glass of the second, which (that
I might have no suspicion of its being devoted to any improper use)
she began to take in my presence.

'Cheer up, sir,' said Mrs. Crupp.  'I can't abear to see you so,
sir: I'm a mother myself.'

I did not quite perceive the application of this fact to myself,
but I smiled on Mrs. Crupp, as benignly as was in my power.

'Come, sir,' said Mrs. Crupp.  'Excuse me.  I know what it is, sir. 
There's a lady in the case.'

'Mrs. Crupp?' I returned, reddening.

'Oh, bless you!  Keep a good heart, sir!' said Mrs. Crupp, nodding
encouragement.  'Never say die, sir!  If She don't smile upon you,
there's a many as will.  You are a young gentleman to be smiled on,
Mr. Copperfull, and you must learn your walue, sir.'

Mrs. Crupp always called me Mr. Copperfull: firstly, no doubt,
because it was not my name; and secondly, I am inclined to think,
in some indistinct association with a washing-day.

'What makes you suppose there is any young lady in the case, Mrs.
Crupp?' said I.

'Mr. Copperfull,' said Mrs. Crupp, with a great deal of feeling,
'I'm a mother myself.'

For some time Mrs. Crupp could only lay her hand upon her nankeen
bosom, and fortify herself against returning pain with sips of her
medicine.  At length she spoke again.

'When the present set were took for you by your dear aunt, Mr.
Copperfull,' said Mrs. Crupp, 'my remark were, I had now found
summun I could care for.  "Thank Ev'in!" were the expression, "I
have now found summun I can care for!" - You don't eat enough, sir,
nor yet drink.'

'Is that what you found your supposition on, Mrs. Crupp?' said I.

'Sir,' said Mrs. Crupp, in a tone approaching to severity, 'I've
laundressed other young gentlemen besides yourself.  A young
gentleman may be over-careful of himself, or he may be
under-careful of himself.  He may brush his hair too regular, or
too un-regular.  He may wear his boots much too large for him, or
much too small.  That is according as the young gentleman has his
original character formed.  But let him go to which extreme he may,
sir, there's a young lady in both of 'em.'

Mrs. Crupp shook her head in such a determined manner, that I had
not an inch of vantage-ground left.

'It was but the gentleman which died here before yourself,' said
Mrs. Crupp, 'that fell in love - with a barmaid - and had his
waistcoats took in directly, though much swelled by drinking.'

'Mrs. Crupp,' said I, 'I must beg you not to connect the young lady
in my case with a barmaid, or anything of that sort, if you
please.'

'Mr. Copperfull,' returned Mrs. Crupp, 'I'm a mother myself, and
not likely.  I ask your pardon, sir, if I intrude.  I should never
wish to intrude where I were not welcome.  But you are a young
gentleman, Mr. Copperfull, and my adwice to you is, to cheer up,
sir, to keep a good heart, and to know your own walue.  If you was
to take to something, sir,' said Mrs. Crupp, 'if you was to take to
skittles, now, which is healthy, you might find it divert your
mind, and do you good.'

With these words, Mrs. Crupp, affecting to be very careful of the
brandy - which was all gone - thanked me with a majestic curtsey,
and retired.  As her figure disappeared into the gloom of the
entry, this counsel certainly presented itself to my mind in the
light of a slight liberty on Mrs. Crupp's part; but, at the same
time, I was content to receive it, in another point of view, as a
word to the wise, and a warning in future to keep my secret better.



CHAPTER 27
TOMMY TRADDLES


It may have been in consequence of Mrs. Crupp's advice, and,
perhaps, for no better reason than because there was a certain
similarity in the sound of the word skittles and Traddles, that it
came into my head, next day, to go and look after Traddles.  The
time he had mentioned was more than out, and he lived in a little
street near the Veterinary College at Camden Town, which was
principally tenanted, as one of our clerks who lived in that
direction informed me, by gentlemen students, who bought live
donkeys, and made experiments on those quadrupeds in their private
apartments.  Having obtained from this clerk a direction to the
academic grove in question, I set out, the same afternoon, to visit
my old schoolfellow.

I found that the street was not as desirable a one as I could have
wished it to be, for the sake of Traddles.  The inhabitants
appeared to have a propensity to throw any little trifles they were
not in want of, into the road: which not only made it rank and
sloppy, but untidy too, on account of the cabbage-leaves.  The
refuse was not wholly vegetable either, for I myself saw a shoe, a
doubled-up saucepan, a black bonnet, and an umbrella, in various
stages of decomposition, as I was looking out for the number I
wanted.

The general air of the place reminded me forcibly of the days when
I lived with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber.  An indescribable character of
faded gentility that attached to the house I sought, and made it
unlike all the other houses in the street - though they were all
built on one monotonous pattern, and looked like the early copies
of a blundering boy who was learning to make houses, and had not
yet got out of his cramped brick-and-mortar pothooks - reminded me
still more of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber.  Happening to arrive at the
door as it was opened to the afternoon milkman, I was reminded of
Mr. and Mrs. Micawber more forcibly yet.

'Now,' said the milkman to a very youthful servant girl.  'Has that
there little bill of mine been heerd on?'

'Oh, master says he'll attend to it immediate,' was the reply.

'Because,' said the milkman, going on as if he had received no
answer, and speaking, as I judged from his tone, rather for the
edification of somebody within the house, than of the youthful
servant - an impression which was strengthened by his manner of
glaring down the passage - 'because that there little bill has been
running so long, that I begin to believe it's run away altogether,
and never won't be heerd of.  Now, I'm not a going to stand it, you
know!' said the milkman, still throwing his voice into the house,
and glaring down the passage.

As to his dealing in the mild article of milk, by the by, there
never was a greater anomaly.  His deportment would have been fierce
in a butcher or a brandy-merchant.

The voice of the youthful servant became faint, but she seemed to
me, from the action of her lips, again to murmur that it would be
attended to immediate.

'I tell you what,' said the milkman, looking hard at her for the
first time, and taking her by the chin, 'are you fond of milk?'

'Yes, I likes it,' she replied.
'Good,' said the milkman.  'Then you won't have none tomorrow. 
D'ye hear?  Not a fragment of milk you won't have tomorrow.'

I thought she seemed, upon the whole, relieved by the prospect of
having any today.  The milkman, after shaking his head at her
darkly, released her chin, and with anything rather than good-will
opened his can, and deposited the usual quantity in the family jug. 
This done, he went away, muttering, and uttered the cry of his
trade next door, in a vindictive shriek.

'Does Mr. Traddles live here?' I then inquired.

A mysterious voice from the end of the passage replied 'Yes.'  Upon
which the youthful servant replied 'Yes.'

'Is he at home?' said I.

Again the mysterious voice replied in the affirmative, and again
the servant echoed it.  Upon this, I walked in, and in pursuance of
the servant's directions walked upstairs; conscious, as I passed
the back parlour-door, that I was surveyed by a mysterious eye,
probably belonging to the mysterious voice.

When I got to the top of the stairs - the house was only a story
high above the ground floor - Traddles was on the landing to meet
me.  He was delighted to see me, and gave me welcome, with great
heartiness, to his little room.  It was in the front of the house,
and extremely neat, though sparely furnished.  It was his only
room, I saw; for there was a sofa-bedstead in it, and his
blacking-brushes and blacking were among his books - on the top
shelf, behind a dictionary.  His table was covered with papers, and
he was hard at work in an old coat.  I looked at nothing, that I
know of, but I saw everything, even to the prospect of a church
upon his china inkstand, as I sat down - and this, too, was a
faculty confirmed in me in the old Micawber times.  Various
ingenious arrangements he had made, for the disguise of his chest
of drawers, and the accommodation of his boots, his shaving-glass,
and so forth, particularly impressed themselves upon me, as
evidences of the same Traddles who used to make models of
elephants' dens in writing-paper to put flies in; and to comfort
himself under ill usage, with the memorable works of art I have so
often mentioned.

In a corner of the room was something neatly covered up with a
large white cloth.  I could not make out what that was.

'Traddles,' said I, shaking hands with him again, after I had sat
down, 'I am delighted to see you.'

'I am delighted to see YOU, Copperfield,' he returned.  'I am very
glad indeed to see you.  It was because I was thoroughly glad to
see you when we met in Ely Place, and was sure you were thoroughly
glad to see me, that I gave you this address instead of my address
at chambers.'
'Oh!  You have chambers?' said I.

'Why, I have the fourth of a room and a passage, and the fourth of
a clerk,' returned Traddles.  'Three others and myself unite to
have a set of chambers - to look business-like - and we quarter the
clerk too.  Half-a-crown a week he costs me.'

His old simple character and good temper, and something of his old
unlucky fortune also, I thought, smiled at me in the smile with
which he made this explanation.

'It's not because I have the least pride, Copperfield, you
understand,' said Traddles, 'that I don't usually give my address
here.  It's only on account of those who come to me, who might not
like to come here.  For myself, I am fighting my way on in the
world against difficulties, and it would be ridiculous if I made a
pretence of doing anything else.'

'You are reading for the bar, Mr. Waterbrook informed me?' said I.

'Why, yes,' said Traddles, rubbing his hands slowly over one
another.  'I am reading for the bar.  The fact is, I have just
begun to keep my terms, after rather a long delay.  It's some time
since I was articled, but the payment of that hundred pounds was a
great pull.  A great pull!' said Traddles, with a wince, as if he
had had a tooth out.

'Do you know what I can't help thinking of, Traddles, as I sit here
looking at you?' I asked him.

'No,' said he.

'That sky-blue suit you used to wear.'

'Lord, to be sure!' cried Traddles, laughing.  'Tight in the arms
and legs, you know?  Dear me!  Well!  Those were happy times,
weren't they?'

'I think our schoolmaster might have made them happier, without
doing any harm to any of us, I acknowledge,' I returned.

'Perhaps he might,' said Traddles.  'But dear me, there was a good
deal of fun going on.  Do you remember the nights in the bedroom? 
When we used to have the suppers?  And when you used to tell the
stories?  Ha, ha, ha!  And do you remember when I got caned for
crying about Mr. Mell?  Old Creakle!  I should like to see him
again, too!'

'He was a brute to you, Traddles,' said I, indignantly; for his
good humour made me feel as if I had seen him beaten but yesterday.

'Do you think so?' returned Traddles.  'Really?  Perhaps he was
rather.  But it's all over, a long while.  Old Creakle!'

'You were brought up by an uncle, then?' said I.

'Of course I was!' said Traddles.  'The one I was always going to
write to.  And always didn't, eh!  Ha, ha, ha!  Yes, I had an uncle
then.  He died soon after I left school.'

'Indeed!'

'Yes.  He was a retired - what do you call it! - draper -
cloth-merchant - and had made me his heir.  But he didn't like me
when I grew up.'

'Do you really mean that?' said I.  He was so composed, that I
fancied he must have some other meaning.

'Oh dear, yes, Copperfield!  I mean it,' replied Traddles.  'It was
an unfortunate thing, but he didn't like me at all.  He said I
wasn't at all what he expected, and so he married his housekeeper.'

'And what did you do?' I asked.

'I didn't do anything in particular,' said Traddles.  'I lived with
them, waiting to be put out in the world, until his gout
unfortunately flew to his stomach - and so he died, and so she
married a young man, and so I wasn't provided for.'

'Did you get nothing, Traddles, after all?'

'Oh dear, yes!' said Traddles.  'I got fifty pounds.  I had never
been brought up to any profession, and at first I was at a loss
what to do for myself.  However, I began, with the assistance of
the son of a professional man, who had been to Salem House -
Yawler, with his nose on one side.  Do you recollect him?'

No.  He had not been there with me; all the noses were straight in
my day.

'It don't matter,' said Traddles.  'I began, by means of his
assistance, to copy law writings.  That didn't answer very well;
and then I began to state cases for them, and make abstracts, and
that sort of work.  For I am a plodding kind of fellow,
Copperfield, and had learnt the way of doing such things pithily. 
Well!  That put it in my head to enter myself as a law student; and
that ran away with all that was left of the fifty pounds.  Yawler
recommended me to one or two other offices, however - Mr.
Waterbrook's for one - and I got a good many jobs.  I was fortunate
enough, too, to become acquainted with a person in the publishing
way, who was getting up an Encyclopaedia, and he set me to work;
and, indeed' (glancing at his table), 'I am at work for him at this
minute.  I am not a bad compiler, Copperfield,' said Traddles,
preserving the same air of cheerful confidence in all he said, 'but
I have no invention at all; not a particle.  I suppose there never
was a young man with less originality than I have.'

As Traddles seemed to expect that I should assent to this as a
matter of course, I nodded; and he went on, with the same sprightly
patience - I can find no better expression - as before.

'So, by little and little, and not living high, I managed to scrape
up the hundred pounds at last,' said Traddles; 'and thank Heaven
that's paid - though it was - though it certainly was,' said
Traddles, wincing again as if he had had another tooth out, 'a
pull.  I am living by the sort of work I have mentioned, still, and
I hope, one of these days, to get connected with some newspaper:
which would almost be the making of my fortune.  Now, Copperfield,
you are so exactly what you used to be, with that agreeable face,
and it's so pleasant to see you, that I sha'n't conceal anything. 
Therefore you must know that I am engaged.'

Engaged!  Oh, Dora!

'She is a curate's daughter,' said Traddles; 'one of ten, down in
Devonshire.  Yes!' For he saw me glance, involuntarily, at the
prospect on the inkstand.  'That's the church!  You come round here
to the left, out of this gate,' tracing his finger along the
inkstand, 'and exactly where I hold this pen, there stands the
house - facing, you understand, towards the church.'

The delight with which he entered into these particulars, did not
fully present itself to me until afterwards; for my selfish
thoughts were making a ground-plan of Mr. Spenlow's house and
garden at the same moment.

'She is such a dear girl!' said Traddles; 'a little older than me,
but the dearest girl!  I told you I was going out of town?  I have
been down there.  I walked there, and I walked back, and I had the
most delightful time!  I dare say ours is likely to be a rather
long engagement, but our motto is "Wait and hope!" We always say
that.  "Wait and hope," we always say.  And she would wait,
Copperfield, till she was sixty - any age you can mention - for
me!'

Traddles rose from his chair, and, with a triumphant smile, put his
hand upon the white cloth I had observed.

'However,' he said, 'it's not that we haven't made a beginning
towards housekeeping.  No, no; we have begun.  We must get on by
degrees, but we have begun.  Here,' drawing the cloth off with
great pride and care, 'are two pieces of furniture to commence
with.  This flower-pot and stand, she bought herself.  You put that
in a parlour window,' said Traddles, falling a little back from it
to survey it with the greater admiration, 'with a plant in it, and
- and there you are!  This little round table with the marble top
(it's two feet ten in circumference), I bought.  You want to lay a
book down, you know, or somebody comes to see you or your wife, and
wants a place to stand a cup of tea upon, and - and there you are
again!' said Traddles.  'It's an admirable piece of workmanship -
firm as a rock!'
I praised them both, highly, and Traddles replaced the covering as
carefully as he had removed it.

'It's not a great deal towards the furnishing,' said Traddles, 'but
it's something.  The table-cloths, and pillow-cases, and articles
of that kind, are what discourage me most, Copperfield.  So does
the ironmongery - candle-boxes, and gridirons, and that sort of
necessaries - because those things tell, and mount up.  However,
"wait

and hope!" And I assure you she's the dearest girl!'

'I am quite certain of it,' said I.

'In the meantime,' said Traddles, coming back to his chair; 'and
this is the end of my prosing about myself, I get on as well as I
can.  I don't make much, but I don't spend much.  In general, I
board with the people downstairs, who are very agreeable people
indeed.  Both Mr. and Mrs. Micawber have seen a good deal of life,
and are excellent company.'

'My dear Traddles!' I quickly exclaimed.  'What are you talking
about?'

Traddles looked at me, as if he wondered what I was talking about.

'Mr. and Mrs. Micawber!' I repeated.  'Why, I am intimately
acquainted with them!'

An opportune double knock at the door, which I knew well from old
experience in Windsor Terrace, and which nobody but Mr. Micawber
could ever have knocked at that door, resolved any doubt in my mind
as to their being my old friends.  I begged Traddles to ask his
landlord to walk up.  Traddles accordingly did so, over the
banister; and Mr. Micawber, not a bit changed - his tights, his
stick, his shirt-collar, and his eye-glass, all the same as ever -
came into the room with a genteel and youthful air.

'I beg your pardon, Mr. Traddles,' said Mr. Micawber, with the old
roll in his voice, as he checked himself in humming a soft tune. 
'I was not aware that there was any individual, alien to this
tenement, in your sanctum.'

Mr. Micawber slightly bowed to me, and pulled up his shirt-collar.

'How do you do, Mr. Micawber?' said I.

'Sir,' said Mr. Micawber, 'you are exceedingly obliging.  I am in
statu quo.'

'And Mrs. Micawber?' I pursued.

'Sir,' said Mr. Micawber, 'she is also, thank God, in statu quo.'

'And the children, Mr. Micawber?'

'Sir,' said Mr. Micawber, 'I rejoice to reply that they are,
likewise, in the enjoyment of salubrity.'

All this time, Mr. Micawber had not known me in the least, though
he had stood face to face with me.  But now, seeing me smile, he
examined my features with more attention, fell back, cried, 'Is it
possible!  Have I the pleasure of again beholding Copperfield!' and
shook me by both hands with the utmost fervour.

'Good Heaven, Mr. Traddles!' said Mr. Micawber, 'to think that I
should find you acquainted with the friend of my youth, the
companion of earlier days!  My dear!' calling over the banisters to
Mrs. Micawber, while Traddles looked (with reason) not a little
amazed at this description of me.  'Here is a gentleman in Mr.
Traddles's apartment, whom he wishes to have the pleasure of
presenting to you, my love!'

Mr. Micawber immediately reappeared, and shook hands with me again.

'And how is our good friend the Doctor, Copperfield?' said Mr.
Micawber, 'and all the circle at Canterbury?'

'I have none but good accounts of them,' said I.

'I am most delighted to hear it,' said Mr. Micawber.  'It was at
Canterbury where we last met.  Within the shadow, I may
figuratively say, of that religious edifice immortalized by
Chaucer, which was anciently the resort of Pilgrims from the
remotest corners of - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, 'in the
immediate neighbourhood of the Cathedral.'

I replied that it was.  Mr. Micawber continued talking as volubly
as he could; but not, I thought, without showing, by some marks of
concern in his countenance, that he was sensible of sounds in the
next room, as of Mrs. Micawber washing her hands, and hurriedly
opening and shutting drawers that were uneasy in their action.

'You find us, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, with one eye on
Traddles, 'at present established, on what may be designated as a
small and unassuming scale; but, you are aware that I have, in the
course of my career, surmounted difficulties, and conquered
obstacles.  You are no stranger to the fact, that there have been
periods of my life, when it has been requisite that I should pause,
until certain expected events should turn up; when it has been
necessary that I should fall back, before making what I trust I
shall not be accused of presumption in terming - a spring.  The
present is one of those momentous stages in the life of man.  You
find me, fallen back, FOR a spring; and I have every reason to
believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result.'

I was expressing my satisfaction, when Mrs. Micawber came in; a
little more slatternly than she used to be, or so she seemed now,
to my unaccustomed eyes, but still with some preparation of herself
for company, and with a pair of brown gloves on.

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber, leading her towards me, 'here is a
gentleman of the name of Copperfield, who wishes to renew his
acquaintance with you.'

It would have been better, as it turned out, to have led gently up
to this announcement, for Mrs. Micawber, being in a delicate state
of health, was overcome by it, and was taken so unwell, that Mr.
Micawber was obliged, in great trepidation, to run down to the
water-butt in the backyard, and draw a basinful to lave her brow
with.  She presently revived, however, and was really pleased to
see me.  We had half-an-hour's talk, all together; and I asked her
about the twins, who, she said, were 'grown great creatures'; and
after Master and Miss Micawber, whom she described as 'absolute
giants', but they were not produced on that occasion.

Mr. Micawber was very anxious that I should stay to dinner.  I
should not have been averse to do so, but that I imagined I
detected trouble, and calculation relative to the extent of the
cold meat, in Mrs. Micawber's eye.  I therefore pleaded another
engagement; and observing that Mrs. Micawber's spirits were
immediately lightened, I resisted all persuasion to forego it.

But I told Traddles, and Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, that before I could
think of leaving, they must appoint a day when they would come and
dine with me.  The occupations to which Traddles stood pledged,
rendered it necessary to fix a somewhat distant one; but an
appointment was made for the purpose, that suited us all, and then
I took my leave.

Mr. Micawber, under pretence of showing me a nearer way than that
by which I had come, accompanied me to the corner of the street;
being anxious (he explained to me) to say a few words to an old
friend, in confidence.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'I need hardly tell you
that to have beneath our roof, under existing circumstances, a mind
like that which gleams - if I may be allowed the expression - which
gleams - in your friend Traddles, is an unspeakable comfort.  With
a washerwoman, who exposes hard-bake for sale in her
parlour-window, dwelling next door, and a Bow-street officer
residing over the way, you may imagine that his society is a source
of consolation to myself and to Mrs. Micawber.  I am at present, my
dear Copperfield, engaged in the sale of corn upon commission.  It
is not an avocation of a remunerative description - in other words,
it does not pay - and some temporary embarrassments of a pecuniary
nature have been the consequence.  I am, however, delighted to add
that I have now an immediate prospect of something turning up (I am
not at liberty to say in what direction), which I trust will enable
me to provide, permanently, both for myself and for your friend
Traddles, in whom I have an unaffected interest.  You may, perhaps,
be prepared to hear that Mrs. Micawber is in a state of health
which renders it not wholly improbable that an addition may be
ultimately made to those pledges of affection which - in short, to
the infantine group.  Mrs. Micawber's family have been so good as
to express their dissatisfaction at this state of things.  I have
merely to observe, that I am not aware that it is any business of
theirs, and that I repel that exhibition of feeling with scorn, and
with defiance!'

Mr. Micawber then shook hands with me again, and left me.



CHAPTER 28
Mr. MICAWBER'S GAUNTLET


Until the day arrived on which I was to entertain my newly-found
old friends, I lived principally on Dora and coffee.  In my
love-lorn condition, my appetite languished; and I was glad of it,
for I felt as though it would have been an act of perfidy towards
Dora to have a natural relish for my dinner.  The quantity of
walking exercise I took, was not in this respect attended with its
usual consequence, as the disappointment counteracted the fresh
air.  I have my doubts, too, founded on the acute experience
acquired at this period of my life, whether a sound enjoyment of
animal food can develop itself freely in any human subject who is
always in torment from tight boots.  I think the extremities
require to be at peace before the stomach will conduct itself with
vigour.

On the occasion of this domestic little party, I did not repeat my
former extensive preparations.  I merely provided a pair of soles,
a small leg of mutton, and a pigeon-pie.  Mrs. Crupp broke out into
rebellion on my first bashful hint in reference to the cooking of
the fish and joint, and said, with a dignified sense of injury,
'No!  No, sir!  You will not ask me sich a thing, for you are
better acquainted with me than to suppose me capable of doing what
I cannot do with ampial satisfaction to my own feelings!' But, in
the end, a compromise was effected; and Mrs. Crupp consented to
achieve this feat, on condition that I dined from home for a
fortnight afterwards.

And here I may remark, that what I underwent from Mrs. Crupp, in
consequence of the tyranny she established over me, was dreadful. 
I never was so much afraid of anyone.  We made a compromise of
everything.  If I hesitated, she was taken with that wonderful
disorder which was always lying in ambush in her system, ready, at
the shortest notice, to prey upon her vitals.  If I rang the bell
impatiently, after half-a-dozen unavailing modest pulls, and she
appeared at last - which was not by any means to be relied upon -
she would appear with a reproachful aspect, sink breathless on a
chair near the door, lay her hand upon her nankeen bosom, and
become so ill, that I was glad, at any sacrifice of brandy or
anything else, to get rid of her.  If I objected to having my bed
made at five o'clock in the afternoon - which I do still think an
uncomfortable arrangement - one motion of her hand towards the same
nankeen region of wounded sensibility was enough to make me falter
an apology.  In short, I would have done anything in an honourable
way rather than give Mrs. Crupp offence; and she was the terror of
my life.

I bought a second-hand dumb-waiter for this dinner-party, in
preference to re-engaging the handy young man; against whom I had
conceived a prejudice, in consequence of meeting him in the Strand,
one Sunday morning, in a waistcoat remarkably like one of mine,
which had been missing since the former occasion.  The 'young gal'
was re-engaged; but on the stipulation that she should only bring
in the dishes, and then withdraw to the landing-place, beyond the
outer door; where a habit of sniffing she had contracted would be
lost upon the guests, and where her retiring on the plates would be
a physical impossibility.

Having laid in the materials for a bowl of punch, to be compounded
by Mr. Micawber; having provided a bottle of lavender-water, two
wax-candles, a paper of mixed pins, and a pincushion, to assist
Mrs. Micawber in her toilette at my dressing-table; having also
caused the fire in my bedroom to be lighted for Mrs. Micawber's
convenience; and having laid the cloth with my own hands, I awaited
the result with composure.

At the appointed time, my three visitors arrived together.  Mr.
Micawber with more shirt-collar than usual, and a new ribbon to his
eye-glass; Mrs. Micawber with her cap in a whitey-brown paper
parcel; Traddles carrying the parcel, and supporting Mrs. Micawber
on his arm.  They were all delighted with my residence.  When I
conducted Mrs. Micawber to my dressing-table, and she saw the scale
on which it was prepared for her, she was in such raptures, that
she called Mr. Micawber to come in and look.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'this is luxurious.  This
is a way of life which reminds me of the period when I was myself
in a state of celibacy, and Mrs. Micawber had not yet been
solicited to plight her faith at the Hymeneal altar.'

'He means, solicited by him, Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber,
archly.  'He cannot answer for others.'

'My dear,' returned Mr. Micawber with sudden seriousness, 'I have
no desire to answer for others.  I am too well aware that when, in
the inscrutable decrees of Fate, you were reserved for me, it is
possible you may have been reserved for one, destined, after a
protracted struggle, at length to fall a victim to pecuniary
involvements of a complicated nature.  I understand your allusion,
my love.  I regret it, but I can bear it.'

'Micawber!' exclaimed Mrs. Micawber, in tears.  'Have I deserved
this!  I, who never have deserted you; who never WILL desert you,
Micawber!'
'My love,' said Mr. Micawber, much affected, 'you will forgive, and
our old and tried friend Copperfield will, I am sure, forgive, the
momentary laceration of a wounded spirit, made sensitive by a
recent collision with the Minion of Power - in other words, with a
ribald Turncock attached to the water-works - and will pity, not
condemn, its excesses.'

Mr. Micawber then embraced Mrs. Micawber, and pressed my hand;
leaving me to infer from this broken allusion that his domestic
supply of water had been cut off that afternoon, in consequence of
default in the payment of the company's rates.

To divert his thoughts from this melancholy subject, I informed Mr.
Micawber that I relied upon him for a bowl of punch, and led him to
the lemons.  His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone
in a moment.  I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid
the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning rum,
and the steam of boiling water, as Mr. Micawber did that afternoon. 
It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud
of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and
looked as if he were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his
family down to the latest posterity.  As to Mrs. Micawber, I don't
know whether it was the effect of the cap, or the lavender-water,
or the pins, or the fire, or the wax-candles, but she came out of
my room, comparatively speaking, lovely.  And the lark was never
gayer than that excellent woman.

I suppose - I never ventured to inquire, but I suppose - that Mrs.
Crupp, after frying the soles, was taken ill.  Because we broke
down at that point.  The leg of mutton came up very red within, and
very pale without: besides having a foreign substance of a gritty
nature sprinkled over it, as if if had had a fall into the ashes of
that remarkable kitchen fireplace.  But we were not in condition to
judge of this fact from the appearance of the gravy, forasmuch as
the 'young gal' had dropped it all upon the stairs - where it
remained, by the by, in a long train, until it was worn out.  The
pigeon-pie was not bad, but it was a delusive pie: the crust being
like a disappointing head, phrenologically speaking: full of lumps
and bumps, with nothing particular underneath.  In short, the
banquet was such a failure that I should have been quite unhappy -
about the failure, I mean, for I was always unhappy about Dora - if
I had not been relieved by the great good humour of my company, and
by a bright suggestion from Mr. Micawber.

'My dear friend Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'accidents will
occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated
by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances the
- a - I would say, in short, by the influence of Woman, in the
lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and
must be borne with philosophy.  If you will allow me to take the
liberty of remarking that there are few comestibles better, in
their way, than a Devil, and that I believe, with a little division
of labour, we could accomplish a good one if the young person in
attendance could produce a gridiron, I would put it to you, that
this little misfortune may be easily repaired.'

There was a gridiron in the pantry, on which my morning rasher of
bacon was cooked.  We had it in, in a twinkling, and immediately
applied ourselves to carrying Mr. Micawber's idea into effect.  The
division of labour to which he had referred was this: - Traddles
cut the mutton into slices; Mr. Micawber (who could do anything of
this sort to perfection) covered them with pepper, mustard, salt,
and cayenne; I put them on the gridiron, turned them with a fork,
and took them off, under Mr. Micawber's direction; and Mrs.
Micawber heated, and continually stirred, some mushroom ketchup in
a little saucepan.  When we had slices enough done to begin upon,
we fell-to, with our sleeves still tucked up at the wrist, more
slices sputtering and blazing on the fire, and our attention
divided between the mutton on our plates, and the mutton then
preparing.

What with the novelty of this cookery, the excellence of it, the
bustle of it, the frequent starting up to look after it, the
frequent sitting down to dispose of it as the crisp slices came off
the gridiron hot and hot, the being so busy, so flushed with the
fire, so amused, and in the midst of such a tempting noise and
savour, we reduced the leg of mutton to the bone.  My own appetite
came back miraculously.  I am ashamed to record it, but I really
believe I forgot Dora for a little while.  I am satisfied that Mr.
and Mrs. Micawber could not have enjoyed the feast more, if they
had sold a bed to provide it.  Traddles laughed as heartily, almost
the whole time, as he ate and worked.  Indeed we all did, all at
once; and I dare say there was never a greater success.

We were at the height of our enjoyment, and were all busily
engaged, in our several departments, endeavouring to bring the last
batch of slices to a state of perfection that should crown the
feast, when I was aware of a strange presence in the room, and my
eyes encountered those of the staid Littimer, standing hat in hand
before me.

'What's the matter?' I involuntarily asked.

'I beg your pardon, sir, I was directed to come in.  Is my master
not here, sir?'

'No.'

'Have you not seen him, sir?'

'No; don't you come from him?'

'Not immediately so, sir.'

'Did he tell you you would find him here?'

'Not exactly so, sir.  But I should think he might be here
tomorrow, as he has not been here today.'
'Is he coming up from Oxford?'

'I beg, sir,' he returned respectfully, 'that you will be seated,
and allow me to do this.'  With which he took the fork from my
unresisting hand, and bent over the gridiron, as if his whole
attention were concentrated on it.

We should not have been much discomposed, I dare say, by the
appearance of Steerforth himself, but we became in a moment the
meekest of the meek before his respectable serving-man.  Mr.
Micawber, humming a tune, to show that he was quite at ease,
subsided into his chair, with the handle of a hastily concealed
fork sticking out of the bosom of his coat, as if he had stabbed
himself.  Mrs. Micawber put on her brown gloves, and assumed a
genteel languor.  Traddles ran his greasy hands through his hair,
and stood it bolt upright, and stared in confusion on the
table-cloth.  As for me, I was a mere infant at the head of my own
table; and hardly ventured to glance at the respectable phenomenon,
who had come from Heaven knows where, to put my establishment to
rights.

Meanwhile he took the mutton off the gridiron, and gravely handed
it round.  We all took some, but our appreciation of it was gone,
and we merely made a show of eating it.  As we severally pushed
away our plates, he noiselessly removed them, and set on the
cheese.  He took that off, too, when it was done with; cleared the
table; piled everything on the dumb-waiter; gave us our
wine-glasses; and, of his own accord, wheeled the dumb-waiter into
the pantry.  All this was done in a perfect manner, and he never
raised his eyes from what he was about.  Yet his very elbows, when
he had his back towards me, seemed to teem with the expression of
his fixed opinion that I was extremely young.

'Can I do anything more, sir?'

I thanked him and said, No; but would he take no dinner himself?

'None, I am obliged to you, sir.'

'Is Mr. Steerforth coming from Oxford?'

'I beg your pardon, sir?'

'Is Mr. Steerforth coming from Oxford?'

'I should imagine that he might be here tomorrow, sir.  I rather
thought he might have been here today, sir.  The mistake is mine,
no doubt, sir.'

'If you should see him first -' said I.

'If you'll excuse me, sir, I don't think I shall see him first.'

'In case you do,' said I, 'pray say that I am sorry he was not here
today, as an old schoolfellow of his was here.'

'Indeed, sir!' and he divided a bow between me and Traddles, with
a glance at the latter.

He was moving softly to the door, when, in a forlorn hope of saying
something naturally - which I never could, to this man - I said:

'Oh! Littimer!'

'Sir!'

'Did you remain long at Yarmouth, that time?'

'Not particularly so, sir.'

'You saw the boat completed?'

'Yes, sir.  I remained behind on purpose to see the boat
completed.'

'I know!' He raised his eyes to mine respectfully.

'Mr. Steerforth has not seen it yet, I suppose?'

'I really can't say, sir.  I think - but I really can't say, sir. 
I wish you good night, sir.'

He comprehended everybody present, in the respectful bow with which
he followed these words, and disappeared.  My visitors seemed to
breathe more freely when he was gone; but my own relief was very
great, for besides the constraint, arising from that extraordinary
sense of being at a disadvantage which I always had in this man's
presence, my conscience had embarrassed me with whispers that I had
mistrusted his master, and I could not repress a vague uneasy dread
that he might find it out.  How was it, having so little in reality
to conceal, that I always DID feel as if this man were finding me
out?

Mr. Micawber roused me from this reflection, which was blended with
a certain remorseful apprehension of seeing Steerforth himself, by
bestowing many encomiums on the absent Littimer as a most
respectable fellow, and a thoroughly admirable servant.  Mr.
Micawber, I may remark, had taken his full share of the general
bow, and had received it with infinite condescension.

'But punch, my dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, tasting it,
'like time and tide, waits for no man.  Ah! it is at the present
moment in high flavour.  My love, will you give me your opinion?'

Mrs. Micawber pronounced it excellent.

'Then I will drink,' said Mr. Micawber, 'if my friend Copperfield
will permit me to take that social liberty, to the days when my
friend Copperfield and myself were younger, and fought our way in
the world side by side.  I may say, of myself and Copperfield, in
words we have sung together before now, that


We twa hae run about the braes
And pu'd the gowans' fine


- in a figurative point of view - on several occasions.  I am not
exactly aware,' said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll in his voice,
and the old indescribable air of saying something genteel, 'what
gowans may be, but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself
would frequently have taken a pull at them, if it had been
feasible.'

Mr. Micawber, at the then present moment, took a pull at his punch. 
So we all did: Traddles evidently lost in wondering at what distant
time Mr. Micawber and I could have been comrades in the battle of
the world.

'Ahem!' said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat, and warming with
the punch and with the fire.  'My dear, another glass?'

Mrs. Micawber said it must be very little; but we couldn't allow
that, so it was a glassful.

'As we are quite confidential here, Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs.
Micawber, sipping her punch, 'Mr. Traddles being a part of our
domesticity, I should much like to have your opinion on Mr.
Micawber's prospects.  For corn,' said Mrs. Micawber
argumentatively, 'as I have repeatedly said to Mr. Micawber, may be
gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative.  Commission to the extent
of two and ninepence in a fortnight cannot, however limited our
ideas, be considered remunerative.'

We were all agreed upon that.

'Then,' said Mrs. Micawber, who prided herself on taking a clear
view of things, and keeping Mr. Micawber straight by her woman's
wisdom, when he might otherwise go a little crooked, 'then I ask
myself this question.  If corn is not to be relied upon, what is? 
Are coals to be relied upon?  Not at all.  We have turned our
attention to that experiment, on the suggestion of my family, and
we find it fallacious.'

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair with his hands in his
pockets, eyed us aside, and nodded his head, as much as to say that
the case was very clearly put.

'The articles of corn and coals,' said Mrs. Micawber, still more
argumentatively, 'being equally out of the question, Mr.
Copperfield, I naturally look round the world, and say, "What is
there in which a person of Mr. Micawber's talent is likely to
succeed?" And I exclude the doing anything on commission, because
commission is not a certainty.  What is best suited to a person of
Mr. Micawber's peculiar temperament is, I am convinced, a
certainty.'

Traddles and I both expressed, by a feeling murmur, that this great
discovery was no doubt true of Mr. Micawber, and that it did him
much credit.

'I will not conceal from you, my dear Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs.
Micawber, 'that I have long felt the Brewing business to be
particularly adapted to Mr. Micawber.  Look at Barclay and Perkins!
Look at Truman, Hanbury, and Buxton!  It is on that extensive
footing that Mr. Micawber, I know from my own knowledge of him, is
calculated to shine; and the profits, I am told, are e-NOR-MOUS!
But if Mr. Micawber cannot get into those firms - which decline to
answer his letters, when he offers his services even in an inferior
capacity - what is the use of dwelling upon that idea?  None.  I
may have a conviction that Mr. Micawber's manners -'

'Hem!  Really, my dear,' interposed Mr. Micawber.

'My love, be silent,' said Mrs. Micawber, laying her brown glove on
his hand.  'I may have a conviction, Mr. Copperfield, that Mr.
Micawber's manners peculiarly qualify him for the Banking business. 
I may argue within myself, that if I had a deposit at a
banking-house, the manners of Mr. Micawber, as representing that
banking-house, would inspire confidence, and must extend the
connexion.  But if the various banking-houses refuse to avail
themselves of Mr. Micawber's abilities, or receive the offer of
them with contumely, what is the use of dwelling upon THAT idea? 
None.  As to originating a banking-business, I may know that there
are members of my family who, if they chose to place their money in
Mr. Micawber's hands, might found an establishment of that
description.  But if they do NOT choose to place their money in Mr.
Micawber's hands - which they don't - what is the use of that? 
Again I contend that we are no farther advanced than we were
before.'

I shook my head, and said, 'Not a bit.'  Traddles also shook his
head, and said, 'Not a bit.'

'What do I deduce from this?' Mrs. Micawber went on to say, still
with the same air of putting a case lucidly.  'What is the
conclusion, my dear Mr. Copperfield, to which I am irresistibly
brought?  Am I wrong in saying, it is clear that we must live?'

I answered 'Not at all!' and Traddles answered 'Not at all!' and I
found myself afterwards sagely adding, alone, that a person must
either live or die.

'Just so,' returned Mrs. Micawber, 'It is precisely that.  And the
fact is, my dear Mr. Copperfield, that we can not live without
something widely different from existing circumstances shortly
turning up.  Now I am convinced, myself, and this I have pointed
out to Mr. Micawber several times of late, that things cannot be
expected to turn up of themselves.  We must, in a measure, assist
to turn them up.  I may be wrong, but I have formed that opinion.'

Both Traddles and I applauded it highly.

'Very well,' said Mrs. Micawber.  'Then what do I recommend?  Here
is Mr. Micawber with a variety of qualifications - with great
talent -'

'Really, my love,' said Mr. Micawber.

'Pray, my dear, allow me to conclude.  Here is Mr. Micawber, with
a variety of qualifications, with great talent - I should say, with
genius, but that may be the partiality of a wife -'

Traddles and I both murmured 'No.'

'And here is Mr. Micawber without any suitable position or
employment.  Where does that responsibility rest?  Clearly on
society.  Then I would make a fact so disgraceful known, and boldly
challenge society to set it right.  It appears to me, my dear Mr.
Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, forcibly, 'that what Mr. Micawber
has to do, is to throw down the gauntlet to society, and say, in
effect, "Show me who will take that up.  Let the party immediately
step forward."'

I ventured to ask Mrs. Micawber how this was to be done.

'By advertising,' said Mrs. Micawber - 'in all the papers.  It
appears to me, that what Mr. Micawber has to do, in justice to
himself, in justice to his family, and I will even go so far as to
say in justice to society, by which he has been hitherto
overlooked, is to advertise in all the papers; to describe himself
plainly as so-and-so, with such and such qualifications and to put
it thus: "Now employ me, on remunerative terms, and address,
post-paid, to W. M., Post Office, Camden Town."'

'This idea of Mrs. Micawber's, my dear Copperfield,' said Mr.
Micawber, making his shirt-collar meet in front of his chin, and
glancing at me sideways, 'is, in fact, the Leap to which I alluded,
when I last had the pleasure of seeing you.'

'Advertising is rather expensive,' I remarked, dubiously.

'Exactly so!' said Mrs. Micawber, preserving the same logical air. 
'Quite true, my dear Mr. Copperfield!  I have made the identical
observation to Mr. Micawber.  It is for that reason especially,
that I think Mr. Micawber ought (as I have already said, in justice
to himself, in justice to his family, and in justice to society) to
raise a certain sum of money - on a bill.'

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair, trifled with his eye-glass
and cast his eyes up at the ceiling; but I thought him observant of
Traddles, too, who was looking at the fire.

'If no member of my family,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'is possessed of
sufficient natural feeling to negotiate that bill - I believe there
is a better business-term to express what I mean -'

Mr. Micawber, with his eyes still cast up at the ceiling, suggested
'Discount.'

'To discount that bill,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'then my opinion is,
that Mr. Micawber should go into the City, should take that bill
into the Money Market, and should dispose of it for what he can
get.  If the individuals in the Money Market oblige Mr. Micawber to
sustain a great sacrifice, that is between themselves and their
consciences.  I view it, steadily, as an investment.  I recommend
Mr. Micawber, my dear Mr. Copperfield, to do the same; to regard it
as an investment which is sure of return, and to make up his mind
to any sacrifice.'

I felt, but I am sure I don't know why, that this was self-denying
and devoted in Mrs. Micawber, and I uttered a murmur to that
effect.  Traddles, who took his tone from me, did likewise, still
looking at the fire.

'I will not,' said Mrs. Micawber, finishing her punch, and
gathering her scarf about her shoulders, preparatory to her
withdrawal to my bedroom: 'I will not protract these remarks on the
subject of Mr. Micawber's pecuniary affairs.  At your fireside, my
dear Mr. Copperfield, and in the presence of Mr. Traddles, who,
though not so old a friend, is quite one of ourselves, I could not
refrain from making you acquainted with the course I advise Mr.
Micawber to take.  I feel that the time is arrived when Mr.
Micawber should exert himself and - I will add - assert himself,
and it appears to me that these are the means.  I am aware that I
am merely a female, and that a masculine judgement is usually
considered more competent to the discussion of such questions;
still I must not forget that, when I lived at home with my papa and
mama, my papa was in the habit of saying, "Emma's form is fragile,
but her grasp of a subject is inferior to none." That my papa was
too partial, I well know; but that he was an observer of character
in some degree, my duty and my reason equally forbid me to doubt.'

With these words, and resisting our entreaties that she would grace
the remaining circulation of the punch with her presence, Mrs.
Micawber retired to my bedroom.  And really I felt that she was a
noble woman - the sort of woman who might have been a Roman matron,
and done all manner of heroic things, in times of public trouble.

In the fervour of this impression, I congratulated Mr. Micawber on
the treasure he possessed.  So did Traddles.  Mr. Micawber extended
his hand to each of us in succession, and then covered his face
with his pocket-handkerchief, which I think had more snuff upon it
than he was aware of.  He then returned to the punch, in the
highest state of exhilaration.

He was full of eloquence.  He gave us to understand that in our
children we lived again, and that, under the pressure of pecuniary
difficulties, any accession to their number was doubly welcome.  He
said that Mrs. Micawber had latterly had her doubts on this point,
but that he had dispelled them, and reassured her.  As to her
family, they were totally unworthy of her, and their sentiments
were utterly indifferent to him, and they might - I quote his own
expression - go to the Devil.

Mr. Micawber then delivered a warm eulogy on Traddles.  He said
Traddles's was a character, to the steady virtues of which he (Mr.
Micawber) could lay no claim, but which, he thanked Heaven, he
could admire.  He feelingly alluded to the young lady, unknown,
whom Traddles had honoured with his affection, and who had
reciprocated that affection by honouring and blessing Traddles with
her affection.  Mr. Micawber pledged her.  So did I.  Traddles
thanked us both, by saying, with a simplicity and honesty I had
sense enough to be quite charmed with, 'I am very much obliged to
you indeed.  And I do assure you, she's the dearest girl! -'

Mr. Micawber took an early opportunity, after that, of hinting,
with the utmost delicacy and ceremony, at the state of MY
affections.  Nothing but the serious assurance of his friend
Copperfield to the contrary, he observed, could deprive him of the
impression that his friend Copperfield loved and was beloved. 
After feeling very hot and uncomfortable for some time, and after
a good deal of blushing, stammering, and denying, I said, having my
glass in my hand, 'Well! I would give them D.!' which so excited
and gratified Mr. Micawber, that he ran with a glass of punch into
my bedroom, in order that Mrs. Micawber might drink D., who drank
it with enthusiasm, crying from within, in a shrill voice, 'Hear,
hear!  My dear Mr. Copperfield, I am delighted.  Hear!' and tapping
at the wall, by way of applause.

Our conversation, afterwards, took a more worldly turn; Mr.
Micawber telling us that he found Camden Town inconvenient, and
that the first thing he contemplated doing, when the advertisement
should have been the cause of something satisfactory turning up,
was to move.  He mentioned a terrace at the western end of Oxford
Street, fronting Hyde Park, on which he had always had his eye, but
which he did not expect to attain immediately, as it would require
a large establishment.  There would probably be an interval, he
explained, in which he should content himself with the upper part
of a house, over some respectable place of business - say in
Piccadilly, - which would be a cheerful situation for Mrs.
Micawber; and where, by throwing out a bow-window, or carrying up
the roof another story, or making some little alteration of that
sort, they might live, comfortably and reputably, for a few years. 
Whatever was reserved for him, he expressly said, or wherever his
abode might be, we might rely on this - there would always be a
room for Traddles, and a knife and fork for me.  We acknowledged
his kindness; and he begged us to forgive his having launched into
these practical and business-like details, and to excuse it as
natural in one who was making entirely new arrangements in life.

Mrs. Micawber, tapping at the wall again to know if tea were ready,
broke up this particular phase of our friendly conversation.  She
made tea for us in a most agreeable manner; and, whenever I went
near her, in handing about the tea-cups and bread-and-butter, asked
me, in a whisper, whether D. was fair, or dark, or whether she was
short, or tall: or something of that kind; which I think I liked. 
After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and
Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, flat
voice, which I remembered to have considered, when I first knew
her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of
'The Dashing White Sergeant', and 'Little Tafflin'.  For both of
these songs Mrs. Micawber had been famous when she lived at home
with her papa and mama.  Mr. Micawber told us, that when he heard
her sing the first one, on the first occasion of his seeing her
beneath the parental roof, she had attracted his attention in an
extraordinary degree; but that when it came to Little Tafflin, he
had resolved to win that woman or perish in the attempt.

It was between ten and eleven o'clock when Mrs. Micawber rose to
replace her cap in the whitey-brown paper parcel, and to put on her
bonnet.  Mr. Micawber took the opportunity of Traddles putting on
his great-coat, to slip a letter into my hand, with a whispered
request that I would read it at my leisure.  I also took the
opportunity of my holding a candle over the banisters to light them
down, when Mr. Micawber was going first, leading Mrs. Micawber, and
Traddles was following with the cap, to detain Traddles for a
moment on the top of the stairs.

'Traddles,' said I, 'Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor fellow:
but, if I were you, I wouldn't lend him anything.'

'My dear Copperfield,' returned Traddles, smiling, 'I haven't got
anything to lend.'

'You have got a name, you know,' said I.

'Oh!  You call THAT something to lend?' returned Traddles, with a
thoughtful look.

'Certainly.'

'Oh!' said Traddles.  'Yes, to be sure!  I am very much obliged to
you, Copperfield; but - I am afraid I have lent him that already.'

'For the bill that is to be a certain investment?' I inquired.

'No,' said Traddles.  'Not for that one.  This is the first I have
heard of that one.  I have been thinking that he will most likely
propose that one, on the way home.  Mine's another.'

'I hope there will be nothing wrong about it,' said I.
'I hope not,' said Traddles.  'I should think not, though, because
he told me, only the other day, that it was provided for.  That was
Mr. Micawber's expression, "Provided for."'

Mr. Micawber looking up at this juncture to where we were standing,
I had only time to repeat my caution.  Traddles thanked me, and
descended.  But I was much afraid, when I observed the good-natured
manner in which he went down with the cap in his hand, and gave
Mrs. Micawber his arm, that he would be carried into the Money
Market neck and heels.

I returned to my fireside, and was musing, half gravely and half
laughing, on the character of Mr. Micawber and the old relations
between us, when I heard a quick step ascending the stairs.  At
first, I thought it was Traddles coming back for something Mrs.
Micawber had left behind; but as the step approached, I knew it,
and felt my heart beat high, and the blood rush to my face, for it
was Steerforth's.

I was never unmindful of Agnes, and she never left that sanctuary
in my thoughts - if I may call it so - where I had placed her from
the first.  But when he entered, and stood before me with his hand
out, the darkness that had fallen on him changed to light, and I
felt confounded and ashamed of having doubted one I loved so
heartily.  I loved her none the less; I thought of her as the same
benignant, gentle angel in my life; I reproached myself, not her,
with having done him an injury; and I would have made him any
atonement if I had known what to make, and how to make it.

'Why, Daisy, old boy, dumb-foundered!' laughed Steerforth, shaking
my hand heartily, and throwing it gaily away.  'Have I detected you
in another feast, you Sybarite!  These Doctors' Commons fellows are
the gayest men in town, I believe, and beat us sober Oxford people
all to nothing!' His bright glance went merrily round the room, as
he took the seat on the sofa opposite to me, which Mrs. Micawber
had recently vacated, and stirred the fire into a blaze.

'I was so surprised at first,' said I, giving him welcome with all
the cordiality I felt, 'that I had hardly breath to greet you with,
Steerforth.'

'Well, the sight of me is good for sore eyes, as the Scotch say,'
replied Steerforth, 'and so is the sight of you, Daisy, in full
bloom.  How are you, my Bacchanal?'

'I am very well,' said I; 'and not at all Bacchanalian tonight,
though I confess to another party of three.'

'All of whom I met in the street, talking loud in your praise,'
returned Steerforth.  'Who's our friend in the tights?'

I gave him the best idea I could, in a few words, of Mr. Micawber. 
He laughed heartily at my feeble portrait of that gentleman, and
said he was a man to know, and he must know him.
'But who do you suppose our other friend is?' said I, in my turn.

'Heaven knows,' said Steerforth.  'Not a bore, I hope?  I thought
he looked a little like one.'

'Traddles!' I replied, triumphantly.

'Who's he?' asked Steerforth, in his careless way.

'Don't you remember Traddles?  Traddles in our room at Salem
House?'

'Oh!  That fellow!' said Steerforth, beating a lump of coal on the
top of the fire, with the poker.  'Is he as soft as ever?  And
where the deuce did you pick him up?'

I extolled Traddles in reply, as highly as I could; for I felt that
Steerforth rather slighted him.  Steerforth, dismissing the subject
with a light nod, and a smile, and the remark that he would be glad
to see the old fellow too, for he had always been an odd fish,
inquired if I could give him anything to eat?  During most of this
short dialogue, when he had not been speaking in a wild vivacious
manner, he had sat idly beating on the lump of coal with the poker. 
I observed that he did the same thing while I was getting out the
remains of the pigeon-pie, and so forth.

'Why, Daisy, here's a supper for a king!' he exclaimed, starting
out of his silence with a burst, and taking his seat at the table. 
'I shall do it justice, for I have come from Yarmouth.'

'I thought you came from Oxford?' I returned.

'Not I,' said Steerforth.  'I have been seafaring - better
employed.'

'Littimer was here today, to inquire for you,' I remarked, 'and I
understood him that you were at Oxford; though, now I think of it,
he certainly did not say so.'

'Littimer is a greater fool than I thought him, to have been
inquiring for me at all,' said Steerforth, jovially pouring out a
glass of wine, and drinking to me.  'As to understanding him, you
are a cleverer fellow than most of us, Daisy, if you can do that.'

'That's true, indeed,' said I, moving my chair to the table.  'So
you have been at Yarmouth, Steerforth!' interested to know all
about it.  'Have you been there long?'

'No,' he returned.  'An escapade of a week or so.'

'And how are they all?  Of course, little Emily is not married
yet?'

'Not yet.  Going to be, I believe - in so many weeks, or months, or
something or other.  I have not seen much of 'em.  By the by'; he
laid down his knife and fork, which he had been using with great
diligence, and began feeling in his pockets; 'I have a letter for
you.'

'From whom?'

'Why, from your old nurse,' he returned, taking some papers out of
his breast pocket.  "'J. Steerforth, Esquire, debtor, to The
Willing Mind"; that's not it.  Patience, and we'll find it
presently.  Old what's-his-name's in a bad way, and it's about
that, I believe.'

'Barkis, do you mean?'

'Yes!' still feeling in his pockets, and looking over their
contents: 'it's all over with poor Barkis, I am afraid.  I saw a
little apothecary there - surgeon, or whatever he is - who brought
your worship into the world.  He was mighty learned about the case,
to me; but the upshot of his opinion was, that the carrier was
making his last journey rather fast.  - Put your hand into the
breast pocket of my great-coat on the chair yonder, and I think
you'll find the letter.  Is it there?'

'Here it is!' said I.

'That's right!'

It was from Peggotty; something less legible than usual, and brief. 
It informed me of her husband's hopeless state, and hinted at his
being 'a little nearer' than heretofore, and consequently more
difficult to manage for his own comfort.  It said nothing of her
weariness and watching, and praised him highly.  It was written
with a plain, unaffected, homely piety that I knew to be genuine,
and ended with 'my duty to my ever darling' - meaning myself.

While I deciphered it, Steerforth continued to eat and drink.

'It's a bad job,' he said, when I had done; 'but the sun sets every
day, and people die every minute, and we mustn't be scared by the
common lot.  If we failed to hold our own, because that equal foot
at all men's doors was heard knocking somewhere, every object in
this world would slip from us.  No!  Ride on!  Rough-shod if need
be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on!  Ride on over all
obstacles, and win the race!'

'And win what race?' said I.

'The race that one has started in,' said he.  'Ride on!'

I noticed, I remember, as he paused, looking at me with his
handsome head a little thrown back, and his glass raised in his
hand, that, though the freshness of the sea-wind was on his face,
and it was ruddy, there were traces in it, made since I last saw
it, as if he had applied himself to some habitual strain of the
fervent energy which, when roused, was so passionately roused
within him.  I had it in my thoughts to remonstrate with him upon
his desperate way of pursuing any fancy that he took - such as this
buffeting of rough seas, and braving of hard weather, for example
- when my mind glanced off to the immediate subject of our
conversation again, and pursued that instead.

'I tell you what, Steerforth,' said I, 'if your high spirits will
listen to me -'

'They are potent spirits, and will do whatever you like,' he
answered, moving from the table to the fireside again.

'Then I tell you what, Steerforth.  I think I will go down and see
my old nurse.  It is not that I can do her any good, or render her
any real service; but she is so attached to me that my visit will
have as much effect on her, as if I could do both.  She will take
it so kindly that it will be a comfort and support to her.  It is
no great effort to make, I am sure, for such a friend as she has
been to me.  Wouldn't you go a day's journey, if you were in my
place?'

His face was thoughtful, and he sat considering a little before he
answered, in a low voice, 'Well!  Go.  You can do no harm.'

'You have just come back,' said I, 'and it would be in vain to ask
you to go with me?'

'Quite,' he returned.  'I am for Highgate tonight.  I have not seen
my mother this long time, and it lies upon my conscience, for it's
something to be loved as she loves her prodigal son.  - Bah!
Nonsense! - You mean to go tomorrow, I suppose?' he said, holding
me out at arm's length, with a hand on each of my shoulders.

'Yes, I think so.'

'Well, then, don't go till next day.  I wanted you to come and stay
a few days with us.  Here I am, on purpose to bid you, and you fly
off to Yarmouth!'

'You are a nice fellow to talk of flying off, Steerforth, who are
always running wild on some unknown expedition or other!'

He looked at me for a moment without speaking, and then rejoined,
still holding me as before, and giving me a shake:

'Come!  Say the next day, and pass as much of tomorrow as you can
with us! Who knows when we may meet again, else?  Come!  Say the
next day!  I want you to stand between Rosa Dartle and me, and keep
us asunder.'

'Would you love each other too much, without me?'

'Yes; or hate,' laughed Steerforth; 'no matter which.  Come!  Say
the next day!'

I said the next day; and he put on his great-coat and lighted his
cigar, and set off to walk home.  Finding him in this intention, I
put on my own great-coat (but did not light my own cigar, having
had enough of that for one while) and walked with him as far as the
open road: a dull road, then, at night.  He was in great spirits
all the way; and when we parted, and I looked after him going so
gallantly and airily homeward, I thought of his saying, 'Ride on
over all obstacles, and win the race!' and wished, for the first
time, that he had some worthy race to run.

I was undressing in my own room, when Mr. Micawber's letter tumbled
on the floor.  Thus reminded of it, I broke the seal and read as
follows.  It was dated an hour and a half before dinner.  I am not
sure whether I have mentioned that, when Mr. Micawber was at any
particularly desperate crisis, he used a sort of legal phraseology,
which he seemed to think equivalent to winding up his affairs.


'SIR - for I dare not say my dear Copperfield,

'It is expedient that I should inform you that the undersigned is
Crushed.  Some flickering efforts to spare you the premature
knowledge of his calamitous position, you may observe in him this
day; but hope has sunk beneath the horizon, and the undersigned is
Crushed.

'The present communication is penned within the personal range (I
cannot call it the society) of an individual, in a state closely
bordering on intoxication, employed by a broker.  That individual
is in legal possession of the premises, under a distress for rent. 
His inventory includes, not only the chattels and effects of every
description belonging to the undersigned, as yearly tenant of this
habitation, but also those appertaining to Mr. Thomas Traddles,
lodger, a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.

'If any drop of gloom were wanting in the overflowing cup, which is
now "commended" (in the language of an immortal Writer) to the lips
of the undersigned, it would be found in the fact, that a friendly
acceptance granted to the undersigned, by the before-mentioned Mr.
Thomas Traddles, for the sum Of 23l 4s 9 1/2d is over due, and is
NOT provided for.  Also, in the fact that the living
responsibilities clinging to the undersigned will, in the course of
nature, be increased by the sum of one more helpless victim; whose
miserable appearance may be looked for - in round numbers - at the
expiration of a period not exceeding six lunar months from the
present date.

'After premising thus much, it would be a work of supererogation to
add, that dust and ashes are for ever scattered

               'On
                    'The
                         'Head
                              'Of
                                   'WILKINS MICAWBER.'


Poor Traddles!  I knew enough of Mr. Micawber by this time, to
foresee that he might be expected to recover the blow; but my
night's rest was sorely distressed by thoughts of Traddles, and of
the curate's daughter, who was one of ten, down in Devonshire, and
who was such a dear girl, and who would wait for Traddles (ominous
praise!) until she was sixty, or any age that could be mentioned.



CHAPTER 29
I VISIT STEERFORTH AT HIS HOME, AGAIN


I mentioned to Mr. Spenlow in the morning, that I wanted leave of
absence for a short time; and as I was not in the receipt of any
salary, and consequently was not obnoxious to the implacable
Jorkins, there was no difficulty about it.  I took that
opportunity, with my voice sticking in my throat, and my sight
failing as I uttered the words, to express my hope that Miss
Spenlow was quite well; to which Mr. Spenlow replied, with no more
emotion than if he had been speaking of an ordinary human being,
that he was much obliged to me, and she was very well.

We articled clerks, as germs of the patrician order of proctors,
were treated with so much consideration, that I was almost my own
master at all times.  As I did not care, however, to get to
Highgate before one or two o'clock in the day, and as we had
another little excommunication case in court that morning, which
was called The office of the judge promoted by Tipkins against
Bullock for his soul's correction, I passed an hour or two in
attendance on it with Mr. Spenlow very agreeably.  It arose out of
a scuffle between two churchwardens, one of whom was alleged to
have pushed the other against a pump; the handle of which pump
projecting into a school-house, which school-house was under a
gable of the church-roof, made the push an ecclesiastical offence. 
It was an amusing case; and sent me up to Highgate, on the box of
the stage-coach, thinking about the Commons, and what Mr. Spenlow
had said about touching the Commons and bringing down the country.

Mrs. Steerforth was pleased to see me, and so was Rosa Dartle.  I
was agreeably surprised to find that Littimer was not there, and
that we were attended by a modest little parlour-maid, with blue
ribbons in her cap, whose eye it was much more pleasant, and much
less disconcerting, to catch by accident, than the eye of that
respectable man.  But what I particularly observed, before I had
been half-an-hour in the house, was the close and attentive watch
Miss Dartle kept upon me; and the lurking manner in which she
seemed to compare my face with Steerforth's, and Steerforth's with
mine, and to lie in wait for something to come out between the two. 
So surely as I looked towards her, did I see that eager visage,
with its gaunt black eyes and searching brow, intent on mine; or
passing suddenly from mine to Steerforth's; or comprehending both
of us at once.  In this lynx-like scrutiny she was so far from
faltering when she saw I observed it, that at such a time she only
fixed her piercing look upon me with a more intent expression
still.  Blameless as I was, and knew that I was, in reference to
any wrong she could possibly suspect me of, I shrunk before her
strange eyes, quite unable to endure their hungry lustre.

All day, she seemed to pervade the whole house.  If I talked to
Steerforth in his room, I heard her dress rustle in the little
gallery outside.  When he and I engaged in some of our old
exercises on the lawn behind the house, I saw her face pass from
window to window, like a wandering light, until it fixed itself in
one, and watched us.  When we all four went out walking in the
afternoon, she closed her thin hand on my arm like a spring, to
keep me back, while Steerforth and his mother went on out of
hearing: and then spoke to me.

'You have been a long time,' she said, 'without coming here.  Is
your profession really so engaging and interesting as to absorb
your whole attention?  I ask because I always want to be informed,
when I am ignorant.  Is it really, though?'

I replied that I liked it well enough, but that I certainly could
not claim so much for it.

'Oh! I am glad to know that, because I always like to be put right
when I am wrong,' said Rosa Dartle.  'You mean it is a little dry,
perhaps?'

'Well,' I replied; 'perhaps it was a little dry.'

'Oh! and that's a reason why you want relief and change -
excitement and all that?' said she.  'Ah! very true!  But isn't it
a little - Eh? - for him; I don't mean you?'

A quick glance of her eye towards the spot where Steerforth was
walking, with his mother leaning on his arm, showed me whom she
meant; but beyond that, I was quite lost.  And I looked so, I have
no doubt.

'Don't it - I don't say that it does, mind I want to know - don't
it rather engross him?  Don't it make him, perhaps, a little more
remiss than usual in his visits to his blindly-doting - eh?'  With
another quick glance at them, and such a glance at me as seemed to
look into my innermost thoughts.

'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'pray do not think -'

'I don't!' she said.  'Oh dear me, don't suppose that I think
anything!  I am not suspicious.  I only ask a question.  I don't
state any opinion.  I want to found an opinion on what you tell me. 
Then, it's not so?  Well! I am very glad to know it.'

'It certainly is not the fact,' said I, perplexed, 'that I am
accountable for Steerforth's having been away from home longer than
usual - if he has been: which I really don't know at this moment,
unless I understand it from you.  I have not seen him this long
while, until last night.'

'No?'

'Indeed, Miss Dartle, no!'

As she looked full at me, I saw her face grow sharper and paler,
and the marks of the old wound lengthen out until it cut through
the disfigured lip, and deep into the nether lip, and slanted down
the face.  There was something positively awful to me in this, and
in the brightness of her eyes, as she said, looking fixedly at me:

'What is he doing?'

I repeated the words, more to myself than her, being so amazed.

'What is he doing?' she said, with an eagerness that seemed enough
to consume her like a fire.  'In what is that man assisting him,
who never looks at me without an inscrutable falsehood in his eyes? 
If you are honourable and faithful, I don't ask you to betray your
friend.  I ask you only to tell me, is it anger, is it hatred, is
it pride, is it restlessness, is it some wild fancy, is it love,
what is it, that is leading him?'

'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'how shall I tell you, so that you will
believe me, that I know of nothing in Steerforth different from
what there was when I first came here?  I can think of nothing.  I
firmly believe there is nothing.  I hardly understand even what you
mean.'

As she still stood looking fixedly at me, a twitching or throbbing,
from which I could not dissociate the idea of pain, came into that
cruel mark; and lifted up the corner of her lip as if with scorn,
or with a pity that despised its object.  She put her hand upon it
hurriedly - a hand so thin and delicate, that when I had seen her
hold it up before the fire to shade her face, I had compared it in
my thoughts to fine porcelain - and saying, in a quick, fierce,
passionate way, 'I swear you to secrecy about this!' said not a
word more.

Mrs. Steerforth was particularly happy in her son's society, and
Steerforth was, on this occasion, particularly attentive and
respectful to her.  It was very interesting to me to see them
together, not only on account of their mutual affection, but
because of the strong personal resemblance between them, and the
manner in which what was haughty or impetuous in him was softened
by age and sex, in her, to a gracious dignity.  I thought, more
than once, that it was well no serious cause of division had ever
come between them; or two such natures - I ought rather to express
it, two such shades of the same nature - might have been harder to
reconcile than the two extremest opposites in creation.  The idea
did not originate in my own discernment, I am bound to confess, but
in a speech of Rosa Dartle's.

She said at dinner:

'Oh, but do tell me, though, somebody, because I have been thinking
about it all day, and I want to know.'

'You want to know what, Rosa?' returned Mrs. Steerforth.  'Pray,
pray, Rosa, do not be mysterious.'

'Mysterious!' she cried.  'Oh! really?  Do you consider me so?'

'Do I constantly entreat you,' said Mrs. Steerforth, 'to speak
plainly, in your own natural manner?'

'Oh! then this is not my natural manner?' she rejoined.  'Now you
must really bear with me, because I ask for information.  We never
know ourselves.'

'It has become a second nature,' said Mrs. Steerforth, without any
displeasure; 'but I remember, - and so must you, I think, - when
your manner was different, Rosa; when it was not so guarded, and
was more trustful.'

'I am sure you are right,' she returned; 'and so it is that bad
habits grow upon one!  Really?  Less guarded and more trustful? 
How can I, imperceptibly, have changed, I wonder!  Well, that's
very odd!  I must study to regain my former self.'

'I wish you would,' said Mrs. Steerforth, with a smile.

'Oh!  I really will, you know!' she answered.  'I will learn
frankness from - let me see - from James.'

'You cannot learn frankness, Rosa,' said Mrs. Steerforth quickly -
for there was always some effect of sarcasm in what Rosa Dartle
said, though it was said, as this was, in the most unconscious
manner in the world - 'in a better school.'

'That I am sure of,' she answered, with uncommon fervour.  'If I am
sure of anything, of course, you know, I am sure of that.'

Mrs. Steerforth appeared to me to regret having been a little
nettled; for she presently said, in a kind tone:

'Well, my dear Rosa, we have not heard what it is that you want to
be satisfied about?'

'That I want to be satisfied about?' she replied, with provoking
coldness.  'Oh!  It was only whether people, who are like each
other in their moral constitution - is that the phrase?'

'It's as good a phrase as another,' said Steerforth.

'Thank you: - whether people, who are like each other in their
moral constitution, are in greater danger than people not so
circumstanced, supposing any serious cause of variance to arise
between them, of being divided angrily and deeply?'

'I should say yes,' said Steerforth.

'Should you?' she retorted.  'Dear me!  Supposing then, for
instance - any unlikely thing will do for a supposition - that you
and your mother were to have a serious quarrel.'

'My dear Rosa,' interposed Mrs. Steerforth, laughing
good-naturedly, 'suggest some other supposition!  James and I know
our duty to each other better, I pray Heaven!'

'Oh!' said Miss Dartle, nodding her head thoughtfully.  'To be
sure.  That would prevent it?  Why, of course it would.  Exactly. 
Now, I am glad I have been so foolish as to put the case, for it is
so very good to know that your duty to each other would prevent it!
Thank you very much.'

One other little circumstance connected with Miss Dartle I must not
omit; for I had reason to remember it thereafter, when all the
irremediable past was rendered plain.  During the whole of this
day, but especially from this period of it, Steerforth exerted
himself with his utmost skill, and that was with his utmost ease,
to charm this singular creature into a pleasant and pleased
companion.  That he should succeed, was no matter of surprise to
me.  That she should struggle against the fascinating influence of
his delightful art - delightful nature I thought it then - did not
surprise me either; for I knew that she was sometimes jaundiced and
perverse.  I saw her features and her manner slowly change; I saw
her look at him with growing admiration; I saw her try, more and
more faintly, but always angrily, as if she condemned a weakness in
herself, to resist the captivating power that he possessed; and
finally, I saw her sharp glance soften, and her smile become quite
gentle, and I ceased to be afraid of her as I had really been all
day, and we all sat about the fire, talking and laughing together,
with as little reserve as if we had been children.

Whether it was because we had sat there so long, or because
Steerforth was resolved not to lose the advantage he had gained, I
do not know; but we did not remain in the dining-room more than
five minutes after her departure.  'She is playing her harp,' said
Steerforth, softly, at the drawing-room door, 'and nobody but my
mother has heard her do that, I believe, these three years.'  He
said it with a curious smile, which was gone directly; and we went
into the room and found her alone.

'Don't get up,' said Steerforth (which she had already done)' my
dear Rosa, don't!  Be kind for once, and sing us an Irish song.'

'What do you care for an Irish song?' she returned.

'Much!' said Steerforth.  'Much more than for any other.  Here is
Daisy, too, loves music from his soul.  Sing us an Irish song,
Rosa! and let me sit and listen as I used to do.'

He did not touch her, or the chair from which she had risen, but
sat himself near the harp.  She stood beside it for some little
while, in a curious way, going through the motion of playing it
with her right hand, but not sounding it.  At length she sat down,
and drew it to her with one sudden action, and played and sang.

I don't know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that
song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can
imagine.  There was something fearful in the reality of it.  It was
as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out of
passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low
sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still.  I was
dumb when she leaned beside the harp again, playing it, but not
sounding it, with her right hand.

A minute more, and this had roused me from my trance: - Steerforth
had left his seat, and gone to her, and had put his arm laughingly
about her, and had said, 'Come, Rosa, for the future we will love
each other very much!' And she had struck him, and had thrown him
off with the fury of a wild cat, and had burst out of the room.

'What is the matter with Rosa?' said Mrs. Steerforth, coming in.

'She has been an angel, mother,' returned Steerforth, 'for a little
while; and has run into the opposite extreme, since, by way of
compensation.'

'You should be careful not to irritate her, James.  Her temper has
been soured, remember, and ought not to be tried.'

Rosa did not come back; and no other mention was made of her, until
I went with Steerforth into his room to say Good night.  Then he
laughed about her, and asked me if I had ever seen such a fierce
little piece of incomprehensibility.

I expressed as much of my astonishment as was then capable of
expression, and asked if he could guess what it was that she had
taken so much amiss, so suddenly.

'Oh, Heaven knows,' said Steerforth.  'Anything you like - or
nothing!  I told you she took everything, herself included, to a
grindstone, and sharpened it.  She is an edge-tool, and requires
great care in dealing with.  She is always dangerous.  Good night!'

'Good night!' said I, 'my dear Steerforth!  I shall be gone before
you wake in the morning.  Good night!'

He was unwilling to let me go; and stood, holding me out, with a
hand on each of my shoulders, as he had done in my own room.

'Daisy,' he said, with a smile - 'for though that's not the name
your godfathers and godmothers gave you, it's the name I like best
to call you by - and I wish, I wish, I wish, you could give it to
me!'

'Why so I can, if I choose,' said I.

'Daisy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think of me
at my best, old boy.  Come!  Let us make that bargain.  Think of me
at my best, if circumstances should ever part us!'

'You have no best to me, Steerforth,' said I, 'and no worst.  You
are always equally loved, and cherished in my heart.'

So much compunction for having ever wronged him, even by a
shapeless thought, did I feel within me, that the confession of
having done so was rising to my lips.  But for the reluctance I had
to betray the confidence of Agnes, but for my uncertainty how to
approach the subject with no risk of doing so, it would have
reached them before he said, 'God bless you, Daisy, and good
night!' In my doubt, it did NOT reach them; and we shook hands, and
we parted.

I was up with the dull dawn, and, having dressed as quietly as I
could, looked into his room.  He was fast asleep; lying, easily,
with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

The time came in its season, and that was very soon, when I almost
wondered that nothing troubled his repose, as I looked at him.  But
he slept - let me think of him so again - as I had often seen him
sleep at school; and thus, in this silent hour, I left him.

- Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive
hand in love and friendship.  Never, never more!



CHAPTER 30
A LOSS


I got down to Yarmouth in the evening, and went to the inn.  I knew
that Peggotty's spare room - my room - was likely to have
occupation enough in a little while, if that great Visitor, before
whose presence all the living must give place, were not already in
the house; so I betook myself to the inn, and dined there, and
engaged my bed.

It was ten o'clock when I went out.  Many of the shops were shut,
and the town was dull.  When I came to Omer and Joram's, I found
the shutters up, but the shop door standing open.  As I could
obtain a perspective view of Mr. Omer inside, smoking his pipe by
the parlour door, I entered, and asked him how he was.

'Why, bless my life and soul!' said Mr. Omer, 'how do you find
yourself?  Take a seat.  - Smoke not disagreeable, I hope?'

'By no means,' said I.  'I like it - in somebody else's pipe.'

'What, not in your own, eh?' Mr. Omer returned, laughing.  'All the
better, sir.  Bad habit for a young man.  Take a seat.  I smoke,
myself, for the asthma.'

Mr. Omer had made room for me, and placed a chair.  He now sat down
again very much out of breath, gasping at his pipe as if it
contained a supply of that necessary, without which he must perish.

'I am sorry to have heard bad news of Mr. Barkis,' said I.

Mr. Omer looked at me, with a steady countenance, and shook his
head.

'Do you know how he is tonight?' I asked.

'The very question I should have put to you, sir,' returned Mr.
Omer, 'but on account of delicacy.  It's one of the drawbacks of
our line of business.  When a party's ill, we can't ask how the
party is.'

The difficulty had not occurred to me; though I had had my
apprehensions too, when I went in, of hearing the old tune.  On its
being mentioned, I recognized it, however, and said as much.

'Yes, yes, you understand,' said Mr. Omer, nodding his head.  'We
dursn't do it.  Bless you, it would be a shock that the generality
of parties mightn't recover, to say "Omer and Joram's compliments,
and how do you find yourself this morning?" - or this afternoon -
as it may be.'

Mr. Omer and I nodded at each other, and Mr. Omer recruited his
wind by the aid of his pipe.

'It's one of the things that cut the trade off from attentions they
could often wish to show,' said Mr. Omer.  'Take myself.  If I have
known Barkis a year, to move to as he went by, I have known him
forty years.  But I can't go and say, "how is he?"'

I felt it was rather hard on Mr. Omer, and I told him so.

'I'm not more self-interested, I hope, than another man,' said Mr.
Omer.  'Look at me!  My wind may fail me at any moment, and it
ain't likely that, to my own knowledge, I'd be self-interested
under such circumstances.  I say it ain't likely, in a man who
knows his wind will go, when it DOES go, as if a pair of bellows
was cut open; and that man a grandfather,' said Mr. Omer.

I said, 'Not at all.'

'It ain't that I complain of my line of business,' said Mr. Omer. 
'It ain't that.  Some good and some bad goes, no doubt, to all
callings.  What I wish is, that parties was brought up
stronger-minded.'

Mr. Omer, with a very complacent and amiable face, took several
puffs in silence; and then said, resuming his first point:

'Accordingly we're obleeged, in ascertaining how Barkis goes on, to
limit ourselves to Em'ly.  She knows what our real objects are, and
she don't have any more alarms or suspicions about us, than if we
was so many lambs.  Minnie and Joram have just stepped down to the
house, in fact (she's there, after hours, helping her aunt a bit),
to ask her how he is tonight; and if you was to please to wait till
they come back, they'd give you full partic'lers.  Will you take
something?  A glass of srub and water, now?  I smoke on srub and
water, myself,' said Mr. Omer, taking up his glass, 'because it's
considered softening to the passages, by which this troublesome
breath of mine gets into action.  But, Lord bless you,' said Mr.
Omer, huskily, 'it ain't the passages that's out of order!  "Give
me breath enough," said I to my daughter Minnie, "and I'll find
passages, my dear."'

He really had no breath to spare, and it was very alarming to see
him laugh.  When he was again in a condition to be talked to, I
thanked him for the proffered refreshment, which I declined, as I
had just had dinner; and, observing that I would wait, since he was
so good as to invite me, until his daughter and his son-in-law came
back, I inquired how little Emily was?

'Well, sir,' said Mr. Omer, removing his pipe, that he might rub
his chin: 'I tell you truly, I shall be glad when her marriage has
taken place.'

'Why so?' I inquired.

'Well, she's unsettled at present,' said Mr. Omer.  'It ain't that
she's not as pretty as ever, for she's prettier - I do assure you,
she is prettier.  It ain't that she don't work as well as ever, for
she does.  She WAS worth any six, and she IS worth any six.  But
somehow she wants heart.  If you understand,' said Mr. Omer, after
rubbing his chin again, and smoking a little, 'what I mean in a
general way by the expression, "A long pull, and a strong pull, and
a pull altogether, my hearties, hurrah!" I should say to you, that
that was - in a general way - what I miss in Em'ly.'

Mr. Omer's face and manner went for so much, that I could
conscientiously nod my head, as divining his meaning.  My quickness
of apprehension seemed to please him, and he went on:
'Now I consider this is principally on account of her being in an
unsettled state, you see.  We have talked it over a good deal, her
uncle and myself, and her sweetheart and myself, after business;
and I consider it is principally on account of her being unsettled. 
You must always recollect of Em'ly,' said Mr. Omer, shaking his
head gently, 'that she's a most extraordinary affectionate little
thing.  The proverb says, "You can't make a silk purse out of a
sow's ear." Well, I don't know about that.  I rather think you may,
if you begin early in life.  She has made a home out of that old
boat, sir, that stone and marble couldn't beat.'

'I am sure she has!' said I.

'To see the clinging of that pretty little thing to her uncle,'
said Mr. Omer; 'to see the way she holds on to him, tighter and
tighter, and closer and closer, every day, is to see a sight.  Now,
you know, there's a struggle going on when that's the case.  Why
should it be made a longer one than is needful?'

I listened attentively to the good old fellow, and acquiesced, with
all my heart, in what he said.

'Therefore, I mentioned to them,' said Mr. Omer, in a comfortable,
easy-going tone, 'this.  I said, "Now, don't consider Em'ly nailed
down in point of time, at all.  Make it your own time.  Her
services have been more valuable than was supposed; her learning
has been quicker than was supposed; Omer and Joram can run their
pen through what remains; and she's free when you wish.  If she
likes to make any little arrangement, afterwards, in the way of
doing any little thing for us at home, very well.  If she don't,
very well still.  We're no losers, anyhow." For - don't you see,'
said Mr. Omer, touching me with his pipe, 'it ain't likely that a
man so short of breath as myself, and a grandfather too, would go
and strain points with a little bit of a blue-eyed blossom, like
her?'

'Not at all, I am certain,' said I.

'Not at all!  You're right!' said Mr. Omer.  'Well, sir, her cousin
- you know it's a cousin she's going to be married to?'

'Oh yes,' I replied.  'I know him well.'

'Of course you do,' said Mr. Omer.  'Well, sir!  Her cousin being,
as it appears, in good work, and well to do, thanked me in a very
manly sort of manner for this (conducting himself altogether, I
must say, in a way that gives me a high opinion of him), and went
and took as comfortable a little house as you or I could wish to
clap eyes on.  That little house is now furnished right through, as
neat and complete as a doll's parlour; and but for Barkis's illness
having taken this bad turn, poor fellow, they would have been man
and wife - I dare say, by this time.  As it is, there's a
postponement.'

'And Emily, Mr. Omer?' I inquired.  'Has she become more settled?'

'Why that, you know,' he returned, rubbing his double chin again,
'can't naturally be expected.  The prospect of the change and
separation, and all that, is, as one may say, close to her and far
away from her, both at once.  Barkis's death needn't put it off
much, but his lingering might.  Anyway, it's an uncertain state of
matters, you see.'

'I see,' said I.

'Consequently,' pursued Mr. Omer, 'Em'ly's still a little down, and
a little fluttered; perhaps, upon the whole, she's more so than she
was.  Every day she seems to get fonder and fonder of her uncle,
and more loth to part from all of us.  A kind word from me brings
the tears into her eyes; and if you was to see her with my daughter
Minnie's little girl, you'd never forget it.  Bless my heart
alive!' said Mr. Omer, pondering, 'how she loves that child!'

Having so favourable an opportunity, it occurred to me to ask Mr.
Omer, before our conversation should be interrupted by the return
of his daughter and her husband, whether he knew anything of
Martha.

'Ah!' he rejoined, shaking his head, and looking very much
dejected.  'No good.  A sad story, sir, however you come to know
it.  I never thought there was harm in the girl.  I wouldn't wish
to mention it before my daughter Minnie - for she'd take me up
directly - but I never did.  None of us ever did.'

Mr. Omer, hearing his daughter's footstep before I heard it,
touched me with his pipe, and shut up one eye, as a caution.  She
and her husband came in immediately afterwards.

Their report was, that Mr. Barkis was 'as bad as bad could be';
that he was quite unconscious; and that Mr. Chillip had mournfully
said in the kitchen, on going away just now, that the College of
Physicians, the College of Surgeons, and Apothecaries' Hall, if
they were all called in together, couldn't help him.  He was past
both Colleges, Mr. Chillip said, and the Hall could only poison
him.

Hearing this, and learning that Mr. Peggotty was there, I
determined to go to the house at once.  I bade good night to Mr.
Omer, and to Mr. and Mrs. Joram; and directed my steps thither,
with a solemn feeling, which made Mr. Barkis quite a new and
different creature.

My low tap at the door was answered by Mr. Peggotty.  He was not so
much surprised to see me as I had expected.  I remarked this in
Peggotty, too, when she came down; and I have seen it since; and I
think, in the expectation of that dread surprise, all other changes
and surprises dwindle into nothing.

I shook hands with Mr. Peggotty, and passed into the kitchen, while
he softly closed the door.  Little Emily was sitting by the fire,
with her hands before her face.  Ham was standing near her.

We spoke in whispers; listening, between whiles, for any sound in
the room above.  I had not thought of it on the occasion of my last
visit, but how strange it was to me, now, to miss Mr. Barkis out of
the kitchen!

'This is very kind of you, Mas'r Davy,' said Mr. Peggotty.

'It's oncommon kind,' said Ham.

'Em'ly, my dear,' cried Mr. Peggotty.  'See here!  Here's Mas'r
Davy come!  What, cheer up, pretty!  Not a wured to Mas'r Davy?'

There was a trembling upon her, that I can see now.  The coldness
of her hand when I touched it, I can feel yet.  Its only sign of
animation was to shrink from mine; and then she glided from the
chair, and creeping to the other side of her uncle, bowed herself,
silently and trembling still, upon his breast.

'It's such a loving art,' said Mr. Peggotty, smoothing her rich
hair with his great hard hand, 'that it can't abear the sorrer of
this.  It's nat'ral in young folk, Mas'r Davy, when they're new to
these here trials, and timid, like my little bird, - it's nat'ral.'

She clung the closer to him, but neither lifted up her face, nor
spoke a word.

'It's getting late, my dear,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'and here's Ham
come fur to take you home.  Theer!  Go along with t'other loving
art!  What' Em'ly?  Eh, my pretty?'

The sound of her voice had not reached me, but he bent his head as
if he listened to her, and then said:

'Let you stay with your uncle?  Why, you doen't mean to ask me
that!  Stay with your uncle, Moppet?  When your husband that'll be
so soon, is here fur to take you home?  Now a person wouldn't think
it, fur to see this little thing alongside a rough-weather chap
like me,' said Mr. Peggotty, looking round at both of us, with
infinite pride; 'but the sea ain't more salt in it than she has
fondness in her for her uncle - a foolish little Em'ly!'

'Em'ly's in the right in that, Mas'r Davy!' said Ham.  'Lookee
here!  As Em'ly wishes of it, and as she's hurried and frightened,
like, besides, I'll leave her till morning.  Let me stay too!'

'No, no,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'You doen't ought - a married man
like you - or what's as good - to take and hull away a day's work. 
And you doen't ought to watch and work both.  That won't do.  You
go home and turn in.  You ain't afeerd of Em'ly not being took good
care on, I know.'
Ham yielded to this persuasion, and took his hat to go.  Even when
he kissed her.  - and I never saw him approach her, but I felt that
nature had given him the soul of a gentleman - she seemed to cling
closer to her uncle, even to the avoidance of her chosen husband. 
I shut the door after him, that it might cause no disturbance of
the quiet that prevailed; and when I turned back, I found Mr.
Peggotty still talking to her.

'Now, I'm a going upstairs to tell your aunt as Mas'r Davy's here,
and that'll cheer her up a bit,' he said.  'Sit ye down by the
fire, the while, my dear, and warm those mortal cold hands.  You
doen't need to be so fearsome, and take on so much.  What?  You'll
go along with me? - Well! come along with me - come!  If her uncle
was turned out of house and home, and forced to lay down in a dyke,
Mas'r Davy,' said Mr. Peggotty, with no less pride than before,
'it's my belief she'd go along with him, now!  But there'll be
someone else, soon, - someone else, soon, Em'ly!'

Afterwards, when I went upstairs, as I passed the door of my little
chamber, which was dark, I had an indistinct impression of her
being within it, cast down upon the floor.  But, whether it was
really she, or whether it was a confusion of the shadows in the
room, I don't know now.

I had leisure to think, before the kitchen fire, of pretty little
Emily's dread of death - which, added to what Mr. Omer had told me,
I took to be the cause of her being so unlike herself - and I had
leisure, before Peggotty came down, even to think more leniently of
the weakness of it: as I sat counting the ticking of the clock, and
deepening my sense of the solemn hush around me.  Peggotty took me
in her arms, and blessed and thanked me over and over again for
being such a comfort to her (that was what she said) in her
distress.  She then entreated me to come upstairs, sobbing that Mr.
Barkis had always liked me and admired me; that he had often talked
of me, before he fell into a stupor; and that she believed, in case
of his coming to himself again, he would brighten up at sight of
me, if he could brighten up at any earthly thing.

The probability of his ever doing so, appeared to me, when I saw
him, to be very small.  He was lying with his head and shoulders
out of bed, in an uncomfortable attitude, half resting on the box
which had cost him so much pain and trouble.  I learned, that, when
he was past creeping out of bed to open it, and past assuring
himself of its safety by means of the divining rod I had seen him
use, he had required to have it placed on the chair at the
bed-side, where he had ever since embraced it, night and day.  His
arm lay on it now.  Time and the world were slipping from beneath
him, but the box was there; and the last words he had uttered were
(in an explanatory tone) 'Old clothes!'

'Barkis, my dear!' said Peggotty, almost cheerfully: bending over
him, while her brother and I stood at the bed's foot.  'Here's my
dear boy - my dear boy, Master Davy, who brought us together,
Barkis!  That you sent messages by, you know!  Won't you speak to
Master Davy?'

He was as mute and senseless as the box, from which his form
derived the only expression it had.

'He's a going out with the tide,' said Mr. Peggotty to me, behind
his hand.

My eyes were dim and so were Mr. Peggotty's; but I repeated in a
whisper, 'With the tide?'

'People can't die, along the coast,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'except
when the tide's pretty nigh out.  They can't be born, unless it's
pretty nigh in - not properly born, till flood.  He's a going out
with the tide.  It's ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an
hour.  If he lives till it turns, he'll hold his own till past the
flood, and go out with the next tide.'

We remained there, watching him, a long time - hours.  What
mysterious influence my presence had upon him in that state of his
senses, I shall not pretend to say; but when he at last began to
wander feebly, it is certain he was muttering about driving me to
school.

'He's coming to himself,' said Peggotty.

Mr. Peggotty touched me, and whispered with much awe and reverence. 
'They are both a-going out fast.'

'Barkis, my dear!' said Peggotty.

'C. P. Barkis,' he cried faintly.  'No better woman anywhere!'

'Look!  Here's Master Davy!' said Peggotty.  For he now opened his
eyes.

I was on the point of asking him if he knew me, when he tried to
stretch out his arm, and said to me, distinctly, with a pleasant
smile:

'Barkis is willin'!'

And, it being low water, he went out with the tide.



CHAPTER 31
A GREATER LOSS


It was not difficult for me, on Peggotty's solicitation, to resolve
to stay where I was, until after the remains of the poor carrier
should have made their last journey to Blunderstone.  She had long
ago bought, out of her own savings, a little piece of ground in our
old churchyard near the grave of 'her sweet girl', as she always
called my mother; and there they were to rest.

In keeping Peggotty company, and doing all I could for her (little
enough at the utmost), I was as grateful, I rejoice to think, as
even now I could wish myself to have been.  But I am afraid I had
a supreme satisfaction, of a personal and professional nature, in
taking charge of Mr. Barkis's will, and expounding its contents.

I may claim the merit of having originated the suggestion that the
will should be looked for in the box.  After some search, it was
found in the box, at the bottom of a horse's nose-bag; wherein
(besides hay) there was discovered an old gold watch, with chain
and seals, which Mr. Barkis had worn on his wedding-day, and which
had never been seen before or since; a silver tobacco-stopper, in
the form of a leg; an imitation lemon, full of minute cups and
saucers, which I have some idea Mr. Barkis must have purchased to
present to me when I was a child, and afterwards found himself
unable to part with; eighty-seven guineas and a half, in guineas
and half-guineas; two hundred and ten pounds, in perfectly clean
Bank notes; certain receipts for Bank of England stock; an old
horseshoe, a bad shilling, a piece of camphor, and an oyster-shell. 
From the circumstance of the latter article having been much
polished, and displaying prismatic colours on the inside, I
conclude that Mr. Barkis had some general ideas about pearls, which
never resolved themselves into anything definite.

For years and years, Mr. Barkis had carried this box, on all his
journeys, every day.  That it might the better escape notice, he
had invented a fiction that it belonged to 'Mr. Blackboy', and was
'to be left with Barkis till called for'; a fable he had
elaborately written on the lid, in characters now scarcely legible.

He had hoarded, all these years, I found, to good purpose.  His
property in money amounted to nearly three thousand pounds.  Of
this he bequeathed the interest of one thousand to Mr. Peggotty for
his life; on his decease, the principal to be equally divided
between Peggotty, little Emily, and me, or the survivor or
survivors of us, share and share alike.  All the rest he died
possessed of, he bequeathed to Peggotty; whom he left residuary
legatee, and sole executrix of that his last will and testament.

I felt myself quite a proctor when I read this document aloud with
all possible ceremony, and set forth its provisions, any number of
times, to those whom they concerned.  I began to think there was
more in the Commons than I had supposed.  I examined the will with
the deepest attention, pronounced it perfectly formal in all
respects, made a pencil-mark or so in the margin, and thought it
rather extraordinary that I knew so much.

In this abstruse pursuit; in making an account for Peggotty, of all
the property into which she had come; in arranging all the affairs
in an orderly manner; and in being her referee and adviser on every
point, to our joint delight; I passed the week before the funeral. 
I did not see little Emily in that interval, but they told me she
was to be quietly married in a fortnight.

I did not attend the funeral in character, if I may venture to say
so.  I mean I was not dressed up in a black coat and a streamer, to
frighten the birds; but I walked over to Blunderstone early in the
morning, and was in the churchyard when it came, attended only by
Peggotty and her brother.  The mad gentleman looked on, out of my
little window; Mr. Chillip's baby wagged its heavy head, and rolled
its goggle eyes, at the clergyman, over its nurse's shoulder; Mr.
Omer breathed short in the background; no one else was there; and
it was very quiet.  We walked about the churchyard for an hour,
after all was over; and pulled some young leaves from the tree
above my mother's grave.

A dread falls on me here.  A cloud is lowering on the distant town,
towards which I retraced my solitary steps.  I fear to approach it. 
I cannot bear to think of what did come, upon that memorable night;
of what must come again, if I go on.

It is no worse, because I write of it.  It would be no better, if
I stopped my most unwilling hand.  It is done.  Nothing can undo
it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

My old nurse was to go to London with me next day, on the business
of the will.  Little Emily was passing that day at Mr. Omer's.  We
were all to meet in the old boathouse that night.  Ham would bring
Emily at the usual hour.  I would walk back at my leisure.  The
brother and sister would return as they had come, and be expecting
us, when the day closed in, at the fireside.

I parted from them at the wicket-gate, where visionary Strap had
rested with Roderick Random's knapsack in the days of yore; and,
instead of going straight back, walked a little distance on the
road to Lowestoft.  Then I turned, and walked back towards
Yarmouth.  I stayed to dine at a decent alehouse, some mile or two
from the Ferry I have mentioned before; and thus the day wore away,
and it was evening when I reached it.  Rain was falling heavily by
that time, and it was a wild night; but there was a moon behind the
clouds, and it was not dark.

I was soon within sight of Mr. Peggotty's house, and of the light
within it shining through the window.  A little floundering across
the sand, which was heavy, brought me to the door, and I went in.

It looked very comfortable indeed.  Mr. Peggotty had smoked his
evening pipe and there were preparations for some supper by and by. 
The fire was bright, the ashes were thrown up, the locker was ready
for little Emily in her old place.  In her own old place sat
Peggotty, once more, looking (but for her dress) as if she had
never left it.  She had fallen back, already, on the society of the
work-box with St. Paul's upon the lid, the yard-measure in the
cottage, and the bit of wax-candle; and there they all were, just
as if they had never been disturbed.  Mrs. Gummidge appeared to be
fretting a little, in her old corner; and consequently looked quite
natural, too.

'You're first of the lot, Mas'r Davy!' said Mr. Peggotty with a
happy face.  'Doen't keep in that coat, sir, if it's wet.'

'Thank you, Mr. Peggotty,' said I, giving him my outer coat to hang
up.  'It's quite dry.'

'So 'tis!' said Mr. Peggotty, feeling my shoulders.  'As a chip!
Sit ye down, sir.  It ain't o' no use saying welcome to you, but
you're welcome, kind and hearty.'

'Thank you, Mr. Peggotty, I am sure of that.  Well, Peggotty!' said
I, giving her a kiss.  'And how are you, old woman?'

'Ha, ha!' laughed Mr. Peggotty, sitting down beside us, and rubbing
his hands in his sense of relief from recent trouble, and in the
genuine heartiness of his nature; 'there's not a woman in the
wureld, sir - as I tell her - that need to feel more easy in her
mind than her!  She done her dooty by the departed, and the
departed know'd it; and the departed done what was right by her, as
she done what was right by the departed; - and - and - and it's all
right!'

Mrs. Gummidge groaned.

'Cheer up, my pritty mawther!' said Mr. Peggotty.  (But he shook
his head aside at us, evidently sensible of the tendency of the
late occurrences to recall the memory of the old one.) 'Doen't be
down!  Cheer up, for your own self, on'y a little bit, and see if
a good deal more doen't come nat'ral!'

'Not to me, Dan'l,' returned Mrs. Gummidge.  'Nothink's nat'ral to
me but to be lone and lorn.'

'No, no,' said Mr. Peggotty, soothing her sorrows.

'Yes, yes, Dan'l!' said Mrs. Gummidge.  'I ain't a person to live
with them as has had money left.  Thinks go too contrary with me. 
I had better be a riddance.'

'Why, how should I ever spend it without you?' said Mr. Peggotty,
with an air of serious remonstrance.  'What are you a talking on? 
Doen't I want you more now, than ever I did?'

'I know'd I was never wanted before!' cried Mrs. Gummidge, with a
pitiable whimper, 'and now I'm told so!  How could I expect to be
wanted, being so lone and lorn, and so contrary!'

Mr. Peggotty seemed very much shocked at himself for having made a
speech capable of this unfeeling construction, but was prevented
from replying, by Peggotty's pulling his sleeve, and shaking her
head.  After looking at Mrs. Gummidge for some moments, in sore
distress of mind, he glanced at the Dutch clock, rose, snuffed the
candle, and put it in the window.

'Theer!'said Mr. Peggotty, cheerily.'Theer we are, Missis
Gummidge!' Mrs. Gummidge slightly groaned.  'Lighted up, accordin'
to custom!  You're a wonderin' what that's fur, sir!  Well, it's
fur our little Em'ly.  You see, the path ain't over light or
cheerful arter dark; and when I'm here at the hour as she's a
comin' home, I puts the light in the winder.  That, you see,' said
Mr. Peggotty, bending over me with great glee, 'meets two objects. 
She says, says Em'ly, "Theer's home!" she says.  And likewise, says
Em'ly, "My uncle's theer!" Fur if I ain't theer, I never have no
light showed.'

'You're a baby!' said Peggotty; very fond of him for it, if she
thought so.

'Well,' returned Mr. Peggotty, standing with his legs pretty wide
apart, and rubbing his hands up and down them in his comfortable
satisfaction, as he looked alternately at us and at the fire.  'I
doen't know but I am.  Not, you see, to look at.'

'Not azackly,' observed Peggotty.

'No,' laughed Mr. Peggotty, 'not to look at, but to - to consider
on, you know.  I doen't care, bless you!  Now I tell you.  When I
go a looking and looking about that theer pritty house of our
Em'ly's, I'm - I'm Gormed,' said Mr. Peggotty, with sudden emphasis
- 'theer!  I can't say more - if I doen't feel as if the littlest
things was her, a'most.  I takes 'em up and I put 'em down, and I
touches of 'em as delicate as if they was our Em'ly.  So 'tis with
her little bonnets and that.  I couldn't see one on 'em rough used
a purpose - not fur the whole wureld.  There's a babby fur you, in
the form of a great Sea Porkypine!' said Mr. Peggotty, relieving
his earnestness with a roar of laughter.

Peggotty and I both laughed, but not so loud.

'It's my opinion, you see,' said Mr. Peggotty, with a delighted
face, after some further rubbing of his legs, 'as this is along of
my havin' played with her so much, and made believe as we was
Turks, and French, and sharks, and every wariety of forinners -
bless you, yes; and lions and whales, and I doen't know what all!
- when she warn't no higher than my knee.  I've got into the way on
it, you know.  Why, this here candle, now!' said Mr. Peggotty,
gleefully holding out his hand towards it, 'I know wery well that
arter she's married and gone, I shall put that candle theer, just
the same as now.  I know wery well that when I'm here o' nights
(and where else should I live, bless your arts, whatever fortun' I
come into!) and she ain't here or I ain't theer, I shall put the
candle in the winder, and sit afore the fire, pretending I'm
expecting of her, like I'm a doing now.  THERE'S a babby for you,'
said Mr. Peggotty, with another roar, 'in the form of a Sea
Porkypine!  Why, at the present minute, when I see the candle
sparkle up, I says to myself, "She's a looking at it!  Em'ly's a
coming!" THERE'S a babby for you, in the form of a Sea Porkypine!
Right for all that,' said Mr. Peggotty, stopping in his roar, and
smiting his hands together; 'fur here she is!'

It was only Ham.  The night should have turned more wet since I
came in, for he had a large sou'wester hat on, slouched over his
face.

'Wheer's Em'ly?' said Mr. Peggotty.

Ham made a motion with his head, as if she were outside.  Mr.
Peggotty took the light from the window, trimmed it, put it on the
table, and was busily stirring the fire, when Ham, who had not
moved, said:

'Mas'r Davy, will you come out a minute, and see what Em'ly and me
has got to show you?'

We went out.  As I passed him at the door, I saw, to my
astonishment and fright, that he was deadly pale.  He pushed me
hastily into the open air, and closed the door upon us.  Only upon
us two.

'Ham! what's the matter?'

'Mas'r Davy! -' Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully he wept!

I was paralysed by the sight of such grief.  I don't know what I
thought, or what I dreaded.  I could only look at him.

'Ham!  Poor good fellow!  For Heaven's sake, tell me what's the
matter!'

'My love, Mas'r Davy - the pride and hope of my art - her that I'd
have died for, and would die for now - she's gone!'

'Gone!'

'Em'ly's run away!  Oh, Mas'r Davy, think HOW she's run away, when
I pray my good and gracious God to kill her (her that is so dear
above all things) sooner than let her come to ruin and disgrace!'

The face he turned up to the troubled sky, the quivering of his
clasped hands, the agony of his figure, remain associated with the
lonely waste, in my remembrance, to this hour.  It is always night
there, and he is the only object in the scene.

'You're a scholar,' he said, hurriedly, 'and know what's right and
best.  What am I to say, indoors?  How am I ever to break it to
him, Mas'r Davy?'

I saw the door move, and instinctively tried to hold the latch on
the outside, to gain a moment's time.  It was too late.  Mr.
Peggotty thrust forth his face; and never could I forget the change
that came upon it when he saw us, if I were to live five hundred
years.

I remember a great wail and cry, and the women hanging about him,
and we all standing in the room; I with a paper in my hand, which
Ham had given me; Mr. Peggotty, with his vest torn open, his hair
wild, his face and lips quite white, and blood trickling down his
bosom (it had sprung from his mouth, I think), looking fixedly at
me.

'Read it, sir,' he said, in a low shivering voice.  'Slow, please. 
I doen't know as I can understand.'

In the midst of the silence of death, I read thus, from a blotted
letter:


'"When you, who love me so much better than I ever have deserved,
even when my mind was innocent, see this, I shall be far away."'


'I shall be fur away,' he repeated slowly.  'Stop!  Em'ly fur away. 
Well!'


'"When I leave my dear home - my dear home - oh, my dear home! - in
the morning,"'

the letter bore date on the previous night:


'"- it will be never to come back, unless he brings me back a lady. 
This will be found at night, many hours after, instead of me.  Oh,
if you knew how my heart is torn.  If even you, that I have wronged
so much, that never can forgive me, could only know what I suffer!
I am too wicked to write about myself!  Oh, take comfort in
thinking that I am so bad.  Oh, for mercy's sake, tell uncle that
I never loved him half so dear as now.  Oh, don't remember how
affectionate and kind you have all been to me - don't remember we
were ever to be married - but try to think as if I died when I was
little, and was buried somewhere.  Pray Heaven that I am going away
from, have compassion on my uncle!  Tell him that I never loved him
half so dear.  Be his comfort.  Love some good girl that will be
what I was once to uncle, and be true to you, and worthy of you,
and know no shame but me.  God bless all!  I'll pray for all,
often, on my knees.  If he don't bring me back a lady, and I don't
pray for my own self, I'll pray for all.  My parting love to uncle. 
My last tears, and my last thanks, for uncle!"'

That was all.

He stood, long after I had ceased to read, still looking at me.  At
length I ventured to take his hand, and to entreat him, as well as
I could, to endeavour to get some command of himself.  He replied,
'I thankee, sir, I thankee!' without moving.

Ham spoke to him.  Mr. Peggotty was so far sensible of HIS
affliction, that he wrung his hand; but, otherwise, he remained in
the same state, and no one dared to disturb him.

Slowly, at last, he moved his eyes from my face, as if he were
waking from a vision, and cast them round the room.  Then he said,
in a low voice:

'Who's the man?  I want to know his name.'

Ham glanced at me, and suddenly I felt a shock that struck me back.

'There's a man suspected,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'Who is it?'

'Mas'r Davy!' implored Ham.  'Go out a bit, and let me tell him
what I must.  You doen't ought to hear it, sir.'

I felt the shock again.  I sank down in a chair, and tried to utter
some reply; but my tongue was fettered, and my sight was weak.

'I want to know his name!' I heard said once more.

'For some time past,' Ham faltered, 'there's been a servant about
here, at odd times.  There's been a gen'lm'n too.  Both of 'em
belonged to one another.'

Mr. Peggotty stood fixed as before, but now looking at him.

'The servant,' pursued Ham, 'was seen along with - our poor girl -
last night.  He's been in hiding about here, this week or over.  He
was thought to have gone, but he was hiding.  Doen't stay, Mas'r
Davy, doen't!'

I felt Peggotty's arm round my neck, but I could not have moved if
the house had been about to fall upon me.

'A strange chay and hosses was outside town, this morning, on the
Norwich road, a'most afore the day broke,' Ham went on.  'The
servant went to it, and come from it, and went to it again.  When
he went to it again, Em'ly was nigh him.  The t'other was inside. 
He's the man.'

'For the Lord's love,' said Mr. Peggotty, falling back, and putting
out his hand, as if to keep off what he dreaded.  'Doen't tell me
his name's Steerforth!'

'Mas'r Davy,' exclaimed Ham, in a broken voice, 'it ain't no fault
of yourn - and I am far from laying of it to you - but his name is
Steerforth, and he's a damned villain!'

Mr. Peggotty uttered no cry, and shed no tear, and moved no more,
until he seemed to wake again, all at once, and pulled down his
rough coat from its peg in a corner.

'Bear a hand with this!  I'm struck of a heap, and can't do it,' he
said, impatiently.  'Bear a hand and help me.  Well!' when somebody
had done so.  'Now give me that theer hat!'

Ham asked him whither he was going.

'I'm a going to seek my niece.  I'm a going to seek my Em'ly.  I'm
a going, first, to stave in that theer boat, and sink it where I
would have drownded him, as I'm a living soul, if I had had one
thought of what was in him!  As he sat afore me,' he said, wildly,
holding out his clenched right hand, 'as he sat afore me, face to
face, strike me down dead, but I'd have drownded him, and thought
it right! - I'm a going to seek my niece.'

'Where?' cried Ham, interposing himself before the door.

'Anywhere!  I'm a going to seek my niece through the wureld.  I'm
a going to find my poor niece in her shame, and bring her back.  No
one stop me!  I tell you I'm a going to seek my niece!'

'No, no!' cried Mrs. Gummidge, coming between them, in a fit of
crying.  'No, no, Dan'l, not as you are now.  Seek her in a little
while, my lone lorn Dan'l, and that'll be but right! but not as you
are now.  Sit ye down, and give me your forgiveness for having ever
been a worrit to you, Dan'l - what have my contraries ever been to
this! - and let us speak a word about them times when she was first
an orphan, and when Ham was too, and when I was a poor widder
woman, and you took me in.  It'll soften your poor heart, Dan'l,'
laying her head upon his shoulder, 'and you'll bear your sorrow
better; for you know the promise, Dan'l, "As you have done it unto
one of the least of these, you have done it unto me",- and that can
never fail under this roof, that's been our shelter for so many,
many year!'

He was quite passive now; and when I heard him crying, the impulse
that had been upon me to go down upon my knees, and ask their
pardon for the desolation I had caused, and curse Steer- forth,
yielded to a better feeling, My overcharged heart found the same
relief, and I cried too.



CHAPTER 32
THE BEGINNING OF A LONG JOURNEY


What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and
so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth
better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken.  In the
keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more
of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that
was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might
have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever
I had done in the height of my devotion to him.  Deeply as I felt
my own unconscious part in his pollution of an honest home, I
believed that if I had been brought face to face with him, I could
not have uttered one reproach.  I should have loved him so well
still - though he fascinated me no longer - I should have held in
so much tenderness the memory of my affection for him, that I think
I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child, in all but
the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united. 
That thought I never had.  I felt, as he had felt, that all was at
an end between us.  What his remembrances of me were, I have never
known - they were light enough, perhaps, and easily dismissed - but
mine of him were as the remembrances of a cherished friend, who was
dead.

Yes, Steerforth, long removed from the scenes of this poor history!
My sorrow may bear involuntary witness against you at the judgement
Throne; but my angry thoughts or my reproaches never will, I know!

The news of what had happened soon spread through the town;
insomuch that as I passed along the streets next morning, I
overheard the people speaking of it at their doors.  Many were hard
upon her, some few were hard upon him, but towards her second
father and her lover there was but one sentiment.  Among all kinds
of people a respect for them in their distress prevailed, which was
full of gentleness and delicacy.  The seafaring men kept apart,
when those two were seen early, walking with slow steps on the
beach; and stood in knots, talking compassionately among
themselves.

It was on the beach, close down by the sea, that I found them.  It
would have been easy to perceive that they had not slept all last
night, even if Peggotty had failed to tell me of their still
sitting just as I left them, when it was broad day.  They looked
worn; and I thought Mr. Peggotty's head was bowed in one night more
than in all the years I had known him.  But they were both as grave
and steady as the sea itself, then lying beneath a dark sky,
waveless - yet with a heavy roll upon it, as if it breathed in its
rest - and touched, on the horizon, with a strip of silvery light
from the unseen sun.

'We have had a mort of talk, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty to me, when we
had all three walked a little while in silence, 'of what we ought
and doen't ought to do.  But we see our course now.'

I happened to glance at Ham, then looking out to sea upon the
distant light, and a frightful thought came into my mind - not that
his face was angry, for it was not; I recall nothing but an
expression of stern determination in it - that if ever he
encountered Steerforth, he would kill him.

'My dooty here, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'is done.  I'm a going to
seek my -' he stopped, and went on in a firmer voice: 'I'm a going
to seek her.  That's my dooty evermore.'

He shook his head when I asked him where he would seek her, and
inquired if I were going to London tomorrow?  I told him I had not
gone today, fearing to lose the chance of being of any service to
him; but that I was ready to go when he would.

'I'll go along with you, sir,' he rejoined, 'if you're agreeable,
tomorrow.'

We walked again, for a while, in silence.

'Ham,'he presently resumed,'he'll hold to his present work, and go
and live along with my sister.  The old boat yonder -'

'Will you desert the old boat, Mr. Peggotty?' I gently interposed.

'My station, Mas'r Davy,' he returned, 'ain't there no longer; and
if ever a boat foundered, since there was darkness on the face of
the deep, that one's gone down.  But no, sir, no; I doen't mean as
it should be deserted.  Fur from that.'

We walked again for a while, as before, until he explained:

'My wishes is, sir, as it shall look, day and night, winter and
summer, as it has always looked, since she fust know'd it.  If ever
she should come a wandering back, I wouldn't have the old place
seem to cast her off, you understand, but seem to tempt her to draw
nigher to 't, and to peep in, maybe, like a ghost, out of the wind
and rain, through the old winder, at the old seat by the fire. 
Then, maybe, Mas'r Davy, seein' none but Missis Gummidge there, she
might take heart to creep in, trembling; and might come to be laid
down in her old bed, and rest her weary head where it was once so
gay.'

I could not speak to him in reply, though I tried.

'Every night,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'as reg'lar as the night comes,
the candle must be stood in its old pane of glass, that if ever she
should see it, it may seem to say "Come back, my child, come back!"
If ever there's a knock, Ham (partic'ler a soft knock), arter dark,
at your aunt's door, doen't you go nigh it.  Let it be her - not
you - that sees my fallen child!'

He walked a little in front of us, and kept before us for some
minutes.  During this interval, I glanced at Ham again, and
observing the same expression on his face, and his eyes still
directed to the distant light, I touched his arm.

Twice I called him by his name, in the tone in which I might have
tried to rouse a sleeper, before he heeded me.  When I at last
inquired on what his thoughts were so bent, he replied:

'On what's afore me, Mas'r Davy; and over yon.'
'On the life before you, do you mean?' He had pointed confusedly
out to sea.

'Ay, Mas'r Davy.  I doen't rightly know how 'tis, but from over yon
there seemed to me to come - the end of it like,' looking at me as
if he were waking, but with the same determined face.

'What end?' I asked, possessed by my former fear.

'I doen't know,'he said, thoughtfully; 'I was calling to mind that
the beginning of it all did take place here - and then the end
come.  But it's gone!  Mas'r Davy,' he added; answering, as I
think, my look; 'you han't no call to be afeerd of me: but I'm
kiender muddled; I don't fare to feel no matters,' - which was as
much as to say that he was not himself, and quite confounded.

Mr. Peggotty stopping for us to join him: we did so, and said no
more.  The remembrance of this, in connexion with my former
thought, however, haunted me at intervals, even until the
inexorable end came at its appointed time.

We insensibly approached the old boat, and entered.  Mrs. Gummidge,
no longer moping in her especial corner, was busy preparing
breakfast.  She took Mr. Peggotty's hat, and placed his seat for
him, and spoke so comfortably and softly, that I hardly knew her.

'Dan'l, my good man,' said she, 'you must eat and drink, and keep
up your strength, for without it you'll do nowt.  Try, that's a
dear soul!  An if I disturb you with my clicketten,' she meant her
chattering, 'tell me so, Dan'l, and I won't.'

When she had served us all, she withdrew to the window, where she
sedulously employed herself in repairing some shirts and other
clothes belonging to Mr. Peggotty, and neatly folding and packing
them in an old oilskin bag, such as sailors carry.  Meanwhile, she
continued talking, in the same quiet manner:

'All times and seasons, you know, Dan'l,' said Mrs. Gummidge, 'I
shall be allus here, and everythink will look accordin' to your
wishes.  I'm a poor scholar, but I shall write to you, odd times,
when you're away, and send my letters to Mas'r Davy.  Maybe you'll
write to me too, Dan'l, odd times, and tell me how you fare to feel
upon your lone lorn journies.'

'You'll be a solitary woman heer, I'm afeerd!' said Mr. Peggotty.

'No, no, Dan'l,' she returned, 'I shan't be that.  Doen't you mind
me.  I shall have enough to do to keep a Beein for you' (Mrs.
Gummidge meant a home), 'again you come back - to keep a Beein here
for any that may hap to come back, Dan'l.  In the fine time, I
shall set outside the door as I used to do.  If any should come
nigh, they shall see the old widder woman true to 'em, a long way
off.'

What a change in Mrs. Gummidge in a little time!  She was another
woman.  She was so devoted, she had such a quick perception of what
it would be well to say, and what it would be well to leave unsaid;
she was so forgetful of herself, and so regardful of the sorrow
about her, that I held her in a sort of veneration.  The work she
did that day!  There were many things to be brought up from the
beach and stored in the outhouse - as oars, nets, sails, cordage,
spars, lobster-pots, bags of ballast, and the like; and though
there was abundance of assistance rendered, there being not a pair
of working hands on all that shore but would have laboured hard for
Mr. Peggotty, and been well paid in being asked to do it, yet she
persisted, all day long, in toiling under weights that she was
quite unequal to, and fagging to and fro on all sorts of
unnecessary errands.  As to deploring her misfortunes, she appeared
to have entirely lost the recollection of ever having had any.  She
preserved an equable cheerfulness in the midst of her sympathy,
which was not the least astonishing part of the change that had
come over her.  Querulousness was out of the question.  I did not
even observe her voice to falter, or a tear to escape from her
eyes, the whole day through, until twilight; when she and I and Mr.
Peggotty being alone together, and he having fallen asleep in
perfect exhaustion, she broke into a half-suppressed fit of sobbing
and crying, and taking me to the door, said, 'Ever bless you, Mas'r
Davy, be a friend to him, poor dear!' Then, she immediately ran out
of the house to wash her face, in order that she might sit quietly
beside him, and be found at work there, when he should awake.  In
short I left her, when I went away at night, the prop and staff of
Mr. Peggotty's affliction; and I could not meditate enough upon the
lesson that I read in Mrs. Gummidge, and the new experience she
unfolded to me.

It was between nine and ten o'clock when, strolling in a melancholy
manner through the town, I stopped at Mr. Omer's door.  Mr. Omer
had taken it so much to heart, his daughter told me, that he had
been very low and poorly all day, and had gone to bed without his
pipe.

'A deceitful, bad-hearted girl,' said Mrs. Joram.  'There was no
good in her, ever!'

'Don't say so,' I returned.  'You don't think so.'

'Yes, I do!' cried Mrs. Joram, angrily.

'No, no,' said I.

Mrs. Joram tossed her head, endeavouring to be very stern and
cross; but she could not command her softer self, and began to cry. 
I was young, to be sure; but I thought much the better of her for
this sympathy, and fancied it became her, as a virtuous wife and
mother, very well indeed.

'What will she ever do!' sobbed Minnie.  'Where will she go!  What
will become of her!  Oh, how could she be so cruel, to herself and
him!'

I remembered the time when Minnie was a young and pretty girl; and
I was glad she remembered it too, so feelingly.

'My little Minnie,' said Mrs. Joram, 'has only just now been got to
sleep.  Even in her sleep she is sobbing for Em'ly.  All day long,
little Minnie has cried for her, and asked me, over and over again,
whether Em'ly was wicked?  What can I say to her, when Em'ly tied
a ribbon off her own neck round little Minnie's the last night she
was here, and laid her head down on the pillow beside her till she
was fast asleep!  The ribbon's round my little Minnie's neck now. 
It ought not to be, perhaps, but what can I do?  Em'ly is very bad,
but they were fond of one another.  And the child knows nothing!'

Mrs. Joram was so unhappy that her husband came out to take care of
her.  Leaving them together, I went home to Peggotty's; more
melancholy myself, if possible, than I had been yet.

That good creature - I mean Peggotty - all untired by her late
anxieties and sleepless nights, was at her brother's, where she
meant to stay till morning.  An old woman, who had been employed
about the house for some weeks past, while Peggotty had been unable
to attend to it, was the house's only other occupant besides
myself.  As I had no occasion for her services, I sent her to bed,
by no means against her will, and sat down before the kitchen fire
a little while, to think about all this.

I was blending it with the deathbed of the late Mr. Barkis, and was
driving out with the tide towards the distance at which Ham had
looked so singularly in the morning, when I was recalled from my
wanderings by a knock at the door.  There was a knocker upon the
door, but it was not that which made the sound.  The tap was from
a hand, and low down upon the door, as if it were given by a child.

It made me start as much as if it had been the knock of a footman
to a person of distinction.  I opened the door; and at first looked
down, to my amazement, on nothing but a great umbrella that
appeared to be walking about of itself.  But presently I discovered
underneath it, Miss Mowcher.

I might not have been prepared to give the little creature a very
kind reception, if, on her removing the umbrella, which her utmost
efforts were unable to shut up, she had shown me the 'volatile'
expression of face which had made so great an impression on me at
our first and last meeting.  But her face, as she turned it up to
mine, was so earnest; and when I relieved her of the umbrella
(which would have been an inconvenient one for the Irish Giant),
she wrung her little hands in such an afflicted manner; that I
rather inclined towards her.

'Miss Mowcher!' said I, after glancing up and down the empty
street, without distinctly knowing what I expected to see besides;
'how do you come here?  What is the matter?'
She motioned to me with her short right arm, to shut the umbrella
for her; and passing me hurriedly, went into the kitchen.  When I
had closed the door, and followed, with the umbrella in my hand, I
found her sitting on the corner of the fender - it was a low iron
one, with two flat bars at top to stand plates upon - in the shadow
of the boiler, swaying herself backwards and forwards, and chafing
her hands upon her knees like a person in pain.

Quite alarmed at being the only recipient of this untimely visit,
and the only spectator of this portentous behaviour, I exclaimed
again, 'Pray tell me, Miss Mowcher, what is the matter! are you
ill?'

'My dear young soul,' returned Miss Mowcher, squeezing her hands
upon her heart one over the other.  'I am ill here, I am very ill. 
To think that it should come to this, when I might have known it
and perhaps prevented it, if I hadn't been a thoughtless fool!'

Again her large bonnet (very disproportionate to the figure) went
backwards and forwards, in her swaying of her little body to and
fro; while a most gigantic bonnet rocked, in unison with it, upon
the wall.

'I am surprised,' I began, 'to see you so distressed and serious'-
when she interrupted me.

'Yes, it's always so!' she said.  'They are all surprised, these
inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any
natural feeling in a little thing like me!  They make a plaything
of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away when they are
tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden
soldier!  Yes, yes, that's the way.  The old way!'

'It may be, with others,' I returned, 'but I do assure you it is
not with me.  Perhaps I ought not to be at all surprised to see you
as you are now: I know so little of you.  I said, without
consideration, what I thought.'

'What can I do?' returned the little woman, standing up, and
holding out her arms to show herself.  'See!  What I am, my father
was; and my sister is; and my brother is.  I have worked for sister
and brother these many years - hard, Mr. Copperfield - all day.  I
must live.  I do no harm.  If there are people so unreflecting or
so cruel, as to make a jest of me, what is left for me to do but to
make a jest of myself, them, and everything?  If I do so, for the
time, whose fault is that?  Mine?'

No.  Not Miss Mowcher's, I perceived.

'If I had shown myself a sensitive dwarf to your false friend,'
pursued the little woman, shaking her head at me, with reproachful
earnestness, 'how much of his help or good will do you think I
should ever have had?  If little Mowcher (who had no hand, young
gentleman, in the making of herself) addressed herself to him, or
the like of him, because of her misfortunes, when do you suppose
her small voice would have been heard?  Little Mowcher would have
as much need to live, if she was the bitterest and dullest of
pigmies; but she couldn't do it.  No.  She might whistle for her
bread and butter till she died of Air.'

Miss Mowcher sat down on the fender again, and took out her
handkerchief, and wiped her eyes.

'Be thankful for me, if you have a kind heart, as I think you
have,' she said, 'that while I know well what I am, I can be
cheerful and endure it all.  I am thankful for myself, at any rate,
that I can find my tiny way through the world, without being
beholden to anyone; and that in return for all that is thrown at
me, in folly or vanity, as I go along, I can throw bubbles back. 
If I don't brood over all I want, it is the better for me, and not
the worse for anyone.  If I am a plaything for you giants, be
gentle with me.'

Miss Mowcher replaced her handkerchief in her pocket, looking at me
with very intent expression all the while, and pursued:

'I saw you in the street just now.  You may suppose I am not able
to walk as fast as you, with my short legs and short breath, and I
couldn't overtake you; but I guessed where you came, and came after
you.  I have been here before, today, but the good woman wasn't at
home.'

'Do you know her?' I demanded.

'I know of her, and about her,' she replied, 'from Omer and Joram. 
I was there at seven o'clock this morning.  Do you remember what
Steerforth said to me about this unfortunate girl, that time when
I saw you both at the inn?'

The great bonnet on Miss Mowcher's head, and the greater bonnet on
the wall, began to go backwards and forwards again when she asked
this question.

I remembered very well what she referred to, having had it in my
thoughts many times that day.  I told her so.

'May the Father of all Evil confound him,' said the little woman,
holding up her forefinger between me and her sparkling eyes, 'and
ten times more confound that wicked servant; but I believed it was
YOU who had a boyish passion for her!'

'I?' I repeated.

'Child, child!  In the name of blind ill-fortune,' cried Miss
Mowcher, wringing her hands impatiently, as she went to and fro
again upon the fender, 'why did you praise her so, and blush, and
look disturbed?  '

I could not conceal from myself that I had done this, though for a
reason very different from her supposition.

'What did I know?' said Miss Mowcher, taking out her handkerchief
again, and giving one little stamp on the ground whenever, at short
intervals, she applied it to her eyes with both hands at once.  'He
was crossing you and wheedling you, I saw; and you were soft wax in
his hands, I saw.  Had I left the room a minute, when his man told
me that "Young Innocence" (so he called you, and you may call him
"Old Guilt" all the days of your life) had set his heart upon her,
and she was giddy and liked him, but his master was resolved that
no harm should come of it - more for your sake than for hers - and
that that was their business here?  How could I BUT believe him? 
I saw Steerforth soothe and please you by his praise of her!  You
were the first to mention her name.  You owned to an old admiration
of her.  You were hot and cold, and red and white, all at once when
I spoke to you of her.  What could I think - what DID I think - but
that you were a young libertine in everything but experience, and
had fallen into hands that had experience enough, and could manage
you (having the fancy) for your own good?  Oh! oh! oh!  They were
afraid of my finding out the truth,' exclaimed Miss Mowcher,
getting off the fender, and trotting up and down the kitchen with
her two short arms distressfully lifted up, 'because I am a sharp
little thing - I need be, to get through the world at all! - and
they deceived me altogether, and I gave the poor unfortunate girl
a letter, which I fully believe was the beginning of her ever
speaking to Littimer, who was left behind on purpose!'

I stood amazed at the revelation of all this perfidy, looking at
Miss Mowcher as she walked up and down the kitchen until she was
out of breath: when she sat upon the fender again, and, drying her
face with her handkerchief, shook her head for a long time, without
otherwise moving, and without breaking silence.

'My country rounds,' she added at length, 'brought me to Norwich,
Mr. Copperfield, the night before last.  What I happened to find
there, about their secret way of coming and going, without you -
which was strange - led to my suspecting something wrong.  I got
into the coach from London last night, as it came through Norwich,
and was here this morning.  Oh, oh, oh! too late!'

Poor little Mowcher turned so chilly after all her crying and
fretting, that she turned round on the fender, putting her poor
little wet feet in among the ashes to warm them, and sat looking at
the fire, like a large doll.  I sat in a chair on the other side of
the hearth, lost in unhappy reflections, and looking at the fire
too, and sometimes at her.

'I must go,' she said at last, rising as she spoke.  'It's late. 
You don't mistrust me?'

Meeting her sharp glance, which was as sharp as ever when she asked
me, I could not on that short challenge answer no, quite frankly.

'Come!' said she, accepting the offer of my hand to help her over
the fender, and looking wistfully up into my face, 'you know you
wouldn't mistrust me, if I was a full-sized woman!'

I felt that there was much truth in this; and I felt rather ashamed
of myself.

'You are a young man,' she said, nodding.  'Take a word of advice,
even from three foot nothing.  Try not to associate bodily defects
with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason.'

She had got over the fender now, and I had got over my suspicion. 
I told her that I believed she had given me a faithful account of
herself, and that we had both been hapless instruments in designing
hands.  She thanked me, and said I was a good fellow.

'Now, mind!' she exclaimed, turning back on her way to the door,
and looking shrewdly at me, with her forefinger up again.- 'I have
some reason to suspect, from what I have heard - my ears are always
open; I can't afford to spare what powers I have - that they are
gone abroad.  But if ever they return, if ever any one of them
returns, while I am alive, I am more likely than another, going
about as I do, to find it out soon.  Whatever I know, you shall
know.  If ever I can do anything to serve the poor betrayed girl,
I will do it faithfully, please Heaven!  And Littimer had better
have a bloodhound at his back, than little Mowcher!'

I placed implicit faith in this last statement, when I marked the
look with which it was accompanied.

'Trust me no more, but trust me no less, than you would trust a
full-sized woman,' said the little creature, touching me
appealingly on the wrist.  'If ever you see me again, unlike what
I am now, and like what I was when you first saw me, observe what
company I am in.  Call to mind that I am a very helpless and
defenceless little thing.  Think of me at home with my brother like
myself and sister like myself, when my day's work is done.  Perhaps
you won't, then, be very hard upon me, or surprised if I can be
distressed and serious.  Good night!'

I gave Miss Mowcher my hand, with a very different opinion of her
from that which I had hitherto entertained, and opened the door to
let her out.  It was not a trifling business to get the great
umbrella up, and properly balanced in her grasp; but at last I
successfully accomplished this, and saw it go bobbing down the
street through the rain, without the least appearance of having
anybody underneath it, except when a heavier fall than usual from
some over-charged water-spout sent it toppling over, on one side,
and discovered Miss Mowcher struggling violently to get it right. 
After making one or two sallies to her relief, which were rendered
futile by the umbrella's hopping on again, like an immense bird,
before I could reach it, I came in, went to bed, and slept till
morning.

In the morning I was joined by Mr. Peggotty and by my old nurse,
and we went at an early hour to the coach office, where Mrs.
Gummidge and Ham were waiting to take leave of us.

'Mas'r Davy,' Ham whispered, drawing me aside, while Mr. Peggotty
was stowing his bag among the luggage, 'his life is quite broke up. 
He doen't know wheer he's going; he doen't know -what's afore him;
he's bound upon a voyage that'll last, on and off, all the rest of
his days, take my wured for 't, unless he finds what he's a seeking
of.  I am sure you'll be a friend to him, Mas'r Davy?'

'Trust me, I will indeed,' said I, shaking hands with Ham
earnestly.

'Thankee.  Thankee, very kind, sir.  One thing furder.  I'm in good
employ, you know, Mas'r Davy, and I han't no way now of spending
what I gets.  Money's of no use to me no more, except to live.  If
you can lay it out for him, I shall do my work with a better art. 
Though as to that, sir,' and he spoke very steadily and mildly,
'you're not to think but I shall work at all times, like a man, and
act the best that lays in my power!'

I told him I was well convinced of it; and I hinted that I hoped
the time might even come, when he would cease to lead the lonely
life he naturally contemplated now.

'No, sir,' he said, shaking his head, 'all that's past and over
with me, sir.  No one can never fill the place that's empty.  But
you'll bear in mind about the money, as theer's at all times some
laying by for him?'

Reminding him of the fact, that Mr. Peggotty derived a steady,
though certainly a very moderate income from the bequest of his
late brother-in-law, I promised to do so.  We then took leave of
each other.  I cannot leave him even now, without remembering with
a pang, at once his modest fortitude and his great sorrow.

As to Mrs. Gummidge, if I were to endeavour to describe how she ran
down the street by the side of the coach, seeing nothing but Mr.
Peggotty on the roof, through the tears she tried to repress, and
dashing herself against the people who were coming in the opposite
direction, I should enter on a task of some difficulty.  Therefore
I had better leave her sitting on a baker's door-step, out of
breath, with no shape at all remaining in her bonnet, and one of
her shoes off, lying on the pavement at a considerable distance.

When we got to our journey's end, our first pursuit was to look
about for a little lodging for Peggotty, where her brother could
have a bed.  We were so fortunate as to find one, of a very clean
and cheap description, over a chandler's shop, only two streets
removed from me.  When we had engaged this domicile, I bought some
cold meat at an eating-house, and took my fellow-travellers home to
tea; a proceeding, I regret to state, which did not meet with Mrs.
Crupp's approval, but quite the contrary.  I ought to observe,
however, in explanation of that lady's state of mind, that she was
much offended by Peggotty's tucking up her widow's gown before she
had been ten minutes in the place, and setting to work to dust my
bedroom.  This Mrs. Crupp regarded in the light of a liberty, and
a liberty, she said, was a thing she never allowed.

Mr. Peggotty had made a communication to me on the way to London
for which I was not unprepared.  It was, that he purposed first
seeing Mrs. Steerforth.  As I felt bound to assist him in this, and
also to mediate between them; with the view of sparing the mother's
feelings as much as possible, I wrote to her that night.  I told
her as mildly as I could what his wrong was, and what my own share
in his injury.  I said he was a man in very common life, but of a
most gentle and upright character; and that I ventured to express
a hope that she would not refuse to see him in his heavy trouble. 
I mentioned two o'clock in the afternoon as the hour of our coming,
and I sent the letter myself by the first coach in the morning.

At the appointed time, we stood at the door - the door of that
house where I had been, a few days since, so happy: where my
youthful confidence and warmth of heart had been yielded up so
freely: which was closed against me henceforth: which was now a
waste, a ruin.

No Littimer appeared.  The pleasanter face which had replaced his,
on the occasion of my last visit, answered to our summons, and went
before us to the drawing-room.  Mrs. Steerforth was sitting there. 
Rosa Dartle glided, as we went in, from another part of the room
and stood behind her chair.

I saw, directly, in his mother's face, that she knew from himself
what he had done.  It was very pale; and bore the traces of deeper
emotion than my letter alone, weakened by the doubts her fondness
would have raised upon it, would have been likely to create.  I
thought her more like him than ever I had thought her; and I felt,
rather than saw, that the resemblance was not lost on my companion.

She sat upright in her arm-chair, with a stately, immovable,
passionless air, that it seemed as if nothing could disturb.  She
looked very steadfastly at Mr. Peggotty when he stood before her;
and he looked quite as steadfastly at her.  Rosa Dartle's keen
glance comprehended all of us.  For some moments not a word was
spoken.

She motioned to Mr. Peggotty to be seated.  He said, in a low
voice, 'I shouldn't feel it nat'ral, ma'am, to sit down in this
house.  I'd sooner stand.'  And this was succeeded by another
silence, which she broke thus:

'I know, with deep regret, what has brought you here.  What do you
want of me?  What do you ask me to do?'

He put his hat under his arm, and feeling in his breast for Emily's
letter, took it out, unfolded it, and gave it to her.
'Please to read that, ma'am.  That's my niece's hand!'

She read it, in the same stately and impassive way, - untouched by
its contents, as far as I could see, - and returned it to him.

'"Unless he brings me back a lady,"' said Mr. Peggotty, tracing out
that part with his finger.  'I come to know, ma'am, whether he will
keep his wured?'

'No,' she returned.

'Why not?' said Mr. Peggotty.

'It is impossible.  He would disgrace himself.  You cannot fail to
know that she is far below him.'

'Raise her up!' said Mr. Peggotty.

'She is uneducated and ignorant.'

'Maybe she's not; maybe she is,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'I think not,
ma'am; but I'm no judge of them things.  Teach her better!'

'Since you oblige me to speak more plainly, which I am very
unwilling to do, her humble connexions would render such a thing
impossible, if nothing else did.'

'Hark to this, ma'am,' he returned, slowly and quietly.  'You know
what it is to love your child.  So do I.  If she was a hundred
times my child, I couldn't love her more.  You doen't know what it
is to lose your child.  I do.  All the heaps of riches in the
wureld would be nowt to me (if they was mine) to buy her back! 
But, save her from this disgrace, and she shall never be disgraced
by us.  Not one of us that she's growed up among, not one of us
that's lived along with her and had her for their all in all, these
many year, will ever look upon her pritty face again.  We'll be
content to let her be; we'll be content to think of her, far off,
as if she was underneath another sun and sky; we'll be content to
trust her to her husband, - to her little children, p'raps, - and
bide the time when all of us shall be alike in quality afore our
God!'

The rugged eloquence with which he spoke, was not devoid of all
effect.  She still preserved her proud manner, but there was a
touch of softness in her voice, as she answered:

'I justify nothing.  I make no counter-accusations.  But I am sorry
to repeat, it is impossible.  Such a marriage would irretrievably
blight my son's career, and ruin his prospects.  Nothing is more
certain than that it never can take place, and never will.  If
there is any other compensation -'

'I am looking at the likeness of the face,' interrupted Mr.
Peggotty, with a steady but a kindling eye, 'that has looked at me,
in my home, at my fireside, in my boat - wheer not?  - smiling and
friendly, when it was so treacherous, that I go half wild when I
think of it.  If the likeness of that face don't turn to burning
fire, at the thought of offering money to me for my child's blight
and ruin, it's as bad.  I doen't know, being a lady's, but what
it's worse.'

She changed now, in a moment.  An angry flush overspread her
features; and she said, in an intolerant manner, grasping the
arm-chair tightly with her hands:

'What compensation can you make to ME for opening such a pit
between me and my son?  What is your love to mine?  What is your
separation to ours?'

Miss Dartle softly touched her, and bent down her head to whisper,
but she would not hear a word.

'No, Rosa, not a word!  Let the man listen to what I say!  My son,
who has been the object of my life, to whom its every thought has
been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish,
from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth, - to
take up in a moment with a miserable girl, and avoid me!  To repay
my confidence with systematic deception, for her sake, and quit me
for her!  To set this wretched fancy, against his mother's claims
upon his duty, love, respect, gratitude - claims that every day and
hour of his life should have strengthened into ties that nothing
could be proof against!  Is this no injury?'

Again Rosa Dartle tried to soothe her; again ineffectually.

'I say, Rosa, not a word!  If he can stake his all upon the
lightest object, I can stake my all upon a greater purpose.  Let
him go where he will, with the means that my love has secured to
him!  Does he think to reduce me by long absence?  He knows his
mother very little if he does.  Let him put away his whim now, and
he is welcome back.  Let him not put her away now, and he never
shall come near me, living or dying, while I can raise my hand to
make a sign against it, unless, being rid of her for ever, he comes
humbly to me and begs for my forgiveness.  This is my right.  This
is the acknowledgement I WILL HAVE.  This is the separation that
there is between us!  And is this,' she added, looking at her
visitor with the proud intolerant air with which she had begun, 'no
injury?'

While I heard and saw the mother as she said these words, I seemed
to hear and see the son, defying them.  All that I had ever seen in
him of an unyielding, wilful spirit, I saw in her.  All the
understanding that I had now of his misdirected energy, became an
understanding of her character too, and a perception that it was,
in its strongest springs, the same.

She now observed to me, aloud, resuming her former restraint, that
it was useless to hear more, or to say more, and that she begged to
put an end to the interview.  She rose with an air of dignity to
leave the room, when Mr. Peggotty signified that it was needless.

'Doen't fear me being any hindrance to you, I have no more to say,
ma'am,' he remarked, as he moved towards the door.  'I come beer
with no hope, and I take away no hope.  I have done what I thowt
should be done, but I never looked fur any good to come of my
stan'ning where I do.  This has been too evil a house fur me and
mine, fur me to be in my right senses and expect it.'

With this, we departed; leaving her standing by her elbow-chair, a
picture of a noble presence and a handsome face.

We had, on our way out, to cross a paved hall, with glass sides and
roof, over which a vine was trained.  Its leaves and shoots were
green then, and the day being sunny, a pair of glass doors leading
to the garden were thrown open.  Rosa Dartle, entering this way
with a noiseless step, when we were close to them, addressed
herself to me:

'You do well,' she said, 'indeed, to bring this fellow here!'

Such a concentration of rage and scorn as darkened her face, and
flashed in her jet-black eyes, I could not have thought
compressible even into that face.  The scar made by the hammer was,
as usual in this excited state of her features, strongly marked. 
When the throbbing I had seen before, came into it as I looked at
her, she absolutely lifted up her hand, and struck it.

'This is a fellow,' she said, 'to champion and bring here, is he
not?  You are a true man!'

'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'you are surely not so unjust as to
condemn ME!'

'Why do you bring division between these two mad creatures?' she
returned.  'Don't you know that they are both mad with their own
self-will and pride?'

'Is it my doing?' I returned.

'Is it your doing!' she retorted.  'Why do you bring this man
here?' 

'He is a deeply-injured man, Miss Dartle,' I replied.  'You may not
know it.'

'I know that James Steerforth,' she said, with her hand on her
bosom, as if to prevent the storm that was raging there, from being
loud, 'has a false, corrupt heart, and is a traitor.  But what need
I know or care about this fellow, and his common niece?'

'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'you deepen the injury.  It is
sufficient already.  I will only say, at parting, that you do him
a great wrong.'

'I do him no wrong,' she returned.  'They are a depraved, worthless
set.  I would have her whipped!'

Mr. Peggotty passed on, without a word, and went out at the door.

'Oh, shame, Miss Dartle! shame!' I said indignantly.  'How can you
bear to trample on his undeserved affliction!'

'I would trample on them all,' she answered.  'I would have his
house pulled down.  I would have her branded on the face, dressed
in rags, and cast out in the streets to starve.  If I had the power
to sit in judgement on her, I would see it done.  See it done?  I
would do it!  I detest her.  If I ever could reproach her with her
infamous condition, I would go anywhere to do so.  If I could hunt
her to her grave, I would.  If there was any word of comfort that
would be a solace to her in her dying hour, and only I possessed
it, I wouldn't part with it for Life itself.'

The mere vehemence of her words can convey, I am sensible, but a
weak impression of the passion by which she was possessed, and
which made itself articulate in her whole figure, though her voice,
instead of being raised, was lower than usual.  No description I
could give of her would do justice to my recollection of her, or to
her entire deliverance of herself to her anger.  I have seen
passion in many forms, but I have never seen it in such a form as
that.

When I joined Mr. Peggotty, he was walking slowly and thoughtfully
down the hill.  He told me, as soon as I came up with him, that
having now discharged his mind of what he had purposed doing in
London, he meant 'to set out on his travels', that night.  I asked
him where he meant to go?  He only answered, 'I'm a going, sir, to
seek my niece.'

We went back to the little lodging over the chandler's shop, and
there I found an opportunity of repeating to Peggotty what he had
said to me.  She informed me, in return, that he had said the same
to her that morning.  She knew no more than I did, where he was
going, but she thought he had some project shaped out in his mind.

I did not like to leave him, under such circumstances, and we all
three dined together off a beefsteak pie - which was one of the
many good things for which Peggotty was famous - and which was
curiously flavoured on this occasion, I recollect well, by a
miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new
loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually
ascending from the shop.  After dinner we sat for an hour or so
near the window, without talking much; and then Mr. Peggotty got
up, and brought his oilskin bag and his stout stick, and laid them
on the table.

He accepted, from his sister's stock of ready money, a small sum on
account of his legacy; barely enough, I should have thought, to
keep him for a month.  He promised to communicate with me, when
anything befell him; and he slung his bag about him, took his hat
and stick, and bade us both 'Good-bye!'

'All good attend you, dear old woman,' he said, embracing Peggotty,
'and you too, Mas'r Davy!' shaking hands with me.  'I'm a-going to
seek her, fur and wide.  If she should come home while I'm away -
but ah, that ain't like to be! - or if I should bring her back, my
meaning is, that she and me shall live and die where no one can't
reproach her.  If any hurt should come to me, remember that the
last words I left for her was, "My unchanged love is with my
darling child, and I forgive her!"'

He said this solemnly, bare-headed; then, putting on his hat, he
went down the stairs, and away.  We followed to the door.  It was
a warm, dusty evening, just the time when, in the great main
thoroughfare out of which that by-way turned, there was a temporary
lull in the eternal tread of feet upon the pavement, and a strong
red sunshine.  He turned, alone, at the corner of our shady street,
into a glow of light, in which we lost him.

Rarely did that hour of the evening come, rarely did I wake at
night, rarely did I look up at the moon, or stars, or watch the
falling rain, or hear the wind, but I thought of his solitary
figure toiling on, poor pilgrim, and recalled the words:

'I'm a going to seek her, fur and wide.  If any hurt should come to
me, remember that the last words I left for her was, "My unchanged
love is with my darling child, and I forgive her!"'



CHAPTER 33
BLISSFUL


All this time, I had gone on loving Dora, harder than ever.  Her
idea was my refuge in disappointment and distress, and made some
amends to me, even for the loss of my friend.  The more I pitied
myself, or pitied others, the more I sought for consolation in the
image of Dora.  The greater the accumulation of deceit and trouble
in the world, the brighter and the purer shone the star of Dora
high above the world.  I don't think I had any definite idea where
Dora came from, or in what degree she was related to a higher order
of beings; but I am quite sure I should have scouted the notion of
her being simply human, like any other young lady, with indignation
and contempt.

If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora.  I was not merely
over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through
and through.  Enough love might have been wrung out of me,
metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would
have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my
entire existence.

The first thing I did, on my own account, when I came back, was to
take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable
riddle of my childhood, to go 'round and round the house, without
ever touching the house', thinking about Dora.  I believe the theme
of this incomprehensible conundrum was the moon.  No matter what it
was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round
the house and garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the
palings, getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the
rusty nails on the top, blowing kisses at the lights in the
windows, and romantically calling on the night, at intervals, to
shield my Dora - I don't exactly know what from, I suppose from
fire.  Perhaps from mice, to which she had a great objection.

My love was so much in my mind and it was so natural to me to
confide in Peggotty, when I found her again by my side of an
evening with the old set of industrial implements, busily making
the tour of my wardrobe, that I imparted to her, in a sufficiently
roundabout way, my great secret.  Peggotty was strongly interested,
but I could not get her into my view of the case at all.  She was
audaciously prejudiced in my favour, and quite unable to understand
why I should have any misgivings, or be low-spirited about it. 
'The young lady might think herself well off,' she observed, 'to
have such a beau.  And as to her Pa,' she said, 'what did the
gentleman expect, for gracious sake!'

I observed, however, that Mr. Spenlow's proctorial gown and stiff
cravat took Peggotty down a little, and inspired her with a greater
reverence for the man who was gradually becoming more and more
etherealized in my eyes every day, and about whom a reflected
radiance seemed to me to beam when he sat erect in Court among his
papers, like a little lighthouse in a sea of stationery.  And by
the by, it used to be uncommonly strange to me to consider, I
remember, as I sat in Court too, how those dim old judges and
doctors wouldn't have cared for Dora, if they had known her; how
they wouldn't have gone out of their senses with rapture, if
marriage with Dora had been proposed to them; how Dora might have
sung, and played upon that glorified guitar, until she led me to
the verge of madness, yet not have tempted one of those slow-goers
an inch out of his road!

I despised them, to a man.  Frozen-out old gardeners in the
flower-beds of the heart, I took a personal offence against them
all.  The Bench was nothing to me but an insensible blunderer.  The
Bar had no more tenderness or poetry in it, than the bar of a
public-house.

Taking the management of Peggotty's affairs into my own hands, with
no little pride, I proved the will, and came to a settlement with
the Legacy Duty-office, and took her to the Bank, and soon got
everything into an orderly train.  We varied the legal character of
these proceedings by going to see some perspiring Wax-work, in
Fleet Street (melted, I should hope, these twenty years); and by
visiting Miss Linwood's Exhibition, which I remember as a Mausoleum
of needlework, favourable to self-examination and repentance; and
by inspecting the Tower of London; and going to the top of St.
Paul's.  All these wonders afforded Peggotty as much pleasure as
she was able to enjoy, under existing circumstances: except, I
think, St. Paul's, which, from her long attachment to her work-box,
became a rival of the picture on the lid, and was, in some
particulars, vanquished, she considered, by that work of art.

Peggotty's business, which was what we used to call 'common-form
business' in the Commons (and very light and lucrative the
common-form business was), being settled, I took her down to the
office one morning to pay her bill.  Mr. Spenlow had stepped out,
old Tiffey said, to get a gentleman sworn for a marriage licence;
but as I knew he would be back directly, our place lying close to
the Surrogate's, and to the Vicar-General's office too, I told
Peggotty to wait.

We were a little like undertakers, in the Commons, as regarded
Probate transactions; generally making it a rule to look more or
less cut up, when we had to deal with clients in mourning.  In a
similar feeling of delicacy, we were always blithe and
light-hearted with the licence clients.  Therefore I hinted to
Peggotty that she would find Mr. Spenlow much recovered from the
shock of Mr. Barkis's decease; and indeed he came in like a
bridegroom.

But neither Peggotty nor I had eyes for him, when we saw, in
company with him, Mr. Murdstone.  He was very little changed.  His
hair looked as thick, and was certainly as black, as ever; and his
glance was as little to be trusted as of old.

'Ah, Copperfield?' said Mr. Spenlow.  'You know this gentleman, I
believe?'

I made my gentleman a distant bow, and Peggotty barely recognized
him.  He was, at first, somewhat disconcerted to meet us two
together; but quickly decided what to do, and came up to me.

'I hope,' he said, 'that you are doing well?'

'It can hardly be interesting to you,' said I.  'Yes, if you wish
to know.'

We looked at each other, and he addressed himself to Peggotty.

'And you,' said he.  'I am sorry to observe that you have lost your
husband.'

'It's not the first loss I have had in my life, Mr. Murdstone,'
replied Peggotty, trembling from head to foot.  'I am glad to hope
that there is nobody to blame for this one, - nobody to answer for
it.'

'Ha!' said he; 'that's a comfortable reflection.  You have done
your duty?'

'I have not worn anybody's life away,' said Peggotty, 'I am
thankful to think!  No, Mr. Murdstone, I have not worrited and
frightened any sweet creetur to an early grave!'

He eyed her gloomily - remorsefully I thought - for an instant; and
said, turning his head towards me, but looking at my feet instead
of my face:

'We are not likely to encounter soon again; - a source of
satisfaction to us both, no doubt, for such meetings as this can
never be agreeable.  I do not expect that you, who always rebelled
against my just authority, exerted for your benefit and
reformation, should owe me any good-will now.  There is an
antipathy between us -'

'An old one, I believe?' said I, interrupting him.

He smiled, and shot as evil a glance at me as could come from his
dark eyes.

'It rankled in your baby breast,' he said.  'It embittered the life
of your poor mother.  You are right.  I hope you may do better,
yet; I hope you may correct yourself.'

Here he ended the dialogue, which had been carried on in a low
voice, in a corner of the outer office, by passing into Mr.
Spenlow's room, and saying aloud, in his smoothest manner:

'Gentlemen of Mr. Spenlow's profession are accustomed to family
differences, and know how complicated and difficult they always
are!' With that, he paid the money for his licence; and, receiving
it neatly folded from Mr. Spenlow, together with a shake of the
hand, and a polite wish for his happiness and the lady's, went out
of the office.

I might have had more difficulty in constraining myself to be
silent under his words, if I had had less difficulty in impressing
upon Peggotty (who was only angry on my account, good creature!)
that we were not in a place for recrimination, and that I besought
her to hold her peace.  She was so unusually roused, that I was
glad to compound for an affectionate hug, elicited by this revival
in her mind of our old injuries, and to make the best I could of
it, before Mr. Spenlow and the clerks.

Mr. Spenlow did not appear to know what the connexion between Mr.
Murdstone and myself was; which I was glad of, for I could not bear
to acknowledge him, even in my own breast, remembering what I did
of the history of my poor mother.  Mr. Spenlow seemed to think, if
he thought anything about the matter, that my aunt was the leader
of the state party in our family, and that there was a rebel party
commanded by somebody else - so I gathered at least from what he
said, while we were waiting for Mr. Tiffey to make out Peggotty's
bill of costs.

'Miss Trotwood,' he remarked, 'is very firm, no doubt, and not
likely to give way to opposition.  I have an admiration for her
character, and I may congratulate you, Copperfield, on being on the
right side.  Differences between relations are much to be deplored
- but they are extremely general - and the great thing is, to be on
the right side': meaning, I take it, on the side of the moneyed
interest.

'Rather a good marriage this, I believe?' said Mr. Spenlow.

I explained that I knew nothing about it.

'Indeed!' he said.  'Speaking from the few words Mr. Murdstone
dropped - as a man frequently does on these occasions - and from
what Miss Murdstone let fall, I should say it was rather a good
marriage.'

'Do you mean that there is money, sir?' I asked.

'Yes,' said Mr. Spenlow, 'I understand there's money.  Beauty too,
I am told.'

'Indeed!  Is his new wife young?'

'Just of age,' said Mr. Spenlow.  'So lately, that I should think
they had been waiting for that.'

'Lord deliver her!' said Peggotty.  So very emphatically and
unexpectedly, that we were all three discomposed; until Tiffey came
in with the bill.

Old Tiffey soon appeared, however, and handed it to Mr. Spenlow, to
look over.  Mr. Spenlow, settling his chin in his cravat and
rubbing it softly, went over the items with a deprecatory air - as
if it were all Jorkins's doing - and handed it back to Tiffey with
a bland sigh.

'Yes,' he said.  'That's right.  Quite right.  I should have been
extremely happy, Copperfield, to have limited these charges to the
actual expenditure out of pocket, but it is an irksome incident in
my professional life, that I am not at liberty to consult my own
wishes.  I have a partner - Mr. Jorkins.'

As he said this with a gentle melancholy, which was the next thing
to making no charge at all, I expressed my acknowledgements on
Peggotty's behalf, and paid Tiffey in banknotes.  Peggotty then
retired to her lodging, and Mr. Spenlow and I went into Court,
where we had a divorce-suit coming on, under an ingenious little
statute (repealed now, I believe, but in virtue of which I have
seen several marriages annulled), of which the merits were these. 
The husband, whose name was Thomas Benjamin, had taken out his
marriage licence as Thomas only; suppressing the Benjamin, in case
he should not find himself as comfortable as he expected.  NOT
finding himself as comfortable as he expected, or being a little
fatigued with his wife, poor fellow, he now came forward, by a
friend, after being married a year or two, and declared that his
name was Thomas Benjamin, and therefore he was not married at all. 
Which the Court confirmed, to his great satisfaction.

I must say that I had my doubts about the strict justice of this,
and was not even frightened out of them by the bushel of wheat
which reconciles all anomalies.  But Mr. Spenlow argued the matter
with me.  He said, Look at the world, there was good and evil in
that; look at the ecclesiastical law, there was good and evil in
THAT.  It was all part of a system.  Very good.  There you were!

I had not the hardihood to suggest to Dora's father that possibly
we might even improve the world a little, if we got up early in the
morning, and took off our coats to the work; but I confessed that
I thought we might improve the Commons.  Mr. Spenlow replied that
he would particularly advise me to dismiss that idea from my mind,
as not being worthy of my gentlemanly character; but that he would
be glad to hear from me of what improvement I thought the Commons
susceptible?

Taking that part of the Commons which happened to be nearest to us
- for our man was unmarried by this time, and we were out of Court,
and strolling past the Prerogative Office - I submitted that I
thought the Prerogative Office rather a queerly managed
institution.  Mr. Spenlow inquired in what respect?  I replied,
with all due deference to his experience (but with more deference,
I am afraid, to his being Dora's father), that perhaps it was a
little nonsensical that the Registry of that Court, containing the
original wills of all persons leaving effects within the immense
province of Canterbury, for three whole centuries, should be an
accidental building, never designed for the purpose, leased by the
registrars for their Own private emolument, unsafe, not even
ascertained to be fire-proof, choked with the important documents
it held, and positively, from the roof to the basement, a mercenary
speculation of the registrars, who took great fees from the public,
and crammed the public's wills away anyhow and anywhere, having no
other object than to get rid of them cheaply.  That, perhaps, it
was a little unreasonable that these registrars in the receipt of
profits amounting to eight or nine thousand pounds a year (to say
nothing of the profits of the deputy registrars, and clerks of
seats), should not be obliged to spend a little of that money, in
finding a reasonably safe place for the important documents which
all classes of people were compelled to hand over to them, whether
they would or no.  That, perhaps, it was a little unjust, that all
the great offices in this great office should be magnificent
sinecures, while the unfortunate working-clerks in the cold dark
room upstairs were the worst rewarded, and the least considered
men, doing important services, in London.  That perhaps it was a
little indecent that the principal registrar of all, whose duty it
was to find the public, constantly resorting to this place, all
needful accommodation, should be an enormous sinecurist in virtue
of that post (and might be, besides, a clergyman, a pluralist, the
holder of a staff in a cathedral, and what not), - while the public
was put to the inconvenience of which we had a specimen every
afternoon when the office was busy, and which we knew to be quite
monstrous.  That, perhaps, in short, this Prerogative Office of the
diocese of Canterbury was altogether such a pestilent job, and such
a pernicious absurdity, that but for its being squeezed away in a
corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, which few people knew, it must
have been turned completely inside out, and upside down, long ago.

Mr. Spenlow smiled as I became modestly warm on the subject, and
then argued this question with me as he had argued the other.  He
said, what was it after all?  It was a question of feeling.  If the
public felt that their wills were in safe keeping, and took it for
granted that the office was not to be made better, who was the
worse for it?  Nobody.  Who was the better for it?  All the
Sinecurists.  Very well.  Then the good predominated.  It might not
be a perfect system; nothing was perfect; but what he objected to,
was, the insertion of the wedge.  Under the Prerogative Office, the
country had been glorious.  Insert the wedge into the Prerogative
Office, and the country would cease to be glorious.  He considered
it the principle of a gentleman to take things as he found them;
and he had no doubt the Prerogative Office would last our time.  I
deferred to his opinion, though I had great doubts of it myself. 
I find he was right, however; for it has not only lasted to the
present moment, but has done so in the teeth of a great
parliamentary report made (not too willingly) eighteen years ago,
when all these objections of mine were set forth in detail, and
when the existing stowage for wills was described as equal to the
accumulation of only two years and a half more.  What they have
done with them since; whether they have lost many, or whether they
sell any, now and then, to the butter shops; I don't know.  I am
glad mine is not there, and I hope it may not go there, yet awhile.

I have set all this down, in my present blissful chapter, because
here it comes into its natural place.  Mr. Spenlow and I falling
into this conversation, prolonged it and our saunter to and fro,
until we diverged into general topics.  And so it came about, in
the end, that Mr. Spenlow told me this day week was Dora's
birthday, and he would be glad if I would come down and join a
little picnic on the occasion.  I went out of my senses
immediately; became a mere driveller next day, on receipt of a
little lace-edged sheet of note-paper, 'Favoured by papa.  To
remind'; and passed the intervening period in a state of dotage.

I think I committed every possible absurdity in the way of
preparation for this blessed event.  I turn hot when I remember the
cravat I bought.  My boots might be placed in any collection of
instruments of torture.  I provided, and sent down by the Norwood
coach the night before, a delicate little hamper, amounting in
itself, I thought, almost to a declaration.  There were crackers in
it with the tenderest mottoes that could be got for money.  At six
in the morning, I was in Covent Garden Market, buying a bouquet for
Dora.  At ten I was on horseback (I hired a gallant grey, for the
occasion), with the bouquet in my hat, to keep it fresh, trotting
down to Norwood.

I suppose that when I saw Dora in the garden and pretended not to
see her, and rode past the house pretending to be anxiously looking
for it, I committed two small fooleries which other young gentlemen
in my circumstances might have committed - because they came so
very natural to me.  But oh! when I DID find the house, and DID
dismount at the garden-gate, and drag those stony-hearted boots
across the lawn to Dora sitting on a garden-seat under a lilac
tree, what a spectacle she was, upon that beautiful morning, among
the butterflies, in a white chip bonnet and a dress of celestial
blue!  There was a young lady with her - comparatively stricken in
years - almost twenty, I should say.  Her name was Miss Mills.  and
Dora called her Julia.  She was the bosom friend of Dora.  Happy
Miss Mills!

Jip was there, and Jip WOULD bark at me again.  When I presented my
bouquet, he gnashed his teeth with jealousy.  Well he might.  If he
had the least idea how I adored his mistress, well he might!

'Oh, thank you, Mr. Copperfield!  What dear flowers!' said Dora.

I had had an intention of saying (and had been studying the best
form of words for three miles) that I thought them beautiful before
I saw them so near HER.  But I couldn't manage it.  She was too
bewildering.  To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled
chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power of language in a
feeble ecstasy.  I wonder I didn't say, 'Kill me, if you have a
heart, Miss Mills.  Let me die here!'

Then Dora held my flowers to Jip to smell.  Then Jip growled, and
wouldn't smell them.  Then Dora laughed, and held them a little
closer to Jip, to make him.  Then Jip laid hold of a bit of
geranium with his teeth, and worried imaginary cats in it.  Then
Dora beat him, and pouted, and said, 'My poor beautiful flowers!'
as compassionately, I thought, as if Jip had laid hold of me.  I
wished he had!

'You'll be so glad to hear, Mr. Copperfield,' said Dora, 'that that
cross Miss Murdstone is not here.  She has gone to her brother's
marriage, and will be away at least three weeks.  Isn't that
delightful?'

I said I was sure it must be delightful to her, and all that was
delightful to her was delightful to me.  Miss Mills, with an air of
superior wisdom and benevolence, smiled upon us.

'She is the most disagreeable thing I ever saw,' said Dora.  'You
can't believe how ill-tempered and shocking she is, Julia.'

'Yes, I can, my dear!' said Julia.

'YOU can, perhaps, love,' returned Dora, with her hand on julia's. 
'Forgive my not excepting you, my dear, at first.'

I learnt, from this, that Miss Mills had had her trials in the
course of a chequered existence; and that to these, perhaps, I
might refer that wise benignity of manner which I had already
noticed.  i found, in the course of the day, that this was the
case: Miss Mills having been unhappy in a misplaced affection, and
being understood to have retired from the world on her awful stock
of experience, but still to take a calm interest in the unblighted
hopes and loves of youth.

But now Mr. Spenlow came out of the house, and Dora went to him,
saying, 'Look, papa, what beautiful flowers!' And Miss Mills smiled
thoughtfully, as who should say, 'Ye Mayflies, enjoy your brief
existence in the bright morning of life!' And we all walked from
the lawn towards the carriage, which was getting ready.

I shall never have such a ride again.  I have never had such
another.  There were only those three, their hamper, my hamper, and
the guitar-case, in the phaeton; and, of course, the phaeton was
open; and I rode behind it, and Dora sat with her back to the
horses, looking towards me.  She kept the bouquet close to her on
the cushion, and wouldn't allow Jip to sit on that side of her at
all, for fear he should crush it.  She often carried it in her
hand, often refreshed herself with its fragrance.  Our eyes at
those times often met; and my great astonishment is that I didn't
go over the head of my gallant grey into the carriage.

There was dust, I believe.  There was a good deal of dust, I
believe.  I have a faint impression that Mr. Spenlow remonstrated
with me for riding in it; but I knew of none.  I was sensible of a
mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else.  He stood
up sometimes, and asked me what I thought of the prospect.  I said
it was delightful, and I dare say it was; but it was all Dora to
me.  The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora.  The south wind
blew Dora, and the wild flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a
bud.  My comfort is, Miss Mills understood me.  Miss Mills alone
could enter into my feelings thoroughly.

I don't know how long we were going, and to this hour I know as
little where we went.  Perhaps it was near Guildford.  Perhaps some
Arabian-night magician, opened up the place for the day, and shut
it up for ever when we came away.  It was a green spot, on a hill,
carpeted with soft turf.  There were shady trees, and heather, and,
as far as the eye could see, a rich landscape.

It was a trying thing to find people here, waiting for us; and my
jealousy, even of the ladies, knew no bounds.  But all of my own
sex - especially one impostor, three or four years my elder, with
a red whisker, on which he established an amount of presumption not
to be endured - were my mortal foes.

We all unpacked our baskets, and employed ourselves in getting
dinner ready.  Red Whisker pretended he could make a salad (which
I don't believe), and obtruded himself on public notice.  Some of
the young ladies washed the lettuces for him, and sliced them under
his directions.  Dora was among these.  I felt that fate had pitted
me against this man, and one of us must fall.

Red Whisker made his salad (I wondered how they could eat it. 
Nothing should have induced ME to touch it!) and voted himself into
the charge of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, being an
ingenious beast, in the hollow trunk of a tree.  By and by, I saw
him, with the majority of a lobster on his plate, eating his dinner
at the feet of Dora!

I have but an indistinct idea of what happened for some time after
this baleful object presented itself to my view.  I was very merry,
I know; but it was hollow merriment.  I attached myself to a young
creature in pink, with little eyes, and flirted with her
desperately.  She received my attentions with favour; but whether
on my account solely, or because she had any designs on Red
Whisker, I can't say.  Dora's health was drunk.  When I drank it,
I affected to interrupt my conversation for that purpose, and to
resume it immediately afterwards.  I caught Dora's eye as I bowed
to her, and I thought it looked appealing.  But it looked at me
over the head of Red Whisker, and I was adamant.

The young creature in pink had a mother in green; and I rather
think the latter separated us from motives of policy.  Howbeit,
there was a general breaking up of the party, while the remnants of
the dinner were being put away; and I strolled off by myself among
the trees, in a raging and remorseful state.  I was debating
whether I should pretend that I was not well, and fly - I don't
know where - upon my gallant grey, when Dora and Miss Mills met me.

'Mr. Copperfield,' said Miss Mills, 'you are dull.'

I begged her pardon.  Not at all.

'And Dora,' said Miss Mills, 'YOU are dull.'

Oh dear no!  Not in the least.

'Mr. Copperfield and Dora,' said Miss Mills, with an almost
venerable air.  'Enough of this.  Do not allow a trivial
misunderstanding to wither the blossoms of spring, which, once put
forth and blighted, cannot be renewed.  I speak,' said Miss Mills,
'from experience of the past - the remote, irrevocable past.  The
gushing fountains which sparkle in the sun, must not be stopped in
mere caprice; the oasis in the desert of Sahara must not be plucked
up idly.'

I hardly knew what I did, I was burning all over to that
extraordinary extent; but I took Dora's little hand and kissed it
- and she let me!  I kissed Miss Mills's hand; and we all seemed,
to my thinking, to go straight up to the seventh heaven.
We did not come down again.  We stayed up there all the evening. 
At first we strayed to and fro among the trees: I with Dora's shy
arm drawn through mine: and Heaven knows, folly as it all was, it
would have been a happy fate to have been struck immortal with
those foolish feelings, and have stayed among the trees for ever!

But, much too soon, we heard the others laughing and talking, and
calling 'where's Dora?' So we went back, and they wanted Dora to
sing.  Red Whisker would have got the guitar-case out of the
carriage, but Dora told him nobody knew where it was, but I.  So
Red Whisker was done for in a moment; and I got it, and I unlocked
it, and I took the guitar out, and I sat by her, and I held her
handkerchief and gloves, and I drank in every note of her dear
voice, and she sang to ME who loved her, and all the others might
applaud as much as they liked, but they had nothing to do with it!

I was intoxicated with joy.  I was afraid it was too happy to be
real, and that I should wake in Buckingham Street presently, and
hear Mrs. Crupp clinking the teacups in getting breakfast ready. 
But Dora sang, and others sang, and Miss Mills sang - about the
slumbering echoes in the caverns of Memory; as if she were a
hundred years old - and the evening came on; and we had tea, with
the kettle boiling gipsy-fashion; and I was still as happy as ever.

I was happier than ever when the party broke up, and the other
people, defeated Red Whisker and all, went their several ways, and
we went ours through the still evening and the dying light, with
sweet scents rising up around us.  Mr. Spenlow being a little
drowsy after the champagne - honour to the soil that grew the
grape, to the grape that made the wine, to the sun that ripened it,
and to the merchant who adulterated it! - and being fast asleep in
a corner of the carriage, I rode by the side and talked to Dora. 
She admired my horse and patted him - oh, what a dear little hand
it looked upon a horse! - and her shawl would not keep right, and
now and then I drew it round her with my arm; and I even fancied
that Jip began to see how it was, and to understand that he must
make up his mind to be friends with me.

That sagacious Miss Mills, too; that amiable, though quite used up,
recluse; that little patriarch of something less than twenty, who
had done with the world, and mustn't on any account have the
slumbering echoes in the caverns of Memory awakened; what a kind
thing she did!

'Mr. Copperfield,' said Miss Mills, 'come to this side of the
carriage a moment - if you can spare a moment.  I want to speak to
you.'

Behold me, on my gallant grey, bending at the side of Miss Mills,
with my hand upon the carriage door!

'Dora is coming to stay with me.  She is coming home with me the
day after tomorrow.  If you would like to call, I am sure papa
would be happy to see you.'
What could I do but invoke a silent blessing on Miss Mills's head,
and store Miss Mills's address in the securest corner of my memory!
What could I do but tell Miss Mills, with grateful looks and
fervent words, how much I appreciated her good offices, and what an
inestimable value I set upon her friendship!

Then Miss Mills benignantly dismissed me, saying, 'Go back to
Dora!' and I went; and Dora leaned out of the carriage to talk to
me, and we talked all the rest of the way; and I rode my gallant
grey so close to the wheel that I grazed his near fore leg against
it, and 'took the bark off', as his owner told me, 'to the tune of
three pun' sivin' - which I paid, and thought extremely cheap for
so much joy.  What time Miss Mills sat looking at the moon,
murmuring verses- and recalling, I suppose, the ancient days when
she and earth had anything in common.

Norwood was many miles too near, and we reached it many hours too
soon; but Mr. Spenlow came to himself a little short of it, and
said, 'You must come in, Copperfield, and rest!' and I consenting,
we had sandwiches and wine-and-water.  In the light room, Dora
blushing looked so lovely, that I could not tear myself away, but
sat there staring, in a dream, until the snoring of Mr. Spenlow
inspired me with sufficient consciousness to take my leave.  So we
parted; I riding all the way to London with the farewell touch of
Dora's hand still light on mine, recalling every incident and word
ten thousand times; lying down in my own bed at last, as enraptured
a young noodle as ever was carried out of his five wits by love.

When I awoke next morning, I was resolute to declare my passion to
Dora, and know my fate.  Happiness or misery was now the question. 
There was no other question that I knew of in the world, and only
Dora could give the answer to it.  I passed three days in a luxury
of wretchedness, torturing myself by putting every conceivable
variety of discouraging construction on all that ever had taken
place between Dora and me.  At last, arrayed for the purpose at a
vast expense, I went to Miss Mills's, fraught with a declaration.

How many times I went up and down the street, and round the square
- painfully aware of being a much better answer to the old riddle
than the original one - before I could persuade myself to go up the
steps and knock, is no matter now.  Even when, at last, I had
knocked, and was waiting at the door, I had some flurried thought
of asking if that were Mr. Blackboy's (in imitation of poor
Barkis), begging pardon, and retreating.  But I kept my ground.

Mr. Mills was not at home.  I did not expect he would be.  Nobody
wanted HIM.  Miss Mills was at home.  Miss Mills would do.

I was shown into a room upstairs, where Miss Mills and Dora were. 
Jip was there.  Miss Mills was copying music (I recollect, it was
a new song, called 'Affection's Dirge'), and Dora was painting
flowers.  What were my feelings, when I recognized my own flowers;
the identical Covent Garden Market purchase!  I cannot say that
they were very like, or that they particularly resembled any
flowers that have ever come under my observation; but I knew from
the paper round them which was accurately copied, what the
composition was.

Miss Mills was very glad to see me, and very sorry her papa was not
at home: though I thought we all bore that with fortitude.  Miss
Mills was conversational for a few minutes, and then, laying down
her pen upon 'Affection's Dirge', got up, and left the room.

I began to think I would put it off till tomorrow.

'I hope your poor horse was not tired, when he got home at night,'
said Dora, lifting up her beautiful eyes.  'It was a long way for
him.'

I began to think I would do it today.

'It was a long way for him,' said I, 'for he had nothing to uphold
him on the journey.'

'Wasn't he fed, poor thing?' asked Dora.

I began to think I would put it off till tomorrow.

'Ye-yes,' I said, 'he was well taken care of.  I mean he had not
the unutterable happiness that I had in being so near you.'

Dora bent her head over her drawing and said, after a little while
- I had sat, in the interval, in a burning fever, and with my legs
in a very rigid state -

'You didn't seem to be sensible of that happiness yourself, at one
time of the day.'

I saw now that I was in for it, and it must be done on the spot.

'You didn't care for that happiness in the least,' said Dora,
slightly raising her eyebrows, and shaking her head, 'when you were
sitting by Miss Kitt.'

Kitt, I should observe, was the name of the creature in pink, with
the little eyes.

'Though certainly I don't know why you should,' said Dora, or why
you should call it a happiness at all.  But of course you don't
mean what you say.  And I am sure no one doubts your being at
liberty to do whatever you like.  Jip, you naughty boy, come here!'

I don't know how I did it.  I did it in a moment.  I intercepted
Jip.  I had Dora in my arms.  I was full of eloquence.  I never
stopped for a word.  I told her how I loved her.  I told her I
should die without her.  I told her that I idolized and worshipped
her.  Jip barked madly all the time.

When Dora hung her head and cried, and trembled, my eloquence
increased so much the more.  If she would like me to die for her,
she had but to say the word, and I was ready.  Life without Dora's
love was not a thing to have on any terms.  I couldn't bear it, and
I wouldn't.  I had loved her every minute, day and night, since I
first saw her.  I loved her at that minute to distraction.  I
should always love her, every minute, to distraction.  Lovers had
loved before, and lovers would love again; but no lover had loved,
might, could, would, or should ever love, as I loved Dora.  The
more I raved, the more Jip barked.  Each of us, in his own way, got
more mad every moment.

Well, well!  Dora and I were sitting on the sofa by and by, quiet
enough, and Jip was lying in her lap, winking peacefully at me.  It
was off my mind.  I was in a state of perfect rapture.  Dora and I
were engaged.

I suppose we had some notion that this was to end in marriage.  We
must have had some, because Dora stipulated that we were never to
be married without her papa's consent.  But, in our youthful
ecstasy, I don't think that we really looked before us or behind
us; or had any aspiration beyond the ignorant present.  We were to
keep our secret from Mr. Spenlow; but I am sure the idea never
entered my head, then, that there was anything dishonourable in
that.

Miss Mills was more than usually pensive when Dora, going to find
her, brought her back; - I apprehend, because there was a tendency
in what had passed to awaken the slumbering echoes in the caverns
of Memory.  But she gave us her blessing, and the assurance of her
lasting friendship, and spoke to us, generally, as became a Voice
from the Cloister.

What an idle time it was!  What an insubstantial, happy, foolish
time it was!

When I measured Dora's finger for a ring that was to be made of
Forget-me-nots, and when the jeweller, to whom I took the measure,
found me out, and laughed over his order-book, and charged me
anything he liked for the pretty little toy, with its blue stones
- so associated in my remembrance with Dora's hand, that yesterday,
when I saw such another, by chance, on the finger of my own
daughter, there was a momentary stirring in my heart, like pain!

When I walked about, exalted with my secret, and full of my own
interest, and felt the dignity of loving Dora, and of being
beloved, so much, that if I had walked the air, I could not have
been more above the people not so situated, who were creeping on
the earth!

When we had those meetings in the garden of the square, and sat
within the dingy summer-house, so happy, that I love the London
sparrows to this hour, for nothing else, and see the plumage of the
tropics in their smoky feathers!
When we had our first great quarrel (within a week of our
betrothal), and when Dora sent me back the ring, enclosed in a
despairing cocked-hat note, wherein she used the terrible
expression that 'our love had begun in folly, and ended in
madness!' which dreadful words occasioned me to tear my hair, and
cry that all was over!

When, under cover of the night, I flew to Miss Mills, whom I saw by
stealth in a back kitchen where there was a mangle, and implored
Miss Mills to interpose between us and avert insanity.  When Miss
Mills undertook the office and returned with Dora, exhorting us,
from the pulpit of her own bitter youth, to mutual concession, and
the avoidance of the Desert of Sahara!

When we cried, and made it up, and were so blest again, that the
back kitchen, mangle and all, changed to Love's own temple, where
we arranged a plan of correspondence through Miss Mills, always to
comprehend at least one letter on each side every day!

What an idle time!  What an insubstantial, happy, foolish time!  Of
all the times of mine that Time has in his grip, there is none that
in one retrospect I can smile at half so much, and think of half so
tenderly.



CHAPTER 34
MY AUNT ASTONISHES ME


I wrote to Agnes as soon as Dora and I were engaged.  I wrote her
a long letter, in which I tried to make her comprehend how blest I
was, and what a darling Dora was.  I entreated Agnes not to regard
this as a thoughtless passion which could ever yield to any other,
or had the least resemblance to the boyish fancies that we used to
joke about.  I assured her that its profundity was quite
unfathomable, and expressed my belief that nothing like it had ever
been known.

Somehow, as I wrote to Agnes on a fine evening by my open window,
and the remembrance of her clear calm eyes and gentle face came
stealing over me, it shed such a peaceful influence upon the hurry
and agitation in which I had been living lately, and of which my
very happiness partook in some degree, that it soothed me into
tears.  I remember that I sat resting my head upon my hand, when
the letter was half done, cherishing a general fancy as if Agnes
were one of the elements of my natural home.  As if, in the
retirement of the house made almost sacred to me by her presence,
Dora and I must be happier than anywhere.  As if, in love, joy,
sorrow, hope, or disappointment; in all emotions; my heart turned
naturally there, and found its refuge and best friend.

Of Steerforth I said nothing.  I only told her there had been sad
grief at Yarmouth, on account of Emily's flight; and that on me it
made a double wound, by reason of the circumstances attending it. 
I knew how quick she always was to divine the truth, and that she
would never be the first to breathe his name.

To this letter, I received an answer by return of post.  As I read
it, I seemed to hear Agnes speaking to me.  It was like her cordial
voice in my ears.  What can I say more!

While I had been away from home lately, Traddles had called twice
or thrice.  Finding Peggotty within, and being informed by Peggotty
(who always volunteered that information to whomsoever would
receive it), that she was my old nurse, he had established a
good-humoured acquaintance with her, and had stayed to have a
little chat with her about me.  So Peggotty said; but I am afraid
the chat was all on her own side, and of immoderate length, as she
was very difficult indeed to stop, God bless her! when she had me
for her theme.

This reminds me, not only that I expected Traddles on a certain
afternoon of his own appointing, which was now come, but that Mrs.
Crupp had resigned everything appertaining to her office (the
salary excepted) until Peggotty should cease to present herself. 
Mrs. Crupp, after holding divers conversations respecting Peggotty,
in a very high-pitched voice, on the staircase - with some
invisible Familiar it would appear, for corporeally speaking she
was quite alone at those times - addressed a letter to me,
developing her views.  Beginning it with that statement of
universal application, which fitted every occurrence of her life,
namely, that she was a mother herself, she went on to inform me
that she had once seen very different days, but that at all periods
of her existence she had had a constitutional objection to spies,
intruders, and informers.  She named no names, she said; let them
the cap fitted, wear it; but spies, intruders, and informers,
especially in widders' weeds (this clause was underlined), she had
ever accustomed herself to look down upon.  If a gentleman was the
victim of spies, intruders, and informers (but still naming no
names), that was his own pleasure.  He had a right to please
himself; so let him do.  All that she, Mrs. Crupp, stipulated for,
was, that she should not be 'brought in contract' with such
persons.  Therefore she begged to be excused from any further
attendance on the top set, until things were as they formerly was,
and as they could be wished to be; and further mentioned that her
little book would be found upon the breakfast-table every Saturday
morning, when she requested an immediate settlement of the same,
with the benevolent view of saving trouble 'and an ill-conwenience'
to all parties.

After this, Mrs. Crupp confined herself to making pitfalls on the
stairs, principally with pitchers, and endeavouring to delude
Peggotty into breaking her legs.  I found it rather harassing to
live in this state of siege, but was too much afraid of Mrs. Crupp
to see any way out of it.

'My dear Copperfield,' cried Traddles, punctually appearing at my
door, in spite of all these obstacles, 'how do you do?'

'My dear Traddles,' said I, 'I am delighted to see you at last, and
very sorry I have not been at home before.  But I have been so much
engaged -'

'Yes, yes, I know,' said Traddles, 'of course.  Yours lives in
London, I think.'

'What did you say?'

'She - excuse me - Miss D., you know,' said Traddles, colouring in
his great delicacy, 'lives in London, I believe?'

'Oh yes.  Near London.'

'Mine, perhaps you recollect,' said Traddles, with a serious look,
'lives down in Devonshire - one of ten.  Consequently, I am not so
much engaged as you - in that sense.'

'I wonder you can bear,' I returned, 'to see her so seldom.'

'Hah!' said Traddles, thoughtfully.  'It does seem a wonder.  I
suppose it is, Copperfield, because there is no help for it?'

'I suppose so,' I replied with a smile, and not without a blush. 
'And because you have so much constancy and patience, Traddles.'

'Dear me!' said Traddles, considering about it, 'do I strike you in
that way, Copperfield?  Really I didn't know that I had.  But she
is such an extraordinarily dear girl herself, that it's possible
she may have imparted something of those virtues to me.  Now you
mention it, Copperfield, I shouldn't wonder at all.  I assure you
she is always forgetting herself, and taking care of the other
nine.'

'Is she the eldest?' I inquired.

'Oh dear, no,' said Traddles.  'The eldest is a Beauty.'

He saw, I suppose, that I could not help smiling at the simplicity
of this reply; and added, with a smile upon his own ingenuous face:

'Not, of course, but that my Sophy - pretty name, Copperfield, I
always think?'

'Very pretty!' said I.

'Not, of course, but that Sophy is beautiful too in my eyes, and
would be one of the dearest girls that ever was, in anybody's eyes
(I should think).  But when I say the eldest is a Beauty, I mean
she really is a -' he seemed to be describing clouds about himself,
with both hands: 'Splendid, you know,' said Traddles,
energetically.
'Indeed!' said I.

'Oh, I assure you,' said Traddles, 'something very uncommon,
indeed!  Then, you know, being formed for society and admiration,
and not being able to enjoy much of it in consequence of their
limited means, she naturally gets a little irritable and exacting,
sometimes.  Sophy puts her in good humour!'

'Is Sophy the youngest?' I hazarded.

'Oh dear, no!' said Traddles, stroking his chin.  'The two youngest
are only nine and ten.  Sophy educates 'em.'

'The second daughter, perhaps?' I hazarded.

'No,' said Traddles.  'Sarah's the second.  Sarah has something the
matter with her spine, poor girl.  The malady will wear out by and
by, the doctors say, but in the meantime she has to lie down for a
twelvemonth.  Sophy nurses her.  Sophy's the fourth.'

'Is the mother living?' I inquired.

'Oh yes,' said Traddles, 'she is alive.  She is a very superior
woman indeed, but the damp country is not adapted to her
constitution, and - in fact, she has lost the use of her limbs.'

'Dear me!' said I.

'Very sad, is it not?' returned Traddles.  'But in a merely
domestic view it is not so bad as it might be, because Sophy takes
her place.  She is quite as much a mother to her mother, as she is
to the other nine.'

I felt the greatest admiration for the virtues of this young lady;
and, honestly with the view of doing my best to prevent the
good-nature of Traddles from being imposed upon, to the detriment
of their joint prospects in life, inquired how Mr. Micawber was?

'He is quite well, Copperfield, thank you,' said Traddles.  'I am
not living with him at present.'

'No?'

'No.  You see the truth is,' said Traddles, in a whisper, 'he had
changed his name to Mortimer, in consequence of his temporary
embarrassments; and he don't come out till after dark - and then in
spectacles.  There was an execution put into our house, for rent. 
Mrs. Micawber was in such a dreadful state that I really couldn't
resist giving my name to that second bill we spoke of here.  You
may imagine how delightful it was to my feelings, Copperfield, to
see the matter settled with it, and Mrs. Micawber recover her
spirits.'

'Hum!' said I.
'Not that her happiness was of long duration,' pursued Traddles,
'for, unfortunately, within a week another execution came in.  It
broke up the establishment.  I have been living in a furnished
apartment since then, and the Mortimers have been very private
indeed.  I hope you won't think it selfish, Copperfield, if I
mention that the broker carried off my little round table with the
marble top, and Sophy's flower-pot and stand?'

'What a hard thing!' I exclaimed indignantly.

'It was a - it was a pull,' said Traddles, with his usual wince at
that expression.  'I don't mention it reproachfully, however, but
with a motive.  The fact is, Copperfield, I was unable to
repurchase them at the time of their seizure; in the first place,
because the broker, having an idea that I wanted them, ran the
price up to an extravagant extent; and, in the second place,
because I - hadn't any money.  Now, I have kept my eye since, upon
the broker's shop,' said Traddles, with a great enjoyment of his
mystery, 'which is up at the top of Tottenham Court Road, and, at
last, today I find them put out for sale.  I have only noticed them
from over the way, because if the broker saw me, bless you, he'd
ask any price for them!  What has occurred to me, having now the
money, is, that perhaps you wouldn't object to ask that good nurse
of yours to come with me to the shop - I can show it her from round
the corner of the next street - and make the best bargain for them,
as if they were for herself, that she can!'

The delight with which Traddles propounded this plan to me, and the
sense he had of its uncommon artfulness, are among the freshest
things in my remembrance.

I told him that my old nurse would be delighted to assist him, and
that we would all three take the field together, but on one
condition.  That condition was, that he should make a solemn
resolution to grant no more loans of his name, or anything else, to
Mr. Micawber.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Traddles, 'I have already done so,
because I begin to feel that I have not only been inconsiderate,
but that I have been positively unjust to Sophy.  My word being
passed to myself, there is no longer any apprehension; but I pledge
it to you, too, with the greatest readiness.  That first unlucky
obligation, I have paid.  I have no doubt Mr. Micawber would have
paid it if he could, but he could not.  One thing I ought to
mention, which I like very much in Mr. Micawber, Copperfield.  It
refers to the second obligation, which is not yet due.  He don't
tell me that it is provided for, but he says it WILL BE.  Now, I
think there is something very fair and honest about that!'

I was unwilling to damp my good friend's confidence, and therefore
assented.  After a little further conversation, we went round to
the chandler's shop, to enlist Peggotty; Traddles declining to pass
the evening with me, both because he endured the liveliest
apprehensions that his property would be bought by somebody else
before he could re-purchase it, and because it was the evening he
always devoted to writing to the dearest girl in the world.

I never shall forget him peeping round the corner of the street in
Tottenham Court Road, while Peggotty was bargaining for the
precious articles; or his agitation when she came slowly towards us
after vainly offering a price, and was hailed by the relenting
broker, and went back again.  The end of the negotiation was, that
she bought the property on tolerably easy terms, and Traddles was
transported with pleasure.

'I am very much obliged to you, indeed,' said Traddles, on hearing
it was to be sent to where he lived, that night.  'If I might ask
one other favour, I hope you would not think it absurd,
Copperfield?'

I said beforehand, certainly not.

'Then if you WOULD be good enough,' said Traddles to Peggotty, 'to
get the flower-pot now, I think I should like (it being Sophy's,
Copperfield) to carry it home myself!'

Peggotty was glad to get it for him, and he overwhelmed her with
thanks, and went his way up Tottenham Court Road, carrying the
flower-pot affectionately in his arms, with one of the most
delighted expressions of countenance I ever saw.

We then turned back towards my chambers.  As the shops had charms
for Peggotty which I never knew them possess in the same degree for
anybody else, I sauntered easily along, amused by her staring in at
the windows, and waiting for her as often as she chose.  We were
thus a good while in getting to the Adelphi.

On our way upstairs, I called her attention to the sudden
disappearance of Mrs. Crupp's pitfalls, and also to the prints of
recent footsteps.  We were both very much surprised, coming higher
up, to find my outer door standing open (which I had shut) and to
hear voices inside.

We looked at one another, without knowing what to make of this, and
went into the sitting-room.  What was my amazement to find, of all
people upon earth, my aunt there, and Mr. Dick!  My aunt sitting on
a quantity of luggage, with her two birds before her, and her cat
on her knee, like a female Robinson Crusoe, drinking tea.  Mr. Dick
leaning thoughtfully on a great kite, such as we had often been out
together to fly, with more luggage piled about him!

'My dear aunt!' cried I.  'Why, what an unexpected pleasure!'

We cordially embraced; and Mr. Dick and I cordially shook hands;
and Mrs. Crupp, who was busy making tea, and could not be too
attentive, cordially said she had knowed well as Mr. Copperfull
would have his heart in his mouth, when he see his dear relations.

'Holloa!' said my aunt to Peggotty, who quailed before her awful
presence.  'How are YOU?'

'You remember my aunt, Peggotty?' said I.

'For the love of goodness, child,' exclaimed my aunt, 'don't call
the woman by that South Sea Island name!  If she married and got
rid of it, which was the best thing she could do, why don't you
give her the benefit of the change?  What's your name now, - P?'
said my aunt, as a compromise for the obnoxious appellation.

'Barkis, ma'am,' said Peggotty, with a curtsey.

'Well!  That's human,' said my aunt.  'It sounds less as if you
wanted a missionary.  How d'ye do, Barkis?  I hope you're well?'

Encouraged by these gracious words, and by my aunt's extending her
hand, Barkis came forward, and took the hand, and curtseyed her
acknowledgements.

'We are older than we were, I see,' said my aunt.  'We have only
met each other once before, you know.  A nice business we made of
it then!  Trot, my dear, another cup.'

I handed it dutifully to my aunt, who was in her usual inflexible
state of figure; and ventured a remonstrance with her on the
subject of her sitting on a box.

'Let me draw the sofa here, or the easy-chair, aunt,' said I.  'Why
should you be so uncomfortable?'

'Thank you, Trot,' replied my aunt, 'I prefer to sit upon my
property.'  Here my aunt looked hard at Mrs. Crupp, and observed,
'We needn't trouble you to wait, ma'am.'

'Shall I put a little more tea in the pot afore I go, ma'am?' said
Mrs. Crupp.

'No, I thank you, ma'am,' replied my aunt.

'Would you let me fetch another pat of butter, ma'am?' said Mrs.
Crupp.  'Or would you be persuaded to try a new-laid hegg?  or
should I brile a rasher?  Ain't there nothing I could do for your
dear aunt, Mr. Copperfull?'

'Nothing, ma'am,' returned my aunt.  'I shall do very well, I thank
you.'

Mrs. Crupp, who had been incessantly smiling to express sweet
temper, and incessantly holding her head on one side, to express a
general feebleness of constitution, and incessantly rubbing her
hands, to express a desire to be of service to all deserving
objects, gradually smiled herself, one-sided herself, and rubbed
herself, out of the room.
'Dick!' said my aunt.  'You know what I told you about time-servers
and wealth-worshippers?'

Mr. Dick - with rather a scared look, as if he had forgotten it -
returned a hasty answer in the affirmative.

'Mrs. Crupp is one of them,' said my aunt.  'Barkis, I'll trouble
you to look after the tea, and let me have another cup, for I don't
fancy that woman's pouring-out!'

I knew my aunt sufficiently well to know that she had something of
importance on her mind, and that there was far more matter in this
arrival than a stranger might have supposed.  I noticed how her eye
lighted on me, when she thought my attention otherwise occupied;
and what a curious process of hesitation appeared to be going on
within her, while she preserved her outward stiffness and
composure.  I began to reflect whether I had done anything to
offend her; and my conscience whispered me that I had not yet told
her about Dora.  Could it by any means be that, I wondered!

As I knew she would only speak in her own good time, I sat down
near her, and spoke to the birds, and played with the cat, and was
as easy as I could be.  But I was very far from being really easy;
and I should still have been so, even if Mr. Dick, leaning over the
great kite behind my aunt, had not taken every secret opportunity
of shaking his head darkly at me, and pointing at her.

'Trot,' said my aunt at last, when she had finished her tea, and
carefully smoothed down her dress, and wiped her lips - 'you
needn't go, Barkis! - Trot, have you got to be firm and
self-reliant?'

'I hope so, aunt.'

'What do you think?' inquired Miss Betsey.

'I think so, aunt.'

'Then why, my love,' said my aunt, looking earnestly at me, 'why do
you think I prefer to sit upon this property of mine tonight?'

I shook my head, unable to guess.

'Because,' said my aunt, 'it's all I have.  Because I'm ruined, my
dear!'

If the house, and every one of us, had tumbled out into the river
together, I could hardly have received a greater shock.

'Dick knows it,' said my aunt, laying her hand calmly on my
shoulder.  'I am ruined, my dear Trot!  All I have in the world is
in this room, except the cottage; and that I have left Janet to
let.  Barkis, I want to get a bed for this gentleman tonight.  To
save expense, perhaps you can make up something here for myself. 
Anything will do.  It's only for tonight.  We'll talk about this,
more, tomorrow.'

I was roused from my amazement, and concern for her - I am sure,
for her - by her falling on my neck, for a moment, and crying that
she only grieved for me.  In another moment she suppressed this
emotion; and said with an aspect more triumphant than dejected:

'We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us,
my dear.  We must learn to act the play out.  We must live
misfortune down, Trot!'



CHAPTER 35
DEPRESSION


As soon as I could recover my presence of mind, which quite
deserted me in the first overpowering shock of my aunt's
intelligence, I proposed to Mr. Dick to come round to the
chandler's shop, and take possession of the bed which Mr. Peggotty
had lately vacated.  The chandler's shop being in Hungerford
Market, and Hungerford Market being a very different place in those
days, there was a low wooden colonnade before the door (not very
unlike that before the house where the little man and woman used to
live, in the old weather-glass), which pleased Mr. Dick mightily. 
The glory of lodging over this structure would have compensated
him, I dare say, for many inconveniences; but, as there were really
few to bear, beyond the compound of flavours I have already
mentioned, and perhaps the want of a little more elbow-room, he was
perfectly charmed with his accommodation.  Mrs. Crupp had
indignantly assured him that there wasn't room to swing a cat
there; but, as Mr. Dick justly observed to me, sitting down on the
foot of the bed, nursing his leg, 'You know, Trotwood, I don't want
to swing a cat.  I never do swing a cat.  Therefore, what does that
signify to ME!'

I tried to ascertain whether Mr. Dick had any understanding of the
causes of this sudden and great change in my aunt's affairs.  As I
might have expected, he had none at all.  The only account he could
give of it was, that my aunt had said to him, the day before
yesterday, 'Now, Dick, are you really and truly the philosopher I
take you for?' That then he had said, Yes, he hoped so.  That then
my aunt had said, 'Dick, I am ruined.'  That then he had said, 'Oh,
indeed!' That then my aunt had praised him highly, which he was
glad of.  And that then they had come to me, and had had bottled
porter and sandwiches on the road.

Mr. Dick was so very complacent, sitting on the foot of the bed,
nursing his leg, and telling me this, with his eyes wide open and
a surprised smile, that I am sorry to say I was provoked into
explaining to him that ruin meant distress, want, and starvation;
but I was soon bitterly reproved for this harshness, by seeing his
face turn pale, and tears course down his lengthened cheeks, while
he fixed upon me a look of such unutterable woe, that it might have
softened a far harder heart than mine.  I took infinitely greater
pains to cheer him up again than I had taken to depress him; and I
soon understood (as I ought to have known at first) that he had
been so confident, merely because of his faith in the wisest and
most wonderful of women, and his unbounded reliance on my
intellectual resources.  The latter, I believe, he considered a
match for any kind of disaster not absolutely mortal.

'What can we do, Trotwood?' said Mr. Dick.  'There's the Memorial
-'

'To be sure there is,' said I.  'But all we can do just now, Mr.
Dick, is to keep a cheerful countenance, and not let my aunt see
that we are thinking about it.'

He assented to this in the most earnest manner; and implored me, if
I should see him wandering an inch out of the right course, to
recall him by some of those superior methods which were always at
my command.  But I regret to state that the fright I had given him
proved too much for his best attempts at concealment.  All the
evening his eyes wandered to my aunt's face, with an expression of
the most dismal apprehension, as if he saw her growing thin on the
spot.  He was conscious of this, and put a constraint upon his
head; but his keeping that immovable, and sitting rolling his eyes
like a piece of machinery, did not mend the matter at all.  I saw
him look at the loaf at supper (which happened to be a small one),
as if nothing else stood between us and famine; and when my aunt
insisted on his making his customary repast, I detected him in the
act of pocketing fragments of his bread and cheese; I have no doubt
for the purpose of reviving us with those savings, when we should
have reached an advanced stage of attenuation.

My aunt, on the other hand, was in a composed frame of mind, which
was a lesson to all of us - to me, I am sure.  She was extremely
gracious to Peggotty, except when I inadvertently called her by
that name; and, strange as I knew she felt in London, appeared
quite at home.  She was to have my bed, and I was to lie in the
sitting-room, to keep guard over her.  She made a great point of
being so near the river, in case of a conflagration; and I suppose
really did find some satisfaction in that circumstance.

'Trot, my dear,' said my aunt, when she saw me making preparations
for compounding her usual night-draught, 'No!'

'Nothing, aunt?'

'Not wine, my dear.  Ale.'

'But there is wine here, aunt.  And you always have it made of
wine.'

'Keep that, in case of sickness,' said my aunt.  'We mustn't use it
carelessly, Trot.  Ale for me.  Half a pint.'

I thought Mr. Dick would have fallen, insensible.  My aunt being
resolute, I went out and got the ale myself.  As it was growing
late, Peggotty and Mr. Dick took that opportunity of repairing to
the chandler's shop together.  I parted from him, poor fellow, at
the corner of the street, with his great kite at his back, a very
monument of human misery.

My aunt was walking up and down the room when I returned, crimping
the borders of her nightcap with her fingers.  I warmed the ale and
made the toast on the usual infallible principles.  When it was
ready for her, she was ready for it, with her nightcap on, and the
skirt of her gown turned back on her knees.

'My dear,' said my aunt, after taking a spoonful of it; 'it's a
great deal better than wine.  Not half so bilious.'

I suppose I looked doubtful, for she added:

'Tut, tut, child.  If nothing worse than Ale happens to us, we are
well off.'

'I should think so myself, aunt, I am sure,' said I.

'Well, then, why DON'T you think so?' said my aunt.

'Because you and I are very different people,' I returned.

'Stuff and nonsense, Trot!' replied my aunt.

MY aunt went on with a quiet enjoyment, in which there was very
little affectation, if any; drinking the warm ale with a tea-spoon,
and soaking her strips of toast in it.

'Trot,' said she, 'I don't care for strange faces in general, but
I rather like that Barkis of yours, do you know!'

'It's better than a hundred pounds to hear you say so!' said I.

'It's a most extraordinary world,' observed my aunt, rubbing her
nose; 'how that woman ever got into it with that name, is
unaccountable to me.  It would be much more easy to be born a
Jackson, or something of that sort, one would think.'

'Perhaps she thinks so, too; it's not her fault,' said I.

'I suppose not,' returned my aunt, rather grudging the admission;
'but it's very aggravating.  However, she's Barkis now.  That's
some comfort.  Barkis is uncommonly fond of you, Trot.'

'There is nothing she would leave undone to prove it,' said I.

'Nothing, I believe,' returned my aunt.  'Here, the poor fool has
been begging and praying about handing over some of her money -
because she has got too much of it.  A simpleton!'

My aunt's tears of pleasure were positively trickling down into the
warm ale.

'She's the most ridiculous creature that ever was born,' said my
aunt.  'I knew, from the first moment when I saw her with that poor
dear blessed baby of a mother of yours, that she was the most
ridiculous of mortals.  But there are good points in Barkis!'

Affecting to laugh, she got an opportunity of putting her hand to
her eyes.  Having availed herself of it, she resumed her toast and
her discourse together.

'Ah!  Mercy upon us!' sighed my aunt.  'I know all about it, Trot!
Barkis and myself had quite a gossip while you were out with Dick. 
I know all about it.  I don't know where these wretched girls
expect to go to, for my part.  I wonder they don't knock out their
brains against - against mantelpieces,' said my aunt; an idea which
was probably suggested to her by her contemplation of mine.

'Poor Emily!' said I.

'Oh, don't talk to me about poor,' returned my aunt.  'She should
have thought of that, before she caused so much misery!  Give me a
kiss, Trot.  I am sorry for your early experience.'

As I bent forward, she put her tumbler on my knee to detain me, and
said:

'Oh, Trot, Trot!  And so you fancy yourself in love!  Do you?'

'Fancy, aunt!' I exclaimed, as red as I could be.  'I adore her
with my whole soul!'

'Dora, indeed!' returned my aunt.  'And you mean to say the little
thing is very fascinating, I suppose?'

'My dear aunt,' I replied, 'no one can form the least idea what she
is!'

'Ah!  And not silly?' said my aunt.

'Silly, aunt!'

I seriously believe it had never once entered my head for a single
moment, to consider whether she was or not.  I resented the idea,
of course; but I was in a manner struck by it, as a new one
altogether.

'Not light-headed?' said my aunt.

'Light-headed, aunt!' I could only repeat this daring speculation
with the same kind of feeling with which I had repeated the
preceding question.

'Well, well!' said my aunt.  'I only ask.  I don't depreciate her. 
Poor little couple!  And so you think you were formed for one
another, and are to go through a party-supper-table kind of life,
like two pretty pieces of confectionery, do you, Trot?'

She asked me this so kindly, and with such a gentle air, half
playful and half sorrowful, that I was quite touched.

'We are young and inexperienced, aunt, I know,' I replied; 'and I
dare say we say and think a good deal that is rather foolish.  But
we love one another truly, I am sure.  If I thought Dora could ever
love anybody else, or cease to love me; or that I could ever love
anybody else, or cease to love her; I don't know what I should do
- go out of my mind, I think!'

'Ah, Trot!' said my aunt, shaking her head, and smiling gravely;
'blind, blind, blind!'

'Someone that I know, Trot,' my aunt pursued, after a pause,
'though of a very pliant disposition, has an earnestness of
affection in him that reminds me of poor Baby.  Earnestness is what
that Somebody must look for, to sustain him and improve him, Trot. 
Deep, downright, faithful earnestness.'

'If you only knew the earnestness of Dora, aunt!' I cried.

'Oh, Trot!' she said again; 'blind, blind!' and without knowing
why, I felt a vague unhappy loss or want of something overshadow me
like a cloud.

'However,' said my aunt, 'I don't want to put two young creatures
out of conceit with themselves, or to make them unhappy; so, though
it is a girl and boy attachment, and girl and boy attachments very
often - mind! I don't say always! - come to nothing, still we'll be
serious about it, and hope for a prosperous issue one of these
days.  There's time enough for it to come to anything!'

This was not upon the whole very comforting to a rapturous lover;
but I was glad to have my aunt in my confidence, and I was mindful
of her being fatigued.  So I thanked her ardently for this mark of
her affection, and for all her other kindnesses towards me; and
after a tender good night, she took her nightcap into my bedroom.

How miserable I was, when I lay down!  How I thought and thought
about my being poor, in Mr. Spenlow's eyes; about my not being what
I thought I was, when I proposed to Dora; about the chivalrous
necessity of telling Dora what my worldly condition was, and
releasing her from her engagement if she thought fit; about how I
should contrive to live, during the long term of my articles, when
I was earning nothing; about doing something to assist my aunt, and
seeing no way of doing anything; about coming down to have no money
in my pocket, and to wear a shabby coat, and to be able to carry
Dora no little presents, and to ride no gallant greys, and to show
myself in no agreeable light!  Sordid and selfish as I knew it was,
and as I tortured myself by knowing that it was, to let my mind run
on my own distress so much, I was so devoted to Dora that I could
not help it.  I knew that it was base in me not to think more of my
aunt, and less of myself; but, so far, selfishness was inseparable
from Dora, and I could not put Dora on one side for any mortal
creature.  How exceedingly miserable I was, that night!

As to sleep, I had dreams of poverty in all sorts of shapes, but I
seemed to dream without the previous ceremony of going to sleep. 
Now I was ragged, wanting to sell Dora matches, six bundles for a
halfpenny; now I was at the office in a nightgown and boots,
remonstrated with by Mr. Spenlow on appearing before the clients in
that airy attire; now I was hungrily picking up the crumbs that
fell from old Tiffey's daily biscuit, regularly eaten when St.
Paul's struck one; now I was hopelessly endeavouring to get a
licence to marry Dora, having nothing but one of Uriah Heep's
gloves to offer in exchange, which the whole Commons rejected; and
still, more or less conscious of my own room, I was always tossing
about like a distressed ship in a sea of bed-clothes.

My aunt was restless, too, for I frequently heard her walking to
and fro.  Two or,three times in the course of the night, attired in
a long flannel wrapper in which she looked seven feet high, she
appeared, like a disturbed ghost, in my room, and came to the side
of the sofa on which I lay.  On the first occasion I started up in
alarm, to learn that she inferred from a particular light in the
sky, that Westminster Abbey was on fire; and to be consulted in
reference to the probability of its igniting Buckingham Street, in
case the wind changed.  Lying still, after that, I found that she
sat down near me, whispering to herself 'Poor boy!' And then it
made me twenty times more wretched, to know how unselfishly mindful
she was of me, and how selfishly mindful I was of myself.

It was difficult to believe that a night so long to me, could be
short to anybody else.  This consideration set me thinking and
thinking of an imaginary party where people were dancing the hours
away, until that became a dream too, and I heard the music
incessantly playing one tune, and saw Dora incessantly dancing one
dance, without taking the least notice of me.  The man who had been
playing the harp all night, was trying in vain to cover it with an
ordinary-sized nightcap, when I awoke; or I should rather say, when
I left off trying to go to sleep, and saw the sun shining in
through the window at last.

There was an old Roman bath in those days at the bottom of one of
the streets out of the Strand - it may be there still - in which I
have had many a cold plunge.  Dressing myself as quietly as I
could, and leaving Peggotty to look after my aunt, I tumbled head
foremost into it, and then went for a walk to Hampstead.  I had a
hope that this brisk treatment might freshen my wits a little; and
I think it did them good, for I soon came to the conclusion that
the first step I ought to take was, to try if my articles could be
cancelled and the premium recovered.  I got some breakfast on the
Heath, and walked back to Doctors' Commons, along the watered roads

and through a pleasant smell of summer flowers, growing in gardens
and carried into town on hucksters' heads, intent on this first
effort to meet our altered circumstances.

I arrived at the office so soon, after all, that I had half an
hour's loitering about the Commons, before old Tiffey, who was
always first, appeared with his key.  Then I sat down in my shady
corner, looking up at the sunlight on the opposite chimney-pots,
and thinking about Dora; until Mr. Spenlow came in, crisp and
curly.

'How are you, Copperfield?' said he.  'Fine morning!'

'Beautiful morning, sir,' said I.  'Could I say a word to you
before you go into Court?'

'By all means,' said he.  'Come into my room.'

I followed him into his room, and he began putting on his gown, and
touching himself up before a little glass he had, hanging inside a
closet door.

'I am sorry to say,' said I, 'that I have some rather disheartening
intelligence from my aunt.'

'No!' said he.  'Dear me!  Not paralysis, I hope?'

'It has no reference to her health, sir,' I replied.  'She has met
with some large losses.  In fact, she has very little left,
indeed.'

'You as-tound me, Copperfield!' cried Mr. Spenlow.

I shook my head.  'Indeed, sir,' said I, 'her affairs are so
changed, that I wished to ask you whether it would be possible - at
a sacrifice on our part of some portion of the premium, of course,'
I put in this, on the spur of the moment, warned by the blank
expression of his face - 'to cancel my articles?'

What it cost me to make this proposal, nobody knows.  It was like
asking, as a favour, to be sentenced to transportation from Dora.

'To cancel your articles, Copperfield?  Cancel?'

I explained with tolerable firmness, that I really did not know
where my means of subsistence were to come from, unless I could
earn them for myself.  I had no fear for the future, I said - and
I laid great emphasis on that, as if to imply that I should still
be decidedly eligible for a son-in-law one of these days - but, for
the present, I was thrown upon my own resources.
'I am extremely sorry to hear this, Copperfield,' said Mr. Spenlow. 
'Extremely sorry.  It is not usual to cancel articles for any such
reason.  It is not a professional course of proceeding.  It is not
a convenient precedent at all.  Far from it.  At the same time -'

'You are very good, sir,' I murmured, anticipating a concession.

'Not at all.  Don't mention it,' said Mr. Spenlow.  'At the same
time, I was going to say, if it had been my lot to have my hands
unfettered - if I had not a partner - Mr. Jorkins -'

My hopes were dashed in a moment, but I made another effort.

'Do you think, sir,' said I, 'if I were to mention it to Mr.
Jorkins -'

Mr. Spenlow shook his head discouragingly.  'Heaven forbid,
Copperfield,' he replied, 'that I should do any man an injustice:
still less, Mr. jorkins.  But I know my partner, Copperfield.  Mr.
jorkins is not a man to respond to a proposition of this peculiar
nature.  Mr. jorkins is very difficult to move from the beaten
track.  You know what he is!'

I am sure I knew nothing about him, except that he had originally
been alone in the business, and now lived by himself in a house
near Montagu Square, which was fearfully in want of painting; that
he came very late of a day, and went away very early; that he never
appeared to be consulted about anything; and that he had a dingy
little black-hole of his own upstairs, where no business was ever
done, and where there was a yellow old cartridge-paper pad upon his
desk, unsoiled by ink, and reported to be twenty years of age.

'Would you object to my mentioning it to him, sir?' I asked.

'By no means,' said Mr. Spenlow.  'But I have some experience of
Mr. jorkins, Copperfield.  I wish it were otherwise, for I should
be happy to meet your views in any respect.  I cannot have the
objection to your mentioning it to Mr. jorkins, Copperfield, if you
think it worth while.'

Availing myself of this permission, which was given with a warm
shake of the hand, I sat thinking about Dora, and looking at the
sunlight stealing from the chimney-pots down the wall of the
opposite house, until Mr. jorkins came.  I then went up to Mr.
jorkins's room, and evidently astonished Mr. jorkins very much by
making my appearance there.

'Come in, Mr. Copperfield,' said Mr. jorkins.  'Come in!'

I went in, and sat down; and stated my case to Mr. jorkins pretty
much as I had stated it to Mr. Spenlow.  Mr. Jorkins was not by any
means the awful creature one might have expected, but a large,
mild, smooth-faced man of sixty, who took so much snuff that there
was a tradition in the Commons that he lived principally on that
stimulant, having little room in his system for any other article
of diet.

'You have mentioned this to Mr. Spenlow, I suppose?' said Mr.
jorkins; when he had heard me, very restlessly, to an end.

I answered Yes, and told him that Mr. Spenlow had introduced his
name.

'He said I should object?' asked Mr. jorkins.

I was obliged to admit that Mr. Spenlow had considered it probable.

'I am sorry to say, Mr. Copperfield, I can't advance your object,'
said Mr. jorkins, nervously.  'The fact is - but I have an
appointment at the Bank, if you'll have the goodness to excuse me.'

With that he rose in a great hurry, and was going out of the room,
when I made bold to say that I feared, then, there was no way of
arranging the matter?

'No!' said Mr. jorkins, stopping at the door to shake his head. 
'Oh, no!  I object, you know,' which he said very rapidly, and went
out.  'You must be aware, Mr. Copperfield,' he added, looking
restlessly in at the door again, 'if Mr. Spenlow objects -'

'Personally, he does not object, sir,' said I.

'Oh!  Personally!' repeated Mr. Jorkins, in an impatient manner. 
'I assure you there's an objection, Mr. Copperfield.  Hopeless!
What you wish to be done, can't be done.  I - I really have got an
appointment at the Bank.'  With that he fairly ran away; and to the
best of my knowledge, it was three days before he showed himself in
the Commons again.

Being very anxious to leave no stone unturned, I waited until Mr.
Spenlow came in, and then described what had passed; giving him to
understand that I was not hopeless of his being able to soften the
adamantine jorkins, if he would undertake the task.

'Copperfield,' returned Mr. Spenlow, with a gracious smile, 'you
have not known my partner, Mr. jorkins, as long as I have.  Nothing
is farther from my thoughts than to attribute any degree of
artifice to Mr. jorkins.  But Mr. jorkins has a way of stating his
objections which often deceives people.  No, Copperfield!' shaking
his head.  'Mr. jorkins is not to be moved, believe me!'

I was completely bewildered between Mr. Spenlow and Mr. jorkins, as
to which of them really was the objecting partner; but I saw with
sufficient clearness that there was obduracy somewhere in the firm,
and that the recovery of my aunt's thousand pounds was out of the
question.  In a state of despondency, which I remember with
anything but satisfaction, for I know it still had too much
reference to myself (though always in connexion with Dora), I left
the office, and went homeward.

I was trying to familiarize my mind with the worst, and to present
to myself the arrangements we should have to make for the future in
their sternest aspect, when a hackney-chariot coming after me, and
stopping at my very feet, occasioned me to look up.  A fair hand
was stretched forth to me from the window; and the face I had never
seen without a feeling of serenity and happiness, from the moment
when it first turned back on the old oak staircase with the great
broad balustrade, and when I associated its softened beauty with
the stained-glass window in the church, was smiling on me.

'Agnes!' I joyfully exclaimed.  'Oh, my dear Agnes, of all people
in the world, what a pleasure to see you!'

'Is it, indeed?' she said, in her cordial voice.

'I want to talk to you so much!' said I.  'It's such a lightening
of my heart, only to look at you!  If I had had a conjuror's cap,
there is no one I should have wished for but you!'

'What?' returned Agnes.

'Well! perhaps Dora first,' I admitted, with a blush.

'Certainly, Dora first, I hope,' said Agnes, laughing.

'But you next!' said I.  'Where are you going?'

She was going to my rooms to see my aunt.  The day being very fine,
she was glad to come out of the chariot, which smelt (I had my head
in it all this time) like a stable put under a cucumber-frame.  I
dismissed the coachman, and she took my arm, and we walked on
together.  She was like Hope embodied, to me.  How different I felt
in one short minute, having Agnes at my side!

My aunt had written her one of the odd, abrupt notes - very little
longer than a Bank note - to which her epistolary efforts were
usually limited.  She had stated therein that she had fallen into
adversity, and was leaving Dover for good, but had quite made up
her mind to it, and was so well that nobody need be uncomfortable
about her.  Agnes had come to London to see my aunt, between whom
and herself there had been a mutual liking these many years:
indeed, it dated from the time of my taking up my residence in Mr.
Wickfield's house.  She was not alone, she said.  Her papa was with
her - and Uriah Heep.

'And now they are partners,' said I.  'Confound him!'

'Yes,' said Agnes.  'They have some business here; and I took
advantage of their coming, to come too.  You must not think my
visit all friendly and disinterested, Trotwood, for - I am afraid
I may be cruelly prejudiced - I do not like to let papa go away
alone, with him.'
'Does he exercise the same influence over Mr. Wickfield still,
Agnes?'

Agnes shook her head.  'There is such a change at home,' said she,
'that you would scarcely know the dear old house.  They live with
us now.'

'They?' said I.

'Mr. Heep and his mother.  He sleeps in your old room,' said Agnes,
looking up into my face.

'I wish I had the ordering of his dreams,' said I.  'He wouldn't
sleep there long.'

'I keep my own little room,' said Agnes, 'where I used to learn my
lessons.  How the time goes!  You remember?  The little panelled
room that opens from the drawing-room?'

'Remember, Agnes?  When I saw you, for the first time, coming out
at the door, with your quaint little basket of keys hanging at your
side?'

'It is just the same,' said Agnes, smiling.  'I am glad you think
of it so pleasantly.  We were very happy.'

'We were, indeed,' said I.

'I keep that room to myself still; but I cannot always desert Mrs.
Heep, you know.  And so,' said Agnes, quietly, 'I feel obliged to
bear her company, when I might prefer to be alone.  But I have no
other reason to complain of her.  If she tires me, sometimes, by
her praises of her son, it is only natural in a mother.  He is a
very good son to her.'

I looked at Agnes when she said these words, without detecting in
her any consciousness of Uriah's design.  Her mild but earnest eyes
met mine with their own beautiful frankness, and there was no
change in her gentle face.

'The chief evil of their presence in the house,' said Agnes, 'is
that I cannot be as near papa as I could wish - Uriah Heep being so
much between us - and cannot watch over him, if that is not too
bold a thing to say, as closely as I would.  But if any fraud or
treachery is practising against him, I hope that simple love and
truth will be strong in the end.  I hope that real love and truth
are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.'

A certain bright smile, which I never saw on any other face, died
away, even while I thought how good it was, and how familiar it had
once been to me; and she asked me, with a quick change of
expression (we were drawing very near my street), if I knew how the
reverse in my aunt's circumstances had been brought about.  On my
replying no, she had not told me yet, Agnes became thoughtful, and
I fancied I felt her arm tremble in mine.

We found my aunt alone, in a state of some excitement.  A
difference of opinion had arisen between herself and Mrs. Crupp, on
an abstract question (the propriety of chambers being inhabited by
the gentler sex); and my aunt, utterly indifferent to spasms on the
part of Mrs. Crupp, had cut the dispute short, by informing that
lady that she smelt of my brandy, and that she would trouble her to
walk out.  Both of these expressions Mrs. Crupp considered
actionable, and had expressed her intention of bringing before a
'British Judy' - meaning, it was supposed, the bulwark of our
national liberties.

MY aunt, however, having had time to cool, while Peggotty was out
showing Mr. Dick the soldiers at the Horse Guards - and being,
besides, greatly pleased to see Agnes - rather plumed herself on
the affair than otherwise, and received us with unimpaired good
humour.  When Agnes laid her bonnet on the table, and sat down
beside her, I could not but think, looking on her mild eyes and her
radiant forehead, how natural it seemed to have her there; how
trustfully, although she was so young and inexperienced, my aunt
confided in her; how strong she was, indeed, in simple love and
truth.

We began to talk about my aunt's losses, and I told them what I had
tried to do that morning.

'Which was injudicious, Trot,' said my aunt, 'but well meant.  You
are a generous boy - I suppose I must say, young man, now - and I
am proud of you, my dear.  So far, so good.  Now, Trot and Agnes,
let us look the case of Betsey Trotwood in the face, and see how it
stands.'

I observed Agnes turn pale, as she looked very attentively at my
aunt.  My aunt, patting her cat, looked very attentively at Agnes.

'Betsey Trotwood,' said my aunt, who had always kept her money
matters to herself.  '- I don't mean your sister, Trot, my dear,
but myself - had a certain property.  It don't matter how much;
enough to live on.  More; for she had saved a little, and added to
it.  Betsey funded her property for some time, and then, by the
advice of her man of business, laid it out on landed security. 
That did very well, and returned very good interest, till Betsey
was paid off.  I am talking of Betsey as if she was a man-of-war. 
Well!  Then, Betsey had to look about her, for a new investment. 
She thought she was wiser, now, than her man of business, who was
not such a good man of business by this time, as he used to be - I
am alluding to your father, Agnes - and she took it into her head
to lay it out for herself.  So she took her pigs,' said my aunt,
'to a foreign market; and a very bad market it turned out to be. 
First, she lost in the mining way, and then she lost in the diving
way - fishing up treasure, or some such Tom Tiddler nonsense,'
explained my aunt, rubbing her nose; 'and then she lost in the
mining way again, and, last of all, to set the thing entirely to
rights, she lost in the banking way.  I don't know what the Bank
shares were worth for a little while,' said my aunt; 'cent per cent
was the lowest of it, I believe; but the Bank was at the other end
of the world, and tumbled into space, for what I know; anyhow, it
fell to pieces, and never will and never can pay sixpence; and
Betsey's sixpences were all there, and there's an end of them. 
Least said, soonest mended!'

My aunt concluded this philosophical summary, by fixing her eyes
with a kind of triumph on Agnes, whose colour was gradually
returning.

'Dear Miss Trotwood, is that all the history?' said Agnes.

'I hope it's enough, child,' said my aunt.  'If there had been more
money to lose, it wouldn't have been all, I dare say.  Betsey would
have contrived to throw that after the rest, and make another
chapter, I have little doubt.  But there was no more money, and
there's no more story.'

Agnes had listened at first with suspended breath.  Her colour
still came and went, but she breathed more freely.  I thought I
knew why.  I thought she had had some fear that her unhappy father
might be in some way to blame for what had happened.  My aunt took
her hand in hers, and laughed.

'Is that all?' repeated my aunt.  'Why, yes, that's all, except,
"And she lived happy ever afterwards." Perhaps I may add that of
Betsey yet, one of these days.  Now, Agnes, you have a wise head. 
So have you, Trot, in some things, though I can't compliment you
always'; and here my aunt shook her own at me, with an energy
peculiar to herself.  'What's to be done?  Here's the cottage,
taking one time with another, will produce say seventy pounds a
year.  I think we may safely put it down at that.  Well! - That's
all we've got,' said my aunt; with whom it was an idiosyncrasy, as
it is with some horses, to stop very short when she appeared to be
in a fair way of going on for a long while.

'Then,' said my aunt, after a rest, 'there's Dick.  He's good for
a hundred a-year, but of course that must be expended on himself. 
I would sooner send him away, though I know I am the only person
who appreciates him, than have him, and not spend his money on
himself.  How can Trot and I do best, upon our means?  What do you
say, Agnes?'

'I say, aunt,' I interposed, 'that I must do something!'

'Go for a soldier, do you mean?' returned my aunt, alarmed; 'or go
to sea?  I won't hear of it.  You are to be a proctor.  We're not
going to have any knockings on the head in THIS family, if you
please, sir.'

I was about to explain that I was not desirous of introducing that
mode of provision into the family, when Agnes inquired if my rooms
were held for any long term?

'You come to the point, my dear,' said my aunt.  'They are not to
be got rid of, for six months at least, unless they could be
underlet, and that I don't believe.  The last man died here.  Five
people out of six would die - of course - of that woman in nankeen
with the flannel petticoat.  I have a little ready money; and I
agree with you, the best thing we can do, is, to live the term out
here, and get a bedroom hard by.'

I thought it my duty to hint at the discomfort my aunt would
sustain, from living in a continual state of guerilla warfare with
Mrs. Crupp; but she disposed of that objection summarily by
declaring that, on the first demonstration of hostilities, she was
prepared to astonish Mrs. Crupp for the whole remainder of her
natural life.

'I have been thinking, Trotwood,' said Agnes, diffidently, 'that if
you had time -'

'I have a good deal of time, Agnes.  I am always disengaged after
four or five o'clock, and I have time early in the morning.  In one
way and another,' said I, conscious of reddening a little as I
thought of the hours and hours I had devoted to fagging about town,
and to and fro upon the Norwood Road, 'I have abundance of time.'

'I know you would not mind,' said Agnes, coming to me, and speaking
in a low voice, so full of sweet and hopeful consideration that I
hear it now, 'the duties of a secretary.'

'Mind, my dear Agnes?'

'Because,' continued Agnes, 'Doctor Strong has acted on his
intention of retiring, and has come to live in London; and he asked
papa, I know, if he could recommend him one.  Don't you think he
would rather have his favourite old pupil near him, than anybody
else?'

'Dear Agnes!' said I.  'What should I do without you!  You are
always my good angel.  I told you so.  I never think of you in any
other light.'

Agnes answered with her pleasant laugh, that one good Angel
(meaning Dora) was enough; and went on to remind me that the Doctor
had been used to occupy himself in his study, early in the morning,
and in the evening - and that probably my leisure would suit his
requirements very well.  I was scarcely more delighted with the
prospect of earning my own bread, than with the hope of earning it
under my old master; in short, acting on the advice of Agnes, I sat
down and wrote a letter to the Doctor, stating my object, and
appointing to call on him next day at ten in the forenoon.  This I
addressed to Highgate - for in that place, so memorable to me, he
lived - and went and posted, myself, without losing a minute.

Wherever Agnes was, some agreeable token of her noiseless presence
seemed inseparable from the place.  When I came back, I found my
aunt's birds hanging, just as they had hung so long in the parlour
window of the cottage; and my easy-chair imitating my aunt's much
easier chair in its position at the open window; and even the round
green fan, which my aunt had brought away with her, screwed on to
the window-sill.  I knew who had done all this, by its seeming to
have quietly done itself; and I should have known in a moment who
had arranged my neglected books in the old order of my school days,
even if I had supposed Agnes to be miles away, instead of seeing
her busy with them, and smiling at the disorder into which they had
fallen.

My aunt was quite gracious on the subject of the Thames (it really
did look very well with the sun upon it, though not like the sea
before the cottage), but she could not relent towards the London
smoke, which, she said, 'peppered everything'.  A complete
revolution, in which Peggotty bore a prominent part, was being
effected in every corner of my rooms, in regard of this pepper; and
I was looking on, thinking how little even Peggotty seemed to do
with a good deal of bustle, and how much Agnes did without any
bustle at all, when a knock came at the door.

'I think,' said Agnes, turning pale, 'it's papa.  He promised me
that he would come.'

I opened the door, and admitted, not only Mr. Wickfield, but Uriah
Heep.  I had not seen Mr. Wickfield for some time.  I was prepared
for a great change in him, after what I had heard from Agnes, but
his appearance shocked me.

It was not that he looked many years older, though still dressed
with the old scrupulous cleanliness; or that there was an
unwholesome ruddiness upon his face; or that his eyes were full and
bloodshot; or that there was a nervous trembling in his hand, the
cause of which I knew, and had for some years seen at work.  It was
not that he had lost his good looks, or his old bearing of a
gentleman - for that he had not - but the thing that struck me
most, was, that with the evidences of his native superiority still
upon him, he should submit himself to that crawling impersonation
of meanness, Uriah Heep.  The reversal of the two natures, in their
relative positions, Uriah's of power and Mr. Wickfield's of
dependence, was a sight more painful to me than I can express.  If
I had seen an Ape taking command of a Man, I should hardly have
thought it a more degrading spectacle.

He appeared to be only too conscious of it himself.  When he came
in, he stood still; and with his head bowed, as if he felt it. 
This was only for a moment; for Agnes softly said to him, 'Papa!
Here is Miss Trotwood - and Trotwood, whom you have not seen for a
long while!' and then he approached, and constrainedly gave my aunt
his hand, and shook hands more cordially with me.  In the moment's
pause I speak of, I saw Uriah's countenance form itself into a most
ill-favoured smile.  Agnes saw it too, I think, for she shrank from
him.

What my aunt saw, or did not see, I defy the science of physiognomy
to have made out, without her own consent.  I believe there never
was anybody with such an imperturbable countenance when she chose. 
Her face might have been a dead-wall on the occasion in question,
for any light it threw upon her thoughts; until she broke silence
with her usual abruptness.

'Well, Wickfield!' said my aunt; and he looked up at her for the
first time.  'I have been telling your daughter how well I have
been disposing of my money for myself, because I couldn't trust it
to you, as you were growing rusty in business matters.  We have
been taking counsel together, and getting on very well, all things
considered.  Agnes is worth the whole firm, in my opinion.'

'If I may umbly make the remark,' said Uriah Heep, with a writhe,
'I fully agree with Miss Betsey Trotwood, and should be only too
appy if Miss Agnes was a partner.'

'You're a partner yourself, you know,' returned my aunt, 'and
that's about enough for you, I expect.  How do you find yourself,
sir?'

In acknowledgement of this question, addressed to him with
extraordinary curtness, Mr. Heep, uncomfortably clutching the blue
bag he carried, replied that he was pretty well, he thanked my
aunt, and hoped she was the same.

'And you, Master - I should say, Mister Copperfield,' pursued
Uriah.  'I hope I see you well!  I am rejoiced to see you, Mister
Copperfield, even under present circumstances.'  I believed that;
for he seemed to relish them very much.  'Present circumstances is
not what your friends would wish for you, Mister Copperfield, but
it isn't money makes the man: it's - I am really unequal with my
umble powers to express what it is,' said Uriah, with a fawning
jerk, 'but it isn't money!'

Here he shook hands with me: not in the common way, but standing at
a good distance from me, and lifting my hand up and down like a
pump handle, that he was a little afraid of.

'And how do you think we are looking, Master Copperfield, - I
should say, Mister?' fawned Uriah.  'Don't you find Mr. Wickfield
blooming, sir?  Years don't tell much in our firm, Master
Copperfield, except in raising up the umble, namely, mother and
self - and in developing,' he added, as an afterthought, 'the
beautiful, namely, Miss Agnes.'

He jerked himself about, after this compliment, in such an
intolerable manner, that my aunt, who had sat looking straight at
him, lost all patience.

'Deuce take the man!' said my aunt, sternly, 'what's he about? 
Don't be galvanic, sir!'

'I ask your pardon, Miss Trotwood,' returned Uriah; 'I'm aware
you're nervous.'

'Go along with you, sir!' said my aunt, anything but appeased. 
'Don't presume to say so!  I am nothing of the sort.  If you're an
eel, sir, conduct yourself like one.  If you're a man, control your
limbs, sir!  Good God!' said my aunt, with great indignation, 'I am
not going to be serpentined and corkscrewed out of my senses!'

Mr. Heep was rather abashed, as most people might have been, by
this explosion; which derived great additional force from the
indignant manner in which my aunt afterwards moved in her chair,
and shook her head as if she were making snaps or bounces at him. 
But he said to me aside in a meek voice:

'I am well aware, Master Copperfield, that Miss Trotwood, though an
excellent lady, has a quick temper (indeed I think I had the
pleasure of knowing her, when I was a numble clerk, before you did,
Master Copperfield), and it's only natural, I am sure, that it
should be made quicker by present circumstances.  The wonder is,
that it isn't much worse!  I only called to say that if there was
anything we could do, in present circumstances, mother or self, or
Wickfield and Heep, -we should be really glad.  I may go so far?'
said Uriah, with a sickly smile at his partner.

'Uriah Heep,' said Mr. Wickfield, in a monotonous forced way, 'is
active in the business, Trotwood.  What he says, I quite concur in. 
You know I had an old interest in you.  Apart from that, what Uriah
says I quite concur in!'

'Oh, what a reward it is,' said Uriah, drawing up one leg, at the
risk of bringing down upon himself another visitation from my aunt,
'to be so trusted in!  But I hope I am able to do something to
relieve him from the fatigues of business, Master Copperfield!'

'Uriah Heep is a great relief to me,' said Mr. Wickfield, in the
same dull voice.  'It's a load off my mind, Trotwood, to have such
a partner.'

The red fox made him say all this, I knew, to exhibit him to me in
the light he had indicated on the night when he poisoned my rest. 
I saw the same ill-favoured smile upon his face again, and saw how
he watched me.

'You are not going, papa?' said Agnes, anxiously.  'Will you not
walk back with Trotwood and me?'

He would have looked to Uriah, I believe, before replying, if that
worthy had not anticipated him.

'I am bespoke myself,' said Uriah, 'on business; otherwise I should
have been appy to have kept with my friends.  But I leave my
partner to represent the firm.  Miss Agnes, ever yours!  I wish you
good-day, Master Copperfield, and leave my umble respects for Miss
Betsey Trotwood.'

With those words, he retired, kissing his great hand, and leering
at us like a mask.

We sat there, talking about our pleasant old Canterbury days, an
hour or two.  Mr. Wickfield, left to Agnes, soon became more like
his former self; though there was a settled depression upon him,
which he never shook off.  For all that, he brightened; and had an
evident pleasure in hearing us recall the little incidents of our
old life, many of which he remembered very well.  He said it was
like those times, to be alone with Agnes and me again; and he
wished to Heaven they had never changed.  I am sure there was an
influence in the placid face of Agnes, and in the very touch of her
hand upon his arm, that did wonders for him.

My aunt (who was busy nearly all this while with Peggotty, in the
inner room) would not accompany us to the place where they were
staying, but insisted on my going; and I went.  We dined together. 
After dinner, Agnes sat beside him, as of old, and poured out his
wine.  He took what she gave him, and no more - like a child - and
we all three sat together at a window as the evening gathered in. 
When it was almost dark, he lay down on a sofa, Agnes pillowing his
head and bending over him a little while; and when she came back to
the window, it was not so dark but I could see tears glittering in
her eyes.

I pray Heaven that I never may forget the dear girl in her love and
truth, at that time of my life; for if I should, I must be drawing
near the end, and then I would desire to remember her best!  She
filled my heart with such good resolutions, strengthened my
weakness so, by her example, so directed - I know not how, she was
too modest and gentle to advise me in many words - the wandering
ardour and unsettled purpose within me, that all the little good I
have done, and all the harm I have forborne, I solemnly believe I
may refer to her.

And how she spoke to me of Dora, sitting at the window in the dark;
listened to my praises of her; praised again; and round the little
fairy-figure shed some glimpses of her own pure light, that made it
yet more precious and more innocent to me!  Oh, Agnes, sister of my
boyhood, if I had known then, what I knew long afterwards! -

There was a beggar in the street, when I went down; and as I turned
my head towards the window, thinking of her calm seraphic eyes, he
made me start by muttering, as if he were an echo of the morning:
'Blind!  Blind!  Blind!'



CHAPTER 36
ENTHUSIASM

I began the next day with another dive into the Roman bath, and
then started for Highgate.  I was not dispirited now.  I was not
afraid of the shabby coat, and had no yearnings after gallant
greys.  My whole manner of thinking of our late misfortune was
changed.  What I had to do, was, to show my aunt that her past
goodness to me had not been thrown away on an insensible,
ungrateful object.  What I had to do, was, to turn the painful
discipline of my younger days to account, by going to work with a
resolute and steady heart.  What I had to do, was, to take my
woodman's axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest
of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to Dora.  And
I went on at a mighty rate, as if it could be done by walking.

When I found myself on the familiar Highgate road, pursuing such a
different errand from that old one of pleasure, with which it was
associated, it seemed as if a complete change had come on my whole
life.  But that did not discourage me.  With the new life, came new
purpose, new intention.  Great was the labour; priceless the
reward.  Dora was the reward, and Dora must be won.

I got into such a transport, that I felt quite sorry my coat was
not a little shabby already.  I wanted to be cutting at those trees
in the forest of difficulty, under circumstances that should prove
my strength.  I had a good mind to ask an old man, in wire
spectacles, who was breaking stones upon the road, to lend me his
hammer for a little while, and let me begin to beat a path to Dora
out of granite.  I stimulated myself into such a heat, and got so
out of breath, that I felt as if I had been earning I don't know
how much.

In this state, I went into a cottage that I saw was to let, and
examined it narrowly, - for I felt it necessary to be practical. 
It would do for me and Dora admirably: with a little front garden
for Jip to run about in, and bark at the tradespeople through the
railings, and a capital room upstairs for my aunt.  I came out
again, hotter and faster than ever, and dashed up to Highgate, at
such a rate that I was there an hour too early; and, though I had
not been, should have been obliged to stroll about to cool myself,
before I was at all presentable.

My first care, after putting myself under this necessary course of
preparation, was to find the Doctor's house.  It was not in that
part of Highgate where Mrs. Steerforth lived, but quite on the
opposite side of the little town.  When I had made this discovery,
I went back, in an attraction I could not resist, to a lane by Mrs.
Steerforth's, and looked over the corner of the garden wall.  His
room was shut up close.  The conservatory doors were standing open,
and Rosa Dartle was walking, bareheaded, with a quick, impetuous
step, up and down a gravel walk on one side of the lawn.  She gave
me the idea of some fierce thing, that was dragging the length of
its chain to and fro upon a beaten track, and wearing its heart
out.

I came softly away from my place of observation, and avoiding that
part of the neighbourhood, and wishing I had not gone near it,
strolled about until it was ten o'clock.  The church with the
slender spire, that stands on the top of the hill now, was not
there then to tell me the time.  An old red-brick mansion, used as
a school, was in its place; and a fine old house it must have been
to go to school at, as I recollect it.

When I approached the Doctor's cottage - a pretty old place, on
which he seemed to have expended some money, if I might judge from
the embellishments and repairs that had the look of being just
completed - I saw him walking in the garden at the side, gaiters
and all, as if he had never left off walking since the days of my
pupilage.  He had his old companions about him, too; for there were
plenty of high trees in the neighbourhood, and two or three rooks
were on the grass, looking after him, as if they had been written
to about him by the Canterbury rooks, and were observing him
closely in consequence.

Knowing the utter hopelessness of attracting his attention from
that distance, I made bold to open the gate, and walk after him, so
as to meet him when he should turn round.  When he did, and came
towards me, he looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments,
evidently without thinking about me at all; and then his benevolent
face expressed extraordinary pleasure, and he took me by both
hands.

'Why, my dear Copperfield,' said the Doctor, 'you are a man!  How
do you do?  I am delighted to see you.  My dear Copperfield, how
very much you have improved!  You are quite - yes - dear me!'

I hoped he was well, and Mrs. Strong too.

'Oh dear, yes!' said the Doctor; 'Annie's quite well, and she'll be
delighted to see you.  You were always her favourite.  She said so,
last night, when I showed her your letter.  And - yes, to be sure
- you recollect Mr. Jack Maldon, Copperfield?'

'Perfectly, sir.'

'Of course,' said the Doctor.  'To be sure.  He's pretty well,
too.'

'Has he come home, sir?' I inquired.

'From India?' said the Doctor.  'Yes.  Mr. Jack Maldon couldn't
bear the climate, my dear.  Mrs. Markleham - you have not forgotten
Mrs. Markleham?'

Forgotten the Old Soldier!  And in that short time!

'Mrs. Markleham,' said the Doctor, 'was quite vexed about him, poor
thing; so we have got him at home again; and we have bought him a
little Patent place, which agrees with him much better.'
I knew enough of Mr. Jack Maldon to suspect from this account that
it was a place where there was not much to do, and which was pretty
well paid.  The Doctor, walking up and down with his hand on my
shoulder, and his kind face turned encouragingly to mine, went on:

'Now, my dear Copperfield, in reference to this proposal of yours. 
It's very gratifying and agreeable to me, I am sure; but don't you
think you could do better?  You achieved distinction, you know,
when you were with us.  You are qualified for many good things. 
You have laid a foundation that any edifice may be raised upon; and
is it not a pity that you should devote the spring-time of your
life to such a poor pursuit as I can offer?'

I became very glowing again, and, expressing myself in a
rhapsodical style, I am afraid, urged my request strongly;
reminding the Doctor that I had already a profession.

'Well, well,' said the Doctor, 'that's true.  Certainly, your
having a profession, and being actually engaged in studying it,
makes a difference.  But, my good young friend, what's seventy
pounds a year?'

'It doubles our income, Doctor Strong,' said I.

'Dear me!' replied the Doctor.  'To think of that!  Not that I mean
to say it's rigidly limited to seventy pounds a-year, because I
have always contemplated making any young friend I might thus
employ, a present too.  Undoubtedly,' said the Doctor, still
walking me up and down with his hand on my shoulder.  'I have
always taken an annual present into account.'

'My dear tutor,' said I (now, really, without any nonsense), 'to
whom I owe more obligations already than I ever can acknowledge -'

'No, no,' interposed the Doctor.  'Pardon me!'

'If you will take such time as I have, and that is my mornings and
evenings, and can think it worth seventy pounds a year, you will do
me such a service as I cannot express.'

'Dear me!' said the Doctor, innocently.  'To think that so little
should go for so much!  Dear, dear!  And when you can do better,
you will?  On your word, now?' said the Doctor, - which he had
always made a very grave appeal to the honour of us boys.

'On my word, sir!' I returned, answering in our old school manner.

'Then be it so,' said the Doctor, clapping me on the shoulder, and
still keeping his hand there, as we still walked up and down.

'And I shall be twenty times happier, sir,' said I, with a little
- I hope innocent - flattery, 'if my employment is to be on the
Dictionary.'

The Doctor stopped, smilingly clapped me on the shoulder again, and
exclaimed, with a triumph most delightful to behold, as if I had
penetrated to the profoundest depths of mortal sagacity, 'My dear
young friend, you have hit it.  It IS the Dictionary!'

How could it be anything else!  His pockets were as full of it as
his head.  It was sticking out of him in all directions.  He told
me that since his retirement from scholastic life, he had been
advancing with it wonderfully; and that nothing could suit him
better than the proposed arrangements for morning and evening work,
as it was his custom to walk about in the daytime with his
considering cap on.  His papers were in a little confusion, in
consequence of Mr. Jack Maldon having lately proffered his
occasional services as an amanuensis, and not being accustomed to
that occupation; but we should soon put right what was amiss, and
go on swimmingly.  Afterwards, when we were fairly at our work, I
found Mr. Jack Maldon's efforts more troublesome to me than I had
expected, as he had not confined himself to making numerous
mistakes, but had sketched so many soldiers, and ladies' heads,
over the Doctor's manuscript, that I often became involved in
labyrinths of obscurity.

The Doctor was quite happy in the prospect of our going to work
together on that wonderful performance, and we settled to begin
next morning at seven o'clock.  We were to work two hours every
morning, and two or three hours every night, except on Saturdays,
when I was to rest.  On Sundays, of course, I was to rest also, and
I considered these very easy terms.

Our plans being thus arranged to our mutual satisfaction, the
Doctor took me into the house to present me to Mrs. Strong, whom we
found in the Doctor's new study, dusting his books, - a freedom
which he never permitted anybody else to take with those sacred
favourites.

They had postponed their breakfast on my account, and we sat down
to table together.  We had not been seated long, when I saw an
approaching arrival in Mrs. Strong's face, before I heard any sound
of it.  A gentleman on horseback came to the gate, and leading his
horse into the little court, with the bridle over his arm, as if he
were quite at home, tied him to a ring in the empty coach-house
wall, and came into the breakfast parlour, whip in hand.  It was
Mr. Jack Maldon; and Mr. Jack Maldon was not at all improved by
India, I thought.  I was in a state of ferocious virtue, however,
as to young men who were not cutting down trees in the forest of
difficulty; and my impression must be received with due allowance.

'Mr. Jack!' said the Doctor.  'Copperfield!'

Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I
believed; and with an air of languid patronage, at which I secretly
took great umbrage.  But his languor altogether was quite a
wonderful sight; except when he addressed himself to his cousin
Annie.
'Have you breakfasted this morning, Mr. Jack?' said the Doctor.

'I hardly ever take breakfast, sir,' he replied, with his head
thrown back in an easy-chair.  'I find it bores me.'

'Is there any news today?' inquired the Doctor.

'Nothing at all, sir,' replied Mr. Maldon.  'There's an account
about the people being hungry and discontented down in the North,
but they are always being hungry and discontented somewhere.'

The Doctor looked grave, and said, as though he wished to change
the subject, 'Then there's no news at all; and no news, they say,
is good news.'

'There's a long statement in the papers, sir, about a murder,'
observed Mr. Maldon.  'But somebody is always being murdered, and
I didn't read it.'

A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of
mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that
time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since.  I
have known it very fashionable indeed.  I have seen it displayed
with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and
gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.  Perhaps
it impressed me the more then, because it was new to me, but it
certainly did not tend to exalt my opinion of, or to strengthen my
confidence in, Mr. Jack Maldon.

'I came out to inquire whether Annie would like to go to the opera
tonight,' said Mr. Maldon, turning to her.  'It's the last good
night there will be, this season; and there's a singer there, whom
she really ought to hear.  She is perfectly exquisite.  Besides
which, she is so charmingly ugly,' relapsing into languor.

The Doctor, ever pleased with what was likely to please his young
wife, turned to her and said:

'You must go, Annie.  You must go.'

'I would rather not,' she said to the Doctor.  'I prefer to remain
at home.  I would much rather remain at home.'

Without looking at her cousin, she then addressed me, and asked me
about Agnes, and whether she should see her, and whether she was
not likely to come that day; and was so much disturbed, that I
wondered how even the Doctor, buttering his toast, could be blind
to what was so obvious.

But he saw nothing.  He told her, good-naturedly, that she was
young and ought to be amused and entertained, and must not allow
herself to be made dull by a dull old fellow.  Moreover, he said,
he wanted to hear her sing all the new singer's songs to him; and
how could she do that well, unless she went?  So the Doctor
persisted in making the engagement for her, and Mr. Jack Maldon was
to come back to dinner.  This concluded, he went to his Patent
place, I suppose; but at all events went away on his horse, looking
very idle.

I was curious to find out next morning, whether she had been.  She
had not, but had sent into London to put her cousin off; and had
gone out in the afternoon to see Agnes, and had prevailed upon the
Doctor to go with her; and they had walked home by the fields, the
Doctor told me, the evening being delightful.  I wondered then,
whether she would have gone if Agnes had not been in town, and
whether Agnes had some good influence over her too!

She did not look very happy, I thought; but it was a good face, or
a very false one.  I often glanced at it, for she sat in the window
all the time we were at work; and made our breakfast, which we took
by snatches as we were employed.  When I left, at nine o'clock, she
was kneeling on the ground at the Doctor's feet, putting on his
shoes and gaiters for him.  There was a softened shade upon her
face, thrown from some green leaves overhanging the open window of
the low room; and I thought all the way to Doctors' Commons, of the
night when I had seen it looking at him as he read.

I was pretty busy now; up at five in the morning, and home at nine
or ten at night.  But I had infinite satisfaction in being so
closely engaged, and never walked slowly on any account, and felt
enthusiastically that the more I tired myself, the more I was doing
to deserve Dora.  I had not revealed myself in my altered character
to Dora yet, because she was coming to see Miss Mills in a few
days, and I deferred all I had to tell her until then; merely
informing her in my letters (all our communications were secretly
forwarded through Miss Mills), that I had much to tell her.  In the
meantime, I put myself on a short allowance of bear's grease,
wholly abandoned scented soap and lavender water, and sold off
three waistcoats at a prodigious sacrifice, as being too luxurious
for my stern career.

Not satisfied with all these proceedings, but burning with
impatience to do something more, I went to see Traddles, now
lodging up behind the parapet of a house in Castle Street, Holborn. 
Mr. Dick, who had been with me to Highgate twice already, and had
resumed his companionship with the Doctor, I took with me.

I took Mr. Dick with me, because, acutely sensitive to my aunt's
reverses, and sincerely believing that no galley-slave or convict
worked as I did, he had begun to fret and worry himself out of
spirits and appetite, as having nothing useful to do.  In this
condition, he felt more incapable of finishing the Memorial than
ever; and the harder he worked at it, the oftener that unlucky head
of King Charles the First got into it.  Seriously apprehending that
his malady would increase, unless we put some innocent deception
upon him and caused him to believe that he was useful, or unless we
could put him in the way of being really useful (which would be
better), I made up my mind to try if Traddles could help us. 
Before we went, I wrote Traddles a full statement of all that had
happened, and Traddles wrote me back a capital answer, expressive
of his sympathy and friendship.

We found him hard at work with his inkstand and papers, refreshed
by the sight of the flower-pot stand and the little round table in
a corner of the small apartment.  He received us cordially, and
made friends with Mr. Dick in a moment.  Mr. Dick professed an
absolute certainty of having seen him before, and we both said,
'Very likely.'

The first subject on which I had to consult Traddles was this, - I
had heard that many men distinguished in various pursuits had begun
life by reporting the debates in Parliament.  Traddles having
mentioned newspapers to me, as one of his hopes, I had put the two
things together, and told Traddles in my letter that I wished to
know how I could qualify myself for this pursuit.  Traddles now
informed me, as the result of his inquiries, that the mere
mechanical acquisition necessary, except in rare cases, for
thorough excellence in it, that is to say, a perfect and entire
command of the mystery of short-hand writing and reading, was about
equal in difficulty to the mastery of six languages; and that it
might perhaps be attained, by dint of perseverance, in the course
of a few years.  Traddles reasonably supposed that this would
settle the business; but I, only feeling that here indeed were a
few tall trees to be hewn down, immediately resolved to work my way
on to Dora through this thicket, axe in hand.

'I am very much obliged to you, my dear Traddles!' said I.  'I'll
begin tomorrow.'

Traddles looked astonished, as he well might; but he had no notion
as yet of my rapturous condition.

'I'll buy a book,' said I, 'with a good scheme of this art in it;
I'll work at it at the Commons, where I haven't half enough to do;
I'll take down the speeches in our court for practice - Traddles,
my dear fellow, I'll master it!'

'Dear me,' said Traddles, opening his eyes, 'I had no idea you were
such a determined character, Copperfield!'

I don't know how he should have had, for it was new enough to me. 
I passed that off, and brought Mr. Dick on the carpet.

'You see,' said Mr. Dick, wistfully, 'if I could exert myself, Mr.
Traddles - if I could beat a drum- or blow anything!'

Poor fellow!  I have little doubt he would have preferred such an
employment in his heart to all others.  Traddles, who would not
have smiled for the world, replied composedly:

'But you are a very good penman, sir.  You told me so,
Copperfield?'
'Excellent!' said I.  And indeed he was.  He wrote with
extraordinary neatness.

'Don't you think,' said Traddles, 'you could copy writings, sir, if
I got them for you?'

Mr. Dick looked doubtfully at me.  'Eh, Trotwood?'

I shook my head.  Mr. Dick shook his, and sighed.  'Tell him about
the Memorial,' said Mr. Dick.

I explained to Traddles that there was a difficulty in keeping King
Charles the First out of Mr. Dick's manuscripts; Mr. Dick in the
meanwhile looking very deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and
sucking his thumb.

'But these writings, you know, that I speak of, are already drawn
up and finished,' said Traddles after a little consideration.  'Mr.
Dick has nothing to do with them.  Wouldn't that make a difference,
Copperfield?  At all events, wouldn't it be well to try?'

This gave us new hope.  Traddles and I laying our heads together
apart, while Mr. Dick anxiously watched us from his chair, we
concocted a scheme in virtue of which we got him to work next day,
with triumphant success.

On a table by the window in Buckingham Street, we set out the work
Traddles procured for him - which was to make, I forget how many
copies of a legal document about some right of way - and on another
table we spread the last unfinished original of the great Memorial. 
Our instructions to Mr. Dick were that he should copy exactly what
he had before him, without the least departure from the original;
and that when he felt it necessary to make the slightest allusion
to King Charles the First, he should fly to the Memorial.  We
exhorted him to be resolute in this, and left my aunt to observe
him.  My aunt reported to us, afterwards, that, at first, he was
like a man playing the kettle-drums, and constantly divided his
attentions between the two; but that, finding this confuse and
fatigue him, and having his copy there, plainly before his eyes, he
soon sat at it in an orderly business-like manner, and postponed
the Memorial to a more convenient time.  In a word, although we
took great care that he should have no more to do than was good for
him, and although he did not begin with the beginning of a week, he
earned by the following Saturday night ten shillings and
nine-pence; and never, while I live, shall I forget his going about
to all the shops in the neighbourhood to change this treasure into
sixpences, or his bringing them to my aunt arranged in the form of
a heart upon a waiter, with tears of joy and pride in his eyes.  He
was like one under the propitious influence of a charm, from the
moment of his being usefully employed; and if there were a happy
man in the world, that Saturday night, it was the grateful creature
who thought my aunt the most wonderful woman in existence, and me
the most wonderful young man.

'No starving now, Trotwood,' said Mr. Dick, shaking hands with me
in a corner.  'I'll provide for her, Sir!' and he flourished his
ten fingers in the air, as if they were ten banks.

I hardly know which was the better pleased, Traddles or I.  'It
really,' said Traddles, suddenly, taking a letter out of his
pocket, and giving it to me, 'put Mr. Micawber quite out of my
head!'

The letter (Mr. Micawber never missed any possible opportunity of
writing a letter) was addressed to me, 'By the kindness of T.
Traddles, Esquire, of the Inner Temple.'  It ran thus: -


'MY DEAR COPPERFIELD,

'You may possibly not be unprepared to receive the intimation that
something has turned up.  I may have mentioned to you on a former
occasion that I was in expectation of such an event.

'I am about to establish myself in one of the provincial towns of
our favoured island (where the society may be described as a happy
admixture of the agricultural and the clerical), in immediate
connexion with one of the learned professions.  Mrs. Micawber and
our offspring will accompany me.  Our ashes, at a future period,
will probably be found commingled in the cemetery attached to a
venerable pile, for which the spot to which I refer has acquired a
reputation, shall I say from China to Peru?

'In bidding adieu to the modern Babylon, where we have undergone
many vicissitudes, I trust not ignobly, Mrs. Micawber and myself
cannot disguise from our minds that we part, it may be for years
and it may be for ever, with an individual linked by strong
associations to the altar of our domestic life.  If, on the eve of
such a departure, you will accompany our mutual friend, Mr. Thomas
Traddles, to our present abode, and there reciprocate the wishes
natural to the occasion, you will confer a Boon

               'On
                    'One
                         'Who
                              'Is
                                   'Ever yours,
                                        'WILKINS MICAWBER.'


I was glad to find that Mr. Micawber had got rid of his dust and
ashes, and that something really had turned up at last.  Learning
from Traddles that the invitation referred to the evening then
wearing away, I expressed my readiness to do honour to it; and we
went off together to the lodging which Mr. Micawber occupied as Mr.
Mortimer, and which was situated near the top of the Gray's Inn
Road.

The resources of this lodging were so limited, that we found the
twins, now some eight or nine years old, reposing in a turn-up
bedstead in the family sitting-room, where Mr. Micawber had
prepared, in a wash-hand-stand jug, what he called 'a Brew' of the
agreeable beverage for which he was famous.  I had the pleasure, on
this occasion, of renewing the acquaintance of Master Micawber,
whom I found a promising boy of about twelve or thirteen, very
subject to that restlessness of limb which is not an unfrequent
phenomenon in youths of his age.  I also became once more known to
his sister, Miss Micawber, in whom, as Mr. Micawber told us, 'her
mother renewed her youth, like the Phoenix'.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'yourself and Mr.
Traddles find us on the brink of migration, and will excuse any
little discomforts incidental to that position.'

Glancing round as I made a suitable reply, I observed that the
family effects were already packed, and that the amount of luggage
was by no means overwhelming.  I congratulated Mrs. Micawber on the
approaching change.

'My dear Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'of your friendly
interest in all our affairs, I am well assured.  My family may
consider it banishment, if they please; but I am a wife and mother,
and I never will desert Mr. Micawber.'

Traddles, appealed to by Mrs. Micawber's eye, feelingly acquiesced.

'That,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'that, at least, is my view, my dear
Mr. Copperfield and Mr. Traddles, of the obligation which I took
upon myself when I repeated the irrevocable words, "I, Emma, take
thee, Wilkins." I read the service over with a flat-candle on the
previous night, and the conclusion I derived from it was, that I
never could desert Mr. Micawber.  And,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'though
it is possible I may be mistaken in my view of the ceremony, I
never will!'

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber, a little impatiently, 'I am not
conscious that you are expected to do anything of the sort.'

'I am aware, my dear Mr. Copperfield,' pursued Mrs. Micawber, 'that
I am now about to cast my lot among strangers; and I am also aware
that the various members of my family, to whom Mr. Micawber has
written in the most gentlemanly terms, announcing that fact, have
not taken the least notice of Mr. Micawber's communication.  Indeed
I may be superstitious,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'but it appears to me
that Mr. Micawber is destined never to receive any answers whatever
to the great majority of the communications he writes.  I may
augur, from the silence of my family, that they object to the
resolution I have taken; but I should not allow myself to be
swerved from the path of duty, Mr. Copperfield, even by my papa and
mama, were they still living.'

I expressed my opinion that this was going in the right direction.
'It may be a sacrifice,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'to immure one's-self
in a Cathedral town; but surely, Mr. Copperfield, if it is a
sacrifice in me, it is much more a sacrifice in a man of Mr.
Micawber's abilities.'

'Oh!  You are going to a Cathedral town?' said I.

Mr. Micawber, who had been helping us all, out of the
wash-hand-stand jug, replied:

'To Canterbury.  In fact, my dear Copperfield, I have entered into
arrangements, by virtue of which I stand pledged and contracted to
our friend Heep, to assist and serve him in the capacity of - and
to be - his confidential clerk.'

I stared at Mr. Micawber, who greatly enjoyed my surprise.

'I am bound to state to you,' he said, with an official air, 'that
the business habits, and the prudent suggestions, of Mrs. Micawber,
have in a great measure conduced to this result.  The gauntlet, to
which Mrs. Micawber referred upon a former occasion, being thrown
down in the form of an advertisement, was taken up by my friend
Heep, and led to a mutual recognition.  Of my friend Heep,' said
Mr. Micawber, 'who is a man of remarkable shrewdness, I desire to
speak with all possible respect.  My friend Heep has not fixed the
positive remuneration at too high a figure, but he has made a great
deal, in the way of extrication from the pressure of pecuniary
difficulties, contingent on the value of my services; and on the
value of those services I pin my faith.  Such address and
intelligence as I chance to possess,' said Mr. Micawber, boastfully
disparaging himself, with the old genteel air, 'will be devoted to
my friend Heep's service.  I have already some acquaintance with
the law - as a defendant on civil process - and I shall immediately
apply myself to the Commentaries of one of the most eminent and
remarkable of our English jurists.  I believe it is unnecessary to
add that I allude to Mr. justice Blackstone.'

These observations, and indeed the greater part of the observations
made that evening, were interrupted by Mrs. Micawber's discovering
that Master Micawber was sitting on his boots, or holding his head
on with both arms as if he felt it loose, or accidentally kicking
Traddles under the table, or shuffling his feet over one another,
or producing them at distances from himself apparently outrageous
to nature, or lying sideways with his hair among the wine-glasses,
or developing his restlessness of limb in some other form
incompatible with the general interests of society; and by Master
Micawber's receiving those discoveries in a resentful spirit.  I
sat all the while, amazed by Mr. Micawber's disclosure, and
wondering what it meant; until Mrs. Micawber resumed the thread of
the discourse, and claimed my attention.

'What I particularly request Mr. Micawber to be careful of, is,'
said Mrs. Micawber, 'that he does not, my dear Mr. Copperfield, in
applying himself to this subordinate branch of the law, place it
out of his power to rise, ultimately, to the top of the tree.  I am
convinced that Mr. Micawber, giving his mind to a profession so
adapted to his fertile resources, and his flow of language, must
distinguish himself.  Now, for example, Mr. Traddles,' said Mrs.
Micawber, assuming a profound air, 'a judge, or even say a
Chancellor.  Does an individual place himself beyond the pale of
those preferments by entering on such an office as Mr. Micawber has
accepted?'

'My dear,' observed Mr. Micawber - but glancing inquisitively at
Traddles, too; 'we have time enough before us, for the
consideration of those questions.'

'Micawber,' she returned, 'no!  Your mistake in life is, that you
do not look forward far enough.  You are bound, in justice to your
family, if not to yourself, to take in at a comprehensive glance
the extremest point in the horizon to which your abilities may lead
you.'

Mr. Micawber coughed, and drank his punch with an air of exceeding
satisfaction - still glancing at Traddles, as if he desired to have
his opinion.

'Why, the plain state of the case, Mrs. Micawber,' said Traddles,
mildly breaking the truth to her.  'I mean the real prosaic fact,
you know -'

'Just so,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'my dear Mr. Traddles, I wish to be
as prosaic and literal as possible on a subject of so much
importance.'

'- Is,' said Traddles, 'that this branch of the law, even if Mr.
Micawber were a regular solicitor -'

'Exactly so,' returned Mrs. Micawber.  ('Wilkins, you are
squinting, and will not be able to get your eyes back.')

'- Has nothing,' pursued Traddles, 'to do with that.  Only a
barrister is eligible for such preferments; and Mr. Micawber could
not be a barrister, without being entered at an inn of court as a
student, for five years.'

'Do I follow you?' said Mrs. Micawber, with her most affable air of
business.  'Do I understand, my dear Mr. Traddles, that, at the
expiration of that period, Mr. Micawber would be eligible as a
Judge or Chancellor?'

'He would be ELIGIBLE,' returned Traddles, with a strong emphasis
on that word.

'Thank you,' said Mrs. Micawber.  'That is quite sufficient.  If
such is the case, and Mr. Micawber forfeits no privilege by
entering on these duties, my anxiety is set at rest.  I speak,'
said Mrs. Micawber, 'as a female, necessarily; but I have always
been of opinion that Mr. Micawber possesses what I have heard my
papa call, when I lived at home, the judicial mind; and I hope Mr.
Micawber is now entering on a field where that mind will develop
itself, and take a commanding station.'

I quite believe that Mr. Micawber saw himself, in his judicial
mind's eye, on the woolsack.  He passed his hand complacently over
his bald head, and said with ostentatious resignation:

'My dear, we will not anticipate the decrees of fortune.  If I am
reserved to wear a wig, I am at least prepared, externally,' in
allusion to his baldness, 'for that distinction.  I do not,' said
Mr. Micawber, 'regret my hair, and I may have been deprived of it
for a specific purpose.  I cannot say.  It is my intention, my dear
Copperfield, to educate my son for the Church; I will not deny that
I should be happy, on his account, to attain to eminence.'

'For the Church?' said I, still pondering, between whiles, on Uriah
Heep.

'Yes,' said Mr. Micawber.  'He has a remarkable head-voice, and
will commence as a chorister.  Our residence at Canterbury, and our
local connexion, will, no doubt, enable him to take advantage of
any vacancy that may arise in the Cathedral corps.'

On looking at Master Micawber again, I saw that he had a certain
expression of face, as if his voice were behind his eyebrows; where
it presently appeared to be, on his singing us (as an alternative
between that and bed) 'The Wood-Pecker tapping'.  After many
compliments on this performance, we fell into some general
conversation; and as I was too full of my desperate intentions to
keep my altered circumstances to myself, I made them known to Mr.
and Mrs. Micawber.  I cannot express how extremely delighted they
both were, by the idea of my aunt's being in difficulties; and how
comfortable and friendly it made them.

When we were nearly come to the last round of the punch, I
addressed myself to Traddles, and reminded him that we must not
separate, without wishing our friends health, happiness, and
success in their new career.  I begged Mr. Micawber to fill us
bumpers, and proposed the toast in due form: shaking hands with him
across the table, and kissing Mrs. Micawber, to commemorate that
eventful occasion.  Traddles imitated me in the first particular,
but did not consider himself a sufficiently old friend to venture
on the second.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, rising with one of his
thumbs in each of his waistcoat pockets, 'the companion of my
youth: if I may be allowed the expression - and my esteemed friend
Traddles: if I may be permitted to call him so - will allow me, on
the part of Mrs. Micawber, myself, and our offspring, to thank them
in the warmest and most uncompromising terms for their good wishes. 
It may be expected that on the eve of a migration which will
consign us to a perfectly new existence,' Mr. Micawber spoke as if
they were going five hundred thousand miles, 'I should offer a few
valedictory remarks to two such friends as I see before me.  But
all that I have to say in this way, I have said.  Whatever station
in society I may attain, through the medium of the learned
profession of which I am about to become an unworthy member, I
shall endeavour not to disgrace, and Mrs. Micawber will be safe to
adorn.  Under the temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities,
contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but
remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I
have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my
natural instincts recoil - I allude to spectacles - and possessing
myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate
pretensions.  All I have to say on that score is, that the cloud
has passed from the dreary scene, and the God of Day is once more
high upon the mountain tops.  On Monday next, on the arrival of the
four o'clock afternoon coach at Canterbury, my foot will be on my
native heath - my name, Micawber!'

Mr. Micawber resumed his seat on the close of these remarks, and
drank two glasses of punch in grave succession.  He then said with
much solemnity:

'One thing more I have to do, before this separation is complete,
and that is to perform an act of justice.  My friend Mr. Thomas
Traddles has, on two several occasions, "put his name", if I may
use a common expression, to bills of exchange for my accommodation. 
On the first occasion Mr. Thomas Traddles was left - let me say, in
short, in the lurch.  The fulfilment of the second has not yet
arrived.  The amount of the first obligation,' here Mr. Micawber
carefully referred to papers, 'was, I believe, twenty-three, four,
nine and a half, of the second, according to my entry of that
transaction, eighteen, six, two.  These sums, united, make a total,
if my calculation is correct, amounting to forty-one, ten, eleven
and a half.  My friend Copperfield will perhaps do me the favour to
check that total?'

I did so and found it correct.

'To leave this metropolis,' said Mr. Micawber, 'and my friend Mr.
Thomas Traddles, without acquitting myself of the pecuniary part of
this obligation, would weigh upon my mind to an insupportable
extent.  I have, therefore, prepared for my friend Mr. Thomas
Traddles, and I now hold in my hand, a document, which accomplishes
the desired object.  I beg to hand to my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles
my I.O.U.  for forty-one, ten, eleven and a half, and I am happy to
recover my moral dignity, and to know that I can once more walk
erect before my fellow man!'

With this introduction (which greatly affected him), Mr. Micawber
placed his I.O.U.  in the hands of Traddles, and said he wished him
well in every relation of life.  I am persuaded, not only that this
was quite the same to Mr. Micawber as paying the money, but that
Traddles himself hardly knew the difference until he had had time
to think about it.
Mr. Micawber walked so erect before his fellow man, on the strength
of this virtuous action, that his chest looked half as broad again
when he lighted us downstairs.  We parted with great heartiness on
both sides; and when I had seen Traddles to his own door, and was
going home alone, I thought, among the other odd and contradictory
things I mused upon, that, slippery as Mr. Micawber was, I was
probably indebted to some compassionate recollection he retained of
me as his boy-lodger, for never having been asked by him for money. 
I certainly should not have had the moral courage to refuse it; and
I have no doubt he knew that (to his credit be it written), quite
as well as I did.



CHAPTER 37
A LITTLE COLD WATER


My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger
than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the
crisis required.  I continued to walk extremely fast, and to have
a general idea that I was getting on.  I made it a rule to take as
much out of myself as I possibly could, in my way of doing
everything to which I applied my energies.  I made a perfect victim
of myself.  I even entertained some idea of putting myself on a
vegetable diet, vaguely conceiving that, in becoming a
graminivorous animal, I should sacrifice to Dora.

As yet, little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate firmness,
otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth.  But another
Saturday came, and on that Saturday evening she was to be at Miss
Mills's; and when Mr. Mills had gone to his whist-club (telegraphed
to me in the street, by a bird-cage in the drawing-room middle
window), I was to go there to tea.

By this time, we were quite settled down in Buckingham Street,
where Mr. Dick continued his copying in a state of absolute
felicity.  My aunt had obtained a signal victory over Mrs. Crupp,
by paying her off, throwing the first pitcher she planted on the
stairs out of window, and protecting in person, up and down the
staircase, a supernumerary whom she engaged from the outer world. 
These vigorous measures struck such terror to the breast of Mrs.
Crupp, that she subsided into her own kitchen, under the impression
that my aunt was mad.  My aunt being supremely indifferent to Mrs.
Crupp's opinion and everybody else's, and rather favouring than
discouraging the idea, Mrs. Crupp, of late the bold, became within
a few days so faint-hearted, that rather than encounter my aunt
upon the staircase, she would endeavour to hide her portly form
behind doors - leaving visible, however, a wide margin of flannel
petticoat - or would shrink into dark corners.  This gave my aunt
such unspeakable satisfaction, that I believe she took a delight in
prowling up and down, with her bonnet insanely perched on the top
of her head, at times when Mrs. Crupp was likely to be in the way.

My aunt, being uncommonly neat and ingenious, made so many little
improvements in our domestic arrangements, that I seemed to be
richer instead of poorer.  Among the rest, she converted the pantry
into a dressing-room for me; and purchased and embellished a
bedstead for my occupation, which looked as like a bookcase in the
daytime as a bedstead could.  I was the object of her constant
solicitude; and my poor mother herself could not have loved me
better, or studied more how to make me happy.

Peggotty had considered herself highly privileged in being allowed
to participate in these labours; and, although she still retained
something of her old sentiment of awe in reference to my aunt, had
received so many marks of encouragement and confidence, that they
were the best friends possible.  But the time had now come (I am
speaking of the Saturday when I was to take tea at Miss Mills's)
when it was necessary for her to return home, and enter on the
discharge of the duties she had undertaken in behalf of Ham.  'So
good-bye, Barkis,' said my aunt, 'and take care of yourself!  I am
sure I never thought I could be sorry to lose you!'

I took Peggotty to the coach office and saw her off.  She cried at
parting, and confided her brother to my friendship as Ham had done. 
We had heard nothing of him since he went away, that sunny
afternoon.

'And now, my own dear Davy,' said Peggotty, 'if, while you're a
prentice, you should want any money to spend; or if, when you're
out of your time, my dear, you should want any to set you up (and
you must do one or other, or both, my darling); who has such a good
right to ask leave to lend it you, as my sweet girl's own old
stupid me!'

I was not so savagely independent as to say anything in reply, but
that if ever I borrowed money of anyone, I would borrow it of her. 
Next to accepting a large sum on the spot, I believe this gave
Peggotty more comfort than anything I could have done.

'And, my dear!' whispered Peggotty, 'tell the pretty little angel
that I should so have liked to see her, only for a minute!  And
tell her that before she marries my boy, I'll come and make your
house so beautiful for you, if you'll let me!'

I declared that nobody else should touch it; and this gave Peggotty
such delight that she went away in good spirits.

I fatigued myself as much as I possibly could in the Commons all
day, by a variety of devices, and at the appointed time in the
evening repaired to Mr. Mills's street.  Mr. Mills, who was a
terrible fellow to fall asleep after dinner, had not yet gone out,
and there was no bird-cage in the middle window.

He kept me waiting so long, that I fervently hoped the Club would
fine him for being late.  At last he came out; and then I saw my
own Dora hang up the bird-cage, and peep into the balcony to look
for me, and run in again when she saw I was there, while Jip
remained behind, to bark injuriously at an immense butcher's dog in
the street, who could have taken him like a pill.

Dora came to the drawing-room door to meet me; and Jip came
scrambling out, tumbling over his own growls, under the impression
that I was a Bandit; and we all three went in, as happy and loving
as could be.  I soon carried desolation into the bosom of our joys
- not that I meant to do it, but that I was so full of the subject
- by asking Dora, without the smallest preparation, if she could
love a beggar?

My pretty, little, startled Dora!  Her only association with the
word was a yellow face and a nightcap, or a pair of crutches, or a
wooden leg, or a dog with a decanter-stand in his mouth, or
something of that kind; and she stared at me with the most
delightful wonder.

'How can you ask me anything so foolish?' pouted Dora.  'Love a
beggar!'

'Dora, my own dearest!' said I.  'I am a beggar!'

'How can you be such a silly thing,' replied Dora, slapping my
hand, 'as to sit there, telling such stories?  I'll make Jip bite
you!'

Her childish way was the most delicious way in the world to me, but
it was necessary to be explicit, and I solemnly repeated:

'Dora, my own life, I am your ruined David!'

'I declare I'll make Jip bite you!' said Dora, shaking her curls,
'if you are so ridiculous.'

But I looked so serious, that Dora left off shaking her curls, and
laid her trembling little hand upon my shoulder, and first looked
scared and anxious, then began to cry.  That was dreadful.  I fell
upon my knees before the sofa, caressing her, and imploring her not
to rend my heart; but, for some time, poor little Dora did nothing
but exclaim Oh dear!  Oh dear!  And oh, she was so frightened!  And
where was Julia Mills!  And oh, take her to Julia Mills, and go
away, please! until I was almost beside myself.

At last, after an agony of supplication and protestation, I got
Dora to look at me, with a horrified expression of face, which I
gradually soothed until it was only loving, and her soft, pretty
cheek was lying against mine.  Then I told her, with my arms
clasped round her, how I loved her, so dearly, and so dearly; how
I felt it right to offer to release her from her engagement,
because now I was poor; how I never could bear it, or recover it,
if I lost her; how I had no fears of poverty, if she had none, my
arm being nerved and my heart inspired by her; how I was already
working with a courage such as none but lovers knew; how I had
begun to be practical, and look into the future; how a crust well
earned was sweeter far than a feast inherited; and much more to the
same purpose, which I delivered in a burst of passionate eloquence
quite surprising to myself, though I had been thinking about it,
day and night, ever since my aunt had astonished me.

'Is your heart mine still, dear Dora?' said I, rapturously, for I
knew by her clinging to me that it was.

'Oh, yes!' cried Dora.  'Oh, yes, it's all yours.  Oh, don't be
dreadful!'

I dreadful!  To Dora!

'Don't talk about being poor, and working hard!' said Dora,
nestling closer to me.  'Oh, don't, don't!'

'My dearest love,' said I, 'the crust well-earned -'

'Oh, yes; but I don't want to hear any more about crusts!' said
Dora.  'And Jip must have a mutton-chop every day at twelve, or
he'll die.'

I was charmed with her childish, winning way.  I fondly explained
to Dora that Jip should have his mutton-chop with his accustomed
regularity.  I drew a picture of our frugal home, made independent
by my labour - sketching in the little house I had seen at
Highgate, and my aunt in her room upstairs.

'I am not dreadful now, Dora?' said I, tenderly.

'Oh, no, no!' cried Dora.  'But I hope your aunt will keep in her
own room a good deal.  And I hope she's not a scolding old thing!'

If it were possible for me to love Dora more than ever, I am sure
I did.  But I felt she was a little impracticable.  It damped my
new-born ardour, to find that ardour so difficult of communication
to her.  I made another trial.  When she was quite herself again,
and was curling Jip's ears, as he lay upon her lap, I became grave,
and said:

'My own!  May I mention something?'

'Oh, please don't be practical!' said Dora, coaxingly.  'Because it
frightens me so!'

'Sweetheart!' I returned; 'there is nothing to alarm you in all
this.  I want you to think of it quite differently.  I want to make
it nerve you, and inspire you, Dora!'

'Oh, but that's so shocking!' cried Dora.

'My love, no.  Perseverance and strength of character will enable
us to bear much worse things.'
'But I haven't got any strength at all,' said Dora, shaking her
curls.  'Have I, Jip?  Oh, do kiss Jip, and be agreeable!'

It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him up to me
for that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little mouth into
kissing form, as she directed the operation, which she insisted
should be performed symmetrically, on the centre of his nose.  I
did as she bade me - rewarding myself afterwards for my obedience
- and she charmed me out of my graver character for I don't know
how long.

'But, Dora, my beloved!' said I, at last resuming it; 'I was going
to mention something.'

The judge of the Prerogative Court might have fallen in love with
her, to see her fold her little hands and hold them up, begging and
praying me not to be dreadful any more.

'Indeed I am not going to be, my darling!' I assured her.  'But,
Dora, my love, if you will sometimes think, - not despondingly, you
know; far from that! - but if you will sometimes think - just to
encourage yourself - that you are engaged to a poor man -'

'Don't, don't!  Pray don't!' cried Dora.  'It's so very dreadful!'

'My soul, not at all!' said I, cheerfully.  'If you will sometimes
think of that, and look about now and then at your papa's
housekeeping, and endeavour to acquire a little habit - of
accounts, for instance -'

Poor little Dora received this suggestion with something that was
half a sob and half a scream.

'- It would be so useful to us afterwards,' I went on.  'And if you
would promise me to read a little - a little Cookery Book that I
would send you, it would be so excellent for both of us.  For our
path in life, my Dora,' said I, warming with the subject, 'is stony
and rugged now, and it rests with us to smooth it.  We must fight
our way onward.  We must be brave.  There are obstacles to be met,
and we must meet, and crush them!'

I was going on at a great rate, with a clenched hand, and a most
enthusiastic countenance; but it was quite unnecessary to proceed. 
I had said enough.  I had done it again.  Oh, she was so
frightened!  Oh, where was Julia Mills!  Oh, take her to Julia
Mills, and go away, please!  So that, in short, I was quite
distracted, and raved about the drawing-room.

I thought I had killed her, this time.  I sprinkled water on her
face.  I went down on my knees.  I plucked at my hair.  I denounced
myself as a remorseless brute and a ruthless beast.  I implored her
forgiveness.  I besought her to look up.  I ravaged Miss Mills's
work-box for a smelling-bottle, and in my agony of mind applied an
ivory needle-case instead, and dropped all the needles over Dora.
I shook my fists at Jip, who was as frantic as myself.  I did every
wild extravagance that could be done, and was a long way beyond the
end of my wits when Miss Mills came into the room.

'Who has done this?' exclaimed Miss Mills, succouring her friend.

I replied, 'I, Miss Mills! I have done it!  Behold the destroyer!'
- or words to that effect - and hid my face from the light, in the
sofa cushion.

At first Miss Mills thought it was a quarrel, and that we were
verging on the Desert of Sahara; but she soon found out how matters
stood, for my dear affectionate little Dora, embracing her, began
exclaiming that I was 'a poor labourer'; and then cried for me, and
embraced me, and asked me would I let her give me all her money to
keep, and then fell on Miss Mills's neck, sobbing as if her tender
heart were broken.

Miss Mills must have been born to be a blessing to us.  She
ascertained from me in a few words what it was all about, comforted
Dora, and gradually convinced her that I was not a labourer - from
my manner of stating the case I believe Dora concluded that I was
a navigator, and went balancing myself up and down a plank all day
with a wheelbarrow - and so brought us together in peace.  When we
were quite composed, and Dora had gone up-stairs to put some
rose-water to her eyes, Miss Mills rang for tea.  In the ensuing
interval, I told Miss Mills that she was evermore my friend, and
that my heart must cease to vibrate ere I could forget her
sympathy.

I then expounded to Miss Mills what I had endeavoured, so very
unsuccessfully, to expound to Dora.  Miss Mills replied, on general
principles, that the Cottage of content was better than the Palace
of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.

I said to Miss Mills that this was very true, and who should know
it better than I, who loved Dora with a love that never mortal had
experienced yet?  But on Miss Mills observing, with despondency,
that it were well indeed for some hearts if this were so, I
explained that I begged leave to restrict the observation to
mortals of the masculine gender.

I then put it to Miss Mills, to say whether she considered that
there was or was not any practical merit in the suggestion I had
been anxious to make, concerning the accounts, the housekeeping,
and the Cookery Book?

Miss Mills, after some consideration, thus replied:

'Mr. Copperfield, I will be plain with you.  Mental suffering and
trial supply, in some natures, the place of years, and I will be as
plain with you as if I were a Lady Abbess.  No.  The suggestion is
not appropriate to our Dora.  Our dearest Dora is a favourite child
of nature.  She is a thing of light, and airiness, and joy.  I am
free to confess that if it could be done, it might be well, but -'
And Miss Mills shook her head.

I was encouraged by this closing admission on the part of Miss
Mills to ask her, whether, for Dora's sake, if she had any
opportunity of luring her attention to such preparations for an
earnest life, she would avail herself of it?  Miss Mills replied in
the affirmative so readily, that I further asked her if she would
take charge of the Cookery Book; and, if she ever could insinuate
it upon Dora's acceptance, without frightening her, undertake to do
me that crowning service.  Miss Mills accepted this trust, too; but
was not sanguine.

And Dora returned, looking such a lovely little creature, that I
really doubted whether she ought to be troubled with anything so
ordinary.  And she loved me so much, and was so captivating
(particularly when she made Jip stand on his hind legs for toast,
and when she pretended to hold that nose of his against the hot
teapot for punishment because he wouldn't), that I felt like a sort
of Monster who had got into a Fairy's bower, when I thought of
having frightened her, and made her cry.

After tea we had the guitar; and Dora sang those same dear old
French songs about the impossibility of ever on any account leaving
off dancing, La ra la, La ra la, until I felt a much greater
Monster than before.

We had only one check to our pleasure, and that happened a little
while before I took my leave, when, Miss Mills chancing to make
some allusion to tomorrow morning, I unluckily let out that, being
obliged to exert myself now, I got up at five o'clock.  Whether
Dora had any idea that I was a Private Watchman, I am unable to
say; but it made a great impression on her, and she neither played
nor sang any more.

It was still on her mind when I bade her adieu; and she said to me,
in her pretty coaxing way - as if I were a doll, I used to think:

'Now don't get up at five o'clock, you naughty boy.  It's so
nonsensical!'

'My love,' said I, 'I have work to do.'

'But don't do it!' returned Dora.  'Why should you?'

It was impossible to say to that sweet little surprised face,
otherwise than lightly and playfully, that we must work to live.

'Oh!  How ridiculous!' cried Dora.

'How shall we live without, Dora?' said I.

'How?  Any how!' said Dora.

She seemed to think she had quite settled the question, and gave me
such a triumphant little kiss, direct from her innocent heart, that
I would hardly have put her out of conceit with her answer, for a
fortune.

Well!  I loved her, and I went on loving her, most absorbingly,
entirely, and completely.  But going on, too, working pretty hard,
and busily keeping red-hot all the irons I now had in the fire, I
would sit sometimes of a night, opposite my aunt, thinking how I
had frightened Dora that time, and how I could best make my way
with a guitar-case through the forest of difficulty, until I used
to fancy that my head was turning quite grey.



CHAPTER 38
A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP


I did not allow my resolution, with respect to the Parliamentary
Debates, to cool.  It was one of the irons I began to heat
immediately, and one of the irons I kept hot, and hammered at, with
a perseverance I may honestly admire.  I bought an approved scheme
of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and
sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in
a few weeks, to the confines of distraction.  The changes that were
rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in
such another position something else, entirely different; the
wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable
consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the
tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled
my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.  When I had
groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had
mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian Temple in itself,
there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary
characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who
insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a
cobweb, meant expectation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket, stood
for disadvantageous.  When I had fixed these wretches in my mind,
I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then,
beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I
dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost
heart-breaking.

It might have been quite heart-breaking, but for Dora, who was the
stay and anchor of my tempest-driven bark.  Every scratch in the
scheme was a gnarled oak in the forest of difficulty, and I went on
cutting them down, one after another, with such vigour, that in
three or four months I was in a condition to make an experiment on
one of our crack speakers in the Commons.  Shall I ever forget how
the crack speaker walked off from me before I began, and left my
imbecile pencil staggering about the paper as if it were in a fit!

This would not do, it was quite clear.  I was flying too high, and
should never get on, so.  I resorted to Traddles for advice; who
suggested that he should dictate speeches to me, at a pace, and
with occasional stoppages, adapted to my weakness.  Very grateful
for this friendly aid, I accepted the proposal; and night after
night, almost every night, for a long time, we had a sort of
Private Parliament in Buckingham Street, after I came home from the
Doctor's.

I should like to see such a Parliament anywhere else!  My aunt and
Mr. Dick represented the Government or the Opposition (as the case
might be), and Traddles, with the assistance of Enfield's Speakers,
or a volume of parliamentary orations, thundered astonishing
invectives against them.  Standing by the table, with his finger in
the page to keep the place, and his right arm flourishing above his
head, Traddles, as Mr. Pitt, Mr. Fox, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Burke, Lord
Castlereagh, Viscount Sidmouth, or Mr. Canning, would work himself
into the most violent heats, and deliver the most withering
denunciations of the profligacy and corruption of my aunt and Mr.
Dick; while I used to sit, at a little distance, with my notebook
on my knee, fagging after him with all my might and main.  The
inconsistency and recklessness of Traddles were not to be exceeded
by any real politician.  He was for any description of policy, in
the compass of a week; and nailed all sorts of colours to every
denomination of mast.  My aunt, looking very like an immovable
Chancellor of the Exchequer, would occasionally throw in an
interruption or two, as 'Hear!' or 'No!' or 'Oh!' when the text
seemed to require it: which was always a signal to Mr. Dick (a
perfect country gentleman) to follow lustily with the same cry. 
But Mr. Dick got taxed with such things in the course of his
Parliamentary career, and was made responsible for such awful
consequences, that he became uncomfortable in his mind sometimes. 
I believe he actually began to be afraid he really had been doing
something, tending to the annihilation of the British constitution,
and the ruin of the country.

Often and often we pursued these debates until the clock pointed to
midnight, and the candles were burning down.  The result of so much
good practice was, that by and by I began to keep pace with
Traddles pretty well, and should have been quite triumphant if I
had had the least idea what my notes were about.  But, as to
reading them after I had got them, I might as well have copied the
Chinese inscriptions of an immense collection of tea-chests, or the
golden characters on all the great red and green bottles in the
chemists' shops!

There was nothing for it, but to turn back and begin all over
again.  It was very hard, but I turned back, though with a heavy
heart, and began laboriously and methodically to plod over the same
tedious ground at a snail's pace; stopping to examine minutely
every speck in the way, on all sides, and making the most desperate
efforts to know these elusive characters by sight wherever I met
them.  I was always punctual at the office; at the Doctor's too:
and I really did work, as the common expression is, like a
cart-horse.
One day, when I went to the Commons as usual, I found Mr. Spenlow
in the doorway looking extremely grave, and talking to himself.  As
he was in the habit of complaining of pains in his head - he had
naturally a short throat, and I do seriously believe he
over-starched himself - I was at first alarmed by the idea that he
was not quite right in that direction; but he soon relieved my
uneasiness.

Instead of returning my 'Good morning' with his usual affability,
he looked at me in a distant, ceremonious manner, and coldly
requested me to accompany him to a certain coffee-house, which, in
those days, had a door opening into the Commons, just within the
little archway in St. Paul's Churchyard.  I complied, in a very
uncomfortable state, and with a warm shooting all over me, as if my
apprehensions were breaking out into buds.  When I allowed him to
go on a little before, on account of the narrowness of the way, I
observed that he carried his head with a lofty air that was
particularly unpromising; and my mind misgave me that he had found
out about my darling Dora.

If I had not guessed this, on the way to the coffee-house, I could
hardly have failed to know what was the matter when I followed him
into an upstairs room, and found Miss Murdstone there, supported by
a background of sideboard, on which were several inverted tumblers
sustaining lemons, and two of those extraordinary boxes, all
corners and flutings, for sticking knives and forks in, which,
happily for mankind, are now obsolete.

Miss Murdstone gave me her chilly finger-nails, and sat severely
rigid.  Mr. Spenlow shut the door, motioned me to a chair, and
stood on the hearth-rug in front of the fireplace.

'Have the goodness to show Mr. Copperfield,' said Mr. Spenlow, what
you have in your reticule, Miss Murdstone.'

I believe it was the old identical steel-clasped reticule of my
childhood, that shut up like a bite.  Compressing her lips, in
sympathy with the snap, Miss Murdstone opened it - opening her
mouth a little at the same time - and produced my last letter to
Dora, teeming with expressions of devoted affection.

'I believe that is your writing, Mr. Copperfield?' said Mr.
Spenlow.

I was very hot, and the voice I heard was very unlike mine, when I
said, 'It is, sir!'

'If I am not mistaken,' said Mr. Spenlow, as Miss Murdstone brought
a parcel of letters out of her reticule, tied round with the
dearest bit of blue ribbon, 'those are also from your pen, Mr.
Copperfield?'

I took them from her with a most desolate sensation; and, glancing
at such phrases at the top, as 'My ever dearest and own Dora,' 'My
best beloved angel,' 'My blessed one for ever,' and the like,
blushed deeply, and inclined my head.

'No, thank you!' said Mr. Spenlow, coldly, as I mechanically
offered them back to him.  'I will not deprive you of them.  Miss
Murdstone, be so good as to proceed!'

That gentle creature, after a moment's thoughtful survey of the
carpet, delivered herself with much dry unction as follows.

'I must confess to having entertained my suspicions of Miss
Spenlow, in reference to David Copperfield, for some time.  I
observed Miss Spenlow and David Copperfield, when they first met;
and the impression made upon me then was not agreeable.  The
depravity of the human heart is such -'

'You will oblige me, ma'am,' interrupted Mr. Spenlow, 'by confining
yourself to facts.'

Miss Murdstone cast down her eyes, shook her head as if protesting
against this unseemly interruption, and with frowning dignity
resumed:

'Since I am to confine myself to facts, I will state them as dryly
as I can.  Perhaps that will be considered an acceptable course of
proceeding.  I have already said, sir, that I have had my
suspicions of Miss Spenlow, in reference to David Copperfield, for
some time.  I have frequently endeavoured to find decisive
corroboration of those suspicions, but without effect.  I have
therefore forborne to mention them to Miss Spenlow's father';
looking severely at him- 'knowing how little disposition there
usually is in such cases, to acknowledge the conscientious
discharge of duty.'

Mr. Spenlow seemed quite cowed by the gentlemanly sternness of Miss
Murdstone's manner, and deprecated her severity with a conciliatory
little wave of his hand.

'On my return to Norwood, after the period of absence occasioned by
my brother's marriage,' pursued Miss Murdstone in a disdainful
voice, 'and on the return of Miss Spenlow from her visit to her
friend Miss Mills, I imagined that the manner of Miss Spenlow gave
me greater occasion for suspicion than before.  Therefore I watched
Miss Spenlow closely.'

Dear, tender little Dora, so unconscious of this Dragon's eye!

'Still,' resumed Miss Murdstone, 'I found no proof until last
night.  It appeared to me that Miss Spenlow received too many
letters from her friend Miss Mills; but Miss Mills being her friend
with her father's full concurrence,' another telling blow at Mr.
Spenlow, 'it was not for me to interfere.  If I may not be
permitted to allude to the natural depravity of the human heart, at
least I may - I must - be permitted, so far to refer to misplaced
confidence.'

Mr. Spenlow apologetically murmured his assent.

'Last evening after tea,' pursued Miss Murdstone, 'I observed the
little dog starting, rolling, and growling about the drawing-room,
worrying something.  I said to Miss Spenlow, "Dora, what is that
the dog has in his mouth?  It's paper." Miss Spenlow immediately
put her hand to her frock, gave a sudden cry, and ran to the dog. 
I interposed, and said, "Dora, my love, you must permit me." '

Oh Jip, miserable Spaniel, this wretchedness, then, was your work!

'Miss Spenlow endeavoured,' said Miss Murdstone, 'to bribe me with
kisses, work-boxes, and small articles of jewellery - that, of
course, I pass over.  The little dog retreated under the sofa on my
approaching him, and was with great difficulty dislodged by the
fire-irons.  Even when dislodged, he still kept the letter in his
mouth; and on my endeavouring to take it from him, at the imminent
risk of being bitten, he kept it between his teeth so
pertinaciously as to suffer himself to be held suspended in the air
by means of the document.  At length I obtained possession of it. 
After perusing it, I taxed Miss Spenlow with having many such
letters in her possession; and ultimately obtained from her the
packet which is now in David Copperfield's hand.'

Here she ceased; and snapping her reticule again, and shutting her
mouth, looked as if she might be broken, but could never be bent.

'You have heard Miss Murdstone,' said Mr. Spenlow, turning to me. 
'I beg to ask, Mr. Copperfield, if you have anything to say in
reply?'

The picture I had before me, of the beautiful little treasure of my
heart, sobbing and crying all night - of her being alone,
frightened, and wretched, then - of her having so piteously begged
and prayed that stony-hearted woman to forgive her - of her having
vainly offered her those kisses, work-boxes, and trinkets - of her
being in such grievous distress, and all for me - very much
impaired the little dignity I had been able to muster.  I am afraid
I was in a tremulous state for a minute or so, though I did my best
to disguise it.

'There is nothing I can say, sir,' I returned, 'except that all the
blame is mine.  Dora -'

'Miss Spenlow, if you please,' said her father, majestically.

'- was induced and persuaded by me,' I went on, swallowing that
colder designation, 'to consent to this concealment, and I bitterly
regret it.'

'You are very much to blame, sir,' said Mr. Spenlow, walking to and
fro upon the hearth-rug, and emphasizing what he said with his
whole body instead of his head, on account of the stiffness of his
cravat and spine.  'You have done a stealthy and unbecoming action,
Mr. Copperfield.  When I take a gentleman to my house, no matter
whether he is nineteen, twenty-nine, or ninety, I take him there in
a spirit of confidence.  If he abuses my confidence, he commits a
dishonourable action, Mr. Copperfield.'

'I feel it, sir, I assure you,' I returned.  'But I never thought
so, before.  Sincerely, honestly, indeed, Mr. Spenlow, I never
thought so, before.  I love Miss Spenlow to that extent -'

'Pooh! nonsense!' said Mr. Spenlow, reddening.  'Pray don't tell me
to my face that you love my daughter, Mr. Copperfield!'

'Could I defend my conduct if I did not, sir?' I returned, with all
humility.

'Can you defend your conduct if you do, sir?' said Mr. Spenlow,
stopping short upon the hearth-rug.  'Have you considered your
years, and my daughter's years, Mr. Copperfield?  Have you
considered what it is to undermine the confidence that should
subsist between my daughter and myself?  Have you considered my
daughter's station in life, the projects I may contemplate for her
advancement, the testamentary intentions I may have with reference
to her?  Have you considered anything, Mr. Copperfield?'

'Very little, sir, I am afraid;' I answered, speaking to him as
respectfully and sorrowfully as I felt; 'but pray believe me, I
have considered my own worldly position.  When I explained it to
you, we were already engaged -'

'I BEG,' said Mr. Spenlow, more like Punch than I had ever seen
him, as he energetically struck one hand upon the other - I could
not help noticing that even in my despair; 'that YOU Will NOT talk
to me of engagements, Mr. Copperfield!'

The otherwise immovable Miss Murdstone laughed contemptuously in
one short syllable.

'When I explained my altered position to you, sir,' I began again,
substituting a new form of expression for what was so unpalatable
to him, 'this concealment, into which I am so unhappy as to have
led Miss Spenlow, had begun.  Since I have been in that altered
position, I have strained every nerve, I have exerted every energy,
to improve it.  I am sure I shall improve it in time.  Will you
grant me time - any length of time?  We are both so young, sir, -'

'You are right,' interrupted Mr. Spenlow, nodding his head a great
many times, and frowning very much, 'you are both very young.  It's
all nonsense.  Let there be an end of the nonsense.  Take away
those letters, and throw them in the fire.  Give me Miss Spenlow's
letters to throw in the fire; and although our future intercourse
must, you are aware, be restricted to the Commons here, we will
agree to make no further mention of the past.  Come, Mr.
Copperfield, you don't want sense; and this is the sensible
course.'

No.  I couldn't think of agreeing to it.  I was very sorry, but
there was a higher consideration than sense.  Love was above all
earthly considerations, and I loved Dora to idolatry, and Dora
loved me.  I didn't exactly say so; I softened it down as much as
I could; but I implied it, and I was resolute upon it.  I don't
think I made myself very ridiculous, but I know I was resolute.

'Very well, Mr. Copperfield,' said Mr. Spenlow, 'I must try my
influence with my daughter.'

Miss Murdstone, by an expressive sound, a long drawn respiration,
which was neither a sigh nor a moan, but was like both, gave it as
her opinion that he should have done this at first.

'I must try,' said Mr. Spenlow, confirmed by this support, 'my
influence with my daughter.  Do you decline to take those letters,
Mr. Copperfield?' For I had laid them on the table.

Yes.  I told him I hoped he would not think it wrong, but I
couldn't possibly take them from Miss Murdstone.

'Nor from me?' said Mr. Spenlow.

No, I replied with the profoundest respect; nor from him.

'Very well!' said Mr. Spenlow.

A silence succeeding, I was undecided whether to go or stay.  At
length I was moving quietly towards the door, with the intention of
saying that perhaps I should consult his feelings best by
withdrawing: when he said, with his hands in his coat pockets, into
which it was as much as he could do to get them; and with what I
should call, upon the whole, a decidedly pious air:

'You are probably aware, Mr. Copperfield, that I am not altogether
destitute of worldly possessions, and that my daughter is my
nearest and dearest relative?'

I hurriedly made him a reply to the effect, that I hoped the error
into which I had been betrayed by the desperate nature of my love,
did not induce him to think me mercenary too?

'I don't allude to the matter in that light,' said Mr. Spenlow. 
'It would be better for yourself, and all of us, if you WERE
mercenary, Mr. Copperfield - I mean, if you were more discreet and
less influenced by all this youthful nonsense.  No.  I merely say,
with quite another view, you are probably aware I have some
property to bequeath to my child?'

I certainly supposed so.

'And you can hardly think,' said Mr. Spenlow, 'having experience of
what we see, in the Commons here, every day, of the various
unaccountable and negligent proceedings of men, in respect of their
testamentary arrangements - of all subjects, the one on which
perhaps the strangest revelations of human inconsistency are to be
met with - but that mine are made?'

I inclined my head in acquiescence.

'I should not allow,' said Mr. Spenlow, with an evident increase of
pious sentiment, and slowly shaking his head as he poised himself
upon his toes and heels alternately, 'my suitable provision for my
child to be influenced by a piece of youthful folly like the
present.  It is mere folly.  Mere nonsense.  In a little while, it
will weigh lighter than any feather.  But I might - I might - if
this silly business were not completely relinquished altogether, be
induced in some anxious moment to guard her from, and surround her
with protections against, the consequences of any foolish step in
the way of marriage.  Now, Mr. Copperfield, I hope that you will
not render it necessary for me to open, even for a quarter of an
hour, that closed page in the book of life, and unsettle, even for
a quarter of an hour, grave affairs long since composed.'

There was a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air about him,
which quite affected me.  He was so peaceful and resigned - clearly
had his affairs in such perfect train, and so systematically wound
up - that he was a man to feel touched in the contemplation of.  I
really think I saw tears rise to his eyes, from the depth of his
own feeling of all this.

But what could I do?  I could not deny Dora and my own heart.  When
he told me I had better take a week to consider of what he had
said, how could I say I wouldn't take a week, yet how could I fail
to know that no amount of weeks could influence such love as mine?

'In the meantime, confer with Miss Trotwood, or with any person
with any knowledge of life,' said Mr. Spenlow, adjusting his cravat
with both hands.  'Take a week, Mr. Copperfield.'

I submitted; and, with a countenance as expressive as I was able to
make it of dejected and despairing constancy, came out of the room. 
Miss Murdstone's heavy eyebrows followed me to the door - I say her
eyebrows rather than her eyes, because they were much more
important in her face - and she looked so exactly as she used to
look, at about that hour of the morning, in our parlour at
Blunderstone, that I could have fancied I had been breaking down in
my lessons again, and that the dead weight on my mind was that
horrible old spelling-book, with oval woodcuts, shaped, to my
youthful fancy, like the glasses out of spectacles.

When I got to the office, and, shutting out old Tiffey and the rest
of them with my hands, sat at my desk, in my own particular nook,
thinking of this earthquake that had taken place so unexpectedly,
and in the bitterness of my spirit cursing Jip, I fell into such a
state of torment about Dora, that I wonder I did not take up my hat
and rush insanely to Norwood.  The idea of their frightening her,
and making her cry, and of my not being there to comfort her, was
so excruciating, that it impelled me to write a wild letter to Mr.
Spenlow, beseeching him not to visit upon her the consequences of
my awful destiny.  I implored him to spare her gentle nature - not
to crush a fragile flower - and addressed him generally, to the
best of my remembrance, as if, instead of being her father, he had
been an Ogre, or the Dragon of Wantley.3 This letter I sealed and
laid upon his desk before he returned; and when he came in, I saw
him, through the half-opened door of his room, take it up and read
it.

He said nothing about it all the morning; but before he went away
in the afternoon he called me in, and told me that I need not make
myself at all uneasy about his daughter's happiness.  He had
assured her, he said, that it was all nonsense; and he had nothing
more to say to her.  He believed he was an indulgent father (as
indeed he was), and I might spare myself any solicitude on her
account.

'You may make it necessary, if you are foolish or obstinate, Mr.
Copperfield,' he observed, 'for me to send my daughter abroad
again, for a term; but I have a better opinion of you.  I hope you
will be wiser than that, in a few days.  As to Miss Murdstone,' for
I had alluded to her in the letter, 'I respect that lady's
vigilance, and feel obliged to her; but she has strict charge to
avoid the subject.  All I desire, Mr. Copperfield, is, that it
should be forgotten.  All you have got to do, Mr. Copperfield, is
to forget it.'

All!  In the note I wrote to Miss Mills, I bitterly quoted this
sentiment.  All I had to do, I said, with gloomy sarcasm, was to
forget Dora.  That was all, and what was that!  I entreated Miss
Mills to see me, that evening.  If it could not be done with Mr.
Mills's sanction and concurrence, I besought a clandestine
interview in the back kitchen where the Mangle was.  I informed her
that my reason was tottering on its throne, and only she, Miss
Mills, could prevent its being deposed.  I signed myself, hers
distractedly; and I couldn't help feeling, while I read this
composition over, before sending it by a porter, that it was
something in the style of Mr. Micawber.

However, I sent it.  At night I repaired to Miss Mills's street,
and walked up and down, until I was stealthily fetched in by Miss
Mills's maid, and taken the area way to the back kitchen.  I have
since seen reason to believe that there was nothing on earth to
prevent my going in at the front door, and being shown up into the
drawing-room, except Miss Mills's love of the romantic and
mysterious.

In the back kitchen, I raved as became me.  I went there, I
suppose, to make a fool of myself, and I am quite sure I did it. 
Miss Mills had received a hasty note from Dora, telling her that
all was discovered, and saying.  'Oh pray come to me, Julia, do,
do!' But Miss Mills, mistrusting the acceptability of her presence
to the higher powers, had not yet gone; and we were all benighted
in the Desert of Sahara.

Miss Mills had a wonderful flow of words, and liked to pour them
out.  I could not help feeling, though she mingled her tears with
mine, that she had a dreadful luxury in our afflictions.  She
petted them, as I may say, and made the most of them.  A deep gulf,
she observed, had opened between Dora and me, and Love could only
span it with its rainbow.  Love must suffer in this stern world; it
ever had been so, it ever would be so.  No matter, Miss Mills
remarked.  Hearts confined by cobwebs would burst at last, and then
Love was avenged.

This was small consolation, but Miss Mills wouldn't encourage
fallacious hopes.  She made me much more wretched than I was
before, and I felt (and told her with the deepest gratitude) that
she was indeed a friend.  We resolved that she should go to Dora
the first thing in the morning, and find some means of assuring
her, either by looks or words, of my devotion and misery.  We
parted, overwhelmed with grief; and I think Miss Mills enjoyed
herself completely.

I confided all to my aunt when I got home; and in spite of all she
could say to me, went to bed despairing.  I got up despairing, and
went out despairing.  It was Saturday morning, and I went straight
to the Commons.

I was surprised, when I came within sight of our office-door, to
see the ticket-porters standing outside talking together, and some
half-dozen stragglers gazing at the windows which were shut up.  I
quickened my pace, and, passing among them, wondering at their
looks, went hurriedly in.

The clerks were there, but nobody was doing anything.  Old Tiffey,
for the first time in his life I should think, was sitting on
somebody else's stool, and had not hung up his hat.

'This is a dreadful calamity, Mr. Copperfield,' said he, as I
entered.

'What is?' I exclaimed.  'What's the matter?'

'Don't you know?' cried Tiffey, and all the rest of them, coming
round me.

'No!' said I, looking from face to face.

'Mr. Spenlow,' said Tiffey.

'What about him!'

'Dead!'
I thought it was the office reeling, and not I, as one of the
clerks caught hold of me.  They sat me down in a chair, untied my
neck-cloth, and brought me some water.  I have no idea whether this
took any time.

'Dead?' said I.

'He dined in town yesterday, and drove down in the phaeton by
himself,' said Tiffey, 'having sent his own groom home by the
coach, as he sometimes did, you know -'

'Well?'

'The phaeton went home without him.  The horses stopped at the
stable-gate.  The man went out with a lantern.  Nobody in the
carriage.'

'Had they run away?'

'They were not hot,' said Tiffey, putting on his glasses; 'no
hotter, I understand, than they would have been, going down at the
usual pace.  The reins were broken, but they had been dragging on
the ground.  The house was roused up directly, and three of them
went out along the road.  They found him a mile off.'

'More than a mile off, Mr. Tiffey,' interposed a junior.

'Was it?  I believe you are right,' said Tiffey, - 'more than a
mile off - not far from the church - lying partly on the roadside,
and partly on the path, upon his face.  Whether he fell out in a
fit, or got out, feeling ill before the fit came on - or even
whether he was quite dead then, though there is no doubt he was
quite insensible - no one appears to know.  If he breathed,
certainly he never spoke.  Medical assistance was got as soon as
possible, but it was quite useless.'

I cannot describe the state of mind into which I was thrown by this
intelligence.  The shock of such an event happening so suddenly,
and happening to one with whom I had been in any respect at
variance - the appalling vacancy in the room he had occupied so
lately, where his chair and table seemed to wait for him, and his
handwriting of yesterday was like a ghost - the in- definable
impossibility of separating him from the place, and feeling, when
the door opened, as if he might come in - the lazy hush and rest
there was in the office, and the insatiable relish with which our
people talked about it, and other people came in and out all day,
and gorged themselves with the subject - this is easily
intelligible to anyone.  What I cannot describe is, how, in the
innermost recesses of my own heart, I had a lurking jealousy even
of Death.  How I felt as if its might would push me from my ground
in Dora's thoughts.  How I was, in a grudging way I have no words
for, envious of her grief.  How it made me restless to think of her
weeping to others, or being consoled by others.  How I had a
grasping, avaricious wish to shut out everybody from her but
myself, and to be all in all to her, at that unseasonable time of
all times.

In the trouble of this state of mind - not exclusively my own, I
hope, but known to others - I went down to Norwood that night; and
finding from one of the servants, when I made my inquiries at the
door, that Miss Mills was there, got my aunt to direct a letter to
her, which I wrote.  I deplored the untimely death of Mr. Spenlow,
most sincerely, and shed tears in doing so.  I entreated her to
tell Dora, if Dora were in a state to hear it, that he had spoken
to me with the utmost kindness and consideration; and had coupled
nothing but tenderness, not a single or reproachful word, with her
name.  I know I did this selfishly, to have my name brought before
her; but I tried to believe it was an act of justice to his memory. 
Perhaps I did believe it.

My aunt received a few lines next day in reply; addressed, outside,
to her; within, to me.  Dora was overcome by grief; and when her
friend had asked her should she send her love to me, had only
cried, as she was always crying, 'Oh, dear papa! oh, poor papa!'
But she had not said No, and that I made the most of.

Mr. jorkins, who had been at Norwood since the occurrence, came to
the office a few days afterwards.  He and Tiffey were closeted
together for some few moments, and then Tiffey looked out at the
door and beckoned me in.

'Oh!' said Mr. jorkins.  'Mr. Tiffey and myself, Mr. Copperfield,
are about to examine the desks, the drawers, and other such
repositories of the deceased, with the view of sealing up his
private papers, and searching for a Will.  There is no trace of
any, elsewhere.  It may be as well for you to assist us, if you
please.'

I had been in agony to obtain some knowledge of the circumstances
in which my Dora would be placed - as, in whose guardianship, and
so forth - and this was something towards it.  We began the search
at once; Mr. jorkins unlocking the drawers and desks, and we all
taking out the papers.  The office-papers we placed on one side,
and the private papers (which were not numerous) on the other.  We
were very grave; and when we came to a stray seal, or pencil-case,
or ring, or any little article of that kind which we associated
personally with him, we spoke very low.

We had sealed up several packets; and were still going on dustily
and quietly, when Mr. jorkins said to us, applying exactly the same
words to his late partner as his late partner had applied to him:

'Mr. Spenlow was very difficult to move from the beaten track.  You
know what he was!  I am disposed to think he had made no will.'

'Oh, I know he had!' said I.

They both stopped and looked at me.
'On the very day when I last saw him,' said I, 'he told me that he
had, and that his affairs were long since settled.'

Mr. jorkins and old Tiffey shook their heads with one accord.

'That looks unpromising,' said Tiffey.

'Very unpromising,' said Mr. jorkins.

'Surely you don't doubt -' I began.

'My good Mr. Copperfield!' said Tiffey, laying his hand upon my
arm, and shutting up both his eyes as he shook his head: 'if you
had been in the Commons as long as I have, you would know that
there is no subject on which men are so inconsistent, and so little
to be trusted.'

'Why, bless my soul, he made that very remark!' I replied
persistently.

'I should call that almost final,' observed Tiffey.  'My opinion is
- no will.'

It appeared a wonderful thing to me, but it turned out that there
was no will.  He had never so much as thought of making one, so far
as his papers afforded any evidence; for there was no kind of hint,
sketch, or memorandum, of any testamentary intention whatever. 
What was scarcely less astonishing to me, was, that his affairs
were in a most disordered state.  It was extremely difficult, I
heard, to make out what he owed, or what he had paid, or of what he
died possessed.  It was considered likely that for years he could
have had no clear opinion on these subjects himself.  By little and
little it came out, that, in the competition on all points of
appearance and gentility then running high in the Commons, he had
spent more than his professional income, which was not a very large
one, and had reduced his private means, if they ever had been great
(which was exceedingly doubtful), to a very low ebb indeed.  There
was a sale of the furniture and lease, at Norwood; and Tiffey told
me, little thinking how interested I was in the story, that, paying
all the just debts of the deceased, and deducting his share of
outstanding bad and doubtful debts due to the firm, he wouldn't
give a thousand pounds for all the assets remaining.

This was at the expiration of about six weeks.  I had suffered
tortures all the time; and thought I really must have laid violent
hands upon myself, when Miss Mills still reported to me, that my
broken-hearted little Dora would say nothing, when I was mentioned,
but 'Oh, poor papa!  Oh, dear papa!' Also, that she had no other
relations than two aunts, maiden sisters of Mr. Spenlow, who lived
at Putney, and who had not held any other than chance communication
with their brother for many years.  Not that they had ever
quarrelled (Miss Mills informed me); but that having been, on the
occasion of Dora's christening, invited to tea, when they
considered themselves privileged to be invited to dinner, they had
expressed their opinion in writing, that it was 'better for the
happiness of all parties' that they should stay away.  Since which
they had gone their road, and their brother had gone his.

These two ladies now emerged from their retirement, and proposed to
take Dora to live at Putney.  Dora, clinging to them both, and
weeping, exclaimed, 'O yes, aunts!  Please take Julia Mills and me
and Jip to Putney!' So they went, very soon after the funeral.

How I found time to haunt Putney, I am sure I don't know; but I
contrived, by some means or other, to prowl about the neighbourhood
pretty often.  Miss Mills, for the more exact discharge of the
duties of friendship, kept a journal; and she used to meet me
sometimes, on the Common, and read it, or (if she had not time to
do that) lend it to me.  How I treasured up the entries, of which
I subjoin a sample! -

'Monday.  My sweet D. still much depressed.  Headache.  Called
attention to J. as being beautifully sleek.  D. fondled J. 
Associations thus awakened, opened floodgates of sorrow.  Rush of
grief admitted.  (Are tears the dewdrops of the heart?  J. M.)

'Tuesday.  D. weak and nervous.  Beautiful in pallor.  (Do we not
remark this in moon likewise?  J. M.) D., J. M. and J. took airing
in carriage.  J. looking out of window, and barking violently at
dustman, occasioned smile to overspread features of D.  (Of such
slight links is chain of life composed! J. M.)

'Wednesday.  D. comparatively cheerful.  Sang to her, as congenial
melody, "Evening Bells".  Effect not soothing, but reverse.  D.
inexpressibly affected.  Found sobbing afterwards, in own room. 
Quoted verses respecting self and young Gazelle.  Ineffectually. 
Also referred to Patience on Monument.  (Qy.  Why on monument?  J.
M.)

'Thursday.  D. certainly improved.  Better night.  Slight tinge of
damask revisiting cheek.  Resolved to mention name of D. C. 
Introduced same, cautiously, in course of airing.  D. immediately
overcome.  "Oh, dear, dear Julia!  Oh, I have been a naughty and
undutiful child!" Soothed and caressed.  Drew ideal picture of D.
C. on verge of tomb.  D. again overcome.  "Oh, what shall I do,
what shall I do?  Oh, take me somewhere!" Much alarmed.  Fainting
of D. and glass of water from public-house.  (Poetical affinity. 
Chequered sign on door-post; chequered human life.  Alas!  J. M.)

'Friday.  Day of incident.  Man appears in kitchen, with blue bag,
"for lady's boots left out to heel".  Cook replies, "No such
orders." Man argues point.  Cook withdraws to inquire, leaving man
alone with J.  On Cook's return, man still argues point, but
ultimately goes.  J. missing.  D. distracted.  Information sent to
police.  Man to be identified by broad nose, and legs like
balustrades of bridge.  Search made in every direction.  No J.  D.
weeping bitterly, and inconsolable.  Renewed reference to young
Gazelle.  Appropriate, but unavailing.  Towards evening, strange
boy calls.  Brought into parlour.  Broad nose, but no balustrades. 
Says he wants a pound, and knows a dog.  Declines to explain
further, though much pressed.  Pound being produced by D. takes
Cook to little house, where J. alone tied up to leg of table.  joy
of D. who dances round J. while he eats his supper.  Emboldened by
this happy change, mention D. C. upstairs.  D. weeps afresh, cries
piteously, "Oh, don't, don't, don't!  It is so wicked to think of
anything but poor papa!" - embraces J.  and sobs herself to sleep. 
(Must not D. C. confine himself to the broad pinions of Time?  J.
M.)'

Miss Mills and her journal were my sole consolation at this period. 
To see her, who had seen Dora but a little while before - to trace
the initial letter of Dora's name through her sympathetic pages -
to be made more and more miserable by her - were my only comforts. 
I felt as if I had been living in a palace of cards, which had
tumbled down, leaving only Miss Mills and me among the ruins; I
felt as if some grim enchanter had drawn a magic circle round the
innocent goddess of my heart, which nothing indeed but those same
strong pinions, capable of carrying so many people over so much,
would enable me to enter!



CHAPTER 39
WICKFIELD AND HEEP


My aunt, beginning, I imagine, to be made seriously uncomfortable
by my prolonged dejection, made a pretence of being anxious that I
should go to Dover, to see that all was working well at the
cottage, which was let; and to conclude an agreement, with the same
tenant, for a longer term of occupation.  Janet was drafted into
the service of Mrs. Strong, where I saw her every day.  She had
been undecided, on leaving Dover, whether or no to give the
finishing touch to that renunciation of mankind in which she had
been educated, by marrying a pilot; but she decided against that
venture.  Not so much for the sake of principle, I believe, as
because she happened not to like him.

Although it required an effort to leave Miss Mills, I fell rather
willingly into my aunt's pretence, as a means of enabling me to
pass a few tranquil hours with Agnes.  I consulted the good Doctor
relative to an absence of three days; and the Doctor wishing me to
take that relaxation, - he wished me to take more; but my energy
could not bear that, - I made up my mind to go.

As to the Commons, I had no great occasion to be particular about
my duties in that quarter.  To say the truth, we were getting in no
very good odour among the tip-top proctors, and were rapidly
sliding down to but a doubtful position.  The business had been
indifferent under Mr. jorkins, before Mr. Spenlow's time; and
although it had been quickened by the infusion of new blood, and by
the display which Mr. Spenlow made, still it was not established on
a sufficiently strong basis to bear, without being shaken, such a
blow as the sudden loss of its active manager.  It fell off very
much.  Mr. jorkins, notwithstanding his reputation in the firm, was
an easy-going, incapable sort of man, whose reputation out of doors
was not calculated to back it up.  I was turned over to him now,
and when I saw him take his snuff and let the business go, I
regretted my aunt's thousand pounds more than ever.

But this was not the worst of it.  There were a number of
hangers-on and outsiders about the Commons, who, without being
proctors themselves, dabbled in common-form business, and got it
done by real proctors, who lent their names in consideration of a
share in the spoil; - and there were a good many of these too.  As
our house now wanted business on any terms, we joined this noble
band; and threw out lures to the hangers-on and outsiders, to bring
their business to us.  Marriage licences and small probates were
what we all looked for, and what paid us best; and the competition
for these ran very high indeed.  Kidnappers and inveiglers were
planted in all the avenues of entrance to the Commons, with
instructions to do their utmost to cut off all persons in mourning,
and all gentlemen with anything bashful in their appearance, and
entice them to the offices in which their respective employers were
interested; which instructions were so well observed, that I
myself, before I was known by sight, was twice hustled into the
premises of our principal opponent.  The conflicting interests of
these touting gentlemen being of a nature to irritate their
feelings, personal collisions took place; and the Commons was even
scandalized by our principal inveigler (who had formerly been in
the wine trade, and afterwards in the sworn brokery line) walking
about for some days with a black eye.  Any one of these scouts used
to think nothing of politely assisting an old lady in black out of
a vehicle, killing any proctor whom she inquired for, representing
his employer as the lawful successor and representative of that
proctor, and bearing the old lady off (sometimes greatly affected)
to his employer's office.  Many captives were brought to me in this
way.  As to marriage licences, the competition rose to such a
pitch, that a shy gentleman in want of one, had nothing to do but
submit himself to the first inveigler, or be fought for, and become
the prey of the strongest.  One of our clerks, who was an outsider,
used, in the height of this contest, to sit with his hat on, that
he might be ready to rush out and swear before a surrogate any
victim who was brought in.  The system of inveigling continues, I
believe, to this day.  The last time I was in the Commons, a civil
able-bodied person in a white apron pounced out upon me from a
doorway, and whispering the word 'Marriage-licence' in my ear, was
with great difficulty prevented from taking me up in his arms and
lifting me into a proctor's.  From this digression, let me proceed
to Dover.

I found everything in a satisfactory state at the cottage; and was
enabled to gratify my aunt exceedingly by reporting that the tenant
inherited her feud, and waged incessant war against donkeys. 
Having settled the little business I had to transact there, and
slept there one night, I walked on to Canterbury early in the
morning.  It was now winter again; and the fresh, cold windy day,
and the sweeping downland, brightened up my hopes a little.

Coming into Canterbury, I loitered through the old streets with a
sober pleasure that calmed my spirits, and eased my heart.  There
were the old signs, the old names over the shops, the old people
serving in them.  It appeared so long, since I had been a schoolboy
there, that I wondered the place was so little changed, until I
reflected how little I was changed myself.  Strange to say, that
quiet influence which was inseparable in my mind from Agnes, seemed
to pervade even the city where she dwelt.  The venerable cathedral
towers, and the old jackdaws and rooks whose airy voices made them
more retired than perfect silence would have done; the battered
gateways, one stuck full with statues, long thrown down, and
crumbled away, like the reverential pilgrims who had gazed upon
them; the still nooks, where the ivied growth of centuries crept
over gabled ends and ruined walls; the ancient houses, the pastoral
landscape of field, orchard, and garden; everywhere - on everything
- I felt the same serener air, the same calm, thoughtful, softening
spirit.

Arrived at Mr. Wickfield's house, I found, in the little lower room
on the ground floor, where Uriah Heep had been of old accustomed to
sit, Mr. Micawber plying his pen with great assiduity.  He was
dressed in a legal-looking suit of black, and loomed, burly and
large, in that small office.

Mr. Micawber was extremely glad to see me, but a little confused
too.  He would have conducted me immediately into the presence of
Uriah, but I declined.

'I know the house of old, you recollect,' said I, 'and will find my
way upstairs.  How do you like the law, Mr. Micawber?'

'My dear Copperfield,' he replied.  'To a man possessed of the
higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the
amount of detail which they involve.  Even in our professional
correspondence,' said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was
writing, 'the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of
expression.  Still, it is a great pursuit.  A great pursuit!'

He then told me that he had become the tenant of Uriah Heep's old
house; and that Mrs. Micawber would be delighted to receive me,
once more, under her own roof.

'It is humble,' said Mr. Micawber, '- to quote a favourite
expression of my friend Heep; but it may prove the stepping-stone
to more ambitious domiciliary accommodation.'

I asked him whether he had reason, so far, to be satisfied with his
friend Heep's treatment of him?  He got up to ascertain if the door
were close shut, before he replied, in a lower voice:

'My dear Copperfield, a man who labours under the pressure of
pecuniary embarrassments, is, with the generality of people, at a
disadvantage.  That disadvantage is not diminished, when that
pressure necessitates the drawing of stipendiary emoluments, before
those emoluments are strictly due and payable.  All I can say is,
that my friend Heep has responded to appeals to which I need not
more particularly refer, in a manner calculated to redound equally
to the honour of his head, and of his heart.'

'I should not have supposed him to be very free with his money
either,' I observed.

'Pardon me!' said Mr. Micawber, with an air of constraint, 'I speak
of my friend Heep as I have experience.'

'I am glad your experience is so favourable,' I returned.

'You are very obliging, my dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber;
and hummed a tune.

'Do you see much of Mr. Wickfield?' I asked, to change the subject.

'Not much,' said Mr. Micawber, slightingly.  'Mr. Wickfield is, I
dare say, a man of very excellent intentions; but he is - in short,
he is obsolete.'

'I am afraid his partner seeks to make him so,' said I.

'My dear Copperfield!' returned Mr. Micawber, after some uneasy
evolutions on his stool, 'allow me to offer a remark!  I am here,
in a capacity of confidence.  I am here, in a position of trust. 
The discussion of some topics, even with Mrs. Micawber herself (so
long the partner of my various vicissitudes, and a woman of a
remarkable lucidity of intellect), is, I am led to consider,
incompatible with the functions now devolving on me.  I would
therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in our friendly
intercourse - which I trust will never be disturbed! - we draw a
line.  On one side of this line,' said Mr. Micawber, representing
it on the desk with the office ruler, 'is the whole range of the
human intellect, with a trifling exception; on the other, IS that
exception; that is to say, the affairs of Messrs Wickfield and
Heep, with all belonging and appertaining thereunto.  I trust I
give no offence to the companion of my youth, in submitting this
proposition to his cooler judgement?'

Though I saw an uneasy change in Mr. Micawber, which sat tightly on
him, as if his new duties were a misfit, I felt I had no right to
be offended.  My telling him so, appeared to relieve him; and he
shook hands with me.

'I am charmed, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'let me assure you,
with Miss Wickfield.  She is a very superior young lady, of very
remarkable attractions, graces, and virtues.  Upon my honour,' said
Mr. Micawber, indefinitely kissing his hand and bowing with his
genteelest air, 'I do Homage to Miss Wickfield!  Hem!'
'I am glad of that, at least,' said I.

'If you had not assured us, my dear Copperfield, on the occasion of
that agreeable afternoon we had the happiness of passing with you,
that D. was your favourite letter,' said Mr. Micawber, 'I should
unquestionably have supposed that A. had been so.'

We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us
occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and
done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim
ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances - of our
knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly
remembered it!  I never had this mysterious impression more
strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.

I took my leave of Mr. Micawber, for the time, charging him with my
best remembrances to all at home.  As I left him, resuming his
stool and his pen, and rolling his head in his stock, to get it
into easier writing order, I clearly perceived that there was
something interposed between him and me, since he had come into his
new functions, which prevented our getting at each other as we used
to do, and quite altered the character of our intercourse.

There was no one in the quaint old drawing-room, though it
presented tokens of Mrs. Heep's whereabouts.  I looked into the
room still belonging to Agnes, and saw her sitting by the fire, at
a pretty old-fashioned desk she had, writing.

My darkening the light made her look up.  What a pleasure to be the
cause of that bright change in her attentive face, and the object
of that sweet regard and welcome!

'Ah, Agnes!' said I, when we were sitting together, side by side;
'I have missed you so much, lately!'

'Indeed?' she replied.  'Again!  And so soon?'

I shook my head.

'I don't know how it is, Agnes; I seem to want some faculty of mind
that I ought to have.  You were so much in the habit of thinking
for me, in the happy old days here, and I came so naturally to you
for counsel and support, that I really think I have missed
acquiring it.'

'And what is it?' said Agnes, cheerfully.

'I don't know what to call it,' I replied.  'I think I am earnest
and persevering?'

'I am sure of it,' said Agnes.

'And patient, Agnes?' I inquired, with a little hesitation.

'Yes,' returned Agnes, laughing.  'Pretty well.'

'And yet,' said I, 'I get so miserable and worried, and am so
unsteady and irresolute in my power of assuring myself, that I know
I must want - shall I call it - reliance, of some kind?'

'Call it so, if you will,' said Agnes.

'Well!' I returned.  'See here!  You come to London, I rely on you,
and I have an object and a course at once.  I am driven out of it,
I come here, and in a moment I feel an altered person.  The
circumstances that distressed me are not changed, since I came into
this room; but an influence comes over me in that short interval
that alters me, oh, how much for the better!  What is it?  What is
your secret, Agnes?'

Her head was bent down, looking at the fire.

'It's the old story,' said I.  'Don't laugh, when I say it was
always the same in little things as it is in greater ones.  My old
troubles were nonsense, and now they are serious; but whenever I
have gone away from my adopted sister -'

Agnes looked up - with such a Heavenly face! - and gave me her
hand, which I kissed.

'Whenever I have not had you, Agnes, to advise and approve in the
beginning, I have seemed to go wild, and to get into all sorts of
difficulty.  When I have come to you, at last (as I have always
done), I have come to peace and happiness.  I come home, now, like
a tired traveller, and find such a blessed sense of rest!'

I felt so deeply what I said, it affected me so sincerely, that my
voice failed, and I covered my face with my hand, and broke into
tears.  I write the truth.  Whatever contradictions and
inconsistencies there were within me, as there are within so many
of us; whatever might have been so different, and so much better;
whatever I had done, in which I had perversely wandered away from
the voice of my own heart; I knew nothing of.  I only knew that I
was fervently in earnest, when I felt the rest and peace of having
Agnes near me.

In her placid sisterly manner; with her beaming eyes; with her
tender voice; and with that sweet composure, which had long ago
made the house that held her quite a sacred place to me; she soon
won me from this weakness, and led me on to tell all that had
happened since our last meeting.

'And there is not another word to tell, Agnes,' said I, when I had
made an end of my confidence.  'Now, my reliance is on you.'

'But it must not be on me, Trotwood,' returned Agnes, with a
pleasant smile.  'It must be on someone else.'

'On Dora?' said I.

'Assuredly.'

'Why, I have not mentioned, Agnes,' said I, a little embarrassed,
'that Dora is rather difficult to - I would not, for the world,
say, to rely upon, because she is the soul of purity and truth -
but rather difficult to - I hardly know how to express it, really,
Agnes.  She is a timid little thing, and easily disturbed and
frightened.  Some time ago, before her father's death, when I
thought it right to mention to her - but I'll tell you, if you will
bear with me, how it was.'

Accordingly, I told Agnes about my declaration of poverty, about
the cookery-book, the housekeeping accounts, and all the rest of
it.

'Oh, Trotwood!' she remonstrated, with a smile.  'Just your old
headlong way!  You might have been in earnest in striving to get on
in the world, without being so very sudden with a timid, loving,
inexperienced girl.  Poor Dora!'

I never heard such sweet forbearing kindness expressed in a voice,
as she expressed in making this reply.  It was as if I had seen her
admiringly and tenderly embracing Dora, and tacitly reproving me,
by her considerate protection, for my hot haste in fluttering that
little heart.  It was as if I had seen Dora, in all her fascinating
artlessness, caressing Agnes, and thanking her, and coaxingly
appealing against me, and loving me with all her childish
innocence.

I felt so grateful to Agnes, and admired her so!  I saw those two
together, in a bright perspective, such well-associated friends,
each adorning the other so much!

'What ought I to do then, Agnes?' I inquired, after looking at the
fire a little while.  'What would it be right to do?'

'I think,' said Agnes, 'that the honourable course to take, would
be to write to those two ladies.  Don't you think that any secret
course is an unworthy one?'

'Yes.  If YOU think so,' said I.

'I am poorly qualified to judge of such matters,' replied Agnes,
with a modest hesitation, 'but I certainly feel - in short, I feel
that your being secret and clandestine, is not being like
yourself.'

'Like myself, in the too high opinion you have of me, Agnes, I am
afraid,' said I.

'Like yourself, in the candour of your nature,' she returned; 'and
therefore I would write to those two ladies.  I would relate, as
plainly and as openly as possible, all that has taken place; and I
would ask their permission to visit sometimes, at their house. 
Considering that you are young, and striving for a place in life,
I think it would be well to say that you would readily abide by any
conditions they might impose upon you.  I would entreat them not to
dismiss your request, without a reference to Dora; and to discuss
it with her when they should think the time suitable.  I would not
be too vehement,' said Agnes, gently, 'or propose too much.  I
would trust to my fidelity and perseverance - and to Dora.'

'But if they were to frighten Dora again, Agnes, by speaking to
her,' said I.  'And if Dora were to cry, and say nothing about me!'

'Is that likely?' inquired Agnes, with the same sweet consideration
in her face.

'God bless her, she is as easily scared as a bird,' said I.  'It
might be!  Or if the two Miss Spenlows (elderly ladies of that sort
are odd characters sometimes) should not be likely persons to
address in that way!'

'I don't think, Trotwood,' returned Agnes, raising her soft eyes to
mine, 'I would consider that.  Perhaps it would be better only to
consider whether it is right to do this; and, if it is, to do it.'

I had no longer any doubt on the subject.  With a lightened heart,
though with a profound sense of the weighty importance of my task,
I devoted the whole afternoon to the composition of the draft of
this letter; for which great purpose, Agnes relinquished her desk
to me.  But first I went downstairs to see Mr. Wickfield and Uriah
Heep.

I found Uriah in possession of a new, plaster-smelling office,
built out in the garden; looking extraordinarily mean, in the midst
of a quantity of books and papers.  He received me in his usual
fawning way, and pretended not to have heard of my arrival from Mr.
Micawber; a pretence I took the liberty of disbelieving.  He
accompanied me into Mr. Wickfield's room, which was the shadow of
its former self - having been divested of a variety of
conveniences, for the accommodation of the new partner - and stood
before the fire, warming his back, and shaving his chin with his
bony hand, while Mr. Wickfield and I exchanged greetings.

'You stay with us, Trotwood, while you remain in Canterbury?' said
Mr. Wickfield, not without a glance at Uriah for his approval.

'Is there room for me?' said I.

'I am sure, Master Copperfield - I should say Mister, but the other
comes so natural,' said Uriah, -'I would turn out of your old room
with pleasure, if it would be agreeable.'

'No, no,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'Why should you be inconvenienced? 
There's another room.  There's another room.'
'Oh, but you know,' returned Uriah, with a grin, 'I should really
be delighted!'

To cut the matter short, I said I would have the other room or none
at all; so it was settled that I should have the other room; and,
taking my leave of the firm until dinner, I went upstairs again.

I had hoped to have no other companion than Agnes.  But Mrs. Heep
had asked permission to bring herself and her knitting near the
fire, in that room; on pretence of its having an aspect more
favourable for her rheumatics, as the wind then was, than the
drawing-room or dining-parlour.  Though I could almost have
consigned her to the mercies of the wind on the topmost pinnacle of
the Cathedral, without remorse, I made a virtue of necessity, and
gave her a friendly salutation.

'I'm umbly thankful to you, sir,' said Mrs. Heep, in
acknowledgement of my inquiries concerning her health, 'but I'm
only pretty well.  I haven't much to boast of.  If I could see my
Uriah well settled in life, I couldn't expect much more I think. 
How do you think my Ury looking, sir?'

I thought him looking as villainous as ever, and I replied that I
saw no change in him.

'Oh, don't you think he's changed?' said Mrs. Heep.  'There I must
umbly beg leave to differ from you.  Don't you see a thinness in
him?'

'Not more than usual,' I replied.

'Don't you though!' said Mrs. Heep.  'But you don't take notice of
him with a mother's eye!'

His mother's eye was an evil eye to the rest of the world, I
thought as it met mine, howsoever affectionate to him; and I
believe she and her son were devoted to one another.  It passed me,
and went on to Agnes.

'Don't YOU see a wasting and a wearing in him, Miss Wickfield?'
inquired Mrs. Heep.

'No,' said Agnes, quietly pursuing the work on which she was
engaged.  'You are too solicitous about him.  He is very well.'

Mrs. Heep, with a prodigious sniff, resumed her knitting.

She never left off, or left us for a moment.  I had arrived early
in the day, and we had still three or four hours before dinner; but
she sat there, plying her knitting-needles as monotonously as an
hour-glass might have poured out its sands.  She sat on one side of
the fire; I sat at the desk in front of it; a little beyond me, on
the other side, sat Agnes.  Whensoever, slowly pondering over my
letter, I lifted up my eyes, and meeting the thoughtful face of
Agnes, saw it clear, and beam encouragement upon me, with its own
angelic expression, I was conscious presently of the evil eye
passing me, and going on to her, and coming back to me again, and
dropping furtively upon the knitting.  What the knitting was, I
don't know, not being learned in that art; but it looked like a
net; and as she worked away with those Chinese chopsticks of
knitting-needles, she showed in the firelight like an ill-looking
enchantress, baulked as yet by the radiant goodness opposite, but
getting ready for a cast of her net by and by.

At dinner she maintained her watch, with the same unwinking eyes. 
After dinner, her son took his turn; and when Mr. Wickfield,
himself, and I were left alone together, leered at me, and writhed
until I could hardly bear it.  In the drawing-room, there was the
mother knitting and watching again.  All the time that Agnes sang
and played, the mother sat at the piano.  Once she asked for a
particular ballad, which she said her Ury (who was yawning in a
great chair) doted on; and at intervals she looked round at him,
and reported to Agnes that he was in raptures with the music.  But
she hardly ever spoke - I question if she ever did - without making
some mention of him.  It was evident to me that this was the duty
assigned to her.

This lasted until bedtime.  To have seen the mother and son, like
two great bats hanging over the whole house, and darkening it with
their ugly forms, made me so uncomfortable, that I would rather
have remained downstairs, knitting and all, than gone to bed.  I
hardly got any sleep.  Next day the knitting and watching began
again, and lasted all day.

I had not an opportunity of speaking to Agnes, for ten minutes.  I
could barely show her my letter.  I proposed to her to walk out
with me; but Mrs. Heep repeatedly complaining that she was worse,
Agnes charitably remained within, to bear her company.  Towards the
twilight I went out by myself, musing on what I ought to do, and
whether I was justified in withholding from Agnes, any longer, what
Uriah Heep had told me in London; for that began to trouble me
again, very much.

I had not walked out far enough to be quite clear of the town, upon
the Ramsgate road, where there was a good path, when I was hailed,
through the dust, by somebody behind me.  The shambling figure, and
the scanty great-coat, were not to be mistaken.  I stopped, and
Uriah Heep came up.

'Well?' said I.

'How fast you walk!' said he.  'My legs are pretty long, but you've
given 'em quite a job.'

'Where are you going?' said I.

'I am going with you, Master Copperfield, if you'll allow me the
pleasure of a walk with an old acquaintance.'  Saying this, with a
jerk of his body, which might have been either propitiatory or
derisive, he fell into step beside me.

'Uriah!' said I, as civilly as I could, after a silence.

'Master Copperfield!' said Uriah.

'To tell you the truth (at which you will not be offended), I came
Out to walk alone, because I have had so much company.'

He looked at me sideways, and said with his hardest grin, 'You mean
mother.'

'Why yes, I do,' said I.

'Ah!  But you know we're so very umble,' he returned.  'And having
such a knowledge of our own umbleness, we must really take care
that we're not pushed to the wall by them as isn't umble.  All
stratagems are fair in love, sir.'

Raising his great hands until they touched his chin, he rubbed them
softly, and softly chuckled; looking as like a malevolent baboon,
I thought, as anything human could look.

'You see,' he said, still hugging himself in that unpleasant way,
and shaking his head at me, 'you're quite a dangerous rival, Master
Copperfield.  You always was, you know.'

'Do you set a watch upon Miss Wickfield, and make her home no home,
because of me?' said I.

'Oh! Master Copperfield!  Those are very arsh words,' he replied.

'Put my meaning into any words you like,' said I.  'You know what
it is, Uriah, as well as I do.'

'Oh no!  You must put it into words,' he said.  'Oh, really!  I
couldn't myself.'

'Do you suppose,' said I, constraining myself to be very temperate
and quiet with him, on account of Agnes, 'that I regard Miss
Wickfield otherwise than as a very dear sister?'

'Well, Master Copperfield,' he replied, 'you perceive I am not
bound to answer that question.  You may not, you know.  But then,
you see, you may!'

Anything to equal the low cunning of his visage, and of his
shadowless eyes without the ghost of an eyelash, I never saw.

'Come then!' said I.  'For the sake of Miss Wickfield -'

'My Agnes!' he exclaimed, with a sickly, angular contortion of
himself.  'Would you be so good as call her Agnes, Master
Copperfield!'

'For the sake of Agnes Wickfield - Heaven bless her!'

'Thank you for that blessing, Master Copperfield!'he interposed.

'I will tell you what I should, under any other circumstances, as
soon have thought of telling to - Jack Ketch.'

'To who, sir?' said Uriah, stretching out his neck, and shading his
ear with his hand.

'To the hangman,' I returned.  'The most unlikely person I could
think of,' - though his own face had suggested the allusion quite
as a natural sequence.  'I am engaged to another young lady.  I
hope that contents you.'

'Upon your soul?' said Uriah.

I was about indignantly to give my assertion the confirmation he
required, when he caught hold of my hand, and gave it a squeeze.

'Oh, Master Copperfield!' he said.  'If you had only had the
condescension to return my confidence when I poured out the fulness
of my art, the night I put you so much out of the way by sleeping
before your sitting-room fire, I never should have doubted you.  As
it is, I'm sure I'll take off mother directly, and only too appy. 
I know you'll excuse the precautions of affection, won't you?  What
a pity, Master Copperfield, that you didn't condescend to return my
confidence!  I'm sure I gave you every opportunity.  But you never
have condescended to me, as much as I could have wished.  I know
you have never liked me, as I have liked you!'

All this time he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishy fingers,
while I made every effort I decently could to get it away.  But I
was quite unsuccessful.  He drew it under the sleeve of his
mulberry-coloured great-coat, and I walked on, almost upon
compulsion, arm-in-arm with him.

'Shall we turn?' said Uriah, by and by wheeling me face about
towards the town, on which the early moon was now shining,
silvering the distant windows.

'Before we leave the subject, you ought to understand,' said I,
breaking a pretty long silence, 'that I believe Agnes Wickfield to
be as far above you, and as far removed from all your aspirations,
as that moon herself!'

'Peaceful!  Ain't she!' said Uriah.  'Very!  Now confess, Master
Copperfield, that you haven't liked me quite as I have liked you. 
All along you've thought me too umble now, I shouldn't wonder?'

'I am not fond of professions of humility,' I returned, 'or
professions of anything else.'
'There now!' said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the
moonlight.  'Didn't I know it!  But how little you think of the
rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield!
Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys;
and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of
charitable, establishment.  They taught us all a deal of umbleness
- not much else that I know of, from morning to night.  We was to
be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our
caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place,
and abase ourselves before our betters.  And we had such a lot of
betters!  Father got the monitor-medal by being umble.  So did I. 
Father got made a sexton by being umble.  He had the character,
among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they
were determined to bring him in.  "Be umble, Uriah," says father to
me, "and you'll get on.  It was what was always being dinned into
you and me at school; it's what goes down best.  Be umble," says
father," and you'll do!" And really it ain't done bad!'

It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this
detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the
Heep family.  I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the
seed.

'When I was quite a young boy,' said Uriah, 'I got to know what
umbleness did, and I took to it.  I ate umble pie with an appetite. 
I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, "Hold
hard!" When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better.  "People
like to be above you," says father, "keep yourself down." I am very
umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I've got a
little power!'

And he said all this - I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight
- that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by
using his power.  I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and
malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a
base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered
by this early, and this long, suppression.

His account of himself was so far attended with an agreeable
result, that it led to his withdrawing his hand in order that he
might have another hug of himself under the chin.  Once apart from
him, I was determined to keep apart; and we walked back, side by
side, saying very little more by the way.  Whether his spirits were
elevated by the communication I had made to him, or by his having
indulged in this retrospect, I don't know; but they were raised by
some influence.  He talked more at dinner than was usual with him;
asked his mother (off duty, from the moment of our re-entering the
house) whether he was not growing too old for a bachelor; and once
looked at Agnes so, that I would have given all I had, for leave to
knock him down.

When we three males were left alone after dinner, he got into a
more adventurous state.  He had taken little or no wine; and I
presume it was the mere insolence of triumph that was upon him,
flushed perhaps by the temptation my presence furnished to its
exhibition.

I had observed yesterday, that he tried to entice Mr. Wickfield to
drink; and, interpreting the look which Agnes had given me as she
went out, had limited myself to one glass, and then proposed that
we should follow her.  I would have done so again today; but Uriah
was too quick for me.

'We seldom see our present visitor, sir,' he said, addressing Mr.
Wickfield, sitting, such a contrast to him, at the end of the
table, 'and I should propose to give him welcome in another glass
or two of wine, if you have no objections.  Mr. Copperfield, your
elth and appiness!'

I was obliged to make a show of taking the hand he stretched across
to me; and then, with very different emotions, I took the hand of
the broken gentleman, his partner.

'Come, fellow-partner,' said Uriah, 'if I may take the liberty, -
now, suppose you give us something or another appropriate to
Copperfield!'

I pass over Mr. Wickfield's proposing my aunt, his proposing Mr.
Dick, his proposing Doctors' Commons, his proposing Uriah, his
drinking everything twice; his consciousness of his own weakness,
the ineffectual effort that he made against it; the struggle
between his shame in Uriah's deportment, and his desire to
conciliate him; the manifest exultation with which Uriah twisted
and turned, and held him up before me.  It made me sick at heart to
see, and my hand recoils from writing it.

'Come, fellow-partner!' said Uriah, at last, 'I'll give you another
one, and I umbly ask for bumpers, seeing I intend to make it the
divinest of her sex.'

Her father had his empty glass in his hand.  I saw him set it down,
look at the picture she was so like, put his hand to his forehead,
and shrink back in his elbow-chair.

'I'm an umble individual to give you her elth,' proceeded Uriah,
'but I admire - adore her.'

No physical pain that her father's grey head could have borne, I
think, could have been more terrible to me, than the mental
endurance I saw compressed now within both his hands.

'Agnes,' said Uriah, either not regarding him, or not knowing what
the nature of his action was, 'Agnes Wickfield is, I am safe to
say, the divinest of her sex.  May I speak out, among friends?  To
be her father is a proud distinction, but to be her usband -'

Spare me from ever again hearing such a cry, as that with which her
father rose up from the table!
'What's the matter?' said Uriah, turning of a deadly colour.  'You
are not gone mad, after all, Mr. Wickfield, I hope?  If I say I've
an ambition to make your Agnes my Agnes, I have as good a right to
it as another man.  I have a better right to it than any other
man!'

I had my arms round Mr. Wickfield, imploring him by everything that
I could think of, oftenest of all by his love for Agnes, to calm
himself a little.  He was mad for the moment; tearing out his hair,
beating his head, trying to force me from him, and to force himself
from me, not answering a word, not looking at or seeing anyone;
blindly striving for he knew not what, his face all staring and
distorted - a frightful spectacle.

I conjured him, incoherently, but in the most impassioned manner,
not to abandon himself to this wildness, but to hear me.  I
besought him to think of Agnes, to connect me with Agnes, to
recollect how Agnes and I had grown up together, how I honoured her
and loved her, how she was his pride and joy.  I tried to bring her
idea before him in any form; I even reproached him with not having
firmness to spare her the knowledge of such a scene as this.  I may
have effected something, or his wildness may have spent itself; but
by degrees he struggled less, and began to look at me - strangely
at first, then with recognition in his eyes.  At length he said, 'I
know, Trotwood!  My darling child and you - I know!  But look at
him!'

He pointed to Uriah, pale and glowering in a corner, evidently very
much out in his calculations, and taken by surprise.

'Look at my torturer,' he replied.  'Before him I have step by step
abandoned name and reputation, peace and quiet, house and home.'

'I have kept your name and reputation for you, and your peace and
quiet, and your house and home too,' said Uriah, with a sulky,
hurried, defeated air of compromise.  'Don't be foolish, Mr.
Wickfield.  If I have gone a little beyond what you were prepared
for, I can go back, I suppose?  There's no harm done.'

'I looked for single motives in everyone,' said Mr. Wickfield, and
I was satisfied I had bound him to me by motives of interest.  But
see what he is - oh, see what he is!'

'You had better stop him, Copperfield, if you can,' cried Uriah,
with his long forefinger pointing towards me.  'He'll say something
presently - mind you! - he'll be sorry to have said afterwards, and
you'll be sorry to have heard!'

'I'll say anything!' cried Mr. Wickfield, with a desperate air. 
'Why should I not be in all the world's power if I am in yours?'

'Mind! I tell you!' said Uriah, continuing to warn me.  'If you
don't stop his mouth, you're not his friend!  Why shouldn't you be
in all the world's power, Mr. Wickfield?  Because you have got a
daughter.  You and me know what we know, don't we?  Let sleeping
dogs lie - who wants to rouse 'em?  I don't.  Can't you see I am as
umble as I can be?  I tell you, if I've gone too far, I'm sorry. 
What would you have, sir?'

'Oh, Trotwood, Trotwood!'exclaimed Mr. Wickfield, wringing his
hands.  'What I have come down to be, since I first saw you in this
house!  I was on my downward way then, but the dreary, dreary road
I have traversed since!  Weak indulgence has ruined me.  Indulgence
in remembrance, and indulgence in forgetfulness.  My natural grief
for my child's mother turned to disease; my natural love for my
child turned to disease.  I have infected everything I touched.  I
have brought misery on what I dearly love, I know -you know!  I
thought it possible that I could truly love one creature in the
world, and not love the rest; I thought it possible that I could
truly mourn for one creature gone out of the world, and not have
some part in the grief of all who mourned.  Thus the lessons of my
life have been perverted!  I have preyed on my own morbid coward
heart, and it has preyed on me.  Sordid in my grief, sordid in my
love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side of both,
oh see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!'

He dropped into a chair, and weakly sobbed.  The excitement into
which he had been roused was leaving him.  Uriah came out of his
corner.

'I don't know all I have done, in my fatuity,' said Mr. Wickfield,
putting out his hands, as if to deprecate my condemnation.  'He
knows best,' meaning Uriah Heep, 'for he has always been at my
elbow, whispering me.  You see the millstone that he is about my
neck.  You find him in my house, you find him in my business.  You
heard him, but a little time ago.  What need have I to say more!'

'You haven't need to say so much, nor half so much, nor anything at
all,' observed Uriah, half defiant, and half fawning.  'You
wouldn't have took it up so, if it hadn't been for the wine. 
You'll think better of it tomorrow, sir.  If I have said too much,
or more than I meant, what of it?  I haven't stood by it!'

The door opened, and Agnes, gliding in, without a vestige of colour
in her face, put her arm round his neck, and steadily said, 'Papa,
you are not well.  Come with me!'

He laid his head upon her shoulder, as if he were oppressed with
heavy shame, and went out with her.  Her eyes met mine for but an
instant, yet I saw how much she knew of what had passed.

'I didn't expect he'd cut up so rough, Master Copperfield,' said
Uriah.  'But it's nothing.  I'll be friends with him tomorrow. 
It's for his good.  I'm umbly anxious for his good.'

I gave him no answer, and went upstairs into the quiet room where
Agnes had so often sat beside me at my books.  Nobody came near me
until late at night.  I took up a book, and tried to read.  I heard
the clocks strike twelve, and was still reading, without knowing
what I read, when Agnes touched me.

'You will be going early in the morning, Trotwood!  Let us say
good-bye, now!'

She had been weeping, but her face then was so calm and beautiful!

'Heaven bless you!' she said, giving me her hand.

'Dearest Agnes!' I returned, 'I see you ask me not to speak of
tonight - but is there nothing to be done?'

'There is God to trust in!' she replied.

'Can I do nothing- I, who come to you with my poor sorrows?'

'And make mine so much lighter,' she replied.  'Dear Trotwood, no!'

'Dear Agnes,' I said, 'it is presumptuous for me, who am so poor in
all in which you are so rich - goodness, resolution, all noble
qualities - to doubt or direct you; but you know how much I love
you, and how much I owe you.  You will never sacrifice yourself to
a mistaken sense of duty, Agnes?'

More agitated for a moment than I had ever seen her, she took her
hands from me, and moved a step back.

'Say you have no such thought, dear Agnes!  Much more than sister!
Think of the priceless gift of such a heart as yours, of such a
love as yours!'

Oh! long, long afterwards, I saw that face rise up before me, with
its momentary look, not wondering, not accusing, not regretting. 
Oh, long, long afterwards, I saw that look subside, as it did now,
into the lovely smile, with which she told me she had no fear for
herself - I need have none for her - and parted from me by the name
of Brother, and was gone!

It was dark in the morning, when I got upon the coach at the inn
door.  The day was just breaking when we were about to start, and
then, as I sat thinking of her, came struggling up the coach side,
through the mingled day and night, Uriah's head.

'Copperfield!' said he, in a croaking whisper, as he hung by the
iron on the roof, 'I thought you'd be glad to hear before you went
off, that there are no squares broke between us.  I've been into
his room already, and we've made it all smooth.  Why, though I'm
umble, I'm useful to him, you know; and he understands his interest
when he isn't in liquor!  What an agreeable man he is, after all,
Master Copperfield!'

I obliged myself to say that I was glad he had made his apology.

'Oh, to be sure!' said Uriah.  'When a person's umble, you know,
what's an apology?  So easy!  I say!  I suppose,' with a jerk, 'you
have sometimes plucked a pear before it was ripe, Master
Copperfield?'

'I suppose I have,' I replied.

'I did that last night,' said Uriah; 'but it'll ripen yet!  It only
wants attending to.  I can wait!'

Profuse in his farewells, he got down again as the coachman got up. 
For anything I know, he was eating something to keep the raw
morning air out; but he made motions with his mouth as if the pear
were ripe already, and he were smacking his lips over it.



CHAPTER 40
THE WANDERER


We had a very serious conversation in Buckingham Street that night,
about the domestic occurrences I have detailed in the last chapter. 
My aunt was deeply interested in them, and walked up and down the
room with her arms folded, for more than two hours afterwards. 
Whenever she was particularly discomposed, she always performed one
of these pedestrian feats; and the amount of her discomposure might
always be estimated by the duration of her walk.  On this occasion
she was so much disturbed in mind as to find it necessary to open
the bedroom door, and make a course for herself, comprising the
full extent of the bedrooms from wall to wall; and while Mr. Dick
and I sat quietly by the fire, she kept passing in and out, along
this measured track, at an unchanging pace, with the regularity of
a clock-pendulum.

When my aunt and I were left to ourselves by Mr. Dick's going out
to bed, I sat down to write my letter to the two old ladies.  By
that time she was tired of walking, and sat by the fire with her
dress tucked up as usual.  But instead of sitting in her usual
manner, holding her glass upon her knee, she suffered it to stand
neglected on the chimney-piece; and, resting her left elbow on her
right arm, and her chin on her left hand, looked thoughtfully at
me.  As often as I raised my eyes from what I was about, I met
hers.  'I am in the lovingest of tempers, my dear,' she would
assure me with a nod, 'but I am fidgeted and sorry!'

I had been too busy to observe, until after she was gone to bed,
that she had left her night-mixture, as she always called it,
untasted on the chimney-piece.  She came to her door, with even
more than her usual affection of manner, when I knocked to acquaint
her with this discovery; but only said, 'I have not the heart to
take it, Trot, tonight,' and shook her head, and went in again.

She read my letter to the two old ladies, in the morning, and
approved of it.  I posted it, and had nothing to do then, but wait,
as patiently as I could, for the reply.  I was still in this state
of expectation, and had been, for nearly a week; when I left the
Doctor's one snowy night, to walk home.

It had been a bitter day, and a cutting north-east wind had blown
for some time.  The wind had gone down with the light, and so the
snow had come on.  It was a heavy, settled fall, I recollect, in
great flakes; and it lay thick.  The noise of wheels and tread of
people were as hushed, as if the streets had been strewn that depth
with feathers.

My shortest way home, - and I naturally took the shortest way on
such a night - was through St. Martin's Lane.  Now, the church
which gives its name to the lane, stood in a less free situation at
that time; there being no open space before it, and the lane
winding down to the Strand.  As I passed the steps of the portico,
I encountered, at the corner, a woman's face.  It looked in mine,
passed across the narrow lane, and disappeared.  I knew it.  I had
seen it somewhere.  But I could not remember where.  I had some
association with it, that struck upon my heart directly; but I was
thinking of anything else when it came upon me, and was confused.

On the steps of the church, there was the stooping figure of a man,
who had put down some burden on the smooth snow, to adjust it; my
seeing the face, and my seeing him, were simultaneous.  I don't
think I had stopped in my surprise; but, in any case, as I went on,
he rose, turned, and came down towards me.  I stood face to face
with Mr. Peggotty!

Then I remembered the woman.  It was Martha, to whom Emily had
given the money that night in the kitchen.  Martha Endell - side by
side with whom, he would not have seen his dear niece, Ham had told
me, for all the treasures wrecked in the sea.

We shook hands heartily.  At first, neither of us could speak a
word.

'Mas'r Davy!' he said, gripping me tight, 'it do my art good to see
you, sir.  Well met, well met!'

'Well met, my dear old friend!' said I.

'I had my thowts o' coming to make inquiration for you, sir,
tonight,' he said, 'but knowing as your aunt was living along wi'
you - fur I've been down yonder - Yarmouth way - I was afeerd it
was too late.  I should have come early in the morning, sir, afore
going away.'

'Again?' said I.

'Yes, sir,' he replied, patiently shaking his head, 'I'm away
tomorrow.'

'Where were you going now?' I asked.

'Well!' he replied, shaking the snow out of his long hair, 'I was
a-going to turn in somewheers.'

In those days there was a side-entrance to the stable-yard of the
Golden Cross, the inn so memorable to me in connexion with his
misfortune, nearly opposite to where we stood.  I pointed out the
gateway, put my arm through his, and we went across.  Two or three
public-rooms opened out of the stable-yard; and looking into one of
them, and finding it empty, and a good fire burning, I took him in
there.

When I saw him in the light, I observed, not only that his hair was
long and ragged, but that his face was burnt dark by the sun.  He
was greyer, the lines in his face and forehead were deeper, and he
had every appearance of having toiled and wandered through all
varieties of weather; but he looked very strong, and like a man
upheld by steadfastness of purpose, whom nothing could tire out. 
He shook the snow from his hat and clothes, and brushed it away
from his face, while I was inwardly making these remarks.  As he
sat down opposite to me at a table, with his back to the door by
which we had entered, he put out his rough hand again, and grasped
mine warmly.

'I'll tell you, Mas'r Davy,' he said, - 'wheer all I've been, and
what-all we've heerd.  I've been fur, and we've heerd little; but
I'll tell you!'

I rang the bell for something hot to drink.  He would have nothing
stronger than ale; and while it was being brought, and being warmed
at the fire, he sat thinking.  There was a fine, massive gravity in
his face, I did not venture to disturb.

'When she was a child,' he said, lifting up his head soon after we
were left alone, 'she used to talk to me a deal about the sea, and
about them coasts where the sea got to be dark blue, and to lay
a-shining and a-shining in the sun.  I thowt, odd times, as her
father being drownded made her think on it so much.  I doen't know,
you see, but maybe she believed - or hoped - he had drifted out to
them parts, where the flowers is always a-blowing, and the country
bright.'

'It is likely to have been a childish fancy,' I replied.

'When she was - lost,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'I know'd in my mind, as
he would take her to them countries.  I know'd in my mind, as he'd
have told her wonders of 'em, and how she was to be a lady theer,
and how he got her to listen to him fust, along o' sech like.  When
we see his mother, I know'd quite well as I was right.  I went
across-channel to France, and landed theer, as if I'd fell down
from the sky.'

I saw the door move, and the snow drift in.  I saw it move a little
more, and a hand softly interpose to keep it open.

'I found out an English gen'leman as was in authority,' said Mr.
Peggotty, 'and told him I was a-going to seek my niece.  He got me
them papers as I wanted fur to carry me through - I doen't rightly
know how they're called - and he would have give me money, but that
I was thankful to have no need on.  I thank him kind, for all he
done, I'm sure!  "I've wrote afore you," he says to me, "and I
shall speak to many as will come that way, and many will know you,
fur distant from here, when you're a-travelling alone." I told him,
best as I was able, what my gratitoode was, and went away through
France.'

'Alone, and on foot?' said I.

'Mostly a-foot,' he rejoined; 'sometimes in carts along with people
going to market; sometimes in empty coaches.  Many mile a day
a-foot, and often with some poor soldier or another, travelling to
see his friends.  I couldn't talk to him,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'nor
he to me; but we was company for one another, too, along the dusty
roads.'

I should have known that by his friendly tone.

'When I come to any town,' he pursued, 'I found the inn, and waited
about the yard till someone turned up (someone mostly did) as
know'd English.  Then I told how that I was on my way to seek my
niece, and they told me what manner of gentlefolks was in the
house, and I waited to see any as seemed like her, going in or out. 
When it warn't Em'ly, I went on agen.  By little and little, when
I come to a new village or that, among the poor people, I found
they know'd about me.  They would set me down at their cottage
doors, and give me what-not fur to eat and drink, and show me where
to sleep; and many a woman, Mas'r Davy, as has had a daughter of
about Em'ly's age, I've found a-waiting fur me, at Our Saviour's
Cross outside the village, fur to do me sim'lar kindnesses.  Some
has had daughters as was dead.  And God only knows how good them
mothers was to me!'

It was Martha at the door.  I saw her haggard, listening face
distinctly.  My dread was lest he should turn his head, and see her
too.

'They would often put their children - particular their little
girls,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'upon my knee; and many a time you might
have seen me sitting at their doors, when night was coming in,
a'most as if they'd been my Darling's children.  Oh, my Darling!'

Overpowered by sudden grief, he sobbed aloud.  I laid my trembling
hand upon the hand he put before his face.  'Thankee, sir,' he
said, 'doen't take no notice.'

In a very little while he took his hand away and put it on his
breast, and went on with his story.
'They often walked with me,' he said, 'in the morning, maybe a mile
or two upon my road; and when we parted, and I said, "I'm very
thankful to you!  God bless you!" they always seemed to understand,
and answered pleasant.  At last I come to the sea.  It warn't hard,
you may suppose, for a seafaring man like me to work his way over
to Italy.  When I got theer, I wandered on as I had done afore. 
The people was just as good to me, and I should have gone from town
to town, maybe the country through, but that I got news of her
being seen among them Swiss mountains yonder.  One as know'd his
servant see 'em there, all three, and told me how they travelled,
and where they was.  I made fur them mountains, Mas'r Davy, day and
night.  Ever so fur as I went, ever so fur the mountains seemed to
shift away from me.  But I come up with 'em, and I crossed 'em. 
When I got nigh the place as I had been told of, I began to think
within my own self, "What shall I do when I see her?"'

The listening face, insensible to the inclement night, still
drooped at the door, and the hands begged me - prayed me - not to
cast it forth.

'I never doubted her,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'No!  Not a bit!  On'y
let her see my face - on'y let her beer my voice - on'y let my
stanning still afore her bring to her thoughts the home she had
fled away from, and the child she had been - and if she had growed
to be a royal lady, she'd have fell down at my feet!  I know'd it
well!  Many a time in my sleep had I heerd her cry out, "Uncle!"
and seen her fall like death afore me.  Many a time in my sleep had
I raised her up, and whispered to her, "Em'ly, my dear, I am come
fur to bring forgiveness, and to take you home!"'

He stopped and shook his head, and went on with a sigh.

'He was nowt to me now.  Em'ly was all.  I bought a country dress
to put upon her; and I know'd that, once found, she would walk
beside me over them stony roads, go where I would, and never,
never, leave me more.  To put that dress upon her, and to cast off
what she wore - to take her on my arm again, and wander towards
home - to stop sometimes upon the road, and heal her bruised feet
and her worse-bruised heart - was all that I thowt of now.  I
doen't believe I should have done so much as look at him.  But,
Mas'r Davy, it warn't to be - not yet!  I was too late, and they
was gone.  Wheer, I couldn't learn.  Some said beer, some said
theer.  I travelled beer, and I travelled theer, but I found no
Em'ly, and I travelled home.'

'How long ago?' I asked.

'A matter o' fower days,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'I sighted the old
boat arter dark, and the light a-shining in the winder.  When I
come nigh and looked in through the glass, I see the faithful
creetur Missis Gummidge sittin' by the fire, as we had fixed upon,
alone.  I called out, "Doen't be afeerd!  It's Dan'l!" and I went
in.  I never could have thowt the old boat would have been so
strange!'
From some pocket in his breast, he took out, with a very careful
hand a small paper bundle containing two or three letters or little
packets, which he laid upon the table.

'This fust one come,' he said, selecting it from the rest, 'afore
I had been gone a week.  A fifty pound Bank note, in a sheet of
paper, directed to me, and put underneath the door in the night. 
She tried to hide her writing, but she couldn't hide it from Me!'

He folded up the note again, with great patience and care, in
exactly the same form, and laid it on one side.

'This come to Missis Gummidge,' he said, opening another, 'two or
three months ago.'After looking at it for some moments, he gave it
to me, and added in a low voice, 'Be so good as read it, sir.'

I read as follows:


'Oh what will you feel when you see this writing, and know it comes
from my wicked hand!  But try, try - not for my sake, but for
uncle's goodness, try to let your heart soften to me, only for a
little little time!  Try, pray do, to relent towards a miserable
girl, and write down on a bit of paper whether he is well, and what
he said about me before you left off ever naming me among
yourselves - and whether, of a night, when it is my old time of
coming home, you ever see him look as if he thought of one he used
to love so dear.  Oh, my heart is breaking when I think about it!
I am kneeling down to you, begging and praying you not to be as
hard with me as I deserve - as I well, well, know I deserve - but
to be so gentle and so good, as to write down something of him, and
to send it to me.  You need not call me Little, you need not call
me by the name I have disgraced; but oh, listen to my agony, and
have mercy on me so far as to write me some word of uncle, never,
never to be seen in this world by my eyes again!

'Dear, if your heart is hard towards me - justly hard, I know -
but, listen, if it is hard, dear, ask him I have wronged the most
- him whose wife I was to have been - before you quite decide
against my poor poor prayer!  If he should be so compassionate as
to say that you might write something for me to read - I think he
would, oh, I think he would, if you would only ask him, for he
always was so brave and so forgiving - tell him then (but not
else), that when I hear the wind blowing at night, I feel as if it
was passing angrily from seeing him and uncle, and was going up to
God against me.  Tell him that if I was to die tomorrow (and oh, if
I was fit, I would be so glad to die!) I would bless him and uncle
with my last words, and pray for his happy home with my last
breath!'


Some money was enclosed in this letter also.  Five pounds.  It was
untouched like the previous sum, and he refolded it in the same
way.  Detailed instructions were added relative to the address of
a reply, which, although they betrayed the intervention of several
hands, and made it difficult to arrive at any very probable
conclusion in reference to her place of concealment, made it at
least not unlikely that she had written from that spot where she
was stated to have been seen.

'What answer was sent?' I inquired of Mr. Peggotty.

'Missis Gummidge,' he returned, 'not being a good scholar, sir, Ham
kindly drawed it out, and she made a copy on it.  They told her I
was gone to seek her, and what my parting words was.'

'Is that another letter in your hand?' said I.

'It's money, sir,' said Mr. Peggotty, unfolding it a little way. 
'Ten pound, you see.  And wrote inside, "From a true friend," like
the fust.  But the fust was put underneath the door, and this come
by the post, day afore yesterday.  I'm a-going to seek her at the
post-mark.'

He showed it to me.  It was a town on the Upper Rhine.  He had
found out, at Yarmouth, some foreign dealers who knew that country,
and they had drawn him a rude map on paper, which he could very
well understand.  He laid it between us on the table; and, with his
chin resting on one hand, tracked his course upon it with the
other.

I asked him how Ham was?  He shook his head.

'He works,' he said, 'as bold as a man can.  His name's as good, in
all that part, as any man's is, anywheres in the wureld.  Anyone's
hand is ready to help him, you understand, and his is ready to help
them.  He's never been heerd fur to complain.  But my sister's
belief is ('twixt ourselves) as it has cut him deep.'

'Poor fellow, I can believe it!'

'He ain't no care, Mas'r Davy,' said Mr. Peggotty in a solemn
whisper - 'kinder no care no-how for his life.  When a man's wanted
for rough sarvice in rough weather, he's theer.  When there's hard
duty to be done with danger in it, he steps for'ard afore all his
mates.  And yet he's as gentle as any child.  There ain't a child
in Yarmouth that doen't know him.'

He gathered up the letters thoughtfully, smoothing them with his
hand; put them into their little bundle; and placed it tenderly in
his breast again.  The face was gone from the door.  I still saw
the snow drifting in; but nothing else was there.

'Well!' he said, looking to his bag, 'having seen you tonight,
Mas'r Davy (and that doos me good!), I shall away betimes tomorrow
morning.  You have seen what I've got heer'; putting his hand on
where the little packet lay; 'all that troubles me is, to think
that any harm might come to me, afore that money was give back.  If
I was to die, and it was lost, or stole, or elseways made away
with, and it was never know'd by him but what I'd took it, I
believe the t'other wureld wouldn't hold me!  I believe I must come
back!'

He rose, and I rose too; we grasped each other by the hand again,
before going out.

'I'd go ten thousand mile,' he said, 'I'd go till I dropped dead,
to lay that money down afore him.  If I do that, and find my Em'ly,
I'm content.  If I doen't find her, maybe she'll come to hear,
sometime, as her loving uncle only ended his search for her when he
ended his life; and if I know her, even that will turn her home at
last!'

As he went out into the rigorous night, I saw the lonely figure
flit away before us.  I turned him hastily on some pretence, and
held him in conversation until it was gone.

He spoke of a traveller's house on the Dover Road, where he knew he
could find a clean, plain lodging for the night.  I went with him
over Westminster Bridge, and parted from him on the Surrey shore. 
Everything seemed, to my imagination, to be hushed in reverence for
him, as he resumed his solitary journey through the snow.

I returned to the inn yard, and, impressed by my remembrance of the
face, looked awfully around for it.  It was not there.  The snow
had covered our late footprints; my new track was the only one to
be seen; and even that began to die away (it snowed so fast) as I
looked back over my shoulder.



CHAPTER 41
DORA'S AUNTS


At last, an answer came from the two old ladies.  They presented
their compliments to Mr. Copperfield, and informed him that they
had given his letter their best consideration, 'with a view to the
happiness of both parties' - which I thought rather an alarming
expression, not only because of the use they had made of it in
relation to the family difference before-mentioned, but because I
had (and have all my life) observed that conventional phrases are
a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great
variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their
original form.  The Misses Spenlow added that they begged to
forbear expressing, 'through the medium of correspondence', an
opinion on the subject of Mr. Copperfield's communication; but that
if Mr. Copperfield would do them the favour to call, upon a certain
day (accompanied, if he thought proper, by a confidential friend),
they would be happy to hold some conversation on the subject.

To this favour, Mr. Copperfield immediately replied, with his
respectful compliments, that he would have the honour of waiting on
the Misses Spenlow, at the time appointed; accompanied, in
accordance with their kind permission, by his friend Mr. Thomas
Traddles of the Inner Temple.  Having dispatched which missive, Mr.
Copperfield fell into a condition of strong nervous agitation; and
so remained until the day arrived.

It was a great augmentation of my uneasiness to be bereaved, at
this eventful crisis, of the inestimable services of Miss Mills. 
But Mr. Mills, who was always doing something or other to annoy me
- or I felt as if he were, which was the same thing - had brought
his conduct to a climax, by taking it into his head that he would
go to India.  Why should he go to India, except to harass me?  To
be sure he had nothing to do with any other part of the world, and
had a good deal to do with that part; being entirely in the India
trade, whatever that was (I had floating dreams myself concerning
golden shawls and elephants' teeth); having been at Calcutta in his
youth; and designing now to go out there again, in the capacity of
resident partner.  But this was nothing to me.  However, it was so
much to him that for India he was bound, and Julia with him; and
Julia went into the country to take leave of her relations; and the
house was put into a perfect suit of bills, announcing that it was
to be let or sold, and that the furniture (Mangle and all) was to
be taken at a valuation.  So, here was another earthquake of which
I became the sport, before I had recovered from the shock of its
predecessor!

I was in several minds how to dress myself on the important day;
being divided between my desire to appear to advantage, and my
apprehensions of putting on anything that might impair my severely
practical character in the eyes of the Misses Spenlow.  I
endeavoured to hit a happy medium between these two extremes; my
aunt approved the result; and Mr. Dick threw one of his shoes after
Traddles and me, for luck, as we went downstairs.

Excellent fellow as I knew Traddles to be, and warmly attached to
him as I was, I could not help wishing, on that delicate occasion,
that he had never contracted the habit of brushing his hair so very
upright.  It gave him a surprised look - not to say a hearth-broomy
kind of expression - which, my apprehensions whispered, might be
fatal to us.

I took the liberty of mentioning it to Traddles, as we were walking
to Putney; and saying that if he WOULD smooth it down a little -

'My dear Copperfield,' said Traddles, lifting off his hat, and
rubbing his hair all kinds of ways, 'nothing would give me greater
pleasure.  But it won't.'

'Won't be smoothed down?' said I.

'No,' said Traddles.  'Nothing will induce it.  If I was to carry
a half-hundred-weight upon it, all the way to Putney, it would be
up again the moment the weight was taken off.  You have no idea
what obstinate hair mine is, Copperfield.  I am quite a fretful
porcupine.'

I was a little disappointed, I must confess, but thoroughly charmed
by his good-nature too.  I told him how I esteemed his good-nature;
and said that his hair must have taken all the obstinacy out of his
character, for he had none.

'Oh!' returned Traddles, laughing.  'I assure you, it's quite an
old story, my unfortunate hair.  My uncle's wife couldn't bear it. 
She said it exasperated her.  It stood very much in my way, too,
when I first fell in love with Sophy.  Very much!'

'Did she object to it?'

'SHE didn't,' rejoined Traddles; 'but her eldest sister - the one
that's the Beauty - quite made game of it, I understand.  In fact,
all the sisters laugh at it.'

'Agreeable!' said I.

'Yes,' returned Traddles with perfect innocence, 'it's a joke for
us.  They pretend that Sophy has a lock of it in her desk, and is
obliged to shut it in a clasped book, to keep it down.  We laugh
about it.'

'By the by, my dear Traddles,' said I, 'your experience may suggest
something to me.  When you became engaged to the young lady whom
you have just mentioned, did you make a regular proposal to her
family?  Was there anything like - what we are going through today,
for instance?' I added, nervously.

'Why,' replied Traddles, on whose attentive face a thoughtful shade
had stolen, 'it was rather a painful transaction, Copperfield, in
my case.  You see, Sophy being of so much use in the family, none
of them could endure the thought of her ever being married. 
Indeed, they had quite settled among themselves that she never was
to be married, and they called her the old maid.  Accordingly, when
I mentioned it, with the greatest precaution, to Mrs. Crewler -'

'The mama?' said I.

'The mama,' said Traddles - 'Reverend Horace Crewler - when I
mentioned it with every possible precaution to Mrs. Crewler, the
effect upon her was such that she gave a scream and became
insensible.  I couldn't approach the subject again, for months.'

'You did at last?' said I.

'Well, the Reverend Horace did,' said Traddles.  'He is an
excellent man, most exemplary in every way; and he pointed out to
her that she ought, as a Christian, to reconcile herself to the
sacrifice (especially as it was so uncertain), and to bear no
uncharitable feeling towards me.  As to myself, Copperfield, I give
you my word, I felt a perfect bird of prey towards the family.'

'The sisters took your part, I hope, Traddles?'

'Why, I can't say they did,' he returned.  'When we had
comparatively reconciled Mrs. Crewler to it, we had to break it to
Sarah.  You recollect my mentioning Sarah, as the one that has
something the matter with her spine?'

'Perfectly!'

'She clenched both her hands,' said Traddles, looking at me in
dismay; 'shut her eyes; turned lead-colour; became perfectly stiff;
and took nothing for two days but toast-and-water, administered
with a tea-spoon.'

'What a very unpleasant girl, Traddles!' I remarked.

'Oh, I beg your pardon, Copperfield!' said Traddles.  'She is a
very charming girl, but she has a great deal of feeling.  In fact,
they all have.  Sophy told me afterwards, that the self-reproach
she underwent while she was in attendance upon Sarah, no words
could describe.  I know it must have been severe, by my own
feelings, Copperfield; which were like a criminal's.  After Sarah
was restored, we still had to break it to the other eight; and it
produced various effects upon them of a most pathetic nature.  The
two little ones, whom Sophy educates, have only just left off
de-testing me.'

'At any rate, they are all reconciled to it now, I hope?' said I.

'Ye-yes, I should say they were, on the whole, resigned to it,'
said Traddles, doubtfully.  'The fact is, we avoid mentioning the
subject; and my unsettled prospects and indifferent circumstances
are a great consolation to them.  There will be a deplorable scene,
whenever we are married.  It will be much more like a funeral, than
a wedding.  And they'll all hate me for taking her away!'

His honest face, as he looked at me with a serio-comic shake of his
head, impresses me more in the remembrance than it did in the
reality, for I was by this time in a state of such excessive
trepidation and wandering of mind, as to be quite unable to fix my
attention on anything.  On our approaching the house where the
Misses Spenlow lived, I was at such a discount in respect of my
personal looks and presence of mind, that Traddles proposed a
gentle stimulant in the form of a glass of ale.  This having been
administered at a neighbouring public-house, he conducted me, with
tottering steps, to the Misses Spenlow's door.

I had a vague sensation of being, as it were, on view, when the
maid opened it; and of wavering, somehow, across a hall with a
weather-glass in it, into a quiet little drawing-room on the
ground-floor, commanding a neat garden.  Also of sitting down here,
on a sofa, and seeing Traddles's hair start up, now his hat was
removed, like one of those obtrusive little figures made of
springs, that fly out of fictitious snuff-boxes when the lid is
taken off.  Also of hearing an old-fashioned clock ticking away on
the chimney-piece, and trying to make it keep time to the jerking
of my heart, - which it wouldn't.  Also of looking round the room
for any sign of Dora, and seeing none.  Also of thinking that Jip
once barked in the distance, and was instantly choked by somebody. 
Ultimately I found myself backing Traddles into the fireplace, and
bowing in great confusion to two dry little elderly ladies, dressed
in black, and each looking wonderfully like a preparation in chip
or tan of the late Mr. Spenlow.

'Pray,' said one of the two little ladies, 'be seated.'

When I had done tumbling over Traddles, and had sat upon something
which was not a cat - my first seat was - I so far recovered my
sight, as to perceive that Mr. Spenlow had evidently been the
youngest of the family; that there was a disparity of six or eight
years between the two sisters; and that the younger appeared to be
the manager of the conference, inasmuch as she had my letter in her
hand - so familiar as it looked to me, and yet so odd! - and was
referring to it through an eye-glass.  They were dressed alike, but
this sister wore her dress with a more youthful air than the other;
and perhaps had a trifle more frill, or tucker, or brooch, or
bracelet, or some little thing of that kind, which made her look
more lively.  They were both upright in their carriage, formal,
precise, composed, and quiet.  The sister who had not my letter,
had her arms crossed on her breast, and resting on each other, like
an Idol.

'Mr. Copperfield, I believe,' said the sister who had got my
letter, addressing herself to Traddles.

This was a frightful beginning.  Traddles had to indicate that I
was Mr. Copperfield, and I had to lay claim to myself, and they had
to divest themselves of a preconceived opinion that Traddles was
Mr. Copperfield, and altogether we were in a nice condition.  To
improve it, we all distinctly heard Jip give two short barks, and
receive another choke.

'Mr. Copperfield!' said the sister with the letter.

I did something - bowed, I suppose - and was all attention, when
the other sister struck in.

'My sister Lavinia,' said she 'being conversant with matters of
this nature, will state what we consider most calculated to promote
the happiness of both parties.'

I discovered afterwards that Miss Lavinia was an authority in
affairs of the heart, by reason of there having anciently existed
a certain Mr. Pidger, who played short whist, and was supposed to
have been enamoured of her.  My private opinion is, that this was
entirely a gratuitous assumption, and that Pidger was altogether
innocent of any such sentiments - to which he had never given any
sort of expression that I could ever hear of.  Both Miss Lavinia
and Miss Clarissa had a superstition, however, that he would have
declared his passion, if he had not been cut short in his youth (at
about sixty) by over-drinking his constitution, and over-doing an
attempt to set it right again by swilling Bath water.  They had a
lurking suspicion even, that he died of secret love; though I must
say there was a picture of him in the house with a damask nose,
which concealment did not appear to have ever preyed upon.

'We will not,' said Miss Lavinia, 'enter on the past history of
this matter.  Our poor brother Francis's death has cancelled that.'

'We had not,' said Miss Clarissa, 'been in the habit of frequent
association with our brother Francis; but there was no decided
division or disunion between us.  Francis took his road; we took
ours.  We considered it conducive to the happiness of all parties
that it should be so.  And it was so.'

Each of the sisters leaned a little forward to speak, shook her
head after speaking, and became upright again when silent.  Miss
Clarissa never moved her arms.  She sometimes played tunes upon
them with her fingers - minuets and marches I should think - but
never moved them.

'Our niece's position, or supposed position, is much changed by our
brother Francis's death,' said Miss Lavinia; 'and therefore we
consider our brother's opinions as regarded her position as being
changed too.  We have no reason to doubt, Mr. Copperfield, that you
are a young gentleman possessed of good qualities and honourable
character; or that you have an affection - or are fully persuaded
that you have an affection - for our niece.'

I replied, as I usually did whenever I had a chance, that nobody
had ever loved anybody else as I loved Dora.  Traddles came to my
assistance with a confirmatory murmur.

Miss Lavinia was going on to make some rejoinder, when Miss
Clarissa, who appeared to be incessantly beset by a desire to refer
to her brother Francis, struck in again:

'If Dora's mama,' she said, 'when she married our brother Francis,
had at once said that there was not room for the family at the
dinner-table, it would have been better for the happiness of all
parties.'

'Sister Clarissa,' said Miss Lavinia.  'Perhaps we needn't mind
that now.'

'Sister Lavinia,' said Miss Clarissa, 'it belongs to the subject. 
With your branch of the subject, on which alone you are competent
to speak, I should not think of interfering.  On this branch of the
subject I have a voice and an opinion.  It would have been better
for the happiness of all parties, if Dora's mama, when she married
our brother Francis, had mentioned plainly what her intentions
were.  We should then have known what we had to expect.  We should
have said "Pray do not invite us, at any time"; and all possibility
of misunderstanding would have been avoided.'

When Miss Clarissa had shaken her head, Miss Lavinia resumed: again
referring to my letter through her eye-glass.  They both had little
bright round twinkling eyes, by the way, which were like birds'
eyes.  They were not unlike birds, altogether; having a sharp,
brisk, sudden manner, and a little short, spruce way of adjusting
themselves, like canaries.

Miss Lavinia, as I have said, resumed:

'You ask permission of my sister Clarissa and myself, Mr.
Copperfield, to visit here, as the accepted suitor of our niece.'

'If our brother Francis,' said Miss Clarissa, breaking out again,
if I may call anything so calm a breaking out, 'wished to surround
himself with an atmosphere of Doctors' Commons, and of Doctors'
Commons only, what right or desire had we to object?  None, I am
sure.  We have ever been far from wishing to obtrude ourselves on
anyone.  But why not say so?  Let our brother Francis and his wife
have their society.  Let my sister Lavinia and myself have our
society.  We can find it for ourselves, I hope.'

As this appeared to be addressed to Traddles and me, both Traddles
and I made some sort of reply.  Traddles was inaudible.  I think I
observed, myself, that it was highly creditable to all concerned. 
I don't in the least know what I meant.

'Sister Lavinia,' said Miss Clarissa, having now relieved her mind,
'you can go on, my dear.'

Miss Lavinia proceeded:

'Mr. Copperfield, my sister Clarissa and I have been very careful
indeed in considering this letter; and we have not considered it
without finally showing it to our niece, and discussing it with our
niece.  We have no doubt that you think you like her very much.'

'Think, ma'am,' I rapturously began, 'oh! -'

But Miss Clarissa giving me a look (just like a sharp canary), as
requesting that I would not interrupt the oracle, I begged pardon.

'Affection,' said Miss Lavinia, glancing at her sister for
corroboration, which she gave in the form of a little nod to every
clause, 'mature affection, homage, devotion, does not easily
express itself.  Its voice is low.  It is modest and retiring, it
lies in ambush, waits and waits.  Such is the mature fruit. 
Sometimes a life glides away, and finds it still ripening in the
shade.'

Of course I did not understand then that this was an allusion to
her supposed experience of the stricken Pidger; but I saw, from the
gravity with which Miss Clarissa nodded her head, that great weight
was attached to these words.

'The light - for I call them, in comparison with such sentiments,
the light - inclinations of very young people,' pursued Miss
Lavinia, 'are dust, compared to rocks.  It is owing to the
difficulty of knowing whether they are likely to endure or have any
real foundation, that my sister Clarissa and myself have been very
undecided how to act, Mr. Copperfield, and Mr. -'

'Traddles,' said my friend, finding himself looked at.

'I beg pardon.  Of the Inner Temple, I believe?' said Miss
Clarissa, again glancing at my letter.

Traddles said 'Exactly so,' and became pretty red in the face.

Now, although I had not received any express encouragement as yet,
I fancied that I saw in the two little sisters, and particularly in
Miss Lavinia, an intensified enjoyment of this new and fruitful
subject of domestic interest, a settling down to make the most of
it, a disposition to pet it, in which there was a good bright ray
of hope.  I thought I perceived that Miss Lavinia would have
uncommon satisfaction in superintending two young lovers, like Dora
and me; and that Miss Clarissa would have hardly less satisfaction
in seeing her superintend us, and in chiming in with her own
particular department of the subject whenever that impulse was
strong upon her.  This gave me courage to protest most vehemently
that I loved Dora better than I could tell, or anyone believe; that
all my friends knew how I loved her; that my aunt, Agnes, Traddles,
everyone who knew me, knew how I loved her, and how earnest my love
had made me.  For the truth of this, I appealed to Traddles.  And
Traddles, firing up as if he were plunging into a Parliamentary
Debate, really did come out nobly: confirming me in good round
terms, and in a plain sensible practical manner, that evidently
made a favourable impression.

'I speak, if I may presume to say so, as one who has some little
experience of such things,' said Traddles, 'being myself engaged to
a young lady - one of ten, down in Devonshire - and seeing no
probability, at present, of our engagement coming to a
termination.'

'You may be able to confirm what I have said, Mr. Traddles,'
observed Miss Lavinia, evidently taking a new interest in him, 'of
the affection that is modest and retiring; that waits and waits?'

'Entirely, ma'am,' said Traddles.

Miss Clarissa looked at Miss Lavinia, and shook her head gravely. 
Miss Lavinia looked consciously at Miss Clarissa, and heaved a
little sigh.
'Sister Lavinia,' said Miss Clarissa, 'take my smelling-bottle.'

Miss Lavinia revived herself with a few whiffs of aromatic vinegar
- Traddles and I looking on with great solicitude the while; and
then went on to say, rather faintly:

'My sister and myself have been in great doubt, Mr. Traddles, what
course we ought to take in reference to the likings, or imaginary
likings, of such very young people as your friend Mr. Copperfield
and our niece.'

'Our brother Francis's child,' remarked Miss Clarissa.  'If our
brother Francis's wife had found it convenient in her lifetime
(though she had an unquestionable right to act as she thought best)
to invite the family to her dinner-table, we might have known our
brother Francis's child better at the present moment.  Sister
Lavinia, proceed.'

Miss Lavinia turned my letter, so as to bring the superscription
towards herself, and referred through her eye-glass to some
orderly-looking notes she had made on that part of it.

'It seems to us,' said she, 'prudent, Mr. Traddles, to bring these
feelings to the test of our own observation.  At present we know
nothing of them, and are not in a situation to judge how much
reality there may be in them.  Therefore we are inclined so far to
accede to Mr. Copperfield's proposal, as to admit his visits here.'

'I shall never, dear ladies,' I exclaimed, relieved of an immense
load of apprehension, 'forget your kindness!'

'But,' pursued Miss Lavinia, - 'but, we would prefer to regard
those visits, Mr. Traddles, as made, at present, to us.  We must
guard ourselves from recognizing any positive engagement between
Mr. Copperfield and our niece, until we have had an opportunity -'

'Until YOU have had an opportunity, sister Lavinia,' said Miss
Clarissa.

'Be it so,' assented Miss Lavinia, with a sigh - 'until I have had
an opportunity of observing them.'

'Copperfield,' said Traddles, turning to me, 'you feel, I am sure,
that nothing could be more reasonable or considerate.'

'Nothing!' cried I.  'I am deeply sensible of it.'

'In this position of affairs,' said Miss Lavinia, again referring
to her notes, 'and admitting his visits on this understanding only,
we must require from Mr. Copperfield a distinct assurance, on his
word of honour, that no communication of any kind shall take place
between him and our niece without our knowledge.  That no project
whatever shall be entertained with regard to our niece, without
being first submitted to us -'
'To you, sister Lavinia,' Miss Clarissa interposed.

'Be it so, Clarissa!' assented Miss Lavinia resignedly - 'to me -
and receiving our concurrence.  We must make this a most express
and serious stipulation, not to be broken on any account.  We
wished Mr. Copperfield to be accompanied by some confidential
friend today,' with an inclination of her head towards Traddles,
who bowed, 'in order that there might be no doubt or misconception
on this subject.  If Mr. Copperfield, or if you, Mr. Traddles, feel
the least scruple, in giving this promise, I beg you to take time
to consider it.'

I exclaimed, in a state of high ecstatic fervour, that not a
moment's consideration could be necessary.  I bound myself by the
required promise, in a most impassioned manner; called upon
Traddles to witness it; and denounced myself as the most atrocious
of characters if I ever swerved from it in the least degree.

'Stay!' said Miss Lavinia, holding up her hand; 'we resolved,
before we had the pleasure of receiving you two gentlemen, to leave
you alone for a quarter of an hour, to consider this point.  You
will allow us to retire.'

It was in vain for me to say that no consideration was necessary. 
They persisted in withdrawing for the specified time.  Accordingly,
these little birds hopped out with great dignity; leaving me to
receive the congratulations of Traddles, and to feel as if I were
translated to regions of exquisite happiness.  Exactly at the
expiration of the quarter of an hour, they reappeared with no less
dignity than they had disappeared.  They had gone rustling away as
if their little dresses were made of autumn-leaves: and they came
rustling back, in like manner.

I then bound myself once more to the prescribed conditions.

'Sister Clarissa,' said Miss Lavinia, 'the rest is with you.'

Miss Clarissa, unfolding her arms for the first time, took the
notes and glanced at them.

'We shall be happy,' said Miss Clarissa, 'to see Mr. Copperfield to
dinner, every Sunday, if it should suit his convenience.  Our hour
is three.'

I bowed.

'In the course of the week,' said Miss Clarissa, 'we shall be happy
to see Mr. Copperfield to tea.  Our hour is half-past six.'

I bowed again.

'Twice in the week,' said Miss Clarissa, 'but, as a rule, not
oftener.'

I bowed again.

'Miss Trotwood,' said Miss Clarissa, 'mentioned in Mr.
Copperfield's letter, will perhaps call upon us.  When visiting is
better for the happiness of all parties, we are glad to receive
visits, and return them.  When it is better for the happiness of
all parties that no visiting should take place, (as in the case of
our brother Francis, and his establishment) that is quite
different.'

I intimated that my aunt would be proud and delighted to make their
acquaintance; though I must say I was not quite sure of their
getting on very satisfactorily together.  The conditions being now
closed, I expressed my acknowledgements in the warmest manner; and,
taking the hand, first of Miss Clarissa, and then of Miss Lavinia,
pressed it, in each case, to my lips.

Miss Lavinia then arose, and begging Mr. Traddles to excuse us for
a minute, requested me to follow her.  I obeyed, all in a tremble,
and was conducted into another room.  There I found my blessed
darling stopping her ears behind the door, with her dear little
face against the wall; and Jip in the plate-warmer with his head
tied up in a towel.

Oh!  How beautiful she was in her black frock, and how she sobbed
and cried at first, and wouldn't come out from behind the door! 
How fond we were of one another, when she did come out at last; and
what a state of bliss I was in, when we took Jip out of the
plate-warmer, and restored him to the light, sneezing very much,
and were all three reunited!

'My dearest Dora!  Now, indeed, my own for ever!'

'Oh, DON'T!' pleaded Dora.  'Please!'

'Are you not my own for ever, Dora?'

'Oh yes, of course I am!' cried Dora, 'but I am so frightened!'

'Frightened, my own?'

'Oh yes!  I don't like him,' said Dora.  'Why don't he go?'

'Who, my life?'

'Your friend,' said Dora.  'It isn't any business of his.  What a
stupid he must be!'

'My love!' (There never was anything so coaxing as her childish
ways.) 'He is the best creature!'

'Oh, but we don't want any best creatures!' pouted Dora.

'My dear,' I argued, 'you will soon know him well, and like him of
all things.  And here is my aunt coming soon; and you'll like her
of all things too, when you know her.'

'No, please don't bring her!' said Dora, giving me a horrified
little kiss, and folding her hands.  'Don't.  I know she's a
naughty, mischief-making old thing!  Don't let her come here,
Doady!' which was a corruption of David.

Remonstrance was of no use, then; so I laughed, and admired, and
was very much in love and very happy; and she showed me Jip's new
trick of standing on his hind legs in a corner - which he did for
about the space of a flash of lightning, and then fell down - and
I don't know how long I should have stayed there, oblivious of
Traddles, if Miss Lavinia had not come in to take me away.  Miss
Lavinia was very fond of Dora (she told me Dora was exactly like
what she had been herself at her age - she must have altered a good
deal), and she treated Dora just as if she had been a toy.  I
wanted to persuade Dora to come and see Traddles, but on my
proposing it she ran off to her own room and locked herself in; so
I went to Traddles without her, and walked away with him on air.

'Nothing could be more satisfactory,' said Traddles; 'and they are
very agreeable old ladies, I am sure.  I shouldn't be at all
surprised if you were to be married years before me, Copperfield.'

'Does your Sophy play on any instrument, Traddles?' I inquired, in
the pride of my heart.

'She knows enough of the piano to teach it to her little sisters,'
said Traddles.

'Does she sing at all?' I asked.

'Why, she sings ballads, sometimes, to freshen up the others a
little when they're out of spirits,' said Traddles.  'Nothing
scientific.'

'She doesn't sing to the guitar?' said I.

'Oh dear no!' said Traddles.

'Paint at all?'

'Not at all,' said Traddles.

I promised Traddles that he should hear Dora sing, and see some of
her flower-painting.  He said he should like it very much, and we
went home arm in arm in great good humour and delight.  I
encouraged him to talk about Sophy, on the way; which he did with
a loving reliance on her that I very much admired.  I compared her
in my mind with Dora, with considerable inward satisfaction; but I
candidly admitted to myself that she seemed to be an excellent kind
of girl for Traddles, too.

Of course my aunt was immediately made acquainted with the
successful issue of the conference, and with all that had been said
and done in the course of it.  She was happy to see me so happy,
and promised to call on Dora's aunts without loss of time.  But she
took such a long walk up and down our rooms that night, while I was
writing to Agnes, that I began to think she meant to walk till
morning.

My letter to Agnes was a fervent and grateful one, narrating all
the good effects that had resulted from my following her advice. 
She wrote, by return of post, to me.  Her letter was hopeful,
earnest, and cheerful.  She was always cheerful from that time.

I had my hands more full than ever, now.  My daily journeys to
Highgate considered, Putney was a long way off; and I naturally
wanted to go there as often as I could.  The proposed tea-drinkings
being quite impracticable, I compounded with Miss Lavinia for
permission to visit every Saturday afternoon, without detriment to
my privileged Sundays.  So, the close of every week was a delicious
time for me; and I got through the rest of the week by looking
forward to it.

I was wonderfully relieved to find that my aunt and Dora's aunts
rubbed on, all things considered, much more smoothly than I could
have expected.  My aunt made her promised visit within a few days
of the conference; and within a few more days, Dora's aunts called
upon her, in due state and form.  Similar but more friendly
exchanges took place afterwards, usually at intervals of three or
four weeks.  I know that my aunt distressed Dora's aunts very much,
by utterly setting at naught the dignity of fly-conveyance, and
walking out to Putney at extraordinary times, as shortly after
breakfast or just before tea; likewise by wearing her bonnet in any
manner that happened to be comfortable to her head, without at all
deferring to the prejudices of civilization on that subject.  But
Dora's aunts soon agreed to regard my aunt as an eccentric and
somewhat masculine lady, with a strong understanding; and although
my aunt occasionally ruffled the feathers of Dora's aunts, by
expressing heretical opinions on various points of ceremony, she
loved me too well not to sacrifice some of her little peculiarities
to the general harmony.

The only member of our small society who positively refused to
adapt himself to circumstances, was Jip.  He never saw my aunt
without immediately displaying every tooth in his head, retiring
under a chair, and growling incessantly: with now and then a
doleful howl, as if she really were too much for his feelings.  All
kinds of treatment were tried with him, coaxing, scolding,
slapping, bringing him to Buckingham Street (where he instantly
dashed at the two cats, to the terror of all beholders); but he
never could prevail upon himself to bear my aunt's society.  He
would sometimes think he had got the better of his objection, and
be amiable for a few minutes; and then would put up his snub nose,
and howl to that extent, that there was nothing for it but to blind
him and put him in the plate-warmer.  At length, Dora regularly
muffled him in a towel and shut him up there, whenever my aunt was
reported at the door.

One thing troubled me much, after we had fallen into this quiet
train.  It was, that Dora seemed by one consent to be regarded like
a pretty toy or plaything.  My aunt, with whom she gradually became
familiar, always called her Little Blossom; and the pleasure of
Miss Lavinia's life was to wait upon her, curl her hair, make
ornaments for her, and treat her like a pet child.  What Miss
Lavinia did, her sister did as a matter of course.  It was very odd
to me; but they all seemed to treat Dora, in her degree, much as
Dora treated Jip in his.

I made up my mind to speak to Dora about this; and one day when we
were out walking (for we were licensed by Miss Lavinia, after a
while, to go out walking by ourselves), I said to her that I wished
she could get them to behave towards her differently.

'Because you know, my darling,' I remonstrated, 'you are not a
child.'

'There!' said Dora.  'Now you're going to be cross!'

'Cross, my love?'

'I am sure they're very kind to me,' said Dora, 'and I am very
happy -'

'Well!  But my dearest life!' said I, 'you might be very happy, and
yet be treated rationally.'

Dora gave me a reproachful look - the prettiest look! - and then
began to sob, saying, if I didn't like her, why had I ever wanted
so much to be engaged to her?  And why didn't I go away, now, if I
couldn't bear her?

What could I do, but kiss away her tears, and tell her how I doted
on her, after that!

'I am sure I am very affectionate,' said Dora; 'you oughtn't to be
cruel to me, Doady!'

'Cruel, my precious love!  As if I would - or could - be cruel to
you, for the world!'

'Then don't find fault with me,' said Dora, making a rosebud of her
mouth; 'and I'll be good.'

I was charmed by her presently asking me, of her own accord, to
give her that cookery-book I had once spoken of, and to show her
how to keep accounts as I had once promised I would.  I brought the
volume with me on my next visit (I got it prettily bound, first, to
make it look less dry and more inviting); and as we strolled about
the Common, I showed her an old housekeeping-book of my aunt's, and
gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil-case and box
of leads, to practise housekeeping with.

But the cookery-book made Dora's head ache, and the figures made
her cry.  They wouldn't add up, she said.  So she rubbed them out,
and drew little nosegays and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the
tablets.

Then I playfully tried verbal instruction in domestic matters, as
we walked about on a Saturday afternoon.  Sometimes, for example,
when we passed a butcher's shop, I would say:

'Now suppose, my pet, that we were married, and you were going to
buy a shoulder of mutton for dinner, would you know how to buy it?'

My pretty little Dora's face would fall, and she would make her
mouth into a bud again, as if she would very much prefer to shut
mine with a kiss.

'Would you know how to buy it, my darling?' I would repeat,
perhaps, if I were very inflexible.

Dora would think a little, and then reply, perhaps, with great
triumph:

'Why, the butcher would know how to sell it, and what need I know? 
Oh, you silly boy!'

So, when I once asked Dora, with an eye to the cookery-book, what
she would do, if we were married, and I were to say I should like
a nice Irish stew, she replied that she would tell the servant to
make it; and then clapped her little hands together across my arm,
and laughed in such a charming manner that she was more delightful
than ever.

Consequently, the principal use to which the cookery-book was
devoted, was being put down in the corner for Jip to stand upon. 
But Dora was so pleased, when she had trained him to stand upon it
without offering to come off, and at the same time to hold the
pencil-case in his mouth, that I was very glad I had bought it.

And we fell back on the guitar-case, and the flower-painting, and
the songs about never leaving off dancing, Ta ra la! and were as
happy as the week was long.  I occasionally wished I could venture
to hint to Miss Lavinia, that she treated the darling of my heart
a little too much like a plaything; and I sometimes awoke, as it
were, wondering to find that I had fallen into the general fault,
and treated her like a plaything too - but not often.



CHAPTER 42
MISCHIEF

I feel as if it were not for me to record, even though this
manuscript is intended for no eyes but mine, how hard I worked at
that tremendous short-hand, and all improvement appertaining to it,
in my sense of responsibility to Dora and her aunts.  I will only
add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time
of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began
to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of
my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on
looking back, I find the source of my success.  I have been very
fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and
not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have
done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence,
without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a
time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its
heels, which I then formed.  Heaven knows I write this, in no
spirit of self-laudation.  The man who reviews his own life, as I
do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need to have been
a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharp consciousness of
many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted, many erratic and
perverted feelings constantly at war within his breast, and
defeating him.  I do not hold one natural gift, I dare say, that I
have not abused.  My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried
to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that
whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to
completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been
thoroughly in earnest.  I have never believed it possible that any
natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the
companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and
hope to gain its end.  There is no such thing as such fulfilment on
this earth.  Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may
form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the
rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear;
and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere
earnestness.  Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could
throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work,
whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.

How much of the practice I have just reduced to precept, I owe to
Agnes, I will not repeat here.  My narrative proceeds to Agnes,
with a thankful love.

She came on a visit of a fortnight to the Doctor's.  Mr. Wickfield
was the Doctor's old friend, and the Doctor wished to talk with
him, and do him good.  It had been matter of conversation with
Agnes when she was last in town, and this visit was the result. 
She and her father came together.  I was not much surprised to hear
from her that she had engaged to find a lodging in the
neighbourhood for Mrs. Heep, whose rheumatic complaint required
change of air, and who would be charmed to have it in such company. 
Neither was I surprised when, on the very next day, Uriah, like a
dutiful son, brought his worthy mother to take possession.

'You see, Master Copperfield,' said he, as he forced himself upon
my company for a turn in the Doctor's garden, 'where a person
loves, a person is a little jealous - leastways, anxious to keep an
eye on the beloved one.'

'Of whom are you jealous, now?' said I.

'Thanks to you, Master Copperfield,' he returned, 'of no one in
particular just at present - no male person, at least.'

'Do you mean that you are jealous of a female person?'

He gave me a sidelong glance out of his sinister red eyes, and
laughed.

'Really, Master Copperfield,' he said, '- I should say Mister, but
I know you'll excuse the abit I've got into - you're so
insinuating, that you draw me like a corkscrew!  Well, I don't mind
telling you,' putting his fish-like hand on mine, 'I'm not a lady's
man in general, sir, and I never was, with Mrs. Strong.'

His eyes looked green now, as they watched mine with a rascally
cunning.

'What do you mean?' said I.

'Why, though I am a lawyer, Master Copperfield,' he replied, with
a dry grin, 'I mean, just at present, what I say.'

'And what do you mean by your look?' I retorted, quietly.

'By my look?  Dear me, Copperfield, that's sharp practice!  What do
I mean by my look?'

'Yes,' said I.  'By your look.'

He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily as it was in
his nature to laugh.  After some scraping of his chin with his
hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast downward - still
scraping, very slowly:

'When I was but an umble clerk, she always looked down upon me. 
She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and forwards at her
ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to you, Master
Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, myself, to be noticed.'

'Well?' said I; 'suppose you were!'

'- And beneath him too,' pursued Uriah, very distinctly, and in a
meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape his chin.

'Don't you know the Doctor better,' said I, 'than to suppose him
conscious of your existence, when you were not before him?'

He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again, and he
made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater convenience of
scraping, as he answered:

'Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor!  Oh no, poor man!  I
mean Mr. Maldon!'

My heart quite died within me.  All my old doubts and apprehensions
on that subject, all the Doctor's happiness and peace, all the
mingled possibilities of innocence and compromise, that I could not
unravel, I saw, in a moment, at the mercy of this fellow's
twisting.

'He never could come into the office, without ordering and shoving
me about,' said Uriah.  'One of your fine gentlemen he was!  I was
very meek and umble - and I am.  But I didn't like that sort of
thing - and I don't!'

He left off scraping his chin, and sucked in his cheeks until they
seemed to meet inside; keeping his sidelong glance upon me all the
while.

'She is one of your lovely women, she is,' he pursued, when he had
slowly restored his face to its natural form; 'and ready to be no
friend to such as me, I know.  She's just the person as would put
my Agnes up to higher sort of game.  Now, I ain't one of your
lady's men, Master Copperfield; but I've had eyes in my ed, a
pretty long time back.  We umble ones have got eyes, mostly
speaking - and we look out of 'em.'

I endeavoured to appear unconscious and not disquieted, but, I saw
in his face, with poor success.

'Now, I'm not a-going to let myself be run down, Copperfield,' he
continued, raising that part of his countenance, where his red
eyebrows would have been if he had had any, with malignant triumph,
'and I shall do what I can to put a stop to this friendship.  I
don't approve of it.  I don't mind acknowledging to you that I've
got rather a grudging disposition, and want to keep off all
intruders.  I ain't a-going, if I know it, to run the risk of being
plotted against.'

'You are always plotting, and delude yourself into the belief that
everybody else is doing the like, I think,' said I.

'Perhaps so, Master Copperfield,' he replied.  'But I've got a
motive, as my fellow-partner used to say; and I go at it tooth and
nail.  I mustn't be put upon, as a numble person, too much.  I
can't allow people in my way.  Really they must come out of the
cart, Master Copperfield!'

'I don't understand you,' said I.

'Don't you, though?' he returned, with one of his jerks.  'I'm
astonished at that, Master Copperfield, you being usually so quick! 
I'll try to be plainer, another time.  - Is that Mr. Maldon
a-norseback, ringing at the gate, sir?'

'It looks like him,' I replied, as carelessly as I could.

Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of
knees, and doubled himself up with laughter.  With perfectly silent
laughter.  Not a sound escaped from him.  I was so repelled by his
odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I
turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the
middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support.

It was not on that evening; but, as I well remember, on the next
evening but one, which was a Sunday; that I took Agnes to see Dora. 
I had arranged the visit, beforehand, with Miss Lavinia; and Agnes
was expected to tea.

I was in a flutter of pride and anxiety; pride in my dear little
betrothed, and anxiety that Agnes should like her.  All the way to
Putney, Agnes being inside the stage-coach, and I outside, I
pictured Dora to myself in every one of the pretty looks I knew so
well; now making up my mind that I should like her to look exactly
as she looked at such a time, and then doubting whether I should
not prefer her looking as she looked at such another time; and
almost worrying myself into a fever about it.

I was troubled by no doubt of her being very pretty, in any case;
but it fell out that I had never seen her look so well.  She was
not in the drawing-room when I presented Agnes to her little aunts,
but was shyly keeping out of the way.  I knew where to look for
her, now; and sure enough I found her stopping her ears again,
behind the same dull old door.

At first she wouldn't come at all; and then she pleaded for five
minutes by my watch.  When at length she put her arm through mine,
to be taken to the drawing-room, her charming little face was
flushed, and had never been so pretty.  But, when we went into the
room, and it turned pale, she was ten thousand times prettier yet.

Dora was afraid of Agnes.  She had told me that she knew Agnes was
'too clever'.  But when she saw her looking at once so cheerful and
so earnest, and so thoughtful, and so good, she gave a faint little
cry of pleased surprise, and just put her affectionate arms round
Agnes's neck, and laid her innocent cheek against her face.

I never was so happy.  I never was so pleased as when I saw those
two sit down together, side by side.  As when I saw my little
darling looking up so naturally to those cordial eyes.  As when I
saw the tender, beautiful regard which Agnes cast upon her.

Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa partook, in their way, of my joy. 
It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world.  Miss Clarissa
presided.  I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake - the little
sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking
at sugar; Miss Lavinia looked on with benignant patronage, as if
our happy love were all her work; and we were perfectly contented
with ourselves and one another.

The gentle cheerfulness of Agnes went to all their hearts.  Her
quiet interest in everything that interested Dora; her manner of
making acquaintance with Jip (who responded instantly); her
pleasant way, when Dora was ashamed to come over to her usual seat
by me; her modest grace and ease, eliciting a crowd of blushing
little marks of confidence from Dora; seemed to make our circle
quite complete.

'I am so glad,' said Dora, after tea, 'that you like me.  I didn't
think you would; and I want, more than ever, to be liked, now Julia
Mills is gone.'

I have omitted to mention it, by the by.  Miss Mills had sailed,
and Dora and I had gone aboard a great East Indiaman at Gravesend
to see her; and we had had preserved ginger, and guava, and other
delicacies of that sort for lunch; and we had left Miss Mills
weeping on a camp-stool on the quarter-deck, with a large new diary
under her arm, in which the original reflections awakened by the
contemplation of Ocean were to be recorded under lock and key.

Agnes said she was afraid I must have given her an unpromising
character; but Dora corrected that directly.

'Oh no!' she said, shaking her curls at me; 'it was all praise.  He
thinks so much of your opinion, that I was quite afraid of it.'

'My good opinion cannot strengthen his attachment to some people
whom he knows,' said Agnes, with a smile; 'it is not worth their
having.'

'But please let me have it,' said Dora, in her coaxing way, 'if you
can!'

We made merry about Dora's wanting to be liked, and Dora said I was
a goose, and she didn't like me at any rate, and the short evening
flew away on gossamer-wings.  The time was at hand when the coach
was to call for us.  I was standing alone before the fire, when
Dora came stealing softly in, to give me that usual precious little
kiss before I went.

'Don't you think, if I had had her for a friend a long time ago,
Doady,' said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her
little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my
coat, 'I might have been more clever perhaps?'

'My love!' said I, 'what nonsense!'

'Do you think it is nonsense?' returned Dora, without looking at
me.  'Are you sure it is?'

'Of course I am!'
'I have forgotten,' said Dora, still turning the button round and
round, 'what relation Agnes is to you, you dear bad boy.'

'No blood-relation,' I replied; 'but we were brought up together,
like brother and sister.'

'I wonder why you ever fell in love with me?' said Dora, beginning
on another button of my coat.

'Perhaps because I couldn't see you, and not love you, Dora!'

'Suppose you had never seen me at all,' said Dora, going to another
button.

'Suppose we had never been born!' said I, gaily.

I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring
silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on
my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and
at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they
followed her idle fingers.  At length her eyes were lifted up to
mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than
usual, that precious little kiss - once, twice, three times - and
went out of the room.

They all came back together within five minutes afterwards, and
Dora's unusual thoughtfulness was quite gone then.  She was
laughingly resolved to put Jip through the whole of his
performances, before the coach came.  They took some time (not so
much on account of their variety, as Jip's reluctance), and were
still unfinished when it was heard at the door.  There was a
hurried but affectionate parting between Agnes and herself; and
Dora was to write to Agnes (who was not to mind her letters being
foolish, she said), and Agnes was to write to Dora; and they had a
second parting at the coach door, and a third when Dora, in spite
of the remonstrances of Miss Lavinia, would come running out once
more to remind Agnes at the coach window about writing, and to
shake her curls at me on the box.

The stage-coach was to put us down near Covent Garden, where we
were to take another stage-coach for Highgate.  I was impatient for
the short walk in the interval, that Agnes might praise Dora to me. 
Ah! what praise it was!  How lovingly and fervently did it commend
the pretty creature I had won, with all her artless graces best
displayed, to my most gentle care!  How thoughtfully remind me, yet
with no pretence of doing so, of the trust in which I held the
orphan child!

Never, never, had I loved Dora so deeply and truly, as I loved her
that night.  When we had again alighted, and were walking in the
starlight along the quiet road that led to the Doctor's house, I
told Agnes it was her doing.

'When you were sitting by her,' said I, 'you seemed to be no less
her guardian angel than mine; and you seem so now, Agnes.'

'A poor angel,' she returned, 'but faithful.'

The clear tone of her voice, going straight to my heart, made it
natural to me to say:

'The cheerfulness that belongs to you, Agnes (and to no one else
that ever I have seen), is so restored, I have observed today, that
I have begun to hope you are happier at home?'

'I am happier in myself,' she said; 'I am quite cheerful and
light-hearted.'

I glanced at the serene face looking upward, and thought it was the
stars that made it seem so noble.

'There has been no change at home,' said Agnes, after a few
moments.

'No fresh reference,' said I, 'to - I wouldn't distress you, Agnes,
but I cannot help asking - to what we spoke of, when we parted
last?'

'No, none,' she answered.

'I have thought so much about it.'

'You must think less about it.  Remember that I confide in simple
love and truth at last.  Have no apprehensions for me, Trotwood,'
she added, after a moment; 'the step you dread my taking, I shall
never take.'

Although I think I had never really feared it, in any season of
cool reflection, it was an unspeakable relief to me to have this
assurance from her own truthful lips.  I told her so, earnestly.

'And when this visit is over,' said I, - 'for we may not be alone
another time, - how long is it likely to be, my dear Agnes, before
you come to London again?'

'Probably a long time,' she replied; 'I think it will be best - for
papa's sake - to remain at home.  We are not likely to meet often,
for some time to come; but I shall be a good correspondent of
Dora's, and we shall frequently hear of one another that way.'

We were now within the little courtyard of the Doctor's cottage. 
It was growing late.  There was a light in the window of Mrs.
Strong's chamber, and Agnes, pointing to it, bade me good night.

'Do not be troubled,' she said, giving me her hand, 'by our
misfortunes and anxieties.  I can be happier in nothing than in
your happiness.  If you can ever give me help, rely upon it I will
ask you for it.  God bless you always!'
In her beaming smile, and in these last tones of her cheerful
voice, I seemed again to see and hear my little Dora in her
company.  I stood awhile, looking through the porch at the stars,
with a heart full of love and gratitude, and then walked slowly
forth.  I had engaged a bed at a decent alehouse close by, and was
going out at the gate, when, happening to turn my head, I saw a
light in the Doctor's study.  A half-reproachful fancy came into my
mind, that he had been working at the Dictionary without my help. 
With the view of seeing if this were so, and, in any case, of
bidding him good night, if he were yet sitting among his books, I
turned back, and going softly across the hall, and gently opening
the door, looked in.

The first person whom I saw, to my surprise, by the sober light of
the shaded lamp, was Uriah.  He was standing close beside it, with
one of his skeleton hands over his mouth, and the other resting on
the Doctor's table.  The Doctor sat in his study chair, covering
his face with his hands.  Mr. Wickfield, sorely troubled and
distressed, was leaning forward, irresolutely touching the Doctor's
arm.

For an instant, I supposed that the Doctor was ill.  I hastily
advanced a step under that impression, when I met Uriah's eye, and
saw what was the matter.  I would have withdrawn, but the Doctor
made a gesture to detain me, and I remained.

'At any rate,' observed Uriah, with a writhe of his ungainly
person, 'we may keep the door shut.  We needn't make it known to
ALL the town.'

Saying which, he went on his toes to the door, which I had left
open, and carefully closed it.  He then came back, and took up his
former position.  There was an obtrusive show of compassionate zeal
in his voice and manner, more intolerable - at least to me - than
any demeanour he could have assumed.

'I have felt it incumbent upon me, Master Copperfield,' said Uriah,
'to point out to Doctor Strong what you and me have already talked
about.  You didn't exactly understand me, though?'

I gave him a look, but no other answer; and, going to my good old
master, said a few words that I meant to be words of comfort and
encouragement.  He put his hand upon my shoulder, as it had been
his custom to do when I was quite a little fellow, but did not lift
his grey head.

'As you didn't understand me, Master Copperfield,' resumed Uriah in
the same officious manner, 'I may take the liberty of umbly
mentioning, being among friends, that I have called Doctor Strong's
attention to the goings-on of Mrs. Strong.  It's much against the
grain with me, I assure you, Copperfield, to be concerned in
anything so unpleasant; but really, as it is, we're all mixing
ourselves up with what oughtn't to be.  That was what my meaning
was, sir, when you didn't understand me.'
I wonder now, when I recall his leer, that I did not collar him,
and try to shake the breath out of his body.

'I dare say I didn't make myself very clear,' he went on, 'nor you
neither.  Naturally, we was both of us inclined to give such a
subject a wide berth.  Hows'ever, at last I have made up my mind to
speak plain; and I have mentioned to Doctor Strong that - did you
speak, sir?'

This was to the Doctor, who had moaned.  The sound might have
touched any heart, I thought, but it had no effect upon Uriah's.

'- mentioned to Doctor Strong,' he proceeded, 'that anyone may see
that Mr. Maldon, and the lovely and agreeable lady as is Doctor
Strong's wife, are too sweet on one another.  Really the time is
come (we being at present all mixing ourselves up with what
oughtn't to be), when Doctor Strong must be told that this was full
as plain to everybody as the sun, before Mr. Maldon went to India;
that Mr. Maldon made excuses to come back, for nothing else; and
that he's always here, for nothing else.  When you come in, sir, I
was just putting it to my fellow-partner,' towards whom he turned,
'to say to Doctor Strong upon his word and honour, whether he'd
ever been of this opinion long ago, or not.  Come, Mr. Wickfield,
sir!  Would you be so good as tell us?  Yes or no, sir?  Come,
partner!'

'For God's sake, my dear Doctor,' said Mr. Wickfield again laying
his irresolute hand upon the Doctor's arm, 'don't attach too much
weight to any suspicions I may have entertained.'

'There!' cried Uriah, shaking his head.  'What a melancholy
confirmation: ain't it?  Him!  Such an old friend!  Bless your
soul, when I was nothing but a clerk in his office, Copperfield,
I've seen him twenty times, if I've seen him once, quite in a
taking about it - quite put out, you know (and very proper in him
as a father; I'm sure I can't blame him), to think that Miss Agnes
was mixing herself up with what oughtn't to be.'

'My dear Strong,' said Mr. Wickfield in a tremulous voice, 'my good
friend, I needn't tell you that it has been my vice to look for
some one master motive in everybody, and to try all actions by one
narrow test.  I may have fallen into such doubts as I have had,
through this mistake.'

'You have had doubts, Wickfield,' said the Doctor, without lifting
up his head.  'You have had doubts.'

'Speak up, fellow-partner,' urged Uriah.

'I had, at one time, certainly,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'I - God
forgive me - I thought YOU had.'

'No, no, no!' returned the Doctor, in a tone of most pathetic
grief.
'I thought, at one time,' said Mr. Wickfield, 'that you wished to
send Maldon abroad to effect a desirable separation.'

'No, no, no!' returned the Doctor.  'To give Annie pleasure, by
making some provision for the companion of her childhood.  Nothing
else.'

'So I found,' said Mr. Wickfield.  'I couldn't doubt it, when you
told me so.  But I thought - I implore you to remember the narrow
construction which has been my besetting sin - that, in a case
where there was so much disparity in point of years -'

'That's the way to put it, you see, Master Copperfield!' observed
Uriah, with fawning and offensive pity.

'- a lady of such youth, and such attractions, however real her
respect for you, might have been influenced in marrying, by worldly
considerations only.  I make no allowance for innumerable feelings
and circumstances that may have all tended to good.  For Heaven's
sake remember that!'

'How kind he puts it!' said Uriah, shaking his head.

'Always observing her from one point of view,' said Mr. Wickfield;
'but by all that is dear to you, my old friend, I entreat you to
consider what it was; I am forced to confess now, having no escape
-'

'No!  There's no way out of it, Mr. Wickfield, sir,' observed
Uriah, 'when it's got to this.'

'- that I did,' said Mr. Wickfield, glancing helplessly and
distractedly at his partner, 'that I did doubt her, and think her
wanting in her duty to you; and that I did sometimes, if I must say
all, feel averse to Agnes being in such a familiar relation towards
her, as to see what I saw, or in my diseased theory fancied that I
saw.  I never mentioned this to anyone.  I never meant it to be
known to anyone.  And though it is terrible to you to hear,' said
Mr. Wickfield, quite subdued, 'if you knew how terrible it is for
me to tell, you would feel compassion for me!'

The Doctor, in the perfect goodness of his nature, put out his
hand.  Mr. Wickfield held it for a little while in his, with his
head bowed down.

'I am sure,' said Uriah, writhing himself into the silence like a
Conger-eel, 'that this is a subject full of unpleasantness to
everybody.  But since we have got so far, I ought to take the
liberty of mentioning that Copperfield has noticed it too.'

I turned upon him, and asked him how he dared refer to me!

'Oh! it's very kind of you, Copperfield,' returned Uriah,
undulating all over, 'and we all know what an amiable character
yours is; but you know that the moment I spoke to you the other
night, you knew what I meant.  You know you knew what I meant,
Copperfield.  Don't deny it!  You deny it with the best intentions;
but don't do it, Copperfield.'

I saw the mild eye of the good old Doctor turned upon me for a
moment, and I felt that the confession of my old misgivings and
remembrances was too plainly written in my face to be overlooked. 
It was of no use raging.  I could not undo that.  Say what I would,
I could not unsay it.

We were silent again, and remained so, until the Doctor rose and
walked twice or thrice across the room.  Presently he returned to
where his chair stood; and, leaning on the back of it, and
occasionally putting his handkerchief to his eyes, with a simple
honesty that did him more honour, to my thinking, than any disguise
he could have effected, said:

'I have been much to blame.  I believe I have been very much to
blame.  I have exposed one whom I hold in my heart, to trials and
aspersions - I call them aspersions, even to have been conceived in
anybody's inmost mind - of which she never, but for me, could have
been the object.'

Uriah Heep gave a kind of snivel.  I think to express sympathy.

'Of which my Annie,' said the Doctor, 'never, but for me, could
have been the object.  Gentlemen, I am old now, as you know; I do
not feel, tonight, that I have much to live for.  But my life - my
Life - upon the truth and honour of the dear lady who has been the
subject of this conversation!'

I do not think that the best embodiment of chivalry, the
realization of the handsomest and most romantic figure ever
imagined by painter, could have said this, with a more impressive
and affecting dignity than the plain old Doctor did.

'But I am not prepared,' he went on, 'to deny - perhaps I may have
been, without knowing it, in some degree prepared to admit - that
I may have unwittingly ensnared that lady into an unhappy marriage. 
I am a man quite unaccustomed to observe; and I cannot but believe
that the observation of several people, of different ages and
positions, all too plainly tending in one direction (and that so
natural), is better than mine.'

I had often admired, as I have elsewhere described, his benignant
manner towards his youthful wife; but the respectful tenderness he
manifested in every reference to her on this occasion, and the
almost reverential manner in which he put away from him the
lightest doubt of her integrity, exalted him, in my eyes, beyond
description.

'I married that lady,' said the Doctor, 'when she was extremely
young.  I took her to myself when her character was scarcely
formed.  So far as it was developed, it had been my happiness to
form it.  I knew her father well.  I knew her well.  I had taught
her what I could, for the love of all her beautiful and virtuous
qualities.  If I did her wrong; as I fear I did, in taking
advantage (but I never meant it) of her gratitude and her
affection; I ask pardon of that lady, in my heart!'

He walked across the room, and came back to the same place; holding
the chair with a grasp that trembled, like his subdued voice, in
its earnestness.

'I regarded myself as a refuge, for her, from the dangers and
vicissitudes of life.  I persuaded myself that, unequal though we
were in years, she would live tranquilly and contentedly with me. 
I did not shut out of my consideration the time when I should leave
her free, and still young and still beautiful, but with her
judgement more matured - no, gentlemen - upon my truth!'

His homely figure seemed to be lightened up by his fidelity and
generosity.  Every word he uttered had a force that no other grace
could have imparted to it.

'My life with this lady has been very happy.  Until tonight, I have
had uninterrupted occasion to bless the day on which I did her
great injustice.'

His voice, more and more faltering in the utterance of these words,
stopped for a few moments; then he went on:

'Once awakened from my dream - I have been a poor dreamer, in one
way or other, all my life - I see how natural it is that she should
have some regretful feeling towards her old companion and her
equal.  That she does regard him with some innocent regret, with
some blameless thoughts of what might have been, but for me, is, I
fear, too true.  Much that I have seen, but not noted, has come
back upon me with new meaning, during this last trying hour.  But,
beyond this, gentlemen, the dear lady's name never must be coupled
with a word, a breath, of doubt.'

For a little while, his eye kindled and his voice was firm; for a
little while he was again silent.  Presently, he proceeded as
before:

'It only remains for me, to bear the knowledge of the unhappiness
I have occasioned, as submissively as I can.  It is she who should
reproach; not I.  To save her from misconstruction, cruel
misconstruction, that even my friends have not been able to avoid,
becomes my duty.  The more retired we live, the better I shall
discharge it.  And when the time comes - may it come soon, if it be
His merciful pleasure! - when my death shall release her from
constraint, I shall close my eyes upon her honoured face, with
unbounded confidence and love; and leave her, with no sorrow then,
to happier and brighter days.'

I could not see him for the tears which his earnestness and
goodness, so adorned by, and so adorning, the perfect simplicity of
his manner, brought into my eyes.  He had moved to the door, when
he added:

'Gentlemen, I have shown you my heart.  I am sure you will respect
it.  What we have said tonight is never to be said more. 
Wickfield, give me an old friend's arm upstairs!'

Mr. Wickfield hastened to him.  Without interchanging a word they
went slowly out of the room together, Uriah looking after them.

'Well, Master Copperfield!' said Uriah, meekly turning to me.  'The
thing hasn't took quite the turn that might have been expected, for
the old Scholar - what an excellent man! - is as blind as a
brickbat; but this family's out of the cart, I think!'

I needed but the sound of his voice to be so madly enraged as I
never was before, and never have been since.

'You villain,' said I, 'what do you mean by entrapping me into your
schemes?  How dare you appeal to me just now, you false rascal, as
if we had been in discussion together?'

As we stood, front to front, I saw so plainly, in the stealthy
exultation of his face, what I already so plainly knew; I mean that
he forced his confidence upon me, expressly to make me miserable,
and had set a deliberate trap for me in this very matter; that I
couldn't bear it.  The whole of his lank cheek was invitingly
before me, and I struck it with my open hand with that force that
my fingers tingled as if I had burnt them.

He caught the hand in his, and we stood in that connexion, looking
at each other.  We stood so, a long time; long enough for me to see
the white marks of my fingers die out of the deep red of his cheek,
and leave it a deeper red.

'Copperfield,' he said at length, in a breathless voice, 'have you
taken leave of your senses?'

'I have taken leave of you,' said I, wresting my hand away.  'You
dog, I'll know no more of you.'

'Won't you?' said he, constrained by the pain of his cheek to put
his hand there.  'Perhaps you won't be able to help it.  Isn't this
ungrateful of you, now?'

'I have shown you often enough,' said I, 'that I despise you.  I
have shown you now, more plainly, that I do.  Why should I dread
your doing your worst to all about you?  What else do you ever do?'

He perfectly understood this allusion to the considerations that
had hitherto restrained me in my communications with him.  I rather
think that neither the blow, nor the allusion, would have escaped
me, but for the assurance I had had from Agnes that night.  It is
no matter.

There was another long pause.  His eyes, as he looked at me, seemed
to take every shade of colour that could make eyes ugly.

'Copperfield,' he said, removing his hand from his cheek, 'you have
always gone against me.  I know you always used to be against me at
Mr. Wickfield's.'

'You may think what you like,' said I, still in a towering rage. 
'If it is not true, so much the worthier you.'

'And yet I always liked you, Copperfield!' he rejoined.

I deigned to make him no reply; and, taking up my hat, was going
out to bed, when he came between me and the door.

'Copperfield,' he said, 'there must be two parties to a quarrel. 
I won't be one.'

'You may go to the devil!' said I.

'Don't say that!' he replied.  'I know you'll be sorry afterwards. 
How can you make yourself so inferior to me, as to show such a bad
spirit?  But I forgive you.'

'You forgive me!' I repeated disdainfully.

'I do, and you can't help yourself,' replied Uriah.  'To think of
your going and attacking me, that have always been a friend to you!
But there can't be a quarrel without two parties, and I won't be
one.  I will be a friend to you, in spite of you.  So now you know
what you've got to expect.'

The necessity of carrying on this dialogue (his part in which was
very slow; mine very quick) in a low tone, that the house might not
be disturbed at an unseasonable hour, did not improve my temper;
though my passion was cooling down.  Merely telling him that I
should expect from him what I always had expected, and had never
yet been disappointed in, I opened the door upon him, as if he had
been a great walnut put there to be cracked, and went out of the
house.  But he slept out of the house too, at his mother's lodging;
and before I had gone many hundred yards, came up with me.

'You know, Copperfield,' he said, in my ear (I did not turn my
head), 'you're in quite a wrong position'; which I felt to be true,
and that made me chafe the more; 'you can't make this a brave
thing, and you can't help being forgiven.  I don't intend to
mention it to mother, nor to any living soul.  I'm determined to
forgive you.  But I do wonder that you should lift your hand
against a person that you knew to be so umble!'

I felt only less mean than he.  He knew me better than I knew
myself.  If he had retorted or openly exasperated me, it would have
been a relief and a justification; but he had put me on a slow
fire, on which I lay tormented half the night.

In the morning, when I came out, the early church-bell was ringing,
and he was walking up and down with his mother.  He addressed me as
if nothing had happened, and I could do no less than reply.  I had
struck him hard enough to give him the toothache, I suppose.  At
all events his face was tied up in a black silk handkerchief,
which, with his hat perched on the top of it, was far from
improving his appearance.  I heard that he went to a dentist's in
London on the Monday morning, and had a tooth out.  I hope it was
a double one.

The Doctor gave out that he was not quite well; and remained alone,
for a considerable part of every day, during the remainder of the
visit.  Agnes and her father had been gone a week, before we
resumed our usual work.  On the day preceding its resumption, the
Doctor gave me with his own hands a folded note not sealed.  It was
addressed to myself; and laid an injunction on me, in a few
affectionate words, never to refer to the subject of that evening. 
I had confided it to my aunt, but to no one else.  It was not a
subject I could discuss with Agnes, and Agnes certainly had not the
least suspicion of what had passed.

Neither, I felt convinced, had Mrs. Strong then.  Several weeks
elapsed before I saw the least change in her.  It came on slowly,
like a cloud when there is no wind.  At first, she seemed to wonder
at the gentle compassion with which the Doctor spoke to her, and at
his wish that she should have her mother with her, to relieve the
dull monotony of her life.  Often, when we were at work, and she
was sitting by, I would see her pausing and looking at him with
that memorable face.  Afterwards, I sometimes observed her rise,
with her eyes full of tears, and go out of the room.  Gradually, an
unhappy shadow fell upon her beauty, and deepened every day.  Mrs.
Markleham was a regular inmate of the cottage then; but she talked
and talked, and saw nothing.

As this change stole on Annie, once like sunshine in the Doctor's
house, the Doctor became older in appearance, and more grave; but
the sweetness of his temper, the placid kindness of his manner, and
his benevolent solicitude for her, if they were capable of any
increase, were increased.  I saw him once, early on the morning of
her birthday, when she came to sit in the window while we were at
work (which she had always done, but now began to do with a timid
and uncertain air that I thought very touching), take her forehead
between his hands, kiss it, and go hurriedly away, too much moved
to remain.  I saw her stand where he had left her, like a statue;
and then bend down her head, and clasp her hands, and weep, I
cannot say how sorrowfully.

Sometimes, after that, I fancied that she tried to speak even to
me, in intervals when we were left alone.  But she never uttered a
word.  The Doctor always had some new project for her participating
in amusements away from home, with her mother; and Mrs. Markleham,
who was very fond of amusements, and very easily dissatisfied with
anything else, entered into them with great good-will, and was loud
in her commendations.  But Annie, in a spiritless unhappy way, only
went whither she was led, and seemed to have no care for anything.

I did not know what to think.  Neither did my aunt; who must have
walked, at various times, a hundred miles in her uncertainty.  What
was strangest of all was, that the only real relief which seemed to
make its way into the secret region of this domestic unhappiness,
made its way there in the person of Mr. Dick.

What his thoughts were on the subject, or what his observation was,
I am as unable to explain, as I dare say he would have been to
assist me in the task.  But, as I have recorded in the narrative of
my school days, his veneration for the Doctor was unbounded; and
there is a subtlety of perception in real attachment, even when it
is borne towards man by one of the lower animals, which leaves the
highest intellect behind.  To this mind of the heart, if I may call
it so, in Mr. Dick, some bright ray of the truth shot straight.

He had proudly resumed his privilege, in many of his spare hours,
of walking up and down the garden with the Doctor; as he had been
accustomed to pace up and down The Doctor's Walk at Canterbury. 
But matters were no sooner in this state, than he devoted all his
spare time (and got up earlier to make it more) to these
perambulations.  If he had never been so happy as when the Doctor
read that marvellous performance, the Dictionary, to him; he was
now quite miserable unless the Doctor pulled it out of his pocket,
and began.  When the Doctor and I were engaged, he now fell into
the custom of walking up and down with Mrs. Strong, and helping her
to trim her favourite flowers, or weed the beds.  I dare say he
rarely spoke a dozen words in an hour: but his quiet interest, and
his wistful face, found immediate response in both their breasts;
each knew that the other liked him, and that he loved both; and he
became what no one else could be - a link between them.

When I think of him, with his impenetrably wise face, walking up
and down with the Doctor, delighted to be battered by the hard
words in the Dictionary; when I think of him carrying huge
watering-pots after Annie; kneeling down, in very paws of gloves,
at patient microscopic work among the little leaves; expressing as
no philosopher could have expressed, in everything he did, a
delicate desire to be her friend; showering sympathy, trustfulness,
and affection, out of every hole in the watering-pot; when I think
of him never wandering in that better mind of his to which
unhappiness addressed itself, never bringing the unfortunate King
Charles into the garden, never wavering in his grateful service,
never diverted from his knowledge that there was something wrong,
or from his wish to set it right- I really feel almost ashamed of
having known that he was not quite in his wits, taking account of
the utmost I have done with mine.

'Nobody but myself, Trot, knows what that man is!' my aunt would
proudly remark, when we conversed about it.  'Dick will distinguish
himself yet!'

I must refer to one other topic before I close this chapter.  While
the visit at the Doctor's was still in progress, I observed that
the postman brought two or three letters every morning for Uriah
Heep, who remained at Highgate until the rest went back, it being
a leisure time; and that these were always directed in a
business-like manner by Mr. Micawber, who now assumed a round legal
hand.  I was glad to infer, from these slight premises, that Mr.
Micawber was doing well; and consequently was much surprised to
receive, about this time, the following letter from his amiable
wife.



                         'CANTERBURY, Monday Evening.

'You will doubtless be surprised, my dear Mr. Copperfield, to
receive this communication.  Still more so, by its contents.  Still
more so, by the stipulation of implicit confidence which I beg to
impose.  But my feelings as a wife and mother require relief; and
as I do not wish to consult my family (already obnoxious to the
feelings of Mr. Micawber), I know no one of whom I can better ask
advice than my friend and former lodger.

'You may be aware, my dear Mr. Copperfield, that between myself and
Mr. Micawber (whom I will never desert), there has always been
preserved a spirit of mutual confidence.  Mr. Micawber may have
occasionally given a bill without consulting me, or he may have
misled me as to the period when that obligation would become due. 
This has actually happened.  But, in general, Mr. Micawber has had
no secrets from the bosom of affection - I allude to his wife - and
has invariably, on our retirement to rest, recalled the events of
the day.

'You will picture to yourself, my dear Mr. Copperfield, what the
poignancy of my feelings must be, when I inform you that Mr.
Micawber is entirely changed.  He is reserved.  He is secret.  His
life is a mystery to the partner of his joys and sorrows - I again
allude to his wife - and if I should assure you that beyond knowing
that it is passed from morning to night at the office, I now know
less of it than I do of the man in the south, connected with whose
mouth the thoughtless children repeat an idle tale respecting cold
plum porridge, I should adopt a popular fallacy to express an
actual fact.

'But this is not all.  Mr. Micawber is morose.  He is severe.  He
is estranged from our eldest son and daughter, he has no pride in
his twins, he looks with an eye of coldness even on the unoffending
stranger who last became a member of our circle.  The pecuniary
means of meeting our expenses, kept down to the utmost farthing,
are obtained from him with great difficulty, and even under fearful
threats that he will Settle himself (the exact expression); and he
inexorably refuses to give any explanation whatever of this
distracting policy.

'This is hard to bear.  This is heart-breaking.  If you will advise
me, knowing my feeble powers such as they are, how you think it
will be best to exert them in a dilemma so unwonted, you will add
another friendly obligation to the many you have already rendered
me.  With loves from the children, and a smile from the
happily-unconscious stranger, I remain, dear Mr. Copperfield,

                              Your afflicted,

                                   'EMMA MICAWBER.'


I did not feel justified in giving a wife of Mrs. Micawber's
experience any other recommendation, than that she should try to
reclaim Mr. Micawber by patience and kindness (as I knew she would
in any case); but the letter set me thinking about him very much.



CHAPTER 43
ANOTHER RETROSPECT


Once again, let me pause upon a memorable period of my life.  Let
me stand aside, to see the phantoms of those days go by me,
accompanying the shadow of myself, in dim procession.

Weeks, months, seasons, pass along.  They seem little more than a
summer day and a winter evening.  Now, the Common where I walk with
Dora is all in bloom, a field of bright gold; and now the unseen
heather lies in mounds and bunches underneath a covering of snow. 
In a breath, the river that flows through our Sunday walks is
sparkling in the summer sun, is ruffled by the winter wind, or
thickened with drifting heaps of ice.  Faster than ever river ran
towards the sea, it flashes, darkens, and rolls away.

Not a thread changes, in the house of the two little bird-like
ladies.  The clock ticks over the fireplace, the weather-glass
hangs in the hall.  Neither clock nor weather-glass is ever right;
but we believe in both, devoutly.

I have come legally to man's estate.  I have attained the dignity
of twenty-one.  But this is a sort of dignity that may be thrust
upon one.  Let me think what I have achieved.

I have tamed that savage stenographic mystery.  I make a
respectable income by it.  I am in high repute for my
accomplishment in all pertaining to the art, and am joined with
eleven others in reporting the debates in Parliament for a Morning
Newspaper.  Night after night, I record predictions that never come
to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that
are only meant to mystify.  I wallow in words.  Britannia, that
unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl:
skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and
foot with red tape.  I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know
the worth of political life.  I am quite an Infidel about it, and
shall never be converted.

My dear old Traddles has tried his hand at the same pursuit, but it
is not in Traddles's way.  He is perfectly good-humoured respecting
his failure, and reminds me that he always did consider himself
slow.  He has occasional employment on the same newspaper, in
getting up the facts of dry subjects, to be written about and
embellished by more fertile minds.  He is called to the bar; and
with admirable industry and self-denial has scraped another hundred
pounds together, to fee a Conveyancer whose chambers he attends. 
A great deal of very hot port wine was consumed at his call; and,
considering the figure, I should think the Inner Temple must have
made a profit by it.

I have come out in another way.  I have taken with fear and
trembling to authorship.  I wrote a little something, in secret,
and sent it to a magazine, and it was published in the magazine. 
Since then, I have taken heart to write a good many trifling
pieces.  Now, I am regularly paid for them.  Altogether, I am well
off, when I tell my income on the fingers of my left hand, I pass
the third finger and take in the fourth to the middle joint.

We have removed, from Buckingham Street, to a pleasant little
cottage very near the one I looked at, when my enthusiasm first
came on.  My aunt, however (who has sold the house at Dover, to
good advantage), is not going to remain here, but intends removing
herself to a still more tiny cottage close at hand.  What does this
portend?  My marriage?  Yes!

Yes!  I am going to be married to Dora!  Miss Lavinia and Miss
Clarissa have given their consent; and if ever canary birds were in
a flutter, they are.  Miss Lavinia, self-charged with the
superintendence of my darling's wardrobe, is constantly cutting out
brown-paper cuirasses, and differing in opinion from a highly
respectable young man, with a long bundle, and a yard measure under
his arm.  A dressmaker, always stabbed in the breast with a needle
and thread, boards and lodges in the house; and seems to me,
eating, drinking, or sleeping, never to take her thimble off.  They
make a lay-figure of my dear.  They are always sending for her to
come and try something on.  We can't be happy together for five
minutes in the evening, but some intrusive female knocks at the
door, and says, 'Oh, if you please, Miss Dora, would you step
upstairs!'

Miss Clarissa and my aunt roam all over London, to find out
articles of furniture for Dora and me to look at.  It would be
better for them to buy the goods at once, without this ceremony of
inspection; for, when we go to see a kitchen fender and
meat-screen, Dora sees a Chinese house for Jip, with little bells
on the top, and prefers that.  And it takes a long time to accustom
Jip to his new residence, after we have bought it; whenever he goes
in or out, he makes all the little bells ring, and is horribly
frightened.

Peggotty comes up to make herself useful, and falls to work
immediately.  Her department appears to be, to clean everything
over and over again.  She rubs everything that can be rubbed, until
it shines, like her own honest forehead, with perpetual friction. 
And now it is, that I begin to see her solitary brother passing
through the dark streets at night, and looking, as he goes, among
the wandering faces.  I never speak to him at such an hour.  I know
too well, as his grave figure passes onward, what he seeks, and
what he dreads.

Why does Traddles look so important when he calls upon me this
afternoon in the Commons - where I still occasionally attend, for
form's sake, when I have time?  The realization of my boyish
day-dreams is at hand.  I am going to take out the licence.

It is a little document to do so much; and Traddles contemplates
it, as it lies upon my desk, half in admiration, half in awe. 
There are the names, in the sweet old visionary connexion, David
Copperfield and Dora Spenlow; and there, in the corner, is that
Parental Institution, the Stamp Office, which is so benignantly
interested in the various transactions of human life, looking down
upon our Union; and there is the Archbishop of Canterbury invoking
a blessing on us in print, and doing it as cheap as could possibly
be expected.

Nevertheless, I am in a dream, a flustered, happy, hurried dream. 
I can't believe that it is going to be; and yet I can't believe but
that everyone I pass in the street, must have some kind of
perception, that I am to be married the day after tomorrow.  The
Surrogate knows me, when I go down to be sworn; and disposes of me
easily, as if there were a Masonic understanding between us. 
Traddles is not at all wanted, but is in attendance as my general
backer.

'I hope the next time you come here, my dear fellow,' I say to
Traddles, 'it will be on the same errand for yourself.  And I hope
it will be soon.'

'Thank you for your good wishes, my dear Copperfield,' he replies. 
'I hope so too.  It's a satisfaction to know that she'll wait for
me any length of time, and that she really is the dearest girl -'

'When are you to meet her at the coach?' I ask.

'At seven,' says Traddles, looking at his plain old silver watch -
the very watch he once took a wheel out of, at school, to make a
water-mill.  'That is about Miss Wickfield's time, is it not?'

'A little earlier.  Her time is half past eight.'
'I assure you, my dear boy,' says Traddles, 'I am almost as pleased
as if I were going to be married myself, to think that this event
is coming to such a happy termination.  And really the great
friendship and consideration of personally associating Sophy with
the joyful occasion, and inviting her to be a bridesmaid in
conjunction with Miss Wickfield, demands my warmest thanks.  I am
extremely sensible of it.'

I hear him, and shake hands with him; and we talk, and walk, and
dine, and so on; but I don't believe it.  Nothing is real.

Sophy arrives at the house of Dora's aunts, in due course.  She has
the most agreeable of faces, - not absolutely beautiful, but
extraordinarily pleasant, - and is one of the most genial,
unaffected, frank, engaging creatures I have ever seen.  Traddles
presents her to us with great pride; and rubs his hands for ten
minutes by the clock, with every individual hair upon his head
standing on tiptoe, when I congratulate him in a corner on his
choice.

I have brought Agnes from the Canterbury coach, and her cheerful
and beautiful face is among us for the second time.  Agnes has a
great liking for Traddles, and it is capital to see them meet, and
to observe the glory of Traddles as he commends the dearest girl in
the world to her acquaintance.

Still I don't believe it.  We have a delightful evening, and are
supremely happy; but I don't believe it yet.  I can't collect
myself.  I can't check off my happiness as it takes place.  I feel
in a misty and unsettled kind of state; as if I had got up very
early in the morning a week or two ago, and had never been to bed
since.  I can't make out when yesterday was.  I seem to have been
carrying the licence about, in my pocket, many months.

Next day, too, when we all go in a flock to see the house - our
house - Dora's and mine - I am quite unable to regard myself as its
master.  I seem to be there, by permission of somebody else.  I
half expect the real master to come home presently, and say he is
glad to see me.  Such a beautiful little house as it is, with
everything so bright and new; with the flowers on the carpets
looking as if freshly gathered, and the green leaves on the paper
as if they had just come out; with the spotless muslin curtains,
and the blushing rose-coloured furniture, and Dora's garden hat
with the blue ribbon - do I remember, now, how I loved her in such
another hat when I first knew her! - already hanging on its little
peg; the guitar-case quite at home on its heels in a corner; and
everybody tumbling over Jip's pagoda, which is much too big for the
establishment.  Another happy evening, quite as unreal as all the
rest of it, and I steal into the usual room before going away. 
Dora is not there.  I suppose they have not done trying on yet. 
Miss Lavinia peeps in, and tells me mysteriously that she will not
be long.  She is rather long, notwithstanding; but by and by I hear
a rustling at the door, and someone taps.

I say, 'Come in!' but someone taps again.

I go to the door, wondering who it is; there, I meet a pair of
bright eyes, and a blushing face; they are Dora's eyes and face,
and Miss Lavinia has dressed her in tomorrow's dress, bonnet and
all, for me to see.  I take my little wife to my heart; and Miss
Lavinia gives a little scream because I tumble the bonnet, and Dora
laughs and cries at once, because I am so pleased; and I believe it
less than ever.

'Do you think it pretty, Doady?' says Dora.

Pretty!  I should rather think I did.

'And are you sure you like me very much?' says Dora.

The topic is fraught with such danger to the bonnet, that Miss
Lavinia gives another little scream, and begs me to understand that
Dora is only to be looked at, and on no account to be touched.  So
Dora stands in a delightful state of confusion for a minute or two,
to be admired; and then takes off her bonnet - looking so natural
without it! - and runs away with it in her hand; and comes dancing
down again in her own familiar dress, and asks Jip if I have got a
beautiful little wife, and whether he'll forgive her for being
married, and kneels down to make him stand upon the cookery-book,
for the last time in her single life.

I go home, more incredulous than ever, to a lodging that I have
hard by; and get up very early in the morning, to ride to the
Highgate road and fetch my aunt.

I have never seen my aunt in such state.  She is dressed in
lavender-coloured silk, and has a white bonnet on, and is amazing. 
Janet has dressed her, and is there to look at me.  Peggotty is
ready to go to church, intending to behold the ceremony from the
gallery.  Mr. Dick, who is to give my darling to me at the altar,
has had his hair curled.  Traddles, whom I have taken up by
appointment at the turnpike, presents a dazzling combination of
cream colour and light blue; and both he and Mr. Dick have a
general effect about them of being all gloves.

No doubt I see this, because I know it is so; but I am astray, and
seem to see nothing.  Nor do I believe anything whatever.  Still,
as we drive along in an open carriage, this fairy marriage is real
enough to fill me with a sort of wondering pity for the unfortunate
people who have no part in it, but are sweeping out the shops, and
going to their daily occupations.

My aunt sits with my hand in hers all the way.  When we stop a
little way short of the church, to put down Peggotty, whom we have
brought on the box, she gives it a squeeze, and me a kiss.

'God bless you, Trot!  My own boy never could be dearer.  I think
of poor dear Baby this morning.'
'So do I.  And of all I owe to you, dear aunt.'

'Tut, child!' says my aunt; and gives her hand in overflowing
cordiality to Traddles, who then gives his to Mr. Dick, who then
gives his to me, who then gives mine to Traddles, and then we come
to the church door.

The church is calm enough, I am sure; but it might be a steam-power
loom in full action, for any sedative effect it has on me.  I am
too far gone for that.

The rest is all a more or less incoherent dream.

A dream of their coming in with Dora; of the pew-opener arranging
us, like a drill-sergeant, before the altar rails; of my wondering,
even then, why pew-openers must always be the most disagreeable
females procurable, and whether there is any religious dread of a
disastrous infection of good-humour which renders it indispensable
to set those vessels of vinegar upon the road to Heaven.

Of the clergyman and clerk appearing; of a few boatmen and some
other people strolling in; of an ancient mariner behind me,
strongly flavouring the church with rum; of the service beginning
in a deep voice, and our all being very attentive.

Of Miss Lavinia, who acts as a semi-auxiliary bridesmaid, being the
first to cry, and of her doing homage (as I take it) to the memory
of Pidger, in sobs; of Miss Clarissa applying a smelling-bottle; of
Agnes taking care of Dora; of my aunt endeavouring to represent
herself as a model of sternness, with tears rolling down her face;
of little Dora trembling very much, and making her responses in
faint whispers.

Of our kneeling down together, side by side; of Dora's trembling
less and less, but always clasping Agnes by the hand; of the
service being got through, quietly and gravely; of our all looking
at each other in an April state of smiles and tears, when it is
over; of my young wife being hysterical in the vestry, and crying
for her poor papa, her dear papa.

Of her soon cheering up again, and our signing the register all
round.  Of my going into the gallery for Peggotty to bring her to
sign it; of Peggotty's hugging me in a corner, and telling me she
saw my own dear mother married; of its being over, and our going
away.

Of my walking so proudly and lovingly down the aisle with my sweet
wife upon my arm, through a mist of half-seen people, pulpits,
monuments, pews, fonts, organs, and church windows, in which there
flutter faint airs of association with my childish church at home,
so long ago.

Of their whispering, as we pass, what a youthful couple we are, and
what a pretty little wife she is.  Of our all being so merry and
talkative in the carriage going back.  Of Sophy telling us that
when she saw Traddles (whom I had entrusted with the licence) asked
for it, she almost fainted, having been convinced that he would
contrive to lose it, or to have his pocket picked.  Of Agnes
laughing gaily; and of Dora being so fond of Agnes that she will
not be separated from her, but still keeps her hand.

Of there being a breakfast, with abundance of things, pretty and
substantial, to eat and drink, whereof I partake, as I should do in
any other dream, without the least perception of their flavour;
eating and drinking, as I may say, nothing but love and marriage,
and no more believing in the viands than in anything else.

Of my making a speech in the same dreamy fashion, without having an
idea of what I want to say, beyond such as may be comprehended in
the full conviction that I haven't said it.  Of our being very
sociably and simply happy (always in a dream though); and of Jip's
having wedding cake, and its not agreeing with him afterwards.

Of the pair of hired post-horses being ready, and of Dora's going
away to change her dress.  Of my aunt and Miss Clarissa remaining
with us; and our walking in the garden; and my aunt, who has made
quite a speech at breakfast touching Dora's aunts, being mightily
amused with herself, but a little proud of it too.

Of Dora's being ready, and of Miss Lavinia's hovering about her,
loth to lose the pretty toy that has given her so much pleasant
occupation.  Of Dora's making a long series of surprised
discoveries that she has forgotten all sorts of little things; and
of everybody's running everywhere to fetch them.

Of their all closing about Dora, when at last she begins to say
good-bye, looking, with their bright colours and ribbons, like a
bed of flowers.  Of my darling being almost smothered among the
flowers, and coming out, laughing and crying both together, to my
jealous arms.

Of my wanting to carry Jip (who is to go along with us), and Dora's
saying no, that she must carry him, or else he'll think she don't
like him any more, now she is married, and will break his heart. 
Of our going, arm in arm, and Dora stopping and looking back, and
saying, 'If I have ever been cross or ungrateful to anybody, don't
remember it!' and bursting into tears.

Of her waving her little hand, and our going away once more.  Of
her once more stopping, and looking back, and hurrying to Agnes,
and giving Agnes, above all the others, her last kisses and
farewells.

We drive away together, and I awake from the dream.  I believe it
at last.  It is my dear, dear, little wife beside me, whom I love
so well!

'Are you happy now, you foolish boy?' says Dora, 'and sure you
don't repent?'


I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. 
They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.



CHAPTER 44
OUR HOUSEKEEPING


It was a strange condition of things, the honeymoon being over, and
the bridesmaids gone home, when I found myself sitting down in my
own small house with Dora; quite thrown out of employment, as I may
say, in respect of the delicious old occupation of making love.

It seemed such an extraordinary thing to have Dora always there. 
It was so unaccountable not to be obliged to go out to see her, not
to have any occasion to be tormenting myself about her, not to have
to write to her, not to be scheming and devising opportunities of
being alone with her.  Sometimes of an evening, when I looked up
from my writing, and saw her seated opposite, I would lean back in
my chair, and think how queer it was that there we were, alone
together as a matter of course - nobody's business any more - all
the romance of our engagement put away upon a shelf, to rust - no
one to please but one another - one another to please, for life.

When there was a debate, and I was kept out very late, it seemed so
strange to me, as I was walking home, to think that Dora was at
home!  It was such a wonderful thing, at first, to have her coming
softly down to talk to me as I ate my supper.  It was such a
stupendous thing to know for certain that she put her hair in
papers.  It was altogether such an astonishing event to see her do
it!

I doubt whether two young birds could have known less about keeping
house, than I and my pretty Dora did.  We had a servant, of course. 
She kept house for us.  I have still a latent belief that she must
have been Mrs. Crupp's daughter in disguise, we had such an awful
time of it with Mary Anne.

Her name was Paragon.  Her nature was represented to us, when we
engaged her, as being feebly expressed in her name.  She had a
written character, as large as a proclamation; and, according to
this document, could do everything of a domestic nature that ever
I heard of, and a great many things that I never did hear of.  She
was a woman in the prime of life; of a severe countenance; and
subject (particularly in the arms) to a sort of perpetual measles
or fiery rash.  She had a cousin in the Life-Guards, with such long
legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else. 
His shell-jacket was as much too little for him as he was too big
for the premises.  He made the cottage smaller than it need have
been, by being so very much out of proportion to it.  Besides
which, the walls were not thick, and, whenever he passed the
evening at our house, we always knew of it by hearing one continual
growl in the kitchen.

Our treasure was warranted sober and honest.  I am therefore
willing to believe that she was in a fit when we found her under
the boiler; and that the deficient tea-spoons were attributable to
the dustman.

But she preyed upon our minds dreadfully.  We felt our
inexperience, and were unable to help ourselves.  We should have
been at her mercy, if she had had any; but she was a remorseless
woman, and had none.  She was the cause of our first little
quarrel.

'My dearest life,' I said one day to Dora, 'do you think Mary Anne
has any idea of time?'

'Why, Doady?' inquired Dora, looking up, innocently, from her
drawing.

'My love, because it's five, and we were to have dined at four.'

Dora glanced wistfully at the clock, and hinted that she thought it
was too fast.

'On the contrary, my love,' said I, referring to my watch, 'it's a
few minutes too slow.'

My little wife came and sat upon my knee, to coax me to be quiet,
and drew a line with her pencil down the middle of my nose; but I
couldn't dine off that, though it was very agreeable.

'Don't you think, my dear,' said I, 'it would be better for you to
remonstrate with Mary Anne?'

'Oh no, please!  I couldn't, Doady!' said Dora.

'Why not, my love?' I gently asked.

'Oh, because I am such a little goose,' said Dora, 'and she knows
I am!'

I thought this sentiment so incompatible with the establishment of
any system of check on Mary Anne, that I frowned a little.

'Oh, what ugly wrinkles in my bad boy's forehead!' said Dora, and
still being on my knee, she traced them with her pencil; putting it
to her rosy lips to make it mark blacker, and working at my
forehead with a quaint little mockery of being industrious, that
quite delighted me in spite of myself.

'There's a good child,' said Dora, 'it makes its face so much
prettier to laugh.'
'But, my love,' said I.

'No, no! please!' cried Dora, with a kiss, 'don't be a naughty Blue
Beard!  Don't be serious!'

'my precious wife,' said I, 'we must be serious sometimes.  Come!
Sit down on this chair, close beside me!  Give me the pencil! 
There!  Now let us talk sensibly.  You know, dear'; what a little
hand it was to hold, and what a tiny wedding-ring it was to see!
'You know, my love, it is not exactly comfortable to have to go out
without one's dinner.  Now, is it?'

'N-n-no!' replied Dora, faintly.

'My love, how you tremble!'

'Because I KNOW you're going to scold me,' exclaimed Dora, in a
piteous voice.

'My sweet, I am only going to reason.'

'Oh, but reasoning is worse than scolding!' exclaimed Dora, in
despair.  'I didn't marry to be reasoned with.  If you meant to
reason with such a poor little thing as I am, you ought to have
told me so, you cruel boy!'

I tried to pacify Dora, but she turned away her face, and shook her
curls from side to side, and said, 'You cruel, cruel boy!' so many
times, that I really did not exactly know what to do: so I took a
few turns up and down the room in my uncertainty, and came back
again.

'Dora, my darling!'

'No, I am not your darling.  Because you must be sorry that you
married me, or else you wouldn't reason with me!' returned Dora.

I felt so injured by the inconsequential nature of this charge,
that it gave me courage to be grave.

'Now, my own Dora,' said I, 'you are very childish, and are talking
nonsense.  You must remember, I am sure, that I was obliged to go
out yesterday when dinner was half over; and that, the day before,
I was made quite unwell by being obliged to eat underdone veal in
a hurry; today, I don't dine at all - and I am afraid to say how
long we waited for breakfast - and then the water didn't boil.  I
don't mean to reproach you, my dear, but this is not comfortable.'

'Oh, you cruel, cruel boy, to say I am a disagreeable wife!' cried
Dora.

'Now, my dear Dora, you must know that I never said that!'

'You said, I wasn't comfortable!' cried Dora.
'I said the housekeeping was not comfortable!'

'It's exactly the same thing!' cried Dora.  And she evidently
thought so, for she wept most grievously.

I took another turn across the room, full of love for my pretty
wife, and distracted by self-accusatory inclinations to knock my
head against the door.  I sat down again, and said:

'I am not blaming you, Dora.  We have both a great deal to learn. 
I am only trying to show you, my dear, that you must - you really
must' (I was resolved not to give this up) - 'accustom yourself to
look after Mary Anne.  Likewise to act a little for yourself, and
me.'

'I wonder, I do, at your making such ungrateful speeches,' sobbed
Dora.  'When you know that the other day, when you said you would
like a little bit of fish, I went out myself, miles and miles, and
ordered it, to surprise you.'

'And it was very kind of you, my own darling,' said I.  'I felt it
so much that I wouldn't on any account have even mentioned that you
bought a Salmon - which was too much for two.  Or that it cost one
pound six - which was more than we can afford.'

'You enjoyed it very much,' sobbed Dora.  'And you said I was a
Mouse.'

'And I'll say so again, my love,' I returned, 'a thousand times!'

But I had wounded Dora's soft little heart, and she was not to be
comforted.  She was so pathetic in her sobbing and bewailing, that
I felt as if I had said I don't know what to hurt her.  I was
obliged to hurry away; I was kept out late; and I felt all night
such pangs of remorse as made me miserable.  I had the conscience
of an assassin, and was haunted by a vague sense of enormous
wickedness.

It was two or three hours past midnight when I got home.  I found
my aunt, in our house, sitting up for me.

'Is anything the matter, aunt?' said I, alarmed.

'Nothing, Trot,' she replied.  'Sit down, sit down.  Little Blossom
has been rather out of spirits, and I have been keeping her
company.  That's all.'

I leaned my head upon my hand; and felt more sorry and downcast, as
I sat looking at the fire, than I could have supposed possible so
soon after the fulfilment of my brightest hopes.  As I sat
thinking, I happened to meet my aunt's eyes, which were resting on
my face.  There was an anxious expression in them, but it cleared
directly.

'I assure you, aunt,' said I, 'I have been quite unhappy myself all
night, to think of Dora's being so.  But I had no other intention
than to speak to her tenderly and lovingly about our home-affairs.'

MY aunt nodded encouragement.

'You must have patience, Trot,' said she.

'Of course.  Heaven knows I don't mean to be unreasonable, aunt!'

'No, no,' said my aunt.  'But Little Blossom is a very tender
little blossom, and the wind must be gentle with her.'

I thanked my good aunt, in my heart, for her tenderness towards my
wife; and I was sure that she knew I did.

'Don't you think, aunt,' said I, after some further contemplation
of the fire, 'that you could advise and counsel Dora a little, for
our mutual advantage, now and then?'

'Trot,' returned my aunt, with some emotion, 'no!  Don't ask me
such a thing.'

Her tone was so very earnest that I raised my eyes in surprise.

'I look back on my life, child,' said my aunt, 'and I think of some
who are in their graves, with whom I might have been on kinder
terms.  If I judged harshly of other people's mistakes in marriage,
it may have been because I had bitter reason to judge harshly of my
own.  Let that pass.  I have been a grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of
a woman, a good many years.  I am still, and I always shall be. 
But you and I have done one another some good, Trot, - at all
events, you have done me good, my dear; and division must not come
between us, at this time of day.'

'Division between us!' cried I.

'Child, child!' said my aunt, smoothing her dress, 'how soon it
might come between us, or how unhappy I might make our Little
Blossom, if I meddled in anything, a prophet couldn't say.  I want
our pet to like me, and be as gay as a butterfly.  Remember your
own home, in that second marriage; and never do both me and her the
injury you have hinted at!'

I comprehended, at once, that my aunt was right; and I comprehended
the full extent of her generous feeling towards my dear wife.

'These are early days, Trot,' she pursued, 'and Rome was not built
in a day, nor in a year.  You have chosen freely for yourself'; a
cloud passed over her face for a moment, I thought; 'and you have
chosen a very pretty and a very affectionate creature.  It will be
your duty, and it will be your pleasure too - of course I know
that; I am not delivering a lecture - to estimate her (as you chose
her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not
have.  The latter you must develop in her, if you can.  And if you
cannot, child,' here my aunt rubbed her nose, 'you must just
accustom yourself to do without 'em.  But remember, my dear, your
future is between you two.  No one can assist you; you are to work
it out for yourselves.  This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless
you both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are!'

My aunt said this in a sprightly way, and gave me a kiss to ratify
the blessing.

'Now,' said she, 'light my little lantern, and see me into my
bandbox by the garden path'; for there was a communication between
our cottages in that direction.  'Give Betsey Trotwood's love to
Blossom, when you come back; and whatever you do, Trot, never dream
of setting Betsey up as a scarecrow, for if I ever saw her in the
glass, she's quite grim enough and gaunt enough in her private
capacity!'

With this my aunt tied her head up in a handkerchief, with which
she was accustomed to make a bundle of it on such occasions; and I
escorted her home.  As she stood in her garden, holding up her
little lantern to light me back, I thought her observation of me
had an anxious air again; but I was too much occupied in pondering
on what she had said, and too much impressed - for the first time,
in reality - by the conviction that Dora and I had indeed to work
out our future for ourselves, and that no one could assist us, to
take much notice of it.

Dora came stealing down in her little slippers, to meet me, now
that I was alone; and cried upon my shoulder, and said I had been
hard-hearted and she had been naughty; and I said much the same
thing in effect, I believe; and we made it up, and agreed that our
first little difference was to be our last, and that we were never
to have another if we lived a hundred years.

The next domestic trial we went through, was the Ordeal of
Servants.  Mary Anne's cousin deserted into our coal-hole, and was
brought out, to our great amazement, by a piquet of his companions
in arms, who took him away handcuffed in a procession that covered
our front-garden with ignominy.  This nerved me to get rid of Mary
Anne, who went so mildly, on receipt of wages, that I was
surprised, until I found out about the tea-spoons, and also about
the little sums she had borrowed in my name of the tradespeople
without authority.  After an interval of Mrs. Kidgerbury - the
oldest inhabitant of Kentish Town, I believe, who went out charing,
but was too feeble to execute her conceptions of that art - we
found another treasure, who was one of the most amiable of women,
but who generally made a point of falling either up or down the
kitchen stairs with the tray, and almost plunged into the parlour,
as into a bath, with the tea-things.  The ravages committed by this
unfortunate, rendering her dismissal necessary, she was succeeded
(with intervals of Mrs. Kidgerbury) by a long line of Incapables;
terminating in a young person of genteel appearance, who went to
Greenwich Fair in Dora's bonnet.  After whom I remember nothing but
an average equality of failure.

Everybody we had anything to do with seemed to cheat us.  Our
appearance in a shop was a signal for the damaged goods to be
brought out immediately.  If we bought a lobster, it was full of
water.  All our meat turned out to be tough, and there was hardly
any crust to our loaves.  In search of the principle on which
joints ought to be roasted, to be roasted enough, and not too much,
I myself referred to the Cookery Book, and found it there
established as the allowance of a quarter of an hour to every
pound, and say a quarter over.  But the principle always failed us
by some curious fatality, and we never could hit any medium between
redness and cinders.

I had reason to believe that in accomplishing these failures we
incurred a far greater expense than if we had achieved a series of
triumphs.  It appeared to me, on looking over the tradesmen's
books, as if we might have kept the basement storey paved with
butter, such was the extensive scale of our consumption of that
article.  I don't know whether the Excise returns of the period may
have exhibited any increase in the demand for pepper; but if our
performances did not affect the market, I should say several
families must have left off using it.  And the most wonderful fact
of all was, that we never had anything in the house.

As to the washerwoman pawning the clothes, and coming in a state of
penitent intoxication to apologize, I suppose that might have
happened several times to anybody.  Also the chimney on fire, the
parish engine, and perjury on the part of the Beadle.  But I
apprehend that we were personally fortunate in engaging a servant
with a taste for cordials, who swelled our running account for
porter at the public-house by such inexplicable items as 'quartern
rum shrub (Mrs. C.)'; 'Half-quartern gin and cloves (Mrs. C.)';
'Glass rum and peppermint (Mrs. C.)' - the parentheses always
referring to Dora, who was supposed, it appeared on explanation, to
have imbibed the whole of these refreshments.

One of our first feats in the housekeeping way was a little dinner
to Traddles.  I met him in town, and asked him to walk out with me
that afternoon.  He readily consenting, I wrote to Dora, saying I
would bring him home.  It was pleasant weather, and on the road we
made my domestic happiness the theme of conversation.  Traddles was
very full of it; and said, that, picturing himself with such a
home, and Sophy waiting and preparing for him, he could think of
nothing wanting to complete his bliss.

I could not have wished for a prettier little wife at the opposite
end of the table, but I certainly could have wished, when we sat
down, for a little more room.  I did not know how it was, but
though there were only two of us, we were at once always cramped
for room, and yet had always room enough to lose everything in.  I
suspect it may have been because nothing had a place of its own,
except Jip's pagoda, which invariably blocked up the main
thoroughfare.  On the present occasion, Traddles was so hemmed in
by the pagoda and the guitar-case, and Dora's flower-painting, and
my writing-table, that I had serious doubts of the possibility of
his using his knife and fork; but he protested, with his own
good-humour, 'Oceans of room, Copperfield!  I assure you, Oceans!'

There was another thing I could have wished, namely, that Jip had
never been encouraged to walk about the tablecloth during dinner. 
I began to think there was something disorderly in his being there
at all, even if he had not been in the habit of putting his foot in
the salt or the melted butter.  On this occasion he seemed to think
he was introduced expressly to keep Traddles at bay; and he barked
at my old friend, and made short runs at his plate, with such
undaunted pertinacity, that he may be said to have engrossed the
conversation.

However, as I knew how tender-hearted my dear Dora was, and how
sensitive she would be to any slight upon her favourite, I hinted
no objection.  For similar reasons I made no allusion to the
skirmishing plates upon the floor; or to the disreputable
appearance of the castors, which were all at sixes and sevens, and
looked drunk; or to the further blockade of Traddles by wandering
vegetable dishes and jugs.  I could not help wondering in my own
mind, as I contemplated the boiled leg of mutton before me,
previous to carving it, how it came to pass that our joints of meat
were of such extraordinary shapes - and whether our butcher
contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world; but
I kept my reflections to myself.

'My love,' said I to Dora, 'what have you got in that dish?'

I could not imagine why Dora had been making tempting little faces
at me, as if she wanted to kiss me.

'Oysters, dear,' said Dora, timidly.

'Was that YOUR thought?' said I, delighted.

'Ye-yes, Doady,' said Dora.

'There never was a happier one!' I exclaimed, laying down the
carving-knife and fork.  'There is nothing Traddles likes so much!'

'Ye-yes, Doady,' said Dora, 'and so I bought a beautiful little
barrel of them, and the man said they were very good.  But I - I am
afraid there's something the matter with them.  They don't seem
right.'  Here Dora shook her head, and diamonds twinkled in her
eyes.

'They are only opened in both shells,' said I.  'Take the top one
off, my love.'

'But it won't come off!' said Dora, trying very hard, and looking
very much distressed.

'Do you know, Copperfield,' said Traddles, cheerfully examining the
dish, 'I think it is in consequence - they are capital oysters, but
I think it is in consequence - of their never having been opened.'

They never had been opened; and we had no oyster-knives - and
couldn't have used them if we had; so we looked at the oysters and
ate the mutton.  At least we ate as much of it as was done, and
made up with capers.  If I had permitted him, I am satisfied that
Traddles would have made a perfect savage of himself, and eaten a
plateful of raw meat, to express enjoyment of the repast; but I
would hear of no such immolation on the altar of friendship, and we
had a course of bacon instead; there happening, by good fortune, to
be cold bacon in the larder.

My poor little wife was in such affliction when she thought I
should be annoyed, and in such a state of joy when she found I was
not, that the discomfiture I had subdued, very soon vanished, and
we passed a happy evening; Dora sitting with her arm on my chair
while Traddles and I discussed a glass of wine, and taking every
opportunity of whispering in my ear that it was so good of me not
to be a cruel, cross old boy.  By and by she made tea for us; which
it was so pretty to see her do, as if she was busying herself with
a set of doll's tea-things, that I was not particular about the
quality of the beverage.  Then Traddles and I played a game or two
at cribbage; and Dora singing to the guitar the while, it seemed to
me as if our courtship and marriage were a tender dream of mine,
and the night when I first listened to her voice were not yet over.

When Traddles went away, and I came back into the parlour from
seeing him out, my wife planted her chair close to mine, and sat
down by my side.  'I am very sorry,' she said.  'Will you try to
teach me, Doady?'

'I must teach myself first, Dora,' said I.  'I am as bad as you,
love.'

'Ah!  But you can learn,' she returned; 'and you are a clever,
clever man!'

'Nonsense, mouse!' said I.

'I wish,' resumed my wife, after a long silence, 'that I could have
gone down into the country for a whole year, and lived with Agnes!'

Her hands were clasped upon my shoulder, and her chin rested on
them, and her blue eyes looked quietly into mine.

'Why so?' I asked.

'I think she might have improved me, and I think I might have
learned from her,' said Dora.

'All in good time, my love.  Agnes has had her father to take care
of for these many years, you should remember.  Even when she was
quite a child, she was the Agnes whom we know,' said I.

'Will you call me a name I want you to call me?' inquired Dora,
without moving.

'What is it?' I asked with a smile.

'It's a stupid name,' she said, shaking her curls for a moment. 
'Child-wife.'

I laughingly asked my child-wife what her fancy was in desiring to
be so called.  She answered without moving, otherwise than as the
arm I twined about her may have brought her blue eyes nearer to me:

'I don't mean, you silly fellow, that you should use the name
instead of Dora.  I only mean that you should think of me that way. 
When you are going to be angry with me, say to yourself, "it's only
my child-wife!" When I am very disappointing, say, "I knew, a long
time ago, that she would make but a child-wife!" When you miss what
I should like to be, and I think can never be, say, "still my
foolish child-wife loves me!" For indeed I do.'

I had not been serious with her; having no idea until now, that she
was serious herself.  But her affectionate nature was so happy in
what I now said to her with my whole heart, that her face became a
laughing one before her glittering eyes were dry.  She was soon my
child-wife indeed; sitting down on the floor outside the Chinese
House, ringing all the little bells one after another, to punish
Jip for his recent bad behaviour; while Jip lay blinking in the
doorway with his head out, even too lazy to be teased.

This appeal of Dora's made a strong impression on me.  I look back
on the time I write of; I invoke the innocent figure that I dearly
loved, to come out from the mists and shadows of the past, and turn
its gentle head towards me once again; and I can still declare that
this one little speech was constantly in my memory.  I may not have
used it to the best account; I was young and inexperienced; but I
never turned a deaf ear to its artless pleading.

Dora told me, shortly afterwards, that she was going to be a
wonderful housekeeper.  Accordingly, she polished the tablets,
pointed the pencil, bought an immense account-book, carefully
stitched up with a needle and thread all the leaves of the Cookery
Book which Jip had torn, and made quite a desperate little attempt
'to be good', as she called it.  But the figures had the old
obstinate propensity - they WOULD NOT add up.  When she had entered
two or three laborious items in the account-book, Jip would walk
over the page, wagging his tail, and smear them all out.  Her own
little right-hand middle finger got steeped to the very bone in
ink; and I think that was the only decided result obtained.

Sometimes, of an evening, when I was at home and at work - for I
wrote a good deal now, and was beginning in a small way to be known
as a writer - I would lay down my pen, and watch my child-wife
trying to be good.  First of all, she would bring out the immense
account-book, and lay it down upon the table, with a deep sigh. 
Then she would open it at the place where Jip had made it illegible
last night, and call Jip up, to look at his misdeeds.  This would
occasion a diversion in Jip's favour, and some inking of his nose,
perhaps, as a penalty.  Then she would tell Jip to lie down on the
table instantly, 'like a lion' - which was one of his tricks,
though I cannot say the likeness was striking - and, if he were in
an obedient humour, he would obey.  Then she would take up a pen,
and begin to write, and find a hair in it.  Then she would take up
another pen, and begin to write, and find that it spluttered.  Then
she would take up another pen, and begin to write, and say in a low
voice, 'Oh, it's a talking pen, and will disturb Doady!' And then
she would give it up as a bad job, and put the account-book away,
after pretending to crush the lion with it.

Or, if she were in a very sedate and serious state of mind, she
would sit down with the tablets, and a little basket of bills and
other documents, which looked more like curl-papers than anything
else, and endeavour to get some result out of them.  After severely
comparing one with another, and making entries on the tablets, and
blotting them out, and counting all the fingers of her left hand
over and over again, backwards and forwards, she would be so vexed
and discouraged, and would look so unhappy, that it gave me pain to
see her bright face clouded - and for me! - and I would go softly
to her, and say:

'What's the matter, Dora?'

Dora would look up hopelessly, and reply, 'They won't come right. 
They make my head ache so.  And they won't do anything I want!'

Then I would say, 'Now let us try together.  Let me show you,
Dora.'

Then I would commence a practical demonstration, to which Dora
would pay profound attention, perhaps for five minutes; when she
would begin to be dreadfully tired, and would lighten the subject
by curling my hair, or trying the effect of my face with my
shirt-collar turned down.  If I tacitly checked this playfulness,
and persisted, she would look so scared and disconsolate, as she
became more and more bewildered, that the remembrance of her
natural gaiety when I first strayed into her path, and of her being
my child-wife, would come reproachfully upon me; and I would lay
the pencil down, and call for the guitar.

I had a great deal of work to do, and had many anxieties, but the
same considerations made me keep them to myself.  I am far from
sure, now, that it was right to do this, but I did it for my
child-wife's sake.  I search my breast, and I commit its secrets,
if I know them, without any reservation to this paper.  The old
unhappy loss or want of something had, I am conscious, some place
in my heart; but not to the embitterment of my life.  When I walked
alone in the fine weather, and thought of the summer days when all
the air had been filled with my boyish enchantment, I did miss
something of the realization of my dreams; but I thought it was a
softened glory of the Past, which nothing could have thrown upon
the present time.  I did feel, sometimes, for a little while, that
I could have wished my wife had been my counsellor; had had more
character and purpose, to sustain me and improve me by; had been
endowed with power to fill up the void which somewhere seemed to be
about me; but I felt as if this were an unearthly consummation of
my happiness, that never had been meant to be, and never could have
been.

I was a boyish husband as to years.  I had known the softening
influence of no other sorrows or experiences than those recorded in
these leaves.  If I did any wrong, as I may have done much, I did
it in mistaken love, and in my want of wisdom.  I write the exact
truth.  It would avail me nothing to extenuate it now.

Thus it was that I took upon myself the toils and cares of our
life, and had no partner in them.  We lived much as before, in
reference to our scrambling household arrangements; but I had got
used to those, and Dora I was pleased to see was seldom vexed now. 
She was bright and cheerful in the old childish way, loved me
dearly, and was happy with her old trifles.

When the debates were heavy - I mean as to length, not quality, for
in the last respect they were not often otherwise - and I went home
late, Dora would never rest when she heard my footsteps, but would
always come downstairs to meet me.  When my evenings were
unoccupied by the pursuit for which I had qualified myself with so
much pains, and I was engaged in writing at home, she would sit
quietly near me, however late the hour, and be so mute, that I
would often think she had dropped asleep.  But generally, when I
raised my head, I saw her blue eyes looking at me with the quiet
attention of which I have already spoken.

'Oh, what a weary boy!' said Dora one night, when I met her eyes as
I was shutting up my desk.

'What a weary girl!' said I.  'That's more to the purpose.  You
must go to bed another time, my love.  It's far too late for you.'

'No, don't send me to bed!' pleaded Dora, coming to my side. 
'Pray, don't do that!'

'Dora!' To my amazement she was sobbing on my neck.  'Not well, my
dear! not happy!'

'Yes! quite well, and very happy!' said Dora.  'But say you'll let
me stop, and see you write.'

'Why, what a sight for such bright eyes at midnight!' I replied.

'Are they bright, though?' returned Dora, laughing.  'I'm so glad
they're bright.'
'Little Vanity!' said I.

But it was not vanity; it was only harmless delight in my
admiration.  I knew that very well, before she told me so.

'If you think them pretty, say I may always stop, and see you
write!' said Dora.  'Do you think them pretty?'

'Very pretty.'

'Then let me always stop and see you write.'

'I am afraid that won't improve their brightness, Dora.'

'Yes, it will!  Because, you clever boy, you'll not forget me then,
while you are full of silent fancies.  Will you mind it, if I say
something very, very silly?  - more than usual?' inquired Dora,
peeping over my shoulder into my face.

'What wonderful thing is that?' said I.

'Please let me hold the pens,' said Dora.  'I want to have
something to do with all those many hours when you are so
industrious.  May I hold the pens?'

The remembrance of her pretty joy when I said yes, brings tears
into my eyes.  The next time I sat down to write, and regularly
afterwards, she sat in her old place, with a spare bundle of pens
at her side.  Her triumph in this connexion with my work, and her
delight when I wanted a new pen - which I very often feigned to do
- suggested to me a new way of pleasing my child-wife.  I
occasionally made a pretence of wanting a page or two of manuscript
copied.  Then Dora was in her glory.  The preparations she made for
this great work, the aprons she put on, the bibs she borrowed from
the kitchen to keep off the ink, the time she took, the innumerable
stoppages she made to have a laugh with Jip as if he understood it
all, her conviction that her work was incomplete unless she signed
her name at the end, and the way in which she would bring it to me,
like a school-copy, and then, when I praised it, clasp me round the
neck, are touching recollections to me, simple as they might appear
to other men.

She took possession of the keys soon after this, and went jingling
about the house with the whole bunch in a little basket, tied to
her slender waist.  I seldom found that the places to which they
belonged were locked, or that they were of any use except as a
plaything for Jip - but Dora was pleased, and that pleased me.  She
was quite satisfied that a good deal was effected by this
make-belief of housekeeping; and was as merry as if we had been
keeping a baby-house, for a joke.

So we went on.  Dora was hardly less affectionate to my aunt than
to me, and often told her of the time when she was afraid she was
'a cross old thing'.  I never saw my aunt unbend more
systematically to anyone.  She courted Jip, though Jip never
responded; listened, day after day, to the guitar, though I am
afraid she had no taste for music; never attacked the Incapables,
though the temptation must have been severe; went wonderful
distances on foot to purchase, as surprises, any trifles that she
found out Dora wanted; and never came in by the garden, and missed
her from the room, but she would call out, at the foot of the
stairs, in a voice that sounded cheerfully all over the house:

'Where's Little Blossom?'



CHAPTER 45
Mr. Dick fulfils my aunt's Predictions


It was some time now, since I had left the Doctor.  Living in his
neighbourhood, I saw him frequently; and we all went to his house
on two or three occasions to dinner or tea.  The Old Soldier was in
permanent quarters under the Doctor's roof.  She was exactly the
same as ever, and the same immortal butterflies hovered over her
cap.

Like some other mothers, whom I have known in the course of my
life, Mrs. Markleham was far more fond of pleasure than her
daughter was.  She required a great deal of amusement, and, like a
deep old soldier, pretended, in consulting her own inclinations, to
be devoting herself to her child.  The Doctor's desire that Annie
should be entertained, was therefore particularly acceptable to
this excellent parent; who expressed unqualified approval of his
discretion.

I have no doubt, indeed, that she probed the Doctor's wound without
knowing it.  Meaning nothing but a certain matured frivolity and
selfishness, not always inseparable from full-blown years, I think
she confirmed him in his fear that he was a constraint upon his
young wife, and that there was no congeniality of feeling between
them, by so strongly commending his design of lightening the load
of her life.

'My dear soul,' she said to him one day when I was present, 'you
know there is no doubt it would be a little pokey for Annie to be
always shut up here.'

The Doctor nodded his benevolent head.  'When she comes to her
mother's age,' said Mrs. Markleham, with a flourish of her fan,
'then it'll be another thing.  You might put ME into a Jail, with
genteel society and a rubber, and I should never care to come out. 
But I am not Annie, you know; and Annie is not her mother.'

'Surely, surely,' said the Doctor.

'You are the best of creatures - no, I beg your pardon!' for the
Doctor made a gesture of deprecation, 'I must say before your face,
as I always say behind your back, you are the best of creatures;
but of course you don't - now do you?  - enter into the same
pursuits and fancies as Annie?'

'No,' said the Doctor, in a sorrowful tone.

'No, of course not,' retorted the Old Soldier.  'Take your
Dictionary, for example.  What a useful work a Dictionary is!  What
a necessary work!  The meanings of words!  Without Doctor Johnson,
or somebody of that sort, we might have been at this present moment
calling an Italian-iron, a bedstead.  But we can't expect a
Dictionary - especially when it's making - to interest Annie, can
we?'

The Doctor shook his head.

'And that's why I so much approve,' said Mrs. Markleham, tapping
him on the shoulder with her shut-up fan, 'of your thoughtfulness. 
It shows that you don't expect, as many elderly people do expect,
old heads on young shoulders.  You have studied Annie's character,
and you understand it.  That's what I find so charming!'

Even the calm and patient face of Doctor Strong expressed some
little sense of pain, I thought, under the infliction of these
compliments.

'Therefore, my dear Doctor,' said the Old Soldier, giving him
several affectionate taps, 'you may command me, at all times and
seasons.  Now, do understand that I am entirely at your service. 
I am ready to go with Annie to operas, concerts, exhibitions, all
kinds of places; and you shall never find that I am tired.  Duty,
my dear Doctor, before every consideration in the universe!'

She was as good as her word.  She was one of those people who can
bear a great deal of pleasure, and she never flinched in her
perseverance in the cause.  She seldom got hold of the newspaper
(which she settled herself down in the softest chair in the house
to read through an eye-glass, every day, for two hours), but she
found out something that she was certain Annie would like to see. 
It was in vain for Annie to protest that she was weary of such
things.  Her mother's remonstrance always was, 'Now, my dear Annie,
I am sure you know better; and I must tell you, my love, that you
are not making a proper return for the kindness of Doctor Strong.'

This was usually said in the Doctor's presence, and appeared to me
to constitute Annie's principal inducement for withdrawing her
objections when she made any.  But in general she resigned herself
to her mother, and went where the Old Soldier would.

It rarely happened now that Mr. Maldon accompanied them.  Sometimes
my aunt and Dora were invited to do so, and accepted the
invitation.  Sometimes Dora only was asked.  The time had been,
when I should have been uneasy in her going; but reflection on what
had passed that former night in the Doctor's study, had made a
change in my mistrust.  I believed that the Doctor was right, and
I had no worse suspicions.

My aunt rubbed her nose sometimes when she happened to be alone
with me, and said she couldn't make it out; she wished they were
happier; she didn't think our military friend (so she always called
the Old Soldier) mended the matter at all.  My aunt further
expressed her opinion, 'that if our military friend would cut off
those butterflies, and give 'em to the chimney-sweepers for
May-day, it would look like the beginning of something sensible on
her part.'

But her abiding reliance was on Mr. Dick.  That man had evidently
an idea in his head, she said; and if he could only once pen it up
into a corner, which was his great difficulty, he would distinguish
himself in some extraordinary manner.

Unconscious of this prediction, Mr. Dick continued to occupy
precisely the same ground in reference to the Doctor and to Mrs.
Strong.  He seemed neither to advance nor to recede.  He appeared
to have settled into his original foundation, like a building; and
I must confess that my faith in his ever Moving, was not much
greater than if he had been a building.

But one night, when I had been married some months, Mr. Dick put
his head into the parlour, where I was writing alone (Dora having
gone out with my aunt to take tea with the two little birds), and
said, with a significant cough:

'You couldn't speak to me without inconveniencing yourself,
Trotwood, I am afraid?'

'Certainly, Mr. Dick,' said I; 'come in!'

'Trotwood,' said Mr. Dick, laying his finger on the side of his
nose, after he had shaken hands with me.  'Before I sit down, I
wish to make an observation.  You know your aunt?'

'A little,' I replied.

'She is the most wonderful woman in the world, sir!'

After the delivery of this communication, which he shot out of
himself as if he were loaded with it, Mr. Dick sat down with
greater gravity than usual, and looked at me.

'Now, boy,' said Mr. Dick, 'I am going to put a question to you.'

'As many as you please,' said I.

'What do you consider me, sir?' asked Mr. Dick, folding his arms.

'A dear old friend,' said I.
'Thank you, Trotwood,' returned Mr. Dick, laughing, and reaching
across in high glee to shake hands with me.  'But I mean, boy,'
resuming his gravity, 'what do you consider me in this respect?'
touching his forehead.

I was puzzled how to answer, but he helped me with a word.

'Weak?' said Mr. Dick.

'Well,' I replied, dubiously.  'Rather so.'

'Exactly!' cried Mr. Dick, who seemed quite enchanted by my reply. 
'That is, Trotwood, when they took some of the trouble out of
you-know-who's head, and put it you know where, there was a -' Mr.
Dick made his two hands revolve very fast about each other a great
number of times, and then brought them into collision, and rolled
them over and over one another, to express confusion.  'There was
that sort of thing done to me somehow.  Eh?'

I nodded at him, and he nodded back again.

'In short, boy,' said Mr. Dick, dropping his voice to a whisper, 'I
am simple.'

I would have qualified that conclusion, but he stopped me.

'Yes, I am!  She pretends I am not.  She won't hear of it; but I
am.  I know I am.  If she hadn't stood my friend, sir, I should
have been shut up, to lead a dismal life these many years.  But
I'll provide for her!  I never spend the copying money.  I put it
in a box.  I have made a will.  I'll leave it all to her.  She
shall be rich - noble!'

Mr. Dick took out his pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his eyes.  He
then folded it up with great care, pressed it smooth between his
two hands, put it in his pocket, and seemed to put my aunt away
with it.

'Now you are a scholar, Trotwood,' said Mr. Dick.  'You are a fine
scholar.  You know what a learned man, what a great man, the Doctor
is.  You know what honour he has always done me.  Not proud in his
wisdom.  Humble, humble - condescending even to poor Dick, who is
simple and knows nothing.  I have sent his name up, on a scrap of
paper, to the kite, along the string, when it has been in the sky,
among the larks.  The kite has been glad to receive it, sir, and
the sky has been brighter with it.'

I delighted him by saying, most heartily, that the Doctor was
deserving of our best respect and highest esteem.

'And his beautiful wife is a star,' said Mr. Dick.  'A shining
star.  I have seen her shine, sir.  But,' bringing his chair
nearer, and laying one hand upon my knee - 'clouds, sir - clouds.'

I answered the solicitude which his face expressed, by conveying
the same expression into my own, and shaking my head.

'What clouds?' said Mr. Dick.

He looked so wistfully into my face, and was so anxious to
understand, that I took great pains to answer him slowly and
distinctly, as I might have entered on an explanation to a child.

'There is some unfortunate division between them,' I replied. 
'Some unhappy cause of separation.  A secret.  It may be
inseparable from the discrepancy in their years.  It may have grown
up out of almost nothing.'

Mr. Dick, who had told off every sentence with a thoughtful nod,
paused when I had done, and sat considering, with his eyes upon my
face, and his hand upon my knee.

'Doctor not angry with her, Trotwood?' he said, after some time.

'No.  Devoted to her.'

'Then, I have got it, boy!' said Mr. Dick.

The sudden exultation with which he slapped me on the knee, and
leaned back in his chair, with his eyebrows lifted up as high as he
could possibly lift them, made me think him farther out of his wits
than ever.  He became as suddenly grave again, and leaning forward
as before, said - first respectfully taking out his
pocket-handkerchief, as if it really did represent my aunt:

'Most wonderful woman in the world, Trotwood.  Why has she done
nothing to set things right?'

'Too delicate and difficult a subject for such interference,' I
replied.

'Fine scholar,' said Mr. Dick, touching me with his finger.  'Why
has HE done nothing?'

'For the same reason,' I returned.

'Then, I have got it, boy!' said Mr. Dick.  And he stood up before
me, more exultingly than before, nodding his head, and striking
himself repeatedly upon the breast, until one might have supposed
that he had nearly nodded and struck all the breath out of his
body.

'A poor fellow with a craze, sir,' said Mr. Dick, 'a simpleton, a
weak-minded person - present company, you know!' striking himself
again, 'may do what wonderful people may not do.  I'll bring them
together, boy.  I'll try.  They'll not blame me.  They'll not
object to me.  They'll not mind what I do, if it's wrong.  I'm only
Mr. Dick.  And who minds Dick?  Dick's nobody!  Whoo!' He blew a
slight, contemptuous breath, as if he blew himself away.

It was fortunate he had proceeded so far with his mystery, for we
heard the coach stop at the little garden gate, which brought my
aunt and Dora home.

'Not a word, boy!' he pursued in a whisper; 'leave all the blame
with Dick - simple Dick - mad Dick.  I have been thinking, sir, for
some time, that I was getting it, and now I have got it.  After
what you have said to me, I am sure I have got it.  All right!' Not
another word did Mr. Dick utter on the subject; but he made a very
telegraph of himself for the next half-hour (to the great
disturbance of my aunt's mind), to enjoin inviolable secrecy on me.

To my surprise, I heard no more about it for some two or three
weeks, though I was sufficiently interested in the result of his
endeavours; descrying a strange gleam of good sense - I say nothing
of good feeling, for that he always exhibited - in the conclusion
to which he had come.  At last I began to believe, that, in the
flighty and unsettled state of his mind, he had either forgotten
his intention or abandoned it.

One fair evening, when Dora was not inclined to go out, my aunt and
I strolled up to the Doctor's cottage.  It was autumn, when there
were no debates to vex the evening air; and I remember how the
leaves smelt like our garden at Blunderstone as we trod them under
foot, and how the old, unhappy feeling, seemed to go by, on the
sighing wind.

It was twilight when we reached the cottage.  Mrs. Strong was just
coming out of the garden, where Mr. Dick yet lingered, busy with
his knife, helping the gardener to point some stakes.  The Doctor
was engaged with someone in his study; but the visitor would be
gone directly, Mrs. Strong said, and begged us to remain and see
him.  We went into the drawing-room with her, and sat down by the
darkening window.  There was never any ceremony about the visits of
such old friends and neighbours as we were.

We had not sat here many minutes, when Mrs. Markleham, who usually
contrived to be in a fuss about something, came bustling in, with
her newspaper in her hand, and said, out of breath, 'My goodness
gracious, Annie, why didn't you tell me there was someone in the
Study!'

'My dear mama,' she quietly returned, 'how could I know that you
desired the information?'

'Desired the information!' said Mrs. Markleham, sinking on the
sofa.  'I never had such a turn in all my life!'

'Have you been to the Study, then, mama?' asked Annie.

'BEEN to the Study, my dear!' she returned emphatically.  'Indeed
I have!  I came upon the amiable creature - if you'll imagine my
feelings, Miss Trotwood and David - in the act of making his will.'

Her daughter looked round from the window quickly.

'In the act, my dear Annie,' repeated Mrs. Markleham, spreading the
newspaper on her lap like a table-cloth, and patting her hands upon
it, 'of making his last Will and Testament.  The foresight and
affection of the dear!  I must tell you how it was.  I really must,
in justice to the darling - for he is nothing less! - tell you how
it was.  Perhaps you know, Miss Trotwood, that there is never a
candle lighted in this house, until one's eyes are literally
falling out of one's head with being stretched to read the paper. 
And that there is not a chair in this house, in which a paper can
be what I call, read, except one in the Study.  This took me to the
Study, where I saw a light.  I opened the door.  In company with
the dear Doctor were two professional people, evidently connected
with the law, and they were all three standing at the table: the
darling Doctor pen in hand.  "This simply expresses then," said the
Doctor - Annie, my love, attend to the very words - "this simply
expresses then, gentlemen, the confidence I have in Mrs. Strong,
and gives her all unconditionally?" One of the professional people
replied, "And gives her all unconditionally." Upon that, with the
natural feelings of a mother, I said, "Good God, I beg your
pardon!" fell over the door-step, and came away through the little
back passage where the pantry is.'

Mrs. Strong opened the window, and went out into the verandah,
where she stood leaning against a pillar.

'But now isn't it, Miss Trotwood, isn't it, David, invigorating,'
said Mrs. Markleham, mechanically following her with her eyes, 'to
find a man at Doctor Strong's time of life, with the strength of
mind to do this kind of thing?  It only shows how right I was.  I
said to Annie, when Doctor Strong paid a very flattering visit to
myself, and made her the subject of a declaration and an offer, I
said, "My dear, there is no doubt whatever, in my opinion, with
reference to a suitable provision for you, that Doctor Strong will
do more than he binds himself to do."'

Here the bell rang, and we heard the sound of the visitors' feet as
they went out.

'It's all over, no doubt,' said the Old Soldier, after listening;
'the dear creature has signed, sealed, and delivered, and his
mind's at rest.  Well it may be!  What a mind!  Annie, my love, I
am going to the Study with my paper, for I am a poor creature
without news.  Miss Trotwood, David, pray come and see the Doctor.'

I was conscious of Mr. Dick's standing in the shadow of the room,
shutting up his knife, when we accompanied her to the Study; and of
my aunt's rubbing her nose violently, by the way, as a mild vent
for her intolerance of our military friend; but who got first into
the Study, or how Mrs. Markleham settled herself in a moment in her
easy-chair, or how my aunt and I came to be left together near the
door (unless her eyes were quicker than mine, and she held me
back), I have forgotten, if I ever knew.  But this I know, - that
we saw the Doctor before he saw us, sitting at his table, among the
folio volumes in which he delighted, resting his head calmly on his
hand.  That, in the same moment, we saw Mrs. Strong glide in, pale
and trembling.  That Mr. Dick supported her on his arm.  That he
laid his other hand upon the Doctor's arm, causing him to look up
with an abstracted air.  That, as the Doctor moved his head, his
wife dropped down on one knee at his feet, and, with her hands
imploringly lifted, fixed upon his face the memorable look I had
never forgotten.  That at this sight Mrs. Markleham dropped the
newspaper, and stared more like a figure-head intended for a ship
to be called The Astonishment, than anything else I can think of.

The gentleness of the Doctor's manner and surprise, the dignity
that mingled with the supplicating attitude of his wife, the
amiable concern of Mr. Dick, and the earnestness with which my aunt
said to herself, 'That man mad!' (triumphantly expressive of the
misery from which she had saved him) - I see and hear, rather than
remember, as I write about it.

'Doctor!' said Mr. Dick.  'What is it that's amiss?  Look here!'

'Annie!' cried the Doctor.  'Not at my feet, my dear!'

'Yes!' she said.  'I beg and pray that no one will leave the room!
Oh, my husband and father, break this long silence.  Let us both
know what it is that has come between us!'

Mrs. Markleham, by this time recovering the power of speech, and
seeming to swell with family pride and motherly indignation, here
exclaimed, 'Annie, get up immediately, and don't disgrace everybody
belonging to you by humbling yourself like that, unless you wish to
see me go out of my mind on the spot!'

'Mama!' returned Annie.  'Waste no words on me, for my appeal is to
my husband, and even you are nothing here.'

'Nothing!' exclaimed Mrs. Markleham.  'Me, nothing! The child has
taken leave of her senses.  Please to get me a glass of water!'

I was too attentive to the Doctor and his wife, to give any heed to
this request; and it made no impression on anybody else; so Mrs.
Markleham panted, stared, and fanned herself.

'Annie!' said the Doctor, tenderly taking her in his hands.  'My
dear!  If any unavoidable change has come, in the sequence of time,
upon our married life, you are not to blame.  The fault is mine,
and only mine.  There is no change in my affection, admiration, and
respect.  I wish to make you happy.  I truly love and honour you. 
Rise, Annie, pray!'

But she did not rise.  After looking at him for a little while, she
sank down closer to him, laid her arm across his knee, and dropping
her head upon it, said:

'If I have any friend here, who can speak one word for me, or for
my husband in this matter; if I have any friend here, who can give
a voice to any suspicion that my heart has sometimes whispered to
me; if I have any friend here, who honours my husband, or has ever
cared for me, and has anything within his knowledge, no matter what
it is, that may help to mediate between us, I implore that friend
to speak!'

There was a profound silence.  After a few moments of painful
hesitation, I broke the silence.

'Mrs. Strong,' I said, 'there is something within my knowledge,
which I have been earnestly entreated by Doctor Strong to conceal,
and have concealed until tonight.  But, I believe the time has come
when it would be mistaken faith and delicacy to conceal it any
longer, and when your appeal absolves me from his injunction.'

She turned her face towards me for a moment, and I knew that I was
right.  I could not have resisted its entreaty, if the assurance
that it gave me had been less convincing.

'Our future peace,' she said, 'may be in your hands.  I trust it
confidently to your not suppressing anything.  I know beforehand
that nothing you, or anyone, can tell me, will show my husband's
noble heart in any other light than one.  Howsoever it may seem to
you to touch me, disregard that.  I will speak for myself, before
him, and before God afterwards.'

Thus earnestly besought, I made no reference to the Doctor for his
permission, but, without any other compromise of the truth than a
little softening of the coarseness of Uriah Heep, related plainly
what had passed in that same room that night.  The staring of Mrs.
Markleham during the whole narration, and the shrill, sharp
interjections with which she occasionally interrupted it, defy
description.

When I had finished, Annie remained, for some few moments, silent,
with her head bent down, as I have described.  Then, she took the
Doctor's hand (he was sitting in the same attitude as when we had
entered the room), and pressed it to her breast, and kissed it. 
Mr. Dick softly raised her; and she stood, when she began to speak,
leaning on him, and looking down upon her husband - from whom she
never turned her eyes.

'All that has ever been in my mind, since I was married,' she said
in a low, submissive, tender voice, 'I will lay bare before you. 
I could not live and have one reservation, knowing what I know
now.'

'Nay, Annie,' said the Doctor, mildly, 'I have never doubted you,
my child.  There is no need; indeed there is no need, my dear.'

'There is great need,' she answered, in the same way, 'that I
should open my whole heart before the soul of generosity and truth,
whom, year by year, and day by day, I have loved and venerated more
and more, as Heaven knows!'

'Really,' interrupted Mrs. Markleham, 'if I have any discretion at
all -'

('Which you haven't, you Marplot,' observed my aunt, in an
indignant whisper.)

- 'I must be permitted to observe that it cannot be requisite to
enter into these details.'

'No one but my husband can judge of that, mama,' said Annie without
removing her eyes from his face, 'and he will hear me.  If I say
anything to give you pain, mama, forgive me.  I have borne pain
first, often and long, myself.'

'Upon my word!' gasped Mrs. Markleham.

'When I was very young,' said Annie, 'quite a little child, my
first associations with knowledge of any kind were inseparable from
a patient friend and teacher - the friend of my dead father - who
was always dear to me.  I can remember nothing that I know, without
remembering him.  He stored my mind with its first treasures, and
stamped his character upon them all.  They never could have been,
I think, as good as they have been to me, if I had taken them from
any other hands.'

'Makes her mother nothing!' exclaimed Mrs. Markleham.

'Not so mama,' said Annie; 'but I make him what he was.  I must do
that.  As I grew up, he occupied the same place still.  I was proud
of his interest: deeply, fondly, gratefully attached to him.  I
looked up to him, I can hardly describe how - as a father, as a
guide, as one whose praise was different from all other praise, as
one in whom I could have trusted and confided, if I had doubted all
the world.  You know, mama, how young and inexperienced I was, when
you presented him before me, of a sudden, as a lover.'

'I have mentioned the fact, fifty times at least, to everybody
here!' said Mrs. Markleham.

('Then hold your tongue, for the Lord's sake, and don't mention it
any more!' muttered my aunt.)

'It was so great a change: so great a loss, I felt it, at first,'
said Annie, still preserving the same look and tone, 'that I was
agitated and distressed.  I was but a girl; and when so great a
change came in the character in which I had so long looked up to
him, I think I was sorry.  But nothing could have made him what he
used to be again; and I was proud that he should think me so
worthy, and we were married.'
'- At Saint Alphage, Canterbury,' observed Mrs. Markleham.

('Confound the woman!' said my aunt, 'she WON'T be quiet!')

'I never thought,' proceeded Annie, with a heightened colour, 'of
any worldly gain that my husband would bring to me.  My young heart
had no room in its homage for any such poor reference.  Mama,
forgive me when I say that it was you who first presented to my
mind the thought that anyone could wrong me, and wrong him, by such
a cruel suspicion.'

'Me!' cried Mrs. Markleham.

('Ah!  You, to be sure!' observed my aunt, 'and you can't fan it
away, my military friend!')

'It was the first unhappiness of my new life,' said Annie.  'It was
the first occasion of every unhappy moment I have known.  These
moments have been more, of late, than I can count; but not - my
generous husband! - not for the reason you suppose; for in my heart
there is not a thought, a recollection, or a hope, that any power
could separate from you!'

She raised her eyes, and clasped her hands, and looked as beautiful
and true, I thought, as any Spirit.  The Doctor looked on her,
henceforth, as steadfastly as she on him.

'Mama is blameless,' she went on, 'of having ever urged you for
herself, and she is blameless in intention every way, I am sure, -
but when I saw how many importunate claims were pressed upon you in
my name; how you were traded on in my name; how generous you were,
and how Mr. Wickfield, who had your welfare very much at heart,
resented it; the first sense of my exposure to the mean suspicion
that my tenderness was bought - and sold to you, of all men on
earth - fell upon me like unmerited disgrace, in which I forced you
to participate.  I cannot tell you what it was - mama cannot
imagine what it was - to have this dread and trouble always on my
mind, yet know in my own soul that on my marriage-day I crowned the
love and honour of my life!'

'A specimen of the thanks one gets,' cried Mrs. Markleham, in
tears, 'for taking care of one's family!  I wish I was a Turk!'

('I wish you were, with all my heart - and in your native country!'
said my aunt.)

'It was at that time that mama was most solicitous about my Cousin
Maldon.  I had liked him': she spoke softly, but without any
hesitation: 'very much.  We had been little lovers once.  If
circumstances had not happened otherwise, I might have come to
persuade myself that I really loved him, and might have married
him, and been most wretched.  There can be no disparity in marriage
like unsuitability of mind and purpose.'

I pondered on those words, even while I was studiously attending to
what followed, as if they had some particular interest, or some
strange application that I could not divine.  'There can be no
disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose' -'no
disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.'

'There is nothing,' said Annie, 'that we have in common.  I have
long found that there is nothing.  If I were thankful to my husband
for no more, instead of for so much, I should be thankful to him
for having saved me from the first mistaken impulse of my
undisciplined heart.'

She stood quite still, before the Doctor, and spoke with an
earnestness that thrilled me.  Yet her voice was just as quiet as
before.

'When he was waiting to be the object of your munificence, so
freely bestowed for my sake, and when I was unhappy in the
mercenary shape I was made to wear, I thought it would have become
him better to have worked his own way on.  I thought that if I had
been he, I would have tried to do it, at the cost of almost any
hardship.  But I thought no worse of him, until the night of his
departure for India.  That night I knew he had a false and
thankless heart.  I saw a double meaning, then, in Mr. Wickfield's
scrutiny of me.  I perceived, for the first time, the dark
suspicion that shadowed my life.'

'Suspicion, Annie!' said the Doctor.  'No, no, no!'

'In your mind there was none, I know, my husband!' she returned. 
'And when I came to you, that night, to lay down all my load of
shame and grief, and knew that I had to tell that, underneath your
roof, one of my own kindred, to whom you had been a benefactor, for
the love of me, had spoken to me words that should have found no
utterance, even if I had been the weak and mercenary wretch he
thought me - my mind revolted from the taint the very tale
conveyed.  It died upon my lips, and from that hour till now has
never passed them.'

Mrs. Markleham, with a short groan, leaned back in her easy-chair;
and retired behind her fan, as if she were never coming out any
more.

'I have never, but in your presence, interchanged a word with him
from that time; then, only when it has been necessary for the
avoidance of this explanation.  Years have passed since he knew,
from me, what his situation here was.  The kindnesses you have
secretly done for his advancement, and then disclosed to me, for my
surprise and pleasure, have been, you will believe, but
aggravations of the unhappiness and burden of my secret.'

She sunk down gently at the Doctor's feet, though he did his utmost
to prevent her; and said, looking up, tearfully, into his face:

'Do not speak to me yet!  Let me say a little more!  Right or
wrong, if this were to be done again, I think I should do just the
same.  You never can know what it was to be devoted to you, with
those old associations; to find that anyone could be so hard as to
suppose that the truth of my heart was bartered away, and to be
surrounded by appearances confirming that belief.  I was very
young, and had no adviser.  Between mama and me, in all relating to
you, there was a wide division.  If I shrunk into myself, hiding
the disrespect I had undergone, it was because I honoured you so
much, and so much wished that you should honour me!'

'Annie, my pure heart!' said the Doctor, 'my dear girl!'

'A little more! a very few words more!  I used to think there were
so many whom you might have married, who would not have brought
such charge and trouble on you, and who would have made your home
a worthier home.  I used to be afraid that I had better have
remained your pupil, and almost your child.  I used to fear that I
was so unsuited to your learning and wisdom.  If all this made me
shrink within myself (as indeed it did), when I had that to tell,
it was still because I honoured you so much, and hoped that you
might one day honour me.'

'That day has shone this long time, Annie,' said the Doctor, and
can have but one long night, my dear.'

'Another word!  I afterwards meant - steadfastly meant, and
purposed to myself - to bear the whole weight of knowing the
unworthiness of one to whom you had been so good.  And now a last
word, dearest and best of friends!  The cause of the late change in
you, which I have seen with so much pain and sorrow, and have
sometimes referred to my old apprehension - at other times to
lingering suppositions nearer to the truth - has been made clear
tonight; and by an accident I have also come to know, tonight, the
full measure of your noble trust in me, even under that mistake. 
I do not hope that any love and duty I may render in return, will
ever make me worthy of your priceless confidence; but with all this
knowledge fresh upon me, I can lift my eyes to this dear face,
revered as a father's, loved as a husband's, sacred to me in my
childhood as a friend's, and solemnly declare that in my lightest
thought I have never wronged you; never wavered in the love and the
fidelity I owe you!'

She had her arms around the Doctor's neck, and he leant his head
down over her, mingling his grey hair with her dark brown tresses.

'Oh, hold me to your heart, my husband!  Never cast me out!  Do not
think or speak of disparity between us, for there is none, except
in all my many imperfections.  Every succeeding year I have known
this better, as I have esteemed you more and more.  Oh, take me to
your heart, my husband, for my love was founded on a rock, and it
endures!'

In the silence that ensued, my aunt walked gravely up to Mr. Dick,
without at all hurrying herself, and gave him a hug and a sounding
kiss.  And it was very fortunate, with a view to his credit, that
she did so; for I am confident that I detected him at that moment
in the act of making preparations to stand on one leg, as an
appropriate expression of delight.

'You are a very remarkable man, Dick!' said my aunt, with an air of
unqualified approbation; 'and never pretend to be anything else,
for I know better!'

With that, my aunt pulled him by the sleeve, and nodded to me; and
we three stole quietly out of the room, and came away.

'That's a settler for our military friend, at any rate,' said my
aunt, on the way home.  'I should sleep the better for that, if
there was nothing else to be glad of!'

'She was quite overcome, I am afraid,' said Mr. Dick, with great
commiseration.

'What!  Did you ever see a crocodile overcome?' inquired my aunt.

'I don't think I ever saw a crocodile,' returned Mr. Dick, mildly.

'There never would have been anything the matter, if it hadn't been
for that old Animal,' said my aunt, with strong emphasis.  'It's
very much to be wished that some mothers would leave their
daughters alone after marriage, and not be so violently
affectionate.  They seem to think the only return that can be made
them for bringing an unfortunate young woman into the world - God
bless my soul, as if she asked to be brought, or wanted to come! -
is full liberty to worry her out of it again.  What are you
thinking of, Trot?'

I was thinking of all that had been said.  My mind was still
running on some of the expressions used.  'There can be no
disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.' 
'The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.'  'My love
was founded on a rock.'  But we were at home; and the trodden
leaves were lying under-foot, and the autumn wind was blowing.



CHAPTER 46
Intelligence


I must have been married, if I may trust to my imperfect memory for
dates, about a year or so, when one evening, as I was returning
from a solitary walk, thinking of the book I was then writing - for
my success had steadily increased with my steady application, and
I was engaged at that time upon my first work of fiction - I came
past Mrs. Steerforth's house.  I had often passed it before, during
my residence in that neighbourhood, though never when I could
choose another road.  Howbeit, it did sometimes happen that it was
not easy to find another, without making a long circuit; and so I
had passed that way, upon the whole, pretty often.

I had never done more than glance at the house, as I went by with
a quickened step.  It had been uniformly gloomy and dull.  None of
the best rooms abutted on the road; and the narrow, heavily-framed
old-fashioned windows, never cheerful under any circumstances,
looked very dismal, close shut, and with their blinds always drawn
down.  There was a covered way across a little paved court, to an
entrance that was never used; and there was one round staircase
window, at odds with all the rest, and the only one unshaded by a
blind, which had the same unoccupied blank look.  I do not remember
that I ever saw a light in all the house.  If I had been a casual
passer-by, I should have probably supposed that some childless
person lay dead in it.  If I had happily possessed no knowledge of
the place, and had seen it often in that changeless state, I should
have pleased my fancy with many ingenious speculations, I dare say.

As it was, I thought as little of it as I might.  But my mind could
not go by it and leave it, as my body did; and it usually awakened
a long train of meditations.  Coming before me, on this particular
evening that I mention, mingled with the childish recollections and
later fancies, the ghosts of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows
of disappointments dimly seen and understood, the blending of
experience and imagination, incidental to the occupation with which
my thoughts had been busy, it was more than commonly suggestive. 
I fell into a brown study as I walked on, and a voice at my side
made me start.

It was a woman's voice, too.  I was not long in recollecting Mrs.
Steerforth's little parlour-maid, who had formerly worn blue
ribbons in her cap.  She had taken them out now, to adapt herself,
I suppose, to the altered character of the house; and wore but one
or two disconsolate bows of sober brown.

'If you please, sir, would you have the goodness to walk in, and
speak to Miss Dartle?'

'Has Miss Dartle sent you for me?' I inquired.

'Not tonight, sir, but it's just the same.  Miss Dartle saw you
pass
a night or two ago; and I was to sit at work on the staircase, and
when I saw you pass again, to ask you to step in and speak to her.'

I turned back, and inquired of my conductor, as we went along, how
Mrs. Steerforth was.  She said her lady was but poorly, and kept
her own room a good deal.

When we arrived at the house, I was directed to Miss Dartle in the
garden, and left to make my presence known to her myself.  She was
sitting on a seat at one end of a kind of terrace, overlooking the
great city.  It was a sombre evening, with a lurid light in the
sky; and as I saw the prospect scowling in the distance, with here
and there some larger object starting up into the sullen glare, I
fancied it was no inapt companion to the memory of this fierce
woman.

She saw me as I advanced, and rose for a moment to receive me.  I
thought her, then, still more colourless and thin than when I had
seen her last; the flashing eyes still brighter, and the scar still
plainer.

Our meeting was not cordial.  We had parted angrily on the last
occasion; and there was an air of disdain about her, which she took
no pains to conceal.

'I am told you wish to speak to me, Miss Dartle,' said I, standing
near her, with my hand upon the back of the seat, and declining her
gesture of invitation to sit down.

'If you please,' said she.  'Pray has this girl been found?'

'No.'

'And yet she has run away!'

I saw her thin lips working while she looked at me, as if they were
eager to load her with reproaches.

'Run away?' I repeated.

'Yes! From him,' she said, with a laugh.  'If she is not found,
perhaps she never will be found.  She may be dead!'

The vaunting cruelty with which she met my glance, I never saw
expressed in any other face that ever I have seen.

'To wish her dead,' said I, 'may be the kindest wish that one of
her own sex could bestow upon her.  I am glad that time has
softened you so much, Miss Dartle.'

She condescended to make no reply, but, turning on me with another
scornful laugh, said:

'The friends of this excellent and much-injured young lady are
friends of yours.  You are their champion, and assert their rights. 
Do you wish to know what is known of her?'

'Yes,' said I.

She rose with an ill-favoured smile, and taking a few steps towards
a wall of holly that was near at hand, dividing the lawn from a
kitchen-garden, said, in a louder voice, 'Come here!' - as if she
were calling to some unclean beast.

'You will restrain any demonstrative championship or vengeance in
this place, of course, Mr. Copperfield?' said she, looking over her
shoulder at me with the same expression.

I inclined my head, without knowing what she meant; and she said,
'Come here!' again; and returned, followed by the respectable Mr.
Littimer, who, with undiminished respectability, made me a bow, and
took up his position behind her.  The air of wicked grace: of
triumph, in which, strange to say, there was yet something feminine
and alluring: with which she reclined upon the seat between us, and
looked at me, was worthy of a cruel Princess in a Legend.

'Now,' said she, imperiously, without glancing at him, and touching
the old wound as it throbbed: perhaps, in this instance, with
pleasure rather than pain.  'Tell Mr. Copperfield about the
flight.'

'Mr. James and myself, ma'am -'

'Don't address yourself to me!' she interrupted with a frown.

'Mr. James and myself, sir -'

'Nor to me, if you please,' said I.

Mr. Littimer, without being at all discomposed, signified by a
slight obeisance, that anything that was most agreeable to us was
most agreeable to him; and began again.

'Mr. James and myself have been abroad with the young woman, ever
since she left Yarmouth under Mr. james's protection.  We have been
in a variety of places, and seen a deal of foreign country.  We
have been in France, Switzerland, Italy, in fact, almost all
parts.'

He looked at the back of the seat, as if he were addressing himself
to that; and softly played upon it with his hands, as if he were
striking chords upon a dumb piano.

'Mr. James took quite uncommonly to the young woman; and was more
settled, for a length of time, than I have known him to be since I
have been in his service.  The young woman was very improvable, and
spoke the languages; and wouldn't have been known for the same
country-person.  I noticed that she was much admired wherever we
went.'

Miss Dartle put her hand upon her side.  I saw him steal a glance
at her, and slightly smile to himself.

'Very much admired, indeed, the young woman was.  What with her
dress; what with the air and sun; what with being made so much of;
what with this, that, and the other; her merits really attracted
general notice.'

He made a short pause.  Her eyes wandered restlessly over the
distant prospect, and she bit her nether lip to stop that busy
mouth.

Taking his hands from the seat, and placing one of them within the
other, as he settled himself on one leg, Mr. Littimer proceeded,
with his eyes cast down, and his respectable head a little
advanced, and a little on one side:

'The young woman went on in this manner for some time, being
occasionally low in her spirits, until I think she began to weary
Mr. James by giving way to her low spirits and tempers of that
kind; and things were not so comfortable.  Mr. James he began to be
restless again.  The more restless he got, the worse she got; and
I must say, for myself, that I had a very difficult time of it
indeed between the two.  Still matters were patched up here, and
made good there, over and over again; and altogether lasted, I am
sure, for a longer time than anybody could have expected.'

Recalling her eyes from the distance, she looked at me again now,
with her former air.  Mr. Littimer, clearing his throat behind his
hand with a respectable short cough, changed legs, and went on:

'At last, when there had been, upon the whole, a good many words
and reproaches, Mr. James he set off one morning, from the
neighbourhood of Naples, where we had a villa (the young woman
being very partial to the sea), and, under pretence of coming back
in a day or so, left it in charge with me to break it out, that,
for the general happiness of all concerned, he was' - here an
interruption of the short cough - 'gone.  But Mr. James, I must
say, certainly did behave extremely honourable; for he proposed
that the young woman should marry a very respectable person, who
was fully prepared to overlook the past, and who was, at least, as
good as anybody the young woman could have aspired to in a regular
way: her connexions being very common.'

He changed legs again, and wetted his lips.  I was convinced that
the scoundrel spoke of himself, and I saw my conviction reflected
in Miss Dartle's face.

'This I also had it in charge to communicate.  I was willing to do
anything to relieve Mr. James from his difficulty, and to restore
harmony between himself and an affectionate parent, who has
undergone so much on his account.  Therefore I undertook the
commission.  The young woman's violence when she came to, after I
broke the fact of his departure, was beyond all expectations.  She
was quite mad, and had to be held by force; or, if she couldn't
have got to a knife, or got to the sea, she'd have beaten her head
against the marble floor.'

Miss Dartle, leaning back upon the seat, with a light of exultation
in her face, seemed almost to caress the sounds this fellow had
uttered.

'But when I came to the second part of what had been entrusted to
me,' said Mr. Littimer, rubbing his hands uneasily, 'which anybody
might have supposed would have been, at all events, appreciated as
a kind intention, then the young woman came out in her true
colours.  A more outrageous person I never did see.  Her conduct
was surprisingly bad.  She had no more gratitude, no more feeling,
no more patience, no more reason in her, than a stock or a stone. 
If I hadn't been upon my guard, I am convinced she would have had
my blood.'

'I think the better of her for it,' said I, indignantly.

Mr. Littimer bent his head, as much as to say, 'Indeed, sir?  But
you're young!' and resumed his narrative.

'It was necessary, in short, for a time, to take away everything
nigh her, that she could do herself, or anybody else, an injury
with, and to shut her up close.  Notwithstanding which, she got out
in the night; forced the lattice of a window, that I had nailed up
myself; dropped on a vine that was trailed below; and never has
been seen or heard of, to my knowledge, since.'

'She is dead, perhaps,' said Miss Dartle, with a smile, as if she
could have spurned the body of the ruined girl.

'She may have drowned herself, miss,' returned Mr. Littimer,
catching at an excuse for addressing himself to somebody.  'It's
very possible.  Or, she may have had assistance from the boatmen,
and the boatmen's wives and children.  Being given to low company,
she was very much in the habit of talking to them on the beach,
Miss Dartle, and sitting by their boats.  I have known her do it,
when Mr. James has been away, whole days.  Mr. James was far from
pleased to find out, once, that she had told the children she was
a boatman's daughter, and that in her own country, long ago, she
had roamed about the beach, like them.'

Oh, Emily! Unhappy beauty! What a picture rose before me of her
sitting on the far-off shore, among the children like herself when
she was innocent, listening to little voices such as might have
called her Mother had she been a poor man's wife; and to the great
voice of the sea, with its eternal 'Never more!'

'When it was clear that nothing could be done, Miss Dartle -'

'Did I tell you not to speak to me?' she said, with stern contempt.

'You spoke to me, miss,' he replied.  'I beg your pardon.  But it
is my service to obey.'

'Do your service,' she returned.  'Finish your story, and go!'

'When it was clear,' he said, with infinite respectability and an
obedient bow, 'that she was not to be found, I went to Mr. James,
at the place where it had been agreed that I should write to him,
and informed him of what had occurred.  Words passed between us in
consequence, and I felt it due to my character to leave him.  I
could bear, and I have borne, a great deal from Mr. James; but he
insulted me too far.  He hurt me.  Knowing the unfortunate
difference between himself and his mother, and what her anxiety of
mind was likely to be, I took the liberty of coming home to
England, and relating -'

'For money which I paid him,' said Miss Dartle to me.

'Just so, ma'am - and relating what I knew.  I am not aware,' said
Mr. Littimer, after a moment's reflection, 'that there is anything
else.  I am at present out of employment, and should be happy to
meet with a respectable situation.'

Miss Dartle glanced at me, as though she would inquire if there
were anything that I desired to ask.  As there was something which
had occurred to my mind, I said in reply:

'I could wish to know from this - creature,' I could not bring
myself to utter any more conciliatory word, 'whether they
intercepted a letter that was written to her from home, or whether
he supposes that she received it.'

He remained calm and silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and
the tip of every finger of his right hand delicately poised against
the tip of every finger of his left.

Miss Dartle turned her head disdainfully towards him.

'I beg your pardon, miss,' he said, awakening from his abstraction,
'but, however submissive to you, I have my position, though a
servant.  Mr. Copperfield and you, miss, are different people.  If
Mr. Copperfield wishes to know anything from me, I take the liberty
of reminding Mr. Copperfield that he can put a question to me.  I
have a character to maintain.'

After a momentary struggle with myself, I turned my eyes upon him,
and said, 'You have heard my question.  Consider it addressed to
yourself, if you choose.  What answer do you make?'

'Sir,' he rejoined, with an occasional separation and reunion of
those delicate tips, 'my answer must be qualified; because, to
betray Mr. james's confidence to his mother, and to betray it to
you, are two different actions.  It is not probable, I consider,
that Mr. James would encourage the receipt of letters likely to
increase low spirits and unpleasantness; but further than that,
sir, I should wish to avoid going.'

'Is that all?' inquired Miss Dartle of me.

I indicated that I had nothing more to say.  'Except,' I added, as
I saw him moving off, 'that I understand this fellow's part in the
wicked story, and that, as I shall make it known to the honest man
who has been her father from her childhood, I would recommend him
to avoid going too much into public.'

He had stopped the moment I began, and had listened with his usual
repose of manner.

'Thank you, sir.  But you'll excuse me if I say, sir, that there
are neither slaves nor slave-drivers in this country, and that
people are not allowed to take the law into their own hands.  If
they do, it is more to their own peril, I believe, than to other
people's.  Consequently speaking, I am not at all afraid of going
wherever I may wish, sir.'

With that, he made a polite bow; and, with another to Miss Dartle,
went away through the arch in the wall of holly by which he had
come.  Miss Dartle and I regarded each other for a little while in
silence; her manner being exactly what it was, when she had
produced the man.

'He says besides,' she observed, with a slow curling of her lip,
'that his master, as he hears, is coasting Spain; and this done, is
away to gratify his seafaring tastes till he is weary.  But this is
of no interest to you.  Between these two proud persons, mother and
son, there is a wider breach than before, and little hope of its
healing, for they are one at heart, and time makes each more
obstinate and imperious.  Neither is this of any interest to you;
but it introduces what I wish to say.  This devil whom you make an
angel of.  I mean this low girl whom he picked out of the
tide-mud,' with her black eyes full upon me, and her passionate
finger up, 'may be alive, - for I believe some common things are
hard to die.  If she is, you will desire to have a pearl of such
price found and taken care of.  We desire that, too; that he may
not by any chance be made her prey again.  So far, we are united in
one interest; and that is why I, who would do her any mischief that
so coarse a wretch is capable of feeling, have sent for you to hear
what you have heard.'

I saw, by the change in her face, that someone was advancing behind
me.  It was Mrs. Steerforth, who gave me her hand more coldly than
of yore, and with an augmentation of her former stateliness of
manner, but still, I perceived - and I was touched by it - with an
ineffaceable remembrance of my old love for her son.  She was
greatly altered.  Her fine figure was far less upright, her
handsome face was deeply marked, and her hair was almost white. 
But when she sat down on the seat, she was a handsome lady still;
and well I knew the bright eye with its lofty look, that had been
a light in my very dreams at school.

'Is Mr. Copperfield informed of everything, Rosa?'

'Yes.'

'And has he heard Littimer himself?'

'Yes; I have told him why you wished it.'
'You are a good girl.  I have had some slight correspondence with
your former friend, sir,' addressing me, 'but it has not restored
his sense of duty or natural obligation.  Therefore I have no other
object in this, than what Rosa has mentioned.  If, by the course
which may relieve the mind of the decent man you brought here (for
whom I am sorry - I can say no more), my son may be saved from
again falling into the snares of a designing enemy, well!'

She drew herself up, and sat looking straight before her, far away.

'Madam,' I said respectfully, 'I understand.  I assure you I am in
no danger of putting any strained construction on your motives. 
But I must say, even to you, having known this injured family from
childhood, that if you suppose the girl, so deeply wronged, has not
been cruelly deluded, and would not rather die a hundred deaths
than take a cup of water from your son's hand now, you cherish a
terrible mistake.'

'Well, Rosa, well!' said Mrs. Steerforth, as the other was about to
interpose, 'it is no matter.  Let it be.  You are married, sir, I
am told?'

I answered that I had been some time married.

'And are doing well?  I hear little in the quiet life I lead, but
I understand you are beginning to be famous.'

'I have been very fortunate,' I said, 'and find my name connected
with some praise.'

'You have no mother?' - in a softened voice.

'No.'

'It is a pity,' she returned.  'She would have been proud of you. 
Good night!'

I took the hand she held out with a dignified, unbending air, and
it was as calm in mine as if her breast had been at peace.  Her
pride could still its very pulses, it appeared, and draw the placid
veil before her face, through which she sat looking straight before
her on the far distance.

As I moved away from them along the terrace, I could not help
observing how steadily they both sat gazing on the prospect, and
how it thickened and closed around them.  Here and there, some
early lamps were seen to twinkle in the distant city; and in the
eastern quarter of the sky the lurid light still hovered.  But,
from the greater part of the broad valley interposed, a mist was
rising like a sea, which, mingling with the darkness, made it seem
as if the gathering waters would encompass them.  I have reason to
remember this, and think of it with awe; for before I looked upon
those two again, a stormy sea had risen to their feet.

Reflecting on what had been thus told me, I felt it right that it
should be communicated to Mr. Peggotty.  On the following evening
I went into London in quest of him.  He was always wandering about
from place to place, with his one object of recovering his niece
before him; but was more in London than elsewhere.  Often and
often, now, had I seen him in the dead of night passing along the
streets, searching, among the few who loitered out of doors at
those untimely hours, for what he dreaded to find.

He kept a lodging over the little chandler's shop in Hungerford
Market, which I have had occasion to mention more than once, and
from which he first went forth upon his errand of mercy.  Hither I
directed my walk.  On making inquiry for him, I learned from the
people of the house that he had not gone out yet, and I should find
him in his room upstairs.

He was sitting reading by a window in which he kept a few plants. 
The room was very neat and orderly.  I saw in a moment that it was
always kept prepared for her reception, and that he never went out
but he thought it possible he might bring her home.  He had not
heard my tap at the door, and only raised his eyes when I laid my
hand upon his shoulder.

'Mas'r Davy! Thankee, sir! thankee hearty, for this visit! Sit ye
down.  You're kindly welcome, sir!'

'Mr. Peggotty,' said I, taking the chair he handed me, 'don't
expect much! I have heard some news.'

'Of Em'ly!'

He put his hand, in a nervous manner, on his mouth, and turned
pale, as he fixed his eyes on mine.

'It gives no clue to where she is; but she is not with him.'

He sat down, looking intently at me, and listened in profound
silence to all I had to tell.  I well remember the sense of
dignity, beauty even, with which the patient gravity of his face
impressed me, when, having gradually removed his eyes from mine, he
sat looking downward, leaning his forehead on his hand.  He offered
no interruption, but remained throughout perfectly still.  He
seemed to pursue her figure through the narrative, and to let every
other shape go by him, as if it were nothing.

When I had done, he shaded his face, and continued silent.  I
looked out of the window for a little while, and occupied myself
with the plants.

'How do you fare to feel about it, Mas'r Davy?' he inquired at
length.

'I think that she is living,' I replied.

'I doen't know.  Maybe the first shock was too rough, and in the
wildness of her art -! That there blue water as she used to speak
on.  Could she have thowt o' that so many year, because it was to
be her grave!'

He said this, musing, in a low, frightened voice; and walked across
the little room.

'And yet,' he added, 'Mas'r Davy, I have felt so sure as she was
living - I have know'd, awake and sleeping, as it was so trew that
I should find her - I have been so led on by it, and held up by it
- that I doen't believe I can have been deceived.  No! Em'ly's
alive!'

He put his hand down firmly on the table, and set his sunburnt face
into a resolute expression.

'My niece, Em'ly, is alive, sir!' he said, steadfastly.  'I doen't
know wheer it comes from, or how 'tis, but I am told as she's
alive!'

He looked almost like a man inspired, as he said it.  I waited for
a few moments, until he could give me his undivided attention; and
then proceeded to explain the precaution, that, it had occurred to
me last night, it would be wise to take.

'Now, my dear friend -'I began.

'Thankee, thankee, kind sir,' he said, grasping my hand in both of
his.

'If she should make her way to London, which is likely - for where
could she lose herself so readily as in this vast city; and what
would she wish to do, but lose and hide herself, if she does not go
home?  -'

'And she won't go home,' he interposed, shaking his head
mournfully.  'If she had left of her own accord, she might; not as
It was, sir.'

'If she should come here,' said I, 'I believe there is one person,
here, more likely to discover her than any other in the world.  Do
you remember - hear what I say, with fortitude - think of your
great object! - do you remember Martha?'

'Of our town?'

I needed no other answer than his face.

'Do you know that she is in London?'

'I have seen her in the streets,' he answered, with a shiver.

'But you don't know,' said I, 'that Emily was charitable to her,
with Ham's help, long before she fled from home.  Nor, that, when
we met one night, and spoke together in the room yonder, over the
way, she listened at the door.'

'Mas'r Davy!' he replied in astonishment.  'That night when it snew
so hard?'

'That night.  I have never seen her since.  I went back, after
parting from you, to speak to her, but she was gone.  I was
unwilling to mention her to you then, and I am now; but she is the
person of whom I speak, and with whom I think we should
communicate.  Do you understand?'

'Too well, sir,' he replied.  We had sunk our voices, almost to a
whisper, and continued to speak in that tone.

'You say you have seen her.  Do you think that you could find her? 
I could only hope to do so by chance.'

'I think, Mas'r Davy, I know wheer to look.'

'It is dark.  Being together, shall we go out now, and try to find
her tonight?'

He assented, and prepared to accompany me.  Without appearing to
observe what he was doing, I saw how carefully he adjusted the
little room, put a candle ready and the means of lighting it,
arranged the bed, and finally took out of a drawer one of her
dresses (I remember to have seen her wear it), neatly folded with
some other garments, and a bonnet, which he placed upon a chair. 
He made no allusion to these clothes, neither did I.  There they
had been waiting for her, many and many a night, no doubt.

'The time was, Mas'r Davy,' he said, as we came downstairs, 'when
I thowt this girl, Martha, a'most like the dirt underneath my
Em'ly's feet.  God forgive me, theer's a difference now!'

As we went along, partly to hold him in conversation, and partly to
satisfy myself, I asked him about Ham.  He said, almost in the same
words as formerly, that Ham was just the same, 'wearing away his
life with kiender no care nohow for 't; but never murmuring, and
liked by all'.

I asked him what he thought Ham's state of mind was, in reference
to the cause of their misfortunes?  Whether he believed it was
dangerous?  What he supposed, for example, Ham would do, if he and
Steerforth ever should encounter?

'I doen't know, sir,' he replied.  'I have thowt of it oftentimes,
but I can't awize myself of it, no matters.'

I recalled to his remembrance the morning after her departure, when
we were all three on the beach.  'Do you recollect,' said I, 'a
certain wild way in which he looked out to sea, and spoke about
"the end of it"?'

'Sure I do!' said he.

'What do you suppose he meant?'

'Mas'r Davy,' he replied, 'I've put the question to myself a mort
o' times, and never found no answer.  And theer's one curious thing
- that, though he is so pleasant, I wouldn't fare to feel
comfortable to try and get his mind upon 't.  He never said a wured
to me as warn't as dootiful as dootiful could be, and it ain't
likely as he'd begin to speak any other ways now; but it's fur from
being fleet water in his mind, where them thowts lays.  It's deep,
sir, and I can't see down.'

'You are right,' said I, 'and that has sometimes made me anxious.'

'And me too, Mas'r Davy,' he rejoined.  'Even more so, I do assure
you, than his ventersome ways, though both belongs to the
alteration in him.  I doen't know as he'd do violence under any
circumstances, but I hope as them two may be kep asunders.'

We had come, through Temple Bar, into the city.  Conversing no more
now, and walking at my side, he yielded himself up to the one aim
of his devoted life, and went on, with that hushed concentration of
his faculties which would have made his figure solitary in a
multitude.  We were not far from Blackfriars Bridge, when he turned
his head and pointed to a solitary female figure flitting along the
opposite side of the street.  I knew it, readily, to be the figure
that we sought.

We crossed the road, and were pressing on towards her, when it
occurred to me that she might be more disposed to feel a woman's
interest in the lost girl, if we spoke to her in a quieter place,
aloof from the crowd, and where we should be less observed.  I
advised my companion, therefore, that we should not address her
yet, but follow her; consulting in this, likewise, an indistinct
desire I had, to know where she went.

He acquiescing, we followed at a distance: never losing sight of
her, but never caring to come very near, as she frequently looked
about.  Once, she stopped to listen to a band of music; and then we
stopped too.

She went on a long way.  Still we went on.  It was evident, from
the manner in which she held her course, that she was going to some
fixed destination; and this, and her keeping in the busy streets,
and I suppose the strange fascination in the secrecy and mystery of
so following anyone, made me adhere to my first purpose.  At length
she turned into a dull, dark street, where the noise and crowd were
lost; and I said, 'We may speak to her now'; and, mending our pace,
we went after her.


CHAPTER 47
MARTHA


We were now down in Westminster.  We had turned back to follow her,
having encountered her coming towards us; and Westminster Abbey was
the point at which she passed from the lights and noise of the
leading streets.  She proceeded so quickly, when she got free of
the two currents of passengers setting towards and from the bridge,
that, between this and the advance she had of us when she struck
off, we were in the narrow water-side street by Millbank before we
came up with her.  At that moment she crossed the road, as if to
avoid the footsteps that she heard so close behind; and, without
looking back, passed on even more rapidly.

A glimpse of the river through a dull gateway, where some waggons
were housed for the night, seemed to arrest my feet.  I touched my
companion without speaking, and we both forbore to cross after her,
and both followed on that opposite side of the way; keeping as
quietly as we could in the shadow of the houses, but keeping very
near her.

There was, and is when I write, at the end of that low-lying
street, a dilapidated little wooden building, probably an obsolete
old ferry-house.  Its position is just at that point where the
street ceases, and the road begins to lie between a row of houses
and the river.  As soon as she came here, and saw the water, she
stopped as if she had come to her destination; and presently went
slowly along by the brink of the river, looking intently at it.

All the way here, I had supposed that she was going to some house;
indeed, I had vaguely entertained the hope that the house might be
in some way associated with the lost girl.  But that one dark
glimpse of the river, through the gateway, had instinctively
prepared me for her going no farther.

The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive,
sad, and solitary by night, as any about London.  There were
neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the
great blank Prison.  A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the
prison walls.  Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the
marshy land in the vicinity.  In one part, carcases of houses,
inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away.  In another,
the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers,
wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells,
windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by
some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which -
having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather - they
had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.  The clash
and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night
to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that
poured out of their chimneys.  Slimy gaps and causeways, winding
among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the
latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills
offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark,
led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide.  There was a
story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the
Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to
have proceeded from it over the whole place.  Or else it looked as
if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out
of the overflowings of the polluted stream.

As if she were a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to
corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the
river's brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely
and still, looking at the water.

There were some boats and barges astrand in the mud, and these
enabled us to come within a few yards of her without being seen. 
I then signed to Mr. Peggotty to remain where he was, and emerged
from their shade to speak to her.  I did not approach her solitary
figure without trembling; for this gloomy end to her determined
walk, and the way in which she stood, almost within the cavernous
shadow of the iron bridge, looking at the lights crookedly
reflected in the strong tide, inspired a dread within me.

I think she was talking to herself.  I am sure, although absorbed
in gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her shoulders, and
that she was muffling her hands in it, in an unsettled and
bewildered way, more like the action of a sleep-walker than a
waking person.  I know, and never can forget, that there was that
in her wild manner which gave me no assurance but that she would
sink before my eyes, until I had her arm within my grasp.

At the same moment I said 'Martha!'

She uttered a terrified scream, and struggled with me with such
strength that I doubt if I could have held her alone.  But a
stronger hand than mine was laid upon her; and when she raised her
frightened eyes and saw whose it was, she made but one more effort
and dropped down between us.  We carried her away from the water to
where there were some dry stones, and there laid her down, crying
and moaning.  In a little while she sat among the stones, holding
her wretched head with both her hands.

'Oh, the river!' she cried passionately.  'Oh, the river!'

'Hush, hush!' said I.  'Calm yourself.'

But she still repeated the same words, continually exclaiming, 'Oh,
the river!' over and over again.

'I know it's like me!' she exclaimed.  'I know that I belong to it. 
I know that it's the natural company of such as I am! It comes from
country places, where there was once no harm in it - and it creeps
through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable - and it goes
away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled - and
I feel that I must go with it!'
I have never known what despair was, except in the tone of those
words.

'I can't keep away from it.  I can't forget it.  It haunts me day
and night.  It's the only thing in all the world that I am fit for,
or that's fit for me.  Oh, the dreadful river!'

The thought passed through my mind that in the face of my
companion, as he looked upon her without speech or motion, I might
have read his niece's history, if I had known nothing of it.  I
never saw, in any painting or reality, horror and compassion so
impressively blended.  He shook as if he would have fallen; and his
hand - I touched it with my own, for his appearance alarmed me -
was deadly cold.

'She is in a state of frenzy,' I whispered to him.  'She will speak
differently in a little time.'

I don't know what he would have said in answer.  He made some
motion with his mouth, and seemed to think he had spoken; but he
had only pointed to her with his outstretched hand.

A new burst of crying came upon her now, in which she once more hid
her face among the stones, and lay before us, a prostrate image of
humiliation and ruin.  Knowing that this state must pass, before we
could speak to her with any hope, I ventured to restrain him when
he would have raised her, and we stood by in silence until she
became more tranquil.

'Martha,' said I then, leaning down, and helping her to rise - she
seemed to want to rise as if with the intention of going away, but
she was weak, and leaned against a boat.  'Do you know who this is,
who is with me?'

She said faintly, 'Yes.'

'Do you know that we have followed you a long way tonight?'

She shook her head.  She looked neither at him nor at me, but stood
in a humble attitude, holding her bonnet and shawl in one hand,
without appearing conscious of them, and pressing the other,
clenched, against her forehead.

'Are you composed enough,' said I, 'to speak on the subject which
so interested you - I hope Heaven may remember it! - that snowy
night?'

Her sobs broke out afresh, and she murmured some inarticulate
thanks to me for not having driven her away from the door.

'I want to say nothing for myself,' she said, after a few moments. 
'I am bad, I am lost.  I have no hope at all.  But tell him, sir,'
she had shrunk away from him, 'if you don't feel too hard to me to
do it, that I never was in any way the cause of his misfortune.'
'It has never been attributed to you,' I returned, earnestly
responding to her earnestness.

'It was you, if I don't deceive myself,' she said, in a broken
voice, 'that came into the kitchen, the night she took such pity on
me; was so gentle to me; didn't shrink away from me like all the
rest, and gave me such kind help! Was it you, sir?'

'It was,' said I.

'I should have been in the river long ago,' she said, glancing at
it with a terrible expression, 'if any wrong to her had been upon
my mind.  I never could have kept out of it a single winter's
night, if I had not been free of any share in that!'

'The cause of her flight is too well understood,' I said.  'You are
innocent of any part in it, we thoroughly believe, - we know.'

'Oh, I might have been much the better for her, if I had had a
better heart!' exclaimed the girl, with most forlorn regret; 'for
she was always good to me! She never spoke a word to me but what
was pleasant and right.  Is it likely I would try to make her what
I am myself, knowing what I am myself, so well?  When I lost
everything that makes life dear, the worst of all my thoughts was
that I was parted for ever from her!'

Mr. Peggotty, standing with one hand on the gunwale of the boat,
and his eyes cast down, put his disengaged hand before his face.

'And when I heard what had happened before that snowy night, from
some belonging to our town,' cried Martha, 'the bitterest thought
in all my mind was, that the people would remember she once kept
company with me, and would say I had corrupted her! When, Heaven
knows, I would have died to have brought back her good name!'

Long unused to any self-control, the piercing agony of her remorse
and grief was terrible.

'To have died, would not have been much - what can I say?  - I
would have lived!' she cried.  'I would have lived to be old, in
the wretched streets - and to wander about, avoided, in the dark -
and to see the day break on the ghastly line of houses, and
remember how the same sun used to shine into my room, and wake me
once - I would have done even that, to save her!'

Sinking on the stones, she took some in each hand, and clenched
them up, as if she would have ground them.  She writhed into some
new posture constantly: stiffening her arms, twisting them before
her face, as though to shut out from her eyes the little light
there was, and drooping her head, as if it were heavy with
insupportable recollections.

'What shall I ever do!' she said, fighting thus with her despair. 
'How can I go on as I am, a solitary curse to myself, a living
disgrace to everyone I come near!' Suddenly she turned to my
companion.  'Stamp upon me, kill me! When she was your pride, you
would have thought I had done her harm if I had brushed against her
in the street.  You can't believe - why should you?  - a syllable
that comes out of my lips.  It would be a burning shame upon you,
even now, if she and I exchanged a word.  I don't complain.  I
don't say she and I are alike - I know there is a long, long way
between us.  I only say, with all my guilt and wretchedness upon my
head, that I am grateful to her from my soul, and love her.  Oh,
don't think that all the power I had of loving anything is quite
worn out! Throw me away, as all the world does.  Kill me for being
what I am, and having ever known her; but don't think that of me!'

He looked upon her, while she made this supplication, in a wild
distracted manner; and, when she was silent, gently raised her.

'Martha,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'God forbid as I should judge you. 
Forbid as I, of all men, should do that, my girl! You doen't know
half the change that's come, in course of time, upon me, when you
think it likely.  Well!' he paused a moment, then went on.  'You
doen't understand how 'tis that this here gentleman and me has
wished to speak to you.  You doen't understand what 'tis we has
afore us.  Listen now!'

His influence upon her was complete.  She stood, shrinkingly,
before him, as if she were afraid to meet his eyes; but her
passionate sorrow was quite hushed and mute.

'If you heerd,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'owt of what passed between
Mas'r Davy and me, th' night when it snew so hard, you know as I
have been - wheer not - fur to seek my dear niece.  My dear niece,'
he repeated steadily.  'Fur she's more dear to me now, Martha, than
she was dear afore.'

She put her hands before her face; but otherwise remained quiet.

'I have heerd her tell,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'as you was early left
fatherless and motherless, with no friend fur to take, in a rough
seafaring-way, their place.  Maybe you can guess that if you'd had
such a friend, you'd have got into a way of being fond of him in
course of time, and that my niece was kiender daughter-like to me.'

As she was silently trembling, he put her shawl carefully about
her, taking it up from the ground for that purpose.

'Whereby,' said he, 'I know, both as she would go to the wureld's
furdest end with me, if she could once see me again; and that she
would fly to the wureld's furdest end to keep off seeing me.  For
though she ain't no call to doubt my love, and doen't - and
doen't,' he repeated, with a quiet assurance of the truth of what
he said, 'there's shame steps in, and keeps betwixt us.'

I read, in every word of his plain impressive way of delivering
himself, new evidence of his having thought of this one topic, in
every feature it presented.

'According to our reckoning,' he proceeded, 'Mas'r Davy's here, and
mine, she is like, one day, to make her own poor solitary course to
London.  We believe - Mas'r Davy, me, and all of us - that you are
as innocent of everything that has befell her, as the unborn child. 
You've spoke of her being pleasant, kind, and gentle to you.  Bless
her, I knew she was! I knew she always was, to all.  You're
thankful to her, and you love her.  Help us all you can to find
her, and may Heaven reward you!'

She looked at him hastily, and for the first time, as if she were
doubtful of what he had said.

'Will you trust me?' she asked, in a low voice of astonishment.

'Full and free!' said Mr. Peggotty.

'To speak to her, if I should ever find her; shelter her, if I have
any shelter to divide with her; and then, without her knowledge,
come to you, and bring you to her?' she asked hurriedly.

We both replied together, 'Yes!'

She lifted up her eyes, and solemnly declared that she would devote
herself to this task, fervently and faithfully.  That she would
never waver in it, never be diverted from it, never relinquish it,
while there was any chance of hope.  If she were not true to it,
might the object she now had in life, which bound her to something
devoid of evil, in its passing away from her, leave her more
forlorn and more despairing, if that were possible, than she had
been upon the river's brink that night; and then might all help,
human and Divine, renounce her evermore!

She did not raise her voice above her breath, or address us, but
said this to the night sky; then stood profoundly quiet, looking at
the gloomy water.

We judged it expedient, now, to tell her all we knew; which I
recounted at length.  She listened with great attention, and with
a face that often changed, but had the same purpose in all its
varying expressions.  Her eyes occasionally filled with tears, but
those she repressed.  It seemed as if her spirit were quite
altered, and she could not be too quiet.

She asked, when all was told, where we were to be communicated
with, if occasion should arise.  Under a dull lamp in the road, I
wrote our two addresses on a leaf of my pocket-book, which I tore
out and gave to her, and which she put in her poor bosom.  I asked
her where she lived herself.  She said, after a pause, in no place
long.  It were better not to know.

Mr. Peggotty suggesting to me, in a whisper, what had already
occurred to myself, I took out my purse; but I could not prevail
upon her to accept any money, nor could I exact any promise from
her that she would do so at another time.  I represented to her
that Mr. Peggotty could not be called, for one in his condition,
poor; and that the idea of her engaging in this search, while
depending on her own resources, shocked us both.  She continued
steadfast.  In this particular, his influence upon her was equally
powerless with mine.  She gratefully thanked him but remained
inexorable.

'There may be work to be got,' she said.  'I'll try.'

'At least take some assistance,' I returned, 'until you have
tried.'

'I could not do what I have promised, for money,' she replied.  'I
could not take it, if I was starving.  To give me money would be to
take away your trust, to take away the object that you have given
me, to take away the only certain thing that saves me from the
river.'

'In the name of the great judge,' said I, 'before whom you and all
of us must stand at His dread time, dismiss that terrible idea! We
can all do some good, if we will.'

She trembled, and her lip shook, and her face was paler, as she
answered:

'It has been put into your hearts, perhaps, to save a wretched
creature for repentance.  I am afraid to think so; it seems too
bold.  If any good should come of me, I might begin to hope; for
nothing but harm has ever come of my deeds yet.  I am to be
trusted, for the first time in a long while, with my miserable
life, on account of what you have given me to try for.  I know no
more, and I can say no more.'

Again she repressed the tears that had begun to flow; and, putting
out her trembling hand, and touching Mr. Peggotty, as if there was
some healing virtue in him, went away along the desolate road.  She
had been ill, probably for a long time.  I observed, upon that
closer opportunity of observation, that she was worn and haggard,
and that her sunken eyes expressed privation and endurance.

We followed her at a short distance, our way lying in the same
direction, until we came back into the lighted and populous
streets.  I had such implicit confidence in her declaration, that
I then put it to Mr. Peggotty, whether it would not seem, in the
onset, like distrusting her, to follow her any farther.  He being
of the same mind, and equally reliant on her, we suffered her to
take her own road, and took ours, which was towards Highgate.  He
accompanied me a good part of the way; and when we parted, with a
prayer for the success of this fresh effort, there was a new and
thoughtful compassion in him that I was at no loss to interpret.

It was midnight when I arrived at home.  I had reached my own gate,
and was standing listening for the deep bell of St. Paul's, the
sound of which I thought had been borne towards me among the
multitude of striking clocks, when I was rather surprised to see
that the door of my aunt's cottage was open, and that a faint light
in the entry was shining out across the road.

Thinking that my aunt might have relapsed into one of her old
alarms, and might be watching the progress of some imaginary
conflagration in the distance, I went to speak to her.  It was with
very great surprise that I saw a man standing in her little garden.

He had a glass and bottle in his hand, and was in the act of
drinking.  I stopped short, among the thick foliage outside, for
the moon was up now, though obscured; and I recognized the man whom
I had once supposed to be a delusion of Mr. Dick's, and had once
encountered with my aunt in the streets of the city.

He was eating as well as drinking, and seemed to eat with a hungry
appetite.  He seemed curious regarding the cottage, too, as if it
were the first time he had seen it.  After stooping to put the
bottle on the ground, he looked up at the windows, and looked
about; though with a covert and impatient air, as if he was anxious
to be gone.

The light in the passage was obscured for a moment, and my aunt
came out.  She was agitated, and told some money into his hand.  I
heard it chink.

'What's the use of this?' he demanded.

'I can spare no more,' returned my aunt.

'Then I can't go,' said he.  'Here! You may take it back!'

'You bad man,' returned my aunt, with great emotion; 'how can you
use me so?  But why do I ask?  It is because you know how weak I
am! What have I to do, to free myself for ever of your visits, but
to abandon you to your deserts?'

'And why don't you abandon me to my deserts?' said he.

'You ask me why!' returned my aunt.  'What a heart you must have!'

He stood moodily rattling the money, and shaking his head, until at
length he said:

'Is this all you mean to give me, then?'

'It is all I CAN give you,' said my aunt.  'You know I have had
losses, and am poorer than I used to be.  I have told you so. 
Having got it, why do you give me the pain of looking at you for
another moment, and seeing what you have become?'

'I have become shabby enough, if you mean that,' he said.  'I lead
the life of an owl.'

'You stripped me of the greater part of all I ever had,' said my
aunt.  'You closed my heart against the whole world, years and
years.  You treated me falsely, ungratefully, and cruelly.  Go, and
repent of it.  Don't add new injuries to the long, long list of
injuries you have done me!'

'Aye!' he returned.  'It's all very fine - Well! I must do the best
I can, for the present, I suppose.'

In spite of himself, he appeared abashed by my aunt's indignant
tears, and came slouching out of the garden.  Taking two or three
quick steps, as if I had just come up, I met him at the gate, and
went in as he came out.  We eyed one another narrowly in passing,
and with no favour.

'Aunt,' said I, hurriedly.  'This man alarming you again! Let me
speak to him.  Who is he?'

'Child,' returned my aunt, taking my arm, 'come in, and don't speak
to me for ten minutes.'

We sat down in her little parlour.  My aunt retired behind the
round green fan of former days, which was screwed on the back of a
chair, and occasionally wiped her eyes, for about a quarter of an
hour.  Then she came out, and took a seat beside me.

'Trot,' said my aunt, calmly, 'it's my husband.'

'Your husband, aunt?  I thought he had been dead!'

'Dead to me,' returned my aunt, 'but living.'

I sat in silent amazement.

'Betsey Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender
passion,' said my aunt, composedly, 'but the time was, Trot, when
she believed in that man most entirely.  When she loved him, Trot,
right well.  When there was no proof of attachment and affection
that she would not have given him.  He repaid her by breaking her
fortune, and nearly breaking her heart.  So she put all that sort
of sentiment, once and for ever, in a grave, and filled it up, and
flattened it down.'

'My dear, good aunt!'

'I left him,' my aunt proceeded, laying her hand as usual on the
back of mine, 'generously.  I may say at this distance of time,
Trot, that I left him generously.  He had been so cruel to me, that
I might have effected a separation on easy terms for myself; but I
did not.  He soon made ducks and drakes of what I gave him, sank
lower and lower, married another woman, I believe, became an
adventurer, a gambler, and a cheat.  What he is now, you see.  But
he was a fine-looking man when I married him,' said my aunt, with
an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone; 'and I
believed him - I was a fool! - to be the soul of honour!'

She gave my hand a squeeze, and shook her head.

'He is nothing to me now, Trot- less than nothing.  But, sooner
than have him punished for his offences (as he would be if he
prowled about in this country), I give him more money than I can
afford, at intervals when he reappears, to go away.  I was a fool
when I married him; and I am so far an incurable fool on that
subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I
wouldn't have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. 
For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was.'

MY aunt dismissed the matter with a heavy sigh, and smoothed her
dress.

'There, my dear!' she said.  'Now you know the beginning, middle,
and end, and all about it.  We won't mention the subject to one
another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to
anybody else.  This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it
to ourselves, Trot!'



CHAPTER 48
DOMESTIC


I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with
the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and
was very successful.  I was not stunned by the praise which sounded
in my ears, notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it, and
thought better of my own performance, I have little doubt, than
anybody else did.  It has always been in my observation of human
nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself
never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order
that they may believe in him.  For this reason, I retained my
modesty in very self-respect; and the more praise I got, the more
I tried to deserve.

It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other
essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own
fictions.  They express themselves, and I leave them to themselves. 
When I refer to them, incidentally, it is only as a part of my
progress.

Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and
accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with
confidence.  Without such assurance I should certainly have left it
alone, and bestowed my energy on some other endeavour.  I should
have tried to find out what nature and accident really had made me,
and to be that, and nothing else.
I had been writing, in the newspaper and elsewhere, so
prosperously, that when my new success was achieved, I considered
myself reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary debates.  One
joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the
parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it
since; though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers,
without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is
more of it), all the livelong session.

I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose, about
a year and a half.  After several varieties of experiment, we had
given up the housekeeping as a bad job.  The house kept itself, and
we kept a page.  The principal function of this retainer was to
quarrel with the cook; in which respect he was a perfect
Whittington, without his cat, or the remotest chance of being made
Lord Mayor.

He appears to me to have lived in a hail of saucepan-lids.  His
whole existence was a scuffle.  He would shriek for help on the
most improper occasions, - as when we had a little dinner-party, or
a few friends in the evening, - and would come tumbling out of the
kitchen, with iron missiles flying after him.  We wanted to get rid
of him, but he was very much attached to us, and wouldn't go.  He
was a tearful boy, and broke into such deplorable lamentations,
when a cessation of our connexion was hinted at, that we were
obliged to keep him.  He had no mother - no anything in the way of
a relative, that I could discover, except a sister, who fled to
America the moment we had taken him off her hands; and he became
quartered on us like a horrible young changeling.  He had a lively
perception of his own unfortunate state, and was always rubbing his
eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, or stooping to blow his nose on
the extreme corner of a little pocket-handkerchief, which he never
would take completely out of his pocket, but always economized and
secreted.

This unlucky page, engaged in an evil hour at six pounds ten per
annum, was a source of continual trouble to me.  I watched him as
he grew - and he grew like scarlet beans - with painful
apprehensions of the time when he would begin to shave; even of the
days when he would be bald or grey.  I saw no prospect of ever
getting rid of him; and, projecting myself into the future, used to
think what an inconvenience he would be when he was an old man.

I never expected anything less, than this unfortunate's manner of
getting me out of my difficulty.  He stole Dora's watch, which,
like everything else belonging to us, had no particular place of
its own; and, converting it into money, spent the produce (he was
always a weak-minded boy) in incessantly riding up and down between
London and Uxbridge outside the coach.  He was taken to Bow Street,
as well as I remember, on the completion of his fifteenth journey;
when four-and-sixpence, and a second-hand fife which he couldn't
play, were found upon his person.

The surprise and its consequences would have been much less
disagreeable to me if he had not been penitent.  But he was very
penitent indeed, and in a peculiar way - not in the lump, but by
instalments.  For example: the day after that on which I was
obliged to appear against him, he made certain revelations touching
a hamper in the cellar, which we believed to be full of wine, but
which had nothing in it except bottles and corks.  We supposed he
had now eased his mind, and told the worst he knew of the cook;
but, a day or two afterwards, his conscience sustained a new
twinge, and he disclosed how she had a little girl, who, early
every morning, took away our bread; and also how he himself had
been suborned to maintain the milkman in coals.  In two or three
days more, I was informed by the authorities of his having led to
the discovery of sirloins of beef among the kitchen-stuff, and
sheets in the rag-bag.  A little while afterwards, he broke out in
an entirely new direction, and confessed to a knowledge of
burglarious intentions as to our premises, on the part of the
pot-boy, who was immediately taken up.  I got to be so ashamed of
being such a victim, that I would have given him any money to hold
his tongue, or would have offered a round bribe for his being
permitted to run away.  It was an aggravating circumstance in the
case that he had no idea of this, but conceived that he was making
me amends in every new discovery: not to say, heaping obligations
on my head.

At last I ran away myself, whenever I saw an emissary of the police
approaching with some new intelligence; and lived a stealthy life
until he was tried and ordered to be transported.  Even then he
couldn't be quiet, but was always writing us letters; and wanted so
much to see Dora before he went away, that Dora went to visit him,
and fainted when she found herself inside the iron bars.  In short,
I had no peace of my life until he was expatriated, and made (as I
afterwards heard) a shepherd of, 'up the country' somewhere; I have
no geographical idea where.

All this led me into some serious reflections, and presented our
mistakes in a new aspect; as I could not help communicating to Dora
one evening, in spite of my tenderness for her.

'My love,' said I, 'it is very painful to me to think that our want
of system and management, involves not only ourselves (which we
have got used to), but other people.'

'You have been silent for a long time, and now you are going to be
cross!' said Dora.

'No, my dear, indeed! Let me explain to you what I mean.'

'I think I don't want to know,' said Dora.

'But I want you to know, my love.  Put Jip down.'

Dora put his nose to mine, and said 'Boh!' to drive my seriousness
away; but, not succeeding, ordered him into his Pagoda, and sat
looking at me, with her hands folded, and a most resigned little
expression of countenance.

'The fact is, my dear,' I began, 'there is contagion in us.  We
infect everyone about us.'

I might have gone on in this figurative manner, if Dora's face had
not admonished me that she was wondering with all her might whether
I was going to propose any new kind of vaccination, or other
medical remedy, for this unwholesome state of ours.  Therefore I
checked myself, and made my meaning plainer.

'It is not merely, my pet,' said I, 'that we lose money and
comfort, and even temper sometimes, by not learning to be more
careful; but that we incur the serious responsibility of spoiling
everyone who comes into our service, or has any dealings with us. 
I begin to be afraid that the fault is not entirely on one side,
but that these people all turn out ill because we don't turn out
very well ourselves.'

'Oh, what an accusation,' exclaimed Dora, opening her eyes wide;
'to say that you ever saw me take gold watches! Oh!'

'My dearest,' I remonstrated, 'don't talk preposterous nonsense!
Who has made the least allusion to gold watches?'

'You did,' returned Dora.  'You know you did.  You said I hadn't
turned out well, and compared me to him.'

'To whom?' I asked.

'To the page,' sobbed Dora.  'Oh, you cruel fellow, to compare your
affectionate wife to a transported page! Why didn't you tell me
your opinion of me before we were married?  Why didn't you say, you
hard-hearted thing, that you were convinced I was worse than a
transported page?  Oh, what a dreadful opinion to have of me! Oh,
my goodness!'

'Now, Dora, my love,' I returned, gently trying to remove the
handkerchief she pressed to her eyes, 'this is not only very
ridiculous of you, but very wrong.  In the first place, it's not
true.'

'You always said he was a story-teller,' sobbed Dora.  'And now you
say the same of me! Oh, what shall I do! What shall I do!'

'My darling girl,' I retorted, 'I really must entreat you to be
reasonable, and listen to what I did say, and do say.  My dear
Dora, unless we learn to do our duty to those whom we employ, they
will never learn to do their duty to us.  I am afraid we present
opportunities to people to do wrong, that never ought to be
presented.  Even if we were as lax as we are, in all our
arrangements, by choice - which we are not - even if we liked it,
and found it agreeable to be so - which we don't - I am persuaded
we should have no right to go on in this way.  We are positively
corrupting people.  We are bound to think of that.  I can't help
thinking of it, Dora.  It is a reflection I am unable to dismiss,
and it sometimes makes me very uneasy.  There, dear, that's all. 
Come now.  Don't be foolish!'

Dora would not allow me, for a long time, to remove the
handkerchief.  She sat sobbing and murmuring behind it, that, if I
was uneasy, why had I ever been married?  Why hadn't I said, even
the day before we went to church, that I knew I should be uneasy,
and I would rather not?  If I couldn't bear her, why didn't I send
her away to her aunts at Putney, or to Julia Mills in India?  Julia
would be glad to see her, and would not call her a transported
page; Julia never had called her anything of the sort.  In short,
Dora was so afflicted, and so afflicted me by being in that
condition, that I felt it was of no use repeating this kind of
effort, though never so mildly, and I must take some other course.

What other course was left to take?  To 'form her mind'?  This was
a common phrase of words which had a fair and promising sound, and
I resolved to form Dora's mind.

I began immediately.  When Dora was very childish, and I would have
infinitely preferred to humour her, I tried to be grave - and
disconcerted her, and myself too.  I talked to her on the subjects
which occupied my thoughts; and I read Shakespeare to her - and
fatigued her to the last degree.  I accustomed myself to giving
her, as it were quite casually, little scraps of useful
information, or sound opinion - and she started from them when I
let them off, as if they had been crackers.  No matter how
incidentally or naturally I endeavoured to form my little wife's
mind, I could not help seeing that she always had an instinctive
perception of what I was about, and became a prey to the keenest
apprehensions.  In particular, it was clear to me, that she thought
Shakespeare a terrible fellow.  The formation went on very slowly.

I pressed Traddles into the service without his knowledge; and
whenever he came to see us, exploded my mines upon him for the
edification of Dora at second hand.  The amount of practical wisdom
I bestowed upon Traddles in this manner was immense, and of the
best quality; but it had no other effect upon Dora than to depress
her spirits, and make her always nervous with the dread that it
would be her turn next.  I found myself in the condition of a
schoolmaster, a trap, a pitfall; of always playing spider to Dora's
fly, and always pouncing out of my hole to her infinite
disturbance.

Still, looking forward through this intermediate stage, to the time
when there should be a perfect sympathy between Dora and me, and
when I should have 'formed her mind' to my entire satisfaction, I
persevered, even for months.  Finding at last, however, that,
although I had been all this time a very porcupine or hedgehog,
bristling all over with determination, I had effected nothing, it
began to occur to me that perhaps Dora's mind was already formed.

On further consideration this appeared so likely, that I abandoned
my scheme, which had had a more promising appearance in words than
in action; resolving henceforth to be satisfied with my child-wife,
and to try to change her into nothing else by any process.  I was
heartily tired of being sagacious and prudent by myself, and of
seeing my darling under restraint; so I bought a pretty pair of
ear-rings for her, and a collar for Jip, and went home one day to
make myself agreeable.

Dora was delighted with the little presents, and kissed me
joyfully; but there was a shadow between us, however slight, and I
had made up my mind that it should not be there.  If there must be
such a shadow anywhere, I would keep it for the future in my own
breast.

I sat down by my wife on the sofa, and put the ear-rings in her
ears; and then I told her that I feared we had not been quite as
good company lately, as we used to be, and that the fault was mine. 
Which I sincerely felt, and which indeed it was.

'The truth is, Dora, my life,' I said; 'I have been trying to be
wise.'

'And to make me wise too,' said Dora, timidly.  'Haven't you,
Doady?'

I nodded assent to the pretty inquiry of the raised eyebrows, and
kissed the parted lips.

'It's of not a bit of use,' said Dora, shaking her head, until the
ear-rings rang again.  'You know what a little thing I am, and what
I wanted you to call me from the first.  If you can't do so, I am
afraid you'll never like me.  Are you sure you don't think,
sometimes, it would have been better to have -'

'Done what, my dear?' For she made no effort to proceed.

'Nothing!' said Dora.

'Nothing?' I repeated.

She put her arms round my neck, and laughed, and called herself by
her favourite name of a goose, and hid her face on my shoulder in
such a profusion of curls that it was quite a task to clear them
away and see it.

'Don't I think it would have been better to have done nothing, than
to have tried to form my little wife's mind?' said I, laughing at
myself.  'Is that the question?  Yes, indeed, I do.'

'Is that what you have been trying?' cried Dora.  'Oh what a
shocking boy!'

'But I shall never try any more,' said I.  'For I love her dearly
as she is.'

'Without a story - really?' inquired Dora, creeping closer to me.

'Why should I seek to change,' said I, 'what has been so precious
to me for so long! You never can show better than as your own
natural self, my sweet Dora; and we'll try no conceited
experiments, but go back to our old way, and be happy.'

'And be happy!' returned Dora.  'Yes! All day! And you won't mind
things going a tiny morsel wrong, sometimes?'

'No, no,' said I.  'We must do the best we can.'

'And you won't tell me, any more, that we make other people bad,'
coaxed Dora; 'will you?  Because you know it's so dreadfully
cross!'

'No, no,' said I.

'it's better for me to be stupid than uncomfortable, isn't it?'
said Dora.

'Better to be naturally Dora than anything else in the world.'

'In the world! Ah, Doady, it's a large place!'

She shook her head, turned her delighted bright eyes up to mine,
kissed me, broke into a merry laugh, and sprang away to put on
Jip's new collar.

So ended my last attempt to make any change in Dora.  I had been
unhappy in trying it; I could not endure my own solitary wisdom; I
could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my
child-wife.  I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to
improve our proceedings myself, but I foresaw that my utmost would
be very little, or I must degenerate into the spider again, and be
for ever lying in wait.

And the shadow I have mentioned, that was not to be between us any
more, but was to rest wholly on my own heart?  How did that fall?

The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life.  It was deepened, if it
were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed
me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night.  I
loved my wife dearly, and I was happy; but the happiness I had
vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and
there was always something wanting.

In fulfilment of the compact I have made with myself, to reflect my
mind on this paper, I again examine it, closely, and bring its
secrets to the light.  What I missed, I still regarded - I always
regarded - as something that had been a dream of my youthful fancy;
that was incapable of realization; that I was now discovering to be
so, with some natural pain, as all men did.  But that it would have
been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and shared
the many thoughts in which I had no partner; and that this might
have been; I knew.

Between these two irreconcilable conclusions: the one, that what I
felt was general and unavoidable; the other, that it was particular
to me, and might have been different: I balanced curiously, with no
distinct sense of their opposition to each other.  When I thought
of the airy dreams of youth that are incapable of realization, I
thought of the better state preceding manhood that I had outgrown;
and then the contented days with Agnes, in the dear old house,
arose before me, like spectres of the dead, that might have some
renewal in another world, but never more could be reanimated here.

Sometimes, the speculation came into my thoughts, What might have
happened, or what would have happened, if Dora and I had never
known each other?  But she was so incorporated with my existence,
that it was the idlest of all fancies, and would soon rise out of
my reach and sight, like gossamer floating in the air.

I always loved her.  What I am describing, slumbered, and half
awoke, and slept again, in the innermost recesses of my mind. 
There was no evidence of it in me; I know of no influence it had in
anything I said or did.  I bore the weight of all our little cares,
and all my projects; Dora held the pens; and we both felt that our
shares were adjusted as the case required.  She was truly fond of
me, and proud of me; and when Agnes wrote a few earnest words in
her letters to Dora, of the pride and interest with which my old
friends heard of my growing reputation, and read my book as if they
heard me speaking its contents, Dora read them out to me with tears
of joy in her bright eyes, and said I was a dear old clever, famous
boy.

'The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.'  Those
words of Mrs. Strong's were constantly recurring to me, at this
time; were almost always present to my mind.  I awoke with them,
often, in the night; I remember to have even read them, in dreams,
inscribed upon the walls of houses.  For I knew, now, that my own
heart was undisciplined when it first loved Dora; and that if it
had been disciplined, it never could have felt, when we were
married, what it had felt in its secret experience.

'There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind
and purpose.'  Those words I remembered too.  I had endeavoured to
adapt Dora to myself, and found it impracticable.  It remained for
me to adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be
happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and be happy still. 
This was the discipline to which I tried to bring my heart, when I
began to think.  It made my second year much happier than my first;
and, what was better still, made Dora's life all sunshine.

But, as that year wore on, Dora was not strong.  I had hoped that
lighter hands than mine would help to mould her character, and that
a baby-smile upon her breast might change my child-wife to a woman. 
It was not to be.  The spirit fluttered for a moment on the
threshold of its little prison, and, unconscious of captivity, took
wing.

'When I can run about again, as I used to do, aunt,' said Dora, 'I
shall make Jip race.  He is getting quite slow and lazy.'

'I suspect, my dear,' said my aunt quietly working by her side, 'he
has a worse disorder than that.  Age, Dora.'

'Do you think he is old?' said Dora, astonished.  'Oh, how strange
it seems that Jip should be old!'

'It's a complaint we are all liable to, Little One, as we get on in
life,' said my aunt, cheerfully; 'I don't feel more free from it
than I used to be, I assure you.'

'But Jip,' said Dora, looking at him with compassion, 'even little
Jip! Oh, poor fellow!'

'I dare say he'll last a long time yet, Blossom,' said my aunt,
patting Dora on the cheek, as she leaned out of her couch to look
at Jip, who responded by standing on his hind legs, and baulking
himself in various asthmatic attempts to scramble up by the head
and shoulders.  'He must have a piece of flannel in his house this
winter, and I shouldn't wonder if he came out quite fresh again,
with the flowers in the spring.  Bless the little dog!' exclaimed
my aunt, 'if he had as many lives as a cat, and was on the point of
losing 'em all, he'd bark at me with his last breath, I believe!'

Dora had helped him up on the sofa; where he really was defying my
aunt to such a furious extent, that he couldn't keep straight, but
barked himself sideways.  The more my aunt looked at him, the more
he reproached her; for she had lately taken to spectacles, and for
some inscrutable reason he considered the glasses personal.

Dora made him lie down by her, with a good deal of persuasion; and
when he was quiet, drew one of his long ears through and through
her hand, repeating thoughtfully, 'Even little Jip! Oh, poor
fellow!'

'His lungs are good enough,' said my aunt, gaily, 'and his dislikes
are not at all feeble.  He has a good many years before him, no
doubt.  But if you want a dog to race with, Little Blossom, he has
lived too well for that, and I'll give you one.'

'Thank you, aunt,' said Dora, faintly.  'But don't, please!'

'No?' said my aunt, taking off her spectacles.

'I couldn't have any other dog but Jip,' said Dora.  'It would be
so unkind to Jip! Besides, I couldn't be such friends with any
other dog but Jip; because he wouldn't have known me before I was
married, and wouldn't have barked at Doady when he first came to
our house.  I couldn't care for any other dog but Jip, I am afraid,
aunt.'

'To be sure!' said my aunt, patting her cheek again.  'You are
right.'

'You are not offended,' said Dora.  'Are you?'

'Why, what a sensitive pet it is!' cried my aunt, bending over her
affectionately.  'To think that I could be offended!'

'No, no, I didn't really think so,' returned Dora; 'but I am a
little tired, and it made me silly for a moment - I am always a
silly little thing, you know, but it made me more silly - to talk
about Jip.  He has known me in all that has happened to me, haven't
you, Jip?  And I couldn't bear to slight him, because he was a
little altered - could I, Jip?'

Jip nestled closer to his mistress, and lazily licked her hand.

'You are not so old, Jip, are you, that you'll leave your mistress
yet?' said Dora.  'We may keep one another company a little
longer!'

My pretty Dora! When she came down to dinner on the ensuing Sunday,
and was so glad to see old Traddles (who always dined with us on
Sunday), we thought she would be 'running about as she used to do',
in a few days.  But they said, wait a few days more; and then, wait
a few days more; and still she neither ran nor walked.  She looked
very pretty, and was very merry; but the little feet that used to
be so nimble when they danced round Jip, were dull and motionless.

I began to carry her downstairs every morning, and upstairs every
night.  She would clasp me round the neck and laugh, the while, as
if I did it for a wager.  Jip would bark and caper round us, and go
on before, and look back on the landing, breathing short, to see
that we were coming.  My aunt, the best and most cheerful of
nurses, would trudge after us, a moving mass of shawls and pillows. 
Mr. Dick would not have relinquished his post of candle-bearer to
anyone alive.  Traddles would be often at the bottom of the
staircase, looking on, and taking charge of sportive messages from
Dora to the dearest girl in the world.  We made quite a gay
procession of it, and my child-wife was the gayest there.

But, sometimes, when I took her up, and felt that she was lighter
in my arms, a dead blank feeling came upon me, as if I were
approaching to some frozen region yet unseen, that numbed my life. 
I avoided the recognition of this feeling by any name, or by any
communing with myself; until one night, when it was very strong
upon me, and my aunt had left her with a parting cry of 'Good
night, Little Blossom,' I sat down at my desk alone, and cried to
think, Oh what a fatal name it was, and how the blossom withered in
its bloom upon the tree!


CHAPTER 49
I AM INVOLVED IN MYSTERY


I received one morning by the post, the following letter, dated
Canterbury, and addressed to me at Doctor's Commons; which I read
with some surprise:


'MY DEAR SIR,

'Circumstances beyond my individual control have, for a
considerable lapse of time, effected a severance of that intimacy
which, in the limited opportunities conceded to me in the midst of
my professional duties, of contemplating the scenes and events of
the past, tinged by the prismatic hues of memory, has ever afforded
me, as it ever must continue to afford, gratifying emotions of no
common description.  This fact, my dear sir, combined with the
distinguished elevation to which your talents have raised you,
deters me from presuming to aspire to the liberty of addressing the
companion of my youth, by the familiar appellation of Copperfield!
It is sufficient to know that the name to which I do myself the
honour to refer, will ever be treasured among the muniments of our
house (I allude to the archives connected with our former lodgers,
preserved by Mrs. Micawber), with sentiments of personal esteem
amounting to affection.

'It is not for one, situated, through his original errors and a
fortuitous combination of unpropitious events, as is the foundered
Bark (if he may be allowed to assume so maritime a denomination),
who now takes up the pen to address you - it is not, I repeat, for
one so circumstanced, to adopt the language of compliment, or of
congratulation.  That he leaves to abler and to purer hands.

'If your more important avocations should admit of your ever
tracing these imperfect characters thus far - which may be, or may
not be, as circumstances arise - you will naturally inquire by what
object am I influenced, then, in inditing the present missive? 
Allow me to say that I fully defer to the reasonable character of
that inquiry, and proceed to develop it; premising that it is not
an object of a pecuniary nature.

'Without more directly referring to any latent ability that may
possibly exist on my part, of wielding the thunderbolt, or
directing the devouring and avenging flame in any quarter, I may be
permitted to observe, in passing, that my brightest visions are for
ever dispelled - that my peace is shattered and my power of
enjoyment destroyed - that my heart is no longer in the right place
- and that I no more walk erect before my fellow man.  The canker
is in the flower.  The cup is bitter to the brim.  The worm is at
his work, and will soon dispose of his victim.  The sooner the
better.  But I will not digress.
'Placed in a mental position of peculiar painfulness, beyond the
assuaging reach even of Mrs. Micawber's influence, though exercised
in the tripartite character of woman, wife, and mother, it is my
intention to fly from myself for a short period, and devote a
respite of eight-and-forty hours to revisiting some metropolitan
scenes of past enjoyment.  Among other havens of domestic
tranquillity and peace of mind, my feet will naturally tend towards
the King's Bench Prison.  In stating that I shall be (D. V.) on the
outside of the south wall of that place of incarceration on civil
process, the day after tomorrow, at seven in the evening,
precisely, my object in this epistolary communication is
accomplished.

'I do not feel warranted in soliciting my former friend Mr.
Copperfield, or my former friend Mr. Thomas Traddles of the Inner
Temple, if that gentleman is still existent and forthcoming, to
condescend to meet me, and renew (so far as may be) our past
relations of the olden time.  I confine myself to throwing out the
observation, that, at the hour and place I have indicated, may be
found such ruined vestiges as yet
               'Remain,
                    'Of
                         'A
                              'Fallen Tower,
                                   'WILKINS MICAWBER.

'P.S.  It may be advisable to superadd to the above, the statement
that Mrs. Micawber is not in confidential possession of my
intentions.'


I read the letter over several times.  Making due allowance for Mr.
Micawber's lofty style of composition, and for the extraordinary
relish with which he sat down and wrote long letters on all
possible and impossible occasions, I still believed that something
important lay hidden at the bottom of this roundabout
communication.  I put it down, to think about it; and took it up
again, to read it once more; and was still pursuing it, when
Traddles found me in the height of my perplexity.

'My dear fellow,' said I, 'I never was better pleased to see you. 
You come to give me the benefit of your sober judgement at a most
opportune time.  I have received a very singular letter, Traddles,
from Mr. Micawber.'

'No?' cried Traddles.  'You don't say so?  And I have received one
from Mrs. Micawber!'

With that, Traddles, who was flushed with walking, and whose hair,
under the combined effects of exercise and excitement, stood on end
as if he saw a cheerful ghost, produced his letter and made an
exchange with me.  I watched him into the heart of Mr. Micawber's
letter, and returned the elevation of eyebrows with which he said
"'Wielding the thunderbolt, or directing the devouring and avenging
flame!" Bless me, Copperfield!'- and then entered on the perusal of
Mrs. Micawber's epistle.

It ran thus:


'My best regards to Mr. Thomas Traddles, and if he should still
remember one who formerly had the happiness of being well
acquainted with him, may I beg a few moments of his leisure time? 
I assure Mr. T. T. that I would not intrude upon his kindness, were
I in any other position than on the confines of distraction.

'Though harrowing to myself to mention, the alienation of Mr.
Micawber (formerly so domesticated) from his wife and family, is
the cause of my addressing my unhappy appeal to Mr. Traddles, and
soliciting his best indulgence.  Mr. T. can form no adequate idea
of the change in Mr. Micawber's conduct, of his wildness, of his
violence.  It has gradually augmented, until it assumes the
appearance of aberration of intellect.  Scarcely a day passes, I
assure Mr. Traddles, on which some paroxysm does not take place. 
Mr. T. will not require me to depict my feelings, when I inform him
that I have become accustomed to hear Mr. Micawber assert that he
has sold himself to the D.  Mystery and secrecy have long been his
principal characteristic, have long replaced unlimited confidence. 
The slightest provocation, even being asked if there is anything he
would prefer for dinner, causes him to express a wish for a
separation.  Last night, on being childishly solicited for
twopence, to buy 'lemon-stunners' - a local sweetmeat - he
presented an oyster-knife at the twins!

'I entreat Mr. Traddles to bear with me in entering into these
details.  Without them, Mr. T. would indeed find it difficult to
form the faintest conception of my heart-rending situation.

'May I now venture to confide to Mr. T. the purport of my letter? 
Will he now allow me to throw myself on his friendly consideration? 
Oh yes, for I know his heart!

'The quick eye of affection is not easily blinded, when of the
female sex.  Mr. Micawber is going to London.  Though he studiously
concealed his hand, this morning before breakfast, in writing the
direction-card which he attached to the little brown valise of
happier days, the eagle-glance of matrimonial anxiety detected, d,
o, n, distinctly traced.  The West-End destination of the coach, is
the Golden Cross.  Dare I fervently implore Mr. T. to see my
misguided husband, and to reason with him?  Dare I ask Mr. T. to
endeavour to step in between Mr. Micawber and his agonized family? 
Oh no, for that would be too much!

'If Mr. Copperfield should yet remember one unknown to fame, will
Mr. T. take charge of my unalterable regards and similar
entreaties?  In any case, he will have the benevolence to consider
this communication strictly private, and on no account whatever to
be alluded to, however distantly, in the presence of Mr. Micawber. 
If Mr. T. should ever reply to it (which I cannot but feel to be
most improbable), a letter addressed to M. E., Post Office,
Canterbury, will be fraught with less painful consequences than any
addressed immediately to one, who subscribes herself, in extreme
distress,

'Mr. Thomas Traddles's respectful friend and suppliant,

                                   'EMMA MICAWBER.'


'What do you think of that letter?' said Traddles, casting his eyes
upon me, when I had read it twice.

'What do you think of the other?' said I.  For he was still reading
it with knitted brows.

'I think that the two together, Copperfield,' replied Traddles,
'mean more than Mr. and Mrs. Micawber usually mean in their
correspondence - but I don't know what.  They are both written in
good faith, I have no doubt, and without any collusion.  Poor
thing!' he was now alluding to Mrs. Micawber's letter, and we were
standing side by side comparing the two; 'it will be a charity to
write to her, at all events, and tell her that we will not fail to
see Mr. Micawber.'

I acceded to this the more readily, because I now reproached myself
with having treated her former letter rather lightly.  It had set
me thinking a good deal at the time, as I have mentioned in its
place; but my absorption in my own affairs, my experience of the
family, and my hearing nothing more, had gradually ended in my
dismissing the subject.  I had often thought of the Micawbers, but
chiefly to wonder what 'pecuniary liabilities' they were
establishing in Canterbury, and to recall how shy Mr. Micawber was
of me when he became clerk to Uriah Heep.

However, I now wrote a comforting letter to Mrs. Micawber, in our
joint names, and we both signed it.  As we walked into town to post
it, Traddles and I held a long conference, and launched into a
number of speculations, which I need not repeat.  We took my aunt
into our counsels in the afternoon; but our only decided conclusion
was, that we would be very punctual in keeping Mr. Micawber's
appointment.

Although we appeared at the stipulated place a quarter of an hour
before the time, we found Mr. Micawber already there.  He was
standing with his arms folded, over against the wall, looking at
the spikes on the top, with a sentimental expression, as if they
were the interlacing boughs of trees that had shaded him in his
youth.

When we accosted him, his manner was something more confused, and
something less genteel, than of yore.  He had relinquished his
legal suit of black for the purposes of this excursion, and wore
the old surtout and tights, but not quite with the old air.  He
gradually picked up more and more of it as we conversed with him;
but, his very eye-glass seemed to hang less easily, and his
shirt-collar, though still of the old formidable dimensions, rather
drooped.

'Gentlemen!' said Mr. Micawber, after the first salutations, 'you
are friends in need, and friends indeed.  Allow me to offer my
inquiries with reference to the physical welfare of Mrs.
Copperfield in esse, and Mrs. Traddles in posse, - presuming, that
is to say, that my friend Mr. Traddles is not yet united to the
object of his affections, for weal and for woe.'

We acknowledged his politeness, and made suitable replies.  He then
directed our attention to the wall, and was beginning, 'I assure
you, gentlemen,' when I ventured to object to that ceremonious form
of address, and to beg that he would speak to us in the old way.

'My dear Copperfield,' he returned, pressing my hand, 'your
cordiality overpowers me.  This reception of a shattered fragment
of the Temple once called Man - if I may be permitted so to express
myself - bespeaks a heart that is an honour to our common nature. 
I was about to observe that I again behold the serene spot where
some of the happiest hours of my existence fleeted by.'

'Made so, I am sure, by Mrs. Micawber,' said I.  'I hope she is
well?'

'Thank you,' returned Mr. Micawber, whose face clouded at this
reference, 'she is but so-so.  And this,' said Mr. Micawber,
nodding his head sorrowfully, 'is the Bench! Where, for the first
time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of
pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed, from day to day, by
importune voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was
no knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where
personal service of process was not required, and detainees were
merely lodged at the gate! Gentlemen,' said Mr. Micawber, 'when the
shadow of that iron-work on the summit of the brick structure has
been reflected on the gravel of the Parade, I have seen my children
thread the mazes of the intricate pattern, avoiding the dark marks. 
I have been familiar with every stone in the place.  If I betray
weakness, you will know how to excuse me.'

'We have all got on in life since then, Mr. Micawber,' said I.

'Mr. Copperfield,' returned Mr. Micawber, bitterly, 'when I was an
inmate of that retreat I could look my fellow-man in the face, and
punch his head if he offended me.  My fellow-man and myself are no
longer on those glorious terms!'

Turning from the building in a downcast manner, Mr. Micawber
accepted my proffered arm on one side, and the proffered arm of
Traddles on the other, and walked away between us.

'There are some landmarks,' observed Mr. Micawber, looking fondly
back over his shoulder, 'on the road to the tomb, which, but for
the impiety of the aspiration, a man would wish never to have
passed.  Such is the Bench in my chequered career.'

'Oh, you are in low spirits, Mr. Micawber,' said Traddles.

'I am, sir,' interposed Mr. Micawber.

'I hope,' said Traddles, 'it is not because you have conceived a
dislike to the law - for I am a lawyer myself, you know.'

Mr. Micawber answered not a word.

'How is our friend Heep, Mr. Micawber?' said I, after a silence.

'My dear Copperfield,' returned Mr. Micawber, bursting into a state
of much excitement, and turning pale, 'if you ask after my employer
as your friend, I am sorry for it; if you ask after him as MY
friend, I sardonically smile at it.  In whatever capacity you ask
after my employer, I beg, without offence to you, to limit my reply
to this - that whatever his state of health may be, his appearance
is foxy: not to say diabolical.  You will allow me, as a private
individual, to decline pursuing a subject which has lashed me to
the utmost verge of desperation in my professional capacity.'

I expressed my regret for having innocently touched upon a theme
that roused him so much.  'May I ask,' said I, 'without any hazard
of repeating the mistake, how my old friends Mr. and Miss Wickfield
are?'

'Miss Wickfield,' said Mr. Micawber, now turning red, 'is, as she
always is, a pattern, and a bright example.  My dear Copperfield,
she is the only starry spot in a miserable existence.  My respect
for that young lady, my admiration of her character, my devotion to
her for her love and truth, and goodness! - Take me,' said Mr.
Micawber, 'down a turning, for, upon my soul, in my present state
of mind I am not equal to this!'

We wheeled him off into a narrow street, where he took out his
pocket-handkerchief, and stood with his back to a wall.  If I
looked as gravely at him as Traddles did, he must have found our
company by no means inspiriting.

'It is my fate,' said Mr. Micawber, unfeignedly sobbing, but doing
even that, with a shadow of the old expression of doing something
genteel; 'it is my fate, gentlemen, that the finer feelings of our
nature have become reproaches to me.  My homage to Miss Wickfield,
is a flight of arrows in my bosom.  You had better leave me, if you
please, to walk the earth as a vagabond.  The worm will settle my
business in double-quick time.'

Without attending to this invocation, we stood by, until he put up
his pocket-handkerchief, pulled up his shirt-collar, and, to delude
any person in the neighbourhood who might have been observing him,
hummed a tune with his hat very much on one side.  I then mentioned
- not knowing what might be lost if we lost sight of him yet - that
it would give me great pleasure to introduce him to my aunt, if he
would ride out to Highgate, where a bed was at his service.

'You shall make us a glass of your own punch, Mr. Micawber,' said
I, 'and forget whatever you have on your mind, in pleasanter
reminiscences.'

'Or, if confiding anything to friends will be more likely to
relieve you, you shall impart it to us, Mr. Micawber,' said
Traddles, prudently.

'Gentlemen,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'do with me as you will! I am
a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all
directions by the elephants - I beg your pardon; I should have said
the elements.'

We walked on, arm-in-arm, again; found the coach in the act of
starting; and arrived at Highgate without encountering any
difficulties by the way.  I was very uneasy and very uncertain in
my mind what to say or do for the best - so was Traddles,
evidently.  Mr. Micawber was for the most part plunged into deep
gloom.  He occasionally made an attempt to smarten himself, and hum
the fag-end of a tune; but his relapses into profound melancholy
were only made the more impressive by the mockery of a hat
exceedingly on one side, and a shirt-collar pulled up to his eyes.

We went to my aunt's house rather than to mine, because of Dora's
not being well.  My aunt presented herself on being sent for, and
welcomed Mr. Micawber with gracious cordiality.  Mr. Micawber
kissed her hand, retired to the window, and pulling out his
pocket-handkerchief, had a mental wrestle with himself.

Mr. Dick was at home.  He was by nature so exceedingly
compassionate of anyone who seemed to be ill at ease, and was so
quick to find any such person out, that he shook hands with Mr.
Micawber, at least half-a-dozen times in five minutes.  To Mr.
Micawber, in his trouble, this warmth, on the part of a stranger,
was so extremely touching, that he could only say, on the occasion
of each successive shake, 'My dear sir, you overpower me!' Which
gratified Mr. Dick so much, that he went at it again with greater
vigour than before.

'The friendliness of this gentleman,' said Mr. Micawber to my aunt,
'if you will allow me, ma'am, to cull a figure of speech from the
vocabulary of our coarser national sports - floors me.  To a man
who is struggling with a complicated burden of perplexity and
disquiet, such a reception is trying, I assure you.'

'My friend Mr. Dick,' replied my aunt proudly, 'is not a common
man.'

'That I am convinced of,' said Mr. Micawber.  'My dear sir!' for
Mr. Dick was shaking hands with him again; 'I am deeply sensible of
your cordiality!'

'How do you find yourself?' said Mr. Dick, with an anxious look.

'Indifferent, my dear sir,' returned Mr. Micawber, sighing.

'You must keep up your spirits,' said Mr. Dick, 'and make yourself
as comfortable as possible.'

Mr. Micawber was quite overcome by these friendly words, and by
finding Mr. Dick's hand again within his own.  'It has been my
lot,' he observed, 'to meet, in the diversified panorama of human
existence, with an occasional oasis, but never with one so green,
so gushing, as the present!'

At another time I should have been amused by this; but I felt that
we were all constrained and uneasy, and I watched Mr. Micawber so
anxiously, in his vacillations between an evident disposition to
reveal something, and a counter-disposition to reveal nothing, that
I was in a perfect fever.  Traddles, sitting on the edge of his
chair, with his eyes wide open, and his hair more emphatically
erect than ever, stared by turns at the ground and at Mr. Micawber,
without so much as attempting to put in a word.  My aunt, though I
saw that her shrewdest observation was concentrated on her new
guest, had more useful possession of her wits than either of us;
for she held him in conversation, and made it necessary for him to
talk, whether he liked it or not.

'You are a very old friend of my nephew's, Mr. Micawber,' said my
aunt.  'I wish I had had the pleasure of seeing you before.'

'Madam,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'I wish I had had the honour of
knowing you at an earlier period.  I was not always the wreck you
at present behold.'

'I hope Mrs. Micawber and your family are well, sir,' said my aunt.

Mr. Micawber inclined his head.  'They are as well, ma'am,' he
desperately observed after a pause, 'as Aliens and Outcasts can
ever hope to be.'

'Lord bless you, sir!' exclaimed my aunt, in her abrupt way.  'What
are you talking about?'

'The subsistence of my family, ma'am,' returned Mr. Micawber,
'trembles in the balance.  My employer -'

Here Mr. Micawber provokingly left off; and began to peel the
lemons that had been under my directions set before him, together
with all the other appliances he used in making punch.

'Your employer, you know,' said Mr. Dick, jogging his arm as a
gentle reminder.

'My good sir,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'you recall me, I am obliged
to you.'  They shook hands again.  'My employer, ma'am - Mr. Heep
- once did me the favour to observe to me, that if I were not in
the receipt of the stipendiary emoluments appertaining to my
engagement with him, I should probably be a mountebank about the
country, swallowing a sword-blade, and eating the devouring
element.  For anything that I can perceive to the contrary, it is
still probable that my children may be reduced to seek a livelihood
by personal contortion, while Mrs. Micawber abets their unnatural
feats by playing the barrel-organ.'

Mr. Micawber, with a random but expressive flourish of his knife,
signified that these performances might be expected to take place
after he was no more; then resumed his peeling with a desperate
air.

My aunt leaned her elbow on the little round table that she usually
kept beside her, and eyed him attentively.  Notwithstanding the
aversion with which I regarded the idea of entrapping him into any
disclosure he was not prepared to make voluntarily, I should have
taken him up at this point, but for the strange proceedings in
which I saw him engaged; whereof his putting the lemon-peel into
the kettle, the sugar into the snuffer-tray, the spirit into the
empty jug, and confidently attempting to pour boiling water out of
a candlestick, were among the most remarkable.  I saw that a crisis
was at hand, and it came.  He clattered all his means and
implements together, rose from his chair, pulled out his
pocket-handkerchief, and burst into tears.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, behind his handkerchief,
'this is an occupation, of all others, requiring an untroubled
mind, and self-respect.  I cannot perform it.  It is out of the
question.'

'Mr. Micawber,' said I, 'what is the matter?  Pray speak out.  You
are among friends.'

'Among friends, sir!' repeated Mr. Micawber; and all he had
reserved came breaking out of him.  'Good heavens, it is
principally because I AM among friends that my state of mind is
what it is.  What is the matter, gentlemen?  What is NOT the
matter?  Villainy is the matter; baseness is the matter; deception,
fraud, conspiracy, are the matter; and the name of the whole
atrocious mass is - HEEP!'

MY aunt clapped her hands, and we all started up as if we were
possessed.

'The struggle is over!' said Mr. Micawber violently gesticulating
with his pocket-handkerchief, and fairly striking out from time to
time with both arms, as if he were swimming under superhuman
difficulties.  'I will lead this life no longer.  I am a wretched
being, cut off from everything that makes life tolerable.  I have
been under a Taboo in that infernal scoundrel's service.  Give me
back my wife, give me back my family, substitute Micawber for the
petty wretch who walks about in the boots at present on my feet,
and call upon me to swallow a sword tomorrow, and I'll do it.  With
an appetite!'

I never saw a man so hot in my life.  I tried to calm him, that we
might come to something rational; but he got hotter and hotter, and
wouldn't hear a word.

'I'll put my hand in no man's hand,' said Mr. Micawber, gasping,
puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a man
fighting with cold water, 'until I have - blown to fragments - the
- a - detestable - serpent - HEEP! I'll partake of no one's
hospitality, until I have - a - moved Mount Vesuvius - to eruption
- on - a - the abandoned rascal - HEEP! Refreshment - a -
underneath this roof - particularly punch - would - a - choke me -
unless - I had - previously - choked the eyes - out of the head -
a - of - interminable cheat, and liar - HEEP! I - a- I'll know
nobody - and - a - say nothing - and - a - live nowhere - until I
have crushed - to - a - undiscoverable atoms - the - transcendent
and immortal hypocrite and perjurer - HEEP!'

I really had some fear of Mr. Micawber's dying on the spot.  The
manner in which he struggled through these inarticulate sentences,
and, whenever he found himself getting near the name of Heep,
fought his way on to it, dashed at it in a fainting state, and
brought it out with a vehemence little less than marvellous, was
frightful; but now, when he sank into a chair, steaming, and looked
at us, with every possible colour in his face that had no business
there, and an endless procession of lumps following one another in
hot haste up his throat, whence they seemed to shoot into his
forehead, he had the appearance of being in the last extremity.  I
would have gone to his assistance, but he waved me off, and
wouldn't hear a word.

'No, Copperfield! - No communication - a - until - Miss Wickfield
- a - redress from wrongs inflicted by consummate scoundrel -
HEEP!' (I am quite convinced he could not have uttered three words,
but for the amazing energy with which this word inspired him when
he felt it coming.) 'Inviolable secret - a - from the whole world
- a - no exceptions - this day week - a - at breakfast-time - a -
everybody present - including aunt - a - and extremely friendly
gentleman - to be at the hotel at Canterbury - a - where - Mrs.
Micawber and myself - Auld Lang Syne in chorus - and - a - will
expose intolerable ruffian - HEEP! No more to say - a - or listen
to persuasion - go immediately - not capable - a - bear society -
upon the track of devoted and doomed traitor - HEEP!'

With this last repetition of the magic word that had kept him going
at all, and in which he surpassed all his previous efforts, Mr.
Micawber rushed out of the house; leaving us in a state of
excitement, hope, and wonder, that reduced us to a condition little
better than his own.  But even then his passion for writing letters
was too strong to be resisted; for while we were yet in the height
of our excitement, hope, and wonder, the following pastoral note
was brought to me from a neighbouring tavern, at which he had
called to write it: -


          'Most secret and confidential.
'MY DEAR SIR,

'I beg to be allowed to convey, through you, my apologies to your
excellent aunt for my late excitement.  An explosion of a
smouldering volcano long suppressed, was the result of an internal
contest more easily conceived than described.

'I trust I rendered tolerably intelligible my appointment for the
morning of this day week, at the house of public entertainment at
Canterbury, where Mrs. Micawber and myself had once the honour of
uniting our voices to yours, in the well-known strain of the
Immortal exciseman nurtured beyond the Tweed.

'The duty done, and act of reparation performed, which can alone
enable me to contemplate my fellow mortal, I shall be known no
more.  I shall simply require to be deposited in that place of
universal resort, where

     Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
     The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,

                    '- With the plain Inscription,

                         'WILKINS MICAWBER.'



CHAPTER 50
Mr. PEGGOTTY'S DREAM COMES TRUE


By this time, some months had passed since our interview on the
bank of the river with Martha.  I had never seen her since, but she
had communicated with Mr. Peggotty on several occasions.  Nothing
had come of her zealous intervention; nor could I infer, from what
he told me, that any clue had been obtained, for a moment, to
Emily's fate.  I confess that I began to despair of her recovery,
and gradually to sink deeper and deeper into the belief that she
was dead.

His conviction remained unchanged.  So far as I know - and I
believe his honest heart was transparent to me - he never wavered
again, in his solemn certainty of finding her.  His patience never
tired.  And, although I trembled for the agony it might one day be
to him to have his strong assurance shivered at a blow, there was
something so religious in it, so affectingly expressive of its
anchor being in the purest depths of his fine nature, that the
respect and honour in which I held him were exalted every day.

His was not a lazy trustfulness that hoped, and did no more.  He
had been a man of sturdy action all his life, and he knew that in
all things wherein he wanted help he must do his own part
faithfully, and help himself.  I have known him set out in the
night, on a misgiving that the light might not be, by some
accident, in the window of the old boat, and walk to Yarmouth.  I
have known him, on reading something in the newspaper that might
apply to her, take up his stick, and go forth on a journey of
three- or four-score miles.  He made his way by sea to Naples, and
back, after hearing the narrative to which Miss Dartle had assisted
me.  All his journeys were ruggedly performed; for he was always
steadfast in a purpose of saving money for Emily's sake, when she
should be found.  In all this long pursuit, I never heard him
repine; I never heard him say he was fatigued, or out of heart.

Dora had often seen him since our marriage, and was quite fond of
him.  I fancy his figure before me now, standing near her sofa,
with his rough cap in his hand, and the blue eyes of my child-wife
raised, with a timid wonder, to his face.  Sometimes of an evening,
about twilight, when he came to talk with me, I would induce him to
smoke his pipe in the garden, as we slowly paced to and fro
together; and then, the picture of his deserted home, and the
comfortable air it used to have in my childish eyes of an evening
when the fire was burning, and the wind moaning round it, came most
vividly into my mind.

One evening, at this hour, he told me that he had found Martha
waiting near his lodging on the preceding night when he came out,
and that she had asked him not to leave London on any account,
until he should have seen her again.

'Did she tell you why?' I inquired.

'I asked her, Mas'r Davy,' he replied, 'but it is but few words as
she ever says, and she on'y got my promise and so went away.'

'Did she say when you might expect to see her again?' I demanded.

'No, Mas'r Davy,' he returned, drawing his hand thoughtfully down
his face.  'I asked that too; but it was more (she said) than she
could tell.'

As I had long forborne to encourage him with hopes that hung on
threads, I made no other comment on this information than that I
supposed he would see her soon.  Such speculations as it engendered
within me I kept to myself, and those were faint enough.

I was walking alone in the garden, one evening, about a fortnight
afterwards.  I remember that evening well.  It was the second in
Mr. Micawber's week of suspense.  There had been rain all day, and
there was a damp feeling in the air.  The leaves were thick upon
the trees, and heavy with wet; but the rain had ceased, though the
sky was still dark; and the hopeful birds were singing cheerfully. 
As I walked to and fro in the garden, and the twilight began to
close around me, their little voices were hushed; and that peculiar
silence which belongs to such an evening in the country when the
lightest trees are quite still, save for the occasional droppings
from their boughs, prevailed.

There was a little green perspective of trellis-work and ivy at the
side of our cottage, through which I could see, from the garden
where I was walking, into the road before the house.  I happened to
turn my eyes towards this place, as I was thinking of many things;
and I saw a figure beyond, dressed in a plain cloak.  It was
bending eagerly towards me, and beckoning.

'Martha!' said I, going to it.

'Can you come with me?' she inquired, in an agitated whisper.  'I
have been to him, and he is not at home.  I wrote down where he was
to come, and left it on his table with my own hand.  They said he
would not be out long.  I have tidings for him.  Can you come
directly?'

My answer was, to pass out at the gate immediately.  She made a
hasty gesture with her hand, as if to entreat my patience and my
silence, and turned towards London, whence, as her dress betokened,
she had come expeditiously on foot.

I asked her if that were not our destination?  On her motioning
Yes, with the same hasty gesture as before, I stopped an empty
coach that was coming by, and we got into it.  When I asked her
where the coachman was to drive, she answered, 'Anywhere near
Golden Square! And quick!' - then shrunk into a corner, with one
trembling hand before her face, and the other making the former
gesture, as if she could not bear a voice.

Now much disturbed, and dazzled with conflicting gleams of hope and
dread, I looked at her for some explanation.  But seeing how
strongly she desired to remain quiet, and feeling that it was my
own natural inclination too, at such a time, I did not attempt to
break the silence.  We proceeded without a word being spoken. 
Sometimes she glanced out of the window, as though she thought we
were going slowly, though indeed we were going fast; but otherwise
remained exactly as at first.

We alighted at one of the entrances to the Square she had
mentioned, where I directed the coach to wait, not knowing but that
we might have some occasion for it.  She laid her hand on my arm,
and hurried me on to one of the sombre streets, of which there are
several in that part, where the houses were once fair dwellings in
the occupation of single families, but have, and had, long
degenerated into poor lodgings let off in rooms.  Entering at the
open door of one of these, and releasing my arm, she beckoned me to
follow her up the common staircase, which was like a tributary
channel to the street.

The house swarmed with inmates.  As we went up, doors of rooms were
opened and people's heads put out; and we passed other people on
the stairs, who were coming down.  In glancing up from the outside,
before we entered, I had seen women and children lolling at the
windows over flower-pots; and we seemed to have attracted their
curiosity, for these were principally the observers who looked out
of their doors.  It was a broad panelled staircase, with massive
balustrades of some dark wood; cornices above the doors, ornamented
with carved fruit and flowers; and broad seats in the windows.  But
all these tokens of past grandeur were miserably decayed and dirty;
rot, damp, and age, had weakened the flooring, which in many places
was unsound and even unsafe.  Some attempts had been made, I
noticed, to infuse new blood into this dwindling frame, by
repairing the costly old wood-work here and there with common deal;
but it was like the marriage of a reduced old noble to a plebeian
pauper, and each party to the ill-assorted union shrunk away from
the other.  Several of the back windows on the staircase had been
darkened or wholly blocked up.  In those that remained, there was
scarcely any glass; and, through the crumbling frames by which the
bad air seemed always to come in, and never to go out, I saw,
through other glassless windows, into other houses in a similar
condition, and looked giddily down into a wretched yard, which was
the common dust-heap of the mansion.

We proceeded to the top-storey of the house.  Two or three times,
by the way, I thought I observed in the indistinct light the skirts
of a female figure going up before us.  As we turned to ascend the
last flight of stairs between us and the roof, we caught a full
view of this figure pausing for a moment, at a door.  Then it
turned the handle, and went in.

'What's this!' said Martha, in a whisper.  'She has gone into my
room.  I don't know her!'

I knew her.  I had recognized her with amazement, for Miss Dartle.

I said something to the effect that it was a lady whom I had seen
before, in a few words, to my conductress; and had scarcely done
so, when we heard her voice in the room, though not, from where we
stood, what she was saying.  Martha, with an astonished look,
repeated her former action, and softly led me up the stairs; and
then, by a little back-door which seemed to have no lock, and which
she pushed open with a touch, into a small empty garret with a low
sloping roof, little better than a cupboard.  Between this, and the
room she had called hers, there was a small door of communication,
standing partly open.  Here we stopped, breathless with our ascent,
and she placed her hand lightly on my lips.  I could only see, of
the room beyond, that it was pretty large; that there was a bed in
it; and that there were some common pictures of ships upon the
walls.  I could not see Miss Dartle, or the person whom we had
heard her address.  Certainly, my companion could not, for my
position was the best.
A dead silence prevailed for some moments.  Martha kept one hand on
my lips, and raised the other in a listening attitude.

'It matters little to me her not being at home,' said Rosa Dartle
haughtily, 'I know nothing of her.  It is you I come to see.'

'Me?' replied a soft voice.

At the sound of it, a thrill went through my frame.  For it was
Emily's!

'Yes,' returned Miss Dartle, 'I have come to look at you.  What? 
You are not ashamed of the face that has done so much?'

The resolute and unrelenting hatred of her tone, its cold stern
sharpness, and its mastered rage, presented her before me, as if I
had seen her standing in the light.  I saw the flashing black eyes,
and the passion-wasted figure; and I saw the scar, with its white
track cutting through her lips, quivering and throbbing as she
spoke.

'I have come to see,' she said, 'James Steerforth's fancy; the girl
who ran away with him, and is the town-talk of the commonest people
of her native place; the bold, flaunting, practised companion of
persons like James Steerforth.  I want to know what such a thing is
like.'

There was a rustle, as if the unhappy girl, on whom she heaped
these taunts, ran towards the door, and the speaker swiftly
interposed herself before it.  It was succeeded by a moment's
pause.

When Miss Dartle spoke again, it was through her set teeth, and
with a stamp upon the ground.

'Stay there!' she said, 'or I'll proclaim you to the house, and the
whole street! If you try to evade me, I'll stop you, if it's by the
hair, and raise the very stones against you!'

A frightened murmur was the only reply that reached my ears.  A
silence succeeded.  I did not know what to do.  Much as I desired
to put an end to the interview, I felt that I had no right to
present myself; that it was for Mr. Peggotty alone to see her and
recover her.  Would he never come?  I thought impatiently.

'So!' said Rosa Dartle, with a contemptuous laugh, 'I see her at
last! Why, he was a poor creature to be taken by that delicate
mock-modesty, and that hanging head!'

'Oh, for Heaven's sake, spare me!' exclaimed Emily.  'Whoever you
are, you know my pitiable story, and for Heaven's sake spare me, if
you would be spared yourself!'

'If I would be spared!' returned the other fiercely; 'what is there
in common between US, do you think!'

'Nothing but our sex,' said Emily, with a burst of tears.

'And that,' said Rosa Dartle, 'is so strong a claim, preferred by
one so infamous, that if I had any feeling in my breast but scorn
and abhorrence of you, it would freeze it up.  Our sex! You are an
honour to our sex!'

'I have deserved this,' said Emily, 'but it's dreadful! Dear, dear
lady, think what I have suffered, and how I am fallen! Oh, Martha,
come back! Oh, home, home!'

Miss Dartle placed herself in a chair, within view of the door, and
looked downward, as if Emily were crouching on the floor before
her.  Being now between me and the light, I could see her curled
lip, and her cruel eyes intently fixed on one place, with a greedy
triumph.

'Listen to what I say!' she said; 'and reserve your false arts for
your dupes.  Do you hope to move me by your tears?  No more than
you could charm me by your smiles, you purchased slave.'

'Oh, have some mercy on me!' cried Emily.  'Show me some
compassion, or I shall die mad!'

'It would be no great penance,' said Rosa Dartle, 'for your crimes. 
Do you know what you have done?  Do you ever think of the home you
have laid waste?'

'Oh, is there ever night or day, when I don't think of it!' cried
Emily; and now I could just see her, on her knees, with her head
thrown back, her pale face looking upward, her hands wildly clasped
and held out, and her hair streaming about her.  'Has there ever
been a single minute, waking or sleeping, when it hasn't been
before me, just as it used to be in the lost days when I turned my
back upon it for ever and for ever! Oh, home, home! Oh dear, dear
uncle, if you ever could have known the agony your love would cause
me when I fell away from good, you never would have shown it to me
so constant, much as you felt it; but would have been angry to me,
at least once in my life, that I might have had some comfort! I
have none, none, no comfort upon earth, for all of them were always
fond of me!' She dropped on her face, before the imperious figure
in the chair, with an imploring effort to clasp the skirt of her
dress.

Rosa Dartle sat looking down upon her, as inflexible as a figure of
brass.  Her lips were tightly compressed, as if she knew that she
must keep a strong constraint upon herself - I write what I
sincerely believe - or she would be tempted to strike the beautiful
form with her foot.  I saw her, distinctly, and the whole power of
her face and character seemed forced into that expression.  - Would
he never come?

'The miserable vanity of these earth-worms!' she said, when she had
so far controlled the angry heavings of her breast, that she could
trust herself to speak.  'YOUR home! Do you imagine that I bestow
a thought on it, or suppose you could do any harm to that low
place, which money would not pay for, and handsomely?  YOUR home!
You were a part of the trade of your home, and were bought and sold
like any other vendible thing your people dealt in.'

'Oh, not that!' cried Emily.  'Say anything of me; but don't visit
my disgrace and shame, more than I have done, on folks who are as
honourable as you! Have some respect for them, as you are a lady,
if you have no mercy for me.'

'I speak,' she said, not deigning to take any heed of this appeal,
and drawing away her dress from the contamination of Emily's touch,
'I speak of HIS home - where I live.  Here,' she said, stretching
out her hand with her contemptuous laugh, and looking down upon the
prostrate girl, 'is a worthy cause of division between lady-mother
and gentleman-son; of grief in a house where she wouldn't have been
admitted as a kitchen-girl; of anger, and repining, and reproach. 
This piece of pollution, picked up from the water-side, to be made
much of for an hour, and then tossed back to her original place!'

'No! no!' cried Emily, clasping her hands together.  'When he first
came into my way - that the day had never dawned upon me, and he
had met me being carried to my grave! - I had been brought up as
virtuous as you or any lady, and was going to be the wife of as
good a man as you or any lady in the world can ever marry.  If you
live in his home and know him, you know, perhaps, what his power
with a weak, vain girl might be.  I don't defend myself, but I know
well, and he knows well, or he will know when he comes to die, and
his mind is troubled with it, that he used all his power to deceive
me, and that I believed him, trusted him, and loved him!'

Rosa Dartle sprang up from her seat; recoiled; and in recoiling
struck at her, with a face of such malignity, so darkened and
disfigured by passion, that I had almost thrown myself between
them.  The blow, which had no aim, fell upon the air.  As she now
stood panting, looking at her with the utmost detestation that she
was capable of expressing, and trembling from head to foot with
rage and scorn, I thought I had never seen such a sight, and never
could see such another.

'YOU love him?  You?' she cried, with her clenched hand, quivering
as if it only wanted a weapon to stab the object of her wrath.

Emily had shrunk out of my view.  There was no reply.

'And tell that to ME,' she added, 'with your shameful lips?  Why
don't they whip these creatures?  If I could order it to be done,
I would have this girl whipped to death.'

And so she would, I have no doubt.  I would not have trusted her
with the rack itself, while that furious look lasted.
She slowly, very slowly, broke into a laugh, and pointed at Emily
with her hand, as if she were a sight of shame for gods and men.

'SHE love!' she said.  'THAT carrion! And he ever cared for her,
she'd tell me.  Ha, ha! The liars that these traders are!'

Her mockery was worse than her undisguised rage.  Of the two, I
would have much preferred to be the object of the latter.  But,
when she suffered it to break loose, it was only for a moment.  She
had chained it up again, and however it might tear her within, she
subdued it to herself.

'I came here, you pure fountain of love,' she said, 'to see - as I
began by telling you - what such a thing as you was like.  I was
curious.  I am satisfied.  Also to tell you, that you had best seek
that home of yours, with all speed, and hide your head among those
excellent people who are expecting you, and whom your money will
console.  When it's all gone, you can believe, and trust, and love
again, you know! I thought you a broken toy that had lasted its
time; a worthless spangle that was tarnished, and thrown away. 
But, finding you true gold, a very lady, and an ill-used innocent,
with a fresh heart full of love and trustfulness - which you look
like, and is quite consistent with your story! - I have something
more to say.  Attend to it; for what I say I'll do.  Do you hear
me, you fairy spirit?  What I say, I mean to do!'

Her rage got the better of her again, for a moment; but it passed
over her face like a spasm, and left her smiling.

'Hide yourself,' she pursued, 'if not at home, somewhere.  Let it
be somewhere beyond reach; in some obscure life - or, better still,
in some obscure death.  I wonder, if your loving heart will not
break, you have found no way of helping it to be still! I have
heard of such means sometimes.  I believe they may be easily
found.'

A low crying, on the part of Emily, interrupted her here.  She
stopped, and listened to it as if it were music.

'I am of a strange nature, perhaps,' Rosa Dartle went on; 'but I
can't breathe freely in the air you breathe.  I find it sickly. 
Therefore, I will have it cleared; I will have it purified of you. 
If you live here tomorrow, I'll have your story and your character
proclaimed on the common stair.  There are decent women in the
house, I am told; and it is a pity such a light as you should be
among them, and concealed.  If, leaving here, you seek any refuge
in this town in any character but your true one (which you are
welcome to bear, without molestation from me), the same service
shall be done you, if I hear of your retreat.  Being assisted by a
gentleman who not long ago aspired to the favour of your hand, I am
sanguine as to that.'

Would he never, never come?  How long was I to bear this?  How long
could I bear it?
'Oh me, oh me!' exclaimed the wretched Emily, in a tone that might
have touched the hardest heart, I should have thought; but there
was no relenting in Rosa Dartle's smile.  'What, what, shall I do!'

'Do?' returned the other.  'Live happy in your own reflections!
Consecrate your existence to the recollection of James Steerforth's
tenderness - he would have made you his serving-man's wife, would
he not?  - or to feeling grateful to the upright and deserving
creature who would have taken you as his gift.  Or, if those proud
remembrances, and the consciousness of your own virtues, and the
honourable position to which they have raised you in the eyes of
everything that wears the human shape, will not sustain you, marry
that good man, and be happy in his condescension.  If this will not
do either, die! There are doorways and dust-heaps for such deaths,
and such despair - find one, and take your flight to Heaven!'

I heard a distant foot upon the stairs.  I knew it, I was certain. 
It was his, thank God!

She moved slowly from before the door when she said this, and
passed out of my sight.

'But mark!' she added, slowly and sternly, opening the other door
to go away, 'I am resolved, for reasons that I have and hatreds
that I entertain, to cast you out, unless you withdraw from my
reach altogether, or drop your pretty mask.  This is what I had to
say; and what I say, I mean to do!'

The foot upon the stairs came nearer - nearer - passed her as she
went down - rushed into the room!

'Uncle!'

A fearful cry followed the word.  I paused a moment, and looking
in, saw him supporting her insensible figure in his arms.  He gazed
for a few seconds in the face; then stooped to kiss it - oh, how
tenderly! - and drew a handkerchief before it.

'Mas'r Davy,' he said, in a low tremulous voice, when it was
covered, 'I thank my Heav'nly Father as my dream's come true! I
thank Him hearty for having guided of me, in His own ways, to my
darling!'

With those words he took her up in his arms; and, with the veiled
face lying on his bosom, and addressed towards his own, carried
her, motionless and unconscious, down the stairs.



CHAPTER 51
THE BEGINNING OF A LONGER JOURNEY


It was yet early in the morning of the following day, when, as I
was walking in my garden with my aunt (who took little other
exercise now, being so much in attendance on my dear Dora), I was
told that Mr. Peggotty desired to speak with me.  He came into the
garden to meet me half-way, on my going towards the gate; and bared
his head, as it was always his custom to do when he saw my aunt,
for whom he had a high respect.  I had been telling her all that
had happened overnight.  Without saying a word, she walked up with
a cordial face, shook hands with him, and patted him on the arm. 
It was so expressively done, that she had no need to say a word. 
Mr. Peggotty understood her quite as well as if she had said a
thousand.

'I'll go in now, Trot,' said my aunt, 'and look after Little
Blossom, who will be getting up presently.'

'Not along of my being heer, ma'am, I hope?' said Mr. Peggotty. 
'Unless my wits is gone a bahd's neezing' - by which Mr. Peggotty
meant to say, bird's-nesting - 'this morning, 'tis along of me as
you're a-going to quit us?'

'You have something to say, my good friend,' returned my aunt, 'and
will do better without me.'

'By your leave, ma'am,' returned Mr. Peggotty, 'I should take it
kind, pervising you doen't mind my clicketten, if you'd bide heer.'

'Would you?' said my aunt, with short good-nature.  'Then I am sure
I will!'

So, she drew her arm through Mr. Peggotty's, and walked with him to
a leafy little summer-house there was at the bottom of the garden,
where she sat down on a bench, and I beside her.  There was a seat
for Mr. Peggotty too, but he preferred to stand, leaning his hand
on the small rustic table.  As he stood, looking at his cap for a
little while before beginning to speak, I could not help observing
what power and force of character his sinewy hand expressed, and
what a good and trusty companion it was to his honest brow and
iron-grey hair.

'I took my dear child away last night,' Mr. Peggotty began, as he
raised his eyes to ours, 'to my lodging, wheer I have a long time
been expecting of her and preparing fur her.  It was hours afore
she knowed me right; and when she did, she kneeled down at my feet,
and kiender said to me, as if it was her prayers, how it all come
to be.  You may believe me, when I heerd her voice, as I had heerd
at home so playful - and see her humbled, as it might be in the
dust our Saviour wrote in with his blessed hand - I felt a wownd go
to my 'art, in the midst of all its thankfulness.'

He drew his sleeve across his face, without any pretence of
concealing why; and then cleared his voice.

'It warn't for long as I felt that; for she was found.  I had on'y
to think as she was found, and it was gone.  I doen't know why I do
so much as mention of it now, I'm sure.  I didn't have it in my
mind a minute ago, to say a word about myself; but it come up so
nat'ral, that I yielded to it afore I was aweer.'

'You are a self-denying soul,' said my aunt, 'and will have your
reward.'

Mr. Peggotty, with the shadows of the leaves playing athwart his
face, made a surprised inclination of the head towards my aunt, as
an acknowledgement of her good opinion; then took up the thread he
had relinquished.

'When my Em'ly took flight,' he said, in stern wrath for the
moment, 'from the house wheer she was made a prisoner by that theer
spotted snake as Mas'r Davy see, - and his story's trew, and may
GOD confound him! - she took flight in the night.  It was a dark
night, with a many stars a-shining.  She was wild.  She ran along
the sea beach, believing the old boat was theer; and calling out to
us to turn away our faces, for she was a-coming by.  She heerd
herself a-crying out, like as if it was another person; and cut
herself on them sharp-pinted stones and rocks, and felt it no more
than if she had been rock herself.  Ever so fur she run, and there
was fire afore her eyes, and roarings in her ears.  Of a sudden -
or so she thowt, you unnerstand - the day broke, wet and windy, and
she was lying b'low a heap of stone upon the shore, and a woman was
a-speaking to her, saying, in the language of that country, what
was it as had gone so much amiss?'

He saw everything he related.  It passed before him, as he spoke,
so vividly, that, in the intensity of his earnestness, he presented
what he described to me, with greater distinctness than I can
express.  I can hardly believe, writing now long afterwards, but
that I was actually present in these scenes; they are impressed
upon me with such an astonishing air of fidelity.

'As Em'ly's eyes - which was heavy - see this woman better,' Mr.
Peggotty went on, 'she know'd as she was one of them as she had
often talked to on the beach.  Fur, though she had run (as I have
said) ever so fur in the night, she had oftentimes wandered long
ways, partly afoot, partly in boats and carriages, and know'd all
that country, 'long the coast, miles and miles.  She hadn't no
children of her own, this woman, being a young wife; but she was a-
looking to have one afore long.  And may my prayers go up to Heaven
that 'twill be a happiness to her, and a comfort, and a honour, all
her life! May it love her and be dootiful to her, in her old age;
helpful of her at the last; a Angel to her heer, and heerafter!'

'Amen!' said my aunt.

'She had been summat timorous and down,' said Mr. Peggotty, and had
sat, at first, a little way off, at her spinning, or such work as
it was, when Em'ly talked to the children.  But Em'ly had took
notice of her, and had gone and spoke to her; and as the young
woman was partial to the children herself, they had soon made
friends.  Sermuchser, that when Em'ly went that way, she always giv
Em'ly flowers.  This was her as now asked what it was that had gone
so much amiss.  Em'ly told her, and she - took her home.  She did
indeed.  She took her home,' said Mr. Peggotty, covering his face.

He was more affected by this act of kindness, than I had ever seen
him affected by anything since the night she went away.  My aunt
and I did not attempt to disturb him.

'It was a little cottage, you may suppose,' he said, presently,
'but she found space for Em'ly in it, - her husband was away at
sea, - and she kep it secret, and prevailed upon such neighbours as
she had (they was not many near) to keep it secret too.  Em'ly was
took bad with fever, and, what is very strange to me is, - maybe
'tis not so strange to scholars, - the language of that country
went out of her head, and she could only speak her own, that no one
unnerstood.  She recollects, as if she had dreamed it, that she lay
there always a-talking her own tongue, always believing as the old
boat was round the next pint in the bay, and begging and imploring
of 'em to send theer and tell how she was dying, and bring back a
message of forgiveness, if it was on'y a wured.  A'most the whole
time, she thowt, - now, that him as I made mention on just now was
lurking for her unnerneath the winder; now that him as had brought
her to this was in the room, - and cried to the good young woman
not to give her up, and know'd, at the same time, that she couldn't
unnerstand, and dreaded that she must be took away.  Likewise the
fire was afore her eyes, and the roarings in her ears; and theer
was no today, nor yesterday, nor yet tomorrow; but everything in
her life as ever had been, or as ever could be, and everything as
never had been, and as never could be, was a crowding on her all at
once, and nothing clear nor welcome, and yet she sang and laughed
about it! How long this lasted, I doen't know; but then theer come
a sleep; and in that sleep, from being a many times stronger than
her own self, she fell into the weakness of the littlest child.'

Here he stopped, as if for relief from the terrors of his own
description.  After being silent for a few moments, he pursued his
story.

'It was a pleasant arternoon when she awoke; and so quiet, that
there warn't a sound but the rippling of that blue sea without a
tide, upon the shore.  It was her belief, at first, that she was at
home upon a Sunday morning; but the vine leaves as she see at the
winder, and the hills beyond, warn't home, and contradicted of her. 
Then, come in her friend to watch alongside of her bed; and then
she know'd as the old boat warn't round that next pint in the bay
no more, but was fur off; and know'd where she was, and why; and
broke out a-crying on that good young woman's bosom, wheer I hope
her baby is a-lying now, a-cheering of her with its pretty eyes!'

He could not speak of this good friend of Emily's without a flow of
tears.  It was in vain to try.  He broke down again, endeavouring
to bless her!

'That done my Em'ly good,' he resumed, after such emotion as I
could not behold without sharing in; and as to my aunt, she wept
with all her heart; 'that done Em'ly good, and she begun to mend. 
But, the language of that country was quite gone from her, and she
was forced to make signs.  So she went on, getting better from day
to day, slow, but sure, and trying to learn the names of common
things - names as she seemed never to have heerd in all her life -
till one evening come, when she was a-setting at her window,
looking at a little girl at play upon the beach.  And of a sudden
this child held out her hand, and said, what would be in English,
"Fisherman's daughter, here's a shell!" - for you are to unnerstand
that they used at first to call her "Pretty lady", as the general
way in that country is, and that she had taught 'em to call her
"Fisherman's daughter" instead.  The child says of a sudden,
"Fisherman's daughter, here's a shell!" Then Em'ly unnerstands her;
and she answers, bursting out a-crying; and it all comes back!

'When Em'ly got strong again,' said Mr. Peggotty, after another
short interval of silence, 'she cast about to leave that good young
creetur, and get to her own country.  The husband was come home,
then; and the two together put her aboard a small trader bound to
Leghorn, and from that to France.  She had a little money, but it
was less than little as they would take for all they done.  I'm
a'most glad on it, though they was so poor! What they done, is laid
up wheer neither moth or rust doth corrupt, and wheer thieves do
not break through nor steal.  Mas'r Davy, it'll outlast all the
treasure in the wureld.

'Em'ly got to France, and took service to wait on travelling ladies
at a inn in the port.  Theer, theer come, one day, that snake.  -
Let him never come nigh me.  I doen't know what hurt I might do
him! - Soon as she see him, without him seeing her, all her fear
and wildness returned upon her, and she fled afore the very breath
he draw'd.  She come to England, and was set ashore at Dover.

'I doen't know," said Mr. Peggotty, 'for sure, when her 'art begun
to fail her; but all the way to England she had thowt to come to
her dear home.  Soon as she got to England she turned her face
tow'rds it.  But, fear of not being forgiv, fear of being pinted
at, fear of some of us being dead along of her, fear of many
things, turned her from it, kiender by force, upon the road:
"Uncle, uncle," she says to me, "the fear of not being worthy to do
what my torn and bleeding breast so longed to do, was the most
fright'ning fear of all! I turned back, when my 'art was full of
prayers that I might crawl to the old door-step, in the night, kiss
it, lay my wicked face upon it, and theer be found dead in the
morning."

'She come,' said Mr. Peggotty, dropping his voice to an
awe-stricken whisper, 'to London.  She - as had never seen it in
her life - alone - without a penny - young - so pretty - come to
London.  A'most the moment as she lighted heer, all so desolate,
she found (as she believed) a friend; a decent woman as spoke to
her about the needle-work as she had been brought up to do, about
finding plenty of it fur her, about a lodging fur the night, and
making secret inquiration concerning of me and all at home,
tomorrow.  When my child,' he said aloud, and with an energy of
gratitude that shook him from head to foot, 'stood upon the brink
of more than I can say or think on - Martha, trew to her promise,
saved her.'

I could not repress a cry of joy.

'Mas'r Davy!' said he, gripping my hand in that strong hand of his,
'it was you as first made mention of her to me.  I thankee, sir!
She was arnest.  She had know'd of her bitter knowledge wheer to
watch and what to do.  She had done it.  And the Lord was above
all! She come, white and hurried, upon Em'ly in her sleep.  She
says to her, "Rise up from worse than death, and come with me!"
Them belonging to the house would have stopped her, but they might
as soon have stopped the sea.  "Stand away from me," she says, "I
am a ghost that calls her from beside her open grave!" She told
Em'ly she had seen me, and know'd I loved her, and forgive her. 
She wrapped her, hasty, in her clothes.  She took her, faint and
trembling, on her arm.  She heeded no more what they said, than if
she had had no ears.  She walked among 'em with my child, minding
only her; and brought her safe out, in the dead of the night, from
that black pit of ruin!

'She attended on Em'ly,' said Mr. Peggotty, who had released my
hand, and put his own hand on his heaving chest; 'she attended to
my Em'ly, lying wearied out, and wandering betwixt whiles, till
late next day.  Then she went in search of me; then in search of
you, Mas'r Davy.  She didn't tell Em'ly what she come out fur, lest
her 'art should fail, and she should think of hiding of herself. 
How the cruel lady know'd of her being theer, I can't say.  Whether
him as I have spoke so much of, chanced to see 'em going theer, or
whether (which is most like, to my thinking) he had heerd it from
the woman, I doen't greatly ask myself.  My niece is found.

'All night long,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'we have been together, Em'ly
and me.  'Tis little (considering the time) as she has said, in
wureds, through them broken-hearted tears; 'tis less as I have seen
of her dear face, as grow'd into a woman's at my hearth.  But, all
night long, her arms has been about my neck; and her head has laid
heer; and we knows full well, as we can put our trust in one
another, ever more.'

He ceased to speak, and his hand upon the table rested there in
perfect repose, with a resolution in it that might have conquered
lions.

'It was a gleam of light upon me, Trot,' said my aunt, drying her
eyes, 'when I formed the resolution of being godmother to your
sister Betsey Trotwood, who disappointed me; but, next to that,
hardly anything would have given me greater pleasure, than to be
godmother to that good young creature's baby!'

Mr. Peggotty nodded his understanding of my aunt's feelings, but
could not trust himself with any verbal reference to the subject of
her commendation.  We all remained silent, and occupied with our
own reflections (my aunt drying her eyes, and now sobbing
convulsively, and now laughing and calling herself a fool); until
I spoke.

'You have quite made up your mind,' said I to Mr. Peggotty, 'as to
the future, good friend?  I need scarcely ask you.'

'Quite, Mas'r Davy,' he returned; 'and told Em'ly.  Theer's mighty
countries, fur from heer.  Our future life lays over the sea.'

'They will emigrate together, aunt,' said I.

'Yes!' said Mr. Peggotty, with a hopeful smile.  'No one can't
reproach my darling in Australia.  We will begin a new life over
theer!'

I asked him if he yet proposed to himself any time for going away.

'I was down at the Docks early this morning, sir,' he returned, 'to
get information concerning of them ships.  In about six weeks or
two months from now, there'll be one sailing - I see her this
morning - went aboard - and we shall take our passage in her.'

'Quite alone?' I asked.

'Aye, Mas'r Davy!' he returned.  'My sister, you see, she's that
fond of you and yourn, and that accustomed to think on'y of her own
country, that it wouldn't be hardly fair to let her go.  Besides
which, theer's one she has in charge, Mas'r Davy, as doen't ought
to be forgot.'

'Poor Ham!' said I.

'My good sister takes care of his house, you see, ma'am, and he
takes kindly to her,' Mr. Peggotty explained for my aunt's better
information.  'He'll set and talk to her, with a calm spirit, wen
it's like he couldn't bring himself to open his lips to another. 
Poor fellow!' said Mr. Peggotty, shaking his head, 'theer's not so
much left him, that he could spare the little as he has!'

'And Mrs. Gummidge?' said I.

'Well, I've had a mort of consideration, I do tell you,' returned
Mr. Peggotty, with a perplexed look which gradually cleared as he
went on, 'concerning of Missis Gummidge.  You see, wen Missis
Gummidge falls a-thinking of the old 'un, she an't what you may
call good company.  Betwixt you and me, Mas'r Davy - and you, ma'am
- wen Mrs. Gummidge takes to wimicking,' - our old country word for
crying, - 'she's liable to be considered to be, by them as didn't
know the old 'un, peevish-like.  Now I DID know the old 'un,' said
Mr. Peggotty, 'and I know'd his merits, so I unnerstan' her; but
'tan't entirely so, you see, with others - nat'rally can't be!'

My aunt and I both acquiesced.

'Wheerby,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'my sister might - I doen't say she
would, but might - find Missis Gummidge give her a leetle trouble
now-and-again.  Theerfur 'tan't my intentions to moor Missis
Gummidge 'long with them, but to find a Beein' fur her wheer she
can fisherate for herself.'  (A Beein' signifies, in that dialect,
a home, and to fisherate is to provide.) 'Fur which purpose,' said
Mr. Peggotty, 'I means to make her a 'lowance afore I go, as'll
leave her pretty comfort'ble.  She's the faithfullest of creeturs. 
'Tan't to be expected, of course, at her time of life, and being
lone and lorn, as the good old Mawther is to be knocked about
aboardship, and in the woods and wilds of a new and fur-away
country.  So that's what I'm a-going to do with her.'

He forgot nobody.  He thought of everybody's claims and strivings,
but his own.

'Em'ly,' he continued, 'will keep along with me - poor child, she's
sore in need of peace and rest! - until such time as we goes upon
our voyage.  She'll work at them clothes, as must be made; and I
hope her troubles will begin to seem longer ago than they was, wen
she finds herself once more by her rough but loving uncle.'

MY aunt nodded confirmation of this hope, and imparted great
satisfaction to Mr. Peggotty.

'Theer's one thing furder, Mas'r Davy,' said he, putting his hand
in his breast-pocket, and gravely taking out the little paper
bundle I had seen before, which he unrolled on the table.  'Theer's
these here banknotes - fifty pound, and ten.  To them I wish to add
the money as she come away with.  I've asked her about that (but
not saying why), and have added of it up.  I an't a scholar.  Would
you be so kind as see how 'tis?'

He handed me, apologetically for his scholarship, a piece of paper,
and observed me while I looked it over.  It was quite right.

'Thankee, sir,' he said, taking it back.  'This money, if you
doen't see objections, Mas'r Davy, I shall put up jest afore I go,
in a cover directed to him; and put that up in another, directed to
his mother.  I shall tell her, in no more wureds than I speak to
you, what it's the price on; and that I'm gone, and past receiving
of it back.'

I told him that I thought it would be right to do so - that I was
thoroughly convinced it would be, since he felt it to be right.

'I said that theer was on'y one thing furder,' he proceeded with a
grave smile, when he had made up his little bundle again, and put
it in his pocket; 'but theer was two.  I warn't sure in my mind,
wen I come out this morning, as I could go and break to Ham, of my
own self, what had so thankfully happened.  So I writ a letter
while I was out, and put it in the post-office, telling of 'em how
all was as 'tis; and that I should come down tomorrow to unload my
mind of what little needs a-doing of down theer, and, most-like,
take my farewell leave of Yarmouth.'

'And do you wish me to go with you?' said I, seeing that he left
something unsaid.

'If you could do me that kind favour, Mas'r Davy,' he replied.  'I
know the sight on you would cheer 'em up a bit.'

My little Dora being in good spirits, and very desirous that I
should go - as I found on talking it over with her - I readily
pledged myself to accompany him in accordance with his wish.  Next
morning, consequently, we were on the Yarmouth coach, and again
travelling over the old ground.

As we passed along the familiar street at night - Mr. Peggotty, in
despite of all my remonstrances, carrying my bag - I glanced into
Omer and Joram's shop, and saw my old friend Mr. Omer there,
smoking his pipe.  I felt reluctant to be present, when Mr.
Peggotty first met his sister and Ham; and made Mr. Omer my excuse
for lingering behind.

'How is Mr. Omer, after this long time?' said I, going in.

He fanned away the smoke of his pipe, that he might get a better
view of me, and soon recognized me with great delight.

'I should get up, sir, to acknowledge such an honour as this
visit,' said he, 'only my limbs are rather out of sorts, and I am
wheeled about.  With the exception of my limbs and my breath,
howsoever, I am as hearty as a man can be, I'm thankful to say.'

I congratulated him on his contented looks and his good spirits,
and saw, now, that his easy-chair went on wheels.

'It's an ingenious thing, ain't it?' he inquired, following the
direction of my glance, and polishing the elbow with his arm.  'It
runs as light as a feather, and tracks as true as a mail-coach. 
Bless you, my little Minnie - my grand-daughter you know, Minnie's
child - puts her little strength against the back, gives it a
shove, and away we go, as clever and merry as ever you see
anything! And I tell you what - it's a most uncommon chair to smoke
a pipe in.'

I never saw such a good old fellow to make the best of a thing, and
find out the enjoyment of it, as Mr. Omer.  He was as radiant, as
if his chair, his asthma, and the failure of his limbs, were the
various branches of a great invention for enhancing the luxury of
a pipe.

'I see more of the world, I can assure you,' said Mr. Omer, 'in
this chair, than ever I see out of it.  You'd be surprised at the
number of people that looks in of a day to have a chat.  You really
would! There's twice as much in the newspaper, since I've taken to
this chair, as there used to be.  As to general reading, dear me,
what a lot of it I do get through! That's what I feel so strong,
you know! If it had been my eyes, what should I have done?  If it
had been my ears, what should I have done?  Being my limbs, what
does it signify?  Why, my limbs only made my breath shorter when I
used 'em.  And now, if I want to go out into the street or down to
the sands, I've only got to call Dick, Joram's youngest 'prentice,
and away I go in my own carriage, like the Lord Mayor of London.'

He half suffocated himself with laughing here.

'Lord bless you!' said Mr. Omer, resuming his pipe, 'a man must
take the fat with the lean; that's what he must make up his mind
to, in this life.  Joram does a fine business.  Ex-cellent
business!'

'I am very glad to hear it,' said I.

'I knew you would be,' said Mr. Omer.  'And Joram and Minnie are
like Valentines.  What more can a man expect?  What's his limbs to
that!'

His supreme contempt for his own limbs, as he sat smoking, was one
of the pleasantest oddities I have ever encountered.

'And since I've took to general reading, you've took to general
writing, eh, sir?' said Mr. Omer, surveying me admiringly.  'What
a lovely work that was of yours! What expressions in it! I read it
every word - every word.  And as to feeling sleepy! Not at all!'

I laughingly expressed my satisfaction, but I must confess that I
thought this association of ideas significant.

'I give you my word and honour, sir,' said Mr. Omer, 'that when I
lay that book upon the table, and look at it outside; compact in
three separate and indiwidual wollumes - one, two, three; I am as
proud as Punch to think that I once had the honour of being
connected with your family.  And dear me, it's a long time ago,
now, ain't it?  Over at Blunderstone.  With a pretty little party
laid along with the other party.  And you quite a small party then,
yourself.  Dear, dear!'

I changed the subject by referring to Emily.  After assuring him
that I did not forget how interested he had always been in her, and
how kindly he had always treated her, I gave him a general account
of her restoration to her uncle by the aid of Martha; which I knew
would please the old man.  He listened with the utmost attention,
and said, feelingly, when I had done:

'I am rejoiced at it, sir! It's the best news I have heard for many
a day.  Dear, dear, dear! And what's going to be undertook for that
unfortunate young woman, Martha, now?'

'You touch a point that my thoughts have been dwelling on since
yesterday,' said I, 'but on which I can give you no information
yet, Mr. Omer.  Mr. Peggotty has not alluded to it, and I have a
delicacy in doing so.  I am sure he has not forgotten it.  He
forgets nothing that is disinterested and good.'

'Because you know,' said Mr. Omer, taking himself up, where he had
left off, 'whatever is done, I should wish to be a member of.  Put
me down for anything you may consider right, and let me know.  I
never could think the girl all bad, and I am glad to find she's
not.  So will my daughter Minnie be.  Young women are contradictory
creatures in some things - her mother was just the same as her -
but their hearts are soft and kind.  It's all show with Minnie,
about Martha.  Why she should consider it necessary to make any
show, I don't undertake to tell you.  But it's all show, bless you. 
She'd do her any kindness in private.  So, put me down for whatever
you may consider right, will you be so good?  and drop me a line
where to forward it.  Dear me!' said Mr. Omer, 'when a man is
drawing on to a time of life, where the two ends of life meet; when
he finds himself, however hearty he is, being wheeled about for the
second time, in a speeches of go-cart; he should be over-rejoiced
to do a kindness if he can.  He wants plenty.  And I don't speak of
myself, particular,' said Mr. Omer, 'because, sir, the way I look
at it is, that we are all drawing on to the bottom of the hill,
whatever age we are, on account of time never standing still for a
single moment.  So let us always do a kindness, and be
over-rejoiced.  To be sure!'

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and put it on a ledge in the
back of his chair, expressly made for its reception.

'There's Em'ly's cousin, him that she was to have been married to,'
said Mr. Omer, rubbing his hands feebly, 'as fine a fellow as there
is in Yarmouth! He'll come and talk or read to me, in the evening,
for an hour together sometimes.  That's a kindness, I should call
it! All his life's a kindness.'

'I am going to see him now,' said I.

'Are you?' said Mr. Omer.  'Tell him I was hearty, and sent my
respects.  Minnie and Joram's at a ball.  They would be as proud to
see you as I am, if they was at home.  Minnie won't hardly go out
at all, you see, "on account of father", as she says.  So I swore
tonight, that if she didn't go, I'd go to bed at six.  In
consequence of which,' Mr. Omer shook himself and his chair with
laughter at the success of his device, 'she and Joram's at a ball.'

I shook hands with him, and wished him good night.

'Half a minute, sir,' said Mr. Omer.  'If you was to go without
seeing my little elephant, you'd lose the best of sights.  You
never see such a sight! Minnie!'
A musical little voice answered, from somewhere upstairs, 'I am
coming, grandfather!' and a pretty little girl with long, flaxen,
curling hair, soon came running into the shop.

'This is my little elephant, sir,' said Mr. Omer, fondling the
child.  'Siamese breed, sir.  Now, little elephant!'

The little elephant set the door of the parlour open, enabling me
to see that, in these latter days, it was converted into a bedroom
for Mr. Omer who could not be easily conveyed upstairs; and then
hid her pretty forehead, and tumbled her long hair, against the
back of Mr. Omer's chair.

'The elephant butts, you know, sir,' said Mr. Omer, winking, 'when
he goes at a object.  Once, elephant.  Twice.  Three times!'

At this signal, the little elephant, with a dexterity that was next
to marvellous in so small an animal, whisked the chair round with
Mr. Omer in it, and rattled it off, pell-mell, into the parlour,
without touching the door-post: Mr. Omer indescribably enjoying the
performance, and looking back at me on the road as if it were the
triumphant issue of his life's exertions.

After a stroll about the town I went to Ham's house.  Peggotty had
now removed here for good; and had let her own house to the
successor of Mr. Barkis in the carrying business, who had paid her
very well for the good-will, cart, and horse.  I believe the very
same slow horse that Mr. Barkis drove was still at work.

I found them in the neat kitchen, accompanied by Mrs. Gummidge, who
had been fetched from the old boat by Mr. Peggotty himself.  I
doubt if she could have been induced to desert her post, by anyone
else.  He had evidently told them all.  Both Peggotty and Mrs.
Gummidge had their aprons to their eyes, and Ham had just stepped
out 'to take a turn on the beach'.  He presently came home, very
glad to see me; and I hope they were all the better for my being
there.  We spoke, with some approach to cheerfulness, of Mr.
Peggotty's growing rich in a new country, and of the wonders he
would describe in his letters.  We said nothing of Emily by name,
but distantly referred to her more than once.  Ham was the serenest
of the party.

But, Peggotty told me, when she lighted me to a little chamber
where the Crocodile book was lying ready for me on the table, that
he always was the same.  She believed (she told me, crying) that he
was broken-hearted; though he was as full of courage as of
sweetness, and worked harder and better than any boat-builder in
any yard in all that part.  There were times, she said, of an
evening, when he talked of their old life in the boat-house; and
then he mentioned Emily as a child.  But, he never mentioned her as
a woman.

I thought I had read in his face that he would like to speak to me
alone.  I therefore resolved to put myself in his way next evening,
as he came home from his work.  Having settled this with myself, I
fell asleep.  That night, for the first time in all those many
nights, the candle was taken out of the window, Mr. Peggotty swung
in his old hammock in the old boat, and the wind murmured with the
old sound round his head.

All next day, he was occupied in disposing of his fishing-boat and
tackle; in packing up, and sending to London by waggon, such of his
little domestic possessions as he thought would be useful to him;
and in parting with the rest, or bestowing them on Mrs. Gummidge. 
She was with him all day.  As I had a sorrowful wish to see the old
place once more, before it was locked up, I engaged to meet them
there in the evening.  But I so arranged it, as that I should meet
Ham first.

It was easy to come in his way, as I knew where he worked.  I met
him at a retired part of the sands, which I knew he would cross,
and turned back with him, that he might have leisure to speak to me
if he really wished.  I had not mistaken the expression of his
face.  We had walked but a little way together, when he said,
without looking at me:

'Mas'r Davy, have you seen her?'

'Only for a moment, when she was in a swoon,' I softly answered.

We walked a little farther, and he said:

'Mas'r Davy, shall you see her, d'ye think?'

'It would be too painful to her, perhaps,' said I.

'I have thowt of that,' he replied.  'So 'twould, sir, so 'twould.'

'But, Ham,' said I, gently, 'if there is anything that I could
write to her, for you, in case I could not tell it; if there is
anything you would wish to make known to her through me; I should
consider it a sacred trust.'

'I am sure on't.  I thankee, sir, most kind! I think theer is
something I could wish said or wrote.'

'What is it?'

We walked a little farther in silence, and then he spoke.

''Tan't that I forgive her.  'Tan't that so much.  'Tis more as I
beg of her to forgive me, for having pressed my affections upon
her.  Odd times, I think that if I hadn't had her promise fur to
marry me, sir, she was that trustful of me, in a friendly way, that
she'd have told me what was struggling in her mind, and would have
counselled with me, and I might have saved her.'

I pressed his hand.  'Is that all?'
'Theer's yet a something else,' he returned, 'if I can say it,
Mas'r Davy.'

We walked on, farther than we had walked yet, before he spoke
again.  He was not crying when he made the pauses I shall express
by lines.  He was merely collecting himself to speak very plainly.

'I loved her - and I love the mem'ry of her - too deep - to be able
to lead her to believe of my own self as I'm a happy man.  I could
only be happy - by forgetting of her - and I'm afeerd I couldn't
hardly bear as she should be told I done that.  But if you, being
so full of learning, Mas'r Davy, could think of anything to say as
might bring her to believe I wasn't greatly hurt: still loving of
her, and mourning for her: anything as might bring her to believe
as I was not tired of my life, and yet was hoping fur to see her
without blame, wheer the wicked cease from troubling and the weary
are at rest - anything as would ease her sorrowful mind, and yet
not make her think as I could ever marry, or as 'twas possible that
anyone could ever be to me what she was - I should ask of you to
say that - with my prayers for her - that was so dear.'

I pressed his manly hand again, and told him I would charge myself
to do this as well as I could.

'I thankee, sir,' he answered.  ''Twas kind of you to meet me. 
'Twas kind of you to bear him company down.  Mas'r Davy, I
unnerstan' very well, though my aunt will come to Lon'on afore they
sail, and they'll unite once more, that I am not like to see him
agen.  I fare to feel sure on't.  We doen't say so, but so 'twill
be, and better so.  The last you see on him - the very last - will
you give him the lovingest duty and thanks of the orphan, as he was
ever more than a father to?'

This I also promised, faithfully.

'I thankee agen, sir,' he said, heartily shaking hands.  'I know
wheer you're a-going.  Good-bye!'

With a slight wave of his hand, as though to explain to me that he
could not enter the old place, he turned away.  As I looked after
his figure, crossing the waste in the moonlight, I saw him turn his
face towards a strip of silvery light upon the sea, and pass on,
looking at it, until he was a shadow in the distance.

The door of the boat-house stood open when I approached; and, on
entering, I found it emptied of all its furniture, saving one of
the old lockers, on which Mrs. Gummidge, with a basket on her knee,
was seated, looking at Mr. Peggotty.  He leaned his elbow on the
rough chimney-piece, and gazed upon a few expiring embers in the
grate; but he raised his head, hopefully, on my coming in, and
spoke in a cheery manner.

'Come, according to promise, to bid farewell to 't, eh, Mas'r
Davy?' he said, taking up the candle.  'Bare enough, now, an't it?'
'Indeed you have made good use of the time,' said I.

'Why, we have not been idle, sir.  Missis Gummidge has worked like
a - I doen't know what Missis Gummidge an't worked like,' said Mr.
Peggotty, looking at her, at a loss for a sufficiently approving
simile.

Mrs. Gummidge, leaning on her basket, made no observation.

'Theer's the very locker that you used to sit on, 'long with
Em'ly!' said Mr. Peggotty, in a whisper.  'I'm a-going to carry it
away with me, last of all.  And heer's your old little bedroom,
see, Mas'r Davy! A'most as bleak tonight, as 'art could wish!'

In truth, the wind, though it was low, had a solemn sound, and
crept around the deserted house with a whispered wailing that was
very mournful.  Everything was gone, down to the little mirror with
the oyster-shell frame.  I thought of myself, lying here, when that
first great change was being wrought at home.  I thought of the
blue-eyed child who had enchanted me.  I thought of Steerforth: and
a foolish, fearful fancy came upon me of his being near at hand,
and liable to be met at any turn.

''Tis like to be long,' said Mr. Peggotty, in a low voice, 'afore
the boat finds new tenants.  They look upon 't, down beer, as being
unfortunate now!'

'Does it belong to anybody in the neighbourhood?' I asked.

'To a mast-maker up town,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'I'm a-going to give
the key to him tonight.'

We looked into the other little room, and came back to Mrs.
Gummidge, sitting on the locker, whom Mr. Peggotty, putting the
light on the chimney-piece, requested to rise, that he might carry
it outside the door before extinguishing the candle.

'Dan'l,' said Mrs. Gummidge, suddenly deserting her basket, and
clinging to his arm 'my dear Dan'l, the parting words I speak in
this house is, I mustn't be left behind.  Doen't ye think of
leaving me behind, Dan'l! Oh, doen't ye ever do it!'

Mr. Peggotty, taken aback, looked from Mrs. Gummidge to me, and
from me to Mrs. Gummidge, as if he had been awakened from a sleep.

'Doen't ye, dearest Dan'l, doen't ye!' cried Mrs. Gummidge,
fervently.  'Take me 'long with you, Dan'l, take me 'long with you
and Em'ly! I'll be your servant, constant and trew.  If there's
slaves in them parts where you're a-going, I'll be bound to you for
one, and happy, but doen't ye leave me behind, Dan'l, that's a
deary dear!'

'My good soul,' said Mr. Peggotty, shaking his head, 'you doen't
know what a long voyage, and what a hard life 'tis!'
'Yes, I do, Dan'l! I can guess!' cried Mrs. Gummidge.  'But my
parting words under this roof is, I shall go into the house and
die, if I am not took.  I can dig, Dan'l.  I can work.  I can live
hard.  I can be loving and patient now - more than you think,
Dan'l, if you'll on'y try me.  I wouldn't touch the 'lowance, not
if I was dying of want, Dan'l Peggotty; but I'll go with you and
Em'ly, if you'll on'y let me, to the world's end! I know how 'tis;
I know you think that I am lone and lorn; but, deary love, 'tan't
so no more! I ain't sat here, so long, a-watching, and a-thinking
of your trials, without some good being done me.  Mas'r Davy, speak
to him for me! I knows his ways, and Em'ly's, and I knows their
sorrows, and can be a comfort to 'em, some odd times, and labour
for 'em allus! Dan'l, deary Dan'l, let me go 'long with you!'

And Mrs. Gummidge took his hand, and kissed it with a homely pathos
and affection, in a homely rapture of devotion and gratitude, that
he well deserved.

We brought the locker out, extinguished the candle, fastened the
door on the outside, and left the old boat close shut up, a dark
speck in the cloudy night.  Next day, when we were returning to
London outside the coach, Mrs. Gummidge and her basket were on the
seat behind, and Mrs. Gummidge was happy.



CHAPTER 52
I ASSIST AT AN EXPLOSION


When the time Mr. Micawber had appointed so mysteriously, was
within four-and-twenty hours of being come, my aunt and I consulted
how we should proceed; for my aunt was very unwilling to leave
Dora.  Ah! how easily I carried Dora up and down stairs, now!

We were disposed, notwithstanding Mr. Micawber's stipulation for my
aunt's attendance, to arrange that she should stay at home, and be
represented by Mr. Dick and me.  In short, we had resolved to take
this course, when Dora again unsettled us by declaring that she
never would forgive herself, and never would forgive her bad boy,
if my aunt remained behind, on any pretence.

'I won't speak to you,' said Dora, shaking her curls at my aunt. 
'I'll be disagreeable! I'll make Jip bark at you all day.  I shall
be sure that you really are a cross old thing, if you don't go!'

'Tut, Blossom!' laughed my aunt.  'You know you can't do without
me!'

'Yes, I can,' said Dora.  'You are no use to me at all.  You never
run up and down stairs for me, all day long.  You never sit and
tell me stories about Doady, when his shoes were worn out, and he
was covered with dust - oh, what a poor little mite of a fellow!
You never do anything at all to please me, do you, dear?' Dora made
haste to kiss my aunt, and say, 'Yes, you do! I'm only joking!'-
lest my aunt should think she really meant it.

'But, aunt,' said Dora, coaxingly, 'now listen.  You must go.  I
shall tease you, 'till you let me have my own way about it.  I
shall lead my naughty boy such a life, if he don't make you go.  I
shall make myself so disagreeable - and so will Jip! You'll wish
you had gone, like a good thing, for ever and ever so long, if you
don't go.  Besides,' said Dora, putting back her hair, and looking
wonderingly at my aunt and me, 'why shouldn't you both go?  I am
not very ill indeed.  Am I?'

'Why, what a question!' cried my aunt.

'What a fancy!' said I.

'Yes! I know I am a silly little thing!' said Dora, slowly looking
from one of us to the other, and then putting up her pretty lips to
kiss us as she lay upon her couch.  'Well, then, you must both go,
or I shall not believe you; and then I shall cry!'

I saw, in my aunt's face, that she began to give way now, and Dora
brightened again, as she saw it too.

'You'll come back with so much to tell me, that it'll take at least
a week to make me understand!' said Dora.  'Because I know I shan't
understand, for a length of time, if there's any business in it. 
And there's sure to be some business in it! If there's anything to
add up, besides, I don't know when I shall make it out; and my bad
boy will look so miserable all the time.  There! Now you'll go,
won't you?  You'll only be gone one night, and Jip will take care
of me while you are gone.  Doady will carry me upstairs before you
go, and I won't come down again till you come back; and you shall
take Agnes a dreadfully scolding letter from me, because she has
never been to see us!'

We agreed, without any more consultation, that we would both go,
and that Dora was a little Impostor, who feigned to be rather
unwell, because she liked to be petted.  She was greatly pleased,
and very merry; and we four, that is to say, my aunt, Mr. Dick,
Traddles, and I, went down to Canterbury by the Dover mail that
night.

At the hotel where Mr. Micawber had requested us to await him,
which we got into, with some trouble, in the middle of the night,
I found a letter, importing that he would appear in the morning
punctually at half past nine.  After which, we went shivering, at
that uncomfortable hour, to our respective beds, through various
close passages; which smelt as if they had been steeped, for ages,
in a solution of soup and stables.

Early in the morning, I sauntered through the dear old tranquil
streets, and again mingled with the shadows of the venerable
gateways and churches.  The rooks were sailing about the cathedral
towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long
unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were
cutting the bright morning air, as if there were no such thing as
change on earth.  Yet the bells, when they sounded, told me
sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and
my pretty Dora's youth; and of the many, never old, who had lived
and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells had
hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up
within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in
air, as circles do in water.

I looked at the old house from the corner of the street, but did
not go nearer to it, lest, being observed, I might unwittingly do
any harm to the design I had come to aid.  The early sun was
striking edgewise on its gables and lattice-windows, touching them
with gold; and some beams of its old peace seemed to touch my
heart.

I strolled into the country for an hour or so, and then returned by
the main street, which in the interval had shaken off its last
night's sleep.  Among those who were stirring in the shops, I saw
my ancient enemy the butcher, now advanced to top-boots and a baby,
and in business for himself.  He was nursing the baby, and appeared
to be a benignant member of society.

We all became very anxious and impatient, when we sat down to
breakfast.  As it approached nearer and nearer to half past nine
o'clock, our restless expectation of Mr. Micawber increased.  At
last we made no more pretence of attending to the meal, which,
except with Mr. Dick, had been a mere form from the first; but my
aunt walked up and down the room, Traddles sat upon the sofa
affecting to read the paper with his eyes on the ceiling; and I
looked out of the window to give early notice of Mr. Micawber's
coming.  Nor had I long to watch, for, at the first chime of the
half hour, he appeared in the street.

'Here he is,' said I, 'and not in his legal attire!'

My aunt tied the strings of her bonnet (she had come down to
breakfast in it), and put on her shawl, as if she were ready for
anything that was resolute and uncompromising.  Traddles buttoned
his coat with a determined air.  Mr. Dick, disturbed by these
formidable appearances, but feeling it necessary to imitate them,
pulled his hat, with both hands, as firmly over his ears as he
possibly could; and instantly took it off again, to welcome Mr.
Micawber.

'Gentlemen, and madam,' said Mr. Micawber, 'good morning! My dear
sir,' to Mr. Dick, who shook hands with him violently, 'you are
extremely good.'

'Have you breakfasted?' said Mr. Dick.  'Have a chop!'

'Not for the world, my good sir!' cried Mr. Micawber, stopping him
on his way to the bell; 'appetite and myself, Mr. Dixon, have long
been strangers.'

Mr. Dixon was so well pleased with his new name, and appeared to
think it so obliging in Mr. Micawber to confer it upon him, that he
shook hands with him again, and laughed rather childishly.

'Dick,' said my aunt, 'attention!'

Mr. Dick recovered himself, with a blush.

'Now, sir,' said my aunt to Mr. Micawber, as she put on her gloves,
'we are ready for Mount Vesuvius, or anything else, as soon as YOU
please.'

'Madam,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'I trust you will shortly witness
an eruption.  Mr. Traddles, I have your permission, I believe, to
mention here that we have been in communication together?'

'It is undoubtedly the fact, Copperfield,' said Traddles, to whom
I looked in surprise.  'Mr. Micawber has consulted me in reference
to what he has in contemplation; and I have advised him to the best
of my judgement.'

'Unless I deceive myself, Mr. Traddles,' pursued Mr. Micawber,
'what I contemplate is a disclosure of an important nature.'

'Highly so,' said Traddles.

'Perhaps, under such circumstances, madam and gentlemen,' said Mr.
Micawber, 'you will do me the favour to submit yourselves, for the
moment, to the direction of one who, however unworthy to be
regarded in any other light but as a Waif and Stray upon the shore
of human nature, is still your fellow-man, though crushed out of
his original form by individual errors, and the accumulative force
of a combination of circumstances?'

'We have perfect confidence in you, Mr. Micawber,' said I, 'and
will do what you please.'

'Mr. Copperfield,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'your confidence is not,
at the existing juncture, ill-bestowed.  I would beg to be allowed
a start of five minutes by the clock; and then to receive the
present company, inquiring for Miss Wickfield, at the office of
Wickfield and Heep, whose Stipendiary I am.'

My aunt and I looked at Traddles, who nodded his approval.

'I have no more,' observed Mr. Micawber, 'to say at present.'

With which, to my infinite surprise, he included us all in a
comprehensive bow, and disappeared; his manner being extremely
distant, and his face extremely pale.

Traddles only smiled, and shook his head (with his hair standing
upright on the top of it), when I looked to him for an explanation;
so I took out my watch, and, as a last resource, counted off the
five minutes.  My aunt, with her own watch in her hand, did the
like.  When the time was expired, Traddles gave her his arm; and we
all went out together to the old house, without saying one word on
the way.

We found Mr. Micawber at his desk, in the turret office on the
ground floor, either writing, or pretending to write, hard.  The
large office-ruler was stuck into his waistcoat, and was not so
well concealed but that a foot or more of that instrument protruded
from his bosom, like a new kind of shirt-frill.

As it appeared to me that I was expected to speak, I said aloud:

'How do you do, Mr. Micawber?'

'Mr. Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, gravely, 'I hope I see you
well?'

'Is Miss Wickfield at home?' said I.

'Mr. Wickfield is unwell in bed, sir, of a rheumatic fever,' he
returned; 'but Miss Wickfield, I have no doubt, will be happy to
see old friends.  Will you walk in, sir?'

He preceded us to the dining-room - the first room I had entered in
that house - and flinging open the door of Mr. Wickfield's former
office, said, in a sonorous voice:

'Miss Trotwood, Mr. David Copperfield, Mr. Thomas Traddles, and Mr.
Dixon!'

I had not seen Uriah Heep since the time of the blow.  Our visit
astonished him, evidently; not the less, I dare say, because it
astonished ourselves.  He did not gather his eyebrows together, for
he had none worth mentioning; but he frowned to that degree that he
almost closed his small eyes, while the hurried raising of his
grisly hand to his chin betrayed some trepidation or surprise. 
This was only when we were in the act of entering his room, and
when I caught a glance at him over my aunt's shoulder.  A moment
afterwards, he was as fawning and as humble as ever.

'Well, I am sure,' he said.  'This is indeed an unexpected
pleasure! To have, as I may say, all friends round St. Paul's at
once, is a treat unlooked for! Mr. Copperfield, I hope I see you
well, and - if I may umbly express myself so - friendly towards
them as is ever your friends, whether or not.  Mrs. Copperfield,
sir, I hope she's getting on.  We have been made quite uneasy by
the poor accounts we have had of her state, lately, I do assure
you.'

I felt ashamed to let him take my hand, but I did not know yet what
else to do.

'Things are changed in this office, Miss Trotwood, since I was an
umble clerk, and held your pony; ain't they?' said Uriah, with his
sickliest smile.  'But I am not changed, Miss Trotwood.'

'Well, sir,' returned my aunt, 'to tell you the truth, I think you
are pretty constant to the promise of your youth; if that's any
satisfaction to you.'

'Thank you, Miss Trotwood,' said Uriah, writhing in his ungainly
manner, 'for your good opinion! Micawber, tell 'em to let Miss
Agnes know - and mother.  Mother will be quite in a state, when she
sees the present company!' said Uriah, setting chairs.

'You are not busy, Mr. Heep?' said Traddles, whose eye the cunning
red eye accidentally caught, as it at once scrutinized and evaded
us.

'No, Mr. Traddles,' replied Uriah, resuming his official seat, and
squeezing his bony hands, laid palm to palm between his bony knees. 
'Not so much so as I could wish.  But lawyers, sharks, and leeches,
are not easily satisfied, you know! Not but what myself and
Micawber have our hands pretty full, in general, on account of Mr.
Wickfield's being hardly fit for any occupation, sir.  But it's a
pleasure as well as a duty, I am sure, to work for him.  You've not
been intimate with Mr. Wickfield, I think, Mr. Traddles?  I believe
I've only had the honour of seeing you once myself?'

'No, I have not been intimate with Mr. Wickfield,' returned
Traddles; 'or I might perhaps have waited on you long ago, Mr.
Heep.'

There was something in the tone of this reply, which made Uriah
look at the speaker again, with a very sinister and suspicious
expression.  But, seeing only Traddles, with his good-natured face,
simple manner, and hair on end, he dismissed it as he replied, with
a jerk of his whole body, but especially his throat:

'I am sorry for that, Mr. Traddles.  You would have admired him as
much as we all do.  His little failings would only have endeared
him to you the more.  But if you would like to hear my
fellow-partner eloquently spoken of, I should refer you to
Copperfield.  The family is a subject he's very strong upon, if you
never heard him.'

I was prevented from disclaiming the compliment (if I should have
done so, in any case), by the entrance of Agnes, now ushered in by
Mr. Micawber.  She was not quite so self-possessed as usual, I
thought; and had evidently undergone anxiety and fatigue.  But her
earnest cordiality, and her quiet beauty, shone with the gentler
lustre for it.

I saw Uriah watch her while she greeted us; and he reminded me of
an ugly and rebellious genie watching a good spirit.  In the
meanwhile, some slight sign passed between Mr. Micawber and
Traddles; and Traddles, unobserved except by me, went out.

'Don't wait, Micawber,' said Uriah.

Mr. Micawber, with his hand upon the ruler in his breast, stood
erect before the door, most unmistakably contemplating one of his
fellow-men, and that man his employer.

'What are you waiting for?' said Uriah.  'Micawber! did you hear me
tell you not to wait?'

'Yes!' replied the immovable Mr. Micawber.

'Then why DO you wait?' said Uriah.

'Because I - in short, choose,' replied Mr. Micawber, with a burst.

Uriah's cheeks lost colour, and an unwholesome paleness, still
faintly tinged by his pervading red, overspread them.  He looked at
Mr. Micawber attentively, with his whole face breathing short and
quick in every feature.

'You are a dissipated fellow, as all the world knows,' he said,
with an effort at a smile, 'and I am afraid you'll oblige me to get
rid of you.  Go along! I'll talk to you presently.'

'If there is a scoundrel on this earth,' said Mr. Micawber,
suddenly breaking out again with the utmost vehemence, 'with whom
I have already talked too much, that scoundrel's name is - HEEP!'

Uriah fell back, as if he had been struck or stung.  Looking slowly
round upon us with the darkest and wickedest expression that his
face could wear, he said, in a lower voice:

'Oho! This is a conspiracy! You have met here by appointment! You
are playing Booty with my clerk, are you, Copperfield?  Now, take
care.  You'll make nothing of this.  We understand each other, you
and me.  There's no love between us.  You were always a puppy with
a proud stomach, from your first coming here; and you envy me my
rise, do you?  None of your plots against me; I'll counterplot you!
Micawber, you be off.  I'll talk to you presently.'

'Mr. Micawber,' said I, 'there is a sudden change in this fellow. 
in more respects than the extraordinary one of his speaking the
truth in one particular, which assures me that he is brought to
bay.  Deal with him as he deserves!'

'You are a precious set of people, ain't you?' said Uriah, in the
same low voice, and breaking out into a clammy heat, which he wiped
from his forehead, with his long lean hand, 'to buy over my clerk,
who is the very scum of society, - as you yourself were,
Copperfield, you know it, before anyone had charity on you, - to
defame me with his lies?  Miss Trotwood, you had better stop this;
or I'll stop your husband shorter than will be pleasant to you.  I
won't know your story professionally, for nothing, old lady! Miss
Wickfield, if you have any love for your father, you had better not
join that gang.  I'll ruin him, if you do.  Now, come! I have got
some of you under the harrow.  Think twice, before it goes over
you.  Think twice, you, Micawber, if you don't want to be crushed. 
I recommend you to take yourself off, and be talked to presently,
you fool! while there's time to retreat.  Where's mother?' he said,
suddenly appearing to notice, with alarm, the absence of Traddles,
and pulling down the bell-rope.  'Fine doings in a person's own
house!'

'Mrs. Heep is here, sir,' said Traddles, returning with that worthy
mother of a worthy son.  'I have taken the liberty of making myself
known to her.'

'Who are you to make yourself known?' retorted Uriah.  'And what do
you want here?'

'I am the agent and friend of Mr. Wickfield, sir,' said Traddles,
in a composed and business-like way.  'And I have a power of
attorney from him in my pocket, to act for him in all matters.'

'The old ass has drunk himself into a state of dotage,' said Uriah,
turning uglier than before, 'and it has been got from him by
fraud!'

'Something has been got from him by fraud, I know,' returned
Traddles quietly; 'and so do you, Mr. Heep.  We will refer that
question, if you please, to Mr. Micawber.'

'Ury -!' Mrs. Heep began, with an anxious gesture.

'YOU hold your tongue, mother,' he returned; 'least said, soonest
mended.'

'But, my Ury -'

'Will you hold your tongue, mother, and leave it to me?'

Though I had long known that his servility was false, and all his
pretences knavish and hollow, I had had no adequate conception of
the extent of his hypocrisy, until I now saw him with his mask off. 
The suddenness with which he dropped it, when he perceived that it
was useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed;
the leer with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he
had done - all this time being desperate too, and at his wits' end
for the means of getting the better of us - though perfectly
consistent with the experience I had of him, at first took even me
by surprise, who had known him so long, and disliked him so
heartily.

I say nothing of the look he conferred on me, as he stood eyeing
us, one after another; for I had always understood that he hated
me, and I remembered the marks of my hand upon his cheek.  But when
his eyes passed on to Agnes, and I saw the rage with which he felt
his power over her slipping away, and the exhibition, in their
disappointment, of the odious passions that had led him to aspire
to one whose virtues he could never appreciate or care for, I was
shocked by the mere thought of her having lived, an hour, within
sight of such a man.

After some rubbing of the lower part of his face, and some looking
at us with those bad eyes, over his grisly fingers, he made one
more address to me, half whining, and half abusive.

'You think it justifiable, do you, Copperfield, you who pride
yourself so much on your honour and all the rest of it, to sneak
about my place, eaves-dropping with my clerk?  If it had been ME,
I shouldn't have wondered; for I don't make myself out a gentleman
(though I never was in the streets either, as you were, according
to Micawber), but being you! - And you're not afraid of doing this,
either?  You don't think at all of what I shall do, in return; or
of getting yourself into trouble for conspiracy and so forth?  Very
well.  We shall see! Mr. What's-your-name, you were going to refer
some question to Micawber.  There's your referee.  Why don't you
make him speak?  He has learnt his lesson, I see.'

Seeing that what he said had no effect on me or any of us, he sat
on the edge of his table with his hands in his pockets, and one of
his splay feet twisted round the other leg, waiting doggedly for
what might follow.

Mr. Micawber, whose impetuosity I had restrained thus far with the
greatest difficulty, and who had repeatedly interposed with the
first syllable Of SCOUN-drel! without getting to the second, now
burst forward, drew the ruler from his breast (apparently as a
defensive weapon), and produced from his pocket a foolscap
document, folded in the form of a large letter.  Opening this
packet, with his old flourish, and glancing at the contents, as if
he cherished an artistic admiration of their style of composition,
he began to read as follows:


'"Dear Miss Trotwood and gentlemen -"'

'Bless and save the man!' exclaimed my aunt in a low voice.  'He'd
write letters by the ream, if it was a capital offence!'

Mr. Micawber, without hearing her, went on.

'"In appearing before you to denounce probably the most consummate
Villain that has ever existed,"' Mr. Micawber, without looking off
the letter, pointed the ruler, like a ghostly truncheon, at Uriah
Heep, '"I ask no consideration for myself.  The victim, from my
cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to
respond, I have ever been the sport and toy of debasing
circumstances.  Ignominy, Want, Despair, and Madness, have,
collectively or separately, been the attendants of my career."'

The relish with which Mr. Micawber described himself as a prey to
these dismal calamities, was only to be equalled by the emphasis
with which he read his letter; and the kind of homage he rendered
to it with a roll of his head, when he thought he had hit a
sentence very hard indeed.

'"In an accumulation of Ignominy, Want, Despair, and Madness, I
entered the office - or, as our lively neighbour the Gaul would
term it, the Bureau - of the Firm, nominally conducted under the
appellation of Wickfield and - HEEP, but in reality, wielded by -
HEEP alone.  HEEP, and only HEEP, is the mainspring of that
machine.  HEEP, and only HEEP, is the Forger and the Cheat."'

Uriah, more blue than white at these words, made a dart at the
letter, as if to tear it in pieces.  Mr. Micawber, with a perfect
miracle of dexterity or luck, caught his advancing knuckles with
the ruler, and disabled his right hand.  It dropped at the wrist,
as if it were broken.  The blow sounded as if it had fallen on
wood.

'The Devil take you!' said Uriah, writhing in a new way with pain. 
'I'll be even with you.'

'Approach me again, you - you - you HEEP of infamy,' gasped Mr.
Micawber, 'and if your head is human, I'll break it.  Come on, come
on! '

I think I never saw anything more ridiculous - I was sensible of
it, even at the time - than Mr. Micawber making broad-sword guards
with the ruler, and crying, 'Come on!' while Traddles and I pushed
him back into a corner, from which, as often as we got him into it,
he persisted in emerging again.

His enemy, muttering to himself, after wringing his wounded hand
for sometime, slowly drew off his neck-kerchief and bound it up;
then held it in his other hand, and sat upon his table with his
sullen face looking down.

Mr. Micawber, when he was sufficiently cool, proceeded with his
letter.

'"The stipendiary emoluments in consideration of which I entered
into the service of - HEEP,"' always pausing before that word and
uttering it with astonishing vigour, '"were not defined, beyond the
pittance of twenty-two shillings and six per week.  The rest was
left contingent on the value of my professional exertions; in other
and more expressive words, on the baseness of my nature, the
cupidity of my motives, the poverty of my family, the general moral
(or rather immoral) resemblance between myself and - HEEP.  Need I
say, that it soon became necessary for me to solicit from - HEEP -
pecuniary advances towards the support of Mrs. Micawber, and our
blighted but rising family?  Need I say that this necessity had
been foreseen by - HEEP?  That those advances were secured by
I.O.U.'s and other similar acknowledgements, known to the legal
institutions of this country?  And that I thus became immeshed in
the web he had spun for my reception?"'

Mr. Micawber's enjoyment of his epistolary powers, in describing
this unfortunate state of things, really seemed to outweigh any
pain or anxiety that the reality could have caused him.  He read
on:

'"Then it was that - HEEP - began to favour me with just so much of
his confidence, as was necessary to the discharge of his infernal
business.  Then it was that I began, if I may so Shakespearianly
express myself, to dwindle, peak, and pine.  I found that my
services were constantly called into requisition for the
falsification of business, and the mystification of an individual
whom I will designate as Mr. W.  That Mr. W. was imposed upon, kept
in ignorance, and deluded, in every possible way; yet, that all
this while, the ruffian - HEEP - was professing unbounded gratitude
to, and unbounded friendship for, that much-abused gentleman.  This
was bad enough; but, as the philosophic Dane observes, with that
universal applicability which distinguishes the illustrious
ornament of the Elizabethan Era, worse remains behind!"'

Mr. Micawber was so very much struck by this happy rounding off
with a quotation, that he indulged himself, and us, with a second
reading of the sentence, under pretence of having lost his place.

'"It is not my intention,"' he continued reading on, '"to enter on
a detailed list, within the compass of the present epistle (though
it is ready elsewhere), of the various malpractices of a minor
nature, affecting the individual whom I have denominated Mr. W., to
which I have been a tacitly consenting party.  My object, when the
contest within myself between stipend and no stipend, baker and no
baker, existence and non-existence, ceased, was to take advantage
of my opportunities to discover and expose the major malpractices
committed, to that gentleman's grievous wrong and injury, by -
HEEP.  Stimulated by the silent monitor within, and by a no less
touching and appealing monitor without - to whom I will briefly
refer as Miss W. - I entered on a not unlaborious task of
clandestine investigation, protracted - now, to the best of my
knowledge, information, and belief, over a period exceeding twelve
calendar months."'

He read this passage as if it were from an Act of Parliament; and
appeared majestically refreshed by the sound of the words.

'"My charges against - HEEP,"' he read on, glancing at him, and
drawing the ruler into a convenient position under his left arm, in
case of need, '"are as follows."'

We all held our breath, I think.  I am sure Uriah held his.

'"First,"' said Mr. Micawber, '"When Mr. W.'s faculties and memory
for business became, through causes into which it is not necessary
or expedient for me to enter, weakened and confused, - HEEP -
designedly perplexed and complicated the whole of the official
transactions.  When Mr. W. was least fit to enter on business, -
HEEP was always at hand to force him to enter on it.  He obtained
Mr. W.'s signature under such circumstances to documents of
importance, representing them to be other documents of no
importance.  He induced Mr. W. to empower him to draw out, thus,
one particular sum of trust-money, amounting to twelve six
fourteen, two and nine, and employed it to meet pretended business
charges and deficiencies which were either already provided for, or
had never really existed.  He gave this proceeding, throughout, the
appearance of having originated in Mr. W.'s own dishonest
intention, and of having been accomplished by Mr. W.'s own
dishonest act; and has used it, ever since, to torture and
constrain him."'

'You shall prove this, you Copperfield!' said Uriah, with a
threatening shake of the head.  'All in good time!'

'Ask - HEEP - Mr. Traddles, who lived in his house after him,' said
Mr. Micawber, breaking off from the letter; 'will you?'

'The fool himself- and lives there now,' said Uriah, disdainfully.

'Ask - HEEP - if he ever kept a pocket-book in that house,' said
Mr. Micawber; 'will you?'

I saw Uriah's lank hand stop, involuntarily, in the scraping of his
chin.

'Or ask him,' said Mr. Micawber,'if he ever burnt one there.  If he
says yes, and asks you where the ashes are, refer him to Wilkins
Micawber, and he will hear of something not at all to his
advantage!'

The triumphant flourish with which Mr. Micawber delivered himself
of these words, had a powerful effect in alarming the mother; who
cried out, in much agitation:

'Ury, Ury! Be umble, and make terms, my dear!'

'Mother!' he retorted, 'will you keep quiet?  You're in a fright,
and don't know what you say or mean.  Umble!' he repeated, looking
at me, with a snarl; 'I've umbled some of 'em for a pretty long
time back, umble as I was!'

Mr. Micawber, genteelly adjusting his chin in his cravat, presently
proceeded with his composition.

'"Second.  HEEP has, on several occasions, to the best of my
knowledge, information, and belief -"'

'But that won't do,' muttered Uriah, relieved.  'Mother, you keep
quiet.'

'We will endeavour to provide something that WILL do, and do for
you finally, sir, very shortly,' replied Mr. Micawber.

'"Second.  HEEP has, on several occasions, to the best of my
knowledge, information, and belief, systematically forged, to
various entries, books, and documents, the signature of Mr. W.; and
has distinctly done so in one instance, capable of proof by me.  To
wit, in manner following, that is to say:"'

Again, Mr. Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of words,
which, however ludicrously displayed in his case, was, I must say,
not at all peculiar to him.  I have observed it, in the course of
my life, in numbers of men.  It seems to me to be a general rule. 
In the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to enjoy
themselves mightily when they come to several good words in
succession, for the expression of one idea; as, that they utterly
detest, abominate, and abjure, or so forth; and the old anathemas
were made relishing on the same principle.  We talk about the
tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannize over them too; we are
fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait
upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds
well.  As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries
on state occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so,
the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration,
if there be but a great parade of them.  And as individuals get
into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves
when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think
I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties,
and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a
retinue of words.

Mr. Micawber read on, almost smacking his lips:

'"To wit, in manner following, that is to say.  Mr. W. being
infirm, and it being within the bounds of probability that his
decease might lead to some discoveries, and to the downfall of -
HEEP'S - power over the W. family, - as I, Wilkins Micawber, the
undersigned, assume - unless the filial affection of his daughter
could be secretly influenced from allowing any investigation of the
partnership affairs to be ever made, the said - HEEP - deemed it
expedient to have a bond ready by him, as from Mr. W., for the
before-mentioned sum of twelve six fourteen, two and nine, with
interest, stated therein to have been advanced by - HEEP - to Mr.
W. to save Mr. W. from dishonour; though really the sum was never
advanced by him, and has long been replaced.  The signatures to
this instrument purporting to be executed by Mr. W. and attested by
Wilkins Micawber, are forgeries by - HEEP.  I have, in my
possession, in his hand and pocket-book, several similar imitations
of Mr. W.'s signature, here and there defaced by fire, but legible
to anyone.  I never attested any such document.  And I have the
document itself, in my possession."'
Uriah Heep, with a start, took out of his pocket a bunch of keys,
and opened a certain drawer; then, suddenly bethought himself of
what he was about, and turned again towards us, without looking in
it.

'"And I have the document,"' Mr. Micawber read again, looking about
as if it were the text of a sermon, '"in my possession, - that is
to say, I had, early this morning, when this was written, but have
since relinquished it to Mr. Traddles."'

'It is quite true,' assented Traddles.

'Ury, Ury!' cried the mother, 'be umble and make terms.  I know my
son will be umble, gentlemen, if you'll give him time to think. 
Mr. Copperfield, I'm sure you know that he was always very umble,
sir!'

It was singular to see how the mother still held to the old trick,
when the son had abandoned it as useless.

'Mother,' he said, with an impatient bite at the handkerchief in
which his hand was wrapped, 'you had better take and fire a loaded
gun at me.'

'But I love you, Ury,' cried Mrs. Heep.  And I have no doubt she
did; or that he loved her, however strange it may appear; though,
to be sure, they were a congenial couple.  'And I can't bear to
hear you provoking the gentlemen, and endangering of yourself more. 
I told the gentleman at first, when he told me upstairs it was come
to light, that I would answer for your being umble, and making
amends.  Oh, see how umble I am, gentlemen, and don't mind him!'

'Why, there's Copperfield, mother,' he angrily retorted, pointing
his lean finger at me, against whom all his animosity was levelled,
as the prime mover in the discovery; and I did not undeceive him;
'there's Copperfield, would have given you a hundred pound to say
less than you've blurted out!'

'I can't help it, Ury,' cried his mother.  'I can't see you running
into danger, through carrying your head so high.  Better be umble,
as you always was.'

He remained for a little, biting the handkerchief, and then said to
me with a scowl:

'What more have you got to bring forward?  If anything, go on with
it.  What do you look at me for?'

Mr. Micawber promptly resumed his letter, glad to revert to a
performance with which he was so highly satisfied.

'"Third.  And last.  I am now in a condition to show, by - HEEP'S
- false books, and - HEEP'S - real memoranda, beginning with the
partially destroyed pocket-book (which I was unable to comprehend,
at the time of its accidental discovery by Mrs. Micawber, on our
taking possession of our present abode, in the locker or bin
devoted to the reception of the ashes calcined on our domestic
hearth), that the weaknesses, the faults, the very virtues, the
parental affections, and the sense of honour, of the unhappy Mr. W.
have been for years acted on by, and warped to the base purposes of
- HEEP.  That Mr. W. has been for years deluded and plundered, in
every conceivable manner, to the pecuniary aggrandisement of the
avaricious, false, and grasping - HEEP.  That the engrossing object
of- HEEP - was, next to gain, to subdue Mr. and Miss W. (of his
ulterior views in reference to the latter I say nothing) entirely
to himself.  That his last act, completed but a few months since,
was to induce Mr. W. to execute a relinquishment of his share in
the partnership, and even a bill of sale on the very furniture of
his house, in consideration of a certain annuity, to be well and
truly paid by - HEEP - on the four common quarter-days in each and
every year.  That these meshes; beginning with alarming and
falsified accounts of the estate of which Mr. W. is the receiver,
at a period when Mr. W. had launched into imprudent and ill-judged
speculations, and may not have had the money, for which he was
morally and legally responsible, in hand; going on with pretended
borrowings of money at enormous interest, really coming from - HEEP
- and by - HEEP - fraudulently obtained or withheld from Mr. W.
himself, on pretence of such speculations or otherwise; perpetuated
by a miscellaneous catalogue of unscrupulous chicaneries -
gradually thickened, until the unhappy Mr. W. could see no world
beyond.  Bankrupt, as he believed, alike in circumstances, in all
other hope, and in honour, his sole reliance was upon the monster
in the garb of man,"' - Mr. Micawber made a good deal of this, as
a new turn of expression, - '"who, by making himself necessary to
him, had achieved his destruction.  All this I undertake to show. 
Probably much more!"'

I whispered a few words to Agnes, who was weeping, half joyfully,
half sorrowfully, at my side; and there was a movement among us, as
if Mr. Micawber had finished.  He said, with exceeding gravity,
'Pardon me,' and proceeded, with a mixture of the lowest spirits
and the most intense enjoyment, to the peroration of his letter.

'"I have now concluded.  It merely remains for me to substantiate
these accusations; and then, with my ill-starred family, to
disappear from the landscape on which we appear to be an
encumbrance.  That is soon done.  It may be reasonably inferred
that our baby will first expire of inanition, as being the frailest
member of our circle; and that our twins will follow next in order. 
So be it! For myself, my Canterbury Pilgrimage has done much;
imprisonment on civil process, and want, will soon do more.  I
trust that the labour and hazard of an investigation - of which the
smallest results have been slowly pieced together, in the pressure
of arduous avocations, under grinding penurious apprehensions, at
rise of morn, at dewy eve, in the shadows of night, under the
watchful eye of one whom it were superfluous to call Demon -
combined with the struggle of parental Poverty to turn it, when
completed, to the right account, may be as the sprinkling of a few
drops of sweet water on my funeral pyre.  I ask no more.  Let it
be, in justice, merely said of me, as of a gallant and eminent
naval Hero, with whom I have no pretensions to cope, that what I
have done, I did, in despite of mercenary and selfish objects,

     For England, home, and Beauty.

     '"Remaining always, &c.  &c., WILKINS MICAWBER."'


Much affected, but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber
folded up his letter, and handed it with a bow to my aunt, as
something she might like to keep.

There was, as I had noticed on my first visit long ago, an iron
safe in the room.  The key was in it.  A hasty suspicion seemed to
strike Uriah; and, with a glance at Mr. Micawber, he went to it,
and threw the doors clanking open.  It was empty.

'Where are the books?' he cried, with a frightful face.  'Some
thief has stolen the books!'

Mr. Micawber tapped himself with the ruler.  'I did, when I got the
key from you as usual - but a little earlier - and opened it this
morning.'

'Don't be uneasy,' said Traddles.  'They have come into my
possession.  I will take care of them, under the authority I
mentioned.'

'You receive stolen goods, do you?' cried Uriah.

'Under such circumstances,' answered Traddles, 'yes.'

What was my astonishment when I beheld my aunt, who had been
profoundly quiet and attentive, make a dart at Uriah Heep, and
seize him by the collar with both hands!

'You know what I want?' said my aunt.

'A strait-waistcoat,' said he.

'No.  My property!' returned my aunt.  'Agnes, my dear, as long as
I believed it had been really made away with by your father, I
wouldn't - and, my dear, I didn't, even to Trot, as he knows -
breathe a syllable of its having been placed here for investment. 
But, now I know this fellow's answerable for it, and I'll have it!
Trot, come and take it away from him!'

Whether my aunt supposed, for the moment, that he kept her property
in his neck-kerchief, I am sure I don't know; but she certainly
pulled at it as if she thought so.  I hastened to put myself
between them, and to assure her that we would all take care that he
should make the utmost restitution of everything he had wrongly
got.  This, and a few moments' reflection, pacified her; but she
was not at all disconcerted by what she had done (though I cannot
say as much for her bonnet) and resumed her seat composedly.

During the last few minutes, Mrs. Heep had been clamouring to her
son to be 'umble'; and had been going down on her knees to all of
us in succession, and making the wildest promises.  Her son sat her
down in his chair; and, standing sulkily by her, holding her arm
with his hand, but not rudely, said to me, with a ferocious look:

'What do you want done?'

'I will tell you what must be done,' said Traddles.

'Has that Copperfield no tongue?' muttered Uriah, 'I would do a
good deal for you if you could tell me, without lying, that
somebody had cut it out.'

'My Uriah means to be umble!' cried his mother.  'Don't mind what
he says, good gentlemen!'

'What must be done,' said Traddles, 'is this.  First, the deed of
relinquishment, that we have heard of, must be given over to me now
- here.'

'Suppose I haven't got it,' he interrupted.

'But you have,' said Traddles; 'therefore, you know, we won't
suppose so.'  And I cannot help avowing that this was the first
occasion on which I really did justice to the clear head, and the
plain, patient, practical good sense, of my old schoolfellow. 
'Then,' said Traddles, 'you must prepare to disgorge all that your
rapacity has become possessed of, and to make restoration to the
last farthing.  All the partnership books and papers must remain in
our possession; all your books and papers; all money accounts and
securities, of both kinds.  In short, everything here.'

'Must it?  I don't know that,' said Uriah.  'I must have time to
think about that.'

'Certainly,' replied Traddles; 'but, in the meanwhile, and until
everything is done to our satisfaction, we shall maintain
possession of these things; and beg you - in short, compel you - to
keep to your own room, and hold no communication with anyone.'

'I won't do it!' said Uriah, with an oath.

'Maidstone jail is a safer place of detention,' observed Traddles;
'and though the law may be longer in righting us, and may not be
able to right us so completely as you can, there is no doubt of its
punishing YOU.  Dear me, you know that quite as well as I!
Copperfield, will you go round to the Guildhall, and bring a couple
of officers?'

Here, Mrs. Heep broke out again, crying on her knees to Agnes to
interfere in their behalf, exclaiming that he was very humble, and
it was all true, and if he didn't do what we wanted, she would, and
much more to the same purpose; being half frantic with fears for
her darling.  To inquire what he might have done, if he had had any
boldness, would be like inquiring what a mongrel cur might do, if
it had the spirit of a tiger.  He was a coward, from head to foot;
and showed his dastardly nature through his sullenness and
mortification, as much as at any time of his mean life.

'Stop!' he growled to me; and wiped his hot face with his hand. 
'Mother, hold your noise.  Well! Let 'em have that deed.  Go and
fetch it!'

'Do you help her, Mr. Dick,' said Traddles, 'if you please.'

Proud of his commission, and understanding it, Mr. Dick accompanied
her as a shepherd's dog might accompany a sheep.  But, Mrs. Heep
gave him little trouble; for she not only returned with the deed,
but with the box in which it was, where we found a banker's book
and some other papers that were afterwards serviceable.

'Good!' said Traddles, when this was brought.  'Now, Mr. Heep, you
can retire to think: particularly observing, if you please, that I
declare to you, on the part of all present, that there is only one
thing to be done; that it is what I have explained; and that it
must be done without delay.'

Uriah, without lifting his eyes from the ground, shuffled across
the room with his hand to his chin, and pausing at the door, said:

'Copperfield, I have always hated you.  You've always been an
upstart, and you've always been against me.'

'As I think I told you once before,' said I, 'it is you who have
been, in your greed and cunning, against all the world.  It may be
profitable to you to reflect, in future, that there never were
greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and
overreach themselves.  It is as certain as death.'

'Or as certain as they used to teach at school (the same school
where I picked up so much umbleness), from nine o'clock to eleven,
that labour was a curse; and from eleven o'clock to one, that it
was a blessing and a cheerfulness, and a dignity, and I don't know
what all, eh?' said he with a sneer.  'You preach, about as
consistent as they did.  Won't umbleness go down?  I shouldn't have
got round my gentleman fellow-partner without it, I think.  -
Micawber, you old bully, I'll pay YOU!'

Mr. Micawber, supremely defiant of him and his extended finger, and
making a great deal of his chest until he had slunk out at the
door, then addressed himself to me, and proffered me the
satisfaction of 'witnessing the re-establishment of mutual
confidence between himself and Mrs. Micawber'.  After which, he
invited the company generally to the contemplation of that
affecting spectacle.

'The veil that has long been interposed between Mrs. Micawber and
myself, is now withdrawn,' said Mr. Micawber; 'and my children and
the Author of their Being can once more come in contact on equal
terms.'

As we were all very grateful to him, and all desirous to show that
we were, as well as the hurry and disorder of our spirits would
permit, I dare say we should all have gone, but that it was
necessary for Agnes to return to her father, as yet unable to bear
more than the dawn of hope; and for someone else to hold Uriah in
safe keeping.  So, Traddles remained for the latter purpose, to be
presently relieved by Mr. Dick; and Mr. Dick, my aunt, and I, went
home with Mr. Micawber.  As I parted hurriedly from the dear girl
to whom I owed so much, and thought from what she had been saved,
perhaps, that morning - her better resolution notwithstanding - I
felt devoutly thankful for the miseries of my younger days which
had brought me to the knowledge of Mr. Micawber.

His house was not far off; and as the street door opened into the
sitting-room, and he bolted in with a precipitation quite his own,
we found ourselves at once in the bosom of the family.  Mr.
Micawber exclaiming, 'Emma! my life!' rushed into Mrs. Micawber's
arms.  Mrs. Micawber shrieked, and folded Mr. Micawber in her
embrace.  Miss Micawber, nursing the unconscious stranger of Mrs.
Micawber's last letter to me, was sensibly affected.  The stranger
leaped.  The twins testified their joy by several inconvenient but
innocent demonstrations.  Master Micawber, whose disposition
appeared to have been soured by early disappointment, and whose
aspect had become morose, yielded to his better feelings, and
blubbered.

'Emma!' said Mr. Micawber.  'The cloud is past from my mind. 
Mutual confidence, so long preserved between us once, is restored,
to know no further interruption.  Now, welcome poverty!' cried Mr.
Micawber, shedding tears.  'Welcome misery, welcome houselessness,
welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will
sustain us to the end!'

With these expressions, Mr. Micawber placed Mrs. Micawber in a
chair, and embraced the family all round; welcoming a variety of
bleak prospects, which appeared, to the best of my judgement, to be
anything but welcome to them; and calling upon them to come out
into Canterbury and sing a chorus, as nothing else was left for
their support.

But Mrs. Micawber having, in the strength of her emotions, fainted
away, the first thing to be done, even before the chorus could be
considered complete, was to recover her.  This my aunt and Mr.
Micawber did; and then my aunt was introduced, and Mrs. Micawber
recognized me.

'Excuse me, dear Mr. Copperfield,' said the poor lady, giving me
her hand, 'but I am not strong; and the removal of the late
misunderstanding between Mr. Micawber and myself was at first too
much for me.'

'Is this all your family, ma'am?' said my aunt.

'There are no more at present,' returned Mrs. Micawber.

'Good gracious, I didn't mean that, ma'am,' said my aunt.  'I mean,
are all these yours?'

'Madam,' replied Mr. Micawber, 'it is a true bill.'

'And that eldest young gentleman, now,' said my aunt, musing, 'what
has he been brought up to?'

'It was my hope when I came here,' said Mr. Micawber, 'to have got
Wilkins into the Church: or perhaps I shall express my meaning more
strictly, if I say the Choir.  But there was no vacancy for a tenor
in the venerable Pile for which this city is so justly eminent; and
he has - in short, he has contracted a habit of singing in
public-houses, rather than in sacred edifices.'

'But he means well,' said Mrs. Micawber, tenderly.

'I dare say, my love,' rejoined Mr. Micawber, 'that he means
particularly well; but I have not yet found that he carries out his
meaning, in any given direction whatsoever.'

Master Micawber's moroseness of aspect returned upon him again, and
he demanded, with some temper, what he was to do?  Whether he had
been born a carpenter, or a coach-painter, any more than he had
been born a bird?  Whether he could go into the next street, and
open a chemist's shop?  Whether he could rush to the next assizes,
and proclaim himself a lawyer?  Whether he could come out by force
at the opera, and succeed by violence?  Whether he could do
anything, without being brought up to something?

My aunt mused a little while, and then said:

'Mr. Micawber, I wonder you have never turned your thoughts to
emigration.'

'Madam,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'it was the dream of my youth, and
the fallacious aspiration of my riper years.'  I am thoroughly
persuaded, by the by, that he had never thought of it in his life.

'Aye?' said my aunt, with a glance at me.  'Why, what a thing it
would be for yourselves and your family, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, if
you were to emigrate now.'

'Capital, madam, capital,' urged Mr. Micawber, gloomily.

'That is the principal, I may say the only difficulty, my dear Mr.
Copperfield,' assented his wife.

'Capital?' cried my aunt.  'But you are doing us a great service -
have done us a great service, I may say, for surely much will come
out of the fire - and what could we do for you, that would be half
so good as to find the capital?'

'I could not receive it as a gift,' said Mr. Micawber, full of fire
and animation, 'but if a sufficient sum could be advanced, say at
five per cent interest, per annum, upon my personal liability - say
my notes of hand, at twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four months,
respectively, to allow time for something to turn up -'

'Could be?  Can be and shall be, on your own terms,' returned my
aunt, 'if you say the word.  Think of this now, both of you.  Here
are some people David knows, going out to Australia shortly.  If
you decide to go, why shouldn't you go in the same ship?  You may
help each other.  Think of this now, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber.  Take
your time, and weigh it well.'

'There is but one question, my dear ma'am, I could wish to ask,'
said Mrs. Micawber.  'The climate, I believe, is healthy?'

'Finest in the world!' said my aunt.

'Just so,' returned Mrs. Micawber.  'Then my question arises.  Now,
are the circumstances of the country such, that a man of Mr.
Micawber's abilities would have a fair chance of rising in the
social scale?  I will not say, at present, might he aspire to be
Governor, or anything of that sort; but would there be a reasonable
opening for his talents to develop themselves - that would be amply
sufficient - and find their own expansion?'

'No better opening anywhere,' said my aunt, 'for a man who conducts
himself well, and is industrious.'

'For a man who conducts himself well,' repeated Mrs. Micawber, with
her clearest business manner, 'and is industrious.  Precisely.  It
is evident to me that Australia is the legitimate sphere of action
for Mr. Micawber!'

'I entertain the conviction, my dear madam,' said Mr. Micawber,
'that it is, under existing circumstances, the land, the only land,
for myself and family; and that something of an extraordinary
nature will turn up on that shore.  It is no distance -
comparatively speaking; and though consideration is due to the
kindness of your proposal, I assure you that is a mere matter of
form.'

Shall I ever forget how, in a moment, he was the most sanguine of
men, looking on to fortune; or how Mrs. Micawber presently
discoursed about the habits of the kangaroo! Shall I ever recall
that street of Canterbury on a market-day, without recalling him,
as he walked back with us; expressing, in the hardy roving manner
he assumed, the unsettled habits of a temporary sojourner in the
land; and looking at the bullocks, as they came by, with the eye of
an Australian farmer!



CHAPTER 53
ANOTHER RETROSPECT


I must pause yet once again.  O, my child-wife, there is a figure
in the moving crowd before my memory, quiet and still, saying in
its innocent love and childish beauty, Stop to think of me - turn
to look upon the Little Blossom, as it flutters to the ground!

I do.  All else grows dim, and fades away.  I am again with Dora,
in our cottage.  I do not know how long she has been ill.  I am so
used to it in feeling, that I cannot count the time.  It is not
really long, in weeks or months; but, in my usage and experience,
it is a weary, weary while.

They have left off telling me to 'wait a few days more'.  I have
begun to fear, remotely, that the day may never shine, when I shall
see my child-wife running in the sunlight with her old friend Jip.

He is, as it were suddenly, grown very old.  It may be that he
misses in his mistress, something that enlivened him and made him
younger; but he mopes, and his sight is weak, and his limbs are
feeble, and my aunt is sorry that he objects to her no more, but
creeps near her as he lies on Dora's bed - she sitting at the
bedside - and mildly licks her hand.

Dora lies smiling on us, and is beautiful, and utters no hasty or
complaining word.  She says that we are very good to her; that her
dear old careful boy is tiring himself out, she knows; that my aunt
has no sleep, yet is always wakeful, active, and kind.  Sometimes,
the little bird-like ladies come to see her; and then we talk about
our wedding-day, and all that happy time.

What a strange rest and pause in my life there seems to be - and in
all life, within doors and without - when I sit in the quiet,
shaded, orderly room, with the blue eyes of my child-wife turned
towards me, and her little fingers twining round my hand! Many and
many an hour I sit thus; but, of all those times, three times come
the freshest on my mind.


It is morning; and Dora, made so trim by my aunt's hands, shows me
how her pretty hair will curl upon the pillow yet, an how long and
bright it is, and how she likes to have it loosely gathered in that
net she wears.

'Not that I am vain of it, now, you mocking boy,' she says, when I
smile; 'but because you used to say you thought it so beautiful;
and because, when I first began to think about you, I used to peep
in the glass, and wonder whether you would like very much to have
a lock of it.  Oh what a foolish fellow you were, Doady, when I
gave you one!'

'That was on the day when you were painting the flowers I had given
you, Dora, and when I told you how much in love I was.'

'Ah! but I didn't like to tell you,' says Dora, 'then, how I had
cried over them, because I believed you really liked me! When I can
run about again as I used to do, Doady, let us go and see those
places where we were such a silly couple, shall we?  And take some
of the old walks?  And not forget poor papa?'

'Yes, we will, and have some happy days.  So you must make haste to
get well, my dear.'

'Oh, I shall soon do that! I am so much better, you don't know!'


It is evening; and I sit in the same chair, by the same bed, with
the same face turned towards me.  We have been silent, and there is
a smile upon her face.  I have ceased to carry my light burden up
and down stairs now.  She lies here all the day.

'Doady!'

'My dear Dora!'

'You won't think what I am going to say, unreasonable, after what
you told me, such a little while ago, of Mr. Wickfield's not being
well?  I want to see Agnes.  Very much I want to see her.'

'I will write to her, my dear.'

'Will you?'

'Directly.'

'What a good, kind boy! Doady, take me on your arm.  Indeed, my
dear, it's not a whim.  It's not a foolish fancy.  I want, very
much indeed, to see her!'

'I am certain of it.  I have only to tell her so, and she is sure
to come.'

'You are very lonely when you go downstairs, now?' Dora whispers,
with her arm about my neck.

'How can I be otherwise, my own love, when I see your empty chair?'

'My empty chair!' She clings to me for a little while, in silence. 
'And you really miss me, Doady?' looking up, and brightly smiling. 
'Even poor, giddy, stupid me?'

'My heart, who is there upon earth that I could miss so much?'

'Oh, husband! I am so glad, yet so sorry!' creeping closer to me,
and folding me in both her arms.  She laughs and sobs, and then is
quiet, and quite happy.

'Quite!' she says.  'Only give Agnes my dear love, and tell her
that I want very, very, much to see her; and I have nothing left to
wish for.'

'Except to get well again, Dora.'

'Ah, Doady! Sometimes I think - you know I always was a silly
little thing! - that that will never be!'

'Don't say so, Dora! Dearest love, don't think so!'

'I won't, if I can help it, Doady.  But I am very happy; though my
dear boy is so lonely by himself, before his child-wife's empty
chair!'


It is night; and I am with her still.  Agnes has arrived; has been
among us for a whole day and an evening.  She, my aunt, and I, have
sat with Dora since the morning, all together.  We have not talked
much, but Dora has been perfectly contented and cheerful.  We are
now alone.

Do I know, now, that my child-wife will soon leave me?  They have
told me so; they have told me nothing new to my thoughts- but I am
far from sure that I have taken that truth to heart.  I cannot
master it.  I have withdrawn by myself, many times today, to weep. 
I have remembered Who wept for a parting between the living and the
dead.  I have bethought me of all that gracious and compassionate
history.  I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and
that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly
settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come.  I hold
her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me,
alive in all its strength.  I cannot shut out a pale lingering
shadow of belief that she will be spared.

'I am going to speak to you, Doady.  I am going to say something I
have often thought of saying, lately.  You won't mind?' with a
gentle look.

'Mind, my darling?'

'Because I don't know what you will think, or what you may have
thought sometimes.  Perhaps you have often thought the same. 
Doady, dear, I am afraid I was too young.'

I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and she looks into my eyes,
and speaks very softly.  Gradually, as she goes on, I feel, with a
stricken heart, that she is speaking of herself as past.

'I am afraid, dear, I was too young.  I don't mean in years only,
but in experience, and thoughts, and everything.  I was such a
silly little creature! I am afraid it would have been better, if we
had only loved each other as a boy and girl, and forgotten it.  I
have begun to think I was not fit to be a wife.'

I try to stay my tears, and to reply, 'Oh, Dora, love, as fit as I
to be a husband!'

'I don't know,' with the old shake of her curls.  'Perhaps! But if
I had been more fit to be married I might have made you more so,
too.  Besides, you are very clever, and I never was.'

'We have been very happy, my sweet Dora.'

'I was very happy, very.  But, as years went on, my dear boy would
have wearied of his child-wife.  She would have been less and less
a companion for him.  He would have been more and more sensible of
what was wanting in his home.  She wouldn't have improved.  It is
better as it is.'

'Oh, Dora, dearest, dearest, do not speak to me so.  Every word
seems a reproach!'

'No, not a syllable!' she answers, kissing me.  'Oh, my dear, you
never deserved it, and I loved you far too well to say a
reproachful word to you, in earnest - it was all the merit I had,
except being pretty - or you thought me so.  Is it lonely, down-
stairs, Doady?'

'Very! Very!'

'Don't cry! Is my chair there?'

'In its old place.'

'Oh, how my poor boy cries! Hush, hush! Now, make me one promise. 
I want to speak to Agnes.  When you go downstairs, tell Agnes so,
and send her up to me; and while I speak to her, let no one come -
not even aunt.  I want to speak to Agnes by herself.  I want to
speak to Agnes, quite alone.'

I promise that she shall, immediately; but I cannot leave her, for
my grief.

'I said that it was better as it is!' she whispers, as she holds me
in her arms.  'Oh, Doady, after more years, you never could have
loved your child-wife better than you do; and, after more years,
she would so have tried and disappointed you, that you might not
have been able to love her half so well! I know I was too young and
foolish.  It is much better as it is!'

Agnes is downstairs, when I go into the parlour; and I give her the
message.  She disappears, leaving me alone with Jip.

His Chinese house is by the fire; and he lies within it, on his bed
of flannel, querulously trying to sleep.  The bright moon is high
and clear.  As I look out on the night, my tears fall fast, and my
undisciplined heart is chastened heavily - heavily.

I sit down by the fire, thinking with a blind remorse of all those
secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage.  I think of
every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that
trifles make the sum of life.  Ever rising from the sea of my
remembrance, is the image of the dear child as I knew her first,
graced by my young love, and by her own, with every fascination
wherein such love is rich.  Would it, indeed, have been better if
we had loved each other as a boy and a girl, and forgotten it? 
Undisciplined heart, reply!

How the time wears, I know not; until I am recalled by my
child-wife's old companion.  More restless than he was, he crawls
out of his house, and looks at me, and wanders to the door, and
whines to go upstairs.

'Not tonight, Jip! Not tonight!'

He comes very slowly back to me, licks my hand, and lifts his dim
eyes to my face.

'Oh, Jip! It may be, never again!'

He lies down at my feet, stretches himself out as if to sleep, and
with a plaintive cry, is dead.

'Oh, Agnes! Look, look, here!'

- That face, so full of pity, and of grief, that rain of tears,
that awful mute appeal to me, that solemn hand upraised towards
Heaven!

'Agnes?'

It is over.  Darkness comes before my eyes; and, for a time, all
things are blotted out of my remembrance.



CHAPTER 54
Mr. MICAWBER'S TRANSACTIONS


This is not the time at which I am to enter on the state of my mind
beneath its load of sorrow.  I came to think that the Future was
walled up before me, that the energy and action of my life were at
an end, that I never could find any refuge but in the grave.  I
came to think so, I say, but not in the first shock of my grief. 
It slowly grew to that.  If the events I go on to relate, had not
thickened around me, in the beginning to confuse, and in the end to
augment, my affliction, it is possible (though I think not
probable), that I might have fallen at once into this condition. 
As it was, an interval occurred before I fully knew my own
distress; an interval, in which I even supposed that its sharpest
pangs were past; and when my mind could soothe itself by resting on
all that was most innocent and beautiful, in the tender story that
was closed for ever.

When it was first proposed that I should go abroad, or how it came
to be agreed among us that I was to seek the restoration of my
peace in change and travel, I do not, even now, distinctly know. 
The spirit of Agnes so pervaded all we thought, and said, and did,
in that time of sorrow, that I assume I may refer the project to
her influence.  But her influence was so quiet that I know no more.

And now, indeed, I began to think that in my old association of her
with the stained-glass window in the church, a prophetic
foreshadowing of what she would be to me, in the calamity that was
to happen in the fullness of time, had found a way into my mind. 
In all that sorrow, from the moment, never to be forgotten, when
she stood before me with her upraised hand, she was like a sacred
presence in my lonely house.  When the Angel of Death alighted
there, my child-wife fell asleep - they told me so when I could
bear to hear it - on her bosom, with a smile.  From my swoon, I
first awoke to a consciousness of her compassionate tears, her
words of hope and peace, her gentle face bending down as from a
purer region nearer Heaven, over my undisciplined heart, and
softening its pain.

Let me go on.

I was to go abroad.  That seemed to have been determined among us
from the first.  The ground now covering all that could perish of
my departed wife, I waited only for what Mr. Micawber called the
'final pulverization of Heep'; and for the departure of the
emigrants.

At the request of Traddles, most affectionate and devoted of
friends in my trouble, we returned to Canterbury: I mean my aunt,
Agnes, and I.  We proceeded by appointment straight to Mr.
Micawber's house; where, and at Mr. Wickfield's, my friend had been
labouring ever since our explosive meeting.  When poor Mrs.
Micawber saw me come in, in my black clothes, she was sensibly
affected.  There was a great deal of good in Mrs. Micawber's heart,
which had not been dunned out of it in all those many years.

'Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber,' was my aunt's first salutation after
we were seated.  'Pray, have you thought about that emigration
proposal of mine?'

'My dear madam,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'perhaps I cannot better
express the conclusion at which Mrs. Micawber, your humble servant,
and I may add our children, have jointly and severally arrived,
than by borrowing the language of an illustrious poet, to reply
that our Boat is on the shore, and our Bark is on the sea.'

'That's right,' said my aunt.  'I augur all sort of good from your
sensible decision.'

'Madam, you do us a great deal of honour,' he rejoined.  He then
referred to a memorandum.  'With respect to the pecuniary
assistance enabling us to launch our frail canoe on the ocean of
enterprise, I have reconsidered that important business-point; and
would beg to propose my notes of hand - drawn, it is needless to
stipulate, on stamps of the amounts respectively required by the
various Acts of Parliament applying to such securities - at
eighteen, twenty-four, and thirty months.  The proposition I
originally submitted, was twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four; but I
am apprehensive that such an arrangement might not allow sufficient
time for the requisite amount of - Something - to turn up.  We
might not,' said Mr. Micawber, looking round the room as if it
represented several hundred acres of highly cultivated land, 'on
the first responsibility becoming due, have been successful in our
harvest, or we might not have got our harvest in.  Labour, I
believe, is sometimes difficult to obtain in that portion of our
colonial possessions where it will be our lot to combat with the
teeming soil.'

'Arrange it in any way you please, sir,' said my aunt.

'Madam,' he replied, 'Mrs. Micawber and myself are deeply sensible
of the very considerate kindness of our friends and patrons.  What
I wish is, to be perfectly business-like, and perfectly punctual. 
Turning over, as we are about to turn over, an entirely new leaf;
and falling back, as we are now in the act of falling back, for a
Spring of no common magnitude; it is important to my sense of
self-respect, besides being an example to my son, that these
arrangements should be concluded as between man and man.'

I don't know that Mr. Micawber attached any meaning to this last
phrase; I don't know that anybody ever does, or did; but he
appeared to relish it uncommonly, and repeated, with an impressive
cough, 'as between man and man'.

'I propose,' said Mr. Micawber, 'Bills - a convenience to the
mercantile world, for which, I believe, we are originally indebted
to the Jews, who appear to me to have had a devilish deal too much
to do with them ever since - because they are negotiable.  But if
a Bond, or any other description of security, would be preferred,
I should be happy to execute any such instrument.  As between man
and man.'

MY aunt observed, that in a case where both parties were willing to
agree to anything, she took it for granted there would be no
difficulty in settling this point.  Mr. Micawber was of her
opinion.

'In reference to our domestic preparations, madam,' said Mr.
Micawber, with some pride, 'for meeting the destiny to which we are
now understood to be self-devoted, I beg to report them.  My eldest
daughter attends at five every morning in a neighbouring
establishment, to acquire the process - if process it may be called
- of milking cows.  My younger children are instructed to observe,
as closely as circumstances will permit, the habits of the pigs and
poultry maintained in the poorer parts of this city: a pursuit from
which they have, on two occasions, been brought home, within an
inch of being run over.  I have myself directed some attention,
during the past week, to the art of baking; and my son Wilkins has
issued forth with a walking-stick and driven cattle, when
permitted, by the rugged hirelings who had them in charge, to
render any voluntary service in that direction - which I regret to
say, for the credit of our nature, was not often; he being
generally warned, with imprecations, to desist.'

'All very right indeed,' said my aunt, encouragingly.  'Mrs.
Micawber has been busy, too, I have no doubt.'

'My dear madam,' returned Mrs. Micawber, with her business-like
air.  'I am free to confess that I have not been actively engaged
in pursuits immediately connected with cultivation or with stock,
though well aware that both will claim my attention on a foreign
shore.  Such opportunities as I have been enabled to alienate from
my domestic duties, I have devoted to corresponding at some length
with my family.  For I own it seems to me, my dear Mr.
Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, who always fell back on me, I
suppose from old habit, to whomsoever else she might address her
discourse at starting, 'that the time is come when the past should
be buried in oblivion; when my family should take Mr. Micawber by
the hand, and Mr. Micawber should take my family by the hand; when
the lion should lie down with the lamb, and my family be on terms
with Mr. Micawber.'

I said I thought so too.

'This, at least, is the light, my dear Mr. Copperfield,' pursued
Mrs. Micawber, 'in which I view the subject.  When I lived at home
with my papa and mama, my papa was accustomed to ask, when any
point was under discussion in our limited circle, "In what light
does my Emma view the subject?" That my papa was too partial, I
know; still, on such a point as the frigid coldness which has ever
subsisted between Mr. Micawber and my family, I necessarily have
formed an opinion, delusive though it may be.'

'No doubt.  Of course you have, ma'am,' said my aunt.

'Precisely so,' assented Mrs. Micawber.  'Now, I may be wrong in my
conclusions; it is very likely that I am, but my individual
impression is, that the gulf between my family and Mr. Micawber may
be traced to an apprehension, on the part of my family, that Mr.
Micawber would require pecuniary accommodation.  I cannot help
thinking,' said Mrs. Micawber, with an air of deep sagacity, 'that
there are members of my family who have been apprehensive that Mr.
Micawber would solicit them for their names.  - I do not mean to be
conferred in Baptism upon our children, but to be inscribed on
Bills of Exchange, and negotiated in the Money Market.'

The look of penetration with which Mrs. Micawber announced this
discovery, as if no one had ever thought of it before, seemed
rather to astonish my aunt; who abruptly replied, 'Well, ma'am,
upon the whole, I shouldn't wonder if you were right!'

'Mr. Micawber being now on the eve of casting off the pecuniary
shackles that have so long enthralled him,' said Mrs. Micawber,
'and of commencing a new career in a country where there is
sufficient range for his abilities, - which, in my opinion, is
exceedingly important; Mr. Micawber's abilities peculiarly
requiring space, - it seems to me that my family should signalize
the occasion by coming forward.  What I could wish to see, would be
a meeting between Mr. Micawber and my family at a festive
entertainment, to be given at my family's expense; where Mr.
Micawber's health and prosperity being proposed, by some leading
member of my family, Mr. Micawber might have an opportunity of
developing his views.'

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber, with some heat, 'it may be better for
me to state distinctly, at once, that if I were to develop my views
to that assembled group, they would possibly be found of an
offensive nature: my impression being that your family are, in the
aggregate, impertinent Snobs; and, in detail, unmitigated
Ruffians.'

'Micawber,' said Mrs. Micawber, shaking her head, 'no! You have
never understood them, and they have never understood you.'

Mr. Micawber coughed.

'They have never understood you, Micawber,' said his wife.  'They
may be incapable of it.  If so, that is their misfortune.  I can
pity their misfortune.'

'I am extremely sorry, my dear Emma,' said Mr. Micawber, relenting,
'to have been betrayed into any expressions that might, even
remotely, have the appearance of being strong expressions.  All I
would say is, that I can go abroad without your family coming
forward to favour me, - in short, with a parting Shove of their
cold shoulders; and that, upon the whole, I would rather leave
England with such impetus as I possess, than derive any
acceleration of it from that quarter.  At the same time, my dear,
if they should condescend to reply to your communications - which
our joint experience renders most improbable - far be it from me to
be a barrier to your wishes.'

The matter being thus amicably settled, Mr. Micawber gave Mrs.
Micawber his arm, and glancing at the heap of books and papers
lying before Traddles on the table, said they would leave us to
ourselves; which they ceremoniously did.

'My dear Copperfield,' said Traddles, leaning back in his chair
when they were gone, and looking at me with an affection that made
his eyes red, and his hair all kinds of shapes, 'I don't make any
excuse for troubling you with business, because I know you are
deeply interested in it, and it may divert your thoughts.  My dear
boy, I hope you are not worn out?'

'I am quite myself,' said I, after a pause.  'We have more cause to
think of my aunt than of anyone.  You know how much she has done.'

'Surely, surely,' answered Traddles.  'Who can forget it!'

'But even that is not all,' said I.  'During the last fortnight,
some new trouble has vexed her; and she has been in and out of
London every day.  Several times she has gone out early, and been
absent until evening.  Last night, Traddles, with this journey
before her, it was almost midnight before she came home.  You know
what her consideration for others is.  She will not tell me what
has happened to distress her.'

My aunt, very pale, and with deep lines in her face, sat immovable
until I had finished; when some stray tears found their way to her
cheeks, and she put her hand on mine.

'It's nothing, Trot; it's nothing.  There will be no more of it. 
You shall know by and by.  Now Agnes, my dear, let us attend to
these affairs.'

'I must do Mr. Micawber the justice to say,' Traddles began, 'that
although he would appear not to have worked to any good account for
himself, he is a most untiring man when he works for other people. 
I never saw such a fellow.  If he always goes on in the same way,
he must be, virtually, about two hundred years old, at present. 
The heat into which he has been continually putting himself; and
the distracted and impetuous manner in which he has been diving,
day and night, among papers and books; to say nothing of the
immense number of letters he has written me between this house and
Mr. Wickfield's, and often across the table when he has been
sitting opposite, and might much more easily have spoken; is quite
extraordinary.'

'Letters!' cried my aunt.  'I believe he dreams in letters!'

'There's Mr. Dick, too,' said Traddles, 'has been doing wonders! As
soon as he was released from overlooking Uriah Heep, whom he kept
in such charge as I never saw exceeded, he began to devote himself
to Mr. Wickfield.  And really his anxiety to be of use in the
investigations we have been making, and his real usefulness in
extracting, and copying, and fetching, and carrying, have been
quite stimulating to us.'

'Dick is a very remarkable man,' exclaimed my aunt; 'and I always
said he was.  Trot, you know it.'

'I am happy to say, Miss Wickfield,' pursued Traddles, at once with
great delicacy and with great earnestness, 'that in your absence
Mr. Wickfield has considerably improved.  Relieved of the incubus
that had fastened upon him for so long a time, and of the dreadful
apprehensions under which he had lived, he is hardly the same
person.  At times, even his impaired power of concentrating his
memory and attention on particular points of business, has
recovered itself very much; and he has been able to assist us in
making some things clear, that we should have found very difficult
indeed, if not hopeless, without him.  But what I have to do is to
come to results; which are short enough; not to gossip on all the
hopeful circumstances I have observed, or I shall never have done.'
His natural manner and agreeable simplicity made it transparent
that he said this to put us in good heart, and to enable Agnes to
hear her father mentioned with greater confidence; but it was not
the less pleasant for that.

'Now, let me see,' said Traddles, looking among the papers on the
table.  'Having counted our funds, and reduced to order a great
mass of unintentional confusion in the first place, and of wilful
confusion and falsification in the second, we take it to be clear
that Mr. Wickfield might now wind up his business, and his
agency-trust, and exhibit no deficiency or defalcation whatever.'

'Oh, thank Heaven!' cried Agnes, fervently.

'But,' said Traddles, 'the surplus that would be left as his means
of support - and I suppose the house to be sold, even in saying
this - would be so small, not exceeding in all probability some
hundreds of pounds, that perhaps, Miss Wickfield, it would be best
to consider whether he might not retain his agency of the estate to
which he has so long been receiver.  His friends might advise him,
you know; now he is free.  You yourself, Miss Wickfield -
Copperfield - I -'

'I have considered it, Trotwood,' said Agnes, looking to me, 'and
I feel that it ought not to be, and must not be; even on the
recommendation of a friend to whom I am so grateful, and owe so
much.'

'I will not say that I recommend it,' observed Traddles.  'I think
it right to suggest it.  No more.'

'I am happy to hear you say so,' answered Agnes, steadily, 'for it
gives me hope, almost assurance, that we think alike.  Dear Mr.
Traddles and dear Trotwood, papa once free with honour, what could
I wish for! I have always aspired, if I could have released him
from the toils in which he was held, to render back some little
portion of the love and care I owe him, and to devote my life to
him.  It has been, for years, the utmost height of my hopes.  To
take our future on myself, will be the next great happiness - the
next to his release from all trust and responsibility - that I can
know.'

'Have you thought how, Agnes?'

'Often! I am not afraid, dear Trotwood.  I am certain of success. 
So many people know me here, and think kindly of me, that I am
certain.  Don't mistrust me.  Our wants are not many.  If I rent
the dear old house, and keep a school, I shall be useful and
happy.'

The calm fervour of her cheerful voice brought back so vividly,
first the dear old house itself, and then my solitary home, that my
heart was too full for speech.  Traddles pretended for a little
while to be busily looking among the papers.

'Next, Miss Trotwood,' said Traddles, 'that property of yours.'

'Well, sir,' sighed my aunt.  'All I have got to say about it is,
that if it's gone, I can bear it; and if it's not gone, I shall be
glad to get it back.'

'It was originally, I think, eight thousand pounds, Consols?' said
Traddles.

'Right!' replied my aunt.

'I can't account for more than five,' said Traddles, with an air of
perplexity.

'- thousand, do you mean?' inquired my aunt, with uncommon
composure, 'or pounds?'

'Five thousand pounds,' said Traddles.

'It was all there was,' returned my aunt.  'I sold three, myself. 
One, I paid for your articles, Trot, my dear; and the other two I
have by me.  When I lost the rest, I thought it wise to say nothing
about that sum, but to keep it secretly for a rainy day.  I wanted
to see how you would come out of the trial, Trot; and you came out
nobly - persevering, self-reliant, self-denying! So did Dick. 
Don't speak to me, for I find my nerves a little shaken!'

Nobody would have thought so, to see her sitting upright, with her
arms folded; but she had wonderful self-command.

'Then I am delighted to say,' cried Traddles, beaming with joy,
'that we have recovered the whole money!'

'Don't congratulate me, anybody!' exclaimed my aunt.  'How so,
sir?'

'You believed it had been misappropriated by Mr. Wickfield?' said
Traddles.

'Of course I did,' said my aunt, 'and was therefore easily
silenced.  Agnes, not a word!'

'And indeed,' said Traddles, 'it was sold, by virtue of the power
of management he held from you; but I needn't say by whom sold, or
on whose actual signature.  It was afterwards pretended to Mr.
Wickfield, by that rascal, - and proved, too, by figures, - that he
had possessed himself of the money (on general instructions, he
said) to keep other deficiencies and difficulties from the light. 
Mr. Wickfield, being so weak and helpless in his hands as to pay
you, afterwards, several sums of interest on a pretended principal
which he knew did not exist, made himself, unhappily, a party to
the fraud.'

'And at last took the blame upon himself,' added my aunt; 'and
wrote me a mad letter, charging himself with robbery, and wrong
unheard of.  Upon which I paid him a visit early one morning,
called for a candle, burnt the letter, and told him if he ever
could right me and himself, to do it; and if he couldn't, to keep
his own counsel for his daughter's sake.  - If anybody speaks to
me, I'll leave the house!'

We all remained quiet; Agnes covering her face.

'Well, my dear friend,' said my aunt, after a pause, 'and you have
really extorted the money back from him?'

'Why, the fact is,' returned Traddles, 'Mr. Micawber had so
completely hemmed him in, and was always ready with so many new
points if an old one failed, that he could not escape from us.  A
most remarkable circumstance is, that I really don't think he
grasped this sum even so much for the gratification of his avarice,
which was inordinate, as in the hatred he felt for Copperfield.  He
said so to me, plainly.  He said he would even have spent as much,
to baulk or injure Copperfield.'

'Ha!' said my aunt, knitting her brows thoughtfully, and glancing
at Agnes.  'And what's become of him?'

'I don't know.  He left here,' said Traddles, 'with his mother, who
had been clamouring, and beseeching, and disclosing, the whole
time.  They went away by one of the London night coaches, and I
know no more about him; except that his malevolence to me at
parting was audacious.  He seemed to consider himself hardly less
indebted to me, than to Mr. Micawber; which I consider (as I told
him) quite a compliment.'

'Do you suppose he has any money, Traddles?' I asked.

'Oh dear, yes, I should think so,' he replied, shaking his head,
seriously.  'I should say he must have pocketed a good deal, in one
way or other.  But, I think you would find, Copperfield, if you had
an opportunity of observing his course, that money would never keep
that man out of mischief.  He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that
whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly.  It's his
only compensation for the outward restraints he puts upon himself. 
Always creeping along the ground to some small end or other, he
will always magnify every object in the way; and consequently will
hate and suspect everybody that comes, in the most innocent manner,
between him and it.  So the crooked courses will become crookeder,
at any moment, for the least reason, or for none.  It's only
necessary to consider his history here,' said Traddles, 'to know
that.'

'He's a monster of meanness!' said my aunt.

'Really I don't know about that,' observed Traddles thoughtfully. 
'Many people can be very mean, when they give their minds to it.'

'And now, touching Mr. Micawber,' said my aunt.

'Well, really,' said Traddles, cheerfully, 'I must, once more, give
Mr. Micawber high praise.  But for his having been so patient and
persevering for so long a time, we never could have hoped to do
anything worth speaking of.  And I think we ought to consider that
Mr. Micawber did right, for right's sake, when we reflect what
terms he might have made with Uriah Heep himself, for his silence.'

'I think so too,' said I.

'Now, what would you give him?' inquired my aunt.

'Oh! Before you come to that,' said Traddles, a little
disconcerted, 'I am afraid I thought it discreet to omit (not being
able to carry everything before me) two points, in making this
lawless adjustment - for it's perfectly lawless from beginning to
end - of a difficult affair.  Those I.O.U.'s, and so forth, which
Mr. Micawber gave him for the advances he had -'

'Well! They must be paid,' said my aunt.

'Yes, but I don't know when they may be proceeded on, or where they
are,' rejoined Traddles, opening his eyes; 'and I anticipate, that,
between this time and his departure, Mr. Micawber will be
constantly arrested, or taken in execution.'

'Then he must be constantly set free again, and taken out of
execution,' said my aunt.  'What's the amount altogether?'

'Why, Mr. Micawber has entered the transactions - he calls them
transactions - with great form, in a book,' rejoined Traddles,
smiling; 'and he makes the amount a hundred and three pounds,
five.'

'Now, what shall we give him, that sum included?' said my aunt. 
'Agnes, my dear, you and I can talk about division of it
afterwards.  What should it be?  Five hundred pounds?'

Upon this, Traddles and I both struck in at once.  We both
recommended a small sum in money, and the payment, without
stipulation to Mr. Micawber, of the Uriah claims as they came in. 
We proposed that the family should have their passage and their
outfit, and a hundred pounds; and that Mr. Micawber's arrangement
for the repayment of the advances should be gravely entered into,
as it might be wholesome for him to suppose himself under that
responsibility.  To this, I added the suggestion, that I should
give some explanation of his character and history to Mr. Peggotty,
who I knew could be relied on; and that to Mr. Peggotty should be
quietly entrusted the discretion of advancing another hundred.  I
further proposed to interest Mr. Micawber in Mr. Peggotty, by
confiding so much of Mr. Peggotty's story to him as I might feel
justified in relating, or might think expedient; and to endeavour
to bring each of them to bear upon the other, for the common
advantage.  We all entered warmly into these views; and I may
mention at once, that the principals themselves did so, shortly
afterwards, with perfect good will and harmony.

Seeing that Traddles now glanced anxiously at my aunt again, I
reminded him of the second and last point to which he had adverted.

'You and your aunt will excuse me, Copperfield, if I touch upon a
painful theme, as I greatly fear I shall,' said Traddles,
hesitating; 'but I think it necessary to bring it to your
recollection.  On the day of Mr. Micawber's memorable denunciation
a threatening allusion was made by Uriah Heep to your aunt's -
husband.'

My aunt, retaining her stiff position, and apparent composure,
assented with a nod.

'Perhaps,' observed Traddles, 'it was mere purposeless
impertinence?'

'No,' returned my aunt.

'There was - pardon me - really such a person, and at all in his
power?' hinted Traddles.

'Yes, my good friend,' said my aunt.

Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained
that he had not been able to approach this subject; that it had
shared the fate of Mr. Micawber's liabilities, in not being
comprehended in the terms he had made; that we were no longer of
any authority with Uriah Heep; and that if he could do us, or any
of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt he would.

My aunt remained quiet; until again some stray tears found their
way to her cheeks.
'You are quite right,' she said.  'It was very thoughtful to
mention it.'

'Can I - or Copperfield - do anything?' asked Traddles, gently.

'Nothing,' said my aunt.  'I thank you many times.  Trot, my dear,
a vain threat! Let us have Mr. and Mrs. Micawber back.  And don't
any of you speak to me!' With that she smoothed her dress, and sat,
with her upright carriage, looking at the door.

'Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber!' said my aunt, when they entered. 
'We have been discussing your emigration, with many apologies to
you for keeping you out of the room so long; and I'll tell you what
arrangements we propose.'

These she explained to the unbounded satisfaction of the family, -
children and all being then present, - and so much to the awakening
of Mr. Micawber's punctual habits in the opening stage of all bill
transactions, that he could not be dissuaded from immediately
rushing out, in the highest spirits, to buy the stamps for his
notes of hand.  But, his joy received a sudden check; for within
five minutes, he returned in the custody of a sheriff 's officer,
informing us, in a flood of tears, that all was lost.  We, being
quite prepared for this event, which was of course a proceeding of
Uriah Heep's, soon paid the money; and in five minutes more Mr.
Micawber was seated at the table, filling up the stamps with an
expression of perfect joy, which only that congenial employment, or
the making of punch, could impart in full completeness to his
shining face.  To see him at work on the stamps, with the relish of
an artist, touching them like pictures, looking at them sideways,
taking weighty notes of dates and amounts in his pocket-book, and
contemplating them when finished, with a high sense of their
precious value, was a sight indeed.

'Now, the best thing you can do, sir, if you'll allow me to advise
you,' said my aunt, after silently observing him, 'is to abjure
that occupation for evermore.'

'Madam,' replied Mr. Micawber, 'it is my intention to register such
a vow on the virgin page of the future.  Mrs. Micawber will attest
it.  I trust,' said Mr. Micawber, solemnly, 'that my son Wilkins
will ever bear in mind, that he had infinitely better put his fist
in the fire, than use it to handle the serpents that have poisoned
the life-blood of his unhappy parent!' Deeply affected, and changed
in a moment to the image of despair, Mr. Micawber regarded the
serpents with a look of gloomy abhorrence (in which his late
admiration of them was not quite subdued), folded them up and put
them in his pocket.

This closed the proceedings of the evening.  We were weary with
sorrow and fatigue, and my aunt and I were to return to London on
the morrow.  It was arranged that the Micawbers should follow us,
after effecting a sale of their goods to a broker; that Mr.
Wickfield's affairs should be brought to a settlement, with all
convenient speed, under the direction of Traddles; and that Agnes
should also come to London, pending those arrangements.  We passed
the night at the old house, which, freed from the presence of the
Heeps, seemed purged of a disease; and I lay in my old room, like
a shipwrecked wanderer come home.

We went back next day to my aunt's house - not to mine- and when
she and I sat alone, as of old, before going to bed, she said:

'Trot, do you really wish to know what I have had upon my mind
lately?'

'Indeed I do, aunt.  If there ever was a time when I felt unwilling
that you should have a sorrow or anxiety which I could not share,
it is now.'

'You have had sorrow enough, child,' said my aunt, affectionately,
'without the addition of my little miseries.  I could have no other
motive, Trot, in keeping anything from you.'

'I know that well,' said I.  'But tell me now.'

'Would you ride with me a little way tomorrow morning?' asked my
aunt.

'Of course.'

'At nine,' said she.  'I'll tell you then, my dear.'

At nine, accordingly, we went out in a little chariot, and drove to
London.  We drove a long way through the streets, until we came to
one of the large hospitals.  Standing hard by the building was a
plain hearse.  The driver recognized my aunt, and, in obedience to
a motion of her hand at the window, drove slowly off; we following.

'You understand it now, Trot,' said my aunt.  'He is gone!'

'Did he die in the hospital?'

'Yes.'

She sat immovable beside me; but, again I saw the stray tears on
her face.

'He was there once before,' said my aunt presently.  'He was ailing
a long time - a shattered, broken man, these many years.  When he
knew his state in this last illness, he asked them to send for me. 
He was sorry then.  Very sorry.'

'You went, I know, aunt.'

'I went.  I was with him a good deal afterwards.'

'He died the night before we went to Canterbury?' said I.
My aunt nodded.  'No one can harm him now,' she said.  'It was a
vain threat.'

We drove away, out of town, to the churchyard at Hornsey.  'Better
here than in the streets,' said my aunt.  'He was born here.'

We alighted; and followed the plain coffin to a corner I remember
well, where the service was read consigning it to the dust.

'Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,' said my aunt, as we
walked back to the chariot, 'I was married.  God forgive us all!'
We took our seats in silence; and so she sat beside me for a long
time, holding my hand.  At length she suddenly burst into tears,
and said:

'He was a fine-looking man when I married him, Trot - and he was
sadly changed!'

It did not last long.  After the relief of tears, she soon became
composed, and even cheerful.  Her nerves were a little shaken, she
said, or she would not have given way to it.  God forgive us all!

So we rode back to her little cottage at Highgate, where we found
the following short note, which had arrived by that morning's post
from Mr. Micawber:


          'Canterbury,

               'Friday.

'My dear Madam, and Copperfield,

'The fair land of promise lately looming on the horizon is again
enveloped in impenetrable mists, and for ever withdrawn from the
eyes of a drifting wretch whose Doom is sealed!

'Another writ has been issued (in His Majesty's High Court of
King's Bench at Westminster), in another cause of HEEP V. 
MICAWBER, and the defendant in that cause is the prey of the
sheriff having legal jurisdiction in this bailiwick.

     'Now's the day, and now's the hour,
     See the front of battle lower,
     See approach proud EDWARD'S power -
     Chains and slavery!

'Consigned to which, and to a speedy end (for mental torture is not
supportable beyond a certain point, and that point I feel I have
attained), my course is run.  Bless you, bless you! Some future
traveller, visiting, from motives of curiosity, not unmingled, let
us hope, with sympathy, the place of confinement allotted to
debtors in this city, may, and I trust will, Ponder, as he traces
on its wall, inscribed with a rusty nail,
                              'The obscure initials,

                                   'W. M.

'P.S.  I re-open this to say that our common friend, Mr. Thomas
Traddles (who has not yet left us, and is looking extremely well),
has paid the debt and costs, in the noble name of Miss Trotwood;
and that myself and family are at the height of earthly bliss.'



CHAPTER 55
TEMPEST


I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so
bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it,
in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have
seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower
in a plain, and throwing its fore-cast shadow even on the incidents
of my childish days.

For years after it occurred, I dreamed of it often.  I have started
up so vividly impressed by it, that its fury has yet seemed raging
in my quiet room, in the still night.  I dream of it sometimes,
though at lengthened and uncertain intervals, to this hour.  I have
an association between it and a stormy wind, or the lightest
mention of a sea-shore, as strong as any of which my mind is
conscious.  As plainly as I behold what happened, I will try to
write it down.  I do not recall it, but see it done; for it happens
again before me.

The time drawing on rapidly for the sailing of the emigrant-ship,
my good old nurse (almost broken-hearted for me, when we first met)
came up to London.  I was constantly with her, and her brother, and
the Micawbers (they being very much together); but Emily I never
saw.

One evening when the time was close at hand, I was alone with
Peggotty and her brother.  Our conversation turned on Ham.  She
described to us how tenderly he had taken leave of her, and how
manfully and quietly he had borne himself.  Most of all, of late,
when she believed he was most tried.  It was a subject of which the
affectionate creature never tired; and our interest in hearing the
many examples which she, who was so much with him, had to relate,
was equal to hers in relating them.

MY aunt and I were at that time vacating the two cottages at
Highgate; I intending to go abroad, and she to return to her house
at Dover.  We had a temporary lodging in Covent Garden.  As I
walked home to it, after this evening's conversation, reflecting on
what had passed between Ham and myself when I was last at Yarmouth,
I wavered in the original purpose I had formed, of leaving a letter
for Emily when I should take leave of her uncle on board the ship,
and thought it would be better to write to her now.  She might
desire, I thought, after receiving my communication, to send some
parting word by me to her unhappy lover.  I ought to give her the
opportunity.

I therefore sat down in my room, before going to bed, and wrote to
her.  I told her that I had seen him, and that he had requested me
to tell her what I have already written in its place in these
sheets.  I faithfully repeated it.  I had no need to enlarge upon
it, if I had had the right.  Its deep fidelity and goodness were
not to be adorned by me or any man.  I left it out, to be sent
round in the morning; with a line to Mr. Peggotty, requesting him
to give it to her; and went to bed at daybreak.

I was weaker than I knew then; and, not falling asleep until the
sun was up, lay late, and unrefreshed, next day.  I was roused by
the silent presence of my aunt at my bedside.  I felt it in my
sleep, as I suppose we all do feel such things.

'Trot, my dear,' she said, when I opened my eyes, 'I couldn't make
up my mind to disturb you.  Mr. Peggotty is here; shall he come
up?'

I replied yes, and he soon appeared.

'Mas'r Davy,' he said, when we had shaken hands, 'I giv Em'ly your
letter, sir, and she writ this heer; and begged of me fur to ask
you to read it, and if you see no hurt in't, to be so kind as take
charge on't.'

'Have you read it?' said I.

He nodded sorrowfully.  I opened it, and read as follows:


'I have got your message.  Oh, what can I write, to thank you for
your good and blessed kindness to me!

'I have put the words close to my heart.  I shall keep them till I
die.  They are sharp thorns, but they are such comfort.  I have
prayed over them, oh, I have prayed so much.  When I find what you
are, and what uncle is, I think what God must be, and can cry to
him.

'Good-bye for ever.  Now, my dear, my friend, good-bye for ever in
this world.  In another world, if I am forgiven, I may wake a child
and come to you.  All thanks and blessings.  Farewell, evermore.'


This, blotted with tears, was the letter.

'May I tell her as you doen't see no hurt in't, and as you'll be so
kind as take charge on't, Mas'r Davy?' said Mr. Peggotty, when I
had read it.
'Unquestionably,' said I - 'but I am thinking -'

'Yes, Mas'r Davy?'

'I am thinking,' said I, 'that I'll go down again to Yarmouth. 
There's time, and to spare, for me to go and come back before the
ship sails.  My mind is constantly running on him, in his solitude;
to put this letter of her writing in his hand at this time, and to
enable you to tell her, in the moment of parting, that he has got
it, will be a kindness to both of them.  I solemnly accepted his
commission, dear good fellow, and cannot discharge it too
completely.  The journey is nothing to me.  I am restless, and
shall be better in motion.  I'll go down tonight.'

Though he anxiously endeavoured to dissuade me, I saw that he was
of my mind; and this, if I had required to be confirmed in my
intention, would have had the effect.  He went round to the coach
office, at my request, and took the box-seat for me on the mail. 
In the evening I started, by that conveyance, down the road I had
traversed under so many vicissitudes.

'Don't you think that,' I asked the coachman, in the first stage
out of London, 'a very remarkable sky?  I don't remember to have
seen one like it.'

'Nor I - not equal to it,' he replied.  'That's wind, sir. 
There'll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long.'

It was a murky confusion - here and there blotted with a colour
like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel - of flying clouds,
tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in
the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the
deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to
plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of
nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.  There had been
a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great
sound.  In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more
overcast, and blew hard.

But, as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely
over-spreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow,
harder and harder.  It still increased, until our horses could
scarcely face the wind.  Many times, in the dark part of the night
(it was then late in September, when the nights were not short),
the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often
in serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. 
Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of
steel; and, at those times, when there was any shelter of trees or
lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility
of continuing the struggle.

When the day broke, it blew harder and harder.  I had been in
Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had never
known the like of this, or anything approaching to it.  We came to
Ipswich - very late, having had to fight every inch of ground since
we were ten miles out of London; and found a cluster of people in
the market-place, who had risen from their beds in the night,
fearful of falling chimneys.  Some of these, congregating about the
inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead
having been ripped off a high church-tower, and flung into a
by-street, which they then blocked up.  Others had to tell of
country people, coming in from neighbouring villages, who had seen
great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered
about the roads and fields.  Still, there was no abatement in the
storm, but it blew harder.

As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which this
mighty wind was blowing dead on shore, its force became more and
more terrific.  Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our
lips, and showered salt rain upon us.  The water was out, over
miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth; and every
sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little
breakers setting heavily towards us.  When we came within sight of
the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the
rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and
buildings.  When at last we got into the town, the people came out
to their doors, all aslant, and with streaming hair, making a
wonder of the mail that had come through such a night.

I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea;
staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and
seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea-foam; afraid of falling
slates and tiles; and holding by people I met, at angry corners. 
Coming near the beach, I saw, not only the boatmen, but half the
people of the town, lurking behind buildings; some, now and then
braving the fury of the storm to look away to sea, and blown sheer
out of their course in trying to get zigzag back.

joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose husbands were
away in herring or oyster boats, which there was too much reason to
think might have foundered before they could run in anywhere for
safety.  Grizzled old sailors were among the people, shaking their
heads, as they looked from water to sky, and muttering to one
another; ship-owners, excited and uneasy; children, huddling
together, and peering into older faces; even stout mariners,
disturbed and anxious, levelling their glasses at the sea from
behind places of shelter, as if they were surveying an enemy.

The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to
look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying
stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me.  As the high
watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into
surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town.  As the
receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out
deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the
earth.  When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed
themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment
of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of its wrath,
rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster. 
Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with
a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted
up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a
booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made,
to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place
away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and
buildings, rose and fell; the clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed
to see a rending and upheaving of all nature.

Not finding Ham among the people whom this memorable wind - for it
is still remembered down there, as the greatest ever known to blow
upon that coast - had brought together, I made my way to his house. 
It was shut; and as no one answered to my knocking, I went, by back
ways and by-lanes, to the yard where he worked.  I learned, there,
that he had gone to Lowestoft, to meet some sudden exigency of
ship-repairing in which his skill was required; but that he would
be back tomorrow morning, in good time.

I went back to the inn; and when I had washed and dressed, and
tried to sleep, but in vain, it was five o'clock in the afternoon. 
I had not sat five minutes by the coffee-room fire, when the
waiter, coming to stir it, as an excuse for talking, told me that
two colliers had gone down, with all hands, a few miles away; and
that some other ships had been seen labouring hard in the Roads,
and trying, in great distress, to keep off shore.  Mercy on them,
and on all poor sailors, said he, if we had another night like the
last!

I was very much depressed in spirits; very solitary; and felt an
uneasiness in Ham's not being there, disproportionate to the
occasion.  I was seriously affected, without knowing how much, by
late events; and my long exposure to the fierce wind had confused
me.  There was that jumble in my thoughts and recollections, that
I had lost the clear arrangement of time and distance.  Thus, if I
had gone out into the town, I should not have been surprised, I
think, to encounter someone who I knew must be then in London.  So
to speak, there was in these respects a curious inattention in my
mind.  Yet it was busy, too, with all the remembrances the place
naturally awakened; and they were particularly distinct and vivid.

In this state, the waiter's dismal intelligence about the ships
immediately connected itself, without any effort of my volition,
with my uneasiness about Ham.  I was persuaded that I had an
apprehension of his returning from Lowestoft by sea, and being
lost.  This grew so strong with me, that I resolved to go back to
the yard before I took my dinner, and ask the boat-builder if he
thought his attempting to return by sea at all likely?  If he gave
me the least reason to think so, I would go over to Lowestoft and
prevent it by bringing him with me.

I hastily ordered my dinner, and went back to the yard.  I was none
too soon; for the boat-builder, with a lantern in his hand, was
locking the yard-gate.  He quite laughed when I asked him the
question, and said there was no fear; no man in his senses, or out
of them, would put off in such a gale of wind, least of all Ham
Peggotty, who had been born to seafaring.

So sensible of this, beforehand, that I had really felt ashamed of
doing what I was nevertheless impelled to do, I went back to the
inn.  If such a wind could rise, I think it was rising.  The howl
and roar, the rattling of the doors and windows, the rumbling in
the chimneys, the apparent rocking of the very house that sheltered
me, and the prodigious tumult of the sea, were more fearful than in
the morning.  But there was now a great darkness besides; and that
invested the storm with new terrors, real and fanciful.

I could not eat, I could not sit still, I could not continue
steadfast to anything.  Something within me, faintly answering to
the storm without, tossed up the depths of my memory and made a
tumult in them.  Yet, in all the hurry of my thoughts, wild running
with the thundering sea, - the storm, and my uneasiness regarding
Ham were always in the fore-ground.

My dinner went away almost untasted, and I tried to refresh myself
with a glass or two of wine.  In vain.  I fell into a dull slumber
before the fire, without losing my consciousness, either of the
uproar out of doors, or of the place in which I was.  Both became
overshadowed by a new and indefinable horror; and when I awoke - or
rather when I shook off the lethargy that bound me in my chair- my
whole frame thrilled with objectless and unintelligible fear.

I walked to and fro, tried to read an old gazetteer, listened to
the awful noises: looked at faces, scenes, and figures in the fire. 
At length, the steady ticking of the undisturbed clock on the wall
tormented me to that degree that I resolved to go to bed.

It was reassuring, on such a night, to be told that some of the
inn-servants had agreed together to sit up until morning.  I went
to bed, exceedingly weary and heavy; but, on my lying down, all
such sensations vanished, as if by magic, and I was broad awake,
with every sense refined.

For hours I lay there, listening to the wind and water; imagining,
now, that I heard shrieks out at sea; now, that I distinctly heard
the firing of signal guns; and now, the fall of houses in the town. 
I got up, several times, and looked out; but could see nothing,
except the reflection in the window-panes of the faint candle I had
left burning, and of my own haggard face looking in at me from the
black void.

At length, my restlessness attained to such a pitch, that I hurried
on my clothes, and went downstairs.  In the large kitchen, where I
dimly saw bacon and ropes of onions hanging from the beams, the
watchers were clustered together, in various attitudes, about a
table, purposely moved away from the great chimney, and brought
near the door.  A pretty girl, who had her ears stopped with her
apron, and her eyes upon the door, screamed when I appeared,
supposing me to be a spirit; but the others had more presence of
mind, and were glad of an addition to their company.  One man,
referring to the topic they had been discussing, asked me whether
I thought the souls of the collier-crews who had gone down, were
out in the storm?

I remained there, I dare say, two hours.  Once, I opened the
yard-gate, and looked into the empty street.  The sand, the
sea-weed, and the flakes of foam, were driving by; and I was
obliged to call for assistance before I could shut the gate again,
and make it fast against the wind.

There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at length
returned to it; but I was tired now, and, getting into bed again,
fell - off a tower and down a precipice - into the depths of sleep. 
I have an impression that for a long time, though I dreamed of
being elsewhere and in a variety of scenes, it was always blowing
in my dream.  At length, I lost that feeble hold upon reality, and
was engaged with two dear friends, but who they were I don't know,
at the siege of some town in a roar of cannonading.

The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant, that I could
not hear something I much desired to hear, until I made a great
exertion and awoke.  It was broad day - eight or nine o'clock; the
storm raging, in lieu of the batteries; and someone knocking and
calling at my door.

'What is the matter?' I cried.

'A wreck! Close by!'

I sprung out of bed, and asked, what wreck?

'A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and wine. 
Make haste, sir, if you want to see her! It's thought, down on the
beach, she'll go to pieces every moment.'

The excited voice went clamouring along the staircase; and I
wrapped myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran into
the street.

Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one
direction, to the beach.  I ran the same way, outstripping a good
many, and soon came facing the wild sea.

The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more
sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of, had been
diminished by the silencing of half-a-dozen guns out of hundreds. 
But the sea, having upon it the additional agitation of the whole
night, was infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. 
Every appearance it had then presented, bore the expression of
being swelled; and the height to which the breakers rose, and,
looking over one another, bore one another down, and rolled in, in
interminable hosts, was most appalling.
In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves, and in
the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breathless
efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I
looked out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming
heads of the great waves.  A half-dressed boatman, standing next
me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattoo'd arrow on it, pointing in
the same direction) to the left.  Then, O great Heaven, I saw it,
close in upon us!

One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and
lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all
that ruin, as the ship rolled and beat - which she did without a
moment's pause, and with a violence quite inconceivable - beat the
side as if it would stave it in.  Some efforts were even then being
made, to cut this portion of the wreck away; for, as the ship,
which was broadside on, turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly
descried her people at work with axes, especially one active figure
with long curling hair, conspicuous among the rest.  But a great
cry, which was audible even above the wind and water, rose from the
shore at this moment; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck,
made a clean breach, and carried men, spars, casks, planks,
bulwarks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling surge.

The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail, and
a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro.  The ship
had struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then
lifted in and struck again.  I understood him to add that she was
parting amidships, and I could readily suppose so, for the rolling
and beating were too tremendous for any human work to suffer long. 
As he spoke, there was another great cry of pity from the beach;
four men arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the
rigging of the remaining mast; uppermost, the active figure with
the curling hair.

There was a bell on board; and as the ship rolled and dashed, like
a desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of
her deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now
nothing but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards
the sea, the bell rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy
men, was borne towards us on the wind.  Again we lost her, and
again she rose.  Two men were gone.  The agony on the shore
increased.  Men groaned, and clasped their hands; women shrieked,
and turned away their faces.  Some ran wildly up and down along the
beach, crying for help where no help could be.  I found myself one
of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew, not
to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes.

They were making out to me, in an agitated way - I don't know how,
for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to
understand - that the lifeboat had been bravely manned an hour ago,
and could do nothing; and that as no man would be so desperate as
to attempt to wade off with a rope, and establish a communication
with the shore, there was nothing left to try; when I noticed that
some new sensation moved the people on the beach, and saw them
part, and Ham come breaking through them to the front.

I ran to him - as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. 
But, distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible,
the determination in his face, and his look out to sea - exactly
the same look as I remembered in connexion with the morning after
Emily's flight - awoke me to a knowledge of his danger.  I held him
back with both arms; and implored the men with whom I had been
speaking, not to listen to him, not to do murder, not to let him
stir from off that sand!

Another cry arose on shore; and looking to the wreck, we saw the
cruel sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men,
and fly up in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the
mast.

Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the
calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the
people present, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. 
'Mas'r Davy,' he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, 'if my
time is come, 'tis come.  If 'tan't, I'll bide it.  Lord above
bless you, and bless all! Mates, make me ready! I'm a-going off!'

I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the
people around me made me stay; urging, as I confusedly perceived,
that he was bent on going, with help or without, and that I should
endanger the precautions for his safety by troubling those with
whom they rested.  I don't know what I answered, or what they
rejoined; but I saw hurry on the beach, and men running with ropes
from a capstan that was there, and penetrating into a circle of
figures that hid him from me.  Then, I saw him standing alone, in
a seaman's frock and trousers: a rope in his hand, or slung to his
wrist: another round his body: and several of the best men holding,
at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out himself,
slack upon the shore, at his feet.

The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up.  I saw that
she was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary
man upon the mast hung by a thread.  Still, he clung to it.  He had
a singular red cap on, - not like a sailor's cap, but of a finer
colour; and as the few yielding planks between him and destruction
rolled and bulged, and his anticipative death-knell rung, he was
seen by all of us to wave it.  I saw him do it now, and thought I
was going distracted, when his action brought an old remembrance to
my mind of a once dear friend.

Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended
breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great
retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the
rope which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and
in a moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills,
falling with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again
to land.  They hauled in hastily.

He was hurt.  I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he
took no thought of that.  He seemed hurriedly to give them some
directions for leaving him more free - or so I judged from the
motion of his arm - and was gone as before.

And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with
the valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the
shore, borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly.  The
distance was nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the
strife deadly.  At length he neared the wreck.  He was so near,
that with one more of his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to
it, - when a high, green, vast hill-side of water, moving on
shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed to leap up into it with
a mighty bound, and the ship was gone!

Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask had been
broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in. 
Consternation was in every face.  They drew him to my very feet -
insensible - dead.  He was carried to the nearest house; and, no
one preventing me now, I remained near him, busy, while every means
of restoration were tried; but he had been beaten to death by the
great wave, and his generous heart was stilled for ever.

As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done,
a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and
ever since, whispered my name at the door.

'Sir,' said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face,
which, with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, 'will you come over
yonder?'

The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. 
I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to
support me:

'Has a body come ashore?'

He said, 'Yes.'

'Do I know it?' I asked then.

He answered nothing.

But he led me to the shore.  And on that part of it where she and
I had looked for shells, two children - on that part of it where
some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had
been scattered by the wind - among the ruins of the home he had
wronged - I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had
often seen him lie at school.



CHAPTER 56
THE NEW WOUND, AND THE OLD

No need, O Steerforth, to have said, when we last spoke together,
in that hour which I so little deemed to be our parting-hour - no
need to have said, 'Think of me at my best!' I had done that ever;
and could I change now, looking on this sight!

They brought a hand-bier, and laid him on it, and covered him with
a flag, and took him up and bore him on towards the houses.  All
the men who carried him had known him, and gone sailing with him,
and seen him merry and bold.  They carried him through the wild
roar, a hush in the midst of all the tumult; and took him to the
cottage where Death was already.

But when they set the bier down on the threshold, they looked at
one another, and at me, and whispered.  I knew why.  They felt as
if it were not right to lay him down in the same quiet room.

We went into the town, and took our burden to the inn.  So soon as
I could at all collect my thoughts, I sent for Joram, and begged
him to provide me a conveyance in which it could be got to London
in the night.  I knew that the care of it, and the hard duty of
preparing his mother to receive it, could only rest with me; and I
was anxious to discharge that duty as faithfully as I could.

I chose the night for the journey, that there might be less
curiosity when I left the town.  But, although it was nearly
midnight when I came out of the yard in a chaise, followed by what
I had in charge, there were many people waiting.  At intervals,
along the town, and even a little way out upon the road, I saw
more: but at length only the bleak night and the open country were
around me, and the ashes of my youthful friendship.

Upon a mellow autumn day, about noon, when the ground was perfumed
by fallen leaves, and many more, in beautiful tints of yellow, red,
and brown, yet hung upon the trees, through which the sun was
shining, I arrived at Highgate.  I walked the last mile, thinking
as I went along of what I had to do; and left the carriage that had
followed me all through the night, awaiting orders to advance.

The house, when I came up to it, looked just the same.  Not a blind
was raised; no sign of life was in the dull paved court, with its
covered way leading to the disused door.  The wind had quite gone
down, and nothing moved.

I had not, at first, the courage to ring at the gate; and when I
did ring, my errand seemed to me to be expressed in the very sound
of the bell.  The little parlour-maid came out, with the key in her
hand; and looking earnestly at me as she unlocked the gate, said:

'I beg your pardon, sir.  Are you ill?'

'I have been much agitated, and am fatigued.'

'Is anything the matter, sir?  - Mr. James?  -'
'Hush!' said I.  'Yes, something has happened, that I have to break
to Mrs. Steerforth.  She is at home?'

The girl anxiously replied that her mistress was very seldom out
now, even in a carriage; that she kept her room; that she saw no
company, but would see me.  Her mistress was up, she said, and Miss
Dartle was with her.  What message should she take upstairs?

Giving her a strict charge to be careful of her manner, and only to
carry in my card and say I waited, I sat down in the drawing-room
(which we had now reached) until she should come back.  Its former
pleasant air of occupation was gone, and the shutters were half
closed.  The harp had not been used for many and many a day.  His
picture, as a boy, was there.  The cabinet in which his mother had
kept his letters was there.  I wondered if she ever read them now;
if she would ever read them more!

The house was so still that I heard the girl's light step upstairs. 
On her return, she brought a message, to the effect that Mrs.
Steerforth was an invalid and could not come down; but that if I
would excuse her being in her chamber, she would be glad to see me. 
In a few moments I stood before her.

She was in his room; not in her own.  I felt, of course, that she
had taken to occupy it, in remembrance of him; and that the many
tokens of his old sports and accomplishments, by which she was
surrounded, remained there, just as he had left them, for the same
reason.  She murmured, however, even in her reception of me, that
she was out of her own chamber because its aspect was unsuited to
her infirmity; and with her stately look repelled the least
suspicion of the truth.

At her chair, as usual, was Rosa Dartle.  From the first moment of
her dark eyes resting on me, I saw she knew I was the bearer of
evil tidings.  The scar sprung into view that instant.  She
withdrew herself a step behind the chair, to keep her own face out
of Mrs. Steerforth's observation; and scrutinized me with a
piercing gaze that never faltered, never shrunk.

'I am sorry to observe you are in mourning, sir,' said Mrs.
Steerforth.

'I am unhappily a widower,' said I.

'You are very young to know so great a loss,' she returned.  'I am
grieved to hear it.  I am grieved to hear it.  I hope Time will be
good to you.'

'I hope Time,' said I, looking at her, 'will be good to all of us. 
Dear Mrs. Steerforth, we must all trust to that, in our heaviest
misfortunes.'

The earnestness of my manner, and the tears in my eyes, alarmed
her.  The whole course of her thoughts appeared to stop, and
change.

I tried to command my voice in gently saying his name, but it
trembled.  She repeated it to herself, two or three times, in a low
tone.  Then, addressing me, she said, with enforced calmness:

'My son is ill.'

'Very ill.'

'You have seen him?'

'I have.'

'Are you reconciled?'

I could not say Yes, I could not say No.  She slightly turned her
head towards the spot where Rosa Dartle had been standing at her
elbow, and in that moment I said, by the motion of my lips, to
Rosa, 'Dead!'

That Mrs. Steerforth might not be induced to look behind her, and
read, plainly written, what she was not yet prepared to know, I met
her look quickly; but I had seen Rosa Dartle throw her hands up in
the air with vehemence of despair and horror, and then clasp them
on her face.

The handsome lady - so like, oh so like! - regarded me with a fixed
look, and put her hand to her forehead.  I besought her to be calm,
and prepare herself to bear what I had to tell; but I should rather
have entreated her to weep, for she sat like a stone figure.

'When I was last here,' I faltered, 'Miss Dartle told me he was
sailing here and there.  The night before last was a dreadful one
at sea.  If he were at sea that night, and near a dangerous coast,
as it is said he was; and if the vessel that was seen should really
be the ship which -'

'Rosa!' said Mrs. Steerforth, 'come to me!'

She came, but with no sympathy or gentleness.  Her eyes gleamed
like fire as she confronted his mother, and broke into a frightful
laugh.

'Now,' she said, 'is your pride appeased, you madwoman?  Now has he
made atonement to you - with his life! Do you hear?  - His life!'

Mrs. Steerforth, fallen back stiffly in her chair, and making no
sound but a moan, cast her eyes upon her with a wide stare.

'Aye!' cried Rosa, smiting herself passionately on the breast,
'look at me! Moan, and groan, and look at me! Look here!' striking
the scar, 'at your dead child's handiwork!'

The moan the mother uttered, from time to time, went to My heart. 
Always the same.  Always inarticulate and stifled.  Always
accompanied with an incapable motion of the head, but with no
change of face.  Always proceeding from a rigid mouth and closed
teeth, as if the jaw were locked and the face frozen up in pain.

'Do you remember when he did this?' she proceeded.  'Do you
remember when, in his inheritance of your nature, and in your
pampering of his pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me
for life?  Look at me, marked until I die with his high
displeasure; and moan and groan for what you made him!'

'Miss Dartle,' I entreated her.  'For Heaven's sake -'

'I WILL speak!' she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. 
'Be silent, you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud, false
son! Moan for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him,
moan for your loss of him, moan for mine!'

She clenched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure,
as if her passion were killing her by inches.

'You, resent his self-will!' she exclaimed.  'You, injured by his
haughty temper! You, who opposed to both, when your hair was grey,
the qualities which made both when you gave him birth! YOU, who
from his cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he
should have been! Are you rewarded, now, for your years of
trouble?'

'Oh, Miss Dartle, shame! Oh cruel!'

'I tell you,' she returned, 'I WILL speak to her.  No power on
earth should stop me, while I was standing here! Have I been silent
all these years, and shall I not speak now?  I loved him better
than you ever loved him!' turning on her fiercely.  'I could have
loved him, and asked no return.  If I had been his wife, I could
have been the slave of his caprices for a word of love a year.  I
should have been.  Who knows it better than I?  You were exacting,
proud, punctilious, selfish.  My love would have been devoted -
would have trod your paltry whimpering under foot!'

With flashing eyes, she stamped upon the ground as if she actually
did it.

'Look here!' she said, striking the scar again, with a relentless
hand.  'When he grew into the better understanding of what he had
done, he saw it, and repented of it! I could sing to him, and talk
to him, and show the ardour that I felt in all he did, and attain
with labour to such knowledge as most interested him; and I
attracted him.  When he was freshest and truest, he loved me.  Yes,
he did! Many a time, when you were put off with a slight word, he
has taken Me to his heart!'

She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy - for
it was little less - yet with an eager remembrance of it, in which
the smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for the moment.

'I descended - as I might have known I should, but that he
fascinated me with his boyish courtship - into a doll, a trifle for
the occupation of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up, and
trifled with, as the inconstant humour took him.  When he grew
weary, I grew weary.  As his fancy died out, I would no more have
tried to strengthen any power I had, than I would have married him
on his being forced to take me for his wife.  We fell away from one
another without a word.  Perhaps you saw it, and were not sorry. 
Since then, I have been a mere disfigured piece of furniture
between you both; having no eyes, no ears, no feelings, no
remembrances.  Moan?  Moan for what you made him; not for your
love.  I tell you that the time was, when I loved him better than
you ever did!'

She stood with her bright angry eyes confronting the wide stare,
and the set face; and softened no more, when the moaning was
repeated, than if the face had been a picture.

'Miss Dartle,' said I, 'if you can be so obdurate as not to feel
for this afflicted mother -'

'Who feels for me?' she sharply retorted.  'She has sown this.  Let
her moan for the harvest that she reaps today!'

'And if his faults -' I began.

'Faults!' she cried, bursting into passionate tears.  'Who dares
malign him?  He had a soul worth millions of the friends to whom he
stooped!' 

'No one can have loved him better, no one can hold him in dearer
remembrance than I,' I replied.  'I meant to say, if you have no
compassion for his mother; or if his faults - you have been bitter
on them -'

'It's false,' she cried, tearing her black hair; 'I loved him!'

'- if his faults cannot,' I went on, 'be banished from your
remembrance, in such an hour; look at that figure, even as one you
have never seen before, and render it some help!'

All this time, the figure was unchanged, and looked unchangeable. 
Motionless, rigid, staring; moaning in the same dumb way from time
to time, with the same helpless motion of the head; but giving no
other sign of life.  Miss Dartle suddenly kneeled down before it,
and began to loosen the dress.

'A curse upon you!' she said, looking round at me, with a mingled
expression of rage and grief.  'It was in an evil hour that you
ever came here! A curse upon you! Go!'

After passing out of the room, I hurried back to ring the bell, the
sooner to alarm the servants.  She had then taken the impassive
figure in her arms, and, still upon her knees, was weeping over it,
kissing it, calling to it, rocking it to and fro upon her bosom
like a child, and trying every tender means to rouse the dormant
senses.  No longer afraid of leaving her, I noiselessly turned back
again; and alarmed the house as I went out.

Later in the day, I returned, and we laid him in his mother's room. 
She was just the same, they told me; Miss Dartle never left her;
doctors were in attendance, many things had been tried; but she lay
like a statue, except for the low sound now and then.

I went through the dreary house, and darkened the windows.  The
windows of the chamber where he lay, I darkened last.  I lifted up
the leaden hand, and held it to my heart; and all the world seemed
death and silence, broken only by his mother's moaning.



CHAPTER 57
THE EMIGRANTS


One thing more, I had to do, before yielding myself to the shock of
these emotions.  It was, to conceal what had occurred, from those
who were going away; and to dismiss them on their voyage in happy
ignorance.  In this, no time was to be lost.

I took Mr. Micawber aside that same night, and confided to him the
task of standing between Mr. Peggotty and intelligence of the late
catastrophe.  He zealously undertook to do so, and to intercept any
newspaper through which it might, without such precautions, reach
him.

'If it penetrates to him, sir,' said Mr. Micawber, striking himself
on the breast, 'it shall first pass through this body!'

Mr. Micawber, I must observe, in his adaptation of himself to a new
state of society, had acquired a bold buccaneering air, not
absolutely lawless, but defensive and prompt.  One might have
supposed him a child of the wilderness, long accustomed to live out
of the confines of civilization, and about to return to his native
wilds.

He had provided himself, among other things, with a complete suit
of oilskin, and a straw hat with a very low crown, pitched or
caulked on the outside.  In this rough clothing, with a common
mariner's telescope under his arm, and a shrewd trick of casting up
his eye at the sky as looking out for dirty weather, he was far
more nautical, after his manner, than Mr. Peggotty.  His whole
family, if I may so express it, were cleared for action.  I found
Mrs. Micawber in the closest and most uncompromising of bonnets,
made fast under the chin; and in a shawl which tied her up (as I
had been tied up, when my aunt first received me) like a bundle,
and was secured behind at the waist, in a strong knot.  Miss
Micawber I found made snug for stormy weather, in the same manner;
with nothing superfluous about her.  Master Micawber was hardly
visible in a Guernsey shirt, and the shaggiest suit of slops I ever
saw; and the children were done up, like preserved meats, in
impervious cases.  Both Mr. Micawber and his eldest son wore their
sleeves loosely turned back at the wrists, as being ready to lend
a hand in any direction, and to 'tumble up', or sing out, 'Yeo -
Heave - Yeo!' on the shortest notice.

Thus Traddles and I found them at nightfall, assembled on the
wooden steps, at that time known as Hungerford Stairs, watching the
departure of a boat with some of their property on board.  I had
told Traddles of the terrible event, and it had greatly shocked
him; but there could be no doubt of the kindness of keeping it a
secret, and he had come to help me in this last service.  It was
here that I took Mr. Micawber aside, and received his promise.

The Micawber family were lodged in a little, dirty, tumble-down
public-house, which in those days was close to the stairs, and
whose protruding wooden rooms overhung the river.  The family, as
emigrants, being objects of some interest in and about Hungerford,
attracted so many beholders, that we were glad to take refuge in
their room.  It was one of the wooden chambers upstairs, with the
tide flowing underneath.  My aunt and Agnes were there, busily
making some little extra comforts, in the way of dress, for the
children.  Peggotty was quietly assisting, with the old insensible
work-box, yard-measure, and bit of wax-candle before her, that had
now outlived so much.

It was not easy to answer her inquiries; still less to whisper Mr.
Peggotty, when Mr. Micawber brought him in, that I had given the
letter, and all was well.  But I did both, and made them happy.  If
I showed any trace of what I felt, my own sorrows were sufficient
to account for it.

'And when does the ship sail, Mr. Micawber?' asked my aunt.

Mr. Micawber considered it necessary to prepare either my aunt or
his wife, by degrees, and said, sooner than he had expected
yesterday.

'The boat brought you word, I suppose?' said my aunt.

'It did, ma'am,' he returned.

'Well?' said my aunt.  'And she sails -'

'Madam,' he replied, 'I am informed that we must positively be on
board before seven tomorrow morning.'

'Heyday!' said my aunt, 'that's soon.  Is it a sea-going fact, Mr.
Peggotty?'
''Tis so, ma'am.  She'll drop down the river with that theer tide. 
If Mas'r Davy and my sister comes aboard at Gravesen', arternoon o'
next day, they'll see the last on us.'

'And that we shall do,' said I, 'be sure!'

'Until then, and until we are at sea,' observed Mr. Micawber, with
a glance of intelligence at me, 'Mr. Peggotty and myself will
constantly keep a double look-out together, on our goods and
chattels.  Emma, my love,' said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat
in his magnificent way, 'my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles is so
obliging as to solicit, in my ear, that he should have the
privilege of ordering the ingredients necessary to the composition
of a moderate portion of that Beverage which is peculiarly
associated, in our minds, with the Roast Beef of Old England.  I
allude to - in short, Punch.  Under ordinary circumstances, I
should scruple to entreat the indulgence of Miss Trotwood and Miss
Wickfield, but-'

'I can only say for myself,' said my aunt, 'that I will drink all
happiness and success to you, Mr. Micawber, with the utmost
pleasure.'

'And I too!' said Agnes, with a smile.

Mr. Micawber immediately descended to the bar, where he appeared to
be quite at home; and in due time returned with a steaming jug.  I
could not but observe that he had been peeling the lemons with his
own clasp-knife, which, as became the knife of a practical settler,
was about a foot long; and which he wiped, not wholly without
ostentation, on the sleeve of his coat.  Mrs. Micawber and the two
elder members of the family I now found to be provided with similar
formidable instruments, while every child had its own wooden spoon
attached to its body by a strong line.  In a similar anticipation
of life afloat, and in the Bush, Mr. Micawber, instead of helping
Mrs. Micawber and his eldest son and daughter to punch, in
wine-glasses, which he might easily have done, for there was a
shelf-full in the room, served it out to them in a series of
villainous little tin pots; and I never saw him enjoy anything so
much as drinking out of his own particular pint pot, and putting it
in his pocket at the close of the evening.

'The luxuries of the old country,' said Mr. Micawber, with an
intense satisfaction in their renouncement, 'we abandon.  The
denizens of the forest cannot, of course, expect to participate in
the refinements of the land of the Free.'

Here, a boy came in to say that Mr. Micawber was wanted downstairs.

'I have a presentiment,' said Mrs. Micawber, setting down her tin
pot, 'that it is a member of my family!'

'If so, my dear,' observed Mr. Micawber, with his usual suddenness
of warmth on that subject, 'as the member of your family - whoever
he, she, or it, may be - has kept us waiting for a considerable
period, perhaps the Member may now wait MY convenience.'

'Micawber,' said his wife, in a low tone, 'at such a time as
this -'

'"It is not meet,"' said Mr. Micawber, rising, '"that every nice
offence should bear its comment!" Emma, I stand reproved.'

'The loss, Micawber,' observed his wife, 'has been my family's, not
yours.  If my family are at length sensible of the deprivation to
which their own conduct has, in the past, exposed them, and now
desire to extend the hand of fellowship, let it not be repulsed.'

'My dear,' he returned, 'so be it!'

'If not for their sakes; for mine, Micawber,' said his wife.

'Emma,' he returned, 'that view of the question is, at such a
moment, irresistible.  I cannot, even now, distinctly pledge myself
to fall upon your family's neck; but the member of your family, who
is now in attendance, shall have no genial warmth frozen by me.'

Mr. Micawber withdrew, and was absent some little time; in the
course of which Mrs. Micawber was not wholly free from an
apprehension that words might have arisen between him and the
Member.  At length the same boy reappeared, and presented me with
a note written in pencil, and headed, in a legal manner, 'Heep v. 
Micawber'.  From this document, I learned that Mr. Micawber being
again arrested, 'Was in a final paroxysm of despair; and that he
begged me to send him his knife and pint pot, by bearer, as they
might prove serviceable during the brief remainder of his
existence, in jail.  He also requested, as a last act of
friendship, that I would see his family to the Parish Workhouse,
and forget that such a Being ever lived.

Of course I answered this note by going down with the boy to pay
the money, where I found Mr. Micawber sitting in a corner, looking
darkly at the Sheriff 's Officer who had effected the capture.  On
his release, he embraced me with the utmost fervour; and made an
entry of the transaction in his pocket-book - being very
particular, I recollect, about a halfpenny I inadvertently omitted
from my statement of the total.

This momentous pocket-book was a timely reminder to him of another
transaction.  On our return to the room upstairs (where he
accounted for his absence by saying that it had been occasioned by
circumstances over which he had no control), he took out of it a
large sheet of paper, folded small, and quite covered with long
sums, carefully worked.  From the glimpse I had of them, I should
say that I never saw such sums out of a school ciphering-book. 
These, it seemed, were calculations of compound interest on what he
called 'the principal amount of forty-one, ten, eleven and a half',
for various periods.  After a careful consideration of these, and
an elaborate estimate of his resources, he had come to the
conclusion to select that sum which represented the amount with
compound interest to two years, fifteen calendar months, and
fourteen days, from that date.  For this he had drawn a
note-of-hand with great neatness, which he handed over to Traddles
on the spot, a discharge of his debt in full (as between man and
man), with many acknowledgements.

'I have still a presentiment,' said Mrs. Micawber, pensively
shaking her head, 'that my family will appear on board, before we
finally depart.'

Mr. Micawber evidently had his presentiment on the subject too, but
he put it in his tin pot and swallowed it.

'If you have any opportunity of sending letters home, on your
passage, Mrs. Micawber,' said my aunt, 'you must let us hear from
you, you know.'

'My dear Miss Trotwood,' she replied, 'I shall only be too happy to
think that anyone expects to hear from us.  I shall not fail to
correspond.  Mr. Copperfield, I trust, as an old and familiar
friend, will not object to receive occasional intelligence,
himself, from one who knew him when the twins were yet
unconscious?'

I said that I should hope to hear, whenever she had an opportunity
of writing.

'Please Heaven, there will be many such opportunities,' said Mr.
Micawber.  'The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships;
and we can hardly fail to encounter many, in running over.  It is
merely crossing,' said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass,
'merely crossing.  The distance is quite imaginary.'

I think, now, how odd it was, but how wonderfully like Mr.
Micawber, that, when he went from London to Canterbury, he should
have talked as if he were going to the farthest limits of the
earth; and, when he went from England to Australia, as if he were
going for a little trip across the channel.

'On the voyage, I shall endeavour,' said Mr. Micawber,
'occasionally to spin them a yarn; and the melody of my son Wilkins
will, I trust, be acceptable at the galley-fire.  When Mrs.
Micawber has her sea-legs on - an expression in which I hope there
is no conventional impropriety - she will give them, I dare say,
"Little Tafflin".  Porpoises and dolphins, I believe, will be
frequently observed athwart our Bows; and, either on the starboard
or the larboard quarter, objects of interest will be continually
descried.  In short,' said Mr. Micawber, with the old genteel air,
'the probability is, all will be found so exciting, alow and aloft,
that when the lookout, stationed in the main-top, cries Land-oh! we
shall be very considerably astonished!'

With that he flourished off the contents of his little tin pot, as
if he had made the voyage, and had passed a first-class examination
before the highest naval authorities.

' What I chiefly hope, my dear Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs.
Micawber, 'is, that in some branches of our family we may live
again in the old country.  Do not frown, Micawber! I do not now
refer to my own family, but to our children's children.  However
vigorous the sapling,' said Mrs. Micawber, shaking her head, 'I
cannot forget the parent-tree; and when our race attains to
eminence and fortune, I own I should wish that fortune to flow into
the coffers of Britannia.'

'My dear,' said Mr. Micawber, 'Britannia must take her chance.  I
am bound to say that she has never done much for me, and that I
have no particular wish upon the subject.'

'Micawber,' returned Mrs. Micawber, 'there, you are wrong.  You are
going out, Micawber, to this distant clime, to strengthen, not to
weaken, the connexion between yourself and Albion.'

'The connexion in question, my love,' rejoined Mr. Micawber, 'has
not laid me, I repeat, under that load of personal obligation, that
I am at all sensitive as to the formation of another connexion.'

'Micawber,' returned Mrs. Micawber.  'There, I again say, you are
wrong.  You do not know your power, Micawber.  It is that which
will strengthen, even in this step you are about to take, the
connexion between yourself and Albion.'

Mr. Micawber sat in his elbow-chair, with his eyebrows raised; half
receiving and half repudiating Mrs. Micawber's views as they were
stated, but very sensible of their foresight.

'My dear Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'I wish Mr. Micawber
to feel his position.  It appears to me highly important that Mr.
Micawber should, from the hour of his embarkation, feel his
position.  Your old knowledge of me, my dear Mr. Copperfield, will
have told you that I have not the sanguine disposition of Mr.
Micawber.  My disposition is, if I may say so, eminently practical. 
I know that this is a long voyage.  I know that it will involve
many privations and inconveniences.  I cannot shut my eyes to those
facts.  But I also know what Mr. Micawber is.  I know the latent
power of Mr. Micawber.  And therefore I consider it vitally
important that Mr. Micawber should feel his position.'

'My love,' he observed, 'perhaps you will allow me to remark that
it is barely possible that I DO feel my position at the present
moment.'

'I think not, Micawber,' she rejoined.  'Not fully.  My dear Mr.
Copperfield, Mr. Micawber's is not a common case.  Mr. Micawber is
going to a distant country expressly in order that he may be fully
understood and appreciated for the first time.  I wish Mr. Micawber
to take his stand upon that vessel's prow, and firmly say, "This
country I am come to conquer! Have you honours?  Have you riches? 
Have you posts of profitable pecuniary emolument?  Let them be
brought forward.  They are mine!"'

Mr. Micawber, glancing at us all, seemed to think there was a good
deal in this idea.

'I wish Mr. Micawber, if I make myself understood,' said Mrs.
Micawber, in her argumentative tone, 'to be the Caesar of his own
fortunes.  That, my dear Mr. Copperfield, appears to me to be his
true position.  From the first moment of this voyage, I wish Mr.
Micawber to stand upon that vessel's prow and say, "Enough of
delay: enough of disappointment: enough of limited means.  That was
in the old country.  This is the new.  Produce your reparation. 
Bring it forward!"'

Mr. Micawber folded his arms in a resolute manner, as if he were
then stationed on the figure-head.

'And doing that,' said Mrs. Micawber, '- feeling his position - am
I not right in saying that Mr. Micawber will strengthen, and not
weaken, his connexion with Britain?  An important public character
arising in that hemisphere, shall I be told that its influence will
not be felt at home?  Can I be so weak as to imagine that Mr.
Micawber, wielding the rod of talent and of power in Australia,
will be nothing in England?  I am but a woman; but I should be
unworthy of myself and of my papa, if I were guilty of such absurd
weakness.'

Mrs. Micawber's conviction that her arguments were unanswerable,
gave a moral elevation to her tone which I think I had never heard
in it before.

'And therefore it is,' said Mrs. Micawber, 'that I the more wish,
that, at a future period, we may live again on the parent soil. 
Mr. Micawber may be - I cannot disguise from myself that the
probability is, Mr. Micawber will be - a page of History; and he
ought then to be represented in the country which gave him birth,
and did NOT give him employment!'

'My love,' observed Mr. Micawber, 'it is impossible for me not to
be touched by your affection.  I am always willing to defer to your
good sense.  What will be - will be.  Heaven forbid that I should
grudge my native country any portion of the wealth that may be
accumulated by our descendants!'

'That's well,' said my aunt, nodding towards Mr. Peggotty, 'and I
drink my love to you all, and every blessing and success attend
you!'

Mr. Peggotty put down the two children he had been nursing, one on
each knee, to join Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in drinking to all of us
in return; and when he and the Micawbers cordially shook hands as
comrades, and his brown face brightened with a smile, I felt that
he would make his way, establish a good name, and be beloved, go
where he would.

Even the children were instructed, each to dip a wooden spoon into
Mr. Micawber's pot, and pledge us in its contents.  When this was
done, my aunt and Agnes rose, and parted from the emigrants.  It
was a sorrowful farewell.  They were all crying; the children hung
about Agnes to the last; and we left poor Mrs. Micawber in a very
distressed condition, sobbing and weeping by a dim candle, that
must have made the room look, from the river, like a miserable
light-house.

I went down again next morning to see that they were away.  They
had departed, in a boat, as early as five o'clock.  It was a
wonderful instance to me of the gap such partings make, that
although my association of them with the tumble-down public-house
and the wooden stairs dated only from last night, both seemed
dreary and deserted, now that they were gone.

In the afternoon of the next day, my old nurse and I went down to
Gravesend.  We found the ship in the river, surrounded by a crowd
of boats; a favourable wind blowing; the signal for sailing at her
mast-head.  I hired a boat directly, and we put off to her; and
getting through the little vortex of confusion of which she was the
centre, went on board.

Mr. Peggotty was waiting for us on deck.  He told me that Mr.
Micawber had just now been arrested again (and for the last time)
at the suit of Heep, and that, in compliance with a request I had
made to him, he had paid the money, which I repaid him.  He then
took us down between decks; and there, any lingering fears I had of
his having heard any rumours of what had happened, were dispelled
by Mr. Micawber's coming out of the gloom, taking his arm with an
air of friendship and protection, and telling me that they had
scarcely been asunder for a moment, since the night before last.

It was such a strange scene to me, and so confined and dark, that,
at first, I could make out hardly anything; but, by degrees, it
cleared, as my eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and I
seemed to stand in a picture by OSTADE.  Among the great beams,
bulks, and ringbolts of the ship, and the emigrant-berths, and
chests, and bundles, and barrels, and heaps of miscellaneous
baggage -'lighted up, here and there, by dangling lanterns; and
elsewhere by the yellow daylight straying down a windsail or a
hatchway - were crowded groups of people, making new friendships,
taking leave of one another, talking, laughing, crying, eating and
drinking; some, already settled down into the possession of their
few feet of space, with their little households arranged, and tiny
children established on stools, or in dwarf elbow-chairs; others,
despairing of a resting-place, and wandering disconsolately.  From
babies who had but a week or two of life behind them, to crooked
old men and women who seemed to have but a week or two of life
before them; and from ploughmen bodily carrying out soil of England
on their boots, to smiths taking away samples of its soot and smoke
upon their skins; every age and occupation appeared to be crammed
into the narrow compass of the 'tween decks.

As my eye glanced round this place, I thought I saw sitting, by an
open port, with one of the Micawber children near her, a figure
like Emily's; it first attracted my attention, by another figure
parting from it with a kiss; and as it glided calmly away through
the disorder, reminding me of - Agnes! But in the rapid motion and
confusion, and in the unsettlement of my own thoughts, I lost it
again; and only knew that the time was come when all visitors were
being warned to leave the ship; that my nurse was crying on a chest
beside me; and that Mrs. Gummidge, assisted by some younger
stooping woman in black, was busily arranging Mr. Peggotty's goods.

'Is there any last wured, Mas'r Davy?' said he.  'Is there any one
forgotten thing afore we parts?'

'One thing!' said I.  'Martha!'

He touched the younger woman I have mentioned on the shoulder, and
Martha stood before me.

'Heaven bless you, you good man!' cried I.  'You take her with
you!'

She answered for him, with a burst of tears.  I could speak no more
at that time, but I wrung his hand; and if ever I have loved and
honoured any man, I loved and honoured that man in my soul.

The ship was clearing fast of strangers.  The greatest trial that
I had, remained.  I told him what the noble spirit that was gone,
had given me in charge to say at parting.  It moved him deeply. 
But when he charged me, in return, with many messages of affection
and regret for those deaf ears, he moved me more.

The time was come.  I embraced him, took my weeping nurse upon my
arm, and hurried away.  On deck, I took leave of poor Mrs.
Micawber.  She was looking distractedly about for her family, even
then; and her last words to me were, that she never would desert
Mr. Micawber.

We went over the side into our boat, and lay at a little distance,
to see the ship wafted on her course.  It was then calm, radiant
sunset.  She lay between us, and the red light; and every taper
line and spar was visible against the glow.  A sight at once so
beautiful, so mournful, and so hopeful, as the glorious ship,
lying, still, on the flushed water, with all the life on board her
crowded at the bulwarks, and there clustering, for a moment,
bare-headed and silent, I never saw.

Silent, only for a moment.  As the sails rose to the wind, and the
ship began to move, there broke from all the boats three resounding
cheers, which those on board took up, and echoed back, and which
were echoed and re-echoed.  My heart burst out when I heard the
sound, and beheld the waving of the hats and handkerchiefs - and
then I saw her!

Then I saw her, at her uncle's side, and trembling on his shoulder. 
He pointed to us with an eager hand; and she saw us, and waved her
last good-bye to me.  Aye, Emily, beautiful and drooping, cling to
him with the utmost trust of thy bruised heart; for he has clung to
thee, with all the might of his great love!

Surrounded by the rosy light, and standing high upon the deck,
apart together, she clinging to him, and he holding her, they
solemnly passed away.  The night had fallen on the Kentish hills
when we were rowed ashore - and fallen darkly upon me.



CHAPTER 58
ABSENCE


It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the
ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many
unavailing sorrows and regrets.

I went away from England; not knowing, even then, how great the
shock was, that I had to bear.  I left all who were dear to me, and
went away; and believed that I had borne it, and it was past.  As
a man upon a field of battle will receive a mortal hurt, and
scarcely know that he is struck, so I, when I was left alone with
my undisciplined heart, had no conception of the wound with which
it had to strive.

The knowledge came upon me, not quickly, but little by little, and
grain by grain.  The desolate feeling with which I went abroad,
deepened and widened hourly.  At first it was a heavy sense of loss
and sorrow, wherein I could distinguish little else.  By
imperceptible degrees, it became a hopeless consciousness of all
that I had lost - love, friendship, interest; of all that had been
shattered - my first trust, my first affection, the whole airy
castle of my life; of all that remained - a ruined blank and waste,
lying wide around me, unbroken, to the dark horizon.

If my grief were selfish, I did not know it to be so.  I mourned
for my child-wife, taken from her blooming world, so young.  I
mourned for him who might have won the love and admiration of
thousands, as he had won mine long ago.  I mourned for the broken
heart that had found rest in the stormy sea; and for the wandering
remnants of the simple home, where I had heard the night-wind
blowing, when I was a child.

From the accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at length no
hope of ever issuing again.  I roamed from place to place, carrying
my burden with me everywhere.  I felt its whole weight now; and I
drooped beneath it, and I said in my heart that it could never be
lightened.

When this despondency was at its worst, I believed that I should
die.  Sometimes, I thought that I would like to die at home; and
actually turned back on my road, that I might get there soon.  At
other times, I passed on farther away, -from city to city, seeking
I know not what, and trying to leave I know not what behind.

It is not in my power to retrace, one by one, all the weary phases
of distress of mind through which I passed.  There are some dreams
that can only be imperfectly and vaguely described; and when I
oblige myself to look back on this time of my life, I seem to be
recalling such a dream.  I see myself passing on among the
novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures,
castles, tombs, fantastic streets - the old abiding places of
History and Fancy - as a dreamer might; bearing my painful load
through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they fade
before me.  Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was
the night that fell on my undisciplined heart.  Let me look up from
it - as at last I did, thank Heaven! - and from its long, sad,
wretched dream, to dawn.

For many months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud upon my
mind.  Some blind reasons that I had for not returning home -
reasons then struggling within me, vainly, for more distinct
expression - kept me on my pilgrimage.  Sometimes, I had proceeded
restlessly from place to place, stopping nowhere; sometimes, I had
lingered long in one spot.  I had had no purpose, no sustaining
soul within me, anywhere.

I was in Switzerland.  I had come out of Italy, over one of the
great passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among
the by-ways of the mountains.  If those awful solitudes had spoken
to my heart, I did not know it.  I had found sublimity and wonder
in the dread heights and precipices, in the roaring torrents, and
the wastes of ice and snow; but as yet, they had taught me nothing
else.

I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was
to rest.  In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track
along the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far below, I
think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some
softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my
breast.  I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was
not all oppressive, not quite despairing.  I remember almost hoping
that some better change was possible within me.

I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the
remote heights of snow, that closed it in, like eternal clouds. 
The bases of the mountains forming the gorge in which the little
village lay, were richly green; and high above this gentler
vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry
snow-drift, wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche.  Above these,
were range upon range of craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and
smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all gradually blending with the
crowning snow.  Dotted here and there on the mountain's-side, each
tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden cottages, so dwarfed by the
towering heights that they appeared too small for toys.  So did
even the clustered village in the valley, with its wooden bridge
across the stream, where the stream tumbled over broken rocks, and
roared away among the trees.  In the quiet air, there was a sound
of distant singing - shepherd voices; but, as one bright evening
cloud floated midway along the mountain's-side, I could almost have
believed it came from there, and was not earthly music.  All at
once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to
lay down my weary head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept
yet, since Dora died!

I had found a packet of letters awaiting me but a few minutes
before, and had strolled out of the village to read them while my
supper was making ready.  Other packets had missed me, and I had
received none for a long time.  Beyond a line or two, to say that
I was well, and had arrived at such a place, I had not had
fortitude or constancy to write a letter since I left home.

The packet was in my hand.  I opened it, and read the writing of
Agnes.

She was happy and useful, was prospering as she had hoped.  That
was all she told me of herself.  The rest referred to me.

She gave me no advice; she urged no duty on me; she only told me,
in her own fervent manner, what her trust in me was.  She knew (she
said) how such a nature as mine would turn affliction to good.  She
knew how trial and emotion would exalt and strengthen it.  She was
sure that in my every purpose I should gain a firmer and a higher
tendency, through the grief I had undergone.  She, who so gloried
in my fame, and so looked forward to its augmentation, well knew
that I would labour on.  She knew that in me, sorrow could not be
weakness, but must be strength.  As the endurance of my childish
days had done its part to make me what I was, so greater calamities
would nerve me on, to be yet better than I was; and so, as they had
taught me, would I teach others.  She commended me to God, who had
taken my innocent darling to His rest; and in her sisterly
affection cherished me always, and was always at my side go where
I would; proud of what I had done, but infinitely prouder yet of
what I was reserved to do.

I put the letter in my breast, and thought what had I been an hour
ago! When I heard the voices die away, and saw the quiet evening
cloud grow dim, and all the colours in the valley fade, and the
golden snow upon the mountain-tops become a remote part of the pale
night sky, yet felt that the night was passing from my mind, and
all its shadows clearing, there was no name for the love I bore
her, dearer to me, henceforward, than ever until then.

I read her letter many times.  I wrote to her before I slept.  I
told her that I had been in sore need of her help; that without her
I was not, and I never had been, what she thought me; but that she
inspired me to be that, and I would try.

I did try.  In three months more, a year would have passed since
the beginning of my sorrow.  I determined to make no resolutions
until the expiration of those three months, but to try.  I lived in
that valley, and its neighbourhood, all the time.

The three months gone, I resolved to remain away from home for some
time longer; to settle myself for the present in Switzerland, which
was growing dear to me in the remembrance of that evening; to
resume my pen; to work.

I resorted humbly whither Agnes had commended me; I sought out
Nature, never sought in vain; and I admitted to my breast the human
interest I had lately shrunk from.  It was not long, before I had
almost as many friends in the valley as in Yarmouth: and when I
left it, before the winter set in, for Geneva, and came back in the
spring, their cordial greetings had a homely sound to me, although
they were not conveyed in English words.

I worked early and late, patiently and hard.  I wrote a Story, with
a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience, and sent it
to Traddles, and he arranged for its publication very
advantageously for me; and the tidings of my growing reputation
began to reach me from travellers whom I encountered by chance. 
After some rest and change, I fell to work, in my old ardent way,
on a new fancy, which took strong possession of me.  As I advanced
in the execution of this task, I felt it more and more, and roused
my utmost energies to do it well.  This was my third work of
fiction.  It was not half written, when, in an interval of rest, I
thought of returning home.

For a long time, though studying and working patiently, I had
accustomed myself to robust exercise.  My health, severely impaired
when I left England, was quite restored.  I had seen much.  I had
been in many countries, and I hope I had improved my store of
knowledge.

I have now recalled all that I think it needful to recall here, of
this term of absence - with one reservation.  I have made it, thus
far, with no purpose of suppressing any of my thoughts; for, as I
have elsewhere said, this narrative is my written memory.  I have
desired to keep the most secret current of my mind apart, and to
the last.  I enter on it now.  I cannot so completely penetrate the
mystery of my own heart, as to know when I began to think that I
might have set its earliest and brightest hopes on Agnes.  I cannot
say at what stage of my grief it first became associated with the
reflection, that, in my wayward boyhood, I had thrown away the
treasure of her love.  I believe I may have heard some whisper of
that distant thought, in the old unhappy loss or want of something
never to be realized, of which I had been sensible.  But the
thought came into my mind as a new reproach and new regret, when I
was left so sad and lonely in the world.

If, at that time, I had been much with her, I should, in the
weakness of my desolation, have betrayed this.  It was what I
remotely dreaded when I was first impelled to stay away from
England.  I could not have borne to lose the smallest portion of
her sisterly affection; yet, in that betrayal, I should have set a
constraint between us hitherto unknown.

I could not forget that the feeling with which she now regarded me
had grown up in my own free choice and course.  That if she had
ever loved me with another love - and I sometimes thought the time
was when she might have done so - I had cast it away.  It was
nothing, now, that I had accustomed myself to think of her, when we
were both mere children, as one who was far removed from my wild
fancies.  I had bestowed my passionate tenderness upon another
object; and what I might have done, I had not done; and what Agnes
was to me, I and her own noble heart had made her.

In the beginning of the change that gradually worked in me, when I
tried to get a better understanding of myself and be a better man,
I did glance, through some indefinite probation, to a period when
I might possibly hope to cancel the mistaken past, and to be so
blessed as to marry her.  But, as time wore on, this shadowy
prospect faded, and departed from me.  If she had ever loved me,
then, I should hold her the more sacred; remembering the
confidences I had reposed in her, her knowledge of my errant heart,
the sacrifice she must have made to be my friend and sister, and
the victory she had won.  If she had never loved me, could I
believe that she would love me now?

I had always felt my weakness, in comparison with her constancy and
fortitude; and now I felt it more and more.  Whatever I might have
been to her, or she to me, if I had been more worthy of her long
ago, I was not now, and she was not.  The time was past.  I had let
it go by, and had deservedly lost her.

That I suffered much in these contentions, that they filled me with
unhappiness and remorse, and yet that I had a sustaining sense that
it was required of me, in right and honour, to keep away from
myself, with shame, the thought of turning to the dear girl in the
withering of my hopes, from whom I had frivolously turned when they
were bright and fresh - which consideration was at the root of
every thought I had concerning her - is all equally true.  I made
no effort to conceal from myself, now, that I loved her, that I was
devoted to her; but I brought the assurance home to myself, that it
was now too late, and that our long-subsisting relation must be
undisturbed.

I had thought, much and often, of my Dora's shadowing out to me
what might have happened, in those years that were destined not to
try us; I had considered how the things that never happen, are
often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are
accomplished.  The very years she spoke of, were realities now, for
my correction; and would have been, one day, a little later
perhaps, though we had parted in our earliest folly.  I endeavoured
to convert what might have been between myself and Agnes, into a
means of making me more self-denying, more resolved, more conscious
of myself, and my defects and errors.  Thus, through the reflection
that it might have been, I arrived at the conviction that it could
never be.

These, with their perplexities and inconsistencies, were the
shifting quicksands of my mind, from the time of my departure to
the time of my return home, three years afterwards.  Three years
had elapsed since the sailing of the emigrant ship; when, at that
same hour of sunset, and in the same place, I stood on the deck of
the packet vessel that brought me home, looking on the rosy water
where I had seen the image of that ship reflected.

Three years.  Long in the aggregate, though short as they went by. 
And home was very dear to me, and Agnes too - but she was not mine
- she was never to be mine.  She might have been, but that was
past!



CHAPTER 59
RETURN


I landed in London on a wintry autumn evening.  It was dark and
raining, and I saw more fog and mud in a minute than I had seen in
a year.  I walked from the Custom House to the Monument before I
found a coach; and although the very house-fronts, looking on the
swollen gutters, were like old friends to me, I could not but admit
that they were very dingy friends.

I have often remarked - I suppose everybody has - that one's going
away from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for change
in it.  As I looked out of the coach window, and observed that an
old house on Fish-street Hill, which had stood untouched by
painter, carpenter, or bricklayer, for a century, had been pulled
down in my absence; and that a neighbouring street, of
time-honoured insalubrity and inconvenience, was being drained and
widened; I half expected to find St. Paul's Cathedral looking
older.

For some changes in the fortunes of my friends, I was prepared.  My
aunt had long been re-established at Dover, and Traddles had begun
to get into some little practice at the Bar, in the very first term
after my departure.  He had chambers in Gray's Inn, now; and had
told me, in his last letters, that he was not without hopes of
being soon united to the dearest girl in the world.

They expected me home before Christmas; but had no idea of my
returning so soon.  I had purposely misled them, that I might have
the pleasure of taking them by surprise.  And yet, I was perverse
enough to feel a chill and disappointment in receiving no welcome,
and rattling, alone and silent, through the misty streets.

The well-known shops, however, with their cheerful lights, did
something for me; and when I alighted at the door of the Gray's Inn
Coffee-house, I had recovered my spirits.  It recalled, at first,
that so-different time when I had put up at the Golden Cross, and
reminded me of the changes that had come to pass since then; but
that was natural.

'Do you know where Mr. Traddles lives in the Inn?' I asked the
waiter, as I warmed myself by the coffee-room fire.

'Holborn Court, sir.  Number two.'

'Mr. Traddles has a rising reputation among the lawyers, I
believe?' said I.

'Well, sir,' returned the waiter, 'probably he has, sir; but I am
not aware of it myself.'

This waiter, who was middle-aged and spare, looked for help to a
waiter of more authority - a stout, potential old man, with a
double chin, in black breeches and stockings, who came out of a
place like a churchwarden's pew, at the end of the coffee-room,
where he kept company with a cash-box, a Directory, a Law-list, and
other books and papers.

'Mr. Traddles,' said the spare waiter.  'Number two in the Court.'

The potential waiter waved him away, and turned, gravely, to me.

'I was inquiring,' said I, 'whether Mr. Traddles, at number two in
the Court, has not a rising reputation among the lawyers?'

'Never heard his name,' said the waiter, in a rich husky voice.

I felt quite apologetic for Traddles.

'He's a young man, sure?' said the portentous waiter, fixing his
eyes severely on me.  'How long has he been in the Inn?'

'Not above three years,' said I.

The waiter, who I supposed had lived in his churchwarden's pew for
forty years, could not pursue such an insignificant subject.  He
asked me what I would have for dinner?

I felt I was in England again, and really was quite cast down on
Traddles's account.  There seemed to be no hope for him.  I meekly
ordered a bit of fish and a steak, and stood before the fire musing
on his obscurity.

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help
thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the
flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in.  It had such a
prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. 
I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no
doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy
- if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the
shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths
of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming
or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure
brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes; and at the two large coal
fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if
with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below;
and both England, and the law, appeared to me to be very difficult
indeed to be taken by storm.  I went up to my bedroom to change my
wet clothes; and the vast extent of that old wainscoted apartment
(which was over the archway leading to the Inn, I remember), and
the sedate immensity of the four-post bedstead, and the indomitable
gravity of the chests of drawers, all seemed to unite in sternly
frowning on the fortunes of Traddles, or on any such daring youth. 
I came down again to my dinner; and even the slow comfort of the
meal, and the orderly silence of the place - which was bare of
guests, the Long Vacation not yet being over - were eloquent on the
audacity of Traddles, and his small hopes of a livelihood for
twenty years to come.

I had seen nothing like this since I went away, and it quite dashed
my hopes for my friend.  The chief waiter had had enough of me.  He
came near me no more; but devoted himself to an old gentleman in
long gaiters, to meet whom a pint of special port seemed to come
out of the cellar of its own accord, for he gave no order.  The
second waiter informed me, in a whisper, that this old gentleman
was a retired conveyancer living in the Square, and worth a mint of
money, which it was expected he would leave to his laundress's
daughter; likewise that it was rumoured that he had a service of
plate in a bureau, all tarnished with lying by, though more than
one spoon and a fork had never yet been beheld in his chambers by
mortal vision.  By this time, I quite gave Traddles up for lost;
and settled in my own mind that there was no hope for him.

Being very anxious to see the dear old fellow, nevertheless, I
dispatched my dinner, in a manner not at all calculated to raise me
in the opinion of the chief waiter, and hurried out by the back
way.  Number two in the Court was soon reached; and an inscription
on the door-post informing me that Mr. Traddles occupied a set of
chambers on the top storey, I ascended the staircase.  A crazy old
staircase I found it to be, feebly lighted on each landing by a
club- headed little oil wick, dying away in a little dungeon of
dirty glass.

In the course of my stumbling upstairs, I fancied I heard a
pleasant sound of laughter; and not the laughter of an attorney or
barrister, or attorney's clerk or barrister's clerk, but of two or
three merry girls.  Happening, however, as I stopped to listen, to
put my foot in a hole where the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn
had left a plank deficient, I fell down with some noise, and when
I recovered my footing all was silent.

Groping my way more carefully, for the rest of the journey, my
heart beat high when I found the outer door, which had Mr. TRADDLES
painted on it, open.  I knocked.  A considerable scuffling within
ensued, but nothing else.  I therefore knocked again.

A small sharp-looking lad, half-footboy and half-clerk, who was
very much out of breath, but who looked at me as if he defied me to
prove it legally, presented himself.

'Is Mr. Traddles within?' I said.

'Yes, sir, but he's engaged.'

'I want to see him.'

After a moment's survey of me, the sharp-looking lad decided to let
me in; and opening the door wider for that purpose, admitted me,
first, into a little closet of a hall, and next into a little
sitting-room; where I came into the presence of my old friend (also
out of breath), seated at a table, and bending over papers.

'Good God!' cried Traddles, looking up.  'It's Copperfield!' and
rushed into my arms, where I held him tight.

'All well, my dear Traddles?'

'All well, my dear, dear Copperfield, and nothing but good news!'

We cried with pleasure, both of us.

'My dear fellow,' said Traddles, rumpling his hair in his
excitement, which was a most unnecessary operation, 'my dearest
Copperfield, my long-lost and most welcome friend, how glad I am to
see you! How brown you are! How glad I am! Upon my life and honour,
I never was so rejoiced, my beloved Copperfield, never!'

I was equally at a loss to express my emotions.  I was quite unable
to speak, at first.

'My dear fellow!' said Traddles.  'And grown so famous! My glorious
Copperfield! Good gracious me, WHEN did you come, WHERE have you
come from, WHAT have you been doing?'

Never pausing for an answer to anything he said, Traddles, who had
clapped me into an easy-chair by the fire, all this time
impetuously stirred the fire with one hand, and pulled at my
neck-kerchief with the other, under some wild delusion that it was
a great-coat.  Without putting down the poker, he now hugged me
again; and I hugged him; and, both laughing, and both wiping our
eyes, we both sat down, and shook hands across the hearth.

'To think,' said Traddles, 'that you should have been so nearly
coming home as you must have been, my dear old boy, and not at the
ceremony!'

'What ceremony, my dear Traddles?'

'Good gracious me!' cried Traddles, opening his eyes in his old
way.  'Didn't you get my last letter?'

'Certainly not, if it referred to any ceremony.'

'Why, my dear Copperfield,' said Traddles, sticking his hair
upright with both hands, and then putting his hands on my knees, 'I
am married!'

'Married!' I cried joyfully.

'Lord bless me, yes,!' said Traddles - 'by the Reverend Horace - to
Sophy - down in Devonshire.  Why, my dear boy, she's behind the
window curtain! Look here!'

To my amazement, the dearest girl in the world came at that same
instant, laughing and blushing, from her place of concealment.  And
a more cheerful, amiable, honest, happy, bright-looking bride, I
believe (as I could not help saying on the spot) the world never
saw.  I kissed her as an old acquaintance should, and wished them
joy with all my might of heart.

'Dear me,' said Traddles, 'what a delightful re-union this is! You
are so extremely brown, my dear Copperfield! God bless my soul, how
happy I am!'

'And so am I,' said I.

'And I am sure I am!' said the blushing and laughing Sophy.

'We are all as happy as possible!' said Traddles.  'Even the girls
are happy.  Dear me, I declare I forgot them!'

'Forgot?' said I.

'The girls,' said Traddles.  'Sophy's sisters.  They are staying
with us.  They have come to have a peep at London.  The fact is,
when - was it you that tumbled upstairs, Copperfield?'

'It was,' said I, laughing.

'Well then, when you tumbled upstairs,' said Traddles, 'I was
romping with the girls.  In point of fact, we were playing at Puss
in the Corner.  But as that wouldn't do in Westminster Hall, and as
it wouldn't look quite professional if they were seen by a client,
they decamped.  And they are now - listening, I have no doubt,'
said Traddles, glancing at the door of another room.

'I am sorry,' said I, laughing afresh, 'to have occasioned such a
dispersion.'

'Upon my word,' rejoined Traddles, greatly delighted, 'if you had
seen them running away, and running back again, after you had
knocked, to pick up the combs they had dropped out of their hair,
and going on in the maddest manner, you wouldn't have said so.  My
love, will you fetch the girls?'

Sophy tripped away, and we heard her received in the adjoining room
with a peal of laughter.

'Really musical, isn't it, my dear Copperfield?' said Traddles. 
'It's very agreeable to hear.  It quite lights up these old rooms. 
To an unfortunate bachelor of a fellow who has lived alone all his
life, you know, it's positively delicious.  It's charming.  Poor
things, they have had a great loss in Sophy - who, I do assure you,
Copperfield is, and ever was, the dearest girl! - and it gratifies
me beyond expression to find them in such good spirits.  The
society of girls is a very delightful thing, Copperfield.  It's not
professional, but it's very delightful.'

Observing that he slightly faltered, and comprehending that in the
goodness of his heart he was fearful of giving me some pain by what
he had said, I expressed my concurrence with a heartiness that
evidently relieved and pleased him greatly.

'But then,' said Traddles, 'our domestic arrangements are, to say
the truth, quite unprofessional altogether, my dear Copperfield. 
Even Sophy's being here, is unprofessional.  And we have no other
place of abode.  We have put to sea in a cockboat, but we are quite
prepared to rough it.  And Sophy's an extraordinary manager! You'll
be surprised how those girls are stowed away.  I am sure I hardly
know how it's done!'

'Are many of the young ladies with you?' I inquired.

'The eldest, the Beauty is here,' said Traddles, in a low
confidential voice, 'Caroline.  And Sarah's here - the one I
mentioned to you as having something the matter with her spine, you
know.  Immensely better! And the two youngest that Sophy educated
are with us.  And Louisa's here.'

'Indeed!' cried I.

'Yes,' said Traddles.  'Now the whole set - I mean the chambers -
is only three rooms; but Sophy arranges for the girls in the most
wonderful way, and they sleep as comfortably as possible.  Three in
that room,' said Traddles, pointing.  'Two in that.'

I could not help glancing round, in search of the accommodation
remaining for Mr. and Mrs. Traddles.  Traddles understood me.

'Well!' said Traddles, 'we are prepared to rough it, as I said just
now, and we did improvise a bed last week, upon the floor here. 
But there's a little room in the roof - a very nice room, when
you're up there - which Sophy papered herself, to surprise me; and
that's our room at present.  It's a capital little gipsy sort of
place.  There's quite a view from it.'

'And you are happily married at last, my dear Traddles!' said I. 
'How rejoiced I am!'

'Thank you, my dear Copperfield,' said Traddles, as we shook hands
once more.  'Yes, I am as happy as it's possible to be.  There's
your old friend, you see,' said Traddles, nodding triumphantly at
the flower-pot and stand; 'and there's the table with the marble
top! All the other furniture is plain and serviceable, you
perceive.  And as to plate, Lord bless you, we haven't so much as
a tea-spoon.'

'All to be earned?' said I, cheerfully.

'Exactly so,' replied Traddles, 'all to be earned.  Of course we
have something in the shape of tea-spoons, because we stir our tea. 
But they're Britannia metal."

'The silver will be the brighter when it comes,' said I.

'The very thing we say!' cried Traddles.  'You see, my dear
Copperfield,' falling again into the low confidential tone, 'after
I had delivered my argument in DOE dem.  JIPES versus WIGZIELL,
which did me great service with the profession, I went down into
Devonshire, and had some serious conversation in private with the
Reverend Horace.  I dwelt upon the fact that Sophy - who I do
assure you, Copperfield, is the dearest girl! -'

'I am certain she is!' said I.

'She is, indeed!' rejoined Traddles.  'But I am afraid I am
wandering from the subject.  Did I mention the Reverend Horace?'

'You said that you dwelt upon the fact -'

'True! Upon the fact that Sophy and I had been engaged for a long
period, and that Sophy, with the permission of her parents, was
more than content to take me - in short,' said Traddles, with his
old frank smile, 'on our present Britannia-metal footing.  Very
well.  I then proposed to the Reverend Horace - who is a most
excellent clergyman, Copperfield, and ought to be a Bishop; or at
least ought to have enough to live upon, without pinching himself
- that if I could turn the corner, say of two hundred and fifty
pounds, in one year; and could see my way pretty clearly to that,
or something better, next year; and could plainly furnish a little
place like this, besides; then, and in that case, Sophy and I
should be united.  I took the liberty of representing that we had
been patient for a good many years; and that the circumstance of
Sophy's being extraordinarily useful at home, ought not to operate
with her affectionate parents, against her establishment in life -
don't you see?'

'Certainly it ought not,' said I.

'I am glad you think so, Copperfield,' rejoined Traddles, 'because,
without any imputation on the Reverend Horace, I do think parents,
and brothers, and so forth, are sometimes rather selfish in such
cases.  Well! I also pointed out, that my most earnest desire was,
to be useful to the family; and that if I got on in the world, and
anything should happen to him - I refer to the Reverend Horace -'

'I understand,' said I.

'- Or to Mrs. Crewler - it would be the utmost gratification of my
wishes, to be a parent to the girls.  He replied in a most
admirable manner, exceedingly flattering to my feelings, and
undertook to obtain the consent of Mrs. Crewler to this
arrangement.  They had a dreadful time of it with her.  It mounted
from her legs into her chest, and then into her head -'

'What mounted?' I asked.

'Her grief,' replied Traddles, with a serious look.  'Her feelings
generally.  As I mentioned on a former occasion, she is a very
superior woman, but has lost the use of her limbs.  Whatever occurs
to harass her, usually settles in her legs; but on this occasion it
mounted to the chest, and then to the head, and, in short, pervaded
the whole system in a most alarming manner.  However, they brought
her through it by unremitting and affectionate attention; and we
were married yesterday six weeks.  You have no idea what a Monster
I felt, Copperfield, when I saw the whole family crying and
fainting away in every direction! Mrs. Crewler couldn't see me
before we left - couldn't forgive me, then, for depriving her of
her child - but she is a good creature, and has done so since.  I
had a delightful letter from her, only this morning.'

'And in short, my dear friend,' said I, 'you feel as blest as you
deserve to feel!'

'Oh! That's your partiality!' laughed Traddles.  'But, indeed, I am
in a most enviable state.  I work hard, and read Law insatiably. 
I get up at five every morning, and don't mind it at all.  I hide
the girls in the daytime, and make merry with them in the evening. 
And I assure you I am quite sorry that they are going home on
Tuesday, which is the day before the first day of Michaelmas Term. 
But here,' said Traddles, breaking off in his confidence, and
speaking aloud, 'ARE the girls! Mr. Copperfield, Miss Crewler -
Miss Sarah - Miss Louisa - Margaret and Lucy!'

They were a perfect nest of roses; they looked so wholesome and
fresh.  They were all pretty, and Miss Caroline was very handsome;
but there was a loving, cheerful, fireside quality in Sophy's
bright looks, which was better than that, and which assured me that
my friend had chosen well.  We all sat round the fire; while the
sharp boy, who I now divined had lost his breath in putting the
papers out, cleared them away again, and produced the tea-things. 
After that, he retired for the night, shutting the outer door upon
us with a bang.  Mrs. Traddles, with perfect pleasure and composure
beaming from her household eyes, having made the tea, then quietly
made the toast as she sat in a corner by the fire.

She had seen Agnes, she told me while she was toasting.  'Tom' had
taken her down into Kent for a wedding trip, and there she had seen
my aunt, too; and both my aunt and Agnes were well, and they had
all talked of nothing but me.  'Tom' had never had me out of his
thoughts, she really believed, all the time I had been away.  'Tom'
was the authority for everything.  'Tom' was evidently the idol of
her life; never to be shaken on his pedestal by any commotion;
always to be believed in, and done homage to with the whole faith
of her heart, come what might.

The deference which both she and Traddles showed towards the
Beauty, pleased me very much.  I don't know that I thought it very
reasonable; but I thought it very delightful, and essentially a
part of their character.  If Traddles ever for an instant missed
the tea-spoons that were still to be won, I have no doubt it was
when he handed the Beauty her tea.  If his sweet-tempered wife
could have got up any self-assertion against anyone, I am satisfied
it could only have been because she was the Beauty's sister.  A few
slight indications of a rather petted and capricious manner, which
I observed in the Beauty, were manifestly considered, by Traddles
and his wife, as her birthright and natural endowment.  If she had
been born a Queen Bee, and they labouring Bees, they could not have
been more satisfied of that.

But their self-forgetfulness charmed me.  Their pride in these
girls, and their submission of themselves to all their whims, was
the pleasantest little testimony to their own worth I could have
desired to see.  If Traddles were addressed as 'a darling', once in
the course of that evening; and besought to bring something here,
or carry something there, or take something up, or put something
down, or find something, or fetch something, he was so addressed,
by one or other of his sisters-in-law, at least twelve times in an
hour.  Neither could they do anything without Sophy.  Somebody's
hair fell down, and nobody but Sophy could put it up.  Somebody
forgot how a particular tune went, and nobody but Sophy could hum
that tune right.  Somebody wanted to recall the name of a place in
Devonshire, and only Sophy knew it.  Something was wanted to be
written home, and Sophy alone could be trusted to write before
breakfast in the morning.  Somebody broke down in a piece of
knitting, and no one but Sophy was able to put the defaulter in the
right direction.  They were entire mistresses of the place, and
Sophy and Traddles waited on them.  How many children Sophy could
have taken care of in her time, I can't imagine; but she seemed to
be famous for knowing every sort of song that ever was addressed to
a child in the English tongue; and she sang dozens to order with
the clearest little voice in the world, one after another (every
sister issuing directions for a different tune, and the Beauty
generally striking in last), so that I was quite fascinated.  The
best of all was, that, in the midst of their exactions, all the
sisters had a great tenderness and respect both for Sophy and
Traddles.  I am sure, when I took my leave, and Traddles was coming
out to walk with me to the coffee-house, I thought I had never seen
an obstinate head of hair, or any other head of hair, rolling about
in such a shower of kisses.

Altogether, it was a scene I could not help dwelling on with
pleasure, for a long time after I got back and had wished Traddles
good night.  If I had beheld a thousand roses blowing in a top set
of chambers, in that withered Gray's Inn, they could not have
brightened it half so much.  The idea of those Devonshire girls,
among the dry law-stationers and the attorneys' offices; and of the
tea and toast, and children's songs, in that grim atmosphere of
pounce and parchment, red-tape, dusty wafers, ink-jars, brief and
draft paper, law reports, writs, declarations, and bills of costs;
seemed almost as pleasantly fanciful as if I had dreamed that the
Sultan's famous family had been admitted on the roll of attorneys,
and had brought the talking bird, the singing tree, and the golden
water into Gray's Inn Hall.  Somehow, I found that I had taken
leave of Traddles for the night, and come back to the coffee-house,
with a great change in my despondency about him.  I began to think
he would get on, in spite of all the many orders of chief waiters
in England.

Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think about
him at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration of his
happiness to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to thinking,
as they broke and changed, of the principal vicissitudes and
separations that had marked my life.  I had not seen a coal fire,
since I had left England three years ago: though many a wood fire
had I watched, as it crumbled into hoary ashes, and mingled with
the feathery heap upon the hearth, which not inaptly figured to me,
in my despondency, my own dead hopes.

I could think of the past now, gravely, but not bitterly; and could
contemplate the future in a brave spirit.  Home, in its best sense,
was for me no more.  She in whom I might have inspired a dearer
love, I had taught to be my sister.  She would marry, and would
have new claimants on her tenderness; and in doing it, would never
know the love for her that had grown up in my heart.  It was right
that I should pay the forfeit of my headlong passion.  What I
reaped, I had sown.

I was thinking.  And had I truly disciplined my heart to this, and
could I resolutely bear it, and calmly hold the place in her home
which she had calmly held in mine, - when I found my eyes resting
on a countenance that might have arisen out of the fire, in its
association with my early remembrances.

Little Mr. Chillip the Doctor, to whose good offices I was indebted
in the very first chapter of this history, sat reading a newspaper
in the shadow of an opposite corner.  He was tolerably stricken in
years by this time; but, being a mild, meek, calm little man, had
worn so easily, that I thought he looked at that moment just as he
might have looked when he sat in our parlour, waiting for me to be
born.

Mr. Chillip had left Blunderstone six or seven years ago, and I had
never seen him since.  He sat placidly perusing the newspaper, with
his little head on one side, and a glass of warm sherry negus at
his elbow.  He was so extremely conciliatory in his manner that he
seemed to apologize to the very newspaper for taking the liberty of
reading it.

I walked up to where he was sitting, and said, 'How do you do, Mr.
Chillip?'

He was greatly fluttered by this unexpected address from a
stranger, and replied, in his slow way, 'I thank you, sir, you are
very good.  Thank you, sir.  I hope YOU are well.'

'You don't remember me?' said I.

'Well, sir,' returned Mr. Chillip, smiling very meekly, and shaking
his head as he surveyed me, 'I have a kind of an impression that
something in your countenance is familiar to me, sir; but I
couldn't lay my hand upon your name, really.'

'And yet you knew it, long before I knew it myself,' I returned.

'Did I indeed, sir?' said Mr. Chillip.  'Is it possible that I had
the honour, sir, of officiating when -?'

'Yes,' said I.

'Dear me!' cried Mr. Chillip.  'But no doubt you are a good deal
changed since then, sir?'

'Probably,' said I.

'Well, sir,' observed Mr. Chillip, 'I hope you'll excuse me, if I
am compelled to ask the favour of your name?'

On my telling him my name, he was really moved.  He quite shook
hands with me - which was a violent proceeding for him, his usual
course being to slide a tepid little fish-slice, an inch or two in
advance of his hip, and evince the greatest discomposure when
anybody grappled with it.  Even now, he put his hand in his
coat-pocket as soon as he could disengage it, and seemed relieved
when he had got it safe back.

'Dear me, sir!' said Mr. Chillip, surveying me with his head on one
side.  'And it's Mr. Copperfield, is it?  Well, sir, I think I
should have known you, if I had taken the liberty of looking more
closely at you.  There's a strong resemblance between you and your
poor father, sir.'

'I never had the happiness of seeing my father,' I observed.

'Very true, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, in a soothing tone.  'And very
much to be deplored it was, on all accounts! We are not ignorant,
sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his little head again, 'down
in our part of the country, of your fame.  There must be great
excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, tapping himself on the
forehead with his forefinger.  'You must find it a trying
occupation, sir!'

'What is your part of the country now?' I asked, seating myself
near him.

'I am established within a few miles of Bury St. Edmund's, sir,'
said Mr. Chillip.  'Mrs. Chillip, coming into a little property in
that neighbourhood, under her father's will, I bought a practice
down there, in which you will be glad to hear I am doing well.  My
daughter is growing quite a tall lass now, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
giving his little head another little shake.  'Her mother let down
two tucks in her frocks only last week.  Such is time, you see,
sir!'

As the little man put his now empty glass to his lips, when he made
this reflection, I proposed to him to have it refilled, and I would
keep him company with another.  'Well, sir,' he returned, in his
slow way, 'it's more than I am accustomed to; but I can't deny
myself the pleasure of your conversation.  It seems but yesterday
that I had the honour of attending you in the measles.  You came
through them charmingly, sir!'

I acknowledged this compliment, and ordered the negus, which was
soon produced.  'Quite an uncommon dissipation!' said Mr. Chillip,
stirring it, 'but I can't resist so extraordinary an occasion.  You
have no family, sir?'

I shook my head.

'I was aware that you sustained a bereavement, sir, some time ago,'
said Mr. Chillip.  'I heard it from your father-in-law's sister. 
Very decided character there, sir?'

'Why, yes,' said I, 'decided enough.  Where did you see her, Mr.
Chillip?'

'Are you not aware, sir,' returned Mr. Chillip, with his placidest
smile, 'that your father-in-law is again a neighbour of mine?'

'No,' said I.

'He is indeed, sir!' said Mr. Chillip.  'Married a young lady of
that part, with a very good little property, poor thing.  - And
this action of the brain now, sir?  Don't you find it fatigue you?'
said Mr. Chillip, looking at me like an admiring Robin.

I waived that question, and returned to the Murdstones.  'I was
aware of his being married again.  Do you attend the family?' I
asked.

'Not regularly.  I have been called in,' he replied.  'Strong
phrenological developments of the organ of firmness, in Mr.
Murdstone and his sister, sir.'

I replied with such an expressive look, that Mr. Chillip was
emboldened by that, and the negus together, to give his head
several short shakes, and thoughtfully exclaim, 'Ah, dear me! We
remember old times, Mr. Copperfield!'

'And the brother and sister are pursuing their old course, are
they?' said I.

'Well, sir,' replied Mr. Chillip, 'a medical man, being so much in
families, ought to have neither eyes nor ears for anything but his
profession.  Still, I must say, they are very severe, sir: both as
to this life and the next.'

'The next will be regulated without much reference to them, I dare
say,' I returned: 'what are they doing as to this?'

Mr. Chillip shook his head, stirred his negus, and sipped it.

'She was a charming woman, sir!' he observed in a plaintive manner.

'The present Mrs. Murdstone?'

A charming woman indeed, sir,' said Mr. Chillip; 'as amiable, I am
sure, as it was possible to be! Mrs. Chillip's opinion is, that her
spirit has been entirely broken since her marriage, and that she is
all but melancholy mad.  And the ladies,' observed Mr. Chillip,
timorously, 'are great observers, sir.'

'I suppose she was to be subdued and broken to their detestable
mould, Heaven help her!' said I.  'And she has been.'

'Well, sir, there were violent quarrels at first, I assure you,'
said Mr. Chillip; 'but she is quite a shadow now.  Would it be
considered forward if I was to say to you, sir, in confidence, that
since the sister came to help, the brother and sister between them
have nearly reduced her to a state of imbecility?'

I told him I could easily believe it.

'I have no hesitation in saying,' said Mr. Chillip, fortifying
himself with another sip of negus, 'between you and me, sir, that
her mother died of it - or that tyranny, gloom, and worry have made
Mrs. Murdstone nearly imbecile.  She was a lively young woman, sir,
before marriage, and their gloom and austerity destroyed her.  They
go about with her, now, more like her keepers than her husband and
sister-in-law.  That was Mrs. Chillip's remark to me, only last
week.  And I assure you, sir, the ladies are great observers.  Mrs.
Chillip herself is a great observer!'

'Does he gloomily profess to be (I am ashamed to use the word in
such association) religious still?' I inquired.

'You anticipate, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, his eyelids getting quite
red with the unwonted stimulus in which he was indulging.  'One of
Mrs. Chillip's most impressive remarks.  Mrs. Chillip,' he
proceeded, in the calmest and slowest manner, 'quite electrified
me, by pointing out that Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself,
and calls it the Divine Nature.  You might have knocked me down on
the flat of my back, sir, with the feather of a pen, I assure you,
when Mrs. Chillip said so.  The ladies are great observers, sir?'

'Intuitively,' said I, to his extreme delight.

'I am very happy to receive such support in my opinion, sir,' he
rejoined.  'It is not often that I venture to give a non-medical
opinion, I assure you.  Mr. Murdstone delivers public addresses
sometimes, and it is said, - in short, sir, it is said by Mrs.
Chillip, - that the darker tyrant he has lately been, the more
ferocious is his doctrine.'

'I believe Mrs. Chillip to be perfectly right,' said I.

'Mrs. Chillip does go so far as to say,' pursued the meekest of
little men, much encouraged, 'that what such people miscall their
religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.  And do
you know I must say, sir,' he continued, mildly laying his head on
one side, 'that I DON'T find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone
in the New Testament?'

'I never found it either!' said I.

'In the meantime, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, 'they are much disliked;
and as they are very free in consigning everybody who dislikes them
to perdition, we really have a good deal of perdition going on in
our neighbourhood! However, as Mrs. Chillip says, sir, they undergo
a continual punishment; for they are turned inward, to feed upon
their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding.  Now,
sir, about that brain of yours, if you'll excuse my returning to
it.  Don't you expose it to a good deal of excitement, sir?'

I found it not difficult, in the excitement of Mr. Chillip's own
brain, under his potations of negus, to divert his attention from
this topic to his own affairs, on which, for the next half-hour, he
was quite loquacious; giving me to understand, among other pieces
of information, that he was then at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house to
lay his professional evidence before a Commission of Lunacy,
touching the state of mind of a patient who had become deranged
from excessive drinking.
'And I assure you, sir,' he said, 'I am extremely nervous on such
occasions.  I could not support being what is called Bullied, sir. 
It would quite unman me.  Do you know it was some time before I
recovered the conduct of that alarming lady, on the night of your
birth, Mr. Copperfield?'

I told him that I was going down to my aunt, the Dragon of that
night, early in the morning; and that she was one of the most
tender-hearted and excellent of women, as he would know full well
if he knew her better.  The mere notion of the possibility of his
ever seeing her again, appeared to terrify him.  He replied with a
small pale smile, 'Is she so, indeed, sir?  Really?' and almost
immediately called for a candle, and went to bed, as if he were not
quite safe anywhere else.  He did not actually stagger under the
negus; but I should think his placid little pulse must have made
two or three more beats in a minute, than it had done since the
great night of my aunt's disappointment, when she struck at him
with her bonnet.

Thoroughly tired, I went to bed too, at midnight; passed the next
day on the Dover coach; burst safe and sound into my aunt's old
parlour while she was at tea (she wore spectacles now); and was
received by her, and Mr. Dick, and dear old Peggotty, who acted as
housekeeper, with open arms and tears of joy.  My aunt was mightily
amused, when we began to talk composedly, by my account of my
meeting with Mr. Chillip, and of his holding her in such dread
remembrance; and both she and Peggotty had a great deal to say
about my poor mother's second husband, and 'that murdering woman of
a sister', - on whom I think no pain or penalty would have induced
my aunt to bestow any Christian or Proper Name, or any other
designation.



CHAPTER 60
AGNES


My aunt and I, when we were left alone, talked far into the night. 
How the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than cheerfully and
hopefully; how Mr. Micawber had actually remitted divers small sums
of money, on account of those 'pecuniary liabilities', in reference
to which he had been so business-like as between man and man; how
Janet, returning into my aunt's service when she came back to
Dover, had finally carried out her renunciation of mankind by
entering into wedlock with a thriving tavern-keeper; and how my
aunt had finally set her seal on the same great principle, by
aiding and abetting the bride, and crowning the marriage-ceremony
with her presence; were among our topics - already more or less
familiar to me through the letters I had had.  Mr. Dick, as usual,
was not forgotten.  My aunt informed me how he incessantly occupied
himself in copying everything he could lay his hands on, and kept
King Charles the First at a respectful distance by that semblance
of employment; how it was one of the main joys and rewards of her
life that he was free and happy, instead of pining in monotonous
restraint; and how (as a novel general conclusion) nobody but she
could ever fully know what he was.

'And when, Trot,' said my aunt, patting the back of my hand, as we
sat in our old way before the fire, 'when are you going over to
Canterbury?'

'I shall get a horse, and ride over tomorrow morning, aunt, unless
you will go with me?'

'No!' said my aunt, in her short abrupt way.  'I mean to stay where
I am.'

Then, I should ride, I said.  I could not have come through
Canterbury today without stopping, if I had been coming to anyone
but her.

She was pleased, but answered, 'Tut, Trot; MY old bones would have
kept till tomorrow!' and softly patted my hand again, as I sat
looking thoughtfully at the fire.

Thoughtfully, for I could not be here once more, and so near Agnes,
without the revival of those regrets with which I had so long been
occupied.  Softened regrets they might be, teaching me what I had
failed to learn when my younger life was all before me, but not the
less regrets.  'Oh, Trot,' I seemed to hear my aunt say once more;
and I understood her better now - 'Blind, blind, blind!'

We both kept silence for some minutes.  When I raised my eyes, I
found that she was steadily observant of me.  Perhaps she had
followed the current of my mind; for it seemed to me an easy one to
track now, wilful as it had been once.

'You will find her father a white-haired old man,' said my aunt,
'though a better man in all other respects - a reclaimed man. 
Neither will you find him measuring all human interests, and joys,
and sorrows, with his one poor little inch-rule now.  Trust me,
child, such things must shrink very much, before they can be
measured off in that way.'

'Indeed they must,' said I.

'You will find her,' pursued my aunt, 'as good, as beautiful, as
earnest, as disinterested, as she has always been.  If I knew
higher praise, Trot, I would bestow it on her.'

There was no higher praise for her; no higher reproach for me.  Oh,
how had I strayed so far away!

'If she trains the young girls whom she has about her, to be like
herself,' said my aunt, earnest even to the filling of her eyes
with tears, 'Heaven knows, her life will be well employed! Useful
and happy, as she said that day! How could she be otherwise than
useful and happy!'

'Has Agnes any -' I was thinking aloud, rather than speaking.

'Well?  Hey?  Any what?' said my aunt, sharply.

'Any lover,' said I.

'A score,' cried my aunt, with a kind of indignant pride.  'She
might have married twenty times, my dear, since you have been
gone!'

'No doubt,' said I.  'No doubt.  But has she any lover who is
worthy of her?  Agnes could care for no other.'

My aunt sat musing for a little while, with her chin upon her hand. 
Slowly raising her eyes to mine, she said:

'I suspect she has an attachment, Trot.'

'A prosperous one?' said I.

'Trot,' returned my aunt gravely, 'I can't say.  I have no right to
tell you even so much.  She has never confided it to me, but I
suspect it.'

She looked so attentively and anxiously at me (I even saw her
tremble), that I felt now, more than ever, that she had followed my
late thoughts.  I summoned all the resolutions I had made, in all
those many days and nights, and all those many conflicts of my
heart.

'If it should be so,' I began, 'and I hope it is-'

'I don't know that it is,' said my aunt curtly.  'You must not be
ruled by my suspicions.  You must keep them secret.  They are very
slight, perhaps.  I have no right to speak.'

'If it should be so,' I repeated, 'Agnes will tell me at her own
good time.  A sister to whom I have confided so much, aunt, will
not be reluctant to confide in me.'

My aunt withdrew her eyes from mine, as slowly as she had turned
them upon me; and covered them thoughtfully with her hand.  By and
by she put her other hand on my shoulder; and so we both sat,
looking into the past, without saying another word, until we parted
for the night.

I rode away, early in the morning, for the scene of my old
school-days.  I cannot say that I was yet quite happy, in the hope
that I was gaining a victory over myself; even in the prospect of
so soon looking on her face again.

The well-remembered ground was soon traversed, and I came into the
quiet streets, where every stone was a boy's book to me.  I went on
foot to the old house, and went away with a heart too full to
enter.  I returned; and looking, as I passed, through the low
window of the turret-room where first Uriah Heep, and afterwards
Mr. Micawber, had been wont to sit, saw that it was a little
parlour now, and that there was no office.  Otherwise the staid old
house was, as to its cleanliness and order, still just as it had
been when I first saw it.  I requested the new maid who admitted
me, to tell Miss Wickfield that a gentleman who waited on her from
a friend abroad, was there; and I was shown up the grave old
staircase (cautioned of the steps I knew so well), into the
unchanged drawing-room.  The books that Agnes and I had read
together, were on their shelves; and the desk where I had laboured
at my lessons, many a night, stood yet at the same old corner of
the table.  All the little changes that had crept in when the Heeps
were there, were changed again.  Everything was as it used to be,
in the happy time.

I stood in a window, and looked across the ancient street at the
opposite houses, recalling how I had watched them on wet
afternoons, when I first came there; and how I had used to
speculate about the people who appeared at any of the windows, and
had followed them with my eyes up and down stairs, while women went
clicking along the pavement in pattens, and the dull rain fell in
slanting lines, and poured out of the water-spout yonder, and
flowed into the road.  The feeling with which I used to watch the
tramps, as they came into the town on those wet evenings, at dusk,
and limped past, with their bundles drooping over their shoulders
at the ends of sticks, came freshly back to me; fraught, as then,
with the smell of damp earth, and wet leaves and briar, and the
sensation of the very airs that blew upon me in my own toilsome
journey.

The opening of the little door in the panelled wall made me start
and turn.  Her beautiful serene eyes met mine as she came towards
me.  She stopped and laid her hand upon her bosom, and I caught her
in my arms.

'Agnes! my dear girl! I have come too suddenly upon you.'

'No, no! I am so rejoiced to see you, Trotwood!'

'Dear Agnes, the happiness it is to me, to see you once again!'

I folded her to my heart, and, for a little while, we were both
silent.  Presently we sat down, side by side; and her angel-face
was turned upon me with the welcome I had dreamed of, waking and
sleeping, for whole years.

She was so true, she was so beautiful, she was so good, - I owed
her so much gratitude, she was so dear to me, that I could find no
utterance for what I felt.  I tried to bless her, tried to thank
her, tried to tell her (as I had often done in letters) what an
influence she had upon me; but all my efforts were in vain.  My
love and joy were dumb.

With her own sweet tranquillity, she calmed my agitation; led me
back to the time of our parting; spoke to me of Emily, whom she had
visited, in secret, many times; spoke to me tenderly of Dora's
grave.  With the unerring instinct of her noble heart, she touched
the chords of my memory so softly and harmoniously, that not one
jarred within me; I could listen to the sorrowful, distant music,
and desire to shrink from nothing it awoke.  How could I, when,
blended with it all, was her dear self, the better angel of my
life?

'And you, Agnes,' I said, by and by.  'Tell me of yourself.  You
have hardly ever told me of your own life, in all this lapse of
time!'

'What should I tell?' she answered, with her radiant smile.  'Papa
is well.  You see us here, quiet in our own home; our anxieties set
at rest, our home restored to us; and knowing that, dear Trotwood,
you know all.'

'All, Agnes?' said I.

She looked at me, with some fluttering wonder in her face.

'Is there nothing else, Sister?' I said.

Her colour, which had just now faded, returned, and faded again. 
She smiled; with a quiet sadness, I thought; and shook her head.

I had sought to lead her to what my aunt had hinted at; for,
sharply painful to me as it must be to receive that confidence, I
was to discipline my heart, and do my duty to her.  I saw, however,
that she was uneasy, and I let it pass.

'You have much to do, dear Agnes?'

'With my school?' said she, looking up again, in all her bright
composure.

'Yes.  It is laborious, is it not?'

'The labour is so pleasant,' she returned, 'that it is scarcely
grateful in me to call it by that name.'

'Nothing good is difficult to you,' said I.

Her colour came and went once more; and once more, as she bent her
head, I saw the same sad smile.

'You will wait and see papa,' said Agnes, cheerfully, 'and pass the
day with us?  Perhaps you will sleep in your own room?  We always
call it yours.'

I could not do that, having promised to ride back to my aunt's at
night; but I would pass the day there, joyfully.

'I must be a prisoner for a little while,' said Agnes, 'but here
are the old books, Trotwood, and the old music.'

'Even the old flowers are here,' said I, looking round; 'or the old
kinds.'

'I have found a pleasure,' returned Agnes, smiling, 'while you have
been absent, in keeping everything as it used to be when we were
children.  For we were very happy then, I think.'

'Heaven knows we were!' said I.

'And every little thing that has reminded me of my brother,' said
Agnes, with her cordial eyes turned cheerfully upon me, 'has been
a welcome companion.  Even this,' showing me the basket-trifle,
full of keys, still hanging at her side, 'seems to jingle a kind of
old tune!'

She smiled again, and went out at the door by which she had come.

It was for me to guard this sisterly affection with religious care. 
It was all that I had left myself, and it was a treasure.  If I
once shook the foundations of the sacred confidence and usage, in
virtue of which it was given to me, it was lost, and could never be
recovered.  I set this steadily before myself.  The better I loved
her, the more it behoved me never to forget it.

I walked through the streets; and, once more seeing my old
adversary the butcher - now a constable, with his staff hanging up
in the shop - went down to look at the place where I had fought
him; and there meditated on Miss Shepherd and the eldest Miss
Larkins, and all the idle loves and likings, and dislikings, of
that time.  Nothing seemed to have survived that time but Agnes;
and she, ever a star above me, was brighter and higher.

When I returned, Mr. Wickfield had come home, from a garden he had,
a couple of miles or so out of town, where he now employed himself
almost every day.  I found him as my aunt had described him.  We
sat down to dinner, with some half-dozen little girls; and he
seemed but the shadow of his handsome picture on the wall.

The tranquillity and peace belonging, of old, to that quiet ground
in my memory, pervaded it again.  When dinner was done, Mr.
Wickfield taking no wine, and I desiring none, we went up-stairs;
where Agnes and her little charges sang and played, and worked. 
After tea the children left us; and we three sat together, talking
of the bygone days.

'My part in them,' said Mr. Wickfield, shaking his white head, 'has
much matter for regret - for deep regret, and deep contrition,
Trotwood, you well know.  But I would not cancel it, if it were in
my power.'

I could readily believe that, looking at the face beside him.

'I should cancel with it,' he pursued, 'such patience and devotion,
such fidelity, such a child's love, as I must not forget, no! even
to forget myself.'

'I understand you, sir,' I softly said.  'I hold it - I have always
held it - in veneration.'

'But no one knows, not even you,' he returned, 'how much she has
done, how much she has undergone, how hard she has striven.  Dear
Agnes!'

She had put her hand entreatingly on his arm, to stop him; and was
very, very pale.

'Well, well!' he said with a sigh, dismissing, as I then saw, some
trial she had borne, or was yet to bear, in connexion with what my
aunt had told me.  'Well! I have never told you, Trotwood, of her
mother.  Has anyone?'

'Never, sir.'

'It's not much - though it was much to suffer.  She married me in
opposition to her father's wish, and he renounced her.  She prayed
him to forgive her, before my Agnes came into this world.  He was
a very hard man, and her mother had long been dead.  He repulsed
her.  He broke her heart.'

Agnes leaned upon his shoulder, and stole her arm about his neck.

'She had an affectionate and gentle heart,' he said; 'and it was
broken.  I knew its tender nature very well.  No one could, if I
did not.  She loved me dearly, but was never happy.  She was always
labouring, in secret, under this distress; and being delicate and
downcast at the time of his last repulse - for it was not the
first, by many - pined away and died.  She left me Agnes, two weeks
old; and the grey hair that you recollect me with, when you first
came.'  He kissed Agnes on her cheek.

'My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my mind was all
unhealthy then.  I say no more of that.  I am not speaking of
myself, Trotwood, but of her mother, and of her.  If I give you any
clue to what I am, or to what I have been, you will unravel it, I
know.  What Agnes is, I need not say.  I have always read something
of her poor mother's story, in her character; and so I tell it you
tonight, when we three are again together, after such great
changes.  I have told it all.'

His bowed head, and her angel-face and filial duty, derived a more
pathetic meaning from it than they had had before.  If I had wanted
anything by which to mark this night of our re-union, I should have
found it in this.

Agnes rose up from her father's side, before long; and going softly
to her piano, played some of the old airs to which we had often
listened in that place.

'Have you any intention of going away again?' Agnes asked me, as I
was standing by.

'What does my sister say to that?'

'I hope not.'

'Then I have no such intention, Agnes.'

'I think you ought not, Trotwood, since you ask me,' she said,
mildly.  'Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of
doing good; and if I could spare my brother,' with her eyes upon
me, 'perhaps the time could not.'

'What I am, you have made me, Agnes.  You should know best.'

'I made you, Trotwood?'

'Yes! Agnes, my dear girl!' I said, bending over her.  'I tried to
tell you, when we met today, something that has been in my thoughts
since Dora died.  You remember, when you came down to me in our
little room - pointing upward, Agnes?'

'Oh, Trotwood!' she returned, her eyes filled with tears.  'So
loving, so confiding, and so young! Can I ever forget?'

'As you were then, my sister, I have often thought since, you have
ever been to me.  Ever pointing upward, Agnes; ever leading me to
something better; ever directing me to higher things!'

She only shook her head; through her tears I saw the same sad quiet
smile.

'And I am so grateful to you for it, Agnes, so bound to you, that
there is no name for the affection of my heart.  I want you to
know, yet don't know how to tell you, that all my life long I shall
look up to you, and be guided by you, as I have been through the
darkness that is past.  Whatever betides, whatever new ties you may
form, whatever changes may come between us, I shall always look to
you, and love you, as I do now, and have always done.  You will
always be my solace and resource, as you have always been.  Until
I die, my dearest sister, I shall see you always before me,
pointing upward!'

She put her hand in mine, and told me she was proud of me, and of
what I said; although I praised her very far beyond her worth. 
Then she went on softly playing, but without removing her eyes from
me.
'Do you know, what I have heard tonight, Agnes,' said I, strangely
seems to be a part of the feeling with which I regarded you when I
saw you first - with which I sat beside you in my rough
school-days?'

'You knew I had no mother,' she replied with a smile, 'and felt
kindly towards me.'

'More than that, Agnes, I knew, almost as if I had known this
story, that there was something inexplicably gentle and softened,
surrounding you; something that might have been sorrowful in
someone else (as I can now understand it was), but was not so in
you.'

She softly played on, looking at me still.

'Will you laugh at my cherishing such fancies, Agnes?'

'No!'

'Or at my saying that I really believe I felt, even then, that you
could be faithfully affectionate against all discouragement, and
never cease to be so, until you ceased to live?  - Will you laugh
at such a dream?'

'Oh, no! Oh, no!'

For an instant, a distressful shadow crossed her face; but, even in
the start it gave me, it was gone; and she was playing on, and
looking at me with her own calm smile.

As I rode back in the lonely night, the wind going by me like a
restless memory, I thought of this, and feared she was not happy. 
I was not happy; but, thus far, I had faithfully set the seal upon
the Past, and, thinking of her, pointing upward, thought of her as
pointing to that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I
might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what
the strife had been within me when I loved her here.



CHAPTER 61
I AM SHOWN TWO INTERESTING PENITENTS


For a time - at all events until my book should be completed, which
would be the work of several months - I took up my abode in my
aunt's house at Dover; and there, sitting in the window from which
I had looked out at the moon upon the sea, when that roof first
gave me shelter, I quietly pursued my task.

In pursuance of my intention of referring to my own fictions only
when their course should incidentally connect itself with the
progress of my story, I do not enter on the aspirations, the
delights, anxieties, and triumphs of my art.  That I truly devoted
myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed upon it
every energy of my soul, I have already said.  If the books I have
written be of any worth, they will supply the rest.  I shall
otherwise have written to poor purpose, and the rest will be of
interest to no one.

Occasionally, I went to London; to lose myself in the swarm of life
there, or to consult with Traddles on some business point.  He had
managed for me, in my absence, with the soundest judgement; and my
worldly affairs were prospering.  As my notoriety began to bring
upon me an enormous quantity of letters from people of whom I had
no knowledge - chiefly about nothing, and extremely difficult to
answer - I agreed with Traddles to have my name painted up on his
door.  There, the devoted postman on that beat delivered bushels of
letters for me; and there, at intervals, I laboured through them,
like a Home Secretary of State without the salary.

Among this correspondence, there dropped in, every now and then, an
obliging proposal from one of the numerous outsiders always lurking
about the Commons, to practise under cover of my name (if I would
take the necessary steps remaining to make a proctor of myself),
and pay me a percentage on the profits.  But I declined these
offers; being already aware that there were plenty of such covert
practitioners in existence, and considering the Commons quite bad
enough, without my doing anything to make it worse.

The girls had gone home, when my name burst into bloom on
Traddles's door; and the sharp boy looked, all day, as if he had
never heard of Sophy, shut up in a back room, glancing down from
her work into a sooty little strip of garden with a pump in it. 
But there I always found her, the same bright housewife; often
humming her Devonshire ballads when no strange foot was coming up
the stairs, and blunting the sharp boy in his official closet with
melody.

I wondered, at first, why I so often found Sophy writing in a
copy-book; and why she always shut it up when I appeared, and
hurried it into the table-drawer.  But the secret soon came out. 
One day, Traddles (who had just come home through the drizzling
sleet from Court) took a paper out of his desk, and asked me what
I thought of that handwriting?

'Oh, DON'T, Tom!' cried Sophy, who was warming his slippers before
the fire.

'My dear,' returned Tom, in a delighted state, 'why not?  What do
you say to that writing, Copperfield?'

'It's extraordinarily legal and formal,' said I.  'I don't think I
ever saw such a stiff hand.'

'Not like a lady's hand, is it?' said Traddles.

'A lady's!' I repeated.  'Bricks and mortar are more like a lady's
hand!'

Traddles broke into a rapturous laugh, and informed me that it was
Sophy's writing; that Sophy had vowed and declared he would need a
copying-clerk soon, and she would be that clerk; that she had
acquired this hand from a pattern; and that she could throw off -
I forget how many folios an hour.  Sophy was very much confused by
my being told all this, and said that when 'Tom' was made a judge
he wouldn't be so ready to proclaim it.  Which 'Tom' denied;
averring that he should always be equally proud of it, under all
circumstances.

'What a thoroughly good and charming wife she is, my dear
Traddles!' said I, when she had gone away, laughing.

'My dear Copperfield,' returned Traddles, 'she is, without any
exception, the dearest girl! The way she manages this place; her
punctuality, domestic knowledge, economy, and order; her
cheerfulness, Copperfield!'

'Indeed, you have reason to commend her!' I returned.  'You are a
happy fellow.  I believe you make yourselves, and each other, two
of the happiest people in the world.'

'I am sure we ARE two of the happiest people,' returned Traddles. 
'I admit that, at all events.  Bless my soul, when I see her
getting up by candle-light on these dark mornings, busying herself
in the day's arrangements, going out to market before the clerks
come into the Inn, caring for no weather, devising the most capital
little dinners out of the plainest materials, making puddings and
pies, keeping everything in its right place, always so neat and
ornamental herself, sitting up at night with me if it's ever so
late, sweet-tempered and encouraging always, and all for me, I
positively sometimes can't believe it, Copperfield!'

He was tender of the very slippers she had been warming, as he put
them on, and stretched his feet enjoyingly upon the fender.

'I positively sometimes can't believe it,' said Traddles.  'Then
our pleasures! Dear me, they are inexpensive, but they are quite
wonderful! When we are at home here, of an evening, and shut the
outer door, and draw those curtains - which she made - where could
we be more snug?  When it's fine, and we go out for a walk in the
evening, the streets abound in enjoyment for us.  We look into the
glittering windows of the jewellers' shops; and I show Sophy which
of the diamond-eyed serpents, coiled up on white satin rising
grounds, I would give her if I could afford it; and Sophy shows me
which of the gold watches that are capped and jewelled and
engine-turned, and possessed of the horizontal lever-
escape-movement, and all sorts of things, she would buy for me if
she could afford it; and we pick out the spoons and forks,
fish-slices, butter-knives, and sugar-tongs, we should both prefer
if we could both afford it; and really we go away as if we had got
them! Then, when we stroll into the squares, and great streets, and
see a house to let, sometimes we look up at it, and say, how would
THAT do, if I was made a judge?  And we parcel it out - such a room
for us, such rooms for the girls, and so forth; until we settle to
our satisfaction that it would do, or it wouldn't do, as the case
may be.  Sometimes, we go at half-price to the pit of the theatre
- the very smell of which is cheap, in my opinion, at the money -
and there we thoroughly enjoy the play: which Sophy believes every
word of, and so do I.  In walking home, perhaps we buy a little bit
of something at a cook's-shop, or a little lobster at the
fishmongers, and bring it here, and make a splendid supper,
chatting about what we have seen.  Now, you know, Copperfield, if
I was Lord Chancellor, we couldn't do this!'

'You would do something, whatever you were, my dear Traddles,'
thought I, 'that would be pleasant and amiable.  And by the way,'
I said aloud, 'I suppose you never draw any skeletons now?'

'Really,' replied Traddles, laughing, and reddening, 'I can't
wholly deny that I do, my dear Copperfield.  For being in one of
the back rows of the King's Bench the other day, with a pen in my
hand, the fancy came into my head to try how I had preserved that
accomplishment.  And I am afraid there's a skeleton - in a wig - on
the ledge of the desk.'

After we had both laughed heartily, Traddles wound up by looking
with a smile at the fire, and saying, in his forgiving way, 'Old
Creakle!'

'I have a letter from that old - Rascal here,' said I.  For I never
was less disposed to forgive him the way he used to batter
Traddles, than when I saw Traddles so ready to forgive him himself.

'From Creakle the schoolmaster?' exclaimed Traddles.  'No!'

'Among the persons who are attracted to me in my rising fame and
fortune,' said I, looking over my letters, 'and who discover that
they were always much attached to me, is the self-same Creakle.  He
is not a schoolmaster now, Traddles.  He is retired.  He is a
Middlesex Magistrate.'

I thought Traddles might be surprised to hear it, but he was not so
at all.

'How do you suppose he comes to be a Middlesex Magistrate?' said I.

'Oh dear me!' replied Traddles, 'it would be very difficult to
answer that question.  Perhaps he voted for somebody, or lent money
to somebody, or bought something of somebody, or otherwise obliged
somebody, or jobbed for somebody, who knew somebody who got the
lieutenant of the county to nominate him for the commission.'

'On the commission he is, at any rate,' said I.  'And he writes to
me here, that he will be glad to show me, in operation, the only
true system of prison discipline; the only unchallengeable way of
making sincere and lasting converts and penitents - which, you
know, is by solitary confinement.  What do you say?'

'To the system?' inquired Traddles, looking grave.

'No.  To my accepting the offer, and your going with me?'

'I don't object,' said Traddles.

'Then I'll write to say so.  You remember (to say nothing of our
treatment) this same Creakle turning his son out of doors, I
suppose, and the life he used to lead his wife and daughter?'

'Perfectly,' said Traddles.

'Yet, if you'll read his letter, you'll find he is the tenderest of
men to prisoners convicted of the whole calendar of felonies,' said
I; 'though I can't find that his tenderness extends to any other
class of created beings.'

Traddles shrugged his shoulders, and was not at all surprised.  I
had not expected him to be, and was not surprised myself; or my
observation of similar practical satires would have been but
scanty.  We arranged the time of our visit, and I wrote accordingly
to Mr. Creakle that evening.

On the appointed day - I think it was the next day, but no matter
- Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was
powerful.  It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast
expense.  I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate,
what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded
man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the
erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of
refuge for the deserving old.

In an office that might have been on the ground-floor of the Tower
of Babel, it was so massively constructed, we were presented to our
old schoolmaster; who was one of a group, composed of two or three
of the busier sort of magistrates, and some visitors they had
brought.  He received me, like a man who had formed my mind in
bygone years, and had always loved me tenderly.  On my introducing
Traddles, Mr. Creakle expressed, in like manner, but in an inferior
degree, that he had always been Traddles's guide, philosopher, and
friend.  Our venerable instructor was a great deal older, and not
improved in appearance.  His face was as fiery as ever; his eyes
were as small, and rather deeper set.  The scanty, wet-looking grey
hair, by which I remembered him, was almost gone; and the thick
veins in his bald head were none the more agreeable to look at.

After some conversation among these gentlemen, from which I might
have supposed that there was nothing in the world to be
legitimately taken into account but the supreme comfort of
prisoners, at any expense, and nothing on the wide earth to be done
outside prison-doors, we began our inspection.  It being then just
dinner-time, we went, first into the great kitchen, where every
prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out separately (to be
handed to him in his cell), with the regularity and precision of
clock-work.  I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it
occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between
these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to
say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk
of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five
hundred ever dined half so well.  But I learned that the 'system'
required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once
for all, I found that on that head and on all others, 'the system'
put an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies.  Nobody
appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system,
but THE system, to be considered.

As we were going through some of the magnificent passages, I
inquired of Mr. Creakle and his friends what were supposed to be
the main advantages of this all-governing and universally
over-riding system?  I found them to be the perfect isolation of
prisoners - so that no one man in confinement there, knew anything
about another; and the reduction of prisoners to a wholesome state
of mind, leading to sincere contrition and repentance.

Now, it struck me, when we began to visit individuals in their
cells, and to traverse the passages in which those cells were, and
to have the manner of the going to chapel and so forth, explained
to us, that there was a strong probability of the prisoners knowing
a good deal about each other, and of their carrying on a pretty
complete system of intercourse.  This, at the time I write, has
been proved, I believe, to be the case; but, as it would have been
flat blasphemy against the system to have hinted such a doubt then,
I looked out for the penitence as diligently as I could.

And here again, I had great misgivings.  I found as prevalent a
fashion in the form of the penitence, as I had left outside in the
forms of the coats and waistcoats in the windows of the tailors'
shops.  I found a vast amount of profession, varying very little in
character: varying very little (which I thought exceedingly
suspicious), even in words.  I found a great many foxes,
disparaging whole vineyards of inaccessible grapes; but I found
very few foxes whom I would have trusted within reach of a bunch. 
Above all, I found that the most professing men were the greatest
objects of interest; and that their conceit, their vanity, their
want of excitement, and their love of deception (which many of them
possessed to an almost incredible extent, as their histories
showed), all prompted to these professions, and were all gratified
by them.

However, I heard so repeatedly, in the course of our goings to and
fro, of a certain Number Twenty Seven, who was the Favourite, and
who really appeared to be a Model Prisoner, that I resolved to
suspend my judgement until I should see Twenty Seven.  Twenty
Eight, I understood, was also a bright particular star; but it was
his misfortune to have his glory a little dimmed by the
extraordinary lustre of Twenty Seven.  I heard so much of Twenty
Seven, of his pious admonitions to everybody around him, and of the
beautiful letters he constantly wrote to his mother (whom he seemed
to consider in a very bad way), that I became quite impatient to
see him.

I had to restrain my impatience for some time, on account of Twenty
Seven being reserved for a concluding effect.  But, at last, we
came to the door of his cell; and Mr. Creakle, looking through a
little hole in it, reported to us, in a state of the greatest
admiration, that he was reading a Hymn Book.

There was such a rush of heads immediately, to see Number Twenty
Seven reading his Hymn Book, that the little hole was blocked up,
six or seven heads deep.  To remedy this inconvenience, and give us
an opportunity of conversing with Twenty Seven in all his purity,
Mr. Creakle directed the door of the cell to be unlocked, and
Twenty Seven to be invited out into the passage.  This was done;
and whom should Traddles and I then behold, to our amazement, in
this converted Number Twenty Seven, but Uriah Heep!

He knew us directly; and said, as he came out - with the old
writhe, -

'How do you do, Mr. Copperfield?  How do you do, Mr. Traddles?'

This recognition caused a general admiration in the party.  I
rather thought that everyone was struck by his not being proud, and
taking notice of us.

'Well, Twenty Seven,' said Mr. Creakle, mournfully admiring him. 
'How do you find yourself today?'

'I am very umble, sir!' replied Uriah Heep.

'You are always so, Twenty Seven,' said Mr. Creakle.

Here, another gentleman asked, with extreme anxiety: 'Are you quite
comfortable?'

'Yes, I thank you, sir!' said Uriah Heep, looking in that
direction.  'Far more comfortable here, than ever I was outside. 
I see my follies, now, sir.  That's what makes me comfortable.'

Several gentlemen were much affected; and a third questioner,
forcing himself to the front, inquired with extreme feeling: 'How
do you find the beef?'

'Thank you, sir,' replied Uriah, glancing in the new direction of
this voice, 'it was tougher yesterday than I could wish; but it's
my duty to bear.  I have committed follies, gentlemen,' said Uriah,
looking round with a meek smile, 'and I ought to bear the
consequences without repining.'
A murmur, partly of gratification at Twenty Seven's celestial state
of mind, and partly of indignation against the Contractor who had
given him any cause of complaint (a note of which was immediately
made by Mr. Creakle), having subsided, Twenty Seven stood in the
midst of us, as if he felt himself the principal object of merit in
a highly meritorious museum.  That we, the neophytes, might have an
excess of light shining upon us all at once, orders were given to
let out Twenty Eight.

I had been so much astonished already, that I only felt a kind of
resigned wonder when Mr. Littimer walked forth, reading a good
book!

'Twenty Eight,' said a gentleman in spectacles, who had not yet
spoken, 'you complained last week, my good fellow, of the cocoa. 
How has it been since?'

'I thank you, sir,' said Mr. Littimer, 'it has been better made. 
If I might take the liberty of saying so, sir, I don't think the
milk which is boiled with it is quite genuine; but I am aware, sir,
that there is a great adulteration of milk, in London, and that the
article in a pure state is difficult to be obtained.'

It appeared to me that the gentleman in spectacles backed his
Twenty Eight against Mr. Creakle's Twenty Seven, for each of them
took his own man in hand.

'What is your state of mind, Twenty Eight?' said the questioner in
spectacles.

'I thank you, sir,' returned Mr. Littimer; 'I see my follies now,
sir.  I am a good deal troubled when I think of the sins of my
former companions, sir; but I trust they may find forgiveness.'

'You are quite happy yourself?' said the questioner, nodding
encouragement.

'I am much obliged to you, sir,' returned Mr. Littimer.  'Perfectly
so.'

'Is there anything at all on your mind now?' said the questioner. 
'If so, mention it, Twenty Eight.'

'Sir,' said Mr. Littimer, without looking up, 'if my eyes have not
deceived me, there is a gentleman present who was acquainted with
me in my former life.  It may be profitable to that gentleman to
know, sir, that I attribute my past follies, entirely to having
lived a thoughtless life in the service of young men; and to having
allowed myself to be led by them into weaknesses, which I had not
the strength to resist.  I hope that gentleman will take warning,
sir, and will not be offended at my freedom.  It is for his good. 
I am conscious of my own past follies.  I hope he may repent of all
the wickedness and sin to which he has been a party.'

I observed that several gentlemen were shading their eyes, each
with one hand, as if they had just come into church.

'This does you credit, Twenty Eight,' returned the questioner.  'I
should have expected it of you.  Is there anything else?'

'Sir,' returned Mr. Littimer, slightly lifting up his eyebrows, but
not his eyes, 'there was a young woman who fell into dissolute
courses, that I endeavoured to save, sir, but could not rescue.  I
beg that gentleman, if he has it in his power, to inform that young
woman from me that I forgive her her bad conduct towards myself,
and that I call her to repentance - if he will be so good.'

'I have no doubt, Twenty Eight,' returned the questioner, 'that the
gentleman you refer to feels very strongly - as we all must - what
you have so properly said.  We will not detain you.'

'I thank you, sir,' said Mr. Littimer.  'Gentlemen, I wish you a
good day, and hoping you and your families will also see your
wickedness, and amend!'

With this, Number Twenty Eight retired, after a glance between him
and Uriah; as if they were not altogether unknown to each other,
through some medium of communication; and a murmur went round the
group, as his door shut upon him, that he was a most respectable
man, and a beautiful case.

'Now, Twenty Seven,' said Mr. Creakle, entering on a clear stage
with his man, 'is there anything that anyone can do for you?  If
so, mention it.'

'I would umbly ask, sir,' returned Uriah, with a jerk of his
malevolent head, 'for leave to write again to mother.'

'It shall certainly be granted,' said Mr. Creakle.

'Thank you, sir! I am anxious about mother.  I am afraid she ain't
safe.'

Somebody incautiously asked, what from?  But there was a
scandalized whisper of 'Hush!'

'Immortally safe, sir,' returned Uriah, writhing in the direction
of the voice.  'I should wish mother to be got into my state.  I
never should have been got into my present state if I hadn't come
here.  I wish mother had come here.  It would be better for
everybody, if they got took up, and was brought here.'

This sentiment gave unbounded satisfaction - greater satisfaction,
I think, than anything that had passed yet.

'Before I come here,' said Uriah, stealing a look at us, as if he
would have blighted the outer world to which we belonged, if he
could, 'I was given to follies; but now I am sensible of my
follies.  There's a deal of sin outside.  There's a deal of sin in
mother.  There's nothing but sin everywhere - except here.'

'You are quite changed?' said Mr. Creakle.

'Oh dear, yes, sir!' cried this hopeful penitent.

'You wouldn't relapse, if you were going out?' asked somebody else.

'Oh de-ar no, sir!'

'Well!' said Mr. Creakle, 'this is very gratifying.  You have
addressed Mr. Copperfield, Twenty Seven.  Do you wish to say
anything further to him?'

'You knew me, a long time before I came here and was changed, Mr.
Copperfield,' said Uriah, looking at me; and a more villainous look
I never saw, even on his visage.  'You knew me when, in spite of my
follies, I was umble among them that was proud, and meek among them
that was violent - you was violent to me yourself, Mr. Copperfield. 
Once, you struck me a blow in the face, you know.'

General commiseration.  Several indignant glances directed at me.

'But I forgive you, Mr. Copperfield,' said Uriah, making his
forgiving nature the subject of a most impious and awful parallel,
which I shall not record.  'I forgive everybody.  It would ill
become me to bear malice.  I freely forgive you, and I hope you'll
curb your passions in future.  I hope Mr. W. will repent, and Miss
W., and all of that sinful lot.  You've been visited with
affliction, and I hope it may do you good; but you'd better have
come here.  Mr. W. had better have come here, and Miss W. too.  The
best wish I could give you, Mr. Copperfield, and give all of you
gentlemen, is, that you could be took up and brought here.  When I
think of my past follies, and my present state, I am sure it would
be best for you.  I pity all who ain't brought here!'

He sneaked back into his cell, amidst a little chorus of
approbation; and both Traddles and I experienced a great relief
when he was locked in.

It was a characteristic feature in this repentance, that I was fain
to ask what these two men had done, to be there at all.  That
appeared to be the last thing about which they had anything to say. 
I addressed myself to one of the two warders, who, I suspected from
certain latent indications in their faces, knew pretty well what
all this stir was worth.

'Do you know,' said I, as we walked along the passage, 'what felony
was Number Twenty Seven's last "folly"?'

The answer was that it was a Bank case.

'A fraud on the Bank of England?' I asked.
'Yes, sir.  Fraud, forgery, and conspiracy.  He and some others. 
He set the others on.  It was a deep plot for a large sum. 
Sentence, transportation for life.  Twenty Seven was the knowingest
bird of the lot, and had very nearly kept himself safe; but not
quite.  The Bank was just able to put salt upon his tail - and only
just.'

'Do you know Twenty Eight's offence?'

'Twenty Eight,' returned my informant, speaking throughout in a low
tone, and looking over his shoulder as we walked along the passage,
to guard himself from being overheard, in such an unlawful
reference to these Immaculates, by Creakle and the rest; 'Twenty
Eight (also transportation) got a place, and robbed a young master
of a matter of two hundred and fifty pounds in money and valuables,
the night before they were going abroad.  I particularly recollect
his case, from his being took by a dwarf.'

'A what?'

'A little woman.  I have forgot her name?'

'Not Mowcher?'

'That's it! He had eluded pursuit, and was going to America in a
flaxen wig, and whiskers, and such a complete disguise as never you
see in all your born days; when the little woman, being in
Southampton, met him walking along the street - picked him out with
her sharp eye in a moment - ran betwixt his legs to upset him - and
held on to him like grim Death.'

'Excellent Miss Mowcher!' cried I.

'You'd have said so, if you had seen her, standing on a chair in
the witness-box at the trial, as I did,' said my friend.  'He cut
her face right open, and pounded her in the most brutal manner,
when she took him; but she never loosed her hold till he was locked
up.  She held so tight to him, in fact, that the officers were
obliged to take 'em both together.  She gave her evidence in the
gamest way, and was highly complimented by the Bench, and cheered
right home to her lodgings.  She said in Court that she'd have took
him single-handed (on account of what she knew concerning him), if
he had been Samson.  And it's my belief she would!'

It was mine too, and I highly respected Miss Mowcher for it.

We had now seen all there was to see.  It would have been in vain
to represent to such a man as the Worshipful Mr. Creakle, that
Twenty Seven and Twenty Eight were perfectly consistent and
unchanged; that exactly what they were then, they had always been;
that the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that
sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value
at least as well as we did, in the immediate service it would do
them when they were expatriated; in a word, that it was a rotten,
hollow, painfully suggestive piece of business altogether.  We left
them to their system and themselves, and went home wondering.

'Perhaps it's a good thing, Traddles,' said I, 'to have an unsound
Hobby ridden hard; for it's the sooner ridden to death.'

'I hope so,' replied Traddles.



CHAPTER 62
A LIGHT SHINES ON MY WAY


The year came round to Christmas-time, and I had been at home above
two months.  I had seen Agnes frequently.  However loud the general
voice might be in giving me encouragement, and however fervent the
emotions and endeavours to which it roused me, I heard her lightest
word of praise as I heard nothing else.

At least once a week, and sometimes oftener, I rode over there, and
passed the evening.  I usually rode back at night; for the old
unhappy sense was always hovering about me now - most sorrowfully
when I left her - and I was glad to be up and out, rather than
wandering over the past in weary wakefulness or miserable dreams. 
I wore away the longest part of many wild sad nights, in those
rides; reviving, as I went, the thoughts that had occupied me in my
long absence.

Or, if I were to say rather that I listened to the echoes of those
thoughts, I should better express the truth.  They spoke to me from
afar off.  I had put them at a distance, and accepted my inevitable
place.  When I read to Agnes what I wrote; when I saw her listening
face; moved her to smiles or tears; and heard her cordial voice so
earnest on the shadowy events of that imaginative world in which I
lived; I thought what a fate mine might have been - but only
thought so, as I had thought after I was married to Dora, what I
could have wished my wife to be.

My duty to Agnes, who loved me with a love, which, if I disquieted,
I wronged most selfishly and poorly, and could never restore; my
matured assurance that I, who had worked out my own destiny, and
won what I had impetuously set my heart on, had no right to murmur,
and must bear; comprised what I felt and what I had learned.  But
I loved her: and now it even became some consolation to me, vaguely
to conceive a distant day when I might blamelessly avow it; when
all this should be over; when I could say 'Agnes, so it was when I
came home; and now I am old, and I never have loved since!'

She did not once show me any change in herself.  What she always
had been to me, she still was; wholly unaltered.

Between my aunt and me there had been something, in this connexion,
since the night of my return, which I cannot call a restraint, or
an avoidance of the subject, so much as an implied understanding
that we thought of it together, but did not shape our thoughts into
words.  When, according to our old custom, we sat before the fire
at night, we often fell into this train; as naturally, and as
consciously to each other, as if we had unreservedly said so.  But
we preserved an unbroken silence.  I believed that she had read, or
partly read, my thoughts that night; and that she fully
comprehended why I gave mine no more distinct expression.

This Christmas-time being come, and Agnes having reposed no new
confidence in me, a doubt that had several times arisen in my mind
- whether she could have that perception of the true state of my
breast, which restrained her with the apprehension of giving me
pain - began to oppress me heavily.  If that were so, my sacrifice
was nothing; my plainest obligation to her unfulfilled; and every
poor action I had shrunk from, I was hourly doing.  I resolved to
set this right beyond all doubt; - if such a barrier were between
us, to break it down at once with a determined hand.

It was - what lasting reason have I to remember it! - a cold,
harsh, winter day.  There had been snow, some hours before; and it
lay, not deep, but hard-frozen on the ground.  Out at sea, beyond
my window, the wind blew ruggedly from the north.  I had been
thinking of it, sweeping over those mountain wastes of snow in
Switzerland, then inaccessible to any human foot; and had been
speculating which was the lonelier, those solitary regions, or a
deserted ocean.

'Riding today, Trot?' said my aunt, putting her head in at the
door.

'Yes,' said I, 'I am going over to Canterbury.  It's a good day for
a ride.'

'I hope your horse may think so too,' said my aunt; 'but at present
he is holding down his head and his ears, standing before the door
there, as if he thought his stable preferable.'

My aunt, I may observe, allowed my horse on the forbidden ground,
but had not at all relented towards the donkeys.

'He will be fresh enough, presently!' said I.

'The ride will do his master good, at all events,' observed my
aunt, glancing at the papers on my table.  'Ah, child, you pass a
good many hours here! I never thought, when I used to read books,
what work it was to write them.'

'It's work enough to read them, sometimes,' I returned.  'As to the
writing, it has its own charms, aunt.'

'Ah! I see!' said my aunt.  'Ambition, love of approbation,
sympathy, and much more, I suppose?  Well: go along with you!'

'Do you know anything more,' said I, standing composedly before her
- she had patted me on the shoulder, and sat down in my chair - 'of
that attachment of Agnes?'

She looked up in my face a little while, before replying:

'I think I do, Trot.'

'Are you confirmed in your impression?' I inquired.

'I think I am, Trot.'

She looked so steadfastly at me: with a kind of doubt, or pity, or
suspense in her affection: that I summoned the stronger
determination to show her a perfectly cheerful face.

'And what is more, Trot -' said my aunt.

'Yes!'

'I think Agnes is going to be married.'

'God bless her!' said I, cheerfully.

'God bless her!' said my aunt, 'and her husband too!'

I echoed it, parted from my aunt, and went lightly downstairs,
mounted, and rode away.  There was greater reason than before to do
what I had resolved to do.

How well I recollect the wintry ride! The frozen particles of ice,
brushed from the blades of grass by the wind, and borne across my
face; the hard clatter of the horse's hoofs, beating a tune upon
the ground; the stiff-tilled soil; the snowdrift, lightly eddying
in the chalk-pit as the breeze ruffled it; the smoking team with
the waggon of old hay, stopping to breathe on the hill-top, and
shaking their bells musically; the whitened slopes and sweeps of
Down-land lying against the dark sky, as if they were drawn on a
huge slate!

I found Agnes alone.  The little girls had gone to their own homes
now, and she was alone by the fire, reading.  She put down her book
on seeing me come in; and having welcomed me as usual, took her
work-basket and sat in one of the old-fashioned windows.

I sat beside her on the window-seat, and we talked of what I was
doing, and when it would be done, and of the progress I had made
since my last visit.  Agnes was very cheerful; and laughingly
predicted that I should soon become too famous to be talked to, on
such subjects.

'So I make the most of the present time, you see,' said Agnes, 'and
talk to you while I may.'

As I looked at her beautiful face, observant of her work, she
raised her mild clear eyes, and saw that I was looking at her.

'You are thoughtful today, Trotwood!'

'Agnes, shall I tell you what about?  I came to tell you.'

She put aside her work, as she was used to do when we were
seriously discussing anything; and gave me her whole attention.

'My dear Agnes, do you doubt my being true to you?'

'No!' she answered, with a look of astonishment.

'Do you doubt my being what I always have been to you?'

'No!' she answered, as before.

'Do you remember that I tried to tell you, when I came home, what
a debt of gratitude I owed you, dearest Agnes, and how fervently I
felt towards you?'

'I remember it,' she said, gently, 'very well.'

'You have a secret,' said I.  'Let me share it, Agnes.'

She cast down her eyes, and trembled.

'I could hardly fail to know, even if I had not heard - but from
other lips than yours, Agnes, which seems strange - that there is
someone upon whom you have bestowed the treasure of your love.  Do
not shut me out of what concerns your happiness so nearly! If you
can trust me, as you say you can, and as I know you may, let me be
your friend, your brother, in this matter, of all others!'

With an appealing, almost a reproachful, glance, she rose from the
window; and hurrying across the room as if without knowing where,
put her hands before her face, and burst into such tears as smote
me to the heart.

And yet they awakened something in me, bringing promise to my
heart.  Without my knowing why, these tears allied themselves with
the quietly sad smile which was so fixed in my remembrance, and
shook me more with hope than fear or sorrow.

'Agnes! Sister! Dearest! What have I done?'

'Let me go away, Trotwood.  I am not well.  I am not myself.  I
will speak to you by and by - another time.  I will write to you. 
Don't speak to me now.  Don't! don't!'

I sought to recollect what she had said, when I had spoken to her
on that former night, of her affection needing no return.  It
seemed a very world that I must search through in a moment.
'Agnes, I cannot bear to see you so, and think that I have been the
cause.  My dearest girl, dearer to me than anything in life, if you
are unhappy, let me share your unhappiness.  If you are in need of
help or counsel, let me try to give it to you.  If you have indeed
a burden on your heart, let me try to lighten it.  For whom do I
live now, Agnes, if it is not for you!'

'Oh, spare me! I am not myself! Another time!' was all I could
distinguish.

Was it a selfish error that was leading me away?  Or, having once
a clue to hope, was there something opening to me that I had not
dared to think of?

'I must say more.  I cannot let you leave me so! For Heaven's sake,
Agnes, let us not mistake each other after all these years, and all
that has come and gone with them! I must speak plainly.  If you
have any lingering thought that I could envy the happiness you will
confer; that I could not resign you to a dearer protector, of your
own choosing; that I could not, from my removed place, be a
contented witness of your joy; dismiss it, for I don't deserve it!
I have not suffered quite in vain.  You have not taught me quite in
vain.  There is no alloy of self in what I feel for you.'

She was quiet now.  In a little time, she turned her pale face
towards me, and said in a low voice, broken here and there, but
very clear:

'I owe it to your pure friendship for me, Trotwood - which, indeed,
I do not doubt - to tell you, you are mistaken.  I can do no more. 
If I have sometimes, in the course of years, wanted help and
counsel, they have come to me.  If I have sometimes been unhappy,
the feeling has passed away.  If I have ever had a burden on my
heart, it has been lightened for me.  If I have any secret, it is
- no new one; and is - not what you suppose.  I cannot reveal it,
or divide it.  It has long been mine, and must remain mine.'

'Agnes! Stay! A moment!'

She was going away, but I detained her.  I clasped my arm about her
waist.  'In the course of years!' 'It is not a new one!' New
thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the
colours of my life were changing.

'Dearest Agnes! Whom I so respect and honour - whom I so devotedly
love! When I came here today, I thought that nothing could have
wrested this confession from me.  I thought I could have kept it in
my bosom all our lives, till we were old.  But, Agnes, if I have
indeed any new-born hope that I may ever call you something more
than Sister, widely different from Sister! -'

Her tears fell fast; but they were not like those she had lately
shed, and I saw my hope brighten in them.

'Agnes! Ever my guide, and best support! If you had been more
mindful of yourself, and less of me, when we grew up here together,
I think my heedless fancy never would have wandered from you.  But
you were so much better than I, so necessary to me in every boyish
hope and disappointment, that to have you to confide in, and rely
upon in everything, became a second nature, supplanting for the
time the first and greater one of loving you as I do!'

Still weeping, but not sadly - joyfully! And clasped in my arms as
she had never been, as I had thought she never was to be!

'When I loved Dora - fondly, Agnes, as you know -'

'Yes!' she cried, earnestly.  'I am glad to know it!'

'When I loved her - even then, my love would have been incomplete,
without your sympathy.  I had it, and it was perfected.  And when
I lost her, Agnes, what should I have been without you, still!'

Closer in my arms, nearer to my heart, her trembling hand upon my
shoulder, her sweet eyes shining through her tears, on mine!

'I went away, dear Agnes, loving you.  I stayed away, loving you. 
I returned home, loving you!'

And now, I tried to tell her of the struggle I had had, and the
conclusion I had come to.  I tried to lay my mind before her,
truly, and entirely.  I tried to show her how I had hoped I had
come into the better knowledge of myself and of her; how I had
resigned myself to what that better knowledge brought; and how I
had come there, even that day, in my fidelity to this.  If she did
so love me (I said) that she could take me for her husband, she
could do so, on no deserving of mine, except upon the truth of my
love for her, and the trouble in which it had ripened to be what it
was; and hence it was that I revealed it.  And O, Agnes, even out
of thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife
looked upon me, saying it was well; and winning me, through thee,
to tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had withered in its
bloom!

'I am so blest, Trotwood - my heart is so overcharged - but there
is one thing I must say.'

'Dearest, what?'

She laid her gentle hands upon my shoulders, and looked calmly in
my face.

'Do you know, yet, what it is?'

'I am afraid to speculate on what it is.  Tell me, my dear.'

'I have loved you all my life!'

O, we were happy, we were happy! Our tears were not for the trials
(hers so much the greater) through which we had come to be thus,
but for the rapture of being thus, never to be divided more!

We walked, that winter evening, in the fields together; and the
blessed calm within us seemed to be partaken by the frosty air. 
The early stars began to shine while we were lingering on, and
looking up to them, we thanked our GOD for having guided us to this
tranquillity.

We stood together in the same old-fashioned window at night, when
the moon was shining; Agnes with her quiet eyes raised up to it; I
following her glance.  Long miles of road then opened out before my
mind; and, toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy, forsaken and
neglected, who should come to call even the heart now beating
against mine, his own.


It was nearly dinner-time next day when we appeared before my aunt. 
She was up in my study, Peggotty said: which it was her pride to
keep in readiness and order for me.  We found her, in her
spectacles, sitting by the fire.

'Goodness me!' said my aunt, peering through the dusk, 'who's this
you're bringing home?'

'Agnes,' said I.

As we had arranged to say nothing at first, my aunt was not a
little discomfited.  She darted a hopeful glance at me, when I said
'Agnes'; but seeing that I looked as usual, she took off her
spectacles in despair, and rubbed her nose with them.

She greeted Agnes heartily, nevertheless; and we were soon in the
lighted parlour downstairs, at dinner.  My aunt put on her
spectacles twice or thrice, to take another look at me, but as
often took them off again, disappointed, and rubbed her nose with
them.  Much to the discomfiture of Mr. Dick, who knew this to be a
bad symptom.

'By the by, aunt,' said I, after dinner; 'I have been speaking to
Agnes about what you told me.'

'Then, Trot,' said my aunt, turning scarlet, 'you did wrong, and
broke your promise.'

'You are not angry, aunt, I trust?  I am sure you won't be, when
you learn that Agnes is not unhappy in any attachment.'

'Stuff and nonsense!' said my aunt.

As my aunt appeared to be annoyed, I thought the best way was to
cut her annoyance short.  I took Agnes in my arm to the back of her
chair, and we both leaned over her.  My aunt, with one clap of her
hands, and one look through her spectacles, immediately went into
hysterics, for the first and only time in all my knowledge of her.

The hysterics called up Peggotty.  The moment my aunt was restored,
she flew at Peggotty, and calling her a silly old creature, hugged
her with all her might.  After that, she hugged Mr. Dick (who was
highly honoured, but a good deal surprised); and after that, told
them why.  Then, we were all happy together.

I could not discover whether my aunt, in her last short
conversation with me, had fallen on a pious fraud, or had really
mistaken the state of my mind.  It was quite enough, she said, that
she had told me Agnes was going to be married; and that I now knew
better than anyone how true it was.


We were married within a fortnight.  Traddles and Sophy, and Doctor
and Mrs. Strong, were the only guests at our quiet wedding.  We
left them full of joy; and drove away together.  Clasped in my
embrace, I held the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever
had; the centre of myself, the circle of my life, my own, my wife;
my love of whom was founded on a rock!

'Dearest husband!' said Agnes.  'Now that I may call you by that
name, I have one thing more to tell you.'

'Let me hear it, love.'

'It grows out of the night when Dora died.  She sent you for me.'

'She did.'

'She told me that she left me something.  Can you think what it
was?'

I believed I could.  I drew the wife who had so long loved me,
closer to my side.

'She told me that she made a last request to me, and left me a last
charge.'

'And it was -'

'That only I would occupy this vacant place.'

And Agnes laid her head upon my breast, and wept; and I wept with
her, though we were so happy.




CHAPTER 63
A VISITOR

What I have purposed to record is nearly finished; but there is yet
an incident conspicuous in my memory, on which it often rests with
delight, and without which one thread in the web I have spun would
have a ravelled end.

I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect, I
had been married ten happy years.  Agnes and I were sitting by the
fire, in our house in London, one night in spring, and three of our
children were playing in the room, when I was told that a stranger
wished to see me.

He had been asked if he came on business, and had answered No; he
had come for the pleasure of seeing me, and had come a long way. 
He was an old man, my servant said, and looked like a farmer.

As this sounded mysterious to the children, and moreover was like
the beginning of a favourite story Agnes used to tell them,
introductory to the arrival of a wicked old Fairy in a cloak who
hated everybody, it produced some commotion.  One of our boys laid
his head in his mother's lap to be out of harm's way, and little
Agnes (our eldest child) left her doll in a chair to represent her,
and thrust out her little heap of golden curls from between the
window-curtains, to see what happened next.

'Let him come in here!' said I.

There soon appeared, pausing in the dark doorway as he entered, a
hale, grey-haired old man.  Little Agnes, attracted by his looks,
had run to bring him in, and I had not yet clearly seen his face,
when my wife, starting up, cried out to me, in a pleased and
agitated voice, that it was Mr. Peggotty!

It WAS Mr. Peggotty.  An old man now, but in a ruddy, hearty,
strong old age.  When our first emotion was over, and he sat before
the fire with the children on his knees, and the blaze shining on
his face, he looked, to me, as vigorous and robust, withal as
handsome, an old man, as ever I had seen.

'Mas'r Davy,' said he.  And the old name in the old tone fell so
naturally on my ear! 'Mas'r Davy, 'tis a joyful hour as I see you,
once more, 'long with your own trew wife!'

'A joyful hour indeed, old friend!' cried I.

'And these heer pretty ones,' said Mr. Peggotty.  'To look at these
heer flowers! Why, Mas'r Davy, you was but the heighth of the
littlest of these, when I first see you! When Em'ly warn't no
bigger, and our poor lad were BUT a lad!'

'Time has changed me more than it has changed you since then,' said
I.  'But let these dear rogues go to bed; and as no house in
England but this must hold you, tell me where to send for your
luggage (is the old black bag among it, that went so far, I
wonder!), and then, over a glass of Yarmouth grog, we will have the
tidings of ten years!'

'Are you alone?' asked Agnes.

'Yes, ma'am,' he said, kissing her hand, 'quite alone.'

We sat him between us, not knowing how to give him welcome enough;
and as I began to listen to his old familiar voice, I could have
fancied he was still pursuing his long journey in search of his
darling niece.

'It's a mort of water,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'fur to come across, and
on'y stay a matter of fower weeks.  But water ('specially when 'tis
salt) comes nat'ral to me; and friends is dear, and I am heer.  -
Which is verse,' said Mr. Peggotty, surprised to find it out,
'though I hadn't such intentions.'

'Are you going back those many thousand miles, so soon?' asked
Agnes.

'Yes, ma'am,' he returned.  'I giv the promise to Em'ly, afore I
come away.  You see, I doen't grow younger as the years comes
round, and if I hadn't sailed as 'twas, most like I shouldn't never
have done 't.  And it's allus been on my mind, as I must come and
see Mas'r Davy and your own sweet blooming self, in your wedded
happiness, afore I got to be too old.'

He looked at us, as if he could never feast his eyes on us
sufficiently.  Agnes laughingly put back some scattered locks of
his grey hair, that he might see us better.

'And now tell us,' said I, 'everything relating to your fortunes.'

'Our fortuns, Mas'r Davy,' he rejoined, 'is soon told.  We haven't
fared nohows, but fared to thrive.  We've allus thrived.  We've
worked as we ought to 't, and maybe we lived a leetle hard at first
or so, but we have allus thrived.  What with sheep-farming, and
what with stock-farming, and what with one thing and what with
t'other, we are as well to do, as well could be.  Theer's been
kiender a blessing fell upon us,' said Mr. Peggotty, reverentially
inclining his head, 'and we've done nowt but prosper.  That is, in
the long run.  If not yesterday, why then today.  If not today, why
then tomorrow.'

'And Emily?' said Agnes and I, both together.

'Em'ly,' said he, 'arter you left her, ma'am - and I never heerd
her saying of her prayers at night, t'other side the canvas screen,
when we was settled in the Bush, but what I heerd your name - and
arter she and me lost sight of Mas'r Davy, that theer shining
sundown - was that low, at first, that, if she had know'd then what
Mas'r Davy kep from us so kind and thowtful, 'tis my opinion she'd
have drooped away.  But theer was some poor folks aboard as had
illness among 'em, and she took care of them; and theer was the
children in our company, and she took care of them; and so she got
to be busy, and to be doing good, and that helped her.'

'When did she first hear of it?' I asked.

'I kep it from her arter I heerd on 't,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'going
on nigh a year.  We was living then in a solitary place, but among
the beautifullest trees, and with the roses a-covering our Beein to
the roof.  Theer come along one day, when I was out a-working on
the land, a traveller from our own Norfolk or Suffolk in England (I
doen't rightly mind which), and of course we took him in, and giv
him to eat and drink, and made him welcome.  We all do that, all
the colony over.  He'd got an old newspaper with him, and some
other account in print of the storm.  That's how she know'd it. 
When I came home at night, I found she know'd it.'

He dropped his voice as he said these words, and the gravity I so
well remembered overspread his face.

'Did it change her much?' we asked.

'Aye, for a good long time,' he said, shaking his head; 'if not to
this present hour.  But I think the solitoode done her good.  And
she had a deal to mind in the way of poultry and the like, and
minded of it, and come through.  I wonder,' he said thoughtfully,
'if you could see my Em'ly now, Mas'r Davy, whether you'd know
her!'

'Is she so altered?' I inquired.

'I doen't know.  I see her ev'ry day, and doen't know; But,
odd-times, I have thowt so.  A slight figure,' said Mr. Peggotty,
looking at the fire, 'kiender worn; soft, sorrowful, blue eyes; a
delicate face; a pritty head, leaning a little down; a quiet voice
and way - timid a'most.  That's Em'ly!'

We silently observed him as he sat, still looking at the fire.

'Some thinks,' he said, 'as her affection was ill-bestowed; some,
as her marriage was broken off by death.  No one knows how 'tis. 
She might have married well, a mort of times, "but, uncle," she
says to me, "that's gone for ever." Cheerful along with me; retired
when others is by; fond of going any distance fur to teach a child,
or fur to tend a sick person, or fur to do some kindness tow'rds a
young girl's wedding (and she's done a many, but has never seen
one); fondly loving of her uncle; patient; liked by young and old;
sowt out by all that has any trouble.  That's Em'ly!'

He drew his hand across his face, and with a half-suppressed sigh
looked up from the fire.

'Is Martha with you yet?' I asked.

'Martha,' he replied, 'got married, Mas'r Davy, in the second year. 
A young man, a farm-labourer, as come by us on his way to market
with his mas'r's drays - a journey of over five hundred mile, theer
and back - made offers fur to take her fur his wife (wives is very
scarce theer), and then to set up fur their two selves in the Bush. 
She spoke to me fur to tell him her trew story.  I did.  They was
married, and they live fower hundred mile away from any voices but
their own and the singing birds.'

'Mrs. Gummidge?' I suggested.

It was a pleasant key to touch, for Mr. Peggotty suddenly burst
into a roar of laughter, and rubbed his hands up and down his legs,
as he had been accustomed to do when he enjoyed himself in the
long-shipwrecked boat.

'Would you believe it!' he said.  'Why, someun even made offer fur
to marry her! If a ship's cook that was turning settler, Mas'r
Davy, didn't make offers fur to marry Missis Gummidge, I'm Gormed
- and I can't say no fairer than that!'

I never saw Agnes laugh so.  This sudden ecstasy on the part of Mr.
Peggotty was so delightful to her, that she could not leave off
laughing; and the more she laughed the more she made me laugh, and
the greater Mr. Peggotty's ecstasy became, and the more he rubbed
his legs.

'And what did Mrs. Gummidge say?' I asked, when I was grave enough.

'If you'll believe me,' returned Mr. Peggotty, 'Missis Gummidge,
'stead of saying "thank you, I'm much obleeged to you, I ain't
a-going fur to change my condition at my time of life," up'd with
a bucket as was standing by, and laid it over that theer ship's
cook's head 'till he sung out fur help, and I went in and reskied
of him.'

Mr. Peggotty burst into a great roar of laughter, and Agnes and I
both kept him company.

'But I must say this, for the good creetur,' he resumed, wiping his
face, when we were quite exhausted; 'she has been all she said
she'd be to us, and more.  She's the willingest, the trewest, the
honestest-helping woman, Mas'r Davy, as ever draw'd the breath of
life.  I have never know'd her to be lone and lorn, for a single
minute, not even when the colony was all afore us, and we was new
to it.  And thinking of the old 'un is a thing she never done, I do
assure you, since she left England!'

'Now, last, not least, Mr. Micawber,' said I.  'He has paid off
every obligation he incurred here - even to Traddles's bill, you
remember my dear Agnes - and therefore we may take it for granted
that he is doing well.  But what is the latest news of him?'

Mr. Peggotty, with a smile, put his hand in his breast-pocket, and
produced a flat-folded, paper parcel, from which he took out, with
much care, a little odd-looking newspaper.

'You are to understan', Mas'r Davy,' said he, 'as we have left the
Bush now, being so well to do; and have gone right away round to
Port Middlebay Harbour, wheer theer's what we call a town.'

'Mr. Micawber was in the Bush near you?' said I.

'Bless you, yes,' said Mr. Peggotty, 'and turned to with a will. 
I never wish to meet a better gen'l'man for turning to with a will. 
I've seen that theer bald head of his a perspiring in the sun,
Mas'r Davy, till I a'most thowt it would have melted away.  And now
he's a Magistrate.'

'A Magistrate, eh?' said I.

Mr. Peggotty pointed to a certain paragraph in the newspaper, where
I read aloud as follows, from the Port Middlebay Times:


'The public dinner to our distinguished fellow-colonist and
townsman, WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE, Port Middlebay District
Magistrate, came off yesterday in the large room of the Hotel,
which was crowded to suffocation.  It is estimated that not fewer
than forty-seven persons must have been accommodated with dinner at
one time, exclusive of the company in the passage and on the
stairs.  The beauty, fashion, and exclusiveness of Port Middlebay,
flocked to do honour to one so deservedly esteemed, so highly
talented, and so widely popular.  Doctor Mell (of Colonial
Salem-House Grammar School, Port Middlebay) presided, and on his
right sat the distinguished guest.  After the removal of the cloth,
and the singing of Non Nobis (beautifully executed, and in which we
were at no loss to distinguish the bell-like notes of that gifted
amateur, WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE, JUNIOR), the usual loyal and
patriotic toasts were severally given and rapturously received. 
Doctor Mell, in a speech replete with feeling, then proposed "Our
distinguished Guest, the ornament of our town.  May he never leave
us but to better himself, and may his success among us be such as
to render his bettering himself impossible!" The cheering with
which the toast was received defies description.  Again and again
it rose and fell, like the waves of ocean.  At length all was
hushed, and WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE, presented himself to return
thanks.  Far be it from us, in the present comparatively imperfect
state of the resources of our establishment, to endeavour to follow
our distinguished townsman through the smoothly-flowing periods of
his polished and highly-ornate address! Suffice it to observe, that
it was a masterpiece of eloquence; and that those passages in which
he more particularly traced his own successful career to its
source, and warned the younger portion of his auditory from the
shoals of ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were
unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present. 
The remaining toasts were DOCTOR MELL; Mrs. MICAWBER (who
gracefully bowed her acknowledgements from the side-door, where a
galaxy of beauty was elevated on chairs, at once to witness and
adorn the gratifying scene), Mrs. RIDGER BEGS (late Miss Micawber);
Mrs. MELL; WILKINS MICAWBER, ESQUIRE, JUNIOR (who convulsed the
assembly by humorously remarking that he found himself unable to
return thanks in a speech, but would do so, with their permission,
in a song); Mrs. MICAWBER'S FAMILY (well known, it is needless to
remark, in the mother-country), &c.  &c.  &c.  At the conclusion of
the proceedings the tables were cleared as if by art-magic for
dancing.  Among the votaries of TERPSICHORE, who disported
themselves until Sol gave warning for departure, Wilkins Micawber,
Esquire, Junior, and the lovely and accomplished Miss Helena,
fourth daughter of Doctor Mell, were particularly remarkable.'


I was looking back to the name of Doctor Mell, pleased to have
discovered, in these happier circumstances, Mr. Mell, formerly poor
pinched usher to my Middlesex magistrate, when Mr. Peggotty
pointing to another part of the paper, my eyes rested on my own
name, and I read thus:


'          TO DAVID COPPERFIELD, ESQUIRE,

               'THE EMINENT AUTHOR.

'My Dear Sir,

'Years have elapsed, since I had an opportunity of ocularly
perusing the lineaments, now familiar to the imaginations of a
considerable portion of the civilized world.

'But, my dear Sir, though estranged (by the force of circumstances
over which I have had no control) from the personal society of the
friend and companion of my youth, I have not been unmindful of his
soaring flight.  Nor have I been debarred,

     Though seas between us braid ha' roared,

(BURNS) from participating in the intellectual feasts he has spread
before us.

'I cannot, therefore, allow of the departure from this place of an
individual whom we mutually respect and esteem, without, my dear
Sir, taking this public opportunity of thanking you, on my own
behalf, and, I may undertake to add, on that of the whole of the
Inhabitants of Port Middlebay, for the gratification of which you
are the ministering agent.

'Go on, my dear Sir! You are not unknown here, you are not
unappreciated.  Though "remote", we are neither "unfriended",
"melancholy", nor (I may add) "slow".  Go on, my dear Sir, in your
Eagle course! The inhabitants of Port Middlebay may at least aspire
to watch it, with delight, with entertainment, with instruction!

'Among the eyes elevated towards you from this portion of the
globe, will ever be found, while it has light and life,

               'The
                    'Eye
                         'Appertaining to

                              'WILKINS MICAWBER,
                                   'Magistrate.'


I found, on glancing at the remaining contents of the newspaper,
that Mr. Micawber was a diligent and esteemed correspondent of that
journal.  There was another letter from him in the same paper,
touching a bridge; there was an advertisement of a collection of
similar letters by him, to be shortly republished, in a neat
volume, 'with considerable additions'; and, unless I am very much
mistaken, the Leading Article was his also.

We talked much of Mr. Micawber, on many other evenings while Mr.
Peggotty remained with us.  He lived with us during the whole term
of his stay, - which, I think, was something less than a month, -
and his sister and my aunt came to London to see him.  Agnes and I
parted from him aboard-ship, when he sailed; and we shall never
part from him more, on earth.

But before he left, he went with me to Yarmouth, to see a little
tablet I had put up in the churchyard to the memory of Ham.  While
I was copying the plain inscription for him at his request, I saw
him stoop, and gather a tuft of grass from the grave and a little
earth.

'For Em'ly,' he said, as he put it in his breast.  'I promised,
Mas'r Davy.'



CHAPTER 64
A LAST RETROSPECT


And now my written story ends.  I look back, once more - for the
last time - before I close these leaves.

I see myself, with Agnes at my side, journeying along the road of
life.  I see our children and our friends around us; and I hear the
roar of many voices, not indifferent to me as I travel on.

What faces are the most distinct to me in the fleeting crowd?  Lo,
these; all turning to me as I ask my thoughts the question!

Here is my aunt, in stronger spectacles, an old woman of four-score
years and more, but upright yet, and a steady walker of six miles
at a stretch in winter weather.

Always with her, here comes Peggotty, my good old nurse, likewise
in spectacles, accustomed to do needle-work at night very close to
the lamp, but never sitting down to it without a bit of wax candle,
a yard-measure in a little house, and a work-box with a picture of
St. Paul's upon the lid.

The cheeks and arms of Peggotty, so hard and red in my childish
days, when I wondered why the birds didn't peck her in preference
to apples, are shrivelled now; and her eyes, that used to darken
their whole neighbourhood in her face, are fainter (though they
glitter still); but her rough forefinger, which I once associated
with a pocket nutmeg-grater, is just the same, and when I see my
least child catching at it as it totters from my aunt to her, I
think of our little parlour at home, when I could scarcely walk. 
My aunt's old disappointment is set right, now.  She is godmother
to a real living Betsey Trotwood; and Dora (the next in order) says
she spoils her.

There is something bulky in Peggotty's pocket.  It is nothing
smaller than the Crocodile Book, which is in rather a dilapidated
condition by this time, with divers of the leaves torn and stitched
across, but which Peggotty exhibits to the children as a precious
relic.  I find it very curious to see my own infant face, looking
up at me from the Crocodile stories; and to be reminded by it of my
old acquaintance Brooks of Sheffield.

Among my boys, this summer holiday time, I see an old man making
giant kites, and gazing at them in the air, with a delight for
which there are no words.  He greets me rapturously, and whispers,
with many nods and winks, 'Trotwood, you will be glad to hear that
I shall finish the Memorial when I have nothing else to do, and
that your aunt's the most extraordinary woman in the world, sir!'

Who is this bent lady, supporting herself by a stick, and showing
me a countenance in which there are some traces of old pride and
beauty, feebly contending with a querulous, imbecile, fretful
wandering of the mind?  She is in a garden; and near her stands a
sharp, dark, withered woman, with a white scar on her lip.  Let me
hear what they say.

'Rosa, I have forgotten this gentleman's name.'

Rosa bends over her, and calls to her, 'Mr. Copperfield.'

'I am glad to see you, sir.  I am sorry to observe you are in
mourning.  I hope Time will be good to you.'

Her impatient attendant scolds her, tells her I am not in mourning,
bids her look again, tries to rouse her.

'You have seen my son, sir,' says the elder lady.  'Are you
reconciled?'

Looking fixedly at me, she puts her hand to her forehead, and
moans.  Suddenly, she cries, in a terrible voice, 'Rosa, come to
me.  He is dead!' Rosa kneeling at her feet, by turns caresses her,
and quarrels with her; now fiercely telling her, 'I loved him
better than you ever did!'- now soothing her to sleep on her
breast, like a sick child.  Thus I leave them; thus I always find
them; thus they wear their time away, from year to year.

What ship comes sailing home from India, and what English lady is
this, married to a growling old Scotch Croesus with great flaps of
ears?  Can this be Julia Mills?

Indeed it is Julia Mills, peevish and fine, with a black man to
carry cards and letters to her on a golden salver, and a
copper-coloured woman in linen, with a bright handkerchief round
her head, to serve her Tiffin in her dressing-room.  But Julia
keeps no diary in these days; never sings Affection's Dirge;
eternally quarrels with the old Scotch Croesus, who is a sort of
yellow bear with a tanned hide.  Julia is steeped in money to the
throat, and talks and thinks of nothing else.  I liked her better
in the Desert of Sahara.

Or perhaps this IS the Desert of Sahara! For, though Julia has a
stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day,
I see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit
or flower.  What Julia calls 'society', I see; among it Mr. Jack
Maldon, from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it
him, and speaking to me of the Doctor as 'so charmingly antique'. 
But when society is the name for such hollow gentlemen and ladies,
Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to
everything that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must
have lost ourselves in that same Desert of Sahara, and had better
find the way out.

And lo, the Doctor, always our good friend, labouring at his
Dictionary (somewhere about the letter D), and happy in his home
and wife.  Also the Old Soldier, on a considerably reduced footing,
and by no means so influential as in days of yore!

Working at his chambers in the Temple, with a busy aspect, and his
hair (where he is not bald) made more rebellious than ever by the
constant friction of his lawyer's-wig, I come, in a later time,
upon my dear old Traddles.  His table is covered with thick piles
of papers; and I say, as I look around me:

'If Sophy were your clerk, now, Traddles, she would have enough to
do!'

'You may say that, my dear Copperfield! But those were capital
days, too, in Holborn Court! Were they not?'

'When she told you you would be a judge?  But it was not the town
talk then!'

'At all events,' says Traddles, 'if I ever am one -'
'Why, you know you will be.'

'Well, my dear Copperfield, WHEN I am one, I shall tell the story,
as I said I would.'

We walk away, arm in arm.  I am going to have a family dinner with
Traddles.  It is Sophy's birthday; and, on our road, Traddles
discourses to me of the good fortune he has enjoyed.

'I really have been able, my dear Copperfield, to do all that I had
most at heart.  There's the Reverend Horace promoted to that living
at four hundred and fifty pounds a year; there are our two boys
receiving the very best education, and distinguishing themselves as
steady scholars and good fellows; there are three of the girls
married very comfortably; there are three more living with us;
there are three more keeping house for the Reverend Horace since
Mrs. Crewler's decease; and all of them happy.'

'Except -' I suggest.

'Except the Beauty,' says Traddles.  'Yes.  It was very unfortunate
that she should marry such a vagabond.  But there was a certain
dash and glare about him that caught her.  However, now we have got
her safe at our house, and got rid of him, we must cheer her up
again.'

Traddles's house is one of the very houses - or it easily may have
been - which he and Sophy used to parcel out, in their evening
walks.  It is a large house; but Traddles keeps his papers in his
dressing-room and his boots with his papers; and he and Sophy
squeeze themselves into upper rooms, reserving the best bedrooms
for the Beauty and the girls.  There is no room to spare in the
house; for more of 'the girls' are here, and always are here, by
some accident or other, than I know how to count.  Here, when we go
in, is a crowd of them, running down to the door, and handing
Traddles about to be kissed, until he is out of breath.  Here,
established in perpetuity, is the poor Beauty, a widow with a
little girl; here, at dinner on Sophy's birthday, are the three
married girls with their three husbands, and one of the husband's
brothers, and another husband's cousin, and another husband's
sister, who appears to me to be engaged to the cousin.  Traddles,
exactly the same simple, unaffected fellow as he ever was, sits at
the foot of the large table like a Patriarch; and Sophy beams upon
him, from the head, across a cheerful space that is certainly not
glittering with Britannia metal.

And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet,
these faces fade away.  But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly
light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond
them all.  And that remains.

I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me.

My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the
dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.

O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life
indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the
shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing
upward!





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Dombey and Son was contributed by:
Neil McLachlan, nmclachlan@delphi.com
and Ted Davis, 101515.3105@compuserve.com
on behalf of the Talking Newspaper of the UK (TNAUK).

Production:
A Kurzweil flatbed scanner and Xerox Discover software was used to
produce the raw text files, which were edited using the TSEJR ASCII
text editor, with a user lexicon specially developed for this purpose.
Words split at the end of lines have been re-united, maintaining
hyphenation where appropriate; except for the Prefaces, the text has
been reformatted to 70 columns.




Structure:
Contents
Chapters 1 to 62
Preface of 1848
Preface of 1867







Dombey and Son

by Charles Dickens





CONTENTS

 1. Dombey and Son
 2. In which Timely Provision is made for an Emergency that
    will sometimes arise in the best-regulated Families
 3. In which Mr Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the
    Head of the Home-Department
 4. In which some more First Appearances are made on the
    Stage of these Adventures
 5. Paul's Progress and Christening
 6. Paul's Second Deprivation
 7. A Bird's-eye Glimpse of Miss Tox's Dwelling-place; also
    of the State of Miss Tox's Affections
 8. Paul's further Progress, Growth, and Character
 9. In which the Wooden Midshipman gets into Trouble
10. Containing the Sequel of the Midshipman's Disaster
11. Paul's Introduction to a New Scene
12. Paul's Education
13. Shipping Intelligence and Office Business
14. Paul grows more and more Old-fashioned, and goes Home
    for the holidays
15. Amazing Artfulness of Captain Cuttle, and a new Pursuit
    for Walter Gay
16. What the Waves were always saying
17. Captain Cuttle does a little Business for the Young people
18. Father and Daughter
19. Walter goes away
20. Mr Dombey goes upon a journey
21. New Faces
22. A Trifle of Management by Mr Carker the Manager
23. Florence solitary, and the Midshipman mysterious
24. The Study of a Loving Heart
25. Strange News of Uncle Sol
26. Shadows of the Past and Future
27. Deeper shadows
28. Alterations
29. The Opening of the Eyes of Mrs Chick
30. The Interval before the Marriage
31. The Wedding
32. The Wooden Midshipman goes to Pieces
33. Contrasts
34. Another Mother and Daughter
35. The Happy Pair
36. Housewarming
37. More Warnings than One
38. Miss Tox improves an Old Acquaintance
39. Further Adventures of Captain Edward Cuttle, Mariner
40. Domestic Relations
41. New Voices in the Waves
42. Confidential and Accidental
43. The Watches of the Night
44. A Separation
45. The Trusty Agent
46. Recognizant and Reflective
47. The Thunderbolt
48. The Flight of Florence
49. The Midshipman makes a Discovery
50. Mr Toots's Complaint
51. Mr Dombey and the World
52. Secret Intelligence
53. More Intelligence
54. The Fugitives
55. Rob the Grinder loses his Place
56. Several People delighted, and the Game Chicken disgusted
57. Another Wedding
58. After a Lapse
59. Retribution
60. Chiefly Matrimonial
61. Relenting
62. Final




CHAPTER 1.

Dombey and Son



Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great
arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little
basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in
front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were
analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown
while he was very new.

Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about
eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and
though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance,
to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of
course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his
general effect, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother
Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good
time - remorseless twins they are for striding through their human
forests, notching as they go - while the countenance of Son was
crossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time
would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat
part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper
operations.

Dombey, exulting in the long-looked-for event, jingled and jingled
the heavy gold watch-chain that depended from below his trim blue
coat, whereof the buttons sparkled phosphorescently in the feeble rays
of the distant fire. Son, with his little fists curled up and
clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be squaring at existence for
having come upon him so unexpectedly.

'The House will once again, Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey, 'be not
only in name but in fact Dombey and Son;' and he added, in a tone of
luxurious satisfaction, with his eyes half-closed as if he were
reading the name in a device of flowers, and inhaling their fragrance
at the same time; 'Dom-bey and Son!'

The words had such a softening influence, that he appended a term
of endearment to Mrs Dombey's name (though not without some
hesitation, as being a man but little used to that form of address):
and said, 'Mrs Dombey, my - my dear.'

A transient flush of faint surprise overspread the sick lady's face
as she raised her eyes towards him.

'He will be christened Paul, my - Mrs Dombey - of course.'

She feebly echoed, 'Of course,' or rather expressed it by the
motion of her lips, and closed her eyes again.

'His father's name, Mrs Dombey, and his grandfather's! I wish his
grandfather were alive this day! There is some inconvenience in the
necessity of writing Junior,' said Mr Dombey, making a fictitious
autograph on his knee; 'but it is merely of a private and personal
complexion. It doesn't enter into the correspondence of the House. Its
signature remains the same.' And again he said 'Dombey and Son, in
exactly the same tone as before.

Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr Dombey's life. The
earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon
were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float
their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew
for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their
orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.
Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole
reference to them. A. D. had no concern with Anno Domini, but stood
for anno Dombey - and Son.

He had risen, as his father had before him, in the course of life
and death, from Son to Dombey, and for nearly twenty years had been
the sole representative of the Firm. Of those years he had been
married, ten - married, as some said, to a lady with no heart to give
him; whose happiness was in the past, and who was content to bind her
broken spirit to the dutiful and meek endurance of the present. Such
idle talk was little likely to reach the ears of Mr Dombey, whom it
nearly concerned; and probably no one in the world would have received
it with such utter incredulity as he, if it had reached him. Dombey
and Son had often dealt in hides, but never in hearts. They left that
fancy ware to boys and girls, and boarding-schools and books. Mr
Dombey would have reasoned: That a matrimonial alliance with himself
must, in the nature of things, be gratifying and honourable to any
woman of common sense. That the hope of giving birth to a new partner
in such a House, could not fail to awaken a glorious and stirring
ambition in the breast of the least ambitious of her sex. That Mrs
Dombey had entered on that social contract of matrimony: almost
necessarily part of a genteel and wealthy station, even without
reference to the perpetuation of family Firms: with her eyes fully
open to these advantages. That Mrs Dombey had had daily practical
knowledge of his position in society. That Mrs Dombey had always sat
at the head of his table, and done the honours of his house in a
remarkably lady-like and becoming manner. That Mrs Dombey must have
been happy. That she couldn't help it.

Or, at all events, with one drawback. Yes. That he would have
allowed. With only one; but that one certainly involving much. With
the drawback of hope deferred. That hope deferred, which, (as the
Scripture very correctly tells us, Mr Dombey would have added in a
patronising way; for his highest distinct idea even of Scripture, if
examined, would have been found to be; that as forming part of a
general whole, of which Dombey and Son formed another part, it was
therefore to be commended and upheld) maketh the heart sick. They had
been married ten years, and until this present day on which Mr Dombey
sat jingling and jingling his heavy gold watch-chain in the great
arm-chair by the side of the bed, had had no issue.

- To speak of; none worth mentioning. There had been a girl some
six years before, and the child, who had stolen into the chamber
unobserved, was now crouching timidly, in a corner whence she could
see her mother's face. But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the
capital of the House's name and dignity, such a child was merely a
piece of base coin that couldn't be invested - a bad Boy - nothing
more.

Mr Dombey's cup of satisfaction was so full at this moment,
however, that he felt he could afford a drop or two of its contents,
even to sprinkle on the dust in the by-path of his little daughter.

So he said, 'Florence, you may go and look at your pretty brother,
if you lIke, I daresay. Don't touch him!'

The child glanced keenly at the blue coat and stiff white cravat,
which, with a pair of creaking boots and a very loud ticking watch,
embodied her idea of a father; but her eyes returned to her mother's
face immediately, and she neither moved nor answered.

'Her insensibility is as proof against a brother as against every
thing else,' said Mr Dombey to himself He seemed so confirmed in a
previous opinion by the discovery, as to be quite glad of it'

Next moment, the lady had opened her eyes and seen the child; and
the child had run towards her; and, standing on tiptoe, the better to
hide her face in her embrace, had clung about her with a desperate
affection very much at variance with her years.

'Oh Lord bless me!' said Mr Dombey, rising testily. 'A very
illadvised and feverish proceeding this, I am sure. Please to ring
there for Miss Florence's nurse. Really the person should be more
care-'

'Wait! I - had better ask Doctor Peps if he'll have the goodness to
step upstairs again perhaps. I'll go down. I'll go down. I needn't beg
you,' he added, pausing for a moment at the settee before the fire,
'to take particular care of this young gentleman, Mrs - '

'Blockitt, Sir?' suggested the nurse, a simpering piece of faded
gentility, who did not presume to state her name as a fact, but merely
offered it as a mild suggestion.

'Of this young gentleman, Mrs Blockitt.'

'No, Sir, indeed. I remember when Miss Florence was born - '

'Ay, ay, ay,' said Mr Dombey, bending over the basket bedstead, and
slightly bending his brows at the same time. 'Miss Florence was all
very well, but this is another matter. This young gentleman has to
accomplish a destiny. A destiny, little fellow!' As he thus
apostrophised the infant he raised one of his hands to his lips, and
kissed it; then, seeming to fear that the action involved some
compromise of his dignity, went, awkwardly enough, away.

Doctor Parker Peps, one of the Court Physicians, and a man of
immense reputation for assisting at the increase of great families,
was walking up and down the drawing-room with his hands behind him, to
the unspeakable admiration of the family Surgeon, who had regularly
puffed the case for the last six weeks, among all his patients,
friends, and acquaintances, as one to which he was in hourly
expectation day and night of being summoned, in conjunction with
Doctor Parker Pep.

'Well, Sir,' said Doctor Parker Peps in a round, deep, sonorous
voice, muffled for the occasion, like the knocker; 'do you find that
your dear lady is at all roused by your visit?'

'Stimulated as it were?' said the family practitioner faintly:
bowing at the same time to the Doctor, as much as to say, 'Excuse my
putting in a word, but this is a valuable connexion.'

Mr Dombey was quite discomfited by the question. He had thought so
little of the patient, that he was not in a condition to answer it. He
said that it would be a satisfaction to him, if Doctor Parker Peps
would walk upstairs again.

'Good! We must not disguise from you, Sir,' said Doctor Parker
Peps, 'that there is a want of power in Her Grace the Duchess - I beg
your pardon; I confound names; I should say, in your amiable lady.
That there is a certain degree of languor, and a general absence of
elasticity, which we would rather - not -

'See,' interposed the family practitioner with another inclination
of the head.

'Quite so,' said Doctor Parker Peps,' which we would rather not
see. It would appear that the system of Lady Cankaby - excuse me: I
should say of Mrs Dombey: I confuse the names of cases - '

'So very numerous,' murmured the family practitioner - 'can't be
expected I'm sure - quite wonderful if otherwise - Doctor Parker
Peps's West-End practice - '

'Thank you,' said the Doctor, 'quite so. It would appear, I was
observing, that the system of our patient has sustained a shock, from
which it can only hope to rally by a great and strong - '

'And vigorous,' murmured the family practitioner.

'Quite so,' assented the Doctor - 'and vigorous effort. Mr Pilkins
here, who from his position of medical adviser in this family - no one
better qualified to fill that position, I am sure.'

'Oh!' murmured the family practitioner. '"Praise from Sir Hubert
Stanley!"'

'You are good enough,' returned Doctor Parker Peps, 'to say so. Mr
Pilkins who, from his position, is best acquainted with the patient's
constitution in its normal state (an acquaintance very valuable to us
in forming our opinions in these occasions), is of opinion, with me,
that Nature must be called upon to make a vigorous effort in this
instance; and that if our interesting friend the Countess of Dombey -
I beg your pardon; Mrs Dombey - should not be - '

'Able,' said the family practitioner.

'To make,' said Doctor Parker Peps.

'That effort,' said the family practitioner.

'Successfully,' said they both together.

'Then,' added Doctor Parker Peps, alone and very gravely, a crisis
might arise, which we should both sincerely deplore.'

With that, they stood for a few seconds looking at the ground.
Then, on the motion - made in dumb show - of Doctor Parker Peps, they
went upstairs; the family practitioner opening the room door for that
distinguished professional, and following him out, with most
obsequious politeness.

To record of Mr Dombey that he was not in his way affected by this
intelligence, would be to do him an injustice. He was not a man of
whom it could properly be said that he was ever startled, or shocked;
but he certainly had a sense within him, that if his wife should
sicken and decay, he would be very sorry, and that he would find a
something gone from among his plate and furniture, and other household
possessions, which was well worth the having, and could not be lost
without sincere regret. Though it would be a cool,. business-like,
gentlemanly, self-possessed regret, no doubt.

His meditations on the subject were soon interrupted, first by the
rustling of garments on the staircase, and then by the sudden whisking
into the room of a lady rather past the middle age than otherwise but
dressed in a very juvenile manner, particularly as to the tightness of
her bodice, who, running up to him with a kind of screw in her face
and carriage, expressive of suppressed emotion, flung her arms around
his neck, and said, in a choking voice,

'My dear Paul! He's quite a Dombey!'

'Well, well!' returned her brother - for Mr Dombey was her brother
- 'I think he is like the family. Don't agitate yourself, Louisa.'

'It's very foolish of me,' said Louisa, sitting down, and taking
out her pocket~handkerchief, 'but he's - he's such a perfect Dombey!'

Mr Dombey coughed.

'It's so extraordinary,' said Louisa; smiling through her tears,
which indeed were not overpowering, 'as to be perfectly ridiculous. So
completely our family. I never saw anything like it in my life!'

'But what is this about Fanny, herself?' said Mr Dombey. 'How is
Fanny?'

'My dear Paul,' returned Louisa, 'it's nothing whatever. Take my
word, it's nothing whatever. There is exhaustion, certainly, but
nothing like what I underwent myself, either with George or Frederick.
An effort is necessary. That's all. If dear Fanny were a Dombey! - But
I daresay she'll make it; I have no doubt she'll make it. Knowing it
to be required of her, as a duty, of course she'll make it. My dear
Paul, it's very weak and silly of me, I know, to be so trembly and
shaky from head to foot; but I am so very queer that I must ask you
for a glass of wine and a morsel of that cake.'

Mr Dombey promptly supplied her with these refreshments from a tray
on the table.

'I shall not drink my love to you, Paul,' said Louisa: 'I shall
drink to the little Dombey. Good gracious me! - it's the most
astonishing thing I ever knew in all my days, he's such a perfect
Dombey.'

Quenching this expression of opinion in a short hysterical laugh
which terminated in tears, Louisa cast up her eyes, and emptied her
glass.

'I know it's very weak and silly of me,' she repeated, 'to be so
trembly and shaky from head to foot, and to allow my feelings so
completely to get the better of me, but I cannot help it. I thought I
should have fallen out of the staircase window as I came down from
seeing dear Fanny, and that tiddy ickle sing.' These last words
originated in a sudden vivid reminiscence of the baby.

They were succeeded by a gentle tap at the door.

'Mrs Chick,' said a very bland female voice outside, 'how are you
now, my dear friend?'

'My dear Paul,' said Louisa in a low voice, as she rose from her
seat, 'it's Miss Tox. The kindest creature! I never could have got
here without her! Miss Tox, my brother Mr Dombey. Paul, my dear, my
very particular friend Miss Tox.'

The lady thus specially presented, was a long lean figure, wearing
such a faded air that she seemed not to have been made in what
linen-drapers call 'fast colours' originally, and to have, by little
and little, washed out. But for this she might have been described as
the very pink of general propitiation and politeness. From a long
habit of listening admiringly to everything that was said in her
presence, and looking at the speakers as if she were mentally engaged
in taking off impressions of their images upon her soul, never to part
with the same but with life, her head had quite settled on one side.
Her hands had contracted a spasmodic habit of raising themselves of
their own accord as in involuntary admiration. Her eyes were liable to
a similar affection. She had the softest voice that ever was heard;
and her nose, stupendously aquiline, had a little knob in the very
centre or key-stone of the bridge, whence it tended downwards towards
her face, as in an invincible determination never to turn up at
anything.

Miss Tox's dress, though perfectly genteel and good, had a certain
character of angularity and scantiness. She was accustomed to wear odd
weedy little flowers in her bonnets and caps. Strange grasses were
sometimes perceived in her hair; and it was observed by the curious,
of all her collars, frills, tuckers, wristbands, and other gossamer
articles - indeed of everything she wore which had two ends to it
intended to unite - that the two ends were never on good terms, and
wouldn't quite meet without a struggle. She had furry articles for
winter wear, as tippets, boas, and muffs, which stood up on end in
rampant manner, and were not at all sleek. She was much given to the
carrying about of small bags with snaps to them, that went off like
little pistols when they were shut up; and when full-dressed, she wore
round her neck the barrenest of lockets, representing a fishy old eye,
with no approach to speculation in it. These and other appearances of
a similar nature, had served to propagate the opinion, that Miss Tox
was a lady of what is called a limited independence, which she turned
to the best account. Possibly her mincing gait encouraged the belief,
and suggested that her clipping a step of ordinary compass into two or
three, originated in her habit of making the most of everything.

'I am sure,' said Miss Tox, with a prodigious curtsey, 'that to
have the honour of being presented to Mr Dombey is a distinction which
I have long sought, but very little expected at the present moment. My
dear Mrs Chick - may I say Louisa!'

Mrs Chick took Miss Tox's hand in hers, rested the foot of her
wine-glass upon it, repressed a tear, and said in a low voice, 'God
bless you!'

'My dear Louisa then,' said Miss Tox, 'my sweet friend, how are you
now?'

'Better,' Mrs Chick returned. 'Take some wine. You have been almost
as anxious as I have been, and must want it, I am sure.'

Mr Dombey of course officiated, and also refilled his sister's
glass, which she (looking another way, and unconscious of his
intention) held straight and steady the while, and then regarded with
great astonishment, saying, 'My dear Paul, what have you been doing!'

'Miss Tox, Paul,' pursued Mrs Chick, still retaining her hand,
'knowing how much I have been interested in the anticipation of the
event of to-day, and how trembly and shaky I have been from head to
foot in expectation of it, has been working at a little gift for
Fanny, which I promised to present. Miss Tox is ingenuity itself.'

'My dear Louisa,' said Miss Tox. 'Don't say so.

'It is only a pincushion for the toilette table, Paul,' resumed his
sister; 'one of those trifles which are insignificant to your sex in
general, as it's very natural they should be - we have no business to
expect they should be otherwise - but to which we attach some
interest.

'Miss Tox is very good,' said Mr Dombey.

'And I do say, and will say, and must say,' pursued his sister,
pressing the foot of the wine-glass on Miss Tox's hand, at each of the
three clauses, 'that Miss Tox has very prettily adapted the sentiment
to the occasion. I call "Welcome little Dombey" Poetry, myself!'

'Is that the device?' inquired her brother.

'That is the device,' returned Louisa.

'But do me the justice to remember, my dear Louisa,' said Miss
Toxin a tone of low and earnest entreaty, 'that nothing but the - I
have some difficulty in expressing myself - the dubiousness of the
result would have induced me to take so great a liberty: "Welcome,
Master Dombey," would have been much more congenial to my feelings, as
I am sure you know. But the uncertainty attendant on angelic
strangers, will, I hope, excuse what must otherwise appear an
unwarrantable familiarity.' Miss Tox made a graceful bend as she
spoke, in favour of Mr Dombey, which that gentleman graciously
acknowledged. Even the sort of recognition of Dombey and Son, conveyed
in the foregoing conversation, was so palatable to him, that his
sister, Mrs Chick - though he affected to consider her a weak
good-natured person - had perhaps more influence over him than anybody
else.

'My dear Paul,' that lady broke out afresh, after silently
contemplating his features for a few moments, 'I don't know whether to
laugh or cry when I look at you, I declare, you do so remind me of
that dear baby upstairs.'

'Well!' said Mrs Chick, with a sweet smile, 'after this, I forgive
Fanny everything!'

It was a declaration in a Christian spirit, and Mrs Chick felt that
it did her good. Not that she had anything particular to forgive in
her sister-in-law, nor indeed anything at all, except her having
married her brother - in itself a species of audacity - and her
having, in the course of events, given birth to a girl instead of a
boy: which, as Mrs Chick had frequently observed, was not quite what
she had expected of her, and was not a pleasant return for all the
attention and distinction she had met with.

Mr Dombey being hastily summoned out of the room at this moment,
the two ladies were left alone together. Miss Tox immediately became
spasmodic.

'I knew you would admire my brother. I told you so beforehand, my
dear,' said Louisa. Miss Tox's hands and eyes expressed how much. 'And
as to his property, my dear!'

'Ah!' said Miss Tox, with deep feeling. 'Im-mense!'

'But his deportment, my dear Louisa!' said Miss Tox. 'His presence!
His dignity! No portrait that I have ever seen of anyone has been half
so replete with those qualities. Something so stately, you know: so
uncompromising: so very wide across the chest: so upright! A pecuniary
Duke of York, my love, and nothing short of it!' said Miss Tox.
'That's what I should designate him.'

'Why, my dear Paul!' exclaimed his sister, as he returned, 'you
look quite pale! There's nothing the matter?'

'I am sorry to say, Louisa, that they tell me that Fanny - '

'Now, my dear Paul,' returned his sister rising, 'don't believe it.
Do not allow yourself to receive a turn unnecessarily. Remember of
what importance you are to society, and do not allow yourself to be
worried by what is so very inconsiderately told you by people who
ought to know better. Really I'm surprised at them.'

'I hope I know, Louisa,' said Mr Dombey, stiffly, 'how to bear
myself before the world.'

'Nobody better, my dear Paul. Nobody half so well. They would be
ignorant and base indeed who doubted it.'

'Ignorant and base indeed!' echoed Miss Tox softly.

'But,' pursued Louisa, 'if you have any reliance on my experience,
Paul, you may rest assured that there is nothing wanting but an effort
on Fanny's part. And that effort,' she continued, taking off her
bonnet, and adjusting her cap and gloves, in a business-like manner,
'she must be encouraged, and really, if necessary, urged to make. Now,
my dear Paul, come upstairs with me.'

Mr Dombey, who, besides being generally influenced by his sister
for the reason already mentioned, had really faith in her as an
experienced and bustling matron, acquiesced; and followed her, at
once, to the sick chamber.

The lady lay upon her bed as he had left her, clasping her little
daughter to her breast. The child clung close about her, with the same
intensity as before, and never raised her head, or moved her soft
cheek from her mother's face, or looked on those who stood around, or
spoke, or moved, or shed a tear.

'Restless without the little girl,' the Doctor whispered Mr Dombey.
'We found it best to have her in again.'

'Can nothing be done?' asked Mr Dombey.

The Doctor shook his head. 'We can do no more.'

The windows stood open, and the twilight was gathering without.

The scent of the restoratives that had been tried was pungent in
the room, but had no fragrance in the dull and languid air the lady
breathed.

There was such a solemn stillness round the bed; and the two
medical attendants seemed to look on the impassive form with so much
compassion and so little hope, that Mrs Chick was for the moment
diverted from her purpose. But presently summoning courage, and what
she called presence of mind, she sat down by the bedside, and said in
the low precise tone of one who endeavours to awaken a sleeper:

'Fanny! Fanny!'

There was no sound in answer but the loud ticking of Mr Dombey's
watch and Doctor Parker Peps's watch, which seemed in the silence to
be running a race.

'Fanny, my dear,' said Mrs Chick, with assumed lightness, 'here's
Mr Dombey come to see you. Won't you speak to him? They want to lay
your little boy - the baby, Fanny, you know; you have hardly seen him
yet, I think - in bed; but they can't till you rouse yourself a
little. Don't you think it's time you roused yourself a little? Eh?'

She bent her ear to the bed, and listened: at the same time looking
round at the bystanders, and holding up her finger.

'Eh?' she repeated, 'what was it you said, Fanny? I didn't hear
you.'

No word or sound in answer. Mr Dombey's watch and Dr Parker Peps's
watch seemed to be racing faster.

'Now, really, Fanny my dear,' said the sister-in-law, altering her
position, and speaking less confidently, and more earnestly, in spite
of herself, 'I shall have to be quite cross with you, if you don't
rouse yourself. It's necessary for you to make an effort, and perhaps
a very great and painful effort which you are not disposed to make;
but this is a world of effort you know, Fanny, and we must never
yield, when so much depends upon us. Come! Try! I must really scold
you if you don't!'

The race in the ensuing pause was fierce and furious. The watches
seemed to jostle, and to trip each other up.

'Fanny!' said Louisa, glancing round, with a gathering alarm. 'Only
look at me. Only open your eyes to show me that you hear and
understand me; will you? Good Heaven, gentlemen, what is to be done!'

The two medical attendants exchanged a look across the bed; and the
Physician, stooping down, whispered in the child's ear. Not having
understood the purport of his whisper, the little creature turned her
perfectly colourless face and deep dark eyes towards him; but without
loosening her hold in the least

The whisper was repeated.

'Mama!' said the child.

The little voice, familiar and dearly loved, awakened some show of
consciousness, even at that ebb. For a moment, the closed eye lids
trembled, and the nostril quivered, and the faintest shadow of a smile
was seen.

'Mama!' cried the child sobbing aloud. 'Oh dear Mama! oh dear
Mama!'

The Doctor gently brushed the scattered ringlets of the child,
aside from the face and mouth of the mother. Alas how calm they lay
there; how little breath there was to stir them!

Thus, clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother
drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the
world.



CHAPTER 2.

In which Timely Provision is made for an Emergency that
will sometimes arise in the best-regulated Families



'I shall never cease to congratulate myself,' said Mrs Chick,' on
having said, when I little thought what was in store for us, - really
as if I was inspired by something, - that I forgave poor dear Fanny
everything. Whatever happens, that must always be a comfort to me!'

Mrs Chick made this impressive observation in the drawing-room,
after having descended thither from the inspection of the
mantua-makers upstairs, who were busy on the family mourning. She
delivered it for the behoof of Mr Chick, who was a stout bald
gentleman, with a very large face, and his hands continually in his
pockets, and who had a tendency in his nature to whistle and hum
tunes, which, sensible of the indecorum of such sounds in a house of
grief, he was at some pains to repress at present.

'Don't you over-exert yourself, Loo,' said Mr Chick, 'or you'll be
laid up with spasms, I see. Right tol loor rul! Bless my soul, I
forgot! We're here one day and gone the next!'

Mrs Chick contented herself with a glance of reproof, and then
proceeded with the thread of her discourse.

'I am sure,' she said, 'I hope this heart-rending occurrence will
be a warning to all of us, to accustom ourselves to rouse ourselves,
and to make efforts in time where they're required of us. There's a
moral in everything, if we would only avail ourselves of it. It will
be our own faults if we lose sight of this one.'

Mr Chick invaded the grave silence which ensued on this remark with
the singularly inappropriate air of 'A cobbler there was;' and
checking himself, in some confusion, observed, that it was undoubtedly
our own faults if we didn't improve such melancholy occasions as the
present.

'Which might be better improved, I should think, Mr C.,' retorted
his helpmate, after a short pause, 'than by the introduction, either
of the college hornpipe, or the equally unmeaning and unfeeling remark
of rump-te-iddity, bow-wow-wow!' - which Mr Chick had indeed indulged
in, under his breath, and which Mrs Chick repeated in a tone of
withering scorn.

'Merely habit, my dear,' pleaded Mr Chick.

'Nonsense! Habit!' returned his wife. 'If you're a rational being,
don't make such ridiculous excuses. Habit! If I was to get a habit (as
you call it) of walking on the ceiling, like the flies, I should hear
enough of it, I daresay.

It appeared so probable that such a habit might be attended with
some degree of notoriety, that Mr Chick didn't venture to dispute the
position.

'Bow-wow-wow!' repeated Mrs Chick with an emphasis of blighting
contempt on the last syllable. 'More like a professional singer with
the hydrophobia, than a man in your station of life!'

'How's the Baby, Loo?' asked Mr Chick: to change the subject.

'What Baby do you mean?' answered Mrs Chick.

'The poor bereaved little baby,' said Mr Chick. 'I don't know of
any other, my dear.'

'You don't know of any other,'retorted Mrs Chick. 'More shame for
you, I was going to say.

Mr Chick looked astonished.

'I am sure the morning I have had, with that dining-room
downstairs, one mass of babies, no one in their senses would believe.'

'One mass of babies!' repeated Mr Chick, staring with an alarmed
expression about him.

'It would have occurred to most men,' said Mrs Chick, 'that poor
dear Fanny being no more, - those words of mine will always be a balm
and comfort to me,' here she dried her eyes; 'it becomes necessary to
provide a Nurse.'

'Oh! Ah!' said Mr Chick. 'Toor-ru! - such is life, I mean. I hope
you are suited, my dear.'

'Indeed I am not,' said Mrs Chick; 'nor likely to be, so far as I
can see, and in the meantime the poor child seems likely to be starved
to death. Paul is so very particular - naturally so, of course, having
set his whole heart on this one boy - and there are so many objections
to everybody that offers, that I don't see, myself, the least chance
of an arrangement. Meanwhile, of course, the child is - '

'Going to the Devil,' said Mr Chick, thoughtfully, 'to be sure.'

Admonished, however, that he had committed himself, by the
indignation expressed in Mrs Chick's countenance at the idea of a
Dombey going there; and thinking to atone for his misconduct by a
bright suggestion, he added:

'Couldn't something temporary be done with a teapot?'

If he had meant to bring the subject prematurely to a close, he
could not have done it more effectually. After looking at him for some
moments in silent resignation, Mrs Chick said she trusted he hadn't
said it in aggravation, because that would do very little honour to
his heart. She trusted he hadn't said it seriously, because that would
do very little honour to his head. As in any case, he couldn't,
however sanguine his disposition, hope to offer a remark that would be
a greater outrage on human nature in general, we would beg to leave
the discussion at that point.

Mrs Chick then walked majestically to the window and peeped through
the blind, attracted by the sound of wheels. Mr Chick, finding that
his destiny was, for the time, against him, said no more, and walked
off. But it was not always thus with Mr Chick. He was often in the
ascendant himself, and at those times punished Louisa roundly. In
their matrimonial bickerings they were, upon the whole, a
well-matched, fairly-balanced, give-and-take couple. It would have
been, generally speaking, very difficult to have betted on the winner.
Often when Mr Chick seemed beaten, he would suddenly make a start,
turn the tables, clatter them about the ears of Mrs Chick, and carry
all before him. Being liable himself to similar unlooked for checks
from Mrs Chick, their little contests usually possessed a character of
uncertainty that was very animating.

Miss Tox had arrived on the wheels just now alluded to, and came
running into the room in a breathless condition. 'My dear Louisa,'said
Miss Tox, 'is the vacancy still unsupplied?'

'You good soul, yes,' said Mrs Chick.

'Then, my dear Louisa,' returned Miss Tox, 'I hope and believe -
but in one moment, my dear, I'll introduce the party.'

Running downstairs again as fast as she had run up, Miss Tox got
the party out of the hackney-coach, and soon returned with it under
convoy.

It then appeared that she had used the word, not in its legal or
business acceptation, when it merely expresses an individual, but as a
noun of multitude, or signifying many: for Miss Tox escorted a plump
rosy-cheeked wholesome apple-faced young woman, with an infant in her
arms; a younger woman not so plump, but apple-faced also, who led a
plump and apple-faced child in each hand; another plump and also
apple-faced boy who walked by himself; and finally, a plump and
apple-faced man, who carried in his arms another plump and apple-faced
boy, whom he stood down on the floor, and admonished, in a husky
whisper, to 'kitch hold of his brother Johnny.'

'My dear Louisa,' said Miss Tox, 'knowing your great anxiety, and
wishing to relieve it, I posted off myself to the Queen Charlotte's
Royal Married Females,' which you had forgot, and put the question,
Was there anybody there that they thought would suit? No, they said
there was not. When they gave me that answer, I do assure you, my
dear, I was almost driven to despair on your account. But it did so
happen, that one of the Royal Married Females, hearing the inquiry,
reminded the matron of another who had gone to her own home, and who,
she said, would in all likelihood be most satisfactory. The moment I
heard this, and had it corroborated by the matron - excellent
references and unimpeachable character - I got the address, my dear,
and posted off again.'

'Like the dear good Tox, you are!' said Louisa.

'Not at all,' returned Miss Tox. 'Don't say so. Arriving at the
house (the cleanest place, my dear! You might eat your dinner off the
floor), I found the whole family sitting at table; and feeling that no
account of them could be half so comfortable to you and Mr Dombey as
the sight of them all together, I brought them all away. This
gentleman,' said Miss Tox, pointing out the apple-faced man, 'is the
father. Will you have the goodness to come a little forward, Sir?'

The apple-faced man having sheepishly complied with this request,
stood chuckling and grinning in a front row.

'This is his wife, of course,' said Miss Tox, singling out the
young woman with the baby. 'How do you do, Polly?'

'I'm pretty well, I thank you, Ma'am,' said Polly.

By way of bringing her out dexterously, Miss Tox had made the
inquiry as in condescension to an old acquaintance whom she hadn't
seen for a fortnight or so.

'I'm glad to hear it,' said Miss Tox. 'The other young woman is her
unmarried sister who lives with them, and would take care of her
children. Her name's Jemima. How do you do, Jemima?'

'I'm pretty well, I thank you, Ma'am,' returned Jemima.

'I'm very glad indeed to hear it,' said Miss Tox. 'I hope you'll
keep so. Five children. Youngest six weeks. The fine little boy with
the blister on his nose is the eldest The blister, I believe,' said
Miss Tox, looking round upon the family, 'is not constitutional, but
accidental?'

The apple-faced man was understood to growl, 'Flat iron.

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' said Miss Tox, 'did you?

'Flat iron,' he repeated.

'Oh yes,' said Miss Tox. 'Yes! quite true. I forgot. The little
creature, in his mother's absence, smelt a warm flat iron. You're
quite right, Sir. You were going to have the goodness to inform me,
when we arrived at the door that you were by trade a - '

'Stoker,' said the man.

'A choker!' said Miss Tox, quite aghast.

'Stoker,' said the man. 'Steam ingine.'

'Oh-h! Yes!' returned Miss Tox, looking thoughtfully at him, and
seeming still to have but a very imperfect understanding of his
meaning.

'And how do you like it, Sir?'

'Which, Mum?' said the man.

'That,' replied Miss Tox. 'Your trade.'

'Oh! Pretty well, Mum. The ashes sometimes gets in here;' touching
his chest: 'and makes a man speak gruff, as at the present time. But
it is ashes, Mum, not crustiness.'

Miss Tox seemed to be so little enlightened by this reply, as to
find a difficulty in pursuing the subject. But Mrs Chick relieved her,
by entering into a close private examination of Polly, her children,
her marriage certificate, testimonials, and so forth. Polly coming out
unscathed from this ordeal, Mrs Chick withdrew with her report to her
brother's room, and as an emphatic comment on it, and corroboration of
it, carried the two rosiest little Toodles with her. Toodle being the
family name of the apple-faced family.

Mr Dombey had remained in his own apartment since the death of his
wife, absorbed in visions of the youth, education, and destination of
his baby son. Something lay at the bottom of his cool heart, colder
and heavier than its ordinary load; but it was more a sense of the
child's loss than his own, awakening within him an almost angry
sorrow. That the life and progress on which he built such hopes,
should be endangered in the outset by so mean a want; that Dombey and
Son should be tottering for a nurse, was a sore humiliation. And yet
in his pride and jealousy, he viewed with so much bitterness the
thought of being dependent for the very first step towards the
accomplishment of his soul's desire, on a hired serving-woman who
would be to the child, for the time, all that even his alliance could
have made his own wife, that in every new rejection of a candidate he
felt a secret pleasure. The time had now come, however, when he could
no longer be divided between these two sets of feelings. The less so,
as there seemed to be no flaw in the title of Polly Toodle after his
sister had set it forth, with many commendations on the indefatigable
friendship of Miss Tox.

'These children look healthy,' said Mr Dombey. 'But my God, to
think of their some day claiming a sort of relationship to Paul!'

' But what relationship is there!' Louisa began -

'Is there!' echoed Mr Dombey, who had not intended his sister to
participate in the thought he had unconsciously expressed. 'Is there,
did you say, Louisa!'

'Can there be, I mean - '

'Why none,' said Mr Dombey, sternly. 'The whole world knows that, I
presume. Grief has not made me idiotic, Louisa. Take them away,
Louisa! Let me see this woman and her husband.'

Mrs Chick bore off the tender pair of Toodles, and presently
returned with that tougher couple whose presence her brother had
commanded.

'My good woman,' said Mr Dombey, turning round in his easy chair,
as one piece, and not as a man with limbs and joints, 'I understand
you are poor, and wish to earn money by nursing the little boy, my
son, who has been so prematurely deprived of what can never be
replaced. I have no objection to your adding to the comforts of your
family by that means. So far as I can tell, you seem to be a deserving
object. But I must impose one or two conditions on you, before you
enter my house in that capacity. While you are here, I must stipulate
that you are always known as - say as Richards - an ordinary name, and
convenient. Have you any objection to be known as Richards? You had
better consult your husband.'

'Well?' said Mr Dombey, after a pretty long pause. 'What does your
husband say to your being called Richards?'

As the husband did nothing but chuckle and grin, and continually
draw his right hand across his mouth, moistening the palm, Mrs Toodle,
after nudging him twice or thrice in vain, dropped a curtsey and
replied 'that perhaps if she was to be called out of her name, it
would be considered in the wages.'

'Oh, of course,' said Mr Dombey. 'I desire to make it a question of
wages, altogether. Now, Richards, if you nurse my bereaved child, I
wish you to remember this always. You will receive a liberal stipend
in return for the discharge of certain duties, in the performance of
which, I wish you to see as little of your family as possible. When
those duties cease to be required and rendered, and the stipend ceases
to be paid, there is an end of all relations between us. Do you
understand me?'

Mrs Toodle seemed doubtful about it; and as to Toodle himself, he
had evidently no doubt whatever, that he was all abroad.

'You have children of your own,' said Mr Dombey. 'It is not at all
in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my
child need become attached to you. I don't expect or desire anything
of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will
have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and
letting: and will stay away. The child will cease to remember you; and
you will cease, if you please, to remember the child.'

Mrs Toodle, with a little more colour in her cheeks than she had
had before, said 'she hoped she knew her place.'

'I hope you do, Richards,' said Mr Dombey. 'I have no doubt you
know it very well. Indeed it is so plain and obvious that it could
hardly be otherwise. Louisa, my dear, arrange with Richards about
money, and let her have it when and how she pleases. Mr what's-your
name, a word with you, if you please!'

Thus arrested on the threshold as he was following his wife out of
the room, Toodle returned and confronted Mr Dombey alone. He was a
strong, loose, round-shouldered, shuffling, shaggy fellow, on whom his
clothes sat negligently: with a good deal of hair and whisker,
deepened in its natural tint, perhaps by smoke and coal-dust: hard
knotty hands: and a square forehead, as coarse in grain as the bark of
an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects, to Mr Dombey, who was one
of those close-shaved close-cut moneyed gentlemen who are glossy and
crisp like new bank-notes, and who seem to be artificially braced and
tightened as by the stimulating action of golden showerbaths.

'You have a son, I believe?' said Mr Dombey.

'Four on 'em, Sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!'

'Why, it's as much as you can afford to keep them!' said Mr Dombey.

'I couldn't hardly afford but one thing in the world less, Sir.'

'What is that?'

'To lose 'em, Sir.'

'Can you read?' asked Mr Dombey.

'Why, not partick'ler, Sir.'

'Write?'

'With chalk, Sir?'

'With anything?'

'I could make shift to chalk a little bit, I think, if I was put to
it,' said Toodle after some reflection.

'And yet,' said Mr Dombey, 'you are two or three and thirty, I
suppose?'

'Thereabouts, I suppose, Sir,' answered Toodle, after more
reflection

'Then why don't you learn?' asked Mr Dombey.

'So I'm a going to, Sir. One of my little boys is a going to learn
me, when he's old enough, and been to school himself.'

'Well,' said Mr Dombey, after looking at him attentively, and with
no great favour, as he stood gazing round the room (principally round
the ceiling) and still drawing his hand across and across his mouth.
'You heard what I said to your wife just now?'

'Polly heerd it,' said Toodle, jerking his hat over his shoulder in
the direction of the door, with an air of perfect confidence in his
better half. 'It's all right.'

'But I ask you if you heard it. You did, I suppose, and understood
it?' pursued Mr Dombey.

'I heerd it,' said Toodle, 'but I don't know as I understood it
rightly Sir, 'account of being no scholar, and the words being - ask
your pardon - rayther high. But Polly heerd it. It's all right.'

'As you appear to leave everything to her,' said Mr Dombey,
frustrated in his intention of impressing his views still more
distinctly on the husband, as the stronger character, 'I suppose it is
of no use my saying anything to you.'

'Not a bit,' said Toodle. 'Polly heerd it. She's awake, Sir.'

'I won't detain you any longer then,' returned Mr Dombey,
disappointed. 'Where have you worked all your life?'

'Mostly underground, Sir, 'till I got married. I come to the level
then. I'm a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into
full play.'

As he added in one of his hoarse whispers, 'We means to bring up
little Biler to that line,' Mr Dombey inquired haughtily who little
Biler was.

'The eldest on 'em, Sir,' said Toodle, with a smile. 'It ain't a
common name. Sermuchser that when he was took to church the gen'lm'n
said, it wam't a chris'en one, and he couldn't give it. But we always
calls him Biler just the same. For we don't mean no harm. Not we.

'Do you mean to say, Man,' inquired Mr Dombey; looking at him with
marked displeasure, 'that you have called a child after a boiler?'

'No, no, Sir,' returned Toodle, with a tender consideration for his
mistake. 'I should hope not! No, Sir. Arter a BILER Sir. The
Steamingine was a'most as good as a godfather to him, and so we called
him Biler, don't you see!'

As the last straw breaks the laden camel's back, this piece of
information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr Dombey. He motioned his
child's foster-father to the door, who departed by no means
unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in
solitary wretchedness.

It would be harsh, and perhaps not altogether true, to say of him
that he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly
than he had felt his wife's death: but certainly they impressed that
event upon him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and
bitterness. It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child,
that these people - the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them -
should be necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as
he felt disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had
made them so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and
composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and
down his room; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not,
for the world, have had a witness, 'Poor little fellow!'

It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey's pride, that he
pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower,
confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been
working 'mostly underground' all his life, and yet at whose door Death
had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit - but
poor little fellow!

Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him - and it is an
instance of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and
all his thoughts were tending to one centre - that a great temptation
was being placed in this woman's way. Her infant was a boy too. Now,
would it be possIble for her to change them?

Though he was soon satisfied that he had dismissed the idea as
romantic and unlikely - though possible, there was no denying - he
could not help pursuing it so far as to entertain within himself a
picture of what his condition would be, if he should discover such an
imposture when he was grown old. Whether a man so situated would be
able to pluck away the result of so many years of usage, confidence,
and belief, from the impostor, and endow a stranger with it?

But it was idle speculating thus. It couldn't happen. In a moment
afterwards he determined that it could, but that such women were
constantly observed, and had no opportunity given them for the
accomplishment of such a design, even when they were so wicked as to
entertain it. In another moment, he was remembering how few such cases
seemed to have ever happened. In another moment he was wondering
whether they ever happened and were not found out.

As his unusual emotion subsided, these misgivings gradually melted
away, though so much of their shadow remained behind, that he was
constant in his resolution to look closely after Richards himself,
without appearing to do so. Being now in an easier frame of mind, he
regarded the woman's station as rather an advantageous circumstance
than otherwise, by placing, in itself, a broad distance between her
and the child, and rendering their separation easy and natural. Thence
he passed to the contemplation of the future glories of Dombey and
Son, and dismissed the memory of his wife, for the time being, with a
tributary sigh or two.

Meanwhile terms were ratified and agreed upon between Mrs Chick and
Richards, with the assistance of Miss Tox; and Richards being with
much ceremony invested with the Dombey baby, as if it were an Order,
resigned her own, with many tears and kisses, to Jemima. Glasses of
wine were then produced, to sustain the drooping spirits of the
family; and Miss Tox, busying herself in dispensing 'tastes' to the
younger branches, bred them up to their father's business with such
surprising expedition, that she made chokers of four of them in a
quarter of a minute.

'You'll take a glass yourself, Sir, won't you?' said Miss Tox, as
Toodle appeared.

'Thankee, Mum,' said Toodle, 'since you are suppressing.'

'And you're very glad to leave your dear good wife in such a
comfortable home, ain't you, Sir?'said Miss Tox, nodding and winking
at him stealthily.

'No, Mum,' said Toodle. 'Here's wishing of her back agin.'

Polly cried more than ever at this. So Mrs Chick, who had her
matronly apprehensions that this indulgence in grief might be
prejudicial to the little Dombey ('acid, indeed,' she whispered Miss
Tox), hastened to the rescue.

'Your little child will thrive charmingly with your sister Jemima,
Richards,' said Mrs Chick; 'and you have only to make an effort - this
is a world of effort, you know, Richards - to be very happy indeed.
You have been already measured for your mourning, haven't you,
Richards?'

'Ye - es, Ma'am,' sobbed Polly.

'And it'll fit beautifully. I know,' said Mrs Chick, 'for the same
young person has made me many dresses. The very best materials, too!'

'Lor, you'll be so smart,' said Miss Tox, 'that your husband won't
know you; will you, Sir?'

'I should know her,' said Toodle, gruffly, 'anyhows and anywheres.'

Toodle was evidently not to be bought over.

'As to living, Richards, you know,' pursued Mrs Chick, 'why, the
very best of everything will be at your disposal. You will order your
little dinner every day; and anything you take a fancy to, I'm sure
will be as readily provided as if you were a Lady.'

'Yes to be sure!' said Miss Tox, keeping up the ball with great
sympathy. 'And as to porter! - quite unlimited, will it not, Louisa?'

'Oh, certainly!' returned Mrs Chick in the same tone. 'With a
little abstinence, you know, my dear, in point of vegetables.'

'And pickles, perhaps,' suggested Miss Tox.

'With such exceptions,' said Louisa, 'she'll consult her choice
entirely, and be under no restraint at all, my love.'

'And then, of course, you know,' said Miss Tox, 'however fond she
is of her own dear little child - and I'm sure, Louisa, you don't
blame her for being fond of it?'

'Oh no!' cried Mrs Chick, benignantly.

'Still,' resumed Miss Tox, 'she naturally must be interested in her
young charge, and must consider it a privilege to see a little cherub
connected with the superior classes, gradually unfolding itself from
day to day at one common fountain- is it not so, Louisa?'

'Most undoubtedly!' said Mrs Chick. 'You see, my love, she's
already quite contented and comfortable, and means to say goodbye to
her sister Jemima and her little pets, and her good honest husband,
with a light heart and a smile; don't she, my dear?'

'Oh yes!' cried Miss Tox. 'To be sure she does!'

Notwithstanding which, however, poor Polly embraced them all round
in great distress, and coming to her spouse at last, could not make up
her mind to part from him, until he gently disengaged himself, at the
close of the following allegorical piece of consolation:

'Polly, old 'ooman, whatever you do, my darling, hold up your head
and fight low. That's the only rule as I know on, that'll carry anyone
through life. You always have held up your head and fought low, Polly.
Do it now, or Bricks is no longer so. God bless you, Polly! Me and
J'mima will do your duty by you; and with relating to your'n, hold up
your head and fight low, Polly, and you can't go wrong!'

Fortified by this golden secret, Folly finally ran away to avoid
any more particular leave-taking between herself and the children. But
the stratagem hardly succeeded as well as it deserved; for the
smallest boy but one divining her intent, immediately began swarming
upstairs after her - if that word of doubtful etymology be admissible
- on his arms and legs; while the eldest (known in the family by the
name of Biler, in remembrance of the steam engine) beat a demoniacal
tattoo with his boots, expressive of grief; in which he was joined by
the rest of the family.

A quantity of oranges and halfpence thrust indiscriminately on each
young Toodle, checked the first violence of their regret, and the
family were speedily transported to their own home, by means of the
hackney-coach kept in waiting for that purpose. The children, under
the guardianship of Jemima, blocked up the window, and dropped out
oranges and halfpence all the way along. Mr Toodle himself preferred
to ride behind among the spikes, as being the mode of conveyance to
which he was best accustomed.



CHAPTER 3.

In which Mr Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the
Head of the Home-Department



The funeral of the deceased lady having been 'performed to the
entire satisfaction of the undertaker, as well as of the neighbourhood
at large, which is generally disposed to be captious on such a point,
and is prone to take offence at any omissions or short-comings in the
ceremonies, the various members of Mr Dombey's household subsided into
their several places in the domestic system. That small world, like
the great one out of doors, had the capacity of easily forgetting its
dead; and when the cook had said she was a quiet-tempered lady, and
the house-keeper had said it was the common lot, and the butler had
said who'd have thought it, and the housemaid had said she couldn't
hardly believe it, and the footman had said it seemed exactly like a
dream, they had quite worn the subject out, and began to think their
mourning was wearing rusty too.

On Richards, who was established upstairs in a state of honourable
captivity, the dawn of her new life seemed to break cold and grey. Mr
Dombey's house was a large one, on the shady side of a tall, dark,
dreadfully genteel street in the region between Portland Place and
Bryanstone Square.' It was a corner house, with great wide areas
containing cellars frowned upon by barred windows, and leered at by
crooked-eyed doors leading to dustbins. It was a house of dismal
state, with a circular back to it, containing a whole suite of
drawing-rooms looking upon a gravelled yard, where two gaunt trees,
with blackened trunks and branches, rattled rather than rustled, their
leaves were so smoked-dried. The summer sun was never on the street,
but in the morning about breakfast-time, when it came with the
water-carts and the old clothes men, and the people with geraniums,
and the umbrella-mender, and the man who trilled the little bell of
the Dutch clock as he went along. It was soon gone again to return no
more that day; and the bands of music and the straggling Punch's shows
going after it, left it a prey to the most dismal of organs, and white
mice; with now and then a porcupine, to vary the entertainments; until
the butlers whose families were dining out, began to stand at the
house-doors in the twilight, and the lamp-lighter made his nightly
failure in attempting to brighten up the street with gas.

It was as blank a house inside as outside. When the funeral was
over, Mr Dombey ordered the furniture to be covered up - perhaps to
preserve it for the son with whom his plans were all associated - and
the rooms to be ungarnished, saving such as he retained for himself on
the ground floor. Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables
and chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over
with great winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and
looking-glasses, being papered up in journals, daily and weekly,
obtruded fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders. Every
chandelier or lustre, muffled in holland, looked like a monstrous tear
depending from the ceiling's eye. Odours, as from vaults and damp
places, came out of the chimneys. The dead and buried lady was awful
in a picture-frame of ghastly bandages. Every gust of wind that rose,
brought eddying round the corner from the neighbouring mews, some
fragments of the straw that had been strewn before the house when she
was ill, mildewed remains of which were still cleaving to the
neighbourhood: and these, being always drawn by some invisible
attraction to the threshold of the dirty house to let immediately
opposite, addressed a dismal eloquence to Mr Dombey's windows.

The apartments which Mr Dombey reserved for his own inhabiting,
were attainable from the hall, and consisted of a sitting-room; a
library, which was in fact a dressing-room, so that the smell of
hot-pressed paper, vellum, morocco, and Russia leather, contended in
it with the smell of divers pairs of boots; and a kind of conservatory
or little glass breakfast-room beyond, commanding a prospect of the
trees before mentioned, and, generally speaking, of a few prowling
cats. These three rooms opened upon one another. In the morning, when
Mr Dombey was at his breakfast in one or other of the two
first-mentioned of them, as well as in the afternoon when he came home
to dinner, a bell was rung for Richards to repair to this glass
chamber, and there walk to and fro with her young charge. From the
glimpses she caught of Mr Dombey at these times, sitting in the dark
distance, looking out towards the infant from among the dark heavy
furniture - the house had been inhabited for years by his father, and
in many of its appointments was old-fashioned and grim - she began to
entertain ideas of him in his solitary state, as if he were a lone
prisoner in a cell, or a strange apparition that was not to be
accosted or understood. Mr Dombey came to be, in the course of a few
days, invested in his own person, to her simple thinking, with all the
mystery and gloom of his house. As she walked up and down the glass
room, or sat hushing the baby there - which she very often did for
hours together, when the dusk was closing in, too - she would
sometimes try to pierce the gloom beyond, and make out how he was
looking and what he was doing. Sensible that she was plainly to be
seen by him' however, she never dared to pry in that direction but
very furtively and for a moment at a time. Consequently she made out
nothing, and Mr Dombey in his den remained a very shade.

Little Paul Dombey's foster-mother had led this life herself, and
had carried little Paul through it for some weeks; and had returned
upstairs one day from a melancholy saunter through the dreary rooms of
state (she never went out without Mrs Chick, who called on fine
mornings, usually accompanied by Miss Tox, to take her and Baby for an
airing - or in other words, to march them gravely up and down the
pavement, like a walking funeral); when, as she was sitting in her own
room, the door was slowly and quietly opened, and a dark-eyed little
girl looked in.

'It's Miss Florence come home from her aunt's, no doubt,' thought
Richards, who had never seen the child before. 'Hope I see you well,
Miss.'

'Is that my brother?' asked the child, pointing to the Baby.

'Yes, my pretty,' answered Richards. 'Come and kiss him.'

But the child, instead of advancing, looked her earnestly in the
face, and said:

'What have you done with my Mama?'

'Lord bless the little creeter!' cried Richards, 'what a sad
question! I done? Nothing, Miss.'

'What have they done with my Mama?' inquired the child, with
exactly the same look and manner.

'I never saw such a melting thing in all my life!' said Richards,
who naturally substituted 'for this child one of her own, inquiring
for herself in like circumstances. 'Come nearer here, my dear Miss!
Don't be afraid of me.'

'I am not afraid of you,' said the child, drawing nearer. 'But I
want to know what they have done with my Mama.'

Her heart swelled so as she stood before the woman, looking into
her eyes, that she was fain to press her little hand upon her breast
and hold it there. Yet there was a purpose in the child that prevented
both her slender figure and her searching gaze from faltering.

'My darling,' said Richards, 'you wear that pretty black frock in
remembrance of your Mama.'

'I can remember my Mama,' returned the child, with tears springing
to her eyes, 'in any frock.'

'But people put on black, to remember people when they're gone.'

'Where gone?' asked the child.

'Come and sit down by me,' said Richards, 'and I'll tell you a
story.'

With a quick perception that it was intended to relate to what she
had asked, little Florence laid aside the bonnet she had held in her
hand until now, and sat down on a stool at the Nurse's feet, looking
up into her face.

'Once upon a time,' said Richards, 'there was a lady - a very good
lady, and her little daughter dearly loved her.'

'A very good lady and her little daughter dearly loved her,'
repeated the child.

'Who, when God thought it right that it should be so, was taken ill
and died.'

The child shuddered.

'Died, never to be seen again by anyone on earth, and was buried in
the ground where the trees grow.

'The cold ground?' said the child, shuddering again. 'No! The warm
ground,' returned Polly, seizing her advantage, 'where the ugly little
seeds turn into beautiful flowers, and into grass, and corn, and I
don't know what all besides. Where good people turn into bright
angels, and fly away to Heaven!'

The child, who had dropped her head, raised it again, and sat
looking at her intently.

'So; let me see,' said Polly, not a little flurried between this
earnest scrutiny, her desire to comfort the child, her sudden success,
and her very slight confidence in her own powers.' So, when this lady
died, wherever they took her, or wherever they put her, she went to
GOD! and she prayed to Him, this lady did,' said Polly, affecting
herself beyond measure; being heartily in earnest, 'to teach her
little daughter to be sure of that in her heart: and to know that she
was happy there and loved her still: and to hope and try - Oh, all her
life - to meet her there one day, never, never, never to part any
more.'

'It was my Mama!' exclaimed the child, springing up, and clasping
her round the neck.

'And the child's heart,' said Polly, drawing her to her breast:
'the little daughter's heart was so full of the truth of this, that
even when she heard it from a strange nurse that couldn't tell it
right, but was a poor mother herself and that was all, she found a
comfort in it - didn't feel so lonely - sobbed and cried upon her
bosom - took kindly to the baby lying in her lap - and - there, there,
there!' said Polly, smoothing the child's curls and dropping tears
upon them. 'There, poor dear!'

'Oh well, Miss Floy! And won't your Pa be angry neither!' cried a
quick voice at the door, proceeding from a short, brown, womanly girl
of fourteen, with a little snub nose, and black eyes like jet beads.
'When it was 'tickerlerly given out that you wasn't to go and worrit
the wet nurse.

'She don't worry me,' was the surprised rejoinder of Polly. 'I am
very fond of children.'

'Oh! but begging your pardon, Mrs Richards, that don't matter, you
know,' returned the black-eyed girl, who was so desperately sharp and
biting that she seemed to make one's eyes water. 'I may be very fond
of pennywinkles, Mrs Richards, but it don't follow that I'm to have
'em for tea. 'Well, it don't matter,' said Polly. 'Oh, thank'ee, Mrs
Richards, don't it!' returned the sharp girl. 'Remembering, however,
if you'll be so good, that Miss Floy's under my charge, and Master
Paul's under your'n.'

'But still we needn't quarrel,' said Polly.

'Oh no, Mrs Richards,' rejoined Spitfire. 'Not at all, I don't wish
it, we needn't stand upon that footing, Miss Floy being a permanency,
Master Paul a temporary.' Spitfire made use of none but comma pauses;
shooting out whatever she had to say in one sentence, and in one
breath, if possible.

'Miss Florence has just come home, hasn't she?' asked Polly.

'Yes, Mrs Richards, just come, and here, Miss Floy, before you've
been in the house a quarter of an hour, you go a smearing your wet
face against the expensive mourning that Mrs Richards is a wearing for
your Ma!' With this remonstrance, young Spitfire, whose real name was
Susan Nipper, detached the child from her new friend by a wrench - as
if she were a tooth. But she seemed to do it, more in the excessively
sharp exercise of her official functions, than with any deliberate
unkindness.

'She'll be quite happy, now she has come home again,' said Polly,
nodding to her with an encouraging smile upon her wholesome face, 'and
will be so pleased to see her dear Papa to-night.'

'Lork, Mrs Richards!' cried Miss Nipper, taking up her words with a
jerk. 'Don't. See her dear Papa indeed! I should like to see her do
it!'

'Won't she then?' asked Polly.

'Lork, Mrs Richards, no, her Pa's a deal too wrapped up in somebody
else, and before there was a somebody else to be wrapped up in she
never was a favourite, girls are thrown away in this house, Mrs
Richards, I assure you.

The child looked quickly from one nurse to the other, as if she
understood and felt what was said.

'You surprise me!' cried Folly. 'Hasn't Mr Dombey seen her since -
'

'No,' interrupted Susan Nipper. 'Not once since, and he hadn't
hardly set his eyes upon her before that for months and months, and I
don't think he'd have known her for his own child if he had met her in
the streets, or would know her for his own child if he was to meet her
in the streets to-morrow, Mrs Richards, as to me,' said Spitfire, with
a giggle, 'I doubt if he's aweer of my existence.'

'Pretty dear!' said Richards; meaning, not Miss Nipper, but the
little Florence.

'Oh! there's a Tartar within a hundred miles of where we're now in
conversation, I can tell you, Mrs Richards, present company always
excepted too,' said Susan Nipper; 'wish you good morning, Mrs
Richards, now Miss Floy, you come along with me, and don't go hanging
back like a naughty wicked child that judgments is no example to,
don't!'

In spite of being thus adjured, and in spite also of some hauling
on the part of Susan Nipper, tending towards the dislocation of her
right shoulder, little Florence broke away, and kissed her new friend,
affectionately.

'Oh dear! after it was given out so 'tickerlerly, that Mrs Richards
wasn't to be made free with!' exclaimed Susan. 'Very well, Miss Floy!'

'God bless the sweet thing!' said Richards, 'Good-bye, dear!'

'Good-bye!' returned the child. 'God bless you! I shall come to see
you again soon, and you'll come to see me? Susan will let us. Won't
you, Susan?'

Spitfire seemed to be in the main a good-natured little body,
although a disciple of that school of trainers of the young idea which
holds that childhood, like money, must be shaken and rattled and
jostled about a good deal to keep it bright. For, being thus appealed
to with some endearing gestures and caresses, she folded her small
arms and shook her head, and conveyed a relenting expression into her
very-wide-open black eyes.

'It ain't right of you to ask it, Miss Floy, for you know I can't
refuse you, but Mrs Richards and me will see what can be done, if Mrs
Richards likes, I may wish, you see, to take a voyage to Chaney, Mrs
Richards, but I mayn't know how to leave the London Docks.'

Richards assented to the proposition.

'This house ain't so exactly ringing with merry-making,' said Miss
Nipper, 'that one need be lonelier than one must be. Your Toxes and
your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs Richards,
but that's no reason why I need offer 'em the whole set.'

This proposition was also assented to by Richards, as an obvious
one.

'So I'm able, I'm sure,'said Susan Nipper, 'to live friendly, Mrs
Richards, while Master Paul continues a permanency, if the means can
be planned out without going openly against orders, but goodness
gracious Miss Floy, you haven't got your things off yet, you naughty
child, you haven't, come along!'

With these words, Susan Nipper, in a transport of coercion, made a
charge at her young ward, and swept her out of the room.

The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet, and
uncomplaining; was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed
to care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed
to mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly's heart was sore
when she was left alone again. In the simple passage that had taken
place between herself and the motherless little girl, her own motherly
heart had been touched no less than the child's; and she felt, as the
child did, that there was something of confidence and interest between
them from that moment.

Notwithstanding Mr Toodle's great reliance on Polly, she was
perhaps in point of artificial accomplishments very little his
superior. She had been good-humouredly working and drudging for her
life all her life, and was a sober steady-going person, with
matter-of-fact ideas about the butcher and baker, and the division of
pence into farthings. But she was a good plain sample of a nature that
is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel,
and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial
and devotion, than the nature of men. And, perhaps, unlearned as she
was, she could have brought a dawning knowledge home to Mr Dombey at
that early day, which would not then have struck him in the end like
lightning.

But this is from the purpose. Polly only thought, at that time, of
improving on her successful propitiation of Miss Nipper, and devising
some means of having little Florence aide her, lawfully, and without
rebellion. An opening happened to present itself that very night.

She had been rung down into the glass room as usual, and had walked
about and about it a long time, with the baby in her arms, when, to
her great surprise and dismay, Mr Dombey - whom she had seen at first
leaning on his elbow at the table, and afterwards walking up and down
the middle room, drawing, each time, a little nearer, she thought, to
the open folding doors - came out, suddenly, and stopped before her.

'Good evening, Richards.'

Just the same austere, stiff gentleman, as he had appeared to her
on that first day. Such a hard-looking gentleman, that she
involuntarily dropped her eyes and her curtsey at the same time.

'How is Master Paul, Richards?'

'Quite thriving, Sir, and well.'

'He looks so,' said Mr Dombey, glancing with great interest at the
tiny face she uncovered for his observation, and yet affecting to be
half careless of it. 'They give you everything you want, I hope?'

'Oh yes, thank you, Sir.'

She suddenly appended such an obvious hesitation to this reply,
however, that Mr Dombey, who had turned away; stopped, and turned
round again, inquiringly.

'If you please, Sir, the child is very much disposed to take notice
of things,' said Richards, with another curtsey, 'and - upstairs is a
little dull for him, perhaps, Sir.'

'I begged them to take you out for airings, constantly,' said Mr
Dombey. 'Very well! You shall go out oftener. You're quite right to
mention it.'

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' faltered Polly, 'but we go out quite
plenty Sir, thank you.'

'What would you have then?' asked Mr Dombey.

'Indeed Sir, I don't exactly know,' said Polly, 'unless - '

'Yes?'

'I believe nothing is so good for making children lively and
cheerful, Sir, as seeing other children playing about 'em,' observed
Polly, taking courage.

'I think I mentioned to you, Richards, when you came here,' said Mr
Dombey, with a frown, 'that I wished you to see as little of your
family as possible.'

'Oh dear yes, Sir, I wasn't so much as thinking of that.'

'I am glad of it,' said Mr Dombey hastily. 'You can continue your
walk if you please.'

With that, he disappeared into his inner room; and Polly had the
satisfaction of feeling that he had thoroughly misunderstood her
object, and that she had fallen into disgrace without the least
advancement of her purpose.

Next night, she found him walking about the conservatory when she
came down. As she stopped at the door, checked by this unusual sight,
and uncertain whether to advance or retreat, he called her in. His
mind was too much set on Dombey and Son, it soon appeared, to admit of
his having forgotten her suggestion.

'If you really think that sort of society is good for the child,'
he said sharply, as if there had been no interval since she proposed
it, 'where's Miss Florence?'

'Nothing could be better than Miss Florence, Sir,' said Polly
eagerly, 'but I understood from her maid that they were not to - '

Mr Dombey rang the bell, and walked till it was answered.

'Tell them always to let Miss Florence be with Richards when she
chooses, and go out with her, and so forth. Tell them to let the
children be together, when Richards wishes it.'

The iron was now hot, and Richards striking on it boldly - it was a
good cause and she bold in it, though instinctively afraid of Mr
Dombey - requested that Miss Florence might be sent down then and
there, to make friends with her little brother.

She feigned to be dandling the child as the servant retired on this
errand, but she thought that she saw Mr Dombey's colour changed; that
the expression of his face quite altered; that he turned, hurriedly,
as if to gainsay what he had said, or she had said, or both, and was
only deterred by very shame.

And she was right. The last time he had seen his slighted child,
there had been that in the sad embrace between her and her dying
mother, which was at once a revelation and a reproach to him. Let him
be absorbed as he would in the Son on whom he built such high hopes,
he could not forget that closing scene. He could not forget that he
had had no part in it. That, at the bottom of its clear depths of
tenderness and truth' lay those two figures clasped in each other's
arms, while he stood on the bank above them, looking down a mere
spectator - not a sharer with them - quite shut out.

Unable to exclude these things from his remembrance, or to keep his
mind free from such imperfect shapes of the meaning with which they
were fraught, as were able to make themselves visible to him through
the mist of his pride, his previous feeling of indifference towards
little Florence changed into an uneasiness of an extraordinary kind.
Young as she was, and possessing in any eyes but his (and perhaps in
his too) even more than the usual amount of childish simplicity and
confidence, he almost felt as if she watched and distrusted him. As if
she held the clue to something secret in his breast, of the nature of
which he was hardly informed himself. As if she had an innate
knowledge of one jarring and discordant string within him, and her
very breath could sound it.

His feeling about the child had been negative from her birth. He
had never conceived an aversion to her: it had not been worth his
while or in his humour. She had never been a positively disagreeable
object to him. But now he was ill at ease about her. She troubled his
peace. He would have preferred to put her idea aside altogether, if he
had known how. Perhaps - who shall decide on such mysteries! - he was
afraid that he might come to hate her.

When little Florence timidly presented herself, Mr Dombey stopped
in his pacing up and down and looked towards her. Had he looked with
greater interest and with a father's eye, he might have read in her
keen glance the impulses and fears that made her waver; the passionate
desire to run clinging to him, crying, as she hid her face in his
embrace, 'Oh father, try to love me! there's no one else!' the dread
of a repulse; the fear of being too bold, and of offending him; the
pitiable need in which she stood of some assurance and encouragement;
and how her overcharged young heart was wandering to find some natural
resting-place, for its sorrow and affection.

But he saw nothing of this. He saw her pause irresolutely at the
door and look towards him; and he saw no more.

'Come in,' he said, 'come in: what is the child afraid of?'

She came in; and after glancing round her for a moment with an
uncertain air, stood pressing her small hands hard together, close
within the door.

'Come here, Florence,' said her father, coldly. 'Do you know who I
am?'

'Yes, Papa.'

'Have you nothing to say to me?'

The tears that stood in her eyes as she raised them quickly to his
face, were frozen by the expression it wore. She looked down again,
and put out her trembling hand.

Mr Dombey took it loosely in his own, and stood looking down upon
her for a moment, as if he knew as little as the child, what to say or
do.

'There! Be a good girl,' he said, patting her on the head, and
regarding her as it were by stealth with a disturbed and doubtful
look. 'Go to Richards! Go!'

His little daughter hesitated for another instant as though she
would have clung about him still, or had some lingering hope that he
might raise her in his arms and kiss her. She looked up in his face
once more. He thought how like her expression was then, to what it had
been when she looked round at the Doctor - that night - and
instinctively dropped her hand and turned away.

It was not difficult to perceive that Florence was at a great
disadvantage in her father's presence. It was not only a constraint
upon the child's mind, but even upon the natural grace and freedom of
her actions. As she sported and played about her baby brother that
night, her manner was seldom so winning and so pretty as it naturally
was, and sometimes when in his pacing to and fro, he came near her
(she had, perhaps, for the moment, forgotten him) it changed upon the
instant and became forced and embarrassed.

Still, Polly persevered with all the better heart for seeing this;
and, judging of Mr Dombey by herself, had great confidence in the mute
appeal of poor little Florence's mourning dress.' It's hard indeed,'
thought Polly, 'if he takes only to one little motherless child, when
he has another, and that a girl, before his eyes.'

So, Polly kept her before his eyes, as long as she could, and
managed so well with little Paul, as to make it very plain that he was
all the livelier for his sister's company. When it was time to
withdraw upstairs again, she would have sent Florence into the inner
room to say good-night to her father, but the child was timid and drew
back; and when she urged her again, said, spreading her hands before
her eyes, as if to shut out her own unworthiness, 'Oh no, no! He don't
want me. He don't want me!'

The little altercation between them had attracted the notice of Mr
Dombey, who inquired from the table where he was sitting at his wine,
what the matter was.

'Miss Florence was afraid of interrupting, Sir, if she came in to
say good-night,' said Richards.

'It doesn't matter,' returned Mr Dombey. 'You can let her come and
go without regarding me.'

The child shrunk as she listened - and was gone, before her humble
friend looked round again.

However, Polly triumphed not a little in the success of her
well-intentioned scheme, and in the address with which she had brought
it to bear: whereof she made a full disclosure to Spitfire when she
was once more safely entrenched upstairs. Miss Nipper received that
proof of her confidence, as well as the prospect of their free
association for the future, rather coldly, and was anything but
enthusiastic in her demonstrations of joy.

'I thought you would have been pleased,' said Polly.

'Oh yes, Mrs Richards, I'm very well pleased, thank you,' returned
Susan, who had suddenly become so very upright that she seemed to have
put an additional bone in her stays.

'You don't show it,' said Polly.

'Oh! Being only a permanency I couldn't be expected to show it like
a temporary,' said Susan Nipper. 'Temporaries carries it all before
'em here, I find, but though there's a excellent party-wall between
this house and the next, I mayn't exactly like to go to it, Mrs
Richards, notwithstanding!'



CHAPTER 4.

In which some more First Appearances are made on the Stage of these
Adventures



Though the offices of Dombey and Son were within the liberties of
the City of London, and within hearing of Bow Bells, when their
clashing voices were not drowned by the uproar in the streets, yet
were there hints of adventurous and romantic story to be observed in
some of the adjacent objects. Gog and Magog held their state within
ten minutes' walk; the Royal Exchange was close at hand; the Bank of
England, with its vaults of gold and silver 'down among the dead men'
underground, was their magnificent neighbour. Just round the corner
stood the rich East India House, teeming with suggestions of precious
stuffs and stones, tigers, elephants, howdahs, hookahs, umbrellas,
palm trees, palanquins, and gorgeous princes of a brown complexion
sitting on carpets, with their slippers very much turned up at the
toes. Anywhere in the immediate vicinity there might be seen pictures
of ships speeding away full sail to all parts of the world; outfitting
warehouses ready to pack off anybody anywhere, fully equipped in half
an hour; and little timber midshipmen in obsolete naval uniforms,
eternally employed outside the shop doors of nautical
Instrument-makers in taking observations of the hackney carriages.

Sole master and proprietor of one of these effigies - of that which
might be called, familiar!y, the woodenest - of that which thrust
itself out above the pavement, right leg foremost, with a suavity the
least endurable, and had the shoe buckles and flapped waistcoat the
least reconcileable to human reason, and bore at its right eye the
most offensively disproportionate piece of machinery - sole master and
proprietor of that Midshipman, and proud of him too, an elderly
gentleman in a Welsh wig had paid house-rent, taxes, rates, and dues,
for more years than many a full-grown midshipman of flesh and blood
has numbered in his life; and midshipmen who have attained a pretty
green old age, have not been wanting in the English Navy.

The stock-in-trade of this old gentleman comprised chronometers,
barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, quadrants,
and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a
ship's course, or the keeping of a ship's reckoning, or the
prosecuting of a ship's discoveries. Objects in brass and glass were
in his drawers and on his shelves, which none but the initiated could
have found the top of, or guessed the use of, or having once examined,
could have ever got back again into their mahogany nests without
assistance. Everything was jammed into the tightest cases, fitted into
the narrowest corners, fenced up behind the most impertinent cushions,
and screwed into the acutest angles, to prevent its philosophical
composure from being disturbed by the rolling of the sea. Such
extraordinary precautions were taken in every instance to save room,
and keep the thing compact; and so much practical navigation was
fitted, and cushioned, and screwed into every box (whether the box was
a mere slab, as some were, or something between a cocked hat and a
star-fish, as others were, and those quite mild and modest boxes as
compared with others); that the shop itself, partaking of the general
infection, seemed almost to become a snug, sea-going, ship-shape
concern, wanting only good sea-room, in the event of an unexpected
launch, to work its way securely to any desert island in the world.

Many minor incidents in the household life of the Ships'

Instrument-maker who was proud of his little Midshipman, assisted
and bore out this fancy. His acquaintance lying chiefly among
ship-chandlers and so forth, he had always plenty of the veritable
ships' biscuit on his table. It was familiar with dried meats and
tongues, possessing an extraordinary flavour of rope yarn. Pickles
were produced upon it, in great wholesale jars, with 'dealer in all
kinds of Ships' Provisions' on the label; spirits were set forth in
case bottles with no throats. Old prints of ships with alphabetical
references to their various mysteries, hung in frames upon the walls;
the Tartar Frigate under weigh, was on the plates; outlandish shells,
seaweeds, and mosses, decorated the chimney-piece; the little
wainscotted back parlour was lighted by a sky-light, like a cabin.

Here he lived too, in skipper-like state, all alone with his nephew
Walter: a boy of fourteen who looked quite enough like a midshipman,
to carry out the prevailing idea. But there it ended, for Solomon
Gills himself (more generally called old Sol) was far from having a
maritime appearance. To say nothing of his Welsh wig, which was as
plain and stubborn a Welsh wig as ever was worn, and in which he
looked like anything but a Rover, he was a slow, quiet-spoken,
thoughtful old fellow, with eyes as red as if they had been small suns
looking at you through a fog; and a newly-awakened manner, such as he
might have acquired by having stared for three or four days
successively through every optical instrument in his shop, and
suddenly came back to the world again, to find it green. The only
change ever known in his outward man, was from a complete suit of
coffee-colour cut very square, and ornamented with glaring buttons, to
the same suit of coffee-colour minus the inexpressibles, which were
then of a pale nankeen. He wore a very precise shirt-frill, and
carried a pair of first-rate spectacles on his forehead, and a
tremendous chronometer in his fob, rather than doubt which precious
possession, he would have believed in a conspiracy against it on part
of all the clocks and watches in the City, and even of the very Sun
itself. Such as he was, such he had been in the shop and parlour
behind the little Midshipman, for years upon years; going regularly
aloft to bed every night in a howling garret remote from the lodgers,
where, when gentlemen of England who lived below at ease had little or
no idea of the state of the weather, it often blew great guns.

It is half-past five o'clock, and an autumn afternoon, when the
reader and Solomon Gills become acquainted. Solomon Gills is in the
act of seeing what time it is by the unimpeachable chronometer. The
usual daily clearance has been making in the City for an hour or more;
and the human tide is still rolling westward. 'The streets have
thinned,' as Mr Gills says, 'very much.' It threatens to be wet
to-night. All the weatherglasses in the shop are in low spirits, and
the rain already shines upon the cocked hat of the wooden Midshipman.

'Where's Walter, I wonder!' said Solomon Gills, after he had
carefully put up the chronometer again. 'Here's dinner been ready,
half an hour, and no Walter!'

Turning round upon his stool behind the counter, Mr Gills looked
out among the instruments in the window, to see if his nephew might be
crossing the road. No. He was not among the bobbing umbrellas, and he
certainly was not the newspaper boy in the oilskin cap who was slowly
working his way along the piece of brass outside, writing his name
over Mr Gills's name with his forefinger.

'If I didn't know he was too fond of me to make a run of it, and go
and enter himself aboard ship against my wishes, I should begin to be
fidgetty,' said Mr Gills, tapping two or three weather-glasses with
his knuckles. 'I really should. All in the Downs, eh! Lots of
moisture! Well! it's wanted.'

I believe,' said Mr Gills, blowing the dust off the glass top of a
compass-case, 'that you don't point more direct and due to the back
parlour than the boy's inclination does after all. And the parlour
couldn't bear straighter either. Due north. Not the twentieth part of
a point either way.'

'Halloa, Uncle Sol!'

'Halloa, my boy!' cried the Instrument-maker, turning briskly
round. 'What! you are here, are you?'

A cheerful looking, merry boy, fresh with running home in the rain;
fair-faced, bright-eyed, and curly-haired.

'Well, Uncle, how have you got on without me all day? Is dinner
ready? I'm so hungry.'

'As to getting on,' said Solomon good-naturedly, 'it would be odd
if I couldn't get on without a young dog like you a great deal better
than with you. As to dinner being ready, it's been ready this half
hour and waiting for you. As to being hungry, I am!'

'Come along then, Uncle!' cried the boy. 'Hurrah for the admiral!'

'Confound the admiral!' returned Solomon Gills. 'You mean the Lord
Mayor.'

'No I don't!' cried the boy. 'Hurrah for the admiral! Hurrah for
the admiral! For-ward!'

At this word of command, the Welsh wig and its wearer were borne
without resistance into the back parlour, as at the head of a boarding
party of five hundred men; and Uncle Sol and his nephew were speedily
engaged on a fried sole with a prospect of steak to follow.

'The Lord Mayor, Wally,' said Solomon, 'for ever! No more admirals.
The Lord Mayor's your admiral.'

'Oh, is he though!' said the boy, shaking his head. 'Why, the Sword
Bearer's better than him. He draws his sword sometimes.

'And a pretty figure he cuts with it for his pains,' returned the
Uncle. 'Listen to me, Wally, listen to me. Look on the mantelshelf.'

'Why who has cocked my silver mug up there, on a nail?' exclaimed
the boy.

I have,' said his Uncle. 'No more mugs now. We must begin to drink
out of glasses to-day, Walter. We are men of business. We belong to
the City. We started in life this morning.

'Well, Uncle,' said the boy, 'I'll drink out of anything you like,
so long as I can drink to you. Here's to you, Uncle Sol, and Hurrah
for the

'Lord Mayor,' interrupted the old man.

'For the Lord Mayor, Sheriffs, Common Council, and Livery,' said
the boy. 'Long life to 'em!'

The uncle nodded his head with great satisfaction. 'And now,' he
said, 'let's hear something about the Firm.'

'Oh! there's not much to be told about the Firm, Uncle,' said the
boy, plying his knife and fork.' It's a precious dark set of offices,
and in the room where I sit, there's a high fender, and an iron safe,
and some cards about ships that are going to sail, and an almanack,
and some desks and stools, and an inkbottle, and some books, and some
boxes, and a lot of cobwebs, and in one of 'em, just over my head, a
shrivelled-up blue-bottle that looks as if it had hung there ever so
long.'

'Nothing else?' said the Uncle.

'No, nothing else, except an old birdcage (I wonder how that ever
came there!) and a coal-scuttle.'

'No bankers' books, or cheque books, or bills, or such tokens of
wealth rolling in from day to day?' said old Sol, looking wistfully at
his nephew out of the fog that always seemed to hang about him, and
laying an unctuous emphasis upon the words.

'Oh yes, plenty of that I suppose,' returned his nephew carelessly;
'but all that sort of thing's in Mr Carker's room, or Mr Morfin's, or
MR Dombey's.'

'Has Mr Dombey been there to-day?' inquired the Uncle.

'Oh yes! In and out all day.'

'He didn't take any notice of you, I suppose?'.

'Yes he did. He walked up to my seat, - I wish he wasn't so solemn
and stiff, Uncle, - and said, "Oh! you are the son of Mr Gills the
Ships' Instrument-maker." "Nephew, Sir," I said. "I said nephew, boy,"
said he. But I could take my oath he said son, Uncle.'

'You're mistaken I daresay. It's no matter.

'No, it's no matter, but he needn't have been so sharp, I thought.
There was no harm in it though he did say son. Then he told me that
you had spoken to him about me, and that he had found me employment in
the House accordingly, and that I was expected to be attentive and
punctual, and then he went away. I thought he didn't seem to like me
much.'

'You mean, I suppose,' observed the Instrument-maker, 'that you
didn't seem to like him much?'

'Well, Uncle,' returned the boy, laughing. 'Perhaps so; I never
thought of that.'

Solomon looked a little graver as he finished his dinner, and
glanced from time to time at the boy's bright face. When dinner was
done, and the cloth was cleared away (the entertainment had been
brought from a neighbouring eating-house), he lighted a candle, and
went down below into a little cellar, while his nephew, standing on
the mouldy staircase, dutifully held the light. After a moment's
groping here and there, he presently returned with a very
ancient-looking bottle, covered with dust and dirt.

'Why, Uncle Sol!' said the boy, 'what are you about? that's the
wonderful Madeira! - there's only one more bottle!'

Uncle Sol nodded his head, implying that he knew very well what he
was about; and having drawn the cork in solemn silence, filled two
glasses and set the bottle and a third clean glass on the table.

'You shall drink the other bottle, Wally,' he said, 'when you come
to good fortune; when you are a thriving, respected, happy man; when
the start in life you have made to-day shall have brought you, as I
pray Heaven it may! - to a smooth part of the course you have to run,
my child. My love to you!'

Some of the fog that hung about old Sol seemed to have got into his
throat; for he spoke huskily. His hand shook too, as he clinked his
glass against his nephew's. But having once got the wine to his lips,
he tossed it off like a man, and smacked them afterwards.

'Dear Uncle,' said the boy, affecting to make light of it, while
the tears stood in his eyes, 'for the honour you have done me, et
cetera, et cetera. I shall now beg to propose Mr Solomon Gills with
three times three and one cheer more. Hurrah! and you'll return
thanks, Uncle, when we drink the last bottle together; won't you?'

They clinked their glasses again; and Walter, who was hoarding his
wine, took a sip of it, and held the glass up to his eye with as
critical an air as he could possibly assume.

His Uncle sat looking at him for some time in silence. When their
eyes at last met, he began at once to pursue the theme that had
occupied his thoughts, aloud, as if he had been speaking all the time.

'You see, Walter,' he said, 'in truth this business is merely a
habit with me. I am so accustomed to the habit that I could hardly
live if I relinquished it: but there's nothing doing, nothing doing.
When that uniform was worn,' pointing out towards the little
Midshipman, 'then indeed, fortunes were to be made, and were made. But
competition, competition - new invention, new invention - alteration,
alteration - the world's gone past me. I hardly know where I am
myself, much less where my customers are.

'Never mind 'em, Uncle!'

'Since you came home from weekly boarding-school at Peckham, for
instance - and that's ten days,' said Solomon, 'I don't remember more
than one person that has come into the shop.'

'Two, Uncle, don't you recollect? There was the man who came to ask
for change for a sovereign - '

'That's the one,' said Solomon.

'Why Uncle! don't you call the woman anybody, who came to ask the
way to Mile-End Turnpike?'

'Oh! it's true,' said Solomon, 'I forgot her. Two persons.'

'To be sure, they didn't buy anything,' cried the boy.

'No. They didn't buy anything,' said Solomon, quietly.

'Nor want anything,' cried the boy.

'No. If they had, they'd gone to another shop,' said Solomon, in
the same tone.

'But there were two of 'em, Uncle,' cried the boy, as if that were
a great triumph. 'You said only one.'

'Well, Wally,' resumed the old man, after a short pause: 'not being
like the Savages who came on Robinson Crusoe's Island, we can't live
on a man who asks for change for a sovereign, and a woman who inquires
the way to Mile-End Turnpike. As I said just now, the world has gone
past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen
are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same,
business is not the same, business commodities are not the same.
Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man
in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I
remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it
again. Even the noise it makes a long way ahead, confuses me.'

Walter was going to speak, but his Uncle held up his hand.

'Therefore, Wally - therefore it is that I am anxious you should be
early in the busy world, and on the world's track. I am only the ghost
of this business - its substance vanished long ago; and when I die,
its ghost will be laid. As it is clearly no inheritance for you then,
I have thought it best to use for your advantage, almost the only
fragment of the old connexion that stands by me, through long habit.
Some people suppose me to be wealthy. I wish for your sake they were
right. But whatever I leave behind me, or whatever I can give you, you
in such a House as Dombey's are in the road to use well and make the
most of. Be diligent, try to like it, my dear boy, work for a steady
independence, and be happy!'

'I'll do everything I can, Uncle, to deserve your affection. Indeed
I will,' said the boy, earnestly

'I know it,' said Solomon. 'I am sure of it,' and he applied
himself to a second glass of the old Madeira, with increased relish.
'As to the Sea,' he pursued, 'that's well enough in fiction, Wally,
but it won't do in fact: it won't do at all. It's natural enough that
you should think about it, associating it with all these familiar
things; but it won't do, it won't do.'

Solomon Gills rubbed his hands with an air of stealthy enjoyment,
as he talked of the sea, though; and looked on the seafaring objects
about him with inexpressible complacency.

'Think of this wine for instance,' said old Sol, 'which has been to
the East Indies and back, I'm not able to say how often, and has been
once round the world. Think of the pitch-dark nights, the roaring
winds, and rolling seas:'

'The thunder, lightning, rain, hail, storm of all kinds,' said the
boy.

'To be sure,' said Solomon, - 'that this wine has passed through.
Think what a straining and creaking of timbers and masts: what a
whistling and howling of the gale through ropes and rigging:'

'What a clambering aloft of men, vying with each other who shall
lie out first upon the yards to furl the icy sails, while the ship
rolls and pitches, like mad!' cried his nephew.

'Exactly so,' said Solomon: 'has gone on, over the old cask that
held this wine. Why, when the Charming Sally went down in the - '

'In the Baltic Sea, in the dead of night; five-and-twenty minutes
past twelve when the captain's watch stopped in his pocket; he lying
dead against the main-mast - on the fourteenth of February, seventeen
forty-nine!' cried Walter, with great animation.

'Ay, to be sure!' cried old Sol, 'quite right! Then, there were
five hundred casks of such wine aboard; and all hands (except the
first mate, first lieutenant, two seamen, and a lady, in a leaky boat)
going to work to stave the casks, got drunk and died drunk, singing
"Rule Britannia", when she settled and went down, and ending with one
awful scream in chorus.'

'But when the George the Second drove ashore, Uncle, on the coast
of Cornwall, in a dismal gale, two hours before daybreak, on the
fourth of March, 'seventy-one, she had near two hundred horses aboard;
and the horses breaking loose down below, early in the gale, and
tearing to and fro, and trampling each other to death, made such
noises, and set up such human cries, that the crew believing the ship
to be full of devils, some of the best men, losing heart and head,
went overboard in despair, and only two were left alive, at last, to
tell the tale.'

'And when,' said old Sol, 'when the Polyphemus - '

'Private West India Trader, burden three hundred and fifty tons,
Captain, John Brown of Deptford. Owners, Wiggs and Co.,' cried Walter.

'The same,' said Sol; 'when she took fire, four days' sail with a
fair wind out of Jamaica Harbour, in the night - '

'There were two brothers on board,' interposed his nephew, speaking
very fast and loud, 'and there not being room for both of them in the
only boat that wasn't swamped, neither of them would consent to go,
until the elder took the younger by the waist, and flung him in. And
then the younger, rising in the boat, cried out, "Dear Edward, think
of your promised wife at home. I'm only a boy. No one waits at home
for me. Leap down into my place!" and flung himself in the sea!'

The kindling eye and heightened colour of the boy, who had risen
from his seat in the earnestness of what he said and felt, seemed to
remind old Sol of something he had forgotten, or that his encircling
mist had hitherto shut out. Instead of proceeding with any more
anecdotes, as he had evidently intended but a moment before, he gave a
short dry cough, and said, 'Well! suppose we change the subject.'

The truth was, that the simple-minded Uncle in his secret
attraction towards the marvellous and adventurous - of which he was,
in some sort, a distant relation, by his trade - had greatly
encouraged the same attraction in the nephew; and that everything that
had ever been put before the boy to deter him from a life of
adventure, had had the usual unaccountable effect of sharpening his
taste for it. This is invariable. It would seem as if there never was
a book written, or a story told, expressly with the object of keeping
boys on shore, which did not lure and charm them to the ocean, as a
matter of course.

But an addition to the little party now made its appearance, in the
shape of a gentleman in a wide suit of blue, with a hook instead of a
hand attached to his right wrist; very bushy black eyebrows; and a
thick stick in his left hand, covered all over (like his nose) with
knobs. He wore a loose black silk handkerchief round his neck, and
such a very large coarse shirt collar, that it looked like a small
sail. He was evidently the person for whom the spare wine-glass was
intended, and evidently knew it; for having taken off his rough outer
coat, and hung up, on a particular peg behind the door, such a hard
glazed hat as a sympathetic person's head might ache at the sight of,
and which left a red rim round his own forehead as if he had been
wearing a tight basin, he brought a chair to where the clean glass
was, and sat himself down behind it. He was usually addressed as
Captain, this visitor; and had been a pilot, or a skipper, or a
privateersman, or all three perhaps; and was a very salt-looking man
indeed.

His face, remarkable for a brown solidity, brightened as he shook
hands with Uncle and nephew; but he seemed to be of a laconic
disposition, and merely said:

'How goes it?'

'All well,' said Mr Gills, pushing the bottle towards him.

He took it up, and having surveyed and smelt it, said with
extraordinary expression:

'The?'

'The,' returned the Instrument-maker.

Upon that he whistled as he filled his glass, and seemed to think
they were making holiday indeed.

'Wal'r!' he said, arranging his hair (which was thin) with his
hook, and then pointing it at the Instrument-maker, 'Look at him!
Love! Honour! And Obey! Overhaul your catechism till you find that
passage, and when found turn the leaf down. Success, my boy!'

He was so perfectly satisfied both with his quotation and his
reference to it, that he could not help repeating the words again in a
low voice, and saying he had forgotten 'em these forty year.

'But I never wanted two or three words in my life that I didn't
know where to lay my hand upon 'em, Gills,' he observed. 'It comes of
not wasting language as some do.'

The reflection perhaps reminded him that he had better, like young
Norval's father, '"ncrease his store." At any rate he became silent,
and remained so, until old Sol went out into the shop to light it up,
when he turned to Walter, and said, without any introductory remark:

'I suppose he could make a clock if he tried?'

'I shouldn't wonder, Captain Cuttle,' returned the boy.

'And it would go!' said Captain Cuttle, making a species of serpent
in the air with his hook. 'Lord, how that clock would go!'

For a moment or two he seemed quite lost in contemplating the pace
of this ideal timepiece, and sat looking at the boy as if his face
were the dial.

'But he's chockful of science,' he observed, waving his hook
towards the stock-in-trade. 'Look'ye here! Here's a collection of 'em.
Earth, air, or water. It's all one. Only say where you'll have it. Up
in a balloon? There you are. Down in a bell? There you are. D'ye want
to put the North Star in a pair of scales and weigh it? He'll do it
for you.'

It may be gathered from these remarks that Captain Cuttle's
reverence for the stock of instruments was profound, and that his
philosophy knew little or no distinction between trading in it and
inventing it.

'Ah!' he said, with a sigh, 'it's a fine thing to understand 'em.
And yet it's a fine thing not to understand 'em. I hardly know which
is best. It's so comfortable to sit here and feel that you might be
weighed, measured, magnified, electrified, polarized, played the very
devil with: and never know how.'

Nothing short of the wonderful Madeira, combined with the occasion
(which rendered it desirable to improve and expand Walter's mind),
could have ever loosened his tongue to the extent of giving utterance
to this prodigious oration. He seemed quite amazed himself at the
manner in which it opened up to view the sources of the taciturn
delight he had had in eating Sunday dinners in that parlour for ten
years. Becoming a sadder and a wiser man, he mused and held his peace.

'Come!' cried the subject of this admiration, returning. 'Before
you have your glass of grog, Ned, we must finish the bottle.'

'Stand by!' said Ned, filling his glass. 'Give the boy some more.'

'No more, thank'e, Uncle!'

'Yes, yes,' said Sol, 'a little more. We'll finish the bottle, to
the House, Ned - Walter's House. Why it may be his House one of these
days, in part. Who knows? Sir Richard Whittington married his master's
daughter.'

'"Turn again Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, and when you are
old you will never depart from it,"' interposed the Captain. 'Wal'r!
Overhaul the book, my lad.'

'And although Mr Dombey hasn't a daughter,' Sol began.

'Yes, yes, he has, Uncle,' said the boy, reddening and laughing.

'Has he?' cried the old man. 'Indeed I think he has too.

'Oh! I know he has,' said the boy. 'Some of 'em were talking about
it in the office today. And they do say, Uncle and Captain Cuttle,'
lowering his voice, 'that he's taken a dislike to her, and that she's
left, unnoticed, among the servants, and that his mind's so set all
the while upon having his son in the House, that although he's only a
baby now, he is going to have balances struck oftener than formerly,
and the books kept closer than they used to be, and has even been seen
(when he thought he wasn't) walking in the Docks, looking at his ships
and property and all that, as if he was exulting like, over what he
and his son will possess together. That's what they say. Of course, I
don't know.

'He knows all about her already, you see,' said the
instrument-maker.

'Nonsense, Uncle,' cried the boy, still reddening and laughing,
boy-like. 'How can I help hearing what they tell me?'

'The Son's a little in our way at present, I'm afraid, Ned,' said
the old man, humouring the joke.

'Very much,' said the Captain.

'Nevertheless, we'll drink him,' pursued Sol. 'So, here's to Dombey
and Son.'

'Oh, very well, Uncle,' said the boy, merrily. 'Since you have
introduced the mention of her, and have connected me with her and have
said that I know all about her, I shall make bold to amend the toast.
So here's to Dombey - and Son - and Daughter!'



CHAPTER 5.

Paul's Progress and Christening



Little Paul, suffering no contamination from the blood of the
Toodles, grew stouter and stronger every day. Every day, too, he was
more and more ardently cherished by Miss Tox, whose devotion was so
far appreciated by Mr Dombey that he began to regard her as a woman of
great natural good sense, whose feelings did her credit and deserved
encouragement. He was so lavish of this condescension, that he not
only bowed to her, in a particular manner, on several occasions, but
even entrusted such stately recognitions of her to his sister as 'pray
tell your friend, Louisa, that she is very good,' or 'mention to Miss
Tox, Louisa, that I am obliged to her;'specialities which made a deep
impression on the lady thus distinguished.

Whether Miss Tox conceived that having been selected by the Fates
to welcome the little Dombey before he was born, in Kirby, Beard and
Kirby's Best Mixed Pins, it therefore naturally devolved upon her to
greet him with all other forms of welcome in all other early stages of
his existence - or whether her overflowing goodness induced her to
volunteer into the domestic militia as a substitute in some sort for
his deceased Mama - or whether she was conscious of any other motives
- are questions which in this stage of the Firm's history herself only
could have solved. Nor have they much bearing on the fact (of which
there is no doubt), that Miss Tox's constancy and zeal were a heavy
discouragement to Richards, who lost flesh hourly under her patronage,
and was in some danger of being superintended to death.

Miss Tox was often in the habit of assuring Mrs Chick, that nothing
could exceed her interest in all connected with the development of
that sweet child;' and an observer of Miss Tox's proceedings might
have inferred so much without declaratory confirmation. She would
preside over the innocent repasts of the young heir, with ineffable
satisfaction, almost with an air of joint proprietorship with Richards
in the entertainment. At the little ceremonies of the bath and
toilette, she assisted with enthusiasm. The administration of
infantine doses of physic awakened all the active sympathy of her
character; and being on one occasion secreted in a cupboard (whither
she had fled in modesty), when Mr Dombey was introduced into the
nursery by his sister, to behold his son, in the course of preparation
for bed, taking a short walk uphill over Richards's gown, in a short
and airy linen jacket, Miss Tox was so transported beyond the ignorant
present as to be unable to refrain from crying out, 'Is he not
beautiful Mr Dombey! Is he not a Cupid, Sir!' and then almost sinking
behind the closet door with confusion and blushes.

'Louisa,' said Mr Dombey, one day, to his sister, 'I really think I
must present your friend with some little token, on the occasion of
Paul's christening. She has exerted herself so warmly in the child's
behalf from the first, and seems to understand her position so
thoroughly (a very rare merit in this world, I am sorry to say), that
it would really be agreeable to me to notice her.'

Let it be no detraction from the merits of Miss Tox, to hint that
in Mr Dombey's eyes, as in some others that occasionally see the
light, they only achieved that mighty piece of knowledge, the
understanding of their own position, who showed a fitting reverence
for his. It was not so much their merit that they knew themselves, as
that they knew him, and bowed low before him.

'My dear Paul,' returned his sister, 'you do Miss Tox but justice,
as a man of your penetration was sure, I knew, to do. I believe if
there are three words in the English language for which she has a
respect amounting almost to veneration, those words are, Dombey and
Son.'

'Well,' said Mr Dombey, 'I believe it. It does Miss Tox credit.'

'And as to anything in the shape of a token, my dear Paul,' pursued
his sister, 'all I can say is that anything you give Miss Tox will be
hoarded and prized, I am sure, like a relic. But there is a way, my
dear Paul, of showing your sense of Miss Tox's friendliness in a still
more flattering and acceptable manner, if you should be so inclined.'

'How is that?' asked Mr Dombey.

'Godfathers, of course,' continued Mrs Chick, 'are important in
point of connexion and influence.'

'I don't know why they should be, to my son, said Mr Dombey,
coldly.

'Very true, my dear Paul,' retorted Mrs Chick, with an
extraordinary show of animation, to cover the suddenness of her
conversion; 'and spoken like yourself. I might have expected nothing
else from you. I might have known that such would have been your
opinion. Perhaps;' here Mrs Chick faltered again, as not quite
comfortably feeling her way; 'perhaps that is a reason why you might
have the less objection to allowing Miss Tox to be godmother to the
dear thing, if it were only as deputy and proxy for someone else. That
it would be received as a great honour and distinction, Paul, I need
not say.

'Louisa,' said Mr Dombey, after a short pause, 'it is not to be
supposed - '

'Certainly not,' cried Mrs Chick, hastening to anticipate a
refusal, 'I never thought it was.'

Mr Dombey looked at her impatiently.

'Don't flurry me, my dear Paul,' said his sister; 'for that
destroys me. I am far from strong. I have not been quite myself, since
poor dear Fanny departed.'

Mr Dombey glanced at the pocket-handkerchief which his sister
applied to her eyes, and resumed:

'It is not be supposed, I say 'And I say,' murmured Mrs Chick,
'that I never thought it was.'

'Good Heaven, Louisa!' said Mr Dombey.

'No, my dear Paul,' she remonstrated with tearful dignity, 'I must
really be allowed to speak. I am not so clever, or so reasoning, or so
eloquent, or so anything, as you are. I know that very well. So much
the worse for me. But if they were the last words I had to utter - and
last words should be very solemn to you and me, Paul, after poor dear
Fanny - I would still say I never thought it was. And what is more,'
added Mrs Chick with increased dignity, as if she had withheld her
crushing argument until now, 'I never did think it was.' Mr Dombey
walked to the window and back again.

'It is not to be supposed, Louisa,' he said (Mrs Chick had nailed
her colours to the mast, and repeated 'I know it isn't,' but he took
no notice of it), 'but that there are many persons who, supposing that
I recognised any claim at all in such a case, have a claim upon me
superior to Miss Tox's. But I do not. I recognise no such thing. Paul
and myself will be able, when the time comes, to hold our own - the
House, in other words, will be able to hold its own, and maintain its
own, and hand down its own of itself, and without any such
common-place aids. The kind of foreign help which people usually seek
for their children, I can afford to despise; being above it, I hope.
So that Paul's infancy and childhood pass away well, and I see him
becoming qualified without waste of time for the career on which he is
destined to enter, I am satisfied. He will make what powerful friends
he pleases in after-life, when he is actively maintaining - and
extending, if that is possible - the dignity and credit of the Firm.
Until then, I am enough for him, perhaps, and all in all. I have no
wish that people should step in between us. I would much rather show
my sense of the obliging conduct of a deserving person like your
friend. Therefore let it be so; and your husband and myself will do
well enough for the other sponsors, I daresay.'

In the course of these remarks, delivered with great majesty and
grandeur, Mr Dombey had truly revealed the secret feelings of his
breast. An indescribable distrust of anybody stepping in between
himself and his son; a haughty dread of having any rival or partner in
the boy's respect and deference; a sharp misgiving, recently acquired,
that he was not infallible in his power of bending and binding human
wills; as sharp a jealousy of any second check or cross; these were,
at that time the master keys of his soul. In all his life, he had
never made a friend. His cold and distant nature had neither sought
one, nor found one. And now, when that nature concentrated its whole
force so strongly on a partial scheme of parental interest and
ambition, it seemed as if its icy current, instead of being released
by this influence, and running clear and free, had thawed for but an
instant to admit its burden, and then frozen with it into one
unyielding block.

Elevated thus to the godmothership of little Paul, in virtue of her
insignificance, Miss Tox was from that hour chosen and appointed to
office; and Mr Dombey further signified his pleasure that the
ceremony, already long delayed, should take place without further
postponement. His sister, who had been far from anticipating so signal
a success, withdrew as soon as she could, to communicate it to her
best of friends; and Mr Dombey was left alone in his library. He had
already laid his hand upon the bellrope to convey his usual summons to
Richards, when his eye fell upon a writing-desk, belonging to his
deceased wife, which had been taken, among other things, from a
cabinet in her chamber. It was not the first time that his eye had
lighted on it He carried the key in his pocket; and he brought it to
his table and opened it now - having previously locked the room door -
with a well-accustomed hand.

From beneath a leaf of torn and cancelled scraps of paper, he took
one letter that remained entire. Involuntarily holding his breath as
he opened this document, and 'bating in the stealthy action something
of his arrogant demeanour, he s at down, resting his head upon one
hand, and read it through.

He read it slowly and attentively, and with a nice particularity to
every syllable. Otherwise than as his great deliberation seemed
unnatural, and perhaps the result of an effort equally great, he
allowed no sign of emotion to escape him. When he had read it through,
he folded and refolded it slowly several times, and tore it carefully
into fragments. Checking his hand in the act of throwing these away,
he put them in his pocket, as if unwilling to trust them even to the
chances of being re-united and deciphered; and instead of ringing, as
usual, for little Paul, he sat solitary, all the evening, in his
cheerless room.

There was anything but solitude in the nursery; for there, Mrs
Chick and Miss Tox were enjoying a social evening, so much to the
disgust of Miss Susan Nipper, that that young lady embraced every
opportunity of making wry faces behind the door. Her feelings were so
much excited on the occasion, that she found it indispensable to
afford them this relief, even without having the comfort of any
audience or sympathy whatever. As the knight-errants of old relieved
their minds by carving their mistress's names in deserts, and
wildernesses, and other savage places where there was no probability
of there ever being anybody to read them, so did Miss Susan Nipper
curl her snub nose into drawers and wardrobes, put away winks of
disparagement in cupboards, shed derisive squints into stone pitchers,
and contradict and call names out in the passage.

The two interlopers, however, blissfully unconscious of the young
lady's sentiments, saw little Paul safe through all the stages of
undressing, airy exercise, supper and bed; and then sat down to tea
before the fire. The two children now lay, through the good offices of
Polly, in one room; and it was not until the ladies were established
at their tea-table that, happening to look towards the little beds,
they thought of Florence.

'How sound she sleeps!' said Miss Tox.

'Why, you know, my dear, she takes a great deal of exercise in the
course of the day,' returned Mrs Chick, 'playing about little Paul so
much.'

'She is a curious child,' said Miss Tox.

'My dear,' retorted Mrs Chick, in a low voice: 'Her Mama, all
over!'

'In deed!' said Miss Tox. 'Ah dear me!'

A tone of most extraordinary compassion Miss Tox said it in, though
she had no distinct idea why, except that it was expected of her.

'Florence will never, never, never be a Dombey,'said Mrs Chick,
'not if she lives to be a thousand years old.'

Miss Tox elevated her eyebrows, and was again full of

commiseration.

'I quite fret and worry myself about her,' said Mrs Chick, with a
sigh of modest merit. 'I really don't see what is to become of her
when she grows older, or what position she is to take. She don't gain
on her Papa in the least. How can one expect she should, when she is
so very unlike a Dombey?'

Miss Tox looked as if she saw no way out of such a cogent argument
as that, at all.

'And the child, you see,' said Mrs Chick, in deep confidence, 'has
poor dear Fanny's nature. She'll never make an effort in after-life,
I'll venture to say. Never! She'll never wind and twine herself about
her Papa's heart like - '

'Like the ivy?' suggested Miss Tox.

'Like the ivy,' Mrs Chick assented. 'Never! She'll never glide and
nestle into the bosom of her Papa's affections like - the - '

'Startled fawn?' suggested Miss Tox.

'Like the startled fawn,' said Mrs Chick. 'Never! Poor Fanny! Yet,
how I loved her!'

'You must not distress yourself, my dear,' said Miss Tox, in a
soothing voice. 'Now really! You have too much feeling.'

'We have all our faults,' said Mrs Chick, weeping and shaking her
head. 'I daresay we have. I never was blind to hers. I never said I
was. Far from it. Yet how I loved her!'

What a satisfaction it was to Mrs Chick - a common-place piece of
folly enough, compared with whom her sister-in-law had been a very
angel of womanly intelligence and gentleness - to patronise and be
tender to the memory of that lady: in exact pursuance of her conduct
to her in her lifetime: and to thoroughly believe herself, and take
herself in, and make herself uncommonly comfortable on the strength of
her toleration! What a mighty pleasant virtue toleration should be
when we are right, to be so very pleasant when we are wrong, and quite
unable to demonstrate how we come to be invested with the privilege of
exercising it!

Mrs Chick was yet drying her eyes and shaking her head, when
Richards made bold to caution her that Miss Florence was awake and
sitting in her bed. She had risen, as the nurse said, and the lashes
of her eyes were wet with tears. But no one saw them glistening save
Polly. No one else leant over her, and whispered soothing words to
her, or was near enough to hear the flutter of her beating heart.

'Oh! dear nurse!' said the child, looking earnestly up in her face,
'let me lie by my brother!'

'Why, my pet?' said Richards.

'Oh! I think he loves me,' cried the child wildly. 'Let me lie by
him. Pray do!'

Mrs Chick interposed with some motherly words about going to sleep
like a dear, but Florence repeated her supplication, with a frightened
look, and in a voice broken by sobs and tears.

'I'll not wake him,' she said, covering her face and hanging down
her head. 'I'll only touch him with my hand, and go to sleep. Oh,
pray, pray, let me lie by my brother to-night, for I believe he's fond
of me!'

Richards took her without a word, and carrying her to the little
bed in which the infant was sleeping, laid her down by his side. She
crept as near him as she could without disturbing his rest; and
stretching out one arm so that it timidly embraced his neck, and
hiding her face on the other, over which her damp and scattered hair
fell loose, lay motionless.

'Poor little thing,' said Miss Tox; 'she has been dreaming, I
daresay.'

Dreaming, perhaps, of loving tones for ever silent, of loving eyes
for ever closed, of loving arms again wound round her, and relaxing in
that dream within the dam which no tongue can relate. Seeking, perhaps
- in dreams - some natural comfort for a heart, deeply and sorely
wounded, though so young a child's: and finding it, perhaps, in
dreams, if not in waking, cold, substantial truth. This trivial
incident had so interrupted the current of conversation, that it was
difficult of resumption; and Mrs Chick moreover had been so affected
by the contemplation of her own tolerant nature, that she was not in
spirits. The two friends accordingly soon made an end of their tea,
and a servant was despatched to fetch a hackney cabriolet for Miss
Tox. Miss Tox had great experience in hackney cabs, and her starting
in one was generally a work of time, as she was systematic in the
preparatory arrangements.

'Have the goodness, if you please, Towlinson,' said Miss Tox,
'first of all, to carry out a pen and ink and take his number
legibly.'

'Yes, Miss,' said Towlinson.

'Then, if you please, Towlinson,'said Miss Tox, 'have the goodness

to turn the cushion. Which,' said Miss Tox apart to Mrs Chick, 'is
generally damp, my dear.'

'Yes, Miss,' said Towlinson.

'I'll trouble you also, if you please, Towlinson,' said Miss Tox,
'with this card and this shilling. He's to drive to the card, and is
to understand that he will not on any account have more than the
shilling.'

'No, Miss,' said Towlinson.

'And - I'm sorry to give you so much trouble, Towlinson,' said Miss
Tox, looking at him pensively.

'Not at all, Miss,' said Towlinson.

'Mention to the man, then, if you please, Towlinson,' said Miss
Tox, 'that the lady's uncle is a magistrate, and that if he gives her
any of his impertinence he will be punished terribly. You can pretend
to say that, if you please, Towlinson, in a friendly way, and because
you know it was done to another man, who died.'

'Certainly, Miss,' said Towlinson.

'And now good-night to my sweet, sweet, sweet, godson,' said Miss
Tox, with a soft shower of kisses at each repetition of the adjective;
'and Louisa, my dear friend, promise me to take a little something
warm before you go to bed, and not to distress yourself!'

It was with extreme difficulty that Nipper, the black-eyed, who
looked on steadfastly, contained herself at this crisis, and until the
subsequent departure of Mrs Chick. But the nursery being at length
free of visitors, she made herself some recompense for her late
restraint.

'You might keep me in a strait-waistcoat for six weeks,' said
Nipper, 'and when I got it off I'd only be more aggravated, who ever
heard the like of them two Griffins, Mrs Richards?'

'And then to talk of having been dreaming, poor dear!' said Polly.

'Oh you beauties!' cried Susan Nipper, affecting to salute the door
by which the ladies had departed. 'Never be a Dombey won't she? It's
to be hoped she won't, we don't want any more such, one's enough.'

'Don't wake the children, Susan dear,' said Polly.

'I'm very much beholden to you, Mrs Richards,' said Susan, who was
not by any means discriminating in her wrath, 'and really feel it as a
honour to receive your commands, being a black slave and a mulotter.
Mrs Richards, if there's any other orders, you can give me, pray
mention 'em.'

'Nonsense; orders,' said Polly.

'Oh! bless your heart, Mrs Richards,' cried Susan, 'temporaries
always orders permanencies here, didn't you know that, why wherever
was you born, Mrs Richards? But wherever you was born, Mrs Richards,'
pursued Spitfire, shaking her head resolutely, 'and whenever, and
however (which is best known to yourself), you may bear in mind,
please, that it's one thing to give orders, and quite another thing to
take 'em. A person may tell a person to dive off a bridge head
foremost into five-and-forty feet of water, Mrs Richards, but a person
may be very far from diving.'

'There now,' said Polly, 'you're angry because you're a good little
thing, and fond of Miss Florence; and yet you turn round on me,
because there's nobody else.'

'It's very easy for some to keep their tempers, and be soft-spoken,
Mrs Richards,' returned Susan, slightly mollified, 'when their child's
made as much of as a prince, and is petted and patted till it wishes
its friends further, but when a sweet young pretty innocent, that
never ought to have a cross word spoken to or of it, is rundown, the
case is very different indeed. My goodness gracious me, Miss Floy, you
naughty, sinful child, if you don't shut your eyes this minute, I'll
call in them hobgoblins that lives in the cock-loft to come and eat
you up alive!'

Here Miss Nipper made a horrible lowing, supposed to issue from a
conscientious goblin of the bull species, impatient to discharge the
severe duty of his position. Having further composed her young charge
by covering her head with the bedclothes, and making three or four
angry dabs at the pillow, she folded her arms, and screwed up her
mouth, and sat looking at the fire for the rest of the evening.

Though little Paul was said, in nursery phrase, 'to take a deal of
notice for his age,' he took as little notice of all this as of the
preparations for his christening on the next day but one; which
nevertheless went on about him, as to his personal apparel, and that
of his sister and the two nurses, with great activity. Neither did he,
on the arrival of the appointed morning, show any sense of its
importance; being, on the contrary, unusually inclined to sleep, and
unusually inclined to take it ill in his attendants that they dressed
him to go out.

It happened to be an iron-grey autumnal day, with a shrewd east
wind blowing - a day in keeping with the proceedings. Mr Dombey
represented in himself the wind, the shade, and the autumn of the
christening. He stood in his library to receive the company, as hard
and cold as the weather; and when he looked out through the glass
room, at the trees in the little garden, their brown and yellow leaves
came fluttering down, as if he blighted them.

Ugh! They were black, cold rooms; and seemed to be in mourning,
like the inmates of the house. The books precisely matched as to size,
and drawn up in line, like soldiers, looked in their cold, hard,
slippery uniforms, as if they had but one idea among them, and that
was a freezer. The bookcase, glazed and locked, repudiated all
familiarities. Mr Pitt, in bronze, on the top, with no trace of his
celestial origin' about him, guarded the unattainable treasure like an
enchanted Moor. A dusty urn at each high corner, dug up from an
ancient tomb, preached desolation and decay, as from two pulpits; and
the chimney-glass, reflecting Mr Dombey and his portrait at one blow,
seemed fraught with melancholy meditations.

The stiff and stark fire-irons appeared to claim a nearer
relationship than anything else there to Mr Dombey, with his buttoned
coat, his white cravat, his heavy gold watch-chain, and his creaking
boots.

But this was before the arrival of Mr and Mrs Chick, his lawful
relatives, who soon presented themselves.

'My dear Paul,' Mrs Chick murmured, as she embraced him, 'the
beginning, I hope, of many joyful days!'

'Thank you, Louisa,' said Mr Dombey, grimly. 'How do you do, Mr
John?'

'How do you do, Sir?' said Chick.

He gave Mr Dombey his hand, as if he feared it might electrify him.
Mr Dombey tool: it as if it were a fish, or seaweed, or some such
clammy substance, and immediately returned it to him with exalted
politeness.

'Perhaps, Louisa,' said Mr Dombey, slightly turning his head in his
cravat, as if it were a socket, 'you would have preferred a fire?'

'Oh, my dear Paul, no,' said Mrs Chick, who had much ado to keep
her teeth from chattering; 'not for me.'

'Mr John,' said Mr Dombey, 'you are not sensible of any chill?'

Mr John, who had already got both his hands in his pockets over the
wrists, and was on the very threshold of that same canine chorus which
had given Mrs Chick so much offence on a former occasion, protested
that he was perfectly comfortable.

He added in a low voice, 'With my tiddle tol toor rul' - when he
was providentially stopped by Towlinson, who announced:

'Miss Tox!'

And enter that fair enslaver, with a blue nose and indescribably
frosty face, referable to her being very thinly clad in a maze of
fluttering odds and ends, to do honour to the ceremony.

'How do you do, Miss Tox?' said Mr Dombey.

Miss Tox, in the midst of her spreading gauzes, went down
altogether like an opera-glass shutting-up; she curtseyed so low, in
acknowledgment of Mr Dombey's advancing a step or two to meet her.

'I can never forget this occasion, Sir,' said Miss Tox, softly.
''Tis impossible. My dear Louisa, I can hardly believe the evidence of
my senses.'

If Miss Tox could believe the evidence of one of her senses, it was
a very cold day. That was quite clear. She took an early opportunity
of promoting the circulation in the tip of her nose by secretly
chafing it with her pocket handkerchief, lest, by its very low
temperature, it should disagreeably astonish the baby when she came to
kiss it.

The baby soon appeared, carried in great glory by Richards; while
Florence, in custody of that active young constable, Susan Nipper,
brought up the rear. Though the whole nursery party were dressed by
this time in lighter mourning than at first, there was enough in the
appearance of the bereaved children to make the day no brighter. The
baby too - it might have been Miss Tox's nose - began to cry. Thereby,
as it happened, preventing Mr Chick from the awkward fulfilment of a
very honest purpose he had; which was, to make much of Florence. For
this gentleman, insensible to the superior claims of a perfect Dombey
(perhaps on account of having the honour to be united to a Dombey
himself, and being familiar with excellence), really liked her, and
showed that he liked her, and was about to show it in his own way now,
when Paul cried, and his helpmate stopped him short

'Now Florence, child!' said her aunt, briskly, 'what are you doing,
love? Show yourself to him. Engage his attention, my dear!'

The atmosphere became or might have become colder and colder, when
Mr Dombey stood frigidly watching his little daughter, who, clapping
her hands, and standing On tip-toe before the throne of his son and
heir, lured him to bend down from his high estate, and look at her.
Some honest act of Richards's may have aided the effect, but he did
look down, and held his peace. As his sister hid behind her nurse, he
followed her with his eyes; and when she peeped out with a merry cry
to him, he sprang up and crowed lustily - laughing outright when she
ran in upon him; and seeming to fondle her curls with his tiny hands,
while she smothered him with kisses.

Was Mr Dombey pleased to see this? He testified no pleasure by the
relaxation of a nerve; but outward tokens of any kind of feeling were
unusual with him. If any sunbeam stole into the room to light the
children at their play, it never reached his face. He looked on so
fixedly and coldly, that the warm light vanished even from the
laughing eyes of little Florence, when, at last, they happened to meet
his.

It was a dull, grey, autumn day indeed, and in a minute's pause and
silence that took place, the leaves fell sorrowfully.

'Mr John,' said Mr Dombey, referring to his watch, and assuming his
hat and gloves. 'Take my sister, if you please: my arm today is Miss
Tox's. You had better go first with Master Paul, Richards. Be very
careful.'

In Mr Dombey's carriage, Dombey and Son, Miss Tox, Mrs Chick,
Richards, and Florence. In a little carriage following it, Susan
Nipper and the owner Mr Chick. Susan looking out of window, without
intermission, as a relief from the embarrassment of confronting the
large face of that gentleman, and thinking whenever anything rattled
that he was putting up in paper an appropriate pecuniary compliment
for herself.

Once upon the road to church, Mr Dombey clapped his hands for the
amusement of his son. At which instance of parental enthusiasm Miss
Tox was enchanted. But exclusive of this incident, the chief
difference between the christening party and a party in a mourning
coach consisted in the colours of the carriage and horses.

Arrived at the church steps, they were received by a portentous
beadle.' Mr Dombey dismounting first to help the ladies out, and
standing near him at the church door, looked like another beadle. A
beadle less gorgeous but more dreadful; the beadle of private life;
the beadle of our business and our bosoms.

Miss Tox's hand trembled as she slipped it through Mr Dombey's arm,
and felt herself escorted up the steps, preceded by a cocked hat and a
Babylonian collar. It seemed for a moment like that other solemn
institution, 'Wilt thou have this man, Lucretia?' 'Yes, I will.'

'Please to bring the child in quick out of the air there,'
whispered the beadle, holding open the inner door of the church.

Little Paul might have asked with Hamlet 'into my grave?' so chill
and earthy was the place. The tall shrouded pulpit and reading desk;
the dreary perspective of empty pews stretching away under the
galleries, and empty benches mounting to the roof and lost in the
shadow of the great grim organ; the dusty matting and cold stone
slabs; the grisly free seats' in the aisles; and the damp corner by
the bell-rope, where the black trestles used for funerals were stowed
away, along with some shovels and baskets, and a coil or two of
deadly-looking rope; the strange, unusual, uncomfortable smell, and
the cadaverous light; were all in unison. It was a cold and dismal
scene.

'There's a wedding just on, Sir,' said the beadle, 'but it'll be
over directly, if you'll walk into the westry here.

Before he turned again to lead the way, he gave Mr Dombey a bow and
a half smile of recognition, importing that he (the beadle) remembered
to have had the pleasure of attending on him when he buried his wife,
and hoped he had enjoyed himself since.

The very wedding looked dismal as they passed in front of the
altar. The bride was too old and the bridegroom too young, and a
superannuated beau with one eye and an eyeglass stuck in its blank
companion, was giving away the lady, while the friends were shivering.
In the vestry the fire was smoking; and an over-aged and over-worked
and under-paid attorney's clerk, 'making a search,' was running his
forefinger down the parchment pages of an immense register (one of a
long series of similar volumes) gorged with burials. Over the
fireplace was a ground-plan of the vaults underneath the church; and
Mr Chick, skimming the literary portion of it aloud, by way of
enlivening the company, read the reference to Mrs Dombey's tomb in
full, before he could stop himself.

After another cold interval, a wheezy little pew-opener afflicted
with an asthma, appropriate to the churchyard, if not to the church,
summoned them to the font - a rigid marble basin which seemed to have
been playing a churchyard game at cup and ball with its matter of fact
pedestal, and to have been just that moment caught on the top of it.
Here they waited some little time while the marriage party enrolled
themselves; and meanwhile the wheezy little pew-opener - partly in
consequence of her infirmity, and partly that the marriage party might
not forget her - went about the building coughing like a grampus.

Presently the clerk (the only cheerful-looking object there, and he
was an undertaker) came up with a jug of warm water, and said
something, as he poured it into the font, about taking the chill off;
which millions of gallons boiling hot could not have done for the
occasion. Then the clergyman, an amiable and mild-looking young
curate, but obviously afraid of the baby, appeared like the principal
character in a ghost-story, 'a tall figure all in white;' at sight of
whom Paul rent the air with his cries, and never left off again till
he was taken out black in the face.

Even when that event had happened, to the great relief of
everybody, he was heard under the portico, during the rest of the
ceremony, now fainter, now louder, now hushed, now bursting forth
again with an irrepressible sense of his wrongs. This so distracted
the attention of the two ladies, that Mrs Chick was constantly
deploying into the centre aisle, to send out messages by the
pew-opener, while Miss Tox kept her Prayer-book open at the Gunpowder
Plot, and occasionally read responses from that service.

During the whole of these proceedings, Mr Dombey remained as
impassive and gentlemanly as ever, and perhaps assisted in making it
so cold, that the young curate smoked at the mouth as he read. The
only time that he unbent his visage in the least, was when the
clergyman, in delivering (very unaffectedly and simply) the closing
exhortation, relative to the future examination of the child by the
sponsors, happened to rest his eye on Mr Chick; and then Mr Dombey
might have been seen to express by a majestic look, that he would like
to catch him at it.

It might have been well for Mr Dombey, if he had thought of his own
dignity a little less; and had thought of the great origin and purpose
of the ceremony in which he took so formal and so stiff a part, a
little more. His arrogance contrasted strangely with its history.

When it was all over, he again gave his arm to Miss Tox, and
conducted her to the vestry, where he informed the clergyman how much
pleasure it would have given him to have solicited the honour of his
company at dinner, but for the unfortunate state of his household
affairs. The register signed, and the fees paid, and the pew-opener
(whose cough was very bad again) remembered, and the beadle gratified,
and the sexton (who was accidentally on the doorsteps, looking with
great interest at the weather) not forgotten, they got into the
carriage again, and drove home in the same bleak fellowship.

There they found Mr Pitt turning up his nose at a cold collation,
set forth in a cold pomp of glass and silver, and looking more like a
dead dinner lying in state than a social refreshment. On their arrival
Miss Tox produced a mug for her godson, and Mr Chick a knife and fork
and spoon in a case. Mr Dombey also produced a bracelet for Miss Tox;
and, on the receipt of this token, Miss Tox was tenderly affected.

'Mr John,' said Mr Dombey, 'will you take the bottom of the table,
if you please? What have you got there, Mr John?'

'I have got a cold fillet of veal here, Sir,' replied Mr Chick,
rubbing his numbed hands hard together. 'What have you got there,
Sir?'

'This,' returned Mr Dombey, 'is some cold preparation of calf's
head, I think. I see cold fowls - ham - patties - salad - lobster.
Miss Tox will do me the honour of taking some wine? Champagne to Miss
Tox.'

There was a toothache in everything. The wine was so bitter cold
that it forced a little scream from Miss Tox, which she had great
difficulty in turning into a 'Hem!' The veal had come from such an
airy pantry, that the first taste of it had struck a sensation as of
cold lead to Mr Chick's extremities. Mr Dombey alone remained unmoved.
He might have been hung up for sale at a Russian fair as a specimen of
a frozen gentleman.

The prevailing influence was too much even for his sister. She made
no effort at flattery or small talk, and directed all her efforts to
looking as warm as she could.

'Well, Sir,' said Mr Chick, making a desperate plunge, after a long
silence, and filling a glass of sherry; 'I shall drink this, if you'll
allow me, Sir, to little Paul.'

'Bless him!' murmured Miss Tox, taking a sip of wine.

'Dear little Dombey!' murmured Mrs Chick.

'Mr John,' said Mr Dombey, with severe gravity, 'my son would feel
and express himself obliged to you, I have no doubt, if he could
appreciate the favour you have done him. He will prove, in time to
come, I trust, equal to any responsibility that the obliging
disposition of his relations and friends, in private, or the onerous
nature of our position, in public, may impose upon him.'

The tone in which this was said admitting of nothing more, Mr Chick
relapsed into low spirits and silence. Not so Miss Tox, who, having
listened to Mr Dombey with even a more emphatic attention than usual,
and with a more expressive tendency of her head to one side, now leant
across the table, and said to Mrs Chick softly:

'Louisa!'

'My dear,' said Mrs Chick.

'Onerous nature of our position in public may - I have forgotten

the exact term.'

'Expose him to,' said Mrs Chick.

'Pardon me, my dear,' returned Miss Tox, 'I think not. It was more
rounded and flowing. Obliging disposition of relations and friends in
private, or onerous nature of position in public - may - impose upon
him!'

'Impose upon him, to be sure,' said Mrs Chick.

Miss Tox struck her delicate hands together lightly, in triumph;
and added, casting up her eyes, 'eloquence indeed!'

Mr Dombey, in the meanwhile, had issued orders for the attendance
of Richards, who now entered curtseying, but without the baby; Paul
being asleep after the fatigues of the morning. Mr Dombey, having
delivered a glass of wine to this vassal, addressed her in the
following words: Miss Tox previously settling her head on one side,
and making other little arrangements for engraving them on her heart.

'During the six months or so, Richards, which have seen you an
inmate of this house, you have done your duty. Desiring to connect
some little service to you with this occasion, I considered how I
could best effect that object, and I also advised with my sister, Mrs
- '

'Chick,' interposed the gentleman of that name.

'Oh, hush if you please!' said Miss Tox.

'I was about to say to you, Richards,' resumed Mr Dombey, with an
appalling glance at Mr John, 'that I was further assisted in my
decision, by the recollection of a conversation I held with your
husband in this room, on the occasion of your being hired, when he
disclosed to me the melancholy fact that your family, himself at the
head, were sunk and steeped in ignorance.

Richards quailed under the magnificence of the reproof.

'I am far from being friendly,' pursued Mr Dombey, 'to what is
called by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it
is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to
know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I
approve of schools. Having the power of nominating a child on the
foundation of an ancient establishment, called (from a worshipful
company) the Charitable Grinders; where not only is a wholesome
education bestowed upon the scholars, but where a dress and badge is
likewise provided for them; I have (first communicating, through Mrs
Chick, with your family) nominated your eldest son to an existing
vacancy; and he has this day, I am informed, assumed the habit. The
number of her son, I believe,' said Mr Dombey, turning to his sister
and speaking of the child as if he were a hackney-coach, is one
hundred and forty-seven. Louisa, you can tell her.'

'One hundred and forty-seven,' said Mrs Chick 'The dress, Richards,
is a nice, warm, blue baize tailed coat and cap, turned up with orange
coloured binding; red worsted stockings; and very strong leather
small-clothes. One might wear the articles one's self,' said Mrs
Chick, with enthusiasm, 'and be grateful.'

'There, Richards!' said Miss Tox. 'Now, indeed, you may be proud.
The Charitable Grinders!'

'I am sure I am very much obliged, Sir,' returned Richards faintly,
'and take it very kind that you should remember my little ones.' At
the same time a vision of Biler as a Charitable Grinder, with his very
small legs encased in the serviceable clothing described by Mrs Chick,
swam before Richards's eyes, and made them water.

'I am very glad to see you have so much feeling, Richards,' said
Miss Tox.

'It makes one almost hope, it really does,' said Mrs Chick, who
prided herself on taking trustful views of human nature, 'that there
may yet be some faint spark of gratitude and right feeling in the
world.'

Richards deferred to these compliments by curtseying and murmuring

her thanks; but finding it quite impossible to recover her spirits
from the disorder into which they had been thrown by the image of her
son in his precocious nether garments, she gradually approached the
door and was heartily relieved to escape by it.

Such temporary indications of a partial thaw that had appeared with
her, vanished with her; and the frost set in again, as cold and hard
as ever. Mr Chick was twice heard to hum a tune at the bottom of the
table, but on both occasions it was a fragment of the Dead March in
Saul. The party seemed to get colder and colder, and to be gradually
resolving itself into a congealed and solid state, like the collation
round which it was assembled. At length Mrs Chick looked at Miss Tox,
and Miss Tox returned the look, and they both rose and said it was
really time to go. Mr Dombey receiving this announcement with perfect
equanimity, they took leave of that gentleman, and presently departed
under the protection of Mr Chick; who, when they had turned their
backs upon the house and left its master in his usual solitary state,
put his hands in his pockets, threw himself back in the carriage, and
whistled 'With a hey ho chevy!' all through; conveying into his face
as he did so, an expression of such gloomy and terrible defiance, that
Mrs Chick dared not protest, or in any way molest him.

Richards, though she had little Paul on her lap, could not forget
her own first-born. She felt it was ungrateful; but the influence of
the day fell even on the Charitable Grinders, and she could hardly
help regarding his pewter badge, number one hundred and forty-seven,
as, somehow, a part of its formality and sternness. She spoke, too, in
the nursery, of his 'blessed legs,' and was again troubled by his
spectre in uniform.

'I don't know what I wouldn't give,' said Polly, 'to see the poor
little dear before he gets used to 'em.'

'Why, then, I tell you what, Mrs Richards,' retorted Nipper, who
had been admitted to her confidence, 'see him and make your mind
easy.'

'Mr Dombey wouldn't like it,' said Polly.

'Oh, wouldn't he, Mrs Richards!' retorted Nipper, 'he'd like it
very much, I think when he was asked.'

'You wouldn't ask him, I suppose, at all?' said Polly.

'No, Mrs Richards, quite contrairy,' returned Susan, 'and them two
inspectors Tox and Chick, not intending to be on duty tomorrow, as I
heard 'em say, me and Mid Floy will go along with you tomorrow
morning, and welcome, Mrs Richards, if you like, for we may as well
walk there as up and down a street, and better too.'

Polly rejected the idea pretty stoutly at first; but by little and
little she began to entertain it, as she entertained more and more
distinctly the forbidden pictures of her children, and her own home.
At length, arguing that there could be no great harm in calling for a
moment at the door, she yielded to the Nipper proposition.

The matter being settled thus, little Paul began to cry most
piteously, as if he had a foreboding that no good would come of it.

'What's the matter with the child?' asked Susan.

'He's cold, I think,' said Polly, walking with him to and fro, and
hushing him.

It was a bleak autumnal afternoon indeed; and as she walked, and
hushed, and, glancing through the dreary windows, pressed the little
fellow closer to her breast, the withered leaves came showering down.



CHAPTER 6.

Paul's Second Deprivation



Polly was beset by so many misgivings in the morning, that but for
the incessant promptings of her black-eyed companion, she would have
abandoned all thoughts of the expedition, and formally petitioned for
leave to see number one hundred and forty-seven, under the awful
shadow of Mr Dombey's roof. But Susan who was personally disposed in
favour of the excursion, and who (like Tony Lumpkin), if she could
bear the disappointments of other people with tolerable fortitude,
could not abide to disappoint herself, threw so many ingenious doubts
in the way of this second thought, and stimulated the original
intention with so many ingenious arguments, that almost as soon as Mr
Dombey's stately back was turned, and that gentleman was pursuing his
daily road towards the City, his unconscious son was on his way to
Staggs's Gardens.

This euphonious locality was situated in a suburb, known by the
inhabitants of Staggs's Gardens by the name of Camberling Town; a
designation which the Strangers' Map of London, as printed (with a
view to pleasant and commodious reference) on pocket handkerchiefs,
condenses, with some show of reason, into Camden Town. Hither the two
nurses bent their steps, accompanied by their charges; Richards
carrying Paul, of course, and Susan leading little Florence by the
hand, and giving her such jerks and pokes from time to time, as she
considered it wholesome to administer.

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period,
rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were
visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken
through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground;
enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were
undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos
of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the
bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron
soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond.
Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were
wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their
height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely
situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished
walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of
bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above
nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of
incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down,
burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water,
and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the
usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of
confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within
dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came
issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and
wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress;
and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly
away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.

But as yet, the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or
two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a
little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of
it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting
nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that
might be rash enterprise - and then it hoped to sell drink to the
workmen. So, the Excavators' House of Call had sprung up from a
beer-shop; and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the
Railway Eating House, with a roast leg of pork daily, through
interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description.
Lodging-house keepers were favourable in like manner; and for the like
reasons were not to be trusted. The general belief was very slow.
There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and
dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and
carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli
of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the
lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all
seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old
cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of
wretched vegetation, stared it out of countenance. Nothing was the
better for it, or thought of being so. If the miserable waste ground
lying near it could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn,
like many of the miserable neighbours.

Staggs's Gardens was uncommonly incredulous. It was a little row of
houses, with little squalid patches of ground before them, fenced off
with old doors, barrel staves, scraps of tarpaulin, and dead bushes;
with bottomless tin kettles and exhausted iron fenders, thrust into
the gaps. Here, the Staggs's Gardeners trained scarlet beans, kept
fowls and rabbits, erected rotten summer-houses (one was an old boat),
dried clothes, and smoked pipes. Some were of opinion that Staggs's
Gardens derived its name from a deceased capitalist, one Mr Staggs,
who had built it for his delectation. Others, who had a natural taste
for the country, held that it dated from those rural times when the
antlered herd, under the familiar denomination of Staggses, had
resorted to its shady precincts. Be this as it may, Staggs's Gardens
was regarded by its population as a sacred grove not to be withered by
Railroads; and so confident were they generally of its long outliving
any such ridiculous inventions, that the master chimney-sweeper at the
corner, who was understood to take the lead in the local politics of
the Gardens, had publicly declared that on the occasion of the
Railroad opening, if ever it did open, two of his boys should ascend
the flues of his dwelling, with instructions to hail the failure with
derisive cheers from the chimney-pots.

To this unhallowed spot, the very name of which had hitherto been
carefully concealed from Mr Dombey by his sister, was little Paul now
borne by Fate and Richards

'That's my house, Susan,' said Polly, pointing it out.

'Is it, indeed, Mrs Richards?' said Susan, condescendingly.

'And there's my sister Jemima at the door, I do declare' cried
Polly, 'with my own sweet precious baby in her arms!'

The sight added such an extensive pair of wings to Polly's
impatience, that she set off down the Gardens at a run, and bouncing
on Jemima, changed babies with her in a twinkling; to the unutterable
astonishment of that young damsel, on whom the heir of the Dombeys
seemed to have fallen from the clouds.

'Why, Polly!' cried Jemima. 'You! what a turn you have given me!
who'd have thought it! come along in Polly! How well you do look to be
sure! The children will go half wild to see you Polly, that they
will.'

That they did, if one might judge from the noise they made, and the
way in which they dashed at Polly and dragged her to a low chair in
the chimney corner, where her own honest apple face became immediately
the centre of a bunch of smaller pippins, all laying their rosy cheeks
close to it, and all evidently the growth of the same tree. As to
Polly, she was full as noisy and vehement as the children; and it was
not until she was quite out of breath, and her hair was hanging all
about her flushed face, and her new christening attire was very much
dishevelled, that any pause took place in the confusion. Even then,
the smallest Toodle but one remained in her lap, holding on tight with
both arms round her neck; while the smallest Toodle but two mounted on
the back of the chair, and made desperate efforts, with one leg in the
air, to kiss her round the corner.

'Look! there's a pretty little lady come to see you,' said Polly;
'and see how quiet she is! what a beautiful little lady, ain't she?'

This reference to Florence, who had been standing by the door not
unobservant of what passed, directed the attention of the younger
branches towards her; and had likewise the happy effect of leading to
the formal recognition of Miss Nipper, who was not quite free from a
misgiving that she had been already slighted.

'Oh do come in and sit down a minute, Susan, please,' said Polly.
'This is my sister Jemima, this is. Jemima, I don't know what I should
ever do with myself, if it wasn't for Susan Nipper; I shouldn't be
here now but for her.'

'Oh do sit down, Miss Nipper, if you please,' quoth Jemima.

Susan took the extreme corner of a chair, with a stately and
ceremonious aspect.

'I never was so glad to see anybody in all my life; now really I
never was, Miss Nipper,' said Jemima.

Susan relaxing, took a little more of the chair, and smiled
graciously.

'Do untie your bonnet-strings, and make yourself at home, Miss
Nipper, please,' entreated Jemima. 'I am afraid it's a poorer place
than you're used to; but you'll make allowances, I'm sure.'

The black-eyed was so softened by this deferential behaviour, that
she caught up little Miss Toodle who was running past, and took her to
Banbury Cross immediately.

'But where's my pretty boy?' said Polly. 'My poor fellow? I came
all this way to see him in his new clothes.'

'Ah what a pity!' cried Jemima. 'He'll break his heart, when he
hears his mother has been here. He's at school, Polly.'

'Gone already!'

'Yes. He went for the first time yesterday, for fear he should lose
any learning. But it's half-holiday, Polly: if you could only stop
till he comes home - you and Miss Nipper, leastways,' said Jemima,
mindful in good time of the dignity of the black-eyed.

'And how does he look, Jemima, bless him!' faltered Polly.

'Well, really he don't look so bad as you'd suppose,' returned
Jemima.

'Ah!' said Polly, with emotion, 'I knew his legs must be too
short.'

His legs is short,' returned Jemima; 'especially behind; but
they'll get longer, Polly, every day.'

It was a slow, prospective kind of consolation; but the
cheerfulness and good nature with which it was administered, gave it a
value it did not intrinsically possess. After a moment's silence,
Polly asked, in a more sprightly manner:

'And where's Father, Jemima dear?' - for by that patriarchal
appellation, Mr Toodle was generally known in the family.

'There again!' said Jemima. 'What a pity! Father took his dinner
with him this morning, and isn't coming home till night. But he's
always talking of you, Polly, and telling the children about you; and
is the peaceablest, patientest, best-temperedest soul in the world, as
he always was and will be!'

'Thankee, Jemima,' cried the simple Polly; delighted by the speech,
and disappointed by the absence.

'Oh you needn't thank me, Polly,' said her sister, giving her a
sounding kiss upon the cheek, and then dancing little Paul cheerfully.
'I say the same of you sometimes, and think it too.'

In spite of the double disappointment, it was impossible to regard
in the light of a failure a visit which was greeted with such a
reception; so the sisters talked hopefully about family matters, and
about Biler, and about all his brothers and sisters: while the
black-eyed, having performed several journeys to Banbury Cross and
back, took sharp note of the furniture, the Dutch clock, the cupboard,
the castle on the mantel-piece with red and green windows in it,
susceptible of illumination by a candle-end within; and the pair of
small black velvet kittens, each with a lady's reticule in its mouth;
regarded by the Staggs's Gardeners as prodigies of imitative art. The
conversation soon becoming general lest the black-eyed should go off
at score and turn sarcastic, that young lady related to Jemima a
summary of everything she knew concerning Mr Dombey, his prospects,
family, pursuits, and character. Also an exact inventory of her
personal wardrobe, and some account of her principal relations and
friends. Having relieved her mind of these disclosures, she partook of
shrimps and porter, and evinced a disposition to swear eternal
friendship.

Little Florence herself was not behind-hand in improving the
occasion; for, being conducted forth by the young Toodles to inspect
some toad-stools and other curiosities of the Gardens, she entered
with them, heart and soul, on the formation of a temporary breakwater
across a small green pool that had collected in a corner. She was
still busily engaged in that labour, when sought and found by Susan;
who, such was her sense of duty, even under the humanizing influence
of shrimps, delivered a moral address to her (punctuated with thumps)
on her degenerate nature, while washing her face and hands; and
predicted that she would bring the grey hairs of her family in
general, with sorrow to the grave. After some delay, occasioned by a
pretty long confidential interview above stairs on pecuniary subjects,
between Polly and Jemima, an interchange of babies was again effected
- for Polly had all this timeretained her own child, and Jemima little
Paul - and the visitors took leave.

But first the young Toodles, victims of a pious fraud, were deluded
into repairing in a body to a chandler's shop in the neighbourhood,
for the ostensible purpose of spending a penny; and when the coast was
quite clear, Polly fled: Jemima calling after her that if they could
only go round towards the City Road on their way back, they would be
sure to meet little Biler coming from school.

'Do you think that we might make time to go a little round in that
direction, Susan?' inquired Polly, when they halted to take breath.

'Why not, Mrs Richards?' returned Susan.

'It's getting on towards our dinner time you know,' said Polly.

But lunch had rendered her companion more than indifferent to this
grave consideration, so she allowed no weight to it, and they resolved
to go 'a little round.'

Now, it happened that poor Biler's life had been, since yesterday
morning, rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable Grinders. The
youth of the streets could not endure it. No young vagabond could be
brought to bear its contemplation for a moment, without throwing
himself upon the unoffending wearer, and doing him a mischief. His
social existence had been more like that of an early Christian, than
an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had been stoned in the
streets. He had been overthrown into gutters; bespattered with mud;
violently flattened against posts. Entire strangers to his person had
lifted his yellow cap off his head, and cast it to the winds. His legs
had not only undergone verbal criticisms and revilings, but had been
handled and pinched. That very morning, he had received a perfectly
unsolicited black eye on his way to the Grinders' establishment, and
had been punished for it by the master: a superannuated old Grinder of
savage disposition, who had been appointed schoolmaster because he
didn't know anything, and wasn't fit for anything, and for whose cruel
cane all chubby little boys had a perfect fascination.'

Thus it fell out that Biler, on his way home, sought unfrequented
paths; and slunk along by narrow passages and back streets, to avoid
his tormentors. Being compelled to emerge into the main road, his ill
fortune brought him at last where a small party of boys, headed by a
ferocious young butcher, were lying in wait for any means of
pleasurable excitement that might happen. These, finding a Charitable
Grinder in the midst of them - unaccountably delivered over, as it
were, into their hands - set up a general yell and rushed upon him.

But it so fell out likewise, that, at the same time, Polly, looking
hopelessly along the road before her, after a good hour's walk, had
said it was no use going any further, when suddenly she saw this
sight. She no sooner saw it than, uttering a hasty exclamation, and
giving Master Dombey to the black-eyed, she started to the rescue of
her unhappy little son.

Surprises, like misfortunes, rarely come alone. The astonished
Susan Nipper and her two young charges were rescued by the bystanders
from under the very wheels of a passing carriage before they knew what
had happened; and at that moment (it was market day) a thundering
alarm of 'Mad Bull!' was raised.

With a wild confusion before her, of people running up and down,
and shouting, and wheels running over them, and boys fighting, and mad
bulls coming up, and the nurse in the midst of all these dangers being
torn to pieces, Florence screamed and ran. She ran till she was
exhausted, urging Susan to do the same; and then, stopping and
wringing her hands as she remembered they had left the other nurse
behind, found, with a sensation of terror not to be described, that
she was quite alone.

'Susan! Susan!' cried Florence, clapping her hands in the very
ecstasy of her alarm. 'Oh, where are they? where are they?'

'Where are they?' said an old woman, coming hobbling across as fast
as she could from the opposite side of the way. 'Why did you run away
from 'em?'

'I was frightened,' answered Florence. 'I didn't know what I did. I
thought they were with me. Where are they?'

The old woman took her by the wrist, and said, 'I'll show you.'

She was a very ugly old woman, with red rims round her eyes, and a
mouth that mumbled and chattered of itself when she was not speaking.
She was miserably dressed, and carried some skins over her arm. She
seemed to have followed Florence some little way at all events, for
she had lost her breath; and this made her uglier still, as she stood
trying to regain it: working her shrivelled yellow face and throat
into all sorts of contortions.

Florence was afraid of her, and looked, hesitating, up the street,
of which she had almost reached the bottom. It was a solitary place -
more a back road than a street - and there was no one in it but her-
self and the old woman.

'You needn't be frightened now,' said the old woman, still holding
her tight. 'Come along with me.'

'I - I don't know you. What's your name?' asked Florence.

'Mrs Brown,' said the old woman. 'Good Mrs Brown.'

'Are they near here?' asked Florence, beginning to be led away.

'Susan ain't far off,' said Good Mrs Brown; 'and the others are
close to her.'

'Is anybody hurt?' cried Florence.

'Not a bit of it,' said Good Mrs Brown.

The child shed tears of delight on hearing this, and accompanied
the old woman willingly; though she could not help glancing at her
face as they went along - particularly at that industrious mouth - and
wondering whether Bad Mrs Brown, if there were such a person, was at
all like her.

They had not gone far, but had gone by some very uncomfortable
places, such as brick-fields and tile-yards, when the old woman turned
down a dirty lane, where the mud lay in deep black ruts in the middle
of the road. She stopped before a shabby little house, as closely shut
up as a house that was full of cracks and crevices could be. Opening
the door with a key she took out of her bonnet, she pushed the child
before her into a back room, where there was a great heap of rags of
different colours lying on the floor; a heap of bones, and a heap of
sifted dust or cinders; but there was no furniture at all, and the
walls and ceiling were quite black.

The child became so terrified the she was stricken speechless, and
looked as though about to swoon.

'Now don't be a young mule,' said Good Mrs Brown, reviving her with
a shake. 'I'm not a going to hurt you. Sit upon the rags.'

Florence obeyed her, holding out her folded hands, in mute
supplication.

'I'm not a going to keep you, even, above an hour,' said Mrs Brown.
'D'ye understand what I say?'

The child answered with great difficulty, 'Yes.'

'Then,' said Good Mrs Brown, taking her own seat on the bones,
'don't vex me. If you don't, I tell you I won't hurt you. But if you
do, I'll kill you. I could have you killed at any time - even if you
was in your own bed at home. Now let's know who you are, and what you
are, and all about it.'

The old woman's threats and promises; the dread of giving her
offence; and the habit, unusual to a child, but almost natural to
Florence now, of being quiet, and repressing what she felt, and
feared, and hoped; enabled her to do this bidding, and to tell her
little history, or what she knew of it. Mrs Brown listened
attentively, until she had finished.

'So your name's Dombey, eh?' said Mrs Brown.

'I want that pretty frock, Miss Dombey,' said Good Mrs Brown, 'and
that little bonnet, and a petticoat or two, and anything else you can
spare. Come! Take 'em off.'

Florence obeyed, as fast as her trembling hands would allow;
keeping, all the while, a frightened eye on Mrs Brown. When she had
divested herself of all the articles of apparel mentioned by that
lady, Mrs B. examined them at leisure, and seemed tolerably well
satisfied with their quality and value.

'Humph!' she said, running her eyes over the child's slight figure,
'I don't see anything else - except the shoes. I must have the shoes,
Miss Dombey.'

Poor little Florence took them off with equal alacrity, only too
glad to have any more means of conciliation about her. The old woman
then produced some wretched substitutes from the bottom of the heap of
rags, which she turned up for that purpose; together with a girl's
cloak, quite worn out and very old; and the crushed remains of a
bonnet that had probably been picked up from some ditch or dunghill.
In this dainty raiment, she instructed Florence to dress herself; and
as such preparation seemed a prelude to her release, the child
complied with increased readiness, if possible.

In hurriedly putting on the bonnet, if that may be called a bonnet
which was more like a pad to carry loads on, she caught it in her hair
which grew luxuriantly, and could not immediately disentangle it. Good
Mrs Brown whipped out a large pair of scissors, and fell into an
unaccountable state of excitement.

'Why couldn't you let me be!' said Mrs Brown, 'when I was
contented? You little fool!'

'I beg your pardon. I don't know what I have done,' panted
Florence. 'I couldn't help it.'

'Couldn't help it!' cried Mrs Brown. 'How do you expect I can help
it? Why, Lord!' said the old woman, ruffling her curls with a furious
pleasure, 'anybody but me would have had 'em off, first of all.'
Florence was so relieved to find that it was only her hair and not her
head which Mrs Brown coveted, that she offered no resistance or
entreaty, and merely raised her mild eyes towards the face of that
good soul.

'If I hadn't once had a gal of my own - beyond seas now- that was
proud of her hair,' said Mrs Brown, 'I'd have had every lock of it.
She's far away, she's far away! Oho! Oho!'

Mrs Brown's was not a melodious cry, but, accompanied with a wild
tossing up of her lean arms, it was full of passionate grief, and
thrilled to the heart of Florence, whom it frightened more than ever.
It had its part, perhaps, in saving her curls; for Mrs Brown, after
hovering about her with the scissors for some moments, like a new kind
of butterfly, bade her hide them under the bonnet and let no trace of
them escape to tempt her. Having accomplished this victory over
herself, Mrs Brown resumed her seat on the bones, and smoked a very
short black pipe, mowing and mumbling all the time, as if she were
eating the stem.

When the pipe was smoked out, she gave the child a rabbit-skin to
carry, that she might appear the more like her ordinary companion, and
told her that she was now going to lead her to a public street whence
she could inquire her way to her friends. But she cautioned her, with
threats of summary and deadly vengeance in case of disobedience, not
to talk to strangers, nor to repair to her own home (which may have
been too near for Mrs Brown's convenience), but to her father's office
in the City; also to wait at the street corner where she would be
left, until the clock struck three. These directions Mrs Brown
enforced with assurances that there would be potent eyes and ears in
her employment cognizant of all she did; and these directions Florence
promised faithfully and earnestly to observe.

At length, Mrs Brown, issuing forth, conducted her changed and
ragged little friend through a labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes
and alleys, which emerged, after a long time, upon a stable yard, with
a gateway at the end, whence the roar of a great thoroughfare made
itself audible. Pointing out this gateway, and informing Florence that
when the clocks struck three she was to go to the left, Mrs Brown,
after making a parting grasp at her hair which seemed involuntary and
quite beyond her own control, told her she knew what to do, and bade
her go and do it: remembering that she was watched.

With a lighter heart, but still sore afraid, Florence felt herself
released, and tripped off to the corner. When she reached it, she
looked back and saw the head of Good Mrs Brown peeping out of the low
wooden passage, where she had issued her parting injunctions; likewise
the fist of Good Mrs Brown shaking towards her. But though she often
looked back afterwards - every minute, at least, in her nervous
recollection of the old woman - she could not see her again.

Florence remained there, looking at the bustle in the street, and
more and more bewildered by it; and in the meanwhile the clocks
appeared to have made up their minds never to strike three any more.
At last the steeples rang out three o'clock; there was one close by,
so she couldn't be mistaken; and - after often looking over her
shoulder, and often going a little way, and as often coming back
again, lest the all-powerful spies of Mrs Brown should take offence -
she hurried off, as fast as she could in her slipshod shoes, holding
the rabbit-skin tight in her hand.

All she knew of her father's offices was that they belonged to
Dombey and Son, and that that was a great power belonging to the City.
So she could only ask the way to Dombey and Son's in the City; and as
she generally made inquiry of children - being afraid to ask grown
people - she got very little satisfaction indeed. But by dint of
asking her way to the City after a while, and dropping the rest of her
inquiry for the present, she really did advance, by slow degrees,
towards the heart of that great region which is governed by the
terrible Lord Mayor.

Tired of walking, repulsed and pushed about, stunned by the noise
and confusion, anxious for her brother and the nurses, terrified by
what she had undergone, and the prospect of encountering her angry
father in such an altered state; perplexed and frightened alike by
what had passed, and what was passing, and what was yet before her;
Florence went upon her weary way with tearful eyes, and once or twice
could not help stopping to ease her bursting heart by crying bitterly.
But few people noticed her at those times, in the garb she wore: or if
they did, believed that she was tutored to excite compassion, and
passed on. Florence, too, called to her aid all the firmness and
self-reliance of a character that her sad experience had prematurely
formed and tried: and keeping the end she had in view steadily before
her, steadily pursued it.

It was full two hours later in the afternoon than when she had
started on this strange adventure, when, escaping from the clash and
clangour of a narrow street full of carts and waggons, she peeped into
a kind of wharf or landing-place upon the river-side, where there were
a great many packages, casks, and boxes, strewn about; a large pair of
wooden scales; and a little wooden house on wheels, outside of which,
looking at the neighbouring masts and boats, a stout man stood
whistling, with his pen behind his ear, and his hands in his pockets,
as if his day's work were nearly done.

'Now then! 'said this man, happening to turn round. 'We haven't got
anything for you, little girl. Be off!'

'If you please, is this the City?' asked the trembling daughter of
the Dombeys.

'Ah! It's the City. You know that well enough, I daresay. Be off!
We haven't got anything for you.'

'I don't want anything, thank you,' was the timid answer. 'Except
to know the way to Dombey and Son's.'

The man who had been strolling carelessly towards her, seemed
surprised by this reply, and looking attentively in her face,
rejoined:

'Why, what can you want with Dombey and Son's?'

'To know the way there, if you please.'

The man looked at her yet more curiously, and rubbed the back of
his head so hard in his wonderment that he knocked his own hat off.

'Joe!' he called to another man - a labourer- as he picked it up
and put it on again.

'Joe it is!' said Joe.

'Where's that young spark of Dombey's who's been watching the
shipment of them goods?'

'Just gone, by t'other gate,' said Joe.

'Call him back a minute.'

Joe ran up an archway, bawling as he went, and very soon returned

with a blithe-looking boy.

'You're Dombey's jockey, ain't you?' said the first man.

'I'm in Dombey's House, Mr Clark,' returned the boy.

'Look'ye here, then,' said Mr Clark.

Obedient to the indication of Mr Clark's hand, the boy approached
towards Florence, wondering, as well he might, what he had to do with
her. But she, who had heard what passed, and who, besides the relief
of so suddenly considering herself safe at her journey's end, felt
reassured beyond all measure by his lively youthful face and manner,
ran eagerly up to him, leaving one of the slipshod shoes upon the
ground and caught his hand in both of hers.

'I am lost, if you please!' said Florence.

'Lost!' cried the boy.

'Yes, I was lost this morning, a long way from here - and I have
had my clothes taken away, since - and I am not dressed in my own now
- and my name is Florence Dombey, my little brother's only sister -
and, oh dear, dear, take care of me, if you please!' sobbed Florence,
giving full vent to the childish feelings she had so long suppressed,
and bursting into tears. At the same time her miserable bonnet falling
off, her hair came tumbling down about her face: moving to speechless
admiration and commiseration, young Walter, nephew of Solomon Gills,
Ships' Instrument-maker in general.

Mr Clark stood rapt in amazement: observing under his breath, I
never saw such a start on this wharf before. Walter picked up the
shoe, and put it on the little foot as the Prince in the story might
have fitted Cinderella's slipper on. He hung the rabbit-skin over his
left arm; gave the right to Florence; and felt, not to say like
Richard Whittington - that is a tame comparison - but like Saint
George of England, with the dragon lying dead before him.

'Don't cry, Miss Dombey,' said Walter, in a transport of

enthusiasm.

'What a wonderful thing for me that I am here! You are as safe now
as if you were guarded by a whole boat's crew of picked men from a
man-of-war. Oh, don't cry.'

'I won't cry any more,' said Florence. 'I am only crying for joy.'

'Crying for joy!' thought Walter, 'and I'm the cause of it! Come
along, Miss Dombey. There's the other shoe off now! Take mine, Miss
Dombey.'

'No, no, no,' said Florence, checking him in the act of impetuously

pulling off his own. 'These do better. These do very well.'

'Why, to be sure,' said Walter, glancing at her foot, 'mine are a
mile too large. What am I thinking about! You never could walk in
mine! Come along, Miss Dombey. Let me see the villain who will dare
molest you now.'

So Walter, looking immensely fierce, led off Florence, looking very
happy; and they went arm-in-arm along the streets, perfectly
indifferent to any astonishment that their appearance might or did
excite by the way.

It was growing dark and foggy, and beginning to rain too; but they
cared nothing for this: being both wholly absorbed in the late
adventures of Florence, which she related with the innocent good faith
and confidence of her years, while Walter listened as if, far from the
mud and grease of Thames Street, they were rambling alone among the
broad leaves and tall trees of some desert island in the tropics - as
he very likely fancied, for the time, they were.

'Have we far to go?' asked Florence at last, lilting up her eyes to
her companion's face.

'Ah! By-the-bye,' said Walter, stopping, 'let me see; where are we?
Oh! I know. But the offices are shut up now, Miss Dombey. There's
nobody there. Mr Dombey has gone home long ago. I suppose we must go
home too? or, stay. Suppose I take you to my Uncle's, where I live -
it's very near here - and go to your house in a coach to tell them you
are safe, and bring you back some clothes. Won't that be best?'

'I think so,' answered Florence. 'Don't you? What do you think?'

As they stood deliberating in the street, a man passed them, who
glanced quickly at Walter as he went by, as if he recognised him; but
seeming to correct that first impression, he passed on without
stopping.

'Why, I think it's Mr Carker,' said Walter. 'Carker in our House.
Not Carker our Manager, Miss Dombey - the other Carker; the Junior -
Halloa! Mr Carker!'

'Is that Walter Gay?' said the other, stopping and returning. 'I
couldn't believe it, with such a strange companion.

As he stood near a lamp, listening with surprise to Walter's
hurried explanation, he presented a remarkable contrast to the two
youthful figures arm-in-arm before him. He was not old, but his hair
was white; his body was bent, or bowed as if by the weight of some
great trouble: and there were deep lines in his worn and melancholy
face. The fire of his eyes, the expression of his features, the very
voice in which he spoke, were all subdued and quenched, as if the
spirit within him lay in ashes. He was respectably, though very
plainly dressed, in black; but his clothes, moulded to the general
character of his figure, seemed to shrink and abase themselves upon
him, and to join in the sorrowful solicitation which the whole man
from head to foot expressed, to be left unnoticed, and alone in his
humility.

And yet his interest in youth and hopefulness was not extinguished
with the other embers of his soul, for he watched the boy's earnest
countenance as he spoke with unusual sympathy, though with an
inexplicable show of trouble and compassion, which escaped into his
looks, however hard he strove to hold it prisoner. When Walter, in
conclusion, put to him the question he had put to Florence, he still
stood glancing at him with the same expression, as if he had read some
fate upon his face, mournfully at variance with its present
brightness.

'What do you advise, Mr Carker?' said Walter, smiling. 'You always
give me good advice, you know, when you do speak to me. That's not
often, though.'

'I think your own idea is the best,' he answered: looking from
Florence to Walter, and back again.

'Mr Carker,' said Walter, brightening with a generous thought,
'Come! Here's a chance for you. Go you to Mr Dombey's, and be the
messenger of good news. It may do you some good, Sir. I'll remain at
home. You shall go.'

'I!' returned the other.

'Yes. Why not, Mr Carker?' said the boy.

He merely shook him by the hand in answer; he seemed in a manner
ashamed and afraid even to do that; and bidding him good-night, and
advising him to make haste, turned away.

'Come, Miss Dombey,' said Walter, looking after him as they turned
away also, 'we'll go to my Uncle's as quick as we can. Did you ever
hear Mr Dombey speak of Mr Carker the Junior, Miss Florence?'

'No,' returned the child, mildly, 'I don't often hear Papa speak.'

'Ah! true! more shame for him,' thought Walter. After a minute's
pause, during which he had been looking down upon the gentle patient
little face moving on at his side, he said, 'The strangest man, Mr
Carker the Junior is, Miss Florence, that ever you heard of. If you
could understand what an extraordinary interest he takes in me, and
yet how he shuns me and avoids me; and what a low place he holds in
our office, and how he is never advanced, and never complains, though
year after year he sees young men passed over his head, and though his
brother (younger than he is), is our head Manager, you would be as
much puzzled about him as I am.'

As Florence could hardly be expected to understand much about it,
Walter bestirred himself with his accustomed boyish animation and
restlessness to change the subject; and one of the unfortunate shoes
coming off again opportunely, proposed to carry Florence to his
uncle's in his arms. Florence, though very tired, laughingly declined
the proposal, lest he should let her fall; and as they were already
near the wooden Midshipman, and as Walter went on to cite various
precedents, from shipwrecks and other moving accidents, where younger
boys than he had triumphantly rescued and carried off older girls than
Florence, they were still in full conversation about it when they
arrived at the Instrument-maker's door.

'Holloa, Uncle Sol!' cried Walter, bursting into the shop, and
speaking incoherently and out of breath, from that time forth, for the
rest of the evening. 'Here's a wonderful adventure! Here's Mr Dombey's
daughter lost in the streets, and robbed of her clothes by an old
witch of a woman - found by me - brought home to our parlour to rest -
look here!'

'Good Heaven!' said Uncle Sol, starting back against his favourite
compass-case. 'It can't be! Well, I - '

'No, nor anybody else,' said Walter, anticipating the rest. 'Nobody
would, nobody could, you know. Here! just help me lift the little sofa
near the fire, will you, Uncle Sol - take care of the plates - cut
some dinner for her, will you, Uncle - throw those shoes under the
grate. Miss Florence - put your feet on the fender to dry - how damp
they are - here's an adventure, Uncle, eh? - God bless my soul, how
hot I am!'

Solomon Gills was quite as hot, by sympathy, and in excessive
bewilderment. He patted Florence's head, pressed her to eat, pressed
her to drink, rubbed the soles of her feet with his
pocket-handkerchief heated at the fire, followed his locomotive nephew
with his eyes, and ears, and had no clear perception of anything
except that he was being constantly knocked against and tumbled over
by that excited young gentleman, as he darted about the room
attempting to accomplish twenty things at once, and doing nothing at
all.

'Here, wait a minute, Uncle,' he continued, catching up a candle,
'till I run upstairs, and get another jacket on, and then I'll be off.
I say, Uncle, isn't this an adventure?'

'My dear boy,' said Solomon, who, with his spectacles on his
forehead and the great chronometer in his pocket, was incessantly
oscillating between Florence on the sofa, and his nephew in all parts
of the parlour, 'it's the most extraordinary - '

'No, but do, Uncle, please - do, Miss Florence - dinner, you know,
Uncle.'

'Yes, yes, yes,' cried Solomon, cutting instantly into a leg of
mutton, as if he were catering for a giant. 'I'll take care of her,
Wally! I understand. Pretty dear! Famished, of course. You go and get
ready. Lord bless me! Sir Richard Whittington thrice Lord Mayor of
London.'

Walter was not very long in mounting to his lofty garret and
descending from it, but in the meantime Florence, overcome by fatigue,
had sunk into a doze before the fire. The short interval of quiet,
though only a few minutes in duration, enabled Solomon Gills so far to
collect his wits as to make some little arrangements for her comfort,
and to darken the room, and to screen her from the blaze. Thus, when
the boy returned, she was sleeping peacefully.

'That's capital!' he whispered, giving Solomon such a hug that it
squeezed a new expression into his face. 'Now I'm off. I'll just take
a crust of bread with me, for I'm very hungry - and don't wake her,
Uncle Sol.'

'No, no,' said Solomon. 'Pretty child.'

'Pretty, indeed!' cried Walter. 'I never saw such a face, Uncle
Sol. Now I'm off.'

'That's right,' said Solomon, greatly relieved.

'I say, Uncle Sol,' cried Walter, putting his face in at the door.

'Here he is again,' said Solomon.

'How does she look now?'

'Quite happy,' said Solomon.

'That's famous! now I'm off.'

'I hope you are,' said Solomon to himself.

'I say, Uncle Sol,' cried Walter, reappearing at the door.

'Here he is again!' said Solomon.

'We met Mr Carker the Junior in the street, queerer than ever. He
bade me good-bye, but came behind us here - there's an odd thing! -
for when we reached the shop door, I looked round, and saw him going
quietly away, like a servant who had seen me home, or a faithful dog.
How does she look now, Uncle?'

'Pretty much the same as before, Wally,' replied Uncle Sol.

'That's right. Now I am off!'

And this time he really was: and Solomon Gills, with no appetite
for dinner, sat on the opposite side of the fire, watching Florence in
her slumber, building a great many airy castles of the most fantastic
architecture; and looking, in the dim shade, and in the close vicinity
of all the instruments, like a magician disguised in a Welsh wig and a
suit of coffee colour, who held the child in an enchanted sleep.

In the meantime, Walter proceeded towards Mr Dombey's house at a
pace seldom achieved by a hack horse from the stand; and yet with his
head out of window every two or three minutes, in impatient
remonstrance with the driver. Arriving at his journey's end, he leaped
out, and breathlessly announcing his errand to the servant, followed
him straight into the library, we there was a great confusion of
tongues, and where Mr Dombey, his sister, and Miss Tox, Richards, and
Nipper, were all congregated together.

'Oh! I beg your pardon, Sir,' said Walter, rushing up to him, 'but
I'm happy to say it's all right, Sir. Miss Dombey's found!'

The boy with his open face, and flowing hair, and sparkling eyes,
panting with pleasure and excitement, was wonderfully opposed to Mr
Dombey, as he sat confronting him in his library chair.

'I told you, Louisa, that she would certainly be found,' said Mr
Dombey, looking slightly over his shoulder at that lady, who wept in
company with Miss Tox. 'Let the servants know that no further steps
are necessary. This boy who brings the information, is young Gay, from
the office. How was my daughter found, Sir? I know how she was lost.'
Here he looked majestically at Richards. 'But how was she found? Who
found her?'

'Why, I believe I found Miss Dombey, Sir,' said Walter modestly,
'at least I don't know that I can claim the merit of having exactly
found her, Sir, but I was the fortunate instrument of - '

'What do you mean, Sir,' interrupted Mr Dombey, regarding the boy's
evident pride and pleasure in his share of the transaction with an
instinctive dislike, 'by not having exactly found my daughter, and by
being a fortunate instrument? Be plain and coherent, if you please.'

It was quite out of Walter's power to be coherent; but he rendered
himself as explanatory as he could, in his breathless state, and
stated why he had come alone.

'You hear this, girl?' said Mr Dombey sternly to the black-eyed.
'Take what is necessary, and return immediately with this young man to
fetch Miss Florence home. Gay, you will be rewarded to-morrow.

'Oh! thank you, Sir,' said Walter. 'You are very kind. I'm sure I
was not thinking of any reward, Sir.'

'You are a boy,' said Mr Dombey, suddenly and almost fiercely; 'and
what you think of, or affect to think of, is of little consequence.
You have done well, Sir. Don't undo it. Louisa, please to give the lad
some wine.'

Mr Dombey's glance followed Walter Gay with sharp disfavour, as he
left the room under the pilotage of Mrs Chick; and it may be that his
mind's eye followed him with no greater relish, as he rode back to his
Uncle's with Miss Susan Nipper.

There they found that Florence, much refreshed by sleep, had dined,
and greatly improved the acquaintance of Solomon Gills, with whom she
was on terms of perfect confidence and ease. The black-eyed (who had
cried so much that she might now be called the red-eyed, and who was
very silent and depressed) caught her in her arms without a word of
contradiction or reproach, and made a very hysterical meeting of it.
Then converting the parlour, for the nonce, into a private tiring
room, she dressed her, with great care, in proper clothes; and
presently led her forth, as like a Dombey as her natural
disqualifications admitted of her being made.

'Good-night!' said Florence, running up to Solomon. 'You have been
very good to me.

Old Sol was quite delighted, and kissed her like her grand-father.

'Good-night, Walter! Good-bye!' said Florence.

'Good-bye!' said Walter, giving both his hands.

'I'll never forget you,' pursued Florence. 'No! indeed I never
will. Good-bye, Walter!' In the innocence of her grateful heart, the
child lifted up her face to his. Walter, bending down his own, raised
it again, all red and burning; and looked at Uncle Sol, quite
sheepishly.

'Where's Walter?' 'Good-night, Walter!' 'Good-bye, Walter!' 'Shake
hands once more, Walter!' This was still Florence's cry, after she was
shut up with her little maid, in the coach. And when the coach at
length moved off, Walter on the door-step gaily turned the waving of
her handkerchief, while the wooden Midshipman behind him seemed, like
himself, intent upon that coach alone, excluding all the other passing
coaches from his observation.

In good time Mr Dombey's mansion was gained again, and again there
was a noise of tongues in the library. Again, too, the coach was
ordered to wait - 'for Mrs Richards,' one of Susan's fellow-servants
ominously whispered, as she passed with Florence.

The entrance of the lost child made a slight sensation, but not
much. Mr Dombey, who had never found her, kissed her once upon the
forehead, and cautioned her not to run away again, or wander anywhere
with treacherous attendants. Mrs Chick stopped in her lamentations on
the corruption of human nature, even when beckoned to the paths of
virtue by a Charitable Grinder; and received her with a welcome
something short of the reception due to none but perfect Dombeys. Miss
Tox regulated her feelings by the models before her. Richards, the
culprit Richards, alone poured out her heart in broken words of
welcome, and bowed herself over the little wandering head as if she
really loved it.

'Ah, Richards!' said Mrs Chick, with a sigh. 'It would have been
much more satisfactory to those who wish to think well of their fellow
creatures, and much more becoming in you, if you had shown some proper
feeling, in time, for the little child that is now going to be
prematurely deprived of its natural nourishment.

'Cut off,' said Miss Tox, in a plaintive whisper, 'from one common
fountain!'

'If it was ungrateful case,' said Mrs Chick, solemnly, 'and I had
your reflections, Richards, I should feel as if the Charitable
Grinders' dress would blight my child, and the education choke him.'

For the matter of that - but Mrs Chick didn't know it - he had been
pretty well blighted by the dress already; and as to the education,
even its retributive effect might be produced in time, for it was a
storm of sobs and blows.

'Louisa!' said Mr Dombey. 'It is not necessary to prolong these
observations. The woman is discharged and paid. You leave this house,
Richards, for taking my son - my son,' said Mr Dombey, emphatically
repeating these two words, 'into haunts and into society which are not
to be thought of without a shudder. As to the accident which befel
Miss Florence this morning, I regard that as, in one great sense, a
happy and fortunate circumstance; inasmuch as, but for that
occurrence, I never could have known - and from your own lips too - of
what you had been guilty. I think, Louisa, the other nurse, the young
person,' here Miss Nipper sobbed aloud, 'being so much younger, and
necessarily influenced by Paul's nurse, may remain. Have the goodness
to direct that this woman's coach is paid to' - Mr Dombey stopped and
winced - 'to Staggs's Gardens.'

Polly moved towards the door, with Florence holding to her dress,
and crying to her in the most pathetic manner not to go away. It was a
dagger in the haughty father's heart, an arrow in his brain, to see
how the flesh and blood he could not disown clung to this obscure
stranger, and he sitting by. Not that he cared to whom his daughter
turned, or from whom turned away. The swift sharp agony struck through
him, as he thought of what his son might do.

His son cried lustily that night, at all events. Sooth to say, poor
Paul had better reason for his tears than sons of that age often have,
for he had lost his second mother - his first, so far as he knew - by
a stroke as sudden as that natural affliction which had darkened the
beginning of his life. At the same blow, his sister too, who cried
herself to sleep so mournfully, had lost as good and true a friend.
But that is quite beside the question. Let us waste no words about it.



CHAPTER 7.

A Bird's-eye Glimpse of Miss Tox's Dwelling-place: also
of the State of Miss Tox's Affections



Miss Tox inhabited a dark little house that had been squeezed, at
some remote period of English History, into a fashionable
neighbourhood at the west end of the town, where it stood in the shade
like a poor relation of the great street round the corner, coldly
looked down upon by mighty mansions. It was not exactly in a court,
and it was not exactly in a yard; but it was in the dullest of
No-Thoroughfares, rendered anxious and haggard by distant double
knocks. The name of this retirement, where grass grew between the
chinks in the stone pavement, was Princess's Place; and in Princess's
Place was Princess's Chapel, with a tinkling bell, where sometimes as
many as five-and-twenty people attended service on a Sunday. The
Princess's Arms was also there, and much resorted to by splendid
footmen. A sedan chair was kept inside the railing before the
Princess's Arms, but it had never come out within the memory of man;
and on fine mornings, the top of every rail (there were
eight-and-forty, as Miss Tox had often counted) was decorated with a
pewter-pot.

There was another private house besides Miss Tox's in Princess's
Place: not to mention an immense Pair of gates, with an immense pair
of lion-headed knockers on them, which were never opened by any
chance, and were supposed to constitute a disused entrance to
somebody's stables. Indeed, there was a smack of stabling in the air
of Princess's Place; and Miss Tox's bedroom (which was at the back)
commanded a vista of Mews, where hostlers, at whatever sort of work
engaged, were continually accompanying themselves with effervescent
noises; and where the most domestic and confidential garments of
coachmen and their wives and families, usually hung, like Macbeth's
banners, on the outward walls.'

At this other private house in Princess's Place, tenanted by a
retired butler who had married a housekeeper, apartments were let
Furnished, to a single gentleman: to wit, a wooden-featured,
blue-faced Major, with his eyes starting out of his head, in whom Miss
Tox recognised, as she herself expressed it, 'something so truly
military;' and between whom and herself, an occasional interchange of
newspapers and pamphlets, and such Platonic dalliance, was effected
through the medium of a dark servant of the Major's who Miss Tox was
quite content to classify as a 'native,' without connecting him with
any geographical idea whatever.

Perhaps there never was a smaller entry and staircase, than the
entry and staircase of Miss Tox's house. Perhaps, taken altogether,
from top to bottom, it was the most inconvenient little house in
England, and the crookedest; but then, Miss Tox said, what a
situation! There was very little daylight to be got there in the
winter: no sun at the best of times: air was out of the question, and
traffic was walled out. Still Miss Tox said, think of the situation!
So said the blue-faced Major, whose eyes were starting out of his
head: who gloried in Princess's Place: and who delighted to turn the
conversation at his club, whenever he could, to something connected
with some of the great people in the great street round the corner,
that he might have the satisfaction of saying they were his
neighbours.

In short, with Miss Tox and the blue-faced Major, it was enough for
Princess's Place - as with a very small fragment of society, it is
enough for many a little hanger-on of another sort - to be well
connected, and to have genteel blood in its veins. It might be poor,
mean, shabby, stupid, dull. No matter. The great street round the
corner trailed off into Princess's Place; and that which of High
Holborn would have become a choleric word, spoken of Princess's Place
became flat blasphemy.

The dingy tenement inhabited by Miss Tox was her own; having been
devised and bequeathed to her by the deceased owner of the fishy eye
in the locket, of whom a miniature portrait, with a powdered head and
a pigtail, balanced the kettle-holder on opposite sides of the parlour
fireplace. The greater part of the furniture was of the powdered-head
and pig-tail period: comprising a plate-warmer, always languishing and
sprawling its four attenuated bow legs in somebody's way; and an
obsolete harpsichord, illuminated round the maker's name with a
painted garland of sweet peas. In any part of the house, visitors were
usually cognizant of a prevailing mustiness; and in warm weather Miss
Tox had been seen apparently writing in sundry chinks and crevices of
the wainscoat with the the wrong end of a pen dipped in spirits of
turpentine.

Although Major Bagstock had arrived at what is called in polite
literature, the grand meridian of life, and was proceeding on his
journey downhill with hardly any throat, and a very rigid pair of
jaw-bones, and long-flapped elephantine ears, and his eyes and
complexion in the state of artificial excitement already mentioned, he
was mightily proud of awakening an interest in Miss Tox, and tickled
his vanity with the fiction that she was a splendid woman who had her
eye on him. This he had several times hinted at the club: in connexion
with little jocularities, of which old Joe Bagstock, old Joey
Bagstock, old J. Bagstock, old Josh Bagstock, or so forth, was the
perpetual theme: it being, as it were, the Major's stronghold and
donjon-keep of light humour, to be on the most familiar terms with his
own name.

'Joey B., Sir,'the Major would say, with a flourish of his
walking-stick, 'is worth a dozen of you. If you had a few more of the
Bagstock breed among you, Sir, you'd be none the worse for it. Old
Joe, Sir, needn't look far for a wile even now, if he was on the
look-out; but he's hard-hearted, Sir, is Joe - he's tough, Sir, tough,
and de-vilish sly!' After such a declaration, wheezing sounds would be
heard; and the Major's blue would deepen into purple, while his eyes
strained and started convulsively.

Notwithstanding his very liberal laudation of himself, however, the
Major was selfish. It may be doubted whether there ever was a more
entirely selfish person at heart; or at stomach is perhaps a better
expression, seeing that he was more decidedly endowed with that latter
organ than with the former. He had no idea of being overlooked or
slighted by anybody; least of all, had he the remotest comprehension
of being overlooked and slighted by Miss Tox.

And yet, Miss Tox, as it appeared, forgot him - gradually forgot
him. She began to forget him soon after her discovery of the Toodle
family. She continued to forget him up to the time of the christening.
She went on forgetting him with compound interest after that.
Something or somebody had superseded him as a source of interest.

'Good morning, Ma'am,' said the Major, meeting Miss Tox in
Princess's Place, some weeks after the changes chronicled in the last
chapter.

'Good morning, Sir,' said Miss Tox; very coldly.

'Joe Bagstock, Ma'am,' observed the Major, with his usual
gallantry, 'has not had the happiness of bowing to you at your window,
for a considerable period. Joe has been hardly used, Ma'am. His sun
has been behind a cloud.'

Miss Tox inclined her head; but very coldly indeed.

'Joe's luminary has been out of town, Ma'am, perhaps,' inquired the
Major.

'I? out of town? oh no, I have not been out of town,' said Miss
Tox. 'I have been much engaged lately. My time is nearly all devoted
to some very intimate friends. I am afraid I have none to spare, even
now. Good morning, Sir!'

As Miss Tox, with her most fascinating step and carriage,
disappeared from Princess's Place, the Major stood looking after her
with a bluer face than ever: muttering and growling some not at all
complimentary remarks.

'Why, damme, Sir,' said the Major, rolling his lobster eyes round
and round Princess's Place, and apostrophizing its fragrant air, 'six
months ago, the woman loved the ground Josh Bagstock walked on. What's
the meaning of it?'

The Major decided, after some consideration, that it meant
mantraps; that it meant plotting and snaring; that Miss Tox was
digging pitfalls. 'But you won't catch Joe, Ma'am,' said the Major.
'He's tough, Ma'am, tough, is J.B. Tough, and de-vilish sly!' over
which reflection he chuckled for the rest of the day.

But still, when that day and many other days were gone and past, it
seemed that Miss Tox took no heed whatever of the Major, and thought
nothing at all about him. She had been wont, once upon a time, to look
out at one of her little dark windows by accident, and blushingly
return the Major's greeting; but now, she never gave the Major a
chance, and cared nothing at all whether he looked over the way or
not. Other changes had come to pass too. The Major, standing in the
shade of his own apartment, could make out that an air of greater
smartness had recently come over Miss Tox's house; that a new cage
with gilded wires had been provided for the ancient little canary
bird; that divers ornaments, cut out of coloured card-boards and
paper, seemed to decorate the chimney-piece and tables; that a plant
or two had suddenly sprung up in the windows; that Miss Tox
occasionally practised on the harpsichord, whose garland of sweet peas
was always displayed ostentatiously, crowned with the Copenhagen and
Bird Waltzes in a Music Book of Miss Tox's own copying.

Over and above all this, Miss Tox had long been dressed with
uncommon care and elegance in slight mourning. But this helped the
Major out of his difficulty; and be determined within himself that she
had come into a small legacy, and grown proud.

It was on the very next day after he had eased his mind by arriving
at this decision, that the Major, sitting at his breakfast, saw an
apparition so tremendous and wonderful in Miss Tox's little
drawing-room, that he remained for some time rooted to his chair;
then, rushing into the next room, returned with a double-barrelled
opera-glass, through which he surveyed it intently for some minutes.

'It's a Baby, Sir,' said the Major, shutting up the glass again,
'for fifty thousand pounds!'

The Major couldn't forget it. He could do nothing but whistle, and
stare to that extent, that his eyes, compared with what they now
became, had been in former times quite cavernous and sunken. Day after
day, two, three, four times a week, this Baby reappeared. The Major
continued to stare and whistle. To all other intents and purposes he
was alone in Princess's Place. Miss Tox had ceased to mind what he
did. He might have been black as well as blue, and it would have been
of no consequence to her.

The perseverance with which she walked out of Princess's Place to
fetch this baby and its nurse, and walked back with them, and walked
home with them again, and continually mounted guard over them; and the
perseverance with which she nursed it herself, and fed it, and played
with it, and froze its young blood with airs upon the harpsichord, was
extraordinary. At about this same period too, she was seized with a
passion for looking at a certain bracelet; also with a passion for
looking at the moon, of which she would take long observations from
her chamber window. But whatever she looked at; sun, moon, stars, or
bracelet; she looked no more at the Major. And the Major whistled, and
stared, and wondered, and dodged about his room, and could make
nothing of it.

'You'll quite win my brother Paul's heart, and that's the truth, my
dear,' said Mrs Chick, one day.

Miss Tox turned pale.

'He grows more like Paul every day,' said Mrs Chick.

Miss Tox returned no other reply than by taking the little Paul in
her arms, and making his cockade perfectly flat and limp with her
caresses.

'His mother, my dear,' said Miss Tox, 'whose acquaintance I was to
have made through you, does he at all resemble her?'

'Not at all,' returned Louisa

'She was - she was pretty, I believe?' faltered Miss Tox.

'Why, poor dear Fanny was interesting,' said Mrs Chick, after some
judicial consideration. 'Certainly interesting. She had not that air
of commanding superiority which one would somehow expect, almost as a
matter of course, to find in my brother's wife; nor had she that
strength and vigour of mind which such a man requires.'

Miss Tox heaved a deep sigh.

'But she was pleasing:' said Mrs Chick: 'extremely so. And she
meant! - oh, dear, how well poor Fanny meant!'

'You Angel!' cried Miss Tox to little Paul. 'You Picture of your
own Papa!'

If the Major could have known how many hopes and ventures, what a
multitude of plans and speculations, rested on that baby head; and
could have seen them hovering, in all their heterogeneous confusion
and disorder, round the puckered cap of the unconscious little Paul;
he might have stared indeed. Then would he have recognised, among the
crowd, some few ambitious motes and beams belonging to Miss Tox; then
would he perhaps have understood the nature of that lady's faltering
investment in the Dombey Firm.

If the child himself could have awakened in the night, and seen,
gathered about his cradle-curtains, faint reflections of the dreams
that other people had of him, they might have scared him, with good
reason. But he slumbered on, alike unconscious of the kind intentions
of Miss Tox, the wonder of the Major, the early sorrows of his sister,
and the stern visions of his father; and innocent that any spot of
earth contained a Dombey or a Son.



CHAPTER 8.

Paul's Further Progress, Growth and Character



Beneath the watching and attentive eyes of Time - so far another
Major - Paul's slumbers gradually changed. More and more light broke
in upon them; distincter and distincter dreams disturbed them; an
accumulating crowd of objects and impressions swarmed about his rest;
and so he passed from babyhood to childhood, and became a talking,
walking, wondering Dombey.

On the downfall and banishment of Richards, the nursery may be said
to have been put into commission: as a Public Department is sometimes,
when no individual Atlas can be found to support it The Commissioners
were, of course, Mrs Chick and Miss Tox: who devoted themselves to
their duties with such astonishing ardour that Major Bagstock had
every day some new reminder of his being forsaken, while Mr Chick,
bereft of domestic supervision, cast himself upon the gay world, dined
at clubs and coffee-houses, smelt of smoke on three different
occasions, went to the play by himself, and in short, loosened (as Mrs
Chick once told him) every social bond, and moral obligation.

Yet, in spite of his early promise, all this vigilance and care
could not make little Paul a thriving boy. Naturally delicate,
perhaps, he pined and wasted after the dismissal of his nurse, and,
for a long time, seemed but to wait his opportunity of gliding through
their hands, and seeking his lost mother. This dangerous ground in his
steeple-chase towards manhood passed, he still found it very rough
riding, and was grievously beset by all the obstacles in his course.
Every tooth was a break-neck fence, and every pimple in the measles a
stone wall to him. He was down in every fit of the hooping-cough, and
rolled upon and crushed by a whole field of small diseases, that came
trooping on each other's heels to prevent his getting up again. Some
bird of prey got into his throat instead of the thrush; and the very
chickens turning ferocious - if they have anything to do with that
infant malady to which they lend their name - worried him like
tiger-cats.

The chill of Paul's christening had struck home, perhaps to some
sensitive part of his nature, which could not recover itself in the
cold shade of his father; but he was an unfortunate child from that
day. Mrs Wickam often said she never see a dear so put upon.

Mrs Wickam was a waiter's wife - which would seem equivalent to
being any other man's widow - whose application for an engagement in
Mr Dombey's service had been favourably considered, on account of the
apparent impossibility of her having any followers, or anyone to
follow; and who, from within a day or two of Paul's sharp weaning, had
been engaged as his nurse. Mrs Wickam was a meek woman, of a fair
complexion, with her eyebrows always elevated, and her head always
drooping; who was always ready to pity herself, or to be pitied, or to
pity anybody else; and who had a surprising natural gift of viewing
all subjects in an utterly forlorn and pitiable light, and bringing
dreadful precedents to bear upon them, and deriving the greatest
consolation from the exercise of that talent.

It is hardly necessary to observe, that no touch of this quality
ever reached the magnificent knowledge of Mr Dombey. It would have
been remarkable, indeed, if any had; when no one in the house - not
even Mrs Chick or Miss Tox - dared ever whisper to him that there had,
on any one occasion, been the least reason for uneasiness in reference
to little Paul. He had settled, within himself, that the child must
necessarily pass through a certain routine of minor maladies, and that
the sooner he did so the better. If he could have bought him off, or
provided a substitute, as in the case of an unlucky drawing for the
militia, he would have been glad to do so, on liberal terms. But as
this was not feasible, he merely wondered, in his haughty-manner, now
and then, what Nature meant by it; and comforted himself with the
reflection that there was another milestone passed upon the road, and
that the great end of the journey lay so much the nearer. For the
feeling uppermost in his mind, now and constantly intensifying, and
increasing in it as Paul grew older, was impatience. Impatience for
the time to come, when his visions of their united consequence and
grandeur would be triumphantly realized.

Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our
best loves and affections.' Mr Dombey's young child was, from the
beginning, so distinctly important to him as a part of his own
greatness, or (which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and
Son, that there is no doubt his parental affection might have been
easily traced, like many a goodly superstructure of fair fame, to a
very low foundation. But he loved his son with all the love he had. If
there were a warm place in his frosty heart, his son occupied it; if
its very hard surface could receive the impression of any image, the
image of that son was there; though not so much as an infant, or as a
boy, but as a grown man - the 'Son' of the Firm. Therefore he was
impatient to advance into the future, and to hurry over the
intervening passages of his history. Therefore he had little or no
anxiety' about them, in spite of his love; feeling as if the boy had a
charmed life, and must become the man with whom he held such constant
communication in his thoughts, and for whom he planned and projected,
as for an existing reality, every day.

Thus Paul grew to be nearly five years old. He was a pretty little
fellow; though there was something wan and wistful in his small face,
that gave occasion to many significant shakes of Mrs Wickam's head,
and many long-drawn inspirations of Mrs Wickam's breath. His temper
gave abundant promise of being imperious in after-life; and he had as
hopeful an apprehension of his own importance, and the rightful
subservience of all other things and persons to it, as heart could
desire. He was childish and sportive enough at times, and not of a
sullen disposition; but he had a strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful
way, at other times, of sitting brooding in his miniature arm-chair,
when he looked (and talked) like one of those terrible little Beings
in the Fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years
of age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been
substituted. He would frequently be stricken with this precocious mood
upstairs in the nursery; and would sometimes lapse into it suddenly,
exclaiming that he was tired: even while playing with Florence, or
driving Miss Tox in single harness. But at no time did he fall into it
so surely, as when, his little chair being carried down into his
father's room, he sat there with him after dinner, by the fire. They
were the strangest pair at such a time that ever firelight shone upon.
Mr Dombey so erect and solemn, gazing at the blare; his little image,
with an old, old face, peering into the red perspective with the fixed
and rapt attention of a sage. Mr Dombey entertaining complicated
worldly schemes and plans; the little image entertaining Heaven knows
what wild fancies, half-formed thoughts, and wandering speculations.
Mr Dombey stiff with starch and arrogance; the little image by
inheritance, and in unconscious imitation. The two so very much alike,
and yet so monstrously contrasted.

On one of these occasions, when they had both been perfectly quiet
for a long time, and Mr Dombey only knew that the child was awake by
occasionally glancing at his eye, where the bright fire was sparkling
like a jewel, little Paul broke silence thus:

'Papa! what's money?'

The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of
Mr Dombey's thoughts, that Mr Dombey was quite disconcerted.

'What is money, Paul?' he answered. 'Money?'

'Yes,' said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his
little chair, and turning the old face up towards Mr Dombey's; 'what
is money?'

Mr Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some
explanation involving the terms circulating-medium, currency,
depreciation of currency', paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of
precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the
little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered:
'Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You
know what they are?'

'Oh yes, I know what they are,' said Paul. 'I don't mean that,
Papa. I mean what's money after all?'

Heaven and Earth, how old his face was as he turned it up again
towards his father's!

'What is money after all!' said Mr Dombey, backing his chair a
little, that he might the better gaze in sheer amazement at the
presumptuous atom that propounded such an inquiry.

'I mean, Papa, what can it do?' returned Paul, folding his arms
(they were hardly long enough to fold), and looking at the fire, and
up at him, and at the fire, and up at him again.

Mr Dombey drew his chair back to its former place, and patted him
on the head. 'You'll know better by-and-by, my man,' he said. 'Money,
Paul, can do anything.' He took hold of the little hand, and beat it
softly against one of his own, as he said so.

But Paul got his hand free as soon as he could; and rubbing it
gently to and fro on the elbow of his chair, as if his wit were in the
palm, and he were sharpening it - and looking at the fire again, as
though the fire had been his adviser and prompter - repeated, after a
short pause:

'Anything, Papa?'

'Yes. Anything - almost,' said Mr Dombey.

'Anything means everything, don't it, Papa?' asked his son: not
observing, or possibly not understanding, the qualification.

'It includes it: yes,' said Mr Dombey.

'Why didn't money save me my Mama?' returned the child. 'It isn't
cruel, is it?'

'Cruel!' said Mr Dombey, settling his neckcloth, and seeming to
resent the idea. 'No. A good thing can't be cruel.'

'If it's a good thing, and can do anything,' said the little
fellow, thoughtfully, as he looked back at the fire, 'I wonder why it
didn't save me my Mama.'

He didn't ask the question of his father this time. Perhaps he had
seen, with a child's quickness, that it had already made his father
uncomfortable. But he repeated the thought aloud, as if it were quite
an old one to him, and had troubled him very much; and sat with his
chin resting on his hand, still cogitating and looking for an
explanation in the fire.

Mr Dombey having recovered from his surprise, not to say his alarm
(for it was the very first occasion on which the child had ever
broached the subject of his mother to him, though he had had him
sitting by his side, in this same manner, evening after evening),
expounded to him how that money, though a very potent spirit, never to
be disparaged on any account whatever, could not keep people alive
whose time was come to die; and how that we must all die,
unfortunately, even in the City, though we were never so rich. But how
that money caused us to be honoured, feared, respected, courted, and
admired, and made us powerful and glorious in the eyes of all men; and
how that it could, very often, even keep off death, for a long time
together. How, for example, it had secured to his Mama the services of
Mr Pilkins, by which be, Paul, had often profited himself; likewise of
the great Doctor Parker Peps, whom he had never known. And how it
could do all, that could be done. This, with more to the same purpose,
Mr Dombey instilled into the mind of his son, who listened
attentively, and seemed to understand the greater part of what was
said to him.

'It can't make me strong and quite well, either, Papa; can it?'
asked Paul, after a short silence; rubbing his tiny hands.

'Why, you are strong and quite well,' returned Mr Dombey. 'Are you
not?'

Oh! the age of the face that was turned up again, with an
expression, half of melancholy, half of slyness, on it!

'You are as strong and well as such little people usually are? Eh?'
said Mr Dombey.

'Florence is older than I am, but I'm not as strong and well as
Florence, 'I know,' returned the child; 'and I believe that when
Florence was as little as me, she could play a great deal longer at a
time without tiring herself. I am so tired sometimes,' said little
Paul, warming his hands, and looking in between the bars of the grate,
as if some ghostly puppet-show were performing there, 'and my bones
ache so (Wickam says it's my bones), that I don't know what to do.'

'Ay! But that's at night,' said Mr Dombey, drawing his own chair
closer to his son's, and laying his hand gently on his back; 'little
people should be tired at night, for then they sleep well.'

'Oh, it's not at night, Papa,' returned the child, 'it's in the
day; and I lie down in Florence's lap, and she sings to me. At night I
dream about such cu-ri-ous things!'

And he went on, warming his hands again, and thinking about them,
like an old man or a young goblin.

Mr Dombey was so astonished, and so uncomfortable, and so perfectly
at a loss how to pursue the conversation, that he could only sit
looking at his son by the light of the fire, with his hand resting on
his back, as if it were detained there by some magnetic attraction.
Once he advanced his other hand, and turned the contemplative face
towards his own for a moment. But it sought the fire again as soon as
he released it; and remained, addressed towards the flickering blaze,
until the nurse appeared, to summon him to bed.

'I want Florence to come for me,' said Paul.

'Won't you come with your poor Nurse Wickam, Master Paul?' inquired
that attendant, with great pathos.

'No, I won't,' replied Paul, composing himself in his arm-chair
again, like the master of the house.

Invoking a blessing upon his innocence, Mrs Wickam withdrew, and
presently Florence appeared in her stead. The child immediately
started up with sudden readiness and animation, and raised towards his
father in bidding him good-night, a countenance so much brighter, so
much younger, and so much more child-like altogether, that Mr Dombey,
while he felt greatly reassured by the change, was quite amazed at it.

After they had left the room together, he thought he heard a soft
voice singing; and remembering that Paul had said his sister sung to
him, he had the curiosity to open the door and listen, and look after
them. She was toiling up the great, wide, vacant staircase, with him
in her arms; his head was lying on her shoulder, one of his arms
thrown negligently round her neck. So they went, toiling up; she
singing all the way, and Paul sometimes crooning out a feeble
accompaniment. Mr Dombey looked after them until they reached the top
of the staircase - not without halting to rest by the way - and passed
out of his sight; and then he still stood gazing upwards, until the
dull rays of the moon, glimmering in a melancholy manner through the
dim skylight, sent him back to his room.

Mrs Chick and Miss Tox were convoked in council at dinner next day;
and when the cloth was removed, Mr Dombey opened the proceedings by
requiring to be informed, without any gloss or reservation, whether
there was anything the matter with Paul, and what Mr Pilkins said
about him.

'For the child is hardly,' said Mr Dombey, 'as stout as I could
wish.'

'My dear Paul,' returned Mrs Chick, 'with your usual happy
discrimination, which I am weak enough to envy you, every time I am in
your company; and so I think is Miss Tox

'Oh my dear!' said Miss Tox, softly, 'how could it be otherwise?
Presumptuous as it is to aspire to such a level; still, if the bird of
night may - but I'll not trouble Mr Dombey with the sentiment. It
merely relates to the Bulbul.'

Mr Dombey bent his head in stately recognition of the Bulbuls as an
old-established body.

'With your usual happy discrimination, my dear Paul,' resumed Mrs
Chick, 'you have hit the point at once. Our darling is altogether as
stout as we could wish. The fact is, that his mind is too much for
him. His soul is a great deal too large for his frame. I am sure the
way in which that dear child talks!'said Mrs Chick, shaking her head;
'no one would believe. His expressions, Lucretia, only yesterday upon
the subject of Funerals!

'I am afraid,' said Mr Dombey, interrupting her testily, 'that some
of those persons upstairs suggest improper subjects to the child. He
was speaking to me last night about his - about his Bones,' said Mr
Dombey, laying an irritated stress upon the word. 'What on earth has
anybody to do with the - with the - Bones of my son? He is not a
living skeleton, I suppose.

'Very far from it,' said Mrs Chick, with unspeakable expression.

'I hope so,' returned her brother. 'Funerals again! who talks to
the child of funerals? We are not undertakers, or mutes, or
grave-diggers, I believe.'

'Very far from it,' interposed Mrs Chick, with the same profound
expression as before.

'Then who puts such things into his head?' said Mr Dombey. 'Really
I was quite dismayed and shocked last night. Who puts such things into
his head, Louisa?'

'My dear Paul,' said Mrs Chick, after a moment's silence, 'it is of
no use inquiring. I do not think, I will tell you candidly that Wickam
is a person of very cheerful spirit, or what one would call a - '

'A daughter of Momus,' Miss Tox softly suggested.

'Exactly so,' said Mrs Chick; 'but she is exceedingly attentive and
useful, and not at all presumptuous; indeed I never saw a more
biddable woman. I would say that for her, if I was put upon my trial
before a Court of Justice.'

'Well! you are not put upon your trial before a Court of Justice,
at present, Louisa,' returned Mr Dombey, chafing,' and therefore it
don't matter.

'My dear Paul,' said Mrs Chick, in a warning voice, 'I must be
spoken to kindly, or there is an end of me,' at the same time a
premonitory redness developed itself in Mrs Chick's eyelids which was
an invariable sign of rain, unless the weather changed directly.

'I was inquiring, Louisa,' observed Mr Dombey, in an altered voice,
and after a decent interval, 'about Paul's health and actual state.

'If the dear child,' said Mrs Chick, in the tone of one who was
summing up what had been previously quite agreed upon, instead of
saying it all for the first time, 'is a little weakened by that last
attack, and is not in quite such vigorous health as we could wish; and
if he has some temporary weakness in his system, and does occasionally
seem about to lose, for the moment, the use of his - '

Mrs Chick was afraid to say limbs, after Mr Dombey's recent
objection to bones, and therefore waited for a suggestion from Miss
Tox, who, true to her office, hazarded 'members.'

'Members!' repeated Mr Dombey.

'I think the medical gentleman mentioned legs this morning, my dear
Louisa, did he not?' said Miss Tox.

'Why, of course he did, my love,' retorted Mrs Chick, mildly
reproachful. 'How can you ask me? You heard him. I say, if our dear
Paul should lose, for the moment, the use of his legs, these are
casualties common to many children at his time of life, and not to be
prevented by any care or caution. The sooner you understand that,
Paul, and admit that, the better. If you have any doubt as to the
amount of care, and caution, and affection, and self-sacrifice, that
has been bestowed upon little Paul, I should wish to refer the
question to your medical attendant, or to any of your dependants in
this house. Call Towlinson,' said Mrs Chick, 'I believe he has no
prejudice in our favour; quite the contrary. I should wish to hear
what accusation Towlinson can make!'

'Surely you must know, Louisa,' observed Mr Dombey, 'that I don't
question your natural devotion to, and regard for, the future head of
my house.'

'I am glad to hear it, Paul,' said Mrs Chick; 'but really you are
very odd, and sometimes talk very strangely, though without meaning
it, I know. If your dear boy's soul is too much for his body, Paul,
you should remember whose fault that is - who he takes after, I mean -
and make the best of it. He's as like his Papa as he can be. People
have noticed it in the streets. The very beadle, I am informed,
observed it, so long ago as at his christening. He's a very
respectable man, with children of his own. He ought to know.'

'Mr Pilkins saw Paul this morning, I believe?' said Mr Dombey.

'Yes, he did,' returned his sister. 'Miss Tox and myself were
present. Miss Tox and myself are always present. We make a point of
it. Mr Pilkins has seen him for some days past, and a very clever man
I believe him to be. He says it is nothing to speak of; which I can
confirm, if that is any consolation; but he recommended, to-day,
sea-air. Very wisely, Paul, I feel convinced.'

'Sea-air,' repeated Mr Dombey, looking at his sister.

'There is nothing to be made uneasy by, in that,'said Mrs Chick.
'My George and Frederick were both ordered sea-air, when they were
about his age; and I have been ordered it myself a great many times. I
quite agree with you, Paul, that perhaps topics may be incautiously
mentioned upstairs before him, which it would be as well for his
little mind not to expatiate upon; but I really don't see how that is
to be helped, in the case of a child of his quickness. If he were a
common child, there would be nothing in it. I must say I think, with
Miss Tox, that a short absence from this house, the air of Brighton,
and the bodily and mental training of so judicious a person as Mrs
Pipchin for instance - '

'Who is Mrs Pipchin, Louisa?' asked Mr Dombey; aghast at this
familiar introduction of a name he had never heard before.

'Mrs Pipchin, my dear Paul,' returned his sister, 'is an elderly
lady - Miss Tox knows her whole history - who has for some time
devoted all the energies of her mind, with the greatest success, to
the study and treatment of infancy, and who has been extremely well
connected. Her husband broke his heart in - how did you say her
husband broke his heart, my dear? I forget the precise circumstances.

'In pumping water out of the Peruvian Mines,' replied Miss Tox.

'Not being a Pumper himself, of course,' said Mrs Chick, glancing
at her brother; and it really did seem necessary to offer the
explanation, for Miss Tox had spoken of him as if he had died at the
handle; 'but having invested money in the speculation, which failed. I
believe that Mrs Pipchin's management of children is quite
astonishing. I have heard it commended in private circles ever since I
was - dear me - how high!' Mrs Chick's eye wandered about the bookcase
near the bust of Mr Pitt, which was about ten feet from the ground.

'Perhaps I should say of Mrs Pipchin, my dear Sir,' observed Miss
Tox, with an ingenuous blush, 'having been so pointedly referred to,
that the encomium which has been passed upon her by your sweet sister
is well merited. Many ladies and gentleman, now grown up to be
interesting members of society, have been indebted to her care. The
humble individual who addresses you was once under her charge. I
believe juvenile nobility itself is no stranger to her establishment.'

'Do I understand that this respectable matron keeps an
establishment, Miss Tox?' the Mr Dombey, condescendingly.

'Why, I really don't know,' rejoined that lady, 'whether I am
justified in calling it so. It is not a Preparatory School by any
means. Should I express my meaning,' said Miss Tox, with peculiar
sweetness,'if I designated it an infantine Boarding-House of a very
select description?'

'On an exceedingly limited and particular scale,' suggested Mrs
Chick, with a glance at her brother.

'Oh! Exclusion itself!' said Miss Tox.

There was something in this. Mrs Pipchin's husband having broken
his heart of the Peruvian mines was good. It had a rich sound.
Besides, Mr Dombey was in a state almost amounting to consternation at
the idea of Paul remaining where he was one hour after his removal had
been recommended by the medical practitioner. It was a stoppage and
delay upon the road the child must traverse, slowly at the best,
before the goal was reached. Their recommendation of Mrs Pipchin had
great weight with him; for he knew that they were jealous of any
interference with their charge, and he never for a moment took it into
account that they might be solicitous to divide a responsibility, of
which he had, as shown just now, his own established views. Broke his
heart of the Peruvian mines, mused Mr Dombey. Well! a very respectable
way of doing It.

'Supposing we should decide, on to-morrow's inquiries, to send Paul
down to Brighton to this lady, who would go with him?' inquired Mr
Dombey, after some reflection.

'I don't think you could send the child anywhere at present without
Florence, my dear Paul,' returned his sister, hesitating. 'It's quite
an infatuation with him. He's very young, you know, and has his
fancies.'

Mr Dombey turned his head away, and going slowly to the bookcase,
and unlocking it, brought back a book to read.

'Anybody else, Louisa?' he said, without looking up, and turning
over the leaves.

'Wickam, of course. Wickam would be quite sufficient, I should
say,' returned his sister. 'Paul being in such hands as Mrs Pipchin's,
you could hardly send anybody who would be a further check upon her.
You would go down yourself once a week at least, of course.'

'Of course,' said Mr Dombey; and sat looking at one page for an
hour afterwards, without reading one word.

This celebrated Mrs Pipchin was a marvellous ill-favoured,
ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face,
like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard grey eye, that looked as if
it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any
injury. Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had
been the death of Mr Pipchin; but his relict still wore black
bombazeen, of such a lustreless, deep, dead, sombre shade, that gas
itself couldn't light her up after dark, and her presence was a
quencher to any number of candles. She was generally spoken of as 'a
great manager' of children; and the secret of her management was, to
give them everything that they didn't like, and nothing that they did
- which was found to sweeten their dispositions very much. She was
such a bitter old lady, that one was tempted to believe there had been
some mistake in the application of the Peruvian machinery, and that
all her waters of gladness and milk of human kindness, had been pumped
out dry, instead of the mines.

The Castle of this ogress and child-queller was in a steep
by-street at Brighton; where the soil was more than usually chalky,
flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and
thin; where the small front-gardens had the unaccountable property of
producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where
snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and
other public places they were not expected to ornament, with the
tenacity of cupping-glasses. In the winter time the air couldn't be
got out of the Castle, and in the summer time it couldn't be got in.
There was such a continual reverberation of wind in it, that it
sounded like a great shell, which the inhabitants were obliged to hold
to their ears night and day, whether they liked it or no. It was not,
naturally, a fresh-smelling house; and in the window of the front
parlour, which was never opened, Mrs Pipchin kept a collection of
plants in pots, which imparted an earthy flavour of their own to the
establishment. However choice examples of their kind, too, these
plants were of a kind peculiarly adapted to the embowerment of Mrs
Pipchin. There were half-a-dozen specimens of the cactus, writhing
round bits of lath, like hairy serpents; another specimen shooting out
broad claws, like a green lobster; several creeping vegetables,
possessed of sticky and adhesive leaves; and one uncomfortable
flower-pot hanging to the ceiling, which appeared to have boiled over,
and tickling people underneath with its long green ends, reminded them
of spiders - in which Mrs Pipchin's dwelling was uncommonly prolific,
though perhaps it challenged competition still more proudly, in the
season, in point of earwigs.

Mrs Pipchin's scale of charges being high, however, to all who
could afford to pay, and Mrs Pipchin very seldom sweetening the
equable acidity of her nature in favour of anybody, she was held to be
an old 'lady of remarkable firmness, who was quite scientific in her
knowledge of the childish character.' On this reputation, and on the
broken heart of Mr Pipchin, she had contrived, taking one year with
another, to eke out a tolerable sufficient living since her husband's
demise. Within three days after Mrs Chick's first allusion to her,
this excellent old lady had the satisfaction of anticipating a
handsome addition to her current receipts, from the pocket of Mr
Dombey; and of receiving Florence and her little brother Paul, as
inmates of the Castle.

Mrs Chick and Miss Tox, who had brought them down on the previous
night (which they all passed at an Hotel), had just driven away from
the door, on their journey home again; and Mrs Pipchin, with her back
to the fire, stood, reviewing the new-comers, like an old soldier. Mrs
Pipchin's middle-aged niece, her good-natured and devoted slave, but
possessing a gaunt and iron-bound aspect, and much afflicted with
boils on her nose, was divesting Master Bitherstone of the clean
collar he had worn on parade. Miss Pankey, the only other little
boarder at present, had that moment been walked off to the Castle
Dungeon (an empty apartment at the back, devoted to correctional
purposes), for having sniffed thrice, in the presence of visitors.

'Well, Sir,' said Mrs Pipchin to Paul, 'how do you think you shall
like me?'

'I don't think I shall like you at all,' replied Paul. 'I want to
go away. This isn't my house.'

'No. It's mine,' retorted Mrs Pipchin.

'It's a very nasty one,' said Paul.

'There's a worse place in it than this though,' said Mrs Pipchin,
'where we shut up our bad boys.'

'Has he ever been in it?' asked Paul: pointing out Master
Bitherstone.

Mrs Pipchin nodded assent; and Paul had enough to do, for the rest
of that day, in surveying Master Bitherstone from head to foot, and
watching all the workings of his countenance, with the interest
attaching to a boy of mysterious and terrible experiences.

At one o'clock there was a dinner, chiefly of the farinaceous and
vegetable kind, when Miss Pankey (a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a
child, who was shampoo'd every morning, and seemed in danger of being
rubbed away, altogether) was led in from captivity by the ogress
herself, and instructed that nobody who sniffed before visitors ever
went to Heaven. When this great truth had been thoroughly impressed
upon her, she was regaled with rice; and subsequently repeated the
form of grace established in the Castle, in which there was a special
clause, thanking Mrs Pipchin for a good dinner. Mrs Pipchin's niece,
Berinthia, took cold pork. Mrs Pipchin, whose constitution required
warm nourishment, made a special repast of mutton-chops, which were
brought in hot and hot, between two plates, and smelt very nice.

As it rained after dinner, and they couldn't go out walking on the
beach, and Mrs Pipchin's constitution required rest after chops, they
went away with Berry (otherwise Berinthia) to the Dungeon; an empty
room looking out upon a chalk wall and a water-butt, and made ghastly
by a ragged fireplace without any stove in it. Enlivened by company,
however, this was the best place after all; for Berry played with them
there, and seemed to enjoy a game at romps as much as they did; until
Mrs Pipchin knocking angrily at the wall, like the Cock Lane Ghost'
revived, they left off, and Berry told them stories in a whisper until
twilight.

For tea there was plenty of milk and water, and bread and butter,
with a little black tea-pot for Mrs Pipchin and Berry, and buttered
toast unlimited for Mrs Pipchin, which was brought in, hot and hot,
like the chops. Though Mrs Pipchin got very greasy, outside, over this
dish, it didn't seem to lubricate her internally, at all; for she was
as fierce as ever, and the hard grey eye knew no softening.

After tea, Berry brought out a little work-box, with the Royal
Pavilion on the lid, and fell to working busily; while Mrs Pipchin,
having put on her spectacles and opened a great volume bound in green
baize, began to nod. And whenever Mrs Pipchin caught herself falling
forward into the fire, and woke up, she filliped Master Bitherstone on
the nose for nodding too.

At last it was the children's bedtime, and after prayers they went
to bed. As little Miss Pankey was afraid of sleeping alone in the
dark, Mrs Pipchin always made a point of driving her upstairs herself,
like a sheep; and it was cheerful to hear Miss Pankey moaning long
afterwards, in the least eligible chamber, and Mrs Pipchin now and
then going in to shake her. At about half-past nine o'clock the odour
of a warm sweet-bread (Mrs Pipchin's constitution wouldn't go to sleep
without sweet-bread) diversified the prevailing fragrance of the
house, which Mrs Wickam said was 'a smell of building;' and slumber
fell upon the Castle shortly after.

The breakfast next morning was like the tea over night, except that
Mrs Pipchin took her roll instead of toast, and seemed a little more
irate when it was over. Master Bitherstone read aloud to the rest a
pedigree from Genesis judiciously selected by Mrs Pipchin), getting
over the names with the ease and clearness of a person tumbling up the
treadmill. That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampoo'd; and
Master Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water,
from which he always returned very blue and dejected. Paul and
Florence went out in the meantime on the beach with Wickam - who was
constantly in tears - and at about noon Mrs Pipchin presided over some
Early Readings. It being a part of Mrs Pipchin's system not to
encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young
flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of these
lessons was usually of a violent and stunning character: the hero - a
naughty boy - seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off
anything less than a lion, or a bear.

Such was life at Mrs Pipchin's. On Saturday Mr Dombey came down;
and Florence and Paul would go to his Hotel, and have tea They passed
the whole of Sunday with him, and generally rode out before dinner;
and on these occasions Mr Dombey seemed to grow, like Falstaff's
assailants, and instead of being one man in buckram, to become a
dozen. Sunday evening was the most melancholy evening in the week; for
Mrs Pipchin always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday
nights. Miss Pankey was generally brought back from an aunt's at
Rottingdean, in deep distress; and Master Bitherstone, whose relatives
were all in India, and who was required to sit, between the services,
in an erect position with his head against the parlour wall, neither
moving hand nor foot, suffered so acutely in his young spirits that he
once asked Florence, on a Sunday night, if she could give him any idea
of the way back to Bengal.

But it was generally said that Mrs Pipchin was a woman of system
with children; and no doubt she was. Certainly the wild ones went home
tame enough, after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable
roof. It was generally said, too, that it was highly creditable of Mrs
Pipchin to have devoted herself to this way of life, and to have made
such a sacrifice of her feelings, and such a resolute stand against
her troubles, when Mr Pipchin broke his heart in the Peruvian mines.

At this exemplary old lady, Paul would sit staring in his little
arm-chair by the fire, for any length of time. He never seemed to know
what weariness was, when he was looking fixedly at Mrs Pipchin. He was
not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old moods
of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There he
would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at her,
until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs Pipchin, Ogress as she was.
Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking about.

'You,' said Paul, without the least reserve.

'And what are you thinking about me?' asked Mrs Pipchin.

'I'm thinking how old you must be,' said Paul.

'You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman,' returned
the dame. 'That'll never do.'

'Why not?' asked Paul.

'Because it's not polite,' said Mrs Pipchin, snappishly.

'Not polite?' said Paul.

'No.'

'It's not polite,' said Paul, innocently, 'to eat all the mutton
chops and toast, Wickam says.

'Wickam,' retorted Mrs Pipchin, colouring, 'is a wicked, impudent,
bold-faced hussy.'

'What's that?' inquired Paul.

'Never you mind, Sir,' retorted Mrs Pipchin. 'Remember the story of
the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
questions.'

'If the bull was mad,' said Paul, 'how did he know that the boy had
asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I
don't believe that story.

'You don't believe it, Sir?' repeated Mrs Pipchin, amazed.

'No,' said Paul.

'Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little
Infidel?' said Mrs Pipchin.

As Paul had not considered the subject in that light, and had
founded his conclusions on the alleged lunacy of the bull, he allowed
himself to be put down for the present. But he sat turning it over in
his mind, with such an obvious intention of fixing Mrs Pipchin
presently, that even that hardy old lady deemed it prudent to retreat
until he should have forgotten the subject.

From that time, Mrs Pipchin appeared to have something of the same
odd kind of attraction towards Paul, as Paul had towards her. She
would make him move his chair to her side of the fire, instead of
sitting opposite; and there he would remain in a nook between Mrs
Pipchin and the fender, with all the light of his little face absorbed
into the black bombazeen drapery, studying every line and wrinkle of
her countenance, and peering at the hard grey eye, until Mrs Pipchin
was sometimes fain to shut it, on pretence of dozing. Mrs Pipchin had
an old black cat, who generally lay coiled upon the centre foot of the
fender, purring egotistically, and winking at the fire until the
contracted pupils of his eyes were like two notes of admiration. The
good old lady might have been - not to record it disrespectfully - a
witch, and Paul and the cat her two familiars, as they all sat by the
fire together. It would have been quite in keeping with the appearance
of the party if they had all sprung up the chimney in a high wind one
night, and never been heard of any more.

This, however, never came to pass. The cat, and Paul, and Mrs
Pipchin, were constantly to be found in their usual places after dark;
and Paul, eschewing the companionship of Master Bitherstone, went on
studying Mrs Pipchin, and the cat, and the fire, night after night, as
if they were a book of necromancy, in three volumes.

Mrs Wickam put her own construction on Paul's eccentricities; and
being confirmed in her low spirits by a perplexed view of chimneys
from the room where she was accustomed to sit, and by the noise of the
wind, and by the general dulness (gashliness was Mrs Wickam's strong
expression) of her present life, deduced the most dismal reflections
from the foregoing premises. It was a part of Mrs Pipchin's policy to
prevent her own 'young hussy' - that was Mrs Pipchin's generic name
for female servant - from communicating with Mrs Wickam: to which end
she devoted much of her time to concealing herself behind doors, and
springing out on that devoted maiden, whenever she made an approach
towards Mrs Wickam's apartment. But Berry was free to hold what
converse she could in that quarter, consistently with the discharge of
the multifarious duties at which she toiled incessantly from morning
to night; and to Berry Mrs Wickam unburdened her mind.

'What a pretty fellow he is when he's asleep!' said Berry, stopping
to look at Paul in bed, one night when she took up Mrs Wickam's
supper.

'Ah!' sighed Mrs Wickam. 'He need be.'

'Why, he's not ugly when he's awake,' observed Berry.

'No, Ma'am. Oh, no. No more was my Uncle's Betsey Jane,' said Mrs
Wickam.

Berry looked as if she would like to trace the connexion of ideas
between Paul Dombey and Mrs Wickam's Uncle's Betsey Jane

'My Uncle's wife,' Mrs Wickam went on to say, 'died just like his
Mama. My Uncle's child took on just as Master Paul do.'

'Took on! You don't think he grieves for his Mama, sure?' argued
Berry, sitting down on the side of the bed. 'He can't remember
anything about her, you know, Mrs Wickam. It's not possible.'

'No, Ma'am,' said Mrs Wickam 'No more did my Uncle's child. But my
Uncle's child said very strange things sometimes, and looked very
strange, and went on very strange, and was very strange altogether. My
Uncle's child made people's blood run cold, some times, she did!'

'How?' asked Berry.

'I wouldn't have sat up all night alone with Betsey Jane!' said Mrs
Wickam, 'not if you'd have put Wickam into business next morning for
himself. I couldn't have done it, Miss Berry.

Miss Berry naturally asked why not? But Mrs Wickam, agreeably to
the usage of some ladies in her condition, pursued her own branch of
the subject, without any compunction.

'Betsey Jane,' said Mrs Wickam, 'was as sweet a child as I could
wish to see. I couldn't wish to see a sweeter. Everything that a child
could have in the way of illnesses, Betsey Jane had come through. The
cramps was as common to her,' said Mrs Wickam, 'as biles is to
yourself, Miss Berry.' Miss Berry involuntarily wrinkled her nose.

'But Betsey Jane,' said Mrs Wickam, lowering her voice, and looking
round the room, and towards Paul in bed, 'had been minded, in her
cradle, by her departed mother. I couldn't say how, nor I couldn't say
when, nor I couldn't say whether the dear child knew it or not, but
Betsey Jane had been watched by her mother, Miss Berry!' and Mrs
Wickam, with a very white face, and with watery eyes, and with a
tremulous voice, again looked fearfully round the room, and towards
Paul in bed.

'Nonsense!' cried Miss Berry - somewhat resentful of the idea.

'You may say nonsense! I ain't offended, Miss. I hope you may be
able to think in your own conscience that it is nonsense; you'll find
your spirits all the better for it in this - you'll excuse my being so
free - in this burying-ground of a place; which is wearing of me down.
Master Paul's a little restless in his sleep. Pat his back, if you
please.'

'Of course you think,' said Berry, gently doing what she was asked,
'that he has been nursed by his mother, too?'

'Betsey Jane,' returned Mrs Wickam in her most solemn tones, 'was
put upon as that child has been put upon, and changed as that child
has changed. I have seen her sit, often and often, think, think,
thinking, like him. I have seen her look, often and often, old, old,
old, like him. I have heard her, many a time, talk just like him. I
consider that child and Betsey Jane on the same footing entirely, Miss
Berry.'

'Is your Uncle's child alive?' asked Berry.

'Yes, Miss, she is alive,' returned Mrs Wickam with an air of
triumph, for it was evident. Miss Berry expected the reverse; 'and is
married to a silver-chaser. Oh yes, Miss, SHE is alive,' said Mrs
Wickam, laying strong stress on her nominative case.

It being clear that somebody was dead, Mrs Pipchin's niece inquired
who it was.

'I wouldn't wish to make you uneasy,' returned Mrs Wickam, pursuing
her supper. Don't ask me.'

This was the surest way of being asked again. Miss Berry repeated
her question, therefore; and after some resistance, and reluctance,
Mrs Wickam laid down her knife, and again glancing round the room and
at Paul in bed, replied:

'She took fancies to people; whimsical fancies, some of them;
others, affections that one might expect to see - only stronger than
common. They all died.'

This was so very unexpected and awful to Mrs Pipchin's niece, that
she sat upright on the hard edge of the bedstead, breathing short, and
surveying her informant with looks of undisguised alarm.

Mrs Wickam shook her left fore-finger stealthily towards the bed
where Florence lay; then turned it upside down, and made several
emphatic points at the floor; immediately below which was the parlour
in which Mrs Pipchin habitually consumed the toast.

'Remember my words, Miss Berry,' said Mrs Wickam, 'and be thankful
that Master Paul is not too fond of you. I am, that he's not too fond
of me, I assure you; though there isn't much to live for - you'll
excuse my being so free - in this jail of a house!'

Miss Berry's emotion might have led to her patting Paul too hard on
the back, or might have produced a cessation of that soothing
monotony, but he turned in his bed just now, and, presently awaking,
sat up in it with his hair hot and wet from the effects of some
childish dream, and asked for Florence.

She was out of her own bed at the first sound of his voice; and
bending over his pillow immediately, sang him to sleep again. Mrs
Wickam shaking her head, and letting fall several tears, pointed out
the little group to Berry, and turned her eyes up to the ceiling.

'He's asleep now, my dear,' said Mrs Wickam after a pause, 'you'd
better go to bed again. Don't you feel cold?'

'No, nurse,' said Florence, laughing. 'Not at all.'

'Ah!' sighed Mrs Wickam, and she shook her head again, expressing
to the watchful Berry, 'we shall be cold enough, some of us, by and
by!'

Berry took the frugal supper-tray, with which Mrs Wickam had by
this time done, and bade her good-night.

'Good-night, Miss!' returned Wickam softly. 'Good-night! Your aunt
is an old lady, Miss Berry, and it's what you must have looked for,
often.'

This consolatory farewell, Mrs Wickam accompanied with a look of
heartfelt anguish; and being left alone with the two children again,
and becoming conscious that the wind was blowing mournfully, she
indulged in melancholy - that cheapest and most accessible of luxuries
- until she was overpowered by slumber.

Although the niece of Mrs Pipchin did not expect to find that
exemplary dragon prostrate on the hearth-rug when she went downstairs,
she was relieved to find her unusually fractious and severe, and with
every present appearance of intending to live a long time to be a
comfort to all who knew her. Nor had she any symptoms of declining, in
the course of the ensuing week, when the constitutional viands still
continued to disappear in regular succession, notwithstanding that
Paul studied her as attentively as ever, and occupied his usual seat
between the black skirts and the fender, with unwavering constancy.

But as Paul himself was no stronger at the expiration of that time
than he had been on his first arrival, though he looked much healthier
in the face, a little carriage was got for him, in which he could lie
at his ease, with an alphabet and other elementary works of reference,
and be wheeled down to the sea-side. Consistent in his odd tastes, the
child set aside a ruddy-faced lad who was proposed as the drawer of
this carriage, and selected, instead, his grandfather - a weazen, old,
crab-faced man, in a suit of battered oilskin, who had got tough and
stringy from long pickling in salt water, and who smelt like a weedy
sea-beach when the tide is out.

With this notable attendant to pull him along, and Florence always
walking by his side, and the despondent Wickam bringing up the rear,
he went down to the margin of the ocean every day; and there he would
sit or lie in his carriage for hours together: never so distressed as
by the company of children - Florence alone excepted, always.

'Go away, if you please,' he would say to any child who came to
bear him company. Thank you, but I don't want you.'

Some small voice, near his ear, would ask him how he was, perhaps.

'I am very well, I thank you,' he would answer. 'But you had better
go and play, if you please.'

Then he would turn his head, and watch the child away, and say to
Florence, 'We don't want any others, do we? Kiss me, Floy.'

He had even a dislike, at such times, to the company of Wickam, and
was well pleased when she strolled away, as she generally did, to pick
up shells and acquaintances. His favourite spot was quite a lonely
one, far away from most loungers; and with Florence sitting by his
side at work, or reading to him, or talking to him, and the wind
blowing on his face, and the water coming up among the wheels of his
bed, he wanted nothing more.

'Floy,' he said one day, 'where's India, where that boy's friends
live?'

'Oh, it's a long, long distance off,' said Florence, raising her
eyes from her work.

'Weeks off?' asked Paul.

'Yes dear. Many weeks' journey, night and day.'

'If you were in India, Floy,' said Paul, after being silent for a
minute, 'I should - what is it that Mama did? I forget.'

'Loved me!' answered Florence.

'No, no. Don't I love you now, Floy? What is it? - Died. in you
were in India, I should die, Floy.'

She hurriedly put her work aside, and laid her head down on his
pillow, caressing him. And so would she, she said, if he were there.
He would be better soon.

'Oh! I am a great deal better now!' he answered. 'I don't mean
that. I mean that I should die of being so sorry and so lonely, Floy!'

Another time, in the same place, he fell asleep, and slept quietly
for a long time. Awaking suddenly, he listened, started up, and sat
listening.

Florence asked him what he thought he heard.

'I want to know what it says,' he answered, looking steadily in her
face. 'The sea' Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?'

She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves.

'Yes, yes,' he said. 'But I know that they are always saying
something. Always the same thing. What place is over there?' He rose
up, looking eagerly at the horizon.

She told him that there was another country opposite, but he said
he didn't mean that: he meant further away - farther away!

Very often afterwards, in the midst of their talk, he would break
off, to try to understand what it was that the waves were always
saying; and would rise up in his couch to look towards that invisible
region, far away.



CHAPTER 9.

In which the Wooden Midshipman gets into Trouble



That spice of romance and love of the marvellous, of which there
was a pretty strong infusion in the nature of young Walter Gay, and
which the guardianship of his Uncle, old Solomon Gills, had not very
much weakened by the waters of stern practical experience, was the
occasion of his attaching an uncommon and delightful interest to the
adventure of Florence with Good Mrs Brown. He pampered and cherished
it in his memory, especially that part of it with which he had been
associated: until it became the spoiled child of his fancy, and took
its own way, and did what it liked with it.

The recollection of those incidents, and his own share in them, may
have been made the more captivating, perhaps, by the weekly dreamings
of old Sol and Captain Cuttle on Sundays. Hardly a Sunday passed,
without mysterious references being made by one or other of those
worthy chums to Richard Whittington; and the latter gentleman had even
gone so far as to purchase a ballad of considerable antiquity, that
had long fluttered among many others, chiefly expressive of maritime
sentiments, on a dead wall in the Commercial Road: which poetical
performance set forth the courtship and nuptials of a promising young
coal-whipper with a certain 'lovely Peg,' the accomplished daughter of
the master and part-owner of a Newcastle collier. In this stirring
legend, Captain Cuttle descried a profound metaphysical bearing on the
case of Walter and Florence; and it excited him so much, that on very
festive occasions, as birthdays and a few other non-Dominical
holidays, he would roar through the whole song in the little back
parlour; making an amazing shake on the word Pe-e-eg, with which every
verse concluded, in compliment to the heroine of the piece.

But a frank, free-spirited, open-hearted boy, is not much given to
analysing the nature of his own feelings, however strong their hold
upon him: and Walter would have found it difficult to decide this
point. He had a great affection for the wharf where he had encountered
Florence, and for the streets (albeit not enchanting in themselves) by
which they had come home. The shoes that had so often tumbled off by
the way, he preserved in his own room; and, sitting in the little back
parlour of an evening, he had drawn a whole gallery of fancy portraits
of Good Mrs Brown. It may be that he became a little smarter in his
dress after that memorable occasion; and he certainly liked in his
leisure time to walk towards that quarter of the town where Mr
Dombey's house was situated, on the vague chance of passing little
Florence in the street. But the sentiment of all this was as boyish
and innocent as could be. Florence was very pretty, and it is pleasant
to admire a pretty face. Florence was defenceless and weak, and it was
a proud thought that he had been able to render her any protection and
assistance. Florence was the most grateful little creature in the
world, and it was delightful to see her bright gratitude beaming in
her face. Florence was neglected and coldly looked upon, and his
breast was full of youthful interest for the slighted child in her
dull, stately home.

Thus it came about that, perhaps some half-a-dozen times in the
course of the year, Walter pulled off his hat to Florence in the
street, and Florence would stop to shake hands. Mrs Wickam (who, with
a characteristic alteration of his name, invariably spoke of him as
'Young Graves') was so well used to this, knowing the story of their
acquaintance, that she took no heed of it at all. Miss Nipper, on the
other hand, rather looked out for these occasions: her sensitive young
heart being secretly propitiated by Walter's good looks, and inclining
to the belief that its sentiments were responded to.

In this way, Walter, so far from forgetting or losing sight of his
acquaintance with Florence, only remembered it better and better. As
to its adventurous beginning, and all those little circumstances which
gave it a distinctive character and relish, he took them into account,
more as a pleasant story very agreeable to his imagination, and not to
be dismissed from it, than as a part of any matter of fact with which
he was concerned. They set off Florence very much, to his fancy; but
not himself. Sometimes he thought (and then he walked very fast) what
a grand thing it would have been for him to have been going to sea on
the day after that first meeting, and to have gone, and to have done
wonders there, and to have stopped away a long time, and to have come
back an Admiral of all the colours of the dolphin, or at least a
Post-Captain with epaulettes of insupportable brightness, and have
married Florence (then a beautiful young woman) in spite of Mr
Dombey's teeth, cravat, and watch-chain, and borne her away to the
blue shores of somewhere or other, triumphantly. But these flights of
fancy seldom burnished the brass plate of Dombey and Son's Offices
into a tablet of golden hope, or shed a brilliant lustre on their
dirty skylights; and when the Captain and Uncle Sol talked about
Richard Whittington and masters' daughters, Walter felt that he
understood his true position at Dombey and Son's, much better than
they did.

So it was that he went on doing what he had to do from day to day,
in a cheerful, pains-taking, merry spirit; and saw through the
sanguine complexion of Uncle Sol and Captain Cuttle; and yet
entertained a thousand indistinct and visionary fancies of his own, to
which theirs were work-a-day probabilities. Such was his condition at
the Pipchin period, when he looked a little older than of yore, but
not much; and was the same light-footed, light-hearted, light-headed
lad, as when he charged into the parlour at the head of Uncle Sol and
the imaginary boarders, and lighted him to bring up the Madeira.

'Uncle Sol,' said Walter, 'I don't think you're well. You haven't
eaten any breakfast. I shall bring a doctor to you, if you go on like
this.'

'He can't give me what I want, my boy,' said Uncle Sol. 'At least
he is in good practice if he can - and then he wouldn't.'

'What is it, Uncle? Customers?'

'Ay,' returned Solomon, with a sigh. 'Customers would do.'

'Confound it, Uncle!' said Walter, putting down his breakfast cup
with a clatter, and striking his hand on the table: 'when I see the
people going up and down the street in shoals all day, and passing and
re-passing the shop every minute, by scores, I feel half tempted to
rush out, collar somebody, bring him in, and make him buy fifty
pounds' worth of instruments for ready money. What are you looking in
at the door for? - ' continued Walter, apostrophizing an old gentleman
with a powdered head (inaudibly to him of course), who was staring at
a ship's telescope with all his might and main. 'That's no use. I
could do that. Come in and buy it!'

The old gentleman, however, having satiated his curiosity, walked
calmly away.

'There he goes!' said Walter. 'That's the way with 'em all. But,
Uncle - I say, Uncle Sol' - for the old man was meditating and had not
responded to his first appeal. 'Don't be cast down. Don't be out of
spirits, Uncle. When orders do come, they'll come in such a crowd, you
won't be able to execute 'em.'

'I shall be past executing 'em, whenever they come, my boy,'
returned Solomon Gills. 'They'll never come to this shop again, till I
am out of t.'

'I say, Uncle! You musn't really, you know!' urged Walter. 'Don't!'

Old Sol endeavoured to assume a cheery look, and smiled across the
little table at him as pleasantly as he could.

'There's nothing more than usual the matter; is there, Uncle?' said
Walter, leaning his elbows on the tea tray, and bending over, to speak
the more confidentially and kindly. 'Be open with me, Uncle, if there
is, and tell me all about it.'

'No, no, no,' returned Old Sol. 'More than usual? No, no. What
should there be the matter more than usual?'

Walter answered with an incredulous shake of his head. 'That's what
I want to know,' he said, 'and you ask me! I'll tell you what, Uncle,
when I see you like this, I am quite sorry that I live with you.'

Old Sol opened his eyes involuntarily.

'Yes. Though nobody ever was happier than I am and always have been
with you, I am quite sorry that I live with you, when I see you with
anything in your mind.'

'I am a little dull at such times, I know,' observed Solomon,
meekly rubbing his hands.

'What I mean, Uncle Sol,' pursued Walter, bending over a little
more to pat him on the shoulder, 'is, that then I feel you ought to
have, sitting here and pouring out the tea instead of me, a nice
little dumpling of a wife, you know, - a comfortable, capital, cosy
old lady, who was just a match for you, and knew how to manage you,
and keep you in good heart. Here am I, as loving a nephew as ever was
(I am sure I ought to be!) but I am only a nephew, and I can't be such
a companion to you when you're low and out of sorts as she would have
made herself, years ago, though I'm sure I'd give any money if I could
cheer you up. And so I say, when I see you with anything on your mind,
that I feel quite sorry you haven't got somebody better about you than
a blundering young rough-and-tough boy like me, who has got the will
to console you, Uncle, but hasn't got the way - hasn't got the way,'
repeated Walter, reaching over further yet, to shake his Uncle by the
hand.

'Wally, my dear boy,' said Solomon, 'if the cosy little old lady
had taken her place in this parlour five and forty years ago, I never
could have been fonder of her than I am of you.'

'I know that, Uncle Sol,' returned Walter. 'Lord bless you, I know
that. But you wouldn't have had the whole weight of any uncomfortable
secrets if she had been with you, because she would have known how to
relieve you of 'em, and I don't.'

'Yes, yes, you do,' returned the Instrument-maker.

'Well then, what's the matter, Uncle Sol?' said Walter, coaxingly.
'Come! What's the matter?'

Solomon Gills persisted that there was nothing the matter; and
maintained it so resolutely, that his nephew had no resource but to
make a very indifferent imitation of believing him.

'All I can say is, Uncle Sol, that if there is - '

'But there isn't,' said Solomon.

'Very well,, said Walter. 'Then I've no more to say; and that's
lucky, for my time's up for going to business. I shall look in
by-and-by when I'm out, to see how you get on, Uncle. And mind, Uncle!
I'll never believe you again, and never tell you anything more about
Mr Carker the Junior, if I find out that you have been deceiving me!'

Solomon Gills laughingly defied him to find out anything of the
kind; and Walter, revolving in his thoughts all sorts of impracticable
ways of making fortunes and placing the wooden Midshipman in a
position of independence, betook himself to the offices of Dombey and
Son with a heavier countenance than he usually carried there.

There lived in those days, round the corner - in Bishopsgate Street
Without - one Brogley, sworn broker and appraiser, who kept a shop
where every description of second-hand furniture was exhibited in the
most uncomfortable aspect, and under circumstances and in combinations
the most completely foreign to its purpose. Dozens of chairs hooked on
to washing-stands, which with difficulty poised themselves on the
shoulders of sideboards, which in their turn stood upon the wrong side
of dining-tables, gymnastic with their legs upward on the tops of
other dining-tables, were among its most reasonable arrangements. A
banquet array of dish-covers, wine-glasses, and decanters was
generally to be seen, spread forth upon the bosom of a four-post
bedstead, for the entertainment of such genial company as half-a-dozen
pokers, and a hall lamp. A set of window curtains with no windows
belonging to them, would be seen gracefully draping a barricade of
chests of drawers, loaded with little jars from chemists' shops; while
a homeless hearthrug severed from its natural companion the fireside,
braved the shrewd east wind in its adversity, and trembled in
melancholy accord with the shrill complainings of a cabinet piano,
wasting away, a string a day, and faintly resounding to the noises of
the street in its jangling and distracted brain. Of motionless clocks
that never stirred a finger, and seemed as incapable of being
successfully wound up, as the pecuniary affairs of their former
owners, there was always great choice in Mr Brogley's shop; and
various looking-glasses, accidentally placed at compound interest of
reflection and refraction, presented to the eye an eternal perspective
of bankruptcy and ruin.

Mr Brogley himself was a moist-eyed, pink-complexioned,
crisp-haired man, of a bulky figure and an easy temper - for that
class of Caius Marius who sits upon the ruins of other people's
Carthages, can keep up his spirits well enough. He had looked in at
Solomon's shop sometimes, to ask a question about articles in
Solomon's way of business; and Walter knew him sufficiently to give
him good day when they met in the street. But as that was the extent
of the broker's acquaintance with Solomon Gills also, Walter was not a
little surprised when he came back in the course of the forenoon,
agreeably to his promise, to find Mr Brogley sitting in the back
parlour with his hands in his pockets, and his hat hanging up behind
the door.

'Well, Uncle Sol!' said Walter. The old man was sitting ruefully on
the opposite side of the table, with his spectacles over his eyes, for
a wonder, instead of on his forehead. 'How are you now?'

Solomon shook his head, and waved one hand towards the broker, as
introducing him.

'Is there anything the matter?' asked Walter, with a catching in
his breath.

'No, no. There's nothing the matter, said Mr Brogley. 'Don't let it
put you out of the way.' Walter looked from the broker to his Uncle in
mute amazement. 'The fact is,' said Mr Brogley, 'there's a little
payment on a bond debt - three hundred and seventy odd, overdue: and
I'm in possession.'

'In possession!' cried Walter, looking round at the shop.

'Ah!' said Mr Brogley, in confidential assent, and nodding his head
as if he would urge the advisability of their all being comfortable
together. 'It's an execution. That's what it is. Don't let it put you
out of the way. I come myself, because of keeping it quiet and
sociable. You know me. It's quite private.'

'Uncle Sol!' faltered Walter.

'Wally, my boy,' returned his uncle. 'It's the first time. Such a
calamity never happened to me before. I'm an old man to begin.'
Pushing up his spectacles again (for they were useless any longer to
conceal his emotion), he covered his face with his hand, and sobbed
aloud, and his tears fell down upon his coffee-coloured waistcoat.

'Uncle Sol! Pray! oh don't!' exclaimed Walter, who really felt a
thrill of terror in seeing the old man weep. 'For God's sake don't do
that. Mr Brogley, what shall I do?'

'I should recommend you looking up a friend or so,' said Mr
Brogley, 'and talking it over.'

'To be sure!' cried Walter, catching at anything. 'Certainly!
Thankee. Captain Cuttle's the man, Uncle. Wait till I run to Captain
Cuttle. Keep your eye upon my Uncle, will you, Mr Brogley, and make
him as comfortable as you can while I am gone? Don't despair, Uncle
Sol. Try and keep a good heart, there's a dear fellow!'

Saying this with great fervour, and disregarding the old man's
broken remonstrances, Walter dashed out of the shop again as hard as
he could go; and, having hurried round to the office to excuse himself
on the plea of his Uncle's sudden illness, set off, full speed, for
Captain Cuttle's residence.

Everything seemed altered as he ran along the streets. There were
the usual entanglement and noise of carts, drays, omnibuses, waggons,
and foot passengers, but the misfortune that had fallen on the wooden
Midshipman made it strange and new. Houses and shops were different
from what they used to be, and bore Mr Brogley's warrant on their
fronts in large characters. The broker seemed to have got hold of the
very churches; for their spires rose into the sky with an unwonted
air. Even the sky itself was changed, and had an execution in it
plainly.

Captain Cuttle lived on the brink of a little canal near the India
Docks, where there was a swivel bridge which opened now and then to
let some wandering monster of a ship come roamIng up the street like a
stranded leviathan. The gradual change from land to water, on the
approach to Captain Cuttle's lodgings, was curious. It began with the
erection of flagstaffs, as appurtenances to public-houses; then came
slop-sellers' shops, with Guernsey shirts, sou'wester hats, and canvas
pantaloons, at once the tightest and the loosest of their order,
hanging up outside. These were succeeded by anchor and chain-cable
forges, where sledgehammers were dinging upon iron all day long. Then
came rows of houses, with little vane-surmounted masts uprearing
themselves from among the scarlet beans. Then, ditches. Then, pollard
willows. Then, more ditches. Then, unaccountable patches of dirty
water, hardly to be descried, for the ships that covered them. Then,
the air was perfumed with chips; and all other trades were swallowed
up in mast, oar, and block-making, and boatbuilding. Then, the ground
grew marshy and unsettled. Then, there was nothing to be smelt but rum
and sugar. Then, Captain Cuttle's lodgings - at once a first floor and
a top storey, in Brig Place - were close before you.

The Captain was one of those timber-looking men, suits of oak as
well as hearts, whom it is almost impossible for the liveliest
imagination to separate from any part of their dress, however
insignificant. Accordingly, when Walter knocked at the door, and the
Captain instantly poked his head out of one of his little front
windows, and hailed him, with the hard glared hat already on it, and
the shirt-collar like a sail, and the wide suit of blue, all standing
as usual, Walter was as fully persuaded that he was always in that
state, as if the Captain had been a bird and those had been his
feathers.

'Wal'r, my lad!'said Captain Cuttle. 'Stand by and knock again.
Hard! It's washing day.'

Walter, in his impatience, gave a prodigious thump with the
knocker.

'Hard it is!' said Captain Cuttle, and immediately drew in his
head, as if he expected a squall.

Nor was he mistaken: for a widow lady, with her sleeves rolled up
to her shoulders, and her arms frothy with soap-suds and smoking with
hot water, replied to the summons with startling rapidity. Before she
looked at Walter she looked at the knocker, and then, measuring him
with her eyes from head to foot, said she wondered he had left any of
it.

'Captain Cuttle's at home, I know,' said Walter with a conciliatory
smile.

'Is he?' replied the widow lady. 'In-deed!'

'He has just been speaking to me,' said Walter, in breathless
explanation.

'Has he?' replied the widow lady. 'Then p'raps you'll give him Mrs
MacStinger's respects, and say that the next time he lowers himself
and his lodgings by talking out of the winder she'll thank him to come
down and open the door too.' Mrs MacStinger spoke loud, and listened
for any observations that might be offered from the first floor.

'I'll mention it,' said Walter, 'if you'll have the goodness to let
me in, Ma'am.'

For he was repelled by a wooden fortification extending across the
doorway, and put there to prevent the little MacStingers in their
moments of recreation from tumbling down the steps.

'A boy that can knock my door down,' said Mrs MacStinger,
contemptuously, 'can get over that, I should hope!' But Walter, taking
this as a permission to enter, and getting over it, Mrs MacStinger
immediately demanded whether an Englishwoman's house was her castle or
not; and whether she was to be broke in upon by 'raff.' On these
subjects her thirst for information was still very importunate, when
Walter, having made his way up the little staircase through an
artificial fog occasioned by the washing, which covered the banisters
with a clammy perspiration, entered Captain Cuttle's room, and found
that gentleman in ambush behind the door.

'Never owed her a penny, Wal'r,' said Captain Cuttle, in a low
voice, and with visible marks of trepidation on his countenance. 'Done
her a world of good turns, and the children too. Vixen at times,
though. Whew!'

'I should go away, Captain Cuttle,' said Walter.

'Dursn't do it, Wal'r,' returned the Captain. 'She'd find me out,
wherever I went. Sit down. How's Gills?'

The Captain was dining (in his hat) off cold loin of mutton,
porter, and some smoking hot potatoes, which he had cooked himself,
and took out of a little saucepan before the fire as he wanted them.
He unscrewed his hook at dinner-time, and screwed a knife into its
wooden socket instead, with which he had already begun to peel one of
these potatoes for Walter. His rooms were very small, and strongly
impregnated with tobacco-smoke, but snug enough: everything being
stowed away, as if there were an earthquake regularly every half-hour.

'How's Gills?' inquired the Captain.

Walter, who had by this time recovered his breath, and lost his
spirits - or such temporary spirits as his rapid journey had given him
- looked at his questioner for a moment, said 'Oh, Captain Cuttle!'
and burst into tears.

No words can describe the Captain's consternation at this sight Mrs
MacStinger faded into nothing before it. He dropped the potato and the
fork - and would have dropped the knife too if he could - and sat
gazing at the boy, as if he expected to hear next moment that a gulf
had opened in the City, which had swallowed up his old friend,
coffee-coloured suit, buttons, chronometer, spectacles, and all.

But when Walter told him what was really the matter, Captain
Cuttle, after a moment's reflection, started up into full activity. He
emptied out of a little tin canister on the top shelf of the cupboard,
his whole stock of ready money (amounting to thirteen pounds and
half-a-crown), which he transferred to one of the pockets of his
square blue coat; further enriched that repository with the contents
of his plate chest, consisting of two withered atomies of tea-spoons,
and an obsolete pair of knock-knee'd sugar-tongs; pulled up his
immense double-cased silver watch from the depths in which it reposed,
to assure himself that that valuable was sound and whole; re-attached
the hook to his right wrist; and seizing the stick covered over with
knobs, bade Walter come along.

Remembering, however, in the midst of his virtuous excitement, that
Mrs MacStinger might be lying in wait below, Captain Cuttle hesitated
at last, not without glancing at the window, as if he had some
thoughts of escaping by that unusual means of egress, rather than
encounter his terrible enemy. He decided, however, in favour of
stratagem.

'Wal'r,' said the Captain, with a timid wink, 'go afore, my lad.
Sing out, "good-bye, Captain Cuttle," when you're in the passage, and
shut the door. Then wait at the corner of the street 'till you see me.

These directions were not issued without a previous knowledge of
the enemy's tactics, for when Walter got downstairs, Mrs MacStinger
glided out of the little back kitchen, like an avenging spirit. But
not gliding out upon the Captain, as she had expected, she merely made
a further allusion to the knocker, and glided in again.

Some five minutes elapsed before Captain Cuttle could summon
courage to attempt his escape; for Walter waited so long at the street
corner, looking back at the house, before there were any symptoms of
the hard glazed hat. At length the Captain burst out of the door with
the suddenness of an explosion, and coming towards him at a great
pace, and never once looking over his shoulder, pretended, as soon as
they were well out of the street, to whistle a tune.

'Uncle much hove down, Wal'r?' inquired the Captain, as they were
walking along.

'I am afraid so. If you had seen him this morning, you would never
have forgotten it.'

'Walk fast, Wal'r, my lad,' returned the Captain, mending his pace;
'and walk the same all the days of your life. Overhaul the catechism
for that advice, and keep it!'

The Captain was too busy with his own thoughts of Solomon Gills,
mingled perhaps with some reflections on his late escape from Mrs
MacStinger, to offer any further quotations on the way for Walter's
moral improvement They interchanged no other word until they arrived
at old Sol's door, where the unfortunate wooden Midshipman, with his
instrument at his eye, seemed to be surveying the whole horizon in
search of some friend to help him out of his difficulty.

'Gills!' said the Captain, hurrying into the back parlour, and
taking him by the hand quite tenderly. 'Lay your head well to the
wind, and we'll fight through it. All you've got to do,' said the
Captain, with the solemnity of a man who was delivering himself of one
of the most precious practical tenets ever discovered by human wisdom,
'is to lay your head well to the wind, and we'll fight through it!'

Old Sol returned the pressure of his hand, and thanked him.

Captain Cuttle, then, with a gravity suitable to the nature of the
occasion, put down upon the table the two tea-spoons and the
sugar-tongs, the silver watch, and the ready money; and asked Mr
Brogley, the broker, what the damage was.

'Come! What do you make of it?' said Captain Cuttle.

'Why, Lord help you!' returned the broker; 'you don't suppose that
property's of any use, do you?'

'Why not?' inquired the Captain.

'Why? The amount's three hundred and seventy, odd,' replied the
broker.

'Never mind,' returned the Captain, though he was evidently
dismayed by the figures: 'all's fish that comes to your net, I
suppose?'

'Certainly,' said Mr Brogley. 'But sprats ain't whales, you know.'

The philosophy of this observation seemed to strike the Captain. He
ruminated for a minute; eyeing the broker, meanwhile, as a deep
genius; and then called the Instrument-maker aside.

'Gills,' said Captain Cuttle, 'what's the bearings of this
business? Who's the creditor?'

'Hush!' returned the old man. 'Come away. Don't speak before Wally.
It's a matter of security for Wally's father - an old bond. I've paid
a good deal of it, Ned, but the times are so bad with me that I can't
do more just now. I've foreseen it, but I couldn't help it. Not a word
before Wally, for all the world.'

'You've got some money, haven't you?' whispered the Captain.

'Yes, yes - oh yes- I've got some,' returned old Sol, first putting
his hands into his empty pockets, and then squeezing his Welsh wig
between them, as if he thought he might wring some gold out of it;
'but I - the little I have got, isn't convertible, Ned; it can't be
got at. I have been trying to do something with it for Wally, and I'm
old fashioned, and behind the time. It's here and there, and - and, in
short, it's as good as nowhere,' said the old man, looking in
bewilderment about him.

He had so much the air of a half-witted person who had been hiding
his money in a variety of places, and had forgotten where, that the
Captain followed his eyes, not without a faint hope that he might
remember some few hundred pounds concealed up the chimney, or down in
the cellar. But Solomon Gills knew better than that.

'I'm behind the time altogether, my dear Ned,' said Sol, in
resigned despair, 'a long way. It's no use my lagging on so far behind
it. The stock had better be sold - it's worth more than this debt -
and I had better go and die somewhere, on the balance. I haven't any
energy left. I don't understand things. This had better be the end of
it. Let 'em sell the stock and take him down,' said the old man,
pointing feebly to the wooden Midshipman, 'and let us both be broken
up together.'

'And what d'ye mean to do with Wal'r?'said the Captain. 'There,
there! Sit ye down, Gills, sit ye down, and let me think o' this. If I
warn't a man on a small annuity, that was large enough till to-day, I
hadn't need to think of it. But you only lay your head well to the
wind,' said the Captain, again administering that unanswerable piece
of consolation, 'and you're all right!'

Old Sol thanked him from his heart, and went and laid it against
the back parlour fire-place instead.

Captain Cuttle walked up and down the shop for some time,
cogitating profoundly, and bringing his bushy black eyebrows to bear
so heavily on his nose, like clouds setting on a mountain, that Walter
was afraid to offer any interruption to the current of his
reflections. Mr Brogley, who was averse to being any constraint upon
the party, and who had an ingenious cast of mind, went, softly
whistling, among the stock; rattling weather-glasses, shaking
compasses as if they were physic, catching up keys with loadstones,
looking through telescopes, endeavouring to make himself acquainted
with the use of the globes, setting parallel rulers astride on to his
nose, and amusing himself with other philosophical transactions.

'Wal'r!' said the Captain at last. 'I've got it.'

'Have you, Captain Cuttle?' cried Walter, with great animation.

'Come this way, my lad,' said the Captain. 'The stock's the
security. I'm another. Your governor's the man to advance money.'

'Mr Dombey!' faltered Walter.

The Captain nodded gravely. 'Look at him,' he said. 'Look at Gills.
If they was to sell off these things now, he'd die of it. You know he
would. We mustn't leave a stone unturned - and there's a stone for
you.'

'A stone! - Mr Dombey!' faltered Walter.

'You run round to the office, first of all, and see if he's there,'
said Captain Cuttle, clapping him on the back. 'Quick!'

Walter felt he must not dispute the command - a glance at his Uncle
would have determined him if he had felt otherwise - and disappeared
to execute it. He soon returned, out of breath, to say that Mr Dombey
was not there. It was Saturday, and he had gone to Brighton.

'I tell you what, Wal'r!' said the Captain, who seemed to have
prepared himself for this contingency in his absence. 'We'll go to
Brighton. I'll back you, my boy. I'll back you, Wal'r. We'll go to
Brighton by the afternoon's coach.'

If the application must be made to Mr Dombey at all, which was
awful to think of, Walter felt that he would rather prefer it alone
and unassisted, than backed by the personal influence of Captain
Cuttle, to which he hardly thought Mr Dombey would attach much weight.
But as the Captain appeared to be of quite another opinion, and was
bent upon it, and as his friendship was too zealous and serious to be
trifled with by one so much younger than himself, he forbore to hint
the least objection. Cuttle, therefore, taking a hurried leave of
Solomon Gills, and returning the ready money, the teaspoons, the
sugar-tongs, and the silver watch, to his pocket - with a view, as
Walter thought, with horror, to making a gorgeous impression on Mr
Dombey - bore him off to the coach-office, with- out a minute's delay,
and repeatedly assured him, on the road, that he would stick by him to
the last.



CHAPTER 10.

Containing the Sequel of the Midshipman's Disaster



Major Bagstock, after long and frequent observation of Paul, across
Princess's Place, through his double-barrelled opera-glass; and after
receiving many minute reports, daily, weekly, and monthly, on that
subject, from the native who kept himself in constant communication
with Miss Tox's maid for that purpose; came to the conclusion that
Dombey, Sir, was a man to be known, and that J. B. was the boy to make
his acquaintance.

Miss Tox, however, maintaining her reserved behaviour, and frigidly
declining to understand the Major whenever he called (which he often
did) on any little fishing excursion connected with this project, the
Major, in spite of his constitutional toughness and slyness, was fain
to leave the accomplishment of his desire in some measure to chance,
'which,' as he was used to observe with chuckles at his club, 'has
been fifty to one in favour of Joey B., Sir, ever since his elder
brother died of Yellow Jack in the West Indies.'

It was some time coming to his aid in the present instance, but it
befriended him at last. When the dark servant, with full particulars,
reported Miss Tox absent on Brighton service, the Major was suddenly
touched with affectionate reminiscences of his friend Bill Bitherstone
of Bengal, who had written to ask him, if he ever went that way, to
bestow a call upon his only son. But when the same dark servant
reported Paul at Mrs Pipchin's, and the Major, referring to the letter
favoured by Master Bitherstone on his arrival in England - to which he
had never had the least idea of paying any attention - saw the opening
that presented itself, he was made so rabid by the gout, with which he
happened to be then laid up, that he threw a footstool at the dark
servant in return for his intelligence, and swore he would be the
death of the rascal before he had done with him: which the dark
servant was more than half disposed to believe.

At length the Major being released from his fit, went one Saturday
growling down to Brighton, with the native behind him; apostrophizing
Miss Tox all the way, and gloating over the prospect of carrying by
storm the distinguished friend to whom she attached so much mystery,
and for whom she had deserted him,

'Would you, Ma'am, would you!' said the Major, straining with
vindictiveness, and swelling every already swollen vein in his head.
'Would you give Joey B. the go-by, Ma'am? Not yet, Ma'am, not yet!
Damme, not yet, Sir. Joe is awake, Ma'am. Bagstock is alive, Sir. J.
B. knows a move or two, Ma'am. Josh has his weather-eye open, Sir.
You'll find him tough, Ma'am. Tough, Sir, tough is Joseph. Tough, and
de-vilish sly!'

And very tough indeed Master Bitherstone found him, when he took
that young gentleman out for a walk. But the Major, with his
complexion like a Stilton cheese, and his eyes like a prawn's, went
roving about, perfectly indifferent to Master Bitherstone's amusement,
and dragging Master Bitherstone along, while he looked about him high
and low, for Mr Dombey and his children.

In good time the Major, previously instructed by Mrs Pipchin, spied
out Paul and Florence, and bore down upon them; there being a stately
gentleman (Mr Dombey, doubtless) in their company. Charging with
Master Bitherstone into the very heart of the little squadron, it fell
out, of course, that Master Bitherstone spoke to his fellow-sufferers.
Upon that the Major stopped to notice and admire them; remembered with
amazement that he had seen and spoken to them at his friend Miss Tox's
in Princess's Place; opined that Paul was a devilish fine fellow, and
his own little friend; inquired if he remembered Joey B. the Major;
and finally, with a sudden recollection of the conventionalities of
life, turned and apologised to Mr Dombey.

'But my little friend here, Sir,' said the Major, 'makes a boy of
me again: An old soldier, Sir - Major Bagstock, at your service - is
not ashamed to confess it.' Here the Major lifted his hat. 'Damme,
Sir,' cried the Major with sudden warmth, 'I envy you.' Then he
recollected himself, and added, 'Excuse my freedom.'

Mr Dombey begged he wouldn't mention it.

'An old campaigner, Sir,' said the Major, 'a smoke-dried,
sun-burnt, used-up, invalided old dog of a Major, Sir, was not afraid
of being condemned for his whim by a man like Mr Dombey. I have the
honour of addressing Mr Dombey, I believe?'

'I am the present unworthy representative of that name, Major,'
returned Mr Dombey.

'By G-, Sir!' said the Major, 'it's a great name. It's a name,
Sir,' said the Major firmly, as if he defied Mr Dombey to contradict
him, and would feel it his painful duty to bully him if he did, 'that
is known and honoured in the British possessions abroad. It is a name,
Sir, that a man is proud to recognise. There is nothing adulatory in
Joseph Bagstock, Sir. His Royal Highness the Duke of York observed on
more than one occasion, "there is no adulation in Joey. He is a plain
old soldier is Joe. He is tough to a fault is Joseph:" but it's a
great name, Sir. By the Lord, it's a great name!' said the Major,
solemnly.

'You are good enough to rate it higher than it deserves, perhaps,
Major,' returned Mr Dombey.

'No, Sir,' said the Major, in a severe tone. No, Mr Dombey, let us
understand each other. That is not the Bagstock vein, Sir. You don't
know Joseph B. He is a blunt old blade is Josh. No flattery in him,
Sir. Nothing like it.'

Mr Dombey inclined his head, and said he believed him to be in
earnest, and that his high opinion was gratifying.

'My little friend here, Sir,' croaked the Major, looking as amiably
as he could, on Paul, 'will certify for Joseph Bagstock that he is a
thorough-going, down-right, plain-spoken, old Trump, Sir, and nothing
more. That boy, Sir,' said the Major in a lower tone, 'will live in
history. That boy, Sir, is not a common production. Take care of him,
Mr Dombey.'

Mr Dombey seemed to intimate that he would endeavour to do so.

'Here is a boy here, Sir,' pursued the Major, confidentially, and
giving him a thrust with his cane. 'Son of Bitherstone of Bengal. Bill
Bitherstone formerly of ours. That boy's father and myself, Sir, were
sworn friends. Wherever you went, Sir, you heard of nothing but Bill
Bitherstone and Joe Bagstock. Am I blind to that boy's defects? By no
means. He's a fool, Sir.'

Mr Dombey glanced at the libelled Master Bitherstone, of whom he
knew at least as much as the Major did, and said, in quite a
complacent manner, 'Really?'

'That is what he is, sir,' said the Major. 'He's a fool. Joe
Bagstock never minces matters. The son of my old friend Bill
Bitherstone, of Bengal, is a born fool, Sir.' Here the Major laughed
till he was almost black. 'My little friend is destined for a public
school,' I' presume, Mr Dombey?' said the Major when he had recovered.

'I am not quite decided,' returned Mr Dombey. 'I think not. He is
delicate.'

'If he's delicate, Sir,' said the Major, 'you are right. None but
the tough fellows could live through it, Sir, at Sandhurst. We put
each other to the torture there, Sir. We roasted the new fellows at a
slow fire, and hung 'em out of a three pair of stairs window, with
their heads downwards. Joseph Bagstock, Sir, was held out of the
window by the heels of his boots, for thirteen minutes by the college
clock'

The Major might have appealed to his countenance in corroboration
of this story. It certainly looked as if he had hung out a little too
long.

'But it made us what we were, Sir,' said the Major, settling his
shirt frill. 'We were iron, Sir, and it forged us. Are you remaining
here, Mr Dombey?'

'I generally come down once a week, Major,' returned that
gentleman. 'I stay at the Bedford.'

'I shall have the honour of calling at the Bedford, Sir, if you'll
permit me,' said the Major. 'Joey B., Sir, is not in general a calling
man, but Mr Dombey's is not a common name. I am much indebted to my
little friend, Sir, for the honour of this introduction.'

Mr Dombey made a very gracious reply; and Major Bagstock, having
patted Paul on the head, and said of Florence that her eyes would play
the Devil with the youngsters before long - 'and the oldsters too,
Sir, if you come to that,' added the Major, chuckling very much -
stirred up Master Bitherstone with his walking-stick, and departed
with that young gentleman, at a kind of half-trot; rolling his head
and coughing with great dignity, as he staggered away, with his legs
very wide asunder.

In fulfilment of his promise, the Major afterwards called on Mr
Dombey; and Mr Dombey, having referred to the army list, afterwards
called on the Major. Then the Major called at Mr Dombey's house in
town; and came down again, in the same coach as Mr Dombey. In short,
Mr Dombey and the Major got on uncommonly well together, and
uncommonly fast: and Mr Dombey observed of the Major, to his sister,
that besides being quite a military man he was really something more,
as he had a very admirable idea of the importance of things
unconnected with his own profession.

At length Mr Dombey, bringing down Miss Tox and Mrs Chick to see
the children, and finding the Major again at Brighton, invited him to
dinner at the Bedford, and complimented Miss Tox highly, beforehand,
on her neighbour and acquaintance.

'My dearest Louisa,' said Miss Tox to Mrs Chick, when they were
alone together, on the morning of the appointed day, 'if I should seem
at all reserved to Major Bagstock, or under any constraint with him,
promise me not to notice it.'

'My dear Lucretia,' returned Mrs Chick, 'what mystery is involved
in this remarkable request? I must insist upon knowing.'

'Since you are resolved to extort a confession from me, Louisa,'
said Miss Tox instantly, 'I have no alternative but to confide to you
that the Major has been particular.'

'Particular!' repeated Mrs Chick.

'The Major has long been very particular indeed, my love, in his
attentions,' said Miss Tox, 'occasionally they have been so very
marked, that my position has been one of no common difficulty.'

'Is he in good circumstances?' inquired Mrs Chick.

'I have every reason to believe, my dear - indeed I may say I
know,' returned Miss Tox, 'that he is wealthy. He is truly military,
and full of anecdote. I have been informed that his valour, when he
was in active service, knew no bounds. I am told that he did all sorts
of things in the Peninsula, with every description of fire-arm; and in
the East and West Indies, my love, I really couldn't undertake to say
what he did not do.'

'Very creditable to him indeed,' said Mrs Chick, 'extremely so; and
you have given him no encouragement, my dear?'

'If I were to say, Louisa,' replied Miss Tox, with every
demonstration of making an effort that rent her soul, 'that I never
encouraged Major Bagstock slightly, I should not do justice to the
friendship which exists between you and me. It is, perhaps, hardly in
the nature of woman to receive such attentions as the Major once
lavished upon myself without betraying some sense of obligation. But
that is past - long past. Between the Major and me there is now a
yawning chasm, and I will not feign to give encouragement, Louisa,
where I cannot give my heart. My affections,' said Miss Tox - 'but,
Louisa, this is madness!' and departed from the room.

All this Mrs Chick communicated to her brother before dinner: and
it by no means indisposed Mr Dombey to receive the Major with unwonted
cordiality. The Major, for his part, was in a state of plethoric
satisfaction that knew no bounds: and he coughed, and choked, and
chuckled, and gasped, and swelled, until the waiters seemed positively
afraid of him.

'Your family monopolises Joe's light, Sir,' said the Major, when he
had saluted Miss Tox. 'Joe lives in darkness. Princess's Place is
changed into Kamschatka in the winter time. There is no ray of sun,
Sir, for Joey B., now.'

'Miss Tox is good enough to take a great deal of interest in Paul,
Major,' returned Mr Dombey on behalf of that blushing virgin.

'Damme Sir,' said the Major, 'I'm jealous of my little friend. I'm
pining away Sir. The Bagstock breed is degenerating in the forsaken
person of old Joe.' And the Major, becoming bluer and bluer and
puffing his cheeks further and further over the stiff ridge of his
tight cravat, stared at Miss Tox, until his eyes seemed as if he were
at that moment being overdone before the slow fire at the military
college.

Notwithstanding the palpitation of the heart which these allusions
occasioned her, they were anything but disagreeable to Miss Tox, as
they enabled her to be extremely interesting, and to manifest an
occasional incoherence and distraction which she was not at all
unwilling to display. The Major gave her abundant opportunities of
exhibiting this emotion: being profuse in his complaints, at dinner,
of her desertion of him and Princess's Place: and as he appeared to
derive great enjoyment from making them, they all got on very well.

None the worse on account of the Major taking charge of the whole
conversation, and showing as great an appetite in that respect as in
regard of the various dainties on the table, among which he may be
almost said to have wallowed: greatly to the aggravation of his
inflammatory tendencies. Mr Dombey's habitual silence and reserve
yielding readily to this usurpation, the Major felt that he was coming
out and shining: and in the flow of spirits thus engendered, rang such
an infinite number of new changes on his own name that he quite
astonished himself. In a word, they were all very well pleased. The
Major was considered to possess an inexhaustible fund of conversation;
and when he took a late farewell, after a long rubber, Mr Dombey again
complimented the blushing Miss Tox on her neighbour and acquaintance.

But all the way home to his own hotel, the Major incessantly said
to himself, and of himself, 'Sly, Sir - sly, Sir - de-vil-ish sly!'
And when he got there, sat down in a chair, and fell into a silent fit
of laughter, with which he was sometimes seized, and which was always
particularly awful. It held him so long on this occasion that the dark
servant, who stood watching him at a distance, but dared not for his
life approach, twice or thrice gave him over for lost. His whole form,
but especially his face and head, dilated beyond all former
experience; and presented to the dark man's view, nothing but a
heaving mass of indigo. At length he burst into a violent paroxysm of
coughing, and when that was a little better burst into such
ejaculations as the following:

'Would you, Ma'am, would you? Mrs Dombey, eh, Ma'am? I think not,
Ma'am. Not while Joe B. can put a spoke in your wheel, Ma'am. J. B.'s
even with you now, Ma'am. He isn't altogether bowled out, yet, Sir,
isn't Bagstock. She's deep, Sir, deep, but Josh is deeper. Wide awake
is old Joe - broad awake, and staring, Sir!' There was no doubt of
this last assertion being true, and to a very fearful extent; as it
continued to be during the greater part of that night, which the Major
chiefly passed in similar exclamations, diversified with fits of
coughing and choking that startled the whole house.

It was on the day after this occasion (being Sunday) when, as Mr
Dombey, Mrs Chick, and Miss Tox were sitting at breakfast, still
eulogising the Major, Florence came running in: her face suffused with
a bright colour, and her eyes sparkling joyfully: and cried,

'Papa! Papa! Here's Walter! and he won't come in.'

'Who?' cried Mr Dombey. 'What does she mean? What is this?'

'Walter, Papa!' said Florence timidly; sensible of having
approached the presence with too much familiarity. 'Who found me when
I was lost.'

'Does she mean young Gay, Louisa?' inquired Mr Dombey, knitting his
brows. 'Really, this child's manners have become very boisterous. She
cannot mean young Gay, I think. See what it is, will you?'

Mrs Chick hurried into the passage, and returned with the
information that it was young Gay, accompanied by a very
strange-looking person; and that young Gay said he would not take the
liberty of coming in, hearing Mr Dombey was at breakfast, but would
wait until Mr Dombey should signify that he might approach.

'Tell the boy to come in now,' said Mr Dombey. 'Now, Gay, what is
the matter? Who sent you down here? Was there nobody else to come?'

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' returned Walter. 'I have not been sent. I
have been so bold as to come on my own account, which I hope you'll
pardon when I mention the cause.

But Mr Dombey, without attending to what he said, was looking
impatiently on either side of him (as if he were a pillar in his way)
at some object behind.

'What's that?' said Mr Dombey. 'Who is that? I think you have made
some mistake in the door, Sir.'

'Oh, I'm very sorry to intrude with anyone, Sir,' cried Walter,
hastily: 'but this is - this is Captain Cuttle, Sir.'

'Wal'r, my lad,' observed the Captain in a deep voice: 'stand by!'

At the same time the Captain, coming a little further in, brought
out his wide suit of blue, his conspicuous shirt-collar, and his
knobby nose in full relief, and stood bowing to Mr Dombey, and waving
his hook politely to the ladies, with the hard glazed hat in his one
hand, and a red equator round his head which it had newly imprinted
there.

Mr Dombey regarded this phenomenon with amazement and indignation,
and seemed by his looks to appeal to Mrs Chick and Miss Tox against
it. Little Paul, who had come in after Florence, backed towards Miss
Tox as the Captain waved his book, and stood on the defensive.

'Now, Gay,' said Mr Dombey. 'What have you got to say to me?'

Again the Captain observed, as a general opening of the
conversation that could not fail to propitiate all parties, 'Wal'r,
standby!'

'I am afraid, Sir,' began Walter, trembling, and looking down at
the ground, 'that I take a very great liberty in coming - indeed, I am
sure I do. I should hardly have had the courage to ask to see you,
Sir, even after coming down, I am afraid, if I had not overtaken Miss
Dombey, and - '

'Well!' said Mr Dombey, following his eyes as he glanced at the
attentive Florence, and frowning unconsciously as she encouraged him
with a smile. 'Go on, if you please.'

'Ay, ay,' observed the Captain, considering it incumbent on him, as
a point of good breeding, to support Mr Dombey. 'Well said! Go on,
Wal'r.'

Captain Cuttle ought to have been withered by the look which Mr
Dombey bestowed upon him in acknowledgment of his patronage. But quite
innocent of this, he closed one eye in reply, and gave Mr Dombey to
understand, by certain significant motions of his hook, that Walter
was a little bashful at first, and might be expected to come out
shortly.

'It is entirely a private and personal matter, that has brought me
here, Sir,' continued Walter, faltering, 'and Captain Cuttle

'Here!' interposed the Captain, as an assurance that he was at
hand, and might be relied upon.

'Who is a very old friend of my poor Uncle's, and a most excellent
man, Sir,' pursued Walter, raising his eyes with a look of entreaty in
the Captain's behalf, 'was so good as to offer to come with me, which
I could hardly refuse.'

'No, no, no;' observed the Captain complacently. 'Of course not. No
call for refusing. Go on, Wal'r.'

'And therefore, Sir,' said Walter, venturing to meet Mr Dombey's
eye, and proceeding with better courage in the very desperation of the
case, now that there was no avoiding it, 'therefore I have come, with
him, Sir, to say that my poor old Uncle is in very great affliction
and distress. That, through the gradual loss of his business, and not
being able to make a payment, the apprehension of which has weighed
very heavily upon his mind, months and months, as indeed I know, Sir,
he has an execution in his house, and is in danger of losing all he
has, and breaking his heart. And that if you would, in your kindness,
and in your old knowledge of him as a respectable man, do anything to
help him out of his difficulty, Sir, we never could thank you enough
for it.'

Walter's eyes filled with tears as he spoke; and so did those of
Florence. Her father saw them glistening, though he appeared to look
at Walter only.

'It is a very large sum, Sir,' said Walter. 'More than three
hundred pounds. My Uncle is quite beaten down by his misfortune, it
lies so heavy on him; and is quite unable to do anything for his own
relief. He doesn't even know yet, that I have come to speak to you.
You would wish me to say, Sir,' added Walter, after a moment's
hesitation, 'exactly what it is I want. I really don't know, Sir.
There is my Uncle's stock, on which I believe I may say, confidently,
there are no other demands, and there is Captain Cuttle, who would
wish to be security too. I - I hardly like to mention,' said Walter,
'such earnings as mine; but if you would allow them - accumulate -
payment - advance - Uncle - frugal, honourable, old man.' Walter
trailed off, through these broken sentences, into silence: and stood
with downcast head, before his employer.

Considering this a favourable moment for the display of the
valuables, Captain Cuttle advanced to the table; and clearing a space
among the breakfast-cups at Mr Dombey's elbow, produced the silver
watch, the ready money, the teaspoons, and the sugar-tongs; and piling
them up into a heap that they might look as precious as possible,
delivered himself of these words:

'Half a loaf's better than no bread, and the same remark holds good
with crumbs. There's a few. Annuity of one hundred pound premium also
ready to be made over. If there is a man chock full of science in the
world, it's old Sol Gills. If there is a lad of promise - one
flowing,' added the Captain, in one of his happy quotations, 'with
milk and honey - it's his nevy!'

The Captain then withdrew to his former place, where he stood
arranging his scattered locks with the air of a man who had given the
finishing touch to a difficult performance.

When Walter ceased to speak, Mr Dombey's eyes were attracted to
little Paul, who, seeing his sister hanging down her head and silently
weeping in her commiseration for the distress she had heard described,
went over to her, and tried to comfort her: looking at Walter and his
father as he did so, with a very expressive face. After the momentary
distraction of Captain Cuttle's address, which he regarded with lofty
indifference, Mr Dombey again turned his eyes upon his son, and sat
steadily regarding the child, for some moments, in silence.

'What was this debt contracted for?' asked Mr Dombey, at length.
'Who is the creditor?'

'He don't know,' replied the Captain, putting his hand on Walter's
shoulder. 'I do. It came of helping a man that's dead now, and that's
cost my friend Gills many a hundred pound already. More particulars in
private, if agreeable.'

'People who have enough to do to hold their own way,' said Mr
Dombey, unobservant of the Captain's mysterious signs behind Walter,
and still looking at his son, 'had better be content with their own
obligations and difficulties, and not increase them by engaging for
other men. It is an act of dishonesty and presumption, too,' said Mr
Dombey, sternly; 'great presumption; for the wealthy could do no more.
Paul, come here!'

The child obeyed: and Mr Dombey took him on his knee.

'If you had money now - ' said Mr Dombey. 'Look at me!'

Paul, whose eyes had wandered to his sister, and to Walter, looked
his father in the face.

'If you had money now,' said Mr Dombey; 'as much money as young Gay
has talked about; what would you do?'

'Give it to his old Uncle,' returned Paul.

'Lend it to his old Uncle, eh?' retorted Mr Dombey. 'Well! When you
are old enough, you know, you will share my money, and we shall use it
together.'

'Dombey and Son,' interrupted Paul, who had been tutored early in
the phrase.

'Dombey and Son,' repeated his father. 'Would you like to begin to
be Dombey and Son, now, and lend this money to young Gay's Uncle?'

'Oh! if you please, Papa!' said Paul: 'and so would Florence.'

'Girls,' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son.
Would you like it?'

'Yes, Papa, yes!'

'Then you shall do it,' returned his father. 'And you see, Paul,'
he added, dropping his voice, 'how powerful money is, and how anxious
people are to get it. Young Gay comes all this way to beg for money,
and you, who are so grand and great, having got it, are going to let
him have it, as a great favour and obligation.'

Paul turned up the old face for a moment, in which there was a
sharp understanding of the reference conveyed in these words: but it
was a young and childish face immediately afterwards, when he slipped
down from his father's knee, and ran to tell Florence not to cry any
more, for he was going to let young Gay have the money.

Mr Dombey then turned to a side-table, and wrote a note and sealed
it. During the interval, Paul and Florence whispered to Walter, and
Captain Cuttle beamed on the three, with such aspiring and ineffably
presumptuous thoughts as Mr Dombey never could have believed in. The
note being finished, Mr Dombey turned round to his former place, and
held it out to Walter.

'Give that,' he said, 'the first thing to-morrow morning, to Mr
Carker. He will immediately take care that one of my people releases
your Uncle from his present position, by paying the amount at issue;
and that such arrangements are made for its repayment as may be
consistent with your Uncle's circumstances. You will consider that
this is done for you by Master Paul.'

Walter, in the emotion of holding in his hand the means of
releasing his good Uncle from his trouble, would have endeavoured to
express something of his gratitude and joy. But Mr Dombey stopped him
short.

'You will consider that it is done,' he repeated, 'by Master Paul.
I have explained that to him, and he understands it. I wish no more to
be said.'

As he motioned towards the door, Walter could only bow his head and
retire. Miss Tox, seeing that the Captain appeared about to do the
same, interposed.

'My dear Sir,' she said, addressing Mr Dombey, at whose munificence
both she and Mrs Chick were shedding tears copiously; 'I think you
have overlooked something. Pardon me, Mr Dombey, I think, in the
nobility of your character, and its exalted scope, you have omitted a
matter of detail.'

'Indeed, Miss Tox!' said Mr Dombey.

'The gentleman with the - Instrument,' pursued Miss Tox, glancing
at Captain Cuttle, 'has left upon the table, at your elbow - '

'Good Heaven!' said Mr Dombey, sweeping the Captain's property from
him, as if it were so much crumb indeed. 'Take these things away. I am
obliged to you, Miss Tox; it is like your usual discretion. Have the
goodness to take these things away, Sir!'

Captain Cuttle felt he had no alternative but to comply. But he was
so much struck by the magnanimity of Mr Dombey, in refusing treasures
lying heaped up to his hand, that when he had deposited the teaspoons
and sugar-tongs in one pocket, and the ready money in another, and had
lowered the great watch down slowly into its proper vault, he could
not refrain from seizing that gentleman's right hand in his own
solitary left, and while he held it open with his powerful fingers,
bringing the hook down upon its palm in a transport of admiration. At
this touch of warm feeling and cold iron, Mr Dombey shivered all over.

Captain Cuttle then kissed his hook to the ladies several times,
with great elegance and gallantry; and having taken a particular leave
of Paul and Florence, accompanied Walter out of the room. Florence was
running after them in the earnestness of her heart, to send some
message to old Sol, when Mr Dombey called her back, and bade her stay
where she was.

'Will you never be a Dombey, my dear child!' said Mrs Chick, with
pathetic reproachfulness.

'Dear aunt,' said Florence. 'Don't be angry with me. I am so
thankful to Papa!'

She would have run and thrown her arms about his neck if she had
dared; but as she did not dare, she glanced with thankful eyes towards
him, as he sat musing; sometimes bestowing an uneasy glance on her,
but, for the most part, watching Paul, who walked about the room with
the new-blown dignity of having let young Gay have the money.

And young Gay - Walter- what of him?

He was overjoyed to purge the old man's hearth from bailiffs and
brokers, and to hurry back to his Uncle with the good tidings. He was
overjoyed to have it all arranged and settled next day before noon;
and to sit down at evening in the little back parlour with old Sol and
Captain Cuttle; and to see the Instrument-maker already reviving, and
hopeful for the future, and feeling that the wooden Midshipman was his
own again. But without the least impeachment of his gratitude to Mr
Dombey, it must be confessed that Walter was humbled and cast down. It
is when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough
wind, that we are the most disposed to picture to ourselves what
flowers they might have borne, if they had flourished; and now, when
Walter found himself cut off from that great Dombey height, by the
depth of a new and terrible tumble, and felt that all his old wild
fancies had been scattered to the winds in the fall, he began to
suspect that they might have led him on to harmless visions of
aspiring to Florence in the remote distance of time.

The Captain viewed the subject in quite a different light. He
appeared to entertain a belief that the interview at which he had
assisted was so very satisfactory and encouraging, as to be only a
step or two removed from a regular betrothal of Florence to Walter;
and that the late transaction had immensely forwarded, if not
thoroughly established, the Whittingtonian hopes. Stimulated by this
conviction, and by the improvement in the spirits of his old friend,
and by his own consequent gaiety, he even attempted, in favouring them
with the ballad of 'Lovely Peg' for the third time in one evening, to
make an extemporaneous substitution of the name 'Florence;' but
finding this difficult, on account of the word Peg invariably rhyming
to leg (in which personal beauty the original was described as having
excelled all competitors), he hit upon the happy thought of changing
it to Fle-e-eg; which he accordingly did, with an archness almost
supernatural, and a voice quite vociferous, notwithstanding that the
time was close at band when he must seek the abode of the dreadful Mrs
MacStinger.

That same evening the Major was diffuse at his club, on the subject
of his friend Dombey in the City. 'Damme, Sir,' said the Major, 'he's
a prince, is my friend Dombey in the City. I tell you what, Sir. If
you had a few more men among you like old Joe Bagstock and my friend
Dombey in the City, Sir, you'd do!'



CHAPTER 11.

Paul's Introduction to a New Scene



Mrs Pipchin's constitution was made of such hard metal, in spite of
its liability to the fleshly weaknesses of standing in need of repose
after chops, and of requiring to be coaxed to sleep by the soporific
agency of sweet-breads, that it utterly set at naught the predictions
of Mrs Wickam, and showed no symptoms of decline. Yet, as Paul's rapt
interest in the old lady continued unbated, Mrs Wickam would not budge
an inch from the position she had taken up. Fortifying and entrenching
herself on the strong ground of her Uncle's Betsey Jane, she advised
Miss Berry, as a friend, to prepare herself for the worst; and
forewarned her that her aunt might, at any time, be expected to go off
suddenly, like a powder-mill.

'I hope, Miss Berry,' Mrs Wickam would observe, 'that you'll come
into whatever little property there may be to leave. You deserve it, I
am sure, for yours is a trying life. Though there don't seem much
worth coming into - you'll excuse my being so open - in this dismal
den.'

Poor Berry took it all in good part, and drudged and slaved away as
usual; perfectly convinced that Mrs Pipchin was one of the most
meritorious persons in the world, and making every day innumerable
sacrifices of herself upon the altar of that noble old woman. But all
these immolations of Berry were somehow carried to the credit of Mrs
Pipchin by Mrs Pipchin's friends and admirers; and were made to
harmonise with, and carry out, that melancholy fact of the deceased Mr
Pipchin having broken his heart in the Peruvian mines.

For example, there was an honest grocer and general dealer in the
retail line of business, between whom and Mrs Pipchin there was a
small memorandum book, with a greasy red cover, perpetually in
question, and concerning which divers secret councils and conferences
were continually being held between the parties to that register, on
the mat in the passage, and with closed doors in the parlour. Nor were
there wanting dark hints from Master Bitherstone (whose temper had
been made revengeful by the solar heats of India acting on his blood),
of balances unsettled, and of a failure, on one occasion within his
memory, in the supply of moist sugar at tea-time. This grocer being a
bachelor and not a man who looked upon the surface for beauty, had
once made honourable offers for the hand of Berry, which Mrs Pipchin
had, with contumely and scorn, rejected. Everybody said how laudable
this was in Mrs Pipchin, relict of a man who had died of the Peruvian
mines; and what a staunch, high, independent spirit the old lady had.
But nobody said anything about poor Berry, who cried for six weeks
(being soundly rated by her good aunt all the time), and lapsed into a
state of hopeless spinsterhood.

'Berry's very fond of you, ain't she?' Paul once asked Mrs Pipchin
when they were sitting by the fire with the cat.

'Yes,' said Mrs Pipchin.

'Why?' asked Paul.

'Why!' returned the disconcerted old lady. 'How can you ask such
things, Sir! why are you fond of your sister Florence?'

'Because she's very good,' said Paul. 'There's nobody like
Florence.'

'Well!' retorted Mrs Pipchin, shortly, 'and there's nobody like me,
I suppose.'

'Ain't there really though?' asked Paul, leaning forward in his
chair, and looking at her very hard.

'No,' said the old lady.

'I am glad of that,' observed Paul, rubbing his hands thoughtfully.
'That's a very good thing.'

Mrs Pipchin didn't dare to ask him why, lest she should receive
some perfectly annihilating answer. But as a compensation to her
wounded feelings, she harassed Master Bitherstone to that extent until
bed-time, that he began that very night to make arrangements for an
overland return to India, by secreting from his supper a quarter of a
round of bread and a fragment of moist Dutch cheese, as the beginning
of a stock of provision to support him on the voyage.

Mrs Pipchin had kept watch and ward over little Paul and his sister
for nearly twelve months. They had been home twice, but only for a few
days; and had been constant in their weekly visits to Mr Dombey at the
hotel. By little and little Paul had grown stronger, and had become
able to dispense with his carriage; though he still looked thin and
delicate; and still remained the same old, quiet, dreamy child that he
had been when first consigned to Mrs Pipchin's care. One Saturday
afternoon, at dusk, great consternation was occasioned in the Castle
by the unlooked-for announcement of Mr Dombey as a visitor to Mrs
Pipchin. The population of the parlour was immediately swept upstairs
as on the wings of a whirlwind, and after much slamming of bedroom
doors, and trampling overhead, and some knocking about of Master
Bitherstone by Mrs Pipchin, as a relief to the perturbation of her
spirits, the black bombazeen garments of the worthy old lady darkened
the audience-chamber where Mr Dombey was contemplating the vacant
arm-chair of his son and heir.

'Mrs Pipchin,' said Mr Dombey, 'How do you do?'

'Thank you, Sir,' said Mrs Pipchin, 'I am pretty well,
considering.'

Mrs Pipchin always used that form of words. It meant, considering
her virtues, sacrifices, and so forth.

'I can't expect, Sir, to be very well,' said Mrs Pipchin, taking a
chair and fetching her breath; 'but such health as I have, I am
grateful for.'

Mr Dombey inclined his head with the satisfied air of a patron, who
felt that this was the sort of thing for which he paid so much a
quarter. After a moment's silence he went on to say:

'Mrs Pipchin, I have taken the liberty of calling, to consult you
in reference to my son. I have had it in my mind to do so for some
time past; but have deferred it from time to time, in order that his
health might be thoroughly re-established. You have no misgivings on
that subject, Mrs Pipchin?'

'Brighton has proved very beneficial, Sir,' returned Mrs Pipchin.
'Very beneficial, indeed.'

'I purpose,' said Mr Dombey, 'his remaining at Brighton.'

Mrs Pipchin rubbed her hands, and bent her grey eyes on the fire.

'But,' pursued Mr Dombey, stretching out his forefinger, 'but
possibly that he should now make a change, and lead a different kind
of life here. In short, Mrs Pipchin, that is the object of my visit.
My son is getting on, Mrs Pipchin. Really, he is getting on.'

There was something melancholy in the triumphant air with which Mr
Dombey said this. It showed how long Paul's childish life had been to
him, and how his hopes were set upon a later stage of his existence.
Pity may appear a strange word to connect with anyone so haughty and
so cold, and yet he seemed a worthy subject for it at that moment.

'Six years old!' said Mr Dombey, settling his neckcloth - perhaps
to hide an irrepressible smile that rather seemed to strike upon the
surface of his face and glance away, as finding no resting-place, than
to play there for an instant. 'Dear me, six will be changed to
sixteen, before we have time to look about us.'

'Ten years,' croaked the unsympathetic Pipchin, with a frosty
glistening of her hard grey eye, and a dreary shaking of her bent
head, 'is a long time.'

'It depends on circumstances, returned Mr Dombey; 'at all events,
Mrs Pipchin, my son is six years old, and there is no doubt, I fear,
that in his studies he is behind many children of his age - or his
youth,' said Mr Dombey, quickly answering what he mistrusted was a
shrewd twinkle of the frosty eye, 'his youth is a more appropriate
expression. Now, Mrs Pipchin, instead of being behind his peers, my
son ought to be before them; far before them. There is an eminence
ready for him to mount upon. There is nothing of chance or doubt in
the course before my son. His way in life was clear and prepared, and
marked out before he existed. The education of such a young gentleman
must not be delayed. It must not be left imperfect. It must be very
steadily and seriously undertaken, Mrs Pipchin.'

'Well, Sir,' said Mrs Pipchin, 'I can say nothing to the contrary.'

'I was quite sure, Mrs Pipchin,' returned Mr Dombey, approvingly,
'that a person of your good sense could not, and would not.'

'There is a great deal of nonsense - and worse - talked about young
people not being pressed too hard at first, and being tempted on, and
all the rest of it, Sir,' said Mrs Pipchin, impatiently rubbing her
hooked nose. 'It never was thought of in my time, and it has no
business to be thought of now. My opinion is "keep 'em at it".'

'My good madam,' returned Mr Dombey, 'you have not acquired your
reputation undeservedly; and I beg you to believe, Mrs Pipchin, that I
am more than satisfied with your excellent system of management, and
shall have the greatest pleasure in commending it whenever my poor
commendation - ' Mr Dombey's loftiness when he affected to disparage
his own importance, passed all bounds - 'can be of any service. I have
been thinking of Doctor Blimber's, Mrs Pipchin.'

'My neighbour, Sir?' said Mrs Pipchin. 'I believe the Doctor's is
an excellent establishment. I've heard that it's very strictly
conducted, and there is nothing but learning going on from morning to
night.'

'And it's very expensive,' added Mr Dombey.

'And it's very expensive, Sir,' returned Mrs Pipchin, catching at
the fact, as if in omitting that, she had omitted one of its leading
merits.

'I have had some communication with the Doctor, Mrs Pipchin,' said
Mr Dombey, hitching his chair anxiously a little nearer to the fire,
'and he does not consider Paul at all too young for his purpose. He
mentioned several instances of boys in Greek at about the same age. If
I have any little uneasiness in my own mind, Mrs Pipchin, on the
subject of this change, it is not on that head. My son not having
known a mother has gradually concentrated much - too much - of his
childish affection on his sister. Whether their separation - ' Mr
Dombey said no more, but sat silent.

'Hoity-toity!' exclaimed Mrs Pipchin, shaking out her black
bombazeen skirts, and plucking up all the ogress within her. 'If she
don't like it, Mr Dombey, she must be taught to lump it.' The good
lady apologised immediately afterwards for using so common a figure of
speech, but said (and truly) that that was the way she reasoned with
'em.

Mr Dombey waited until Mrs Pipchin had done bridling and shaking
her head, and frowning down a legion of Bitherstones and Pankeys; and
then said quietly, but correctively, 'He, my good madam, he.'

Mrs Pipchin's system would have applied very much the same mode of
cure to any uneasiness on the part of Paul, too; but as the hard grey
eye was sharp enough to see that the recipe, however Mr Dombey might
admit its efficacy in the case of the daughter, was not a sovereign
remedy for the son, she argued the point; and contended that change,
and new society, and the different form of life he would lead at
Doctor Blimber's, and the studies he would have to master, would very
soon prove sufficient alienations. As this chimed in with Mr Dombey's
own hope and belief, it gave that gentleman a still higher opinion of
Mrs Pipchin's understanding; and as Mrs Pipchin, at the same time,
bewailed the loss of her dear little friend (which was not an
overwhelming shock to her, as she had long expected it, and had not
looked, in the beginning, for his remaining with her longer than three
months), he formed an equally good opinion of Mrs Pipchin's
disinterestedness. It was plain that he had given the subject anxious
consideration, for he had formed a plan, which he announced to the
ogress, of sending Paul to the Doctor's as a weekly boarder for the
first half year, during which time Florence would remain at the
Castle, that she might receive her brother there, on Saturdays. This
would wean him by degrees, Mr Dombey said; possibly with a
recollection of his not having been weaned by degrees on a former
occasion.

Mr Dombey finished the interview by expressing his hope that Mrs
Pipchin would still remain in office as general superintendent and
overseer of his son, pending his studies at Brighton; and having
kissed Paul, and shaken hands with Florence, and beheld Master
Bitherstone in his collar of state, and made Miss Pankey cry by
patting her on the head (in which region she was uncommonly tender, on
account of a habit Mrs Pipchin had of sounding it with her knuckles,
like a cask), he withdrew to his hotel and dinner: resolved that Paul,
now that he was getting so old and well, should begin a vigorous
course of education forthwith, to qualify him for the position in
which he was to shine; and that Doctor Blimber should take him in hand
immediately.

Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he
might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The Doctor only
undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had, always ready,
a supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; and it was
at once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten
with it.

In fact, Doctor Blimber's establishment was a great hot-house, in
which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys
blew before their time. Mental green-peas were produced at Christmas,
and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical
gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and
from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber's cultivation. Every
description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs
of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no
consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to
bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other.

This was all very pleasant and ingenious, but the system of forcing
was attended with its usual disadvantages. There was not the right
taste about the premature productions, and they didn't keep well.
Moreover, one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively
large head (the oldest of the ten who had 'gone through' everything),
suddenly left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a
mere stalk. And people did say that the Doctor had rather overdone it
with young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off
having brains.

There young Toots was, at any rate; possessed of the gruffest of
voices and the shrillest of minds; sticking ornamental pins into his
shirt, and keeping a ring in his waistcoat pocket to put on his little
finger by stealth, when the pupils went out walking; constantly
falling in love by sight with nurserymaids, who had no idea of his
existence; and looking at the gas-lighted world over the little iron
bars in the left-hand corner window of the front three pairs of
stairs, after bed-time, like a greatly overgrown cherub who had sat up
aloft much too long.

The Doctor was a portly gentleman in a suit of black, with strings
at his knees, and stockings below them. He had a bald head, highly
polished; a deep voice; and a chin so very double, that it was a
wonder how he ever managed to shave into the creases. He had likewise
a pair of little eyes that were always half shut up, and a mouth that
was always half expanded into a grin, as if he had, that moment, posed
a boy, and were waiting to convict him from his own lips. Insomuch,
that when the Doctor put his right hand into the breast of his coat,
and with his other hand behind him, and a fly perceptible wag of his
head, made the commonest observation to a nervous stranger, it was
like a sentiment from the sphynx, and settled his business.

The Doctor's was a mighty fine house, fronting the sea. Not a
joyful style of house within, but quite the contrary. Sad-coloured
curtains, whose proportions were spare and lean, hid themselves
despondently behind the windows. The tables and chairs were put away
in rows, like figures in a sum; fires were so rarely lighted in the
rooms of ceremony, that they felt like wells, and a visitor
represented the bucket; the dining-room seemed the last place in the
world where any eating or drinking was likely to occur; there was no
sound through all the house but the ticking of a great clock in the
hall, which made itself audible in the very garrets; and sometimes a
dull cooing of young gentlemen at their lessons, like the murmurings
of an assemblage of melancholy pigeons.

Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft
violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense
about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore
spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of
deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They
must be dead - stone dead - and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a
Ghoul.

Mrs Blimber, her Mama, was not learned herself, but she pretended
to be, and that did quite as well. She said at evening parties, that
if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died
contented. It was the steady joy of her life to see the Doctor's young
gentlemen go out walking, unlike all other young gentlemen, in the
largest possible shirt-collars, and the stiffest possible cravats. It
was so classical, she said.

As to Mr Feeder, B.A., Doctor Blimber's assistant, he was a kind of
human barrel-organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was
continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He
might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early
life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he
had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation
to bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber's young gentlemen. The
young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew
no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage
noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of
exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing
system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three
weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months.
He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in
four; he was an old misanthrope, in five; envied Curtius that blessed
refuge in the earth, in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth
had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards
departed, that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages,
were a mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning
in the world.

But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the Doctor's hothouse, all
the time; and the Doctor's glory and reputation were great, when he
took his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.

Upon the Doctor's door-steps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering
heart, and with his small right hand in his father's. His other hand
was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that
one; and how loose and cold the other!

Mrs Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and
her hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen. She was out of breath - for
Mr Dombey, full of great thoughts, had walked fast - and she croaked
hoarsely as she waited for the opening of the door.

'Now, Paul,' said Mr Dombey, exultingly. 'This is the way indeed to
be Dombey and Son, and have money. You are almost a man already.'

'Almost,' returned the child.

Even his childish agitation could not master the sly and quaint yet
touching look, with which he accompanied the reply.

It brought a vague expression of dissatisfaction into Mr Dombey's
face; but the door being opened, it was quickly gone

'Doctor Blimber is at home, I believe?' said Mr Dombey.

The man said yes; and as they passed in, looked at Paul as if he
were a little mouse, and the house were a trap. He was a weak-eyed
young man, with the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his
countenance. It was mere imbecility; but Mrs Pipchin took it into her
head that it was impudence, and made a snap at him directly.

'How dare you laugh behind the gentleman's back?' said Mrs Pipchin.
'And what do you take me for?'

'I ain't a laughing at nobody, and I'm sure I don't take you for
nothing, Ma'am,' returned the young man, in consternation.

'A pack of idle dogs!' said Mrs Pipchin, 'only fit to be turnspits.
Go and tell your master that Mr Dombey's here, or it'll be worse for
you!'

The weak-eyed young man went, very meekly, to discharge himself of
this commission; and soon came back to invite them to the Doctor's
study.

'You're laughing again, Sir,' said Mrs Pipchin, when it came to her
turn, bringing up the rear, to pass him in the hall.

'I ain't,' returned the young man, grievously oppressed. 'I never
see such a thing as this!'

'What is the matter, Mrs Pipchin?' said Mr Dombey, looking round.
'Softly! Pray!'

Mrs Pipchin, in her deference, merely muttered at the young man as
she passed on, and said, 'Oh! he was a precious fellow' - leaving the
young man, who was all meekness and incapacity, affected even to tears
by the incident. But Mrs Pipchin had a way of falling foul of all meek
people; and her friends said who could wonder at it, after the
Peruvian mines!

The Doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at
each knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on
the mantel-shelf. 'And how do you do, Sir?' he said to Mr Dombey, 'and
how is my little friend?' Grave as an organ was the Doctor's speech;
and when he ceased, the great clock in the hall seemed (to Paul at
least) to take him up, and to go on saying, 'how, is, my, lit, tle,
friend? how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?' over and over and over again.

The little friend being something too small to be seen at all from
where the Doctor sat, over the books on his table, the Doctor made
several futile attempts to get a view of him round the legs; which Mr
Dombey perceiving, relieved the Doctor from his embarrassment by
taking Paul up in his arms, and sitting him on another little table,
over against the Doctor, in the middle of the room.

'Ha!' said the Doctor, leaning back in his chair with his hand in
his breast. 'Now I see my little friend. How do you do, my little
friend?'

The clock in the hall wouldn't subscribe to this alteration in the
form of words, but continued to repeat how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?
how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?'

'Very well, I thank you, Sir,' returned Paul, answering the clock
quite as much as the Doctor.

'Ha!' said Doctor Blimber. 'Shall we make a man of him?'

'Do you hear, Paul?' added Mr Dombey; Paul being silent.

'Shall we make a man of him?' repeated the Doctor.

'I had rather be a child,' replied Paul.

'Indeed!' said the Doctor. 'Why?'

The child sat on the table looking at him, with a curious
expression of suppressed emotion in his face, and beating one hand
proudly on his knee as if he had the rising tears beneath it, and
crushed them. But his other hand strayed a little way the while, a
little farther - farther from him yet - until it lighted on the neck
of Florence. 'This is why,' it seemed to say, and then the steady look
was broken up and gone; the working lip was loosened; and the tears
came streaming forth.

'Mrs Pipchin,' said his father, in a querulous manner, 'I am really
very sorry to see this.'

'Come away from him, do, Miss Dombey,' quoth the matron.

'Never mind,' said the Doctor, blandly nodding his head, to keep
Mrs Pipchin back. 'Never mind; we shall substitute new cares and new
impressions, Mr Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little
friend to acquire - '

'Everything, if you please, Doctor,' returned Mr Dombey, firmly.

'Yes,' said the Doctor, who, with his half-shut eyes, and his usual
smile, seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might
attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff. 'Yes,
exactly. Ha! We shall impart a great variety of information to our
little friend, and bring him quickly forward, I daresay. I daresay.
Quite a virgin soil, I believe you said, Mr Dombey?'

'Except some ordinary preparation at home, and from this lady,'
replied Mr Dombey, introducing Mrs Pipchin, who instantly communicated
a rigidity to her whole muscular system, and snorted defiance
beforehand, in case the Doctor should disparage her; 'except so far,
Paul has, as yet, applied himself to no studies at all.'

Doctor Blimber inclined his head, in gentle tolerance of such
insignificant poaching as Mrs Pipchin's, and said he was glad to hear
it. It was much more satisfactory, he observed, rubbing his hands, to
begin at the foundation. And again he leered at Paul, as if he would
have liked to tackle him with the Greek alphabet, on the spot.

'That circumstance, indeed, Doctor Blimber,' pursued Mr Dombey,
glancing at his little son, 'and the interview I have already had the
pleasure of holding with you, renders any further explanation, and
consequently, any further intrusion on your valuable time, so
unnecessary, that - '

'Now, Miss Dombey!' said the acid Pipchin.

'Permit me,' said the Doctor, 'one moment. Allow me to present Mrs
Blimber and my daughter; who will be associated with the domestic life
of our young Pilgrim to Parnassus Mrs Blimber,' for the lady, who had
perhaps been in waiting, opportunely entered, followed by her
daughter, that fair Sexton in spectacles, 'Mr Dombey. My daughter
Cornelia, Mr Dombey. Mr Dombey, my love,' pursued the Doctor, turning
to his wife, 'is so confiding as to - do you see our little friend?'

Mrs Blimber, in an excess of politeness, of which Mr Dombey was the
object, apparently did not, for she was backing against the little
friend, and very much endangering his position on the table. But, on
this hint, she turned to admire his classical and intellectual
lineaments, and turning again to Mr Dombey, said, with a sigh, that
she envied his dear son.

'Like a bee, Sir,' said Mrs Blimber, with uplifted eyes, 'about to
plunge into a garden of the choicest flowers, and sip the sweets for
the first time Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Plautus, Cicero. What a
world of honey have we here. It may appear remarkable, Mr Dombey, in
one who is a wife - the wife of such a husband - '

'Hush, hush,' said Doctor Blimber. 'Fie for shame.'

'Mr Dombey will forgive the partiality of a wife,' said Mrs
Blimber, with an engaging smile.

Mr Dombey answered 'Not at all:' applying those words, it is to be
presumed, to the partiality, and not to the forgiveness.

'And it may seem remarkable in one who is a mother also,' resumed
Mrs Blimber.

'And such a mother,' observed Mr Dombey, bowing with some confused
idea of being complimentary to Cornelia.

'But really,' pursued Mrs Blimber, 'I think if I could have known
Cicero, and been his friend, and talked with him in his retirement at
Tusculum (beau-ti-ful Tusculum!), I could have died contented.'

A learned enthusiasm is so very contagious, that Mr Dombey half
believed this was exactly his case; and even Mrs Pipchin, who was not,
as we have seen, of an accommodating disposition generally, gave
utterance to a little sound between a groan and a sigh, as if she
would have said that nobody but Cicero could have proved a lasting
consolation under that failure of the Peruvian MInes, but that he
indeed would have been a very Davy-lamp of refuge.

Cornelia looked at Mr Dombey through her spectacles, as if she
would have liked to crack a few quotations with him from the authority
in question. But this design, if she entertained it, was frustrated by
a knock at the room-door.

'Who is that?' said the Doctor. 'Oh! Come in, Toots; come in. Mr
Dombey, Sir.' Toots bowed. 'Quite a coincidence!' said Doctor Blimber.
'Here we have the beginning and the end. Alpha and Omega Our head boy,
Mr Dombey.'

The Doctor might have called him their head and shoulders boy, for
he was at least that much taller than any of the rest. He blushed very
much at finding himself among strangers, and chuckled aloud.

'An addition to our little Portico, Toots,' said the Doctor; 'Mr
Dombey's son.'

Young Toots blushed again; and finding, from a solemn silence which
prevailed, that he was expected to say something, said to Paul, 'How
are you?' in a voice so deep, and a manner so sheepish, that if a lamb
had roared it couldn't have been more surprising.

'Ask Mr Feeder, if you please, Toots,' said the Doctor, 'to prepare
a few introductory volumes for Mr Dombey's son, and to allot him a
convenient seat for study. My dear, I believe Mr Dombey has not seen
the dormitories.'

'If Mr Dombey will walk upstairs,' said Mrs Blimber, 'I shall be
more than proud to show him the dominions of the drowsy god.'

With that, Mrs Blimber, who was a lady of great suavity, and a wiry
figure, and who wore a cap composed of sky-blue materials, pied
upstairs with Mr Dombey and Cornelia; Mrs Pipchin following, and
looking out sharp for her enemy the footman.

While they were gone, Paul sat upon the table, holding Florence by
the hand, and glancing timidly from the Doctor round and round the
room, while the Doctor, leaning back in his chair, with his hand in
his breast as usual, held a book from him at arm's length, and read.
There was something very awful in this manner of reading. It was such
a determined, unimpassioned, inflexible, cold-blooded way of going to
work. It left the Doctor's countenance exposed to view; and when the
Doctor smiled suspiciously at his author, or knit his brows, or shook
his head and made wry faces at him, as much as to say, 'Don't tell me,
Sir; I know better,' it was terrific.

Toots, too, had no business to be outside the door, ostentatiously
examining the wheels in his watch, and counting his half-crowns. But
that didn't last long; for Doctor Blimber, happening to change the
position of his tight plump legs, as if he were going to get up, Toots
swiftly vanished, and appeared no more.

Mr Dombey and his conductress were soon heard coming downstairs
again, talking all the way; and presently they re-entered the Doctor's
study.

'I hope, Mr Dombey,' said the Doctor, laying down his book, 'that
the arrangements meet your approval.'

'They are excellent, Sir,' said Mr Dombey.

'Very fair, indeed,' said Mrs Pipchin, in a low voice; never
disposed to give too much encouragement.

'Mrs Pipchin,' said Mr Dombey, wheeling round, 'will, with your
permission, Doctor and Mrs Blimber, visit Paul now and then.'

'Whenever Mrs Pipchin pleases,' observed the Doctor.

'Always happy to see her,' said Mrs Blimber.

'I think,' said Mr Dombey, 'I have given all the trouble I need,
and may take my leave. Paul, my child,' he went close to him, as he
sat upon the table. 'Good-bye.'

'Good-bye, Papa.'

The limp and careless little hand that Mr Dombey took in his, was
singularly out of keeping with the wistful face. But he had no part in
its sorrowful expression. It was not addressed to him. No, no. To
Florence - all to Florence.

If Mr Dombey in his insolence of wealth, had ever made an enemy,
hard to appease and cruelly vindictive in his hate, even such an enemy
might have received the pang that wrung his proud heart then, as
compensation for his injury.

He bent down, over his boy, and kissed him. If his sight were
dimmed as he did so, by something that for a moment blurred the little
face, and made it indistinct to him, his mental vision may have been,
for that short time, the clearer perhaps.

'I shall see you soon, Paul. You are free on Saturdays and Sundays,
you know.'

'Yes, Papa,' returned Paul: looking at his sister. 'On Saturdays
and Sundays.'

'And you'll try and learn a great deal here, and be a clever man,'
said Mr Dombey; 'won't you?'

'I'll try,' returned the child, wearily.

'And you'll soon be grown up now!' said Mr Dombey.

'Oh! very soon!' replied the child. Once more the old, old look
passed rapidly across his features like a strange light. It fell on
Mrs Pipchin, and extinguished itself in her black dress. That
excellent ogress stepped forward to take leave and to bear off
Florence, which she had long been thirsting to do. The move on her
part roused Mr Dombey, whose eyes were fixed on Paul. After patting
him on the head, and pressing his small hand again, he took leave of
Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber, with his usual polite
frigidity, and walked out of the study.

Despite his entreaty that they would not think of stirring, Doctor
Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber all pressed forward to attend
him to the hall; and thus Mrs Pipchin got into a state of entanglement
with Miss Blimber and the Doctor, and was crowded out of the study
before she could clutch Florence. To which happy accident Paul stood
afterwards indebted for the dear remembrance, that Florence ran back
to throw her arms round his neck, and that hers was the last face in
the doorway: turned towards him with a smile of encouragement, the
brighter for the tears through which it beamed.

It made his childish bosom heave and swell when it was gone; and
sent the globes, the books, blind Homer and Minerva, swimming round
the room. But they stopped, all of a sudden; and then he heard the
loud clock in the hall still gravely inquiring 'how, is, my, lit, tle,
friend? how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?' as it had done before.

He sat, with folded hands, upon his pedestal, silently listening.
But he might have answered 'weary, weary! very lonely, very sad!' And
there, with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so
cold, and bare, and strange, Paul sat as if he had taken life
unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming.



CHAPTER 12.

Paul's Education



After the lapse of some minutes, which appeared an immense time to
little Paul Dombey on the table, Doctor Blimber came back. The
Doctor's walk was stately, and calculated to impress the juvenile mind
with solemn feelings. It was a sort of march; but when the Doctor put
out his right foot, he gravely turned upon his axis, with a
semi-circular sweep towards the left; and when he put out his left
foot, he turned in the same manner towards the right. So that he
seemed, at every stride he took, to look about him as though he were
saying, 'Can anybody have the goodness to indicate any subject, in any
direction, on which I am uninformed? I rather think not'

Mrs Blimber and Miss Blimber came back in the Doctor's company; and
the Doctor, lifting his new pupil off the table, delivered him over to
Miss Blimber.

'Cornelia,' said the Doctor, 'Dombey will be your charge at first.
Bring him on, Cornelia, bring him on.'

Miss Blimber received her young ward from the Doctor's hands; and
Paul, feeling that the spectacles were surveying him, cast down his
eyes.

'How old are you, Dombey?' said Miss Blimber.

'Six,' answered Paul, wondering, as he stole a glance at the young
lady, why her hair didn't grow long like Florence's, and why she was
like a boy.

'How much do you know of your Latin Grammar, Dombey?' said Miss
Blimber.

'None of it,' answered Paul. Feeling that the answer was a shock to
Miss Blimber's sensibility, he looked up at the three faces that were
looking down at him, and said:

'I have'n't been well. I have been a weak child. I couldn't learn a
Latin Grammar when I was out, every day, with old Glubb. I wish you'd
tell old Glubb to come and see me, if you please.'

'What a dreadfully low name' said Mrs Blimber. 'Unclassical to a
degree! Who is the monster, child?'

'What monster?' inquired Paul.

'Glubb,' said Mrs Blimber, with a great disrelish.

'He's no more a monster than you are,' returned Paul.

'What!' cried the Doctor, in a terrible voice. 'Ay, ay, ay? Aha!
What's that?'

Paul was dreadfully frightened; but still he made a stand for the
absent Glubb, though he did it trembling.

'He's a very nice old man, Ma'am,' he said. 'He used to draw my
couch. He knows all about the deep sea, and the fish that are in it,
and the great monsters that come and lie on rocks in the sun, and dive
into the water again when they're startled, blowing and splashing so,
that they can be heard for miles. There are some creatures, said Paul,
warming with his subject, 'I don't know how many yards long, and I
forget their names, but Florence knows, that pretend to be in
distress; and when a man goes near them, out of compassion, they open
their great jaws, and attack him. But all he has got to do,' said
Paul, boldly tendering this information to the very Doctor himself,
'is to keep on turning as he runs away, and then, as they turn slowly,
because they are so long, and can't bend, he's sure to beat them. And
though old Glubb don't know why the sea should make me think of my
Mama that's dead, or what it is that it is always saying - always
saying! he knows a great deal about it. And I wish,' the child
concluded, with a sudden falling of his countenance, and failing in
his animation, as he looked like one forlorn, upon the three strange
faces, 'that you'd let old Glubb come here to see me, for I know him
very well, and he knows me.

'Ha!' said the Doctor, shaking his head; 'this is bad, but study
will do much.'

Mrs Blimber opined, with something like a shiver, that he was an
unaccountable child; and, allowing for the difference of visage,
looked at him pretty much as Mrs Pipchin had been used to do.

'Take him round the house, Cornelia,' said the Doctor, 'and
familiarise him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey.'

Dombey obeyed; giving his hand to the abstruse Cornelia, and
looking at her sideways, with timid curiosity, as they went away
together. For her spectacles, by reason of the glistening of the
glasses, made her so mysterious, that he didn't know where she was
looking, and was not indeed quite sure that she had any eyes at all
behind them.

Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom, which was situated at
the back of the hall, and was approached through two baize doors,
which deadened and muffled the young gentlemen's voices. Here, there
were eight young gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration,
all very hard at work, and very grave indeed. Toots, as an old hand,
had a desk to himself in one corner: and a magnificent man, of immense
age, he looked, in Paul's young eyes, behind it.

Mr Feeder, B.A., who sat at another little desk, had his Virgil
stop on, and was slowly grinding that tune to four young gentlemen. Of
the remaining four, two, who grasped their foreheads convulsively,
were engaged in solving mathematical problems; one with his face like
a dirty window, from much crying, was endeavouring to flounder through
a hopeless number of lines before dinner; and one sat looking at his
task in stony stupefaction and despair - which it seemed had been his
condition ever since breakfast time.

The appearance of a new boy did not create the sensation that might
have been expected. Mr Feeder, B.A. (who was in the habit of shaving
his head for coolness, and had nothing but little bristles on it),
gave him a bony hand, and told him he was glad to see him - which Paul
would have been very glad to have told him, if he could have done so
with the least sincerity. Then Paul, instructed by Cornelia, shook
hands with the four young gentlemen at Mr Feeder's desk; then with the
two young gentlemen at work on the problems, who were very feverish;
then with the young gentleman at work against time, who was very inky;
and lastly with the young gentleman in a state of stupefaction, who
was flabby and quite cold.

Paul having been already introduced to Toots, that pupil merely
chuckled and breathed hard, as his custom was, and pursued the
occupation in which he was engaged. It was not a severe one; for on
account of his having 'gone through' so much (in more senses than
one), and also of his having, as before hinted, left off blowing in
his prime, Toots now had licence to pursue his own course of study:
which was chiefly to write long letters to himself from persons of
distinction, adds 'P. Toots, Esquire, Brighton, Sussex,' and to
preserve them in his desk with great care.

These ceremonies passed, Cornelia led Paul upstairs to the top of
the house; which was rather a slow journey, on account of Paul being
obliged to land both feet on every stair, before he mounted another.
But they reached their journey's end at last; and there, in a front
room, looking over the wild sea, Cornelia showed him a nice little bed
with white hangings, close to the window, on which there was already
beautifully written on a card in round text - down strokes very thick,
and up strokes very fine - DOMBEY; while two other little bedsteads in
the same room were announced, through like means, as respectively
appertaining unto BRIGGS and TOZER.

Just as they got downstairs again into the hall, Paul saw the
weak-eyed young man who had given that mortal offence to Mrs Pipchin,
suddenly seize a very large drumstick, and fly at a gong that was
hanging up, as if he had gone mad, or wanted vengeance. Instead of
receiving warning, however, or being instantly taken into custody, the
young man left off unchecked, after having made a dreadful noise. Then
Cornelia Blimber said to Dombey that dinner would be ready in a
quarter of an hour, and perhaps he had better go into the schoolroom
among his 'friends.'

So Dombey, deferentially passing the great clock which was still as
anxious as ever to know how he found himself, opened the schoolroom
door a very little way, and strayed in like a lost boy: shutting it
after him with some difficulty. His friends were all dispersed about
the room except the stony friend, who remained immoveable. Mr Feeder
was stretching himself in his grey gown, as if, regardless of expense,
he were resolved to pull the sleeves off.

'Heigh ho hum!' cried Mr Feeder, shaking himself like a cart-horse.
'Oh dear me, dear me! Ya-a-a-ah!'

Paul was quite alarmed by Mr Feeder's yawning; it was done on such
a great scale, and he was so terribly in earnest. All the boys too
(Toots excepted) seemed knocked up, and were getting ready for dinner
- some newly tying their neckcloths, which were very stiff indeed; and
others washing their hands or brushing their hair, in an adjoining
ante-chamber - as if they didn't think they should enjoy it at all.

Young Toots who was ready beforehand, and had therefore nothing to
do, and had leisure to bestow upon Paul, said, with heavy good nature:

'Sit down, Dombey.'

'Thank you, Sir,' said Paul.

His endeavouring to hoist himself on to a very high window-seat,
and his slipping down again, appeared to prepare Toots's mind for the
reception of a discovery.

'You're a very small chap;' said Mr Toots.

'Yes, Sir, I'm small,' returned Paul. 'Thank you, Sir.'

For Toots had lifted him into the seat, and done it kindly too.

'Who's your tailor?' inquired Toots, after looking at him for some
moments.

'It's a woman that has made my clothes as yet,' said Paul. 'My
sister's dressmaker.'

'My tailor's Burgess and Co.,' said Toots. 'Fash'nable. But very
dear.'

Paul had wit enough to shake his head, as if he would have said it
was easy to see that; and indeed he thought so.

'Your father's regularly rich, ain't he?' inquired Mr Toots.

'Yes, Sir,' said Paul. 'He's Dombey and Son.'

'And which?' demanded Toots.

'And Son, Sir,' replied Paul.

Mr Toots made one or two attempts, in a low voice, to fix the Firm
in his mind; but not quite succeeding, said he would get Paul to
mention the name again to-morrow morning, as it was rather important.
And indeed he purposed nothing less than writing himself a private and
confidential letter from Dombey and Son immediately.

By this time the other pupils (always excepting the stony boy)
gathered round. They were polite, but pale; and spoke low; and they
were so depressed in their spirits, that in comparison with the
general tone of that company, Master Bitherstone was a perfect Miller,
or complete Jest Book.' And yet he had a sense of injury upon him,
too, had Bitherstone.

'You sleep in my room, don't you?' asked a solemn young gentleman,
whose shirt-collar curled up the lobes of his ears.

'Master Briggs?' inquired Paul.

'Tozer,' said the young gentleman.

Paul answered yes; and Tozer pointing out the stony pupil, said
that was Briggs. Paul had already felt certain that it must be either
Briggs or Tozer, though he didn't know why.

'Is yours a strong constitution?' inquired Tozer.

Paul said he thought not. Tozer replied that he thought not also,
judging from Paul's looks, and that it was a pity, for it need be. He
then asked Paul if he were going to begin with Cornelia; and on Paul
saying 'yes,' all the young gentlemen (Briggs excepted) gave a low
groan.

It was drowned in the tintinnabulation of the gong, which sounding
again with great fury, there was a general move towards the
dining-room; still excepting Briggs the stony boy, who remained where
he was, and as he was; and on its way to whom Paul presently
encountered a round of bread, genteelly served on a plate and napkin,
and with a silver fork lying crosswise on the top of it.

Doctor Blimber was already in his place in the dining-room, at the
top of the table, with Miss Blimber and Mrs Blimber on either side of
him. Mr Feeder in a black coat was at the bottom. Paul's chair was
next to Miss Blimber; but it being found, when he sat in it, that his
eyebrows were not much above the level of the table-cloth, some books
were brought in from the Doctor's study, on which he was elevated, and
on which he always sat from that time - carrying them in and out
himself on after occasions, like a little elephant and castle.'

Grace having been said by the Doctor, dinner began. There was some
nice soup; also roast meat, boiled meat, vegetables, pie, and cheese.
Every young gentleman had a massive silver fork, and a napkin; and all
the arrangements were stately and handsome. In particular, there was a
butler in a blue coat and bright buttons, who gave quite a winey
flavour to the table beer; he poured it out so superbly.

Nobody spoke, unless spoken to, except Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber,
and Miss Blimber, who conversed occasionally. Whenever a young
gentleman was not actually engaged with his knife and fork or spoon,
his eye, with an irresistible attraction, sought the eye of Doctor
Blimber, Mrs Blimber, or Miss Blimber, and modestly rested there.
Toots appeared to be the only exception to this rule. He sat next Mr
Feeder on Paul's side of the table, and frequently looked behind and
before the intervening boys to catch a glimpse of Paul.

Only once during dinner was there any conversation that included
the young gentlemen. It happened at the epoch of the cheese, when the
Doctor, having taken a glass of port wine, and hemmed twice or thrice,
said:

'It is remarkable, Mr Feeder, that the Romans - '

At the mention of this terrible people, their implacable enemies,
every young gentleman fastened his gaze upon the Doctor, with an
assumption of the deepest interest. One of the number who happened to
be drinking, and who caught the Doctor's eye glaring at him through
the side of his tumbler, left off so hastily that he was convulsed for
some moments, and in the sequel ruined Doctor Blimber's point.

'It is remarkable, Mr Feeder,' said the Doctor, beginning again
slowly, 'that the Romans, in those gorgeous and profuse entertainments
of which we read in the days of the Emperors, when luxury had attained
a height unknown before or since, and when whole provinces were
ravaged to supply the splendid means of one Imperial Banquet - '

Here the offender, who had been swelling and straining, and waiting
in vain for a full stop, broke out violently.

'Johnson,' said Mr Feeder, in a low reproachful voice, 'take some
water.'

The Doctor, looking very stern, made a pause until the water was
brought, and then resumed:

'And when, Mr Feeder - '

But Mr Feeder, who saw that Johnson must break out again, and who
knew that the Doctor would never come to a period before the young
gentlemen until he had finished all he meant to say, couldn't keep his
eye off Johnson; and thus was caught in the fact of not looking at the
Doctor, who consequently stopped.

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' said Mr Feeder, reddening. 'I beg your
pardon, Doctor Blimber.'

'And when,' said the Doctor, raising his voice, 'when, Sir, as we
read, and have no reason to doubt - incredible as it may appear to the
vulgar - of our time - the brother of Vitellius prepared for him a
feast, in which were served, of fish, two thousand dishes - '

'Take some water, Johnson - dishes, Sir,' said Mr Feeder.

'Of various sorts of fowl, five thousand dishes.'

'Or try a crust of bread,' said Mr Feeder.

'And one dish,' pursued Doctor Blimber, raising his voice still
higher as he looked all round the table, 'called, from its enormous
dimensions, the Shield of Minerva, and made, among other costly
ingredients, of the brains of pheasants - '

'Ow, ow, ow!' (from Johnson.)

'Woodcocks - '

'Ow, ow, ow!'

'The sounds of the fish called scari - '

'You'll burst some vessel in your head,' said Mr Feeder. 'You had
better let it come.'

'And the spawn of the lamprey, brought from the Carpathian Sea,'
pursued the Doctor, in his severest voice; 'when we read of costly
entertainments such as these, and still remember, that we have a Titus
- '

'What would be your mother's feelings if you died of apoplexy!'
said Mr Feeder.

'A Domitian - '

'And you're blue, you know,' said Mr Feeder.

'A Nero, a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Heliogabalus, and many more,
pursued the Doctor; 'it is, Mr Feeder - if you are doing me the honour
to attend - remarkable; VERY remarkable, Sir - '

But Johnson, unable to suppress it any longer, burst at that moment
into such an overwhelming fit of coughing, that although both his
immediate neighbours thumped him on the back, and Mr Feeder himself
held a glass of water to his lips, and the butler walked him up and
down several times between his own chair and the sideboard, like a
sentry, it was a full five minutes before he was moderately composed.
Then there was a profound silence.

'Gentlemen,' said Doctor Blimber, 'rise for Grace! Cornelia, lift
Dombey down' - nothing of whom but his scalp was accordingly seen
above the tablecloth. 'Johnson will repeat to me tomorrow morning
before breakfast, without book, and from the Greek Testament, the
first chapter of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians. We will
resume our studies, Mr Feeder, in half-an-hour.'

The young gentlemen bowed and withdrew. Mr Feeder did likewise.
During the half-hour, the young gentlemen, broken into pairs, loitered
arm-in-arm up and down a small piece of ground behind the house, or
endeavoured to kindle a spark of animation in the breast of Briggs.
But nothing happened so vulgar as play. Punctually at the appointed
time, the gong was sounded, and the studies, under the joint auspices
of Doctor Blimber and Mr Feeder, were resumed.

As the Olympic game of lounging up and down had been cut shorter
than usual that day, on Johnson's account, they all went out for a
walk before tea. Even Briggs (though he hadn't begun yet) partook of
this dissipation; in the enjoyment of which he looked over the cliff
two or three times darkly. Doctor Blimber accompanied them; and Paul
had the honour of being taken in tow by the Doctor himself: a
distinguished state of things, in which he looked very little and
feeble.

Tea was served in a style no less polite than the dinner; and after
tea, the young gentlemen rising and bowing as before, withdrew to
fetch up the unfinished tasks of that day, or to get up the already
looming tasks of to-morrow. In the meantime Mr Feeder withdrew to his
own room; and Paul sat in a corner wondering whether Florence was
thinking of him, and what they were all about at Mrs Pipchin's.

Mr Toots, who had been detained by an important letter from the
Duke of Wellington, found Paul out after a time; and having looked at
him for a long while, as before, inquired if he was fond of
waistcoats.

Paul said 'Yes, Sir.'

'So am I,' said Toots.

No word more spoke Toots that night; but he stood looking at Paul
as if he liked him; and as there was company in that, and Paul was not
inclined to talk, it answered his purpose better than conversation.

At eight o'clock or so, the gong sounded again for prayers in the
dining-room, where the butler afterwards presided over a side-table,
on which bread and cheese and beer were spread for such young
gentlemen as desired to partake of those refreshments. The ceremonies
concluded by the Doctor's saying, 'Gentlemen, we will resume our
studies at seven to-morrow;' and then, for the first time, Paul saw
Cornelia Blimber's eye, and saw that it was upon him. When the Doctor
had said these words, 'Gentlemen, we will resume our studies at seven
tomorrow,' the pupils bowed again, and went to bed.

In the confidence of their own room upstairs, Briggs said his head
ached ready to split, and that he should wish himself dead if it
wasn't for his mother, and a blackbird he had at home Tozer didn't say
much, but he sighed a good deal, and told Paul to look out, for his
turn would come to-morrow. After uttering those prophetic words, he
undressed himself moodily, and got into bed. Briggs was in his bed
too, and Paul in his bed too, before the weak-eyed young man appeared
to take away the candle, when he wished them good-night and pleasant
dreams. But his benevolent wishes were in vain, as far as Briggs and
Tozer were concerned; for Paul, who lay awake for a long while, and
often woke afterwards, found that Briggs was ridden by his lesson as a
nightmare: and that Tozer, whose mind was affected in his sleep by
similar causes, in a minor degree talked unknown tongues, or scraps of
Greek and Latin - it was all one to Paul- which, in the silence of
night, had an inexpressibly wicked and guilty effect.

Paul had sunk into a sweet sleep, and dreamed that he was walking
hand in hand with Florence through beautiful gardens, when they came
to a large sunflower which suddenly expanded itself into a gong, and
began to sound. Opening his eyes, he found that it was a dark, windy
morning, with a drizzling rain: and that the real gong was giving
dreadful note of preparation, down in the hall.

So he got up directly, and found Briggs with hardly any eyes, for
nightmare and grief had made his face puffy, putting his boots on:
while Tozer stood shivering and rubbing his shoulders in a very bad
humour. Poor Paul couldn't dress himself easily, not being used to it,
and asked them if they would have the goodness to tie some strings for
him; but as Briggs merely said 'Bother!' and Tozer, 'Oh yes!' he went
down when he was otherwise ready, to the next storey, where he saw a
pretty young woman in leather gloves, cleaning a stove. The young
woman seemed surprised at his appearance, and asked him where his
mother was. When Paul told her she was dead, she took her gloves off,
and did what he wanted; and furthermore rubbed his hands to warm them;
and gave him a kiss; and told him whenever he wanted anything of that
sort - meaning in the dressing way - to ask for 'Melia; which Paul,
thanking her very much, said he certainly would. He then proceeded
softly on his journey downstairs, towards the room in which the young
gentlemen resumed their studies, when, passing by a door that stood
ajar, a voice from within cried, 'Is that Dombey?' On Paul replying,
'Yes, Ma'am:' for he knew the voice to be Miss Blimber's: Miss Blimber
said, 'Come in, Dombey.' And in he went. Miss Blimber presented
exactly the appearance she had presented yesterday, except that she
wore a shawl. Her little light curls were as crisp as ever, and she
had already her spectacles on, which made Paul wonder whether she went
to bed in them. She had a cool little sitting-room of her own up
there, with some books in it, and no fire But Miss Blimber was never
cold, and never sleepy.

Now, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber, 'I am going out for a
constitutional.'

Paul wondered what that was, and why she didn't send the footman
out to get it in such unfavourable weather. But he made no observation
on the subject: his attention being devoted to a little pile of new
books, on which Miss Blimber appeared to have been recently engaged.

'These are yours, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber.

'All of 'em, Ma'am?' said Paul.

'Yes,' returned Miss Blimber; 'and Mr Feeder will look you out some
more very soon, if you are as studious as I expect you will be,
Dombey.'

'Thank you, Ma'am,' said Paul.

'I am going out for a constitutional,' resumed Miss Blimber; 'and
while I am gone, that is to say in the interval between this and
breakfast, Dombey, I wish you to read over what I have marked in these
books, and to tell me if you quite understand what you have got to
learn. Don't lose time, Dombey, for you have none to spare, but take
them downstairs, and begin directly.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' answered Paul.

There were so many of them, that although Paul put one hand under
the bottom book and his other hand and his chin on the top book, and
hugged them all closely, the middle book slipped out before he reached
the door, and then they all tumbled down on the floor. Miss Blimber
said, 'Oh, Dombey, Dombey, this is really very careless!' and piled
them up afresh for him; and this time, by dint of balancing them with
great nicety, Paul got out of the room, and down a few stairs before
two of them escaped again. But he held the rest so tight, that he only
left one more on the first floor, and one in the passage; and when he
had got the main body down into the schoolroom, he set off upstairs
again to collect the stragglers. Having at last amassed the whole
library, and climbed into his place, he fell to work, encouraged by a
remark from Tozer to the effect that he 'was in for it now;' which was
the only interruption he received till breakfast time. At that meal,
for which he had no appetite, everything was quite as solemn and
genteel as at the others; and when it was finished, he followed Miss
Blimber upstairs.

'Now, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber. 'How have you got on with those
books?'

They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin - names of
things, declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon,
and preliminary rules - a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient
history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three
weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul
had spelt out number two, he found he had no idea of number one;
fragments whereof afterwards obtruded themselves into number three,
which slided into number four, which grafted itself on to number two.
So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was
troy weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three
times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.

'Oh, Dombey, Dombey!' said Miss Blimber, 'this is very shocking.'

'If you please,' said Paul, 'I think if I might sometimes talk a
little to old Glubb, I should be able to do better.'

'Nonsense, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber. 'I couldn't hear of it. This
is not the place for Glubbs of any kind. You must take the books down,
I suppose, Dombey, one by one, and perfect yourself in the day's
instalment of subject A, before you turn at all to subject B. I am
sorry to say, Dombey, that your education appears to have been very
much neglected.'

'So Papa says,' returned Paul; 'but I told you - I have been a weak
child. Florence knows I have. So does Wickam.'

'Who is Wickam?' asked Miss Blimber.

'She has been my nurse,' Paul answered.

'I must beg you not to mention Wickam to me, then,' said Miss
Blimber.'I couldn't allow it'.

'You asked me who she was,' said Paul.

'Very well,' returned Miss Blimber; 'but this is all very different
indeed from anything of that sort, Dombey, and I couldn't think of
permitting it. As to having been weak, you must begin to be strong.
And now take away the top book, if you please, Dombey, and return when
you are master of the theme.'

Miss Blimber expressed her opinions on the subject of Paul's
uninstructed state with a gloomy delight, as if she had expected this
result, and were glad to find that they must be in constant
communication. Paul withdrew with the top task, as he was told, and
laboured away at it, down below: sometimes remembering every word of
it, and sometimes forgetting it all, and everything else besides:
until at last he ventured upstairs again to repeat the lesson, when it
was nearly all driven out of his head before he began, by Miss
Blimber's shutting up the book, and saying, 'Good, Dombey!' a
proceeding so suggestive of the knowledge inside of her, that Paul
looked upon the young lady with consternation, as a kind of learned
Guy Faux, or artificial Bogle, stuffed full of scholastic straw.

He acquitted himself very well, nevertheless; and Miss Blimber,
commending him as giving promise of getting on fast, immediately
provided him with subject B; from which he passed to C, and even D
before dinner. It was hard work, resuming his studies, soon after
dinner; and he felt giddy and confused and drowsy and dull. But all
the other young gentlemen had similar sensations, and were obliged to
resume their studies too, if there were any comfort in that. It was a
wonder that the great clock in the hall, instead of being constant to
its first inquiry, never said, 'Gentlemen, we will now resume our
studies,' for that phrase was often enough repeated in its
neighbourhood. The studies went round like a mighty wheel, and the
young gentlemen were always stretched upon it.

After tea there were exercises again, and preparations for next day
by candlelight. And in due course there was bed; where, but for that
resumption of the studies which took place in dreams, were rest and
sweet forgetfulness.

Oh Saturdays! Oh happy Saturdays, when Florence always came at
noon, and never would, in any weather, stay away, though Mrs Pipchin
snarled and growled, and worried her bitterly. Those Saturdays were
Sabbaths for at least two little Christians among all the Jews, and
did the holy Sabbath work of strengthening and knitting up a brother's
and a sister's love.

Not even Sunday nights - the heavy Sunday nights, whose shadow
darkened the first waking burst of light on Sunday mornings - could
mar those precious Saturdays. Whether it was the great sea-shore,
where they sat, and strolled together; or whether it was only Mrs
Pipchin's dull back room, in which she sang to him so softly, with his
drowsy head upon her arm; Paul never cared. It was Florence. That was
all he thought of. So, on Sunday nights, when the Doctor's dark door
stood agape to swallow him up for another week, the time was come for
taking leave of Florence; no one else.

Mrs Wickam had been drafted home to the house in town, and Miss
Nipper, now a smart young woman, had come down. To many a single
combat with Mrs Pipchin, did Miss Nipper gallantly devote herself, and
if ever Mrs Pipchin in all her life had found her match, she had found
it now. Miss Nipper threw away the scabbard the first morning she
arose in Mrs Pipchin's house. She asked and gave no quarter. She said
it must be war, and war it was; and Mrs Pipchin lived from that time
in the midst of surprises, harassings, and defiances, and skirmishing
attacks that came bouncing in upon her from the passage, even in
unguarded moments of chops, and carried desolation to her very toast.

Miss Nipper had returned one Sunday night with Florence, from
walking back with Paul to the Doctor's, when Florence took from her
bosom a little piece of paper, on which she had pencilled down some
words.

'See here, Susan,' she said. 'These are the names of the little
books that Paul brings home to do those long exercises with, when he
is so tired. I copied them last night while he was writing.'

'Don't show 'em to me, Miss Floy, if you please,' returned Nipper,
'I'd as soon see Mrs Pipchin.'

'I want you to buy them for me, Susan, if you will, tomorrow
morning. I have money enough,' said Florence.

'Why, goodness gracious me, Miss Floy,' returned Miss Nipper, 'how
can you talk like that, when you have books upon books already, and
masterses and mississes a teaching of you everything continual, though
my belief is that your Pa, Miss Dombey, never would have learnt you
nothing, never would have thought of it, unless you'd asked him - when
be couldn't well refuse; but giving consent when asked, and offering
when unasked, Miss, is quite two things; I may not have my objections
to a young man's keeping company with me, and when he puts the
question, may say "yes," but that's not saying "would you be so kind
as like me."'

'But you can buy me the books, Susan; and you will, when you know
why I want them.'

'Well, Miss, and why do you want 'em?' replied Nipper; adding, in a
lower voice, 'If it was to fling at Mrs Pipchin's head, I'd buy a
cart-load.'

'Paul has a great deal too much to do, Susan,' said Florence, 'I am
sure of it.'

'And well you may be, Miss,' returned her maid, 'and make your mind
quite easy that the willing dear is worked and worked away. If those
is Latin legs,' exclaimed Miss Nipper, with strong feeling - in
allusion to Paul's; 'give me English ones.'

'I am afraid he feels lonely and lost at Doctor Blimber's, Susan,'
pursued Florence, turning away her face.

'Ah,' said Miss Nipper, with great sharpness, 'Oh, them "Blimbers"'

'Don't blame anyone,' said Florence. 'It's a mistake.'

'I say nothing about blame, Miss,' cried Miss Nipper, 'for I know
that you object, but I may wish, Miss, that the family was set to work
to make new roads, and that Miss Blimber went in front and had the
pickaxe.'

After this speech, Miss Nipper, who was perfectly serious, wiped
her eyes.

'I think I could perhaps give Paul some help, Susan, if I had these
books,' said Florence, 'and make the coming week a little easier to
him. At least I want to try. So buy them for me, dear, and I will
never forget how kind it was of you to do it!'

It must have been a harder heart than Susan Nipper's that could
have rejected the little purse Florence held out with these words, or
the gentle look of entreaty with which she seconded her petition.
Susan put the purse in her pocket without reply, and trotted out at
once upon her errand.

The books were not easy to procure; and the answer at several shops
was, either that they were just out of them, or that they never kept
them, or that they had had a great many last month, or that they
expected a great many next week But Susan was not easily baffled in
such an enterprise; and having entrapped a white-haired youth, in a
black calico apron, from a library where she was known, to accompany
her in her quest, she led him such a life in going up and down, that
he exerted himself to the utmost, if it were only to get rid of her;
and finally enabled her to return home in triumph.

With these treasures then, after her own daily lessons were over,
Florence sat down at night to track Paul's footsteps through the
thorny ways of learning; and being possessed of a naturally quick and
sound capacity, and taught by that most wonderful of masters, love, it
was not long before she gained upon Paul's heels, and caught and
passed him.

Not a word of this was breathed to Mrs Pipchin: but many a night
when they were all in bed, and when Miss Nipper, with her hair in
papers and herself asleep in some uncomfortable attitude, reposed
unconscious by her side; and when the chinking ashes in the grate were
cold and grey; and when the candles were burnt down and guttering out;
- Florence tried so hard to be a substitute for one small Dombey, that
her fortitude and perseverance might have almost won her a free right
to bear the name herself.

And high was her reward, when one Saturday evening, as little Paul
was sitting down as usual to 'resume his studies,' she sat down by his
side, and showed him all that was so rough, made smooth, and all that
was so dark, made clear and plain, before him. It was nothing but a
startled look in Paul's wan face - a flush - a smile - and then a
close embrace - but God knows how her heart leapt up at this rich
payment for her trouble.

'Oh, Floy!' cried her brother, 'how I love you! How I love you,
Floy!'

'And I you, dear!'

'Oh! I am sure of that, Floy.'

He said no more about it, but all that evening sat close by her,
very quiet; and in the night he called out from his little room within
hers, three or four times, that he loved her.

Regularly, after that, Florence was prepared to sit down with Paul
on Saturday night, and patiently assist him through so much as they
could anticipate together of his next week's work. The cheering
thought that he was labouring on where Florence had just toiled before
him, would, of itself, have been a stimulant to Paul in the perpetual
resumption of his studies; but coupled with the actual lightening of
his load, consequent on this assistance, it saved him, possibly, from
sinking underneath the burden which the fair Cornelia Blimber piled
upon his back.

It was not that Miss Blimber meant to be too hard upon him, or that
Doctor Blimber meant to bear too heavily on the young gentlemen in
general. Cornelia merely held the faith in which she had been bred;
and the Doctor, in some partial confusion of his ideas, regarded the
young gentlemen as if they were all Doctors, and were born grown up.
Comforted by the applause of the young gentlemen's nearest relations,
and urged on by their blind vanity and ill-considered haste, it would
have been strange if Doctor Blimber had discovered his mistake, or
trimmed his swelling sails to any other tack.

Thus in the case of Paul. When Doctor Blimber said he made great
progress and was naturally clever, Mr Dombey was more bent than ever
on his being forced and crammed. In the case of Briggs, when Doctor
Blimber reported that he did not make great progress yet, and was not
naturally clever, Briggs senior was inexorable in the same purpose. In
short, however high and false the temperature at which the Doctor kept
his hothouse, the owners of the plants were always ready to lend a
helping hand at the bellows, and to stir the fire.

Such spirits as he had in the outset, Paul soon lost of course. But
he retained all that was strange, and old, and thoughtful in his
character: and under circumstances so favourable to the development of
those tendencies, became even more strange, and old, and thoughtful,
than before.

The only difference was, that he kept his character to himself. He
grew more thoughtful and reserved, every day; and had no such
curiosity in any living member of the Doctor's household, as he had
had in Mrs Pipchin. He loved to be alone; and in those short intervals
when he was not occupied with his books, liked nothing so well as
wandering about the house by himself, or sitting on the stairs,
listening to the great clock in the hall. He was intimate with all the
paperhanging in the house; saw things that no one else saw in the
patterns; found out miniature tigers and lions running up the bedroom
walls, and squinting faces leering in the squares and diamonds of the
floor-cloth.

The solitary child lived on, surrounded by this arabesque work of
his musing fancy, and no one understood him. Mrs Blimber thought him
'odd,' and sometimes the servants said among themselves that little
Dombey 'moped;' but that was all.

Unless young Toots had some idea on the subject, to the expression
of which he was wholly unequal. Ideas, like ghosts (according to the
common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before they will
explain themselves; and Toots had long left off asking any questions
of his own mind. Some mist there may have been, issuing from that
leaden casket, his cranium, which, if it could have taken shape and
form, would have become a genie; but it could not; and it only so far
followed the example of the smoke in the Arabian story, as to roll out
in a thick cloud, and there hang and hover. But it left a little
figure visible upon a lonely shore, and Toots was always staring at
it.

'How are you?' he would say to Paul, fifty times a day. 'Quite
well, Sir, thank you,' Paul would answer. 'Shake hands,' would be
Toots's next advance.

Which Paul, of course, would immediately do. Mr Toots generally
said again, after a long interval of staring and hard breathing, 'How
are you?' To which Paul again replied, 'Quite well, Sir, thank you.'

One evening Mr Toots was sitting at his desk, oppressed by
correspondence, when a great purpose seemed to flash upon him. He laid
down his pen, and went off to seek Paul, whom he found at last, after
a long search, looking through the window of his little bedroom.

'I say!' cried Toots, speaking the moment he entered the room, lest
he should forget it; 'what do you think about?'

'Oh! I think about a great many things,' replied Paul.

'Do you, though?' said Toots, appearing to consider that fact in
itself surprising. 'If you had to die,' said Paul, looking up into his
face - Mr Toots started, and seemed much disturbed.

'Don't you think you would rather die on a moonlight night, when
the sky was quite clear, and the wind blowing, as it did last night?'

Mr Toots said, looking doubtfully at Paul, and shaking his head,
that he didn't know about that.

'Not blowing, at least,' said Paul, 'but sounding in the air like
the sea sounds in the shells. It was a beautiful night. When I had
listened to the water for a long time, I got up and looked out. There
was a boat over there, in the full light of the moon; a boat with a
sail.'

The child looked at him so steadfastly, and spoke so earnestly,
that Mr Toots, feeling himself called upon to say something about this
boat, said, 'Smugglers.' But with an impartial remembrance of there
being two sides to every question, he added, 'or Preventive.'

'A boat with a sail,' repeated Paul, 'in the full light of the
moon. The sail like an arm, all silver. It went away into the
distance, and what do you think it seemed to do as it moved with the
waves?'

'Pitch,' said Mr Toots.

'It seemed to beckon,' said the child, 'to beckon me to come! -
There she is! There she is!'

Toots was almost beside himself with dismay at this sudden
exclamation, after what had gone before, and cried 'Who?'

'My sister Florence!' cried Paul, 'looking up here, and waving her
hand. She sees me - she sees me! Good-night, dear, good-night,
good-night.'

His quick transition to a state of unbounded pleasure, as he stood
at his window, kissing and clapping his hands: and the way in which
the light retreated from his features as she passed out of his view,
and left a patient melancholy on the little face: were too remarkable
wholly to escape even Toots's notice. Their interview being
interrupted at this moment by a visit from Mrs Pipchin, who usually
brought her black skirts to bear upon Paul just before dusk, once or
twice a week, Toots had no opportunity of improving the occasion: but
it left so marked an impression on his mind that he twice returned,
after having exchanged the usual salutations, to ask Mrs Pipchin how
she did. This the irascible old lady conceived to be a deeply devised
and long-meditated insult, originating in the diabolical invention of
the weak-eyed young man downstairs, against whom she accordingly
lodged a formal complaint with Doctor Blimber that very night; who
mentioned to the young man that if he ever did it again, he should be
obliged to part with him.

The evenings being longer now, Paul stole up to his window every
evening to look out for Florence. She always passed and repassed at a
certain time, until she saw him; and their mutual recognition was a
gleam of sunshine in Paul's daily life. Often after dark, one other
figure walked alone before the Doctor's house. He rarely joined them
on the Saturdays now. He could not bear it. He would rather come
unrecognised, and look up at the windows where his son was qualifying
for a man; and wait, and watch, and plan, and hope.

Oh! could he but have seen, or seen as others did, the slight spare
boy above, watching the waves and clouds at twilight, with his earnest
eyes, and breasting the window of his solitary cage when birds flew
by, as if he would have emulated them, and soared away!



CHAPTER 13.

Shipping Intelligence and Office Business



Mr Dombey's offices were in a court where there was an
old-established stall of choice fruit at the corner: where
perambulating merchants, of both sexes, offered for sale at any time
between the hours of ten and five, slippers, pocket-books, sponges,
dogs' collars, and Windsor soap; and sometimes a pointer or an
oil-painting.

The pointer always came that way, with a view to the Stock
Exchange, where a sporting taste (originating generally in bets of new
hats) is much in vogue. The other commodities were addressed to the
general public; but they were never offered by the vendors to Mr
Dombey. When he appeared, the dealers in those wares fell off
respectfully. The principal slipper and dogs' collar man - who
considered himself a public character, and whose portrait was screwed
on to an artist's door in Cheapside - threw up his forefinger to the
brim of his hat as Mr Dombey went by. The ticket-porter, if he were
not absent on a job, always ran officiously before, to open Mr
Dombey's office door as wide as possible, and hold it open, with his
hat off, while he entered.

The clerks within were not a whit behind-hand in their
demonstrations of respect. A solemn hush prevailed, as Mr Dombey
passed through the outer office. The wit of the Counting-House became
in a moment as mute as the row of leathern fire-buckets hanging up
behind him. Such vapid and flat daylight as filtered through the
ground-glass windows and skylights, leaving a black sediment upon the
panes, showed the books and papers, and the figures bending over them,
enveloped in a studious gloom, and as much abstracted in appearance,
from the world without, as if they were assembled at the bottom of the
sea; while a mouldy little strong room in the obscure perspective,
where a shaded lamp was always burning, might have represented the
cavern of some ocean monster, looking on with a red eye at these
mysteries of the deep.

When Perch the messenger, whose place was on a little bracket, like
a timepiece, saw Mr Dombey come in - or rather when he felt that he
was coming, for he had usually an instinctive sense of his approach -
he hurried into Mr Dombey's room, stirred the fire, carried fresh
coals from the bowels of the coal-box, hung the newspaper to air upon
the fender, put the chair ready, and the screen in its place, and was
round upon his heel on the instant of Mr Dombey's entrance, to take
his great-coat and hat, and hang them up. Then Perch took the
newspaper, and gave it a turn or two in his hands before the fire, and
laid it, deferentially, at Mr Dombey's elbow. And so little objection
had Perch to being deferential in the last degree, that if he might
have laid himself at Mr Dombey's feet, or might have called him by
some such title as used to be bestowed upon the Caliph Haroun
Alraschid, he would have been all the better pleased.

As this honour would have been an innovation and an experiment,
Perch was fain to content himself by expressing as well as he could,
in his manner, You are the light of my Eyes. You are the Breath of my
Soul. You are the commander of the Faithful Perch! With this imperfect
happiness to cheer him, he would shut the door softly, walk away on
tiptoe, and leave his great chief to be stared at, through a
dome-shaped window in the leads, by ugly chimney-pots and backs of
houses, and especially by the bold window of a hair-cutting saloon on
a first floor, where a waxen effigy, bald as a Mussulman in the
morning, and covered, after eleven o'clock in the day, with luxuriant
hair and whiskers in the latest Christian fashion, showed him the
wrong side of its head for ever.

Between Mr Dombey and the common world, as it was accessible
through the medium of the outer office - to which Mr Dombey's presence
in his own room may be said to have struck like damp, or cold air -
there were two degrees of descent. Mr Carker in his own office was the
first step; Mr Morfin, in his own office, was the second. Each of
these gentlemen occupied a little chamber like a bath-room, opening
from the passage outside Mr Dombey's door. Mr Carker, as Grand Vizier,
inhabited the room that was nearest to the Sultan. Mr Morfin, as an
officer of inferior state, inhabited the room that was nearest to the
clerks.

The gentleman last mentioned was a cheerful-looking, hazel-eyed
elderly bachelor: gravely attired, as to his upper man, in black; and
as to his legs, in pepper-and-salt colour. His dark hair was just
touched here and there with specks of gray, as though the tread of
Time had splashed it; and his whiskers were already white. He had a
mighty respect for Mr Dombey, and rendered him due homage; but as he
was of a genial temper himself, and never wholly at his ease in that
stately presence, he was disquieted by no jealousy of the many
conferences enjoyed by Mr Carker, and felt a secret satisfaction in
having duties to discharge, which rarely exposed him to be singled out
for such distinction. He was a great musical amateur in his way -
after business; and had a paternal affection for his violoncello,
which was once in every week transported from Islington, his place of
abode, to a certain club-room hard by the Bank, where quartettes of
the most tormenting and excruciating nature were executed every
Wednesday evening by a private party.

Mr Carker was a gentleman thirty-eight or forty years old, of a
florid complexion, and with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth,
whose regularity and whiteness were quite distressing. It was
impossible to escape the observation of them, for he showed them
whenever he spoke; and bore so wide a smile upon his countenance (a
smile, however, very rarely, indeed, extending beyond his mouth), that
there was something in it like the snarl of a cat. He affected a stiff
white cravat, after the example of his principal, and was always
closely buttoned up and tightly dressed. His manner towards Mr Dombey
was deeply conceived and perfectly expressed. He was familiar with
him, in the very extremity of his sense of the distance between them.
'Mr Dombey, to a man in your position from a man in mine, there is no
show of subservience compatible with the transaction of business
between us, that I should think sufficient. I frankly tell you, Sir, I
give it up altogether. I feel that I could not satisfy my own mind;
and Heaven knows, Mr Dombey, you can afford to dispense with the
endeavour.' If he had carried these words about with him printed on a
placard, and had constantly offered it to Mr Dombey's perusal on the
breast of his coat, he could not have been more explicit than he was.

This was Carker the Manager. Mr Carker the Junior, Walter's friend,
was his brother; two or three years older than he, but widely removed
in station. The younger brother's post was on the top of the official
ladder; the elder brother's at the bottom. The elder brother never
gained a stave, or raised his foot to mount one. Young men passed
above his head, and rose and rose; but he was always at the bottom. He
was quite resigned to occupy that low condition: never complained of
it: and certainly never hoped to escape from it.

'How do you do this morning?' said Mr Carker the Manager, entering
Mr Dombey's room soon after his arrival one day: with a bundle of
papers in his hand.

'How do you do, Carker?' said Mr Dombey.

'Coolish!' observed Carker, stirring the fire.

'Rather,' said Mr Dombey.

'Any news of the young gentleman who is so important to us all?'
asked Carker, with his whole regiment of teeth on parade.

'Yes - not direct news- I hear he's very well,' said Mr Dombey. Who
had come from Brighton over-night. But no one knew It.

'Very well, and becoming a great scholar, no doubt?' observed the
Manager.

'I hope so,' returned Mr Dombey.

'Egad!' said Mr Carker, shaking his head, 'Time flies!'

'I think so, sometimes,' returned Mr Dombey, glancing at his
newspaper.

'Oh! You! You have no reason to think so,' observed Carker. 'One
who sits on such an elevation as yours, and can sit there, unmoved, in
all seasons - hasn't much reason to know anything about the flight of
time. It's men like myself, who are low down and are not superior in
circumstances, and who inherit new masters in the course of Time, that
have cause to look about us. I shall have a rising sun to worship,
soon.'

'Time enough, time enough, Carker!' said Mr Dombey, rising from his
chair, and standing with his back to the fire. 'Have you anything
there for me?'

'I don't know that I need trouble you,' returned Carker, turning
over the papers in his hand. 'You have a committee today at three, you
know.'

'And one at three, three-quarters,' added Mr Dombey.

'Catch you forgetting anything!' exclaimed Carker, still turning
over his papers. 'If Mr Paul inherits your memory, he'll be a
troublesome customer in the House. One of you is enough'

'You have an accurate memory of your own,' said Mr Dombey.

'Oh! I!' returned the manager. 'It's the only capital of a man like
me.'

Mr Dombey did not look less pompous or at all displeased, as he
stood leaning against the chimney-piece, surveying his (of course
unconscious) clerk, from head to foot. The stiffness and nicety of Mr
Carker's dress, and a certain arrogance of manner, either natural to
him or imitated from a pattern not far off, gave great additional
effect to his humility. He seemed a man who would contend against the
power that vanquished him, if he could, but who was utterly borne down
by the greatness and superiority of Mr Dombey.

'Is Morfin here?' asked Mr Dombey after a short pause, during which
Mr Carker had been fluttering his papers, and muttering little
abstracts of their contents to himself.

'Morfin's here,' he answered, looking up with his widest and almost
sudden smile; 'humming musical recollections - of his last night's
quartette party, I suppose - through the walls between us, and driving
me half mad. I wish he'd make a bonfire of his violoncello, and burn
his music-books in it.'

'You respect nobody, Carker, I think,' said Mr Dombey.

'No?' inquired Carker, with another wide and most feline show of
his teeth. 'Well! Not many people, I believe. I wouldn't answer
perhaps,' he murmured, as if he were only thinking it, 'for more than
one.'

A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if
feigned. But Mr Dombey hardly seemed to think so, as he still stood
with his back to the fire, drawn up to his full height, and looking at
his head-clerk with a dignified composure, in which there seemed to
lurk a stronger latent sense of power than usual.

'Talking of Morfin,' resumed Mr Carker, taking out one paper from
the rest, 'he reports a junior dead in the agency at Barbados, and
proposes to reserve a passage in the Son and Heir - she'll sail in a
month or so - for the successor. You don't care who goes, I suppose?
We have nobody of that sort here.'

Mr Dombey shook his head with supreme indifference.

'It's no very precious appointment,' observed Mr Carker, taking up
a pen, with which to endorse a memorandum on the back of the paper. 'I
hope he may bestow it on some orphan nephew of a musical friend. It
may perhaps stop his fiddle-playing, if he has a gift that way. Who's
that? Come in!'

'I beg your pardon, Mr Carker. I didn't know you were here, Sir,'
answered Walter; appearing with some letters in his hand, unopened,
and newly arrived. 'Mr Carker the junior, Sir - '

At the mention of this name, Mr Carker the Manager was or affected
to be, touched to the quick with shame and humiliation. He cast his
eyes full on Mr Dombey with an altered and apologetic look, abased
them on the ground, and remained for a moment without speaking.

'I thought, Sir,' he said suddenly and angrily, turning on Walter,
'that you had been before requested not to drag Mr Carker the Junior
into your conversation.'

'I beg your pardon,' returned Walter. 'I was only going to say that
Mr Carker the Junior had told me he believed you were gone out, or I
should not have knocked at the door when you were engaged with Mr
Dombey. These are letters for Mr Dombey, Sir.'

'Very well, Sir,' returned Mr Carker the Manager, plucking them
sharply from his hand. 'Go about your business.'

But in taking them with so little ceremony, Mr Carker dropped one
on the floor, and did not see what he had done; neither did Mr Dombey
observe the letter lying near his feet. Walter hesitated for a moment,
thinking that one or other of them would notice it; but finding that
neither did, he stopped, came back, picked it up, and laid it himself
on Mr Dombey's desk. The letters were post-letters; and it happened
that the one in question was Mrs Pipchin's regular report, directed as
usual - for Mrs Pipchin was but an indifferent penwoman - by Florence.
Mr Dombey, having his attention silently called to this letter by
Walter, started, and looked fiercely at him, as if he believed that he
had purposely selected it from all the rest.

'You can leave the room, Sir!' said Mr Dombey, haughtily.

He crushed the letter in his hand; and having watched Walter out at
the door, put it in his pocket without breaking the seal.

'These continual references to Mr Carker the Junior,' Mr Carker the
Manager began, as soon as they were alone, 'are, to a man in my
position, uttered before one in yours, so unspeakably distressing - '

'Nonsense, Carker,' Mr Dombey interrupted. 'You are too sensitive.'

'I am sensitive,' he returned. 'If one in your position could by
any possibility imagine yourself in my place: which you cannot: you
would be so too.'

As Mr Dombey's thoughts were evidently pursuing some other subject,
his discreet ally broke off here, and stood with his teeth ready to
present to him, when he should look up.

'You want somebody to send to the West Indies, you were saying,'
observed Mr Dombey, hurriedly.

'Yes,' replied Carker.

'Send young Gay.'

'Good, very good indeed. Nothing easier,' said Mr Carker, without
any show of surprise, and taking up the pen to re-endorse the letter,
as coolly as he had done before. '"Send young Gay."'

'Call him back,' said Mr Dombey.

Mr Carker was quick to do so, and Walter was quick to return.

'Gay,' said Mr Dombey, turning a little to look at him over his
shoulder. 'Here is a -

'An opening,' said Mr Carker, with his mouth stretched to the
utmost.

'In the West Indies. At Barbados. I am going to send you,' said Mr
Dombey, scorning to embellish the bare truth, 'to fill a junior
situation in the counting-house at Barbados. Let your Uncle know from
me, that I have chosen you to go to the West Indies.'

Walter's breath was so completely taken away by his astonishment,
that he could hardly find enough for the repetition of the words 'West
Indies.'

'Somebody must go,' said Mr Dombey, 'and you are young and healthy,
and your Uncle's circumstances are not good. Tell your Uncle that you
are appointed. You will not go yet. There will be an interval of a
month - or two perhaps.'

'Shall I remain there, Sir?' inquired Walter.

'Will you remain there, Sir!' repeated Mr Dombey, turning a little
more round towards him. 'What do you mean? What does he mean, Carker?'

'Live there, Sir,' faltered Walter.

'Certainly,' returned Mr Dombey.

Walter bowed.

'That's all,' said Mr Dombey, resuming his letters. 'You will
explain to him in good time about the usual outfit and so forth,
Carker, of course. He needn't wait, Carker.'

'You needn't wait, Gay,' observed Mr Carker: bare to the gums.

'Unless,' said Mr Dombey, stopping in his reading without looking
off the letter, and seeming to listen. 'Unless he has anything to
say.'

'No, Sir,' returned Walter, agitated and confused, and almost
stunned, as an infinite variety of pictures presented themselves to
his mind; among which Captain Cuttle, in his glazed hat, transfixed
with astonishment at Mrs MacStinger's, and his uncle bemoaning his
loss in the little back parlour, held prominent places. 'I hardly know
- I - I am much obliged, Sir.'

'He needn't wait, Carker,' said Mr Dombey.

And as Mr Carker again echoed the words, and also collected his
papers as if he were going away too, Walter felt that his lingering
any longer would be an unpardonable intrusion - especially as he had
nothing to say - and therefore walked out quite confounded.

Going along the passage, with the mingled consciousness and
helplessness of a dream, he heard Mr Dombey's door shut again, as Mr
Carker came out: and immediately afterwards that gentleman called to
him.

'Bring your friend Mr Carker the Junior to my room, Sir, if you
please.'

Walter went to the outer office and apprised Mr Carker the Junior
of his errand, who accordingly came out from behind a partition where
he sat alone in one corner, and returned with him to the room of Mr
Carker the Manager.

That gentleman was standing with his back to the fire, and his
hands under his coat-tails, looking over his white cravat, as
unpromisingly as Mr Dombey himself could have looked. He received them
without any change in his attitude or softening of his harsh and black
expression: merely signing to Walter to close the door.

'John Carker,' said the Manager, when this was done, turning
suddenly upon his brother, with his two rows of teeth bristling as if
he would have bitten him, 'what is the league between you and this
young man, in virtue of which I am haunted and hunted by the mention
of your name? Is it not enough for you, John Carker, that I am your
near relation, and can't detach myself from that - '

'Say disgrace, James,' interposed the other in a low voice, finding
that he stammered for a word. 'You mean it, and have reason, say
disgrace.'

'From that disgrace,' assented his brother with keen emphasis, 'but
is the fact to be blurted out and trumpeted, and proclaimed
continually in the presence of the very House! In moments of
confidence too? Do you think your name is calculated to harmonise in
this place with trust and confidence, John Carker?'

'No,' returned the other. 'No, James. God knows I have no such
thought.'

'What is your thought, then?' said his brother, 'and why do you
thrust yourself in my way? Haven't you injured me enough already?'

'I have never injured you, James, wilfully.'

'You are my brother,' said the Manager. 'That's injury enough.'

'I wish I could undo it, James.'

'I wish you could and would.'

During this conversation, Walter had looked from one brother to the
other, with pain and amazement. He who was the Senior in years, and
Junior in the House, stood, with his eyes cast upon the ground, and
his head bowed, humbly listening to the reproaches of the other.
Though these were rendered very bitter by the tone and look with which
they were accompanied, and by the presence of Walter whom they so much
surprised and shocked, he entered no other protest against them than
by slightly raising his right hand in a deprecatory manner, as if he
would have said, 'Spare me!' So, had they been blows, and he a brave
man, under strong constraint, and weakened by bodily suffering, he
might have stood before the executioner.

Generous and quick in all his emotions, and regarding himself as
the innocent occasion of these taunts, Walter now struck in, with all
the earnestness he felt.

'Mr Carker,' he said, addressing himself to the Manager. 'Indeed,
indeed, this is my fault solely. In a kind of heedlessness, for which
I cannot blame myself enough, I have, I have no doubt, mentioned Mr
Carker the Junior much oftener than was necessary; and have allowed
his name sometimes to slip through my lips, when it was against your
expressed wish. But it has been my own mistake, Sir. We have never
exchanged one word upon the subject - very few, indeed, on any
subject. And it has not been,' added Walter, after a moment's pause,
'all heedlessness on my part, Sir; for I have felt an interest in Mr
Carker ever since I have been here, and have hardly been able to help
speaking of him sometimes, when I have thought of him so much!'

Walter said this from his soul, and with the very breath of honour.
For he looked upon the bowed head, and the downcast eyes, and upraised
hand, and thought, 'I have felt it; and why should I not avow it in
behalf of this unfriended, broken man!'

Mr Carker the Manager looked at him, as he spoke, and when he had
finished speaking, with a smile that seemed to divide his face into
two parts.

'You are an excitable youth, Gay,' he said; 'and should endeavour
to cool down a little now, for it would be unwise to encourage
feverish predispositions. Be as cool as you can, Gay. Be as cool as
you can. You might have asked Mr John Carker himself (if you have not
done so) whether he claims to be, or is, an object of such strong
interest.'

'James, do me justice,' said his brother. 'I have claimed nothing;
and I claim nothing. Believe me, on my -

'Honour?' said his brother, with another smile, as he warmed
himself before the fire.

'On my Me - on my fallen life!' returned the other, in the same low
voice, but with a deeper stress on his words than he had yet seemed
capable of giving them. 'Believe me, I have held myself aloof, and
kept alone. This has been unsought by me. I have avoided him and
everyone.

'Indeed, you have avoided me, Mr Carker,' said Walter, with the
tears rising to his eyes; so true was his compassion. 'I know it, to
my disappointment and regret. When I first came here, and ever since,
I am sure I have tried to be as much your friend, as one of my age
could presume to be; but it has been of no use.

'And observe,' said the Manager, taking him up quickly, 'it will be
of still less use, Gay, if you persist in forcing Mr John Carker's
name on people's attention. That is not the way to befriend Mr John
Carker. Ask him if he thinks it is.'

'It is no service to me,' said the brother. 'It only leads to such
a conversation as the present, which I need not say I could have well
spared. No one can be a better friend to me:' he spoke here very
distinctly, as if he would impress it upon Walter: 'than in forgetting
me, and leaving me to go my way, unquestioned and unnoticed.'

'Your memory not being retentive, Gay, of what you are told by
others,' said Mr Carker the Manager, warming himself with great and
increased satisfaction, 'I thought it well that you should be told
this from the best authority,' nodding towards his brother. 'You are
not likely to forget it now, I hope. That's all, Gay. You can go.

Walter passed out at the door, and was about to close it after him,
when, hearing the voices of the brothers again, and also the mention
of his own name, he stood irresolutely, with his hand upon the lock,
and the door ajar, uncertain whether to return or go away. In this
position he could not help overhearing what followed.

'Think of me more leniently, if you can, James,' said John Carker,
'when I tell you I have had - how could I help having, with my
history, written here' - striking himself upon the breast - 'my whole
heart awakened by my observation of that boy, Walter Gay. I saw in him
when he first came here, almost my other self.'

'Your other self!' repeated the Manager, disdainfully.

'Not as I am, but as I was when I first came here too; as sanguine,
giddy, youthful, inexperienced; flushed with the same restless and
adventurous fancies; and full of the same qualities, fraught with the
same capacity of leading on to good or evil.'

'I hope not,' said his brother, with some hidden and sarcastic
meaning in his tone.

'You strike me sharply; and your hand is steady, and your thrust is
very deep,' returned the other, speaking (or so Walter thought) as if
some cruel weapon actually stabbed him as he spoke. 'I imagined all
this when he was a boy. I believed it. It was a truth to me. I saw him
lightly walking on the edge of an unseen gulf where so many others
walk with equal gaiety, and from which

'The old excuse,' interrupted his brother, as he stirred the fire.
'So many. Go on. Say, so many fall.'

'From which ONE traveller fell,' returned the other, 'who set
forward, on his way, a boy like him, and missed his footing more and
more, and slipped a little and a little lower; and went on stumbling
still, until he fell headlong and found himself below a shattered man.
Think what I suffered, when I watched that boy.'

'You have only yourself to thank for it,' returned the brother.

'Only myself,' he assented with a sigh. 'I don't seek to divide the
blame or shame.'

'You have divided the shame,' James Carker muttered through his
teeth. And, through so many and such close teeth, he could mutter
well.

'Ah, James,' returned his brother, speaking for the first time in
an accent of reproach, and seeming, by the sound of his voice, to have
covered his face with his hands, 'I have been, since then, a useful
foil to you. You have trodden on me freely in your climbing up. Don't
spurn me with your heel!'

A silence ensued. After a time, Mr Carker the Manager was heard
rustling among his papers, as if he had resolved to bring the
interview to a conclusion. At the same time his brother withdrew
nearer to the door.

'That's all,' he said. 'I watched him with such trembling and such
fear, as was some little punishment to me, until he passed the place
where I first fell; and then, though I had been his father, I believe
I never could have thanked God more devoutly. I didn't dare to warn
him, and advise him; but if I had seen direct cause, I would have
shown him my example. I was afraid to be seen speaking with him, lest
it should be thought I did him harm, and tempted him to evil, and
corrupted him: or lest I really should. There may be such contagion in
me; I don't know. Piece out my history, in connexion with young Walter
Gay, and what he has made me feel; and think of me more leniently,
James, if you can.

With these words he came out to where Walter was standing. He
turned a little paler when he saw him there, and paler yet when Walter
caught him by the hand, and said in a whisper:

'Mr Carker, pray let me thank you! Let me say how much I feel for
you! How sorry I am, to have been the unhappy cause of all this! How I
almost look upon you now as my protector and guardian! How very, very
much, I feel obliged to you and pity you!' said Walter, squeezing both
his hands, and hardly knowing, in his agitation, what he did or said.

Mr Morfin's room being close at hand and empty, and the door wide
open, they moved thither by one accord: the passage being seldom free
from someone passing to or fro. When they were there, and Walter saw
in Mr Carker's face some traces of the emotion within, he almost felt
as if he had never seen the face before; it was so greatly changed.

'Walter,' he said, laying his hand on his shoulder. 'I am far
removed from you, and may I ever be. Do you know what I am?'

'What you are!' appeared to hang on Walter's lips, as he regarded
him attentively.

'It was begun,' said Carker, 'before my twenty-first birthday - led
up to, long before, but not begun till near that time. I had robbed
them when I came of age. I robbed them afterwards. Before my
twenty-second birthday, it was all found out; and then, Walter, from
all men's society, I died.'

Again his last few words hung trembling upon Walter's lips, but he
could neither utter them, nor any of his own.

'The House was very good to me. May Heaven reward the old man for
his forbearance! This one, too, his son, who was then newly in the
Firm, where I had held great trust! I was called into that room which
is now his - I have never entered it since - and came out, what you
know me. For many years I sat in my present seat, alone as now, but
then a known and recognised example to the rest. They were all
merciful to me, and I lived. Time has altered that part of my poor
expiation; and I think, except the three heads of the House, there is
no one here who knows my story rightly. Before the little boy grows
up, and has it told to him, my corner may be vacant. I would rather
that it might be so! This is the only change to me since that day,
when I left all youth, and hope, and good men's company, behind me in
that room. God bless you, Walter! Keep you, and all dear to you, in
honesty, or strike them dead!'

Some recollection of his trembling from head to foot, as if with
excessive cold, and of his bursting into tears, was all that Walter
could add to this, when he tried to recall exactly what had passed
between them.

When Walter saw him next, he was bending over his desk in his old
silent, drooping, humbled way. Then, observing him at his work, and
feeling how resolved he evidently was that no further intercourse
should arise between them, and thinking again and again on all he had
seen and heard that morning in so short a time, in connexion with the
history of both the Carkers, Walter could hardly believe that he was
under orders for the West Indies, and would soon be lost to Uncle Sol,
and Captain Cuttle, and to glimpses few and far between of Florence
Dombey - no, he meant Paul - and to all he loved, and liked, and
looked for, in his daily life.

But it was true, and the news had already penetrated to the outer
office; for while he sat with a heavy heart, pondering on these
things, and resting his head upon his arm, Perch the messenger,
descending from his mahogany bracket, and jogging his elbow, begged
his pardon, but wished to say in his ear, Did he think he could
arrange to send home to England a jar of preserved Ginger, cheap, for
Mrs Perch's own eating, in the course of her recovery from her next
confinement?



CHAPTER 14.

Paul grows more and more Old-fashioned, and goes Home for the Holidays



When the Midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations
of joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at
Doctor Blimber's. Any such violent expression as 'breaking up,' would
have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young
gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they
never broke up. They would have scorned the action.

Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a starched white
cambric neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs Tozer,
his parent, who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion that he
couldn't be in that forward state of preparation too soon - Tozer
said, indeed, that choosing between two evils, he thought he would
rather stay where he was, than go home. However inconsistent this
declaration might appear with that passage in Tozer's Essay on the
subject, wherein he had observed 'that the thoughts of home and all
its recollections, awakened in his mind the most pleasing emotions of
anticipation and delight,' and had also likened himself to a Roman
General, flushed with a recent victory over the Iceni, or laden with
Carthaginian spoil, advancing within a few hours' march of the
Capitol, presupposed, for the purposes of the simile, to be the
dwelling-place of Mrs Tozer, still it was very sincerely made. For it
seemed that Tozer had a dreadful Uncle, who not only volunteered
examinations of him, in the holidays, on abstruse points, but twisted
innocent events and things, and wrenched them to the same fell
purpose. So that if this Uncle took him to the Play, or, on a similar
pretence of kindness, carried him to see a Giant, or a Dwarf, or a
Conjuror, or anything, Tozer knew he had read up some classical
allusion to the subject beforehand, and was thrown into a state of
mortal apprehension: not foreseeing where he might break out, or what
authority he might not quote against him.

As to Briggs, his father made no show of artifice about it. He
never would leave him alone. So numerous and severe were the mental
trials of that unfortunate youth in vacation time, that the friends of
the family (then resident near Bayswater, London) seldom approached
the ornamental piece of water in Kensington Gardens,' without a vague
expectation of seeing Master Briggs's hat floating on the surface, and
an unfinished exercise lying on the bank. Briggs, therefore, was not
at all sanguine on the subject of holidays; and these two sharers of
little Paul's bedroom were so fair a sample of the young gentlemen in
general, that the most elastic among them contemplated the arrival of
those festive periods with genteel resignation.

It was far otherwise with little Paul. The end of these first
holidays was to witness his separation from Florence, but who ever
looked forward to the end of holidays whose beginning was not yet
come! Not Paul, assuredly. As the happy time drew near, the lions and
tigers climbing up the bedroom walls became quite tame and frolicsome.
The grim sly faces in the squares and diamonds of the floor-cloth,
relaxed and peeped out at him with less wicked eyes. The grave old
clock had more of personal interest in the tone of its formal inquiry;
and the restless sea went rolling on all night, to the sounding of a
melancholy strain - yet it was pleasant too - that rose and fell with
the waves, and rocked him, as it were, to sleep.

Mr Feeder, B.A., seemed to think that he, too, would enjoy the
holidays very much. Mr Toots projected a life of holidays from that
time forth; for, as he regularly informed Paul every day, it was his
'last half' at Doctor Blimber's, and he was going to begin to come
into his property directly.

It was perfectly understood between Paul and Mr Toots, that they
were intimate friends, notwithstanding their distance in point of
years and station. As the vacation approached, and Mr Toots breathed
harder and stared oftener in Paul's society, than he had done before,
Paul knew that he meant he was sorry they were going to lose sight of
each other, and felt very much obliged to him for his patronage and
good opinion.

It was even understood by Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss
Blimber, as well as by the young gentlemen in general, that Toots had
somehow constituted himself protector and guardian of Dombey, and the
circumstance became so notorious, even to Mrs Pipchin, that the good
old creature cherished feelings of bitterness and jealousy against
Toots; and, in the sanctuary of her own home, repeatedly denounced him
as a 'chuckle-headed noodle.' Whereas the innocent Toots had no more
idea of awakening Mrs Pipchin's wrath, than he had of any other
definite possibility or proposition. On the contrary, he was disposed
to consider her rather a remarkable character, with many points of
interest about her. For this reason he smiled on her with so much
urbanity, and asked her how she did, so often, in the course of her
visits to little Paul, that at last she one night told him plainly,
she wasn't used to it, whatever he might think; and she could not, and
she would not bear it, either from himself or any other puppy then
existing: at which unexpected acknowledgment of his civilities, Mr
Toots was so alarmed that he secreted himself in a retired spot until
she had gone. Nor did he ever again face the doughty Mrs Pipchin,
under Doctor Blimber's roof.

They were within two or three weeks of the holidays, when, one day,
Cornelia Blimber called Paul into her room, and said, 'Dombey, I am
going to send home your analysis.'

'Thank you, Ma'am,' returned Paul.

'You know what I mean, do you, Dombey?' inquired Miss Blimber,
looking hard at him, through the spectacles.

'No, Ma'am,' said Paul.

'Dombey, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber, 'I begin to be afraid you are
a sad boy. When you don't know the meaning of an expression, why don't
you seek for information?'

'Mrs Pipchin told me I wasn't to ask questions,' returned Paul.

'I must beg you not to mention Mrs Pipchin to me, on any account,
Dombey,' returned Miss Blimber. 'I couldn't think of allowing it. The
course of study here, is very far removed from anything of that sort.
A repetition of such allusions would make it necessary for me to
request to hear, without a mistake, before breakfast-time to-morrow
morning, from Verbum personale down to simillimia cygno.'

'I didn't mean, Ma'am - ' began little Paul.

'I must trouble you not to tell me that you didn't mean, if you
please, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber, who preserved an awful politeness
in her admonitions. 'That is a line of argument I couldn't dream of
permitting.'

Paul felt it safest to say nothing at all, so he only looked at
Miss Blimber's spectacles. Miss Blimber having shaken her head at him
gravely, referred to a paper lying before her.

'"Analysis of the character of P. Dombey." If my recollection
serves me,' said Miss Blimber breaking off, 'the word analysis as
opposed to synthesis, is thus defined by Walker. "The resolution of an
object, whether of the senses or of the intellect, into its first
elements." As opposed to synthesis, you observe. Now you know what
analysis is, Dombey.'

Dombey didn't seem to be absolutely blinded by the light let in
upon his intellect, but he made Miss Blimber a little bow.

'"Analysis,"' resumed Miss Blimber, casting her eye over the paper,
'"of the character of P. Dombey." I find that the natural capacity of
Dombey is extremely good; and that his general disposition to study
may be stated in an equal ratio. Thus, taking eight as our standard
and highest number, I find these qualities in Dombey stated each at
six three-fourths!'

Miss Blimber paused to see how Paul received this news. Being
undecided whether six three-fourths meant six pounds fifteen, or
sixpence three farthings, or six foot three, or three quarters past
six, or six somethings that he hadn't learnt yet, with three unknown
something elses over, Paul rubbed his hands and looked straight at
Miss Blimber. It happened to answer as well as anything else he could
have done; and Cornelia proceeded.

'"Violence two. Selfishness two. Inclination to low company, as
evinced in the case of a person named Glubb, originally seven, but
since reduced. Gentlemanly demeanour four, and improving with
advancing years." Now what I particularly wish to call your attention
to, Dombey, is the general observation at the close of this analysis.'

Paul set himself to follow it with great care.

'"It may be generally observed of Dombey,"' said Miss Blimber,
reading in a loud voice, and at every second word directing her
spectacles towards the little figure before her: '"that his abilities
and inclinations are good, and that he has made as much progress as
under the circumstances could have been expected. But it is to be
lamented of this young gentleman that he is singular (what is usually
termed old-fashioned) in his character and conduct, and that, without
presenting anything in either which distinctly calls for reprobation,
he is often very unlike other young gentlemen of his age and social
position." Now, Dombey,' said Miss Blimber, laying down the paper, 'do
you understand that?'

'I think I do, Ma'am,' said Paul.

'This analysis, you see, Dombey,' Miss Blimber continued, 'is going
to be sent home to your respected parent. It will naturally be very
painful to him to find that you are singular in your character and
conduct. It is naturally painful to us; for we can't like you, you
know, Dombey, as well as we could wish.'

She touched the child upon a tender point. He had secretly become
more and more solicitous from day to day, as the time of his departure
drew more near, that all the house should like him. From some hidden
reason, very imperfectly understood by himself - if understood at all
- he felt a gradually increasing impulse of affection, towards almost
everything and everybody in the place. He could not bear to think that
they would be quite indifferent to him when he was gone. He wanted
them to remember him kindly; and he had made it his business even to
conciliate a great hoarse shaggy dog, chained up at the back of the
house, who had previously been the terror of his life: that even he
might miss him when he was no longer there.

Little thinking that in this, he only showed again the difference
between himself and his compeers, poor tiny Paul set it forth to Miss
Blimber as well as he could, and begged her, in despite of the
official analysis, to have the goodness to try and like him. To Mrs
Blimber, who had joined them, he preferred the same petition: and when
that lady could not forbear, even in his presence, from giving
utterance to her often-repeated opinion, that he was an odd child,
Paul told her that he was sure she was quite right; that he thought it
must be his bones, but he didn't know; and that he hoped she would
overlook it, for he was fond of them all.

'Not so fond,' said Paul, with a mixture of timidity and perfect
frankness, which was one of the most peculiar and most engaging
qualities of the child, 'not so fond as I am of Florence, of course;
that could never be. You couldn't expect that, could you, Ma'am?'

'Oh! the old-fashioned little soul!' cried Mrs Blimber, in a
whisper.

'But I like everybody here very much,' pursued Paul, 'and I should
grieve to go away, and think that anyone was glad that I was gone, or
didn't care.'

Mrs Blimber was now quite sure that Paul was the oddest child in
the world; and when she told the Doctor what had passed, the Doctor
did not controvert his wife's opinion. But he said, as he had said
before, when Paul first came, that study would do much; and he also
said, as he had said on that occasion, 'Bring him on, Cornelia! Bring
him on!'

Cornelia had always brought him on as vigorously as she could; and
Paul had had a hard life of it. But over and above the getting through
his tasks, he had long had another purpose always present to him, and
to which he still held fast. It was, to be a gentle, useful, quiet
little fellow, always striving to secure the love and attachment of
the rest; and though he was yet often to be seen at his old post on
the stairs, or watching the waves and clouds from his solitary window,
he was oftener found, too, among the other boys, modestly rendering
them some little voluntary service. Thus it came to pass, that even
among those rigid and absorbed young anchorites, who mortified
themselves beneath the roof of Doctor Blimber, Paul was an object of
general interest; a fragile little plaything that they all liked, and
that no one would have thought of treating roughly. But he could not
change his nature, or rewrite the analysis; and so they all agreed
that Dombey was old-fashioned.

There were some immunities, however, attaching to the character
enjoyed by no one else. They could have better spared a
newer-fashioned child, and that alone was much. When the others only
bowed to Doctor Blimber and family on retiring for the night, Paul
would stretch out his morsel of a hand, and boldly shake the Doctor's;
also Mrs Blimber's; also Cornelia's. If anybody was to be begged off
from impending punishment, Paul was always the delegate. The weak-eyed
young man himself had once consulted him, in reference to a little
breakage of glass and china. And it was darKly rumoured that the
butler, regarding him with favour such as that stern man had never
shown before to mortal boy, had sometimes mingled porter with his
table-beer to make him strong.

Over and above these extensive privileges, Paul had free right of
entry to Mr Feeder's room, from which apartment he had twice led Mr
Toots into the open air in a state of faintness, consequent on an
unsuccessful attempt to smoke a very blunt cigar: one of a bundle
which that young gentleman had covertly purchased on the shingle from
a most desperate smuggler, who had acknowledged, in confidence, that
two hundred pounds was the price set upon his head, dead or alive, by
the Custom House. It was a snug room, Mr Feeder's, with his bed in
another little room inside of it; and a flute, which Mr Feeder
couldn't play yet, but was going to make a point of learning, he said,
hanging up over the fireplace. There were some books in it, too, and a
fishing-rod; for Mr Feeder said he should certainly make a point of
learning to fish, when he could find time. Mr Feeder had amassed, with
similar intentions, a beautiful little curly secondhand key-bugle, a
chess-board and men, a Spanish Grammar, a set of sketching materials,
and a pair of boxing-gloves. The art of self-defence Mr Feeder said he
should undoubtedly make a point of learning, as he considered it the
duty of every man to do; for it might lead to the protection of a
female in distress. But Mr Feeder's great possession was a large green
jar of snuff, which Mr Toots had brought down as a present, at the
close of the last vacation; and for which he had paid a high price,
having been the genuine property of the Prince Regent. Neither Mr
Toots nor Mr Feeder could partake of this or any other snuff, even in
the most stinted and moderate degree, without being seized with
convulsions of sneezing. Nevertheless it was their great delight to
moisten a box-full with cold tea, stir it up on a piece of parchment
with a paper-knife, and devote themselves to its consumption then and
there. In the course of which cramming of their noses, they endured
surprising torments with the constancy of martyrs: and, drinking
table-beer at intervals, felt all the glories of dissipation.

To little Paul sitting silent in their company, and by the side of
his chief patron, Mr Toots, there was a dread charm in these reckless
occasions: and when Mr Feeder spoke of the dark mysteries of London,
and told Mr Toots that he was going to observe it himself closely in
all its ramifications in the approaching holidays, and for that
purpose had made arrangements to board with two old maiden ladies at
Peckham, Paul regarded him as if he were the hero of some book of
travels or wild adventure, and was almost afraid of such a slashing
person.

Going into this room one evening, when the holidays were very near,
Paul found Mr Feeder filling up the blanks in some printed letters,
while some others, already filled up and strewn before him, were being
folded and sealed by Mr Toots. Mr Feeder said, 'Aha, Dombey, there you
are, are you?' - for they were always kind to him, and glad to see him
- and then said, tossing one of the letters towards him, 'And there
you are, too, Dombey. That's yours.'

'Mine, Sir?' said Paul.

'Your invitation,' returned Mr Feeder.

Paul, looking at it, found, in copper-plate print, with the
exception of his own name and the date, which were in Mr Feeder's
penmanship, that Doctor and Mrs Blimber requested the pleasure of Mr
P. Dombey's company at an early party on Wednesday Evening the
Seventeenth Instant; and that the hour was half-past seven o'clock;
and that the object was Quadrilles. Mr Toots also showed him, by
holding up a companion sheet of paper, that Doctor and Mrs Blimber
requested the pleasure of Mr Toots's company at an early party on
Wednesday Evening the Seventeenth Instant, when the hour was half-past
seven o'clock, and when the object was Quadrilles. He also found, on
glancing at the table where Mr Feeder sat, that the pleasure of Mr
Briggs's company, and of Mr Tozer's company, and of every young
gentleman's company, was requested by Doctor and Mrs Blimber on the
same genteel Occasion.

Mr Feeder then told him, to his great joy, that his sister was
invited, and that it was a half-yearly event, and that, as the
holidays began that day, he could go away with his sister after the
party, if he liked, which Paul interrupted him to say he would like,
very much. Mr Feeder then gave him to understand that he would be
expected to inform Doctor and Mrs Blimber, in superfine small-hand,
that Mr P. Dombey would be happy to have the honour of waiting on
them, in accordance with their polite invitation. Lastly, Mr Feeder
said, he had better not refer to the festive occasion, in the hearing
of Doctor and Mrs Blimber; as these preliminaries, and the whole of
the arrangements, were conducted on principles of classicality and
high breeding; and that Doctor and Mrs Blimber on the one hand, and
the young gentlemen on the other, were supposed, in their scholastic
capacities, not to have the least idea of what was in the wind.

Paul thanked Mr Feeder for these hints, and pocketing his
invitation, sat down on a stool by the side of Mr Toots, as usual. But
Paul's head, which had long been ailing more or less, and was
sometimes very heavy and painful, felt so uneasy that night, that he
was obliged to support it on his hand. And yet it dropped so, that by
little and little it sunk on Mr Toots's knee, and rested there, as if
it had no care to be ever lifted up again.

That was no reason why he should be deaf; but he must have been, he
thought, for, by and by, he heard Mr Feeder calling in his ear, and
gently shaking him to rouse his attention. And when he raised his
head, quite scared, and looked about him, he found that Doctor Blimber
had come into the room; and that the window was open, and that his
forehead was wet with sprinkled water; though how all this had been
done without his knowledge, was very curious indeed.

'Ah! Come, come! That's well! How is my little friend now?' said
Doctor Blimber, encouragingly.

'Oh, quite well, thank you, Sir,' said Paul.

But there seemed to be something the matter with the floor, for he
couldn't stand upon it steadily; and with the walls too, for they were
inclined to turn round and round, and could only be stopped by being
looked at very hard indeed. Mr Toots's head had the appearance of
being at once bigger and farther off than was quite natural; and when
he took Paul in his arms, to carry him upstairs, Paul observed with
astonishment that the door was in quite a different place from that in
which he had expected to find it, and almost thought, at first, that
Mr Toots was going to walk straight up the chimney.

It was very kind of Mr Toots to carry him to the top of the house
so tenderly; and Paul told him that it was. But Mr Toots said he would
do a great deal more than that, if he could; and indeed he did more as
it was: for he helped Paul to undress, and helped him to bed, in the
kindest manner possible, and then sat down by the bedside and chuckled
very much; while Mr Feeder, B.A., leaning over the bottom of the
bedstead, set all the little bristles on his head bolt upright with
his bony hands, and then made believe to spar at Paul with great
science, on account of his being all right again, which was so
uncommonly facetious, and kind too in Mr Feeder, that Paul, not being
able to make up his mind whether it was best to laugh or cry at him,
did both at once.

How Mr Toots melted away, and Mr Feeder changed into Mrs Pipchin,
Paul never thought of asking; neither was he at all curious to know;
but when he saw Mrs Pipchin standing at the bottom of the bed, instead
of Mr Feeder, he cried out, 'Mrs Pipchin, don't tell Florence!'

'Don't tell Florence what, my little Paul?' said Mrs Pipchin,
coming round to the bedside, and sitting down in the chair.

'About me,' said Paul.

'No, no,' said Mrs Pipchin.

'What do you think I mean to do when I grow up, Mrs Pipchin?'
inquired Paul, turning his face towards her on his pillow, and resting
his chin wistfully on his folded hands.

Mrs Pipchin couldn't guess.

'I mean,' said Paul, 'to put my money all together in one Bank,
never try to get any more, go away into the country with my darling
Florence, have a beautiful garden, fields, and woods, and live there
with her all my life!'

'Indeed!' cried Mrs Pipchin.

'Yes,' said Paul. 'That's what I mean to do, when I - ' He stopped,
and pondered for a moment.

Mrs Pipchin's grey eye scanned his thoughtful face.

'If I grow up,' said Paul. Then he went on immediately to tell Mrs
Pipchin all about the party, about Florence's invitation, about the
pride he would have in the admiration that would be felt for her by
all the boys, about their being so kind to him and fond of him, about
his being so fond of them, and about his being so glad of it. Then he
told Mrs Pipchin about the analysis, and about his being certainly
old-fashioned, and took Mrs Pipchin's opinion on that point, and
whether she knew why it was, and what it meant. Mrs Pipchin denied the
fact altogether, as the shortest way of getting out of the difficulty;
but Paul was far from satisfied with that reply, and looked so
searchingly at Mrs Pipchin for a truer answer, that she was obliged to
get up and look out of the window to avoid his eyes.

There was a certain calm Apothecary, 'who attended at the
establishment when any of the young gentlemen were ill, and somehow he
got into the room and appeared at the bedside, with Mrs Blimber. How
they came there, or how long they had been there, Paul didn't know;
but when he saw them, he sat up in bed, and answered all the
Apothecary's questions at full length, and whispered to him that
Florence was not to know anything about it, if he pleased, and that he
had set his mind upon her coming to the party. He was very chatty with
the Apothecary, and they parted excellent friends. Lying down again
with his eyes shut, he heard the Apothecary say, out of the room and
quite a long way off - or he dreamed it - that there was a want of
vital power (what was that, Paul wondered!) and great constitutional
weakness. That as the little fellow had set his heart on parting with
his school-mates on the seventeenth, it would be better to indulge the
fancy if he grew no worse. That he was glad to hear from Mrs Pipchin,
that the little fellow would go to his friends in London on the
eighteenth. That he would write to Mr Dombey, when he should have
gained a better knowledge of the case, and before that day. That there
was no immediate cause for - what? Paul lost that word And that the
little fellow had a fine mind, but was an old-fashioned boy.

What old fashion could that be, Paul wondered with a palpitating
heart, that was so visibly expressed in him; so plainly seen by so
many people!

He could neither make it out, nor trouble himself long with the
effort. Mrs Pipchin was again beside him, if she had ever been away
(he thought she had gone out with the Doctor, but it was all a dream
perhaps), and presently a bottle and glass got into her hands
magically, and she poured out the contents for him. After that, he had
some real good jelly, which Mrs Blimber brought to him herself; and
then he was so well, that Mrs Pipchin went home, at his urgent
solicitation, and Briggs and Tozer came to bed. Poor Briggs grumbled
terribly about his own analysis, which could hardly have discomposed
him more if it had been a chemical process; but he was very good to
Paul, and so was Tozer, and so were all the rest, for they every one
looked in before going to bed, and said, 'How are you now, Dombey?'
'Cheer up, little Dombey!' and so forth. After Briggs had got into
bed, he lay awake for a long time, still bemoaning his analysis, and
saying he knew it was all wrong, and they couldn't have analysed a
murderer worse, and - how would Doctor Blimber like it if his
pocket-money depended on it? It was very easy, Briggs said, to make a
galley-slave of a boy all the half-year, and then score him up idle;
and to crib two dinners a-week out of his board, and then score him up
greedy; but that wasn't going to be submitted to, he believed, was it?
Oh! Ah!

Before the weak-eyed young man performed on the gong next morning,
he came upstairs to Paul and told him he was to lie still, which Paul
very gladly did. Mrs Pipchin reappeared a little before the
Apothecary, and a little after the good young woman whom Paul had seen
cleaning the stove on that first morning (how long ago it seemed now!)
had brought him his breakfast. There was another consultation a long
way off, or else Paul dreamed it again; and then the Apothecary,
coming back with Doctor and Mrs Blimber, said:

'Yes, I think, Doctor Blimber, we may release this young gentleman
from his books just now; the vacation being so very near at hand.'

'By all means,' said Doctor Blimber. 'My love, you will inform
Cornelia, if you please.'

'Assuredly,' said Mrs Blimber.

The Apothecary bending down, looked closely into Paul's eyes, and
felt his head, and his pulse, and his heart, with so much interest and
care, that Paul said, 'Thank you, Sir.'

'Our little friend,' observed Doctor Blimber, 'has never
complained.'

'Oh no!' replied the Apothecary. 'He was not likely to complain.'

'You find him greatly better?' said Doctor Blimber.

'Oh! he is greatly better, Sir,' returned the Apothecary.

Paul had begun to speculate, in his own odd way, on the subject
that might occupy the Apothecary's mind just at that moment; so
musingly had he answered the two questions of Doctor Blimber. But the
Apothecary happening to meet his little patient's eyes, as the latter
set off on that mental expedition, and coming instantly out of his
abstraction with a cheerful smile, Paul smiled in return and abandoned
it.

He lay in bed all that day, dozing and dreaming, and looking at Mr
Toots; but got up on the next, and went downstairs. Lo and behold,
there was something the matter with the great clock; and a workman on
a pair of steps had taken its face off, and was poking instruments
into the works by the light of a candle! This was a great event for
Paul, who sat down on the bottom stair, and watched the operation
attentively: now and then glancing at the clock face, leaning all
askew, against the wall hard by, and feeling a little confused by a
suspicion that it was ogling him.

The workman on the steps was very civil; and as he said, when he
observed Paul, 'How do you do, Sir?' Paul got into conversation with
him, and told him he hadn't been quite well lately. The ice being thus
broken, Paul asked him a multitude of questions about chimes and
clocks: as, whether people watched up in the lonely church steeples by
night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung when people
died, and whether those were different bells from wedding bells, or
only sounded dismal in the fancies of the living. Finding that his new
acquaintance was not very well informed on the subject of the Curfew
Bell of ancient days, Paul gave him an account of that institution;
and also asked him, as a practical man, what he thought about King
Alfred's idea of measuring time by the burning of candles; to which
the workman replied, that he thought it would be the ruin of the clock
trade if it was to come up again. In fine, Paul looked on, until the
clock had quite recovered its familiar aspect, and resumed its sedate
inquiry; when the workman, putting away his tools in a long basket,
bade him good day, and went away. Though not before he had whispered
something, on the door-mat, to the footman, in which there was the
phrase 'old-fashioned' - for Paul heard it. What could that old
fashion be, that seemed to make the people sorry! What could it be!

Having nothing to learn now, he thought of this frequently; though
not so often as he might have done, if he had had fewer things to
think of. But he had a great many; and was always thinking, all day
long.

First, there was Florence coming to the party. Florence would see
that the boys were fond of him; and that would make her happy. This
was his great theme. Let Florence once be sure that they were gentle
and good to him, and that he had become a little favourite among them,
and then the would always think of the time he had passed there,
without being very sorry. Florence might be all the happier too for
that, perhaps, when he came back.

When he came back! Fifty times a day, his noiseless little feet
went up the stairs to his own room, as he collected every book, and
scrap, and trifle that belonged to him, and put them all together
there, down to the minutest thing, for taking home! There was no shade
of coming back on little Paul; no preparation for it, or other
reference to it, grew out of anything he thought or did, except this
slight one in connexion with his sister. On the contrary, he had to
think of everything familiar to him, in his contemplative moods and in
his wanderings about the house, as being to be parted with; and hence
the many things he had to think of, all day long.

He had to peep into those rooms upstairs, and think how solitary
they would be when he was gone, and wonder through how many silent
days, weeks, months, and years, they would continue just as grave and
undisturbed. He had to think - would any other child (old-fashioned,
like himself stray there at any time, to whom the same grotesque
distortions of pattern and furniture would manifest themselves; and
would anybody tell that boy of little Dombey, who had been there once?
He had to think of a portrait on the stairs, which always looked
earnestly after him as he went away, eyeing it over his shoulder; and
which, when he passed it in the company of anyone, still seemed to
gaze at him, and not at his companion. He had much to think of, in
association with a print that hung up in another place, where, in the
centre of a wondering group, one figure that he knew, a figure with a
light about its head - benignant, mild, and merciful - stood pointing
upward.

At his own bedroom window, there were crowds of thoughts that mixed
with these, and came on, one upon another, like the rolling waves.
Where those wild birds lived, that were always hovering out at sea in
troubled weather; where the clouds rose and first began; whence the
wind issued on its rushing flight, and where it stopped; whether the
spot where he and Florence had so often sat, and watched, and talked
about these things, could ever be exactly as it used to be without
them; whether it could ever be the same to Florence, if he were in
some distant place, and she were sitting there alone.

He had to think, too, of Mr Toots, and Mr Feeder, B.A., of all the
boys; and of Doctor Blimber, Mrs Blimber, and Miss Blimber; of home,
and of his aunt and Miss Tox; of his father; Dombey and Son, Walter
with the poor old Uncle who had got the money he wanted, and that
gruff-voiced Captain with the iron hand. Besides all this, he had a
number of little visits to pay, in the course of the day; to the
schoolroom, to Doctor Blimber's study, to Mrs Blimber's private
apartment, to Miss Blimber's, and to the dog. For he was free of the
whole house now, to range it as he chose; and, in his desire to part
with everybody on affectionate terms, he attended, in his way, to them
all. Sometimes he found places in books for Briggs, who was always
losing them; sometimes he looked up words in dictionaries for other
young gentlemen who were in extremity; sometimes he held skeins of
silk for Mrs Blimber to wind; sometimes he put Cornelia's desk to
rights; sometimes he would even creep into the Doctor's study, and,
sitting on the carpet near his learned feet, turn the globes softly,
and go round the world, or take a flight among the far-off stars.

In those days immediately before the holidays, in short, when the
other young gentlemen were labouring for dear life through a general
resumption of the studies of the whole half-year, Paul was such a
privileged pupil as had never been seen in that house before. He could
hardly believe it himself; but his liberty lasted from hour to hour,
and from day to day; and little Dombey was caressed by everyone.
Doctor Blimber was so particular about him, that he requested Johnson
to retire from the dinner-table one day, for having thoughtlessly
spoken to him as 'poor little Dombey;' which Paul thought rather hard
and severe, though he had flushed at the moment, and wondered why
Johnson should pity him. It was the more questionable justice, Paul
thought, in the Doctor, from his having certainly overheard that great
authority give his assent on the previous evening, to the proposition
(stated by Mrs Blimber) that poor dear little Dombey was more
old-fashioned than ever. And now it was that Paul began to think it
must surely be old-fashioned to be very thin, and light, and easily
tired, and soon disposed to lie down anywhere and rest; for he
couldn't help feeling that these were more and more his habits every
day.

At last the party-day arrived; and Doctor Blimber said at
breakfast, 'Gentlemen, we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth
of next month.' Mr Toots immediately threw off his allegiance, and put
on his ring: and mentioning the Doctor in casual conversation shortly
afterwards, spoke of him as 'Blimber'! This act of freedom inspired
the older pupils with admiration and envy; but the younger spirits
were appalled, and seemed to marvel that no beam fell down and crushed
him.

Not the least allusion was made to the ceremonies of the evening,
either at breakfast or at dinner; but there was a bustle in the house
all day, and in the course of his perambulations, Paul made
acquaintance with various strange benches and candlesticks, and met a
harp in a green greatcoat standing on the landing outside the
drawing-room door. There was something queer, too, about Mrs Blimber's
head at dinner-time, as if she had screwed her hair up too tight; and
though Miss Blimber showed a graceful bunch of plaited hair on each
temple, she seemed to have her own little curls in paper underneath,
and in a play-bill too; for Paul read 'Theatre Royal' over one of her
sparkling spectacles, and 'Brighton' over the other.

There was a grand array of white waistcoats and cravats in the
young gentlemen's bedrooms as evening approached; and such a smell of
singed hair, that Doctor Blimber sent up the footman with his
compliments, and wished to know if the house was on fire. But it was
only the hairdresser curling the young gentlemen, and over-heating his
tongs in the ardour of business.

When Paul was dressed - which was very soon done, for he felt
unwell and drowsy, and was not able to stand about it very long - he
went down into the drawing-room; where he found Doctor Blimber pacing
up and down the room full dressed, but with a dignified and
unconcerned demeanour, as if he thought it barely possible that one or
two people might drop in by and by. Shortly afterwards, Mrs Blimber
appeared, looking lovely, Paul thought; and attired in such a number
of skirts that it was quite an excursion to walk round her. Miss
Blimber came down soon after her Mama; a little squeezed in
appearance, but very charming.

Mr Toots and Mr Feeder were the next arrivals. Each of these
gentlemen brought his hat in his hand, as if he lived somewhere else;
and when they were announced by the butler, Doctor Blimber said, 'Ay,
ay, ay! God bless my soul!' and seemed extremely glad to see them. Mr
Toots was one blaze of jewellery and buttons; and he felt the
circumstance so strongly, that when he had shaken hands with the
Doctor, and had bowed to Mrs Blimber and Miss Blimber, he took Paul
aside, and said, 'What do you think of this, Dombey?'

But notwithstanding this modest confidence in himself, Mr Toots
appeared to be involved in a good deal of uncertainty whether, on the
whole, it was judicious to button the bottom button of his waistcoat,
and whether, on a calm revision of all the circumstances, it was best
to wear his waistbands turned up or turned down. Observing that Mr
Feeder's were turned up, Mr Toots turned his up; but the waistbands of
the next arrival being turned down, Mr Toots turned his down. The
differences in point of waistcoat-buttoning, not only at the bottom,
but at the top too, became so numerous and complicated as the arrivals
thickened, that Mr Toots was continually fingering that article of
dress, as if he were performing on some instrument; and appeared to
find the incessant execution it demanded, quite bewildering. All the
young gentlemen, tightly cravatted, curled, and pumped, and with their
best hats in their hands, having been at different times announced and
introduced, Mr Baps, the dancing-master, came, accompanied by Mrs
Baps, to whom Mrs Blimber was extremely kind and condescending. Mr
Baps was a very grave gentleman, with a slow and measured manner of
speaking; and before he had stood under the lamp five minutes, he
began to talk to Toots (who had been silently comparing pumps with
him) about what you were to do with your raw materials when they came
into your ports in return for your drain of gold. Mr Toots, to whom
the question seemed perplexing, suggested 'Cook 'em.' But Mr Baps did
not appear to think that would do.

Paul now slipped away from the cushioned corner of a sofa, which
had been his post of observation, and went downstairs into the
tea-room to be ready for Florence, whom he had not seen for nearly a
fortnight, as he had remained at Doctor Blimber's on the previous
Saturday and Sunday, lest he should take cold. Presently she came:
looking so beautiful in her simple ball dress, with her fresh flowers
in her hand, that when she knelt down on the ground to take Paul round
the neck and kiss him (for there was no one there, but his friend and
another young woman waiting to serve out the tea), he could hardly
make up his mind to let her go again, or to take away her bright and
loving eyes from his face.

'But what is the matter, Floy?' asked Paul, almost sure that he saw
a tear there.

'Nothing, darling; nothing,' returned Florence.

Paul touched her cheek gently with his finger - and it was a tear!
'Why, Floy!' said he.

'We'll go home together, and I'll nurse you, love,' said Florence.

'Nurse me!' echoed Paul.

Paul couldn't understand what that had to do with it, nor why the
two young women looked on so seriously, nor why Florence turned away
her face for a moment, and then turned it back, lighted up again with
smiles.

'Floy,' said Paul, holding a ringlet of her dark hair in his hand.
'Tell me, dear, Do you think I have grown old-fashioned?'

His sister laughed, and fondled him, and told him 'No.'

'Because I know they say so,' returned Paul, 'and I want to know
what they mean, Floy.' But a loud double knock coming at the door, and
Florence hurrying to the table, there was no more said between them.
Paul wondered again when he saw his friend whisper to Florence, as if
she were comforting her; but a new arrival put that out of his head
speedily.

It was Sir Barnet Skettles, Lady Skettles, and Master Skettles.
Master Skettles was to be a new boy after the vacation, and Fame had
been busy, in Mr Feeder's room, with his father, who was in the House
of Commons, and of whom Mr Feeder had said that when he did catch the
Speaker's eye (which he had been expected to do for three or four
years), it was anticipated that he would rather touch up the Radicals.

'And what room is this now, for instance?' said Lady Skettles to
Paul's friend, 'Melia.

'Doctor Blimber's study, Ma'am,' was the reply.

Lady Skettles took a panoramic survey of it through her glass, and
said to Sir Barnet Skettles, with a nod of approval, 'Very good.' Sir
Barnet assented, but Master Skettles looked suspicious and doubtful.

'And this little creature, now,' said Lady Skettles, turning to
Paul. 'Is he one of the

'Young gentlemen, Ma'am; yes, Ma'am,' said Paul's friend.

'And what is your name, my pale child?' said Lady Skettles.

'Dombey,' answered Paul.

Sir Barnet Skettles immediately interposed, and said that he had
had the honour of meeting Paul's father at a public dinner, and that
he hoped he was very well. Then Paul heard him say to Lady Skettles,
'City - very rich - most respectable - Doctor mentioned it.' And then
he said to Paul, 'Will you tell your good Papa that Sir Barnet
Skettles rejoiced to hear that he was very well, and sent him his best
compliments?'

'Yes, Sir,' answered Paul.

'That is my brave boy,' said Sir Barnet Skettles. 'Barnet,' to
Master Skettles, who was revenging himself for the studies to come, on
the plum-cake, 'this is a young gentleman you ought to know. This is a
young gentleman you may know, Barnet,' said Sir Barnet Skettles, with
an emphasis on the permission.

'What eyes! What hair! What a lovely face!' exclaimed Lady Skettles
softly, as she looked at Florence through her glass. 'My sister,' said
Paul, presenting her.

The satisfaction of the Skettleses was now complex And as Lady
Skettles had conceived, at first sight, a liking for Paul, they all
went upstairs together: Sir Barnet Skettles taking care of Florence,
and young Barnet following.

Young Barnet did not remain long in the background after they had
reached the drawing-room, for Dr Blimber had him out in no time,
dancing with Florence. He did not appear to Paul to be particularly
happy, or particularly anything but sulky, or to care much what he was
about; but as Paul heard Lady Skettles say to Mrs Blimber, while she
beat time with her fan, that her dear boy was evidently smitten to
death by that angel of a child, Miss Dombey, it would seem that
Skettles Junior was in a state of bliss, without showing it.

Little Paul thought it a singular coincidence that nobody had
occupied his place among the pillows; and that when he came into the
room again, they should all make way for him to go back to it,
remembering it was his. Nobody stood before him either, when they
observed that he liked to see Florence dancing, but they left the
space in front quite clear, so that he might follow her with his eyes.
They were so kind, too, even the strangers, of whom there were soon a
great many, that they came and spoke to him every now and then, and
asked him how he was, and if his head ached, and whether he was tired.
He was very much obliged to them for all their kindness and attention,
and reclining propped up in his corner, with Mrs Blimber and Lady
Skettles on the same sofa, and Florence coming and sitting by his side
as soon as every dance was ended, he looked on very happily indeed.

Florence would have sat by him all night, and would not have danced
at all of her own accord, but Paul made her, by telling her how much
it pleased him. And he told her the truth, too; for his small heart
swelled, and his face glowed, when he saw how much they all admired
her, and how she was the beautiful little rosebud of the room.

From his nest among the pillows, Paul could see and hear almost
everything that passed as if the whole were being done for his
amusement. Among other little incidents that he observed, he observed
Mr Baps the dancing-master get into conversation with Sir Barnet
Skettles, and very soon ask him, as he had asked Mr Toots, what you
were to do with your raw materials, when they came into your ports in
return for your drain of gold - which was such a mystery to Paul that
he was quite desirous to know what ought to be done with them. Sir
Barnet Skettles had much to say upon the question, and said it; but it
did not appear to solve the question, for Mr Baps retorted, Yes, but
supposing Russia stepped in with her tallows; which struck Sir Barnet
almost dumb, for he could only shake his head after that, and say, Why
then you must fall back upon your cottons, he supposed.

Sir Barnet Skettles looked after Mr Baps when he went to cheer up
Mrs Baps (who, being quite deserted, was pretending to look over the
music-book of the gentleman who played the harp), as if he thought him
a remarkable kind of man; and shortly afterwards he said so in those
words to Doctor Blimber, and inquired if he might take the liberty of
asking who he was, and whether he had ever been in the Board of Trade.
Doctor Blimber answered no, he believed not; and that in fact he was a
Professor of - '

'Of something connected with statistics, I'll swear?' observed Sir
Barnet Skettles.

'Why no, Sir Barnet,' replied Doctor Blimber, rubbing his chin.
'No, not exactly.'

'Figures of some sort, I would venture a bet,' said Sir Barnet
Skettles.

'Why yes,' said Doctor Blimber, yes, but not of that sort. Mr Baps
is a very worthy sort of man, Sir Barnet, and - in fact he's our
Professor of dancing.'

Paul was amazed to see that this piece of information quite altered
Sir Barnet Skettles's opinion of Mr Baps, and that Sir Barnet flew
into a perfect rage, and glowered at Mr Baps over on the other side of
the room. He even went so far as to D Mr Baps to Lady Skettles, in
telling her what had happened, and to say that it was like his most
con-sum-mate and con-foun-ded impudence.

There was another thing that Paul observed. Mr Feeder, after
imbibing several custard-cups of negus, began to enjoy himself. The
dancing in general was ceremonious, and the music rather solemn - a
little like church music in fact - but after the custard-cups, Mr
Feeder told Mr Toots that he was going to throw a little spirit into
the thing. After that, Mr Feeder not only began to dance as if he
meant dancing and nothing else, but secretly to stimulate the music to
perform wild tunes. Further, he became particular in his attentions to
the ladies; and dancing with Miss Blimber, whispered to her -
whispered to her! - though not so softly but that Paul heard him say
this remarkable poetry,

             'Had I a heart for falsehood framed,

              I ne'er could injure You!'
This, Paul heard him repeat to four young ladies, in succession. Well
might Mr Feeder say to Mr Toots, that he was afraid he should be the
worse for it to-morrow!

Mrs Blimber was a little alarmed by this - comparatively speaking -
profligate behaviour; and especially by the alteration in the
character of the music, which, beginning to comprehend low melodies
that were popular in the streets, might not unnaturally be supposed to
give offence to Lady Skettles. But Lady Skettles was so very kind as
to beg Mrs Blimber not to mention it; and to receive her explanation
that Mr Feeder's spirits sometimes betrayed him into excesses on these
occasions, with the greatest courtesy and politeness; observing, that
he seemed a very nice sort of person for his situation, and that she
particularly liked the unassuming style of his hair - which (as
already hinted) was about a quarter of an inch long.

Once, when there was a pause in the dancing, Lady Skettles told
Paul that he seemed very fond of music. Paul replied, that he was; and
if she was too, she ought to hear his sister, Florence, sing. Lady
Skettles presently discovered that she was dying with anxiety to have
that gratification; and though Florence was at first very much
frightened at being asked to sing before so many people, and begged
earnestly to be excused, yet, on Paul calling her to him, and saying,
'Do, Floy! Please! For me, my dear!' she went straight to the piano,
and began. When they all drew a little away, that Paul might see her;
and when he saw her sitting there all alone, so young, and good, and
beautiful, and kind to him; and heard her thrilling voice, so natural
and sweet, and such a golden link between him and all his life's love
and happiness, rising out of the silence; he turned his face away, and
hid his tears. Not, as he told them when they spoke to him, not that
the music was too plaintive or too sorrowful, but it was so dear to
him.

They all loved Florence. How could they help it! Paul had known
beforehand that they must and would; and sitting in his cushioned
corner, with calmly folded hands; and one leg loosely doubled under
him, few would have thought what triumph and delight expanded his
childish bosom while he watched her, or what a sweet tranquillity he
felt. Lavish encomiums on 'Dombey's sister' reached his ears from all
the boys: admiration of the self-possessed and modest little beauty
was on every lip: reports of her intelligence and accomplishments
floated past him, constantly; and, as if borne in upon the air of the
summer night, there was a half intelligible sentiment diffused around,
referring to Florence and himself, and breathing sympathy for both,
that soothed and touched him.

He did not know why. For all that the child observed, and felt, and
thought, that night - the present and the absent; what was then and
what had been - were blended like the colours in the rainbow, or in
the plumage of rich birds when the sun is shining on them, or in the
softening sky when the same sun is setting. The many things he had had
to think of lately, passed before him in the music; not as claiming
his attention over again, or as likely evermore to occupy it, but as
peacefully disposed of and gone. A solitary window, gazed through
years ago, looked out upon an ocean, miles and miles away; upon its
waters, fancies, busy with him only yesterday, were hushed and lulled
to rest like broken waves. The same mysterious murmur he had wondered
at, when lying on his couch upon the beach, he thought he still heard
sounding through his sister's song, and through the hum of voices, and
the tread of feet, and having some part in the faces flitting by, and
even in the heavy gentleness of Mr Toots, who frequently came up to
shake him by the hand. Through the universal kindness he still thought
he heard it, speaking to him; and even his old-fashioned reputation
seemed to be allied to it, he knew not how. Thus little Paul sat
musing, listening, looking on, and dreaming; and was very happy.

Until the time arrived for taking leave: and then, indeed, there
was a sensation in the party. Sir Barnet Skettles brought up Skettles
Junior to shake hands with him, and asked him if he would remember to
tell his good Papa, with his best compliments, that he, Sir Barnet
Skettles, had said he hoped the two young gentlemen would become
intimately acquainted. Lady Skettles kissed him, and patted his hair
upon his brow, and held him in her arms; and even Mrs Baps - poor Mrs
Baps! Paul was glad of that - came over from beside the music-book of
the gentleman who played the harp, and took leave of him quite as
heartily as anybody in the room.

'Good-bye, Doctor Blimber,' said Paul, stretching out his hand.

'Good-bye, my little friend,' returned the Doctor.

'I'm very much obliged to you, Sir,' said Paul, looking innocently
up into his awful face. 'Ask them to take care of Diogenes, if you
please.'

Diogenes was the dog: who had never in his life received a friend
into his confidence, before Paul. The Doctor promised that every
attention should he paid to Diogenes in Paul's absence, and Paul
having again thanked him, and shaken hands with him, bade adieu to Mrs
Blimber and Cornelia with such heartfelt earnestness that Mrs Blimber
forgot from that moment to mention Cicero to Lady Skettles, though she
had fully intended it all the evening. Cornelia, taking both Paul's
hands in hers, said,'Dombey, Dombey, you have always been my favourite
pupil. God bless you!' And it showed, Paul thought, how easily one
might do injustice to a person; for Miss Blimber meant it - though she
was a Forcer - and felt it.

A boy then went round among the young gentlemen, of 'Dombey's
going!' 'Little Dombey's going!' and there was a general move after
Paul and Florence down the staircase and into the hall, in which the
whole Blimber family were included. Such a circumstance, Mr Feeder
said aloud, as had never happened in the case of any former young
gentleman within his experience; but it would be difficult to say if
this were sober fact or custard-cups. The servants, with the butler at
their head, had all an interest in seeing Little Dombey go; and even
the weak-eyed young man, taking out his books and trunks to the coach
that was to carry him and Florence to Mrs Pipchin's for the night,
melted visibly.

Not even the influence of the softer passion on the young gentlemen
- and they all, to a boy, doted on Florence - could restrain them from
taking quite a noisy leave of Paul; waving hats after him, pressing
downstairs to shake hands with him, crying individually 'Dombey, don't
forget me!' and indulging in many such ebullitions of feeling,
uncommon among those young Chesterfields. Paul whispered Florence, as
she wrapped him up before the door was opened, Did she hear them?
Would she ever forget it? Was she glad to know it? And a lively
delight was in his eyes as he spoke to her.

Once, for a last look, he turned and gazed upon the faces thus
addressed to him, surprised to see how shining and how bright, and
numerous they were, and how they were all piled and heaped up, as
faces are at crowded theatres. They swam before him as he looked, like
faces in an agitated glass; and next moment he was in the dark coach
outside, holding close to Florence. From that time, whenever he
thought of Doctor Blimber's, it came back as he had seen it in this
last view; and it never seemed to be a real place again, but always a
dream, full of eyes.

This was not quite the last of Doctor Blimber's, however. There was
something else. There was Mr Toots. Who, unexpectedly letting down one
of the coach-windows, and looking in, said, with a most egregious
chuckle, 'Is Dombey there?' and immediately put it up again, without
waiting for an answer. Nor was this quite the last of Mr Toots, even;
for before the coachman could drive off, he as suddenly let down the
other window, and looking in with a precisely similar chuckle, said in
a precisely similar tone of voice, 'Is Dombey there?' and disappeared
precisely as before.

How Florence laughed! Paul often remembered it, and laughed himself
whenever he did so.

But there was much, soon afterwards - next day, and after that -
which Paul could only recollect confusedly. As, why they stayed at Mrs
Pipchin's days and nights, instead of going home; why he lay in bed,
with Florence sitting by his side; whether that had been his father in
the room, or only a tall shadow on the wall; whether he had heard his
doctor say, of someone, that if they had removed him before the
occasion on which he had built up fancies, strong in proportion to his
own weakness, it was very possible he might have pined away.

He could not even remember whether he had often said to Florence,
'Oh Floy, take me home, and never leave me!' but he thought he had. He
fancied sometimes he had heard himself repeating, 'Take me home, Floy!
take me home!'

But he could remember, when he got home, and was carried up the
well-remembered stairs, that there had been the rumbling of a coach
for many hours together, while he lay upon the seat, with Florence
still beside him, and old Mrs Pipchin sitting opposite. He remembered
his old bed too, when they laid him down in it: his aunt, Miss Tox,
and Susan: but there was something else, and recent too, that still
perplexed him.

'I want to speak to Florence, if you please,' he said. 'To Florence
by herself, for a moment!'

She bent down over him, and the others stood away.

'Floy, my pet, wasn't that Papa in the hall, when they brought me
from the coach?'

'Yes, dear.'

'He didn't cry, and go into his room, Floy, did he, when he saw me
coming in?'

Florence shook her head, and pressed her lips against his cheek.

'I'm very glad he didn't cry,' said little Paul. 'I thought he did.
Don't tell them that I asked.'



CHAPTER 15.

Amazing Artfulness of Captain Cuttle, and a new Pursuit for Walter Gay



Walter could not, for several days, decide what to do in the
Barbados business; and even cherished some faint hope that Mr Dombey
might not have meant what he had said, or that he might change his
mind, and tell him he was not to go. But as nothing occurred to give
this idea (which was sufficiently improbable in itself) any touch of
confirmation, and as time was slipping by, and he had none to lose, he
felt that he must act, without hesitating any longer.

Walter's chief difficulty was, how to break the change in his
affairs to Uncle Sol, to whom he was sensible it would he a terrible
blow. He had the greater difficulty in dashing Uncle Sol's spirits
with such an astounding piece of intelligence, because they had lately
recovered very much, and the old man had become so cheerful, that the
little back parlour was itself again. Uncle Sol had paid the first
appointed portion of the debt to Mr Dombey, and was hopeful of working
his way through the rest; and to cast him down afresh, when he had
sprung up so manfully from his troubles, was a very distressing
necessity.

Yet it would never do to run away from him. He must know of it
beforehand; and how to tell him was the point. As to the question of
going or not going, Walter did not consider that he had any power of
choice in the matter. Mr Dombey had truly told him that he was young,
and that his Uncle's circumstances were not good; and Mr Dombey had
plainly expressed, in the glance with which he had accompanied that
reminder, that if he declined to go he might stay at home if he chose,
but not in his counting-house. His Uncle and he lay under a great
obligation to Mr Dombey, which was of Walter's own soliciting. He
might have begun in secret to despair of ever winning that gentleman's
favour, and might have thought that he was now and then disposed to
put a slight upon him, which was hardly just. But what would have been
duty without that, was still duty with it - or Walter thought so- and
duty must be done.

When Mr Dombey had looked at him, and told him he was young, and
that his Uncle's circumstances were not good, there had been an
expression of disdain in his face; a contemptuous and disparaging
assumption that he would be quite content to live idly on a reduced
old man, which stung the boy's generous soul. Determined to assure Mr
Dombey, in so far as it was possible to give him the assurance without
expressing it in words, that indeed he mistook his nature, Walter had
been anxious to show even more cheerfulness and activity after the
West Indian interview than he had shown before: if that were possible,
in one of his quick and zealous disposition. He was too young and
inexperienced to think, that possibly this very quality in him was not
agreeable to Mr Dombey, and that it was no stepping-stone to his good
opinion to be elastic and hopeful of pleasing under the shadow of his
powerful displeasure, whether it were right or wrong. But it may have
been - it may have been- that the great man thought himself defied in
this new exposition of an honest spirit, and purposed to bring it
down.

'Well! at last and at least, Uncle Sol must be told,' thought
Walter, with a sigh. And as Walter was apprehensive that his voice
might perhaps quaver a little, and that his countenance might not be
quite as hopeful as he could wish it to be, if he told the old man
himself, and saw the first effects of his communication on his
wrinkled face, he resolved to avail himself of the services of that
powerful mediator, Captain Cuttle. Sunday coming round, he set off
therefore, after breakfast, once more to beat up Captain Cuttle's
quarters.

It was not unpleasant to remember, on the way thither, that Mrs
MacStinger resorted to a great distance every Sunday morning, to
attend the ministry of the Reverend Melchisedech Howler, who, having
been one day discharged from the West India Docks on a false suspicion
(got up expressly against him by the general enemy) of screwing
gimlets into puncheons, and applying his lips to the orifice, had
announced the destruction of the world for that day two years, at ten
in the morning, and opened a front parlour for the reception of ladies
and gentlemen of the Ranting persuasion, upon whom, on the first
occasion of their assemblage, the admonitions of the Reverend
Melchisedech had produced so powerful an effect, that, in their
rapturous performance of a sacred jig, which closed the service, the
whole flock broke through into a kitchen below, and disabled a mangle
belonging to one of the fold.

This the Captain, in a moment of uncommon conviviality, had
confided to Walter and his Uncle, between the repetitions of lovely
Peg, on the night when Brogley the broker was paid out. The Captain
himself was punctual in his attendance at a church in his own
neighbourhood, which hoisted the Union Jack every Sunday morning; and
where he was good enough - the lawful beadle being infirm - to keep an
eye upon the boys, over whom he exercised great power, in virtue of
his mysterious hook. Knowing the regularity of the Captain's habits,
Walter made all the haste he could, that he might anticipate his going
out; and he made such good speed, that he had the pleasure, on turning
into Brig Place, to behold the broad blue coat and waistcoat hanging
out of the Captain's oPen window, to air in the sun.

It appeared incredible that the coat and waistcoat could be seen by
mortal eyes without the Captain; but he certainly was not in them,
otherwise his legs - the houses in Brig Place not being lofty- would
have obstructed the street door, which was perfectly clear. Quite
wondering at this discovery, Walter gave a single knock.

'Stinger,' he distinctly heard the Captain say, up in his room, as
if that were no business of his. Therefore Walter gave two knocks.

'Cuttle,' he heard the Captain say upon that; and immediately
afterwards the Captain, in his clean shirt and braces, with his
neckerchief hanging loosely round his throat like a coil of rope, and
his glazed hat on, appeared at the window, leaning out over the broad
blue coat and waistcoat.

'Wal'r!' cried the Captain, looking down upon him in amazement.

'Ay, ay, Captain Cuttle,' returned Walter, 'only me'

'What's the matter, my lad?' inquired the Captain, with great
concern. 'Gills an't been and sprung nothing again?'

'No, no,' said Walter. 'My Uncle's all right, Captain Cuttle.'

The Captain expressed his gratification, and said he would come
down below and open the door, which he did.

'Though you're early, Wal'r,' said the Captain, eyeing him still
doubtfully, when they got upstairs:

'Why, the fact is, Captain Cuttle,' said Walter, sitting down, 'I
was afraid you would have gone out, and I want to benefit by your
friendly counsel.'

'So you shall,' said the Captain; 'what'll you take?'

'I want to take your opinion, Captain Cuttle,' returned Walter,
smiling. 'That's the only thing for me.'

'Come on then,' said the Captain. 'With a will, my lad!'

Walter related to him what had happened; and the difficulty in
which he felt respecting his Uncle, and the relief it would be to him
if Captain Cuttle, in his kindness, would help him to smooth it away;
Captain Cuttle's infinite consternation and astonishment at the
prospect unfolded to him, gradually swallowing that gentleman up,
until it left his face quite vacant, and the suit of blue, the glazed
hat, and the hook, apparently without an owner.

'You see, Captain Cuttle,' pursued Walter, 'for myself, I am young,
as Mr Dombey said, and not to be considered. I am to fight my way
through the world, I know; but there are two points I was thinking, as
I came along, that I should be very particular about, in respect to my
Uncle. I don't mean to say that I deserve to be the pride and delight
of his life - you believe me, I know - but I am. Now, don't you think
I am?'

The Captain seemed to make an endeavour to rise from the depths of
his astonishment, and get back to his face; but the effort being
ineffectual, the glazed hat merely nodded with a mute, unutterable
meaning.

'If I live and have my health,' said Walter, 'and I am not afraid
of that, still, when I leave England I can hardly hope to see my Uncle
again. He is old, Captain Cuttle; and besides, his life is a life of
custom - '

'Steady, Wal'r! Of a want of custom?' said the Captain, suddenly
reappearing.

'Too true,' returned Walter, shaking his head: 'but I meant a life
of habit, Captain Cuttle - that sort of custom. And if (as you very
truly said, I am sure) he would have died the sooner for the loss of
the stock, and all those objects to which he has been accustomed for
so many years, don't you think he might die a little sooner for the
loss of - '

'Of his Nevy,' interposed the Captain. 'Right!'

'Well then,' said Walter, trying to speak gaily, 'we must do our
best to make him believe that the separation is but a temporary one,
after all; but as I know better, or dread that I know better, Captain
Cuttle, and as I have so many reasons for regarding him with
affection, and duty, and honour, I am afraid I should make but a very
poor hand at that, if I tried to persuade him of it. That's my great
reason for wishing you to break it out to him; and that's the first
point.'

'Keep her off a point or so!' observed the Captain, in a
comtemplative voice.

'What did you say, Captain Cuttle?' inquired Walter.

'Stand by!' returned the Captain, thoughtfully.

Walter paused to ascertain if the Captain had any particular
information to add to this, but as he said no more, went on.

'Now, the second point, Captain Cuttle. I am sorry to say, I am not
a favourite with Mr Dombey. I have always tried to do my best, and I
have always done it; but he does not like me. He can't help his
likings and dislikings, perhaps. I say nothing of that. I only say
that I am certain he does not like me. He does not send me to this
post as a good one; he disclaims to represent it as being better than
it is; and I doubt very much if it will ever lead me to advancement in
the House - whether it does not, on the contrary, dispose of me for
ever, and put me out of the way. Now, we must say nothing of this to
my Uncle, Captain Cuttle, but must make it out to be as favourable and
promising as we can; and when I tell you what it really is, I only do
so, that in case any means should ever arise of lending me a hand, so
far off, I may have one friend at home who knows my real situation.

'Wal'r, my boy,' replied the Captain, 'in the Proverbs of Solomon
you will find the following words, "May we never want a friend in
need, nor a bottle to give him!" When found, make a note of.'

Here the Captain stretched out his hand to Walter, with an air of
downright good faith that spoke volumes; at the same time repeating
(for he felt proud of the accuracy and pointed application of his
quotation), 'When found, make a note of.'

'Captain Cuttle,' said Walter, taking the immense fist extended to
him by the Captain in both his hands, which it completely filled, next
to my Uncle Sol, I love you. There is no one on earth in whom I can
more safely trust, I am sure. As to the mere going away, Captain
Cuttle, I don't care for that; why should I care for that! If I were
free to seek my own fortune - if I were free to go as a common sailor
- if I were free to venture on my own account to the farthest end of
the world - I would gladly go! I would have gladly gone, years ago,
and taken my chance of what might come of it. But it was against my
Uncle's wishes, and against the plans he had formed for me; and there
was an end of that. But what I feel, Captain Cuttle, is that we have
been a little mistaken all along, and that, so far as any improvement
in my prospects is concerned, I am no better off now than I was when I
first entered Dombey's House - perhaps a little worse, for the House
may have been kindly inclined towards me then, and it certainly is not
now.'

'Turn again, Whittington,' muttered the disconsolate Captain, after
looking at Walter for some time.

'Ay,' replied Walter, laughing, 'and turn a great many times, too,
Captain Cuttle, I'm afraid, before such fortune as his ever turns up
again. Not that I complain,' he added, in his lively, animated,
energetic way. 'I have nothing to complain of. I am provided for. I
can live. When I leave my Uncle, I leave him to you; and I can leave
him to no one better, Captain Cuttle. I haven't told you all this
because I despair, not I; it's to convince you that I can't pick and
choose in Dombey's House, and that where I am sent, there I must go,
and what I am offered, that I must take. It's better for my Uncle that
I should be sent away; for Mr Dombey is a valuable friend to him, as
he proved himself, you know when, Captain Cuttle; and I am persuaded
he won't be less valuable when he hasn't me there, every day, to
awaken his dislike. So hurrah for the West Indies, Captain Cuttle! How
does that tune go that the sailors sing?

              'For the Port of Barbados, Boys!

                                            Cheerily!

              Leaving old England behind us, Boys!

                                            Cheerily!'
Here the Captain roared in chorus -

              'Oh cheerily, cheerily!

                                            Oh cheer-i-ly!'

The last line reaching the quick ears of an ardent skipper not
quite sober, who lodged opposite, and who instantly sprung out of bed,
threw up his window, and joined in, across the street, at the top of
his voice, produced a fine effect. When it was impossible to sustain
the concluding note any longer, the skipper bellowed forth a terrific
'ahoy!' intended in part as a friendly greeting, and in part to show
that he was not at all breathed. That done, he shut down his window,
and went to bed again.

'And now, Captain Cuttle,' said Walter, handing him the blue coat
and waistcoat, and bustling very much, 'if you'll come and break the
news to Uncle Sol (which he ought to have known, days upon days ago,
by rights), I'll leave you at the door, you know, and walk about until
the afternoon.'

The Captain, however, scarcely appeared to relish the commission,
or to be by any means confident of his powers of executing it. He had
arranged the future life and adventures of Walter so very differently,
and so entirely to his own satisfaction; he had felicitated himself so
often on the sagacity and foresight displayed in that arrangement, and
had found it so complete and perfect in all its parts; that to suffer
it to go to pieces all at once, and even to assist in breaking it up,
required a great effort of his resolution. The Captain, too, found it
difficult to unload his old ideas upon the subject, and to take a
perfectly new cargo on board, with that rapidity which the
circumstances required, or without jumbling and confounding the two.
Consequently, instead of putting on his coat and waistcoat with
anything like the impetuosity that could alone have kept pace with
Walter's mood, he declined to invest himself with those garments at
all at present; and informed Walter that on such a serious matter, he
must be allowed to 'bite his nails a bit'

'It's an old habit of mine, Wal'r,' said the Captain, 'any time
these fifty year. When you see Ned Cuttle bite his nails, Wal'r, then
you may know that Ned Cuttle's aground.'

Thereupon the Captain put his iron hook between his teeth, as if it
were a hand; and with an air of wisdom and profundity that was the
very concentration and sublimation of all philosophical reflection and
grave inquiry, applied himself to the consideration of the subject in
its various branches.

'There's a friend of mine,' murmured the Captain, in an absent
manner, 'but he's at present coasting round to Whitby, that would
deliver such an opinion on this subject, or any other that could be
named, as would give Parliament six and beat 'em. Been knocked
overboard, that man,' said the Captain, 'twice, and none the worse for
it. Was beat in his apprenticeship, for three weeks (off and on),
about the head with a ring-bolt. And yet a clearer-minded man don't
walk.'

Despite of his respect for Captain Cuttle, Walter could not help
inwardly rejoicing at the absence of this sage, and devoutly hoping
that his limpid intellect might not be brought to bear on his
difficulties until they were quite settled.

'If you was to take and show that man the buoy at the Nore,' said
Captain Cuttle in the same tone, 'and ask him his opinion of it,
Wal'r, he'd give you an opinion that was no more like that buoy than
your Uncle's buttons are. There ain't a man that walks - certainly not
on two legs - that can come near him. Not near him!'

'What's his name, Captain Cuttle?' inquired Walter, determined to
be interested in the Captain's friend.

'His name's Bunsby, said the Captain. 'But Lord, it might be
anything for the matter of that, with such a mind as his!'

The exact idea which the Captain attached to this concluding piece
of praise, he did not further elucidate; neither did Walter seek to
draw it forth. For on his beginning to review, with the vivacity
natural to himself and to his situation, the leading points in his own
affairs, he soon discovered that the Captain had relapsed into his
former profound state of mind; and that while he eyed him steadfastly
from beneath his bushy eyebrows, he evidently neither saw nor heard
him, but remained immersed in cogitation.

In fact, Captain Cuttle was labouring with such great designs, that
far from being aground, he soon got off into the deepest of water, and
could find no bottom to his penetration. By degrees it became
perfectly plain to the Captain that there was some mistake here; that
it was undoubtedly much more likely to be Walter's mistake than his;
that if there were really any West India scheme afoot, it was a very
different one from what Walter, who was young and rash, supposed; and
could only be some new device for making his fortune with unusual
celerity. 'Or if there should be any little hitch between 'em,'
thought the Captain, meaning between Walter and Mr Dombey, 'it only
wants a word in season from a friend of both parties, to set it right
and smooth, and make all taut again.' Captain Cuttle's deduction from
these considerations was, that as he already enjoyed the pleasure of
knowing Mr Dombey, from having spent a very agreeable half-hour in his
company at Brighton (on the morning when they borrowed the money); and
that, as a couple of men of the world, who understood each other, and
were mutually disposed to make things comfortable, could easily
arrange any little difficulty of this sort, and come at the real
facts; the friendly thing for him to do would be, without saying
anything about it to Walter at present, just to step up to Mr Dombey's
house - say to the servant 'Would ye be so good, my lad, as report
Cap'en Cuttle here?' - meet Mr Dombey in a confidential spirit- hook
him by the button-hole - talk it over - make it all right - and come
away triumphant!

As these reflections presented themselves to the Captain's mind,
and by slow degrees assumed this shape and form, his visage cleared
like a doubtful morning when it gives place to a bright noon. His
eyebrows, which had been in the highest degree portentous, smoothed
their rugged bristling aspect, and became serene; his eyes, which had
been nearly closed in the severity of his mental exercise, opened
freely; a smile which had been at first but three specks - one at the
right-hand corner of his mouth, and one at the corner of each eye -
gradually overspread his whole face, and, rippling up into his
forehead, lifted the glazed hat: as if that too had been aground with
Captain Cuttle, and were now, like him, happily afloat again.

Finally, the Captain left off biting his nails, and said, 'Now,
Wal'r, my boy, you may help me on with them slops.' By which the
Captain meant his coat and waistcoat.

Walter little imagined why the Captain was so particular in the
arrangement of his cravat, as to twist the pendent ends into a sort of
pigtail, and pass them through a massive gold ring with a picture of a
tomb upon it, and a neat iron railing, and a tree, in memory of some
deceased friend. Nor why the Captain pulled up his shirt-collar to the
utmost limits allowed by the Irish linen below, and by so doing
decorated himself with a complete pair of blinkers; nor why he changed
his shoes, and put on an unparalleled pair of ankle-jacks, which he
only wore on extraordinary occasions. The Captain being at length
attired to his own complete satisfaction, and having glanced at
himself from head to foot in a shaving-glass which he removed from a
nail for that purpose, took up his knotted stick, and said he was
ready.

The Captain's walk was more complacent than usual when they got out
into the street; but this Walter supposed to be the effect of the
ankle-jacks, and took little heed of. Before they had gone very far,
they encountered a woman selling flowers; when the Captain stopping
short, as if struck by a happy idea, made a purchase of the largest
bundle in her basket: a most glorious nosegay, fan-shaped, some two
feet and a half round, and composed of all the jolliest-looking
flowers that blow.

Armed with this little token which he designed for Mr Dombey,
Captain Cuttle walked on with Walter until they reached the
Instrument-maker's door, before which they both paused.

'You're going in?' said Walter.

'Yes,' returned the Captain, who felt that Walter must be got rid
of before he proceeded any further, and that he had better time his
projected visit somewhat later in the day.

'And you won't forget anything?'

'No,' returned the Captain.

'I'll go upon my walk at once,' said Walter, 'and then I shall be
out of the way, Captain Cuttle.'

'Take a good long 'un, my lad!' replied the Captain, calling after
him. Walter waved his hand in assent, and went his way.

His way was nowhere in particular; but he thought he would go out
into the fields, where he could reflect upon the unknown life before
him, and resting under some tree, ponder quietly. He knew no better
fields than those near Hampstead, and no better means of getting at
them than by passing Mr Dombey's house.

It was as stately and as dark as ever, when he went by and glanced
up at its frowning front. The blinds were all pulled down, but the
upper windows stood wide open, and the pleasant air stirring those
curtains and waving them to and fro was the only sign of animation in
the whole exterior. Walter walked softly as he passed, and was glad
when he had left the house a door or two behind.

He looked back then; with the interest he had always felt for the
place since the adventure of the lost child, years ago; and looked
especially at those upper windows. While he was thus engaged, a
chariot drove to the door, and a portly gentleman in black, with a
heavy watch-chain, alighted, and went in. When he afterwards
remembered this gentleman and his equipage together, Walter had no
doubt be was a physician; and then he wondered who was ill; but the
discovery did not occur to him until he had walked some distance,
thinking listlessly of other things.

Though still, of what the house had suggested to him; for Walter
pleased hImself with thinking that perhaps the time might come, when
the beautiful child who was his old friend and had always been so
grateful to him and so glad to see him since, might interest her
brother in his behalf and influence his fortunes for the better. He
liked to imagine this - more, at that moment, for the pleasure of
imagining her continued remembrance of him, than for any worldly
profit he might gain: but another and more sober fancy whispered to
him that if he were alive then, he would be beyond the sea and
forgotten; she married, rich, proud, happy. There was no more reason
why she should remember him with any interest in such an altered state
of things, than any plaything she ever had. No, not so much.

Yet Walter so idealised the pretty child whom he had found
wandering in the rough streets, and so identified her with her
innocent gratitude of that night and the simplicity and truth of its
expression, that he blushed for himself as a libeller when he argued
that she could ever grow proud. On the other hand, his meditations
were of that fantastic order that it seemed hardly less libellous in
him to imagine her grown a woman: to think of her as anything but the
same artless, gentle, winning little creature, that she had been in
the days of Good Mrs Brown. In a word, Walter found out that to reason
with himself about Florence at all, was to become very unreasonable
indeed; and that he could do no better than preserve her image in his
mind as something precious, unattainable, unchangeable, and indefinite
- indefinite in all but its power of giving him pleasure, and
restraining him like an angel's hand from anything unworthy.

It was a long stroll in the fields that Walter took that day,
listening to the birds, and the Sunday bells, and the softened murmur
of the town - breathing sweet scents; glancing sometimes at the dim
horizon beyond which his voyage and his place of destination lay; then
looking round on the green English grass and the home landscape. But
he hardly once thought, even of going away, distinctly; and seemed to
put off reflection idly, from hour to hour, and from minute to minute,
while he yet went on reflecting all the time.

Walter had left the fields behind him, and was plodding homeward in
the same abstracted mood, when he heard a shout from a man, and then a
woman's voice calling to him loudly by name. Turning quickly in his
surprise, he saw that a hackney-coach, going in the contrary
direction, had stopped at no great distance; that the coachman was
looking back from his box and making signals to him with his whip; and
that a young woman inside was leaning out of the window, and beckoning
with immense energy. Running up to this coach, he found that the young
woman was Miss Nipper, and that Miss Nipper was in such a flutter as
to be almost beside herself.

'Staggs's Gardens, Mr Walter!' said Miss Nipper; 'if you please, oh
do!'

'Eh?' cried Walter; 'what is the matter?'

'Oh, Mr Walter, Staggs's Gardens, if you please!' said Susan.

'There!' cried the coachman, appealing to Walter, with a sort of
exalting despair; 'that's the way the young lady's been a goin' on for
up'ards of a mortal hour, and me continivally backing out of no
thoroughfares, where she would drive up. I've had a many fares in this
coach, first and last, but never such a fare as her.'

'Do you want to go to Staggs's Gardens, Susan?' inquired Walter.

'Ah! She wants to go there! WHERE IS IT?' growled the coachman.

'I don't know where it is!' exclaimed Susan, wildly. 'Mr Walter, I
was there once myself, along with Miss Floy and our poor darling
Master Paul, on the very day when you found Miss Floy in the City, for
we lost her coming home, Mrs Richards and me, and a mad bull, and Mrs
Richards's eldest, and though I went there afterwards, I can't
remember where it is, I think it's sunk into the ground. Oh, Mr
Walter, don't desert me, Staggs's Gardens, if you please! Miss Floy's
darling - all our darlings - little, meek, meek Master Paul! Oh Mr
Walter!'

'Good God!' cried Walter. 'Is he very ill?'

'The pretty flower!' cried Susan, wringing her hands, 'has took the
fancy that he'd like to see his old nurse, and I've come to bring her
to his bedside, Mrs Staggs, of Polly Toodle's Gardens, someone pray!'

Greatly moved by what he heard, and catching Susan's earnestness
immediately, Walter, now that he understood the nature of her errand,
dashed into it with such ardour that the coachman had enough to do to
follow closely as he ran before, inquiring here and there and
everywhere, the way to Staggs's Gardens.

There was no such place as Staggs's Gardens. It had vanished from
the earth. Where the old rotten summer-houses once had stood, palaces
now reared their heads, and granite columns of gigantic girth opened a
vista to the railway world beyond. The miserable waste ground, where
the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone;
and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich
goods and costly merchandise. The old by-streets now swarmed with
passengers and vehicles of every kind: the new streets that had
stopped disheartened in the mud and waggon-ruts, formed towns within
themselves, originating wholesome comforts and conveniences belonging
to themselves, and never tried nor thought of until they sprung into
existence. Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens,
churches, healthy public walks. The carcasses of houses, and
beginnings of new thoroughfares, had started off upon the line at
steam's own speed, and shot away into the country in a monster train.'

As to the neighbourhood which had hesitated to acknowledge the
railroad in its straggling days, that had grown wise and penitent, as
any Christian might in such a case, and now boasted of its powerful
and prosperous relation. There were railway patterns in its drapers'
shops, and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen. There were
railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses;
railway plans, maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and
time-tables; railway hackney-coach and stands; railway omnibuses,
railway streets and buildings, railway hangers-on and parasites, and
flatterers out of all calculation. There was even railway time
observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in. Among the
vanquished was the master chimney-sweeper, whilom incredulous at
Staggs's Gardens, who now lived in a stuccoed house three stories
high, and gave himself out, with golden flourishes upon a varnished
board, as contractor for the cleansing of railway chimneys by
machinery.

To and from the heart of this great change, all day and night,
throbbing currents rushed and returned incessantly like its life's
blood. Crowds of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving
scores upon scores of times in every four-and-twenty hours, produced a
fermentation in the place that was always in action. The very houses
seemed disposed to pack up and take trips. Wonderful Members of
Parliament, who, little more than twenty years before, had made
themselves merry with the wild railroad theories of engineers, and
given them the liveliest rubs in cross-examination, went down into the
north with their watches in their hands, and sent on messages before
by the electric telegraph, to say that they were coming. Night and day
the conquering engines rumbled at their distant work, or, advancing
smoothly to their journey's end, and gliding like tame dragons into
the allotted corners grooved out to the inch for their reception,
stood bubbling and trembling there, making the walls quake, as if they
were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers yet
unsuspected in them, and strong purposes not yet achieved.

But Staggs's Gardens had been cut up root and branch. Oh woe the
day when 'not a rood of English ground' - laid out in Staggs's Gardens
- is secure!

At last, after much fruitless inquiry, Walter, followed by the
coach and Susan, found a man who had once resided in that vanished
land, and who was no other than the master sweep before referred to,
grown stout, and knocking a double knock at his own door. He knowed
Toodle, he said, well. Belonged to the Railroad, didn't he?

'Yes' sir, yes!' cried Susan Nipper from the coach window.

Where did he live now? hastily inquired Walter.

He lived in the Company's own Buildings, second turning to the
right, down the yard, cross over, and take the second on the right
again. It was number eleven; they couldn't mistake it; but if they
did, they had only to ask for Toodle, Engine Fireman, and any one
would show them which was his house. At this unexpected stroke of
success Susan Nipper dismounted from the coach with all speed, took
Walter's arm, and set off at a breathless pace on foot; leaving the
coach there to await their return.

'Has the little boy been long ill, Susan?' inquired Walter, as they
hurried on.

'Ailing for a deal of time, but no one knew how much,' said Susan;
adding, with excessive sharpness, 'Oh, them Blimbers!'

'Blimbers?' echoed Walter.

'I couldn't forgive myself at such a time as this, Mr Walter,' said
Susan, 'and when there's so much serious distress to think about, if I
rested hard on anyone, especially on them that little darling Paul
speaks well of, but I may wish that the family was set to work in a
stony soil to make new roads, and that Miss Blimber went in front, and
had the pickaxe!'

Miss Nipper then took breath, and went on faster than before, as if
this extraordinary aspiration had relieved her. Walter, who had by
this time no breath of his own to spare, hurried along without asking
any more questions; and they soon, in their impatience, burst in at a
little door and came into a clean parlour full of children.

'Where's Mrs Richards?' exclaimed Susan Nipper, looking round. 'Oh
Mrs Richards, Mrs Richards, come along with me, my dear creetur!'

'Why, if it ain't Susan!' cried Polly, rising with her honest face
and motherly figure from among the group, in great surprIse.

'Yes, Mrs Richards, it's me,' said Susan, 'and I wish it wasn't,
though I may not seem to flatter when I say so, but little Master Paul
is very ill, and told his Pa today that he would like to see the face
of his old nurse, and him and Miss Floy hope you'll come along with me
- and Mr Walter, Mrs Richards - forgetting what is past, and do a
kindness to the sweet dear that is withering away. Oh, Mrs Richards,
withering away!' Susan Nipper crying, Polly shed tears to see her, and
to hear what she had said; and all the children gathered round
(including numbers of new babies); and Mr Toodle, who had just come
home from Birmingham, and was eating his dinner out of a basin, laid
down his knife and fork, and put on his wife's bonnet and shawl for
her, which were hanging up behind the door; then tapped her on the
back; and said, with more fatherly feeling than eloquence, 'Polly! cut
away!'

So they got back to the coach, long before the coachman expected
them; and Walter, putting Susan and Mrs Richards inside, took his seat
on the box himself that there might be no more mistakes, and deposited
them safely in the hall of Mr Dombey's house - where, by the bye, he
saw a mighty nosegay lying, which reminded him of the one Captain
Cuttle had purchased in his company that morning. He would have
lingered to know more of the young invalid, or waited any length of
time to see if he could render the least service; but, painfully
sensible that such conduct would be looked upon by Mr Dombey as
presumptuous and forward, he turned slowly, sadly, anxiously, away.

He had not gone five minutes' walk from the door, when a man came
running after him, and begged him to return. Walter retraced his steps
as quickly as he could, and entered the gloomy house with a sorrowful
foreboding.



CHAPTER 16.

What the Waves were always saying



Paul had never risen from his little bed. He lay there, listening
to the noises in the street, quite tranquilly; not caring much how the
time went, but watching it and watching everything about him with
observing eyes.

When the sunbeams struck into his room through the rustling blinds,
and quivered on the opposite wall like golden water, he knew that
evening was coming on, and that the sky was red and beautiful. As the
reflection died away, and a gloom went creeping up the wall, he
watched it deepen, deepen, deepen, into night. Then he thought how the
long streets were dotted with lamps, and how the peaceful stars were
shining overhead. His fancy had a strange tendency to wander to the
river, which he knew was flowing through the great city; and now he
thought how black it was, and how deep it would look, reflecting the
hosts of stars - and more than all, how steadily it rolled away to
meet the sea.

As it grew later in the night, and footsteps in the street became
so rare that he could hear them coming, count them as they passed, and
lose them in the hollow distance, he would lie and watch the
many-coloured ring about the candle, and wait patiently for day. His
only trouble was, the swift and rapid river. He felt forced,
sometimes, to try to stop it - to stem it with his childish hands - or
choke its way with sand - and when he saw it coming on, resistless, he
cried out! But a word from Florence, who was always at his side,
restored him to himself; and leaning his poor head upon her breast, he
told Floy of his dream, and smiled.

When day began to dawn again, he watched for the sun; and when its
cheerful light began to sparkle in the room, he pictured to himself -
pictured! he saw - the high church towers rising up into the morning
sky, the town reviving, waking, starting into life once more, the
river glistening as it rolled (but rolling fast as ever), and the
country bright with dew. Familiar sounds and cries came by degrees
into the street below; the servants in the house were roused and busy;
faces looked in at the door, and voices asked his attendants softly
how he was. Paul always answered for himself, 'I am better. I am a
great deal better, thank you! Tell Papa so!'

By little and little, he got tired of the bustle of the day, the
noise of carriages and carts, and people passing and repassing; and
would fall asleep, or be troubled with a restless and uneasy sense
again - the child could hardly tell whether this were in his sleeping
or his waking moments - of that rushing river. 'Why, will it never
stop, Floy?' he would sometimes ask her. 'It is bearing me away, I
think!'

But Floy could always soothe and reassure him; and it was his daily
delight to make her lay her head down on his pillow, and take some
rest.

'You are always watching me, Floy, let me watch you, now!' They
would prop him up with cushions in a corner of his bed, and there he
would recline the while she lay beside him: bending forward oftentimes
to kiss her, and whispering to those who were near that she was tired,
and how she had sat up so many nights beside him.

Thus, the flush of the day, in its heat and light, would gradually
decline; and again the golden water would be dancing on the wall.

He was visited by as many as three grave doctors - they used to
assemble downstairs, and come up together - and the room was so quiet,
and Paul was so observant of them (though he never asked of anybody
what they said), that he even knew the difference in the sound of
their watches. But his interest centred in Sir Parker Peps, who always
took his seat on the side of the bed. For Paul had heard them say long
ago, that that gentleman had been with his Mama when she clasped
Florence in her arms, and died. And he could not forget it, now. He
liked him for it. He was not afraid.

The people round him changed as unaccountably as on that first
night at Doctor Blimber's - except Florence; Florence never changed -
and what had been Sir Parker Peps, was now his father, sitting with
his head upon his hand. Old Mrs Pipchin dozing in an easy chair, often
changed to Miss Tox, or his aunt; and Paul was quite content to shut
his eyes again, and see what happened next, without emotion. But this
figure with its head upon its hand returned so often, and remained so
long, and sat so still and solemn, never speaking, never being spoken
to, and rarely lifting up its face, that Paul began to wonder
languidly, if it were real; and in the night-time saw it sitting
there, with fear.

'Floy!' he said. 'What is that?'

'Where, dearest?'

'There! at the bottom of the bed.'

'There's nothing there, except Papa!'

The figure lifted up its head, and rose, and coming to the bedside,
said:

'My own boy! Don't you know me?'

Paul looked it in the face, and thought, was this his father? But
the face so altered to his thinking, thrilled while he gazed, as if it
were in pain; and before he could reach out both his hands to take it
between them, and draw it towards him, the figure turned away quickly
from the little bed, and went out at the door.

Paul looked at Florence with a fluttering heart, but he knew what
she was going to say, and stopped her with his face against her lips.
The next time he observed the figure sitting at the bottom of the bed,
he called to it.

'Don't be sorry for me, dear Papa! Indeed I am quite happy!'

His father coming and bending down to him - which he did quickly,
and without first pausing by the bedside - Paul held him round the
neck, and repeated those words to him several times, and very
earnestly; and Paul never saw him in his room again at any time,
whether it were day or night, but he called out, 'Don't be sorry for
me! Indeed I am quite happy!' This was the beginning of his always
saying in the morning that he was a great deal better, and that they
were to tell his father so.

How many times the golden water danced upon the wall; how many
nights the dark, dark river rolled towards the sea in spite of him;
Paul never counted, never sought to know. If their kindness, or his
sense of it, could have increased, they were more kind, and he more
grateful every day; but whether they were many days or few, appeared
of little moment now, to the gentle boy.

One night he had been thinking of his mother, and her picture in
the drawing-room downstairs, and thought she must have loved sweet
Florence better than his father did, to have held her in her arms when
she felt that she was dying - for even he, her brother, who had such
dear love for her, could have no greater wish than that. The train of
thought suggested to him to inquire if he had ever seen his mother?
for he could not remember whether they had told him, yes or no, the
river running very fast, and confusing his mind.

'Floy, did I ever see Mama?'

'No, darling, why?'

'Did I ever see any kind face, like Mama's, looking at me when I
was a baby, Floy?'

He asked, incredulously, as if he had some vision of a face before
him.

'Oh yes, dear!'

'Whose, Floy?'

'Your old nurse's. Often.'

'And where is my old nurse?' said Paul. 'Is she dead too? Floy, are
we all dead, except you?'

There was a hurry in the room, for an instant - longer, perhaps;
but it seemed no more - then all was still again; and Florence, with
her face quite colourless, but smiling, held his head upon her arm.
Her arm trembled very much.

'Show me that old nurse, Floy, if you please!'

'She is not here, darling. She shall come to-morrow.'

'Thank you, Floy!'

Paul closed his eyes with those words, and fell asleep. When he
awoke, the sun was high, and the broad day was clear and He lay a
little, looking at the windows, which were open, and the curtains
rustling in the air, and waving to and fro: then he said, 'Floy, is it
tomorrow? Is she come?'

Someone seemed to go in quest of her. Perhaps it was Susan. Paul
thought he heard her telling him when he had closed his eyes again,
that she would soon be back; but he did not open them to see. She kept
her word - perhaps she had never been away - but the next thing that
happened was a noise of footsteps on the stairs, and then Paul woke -
woke mind and body - and sat upright in his bed. He saw them now about
him. There was no grey mist before them, as there had been sometimes
in the night. He knew them every one, and called them by their names.

'And who is this? Is this my old nurse?' said the child, regarding
with a radiant smile, a figure coming in.

Yes, yes. No other stranger would have shed those tears at sight of
him, and called him her dear boy, her pretty boy, her own poor
blighted child. No other woman would have stooped down by his bed, and
taken up his wasted hand, and put it to her lips and breast, as one
who had some right to fondle it. No other woman would have so
forgotten everybody there but him and Floy, and been so full of
tenderness and pity.

'Floy! this is a kind good face!' said Paul. 'I am glad to see it
again. Don't go away, old nurse! Stay here.'

His senses were all quickened, and he heard a name he knew.

'Who was that, who said "Walter"?' he asked, looking round.
'Someone said Walter. Is he here? I should like to see him very much.'

Nobody replied directly; but his father soon said to Susan, 'Call
him back, then: let him come up!' Alter a short pause of expectation,
during which he looked with smiling interest and wonder, on his nurse,
and saw that she had not forgotten Floy, Walter was brought into the
room. His open face and manner, and his cheerful eyes, had always made
him a favourite with Paul; and when Paul saw him' he stretched Out his
hand, and said 'Good-bye!'

'Good-bye, my child!' said Mrs Pipchin, hurrying to his bed's head.
'Not good-bye?'

For an instant, Paul looked at her with the wistful face with which
he had so often gazed upon her in his corner by the fire. 'Yes,' he
said placidly, 'good-bye! Walter dear, good-bye!' - turning his head
to where he stood, and putting out his hand again. 'Where is Papa?'

He felt his father's breath upon his cheek, before the words had
parted from his lips.

'Remember Walter, dear Papa,' he whispered, looking in his face.
'Remember Walter. I was fond of Walter!' The feeble hand waved in the
air, as if it cried 'good-bye!' to Walter once again.

'Now lay me down,' he said, 'and, Floy, come close to me, and let
me see you!'

Sister and brother wound their arms around each other, and the
golden light came streaming in, and fell upon them, locked together.

'How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the rushes,
'Floy! But it's very near the sea. I hear the waves! They always said
so!'

Presently he told her the motion of the boat upon the stream was
lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now, how bright the
flowers growing on them, and how tall the rushes! Now the boat was out
at sea, but gliding smoothly on. And now there was a shore before him.
Who stood on the bank! -

He put his hands together, as he had been used to do at his
prayers. He did not remove his arms to do it; but they saw him fold
them so, behind her neck.

'Mama is like you, Floy. I know her by the face! But tell them that
the print upon the stairs at school is not divine enough. The light
about the head is shining on me as I go!'

The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else
stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in
with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has
run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The
old, old fashion - Death!

Oh thank GOD, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of
Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards
not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!

'Dear me, dear me! To think,' said Miss Tox, bursting out afresh
that night, as if her heart were broken, 'that Dombey and Son should
be a Daughter after all!'



CHAPTER 17.

Captain Cuttle does a little Business for the Young People



Captain Cuttle, in the exercise of that surprising talent for
deep-laid and unfathomable scheming, with which (as is not unusual in
men of transparent simplicity) he sincerely believed himself to be
endowed by nature, had gone to Mr Dombey's house on the eventful
Sunday, winking all the way as a vent for his superfluous sagacity,
and had presented himself in the full lustre of the ankle-jacks before
the eyes of Towlinson. Hearing from that individual, to his great
concern, of the impending calamity, Captain Cuttle, in his delicacy,
sheered off again confounded; merely handing in the nosegay as a small
mark of his solicitude, and leaving his respectful compliments for the
family in general, which he accompanied with an expression of his hope
that they would lay their heads well to the wind under existing
circumstances, and a friendly intimation that he would 'look up again'
to-morrow.

The Captain's compliments were never heard of any more. The
Captain's nosegay, after lying in the hall all night, was swept into
the dust-bin next morning; and the Captain's sly arrangement, involved
in one catastrophe with greater hopes and loftier designs, was crushed
to pieces. So, when an avalanche bears down a mountain-forest, twigs
and bushes suffer with the trees, and all perish together.

When Walter returned home on the Sunday evening from his long walk,
and its memorable close, he was too much occupied at first by the
tidings he had to give them, and by the emotions naturally awakened in
his breast by the scene through which he had passed, to observe either
that his Uncle was evidently unacquainted with the intelligence the
Captain had undertaken to impart, or that the Captain made signals
with his hook, warning him to avoid the subject. Not that the
Captain's signals were calculated to have proved very comprehensible,
however attentively observed; for, like those Chinese sages who are
said in their conferences to write certain learned words in the air
that are wholly impossible of pronunciation, the Captain made such
waves and flourishes as nobody without a previous knowledge of his
mystery, would have been at all likely to understand.

Captain Cuttle, however, becoming cognisant of what had happened,
relinquished these attempts, as he perceived the slender chance that
now existed of his being able to obtain a little easy chat with Mr
Dombey before the period of Walter's departure. But in admitting to
himself, with a disappointed and crestfallen countenance, that Sol
Gills must be told, and that Walter must go - taking the case for the
present as he found it, and not having it enlightened or improved
beforehand by the knowing management of a friend - the Captain still
felt an unabated confidence that he, Ned Cuttle, was the man for Mr
Dombey; and that, to set Walter's fortunes quite square, nothing was
wanted but that they two should come together. For the Captain never
could forget how well he and Mr Dombey had got on at Brighton; with
what nicety each of them had put in a word when it was wanted; how
exactly they had taken one another's measure; nor how Ned Cuttle had
pointed out that resources in the first extremity, and had brought the
interview to the desired termination. On all these grounds the Captain
soothed himself with thinking that though Ned Cuttle was forced by the
pressure of events to 'stand by' almost useless for the present, Ned
would fetch up with a wet sail in good time, and carry all before him.

Under the influence of this good-natured delusion, Captain Cuttle
even went so far as to revolve in his own bosom, while he sat looking
at Walter and listening with a tear on his shirt-collar to what he
related, whether it might not be at once genteel and politic to give
Mr Dombey a verbal invitation, whenever they should meet, to come and
cut his mutton in Brig Place on some day of his own naming, and enter
on the question of his young friend's prospects over a social glass.
But the uncertain temper of Mrs MacStinger, and the possibility of her
setting up her rest in the passage during such an entertainment, and
there delivering some homily of an uncomplimentary nature, operated as
a check on the Captain's hospitable thoughts, and rendered him timid
of giving them encouragement.

One fact was quite clear to the Captain, as Walter, sitting
thoughtfully over his untasted dinner, dwelt on all that had happened;
namely, that however Walter's modesty might stand in the way of his
perceiving it himself, he was, as one might say, a member of Mr
Dombey's family. He had been, in his own person, connected with the
incident he so pathetically described; he had been by name remembered
and commended in close association with it; and his fortunes must have
a particular interest in his employer's eyes. If the Captain had any
lurking doubt whatever of his own conclusions, he had not the least
doubt that they were good conclusions for the peace of mind of the
Instrument-maker. Therefore he availed himself of so favourable a
moment for breaking the West Indian intelligence to his friend, as a
piece of extraordinary preferment; declaring that for his part he
would freely give a hundred thousand pounds (if he had it) for
Walter's gain in the long-run, and that he had no doubt such an
investment would yield a handsome premium.

Solomon Gills was at first stunned by the communication, which fell
upon the little back-parlour like a thunderbolt, and tore up the
hearth savagely. But the Captain flashed such golden prospects before
his dim sight: hinted so mysteriously at 'Whittingtonian consequences;
laid such emphasis on what Walter had just now told them: and appealed
to it so confidently as a corroboration of his predictions, and a
great advance towards the realisation of the romantic legend of Lovely
Peg: that he bewildered the old man. Walter, for his part, feigned to
be so full of hope and ardour, and so sure of coming home again soon,
and backed up the Captain with such expressive shakings of his head
and rubbings of his hands, that Solomon, looking first at him then at
Captain Cuttle, began to think he ought to be transported with joy.

'But I'm behind the time, you understand,' he observed in apology,
passing his hand nervously down the whole row of bright buttons on his
coat, and then up again, as if they were beads and he were telling
them twice over: 'and I would rather have my dear boy here. It's an
old-fashioned notion, I daresay. He was always fond of the sea He's' -
and he looked wistfully at Walter - 'he's glad to go.'

'Uncle Sol!' cried Walter, quickly, 'if you say that, I won't go.
No, Captain Cuttle, I won't. If my Uncle thinks I could be glad to
leave him, though I was going to be made Governor of all the Islands
in the West Indies, that's enough. I'm a fixture.'

'Wal'r, my lad,' said the Captain. 'Steady! Sol Gills, take an
observation of your nevy.

Following with his eyes the majestic action of the Captain's hook,
the old man looked at Walter.

'Here is a certain craft,' said the Captain, with a magnificent
sense of the allegory into which he was soaring, 'a-going to put out
on a certain voyage. What name is wrote upon that craft indelibly? Is
it The Gay? or,' said the Captain, raising his voice as much as to
say, observe the point of this, 'is it The Gills?'

'Ned,' said the old man, drawing Walter to his side, and taking his
arm tenderly through his, 'I know. I know. Of course I know that Wally
considers me more than himself always. That's in my mind. When I say
he is glad to go, I mean I hope he is. Eh? look you, Ned and you too,
Wally, my dear, this is new and unexpected to me; and I'm afraid my
being behind the time, and poor, is at the bottom of it. Is it really
good fortune for him, do you tell me, now?' said the old man, looking
anxiously from one to the other. 'Really and truly? Is it? I can
reconcile myself to almost anything that advances Wally, but I won't
have Wally putting himself at any disadvantage for me, or keeping
anything from me. You, Ned Cuttle!' said the old man, fastening on the
Captain, to the manifest confusion of that diplomatist; 'are you
dealing plainly by your old friend? Speak out, Ned Cuttle. Is there
anything behind? Ought he to go? How do you know it first, and why?'

As it was a contest of affection and self-denial, Walter struck in
with infinite effect, to the Captain's relief; and between them they
tolerably reconciled old Sol Gills, by continued talking, to the
project; or rather so confused him, that nothing, not even the pain of
separation, was distinctly clear to his mind.

He had not much time to balance the matter; for on the very next
day, Walter received from Mr Carker the Manager, the necessary
credentials for his passage and outfit, together with the information
that the Son and Heir would sail in a fortnight, or within a day or
two afterwards at latest. In the hurry of preparation: which Walter
purposely enhanced as much as possible: the old man lost what little
selfpossession he ever had; and so the time of departure drew on
rapidly.

The Captain, who did not fail to make himself acquainted with all
that passed, through inquiries of Walter from day to day, found the
time still tending on towards his going away, without any occasion
offering itself, or seeming likely to offer itself, for a better
understanding of his position. It was after much consideration of this
fact, and much pondering over such an unfortunate combination of
circumstances, that a bright idea occurred to the Captain. Suppose he
made a call on Mr Carker, and tried to find out from him how the land
really lay!

Captain Cuttle liked this idea very much. It came upon him in a
moment of inspiration, as he was smoking an early pipe in Brig Place
after breakfast; and it was worthy of the tobacco. It would quiet his
conscience, which was an honest one, and was made a little uneasy by
what Walter had confided to him, and what Sol Gills had said; and it
would be a deep, shrewd act of friendship. He would sound Mr Carker
carefully, and say much or little, just as he read that gentleman's
character, and discovered that they got on well together or the
reverse.

Accordingly, without the fear of Walter before his eyes (who he
knew was at home packing), Captain Cuttle again assumed his
ankle-jacks and mourning brooch, and issued forth on this second
expedition. He purchased no propitiatory nosegay on the present
occasion, as he was going to a place of business; but he put a small
sunflower in his button-hole to give himself an agreeable relish of
the country; and with this, and the knobby stick, and the glazed hat,
bore down upon the offices of Dombey and Son.

After taking a glass of warm rum-and-water at a tavern close by, to
collect his thoughts, the Captain made a rush down the court, lest its
good effects should evaporate, and appeared suddenly to Mr Perch.

'Matey,' said the Captain, in persuasive accents. 'One of your
Governors is named Carker.' Mr Perch admitted it; but gave him to
understand, as in official duty bound, that all his Governors were
engaged, and never expected to be disengaged any more.

'Look'ee here, mate,' said the Captain in his ear; 'my name's
Cap'en Cuttle.'

The Captain would have hooked Perch gently to him, but Mr Perch
eluded the attempt; not so much in design, as in starting at the
sudden thought that such a weapon unexpectedly exhibited to Mrs Perch
might, in her then condition, be destructive to that lady's hopes.

'If you'll be so good as just report Cap'en Cuttle here, when you
get a chance,' said the Captain, 'I'll wait.'

Saying which, the Captain took his seat on Mr Perch's bracket, and
drawing out his handkerchief from the crown of the glazed hat which he
jammed between his knees (without injury to its shape, for nothing
human could bend it), rubbed his head well all over, and appeared
refreshed. He subsequently arranged his hair with his hook, and sat
looking round the office, contemplating the clerks with a serene
respect.

The Captain's equanimity was so impenetrable, and he was altogether
so mysterious a being, that Perch the messenger was daunted.

'What name was it you said?' asked Mr Perch, bending down over him
as he sat on the bracket.

'Cap'en,' in a deep hoarse whisper.

'Yes,' said Mr Perch, keeping time with his head.

'Cuttle.'

'Oh!' said Mr Perch, in the same tone, for he caught it, and
couldn't help it; the Captain, in his diplomacy, was so impressive.
'I'll see if he's disengaged now. I don't know. Perhaps he may be for
a minute.'

'Ay, ay, my lad, I won't detain him longer than a minute,' said the
Captain, nodding with all the weighty importance that he felt within
him. Perch, soon returning, said, 'Will Captain Cuttle walk this way?'

Mr Carker the Manager, standing on the hearth-rug before the empty
fireplace, which was ornamented with a castellated sheet of brown
paper, looked at the Captain as he came in, with no very special
encouragement.

'Mr Carker?' said Captain Cuttle.

'I believe so,' said Mr Carker, showing all his teeth.

The Captain liked his answering with a smile; it looked pleasant.
'You see,' began the Captain, rolling his eyes slowly round the little
room, and taking in as much of it as his shirt-collar permitted; 'I'm
a seafaring man myself, Mr Carker, and Wal'r, as is on your books
here, is almost a son of mine.'

'Walter Gay?' said Mr Carker, showing all his teeth again.

'Wal'r Gay it is,' replied the Captain, 'right!' The Captain's
manner expressed a warm approval of Mr Carker's quickness of
perception. 'I'm a intimate friend of his and his Uncle's. Perhaps,'
said the Captain, 'you may have heard your head Governor mention my
name? - Captain Cuttle.'

'No!' said Mr Carker, with a still wider demonstration than before.

'Well,' resumed the Captain, 'I've the pleasure of his
acquaintance. I waited upon him down on the Sussex coast there, with
my young friend Wal'r, when - in short, when there was a little
accommodation wanted.' The Captain nodded his head in a manner that
was at once comfortable, easy, and expressive. 'You remember, I
daresay?'

'I think,' said Mr Carker, 'I had the honour of arranging the
business.'

'To be sure!' returned the Captain. 'Right again! you had. Now I've
took the liberty of coming here -

'Won't you sit down?' said Mr Carker, smiling.

'Thank'ee,' returned the Captain, availing himself of the offer. 'A
man does get more way upon himself, perhaps, in his conversation, when
he sits down. Won't you take a cheer yourself?'

'No thank you,' said the Manager, standing, perhaps from the force
of winter habit, with his back against the chimney-piece, and looking
down upon the Captain with an eye in every tooth and gum. 'You have
taken the liberty, you were going to say - though it's none - '

'Thank'ee kindly, my lad,' returned the Captain: 'of coming here,
on account of my friend Wal'r. Sol Gills, his Uncle, is a man of
science, and in science he may be considered a clipper; but he ain't
what I should altogether call a able seaman - not man of practice.
Wal'r is as trim a lad as ever stepped; but he's a little down by the
head in one respect, and that is, modesty. Now what I should wish to
put to you,' said the Captain, lowering his voice, and speaking in a
kind of confidential growl, 'in a friendly way, entirely between you
and me, and for my own private reckoning, 'till your head Governor has
wore round a bit, and I can come alongside of him, is this - Is
everything right and comfortable here, and is Wal'r out'ard bound with
a pretty fair wind?'

'What do you think now, Captain Cuttle?' returned Carker, gathering
up his skirts and settling himself in his position. 'You are a
practical man; what do you think?'

The acuteness and the significance of the Captain's eye as he
cocked it in reply, no words short of those unutterable Chinese words
before referred to could describe.

'Come!' said the Captain, unspeakably encouraged, 'what do you say?
Am I right or wrong?'

So much had the Captain expressed in his eye, emboldened and
incited by Mr Carker's smiling urbanity, that he felt himself in as
fair a condition to put the question, as if he had expressed his
sentiments with the utmost elaboration.

'Right,' said Mr Carker, 'I have no doubt.'

'Out'ard bound with fair weather, then, I say,' cried Captain
Cuttle.

Mr Carker smiled assent.

'Wind right astarn, and plenty of it,' pursued the Captain.

Mr Carker smiled assent again.

'Ay, ay!' said Captain Cuttle, greatly relieved and pleased. 'I
know'd how she headed, well enough; I told Wal'r so. Thank'ee,
thank'ee.'

'Gay has brilliant prospects,' observed Mr Carker, stretching his
mouth wider yet: 'all the world before him.'

'All the world and his wife too, as the saying is,' returned the
delighted Captain.

At the word 'wife' (which he had uttered without design), the
Captain stopped, cocked his eye again, and putting the glazed hat on
the top of the knobby stick, gave it a twirl, and looked sideways at
his always smiling friend.

'I'd bet a gill of old Jamaica,' said the Captain, eyeing him
attentively, 'that I know what you're a smiling at.'

Mr Carker took his cue, and smiled the more.

'It goes no farther?' said the Captain, making a poke at the door
with the knobby stick to assure himself that it was shut.

'Not an inch,' said Mr Carker.

'You're thinking of a capital F perhaps?' said the Captain.

Mr Carker didn't deny it.

'Anything about a L,' said the Captain, 'or a O?'

Mr Carker still smiled.

'Am I right, again?' inquired the Captain in a whisper, with the
scarlet circle on his forehead swelling in his triumphant joy.

Mr Carker, in reply, still smiling, and now nodding assent, Captain
Cuttle rose and squeezed him by the hand, assuring him, warmly, that
they were on the same tack, and that as for him (Cuttle) he had laid
his course that way all along. 'He know'd her first,' said the
Captain, with all the secrecy and gravity that the subject demanded,
'in an uncommon manner - you remember his finding her in the street
when she was a'most a babby - he has liked her ever since, and she
him, as much as two youngsters can. We've always said, Sol Gills and
me, that they was cut out for each other.'

A cat, or a monkey, or a hyena, or a death's-head, could not have
shown the Captain more teeth at one time, than Mr Carker showed him at
this period of their interview.

'There's a general indraught that way,' observed the happy Captain.
'Wind and water sets in that direction, you see. Look at his being
present t'other day!'

'Most favourable to his hopes,' said Mr Carker.

'Look at his being towed along in the wake of that day!' pursued
the Captain. 'Why what can cut him adrift now?'

'Nothing,' replied Mr Carker.

'You're right again,' returned the Captain, giving his hand another
squeeze. 'Nothing it is. So! steady! There's a son gone: pretty little
creetur. Ain't there?'

'Yes, there's a son gone,' said the acquiescent Carker.

'Pass the word, and there's another ready for you,' quoth the
Captain. 'Nevy of a scientific Uncle! Nevy of Sol Gills! Wal'r! Wal'r,
as is already in your business! And' - said the Captain, rising
gradually to a quotation he was preparing for a final burst, 'who -
comes from Sol Gills's daily, to your business, and your buzzums.' The
Captain's complacency as he gently jogged Mr Carker with his elbow, on
concluding each of the foregoing short sentences, could be surpassed
by nothing but the exultation with which he fell back and eyed him
when he had finished this brilliant display of eloquence and sagacity;
his great blue waistcoat heaving with the throes of such a
masterpiece, and his nose in a state of violent inflammation from the
same cause.

'Am I right?' said the Captain.

'Captain Cuttle,' said Mr Carker, bending down at the knees, for a
moment, in an odd manner, as if he were falling together to hug the
whole of himself at once, 'your views in reference to Walter Gay are
thoroughly and accurately right. I understand that we speak together
in confidence.

'Honour!' interposed the Captain. 'Not a word.'

'To him or anyone?' pursued the Manager.

Captain Cuttle frowned and shook his head.

'But merely for your own satisfaction and guidance - and guidance,
of course,' repeated Mr Carker, 'with a view to your future
proceedings.'

'Thank'ee kindly, I am sure,' said the Captain, listening with
great attention.

'I have no hesitation in saying, that's the fact. You have hit the
probabilities exactly.'

'And with regard to your head Governor,' said the Captain, 'why an
interview had better come about nat'ral between us. There's time
enough.'

Mr Carker, with his mouth from ear to ear, repeated, 'Time enough.'
Not articulating the words, but bowing his head affably, and forming
them with his tongue and lips.

'And as I know - it's what I always said- that Wal'r's in a way to
make his fortune,' said the Captain.

'To make his fortune,' Mr Carker repeated, in the same dumb manner.

'And as Wal'r's going on this little voyage is, as I may say, in
his day's work, and a part of his general expectations here,' said the
Captain.

'Of his general expectations here,' assented Mr Carker, dumbly as
before.

'Why, so long as I know that,' pursued the Captain, 'there's no
hurry, and my mind's at ease.

Mr Carker still blandly assenting in the same voiceless manner,
Captain Cuttle was strongly confirmed in his opinion that he was one
of the most agreeable men he had ever met, and that even Mr Dombey
might improve himself on such a model. With great heartiness,
therefore, the Captain once again extended his enormous hand (not
unlike an old block in colour), and gave him a grip that left upon his
smoother flesh a proof impression of the chinks and crevices with
which the Captain's palm was liberally tattooed.

'Farewell!' said the Captain. 'I ain't a man of many words, but I
take it very kind of you to be so friendly, and above-board. You'll
excuse me if I've been at all intruding, will you?' said the Captain.

'Not at all,' returned the other.

'Thank'ee. My berth ain't very roomy,' said the Captain, turning
back again, 'but it's tolerably snug; and if you was to find yourself
near Brig Place, number nine, at any time - will you make a note of
it? - and would come upstairs, without minding what was said by the
person at the door, I should be proud to see you.

With that hospitable invitation, the Captain said 'Good day!' and
walked out and shut the door; leaving Mr Carker still reclining
against the chimney-piece. In whose sly look and watchful manner; in
whose false mouth, stretched but not laughing; in whose spotless
cravat and very whiskers; even in whose silent passing of his soft
hand over his white linen and his smooth face; there was something
desperately cat-like.

The unconscious Captain walked out in a state of self-glorification
that imparted quite a new cut to the broad blue suit. 'Stand by, Ned!'
said the Captain to himself. 'You've done a little business for the
youngsters today, my lad!'

In his exultation, and in his familiarity, present and prospective,
with the House, the Captain, when he reached the outer office, could
not refrain from rallying Mr Perch a little, and asking him whether he
thought everybody was still engaged. But not to be bitter on a man who
had done his duty, the Captain whispered in his ear, that if he felt
disposed for a glass of rum-and-water, and would follow, he would be
happy to bestow the same upon him.

Before leaving the premises, the Captain, somewhat to the
astonishment of the clerks, looked round from a central point of view,
and took a general survey of the officers part and parcel of a project
in which his young friend was nearly interested. The strong-room
excited his especial admiration; but, that he might not appear too
particular, he limited himself to an approving glance, and, with a
graceful recognition of the clerks as a body, that was full of
politeness and patronage, passed out into the court. Being promptly
joined by Mr Perch, he conveyed that gentleman to the tavern, and
fulfilled his pledge - hastily, for Perch's time was precious.

'I'll give you for a toast,' said the Captain, 'Wal'r!'

'Who?' submitted Mr Perch.

'Wal'r!' repeated the Captain, in a voice of thunder.

Mr Perch, who seemed to remember having heard in infancy that there
was once a poet of that name, made no objection; but he was much
astonished at the Captain's coming into the City to propose a poet;
indeed, if he had proposed to put a poet's statue up - say
Shakespeare's for example - in a civic thoroughfare, he could hardly
have done a greater outrage to Mr Perch's experience. On the whole, he
was such a mysterious and incomprehensible character, that Mr Perch
decided not to mention him to Mrs Perch at all, in case of giving rise
to any disagreeable consequences.

Mysterious and incomprehensible, the Captain, with that lively
sense upon him of having done a little business for the youngsters,
remained all day, even to his most intimate friends; and but that
Walter attributed his winks and grins, and other such pantomimic
reliefs of himself, to his satisfaction in the success of their
innocent deception upon old Sol Gills, he would assuredly have
betrayed himself before night. As it was, however, he kept his own
secret; and went home late from the Instrument-maker's house, wearing
the glazed hat so much on one side, and carrying such a beaming
expression in his eyes, that Mrs MacStinger (who might have been
brought up at Doctor Blimber's, she was such a Roman matron) fortified
herself, at the first glimpse of him, behind the open street door, and
refused to come out to the contemplation of her blessed infants, until
he was securely lodged in his own room.



CHAPTER 18.

Father and Daughter



There is a hush through Mr Dombey's house. Servants gliding up and
down stairs rustle, but make no sound of footsteps. They talk together
constantly, and sit long at meals, making much of their meat and
drink, and enjoying themselves after a grim unholy fashion. Mrs
Wickam, with her eyes suffused with tears, relates melancholy
anecdotes; and tells them how she always said at Mrs Pipchin's that it
would be so, and takes more table-ale than usual, and is very sorry
but sociable. Cook's state of mind is similar. She promises a little
fry for supper, and struggles about equally against her feelings and
the onions. Towlinson begins to think there's a fate in it, and wants
to know if anybody can tell him ofany good that ever came of living in
a corner house. It seems to all of them as having happened a long time
ago; though yet the child lies, calm and beautiful, upon his little
bed.

After dark there come some visitors - noiseless visitors, with
shoes of felt - who have been there before; and with them comes that
bed of rest which is so strange a one for infant sleepers. All this
time, the bereaved father has not been seen even by his attendant; for
he sits in an inner corner of his own dark room when anyone is there,
and never seems to move at other times, except to pace it to and fro.
But in the morning it is whispered among the household that he was
heard to go upstairs in the dead night, and that he stayed there - in
the room - until the sun was shining.

At the offices in the City, the ground-glass windows are made more
dim by shutters; and while the lighted lamps upon the desks are half
extinguished by the day that wanders in, the day is half extinguished
by the lamps, and an unusual gloom prevails. There is not much
business done. The clerks are indisposed to work; and they make
assignations to eat chops in the afternoon, and go up the river.
Perch, the messenger, stays long upon his errands; and finds himself
in bars of public-houses, invited thither by friends, and holding
forth on the uncertainty of human affairs. He goes home to Ball's Pond
earlier in the evening than usual, and treats Mrs Perch to a veal
cutlet and Scotch ale. Mr Carker the Manager treats no one; neither is
he treated; but alone in his own room he shows his teeth all day; and
it would seem that there is something gone from Mr Carker's path -
some obstacle removed - which clears his way before him.

Now the rosy children living opposite to Mr Dombey's house, peep
from their nursery windows down into the street; for there are four
black horses at his door, with feathers on their heads; and feathers
tremble on the carriage that they draw; and these, and an array of men
with scarves and staves, attract a crowd. The juggler who was going to
twirl the basin, puts his loose coat on again over his fine dress; and
his trudging wife, one-sided with her heavy baby in her arms, loiters
to see the company come out. But closer to her dingy breast she
presses her baby, when the burden that is so easily carried is borne
forth; and the youngest of the rosy children at the high window
opposite, needs no restraining hand to check her in her glee, when,
pointing with her dimpled finger, she looks into her nurse's face, and
asks 'What's that?'

And now, among the knot of servants dressed in mourning, and the
weeping women, Mr Dombey passes through the hall to the other carriage
that is waiting to receive him. He is not 'brought down,' these
observers think, by sorrow and distress of mind. His walk is as erect,
his bearing is as stiff as ever it has been. He hides his face behind
no handkerchief, and looks before him. But that his face is something
sunk and rigid, and is pale, it bears the same expression as of old.
He takes his place within the carriage, and three other gentlemen
follow. Then the grand funeral moves slowly down the street. The
feathers are yet nodding in the distance, when the juggler has the
basin spinning on a cane, and has the same crowd to admire it. But the
juggler's wife is less alert than usual with the money-box, for a
child's burial has set her thinking that perhaps the baby underneath
her shabby shawl may not grow up to be a man, and wear a sky-blue
fillet round his head, and salmon-coloured worsted drawers, and tumble
in the mud.

The feathers wind their gloomy way along the streets, and come
within the sound of a church bell. In this same church, the pretty boy
received all that will soon be left of him on earth - a name. All of
him that is dead, they lay there, near the perishable substance of his
mother. It is well. Their ashes lie where Florence in her walks - oh
lonely, lonely walks! - may pass them any day.

The service over, and the clergyman withdrawn, Mr Dombey looks
round, demanding in a low voice, whether the person who has been
requested to attend to receive instructions for the tablet, is there?

Someone comes forward, and says 'Yes.'

Mr Dombey intimates where he would have it placed; and shows him,
with his hand upon the wall, the shape and size; and how it is to
follow the memorial to the mother. Then, with his pencil, he writes
out the inscription, and gives it to him: adding, 'I wish to have it
done at once.

'It shall be done immediately, Sir.'

'There is really nothing to inscribe but name and age, you see.'

The man bows, glancing at the paper, but appears to hesitate. Mr
Dombey not observing his hesitation, turns away, and leads towards the
porch.

'I beg your pardon, Sir;' a touch falls gently on his mourning
cloak; 'but as you wish it done immediately, and it may be put in hand
when I get back - '

'Well?'

'Will you be so good as read it over again? I think there's a
mistake.'

'Where?'

The statuary gives him back the paper, and points out, with his
pocket rule, the words, 'beloved and only child.'

'It should be, "son," I think, Sir?'

'You are right. Of course. Make the correction.'

The father, with a hastier step, pursues his way to the coach. When
the other three, who follow closely, take their seats, his face is
hidden for the first time - shaded by his cloak. Nor do they see it
any more that day. He alights first, and passes immediately into his
own room. The other mourners (who are only Mr Chick, and two of the
medical attendants) proceed upstairs to the drawing-room, to be
received by Mrs Chick and Miss Tox. And what the face is, in the
shut-up chamber underneath: or what the thoughts are: what the heart
is, what the contest or the suffering: no one knows.

The chief thing that they know, below stairs, in the kitchen, is
that 'it seems like Sunday.' They can hardly persuade themselves but
that there is something unbecoming, if not wicked, in the conduct of
the people out of doors, who pursue their ordinary occupations, and
wear their everyday attire. It is quite a novelty to have the blinds
up, and the shutters open; and they make themselves dismally
comfortable over bottles of wine, which are freely broached as on a
festival. They are much inclined to moralise. Mr Towlinson proposes
with a sigh, 'Amendment to us all!' for which, as Cook says with
another sigh, 'There's room enough, God knows.' In the evening, Mrs
Chick and Miss Tox take to needlework again. In the evening also, Mr
Towlinson goes out to take the air, accompanied by the housemaid, who
has not yet tried her mourning bonnet. They are very tender to each
other at dusky street-corners, and Towlinson has visions of leading an
altered and blameless existence as a serious greengrocer in Oxford
Market.

There is sounder sleep and deeper rest in Mr Dombey's house
tonight, than there has been for many nights. The morning sun awakens
the old household, settled down once more in their old ways. The rosy
children opposite run past with hoops. There is a splendid wedding in
the church. The juggler's wife is active with the money-box in another
quarter of the town. The mason sings and whistles as he chips out
P-A-U-L in the marble slab before him.

And can it be that in a world so full and busy, the loss of one
weak creature makes a void in any heart, so wide and deep that nothing
but the width and depth of vast eternity can fill it up! Florence, in
her innocent affliction, might have answered, 'Oh my brother, oh my
dearly loved and loving brother! Only friend and companion of my
slighted childhood! Could any less idea shed the light already dawning
on your early grave, or give birth to the softened sorrow that is
springing into life beneath this rain of tears!'

'My dear child,' said Mrs Chick, who held it as a duty incumbent on
her, to improve the occasion, 'when you are as old as I am - '

'Which will be the prime of life,' observed Miss Tox.

'You will then,' pursued Mrs Chick, gently squeezing Miss Tox's
hand in acknowledgment of her friendly remark, 'you will then know
that all grief is unavailing, and that it is our duty to submit.'

'I will try, dear aunt I do try,' answered Florence, sobbing.

'I am glad to hear it,' said Mrs Chick, 'because; my love, as our
dear Miss Tox - of whose sound sense and excellent judgment, there
cannot possibly be two opinions - '

'My dear Louisa, I shall really be proud, soon,' said Miss Tox

- 'will tell you, and confirm by her experience,' pursued Mrs
Chick, 'we are called upon on all occasions to make an effort It is
required of us. If any - my dear,' turning to Miss Tox, 'I want a
word. Mis- Mis-'

'Demeanour?' suggested Miss Tox.

'No, no, no,' said Mrs Chic 'How can you! Goodness me, it's on, the
end of my tongue. Mis-'

Placed affection?' suggested Miss Tox, timidly.

'Good gracious, Lucretia!' returned Mrs Chick 'How very monstrous!
Misanthrope, is the word I want. The idea! Misplaced affection! I say,
if any misanthrope were to put, in my presence, the question "Why were
we born?" I should reply, "To make an effort"'

'Very good indeed,' said Miss Tox, much impressed by the
originality of the sentiment 'Very good.'

'Unhappily,' pursued Mrs Chick, 'we have a warning under our own
eyes. We have but too much reason to suppose, my dear child, that if
an effort had been made in time, in this family, a train of the most
trying and distressing circumstances might have been avoided. Nothing
shall ever persuade me,' observed the good matron, with a resolute
air, 'but that if that effort had been made by poor dear Fanny, the
poor dear darling child would at least have had a stronger
constitution.'

Mrs Chick abandoned herself to her feelings for half a moment; but,
as a practical illustration of her doctrine, brought herself up short,
in the middle of a sob, and went on again.

'Therefore, Florence, pray let us see that you have some strength
of mind, and do not selfishly aggravate the distress in which your
poor Papa is plunged.'

'Dear aunt!' said Florence, kneeling quickly down before her, that
she might the better and more earnestly look into her face. 'Tell me
more about Papa. Pray tell me about him! Is he quite heartbroken?'

Miss Tox was of a tender nature, and there was something in this
appeal that moved her very much. Whether she saw it in a succession,
on the part of the neglected child, to the affectionate concern so
often expressed by her dead brother - or a love that sought to twine
itself about the heart that had loved him, and that could not bear to
be shut out from sympathy with such a sorrow, in such sad community of
love and grief - or whether the only recognised the earnest and
devoted spirit which, although discarded and repulsed, was wrung with
tenderness long unreturned, and in the waste and solitude of this
bereavement cried to him to seek a comfort in it, and to give some, by
some small response - whatever may have been her understanding of it,
it moved Miss Tox. For the moment she forgot the majesty of Mrs Chick,
and, patting Florence hastily on the cheek, turned aside and suffered
the tears to gush from her eyes, without waiting for a lead from that
wise matron.

Mrs Chick herself lost, for a moment, the presence of mind on which
she so much prided herself; and remained mute, looking on the
beautiful young face that had so long, so steadily, and patiently,
been turned towards the little bed. But recovering her voice - which
was synonymous with her presence of mind, indeed they were one and the
same thing - she replied with dignity:

'Florence, my dear child, your poor Papa is peculiar at times; and
to question me about him, is to question me upon a subject which I
really do not pretend to understand. I believe I have as much
influence with your Papa as anybody has. Still, all I can say is, that
he has said very little to me; and that I have only seen him once or
twice for a minute at a time, and indeed have hardly seen him then,
for his room has been dark. I have said to your Papa, "Paul!" - that
is the exact expression I used - "Paul! why do you not take something
stimulating?" Your Papa's reply has always been, "Louisa, have the
goodness to leave me. I want nothing. I am better by myself." If I was
to be put upon my oath to-morrow, Lucretia, before a magistrate,' said
Mrs Chick, 'I have no doubt I could venture to swear to those
identical words.'

Miss Tox expressed her admiration by saying, 'My Louisa is ever
methodical!'

'In short, Florence,' resumed her aunt, 'literally nothing has
passed between your poor Papa and myself, until to-day; when I
mentioned to your Papa that Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles had written
exceedingly kind notes - our sweet boy! Lady Skettles loved him like a
- where's my pocket handkerchief?'

Miss Tox produced one.

'Exceedingly kind notes, proposing that you should visit them for
change of scene. Mentioning to your Papa that I thought Miss Tox and
myself might now go home (in which he quite agreed), I inquired if he
had any objection to your accepting this invitation. He said, "No,
Louisa, not the least!"' Florence raised her tearful eye

'At the same time, if you would prefer staying here, Florence, to
paying this visit at present, or to going home with me - '

'I should much prefer it, aunt,' was the faint rejoinder.

'Why then, child,'said Mrs Chick, 'you can. It's a strange choice,
I must say. But you always were strange. Anybody else at your time of
life, and after what has passed - my dear Miss Tox, I have lost my
pocket handkerchief again - would be glad to leave here, one would
suppose.

'I should not like to feel,' said Florence, 'as if the house was
avoided. I should not like to think that the - his - the rooms
upstairs were quite empty and dreary, aunt. I would rather stay here,
for the present. Oh my brother! oh my brother!'

It was a natural emotion, not to be suppressed; and it would make
way even between the fingers of the hands with which she covered up
her face. The overcharged and heavy-laden breast must some times have
that vent, or the poor wounded solitary heart within it would have
fluttered like a bird with broken wings, and sunk down in the dust'

'Well, child!' said Mrs Chick, after a pause 'I wouldn't on any
account say anything unkind to you, and that I'm sure you know. You
will remain here, then, and do exactly as you like. No one will
interfere with you, Florence, or wish to interfere with you, I'm sure.

Florence shook her head in sad assent'

'I had no sooner begun to advise your poor Papa that he really
ought to seek some distraction and restoration in a temporary change,'
said Mrs Chick, 'than he told me he had already formed the intention
of going into the country for a short time. I'm sure I hope he'll go
very soon. He can't go too soon. But I suppose there are some
arrangements connected with his private papers and so forth,
consequent on the affliction that has tried us all so much - I can't
think what's become of mine: Lucretia, lend me yours, my dear - that
may occupy him for one or two evenings in his own room. Your Papa's a
Dombey, child, if ever there was one,' said Mrs Chick, drying both her
eyes at once with great care on opposite corners of Miss Tox's
handkerchief 'He'll make an effort. There's no fear of him.'

'Is there nothing, aunt,' said Florence, trembling, 'I might do to
-

'Lord, my dear child,' interposed Mrs Chick, hastily, 'what are you
talking about? If your Papa said to Me - I have given you his exact
words, "Louisa, I want nothing; I am better by myself" - what do you
think he'd say to you? You mustn't show yourself to him, child. Don't
dream of such a thing.'

'Aunt,' said Florence, 'I will go and lie down on my bed.'

Mrs Chick approved of this resolution, and dismissed her with a
kiss. But Miss Tox, on a faint pretence of looking for the mislaid
handkerchief, went upstairs after her; and tried in a few stolen
minutes to comfort her, in spite of great discouragement from Susan
Nipper. For Miss Nipper, in her burning zeal, disparaged Miss Tox as a
crocodile; yet her sympathy seemed genuine, and had at least the
vantage-ground of disinterestedness - there was little favour to be
won by it.

And was there no one nearer and dearer than Susan, to uphold the
striving heart in its anguish? Was there no other neck to clasp; no
other face to turn to? no one else to say a soothing word to such deep
sorrow? Was Florence so alone in the bleak world that nothing else
remained to her? Nothing. Stricken motherless and brotherless at once
- for in the loss of little Paul, that first and greatest loss fell
heavily upon her - this was the only help she had. Oh, who can tell
how much she needed help at first!

At first, when the house subsided into its accustomed course, and
they had all gone away, except the servants, and her father shut up in
his own rooms, Florence could do nothing but weep, and wander up and
down, and sometimes, in a sudden pang of desolate remembrance, fly to
her own chamber, wring her hands, lay her face down on her bed, and
know no consolation: nothing but the bitterness and cruelty of grief.
This commonly ensued upon the recognition of some spot or object very
tenderly dated with him; and it made the ale house, at first, a place
of agony.

But it is not in the nature of pure love to burn so fiercely and
unkindly long. The flame that in its grosser composition has the taint
of earth may prey upon the breast that gives it shelter; but the fire
from heaven is as gentle in the heart, as when it rested on the heads
of the assembled twelve, and showed each man his brother, brightened
and unhurt. The image conjured up, there soon returned the placid
face, the softened voice, the loving looks, the quiet trustfulness and
peace; and Florence, though she wept still, wept more tranquilly, and
courted the remembrance.

It was not very long before the golden water, dancing on the wall,
in the old place, at the old serene time, had her calm eye fixed upon
it as it ebbed away. It was not very long before that room again knew
her, often; sitting there alone, as patient and as mild as when she
had watched beside the little bed. When any sharp sense of its being
empty smote upon her, she could kneel beside it, and pray GOD - it was
the pouring out of her full heart - to let one angel love her and
remember her.

It was not very long before, in the midst of the dismal house so
wide and dreary, her low voice in the twilight, slowly and stopping
sometimes, touched the old air to which he had so often listened, with
his drooping head upon her arm. And after that, and when it was quite
dark, a little strain of music trembled in the room: so softly played
and sung, that it was more lIke the mournful recollection of what she
had done at his request on that last night, than the reality repeated.
But it was repeated, often - very often, in the shadowy solitude; and
broken murmurs of the strain still trembled on the keys, when the
sweet voice was hushed in tears.

Thus she gained heart to look upon the work with which her fingers
had been busy by his side on the sea-shore; and thus it was not very
long before she took to it again - with something of a human love for
it, as if it had been sentient and had known him; and, sitting in a
window, near her mother's picture, in the unused room so long
deserted, wore away the thoughtful hours.

Why did the dark eyes turn so often from this work to where the
rosy children lived? They were not immediate!y suggestive of her loss;
for they were all girls: four little sisters. But they were motherless
like her - and had a father.

It was easy to know when he had gone out and was expected home, for
the elder child was always dressed and waiting for him at the
drawing-room window, or n the balcony; and when he appeared, her
expectant face lighted up with joy, while the others at the high
window, and always on the watch too, clapped their hands, and drummed
them on the sill, and called to him. The elder child would come down
to the hall, and put her hand in his, and lead him up the stairs; and
Florence would see her afterwards sitting by his side, or on his knee,
or hanging coaxingly about his neck and talking to him: and though
they were always gay together, he would often watch her face as if he
thought her like her mother that was dead. Florence would sometimes
look no more at this, and bursting into tears would hide behind the
curtain as if she were frightened, or would hurry from the window. Yet
she could not help returning; and her work would soon fall unheeded
from her hands again.

It was the house that had been empty, years ago. It had remained so
for a long time. At last, and while she had been away from home, this
family had taken it; and it was repaired and newly painted; and there
were birds and flowers about it; and it looked very different from its
old self. But she never thought of the house. The children and their
father were all in all.

When he had dined, she could see them, through the open windows, go
down with their governess or nurse, and cluster round the table; and
in the still summer weather, the sound of their childish voices and
clear laughter would come ringing across the street, into the drooping
air of the room in which she sat. Then they would climb and clamber
upstairs with him, and romp about him on the sofa, or group themselves
at his knee, a very nosegay of little faces, while he seemed to tell
them some story. Or they would come running out into the balcony; and
then Florence would hide herself quickly, lest it should check them in
their joy, to see her in her black dress, sitting there alone.

The elder child remained with her father when the rest had gone
away, and made his tea for him - happy little house-keeper she was
then! - and sat conversing with him, sometimes at the window,
sometimes in the room, until the candles came. He made her his
companion, though she was some years younger than Florence; and she
could be as staid and pleasantly demure, with her little book or
work-box, as a woman. When they had candles, Florence from her own
dark room was not afraid to look again. But when the time came for the
child to say 'Good-night, Papa,' and go to bed, Florence would sob and
tremble as she raised her face to him, and could look no more.

Though still she would turn, again and again, before going to bed
herself from the simple air that had lulled him to rest so often, long
ago, and from the other low soft broken strain of music, back to that
house. But that she ever thought of it, or watched it, was a secret
which she kept within her own young breast.

And did that breast of Florence - Florence, so ingenuous and true -
so worthy of the love that he had borne her, and had whispered in his
last faint words - whose guileless heart was mirrored in the beauty of
her face, and breathed in every accent of her gentle voice - did that
young breast hold any other secret? Yes. One more.

When no one in the house was stirring, and the lights were all
extinguished, she would softly leave her own room, and with noiseless
feet descend the staircase, and approach her father's door. Against
it, scarcely breathing, she would rest her face and head, and press
her lips, in the yearning of her love. She crouched upon the cold
stone floor outside it, every night, to listen even for his breath;
and in her one absorbing wish to be allowed to show him some
affection, to be a consolation to him, to win him over to the
endurance of some tenderness from her, his solitary child, she would
have knelt down at his feet, if she had dared, in humble supplication.

No one knew it' No one thought of it. The door was ever closed, and
he shut up within. He went out once or twice, and it was said in the
house that he was very soon going on his country journey; but he lived
in those rooms, and lived alone, and never saw her, or inquired for
her. Perhaps he did not even know that she was in the house.

One day, about a week after the funeral, Florence was sitting at
her work, when Susan appeared, with a face half laughing and half
crying, to announce a visitor.

'A visitor! To me, Susan!' said Florence, looking up in
astonishment.

'Well, it is a wonder, ain't it now, Miss Floy?' said Susan; 'but I
wish you had a many visitors, I do, indeed, for you'd be all the
better for it, and it's my opinion that the sooner you and me goes
even to them old Skettleses, Miss, the better for both, I may not wish
to live in crowds, Miss Floy, but still I'm not a oyster.'

To do Miss Nipper justice, she spoke more for her young mistress
than herself; and her face showed it.

'But the visitor, Susan,' said Florence.

Susan, with an hysterical explosion that was as much a laugh as a
sob, and as much a sob as a laugh, answered,

'Mr Toots!'

The smile that appeared on Florence's face passed from it in a
moment, and her eyes filled with tears. But at any rate it was a
smile, and that gave great satisfaction to Miss Nipper.

'My own feelings exactly, Miss Floy,' said Susan, putting her apron
to her eyes, and shaking her head. 'Immediately I see that Innocent in
the Hall, Miss Floy, I burst out laughing first, and then I choked.'

Susan Nipper involuntarily proceeded to do the like again on the
spot. In the meantime Mr Toots, who had come upstairs after her, all
unconscious of the effect he produced, announced himself with his
knuckles on the door, and walked in very brisKly.

'How d'ye do, Miss Dombey?' said Mr Toots. 'I'm very well, I thank
you; how are you?'

Mr Toots - than whom there were few better fellows in the world,
though there may have been one or two brighter spirits - had
laboriously invented this long burst of discourse with the view of
relieving the feelings both of Florence and himself. But finding that
he had run through his property, as it were, in an injudicious manner,
by squandering the whole before taking a chair, or before Florence had
uttered a word, or before he had well got in at the door, he deemed it
advisable to begin again.

'How d'ye do, Miss Dombey?' said Mr Toots. 'I'm very well, I thank
you; how are you?'

Florence gave him her hand, and said she was very well.

'I'm very well indeed,' said Mr Toots, taking a chair. 'Very well
indeed, I am. I don't remember,' said Mr Toots, after reflecting a
little, 'that I was ever better, thank you.'

'It's very kind of you to come,' said Florence, taking up her work,
'I am very glad to see you.'

Mr Toots responded with a chuckle. Thinking that might be too
lively, he corrected it with a sigh. Thinking that might be too
melancholy, he corrected it with a chuckle. Not thoroughly pleasing
himself with either mode of reply, he breathed hard.

'You were very kind to my dear brother,' said Florence, obeying her
own natural impulse to relieve him by saying so. 'He often talked to
me about you.'

'Oh it's of no consequence,' said Mr Toots hastily. 'Warm, ain't
it?'

'It is beautiful weather,' replied Florence.

'It agrees with me!' said Mr Toots. 'I don't think I ever was so
well as I find myself at present, I'm obliged to you.

After stating this curious and unexpected fact, Mr Toots fell into
a deep well of silence.

'You have left Dr Blimber's, I think?' said Florence, trying to
help him out.

'I should hope so,' returned Mr Toots. And tumbled in again.

He remained at the bottom, apparently drowned, for at least ten
minutes. At the expiration of that period, he suddenly floated, and
said,

'Well! Good morning, Miss Dombey.'

'Are you going?' asked Florence, rising.

'I don't know, though. No, not just at present,' said Mr Toots,
sitting down again, most unexpectedly. 'The fact is - I say, Miss
Dombey!'

'Don't be afraid to speak to me,' said Florence, with a quiet
smile, 'I should he very glad if you would talk about my brother.'

'Would you, though?' retorted Mr Toots, with sympathy in every
fibre of his otherwise expressionless face. 'Poor Dombey! I'm sure I
never thought that Burgess and Co. - fashionable tailors (but very
dear), that we used to talk about - would make this suit of clothes
for such a purpose.' Mr Toots was dressed in mourning. 'Poor Dombey! I
say! Miss Dombey!' blubbered Toots.

'Yes,' said Florence.

'There's a friend he took to very much at last. I thought you'd
lIke to have him, perhaps, as a sort of keepsake. You remember his
remembering Diogenes?'

'Oh yes! oh yes' cried Florence.

'Poor Dombey! So do I,' said Mr Toots.

Mr Toots, seeing Florence in tears, had great difficulty in getting
beyond this point, and had nearly tumbled into the well again. But a
chucKle saved him on the brink.

'I say,' he proceeded, 'Miss Dombey! I could have had him stolen
for ten shillings, if they hadn't given him up: and I would: but they
were glad to get rid of him, I think. If you'd like to have him, he's
at the door. I brought him on purpose for you. He ain't a lady's dog,
you know,' said Mr Toots, 'but you won't mind that, will you?'

In fact, Diogenes was at that moment, as they presently ascertained
from looking down into the street, staring through the window of a
hackney cabriolet, into which, for conveyance to that spot, he had
been ensnared, on a false pretence of rats among the straw. Sooth to
say, he was as unlike a lady's dog as might be; and in his gruff
anxiety to get out, presented an appearance sufficiently unpromising,
as he gave short yelps out of one side of his mouth, and overbalancing
himself by the intensity of every one of those efforts, tumbled down
into the straw, and then sprung panting up again, putting out his
tongue, as if he had come express to a Dispensary to be examined for
his health.

But though Diogenes was as ridiculous a dog as one would meet with
on a summer's day; a blundering, ill-favoured, clumsy, bullet-headed
dog, continually acting on a wrong idea that there was an enemy in the
neighbourhood, whom it was meritorious to bark at; and though he was
far from good-tempered, and certainly was not clever, and had hair all
over his eyes, and a comic nose, and an inconsistent tail, and a gruff
voice; he was dearer to Florence, in virtue of that parting
remembrance of him, and that request that he might be taken care of,
than the most valuable and beautiful of his kind. So dear, indeed, was
this same ugly Diogenes, and so welcome to her, that she took the
jewelled hand of Mr Toots and kissed it in her gratitude. And when
Diogenes, released, came tearing up the stairs and bouncing into the
room (such a business as there was, first, to get him out of the
cabriolet!), dived under all the furniture, and wound a long iron
chain, that dangled from his neck, round legs of chairs and tables,
and then tugged at it until his eyes became unnaturally visible, in
consequence of their nearly starting out of his head; and when he
growled at Mr Toots, who affected familiarity; and went pell-mell at
Towlinson, morally convinced that he was the enemy whom he had barked
at round the corner all his life and had never seen yet; Florence was
as pleased with him as if he had been a miracle of discretion.

Mr Toots was so overjoyed by the success of his present, and was so
delighted to see Florence bending down over Diogenes, smoothing his
coarse back with her little delicate hand - Diogenes graciously
allowing it from the first moment of their acquaintance - that he felt
it difficult to take leave, and would, no doubt, have been a much
longer time in making up his mind to do so, if he had not been
assisted by Diogenes himself, who suddenly took it into his head to
bay Mr Toots, and to make short runs at him with his mouth open. Not
exactly seeing his way to the end of these demonstrations, and
sensible that they placed the pantaloons constructed by the art of
Burgess and Co. in jeopardy, Mr Toots, with chuckles, lapsed out at
the door: by which, after looking in again two or three times, without
any object at all, and being on each occasion greeted with a fresh run
from Diogenes, he finally took himself off and got away.

'Come, then, Di! Dear Di! Make friends with your new mistress. Let
us love each other, Di!'said Florence, fondling his shaggy head. And
Di, the rough and gruff, as if his hairy hide were pervious to the
tear that dropped upon it, and his dog's heart melted as it fell, put
his nose up to her face, and swore fidelity.

Diogenes the man did not speak plainer to Alexander the Great than
Diogenes the dog spoke to Florence.' He subscribed to the offer of his
little mistress cheerfully, and devoted himself to her service. A
banquet was immediately provided for him in a corner; and when he had
eaten and drunk his fill, he went to the window where Florence was
sitting, looking on, rose up on his hind legs, with his awkward fore
paws on her shoulders, licked her face and hands, nestled his great
head against her heart, and wagged his tail till he was tired.
Finally, Diogenes coiled himself up at her feet and went to sleep.

Although Miss Nipper was nervous in regard of dogs, and felt it
necessary to come into the room with her skirts carefully collected
about her, as if she were crossing a brook on stepping-stones; also to
utter little screams and stand up on chairs when Diogenes stretched
himself, she was in her own manner affected by the kindness of Mr
Toots, and could not see Florence so alive to the attachment and
society of this rude friend of little Paul's, without some mental
comments thereupon that brought the water to her eyes. Mr Dombey, as a
part of her reflections, may have been, in the association of ideas,
connected with the dog; but, at any rate, after observing Diogenes and
his mistress all the evening, and after exerting herself with much
good-will to provide Diogenes a bed in an ante-chamber outside his
mistress's door, she said hurriedly to Florence, before leaving her
for the night:

'Your Pa's a going off, Miss Floy, tomorrow morning.'

'To-morrow morning, Susan?'

'Yes, Miss; that's the orders. Early.'

'Do you know,' asked Florence, without looking at her, 'where Papa
is going, Susan?'

'Not exactly, Miss. He's going to meet that precious Major first,
and I must say if I was acquainted with any Major myself (which
Heavens forbid), it shouldn't be a blue one!'

'Hush, Susan!' urged Florence gently.

'Well, Miss Floy,' returned Miss Nipper, who was full of burning
indignation, and minded her stops even less than usual. 'I can't help
it, blue he is, and while I was a Christian, although humble, I would
have natural-coloured friends, or none.'

It appeared from what she added and had gleaned downstairs, that
Mrs Chick had proposed the Major for Mr Dombey's companion, and that
Mr Dombey, after some hesitation, had invited him.

'Talk of him being a change, indeed!' observed Miss Nipper to
herself with boundless contempt. 'If he's a change, give me a
constancy.

'Good-night, Susan,' said Florence.

'Good-night, my darling dear Miss Floy.'

Her tone of commiseration smote the chord so often roughly touched,
but never listened to while she or anyone looked on. Florence left
alone, laid her head upon her hand, and pressing the other over her
swelling heart, held free communication with her sorrows.

It was a wet night; and the melancholy rain fell pattering and
dropping with a weary sound. A sluggish wind was blowing, and went
moaning round the house, as if it were in pain or grief. A shrill
noise quivered through the trees. While she sat weeping, it grew late,
and dreary midnight tolled out from the steeples.

Florence was little more than a child in years - not yet fourteen-
and the loneliness and gloom of such an hour in the great house where
Death had lately made its own tremendous devastation, might have set
an older fancy brooding on vague terrors. But her innocent imagination
was too full of one theme to admit them. Nothing wandered in her
thoughts but love - a wandering love, indeed, and castaway - but
turning always to her father. There was nothing in the dropping of the
rain, the moaning of the wind, the shuddering of the trees, the
striking of the solemn clocks, that shook this one thought, or
diminished its interest' Her recollections of the dear dead boy - and
they were never absent - were itself, the same thing. And oh, to be
shut out: to be so lost: never to have looked into her father's face
or touched him, since that hour!

She could not go to bed, poor child, and never had gone yet, since
then, without making her nightly pilgrimage to his door. It would have
been a strange sad sight, to see her' now, stealing lightly down the
stairs through the thick gloom, and stopping at it with a beating
heart, and blinded eyes, and hair that fell down loosely and unthought
of; and touching it outside with her wet cheek. But the night covered
it, and no one knew.

The moment that she touched the door on this night, Florence found
that it was open. For the first time it stood open, though by but a
hair's-breadth: and there was a light within. The first impulse of the
timid child - and she yielded to it - was to retire swiftly. Her next,
to go back, and to enter; and this second impulse held her in
irresolution on the staircase.

In its standing open, even by so much as that chink, there seemed
to be hope. There was encouragement in seeing a ray of light from
within, stealing through the dark stern doorway, and falling in a
thread upon the marble floor. She turned back, hardly knowing what she
did, but urged on by the love within her, and the trial they had
undergone together, but not shared: and with her hands a little raised
and trembling, glided in.

Her father sat at his old table in the middle room. He had been
arranging some papers, and destroying others, and the latter lay in
fragile ruins before him. The rain dripped heavily upon the glass
panes in the outer room, where he had so often watched poor Paul, a
baby; and the low complainings of the wind were heard without.

But not by him. He sat with his eyes fixed on the table, so
immersed in thought, that a far heavier tread than the light foot of
his child could make, might have failed to rouse him. His face was
turned towards her. By the waning lamp, and at that haggard hour, it
looked worn and dejected; and in the utter loneliness surrounding him,
there was an appeal to Florence that struck home.

'Papa! Papa! speak to me, dear Papa!'

He started at her voice, and leaped up from his seat. She was close
before him' with extended arms, but he fell back.

'What is the matter?' he said, sternly. 'Why do you come here? What
has frightened you?'

If anything had frightened her, it was the face he turned upon her.
The glowing love within the breast of his young daughter froze before
it, and she stood and looked at him as if stricken into stone.

There was not one touch of tenderness or pity in it. There was not
one gleam of interest, parental recognition, or relenting in it. There
was a change in it, but not of that kind. The old indifference and
cold constraint had given place to something: what, she never thought
and did not dare to think, and yet she felt it in its force, and knew
it well without a name: that as it looked upon her, seemed to cast a
shadow on her head.

Did he see before him the successful rival of his son, in health
and life? Did he look upon his own successful rival in that son's
affection? Did a mad jealousy and withered pride, poison sweet
remembrances that should have endeared and made her precious to him?
Could it be possible that it was gall to him to look upon her in her
beauty and her promise: thinking of his infant boy!

Florence had no such thoughts. But love is quick to know when it is
spurned and hopeless: and hope died out of hers, as she stood looking
in her father's face.

'I ask you, Florence, are you frightened? Is there anything the
matter, that you come here?'

'I came, Papa - '

'Against my wishes. Why?'

She saw he knew why: it was written broadly on his face: and
dropped her head upon her hands with one prolonged low cry.

Let him remember it in that room, years to come. It has faded from
the air, before he breaks the silence. It may pass as quickly from his
brain, as he believes, but it is there. Let him remember it in that
room, years to come!

He took her by the arm. His hand was cold, and loose, and scarcely
closed upon her.

'You are tired, I daresay,' he said, taking up the light, and
leading her towards the door, 'and want rest. We all want rest. Go,
Florence. You have been dreaming.'

The dream she had had, was over then, God help her! and she felt
that it could never more come back

'I will remain here to light you up the stairs. The whole house is
yours above there,' said her father, slowly. 'You are its mistress
now. Good-night!'

Still covering her face, she sobbed, and answered 'Good-night, dear
Papa,' and silently ascended. Once she looked back as if she would
have returned to him, but for fear. It was a mommentary thought, too
hopeless to encourage; and her father stood there with the light -
hard, unresponsive, motionless - until the fluttering dress of his
fair child was lost in the darkness.

Let him remember it in that room, years to come. The rain that
falls upon the roof: the wind that mourns outside the door: may have
foreknowledge in their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that
room, years to come!

The last time he had watched her, from the same place, winding up
those stairs, she had had her brother in her arms. It did not move his
heart towards her now, it steeled it: but he went into his room, and
locked his door, and sat down in his chair, and cried for his lost
boy.

Diogenes was broad awake upon his post, and waiting for his little
mistress.

'Oh, Di! Oh, dear Di! Love me for his sake!'

Diogenes already loved her for her own, and didn't care how much he
showed it. So he made himself vastly ridiculous by performing a
variety of uncouth bounces in the ante-chamber, and concluded, when
poor Florence was at last asleep, and dreaming of the rosy children
opposite, by scratching open her bedroom door: rolling up his bed into
a pillow: lying down on the boards, at the full length of his tether,
with his head towards her: and looking lazily at her, upside down, out
of the tops of his eyes, until from winking and winking he fell asleep
himself, and dreamed, with gruff barks, of his enemy.



CHAPTER 19.

Walter goes away



The wooden Midshipman at the Instrument-maker's door, like the
hard-hearted little Midshipman he was, remained supremely indifferent
to Walter's going away, even when the very last day of his sojourn in
the back parlour was on the decline. With his quadrant at his round
black knob of an eye, and his figure in its old attitude of
indomitable alacrity, the Midshipman displayed his elfin small-clothes
to the best advantage, and, absorbed in scientific pursuits, had no
sympathy with worldly concerns. He was so far the creature of
circumstances, that a dry day covered him with dust, and a misty day
peppered him with little bits of soot, and a wet day brightened up his
tarnished uniform for the moment, and a very hot day blistered him;
but otherwise he was a callous, obdurate, conceited Midshipman, intent
on his own discoveries, and caring as little for what went on about
him, terrestrially, as Archimedes at the taking of Syracuse.

Such a Midshipman he seemed to be, at least, in the then position
of domestic affairs. Walter eyed him kindly many a time in passing in
and out; and poor old Sol, when Walter was not there, would come and
lean against the doorpost, resting his weary wig as near the
shoe-buckles of the guardian genius of his trade and shop as he could.
But no fierce idol with a mouth from ear to ear, and a murderous
visage made of parrot's feathers, was ever more indifferent to the
appeals of its savage votaries, than was the Midshipman to these marks
of attachment.

Walter's heart felt heavy as he looked round his old bedroom, up
among the parapets and chimney-pots, and thought that one more night
already darkening would close his acquaintance with it, perhaps for
ever. Dismantled of his little stock of books and pictures, it looked
coldly and reproachfully on him for his desertion, and had already a
foreshadowing upon it of its coming strangeness. 'A few hours more,'
thought Walter, 'and no dream I ever had here when I was a schoolboy
will be so little mine as this old room. The dream may come back in my
sleep, and I may return waking to this place, it may be: but the dream
at least will serve no other master, and the room may have a score,
and every one of them may change, neglect, misuse it.'

But his Uncle was not to be left alone in the little back parlour,
where he was then sitting by himself; for Captain Cuttle, considerate
in his roughness, stayed away against his will, purposely that they
should have some talk together unobserved: so Walter, newly returned
home from his last day's bustle, descended briskly, to bear him
company.

'Uncle,' he said gaily, laying his hand upon the old man's
shoulder, 'what shall I send you home from Barbados?'

'Hope, my dear Wally. Hope that we shall meet again, on this side
of the grave. Send me as much of that as you can.'

'So I will, Uncle: I have enough and to spare, and I'll not be
chary of it! And as to lively turtles, and limes for Captain Cuttle's
punch, and preserves for you on Sundays, and all that sort of thing,
why I'll send you ship-loads, Uncle: when I'm rich enough.'

Old Sol wiped his spectacles, and faintly smiled.

'That's right, Uncle!' cried Walter, merrily, and clapping him half
a dozen times more upon the shoulder. 'You cheer up me! I'll cheer up
you! We'll be as gay as larks to-morrow morning, Uncle, and we'll fly
as high! As to my anticipations, they are singing out of sight now.

'Wally, my dear boy,' returned the old man, 'I'll do my best, I'll
do my best.'

'And your best, Uncle,' said Walter, with his pleasant laugh, 'is
the best best that I know. You'll not forget what you're to send me,
Uncle?'

'No, Wally, no,' replied the old man; 'everything I hear about Miss
Dombey, now that she is left alone, poor lamb, I'll write. I fear it
won't be much though, Wally.'

'Why, I'll tell you what, Uncle,' said Walter, after a moment's
hesitation, 'I have just been up there.'

'Ay, ay, ay?' murmured the old man, raising his eyebrows, and his
spectacles with them.

'Not to see her,' said Walter, 'though I could have seen her, I
daresay, if I had asked, Mr Dombey being out of town: but to say a
parting word to Susan. I thought I might venture to do that, you know,
under the circumstances, and remembering when I saw Miss Dombey last.'

'Yes, my boy, yes,' replied his Uncle, rousing himself from a
temporary abstraction.

'So I saw her,' pursued Walter, 'Susan, I mean: and I told her I
was off and away to-morrow. And I said, Uncle, that you had always had
an interest in Miss Dombey since that night when she was here, and
always wished her well and happy, and always would be proud and glad
to serve her in the least: I thought I might say that, you know, under
the circumstances. Don't you think so ?'

'Yes, my boy, yes,' replied his Uncle, in the tone as before.

'And I added,' pursued Walter, 'that if she - Susan, I mean - could
ever let you know, either through herself, or Mrs Richards, or anybody
else who might be coming this way, that Miss Dombey was well and
happy, you would take it very kindly, and would write so much to me,
and I should take it very kindly too. There! Upon my word, Uncle,'
said Walter, 'I scarcely slept all last night through thinking of
doing this; and could not make up my mind when I was out, whether to
do it or not; and yet I am sure it is the true feeling of my heart,
and I should have been quite miserable afterwards if I had not
relieved it.'

His honest voice and manner corroborated what he said, and quite
established its ingenuousness.

'So, if you ever see her, Uncle,' said Walter, 'I mean Miss Dombey
now - and perhaps you may, who knows! - tell her how much I felt for
her; how much I used to think of her when I was here; how I spoke of
her, with the tears in my eyes, Uncle, on this last night before I
went away. Tell her that I said I never could forget her gentle
manner, or her beautiful face, or her sweet kind disposition that was
better than all. And as I didn't take them from a woman's feet, or a
young lady's: only a little innocent child's,' said Walter: 'tell her,
if you don't mind, Uncle, that I kept those shoes - she'll remember
how often they fell off, that night - and took them away with me as a
remembrance!'

They were at that very moment going out at the door in one of
Walter's trunks. A porter carrying off his baggage on a truck for
shipment at the docks on board the Son and Heir, had got possession of
them; and wheeled them away under the very eye of the insensible
Midshipman before their owner had well finished speaking.

But that ancient mariner might have been excused his insensibility
to the treasure as it rolled away. For, under his eye at the same
moment, accurately within his range of observation, coming full into
the sphere of his startled and intensely wide-awake look-out, were
Florence and Susan Nipper: Florence looking up into his face half
timidly, and receiving the whole shock of his wooden ogling!

More than this, they passed into the shop, and passed in at the
parlour door before they were observed by anybody but the Midshipman.
And Walter, having his back to the door, would have known nothing of
their apparition even then, but for seeing his Uncle spring out of his
own chair, and nearly tumble over another.

'Why, Uncle!' exclaimed Walter. 'What's the matter?'

Old Solomon replied, 'Miss Dombey!'

'Is it possible?' cried Walter, looking round and starting up in
his turn. 'Here!'

Why, It was so possible and so actual, that, while the words were
on his lips, Florence hurried past him; took Uncle Sol's
snuff-coloured lapels, one in each hand; kissed him on the cheek; and
turning, gave her hand to Walter with a simple truth and earnestness
that was her own, and no one else's in the world!

'Going away, Walter!' said Florence.

'Yes, Miss Dombey,' he replied, but not so hopefully as he
endeavoured: 'I have a voyage before me.'

'And your Uncle,' said Florence, looking back at Solomon. 'He is
sorry you are going, I am sure. Ah! I see he is! Dear Walter, I am
very sorry too.'

'Goodness knows,' exclaimed Miss Nipper, 'there's a many we could
spare instead, if numbers is a object, Mrs Pipchin as a overseer would
come cheap at her weight in gold, and if a knowledge of black slavery
should be required, them Blimbers is the very people for the
sitiwation.'

With that Miss Nipper untied her bonnet strings, and alter looking
vacantly for some moments into a little black teapot that was set
forth with the usual homely service on the table, shook her head and a
tin canister, and began unasked to make the tea.

In the meantime Florence had turned again to the Instrument-maker,
who was as full of admiration as surprise. 'So grown!' said old Sol.
'So improved! And yet not altered! Just the same!'

'Indeed!' said Florence.

'Ye - yes,' returned old Sol, rubbing his hands slowly, and
considering the matter half aloud, as something pensive in the bright
eyes looking at him arrested his attention. 'Yes, that expression was
in the younger face, too!'

'You remember me,' said Florence with a smile, 'and what a little
creature I was then?'

'My dear young lady,' returned the Instrument-maker, 'how could I
forget you, often as I have thought of you and heard of you since! At
the very moment, indeed, when you came in, Wally was talking about you
to me, and leaving messages for you, and - '

'Was he?' said Florence. 'Thank you, Walter! Oh thank you, Walter!
I was afraid you might be going away and hardly thinking of me;' and
again she gave him her little hand so freely and so faithfully that
Walter held it for some moments in his own, and could not bear to let
it go.

Yet Walter did not hold it as he might have held it once, nor did
its touch awaken those old day-dreams of his boyhood that had floated
past him sometimes even lately, and confused him with their indistinct
and broken shapes. The purity and innocence of her endearing manner,
and its perfect trustfulness, and the undisguised regard for him that
lay so deeply seated in her constant eyes, and glowed upon her fair
face through the smile that shaded - for alas! it was a smile too sad
to brighten - it, were not of their romantic race. They brought back
to his thoughts the early death-bed he had seen her tending, and the
love the child had borne her; and on the wings of such remembrances
she seemed to rise up, far above his idle fancies, into clearer and
serener air.

'I - I am afraid I must call you Walter's Uncle, Sir,' said
Florence to the old man, 'if you'll let me.'

'My dear young lady,' cried old Sol. 'Let you! Good gracious!'

'We always knew you by that name, and talked of you,' said
Florence, glancing round, and sighing gently. 'The nice old parlour!
Just the same! How well I recollect it!'

Old Sol looked first at her, then at his nephew, and then rubbed
his hands, and rubbed his spectacles, and said below his breath, 'Ah!
time, time, time!'

There was a short silence; during which Susan Nipper skilfully
impounded two extra cups and saucers from the cupboard, and awaited
the drawing of the tea with a thoughtful air.

'I want to tell Walter's Uncle,' said Florence, laying her hand
timidly upon the old man's as it rested on the table, to bespeak his
attention, 'something that I am anxious about. He is going to be left
alone, and if he will allow me - not to take Walter's place, for that
I couldn't do, but to be his true friend and help him if I ever can
while Walter is away, I shall be very much obliged to him indeed. Will
you? May I, Walter's Uncle?'

The Instrument-maker, without speaking, put her hand to his lips,
and Susan Nipper, leaning back with her arms crossed, in the chair of
presidency into which she had voted herself, bit one end of her bonnet
strings, and heaved a gentle sigh as she looked up at the skylight.

'You will let me come to see you,' said Florence, 'when I can; and
you will tell me everything about yourself and Walter; and you will
have no secrets from Susan when she comes and I do not, but will
confide in us, and trust us, and rely upon us. And you'll try to let
us be a comfort to you? Will you, Walter's Uncle?'

The sweet face looking into his, the gentle pleading eyes, the soft
voice, and the light touch on his arm made the more winning by a
child's respect and honour for his age, that gave to all an air of
graceful doubt and modest hesitation - these, and her natural
earnestness, so overcame the poor old Instrument-maker, that he only
answered:

'Wally! say a word for me, my dear. I'm very grateful.'

'No, Walter,' returned Florence with her quiet smile. 'Say nothing
for him, if you please. I understand him very well, and we must learn
to talk together without you, dear Walter.'

The regretful tone in which she said these latter words, touched
Walter more than all the rest.

'Miss Florence,' he replied, with an effort to recover the cheerful
manner he had preserved while talking with his Uncle, 'I know no more
than my Uncle, what to say in acknowledgment of such kindness, I am
sure. But what could I say, after all, if I had the power of talking
for an hour, except that it is like you?'

Susan Nipper began upon a new part of her bonnet string, and nodded
at the skylight, in approval of the sentiment expressed.

'Oh! but, Walter,' said Florence, 'there is something that I wish
to say to you before you go away, and you must call me Florence, if
you please, and not speak like a stranger.'

'Like a stranger!' returned Walter, 'No. I couldn't speak so. I am
sure, at least, I couldn't feel like one.'

'Ay, but that is not enough, and is not what I mean. For, Walter,'
added Florence, bursting into tears, 'he liked you very much, and said
before he died that he was fond of you, and said "Remember Walter!"
and if you'll be a brother to me, Walter, now that he is gone and I
have none on earth, I'll be your sister all my life, and think of you
like one wherever we may be! This is what I wished to say, dear
Walter, but I cannot say it as I would, because my heart is full.'

And in its fulness and its sweet simplicity, she held out both her
hands to him. Walter taking them, stooped down and touched the tearful
face that neither shrunk nor turned away, nor reddened as he did so,
but looked up at him with confidence and truth. In that one moment,
every shadow of doubt or agitation passed away from Walter's soul. It
seemed to him that he responded to her innocent appeal, beside the
dead child's bed: and, in the solemn presence he had seen there,
pledged himself to cherish and protect her very image, in his
banishment, with brotherly regard; to garner up her simple faith,
inviolate; and hold himself degraded if he breathed upon it any
thought that was not in her own breast when she gave it to him.

Susan Nipper, who had bitten both her bonnet strings at once, and
imparted a great deal of private emotion to the skylight, during this
transaction, now changed the subject by inquiring who took milk and
who took sugar; and being enlightened on these points, poured out the
tea. They all four gathered socially about the little table, and took
tea under that young lady's active superintendence; and the presence
of Florence in the back parlour, brightened the Tartar frigate on the
wall.

Half an hour ago Walter, for his life, would have hardly called her
by her name. But he could do so now when she entreated him. He could
think of her being there, without a lurking misgiving that it would
have been better if she had not come. He could calmly think how
beautiful she was, how full of promise, what a home some happy man
would find in such a heart one day. He could reflect upon his own
place in that heart, with pride; and with a brave determination, if
not to deserve it - he still thought that far above him - never to
deserve it less

Some fairy influence must surely have hovered round the hands of
Susan Nipper when she made the tea, engendering the tranquil air that
reigned in the back parlour during its discussion. Some
counter-influence must surely have hovered round the hands of Uncle
Sol's chronometer, and moved them faster than the Tartar frigate ever
went before the wind. Be this as it may, the visitors had a coach in
waiting at a quiet corner not far off; and the chronometer, on being
incidentally referred to, gave such a positive opinion that it had
been waiting a long time, that it was impossible to doubt the fact,
especially when stated on such unimpeachable authority. If Uncle Sol
had been going to be hanged by his own time, he never would have
allowed that the chronometer was too fast, by the least fraction of a
second.

Florence at parting recapitulated to the old man all that she had
said before, and bound him to the compact. Uncle Sol attended her
lovingly to the legs of the wooden Midshipman, and there resigned her
to Walter, who was ready to escort her and Susan Nipper to the coach.

'Walter,' said Florence by the way, 'I have been afraid to ask
before your Uncle. Do you think you will be absent very long?'

'Indeed,' said Walter, 'I don't know. I fear so. Mr Dombey
signified as much, I thought, when he appointed me.'

'Is it a favour, Walter?' inquired Florence, after a moment's
hesitation, and looking anxiously in his face.

'The appointment?' returned Walter.

'Yes.'

Walter would have given anything to have answered in the
affirmative, but his face answered before his lips could, and Florence
was too attentive to it not to understand its reply.

'I am afraid you have scarcely been a favourite with Papa,' she
said, timidly.

'There is no reason,' replied Walter, smiling, 'why I should be.'

'No reason, Walter!'

'There was no reason,' said Walter, understanding what she meant.
'There are many people employed in the House. Between Mr Dombey and a
young man like me, there's a wide space of separation. If I do my
duty, I do what I ought, and do no more than all the rest.'

Had Florence any misgiving of which she was hardly conscious: any
misgiving that had sprung into an indistinct and undefined existence
since that recent night when she had gone down to her father's room:
that Walter's accidental interest in her, and early knowledge of her,
might have involved him in that powerful displeasure and dislike? Had
Walter any such idea, or any sudden thought that it was in her mind at
that moment? Neither of them hinted at it. Neither of them spoke at
all, for some short time. Susan, walking on the other side of Walter,
eyed them both sharply; and certainly Miss Nipper's thoughts travelled
in that direction, and very confidently too.

'You may come back very soon,' said Florence, 'perhaps, Walter.'

'I may come back,' said Walter, 'an old man, and find you an old
lady. But I hope for better things.'

'Papa,' said Florence, after a moment, 'will - will recover from
his grief, and - speak more freely to me one day, perhaps; and if he
should, I will tell him how much I wish to see you back again, and ask
him to recall you for my sake.'

There was a touching modulation in these words about her father,
that Walter understood too well.

The coach being close at hand, he would have left her without
speaking, for now he felt what parting was; but Florence held his hand
when she was seated, and then he found there was a little packet in
her own.

'Walter,' she said, looking full upon him with her affectionate
eyes, 'like you, I hope for better things. I will pray for them, and
believe that they will arrive. I made this little gift for Paul. Pray
take it with my love, and do not look at it until you are gone away.
And now, God bless you, Walter! never forget me. You are my brother,
dear!'

He was glad that Susan Nipper came between them, or he might have
left her with a sorrowful remembrance of him. He was glad too that she
did not look out of the coach again, but waved the little hand to him
instead, as long as he could see it.

In spite of her request, he could not help opening the packet that
night when he went to bed. It was a little purse: and there was was
money in it.

Bright rose the sun next morning, from his absence in strange
countries and up rose Walter with it to receive the Captain, who was
already at the door: having turned out earlier than was necessary, in
order to get under weigh while Mrs MacStinger was still slumbering.
The Captain pretended to be in tip-top spirits, and brought a very
smoky tongue in one of the pockets of the of the broad blue coat for
breakfast.

'And, Wal'r,' said the Captain, when they took their seats at
table, if your Uncle's the man I think him, he'll bring out the last
bottle of the Madeira on the present occasion.'

'No, no, Ned,' returned the old man. 'No! That shall be opened when
Walter comes home again.'

'Well said!' cried the Captain. 'Hear him!'

'There it lies,' said Sol Gills, 'down in the little cellar,
covered with dirt and cobwebs. There may be dirt and cobwebs over you
and me perhaps, Ned, before it sees the light.'

'Hear him! 'cried the Captain. 'Good morality! Wal'r, my lad. Train
up a fig-tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under
the shade on it. Overhaul the - Well,' said the Captain on second
thoughts, 'I ain't quite certain where that's to be found, but when
found, make a note of. Sol Gills, heave ahead again!'

'But there or somewhere, it shall lie, Ned, until Wally comes back
to claim it,' said the old man. 'That's all I meant to say.'

'And well said too,' returned the Captain; 'and if we three don't
crack that bottle in company, I'll give you two leave to.'

Notwithstanding the Captain's excessive joviality, he made but a
poor hand at the smoky tongue, though he tried very hard, when anybody
looked at him, to appear as if he were eating with a vast apetite. He
was terribly afraid, likewise, of being left alone with either Uncle
or nephew; appearing to consider that his only chance of safety as to
keeping up appearances, was in there being always three together. This
terror on the part of the Captain, reduced him to such ingenious
evasions as running to the door, when Solomon went to put his coat on,
under pretence of having seen an extraordinary hackney-coach pass: and
darting out into the road when Walter went upstairs to take leave of
the lodgers, on a feint of smelling fire in a neighbouring chimney.
These artifices Captain Cuttle deemed inscrutable by any uninspired
observer.

Walter was coming down from his parting expedition upstairs, and
was crossing the shop to go back to the little parlour, when he saw a
faded face he knew, looking in at the door, and darted towards it.

'Mr Carker!' cried Walter, pressing the hand of John Carker the
Junior. 'Pray come in! This is kind of you, to be here so early to say
good-bye to me. You knew how glad it would make me to shake hands with
you, once, before going away. I cannot say how glad I am to have this
opportunity. Pray come in.'

'It is not likely that we may ever meet again, Walter,' returned
the other, gently resisting his invitation, 'and I am glad of this
opportunity too. I may venture to speak to you, and to take you by the
hand, on the eve of separation. I shall not have to resist your frank
approaches, Walter, any more.

There was a melancholy in his smile as he said it, that showed he
had found some company and friendship for his thoughts even in that.

'Ah, Mr Carker!' returned Walter. 'Why did you resist them? You
could have done me nothing but good, I am very sure.

He shook his head. 'If there were any good,' he said, 'I could do
on this earth, I would do it, Walter, for you. The sight of you from
day to day, has been at once happiness and remorse to me. But the
pleasure has outweighed the pain. I know that, now, by knowing what I
lose.'

'Come in, Mr Carker, and make acquaintance with my good old Uncle,'
urged Walter. 'I have often talked to him about you, and he will be
glad to tell you all he hears from me. I have not,' said Walter,
noticing his hesitation, and speaking with embarrassment himself: 'I
have not told him anything about our last conversation, Mr Carker; not
even him, believe me.

The grey Junior pressed his hand, and tears rose in his eyes.

'If I ever make acquaintance with him, Walter,' he returned, 'it
will be that I may hear tidings of you. Rely on my not wronging your
forbearance and consideration. It would be to wrong it, not to tell
him all the truth, before I sought a word of confidence from him. But
I have no friend or acquaintance except you: and even for your sake,
am little likely to make any.'

'I wish,' said Walter, 'you had suffered me to be your friend
indeed. I always wished it, Mr Carker, as you know; but never half so
much as now, when we are going to part'

'It is enough replied the other, 'that you have been the friend of
my own breast, and that when I have avoided you most, my heart
inclined the most towards you, and was fullest of you. Walter,
good-bye!'

'Good-bye, Mr Carker. Heaven be with you, Sir!' cried Walter with
emotion.

'If,' said the other, retaining his hand while he spoke; 'if when
you come back, you miss me from my old corner, and should hear from
anyone where I am lying, come and look upon my grave. Think that I
might have been as honest and as happy as you! And let me think, when
I know time is coming on, that some one like my former self may stand
there, for a moment, and remember me with pity and forgiveness!
Walter, good-bye!'

His figure crept like a shadow down the bright, sun-lighted street,
so cheerful yet so solemn in the early summer morning; and slowly
passed away.

The relentless chronometer at last announced that Walter must turn
his back upon the wooden Midshipman: and away they went, himself, his
Uncle, and the Captain, in a hackney-coach to a wharf, where they were
to take steam-boat for some Reach down the river, the name of which,
as the Captain gave it out, was a hopeless mystery to the ears of
landsmen. Arrived at this Reach (whither the ship had repaired by last
night's tide), they were boarded by various excited watermen, and
among others by a dirty Cyclops of the Captain's acquaintance, who,
with his one eye, had made the Captain out some mile and a half off,
and had been exchanging unintelligible roars with him ever since.
Becoming the lawful prize of this personage, who was frightfully
hoarse and constitutionally in want of shaving, they were all three
put aboard the Son and Heir. And the Son and Heir was in a pretty
state of confusion, with sails lying all bedraggled on the wet decks,
loose ropes tripping people up, men in red shirts running barefoot to
and fro, casks blockading every foot of space, and, in the thickest of
the fray, a black cook in a black caboose up to his eyes in vegetables
and blinded with smoke.

The Captain immediately drew Walter into a corner, and with a great
effort, that made his face very red, pulled up the silver watch, which
was so big, and so tight in his pocket, that it came out like a bung.

'Wal'r,' said the Captain, handing it over, and shaking him
heartily by the hand, 'a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an
hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the arternoon,
and it's a watch that'll do you credit.'

'Captain Cuttle! I couldn't think of it!' cried Walter, detaining
him, for he was running away. 'Pray take it back. I have one already.'

'Then, Wal'r,' said the Captain, suddenly diving into one of his
pockets and bringing up the two teaspoons and the sugar-tongs, with
which he had armed himself to meet such an objection, 'take this here
trifle of plate, instead.'

'No, no, I couldn't indeed!' cried Walter, 'a thousand thanks!
Don't throw them away, Captain Cuttle!' for the Captain was about to
jerk them overboard. 'They'll be of much more use to you than me. Give
me your stick. I have often thought I should like to have it. There!
Good-bye, Captain Cuttle! Take care of my Uncle! Uncle Sol, God bless
you!'

They were over the side in the confusion, before Walter caught
another glimpse of either; and when he ran up to the stern, and looked
after them, he saw his Uncle hanging down his head in the boat, and
Captain Cuttle rapping him on the back with the great silver watch (it
must have been very painful), and gesticulating hopefully with the
teaspoons and sugar-tongs. Catching sight of Walter, Captain Cuttle
dropped the property into the bottom of the boat with perfect
unconcern, being evidently oblivious of its existence, and pulling off
the glazed hat hailed him lustily. The glazed hat made quite a show in
the sun with its glistening, and the Captain continued to wave it
until he could be seen no longer. Then the confusion on board, which
had been rapidly increasing, reached its height; two or three other
boats went away with a cheer; the sails shone bright and full above,
as Walter watched them spread their surface to the favourable breeze;
the water flew in sparkles from the prow; and off upon her voyage went
the Son and Heir, as hopefully and trippingly as many another son and
heir, gone down, had started on his way before her.

Day after day, old Sol and Captain Cuttle kept her reckoning in the
little hack parlour and worked out her course, with the chart spread
before them on the round table. At night, when old Sol climbed
upstairs, so lonely, to the attic where it sometimes blew great guns,
he looked up at the stars and listened to the wind, and kept a longer
watch than would have fallen to his lot on board the ship. The last
bottle of the old Madeira, which had had its cruising days, and known
its dangers of the deep, lay silently beneath its dust and cobwebs, in
the meanwhile, undisturbed.



CHAPTER 20.

Mr Dombey goes upon a Journey



'Mr Dombey, Sir,' said Major Bagstock, 'Joee' B. is not in general
a man of sentiment, for Joseph is tough. But Joe has his feelings,
Sir, and when they are awakened - Damme, Mr Dombey,? cried the Major
with sudden ferocity, 'this is weakness, and I won't submit to it]'

Major Bagstock delivered himself of these expressions on receiving
Mr Dombey as his guest at the head of his own staircase in Princess's
Place. Mr Dombey had come to breakfast with the Major, previous to
their setting forth on their trip; and the ill-starved Native had
already undergone a world of misery arising out of the muffins, while,
in connexion with the general question of boiled eggs, life was a
burden to him.

'It is not for an old soldier of the Bagstock breed,' observed the
Major, relapsing into a mild state, 'to deliver himself up, a prey to
his own emotions; but - damme, Sir,' cried the Major, in another spasm
of ferocity, 'I condole with you!'

The Major's purple visage deepened in its hue, and the Major's
lobster eyes stood out in bolder relief, as he shook Mr Dombey by the
hand, imparting to that peaceful action as defiant a character as if
it had been the prelude to his immediately boxing Mr Dombey for a
thousand pounds a side and the championship of England. With a
rotatory motion of his head, and a wheeze very like the cough of a
horse, the Major then conducted his visitor to the sitting-room, and
there welcomed him (having now composed his feelings) with the freedom
and frankness ofa travelling companion.

'Dombey,' said the Major, 'I'm glad to see you. I'm proud to see
you. There are not many men in Europe to whom J. Bagstock would say
that - for Josh is blunt. Sir: it's his nature - but Joey B. is proud
to see you, Dombey.'

'Major,' returned Mr Dombey, 'you are very obliging.'

'No, Sir,' said the Major, 'Devil a bit! That's not my character.
If that had been Joe's character, Joe might have been, by this time,
Lieutenant-General Sir Joseph Bagstock, K.C.B., and might have
received you in very different quarters. You don't know old Joe yet, I
find. But this occasion, being special, is a source of pride to me. By
the Lord, Sir,' said the Major resolutely, 'it's an honour to me!'

Mr Dombey, in his estimation of himself and his money, felt that
this was very true, and therefore did not dispute the point. But the
instinctive recognition of such a truth by the Major, and his plain
avowal of it, were very able. It was a confirmation to Mr Dombey, if
he had required any, of his not being mistaken in the Major. It was an
assurance to him that his power extended beyond his own immediate
sphere; and that the Major, as an officer and a gentleman, had a no
less becoming sense of it, than the beadle of the Royal Exchange.

And if it were ever consolatory to know this, or the like of this,
it was consolatory then, when the impotence of his will, the
instability of his hopes, the feebleness of wealth, had been so
direfully impressed upon him. What could it do, his boy had asked him.
Sometimes, thinking of the baby question, he could hardly forbear
inquiring, himself, what could it do indeed: what had it done?

But these were lonely thoughts, bred late at night in the sullen
despondency and gloom of his retirement, and pride easily found its
reassurance in many testimonies to the truth, as unimpeachable and
precious as the Major's. Mr Dombey, in his friendlessness, inclined to
the Major. It cannot be said that he warmed towards him, but he thawed
a little, The Major had had some part - and not too much - in the days
by the seaside. He was a man of the world, and knew some great people.
He talked much, and told stories; and Mr Dombey was disposed to regard
him as a choice spirit who shone in society, and who had not that
poisonous ingredient of poverty with which choice spirits in general
are too much adulterated. His station was undeniable. Altogether the
Major was a creditable companion, well accustomed to a life of
leisure, and to such places as that they were about to visit, and
having an air of gentlemanly ease about him that mixed well enough
with his own City character, and did not compete with it at all. If Mr
Dombey had any lingering idea that the Major, as a man accustomed, in
the way of his calling, to make light of the ruthless hand that had
lately crushed his hopes, might unconsciously impart some useful
philosophy to him, and scare away his weak regrets, he hid it from
himself, and left it lying at the bottom of his pride, unexamined.

'Where is my scoundrel?' said the Major, looking wrathfully round
the room.

The Native, who had no particular name, but answered to any
vituperative epithet, presented himself instantly at the door and
ventured to come no nearer.

'You villain!' said the choleric Major, 'where's the breakfast?'

The dark servant disappeared in search of it, and was quickly heard
reascending the stairs in such a tremulous state, that the plates and
dishes on the tray he carried, trembling sympathetically as he came,
rattled again, all the way up.

'Dombey,' said the Major, glancing at the Native as he arranged the
table, and encouraging him with an awful shake of his fist when he
upset a spoon, 'here is a devilled grill, a savoury pie, a dish of
kidneys, and so forth. Pray sit down. Old Joe can give you nothing but
camp fare, you see.

'Very excellent fare, Major,' replied his guest; and not in mere
politeness either; for the Major always took the best possible care of
himself, and indeed ate rather more of rich meats than was good for
him, insomuch that his Imperial complexion was mainly referred by the
faculty to that circumstance.

'You have been looking over the way, Sir,' observed the Major.
'Have you seen our friend?'

'You mean Miss Tox,' retorted Mr Dombey. 'No.'

'Charming woman, Sir,' said the Major, with a fat laugh rising in
his short throat, and nearly suffocating him.

'Miss Tox is a very good sort of person, I believe,' replied Mr
Dombey.

The haughty coldness of the reply seemed to afford Major Bagstock
infinite delight. He swelled and swelled, exceedingly: and even laid
down his knife and fork for a moment, to rub his hands.

'Old Joe, Sir,' said the Major, 'was a bit ofa favourite in that
quarter once. But Joe has had his day. J. Bagstock is extinguished -
outrivalled - floored, Sir.'

'I should have supposed,' Mr Dombey replied, 'that the lady's day
for favourites was over: but perhaps you are jesting, Major.'

'Perhaps you are jesting, Dombey?' was the Major's rejoinder.

There never was a more unlikely possiblity. It was so clearly
expressed in Mr Dombey's face, that the Major apologised.

'I beg your pardon,' he said. 'I see you are in earnest. I tell you
what, Dombey.' The Major paused in his eating, and looked mysteriously
indignant. 'That's a de-vilish ambitious woman, Sir.'

Mr Dombey said 'Indeed?' with frigid indifference: mingled perhaps
with some contemptuous incredulity as to Miss Tox having the
presumption to harbour such a superior quality.

'That woman, Sir,' said the Major, 'is, in her way, a Lucifer. Joey
B. has had his day, Sir, but he keeps his eyes. He sees, does Joe. His
Royal Highness the late Duke of York observed of Joey, at a levee,
that he saw.'

The Major accompanied this with such a look, and, between eating,
drinking, hot tea, devilled grill, muffins, and meaning, was
altogether so swollen and inflamed about the head, that even Mr Dombey
showed some anxiety for him.

'That ridiculous old spectacle, Sir,' pursued the Major, 'aspires.
She aspires sky-high, Sir. Matrimonially, Dombey.'

'I am sorry for her,' said Mr Dombey.

'Don't say that, Dombey,' returned the Major in a warning voice.

'Why should I not, Major?' said Mr Dombey.

The Major gave no answer but the horse's cough, and went on eating
vigorously.

'She has taken an interest in your household,' said the Major,
stopping short again, 'and has been a frequent visitor at your house
for some time now.'

'Yes,' replied Mr Dombey with great stateliness, 'Miss Tox was
originally received there, at the time of Mrs Dombey's death, as a
friend of my sister's; and being a well-behaved person, and showing a
liking for the poor infant, she was permitted - may I say encouraged -
to repeat her visits with my sister, and gradually to occupy a kind of
footing of familiarity in the family. I have,' said Mr Dombey, in the
tone of a man who was making a great and valuable concession, 'I have
a respect for Miss Tox. She his been so obliging as to render many
little services in my house: trifling and insignificant services
perhaps, Major, but not to be disparaged on that account: and I hope I
have had the good fortune to be enabled to acknowledge them by such
attention and notice as it has been in my power to bestow. I hold
myself indebted to Miss Tox, Major,' added Mr Dombey, with a slight
wave of his hand, 'for the pleasure of your acquaintance.'

'Dombey,' said the Major, warmly: 'no! No, Sir! Joseph Bagstock can
never permit that assertion to pass uncontradicted. Your knowledge of
old Joe, Sir, such as he is, and old Joe's knowledge of you, Sir, had
its origin in a noble fellow, Sir - in a great creature, Sir. Dombey!'
said the Major, with a struggle which it was not very difficult to
parade, his whole life being a struggle against all kinds of
apoplectic symptoms, 'we knew each other through your boy.'

Mr Dombey seemed touched, as it is not improbable the Major
designed he should be, by this allusion. He looked down and sighed:
and the Major, rousing himself fiercely, again said, in reference to
the state of mind into which he felt himself in danger of falling,
that this was weakness, and nothing should induce him to submit to it.

'Our friend had a remote connexion with that event,' said the
Major, 'and all the credit that belongs to her, J. B. is willing to
give her, Sir. Notwithstanding which, Ma'am,' he added, raising his
eyes from his plate, and casting them across Princess's Place, to
where Miss Tox was at that moment visible at her window watering her
flowers, 'you're a scheming jade, Ma'am, and your ambition is a piece
of monstrous impudence. If it only made yourself ridiculous, Ma'am,'
said the Major, rolling his head at the unconscious Miss Tox, while
his starting eyes appeared to make a leap towards her, 'you might do
that to your heart's content, Ma'am, without any objection, I assure
you, on the part of Bagstock.' Here the Major laughed frightfully up
in the tips of his ears and in the veins of his head. 'But when,
Ma'am,' said the Major, 'you compromise other people, and generous,
unsuspicious people too, as a repayment for their condescension, you
stir the blood of old Joe in his body.'

'Major,' said Mr Dombey, reddening, 'I hope you do not hint at
anything so absurd on the part of Miss Tox as - '

'Dombey,' returned the Major, 'I hint at nothing. But Joey B. has
lived in the world, Sir: lived in the world with his eyes open, Sir,
and his ears cocked: and Joe tells you, Dombey, that there's a
devilish artful and ambitious woman over the way.'

Mr Dombey involuntarily glanced over the way; and an angry glance
he sent in that direction, too.

'That's all on such a subject that shall pass the lips of Joseph
Bagstock,' said the Major firmly. 'Joe is not a tale-bearer, but there
are times when he must speak, when he will speak! - confound your
arts, Ma'am,' cried the Major, again apostrophising his fair
neighbour, with great ire, - 'when the provocation is too strong to
admit of his remaining silent.'

The emotion of this outbreak threw the Major into a paroxysm of
horse's coughs, which held him for a long time. On recovering he
added:

'And now, Dombey, as you have invited Joe - old Joe, who has no
other merit, Sir, but that he is tough and hearty - to be your guest
and guide at Leamington, command him in any way you please, and he is
wholly yours. I don't know, Sir,' said the Major, wagging his double
chin with a jocose air, 'what it is you people see in Joe to make you
hold him in such great request, all of you; but this I know, Sir, that
if he wasn't pretty tough, and obstinate in his refusals, you'd kill
him among you with your invitations and so forth, in double-quick
time.'

Mr Dombey, in a few words, expressed his sense of the preference he
received over those other distinguished members of society who were
clamouring for the possession of Major Bagstock. But the Major cut him
short by giving him to understand that he followed his own
inclinations, and that they had risen up in a body and said with one
accord, 'J. B., Dombey is the man for you to choose as a friend.'

The Major being by this time in a state of repletion, with essence
of savoury pie oozing out at the corners of his eyes, and devilled
grill and kidneys tightening his cravat: and the time moreover
approaching for the departure of the railway train to Birmingham, by
which they were to leave town: the Native got him into his great-coat
with immense difficulty, and buttoned him up until his face looked
staring and gasping, over the top of that garment, as if he were in a
barrel. The Native then handed him separately, and with a decent
interval between each supply, his washleather gloves, his thick stick,
and his hat; which latter article the Major wore with a rakish air on
one side of his head, by way of toning down his remarkable visage. The
Native had previously packed, in all possible and impossible parts of
Mr Dombey's chariot, which was in waiting, an unusual quantity of
carpet-bags and small portmanteaus, no less apoplectic in appearance
than the Major himself: and having filled his own pockets with Seltzer
water, East India sherry, sandwiches, shawls, telescopes, maps, and
newspapers, any or all of which light baggage the Major might require
at any instant of the journey, he announced that everything was ready.
To complete the equipment of this unfortunate foreigner (currently
believed to be a prince in his own country), when he took his seat in
the rumble by the side of Mr Towlinson, a pile of the Major's cloaks
and great-coats was hurled upon him by the landlord, who aimed at him
from the pavement with those great missiles like a Titan, and so
covered him up, that he proceeded, in a living tomb, to the railroad
station.

But before the carriage moved away, and while the Native was in the
act of sepulture, Miss Tox appearing at her window, waved a lilywhite
handkerchief. Mr Dombey received this parting salutation very coldly -
very coldly even for him - and honouring her with the slightest
possible inclination of his head, leaned back in the carriage with a
very discontented look. His marked behaviour seemed to afford the
Major (who was all politeness in his recognition of Miss Tox)
unbounded satisfaction; and he sat for a long time afterwards,
leering, and choking, like an over-fed Mephistopheles.

During the bustle of preparation at the railway, Mr Dombey and the
Major walked up and down the platform side by side; the former
taciturn and gloomy, and the latter entertaining him, or entertaining
himself, with a variety of anecdotes and reminiscences, in most of
which Joe Bagstock was the principal performer. Neither of the two
observed that in the course of these walks, they attracted the
attention of a working man who was standing near the engine, and who
touched his hat every time they passed; for Mr Dombey habitually
looked over the vulgar herd, not at them; and the Major was looking,
at the time, into the core of one of his stories. At length, however,
this man stepped before them as they turned round, and pulling his hat
off, and keeping it off, ducked his head to Mr Dombey.

'Beg your pardon, Sir,' said the man, 'but I hope you're a doin'
pretty well, Sir.'

He was dressed in a canvas suit abundantly besmeared with coal-dust
and oil, and had cinders in his whiskers, and a smell of half-slaked
ashes all over him. He was not a bad-looking fellow, nor even what
could be fairly called a dirty-looking fellow, in spite of this; and,
in short, he was Mr Toodle, professionally clothed.

'I shall have the honour of stokin' of you down, Sir,' said Mr
Toodle. 'Beg your pardon, Sir. - I hope you find yourself a coming
round?'

Mr Dombey looked at him, in return for his tone of interest, as if
a man like that would make his very eyesight dirty.

''Scuse the liberty, Sir,' said Toodle, seeing he was not clearly
remembered, 'but my wife Polly, as was called Richards in your family
- '

A change in Mr Dombey's face, which seemed to express recollection
of him, and so it did, but it expressed in a much stronger degree an
angry sense of humiliation, stopped Mr Toodle short.

'Your wife wants money, I suppose,' said Mr Dombey, putting his
hand in his pocket, and speaking (but that he always did) haughtily.

'No thank'ee, Sir,' returned Toodle, 'I can't say she does. I
don't.'

Mr Dombey was stopped short now in his turn: and awkwardly: with
his hand in his pocket.

'No, Sir,' said Toodle, turning his oilskin cap round and round;
'we're a doin' pretty well, Sir; we haven't no cause to complain in
the worldly way, Sir. We've had four more since then, Sir, but we rubs
on.'

Mr Dombey would have rubbed on to his own carriage, though in so
doing he had rubbed the stoker underneath the wheels; but his
attention was arrested by something in connexion with the cap still
going slowly round and round in the man's hand.

'We lost one babby,' observed Toodle, 'there's no denyin'.'

'Lately,' added Mr Dombey, looking at the cap.

'No, Sir, up'ard of three years ago, but all the rest is hearty.
And in the matter o readin', Sir,' said Toodle, ducking again, as if
to remind Mr Dombey of what had passed between them on that subject
long ago, 'them boys o' mine, they learned me, among 'em, arter all.
They've made a wery tolerable scholar of me, Sir, them boys.'

'Come, Major!' said Mr Dombey.

'Beg your pardon, Sir,' resumed Toodle, taking a step before them
and deferentially stopping them again, still cap in hand: 'I wouldn't
have troubled you with such a pint except as a way of gettin' in the
name of my son Biler - christened Robin - him as you was so good as to
make a Charitable Grinder on.'

'Well, man,' said Mr Dombey in his severest manner. 'What about
him?'

'Why, Sir,' returned Toodle, shaking his head with a face of great
anxiety and distress, 'I'm forced to say, Sir, that he's gone wrong.

'He has gone wrong, has he?' said Mr Dombey, with a hard kind of
satisfaction.

'He has fell into bad company, you see, genelmen,' pursued the
father, looking wistfully at both, and evidently taking the Major into
the conversation with the hope of having his sympathy. 'He has got
into bad ways. God send he may come to again, genelmen, but he's on
the wrong track now! You could hardly be off hearing of it somehow,
Sir,' said Toodle, again addressing Mr Dombey individually; 'and it's
better I should out and say my boy's gone rather wrong. Polly's
dreadful down about it, genelmen,' said Toodle with the same dejected
look, and another appeal to the Major.

'A son of this man's whom I caused to be educated, Major,' said Mr
Dombey, giving him his arm. 'The usual return!'

'Take advice from plain old Joe, and never educate that sort of
people, Sir,' returned the Major. 'Damme, Sir, it never does! It
always fails!'

The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son,
the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and
taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of
schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have
been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when
Mr Dombey angrily repeating 'The usual return!' led the Major away.
And the Major being heavy to hoist into Mr Dombey's carriage, elevated
in mid-air, and having to stop and swear that he would flay the Native
alive, and break every bone in his skin, and visit other physical
torments upon him, every time he couldn't get his foot on the step,
and fell back on that dark exile, had barely time before they started
to repeat hoarsely that it would never do: that it always failed: and
that if he were to educate 'his own vagabond,' he would certainly be
hanged.

Mr Dombey assented bitterly; but there was something more in his
bitterness, and in his moody way of falling back in the carriage, and
looking with knitted brows at the changing objects without, than the
failure of that noble educational system administered by the Grinders'
Company. He had seen upon the man's rough cap a piece of new crape,
and he had assured himself, from his manner and his answers, that he
wore it for his son.

So] from high to low, at home or abroad, from Florence in his great
house to the coarse churl who was feeding the fire then smoking before
them, everyone set up some claim or other to a share in his dead boy,
and was a bidder against him! Could he ever forget how that woman had
wept over his pillow, and called him her own child! or how he, waking
from his sleep, had asked for her, and had raised himself in his bed
and brightened when she carne in!

To think of this presumptuous raker among coals and ashes going on
before there, with his sign of mourning! To think that he dared to
enter, even by a common show like that, into the trial and
disappointrnent of a proud gentleman's secret heart! To think that
this lost child, who was to have divided with him his riches, and his
projects, and his power, and allied with whom he was to have shut out
all the world as with a double door of gold, should have let in such a
herd to insult him with their knowledge of his defeated hopes, and
their boasts of claiming community of feeling with himself, so far
removed: if not of having crept into the place wherein he would have
lorded it, alone!

He found no pleasure or relief in the journey. Tortured by these
thoughts he carried monotony with him, through the rushing landscape,
and hurried headlong, not through a rich and varied country, but a
wilderness of blighted plans and gnawing jealousies. The very speed at
which the train was whirled along, mocked the swift course of the
young life that had been borne away so steadily and so inexorably to
its foredoomed end. The power that forced itself upon its iron way -
its own - defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart
of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages,
and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death.

Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, from the town,
burrowmg among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum,
flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp
earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into
the sunny day so bright and wide; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and
a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn,
through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the
clay, through the rock, among objects close at hand and almost in the
grasp, ever flying from the traveller, and a deceitful distance ever
moving slowly within him: like as in the track of the remorseless
monster, Death!

Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by
the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the
sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is
floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking,
where the stream is running, where the village clusters, where the
great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze
smooths or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away, with a shriek, and
a roar, and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and
vapour: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!

Breasting the wind and light, the shower and sunshine, away, and
still away, it rolls and roars, fierce and rapid, smooth and certain,
and great works and massive bridges crossing up above, fall like a
beam of shadow an inch broad, upon the eye, and then are lost. Away,
and still away, onward and onward ever: glimpses of cottage-homes, of
houses, mansions, rich estates, of husbandry and handicraft, of
people, of old roads and paths that look deserted, small, and
insignificant as they are left behind: and so they do, and what else
is there but such glimpses, in the track of the indomitable monster,
Death!

Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, plunging down into
the earth again, and working on in such a storm of energy and
perseverance, that amidst the darkness and whirlwind the motion seems
reversed, and to tend furiously backward, until a ray of light upon
the Wet wall shows its surface flying past like a fierce stream, Away
once more into the day, and through the day, with a shrill yell of
exultation, roaring, rattling, tearing on, spurning everything with
its dark breath, sometimes pausing for a minute where a crowd of faces
are, that in a minute more are not; sometimes lapping water greedily,
and before the spout at which it drinks' has ceased to drip upon the
ground, shrieking, roaring, rattling through the purple distance!

Louder and louder yet, it shrieks and cries as it comes tearing on
resistless to the goal: and now its way, still like the way of Death,
is strewn with ashes thickly. Everything around is blackened. There
are dark pools of water, muddy lanes, and miserable habitations far
below. There are jagged walls and falling houses close at hand, and
through the battered roofs and broken windows, wretched rooms are
seen, where 'want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes,
while smoke and crowded gables, and distorted chimneys, and deformity
of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind and body, choke the
murky distance. As Mr Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is
never in his thoughts that the monster who has brought him there has
let the light of day in on these things: not made or caused them. It
was the journey's fitting end, and might have been the end of
everything; it was so ruinous and dreary.'

So, pursuing the one course of thought, he had the one relentless
monster still before him. All things looked black, and cold, and
deadly upon him, and he on them. He found a likeness to his misfortune
everywhere. There was a remorseless triumph going on about him, and it
galled and stung him in his pride and jealousy, whatever form it took:
though most of all when it divided with him the love and memory of his
lost boy.

There was a face - he had looked upon it, on the previous night,
and it on him with eyes that read his soul, though they were dim with
tears, and hidden soon behind two quivering hands - that often had
attended him in fancy, on this ride. He had seen it, with the
expression of last night, timidly pleading to him. It was not
reproachful, but there was something of doubt, almost of hopeful
incredulity in it, which, as he once more saw that fade away into a
desolate certainty of his dislike, was like reproach. It was a trouble
to him to think of this face of Florence.

Because he felt any new compunction towards it? No. Because the
feeling it awakened in him - of which he had had some old
foreshadowing in older times - was full-formed now, and spoke out
plainly, moving him too much, and threatening to grow too strong for
his composure. Because the face was abroad, in the expression of
defeat and persecution that seemed to encircle him like the air.
Because it barbed the arrow of that cruel and remorseless enemy on
which his thoughts so ran, and put into its grasp a double-handed
sword. Because he knew full well, in his own breast, as he stood
there, tinging the scene of transition before him with the morbid
colours of his own mind, and making it a ruin and a picture of decay,
instead of hopeful change, and promise of better things, that life had
quite as much to do with his complainings as death. One child was
gone, and one child left. Why was the object of his hope removed
instead of her?

The sweet, calm, gentle presence in his fancy, moved him to no
reflection but that. She had been unwelcome to him from the first; she
was an aggravation of his bitterness now. If his son had been his only
child, and the same blow had fallen on him, it would have been heavy
to bear; but infinitely lighter than now, when it might have fallen on
her (whom he could have lost, or he believed it, without a pang), and
had not. Her loving and innocent face rising before him, had no
softening or winning influence. He rejected the angel, and took up
with the tormenting spirit crouching in his bosom. Her patience,
goodness, youth, devotion, love, were as so many atoms in the ashes
upon which he set his heel. He saw her image in the blight and
blackness all around him, not irradiating but deepening the gloom.
More than once upon this journey, and now again as he stood pondering
at this journey's end, tracing figures in the dust with his stick, the
thought came into his mind, what was there he could interpose between
himself and it?

The Major, who had been blowing and panting all the way down, like
another engine, and whose eye had often wandered from his newspaper to
leer at the prospect, as if there were a procession of discomfited
Miss Toxes pouring out in the smoke of the train, and flying away over
the fields to hide themselves in any place of refuge, aroused his
friends by informing him that the post-horses were harnessed and the
carriage ready.

'Dombey,' said the Major, rapping him on the arm with his cane,
'don't be thoughtful. It's a bad habit, Old Joe, Sir, wouldn't be as
tough as you see him, if he had ever encouraged it. You are too great
a man, Dombey, to be thoughtful. In your position, Sir, you're far
above that kind of thing.'

The Major even in his friendly remonstrrnces, thus consulting the
dignity and honour of Mr Dombey, and showing a lively sense of their
importance, Mr Dombey felt more than ever disposed to defer to a
gentleman possessing so much good sense and such a well-regulated
mind; acoordingly he made an effort to listen to the Major's stories,
as they trotted along the turnpike road; and the Major, finding both
the pace and the road a great deal better adapted to his
conversational powers than the mode of travelling they had just
relinquished, came out of his entertainment,

But still the Major, blunt and tough as he was, and as he so very
often said he was, administered some palatable catering to his
companion's appetite. He related, or rather suffered it to escape him,
accidentally, and as one might say, grudgingly and against his will,
how there was great curiosity and excitement at the club, in regard of
his friend Dombey. How he was suffocated with questions, Sir. How old
Joe Bagstock was a greater man than ever, there, on the strength of
Dombey. How they said, 'Bagstock, your friend Dombey now, what is the
view he takes of such and such a question? Though, by the Rood, Sir,'
said the Major, with a broad stare, 'how they discovered that J. B.
ever came to know you, is a mystery!'

In this flow of spirits and conversation, only interrupted by his
usual plethoric symptoms, and by intervals of lunch, and from time to
time by some violent assault upon the Native, who wore a pair of
ear-rings in his dark-brown ears, and on whom his European clothes sat
with an outlandish impossibility of adjustment - being, of their own
accord, and without any reference to the tailor's art, long where they
ought to be short, short where they ought to be long, tight where they
ought to be loose, and loose where they ought to be tight - and to
which he imparted a new grace, whenever the Major attacked him, by
shrinking into them like a shrivelled nut, or a cold monkey - in this
flow of spirits and conversation, the Major continued all day: so that
when evening came on, and found them trotting through the green and
leafy road near Leamington, the Major's voice, what with talking and
eating and chuckling and choking, appeared to be in the box under the
rumble, or in some neighbouring hay-stack. Nor did the Major improve
it at the Royal Hotel, where rooms and dinner had been ordered, and
where he so oppressed his organs of speech by eating and drinking,
that when he retired to bed he had no voice at all, except to cough
with, and could only make himself intelligible to the dark servant by
gasping at him.

He not only rose next morning, however, like a giant refreshed, but
conducted himself, at breakfast like a giant refreshing. At this meal
they arranged their daily habits. The Major was to take the
responsibility of ordering evrything to eat and drink; and they were
to have a late breakfast together every morning, and a late dinner
together every day. Mr Dombey would prefer remaining in his own room,
or walking in the country by himself, on that first day of their
sojourn at Leamington; but next morning he would be happy to accompany
the Major to the Pump-room, and about the town. So they parted until
dinner-time. Mr Dombey retired to nurse his wholesome thoughts in his
own way. The Major, attended by the Native carrying a camp-stool, a
great-coat, and an umbrella, swaggered up and down through all the
public places: looking into subscription books to find out who was
there, looking up old ladies by whom he was much admired, reporting J.
B. tougher than ever, and puffing his rich friend Dombey wherever he
went. There never was a man who stood by a friend more staunchly than
the Major, when in puffing him, he puffed himself.

It was surprising how much new conversation the Major had to let
off at dinner-time, and what occasion he gave Mr Dombey to admire his
social qualities. At breakfast next morning, he knew the contents of
the latest newspapers received; and mentioned several subjects in
connexion with them, on which his opinion had recently been sought by
persons of such power and might, that they were only to be obscurely
hinted at. Mr Dombey, who had been so long shut up within himself, and
who had rarely, at any time, overstepped the enchanted circle within
which the operations of Dombey and Son were conducted, began to think
this an improvement on his solitary life; and in place of excusing
himself for another day, as he had thought of doing when alone, walked
out with the Major arm-in-arm.



CHAPTER 21.

New Faces



The MAJOR, more blue-faced and staring - more over-ripe, as it
were, than ever - and giving vent, every now and then, to one of the
horse's coughs, not so much of necessity as in a spontaneous explosion
of importance, walked arm-in-arm with Mr Dombey up the sunny side of
the way, with his cheeks swelling over his tight stock, his legs
majestically wide apart, and his great head wagging from side to side,
as if he were remonstrating within himself for being such a
captivating object. They had not walked many yards, before the Major
encountered somebody he knew, nor many yards farther before the Major
encountered somebody else he knew, but he merely shook his fingers at
them as he passed, and led Mr Dombey on: pointing out the localities
as they went, and enlivening the walk with any current scandal
suggested by them.

In this manner the Major and Mr Dombey were walking arm-in-arm,
much to their own satisfaction, when they beheld advancing towards
them, a wheeled chair, in which a lady was seated, indolently steering
her carriage by a kind of rudder in front, while it was propelled by
some unseen power in the rear. Although the lady was not young, she
was very blooming in the face - quite rosy- and her dress and attitude
were perfectly juvenile. Walking by the side of the chair, and
carrying her gossamer parasol with a proud and weary air, as if so
great an effort must be soon abandoned and the parasol dropped,
sauntered a much younger lady, very handsome, very haughty, very
wilful, who tossed her head and drooped her eyelids, as though, if
there were anything in all the world worth looking into, save a
mirror, it certainly was not the earth or sky.

'Why, what the devil have we here, Sir!' cried the Major, stopping
as this little cavalcade drew near.

'My dearest Edith!' drawled the lady in the chair, 'Major
Bagstock!'

The Major no sooner heard the voice, than he relinquished Mr
Dombey's arm, darted forward, took the hand of the lady in the chair
and pressed it to his lips. With no less gallantry, the Major folded
both his gloves upon his heart, and bowed low to the other lady. And
now, the chair having stopped, the motive power became visible in the
shape of a flushed page pushing behind, who seemed to have in part
outgrown and in part out-pushed his strength, for when he stood
upright he was tall, and wan, and thin, and his plight appeared the
more forlorn from his having injured the shape of his hat, by butting
at the carriage with his head to urge it forward, as is sometimes done
by elephants in Oriental countries.

'Joe Bagstock,' said the Major to both ladies, 'is a proud and
happy man for the rest of his life.'

'You false creature! said the old lady in the chair, insipidly.
'Where do you come from? I can't bear you.'

'Then suffer old Joe to present a friend, Ma'am,' said the Major,
promptly, 'as a reason for being tolerated. Mr Dombey, Mrs Skewton.'
The lady in the chair was gracious. 'Mr Dombey, Mrs Granger.' The lady
with the parasol was faintly conscious of Mr Dombey's taking off his
hat, and bowing low. 'I am delighted, Sir,' said the Major, 'to have
this opportunity.'

The Major seemed in earnest, for he looked at all the three, and
leered in his ugliest manner.

'Mrs Skewton, Dombey,' said the Major, 'makes havoc in the heart of
old Josh.'

Mr Dombey signified that he didn't wonder at it.

'You perfidious goblin,' said the lady in the chair, 'have done!
How long have you been here, bad man?'

'One day,' replied the Major.

'And can you be a day, or even a minute,' returned the lady,
slightly settling her false curls and false eyebrows with her fan, and
showing her false teeth, set off by her false complexion, 'in the
garden of what's-its-name

'Eden, I suppose, Mama,' interrupted the younger lady, scornfully.

'My dear Edith,' said the other, 'I cannot help it. I never can
remember those frightful names - without having your whole Soul and
Being inspired by the sight of Nature; by the perfume,' said Mrs
Skewton, rustling a handkerchief that was faint and sickly with
essences, 'of her artless breath, you creature!'

The discrepancy between Mrs Skewton's fresh enthusiasm of words,
and forlornly faded manner, was hardly less observable than that
between her age, which was about seventy, and her dress, which would
have been youthful for twenty-seven. Her attitude in the wheeled chair
(which she never varied) was one in which she had been taken in a
barouche, some fifty years before, by a then fashionable artist who
had appended to his published sketch the name of Cleopatra: in
consequence of a discovery made by the critics of the time, that it
bore an exact resemblance to that Princess as she reclined on board
her galley. Mrs Skewton was a beauty then, and bucks threw
wine-glasses over their heads by dozens in her honour. The beauty and
the barouche had both passed away, but she still preserved the
attitude, and for this reason expressly, maintained the wheeled chair
and the butting page: there being nothing whatever, except the
attitude, to prevent her from walking.

'Mr Dombey is devoted to Nature, I trust?' said Mrs Skewton,
settling her diamond brooch. And by the way, she chiefly lived upon
the reputation of some diamonds, and her family connexions.

'My friend Dombey, Ma'am,' returned the Major, 'may be devoted to
her in secret, but a man who is paramount in the greatest city in the
universe -

'No one can be a stranger,' said Mrs Skewton, 'to Mr Dombey's
immense influence.'

As Mr Dombey acknowledged the compliment with a bend of his head,
the younger lady glancing at him, met his eyes.

'You reside here, Madam?' said Mr Dombey, addressing her.

'No, we have been to a great many places. To Harrogate and
Scarborough, and into Devonshire. We have been visiting, and resting
here and there. Mama likes change.'

'Edith of course does not,' said Mrs Skewton, with a ghastly
archness.

'I have not found that there is any change in such places,' was the
answer, delivered with supreme indifference.

'They libel me. There is only one change, Mr Dombey,' observed Mrs
Skewton, with a mincing sigh, 'for which I really care, and that I
fear I shall never be permitted to enjoy. People cannot spare one. But
seclusion and contemplation are my what-his-name - '

'If you mean Paradise, Mama, you had better say so, to render
yourself intelligible,' said the younger lady.

'My dearest Edith,' returned Mrs Skewton, 'you know that I am
wholly dependent upon you for those odious names. I assure you, Mr
Dombey, Nature intended me for an Arcadian. I am thrown away in
society. Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for, has been to
retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and
china.'

This curious association of objects, suggesting a remembrance of
the celebrated bull who got by mistake into a crockery shop, was
received with perfect gravity by Mr Dombey, who intimated his opinion
that Nature was, no doubt, a very respectable institution.

'What I want,' drawled Mrs Skewton, pinching her shrivelled throat,
'is heart.' It was frightfully true in one sense, if not in that in
which she used the phrase. 'What I want, is frankness, confidence,
less conventionality, and freer play of soul. We are so dreadfully
artificial.'

We were, indeed.

'In short,' said Mrs Skewton, 'I want Nature everywhere. It would
be so extremely charming.'

'Nature is inviting us away now, Mama, if you are ready,' said the
younger lady, curling her handsome lip. At this hint, the wan page,
who had been surveying the party over the top of the chair, vanished
behind it, as if the ground had swallowed him up.

'Stop a moment, Withers!' said Mrs Skewton, as the chair began to
move; calling to the page with all the languid dignity with which she
had called in days of yore to a coachman with a wig, cauliflower
nosegay, and silk stockings. 'Where are you staying, abomination?' The
Major was staying at the Royal Hotel, with his friend Dombey.

'You may come and see us any evening when you are good,' lisped Mrs
Skewton. 'If Mr Dombey will honour us, we shall be happy. Withers, go
on!'

The Major again pressed to his blue lips the tips of the fingers
that were disposed on the ledge of the wheeled chair with careful
carelessness, after the Cleopatra model: and Mr Dombey bowed. The
elder lady honoured them both with a very gracious smile and a girlish
wave of her hand; the younger lady with the very slightest inclination
of her head that common courtesy allowed.

The last glimpse of the wrinkled face of the mother, with that
patched colour on it which the sun made infinitely more haggard and
dismal than any want of colour could have been, and of the proud
beauty of the daughter with her graceful figure and erect deportment,
engendered such an involuntary disposition on the part of both the
Major and Mr Dombey to look after them, that they both turned at the
same moment. The Page, nearly as much aslant as his own shadow, was
toiling after the chair, uphill, like a slow battering-ram; the top of
Cleopatra's bonnet was fluttering in exactly the same corner to the
inch as before; and the Beauty, loitering by herself a little in
advance, expressed in all her elegant form, from head to foot, the
same supreme disregard of everything and everybody.

'I tell you what, Sir,' said the Major, as they resumed their walk
again. 'If Joe Bagstock were a younger man, there's not a woman in the
world whom he'd prefer for Mrs Bagstock to that woman. By George,
Sir!' said the Major, 'she's superb!'

'Do you mean the daughter?' inquired Mr Dombey.

'Is Joey B. a turnip, Dombey,' said the Major, 'that he should mean
the mother?'

'You were complimentary to the mother,' returned Mr Dombey.

'An ancient flame, Sir,' chuckled Major Bagstock. 'Devilish
ancient. I humour her.'

'She impresses me as being perfectly genteel,' said Mr Dombey.

'Genteel, Sir,' said the Major, stopping short, and staring in his
companion's face. 'The Honourable Mrs Skewton, Sir, is sister to the
late Lord Feenix, and aunt to the present Lord. The family are not
wealthy - they're poor, indeed - and she lives upon a small jointure;
but if you come to blood, Sir!' The Major gave a flourish with his
stick and walked on again, in despair of being able to say what you
came to, if you came to that.

'You addressed the daughter, I observed,' said Mr Dombey, after a
short pause, 'as Mrs Granger.'

'Edith Skewton, Sir,' returned the Major, stopping short again, and
punching a mark in the ground with his cane, to represent her,
'married (at eighteen) Granger of Ours;' whom the Major indicated by
another punch. 'Granger, Sir,' said the Major, tapping the last ideal
portrait, and rolling his head emphatically, 'was Colonel of Ours; a
de-vilish handsome fellow, Sir, of forty-one. He died, Sir, in the
second year of his marriage.' The Major ran the representative of the
deceased Granger through and through the body with his walking-stick,
and went on again, carrying his stick over his shoulder.

'How long is this ago?' asked Mr Dombey, making another halt.

'Edith Granger, Sir,' replied the Major, shutting one eye, putting
his head on one side, passing his cane into his left hand, and
smoothing his shirt-frill with his right, 'is, at this present time,
not quite thirty. And damme, Sir,' said the Major, shouldering his
stick once more, and walking on again, 'she's a peerless woman!'

'Was there any family?' asked Mr Dombey presently.

'Yes, Sir,' said the Major. 'There was a boy.'

Mr Dombey's eyes sought the ground, and a shade came over his face.

'Who was drowned, Sir,' pursued the Major. 'When a child of four or
five years old.'

'Indeed?' said Mr Dombey, raising his head.

'By the upsetting of a boat in which his nurse had no business to
have put him,' said the Major. 'That's his history. Edith Granger is
Edith Granger still; but if tough old Joey B., Sir, were a little
younger and a little richer, the name of that immortal paragon should
be Bagstock.'

The Major heaved his shoulders, and his cheeks, and laughed more
like an over-fed Mephistopheles than ever, as he said the words.

'Provided the lady made no objection, I suppose?' said Mr Dombey
coldly.

'By Gad, Sir,' said the Major, 'the Bagstock breed are not
accustomed to that sort of obstacle. Though it's true enough that
Edith might have married twenty times, but for being proud, Sir,
proud.'

Mr Dombey seemed, by his face, to think no worse of her for that.

'It's a great quality after all,' said the Major. 'By the Lord,
it's a high quality! Dombey! You are proud yourself, and your friend,
Old Joe, respects you for it, Sir.'

With this tribute to the character of his ally, which seemed to be
wrung from him by the force of circumstances and the irresistible
tendency of their conversation, the Major closed the subject, and
glided into a general exposition of the extent to which he had been
beloved and doted on by splendid women and brilliant creatures.

On the next day but one, Mr Dombey and the Major encountered the
Honourable Mrs Skewton and her daughter in the Pump-room; on the day
after, they met them again very near the place where they had met them
first. After meeting them thus, three or four times in all, it became
a point of mere civility to old acquaintances that the Major should go
there one evening. Mr Dombey had not originally intended to pay
visits, but on the Major announcing this intention, he said he would
have the pleasure of accompanying him. So the Major told the Native to
go round before dinner, and say, with his and Mr Dombey's compliments,
that they would have the honour of visiting the ladies that same
evening, if the ladies were alone. In answer to which message, the
Native brought back a very small note with a very large quantity of
scent about it, indited by the Honourable Mrs Skewton to Major
Bagstock, and briefly saying, 'You are a shocking bear and I have a
great mind not to forgive you, but if you are very good indeed,' which
was underlined, 'you may come. Compliments (in which Edith unites) to
Mr Dombey.'

The Honourable Mrs Skewton and her daughter, Mrs Granger, resided,
while at Leamington, in lodgings that were fashionable enough and dear
enough, but rather limited in point of space and conveniences; so that
the Honourable Mrs Skewton, being in bed, had her feet in the window
and her head in the fireplace, while the Honourable Mrs Skewton's maid
was quartered in a closet within the drawing-room, so extremely small,
that, to avoid developing the whole of its accommodations, she was
obliged to writhe in and out of the door like a beautiful serpent.
Withers, the wan page, slept out of the house immediately under the
tiles at a neighbouring milk-shop; and the wheeled chair, which was
the stone of that young Sisyphus, passed the night in a shed belonging
to the same dairy, where new-laid eggs were produced by the poultry
connected with the establishment, who roosted on a broken donkey-cart,
persuaded, to all appearance, that it grew there, and was a species of
tree.

Mr Dombey and the Major found Mrs Skewton arranged, as Cleopatra,
among the cushions of a sofa: very airily dressed; and certainly not
resembling Shakespeare's Cleopatra, whom age could not wither. On
their way upstairs they had heard the sound of a harp, but it had
ceased on their being announced, and Edith now stood beside it
handsomer and haughtier than ever. It was a remarkable characteristic
of this lady's beauty that it appeared to vaunt and assert itself
without her aid, and against her will. She knew that she was
beautiful: it was impossible that it could be otherwise: but she
seemed with her own pride to defy her very self.

Whether she held cheap attractions that could only call forth
admiration that was worthless to her, or whether she designed to
render them more precious to admirers by this usage of them, those to
whom they were precious seldom paused to consider.

'I hope, Mrs Granger,' said Mr Dombey, advancing a step towards
her, 'we are not the cause of your ceasing to play?'

'You! oh no!'

'Why do you not go on then, my dearest Edith?' said Cleopatra.

'I left off as I began - of my own fancy.'

The exquisite indifference of her manner in saying this: an
indifference quite removed from dulness or insensibility, for it was
pointed with proud purpose: was well set off by the carelessness with
which she drew her hand across the strings, and came from that part of
the room.

'Do you know, Mr Dombey,' said her languishing mother, playing with
a hand-screen, 'that occasionally my dearest Edith and myself actually
almost differ - '

'Not quite, sometimes, Mama?' said Edith.

'Oh never quite, my darling! Fie, fie, it would break my heart,'
returned her mother, making a faint attempt to pat her with the
screen, which Edith made no movement to meet, ' - about these old
conventionalities of manner that are observed in little things? Why
are we not more natural? Dear me! With all those yearnings, and
gushings, and impulsive throbbings that we have implanted in our
souls, and which are so very charming, why are we not more natural?'

Mr Dombey said it was very true, very true.

'We could be more natural I suppose if we tried?' said Mrs Skewton.

Mr Dombey thought it possible.

'Devil a bit, Ma'am,' said the Major. 'We couldn't afford it.
Unless the world was peopled with J.B.'s - tough and blunt old Joes,
Ma'am, plain red herrings with hard roes, Sir - we couldn't afford it.
It wouldn't do.'

'You naughty Infidel,' said Mrs Skewton, 'be mute.'

'Cleopatra commands,' returned the Major, kissing his hand, 'and
Antony Bagstock obeys.'

'The man has no sensitiveness,' said Mrs Skewton, cruelly holding
up the hand-screen so as to shut the Major out. 'No sympathy. And what
do we live for but sympathy! What else is so extremely charming!
Without that gleam of sunshine on our cold cold earth,' said Mrs
Skewton, arranging her lace tucker, and complacently observing the
effect of her bare lean arm, looking upward from the wrist, 'how could
we possibly bear it? In short, obdurate man!' glancing at the Major,
round the screen, 'I would have my world all heart; and Faith is so
excessively charming, that I won't allow you to disturb it, do you
hear?'

The Major replied that it was hard in Cleopatra to require the
world to be all heart, and yet to appropriate to herself the hearts of
all the world; which obliged Cleopatra to remind him that flattery was
insupportable to her, and that if he had the boldness to address her
in that strain any more, she would positively send him home.

Withers the Wan, at this period, handing round the tea, Mr Dombey
again addressed himself to Edith.

'There is not much company here, it would seem?' said Mr Dombey, in
his own portentous gentlemanly way.

'I believe not. We see none.'

'Why really,' observed Mrs Skewton fom her couch, 'there are no
people here just now with whom we care to associate.'

'They have not enough heart,' said Edith, with a smile. The very
twilight of a smile: so singularly were its light and darkness
blended.

'My dearest Edith rallies me, you see!' said her mother, shaking
her head: which shook a little of itself sometimes, as if the palsy
Bed now and then in opposition to the diamonds. 'Wicked one!'

'You have been here before, if I am not mistaken?' said Mr Dombey.
Still to Edith.

'Oh, several times. I think we have been everywhere.'

'A beautiful country!'

'I suppose it is. Everybody says so.'

'Your cousin Feenix raves about it, Edith,' interposed her mother
from her couch.

The daughter slightly turned her graceful head, and raising her
eyebrows by a hair's-breadth, as if her cousin Feenix were of all the
mortal world the least to be regarded, turned her eyes again towards
Mr Dombey.

'I hope, for the credit of my good taste, that I am tired of the
neighbourhood,' she said.

'You have almost reason to be, Madam,' he replied, glancing at a
variety of landscape drawings, of which he had already recognised
several as representing neighbouring points of view, and which were
strewn abundantly about the room, 'if these beautiful productions are
from your hand.'

She gave him no reply, but sat in a disdainful beauty, quite
amazing.

'Have they that interest?' said Mr Dombey. 'Are they yours?'

'Yes.'

'And you play, I already know.'

'Yes.'

'And sing?'

'Yes.'

She answered all these questions with a strange reluctance; and
with that remarkable air of opposition to herself, already noticed as
belonging to her beauty. Yet she was not embarrassed, but wholly
self-possessed. Neither did she seem to wish to avoid the
conversation, for she addressed her face, and - so far as she could -
her manner also, to him; and continued to do so, when he was silent.

'You have many resources against weariness at least,' said Mr
Dombey.

'Whatever their efficiency may be,' she returned, 'you know them
all now. I have no more.

'May I hope to prove them all?' said Mr Dombey, with solemn
gallantry, laying down a drawing he had held, and motioning towards
the harp.

'Oh certainly] If you desire it!'

She rose as she spoke, and crossing by her mother's couch, and
directing a stately look towards her, which was instantaneous in its
duration, but inclusive (if anyone had seen it) of a multitude of
expressions, among which that of the twilight smile, without the smile
itself, overshadowed all the rest, went out of the room.

The Major, who was quite forgiven by this time, had wheeled a
little table up to Cleopatra, and was sitting down to play picquet
with her. Mr Dombey, not knowing the game, sat down to watch them for
his edification until Edith should return.

'We are going to have some music, Mr Dombey, I hope?' said
Cleopatra.

'Mrs Granger has been kind enough to promise so,' said Mr Dombey.

'Ah! That's very nice. Do you propose, Major?'

'No, Ma'am,' said the Major. 'Couldn't do it.'

'You're a barbarous being,' replied the lady, 'and my hand's
destroyed. You are fond of music, Mr Dombey?'

'Eminently so,' was Mr Dombey's answer.

'Yes. It's very nice,' said Cleopatra, looking at her cards. 'So
much heart in it - undeveloped recollections of a previous state of
existence' - and all that - which is so truly charming. Do you know,'
simpered Cleopatra, reversing the knave of clubs, who had come into
her game with his heels uppermost, 'that if anything could tempt me to
put a period to my life, it would be curiosity to find out what it's
all about, and what it means; there are so many provoking mysteries,
really, that are hidden from us. Major, you to play.'

The Major played; and Mr Dombey, looking on for his instruction,
would soon have been in a state of dire confusion, but that he gave no
attention to the game whatever, and sat wondering instead when Edith
would come back.

She came at last, and sat down to her harp, and Mr Dombey rose and
stood beside her, listening. He had little taste for music, and no
knowledge of the strain she played, but he saw her bending over it,
and perhaps he heard among the sounding strings some distant music of
his own, that tamed the monster of the iron road, and made it less
inexorable.

Cleopatra had a sharp eye, verily, at picquet. It glistened like a
bird's, and did not fix itself upon the game, but pierced the room
from end to end, and gleamed on harp, performer, listener, everything.

When the haughty beauty had concluded, she arose, and receiving Mr
Dombey's thanks and compliments in exactly the same manner as before,
went with scarcely any pause to the piano, and began there.

Edith Granger, any song but that! Edith Granger, you are very
handsome, and your touch upon the keys is brilliant, and your voice is
deep and rich; but not the air that his neglected daughter sang to his
dead son]

Alas, he knows it not; and if he did, what air of hers would stir
him, rigid man! Sleep, lonely Florence, sleep! Peace in thy dreams,
although the night has turned dark, and the clouds are gathering, and
threaten to discharge themselves in hail!



CHAPTER 22.

A Trifle of Management by Mr Carker the Manager



Mr Carker the Manager sat at his desk, smooth and soft as usual,
reading those letters which were reserved for him to open, backing
them occasionally with such memoranda and references as their business
purport required, and parcelling them out into little heaps for
distribution through the several departments of the House. The post
had come in heavy that morning, and Mr Carker the Manager had a good
deal to do.

The general action of a man so engaged - pausing to look over a
bundle of papers in his hand, dealing them round in various portions,
taking up another bundle and examining its contents with knitted brows
and pursed-out lips - dealing, and sorting, and pondering by turns -
would easily suggest some whimsical resemblance to a player at cards.
The face of Mr Carker the Manager was in good keeping with such a
fancy. It was the face of a man who studied his play, warily: who made
himself master of all the strong and weak points of the game: who
registered the cards in his mind as they fell about him, knew exactly
what was on them, what they missed, and what they made: who was crafty
to find out what the other players held, and who never betrayed his
own hand.

The letters were in various languages, but Mr Carker the Manager
read them all. If there had been anything in the offices of Dombey and
Son that he could read, there would have been a card wanting in the
pack. He read almost at a glance, and made combinations of one letter
with another and one business with another as he went on, adding new
matter to the heaps - much as a man would know the cards at sight, and
work out their combinations in his mind after they were turned.
Something too deep for a partner, and much too deep for an adversary,
Mr Carker the Manager sat in the rays of the sun that came down
slanting on him through the skylight, playing his game alone.

And although it is not among the instincts wild or domestic of the
cat tribe to play at cards, feline from sole to crown was Mr Carker
the Manager, as he basked in the strip of summer-light and warmth that
shone upon his table and the ground as if they were a crooked
dial-plate, and himself the only figure on it. With hair and whiskers
deficient in colour at all times, but feebler than common in the rich
sunshine, and more like the coat of a sandy tortoise-shell cat; with
long nails, nicely pared and sharpened; with a natural antipathy to
any speck of dirt, which made him pause sometimes and watch the
falling motes of dust, and rub them off his smooth white hand or
glossy linen: Mr Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp of tooth,
soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of heart, nice of
habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness and patience at his work, as if
he were waiting at a mouse's hole.

At length the letters were disposed of, excepting one which he
reserved for a particular audience. Having locked the more
confidential correspondence in a drawer, Mr Carker the Manager rang
his bell.

'Why do you answer it?' was his reception of his brother.

'The messenger is out, and I am the next,' was the submissive
reply.

'You are the next?' muttered the Manager. 'Yes! Creditable to me!
There!'

Pointing to the heaps of opened letters, he turned disdainfully
away, in his elbow-chair, and broke the seal of that one which he held
in his hand.

'I am sorry to trouble you, James,' said the brother, gathering
them up, 'but - '

'Oh! you have something to say. I knew that. Well?'

Mr Carker the Manager did not raise his eyes or turn them on his
brother, but kept them on his letter, though without opening it.

'Well?' he repeated sharply.

'I am uneasy about Harriet.'

'Harriet who? what Harriet? I know nobody of that name.'

'She is not well, and has changed very much of late.'

'She changed very much, a great many years ago,' replied the
Manager; 'and that is all I have to say.

'I think if you would hear me -

'Why should I hear you, Brother John?' returned the Manager, laying
a sarcastic emphasis on those two words, and throwing up his head, but
not lifting his eyes. 'I tell you, Harriet Carker made her choice many
years ago between her two brothers. She may repent it, but she must
abide by it.'

'Don't mistake me. I do not say she does repent it. It would be
black ingratitude in me to hint at such a thing,' returned the other.
'Though believe me, James, I am as sorry for her sacrifice as you.'

'As I?' exclaimed the Manager. 'As I?'

'As sorry for her choice - for what you call her choice - as you
are angry at it,' said the Junior.

'Angry?' repeated the other, with a wide show of his teeth.

'Displeased. Whatever word you like best. You know my meaning.
There is no offence in my intention.'

'There is offence in everything you do,' replied his brother,
glancing at him with a sudden scowl, which in a moment gave place to a
wider smile than the last. 'Carry those papers away, if you please. I
am busy.

His politeness was so much more cutting than his wrath, that the
Junior went to the door. But stopping at it, and looking round, he
said:

'When Harriet tried in vain to plead for me with you, on your first
just indignation, and my first disgrace; and when she left you, James,
to follow my broken fortunes, and devote herself, in her mistaken
affection, to a ruined brother, because without her he had no one, and
was lost; she was young and pretty. I think if you could see her now -
if you would go and see her - she would move your admiration and
compassion.'

The Manager inclined his head, and showed his teeth, as who should
say, in answer to some careless small-talk, 'Dear me! Is that the
case?' but said never a word.

'We thought in those days: you and I both: that she would marry
young, and lead a happy and light-hearted life,' pursued the other.
'Oh if you knew how cheerfully she cast those hopes away; how
cheerfully she has gone forward on the path she took, and never once
looked back; you never could say again that her name was strange in
your ears. Never!'

Again the Manager inclined his head and showed his teeth, and
seemed to say, 'Remarkable indeed! You quite surprise me!' And again
he uttered never a word.

'May I go on?' said John Carker, mildly.

'On your way?' replied his smiling brother. 'If you will have the
goodness.

John Carker, with a sigh, was passing slowly out at the door, when
his brother's voice detained him for a moment on the threshold.

'If she has gone, and goes, her own way cheerfully,' he said,
throwing the still unfolded letter on his desk, and putting his hands
firmly in his pockets, 'you may tell her that I go as cheerfully on
mine. If she has never once looked back, you may tell her that I have,
sometimes, to recall her taking part with you, and that my resolution
is no easier to wear away;' he smiled very sweetly here; 'than
marble.'

'I tell her nothing of you. We never speak about you. Once a year,
on your birthday, Harriet says always, "Let us remember James by name,
and wish him happy," but we say no more'

'Tell it then, if you please,' returned the other, 'to yourself.
You can't repeat it too often, as a lesson to you to avoid the subject
in speaking to me. I know no Harriet Carker. There is no such person.
You may have a sister; make much of her. I have none.'

Mr Carker the Manager took up the letter again, and waved it with a
smile of mock courtesy towards the door. Unfolding it as his brother
withdrew, and looking darkly aiter him as he left the room, he once
more turned round in his elbow-chair, and applied himself to a
diligent perusal of its contents.

It was in the writing of his great chief, Mr Dombey, and dated from
Leamington. Though he was a quick reader of all other letters, Mr
Carker read this slowly; weighing the words as he went, and bringing
every tooth in his head to bear upon them. When he had read it through
once, he turned it over again, and picked out these passages. 'I find
myself benefited by the change, and am not yet inclined to name any
time for my return.' 'I wish, Carker, you would arrange to come down
once and see me here, and let me know how things are going on, in
person.' 'I omitted to speak to you about young Gay. If not gone per
Son and Heir, or if Son and Heir still lying in the Docks, appoint
some other young man and keep him in the City for the present. I am
not decided.' 'Now that's unfortunate!' said Mr Carker the Manager,
expanding his mouth, as if it were made of India-rubber: 'for he's far
away.'

Still that passage, which was in a postscript, attracted his
attention and his teeth, once more.

'I think,' he said, 'my good friend Captain Cuttle mentioned
something about being towed along in the wake of that day. What a pity
he's so far away!'

He refolded the letter, and was sitting trifling with it, standing
it long-wise and broad-wise on his table, and turning it over and over
on all sides - doing pretty much the same thing, perhaps, by its
contents - when Mr Perch the messenger knocked softly at the door, and
coming in on tiptoe, bending his body at every step as if it were the
delight of his life to bow, laid some papers on the table.

'Would you please to be engaged, Sir?' asked Mr Perch, rubbing his
hands, and deferentially putting his head on one side, like a man who
felt he had no business to hold it up in such a presence, and would
keep it as much out of the way as possible.

'Who wants me?'

'Why, Sir,' said Mr Perch, in a soft voice, 'really nobody, Sir, to
speak of at present. Mr Gills the Ship's Instrument-maker, Sir, has
looked in, about a little matter of payment, he says: but I mentioned
to him, Sir, that you was engaged several deep; several deep.'

Mr Perch coughed once behind his hand, and waited for further
orders.

'Anybody else?'

'Well, Sir,' said Mr Perch, 'I wouldn't of my own self take the
liberty of mentioning, Sir, that there was anybody else; but that same
young lad that was here yesterday, Sir, and last week, has been
hanging about the place; and it looks, Sir,' added Mr Perch, stopping
to shut the door, 'dreadful unbusiness-like to see him whistling to
the sparrows down the court, and making of 'em answer him.'

'You said he wanted something to do, didn't you, Perch?' asked Mr
Carker, leaning back in his chair and looking at that officer.

'Why, Sir,' said Mr Perch, coughing behind his hand again, 'his
expression certainly were that he was in wants of a sitiwation, and
that he considered something might be done for him about the Docks,
being used to fishing with a rod and line: but - ' Mr Perch shook his
head very dubiously indeed.

'What does he say when he comes?' asked Mr Carker.

'Indeed, Sir,' said Mr Perch, coughing another cough behind his
hand, which was always his resource as an expression of humility when
nothing else occurred to him, 'his observation generally air that he
would humbly wish to see one of the gentlemen, and that he wants to
earn a living. But you see, Sir,' added Perch, dropping his voice to a
whisper, and turning, in the inviolable nature of his confidence, to
give the door a thrust with his hand and knee, as if that would shut
it any more when it was shut already, 'it's hardly to be bore, Sir,
that a common lad like that should come a prowling here, and saying
that his mother nursed our House's young gentleman, and that he hopes
our House will give him a chance on that account. I am sure, Sir,'
observed Mr Perch, 'that although Mrs Perch was at that time nursing
as thriving a little girl, Sir, as we've ever took the liberty of
adding to our family, I wouldn't have made so free as drop a hint of
her being capable of imparting nourishment, not if it was never so!'

Mr Carker grinned at him like a shark, but in an absent, thoughtful
manner.

'Whether,' submitted Mr Perch, after a short silence, and another
cough, 'it mightn't be best for me to tell him, that if he was seen
here any more he would be given into custody; and to keep to it! With
respect to bodily fear,' said Mr Perch, 'I'm so timid, myself, by
nature, Sir, and my nerves is so unstrung by Mrs Perch's state, that I
could take my affidavit easy.'

'Let me see this fellow, Perch,' said Mr Carker. 'Bring him in!'

'Yes, Sir. Begging your pardon, Sir,' said Mr Perch, hesitating at
the door, 'he's rough, Sir, in appearance.'

'Never mind. If he's there, bring him in. I'll see Mr Gills
directly. Ask him to wait.'

Mr Perch bowed; and shutting the door, as precisely and carefully
as if he were not coming back for a week, went on his quest among the
sparrows in the court. While he was gone, Mr Carker assumed his
favourite attitude before the fire-place, and stood looking at the
door; presenting, with his under lip tucked into the smile that showed
his whole row of upper teeth, a singularly crouching apace.

The messenger was not long in returning, followed by a pair of
heavy boots that came bumping along the passage like boxes. With the
unceremonious words 'Come along with you!' - a very unusual form of
introduction from his lips - Mr Perch then ushered into the presence a
strong-built lad of fifteen, with a round red face, a round sleek
head, round black eyes, round limbs, and round body, who, to carry out
the general rotundity of his appearance, had a round hat in his hand,
without a particle of brim to it.

Obedient to a nod from Mr Carker, Perch had no sooner confronted
the visitor with that gentleman than he withdrew. The moment they were
face to face alone, Mr Carker, without a word of preparation, took him
by the throat, and shook him until his head seemed loose upon his
shoulders.

The boy, who in the midst of his astonishment could not help
staring wildly at the gentleman with so many white teeth who was
choking him, and at the office walls, as though determined, if he were
choked, that his last look should be at the mysteries for his
intrusion into which he was paying such a severe penalty, at last
contrived to utter -

'Come, Sir! You let me alone, will you!'

'Let you alone!' said Mr Carker. 'What! I have got you, have I?'
There was no doubt of that, and tightly too. 'You dog,' said Mr
Carker, through his set jaws, 'I'll strangle you!'

Biler whimpered, would he though? oh no he wouldn't - and what was
he doing of - and why didn't he strangle some- body of his own size
and not him: but Biler was quelled by the extraordinary nature of his
reception, and, as his head became stationary, and he looked the
gentleman in the face, or rather in the teeth, and saw him snarling at
him, he so far forgot his manhood as to cry.

'I haven't done nothing to you, Sir,' said Biler, otherwise Rob,
otherwise Grinder, and always Toodle.

'You young scoundrel!' replied Mr Carker, slowly releasing him, and
moving back a step into his favourite position. 'What do you mean by
daring to come here?'

'I didn't mean no harm, Sir,' whimpered Rob, putting one hand to
his throat, and the knuckles of the other to his eyes. 'I'll never
come again, Sir. I only wanted work.'

'Work, young Cain that you are!' repeated Mr Carker, eyeing him
narrowly. 'Ain't you the idlest vagabond in London?'

The impeachment, while it much affected Mr Toodle Junior, attached
to his character so justly, that he could not say a word in denial. He
stood looking at the gentleman, therefore, with a frightened,
self-convicted, and remorseful air. As to his looking at him, it may
be observed that he was fascinated by Mr Carker, and never took his
round eyes off him for an instant.

'Ain't you a thief?' said Mr Carker, with his hands behind him in
his pockets.

'No, sir,' pleaded Rob.

'You are!' said Mr Carker.

'I ain't indeed, Sir,' whimpered Rob. 'I never did such a thing as
thieve, Sir, if you'll believe me. I know I've been a going wrong,
Sir, ever since I took to bird-catching' and walking-matching. I'm
sure a cove might think,' said Mr Toodle Junior, with a burst of
penitence, 'that singing birds was innocent company, but nobody knows
what harm is in them little creeturs and what they brings you down
to.'

They seemed to have brought him down to a velveteen jacket and
trousers very much the worse for wear, a particularly small red
waistcoat like a gorget, an interval of blue check, and the hat before
mentioned.

'I ain't been home twenty times since them birds got their will of
me,' said Rob, 'and that's ten months. How can I go home when
everybody's miserable to see me! I wonder,' said Biler, blubbering
outright, and smearing his eyes with his coat-cuff, 'that I haven't
been and drownded myself over and over again.'

All of which, including his expression of surprise at not having
achieved this last scarce performance, the boy said, just as if the
teeth of Mr Carker drew it out ofhim, and he had no power of
concealing anything with that battery of attraction in full play.

'You're a nice young gentleman!' said Mr Carker, shaking his head
at him. 'There's hemp-seed sown for you, my fine fellow!'

'I'm sure, Sir,' returned the wretched Biler, blubbering again, and
again having recourse to his coat-cuff: 'I shouldn't care, sometimes,
if it was growed too. My misfortunes all began in wagging, Sir; but
what could I do, exceptin' wag?'

'Excepting what?' said Mr Carker.

'Wag, Sir. Wagging from school.'

'Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?' said Mr
Carker.

'Yes, Sir, that's wagging, Sir,' returned the quondam Grinder, much
affected. 'I was chivied through the streets, Sir, when I went there,
and pounded when I got there. So I wagged, and hid myself, and that
began it.'

'And you mean to tell me,' said Mr Carker, taking him by the throat
again, holding him out at arm's-length, and surveying him in silence
for some moments, 'that you want a place, do you?'

'I should be thankful to be tried, Sir,' returned Toodle Junior,
faintly.

Mr Carker the Manager pushed him backward into a corner - the boy
submitting quietly, hardly venturing to breathe, and never once
removing his eyes from his face - and rang the bell.

'Tell Mr Gills to come here.'

Mr Perch was too deferential to express surprise or recognition of
the figure in the corner: and Uncle Sol appeared immediately.

'Mr Gills!' said Carker, with a smile, 'sit down. How do you do?
You continue to enjoy your health, I hope?'

'Thank you, Sir,' returned Uncle Sol, taking out his pocket-book,
and handing over some notes as he spoke. 'Nothing ails me in body but
old age. Twenty-five, Sir.'

'You are as punctual and exact, Mr Gills,' replied the smiling
Manager, taking a paper from one of his many drawers, and making an
endorsement on it, while Uncle Sol looked over him, 'as one of your
own chronometers. Quite right.'

'The Son and Heir has not been spoken, I find by the list, Sir,'
said Uncle Sol, with a slight addition to the usual tremor in his
voice.

'The Son and Heir has not been spoken,' returned Carker. 'There
seems to have been tempestuous weather, Mr Gills, and she has probably
been driven out of her course.'

'She is safe, I trust in Heaven!' said old Sol.

'She is safe, I trust in Heaven!' assented Mr Carker in that
voiceless manner of his: which made the observant young Toodle
trernble again. 'Mr Gills,' he added aloud, throwing himself back in
his chair, 'you must miss your nephew very much?'

Uncle Sol, standing by him, shook his head and heaved a deep sigh.

'Mr Gills,' said Carker, with his soft hand playing round his
mouth, and looking up into the Instrument-maker's face, 'it would be
company to you to have a young fellow in your shop just now, and it
would be obliging me if you would give one house-room for the present.
No, to be sure,' he added quickly, in anticipation of what the old man
was going to say, 'there's not much business doing there, I know; but
you can make him clean the place out, polish up the instruments;
drudge, Mr Gills. That's the lad!'

Sol Gills pulled down his spectacles from his forehead to his eyes,
and looked at Toodle Junior standing upright in the corner: his head
presenting the appearance (which it always did) of having been newly
drawn out of a bucket of cold water; his small waistcoat rising and
falling quickly in the play of his emotions; and his eyes intently
fixed on Mr Carker, without the least reference to his proposed
master.

'Will you give him house-room, Mr Gills?' said the Manager.

Old Sol, without being quite enthusiastic on the subject, replied
that he was glad of any opportunity, however slight, to oblige Mr
Carker, whose wish on such a point was a command: and that the wooden
Midshipman would consider himself happy to receive in his berth any
visitor of Mr Carker's selecting.

Mr Carker bared himself to the tops and bottoms of his gums: making
the watchful Toodle Junior tremble more and more: and acknowledged the
Instrument-maker's politeness in his most affable manner.

'I'll dispose of him so, then, Mr Gills,' he answered, rising, and
shaking the old man by the hand, 'until I make up my mind what to do
with him, and what he deserves. As I consider myself responsible for
him, Mr Gills,' here he smiled a wide smile at Rob, who shook before
it: 'I shall be glad if you'll look sharply after him, and report his
behaviour to me. I'll ask a question or two of his parents as I ride
home this afternoon - respectable people - to confirm some particulars
in his own account of himself; and that done, Mr Gills, I'll send him
round to you to-morrow morning. Goodbye!'

His smile at parting was so full of teeth, that it confused old
Sol, and made him vaguely uncomfortable. He went home, thinking of
raging seas, foundering ships, drowning men, an ancient bottle of
Madeira never brought to light, and other dismal matters.

'Now, boy!' said Mr Carker, putting his hand on young Toodle's
shoulder, and bringing him out into the middle of the room. 'You have
heard me?'

Rob said, 'Yes, Sir.'

'Perhaps you understand,' pursued his patron, 'that if you ever
deceive or play tricks with me, you had better have drowned yourself,
indeed, once for all, before you came here?'

There was nothing in any branch of mental acquisition that Rob
seemed to understand better than that.

'If you have lied to me,' said Mr Carker, 'in anything, never come
in my way again. If not, you may let me find you waiting for me
somewhere near your mother's house this afternoon. I shall leave this
at five o'clock, and ride there on horseback. Now, give me the
address.'

Rob repeated it slowly, as Mr Carker wrote it down. Rob even spelt
it over a second time, letter by letter, as if he thought that the
omission of a dot or scratch would lead to his destruction. Mr Carker
then handed him out of the room; and Rob, keeping his round eyes fixed
upon his patron to the last, vanished for the time being.

Mr Carker the Manager did a great deal of business in the course of
the day, and stowed his teeth upon a great many people. In the office,
in the court, in the street, and on 'Change, they glistened and
bristled to a terrible extent. Five o'clock arriving, and with it Mr
Carker's bay horse, they got on horseback, and went gleaming up
Cheapside.

As no one can easily ride fast, even if inclined to do so, through
the press and throng of the City at that hour, and as Mr Carker was
not inclined, he went leisurely along, picking his way among the carts
and carriages, avoiding whenever he could the wetter and more dirty
places in the over-watered road, and taking infinite pains to keep
himself and his steed clean. Glancing at the passersby while he was
thus ambling on his way, he suddenly encountered the round eyes of the
sleek-headed Rob intently fixed upon his face as if they had never
been taken off, while the boy himself, with a pocket-handkerchief
twisted up like a speckled eel and girded round his waist, made a very
conspicuous demonstration of being prepared to attend upon him, at
whatever pace he might think proper to go.

This attention, however flattering, being one of an unusual kind,
and attracting some notice from the other passengers, Mr Carker took
advantage of a clearer thoroughfare and a cleaner road, and broke into
a trot. Rob immediately did the same. Mr Carker presently tried a
canter; Rob Was still in attendance. Then a short gallop; it Was all
one to the boy. Whenever Mr Carker turned his eyes to that side of the
road, he still saw Toodle Junior holding his course, apparently
without distress, and working himself along by the elbows after the
most approved manner of professional gentlemen who get over the ground
for wagers.

Ridiculous as this attendance was, it was a sign of an influence
established over the boy, and therefore Mr Carker, affecting not to
notice it, rode away into the neighbourhood of Mr Toodle's house. On
his slackening his pace here, Rob appeared before him to point out the
turnings; and when he called to a man at a neighbouring gateway to
hold his horse, pending his visit to the buildings that had succeeded
Staggs's Gardens, Rob dutifully held the stirrup, while the Manager
dismounted.

'Now, Sir,' said Mr Carker, taking him by the shoulder, 'come
along!'

The prodigal son was evidently nervous of visiting the parental
abode; but Mr Carker pushing him on before, he had nothing for it but
to open the right door, and suffer himself to be walked into the midst
of his brothers and sisters, mustered in overwhelming force round the
family tea-table. At sight of the prodigal in the grasp of a stranger,
these tender relations united in a general howl, which smote upon the
prodigal's breast so sharply when he saw his mother stand up among
them, pale and trembling, with the baby in her arms, that he lent his
own voice to the chorus.

Nothing doubting now that the stranger, if not Mr Ketch' in person,
was one of that company, the whole of the young family wailed the
louder, while its more infantine members, unable to control the
transports of emotion appertaining to their time of life, threw
themselves on their backs like young birds when terrified by a hawk,
and kicked violently. At length, poor Polly making herself audible,
said, with quivering lips, 'Oh Rob, my poor boy, what have you done at
last!'

'Nothing, mother,' cried Rob, in a piteous voice, 'ask the
gentleman!'

'Don't be alarmed,' said Mr Carker, 'I want to do him good.'

At this announcement, Polly, who had not cried yet, began to do so.
The elder Toodles, who appeared to have been meditating a rescue,
unclenched their fists. The younger Toodles clustered round their
mother's gown, and peeped from under their own chubby arms at their
desperado brother and his unknown friend. Everybody blessed the
gentleman with the beautiful teeth, who wanted to do good.

'This fellow,' said Mr Carker to Polly, giving him a gentle shake,
'is your son, eh, Ma'am?'

'Yes, Sir,' sobbed Polly, with a curtsey; 'yes, Sir.'

'A bad son, I am afraid?' said Mr Carker.

'Never a bad son to me, Sir,' returned Polly.

'To whom then?' demanded Mr Carker.

'He has been a little wild, Sir,' returned Polly, checking the
baby, who was making convulsive efforts with his arms and legs to
launch himself on Biler, through the ambient air, 'and has gone with
wrong companions: but I hope he has seen the misery of that, Sir, and
will do well again.'

Mr Carker looked at Polly, and the clean room, and the clean
children, and the simple Toodle face, combined of father and mother,
that was reflected and repeated everywhere about him - and seemed to
have achieved the real purpose of his visit.

'Your husband, I take it, is not at home?' he said.

'No, Sir,' replied Polly. 'He's down the line at present.'

The prodigal Rob seemed very much relieved to hear it: though still
in the absorption of all his faculties in his patron, he hardly took
his eyes from Mr Carker's face, unless for a moment at a time to steal
a sorrowful glance at his mother.

'Then,' said Mr Carker, 'I'll tell you how I have stumbled on this
boy of yours, and who I am, and what I am going to do for him.'

This Mr Carker did, in his own way; saying that he at first
intended to have accumulated nameless terrors on his presumptuous
head, for coming to the whereabout of Dombey and Son. That he had
relented, in consideration of his youth, his professed contrition, and
his friends. That he was afraid he took a rash step in doing anything
for the boy, and one that might expose him to the censure of the
prudent; but that he did it of himself and for himself, and risked the
consequences single-handed; and that his mother's past connexion with
Mr Dombey's family had nothing to do with it, and that Mr Dombey had
nothing to do with it, but that he, Mr Carker, was the be-all and the
end-all of this business. Taking great credit to himself for his
goodness, and receiving no less from all the family then present, Mr
Carker signified, indirectly but still pretty plainly, that Rob's
implicit fidelity, attachment, and devotion, were for evermore his
due, and the least homage he could receive. And with this great truth
Rob himself was so impressed, that, standing gazing on his patron with
tears rolling down his cheeks, he nodded his shiny head until it
seemed almost as loose as it had done under the same patron's hands
that morning.

Polly, who had passed Heaven knows how many sleepless nights on
account of this her dissipated firstborn, and had not seen him for
weeks and weeks, could have almost kneeled to Mr Carker the Manager,
as to a Good Spirit - in spite of his teeth. But Mr Carker rising to
depart, she only thanked him with her mother's prayers and blessings;
thanks so rich when paid out of the Heart's mint, especially for any
service Mr Carker had rendered, that he might have given back a large
amount of change, and yet been overpaid.

As that gentleman made his way among the crowding children to the
door, Rob retreated on his mother, and took her and the baby in the
same repentant hug.

'I'll try hard, dear mother, now. Upon my soul I will!' said Rob.

'Oh do, my dear boy! I am sure you will, for our sakes and your
own!' cried Polly, kissing him. 'But you're coming back to speak to
me, when you have seen the gentleman away?'

'I don't know, mother.' Rob hesitated, and looked down. 'Father -
when's he coming home?'

'Not till two o'clock to-morrow morning.'

'I'll come back, mother dear!' cried Rob. And passing through the
shrill cry of his brothers and sisters in reception of this promise,
he followed Mr Carker out.

'What!' said Mr Carker, who had heard this. 'You have a bad father,
have you?'

'No, Sir!' returned Rob, amazed. 'There ain't a better nor a kinder
father going, than mine is.'

'Why don't you want to see him then?' inquired his patron.

'There's such a difference between a father and a mother, Sir,'
said Rob, after faltering for a moment. 'He couldn't hardly believe
yet that I was doing to do better - though I know he'd try to but a
mother - she always believes what's,' good, Sir; at least I know my
mother does, God bless her!'

Mr Carker's mouth expanded, but he said no more until he was
mounted on his horse, and had dismissed the man who held it, when,
looking down from the saddle steadily into the attentive and watchful
face of the boy, he said:

'You'll come to me tomorrow morning, and you shall be shown where
that old gentleman lives; that old gentleman who was with me this
morning; where you are going, as you heard me say.'

'Yes, Sir,' returned Rob.

'I have a great interest in that old gentleman, and in serving him,
you serve me, boy, do you understand? Well,' he added, interrupting
him, for he saw his round face brighten when he was told that: 'I see
you do. I want to know all about that old gentleman, and how he goes
on from day to day - for I am anxious to be of service to him - and
especially who comes there to see him. Do you understand?'

Rob nodded his steadfast face, and said 'Yes, Sir,' again.

'I should like to know that he has friends who are attentive to
him, and that they don't desert him - for he lives very much alone
now, poor fellow; but that they are fond of him, and of his nephew who
has gone abroad. There is a very young lady who may perhaps come to
see him. I want particularly to know all about her.'

'I'll take care, Sir,' said the boy.

'And take care,' returned his patron, bending forward to advance
his grinning face closer to the boy's, and pat him on the shoulder
with the handle of his whip: 'take care you talk about affairs of mine
to nobody but me.'

'To nobody in the world, Sir,' replied Rob, shaking his head.

'Neither there,' said Mr CarHer, pointing to the place they had
just left, 'nor anywhere else. I'll try how true and grateful you can
be. I'll prove you!' Making this, by his display of teeth and by the
action of his head, as much a threat as a promise, he turned from
Rob's eyes, which were nailed upon him as if he had won the boy by a
charm, body and soul, and rode away. But again becoming conscious,
after trotting a short distance, that his devoted henchman, girt as
before, was yielding him the same attendance, to the great amusement
of sundry spectators, he reined up, and ordered him off. To ensure his
obedience, he turned in the saddle and watched him as he retired. It
was curious to see that even then Rob could not keep his eyes wholly
averted from his patron's face, but, constantly turning and turning
again to look after him' involved himself in a tempest of buffetings
and jostlings from the other passengers in the street: of which, in
the pursuit of the one paramount idea, he was perfectly heedless.

Mr Carker the Manager rode on at a foot-pace, with the easy air of
one who had performed all the business of the day in a satisfactory
manner, and got it comfortably off his mind. Complacent and affable as
man could be, Mr Carker picked his way along the streets and hummed a
soft tune as he went He seemed to purr, he was so glad.

And in some sort, Mr Carker, in his fancy, basked upon a hearth
too. Coiled up snugly at certain feet, he was ready for a spring, Or
for a tear, or for a scratch, or for a velvet touch, as the humour
took him and occasion served. Was there any bird in a cage, that came
in for a share ofhis regards?

'A very young lady!' thought Mr Carker the Manager, through his
song. 'Ay! when I saw her last, she was a little child. With dark eyes
and hair, I recollect, and a good face; a very good face! I daresay
she's pretty.'

More affable and pleasant yet, and humming his song until his many
teeth vibrated to it, Mr Carker picked his way along, and turned at
last into the shady street where Mr Dombey's house stood. He had been
so busy, winding webs round good faces, and obscuring them with
meshes, that he hardly thought of being at this point of his ride,
until, glancing down the cold perspective of tall houses, he reined in
his horse quickly within a few yards of the door. But to explain why
Mr Carker reined in his horse quickly, and what he looked at in no
small surprise, a few digressive words are necessary.

Mr Toots, emancipated from the Blimber thraldom and coming into the
possession of a certain portion of his wordly wealth, 'which,' as he
had been wont, during his last half-year's probation, to communicate
to Mr Feeder every evening as a new discovery, 'the executors couldn't
keep him out of' had applied himself with great diligence, to the
science of Life. Fired with a noble emulation to pursue a brilliant
and distinguished career, Mr Toots had furnished a choice set of
apartments; had established among them a sporting bower, embellished
with the portraits of winning horses, in which he took no particle of
interest; and a divan, which made him poorly. In this delicious abode,
Mr Toots devoted himself to the cultivation of those gentle arts which
refine and humanise existence, his chief instructor in which was an
interesting character called the Game Chicken, who was always to be
heard of at the bar of the Black Badger, wore a shaggy white
great-coat in the warmest weather, and knocked Mr Toots about the head
three times a week, for the small consideration of ten and six per
visit.

The Game Chicken, who was quite the Apollo of Mr Toots's Pantheon,
had introduced to him a marker who taught billiards, a Life Guard who
taught fencing, a jobmaster who taught riding, a Cornish gentleman who
was up to anything in the athletic line, and two or three other
friends connected no less intimately with the fine arts. Under whose
auspices Mr Toots could hardly fail to improve apace, and under whose
tuition he went to work.

But however it came about, it came to pass, even while these
gentlemen had the gloss of novelty upon them, that Mr Toots felt, he
didn't know how, unsettled and uneasy. There were husks in his corn,
that even Game Chickens couldn't peck up; gloomy giants in his
leisure, that even Game Chickens couldn't knock down. Nothing seemed
to do Mr Toots so much good as incessantly leaving cards at Mr
Dombey's door. No taxgatherer in the British Dominions - that
wide-spread territory on which the sun never sets, and where the
tax-gatherer never goes to bed - was more regular and persevering in
his calls than Mr Toots.

Mr Toots never went upstairs; and always performed the same
ceremonies, richly dressed for the purpose, at the hall door.

'Oh! Good morning!' would be Mr Toots's first remark to the
servant. 'For Mr Dombey,' would be Mr Toots's next remark, as he
handed in a card. 'For Miss Dombey,' would be his next, as he handed
in another.

Mr Toots would then turn round as if to go away; but the man knew
him by this time, and knew he wouldn't.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,' Mr Toots would say, as if a thought had
suddenly descended on him. 'Is the young woman at home?'

The man would rather think she was;, but wouldn't quite know. Then
he would ring a bell that rang upstairs, and would look up the
staircase, and would say, yes, she was at home, and was coming down.
Then Miss Nipper would appear, and the man would retire.

'Oh! How de do?' Mr Toots would say, with a chuckle and a blush.

Susan would thank him, and say she was very well.

'How's Diogenes going on?' would be Mr Toots's second
interrogation.

Very well indeed. Miss Florence was fonder and fonder of him every
day. Mr Toots was sure to hail this with a burst of chuckles, like the
opening of a bottle of some effervescent beverage.

'Miss Florence is quite well, Sir,' Susan would add.

Oh, it's of no consequence, thank'ee,' was the invariable reply of
Mr Toots; and when he had said so, he always went away very fast.

Now it is certain that Mr Toots had a filmy something in his mind,
which led him to conclude that if he could aspire successfully in the
fulness of time, to the hand of Florence, he would be fortunate and
blest. It is certain that Mr Toots, by some remote and roundabout
road, had got to that point, and that there he made a stand. His heart
was wounded; he was touched; he was in love. He had made a desperate
attempt, one night, and had sat up all night for the purpose, to write
an acrostic on Florence, which affected him to tears in the
conception. But he never proceeded in the execution further than the
words 'For when I gaze,' - the flow of imagination in which he had
previously written down the initial letters of the other seven lines,
deserting him at that point.

Beyond devising that very artful and politic measure of leaving a
card for Mr Dombey daily, the brain of Mr Toots had not worked much in
reference to the subject that held his feelings prisoner. But deep
consideration at length assured Mr Toots that an important step to
gain, was, the conciliation of Miss Susan Nipper, preparatory to
giving her some inkling of his state of mind.

A little light and playful gallantry towards this lady seemed the
means to employ in that early chapter of the history, for winning her
to his interests. Not being able quite to make up his mind about it,
he consulted the Chicken - without taking that gentleman into his
confidence; merely informing him that a friend in Yorkshire had
written to him (Mr Toots) for his opinion on such a question. The
Chicken replying that his opinion always was, 'Go in and win,' and
further, 'When your man's before you and your work cut out, go in and
do it,' Mr Toots considered this a figurative way of supporting his
own view of the case, and heroically resolved to kiss Miss Nipper next
day.

Upon the next day, therefore, Mr Toots, putting into requisition
some of the greatest marvels that Burgess and Co. had ever turned out,
went off to Mr Dotnbey's upon this design. But his heart failed him so
much as he approached the scene of action, that, although he arrived
on the ground at three o'clock in the afternoon, it was six before he
knocked at the door.

Everything happened as usual, down to the point where Susan said
her young mistress was well, and Mr Toots said it was ofno
consequence. To her amazement, Mr Toots, instead of going off, like a
rocket, after that observation, lingered and chuckled.

'Perhaps you'd like to walk upstairs, Sir!' said Susan.

'Well, I think I will come in!' said Mr Toots.

But instead of walking upstairs, the bold Toots made an awkward
plunge at Susan when the door was shut, and embracing that fair
creature, kissed her on the cheek

'Go along with you!~ cried Susan, 'or Ill tear your eyes out.'

'Just another!' said Mr Toots.

'Go along with you!' exclaimed Susan, giving him a push 'Innocents
like you, too! Who'll begin next? Go along, Sir!'

Susan was not in any serious strait, for she could hardly speak for
laughing; but Diogenes, on the staircase, hearing a rustling against
the wall, and a shuffling of feet, and seeing through the banisters
that there was some contention going on, and foreign invasion in the
house, formed a different opinion, dashed down to the rescue, and in
the twinkling of an eye had Mr Toots by the leg.

Susan screamed, laughed, opened the street-door, and ran
downstairs; the bold Toots tumbled staggering out into the street,
with Diogenes holding on to one leg of his pantaioons, as if Burgess
and Co. were his cooks, and had provided that dainty morsel for his
holiday entertainment; Diogenes shaken off, rolled over and over in
the dust, got up' again, whirled round the giddy Toots and snapped at
him: and all this turmoil Mr Carker, reigning up his horse and sitting
a little at a distance, saw to his amazement, issue from the stately
house of Mr Dombey.

Mr Carker remained watching the discomfited Toots, when Diogenes
was called in, and the door shut: and while that gentleman, taking
refuge in a doorway near at hand, bound up the torn leg of his
pantaloons with a costly silk handkerchief that had formed part of his
expensive outfit for the advent

'I beg your pardon, Sir,' said Mr Carker, riding up, with his most
propitiatory smile. 'I hope you are not hurt?'

'Oh no, thank you,' replied Mr Toots, raising his flushed face,
'it's of no consequence' Mr Toots would have signified, if he could,
that he liked it very much.

'If the dog's teeth have entered the leg, Sir - ' began Carker,
with a display of his own'

'No, thank you,' said Mr Toots, 'it's all quite right. It's very
comfortable, thank you.'

'I have the pleasure of knowing Mr Dombey,' observed Carker.

'Have you though?' rejoined the blushing Took

'And you will allow me, perhaps, to apologise, in his absence,'
said Mr Carker, taking off his hat, 'for such a misadventure, and to
wonder how it can possibly have happened.'

Mr Toots is so much gratified by this politeness, and the lucky
chance of making frends with a friend of Mr Dombey, that he pulls out
his card-case which he never loses an opportunity of using, and hands
his name and address to Mr Carker: who responds to that courtesy by
giving him his own, and with that they part.

As Mr Carker picks his way so softly past the house, looking up at
the windows, and trying to make out the pensive face behind the
curtain looking at the children opposite, the rough head of Diogenes
came clambering up close by it, and the dog, regardless of all
soothing, barks and growls, and makes at him from that height, as ifhe
would spring down and tear him limb from limb.

Well spoken, Di, so near your Mistress! Another, and another with
your head up, your eyes flashing, and your vexed mouth worrying
itself, for want of him! Another, as he picks his way along! You have
a good scent, Di, - cats, boy, cats!



CHAPTER 23.

Florence solitary, and the Midshipman mysterious



Florence lived alone in the great dreary house, and day succeeded
day, and still she lived alone; and the blank walls looked down upon
her with a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare
her youth and beauty into stone.

No magic dwelling-place in magic story, shut up in the heart of a
thick wood, was ever more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was
her father's mansion in its grim reality, as it stood lowering on the
street: always by night, when lights were shining from neighbouring
windows, a blot upon its scanty brightness; always by day, a frown
upon its never-smiling face.

There were not two dragon sentries keeping ward before the gate of
this above, as in magic legend are usually found on duty over the
wronged innocence imprisoned; but besides a glowering visage, with its
thin lips parted wickedly, that surveyed all comers from above the
archway of the door, there was a monstrous fantasy of rusty iron,
curling and twisting like a petrifaction of an arbour over threshold,
budding in spikes and corkscrew points, and bearing, one on either
side, two ominous extinguishers, that seemed to say, 'Who enter here,
leave light behind!' There were no talismanic characters engraven on
the portal, but the house was now so neglected in appearance, that
boys chalked the railings and the pavement - particularly round the
corner where the side wall was - and drew ghosts on the stable door;
and being sometimes driven off by Mr Towlinson, made portraits of him,
in return, with his ears growing out horizontally from under his hat.
Noise ceased to be, within the shadow of the roof. The brass band that
came into the street once a week, in the morning, never brayed a note
in at those windows; but all such company, down to a poor little
piping organ of weak intellect, with an imbecile party of automaton
dancers, waltzing in and out at folding-doors, fell off from it with
one accord, and shunned it as a hopeless place.

The spell upon it was more wasting than the spell that used to set
enchanted houses sleeping once upon a time, but left their waking
freshness unimpaired. The passive desolation of disuse was everywhere
silently manifest about it. Within doors, curtains, drooping heavily,
lost their old folds and shapes, and hung like cumbrous palls.
Hecatombs of furniture, still piled and covered up, shrunk like
imprisoned and forgotten men, and changed insensibly. Mirrors were dim
as with the breath of years. Patterns of carpets faded and became
perplexed and faint, like the memory of those years' trifling
incidents. Boards, starting at unwonted footsteps, creaked and shook.
Keys rusted in the locks of doors. Damp started on the walls, and as
the stains came out, the pictures seemed to go in and secrete
themselves. Mildew and mould began to lurk in closets. Fungus trees
grew in corners of the cellars. Dust accumulated, nobody knew whence
nor how; spiders, moths, and grubs were heard of every day. An
exploratory blackbeetle now and then was found immovable upon the
stairs, or in an upper room, as wondering how he got there. Rats began
to squeak and scuffle in the night time, through dark galleries they
mined behind the panelling.

The dreary magnificence of the state rooms, seen imperfectly by the
doubtful light admitted through closed shutters, would have answered
well enough for an enchanted abode. Such as the tarnished paws of
gilded lions, stealthily put out from beneath their wrappers; the
marble lineaments of busts on pedestals, fearfully revealing
themselves through veils; the clocks that never told the time, or, if
wound up by any chance, told it wrong, and struck unearthly numbers,
which are not upon the dial; the accidental tinklings among the
pendant lustres, more startling than alarm-bells; the softened sounds
and laggard air that made their way among these objects, and a phantom
crowd of others, shrouded and hooded, and made spectral of shape. But,
besides, there was the great staircase, where the lord of the place so
rarely set his foot, and by which his little child had gone up to
Heaven. There were other staircases and passages where no one went for
weeks together; there were two closed rooms associated with dead
members of the family, and with whispered recollections of them; and
to all the house but Florence, there was a gentle figure moving
through the solitude and gloom, that gave to every lifeless thing a
touch of present human interest and wonder,

For Florence lived alone in the deserted house, and day succeeded
day, and still she lived alone, and the cold walls looked down upon
her with a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare
her youth and beauty into stone

The grass began to grow upon the roof, and in the crevices of the
basement paving. A scaly crumbling vegetation sprouted round the
window-sills. Fragments of mortar lost their hold upon the insides of
the unused chimneys, and came dropping down. The two trees with the
smoky trunks were blighted high up, and the withered branches
domineered above the leaves, Through the whole building white had
turned yellow, yellow nearly black; and since the time when the poor
lady died, it had slowly become a dark gap in the long monotonous
street.

But Florence bloomed there, like the king's fair daughter in the
story. Her books, her music, and her daily teachers, were her only
real companions, Susan Nipper and Diogenes excepted: of whom the
former, in her attendance on the studies of her young mistress, began
to grow quite learned herself, while the latter, softened possibly by
the same influences, would lay his head upon the window-ledge, and
placidly open and shut his eyes upon the street, all through a summer
morning; sometimes pricking up his head to look with great
significance after some noisy dog in a cart, who was barking his way
along, and sometimes, with an exasperated and unaccountable
recollection of his supposed enemy in the neighbourhood, rushing to
the door, whence, after a deafening disturbance, he would come jogging
back with a ridiculous complacency that belonged to him, and lay his
jaw upon the window-ledge again, with the air of a dog who had done a
public service.

So Florence lived in her wilderness of a home, within the circle of
her innocent pursuits and thoughts, and nothing harmed her. She could
go down to her father's rooms now, and think of him, and suffer her
loving heart humbly to approach him, without fear of repulse. She
could look upon the objects that had surrounded him in his sorrow, and
could nestle near his chair, and not dread the glance that she so well
remembered. She could render him such little tokens of her duty and
service' as putting everything in order for him with her own hands,
binding little nosegays for table, changing them as one by one they
withered and he did not come back, preparing something for him every'
day, and leaving some timid mark of her presence near his usual seat.
To-day, it was a little painted stand for his watch; tomorrow she
would be afraid to leave it, and would substitute some other trifle of
her making not so likely to attract his eye. Waking in the night,
perhaps, she would tremble at the thought of his coming home and
angrily rejecting it, and would hurry down with slippered feet and
quickly beating heart, and bring it away. At another time, she would
only lay her face upon his desk, and leave a kiss there, and a tear.

Still no one knew of this. Unless the household found it out when
she was not there - and they all held Mr Dombey's rooms in awe - it
was as deep a secret in her breast as what had gone before it.
Florence stole into those rooms at twilight, early in the morning, and
at times when meals were served downstairs. And although they were in
every nook the better and the brighter for her care, she entered and
passed out as quietly as any sunbeam, opting that she left her light
behind.

Shadowy company attended Florence up and down the echoing house,
and sat with her in the dismantled rooms. As if her life were an
enchanted vision, there arose out of her solitude ministering
thoughts, that made it fanciful and unreal. She imagined so often what
her life would have been if her father could have loved her and she
had been a favourite child, that sometimes, for the moment, she almost
believed it was so, and, borne on by the current of that pensive
fiction, seemed to remember how they had watched her brother in his
grave together; how they had freely shared his heart between them; how
they were united in the dear remembrance of him; how they often spoke
about him yet; and her kind father, looking at her gently, told her of
their common hope and trust in God. At other times she pictured to
herself her mother yet alive. And oh the happiness of falling on her
neck, and clinging to her with the love and confidence of all her
soul! And oh the desolation of the solitary house again, with evening
coming on, and no one there!

But there was one thought, scarcely shaped out to herself, yet
fervent and strong within her, that upheld Florence when she strove
and filled her true young heart, so sorely tried, with constancy of
purpose. Into her mind, as 'into all others contending with the great
affliction of our mortal nature, there had stolen solemn wonderings
and hopes, arising in the dim world beyond the present life, and
murmuring, like faint music, of recognition in the far-off land
between her brother and her mother: of some present consciousness in
both of her: some love and commiseration for her: and some knowledge
of her as she went her way upon the earth. It was a soothing
consolation to Florence to give shelter to these thoughts, until one
day - it was soon after she had last seen her father in his own room,
late at night - the fancy came upon her, that, in weeping for his
alienated heart, she might stir the spirits of the dead against him'
Wild, weak, childish, as it may have been to think so, and to tremble
at the half-formed thought, it was the impulse of her loving nature;
and from that hour Florence strove against the cruel wound in her
breast, and tried to think of him whose hand had made it, only with
hope.

Her father did not know - she held to it from that time - how much
she loved him. She was very young, and had no mother, and had never
learned, by some fault or misfortune, how to express to him that she
loved him. She would be patient, and would try to gain that art in
time, and win him to a better knowledge of his only child.

This became the purpose of her life. The morning sun shone down
upon the faded house, and found the resolution bright and fresh within
the bosom of its solitary mistress, Through all the duties of the day,
it animated her; for Florence hoped that the more she knew, and the
more accomplished she became, the more glad he would be when he came
to know and like her. Sometimes she wondered, with a swelling heart
and rising tear, whether she was proficient enough in anything to
surprise him when they should become companions. Sometimes she tried
to think if there were any kind of knowledge that would bespeak his
interest more readily than another. Always: at her books, her music,
and her work: in her morning walks, and in her nightly prayers: she
had her engrossing aim in view. Strange study for a child, to learn
the road to a hard parent's heart!

There were many careless loungers through the street, as the summer
evening deepened into night, who glanced across the road at the sombre
house, and saw the youthful figure at the window, such a contrast to
it, looking upward at the stars as they began to shine, who would have
slept the worse if they had known on what design she mused so steady.
The reputation of the mansion as a haunted house, would not have been
the gayer with some humble dwellers elsewhere, who were struck by its
external gloom in passing and repassing on their daily avocations, and
so named it, if they could have read its story in the darkening face.
But Florence held her sacred purpose, unsuspected and unaided: and
studied only how to bring her father to the understanding that she
loved him, and made no appeal against him in any wandering thought.

Thus Florence lived alone in the deserted house, and day succeeded
day, and still she lived alone, and the monotonous walls looked down
upon her with a stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like intent to stare
her youth and beauty into stone.

Susan Nipper stood opposite to her young mistress one morning, as
she folded and sealed a note she had been writing: and showed in her
looks an approving knowledge of its contents.

'Better late than never, dear Miss Floy,' said Susan, 'and I do
say, that even a visit to them old Skettleses will be a Godsend.'

'It is very good of Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, Susan,' returned
Florence, with a mild correction of that young lady's familiar mention
of the family in question, 'to repeat their invitation so kindly.'

Miss Nipper, who was perhaps the most thoroughgoing partisan on the
face of the earth, and who carried her partisanship into all matters
great or small, and perpetually waged war with it against society,
screwed up her lips and shook her head, as a protest against any
recognition of disinterestedness in the Skettleses, and a plea in bar
that they would have valuable consideration for their kindness, in the
company of Florence.

'They know what they're about, if ever people did,' murmured Miss
Nipper, drawing in her breath 'oh! trust them Skettleses for that!'

'I am not very anxious to go to Fulham, Susan, I confess,' said
Florence thoughtfully: 'but it will be right to go. I think it will be
better.'

'Much better,' interposed Susan, with another emphatic shake of her
head.

'And so,' said Florence, 'though I would prefer to have gone when
there was no one there, instead of in this vacation time, when it
seems there are some young people staying in the house, I have
thankfully said yes.'

'For which I say, Miss Floy, Oh be joyful!' returned Susan, 'Ah!

This last ejaculation, with which Miss Nipper frequently wound up a
sentence, at about that epoch of time, was supposed below the level of
the hall to have a general reference to Mr Dombey, and to be
expressive of a yearning in Miss Nipper to favour that gentleman with
a piece of her mind. But she never explained it; and it had, in
consequence, the charm of mystery, in addition to the advantage of the
sharpest expression.

'How long it is before we have any news of Walter, Susan!' observed
Florence, after a moment's silence.

'Long indeed, Miss Floy!' replied her maid. 'And Perch said, when
he came just now to see for letters - but what signifies what he
says!' exclaimed Susan, reddening and breaking off. 'Much he knows
about it!'

Florence raised her eyes quickly, and a flush overspread her face.

'If I hadn't,' said Susan Nipper, evidently struggling with some
latent anxiety and alarm, and looking full at her young mistress,
while endeavouring to work herself into a state of resentment with the
unoffending Mr Perch's image, 'if I hadn't more manliness than that
insipidest of his sex, I'd never take pride in my hair again, but turn
it up behind my ears, and wear coarse caps, without a bit of border,
until death released me from my insignificance. I may not be a Amazon,
Miss Floy, and wouldn't so demean myself by such disfigurement, but
anyways I'm not a giver up, I hope'

'Give up! What?' cried Florence, with a face of terror.

'Why, nothing, Miss,' said Susan. 'Good gracious, nothing! It's
only that wet curl-paper of a man, Perch, that anyone might almost
make away with, with a touch, and really it would be a blessed event
for all parties if someone would take pity on him, and would have the
goodness!'

'Does he give up the ship, Susan?' inquired Florence, very pale.

'No, Miss,' returned Susan, 'I should like to see' him make so bold
as do it to my face! No, Miss, but he goes 'on about some bothering
ginger that Mr Walter was to send to Mrs Perch, and shakes his dismal
head, and says he hopes it may be coming; anyhow, he says, it can't
come now in time for the intended occasion, but may do for next, which
really,' said Miss Nipper, with aggravated scorn, 'puts me out of
patience with the man, for though I can bear a great deal, I am not a
camel, neither am I,' added Susan, after a moment's consideration, 'if
I know myself, a dromedary neither.'

'What else does he say, Susan?' inquired Florence, earnestly.
'Won't you tell me?'

'As if I wouldn't tell you anything, Miss Floy, and everything!'
said Susan. 'Why, nothing Miss, he says that there begins to be a
general talk about the ship, and that they have never had a ship on
that voyage half so long unheard of, and that the Captain's wife was
at the office yesterday, and seemed a little put out about it, but
anyone could say that, we knew nearly that before.'

'I must visit Walter's uncle,' said Florence, hurriedly, 'before I
leave home. I will go and see him this morning. Let us walk there,
directly, Susan.

Miss Nipper having nothing to urge against the proposal, but being
perfectly acquiescent, they were soon equipped, and in the streets,
and on their way towards the little Midshipman.

The state of mind in which poor Walter had gone to Captain
Cuttle's, on the day when Brogley the broker came into possession, and
when there seemed to him to be an execution in the very steeples, was
pretty much the same as that in which Florence now took her way to
Uncle Sol's; with this difference, that Florence suffered the added
pain of thinking that she had been, perhaps, the innocent occasion of
involving Walter in peril, and all to whom he was dear, herself
included, in an agony of suspense. For the rest, uncertainty and
danger seemed written upon everything. The weathercocks on spires and
housetops were mysterious with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like
so many ghostly fingers, out to dangerous seas, where fragments of
great wrecks were drifting, perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon
them into a sleep as deep as the unfathomable waters. When Florence
came into the City, and passed gentlemen who were talking together,
she dreaded to hear them speaking of the ship, an'd saying it was
lost. Pictures and prints of vessels fighting with the rolling waves
filled her with alarm. The smoke and clouds, though moving gently,
moved too fast for her apprehensions, and made her fear there was a
tempest blowing at that moment on the ocean.

Susan Nipper may or may not have been affected similarly, but
having her attention much engaged in struggles with boys, whenever
there was any press of people - for, between that grade of human kind
and herself, there was some natural animosity that invariably broke
out, whenever they came together - it would seem that she had not much
leisure on the road for intellectual operations,

Arriving in good time abreast of the wooden Midshipman on the
opposite side of the way, and waiting for an opportunity to cross the
street, they were a little surprised at first to see, at the
Instrument-maker's door, a round-headed lad, with his chubby face
addressed towards the sky, who, as they looked at him, suddenly thrust
into his capacious mouth two fingers of each hand, and with the
assistance of that machinery whistled, with astonishing shrillness, to
some pigeons at a considerable elevation in the air.

'Mrs Richards's eldest, Miss!' said Susan, 'and the worrit of Mrs
Richards's life!'

As Polly had been to tell Florence of the resuscitated prospects of
her son and heir, Florence was prepared for the meeting: so, a
favourable moment presenting itself, they both hastened across,
without any further contemplation of Mrs Richards's bane' That
sporting character, unconscious of their approach, again whistled with
his utmost might, and then yelled in a rapture of excitement, 'Strays!
Whip! Strays!' which identification had such an effect upon the
conscience-stricken pigeons, that instead of going direct to some town
in the North of England, as appeared to have been their original
intention, they began to wheel and falter; whereupon Mrs Richards's
first born pierced them with another whistle, and again yelled, in a
voice that rose above the turmoil of the street, 'Strays! Who~oop!
Strays!'

From this transport, he was abruptly recalled to terrestrial
objects, by a poke from Miss Nipper, which sent him into the shop,

'Is this the way you show your penitence, when Mrs Richards has
been fretting for you months and months?' said Susan, following the
poke. 'Where's Mr Gills?'

Rob, who smoothed his first rebellious glance at Miss Nipper when
he saw Florence following, put his knuckles to his hair, in honour of
the latter, and said to the former, that Mr Gills was out'

Fetch him home,' said Miss Nipper, with authority, 'and say that my
young lady's here.'

'I don't know where he's gone,' said Rob.

'Is that your penitence?' cried Susan, with stinging sharpness.

'Why how can I go and fetch him when I don't know where to go?'
whimpered the baited Rob. 'How can you be so unreasonable?'

'Did Mr Gills say when he should be home?' asked Florence.

'Yes, Miss,' replied Rob, with another application of his knuckles
to his hair. 'He said he should be home early in the afternoon; in
about a couple of hours from now, Miss.'

'Is he very anxious about his nephew?' inquired Susan.

'Yes, Miss,' returned Rob, preferring to address himself to
Florence and slighting Nipper; 'I should say he was, very much so. He
ain't indoors, Miss, not a quarter of an hour together. He can't
settle in one place five minutes. He goes about, like a - just like a
stray,' said Rob, stooping to get a glimpse of the pigeons through the
window, and checking himself, with his fingers half-way to his mouth,
on the verge of another whistle.

'Do you know a friend of Mr Gills, called Captain Cuttle?' inquired
Florence, after a moment's reflection.

'Him with a hook, Miss?' rejoined Rob, with an illustrative twist
of his left hand. Yes, Miss. He was here the day before yesterday.'

'Has he not been here since?' asked Susan.

'No, Miss,' returned Rob, still addressing his reply to Florence.

'Perhaps Walter's Uncle has gone there, Susan,' observed Florence,
turning to her.

'To Captain Cuttle's, Miss?' interposed Rob; 'no, he's not gone
there, Miss. Because he left particular word that if Captain Cuttle
called, I should tell him how surprised he was, not to have seen him
yesterday, and should make him stop till he came back'

'Do you know where Captain Cuttle lives?' asked Florence.

Rob replied in the affirmative, and turning to a greasy parchment
book on the shop desk, read the address aloud.

Florence again turned to her maid and took counsel with her in a
low voice, while Rob the round-eyed, mindful of his patron's secret
charge, looked on and listened. Florence proposed that they kould go
to Captain Cuttle's house; hear from his own lips, what he thought of
the absence of any tidings ofthe Son and Heir; and bring him, if they
could, to comfort Uncle Sol. Susan at first objected slightly, on the
score of distance; but a hackney-coach being mentioned by her
mistress, withdrew that opposition, and gave in her assent. There were
some minutes of discussion between them before they came to this
conclusion, during which the staring Rob paid close attention to both
speakers, and inclined his ear to each by turns, as if he were
appointed arbitrator of the argument.

In time, Rob was despatched for a coach, the visitors keeping shop
meanwhile; and when he brought it, they got into it, leaving word for
Uncle Sol that they would be sure to call again, on their way back.
Rob having stared after the coach until it was as invisible as the
pigeons had now become, sat down behind the desk with a most assiduous
demeanour; and in order that he might forget nothing of what had
transpired, made notes of it on various small scraps of paper, with a
vast expenditure of ink. There was no danger of these documents
betraying anything, if accidentally lost; for long before a word was
dry, it became as profound a mystery to Rob, as if he had had no part
whatever in its production.

While he was yet busy with these labours, the hackney-coach, after
encountering unheard-of difficulties from swivel-bridges, soft roads,
impassable canals, caravans of casks, settlements of scarlet-beans and
little wash-houses, and many such obstacles abounding in that country,
stopped at the corner of Brig Place. Alighting here, Florence and
Susan Nipper walked down the street, and sought out the abode of
Captain Cuttle.

It happened by evil chance to be one of Mrs MacStinger's great
cleaning days. On these occasions, Mrs MacStinger was knocked up by
the policeman at a quarter before three in the morning, and rarely
such before twelve o'clock next night. The chief object of this
institution appeared to be, that Mrs MacStinger should move all the
furniture into the back garden at early dawn, walk about the house in
pattens all day, and move the furniture back again after dark. These
ceremonies greatly fluttered those doves the young MacStingers, who
were not only unable at such times to find any resting-place for the
soles of their feet, but generally came in for a good deal of pecking
from the maternal bird during the progress of the solemnities.

At the moment when Florence and Susan Nipper presented themselves
at Mrs MacStinger's door, that worthy but redoubtable female was in
the act of conveying Alexander MacStinger, aged two years and three
months, along the passage, for forcible deposition in a sitting
posture on the street pavement: Alexander being black in the face with
holding his breath after punishment, and a cool paving-stone being
usually found to act as a powerful restorative in such cases.

The feelings of Mrs MacStinger, as a woman and a mother, were
outraged by the look of pity for Alexander which she observed on
Florence's face. Therefore, Mrs MacStinger asserting those finest
emotions of our nature, in preference to weakly gratifying her
curiosity, shook and buffeted Alexander both before and during the
application of the paving-stone, and took no further notice of the
strangers.

'I beg your pardon, Ma'am,' said Florence, when the child had found
his breath again, and was using it. 'Is this Captain Cuttle's house?'

'No,' said Mrs MacStinger.

'Not Number Nine?' asked Florence, hesitating.

'Who said it wasn't Number Nine?' said Mrs MacStinger.

Susan Nipper instantly struck in, and begged to inquire what Mrs
MacStinger meant by that, and if she knew whom she was talking to.

Mrs MacStinger in retort, looked at her all over. 'What do you want
with Captain Cuttle, I should wish to know?' said Mrs MacStinger.

'Should you? Then I'm sorry that you won't be satisfied,' returned
Miss Nipper.

'Hush, Susan! If you please!' said Florence. 'Perhaps you can have
the goodness to tell us where Captain Cutlle lives, Ma'am as he don't
live here.'

'Who says he don't live here?' retorted the implacable MacStinger.
'I said it wasn't Cap'en Cuttle's house - and it ain't his house -and
forbid it, that it ever should be his house - for Cap'en Cuttle don't
know how to keep a house - and don't deserve to have a house - it's my
house - and when I let the upper floor to Cap'en Cuttle, oh I do a
thankless thing, and cast pearls before swine!'

Mrs MacStinger pitched her voice for the upper windows in offering
these remarks, and cracked off each clause sharply by itself as if
from a rifle possessing an infinity of barrels. After the last shot,
the Captain's voice was heard to say, in feeble remonstrance from his
own room, 'Steady below!'

'Since you want Cap'en Cuttle, there he is!' said Mrs MacStinger,
with an angry motion of her hand. On Florence making bold to enter,
without any more parley, and on Susan following, Mrs MacStinger
recommenced her pedestrian exercise in pattens, and Alexander
MacStinger (still on the paving-stone), who had stopped in his crying
to attend to the conversation, began to wail again, entertaining
himself during that dismal performance, which was quite mechanical,
with a general survey of the prospect, terminating in the
hackney-coach.

The Captain in his own apartment was sitting with his hands in his
pockets and his legs drawn up under his chair, on a very small
desolate island, lying about midway in an ocean of soap and water. The
Captain's windows had been cleaned, the walls had been cleaned, the
stove had been cleaned, and everything the stove excepted, was wet,
and shining with soft soap and sand: the smell of which dry-saltery
impregnated the air. In the midst of the dreary scene, the Captain,
cast away upon his island, looked round on the waste of waters with a
rueful countenance, and seemed waiting for some friendly bark to come
that way, and take him off.

But when the Captain, directing his forlorn visage towards the
door, saw Florence appear with her maid, no words can describe his
astonishment. Mrs MacStinger's eloquence having rendered all other
sounds but imperfectly distinguishable, he had looked for no rarer
visitor than the potboy or the milkman; wherefore, when Florence
appeared, and coming to the confines of the island, put her hand in
his, the Captain stood up, aghast, as if he supposed her, for the
moment, to be some young member of the Flying Dutchman's family.'

Instantly recovering his self-possession, however, the Captain's
first care was to place her on dry land, which he happily
accomplished, with one motion of his arm. Issuing forth, then, upon
the main, Captain Cuttle took Miss Nipper round the waist, and bore
her to the island also. Captain Cuttle, then, with great respect and
admiration, raised the hand of Florence to his lips, and standing off
a little(for the island was not large enough for three), beamed on her
from the soap and water like a new description of Triton.

'You are amazed to see us, I am sure,'said Florence, with a smile.

The inexpressibly gratified Captain kissed his hook in reply, and
growled, as if a choice and delicate compliment were included in the
words, 'Stand by! Stand by!'

'But I couldn't rest,' said Florence, 'without coming to ask you
what you think about dear Walter - who is my brother now- and whether
there is anything to fear, and whether you will not go and console his
poor Uncle every day, until we have some intelligence of him?'

At these words Captain Cuttle, as by an involuntary gesture,
clapped his hand to his head, on which the hard glazed hat was not,
and looked discomfited.

'Have you any fears for Walter's safety?' inquired Florence, from
whose face the Captain (so enraptured he was with it) could not take
his eyes: while she, in her turn, looked earnestly at him, to be
assured of the sincerity of his reply.

'No, Heart's-delight,' said Captain Cuttle, 'I am not afeard. Wal'r
is a lad as'll go through a deal o' hard weather. Wal'r is a lad as'll
bring as much success to that 'ere brig as a lad is capable on.
Wal'r,' said the Captain, his eyes glistening with the praise of his
young friend, and his hook raised to announce a beautiful quotation,
'is what you may call a out'ard and visible sign of an in'ard and
spirited grasp, and when found make a note of.'

Florence, who did not quite understand this, though the Captain
evidentllty thought it full of meaning, and highly satisfactory,
mildly looked to him for something more.

'I am not afeard, my Heart's-delight,' resumed the Captain,
'There's been most uncommon bad weather in them latitudes, there's no
denyin', and they have drove and drove and been beat off, may be
t'other side the world. But the ship's a good ship, and the lad's a
good lad; and it ain't easy, thank the Lord,' the Captain made a
little bow, 'to break up hearts of oak, whether they're in brigs or
buzzums. Here we have 'em both ways, which is bringing it up with a
round turn, and so I ain't a bit afeard as yet.'

'As yet?' repeated Florence.

'Not a bit,' returned the Captain, kissing his iron hand; 'and
afore I begin to be, my Hearts-delight, Wal'r will have wrote home
from the island, or from some port or another, and made all taut and
shipsahape'And with regard to old Sol Gills, here the Captain became
solemn, 'who I'll stand by, and not desert until death do us part, and
when the stormy winds do blow, do blow, do blow - overhaul the
Catechism,' said the Captain parenthetically, 'and there you'll find
them expressions - if it would console Sol Gills to have the opinion
of a seafaring man as has got a mind equal to any undertaking that he
puts it alongside of, and as was all but smashed in his'prenticeship,
and of which the name is Bunsby, that 'ere man shall give him such an
opinion in his own parlour as'll stun him. Ah!' said Captain Cuttle,
vauntingly, 'as much as if he'd gone and knocked his head again a
door!'

'Let us take this ~gentleman to see him, and let us hear what he
says,' cried Florence. 'Will you go with us now? We have a coach
here.'

Again the Captain clapped his hand to his head, on which the hard
glazed hat was not, and looked discomfited. But at this instant a most
remarkable phenomenon occurred. The door opening, without any note of
preparation, and apparently of itself, the hard glazed hat in question
skimmed into the room like a bird, and alighted heavily at the
Captain's feet. The door then shut as violently as it had opened, and
nothIng ensued in explanation of the prodigy.

Captain Cuttle picked up his hat, and having turned it over with a
look of interest and welcome, began to polish it on his sleeve' While
doing so, the Captain eyed his visitors intently, and said in a low
voice

'You see I should have bore down on Sol Gills yesterday, and this
morning, but she - she took it away and kep it. That's the long and
short ofthe subject.'

'Who did, for goodness sake?' asked Susan Nipper.

'The lady of the house, my dear,'returned the Captain, in a gruff
whisper, and making signals of secrecy.'We had some words about the
swabbing of these here planks, and she - In short,' said the Captain,
eyeing the door, and relieving himself with a long breath, 'she
stopped my liberty.'

'Oh! I wish she had me to deal with!' said Susan, reddening with
the energy of the wish. 'I'd stop her!'

'Would you, do you, my dear?' rejoined the Captain, shaking his
head doubtfully, but regarding the desperate courage of the fair
aspirant with obvious admiration. 'I don't know. It's difficult
navigation. She's very hard to carry on with, my dear. You never can
tell how she'll head, you see. She's full one minute, and round upon
you next. And when she in a tartar,' said the Captain, with the
perspiration breaking out upon his forehead. There was nothing but a
whistle emphatic enough for the conclusion of the sentence, so the
Captain whistled tremulously. After which he again shook his head, and
recurring to his admiration of Miss Nipper's devoted bravery, timidly
repeated, 'Would you, do you think, my dear?'

Susan only replied with a bridling smile, but that was so very full
of defiance, that there is no knowing how long Captain Cuttle might
have stood entranced in its contemplation, if Florence in her anxiety
had not again proposed their immediately resorting to the oracular
Bunsby. Thus reminded of his duty, Captain Cuttle Put on the glazed
hat firmly, took up another knobby stick, with which he had supplied
the place of that one given to Walter, and offering his arm to
Florence, prepared to cut his way through the enemy.

It turned out, however, that Mrs MacStinger had already changed her
course, and that she headed, as the Captain had remarked she often
did, in quite a new direction. For when they got downstairs, they
found that exemplary woman beating the mats on the doorsteps, with
Alexander, still upon the paving-stone, dimly looming through a fog of
dust; and so absorbed was Mrs MacStinger in her household occupation,
that when Captain Cuttle and his visitors passed, she beat the harder,
and neither by word nor gesture showed any consciousness of their
vicinity. The Captain was so well pleased with this easy escape -
although the effect of the door-mats on him was like a copious
administration of snuff, and made him sneeze until the tears ran down
his face - that he could hardly believe his good fortune; but more
than once, between the door and the hackney-coach, looked over his
shoulder, with an obvious apprehension of Mrs MacStinger's giving
chase yet.

However, they got to the corner of Brig Place without any
molestation from that terrible fire-ship; and the Captain mounting the
coach-box - for his gallantry would not allow him to ride inside with
the ladies, though besought to do so - piloted the driver on his
course for Captain Bunsby's vessel, which was called the Cautious
Clara, and was lying hard by Ratcliffe.

Arrived at the wharf off which this great commander's ship was
jammed in among some five hundred companions, whose tangled rigging
looked like monstrous cobwebs half swept down, Captain Cuttle appeared
at the coach-window, and invited Florence and Miss Nipper to accompany
him on board; observing that Bunsby was to the last degree
soft-hearted in respect of ladies, and that nothing would so much tend
to bring his expansive intellect into a state of harmony as their
presentation to the Cautious Clara.

Florence readily consented; and the Captain, taking her little hand
in his prodigious palm, led her, with a mixed expression of patronage,
paternity, pride, and ceremony, that was pleasant to see, over several
very dirty decks, until, coming to the Clara, they found that cautious
craft (which lay outside the tier) with her gangway removed, and
half-a-dozen feet of river interposed between herself and her nearest
neighbour. It appeared, from Captain Cuttle's explanation, that the
great Bunsby, like himself, was cruelly treated by his landlady, and
that when her usage of him for the time being was so hard that he
could bear it no longer, he set this gulf between them as a last
resource.

'Clara a-hoy!' cried the Captain, putting a hand to each side of
his mouth.

'A-hoy!' cried a boy, like the Captain's echo, tumbling up from
below.

'Bunsby aboard?' cried the Captain, hailing the boy in a stentorian
voice, as if he were half-a-mile off instead of two yards.

'Ay, ay!' cried the boy, in the same tone.

The boy then shoved out a plank to Captain Cuttle, who adjusted it
carefully, and led Florence across: returning presently for Miss
Nipper. So they stood upon the deck of the Cautious Clara, in whose
standing rigging, divers fluttering articles of dress were curing, in
company with a few tongues and some mackerel.

Immediately there appeared, coming slowly up above the bulk-head of
the cabin, another bulk-head 'human, and very large - with one
stationary eye in the mahogany face, and one revolving one, on the
principle of some lighthouses. This head was decorated with shaggy
hair, like oakum,' which had no governing inclination towards the
north, east, west, or south, but inclined to all four quarters of the
compass, and to every point upon it. The head was followed by a
perfect desert of chin, and by a shirt-collar and neckerchief, and by
a dreadnought pilot-coat, and by a pair of dreadnought pilot-trousers,
whereof the waistband was so very broad and high, that it became a
succedaneum for a waistcoat: being ornamented near the wearer's
breastbone with some massive wooden buttons, like backgammon men. As
the lower portions of these pantaloons became revealed, Bunsby stood
confessed; his hands in their pockets, which were of vast size; and
his gaze directed, not to Captain Cuttle or the ladies, but the
mast-head.

The profound appearance of this philosopher, who was bulky and
strong, and on whose extremely red face an expression of taciturnity
sat enthroned, not inconsistent with his character, in which that
quality was proudly conspicuous, almost daunted Captain Cuttle, though
on familiar terms with him. Whispering to Florence that Bunsby had
never in his life expressed surprise, and was considered not to know
what it meant, the Captain watched him as he eyed his mast-head, and
afterwards swept the horizon; and when the revolving eye seemed to be
coming round in his direction, said:

'Bunsby, my lad, how fares it?'

A deep, gruff, husky utterance, which seemed to have no connexion
with Bunsby, and certainly had not the least effect upon his face,
replied, 'Ay, ay, shipmet, how goes it?' At the same time Bunsby's
right hand and arm, emerging from a pocket, shook the Captain's, and
went back again.

'Bunsby,' said the Captain, striking home at once, 'here you are; a
man of mind, and a man as can give an opinion. Here's a young lady as
wants to take that opinion, in regard of my friend Wal'r; likewise my
t'other friend, Sol Gills, which is a character for you to come within
hail of, being a man of science, which is the mother of inwention, and
knows no law. Bunsby, will you wear, to oblige me, and come along with
us?'

The great commander, who seemed by expression of his visage to be
always on the look-out for something in the extremest distance' and to
have no ocular knowledge of any anng' within ten miles, made no reply
whatever.

'Here is a man,' said the Captain, addressing himself to his fair
auditors, and indicating the commander with his outstretched hook,
'that has fell down, more than any man alive; that has had more
accidents happen to his own self than the Seamen's Hospital to all
hands; that took as many spars and bars and bolts about the outside of
his head when he was young, as you'd want a order for on Chatham-yard
to build a pleasure yacht with; and yet that his opinions in that way,
it's my belief, for there ain't nothing like 'em afloat or ashore.'

The stolid commander appeared by a very slight vibration in his
elbows, to express some satisfitction in this encomium; but if his
face had been as distant as his gaze was, it could hardIy have
enlightened the beholders less in reference to anything that was
passing in his thoughts.

'Shipmate,' said Bunsby, all of a sudden, and stooping down to look
out under some interposing spar, 'what'll the ladies drink?'

Captain Cuttle, whose delicacy was shocked by such an inquiry in
connection with Florence, drew the sage aside, and seeming to explain
in his ear, accompanied him below; where, that he might not take
offence, the Captain drank a dram himself' which Florence and Susan,
glancing down the open skylight, saw the sage, with difficulty finding
room for himself between his berth and a very little brass fireplace,
serve out for self and friend. They soon reappeared on deck, and
Captain Cuttle, triumphing in the success of his enterprise, conducted
Florence back to the coach, while Bunsby followed, escorting Miss
Nipper, whom he hugged upon the way (much to that young lady's
indignation) with his pilot-coated arm, like a blue bear.

The Captain put his oracle inside, and gloried so much in having
secured him, and having got that mind into a hackney-coach, that he
could not refrain from often peeping in at Florence through the little
window behind the driver, and testifiing his delight in smiles, and
also in taps upon his forehead, to hint to her that the brain of
Bunsby was hard at it' In the meantime, Bunsby, still hugging Miss
Nipper (for his friend, the Captain, had not exaggerated the softness
of his heart), uniformily preserved his gravity of deportment, and
showed no other consciousness of her or anything.

Uncle Sol, who had come home, received them at the door, and
ushered them immediately into the little back parlour: strangely
altered by the absence of Walter. On the table, and about the room,
were the charts and maps on which the heavy-hearted Instrument-maker
had again and again tracked the missing vessel across the sea, and on
which, with a pair of compasses that he still had in his hand, he had
been measuring, a minute before, how far she must have driven, to have
driven here or there: and trying to demonstrate that a long time must
elapse before hope was exhausted.

'Whether she can have run,' said Uncle Sol, looking wistfully over
the chart; 'but no, that's almost impossible or whether she can have
been forced by stress of weather, - but that's not reasonably likely.
Or whether there is any hope she so far changed her course as - but
even I can hardly hope that!' With such broken suggestions, poor old
Uncle Sol roamed over the great sheet before him, and could not find a
speck of hopeful probability in it large enough to set one small point
of the compasses upon.

Florence saw immediately - it would have been difficult to help
seeing - that there was a singular, indescribable change in the old
man, and that while his manner was far more restless and unsettled
than usual, there was yet a curious, contradictory decision in it,
that perplexed her very much. She fancied once that he spoke wildly,
and at random; for on her saying she regretted not to have seen him
when she had been there before that morning, he at first replied that
he had been to see her, and directly afterwards seemed to wish to
recall that answer.

'You have been to see me?' said Florence. 'To-day?'

'Yes, my dear young lady,' returned Uncle Sol, looking at her and
away from her in a confused manner. 'I wished to see you with my own
eyes, and to hear you with my own ears, once more before - ' There he
stopped.

'Before when? Before what?' said Florence, putting her hand upon
his arm.

'Did I say "before?"' replied old Sol. 'If I did, I must have meant
before we should have news of my dear boy.'

'You are not well,' said Florence, tenderly. 'You have been so very
anxious I am sure you are not well.'

'I am as well,' returned the old man, shutting up his right hand,
and holding it out to show her: 'as well and firm as any man at my
time of life can hope to be. See! It's steady. Is its master not as
capable of resolution and fortitude as many a younger man? I think so.
We shall see.'

There was that in his manner more than in his words, though they
remained with her too, which impressed Florence so much, that she
would have confided her uneasiness to Captain Cuttle at that moment,
if the Captain had not seized that moment for expounding the state of
circumstance, on which the opinion of the sagacious Bunsby was
requested, and entreating that profound authority to deliver the same.

Bunsby, whose eye continued to be addressed to somewhere about the
half-way house between London and Gravesend, two or three times put
out his rough right arm, as seeking to wind it for inspiration round
the fair form of Miss Nipper; but that young female having withdrawn
herself, in displeasure, to the opposite side of the table, the soft
heart of the Commander of the Cautious Clara met with no response to
its impulses. After sundry failures in this wise, the Commander,
addressing himself to nobody, thus spake; or rather the voice within
him said of its own accord, and quite independent of himself, as if he
were possessed by a gruff spirit:

'My name's Jack Bunsby!'

'He was christened John,' cried the delighted Captain Cuttle. 'Hear
him!'

'And what I says,' pursued the voice, after some deliberation, 'I
stands to.

The Captain, with Florence on his arm, nodded at the auditory, and
seemed to say, 'Now he's coming out. This is what I meant when I
brought him.'

'Whereby,' proceeded the voice, 'why not? If so, what odds? Can any
man say otherwise? No. Awast then!'

When it had pursued its train of argument to this point, the voice
stopped, and rested. It then proceeded very slowly, thus:

'Do I believe that this here Son and Heir's gone down, my lads?
Mayhap. Do I say so? Which? If a skipper stands out by Sen' George's
Channel, making for the Downs, what's right ahead of him? The
Goodwins. He isn't foroed to run upon the Goodwins, but he may. The
bearings of this observation lays in the application on it. That ain't
no part of my duty. Awast then, keep a bright look-out for'ard, and
good luck to you!'

The voice here went out of the back parlour and into the street,
taking the Commander of the Cautious Clara with it, and accompanying
him on board again with all convenient expedition, where he
immediately turned in, and refreshed his mind with a nap.

The students of the sage's precepts, left to their own application
of his wisdom - upon a principle which was the main leg of the Bunsby
tripod, as it is perchance of some other oracular stools - looked upon
one another in a little uncertainty; while Rob the Grinder, who had
taken the innocent freedom of peering in, and listening, through the
skylight in the roof, came softly down from the leads, in a state of
very dense confusion. Captain Cuttle, however, whose admiration of
Bunsby was, if possible, enhanced by the splendid manner in which he
had justified his reputation and come through this solemn reference,
proceeded to explain that Bunsby meant nothing but confidence; that
Bunsby had no misgivings; and that such an opinion as that man had
given, coming from such a mind as his, was Hope's own anchor, with
good roads to cast it in. Florence endeavoured to believe that the
Captain was right; but the Nipper, with her arms tight folded, shook
her head in resolute denial, and had no more trust m Bunsby than in Mr
Perch himself.

The philosopher seemed to have left Uncle Sol pretty much where he
had found him, for he still went roaming about the watery world,
compasses in hand, and discovering no rest for them. It was in
pursuance of a whisper in his ear from Florence, while the old man was
absorbed in this pursuit, that Captain Cuttle laid his heavy hand upon
his shoulder.

'What cheer, Sol Gills?' cried the Captain, heartily.

'But so-so, Ned,' returned the Instrument-maker. 'I have been
remembering, all this afternoon, that on the very day when my boy
entered Dombey's House, and came home late to dinner, sitting just
there where you stand, we talked of storm and shipwreck, and I could
hardly turn him from the subject'

But meeting the eyes of Florence, which were fixed with earnest
scrutiny upon his face, the old man stopped and smiled.

'Stand by, old friend!' cried the Captain. 'Look alive! I tell you
what, Sol Gills; arter I've convoyed Heart's-delight safe home,' here
the Captain kissed his hook to Florence, 'I'll come back and take you
in tow for the rest of this blessed day. You'll come and eat your
dinner along with me, Sol, somewheres or another.'

'Not to-day, Ned!' said the old man quickly, and appearing to be
unaccountably startled by the proposition. 'Not to-day. I couldn't do
it!'

'Why not?' returned the Captain, gazing at him in astonishment.

'I - I have so much to do. I - I mean to think of, and arrange. I
couldn't do it, Ned, indeed. I must go out again, and be alone, and
turn my mind to many things to-day.'

The Captain looked at the Instrument-maker, and looked at Florence,
and again at the Instrument-maker. 'To-morrow, then,' he suggested, at
last.

'Yes, yes. To-morrow,' said the old man. 'Think of me to-morrow.
Say to-morrow.'

'I shall come here early, mind, Sol Gills,' stipulated the Captain.

'Yes, yes. The first thing tomorrow morning,' said old Sol; 'and
now good-bye, Ned Cuttle, and God bless you!'

Squeezing both the Captain's hands, with uncommon fervour, as he
said it, the old man turned to Florence, folded hers in his own, and
put them to his lips; then hurried her out to the coach with very
singular precipitation. Altogether, he made such an effect on Captain
Cuttle that the Captain lingered behind, and instructed Rob to be
particularly gentle and attentive to his master until the morning:
which injunction he strengthened with the payment of one shilling
down, and the promise of another sixpence before noon next day. This
kind office performed, Captain Cuttle, who considered himself the
natural and lawful body-guard of Florence, mounted the box with a
mighty sense of his trust, and escorted her home. At parting, he
assured her that he would stand by Sol Gills, close and true; and once
again inquired of Susan Nipper, unable to forget her gallant words in
reference to Mrs MacStinger, 'Would you, do you think my dear,
though?'

When the desolate house had closed upon the two, the Captain's
thoughts reverted to the old Instrument-maker, and he felt
uncomfortable. Therefore, instead of going home, he walked up and down
the street several times, and, eking out his leisure until evening,
dined late at a certain angular little tavern in the City, with a
public parlour like a wedge, to which glazed hats much resorted. The
Captain's principal intention was to pass Sol Gills's, after dark, and
look in through the window: which he did, The parlour door stood open,
and he could see his old friend writing busily and steadily at the
table within, while the little Midshipman, already sheltered from the
night dews, watched him from the counter; under which Rob the Grinder
made his own bed, preparatory to shutting the shop. Reassured by the
tranquillity that reigned within the precincts of the wooden mariner,
the Captain headed for Brig Place, resolving to weigh anchor betimes
in the morning.



CHAPTER 24.

The Study of a Loving Heart



Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty
villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most
desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be
going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among
which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the
drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and
shrubbery.

Sir Barnet Skettles expressed his personal consequence chiefly
through an antique gold snuffbox, and a ponderous silk
pocket-kerchief, which he had an imposing manner of drawing out of his
pocket like a banner and using with both hands at once. Sir Barnet's
object in life was constantly to extend the range of his acquaintance.
Like a heavy body dropped into water - not to disparage so worthy a
gentleman by the comparison - it was in the nature of things that Sir
Barnet must spread an ever widening circle about him, until there was
no room left. Or, like a sound in air, the vibration of which,
according to the speculation of an ingenious modern philosopher, may
go on travelling for ever through the interminable fields of space,
nothing but coming to the end of his moral tether could stop Sir
Barnet Skettles in his voyage of discovery through the social system.

Sir Barnet was proud of making people acquainted with people. He
liked the thing for its own sake, and it advanced his favourite object
too. For example, if Sir Barnet had the good fortune to get hold of a
law recruit, or a country gentleman, and ensnared him to his
hospitable villa, Sir Barnet would say to him, on the morning after
his arrival, 'Now, my dear Sir, is there anybody you would like to
know? Who is there you would wish to meet? Do you take any interest in
writing people, or in painting or sculpturing people, or in acting
people, or in anything of that sort?' Possibly the patient answered
yes, and mentioned somebody, of whom Sir Barnet had no more personal
knowledge than of Ptolemy the Great. Sir Barnet replied, that nothing
on earth was easier, as he knew him very well: immediately called on
the aforesaid somebody, left his card, wrote a short note, - 'My dear
Sir - penalty of your eminent position - friend at my house naturally
desirous - Lady Skettles and myself participate - trust that genius
being superior to ceremonies, you will do us the distinguished favour
of giving us the pleasure,' etc, etc. - and so killed a brace of birds
with one stone, dead as door-nails.

With the snuff-box and banner in full force, Sir Barnet Skettles
propounded his usual inquiry to Florence on the first morning of her
visit. When Florence thanked him, and said there was no one in
particular whom she desired to see, it was natural she should think
with a pang, of poor lost Walter. When Sir Barnet Skettles, urging his
kind offer, said, 'My dear Miss Dombey, are you sure you can remember
no one whom your good Papa - to whom I beg you present the best
compliments of myself and Lady Skettles when you write - might wish
you to know?' it was natural, perhaps, that her poor head should droop
a little, and that her voice should tremble as it softly answered in
the negative.

Skettles Junior, much stiffened as to his cravat, and sobered down
as to his spirits' was at home for the holidays, and appeared to feel
himself aggrieved by the solicitude of his excellent mother that he
should be attentive to Florence. Another and a deeper injury under
which the soul of young Barnet chafed, was the company of Dr and Mrs
Blimber, who had been invited on a visit to the paternal roof-tree,
and of whom the young gentleman often said he would have preferred
their passing the vacation at Jericho.

'Is there anybody you can suggest now, Doctor Blimber?' said Sir
Barnet Skettles, turning to that gentleman.

'You are very kind, Sir Barnet,' returned Doctor Blimber. 'Really I
am not aware that there is, in particular. I like to know my
fellow-men in general, Sir Barnet. What does Terence say? Anyone who
is the parent of a son is interesting to me.

'Has Mrs Blimber any wish to see any remarkable person?' asked Sir
Barnet, courteously.

Mrs Blimber replied, with a sweet smile and a shake of her sky-blue
cap, that if Sir Barnet could have made her known to Cicero, she would
have troubled him; but such an introduction not being feasible, and
she already enjoying the friendship of himself and his amiable lady,
and possessing with the Doctor her husband their joint confidence in
regard to their dear son - here young Barnet was observed to curl his
nose - she asked no more.

Sir Barnet was fain, under these circumstances, to content himself
for the time with the company assembled. Florence was glad of that;
for she had a study to pursue among them, and it lay too near her
heart, and was too precious and momentous, to yield to any other
interest.

There were some children staying in the house. Children who were as
frank and happy with fathers and with mothers as those rosy faces
opposite home. Children who had no restraint upon their love. and
freely showed it. Florence sought to learn their secret; sought to
find out what it was she had missed; what simple art they knew, and
she knew not; how she could be taught by them to show her father that
she loved him, and to win his love again.

Many a day did Florence thoughtfully observe these children. On
many a bright morning did she leave her bed when the glorious sun
rose, and walking up and down upon the river's bank' before anyone in
the house was stirring, look up at the windows of their rooms, and
think of them, asleep, so gently tended and affectionately thought of.
Florence would feel more lonely then, than in the great house all
alone; and would think sometimes that she was better there than here,
and that there was greater peace in hiding herself than in mingling
with others of her age, and finding how unlike them all she was. But
attentive to her study, though it touched her to the quick at every
little leaf she turned in the hard book, Florence remained among them,
and tried with patient hope, to gain the knowledge that she wearied
for.

Ah! how to gain it! how to know the charm in its beginning! There
were daughters here, who rose up in the morning, and lay down to rest
at night, possessed of fathers' hearts already. They had no repulse to
overcome, no coldness to dread, no frown to smooth away. As the
morning advanced, and the windows opened one by one, and the dew began
to dry upon the flowers and and youthful feet began to move upon the
lawn, Florence, glancing round at the bright faces, thought what was
there she could learn from these children? It was too late to learn
from them; each could approach her father fearlessly, and put up her
lips to meet the ready kiss, and wind her arm about the neck that bent
down to caress her. She could not begin by being so bold. Oh! could it
be that there was less and less hope as she studied more and more!

She remembered well, that even the old woman who had robbed her
when a little child - whose image and whose house, and all she had
said and done, were stamped upon her recollection, with the enduring
sharpness of a fearful impression made at that early period of life -
had spoken fondly of her daughter, and how terribly even she had cried
out in the pain of hopeless separation from her child But her own
mother, she would think again, when she recalled this, had loved her
well. Then, sometimes, when her thoughts reverted swiftly to the void
between herself and her father, Florence would tremble, and the tears
would start upon her face, as she pictured to herself her mother
living on, and coming also to dislike her, because of her wanting the
unknown grace that should conciliate that father naturally, and had
never done so from her cradle She knew that this imagination did wrong
to her mother's memory, and had no truth in it, or base to rest upon;
and yet she tried so hard to justify him, and to find the whole blame
in herself, that she could not resist its passing, like a wild cloud,
through the distance of her mind.

There came among the other visitors, soon after Florence, one
beautiful girl, three or four years younger than she, who was an
orphan child, and who was accompanied by her aunt, a grey-haired lady,
who spoke much to Florence, and who greatly liked (but that they all
did) to hear her sing of an evening, and would always sit near her at
that time, with motherly interest. They had only been two days in the
house, when Florence, being in an arbour in the garden one warm
morning, musingly observant of a youthful group upon the turf, through
some intervening boughs, - and wreathing flowers for the head of one
little creature among them who was the pet and plaything of the rest,
heard this same lady and her niece, in pacing up and down a sheltered
nook close by, speak of herself.

'Is Florence an orphan like me, aunt?' said the child.

'No, my love. She has no mother, but her father is living.'

'Is she in mourning for her poor Mama, now?' inquired the child
quickly.

'No; for her only brother.'

'Has she no other brother?'

'None.'

'No sister?'

'None,'

'I am very, very sorry!' said the little girL

As they stopped soon afterwards to watch some boats, and had been
silent in the meantime, Florence, who had risen when she heard her
name, and had gathered up her flowers to go and meet them, that they
might know of her being within hearing, resumed her seat and work,
expecting to hear no more; but the conversation recommenced next
moment.

'Florence is a favourite with everyone here, and deserves to be, I
am sure,' said the child, earnestly. 'Where is her Papa?'

The aunt replied, after a moment's pause, that she did not know.
Her tone of voice arrested Florence, who had started from her seat
again; and held her fastened to the spot, with her work hastily caught
up to her bosom, and her two hands saving it from being scattered on
the ground.

'He is in England, I hope, aunt?' said the child.

'I believe so. Yes; I know he is, indeed.'

'Has he ever been here?'

'I believe not. No.'

'Is he coming here to see her?'

'I believe not.

'Is he lame, or blind, or ill, aunt?' asked the child.

The flowers that Florence held to her breast began to fall when she
heard those words, so wonderingly spoke She held them closer; and her
face hung down upon them'

'Kate,' said the lady, after another moment of silence, 'I will
tell you the whole truth about Florence as I have heard it, and
believe it to be. Tell no one else, my dear, because it may be little
known here, and your doing so would give her pain.'

'I never will!' exclaimed the child.

'I know you never will,' returned the lady. 'I can trust you as
myself. I fear then, Kate, that Florence's father cares little for
her, very seldom sees her, never was kind to her in her life, and now
quite shuns her and avoids her. She would love him dearly if he would
suffer her, but he will not - though for no fault of hers; and she is
greatly to be loved and pitied by all gentle hearts.'

More of the flowers that Florence held fell scattering on the
ground; those that remained were wet, but not with dew; and her face
dropped upon her laden hands.

'Poor Florence! Dear, good Florence!' cried the child.

'Do you know why I have told you this, Kate?' said the lady.

'That I may be very kind to her, and take great care to try to
please her. Is that the reason, aunt?'

'Partly,' said the lady, 'but not all. Though we see her so
cheerful; with a pleasant smile for everyone; ready to oblige us all,
and bearing her part in every amusement here: she can hardly be quite
happy, do you think she can, Kate?'

'I am afraid not,' said the little girl.

'And you can understand,' pursued the lady, 'why her observation of
children who have parents who are fond of them, and proud of them -
like many here, just now - should make her sorrowful in secret?'

'Yes, dear aunt,' said the child, 'I understand that very well.
Poor Florence!'

More flowers strayed upon the ground, and those she yet held to her
breast trembled as if a wintry wind were rustling them.

'My Kate,' said the lady, whose voice was serious, but very calm
and sweet, and had so impressed Florence from the first moment of her
hearing it, 'of all the youthful people here, you are her natural and
harmless friend; you have not the innocent means, that happier
children have - '

'There are none happier, aunt!' exclaimed the child, who seemed to
cling about her.

'As other children have, dear Kate, of reminding her of her
misfortune. Therefore I would have you, when you try to be her little
friend, try all the more for that, and feel that the bereavement you
sustained - thank Heaven! before you knew its weight- gives you claim
and hold upon poor Florence.'

'But I am not without a parent's love, aunt, and I never have
been,' said the child, 'with you.'

'However that may be, my dear,' returned the lady, 'your misfortune
is a lighter one than Florence's; for not an orphan in the wide world
can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living
parent's love.'

The flowers were scattered on the ground like dust; the empty hands
were spread upon the face; and orphaned Florence, shrinking down upon
the ground, wept long and bitterly.

But true of heart and resolute in her good purpose, Florence held
to it as her dying mother held by her upon the day that gave Paul
life. He did not know how much she loved him. However long the time in
coming, and however slow the interval, she must try to bring that
knowledge to her father's heart one day or other. Meantime she must be
careful in no thoughtless word, or look, or burst of feeling awakened
by any chance circumstance, to complain against him, or to give
occasion for these whispers to his prejudice.

Even in the response she made the orphan child, to whom she was
attracted strongly, and whom she had such occasion to remember,
Florence was mindful of him' If she singled her out too plainly
(Florence thought) from among the rest, she would confirm - in one
mind certainly: perhaps in more - the belief that he was cruel and
unnatural. Her own delight was no set-off to this, 'What she had
overheard was a reason, not for soothing herself, but for saving him;
and Florence did it, in pursuance of the study of her heart.

She did so always. If a book were read aloud, and there were
anything in the story that pointed at an unkind father, she was in
pain for their application of it to him; not for herself. So with any
trifle of an interlude that was acted, or picture that was shown, or
game that was played, among them. The occasions for such tenderness
towards him were so many, that her mind misgave her often, it would
indeed be better to go back to the old house, and live again within
the shadow of its dull walls, undisturbed. How few who saw sweet
Florence, in her spring of womanhood, the modest little queen of those
small revels, imagined what a load of sacred care lay heavy in her
breast! How few of those who stiffened in her father's freezing
atmosphere, suspected what a heap of fiery coals was piled upon his
head!

Florence pursued her study patiently, and, failing to acquire the
secret of the nameless grace she sought, among the youthful company
who were assembled in the house, often walked out alone, in the early
morning, among the children of the poor. But still she found them all
too far advanced to learn from. They had won their household places
long ago, and did not stand without, as she did, with a bar across the
door.

There was one man whom she several times observed at work very
early, and often with a girl of about her own age seated near him' He
was a very poor man, who seemed to have no regular employment, but now
went roaming about the banks of the river when the tide was low,
looking out for bits and scraps in the mud; and now worked at the
unpromising little patch of garden-ground before his cottage; and now
tinkered up a miserable old boat that belonged to him; or did some job
of that kind for a neighbour, as chance occurred. Whatever the man's
labour, the girl was never employed; but sat, when she was with him,
in a listless, moping state, and idle.

Florence had often wished to speak to this man; yet she had never
taken courage to do so, as he made no movement towards her. But one
morning when she happened to come upon him suddenly, from a by-path
among some pollard willows which terminated in the little shelving
piece of stony ground that lay between his dwelling and the water,
where he was bending over a fire he had made to caulk the old boat
which was lying bottom upwards, close by, he raised his head at the
sound of her footstep, and gave her Good morning.

'Good morning,' said Florence, approaching nearer, 'you are at work
early.'

'I'd be glad to be often at work earlier, Miss, if I had work to
do.'

'Is it so hard to get?' asked Florence.

'I find it so,' replied the man.

Florence glanced to where the girl was sitting, drawn together,
with her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her hands, and said:

'Is that your daughter?'

He raised his head quickly, and looking towards the girl with a
brightened face, nodded to her, and said 'Yes,' Florence looked
towards her too, and gave her a kind salutation; the girl muttered
something in return, ungraciously and sullenly.

'Is she in want of employment also?' said Florence.

The man shook his head. 'No, Miss,' he said. 'I work for both,'

'Are there only you two, then?' inquired Florence.

'Only us two,' said the man. 'Her mother his been dead these ten
year. Martha!' lifted up his head again, and whistled to her) 'won't
you say a word to the pretty young lady?'

The girl made an impatient gesture with her cowering shoulders, and
turned her head another way. Ugly, misshapen, peevish,
ill-conditioned, ragged, dirty - but beloved! Oh yes! Florence had
seen her father's look towards her, and she knew whose look it had no
likeness to.

'I'm afraid she's worse this morning, my poor girl!' said the man,
suspending his work, and contemplating his ill-favoured child, with a
compassion that was the more tender for being rougher.

'She is ill, then!' said Florence,

The man drew a deep sigh 'I don't believe my Martha's had five
short days' good health,' he answered, looking at her still, 'in as
many long years'

'Ay! and more than that, John,' said a neighbour, who had come down
to help him with the boat.

'More than that, you say, do you?' cried the other, pushing back
his battered hat, and drawing his hand across his forehead. 'Very
like. It seems a long, long time.'

'And the more the time,' pursued the neighbour, 'the more you've
favoured and humoured her, John, till she's got to be a burden to
herself, and everybody else'

'Not to me,' said her father, falling to his work. 'Not to me.'

Florence could feel - who better? - how truly he spoke. She drew a
little closer to him, and would have been glad to touch his rugged
hand, and thank him for his goodness to the miserable object that he
looked upon with eyes so different from any other man's.

'Who would favour my poor girl - to call it favouring - if I
didn't?' said the father.

'Ay, ay,' cried the neighbour. 'In reason, John. But you! You rob
yourself to give to her. You bind yourself hand and foot on her
account. You make your life miserable along of her. And what does she
care! You don't believe she knows it?'

The father lifted up his head again, and whistled to her. Martha
made the same impatient gesture with her crouching shoulders, in
reply; and he was glad and happy.

'Only for that, Miss,' said the neighbour, with a smile, in which
there was more of secret sympathy than he expressed; 'only to get
that, he never lets her out of his sight!'

'Because the day'll come, and has been coming a long while,'
observed the other, bending low over his work, 'when to get half as
much from that unfort'nate child of mine - to get the trembling of a
finger, or the waving of a hair - would be to raise the dead.'

Florence softly put some money near his hand on the old boat, and
left him.

And now Florence began to think, if she were to fall ill, if she
were to fade like her dear brother, would he then know that she had
loved him; would she then grow dear to him; would he come to her
bedside, when she was weak and dim of sight, and take her into his
embrace, and cancel all the past? Would he so forgive her, in that
changed condition, for not having been able to lay open her childish
heart to him, as to make it easy to relate with what emotions she had
gone out of his room that night; what she had meant to say if she had
had the courage; and how she had endeavoured, afterwards, to learn the
way she never knew in infancy?

Yes, she thought if she were dying, he would relent. She thought,
that if she lay, serene and not unwilling to depart, upon the bed that
was curtained round with recollections of their darling boy, he would
be touched home, and would say, 'Dear Florence, live for me, and we
will love each other as we might have done, and be as happy as we
might have been these many years!' She thought that if she heard such
words from him, and had her arms clasped round him' she could answer
with a smile, 'It is too late for anything but this; I never could be
happier, dear father!' and so leave him, with a blessing on her lips.

The golden water she remembered on the wall, appeared to Florence,
in the light of such reflections, only as a current flowing on to
rest, and to a region where the dear ones, gone before, were waiting,
hand in hand; and often when she looked upon the darker river rippling
at her feet, she thought with awful wonder, but not terror, of that
river which her brother had so often said was bearing him away.

The father and his sick daughter were yet fresh in Florence's mind,
and, indeed, that incident was not a week old, when Sir Barnet and his
lady going out walking in the lanes one afternoon, proposed to her to
bear them company. Florence readily consenting, Lady Skettles ordered
out young Barnet as a matter of course. For nothing delighted Lady
Skettles so much, as beholding her eldest son with Florence on his
arm.

Barnet, to say the truth, appeared to entertain an opposite
sentiment on the subject, and on such occasions frequently expressed
himself audibly, though indefinitely, in reference to 'a parcel of
girls.' As it was not easy to ruffle her sweet temper, however,
Florence generally reconciled the young gentleman to his fate after a
few minutes, and they strolled on amicably: Lady Skettles and Sir
Barnet following, in a state of perfect complacency and high
gratification.

This was the order of procedure on the afternoon in question; and
Florence had almost succeeded in overruling the present objections of
Skettles Junior to his destiny, when a gentleman on horseback came
riding by, looked at them earnestly as he passed, drew in his rein,
wheeled round, and came riding back again, hat in hand.

The gentleman had looked particularly at Florence; and when the
little party stopped, on his riding back, he bowed to her, before
saluting Sir Barnet and his lady. Florence had no remembrance of
having ever seen him, but she started involuntarily when he came near
her, and drew back.

'My horse is perfectly quiet, I assure you,' said the gentleman.

It was not that, but something in the gentleman himself - Florence
could not have said what - that made her recoil as if she had been
stung.

'I have the honour to address Miss Dombey, I believe?' said the
gentleman, with a most persuasive smile. On Florence inclining her
head, he added, 'My name is Carker. I can hardly hope to be remembered
by Miss Dombey, except by name. Carker.'

Florence, sensible of a strange inclination to shiver, though the
day was hot, presented him to her host and hostess; by whom he was
very graciously received.

'I beg pardon,' said Mr Carker, 'a thousand times! But I am going
down tomorrow morning to Mr Dombey, at Leamington, and if Miss Dombey
can entrust me with any commission, need I say how very happy I shall
be?'

Sir Barnet immediately divining that Florence would desire to write
a letter to her father, proposed to return, and besought Mr Carker to
come home and dine in his riding gear. Mr Carker had the misfortune to
be engaged to dinner, but if Miss Dombey wished to write, nothing
would delight him more than to accompany them back, and to be her
faithful slave in waiting as long as she pleased. As he said this with
his widest smile, and bent down close to her to pat his horse's neck,
Florence meeting his eyes, saw, rather than heard him say, 'There is
no news of the ship!'

Confused, frightened, shrinking from him, and not even sure that he
had said those words, for he seemed to have shown them to her in some
extraordinary manner through his smile, instead of uttering them,
Florence faintly said that she was obliged to him, but she would not
write; she had nothing to say.

'Nothing to send, Miss Dombey?' said the man of teeth.

'Nothing,' said Florence, 'but my - but my dear love- if you
please.'

Disturbed as Florence was, she raised her eyes to his face with an
imploring and expressive look, that plainly besought him, if he knew -
which he as plainly did - that any message between her and her father
was an uncommon charge, but that one most of all, to spare her. Mr
Carker smiled and bowed low, and being charged by Sir Barnet with the
best compliments of himself and Lady Skettles, took his leave, and
rode away: leaving a favourable impression on that worthy couple.
Florence was seized with such a shudder as he went, that Sir Barnet,
adopting the popular superstition, supposed somebody was passing over
her grave. Mr Carker turning a corner, on the instant, looked back,
and bowed, and disappeared, as if he rode off to the churchyard
straight, to do it.



CHAPTER 25.

Strange News of Uncle Sol


Captain Cuttle, though no sluggard, did not turn out so early on
the morning after he had seen Sol Gills, through the shop-window,
writing in the parlour, with the Midshipman upon the counter, and Rob
the Grinder making up his bed below it, but that the clocks struck six
as he raised himself on his elbow, and took a survey of his little
chamber. The Captain's eyes must have done severe duty, if he usually
opened them as wide on awaking as he did that morning; and were but
roughly rewarded for their vigilance, if he generally rubbed them half
as hard. But the occasion was no common one, for Rob the Grinder had
certainly never stood in the doorway of Captain Cuttle's room before,
and in it he stood then, panting at the Captain, with a flushed and
touzled air of Bed about him, that greatly heightened both his colour
and expression.

'Holloa!' roared the Captain. 'What's the matter?'

Before Rob could stammer a word in answer, Captain Cuttle turned
out, all in a heap, and covered the boy's mouth with his hand.

'Steady, my lad,' said the Captain, 'don't ye speak a word to me as
yet!'

The Captain, looking at his visitor in great consternation, gently
shouldered him into the next room, after laying this injunction upon
him; and disappearing for a few moments, forthwith returned in the
blue suit. Holding up his hand in token of the injunction not yet
being taken off, Captain Cuttle walked up to the cupboard, and poured
himself out a dram; a counterpart of which he handed to the messenger.
The Captain then stood himself up in a corner, against the wall, as if
to forestall the possibility of being knocked backwards by the
communication that was to be made to him; and having swallowed his
liquor, with his eyes fixed on the messenger, and his face as pale as
his face could be, requested him to 'heave ahead.'

'Do you mean, tell you, Captain?' asked Rob, who had been greatly
impressed by these precautions

'Ay!' said the Captain.

'Well, Sir,' said Rob, 'I ain't got much to tell. But look here!'

Rob produced a bundle of keys. The Captain surveyed them, remained
in his corner, and surveyed the messenger.

'And look here!' pursued Rob.

The boy produced a sealed packet, which Captain Cuttle stared at as
he had stared at the keys.

'When I woke this morning, Captain,' said Rob, 'which was about a
quarter after five, I found these on my pillow. The shop-door was
unbolted and unlocked, and Mr Gills gone.'

'Gone!' roared the Captain.

'Flowed, Sir,' returned Rob.

The Captain's voice was so tremendous, and he came out of his
corner with such way on him, that Rob retreated before him into
another corner: holding out the keys and packet, to prevent himself
from being run down.

'"For Captain Cuttle," Sir,' cried Rob, 'is on the keys, and on the
packet too. Upon my word and honour, Captain Cuttle, I don't know
anything more about it. I wish I may die if I do! Here's a sitiwation
for a lad that's just got a sitiwation,' cried the unfortunate
Grinder, screwing his cuff into his face: 'his master bolted with his
place, and him blamed for it!'

These lamentations had reference to Captain Cuttle's gaze, or
rather glare, which was full of vague suspicions, threatenings, and
denunciations. Taking the proffered packet from his hand, the Captain
opened it and read as follows:-

'My dear Ned Cuttle. Enclosed is my will!' The Captain turned it
over, with a doubtful look - 'and Testament - Where's the Testament?'
said the Captain, instantly impeaching the ill-fated Grinder. 'What
have you done with that, my lad?'

'I never see it,' whimpered Rob. 'Don't keep on suspecting an
innocent lad, Captain. I never touched the Testament.'

Captain Cuttle shook his head, implying that somebody must be made
answerable for it; and gravely proceeded:

'Which don't break open for a year, or until you have decisive
intelligence of my dear Walter, who is dear to you, Ned, too, I am
sure.' The Captain paused and shook his head in some emotion; then, as
a re-establishment of his dignity in this trying position, looked with
exceeding sternness at the Grinder. 'If you should never hear of me,
or see me more, Ned, remember an old friend as he will remember you to
the last - kindly; and at least until the period I have mentioned has
expired, keep a home in the old place for Walter. There are no debts,
the loan from Dombey's House is paid off and all my keys I send with
this. Keep this quiet, and make no inquiry for me; it is useless. So
no more, dear Ned, from your true friend, Solomon Gills.' The Captain
took a long breath, and then read these words written below: '"The boy
Rob, well recommended, as I told you, from Dombey's House. If all else
should come to the hammer, take care, Ned, of the little Midshipman."'

To convey to posterity any idea of the manner in which the Captain,
after turning this letter over and over, and reading it a score of
times, sat down in his chair, and held a court-martial on the subject
in his own mind, would require the united genius of all the great men,
who, discarding their own untoward days, have determined to go down to
posterity, and have never got there. At first the Captain was too much
confounded and distressed to think of anything but the letter itself;
and even when his thoughts began to glance upon the various attendant
facts, they might, perhaps, as well have occupied themselves with
their former theme, for any light they reflected on them. In this
state of mind, Captain Cuttle having the Grinder before the court, and
no one else, found it a great relief to decide, generally, that he was
an object of suspicion: which the Captain so clearly expressed in his
visage, that Rob remonstrated.

'Oh, don't, Captain!' cried the Grinder. 'I wonder how you can!
what have I done to be looked at, like that?'

'My lad,' said Captain Cuttle, 'don't you sing out afore you're
hurt. And don't you commit yourself, whatever you do.'

'I haven't been and committed nothing, Captain!' answered Rob.

'Keep her free, then,' said the Captain, impressively, 'and ride
easy.

With a deep sense of the responsibility imposed upon him' and the
necessity of thoroughly fathoming this mysterious affair as became a
man in his relations with the parties, Captain Cuttle resolved to go
down and examine the premises, and to keep the Grinder with him.
Considering that youth as under arrest at present, the Captain was in
some doubt whether it might not be expedient to handcuff him, or tie
his ankles together, or attach a weight to his legs; but not being
clear as to the legality of such formalities, the Captain decided
merely to hold him by the shoulder all the way, and knock him down if
he made any objection.

However, he made none, and consequently got to the
Instrument-maker's house without being placed under any more stringent
restraint. As the shutters were not yet taken down, the Captain's
first care was to have the shop opened; and when the daylight was
freely admitted, he proceeded, with its aid, to further investigation.

The Captain's first care was to establish himself in a chair in the
shop, as President of the solemn tribunal that was sitting within him;
and to require Rob to lie down in his bed under the counter, show
exactly where he discovered the keys and packet when he awoke, how he
found the door when he went to try it, how he started off to Brig
Place - cautiously preventing the latter imitation from being carried
farther than the threshold - and so on to the end of the chapter. When
all this had been done several times, the Captain shook his head and
seemed to think the matter had a bad look.

Next, the Captain, with some indistinct idea of finding a body,
instituted a strict search over the whole house; groping in the
cellars with a lighted candle, thrusting his hook behind doors,
bringing his head into violent contact with beams, and covering
himself with cobwebs. Mounting up to the old man's bed-room, they
found that he had not been in bed on the previous night, but had
merely lain down on the coverlet, as was evident from the impression
yet remaining there.

'And I think, Captain,' said Rob, looking round the room, 'that
when Mr Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he
was taking little things away, piecemeal, not to attract attention.'

'Ay!' said the Captain, mysteriously. 'Why so, my lad?'

'Why,' returned Rob, looking about, 'I don't see his shaving
tackle. Nor his brushes, Captain. Nor no shirts. Nor yet his shoes.'

As each of these articles was mentioned, Captain Cuttle took
particular notice of the corresponding department of the Grinder, lest
he should appear to have been in recent use, or should prove to be in
present possession thereof. But Rob had no occasion to shave, was not
brushed, and wore the clothes he had on for a long time past, beyond
all possibility of a mistake.

'And what should you say,' said the Captain - 'not committing
yourself - about his time of sheering off? Hey?'

'Why, I think, Captain,' returned Rob, 'that he must have gone
pretty soon after I began to snore.'

'What o'clock was that?' said the Captain, prepared to be very
particular about the exact time.

'How can I tell, Captain!' answered Rob. 'I only know that I'm a
heavy sleeper at first, and a light one towards morning; and if Mr
Gills had come through the shop near daybreak, though ever so much on
tiptoe, I'm pretty sure I should have heard him shut the door at all
events.

On mature consideration of this evidence, Captain Cuttle began to
think that the Instrument-maker must have vanished of his own accord;
to which logical conclusion he was assisted by the letter addressed to
himself, which, as being undeniably in the old man's handwriting,
would seem, with no great forcing, to bear the construction, that he
arranged of his own will to go, and so went. The Captain had next to
consider where and why? and as there was no way whatsoever that he saw
to the solution of the first difficulty, he confined his meditations
to the second.

Remembering the old man's curious manner, and the farewell he had
taken of him; unaccountably fervent at the time, but quite
intelligible now: a terrible apprehension strengthened on the Captain,
that, overpowered by his anxieties and regrets for Walter, he had been
driven to commit suicide. Unequal to the wear and tear of daily life,
as he had often professed himself to be, and shaken as he no doubt was
by the uncertainty and deferred hope he had undergone, it seemed no
violently strained misgiving, but only too probable. Free from debt,
and with no fear for his personal liberty, or the seizure of his
goods, what else but such a state of madness could have hurried him
away alone and secretly? As to his carrying some apparel with him, if
he had really done so - and they were not even sure of that - he might
have done so, the Captain argued, to prevent inquiry, to distract
attention from his probable fate, or to ease the very mind that was
now revolving all these possibilities. Such, reduced into plain
language, and condensed within a small compass, was the final result
and substance of Captain Cuttle's deliberations: which took a long
time to arrive at this pass, and were, like some more public
deliberations, very discursive and disorderly.

Dejected and despondent in the extreme, Captain Cuttle felt it just
to release Rob from the arrest in which he had placed him, and to
enlarge him, subject to a kind of honourable inspection which he still
resolved to exercise; and having hired a man, from Brogley the Broker,
to sit in the shop during their absence, the Captain, taking Rob with
him, issued forth upon a dismal quest after the mortal remains of
Solomon Gills.

Not a station-house, or bone-house, or work-house in the metropolis
escaped a visitation from the hard glazed hat. Along the wharves,
among the shipping on the bank-side, up the river, down the river,
here, there, everywhere, it went gleaming where men were thickest,
like the hero's helmet in an epic battle. For a whole week the Captain
read of all the found and missing people in all the newspapers and
handbills, and went forth on expeditions at all hours of the day to
identify Solomon Gills, in poor little ship-boys who had fallen
overboard, and in tall foreigners with dark beards who had taken
poison - 'to make sure,' Captain Cuttle said, 'that it wam't him.' It
is a sure thing that it never was, and that the good Captain had no
other satisfaction.

Captain Cuttle at last abandoned these attempts as hopeless, and
set himself to consider what was to be done next. After several new
perusals of his poor friend's letter, he considered that the
maintenance of' a home in the old place for Walter' was the primary
duty imposed upon him. Therefore, the Captain's decision was, that he
would keep house on the premises of Solomon Gills himself, and would
go into the instrument-business, and see what came of it.

But as this step involved the relinquishment of his apartments at
Mrs MacStinger's, and he knew that resolute woman would never hear of
his deserting them, the Captain took the desperate determination of
running away.

'Now, look ye here, my lad,' said the Captain to Rob, when he had
matured this notable scheme, 'to-morrow, I shan't be found in this
here roadstead till night - not till arter midnight p'rhaps. But you
keep watch till you hear me knock, and the moment you do, turn-to, and
open the door.'

'Very good, Captain,' said Rob.

'You'll continue to be rated on these here books,' pursued the
Captain condescendingly, 'and I don't say but what you may get
promotion, if you and me should pull together with a will. But the
moment you hear me knock to-morrow night, whatever time it is, turn-to
and show yourself smart with the door.'

'I'll be sure to do it, Captain,' replied Rob.

'Because you understand,' resumed the Captain, coming back again to
enforce this charge upon his mind, 'there may be, for anything I can
say, a chase; and I might be took while I was waiting, if you didn't
show yourself smart with the door.'

Rob again assured the Captain that he would be prompt and wakeful;
and the Captain having made this prudent arrangement, went home to Mrs
MacStinger's for the last time.

The sense the Captain had of its being the last time, and of the
awful purpose hidden beneath his blue waistcoat, inspired him with
such a mortal dread of Mrs MacStinger, that the sound of that lady's
foot downstairs at any time of the day, was sufficient to throw him
into a fit of trembling. It fell out, too, that Mrs MacStinger was in
a charming temper - mild and placid as a house- lamb; and Captain
Cuttle's conscience suffered terrible twinges, when she came up to
inquire if she could cook him nothing for his dinner.

'A nice small kidney-pudding now, Cap'en Cuttle,' said his
landlady: 'or a sheep's heart. Don't mind my trouble.'

'No thank'ee, Ma'am,' returned the Captain.

'Have a roast fowl,' said Mrs MacStinger, 'with a bit of weal
stuffing and some egg sauce. Come, Cap'en Cuttle! Give yourself a
little treat!'

'No thank'ee, Ma'am,' returned the Captain very humbly.

'I'm sure you're out of sorts, and want to be stimulated,' said Mrs
MacStinger. 'Why not have, for once in a way, a bottle of sherry
wine?'

'Well, Ma'am,' rejoined the Captain, 'if you'd be so good as take a
glass or two, I think I would try that. Would you do me the favour,
Ma'am,' said the Captain, torn to pieces by his conscience, 'to accept
a quarter's rent ahead?'

'And why so, Cap'en Cuttle?' retorted Mrs MacStinger - sharply, as
the Captain thought.

The Captain was frightened to dead 'If you would Ma'am,' he said
with submission, 'it would oblige me. I can't keep my money very well.
It pays itself out. I should take it kind if you'd comply.'

'Well, Cap'en Cuttle,' said the unconscious MacStinger, rubbing her
hands, 'you can do as you please. It's not for me, with my family, to
refuse, no more than it is to ask'

'And would you, Ma'am,' said the Captain, taking down the tin
canister in which he kept his cash' from the top shelf of the
cupboard, 'be so good as offer eighteen-pence a-piece to the little
family all round? If you could make it convenient, Ma'am, to pass the
word presently for them children to come for'ard, in a body, I should
be glad to see 'em'

These innocent MacStingers were so many daggers to the Captain's
breast, when they appeared in a swarm, and tore at him with the
confiding trustfulness he so little deserved. The eye of Alexander
MacStinger, who had been his favourite, was insupportable to the
Captain; the voice of Juliana MacStinger, who was the picture of her
mother, made a coward of him.

Captain Cuttle kept up appearances, nevertheless, tolerably well,
and for an hour or two was very hardly used and roughly handled by the
young MacStingers: who in their childish frolics, did a little damage
also to the glazed hat, by sitting in it, two at a time, as in a nest,
and drumming on the inside of the crown with their shoes. At length
the Captain sorrowfully dismissed them: taking leave of these cherubs
with the poignant remorse and grief of a man who was going to
execution.

In the silence of night, the Captain packed up his heavier property
in a chest, which he locked, intending to leave it there, in all
probability for ever, but on the forlorn chance of one day finding a
man sufficiently bold and desperate to come and ask for it. Of his
lighter necessaries, the Captain made a bundle; and disposed his plate
about his person, ready for flight. At the hour of midnight, when Brig
Place was buried in slumber, and Mrs MacStinger was lulled in sweet
oblivion, with her infants around her, the guilty Captain, stealing
down on tiptoe, in the dark, opened the door, closed it softly after
him, and took to his heels

Pursued by the image of Mrs MacStinger springing out of bed, and,
regardless of costume, following and bringing him back; pursued also
by a consciousness of his enormous crime; Captain Cuttle held on at a
great pace, and allowed no grass to grow under his feet, between Brig
Place and the Instrument-maker's door. It opened when he knocked - for
Rob was on the watch - and when it was bolted and locked behind him,
Captain Cuttle felt comparatively safe.

'Whew!' cried the Captain, looking round him. 'It's a breather!'

'Nothing the matter, is there, Captain?' cried the gaping Rob.

'No, no!' said Captain Cuttle, after changing colour, and listening
to a passing footstep in the street. 'But mind ye, my lad; if any
lady, except either of them two as you see t'other day, ever comes and
asks for Cap'en Cuttle, be sure to report no person of that name
known, nor never heard of here; observe them orders, will you?'

'I'll take care, Captain,' returned Rob.

'You might say - if you liked,' hesitated the Captain, 'that you'd
read in the paper that a Cap'en of that name was gone to Australia,
emigrating, along with a whole ship's complement of people as had all
swore never to come back no more.

Rob nodded his understanding of these instructions; and Captain
Cuttle promising to make a man of him, if he obeyed orders, dismissed
him, yawning, to his bed under the counter, and went aloft to the
chamber of Solomon Gills.

What the Captain suffered next day, whenever a bonnet passed, or
how often he darted out of the shop to elude imaginary MacStingers,
and sought safety in the attic, cannot be told. But to avoid the
fatigues attendant on this means of self-preservation, the Captain
curtained the glass door of communication between the shop and
parlour, on the inside; fitted a key to it from the bunch that had
been sent to him; and cut a small hole of espial in the wall. The
advantage of this fortification is obvious. On a bonnet appearing, the
Captain instantly slipped into his garrison, locked himself up, and
took a secret observation of the enemy. Finding it a false alarm, the
Captain instantly slipped out again. And the bonnets in the street
were so very numerous, and alarms were so inseparable from their
appearance, that the Captain was almost incessantly slipping in and
out all day long.

Captain Cuttle found time, however, in the midst of this fatiguing
service to inspect the stock; in connexion with which he had the
general idea (very laborious to Rob) that too much friction could not
be bestowed upon it, and that it could not be made too bright. He also
ticketed a few attractive-looking articles at a venture, at prices
ranging from ten shillings to fifty pounds, and exposed them in the
window to the great astonishment of the public.

After effecting these improvements, Captain Cuttle, surrounded by
the instruments, began to feel scientific: and looked up at the stars
at night, through the skylight, when he was smoking his pipe in the
little back parlour before going to bed, as if he had established a
kind of property in them. As a tradesman in the City, too, he began to
have an interest in the Lord Mayor, and the Sheriffs, and in Public
Companies; and felt bound to read the quotations of the Funds every
day, though he was unable to make out, on any principle of navigation,
what the figures meant, and could have very well dispensed with the
fractions. Florence, the Captain waited on, with his strange news of
Uncle Sol, immediately after taking possession of the Midshipman; but
she was away from home. So the Captain sat himself down in his altered
station of life, with no company but Rob the Grinder; and losing count
of time, as men do when great changes come upon them, thought musingly
of Walter, and of Solomon Gills, and even of Mrs MacStinger herself,
as among the things that had been.



CHAPTER 26.

Shadows of the Past and Future



'Your most obedient, Sir,' said the Major. 'Damme, Sir, a friend of
my friend Dombey's is a friend of mine, and I'm glad to see you!'

'I am infinitely obliged, Carker,' explained Mr Dombey, 'to Major
Bagstock, for his company and conversation. 'Major Bagstock has
rendered me great service, Carker.'

Mr Carker the Manager, hat in hand, just arrived at Leamington, and
just introduced to the Major, showed the Major his whole double range
of teeth, and trusted he might take the liberty of thanking him with
all his heart for having effected so great an Improvement in Mr
Dombey's looks and spirits'

'By Gad, Sir,' said the Major, in reply, 'there are no thanks due
to me, for it's a give and take affair. A great creature like our
friend Dombey, Sir,' said the Major, lowering his voice, but not
lowering it so much as to render it inaudible to that gentleman,
'cannot help improving and exalting his friends. He strengthens and
invigorates a man, Sir, does Dombey, in his moral nature.'

Mr Carker snapped at the expression. In his moral nature. Exactly.
The very words he had been on the point of suggesting.

'But when my friend Dombey, Sir,' added the Major, 'talks to you of
Major Bagstock, I must crave leave to set him and you right. He means
plain Joe, Sir - Joey B. - Josh. Bagstock - Joseph- rough and tough
Old J., Sir. At your service.'

Mr Carker's excessively friendly inclinations towards the Major,
and Mr Carker's admiration of his roughness, toughness, and plainness,
gleamed out of every tooth in Mr Carker's head.

'And now, Sir,' said the Major, 'you and Dombey have the devil's
own amount of business to talk over.'

'By no means, Major,' observed Mr Dombey.

'Dombey,' said the Major, defiantly, 'I know better; a man of your
mark - the Colossus of commerce - is not to be interrupted. Your
moments are precious. We shall meet at dinner-time. In the interval,
old Joseph will be scarce. The dinner-hour is a sharp seven, Mr
Carker.'

With that, the Major, greatly swollen as to his face, withdrew; but
immediately putting in his head at the door again, said:

'I beg your pardon. Dombey, have you any message to 'em?'

Mr Dombey in some embarrassment, and not without a glance at the
courteous keeper of his business confidence, entrusted the Major with
his compliments.

'By the Lord, Sir,' said the Major, 'you must make it something
warmer than that, or old Joe will be far from welcome.'

'Regards then, if you will, Major,' returned Mr Dombey.

'Damme, Sir,' said the Major, shaking his shoulders and his great
cheeks jocularly: 'make it something warmer than that.'

'What you please, then, Major,' observed Mr Dombey.

'Our friend is sly, Sir, sly, Sir, de-vilish sly,' said the Major,
staring round the door at Carker. 'So is Bagstock.' But stopping in
the midst of a chuckle, and drawing himself up to his full height, the
Major solemnly exclaimed, as he struck himself on the chest, 'Dombey!
I envy your feelings. God bless you!' and withdrew.

'You must have found the gentleman a great resource,' said Carker,
following him with his teeth.

'Very great indeed,' said Mr Dombey.

'He has friends here, no doubt,' pursued Carker. 'I perceive, from
what he has said, that you go into society here. Do you know,' smiling
horribly, 'I am so very glad that you go into society!'

Mr Dombey acknowledged this display of interest on the part of his
second in command, by twirling his watch-chain, and slightly moving
his head.

'You were formed for society,' said Carker. 'Of all the men I know,
you are the best adapted, by nature and by position, for society. Do
you know I have been frequently amazed that you should have held it at
arm's length so long!'

'I have had my reasons, Carker. I have been alone, and indifferent
to it. But you have great social qualifications yourself, and are the
more likely to have been surprised.'

'Oh! I!' returned the other, with ready self-disparagement. 'It's
quite another matter in the case of a man like me. I don't come into
comparison with you.'

Mr Dombey put his hand to his neckcloth, settled his chin in it,
coughed, and stood looking at his faithful friend and servant for a
few moments in silence.

'I shall have the pleasure, Carker,' said Mr Dombey at length:
making as if he swallowed something a little too large for his throat:
'to present you to my - to the Major's friends. Highly agreeable
people.'

'Ladies among them, I presume?' insinuated the smooth Manager.

'They are all - that is to say, they are both - ladies,' replied Mr
Dombey.

'Only two?' smiled Carker.

'They are only two. I have confined my visits to their residence,
and have made no other acquaintance here.'

'Sisters, perhaps?' quoth Carker.

'Mother and daughter,' replied Mr Dombey.

As Mr Dombey dropped his eyes, and adjusted his neckcloth again,
the smiling face of Mr Carker the Manager became in a moment, and
without any stage of transition, transformed into a most intent and
frowning face, scanning his closely, and with an ugly sneer. As Mr
Dombey raised his eyes, it changed back, no less quickly, to its old
expression, and showed him every gum of which it stood possessed.

'You are very kind,' said Carker, 'I shall be delighted to know
them. Speaking of daughters, I have seen Miss Dombey.'

There was a sudden rush of blood to Mr Dombey's face.

'I took the liberty of waiting on her,' said Carker, 'to inquire if
she could charge me with any little commission. I am not so fortunate
as to be the bearer of any but her - but her dear love.'

Wolf's face that it was then, with even the hot tongue revealing
itself through the stretched mouth, as the eyes encountered Mr
Dombey's!

'What business intelligence is there?' inquired the latter
gentleman, after a silence, during which Mr Carker had produced some
memoranda and other papers.

'There is very little,' returned Carker. 'Upon the whole we have
not had our usual good fortune of late, but that is of little moment
to you. At Lloyd's, they give up the Son and Heir for lost. Well, she
was insured, from her keel to her masthead.'

'Carker,' said Mr Dombey, taking a chair near him, 'I cannot say
that young man, Gay, ever impressed me favourably

'Nor me,' interposed the Manager.

'But I wish,' said Mr Dombey, without heeding the interruption, 'he
had never gone on board that ship. I wish he had never been sent out.

'It is a pity you didn't say so, in good time, is it not?' retorted
Carker, coolly. 'However, I think it's all for the best. I really,
think it's all for the best. Did I mention that there was something
like a little confidence between Miss Dombey and myself?'

'No,' said Mr Dombey, sternly.

'I have no doubt,' returned Mr Carker, after an impressive pause,
'that wherever Gay is, he is much better where he is, than at home
here. If I were, or could be, in your place, I should be satisfied of
that. I am quite satisfied of it myself. Miss Dombey is confiding and
young - perhaps hardly proud enough, for your daughter - if she have a
fault. Not that that is much though, I am sure. Will you check these
balances with me?'

Mr Dombey leaned back in his chair, instead of bending over the
papers that were laid before him, and looked the Manager steadily in
the face. The Manager, with his eyelids slightly raised, affected to
be glancing at his figures, and to await the leisure of his principal.
He showed that he affected this, as if from great delicacy, and with a
design to spare Mr Dombey's feelings; and the latter, as he looked at
him, was cognizant of his intended consideration, and felt that but
for it, this confidential Carker would have said a great deal more,
which he, Mr Dombey, was too proud to ask for. It was his way in
business, often. Little by little, Mr Dombey's gaze relaxed, and his
attention became diverted to the papers before him; but while busy
with the occupation they afforded him, he frequently stopped, and
looked at Mr Carker again. Whenever he did so, Mr Carker was
demonstrative, as before, in his delicacy, and impressed it on his
great chief more and more.

While they were thus engaged; and under the skilful culture of the
Manager, angry thoughts in reference to poor Florence brooded and bred
in Mr Dombey's breast, usurping the place of the cold dislike that
generally reigned there; Major Bagstock, much admired by the old
ladies of Leamington, and followed by the Native, carrying the usual
amount of light baggage, straddled along the shady side of the way, to
make a morning call on Mrs Skewton. It being midday when the Major
reached the bower of Cleopatra, he had the good fortune to find his
Princess on her usual sofa, languishing over a cup of coffee, with the
room so darkened and shaded for her more luxurious repose, that
Withers, who was in attendance on her, loomed like a phantom page.

'What insupportable creature is this, coming in?' said Mrs Skewton,
'I cannot hear it. Go away, whoever you are!'

'You have not the heart to banish J. B., Ma'am!' said the Major
halting midway, to remonstrate, with his cane over his shoulder.

'Oh it's you, is it? On second thoughts, you may enter,' observed
Cleopatra.

The Major entered accordingly, and advancing to the sofa pressed
her charming hand to his lips.

'Sit down,' said Cleopatra, listlessly waving her fan, 'a long way
off. Don't come too near me, for I am frightfully faint and sensitive
this morning, and you smell of the Sun. You are absolutely tropical.'

'By George, Ma'am,' said the Major, 'the time has been when Joseph
Bagstock has been grilled and blistered by the Sun; then time was,
when he was forced, Ma'am, into such full blow, by high hothouse heat
in the West Indies, that he was known as the Flower. A man never heard
of Bagstock, Ma'am, in those days; he heard of the Flower - the Flower
of Ours. The Flower may have faded, more or less, Ma'am,' observed the
Major, dropping into a much nearer chair than had been indicated by
his cruel Divinity, 'but it is a tough plant yet, and constant as the
evergreen.'

Here the Major, under cover of the dark room, shut up one eye,
rolled his head like a Harlequin, and, in his great self-satisfaction,
perhaps went nearer to the confines of apoplexy than he had ever gone
before.

'Where is Mrs Granger?' inquired Cleopatra of her page.

Withers believed she was in her own room.

'Very well,' said Mrs Skewton. 'Go away, and shut the door. I am
engaged.'

As Withers disappeared, Mrs Skewton turned her head languidly
towards the Major, without otherwise moving, and asked him how his
friend was.

'Dombey, Ma'am,' returned the Major, with a facetious gurgling in
his throat, 'is as well as a man in his condition can be. His
condition is a desperate one, Ma'am. He is touched, is Dombey!
Touched!' cried the Major. 'He is bayonetted through the body.'

Cleopatra cast a sharp look at the Major, that contrasted forcibly
with the affected drawl in which she presently said:

'Major Bagstock, although I know but little of the world, - nor can
I really regret my experience, for I fear it is a false place, full of
withering conventionalities: where Nature is but little regarded, and
where the music of the heart, and the gushing of the soul, and all
that sort of thing, which is so truly poetical, is seldom heard, - I
cannot misunderstand your meaning. There is an allusion to Edith - to
my extremely dear child,' said Mrs Skewton, tracing the outline of her
eyebrows with her forefinger, 'in your words, to which the tenderest
of chords vibrates excessively.'

'Bluntness, Ma'am,' returned the Major, 'has ever been the
characteristic of the Bagstock breed. You are right. Joe admits it.'

'And that allusion,' pursued Cleopatra, 'would involve one of the
most - if not positively the most - touching, and thrilling, and
sacred emotions of which our sadly-fallen nature is susceptible, I
conceive.'

The Major laid his hand upon his lips, and wafted a kiss to
Cleopatra, as if to identify the emotion in question.

'I feel that I am weak. I feel that I am wanting in that energy,
which should sustain a Mama: not to say a parent: on such a subject,'
said Mrs Skewton, trimming her lips with the laced edge of her
pocket-handkerchief; 'but I can hardly approach a topic so excessively
momentous to my dearest Edith without a feeling of faintness.
Nevertheless, bad man, as you have boldly remarked upon it, and as it
has occasioned me great anguish:' Mrs Skewton touched her left side
with her fan: 'I will not shrink from my duty.'

The Major, under cover of the dimness, swelled, and swelled, and
rolled his purple face about, and winked his lobster eye, until he
fell into a fit of wheezing, which obliged him to rise and take a turn
or two about the room, before his fair friend could proceed.

'Mr Dombey,' said Mrs Skewton, when she at length resumed, 'was
obliging enough, now many weeks ago, to do us the honour of visiting
us here; in company, my dear Major, with yourself. I acknowledge - let
me be open - that it is my failing to be the creature of impulse, and
to wear my heart as it were, outside. I know my failing full well. My
enemy cannot know it better. But I am not penitent; I would rather not
be frozen by the heartless world, and am content to bear this
imputation justly.'

Mrs Skewton arranged her tucker, pinched her wiry throat to give it
a soft surface, and went on, with great complacency.

'It gave me (my dearest Edith too, I am sure) infinite pleasure to
receive Mr Dombey. As a friend of yours, my dear Major, we were
naturally disposed to be prepossessed in his favour; and I fancied
that I observed an amount of Heart in Mr Dombey, that was excessively
refreshing.'

'There is devilish little heart in Dombey now, Ma'am,' said the
Major.

'Wretched man!' cried Mrs Skewton, looking at him languidly, 'pray
be silent.'

'J. B. is dumb, Ma'am,' said the Major.

'Mr Dombey,' pursued Cleopatra, smoothing the rosy hue upon her
cheeks, 'accordingly repeated his visit; and possibly finding some
attraction in the simplicity and primitiveness of our tastes - for
there is always a charm in nature - it is so very sweet - became one
of our little circle every evening. Little did I think of the awful
responsibility into which I plunged when I encouraged Mr Dombey - to -

'To beat up these quarters, Ma'am,' suggested Major Bagstock.

'Coarse person! 'said Mrs Skewton, 'you anticipate my meaning,
though in odious language.

Here Mrs Skewton rested her elbow on the little table at her side,
and suffering her wrist to droop in what she considered a graceful and
becoming manner, dangled her fan to and fro, and lazily admired her
hand while speaking.

'The agony I have endured,' she said mincingly, 'as the truth has
by degrees dawned upon me, has been too exceedingly terrific to dilate
upon. My whole existence is bound up in my sweetest Edith; and to see
her change from day to day - my beautiful pet, who has positively
garnered up her heart since the death of that most delightful
creature, Granger - is the most affecting thing in the world.'

Mrs Skewton's world was not a very trying one, if one might judge
of it by the influence of its most affecting circumstance upon her;
but this by the way.

'Edith,' simpered Mrs Skewton, 'who is the perfect pearl of my
life, is said to resemble me. I believe we are alike.'

'There is one man in the world who never will admit that anyone
resembles you, Ma'am,' said the Major; 'and that man's name is Old Joe
Bagstock.'

Cleopatra made as if she would brain the flatterer with her fan,
but relenting, smiled upon him and proceeded:

'If my charming girl inherits any advantages from me, wicked one!':
the Major was the wicked one: 'she inherits also my foolish nature.
She has great force of character - mine has been said to be immense,
though I don't believe it - but once moved, she is susceptible and
sensitive to the last extent. What are my feelings when I see her
pining! They destroy me.

The Major advancing his double chin, and pursing up his blue lips
into a soothing expression, affected the profoundest sympathy.

'The confidence,' said Mrs Skewton, 'that has subsisted between us
- the free development of soul, and openness of sentiment - is
touching to think of. We have been more like sisters than Mama and
child.'

'J. B.'s own sentiment,' observed the Major, 'expressed by J. B.
fifty thousand times!'

'Do not interrupt, rude man!' said Cleopatra. 'What are my
feelings, then, when I find that there is one subject avoided by us!
That there is a what's-his-name - a gulf - opened between us. That my
own artless Edith is changed to me! They are of the most poignant
description, of course.'

The Major left his chair, and took one nearer to the little table.

'From day to day I see this, my dear Major,' proceeded Mrs Skewton.
'From day to day I feel this. From hour to hour I reproach myself for
that excess of faith and trustfulness which has led to such
distressing consequences; and almost from minute to minute, I hope
that Mr Dombey may explain himself, and relieve the torture I undergo,
which is extremely wearing. But nothing happens, my dear Major; I am
the slave of remorse - take care of the coffee-cup: you are so very
awkward - my darling Edith is an altered being; and I really don't see
what is to be done, or what good creature I can advise with.'

Major Bagstock, encouraged perhaps by the softened and confidential
tone into which Mrs Skewton, after several times lapsing into it for a
moment, seemed now to have subsided for good, stretched out his hand
across the little table, and said with a leer,

'Advise with Joe, Ma'am.'

'Then, you aggravating monster,' said Cleopatra, giving one hand to
the Major, and tapping his knuckles with her fan, which she held in
the other: 'why don't you talk to me? you know what I mean. Why don't
you tell me something to the purpose?'

The Major laughed, and kissed the hand she had bestowed upon him,
and laughed again immensely.

'Is there as much Heart in Mr Dombey as I gave him credit for?'
languished Cleopatra tenderly. 'Do you think he is in earnest, my dear
Major? Would you recommend his being spoken to, or his being left
alone? Now tell me, like a dear man, what would you advise.'

'Shall we marry him to Edith Granger, Ma'am?' chuckled the Major,
hoarsely.

'Mysterious creature!' returned Cleopatra, bringing her fan to bear
upon the Major's nose. 'How can we marry him?'

'Shall we marry him to Edith Granger, Ma'am, I say?' chuckled the
Major again.

Mrs Skewton returned no answer in words, but smiled upon the Major
with so much archness and vivacity, that that gallant officer
considering himself challenged, would have imprinted a kiss on her
exceedingly red lips, but for her interposing the fan with a very
winning and juvenile dexterity. It might have been in modesty; it
might have been in apprehension of some danger to their bloom.

'Dombey, Ma'am,' said the Major, 'is a great catch.'

'Oh, mercenary wretch!' cried Cleopatra, with a little shriek, 'I
am shocked.'

'And Dombey, Ma'am,' pursued the Major, thrusting forward his head,
and distending his eyes, 'is in earnest. Joseph says it; Bagstock
knows it; J. B. keeps him to the mark. Leave Dombey to himself, Ma'am.
Dombey is safe, Ma'am. Do as you have done; do no more; and trust to
J. B. for the end.'

'You really think so, my dear Major?' returned Cleopatra, who had
eyed him very cautiously, and very searchingly, in spite of her
listless bearing.

'Sure of it, Ma'am,' rejoined the Major. 'Cleopatra the peerless,
and her Antony Bagstock, will often speak of this, triumphantly, when
sharing the elegance and wealth of Edith Dombey's establishment.
Dombey's right-hand man, Ma'am,' said the Major, stopping abruptly in
a chuckle, and becoming serious, 'has arrived.'

'This morning?' said Cleopatra.

'This morning, Ma'am,' returned the Major. 'And Dombey's anxiety
for his arrival, Ma'am, is to be referred - take J. B.'s word for
this; for Joe is devilish sly' - the Major tapped his nose, and
screwed up one of his eyes tight: which did not enhance his native
beauty - 'to his desire that what is in the wind should become known
to him' without Dombey's telling and consulting him. For Dombey is as
proud, Ma'am,' said the Major, 'as Lucifer.'

'A charming quality,' lisped Mrs Skewton; 'reminding one of dearest
Edith.'

'Well, Ma'am,' said the Major. 'I have thrown out hints already,
and the right-hand man understands 'em; and I'll throw out more,
before the day is done. Dombey projected this morning a ride to
Warwick Castle, and to Kenilworth, to-morrow, to be preceded by a
breakfast with us. I undertook the delivery of this invitation. Will
you honour us so far, Ma'am?' said the Major, swelling with shortness
of breath and slyness, as he produced a note, addressed to the
Honourable Mrs Skewton, by favour of Major Bagstock, wherein hers ever
faithfully, Paul Dombey, besought her and her amiable and accomplished
daughter to consent to the proposed excursion; and in a postscript
unto which, the same ever faithfully Paul Dombey entreated to be
recalled to the remembrance of Mrs Granger.

'Hush!' said Cleopatra, suddenly, 'Edith!'

The loving mother can scarcely be described as resuming her insipid
and affected air when she made this exclamation; for she had never
cast it off; nor was it likely that she ever would or could, in any
other place than in the grave. But hurriedly dismissing whatever
shadow of earnestness, or faint confession of a purpose, laudable or
wicked, that her face, or voice, or manner: had, for the moment,
betrayed, she lounged upon the couch, her most insipid and most
languid self again, as Edith entered the room.

Edith, so beautiful and stately, but so cold and so repelling. Who,
slightly acknowledging the presence of Major Bagstock, and directing a
keen glance at her mother, drew back the from a window, and sat down
there, looking out.

'My dearest Edith,' said Mrs Skewton, 'where on earth have you
been? I have wanted you, my love, most sadly.'

'You said you were engaged, and I stayed away,' she answered,
without turning her head.

'It was cruel to Old Joe, Ma'am,' said the Major in his gallantry.

'It was very cruel, I know,' she said, still looking out - and said
with such calm disdain, that the Major was discomfited, and could
think of nothing in reply.

'Major Bagstock, my darling Edith,' drawled her mother, 'who is
generally the most useless and disagreeable creature in the world: as
you know - '

'It is surely not worthwhile, Mama,' said Edith, looking round, 'to
observe these forms of speech. We are quite alone. We know each
other.'

The quiet scorn that sat upon her handsome face - a scorn that
evidently lighted on herself, no less than them - was so intense and
deep, that her mother's simper, for the instant, though of a hardy
constitution, drooped before it.

'My darling girl,' she began again.

'Not woman yet?' said Edith, with a smile.

'How very odd you are to-day, my dear! Pray let me say, my love,
that Major Bagstock has brought the kindest of notes from Mr Dombey,
proposing that we should breakfast with him to-morrow, and ride to
Warwick and Kenilworth. Will you go, Edith?'

'Will I go!' she repeated, turning very red, and breathing quickly
as she looked round at her mother.

'I knew you would, my own, observed the latter carelessly. 'It is,
as you say, quite a form to ask. Here is Mr Dombey's letter, Edith.'

'Thank you. I have no desire to read it,' was her answer.

'Then perhaps I had better answer it myself,' said Mrs Skewton,
'though I had thought of asking you to be my secretary, darling.' As
Edith made no movement, and no answer, Mrs Skewton begged the Major to
wheel her little table nearer, and to set open the desk it contained,
and to take out pen and paper for her; all which congenial offices of
gallantry the Major discharged, with much submission and devotion.

'Your regards, Edith, my dear?' said Mrs Skewton, pausing, pen in
hand, at the postscript.

'What you will, Mama,' she answered, without turning her head, and
with supreme indifference.

Mrs Skewton wrote what she would, without seeking for any more
explicit directions, and handed her letter to the Major, who receiving
it as a precious charge, made a show of laying it near his heart, but
was fain to put it in the pocket of his pantaloons on account of the
insecurity of his waistcoat The Major then took a very polished and
chivalrous farewell of both ladies, which the elder one acknowledged
in her usual manner, while the younger, sitting with her face
addressed to the window, bent her head so slightly that it would have
been a greater compliment to the Major to have made no sign at all,
and to have left him to infer that he had not been heard or thought
of.

'As to alteration in her, Sir,' mused the Major on his way back; on
which expedition - the afternoon being sunny and hot - he ordered the
Native and the light baggage to the front, and walked in the shadow of
that expatriated prince: 'as to alteration, Sir, and pining, and so
forth, that won't go down with Joseph Bagstock, None of that, Sir. It
won't do here. But as to there being something of a division between
'em - or a gulf as the mother calls it - damme, Sir, that seems true
enough. And it's odd enough! Well, Sir!' panted the Major, 'Edith
Granger and Dombey are well matched; let 'em fight it out! Bagstock
backs the winner!'

The Major, by saying these latter words aloud, in the vigour of his
thoughts, caused the unhappy Native to stop, and turn round, in the
belief that he was personally addressed. Exasperated to the last
degree by this act of insubordination, the Major (though he was
swelling with enjoyment of his own humour, at the moment of its
occurrence instantly thrust his cane among the Native's ribs, and
continued to stir him up, at short intervals, all the way to the
hotel.

Nor was the Major less exasperated as he dressed for dinner, during
which operation the dark servant underwent the pelting of a shower of
miscellaneous objects, varying in size from a boot to a hairbrush, and
including everything that came within his master's reach. For the
Major plumed himself on having the Native in a perfect state of drill,
and visited the least departure from strict discipline with this kind
of fatigue duty. Add to this, that he maintained the Native about his
person as a counter-irritant against the gout, and all other
vexations, mental as well as bodily; and the Native would appear to
have earned his pay - which was not large.

At length, the Major having disposed of all the missiles that were
convenient to his hand, and having called the Native so many new names
as must have given him great occasion to marvel at the resources of
the English language, submitted to have his cravat put on; and being
dressed, and finding himself in a brisk flow of spirits after this
exercise, went downstairs to enliven 'Dombey' and his right-hand man.

Dombey was not yet in the room, but the right-hand man was there,
and his dental treasures were, as usual, ready for the Major.

'Well, Sir!' said the Major. 'How have you passed the time since I
had the happiness of meeting you? Have you walked at all?'

'A saunter of barely half an hour's duration,' returned Carker. 'We
have been so much occupied.'

'Business, eh?' said the Major.

'A variety of little matters necessary to be gone through,' replied
Carker. 'But do you know - this is quite unusual with me, educated in
a distrustful school, and who am not generally disposed to be
communicative,' he said, breaking off, and speaking in a charming tone
of frankness - 'but I feel quite confidential with you, Major
Bagstock.'

'You do me honour, Sir,' returned the Major. 'You may be.'

'Do you know, then,' pursued Carker, 'that I have not found my
friend - our friend, I ought rather to call him - '

'Meaning Dombey, Sir?' cried the Major. 'You see me, Mr Carker,
standing here! J. B.?'

He was puffy enough to see, and blue enough; and Mr Carker
intimated the he had that pleasure.

'Then you see a man, Sir, who would go through fire and water to
serve Dombey,' returned Major Bagstock.

Mr Carker smiled, and said he was sure of it. 'Do you know, Major,'
he proceeded: 'to resume where I left off' that I have not found our
friend so attentive to business today, as usual?'

'No?' observed the delighted Major.

'I have found him a little abstracted, and with his attention
disposed to wander,' said Carker.

'By Jove, Sir,' cried the Major, 'there's a lady in the case.'

'Indeed, I begin to believe there really is,' returned Carker; 'I
thought you might be jesting when you seemed to hint at it; for I know
you military men -

The Major gave the horse's cough, and shook his head and shoulders,
as much as to say, 'Well! we are gay dogs, there's no denying.' He
then seized Mr Carker by the button-hole, and with starting eyes
whispered in his ear, that she was a woman of extraordinary charms,
Sir. That she was a young widow, Sir. That she was of a fine family,
Sir. That Dombey was over head and ears in love with her, Sir, and
that it would be a good match on both sides; for she had beauty,
blood, and talent, and Dombey had fortune; and what more could any
couple have? Hearing Mr Dombey's footsteps without, the Major cut
himself short by saying, that Mr Carker would see her tomorrow
morning, and would judge for himself; and between his mental
excitement, and the exertion of saying all this in wheezy whispers,
the Major sat gurgling in the throat and watering at the eyes, until
dinner was ready.

The Major, like some other noble animals, exhibited himself to
great advantage at feeding-time. On this occasion, he shone
resplendent at one end of the table, supported by the milder lustre of
Mr Dombey at the other; while Carker on one side lent his ray to
either light, or suffered it to merge into both, as occasion arose.

During the first course or two, the Major was usually grave; for
the Native, in obedience to general orders, secretly issued, collected
every sauce and cruet round him, and gave him a great deal to do, in
taking out the stoppers, and mixing up the contents in his plate.
Besides which, the Native had private zests and flavours on a
side-table, with which the Major daily scorched himself; to say
nothing of strange machines out of which he spirited unknown liquids
into the Major's drink. But on this occasion, Major Bagstock, even
amidst these many occupations, found time to be social; and his
sociality consisted in excessive slyness for the behoof of Mr Carker,
and the betrayal of Mr Dombey's state of mind.

'Dombey,' said the Major, 'you don't eat; what's the matter?'

'Thank you,' returned the gentleman, 'I am doing very well; I have
no great appetite today.'

'Why, Dombey, what's become of it?' asked the Major. 'Where's it
gone? You haven't left it with our friends, I'll swear, for I can
answer for their having none to-day at luncheon. I can answer for one
of 'em, at least: I won't say which.'

Then the Major winked at Carker, and became so frightfully sly,
that his dark attendant was obliged to pat him on the back, without
orders, or he would probably have disappeared under the table.

In a later stage of the dinner: that is to say, when the Native
stood at the Major's elbow ready to serve the first bottle of
champagne: the Major became still slyer.

'Fill this to the brim, you scoundrel,' said the Major, holding up
his glass. 'Fill Mr Carker's to the brim too. And Mr Dombey's too. By
Gad, gentlemen,' said the Major, winking at his new friend, while Mr
Dombey looked into his plate with a conscious air, 'we'll consecrate
this glass of wine to a Divinity whom Joe is proud to know, and at a
distance humbly and reverently to admire. Edith,' said the Major, 'is
her name; angelic Edith!'

'To angelic Edith!' cried the smiling Carker.

'Edith, by all means,' said Mr Dombey.

The entrance of the waiters with new dishes caused the Major to be
slyer yet, but in a more serious vein. 'For though among ourselves,
Joe Bagstock mingles jest and earnest on this subject, Sir,' said the
Major, laying his finger on his lips, and speaking half apart to
Carker, 'he holds that name too sacred to be made the property of
these fellows, or of any fellows. Not a word!, Sir' while they are
here!'

This was respectful and becoming on the Major's part, and Mr Dombey
plainly felt it so. Although embarrassed in his own frigid way, by the
Major's allusions, Mr Dombey had no objection to such rallying, it was
clear, but rather courted it. Perhaps the Major had been pretty near
the truth, when he had divined that morning that the great man who was
too haughty formally to consult with, or confide in his prime
minister, on such a matter, yet wished him to be fully possessed of
it. Let this be how it may, he often glanced at Mr Carker while the
Major plied his light artillery, and seemed watchful of its effect
upon him.

But the Major, having secured an attentive listener, and a smiler
who had not his match in all the world - 'in short, a devilish
intelligent and able fellow,' as he often afterwards declared - was
not going to let him off with a little slyness personal to Mr Dombey.
Therefore, on the removal of the cloth, the Major developed himself as
a choice spirit in the broader and more comprehensive range of
narrating regimental stories, and cracking regimental jokes, which he
did with such prodigal exuberance, that Carker was (or feigned to be)
quite exhausted with laughter and admiration: while Mr Dombey looked
on over his starched cravat, like the Major's proprietor, or like a
stately showman who was glad to see his bear dancing well.

When the Major was too hoarse with meat and drink, and the display
of his social powers, to render himself intelligible any longer, they
adjourned to coffee. After which, the Major inquired of Mr Carker the
Manager, with little apparent hope of an answer in the affirmative, if
he played picquet.

'Yes, I play picquet a little,' said Mr Carker.

'Backgammon, perhaps?' observed the Major, hesitating.

'Yes, I play backgammon a little too,' replied the man of teeth.

'Carker plays at all games, I believe,' said Mr Dombey, laying
himself on a sofa like a man of wood, without a hinge or a joint in
him; 'and plays them well.'

In sooth, he played the two in question, to such perfection, that
the Major was astonished, and asked him, at random, if he played
chess.

'Yes, I play chess a little,' answered Carker. 'I have sometimes
played, and won a game - it's a mere trick - without seeing the
board.'

'By Gad, Sir!' said the Major, staring, 'you are a contrast to
Dombey, who plays nothing.'

'Oh! He!' returned the Manager. 'He has never had occasion to
acquire such little arts. To men like me, they are sometimes useful.
As at present, Major Bagstock, when they enable me to take a hand with
you.'

It might be only the false mouth, so smooth and wide; and yet there
seemed to lurk beneath the humility and subserviency of this short
speech, a something like a snarl; and, for a moment, one might have
thought that the white teeth were prone to bite the hand they fawned
upon. But the Major thought nothing about it; and Mr Dombey lay
meditating with his eyes half shut, during the whole of the play,
which lasted until bed-time.

By that time, Mr Carker, though the winner, had mounted high into
the Major's good opinion, insomuch that when he left the Major at his
own room before going to bed, the Major as a special attention, sent
the Native - who always rested on a mattress spread upon the ground at
his master's door - along the gallery, to light him to his room in
state.

There was a faint blur on the surface of the mirror in Mr Carker's
chamber, and its reflection was, perhaps, a false one. But it showed,
that night, the image of a man, who saw, in his fancy, a crowd of
people slumbering on the ground at his feet, like the poor Native at
his master's door: who picked his way among them: looking down,
maliciously enough: but trod upon no upturned face - as yet.



CHAPTER 27.

Deeper Shadows


Mr Carker the Manager rose with the lark, and went out, walking in
the summer day. His meditations - and he meditated with contracted
brows while he strolled along - hardly seemed to soar as high as the
lark, or to mount in that direction; rather they kept close to their
nest upon the earth, and looked about, among the dust and worms. But
there was not a bird in the air, singing unseen, farther beyond the
reach of human eye than Mr Carker's thoughts. He had his face so
perfectly under control, that few could say more, in distinct terms,
of its expression, than that it smiled or that it pondered. It
pondered now, intently. As the lark rose higher, he sank deeper in
thought. As the lark poured out her melody clearer and stronger, he
fell into a graver and profounder silence. At length, when the lark
came headlong down, with an accumulating stream of song, and dropped
among the green wheat near him, rippling in the breath of the morning
like a river, he sprang up from his reverie, and looked round with a
sudden smile, as courteous and as soft as if he had had numerous
observers to propitiate; nor did he relapse, after being thus
awakened; but clearing his face, like one who bethought himself that
it might otherwise wrinkle and tell tales, went smiling on, as if for
practice.

Perhaps with an eye to first impressions, Mr Carker was very
carefully and trimly dressed, that morning. Though always somewhat
formal, in his dress, in imitation of the great man whom he served, he
stopped short of the extent of Mr Dombey's stiffness: at once perhaps
because he knew it to be ludicrous, and because in doing so he found
another means of expressing his sense of the difference and distance
between them. Some people quoted him indeed, in this respect, as a
pointed commentary, and not a flattering one, on his icy patron - but
the world is prone to misconstruction, and Mr Carker was not
accountable for its bad propensity.

Clean and florid: with his light complexion, fading as it were, in
the sun, and his dainty step enhancing the softness of the turf: Mr
Carker the Manager strolled about meadows, and green lanes, and glided
among avenues of trees, until it was time to return to breakfast.
Taking a nearer way back, Mr Carker pursued it, airing his teeth, and
said aloud as he did so, 'Now to see the second Mrs Dombey!'

He had strolled beyond the town, and re-entered it by a pleasant
walk, where there was a deep shade of leafy trees, and where there
were a few benches here and there for those who chose to rest. It not
being a place of general resort at any hour, and wearing at that time
of the still morning the air of being quite deserted and retired, Mr
Carker had it, or thought he had it, all to himself. So, with the whim
of an idle man, to whom there yet remained twenty minutes for reaching
a destination easily able in ten, Mr Carker threaded the great boles
of the trees, and went passing in and out, before this one and behind
that, weaving a chain of footsteps on the dewy ground.

But he found he was mistaken in supposing there was no one in the
grove, for as he softly rounded the trunk of one large tree, on which
the obdurate bark was knotted and overlapped like the hide of a
rhinoceros or some kindred monster of the ancient days before the
Flood, he saw an unexpected figure sitting on a bench near at hand,
about which, in another moment, he would have wound the chain he was
making.

It was that of a lady, elegantly dressed and very handsome, whose
dark proud eyes were fixed upon the ground, and in whom some passion
or struggle was raging. For as she sat looking down, she held a corner
of her under lip within her mouth, her bosom heaved, her nostril
quivered, her head trembled, indignant tears were on her cheek, and
her foot was set upon the moss as though she would have crushed it
into nothing. And yet almost the self-same glance that showed him
this, showed him the self-same lady rising with a scornful air of
weariness and lassitude, and turning away with nothing expressed in
face or figure but careless beauty and imperious disdain.

A withered and very ugly old woman, dressed not so much like a
gipsy as like any of that medley race of vagabonds who tramp about the
country, begging, and stealing, and tinkering, and weaving rushes, by
turns, or all together, had been observing the lady, too; for, as she
rose, this second figure strangely confronting the first, scrambled up
from the ground - out of it, it almost appeared - and stood in the
way.

'Let me tell your fortune, my pretty lady,' said the old woman,
munching with her jaws, as if the Death's Head beneath her yellow skin
were impatient to get out.

'I can tell it for myself,' was the reply.

'Ay, ay, pretty lady; but not right. You didn't tell it right when
you were sitting there. I see you! Give me a piece of silver, pretty
lady, and I'll tell your fortune true. There's riches, pretty lady, in
your face.'

'I know,' returned the lady, passing her with a dark smile, and a
proud step. 'I knew it before.

'What! You won't give me nothing?' cried the old woman. 'You won't
give me nothing to tell your fortune, pretty lady? How much will you
give me to tell it, then? Give me something, or I'll call it after
you!' croaked the old woman, passionately.

Mr Carker, whom the lady was about to pass close, slinking against
his tree as she crossed to gain the path, advanced so as to meet her,
and pulling off his hat as she went by, bade the old woman hold her
peace. The lady acknowledged his interference with an inclination of
the head, and went her way.

'You give me something then, or I'll call it after her!' screamed
the old woman, throwing up her arms, and pressing forward against his
outstretched hand. 'Or come,' she added, dropping her voice suddenly,
looking at him earnestly, and seeming in a moment to forget the object
of her wrath, 'give me something, or I'll call it after you! '

'After me, old lady!' returned the Manager, putting his hand in his
pocket.

'Yes,' said the woman, steadfast in her scrutiny, and holding out
her shrivelled hand. 'I know!'

'What do you know?' demanded Carker, throwing her a shilling. 'Do
you know who the handsome lady is?'

Munching like that sailor's wife of yore, who had chestnuts In her
lap, and scowling like the witch who asked for some in vain, the old
woman picked the shilling up, and going backwards, like a crab, or
like a heap of crabs: for her alternately expanding and contracting
hands might have represented two of that species, and her creeping
face, some half-a-dozen more: crouched on the veinous root of an old
tree, pulled out a short black pipe from within the crown of her
bonnet, lighted it with a match, and smoked in silence, looking
fixedly at her questioner.

Mr Carker laughed, and turned upon his heel.

'Good!' said the old woman. 'One child dead, and one child living:
one wife dead, and one wife coming. Go and meet her!'

In spite of himself, the Manager looked round again, and stopped.
The old woman, who had not removed her pipe, and was munching and
mumbling while she smoked, as if in conversation with an invisible
familiar, pointed with her finger in the direction he was going, and
laughed.

'What was that you said, Beldamite?' he demanded.

The woman mumbled, and chattered, and smoked, and still pointed
before him; but remained silent Muttering a farewell that was not
complimentary, Mr Carker pursued his way; but as he turned out of that
place, and looked over his shoulder at the root of the old tree, he
could yet see the finger pointing before him, and thought he heard the
woman screaming, 'Go and meet her!'

Preparations for a choice repast were completed, he found, at the
hotel; and Mr Dombey, and the Major, and the breakfast, were awaiting
the ladies. Individual constitution has much to do with the
development of such facts, no doubt; but in this case, appetite
carried it hollow over the tender passion; Mr Dombey being very cool
and collected, and the Major fretting and fuming in a state of violent
heat and irritation. At length the door was thrown open by the Native,
and, after a pause, occupied by her languishing along the gallery, a
very blooming, but not very youthful lady, appeared.

'My dear Mr Dombey,' said the lady, 'I am afraid we are late, but
Edith has been out already looking for a favourable point of view for
a sketch, and kept me waiting for her. Falsest of Majors,' giving him
her little finger, 'how do you do?'

'Mrs Skewton,' said Mr Dombey, 'let me gratify my friend Carker:'
Mr Dombey unconsciously emphasised the word friend, as saying "no
really; I do allow him to take credit for that distinction:" 'by
presenting him to you. You have heard me mention Mr Carker.'

'I am charmed, I am sure,' said Mrs Skewton, graciously.

Mr Carker was charmed, of course. Would he have been more charmed
on Mr Dombey's behalf, if Mrs Skewton had been (as he at first
supposed her) the Edith whom they had toasted overnight?

'Why, where, for Heaven's sake, is Edith?' exclaimed Mrs Skewton,
looking round. 'Still at the door, giving Withers orders about the
mounting of those drawings! My dear Mr Dombey, will you have the
kindness -

Mr Dombey was already gone to seek her. Next moment he returned,
bearing on his arm the same elegantly dressed and very handsome lady
whom Mr Carker had encountered underneath the trees.

'Carker - ' began Mr Dombey. But their recognition of each other
was so manifest, that Mr Dombey stopped surprised.

'I am obliged to the gentleman,' said Edith, with a stately bend,
'for sparing me some annoyance from an importunate beggar just now.'

'I am obliged to my good fortune,' said Mr Carker, bowing low, 'for
the opportunity of rendering so slight a service to one whose servant
I am proud to be.'

As her eye rested on him for an instant, and then lighted on the
ground, he saw in its bright and searching glance a suspicion that he
had not come up at the moment of his interference, but had secretly
observed her sooner. As he saw that, she saw in his eye that her
distrust was not without foundation.

'Really,' cried Mrs Skewton, who had taken this opportunity of
inspecting Mr Carker through her glass, and satisfying herself (as she
lisped audibly to the Major) that he was all heart; 'really now, this
is one of the most enchanting coincidences that I ever heard of. The
idea! My dearest Edith, there is such an obvious destiny in it, that
really one might almost be induced to cross one's arms upon one's
frock, and say, like those wicked Turks, there is no What's-his-name
but Thingummy, and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet!'

Edith designed no revision of this extraordinary quotation from the
Koran, but Mr Dombey felt it necessary to offer a few polite remarks.

'It gives me great pleasure,' said Mr Dombey, with cumbrous
gallantry, 'that a gentleman so nearly connected with myself as Carker
is, should have had the honour and happiness of rendering the least
assistance to Mrs Granger.' Mr Dombey bowed to her. 'But it gives me
some pain, and it occasions me to be really envious of Carker;' he
unconsciously laid stress on these words, as sensible that they must
appear to involve a very surprising proposition; 'envious of Carker,
that I had not that honour and that happiness myself.' Mr Dombey bowed
again. Edith, saving for a curl of her lip, was motionless.

'By the Lord, Sir,' cried the Major, bursting into speech at sight
of the waiter, who was come to announce breakfast, 'it's an
extraordinary thing to me that no one can have the honour and
happiness of shooting all such beggars through the head without being
brought to book for it. But here's an arm for Mrs Granger if she'll do
J. B. the honour to accept it; and the greatest service Joe can render
you, Ma'am, just now, is, to lead you into table!'

With this, the Major gave his arm to Edith; Mr Dombey led the way
with Mrs Skewton; Mrs Carker went last, smiling on the party.

'I am quite rejoiced, Mr Carker,' said the lady-mother, at
breakfast, after another approving survey of him through her glass,
'that you have timed your visit so happily, as to go with us to-day.
It is the most enchanting expedition!'

'Any expedition would be enchanting in such society,' returned
Carker; 'but I believe it is, in itself, full of interest.'

'Oh!' cried Mrs Skewton, with a faded little scream of rapture,
'the Castle is charming! - associations of the Middle Ages - and all
that - which is so truly exquisite. Don't you dote upon the Middle
Ages, Mr Carker?'

'Very much, indeed,' said Mr Carker.

'Such charming times!' cried Cleopatra. 'So full of faith! So
vigorous and forcible! So picturesque! So perfectly removed from
commonplace! Oh dear! If they would only leave us a little more of the
poetry of existence in these terrible days!'

Mrs Skewton was looking sharp after Mr Dombey all the time she said
this, who was looking at Edith: who was listening, but who never
lifted up her eyes.

'We are dreadfully real, Mr Carker,' said Mrs Skewton; 'are we
not?'

Few people had less reason to complain of their reality than
Cleopatra, who had as much that was false about her as could well go
to the composition of anybody with a real individual existence. But Mr
Carker commiserated our reality nevertheless, and agreed that we were
very hardly used in that regard.

'Pictures at the Castle, quite divine!' said Cleopatra. 'I hope you
dote upon pictures?'

'I assure you, Mrs Skewton,' said Mr Dombey, with solemn
encouragement of his Manager, 'that Carker has a very good taste for
pictures; quite a natural power of appreciating them. He is a very
creditable artist himself. He will be delighted, I am sure, with Mrs
Granger's taste and skill.'

'Damme, Sir!' cried Major Bagstock, 'my opinion is, that you're the
admirable Carker, and can do anything.'

'Oh!' smiled Carker, with humility, 'you are much too sanguine,
Major Bagstock. I can do very little. But Mr Dombey is so generous in
his estimation of any trivial accomplishment a man like myself may
find it almost necessary to acquire, and to which, in his very
different sphere, he is far superior, that - ' Mr Carker shrugged his
shoulders, deprecating further praise, and said no more.

All this time, Edith never raised her eyes, unless to glance
towards her mother when that lady's fervent spirit shone forth in
words. But as Carker ceased, she looked at Mr Dombey for a moment. For
a moment only; but with a transient gleam of scornful wonder on her
face, not lost on one observer, who was smiling round the board.

Mr Dombey caught the dark eyelash in its descent, and took the
opportunity of arresting it.

'You have been to Warwick often, unfortunately?' said Mr Dombey.

'Several times.'

'The visit will be tedious to you, I am afraid.'

'Oh no; not at all.'

'Ah! You are like your cousin Feenix, my dearest Edith,' said Mrs
Skewton. 'He has been to Warwick Castle fifty times, if he has been
there once; yet if he came to Leamington to-morrow - I wish he would,
dear angel! - he would make his fifty-second visit next day.'

'We are all enthusiastic, are we not, Mama?' said Edith, with a
cold smile.

'Too much so, for our peace, perhaps, my dear,' returned her
mother; 'but we won't complain. Our own emotions are our recompense.
If, as your cousin Feenix says, the sword wears out the
what's-its-name

'The scabbard, perhaps,' said Edith.

'Exactly - a little too fast, it is because it is bright and
glowing, you know, my dearest love.'

Mrs Skewton heaved a gentle sigh, supposed to cast a shadow on the
surface of that dagger of lath, whereof her susceptible bosom was the
sheath: and leaning her head on one side, in the Cleopatra manner,
looked with pensive affection on her darling child.

Edith had turned her face towards Mr Dombey when he first addressed
her, and had remained in that attitude, while speaking to her mother,
and while her mother spoke to her, as though offering him her
attention, if he had anything more to say. There was something in the
manner of this simple courtesy: almost defiant, and giving it the
character of being rendered on compulsion, or as a matter of traffic
to which she was a reluctant party again not lost upon that same
observer who was smiling round the board. It set him thinking of her
as he had first seen her, when she had believed herself to be alone
among the trees.

Mr Dombey having nothing else to say, proposed - the breakfast
being now finished, and the Major gorged, like any Boa Constrictor -
that they should start. A barouche being in waiting, according to the
orders of that gentleman, the two ladies, the Major and himself, took
their seats in it; the Native and the wan page mounted the box, Mr
Towlinson being left behind; and Mr Carker, on horseback, brought up
the rear. Mr Carker cantered behind the carriage. at the distance of a
hundred yards or so, and watched it, during all the ride, as if he
were a cat, indeed, and its four occupants, mice. Whether he looked to
one side of the road, or to the other - over distant landscape, with
its smooth undulations, wind-mills, corn, grass, bean fields,
wild-flowers, farm-yards, hayricks, and the spire among the wood - or
upwards in the sunny air, where butterflies were sporting round his
head, and birds were pouring out their songs - or downward, where the
shadows of the branches interlaced, and made a trembling carpet on the
road - or onward, where the overhanging trees formed aisles and
arches, dim with the softened light that steeped through leaves - one
corner of his eye was ever on the formal head of Mr Dombey, addressed
towards him, and the feather in the bonnet, drooping so neglectfully
and scornfully between them; much as he had seen the haughty eyelids
droop; not least so, when the face met that now fronting it. Once, and
once only, did his wary glance release these objects; and that was,
when a leap over a low hedge, and a gallop across a field, enabled him
to anticipate the carriage coming by the road, and to be standing
ready, at the journey's end, to hand the ladies out. Then, and but
then, he met her glance for an instant in her first surprise; but when
he touched her, in alighting, with his soft white hand, it overlooked
him altogether as before.

Mrs Skewton was bent on taking charge of Mr Carker herself, and
showing him the beauties of the Castle. She was determined to have his
arm, and the Major's too. It would do that incorrigible creature: who
was the most barbarous infidel in point of poetry: good to be in such
company. This chance arrangement left Mr Dombey at liberty to escort
Edith: which he did: stalking before them through the apartments with
a gentlemanly solemnity.

'Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with
their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their
delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their
picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly
charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!'

'Yes, we have fallen off deplorably,' said Mr Carker.

The peculiarity of their conversation was, that Mrs Skewton, in
spite of her ecstasies, and Mr Carker, in spite of his urbanity, were
both intent on watching Mr Dombey and Edith. With all their
conversational endowments, they spoke somewhat distractedly, and at
random, in consequence.

'We have no Faith left, positively,' said Mrs Skewton, advancing
her shrivelled ear; for Mr Dombey was saying something to Edith. 'We
have no Faith in the dear old Barons, who were the most delightful
creatures - or in the dear old Priests, who were the most warlike of
men - or even in the days of that inestimable Queen Bess, upon the
wall there, which were so extremely golden. Dear creature! She was all
Heart And that charming father of hers! I hope you dote on Harry the
Eighth!'

'I admire him very much,' said Carker.

'So bluff!' cried Mrs Skewton, 'wasn't he? So burly. So truly
English. Such a picture, too, he makes, with his dear little peepy
eyes, and his benevolent chin!'

'Ah, Ma'am!' said Carker, stopping short; 'but if you speak of
pictures, there's a composition! What gallery in the world can produce
the counterpart of that?'

As the smiling gentleman thus spake, he pointed through a doorway
to where Mr Dombey and Edith were standing alone in the centre of
another room.

They were not interchanging a word or a look. Standing together,
arm in arm, they had the appearance of being more divided than if seas
had rolled between them. There was a difference even in the pride of
the two, that removed them farther from each other, than if one had
been the proudest and the other the humblest specimen of humanity in
all creation. He, self-important, unbending, formal, austere. She,
lovely and graceful, in an uncommon degree, but totally regardless of
herself and him and everything around, and spurning her own
attractions with her haughty brow and lip, as if they were a badge or
livery she hated. So unmatched were they, and opposed, so forced and
linked together by a chain which adverse hazard and mischance had
forged: that fancy might have imagined the pictures on the walls
around them, startled by the unnatural conjunction, and observant of
it in their several expressions. Grim knights and warriors looked
scowling on them. A churchman, with his hand upraised, denounced the
mockery of such a couple coming to God's altar. Quiet waters in
landscapes, with the sun reflected in their depths, asked, if better
means of escape were not at hand, was there no drowning left? Ruins
cried, 'Look here, and see what We are, wedded to uncongenial Time!'
Animals, opposed by nature, worried one another, as a moral to them.
Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such
torment in its painted history of suffering.

Nevertheless, Mrs Skewton was so charmed by the sight to which Mr
Carker invoked her attention, that she could not refraIn from saying,
half aloud, how sweet, how very full of soul it was! Edith,
overhearing, looked round, and flushed indignant scarlet to her hair.

'My dearest Edith knows I was admiring her!' said Cleopatra,
tapping her, almost timidly, on the back with her parasol. 'Sweet
pet!'

Again Mr Carker saw the strife he had witnessed so unexpectedly
among the trees. Again he saw the haughty languor and indifference
come over it, and hide it like a cloud.

She did not raise her eyes to him; but with a slight peremptory
motion of them, seemed to bid her mother come near. Mrs Skewton
thought it expedient to understand the hint, and advancing quickly,
with her two cavaliers, kept near her daughter from that time,

Mr Carker now, having nothing to distract his attention, began to
discourse upon the pictures and to select the best, and point them out
to Mr Dombey: speaking with his usual familiar recognition of Mr
Dombey's greatness, and rendering homage by adjusting his eye-glass
for him, or finding out the right place in his catalogue, or holding
his stick, or the like. These services did not so much originate with
Mr Carker, in truth, as with Mr Dombey himself, who was apt to assert
his chieftainship by saying, with subdued authority, and in an easy
way - for him - 'Here, Carker, have the goodness to assist me, will
you?' which the smiling gentleman always did with pleasure.

They made the tour of the pictures, the walls, crow's nest, and so
forth; and as they were still one little party, and the Major was
rather in the shade: being sleepy during the process of digestion: Mr
Carker became communicative and agreeable. At first, he addressed
himself for the most part to Mrs Skewton; but as that sensitive lady
was in such ecstasies with the works of art, after the first quarter
of an hour, that she could do nothing but yawn (they were such perfect
inspirations, she observed as a reason for that mark of rapture), he
transferred his attentions to Mr Dombey. Mr Dombey said little beyond
an occasional 'Very true, Carker,' or 'Indeed, Carker,' but he tacitly
encouraged Carker to proceed, and inwardly approved of his behaviour
very much: deeming it as well that somebody should talk, and thinking
that his remarks, which were, as one might say, a branch of the parent
establishment, might amuse Mrs Granger. Mr Carker, who possessed an
excellent discretion, never took the liberty of addressing that lady,
direct; but she seemed to listen, though she never looked at him; and
once or twice, when he was emphatic in his peculiar humility, the
twilight smile stole over her face, not as a light, but as a deep
black shadow.

Warwick Castle being at length pretty well exhausted, and the Major
very much so: to say nothing of Mrs Skewton, whose peculiar
demonstrations of delight had become very frequent Indeed: the
carriage was again put In requisition, and they rode to several
admired points of view In the neighbourhood. Mr Dombey ceremoniously
observed of one of these, that a sketch, however slight, from the fair
hand of Mrs Granger, would be a remembrance to him of that agreeable
day: though he wanted no artificial remembrance, he was sure (here Mr
Dombey made another of his bows), which he must always highly value.
Withers the lean having Edith's sketch-book under his arm, was
immediately called upon by Mrs Skewton to produce the same: and the
carriage stopped, that Edith might make the drawing, which Mr Dombey
was to put away among his treasures.

'But I am afraid I trouble you too much,' said Mr Dombey.

'By no means. Where would you wish it taken from?' she answered,
turning to him with the same enforced attention as before.

Mr Dombey, with another bow, which cracked the starch in his
cravat, would beg to leave that to the Artist.

'I would rather you chose for yourself,' said Edith.

'Suppose then,' said Mr Dombey, 'we say from here. It appears a
good spot for the purpose, or - Carker, what do you think?'

There happened to be in the foreground, at some little distance, a
grove of trees, not unlike that In which Mr Carker had made his chain
of footsteps in the morning, and with a seat under one tree, greatly
resembling, in the general character of its situation, the point where
his chain had broken.

'Might I venture to suggest to Mrs Granger,' said Carker, 'that
that is an interesting - almost a curious - point of view?'

She followed the direction of his riding-whip with her eyes, and
raised them quickly to his face. It was the second glance they had
exchanged since their introduction; and would have been exactly like
the first, but that its expression was plainer.

'Will you like that?' said Edith to Mr Dombey.

'I shall be charmed,' said Mr Dombey to Edith.

Therefore the carriage was driven to the spot where Mr Dombey was
to be charmed; and Edith, without moving from her seat, and openIng
her sketch-book with her usual proud indifference, began to sketch.

'My pencils are all pointless,' she said, stopping and turning them
over.

'Pray allow me,' said Mr Dombey. 'Or Carker will do it better, as
he understands these things. Carker, have the goodness to see to these
pencils for Mrs Granger.

Mr Carker rode up close to the carriage-door on Mrs Granger's side,
and letting the rein fall on his horse's neck, took the pencils from
her hand with a smile and a bow, and sat in the saddle leisurely
mending them. Having done so, he begged to be allowed to hold them,
and to hand them to her as they were required; and thus Mr Carker,
with many commendations of Mrs Granger's extraordinary skill -
especially in trees - remained - close at her side, looking over the
drawing as she made it. Mr Dombey in the meantime stood bolt upright
in the carriage like a highly respectable ghost, looking on too; while
Cleopatra and the Major dallied as two ancient doves might do.

'Are you satisfied with that, or shall I finish it a little more?'
said Edith, showing the sketch to Mr Dombey.

Mr Dombey begged that it might not be touched; it was perfection.

'It is most extraordinary,' said Carker, bringing every one of his
red gums to bear upon his praise. 'I was not prepared for anything so
beautiful, and so unusual altogether.'

This might have applied to the sketcher no less than to the sketch;
but Mr Carker's manner was openness itself - not as to his mouth
alone, but as to his whole spirit. So it continued to be while the
drawing was laid aside for Mr Dombey, and while the sketching
materials were put up; then he handed in the pencils (which were
received with a distant acknowledgment of his help, but without a
look), and tightening his rein, fell back, and followed the carriage
again.

Thinking, perhaps, as he rode, that even this trivial sketch had
been made and delivered to its owner, as if it had been bargained for
and bought. Thinking, perhaps, that although she had assented with
such perfect readiness to his request, her haughty face, bent over the
drawing, or glancing at the distant objects represented in it, had
been the face of a proud woman, engaged in a sordid and miserable
transaction. Thinking, perhaps, of such things: but smiling certainly,
and while he seemed to look about him freely, in enjoyment of the air
and exercise, keeping always that sharp corner of his eye upon the
carriage.

A stroll among the haunted ruins of Kenilworth, and more rides to
more points of view: most of which, Mrs Skewton reminded Mr Dombey,
Edith had already sketched, as he had seen in looking over her
drawings: brought the day's expedition to a close. Mrs Skewton and
Edith were driven to their own lodgings; Mr Carker was graciously
invited by Cleopatra to return thither with Mr Dombey and the Major,
in the evening, to hear some of Edith's music; and the three gentlemen
repaired to their hotel to dinner.

The dinner was the counterpart of yesterday's, except that the
Major was twenty-four hours more triumphant and less mysterious. Edith
was toasted again. Mr Dombey was again agreeably embarrassed. And Mr
Carker was full of interest and praise.

There were no other visitors at Mrs Skewton's. Edith's drawings
were strewn about the room, a little more abundantly than usual
perhaps; and Withers, the wan page, handed round a little stronger
tea. The harp was there; the piano was there; and Edith sang and
played. But even the music was played by Edith to Mr Dombey's order,
as it were, in the same uncompromising way. As thus.

'Edith, my dearest love,' said Mrs Skewton, half an hour after tea,
'Mr Dombey is dying to hear you, I know.'

'Mr Dombey has life enough left to say so for himself, Mama, I have
no doubt.'

'I shall be immensely obliged,' said Mr Dombey.

'What do you wish?'

'Piano?' hesitated Mr Dombey.

'Whatever you please. You have only to choose.

Accordingly, she began with the piano. It was the same with the
harp; the same with her singing; the same with the selection of the
pieces that she sang and played. Such frigid and constrained, yet
prompt and pointed acquiescence with the wishes he imposed upon her,
and on no one else, was sufficiently remarkable to penetrate through
all the mysteries of picquet, and impress itself on Mr Carker's keen
attention. Nor did he lose sight of the fact that Mr Dombey was
evidently proud of his power, and liked to show it.

Nevertheless, Mr Carker played so well - some games with the Major,
and some with Cleopatra, whose vigilance of eye in respect of Mr
Dombey and Edith no lynx could have surpassed - that he even
heightened his position in the lady-mother's good graces; and when on
taking leave he regretted that he would be obliged to return to London
next morning, Cleopatra trusted: community of feeling not being met
with every day: that it was far from being the last time they would
meet.

'I hope so,' said Mr Carker, with an expressive look at the couple
in the distance, as he drew towards the door, following the Major. 'I
think so.'

Mr Dombey, who had taken a stately leave of Edith, bent, or made
some approach to a bend, over Cleopatra's couch, and said, in a low
voice:

'I have requested Mrs Granger's permission to call on her to-morrow
morning - for a purpose - and she has appointed twelve o'clock. May I
hope to have the pleasure of finding you at home, Madam, afterwards?'

Cleopatra was so much fluttered and moved, by hearing this, of
course, incomprehensible speech, that she could only shut her eyes,
and shake her head, and give Mr Dombey her hand; which Mr Dombey, not
exactly knowing what to do with, dropped.

'Dombey, come along!' cried the Major, looking in at the door.
'Damme, Sir, old Joe has a great mind to propose an alteration in the
name of the Royal Hotel, and that it should be called the Three Jolly
Bachelors, in honour of ourselves and Carker.' With this, the Major
slapped Mr Dombey on the back, and winking over his shoulder at the
ladies, with a frightful tendency of blood to the head, carried him
off.

Mrs Skewton reposed on her sofa, and Edith sat apart, by her harp,
in silence. The mother, trifling with her fan, looked stealthily at
the daughter more than once, but the daughter, brooding gloomily with
downcast eyes, was not to be disturbed.

Thus they remained for a long hour, without a word, until Mrs
Skewton's maid appeared, according to custom, to prepare her gradually
for night. At night, she should have been a skeleton, with dart and
hour-glass, rather than a woman, this attendant; for her touch was as
the touch of Death. The painted object shrivelled underneath her hand;
the form collapsed, the hair dropped off, the arched dark eyebrows
changed to scanty tufts of grey; the pale lips shrunk, the skin became
cadaverous and loose; an old, worn, yellow, nodding woman, with red
eyes, alone remained in Cleopatra's place, huddled up, like a slovenly
bundle, in a greasy flannel gown.

The very voice was changed, as it addressed Edith, when they were
alone again.

'Why don't you tell me,' it said sharply, 'that he is coming here
to-morrow by appointment?'

'Because you know it,' returned Edith, 'Mother.'

The mocking emphasis she laid on that one word!

'You know he has bought me,' she resumed. 'Or that he will,
to-morrow. He has considered of his bargain; he has shown it to his
friend; he is even rather proud of it; he thinks that it will suit
him, and may be had sufficiently cheap; and he will buy to-morrow.
God, that I have lived for this, and that I feel it!'

Compress into one handsome face the conscious self-abasement, and
the burning indignation of a hundred women, strong in passion and in
pride; and there it hid itself with two white shuddering arms.

'What do you mean?' returned the angry mother. 'Haven't you from a
child - '

'A child!' said Edith, looking at her, 'when was I a child? What
childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing,
mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or
even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I
learnt You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride
tonight'

And as she spoke, she struck her hand upon her beautiful bosom, as
though she would have beaten down herself

'Look at me,' she said, 'who have never known what it is to have an
honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when
children play; and married in my youth - an old age of design - to one
for whom I had no feeling but indifference. Look at me, whom he left a
widow, dying before his inheritance descended to him - a judgment on
you! well deserved! - and tell me what has been my life for ten years
since.'

'We have been making every effort to endeavour to secure to you a
good establishment,' rejoined her mother. 'That has been your life.
And now you have got it.'

'There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so
shown and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been,
for ten shameful years,' cried Edith, with a burning brow, and the
same bitter emphasis on the one word. 'Is it not so? Have I been made
the bye-word of all kinds of men? Have fools, have profligates, have
boys, have dotards, dangled after me, and one by one rejected me, and
fallen off, because you were too plain with all your cunning: yes, and
too true, with all those false pretences: until we have almost come to
be notorious? The licence of look and touch,' she said, with flashing
eyes, 'have I submitted to it, in half the places of resort upon the
map of England? Have I been hawked and vended here and there, until
the last grain of self-respect is dead within me, and I loathe myself?
Has been my late childhood? I had none before. Do not tell me that I
had, tonight of all nights in my life!'

'You might have been well married,' said her mother, 'twenty times
at least, Edith, if you had given encouragement enough.'

'No! Who takes me, refuse that I am, and as I well deserve to be,'
she answered, raising her head, and trembling in her energy of shame
and stormy pride, 'shall take me, as this man does, with no art of
mine put forth to lure him. He sees me at the auction, and he thinks
it well to buy me. Let him! When he came to view me - perhaps to bid -
he required to see the roll of my accomplishments. I gave it to him.
When he would have me show one of them, to justify his purchase to his
men, I require of him to say which he demands, and I exhibit it. I
will do no more. He makes the purchase of his own will, and with his
own sense of its worth, and the power of his money; and I hope it may
never disappoint him. I have not vaunted and pressed the bargain;
neither have you, so far as I have been able to prevent you.

'You talk strangely to-night, Edith, to your own Mother.'

'It seems so to me; stranger to me than you,' said Edith. 'But my
education was completed long ago. I am too old now, and have fallen
too low, by degrees, to take a new course, and to stop yours, and to
help myself. The germ of all that purifies a woman's breast, and makes
it true and good, has never stirred in mine, and I have nothing else
to sustain me when I despise myself.' There had been a touching
sadness in her voice, but it was gone, when she went on to say, with a
curled lip, 'So, as we are genteel and poor, I am content that we
should be made rich by these means; all I say is, I have kept the only
purpose I have had the strength to form - I had almost said the power,
with you at my side, Mother - and have not tempted this man on.'

'This man! You speak,' said her mother, 'as if you hated him.'

'And you thought I loved him, did you not?' she answered, stopping
on her way across the room, and looking round. 'Shall I tell you,' she
continued, with her eyes fixed on her mother, 'who already knows us
thoroughly, and reads us right, and before whom I have even less of
self-respect or confidence than before my own inward self; being so
much degraded by his knowledge of me?'

'This is an attack, I suppose,' returned her mother coldly, 'on
poor, unfortunate what's-his-name - Mr Carker! Your want of
self-respect and confidence, my dear, in reference to that person (who
is very agreeable, it strikes me), is not likely to have much effect
on your establishment. Why do you look at me so hard? Are you ill?'

Edith suddenly let fall her face, as if it had been stung, and
while she pressed her hands upon it, a terrible tremble crept over her
whole frame. It was quickly gone; and with her usual step, she passed
out of the room.

The maid who should have been a skeleton, then reappeared, and
giving one arm to her mistress, who appeared to have taken off her
manner with her charms, and to have put on paralysis with her flannel
gown, collected the ashes of Cleopatra, and carried them away in the
other, ready for tomorrow's revivification.



CHAPTER 28.

Alterations


'So the day has come at length, Susan,' said Florence to the
excellent Nipper, 'when we are going back to our quiet home!'

Susan drew in her breath with an amount of expression not easily
described, further relieving her feelings with a smart cough,
answered, 'Very quiet indeed, Miss Floy, no doubt. Excessive so.'

'When I was a child,' said Florence, thoughtfully, and after musing
for some moments, 'did you ever see that gentleman who has taken the
trouble to ride down here to speak to me, now three times - three
times, I think, Susan?'

'Three times, Miss,' returned the Nipper. 'Once when you was out a
walking with them Sket- '

Florence gently looked at her, and Miss Nipper checked herself.

'With Sir Barnet and his lady, I mean to say, Miss, and the young
gentleman. And two evenings since then.'

'When I was a child, and when company used to come to visit Papa,
did you ever see that gentleman at home, Susan?' asked Florence.

'Well, Miss,' returned her maid, after considering, 'I really
couldn't say I ever did. When your poor dear Ma died, Miss Floy, I was
very new in the family, you see, and my element:' the Nipper bridled,
as opining that her merits had been always designedly extinguished by
Mr Dombey: 'was the floor below the attics.'

'To be sure,' said Florence, still thoughtfully; 'you are not
likely to have known who came to the house. I quite forgot.'

'Not, Miss, but what we talked about the family and visitors,' said
Susan, 'and but what I heard much said, although the nurse before Mrs
Richards make unpleasant remarks when I was in company, and hint at
little Pitchers, but that could only be attributed, poor thing,'
observed Susan, with composed forbearance, 'to habits of intoxication,
for which she was required to leave, and did.'

Florence, who was seated at her chamber window, with her face
resting on her hand, sat looking out, and hardly seemed to hear what
Susan said, she was so lost in thought.

'At all events, Miss,' said Susan, 'I remember very well that this
same gentleman, Mr Carker, was almost, if not quite, as great a
gentleman with your Papa then, as he is now. It used to be said in the
house then, Miss, that he was at the head of all your Pa's affairs in
the City, and managed the whole, and that your Pa minded him more than
anybody, which, begging your pardon, Miss Floy, he might easy do, for
he never minded anybody else. I knew that, Pitcher as I might have
been.'

Susan Nipper, with an injured remembrance of the nurse before Mrs
Richards, emphasised 'Pitcher' strongly.

'And that Mr Carker has not fallen off, Miss,' she pursued, 'but
has stood his ground, and kept his credit with your Pa, I know from
what is always said among our people by that Perch, whenever he comes
to the house; and though he's the weakest weed in the world, Miss
Floy, and no one can have a moment's patience with the man, he knows
what goes on in the City tolerable well, and says that your Pa does
nothing without Mr Carker, and leaves all to Mr Carker, and acts
according to Mr Carker, and has Mr Carker always at his elbow, and I
do believe that he believes (that washiest of Perches!) that after
your Pa, the Emperor of India is the child unborn to Mr Carker.'

Not a word of this was lost on Florence, who, with an awakened
interest in Susan's speech, no longer gazed abstractedly on the
prospect without, but looked at her, and listened with attention.

'Yes, Susan,' she said, when that young lady had concluded. 'He is
in Papa's confidence, and is his friend, I am sure.'

Florence's mind ran high on this theme, and had done for some days.
Mr Carker, in the two visits with which he had followed up his first
one, had assumed a confidence between himself and her - a right on his
part to be mysterious and stealthy, in telling her that the ship was
still unheard of - a kind of mildly restrained power and authority
over her - that made her wonder, and caused her great uneasiness. She
had no means of repelling it, or of freeing herself from the web he
was gradually winding about her; for that would have required some art
and knowledge of the world, opposed to such address as his; and
Florence had none. True, he had said no more to her than that there
was no news of the ship, and that he feared the worst; but how he came
to know that she was interested in the ship, and why he had the right
to signify his knowledge to her, so insidiously and darkly, troubled
Florence very much.

This conduct on the part of Mr Carker, and her habit of often
considering it with wonder and uneasiness, began to invest him with an
uncomfortable fascination in Florence's thoughts. A more distinct
remembrance of his features, voice, and manner: which she sometimes
courted, as a means of reducing him to the level of a real personage,
capable of exerting no greater charm over her than another: did not
remove the vague impression. And yet he never frowned, or looked upon
her with an air of dislike or animosity, but was always smiling and
serene.

Again, Florence, in pursuit of her strong purpose with reference to
her father, and her steady resolution to believe that she was herself
unwittingly to blame for their so cold and distant relations, would
recall to mind that this gentleman was his confidential friend, and
would think, with an anxious heart, could her struggling tendency to
dislike and fear him be a part of that misfortune in her, which had
turned her father's love adrift, and left her so alone? She dreaded
that it might be; sometimes believed it was: then she resolved that
she would try to conquer this wrong feeling; persuaded herself that
she was honoured and encouraged by the notice of her father's friend;
and hoped that patient observation of him and trust in him would lead
her bleeding feet along that stony road which ended in her father's
heart.

Thus, with no one to advise her - for she could advise with no one
without seeming to complain against him - gentle Florence tossed on an
uneasy sea of doubt and hope; and Mr Carker, like a scaly monster of
the deep, swam down below, and kept his shining eye upon her. Florence
had a new reason in all this for wishing to be at home again. Her
lonely life was better suited to her course of timid hope and doubt;
and she feared sometimes, that in her absence she might miss some
hopeful chance of testifying her affection for her father. Heaven
knows, she might have set her mind at rest, poor child! on this last
point; but her slighted love was fluttering within her, and, even in
her sleep, it flew away in dreams, and nestled, like a wandering bird
come home, upon her father's neck.

Of Walter she thought often. Ah! how often, when the night was
gloomy, and the wind was blowing round the house! But hope was strong
in her breast. It is so difficult for the young and ardent, even with
such experience as hers, to imagine youth and ardour quenched like a
weak flame, and the bright day of life merging into night, at noon,
that hope was strong yet. Her tears fell frequently for Walter's
sufferings; but rarely for his supposed death, and never long.

She had written to the old Instrument-maker, but had received no
answer to her note: which indeed required none. Thus matters stood
with Florence on the morning when she was going home, gladly, to her
old secluded life.

Doctor and Mrs Blimber, accompanied (much against his will) by
their valued charge, Master Barnet, were already gone back to
Brighton, where that young gentleman and his fellow-pilgrims to
Parnassus were then, no doubt, in the continual resumption of their
studies. The holiday time was past and over; most of the juvenile
guests at the villa had taken their departure; and Florence's long
visit was come to an end.

There was one guest, however, albeit not resident within the house,
who had been very constant in his attentions to the family, and who
still remained devoted to them. This was Mr Toots, who after renewing,
some weeks ago, the acquaintance he had had the happiness of forming
with Skettles Junior, on the night when he burst the Blimberian bonds
and soared into freedom with his ring on, called regularly every other
day, and left a perfect pack of cards at the hall-door; so many
indeed, that the ceremony was quite a deal on the part of Mr Toots,
and a hand at whist on the part of the servant.

Mr Toots, likewise, with the bold and happy idea of preventing the
family from forgetting him (but there is reason to suppose that this
expedient originated in the teeming brain of the Chicken), had
established a six-oared cutter, manned by aquatic friends of the
Chicken's and steered by that illustrious character in person, who
wore a bright red fireman's coat for the purpose, and concealed the
perpetual black eye with which he was afflicted, beneath a green
shade. Previous to the institution of this equipage, Mr Toots sounded
the Chicken on a hypothetical case, as, supposing the Chicken to be
enamoured of a young lady named Mary, and to have conceived the
intention of starting a boat of his own, what would he call that boat?
The Chicken replied, with divers strong asseverations, that he would
either christen it Poll or The Chicken's Delight. Improving on this
idea, Mr Toots, after deep study and the exercise of much invention,
resolved to call his boat The Toots's Joy, as a delicate compliment to
Florence, of which no man knowing the parties, could possibly miss the
appreciation.

Stretched on a crimson cushion in his gallant bark, with his shoes
in the air, Mr Toots, in the exercise of his project, had come up the
river, day after day, and week after week, and had flitted to and fro,
near Sir Barnet's garden, and had caused his crew to cut across and
across the river at sharp angles, for his better exhibition to any
lookers-out from Sir Barnet's windows, and had had such evolutions
performed by the Toots's Joy as had filled all the neighbouring part
of the water-side with astonishment. But whenever he saw anyone in Sir
Barnet's garden on the brink of the river, Mr Toots always feigned to
be passing there, by a combination of coincidences of the most
singular and unlikely description.

'How are you, Toots?' Sir Barnet would say, waving his hand from
the lawn, while the artful Chicken steered close in shore.

'How de do, Sir Barnet?' Mr Toots would answer, What a surprising
thing that I should see you here!'

Mr Toots, in his sagacity, always said this, as if, instead of that
being Sir Barnet's house, it were some deserted edifice on the banks
of the Nile, or Ganges.

'I never was so surprised!' Mr Toots would exclaim. - 'Is Miss
Dombey there?'

Whereupon Florence would appear, perhaps.

'Oh, Diogenes is quite well, Miss Dombey,' Toots would cry. 'I
called to ask this morning.'

'Thank you very much!' the pleasant voice of Florence would reply.

'Won't you come ashore, Toots?' Sir Barnet would say then. 'Come!
you're in no hurry. Come and see us.'

'Oh, it's of no consequence, thank you!' Mr Toots would blushingly
rejoin. 'I thought Miss Dombey might like to know, that's all.
Good-bye!' And poor Mr Toots, who was dying to accept the invitation,
but hadn't the courage to do it, signed to the Chicken, with an aching
heart, and away went the Joy, cleaving the water like an arrow.

The Joy was lying in a state of extraordinary splendour, at the
garden steps, on the morning of Florence's departure. When she went
downstairs to take leave, after her talk with Susan, she found Mr
Toots awaiting her in the drawing-room.

'Oh, how de do, Miss Dombey?' said the stricken Toots, always
dreadfully disconcerted when the desire of his heart was gained, and
he was speaking to her; 'thank you, I'm very well indeed, I hope
you're the same, so was Diogenes yesterday.'

'You are very kind,' said Florence.

'Thank you, it's of no consequence,' retorted Mr Toots. 'I thought
perhaps you wouldn't mind, in this fine weather, coming home by water,
Miss Dombey. There's plenty of room in the boat for your maid.'

'I am very much obliged to you,' said Florence, hesitating. 'I
really am - but I would rather not.'

'Oh, it's of no consequence,' retorted Mr Toots. 'Good morning.'

'Won't you wait and see Lady Skettles?' asked Florence, kindly.

'Oh no, thank you,' returned Mr Toots, 'it's of no consequence at
all.'

So shy was Mr Toots on such occasions, and so flurried! But Lady
Skettles entering at the moment, Mr Toots was suddenly seized with a
passion for asking her how she did, and hoping she was very well; nor
could Mr Toots by any possibility leave off shaking hands with her,
until Sir Barnet appeared: to whom he immediately clung with the
tenacity of desperation.

'We are losing, today, Toots,' said Sir Barnet, turning towards
Florence, 'the light of our house, I assure you'

'Oh, it's of no conseq - I mean yes, to be sure,' faltered the
embarrassed Mr Toots. 'Good morning!'

Notwithstanding the emphatic nature of this farewell, Mr Toots,
instead of going away, stood leering about him, vacantly. Florence, to
relieve him, bade adieu, with many thanks, to Lady Skettles, and gave
her arm to Sir Barnet.

'May I beg of you, my dear Miss Dombey,' said her host, as he
conducted her to the carriage, 'to present my best compliments to your
dear Papa?'

It was distressing to Florence to receive the commission, for she
felt as if she were imposing on Sir Barnet by allowing him to believe
that a kindness rendered to her, was rendered to her father. As she
could not explain, however, she bowed her head and thanked him; and
again she thought that the dull home, free from such embarrassments,
and such reminders of her sorrow, was her natural and best retreat.

Such of her late friends and companions as were yet remaining at
the villa, came running from within, and from the garden, to say
good-bye. They were all attached to her, and very earnest in taking
leave of her. Even the household were sorry for her going, and the
servants came nodding and curtseying round the carriage door. As
Florence looked round on the kind faces, and saw among them those of
Sir Barnet and his lady, and of Mr Toots, who was chuckling and
staring at her from a distance, she was reminded of the night when
Paul and she had come from Doctor Blimber's: and when the carriage
drove away, her face was wet with tears.

Sorrowful tears, but tears of consolation, too; for all the softer
memories connected with the dull old house to which she was returning
made it dear to her, as they rose up. How long it seemed since she had
wandered through the silent rooms: since she had last crept, softly
and afraid, into those her father occupied: since she had felt the
solemn but yet soothing influence of the beloved dead in every action
of her daily life! This new farewell reminded her, besides, of her
parting with poor Walter: of his looks and words that night: and of
the gracious blending she had noticed in him, of tenderness for those
he left behind, with courage and high spirit. His little history was
associated with the old house too, and gave it a new claim and hold
upon her heart. Even Susan Nipper softened towards the home of so many
years, as they were on their way towards it. Gloomy as it was, and
rigid justice as she rendered to its gloom, she forgave it a great
deal. 'I shall be glad to see it again, I don't deny, Miss,' said the
Nipper. 'There ain't much in it to boast of, but I wouldn't have it
burnt or pulled down, neither!'

'You'll be glad to go through the old rooms, won't you, Susan?'
said Florence, smiling.

'Well, Miss,' returned the Nipper, softening more and more towards
the house, as they approached it nearer, 'I won't deny but what I
shall, though I shall hate 'em again, to-morrow, very likely.'

Florence felt that, for her, there was greater peace within it than
elsewhere. It was better and easier to keep her secret shut up there,
among the tall dark walls, than to carry it abroad into the light, and
try to hide it from a crowd of happy eyes. It was better to pursue the
study of her loving heart, alone, and find no new discouragements in
loving hearts about her. It was easier to hope, and pray, and love on,
all uncared for, yet with constancy and patience, in the tranquil
sanctuary of such remembrances: although it mouldered, rusted, and
decayed about her: than in a new scene, let its gaiety be what it
would. She welcomed back her old enchanted dream of life, and longed
for the old dark door to close upon her, once again.

Full of such thoughts, they turned into the long and sombre street.
Florence was not on that side of the carriage which was nearest to her
home, and as the distance lessened between them and it, she looked out
of her window for the children over the way.

She was thus engaged, when an exclamation from Susan caused her to
turn quickly round.

'Why, Gracious me!' cried Susan, breathless, 'where's our house!'

'Our house!' said Florence.

Susan, drawing in her head from the window, thrust it out again,
drew it in again as the carriage stopped, and stared at her mistress
in amazement.

There was a labyrinth of scaffolding raised all round the house,
from the basement to the roof. Loads of bricks and stones, and heaps
of mortar, and piles of wood, blocked up half the width and length of
the broad street at the side. Ladders were raised against the walls;
labourers were climbing up and down; men were at work upon the steps
of the scaffolding; painters and decorators were busy inside; great
rolls of ornamental paper were being delivered from a cart at the
door; an upholsterer's waggon also stopped the way; no furniture was
to be seen through the gaping and broken windows in any of the rooms;
nothing but workmen, and the implements of their several trades,
swarming from the kitchens to the garrets. Inside and outside alike:
bricklayers, painters, carpenters, masons: hammer, hod, brush,
pickaxe, saw, and trowel: all at work together, in full chorus!

Florence descended from the coach, half doubting if it were, or
could be the right house, until she recognised Towlinson, with a
sun-burnt face, standing at the door to receive her.

'There is nothing the matter?' inquired Florence.

'Oh no, Miss.'

'There are great alterations going on.'

'Yes, Miss, great alterations,' said Towlinson.

Florence passed him as if she were in a dream, and hurried
upstairs. The garish light was in the long-darkened drawing-room and
there were steps and platforms, and men In paper caps, in the high
places. Her mother's picture was gone with the rest of the moveables,
and on the mark where it had been, was scrawled in chalk, 'this room
in panel. Green and gold.' The staircase was a labyrinth of posts and
planks like the outside of the house, and a whole Olympus of plumbers
and glaziers was reclining in various attitudes, on the skylight. Her
own room was not yet touched within, but there were beams and boards
raised against it without, baulking the daylight. She went up swiftly
to that other bedroom, where the little bed was; and a dark giant of a
man with a pipe in his mouth, and his head tied up in a
pocket-handkerchief, was staring in at the window.

It was here that Susan Nipper, who had been in quest of Florence,
found her, and said, would she go downstairs to her Papa, who wished
to speak to her.

'At home! and wishing to speak to me!' cried Florence, trembling.

Susan, who was infinitely more distraught than Florence herself,
repeated her errand; and Florence, pale and agitated, hurried down
again, without a moment's hesitation. She thought upon the way down,
would she dare to kiss him? The longing of her heart resolved her, and
she thought she would.

Her father might have heard that heart beat, when it came into his
presence. One instant, and it would have beat against his breast.

But he was not alone. There were two ladies there; and Florence
stopped. Striving so hard with her emotion, that if her brute friend
Di had not burst in and overwhelmed her with his caresses as a welcome
home - at which one of the ladies gave a little scream, and that
diverted her attention from herself - she would have swooned upon the
floor.

'Florence,' said her father, putting out his hand: so stiffly that
it held her off: 'how do you do?'

Florence took the hand between her own, and putting it timidly to
her lips, yielded to its withdrawal. It touched the door in shutting
it, with quite as much endearment as it had touched her.

'What dog is that?' said Mr Dombey, displeased.

'It is a dog, Papa - from Brighton.'

'Well!' said Mr Dombey; and a cloud passed over his face, for he
understood her.

'He is very good-tempered,' said Florence, addressing herself with
her natural grace and sweetness to the two lady strangers. 'He is only
glad to see me. Pray forgive him.'

She saw in the glance they interchanged, that the lady who had
screamed, and who was seated, was old; and that the other lady, who
stood near her Papa, was very beautiful, and of an elegant figure.

'Mrs Skewton,' said her father, turning to the first, and holding
out his hand, 'this is my daughter Florence.'

'Charming, I am sure,' observed the lady, putting up her glass. 'So
natural! My darling Florence, you must kiss me, if you please.'

Florence having done so, turned towards the other lady, by whom her
father stood waiting.

'Edith,' said Mr Dombey, 'this is my daughter Florence. Florence,
this lady will soon be your Mama.'

Florence started, and looked up at the beautiful face in a conflict
of emotions, among which the tears that name awakened, struggled for a
moment with surprise, interest, admiration, and an indefinable sort of
fear. Then she cried out, 'Oh, Papa, may you be happy! may you be
very, very happy all your life!' and then fell weeping on the lady's
bosom.

There was a short silence. The beautiful lady, who at first had
seemed to hesitate whether or no she should advance to Florence, held
her to her breast, and pressed the hand with which she clasped her,
close about her waist, as if to reassure her and comfort her. Not one
word passed the lady's lips. She bent her head down over Florence, and
she kissed her on the cheek, but she said no word.

'Shall we go on through the rooms,' said Mr Dombey, 'and see how
our workmen are doing? Pray allow me, my dear madam.'

He said this in offering his arm to Mrs Skewton, who had been
looking at Florence through her glass, as though picturing to herself
what she might be made, by the infusion - from her own copious
storehouse, no doubt - of a little more Heart and Nature. Florence was
still sobbing on the lady's breast, and holding to her, when Mr Dombey
was heard to say from the Conservatory:

'Let us ask Edith. Dear me, where is she?'

'Edith, my dear!' cried Mrs Skewton, 'where are you? Looking for Mr
Dombey somewhere, I know. We are here, my love.'

The beautiful lady released her hold of Florence, and pressing her
lips once more upon her face, withdrew hurriedly, and joined them.
Florence remained standing In the same place: happy, sorry, joyful,
and in tears, she knew not how, or how long, but all at once: when her
new Mama came back, and took her in her arms again.

'Florence,' said the lady, hurriedly, and looking into her face
with great earnestness. 'You will not begin by hating me?'

'By hating you, Mama?' cried Florence, winding her arm round her
neck, and returning the look.

'Hush! Begin by thinking well of me,' said the beautiful lady.
'Begin by believing that I will try to make you happy, and that I am
prepared to love you, Florence. Good-bye. We shall meet again soon.
Good-bye! Don't stay here, now.'

Again she pressed her to her breast she had spoken in a rapid
manner, but firmly - and Florence saw her rejoin them in the other
room. And now Florence began to hope that she would learn from her new
and beautiful Mama, how to gaIn her father's love; and in her sleep
that night, in her lost old home, her own Mama smiled radiantly upon
the hope, and blessed it. Dreaming Florence!



CHAPTER 29.

The Opening of the Eyes of Mrs Chick



Miss Tox, all unconscious of any such rare appearances in connexion
with Mr Dombey's house, as scaffoldings and ladders, and men with
their heads tied up in pocket-handkerchiefs, glaring in at the windows
like flying genii or strange birds, - having breakfasted one morning
at about this eventful period of time, on her customary viands; to
wit, one French roll rasped, one egg new laid (or warranted to be),
and one little pot of tea, wherein was infused one little silver
scoopful of that herb on behalf of Miss Tox, and one little silver
scoopful on behalf of the teapot - a flight of fancy in which good
housekeepers delight; went upstairs to set forth the bird waltz on the
harpsichord, to water and arrange the plants, to dust the nick-nacks,
and, according to her daily custom, to make her little drawing-room
the garland of Princess's Place.

Miss Tox endued herself with a pair of ancient gloves, like dead
leaves, in which she was accustomed to perform these avocations -
hidden from human sight at other times in a table drawer - and went
methodically to work; beginning with the bird waltz; passing, by a
natural association of ideas, to her bird - a very high-shouldered
canary, stricken in years, and much rumpled, but a piercing singer, as
Princess's Place well knew; taking, next in order, the little china
ornaments, paper fly-cages, and so forth; and coming round, in good
time, to the plants, which generally required to be snipped here and
there with a pair of scissors, for some botanical reason that was very
powerful with Miss Tox. Miss Tox was slow in coming to the plants,
this morning. The weather was warm, the wind southerly; and there was
a sigh of the summer-time In Princess's Place, that turned Miss Tox's
thoughts upon the country. The pot-boy attached to the Princess's Arms
had come out with a can and trickled water, in a flowering pattern,
all over Princess's Place, and it gave the weedy ground a fresh scent
- quite a growing scent, Miss Tox said. There was a tiny blink of sun
peeping in from the great street round the corner, and the smoky
sparrows hopped over it and back again, brightening as they passed: or
bathed in it, like a stream, and became glorified sparrows,
unconnected with chimneys. Legends in praise of Ginger-Beer, with
pictorial representations of thirsty customers submerged in the
effervescence, or stunned by the flying corks, were conspicuous in the
window of the Princess's Arms. They were making late hay, somewhere
out of town; and though the fragrance had a long way to come, and many
counter fragrances to contend with among the dwellings of the poor
(may God reward the worthy gentlemen who stickle for the Plague as
part and parcel of the wisdom of our ancestors, and who do their
little best to keep those dwellings miserable!), yet it was wafted
faintly into Princess's Place, whispering of Nature and her wholesome
air, as such things will, even unto prisoners and captives, and those
who are desolate and oppressed, in very spite of aldermen and knights
to boot: at whose sage nod - and how they nod! - the rolling world
stands still!

Miss Tox sat down upon the window-seat, and thought of her good
Papa deceased - Mr Tox, of the Customs Department of the public
service; and of her childhood, passed at a seaport, among a
considerable quantity of cold tar, and some rusticity. She fell into a
softened remembrance of meadows, in old time, gleaming with
buttercups, like so many inverted firmaments of golden stars; and how
she had made chains of dandelion-stalks for youthful vowers of eternal
constancy, dressed chiefly in nankeen; and how soon those fetters had
withered and broken.

Sitting on the window-seat, and looking out upon the sparrows and
the blink of sun, Miss Tox thought likewise of her good Mama deceased
- sister to the owner of the powdered head and pigtail - of her
virtues and her rheumatism. And when a man with bulgy legs, and a
rough voice, and a heavy basket on his head that crushed his hat into
a mere black muffin, came crying flowers down Princess's Place, making
his timid little roots of daisies shudder in the vibration of every
yell he gave, as though he had been an ogre, hawking little children,
summer recollections were so strong upon Miss Tox, that she shook her
head, and murmured she would be comparatively old before she knew it -
which seemed likely.

In her pensive mood, Miss Tox's thoughts went wandering on Mr
Dombey's track; probably because the Major had returned home to his
lodgings opposite, and had just bowed to her from his window. What
other reason could Miss Tox have for connecting Mr Dombey with her
summer days and dandelion fetters? Was he more cheerful? thought Miss
Tox. Was he reconciled to the decrees of fate? Would he ever marry
again? and if yes, whom? What sort of person now!

A flush - it was warm weather - overspread Miss Tox's face, as,
while entertaining these meditations, she turned her head, and was
surprised by the reflection of her thoughtful image In the
chimney-glass. Another flush succeeded when she saw a little carriage
drive into Princess's Place, and make straight for her own door. Miss
Tox arose, took up her scissors hastily, and so coming, at last, to
the plants, was very busy with them when Mrs Chick entered the room.

'How is my sweetest friend!' exclaimed Miss Tox, with open arms.

A little stateliness was mingled with Miss Tox's sweetest friend's
demeanour, but she kissed Miss Tox, and said, 'Lucretia, thank you, I
am pretty well. I hope you are the same. Hem!'

Mrs Chick was labouring under a peculiar little monosyllabic cough;
a sort of primer, or easy introduction to the art of coughing.

'You call very early, and how kind that is, my dear!' pursued Miss
Tox. 'Now, have you breakfasted?'

'Thank you, Lucretia,' said Mrs Chick, 'I have. I took an early
breakfast' - the good lady seemed curious on the subject of Princess's
Place, and looked all round it as she spoke - 'with my brother, who
has come home.'

'He is better, I trust, my love,' faltered Miss Tox.

'He is greatly better, thank you. Hem!'

'My dear Louisa must be careful of that cough' remarked Miss Tox.

'It's nothing,' returned Mrs Chic 'It's merely change of weather.
We must expect change.'

'Of weather?' asked Miss Tox, in her simplicity.

'Of everything' returned Mrs Chick 'Of course we must. It's a world
of change. Anyone would surprise me very much, Lucretia, and would
greatly alter my opinion of their understanding, if they attempted to
contradict or evade what is so perfectly evident. Change!' exclaimed
Mrs Chick, with severe philosophy. 'Why, my gracious me, what is there
that does not change! even the silkworm, who I am sure might be
supposed not to trouble itself about such subjects, changes into all
sorts of unexpected things continually.'

'My Louisa,' said the mild Miss Tox, 'is ever happy in her
illustrations.'

'You are so kind, Lucretia,' returned Mrs Chick, a little softened,
'as to say so, and to think so, I believe. I hope neither of us may
ever have any cause to lessen our opinion of the other, Lucretia.'

'I am sure of it,' returned Miss Tox.

Mrs Chick coughed as before, and drew lines on the carpet with the
ivory end of her parasol. Miss Tox, who had experience of her fair
friend, and knew that under the pressure of any slight fatigue or
vexation she was prone to a discursive kind of irritability, availed
herself of the pause, to change the subject.

'Pardon me, my dear Louisa,' said Miss Tox, 'but have I caught
sight of the manly form of Mr Chick in the carriage?'

'He is there,' said Mrs Chick, 'but pray leave him there. He has
his newspaper, and would be quite contented for the next two hours. Go
on with your flowers, Lucretia, and allow me to sit here and rest.'

'My Louisa knows,' observed Miss Tox, 'that between friends like
ourselves, any approach to ceremony would be out of the question.
Therefore - ' Therefore Miss Tox finished the sentence, not in words
but action; and putting on her gloves again, which she had taken off,
and arming herself once more with her scissors, began to snip and clip
among the leaves with microscopic industry.

'Florence has returned home also,' said Mrs Chick, after sitting
silent for some time, with her head on one side, and her parasol
sketching on the floor; 'and really Florence is a great deal too old
now, to continue to lead that solitary life to which she has been
accustomed. Of course she is. There can be no doubt about it. I should
have very little respect, indeed, for anybody who could advocate a
different opinion. Whatever my wishes might be, I could not respect
them. We cannot command our feelings to such an extent as that.'

Miss Tox assented, without being particular as to the
intelligibility of the proposition.

'If she's a strange girl,' said Mrs Chick, 'and if my brother Paul
cannot feel perfectly comfortable in her society, after all the sad
things that have happened, and all the terrible disappointments that
have been undergone, then, what is the reply? That he must make an
effort. That he is bound to make an effort. We have always been a
family remarkable for effort. Paul is at the head of the family;
almost the only representative of it left - for what am I - I am of no
consequence - '

'My dearest love,' remonstrated Miss Tox.

Mrs Chick dried her eyes, which were, for the moment, overflowing;
and proceeded:

'And consequently he is more than ever bound to make an effort. And
though his having done so, comes upon me with a sort of shock - for
mine is a very weak and foolish nature; which is anything but a
blessing I am sure; I often wish my heart was a marble slab, or a
paving-stone -

'My sweet Louisa,' remonstrated Miss Tox again.

'Still, it is a triumph to me to know that he is so true to
himself, and to his name of Dombey; although, of course, I always knew
he would be. I only hope,' said Mrs Chick, after a pause, 'that she
may be worthy of the name too.

Miss Tox filled a little green watering-pot from a jug, and
happening to look up when she had done so, was so surprised by the
amount of expression Mrs Chick had conveyed into her face, and was
bestowing upon her, that she put the little watering-pot on the table
for the present, and sat down near it.

'My dear Louisa,' said Miss Tox, 'will it be the least satisfaction
to you, if I venture to observe in reference to that remark, that I,
as a humble individual, think your sweet niece in every way most
promising?~ 'What do you mean, Lucretia?' returned Mrs Chick, with
increased stateliness of manner. 'To what remark of mine, my dear, do
you refer?'

'Her being worthy of her name, my love,' replied Miss Tox.

'If,' said Mrs Chick, with solemn patience, 'I have not expressed
myself with clearness, Lucretia, the fault of course is mine. There
is, perhaps, no reason why I should express myself at all, except the
intimacy that has subsisted between us, and which I very much hope,
Lucretia - confidently hope - nothing will occur to disturb. Because,
why should I do anything else? There is no reason; it would be absurd.
But I wish to express myself clearly, Lucretia; and therefore to go
back to that remark, I must beg to say that it was not intended to
relate to Florence, in any way.'

'Indeed!' returned Miss Tox.

'No,' said Mrs Chick shortly and decisively.

'Pardon me, my dear,' rejoined her meek friend; 'but I cannot have
understood it. I fear I am dull.'

Mrs Chick looked round the room and over the way; at the plants, at
the bird, at the watering-pot, at almost everything within view,
except Miss Tox; and finally dropping her glance upon Miss Tox, for a
moment, on its way to the ground, said, looking meanwhile with
elevated eyebrows at the carpet:

'When I speak, Lucretia, of her being worthy of the name, I speak
of my brother Paul's second wife. I believe I have already said, in
effect, if not in the very words I now use, that it is his intention
to marry a second wife.'

Miss Tox left her seat in a hurry, and returned to her plants;
clipping among the stems and leaves, with as little favour as a barber
working at so many pauper heads of hair.

'Whether she will be fully sensible of the distinction conferred
upon her,' said Mrs Chick, in a lofty tone, 'is quite another
question. I hope she may be. We are bound to think well of one another
in this world, and I hope she may be. I have not been advised with
myself If I had been advised with, I have no doubt my advice would
have been cavalierly received, and therefore it is infinitely better
as it is. I much prefer it as it is.'

Miss Tox, with head bent down, still clipped among the plants. Mrs
Chick, with energetic shakings of her own head from time to time,
continued to hold forth, as if in defiance of somebody. 'If my brother
Paul had consulted with me, which he sometimes does - or rather,
sometimes used to do; for he will naturally do that no more now, and
this is a circumstance which I regard as a relief from
responsibility,' said Mrs Chick, hysterically, 'for I thank Heaven I
am not jealous - ' here Mrs Chick again shed tears: 'if my brother
Paul had come to me, and had said, "Louisa, what kind of qualities
would you advise me to look out for, in a wife?" I should certainly
have answered, "Paul, you must have family, you must have beauty, you
must have dignity, you must have connexion." Those are the words I
should have used. You might have led me to the block immediately
afterwards,' said Mrs Chick, as if that consequence were highly
probable, 'but I should have used them. I should have said, "Paul! You
to marry a second time without family! You to marry without beauty!
You to marry without dignity! You to marry without connexion! There is
nobody in the world, not mad, who could dream of daring to entertain
such a preposterous idea!"'

Miss Tox stopped clipping; and with her head among the plants,
listened attentively. Perhaps Miss Tox thought there was hope in this
exordium, and the warmth of Mrs Chick.

I should have adopted this course of argument,' pursued the
discreet lady, 'because I trust I am not a fool. I make no claim to be
considered a person of superior intellect - though I believe some
people have been extraordinary enough to consider me so; one so little
humoured as I am, would very soon be disabused of any such notion; but
I trust I am not a downright fool. And to tell ME,' said Mrs Chick
with ineffable disdain, 'that my brother Paul Dombey could ever
contemplate the possibility of uniting himself to anybody - I don't
care who' - she was more sharp and emphatic in that short clause than
in any other part of her discourse - 'not possessing these requisites,
would be to insult what understanding I have got, as much as if I was
to be told that I was born and bred an elephant, which I may be told
next,' said Mrs Chick, with resignation. 'It wouldn't surprise me at
all. I expect it.'

In the moment's silence that ensued, Miss Tox's scissors gave a
feeble clip or two; but Miss Tox's face was still invisible, and Miss
Tox's morning gown was agitated. Mrs Chick looked sideways at her,
through the intervening plants, and went on to say, in a tone of bland
conviction, and as one dwelling on a point of fact that hardly
required to be stated:

'Therefore, of course my brother Paul has done what was to be
expected of him, and what anybody might have foreseen he would do, if
he entered the marriage state again. I confess it takes me rather by
surprise, however gratifying; because when Paul went out of town I had
no idea at all that he would form any attachment out of town, and he
certainly had no attachment when he left here. However, it seems to be
extremely desirable in every point of view. I have no doubt the mother
is a most genteel and elegant creature, and I have no right whatever
to dispute the policy of her living with them: which is Paul's affair,
not mine - and as to Paul's choice, herself, I have only seen her
picture yet, but that is beautiful indeed. Her name is beautiful too,'
said Mrs Chick, shaking her head with energy, and arranging herself in
her chair; 'Edith is at once uncommon, as it strikes me, and
distinguished. Consequently, Lucretia, I have no doubt you will be
happy to hear that the marriage is to take place immediately - of
course, you will:' great emphasis again: 'and that you are delighted
with this change in the condition of my brother, who has shown you a
great deal of pleasant attention at various times.'

Miss Tox made no verbal answer, but took up the little watering-pot
with a trembling hand, and looked vacantly round as if considering
what article of furniture would be improved by the contents. The room
door opening at this crisis of Miss Tox's feelings, she started,
laughed aloud, and fell into the arms of the person entering; happily
insensible alike of Mrs Chick's indignant countenance and of the Major
at his window over the way, who had his double-barrelled eye-glass in
full action, and whose face and figure were dilated with
Mephistophelean joy.

Not so the expatriated Native, amazed supporter of Miss Tox's
swooning form, who, coming straight upstairs, with a polite inquiry
touching Miss Tox's health (in exact pursuance of the Major's
malicious instructions), had accidentally arrived in the very nick of
time to catch the delicate burden in his arms, and to receive the
content' of the little watering-pot in his shoe; both of which
circumstances, coupled with his consciousness of being closely watched
by the wrathful Major, who had threatened the usual penalty in regard
of every bone in his skin in case of any failure, combined to render
him a moving spectacle of mental and bodily distress.

For some moments, this afflicted foreigner remained clasping Miss
Tox to his heart, with an energy of action in remarkable opposition to
his disconcerted face, while that poor lady trickled slowly down upon
him the very last sprinklings of the little watering-pot, as if he
were a delicate exotic (which indeed he was), and might be almost
expected to blow while the gentle rain descended. Mrs Chick, at length
recovering sufficient presence of mind to interpose, commanded him to
drop Miss Tox upon the sofa and withdraw; and the exile promptly
obeying, she applied herself to promote Miss Tox's recovery.

But none of that gentle concern which usually characterises the
daughters of Eve in their tending of each other; none of that
freemasonry in fainting, by which they are generally bound together In
a mysterious bond of sisterhood; was visible in Mrs Chick's demeanour.
Rather like the executioner who restores the victim to sensation
previous to proceeding with the torture (or was wont to do so, in the
good old times for which all true men wear perpetual mourning), did
Mrs Chick administer the smelling-bottle, the slapping on the hands,
the dashing of cold water on the face, and the other proved remedies.
And when, at length, Miss Tox opened her eyes, and gradually became
restored to animation and consciousness, Mrs Chick drew off as from a
criminal, and reversing the precedent of the murdered king of Denmark,
regarded her more in anger than In sorrow.'

'Lucretia!' said Mrs Chick 'I will not attempt to disguise what I
feel. My eyes are opened, all at once. I wouldn't have believed this,
if a Saint had told it to me.

'I am foolish to give way to faintness,' Miss Tox faltered. 'I
shall be better presently.'

'You will be better presently, Lucretia!' repeated Mrs Chick, with
exceeding scorn. 'Do you suppose I am blind? Do you imagine I am in my
second childhood? No, Lucretia! I am obliged to you!'

Miss Tox directed an imploring, helpless kind of look towards her
friend, and put her handkerchief before her face.

'If anyone had told me this yesterday,' said Mrs Chick, with
majesty, 'or even half-an-hour ago, I should have been tempted, I
almost believe, to strike them to the earth. Lucretia Tox, my eyes are
opened to you all at once. The scales:' here Mrs Chick cast down an
imaginary pair, such as are commonly used in grocers' shops: 'have
fallen from my sight. The blindness of my confidence is past,
Lucretia. It has been abused and played, upon, and evasion is quite
out of the question now, I assure you.

'Oh! to what do you allude so cruelly, my love?' asked Miss Tox,
through her tears.

'Lucretia,' said Mrs Chick, 'ask your own heart. I must entreat you
not to address me by any such familiar term as you have just used, if
you please. I have some self-respect left, though you may think
otherwise.'

'Oh, Louisa!' cried Miss Tox. 'How can you speak to me like that?'

'How can I speak to you like that?' retorted Mrs Chick, who, in
default of having any particular argument to sustain herself upon,
relied principally on such repetitions for her most withering effects.
'Like that! You may well say like that, indeed!'

Miss Tox sobbed pitifully.

'The idea!' said Mrs Chick, 'of your having basked at my brother's
fireside, like a serpent, and wound yourself, through me, almost into
his confidence, Lucretia, that you might, in secret, entertain designs
upon him, and dare to aspire to contemplate the possibility of his
uniting himself to you! Why, it is an idea,' said Mrs Chick, with
sarcastic dignity, 'the absurdity of which almost relieves its
treachery.'

'Pray, Louisa,' urged Miss Tox, 'do not say such dreadful things.'

'Dreadful things!' repeated Mrs Chick. 'Dreadful things! Is it not
a fact, Lucretia, that you have just now been unable to command your
feelings even before me, whose eyes you had so completely closed?'

'I have made no complaint,' sobbed Miss Tox. 'I have said nothing.
If I have been a little overpowered by your news, Louisa, and have
ever had any lingering thought that Mr Dombey was inclined to be
particular towards me, surely you will not condemn me.'

'She is going to say,' said Mrs Chick, addressing herself to the
whole of the furniture, in a comprehensive glance of resignation and
appeal, 'She is going to say - I know it - that I have encouraged
her!'

'I don't wish to exchange reproaches, dear Louisa,' sobbed Miss Tox
'Nor do I wish to complain. But, in my own defence - '

'Yes,' cried Mrs Chick, looking round the room with a prophetic
smile, 'that's what she's going to say. I knew it. You had better say
it. Say it openly! Be open, Lucretia Tox,' said Mrs Chick, with
desperate sternness, 'whatever you are.'

'In my own defence,' faltered Miss Tox, 'and only In my own defence
against your unkind words, my dear Louisa, I would merely ask you if
you haven't often favoured such a fancy, and even said it might
happen, for anything we could tell?'

'There is a point,' said Mrs Chick, rising, not as if she were
going to stop at the floor, but as if she were about to soar up, high,
into her native skies, 'beyond which endurance becomes ridiculous, if
not culpable. I can bear much; but not too much. What spell was on me
when I came into this house this day, I don't know; but I had a
presentiment - a dark presentiment,' said Mrs Chick, with a shiver,
'that something was going to happen. Well may I have had that
foreboding, Lucretia, when my confidence of many years is destroyed in
an instant, when my eyes are opened all at once, and when I find you
revealed in your true colours. Lucretia, I have been mistaken in you.
It is better for us both that this subject should end here. I wish you
well, and I shall ever wish you well. But, as an individual who
desires to be true to herself in her own poor position, whatever that
position may be, or may not be - and as the sister of my brother - and
as the sister-in-law of my brother's wife - and as a connexion by
marriage of my brother's wife's mother - may I be permitted to add, as
a Dombey? - I can wish you nothing else but good morning.'

These words, delivered with cutting suavity, tempered and chastened
by a lofty air of moral rectitude, carried the speaker to the door.
There she inclined her head in a ghostly and statue-like manner, and
so withdrew to her carriage, to seek comfort and consolation in the
arms of Mr Chick, her lord.

Figuratively speaking, that is to say; for the arms of Mr Chick
were full of his newspaper. Neither did that gentleman address his
eyes towards his wife otherwise than by stealth. Neither did he offer
any consolation whatever. In short, he sat reading, and humming fag
ends of tunes, and sometimes glancing furtively at her without
delivering himself of a word, good, bad, or indifferent.

In the meantime Mrs Chick sat swelling and bridling, and tossing
her head, as if she were still repeating that solemn formula of
farewell to Lucretia Tox. At length, she said aloud, 'Oh the extent to
which her eyes had been opened that day!'

'To which your eyes have been opened, my dear!' repeated Mr Chick.

'Oh, don't talk to me!' said Mrs Chic 'if you can bear to see me in
this state, and not ask me what the matter is, you had better hold
your tongue for ever.'

'What is the matter, my dear?' asked Mr Chick

'To think,' said Mrs Chick, in a state of soliloquy, 'that she
should ever have conceived the base idea of connecting herself with
our family by a marriage with Paul! To think that when she was playing
at horses with that dear child who is now in his grave - I never liked
it at the time - she should have been hiding such a double-faced
design! I wonder she was never afraid that something would happen to
her. She is fortunate if nothing does.'

'I really thought, my dear,' said Mr Chick slowly, after rubbing
the bridge of his nose for some time with his newspaper, 'that you had
gone on the same tack yourself, all along, until this morning; and had
thought it would be a convenient thing enough, if it could have been
brought about.'

Mrs Chick instantly burst into tears, and told Mr Chick that if he
wished to trample upon her with his boots, he had better do It.

'But with Lucretia Tox I have done,' said Mrs Chick, after
abandoning herself to her feelings for some minutes, to Mr Chick's
great terror. 'I can bear to resign Paul's confidence in favour of one
who, I hope and trust, may be deserving of it, and with whom he has a
perfect right to replace poor Fanny if he chooses; I can bear to be
informed, In Paul's cool manner, of such a change in his plans, and
never to be consulted until all is settled and determined; but deceit
I can not bear, and with Lucretia Tox I have done. It is better as it
is,' said Mrs Chick, piously; 'much better. It would have been a long
time before I could have accommodated myself comfortably with her,
after this; and I really don't know, as Paul is going to be very
grand, and these are people of condition, that she would have been
quite presentable, and might not have compromised myself. There's a
providence in everything; everything works for the best; I have been
tried today but on the whole I do not regret it.'

In which Christian spirit, Mrs Chick dried her eyes and smoothed
her lap, and sat as became a person calm under a great wrong. Mr Chick
feeling his unworthiness no doubt, took an early opportunity of being
set down at a street corner and walking away whistling, with his
shoulders very much raised, and his hands in his pockets.

While poor excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if she were a fawner and
toad-eater, was at least an honest and a constant one, and had ever
borne a faithful friendship towards her impeacher and had been truly
absorbed and swallowed up in devotion to the magnificence of Mr Dombey
- while poor excommunicated Miss Tox watered her plants with her
tears, and felt that it was winter in Princess's Place.



CHAPTER 30.

The interval before the Marriage



Although the enchanted house was no more, and the working world had
broken into it, and was hammering and crashing and tramping up and
down stairs all day long keeping Diogenes in an incessant paroxysm of
barking, from sunrise to sunset - evidently convinced that his enemy
had got the better of him at last, and was then sacking the premises
in triumphant defiance - there was, at first, no other great change in
the method of Florence's life. At night, when the workpeople went
away, the house was dreary and deserted again; and Florence, listening
to their voices echoing through the hall and staircase as they
departed, pictured to herself the cheerful homes to which the were
returning, and the children who were waiting for them, and was glad to
think that they were merry and well pleased to go.

She welcomed back the evening silence as an old friend, but it came
now with an altered face, and looked more kindly on her. Fresh hope
was in it. The beautiful lady who had soothed and carressed her, in
the very room in which her heart had been so wrung, was a spirit of
promise to her. Soft shadows of the bright life dawning, when her
father's affection should be gradually won, and all, or much should be
restored, of what she had lost on the dark day when a mother's love
had faded with a mother's last breath on her cheek, moved about her in
the twilight and were welcome company. Peeping at the rosy children
her neighbours, it was a new and precious sensation to think that they
might soon speak together and know each other; when she would not
fear, as of old, to show herself before them, lest they should be
grieved to see her in her black dress sitting there alone!

In her thoughts of her new mother, and in the love and trust
overflowing her pure heart towards her, Florence loved her own dead
mother more and more. She had no fear of setting up a rival in her
breast. The new flower sprang from the deep-planted and long-cherished
root, she knew. Every gentle word that had fallen from the lips of the
beautiful lady, sounded to Florence like an echo of the voice long
hushed and silent. How could she love that memory less for living
tenderness, when it was her memory of all parental tenderness and
love!

Florence was, one day, sitting reading in her room, and thinking of
the lady and her promised visit soon - for her book turned on a
kindred subject - when, raising her eyes, she saw her standing in the
doorway.

'Mama!' cried Florence, joyfully meeting her. 'Come again!'

'Not Mama yet,' returned the lady, with a serious smile, as she
encircled Florence's neck with her arm.

'But very soon to be,' cried Florence.

'Very soon now, Florence: very soon.

Edith bent her head a little, so as to press the blooming cheek of
Florence against her own, and for some few moments remained thus
silent. There was something so very tender in her manner, that
Florence was even more sensible of it than on the first occasion of
their meeting.

She led Florence to a chair beside her, and sat down: Florence
looking in her face, quite wondering at its beauty, and willingly
leaving her hand In hers.

'Have you been alone, Florence, since I was here last?'

'Oh yes!' smiled Florence, hastily.

She hesitated and cast down her eyes; for her new Mama was very
earnest in her look, and the look was intently and thoughtfully fixed
upon her face.

'I - I- am used to be alone,' said Florence. 'I don't mind it at
all. Di and I pass whole days together, sometimes.' Florence might
have said, whole weeks and months.

'Is Di your maid, love?'

'My dog, Mama,' said Florence, laughing. 'Susan is my maid.'

'And these are your rooms,' said Edith, looking round. 'I was not
shown these rooms the other day. We must have them improved, Florence.
They shall be made the prettiest in the house.'

'If I might change them, Mama,' returned Florence; 'there is one
upstairs I should like much better.'

'Is this not high enough, dear girl?' asked Edith, smiling.

'The other was my brother's room,' said Florence, 'and I am very
fond of it. I would have spoken to Papa about it when I came home, and
found the workmen here, and everything changing; but - '

Florence dropped her eyes, lest the same look should make her
falter again.

'but I was afraid it might distress him; and as you said you would
be here again soon, Mama, and are the mistress of everything, I
determined to take courage and ask you.'

Edith sat looking at her, with her brilliant eyes intent upon her
face, until Florence raising her own, she, in her turn, withdrew her
gaze, and turned it on the ground. It was then that Florence thought
how different this lady's beauty was, from what she had supposed. She
had thought it of a proud and lofty kind; yet her manner was so
subdued and gentle, that if she had been of Florence's own age and
character, it scarcely could have invited confidence more.

Except when a constrained and singular reserve crept over her; and
then she seemed (but Florence hardly understood this, though she could
not choose but notice it, and think about it) as if she were humbled
before Florence, and ill at ease. When she had said that she was not
her Mama yet, and when Florence had called her the mistress of
everything there, this change in her was quick and startling; and now,
while the eyes of Florence rested on her face, she sat as though she
would have shrunk and hidden from her, rather than as one about to
love and cherish her, in right of such a near connexion.

She gave Florence her ready promise, about her new room, and said
she would give directions about it herself. She then asked some
questions concerning poor Paul; and when they had sat in conversation
for some time, told Florence she had come to take her to her own home.

'We have come to London now, my mother and I,' said Edith, 'and you
shall stay with us until I am married. I wish that we should know and
trust each other, Florence.'

'You are very kind to me,' said Florence, 'dear Mama. How much I
thank you!'

'Let me say now, for it may be the best opportunity,' continued
Edith, looking round to see that they were quite alone, and speaking
in a lower voice, 'that when I am married, and have gone away for some
weeks, I shall be easier at heart if you will come home here. No
matter who invites you to stay elsewhere. Come home here. It is better
to be alone than - what I would say is,' she added, checking herself,
'that I know well you are best at home, dear Florence.'

'I will come home on the very day, Mama'

'Do so. I rely on that promise. Now, prepare to come with me, dear
girl. You will find me downstairs when you are ready.'

Slowly and thoughtfully did Edith wander alone through the mansion
of which she was so soon to be the lady: and little heed took she of
all the elegance and splendour it began to display. The same
indomitable haughtiness of soul, the same proud scorn expressed in eye
and lip, the same fierce beauty, only tamed by a sense of its own
little worth, and of the little worth of everything around it, went
through the grand saloons and halls, that had got loose among the
shady trees, and raged and rent themselves. The mimic roses on the
walls and floors were set round with sharp thorns, that tore her
breast; in every scrap of gold so dazzling to the eye, she saw some
hateful atom of her purchase-money; the broad high mirrors showed her,
at full length, a woman with a noble quality yet dwelling in her
nature, who was too false to her better self, and too debased and
lost, to save herself. She believed that all this was so plain, more
or less, to all eyes, that she had no resource or power of
self-assertion but in pride: and with this pride, which tortured her
own heart night and day, she fought her fate out, braved it, and
defied it.

Was this the woman whom Florence - an innocent girl, strong only in
her earnestness and simple truth - could so impress and quell, that by
her side she was another creature, with her tempest of passion hushed,
and her very pride itself subdued? Was this the woman who now sat
beside her in a carriage, with her arms entwined, and who, while she
courted and entreated her to love and trust her, drew her fair head to
nestle on her breast, and would have laid down life to shield it from
wrong or harm?

Oh, Edith! it were well to die, indeed, at such a time! Better and
happier far, perhaps, to die so, Edith, than to live on to the end!

The Honourable Mrs Skewton, who was thinking of anything rather
than of such sentiments - for, like many genteel persons who have
existed at various times, she set her face against death altogether,
and objected to the mention of any such low and levelling upstart -
had borrowed a house in Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, from a stately
relative (one of the Feenix brood), who was out of town, and who did
not object to lending it, in the handsomest manner, for nuptial
purposes, as the loan implied his final release and acquittance from
all further loans and gifts to Mrs Skewton and her daughter. It being
necessary for the credit of the family to make a handsome appearance
at such a time, Mrs Skewton, with the assistance of an accommodating
tradesman resident In the parish of Mary-le-bone, who lent out all
sorts of articles to the nobility and gentry, from a service of plate
to an army of footmen, clapped into this house a silver-headed butler
(who was charged extra on that account, as having the appearnce of an
ancient family retainer), two very tall young men in livery, and a
select staff of kitchen-servants; so that a legend arose, downstairs,
that Withers the page, released at once from his numerous household
duties, and from the propulsion of the wheeled-chair (inconsistent
with the metropolis), had been several times observed to rub his eyes
and pinch his limbs, as if he misdoubted his having overslept himself
at the Leamington milkman's, and being still in a celestial dream. A
variety of requisites in plate and china being also conveyed to the
same establishment from the same convenient source, with several
miscellaneous articles, including a neat chariot and a pair of bays,
Mrs Skewton cushioned herself on the principal sofa, in the Cleopatra
attitude, and held her court in fair state.

'And how,' said Mrs Skewton, on the entrance of her daughter and
her charge, 'is my charming Florence? You must come and kiss me,
Florence, if you please, my love.'

Florence was timidly stooping to pick out a place In the white part
of Mrs Skewton's face, when that lady presented her ear, and relieved
her of her difficulty.

'Edith, my dear,' said Mrs Skewton, 'positively, I - stand a little
more in the light, my sweetest Florence, for a moment.

Florence blushingly complied.

'You don't remember, dearest Edith,' said her mother, 'what you
were when you were about the same age as our exceedingly precious
Florence, or a few years younger?'

'I have long forgotten, mother.'

'For positively, my dear,' said Mrs Skewton, 'I do think that I see
a decided resemblance to what you were then, in our extremely
fascinating young friend. And it shows,' said Mrs Skewton, in a lower
voice, which conveyed her opinion that Florence was in a very
unfinished state, 'what cultivation will do.'

'It does, indeed,' was Edith's stern reply.

Her mother eyed her sharply for a moment, and feeling herself on
unsafe ground, said, as a diversion:

'My charming Florence, you must come and kiss me once more, if you
please, my love.'

Florence complied, of course, and again imprinted her lips on Mrs
Skewton's ear.

'And you have heard, no doubt, my darling pet,' said Mrs Skewton,
detaining her hand, 'that your Papa, whom we all perfectly adore and
dote upon, is to be married to my dearest Edith this day week.'

'I knew it would be very soon,' returned Florence, 'but not exactly
when.'

'My darling Edith,' urged her mother, gaily, 'is it possible you
have not told Florence?'

'Why should I tell Florence?' she returned, so suddenly and
harshly, that Florence could scarcely believe it was the same voice.

Mrs Skewton then told Florence, as another and safer diversion,
that her father was coming to dinner, and that he would no doubt be
charmingly surprised to see her; as he had spoken last night of
dressing in the City, and had known nothing of Edith's design, the
execution of which, according to Mrs Skewton's expectation, would
throw him into a perfect ecstasy. Florence was troubled to hear this;
and her distress became so keen, as the dinner-hour approached, that
if she had known how to frame an entreaty to be suffered to return
home, without involving her father in her explanation, she would have
hurried back on foot, bareheaded, breathless, and alone, rather than
incur the risk of meeting his displeasure.

As the time drew nearer, she could hardly breathe. She dared not
approach a window, lest he should see her from the street. She dared
not go upstairs to hide her emotion, lest, in passing out at the door,
she should meet him unexpectedly; besides which dread, she felt as
though she never could come back again if she were summoned to his
presence. In this conflict of fears; she was sitting by Cleopatra's
couch, endeavouring to understand and to reply to the bald discourse
of that lady, when she heard his foot upon the stair.

'I hear him now!' cried Florence, starting. 'He is coming!'

Cleopatra, who in her juvenility was always playfully disposed, and
who in her self-engrossment did not trouble herself about the nature
of this agitation, pushed Florence behind her couch, and dropped a
shawl over her, preparatory to giving Mr Dombey a rapture of surprise.
It was so quickly done, that in a moment Florence heard his awful step
in the room.

He saluted his intended mother-in-law, and his intended bride. The
strange sound of his voice thrilled through the whole frame of his
child.

'My dear Dombey,' said Cleopatra, 'come here and tell me how your
pretty Florence is.'

'Florence is very well,' said Mr Dombey, advancing towards the
couch.

'At home?'

'At home,' said Mr Dombey.

'My dear Dombey,' returned Cleopatra, with bewitching vivacity;
'now are you sure you are not deceiving me? I don't know what my
dearest Edith will say to me when I make such a declaration, but upon
my honour I am afraid you are the falsest of men, my dear Dombey.'

Though he had been; and had been detected on the spot, in the most
enormous falsehood that was ever said or done; he could hardly have
been more disconcerted than he was, when Mrs Skewton plucked the shawl
away, and Florence, pale and trembling, rose before him like a ghost.
He had not yet recovered his presence of mind, when Florence had run
up to him, clasped her hands round his neck, kissed his face, and
hurried out of the room. He looked round as if to refer the matter to
somebody else, but Edith had gone after Florence, instantly.

'Now, confess, my dear Dombey,' said Mrs Skewton, giving him her
hand, 'that you never were more surprised and pleased in your life.'

'I never was more surprised,' said Mr Dombey.

'Nor pleased, my dearest Dombey?' returned Mrs Skewton, holding up
her fan.

'I - yes, I am exceedingly glad to meet Florence here,' said Mr
Dombey. He appeared to consider gravely about it for a moment, and
then said, more decidedly, 'Yes, I really am very glad indeed to meet
Florence here.'

'You wonder how she comes here?' said Mrs Skewton, 'don't you?'

'Edith, perhaps - ' suggested Mr Dombey.

'Ah! wicked guesser!' replied Cleopatra, shaking her head. 'Ah!
cunning, cunning man! One shouldn't tell these things; your sex, my
dear Dombey, are so vain, and so apt to abuse our weakness; but you
know my open soul - very well; immediately.'

This was addressed to one of the very tall young men who announced
dinner.

'But Edith, my dear Dombey,' she continued in a whisper, when she
cannot have you near her - and as I tell her, she cannot expect that
always - will at least have near her something or somebody belonging
to you. Well, how extremely natural that is! And in this spirit,
nothing would keep her from riding off to-day to fetch our darling
Florence. Well, how excessively charming that is!'

As she waited for an answer, Mr Dombey answered, 'Eminently so.

'Bless you, my dear Dombey, for that proof of heart!' cried
Cleopatra, squeezing his hand. 'But I am growing too serious! Take me
downstairs, like an angel, and let us see what these people intend to
give us for dinner. Bless you, dear Dombey!'

Cleopatra skipping off her couch with tolerable briskness, after
the last benediction, Mr Dombey took her arm in his and led her
ceremoniously downstairs; one of the very tall young men on hire,
whose organ of veneration was imperfectly developed, thrusting his
tongue into his cheek, for the entertainment of the other very tall
young man on hire, as the couple turned into the dining-room.

Florence and Edith were already there, and sitting side by side.
Florence would have risen when her father entered, to resign her chair
to him; but Edith openly put her hand upon her arm, and Mr Dombey took
an opposite place at the round table.

The conversation was almost entirely sustained by Mrs Skewton.
Florence hardly dared to raise her eyes, lest they should reveal the
traces of tears; far less dared to speak; and Edith never uttered one
word, unless in answer to a question. Verily, Cleopatra worked hard,
for the establishment that was so nearly clutched; and verily it
should have been a rich one to reward her!

And so your preparations are nearly finished at last, my dear
Dombey?' said Cleopatra, when the dessert was put upon the table, and
the silver-headed butler had withdrawn. 'Even the lawyers'
preparations!'

'Yes, madam,' replied Mr Dombey; 'the deed of settlement, the
professional gentlemen inform me, is now ready, and as I was
mentioning to you, Edith has only to do us the favour to suggest her
own time for its execution.'

Edith sat like a handsome statue; as cold, as silent, and as still.

'My dearest love,' said Cleopatra, 'do you hear what Mr Dombey
says? Ah, my dear Dombey!' aside to that gentleman, 'how her absence,
as the time approaches, reminds me of the days, when that most
agreeable of creatures, her Papa, was in your situation!'

'I have nothing to suggest. It shall be when you please,' said
Edith, scarcely looking over the table at Mr Dombey.

'To-morrow?' suggested Mr Dombey.

'If you please.'

'Or would next day,' said Mr Dombey, 'suit your engagements
better?'

'I have no engagements. I am always at your disposal. Let it be
when you like.'

'No engagements, my dear Edith!' remonstrated her mother, 'when you
are in a most terrible state of flurry all day long, and have a
thousand and one appointments with all sorts of trades-people!'

'They are of your making,' returned Edith, turning on her with a
slight contraction of her brow. 'You and Mr Dombey can arrange between
you.'

'Very true indeed, my love, and most considerate of you!' said
Cleopatra. 'My darling Florence, you must really come and kiss me once
more, if you please, my dear!'

Singular coincidence, that these gushes of interest In Florence
hurried Cleopatra away from almost every dialogue in which Edith had a
share, however trifling! Florence had certainly never undergone so
much embracing, and perhaps had never been, unconsciously, so useful
in her life.

Mr Dombey was far from quarrelling, in his own breast, with the
manner of his beautiful betrothed. He had that good reason for
sympathy with haughtiness and coldness, which is found In a
fellow-feeling. It flattered him to think how these deferred to him,
in Edith's case, and seemed to have no will apart from his. It
flattered him to picture to himself, this proud and stately woman
doing the honours of his house, and chilling his guests after his own
manner. The dignity of Dombey and Son would be heightened and
maintained, indeed, in such hands.

So thought Mr Dombey, when he was left alone at the dining-table,
and mused upon his past and future fortunes: finding no uncongeniality
in an air of scant and gloomy state that pervaded the room, in colour
a dark brown, with black hatchments of pictures blotching the walls,
and twenty-four black chairs, with almost as many nails in them as so
many coffins, waiting like mutes, upon the threshold of the Turkey
carpet; and two exhausted negroes holding up two withered branches of
candelabra on the sideboard, and a musty smell prevailing as if the
ashes of ten thousand dinners were entombed in the sarcophagus below
it. The owner of the house lived much abroad; the air of England
seldom agreed long with a member of the Feenix family; and the room
had gradually put itself into deeper and still deeper mourning for
him, until it was become so funereal as to want nothing but a body in
it to be quite complete.

No bad representation of the body, for the nonce, in his unbending
form, if not in his attitude, Mr Dombey looked down into the cold
depths of the dead sea of mahogany on which the fruit dishes and
decanters lay at anchor: as if the subjects of his thoughts were
rising towards the surface one by one, and plunging down again. Edith
was there In all her majesty of brow and figure; and close to her came
Florence, with her timid head turned to him, as it had been, for an
instant, when she left the room; and Edith's eyes upon her, and
Edith's hand put out protectingly. A little figure in a low arm-chair
came springing next into the light, and looked upon him wonderingly,
with its bright eyes and its old-young face, gleaming as in the
flickering of an evening fire. Again came Florence close upon it, and
absorbed his whole attention. Whether as a fore-doomed difficulty and
disappointment to him; whether as a rival who had crossed him in his
way, and might again; whether as his child, of whom, in his successful
wooing, he could stoop to think as claiming, at such a time, to be no
more estranged; or whether as a hint to him that the mere appearance
of caring for his own blood should be maintained in his new relations;
he best knew. Indifferently well, perhaps, at best; for marriage
company and marriage altars, and ambitious scenes - still blotted here
and there with Florence - always Florence - turned up so fast, and so
confusedly, that he rose, and went upstairs to escape them.

It was quite late at night before candles were brought; for at
present they made Mrs Skewton's head ache, she complained; and in the
meantime Florence and Mrs Skewton talked together (Cleopatra being
very anxious to keep her close to herself), or Florence touched the
piano softly for Mrs Skewton's delight; to make no mention of a few
occasions in the course of the evening, when that affectionate lady
was impelled to solicit another kiss, and which always happened after
Edith had said anything. They were not many, however, for Edith sat
apart by an open window during the whole time (in spite of her
mother's fears that she would take cold), and remained there until Mr
Dombey took leave. He was serenely gracious to Florence when he did
so; and Florence went to bed in a room within Edith's, so happy and
hopeful, that she thought of her late self as if it were some other
poor deserted girl who was to be pitied for her sorrow; and in her
pity, sobbed herself to sleep.

The week fled fast. There were drives to milliners, dressmakers,
jewellers, lawyers, florists, pastry-cooks; and Florence was always of
the party. Florence was to go to the wedding. Florence was to cast off
her mourning, and to wear a brilliant dress on the occasion. The
milliner's intentions on the subject of this dress - the milliner was
a Frenchwoman, and greatly resembled Mrs Skewton - were so chaste and
elegant, that Mrs Skewton bespoke one like it for herself. The
milliner said it would become her to admiration, and that all the
world would take her for the young lady's sister.

The week fled faster. Edith looked at nothing and cared for
nothing. Her rich dresses came home, and were tried on, and were
loudly commended by Mrs Skewton and the milliners, and were put away
without a word from her. Mrs Skewton made their plans for every day,
and executed them. Sometimes Edith sat in the carriage when they went
to make purchases; sometimes, when it was absolutely necessary, she
went into the shops. But Mrs Skewton conducted the whole business,
whatever it happened to be; and Edith looked on as uninterested and
with as much apparent indifference as if she had no concern in it.
Florence might perhaps have thought she was haughty and listless, but
that she was never so to her. So Florence quenched her wonder in her
gratitude whenever it broke out, and soon subdued it.

The week fled faster. It had nearly winged its flight away. The
last night of the week, the night before the marriage, was come. In
the dark room - for Mrs Skewton's head was no better yet, though she
expected to recover permanently to-morrow - were that lady, Edith, and
Mr Dombey. Edith was at her open window looking out into the street;
Mr Dombey and Cleopatra were talking softly on the sofa. It was
growing late; and Florence, being fatigued, had gone to bed.

'My dear Dombey,' said Cleopatra, 'you will leave me Florence
to-morrow, when you deprive me of my sweetest Edith.'

Mr Dombey said he would, with pleasure.

'To have her about me, here, while you are both at Paris, and to
think at her age, I am assisting in the formation of her mind, my dear
Dombey,' said Cleopatra, 'will be a perfect balm to me in the
extremely shattered state to which I shall be reduced.'

Edith turned her head suddenly. Her listless manner was exchanged,
in a moment, to one of burning interest, and, unseen in the darkness,
she attended closely to their conversation.

Mr Dombey would be delighted to leave Florence in such admirable
guardianship.

'My dear Dombey,' returned Cleopatra, 'a thousand thanks for your
good opinion. I feared you were going, with malice aforethought' as
the dreadful lawyers say - those horrid proses! - to condemn me to
utter solitude;'

'Why do me so great an injustice, my dear madam?' said Mr Dombey.

'Because my charming Florence tells me so positively she must go
home tomorrow, returned Cleopatra, that I began to be afraid, my
dearest Dombey, you were quite a Bashaw.'

'I assure you, madam!' said Mr Dombey, 'I have laid no commands on
Florence; and if I had, there are no commands like your wish.'

'My dear Dombey,' replied Cleopatra, what a courtier you are!
Though I'll not say so, either; for courtiers have no heart, and yours
pervades your farming life and character. And are you really going so
early, my dear Dombey!'

Oh, indeed! it was late, and Mr Dombey feared he must.

'Is this a fact, or is it all a dream!' lisped Cleopatra. 'Can I
believe, my dearest Dombey, that you are coming back tomorrow morning
to deprive me of my sweet companion; my own Edith!'

Mr Dombey, who was accustomed to take things literally, reminded
Mrs Skewton that they were to meet first at the church.

'The pang,' said Mrs Skewton, 'of consigning a child, even to you,
my dear Dombey, is one of the most excruciating imaginable, and
combined with a naturally delicate constitution, and the extreme
stupidity of the pastry-cook who has undertaken the breakfast, is
almost too much for my poor strength. But I shall rally, my dear
Dombey, In the morning; do not fear for me, or be uneasy on my
account. Heaven bless you! My dearest Edith!' she cried archly.
'Somebody is going, pet.'

Edith, who had turned her head again towards the window, and whose
interest in their conversation had ceased, rose up in her place, but
made no advance towards him, and said nothing. Mr Dombey, with a lofty
gallantry adapted to his dignity and the occasion, betook his creaking
boots towards her, put her hand to his lips, said, 'Tomorrow morning I
shall have the happiness of claiming this hand as Mrs Dombey's,' and
bowed himself solemnly out.

Mrs Skewton rang for candles as soon as the house-door had closed
upon him. With the candles appeared her maid, with the juvenile dress
that was to delude the world to-morrow. The dress had savage
retribution in it, as such dresses ever have, and made her infinitely
older and more hideous than her greasy flannel gown. But Mrs Skewton
tried it on with mincing satisfaction; smirked at her cadaverous self
in the glass, as she thought of its killing effect upon the Major; and
suffering her maid to take it off again, and to prepare her for
repose, tumbled into ruins like a house of painted cards.

All this time, Edith remained at the dark window looking out into
the street. When she and her mother were at last left alone, she moved
from it for the first time that evening, and came opposite to her. The
yawning, shaking, peevish figure of the mother, with her eyes raised
to confront the proud erect form of the daughter, whose glance of fire
was bent downward upon her, had a conscious air upon it, that no
levity or temper could conceal.

'I am tired to death,' said she. 'You can't be trusted for a
moment. You are worse than a child. Child! No child would be half so
obstinate and undutiful.'

'Listen to me, mother,' returned Edith, passing these words by with
a scorn that would not descend to trifle with them. 'You must remain
alone here until I return.'

'Must remain alone here, Edith, until you return!' repeated her
mother.

'Or in that name upon which I shall call to-morrow to witness what
I do, so falsely: and so shamefully, I swear I will refuse the hand of
this man in the church. If I do not, may I fall dead upon the
pavement!'

The mother answered with a look of quick alarm, in no degree
diminished by the look she met.

'It is enough,' said Edith, steadily, 'that we are what we are. I
will have no youth and truth dragged down to my level. I will have no
guileless nature undermined, corrupted, and perverted, to amuse the
leisure of a world of mothers. You know my meaning. Florence must go
home.'

'You are an idiot, Edith,' cried her angry mother. 'Do you expect
there can ever be peace for you in that house, till she is married,
and away?'

'Ask me, or ask yourself, if I ever expect peace in that house,'
said her daughter, 'and you know the answer.

'And am I to be told to-night, after all my pains and labour, and
when you are going, through me, to be rendered independent,' her
mother almost shrieked in her passion, while her palsied head shook
like a leaf, 'that there is corruption and contagion in me, and that I
am not fit company for a girl! What are you, pray? What are you?'

'I have put the question to myself,' said Edith, ashy pale, and
pointing to the window, 'more than once when I have been sitting
there, and something in the faded likeness of my sex has wandered past
outside; and God knows I have met with my reply. Oh mother, mother, if
you had but left me to my natural heart when I too was a girl - a
younger girl than Florence - how different I might have been!'

Sensible that any show of anger was useless here, her mother
restrained herself, and fell a whimpering, and bewailed that she had
lived too long, and that her only child had cast her off, and that
duty towards parents was forgotten in these evil days, and that she
had heard unnatural taunts, and cared for life no longer.

'If one is to go on living through continual scenes like this,' she
whined,'I am sure it would be much better for me to think of some
means of putting an end to my existence. Oh! The idea of your being my
daughter, Edith, and addressing me in such a strain!'

'Between us, mother,' returned Edith, mournfully, 'the time for
mutual reproaches is past.

'Then why do you revive it?' whimpered her mother. 'You know that
you are lacerating me in the cruellest manner. You know how sensitive
I am to unkindness. At such a moment, too, when I have so much to
think of, and am naturally anxious to appear to the best advantage! I
wonder at you, Edith. To make your mother a fright upon your
wedding-day!'

Edith bent the same fixed look upon her, as she sobbed and rubbed
her eyes; and said in the same low steady voice, which had neither
risen nor fallen since she first addressed her, 'I have said that
Florence must go home.'

'Let her go!' cried the afflicted and affrighted parent, hastily.
'I am sure I am willing she should go. What is the girl to me?'

'She is so much to me, that rather than communicate, or suffer to
be communicated to her, one grain of the evil that is in my breast,
mother, I would renounce you, as I would (if you gave me cause)
renounce him in the church to-morrow,' replied Edith. 'Leave her
alone. She shall not, while I can interpose, be tampered with and
tainted by the lessons I have learned. This is no hard condition on
this bitter night.'

'If you had proposed it in a filial manner, Edith,' whined her
mother, 'perhaps not; very likely not. But such extremely cutting
words - '

'They are past and at an end between us now,' said Edith. 'Take
your own way, mother; share as you please in what you have gained;
spend, enjoy, make much of it; and be as happy as you will. The object
of our lives is won. Henceforth let us wear it silently. My lips are
closed upon the past from this hour. I forgive you your part in
to-morrow's wickedness. May God forgive my own!'

Without a tremor in her voice, or frame, and passing onward with a
foot that set itself upon the neck of every soft emotion, she bade her
mother good-night, and repaired to her own room.

But not to rest; for there was no rest in the tumult of her
agitation when alone to and fro, and to and fro, and to and fro again,
five hundred times, among the splendid preparations for her adornment
on the morrow; with her dark hair shaken down, her dark eyes flashing
with a raging light, her broad white bosom red with the cruel grasp of
the relentless hand with which she spurned it from her, pacing up and
down with an averted head, as if she would avoid the sight of her own
fair person, and divorce herself from its companionship. Thus, In the
dead time of the night before her bridal, Edith Granger wrestled with
her unquiet spirit, tearless, friendless, silent, proud, and
uncomplaining.

At length it happened that she touched the open door which led into
the room where Florence lay.

She started, stopped, and looked in.

A light was burning there, and showed her Florence in her bloom of
innocence and beauty, fast asleep. Edith held her breath, and felt
herself drawn on towards her.

Drawn nearer, nearer, nearer yet; at last, drawn so near, that
stooping down, she pressed her lips to the gentle hand that lay
outside the bed, and put it softly to her neck. Its touch was like the
prophet's rod of old upon the rock. Her tears sprung forth beneath it,
as she sunk upon her knees, and laid her aching head and streaming
hair upon the pillow by its side.

Thus Edith Granger passed the night before her bridal. Thus the sun
found her on her bridal morning.



CHAPTER 31.

The Wedding



Dawn with its passionless blank face, steals shivering to the
church beneath which lies the dust of little Paul and his mother, and
looks in at the windows. It is cold and dark. Night crouches yet, upon
the pavement, and broods, sombre and heavy, in nooks and corners of
the building. The steeple-clock, perched up above the houses, emerging
from beneath another of the countless ripples in the tide of time that
regularly roll and break on the eternal shore, is greyly visible, like
a stone beacon, recording how the sea flows on; but within doors,
dawn, at first, can only peep at night, and see that it is there.

Hovering feebly round the church, and looking in, dawn moans and
weeps for its short reign, and its tears trickle on the window-glass,
and the trees against the church-wall bow their heads, and wring their
many hands in sympathy. Night, growing pale before it, gradually fades
out of the church, but lingers in the vaults below, and sits upon the
coffins. And now comes bright day, burnishing the steeple-clock, and
reddening the spire, and drying up the tears of dawn, and stifling its
complaining; and the dawn, following the night, and chasing it from
its last refuge, shrinks into the vaults itself and hides, with a
frightened face, among the dead, until night returns, refreshed, to
drive it out.

And now, the mice, who have been busier with the prayer-books than
their proper owners, and with the hassocks, more worn by their little
teeth than by human knees, hide their bright eyes in their holes, and
gather close together in affright at the resounding clashing of the
church-door. For the beadle, that man of power, comes early this
morning with the sexton; and Mrs Miff, the wheezy little pew-opener -
a mighty dry old lady, sparely dressed, with not an inch of fulness
anywhere about her - is also here, and has been waiting at the
church-gate half-an-hour, as her place is, for the beadle.

A vinegary face has Mrs Miff, and a mortified bonnet, and eke a
thirsty soul for sixpences and shillings. Beckoning to stray people to
come into pews, has given Mrs Miff an air of mystery; and there is
reservation in the eye of Mrs Miff, as always knowing of a softer
seat, but having her suspicions of the fee. There is no such fact as
Mr Miff, nor has there been, these twenty years, and Mrs Miff would
rather not allude to him. He held some bad opinions, it would seem,
about free seats; and though Mrs Miff hopes he may be gone upwards,
she couldn't positively undertake to say so.

Busy is Mrs Miff this morning at the church-door, beating and
dusting the altar-cloth, the carpet, and the cushions; and much has
Mrs Miff to say, about the wedding they are going to have. Mrs Miff is
told, that the new furniture and alterations in the house cost full
five thousand pound if they cost a penny; and Mrs Miff has heard, upon
the best authority, that the lady hasn't got a sixpence wherewithal to
bless herself. Mrs Miff remembers, like wise, as if it had happened
yesterday, the first wife's funeral, and then the christening, and
then the other funeral; and Mrs Miff says, by-the-bye she'll
soap-and-water that 'ere tablet presently, against the company arrive.
Mr Sownds the Beadle, who is sitting in the sun upon the church steps
all this time (and seldom does anything else, except, in cold weather,
sitting by the fire), approves of Mrs Miff's discourse, and asks if
Mrs Miff has heard it said, that the lady is uncommon handsome? The
information Mrs Miff has received, being of this nature, Mr Sownds the
Beadle, who, though orthodox and corpulent, is still an admirer of
female beauty, observes, with unction, yes, he hears she is a spanker
- an expression that seems somewhat forcible to Mrs Miff, or would,
from any lips but those of Mr Sownds the Beadle.

In Mr Dombey's house, at this same time, there is great stir and
bustle, more especially among the women: not one of whom has had a
wink of sleep since four o'clock, and all of whom were fully dressed
before six. Mr Towlinson is an object of greater consideration than
usual to the housemaid, and the cook says at breakfast time that one
wedding makes many, which the housemaid can't believe, and don't think
true at all. Mr Towlinson reserves his sentiments on this question;
being rendered something gloomy by the engagement of a foreigner with
whiskers (Mr Towlinson is whiskerless himself), who has been hired to
accompany the happy pair to Paris, and who is busy packing the new
chariot. In respect of this personage, Mr Towlinson admits, presently,
that he never knew of any good that ever come of foreigners; and being
charged by the ladies with prejudice, says, look at Bonaparte who was
at the head of 'em, and see what he was always up to! Which the
housemaid says is very true.

The pastry-cook is hard at work in the funereal room in Brook
Street, and the very tall young men are busy looking on. One of the
very tall young men already smells of sherry, and his eyes have a
tendency to become fixed in his head, and to stare at objects without
seeing them. The very tall young man is conscious of this failing in
himself; and informs his comrade that it's his 'exciseman.' The very
tall young man would say excitement, but his speech is hazy.

The men who play the bells have got scent of the marriage; and the
marrow-bones and cleavers too; and a brass band too. The first, are
practising in a back settlement near Battlebridge; the second, put
themselves in communication, through their chief, with Mr Towlinson,
to whom they offer terms to be bought off; and the third, in the
person of an artful trombone, lurks and dodges round the corner,
waiting for some traitor tradesman to reveal the place and hour of
breakfast, for a bribe. Expectation and excitement extend further yet,
and take a wider range. From Balls Pond, Mr Perch brings Mrs Perch to
spend the day with Mr Dombey's servants, and accompany them,
surreptitiously, to see the wedding. In Mr Toots's lodgings, Mr Toots
attires himself as if he were at least the Bridegroom; determined to
behold the spectacle in splendour from a secret corner of the gallery,
and thither to convey the Chicken: for it is Mr Toots's desperate
intent to point out Florence to the Chicken, then and there, and
openly to say, 'Now, Chicken, I will not deceive you any longer; the
friend I have sometimes mentioned to you is myself; Miss Dombey is the
object of my passion; what are your opinions, Chicken, in this state
of things, and what, on the spot, do you advise? The
so-much-to-be-astonished Chicken, in the meanwhile, dips his beak into
a tankard of strong beer, in Mr Toots's kitchen, and pecks up two
pounds of beefsteaks. In Princess's Place, Miss Tox is up and doing;
for she too, though in sore distress, is resolved to put a shilling in
the hands of Mrs Miff, and see the ceremony which has a cruel
fascination for her, from some lonely corner. The quarters of the
wooden Midshipman are all alive; for Captain Cuttle, in his
ankle-jacks and with a huge shirt-collar, is seated at his breakfast,
listening to Rob the Grinder as he reads the marriage service to him
beforehand, under orders, to the end that the Captain may perfectly
understand the solemnity he is about to witness: for which purpose,
the Captain gravely lays injunctions on his chaplain, from time to
time, to 'put about,' or to 'overhaul that 'ere article again,' or to
stick to his own duty, and leave the Amens to him, the Captain; one of
which he repeats, whenever a pause is made by Rob the Grinder, with
sonorous satisfaction.

Besides all this, and much more, twenty nursery-maids in Mr
Dombey's street alone, have promised twenty families of little women,
whose instinctive interest in nuptials dates from their cradles, that
they shall go and see the marriage. Truly, Mr Sownds the Beadle has
good reason to feel himself in office, as he suns his portly figure on
the church steps, waiting for the marriage hour. Truly, Mrs Miff has
cause to pounce on an unlucky dwarf child, with a giant baby, who
peeps in at the porch, and drive her forth with indignation!

Cousin Feenix has come over from abroad, expressly to attend the
marriage. Cousin Feenix was a man about town, forty years ago; but he
is still so juvenile in figure and in manner, and so well got up, that
strangers are amazed when they discover latent wrinkles in his
lordship's face, and crows' feet in his eyes: and first observe him,
not exactly certain when he walks across a room, of going quite
straight to where he wants to go. But Cousin Feenix, getting up at
half-past seven o'clock or so, is quite another thing from Cousin
Feenix got up; and very dim, indeed, he looks, while being shaved at
Long's Hotel, in Bond Street.

Mr Dombey leaves his dressing-room, amidst a general whisking away
of the women on the staircase, who disperse in all directions, with a
great rustling of skirts, except Mrs Perch, who, being (but that she
always is) in an interesting situation, is not nimble, and is obliged
to face him, and is ready to sink with confusion as she curtesys; -
may Heaven avert all evil consequences from the house of Perch! Mr
Dombey walks up to the drawing-room, to bide his time. Gorgeous are Mr
Dombey's new blue coat, fawn-coloured pantaloons, and lilac waistcoat;
and a whisper goes about the house, that Mr Dombey's hair is curled.

A double knock announces the arrival of the Major, who is gorgeous
too, and wears a whole geranium in his button-hole, and has his hair
curled tight and crisp, as well the Native knows.

'Dombey!' says the Major, putting out both hands, 'how are you?'

'Major,' says Mr Dombey, 'how are You?'

'By Jove, Sir,' says the Major, 'Joey B. is in such case this
morning, Sir,' - and here he hits himself hard upon the breast - 'In
such case this morning, Sir, that, damme, Dombey, he has half a mind
to make a double marriage of it, Sir, and take the mother.'

Mr Dombey smiles; but faintly, even for him; for Mr Dombey feels
that he is going to be related to the mother, and that, under those
circumstances, she is not to be joked about.

'Dombey,' says the Major, seeing this, 'I give you joy. I
congratulate you, Dombey. By the Lord, Sir,' says the Major, 'you are
more to be envied, this day, than any man in England!'

Here again Mr Dombey's assent is qualified; because he is going to
confer a great distinction on a lady; and, no doubt, she is to be
envied most.

'As to Edith Granger, Sir,' pursues the Major, 'there is not a
woman in all Europe but might - and would, Sir, you will allow
Bagstock to add - and would- give her ears, and her earrings, too, to
be in Edith Granger's place.'

'You are good enough to say so, Major,' says Mr Dombey.

'Dombey,' returns the Major, 'you know it. Let us have no false
delicacy. You know it. Do you know it, or do you not, Dombey?' says
the Major, almost in a passion.

'Oh, really, Major - '

'Damme, Sir,' retorts the Major, 'do you know that fact, or do you
not? Dombey! Is old Joe your friend? Are we on that footing of
unreserved intimacy, Dombey, that may justify a man - a blunt old
Joseph B., Sir - in speaking out; or am I to take open order, Dombey,
and to keep my distance, and to stand on forms?'

'My dear Major Bagstock,' says Mr Dombey, with a gratified air,
'you are quite warm.'

'By Gad, Sir,' says the Major, 'I am warm. Joseph B. does not deny
it, Dombey. He is warm. This is an occasion, Sir, that calls forth all
the honest sympathies remaining in an old, infernal, battered,
used-up, invalided, J. B. carcase. And I tell you what, Dombey - at
such a time a man must blurt out what he feels, or put a muzzle on;
and Joseph Bagstock tells you to your face, Dombey, as he tells his
club behind your back, that he never will be muzzled when Paul Dombey
is in question.  Now, damme, Sir,' concludes the Major, with great
firmness, 'what do you make of that?'

'Major,' says Mr Dombey, 'I assure you that I am really obliged to
you. I had no idea of checking your too partial friendship.'

'Not too partial, Sir!' exclaims the choleric Major. 'Dombey, I
deny it.'

'Your friendship I will say then,' pursues Mr Dombey, 'on any
account. Nor can I forget, Major, on such an occasion as the present,
how much I am indebted to it.'

'Dombey,' says the Major, with appropriate action, 'that is the
hand of Joseph Bagstock: of plain old Joey B., Sir, if you like that
better! That is the hand, of which His Royal Highness the late Duke of
York, did me the honour to observe, Sir, to His Royal Highness the
late Duke of Kent, that it was the hand of Josh: a rough and tough,
and possibly an up-to-snuff, old vagabond. Dombey, may the present
moment be the least unhappy of our lives. God bless you!'

Now enters Mr Carker, gorgeous likewise, and smiling like a
wedding-guest indeed. He can scarcely let Mr Dombey's hand go, he is
so congratulatory; and he shakes the Major's hand so heartily at the
same time, that his voice shakes too, in accord with his arms, as it
comes sliding from between his teeth.

'The very day is auspicious,' says Mr Carker. 'The brightest and
most genial weather! I hope I am not a moment late?'

'Punctual to your time, Sir,' says the Major.

'I am rejoiced, I am sure,' says Mr Carker. 'I was afraid I might
be a few seconds after the appointed time, for I was delayed by a
procession of waggons; and I took the liberty of riding round to Brook
Street' - this to Mr Dombey - 'to leave a few poor rarities of flowers
for Mrs Dombey. A man in my position, and so distinguished as to be
invited here, is proud to offer some homage in acknowledgment of his
vassalage: and as I have no doubt Mrs Dombey is overwhelmed with what
is costly and magnificent;' with a strange glance at his patron; 'I
hope the very poverty of my offering, may find favour for it.'

'Mrs Dombey, that is to be,' returns Mr Dombey, condescendingly,
'will be very sensible of your attention, Carker, I am sure.'

'And if she is to be Mrs Dombey this morning, Sir,' says the Major,
putting down his coffee-cup, and looking at his watch, 'it's high time
we were off!'

Forth, in a barouche, ride Mr Dombey, Major Bagstock, and Mr
Carker, to the church. Mr Sownds the Beadle has long risen from the
steps, and is in waiting with his cocked hat in his hand. Mrs Miff
curtseys and proposes chairs in the vestry. Mr Dombey prefers
remaining in the church. As he looks up at the organ, Miss Tox in the
gallery shrinks behind the fat leg of a cherubim on a monument, with
cheeks like a young Wind. Captain Cuttle, on the contrary, stands up
and waves his hook, in token of welcome and encouragement. Mr Toots
informs the Chicken, behind his hand, that the middle gentleman, he in
the fawn-coloured pantaloons, is the father of his love. The Chicken
hoarsely whispers Mr Toots that he's as stiff a cove as ever he see,
but that it is within the resources of Science to double him up, with
one blow in the waistcoat.

Mr Sownds and Mrs Miff are eyeing Mr Dombey from a little distance,
when the noise of approaching wheels is heard, and Mr Sownds goes out.
Mrs Miff, meeting Mr Dombey's eye as it is withdrawn from the
presumptuous maniac upstairs, who salutes him with so much urbanity,
drops a curtsey, and informs him that she believes his 'good lady' is
come. Then there is a crowding and a whispering at the door, and the
good lady enters, with a haughty step.

There is no sign upon her face, of last night's suffering; there is
no trace in her manner, of the woman on the bended knees, reposing her
wild head, in beautiful abandonment, upon the pillow of the sleeping
girl. That girl, all gentle and lovely, is at her side - a striking
contrast to her own disdainful and defiant figure, standing there,
composed, erect, inscrutable of will, resplendent and majestic in the
zenith of its charms, yet beating down, and treading on, the
admiration that it challenges.

There is a pause while Mr Sownds the Beadle glides into the vestry
for the clergyman and clerk. At this juncture, Mrs Skewton speaks to
Mr Dombey: more distinctly and emphatically than her custom is, and
moving at the same time, close to Edith.

'My dear Dombey,' said the good Mama, 'I fear I must relinquish
darling Florence after all, and suffer her to go home, as she herself
proposed. After my loss of to-day, my dear Dombey, I feel I shall not
have spirits, even for her society.'

'Had she not better stay with you?' returns the Bridegroom.

'I think not, my dear Dombey. No, I think not. I shall be better
alone. Besides, my dearest Edith will be her natural and constant
guardian when you return, and I had better not encroach upon her
trust, perhaps. She might be jealous. Eh, dear Edith?'

The affectionate Mama presses her daughter's arm, as she says this;
perhaps entreating her attention earnestly.

'To be serious, my dear Dombey,' she resumes, 'I will relinquish
our dear child, and not inflict my gloom upon her. We have settled
that, just now. She fully understands, dear Dombey. Edith, my dear, -
she fully understands.'

Again, the good mother presses her daughter's arm. Mr Dombey offers
no additional remonstrance; for the clergyman and clerk appear; and
Mrs Miff, and Mr Sownds the Beadle, group the party in their proper
places at the altar rails.

The sun is shining down, upon the golden letters of the ten
commandments. Why does the Bride's eye read them, one by one? Which
one of all the ten appears the plainest to her in the glare of light?
False Gods; murder; theft; the honour that she owes her mother; -
which is it that appears to leave the wall, and printing itself in
glowing letters, on her book!

"Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?"'

Cousin Feenix does that. He has come from Baden-Baden on purpose.
'Confound it,' Cousin Feenix says - good-natured creature, Cousin
Feenix - 'when we do get a rich City fellow into the family, let us
show him some attention; let us do something for him.' I give this
woman to be married to this man,' saith Cousin Feenix therefore.
Cousin Feenix, meaning to go in a straight line, but turning off
sideways by reason of his wilful legs, gives the wrong woman to be
married to this man, at first - to wit, a brides- maid of some
condition, distantly connected with the family, and ten years Mrs
Skewton's junior - but Mrs Miff, interposing her mortified bonnet,
dexterously turns him back, and runs him, as on castors, full at the
'good lady:' whom Cousin Feenix giveth to married to this man
accordingly. And will they in the sight of heaven - ? Ay, that they
will: Mr Dombey says he will. And what says Edith? She will. So, from
that day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do them
part, they plight their troth to one another, and are married. In a
firm, free hand, the Bride subscribes her name in the register, when
they adjourn to the vestry. 'There ain't a many ladies come here,' Mrs
Miff says with a curtsey - to look at Mrs Miff, at such a season, is
to make her mortified bonnet go down with a dip - writes their names
like this good lady!' Mr Sownds the Beadle thinks it is a truly
spanking signature, and worthy of the writer - this, however, between
himself and conscience. Florence signs too, but unapplauded, for her
hand shakes. All the party sign; Cousin Feenix last; who puts his
noble name into a wrong place, and enrols himself as having been born
that morning. The Major now salutes the Bride right gallantly, and
carries out that branch of military tactics in reference to all the
ladies: notwithstanding Mrs Skewton's being extremely hard to kiss,
and squeaking shrilly in the sacred edIfice. The example is followed
by Cousin. Feenix and even by Mr Dombey. Lastly, Mr Carker, with hIs
white teeth glistening, approaches Edith, more as if he meant to bite
her, than to taste the sweets that linger on her lips.

There is a glow upon her proud cheek, and a flashing in her eyes,
that may be meant to stay him; but it does not, for he salutes her as
the rest have done, and wishes her all happiness.

'If wishes,' says he in a low voice, 'are not superfluous, applied
to such a union.'

'I thank you, Sir,' she answers, with a curled lip, and a heaving
bosom.

But, does Edith feel still, as on the night when she knew that Mr
Dombey would return to offer his alliance, that Carker knows her
thoroughly, and reads her right, and that she is more degraded by his
knowledge of her, than by aught else? Is it for this reason that her
haughtiness shrinks beneath his smile, like snow within the hands that
grasps it firmly, and that her imperious glance droops In meeting his,
and seeks the ground?

'I am proud to see,' said Mr Carker, with a servile stooping of his
neck, which the revelations making by his eyes and teeth proclaim to
be a lie, 'I am proud to see that my humble offering is graced by Mrs
Dombey's hand, and permitted to hold so favoured a place in so joyful
an occasion.'

Though she bends her head, in answer, there is something in the
momentary action of her hand, as if she would crush the flowers it
holds, and fling them, with contempt, upon the ground. But, she puts
the hand through the arm of her new husband, who has been standing
near, conversing with the Major, and is proud again, and motionless,
and silent.

The carriages are once more at the church door. Mr Dombey, with his
bride upon his arm, conducts her through the twenty families of little
women who are on the steps, and every one of whom remembers the
fashion and the colour of her every article of dress from that moment,
and reproduces it on her doll, who is for ever being married.
Cleopatra and Cousin Feenix enter the same carriage. The Major hands
into a second carriage, Florence, and the bridesmaid who so narrowly
escaped being given away by mistake, and then enters it himself, and
is followed by Mr Carker. Horses prance and caper; coachmen and
footmen shine in fluttering favours, flowers, and new-made liveries.
Away they dash and rattle through the streets; and as they pass along,
a thousand heads are turned to look at them, and a thousand sober
moralists revenge themselves for not being married too, that morning,
by reflecting that these people little think such happiness can't
last.

Miss Tox emerges from behind the cherubim's leg, when all is quiet,
and comes slowly down from the gallery. Miss Tox's eyes are red, and
her pocket-handkerchief is damp. She is wounded, but not exasperated,
and she hopes they may be happy. She quite admits to herself the
beauty of the bride, and her own comparatively feeble and faded
attractions; but the stately image of Mr Dombey in his lilac
waistcoat, and his fawn-coloured pantaloons, is present to her mind,
and Miss Tox weeps afresh, behind her veil, on her way home to
Princess's Place. Captain Cuttle, having joined in all the amens and
responses, with a devout growl, feels much improved by his religious
exercises; and in a peaceful frame of mind pervades the body of the
church, glazed hat in hand, and reads the tablet to the memory of
little Paul. The gallant Mr Toots, attended by the faithful Chicken,
leaves the building in torments of love. The Chicken is as yet unable
to elaborate a scheme for winning Florence, but his first idea has
gained possession of him, and he thinks the doubling up of Mr Dombey
would be a move in the right direction. Mr Dombey's servants come out
of their hiding-places, and prepare to rush to Brook Street, when they
are delayed by symptoms of indisposition on the part of Mrs Perch, who
entreats a glass of water, and becomes alarming; Mrs Perch gets better
soon, however, and is borne away; and Mrs Miff, and Mr Sownds the
Beadle, sit upon the steps to count what they have gained by the
affair, and talk it over, while the sexton tolls a funeral.

Now, the carriages arrive at the Bride's residence, and the players
on the bells begin to jingle, and the band strikes up, and Mr Punch,
that model of connubial bliss, salutes his wife. Now, the people run,
and push, and press round in a gaping throng, while Mr Dombey, leading
Mrs Dombey by the hand, advances solemnly into the Feenix Halls. Now,
the rest of the wedding party alight, and enter after them. And why
does Mr Carker, passing through the people to the hall-door, think of
the old woman who called to him in the Grove that morning? Or why does
Florence, as she passes, think, with a tremble, of her childhood, when
she was lost, and of the visage of Good Mrs Brown?

Now, there are more congratulations on this happiest of days, and
more company, though not much; and now they leave the drawing-room,
and range themselves at table in the dark-brown dining-room, which no
confectioner can brighten up, let him garnish the exhausted negroes
with as many flowers and love-knots as he will.

The pastry-cook has done his duty like a man, though, and a rich
breakfast is set forth. Mr and Mrs Chick have joined the party, among
others. Mrs Chick admires that Edith should be, by nature, such a
perfect Dombey; and is affable and confidential to Mrs Skewton, whose
mind is relieved of a great load, and who takes her share of the
champagne. The very tall young man who suffered from excitement early,
is better; but a vague sentiment of repentance has seized upon him,
and he hates the other very tall young man, and wrests dishes from him
by violence, and takes a grim delight in disobliging the company. The
company are cool and calm, and do not outrage the black hatchments of
pictures looking down upon them, by any excess of mirth. Cousin Feenix
and the Major are the gayest there; but Mr Carker has a smile for the
whole table. He has an especial smile for the Bride, who very, very
seldom meets it.

Cousin Feenix rises, when the company have breakfasted, and the
servants have left the room; and wonderfully young he looks, with his
white wristbands almost covering his hands (otherwise rather bony),
and the bloom of the champagne in his cheeks.

'Upon my honour,' says Cousin Feenix, 'although it's an unusual
sort of thing in a private gentleman's house, I must beg leave to call
upon you to drink what is usually called a - in fact a toast.

The Major very hoarsely indicates his approval. Mr Carker, bending
his head forward over the table in the direction of Cousin Feenix,
smiles and nods a great many times.

'A - in fact it's not a - ' Cousin Feenix beginning again, thus,
comes to a dead stop.

'Hear, hear!' says the Major, in a tone of conviction.

Mr Carker softly claps his hands, and bending forward over the
table again, smiles and nods a great many more times than before, as
if he were particularly struck by this last observation, and desired
personally to express his sense of the good it has done

'It is,' says Cousin Feenix, 'an occasion in fact, when the general
usages of life may be a little departed from, without impropriety; and
although I never was an orator in my life, and when I was in the House
of Commons, and had the honour of seconding the address, was - in
fact, was laid up for a fortnight with the consciousness of failure -
'

The Major and Mr Carker are so much delighted by this fragment of
personal history, that Cousin Feenix laughs, and addressing them
individually, goes on to say:

'And in point of fact, when I was devilish ill - still, you know, I
feel that a duty devolves upon me. And when a duty devolves upon an
Englishman, he is bound to get out of it, in my opinion, in the best
way he can. Well! our family has had the gratification, to-day, of
connecting itself, in the person of my lovely and accomplished
relative, whom I now see - in point of fact, present - '

Here there is general applause.

'Present,' repeats Cousin Feenix, feeling that it is a neat point
which will bear repetition, - 'with one who - that is to say, with a
man, at whom the finger of scorn can never - in fact, with my
honourable friend Dombey, if he will allow me to call him so.'

Cousin Feenix bows to Mr Dombey; Mr Dombey solemnly returns the
bow; everybody is more or less gratified and affected by this
extraordinary, and perhaps unprecedented, appeal to the feelings.

'I have not,' says Cousin Feenix, 'enjoyed those opportunities
which I could have desired, of cultivating the acquaintance of my
friend Dombey, and studying those qualities which do equal honour to
his head, and, in point of fact, to his heart; for it has been my
misfortune to be, as we used to say in my time in the House of
Commons, when it was not the custom to allude to the Lords, and when
the order of parliamentary proceedings was perhaps better observed
than it is now - to be in - in point of fact,' says Cousin Feenix,
cherishing his joke, with great slyness, and finally bringing it out
with a jerk, "'in another place!"'

The Major falls into convulsions, and is recovered with difficulty.

'But I know sufficient of my friend Dombey,' resumes Cousin Feenix
in a graver tone, as if he had suddenly become a sadder and wiser man'
'to know that he is, in point of fact, what may be emphatically called
a - a merchant - a British merchant - and a - and a man. And although
I have been resident abroad, for some years (it would give me great
pleasure to receive my friend Dombey, and everybody here, at
Baden-Baden, and to have an opportunity of making 'em known to the
Grand Duke), still I know enough, I flatter myself, of my lovely and
accomplished relative, to know that she possesses every requisite to
make a man happy, and that her marriage with my friend Dombey is one
of inclination and affection on both sides.'

Many smiles and nods from Mr Carker.

'Therefore,' says Cousin Feenix, 'I congratulate the family of
which I am a member, on the acquisition of my friend Dombey. I
congratulate my friend Dombey on his union with my lovely and
accomplished relative who possesses every requisite to make a man
happy; and I take the liberty of calling on you all, in point of fact,
to congratulate both my friend Dombey and my lovely and accomplished
relative, on the present occasion.'

The speech of Cousin Feenix is received with great applause, and Mr
Dombey returns thanks on behalf of himself and Mrs Dombey. J. B.
shortly afterwards proposes Mrs Skewton. The breakfast languishes when
that is done, the violated hatchments are avenged, and Edith rises to
assume her travelling dress.

All the servants in the meantime, have been breakfasting below.
Champagne has grown too common among them to be mentioned, and roast
fowls, raised pies, and lobster-salad, have become mere drugs. The
very tall young man has recovered his spirits, and again alludes to
the exciseman. His comrade's eye begins to emulate his own, and he,
too, stares at objects without taking cognizance thereof. There is a
general redness in the faces of the ladies; in the face of Mrs Perch
particularly, who is joyous and beaming, and lifted so far above the
cares of life, that if she were asked just now to direct a wayfarer to
Ball's Pond, where her own cares lodge, she would have some difficulty
in recalling the way. Mr Towlinson has proposed the happy pair; to
which the silver-headed butler has responded neatly, and with emotion;
for he half begins to think he is an old retainer of the family, and
that he is bound to be affected by these changes. The whole party, and
especially the ladies, are very frolicsome. Mr Dombey's cook, who
generally takes the lead in society, has said, it is impossible to
settle down after this, and why not go, in a party, to the play?
Everybody (Mrs Perch included) has agreed to this; even the Native,
who is tigerish in his drink, and who alarms the ladies (Mrs Perch
particularly) by the rolling of his eyes. One of the very tall young
men has even proposed a ball after the play, and it presents itself to
no one (Mrs Perch included) in the light of an impossibility. Words
have arisen between the housemaid and Mr Towlinson; she, on the
authority of an old saw, asserting marriages to be made in Heaven: he,
affecting to trace the manufacture elsewhere; he, supposing that she
says so, because she thinks of being married her own self: she,
saying, Lord forbid, at any rate, that she should ever marry him. To
calm these flying taunts, the silver-headed butler rises to propose
the health of Mr Towlinson, whom to know is to esteem, and to esteem
is to wish well settled in life with the object of his choice,
wherever (here the silver-headed butler eyes the housemaid) she may
be. Mr Towlinson returns thanks in a speech replete with feeling, of
which the peroration turns on foreigners, regarding whom he says they
may find favour, sometimes, with weak and inconstant intellects that
can be led away by hair, but all he hopes, is, he may never hear of no
foreigner never boning nothing out of no travelling chariot. The eye
of Mr Towlinson is so severe and so expressive here, that the
housemaid is turning hysterical, when she and all the rest, roused by
the intelligence that the Bride is going away, hurry upstairs to
witness her departure.

The chariot is at the door; the Bride is descending to the hall,
where Mr Dombey waits for her. Florence is ready on the staircase to
depart too; and Miss Nipper, who has held a middle state between the
parlour and the kitchen, is prepared to accompany her. As Edith
appears, Florence hastens towards her, to bid her farewell.

Is Edith cold, that she should tremble! Is there anything unnatural
or unwholesome in the touch of Florence, that the beautiful form
recedes and contracts, as if it could not bear it! Is there so much
hurry in this going away, that Edith, with a wave of her hand, sweeps
on, and is gone!

Mrs Skewton, overpowered by her feelings as a mother, sinks on her
sofa in the Cleopatra attitude, when the clatter of the chariot wheels
is lost, and sheds several tears. The Major, coming with the rest of
the company from table, endeavours to comfort her; but she will not be
comforted on any terms, and so the Major takes his leave. Cousin
Feenix takes his leave, and Mr Carker takes his leave. The guests all
go away. Cleopatra, left alone, feels a little giddy from her strong
emotion, and falls asleep.

Giddiness prevails below stairs too. The very tall young man whose
excitement came on so soon, appears to have his head glued to the
table in the pantry, and cannot be detached from - it. A violent
revulsion has taken place in the spirits of Mrs Perch, who is low on
account of Mr Perch, and tells cook that she fears he is not so much
attached to his home, as he used to be, when they were only nine in
family. Mr Towlinson has a singing in his ears and a large wheel going
round and round inside his head. The housemaid wishes it wasn't wicked
to wish that one was dead.

There is a general delusion likewise, in these lower regions, on
the subject of time; everybody conceiving that it ought to be, at the
earliest, ten o'clock at night, whereas it is not yet three in the
afternoon. A shadowy idea of wickedness committed, haunts every
individual in the party; and each one secretly thinks the other a
companion in guilt, whom it would be agreeable to avoid. No man or
woman has the hardihood to hint at the projected visit to the play.
Anyone reviving the notion of the ball, would be scouted as a
malignant idiot.

Mrs Skewton sleeps upstairs, two hours afterwards, and naps are not
yet over in the kitchen. The hatchments in the dining-room look down
on crumbs, dirty plates, spillings of wine, half-thawed ice, stale
discoloured heel-taps, scraps of lobster, drumsticks of fowls, and
pensive jellies, gradually resolving themselves into a lukewarm gummy
soup. The marriage is, by this time, almost as denuded of its show and
garnish as the breakfast. Mr Dombey's servants moralise so much about
it, and are so repentant over their early tea, at home, that by eight
o'clock or so, they settle down into confirmed seriousness; and Mr
Perch, arriving at that time from the City, fresh and jocular, with a
white waistcoat and a comic song, ready to spend the evening, and
prepared for any amount of dissipation, is amazed to find himself
coldly received, and Mrs Perch but poorly, and to have the pleasing
duty of escorting that lady home by the next omnibus.

Night closes in. Florence, having rambled through the handsome
house, from room to room, seeks her own chamber, where the care of
Edith has surrounded her with luxuries and comforts; and divesting
herself of her handsome dress, puts on her old simple mourning for
dear Paul, and sits down to read, with Diogenes winking and blinking
on the ground beside her. But Florence cannot read tonight. The house
seems strange and new, and there are loud echoes in it. There is a
shadow on her heart: she knows not why or what: but it is heavy.
Florence shuts her book, and gruff Diogenes, who takes that for a
signal, puts his paws upon her lap, and rubs his ears against her
caressing hands. But Florence cannot see him plainly, in a little
time, for there is a mist between her eyes and him, and her dead
brother and dead mother shine in it like angels. Walter, too, poor
wandering shipwrecked boy, oh, where is he?

The Major don't know; that's for certain; and don't care. The
Major, having choked and slumbered, all the afternoon, has taken a
late dinner at his club, and now sits over his pint of wine, driving a
modest young man, with a fresh-coloured face, at the next table (who
would give a handsome sum to be able to rise and go away, but cannot
do it) to the verge of madness, by anecdotes of Bagstock, Sir, at
Dombey's wedding, and Old Joe's devilish gentle manly friend, Lord
Feenix. While Cousin Feenix, who ought to be at Long's, and in bed,
finds himself, instead, at a gaming-table, where his wilful legs have
taken him, perhaps, in his own despite.

Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and
holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping
through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw
into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among
the dead. The timid mice again cower close together, when the great
door clashes, and Mr Sownds and Mrs Miff treading the circle of their
daily lives, unbroken as a marriage ring, come in. Again, the cocked
hat and the mortified bonnet stand in the background at the marriage
hour; and again this man taketh this woman, and this woman taketh this
man, on the solemn terms:

'To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse,
for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to
cherish, until death do them part.'

The very words that Mr Carker rides into town repeating, with his
mouth stretched to the utmost, as he picks his dainty way.



CHAPTER 32.

The Wooden Midshipman goes to Pieces



Honest Captain Cuttle, as the weeks flew over him in his fortified
retreat, by no means abated any of his prudent provisions against
surprise, because of the non-appearance of the enemy. The Captain
argued that his present security was too profound and wonderful to
endure much longer; he knew that when the wind stood in a fair
quarter, the weathercock was seldom nailed there; and he was too well
acquainted with the determined and dauntless character of Mrs
MacStinger, to doubt that that heroic woman had devoted herself to the
task of his discovery and capture. Trembling beneath the weight of
these reasons, Captain Cuttle lived a very close and retired life;
seldom stirring abroad until after dark; venturing even then only into
the obscurest streets; never going forth at all on Sundays; and both
within and without the walls of his retreat, avoiding bonnets, as if
they were worn by raging lions.

The Captain never dreamed that in the event of his being pounced
upon by Mrs MacStinger, in his walks, it would be possible to offer
resistance. He felt that it could not be done. He saw himself, in his
mind's eye, put meekly in a hackney-coach, and carried off to his old
lodgings. He foresaw that, once immured there, he was a lost man: his
hat gone; Mrs MacStinger watchful of him day and night; reproaches
heaped upon his head, before the infant family; himself the guilty
object of suspicion and distrust; an ogre in the children's eyes, and
in their mother's a detected traitor.

A violent perspiration, and a lowness of spirits, always came over
the Captain as this gloomy picture presented itself to his
imagination. It generally did so previous to his stealing out of doors
at night for air and exercise. Sensible of the risk he ran, the
Captain took leave of Rob, at those times, with the solemnity which
became a man who might never return: exhorting him, in the event of
his (the Captain's) being lost sight of, for a time, to tread in the
paths of virtue, and keep the brazen instruments well polished.

But not to throw away a chance; and to secure to himself a means,
in case of the worst, of holding communication with the external
world; Captain Cuttle soon conceived the happy idea of teaching Rob
the Grinder some secret signal, by which that adherent might make his
presence and fidelity known to his commander, in the hour of
adversity. After much cogitation, the Captain decided in favour of
instructing him to whistle the marine melody, 'Oh cheerily, cheerily!'
and Rob the Grinder attaining a point as near perfection in that
accomplishment as a landsman could hope to reach, the Captain
impressed these mysterious instructions on his mind:

'Now, my lad, stand by! If ever I'm took - '

'Took, Captain!' interposed Rob, with his round eyes wide open.

'Ah!' said Captain Cuttle darkly, 'if ever I goes away, meaning to
come back to supper, and don't come within hail again, twenty-four
hours arter my loss, go you to Brig Place and whistle that 'ere tune
near my old moorings - not as if you was a meaning of it, you
understand, but as if you'd drifted there, promiscuous. If I answer in
that tune, you sheer off, my lad, and come back four-and-twenty hours
arterwards; if I answer in another tune, do you stand off and on, and
wait till I throw out further signals. Do you understand them orders,
now?'

'What am I to stand off and on of, Captain?' inquired Rob. 'The
horse-road?'

'Here's a smart lad for you!' cried the Captain eyeing him sternly,
'as don't know his own native alphabet! Go away a bit and come back
again alternate - d'ye understand that?'

'Yes, Captain,' said Rob.

'Very good my lad, then,' said the Captain, relenting. 'Do it!'

That he might do it the better, Captain Cuttle sometimes
condescended, of an evening after the shop was shut, to rehearse this
scene: retiring into the parlour for the purpose, as into the lodgings
of a supposititious MacStinger, and carefully observing the behaviour
of his ally, from the hole of espial he had cut in the wall. Rob the
Grinder discharged himself of his duty with so much exactness and
judgment, when thus put to the proof, that the Captain presented him,
at divers times, with seven sixpences, in token of satisfaction; and
gradually felt stealing over his spirit the resignation of a man who
had made provision for the worst, and taken every reasonable
precaution against an unrelenting fate.

Nevertheless, the Captain did not tempt ill-fortune, by being a
whit more venturesome than before. Though he considered it a point of
good breeding in himself, as a general friend of the family, to attend
Mr Dombey's wedding (of which he had heard from Mr Perch), and to show
that gentleman a pleasant and approving countenance from the gallery,
he had repaired to the church in a hackney cabriolet with both windows
up; and might have scrupled even to make that venture, in his dread of
Mrs MacStinger, but that the lady's attendance on the ministry of the
Reverend Melchisedech rendered it peculiarly unlikely that she would
be found in communion with the Establishment.

The Captain got safe home again, and fell into the ordinary routine
of his new life, without encountering any more direct alarm from the
enemy, than was suggested to him by the daily bonnets in the street.
But other subjects began to lay heavy on the Captain's mind. Walter's
ship was still unheard of. No news came of old Sol Gills. Florence did
not even know of the old man's disappearance, and Captain Cuttle had
not the heart to tell her. Indeed the Captain, as his own hopes of the
generous, handsome, gallant-hearted youth, whom he had loved,
according to his rough manner, from a child, began to fade, and faded
more and more from day to day, shrunk with instinctive pain from the
thought of exchanging a word with Florence. If he had had good news to
carry to her, the honest Captain would have braved the newly decorated
house and splendid furniture - though these, connected with the lady
he had seen at church, were awful to him - and made his way into her
presence. With a dark horizon gathering around their common hopes,
however, that darkened every hour, the Captain almost felt as if he
were a new misfortune and affliction to her; and was scarcely less
afraid of a visit from Florence, than from Mrs MacStinger herself.

It was a chill dark autumn evening, and Captain Cuttle had ordered
a fire to be kindled in the little back parlour, now more than ever
like the cabin of a ship. The rain fell fast, and the wind blew hard;
and straying out on the house-top by that stormy bedroom of his old
friend, to take an observation of the weather, the Captain's heart
died within him, when he saw how wild and desolate it was. Not that he
associated the weather of that time with poor Walter's destiny, or
doubted that if Providence had doomed him to be lost and shipwrecked,
it was over, long ago; but that beneath an outward influence, quite
distinct from the subject-matter of his thoughts, the Captain's
spirits sank, and his hopes turned pale, as those of wiser men had
often done before him, and will often do again.

Captain Cuttle, addressing his face to the sharp wind and slanting
rain, looked up at the heavy scud that was flying fast over the
wilderness of house-tops, and looked for something cheery there in
vain. The prospect near at hand was no better. In sundry tea-chests
and other rough boxes at his feet, the pigeons of Rob the Grinder were
cooing like so many dismal breezes getting up. A crazy weathercock of
a midshipman, with a telescope at his eye, once visible from the
street, but long bricked out, creaked and complained upon his rusty
pivot as the shrill blast spun him round and round, and sported with
him cruelly. Upon the Captain's coarse blue vest the cold raindrops
started like steel beads; and he could hardly maintain himself aslant
against the stiff Nor'-Wester that came pressing against him,
importunate to topple him over the parapet, and throw him on the
pavement below. If there were any Hope alive that evening, the Captain
thought, as he held his hat on, it certainly kept house, and wasn't
out of doors; so the Captain, shaking his head in a despondent manner,
went in to look for it.

Captain Cuttle descended slowly to the little back parlour, and,
seated in his accustomed chair, looked for it in the fire; but it was
not there, though the fire was bright. He took out his tobacco-box and
pipe, and composing himself to smoke, looked for it in the red glow
from the bowl, and in the wreaths of vapour that curled upward from
his lips; but there was not so much as an atom of the rust of Hope's
anchor in either. He tried a glass of grog; but melancholy truth was
at the bottom of that well, and he couldn't finish it. He made a turn
or two in the shop, and looked for Hope among the instruments; but
they obstinately worked out reckonings for the missing ship, in spite
of any opposition he could offer, that ended at the bottom of the lone
sea.

The wind still rushing, and the rain still pattering, against the
closed shutters, the Captain brought to before the wooden Midshipman
upon the counter, and thought, as he dried the little officer's
uniform with his sleeve, how many years the Midshipman had seen,
during which few changes - hardly any - had transpired among his
ship's company; how the changes had come all together, one day, as it
might be; and of what a sweeping kind they web Here was the little
society of the back parlour broken up, and scattered far and wide.
Here was no audience for Lovely Peg, even if there had been anybody to
sing it, which there was not; for the Captain was as morally certain
that nobody but he could execute that ballad, he was that he had not
the spirit, under existing circumstances, to attempt it. There was no
bright face of 'Wal'r' In the house; - here the Captain transferred
his sleeve for a moment from the Midshipman's uniform to his own
cheek; - the familiar wig and buttons of Sol Gills were a vision of
the past; Richard Whittington was knocked on the head; and every plan
and project in connexion with the Midshipman, lay drifting, without
mast or rudder, on the waste of waters.

As the Captain, with a dejected face, stood revolving these
thoughts, and polishing the Midshipman, partly in the tenderness of
old acquaintance, and partly in the absence of his mind, a knocking at
the shop-door communicated a frightful start to the frame of Rob the
Grinder, seated on the counter, whose large eyes had been intently
fixed on the Captain's face, and who had been debating within himself,
for the five hundredth time, whether the Captain could have done a
murder, that he had such an evil conscience, and was always running
away.

'What's that?' said Captain Cuttle, softly.

'Somebody's knuckles, Captain,' answered Rob the Grinder.

The Captain, with an abashed and guilty air, immediately walked on
tiptoe to the little parlour and locked himself in. Rob, opening the
door, would have parleyed with the visitor on the threshold if the
visitor had come in female guise; but the figure being of the male
sex, and Rob's orders only applying to women, Rob held the door open
and allowed it to enter: which it did very quickly, glad to get out of
the driving rain.

'A job for Burgess and Co. at any rate,' said the visitor, looking
over his shoulder compassionately at his own legs, which were very wet
and covered with splashes.  'Oh, how-de-do, Mr Gills?'

The salutation was addressed to the Captain, now emerging from the
back parlour with a most transparent and utterly futile affectation of
coming out by accidence.

'Thankee,' the gentleman went on to say in the same breath; 'I'm
very well indeed, myself, I'm much obliged to you. My name is Toots, -
Mister Toots.'

The Captain remembered to have seen this young gentleman at the
wedding, and made him a bow. Mr Toots replied with a chuckle; and
being embarrassed, as he generally was, breathed hard, shook hands
with the Captain for a long time, and then falling on Rob the Grinder,
in the absence of any other resource, shook hands with him in a most
affectionate and cordial manner.

'I say! I should like to speak a word to you, Mr Gills, if you
please,' said Toots at length, with surprising presence of mind. 'I
say! Miss D.O.M. you know!'

The Captain, with responsive gravity and mystery, immediately waved
his hook towards the little parlour, whither Mr Toots followed him.

'Oh! I beg your pardon though,' said Mr Toots, looking up In the
Captain's face as he sat down in a chair by the fire, which the
Captain placed for him; 'you don't happen to know the Chicken at all;
do you, Mr Gills?'

'The Chicken?' said the Captain.

'The Game Chicken,' said Mr Toots.

The Captain shaking his head, Mr Toots explained that the man
alluded to was the celebrated public character who had covered himself
and his country with glory in his contest with the Nobby Shropshire
One; but this piece of information did not appear to enlighten the
Captain very much.

'Because he's outside: that's all,' said Mr Toots. 'But it's of no
consequence; he won't get very wet, perhaps.'

'I can pass the word for him in a moment,' said the Captain.

'Well, if you would have the goodness to let him sit in the shop
with your young man,' chuckled Mr Toots, 'I should be glad; because,
you know, he's easily offended, and the damp's rather bad for his
stamina. I'll call him in, Mr Gills.'

With that, Mr Toots repairing to the shop-door, sent a peculiar
whistle into the night, which produced a stoical gentleman in a shaggy
white great-coat and a flat-brimmed hat, with very short hair, a
broken nose, and a considerable tract of bare and sterile country
behind each ear.

'Sit down, Chicken,' said Mr Toots.

The compliant Chicken spat out some small pieces of straw on which
he was regaling himself, and took in a fresh supply from a reserve he
carried in his hand.

'There ain't no drain of nothing short handy, is there?' said the
Chicken, generally. 'This here sluicing night is hard lines to a man
as lives on his condition.

Captain Cuttle proffered a glass of rum, which the Chicken,
throwing back his head, emptied into himself, as into a cask, after
proposing the brief sentiment, 'Towards us!' Mr Toots and the Captain
returning then to the parlour, and taking their seats before the fire,
Mr Toots began:

'Mr Gills - '

'Awast!' said the Captain. 'My name's Cuttle.'

Mr Toots looked greatly disconcerted, while the Captain proceeded
gravely.

'Cap'en Cuttle is my name, and England is my nation, this here is
my dwelling-place, and blessed be creation - Job,' said the Captain,
as an index to his authority.

'Oh! I couldn't see Mr Gills, could I?' said Mr Toots; 'because - '

'If you could see Sol Gills, young gen'l'm'n,' said the Captain,
impressively, and laying his heavy hand on Mr Toots's knee, 'old Sol,
mind you - with your own eyes - as you sit there - you'd be welcomer
to me, than a wind astern, to a ship becalmed. But you can't see Sol
Gills. And why can't you see Sol Gills?' said the Captain, apprised by
the face of Mr Toots that he was making a profound impression on that
gentleman's mind. 'Because he's inwisible.'

Mr Toots in his agitation was going to reply that it was of no
consequence at all. But he corrected himself, and said, 'Lor bless
me!'

'That there man,' said the Captain, 'has left me in charge here by
a piece of writing, but though he was a'most as good as my sworn
brother, I know no more where he's gone, or why he's gone; if so be to
seek his nevy, or if so be along of being not quite settled in his
mind; than you do. One morning at daybreak, he went over the side,'
said the Captain, 'without a splash, without a ripple I have looked
for that man high and low, and never set eyes, nor ears, nor nothing
else, upon him from that hour.'

'But, good Gracious, Miss Dombey don't know - ' Mr Toots began.

'Why, I ask you, as a feeling heart,' said the Captain, dropping
his voice, 'why should she know? why should she be made to know, until
such time as there wam't any help for it? She took to old Sol Gills,
did that sweet creetur, with a kindness, with a affability, with a -
what's the good of saying so? you know her.'

'I should hope so,' chuckled Mr Toots, with a conscious blush that
suffused his whole countenance.

'And you come here from her?' said the Captain.

'I should think so,' chuckled Mr Toots.

'Then all I need observe, is,' said the Captain, 'that you know a
angel, and are chartered a angel.'

Mr Toots instantly seized the Captain's hand, and requested the
favour of his friendship.

'Upon my word and honour,' said Mr Toots, earnestly, 'I should be
very much obliged to you if you'd improve my acquaintance I should
like to know you, Captain, very much. I really am In want of a friend,
I am. Little Dombey was my friend at old Blimber's, and would have
been now, if he'd have lived. The Chicken,' said Mr Toots, in a
forlorn whisper, 'is very well - admirable in his way - the sharpest
man perhaps in the world; there's not a move he isn't up to, everybody
says so - but I don't know - he's not everything. So she is an angel,
Captain. If there is an angel anywhere, it's Miss Dombey. That's what
I've always said. Really though, you know,' said Mr Toots, 'I should
be very much obliged to you if you'd cultivate my acquaintance.'

Captain Cuttle received this proposal in a polite manner, but still
without committing himself to its acceptance; merely observing, 'Ay,
ay, my lad. We shall see, we shall see;' and reminding Mr Toots of his
immediate mission, by inquiring to what he was indebted for the honour
of that visit.

'Why the fact is,' replied Mr Toots, 'that it's the young woman I
come from. Not Miss Dombey - Susan, you know.

The Captain nodded his head once, with a grave expression of face
indicative of his regarding that young woman with serious respect.

'And I'll tell you how it happens,' said Mr Toots. 'You know, I go
and call sometimes, on Miss Dombey. I don't go there on purpose, you
know, but I happen to be in the neighbourhood very often; and when I
find myself there, why - why I call.'

'Nat'rally,' observed the Captain.

'Yes,' said Mr Toots. 'I called this afternoon. Upon my word and
honour, I don't think it's possible to form an idea of the angel Miss
Dombey was this afternoon.'

The Captain answered with a jerk of his head, implying that it
might not be easy to some people, but was quite so to him.

'As I was coming out,' said Mr Toots, 'the young woman, in the most
unexpected manner, took me into the pantry.

The Captain seemed, for the moment, to object to this proceeding;
and leaning back in his chair, looked at Mr Toots with a distrustful,
if not threatening visage.

'Where she brought out,' said Mr Toots, 'this newspaper. She told
me that she had kept it from Miss Dombey all day, on account of
something that was in it, about somebody that she and Dombey used to
know; and then she read the passage to me. Very well. Then she said -
wait a minute; what was it she said, though!'

Mr Toots, endeavouring to concentrate his mental powers on this
question, unintentionally fixed the Captain's eye, and was so much
discomposed by its stern expression, that his difficulty in resuming
the thread of his subject was enhanced to a painful extent.

'Oh!' said Mr Toots after long consideration. 'Oh, ah! Yes! She
said that she hoped there was a bare possibility that it mightn't be
true; and that as she couldn't very well come out herself, without
surprising Miss Dombey, would I go down to Mr Solomon Gills the
Instrument-maker's in this street, who was the party's Uncle, and ask
whether he believed it was true, or had heard anything else in the
City. She said, if he couldn't speak to me, no doubt Captain Cuttle
could. By the bye!' said Mr Toots, as the discovery flashed upon him,
'you, you know!'

The Captain glanced at the newspaper in Mr Toots's hand, and
breathed short and hurriedly.

'Well, pursued Mr Toots, 'the reason why I'm rather late is,
because I went up as far as Finchley first, to get some uncommonly
fine chickweed that grows there, for Miss Dombey's bird. But I came on
here, directly afterwards. You've seen the paper, I suppose?'

The Captain, who had become cautious of reading the news, lest he
should find himself advertised at full length by Mrs MacStinger, shook
his head.

'Shall I read the passage to you?' inquired Mr Toots.

The Captain making a sign in the affirmative, Mr Toots read as
follows, from the Shipping Intelligence:

'"Southampton. The barque Defiance, Henry James, Commander, arrived
in this port to-day, with a cargo of sugar, coffee, and rum, reports
that being becalmed on the sixth day of her passage home from Jamaica,
in" - in such and such a latitude, you know,' said Mr Toots, after
making a feeble dash at the figures, and tumbling over them.

'Ay!' cried the Captain, striking his clenched hand on the table.
'Heave ahead, my lad!'

' - latitude,' repeated Mr Toots, with a startled glance at the
Captain, 'and longitude so-and-so, - "the look-out observed, half an
hour before sunset, some fragments of a wreck, drifting at about the
distance of a mile. The weather being clear, and the barque making no
way, a boat was hoisted out, with orders to inspect the same, when
they were found to consist of sundry large spars, and a part of the
main rigging of an English brig, of about five hundred tons burden,
together with a portion of the stem on which the words and letters
'Son and H-' were yet plainly legible. No vestige of any dead body was
to be seen upon the floating fragments. Log of the Defiance states,
that a breeze springing up in the night, the wreck was seen no more.
There can be no doubt that all surmises as to the fate of the missing
vessel, the Son and Heir, port of London, bound for Barbados, are now
set at rest for ever; that she broke up in the last hurricane; and
that every soul on board perished."'

Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had
survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its
death-shock. During the reading of the paragraph, and for a minute or
two afterwards, he sat with his gaze fixed on the modest Mr Toots,
like a man entranced; then, suddenly rising, and putting on his glazed
hat, which, in his visitor's honour, he had laid upon the table, the
Captain turned his back, and bent his head down on the little
chimneypiece.

'Oh' upon my word and honour,' cried Mr Toots, whose tender heart
was moved by the Captain's unexpected distress, 'this is a most
wretched sort of affair this world is! Somebody's always dying, or
going and doing something uncomfortable in it. I'm sure I never should
have looked forward so much, to coming into my property, if I had
known this. I never saw such a world. It's a great deal worse than
Blimber's.'

Captain Cuttle, without altering his position, signed to Mr Toots
not to mind him; and presently turned round, with his glazed hat
thrust back upon his ears, and his hand composing and smoothing his
brown face.

'Wal'r, my dear lad,' said the Captain, 'farewell! Wal'r my child,
my boy, and man, I loved you! He warn't my flesh and blood,' said the
Captain, looking at the fire - 'I ain't got none - but something of
what a father feels when he loses a son, I feel in losing Wal'r. For
why?' said the Captain. 'Because it ain't one loss, but a round dozen.
Where's that there young school-boy with the rosy face and curly hair,
that used to be as merry in this here parlour, come round every week,
as a piece of music? Gone down with Wal'r. Where's that there fresh
lad, that nothing couldn't tire nor put out, and that sparkled up and
blushed so, when we joked him about Heart's Delight, that he was
beautiful to look at? Gone down with Wal'r. Where's that there man's
spirit, all afire, that wouldn't see the old man hove down for a
minute, and cared nothing for itself? Gone down with Wal'r. It ain't
one Wal'r. There was a dozen Wal'rs that I know'd and loved, all
holding round his neck when he went down, and they're a-holding round
mine now!'

Mr Toots sat silent: folding and refolding the newspaper as small
as possible upon his knee.

'And Sol Gills,' said the Captain, gazing at the fire, 'poor
nevyless old Sol, where are you got to! you was left in charge of me;
his last words was, "Take care of my Uncle!" What came over you, Sol,
when you went and gave the go-bye to Ned Cuttle; and what am I to put
In my accounts that he's a looking down upon, respecting you! Sol
Gills, Sol Gills!' said the Captain, shaking his head slowly, 'catch
sight of that there newspaper, away from home, with no one as know'd
Wal'r by, to say a word; and broadside to you broach, and down you
pitch, head foremost!'

Drawing a heavy sigh, the Captain turned to Mr Toots, and roused
himself to a sustained consciousness of that gentleman's presence.

'My lad,' said the Captain, 'you must tell the young woman honestly
that this here fatal news is too correct. They don't romance, you see,
on such pints. It's entered on the ship's log, and that's the truest
book as a man can write. To-morrow morning,' said the Captain, 'I'll
step out and make inquiries; but they'll lead to no good. They can't
do it. If you'll give me a look-in in the forenoon, you shall know
what I have heerd; but tell the young woman from Cap'en Cuttle, that
it's over. Over!' And the Captain, hooking off his glazed hat, pulled
his handkerchief out of the crown, wiped his grizzled head
despairingly, and tossed the handkerchief in again, with the
indifference of deep dejection.

'Oh! I assure you,' said Mr Toots, 'really I am dreadfully sorry.
Upon my word I am, though I wasn't acquainted with the party. Do you
think Miss Dombey will be very much affected, Captain Gills - I mean
Mr Cuttle?'

'Why, Lord love you,' returned the Captain, with something of
compassion for Mr Toots's innocence.  When she warn't no higher than
that, they were as fond of one another as two young doves.'

'Were they though!' said Mr Toots, with a considerably lengthened
face.

'They were made for one another,' said the Captain, mournfully;
'but what signifies that now!'

'Upon my word and honour,' cried Mr Toots, blurting out his words
through a singular combination of awkward chuckles and emotion, 'I'm
even more sorry than I was before. You know, Captain Gills, I - I
positively adore Miss Dombey; - I - I am perfectly sore with loving
her;' the burst with which this confession forced itself out of the
unhappy Mr Toots, bespoke the vehemence of his feelings; 'but what
would be the good of my regarding her in this manner, if I wasn't
truly sorry for her feeling pain, whatever was the cause of it. Mine
ain't a selfish affection, you know,' said Mr Toots, in the confidence
engendered by his having been a witness of the Captain's tenderness.
'It's the sort of thing with me, Captain Gills, that if I could be run
over - or - or trampled upon - or - or thrown off a very high place
-or anything of that sort - for Miss Dombey's sake, it would be the
most delightful thing that could happen to me.

All this, Mr Toots said in a suppressed voice, to prevent its
reaching the jealous ears of the Chicken, who objected to the softer
emotions; which effort of restraint, coupled with the intensity of his
feelings, made him red to the tips of his ears, and caused him to
present such an affecting spectacle of disinterested love to the eyes
of Captain Cuttle, that the good Captain patted him consolingly on the
back, and bade him cheer up.

'Thankee, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'it's kind of you, in the
midst of your own troubles, to say so. I'm very much obliged to you.
As I said before, I really want a friend, and should be glad to have
your acquaintance. Although I am very well off,' said Mr Toots, with
energy, 'you can't think what a miserable Beast I am. The hollow
crowd, you know, when they see me with the Chicken, and characters of
distinction like that, suppose me to be happy; but I'm wretched. I
suffer for Miss Dombey, Captain Gills. I can't get through my meals; I
have no pleasure in my tailor; I often cry when I'm alone. I assure
you it'll be a satisfaction to me to come back to-morrow, or to come
back fifty times.'

Mr Toots, with these words, shook the Captain's hand; and
disguising such traces of his agitation as could be disguised on so
short a notice, before the Chicken's penetrating glance, rejoined that
eminent gentleman in the shop. The Chicken, who was apt to be jealous
of his ascendancy, eyed Captain Cuttle with anything but favour as he
took leave of Mr Toots, but followed his patron without being
otherwise demonstrative of his ill-will: leaving the Captain oppressed
with sorrow; and Rob the Grinder elevated with joy, on account of
having had the honour of staring for nearly half an hour at the
conqueror of the Nobby Shropshire One.

Long after Rob was fast asleep in his bed under the counter, the
Captain sat looking at the fire; and long after there was no fire to
look at, the Captain sat gazing on the rusty bars, with unavailing
thoughts of Walter and old Sol crowding through his mind. Retirement
to the stormy chamber at the top of the house brought no rest with it;
and the Captain rose up in the morning, sorrowful and unrefreshed.

As soon as the City offices were opened, the Captain issued forth
to the counting-house of Dombey and Son. But there was no opening of
the Midshipman's windows that morning. Rob the Grinder, by the
Captain's orders, left the shutters closed, and the house was as a
house of death.

It chanced that Mr Carker was entering the office, as Captain
Cuttle arrived at the door. Receiving the Manager's benison gravely
and silently, Captain Cuttle made bold to accompany him into his own
room.

'Well, Captain Cuttle,' said Mr Carker, taking up his usual
position before the fireplace, and keeping on his hat, 'this is a bad
business.'

'You have received the news as was in print yesterday, Sir?' said
the Captain.

'Yes,' said Mr Carker, 'we have received it! It was accurately
stated. The underwriters suffer a considerable loss. We are very
sorry. No help! Such is life!'

Mr Carker pared his nails delicately with a penknife, and smiled at
the Captain, who was standing by the door looking at him.

'I excessively regret poor Gay,' said Carker, 'and the crew. I
understand there were some of our very best men among 'em. It always
happens so. Many men with families too. A comfort to reflect that poor
Gay had no family, Captain Cuttle!'

The Captain stood rubbing his chin, and looking at the Manager. The
Manager glanced at the unopened letters lying on his desk, and took up
the newspaper.

'Is there anything I can do for you, Captain Cuttle?' he asked
looking off it, with a smiling and expressive glance at the door.

'I wish you could set my mind at rest, Sir, on something it's
uneasy about,' returned the Captain.

'Ay!' exclaimed the Manager, 'what's that? Come, Captain Cuttle, I
must trouble you to be quick, if you please. I am much engaged.'

'Lookee here, Sir,' said the Captain, advancing a step. 'Afore my
friend Wal'r went on this here disastrous voyage -

'Come, come, Captain Cuttle,' interposed the smiling Manager,
'don't talk about disastrous voyages in that way. We have nothing to
do with disastrous voyages here, my good fellow. You must have begun
very early on your day's allowance, Captain, if you don't remember
that there are hazards in all voyages, whether by sea or land. You are
not made uneasy by the supposition that young what's-his-name was lost
in bad weather that was got up against him in these offices - are you?
Fie, Captain! Sleep, and soda-water, are the best cures for such
uneasiness as that.

'My lad,' returned the Captain, slowly - 'you are a'most a lad to
me, and so I don't ask your pardon for that slip of a word, - if you
find any pleasure in this here sport, you ain't the gentleman I took
you for. And if you ain't the gentleman I took you for, may be my mind
has call to be uneasy. Now this is what it is, Mr Carker. - Afore that
poor lad went away, according to orders, he told me that he warn't a
going away for his own good, or for promotion, he know'd. It was my
belief that he was wrong, and I told him so, and I come here, your
head governor being absent, to ask a question or two of you in a civil
way, for my own satisfaction. Them questions you answered - free. Now
it'll ease my mind to know, when all is over, as it is, and when what
can't be cured must be endoored - for which, as a scholar, you'll
overhaul the book it's in, and thereof make a note - to know once
more, in a word, that I warn't mistaken; that I warn't back'ard in my
duty when I didn't tell the old man what Wal'r told me; and that the
wind was truly in his sail, when he highsted of it for Barbados
Harbour. Mr Carker,' said the Captain, in the goodness of his nature,
'when I was here last, we was very pleasant together. If I ain't been
altogether so pleasant myself this morning, on account of this poor
lad, and if I have chafed again any observation of yours that I might
have fended off, my name is Ed'ard Cuttle, and I ask your pardon.'

'Captain Cuttle,' returned the Manager, with all possible
politeness, 'I must ask you to do me a favour.'

'And what is it, Sir?' inquired the Captain.

'To have the goodness to walk off, if you please,' rejoined the
Manager, stretching forth his arm, 'and to carry your jargon somewhere
else.'

Every knob in the Captain's face turned white with astonishment and
indignation; even the red rim on his forehead faded, like a rainbow
among the gathering clouds.

'I tell you what, Captain Cuttle,' said the Manager, shaking his
forefinger at him, and showing him all his teeth, but still amiably
smiling, 'I was much too lenient with you when you came here before.
You belong to an artful and audacious set of people. In my desire to
save young what's-his-name from being kicked out of this place, neck
and crop, my good Captain, I tolerated you; but for once, and only
once. Now, go, my friend!'

The Captain was absolutely rooted to the ground, and speechless -

'Go,' said the good-humoured Manager, gathering up his skirts, and
standing astride upon the hearth-rug, 'like a sensible fellow, and let
us have no turning out, or any such violent measures. If Mr Dombey
were here, Captain, you might be obliged to leave in a more
ignominious manner, possibly. I merely say, Go!'

The Captain, laying his ponderous hand upon his chest, to assist
himself in fetching a deep breath, looked at Mr Carker from head to
foot, and looked round the little room, as if he did not clearly
understand where he was, or in what company.

'You are deep, Captain Cuttle,' pursued Carker, with the easy and
vivacious frankness of a man of the world who knew the world too well
to be ruffled by any discovery of misdoing, when it did not
immediately concern himself, 'but you are not quite out of soundings,
either - neither you nor your absent friend, Captain. What have you
done with your absent friend, hey?'

Again the Captain laid his hand upon his chest. After drawing
another deep breath, he conjured himself to 'stand by!' But In a
whisper.

'You hatch nice little plots, and hold nice little councils, and
make nice little appointments, and receive nice little visitors, too,
Captain, hey?' said Carker, bending his brows upon him, without
showing his teeth any the less: 'but it's a bold measure to come here
afterwards. Not like your discretion! You conspirators, and hiders,
and runners-away, should know better than that. Will you oblige me by
going?'

'My lad,' gasped the Captain, in a choked and trembling voice, and
with a curious action going on in the ponderous fist; 'there's a many
words I could wish to say to you, but I don't rightly know where
they're stowed just at present. My young friend, Wal'r, was drownded
only last night, according to my reckoning, and it puts me out, you
see. But you and me will come alongside o'one another again, my lad,'
said the Captain, holding up his hook, if we live.'

'It will be anything but shrewd in you, my good fellow, if we do,'
returned the Manager, with the same frankness; 'for you may rely, I
give you fair warning, upon my detecting and exposing you. I don't
pretend to be a more moral man than my neighbours, my good Captain;
but the confidence of this House, or of any member of this House, is
not to be abused and undermined while I have eyes and ears. Good day!'
said Mr Carker, nodding his head.

Captain Cuttle, looking at him steadily (Mr Carker looked full as
steadily at the Captain), went out of the office and left him standing
astride before the fire, as calm and pleasant as if there were no more
spots upon his soul than on his pure white linen, and his smooth sleek
skin.

The Captain glanced, in passing through the outer counting-house,
at the desk where he knew poor Walter had been used to sit, now
occupied by another young boy, with a face almost as fresh and hopeful
as his on the day when they tapped the famous last bottle but one of
the old Madeira, in the little back parlour. The nation of ideas, thus
awakened, did the Captain a great deal of good; it softened him in the
very height of his anger, and brought the tears into his eyes.

Arrived at the wooden Midshipman's again, and sitting down in a
corner of the dark shop, the Captain's indignation, strong as it was,
could make no head against his grief. Passion seemed not only to do
wrong and violence to the memory of the dead, but to be infected by
death, and to droop and decline beside it. All the living knaves and
liars in the world, were nothing to the honesty and truth of one dead
friend.

The only thing the honest Captain made out clearly, in this state
of mind, besides the loss of Walter, was, that with him almost the
whole world of Captain Cuttle had been drowned. If he reproached
himself sometimes, and keenly too, for having ever connived at
Walter's innocent deceit, he thought at least as often of the Mr
Carker whom no sea could ever render up; and the Mr Dombey, whom he
now began to perceive was as far beyond human recall; and the 'Heart's
Delight,' with whom he must never foregather again; and the Lovely
Peg, that teak-built and trim ballad, that had gone ashore upon a
rock, and split into mere planks and beams of rhyme. The Captain sat
in the dark shop, thinking of these things, to the entire exclusion of
his own injury; and looking with as sad an eye upon the ground, as if
in contemplation of their actual fragments, as they floated past

But the Captain was not unmindful, for all that, of such decent and
rest observances in memory of poor Walter, as he felt within his
power. Rousing himself, and rousing Rob the Grinder (who in the
unnatural twilight was fast asleep), the Captain sallied forth with
his attendant at his heels, and the door-key in his pocket, and
repairing to one of those convenient slop-selling establishments of
which there is abundant choice at the eastern end of London, purchased
on the spot two suits of mourning - one for Rob the Grinder, which was
immensely too small, and one for himself, which was immensely too
large. He also provided Rob with a species of hat, greatly to be
admired for its symmetry and usefulness, as well as for a happy
blending of the mariner with the coal-heaver; which is usually termed
a sou'wester; and which was something of a novelty in connexion with
the instrument business. In their several garments, which the vendor
declared to be such a miracle in point of fit as nothing but a rare
combination of fortuitous circumstances ever brought about, and the
fashion of which was unparalleled within the memory of the oldest
inhabitant, the Captain and Grinder immediately arrayed themselves:
presenting a spectacle fraught with wonder to all who beheld it.

In this altered form, the Captain received Mr Toots. 'I'm took
aback, my lad, at present,' said the Captain, 'and will only confirm
that there ill news. Tell the young woman to break it gentle to the
young lady, and for neither of 'em never to think of me no more -
'special, mind you, that is - though I will think of them, when night
comes on a hurricane and seas is mountains rowling, for which overhaul
your Doctor Watts, brother, and when found make a note on."

The Captain reserved, until some fitter time, the consideration of
Mr Toots's offer of friendship, and thus dismissed him. Captain
Cuttle's spirits were so low, in truth, that he half determined, that
day, to take no further precautions against surprise from Mrs
MacStinger, but to abandon himself recklessly to chance, and be
indifferent to what might happen. As evening came on, he fell into a
better frame of mind, however; and spoke much of Walter to Rob the
Grinder, whose attention and fidelity he likewise incidentally
commended. Rob did not blush to hear the Captain earnest in his
praises, but sat staring at him, and affecting to snivel with
sympathy, and making a feint of being virtuous, and treasuring up
every word he said (like a young spy as he was) with very promising
deceit.

When Rob had turned in, and was fast asleep, the Captain trimmed
the candle, put on his spectacles - he had felt it appropriate to take
to spectacles on entering into the Instrument Trade, though his eyes
were like a hawk's - and opened the prayer-book at the Burial Service.
And reading softly to himself, in the little back parlour, and
stopping now and then to wipe his eyes, the Captain, In a true and
simple spirit, committed Walter's body to the deep.



CHAPTER 33.

Contrasts



Turn we our eyes upon two homes; not lying side by side, but wide
apart, though both within easy range and reach of the great city of
London.

The first is situated in the green and wooded country near Norwood.
It is not a mansion; it is of no pretensions as to size; but it is
beautifully arranged, and tastefully kept. The lawn, the soft, smooth
slope, the flower-garden, the clumps of trees where graceful forms of
ash and willow are not wanting, the conservatory, the rustic verandah
with sweet-smelling creeping plants entwined about the pillars, the
simple exterior of the house, the well-ordered offices, though all
upon the diminutive scale proper to a mere cottage, bespeak an amount
of elegant comfort within, that might serve for a palace. This
indication is not without warrant; for, within, it is a house of
refinement and luxury. Rich colours, excellently blended, meet the eye
at every turn; in the furniture - its proportions admirably devised to
suit the shapes and sizes of the small rooms; on the walls; upon the
floors; tingeing and subduing the light that comes in through the odd
glass doors and windows here and there. There are a few choice prints
and pictures too; in quaint nooks and recesses there is no want of
books; and there are games of skill and chance set forth on tables -
fantastic chessmen, dice, backgammon, cards, and billiards.

And yet amidst this opulence of comfort, there is something in the
general air that is not well. Is it that the carpets and the cushions
are too soft and noiseless, so that those who move or repose among
them seem to act by stealth? Is it that the prints and pictures do not
commemorate great thoughts or deeds, or render nature in the Poetry of
landscape, hall, or hut, but are of one voluptuous cast - mere shows
of form and colour - and no more? Is it that the books have all their
gold outside, and that the titles of the greater part qualify them to
be companions of the prints and pictures? Is it that the completeness
and the beauty of the place are here and there belied by an
affectation of humility, in some unimportant and inexpensive regard,
which is as false as the face of the too truly painted portrait
hanging yonder, or its original at breakfast in his easy chair below
it? Or is it that, with the daily breath of that original and master
of all here, there issues forth some subtle portion of himself, which
gives a vague expression of himself to everything about him?

It is Mr Carker the Manager who sits in the easy chair. A gaudy
parrot in a burnished cage upon the table tears at the wires with her
beak, and goes walking, upside down, in its dome-top, shaking her
house and screeching; but Mr Carker is indifferent to the bird, and
looks with a musing smile at a picture on the opposite wall.

'A most extraordinary accidental likeness, certainly,' says he.

Perhaps it is a Juno; perhaps a Potiphar's Wife'; perhaps some
scornful Nymph - according as the Picture Dealers found the market,
when they christened it. It is the figure of a woman, supremely
handsome, who, turning away, but with her face addressed to the
spectator, flashes her proud glance upon him.

It is like Edith.

With a passing gesture of his hand at the picture - what! a menace?
No; yet something like it. A wave as of triumph? No; yet more like
that. An insolent salute wafted from his lips? No; yet like that too -
he resumes his breakfast, and calls to the chafing and imprisoned
bird, who coming down into a pendant gilded hoop within the cage, like
a great wedding-ring, swings in it, for his delight.

The second home is on the other side of London, near to where the
busy great north road of bygone days is silent and almost deserted,
except by wayfarers who toil along on foot. It is a poor small house,
barely and sparely furnished, but very clean; and there is even an
attempt to decorate it, shown in the homely flowers trained about the
porch and in the narrow garden. The neighbourhood in which it stands
has as little of the country to recommend'it, as it has of the town.
It is neither of the town nor country. The former, like the giant in
his travelling boots, has made a stride and passed it, and has set his
brick-and-mortar heel a long way in advance; but the intermediate
space between the giant's feet, as yet, is only blighted country, and
not town; and, here, among a few tall chimneys belching smoke all day
and night, and among the brick-fields and the lanes where turf is cut,
and where the fences tumble down, and where the dusty nettles grow,
and where a scrap or two of hedge may yet be seen, and where the
bird-catcher still comes occasionally, though he swears every time to
come no more - this second home is to be found.'

She who inhabits it, is she who left the first in her devotion to
an outcast brother. She withdrew from that home its redeeming spirit,
and from its master's breast his solitary angel: but though his liking
for her is gone, after this ungrateful slight as he considers it; and
though he abandons her altogether in return, an old idea of her is not
quite forgotten even by him. Let her flower-garden, in which he never
sets his foot, but which is yet maintained, among all his costly
alterations, as if she had quitted it but yesterday, bear witness!

Harriet Carker has changed since then, and on her beauty there has
fallen a heavier shade than Time of his unassisted self can cast,
all-potent as he is - the shadow of anxiety and sorrow, and the daily
struggle of a poor existence. But it is beauty still; and still a
gentle, quiet, and retiring beauty that must be sought out, for it
cannot vaunt itself; if it could, it would be what it is, no more.

Yes. This slight, small, patient figure, neatly dressed in homely
stuffs, and indicating nothing but the dull, household virtues, that
have so little in common with the received idea of heroism and
greatness, unless, indeed, any ray of them should shine through the
lives of the great ones of the earth, when it becomes a constellation
and is tracked in Heaven straightway - this slight, small, patient
figure, leaning on the man still young but worn and grey, is she, his
sister, who, of all the world, went over to him in his shame and put
her hand in his, and with a sweet composure and determination, led him
hopefully upon his barren way.

'It is early, John,' she said. 'Why do you go so early?'

'Not many minutes earlier than usual, Harriet. If I have the time
to spare, I should like, I think - it's a fancy - to walk once by the
house where I took leave of him.'

'I wish I had ever seen or known him, John.'

'It is better as it is, my dear, remembering his fate.'

'But I could not regret it more, though I had known him. Is not
your sorrow mine? And if I had, perhaps you would feel that I was a
better companion to you in speaking about him, than I may seem now.

'My dearest sister! Is there anything within the range of rejoicing
or regret, in which I am not sure of your companionship?'

'I hope you think not, John, for surely there is nothing!'

'How could you be better to me, or nearer to me then, than you are
in this, or anything?' said her brother. 'I feel that you did know
him, Harriet, and that you shared my feelings towards him.'

She drew the hand which had been resting on his shoulder, round his
neck, and answered, with some hesitation:

'No, not quite.'

'True, true!' he said; 'you think I might have done him no harm if
I had allowed myself to know him better?'

'Think! I know it.'

'Designedly, Heaven knows I would not,' he replied, shaking his
head mournfully; 'but his reputation was too precious to be perilled
by such association. Whether you share that knowledge, or do not, my
dear - '

'I do not,' she said quietly.

'It is still the truth, Harriet, and my mind is lighter when I
think of him for that which made it so much heavier then.' He checked
himself in his tone of melancholy, and smiled upon her as he said
'Good-bye!'

'Good-bye, dear John! In the evening, at the old time and place, I
shall meet you as usual on your way home. Good-bye.'

The cordial face she lifted up to his to kiss him, was his home,
his life, his universe, and yet it was a portion of his punishment and
grief; for in the cloud he saw upon it - though serene and calm as any
radiant cloud at sunset - and in the constancy and devotion of her
life, and in the sacrifice she had made of ease, enjoyment, and hope,
he saw the bitter fruits of his old crime, for ever ripe and fresh.

She stood at the door looking after him, with her hands loosely
clasped in each other, as he made his way over the frowzy and uneven
patch of ground which lay before their house, which had once (and not
long ago) been a pleasant meadow, and was now a very waste, with a
disorderly crop of beginnings of mean houses, rising out of the
rubbish, as if they had been unskilfully sown there. Whenever he
looked back - as once or twice he did - her cordial face shone like a
light upon his heart; but when he plodded on his way, and saw her not,
the tears were in her eyes as she stood watching him.

Her pensive form was not long idle at the door. There was daily
duty to discharge, and daily work to do - for such commonplace spirits
that are not heroic, often work hard with their hands - and Harriet
was soon busy with her household tasks. These discharged, and the poor
house made quite neat and orderly, she counted her little stock of
money, with an anxious face, and went out thoughtfully to buy some
necessaries for their table, planning and conniving, as she went, how
to save. So sordid are the lives of such lo natures, who are not only
not heroic to their valets and waiting-women, but have neither valets
nor waiting-women to be heroic to withal!

While she was absent, and there was no one in the house, there
approached it by a different way from that the brother had taken, a
gentleman, a very little past his prime of life perhaps, but of a
healthy florid hue, an upright presence, and a bright clear aspect,
that was gracious and good-humoured. His eyebrows were still black,
and so was much of his hair; the sprinkling of grey observable among
the latter, graced the former very much, and showed his broad frank
brow and honest eyes to great advantage.

After knocking once at the door, and obtaining no response, this
gentleman sat down on a bench in the little porch to wait. A certain
skilful action of his fingers as he hummed some bars, and beat time on
the seat beside him, seemed to denote the musician; and the
extraordinary satisfaction he derived from humming something very slow
and long, which had no recognisable tune, seemed to denote that he was
a scientific one.

The gentleman was still twirlIng a theme, which seemed to go round
and round and round, and in and in and in, and to involve itself like
a corkscrew twirled upon a table, without getting any nearer to
anything, when Harriet appeared returning. He rose up as she advanced,
and stood with his head uncovered.

'You are come again, Sir!' she said, faltering.

'I take that liberty,' he answered. 'May I ask for five minutes of
your leisure?'

After a moment's hesitation, she opened the door, and gave him
admission to the little parlour. The gentleman sat down there, drew
his chair to the table over against her, and said, in a voice that
perfectly corresponded to his appearance, and with a simplicity that
was very engaging:

'Miss Harriet, you cannot be proud. You signified to me, when I
called t'other morning, that you were. Pardon me if I say that I
looked into your face while you spoke, and that it contradicted you. I
look into it again,' he added, laying his hand gently on her arm, for
an instant, 'and it contradicts you more and more.'

She was somewhat confused and agitated, and could make no ready
answer.

'It is the mirror of truth,' said her visitor, 'and gentleness.
Excuse my trusting to it, and returning.'

His manner of saying these words, divested them entirely of the
character of compliments. It was so plain, grave, unaffected, and
sincere, that she bent her head, as if at once to thank him, and
acknowledge his sincerity.

'The disparity between our ages,' said the gentleman, 'and the
plainness of my purpose, empower me, I am glad to think, to speak my
mind. That is my mind; and so you see me for the second time.'

'There is a kind of pride, Sir,' she returned, after a moment's
silence, 'or what may be supposed to be pride, which is mere duty. I
hope I cherish no other.'

'For yourself,' he said.

'For myself.'

'But - pardon me - ' suggested the gentleman. 'For your brother
John?'

'Proud of his love, I am,' said Harriet, looking full upon her
visitor, and changing her manner on the instant - not that it was less
composed and quiet, but that there was a deep impassioned earnestness
in it that made the very tremble in her voice a part of her firmness,
'and proud of him. Sir, you who strangely know the story of his life,
and repeated it to me when you were here last - '

'Merely to make my way into your confidence,' interposed the
gentleman. 'For heaven's sake, don't suppose - '

'I am sure,' she said, 'you revived it, in my hearing, with a kind
and good purpose. I am quite sure of it.'

'I thank you,' returned her visitor, pressing her hand hastily. 'I
am much obliged to you. You do me justice, I assure you. You were
going to say, that I, who know the story of John Carker's life - '

'May think it pride in me,' she continued, 'when I say that I am
proud of him! I am. You know the time was, when I was not - when I
could not be - but that is past. The humility of many years, the
uncomplaining expiation, the true repentance, the terrible regret, the
pain I know he has even in my affection, which he thinks has cost me
dear, though Heaven knows I am happy, but for his sorrow I - oh, Sir,
after what I have seen, let me conjure you, if you are in any place of
power, and are ever wronged, never, for any wrong, inflict a
punishment that cannot be recalled; while there is a GOD above us to
work changes in the hearts He made.'

'Your brother is an altered man,' returned the gentleman,
compassionately. 'I assure you I don't doubt it.'

'He was an altered man when he did wrong,' said Harriet. 'He is an
altered man again, and is his true self now, believe me, Sir.'

'But we go on, said her visitor, rubbing his forehead, in an absent
manner, with his hand, and then drumming thoughtfully on the table,
'we go on in our clockwork routine, from day to day, and can't make
out, or follow, these changes. They - they're a metaphysical sort of
thing. We - we haven't leisure for it. We - we haven't courage.
They're not taught at schools or colleges, and we don't know how to
set about it. In short, we are so d-------d business-like,' said the
gentleman, walking to the window, and back, and sitting down again, in
a state of extreme dissatisfaction and vexation.

'I am sure,' said the gentleman, rubbing his forehead again; and
drumming on the table as before, 'I have good reason to believe that a
jog-trot life, the same from day to day, would reconcile one to
anything. One don't see anything, one don't hear anything, one don't
know anything; that's the fact. We go on taking everything for
granted, and so we go on, until whatever we do, good, bad, or
indifferent, we do from habit. Habit is all I shall have to report,
when I am called upon to plead to my conscience, on my death-bed.
''Habit," says I; ''I was deaf, dumb, blind, and paralytic, to a
million things, from habit." ''Very business-like indeed, Mr
What's-your-name,' says Conscience, ''but it won't do here!"'

The gentleman got up and walked to the window again and back:
seriously uneasy, though giving his uneasiness this peculiar
expression.

'Miss Harriet,' he said, resuming his chair, 'I wish you would let
me serve you. Look at me; I ought to look honest, for I know I am so,
at present. Do I?'

'Yes,' she answered with a smile.

'I believe every word you have said,' he returned. 'I am full of
self-reproach that I might have known this and seen this, and known
you and seen you, any time these dozen years, and that I never have. I
hardly know how I ever got here - creature that I am, not only of my
own habit, but of other people'sl But having done so, let me do
something. I ask it in all honour and respect. You inspire me with
both, in the highest degree. Let me do something.'

'We are contented, Sir.'

'No, no, not quite,' returned the gentleman. 'I think not quite.
There are some little comforts that might smooth your life, and his.
And his!' he repeated, fancying that had made some impression on her.
'I have been in the habit of thinking that there was nothing wanting
to be done for him; that it was all settled and over; in short, of not
thinking at all about it. I am different now. Let me do something for
him. You too,' said the visitor, with careful delicacy, 'have need to
watch your health closely, for his sake, and I fear it fails.'

'Whoever you may be, Sir,' answered Harriet, raising her eyes to
his face, 'I am deeply grateful to you. I feel certain that in all you
say, you have no object in the world but kindness to us. But years
have passed since we began this life; and to take from my brother any
part of what has so endeared him to me, and so proved his better
resolution - any fragment of the merit of his unassisted, obscure, and
forgotten reparation - would be to diminish the comfort it will be to
him and me, when that time comes to each of us, of which you spoke
just now. I thank you better with these tears than any words. Believe
it, pray.

The gentleman was moved, and put the hand she held out, to his
lips, much as a tender father might kiss the hand of a dutiful child.
But more reverently.

'If the day should ever come, said Harriet, 'when he is restored,
in part, to the position he lost - '

'Restored!' cried the gentleman, quickly. 'How can that be hoped
for? In whose hands does the power of any restoration lie? It is no
mistake of mine, surely, to suppose that his having gained the
priceless blessing of his life, is one cause of the animosity shown to
him by his brother.'

'You touch upon a subject that is never breathed between us; not
even between us,' said Harriet.

'I beg your forgiveness,' said the visitor. 'I should have known
it. I entreat you to forget that I have done so, inadvertently. And
now, as I dare urge no more - as I am not sure that I have a right to
do so - though Heaven knows, even that doubt may be habit,' said the
gentleman, rubbing his head, as despondently as before, 'let me;
though a stranger, yet no stranger; ask two favours.'

'What are they?' she inquired.

'The first, that if you should see cause to change your resolution,
you will suffer me to be as your right hand. My name shall then be at
your service; it is useless now, and always insignificant.'

'Our choice of friends,' she answered, smiling faintly, 'is not so
great, that I need any time for consideration. I can promise that.'

'The second, that you will allow me sometimes, say every Monday
morning, at nine o'clock - habit again - I must be businesslike,' said
the gentleman, with a whimsical inclination to quarrel with himself on
that head, 'in walking past, to see you at the door or window. I don't
ask to come in, as your brother will be gone out at that hour. I don't
ask to speak to you. I merely ask to see, for the satisfaction of my
own mind, that you are well, and without intrusion to remind you, by
the sight of me, that you have a friend - an elderly friend,
grey-haired already, and fast growing greyer - whom you may ever
command.'

The cordial face looked up in his; confided in it; and promised.

'I understand, as before,' said the gentleman, rising, 'that you
purpose not to mention my visit to John Carker, lest he should be at
all distressed by my acquaintance with his history. I am glad of it,
for it is out of the ordinary course of things, and - habit again!'
said the gentleman, checking himself impatiently, 'as if there were no
better course than the ordinary course!'

With that he turned to go, and walking, bareheaded, to the outside
of the little porch, took leave of her with such a happy mixture of
unconstrained respect and unaffected interest, as no breeding could
have taught, no truth mistrusted, and nothing but a pure and single
heart expressed.

Many half-forgotten emotions were awakened in the sister's mind by
this visit. It was so very long since any other visitor had crossed
their threshold; it was so very long since any voice of apathy had
made sad music in her ears; that the stranger's figure remained
present to her, hours afterwards, when she sat at the window, plying
her needle; and his words seemed newly spoken, again and again. He had
touched the spring that opened her whole life; and if she lost him for
a short space, it was only among the many shapes of the one great
recollection of which that life was made.

Musing and working by turns; now constraining herself to be steady
at her needle for a long time together, and now letting her work fall,
unregarded, on her lap, and straying wheresoever her busier thoughts
led, Harriet Carker found the hours glide by her, and the day steal
on. The morning, which had been bright and clear, gradually became
overcast; a sharp wind set in; the rain fell heavily; and a dark mist
drooping over the distant town, hid it from the view.

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the
stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard
by, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town
before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as
a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore,
went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as
if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers
crept past, but always, as she thought, In one direction - always
towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity,
towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they
never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons,
the river, fever, madness, vice, and death, - they passed on to the
monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.

The chill wind was howling, and the rain was falling, and the day
was darkening moodily, when Harriet, raising her eyes from the work on
which she had long since been engaged with unremitting constancy, saw
one of these travellers approaching.

A woman. A solitary woman of some thirty years of age; tall;
well-formed; handsome; miserably dressed; the soil of many country
roads in varied weather - dust, chalk, clay, gravel - clotted on her
grey cloak by the streaming wet; no bonnet on her head, nothing to
defend her rich black hair from the rain, but a torn handkerchief;
with the fluttering ends of which, and with her hair, the wind blinded
her so that she often stopped to push them back, and look upon the way
she was going.

She was in the act of doing so, when Harriet observed her. As her
hands, parting on her sunburnt forehead, swept across her face, and
threw aside the hindrances that encroached upon it, there was a
reckless and regardless beauty in it: a dauntless and depraved
indifference to more than weather: a carelessness of what was cast
upon her bare head from Heaven or earth: that, coupled with her misery
and loneliness, touched the heart of her fellow-woman. She thought of
all that was perverted and debased within her, no less than without:
of modest graces of the mind, hardened and steeled, like these
attractions of the person; of the many gifts of the Creator flung to
the winds like the wild hair; of all the beautiful ruin upon which the
storm was beating and the night was coming.

Thinking of this, she did not turn away with a delicate indignation
- too many of her own compassionate and tender sex too often do - but
pitied her.

Her fallen sister came on, looking far before her, trying with her
eager eyes to pierce the mist in which the city was enshrouded, and
glancing, now and then, from side to side, with the bewildered - and
uncertain aspect of a stranger. Though her tread was bold and
courageous, she was fatigued, and after a moment of irresolution, -
sat down upon a heap of stones; seeking no shelter from the rain, but
letting it rain on her as it would.

She was now opposite the house; raising her head after resting it
for a moment on both hands, her eyes met those of Harriet.

In a moment, Harriet was at the door; and the other, rising from
her seat at her beck, came slowly, and with no conciliatory look,
towards her.

'Why do you rest in the rain?' said Harriet, gently.

'Because I have no other resting-place,' was the reply.

'But there are many places of shelter near here. This,' referring
to the little porch, 'is better than where you were. You are very
welcome to rest here.'

The wanderer looked at her, in doubt and surprise, but without any
expression of thankfulness; and sitting down, and taking off one of
her worn shoes to beat out the fragments of stone and dust that were
inside, showed that her foot was cut and bleeding.

Harriet uttering an expression of pity, the traveller looked up
with a contemptuous and incredulous smile.

'Why, what's a torn foot to such as me?' she said. 'And what's a
torn foot in such as me, to such as you?'

'Come in and wash it,' answered Harriet, mildly, 'and let me give
you something to bind it up.'

The woman caught her arm, and drawing it before her own eyes, hid
them against it, and wept. Not like a woman, but like a stern man
surprised into that weakness; with a violent heaving of her breast,
and struggle for recovery, that showed how unusual the emotion was
with her.

She submitted to be led into the house, and, evidently more in
gratitude than in any care for herself, washed and bound the injured
place. Harriet then put before her fragments of her own frugal dinner,
and when she had eaten of them, though sparingly, besought her, before
resuming her road (which she showed her anxiety to do), to dry her
clothes before the fire. Again, more in gratitude than with any
evidence of concern in her own behalf, she sat down in front of it,
and unbinding the handkerchief about her head, and letting her thick
wet hair fall down below her waist, sat drying it with the palms of
her hands, and looking at the blaze.

'I daresay you are thinking,' she said, lifting her head suddenly,
'that I used to be handsome, once. I believe I was - I know I was -
Look here!' She held up her hair roughly with both hands; seizing it
as if she would have torn it out; then, threw it down again, and flung
it back as though it were a heap of serpents.

'Are you a stranger in this place?' asked Harriet.

'A stranger!' she returned, stopping between each short reply, and
looking at the fire. 'Yes. Ten or a dozen years a stranger. I have had
no almanack where I have been. Ten or a dozen years. I don't know this
part. It's much altered since I went away.'

'Have you been far?'

'Very far. Months upon months over the sea, and far away even then.
I have been where convicts go,' she added, looking full upon her
entertainer. 'I have been one myself.'

'Heaven help you and forgive you!' was the gentle answer.

'Ah! Heaven help me and forgive me!' she returned, nodding her head
at the fire. 'If man would help some of us a little more, God would
forgive us all the sooner perhaps.'

But she was softened by the earnest manner, and the cordial face so
full of mildness and so free from judgment, of her, and said, less
hardily:

'We may be about the same age, you and me. If I am older, it is not
above a year or two. Oh think of that!'

She opened her arms, as though the exhibition of her outward form
would show the moral wretch she was; and letting them drop at her
sides, hung down her head.

'There is nothing we may not hope to repair; it is never too late
to amend,' said Harriet. 'You are penitent

'No,' she answered. 'I am not! I can't be. I am no such thing. Why
should I be penitent, and all the world go free? They talk to me of my
penitence. Who's penitent for the wrongs that have been done to me?'

She rose up, bound her handkerchief about her head, and turned to
move away.

'Where are you going?' said Harriet.

'Yonder,' she answered, pointing with her hand. 'To London.'

'Have you any home to go to?'

'I think I have a mother. She's as much a mother, as her dwelling
is a home,' she answered with a bitter laugh.

'Take this,' cried Harriet, putting money in her hand. 'Try to do
well. It is very little, but for one day it may keep you from harm.'

'Are you married?' said the other, faintly, as she took it.

'No. I live here with my brother. We have not much to spare, or I
would give you more.'

'Will you let me kiss you?'

Seeing no scorn or repugnance in her face, the object of her
charity bent over her as she asked the question, and pressed her lips
against her cheek. Once more she caught her arm, and covered her eyes
with it; and then was gone.

Gone into the deepening night, and howling wind, and pelting rain;
urging her way on towards the mist-enshrouded city where the blurred
lights gleamed; and with her black hair, and disordered head-gear,
fluttering round her reckless face.



CHAPTER 34.

Another Mother and Daughter



In an ugly and dark room, an old woman, ugly and dark too, sat
listening to the wind and rain, and crouching over a meagre fire. More
constant to the last-named occupation than the first, she never
changed her attitude, unless, when any stray drops of rain fell
hissing on the smouldering embers, to raise her head with an awakened
attention to the whistling and pattering outside, and gradually to let
it fall again lower and lower and lower as she sunk into a brooding
state of thought, in which the noises of the night were as
indistinctly regarded as is the monotonous rolling of a sea by one who
sits in contemplation on its shore.

There was no light in the room save that which the fire afforded.
Glaring sullenly from time to time like the eye of a fierce beast half
asleep, it revealed no objects that needed to be jealous of a better
display. A heap of rags, a heap of bones, a wretched bed, two or three
mutilated chairs or stools, the black walls and blacker ceiling, were
all its winking brightness shone upon. As the old woman, with a
gigantic and distorted image of herself thrown half upon the wall
behind her, half upon the roof above, sat bending over the few loose
bricks within which it was pent, on the damp hearth of the chimney -
for there was no stove - she looked as if she were watching at some
witch's altar for a favourable token; and but that the movement of her
chattering jaws and trembling chin was too frequent and too fast for
the slow flickering of the fire, it would have seemed an illusion
wrought by the light, as it came and went, upon a face as motionless
as the form to which it belonged.

If Florence could have stood within the room and looked upon the
original of the shadow thrown upon the wall and roof as it cowered
thus over the fire, a glance might have sufficed to recall the figure
of Good Mrs Brown; notwithstanding that her childish recollection of
that terrible old woman was as grotesque and exaggerated a presentment
of the truth, perhaps, as the shadow on the wall. But Florence was not
there to look on; and Good Mrs Brown remained unrecognised, and sat
staring at her fire, unobserved.

Attracted by a louder sputtering than usual, as the rain came
hissing down the chimney in a little stream, the old woman raised her
head, impatiently, to listen afresh. And this time she did not drop it
again; for there was a hand upon the door, and a footstep in the room.

'Who's that?' she said, looking over her shoulder.

'One who brings you news, was the answer, in a woman's voice.

'News? Where from?'

'From abroad.'

'From beyond seas?' cried the old woman, starting up.

'Ay, from beyond seas.'

The old woman raked the fire together, hurriedly, and going close
to her visitor who had entered, and shut the door, and who now stood
in the middle of the room, put her hand upon the drenched cloak, and
turned the unresisting figure, so as to have it in the full light of
the fire. She did not find what she had expected, whatever that might
be; for she let the cloak go again, and uttered a querulous cry of
disappointment and misery.

'What is the matter?' asked her visitor.

'Oho! Oho!' cried the old woman, turning her face upward, with a
terrible howl.

'What is the matter?' asked the visitor again.

'It's not my gal!' cried the old woman, tossing up her arms, and
clasping her hands above her head. 'Where's my Alice? Where's my
handsome daughter? They've been the death of her!'

'They've not been the death of her yet, if your name's Marwood,'
said the visitor.

'Have you seen my gal, then?' cried the old woman. 'Has she wrote
to me?'

'She said you couldn't read,' returned the other.

'No more I can!' exclaimed the old woman, wringing her hands.

'Have you no light here?' said the other, looking round the room.

The old woman, mumbling and shaking her head, and muttering to
herself about her handsome daughter, brought a candle from a cupboard
in the corner, and thrusting it into the fire with a trembling hand,
lighted it with some difficulty and set it on the table. Its dirty
wick burnt dimly at first, being choked in its own grease; and when
the bleared eyes and failing sight of the old woman could distinguish
anything by its light, her visitor was sitting with her arms folded,
her eyes turned downwards, and a handkerchief she had worn upon her
head lying on the table by her side.

'She sent to me by word of mouth then, my gal, Alice?' mumbled the
old woman, after waiting for some moments. 'What did she say?'

'Look,' returned the visitor.

The old woman repeated the word in a scared uncertain way; and,
shading her eyes, looked at the speaker, round the room, and at the
speaker once again.

'Alice said look again, mother;' and the speaker fixed her eyes
upon her.

Again the old woman looked round the room, and at her visitor, and
round the room once more. Hastily seizing the candle, and rising from
her seat, she held it to the visitor's face, uttered a loud cry, set
down the light, and fell upon her neck!

'It's my gal! It's my Alice! It's my handsome daughter, living and
come back!' screamed the old woman, rocking herself to and fro upon
the breast that coldly suffered her embrace. 'It's my gal! It's my
Alice! It's my handsome daughter, living and come back!' she screamed
again, dropping on the floor before her, clasping her knees, laying
her head against them, and still rocking herself to and fro with every
frantic demonstration of which her vitality was capable.

'Yes, mother,' returned Alice, stooping forward for a moment and
kissing her, but endeavouring, even in the act, to disengage herself
from her embrace. 'I am here, at last. Let go, mother; let go. Get up,
and sit in your chair. What good does this do?'

'She's come back harder than she went!' cried the mother, looking
up in her face, and still holding to her knees. 'She don't care for
me! after all these years, and all the wretched life I've led!'

'Why> mother!' said Alice, shaking her ragged skirts to detach the
old woman from them: 'there are two sides to that. There have been
years for me as well as you, and there has been wretchedness for me as
well as you. Get up, get up!'

Her mother rose, and cried, and wrung her hands, and stood at a
little distance gazing on her. Then she took the candle again, and
going round her, surveyed her from head to foot, making a low moaning
all the time. Then she put the candle down, resumed her chair, and
beating her hands together to a kind of weary tune, and rolling
herself from side to side, continued moaning and wailing to herself.

Alice got up, took off her wet cloak, and laid it aside. That done,
she sat down as before, and with her arms folded, and her eyes gazing
at the fire, remained silently listening with a contemptuous face to
her old mother's inarticulate complainings.

'Did you expect to see me return as youthful as I went away,
mother?' she said at length, turning her eyes upon the old woman. 'Did
you think a foreign life, like mine, was good for good looks? One
would believe so, to hear you!'

'It ain't that!' cried the mother. 'She knows it!'

'What is it then?' returned the daughter. 'It had best be something
that don't last, mother, or my way out is easier than my way in.

'Hear that!' exclaimed the mother. 'After all these years she
threatens to desert me in the moment of her coming back again!'

'I tell you, mother, for the second time, there have been years for
me as well as you,' said Alice. 'Come back harder? Of course I have
come back harder. What else did you expect?'

'Harder to me! To her own dear mother!' cried the old woman

'I don't know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother
didn't,' she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted
brows, and compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force,
every softer feeling from her breast. 'Listen, mother, to a word or
two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more,
perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away
undutiful enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But
have you been very dutiful to me?'

'I!' cried the old woman. 'To my gal! A mother dutiful to her own
child!'

'It sounds unnatural, don't it?' returned the daughter, looking
coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy, beautiful face; 'but
I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I
have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last;
but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now
and then - to pass away the time - whether no one ever owed any duty
to me.

Her mother sat mowing, and mumbling, and shaking her head, but
whether angrily or remorsefully, or in denial, or only in her physical
infirmity, did not appear.

'There was a child called Alice Marwood,' said the daughter, with a
laugh, and looking down at herself in terrible derision of herself,
'born, among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her,
nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.'

'Nobody!' echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her
breast.

'The only care she knew,' returned the daughter, 'was to be beaten,
and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better
without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a
crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks
out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have
been hunted and worried to death for ugliness.'

'Go on! go on!' exclaimed the mother.

'I am going on,' returned the daughter. 'There was a girl called
Alice Marwood. She was handsome. She was taught too late, and taught
all wrong. She was too well cared for, too well trained, too well
helped on, too much looked after. You were very fond of her - you were
better off then. What came to that girl comes to thousands every year.
It was only ruin, and she was born to it.'

'After all these years!' whined the old woman. 'My gal begins with
this.'

'She'll soon have ended,' said the daughter. 'There was a criminal
called Alice Marwood - a girl still, but deserted and an outcast. And
she was tried, and she was sentenced. And lord, how the gentlemen in
the Court talked about it! and how grave the judge was on her duty,
and on her having perverted the gifts of nature - as if he didn't know
better than anybody there, that they had been made curses to her! -
and how he preached about the strong arm of the Law - so very strong
to save her, when she was an innocent and helpless little wretch! -
and how solemn and religious it all was! I have thought of that, many
times since, to be sure!'

She folded her arms tightly on her breast, and laughed in a tone
that made the howl of the old woman musical.

'So Alice Marwood was transported, mother,' she pursued, 'and was
sent to learn her duty, where there was twenty times less duty, and
more wickedness, and wrong, and infamy, than here. And Alice Marwood
is come back a woman. Such a woman as she ought to be, after all this.
In good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and
more strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the
gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's
crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the
streets they live in, that'll keep them to it till they've made their
fortunes.'

The old woman leaned her elbows on the table, and resting her face
upon her two hands, made a show of being in great distress - or really
was, perhaps.

'There! I have done, mother,' said the daughter, with a motion of
her head, as if in dismissal of the subject. 'I have said enough.
Don't let you and I talk of being dutiful, whatever we do. Your
childhood was like mine, I suppose. So much the worse for both of us.
I don't want to blame you, or to defend myself; why should I? That's
all over long ago. But I am a woman - not a girl, now - and you and I
needn't make a show of our history, like the gentlemen in the Court.
We know all about it, well enough.'

Lost and degraded as she was, there was a beauty in her, both of
face and form, which, even in its worst expression, could not but be
recognised as such by anyone regarding her with the least attention.
As she subsided into silence, and her face which had been harshly
agitated, quieted down; while her dark eyes, fixed upon the fire,
exchanged the reckless light that had animated them, for one that was
softened by something like sorrow; there shone through all her wayworn
misery and fatigue, a ray of the departed radiance of the fallen
angel.'

Her mother, after watching her for some time without speaking,
ventured to steal her withered hand a little nearer to her across the
table; and finding that she permitted this, to touch her face, and
smooth her hair. With the feeling, as it seemed, that the old woman
was at least sincere in this show of interest, Alice made no movement
to check her; so, advancing by degrees, she bound up her daughter's
hair afresh, took off her wet shoes, if they deserved the name, spread
something dry upon her shoulders, and hovered humbly about her,
muttering to herself, as she recognised her old features and
expression more and more.

'You are very poor, mother, I see,' said Alice, looking round, when
she had sat thus for some time.

'Bitter poor, my deary,' replied the old woman.

She admired her daughter, and was afraid of her. Perhaps her
admiration, such as it was, had originated long ago, when she first
found anything that was beautiful appearing in the midst of the
squalid fight of her existence. Perhaps her fear was referable, in
some sort, to the retrospect she had so lately heard. Be this as it
might, she stood, submissively and deferentially, before her child,
and inclined her head, as if in a pitiful entreaty to be spared any
further reproach.

'How have you lived?'

'By begging, my deary.

'And pilfering, mother?'

'Sometimes, Ally - in a very small way. I am old and timid. I have
taken trifles from children now and then, my deary, but not often. I
have tramped about the country, pet, and I know what I know. I have
watched.'

'Watched?' returned the daughter, looking at her.

'I have hung about a family, my deary,' said the mother, even more
humbly and submissively than before.

'What family?'

'Hush, darling. Don't be angry with me. I did it for the love of
you. In memory of my poor gal beyond seas.' She put out her hand
deprecatingly, and drawing it back again, laid it on her lips.

'Years ago, my deary,' she pursued, glancing timidly at the
attentive and stem face opposed to her, 'I came across his little
child, by chance.'

'Whose child?'

'Not his, Alice deary; don't look at me like that; not his. How
could it be his? You know he has none.'

'Whose then?' returned the daughter. 'You said his.'

'Hush, Ally; you frighten me, deary. Mr Dombey's - only Mr
Dombey's. Since then, darling, I have seen them often. I have seen
him.'

In uttering this last word, the old woman shrunk and recoiled, as
if with sudden fear that her daughter would strike her. But though the
daughter's face was fixed upon her, and expressed the most vehement
passion, she remained still: except that she clenched her arms tighter
and tighter within each other, on her bosom, as if to restrain them by
that means from doing an injury to herself, or someone else, in the
blind fury of the wrath that suddenly possessed her.

'Little he thought who I was!' said the old woman, shaking her
clenched hand.

'And little he cared!' muttered her daughter, between her teeth.

'But there we were, said the old woman, 'face to face. I spoke to
him, and he spoke to me. I sat and watched him as he went away down a
long grove of trees: and at every step he took, I cursed him soul and
body.'

'He will thrive in spite of that,' returned the daughter
disdainfully.

'Ay, he is thriving,' said the mother.

She held her peace; for the face and form before her were unshaped
by rage. It seemed as if the bosom would burst with the emotions that
strove within it. The effort that constrained and held it pent up, was
no less formidable than the rage itself: no less bespeaking the
violent and dangerous character of the woman who made it. But it
succeeded, and she asked, after a silence:

'Is he married?'

'No, deary,' said the mother.

'Going to be?'

'Not that I know of, deary. But his master and friend is married.
Oh, we may give him joy! We may give 'em all joy!' cried the old
woman, hugging herself with her lean arms in her exultation. 'Nothing
but joy to us will come of that marriage. Mind met'

The daughter looked at her for an explanation.

'But you are wet and tired; hungry and thirsty,' said the old
woman, hobbling to the cupboard; 'and there's little here, and little'
- diving down into her pocket, and jingling a few half- pence on the
table - 'little here. Have you any money, Alice, deary?'

The covetous, sharp, eager face, with which she 'asked the question
and looked on, as her daughter took out of her bosom the little gift
she had so lately received, told almost as much of the history of this
parent and child as the child herself had told in words.

'Is that all?' said the mother.

'I have no more. I should not have this, but for charity.'

'But for charity, eh, deary?' said the old woman, bending greedily
over the table to look at the money, which she appeared distrustful of
her daughter's still retaining in her hand, and gazing on. 'Humph! six
and six is twelve, and six eighteen - so - we must make the most of
it. I'll go buy something to eat and drink.'

With greater alacrity than might have been expected in one of her
appearance - for age and misery seemed to have made her as decrepit as
ugly - she began to occupy her trembling hands in tying an old bonnet
on her head, and folding a torn shawl about herself: still eyeing the
money in her daughter's hand, with the same sharp desire.

'What joy is to come to us of this marriage, mother?' asked the
daughter. 'You have not told me that.'

'The joy,' she replied, attiring herself, with fumbling fingers,
'of no love at all, and much pride and hate, my deary. The joy of
confusion and strife among 'em, proud as they are, and of danger -
danger, Alice!'

'What danger?'

'I have seen what I have seen. I know what I know!' chuckled the
mother. 'Let some look to it. Let some be upon their guard. My gal may
keep good company yet!'

Then, seeing that in the wondering earnestness with which her
daughter regarded her, her hand involuntarily closed upon the money,
the old woman made more speed to secure it, and hurriedly added, 'but
I'll go buy something; I'll go buy something.'

As she stood with her hand stretched out before her daughter, her
daughter, glancing again at the money, put it to her lips before
parting with it.

'What, Ally! Do you kiss it?' chuckled the old woman. 'That's like
me - I often do. Oh, it's so good to us!' squeezing her own tarnished
halfpence up to her bag of a throat, 'so good to us in everything but
not coming in heaps!'

'I kiss it, mother,' said the daughter, 'or I did then - I don't
know that I ever did before - for the giver's sake.'

'The giver, eh, deary?' retorted the old woman, whose dimmed eyes
glistened as she took it. 'Ay! I'll kiss it for the giver's sake, too,
when the giver can make it go farther. But I'll go spend it, deary.
I'll be back directly.'

'You seem to say you know a great deal, mother,' said the daughter,
following her to the door with her eyes. 'You have grown very wise
since we parted.'

'Know!' croaked the old woman, coming back a step or two, 'I know
more than you think I know more than he thinks, deary, as I'll tell
you by and bye. I know all'

The daughter smiled incredulously.

'I know of his brother, Alice,' said the old woman, stretching out
her neck with a leer of malice absolutely frightful, 'who might have
been where you have been - for stealing money - and who lives with his
sister, over yonder, by the north road out of London.'

'Where?'

'By the north road out of London, deary. You shall see the house if
you like. It ain't much to boast of, genteel as his own is. No, no,
no,' cried the old woman, shaking her head and laughing; for her
daughter had started up, 'not now; it's too far off; it's by the
milestone, where the stones are heaped; - to-morrow, deary, if it's
fine, and you are in the humour. But I'll go spend - '

'Stop!' and the daughter flung herself upon her, with her former
passion raging like a fire. 'The sister is a fair-faced Devil, with
brown hair?'

The old woman, amazed and terrified, nodded her head.

'I see the shadow of him in her face! It's a red house standing by
itself. Before the door there is a small green porch.'

Again the old woman nodded.

'In which I sat to-day! Give me back the money.'

'Alice! Deary!'

'Give me back the money, or you'll be hurt.'

She forced it from the old woman's hand as she spoke, and utterly
indifferent to her complainings and entreaties, threw on the garments
she had taken off, and hurried out, with headlong speed.

The mother followed, limping after her as she could, and
expostulating with no more effect upon her than upon the wind and rain
and darkness that encompassed them. Obdurate and fierce in her own
purpose, and indifferent to all besides, the daughter defied the
weather and the distance, as if she had known no travel or fatigue,
and made for the house where she had been relieved. After some quarter
of an hour's walking, the old woman, spent and out of breath, ventured
to hold by her skirts; but she ventured no more, and they travelled on
in silence through the wet and gloom. If the mother now and then
uttered a word of complaint, she stifled it lest her daughter should
break away from her and leave her behind; and the daughter was dumb.

It was within an hour or so of midnight, when they left the regular
streets behind them, and entered on the deeper gloom of that neutral
ground where the house was situated. The town lay in the distance,
lurid and lowering; the bleak wind howled over the open space; all
around was black, wild, desolate.

'This is a fit place for me!' said the daughter, stopping to look
back. 'I thought so, when I was here before, to-day.'

'Alice, my deary,' cried the mother, pulling her gently by the
skirt. 'Alice!'

'What now, mother?'

'Don't give the money back, my darling; please don't. We can't
afford it. We want supper, deary. Money is money, whoever gives it.
Say what you will, but keep the money.'

'See there!' was all the daughter's answer. 'That is the house I
mean. Is that it?'

The old woman nodded in the affirmative; and a few more paces
brought them to the threshold. There was the light of fire and candle
in the room where Alice had sat to dry her clothes; and on her
knocking at the door, John Carker appeared from that room.

He was surprised to see such visitors at such an hour, and asked
Alice what she wanted.

'I want your sister,' she said. 'The woman who gave me money
to-day.'

At the sound of her raised voice, Harriet came out.

'Oh!' said Alice. 'You are here! Do you remember me?'

'Yes,' she answered, wondering.

The face that had humbled itself before her, looked on her now with
such invincible hatred and defiance; and the hand that had gently
touched her arm, was clenched with such a show of evil purpose, as if
it would gladly strangle her; that she drew close to her brother for
protection.

'That I could speak with you, and not know you! That I could come
near you, and not feel what blood was running in your veins, by the
tingling of my own!' said Alice, with a menacing gesture.

'What do you mean? What have I done?'

'Done!' returned the other. 'You have sat me by your fire; you have
given me food and money; you have bestowed your compassion on me! You!
whose name I spit upon!'

The old woman, with a malevolence that made her uglIness quite
awful, shook her withered hand at the brother and sister in
confirmation of her daughter, but plucked her by the skirts again,
nevertheless, imploring her to keep the money.

'If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I
spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched
you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this
roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon
all belonging to you!'

As she said the words, she threw the money down upon the ground,
and spurned it with her foot.

'I tread it in the dust: I wouldn't take it if it paved my way to
Heaven! I would the bleeding foot that brought me here to-day, had
rotted off, before it led me to your house!'

Harriet, pale and trembling, restrained her brother, and suffered
her to go on uninterrupted.

'It was well that I should be pitied and forgiven by you, or anyone
of your name, in the first hour of my return! It was well that you
should act the kind good lady to me! I'll thank you when I die; I'll
pray for you, and all your race, you may be sure!'

With a fierce action of her hand, as if she sprinkled hatred on the
ground, and with it devoted those who were standing there to
destruction, she looked up once at the black sky, and strode out into
the wild night.

The mother, who had plucked at her skirts again and again in vain,
and had eyed the money lying on the threshold with an absorbing greed
that seemed to concentrate her faculties upon it, would have prowled
about, until the house was dark, and then groped in the mire on the
chance of repossessing herself of it. But the daughter drew her away,
and they set forth, straight, on their return to their dwelling; the
old woman whimpering and bemoaning their loss upon the road, and
fretfully bewailing, as openly as she dared, the undutiful conduct of
her handsome girl in depriving her of a supper, on the very first
night of their reunion.

Supperless to bed she went, saving for a few coarse fragments; and
those she sat mumbling and munching over a scrap of fire, long after
her undutiful daughter lay asleep.

Were this miserable mother, and this miserable daughter, only the
reduction to their lowest grade, of certain social vices sometimes
prevailing higher up? In this round world of many circles within
circles, do we make a weary journey from the high grade to the low, to
find at last that they lie close together, that the two extremes
touch, and that our journey's end is but our starting-place? Allowing
for great difference of stuff and texture, was the pattern of this
woof repeated among gentle blood at all?

Say, Edith Dombey! And Cleopatra, best of mothers, let us have your
testimony!



CHAPTER 35.

The Happy Pair



The dark blot on the street is gone. Mr Dombey's mansion, if it be
a gap among the other houses any longer, is only so because it is not
to be vied with in its brightness, and haughtily casts them off. The
saying is, that home is home, be it never so homely. If it hold good
in the opposite contingency, and home is home be it never so stately,
what an altar to the Household Gods is raised up here!

Lights are sparkling in the windows this evening, and the ruddy
glow of fires is warm and bright upon the hangings and soft carpets,
and the dinner waits to be served, and the dinner-table is handsomely
set forth, though only for four persons, and the side board is
cumbrous with plate. It is the first time that the house has been
arranged for occupation since its late changes, and the happy pair are
looked for every minute.

Only second to the wedding morning, in the interest and expectation
it engenders among the household, is this evening of the coming home.
Mrs Perch is in the kitchen taking tea; and has made the tour of the
establishment, and priced the silks and damasks by the yard, and
exhausted every interjection in the dictionary and out of it
expressive of admiration and wonder. The upholsterer's foreman, who
has left his hat, with a pocket-handkerchief in it, both smelling
strongly of varnish, under a chair in the hall, lurks about the house,
gazing upwards at the cornices, and downward at the carpets, and
occasionally, in a silent transport of enjoyment, taking a rule out of
his pocket, and skirmishingly measuring expensive objects, with
unutterable feelings. Cook is in high spirits, and says give her a
place where there's plenty of company (as she'll bet you sixpence
there will be now), for she is of a lively disposition, and she always
was from a child, and she don't mind who knows it; which sentiment
elicits from the breast of Mrs Perch a responsive murmur of support
and approbation. All the housemaid hopes is, happiness for 'em - but
marriage is a lottery, and the more she thinks about it, the more she
feels the independence and the safety of a single life. Mr Towlinson
is saturnine and grim' and says that's his opinion too, and give him
War besides, and down with the French - for this young man has a
general impression that every foreigner is a Frenchman, and must be by
the laws of nature.

At each new sound of wheels, they all stop> whatever they are
saying, and listen; and more than once there is a general starting up
and a cry of 'Here they are!' But here they are not yet; and Cook
begins to mourn over the dinner, which has been put back twice, and
the upholsterer's foreman still goes lurking about the rooms,
undisturbed in his blissful reverie!

Florence is ready to receive her father and her new Mama Whether
the emotions that are throbbing in her breast originate In pleasure or
in pain, she hardly knows. But the fluttering heart sends added colour
to her cheeks, and brightness to her eyes; and they say downstairs,
drawing their heads together - for they always speak softly when they
speak of her - how beautiful Miss Florence looks to-night, and what a
sweet young lady she has grown, poor dear! A pause succeeds; and then
Cook, feeling, as president, that her sentiments are waited for,
wonders whether - and there stops. The housemaid wonders too, and so
does Mrs Perch, who has the happy social faculty of always wondering
when other people wonder, without being at all particular what she
wonders at. Mr Towlinson, who now descries an opportunity of bringing
down the spirits of the ladies to his own level, says wait and see; he
wishes some people were well out of this. Cook leads a sigh then, and
a murmur of 'Ah, it's a strange world, it is indeed!' and when it has
gone round the table, adds persuasively, 'but Miss Florence can't well
be the worse for any change, Tom.' Mr Towlinson's rejoinder, pregnant
with frightful meaning, is 'Oh, can't she though!' and sensible that a
mere man can scarcely be more prophetic, or improve upon that, he
holds his peace.

Mrs Skewton, prepared to greet her darling daughter and dear
son-in-law with open arms, is appropriately attired for that purpose
in a very youthful costume, with short sleeves. At present, however,
her ripe charms are blooming in the shade of her own apartments,
whence she had not emerged since she took possession of them a few
hours ago, and where she is fast growing fretful, on account of the
postponement of dinner. The maid who ought to be a skeleton, but is in
truth a buxom damsel, is, on the other hand, In a most amiable state:
considering her quarterly stipend much safer than heretofore, and
foreseeing a great improvement in her board and lodging.

Where are the happy pair, for whom this brave home is waiting? Do
steam, tide, wind, and horses, all abate their speed, to linger on
such happiness? Does the swarm of loves and graces hovering about them
retard their progress by its numbers? Are there so many flowers in
their happy path, that they can scarcely move along, without
entanglement in thornless roses, and sweetest briar?

They are here at last! The noise of wheels is heard, grows louder,
and a carriage drives up to the door! A thundering knock from the
obnoxious foreigner anticipates the rush of Mr Towlinson and party to
open it; and Mr Dombey and his bride alight, and walk in arm in arm.

'My sweetest Edith!' cries an agitated voice upon the stairs. 'My
dearest Dombey!' and the short sleeves wreath themselves about the
happy couple in turn, and embrace them.

Florence had come down to the hall too, but did not advance:
reserving her timid welcome until these nearer and dearer transports
should subside. But the eyes of Edith sought her out, upon the
threshold; and dismissing her sensitive parent with a slight kiss on
the cheek, she hurried on to Florence and embraced her.

'How do you do, Florence?' said Mr Dombey, putting out his hand.

As Florence, trembling, raised it to her lips, she met his glance.
The look was cold and distant enough, but it stirred her heart to
think that she observed in it something more of interest than he had
ever shown before. It even expressed a kind of faint surprise, and not
a disagreeable surprise, at sight of her. She dared not raise her eyes
to his any more; but she felt that he looked at her once again, and
not less favourably. Oh what a thrill of joy shot through her,
awakened by even this intangible and baseless confirmation of her hope
that she would learn to win him, through her new and beautiful Mama!

'You will not be long dressing, Mrs Dombey, I presume?' said Mr
Dombey.

'I shall be ready immediately.'

'Let them send up dinner in a quarter of an hour.'

With that Mr Dombey stalked away to his own dressing-room, and Mrs
Dombey went upstairs to hers. Mrs Skewton and Florence repaired to the
drawing-room, where that excellent mother considered it incumbent on
her to shed a few irrepressible tears, supposed to be forced from her
by her daughter's felicity; and which she was still drying, very
gingerly, with a laced corner of her pocket-handkerchief, when her
son-in-law appeared.

'And how, my dearest Dombey, did you find that delightfullest of
cities, Paris?' she asked, subduing her emotion.

'It was cold,' returned Mr Dombey.

'Gay as ever,' said Mrs Skewton, 'of course.

'Not particularly. I thought it dull,' said Mr Dombey.

'Fie, my dearest Dombey!' archly; 'dull!'

'It made that impression upon me, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, with
grave politeness. 'I believe Mrs Dombey found it dull too. She
mentioned once or twice that she thought it so.'

'Why, you naughty girl!' cried Mrs Skewton, rallying her dear
child, who now entered, 'what dreadfully heretical things have you
been saying about Paris?'

Edith raised her eyebrows with an air of weariness; and passing the
folding-doors which were thrown open to display the suite of rooms in
their new and handsome garniture, and barely glancing at them as she
passed, sat down by Florence.

'My dear Dombey,' said Mrs Skewton, 'how charmingly these people
have carried out every idea that we hinted. They have made a perfect
palace of the house, positively.'

'It is handsome,' said Mr Dombey, looking round. 'I directed that
no expense should be spared; and all that money could do, has been
done, I believe.'

'And what can it not do, dear Dombey?' observed Cleopatra.

'It is powerful, Madam,' said Mr Dombey.

He looked in his solemn way towards his wife, but not a word said
she.

'I hope, Mrs Dombey,' addressing her after a moment's silence, with
especial distinctness; 'that these alterations meet with your
approval?'

'They are as handsome as they can be,' she returned, with haughty
carelessness. 'They should be so, of' course. And I suppose they are.'

An expression of scorn was habitual to the proud face, and seemed
inseparable from it; but the contempt with which it received any
appeal to admiration, respect, or consideration on the ground of his
riches, no matter how slight or ordinary in itself, was a new and
different expression, unequalled in intensity by any other of which it
was capable. Whether Mr Dombey, wrapped in his own greatness, was at
all aware of this, or no, there had not been wanting opportunities
already for his complete enlightenment; and at that moment it might
have been effected by the one glance of the dark eye that lighted on
him, after it had rapidly and scornfully surveyed the theme of his
self-glorification. He might have read in that one glance that nothing
that his wealth could do, though it were increased ten thousand fold,
could win him for its own sake, one look of softened recognition from
the defiant woman, linked to him, but arrayed with her whole soul
against him. He might have read in that one glance that even for its
sordid and mercenary influence upon herself, she spurned it, while she
claimed its utmost power as her right, her bargain - as the base and
worthless recompense for which she had become his wife. He might have
read in it that, ever baring her own head for the lightning of her own
contempt and pride to strike, the most innocent allusion to the power
of his riches degraded her anew, sunk her deeper in her own respect,
and made the blight and waste within her more complete.

But dinner was announced, and Mr Dombey led down Cleopatra; Edith
and his daughter following. Sweeping past the gold and silver
demonstration on the sideboard as if it were heaped-up dirt, and
deigning to bestow no look upon the elegancies around her, she took
her place at his board for the first time, and sat, like a statue, at
the feast.

Mr Dombey, being a good deal in the statue way himself, was well
enough pleased to see his handsome wife immovable and proud and cold.
Her deportment being always elegant and graceful, this as a general
behaviour was agreeable and congenial to him. Presiding, therefore,
with his accustomed dignity, and not at all reflecting on his wife by
any warmth or hilarity of his own, he performed his share of the
honours of the table with a cool satisfaction; and the installation
dinner, though not regarded downstairs as a great success, or very
promising beginning, passed oil, above, in a sufficiently polite,
genteel, and frosty manner.

Soon after tea' Mrs Skewton, who affected to be quite overcome and
worn Out by her emotions of happiness, arising in the contemplation of
her dear child united to the man of her heart, but who, there is
reason to suppose, found this family party somewhat dull, as she
yawned for one hour continually behind her fan, retired to bed. Edith,
also, silently withdrew and came back' no more. Thus, it happened that
Florence, who had been upstairs to have some conversation with
Diogenes, returning to the drawing-room with her little work-basket,
found no one there but her father, who was walking to and fro, in
dreary magnificence.

'I beg your pardon. Shall I go away, Papa?' said Florence faintly,
hesitating at the door.

'No,' returned Mr Dombey, looking round over his shoulder; you can
come and go here, Florence, as you please. This is not my private
room.

Florence entered, and sat down at a distant little table with her
work: finding herself for the first time in her life - for the very
first time within her memory from her infancy to that hour - alone
with her father, as his companion. She, his natural companion, his
only child, who in her lonely life and grief had known the suffering
of a breaking heart; who, in her rejected love, had never breathed his
name to God at night, but with a tearful blessing, heavier on him than
a curse; who had prayed to die young, so she might only die in his
arms; who had, all through, repaid the agony of slight and coldness,
and dislike, with patient unexacting love, excusing him, and pleading
for him, like his better angel!

She trembled, and her eyes were dim. His figure seemed to grow in
height and bulk before her as he paced the room: now it was all
blurred and indistinct; now clear again, and plain; and now she seemed
to think that this had happened, just the same, a multitude of years
ago. She yearned towards him, and yet shrunk from his approach.
Unnatural emotion in a child, innocent of wrong! Unnatural the hand
that had directed the sharp plough, which furrowed up her gentle
nature for the sowing of its seeds!

Bent upon not distressing or offending him by her distress,
Florence controlled herself, and sat quietly at her work. After a few
more turns across and across the room, he left off pacing it; and
withdrawing into a shadowy corner at some distance, where there was an
easy chair, covered his head with a handkerchief, and composed himself
to sleep.

It was enough for Florence to sit there watching him; turning her
eyes towards his chair from time to time; watching him with her
thoughts, when her face was intent upon her work; and sorrowfully glad
to think that he could sleep, while she was there, and that he was not
made restless by her strange and long-forbidden presence.

What would have been her thoughts if she had known that he was
steadily regarding her; that the veil upon his face, by accident or by
design, was so adjusted that his sight was free, and that itnever
wandered from her face face an instant That when she looked towards
him' In the obscure dark corner, her speaking eyes, more earnest and
pathetic in their voiceless speech than all the orators of all the
world, and impeaching him more nearly in their mute address, met his,
and did not know it! That when she bent her head again over her work,
he drew his breath more easily, but with the same attention looked
upon her still - upon her white brow and her falling hair, and busy
hands; and once attracted, seemed to have no power to turn his eyes
away!

And what were his thoughts meanwhile? With what emotions did he
prolong the attentive gaze covertly directed on his unknown daughter?
Was there reproach to him in the quiet figure and the mild eyes? Had
he begun to her disregarded claims and did they touch him home at
last, and waken him to some sense of his cruel injustice?

There are yielding moments in the lives of the sternest and
harshest men, though such men often keep their secret well. The sight
ofher in her beauty, almost changed into a woman without his
knowledge, may have struck out some such moments even In his life of
pride. Some passing thought that he had had a happy home within his
reach-had had a household spirit bending at has feet - had overlooked
it in his stiffnecked sullen arrogance, and wandered away and lost
himself, may have engendered them. Some simple eloquence distinctly
heard, though only uttered in her eyes, unconscious that he read them'
as'By the death-beds I have tended, by the childhood I have suffered,
by our meeting in this dreary house at midnight, by the cry wrung from
me in the anguish of my heart, oh, father, turn to me and seek a
refuge in my love before it is too late!' may have arrested them.
Meaner and lower thoughts, as that his dead boy was now superseded by
new ties, and he could forgive the having been supplanted in his
affection, may have occasioned them. The mere association of her as an
ornament, with all the ornament and pomp about him, may have been
sufficient. But as he looked, he softened to her, more and more. As he
looked, she became blended with the child he had loved, and he could
hardly separate the two. As he looked, he saw her for an instant by a
clearer and a brighter light, not bending over that child's pillow as
his rival - monstrous thought - but as the spirit of his home, and in
the action tending himself no less, as he sat once more with his
bowed-down head upon his hand at the foot of the little bed. He felt
inclined to speak to her, and call her to him. The words 'Florence,
come here!' were rising to his lips - but slowly and with difficulty,
they were so very strange - when they were checked and stifled by a
footstep on the stair.

It was his wife's. She had exchanged her dinner dress for a loose
robe, and unbound her hair, which fell freely about her neck. But this
was not the change in her that startled him.

'Florence, dear,' she said, 'I have been looking for you
everywhere.'

As she sat down by the side of Florence, she stooped and kissed her
hand. He hardly knew his wife. She was so changed. It was not merely
that her smile was new to him - though that he had never seen; but her
manner, the tone of her voice, the light of her eyes, the interest,
and confidence, and winning wish to please, expressed in all-this was
not Edith.

'Softly, dear Mama. Papa is asleep.'

It was Edith now. She looked towards the corner where he was, and
he knew that face and manner very well.

'I scarcely thought you could be here, Florence.'

Again, how altered and how softened, in an instant!

'I left here early,' pursued Edith, 'purposely to sit upstairs and
talk with you. But, going to your room, I found my bird was flown, and
I have been waiting there ever since, expecting its return.

If it had been a bird, indeed, she could not have taken it more
tenderly and gently to her breast, than she did Florence.

'Come, dear!'

'Papa will not expect to find me, I suppose, when he wakes,'
hesitated Florence.

'Do you think he will, Florence?' said Edith, looking full upon
her.

Florence drooped her head, and rose, and put up her work-basket
Edith drew her hand through her arm, and they went out of the room
like sisters. Her very step was different and new to him' Mr Dombey
thought, as his eyes followed her to the door.

He sat in his shadowy corner so long, that the church clocks struck
the hour three times before he moved that night. All that while his
face was still intent upon the spot where Florence had been seated.
The room grew darker, as the candles waned and went out; but a
darkness gathered on his face, exceeding any that the night could
cast, and rested there.

Florence and Edith, seated before the fire in the remote room where
little Paul had died, talked together for a long time. Diogenes, who
was of the party, had at first objected to the admission of Edith,
and, even In deference to his mistress's wish, had only permitted it
under growling protest. But, emerging by little and little from the
ante-room, whither he had retired in dudgeon, he soon appeared to
comprehend, that with the most amiable intentions he had made one of
those mistakes which will occasionally arise in the best-regulated
dogs' minds; as a friendly apology for which he stuck himself up on
end between the two, in a very hot place in front of the fire, and sat
panting at it, with his tongue out, and a most imbecile expression of
countenance, listening to the conversation.

It turned, at first, on Florence's books and favourite pursuits,
and on the manner in which she had beguiled the interval since the
marriage. The last theme opened up to her a subject which lay very
near her heart, and she said, with the tears starting to her eyes:

'Oh, Mama! I have had a great sorrow since that day.'

'You a great sorrow, Florence!'

'Yes. Poor Walter is drowned.'

Florence spread her hands before her face, and wept with all her
heart. Many as were the secret tears which Walter's fate had cost her,
they flowed yet, when she thought or spoke of him.

'But tell me, dear,' said Edith, soothing her. 'Who was Walter?
What was he to you?'

'He was my brother, Mama. After dear Paul died, we said we would be
brother and sister. I had known him a long time - from a little child.
He knew Paul, who liked him very much; Paul said, almost at the last,
"Take care of Walter, dear Papa! I was fond of him!" Walter had been
brought in to see him, and was there then - in this room.

'And did he take care of Walter?' inquired Edith, sternly.

'Papa? He appointed him to go abroad. He was drowned in shipwreck
on his voyage,' said Florence, sobbing.

'Does he know that he is dead?' asked Edith.

'I cannot tell, Mama. I have no means of knowing. Dear Mama!' cried
Florence, clinging to her as for help, and hiding her face upon her
bosom, 'I know that you have seen - '

'Stay! Stop, Florence.' Edith turned so pale, and spoke so
earnestly, that Florence did not need her restraining hand upon her
lips. 'Tell me all about Walter first; let me understand this history
all through.'

Florence related it, and everything belonging to it, even down to
the friendship of Mr Toots, of whom she could hardly speak in her
distress without a tearful smile, although she was deeply grateful to
him. When she had concluded her account, to the whole of which Edith,
holding her hand, listened with close attention, and when a silence
had succeeded, Edith said:

'What is it that you know I have seen, Florence?'

'That I am not,' said Florence, with the same mute appeal, and the
same quick concealment of her face as before, 'that I am not a
favourite child, Mama. I never have been. I have never known how to
be. I have missed the way, and had no one to show it to me. Oh, let me
learn from you how to become dearer to Papa Teach me! you, who can so
well!' and clinging closer to her, with some broken fervent words of
gratitude and endearment, Florence, relieved of her sad secret, wept
long, but not as painfully as of yore, within the encircling arms of
her new mother.

Pale even to her lips, and with a face that strove for composure
until its proud beauty was as fixed as death, Edith looked down upon
the weeping girl, and once kissed her. Then gradually disengaging
herself, and putting Florence away, she said, stately, and quiet as a
marble image, and in a voice that deepened as she spoke, but had no
other token of emotion in it:

'Florence, you do not know me! Heaven forbid that you should learn
from me!'

'Not learn from you?' repeated Florence, in surprise.

'That I should teach you how to love, or be loved, Heaven forbid!'
said Edith. 'If you could teach me, that were better; but it is too
late. You are dear to me, Florence. I did not think that anything
could ever be so dear to me, as you are in this little time.'

She saw that Florence would have spoken here, so checked her with
her hand, and went on.

'I will be your true friend always. I will cherish you, as much, if
not as well as anyone in this world could. You may trust in me - I
know it and I say it, dear, - with the whole confidence even of your
pure heart. There are hosts of women whom he might have married,
better and truer in all other respects than I am, Florence; but there
is not one who could come here, his wife, whose heart could beat with
greater truth to you than mine does.'

'I know it, dear Mama!' cried Florence. 'From that first most happy
day I have known it.'

'Most happy day!' Edith seemed to repeat the words involuntarily,
and went on. 'Though the merit is not mine, for I thought little of
you until I saw you, let the undeserved reward be mine in your trust
and love. And in this - in this, Florence; on the first night of my
taking up my abode here; I am led on as it is best I should be, to say
it for the first and last time.'

Florence, without knowing why, felt almost afraid to hear her
proceed, but kept her eyes riveted on the beautiful face so fixed upon
her own.

'Never seek to find in me,' said Edith, laying her hand upon her
breast, 'what is not here. Never if you can help it, Florence, fall
off from me because it is not here. Little by little you will know me
better, and the time will come when you will know me, as I know
myself. Then, be as lenient to me as you can, and do not turn to
bitterness the only sweet remembrance I shall have.

The tears that were visible in her eyes as she kept them fixed on
Florence, showed that the composed face was but as a handsome mask;
but she preserved it, and continued:

'I have seen what you say, and know how true it is. But believe me
- you will soon, if you cannot now - there is no one on this earth
less qualified to set it right or help you, Florence, than I. Never
ask me why, or speak to me about it or of my husband, more. There
should be, so far, a division, and a silence between us two, like the
grave itself.'

She sat for some time silent; Florence scarcely venturing to
breathe meanwhile, as dim and imperfect shadows of the truth, and all
its daily consequences, chased each other through her terrified, yet
incredulous imagination. Almost as soon as she had ceased to speak,
Edith's face began to subside from its set composure to that quieter
and more relenting aspect, which it usually wore when she and Florence
were alone together. She shaded it, after this change, with her hands;
and when she arose, and with an affectionate embrace bade Florence
good-night, went quickly, and without looking round.

But when Florence was in bed, and the room was dark except for the
glow of the fire, Edith returned, and saying that she could not sleep,
and that her dressing-room was lonely, drew a chair upon the hearth,
and watched the embers as they died away. Florence watched them too
from her bed, until they, and the noble figure before them, crowned
with its flowing hair, and in its thoughtful eyes reflecting back
their light, became confused and indistinct, and finally were lost in
slumber.

In her sleep, however, Florence could not lose an undefined
impression of what had so recently passed. It formed the subject of
her dreams, and haunted her; now in one shape, now in another; but
always oppressively; and with a sense of fear. She dreamed of seeking
her father in wildernesses, of following his track up fearful heights,
and down into deep mines and caverns; of being charged with something
that would release him from extraordinary suffering - she knew not
what, or why - yet never being able to attain the goal and set him
free. Then she saw him dead, upon that very bed, and in that very
room, and knew that he had never loved her to the last, and fell upon
his cold breast, passionately weeping. Then a prospect opened, and a
river flowed, and a plaintive voice she knew, cried, 'It is running
on, Floy! It has never stopped! You are moving with it!' And she saw
him at a distance stretching out his arms towards her, while a figure
such as Walter's used to be, stood near him, awfully serene and still.
In every vision, Edith came and went, sometimes to her joy, sometimes
to her sorrow, until they were alone upon the brink of a dark grave,
and Edith pointing down, she looked and saw - what! - another Edith
lying at the bottom.

In the terror of this dream, she cried out and awoke, she thought.
A soft voice seemed to whisper in her ear, 'Florence, dear Florence,
it is nothing but a dream!' and stretching out her arms, she returned
the caress of her new Mama, who then went out at the door in the light
of the grey morning. In a moment, Florence sat up wondering whether
this had really taken place or not; but she was only certain that it
was grey morning indeed, and that the blackened ashes of the fire were
on the hearth, and that she was alone.

So passed the night on which the happy pair came home.



CHAPTER 36.

Housewarming



Many succeeding days passed in like manner; except that there were
numerous visits received and paid, and that Mrs Skewton held little
levees in her own apartments, at which Major Bagstock was a frequent
attendant, and that Florence encountered no second look from her
father, although she saw him every day. Nor had she much communication
in words with her new Mama, who was imperious and proud to all the
house but her - Florence could not but observe that - and who,
although she always sent for her or went to her when she came home
from visiting, and would always go into her room at night, before
retiring to rest, however late the hour, and never lost an opportunity
of being with her, was often her silent and thoughtful companion for a
long time together.

Florence, who had hoped for so much from this marriage, could not
help sometimes comparing the bright house with the faded dreary place
out of which it had arisen, and wondering when, in any shape, it would
begin to be a home; for that it was no home then, for anyone, though
everything went on luxuriously and regularly, she had always a secret
misgiving. Many an hour of sorrowful reflection by day and night, and
many a tear of blighted hope, Florence bestowed upon the assurance her
new Mama had given her so strongly, that there was no one on the earth
more powerless than herself to teach her how to win her father's
heart. And soon Florence began to think - resolved to think would be
the truer phrase - that as no one knew so well, how hopeless of being
subdued or changed her father's coldness to her was, so she had given
her this warning, and forbidden the subject in very compassion.
Unselfish here, as in her every act and fancy, Florence preferred to
bear the pain of this new wound, rather than encourage any faint
foreshadowings of the truth as it concerned her father; tender of him,
even in her wandering thoughts. As for his home, she hoped it would
become a better one, when its state of novelty and transition should
be over; and for herself, thought little and lamented less.

If none of the new family were particularly at home in private, it
was resolved that Mrs Dombey at least should be at home in public,
without delay. A series of entertainments in celebration of the late
nuptials, and in cultivation of society, were arranged, chiefly by Mr
Dombey and Mrs Skewton; and it was settled that the festive
proceedings should commence by Mrs Dombey's being at home upon a
certain evening, and by Mr and Mrs Dombey's requesting the honour of
the company of a great many incongruous people to dinner on the same
day.

Accordingly, Mr Dombey produced a list of sundry eastern magnates
who were to be bidden to this feast on his behalf; to which Mrs
Skewton, acting for her dearest child, who was haughtily careless on
the subject, subjoined a western list, comprising Cousin Feenix, not
yet returned to Baden-Baden, greatly to the detriment of his personal
estate; and a variety of moths of various degrees and ages, who had,
at various times, fluttered round the light of her fair daughter, or
herself, without any lasting injury to their wings. Florence was
enrolled as a member of the dinner-party, by Edith's command -
elicited by a moment's doubt and hesitation on the part of Mrs
Skewton; and Florence, with a wondering heart, and with a quick
instinctive sense of everything that grated on her father in the
least, took her silent share in the proceedings of the day.

The proceedings commenced by Mr Dombey, in a cravat of
extraordinary height and stiffness, walking restlessly about the
drawing-room until the hour appointed for dinner; punctual to which,
an East India Director,' of immense wealth, in a waistcoat apparently
constructed in serviceable deal by some plain carpenter, but really
engendered in the tailor's art, and composed of the material called
nankeen, arrived and was received by Mr Dombey alone. The next stage
of the proceedings was Mr Dombey's sending his compliments to Mrs
Dombey, with a correct statement of the time; and the next, the East
India Director's falling prostrate, in a conversational point of view,
and as Mr Dombey was not the man to pick him up, staring at the fire
until rescue appeared in the shape of Mrs Skewton; whom the director,
as a pleasant start in life for the evening, mistook for Mrs Dombey,
and greeted with enthusiasm.

The next arrival was a Bank Director, reputed to be able to buy up
anything - human Nature generally, if he should take it in his head to
influence the money market in that direction - but who was a
wonderfully modest-spoken man, almost boastfully so, and mentioned his
'little place' at Kingston-upon-Thames, and its just being barely
equal to giving Dombey a bed and a chop, if he would come and visit
it. Ladies, he said, it was not for a man who lived in his quiet way
to take upon himself to invite - but if Mrs Skewton and her daughter,
Mrs Dombey, should ever find themselves in that direction, and would
do him the honour to look at a little bit of a shrubbery they would
find there, and a poor little flower-bed or so, and a humble apology
for a pinery, and two or three little attempts of that sort without
any pretension, they would distinguish him very much. Carrying out his
character, this gentleman was very plainly dressed, in a wisp of
cambric for a neckcloth, big shoes, a coat that was too loose for him,
and a pair of trousers that were too spare; and mention being made of
the Opera by Mrs Skewton, he said he very seldom went there, for he
couldn't afford it. It seemed greatly to delight and exhilarate him to
say so: and he beamed on his audience afterwards, with his hands in
his pockets, and excessive satisfaction twinkling in his eyes.

Now Mrs Dombey appeared, beautiful and proud, and as disdainful and
defiant of them all as if the bridal wreath upon her head had been a
garland of steel spikes put on to force concession from her which she
would die sooner than yield. With her was Florence. When they entered
together, the shadow of the night of the return again darkened Mr
Dombey's face. But unobserved; for Florence did not venture to raise
her eyes to his, and Edith's indifference was too supreme to take the
least heed of him.

The arrivals quickly became numerous. More directors, chairmen of
public companies, elderly ladies carrying burdens on their heads for
full dress, Cousin Feenix, Major Bagstock, friends of Mrs Skewton,
with the same bright bloom on their complexion, and very precious
necklaces on very withered necks. Among these, a young lady of
sixty-five, remarkably coolly dressed as to her back and shoulders,
who spoke with an engaging lisp, and whose eyelids wouldn't keep up
well, without a great deal of trouble on her part, and whose manners
had that indefinable charm which so frequently attaches to the
giddiness of youth. As the greater part of Mr Dombey's list were
disposed to be taciturn, and the greater part of Mrs Dombey's list
were disposed to be talkative, and there was no sympathy between them,
Mrs Dombey's list, by magnetic agreement, entered into a bond of union
against Mr Dombey's list, who, wandering about the rooms in a desolate
manner, or seeking refuge in corners, entangled themselves with
company coming in, and became barricaded behind sofas, and had doors
opened smartly from without against their heads, and underwent every
sort of discomfiture.

When dinner was announced, Mr Dombey took down an old lady like a
crimson velvet pincushion stuffed with bank notes, who might have been
the identical old lady of Threadneedle Street, she was so rich, and
looked so unaccommodating; Cousin Feenix took down Mrs Dombey; Major
Bagstock took down Mrs Skewton; the young thing with the shoulders was
bestowed, as an extinguisher, upon the East India Director; and the
remaining ladies were left on view in the drawing-room by the
remaining gentlemen, until a forlorn hope volunteered to conduct them
downstairs, and those brave spirits with their captives blocked up the
dining-room door, shutting out seven mild men in the stony-hearted
hall. When all the rest were got in and were seated, one of these mild
men still appeared, in smiling confusion, totally destitute and
unprovided for, and, escorted by the butler, made the complete circuit
of the table twice before his chair could be found, which it finally
was, on Mrs Dombey's left hand; after which the mild man never held up
his head again.

Now, the spacious dining-room, with the company seated round the
glittering table, busy with their glittering spoons, and knives and
forks, and plates, might have been taken for a grown-up exposition of
Tom Tiddler's ground, where children pick up gold and silver.' Mr
Dombey, as Tiddler, looked his character to admiration; and the long
plateau of precious metal frosted, separating him from Mrs Dombey,
whereon frosted Cupids offered scentless flowers to each of them, was
allegorical to see.

Cousin Feenix was in great force, and looked astonishingly young.
But he was sometimes thoughtless in his good humour - his memory
occasionally wandering like his legs - and on this occasion caused the
company to shudder. It happened thus. The young lady with the back,
who regarded Cousin Feenix with sentiments of tenderness, had
entrapped the East India Director into leading her to the chair next
him; in return for which good office, she immediately abandoned the
Director, who, being shaded on the other side by a gloomy black velvet
hat surmounting a bony and speechless female with a fan, yielded to a
depression of spirits and withdrew into himself. Cousin Feenix and the
young lady were very lively and humorous, and the young lady laughed
so much at something Cousin Feenix related to her, that Major Bagstock
begged leave to inquire on behalf of Mrs Skewton (they were sitting
opposite, a little lower down), whether that might not be considered
public property.

'Why, upon my life,' said Cousin Feenix, 'there's nothing in it; it
really is not worth repeating: in point of fact, it's merely an
anecdote of Jack Adams. I dare say my friend Dombey;' for the general
attention was concentrated on Cousin Feenix; 'may remember Jack Adams,
Jack Adams, not Joe; that was his brother. Jack - little Jack - man
with a cast in his eye, and slight impediment in his speech - man who
sat for somebody's borough. We used to call him in my parliamentary
time W. P. Adams, in consequence of his being Warming Pan for a young
fellow who was in his minority. Perhaps my friend Dombey may have
known the man?'

Mr Dombey, who was as likely to have known Guy Fawkes, replied in
the negative. But one of the seven mild men unexpectedly leaped into
distinction, by saying he had known him, and adding - 'always wore
Hessian boots!'

'Exactly,' said Cousin Feenix, bending forward to see the mild man,
and smile encouragement at him down the table. 'That was Jack. Joe
wore - '

'Tops!' cried the mild man, rising in public estimation every
Instant.

'Of course,' said Cousin Feenix, 'you were intimate with em?'

'I knew them both,' said the mild man. With whom Mr Dombey
immediately took wine.

'Devilish good fellow, Jack!' said Cousin Feenix, again bending
forward, and smiling.

'Excellent,' returned the mild man, becoming bold on his success.
'One of the best fellows I ever knew.'

'No doubt you have heard the story?' said Cousin Feenix.

'I shall know,' replied the bold mild man, 'when I have heard your
Ludship tell it.' With that, he leaned back in his chair and smiled at
the ceiling, as knowing it by heart, and being already tickled.

'In point of fact, it's nothing of a story in itself,' said Cousin
Feenix, addressing the table with a smile, and a gay shake of his
head, 'and not worth a word of preface. But it's illustrative of the
neatness of Jack's humour. The fact is, that Jack was invited down to
a marriage - which I think took place in Berkshire?'

'Shropshire,' said the bold mild man, finding himself appealed to.

'Was it? Well! In point of fact it might have been in any shire,'
said Cousin Feenix. 'So my friend being invited down to this marriage
in Anyshire,' with a pleasant sense of the readiness of this joke,
'goes. Just as some of us, having had the honour of being invited to
the marriage of my lovely and accomplished relative with my friend
Dombey, didn't require to be asked twice, and were devilish glad to be
present on so interesting an occasion. - Goes - Jack goes. Now, this
marriage was, in point of fact, the marriage of an uncommonly fine
girl with a man for whom she didn't care a button, but whom she
accepted on account of his property, which was immense. When Jack
returned to town, after the nuptials, a man he knew, meeting him in
the lobby of the House of Commons, says, "Well, Jack, how are the
ill-matched couple?" "Ill-matched," says Jack "Not at all. It's a
perfectly and equal transaction. She is regularly bought, and you may
take your oath he is as regularly sold!"'

In his full enjoyment of this culminating point of his story, the
shudder, which had gone all round the table like an electric spark,
struck Cousin Feenix, and he stopped. Not a smile occasioned by the
only general topic of conversation broached that day, appeared on any
face. A profound silence ensued; and the wretched mild man, who had
been as innocent of any real foreknowledge of the story as the child
unborn, had the exquisite misery of reading in every eye that he was
regarded as the prime mover of the mischief.

Mr Dombey's face was not a changeful one, and being cast in its
mould of state that day, showed little other apprehension of the
story, if any, than that which he expressed when he said solemnly,
amidst the silence, that it was 'Very good.' There was a rapid glance
from Edith towards Florence, but otherwise she remained, externally,
impassive and unconscious.

Through the various stages of rich meats and wines, continual gold
and silver, dainties of earth, air, fire, and water, heaped-up fruits,
and that unnecessary article in Mr Dombey's banquets - ice- the dinner
slowly made its way: the later stages being achieved to the sonorous
music of incessant double knocks, announcing the arrival of visitors,
whose portion of the feast was limited to the smell thereof. When Mrs
Dombey rose, it was a sight to see her lord, with stiff throat and
erect head, hold the door open for the withdrawal of the ladies; and
to see how she swept past him with his daughter on her arm.

Mr Dombey was a grave sight, behind the decanters, in a state of
dignity; and the East India Director was a forlorn sight near the
unoccupied end of the table, in a state of solitude; and the Major was
a military sight, relating stories of the Duke of York to six of the
seven mild men (the ambitious one was utterly quenched); and the Bank
Director was a lowly sight, making a plan of his little attempt at a
pinery, with dessert-knives, for a group of admirers; and Cousin
Feenix was a thoughtful sight, as he smoothed his long wristbands and
stealthily adjusted his wig. But all these sights were of short
duration, being speedily broken up by coffee, and the desertion of the
room.

There was a throng in the state-rooms upstairs, increasing every
minute; but still Mr Dombey's list of visitors appeared to have some
native impossibility of amalgamation with Mrs Dombey's list, and no
one could have doubted which was which. The single exception to this
rule perhaps was Mr Carker, who now smiled among the company, and who,
as he stood in the circle that was gathered about Mrs Dombey -
watchful of her, of them, his chief, Cleopatra and the Major,
Florence, and everything around - appeared at ease with both divisions
of guests, and not marked as exclusively belonging to either.

Florence had a dread of him, which made his presence in the room a
nightmare to her. She could not avoid the recollection of it, for her
eyes were drawn towards him every now and then, by an attraction of
dislike and distrust that she could not resist. Yet her thoughts were
busy with other things; for as she sat apart - not unadmired or
unsought, but in the gentleness of her quiet spirit - she felt how
little part her father had in what was going on, and saw, with pain,
how ill at ease he seemed to be, and how little regarded he was as he
lingered about near the door, for those visitors whom he wished to
distinguish with particular attention, and took them up to introduce
them to his wife, who received them with proud coldness, but showed no
interest or wish to please, and never, after the bare ceremony of
reception, in consultation of his wishes, or in welcome of his
friends, opened her lips. It was not the less perplexing or painful to
Florence, that she who acted thus, treated her so kindly and with such
loving consideration, that it almost seemed an ungrateful return on
her part even to know of what was passing before her eyes.

Happy Florence would have been, might she have ventured to bear her
father company, by so much as a look; and happy Florence was, in
little suspecting the main cause of his uneasiness. But afraid of
seeming to know that he was placed at any did advantage, lest he
should be resentful of that knowledge; and divided between her impulse
towards him, and her grateful affection for Edith; she scarcely dared
to raise her eyes towards either. Anxious and unhappy for them both,
the thought stole on her through the crowd, that it might have been
better for them if this noise of tongues and tread of feet had never
come there, - if the old dulness and decay had never been replaced by
novelty and splendour, - if the neglected child had found no friend in
Edith, but had lived her solitary life, unpitied and forgotten.

Mrs Chick had some such thoughts too, but they were not so quietly
developed in her mind. This good matron had been outraged in the first
instance by not receiving an invitation to dinner. That blow partially
recovered, she had gone to a vast expense to make such a figure before
Mrs Dombey at home, as should dazzle the senses of that lady, and heap
mortification, mountains high, on the head of Mrs Skewton.

'But I am made,' said Mrs Chick to Mr Chick, 'of no more account
than Florence! Who takes the smallest notice of me? No one!'

'No one, my dear,' assented Mr Chick, who was seated by the side of
Mrs Chick against the wall, and could console himself, even there, by
softly whistling.

'Does it at all appear as if I was wanted here?' exclaimed Mrs
Chick, with flashing eyes.

'No, my dear, I don't think it does,' said Mr Chic

'Paul's mad!' said Mrs Chic

Mr Chick whistled.

'Unless you are a monster, which I sometimes think you are,' said
Mrs Chick with candour, 'don't sit there humming tunes. How anyone
with the most distant feelings of a man, can see that mother-in-law of
Paul's, dressed as she is, going on like that, with Major Bagstock,
for whom, among other precious things, we are indebted to your
Lucretia Tox

'My Lucretia Tox, my dear!' said Mr Chick, astounded.

'Yes,' retorted Mrs Chick, with great severity, 'your Lucretia Tox
- I say how anybody can see that mother-in-law of Paul's, and that
haughty wife of Paul's, and these indecent old frights with their
backs and shoulders, and in short this at home generally, and hum - '
on which word Mrs Chick laid a scornful emphasis that made Mr Chick
start, 'is, I thank Heaven, a mystery to me!

Mr Chick screwed his mouth into a form irreconcilable with humming
or whistling, and looked very contemplative.

'But I hope I know what is due to myself,' said Mrs Chick, swelling
with indignation, 'though Paul has forgotten what is due to me. I am
not going to sit here, a member of this family, to be taken no notice
of. I am not the dirt under Mrs Dombey's feet, yet - not quite yet,'
said Mrs Chick, as if she expected to become so, about the day after
to-morrow. 'And I shall go. I will not say (whatever I may think) that
this affair has been got up solely to degrade and insult me. I shall
merely go. I shall not be missed!'

Mrs Chick rose erect with these words, and took the arm of Mr
Chick, who escorted her from the room, after half an hour's shady
sojourn there. And it is due to her penetration to observe that she
certainly was not missed at all.

But she was not the only indignant guest; for Mr Dombey's list
(still constantly in difficulties) were, as a body, indignant with Mrs
Dombey's list, for looking at them through eyeglasses, and audibly
wondering who all those people were; while Mrs Dombey's list
complained of weariness, and the young thing with the shoulders,
deprived of the attentions of that gay youth Cousin Feenix (who went
away from the dinner-table), confidentially alleged to thirty or forty
friends that she was bored to death. All the old ladies with the
burdens on their heads, had greater or less cause of complaint against
Mr Dombey; and the Directors and Chairmen coincided in thinking that
if Dombey must marry, he had better have married somebody nearer his
own age, not quite so handsome, and a little better off. The general
opinion among this class of gentlemen was, that it was a weak thing in
Dombey, and he'd live to repent it. Hardly anybody there, except the
mild men, stayed, or went away, without considering himself or herself
neglected and aggrieved by Mr Dombey or Mrs Dombey; and the speechless
female in the black velvet hat was found to have been stricken mute,
because the lady in the crimson velvet had been handed down before
her. The nature even of the mild men got corrupted, either from their
curdling it with too much lemonade, or from the general inoculation
that prevailed; and they made sarcastic jokes to one another, and
whispered disparagement on stairs and in bye-places. The general
dissatisfaction and discomfort so diffused itself, that the assembled
footmen in the hall were as well acquainted with it as the company
above. Nay, the very linkmen outside got hold of it, and compared the
party to a funeral out of mourning, with none of the company
remembered in the will. At last, the guests were all gone, and the
linkmen too; and the street, crowded so long with carriages, was
clear; and the dying lights showed no one in the rooms, but Mr Dombey
and Mr Carker, who were talking together apart, and Mrs Dombey and her
mother: the former seated on an ottoman; the latter reclining in the
Cleopatra attitude, awaiting the arrival of her maid. Mr Dombey having
finished his communication to Carker, the latter advanced obsequiously
to take leave.

'I trust,' he said, 'that the fatigues of this delightful evening
will not inconvenience Mrs Dombey to-morrow.'

'Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey, advancing, 'has sufficiently spared
herself fatigue, to relieve you from any anxiety of that kind. I
regret to say, Mrs Dombey, that I could have wished you had fatigued
yourself a little more on this occasion.

She looked at him with a supercilious glance, that it seemed not
worth her while to protract, and turned away her eyes without
speaking.

'I am sorry, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, 'that you should not have
thought it your duty -

She looked at him again.

'Your duty, Madam,' pursued Mr Dombey, 'to have received my friends
with a little more deference. Some of those whom you have been pleased
to slight to-night in a very marked manner, Mrs Dombey, confer a
distinction upon you, I must tell you, in any visit they pay you.

'Do you know that there is someone here?' she returned, now looking
at him steadily.

'No! Carker! I beg that you do not. I insist that you do not,'
cried Mr Dombey, stopping that noiseless gentleman in his withdrawal.
'Mr Carker, Madam, as you know, possesses my confidence. He is as well
acquainted as myself with the subject on which I speak. I beg to tell
you, for your information, Mrs Dombey, that I consider these wealthy
and important persons confer a distinction upon me:' and Mr Dombey
drew himself up, as having now rendered them of the highest possible
importance.

'I ask you,' she repeated, bending her disdainful, steady gaze upon
him, 'do you know that there is someone here, Sir?'

'I must entreat,' said Mr Carker, stepping forward, 'I must beg, I
must demand, to be released. Slight and unimportant as this difference
is - '

Mrs Skewton, who had been intent upon her daughter's face, took him
up here.

'My sweetest Edith,' she said, 'and my dearest Dombey; our
excellent friend Mr Carker, for so I am sure I ought to mention him -
'

Mr Carker murmured, 'Too much honour.'

' - has used the very words that were in my mind, and that I have
been dying, these ages, for an opportunity of introducing. Slight and
unimportant! My sweetest Edith, and my dearest Dombey, do we not know
that any difference between you two - No, Flowers; not now.

Flowers was the maid, who, finding gentlemen present, retreated
with precipitation.

'That any difference between you two,' resumed Mrs Skewton, 'with
the Heart you possess in common, and the excessively charming bond of
feeling that there is between you, must be slight and unimportant?
What words could better define the fact? None. Therefore I am glad to
take this slight occasion - this trifling occasion, that is so replete
with Nature, and your individual characters, and all that - so truly
calculated to bring the tears into a parent's eyes - to say that I
attach no importance to them in the least, except as developing these
minor elements of Soul; and that, unlike most Mamas-in-law (that
odious phrase, dear Dombey!) as they have been represented to me to
exist in this I fear too artificial world, I never shall attempt to
interpose between you, at such a time, and never can much regret,
after all, such little flashes of the torch of What's-his-name - not
Cupid, but the other delightful creature.

There was a sharpness in the good mother's glance at both her
children as she spoke, that may have been expressive of a direct and
well-considered purpose hidden between these rambling words. That
purpose, providently to detach herself in the beginning from all the
clankings of their chain that were to come, and to shelter herself
with the fiction of her innocent belief in their mutual affection, and
their adaptation to each other.

'I have pointed out to Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey, in his most
stately manner, 'that in her conduct thus early in our married life,
to which I object, and which, I request, may be corrected. Carker,'
with a nod of dismissal, 'good-night to you!'

Mr Carker bowed to the imperious form of the Bride, whose sparkling
eye was fixed upon her husband; and stopping at Cleopatra's couch on
his way out, raised to his lips the hand she graciously extended to
him, in lowly and admiring homage.

If his handsome wife had reproached him, or even changed
countenance, or broken the silence in which she remained, by one word,
now that they were alone (for Cleopatra made off with all speed), Mr
Dombey would have been equal to some assertion of his case against
her. But the intense, unutterable, withering scorn, with which, after
looking upon him, she dropped her eyes, as if he were too worthless
and indifferent to her to be challenged with a syllable - the
ineffable disdain and haughtiness in which she sat before him - the
cold inflexible resolve with which her every feature seemed to bear
him down, and put him by - these, he had no resource against; and he
left her, with her whole overbearing beauty concentrated on despising
him.

Was he coward enough to watch her, an hour afterwards, on the old
well staircase, where he had once seen Florence in the moonlight,
toiling up with Paul? Or was he in the dark by accident, when, looking
up, he saw her coming, with a light, from the room where Florence lay,
and marked again the face so changed, which he could not subdue?

But it could never alter as his own did. It never, in its uttermost
pride and passion, knew the shadow that had fallen on his, in the dark
corner, on the night of the return; and often since; and which
deepened on it now, as he looked up.



CHAPTER 37.

More Warnings than One



Florence, Edith, and Mrs Skewton were together next day, and the
carriage was waiting at the door to take them out. For Cleopatra had
her galley again now, and Withers, no longer the-wan, stood upright in
a pigeon-breasted jacket and military trousers, behind her wheel-less
chair at dinner-time and butted no more. The hair of Withers was
radiant with pomatum, in these days of down, and he wore kid gloves
and smelt of the water of Cologne.

They were assembled in Cleopatra's room The Serpent of old Nile
(not to mention her disrespectfully) was reposing on her sofa, sipping
her morning chocolate at three o'clock in the afternoon, and Flowers
the Maid was fastening on her youthful cuffs and frills, and
performing a kind of private coronation ceremony on her, with a
peach-coloured velvet bonnet; the artificial roses in which nodded to
uncommon advantage, as the palsy trifled with them, like a breeze.

'I think I am a little nervous this morning, Flowers,' said Mrs
Skewton. 'My hand quite shakes.'

'You were the life of the party last night, Ma'am, you know,'
returned Flowers, ' and you suffer for it, to-day, you see.'

Edith, who had beckoned Florence to the window, and was looking
out, with her back turned on the toilet of her esteemed mother,
suddenly withdrew from it, as if it had lightened.

'My darling child,' cried Cleopatra, languidly, 'you are not
nervous? Don't tell me, my dear Edith, that you, so enviably
self-possessed, are beginning to be a martyr too, like your
unfortunately constituted mother! Withers, someone at the door.'

'Card, Ma'am,' said Withers, taking it towards Mrs Dombey.

'I am going out,' she said without looking at it.

'My dear love,' drawled Mrs Skewton, 'how very odd to send that
message without seeing the name! Bring it here, Withers. Dear me, my
love; Mr Carker, too! That very sensible person!'

'I am going out,' repeated Edith, in so imperious a tone that
Withers, going to the door, imperiously informed the servant who was
waiting, 'Mrs Dombey is going out. Get along with you,' and shut it on
him.'

But the servant came back after a short absence, and whispered to
Withers again, who once more, and not very willingly, presented
himself before Mrs Dombey.

'If you please, Ma'am, Mr Carker sends his respectful compliments,
and begs you would spare him one minute, if you could - for business,
Ma'am, if you please.'

'Really, my love,' said Mrs Skewton in her mildest manner; for her
daughter's face was threatening; 'if you would allow me to offer a
word, I should recommend - '

'Show him this way,' said Edith. As Withers disappeared to execute
the command, she added, frowning on her mother, 'As he comes at your
recommendation, let him come to your room.'

'May I - shall I go away?' asked Florence, hurriedly.

Edith nodded yes, but on her way to the door Florence met the
visitor coming in. With the same disagreeable mixture of familiarity
and forbearance, with which he had first addressed her, he addressed
her now in his softest manner - hoped she was quite well - needed not
to ask, with such looks to anticipate the answer - had scarcely had
the honour to know her, last night, she was so greatly changed - and
held the door open for her to pass out; with a secret sense of power
in her shrinking from him, that all the deference and politeness of
his manner could not quite conceal.

He then bowed himself for a moment over Mrs Skewton's condescending
hand, and lastly bowed to Edith. Coldly returning his salute without
looking at him, and neither seating herself nor inviting him to be
seated, she waited for him to speak.

Entrenched in her pride and power, and with all the obduracy of her
spirit summoned about her, still her old conviction that she and her
mother had been known by this man in their worst colours, from their
first acquaintance; that every degradation she had suffered in her own
eyes was as plain to him as to herself; that he read her life as
though it were a vile book, and fluttered the leaves before her in
slight looks and tones of voice which no one else could detect;
weakened and undermined her. Proudly as she opposed herself to him,
with her commanding face exacting his humility, her disdainful lip
repulsing him, her bosom angry at his intrusion, and the dark lashes
of her eyes sullenly veiling their light, that no ray of it might
shine upon him - and submissively as he stood before her, with an
entreating injured manner, but with complete submission to her will -
she knew, in her own soul, that the cases were reversed, and that the
triumph and superiority were his, and that he knew it full well.

'I have presumed,' said Mr Carker, 'to solicit an interview, and I
have ventured to describe it as being one of business, because - '

'Perhaps you are charged by Mr Dombey with some message of
reproof,' said Edit 'You possess Mr Dombey's confidence in such an
unusual degree, Sir, that you would scarcely surprise me if that were
your business.'

'I have no message to the lady who sheds a lustre upon his name,'
said Mr Carker. 'But I entreat that lady, on my own behalf to be just
to a very humble claimant for justice at her hands - a mere dependant
of Mr Dombey's - which is a position of humility; and to reflect upon
my perfect helplessness last night, and the impossibility of my
avoiding the share that was forced upon me in a very painful
occasion.'

'My dearest Edith,' hinted Cleopatra in a low voice, as she held
her eye-glass aside, 'really very charming of Mr What's-his-name. And
full of heart!'

'For I do,' said Mr Carker, appealing to Mrs Skewton with a look of
grateful deference, - 'I do venture to call it a painful occasion,
though merely because it was so to me, who had the misfortune to be
present. So slight a difference, as between the principals - between
those who love each other with disinterested devotion, and would make
any sacrifice of self in such a cause - is nothing. As Mrs Skewton
herself expressed, with so much truth and feeling last night, it is
nothing.'

Edith could not look at him, but she said after a few moments,

'And your business, Sir - '

'Edith, my pet,' said Mrs Skewton, 'all this time Mr Carker is
standing! My dear Mr Carker, take a seat, I beg.'

He offered no reply to the mother, but fixed his eyes on the proud
daughter, as though he would only be bidden by her, and was resolved
to he bidden by her. Edith, in spite of herself sat down, and slightly
motioned with her hand to him to be seated too. No action could be
colder, haughtier, more insolent in its air of supremacy and
disrespect, but she had struggled against even that concession
ineffectually, and it was wrested from her. That was enough! Mr Carker
sat down.

'May I be allowed, Madam,' said Carker, turning his white teeth on
Mrs Skewton like a light - 'a lady of your excellent sense and quick
feeling will give me credit, for good reason, I am sure - to address
what I have to say, to Mrs Dombey, and to leave her to impart it to
you who are her best and dearest friend - next to Mr Dombey?'

Mrs Skewton would have retired, but Edith stopped her. Edith would
have stopped him too, and indignantly ordered him to speak openly or
not at all, but that he said, in a low Voice - 'Miss Florence - the
young lady who has just left the room - '

Edith suffered him to proceed. She looked at him now. As he bent
forward, to be nearer, with the utmost show of delicacy and respect,
and with his teeth persuasively arrayed, in a self-depreciating smile,
she felt as if she could have struck him dead.

'Miss Florence's position,' he began, 'has been an unfortunate one.
I have a difficulty in alluding to it to you, whose attachment to her
father is naturally watchful and jealous of every word that applies to
him.' Always distinct and soft in speech, no language could describe
the extent of his distinctness and softness, when he said these words,
or came to any others of a similar import. 'But, as one who is devoted
to Mr Dombey in his different way, and whose life is passed in
admiration of Mr Dombey's character, may I say, without offence to
your tenderness as a wife, that Miss Florence has unhappily been
neglected - by her father. May I say by her father?'

Edith replied, 'I know it.'

'You know it!' said Mr Carker, with a great appearance of relief.
'It removes a mountain from my breast. May I hope you know how the
neglect originated; in what an amiable phase of Mr Dombey's pride -
character I mean?'

'You may pass that by, Sir,' she returned, 'and come the sooner to
the end of what you have to say.'

'Indeed, I am sensible, Madam,' replied Carker, - 'trust me, I am
deeply sensible, that Mr Dombey can require no justification in
anything to you. But, kindly judge of my breast by your own, and you
will forgive my interest in him, if in its excess, it goes at all
astray.

What a stab to her proud heart, to sit there, face to face with
him, and have him tendering her false oath at the altar again and
again for her acceptance, and pressing it upon her like the dregs of a
sickening cup she could not own her loathing of or turn away from'.
How shame, remorse, and passion raged within her, when, upright and
majestic in her beauty before him, she knew that in her spirit she was
down at his feet!

'Miss Florence,' said Carker, 'left to the care - if one may call
it care - of servants and mercenary people, in every way her
inferiors, necessarily wanted some guide and compass in her younger
days, and, naturally, for want of them, has been indiscreet, and has
in some degree forgotten her station. There was some folly about one
Walter, a common lad, who is fortunately dead now: and some very
undesirable association, I regret to say, with certain coasting
sailors, of anything but good repute, and a runaway old bankrupt.'

'I have heard the circumstances, Sir,' said Edith, flashing her
disdainful glance upon him, 'and I know that you pervert them. You may
not know it. I hope so.'

'Pardon me,' said Mr Carker, 'I believe that nobody knows them so
well as I. Your generous and ardent nature, Madam - the same nature
which is so nobly imperative in vindication of your beloved and
honoured husband, and which has blessed him as even his merits deserve
- I must respect, defer to, bow before. But, as regards the
circumstances, which is indeed the business I presumed to solicit your
attention to, I can have no doubt, since, in the execution of my trust
as Mr Dombey's confidential - I presume to say - friend, I have fully
ascertained them. In my execution of that trust; in my deep concern,
which you can so well understand, for everything relating to him,
intensified, if you will (for I fear I labour under your displeasure),
by the lower motive of desire to prove my diligence, and make myself
the more acceptable; I have long pursued these circumstances by myself
and trustworthy instruments, and have innumerable and most minute
proofs.'

She raised her eyes no higher than his mouth, but she saw the means
of mischief vaunted in every tooth it contained.

'Pardon me, Madam,' he continued, 'if in my perplexity, I presume
to take counsel with you, and to consult your pleasure. I think I have
observed that you are greatly interested in Miss Florence?'

What was there in her he had not observed, and did not know?
Humbled and yet maddened by the thought, in every new presentment of
it, however faint, she pressed her teeth upon her quivering lip to
force composure on it, and distantly inclined her head in reply.

'This interest, Madam - so touching an evidence of everything
associated with Mr Dombey being dear to you - induces me to pause
before I make him acquainted with these circumstances, which, as yet,
he does not know. It so shakes me, if I may make the confession, in my
allegiance, that on the intimation of the least desire to that effect
from you, I would suppress them.'

Edith raised her head quickly, and starting back, bent her dark
glance upon him. He met it with his blandest and most deferential
smile, and went on.

'You say that as I describe them, they are perverted. I fear not -
I fear not: but let us assume that they are. The uneasiness I have for
some time felt on the subject, arises in this: that the mere
circumstance of such association often repeated, on the part of Miss
Florence, however innocently and confidingly, would be conclusive with
Mr Dombey, already predisposed against her, and would lead him to take
some step (I know he has occasionally contemplated it) of separation
and alienation of her from his home. Madam, bear with me, and remember
my intercourse with Mr Dombey, and my knowledge of him, and my
reverence for him, almost from childhood, when I say that if he has a
fault, it is a lofty stubbornness, rooted in that noble pride and
sense of power which belong to him, and which we must all defer to;
which is not assailable like the obstinacy of other characters; and
which grows upon itself from day to day, and year to year.

She bent her glance upon him still; but, look as steadfast as she
would, her haughty nostrils dilated, and her breath came somewhat
deeper, and her lip would slightly curl, as he described that in his
patron to which they must all bow down. He saw it; and though his
expression did not change, she knew he saw it.

'Even so slight an incident as last night's,' he said, 'if I might
refer to it once more, would serve to illustrate my meaning, better
than a greater one. Dombey and Son know neither time, nor place, nor
season, but bear them all down. But I rejoice in its occurrence, for
it has opened the way for me to approach Mrs Dombey with this subject
to-day, even if it has entailed upon me the penalty of her temporary
displeasure. Madam, in the midst of my uneasiness and apprehension on
this subject, I was summoned by Mr Dombey to Leamington. There I saw
you. There I could not help knowing what relation you would shortly
occupy towards him - to his enduring happiness and yours. There I
resolved to await the time of your establishment at home here, and to
do as I have now done. I have, at heart, no fear that I shall be
wanting in my duty to Mr Dombey, if I bury what I know in your breast;
for where there is but one heart and mind between two persons - as in
such a marriage - one almost represents the other. I can acquit my
conscience therefore, almost equally, by confidence, on such a theme,
in you or him. For the reasons I have mentioned I would select you.
May I aspire to the distinction of believing that my confidence is
accepted, and that I am relieved from my responsibility?'

He long remembered the look she gave him - who could see it, and
forget it? - and the struggle that ensued within her. At last she
said:

'I accept it, Sir You will please to consider this matter at an
end, and that it goes no farther.'

He bowed low, and rose. She rose too, and he took leave with all
humility. But Withers, meeting him on the stairs, stood amazed at the
beauty of his teeth, and at his brilliant smile; and as he rode away
upon his white-legged horse, the people took him for a dentist, such
was the dazzling show he made. The people took her, when she rode out
in her carriage presently, for a great lady, as happy as she was rich
and fine. But they had not seen her, just before, in her own room with
no one by; and they had not heard her utterance of the three words,
'Oh Florence, Florence!'

Mrs Skewton, reposing on her sofa, and sipping her chocolate, had
heard nothing but the low word business, for which she had a mortal
aversion, insomuch that she had long banished it from her vocabulary,
and had gone nigh, in a charming manner and with an immense amount of
heart, to say nothing of soul, to ruin divers milliners and others in
consequence. Therefore Mrs Skewton asked no questions, and showed no
curiosity. Indeed, the peach-velvet bonnet gave her sufficient
occupation out of doors; for being perched on the back of her head,
and the day being rather windy, it was frantic to escape from Mrs
Skewton's company, and would be coaxed into no sort of compromise.
When the carriage was closed, and the wind shut out, the palsy played
among the artificial roses again like an almshouse-full of
superannuated zephyrs; and altogether Mrs Skewton had enough to do,
and got on but indifferently.

She got on no better towards night; for when Mrs Dombey, in her
dressing-room, had been dressed and waiting for her half an hour, and
Mr Dombey, in the drawing-room, had paraded himself into a state of
solemn fretfulness (they were all three going out to dinner), Flowers
the Maid appeared with a pale face to Mrs Dombey, saying:

'If you please, Ma'am, I beg your pardon, but I can't do nothing
with Missis!'

'What do you mean?' asked Edith.

'Well, Ma'am,' replied the frightened maid, 'I hardly know. She's
making faces!'

Edith hurried with her to her mother's room. Cleopatra was arrayed
in full dress, with the diamonds, short sleeves, rouge, curls, teeth,
and other juvenility all complete; but Paralysis was not to be
deceived, had known her for the object of its errand, and had struck
her at her glass, where she lay like a horrible doll that had tumbled
down.

They took her to pieces in very shame, and put the little of her
that was real on a bed. Doctors were sent for, and soon came. Powerful
remedies were resorted to; opinions given that she would rally from
this shock, but would not survive another; and there she lay
speechless, and staring at the ceiling, for days; sometimes making
inarticulate sounds in answer to such questions as did she know who
were present, and the like: sometimes giving no reply either by sign
or gesture, or in her unwinking eyes.

At length she began to recover consciousness, and in some degree
the power of motion, though not yet of speech. One day the use of her
right hand returned; and showing it to her maid who was in attendance
on her, and appearing very uneasy in her mind, she made signs for a
pencil and some paper. This the maid immediately provided, thinking
she was going to make a will, or write some last request; and Mrs
Dombey being from home, the maid awaited the result with solemn
feelings.

After much painful scrawling and erasing, and putting in of wrong
characters, which seemed to tumble out of the pencil of their own
accord, the old woman produced this document:

              'Rose-coloured curtains.'

The maid being perfectly transfixed, and with tolerable reason,
Cleopatra amended the manuscript by adding two words more, when it
stood thus:

              'Rose-coloured curtains for doctors.'

The maid now perceived remotely that she wished these articles to
be provided for the better presentation of her complexion to the
faculty; and as those in the house who knew her best, had no doubt of
the correctness of this opinion, which she was soon able to establish
for herself the rose-coloured curtains were added to her bed, and she
mended with increased rapidity from that hour. She was soon able to
sit up, in curls and a laced cap and nightgown, and to have a little
artificial bloom dropped into the hollow caverns of her cheeks.

It was a tremendous sight to see this old woman in her finery
leering and mincing at Death, and playing off her youthful tricks upon
him as if he had been the Major; but an alteration in her mind that
ensued on the paralytic stroke was fraught with as much matter for
reflection, and was quite as ghastly.

Whether the weakening of her intellect made her more cunning and
false than before, or whether it confused her between what she had
assumed to be and what she really had been, or whether it had awakened
any glimmering of remorse, which could neither struggle into light nor
get back into total darkness, or whether, in the jumble of her
faculties, a combination of these effects had been shaken up, which is
perhaps the more likely supposition, the result was this: - That she
became hugely exacting in respect of Edith's affection and gratitude
and attention to her; highly laudatory of herself as a most
inestimable parent; and very jealous of having any rival in Edith's
regard. Further, in place of remembering that compact made between
them for an avoidance of the subject, she constantly alluded to her
daughter's marriage as a proof of her being an incomparable mother;
and all this, with the weakness and peevishness of such a state,
always serving for a sarcastic commentary on her levity and
youthfulness.

'Where is Mrs Dombey? she would say to her maid.

'Gone out, Ma'am.'

'Gone out! Does she go out to shun her Mama, Flowers?'

'La bless you, no, Ma'am. Mrs Dombey has only gone out for a ride
with Miss Florence.'

'Miss Florence. Who's Miss Florence? Don't tell me about Miss
Florence. What's Miss Florence to her, compared to me?'

The apposite display of the diamonds, or the peach-velvet bonnet
(she sat in the bonnet to receive visitors, weeks before she could
stir out of doors), or the dressing of her up in some gaud or other,
usually stopped the tears that began to flow hereabouts; and she would
remain in a complacent state until Edith came to see her; when, at a
glance of the proud face, she would relapse again.

'Well, I am sure, Edith!' she would cry, shaking her head.

'What is the matter, mother?'

'Matter! I really don't know what is the matter. The world is
coming to such an artificial and ungrateful state, that I begin to
think there's no Heart - or anything of that sort - left in it,
positively. Withers is more a child to me than you are. He attends to
me much more than my own daughter. I almost wish I didn't look so
young - and all that kind of thing - and then perhaps I should be more
considered.'

'What would you have, mother?'

'Oh, a great deal, Edith,' impatiently.

'Is there anything you want that you have not? It is your own fault
if there be.'

'My own fault!' beginning to whimper. 'The parent I have been to
you, Edith: making you a companion from your cradle! And when you
neglect me, and have no more natural affection for me than if I was a
stranger - not a twentieth part of the affection that you have for
Florence - but I am only your mother, and should corrupt her in a day!
- you reproach me with its being my own fault.'

'Mother, mother, I reproach you with nothing. Why will you always
dwell on this?'

'Isn't it natural that I should dwell on this, when I am all
affection and sensitiveness, and am wounded in the cruellest way,
whenever you look at me?'

'I do not mean to wound you, mother. Have you no remembrance of
what has been said between us? Let the Past rest.'

'Yes, rest! And let gratitude to me rest; and let affection for me
rest; and let me rest in my out-of-the-way room, with no society and
no attention, while you find new relations to make much of, who have
no earthly claim upon you! Good gracious, Edith, do you know what an
elegant establishment you are at the head of?'

'Yes. Hush!'

'And that gentlemanly creature, Dombey? Do you know that you are
married to him, Edith, and that you have a settlement and a position,
and a carriage, and I don't know what?'

'Indeed, I know it, mother; well.'

'As you would have had with that delightful good soul - what did
they call him? - Granger - if he hadn't died. And who have you to
thank for all this, Edith?'

'You, mother; you.'

'Then put your arms round my neck, and kiss me; and show me, Edith,
that you know there never was a better Mama than I have been to you.
And don't let me become a perfect fright with teasing and wearing
myself at your ingratitude, or when I'm out again in society no soul
will know me, not even that hateful animal, the Major.'

But, sometimes, when Edith went nearer to her, and bending down her
stately head, Put her cold cheek to hers, the mother would draw back
as If she were afraid of her, and would fall into a fit of trembling,
and cry out that there was a wandering in her wits. And sometimes she
would entreat her, with humility, to sit down on the chair beside her
bed, and would look at her (as she sat there brooding) with a face
that even the rose-coloured curtains could not make otherwise than
scared and wild.

The rose-coloured curtains blushed, in course of time, on
Cleopatra's bodily recovery, and on her dress - more juvenile than
ever, to repair the ravages of illness - and on the rouge, and on the
teeth, and on the curls, and on the diamonds, and the short sleeves,
and the whole wardrobe of the doll that had tumbled down before the
mirror. They blushed, too, now and then, upon an indistinctness in her
speech which she turned off with a girlish giggle, and on an
occasional failing In her memory, that had no rule in it, but came and
went fantastically, as if in mockery of her fantastic self.

But they never blushed upon a change in the new manner of her
thought and speech towards her daughter. And though that daughter
often came within their influence, they never blushed upon her
loveliness irradiated by a smile, or softened by the light of filial
love, in its stem beauty.



CHAPTER 38.

Miss Tox improves an Old Acquaintance



The forlorn Miss Tox, abandoned by her friend Louisa Chick, and
bereft of Mr Dombey's countenance - for no delicate pair of wedding
cards, united by a silver thread, graced the chimney-glass in
Princess's Place, or the harpsichord, or any of those little posts of
display which Lucretia reserved for holiday occupation - became
depressed in her spirits, and suffered much from melancholy. For a
time the Bird Waltz was unheard in Princess's Place, the plants were
neglected, and dust collected on the miniature of Miss Tox's ancestor
with the powdered head and pigtail.


Miss Tox, however, was not of an age or of a disposition long to
abandon herself to unavailing regrets. Only two notes of the
harpsichord were dumb from disuse when the Bird Waltz again warbled
and trilled in the crooked drawing-room: only one slip of geranium
fell a victim to imperfect nursing, before she was gardening at her
green baskets again, regularly every morning; the powdered-headed
ancestor had not been under a cloud for more than six weeks, when Miss
Tox breathed on his benignant visage, and polished him up with a piece
of wash-leather.

Still, Miss Tox was lonely, and at a loss. Her attachments, however
ludicrously shown, were real and strong; and she was, as she expressed
it, 'deeply hurt by the unmerited contumely she had met with from
Louisa.' But there was no such thing as anger in Miss Tox's
composition. If she had ambled on through life, in her soft spoken
way, without any opinions, she had, at least, got so far without any
harsh passions. The mere sight of Louisa Chick in the street one day,
at a considerable distance, so overpowered her milky nature, that she
was fain to seek immediate refuge in a pastrycook's, and there, in a
musty little back room usually devoted to the consumption of soups,
and pervaded by an ox-tail atmosphere, relieve her feelings by weeping
plentifully.

Against Mr Dombey Miss Tox hardly felt that she had any reason of
complaint. Her sense of that gentleman's magnificence was such, that
once removed from him, she felt as if her distance always had been
immeasurable, and as if he had greatly condescended in tolerating her
at all. No wife could be too handsome or too stately for him,
according to Miss Tox's sincere opinion. It was perfectly natural that
in looking for one, he should look high. Miss Tox with tears laid down
this proposition, and fully admitted it, twenty times a day. She never
recalled the lofty manner in which Mr Dombey had made her subservient
to his convenience and caprices, and had graciously permitted her to
be one of the nurses of his little son. She only thought, in her own
words, 'that she had passed a great many happy hours in that house,
which she must ever remember with gratification, and that she could
never cease to regard Mr Dombey as one of the most impressive and
dignified of men.'

Cut off, however, from the implacable Louisa, and being shy of the
Major (whom she viewed with some distrust now), Miss Tox found it very
irksome to know nothing of what was going on in Mr Dombey's
establishment. And as she really had got into the habit of considering
Dombey and Son as the pivot on which the world in general turned, she
resolved, rather than be ignorant of intelligence which so strongly
interested her, to cultivate her old acquaintance, Mrs Richards, who
she knew, since her last memorable appearance before Mr Dombey, was in
the habit of sometimes holding communication with his servants.
Perhaps Miss Tox, in seeking out the Toodle family, had the tender
motive hidden in her breast of having somebody to whom she could talk
about Mr Dombey, no matter how humble that somebody might be.

At all events, towards the Toodle habitation Miss Tox directed her
steps one evening, what time Mr Toodle, cindery and swart, was
refreshing himself with tea, in the bosom of his family. Mr Toodle had
only three stages of existence. He was either taking refreshment in
the bosom just mentioned, or he was tearing through the country at
from twenty-five to fifty miles an hour, or he was sleeping after his
fatigues. He was always in a whirlwind or a calm, and a peaceable,
contented, easy-going man Mr Toodle was in either state, who seemed to
have made over all his own inheritance of fuming and fretting to the
engines with which he was connected, which panted, and gasped, and
chafed, and wore themselves out, in a most unsparing manner, while Mr
Toodle led a mild and equable life.

'Polly, my gal,' said Mr Toodle, with a young Toodle on each knee,
and two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered about - Mr
Toodle was never out of children, but always kept a good supply on
hand - 'you ain't seen our Biler lately, have you?'

'No,' replied Polly, 'but he's almost certain to look in tonight.
It's his right evening, and he's very regular.'

'I suppose,' said Mr Toodle, relishing his meal infinitely, 'as our
Biler is a doin' now about as well as a boy can do, eh, Polly?'

'Oh! he's a doing beautiful!' responded Polly.

'He ain't got to be at all secret-like - has he, Polly?' inquired
Mr Toodle.

'No!' said Mrs Toodle, plumply.

'I'm glad he ain't got to be at all secret-like, Polly,' observed
Mr Toodle in his slow and measured way, and shovelling in his bread
and butter with a clasp knife, as if he were stoking himself, 'because
that don't look well; do it, Polly?'

'Why, of course it don't, father. How can you ask!'

'You see, my boys and gals,' said Mr Toodle, looking round upon his
family, 'wotever you're up to in a honest way, it's my opinion as you
can't do better than be open. If you find yourselves in cuttings or in
tunnels, don't you play no secret games. Keep your whistles going, and
let's know where you are.

The rising Toodles set up a shrill murmur, expressive of their
resolution to profit by the paternal advice.

'But what makes you say this along of Rob, father?' asked his wife,
anxiously.

'Polly, old ooman,' said Mr Toodle, 'I don't know as I said it
partickler along o' Rob, I'm sure. I starts light with Rob only; I
comes to a branch; I takes on what I finds there; and a whole train of
ideas gets coupled on to him, afore I knows where I am, or where they
comes from. What a Junction a man's thoughts is,' said Mr Toodle,
'to-be-sure!'

This profound reflection Mr Toodle washed down with a pint mug of
tea, and proceeded to solidify with a great weight of bread and
butter; charging his young daughters meanwhile, to keep plenty of hot
water in the pot, as he was uncommon dry, and should take the
indefinite quantity of 'a sight of mugs,' before his thirst was
appeased.

In satisfying himself, however, Mr Toodle was not regardless of the
younger branches about him, who, although they had made their own
evening repast, were on the look-out for irregular morsels, as
possessing a relish. These he distributed now and then to the
expectant circle, by holding out great wedges of bread and butter, to
be bitten at by the family in lawful succession, and by serving out
small doses of tea in like manner with a spoon; which snacks had such
a relish in the mouths of these young Toodles, that, after partaking
of the same, they performed private dances of ecstasy among
themselves, and stood on one leg apiece, and hopped, and indulged in
other saltatory tokens of gladness. These vents for their excitement
found, they gradually closed about Mr Toodle again, and eyed him hard
as he got through more bread and butter and tea; affecting, however,
to have no further expectations of their own in reference to those
viands, but to be conversing on foreign subjects, and whispering
confidentially.

Mr Toodle, in the midst of this family group, and setting an awful
example to his children in the way of appetite, was conveying the two
young Toodles on his knees to Birmingham by special engine, and was
contemplating the rest over a barrier of bread and butter, when Rob
the Grinder, in his sou'wester hat and mourning slops, presented
himself, and was received with a general rush of brothers and sisters.

'Well, mother!' said Rob, dutifully kissing her; 'how are you,
mother?'

'There's my boy!' cried Polly, giving him a hug and a pat on the
back. 'Secret! Bless you, father, not he!'

This was intended for Mr Toodle's private edification, but Rob the
Grinder, whose withers were not unwrung, caught the words as they were
spoken.

'What! father's been a saying something more again me, has he?'
cried the injured innocent. 'Oh, what a hard thing it is that when a
cove has once gone a little wrong, a cove's own father should be
always a throwing it in his face behind his back! It's enough,' cried
Rob, resorting to his coat-cuff in anguish of spirit, 'to make a cove
go and do something, out of spite!'

'My poor boy!' cried Polly, 'father didn't mean anything.'

'If father didn't mean anything,' blubbered the injured Grinder,
'why did he go and say anything, mother? Nobody thinks half so bad of
me as my own father does. What a unnatural thing! I wish somebody'd
take and chop my head off. Father wouldn't mind doing it, I believe,
and I'd much rather he did that than t'other.'

At these desperate words all the young Toodles shrieked; a pathetic
effect, which the Grinder improved by ironically adjuring them not to
cry for him, for they ought to hate him, they ought, if they was good
boys and girls; and this so touched the youngest Toodle but one, who
was easily moved, that it touched him not only in his spirit but in
his wind too; making him so purple that Mr Toodle in consternation
carried him out to the water-butt, and would have put him under the
tap, but for his being recovered by the sight of that instrument.

Matters having reached this point, Mr Toodle explained, and the
virtuous feelings of his son being thereby calmed, they shook hands,
and harmony reigned again.

'Will you do as I do, Biler, my boy?' inquired his father,
returning to his tea with new strength.

'No, thank'ee, father. Master and I had tea together.'

'And how is master, Rob?' said Polly.

'Well, I don't know, mother; not much to boast on. There ain't no
bis'ness done, you see. He don't know anything about it - the Cap'en
don't. There was a man come into the shop this very day, and says, "I
want a so-and-so," he says - some hard name or another. "A which?"
says the Cap'en. "A so-and-so," says the man. "Brother," says the
Cap'en, "will you take a observation round the shop." "Well," says the
man, "I've done" "Do you see wot you want?" says the Cap'en "No, I
don't," says the man. "Do you know it wen you do see it?" says the
Cap'en. "No, I don't," says the man. "Why, then I tell you wot, my
lad," says the Cap'en, "you'd better go back and ask wot it's like,
outside, for no more don't I!"'

'That ain't the way to make money, though, is it?' said Polly.

'Money, mother! He'll never make money. He has such ways as I never
see. He ain't a bad master though, I'll say that for him. But that
ain't much to me, for I don't think I shall stop with him long.'

'Not stop in your place, Rob!' cried his mother; while Mr Toodle
opened his eyes.

'Not in that place, p'raps,' returned the Grinder, with a wink. 'I
shouldn't wonder - friends at court you know - but never you mind,
mother, just now; I'm all right, that's all.'

The indisputable proof afforded in these hints, and in the
Grinder's mysterious manner, of his not being subject to that failing
which Mr Toodle had, by implication, attributed to him, might have led
to a renewal of his wrongs, and of the sensation in the family, but
for the opportune arrival of another visitor, who, to Polly's great
surprise, appeared at the door, smiling patronage and friendship on
all there.

'How do you do, Mrs Richards?' said Miss Tox. 'I have come to see
you. May I come in?'

The cheery face of Mrs Richards shone with a hospitable reply, and
Miss Tox, accepting the proffered chair, and grab fully recognising Mr
Toodle on her way to it, untied her bonnet strings, and said that in
the first place she must beg the dear children, one and all, to come
and kiss her.

The ill-starred youngest Toodle but one, who would appear, from the
frequency of his domestic troubles, to have been born under an unlucky
planet, was prevented from performing his part in this general
salutation by having fixed the sou'wester hat (with which he had been
previously trifling) deep on his head, hind side before, and being
unable to get it off again; which accident presenting to his terrified
imagination a dismal picture of his passing the rest of his days in
darkness, and in hopeless seclusion from his friends and family,
caused him to struggle with great violence, and to utter suffocating
cries. Being released, his face was discovered to be very hot, and
red, and damp; and Miss Tox took him on her lap, much exhausted.

'You have almost forgotten me, Sir, I daresay,' said Miss Tox to Mr
Toodle.

'No, Ma'am, no,' said Toodle. 'But we've all on us got a little
older since then.'

'And how do you find yourself, Sir?' inquired Miss Tox, blandly.

'Hearty, Ma'am, thank'ee,' replied Toodle. 'How do you find
yourself, Ma'am? Do the rheumaticks keep off pretty well, Ma'am? We
must all expect to grow into 'em, as we gets on.'

'Thank you,' said Miss Tox. 'I have not felt any inconvenience from
that disorder yet.'

'You're wery fortunate, Ma'am,' returned Mr Toodle. 'Many people at
your time of life, Ma'am, is martyrs to it. There was my mother - '
But catching his wife's eye here, Mr Toodle judiciously buried the
rest in another mug of tea

'You never mean to say, Mrs Richards,' cried Miss Tox, looking at
Rob, 'that that is your - '

'Eldest, Ma'am,' said Polly. 'Yes, indeed, it is. That's the little
fellow, Ma'am, that was the innocent cause of so much.'

'This here, Ma'am,' said Toodle, 'is him with the short legs - and
they was,' said Mr Toodle, with a touch of poetry in his tone,
'unusual short for leathers - as Mr Dombey made a Grinder on.'

The recollection almost overpowered Miss Tox. The subject of it had
a peculiar interest for her directly. She asked him to shake hands,
and congratulated his mother on his frank, ingenuous face. Rob,
overhearing her, called up a look, to justify the eulogium, but it was
hardly the right look.

'And now, Mrs Richards,' said Miss Tox, - 'and you too, Sir,'
addressing Toodle - 'I'll tell you, plainly and truly, what I have
come here for. You may be aware, Mrs Richards - and, possibly, you may
be aware too, Sir - that a little distance has interposed itself
between me and some of my friends, and that where I used to visit a
good deal, I do not visit now.'

Polly, who, with a woman's tact, understood this at once, expressed
as much in a little look. Mr Toodle, who had not the faintest idea of
what Miss Tox was talking about, expressed that also, in a stare.

'Of course,' said Miss Tox, 'how our little coolness has arisen is
of no moment, and does not require to be discussed. It is sufficient
for me to say, that I have the greatest possible respect for, and
interest in, Mr Dombey;' Miss Tox's voice faltered; 'and everything
that relates to him.'

Mr Toodle, enlightened, shook his head, and said he had heerd it
said, and, for his own part, he did think, as Mr Dombey was a
difficult subject.

'Pray don't say so, Sir, if you please,' returned Miss Tox. 'Let me
entreat you not to say so, Sir, either now, or at any future time.
Such observations cannot but be very painful to me; and to a
gentleman, whose mind is constituted as, I am quite sure, yours is,
can afford no permanent satisfaction.'

Mr Toodle, who had not entertained the least doubt of offering a
remark that would be received with acquiescence, was greatly
confounded.

'All that I wish to say, Mrs Richards,' resumed Miss Tox, - 'and I
address myself to you too, Sir, - is this. That any intelligence of
the proceedings of the family, of the welfare of the family, of the
health of the family, that reaches you, will be always most acceptable
to me. That I shall be always very glad to chat with Mrs Richards
about the family, and about old time And as Mrs Richards and I never
had the least difference (though I could wish now that we had been
better acquainted, but I have no one but myself to blame for that), I
hope she will not object to our being very good friends now, and to my
coming backwards and forwards here, when I like, without being a
stranger. Now, I really hope, Mrs Richards,' said Miss Tox -
earnestly, 'that you will take this, as I mean it, like a
good-humoured creature, as you always were.'

Polly was gratified, and showed it. Mr Toodle didn't know whether
he was gratified or not, and preserved a stolid calmness.

'You see, Mrs Richards,' said Miss Tox - 'and I hope you see too,
Sir - there are many little ways in which I can be slightly useful to
you, if you will make no stranger of me; and in which I shall be
delighted to be so. For instance, I can teach your children something.
I shall bring a few little books, if you'll allow me, and some work,
and of an evening now and then, they'll learn - dear me, they'll learn
a great deal, I trust, and be a credit to their teacher.'

Mr Toodle, who had a great respect for learning, jerked his head
approvingly at his wife, and moistened his hands with dawning
satisfaction.

'Then, not being a stranger, I shall be in nobody's way,' said Miss
Tox, 'and everything will go on just as if I were not here. Mrs
Richards will do her mending, or her ironing, or her nursing, whatever
it is, without minding me: and you'll smoke your pipe, too, if you're
so disposed, Sir, won't you?'

'Thank'ee, Mum,' said Mr Toodle. 'Yes; I'll take my bit of backer.'

'Very good of you to say so, Sir,' rejoined Miss Tox, 'and I really
do assure you now, unfeignedly, that it will be a great comfort to me,
and that whatever good I may be fortunate enough to do the children,
you will more than pay back to me, if you'll enter into this little
bargain comfortably, and easily, and good-naturedly, without another
word about it.'

The bargain was ratified on the spot; and Miss Tox found herself so
much at home already, that without delay she instituted a preliminary
examination of the children all round - which Mr Toodle much admired -
and booked their ages, names, and acquirements, on a piece of paper.
This ceremony, and a little attendant gossip, prolonged the time until
after their usual hour of going to bed, and detained Miss Tox at the
Toodle fireside until it was too late for her to walk home alone. The
gallant Grinder, however, being still there, politely offered to
attend her to her own door; and as it was something to Miss Tox to be
seen home by a youth whom Mr Dombey had first inducted into those
manly garments which are rarely mentioned by name,' she very readily
accepted the proposal.

After shaking hands with Mr Toodle and Polly, and kissing all the
children, Miss Tox left the house, therefore, with unlimited
popularity, and carrying away with her so light a heart that it might
have given Mrs Chick offence if that good lady could have weighed it.

Rob the Grinder, in his modesty, would have walked behind, but Miss
Tox desired him to keep beside her, for conversational purposes; and,
as she afterwards expressed it to his mother, 'drew him out,' upon the
road.

He drew out so bright, and clear, and shining, that Miss Tox was
charmed with him. The more Miss Tox drew him out, the finer he came -
like wire. There never was a better or more promising youth - a more
affectionate, steady, prudent, sober, honest, meek, candid young man -
than Rob drew out, that night.

'I am quite glad,' said Miss Tox, arrived at her own door, 'to know
you. I hope you'll consider me your friend, and that you'll come and
see me as often as you like. Do you keep a money-box?'

'Yes, Ma'am,' returned Rob; 'I'm saving up, against I've got enough
to put in the Bank, Ma'am.

'Very laudable indeed,' said Miss Tox. 'I'm glad to hear it. Put
this half-crown into it, if you please.'

'Oh thank you, Ma'am,' replied Rob, 'but really I couldn't think of
depriving you.'

'I commend your independent spirit,' said Miss Tox, 'but it's no
deprivation, I assure you. I shall be offended if you don't take it,
as a mark of my good-will. Good-night, Robin.'

'Good-night, Ma'am,' said Rob, 'and thank you!'

Who ran sniggering off to get change, and tossed it away with a
pieman. But they never taught honour at the Grinders' School, where
the system that prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering
of hypocrisy. Insomuch, that many of the friends and masters of past
Grinders said, if this were what came of education for the common
people, let us have none. Some more rational said, let us have a
better one. But the governing powers of the Grinders' Company were
always ready for them, by picking out a few boys who had turned out
well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could
have only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of
those objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the
Grinders' Institution.



CHAPTER 39.

Further Adventures of Captain Edward Cuttle, Mariner



Time, sure of foot and strong of will, had so pressed onward, that
the year enjoined by the old Instrument-maker, as the term during
which his friend should refrain from opening the sealed packet
accompanying the letter he had left for him, was now nearly expired,
and Captain Cuttle began to look at it, of an evening, with feelings
of mystery and uneasiness

The Captain, in his honour, would as soon have thought of opening
the parcel one hour before the expiration of the term, as he would
have thought of opening himself, to study his own anatomy. He merely
brought it out, at a certain stage of his first evening pipe, laid it
on the table, and sat gazing at the outside of it, through the smoke,
in silent gravity, for two or three hours at a spell. Sometimes, when
he had contemplated it thus for a pretty long while, the Captain would
hitch his chair, by degrees, farther and farther off, as if to get
beyond the range of its fascination; but if this were his design, he
never succeeded: for even when he was brought up by the parlour wall,
the packet still attracted him; or if his eyes, in thoughtful
wandering, roved to the ceiling or the fire, its image immediately
followed, and posted itself conspicuously among the coals, or took up
an advantageous position on the whitewash.

In respect of Heart's Delight, the Captain's parental and
admiration knew no change. But since his last interview with Mr
Carker, Captain Cuttle had come to entertain doubts whether his former
intervention in behalf of that young lady and his dear boy Wal'r, had
proved altogether so favourable as he could have wished, and as he at
the time believed. The Captain was troubled with a serious misgiving
that he had done more harm than good, in short; and in his remorse and
modesty he made the best atonement he could think of, by putting
himself out of the way of doing any harm to anyone, and, as it were,
throwing himself overboard for a dangerous person.

Self-buried, therefore, among the instruments, the Captain never
went near Mr Dombey's house, or reported himself in any way to
Florence or Miss Nipper. He even severed himself from Mr Perch, on the
occasion of his next visit, by dryly informing that gentleman, that he
thanked him for his company, but had cut himself adrift from all such
acquaintance, as he didn't know what magazine he mightn't blow up,
without meaning of it. In this self-imposed retirement, the Captain
passed whole days and weeks without interchanging a word with anyone
but Rob the Grinder, whom he esteemed as a pattern of disinterested
attachment and fidelity. In this retirement, the Captain, gazing at
the packet of an evening, would sit smoking, and thinking of Florence
and poor Walter, until they both seemed to his homely fancy to be
dead, and to have passed away into eternal youth, the beautiful and
innocent children of his first remembrance.

The Captain did not, however, in his musings, neglect his own
improvement, or the mental culture of Rob the Grinder. That young man
was generally required to read out of some book to the Captain, for
one hour, every evening; and as the Captain implicitly believed that
all books were true, he accumulated, by this means, many remarkable
facts. On Sunday nights, the Captain always read for himself, before
going to bed, a certain Divine Sermon once delivered on a Mount; and
although he was accustomed to quote the text, without book, after his
own manner, he appeared to read it with as reverent an understanding
of its heavenly spirit, as if he had got it all by heart in Greek, and
had been able to write any number of fierce theological disquisitions
on its every phrase.

Rob the Grinder, whose reverence for the inspired writings, under
the admirable system of the Grinders' School, had been developed by a
perpetual bruising of his intellectual shins against all the proper
names of all the tribes of Judah, and by the monotonous repetition of
hard verses, especially by way of punishment, and by the parading of
him at six years old in leather breeches, three times a Sunday, very
high up, in a very hot church, with a great organ buzzing against his
drowsy head, like an exceedingly busy bee - Rob the Grinder made a
mighty show of being edified when the Captain ceased to read, and
generally yawned and nodded while the reading was in progress. The
latter fact being never so much as suspected by the good Captain.

Captain Cuttle, also, as a man of business; took to keeping books.
In these he entered observations on the weather, and on the currents
of the waggons and other vehicles: which he observed, in that quarter,
to set westward in the morning and during the greater part of the day,
and eastward towards the evening. Two or three stragglers appearing in
one week, who 'spoke him' - so the Captain entered it- on the subject
of spectacles, and who, without positively purchasing, said they would
look in again, the Captain decided that the business was improving,
and made an entry in the day-book to that effect: the wind then
blowing (which he first recorded) pretty fresh, west and by north;
having changed in the night.

One of the Captain's chief difficulties was Mr Toots, who called
frequently, and who without saying much seemed to have an idea that
the little back parlour was an eligible room to chuckle in, as he
would sit and avail himself of its accommodations in that regard by
the half-hour together, without at all advancing in intimacy with the
Captain. The Captain, rendered cautious by his late experience, was
unable quite to satisfy his mind whether Mr Toots was the mild subject
he appeared to be, or was a profoundly artful and dissimulating
hypocrite. His frequent reference to Miss Dombey was suspicious; but
the Captain had a secret kindness for Mr Toots's apparent reliance on
him, and forbore to decide against him for the present; merely eyeing
him, with a sagacity not to be described, whenever he approached the
subject that was nearest to his heart.

'Captain Gills,' blurted out Mr Toots, one day all at once, as his
manner was, 'do you think you could think favourably of that
proposition of mine, and give me the pleasure of your acquaintance?'

'Why, I tell you what it is, my lad,' replied the Captain, who had
at length concluded on a course of action; 'I've been turning that
there, over.'

'Captain Gills, it's very kind of you,' retorted Mr Toots. 'I'm
much obliged to you. Upon my word and honour, Captain Gills, it would
be a charity to give me the pleasure of your acquaintance. It really
would.'

'You see, brother,' argued the Captain slowly, 'I don't know you.

'But you never can know me, Captain Gills,' replied Mr Toots,
steadfast to his point, 'if you don't give me the pleasure of your
acquaintance.

The Captain seemed struck by the originality and power of this
remark, and looked at Mr Toots as if he thought there was a great deal
more in him than he had expected.

'Well said, my lad,' observed the Captain, nodding his head
thoughtfully; 'and true. Now look'ee here: You've made some
observations to me, which gives me to understand as you admire a
certain sweet creetur. Hey?'

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, gesticulating violently with the
hand in which he held his hat, 'Admiration is not the word. Upon my
honour, you have no conception what my feelings are. If I could be
dyed black, and made Miss Dombey's slave, I should consider it a
compliment. If, at the sacrifice of all my property, I could get
transmigrated into Miss Dombey's dog - I - I really think I should
never leave off wagging my tail. I should be so perfectly happy,
Captain Gills!'

Mr Toots said it with watery eyes, and pressed his hat against his
bosom with deep emotion.

'My lad,' returned the Captain, moved to compassion, 'if you're in
arnest -

'Captain Gills,' cried Mr Toots, 'I'm in such a state of mind, and
am so dreadfully in earnest, that if I could swear to it upon a hot
piece of iron, or a live coal, or melted lead, or burning sealing-wax,
Or anything of that sort, I should be glad to hurt myself, as a relief
to my feelings.' And Mr Toots looked hurriedly about the room, as if
for some sufficiently painful means of accomplishing his dread
purpose.

The Captain pushed his glazed hat back upon his head, stroked his
face down with his heavy hand - making his nose more mottled in the
process - and planting himself before Mr Toots, and hooking him by the
lapel of his coat, addressed him in these words, while Mr Toots looked
up into his face, with much attention and some wonder.

'If you're in arnest, you see, my lad,' said the Captain, 'you're a
object of clemency, and clemency is the brightest jewel in the crown
of a Briton's head, for which you'll overhaul the constitution as laid
down in Rule Britannia, and, when found, that is the charter as them
garden angels was a singing of, so many times over. Stand by! This
here proposal o' you'rn takes me a little aback. And why? Because I
holds my own only, you understand, in these here waters, and haven't
got no consort, and may be don't wish for none. Steady! You hailed me
first, along of a certain young lady, as you was chartered by. Now if
you and me is to keep one another's company at all, that there young
creetur's name must never be named nor referred to. I don't know what
harm mayn't have been done by naming of it too free, afore now, and
thereby I brings up short. D'ye make me out pretty clear, brother?'

'Well, you'll excuse me, Captain Gills,' replied Mr Toots, 'if I
don't quite follow you sometimes. But upon my word I - it's a hard
thing, Captain Gills, not to be able to mention Miss Dombey. I really
have got such a dreadful load here!' - Mr Toots pathetically touched
his shirt-front with both hands - 'that I feel night and day, exactly
as if somebody was sitting upon me.

'Them,' said the Captain, 'is the terms I offer. If they're hard
upon you, brother, as mayhap they are, give 'em a wide berth, sheer
off, and part company cheerily!'

'Captain Gills,' returned Mr Toots, 'I hardly know how it is, but
after what you told me when I came here, for the first time, I - I
feel that I'd rather think about Miss Dombey in your society than talk
about her in almost anybody else's. Therefore, Captain Gills, if
you'll give me the pleasure of your acquaintance, I shall be very
happy to accept it on your own conditions. I wish to be honourable,
Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, holding back his extended hand for a
moment, 'and therefore I am obliged to say that I can not help
thinking about Miss Dombey. It's impossible for me to make a promise
not to think about her.'

'My lad,' said the Captain, whose opinion of Mr Toots was much
improved by this candid avowal, 'a man's thoughts is like the winds,
and nobody can't answer for 'em for certain, any length of time
together. Is it a treaty as to words?'

'As to words, Captain Gills,' returned Mr Toots, 'I think I can
bind myself.'

Mr Toots gave Captain Cuttle his hand upon it, then and there; and
the Captain with a pleasant and gracious show of condescension,
bestowed his acquaintance upon him formally. Mr Toots seemed much
relieved and gladdened by the acquisition, and chuckled rapturously
during the remainder of his visit. The Captain, for his part, was not
ill pleased to occupy that position of patronage, and was exceedingly
well satisfied by his own prudence and foresight.

But rich as Captain Cuttle was in the latter quality, he received a
surprise that same evening from a no less ingenuous and simple youth,
than Rob the Grinder. That artless lad, drinking tea at the same
table, and bending meekly over his cup and saucer, having taken
sidelong observations of his master for some time, who was reading the
newspaper with great difficulty, but much dignity, through his
glasses, broke silence by saying -

'Oh! I beg your pardon, Captain, but you mayn't be in want of any
pigeons, may you, Sir?'

'No, my lad,' replied the Captain.

'Because I was wishing to dispose of mine, Captain,' said Rob.

'Ay, ay?' cried the Captain, lifting up his bushy eyebrows a
little.

'Yes; I'm going, Captain, if you please,' said Rob.

'Going? Where are you going?' asked the Captain, looking round at
him over the glasses.

'What? didn't you know that I was going to leave you, Captain?'
asked Rob, with a sneaking smile.

The Captain put down the paper, took off his spectacles, and
brought his eyes to bear on the deserter.

'Oh yes, Captain, I am going to give you warning. I thought you'd
have known that beforehand, perhaps,' said Rob, rubbing his hands, and
getting up. 'If you could be so good as provide yourself soon,
Captain, it would be a great convenience to me. You couldn't provide
yourself by to-morrow morning, I am afraid, Captain: could you, do you
think?'

'And you're a going to desert your colours, are you, my lad?' said
the Captain, after a long examination of his face.

'Oh, it's very hard upon a cove, Captain,' cried the tender Rob,
injured and indignant in a moment, 'that he can't give lawful warning,
without being frowned at in that way, and called a deserter. You
haven't any right to call a poor cove names, Captain. It ain't because
I'm a servant and you're a master, that you're to go and libel me.
What wrong have I done? Come, Captain, let me know what my crime is,
will you?'

The stricken Grinder wept, and put his coat-cuff in his eye.

'Come, Captain,' cried the injured youth, 'give my crime a name!
What have I been and done? Have I stolen any of the property? have I
set the house a-fire? If I have, why don't you give me in charge, and
try it? But to take away the character of a lad that's been a good
servant to you, because he can't afford to stand in his own light for
your good, what a injury it is, and what a bad return for faithful
service! This is the way young coves is spiled and drove wrong. I
wonder at you, Captain, I do.'

All of which the Grinder howled forth in a lachrymose whine, and
backing carefully towards the door.

'And so you've got another berth, have you, my lad?' said the
Captain, eyeing him intently.

'Yes, Captain, since you put it in that shape, I have got another
berth,' cried Rob, backing more and more; 'a better berth than I've
got here, and one where I don't so much as want your good word,
Captain, which is fort'nate for me, after all the dirt you've throw'd
at me, because I'm poor, and can't afford to stand in my own light for
your good. Yes, I have got another berth; and if it wasn't for leaving
you unprovided, Captain, I'd go to it now, sooner than I'd take them
names from you, because I'm poor, and can't afford to stand in my own
light for your good. Why do you reproach me for being poor, and not
standing in my own light for your good, Captain? How can you so demean
yourself?'

'Look ye here, my boy,' replied the peaceful Captain. 'Don't you
pay out no more of them words.'

'Well, then, don't you pay in no more of your words, Captain,'
retorted the roused innocent, getting louder in his whine, and backing
into the shop. 'I'd sooner you took my blood than my character.'

'Because,' pursued the Captain calmly, 'you have heerd, may be, of
such a thing as a rope's end.'

'Oh, have I though, Captain?' cried the taunting Grinder. 'No I
haven't. I never heerd of any such a article!'

'Well,' said the Captain, 'it's my belief as you'll know more about
it pretty soon, if you don't keep a bright look-out. I can read your
signals, my lad. You may go.'

'Oh! I may go at once, may I, Captain?' cried Rob, exulting in his
success. 'But mind! I never asked to go at once, Captain. You are not
to take away my character again, because you send me off of your own
accord. And you're not to stop any of my wages, Captain!'

His employer settled the last point by producing the tin canister
and telling the Grinder's money out in full upon the table. Rob,
snivelling and sobbing, and grievously wounded in his feelings, took
up the pieces one by one, with a sob and a snivel for each, and tied
them up separately in knots in his pockethandkerchief; then he
ascended to the roof of the house and filled his hat and pockets with
pigeons; then, came down to his bed under the counter and made up his
bundle, snivelling and sobbing louder, as if he were cut to the heart
by old associations; then he whined, 'Good-night, Captain. I leave you
without malice!' and then, going out upon the door-step, pulled the
little Midshipman's nose as a parting indignity, and went away down
the street grinning triumphantly.

The Captain, left to himself, resumed his perusal of the news as if
nothing unusual or unexpected had taken place, and went reading on
with the greatest assiduity. But never a word did Captain Cuttle
understand, though he read a vast number, for Rob the Grinder was
scampering up one column and down another all through the newspaper.

It is doubtful whether the worthy Captain had ever felt himself
quite abandoned until now; but now, old Sol Gills, Walter, and Heart's
Delight were lost to him indeed, and now Mr Carker deceived and jeered
him cruelly. They were all represented in the false Rob, to whom he
had held forth many a time on the recollections that were warm within
him; he had believed in the false Rob, and had been glad to believe in
him; he had made a companion of him as the last of the old ship's
company; he had taken the command of the little Midshipman with him at
his right hand; he had meant to do his duty by him, and had felt
almost as kindly towards the boy as if they had been shipwrecked and
cast upon a desert place together. And now, that the false Rob had
brought distrust, treachery, and meanness into the very parlour, which
was a kind of sacred place, Captain Cuttle felt as if the parlour
might have gone down next, and not surprised him much by its sinking,
or given him any very great concern.

Therefore Captain Cuttle read the newspaper with profound attention
and no comprehension, and therefore Captain Cuttle said nothing
whatever about Rob to himself, or admitted to himself that he was
thinking about him, or would recognise in the most distant manner that
Rob had anything to do with his feeling as lonely as Robinson Crusoe.

In the same composed, business-like way, the Captain stepped over
to Leadenhall Market in the dusk, and effected an arrangement with a
private watchman on duty there, to come and put up and take down the
shutters of the wooden Midshipman every night and morning. He then
called in at the eating-house to diminish by one half the daily
rations theretofore supplied to the Midshipman, and at the
public-house to stop the traitor's beer. 'My young man,' said the
Captain, in explanation to the young lady at the bar, 'my young man
having bettered himself, Miss.' Lastly, the Captain resolved to take
possession of the bed under the counter, and to turn in there o'
nights instead of upstairs, as sole guardian of the property.

From this bed Captain Cuttle daily rose thenceforth, and clapped on
his glazed hat at six o'clock in the morning, with the solitary air of
Crusoe finishing his toilet with his goat-skin cap; and although his
fears of a visitation from the savage tribe, MacStinger, were somewhat
cooled, as similar apprehensions on the part of that lone mariner used
to be by the lapse of a long interval without any symptoms of the
cannibals, he still observed a regular routine of defensive
operations, and never encountered a bonnet without previous survey
from his castle of retreat. In the meantime (during which he received
no call from Mr Toots, who wrote to say he was out of town) his own
voice began to have a strange sound in his ears; and he acquired such
habits of profound meditation from much polishing and stowing away of
the stock, and from much sitting behind the counter reading, or
looking out of window, that the red rim made on his forehead by the
hard glazed hat, sometimes ached again with excess of reflection.

The year being now expired, Captain Cuttle deemed it expedient to
open the packet; but as he had always designed doing this in the
presence of Rob the Grinder, who had brought it to him, and as he had
an idea that it would be regular and ship-shape to open it in the
presence of somebody, he was sadly put to it for want of a witness. In
this difficulty, he hailed one day with unusual delight the
announcement in the Shipping Intelligence of the arrival of the
Cautious Clara, Captain John Bunsby, from a coasting voyage; and to
that philosopher immediately dispatched a letter by post, enjoining
inviolable secrecy as to his place of residence, and requesting to be
favoured with an early visit, in the evening season.

Bunsby, who was one of those sages who act upon conviction, took
some days to get the conviction thoroughly into his mind, that he had
received a letter to this effect. But when he had grappled with the
fact, and mastered it, he promptly sent his boy with the message,
'He's a coming to-night.' Who being instructed to deliver those words
and disappear, fulfilled his mission like a tarry spirit, charged with
a mysterious warning.

The Captain, well pleased to receive it, made preparation of pipes
and rum and water, and awaited his visitor in the back parlour. At the
hour of eight, a deep lowing, as of a nautical Bull, outside the
shop-door, succeeded by the knocking of a stick on the panel,
announced to the listening ear of Captain Cuttle, that Bunsby was
alongside; whom he instantly admitted, shaggy and loose, and with his
stolid mahogany visage, as usual, appearing to have no consciousness
of anything before it, but to be attentively observing something that
was taking place in quite another part of the world.

'Bunsby,' said the Captain, grasping him by the hand, 'what cheer,
my lad, what cheer?'

'Shipmet,' replied the voice within Bunsby, unaccompanied by any
sign on the part of the Commander himself, 'hearty, hearty.'

'Bunsby!' said the Captain, rendering irrepressible homage to his
genius, 'here you are! a man as can give an opinion as is brighter
than di'monds - and give me the lad with the tarry trousers as shines
to me like di'monds bright, for which you'll overhaul the Stanfell's
Budget, and when found make a note.' Here you are, a man as gave an
opinion in this here very place, that has come true, every letter on
it,' which the Captain sincerely believed.

'Ay, ay?' growled Bunsby.

'Every letter,' said the Captain.

'For why?' growled Bunsby, looking at his friend for the first
time. 'Which way? If so, why not? Therefore.' With these oracular
words - they seemed almost to make the Captain giddy; they launched
him upon such a sea of speculation and conjecture - the sage submitted
to be helped off with his pilot-coat, and accompanied his friend into
the back parlour, where his hand presently alighted on the rum-bottle,
from which he brewed a stiff glass of grog; and presently afterwards
on a pipe, which he filled, lighted, and began to smoke.

Captain Cuttle, imitating his visitor in the matter of these
particulars, though the rapt and imperturbable manner of the great
Commander was far above his powers, sat in the opposite corner of the
fireside, observing him respectfully, and as if he waited for some
encouragement or expression of curiosity on Bunsby's part which should
lead him to his own affairs. But as the mahogany philosopher gave no
evidence of being sentient of anything but warmth and tobacco, except
once, when taking his pipe from his lips to make room for his glass,
he incidentally remarked with exceeding gruffness, that his name was
Jack Bunsby - a declaration that presented but small opening for
conversation - the Captain bespeaking his attention in a short
complimentary exordium, narrated the whole history of Uncle Sol's
departure, with the change it had produced in his own life and
fortunes; and concluded by placing the packet on the table.

After a long pause, Mr Bunsby nodded his head.

'Open?' said the Captain.

Bunsby nodded again.

The Captain accordingly broke the seal, and disclosed to view two
folded papers, of which he severally read the endorsements, thus:
'Last Will and Testament of Solomon Gills.' 'Letter for Ned Cuttle.'

Bunsby, with his eye on the coast of Greenland, seemed to listen
for the contents. The Captain therefore hemmed to clear his throat,
and read the letter aloud.

'"My dear Ned Cuttle. When I left home for the West Indies" - '

Here the Captain stopped, and looked hard at Bunsby, who looked
fixedly at the coast of Greenland.

' - "in forlorn search of intelligence of my dear boy, I knew that
if you were acquainted with my design, you would thwart it, or
accompany me; and therefore I kept it secret. If you ever read this
letter, Ned, I am likely to be dead. You will easily forgive an old
friend's folly then, and will feel for the restlessness and
uncertainty in which he wandered away on such a wild voyage. So no
more of that. I have little hope that my poor boy will ever read these
words, or gladden your eyes with the sight of his frank face any
more." No, no; no more,' said Captain Cuttle, sorrowfully meditating;
'no more. There he lays, all his days - '

Mr Bunsby, who had a musical ear, suddenly bellowed, 'In the Bays
of Biscay, O!' which so affected the good Captain, as an appropriate
tribute to departed worth, that he shook him by the hand in
acknowledgment, and was fain to wipe his eyes.

'Well, well!' said the Captain with a sigh, as the Lament of Bunsby
ceased to ring and vibrate in the skylight. 'Affliction sore, long
time he bore, and let us overhaul the wollume, and there find it.'

'Physicians,' observed Bunsby, 'was in vain."

'Ay, ay, to be sure,' said the Captain, 'what's the good o' them in
two or three hundred fathoms o' water!' Then, returning to the letter,
he read on: - '"But if he should be by, when it is opened;"' the
Captain involuntarily looked round, and shook his head; '"or should
know of it at any other time;"' the Captain shook his head again; '"my
blessing on him! In case the accompanying paper is not legally
written, it matters very little, for there is no one interested but
you and he, and my plain wish is, that if he is living he should have
what little there may be, and if (as I fear) otherwise, that you
should have it, Ned. You will respect my wish, I know. God bless you
for it, and for all your friendliness besides, to Solomon Gills."
Bunsby!' said the Captain, appealing to him solemnly, 'what do you
make of this? There you sit, a man as has had his head broke from
infancy up'ards, and has got a new opinion into it at every seam as
has been opened. Now, what do you make o' this?'

'If so be,' returned Bunsby, with unusual promptitude, 'as he's
dead, my opinion is he won't come back no more. If so be as he's
alive, my opinion is he will. Do I say he will? No. Why not? Because
the bearings of this obserwation lays in the application on it.'

'Bunsby!' said Captain Cuttle, who would seem to have estimated the
value of his distinguished friend's opinions in proportion to the
immensity of the difficulty he experienced in making anything out of
them; 'Bunsby,' said the Captain, quite confounded by admiration, 'you
carry a weight of mind easy, as would swamp one of my tonnage soon.
But in regard o' this here will, I don't mean to take no steps towards
the property - Lord forbid! - except to keep it for a more rightful
owner; and I hope yet as the rightful owner, Sol Gills, is living
and'll come back, strange as it is that he ain't forwarded no
dispatches. Now, what is your opinion, Bunsby, as to stowing of these
here papers away again, and marking outside as they was opened, such a
day, in the presence of John Bunsby and Ed'ard Cuttle?'

Bunsby, descrying no objection, on the coast of Greenland or
elsewhere, to this proposal, it was carried into execution; and that
great man, bringing his eye into the present for a moment, affixed his
sign-manual to the cover, totally abstaining, with characteristic
modesty, from the use of capital letters. Captain Cuttle, having
attached his own left-handed signature, and locked up the packet in
the iron safe, entreated his guest to mix another glass and smoke
another pipe; and doing the like himself, fell a musing over the fire
on the possible fortunes of the poor old Instrument-maker.

And now a surprise occurred, so overwhelming and terrific that
Captain Cuttle, unsupported by the presence of Bunsby, must have sunk
beneath it, and been a lost man from that fatal hour.

How the Captain, even in the satisfaction of admitting such a
guest, could have only shut the door, and not locked it, of which
negligence he was undoubtedly guilty, is one of those questions that
must for ever remain mere points of speculation, or vague charges
against destiny. But by that unlocked door, at this quiet moment, did
the fell MacStinger dash into the parlour, bringing Alexander
MacStinger in her parental arms, and confusion and vengeance (not to
mention Juliana MacStinger, and the sweet child's brother, Charles
MacStinger, popularly known about the scenes of his youthful sports,
as Chowley) in her train. She came so swiftly and so silently, like a
rushing air from the neighbourhood of the East India Docks, that
Captain Cuttle found himself in the very act of sitting looking at
her, before the calm face with which he had been meditating, changed
to one of horror and dismay.

But the moment Captain Cuttle understood the full extent of his
misfortune, self-preservation dictated an attempt at flight. Darting
at the little door which opened from the parlour on the steep little
range of cellar-steps, the Captain made a rush, head-foremost, at the
latter, like a man indifferent to bruises and contusions, who only
sought to hide himself in the bowels of the earth. In this gallant
effort he would probably have succeeded, but for the affectionate
dispositions of Juliana and Chowley, who pinning him by the legs - one
of those dear children holding on to each - claimed him as their
friend, with lamentable cries. In the meantime, Mrs MacStinger, who
never entered upon any action of importance without previously
inverting Alexander MacStinger, to bring him within the range of a
brisk battery of slaps, and then sitting him down to cool as the
reader first beheld him, performed that solemn rite, as if on this
occasion it were a sacrifice to the Furies; and having deposited the
victim on the floor, made at the Captain with a strength of purpose
that appeared to threaten scratches to the interposing Bunsby.

The cries of the two elder MacStingers, and the wailing of young
Alexander, who may be said to have passed a piebald childhood,
forasmuch as he was black in the face during one half of that fairy
period of existence, combined to make this visitation the more awful.
But when silence reigned again, and the Captain, in a violent
perspiration, stood meekly looking at Mrs MacStinger, its terrors were
at their height.

'Oh, Cap'en Cuttle, Cap'en Cuttle!' said Mrs MacStinger, making her
chin rigid, and shaking it in unison with what, but for the weakness
of her sex, might be described as her fist. 'Oh, Cap'en Cuttle, Cap'en
Cuttle, do you dare to look me in the face, and not be struck down in
the herth!'

The Captain, who looked anything but daring, feebly muttered
'Standby!'

'Oh I was a weak and trusting Fool when I took you under my roof,
Cap'en Cuttle, I was!' cried Mrs MacStinger. 'To think of the benefits
I've showered on that man, and the way in which I brought my children
up to love and honour him as if he was a father to 'em, when there
ain't a housekeeper, no nor a lodger in our street, don't know that I
lost money by that man, and by his guzzlings and his muzzlings' - Mrs
MacStinger used the last word for the joint sake of alliteration and
aggravation, rather than for the expression of any idea - 'and when
they cried out one and all, shame upon him for putting upon an
industrious woman, up early and late for the good of her young family,
and keeping her poor place so clean that a individual might have ate
his dinner, yes, and his tea too, if he was so disposed, off any one
of the floors or stairs, in spite of all his guzzlings and his
muzzlings, such was the care and pains bestowed upon him!'

Mrs MacStinger stopped to fetch her breath; and her face flushed
with triumph in this second happy introduction of Captain Cuttle's
muzzlings.

'And he runs awa-a-a-y!'cried Mrs MacStinger, with a lengthening
out of the last syllable that made the unfortunate Captain regard
himself as the meanest of men; 'and keeps away a twelve-month! From a
woman! Such is his conscience! He hasn't the courage to meet her
hi-i-igh;' long syllable again; 'but steals away, like a felion. Why,
if that baby of mine,' said Mrs MacStinger, with sudden rapidity, 'was
to offer to go and steal away, I'd do my duty as a mother by him, till
he was covered with wales!'

The young Alexander, interpreting this into a positive promise, to
be shortly redeemed, tumbled over with fear and grief, and lay upon
the floor, exhibiting the soles of his shoes and making such a
deafening outcry, that Mrs MacStinger found it necessary to take him
up in her arms, where she quieted him, ever and anon, as he broke out
again, by a shake that seemed enough to loosen his teeth.

'A pretty sort of a man is Cap'en Cuttle,' said Mrs MacStinger,
with a sharp stress on the first syllable of the Captain's name, 'to
take on for - and to lose sleep for- and to faint along of- and to
think dead forsooth - and to go up and down the blessed town like a
madwoman, asking questions after! Oh, a pretty sort of a man! Ha ha ha
ha! He's worth all that trouble and distress of mind, and much more.
That's nothing, bless you! Ha ha ha ha! Cap'en Cuttle,' said Mrs
MacStinger, with severe reaction in her voice and manner, 'I wish to
know if you're a-coming home.

The frightened Captain looked into his hat, as if he saw nothing
for it but to put it on, and give himself up.

'Cap'en Cuttle,' repeated Mrs MacStinger, in the same determined
manner, 'I wish to know if you're a-coming home, Sir.'

The Captain seemed quite ready to go, but faintly suggested
something to the effect of 'not making so much noise about it.'

'Ay, ay, ay,' said Bunsby, in a soothing tone. 'Awast, my lass,
awast!'

'And who may you be, if you please!' retorted Mrs MacStinger, with
chaste loftiness. 'Did you ever lodge at Number Nine, Brig Place, Sir?
My memory may be bad, but not with me, I think. There was a Mrs
Jollson lived at Number Nine before me, and perhaps you're mistaking
me for her. That is my only ways of accounting for your familiarity,
Sir.'

'Come, come, my lass, awast, awast!' said Bunsby.

Captain Cuttle could hardly believe it, even of this great man,
though he saw it done with his waking eyes; but Bunsby, advancing
boldly, put his shaggy blue arm round Mrs MacStinger, and so softened
her by his magic way of doing it, and by these few words - he said no
more - that she melted into tears, after looking upon him for a few
moments, and observed that a child might conquer her now, she was so
low in her courage.

Speechless and utterly amazed, the Captain saw him gradually
persuade this inexorable woman into the shop, return for rum and water
and a candle, take them to her, and pacify her without appearing to
utter one word. Presently he looked in with his pilot-coat on, and
said, 'Cuttle, I'm a-going to act as convoy home;' and Captain Cuttle,
more to his confusion than if he had been put in irons himself, for
safe transport to Brig Place, saw the family pacifically filing off,
with Mrs MacStinger at their head. He had scarcely time to take down
his canister, and stealthily convey some money into the hands of
Juliana MacStinger, his former favourite, and Chowley, who had the
claim upon him that he was naturally of a maritime build, before the
Midshipman was abandoned by them all; and Bunsby whispering that he'd
carry on smart, and hail Ned Cuttle again before he went aboard, shut
the door upon himself, as the last member of the party.

Some uneasy ideas that he must be walking in his sleep, or that he
had been troubled with phantoms, and not a family of flesh and blood,
beset the Captain at first, when he went back to the little parlour,
and found himself alone. Illimitable faith in, and immeasurable
admiration of, the Commander of the Cautious Clara, succeeded, and
threw the Captain into a wondering trance.

Still, as time wore on, and Bunsby failed to reappear, the Captain
began to entertain uncomfortable doubts of another kind. Whether
Bunsby had been artfully decoyed to Brig Place, and was there detained
in safe custody as hostage for his friend; in which case it would
become the Captain, as a man of honour, to release him, by the
sacrifice of his own liberty. Whether he had been attacked and
defeated by Mrs MacStinger, and was ashamed to show himself after his
discomfiture. Whether Mrs MacStinger, thinking better of it, in the
uncertainty of her temper, had turned back to board the Midshipman
again, and Bunsby, pretending to conduct her by a short cut, was
endeavouring to lose the family amid the wilds and savage places of
the City. Above all, what it would behove him, Captain Cuttle, to do,
in case of his hearing no more, either of the MacStingers or of
Bunsby, which, in these wonderful and unforeseen conjunctions of
events, might possibly happen.

He debated all this until he was tired; and still no Bunsby. He
made up his bed under the counter, all ready for turning in; and still
no Bunsby. At length, when the Captain had given him up, for that
night at least, and had begun to undress, the sound of approaching
wheels was heard, and, stopping at the door, was succeeded by Bunsby's
hail.

The Captain trembled to think that Mrs MacStinger was not to be got
rid of, and had been brought back in a coach.

But no. Bunsby was accompanied by nothing but a large box, which he
hauled into the shop with his own hands, and as soon as he had hauled
in, sat upon. Captain Cuttle knew it for the chest he had left at Mrs
MacStinger's house, and looking, candle in hand, at Bunsby more
attentively, believed that he was three sheets in the wind, or, in
plain words, drunk. It was difficult, however, to be sure of this; the
Commander having no trace of expression in his face when sober.

'Cuttle,' said the Commander, getting off the chest, and opening
the lid, 'are these here your traps?'

Captain Cuttle looked in and identified his property.

'Done pretty taut and trim, hey, shipmet?' said Bunsby.

The grateful and bewildered Captain grasped him by the hand, and
was launching into a reply expressive of his astonished feelings, when
Bunsby disengaged himself by a jerk of his wrist, and seemed to make
an effort to wink with his revolving eye, the only effect of which
attempt, in his condition, was nearly to over-balance him. He then
abruptly opened the door, and shot away to rejoin the Cautious Clara
with all speed - supposed to be his invariable custom, whenever he
considered he had made a point.

As it was not his humour to be often sought, Captain Cuttle decided
not to go or send to him next day, or until he should make his
gracious pleasure known in such wise, or failing that, until some
little time should have lapsed. The Captain, therefore, renewed his
solitary life next morning, and thought profoundly, many mornings,
noons, and nights, of old Sol Gills, and Bunsby's sentiments
concerning him, and the hopes there were of his return. Much of such
thinking strengthened Captain Cuttle's hopes; and he humoured them and
himself by watching for the Instrument-maker at the door - as he
ventured to do now, in his strange liberty - and setting his chair in
its place, and arranging the little parlour as it used to be, in case
he should come home unexpectedly. He likewise, in his thoughtfulness,
took down a certain little miniature of Walter as a schoolboy, from
its accustomed nail, lest it should shock the old man on his return.
The Captain had his presentiments, too, sometimes, that he would come
on such a day; and one particular Sunday, even ordered a double
allowance of dinner, he was so sanguine. But come, old Solomon did
not; and still the neighbours noticed how the seafaring man in the
glazed hat, stood at the shop-door of an evening, looking up and down
the street.



CHAPTER 40.

Domestic Relations



It was not in the nature of things that a man of Mr Dombey's mood,
opposed to such a spirit as he had raised against himself, should be
softened in the imperious asperity of his temper; or that the cold
hard armour of pride in which he lived encased, should be made more
flexible by constant collision with haughty scorn and defiance. It is
the curse of such a nature - it is a main part of the heavy
retribution on itself it bears within itself - that while deference
and concession swell its evil qualities, and are the food it grows
upon, resistance and a questioning of its exacting claims, foster it
too, no less. The evil that is in it finds equally its means of growth
and propagation in opposites. It draws support and life from sweets
and bitters; bowed down before, or unacknowledged, it still enslaves
the breast in which it has its throne; and, worshipped or rejected, is
as hard a master as the Devil in dark fables.

Towards his first wife, Mr Dombey, in his cold and lofty arrogance,
had borne himself like the removed Being he almost conceived himself
to be. He had been 'Mr Dombey' with her when she first saw him, and he
was 'Mr Dombey' when she died. He had asserted his greatness during
their whole married life, and she had meekly recognised it. He had
kept his distant seat of state on the top of his throne, and she her
humble station on its lowest step; and much good it had done him, so
to live in solitary bondage to his one idea. He had imagined that the
proud character of his second wife would have been added to his own -
would have merged into it, and exalted his greatness. He had pictured
himself haughtier than ever, with Edith's haughtiness subservient to
his. He had never entertained the possibility of its arraying itself
against him. And now, when he found it rising in his path at every
step and turn of his daily life, fixing its cold, defiant, and
contemptuous face upon him, this pride of his, instead of withering,
or hanging down its head beneath the shock, put forth new shoots,
became more concentrated and intense, more gloomy, sullen, irksome,
and unyielding, than it had ever been before.

Who wears such armour, too, bears with him ever another heavy
retribution. It is of proof against conciliation, love, and
confidence; against all gentle sympathy from without, all trust, all
tenderness, all soft emotion; but to deep stabs in the self-love, it
is as vulnerable as the bare breast to steel; and such tormenting
festers rankle there, as follow on no other wounds, no, though dealt
with the mailed hand of Pride itself, on weaker pride, disarmed and
thrown down.

Such wounds were his. He felt them sharply, in the solitude of his
old rooms; whither he now began often to retire again, and pass long
solitary hours. It seemed his fate to be ever proud and powerful; ever
humbled and powerless where he would be most strong. Who seemed fated
to work out that doom?

Who? Who was it who could win his wife as she had won his boy? Who
was it who had shown him that new victory, as he sat in the dark
corner? Who was it whose least word did what his utmost means could
not? Who was it who, unaided by his love, regard or notice, thrived
and grew beautiful when those so aided died? Who could it be, but the
same child at whom he had often glanced uneasily in her motherless
infancy, with a kind of dread, lest he might come to hate her; and of
whom his foreboding was fulfilled, for he DID hate her in his heart?

Yes, and he would have it hatred, and he made it hatred, though
some sparkles of the light in which she had appeared before him on the
memorable night of his return home with his Bride, occasionally hung
about her still. He knew now that she was beautiful; he did not
dispute that she was graceful and winning, and that in the bright dawn
of her womanhood she had come upon him, a surprise. But he turned even
this against her. In his sullen and unwholesome brooding, the unhappy
man, with a dull perception of his alienation from all hearts, and a
vague yearning for what he had all his life repelled, made a distorted
picture of his rights and wrongs, and justified himself with it
against her. The worthier she promised to be of him, the greater claim
he was disposed to antedate upon her duty and submission. When had she
ever shown him duty and submission? Did she grace his life - or
Edith's? Had her attractions been manifested first to him - or Edith?
Why, he and she had never been, from her birth, like father and child!
They had always been estranged. She had crossed him every way and
everywhere. She was leagued against him now. Her very beauty softened
natures that were obdurate to him, and insulted him with an unnatural
triumph.

It may have been that in all this there were mutterings of an
awakened feeling in his breast, however selfishly aroused by his
position of disadvantage, in comparison with what she might have made
his life. But he silenced the distant thunder with the rolling of his
sea of pride. He would bear nothing but his pride. And in his pride, a
heap of inconsistency, and misery, and self-inflicted torment, he
hated her.

To the moody, stubborn, sullen demon, that possessed him, his wife
opposed her different pride in its full force. They never could have
led a happy life together; but nothing could have made it more
unhappy, than the wilful and determined warfare of such elements. His
pride was set upon maintaining his magnificent supremacy, and forcing
recognition of it from her. She would have been racked to death, and
turned but her haughty glance of calm inflexible disdain upon him, to
the last. Such recognition from Edith! He little knew through what a
storm and struggle she had been driven onward to the crowning honour
of his hand. He little knew how much she thought she had conceded,
when she suffered him to call her wife.

Mr Dombey was resolved to show her that he was supreme. There must
be no will but his. Proud he desired that she should be, but she must
be proud for, not against him. As he sat alone, hardening, he would
often hear her go out and come home, treading the round of London life
with no more heed of his liking or disliking, pleasure or displeasure,
than if he had been her groom. Her cold supreme indifference - his own
unquestioned attribute usurped - stung him more than any other kind of
treatment could have done; and he determined to bend her to his
magnificent and stately will.

He had been long communing with these thoughts, when one night he
sought her in her own apartment, after he had heard her return home
late. She was alone, in her brilliant dress, and had but that moment
come from her mother's room. Her face was melancholy and pensive, when
he came upon her; but it marked him at the door; for, glancing at the
mirror before it, he saw immediately, as in a picture-frame, the
knitted brow, and darkened beauty that he knew so well.

'Mrs Dombey,' he said, entering, 'I must beg leave to have a few
words with you.'

'To-morrow,' she replied.

'There is no time like the present, Madam,' he returned. 'You
mistake your position. I am used to choose my own times; not to have
them chosen for me. I think you scarcely understand who and what I am,
Mrs Dombey.

'I think,' she answered, 'that I understand you very well.'

She looked upon him as she said so, and folding her white arms,
sparkling with gold and gems, upon her swelling breast, turned away
her eyes.

If she had been less handsome, and less stately in her cold
composure, she might not have had the power of impressing him with the
sense of disadvantage that penetrated through his utmost pride. But
she had the power, and he felt it keenly. He glanced round the room:
saw how the splendid means of personal adornment, and the luxuries of
dress, were scattered here and there, and disregarded; not in mere
caprice and carelessness (or so he thought), but in a steadfast
haughty disregard of costly things: and felt it more and more.
Chaplets of flowers, plumes of feathers, jewels, laces, silks and
satins; look where he would, he saw riches, despised, poured out, and.
made of no account. The very diamonds - a marriage gift - that rose
and fell impatiently upon her bosom, seemed to pant to break the chain
that clasped them round her neck, and roll down on the floor where she
might tread upon them.

He felt his disadvantage, and he showed it. Solemn and strange
among this wealth of colour and voluptuous glitter, strange and
constrained towards its haughty mistress, whose repellent beauty it
repeated, and presented all around him, as in so many fragments of a
mirror, he was conscious of embarrassment and awkwardness. Nothing
that ministered to her disdainful self-possession could fail to gall
him. Galled and irritated with himself, he sat down, and went on, in
no improved humour:

'Mrs Dombey, it is very necessary that there should be some
understanding arrived at between us. Your conduct does not please me,
Madam.'

She merely glanced at him again, and again averted her eyes; but
she might have spoken for an hour, and expressed less.

'I repeat, Mrs Dombey, does not please me. I have already taken
occasion to request that it may be corrected. I now insist upon it.'

'You chose a fitting occasion for your first remonstrance, Sir, and
you adopt a fitting manner, and a fitting word for your second. You
insist! To me!'

'Madam,' said Mr Dombey, with his most offensive air of state, 'I
have made you my wife. You bear my name. You are associated with my
position and my reputation. I will not say that the world in general
may be disposed to think you honoured by that association; but I will
say that I am accustomed to "insist," to my connexions and
dependents.'

'Which may you be pleased to consider me? she asked.

'Possibly I may think that my wife should partake - or does
partake, and cannot help herself - of both characters, Mrs Dombey.'

She bent her eyes upon him steadily, and set her trembling lips. He
saw her bosom throb, and saw her face flush and turn white. All this
he could know, and did: but he could not know that one word was
whispering in the deep recesses of her heart, to keep her quiet; and
that the word was Florence.

Blind idiot, rushing to a precipice! He thought she stood in awe of
him.

'You are too expensive, Madam,' said Mr Dombey. 'You are
extravagant. You waste a great deal of money - or what would be a
great deal in the pockets of most gentlemen - in cultivating a kind of
society that is useless to me, and, indeed, that upon the whole is
disagreeable to me. I have to insist upon a total change in all these
respects. I know that in the novelty of possessing a tithe of such
means as Fortune has placed at your disposal, ladies are apt to run
into a sudden extreme. There has been more than enough of that
extreme. I beg that Mrs Granger's very different experiences may now
come to the instruction of Mrs Dombey.'

Still the fixed look, the trembling lips, the throbbing breast, the
face now crimson and now white; and still the deep whisper Florence,
Florence, speaking to her in the beating of her heart.

His insolence of self-importance dilated as he saw this alteration
in her. Swollen no less by her past scorn of him, and his so recent
feeling of disadvantage, than by her present submission (as he took it
to be), it became too mighty for his breast, and burst all bounds.
Why, who could long resist his lofty will and pleasure! He had
resolved to conquer her, and look here!

'You will further please, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, in a tone of
sovereign command, 'to understand distinctly, that I am to be deferred
to and obeyed. That I must have a positive show and confession of
deference before the world, Madam. I am used to this. I require it as
my right. In short I will have it. I consider it no unreasonable
return for the worldly advancement that has befallen you; and I
believe nobody will be surprised, either at its being required from
you, or at your making it. - To Me - To Me!' he added, with emphasis.

No word from her. No change in her. Her eyes upon him.

'I have learnt from your mother, Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey, with
magisterial importance, what no doubt you know, namely, that Brighton
is recommended for her health. Mr Carker has been so good

She changed suddenly. Her face and bosom glowed as if the red light
of an angry sunset had been flung upon them. Not unobservant of the
change, and putting his own interpretation upon it, Mr Dombey resumed:

'Mr Carker has been so good as to go down and secure a house there,
for a time. On the return of the establishment to London, I shall take
such steps for its better management as I consider necessary. One of
these, will be the engagement at Brighton (if it is to be effected),
of a very respectable reduced person there, a Mrs Pipchin, formerly
employed in a situation of trust in my family, to act as housekeeper.
An establishment like this, presided over but nominally, Mrs Dombey,
requires a competent head.'

She had changed her attitude before he arrived at these words, and
now sat - still looking at him fixedly - turning a bracelet round and
round upon her arm; not winding it about with a light, womanly touch,
but pressing and dragging it over the smooth skin, until the white
limb showed a bar of red.

'I observed,' said Mr Dombey - 'and this concludes what I deem it
necessary to say to you at present, Mrs Dombey - I observed a moment
ago, Madam, that my allusion to Mr Carker was received in a peculiar
manner. On the occasion of my happening to point out to you, before
that confidential agent, the objection I had to your mode of receiving
my visitors, you were pleased to object to his presence. You will have
to get the better of that objection, Madam, and to accustom yourself
to it very probably on many similar occasions; unless you adopt the
remedy which is in your own hands, of giving me no cause of complaint.
Mr Carker,' said Mr Dombey, who, after the emotion he had just seen,
set great store by this means of reducing his proud wife, and who was
perhaps sufficiently willing to exhibit his power to that gentleman in
a new and triumphant aspect, 'Mr Carker being in my confidence, Mrs
Dombey, may very well be in yours to such an extent. I hope, Mrs
Dombey,' he continued, after a few moments, during which, in his
increasing haughtiness, he had improved on his idea, 'I may not find
it necessary ever to entrust Mr Carker with any message of objection
or remonstrance to you; but as it would be derogatory to my position
and reputation to be frequently holding trivial disputes with a lady
upon whom I have conferred the highest distinction that it is in my
power to bestow, I shall not scruple to avail myself of his services
if I see occasion.'

'And now,' he thought, rising in his moral magnificence, and rising
a stiffer and more impenetrable man than ever, 'she knows me and my
resolution.'

The hand that had so pressed the bracelet was laid heavily upon her
breast, but she looked at him still, with an unaltered face, and said
in a low voice:

'Wait! For God's sake! I must speak to you.'

Why did she not, and what was the inward struggle that rendered her
incapable of doing so, for minutes, while, in the strong constraint
she put upon her face, it was as fixed as any statue's - looking upon
him with neither yielding nor unyielding, liking nor hatred, pride not
humility: nothing but a searching gaze?

'Did I ever tempt you to seek my hand? Did I ever use any art to
win you? Was I ever more conciliating to you when you pursued me, than
I have been since our marriage? Was I ever other to you than I am?'

'It is wholly unnecessary, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, 'to enter upon
such discussions.'

'Did you think I loved you? Did you know I did not? Did you ever
care, Man! for my heart, or propose to yourself to win the worthless
thing? Was there any poor pretence of any in our bargain? Upon your
side, or on mine?'

'These questions,' said Mr Dombey, 'are all wide of the purpose,
Madam.'

She moved between him and the door to prevent his going away, and
drawing her majestic figure to its height, looked steadily upon him
still.

'You answer each of them. You answer me before I speak, I see. How
can you help it; you who know the miserable truth as well as I? Now,
tell me. If I loved you to devotion, could I do more than render up my
whole will and being to you, as you have just demanded? If my heart
were pure and all untried, and you its idol, could you ask more; could
you have more?'

'Possibly not, Madam,' he returned coolly.

'You know how different I am. You see me looking on you now, and
you can read the warmth of passion for you that is breathing in my
face.' Not a curl of the proud lip, not a flash of the dark eye,
nothing but the same intent and searching look, accompanied these
words. 'You know my general history. You have spoken of my mother. Do
you think you can degrade, or bend or break, me to submission and
obedience?'

Mr Dombey smiled, as he might have smiled at an inquiry whether he
thought he could raise ten thousand pounds.

'If there is anything unusual here,' she said, with a slight motion
of her hand before her brow, which did not for a moment flinch from
its immovable and otherwise expressionless gaze, 'as I know there are
unusual feelings here,' raising the hand she pressed upon her bosom,
and heavily returning it, 'consider that there is no common meaning in
the appeal I am going to make you. Yes, for I am going;' she said it
as in prompt reply to something in his face; 'to appeal to you.'

Mr Dombey, with a slightly condescending bend of his chin that
rustled and crackled his stiff cravat, sat down on a sofa that was
near him, to hear the appeal.

'If you can believe that I am of such a nature now,' - he fancied
he saw tears glistening in her eyes, and he thought, complacently,
that he had forced them from her, though none fell on her cheek, and
she regarded him as steadily as ever, - 'as would make what I now say
almost incredible to myself, said to any man who had become my
husband, but, above all, said to you, you may, perhaps, attach the
greater weight to it. In the dark end to which we are tending, and may
come, we shall not involve ourselves alone (that might not be much)
but others.'

Others! He knew at whom that word pointed, and frowned heavily.

'I speak to you for the sake of others. Also your own sake; and for
mine. Since our marriage, you have been arrogant to me; and I have
repaid you in kind. You have shown to me and everyone around us, every
day and hour, that you think I am graced and distinguished by your
alliance. I do not think so, and have shown that too. It seems you do
not understand, or (so far as your power can go) intend that each of
us shall take a separate course; and you expect from me instead, a
homage you will never have.'

Although her face was still the same, there was emphatic
confirmation of this 'Never' in the very breath she drew.

'I feel no tenderness towards you; that you know. You would care
nothing for it, if I did or could. I know as well that you feel none
towards me. But we are linked together; and in the knot that ties us,
as I have said, others are bound up. We must both die; we are both
connected with the dead already, each by a little child. Let us
forbear.'

Mr Dombey took a long respiration, as if he would have said, Oh!
was this all!

'There is no wealth,' she went on, turning paler as she watched
him, while her eyes grew yet more lustrous in their earnestness, 'that
could buy these words of me, and the meaning that belongs to them.
Once cast away as idle breath, no wealth or power can bring them back.
I mean them; I have weighed them; and I will be true to what I
undertake. If you will promise to forbear on your part, I will promise
to forbear on mine. We are a most unhappy pair, in whom, from
different causes, every sentiment that blesses marriage, or justifies
it, is rooted out; but in the course of time, some friendship, or some
fitness for each other, may arise between us. I will try to hope so,
if you will make the endeavour too; and I will look forward to a
better and a happier use of age than I have made of youth or prime.

Throughout she had spoken in a low plain voice, that neither rose
nor fell; ceasing, she dropped the hand with which she had enforced
herself to be so passionless and distinct, but not the eyes with which
she had so steadily observed him.

'Madam,' said Mr Dombey, with his utmost dignity, 'I cannot
entertain any proposal of this extraordinary nature.

She looked at him yet, without the least change.

'I cannot,' said Mr Dombey, rising as he spoke, 'consent to
temporise or treat with you, Mrs Dombey, upon a subject as to which
you are in possession of my opinions and expectations. I have stated
my ultimatum, Madam, and have only to request your very serious
attention to it.'

To see the face change to its old expression, deepened in
intensity! To see the eyes droop as from some mean and odious object!
To see the lighting of the haughty brow! To see scorn, anger,
indignation, and abhorrence starting into sight, and the pale blank
earnestness vanish like a mist! He could not choose but look, although
he looked to his dismay.

'Go, Sir!' she said, pointing with an imperious hand towards the
door. 'Our first and last confidence is at an end. Nothing can make us
stranger to each other than we are henceforth.'

'I shall take my rightful course, Madam,' said Mr Dombey,
'undeterred, you may be sure, by any general declamation.'

She turned her back upon him, and, without reply, sat down before
her glass.

'I place my reliance on your improved sense of duty, and more
correct feeling, and better reflection, Madam,' said Mr Dombey.

She answered not one word. He saw no more expression of any heed of
him, in the mirror, than if he had been an unseen spider on the wall,
or beetle on the floor, or rather, than if he had been the one or
other, seen and crushed when she last turned from him, and forgotten
among the ignominious and dead vermin of the ground.

He looked back, as he went out at the door, upon the well-lighted
and luxurious room, the beautiful and glittering objects everywhere
displayed, the shape of Edith in its rich dress seated before her
glass, and the face of Edith as the glass presented it to him; and
betook himself to his old chamber of cogitation, carrying away with
him a vivid picture in his mind of all these things, and a rambling
and unaccountable speculation (such as sometimes comes into a man's
head) how they would all look when he saw them next.

For the rest, Mr Dombey was very taciturn, and very dignified, and
very confident of carrying out his purpose; and remained so.

He did not design accompanying the family to Brighton; but he
graciously informed Cleopatra at breakfast, on the morning of
departure, which arrived a day or two afterwards, that he might be
expected down, soon. There was no time to be lost in getting Cleopatra
to any place recommended as being salutary; for, indeed, she seemed
upon the wane, and turning of the earth, earthy.

Without having undergone any decided second attack of her malady,
the old woman seemed to have crawled backward in her recovery from the
first. She was more lean and shrunken, more uncertain in her
imbecility, and made stranger confusions in her mind and memory. Among
other symptoms of this last affliction, she fell into the habit of
confounding the names of her two sons-in-law, the living and the
deceased; and in general called Mr Dombey, either 'Grangeby,' or
'Domber,' or indifferently, both.

But she was youthful, very youthful still; and in her youthfulness
appeared at breakfast, before going away, in a new bonnet made
express, and a travelling robe that was embroidered and braided like
an old baby's. It was not easy to put her into a fly-away bonnet now,
or to keep the bonnet in its place on the back of her poor nodding
head, when it was got on. In this instance, it had not only the
extraneous effect of being always on one side, but of being
perpetually tapped on the crown by Flowers the maid, who attended in
the background during breakfast to perform that duty.

'Now, my dearest Grangeby,' said Mrs Skewton, 'you must posively
prom,' she cut some of her words short, and cut out others altogether,
'come down very soon.'

'I said just now, Madam,' returned Mr Dombey, loudly and
laboriously, 'that I am coming in a day or two.'

'Bless you, Domber!'

Here the Major, who was come to take leave of the ladies, and who
was staring through his apoplectic eyes at Mrs Skewton's face with the
disinterested composure of an immortal being, said:

'Begad, Ma'am, you don't ask old Joe to come!'

'Sterious wretch, who's he?' lisped Cleopatra. But a tap on the
bonnet from Flowers seeming to jog her memory, she added, 'Oh! You
mean yourself, you naughty creature!'

'Devilish queer, Sir,' whispered the Major to Mr Dombey. 'Bad case.
Never did wrap up enough;' the Major being buttoned to the chin. 'Why
who should J. B. mean by Joe, but old Joe Bagstock - Joseph - your
slave - Joe, Ma'am? Here! Here's the man! Here are the Bagstock
bellows, Ma'am!' cried the Major, striking himself a sounding blow on
the chest.

'My dearest Edith - Grangeby - it's most trordinry thing,' said
Cleopatra, pettishly, 'that Major - '

'Bagstock! J. B.!' cried the Major, seeing that she faltered for
his name.

'Well, it don't matter,' said Cleopatra. 'Edith, my love, you know
I never could remember names - what was it? oh! - most trordinry thing
that so many people want to come down to see me. I'm not going for
long. I'm coming back. Surely they can wait, till I come back!'

Cleopatra looked all round the table as she said it, and appeared
very uneasy.

'I won't have Vistors - really don't want visitors,' she said;
'little repose - and all that sort of thing - is what I quire. No
odious brutes must proach me till I've shaken off this numbness;' and
in a grisly resumption of her coquettish ways, she made a dab at the
Major with her fan, but overset Mr Dombey's breakfast cup instead,
which was in quite a different direction.

Then she called for Withers, and charged him to see particularly
that word was left about some trivial alterations in her room, which
must be all made before she came back, and which must be set about
immediately, as there was no saying how soon she might come back; for
she had a great many engagements, and all sorts of people to call
upon. Withers received these directions with becoming deference, and
gave his guarantee for their execution; but when he withdrew a pace or
two behind her, it appeared as if he couldn't help looking strangely
at the Major, who couldn't help looking strangely at Mr Dombey, who
couldn't help looking strangely at Cleopatra, who couldn't help
nodding her bonnet over one eye, and rattling her knife and fork upon
her plate in using them, as if she were playing castanets.

Edith alone never lifted her eyes to any face at the table, and
never seemed dismayed by anything her mother said or did. She listened
to her disjointed talk, or at least, turned her head towards her when
addressed; replied in a few low words when necessary; and sometimes
stopped her when she was rambling, or brought her thoughts back with a
monosyllable, to the point from which they had strayed. The mother,
however unsteady in other things, was constant in this - that she was
always observant of her. She would look at the beautiful face, in its
marble stillness and severity, now with a kind of fearful admiration;
now in a giggling foolish effort to move it to a smile; now with
capricious tears and jealous shakings of her head, as imagining
herself neglected by it; always with an attraction towards it, that
never fluctuated like her other ideas, but had constant possession of
her. From Edith she would sometimes look at Florence, and back again
at Edith, in a manner that was wild enough; and sometimes she would
try to look elsewhere, as if to escape from her daughter's face; but
back to it she seemed forced to come, although it never sought hers
unless sought, or troubled her with one single glance.

The best concluded, Mrs Skewton, affecting to lean girlishly upon
the Major's arm, but heavily supported on the other side by Flowers
the maid, and propped up behind by Withers the page, was conducted to
the carriage, which was to take her, Florence, and Edith to Brighton.

'And is Joseph absolutely banished?' said the Major, thrusting in
his purple face over the steps. 'Damme, Ma'am, is Cleopatra so
hard-hearted as to forbid her faithful Antony Bagstock to approach the
presence?'

'Go along!' said Cleopatra, 'I can't bear you. You shall see me
when I come back, if you are very good.'

'Tell Joseph, he may live in hope, Ma'am,' said the Major; 'or
he'll die in despair.'

Cleopatra shuddered, and leaned back. 'Edith, my dear,' she said.
'Tell him - '

'What?'

'Such dreadful words,' said Cleopatra. 'He uses such dreadful
words!'

Edith signed to him to retire, gave the word to go on, and left the
objectionable Major to Mr Dombey. To whom he returned, whistling.

'I'll tell you what, Sir,' said the Major, with his hands behind
him, and his legs very wide asunder, 'a fair friend of ours has
removed to Queer Street.'

'What do you mean, Major?' inquired Mr Dombey.

'I mean to say, Dombey,' returned the Major, 'that you'll soon be
an orphan-in-law.'

Mr Dombey appeared to relish this waggish description of himself so
very little, that the Major wound up with the horse's cough, as an
expression of gravity.

'Damme, Sir,' said the Major, 'there is no use in disguising a
fact. Joe is blunt, Sir. That's his nature. If you take old Josh at
all, you take him as you find him; and a devilish rusty, old rasper,
of a close-toothed, J. B. file, you do find him. Dombey,' said the
Major, 'your wife's mother is on the move, Sir.'

'I fear,' returned Mr Dombey, with much philosophy, 'that Mrs
Skewton is shaken.'

'Shaken, Dombey!' said the Major. 'Smashed!'

'Change, however,' pursued Mr Dombey, 'and attention, may do much
yet.'

'Don't believe it, Sir,' returned the Major. 'Damme, Sir, she never
wrapped up enough. If a man don't wrap up,' said the Major, taking in
another button of his buff waistcoat, 'he has nothing to fall back
upon. But some people will die. They will do it. Damme, they will.
They're obstinate. I tell you what, Dombey, it may not be ornamental;
it may not be refined; it may be rough and tough; but a little of the
genuine old English Bagstock stamina, Sir, would do all the good in
the world to the human breed.'

After imparting this precious piece of information, the Major, who
was certainly true-blue, whatever other endowments he may have had or
wanted, coming within the 'genuine old English' classification, which
has never been exactly ascertained, took his lobster-eyes and his
apoplexy to the club, and choked there all day.

Cleopatra, at one time fretful, at another self-complacent,
sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, and at all times juvenile, reached
Brighton the same night, fell to pieces as usual, and was put away in
bed; where a gloomy fancy might have pictured a more potent skeleton
than the maid, who should have been one, watching at the rose-coloured
curtains, which were carried down to shed their bloom upon her.

It was settled in high council of medical authority that she should
take a carriage airing every day, and that it was important she should
get out every day, and walk if she could. Edith was ready to attend
her - always ready to attend her, with the same mechanical attention
and immovable beauty - and they drove out alone; for Edith had an
uneasiness in the presence of Florence, now that her mother was worse,
and told Florence, with a kiss, that she would rather they two went
alone.

Mrs Skewton, on one particular day, was in the irresolute,
exacting, jealous temper that had developed itself on her recovery
from her first attack. After sitting silent in the carriage watching
Edith for some time, she took her hand and kissed it passionately. The
hand was neither given nor withdrawn, but simply yielded to her
raising of it, and being released, dropped down again, almost as if it
were insensible. At this she began to whimper and moan, and say what a
mother she had been, and how she was forgotten! This she continued to
do at capricious intervals, even when they had alighted: when she
herself was halting along with the joint support of Withers and a
stick, and Edith was walking by her side, and the carriage slowly
following at a little distance.

It was a bleak, lowering, windy day, and they were out upon the
Downs with nothing but a bare sweep of land between them and the sky.
The mother, with a querulous satisfaction in the monotony of her
complaint, was still repeating it in a low voice from time to time,
and the proud form of her daughter moved beside her slowly, when there
came advancing over a dark ridge before them, two other figures, which
in the distance, were so like an exaggerated imitation of their own,
that Edith stopped.

Almost as she stopped, the two figures stopped; and that one which
to Edith's thinking was like a distorted shadow of her mother, spoke
to the other, earnestly, and with a pointing hand towards them. That
one seemed inclined to turn back, but the other, in which Edith
recognised enough that was like herself to strike her with an unusual
feeling, not quite free from fear, came on; and then they came on
together.

The greater part of this observation, she made while walking
towards them, for her stoppage had been momentary. Nearer observation
showed her that they were poorly dressed, as wanderers about the
country; that the younger woman carried knitted work or some such
goods for sale; and that the old one toiled on empty-handed.

And yet, however far removed she was in dress, in dignity, in
beauty, Edith could not but compare the younger woman with herself,
still. It may have been that she saw upon her face some traces which
she knew were lingering in her own soul, if not yet written on that
index; but, as the woman came on, returning her gaze, fixing her
shining eyes upon her, undoubtedly presenting something of her own air
and stature, and appearing to reciprocate her own thoughts, she felt a
chill creep over her, as if the day were darkening, and the wind were
colder.

They had now come up. The old woman, holding out her hand
importunately, stopped to beg of Mrs Skewton. The younger one stopped
too, and she and Edith looked in one another's eyes.

'What is it that you have to sell?' said Edith.

'Only this,' returned the woman, holding out her wares, without
looking at them. 'I sold myself long ago.'

'My Lady, don't believe her,' croaked the old woman to Mrs Skewton;
'don't believe what she says. She loves to talk like that. She's my
handsome and undutiful daughter. She gives me nothing but reproaches,
my Lady, for all I have done for her. Look at her now, my Lady, how
she turns upon her poor old mother with her looks.'

As Mrs Skewton drew her purse out with a trembling hand, and
eagerly fumbled for some money, which the other old woman greedily
watched for - their heads all but touching, in their hurry and
decrepitude - Edith interposed:

'I have seen you,' addressing the old woman, 'before.'

'Yes, my Lady,' with a curtsey. 'Down in Warwickshire. The morning
among the trees. When you wouldn't give me nothing. But the gentleman,
he give me something! Oh, bless him, bless him!' mumbled the old
woman, holding up her skinny hand, and grinning frightfully at her
daughter.

'It's of no use attempting to stay me, Edith!' said Mrs Skewton,
angrily anticipating an objection from her. 'You know nothing about
it. I won't be dissuaded. I am sure this is an excellent woman, and a
good mother.'

'Yes, my Lady, yes,' chattered the old woman, holding out her
avaricious hand. 'Thankee, my Lady. Lord bless you, my Lady. Sixpence
more, my pretty Lady, as a good mother yourself.'

'And treated undutifully enough, too, my good old creature,
sometimes, I assure you,' said Mrs Skewton, whimpering. 'There! Shake
hands with me. You're a very good old creature - full of
what's-his-name - and all that. You're all affection and et cetera,
ain't you?'

'Oh, yes, my Lady!'

'Yes, I'm sure you are; and so's that gentlemanly creature
Grangeby. I must really shake hands with you again. And now you can
go, you know; and I hope,' addressing the daughter, 'that you'll show
more gratitude, and natural what's-its-name, and all the rest of it -
but I never remember names - for there never was a better mother than
the good old creature's been to you. Come, Edith!'

As the ruin of Cleopatra tottered off whimpering, and wiping its
eyes with a gingerly remembrance of rouge in their neighbourhood, the
old woman hobbled another way, mumbling and counting her money. Not
one word more, nor one other gesture, had been exchanged between Edith
and the younger woman, but neither had removed her eyes from the other
for a moment. They had remained confronted until now, when Edith, as
awakening from a dream, passed slowly on.

'You're a handsome woman,' muttered her shadow, looking after her;
'but good looks won't save us. And you're a proud woman; but pride
won't save us. We had need to know each other when we meet again!'



CHAPTER 41.

New Voices in the Waves



All is going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with
repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the
sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their
trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the
invisible country far away.


With a tender melancholy pleasure, Florence finds herself again on
the old ground so sadly trodden, yet so happily, and thinks of him in
the quiet place, where he and she have many and many a time conversed
together, with the water welling up about his couch. And now, as she
sits pensive there, she hears in the wild low murmur of the sea, his
little story told again, his very words repeated; and finds that all
her life and hopes, and griefs, since - in the solitary house, and in
the pageant it has changed to - have a portion in the burden of the
marvellous song.

And gentle Mr Toots, who wanders at a distance, looking wistfully
towards the figure that he dotes upon, and has followed there, but
cannot in his delicacy disturb at such a time, likewise hears the
requiem of little Dombey on the waters, rising and falling in the
lulls of their eternal madrigal in praise of Florence. Yes! and he
faintly understands, poor Mr Toots, that they are saying something of
a time when he was sensible of being brighter and not addle-brained;
and the tears rising in his eyes when he fears that he is dull and
stupid now, and good for little but to be laughed at, diminish his
satisfaction in their soothing reminder that he is relieved from
present responsibility to the Chicken, by the absence of that game
head of poultry in the country, training (at Toots's cost) for his
great mill with the Larkey Boy.

But Mr Toots takes courage, when they whisper a kind thought to
him; and by slow degrees and with many indecisive stoppages on the
way, approaches Florence. Stammering and blushing, Mr Toots affects
amazement when he comes near her, and says (having followed close on
the carriage in which she travelled, every inch of the way from
London, loving even to be choked by the dust of its wheels) that he
never was so surprised in all his life.

'And you've brought Diogenes, too, Miss Dombey!' says Mr Toots,
thrilled through and through by the touch of the small hand so
pleasantly and frankly given him.

No doubt Diogenes is there, and no doubt Mr Toots has reason to
observe him, for he comes straightway at Mr Toots's legs, and tumbles
over himself in the desperation with which he makes at him, like a
very dog of Montargis. But he is checked by his sweet mistress.

'Down, Di, down. Don't you remember who first made us friends, Di?
For shame!'

Oh! Well may Di lay his loving cheek against her hand, and run off,
and run back, and run round her, barking, and run headlong at anybody
coming by, to show his devotion. Mr Toots would run headlong at
anybody, too. A military gentleman goes past, and Mr Toots would like
nothing better than to run at him, full tilt.

'Diogenes is quite in his native air, isn't he, Miss Dombey?' says
Mr Toots.

Florence assents, with a grateful smile.

'Miss Dombey,' says Mr Toots, 'beg your pardon, but if you would
like to walk to Blimber's, I - I'm going there.'

Florence puts her arm in that of Mr Toots without a word, and they
walk away together, with Diogenes going on before. Mr Toots's legs
shake under him; and though he is splendidly dressed, he feels
misfits, and sees wrinkles, in the masterpieces of Burgess and Co.,
and wishes he had put on that brightest pair of boots.

Doctor Blimber's house, outside, has as scholastic and studious an
air as ever; and up there is the window where she used to look for the
pale face, and where the pale face brightened when it saw her, and the
wasted little hand waved kisses as she passed. The door is opened by
the same weak-eyed young man, whose imbecility of grin at sight of Mr
Toots is feebleness of character personified. They are shown into the
Doctor's study, where blind Homer and Minerva give them audience as of
yore, to the sober ticking of the great clock in the hall; and where
the globes stand still in their accustomed places, as if the world
were stationary too, and nothing in it ever perished in obedience to
the universal law, that, while it keeps it on the roll, calls
everything to earth.

And here is Doctor Blimber, with his learned legs; and here is Mrs
Blimber, with her sky-blue cap; and here Cornelia, with her sandy
little row of curls, and her bright spectacles, still working like a
sexton in the graves of languages. Here is the table upon which he sat
forlorn and strange, the 'new boy' of the school; and hither comes the
distant cooing of the old boys, at their old lives in the old room on
the old principle!

'Toots,' says Doctor Blimber, 'I am very glad to see you, Toots.'

Mr Toots chuckles in reply.

'Also to see you, Toots, in such good company,' says Doctor
Blimber.

Mr Toots, with a scarlet visage, explains that he has met Miss
Dombey by accident, and that Miss Dombey wishing, like himself, to see
the old place, they have come together.

'You will like,' says Doctor Blimber, 'to step among our young
friends, Miss Dombey, no doubt. All fellow-students of yours, Toots,
once. I think we have no new disciples in our little portico, my
dear,' says Doctor Blimber to Cornelia, 'since Mr Toots left us.'

'Except Bitherstone,' returns Cornelia.

'Ay, truly,' says the Doctor. 'Bitherstone is new to Mr Toots.'

New to Florence, too, almost; for, in the schoolroom, Bitherstone -
no longer Master Bitherstone of Mrs Pipchin's - shows in collars and a
neckcloth, and wears a watch. But Bitherstone, born beneath some
Bengal star of ill-omen, is extremely inky; and his Lexicon has got so
dropsical from constant reference, that it won't shut, and yawns as if
it really could not bear to be so bothered. So does Bitherstone its
master, forced at Doctor Blimber's highest pressure; but in the yawn
of Bitherstone there is malice and snarl, and he has been heard to say
that he wishes he could catch 'old Blimber' in India. He'd precious
soon find himself carried up the country by a few of his
(Bitherstone's) Coolies, and handed over to the Thugs; he can tell him
that.

Briggs is still grinding in the mill of knowledge; and Tozer, too;
and Johnson, too; and all the rest; the older pupils being principally
engaged in forgetting, with prodigious labour, everything they knew
when they were younger. All are as polite and as pale as ever; and
among them, Mr Feeder, B.A., with his bony hand and bristly head, is
still hard at it; with his Herodotus stop on just at present, and his
other barrels on a shelf behind him.

A mighty sensation is created, even among these grave young
gentlemen, by a visit from the emancipated Toots; who is regarded with
a kind of awe, as one who has passed the Rubicon, and is pledged never
to come back, and concerning the cut of whose clothes, and fashion of
whose jewellery, whispers go about, behind hands; the bilious
Bitherstone, who is not of Mr Toots's time, affecting to despise the
latter to the smaller boys, and saying he knows better, and that he
should like to see him coming that sort of thing in Bengal, where his
mother had got an emerald belonging to him that was taken out of the
footstool of a Rajah. Come now!

Bewildering emotions are awakened also by the sight of Florence,
with whom every young gentleman immediately falls in love, again;
except, as aforesaid, the bilious Bitherstone, who declines to do so,
out of contradiction. Black jealousies of Mr Toots arise, and Briggs
is of opinion that he ain't so very old after all. But this
disparaging insinuation is speedily made nought by Mr Toots saying
aloud to Mr Feeder, B.A., 'How are you, Feeder?' and asking him to
come and dine with him to-day at the Bedford; in right of which feats
he might set up as Old Parr, if he chose, unquestioned.

There is much shaking of hands, and much bowing, and a great desire
on the part of each young gentleman to take Toots down in Miss
Dombey's good graces; and then, Mr Toots having bestowed a chuckle on
his old desk, Florence and he withdraw with Mrs Blimber and Cornelia;
and Doctor Blimber is heard to observe behind them as he comes out
last, and shuts the door, 'Gentlemen, we will now resume our studies,'
For that and little else is what the Doctor hears the sea say, or has
heard it saying all his life.

Florence then steals away and goes upstairs to the old bedroom with
Mrs Blimber and Cornelia; Mr Toots, who feels that neither he nor
anybody else is wanted there, stands talking to the Doctor at the
study-door, or rather hearing the Doctor talk to him, and wondering
how he ever thought the study a great sanctuary, and the Doctor, with
his round turned legs, like a clerical pianoforte, an awful man.
Florence soon comes down and takes leave; Mr Toots takes leave; and
Diogenes, who has been worrying the weak-eyed young man pitilessly all
the time, shoots out at the door, and barks a glad defiance down the
cliff; while Melia, and another of the Doctor's female domestics,
looks out of an upper window, laughing 'at that there Toots,' and
saying of Miss Dombey, 'But really though, now - ain't she like her
brother, only prettier?'

Mr Toots, who saw when Florence came down that there were tears
upon her face, is desperately anxious and uneasy, and at first fears
that he did wrong in proposing the visit. But he is soon relieved by
her saying she is very glad to have been there again, and by her
talking quite cheerfully about it all, as they walked on by the sea.
What with the voices there, and her sweet voice, when they come near
Mr Dombey's house, and Mr Toots must leave her, he is so enslaved that
he has not a scrap of free-will left; when she gives him her hand at
parting, he cannot let it go.

'Miss Dombey, I beg your pardon,' says Mr Toots, in a sad fluster,
'but if you would allow me to - to -

The smiling and unconscious look of Florence brings him to a dead
stop.

'If you would allow me to - if you would not consider it a liberty,
Miss Dombey, if I was to - without any encouragement at all, if I was
to hope, you know,' says Mr Toots.

Florence looks at him inquiringly.

'Miss Dombey,' says Mr Toots, who feels that he is in for it now,
'I really am in that state of adoration of you that I don't know what
to do with myself. I am the most deplorable wretch. If it wasn't at
the corner of the Square at present, I should go down on my knees, and
beg and entreat of you, without any encouragement at all, just to let
me hope that I may - may think it possible that you -

'Oh, if you please, don't!' cries Florence, for the moment quite
alarmed and distressed. 'Oh, pray don't, Mr Toots. Stop, if you
please. Don't say any more. As a kindness and a favour to me, don't.'

Mr Toots is dreadfully abashed, and his mouth opens.

'You have been so good to me,' says Florence, 'I am so grateful to
you, I have such reason to like you for being a kind friend to me, and
I do like you so much;' and here the ingenuous face smiles upon him
with the pleasantest look of honesty in the world; 'that I am sure you
are only going to say good-bye!'

'Certainly, Miss Dombey,' says Mr Toots, 'I - I - that's exactly
what I mean. It's of no consequence.'

'Good-bye!' cries Florence.

'Good-bye, Miss Dombey!' stammers Mr Toots. 'I hope you won't think
anything about it. It's - it's of no consequence, thank you. It's not
of the least consequence in the world.'

Poor Mr Toots goes home to his hotel in a state of desperation,
locks himself into his bedroom, flings himself upon his bed, and lies
there for a long time; as if it were of the greatest consequence,
nevertheless. But Mr Feeder, B.A., is coming to dinner, which happens
well for Mr Toots, or there is no knowing when he might get up again.
Mr Toots is obliged to get up to receive him, and to give him
hospitable entertainment.

And the generous influence of that social virtue, hospitality (to
make no mention of wine and good cheer), opens Mr Toots's heart, and
warms him to conversation. He does not tell Mr Feeder, B.A., what
passed at the corner of the Square; but when Mr Feeder asks him 'When
it is to come off?' Mr Toots replies, 'that there are certain
subjects' - which brings Mr Feeder down a peg or two immediately. Mr
Toots adds, that he don't know what right Blimber had to notice his
being in Miss Dombey's company, and that if he thought he meant
impudence by it, he'd have him out, Doctor or no Doctor; but he
supposes its only his ignorance. Mr Feeder says he has no doubt of it.

Mr Feeder, however, as an intimate friend, is not excluded from the
subject. Mr Toots merely requires that it should be mentioned
mysteriously, and with feeling. After a few glasses of wine, he gives
Miss Dombey's health, observing, 'Feeder, you have no idea of the
sentiments with which I propose that toast.' Mr Feeder replies, 'Oh,
yes, I have, my dear Toots; and greatly they redound to your honour,
old boy.' Mr Feeder is then agitated by friendship, and shakes hands;
and says, if ever Toots wants a brother, he knows where to find him,
either by post or parcel. Mr Feeder like-wise says, that if he may
advise, he would recommend Mr Toots to learn the guitar, or, at least
the flute; for women like music, when you are paying your addresses to
'em, and he has found the advantage of it himself.

This brings Mr Feeder, B.A., to the confession that he has his eye
upon Cornelia Blimber. He informs Mr Toots that he don't object to
spectacles, and that if the Doctor were to do the handsome thing and
give up the business, why, there they are - provided for. He says it's
his opinion that when a man has made a handsome sum by his business,
he is bound to give it up; and that Cornelia would be an assistance in
it which any man might be proud of. Mr Toots replies by launching
wildly out into Miss Dombey's praises, and by insinuations that
sometimes he thinks he should like to blow his brains out. Mr Feeder
strongly urges that it would be a rash attempt, and shows him, as a
reconcilement to existence, Cornelia's portrait, spectacles and all.

Thus these quiet spirits pass the evening; and when it has yielded
place to night, Mr Toots walks home with Mr Feeder, and parts with him
at Doctor Blimber's door. But Mr Feeder only goes up the steps, and
when Mr Toots is gone, comes down again, to stroll upon the beach
alone, and think about his prospects. Mr Feeder plainly hears the
waves informing him, as he loiters along, that Doctor Blimber will
give up the business; and he feels a soft romantic pleasure in looking
at the outside of the house, and thinking that the Doctor will first
paint it, and put it into thorough repair.

Mr Toots is likewise roaming up and down, outside the casket that
contains his jewel; and in a deplorable condition of mind, and not
unsuspected by the police, gazes at a window where he sees a light,
and which he has no doubt is Florence's. But it is not, for that is
Mrs Skewton's room; and while Florence, sleeping in another chamber,
dreams lovingly, in the midst of the old scenes, and their old
associations live again, the figure which in grim reality is
substituted for the patient boy's on the same theatre, once more to
connect it - but how differently! - with decay and death, is stretched
there, wakeful and complaining. Ugly and haggard it lies upon its bed
of unrest; and by it, in the terror of her unimpassioned loveliness -
for it has terror in the sufferer's failing eyes - sits Edith. What do
the waves say, in the stillness of the night, to them?

'Edith, what is that stone arm raised to strike me? Don't you see
it?'

There is nothing, mother, but your fancy.'

'But my fancy! Everything is my fancy. Look! Is it possible that
you don't see it?'

'Indeed, mother, there is nothing. Should I sit unmoved, if there
were any such thing there?'

'Unmoved?' looking wildly at her - 'it's gone now - and why are you
so unmoved? That is not my fancy, Edith. It turns me cold to see you
sitting at my side.'

'I am sorry, mother.'

'Sorry! You seem always sorry. But it is not for me!'

With that, she cries; and tossing her restless head from side to
side upon her pillow, runs on about neglect, and the mother she has
been, and the mother the good old creature was, whom they met, and the
cold return the daughters of such mothers make. In the midst of her
incoherence, she stops, looks at her daughter, cries out that her wits
are going, and hides her face upon the bed.

Edith, in compassion, bends over her and speaks to her. The sick
old woman clutches her round the neck, and says, with a look of
horror,

'Edith! we are going home soon; going back. You mean that I shall
go home again?'

'Yes, mother, yes.'

'And what he said - what's-his-name, I never could remember names -
Major - that dreadful word, when we came away - it's not true? Edith!'
with a shriek and a stare, 'it's not that that is the matter with me.'

Night after night, the lights burn in the window, and the figure
lies upon the bed, and Edith sits beside it, and the restless waves
are calling to them both the whole night long. Night after night, the
waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled
upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds are
on their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to
the invisible country far away.

And still the sick old woman looks into the corner, where the stone
arm - part of a figure of some tomb, she says - is raised to strike
her. At last it falls; and then a dumb old woman lies upon the the
bed, and she is crooked and shrunk up, and half of her is dead.

Such is the figure, painted and patched for the sun to mock, that
is drawn slowly through the crowd from day to day; looking, as it
goes, for the good old creature who was such a mother, and making
mouths as it peers among the crowd in vain. Such is the figure that is
often wheeled down to the margin of the sea, and stationed there; but
on which no wind can blow freshness, and for which the murmur of the
ocean has no soothing word. She lies and listens to it by the hour;
but its speech is dark and gloomy to her, and a dread is on her face,
and when her eyes wander over the expanse, they see but a broad
stretch of desolation between earth and heaven.

Florence she seldom sees, and when she does, is angry with and mows
at. Edith is beside her always, and keeps Florence away; and Florence,
in her bed at night, trembles at the thought of death in such a shape,
and often wakes and listens, thinking it has come. No one attends on
her but Edith. It is better that few eyes should see her; and her
daughter watches alone by the bedside.

A shadow even on that shadowed face, a sharpening even of the
sharpened features, and a thickening of the veil before the eyes into
a pall that shuts out the dim world, is come. Her wandering hands upon
the coverlet join feebly palm to palm, and move towards her daughter;
and a voice not like hers, not like any voice that speaks our mortal
language - says, 'For I nursed you!'

Edith, without a tear, kneels down to bring her voice closer to the
sinking head, and answers:

'Mother, can you hear me?'

Staring wide, she tries to nod in answer.

'Can you recollect the night before I married?'

The head is motionless, but it expresses somehow that she does.

'I told you then that I forgave your part in it, and prayed God to
forgive my own. I told you that time past was at an end between us. I
say so now, again. Kiss me, mother.'

Edith touches the white lips, and for a moment all is still. A
moment afterwards, her mother, with her girlish laugh, and the
skeleton of the Cleopatra manner, rises in her bed.

Draw the rose-coloured curtains. There is something else upon its
flight besides the wind and clouds. Draw the rose-coloured curtains
close!


Intelligence of the event is sent to Mr Dombey in town, who waits
upon Cousin Feenix (not yet able to make up his mind for Baden-Baden),
who has just received it too. A good-natured creature like Cousin
Feenix is the very man for a marriage or a funeral, and his position
in the family renders it right that he should be consulted.

'Dombey,' said Cousin Feenix, 'upon my soul, I am very much shocked
to see you on such a melancholy occasion. My poor aunt! She was a
devilish lively woman.'

Mr Dombey replies, 'Very much so.'

'And made up,' says Cousin Feenix, 'really young, you know,
considering. I am sure, on the day of your marriage, I thought she was
good for another twenty years. In point of fact, I said so to a man at
Brooks's - little Billy Joper - you know him, no doubt - man with a
glass in his eye?'

Mr Dombey bows a negative. 'In reference to the obsequies,' he
hints, 'whether there is any suggestion - '

'Well, upon my life,' says Cousin Feenix, stroking his chin, which
he has just enough of hand below his wristbands to do; 'I really don't
know. There's a Mausoleum down at my place, in the park, but I'm
afraid it's in bad repair, and, in point of fact, in a devil of a
state. But for being a little out at elbows, I should have had it put
to rights; but I believe the people come and make pic-nic parties
there inside the iron railings.'

Mr Dombey is clear that this won't do.

'There's an uncommon good church in the village,' says Cousin
Feenix, thoughtfully; 'pure specimen of the Anglo-Norman style, and
admirably well sketched too by Lady Jane Finchbury - woman with tight
stays - but they've spoilt it with whitewash, I understand, and it's a
long journey.

'Perhaps Brighton itself,' Mr Dombey suggests.

'Upon my honour, Dombey, I don't think we could do better,' says
Cousin Feenix. 'It's on the spot, you see, and a very cheerful place.'

'And when,' hints Mr Dombey, 'would it be convenient?'

'I shall make a point,' says Cousin Feenix, 'of pledging myself for
any day you think best. I shall have great pleasure (melancholy
pleasure, of course) in following my poor aunt to the confines of the
- in point of fact, to the grave,' says Cousin Feenix, failing in the
other turn of speech.

'Would Monday do for leaving town?' says Mr Dombey.

'Monday would suit me to perfection,' replies Cousin Feenix.
Therefore Mr Dombey arranges to take Cousin Feenix down on that day,
and presently takes his leave, attended to the stairs by Cousin
Feenix, who says, at parting, 'I'm really excessively sorry, Dombey,
that you should have so much trouble about it;' to which Mr Dombey
answers, 'Not at all.'

At the appointed time, Cousin Feenix and Mr Dombey meet, and go
down to Brighton, and representing, in their two selves, all the other
mourners for the deceased lady's loss, attend her remains to their
place of rest. Cousin Feenix, sitting in the mourning-coach,
recognises innumerable acquaintances on the road, but takes no other
notice of them, in decorum, than checking them off aloud, as they go
by, for Mr Dombey's information, as 'Tom Johnson. Man with cork leg,
from White's. What, are you here, Tommy? Foley on a blood mare. The
Smalder girls' - and so forth. At the ceremony Cousin Feenix is
depressed, observing, that these are the occasions to make a man
think, in point of fact, that he is getting shaky; and his eyes are
really moistened, when it is over. But he soon recovers; and so do the
rest of Mrs Skewton's relatives and friends, of whom the Major
continually tells the club that she never did wrap up enough; while
the young lady with the back, who has so much trouble with her
eyelids, says, with a little scream, that she must have been
enormously old, and that she died of all kinds of horrors, and you
mustn't mention it.

So Edith's mother lies unmentioned of her dear friends, who are
deaf to the waves that are hoarse with repetition of their mystery,
and blind to the dust that is piled upon the shore, and to the white
arms that are beckoning, in the moonlight, to the invisible country
far away. But all goes on, as it was wont, upon the margin of the
unknown sea; and Edith standing there alone, and listening to its
waves, has dank weed cast up at her feet, to strew her path in life
withal.



CHAPTER 42.

Confidential and Accidental



Attired no more in Captain Cuttle's sable slops and sou'-wester
hat, but dressed in a substantial suit of brown livery, which, while
it affected to be a very sober and demure livery indeed, was really as
self-satisfied and confident a one as tailor need desire to make, Rob
the Grinder, thus transformed as to his outer man, and all regardless
within of the Captain and the Midshipman, except when he devoted a few
minutes of his leisure time to crowing over those inseparable
worthies, and recalling, with much applauding music from that brazen
instrument, his conscience, the triumphant manner in which he had
disembarrassed himself of their company, now served his patron, Mr
Carker. Inmate of Mr Carker's house, and serving about his person, Rob
kept his round eyes on the white teeth with fear and trembling, and
felt that he had need to open them wider than ever.

He could not have quaked more, through his whole being, before the
teeth, though he had come into the service of some powerful enchanter,
and they had been his strongest spells. The boy had a sense of power
and authority in this patron of his that engrossed his whole attention
and exacted his most implicit submission and obedience. He hardly
considered himself safe in thinking about him when he was absent, lest
he should feel himself immediately taken by the throat again, as on
the morning when he first became bound to him, and should see every
one of the teeth finding him out, and taxing him with every fancy of
his mind. Face to face with him, Rob had no more doubt that Mr Carker
read his secret thoughts, or that he could read them by the least
exertion of his will if he were so inclined, than he had that Mr
Carker saw him when he looked at him. The ascendancy was so complete,
and held him in such enthralment, that, hardly daring to think at all,
but with his mind filled with a constantly dilating impression of his
patron's irresistible command over him, and power of doing anything
with him, he would stand watching his pleasure, and trying to
anticipate his orders, in a state of mental suspension, as to all
other things.

Rob had not informed himself perhaps - in his then state of mind it
would have been an act of no common temerity to inquire - whether he
yielded so completely to this influence in any part, because he had
floating suspicions of his patron's being a master of certain
treacherous arts in which he had himself been a poor scholar at the
Grinders' School. But certainly Rob admired him, as well as feared
him. Mr Carker, perhaps, was better acquainted with the sources of his
power, which lost nothing by his management of it.

On the very night when he left the Captain's service, Rob, after
disposing of his pigeons, and even making a bad bargain in his hurry,
had gone straight down to Mr Carker's house, and hotly presented
himself before his new master with a glowing face that seemed to
expect commendation.

'What, scapegrace!' said Mr Carker, glancing at his bundle 'Have
you left your situation and come to me?'

'Oh if you please, Sir,' faltered Rob, 'you said, you know, when I
come here last - '

'I said,' returned Mr Carker, 'what did I say?'

'If you please, Sir, you didn't say nothing at all, Sir,' returned
Rob, warned by the manner of this inquiry, and very much disconcerted.

His patron looked at him with a wide display of gums, and shaking
his forefinger, observed:

'You'll come to an evil end, my vagabond friend, I foresee. There's
ruin in store for you.

'Oh if you please, don't, Sir!' cried Rob, with his legs trembling
under him. ' I'm sure, Sir, I only want to work for you, Sir, and to
wait upon you, Sir, and to do faithful whatever I'm bid, Sir.'

'You had better do faithfully whatever you are bid,' returned his
patron, 'if you have anything to do with me.'

'Yes, I know that, Sir,' pleaded the submissive Rob; 'I'm sure of
that, SIr. If you'll only be so good as try me, Sir! And if ever you
find me out, Sir, doing anything against your wishes, I give you leave
to kill me.'

'You dog!' said Mr Carker, leaning back in his chair, and smiling
at him serenely. 'That's nothing to what I'd do to you, if you tried
to deceive me.'

'Yes, Sir,' replied the abject Grinder, 'I'm sure you would be down
upon me dreadful, Sir. I wouldn't attempt for to go and do it, Sir,
not if I was bribed with golden guineas.'

Thoroughly checked in his expectations of commendation, the
crestfallen Grinder stood looking at his patron, and vainly
endeavouring not to look at him, with the uneasiness which a cur will
often manifest in a similar situation.

'So you have left your old service, and come here to ask me to take
you into mine, eh?' said Mr Carker.

'Yes, if you please, Sir,' returned Rob, who, in doing so, had
acted on his patron's own instructions, but dared not justify himself
by the least insinuation to that effect.

'Well!' said Mr Carker. 'You know me, boy?'

'Please, Sir, yes, Sir,' returned Rob, tumbling with his hat, and
still fixed by Mr Carker's eye, and fruitlessly endeavouring to unfix
himself.

Mr Carker nodded. 'Take care, then!'

Rob expressed in a number of short bows his lively understanding of
this caution, and was bowing himself back to the door, greatly
relieved by the prospect of getting on the outside of it, when his
patron stopped him.

'Halloa!' he cried, calling him roughly back. 'You have been - shut
that door.'

Rob obeyed as if his life had depended on his alacrity.

'You have been used to eaves-dropping. Do you know what that
means?'

'Listening, Sir?' Rob hazarded, after some embarrassed reflection.

His patron nodded. 'And watching, and so forth.'

'I wouldn't do such a thing here, Sir,' answered Rob; 'upon my word
and honour, I wouldn't, Sir, I wish I may die if I would, Sir, for
anything that could be promised to me. I should consider it is as much
as all the world was worth, to offer to do such a thing, unless I was
ordered, Sir.'

'You had better not' You have been used, too, to babbling and
tattling,' said his patron with perfect coolness. 'Beware of that
here, or you're a lost rascal,' and he smiled again, and again
cautioned him with his forefinger.

The Grinder's breath came short and thick with consternation. He
tried to protest the purity of his intentions, but could only stare at
the smiling gentleman in a stupor of submission, with which the
smiling gentleman seemed well enough satisfied, for he ordered him
downstairs, after observing him for some moments in silence, and gave
him to understand that he was retained in his employment. This was the
manner of Rob the Grinder's engagement by Mr Carker, and his
awe-stricken devotion to that gentleman had strengthened and
increased, if possible, with every minute of his service.

It was a service of some months' duration, when early one morning,
Rob opened the garden gate to Mr Dombey, who was come to breakfast
with his master, by appointment. At the same moment his master himself
came, hurrying forth to receive the distinguished guest, and give him
welcome with all his teeth.

'I never thought,' said Carker, when he had assisted him to alight
from his horse, 'to see you here, I'm sure. This is an extraordinary
day in my calendar. No occasion is very special to a man like you, who
may do anything; but to a man like me, the case is widely different.

'You have a tasteful place here, Carker,' said Mr Dombey,
condescending to stop upon the lawn, to look about him.

'You can afford to say so,' returned Carker. 'Thank you.'

'Indeed,' said Mr Dombey, in his lofty patronage, 'anyone might say
so. As far as it goes, it is a very commodious and well-arranged place
- quite elegant.'

'As far as it goes, truly,' returned Carker, with an air of
disparagement' 'It wants that qualification. Well! we have said enough
about it; and though you can afford to praise it, I thank you
nonetheless. Will you walk in?'

Mr Dombey, entering the house, noticed, as he had reason to do, the
complete arrangement of the rooms, and the numerous contrivances for
comfort and effect that abounded there. Mr Carker, in his ostentation
of humility, received this notice with a deferential smile, and said
he understood its delicate meaning, and appreciated it, but in truth
the cottage was good enough for one in his position - better, perhaps,
than such a man should occupy, poor as it was.

'But perhaps to you, who are so far removed, it really does look
better than it is,' he said, with his false mouth distended to its
fullest stretch. 'Just as monarchs imagine attractions in the lives of
beggars.'

He directed a sharp glance and a sharp smile at Mr Dombey as he
spoke, and a sharper glance, and a sharper smile yet, when Mr Dombey,
drawing himself up before the fire, in the attitude so often copied by
his second in command, looked round at the pictures on the walls.
Cursorily as his cold eye wandered over them, Carker's keen glance
accompanied his, and kept pace with his, marking exactly where it
went, and what it saw. As it rested on one picture in particular,
Carker hardly seemed to breathe, his sidelong scrutiny was so cat-like
and vigilant, but the eye of his great chief passed from that, as from
the others, and appeared no more impressed by it than by the rest.

Carker looked at it - it was the picture that resembled Edith - as
if it were a living thing; and with a wicked, silent laugh upon his
face, that seemed in part addressed to it, though it was all derisive
of the great man standing so unconscious beside him. Breakfast was
soon set upon the table; and, inviting Mr Dombey to a chair which had
its back towards this picture, he took his own seat opposite to it as
usual.

Mr Dombey was even graver than it was his custom to be, and quite
silent. The parrot, swinging in the gilded hoop within her gaudy cage,
attempted in vain to attract notice, for Carker was too observant of
his visitor to heed her; and the visitor, abstracted in meditation,
looked fixedly, not to say sullenly, over his stiff neckcloth, without
raising his eyes from the table-cloth. As to Rob, who was in
attendance, all his faculties and energies were so locked up in
observation of his master, that he scarcely ventured to give shelter
to the thought that the visitor was the great gentleman before whom he
had been carried as a certificate of the family health, in his
childhood, and to whom he had been indebted for his leather smalls.

'Allow me,' said Carker suddenly, 'to ask how Mrs Dombey is?'

He leaned forward obsequiously, as he made the inquiry, with his
chin resting on his hand; and at the same time his eyes went up to the
picture, as if he said to it, 'Now, see, how I will lead him on!'

Mr Dombey reddened as he answered:

'Mrs Dombey is quite well. You remind me, Carker, of some
conversation that I wish to have with you.'

'Robin, you can leave us,' said his master, at whose mild tones
Robin started and disappeared, with his eyes fixed on his patron to
the last. 'You don't remember that boy, of course?' he added, when the
enmeshed Grinder was gone.

'No,' said Mr Dombey, with magnificent indifference.

'Not likely that a man like you would. Hardly possible,' murmured
Carker. 'But he is one of that family from whom you took a nurse.
Perhaps you may remember having generously charged yourself with his
education?'

'Is it that boy?' said Mr Dombey, with a frown. 'He does little
credit to his education, I believe.'

'Why, he is a young rip, I am afraid,' returned Carker, with a
shrug. 'He bears that character. But the truth is, I took him into my
service because, being able to get no other employment, he conceived
(had been taught at home, I daresay) that he had some sort of claim
upon you, and was constantly trying to dog your heels with his
petition. And although my defined and recognised connexion with your
affairs is merely of a business character, still I have that
spontaneous interest in everything belonging to you, that - '

He stopped again, as if to discover whether he had led Mr Dombey
far enough yet. And again, with his chin resting on his hand, he
leered at the picture.

'Carker,' said Mr Dombey, 'I am sensible that you do not limit your
- '

'Service,' suggested his smiling entertainer.

'No; I prefer to say your regard,' observed Mr Dombey; very
sensible, as he said so, that he was paying him a handsome and
flattering compliment, 'to our mere business relations. Your
consideration for my feelings, hopes, and disappointments, in the
little instance you have just now mentioned, is an example in point. I
I am obliged to you, Carker.'

Mr Carker bent his head slowly, and very softly rubbed his hands,
as if he were afraid by any action to disturb the current of Mr
Dombey's confidence.

'Your allusion to it is opportune,' said Mr Dombey, after a little
hesitation; 'for it prepares the way to what I was beginning to say to
you, and reminds me that that involves no absolutely new relations
between us, although it may involve more personal confidence on my
part than I have hitherto - '

'Distinguished me with,' suggested Carker, bending his head again:
'I will not say to you how honoured I am; for a man like you well
knows how much honour he has in his power to bestow at pleasure.'

'Mrs Dombey and myself,' said Mr Dombey, passing this compliment
with august self-denial, 'are not quite agreed upon some points. We do
not appear to understand each other yet' Mrs Dombey has something to
learn.'

'Mrs Dombey is distinguished by many rare attractions; and has been
accustomed, no doubt, to receive much adulation,' said the smooth,
sleek watcher of his slightest look and tone. 'But where there is
affection, duty, and respect, any little mistakes engendered by such
causes are soon set right.'

Mr Dombey's thoughts instinctively flew back to the face that had
looked at him in his wife's dressing-room when an imperious hand was
stretched towards the door; and remembering the affection, duty, and
respect, expressed in it, he felt the blood rush to his own face quite
as plainly as the watchful eyes upon him saw it there.

'Mrs Dombey and myself,' he went on to say, 'had some discussion,
before Mrs Skewton's death, upon the causes of my dissatisfaction; of
which you will have formed a general understanding from having been a
witness of what passed between Mrs Dombey and myself on the evening
when you were at our - at my house.'

'When I so much regretted being present,' said the smiling Carker.
'Proud as a man in my position nay must be of your familiar notice -
though I give you no credit for it; you may do anything you please
without losing caste - and honoured as I was by an early presentation
to Mrs Dombey, before she was made eminent by bearing your name, I
almost regretted that night, I assure you, that I had been the object
of such especial good fortune'

That any man could, under any possible circumstances, regret the
being distinguished by his condescension and patronage, was a moral
phenomenon which Mr Dombey could not comprehend. He therefore
responded, with a considerable accession of dignity. 'Indeed! And why,
Carker?'

'I fear,' returned the confidential agent, 'that Mrs Dombey, never
very much disposed to regard me with favourable interest - one in my
position could not expect that, from a lady naturally proud, and whose
pride becomes her so well - may not easily forgive my innocent part in
that conversation. Your displeasure is no light matter, you must
remember; and to be visited with it before a third party -

'Carker,' said Mr Dombey, arrogantly; 'I presume that I am the
first consideration?'

'Oh! Can there be a doubt about it?' replied the other, with the
impatience of a man admitting a notorious and incontrovertible fact'

'Mrs Dombey becomes a secondary consideration, when we are both in
question, I imagine,' said Mr Dombey. 'Is that so?'

'Is it so?' returned Carker. 'Do you know better than anyone, that
you have no need to ask?'

'Then I hope, Carker,' said Mr Dombey, 'that your regret in the
acquisition of Mrs Dombey's displeasure, may be almost counterbalanced
by your satisfaction in retaining my confidence and good opinion.'

'I have the misfortune, I find,' returned Carker, 'to have incurred
that displeasure. Mrs Dombey has expressed it to you?'

'Mrs Dombey has expressed various opinions,' said Mr Dombey, with
majestic coldness and indifference, 'in which I do not participate,
and which I am not inclined to discuss, or to recall. I made Mr's
Dombey acquainted, some time since, as I have already told you, with
certain points of domestic deference and submission on which I felt it
necessary to insist. I failed to convince Mrs Dombey of the expediency
of her immediately altering her conduct in those respects, with a view
to her own peace and welfare, and my dignity; and I informed Mrs
Dombey that if I should find it necessary to object or remonstrate
again, I should express my opinion to her through yourself, my
confidential agent.'

Blended with the look that Carker bent upon him, was a devilish
look at the picture over his head, that struck upon it like a flash of
lightning.

'Now, Carker,' said Mr Dombey, 'I do not hesitate to say to you
that I will carry my point. I am not to be trifled with. Mrs Dombey
must understand that my will is law, and that I cannot allow of one
exception to the whole rule of my life. You will have the goodness to
undertake this charge, which, coming from me, is not unacceptable to
you, I hope, whatever regret you may politely profess - for which I am
obliged to you on behalf of Mrs Dombey; and you will have the
goodness, I am persuaded, to discharge it as exactly as any other
commission.'

'You know,' said Mr Carker, 'that you have only to command me.

'I know,' said Mr Dombey, with a majestic indication of assent,
'that I have only to command you. It is necessary that I should
proceed in this. Mrs Dombey is a lady undoubtedly highly qualified, in
many respects, to -

'To do credit even to your choice,' suggested Carker, with a
yawning show of teeth.

'Yes; if you please to adopt that form of words,' said Mr Dombey,
in his tone of state; 'and at present I do not conceive that Mrs
Dombey does that credit to it, to which it is entitled. There is a
principle of opposition in Mrs Dombey that must be eradicated; that
must be overcome: Mrs Dombey does not appear to understand,' said Mr
Dombey, forcibly, 'that the idea of opposition to Me is monstrous and
absurd.'

'We, in the City, know you better,' replied Carker, with a smile
from ear to ear.

'You know me better,' said Mr Dombey. 'I hope so. Though, indeed, I
am bound to do Mrs Dombey the justice of saying, however inconsistent
it may seem with her subsequent conduct (which remains unchanged),
that on my expressing my disapprobation and determination to her, with
some severity, on the occasion to which I have referred, my admonition
appeared to produce a very powerful effect.' Mr Dombey delivered
himself of those words with most portentous stateliness. 'I wish you
to have the goodness, then, to inform Mrs Dombey, Carker, from me,
that I must recall our former conversation to her remembrance, in some
surprise that it has not yet had its effect. That I must insist upon
her regulating her conduct by the injunctions laid upon her in that
conversation. That I am not satisfied with her conduct. That I am
greatly dissatisfied with it. And that I shall be under the very
disagreeable necessity of making you the bearer of yet more unwelcome
and explicit communications, if she has not the good sense and the
proper feeling to adapt herself to my wishes, as the first Mrs Dombey
did, and, I believe I may add, as any other lady in her place would.'

'The first Mrs Dombey lived very happily,' said Carker.

'The first Mrs Dombey had great good sense,' said Mr Dombey, in a
gentlemanly toleration of the dead, 'and very correct feeling.'

'Is Miss Dombey like her mother, do you think?' said Carker.

Swiftly and darkly, Mr Dombey's face changed. His confidential
agent eyed it keenly.

'I have approached a painful subject,' he said, in a soft regretful
tone of voice, irreconcilable with his eager eye. 'Pray forgive me. I
forget these chains of association in the interest I have. Pray
forgive me.'

But for all he said, his eager eye scanned Mr Dombey's downcast
face none the less closely; and then it shot a strange triumphant look
at the picture, as appealing to it to bear witness how he led him on
again, and what was coming.

Carker,' said Mr Dombey, looking here and there upon the table, and
saying in a somewhat altered and more hurried voice, and with a paler
lip, 'there is no occasion for apology. You mistake. The association
is with the matter in hand, and not with any recollection, as you
suppose. I do not approve of Mrs Dombey's behaviour towards my
daughter.'

'Pardon me,' said Mr Carker, 'I don't quite understand.'

'Understand then,' returned Mr Dombey, 'that you may make that -
that you will make that, if you please - matter of direct objection
from me to Mrs Dombey. You will please to tell her that her show of
devotion for my daughter is disagreeable to me. It is likely to be
noticed. It is likely to induce people to contrast Mrs Dombey in her
relation towards my daughter, with Mrs Dombey in her relation towards
myself. You will have the goodness to let Mrs Dombey know, plainly,
that I object to it; and that I expect her to defer, immediately, to
my objection. Mrs Dombey may be in earnest, or she may be pursuing a
whim, or she may be opposing me; but I object to it in any case, and
in every case. If Mrs Dombey is in earnest, so much the less reluctant
should she be to desist; for she will not serve my daughter by any
such display. If my wife has any superfluous gentleness, and duty over
and above her proper submission to me, she may bestow them where she
pleases, perhaps; but I will have submission first! - Carker,' said Mr
Dombey, checking the unusual emotion with which he had spoken, and
falling into a tone more like that in which he was accustomed to
assert his greatness, 'you will have the goodness not to omit or slur
this point, but to consider it a very important part of your
instructions.'

Mr Carker bowed his head, and rising from the table, and standing
thoughtfully before the fire, with his hand to his smooth chin, looked
down at Mr Dombey with the evil slyness of some monkish carving, half
human and half brute; or like a leering face on an old water-spout. Mr
Dombey, recovering his composure by degrees, or cooling his emotion in
his sense of having taken a high position, sat gradually stiffening
again, and looking at the parrot as she swung to and fro, in her great
wedding ring.

'I beg your pardon,' said Carker, after a silence, suddenly
resuming his chair, and drawing it opposite to Mr Dombey's, 'but let
me understand. Mrs Dombey is aware of the probability of your making
me the organ of your displeasure?'

'Yes,' replied Mr Dombey. 'I have said so.'

'Yes,' rejoined Carker, quickly; 'but why?'

'Why!' Mr Dombey repeated, not without hesitation. 'Because I told
her.'

'Ay,' replied Carker. 'But why did you tell her? You see,' he
continued with a smile, and softly laying his velvet hand, as a cat
might have laid its sheathed claws, on Mr Dombey's arm; 'if I
perfectly understand what is in your mind, I am so much more likely to
be useful, and to have the happiness of being effectually employed. I
think I do understand. I have not the honour of Mrs Dombey's good
opinion. In my position, I have no reason to expect it; but I take the
fact to be, that I have not got it?'

'Possibly not,' said Mr Dombey.

'Consequently,' pursued Carker, 'your making the communications to
Mrs Dombey through me, is sure to be particularly unpalatable to that
lady?'

'It appears to me,' said Mr Dombey, with haughty reserve, and yet
with some embarrassment, 'that Mrs Dombey's views upon the subject
form no part of it as it presents itself to you and me, Carker. But it
may be so.'

'And - pardon me - do I misconceive you,' said Carker, 'when I
think you descry in this, a likely means of humbling Mrs Dombey's
pride - I use the word as expressive of a quality which, kept within
due bounds, adorns and graces a lady so distinguished for her beauty
and accomplishments - and, not to say of punishing her, but of
reducing her to the submission you so naturally and justly require?'

'I am not accustomed, Carker, as you know,' said Mr Dombey, 'to
give such close reasons for any course of conduct I think proper to
adopt, but I will gainsay nothing of this. If you have any objection
to found upon it, that is indeed another thing, and the mere statement
that you have one will be sufficient. But I have not supposed, I
confess, that any confidence I could entrust to you, would be likely
to degrade you - '

'Oh! I degraded!' exclaimed Carker. 'In your service!'

'or to place you,' pursued Mr Dombey, 'in a false position.'

'I in a false position!' exclaimed Carker. 'I shall be proud -
delighted - to execute your trust. I could have wished, I own, to have
given the lady at whose feet I would lay my humble duty and devotion -
for is she not your wife! - no new cause of dislike; but a wish from
you is, of course, paramount to every other consideration on earth.
Besides, when Mrs Dombey is converted from these little errors of
judgment, incidental, I would presume to say, to the novelty of her
situation, I shall hope that she will perceive in the slight part I
take, only a grain - my removed and different sphere gives room for
little more - of the respect for you, and sacrifice of all
considerations to you, of which it will be her pleasure and privilege
to garner up a great store every day.'

Mr Dombey seemed, at the moment, again to see her with her hand
stretched out towards the door, and again to hear through the mild
speech of his confidential agent an echo of the words, 'Nothing can
make us stranger to each other than we are henceforth!' But he shook
off the fancy, and did not shake in his resolution, and said,
'Certainly, no doubt.'

'There is nothing more,' quoth Carker, drawing his chair back to
its old place - for they had taken little breakfast as yet- and
pausing for an answer before he sat down.

'Nothing,' said Mr Dombey, 'but this. You will be good enough to
observe, Carker, that no message to Mrs Dombey with which you are or
may be charged, admits of reply. You will be good enough to bring me
no reply. Mrs Dombey is informed that it does not become me to
temporise or treat upon any matter that is at issue between us, and
that what I say is final.'

Mr Carker signIfied his understanding of these credentials, and
they fell to breakfast with what appetite they might. The Grinder
also, in due time reappeared, keeping his eyes upon his master without
a moment's respite, and passing the time in a reverie of worshipful
tenor. Breakfast concluded, Mr Dombey's horse was ordered out again,
and Mr Carker mounting his own, they rode off for the City together.

Mr Carker was in capital spirits, and talked much. Mr Dombey
received his conversation with the sovereign air of a man who had a
right to be talked to, and occasionally condescended to throw in a few
words to carry on the conversation. So they rode on characteristically
enough. But Mr Dombey, in his dignity, rode with very long stirrups,
and a very loose rein, and very rarely deigned to look down to see
where his horse went. In consequence of which it happened that Mr
Dombey's horse, while going at a round trot, stumbled on some loose
stones, threw him, rolled over him, and lashing out with his iron-shod
feet, in his struggles to get up, kicked him.

Mr Carker, quick of eye, steady of hand, and a good horseman, was
afoot, and had the struggling animal upon his legs and by the bridle,
in a moment. Otherwise that morning's confidence would have been Mr
Dombey's last. Yet even with the flush and hurry of this action red
upon him, he bent over his prostrate chief with every tooth disclosed,
and muttered as he stooped down, 'I have given good cause of offence
to Mrs Dombey now, if she knew it!'

Mr Dombey being insensible, and bleeding from the head and face,
was carried by certain menders of the road, under Carker's direction,
to the nearest public-house, which was not far off, and where he was
soon attended by divers surgeons, who arrived in quick succession from
all parts, and who seemed to come by some mysterious instinct, as
vultures are said to gather about a camel who dies in the desert.
After being at some pains to restore him to consciousness, these
gentlemen examined into the nature of his injuries.

One surgeon who lived hard by was strong for a compound fracture of
the leg, which was the landlord's opinion also; but two surgeons who
lived at a distance, and were only in that neighbourhood by accident,
combated this opinion so disinterestedly, that it was decided at last
that the patient, though severely cut and bruised, had broken no bones
but a lesser rib or so, and might be carefully taken home before
night. His injuries being dressed and bandaged, which was a long
operation, and he at length left to repose, Mr Carker mounted his
horse again, and rode away to carry the intelligence home.

Crafty and cruel as his face was at the best of times, though it
was a sufficiently fair face as to form and regularity of feature, it
was at its worst when he set forth on this errand; animated by the
craft and cruelty of thoughts within him, suggestions of remote
possibility rather than of design or plot, that made him ride as if he
hunted men and women. Drawing rein at length, and slackening in his
speed, as he came into the more public roads, he checked his
white-legged horse into picking his way along as usual, and hid
himself beneath his sleek, hushed, crouched manner, and his ivory
smile, as he best could.

He rode direct to Mr Dombey's house, alighted at the door, and
begged to see Mrs Dombey on an affair of importance. The servant who
showed him to Mr Dombey's own room, soon returned to say that it was
not Mrs Dombey's hour for receiving visitors, and that he begged
pardon for not having mentioned it before.

Mr Carker, who was quite prepared for a cold reception, wrote upon
a card that he must take the liberty of pressing for an interview, and
that he would not be so bold as to do so, for the second time (this he
underlined), if he were not equally sure of the occasion being
sufficient for his justification. After a trifling delay, Mrs Dombey's
maid appeared, and conducted him to a morning room upstairs, where
Edith and Florence were together.

He had never thought Edith half so beautiful before. Much as he
admired the graces of her face and form, and freshly as they dwelt
within his sensual remembrance, he had never thought her half so
beautiful.

Her glance fell haughtily upon him in the doorway; but he looked at
Florence - though only in the act of bending his head, as he came in -
with some irrepressible expression of the new power he held; and it
was his triumph to see the glance droop and falter, and to see that
Edith half rose up to receive him.

He was very sorry, he was deeply grieved; he couldn't say with what
unwillingness he came to prepare her for the intelligence of a very
slight accident. He entreated Mrs Dombey to compose herself. Upon his
sacred word of honour, there was no cause of alarm. But Mr Dombey -

Florence uttered a sudden cry. He did not look at her, but at
Edith. Edith composed and reassured her. She uttered no cry of
distress. No, no.

Mr Dombey had met with an accident in riding. His horse had
slipped, and he had been thrown.

Florence wildly exclaimed that he was badly hurt; that he was
killed!

No. Upon his honour, Mr Dombey, though stunned at first, was soon
recovered, and though certainly hurt was in no kind of danger. If this
were not the truth, he, the distressed intruder, never could have had
the courage to present himself before Mrs Dombey. It was the truth
indeed, he solemnly assured her.

All this he said as if he were answering Edith, and not Florence,
and with his eyes and his smile fastened on Edith.

He then went on to tell her where Mr Dombey was lying, and to
request that a carriage might be placed at his disposal to bring him
home.

'Mama,' faltered Florence in tears, 'if I might venture to go!'

Mr Carker, having his eyes on Edith when he heard these words, gave
her a secret look and slightly shook his head. He saw how she battled
with herself before she answered him with her handsome eyes, but he
wrested the answer from her - he showed her that he would have it, or
that he would speak and cut Florence to the heart - and she gave it to
him. As he had looked at the picture in the morning, so he looked at
her afterwards, when she turned her eyes away.

'I am directed to request,' he said, 'that the new housekeeper -
Mrs Pipchin, I think, is the name - '

Nothing escaped him. He saw in an instant, that she was another
slight of Mr Dombey's on his wife.

' - may be informed that Mr Dombey wishes to have his bed prepared
in his own apartments downstairs, as he prefers those rooms to any
other. I shall return to Mr Dombey almost immediately. That every
possible attention has been paid to his comfort, and that he is the
object of every possible solicitude, I need not assure you, Madam. Let
me again say, there is no cause for the least alarm. Even you may be
quite at ease, believe me.'

He bowed himself out, with his extremest show of deference and
conciliation; and having returned to Mr Dombey's room, and there
arranged for a carriage being sent after him to the City, mounted his
horse again, and rode slowly thither. He was very thoughtful as he
went along, and very thoughtful there, and very thoughtful in the
carriage on his way back to the place where Mr Dombey had been left.
It was only when sitting by that gentleman's couch that he was quite
himself again, and conscious of his teeth.

About the time of twilight, Mr Dombey, grievously afflicted with
aches and pains, was helped into his carriage, and propped with cloaks
and pillows on one side of it, while his confidential agent bore him
company upon the other. As he was not to be shaken, they moved at
little more than a foot pace; and hence it was quite dark when he was
brought home. Mrs Pipchin, bitter and grim, and not oblivious of the
Peruvian mines, as the establishment in general had good reason to
know, received him at the door, and freshened the domestics with
several little sprinklings of wordy vinegar, while they assisted in
conveying him to his room. Mr Carker remained in attendance until he
was safe in bed, and then, as he declined to receive any female
visitor, but the excellent Ogress who presided over his household,
waited on Mrs Dombey once more, with his report on her lord's
condition.

He again found Edith alone with Florence, and he again addressed
the whole of his soothing speech to Edith, as if she were a prey to
the liveliest and most affectionate anxieties. So earnest he was in
his respectful sympathy, that on taking leave, he ventured - with one
more glance towards Florence at the moment - to take her hand, and
bending over it, to touch it with his lips.

Edith did not withdraw the hand, nor did she strike his fair face
with it, despite the flush upon her cheek, the bright light in her
eyes, and the dilation of her whole form. But when she was alone in
her own room, she struck it on the marble chimney-shelf, so that, at
one blow, it was bruised, and bled; and held it from her, near the
shining fire, as if she could have thrust it in and burned it'

Far into the night she sat alone, by the sinking blaze, in dark and
threatening beauty, watching the murky shadows looming on the wall, as
if her thoughts were tangible, and cast them there. Whatever shapes of
outrage and affront, and black foreshadowings of things that might
happen, flickered, indistinct and giant-like, before her, one resented
figure marshalled them against her. And that figure was her husband.



CHAPTER 43.

The Watches of the Night



Florence, long since awakened from her dream, mournfully observed
the estrangement between her father and Edith, and saw it widen more
and more, and knew that there was greater bitterness between them
every day. Each day's added knowledge deepened the shade upon her love
and hope, roused up the old sorrow that had slumbered for a little
time, and made it even heavier to bear than it had been before.

It had been hard - how hard may none but Florence ever know! - to
have the natural affection of a true and earnest nature turned to
agony; and slight, or stern repulse, substituted for the tenderest
protection and the dearest care. It had been hard to feel in her deep
heart what she had felt, and never know the happiness of one touch of
response. But it was much more hard to be compelled to doubt either
her father or Edith, so affectionate and dear to her, and to think of
her love for each of them, by turns, with fear, distrust, and wonder.

Yet Florence now began to do so; and the doing of it was a task
imposed upon her by the very purity of her soul, as one she could not
fly from. She saw her father cold and obdurate to Edith, as to her;
hard, inflexible, unyielding. Could it be, she asked herself with
starting tears, that her own dear mother had been made unhappy by such
treatment, and had pined away and died? Then she would think how proud
and stately Edith was to everyone but her, with what disdain she
treated him, how distantly she kept apart from him, and what she had
said on the night when they came home; and quickly it would come on
Florence, almost as a crime, that she loved one who was set in
opposition to her father, and that her father knowing of it, must
think of her in his solitary room as the unnatural child who added
this wrong to the old fault, so much wept for, of never having won his
fatherly affection from her birth. The next kind word from Edith, the
next kind glance, would shake these thoughts again, and make them seem
like black ingratitude; for who but she had cheered the drooping heart
of Florence, so lonely and so hurt, and been its best of comforters!
Thus, with her gentle nature yearning to them both, feeling for the
misery of both, and whispering doubts of her own duty to both,
Florence in her wider and expanded love, and by the side of Edith,
endured more than when she had hoarded up her undivided secret in the
mournful house, and her beautiful Mama had never dawned upon it.

One exquisite unhappiness that would have far outweighed this,
Florence was spared. She never had the least suspicion that Edith by
her tenderness for her widened the separation from her father, or gave
him new cause of dislike. If Florence had conceived the possIbility of
such an effect being wrought by such a cause, what grief she would
have felt, what sacrifice she would have tried to make, poor loving
girl, how fast and sure her quiet passage might have been beneath it
to the presence of that higher Father who does not reject his
children's love, or spurn their tried and broken hearts, Heaven knows!
But it was otherwise, and that was well.

No word was ever spoken between Florence and Edith now, on these
subjects. Edith had said there ought to be between them, in that wise,
a division and a silence like the grave itself: and Florence felt she
was right'

In this state of affairs her father was brought home, suffering and
disabled; and gloomily retired to his own rooms, where he was tended
by servants, not approached by Edith, and had no friend or companion
but Mr Carker, who withdrew near midnight.

'And nice company he is, Miss Floy,' said Susan Nipper. 'Oh, he's a
precious piece of goods! If ever he wants a character don't let him
come to me whatever he does, that's all I tell him.'

'Dear Susan,' urged Florence, 'don't!'

'Oh, it's very well to say "don't" Miss Floy,' returned the Nipper,
much exasperated; 'but raly begging your pardon we're coming to such
passes that it turns all the blood in a person's body into pins and
needles, with their pints all ways. Don't mistake me, Miss Floy, I
don't mean nothing again your ma-in-law who has always treated me as a
lady should though she is rather high I must say not that I have any
right to object to that particular, but when we come to Mrs Pipchinses
and having them put over us and keeping guard at your Pa's door like
crocodiles (only make us thankful that they lay no eggs!) we are a
growing too outrageous!'

'Papa thinks well of Mrs Pipchin, Susan,' returned Florence, 'and
has a right to choose his housekeeper, you know. Pray don't!'

'Well Miss Floy,' returned the Nipper, 'when you say don't, I never
do I hope but Mrs Pipchin acts like early gooseberries upon me Miss,
and nothing less.'

Susan was unusually emphatic and destitute of punctuation in her
discourse on this night, which was the night of Mr Dombey's being
brought home, because, having been sent downstairs by Florence to
inquire after him, she had been obliged to deliver her message to her
mortal enemy Mrs Pipchin; who, without carrying it in to Mr Dombey,
had taken upon herself to return what Miss Nipper called a huffish
answer, on her own responsibility. This, Susan Nipper construed into
presumption on the part of that exemplary sufferer by the Peruvian
mines, and a deed of disparagement upon her young lady, that was not
to be forgiven; and so far her emphatic state was special. But she had
been in a condition of greatly increased suspicion and distrust, ever
since the marriage; for, like most persons of her quality of mind, who
form a strong and sincere attachment to one in the different station
which Florence occupied, Susan was very jealous, and her jealousy
naturally attached to Edith, who divided her old empire, and came
between them. Proud and glad as Susan Nipper truly was, that her young
mistress should be advanced towards her proper place in the scene of
her old neglect, and that she should have her father's handsome wife
for her companion and protectress, she could not relinquish any part
of her own dominion to the handsome wife, without a grudge and a vague
feeling of ill-will, for which she did not fail to find a
disinterested justification in her sharp perception of the pride and
passion of the lady's character. From the background to which she had
necessarily retired somewhat, since the marriage, Miss Nipper looked
on, therefore, at domestic affairs in general, with a resolute
conviction that no good would come of Mrs Dombey: always being very
careful to publish on all possible occasions, that she had nothing to
say against her.

'Susan,' said Florence, who was sitting thoughtfully at her table,
'it is very late. I shall want nothing more to-night.'

'Ah, Miss Floy!' returned the Nipper, 'I'm sure I often wish for
them old times when I sat up with you hours later than this and fell
asleep through being tired out when you was as broad awake as
spectacles, but you've ma's-in-law to come and sit with you now Miss
Floy and I'm thankful for it I'm sure. I've not a word to say against
'em.'

'I shall not forget who was my old companion when I had none,
Susan,' returned Florence, gently, 'never!' And looking up, she put
her arm round the neck of her humble friend, drew her face down to
hers, and bidding her good-night, kissed it; which so mollified Miss
Nipper, that she fell a sobbing.

'Now my dear Miss Floy, said Susan, 'let me go downstairs again and
see how your Pa is, I know you're wretched about him, do let me go
downstairs again and knock at his door my own self.'

'No,' said Florence, 'go to bed. We shall hear more in the morning.
I will inquire myself in the morning. Mama has been down, I daresay;'
Florence blushed, for she had no such hope; 'or is there now, perhaps.
Good-night!'

Susan was too much softened to express her private opinion on the
probability of Mrs Dombey's being in attendance on her husband, and
silently withdrew. Florence left alone, soon hid her head upon her
hands as she had often done in other days, and did not restrain the
tears from coursing down her face. The misery of this domestic discord
and unhappiness; the withered hope she cherished now, if hope it could
be called, of ever being taken to her father's heart; her doubts and
fears between the two; the yearning of her innocent breast to both;
the heavy disappointment and regret of such an end as this, to what
had been a vision of bright hope and promise to her; all crowded on
her mind and made her tears flow fast. Her mother and her brother
dead, her father unmoved towards her, Edith opposed to him and casting
him away, but loving her, and loved by her, it seemed as if her
affection could never prosper, rest where it would. That weak thought
was soon hushed, but the thoughts in which it had arisen were too true
and strong to be dismissed with it; and they made the night desolate.

Among such reflections there rose up, as there had risen up all
day, the image of her father, wounded and in pain, alone in his own
room, untended by those who should be nearest to him, and passing the
tardy hours in lonely suffering. A frightened thought which made her
start and clasp her hands - though it was not a new one in her mind -
that he might die, and never see her or pronounce her name, thrilled
her whole frame. In her agitation she thought, and trembled while she
thought, of once more stealing downstairs, and venturing to his door.

She listened at her own. The house was quiet, and all the lights
were out. It was a long, long time, she thought, since she used to
make her nightly pilgrimages to his door! It was a long, long time,
she tried to think, since she had entered his room at midnight, and he
had led her back to the stair-foot!

With the same child's heart within her, as of old: even with the
child's sweet timid eyes and clustering hair: Florence, as strange to
her father in her early maiden bloom, as in her nursery time, crept
down the staircase listening as she went, and drew near to his room.
No one was stirring in the house. The door was partly open to admit
air; and all was so still within, that she could hear the burning of
the fire, and count the ticking of the clock that stood upon the
chimney-piece.

She looked in. In that room, the housekeeper wrapped in a blanket
was fast asleep in an easy chair before the fire. The doors between it
and the next were partly closed, and a screen was drawn before them;
but there was a light there, and it shone upon the cornice of his bed.
All was so very still that she could hear from his breathing that he
was asleep. This gave her courage to pass round the screen, and look
into his chamber.

It was as great a start to come upon his sleeping face as if she
had not expected to see it. Florence stood arrested on the spot, and
if he had awakened then, must have remained there.

There was a cut upon his forehead, and they had been wetting his
hair, which lay bedabbled and entangled on the pillow. One of his
arms, resting outside the bed, was bandaged up, and he was very white.
But it was not this, that after the first quick glance, and first
assurance of his sleeping quietly, held Florence rooted to the ground.
It was something very different from this, and more than this, that
made him look so solemn in her eye

She had never seen his face in all her life, but there had been
upon it - or she fancied so - some disturbing consciousness of her.
She had never seen his face in all her life, but hope had sunk within
her, and her timid glance had dropped before its stern, unloving, and
repelling harshness. As she looked upon it now, she saw it, for the
first time, free from the cloud that had darkened her childhood. Calm,
tranquil night was reigning in its stead. He might have gone to sleep,
for anything she saw there, blessing her.

Awake, unkind father! Awake, now, sullen man! The time is flitting
by; the hour is coming with an angry tread. Awake!

There was no change upon his face; and as she watched it, awfully,
its motionless reponse recalled the faces that were gone. So they
looked, so would he; so she, his weeping child, who should say when!
so all the world of love and hatred and indifference around them! When
that time should come, it would not be the heavier to him, for this
that she was going to do; and it might fall something lighter upon
her.

She stole close to the bed, and drawing in her breath, bent down,
and softly kissed him on the face, and laid her own for one brief
moment by its side, and put the arm, with which she dared not touch
him, round about him on the pillow.

Awake, doomed man, while she is near! The time is flitting by; the
hour is coming with an angry tread; its foot is in the house. Awake!

In her mind, she prayed to God to bless her father, and to soften
him towards her, if it might be so; and if not, to forgive him if he
was wrong, and pardon her the prayer which almost seemed impiety. And
doing so, and looking back at him with blinded eyes, and stealing
timidly away, passed out of his room, and crossed the other, and was
gone.

He may sleep on now. He may sleep on while he may. But let him look
for that slight figure when he wakes, and find it near him when the
hour is come!

Sad and grieving was the heart of Florence, as she crept upstairs.
The quiet house had grown more dismal since she came down. The sleep
she had been looking on, in the dead of night, had the solemnity to
her of death and life in one. The secrecy and silence of her own
proceeding made the night secret, silent, and oppressive. She felt
unwilling, almost unable, to go on to her own chamber; and turnIng
into the drawing-rooms, where the clouded moon was shining through the
blinds, looked out into the empty streets.

The wind was blowing drearily. The lamps looked pale, and shook as
if they were cold. There was a distant glimmer of something that was
not quite darkness, rather than of light, in the sky; and foreboding
night was shivering and restless, as the dying are who make a troubled
end. Florence remembered how, as a watcher, by a sick-bed, she had
noted this bleak time, and felt its influence, as if in some hidden
natural antipathy to it; and now it was very, very gloomy.

Her Mama had not come to her room that night, which was one cause
of her having sat late out of her bed. In her general uneasiness, no
less than in her ardent longing to have somebody to speak to, and to
break the spell of gloom and silence, Florence directed her steps
towards the chamber where she slept.

The door was not fastened within, and yielded smoothly to her
hesitating hand. She was surprised to find a bright light burning;
still more surprised, on looking in, to see that her Mama, but
partially undressed, was sitting near the ashes of the fire, which had
crumbled and dropped away. Her eyes were intently bent upon the air;
and in their light, and in her face, and in her form, and in the grasp
with which she held the elbows of her chair as if about to start up,
Florence saw such fierce emotion that it terrified her.

'Mama!' she cried, 'what is the matter?'

Edith started; looking at her with such a strange dread in her
face, that Florence was more frightened than before.

'Mama!' said Florence, hurriedly advancing. 'Dear Mama! what is the
matter?'

'I have not been well,' said Edith, shaking, and still looking at
her in the same strange way. 'I have had had dreams, my love.'

'And not yet been to bed, Mama?'

'No,' she returned. 'Half-waking dreams.'

Her features gradually softened; and suffering Florence to come
closer to her, within her embrace, she said in a tender manner, 'But
what does my bird do here? What does my bird do here?'

'I have been uneasy, Mama, in not seeing you to-night, and in not
knowing how Papa was; and I - '

Florence stopped there, and said no more.

'Is it late?' asked Edith, fondly putting back the curls that
mingled with her own dark hair, and strayed upon her face.

'Very late. Near day.'

'Near day!' she repeated in surprise.

'Dear Mama, what have you done to your hand?' said Florence.

Edith drew it suddenly away, and, for a moment, looked at her with
the same strange dread (there was a sort of wild avoidance in it) as
before; but she presently said, 'Nothing, nothing. A blow.' And then
she said, 'My Florence!' and then her bosom heaved, and she was
weeping passionately.

'Mama!' said Florence. 'Oh Mama, what can I do, what should I do,
to make us happier? Is there anything?'

'Nothing,' she replied.

'Are you sure of that? Can it never be? If I speak now of what is
in my thoughts, in spite of what we have agreed,' said Florence, 'you
will not blame me, will you?'

'It is useless,' she replied, 'useless. I have told you, dear, that
I have had bad dreams. Nothing can change them, or prevent them coming
back.'

'I do not understand,' said Florence, gazing on her agitated face
which seemed to darken as she looked.

'I have dreamed,' said Edith in a low voice, 'of a pride that is
all powerless for good, all powerful for evil; of a pride that has
been galled and goaded, through many shameful years, and has never
recoiled except upon itself; a pride that has debased its owner with
the consciousness of deep humiliation, and never helped its owner
boldly to resent it or avoid it, or to say, "This shall not be!" a
pride that, rightly guided, might have led perhaps to better things,
but which, misdirected and perverted, like all else belonging to the
same possessor, has been self-contempt, mere hardihood and ruin.'

She neither looked nor spoke to Florence now, but went on as if she
were alone.

'I have dreamed,' she said, 'of such indifference and callousness,
arising from this self-contempt; this wretched, inefficient, miserable
pride; that it has gone on with listless steps even to the altar,
yielding to the old, familiar, beckoning finger, - oh mother, oh
mother! - while it spurned it; and willing to be hateful to itself for
once and for all, rather than to be stung daily in some new form.
Mean, poor thing!'

And now with gathering and darkening emotion, she looked as she had
looked when Florence entered.

'And I have dreamed,' she said, 'that in a first late effort to
achieve a purpose, it has been trodden on, and trodden down by a base
foot, but turns and looks upon him. I have dreamed that it is wounded,
hunted, set upon by dogs, but that it stands at hay, and will not
yield; no, that it cannot if it would; but that it is urged on to hate

Her clenched hand tightened on the trembling arm she had in hers,
and as she looked down on the alarmed and wondering face, frown
subsided. 'Oh Florence!' she said, 'I think I have been nearly mad
to-night!' and humbled her proud head upon her neck and wept again.

'Don't leave me! be near me! I have no hope but in you! These words
she said a score of times.

Soon she grew calmer, and was full of pity for the tears of
Florence, and for her waking at such untimely hours. And the day now
dawning, with folded her in her arms and laid her down upon her bed,
and, not lying down herself, sat by her, and bade her try to sleep.

'For you are weary, dearest, and unhappy, and should rest.'

'I am indeed unhappy, dear Mama, tonight,' said Florence. 'But you
are weary and unhappy, too.'

'Not when you lie asleep so near me, sweet.'

They kissed each other, and Florence, worn out, gradually fell into
a gentle slumber; but as her eyes closed on the face beside her, it
was so sad to think upon the face downstairs, that her hand drew
closer to Edith for some comfort; yet, even in the act, it faltered,
lest it should be deserting him. So, in her sleep, she tried to
reconcile the two together, and to show them that she loved them both,
but could not do it, and her waking grief was part of her dreams.

Edith, sitting by, looked down at the dark eyelashes lying wet on
the flushed cheeks, and looked with gentleness and pity, for she knew
the truth. But no sleep hung upon her own eyes. As the day came on she
still sat watching and waking, with the placid hand in hers, and
sometimes whispered, as she looked at the hushed face, 'Be near me,
Florence. I have no hope but in you!'



CHAPTER 44.

A Separation



With the day, though not so early as the sun, uprose Miss Susan
Nipper. There was a heaviness in this young maiden's exceedingly sharp
black eyes, that abated somewhat of their sparkling, and suggested -
which was not their usual character - the possibility of their being
sometimes shut. There was likewise a swollen look about them, as if
they had been crying over-night. But the Nipper, so far from being
cast down, was singularly brisk and bold, and all her energies
appeared to be braced up for some great feat. This was noticeable even
in her dress, which was much more tight and trim than usual; and in
occasional twitches of her head as she went about the house, which
were mightily expressive of determination.

In a word, she had formed a determination, and an aspiring one: it
being nothing less than this - to penetrate to Mr Dombey's presence,
and have speech of that gentleman alone. 'I have often said I would,'
she remarked, in a threatening manner, to herself, that morning, with
many twitches of her head, 'and now I will!'

Spurring herself on to the accomplishment of this desperate design,
with a sharpness that was peculiar to herself, Susan Nipper haunted
the hall and staircase during the whole forenoon, without finding a
favourable opportunity for the assault. Not at all baffled by this
discomfiture, which indeed had a stimulating effect, and put her on
her mettle, she diminished nothing of her vigilance; and at last
discovered, towards evening, that her sworn foe Mrs Pipchin, under
pretence of having sat up all night, was dozing in her own room, and
that Mr Dombey was lying on his sofa, unattended.

With a twitch - not of her head merely, this time, but of her whole
self - the Nipper went on tiptoe to Mr Dombey's door, and knocked.
'Come in!' said Mr Dombey. Susan encouraged herself with a final
twitch, and went in.

Mr Dombey, who was eyeing the fire, gave an amazed look at his
visitor, and raised himself a little on his arm. The Nipper dropped a
curtsey.

'What do you want?' said Mr Dombey.

'If you please, Sir, I wish to speak to you,' said Susan.

Mr Dombey moved his lips as if he were repeating the words, but he
seemed so lost in astonishment at the presumption of the young woman
as to be incapable of giving them utterance.

'I have been in your service, Sir,' said Susan Nipper, with her
usual rapidity, 'now twelve 'year a waiting on Miss Floy my own young
lady who couldn't speak plain when I first come here and I was old in
this house when Mrs Richards was new, I may not be Meethosalem, but I
am not a child in arms.'

Mr Dombey, raised upon his arm and looking at her, offered no
comment on this preparatory statement of fact.

'There never was a dearer or a blesseder young lady than is my
young lady, Sir,' said Susan, 'and I ought to know a great deal better
than some for I have seen her in her grief and I have seen her in her
joy (there's not been much of it) and I have seen her with her brother
and I have seen her in her loneliness and some have never seen her,
and I say to some and all - I do!' and here the black-eyed shook her
head, and slightly stamped her foot; 'that she's the blessedest and
dearest angel is Miss Floy that ever drew the breath of life, the more
that I was torn to pieces Sir the more I'd say it though I may not be
a Fox's Martyr..'

Mr Dombey turned yet paler than his fall had made him, with
indignation and astonishment; and kept his eyes upon the speaker as if
he accused them, and his ears too, of playing him false.

'No one could be anything but true and faithful to Miss Floy, Sir,'
pursued Susan, 'and I take no merit for my service of twelve year, for
I love her - yes, I say to some and all I do!' - and here the
black-eyed shook her head again, and slightly stamped her foot again,
and checked a sob; 'but true and faithful service gives me right to
speak I hope, and speak I must and will now, right or wrong.

'What do you mean, woman?' said Mr Dombey, glaring at her. 'How do
you dare?'

'What I mean, Sir, is to speak respectful and without offence, but
out, and how I dare I know not but I do!'said Susan. 'Oh! you don't
know my young lady Sir you don't indeed, you'd never know so little of
her, if you did.'

Mr Dombey, in a fury, put his hand out for the bell-rope; but there
was no bell-rope on that side of the fire, and he could not rise and
cross to the other without assistance. The quick eye of the Nipper
detected his helplessness immediately, and now, as she afterwards
observed, she felt she had got him.

'Miss Floy,' said Susan Nipper, 'is the most devoted and most
patient and most dutiful and beautiful of daughters, there ain't no
gentleman, no Sir, though as great and rich as all the greatest and
richest of England put together, but might be proud of her and would
and ought. If he knew her value right, he'd rather lose his greatness
and his fortune piece by piece and beg his way in rags from door to
door, I say to some and all, he would!' cried Susan Nipper, bursting
into tears, 'than bring the sorrow on her tender heart that I have
seen it suffer in this house!'

'Woman,' cried Mr Dombey, 'leave the room.

'Begging your pardon, not even if I am to leave the situation,
Sir,' replied the steadfast Nipper, 'in which I have been so many
years and seen so much - although I hope you'd never have the heart to
send me from Miss Floy for such a cause - will I go now till I have
said the rest, I may not be a Indian widow Sir and I am not and I
would not so become but if I once made up my mind to burn myself
alive, I'd do it! And I've made my mind up to go on.'

Which was rendered no less clear by the expression of Susan
Nipper's countenance, than by her words.

'There ain't a person in your service, Sir,' pursued the
black-eyed, 'that has always stood more in awe of you than me and you
may think how true it is when I make so bold as say that I have
hundreds and hundreds of times thought of speaking to you and never
been able to make my mind up to it till last night, but last night
decided of me.'

Mr Dombey, in a paroxysm of rage, made another grasp at the
bell-rope that was not there, and, in its absence, pulled his hair
rather than nothing.

'I have seen,' said Susan Nipper, 'Miss Floy strive and strive when
nothing but a child so sweet and patient that the best of women might
have copied from her, I've seen her sitting nights together half the
night through to help her delicate brother with his learning, I've
seen her helping him and watching him at other times - some well know
when - I've seen her, with no encouragement and no help, grow up to be
a lady, thank God! that is the grace and pride of every company she
goes in, and I've always seen her cruelly neglected and keenly feeling
of it - I say to some and all, I have! - and never said one word, but
ordering one's self lowly and reverently towards one's betters, is not
to be a worshipper of graven images, and I will and must speak!'

'Is there anybody there?' cried Mr Dombey, calling out. 'Where are
the men? where are the women? Is there no one there?'

'I left my dear young lady out of bed late last night,' said Susan,
nothing checked, 'and I knew why, for you was ill Sir and she didn't
know how ill and that was enough to make her wretched as I saw it did.
I may not be a Peacock; but I have my eyes - and I sat up a little in
my own room thinking she might be lonesome and might want me, and I
saw her steal downstairs and come to this door as if it was a guilty
thing to look at her own Pa, and then steal back again and go into
them lonely drawing-rooms, a-crying so, that I could hardly bear to
hear it. I can not bear to hear it,' said Susan Nipper, wiping her
black eyes, and fixing them undauntingly on Mr Dombey's infuriated
face. 'It's not the first time I have heard it, not by many and many a
time you don't know your own daughter, Sir, you don't know what you're
doing, Sir, I say to some and all,' cried Susan Nipper, in a final
burst, 'that it's a sinful shame!'

'Why, hoity toity!' cried the voice of Mrs Pipchin, as the black
bombazeen garments of that fair Peruvian Miner swept into the room.
'What's this, indeed?'

Susan favoured Mrs Pipchin with a look she had invented expressly
for her when they first became acquainted, and resigned the reply to
Mr Dombey.

'What's this?' repeated Mr Dombey, almost foaming. 'What's this,
Madam? You who are at the head of this household, and bound to keep it
in order, have reason to inquire. Do you know this woman?'

'I know very little good of her, Sir,' croaked Mrs Pipchin. 'How
dare you come here, you hussy? Go along with you!'

But the inflexible Nipper, merely honouring Mrs Pipchin with
another look, remained.

'Do you call it managing this establishment, Madam,' said Mr
Dombey, 'to leave a person like this at liberty to come and talk to
me! A gentleman - in his own house - in his own room - assailed with
the impertinences of women-servants!'

'Well, Sir,' returned Mrs Pipchin, with vengeance in her hard grey
eye, 'I exceedingly deplore it; nothing can be more irregular; nothing
can be more out of all bounds and reason; but I regret to say, Sir,
that this young woman is quite beyond control. She has been spoiled by
Miss Dombey, and is amenable to nobody. You know you're not,' said Mrs
Pipchin, sharply, and shaking her head at Susan Nipper. 'For shame,
you hussy! Go along with you!'

'If you find people in my service who are not to be controlled, Mrs
Pipchin,' said Mr Dombey, turning back towards the fire, 'you know
what to do with them, I presume. You know what you are here for? Take
her away!'

'Sir, I know what to do,' retorted Mrs Pipchin, 'and of course
shall do it' Susan Nipper,' snapping her up particularly short, 'a
month's warning from this hour.'

'Oh indeed!' cried Susan, loftily.

'Yes,' returned Mrs Pipchin, 'and don't smile at me, you minx, or
I'll know the reason why! Go along with you this minute!'

'I intend to go this minute, you may rely upon it,' said the
voluble Nipper. 'I have been in this house waiting on my young lady a
dozen year and I won't stop in it one hour under notice from a person
owning to the name of Pipchin trust me, Mrs P.'

'A good riddance of bad rubbish!' said that wrathful old lady. 'Get
along with you, or I'll have you carried out!'

'My comfort is,' said Susan, looking back at Mr Dombey, 'that I
have told a piece of truth this day which ought to have been told long
before and can't be told too often or too plain and that no amount of
Pipchinses - I hope the number of 'em mayn't be great' (here Mrs
Pipchin uttered a very sharp 'Go along with you!' and Miss Nipper
repeated the look) 'can unsay what I have said, though they gave a
whole year full of warnings beginning at ten o'clock in the forenoon
and never leaving off till twelve at night and died of the exhaustion
which would be a Jubilee!'

With these words, Miss Nipper preceded her foe out of the room; and
walking upstairs to her own apartments in great state, to the choking
exasperation of the ireful Pipchin, sat down among her boxes and began
to cry.

From this soft mood she was soon aroused, with a very wholesome and
refreshing effect, by the voice of Mrs Pipchin outside the door.

'Does that bold-faced slut,' said the fell Pipchin, 'intend to take
her warning, or does she not?'

Miss Nipper replied from within that the person described did not
inhabit that part of the house, but that her name was Pipchin, and she
was to be found in the housekeeper's room.

'You saucy baggage!' retorted Mrs Pipchin, rattling at the handle
of the door. 'Go along with you this minute. Pack up your things
directly! How dare you talk in this way to a gentle-woman who has seen
better days?'

To which Miss Nipper rejoined from her castle, that she pitied the
better days that had seen Mrs Pipchin; and that for her part she
considered the worst days in the year to be about that lady's mark,
except that they were much too good for her.

'But you needn't trouble yourself to make a noise at my door,' said
Susan Nipper, 'nor to contaminate the key-hole with your eye, I'm
packing up and going you may take your affidavit.'

The Dowager expressed her lively satisfaction at this intelligence,
and with some general opinions upon young hussies as a race, and
especially upon their demerits after being spoiled by Miss Dombey,
withdrew to prepare the Nipper~s wages. Susan then bestirred herself
to get her trunks in order, that she might take an immediate and
dignified departure; sobbing heartily all the time, as she thought of
Florence.

The object of her regret was not long in coming to her, for the
news soon spread over the house that Susan Nipper had had a
disturbance with Mrs Pipchin, and that they had both appealed to Mr
Dombey, and that there had been an unprecedented piece of work in Mr
Dombey's room, and that Susan was going. The latter part of this
confused rumour, Florence found to be so correct, that Susan had
locked the last trunk and was sitting upon it with her bonnet on, when
she came into her room.

'Susan!' cried Florence. 'Going to leave me! You!'

'Oh for goodness gracious sake, Miss Floy,' said Susan, sobbing,
'don't speak a word to me or I shall demean myself before them'
Pipchinses, and I wouldn't have 'em see me cry Miss Floy for worlds!'

'Susan!' said Florence. 'My dear girl, my old friend! What shall I
do without you! Can you bear to go away so?'

'No-n-o-o, my darling dear Miss Floy, I can't indeed,' sobbed
Susan. 'But it can't be helped, I've done my duty' Miss, I have
indeed. It's no fault of mine. I am quite resigned. I couldn't stay my
month or I could never leave you then my darling and I must at last as
well as at first, don't speak to me Miss Floy, for though I'm pretty
firm I'm not a marble doorpost, my own dear.'

'What is it? Why is it?' said Florence, 'Won't you tell me?' For
Susan was shaking her head.

'No-n-no, my darling,' returned Susan. 'Don't ask me, for I
mustn't, and whatever you do don't put in a word for me to stop, for
it couldn't be and you'd only wrong yourself, and so God bless you my
own precious and forgive me any harm I have done, or any temper I have
showed in all these many years!'

With which entreaty, very heartily delivered, Susan hugged her
mistress in her arms.

'My darling there's a many that may come to serve you and be glad
to serve you and who'll serve you well and true,' said Susan, 'but
there can't be one who'll serve you so affectionate as me or love you
half as dearly, that's my comfort' Good-bye, sweet Miss Floy!'

'Where will you go, Susan?' asked her weeping mistress.

'I've got a brother down in the country Miss - a farmer in Essex
said the heart-broken Nipper, 'that keeps ever so many co-o-ows and
pigs and I shall go down there by the coach and sto-op with him, and
don't mind me, for I've got money in the Savings Banks my dear, and
needn't take another service just yet, which I couldn't, couldn't,
couldn't do, my heart's own mistress!' Susan finished with a burst of
sorrow, which was opportunely broken by the voice of Mrs Pipchin
talking downstairs; on hearing which, she dried her red and swollen
eyes, and made a melancholy feint of calling jauntily to Mr Towlinson
to fetch a cab and carry down her boxes.

Florence, pale and hurried and distressed, but withheld from
useless interference even here, by her dread of causing any new
division between her father and his wife (whose stern, indignant face
had been a warning to her a few moments since), and by her
apprehension of being in some way unconsciously connected already with
the dismissal of her old servant and friend, followed, weeping,
downstairs to Edith's dressing-room, whither Susan betook herself to
make her parting curtsey.

'Now, here's the cab, and here's the boxes, get along with you,
do!' said Mrs Pipchin, presenting herself at the same moment. 'I beg
your pardon, Ma'am, but Mr Dombey's orders are imperative.'

Edith, sitting under the hands of her maid - she was going out to
dinner - preserved her haughty face, and took not the least notice.

'There's your money,' said Mrs Pipchin, who in pursuance of her
system, and in recollection of the Mines, was accustomed to rout the
servants about, as she had routed her young Brighton boarders; to the
everlasting acidulation of Master Bitherstone, 'and the sooner this
house sees your back the better.

Susan had no spirits even for the look that belonged to Ma Pipchin
by right; so she dropped her curtsey to Mrs Dombey (who inclined her
head without one word, and whose eye avoided everyone but Florence),
and gave one last parting hug to her young mistress, and received her
parting embrace in return. Poor Susan's face at this crisis, in the
intensity of her feelings and the determined suffocation of her sobs,
lest one should become audible and be a triumph to Mrs Pipchin,
presented a series of the most extraordinary physiognomical phenomena
ever witnessed.

'I beg your pardon, Miss, I'm sure,' said Towlinson, outside the
door with the boxes, addressing Florence, 'but Mr Toots is in the
drawing-room, and sends his compliments, and begs to know how Diogenes
and Master is.'

Quick as thought, Florence glided out and hastened downstairs,
where Mr Toots, in the most splendid vestments, was breathing very
hard with doubt and agitation on the subject of her coming.

'Oh, how de do, Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots, 'God bless my soul!'

This last ejaculation was occasioned by Mr Toots's deep concern at
the distress he saw in Florence's face; which caused him to stop short
in a fit of chuckles, and become an image of despair.

'Dear Mr Toots,' said Florence, 'you are so friendly to me, and so
honest, that I am sure I may ask a favour of you.

'Miss Dombey,' returned Mr Toots, 'if you'll only name one, you'll
- you'll give me an appetite. To which,' said Mr Toots, with some
sentiment, 'I have long been a stranger.

'Susan, who is an old friend of mine, the oldest friend I have,'
said Florence, 'is about to leave here suddenly, and quite alone, poor
girl. She is going home, a little way into the country. Might I ask
you to take care of her until she is in the coach?'

'Miss Dombey,' returned Mr Toots, 'you really do me an honour and a
kindness. This proof of your confidence, after the manner in which I
was Beast enough to conduct myself at Brighton - '

'Yes,' said Florence, hurriedly - 'no - don't think of that. Then
would you have the kindness to - to go? and to be ready to meet her
when she comes out? Thank you a thousand times! You ease my mind so
much. She doesn't seem so desolate. You cannot think how grateful I
feel to you, or what a good friend I am sure you are!' and Florence in
her earnestness thanked him again and again; and Mr Toots, in his
earnestness, hurried away - but backwards, that he might lose no
glimpse of her.

Florence had not the courage to go out, when she saw poor Susan in
the hall, with Mrs Pipchin driving her forth, and Diogenes jumping
about her, and terrifying Mrs Pipchin to the last degree by making
snaps at her bombazeen skirts, and howling with anguish at the sound
of her voice - for the good duenna was the dearest and most cherished
aversion of his breast. But she saw Susan shake hands with the
servants all round, and turn once to look at her old home; and she saw
Diogenes bound out after the cab, and want to follow it, and testify
an impossibility of conviction that he had no longer any property in
the fare; and the door was shut, and the hurry over, and her tears
flowed fast for the loss of an old friend, whom no one could replace.
No one. No one.

Mr Toots, like the leal and trusty soul he was, stopped the
cabriolet in a twinkling, and told Susan Nipper of his commission, at
which she cried more than before.

'Upon my soul and body!' said Mr Toots, taking his seat beside her.
'I feel for you. Upon my word and honour I think you can hardly know
your own feelings better than I imagine them. I can conceive nothing
more dreadful than to have to leave Miss Dombey.'

Susan abandoned herself to her grief now, and it really was
touching to see her.

'I say,' said Mr Toots, 'now, don't! at least I mean now do, you
know!'

'Do what, Mr Toots!' cried Susan.

'Why, come home to my place, and have some dinner before you
start,' said Mr Toots. 'My cook's a most respectable woman - one of
the most motherly people I ever saw - and she'll be delighted to make
you comfortable. Her son,' said Mr Toots, as an additional
recommendation, 'was educated in the Bluecoat School,' and blown up in
a powder-mill.'

Susan accepting this kind offer, Mr Toots conducted her to his
dwelling, where they were received by the Matron in question who fully
justified his character of her, and by the Chicken who at first
supposed, on seeing a lady in the vehicle, that Mr Dombey had been
doubled up, ably to his old recommendation, and Miss Dombey abducted.
This gentleman awakened in Miss Nipper some considerable astonishment;
for, having been defeated by the Larkey Boy, his visage was in a state
of such great dilapidation, as to be hardly presentable in society
with comfort to the beholders. The Chicken himself attributed this
punishment to his having had the misfortune to get into Chancery early
in the proceedings, when he was severely fibbed by the Larkey one, and
heavily grassed. But it appeared from the published records of that
great contest that the Larkey Boy had had it all his own way from the
beginning, and that the Chicken had been tapped, and bunged, and had
received pepper, and had been made groggy, and had come up piping, and
had endured a complication of similar strange inconveniences, until he
had been gone into and finished.

After a good repast, and much hospitality, Susan set out for the
coach-office in another cabriolet, with Mr Toots inside, as before,
and the Chicken on the box, who, whatever distinction he conferred on
the little party by the moral weight and heroism of his character, was
scarcely ornamental to it, physically speaking, on account of his
plasters; which were numerous. But the Chicken had registered a vow,
in secret, that he would never leave Mr Toots (who was secretly pining
to get rid of him), for any less consideration than the good-will and
fixtures of a public-house; and being ambitious to go into that line,
and drink himself to death as soon as possible, he felt it his cue to
make his company unacceptable.

The night-coach by which Susan was to go, was on the point of
departure. Mr Toots having put her inside, lingered by the window,
irresolutely, until the driver was about to mount; when, standing on
the step, and putting in a face that by the light of the lamp was
anxious and confused, he said abruptly:

'I say, Susan! Miss Dombey, you know - '

'Yes, Sir.'

'Do you think she could - you know - eh?'

'I beg your pardon, Mr Toots,' said Susan, 'but I don't hear you.

'Do you think she could be brought, you know - not exactly at once,
but in time - in a long time - to - to love me, you know? There!' said
poor Mr Toots.

'Oh dear no!' returned Susan, shaking her head. 'I should say,
never. Never!'

'Thank'ee!' said Mr Toots. 'It's of no consequence. Good-night.
It's of no consequence, thank'ee!'



CHAPTER 45.

The Trusty Agent



Edith went out alone that day, and returned home early. It was but
a few minutes after ten o'clock, when her carriage rolled along the
street in which she lived.

There was the same enforced composure on her face, that there had
been when she was dressing; and the wreath upon her head encircled the
same cold and steady brow. But it would have been better to have seen
its leaves and flowers reft into fragments by her passionate hand, or
rendered shapeless by the fitful searches of a throbbing and
bewildered brain for any resting-place, than adorning such
tranquillity. So obdurate, so unapproachable, so unrelenting, one
would have thought that nothing could soften such a woman's nature,
and that everything in life had hardened it.

Arrived at her own door, she was alighting, when some one coming
quietly from the hall, and standing bareheaded, offered her his arm.
The servant being thrust aside, she had no choice but to touch it; and
she then knew whose arm it was.

'How is your patient, Sir?' she asked, with a curled lip.

'He is better,' returned Carker. 'He is doing very well. I have
left him for the night.'

She bent her head, and was passing up the staircase, when he
followed and said, speaking at the bottom:

'Madam! May I beg the favour of a minute's audience?'

She stopped and turned her eyes back 'It is an unseasonable time,
Sir, and I am fatigued. Is your business urgent?'

'It is very urgent, returned Carker. 'As I am so fortunate as to
have met you, let me press my petition.'

She looked down for a moment at his glistening mouth; and he looked
up at her, standing above him in her stately dress, and thought,
again, how beautiful she was.

'Where is Miss Dombey?' she asked the servant, aloud.

'In the morning room, Ma'am.'

'Show the way there!' Turning her eyes again on the attentive
gentleman at the bottom of the stairs, and informing him with a slight
motion of her head, that he was at liberty to follow, she passed on.

'I beg your pardon! Madam! Mrs Dombey!' cried the soft and nimble
Carker, at her side in a moment. 'May I be permitted to entreat that
Miss Dombey is not present?'

She confronted him, with a quick look, but with the same
self-possession and steadiness.

'I would spare Miss Dombey,' said Carker, in a low voice, 'the
knowledge of what I have to say. At least, Madam, I would leave it to
you to decide whether she shall know of it or not. I owe that to you.
It is my bounden duty to you. After our former interview, it would be
monstrous in me if I did otherwise.'

She slowly withdrew her eyes from his face, and turning to the
servant, said, 'Some other room.' He led the way to a drawing-room,
which he speedily lighted up and then left them. While he remained,
not a word was spoken. Edith enthroned herself upon a couch by the
fire; and Mr Carker, with his hat in his hand and his eyes bent upon
the carpet, stood before her, at some little distance.

'Before I hear you, Sir,' said Edith, when the door was closed, 'I
wish you to hear me.'

'To be addressed by Mrs Dombey,' he returned, 'even in accents of
unmerited reproach, is an honour I so greatly esteem, that although I
were not her servant in all things, I should defer to such a wish,
most readily.'

'If you are charged by the man whom you have just now left, Sir;'
Mr Carker raised his eyes, as if he were going to counterfeit
surprise, but she met them, and stopped him, if such were his
intention; 'with any message to me, do not attempt to deliver it, for
I will not receive it. I need scarcely ask you if you are come on such
an errand. I have expected you some time.

'It is my misfortune,' he replied, 'to be here, wholly against my
will, for such a purpose. Allow me to say that I am here for two
purposes. That is one.'

'That one, Sir,' she returned, 'is ended. Or, if you return to it -
'

'Can Mrs Dombey believe,' said Carker, coming nearer, 'that I would
return to it in the face of her prohibition? Is it possible that Mrs
Dombey, having no regard to my unfortunate position, is so determined
to consider me inseparable from my instructor as to do me great and
wilful injustice?'

'Sir,' returned Edith, bending her dark gaze full upon him, and
speaking with a rising passion that inflated her proud nostril and her
swelling neck, and stirred the delicate white down upon a robe she
wore, thrown loosely over shoulders that could hear its snowy
neighbourhood. 'Why do you present yourself to me, as you have done,
and speak to me of love and duty to my husband, and pretend to think
that I am happily married, and that I honour him? How dare you venture
so to affront me, when you know - I do not know better, Sir: I have
seen it in your every glance, and heard it in your every word - that
in place of affection between us there is aversion and contempt, and
that I despise him hardly less than I despise myself for being his!
Injustice! If I had done justice to the torment you have made me feel,
and to my sense of the insult you have put upon me, I should have
slain you!'

She had asked him why he did this. Had she not been blinded by her
pride and wrath, and self-humiliation, - which she was, fiercely as
she bent her gaze upon him, - she would have seen the answer in his
face. To bring her to this declaration.

She saw it not, and cared not whether it was there or no. She saw
only the indignities and struggles she had undergone and had to
undergo, and was writhing under them. As she sat looking fixedly at
them, rather than at him, she plucked the feathers from a pinion of
some rare and beautiful bird, which hung from her wrist by a golden
thread, to serve her as a fan, and rained them on the ground.

He did not shrink beneath her gaze, but stood, until such outward
signs of her anger as had escaped her control subsided, with the air
of a man who had his sufficient reply in reserve and would presently
deliver it. And he then spoke, looking straight into her kindling
eyes.

'Madam,' he said, 'I know, and knew before to-day, that I have
found no favour with you; and I knew why. Yes. I knew why. You have
spoken so openly to me; I am so relieved by the possession of your
confidence - '

'Confidence!' she repeated, with disdain.

He passed it over.

' - that I will make no pretence of concealment. I did see from the
first, that there was no affection on your part for Mr Dombey - how
could it possibly exist between such different subjects? And I have
seen, since, that stronger feelings than indifference have been
engendered in your breast - how could that possibly be otherwise,
either, circumstanced as you have been? But was it for me to presume
to avow this knowledge to you in so many words?'

'Was it for you, Sir,' she replied, 'to feign that other belief,
and audaciously to thrust it on me day by day?'

'Madam, it was,' he eagerly retorted. 'If I had done less, if I had
done anything but that, I should not be speaking to you thus; and I
foresaw - who could better foresee, for who has had greater experience
of Mr Dombey than myself? - that unless your character should prove to
be as yielding and obedient as that of his first submissive lady,
which I did not believe - '

A haughty smile gave him reason to observe that he might repeat
this.

'I say, which I did not believe, - the time was likely to come,
when such an understanding as we have now arrived at, would be
serviceable.'

'Serviceable to whom, Sir?' she demanded scornfully.

'To you. I will not add to myself, as warning me to refrain even
from that limited commendation of Mr Dombey, in which I can honestly
indulge, in order that I may not have the misfortune of saying
anything distasteful to one whose aversion and contempt,' with great
expression, 'are so keen.'

'Is it honest in you, Sir,' said Edith, 'to confess to your
"limited commendation," and to speak in that tone of disparagement,
even of him: being his chief counsellor and flatterer!'

'Counsellor, - yes,' said Carker. 'Flatterer, - no. A little
reservation I fear I must confess to. But our interest and convenience
commonly oblige many of us to make professions that we cannot feel. We
have partnerships of interest and convenience, friendships of interest
and convenience, dealings of interest and convenience, marriages of
interest and convenience, every day.'

She bit her blood-red lip; but without wavering in the dark, stern
watch she kept upon him.

'Madam,' said Mr Carker, sitting down in a chair that was near her,
with an air of the most profound and most considerate respect, 'why
should I hesitate now, being altogether devoted to your service, to
speak plainly? It was natural that a lady, endowed as you are, should
think it feasible to change her husband's character in some respects,
and mould him to a better form.'

'It was not natural to me, Sir,' she rejoined. 'I had never any
expectation or intention of that kind.'

The proud undaunted face showed him it was resolute to wear no mask
he offered, but was set upon a reckless disclosure of itself,
indifferent to any aspect in which it might present itself to such as
he.

'At least it was natural,' he resumed, 'that you should deem it
quite possible to live with Mr Dombey as his wife, at once without
submitting to him, and without coming into such violent collision with
him. But, Madam, you did not know Mr Dombey (as you have since
ascertained), when you thought that. You did not know how exacting and
how proud he is, or how he is, if I may say so, the slave of his own
greatness, and goes yoked to his own triumphal car like a beast of
burden, with no idea on earth but that it is behind him and is to be
drawn on, over everything and through everything.'

His teeth gleamed through his malicious relish of this conceit, as
he went on talking:

'Mr Dombey is really capable of no more true consideration for you,
Madam, than for me. The comparison is an extreme one; I intend it to
be so; but quite just. Mr Dombey, in the plenitude of his power, asked
me - I had it from his own lips yesterday morning - to be his
go-between to you, because he knows I am not agreeable to you, and
because he intends that I shall be a punishment for your contumacy;
and besides that, because he really does consider, that I, his paid
servant, am an ambassador whom it is derogatory to the dignity - not
of the lady to whom I have the happiness of speaking; she has no
existence in his mind - but of his wife, a part of himself, to
receive. You may imagine how regardless of me, how obtuse to the
possibility of my having any individual sentiment or opinion he is,
when he tells me, openly, that I am so employed. You know how
perfectly indifferent to your feelings he is, when he threatens you
with such a messenger. As you, of course, have not forgotten that he
did.'

She watched him still attentively. But he watched her too; and he
saw that this indication of a knowledge on his part, of something that
had passed between herself and her husband, rankled and smarted in her
haughty breast, like a poisoned arrow.

'I do not recall all this to widen the breach between yourself and
Mr Dombey, Madam - Heaven forbid! what would it profit me? - but as an
example of the hopelessness of impressing Mr Dombey with a sense that
anybody is to be considered when he is in question. We who are about
him, have, in our various positions, done our part, I daresay, to
confirm him in his way of thinking; but if we had not done so, others
would - or they would not have been about him; and it has always been,
from the beginning, the very staple of his life. Mr Dombey has had to
deal, in short, with none but submissive and dependent persons, who
have bowed the knee, and bent the neck, before him. He has never known
what it is to have angry pride and strong resentment opposed to him.'

'But he will know it now!' she seemed to say; though her lips did
not part, nor her eyes falter. He saw the soft down tremble once
again, and he saw her lay the plumage of the beautiful bird against
her bosom for a moment; and he unfolded one more ring of the coil into
which he had gathered himself.

'Mr Dombey, though a most honourable gentleman,' he said, 'is so
prone to pervert even facts to his own view, when he is at all
opposed, in consequence of the warp in his mind, that he - can I give
a better instance than this! - he sincerely believes (you will excuse
the folly of what I am about to say; it not being mine) that his
severe expression of opinion to his present wife, on a certain special
occasion she may remember, before the lamented death of Mrs Skewton,
produced a withering effect, and for the moment quite subdued her!'

Edith laughed. How harshly and unmusically need not be described.
It is enough that he was glad to hear her.

'Madam,' he resumed, 'I have done with this. Your own opinions are
so strong, and, I am persuaded, so unalterable,' he repeated those
words slowly and with great emphasis, 'that I am almost afraid to
incur your displeasure anew, when I say that in spite of these defects
and my full knowledge of them, I have become habituated to Mr Dombey,
and esteem him. But when I say so, it is not, believe me, for the mere
sake of vaunting a feeling that is so utterly at variance with your
own, and for which you can have no sympathy' - oh how distinct and
plain and emphasized this was! - 'but to give you an assurance of the
zeal with which, in this unhappy matter, I am yours, and the
indignation with which I regard the part I am to fill!'

She sat as if she were afraid to take her eyes from his face.

And now to unwind the last ring of the coil!

'It is growing late,' said Carker, after a pause, 'and you are, as
you said, fatigued. But the second object of this interview, I must
not forget. I must recommend you, I must entreat you in the most
earnest manner, for sufficient reasons that I have, to be cautious in
your demonstrations of regard for Miss Dombey.'

'Cautious! What do you mean?'

'To be careful how you exhibit too much affection for that young
lady.'

'Too much affection, Sir!' said Edith, knitting her broad brow and
rising. 'Who judges my affection, or measures it out? You?'

'It is not I who do so.' He was, or feigned to be, perplexed.

'Who then?'

'Can you not guess who then?'

'I do not choose to guess,' she answered.

'Madam,' he said after a little hesitation; meantime they had been,
and still were, regarding each other as before; 'I am in a difficulty
here. You have told me you will receive no message, and you have
forbidden me to return to that subject; but the two subjects are so
closely entwined, I find, that unless you will accept this vague
caution from one who has now the honour to possess your confidence,
though the way to it has been through your displeasure, I must violate
the injunction you have laid upon me.'

'You know that you are free to do so, Sir,' said Edith. 'Do it.'

So pale, so trembling, so impassioned! He had not miscalculated the
effect then!

'His instructions were,' he said, in a low voice, 'that I should
inform you that your demeanour towards Miss Dombey is not agreeable to
him. That it suggests comparisons to him which are not favourable to
himself. That he desires it may be wholly changed; and that if you are
in earnest, he is confident it will be; for your continued show of
affection will not benefit its object.'

'That is a threat,' she said.

'That is a threat,' he answered, in his voiceless manner of assent:
adding aloud, 'but not directed against you.'

Proud, erect, and dignified, as she stood confronting him; and
looking through him as she did, with her full bright flashing eye; and
smiling, as she was, with scorn and bitterness; she sunk as if the
ground had dropped beneath her, and in an instant would have fallen on
the floor, but that he caught her in his arms. As instantaneously she
threw him off, the moment that he touched her, and, drawing back,
confronted him again, immoveable, with her hand stretched out.

'Please to leave me. Say no more to-night.'

'I feel the urgency of this,' said Mr Carker, 'because it is
impossible to say what unforeseen consequences might arise, or how
soon, from your being unacquainted with his state of mind. I
understand Miss Dombey is concerned, now, at the dismissal of her old
servant, which is likely to have been a minor consequence in itself.
You don't blame me for requesting that Miss Dombey might not be
present. May I hope so?'

'I do not. Please to leave me, Sir.'

'I knew that your regard for the young lady, which is very sincere
and strong, I am well persuaded, would render it a great unhappiness
to you, ever to be a prey to the reflection that you had injured her
position and ruined her future hopes,' said Carker hurriedly, but
eagerly.

'No more to-night. Leave me, if you please.'

'I shall be here constantly in my attendance upon him, and in the
transaction of business matters. You will allow me to see you again,
and to consult what should be done, and learn your wishes?'

She motioned him towards the door.

'I cannot even decide whether to tell him I have spoken to you yet;
or to lead him to suppose that I have deferred doing so, for want of
opportunity, or for any other reason. It will be necessary that you
should enable me to consult with you very soon.

'At any time but now,' she answered.

'You will understand, when I wish to see you, that Miss Dombey is
not to be present; and that I seek an interview as one who has the
happiness to possess your confidence, and who comes to render you
every assistance in his power, and, perhaps, on many occasions, to
ward off evil from her?'

Looking at him still with the same apparent dread of releasing him
for a moment from the influence of her steady gaze, whatever that
might be, she answered, 'Yes!' and once more bade him go.

He bowed, as if in compliance; but turning back, when he had nearly
reached the door, said:

'I am forgiven, and have explained my fault. May I - for Miss
Dombey's sake, and for my own - take your hand before I go?'

She gave him the gloved hand she had maimed last night. He took it
in one of his, and kissed it, and withdrew. And when he had closed the
door, he waved the hand with which he had taken hers, and thrust it in
his breast.

Edith saw no one that night, but locked her door, and kept herself

alone.

She did not weep; she showed no greater agitation, outwardly, than
when she was riding home. She laid as proud a head upon her pillow as
she had borne in her carriage; and her prayer ran thus:

'May this man be a liar! For if he has spoken truth, she is lost to
me, and I have no hope left!'

This man, meanwhile, went home musing to bed, thinking, with a
dainty pleasure, how imperious her passion was, how she had sat before
him in her beauty, with the dark eyes that had never turned away but
once; how the white down had fluttered; how the bird's feathers had
been strewn upon the ground.



CHAPTER 46.

Recognizant and Reflective



Among sundry minor alterations in Mr Carker's life and habits that
began to take place at this time, none was more remarkable than the
extraordinary diligence with which he applied himself to business, and
the closeness with which he investigated every detail that the affairs
of the House laid open to him. Always active and penetrating in such
matters, his lynx-eyed vigilance now increased twenty-fold. Not only
did his weary watch keep pace with every present point that every day
presented to him in some new form, but in the midst of these
engrossing occupations he found leisure - that is, he made it - to
review the past transactions of the Firm, and his share in them,
during a long series of years. Frequently when the clerks were all
gone, the offices dark and empty, and all similar places of business
shut up, Mr Carker, with the whole anatomy of the iron room laid bare
before him, would explore the mysteries of books and papers, with the
patient progress of a man who was dissecting the minutest nerves and
fibres of his subject. Perch, the messenger, who usually remained on
these occasions, to entertain himself with the perusal of the Price
Current by the light of one candle, or to doze over the fire in the
outer office, at the imminent risk every moment of diving head
foremost into the coal-box, could not withhold the tribute of his
admiration from this zealous conduct, although it much contracted his
domestic enjoyments; and again, and again, expatiated to Mrs Perch
(now nursing twins) on the industry and acuteness of their managing
gentleman in the City.

The same increased and sharp attention that Mr Carker bestowed on
the business of the House, he applied to his own personal affairs.
Though not a partner in the concern - a distinction hitherto reserved
solely to inheritors of the great name of Dombey - he was in the
receipt of some percentage on its dealings; and, participating in all
its facilities for the employment of money to advantage, was
considered, by the minnows among the tritons of the East, a rich man.
It began to be said, among these shrewd observers, that Jem Carker, of
Dombey's, was looking about him to see what he was worth; and that he
was calling in his money at a good time, like the long-headed fellow
he was; and bets were even offered on the Stock Exchange that Jem was
going to marry a rich widow.

Yet these cares did not in the least interfere with Mr Carker's
watching of his chief, or with his cleanness, neatness, sleekness, or
any cat-like quality he possessed. It was not so much that there was a
change in him, in reference to any of his habits, as that the whole
man was intensified. Everything that had been observable in him
before, was observable now, but with a greater amount of
concentration. He did each single thing, as if he did nothing else - a
pretty certain indication in a man of that range of ability and
purpose, that he is doing something which sharpens and keeps alive his
keenest powers.

The only decided alteration in him was, that as he rode to and fro
along the streets, he would fall into deep fits of musing, like that
in which he had come away from Mr Dombey's house, on the morning of
that gentleman's disaster. At such times, he would keep clear of the
obstacles in his way, mechanically; and would appear to see and hear
nothing until arrival at his destination, or some sudden chance or
effort roused him.

Walking his white-legged horse thus, to the counting-house of
Dombey and Son one day, he was as unconscious of the observation of
two pairs of women's eyes, as of the fascinated orbs of Rob the
Grinder, who, in waiting a street's length from the appointed place,
as a demonstration of punctuality, vainly touched and retouched his
hat to attract attention, and trotted along on foot, by his master's
side, prepared to hold his stirrup when he should alight.

'See where he goes!' cried one of these two women, an old creature,
who stretched out her shrivelled arm to point him out to her
companion, a young woman, who stood close beside her, withdrawn like
herself into a gateway.

Mrs Brown's daughter looked out, at this bidding on the part of Mrs
Brown; and there were wrath and vengeance in her face.

'I never thought to look at him again,' she said, in a low voice;
'but it's well I should, perhaps. I see. I see!'

'Not changed!' said the old woman, with a look of eager malice.

'He changed!' returned the other. 'What for? What has he suffered?
There is change enough for twenty in me. Isn't that enough?'

'See where he goes!' muttered the old woman, watching her daughter
with her red eyes; 'so easy and so trim a-horseback, while we are in
the mud.'

'And of it,' said her daughter impatiently. 'We are mud, underneath
his horse's feet. What should we be?'

In the intentness with which she looked after him again, she made a
hasty gesture with her hand when the old woman began to reply, as if
her view could be obstructed by mere sound. Her mother watching her,
and not him, remained silent; until her kindling glance subsided, and
she drew a long breath, as if in the relief of his being gone.

'Deary!' said the old woman then. 'Alice! Handsome gall Ally!' She
gently shook her sleeve to arouse her attention. 'Will you let him go
like that, when you can wring money from him? Why, it's a wickedness,
my daughter.'

'Haven't I told you, that I will not have money from him?' she
returned. 'And don't you yet believe me? Did I take his sister's
money? Would I touch a penny, if I knew it, that had gone through his
white hands - unless it was, indeed, that I could poison it, and send
it back to him? Peace, mother, and come away.

'And him so rich?' murmured the old woman. 'And us so poor!'

'Poor in not being able to pay him any of the harm we owe him,'
returned her daughter. 'Let him give me that sort of riches, and I'll
take them from him, and use them. Come away. Its no good looking at
his horse. Come away, mother!'

But the old woman, for whom the spectacle of Rob the Grinder
returning down the street, leading the riderless horse, appeared to
have some extraneous interest that it did not possess in itself,
surveyed that young man with the utmost earnestness; and seeming to
have whatever doubts she entertained, resolved as he drew nearer,
glanced at her daughter with brightened eyes and with her finger on
her lip, and emerging from the gateway at the moment of his passing,
touched him on the shoulder.

'Why, where's my sprightly Rob been, all this time!' she said, as
he turned round.

The sprightly Rob, whose sprightliness was very much diminished by
the salutation, looked exceedingly dismayed, and said, with the water
rising in his eyes:

'Oh! why can't you leave a poor cove alone, Misses Brown, when he's
getting an honest livelihood and conducting himself respectable? What
do you come and deprive a cove of his character for, by talking to him
in the streets, when he's taking his master's horse to a honest stable
- a horse you'd go and sell for cats' and dogs' meat if you had your
way! Why, I thought,' said the Grinder, producing his concluding
remark as if it were the climax of all his injuries, 'that you was
dead long ago!'

'This is the way,' cried the old woman, appealing to her daughter,
'that he talks to me, who knew him weeks and months together, my
deary, and have stood his friend many and many a time among the
pigeon-fancying tramps and bird-catchers.'

'Let the birds be, will you, Misses Brown?' retorted Rob, in a tone
of the acutest anguish. 'I think a cove had better have to do with
lions than them little creeturs, for they're always flying back in
your face when you least expect it. Well, how d'ye do and what do you
want?' These polite inquiries the Grinder uttered, as it were under
protest, and with great exasperation and vindictiveness.

'Hark how he speaks to an old friend, my deary!' said Mrs Brown,
again appealing to her daughter. 'But there's some of his old friends
not so patient as me. If I was to tell some that he knows, and has
spotted and cheated with, where to find him - '

'Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?' interrupted the
miserable Grinder, glancing quickly round, as though he expected to
see his master's teeth shining at his elbow. 'What do you take a
pleasure in ruining a cove for? At your time of life too! when you
ought to be thinking of a variety of things!'

'What a gallant horse!' said the old woman, patting the animal's
neck.

'Let him alone, will you, Misses Brown?' cried Rob, pushing away
her hand. 'You're enough to drive a penitent cove mad!'

'Why, what hurt do I do him, child?' returned the old woman.

'Hurt?' said Rob. 'He's got a master that would find it out if he
was touched with a straw.' And he blew upon the place where the old
woman's hand had rested for a moment, and smoothed it gently with his
finger, as if he seriously believed what he said.

The old woman looking back to mumble and mouth at her daughter, who
followed, kept close to Rob's heels as he walked on with the bridle in
his hand; and pursued the conversation.

'A good place, Rob, eh?' said she. 'You're in luck, my child.'

'Oh don't talk about luck, Misses Brown,' returned the wretched
Grinder, facing round and stopping. 'If you'd never come, or if you'd
go away, then indeed a cove might be considered tolerable lucky. Can't
you go along, Misses Brown, and not foller me!' blubbered Rob, with
sudden defiance. 'If the young woman's a friend of yours, why don't
she take you away, instead of letting you make yourself so
disgraceful!'

'What!' croaked the old woman, putting her face close to his, with
a malevolent grin upon it that puckered up the loose skin down in her
very throat. 'Do you deny your old chum! Have you lurked to my house
fifty times, and slept sound in a corner when you had no other bed but
the paving-stones, and do you talk to me like this! Have I bought and
sold with you, and helped you in my way of business, schoolboy, sneak,
and what not, and do you tell me to go along? Could I raise a crowd of
old company about you to-morrow morning, that would follow you to ruin
like copies of your own shadow, and do you turn on me with your bold
looks! I'll go. Come, Alice.'

'Stop, Misses Brown!' cried the distracted Grinder. 'What are you
doing of? Don't put yourself in a passion! Don't let her go, if you
please. I haven't meant any offence. I said "how d'ye do," at first,
didn't I? But you wouldn't answer. How you do? Besides,' said Rob
piteously, 'look here! How can a cove stand talking in the street with
his master's prad a wanting to be took to be rubbed down, and his
master up to every individgle thing that happens!'

The old woman made a show of being partially appeased, but shook
her head, and mouthed and muttered still.

'Come along to the stables, and have a glass of something that's
good for you, Misses Brown, can't you?' said Rob, 'instead of going
on, like that, which is no good to you, nor anybody else. Come along
with her, will you be so kind?' said Rob. 'I'm sure I'm delighted to
see her, if it wasn't for the horse!'

With this apology, Rob turned away, a rueful picture of despair,
and walked his charge down a bye street' The old woman, mouthing at
her daughter, followed close upon him. The daughter followed.

Turning into a silent little square or court-yard that had a great
church tower rising above it, and a packer's warehouse, and a
bottle-maker's warehouse, for its places of business, Rob the Grinder
delivered the white-legged horse to the hostler of a quaint stable at
the corner; and inviting Mrs Brown and her daughter to seat themselves
upon a stone bench at the gate of that establishment, soon reappeared
from a neighbouring public-house with a pewter measure and a glass.

'Here's master - Mr Carker, child!' said the old woman, slowly, as
her sentiment before drinking. 'Lord bless him!'

'Why, I didn't tell you who he was,' observed Rob, with staring
eyes.

'We know him by sight,' said Mrs Brown, whose working mouth and
nodding head stopped for the moment, in the fixedness of her
attention. 'We saw him pass this morning, afore he got off his horse;
when you were ready to take it.'

'Ay, ay,' returned Rob, appearing to wish that his readiness had
carried him to any other place. - 'What's the matter with her? Won't
she drink?'

This inquiry had reference to Alice, who, folded in her cloak, sat
a little apart, profoundly inattentive to his offer of the replenished
glass.

The old woman shook her head. 'Don't mind her,' she said; 'she's a
strange creetur, if you know'd her, Rob. But Mr Carker

'Hush!' said Rob, glancing cautiously up at the packer's, and at
the bottle-maker's, as if, from any one of the tiers of warehouses, Mr
Carker might be looking down. 'Softly.'

'Why, he ain't here!' cried Mrs Brown.

'I don't know that,' muttered Rob, whose glance even wandered to
the church tower, as if he might be there, with a supernatural power
of hearing.

'Good master?' inquired Mrs Brown.

Rob nodded; and added, in a low voice, 'precious sharp.'

'Lives out of town, don't he, lovey?' said the old woman.

'When he's at home,' returned Rob; 'but we don't live at home just
now.'

'Where then?' asked the old woman.

'Lodgings; up near Mr Dombey's,' returned Rob.

The younger woman fixed her eyes so searchingly upon him, and so
suddenly, that Rob was quite confounded, and offered the glass again,
but with no more effect upon her than before.

'Mr Dombey - you and I used to talk about him, sometimes, you
know,' said Rob to Mrs Brown. 'You used to get me to talk about him.'

The old woman nodded.

'Well, Mr Dombey, he's had a fall from his horse,' said Rob,
unwillingly; 'and my master has to be up there, more than usual,
either with him, or Mrs Dombey, or some of 'em; and so we've come to
town.'

'Are they good friends, lovey?'asked the old woman.

'Who?' retorted Rob.

'He and she?'

'What, Mr and Mrs Dombey?' said Rob. 'How should I know!'

'Not them - Master and Mrs Dombey, chick,' replied the old woman,
coaxingly.

'I don't know,' said Rob, looking round him again. 'I suppose so.
How curious you are, Misses Brown! Least said, soonest mended.'

'Why there's no harm in it!' exclaimed the old woman, with a laugh,
and a clap of her hands. 'Sprightly Rob, has grown tame since he has
been well off! There's no harm in It.

'No, there's no harm in it, I know,' returned Rob, with the same
distrustful glance at the packer's and the bottle-maker's, and the
church; 'but blabbing, if it's only about the number of buttons on my
master's coat, won't do. I tell you it won't do with him. A cove had
better drown himself. He says so. I shouldn't have so much as told you
what his name was, if you hadn't known it. Talk about somebody else.'

As Rob took another cautious survey of the yard, the old woman made
a secret motion to her daughter. It was momentary, but the daughter,
with a slight look of intelligence, withdrew her eyes from the boy's
face, and sat folded in her cloak as before.

'Rob, lovey!' said the old woman, beckoning him to the other end of
the bench. 'You were always a pet and favourite of mine. Now, weren't
you? Don't you know you were?'

'Yes, Misses Brown,' replied the Grinder, with a very bad grace.

'And you could leave me!' said the old woman, flinging her arms
about his neck. 'You could go away, and grow almost out of knowledge,
and never come to tell your poor old friend how fortunate you were,
proud lad! Oho, Oho!'

'Oh here's a dreadful go for a cove that's got a master wide awake
in the neighbourhood!' exclaimed the wretched Grinder. 'To be howled
over like this here!'

'Won't you come and see me, Robby?' cried Mrs Brown. 'Oho, won't
you ever come and see me?'

'Yes, I tell you! Yes, I will!' returned the Grinder.

'That's my own Rob! That's my lovey!' said Mrs Brown, drying the
tears upon her shrivelled face, and giving him a tender squeeze. 'At
the old place, Rob?'

'Yes,' replied the Grinder.

'Soon, Robby dear?' cried Mrs Brown; 'and often?'

'Yes. Yes. Yes,' replied Rob. 'I will indeed, upon my soul and
body.'

'And then,' said Mrs Brown, with her arms uplifted towards the sky,
and her head thrown back and shaking, 'if he's true to his word, I'll
never come a-near him though I know where he is, and never breathe a
syllable about him! Never!'

This ejaculation seemed a drop of comfort to the miserable Grinder,
who shook Mrs Brown by the hand upon it, and implored her with tears
in his eyes, to leave a cove and not destroy his prospects. Mrs Brown,
with another fond embrace, assented; but in the act of following her
daughter, turned back, with her finger stealthily raised, and asked in
a hoarse whisper for some money.

'A shilling, dear!' she said, with her eager avaricious face, 'or
sixpence! For old acquaintance sake. I'm so poor. And my handsome gal'
- looking over her shoulder - 'she's my gal, Rob - half starves me.

But as the reluctant Grinder put it in her hand, her daughter,
coming quietly back, caught the hand in hen, and twisted out the coin.

'What,' she said, 'mother! always money! money from the first, and
to the last' Do you mind so little what I said but now? Here. Take
it!'

The old woman uttered a moan as the money was restored, but without
in any other way opposing its restoration, hobbled at her daughter's
side out of the yard, and along the bye street upon which it opened.
The astonished and dismayed Rob staring after them, saw that they
stopped, and fell to earnest conversation very soon; and more than
once observed a darkly threatening action of the younger woman's hand
(obviously having reference to someone of whom they spoke), and a
crooning feeble imitation of it on the part of Mrs Brown, that made
him earnestly hope he might not be the subject of their discourse.

With the present consolation that they were gone, and with the
prospective comfort that Mrs Brown could not live for ever, and was
not likely to live long to trouble him, the Grinder, not otherwise
regretting his misdeeds than as they were attended with such
disagreeable incidental consequences, composed his ruffled features to
a more serene expression by thinking of the admirable manner in which
he had disposed of Captain Cuttle (a reflection that seldom failed to
put him in a flow of spirits), and went to the Dombey Counting House
to receive his master's orders.

There his master, so subtle and vigilant of eye, that Rob quaked
before him, more than half expecting to be taxed with Mrs Brown, gave
him the usual morning's box of papers for Mr Dombey, and a note for
Mrs Dombey: merely nodding his head as an enjoinder to be careful, and
to use dispatch - a mysterious admonition, fraught in the Grinder's
imagination with dismal warnings and threats; and more powerful with
him than any words.

Alone again, in his own room, Mr Carker applied himself to work,
and worked all day. He saw many visitors; overlooked a number of
documents; went in and out, to and from, sundry places of mercantile
resort; and indulged in no more abstraction until the day's business
was done. But, when the usual clearance of papers from his table was
made at last, he fell into his thoughtful mood once more.

He was standing in his accustomed place and attitude, with his eyes
intently fixed upon the ground, when his brother entered to bring back
some letters that had been taken out in the course of the day. He put
them quietly on the table, and was going immediately, when Mr Carker
the Manager, whose eyes had rested on him, on his entrance, as if they
had all this time had him for the subject of their contemplation,
instead of the office-floor, said:

'Well, John Carker, and what brings you here?'

His brother pointed to the letters, and was again withdrawing.

'I wonder,' said the Manager, 'that you can come and go, without
inquiring how our master is'.

'We had word this morning in the Counting House, that Mr Dombey was
doing well,' replied his brother.

'You are such a meek fellow,' said the Manager, with a smile, -
'but you have grown so, in the course of years - that if any harm came
to him, you'd be miserable, I dare swear now.'

'I should be truly sorry, James,' returned the other.

'He would be sorry!' said the Manager, pointing at him, as if there
were some other person present to whom he was appealing. 'He would be
truly sorry! This brother of mine! This junior of the place, this
slighted piece of lumber, pushed aside with his face to the wall, like
a rotten picture, and left so, for Heaven knows how many years he's
all gratitude and respect, and devotion too, he would have me
believe!'

'I would have you believe nothing, James,' returned the other. 'Be
as just to me as you would to any other man below you. You ask a
question, and I answer it.'

'And have you nothing, Spaniel,' said the Manager, with unusual
irascibility, 'to complain of in him? No proud treatment to resent, no
insolence, no foolery of state, no exaction of any sort! What the
devil! are you man or mouse?'

'It would be strange if any two persons could be together for so
many years, especially as superior and inferior, without each having
something to complain of in the other - as he thought, at all events,
replied John Carker. 'But apart from my history here - '

'His history here!' exclaimed the Manager. 'Why, there it is. The
very fact that makes him an extreme case, puts him out of the whole
chapter! Well?'

'Apart from that, which, as you hint, gives me a reason to be
thankful that I alone (happily for all the rest) possess, surely there
is no one in the House who would not say and feel at least as much.
You do not think that anybody here would be indifferent to a mischance
or misfortune happening to the head of the House, or anything than
truly sorry for it?'

'You have good reason to be bound to him too!' said the Manager,
contemptuously. 'Why, don't you believe that you are kept here, as a
cheap example, and a famous instance of the clemency of Dombey and
Son, redounding to the credit of the illustrious House?'

'No,' replied his brother, mildly, 'I have long believed that I am
kept here for more kind and disinterested reasons.

'But you were going,' said the Manager, with the snarl of a
tiger-cat, 'to recite some Christian precept, I observed.'

'Nay, James,' returned the other, 'though the tie of brotherhood
between us has been long broken and thrown away - '

'Who broke it, good Sir?' said the Manager.

'I, by my misconduct. I do not charge it upon you.'

The Manager replied, with that mute action of his bristling mouth,
'Oh, you don't charge it upon me!' and bade him go on.

'I say, though there is not that tie between us, do not, I entreat,
assail me with unnecessary taunts, or misinterpret what I say, or
would say. I was only going to suggest to you that it would be a
mistake to suppose that it is only you, who have been selected here,
above all others, for advancement, confidence and distinction
(selected, in the beginning, I know, for your great ability and
trustfulness), and who communicate more freely with Mr Dombey than
anyone, and stand, it may be said, on equal terms with him, and have
been favoured and enriched by him - that it would be a mistake to
suppose that it is only you who are tender of his welfare and
reputation. There is no one in the House, from yourself down to the
lowest, I sincerely believe, who does not participate in that
feeling.'

'You lie!' said the Manager, red with sudden anger. 'You're a
hypocrite, John Carker, and you lie.'

'James!' cried the other, flushing in his turn. 'What do you mean
by these insulting words? Why do you so basely use them to me,
unprovoked?'

'I tell you,' said the Manager, 'that your hypocrisy and meekness -
that all the hypocrisy and meekness of this place - is not worth that
to me,' snapping his thumb and finger, 'and that I see through it as
if it were air! There is not a man employed here, standing between
myself and the lowest in place (of whom you are very considerate, and
with reason, for he is not far off), who wouldn't be glad at heart to
see his master humbled: who does not hate him, secretly: who does not
wish him evil rather than good: and who would not turn upon him, if he
had the power and boldness. The nearer to his favour, the nearer to
his insolence; the closer to him, the farther from him. That's the
creed here!'

'I don't know,' said his brother, whose roused feelings had soon
yielded to surprise, 'who may have abused your ear with such
representations; or why you have chosen to try me, rather than
another. But that you have been trying me, and tampering with me, I am
now sure. You have a different manner and a different aspect from any
that I ever saw m you. I will only say to you, once more, you are
deceived.'

'I know I am,' said the Manager. 'I have told you so.'

'Not by me,' returned his brother. 'By your informant, if you have
one. If not, by your own thoughts and suspicions.'

'I have no suspicions,' said the Manager. 'Mine are certainties.
You pusillanimous, abject, cringing dogs! All making the same show,
all canting the same story, all whining the same professions, all
harbouring the same transparent secret.'

His brother withdrew, without saying more, and shut the door as he
concluded. Mr Carker the Manager drew a chair close before the fire,
and fell to beating the coals softly with the poker.

'The faint-hearted, fawning knaves,' he muttered, with his two
shining rows of teeth laid bare. 'There's not one among them, who
wouldn't feign to be so shocked and outraged - ! Bah! There's not one
among them, but if he had at once the power, and the wit and daring to
use it, would scatter Dombey's pride and lay it low, as ruthlessly as
I rake out these ashes.'

As he broke them up and strewed them in the grate, he looked on
with a thoughtful smile at what he was doing. 'Without the same queen
beckoner too!' he added presently; 'and there is pride there, not to
be forgotten - witness our own acquaintance!' With that he fell into a
deeper reverie, and sat pondering over the blackening grate, until he
rose up like a man who had been absorbed in a book, and looking round
him took his hat and gloves, went to where his horse was waiting,
mounted, and rode away through the lighted streets, for it was
evening.

He rode near Mr Dombey's house; and falling into a walk as he
approached it, looked up at the windows The window where he had once
seen Florence sitting with her dog attracted his attention first,
though there was no light in it; but he smiled as he carried his eyes
up the tall front of the house, and seemed to leave that object
superciliously behind.

'Time was,' he said, 'when it was well to watch even your rising
little star, and know in what quarter there were clouds, to shadow you
if needful. But a planet has arisen, and you are lost in its light.'

He turned the white-legged horse round the street corner, and
sought one shining window from among those at the back of the house.
Associated with it was a certain stately presence, a gloved hand, the
remembrance how the feathers of a beautiful bird's wing had been
showered down upon the floor, and how the light white down upon a robe
had stirred and rustled, as in the rising of a distant storm. These
were the things he carried with him as he turned away again, and rode
through the darkening and deserted Parks at a quick rate.

In fatal truth, these were associated with a woman, a proud woman,
who hated him, but who by slow and sure degrees had been led on by his
craft, and her pride and resentment, to endure his company, and little
by little to receive him as one who had the privilege to talk to her
of her own defiant disregard of her own husband, and her abandonment
of high consideration for herself. They were associated with a woman
who hated him deeply, and who knew him, and who mistrusted him because
she knew him, and because he knew her; but who fed her fierce
resentment by suffering him to draw nearer and yet nearer to her every
day, in spite of the hate she cherished for him. In spite of it! For
that very reason; since in its depths, too far down for her
threatening eye to pierce, though she could see into them dimly, lay
the dark retaliation, whose faintest shadow seen once and shuddered
at, and never seen again, would have been sufficient stain upon her
soul.

Did the phantom of such a woman flit about him on his ride; true to
the reality, and obvious to him?

Yes. He saw her in his mind, exactly as she was. She bore him
company with her pride, resentment, hatred, all as plain to him as her
beauty; with nothing plainer to him than her hatred of him. He saw her
sometimes haughty and repellent at his side, and some times down among
his horse's feet, fallen and in the dust. But he always saw her as she
was, without disguise, and watched her on the dangerous way that she
was going.

And when his ride was over, and he was newly dressed, and came into
the light of her bright room with his bent head, soft voice, and
soothing smile, he saw her yet as plainly. He even suspected the
mystery of the gloved hand, and held it all the longer in his own for
that suspicion. Upon the dangerous way that she was going, he was,
still; and not a footprint did she mark upon it, but he set his own
there, straight'



CHAPTER 47.

The Thunderbolt



The barrier between Mr Dombey and his wife was not weakened by
time. Ill-assorted couple, unhappy in themselves and in each other,
bound together by no tie but the manacle that joined their fettered
hands, and straining that so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that
it wore and chafed to the bone, Time, consoler of affliction and
softener of anger, could do nothing to help them. Their pride, however
different in kind and object, was equal in degree; and, in their
flinty opposition, struck out fire between them which might smoulder
or might blaze, as circumstances were, but burned up everything within
their mutual reach, and made their marriage way a road of ashes.

Let us be just to him. In the monstrous delusion of his life,
swelling with every grain of sand that shifted in its glass, he urged
her on, he little thought to what, or considered how; but still his
feeling towards her, such as it was, remained as at first. She had the
grand demerit of unaccountably putting herself in opposition to the
recognition of his vast importance, and to the acknowledgment of her
complete submission to it, and so far it was necessary to correct and
reduce her; but otherwise he still considered her, in his cold way, a
lady capable of doing honour, if she would, to his choice and name,
and of reflecting credit on his proprietorship.

Now, she, with all her might of passionate and proud resentment,
bent her dark glance from day to day, and hour to hour - from that
night in her own chamber, when she had sat gazing at the shadows on
the wall, to the deeper night fast coming - upon one figure directing
a crowd of humiliations and exasperations against her; and that
figure, still her husband's.

Was Mr Dombey's master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an
unnatural characteristic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to
inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether,
in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be
unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow
range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile
worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people
standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has
never risen up upon the wings of a free mind - drooping and useless
soon - to see her in her comprehensive truth!

Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most
unnatural, and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or
judge admonish the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal
habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and
confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in
ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks,
in everything. But follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his
life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down into their dens,
lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon
the pavement stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights -
millions of immortal creatures have no other world on earth - at the
lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living
in the next street, stops her ears, and lisps 'I don't believe it!'
Breathe the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous
to health and life; and have every sense, conferred upon our race for
its delight and happiness, offended, sickened and disgusted, and made
a channel by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to
think of any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed, that, set in
this foetid bed, could have its natural growth, or put its little
leaves off to the sun as GOD designed it. And then, calling up some
ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its
unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being, so early, far away from
Heaven - but think a little of its having been conceived, and born and
bred, in Hell!

Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon
the health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise
from vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them
lowering in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly
on to corrupt the better portions of a town. But if the moral
pestilence that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of our
Nature, is inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how
terrible the revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety,
drunkenness, theft, murder, and a long train of nameless sins against
the natural affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the
devoted spots, and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread
contagion among the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned
fountains that flow into our hospitals and lazar-houses, inundate the
jails, and make the convict-ships swim deep, and roll across the seas,
and over-run vast continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled
to know, that where we generate disease to strike our children down
and entail itself on unborn generations, there also we breed, by the
same certain process, infancy that knows no innocence, youth without
modesty or shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering
and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear.
unnatural humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs
from thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in
the bye-ways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat
churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity,
and find it growing from such seed.

Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a mole
potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among
them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the
scenes of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air
where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social
retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker!
Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for
men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which
are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would
then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owing one
duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end, to
make the world a better place!

Not the less bright and blest would that day be for rousing some
who never have looked out upon the world of human life around them, to
a knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them
acquainted with a perversion of nature in their own contracted
sympathies and estimates; as great, and yet as natural in its
development when once begun, as the lowest degradation known.'

But no such day had ever dawned on Mr Dombey, or his wife; and the
course of each was taken.

Through six months that ensued upon his accident, they held the
same relations one towards the other. A marble rock could not have
stood more obdurately in his way than she; and no chilled spring,
lying uncheered by any ray of light in the depths of a deep cave,
could be more sullen or more cold than he.

The hope that had fluttered within her when the promise of her new
home dawned, was quite gone from the heart of Florence now. That home
was nearly two years old; and even the patient trust that was in her,
could not survive the daily blight of such experience. If she had any
lingering fancy in the nature of hope left, that Edith and her father
might be happier together, in some distant time, she had none, now,
that her father would ever love her. The little interval in which she
had imagined that she saw some small relenting in him, was forgotten
in the long remembrance of his coldness since and before, or only
remembered as a sorrowful delusion.

Florence loved him still, but, by degrees, had come to love him
rather as some dear one who had been, or who might have been, than as
the hard reality before her eyes. Something of the softened sadness
with which she loved the memory of little Paul, or of her mother,
seemed to enter now into her thoughts of him, and to make them, as it
were, a dear remembrance. Whether it was that he was dead to her, and
that partly for this reason, partly for his share in those old objects
of her affection, and partly for the long association of him with
hopes that were withered and tendernesses he had frozen, she could not
have told; but the father whom she loved began to be a vague and
dreamy idea to her: hardly more substantially connected with her real
life, than the image she would sometimes conjure up, of her dear
brother yet alive, and growing to be a man, who would protect and
cherish her.

The change, if it may be called one, had stolen on her like the
change from childhood to womanhood, and had come with it. Florence was
almost seventeen, when, in her lonely musings, she was conscious of
these thoughts.'

She was often alone now, for the old association between her and
her Mama was greatly changed. At the time of her father's accident,
and when he was lying in his room downstairs, Florence had first
observed that Edith avoided her. Wounded and shocked, and yet unable
to reconcile this with her affection when they did meet, she sought
her in her own room at night, once more.

'Mama,' said Florence, stealing softly to her side, 'have I
offended you?'

Edith answered 'No.'

'I must have done something,' said Florence. 'Tell me what it is.
You have changed your manner to me, dear Mama. I cannot say how
instantly I feel the least change; for I love you with my whole
heart.'

'As I do you,' said Edith. 'Ah, Florence, believe me never more
than now!'

'Why do you go away from me so often, and keep away?' asked
Florence. 'And why do you sometimes look so strangely on me, dear
Mama? You do so, do you not?'

Edith signified assent with her dark eyes.

'Why?' returned Florence imploringly. 'Tell me why, that I may know
how to please you better; and tell me this shall not be so any more.

'My Florence,' answered Edith, taking the hand that embraced her
neck, and looking into the eyes that looked into hers so lovingly, as
Florence knelt upon the ground before her; 'why it is, I cannot tell
you. It is neither for me to say, nor you to hear; but that it is, and
that it must be, I know. Should I do it if I did not?'

'Are we to be estranged, Mama?' asked Florence, gazing at her like
one frightened.

Edith's silent lips formed 'Yes.'

Florence looked at her with increasing fear and wonder, until she
could see her no more through the blinding tears that ran down her
face.

'Florence! my life!' said Edith, hurriedly, 'listen to me. I cannot
bear to see this grief. Be calmer. You see that I am composed, and is
it nothing to me?'

She resumed her steady voice and manner as she said the latter
words, and added presently:

'Not wholly estranged. Partially: and only that, in appearance,
Florence, for in my own breast I am still the same to you, and ever
will be. But what I do is not done for myself.'

'Is it for me, Mama?' asked Florence.

'It is enough,' said Edith, after a pause, 'to know what it is;
why, matters little. Dear Florence, it is better - it is necessary -
it must be - that our association should be less frequent. The
confidence there has been between us must be broken off.'

'When?' cried Florence. 'Oh, Mama, when?'

'Now,' said Edith.

'For all time to come?' asked Florence.

'I do not say that,' answered Edith. 'I do not know that. Nor will
I say that companionship between us is, at the best, an ill-assorted
and unholy union, of which I might have known no good could come. My
way here has been through paths that you will never tread, and my way
henceforth may lie - God knows - I do not see it - '

Her voice died away into silence; and she sat, looking at Florence,
and almost shrinking from her, with the same strange dread and wild
avoidance that Florence had noticed once before. The same dark pride
and rage succeeded, sweeping over her form and features like an angry
chord across the strings of a wild harp. But no softness or humility
ensued on that. She did not lay her head down now, and weep, and say
that she had no hope but in Florence. She held it up as if she were a
beautiful Medusa, looking on him, face to face, to strike him dead.
Yes, and she would have done it, if she had had the charm.

'Mama,' said Florence, anxiously, 'there is a change in you, in
more than what you say to me, which alarms me. Let me stay with you a
little.'

'No,' said Edith, 'no, dearest. I am best left alone now, and I do
best to keep apart from you, of all else. Ask me no questions, but
believe that what I am when I seem fickle or capricious to you, I am
not of my own will, or for myself. Believe, though we are stranger to
each other than we have been, that I am unchanged to you within.
Forgive me for having ever darkened your dark home - I am a shadow on
it, I know well - and let us never speak of this again.'

'Mama,' sobbed Florence, 'we are not to part?'

'We do this that we may not part,' said Edith. 'Ask no more. Go,
Florence! My love and my remorse go with you!'

She embraced her, and dismissed her; and as Florence passed out of
her room, Edith looked on the retiring figure, as if her good angel
went out in that form, and left her to the haughty and indignant
passions that now claimed her for their own, and set their seal upon
her brow.

From that hour, Florence and she were, as they had been, no more.
For days together, they would seldom meet, except at table, and when
Mr Dombey was present. Then Edith, imperious, inflexible, and silent,
never looked at her. Whenever Mr Carker was of the party, as he often
was, during the progress of Mr Dombey's recovery, and afterwards,
Edith held herself more removed from her, and was more distant towards
her, than at other times. Yet she and Florence never encountered, when
there was no one by, but she would embrace her as affectionately as of
old, though not with the same relenting of her proud aspect; and
often, when she had been out late, she would steal up to Florence's
room, as she had been used to do, in the dark, and whisper
'Good-night,' on her pillow. When unconscious, in her slumber, of such
visits, Florence would sometimes awake, as from a dream of those
words, softly spoken, and would seem to feel the touch of lips upon
her face. But less and less often as the months went on.

And now the void in Florence's own heart began again, indeed, to
make a solitude around her. As the image of the father whom she loved
had insensibly become a mere abstraction, so Edith, following the fate
of all the rest about whom her affections had entwined themselves, was
fleeting, fading, growing paler in the distance, every day. Little by
little, she receded from Florence, like the retiring ghost of what she
had been; little by little, the chasm between them widened and seemed
deeper; little by little, all the power of earnestness and tenderness
she had shown, was frozen up in the bold, angry hardihood with which
she stood, upon the brink of a deep precipice unseen by Florence,
daring to look down.

There was but one consideration to set against the heavy loss of
Edith, and though it was slight comfort to her burdened heart, she
tried to think it some relief. No longer divided between her affection
and duty to the two, Florence could love both and do no injustice to
either. As shadows of her fond imagination, she could give them equal
place in her own bosom, and wrong them with no doubts

So she tried to do. At times, and often too, wondering speculations
on the cause of this change in Edith, would obtrude themselves upon
her mind and frighten her; but in the calm of its abandonment once
more to silent grief and loneliness, it was not a curious mind.
Florence had only to remember that her star of promise was clouded in
the general gloom that hung upon the house, and to weep and be
resigned.

Thus living, in a dream wherein the overflowing love of her young
heart expended itself on airy forms, and in a real world where she had
experienced little but the rolling back of that strong tide upon
itself, Florence grew to be seventeen. Timid and retiring as her
solitary life had made her, it had not embittered her sweet temper, or
her earnest nature. A child in innocent simplicity; a woman m her
modest self-reliance, and her deep intensity of feeling; both child
and woman seemed at once expressed in her face and fragile delicacy of
shape, and gracefully to mingle there; - as if the spring should be
unwilling to depart when summer came, and sought to blend the earlier
beauties of the flowers with their bloom. But in her thrilling voice,
in her calm eyes, sometimes in a sage ethereal light that seemed to
rest upon her head, and always in a certain pensive air upon her
beauty, there was an expression, such as had been seen in the dead
boy; and the council in the Servants' Hall whispered so among
themselves, and shook their heads, and ate and drank the more, in a
closer bond of good-fellowship.

This observant body had plenty to say of Mr and Mrs Dombey, and of
Mr Carker, who appeared to be a mediator between them, and who came
and went as if he were trying to make peace, but never could. They all
deplored the uncomfortable state of affairs, and all agreed that Mrs
Pipchin (whose unpopularity was not to be surpassed) had some hand in
it; but, upon the whole, it was agreeable to have so good a subject
for a rallying point, and they made a great deal of it, and enjoyed
themselves very much.

The general visitors who came to the house, and those among whom Mr
and Mrs Dombey visited, thought it a pretty equal match, as to
haughtiness, at all events, and thought nothing more about it. The
young lady with the back did not appear for some time after Mrs
Skewton's death; observing to some particular friends, with her usual
engaging little scream, that she couldn't separate the family from a
notion of tombstones, and horrors of that sort; but when she did come,
she saw nothing wrong, except Mr Dombey's wearing a bunch of gold
seals to his watch, which shocked her very much, as an exploded
superstition. This youthful fascinator considered a daughter-in-law
objectionable in principle; otherwise, she had nothing to say against
Florence, but that she sadly wanted 'style' - which might mean back,
perhaps. Many, who only came to the house on state occasions, hardly
knew who Florence was, and said, going home, 'Indeed, was that Miss
Dombey, in the corner? Very pretty, but a little delicate and
thoughtful in appearance!'

None the less so, certainly, for her life of the last six months.
Florence took her seat at the dinner-table, on the day before the
second anniversary of her father's marriage to Edith (Mrs Skewton had
been lying stricken with paralysis when the first came round), with an
uneasiness, amounting to dread. She had no other warrant for it, than
the occasion, the expression of her father's face, in the hasty glance
she caught of it, and the presence of Mr Carker, which, always
unpleasant to her, was more so on this day, than she had ever felt it
before.

Edith was richly dressed, for she and Mr Dombey were engaged in the
evening to some large assembly, and the dinner-hour that day was late.
She did not appear until they were seated at table, when Mr Carker
rose and led her to her chair. Beautiful and lustrous as she was,
there was that in her face and air which seemed to separate her
hopelessly from Florence, and from everyone, for ever more. And yet,
for an instant, Florence saw a beam of kindness in her eyes, when they
were turned on her, that made the distance to which she had withdrawn
herself, a greater cause of sorrow and regret than ever.

There was very little said at dinner. Florence heard her father
speak to Mr Carker sometimes on business matters, and heard him softly
reply, but she paid little attention to what they said, and only
wished the dinner at an end. When the dessert was placed upon the
table, and they were left alone, with no servant in attendance, Mr
Dombey, who had been several times clearing his throat in a manner
that augured no good, said:

'Mrs Dombey, you know, I suppose, that I have instructed the
housekeeper that there will be some company to dinner here to-morrow.

'I do not dine at home,' she answered.

'Not a large party,' pursued Mr Dombey, with an indifferent
assumption of not having heard her; 'merely some twelve or fourteen.
My sister, Major Bagstock, and some others whom you know but
slightly.'

I do not dine at home,' she repeated.

'However doubtful reason I may have, Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey,
still going majestically on, as if she had not spoken, 'to hold the
occasion in very pleasant remembrance just now, there are appearances
in these things which must be maintained before the world. If you have
no respect for yourself, Mrs Dombey - '

'I have none,' she said.

'Madam,' cried Mr Dombey, striking his hand upon the table, 'hear
me if you please. I say, if you have no respect for yourself - '

'And I say I have none,' she answered.

He looked at her; but the face she showed him in return would not
have changed, if death itself had looked.

'Carker,' said Mr Dombey, turning more quietly to that gentleman,
'as you have been my medium of communication with Mrs Dombey on former
occasions, and as I choose to preserve the decencies of life, so far
as I am individually concerned, I will trouble you to have the
goodness to inform Mrs Dombey that if she has no respect for herself,
I have some respect for myself, and therefore insist on my
arrangements for to-morrow.

'Tell your sovereign master, Sir,' said Edith, 'that I will take
leave to speak to him on this subject by-and-bye, and that I will
speak to him alone.'

'Mr Carker, Madam,' said her husband, 'being in possession of the
reason which obliges me to refuse you that privilege, shall be
absolved from the delivery of any such message.' He saw her eyes move,
while he spoke, and followed them with his own.

'Your daughter is present, Sir,' said Edith.

'My daughter will remain present,' said Mr Dombey.

Florence, who had risen, sat down again, hiding her face in her
hands, and trembling.

'My daughter, Madam' - began Mr Dombey.

But Edith stopped him, in a voice which, although not raised in the
least, was so clear, emphatic, and distinct, that it might have been
heard in a whirlwind.

'I tell you I will speak to you alone,' she said. 'If you are not
mad, heed what I say.'

'I have authority to speak to you, Madam,' returned her husband,
'when and where I please; and it is my pleasure to speak here and
now.'

She rose up as if to leave the room; but sat down again, and
looking at him with all outward composure, said, in the same voice:

'You shall!'

'I must tell you first, that there is a threatening appearance in
your manner, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, 'which does not become you.

She laughed. The shaken diamonds in her hair started and trembled.
There are fables of precious stones that would turn pale, their wearer
being in danger. Had these been such, their imprisoned rays of light
would have taken flight that moment, and they would have been as dull
as lead.

Carker listened, with his eyes cast down.

'As to my daughter, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, resuming the thread of
his discourse, 'it is by no means inconsistent with her duty to me,
that she should know what conduct to avoid. At present you are a very
strong example to her of this kind, and I hope she may profit by it.'

'I would not stop you now,' returned his wife, immoveable in eye,
and voice, and attitude; 'I would not rise and go away, and save you
the utterance of one word, if the room were burning.'

Mr Dombey moved his head, as if in a sarcastic acknowledgment of
the attention, and resumed. But not with so much self-possession as
before; for Edith's quick uneasiness in reference to Florence, and
Edith's indifference to him and his censure, chafed and galled him
like a stiffening wound.

'Mrs Dombey,' said he, 'it may not be inconsistent with my
daughter's improvement to know how very much to be lamented, and how
necessary to be corrected, a stubborn disposition is, especially when
it is indulged in - unthankfully indulged in, I will add - after the
gratification of ambition and interest. Both of which, I believe, had
some share in inducing you to occupy your present station at this
board.'

'No! I would not rise, and go away, and save you the utterance of
one word,' she repeated, exactly as before, 'if the room were
burning.'

'It may be natural enough, Mrs Dombey,' he pursued, 'that you
should be uneasy in the presence of any auditors of these disagreeable
truths; though why' - he could not hide his real feeling here, or keep
his eyes from glancing gloomily at Florence - 'why anyone can give
them greater force and point than myself, whom they so nearly concern,
I do not pretend to understand. It may be natural enough that you
should object to hear, in anybody's presence, that there is a
rebellious principle within you which you cannot curb too soon; which
you must curb, Mrs Dombey; and which, I regret to say, I remember to
have seen manifested - with some doubt and displeasure, on more than
one occasion before our marriage - towards your deceased mother. But
you have the remedy in your own hands. I by no means forgot, when I
began, that my daughter was present, Mrs Dombey. I beg you will not
forget, to-morrow, that there are several persons present; and that,
with some regard to appearances, you will receive your company in a
becoming manner.

'So it is not enough,' said Edith, 'that you know what has passed
between yourself and me; it is not enough that you can look here,'
pointing at Carker, who still listened, with his eyes cast down, 'and
be reminded of the affronts you have put upon me; it is not enough
that you can look here,' pointing to Florence with a hand that
slightly trembled for the first and only time, 'and think of what you
have done, and of the ingenious agony, daily, hourly, constant, you
have made me feel in doing it; it is not enough that this day, of all
others in the year, is memorable to me for a struggle (well-deserved,
but not conceivable by such as you) in which I wish I had died! You
add to all this, do you, the last crowning meanness of making her a
witness of the depth to which I have fallen; when you know that you
have made me sacrifice to her peace, the only gentle feeling and
interest of my life, when you know that for her sake, I would now if I
could - but I can not, my soul recoils from you too much - submit
myself wholly to your will, and be the meekest vassal that you have!'

This was not the way to minister to Mr Dombey's greatness. The old
feeling was roused by what she said, into a stronger and fiercer
existence than it had ever had. Again, his neglected child, at this
rough passage of his life, put forth by even this rebellious woman, as
powerful where he was powerless, and everything where he was nothing!

He turned on Florence, as if it were she who had spoken, and bade
her leave the room. Florence with her covered face obeyed, trembling
and weeping as she went.

'I understand, Madam,' said Mr Dombey, with an angry flush of
triumph, 'the spirit of opposition that turned your affections in that
channel, but they have been met, Mrs Dombey; they have been met, and
turned back!'

'The worse for you!' she answered, with her voice and manner still
unchanged. 'Ay!' for he turned sharply when she said so, 'what is the
worse for me, is twenty million times the worse for you. Heed that, if
you heed nothing else.'

The arch of diamonds spanning her dark hair, flashed and glittered
like a starry bridge. There was no warning in them, or they would have
turned as dull and dim as tarnished honour. Carker still sat and
listened, with his eyes cast down.

'Mrs Dombey,' said Mr Dombey, resuming as much as he could of his
arrogant composure, 'you will not conciliate me, or turn me from any
purpose, by this course of conduct.'

'It is the only true although it is a faint expression of what is
within me,' she replied. 'But if I thought it would conciliate you, I
would repress it, if it were repressible by any human effort. I will
do nothing that you ask.'

'I am not accustomed to ask, Mrs Dombey,' he observed; 'I direct.'

'I will hold no place in your house to-morrow, or on any recurrence
of to-morrow. I will be exhibited to no one, as the refractory slave
you purchased, such a time. If I kept my marriage day, I would keep it
as a day of shame. Self-respect! appearances before the world! what
are these to me? You have done all you can to make them nothing to me,
and they are nothing.'

'Carker,' said Mr Dombey, speaking with knitted brows, and after a
moment's consideration, 'Mrs Dombey is so forgetful of herself and me
in all this, and places me in a position so unsuited to my character,
that I must bring this state of matters to a close.'

'Release me, then,' said Edith, immoveable in voice, in look, and
bearing, as she had been throughout, 'from the chain by which I am
bound. Let me go.'

'Madam?' exclaimed Mr Dombey.

'Loose me. Set me free!'

'Madam?' he repeated, 'Mrs Dombey?'

'Tell him,' said Edith, addressing her proud face to Carker, 'that
I wish for a separation between us, That there had better be one. That
I recommend it to him, Tell him it may take place on his own terms -
his wealth is nothing to me - but that it cannot be too soon.'

'Good Heaven, Mrs Dombey!' said her husband, with supreme
amazement, 'do you imagine it possible that I could ever listen to
such a proposition? Do you know who I am, Madam? Do you know what I
represent? Did you ever hear of Dombey and Son? People to say that Mr
Dombey - Mr Dombey! - was separated from his wife! Common people to
talk of Mr Dombey and his domestic affairs! Do you seriously think,
Mrs Dombey, that I would permit my name to be banded about in such
connexion? Pooh, pooh, Madam! Fie for shame! You're absurd.' Mr Dombey
absolutely laughed.

But not as she did. She had better have been dead than laugh as she
did, in reply, with her intent look fixed upon him. He had better have
been dead, than sitting there, in his magnificence, to hear her.

'No, Mrs Dombey,' he resumed. 'No, Madam. There is no possibility
of separation between you and me, and therefore I the more advise you
to be awakened to a sense of duty. And, Carker, as I was about to say
to you -

Mr Carker, who had sat and listened all this time, now raised his
eyes, in which there was a bright unusual light'

As I was about to say to you, resumed Mr Dombey, 'I must beg you,
now that matters have come to this, to inform Mrs Dombey, that it is
not the rule of my life to allow myself to be thwarted by anybody -
anybody, Carker - or to suffer anybody to be paraded as a stronger
motive for obedience in those who owe obedience to me than I am my
self. The mention that has been made of my daughter, and the use that
is made of my daughter, in opposition to me, are unnatural. Whether my
daughter is in actual concert with Mrs Dombey, I do not know, and do
not care; but after what Mrs Dombey has said today, and my daughter
has heard to-day, I beg you to make known to Mrs Dombey, that if she
continues to make this house the scene of contention it has become, I
shall consider my daughter responsible in some degree, on that lady's
own avowal, and shall visit her with my severe displeasure. Mrs Dombey
has asked "whether it is not enough," that she had done this and that.
You will please to answer no, it is not enough.'

'A moment!' cried Carker, interposing, 'permit me! painful as my
position is, at the best, and unusually painful in seeming to
entertain a different opinion from you,' addressing Mr Dombey, 'I must
ask, had you not better reconsider the question of a separation. I
know how incompatible it appears with your high public position, and I
know how determined you are when you give Mrs Dombey to understand' -
the light in his eyes fell upon her as he separated his words each
from each, with the distinctness of so many bells - 'that nothing but
death can ever part you. Nothing else. But when you consider that Mrs
Dombey, by living in this house, and making it as you have said, a
scene of contention, not only has her part in that contention, but
compromises Miss Dombey every day (for I know how determined you are),
will you not relieve her from a continual irritation of spirit, and a
continual sense of being unjust to another, almost intolerable? Does
this not seem like - I do not say it is - sacrificing Mrs Dombey to
the preservation of your preeminent and unassailable position?'

Again the light in his eyes fell upon her, as she stood looking at
her husband: now with an extraordinary and awful smile upon her face.

'Carker,' returned Mr Dombey, with a supercilious frown, and in a
tone that was intended to be final, 'you mistake your position in
offering advice to me on such a point, and you mistake me (I am
surprised to find) in the character of your advice. I have no more to
say.

'Perhaps,' said Carker, with an unusual and indefinable taunt in
his air, 'you mistook my position, when you honoured me with the
negotiations in which I have been engaged here' - with a motion of his
hand towards Mrs Dombey.

'Not at all, Sir, not at all,' returned the other haughtily. 'You
were employed - '

'Being an inferior person, for the humiliation of Mrs Dombey. I
forgot' Oh, yes, it was expressly understood!' said Carker. 'I beg
your pardon!'

As he bent his head to Mr Dombey, with an air of deference that
accorded ill with his words, though they were humbly spoken, he moved
it round towards her, and kept his watching eyes that way.

She had better have turned hideous and dropped dead, than have
stood up with such a smile upon her face, in such a fallen spirit's
majesty of scorn and beauty. She lifted her hand to the tiara of
bright jewels radiant on her head, and, plucking it off with a force
that dragged and strained her rich black hair with heedless cruelty,
and brought it tumbling wildly on her shoulders, cast the gems upon
the ground. From each arm, she unclasped a diamond bracelet, flung it
down, and trod upon the glittering heap. Without a word, without a
shadow on the fire of her bright eye, without abatement of her awful
smile, she looked on Mr Dombey to the last, in moving to the door; and
left him.

Florence had heard enough before quitting the room, to know that
Edith loved her yet; that she had suffered for her sake; and that she
had kept her sacrifices quiet, lest they should trouble her peace. She
did not want to speak to her of this - she could not, remembering to
whom she was opposed - but she wished, in one silent and affectionate
embrace, to assure her that she felt it all, and thanked her.

Her father went out alone, that evening, and Florence issuing from
her own chamber soon afterwards, went about the house in search of.
Edith, but unavailingly. She was in her own rooms, where Florence had
long ceased to go, and did not dare to venture now, lest she should
unconsciously engender new trouble. Still Florence hoping to meet her
before going to bed, changed from room to room, and wandered through
the house so splendid and so dreary, without remaining anywhere.

She was crossing a gallery of communication that opened at some
little distance on the staircase, and was only lighted on great
occasions, when she saw, through the opening, which was an arch, the
figure of a man coming down some few stairs opposite. Instinctively
apprehensive of her father, whom she supposed it was, she stopped, in
the dark, gazing through the arch into the light. But it was Mr Carker
coming down alone, and looking over the railing into the hall. No bell
was rung to announce his departure, and no servant was in attendance.
He went down quietly, opened the door for himself, glided out, and
shut it softly after him.

Her invincible repugnance to this man, and perhaps the stealthy act
of watching anyone, which, even under such innocent circumstances, is
in a manner guilty and oppressive, made Florence shake from head to
foot. Her blood seemed to run cold. As soon as she could - for at
first she felt an insurmountable dread of moving - she went quickly to
her own room and locked her door; but even then, shut in with her dog
beside her, felt a chill sensation of horror, as if there were danger
brooding somewhere near her.

It invaded her dreams and disturbed the whole night. Rising in the
morning, unrefreshed, and with a heavy recollection of the domestic
unhappiness of the preceding day, she sought Edith again in all the
rooms, and did so, from time to time, all the morning. But she
remained in her own chamber, and Florence saw nothing of her.
Learning, however, that the projected dinner at home was put off,
Florence thought it likely that she would go out in the evening to
fulfil the engagement she had spoken of; and resolved to try and meet
her, then, upon the staircase.

When the evening had set in, she heard, from the room in which she
sat on purpose, a footstep on the stairs that she thought to be
Edith's. Hurrying out, and up towards her room, Florence met her
immediately, coming down alone.

What was Florence's affright and wonder when, at sight of her, with
her tearful face, and outstretched arms, Edith recoiled and shrieked!

'Don't come near me!' she cried. 'Keep away! Let me go by!'

'Mama!' said Florence.

'Don't call me by that name! Don't speak to me! Don't look at me! -
Florence!' shrinking back, as Florence moved a step towards her,
'don't touch me!'

As Florence stood transfixed before the haggard face and staring
eyes, she noted, as in a dream, that Edith spread her hands over them,
and shuddering through all her form, and crouching down against the
wall, crawled by her like some lower animal, sprang up, and fled away.

Florence dropped upon the stairs in a swoon; and was found there by
Mrs Pipchin, she supposed. She knew nothing more, until she found
herself lying on her own bed, with Mrs Pipchin and some servants
standing round her.

'Where is Mama?' was her first question.

'Gone out to dinner,' said Mrs Pipchin.

'And Papa?'

'Mr Dombey is in his own room, Miss Dombey,' said Mrs Pipchin, 'and
the best thing you can do, is to take off your things and go to bed
this minute.' This was the sagacious woman's remedy for all
complaints, particularly lowness of spirits, and inability to sleep;
for which offences, many young victims in the days of the Brighton
Castle had been committed to bed at ten o'clock in the morning.

Without promising obedience, but on the plea of desiring to be very
quiet, Florence disengaged herself, as soon as she could, from the
ministration of Mrs Pipchin and her attendants. Left alone, she
thought of what had happened on the staircase, at first in doubt of
its reality; then with tears; then with an indescribable and terrible
alarm, like that she had felt the night before.

She determined not to go to bed until Edith returned, and if she
could not speak to her, at least to be sure that she was safe at home.
What indistinct and shadowy dread moved Florence to this resolution,
she did not know, and did not dare to think. She only knew that until
Edith came back, there was no repose for her aching head or throbbing
heart.

The evening deepened into night; midnight came; no Edith.

Florence could not read, or rest a moment. She paced her own room,
opened the door and paced the staircase-gallery outside, looked out of
window on the night, listened to the wind blowing and the rain
falling, sat down and watched the faces in the fire, got up and
watched the moon flying like a storm-driven ship through the sea of
clouds.

All the house was gone to bed, except two servants who were waiting
the return of their mistress, downstairs.

One o'clock. The carriages that rumbled in the distance, turned
away, or stopped short, or went past; the silence gradually deepened,
and was more and more rarely broken, save by a rush of wind or sweep
of rain. Two o'clock. No Edith!

Florence, more agitated, paced her room; and paced the gallery
outside; and looked out at the night, blurred and wavy with the
raindrops on the glass, and the tears in her own eyes; and looked up
at the hurry in the sky, so different from the repose below, and yet
so tranquil and solitary. Three o'clock! There was a terror in every
ash that dropped out of the fire. No Edith yet.

More and more agitated, Florence paced her room, and paced the
gallery, and looked out at the moon with a new fancy of her likeness
to a pale fugitive hurrying away and hiding her guilty face. Four
struck! Five! No Edith yet.

But now there was some cautious stir in the house; and Florence
found that Mrs Pipchin had been awakened by one of those who sat up,
had risen and had gone down to her father's door. Stealing lower down
the stairs, and observing what passed, she saw her father come out in
his morning gown, and start when he was told his wife had not come
home. He dispatched a messenger to the stables to inquire whether the
coachman was there; and while the man was gone, dressed himself very
hurriedly.

The man came back, in great haste, bringing the coachman with him,
who said he had been at home and in bed, since ten o'clock. He had
driven his mistress to her old house in Brook Street, where she had
been met by Mr Carker -

Florence stood upon the very spot where she had seen him coming
down. Again she shivered with the nameless terror of that sight, and
had hardly steadiness enough to hear and understand what followed.

- Who had told him, the man went on to say, that his mistress would
not want the carriage to go home in; and had dismissed him.

She saw her father turn white in the face, and heard him ask in a
quick, trembling voice, for Mrs Dombey's maid. The whole house was
roused; for she was there, in a moment, very pale too, and speaking
incoherently.

She said she had dressed her mistress early - full two hours before
she went out - and had been told, as she often was, that she would not
be wanted at night. She had just come from her mistress's rooms, but -

'But what! what was it?' Florence heard her father demand like a
madman.

'But the inner dressing-room was locked and the key gone.'

Her father seized a candle that was flaming on the ground - someone
had put it down there, and forgotten it - and came running upstairs
with such fury, that Florence, in her fear, had hardly time to fly
before him. She heard him striking in the door, as she ran on, with
her hands widely spread, and her hair streaming, and her face like a
distracted person's, back to her own room.

When the door yielded, and he rushed in, what did he see there? No
one knew. But thrown down in a costly mass upon the ground, was every
ornament she had had, since she had been his wife; every dress she had
worn; and everything she had possessed. This was the room in which he
had seen, in yonder mirror, the proud face discard him. This was the
room in which he had wondered, idly, how these things would look when
he should see them next!

Heaping them back into the drawers, and locking them up in a rage
of haste, he saw some papers on the table. The deed of settlement he
had executed on their marriage, and a letter. He read that she was
gone. He read that he was dishonoured. He read that she had fled, upon
her shameful wedding-day, with the man whom he had chosen for her
humiliation; and he tore out of the room, and out of the house, with a
frantic idea of finding her yet, at the place to which she had been
taken, and beating all trace of beauty out of the triumphant face with
his bare hand.

Florence, not knowing what she did, put on a shawl and bonnet, in a
dream of running through the streets until she found Edith, and then
clasping her in her arms, to save and bring her back. But when she
hurried out upon the staircase, and saw the frightened servants going
up and down with lights, and whispering together, and falling away
from her father as he passed down, she awoke to a sense of her own
powerlessness; and hiding in one of the great rooms that had been made
gorgeous for this, felt as if her heart would burst with grief.

Compassion for her father was the first distinct emotion that made
head against the flood of sorrow which overwhelmed her. Her constant
nature turned to him in his distress, as fervently and faithfully, as
if, in his prosperity, he had been the embodiment of that idea which
had gradually become so faint and dim. Although she did not know,
otherwise than through the suggestions of a shapeless fear, the full
extent of his calamity, he stood before her, wronged and deserted; and
again her yearning love impelled her to his side.

He was not long away; for Florence was yet weeping in the great
room and nourishing these thoughts, when she heard him come back. He
ordered the servants to set about their ordinary occupations, and went
into his own apartment, where he trod so heavily that she could hear
him walking up and down from end to end.

Yielding at once to the impulse of her affection, timid at all
other times, but bold in its truth to him in his adversity, and
undaunted by past repulse, Florence, dressed as she was, hurried
downstairs. As she set her light foot in the hall, he came out of his
room. She hastened towards him unchecked, with her arms stretched out,
and crying 'Oh dear, dear Papa!' as if she would have clasped him
round the neck.

And so she would have done. But in his frenzy, he lifted up his
cruel arm, and struck her, crosswise, with that heaviness, that she
tottered on the marble floor; and as he dealt the blow, he told her
what Edith was, and bade her follow her, since they had always been in
league.

She did not sink down at his feet; she did not shut out the sight
of him with her trembling hands; she did not weep; she did not utter
one word of reproach. But she looked at him, and a cry of desolation
issued from her heart. For as she looked, she saw him murdering that
fond idea to which she had held in spite of him. She saw his cruelty,
neglect, and hatred dominant above it, and stamping it down. She saw
she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house.

Ran out of his house. A moment, and her hand was on the lock, the
cry was on her lips, his face was there, made paler by the yellow
candles hastily put down and guttering away, and by the daylight
coming in above the door. Another moment, and the close darkness of
the shut-up house (forgotten to be opened, though it was long since
day) yielded to the unexpected glare and freedom of the morning; and
Florence, with her head bent down to hide her agony of tears, was in
the streets.



CHAPTER 48.

The Flight of Florence



In the wildness of her sorrow, shame, and terror, the forlorn girl
hurried through the sunshine of a bright morning, as if it were the
darkness of a winter night. Wringing her hands and weeping bitterly,
insensible to everything but the deep wound in her breast, stunned by
the loss of all she loved, left like the sole survivor on a lonely
shore from the wreck of a great vessel, she fled without a thought,
without a hope, without a purpose, but to fly somewhere anywhere.

The cheerful vista of the long street, burnished by the morning
light, the sight of the blue sky and airy clouds, the vigorous
freshness of the day, so flushed and rosy in its conquest of the
night, awakened no responsive feelings in her so hurt bosom.
Somewhere, anywhere, to hide her head! somewhere, anywhere, for
refuge, never more to look upon the place from which she fled!

But there were people going to and fro; there were opening shops,
and servants at the doors of houses; there was the rising clash and
roar of the day's struggle. Florence saw surprise and curiosity in the
faces flitting past her; saw long shadows coming back upon the
pavement; and heard voices that were strange to her asking her where
she went, and what the matter was; and though these frightened her the
more at first, and made her hurry on the faster, they did her the good
service of recalling her in some degree to herself, and reminding her
of the necessity of greater composure.

Where to go? Still somewhere, anywhere! still going on; but where!
She thought of the only other time she had been lost in the wild
wilderness of London - though not lost as now - and went that way. To
the home of Walter's Uncle.

Checking her sobs, and drying her swollen eyes, and endeavouring to
calm the agitation of her manner, so as to avoid attracting notice,
Florence, resolving to keep to the more quiet streets as long as she
could, was going on more quietly herself, when a familiar little
shadow darted past upon the sunny pavement, stopped short, wheeled
about, came close to her, made off again, bounded round and round her,
and Diogenes, panting for breath, and yet making the street ring with
his glad bark, was at her feet.

'Oh, Di! oh, dear, true, faithful Di, how did you come here? How
could I ever leave you, Di, who would never leave me?'

Florence bent down on the pavement, and laid his rough, old,
loving, foolish head against her breast, and they got up together, and
went on together; Di more off the ground than on it, endeavouring to
kiss his mistress flying, tumbling over and getting up again without
the least concern, dashing at big dogs in a jocose defiance of his
species, terrifying with touches of his nose young housemaids who were
cleaning doorsteps, and continually stopping, in the midst of a
thousand extravagances, to look back at Florence, and bark until all
the dogs within hearing answered, and all the dogs who could come out,
came out to stare at him.

With this last adherent, Florence hurried away in the advancing
morning, and the strengthening sunshine, to the City. The roar soon
grew more loud, the passengers more numerous, the shops more busy,
until she was carried onward in a stream of life setting that way, and
flowing, indifferently, past marts and mansions, prisons, churches,
market-places, wealth, poverty, good, and evil, like the broad river
side by side with it, awakened from its dreams of rushes, willows, and
green moss, and rolling on, turbid and troubled, among the works and
cares of men, to the deep sea.

At length the quarters of the little Midshipman arose in view.
Nearer yet, and the little Midshipman himself was seen upon his post,
intent as ever on his observations. Nearer yet, and the door stood
open, inviting her to enter. Florence, who had again quickened her
pace, as she approached the end of her journey, ran across the road
(closely followed by Diogenes, whom the bustle had somewhat confused),
ran in, and sank upon the threshold of the well-remembered little
parlour.

The Captain, in his glazed hat, was standing over the fire, making
his morning's cocoa, with that elegant trifle, his watch, upon the
chimney-piece, for easy reference during the progress of the cookery.
Hearing a footstep and the rustle of a dress, the Captain turned with
a palpitating remembrance of the dreadful Mrs MacStinger, at the
instant when Florence made a motion with her hand towards him, reeled,
and fell upon the floor.

The Captain, pale as Florence, pale in the very knobs upon his face
raised her like a baby, and laid her on the same old sofa upon which
she had slumbered long ago.

'It's Heart's Delight!' said the Captain, looking intently in her
face. 'It's the sweet creetur grow'd a woman!'

Captain Cuttle was so respectful of her, and had such a reverence
for her, in this new character, that he would not have held her in his
arms, while she was unconscious, for a thousand pounds.

'My Heart's Delight!' said the Captain, withdrawing to a little
distance, with the greatest alarm and sympathy depicted on his
countenance. 'If you can hail Ned Cuttle with a finger, do it!'

But Florence did not stir.

'My Heart's Delight!' said the trembling Captain. 'For the sake of
Wal'r drownded in the briny deep, turn to, and histe up something or
another, if able!'

Finding her insensible to this impressive adjuration also, Captain
Cuttle snatched from his breakfast-table a basin of cold water, and
sprinkled some upon her face. Yielding to the urgency of the case, the
Captain then, using his immense hand with extraordinary gentleness,
relieved her of her bonnet, moistened her lips and forehead, put back
her hair, covered her feet with his own coat which he pulled off for
the purpose, patted her hand - so small in his, that he was struck
with wonder when he touched it - and seeing that her eyelids quivered,
and that her lips began to move, continued these restorative
applications with a better heart.

'Cheerily,' said the Captain. 'Cheerily! Stand by, my pretty one,
stand by! There! You're better now. Steady's the word, and steady it
is. Keep her so! Drink a little drop o' this here,' said the Captain.
'There you are! What cheer now, my pretty, what cheer now?'

At this stage of her recovery, Captain Cuttle, with an imperfect
association of a Watch with a Physician's treatment of a patient, took
his own down from the mantel-shelf, and holding it out on his hook,
and taking Florence's hand in his, looked steadily from one to the
other, as expecting the dial to do something.

'What cheer, my pretty?' said the Captain. 'What cheer now? You've
done her some good, my lad, I believe,' said the Captain, under his
breath, and throwing an approving glance upon his watch. 'Put you back
half-an-hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the
arternoon, and you're a watch as can be ekalled by few and excelled by
none. What cheer, my lady lass!'

'Captain Cuttle! Is it you?' exclaimed Florence, raising herself a
little.

'Yes, yes, my lady lass,' said the Captain, hastily deciding in his
own mind upon the superior elegance of that form of address, as the
most courtly he could think of.

'Is Walter's Uncle here?' asked Florence.

'Here, pretty?' returned the Captain. 'He ain't been here this many
a long day. He ain't been heerd on, since he sheered off arter poor
Wal'r. But,' said the Captain, as a quotation, 'Though lost to sight,
to memory dear, and England, Home, and Beauty!'

'Do you live here?' asked Florence.

'Yes, my lady lass,' returned the Captain.

'Oh, Captain Cuttle!' cried Florence, putting her hands together,
and speaking wildly. 'Save me! keep me here! Let no one know where I
am! I'll tell you what has happened by-and-by, when I can. I have no
one in the world to go to. Do not send me away!'

'Send you away, my lady lass!' exclaimed the Captain. 'You, my
Heart's Delight! Stay a bit! We'll put up this here deadlight, and
take a double turn on the key!'

With these words, the Captain, using his one hand and his hook with
the greatest dexterity, got out the shutter of the door, put it up,
made it all fast, and locked the door itself.

When he came back to the side of Florence, she took his hand, and
kissed it. The helplessness of the action, the appeal it made to him,
the confidence it expressed, the unspeakable sorrow in her face, the
pain of mind she had too plainly suffered, and was suffering then, his
knowledge of her past history, her present lonely, worn, and
unprotected appearance, all so rushed upon the good Captain together,
that he fairly overflowed with compassion and gentleness.

'My lady lass,' said the Captain, polishing the bridge of his nose
with his arm until it shone like burnished copper, 'don't you say a
word to Ed'ard Cuttle, until such times as you finds yourself a riding
smooth and easy; which won't be to-day, nor yet to-morrow. And as to
giving of you up, or reporting where you are, yes verily, and by God's
help, so I won't, Church catechism, make a note on!'

This the Captain said, reference and all, in one breath, and with
much solemnity; taking off his hat at 'yes verily,' and putting it on
again, when he had quite concluded.

Florence could do but one thing more to thank him, and to show him
how she trusted in him; and she did it' Clinging to this rough
creature as the last asylum of her bleeding heart, she laid her head
upon his honest shoulder, and clasped him round his neck, and would
have kneeled down to bless him, but that he divined her purpose, and
held her up like a true man.

'Steady!' said the Captain. 'Steady! You're too weak to stand, you
see, my pretty, and must lie down here again. There, there!' To see
the Captain lift her on the sofa, and cover her with his coat, would
have been worth a hundred state sights. 'And now,' said the Captain,
'you must take some breakfast, lady lass, and the dog shall have some
too. And arter that you shall go aloft to old Sol Gills's room, and
fall asleep there, like a angel.'

Captain Cuttle patted Diogenes when he made allusion to him, and
Diogenes met that overture graciously, half-way. During the
administration of the restoratives he had clearly been in two minds
whether to fly at the Captain or to offer him his friendship; and he
had expressed that conflict of feeling by alternate waggings of his
tail, and displays of his teeth, with now and then a growl or so. But
by this time, his doubts were all removed. It was plain that he
considered the Captain one of the most amiable of men, and a man whom
it was an honour to a dog to know.

In evidence of these convictions, Diogenes attended on the Captain
while he made some tea and toast, and showed a lively interest in his
housekeeping. But it was in vain for the kind Captain to make such
preparations for Florence, who sorely tried to do some honour to them,
but could touch nothing, and could only weep and weep again.

'Well, well!' said the compassionate Captain, 'arter turning in, my
Heart's Delight, you'll get more way upon you. Now, I'll serve out
your allowance, my lad.' To Diogenes. 'And you shall keep guard on
your mistress aloft.'

Diogenes, however, although he had been eyeing his intended
breakfast with a watering mouth and glistening eyes, instead of
falling to, ravenously, when it was put before him, pricked up his
ears, darted to the shop-door, and barked there furiously: burrowing
with his head at the bottom, as if he were bent on mining his way out.

'Can there be anybody there!' asked Florence, in alarm.

'No, my lady lass,' returned the Captain. 'Who'd stay there,
without making any noise! Keep up a good heart, pretty. It's only
people going by.'

But for all that, Diogenes barked and barked, and burrowed and
burrowed, with pertinacious fury; and whenever he stopped to listen,
appeared to receive some new conviction into his mind, for he set to,
barking and burrowing again, a dozen times. Even when he was persuaded
to return to his breakfast, he came jogging back to it, with a very
doubtful air; and was off again, in another paroxysm, before touching
a morsel.

'If there should be someone listening and watching,' whispered
Florence. 'Someone who saw me come - who followed me, perhaps.'

'It ain't the young woman, lady lass, is it?' said the Captain,
taken with a bright idea

'Susan?' said Florence, shaking her head. 'Ah no! Susan has been
gone from me a long time.'

'Not deserted, I hope?' said the Captain. 'Don't say that that
there young woman's run, my pretty!'

'Oh, no, no!' cried Florence. 'She is one of the truest hearts in
the world!'

The Captain was greatly relieved by this reply, and expressed his
satisfaction by taking off his hard glazed hat, and dabbing his head
all over with his handkerchief, rolled up like a ball, observing
several times, with infinite complacency, and with a beaming
countenance, that he know'd it.

'So you're quiet now, are you, brother?' said the Captain to
Diogenes. 'There warn't nobody there, my lady lass, bless you!'

Diogenes was not so sure of that. The door still had an attraction
for him at intervals; and he went snuffing about it, and growling to
himself, unable to forget the subject. This incident, coupled with the
Captain's observation of Florence's fatigue and faintness, decided him
to prepare Sol Gills's chamber as a place of retirement for her
immediately. He therefore hastily betook himself to the top of the
house, and made the best arrangement of it that his imagination and
his means suggested.

It was very clean already; and the Captain being an orderly man,
and accustomed to make things ship-shape, converted the bed into a
couch, by covering it all over with a clean white drapery. By a
similar contrivance, the Captain converted the little dressing-table
into a species of altar, on which he set forth two silver teaspoons, a
flower-pot, a telescope, his celebrated watch, a pocket-comb, and a
song-book, as a small collection of rarities, that made a choice
appearance. Having darkened the window, and straightened the pieces of
carpet on the floor, the Captain surveyed these preparations with
great delight, and descended to the little parlour again, to bring
Florence to her bower.

Nothing would induce the Captain to believe that it was possible
for Florence to walk upstairs. If he could have got the idea into his
head, he would have considered it an outrageous breach of hospitality
to allow her to do so. Florence was too weak to dispute the point, and
the Captain carried her up out of hand, laid her down, and covered her
with a great watch-coat.

'My lady lass!' said the Captain, 'you're as safe here as if you
was at the top of St Paul's Cathedral, with the ladder cast off. Sleep
is what you want, afore all other things, and may you be able to show
yourself smart with that there balsam for the still small woice of a
wounded mind! When there's anything you want, my Heart's Delight, as
this here humble house or town can offer, pass the word to Ed'ard
Cuttle, as'll stand off and on outside that door, and that there man
will wibrate with joy.' The Captain concluded by kissing the hand that
Florence stretched out to him, with the chivalry of any old
knight-errant, and walking on tiptoe out of the room.

Descending to the little parlour, Captain Cuttle, after holding a
hasty council with himself, decided to open the shop-door for a few
minutes, and satisfy himself that now, at all events, there was no one
loitering about it. Accordingly he set it open, and stood upon the
threshold, keeping a bright look-out, and sweeping the whole street
with his spectacles.

'How de do, Captain Gills?' said a voice beside him. The Captain,
looking down, found that he had been boarded by Mr Toots while
sweeping the horizon.

'How are, you, my lad?' replied the Captain.

'Well, I m pretty well, thank'ee, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots.
'You know I'm never quite what I could wish to be, now. I don't expect
that I ever shall be any more.'

Mr Toots never approached any nearer than this to the great theme
of his life, when in conversation with Captain Cuttle, on account of
the agreement between them.

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'if I could have the pleasure of a
word with you, it's - it's rather particular.'

'Why, you see, my lad,' replied the Captain, leading the way into
the parlour, 'I ain't what you may call exactly free this morning; and
therefore if you can clap on a bit, I should take it kindly.'

'Certainly, Captain Gills,' replied Mr Toots, who seldom had any
notion of the Captain's meaning. 'To clap on, is exactly what I could
wish to do. Naturally.'

'If so be, my lad,' returned the Captain. 'Do it!'

The Captain was so impressed by the possession of his tremendous
secret - by the fact of Miss Dombey being at that moment under his
roof, while the innocent and unconscious Toots sat opposite to him -
that a perspiration broke out on his forehead, and he found it
impossible, while slowly drying the same, glazed hat in hand, to keep
his eyes off Mr Toots's face. Mr Toots, who himself appeared to have
some secret reasons for being in a nervous state, was so unspeakably
disconcerted by the Captain's stare, that after looking at him
vacantly for some time in silence, and shifting uneasily on his chair,
he said:

'I beg your pardon, Captain Gills, but you don't happen to see
anything particular in me, do you?'

'No, my lad,' returned the Captain. 'No.'

'Because you know,' said Mr Toots with a chuckle, 'I kNOW I'm
wasting away. You needn't at all mind alluding to that. I - I should
like it. Burgess and Co. have altered my measure, I'm in that state of
thinness. It's a gratification to me. I - I'm glad of it. I - I'd a
great deal rather go into a decline, if I could. I'm a mere brute you
know, grazing upon the surface of the earth, Captain Gills.'

The more Mr Toots went on in this way, the more the Captain was
weighed down by his secret, and stared at him. What with this cause of
uneasiness, and his desire to get rid of Mr Toots, the Captain was in
such a scared and strange condition, indeed, that if he had been in
conversation with a ghost, he could hardly have evinced greater
discomposure.

'But I was going to say, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots. 'Happening
to be this way early this morning - to tell you the truth, I was
coming to breakfast with you. As to sleep, you know, I never sleep
now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don't get any pay, and he's
got nothing on his mind.'

'Carry on, my lad!' said the Captain, in an admonitory voice.

'Certainly, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots. 'Perfectly true!
Happening to be this way early this morning (an hour or so ago), and
finding the door shut - '

'What! were you waiting there, brother?' demanded the Captain.

'Not at all, Captain Gills,' returned Mr Toots. 'I didn't stop a
moment. I thought you were out. But the person said - by the bye, you
don't keep a dog, you, Captain Gills?'

The Captain shook his head.

'To be sure,' said Mr Toots, 'that's exactly what I said. I knew
you didn't. There is a dog, Captain Gills, connected with - but excuse
me. That's forbidden ground.'

The Captain stared at Mr Toots until he seemed to swell to twice
his natural size; and again the perspiration broke out on the
Captain's forehead, when he thought of Diogenes taking it into his
head to come down and make a third in the parlour.

'The person said,' continued Mr Toots, 'that he had heard a dog
barking in the shop: which I knew couldn't be, and I told him so. But
he was as positive as if he had seen the dog.'

'What person, my lad?' inquired the Captain.

'Why, you see there it is, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, with a
perceptible increase in the nervousness of his manner. 'It's not for
me to say what may have taken place, or what may not have taken place.
Indeed, I don't know. I get mixed up with all sorts of things that I
don't quite understand, and I think there's something rather weak in
my - in my head, in short.'

The Captain nodded his own, as a mark of assent.

'But the person said, as we were walking away,' continued Mr Toots,
'that you knew what, under existing circumstances, might occur - he
said "might," very strongly - and that if you were requested to
prepare yourself, you would, no doubt, come prepared.'

'Person, my lad' the Captain repeated.

'I don't know what person, I'm sure, Captain Gills,' replied Mr
Toots, 'I haven't the least idea. But coming to the door, I found him
waiting there; and he said was I coming back again, and I said yes;
and he said did I know you, and I said, yes, I had the pleasure of
your acquaintance - you had given me the pleasure of your
acquaintance, after some persuasion; and he said, if that was the
case, would I say to you what I have said, about existing
circumstances and coming prepared, and as soon as ever I saw you,
would I ask you to step round the corner, if it was only for one
minute, on most important business, to Mr Brogley's the Broker's. Now,
I tell you what, Captain Gills - whatever it is, I am convinced it's
very important; and if you like to step round, now, I'll wait here
till you come back.'

The Captain, divided between his fear of compromising Florence in
some way by not going, and his horror of leaving Mr Toots in
possession of the house with a chance of finding out the secret, was a
spectacle of mental disturbance that even Mr Toots could not be blind
to. But that young gentleman, considering his nautical friend as
merely in a state of preparation for the interview he was going to
have, was quite satisfied, and did not review his own discreet conduct
without chuckle

At length the Captain decided, as the lesser of two evils, to run
round to Brogley's the Broker's: previously locking the door that
communicated with the upper part of the house, and putting the key in
his pocket. 'If so be,' said the Captain to Mr Toots, with not a
little shame and hesitation, 'as you'll excuse my doing of it,
brother.'

'Captain Gills,' returned Mr Toots, 'whatever you do, is
satisfactory to me.

The Captain thanked him heartily, and promising to come back in
less than five minutes, went out in quest of the person who had
entrusted Mr Toots with this mysterious message. Poor Mr Toots, left
to himself, lay down upon the sofa, little thinking who had reclined
there last, and, gazing up at the skylight and resigning himself to
visions of Miss Dombey, lost all heed of time and place.

It was as well that he did so; for although the Captain was not
gone long, he was gone much longer than he had proposed. When he came
back, he was very pale indeed, and greatly agitated, and even looked
as if he had been shedding tears. He seemed to have lost the faculty
of speech, until he had been to the cupboard and taken a dram of rum
from the case-bottle, when he fetched a deep breath, and sat down in a
chair with his hand before his face.

'Captain Gills,' said Toots, kindly, 'I hope and trust there's
nothing wrong?'

'Thank'ee, my lad, not a bit,' said the Captain. 'Quite contrairy.'

'You have the appearance of being overcome, Captain Gills,'
observed Mr Toots.

'Why, my lad, I am took aback,' the Captain admitted. 'I am.'

'Is there anything I can do, Captain Gills?' inquired Mr Toots. 'If
there is, make use of me.'

The Captain removed his hand from his face, looked at him with a
remarkable expression of pity and tenderness, and took him by the
hand, and shook it hard.

'No, thank'ee,' said the Captain. 'Nothing. Only I'll take it as a
favour if you'll part company for the present. I believe, brother,'
wringing his hand again, 'that, after Wal'r, and on a different model,
you're as good a lad as ever stepped.'

'Upon my word and honour, Captain Gills,' returned Mr Toots, giving
the Captain's hand a preliminary slap before shaking it again, 'it's
delightful to me to possess your good opinion. Thank'ee.

'And bear a hand and cheer up,' said the Captain, patting him on
the back. 'What! There's more than one sweet creetur in the world!'

'Not to me, Captain Gills,' replied Mr Toots gravely. 'Not to me, I
assure you. The state of my feelings towards Miss Dombey is of that
unspeakable description, that my heart is a desert island, and she
lives in it alone. I'm getting more used up every day, and I'm proud
to be so. If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd
form some idea of what unrequited affection is. I have been prescribed
bark, but I don't take it, for I don't wish to have any tone whatever
given to my constitution. I'd rather not. This, however, is forbidden
ground. Captain Gills, goodbye!'

Captain Cuttle cordially reciprocating the warmth of Mr Toots's
farewell, locked the door behind him, and shaking his head with the
same remarkable expression of pity and tenderness as he had regarded
him with before, went up to see if Florence wanted him.

There was an entire change in the Captain's face as he went
upstairs. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, and he polished the
bridge of his nose with his sleeve as he had done already that
morning, but his face was absolutely changed. Now, he might have been
thought supremely happy; now, he might have been thought sad; but the
kind of gravity that sat upon his features was quite new to them, and
was as great an improvement to them as if they had undergone some
sublimating process.

He knocked softly, with his hook, at Florence's door, twice or
thrice; but, receiving no answer, ventured first to peep in, and then
to enter: emboldened to take the latter step, perhaps, by the familiar
recognition of Diogenes, who, stretched upon the ground by the side of
her couch, wagged his tail, and winked his eyes at the Captain,
without being at the trouble of getting up.

She was sleeping heavily, and moaning in her sleep; and Captain
Cuttle, with a perfect awe of her youth, and beauty, and her sorrow,
raised her head, and adjusted the coat that covered her, where it had
fallen off, and darkened the window a little more that she might sleep
on, and crept out again, and took his post of watch upon the stairs.
All this, with a touch and tread as light as Florence's own.

Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of
decision, which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty's
goodness - the delicate fingers that are formed for sensitiveness and
sympathy of touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the
rough hard Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and
softens in a moment!

Florence slept upon her couch, forgetful of her homelessness and
orphanage, and Captain Cuttle watched upon the stairs. A louder sob or
moan than usual, brought him sometimes to her door; but by degrees she
slept more peacefully, and the Captain's watch was undisturbed.



CHAPTER 49.

The Midshipman makes a Discovery



It was long before Florence awoke. The day was in its prime, the
day was in its wane, and still, uneasy in mind and body, she slept on;
unconscious of her strange bed, of the noise and turmoil in the
street, and of the light that shone outside the shaded window. Perfect
unconsciousness of what had happened in the home that existed no more,
even the deep slumber of exhaustion could not produce. Some undefined
and mournful recollection of it, dozing uneasily but never sleeping,
pervaded all her rest. A dull sorrow, like a half-lulled sense of
pain, was always present to her; and her pale cheek was oftener wet
with tears than the honest Captain, softly putting in his head from
time to time at the half-closed door, could have desired to see it.

The sun was getting low in the west, and, glancing out of a red
mist, pierced with its rays opposite loopholes and pieces of fretwork
in the spires of city churches, as if with golden arrows that struck
through and through them - and far away athwart the river and its flat
banks, it was gleaming like a path of fire - and out at sea it was
irradiating sails of ships - and, looked towards, from quiet
churchyards, upon hill-tops in the country, it was steeping distant
prospects in a flush and glow that seemed to mingle earth and sky
together in one glorious suffusion - when Florence, opening her heavy
eyes, lay at first, looking without interest or recognition at the
unfamiliar walls around her, and listening in the same regardless
manner to the noises in the street. But presently she started up upon
her couch, gazed round with a surprised and vacant look, and
recollected all.

'My pretty,' said the Captain, knocking at the door, 'what cheer?'

'Dear friend,' cried Florence, hurrying to him, 'is it you?'

The Captain felt so much pride in the name, and was so pleased by
the gleam of pleasure in her face, when she saw him, that he kissed
his hook, by way of reply, in speechless gratification.

'What cheer, bright di'mond?' said the Captain.

'I have surely slept very long,' returned Florence. 'When did I
come here? Yesterday?'

'This here blessed day, my lady lass,' replied the Captain.

'Has there been no night? Is it still day?' asked Florence.

'Getting on for evening now, my pretty,' said the Captain, drawing
back the curtain of the window. 'See!'

Florence, with her hand upon the Captain's arm, so sorrowful and
timid, and the Captain with his rough face and burly figure, so
quietly protective of her, stood in the rosy light of the bright
evening sky, without saying a word. However strange the form of speech
into which he might have fashioned the feeling, if he had had to give
it utterance, the Captain felt, as sensibly as the most eloquent of
men could have done, that there was something in the tranquil time and
in its softened beauty that would make the wounded heart of Florence
overflow; and that it was better that such tears should have their
way. So not a word spake Captain Cuttle. But when he felt his arm
clasped closer, and when he felt the lonely head come nearer to it,
and lay itself against his homely coarse blue sleeve, he pressed it
gently with his rugged hand, and understood it, and was understood.

'Better now, my pretty!' said the Captain. 'Cheerily, cheerily,
I'll go down below, and get some dinner ready. Will you come down of
your own self, arterwards, pretty, or shall Ed'ard Cuttle come and
fetch you?'

As Florence assured him that she was quite able to walk downstairs,
the Captain, though evidently doubtful of his own hospitality in
permitting it, left her to do so, and immediately set about roasting a
fowl at the fire in the little parlour. To achieve his cookery with
the greater skill, he pulled off his coat, tucked up his wristbands,
and put on his glazed hat, without which assistant he never applied
himself to any nice or difficult undertaking.

After cooling her aching head and burning face in the fresh water
which the Captain's care had provided for her while she slept,
Florence went to the little mirror to bind up her disordered hair.
Then she knew - in a moment, for she shunned it instantly, that on her
breast there was the darkening mark of an angry hand.

Her tears burst forth afresh at the sight; she was ashamed and
afraid of it; but it moved her to no anger against him. Homeless and
fatherless, she forgave him everything; hardly thought that she had
need to forgive him, or that she did; but she fled from the idea of
him as she had fled from the reality, and he was utterly gone and
lost. There was no such Being in the world.

What to do, or where to live, Florence - poor, inexperienced girl!
- could not yet consider. She had indistinct dreams of finding, a long
way off, some little sisters to instruct, who would be gentle with
her, and to whom, under some feigned name, she might attach herself,
and who would grow up in their happy home, and marry, and be good to
their old governess, and perhaps entrust her, in time, with the
education of their own daughters. And she thought how strange and
sorrowful it would be, thus to become a grey-haired woman, carrying
her secret to the grave, when Florence Dombey was forgotten. But it
was all dim and clouded to her now. She only knew that she had no
Father upon earth, and she said so, many times, with her suppliant
head hidden from all, but her Father who was in Heaven.

Her little stock of money amounted to but a few guineas. With a
part of this, it would be necessary to buy some clothes, for she had
none but those she wore. She was too desolate to think how soon her
money would be gone - too much a child in worldly matters to be
greatly troubled on that score yet, even if her other trouble had been
less. She tried to calm her thoughts and stay her tears; to quiet the
hurry in her throbbing head, and bring herself to believe that what
had happened were but the events of a few hours ago, instead of weeks
or months, as they appeared; and went down to her kind protector.

The Captain had spread the cloth with great care, and was making
some egg-sauce in a little saucepan: basting the fowl from time to
time during the process with a strong interest, as it turned and
browned on a string before the fire. Having propped Florence up with
cushions on the sofa, which was already wheeled into a warm corner for
her greater comfort, the Captain pursued his cooking with
extraordinary skill, making hot gravy in a second little saucepan,
boiling a handful of potatoes in a third, never forgetting the
egg-sauce in the first, and making an impartial round of basting and
stirring with the most useful of spoons every minute. Besides these
cares, the Captain had to keep his eye on a diminutive frying-pan, in
which some sausages were hissing and bubbling in a most musical
manner; and there was never such a radiant cook as the Captain looked,
in the height and heat of these functions: it being impossible to say
whether his face or his glazed hat shone the brighter.

The dinner being at length quite ready, Captain Cuttle dished and
served it up, with no less dexterity than he had cooked it. He then
dressed for dinner, by taking off his glazed hat and putting on his
coat. That done, he wheeled the table close against Florence on the
sofa, said grace, unscrewed his hook, screwed his fork into its place,
and did the honours of the table

'My lady lass,' said the Captain, 'cheer up, and try to eat a deal.
Stand by, my deary! Liver wing it is. Sarse it is. Sassage it is. And
potato!' all which the Captain ranged symmetrically on a plate, and
pouring hot gravy on the whole with the useful spoon, set before his
cherished guest.

'The whole row o' dead lights is up, for'ard, lady lass,' observed
the Captain, encouragingly, 'and everythink is made snug. Try and pick
a bit, my pretty. If Wal'r was here - '

'Ah! If I had him for my brother now!' cried Florence.

'Don't! don't take on, my pretty!' said the Captain, 'awast, to
obleege me! He was your nat'ral born friend like, warn't he, Pet?'

Florence had no words to answer with. She only said, 'Oh, dear,
dear Paul! oh, Walter!'

'The wery planks she walked on,' murmured the Captain, looking at
her drooping face, 'was as high esteemed by Wal'r, as the water brooks
is by the hart which never rejices! I see him now, the wery day as he
was rated on them Dombey books, a speaking of her with his face a
glistening with doo - leastways with his modest sentiments - like a
new blowed rose, at dinner. Well, well! If our poor Wal'r was here, my
lady lass - or if he could be - for he's drownded, ain't he?'

Florence shook her head.

'Yes, yes; drownded,' said the Captain, soothingly; 'as I was
saying, if he could be here he'd beg and pray of you, my precious, to
pick a leetle bit, with a look-out for your own sweet health. Whereby,
hold your own, my lady lass, as if it was for Wal'r's sake, and lay
your pretty head to the wind.'

Florence essayed to eat a morsel, for the Captain's pleasure. The
Captain, meanwhile, who seemed to have quite forgotten his own dinner,
laid down his knife and fork, and drew his chair to the sofa.

'Wal'r was a trim lad, warn't he, precious?' said the Captain,
after sitting for some time silently rubbing his chin, with his eyes
fixed upon her, 'and a brave lad, and a good lad?'

Florence tearfully assented.

'And he's drownded, Beauty, ain't he?' said the Captain, in a
soothing voice.

Florence could not but assent again.

'He was older than you, my lady lass,' pursued the Captain, 'but
you was like two children together, at first; wam't you?'

Florence answered 'Yes.'

'And Wal'r's drownded,' said the Captain. 'Ain't he?'

The repetition of this inquiry was a curious source of consolation,
but it seemed to be one to Captain Cuttle, for he came back to it
again and again. Florence, fain to push from her her untasted dinner,
and to lie back on her sofa, gave him her hand, feeling that she had
disappointed him, though truly wishing to have pleased him after all
his trouble, but he held it in his own (which shook as he held it),
and appearing to have quite forgotten all about the dinner and her
want of appetite, went on growling at intervals, in a ruminating tone
of sympathy, 'Poor Wal'r. Ay, ay! Drownded. Ain't he?' And always
waited for her answer, in which the great point of these singular
reflections appeared to consist.

The fowl and sausages were cold, and the gravy and the egg-sauce
stagnant, before the Captain remembered that they were on the board,
and fell to with the assistance of Diogenes, whose united efforts
quickly dispatched the banquet. The Captain's delight and wonder at
the quiet housewifery of Florence in assisting to clear the table,
arrange the parlour, and sweep up the hearth - only to be equalled by
the fervency of his protest when she began to assist him - were
gradually raised to that degree, that at last he could not choose but
do nothing himself, and stand looking at her as if she were some
Fairy, daintily performing these offices for him; the red rim on his
forehead glowing again, in his unspeakable admiration.

But when Florence, taking down his pipe from the mantel-shelf gave
it into his hand, and entreated him to smoke it, the good Captain was
so bewildered by her attention that he held it as if he had never held
a pipe, in all his life. Likewise, when Florence, looking into the
little cupboard, took out the case-bottle and mixed a perfect glass of
grog for him, unasked, and set it at his elbow, his ruddy nose turned
pale, he felt himself so graced and honoured. When he had filled his
pipe in an absolute reverie of satisfaction, Florence lighted it for
him - the Captain having no power to object, or to prevent her - and
resuming her place on the old sofa, looked at him with a smile so
loving and so grateful, a smile that showed him so plainly how her
forlorn heart turned to him, as her face did, through grief, that the
smoke of the pipe got into the Captain's throat and made him cough,
and got into the Captain's eyes, and made them blink and water.

The manner in which the Captain tried to make believe that the
cause of these effects lay hidden in the pipe itself, and the way in
which he looked into the bowl for it, and not finding it there,
pretended to blow it out of the stem, was wonderfully pleasant. The
pipe soon getting into better condition, he fell into that state of
repose becoming a good smoker; but sat with his eyes fixed on
Florence, and, with a beaming placidity not to be described, and
stopping every now and then to discharge a little cloud from his lips,
slowly puffed it forth, as if it were a scroll coming out of his
mouth, bearing the legend 'Poor Wal'r, ay, ay. Drownded, ain't he?'
after which he would resume his smoking with infinite gentleness.

Unlike as they were externally - and there could scarcely be a more
decided contrast than between Florence in her delicate youth and
beauty, and Captain Cuttle with his knobby face, his great broad
weather-beaten person, and his gruff voice - in simple innocence of
the world's ways and the world's perplexities and dangers, they were
nearly on a level. No child could have surpassed Captain Cuttle in
inexperience of everything but wind and weather; in simplicity,
credulity, and generous trustfulness. Faith, hope, and charity, shared
his whole nature among them. An odd sort of romance, perfectly
unimaginative, yet perfectly unreal, and subject to no considerations
of worldly prudence or practicability, was the only partner they had
in his character. As the Captain sat, and smoked, and looked at
Florence, God knows what impossible pictures, in which she was the
principal figure, presented themselves to his mind. Equally vague and
uncertain, though not so sanguine, were her own thoughts of the life
before her; and even as her tears made prismatic colours in the light
she gazed at, so, through her new and heavy grief, she already saw a
rainbow faintly shining in the far-off sky. A wandering princess and a
good monster in a storybook might have sat by the fireside, and talked
as Captain Cuttle and poor Florence talked - and not have looked very
much unlike them.

The Captain was not troubled with the faintest idea of any
difficulty in retaining Florence, or of any responsibility thereby
incurred. Having put up the shutters and locked the door, he was quite
satisfied on this head. If she had been a Ward in Chancery, it would
have made no difference at all to Captain Cuttle. He was the last man
in the world to be troubled by any such considerations.

So the Captain smoked his pipe very comfortably, and Florence and
he meditated after their own manner. When the pipe was out, they had
some tea; and then Florence entreated him to take her to some
neighbouring shop, where she could buy the few necessaries she
immediately wanted. It being quite dark, the Captain consented:
peeping carefully out first, as he had been wont to do in his time of
hiding from Mrs MacStinger; and arming himself with his large stick,
in case of an appeal to arms being rendered necessary by any
unforeseen circumstance.

The pride Captain Cuttle had, in giving his arm to Florence, and
escorting her some two or three hundred yards, keeping a bright
look-out all the time, and attracting the attention of everyone who
passed them, by his great vigilance and numerous precautions, was
extreme. Arrived at the shop, the Captain felt it a point of delicacy
to retire during the making of the purchases, as they were to consist
of wearing apparel; but he previously deposited his tin canister on
the counter, and informing the young lady of the establishment that it
contained fourteen pound two, requested her, in case that amount of
property should not be sufficient to defray the expenses of his
niece's little outfit - at the word 'niece,' he bestowed a most
significant look on Florence, accompanied with pantomime, expressive
of sagacity and mystery - to have the goodness to 'sing out,' and he
would make up the difference from his pocket. Casually consulting his
big watch, as a deep means of dazzling the establishment, and
impressing it with a sense of property, the Captain then kissed his
hook to his niece, and retired outside the window, where it was a
choice sight to see his great face looking in from time to time, among
the silks and ribbons, with an obvious misgiving that Florence had
been spirited away by a back door.

'Dear Captain Cuttle,' said Florence, when she came out with a
parcel, the size of which greatly disappointed the Captain, who had
expected to see a porter following with a bale of goods, 'I don't want
this money, indeed. I have not spent any of it. I have money of my
own.'

'My lady lass,' returned the baffled Captain, looking straight down
the street before them, 'take care on it for me, will you be so good,
till such time as I ask ye for it?'

'May I put it back in its usual place,' said Florence, 'and keep it
there?'

The Captain was not at all gratified by this proposal, but he
answered, 'Ay, ay, put it anywheres, my lady lass, so long as you know
where to find it again. It ain't o' no use to me,' said the Captain.
'I wonder I haven't chucked it away afore now.

The Captain was quite disheartened for the moment, but he revived
at the first touch of Florence's arm, and they returned with the same
precautions as they had come; the Captain opening the door of the
little Midshipman's berth, and diving in, with a suddenness which his
great practice only could have taught him. During Florence's slumber
in the morning, he had engaged the daughter of an elderly lady who
usually sat under a blue umbrella in Leadenhall Market, selling
poultry, to come and put her room in order, and render her any little
services she required; and this damsel now appearing, Florence found
everything about her as convenient and orderly, if not as handsome, as
in the terrible dream she had once called Home.

When they were alone again, the Captain insisted on her eating a
slice of dry toast' and drinking a glass of spiced negus (which he
made to perfection); and, encouraging her with every kind word and
inconsequential quotation be could possibly think of, led her upstairs
to her bedroom. But he too had something on his mind, and was not easy
in his manner.

'Good-night, dear heart,' said Captain Cuttle to her at her
chamber-door.

Florence raised her lips to his face, and kissed him.

At any other time the Captain would have been overbalanced by such
a token of her affection and gratitude; but now, although he was very
sensible of it, he looked in her face with even more uneasiness than
he had testified before, and seemed unwilling to leave her.

'Poor Wal'r!' said the Captain.

'Poor, poor Walter!' sighed Florence.

'Drownded, ain't he?' said the Captain.

Florence shook her head, and sighed.

'Good-night, my lady lass!' said Captain Cuttle, putting out his
hand.

'God bless you, dear, kind friend!'

But the Captain lingered still.

'Is anything the matter, dear Captain Cuttle?' said Florence,
easily alarmed in her then state of mind. 'Have you anything to tell
me?'

'To tell you, lady lass!' replied the Captain, meeting her eyes in
confusion. 'No, no; what should I have to tell you, pretty! You don't
expect as I've got anything good to tell you, sure?'

'No!' said Florence, shaking her head.

The Captain looked at her wistfully, and repeated 'No,' - ' still
lingering, and still showing embarrassment.

'Poor Wal'r!' said the Captain. 'My Wal'r, as I used to call you!
Old Sol Gills's nevy! Welcome to all as knowed you, as the flowers in
May! Where are you got to, brave boy? Drownded, ain't he?'

Concluding his apostrophe with this abrupt appeal to Florence, the
Captain bade her good-night, and descended the stairs, while Florence
remained at the top, holding the candle out to light him down. He was
lost in the obscurity, and, judging from the sound of his receding
footsteps, was in the act of turning into the little parlour, when his
head and shoulders unexpectedly emerged again, as from the deep,
apparently for no other purpose than to repeat, 'Drownded, ain't he,
pretty?' For when he had said that in a tone of tender condolence, he
disappeared.

Florence was very sorry that she should unwittingly, though
naturally, have awakened these associations in the mind of her
protector, by taking refuge there; and sitting down before the little
table where the Captain had arranged the telescope and song-book, and
those other rarities, thought of Walter, and of all that was connected
with him in the past, until she could have almost wished to lie down
on her bed and fade away. But in her lonely yearning to the dead whom
she had loved, no thought of home - no possibility of going back - no
presentation of it as yet existing, or as sheltering her father - once
entered her thoughts. She had seen the murder done. In the last
lingering natural aspect in which she had cherished him through so
much, he had been torn out of her heart, defaced, and slain. The
thought of it was so appalling to her, that she covered her eyes, and
shrunk trembling from the least remembrance of the deed, or of the
cruel hand that did it. If her fond heart could have held his image
after that, it must have broken; but it could not; and the void was
filled with a wild dread that fled from all confronting with its
shattered fragments - with such a dread as could have risen out of
nothing but the depths of such a love, so wronged.

She dared not look into the glass; for the sight of the darkening
mark upon her bosom made her afraid of herself, as if she bore about
her something wicked. She covered it up, with a hasty, faltering hand,
and in the dark; and laid her weary head down, weeping.

The Captain did not go to bed for a long time. He walked to and fro
in the shop and in the little parlour, for a full hour, and, appearing
to have composed himself by that exercise, sat down with a grave and
thoughtful face, and read out of a Prayer-book the forms of prayer
appointed to be used at sea. These were not easily disposed of; the
good Captain being a mighty slow, gruff reader, and frequently
stopping at a hard word to give himself such encouragement as Now, my
lad! With a will!' or, 'Steady, Ed'ard Cuttle, steady!' which had a
great effect in helping him out of any difficulty. Moreover, his
spectacles greatly interfered with his powers of vision. But
notwithstanding these drawbacks, the Captain, being heartily in
earnest, read the service to the very last line, and with genuine
feeling too; and approving of it very much when he had done, turned
in, under the counter (but not before he had been upstairs, and
listened at Florence's door), with a serene breast, and a most
benevolent visage.

The Captain turned out several times in the course of the night, to
assure himself that his charge was resting quietly; and once, at
daybreak, found that she was awake: for she called to know if it were
he, on hearing footsteps near her door.

'Yes' my lady lass,' replied the Captain, in a growling whisper.
'Are you all right, di'mond?'

Florence thanked him, and said 'Yes.'

The Captain could not lose so favourable an opportunity of applying
his mouth to the keyhole, and calling through it, like a hoarse
breeze, 'Poor Wal'r! Drownded, ain't he?' after which he withdrew, and
turning in again, slept till seven o'clock.

Nor was he free from his uneasy and embarrassed manner all that
day; though Florence, being busy with her needle in the little
parlour, was more calm and tranquil than she had been on the day
preceding. Almost always when she raised her eyes from her work, she
observed the captain looking at her, and thoughtfully stroking his
chin; and he so often hitched his arm-chair close to her, as if he
were going to say something very confidential, and hitched it away
again, as not being able to make up his mind how to begin, that in the
course of the day he cruised completely round the parlour in that
frail bark, and more than once went ashore against the wainscot or the
closet door, in a very distressed condition.

It was not until the twilight that Captain Cuttle, fairly dropping
anchor, at last, by the side of Florence, began to talk at all
connectedly. But when the light of the fire was shining on the walls
and ceiling of the little room, and on the tea-board and the cups and
saucers that were ranged upon the table, and on her calm face turned
towards the flame, and reflecting it in the tears that filled her
eyes, the Captain broke a long silence thus:

'You never was at sea, my own?'

'No,' replied Florence.

'Ay,' said the Captain, reverentially; 'it's a almighty element.
There's wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is
roaring and the waves is rowling. Think on it when the stormy nights
is so pitch dark,' said the Captain, solemnly holding up his hook, 'as
you can't see your hand afore you, excepting when the wiwid lightning
reweals the same; and when you drive, drive, drive through the storm
and dark, as if you was a driving, head on, to the world without end,
evermore, amen, and when found making a note of. Them's the times, my
beauty, when a man may say to his messmate (previously a overhauling
of the wollume), "A stiff nor'wester's blowing, Bill; hark, don't you
hear it roar now! Lord help 'em, how I pitys all unhappy folks ashore
now!"' Which quotation, as particularly applicable to the terrors of
the ocean, the Captain delivered in a most impressive manner,
concluding with a sonorous 'Stand by!'

'Were you ever in a dreadful storm?' asked Florence.

'Why ay, my lady lass, I've seen my share of bad weather,' said the
Captain, tremulously wiping his head, 'and I've had my share of
knocking about; but - but it ain't of myself as I was a meaning to
speak. Our dear boy,' drawing closer to her, 'Wal'r, darling, as was
drownded.'

The Captain spoke in such a trembling voice, and looked at Florence
with a face so pale and agitated, that she clung to his hand in
affright.

'Your face is changed,' cried Florence. 'You are altered in a
moment. What is it? Dear Captain Cuttle, it turns me cold to see you!'

'What! Lady lass,' returned the Captain, supporting her with his
hand, 'don't be took aback. No, no! All's well, all's well, my dear.
As I was a saying - Wal'r - he's - he's drownded. Ain't he?'

Florence looked at him intently; her colour came and went; and she
laid her hand upon her breast.

'There's perils and dangers on the deep, my beauty,' said the
Captain; 'and over many a brave ship, and many and many a bould heart,
the secret waters has closed up, and never told no tales. But there's
escapes upon the deep, too, and sometimes one man out of a score, -
ah! maybe out of a hundred, pretty, - has been saved by the mercy of
God, and come home after being given over for dead, and told of all
hands lost. I - I know a story, Heart's Delight,' stammered the
Captain, 'o' this natur, as was told to me once; and being on this
here tack, and you and me sitting alone by the fire, maybe you'd like
to hear me tell it. Would you, deary?'

Florence, trembling with an agitation which she could not control
or understand, involuntarily followed his glance, which went behind
her into the shop, where a lamp was burning. The instant that she
turned her head, the Captain sprung out of his chair, and interposed
his hand.

'There's nothing there, my beauty,' said the Captain. 'Don't look
there.'

'Why not?' asked Florence.

The Captain murmured something about its being dull that way, and
about the fire being cheerful. He drew the door ajar, which had been
standing open until now, and resumed his seat. Florence followed him
with her eyes, and looked intently in his face.

'The story was about a ship, my lady lass,' began the Captain, 'as
sailed out of the Port of London, with a fair wind and in fair
weather, bound for - don't be took aback, my lady lass, she was only
out'ard bound, pretty, only out'ard bound!'

The expression on Florence's face alarmed the Captain, who was
himself very hot and flurried, and showed scarcely less agitation than
she did.

'Shall I go on, Beauty?' said the Captain.

'Yes, yes, pray!' cried Florence.

The Captain made a gulp as if to get down something that was
sticking in his throat, and nervously proceeded:

'That there unfort'nate ship met with such foul weather, out at
sea, as don't blow once in twenty year, my darling. There was
hurricanes ashore as tore up forests and blowed down towns, and there
was gales at sea in them latitudes, as not the stoutest wessel ever
launched could live in. Day arter day that there unfort'nate ship
behaved noble, I'm told, and did her duty brave, my pretty, but at one
blow a'most her bulwarks was stove in, her masts and rudder carved
away, her best man swept overboard, and she left to the mercy of the
storm as had no mercy but blowed harder and harder yet, while the
waves dashed over her, and beat her in, and every time they come a
thundering at her, broke her like a shell. Every black spot in every
mountain of water that rolled away was a bit o' the ship's life or a
living man, and so she went to pieces, Beauty, and no grass will never
grow upon the graves of them as manned that ship.'

'They were not all lost!' cried Florence. 'Some were saved! - Was
one?'

'Aboard o' that there unfort'nate wessel,' said the Captain, rising
from his chair, and clenching his hand with prodigious energy and
exultation, 'was a lad, a gallant lad - as I've heerd tell - that had
loved, when he was a boy, to read and talk about brave actions in
shipwrecks - I've heerd him! I've heerd him! - and he remembered of
'em in his hour of need; for when the stoutest and oldest hands was
hove down, he was firm and cheery. It warn't the want of objects to
like and love ashore that gave him courage, it was his nat'ral mind.
I've seen it in his face, when he was no more than a child - ay, many
a time! - and when I thought it nothing but his good looks, bless
him!'

'And was he saved!' cried Florence. 'Was he saved!'

'That brave lad,' said the Captain, - 'look at me, pretty! Don't
look round - '

Florence had hardly power to repeat, 'Why not?'

'Because there's nothing there, my deary,' said the Captain. 'Don't
be took aback, pretty creetur! Don't, for the sake of Wal'r, as was
dear to all on us! That there lad,' said the Captain, 'arter working
with the best, and standing by the faint-hearted, and never making no
complaint nor sign of fear, and keeping up a spirit in all hands that
made 'em honour him as if he'd been a admiral - that lad, along with
the second-mate and one seaman, was left, of all the beatin' hearts
that went aboard that ship, the only living creeturs - lashed to a
fragment of the wreck, and driftin' on the stormy sea.

Were they saved?' cried Florence.

'Days and nights they drifted on them endless waters,' said the
Captain, 'until at last - No! Don't look that way, pretty! - a sail
bore down upon 'em, and they was, by the Lord's mercy, took aboard:
two living and one dead.'

'Which of them was dead?' cried Florence.

'Not the lad I speak on,' said the Captain.

'Thank God! oh thank God!'

'Amen!' returned the Captain hurriedly. 'Don't be took aback! A
minute more, my lady lass! with a good heart! - aboard that ship, they
went a long voyage, right away across the chart (for there warn't no
touching nowhere), and on that voyage the seaman as was picked up with
him died. But he was spared, and - '

The Captain, without knowing what he did, had cut a slice of bread
from the loaf, and put it on his hook (which was his usual
toasting-fork), on which he now held it to the fire; looking behind
Florence with great emotion in his face, and suffering the bread to
blaze and burn like fuel.

'Was spared,' repeated Florence, 'and-?'

'And come home in that ship,' said the Captain, still looking in
the same direction, 'and - don't be frightened, pretty - and landed;
and one morning come cautiously to his own door to take a obserwation,
knowing that his friends would think him drownded, when he sheered off
at the unexpected - '

'At the unexpected barking of a dog?' cried Florence, quickly.

'Yes,' roared the Captain. 'Steady, darling! courage! Don't look
round yet. See there! upon the wall!'

There was the shadow of a man upon the wall close to her. She
started up, looked round, and with a piercing cry, saw Walter Gay
behind her!

She had no thought of him but as a brother, a brother rescued from
the grave; a shipwrecked brother saved and at her side; and rushed
into his arms. In all the world, he seemed to be her hope, her
comfort, refuge, natural protector. 'Take care of Walter, I was fond
of Walter!' The dear remembrance of the plaintive voice that said so,
rushed upon her soul, like music in the night. 'Oh welcome home, dear
Walter! Welcome to this stricken breast!' She felt the words, although
she could not utter them, and held him in her pure embrace.

Captain Cuttle, in a fit of delirium, attempted to wipe his head
with the blackened toast upon his hook: and finding it an uncongenial
substance for the purpose, put it into the crown of his glazed hat,
put the glazed hat on with some difficulty, essayed to sing a verse of
Lovely Peg, broke down at the first word, and retired into the shop,
whence he presently came back express, with a face all flushed and
besmeared, and the starch completely taken out of his shirt-collar, to
say these words:

'Wal'r, my lad, here is a little bit of property as I should wish
to make over, jintly!'

The Captain hastily produced the big watch, the teaspoons, the
sugar-tongs, and the canister, and laying them on the table, swept
them with his great hand into Walter's hat; but in handing that
singular strong box to Walter, he was so overcome again, that he was
fain to make another retreat into the shop, and absent himself for a
longer space of time than on his first retirement.

But Walter sought him out, and brought him back; and then the
Captain's great apprehension was, that Florence would suffer from this
new shock. He felt it so earnestly, that he turned quite rational, and
positively interdicted any further allusion to Walter's adventures for
some days to come. Captain Cuttle then became sufficiently composed to
relieve himself of the toast in his hat, and to take his place at the
tea-board; but finding Walter's grasp upon his shoulder, on one side,
and Florence whispering her tearful congratulations on the other, the
Captain suddenly bolted again, and was missing for a good ten minutes.

But never in all his life had the Captain's face so shone and
glistened, as when, at last, he sat stationary at the tea-board,
looking from Florence to Walter, and from Walter to Florence. Nor was
this effect produced or at all heightened by the immense quantity of
polishing he had administered to his face with his coat-sleeve during
the last half-hour. It was solely the effect of his internal emotions.
There was a glory and delight within the Captain that spread itself
over his whole visage, and made a perfect illumination there.

The pride with which the Captain looked upon the bronzed cheek and
the courageous eyes of his recovered boy; with which he saw the
generous fervour of his youth, and all its frank and hopeful
qualities, shining once more, in the fresh, wholesome manner, and the
ardent face, would have kindled something of this light in his
countenance. The admiration and sympathy with which he turned his eyes
on Florence, whose beauty, grace, and innocence could have won no
truer or more zealous champion than himself, would have had an equal
influence upon him. But the fulness of the glow he shed around him
could only have been engendered in his contemplation of the two
together, and in all the fancies springing out of that association,
that came sparkling and beaming into his head, and danced about it.

How they talked of poor old Uncle Sol, and dwelt on every little
circumstance relating to his disappearance; how their joy was
moderated by the old man's absence and by the misfortunes of Florence;
how they released Diogenes, whom the Captain had decoyed upstairs some
time before, lest he should bark again; the Captain, though he was in
one continual flutter, and made many more short plunges into the shop,
fully comprehended. But he no more dreamed that Walter looked on
Florence, as it were, from a new and far-off place; that while his
eyes often sought the lovely face, they seldom met its open glance of
sisterly affection, but withdrew themselves when hers were raised
towards him; than he believed that it was Walter's ghost who sat
beside him. He saw them together in their youth and beauty, and he
knew the story of their younger days, and he had no inch of room
beneath his great blue waistcoat for anything save admiration of such
a pair, and gratitude for their being reunited.

They sat thus, until it grew late. The Captain would have been
content to sit so for a week. But Walter rose, to take leave for the
night.

'Going, Walter!' said Florence. 'Where?'

'He slings his hammock for the present, lady lass,' said Captain
Cuttle, 'round at Brogley's. Within hail, Heart's Delight.'

'I am the cause of your going away, Walter,' said Florence. 'There
is a houseless sister in your place.'

'Dear Miss Dombey,' replied Walter, hesitating - 'if it is not too
bold to call you so!

Walter!' she exclaimed, surprised.

'If anything could make me happier in being allowed to see and
speak to you, would it not be the discovery that I had any means on
earth of doing you a moment's service! Where would I not go, what
would I not do, for your sake?'

She smiled, and called him brother.

'You are so changed,' said Walter -

'I changed!' she interrupted.

'To me,' said Walter, softly, as if he were thinking aloud,
'changed to me. I left you such a child, and find you - oh! something
so different - '

'But your sister, Walter. You have not forgotten what we promised
to each other, when we parted?'

'Forgotten!' But he said no more.

'And if you had - if suffering and danger had driven it from your
thoughts - which it has not - you would remember it now, Walter, when
you find me poor and abandoned, with no home but this, and no friends
but the two who hear me speak!'

'I would! Heaven knows I would!' said Walter.

'Oh, Walter,' exclaimed Florence, through her sobs and tears. 'Dear
brother! Show me some way through the world - some humble path that I
may take alone, and labour in, and sometimes think of you as one who
will protect and care for me as for a sister! Oh, help me, Walter, for
I need help so much!'

'Miss Dombey! Florence! I would die to help you. But your friends
are proud and rich. Your father - '

'No, no! Walter!' She shrieked, and put her hands up to her head,
in an attitude of terror that transfixed him where he stood. 'Don't
say that word!'

He never, from that hour, forgot the voice and look with which she
stopped him at the name. He felt that if he were to live a hundred
years, he never could forget it.

Somewhere - anywhere - but never home! All past, all gone, all
lost, and broken up! The whole history of her untold slight and
suffering was in the cry and look; and he felt he never could forget
it, and he never did.

She laid her gentle face upon the Captain's shoulder, and related
how and why she had fled. If every sorrowing tear she shed in doing
so, had been a curse upon the head of him she never named or blamed,
it would have been better for him, Walter thought, with awe, than to
be renounced out of such a strength and might of love.

'There, precious!' said the Captain, when she ceased; and deep
attention the Captain had paid to her while she spoke; listening, with
his glazed hat all awry and his mouth wide open. 'Awast, awast, my
eyes! Wal'r, dear lad, sheer off for to-night, and leave the pretty
one to me!'

Walter took her hand in both of his, and put it to his lips, and
kissed it. He knew now that she was, indeed, a homeless wandering
fugitive; but, richer to him so, than in all the wealth and pride of
her right station, she seemed farther off than even on the height that
had made him giddy in his boyish dreams.

Captain Cuttle, perplexed by no such meditations, guarded Florence
to her room, and watched at intervals upon the charmed ground outside
her door - for such it truly was to him - until he felt sufficiently
easy in his mind about her, to turn in under the counter. On
abandoning his watch for that purpose, he could not help calling once,
rapturously, through the keyhole, 'Drownded. Ain't he, pretty?' - or,
when he got downstairs, making another trial at that verse of Lovely
Peg. But it stuck in his throat somehow, and he could make nothing of
it; so he went to bed, and dreamed that old Sol Gills was married to
Mrs MacStinger, and kept prisoner by that lady in a secret chamber on
a short allowance of victuals.



CHAPTER 50.

Mr Toots's Complaint



There was an empty room above-stairs at the wooden Midshipman's,
which, in days of yore, had been Walter's bedroom. Walter, rousing up
the Captain betimes in the morning, proposed that they should carry
thither such furniture out of the little parlour as would grace it
best, so that Florence might take possession of it when she rose. As
nothing could be more agreeable to Captain Cuttle than making himself
very red and short of breath in such a cause, he turned to (as he
himself said) with a will; and, in a couple of hours, this garret was
transformed into a species of land-cabin, adorned with all the
choicest moveables out of the parlour, inclusive even of the Tartar
frigate, which the Captain hung up over the chimney-piece with such
extreme delight, that he could do nothing for half-an-hour afterwards
but walk backward from it, lost in admiration.

The Captain could be indueed by no persuasion of Walter's to wind
up the big watch, or to take back the canister, or to touch the
sugar-tongs and teaspoons. 'No, no, my lad;' was the Captain's
invariable reply to any solicitation of the kind, 'I've made that
there little property over, jintly.' These words he repeated with
great unction and gravity, evidently believing that they had the
virtue of an Act of Parliament, and that unless he committed himself
by some new admission of ownership, no flaw could be found in such a
form of conveyance.

It was an advantage of the new arrangement, that besides the
greater seclusion it afforded Florence, it admitted of the Midshipman
being restored to his usual post of observation, and also of the shop
shutters being taken down. The latter ceremony, however little
importance the unconscious Captain attached to it, was not wholly
superfluous; for, on the previous day, so much excitement had been
occasioned in the neighbourhood, by the shutters remaining unopened,
that the Instrument-maker's house had been honoured with an unusual
share of public observation, and had been intently stared at from the
opposite side of the way, by groups of hungry gazers, at any time
between sunrise and sunset. The idlers and vagabonds had been
particularly interested in the Captain's fate; constantly grovelling
in the mud to apply their eyes to the cellar-grating, under the
shop-window, and delighting their imaginations with the fancy that
they could see a piece of his coat as he hung in a corner; though this
settlement of him was stoutly disputed by an opposite faction, who
were of opinion that he lay murdered with a hammer, on the stairs. It
was not without exciting some discontent, therefore, that the subject
of these rumours was seen early in the morning standing at his
shop-door as hale and hearty as if nothing had happened; and the
beadle of that quarter, a man of an ambitious character, who had
expected to have the distinction of being present at the breaking open
of the door, and of giving evidence in full uniform before the
coroner, went so far as to say to an opposite neighbour, that the chap
in the glazed hat had better not try it on there - without more
particularly mentioning what - and further, that he, the beadle, would
keep his eye upon him.

'Captain Cuttle,' said Walter, musing, when they stood resting from
their labours at the shop-door, looking down the old familiar street;
it being still early in the morning; 'nothing at all of Uncle Sol, in
all that time!'

'Nothing at all, my lad,' replied the Captain, shaking his head.

'Gone in search of me, dear, kind old man,' said Walter: 'yet never
write to you! But why not? He says, in effect, in this packet that you
gave me,' taking the paper from his pocket, which had been opened in
the presence of the enlightened Bunsby, 'that if you never hear from
him before opening it, you may believe him dead. Heaven forbid! But
you would have heard of him, even if he were dead! Someone would have
written, surely, by his desire, if he could not; and have said, "on
such a day, there died in my house," or "under my care," or so forth,
"Mr Solomon Gills of London, who left this last remembrance and this
last request to you".'

The Captain, who had never climbed to such a clear height of
probability before, was greatly impressed by the wide prospect it
opened, and answered, with a thoughtful shake of his head, 'Well said,
my lad; wery well said.'

'I have been thinking of this, or, at least,' said Walter,
colouring, 'I have been thinking of one thing and another, all through
a sleepless night, and I cannot believe, Captain Cuttle, but that my
Uncle Sol (Lord bless him!) is alive, and will return. I don't so much
wonder at his going away, because, leaving out of consideration that
spice of the marvellous which was always in his character, and his
great affection for me, before which every other consideration of his
life became nothing, as no one ought to know so well as I who had the
best of fathers in him,' - Walter's voice was indistinct and husky
here, and he looked away, along the street, - 'leaving that out of
consideration, I say, I have often read and heard of people who,
having some near and dear relative, who was supposed to be shipwrecked
at sea, have gone down to live on that part of the sea-shore where any
tidings of the missing ship might be expected to arrive, though only
an hour or two sooner than elsewhere, or have even gone upon her track
to the place whither she was bound, as if their going would create
intelligence. I think I should do such a thing myself, as soon as
another, or sooner than many, perhaps. But why my Uncle shouldn't
write to you, when he so clearly intended to do so, or how he should
die abroad, and you not know it through some other hand, I cannot make
out.'

Captain Cuttle observed, with a shake of his head, that Jack Bunsby
himself hadn't made it out, and that he was a man as could give a
pretty taut opinion too.

'If my Uncle had been a heedless young man, likely to be entrapped
by jovial company to some drinking-place, where he was to be got rid
of for the sake of what money he might have about him,' said Walter;
'or if he had been a reckless sailor, going ashore with two or three
months' pay in his pocket, I could understand his disappearing, and
leaving no trace behind. But, being what he was - and is, I hope - I
can't believe it.'

'Wal'r, my lad,' inquired the Captain, wistfully eyeing him as he
pondered and pondered, 'what do you make of it, then?'

'Captain Cuttle,' returned Walter, 'I don't know what to make of
it. I suppose he never has written! There is no doubt about that?'

'If so be as Sol Gills wrote, my lad,' replied the Captain,
argumentatively, 'where's his dispatch?'

'Say that he entrusted it to some private hand,' suggested Walter,
'and that it has been forgotten, or carelessly thrown aside, or lost.
Even that is more probable to me, than the other event. In short, I
not only cannot bear to contemplate that other event, Captain Cuttle,
but I can't, and won't.'

'Hope, you see, Wal'r,' said the Captain, sagely, 'Hope. It's that
as animates you. Hope is a buoy, for which you overhaul your Little
Warbler, sentimental diwision, but Lord, my lad, like any other buoy,
it only floats; it can't be steered nowhere. Along with the
figure-head of Hope,' said the Captain, 'there's a anchor; but what's
the good of my having a anchor, if I can't find no bottom to let it go
in?'

Captain Cuttle said this rather in his character of a sagacious
citizen and householder, bound to impart a morsel from his stores of
wisdom to an inexperienced youth, than in his own proper person.
Indeed, his face was quite luminous as he spoke, with new hope, caught
from Walter; and he appropriately concluded by slapping him on the
back; and saying, with enthusiasm, 'Hooroar, my lad! Indiwidually, I'm
o' your opinion.' Walter, with his cheerful laugh, returned the
salutation, and said:

'Only one word more about my Uncle at present' Captain Cuttle. I
suppose it is impossible that he can have written in the ordinary
course - by mail packet, or ship letter, you understand - '

'Ay, ay, my lad,' said the Captain approvingly.

And that you have missed the letter, anyhow?'

'Why, Wal'r,' said the Captain, turning his eyes upon him with a
faint approach to a severe expression, 'ain't I been on the look-out
for any tidings of that man o' science, old Sol Gills, your Uncle, day
and night, ever since I lost him? Ain't my heart been heavy and
watchful always, along of him and you? Sleeping and waking, ain't I
been upon my post, and wouldn't I scorn to quit it while this here
Midshipman held together!'

'Yes, Captain Cuttle,' replied Walter, grasping his hand, 'I know
you would, and I know how faithful and earnest all you say and feel
is. I am sure of it. You don't doubt that I am as sure of it as I am
that my foot is again upon this door-step, or that I again have hold
of this true hand. Do you?'

'No, no, Wal'r,' returned the Captain, with his beaming

'I'll hazard no more conjectures,' said Walter, fervently shaking
the hard hand of the Captain, who shook his with no less goodwill.
'All I will add is, Heaven forbid that I should touch my Uncle's
possessions, Captain Cuttle! Everything that he left here, shall
remain in the care of the truest of stewards and kindest of men - and
if his name is not Cuttle, he has no name! Now, best of friends, about
- Miss Dombey.'

There was a change in Walter's manner, as he came to these two
words; and when he uttered them, all his confidence and cheerfulness
appeared to have deserted him.

'I thought, before Miss Dombey stopped me when I spoke of her
father last night,' said Walter, ' - you remember how?'

The Captain well remembered, and shook his head.

'I thought,' said Walter, 'before that, that we had but one hard
duty to perform, and that it was, to prevail upon her to communicate
with her friends, and to return home.'

The Captain muttered a feeble 'Awast!' or a 'Stand by!' or
something or other, equally pertinent to the occasion; but it was
rendered so extremely feeble by the total discomfiture with which he
received this announcement, that what it was, is mere matter of
conjecture.

'But,' said Walter, 'that is over. I think so, no longer. I would
sooner be put back again upon that piece of wreck, on which I have so
often floated, since my preservation, in my dreams, and there left to
drift, and drive, and die!'

'Hooroar, my lad!' exclaimed the Captain, in a burst of
uncontrollable satisfaction. 'Hooroar! hooroar! hooroar!'

'To think that she, so young, so good, and beautiful,' said Walter,
'so delicately brought up, and born to such a different fortune,
should strive with the rough world! But we have seen the gulf that
cuts off all behind her, though no one but herself can know how deep
it is; and there is no return.

Captain Cuttle, without quite understanding this, greatly approved
of it, and observed in a tone of strong corroboration, that the wind
was quite abaft.

'She ought not to be alone here; ought she, Captain Cuttle?' said
Walter, anxiously.

'Well, my lad,' replied the Captain, after a little sagacious
consideration. 'I don't know. You being here to keep her company, you
see, and you two being jintly - '

'Dear Captain Cuttle!' remonstrated Walter. 'I being here! Miss
Dombey, in her guileless innocent heart, regards me as her adopted
brother; but what would the guile and guilt of my heart be, if I
pretended to believe that I had any right to approach her, familiarly,
in that character - if I pretended to forget that I am bound, in
honour, not to do it?'

'Wal'r, my lad,' hinted the Captain, with some revival of his
discomfiture, 'ain't there no other character as - '

'Oh!' returned Walter, 'would you have me die in her esteem - in
such esteem as hers - and put a veil between myself and her angel's
face for ever, by taking advantage of her being here for refuge, so
trusting and so unprotected, to endeavour to exalt myself into her
lover? What do I say? There is no one in the world who would be more
opposed to me if I could do so, than you.'

'Wal'r, my lad,' said the Captain, drooping more and more,
'prowiding as there is any just cause or impediment why two persons
should not be jined together in the house of bondage, for which you'll
overhaul the place and make a note, I hope I should declare it as
promised and wowed in the banns. So there ain't no other character;
ain't there, my lad?'

Walter briskly waved his hand in the negative.

'Well, my lad,' growled the Captain slowly, 'I won't deny but what
I find myself wery much down by the head, along o' this here, or but
what I've gone clean about. But as to Lady lass, Wal'r, mind you,
wot's respect and duty to her, is respect and duty in my articles,
howsumever disapinting; and therefore I follows in your wake, my lad,
and feel as you are, no doubt, acting up to yourself. And there ain't
no other character, ain't there?' said the Captain, musing over the
ruins of his fallen castle, with a very despondent face.

'Now, Captain Cuttle,' said Walter, starting a fresh point with a
gayer air, to cheer the Captain up - but nothing could do that; he was
too much concerned - 'I think we should exert ourselves to find
someone who would be a proper attendant for Miss Dombey while she
remains here, and who may be trusted. None of her relations may. It's
clear Miss Dombey feels that they are all subservient to her father.
What has become of Susan?'

'The young woman?' returned the Captain. 'It's my belief as she was
sent away again the will of Heart's Delight. I made a signal for her
when Lady lass first come, and she rated of her wery high, and said
she had been gone a long time.'

'Then,' said Walter, 'do you ask Miss Dombey where she's gone, and
we'll try to find her. The morning's getting on, and Miss Dombey will
soon be rising. You are her best friend. Wait for her upstairs, and
leave me to take care of all down here.'

The Captain, very crest-fallen indeed, echoed the sigh with which
Walter said this, and complied. Florence was delighted with her new
room, anxious to see Walter, and overjoyed at the prospect of greeting
her old friend Susan. But Florence could not say where Susan was gone,
except that it was in Essex, and no one could say, she remembered,
unless it were Mr Toots.

With this information the melancholy Captain returned to Walter,
and gave him to understand that Mr Toots was the young gentleman whom
he had encountered on the door-step, and that he was a friend of his,
and that he was a young gentleman of property, and that he hopelessly
adored Miss Dombey. The Captain also related how the intelligence of
Walter's supposed fate had first made him acquainted with Mr Toots,
and how there was solemn treaty and compact between them, that Mr
Toots should be mute upon the subject of his love.

The question then was, whether Florence could trust Mr Toots; and
Florence saying, with a smile, 'Oh, yes, with her whole heart!' it
became important to find out where Mr Toots lived. This, Florence
didn't know, and the Captain had forgotten; and the Captain was
telling Walter, in the little parlour, that Mr Toots was sure to be
there soon, when in came Mr Toots himself.

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, rushing into the parlour without
any ceremony, 'I'm in a state of mind bordering on distraction!'

Mr Toots had discharged those words, as from a mortar, before he
observed Walter, whom he recognised with what may be described as a
chuckle of misery.

'You'll excuse me, Sir,' said Mr Toots, holding his forehead, 'but
I'm at present in that state that my brain is going, if not gone, and
anything approaching to politeness in an individual so situated would
be a hollow mockery. Captain Gills, I beg to request the favour of a
private interview.'

'Why, Brother,' returned the Captain, taking him by the hand, 'you
are the man as we was on the look-out for.'

'Oh, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'what a look-out that must be,
of which I am the object! I haven't dared to shave, I'm in that rash
state. I haven't had my clothes brushed. My hair is matted together. I
told the Chicken that if he offered to clean my boots, I'd stretch him
a Corpse before me!'

All these indications of a disordered mind were verified in Mr
Toots's appearance, which was wild and savage.

'See here, Brother,' said the Captain. 'This here's old Sol Gills's
nevy Wal'r. Him as was supposed to have perished at sea'

Mr Toots took his hand from his forehead, and stared at Walter.

'Good gracious me!' stammered Mr Toots. 'What a complication of
misery! How-de-do? I - I - I'm afraid you must have got very wet.
Captain Gills, will you allow me a word in the shop?'

He took the Captain by the coat, and going out with him whispered:

'That then, Captain Gills, is the party you spoke of, when you said
that he and Miss Dombey were made for one another?'

'Why, ay, my lad,' replied the disconsolate Captain; 'I was of that
mind once.'

'And at this time!' exclaimed Mr Toots, with his hand to his
forehead again. 'Of all others! - a hated rival! At least, he ain't a
hated rival,' said Mr Toots, stopping short, on second thoughts, and
taking away his hand; 'what should I hate him for? No. If my affection
has been truly disinterested, Captain Gills, let me prove it now!'

Mr Toots shot back abruptly into the parlour, and said, wringing
Walter by the hand:

'How-de-do? I hope you didn't take any cold. I - I shall be very
glad if you'll give me the pleasure of your acquaintance. I wish you
many happy returns of the day. Upon my word and honour,' said Mr
Toots, warming as he became better acquainted with Walter's face and
figure, 'I'm very glad to see you!'

'Thank you, heartily,' said Walter. 'I couldn't desire a more
genuine and genial welcome.'

'Couldn't you, though?' said Mr Toots, still shaking his hand.
'It's very kind of you. I'm much obliged to you. How-de-do? I hope you
left everybody quite well over the - that is, upon the - I mean
wherever you came from last, you know.'

All these good wishes, and better intentions, Walter responded to
manfully.

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'I should wish to be strictly
honourable; but I trust I may be allowed now, to allude to a certain
subject that - '

'Ay, ay, my lad,' returned the Captain. 'Freely, freely.'

'Then, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'and Lieutenant Walters - are
you aware that the most dreadful circumstances have been happening at
Mr Dombey's house, and that Miss Dombey herself has left her father,
who, in my opinion,' said Mr Toots, with great excitement, 'is a
Brute, that it would be a flattery to call a - a marble monument, or a
bird of prey, - and that she is not to be found, and has gone no one
knows where?'

'May I ask how you heard this?' inquired Walter.

'Lieutenant Walters,' said Mr Toots, who had arrived at that
appellation by a process peculiar to himself; probably by jumbling up
his Christian name with the seafaring profession, and supposing some
relationship between him and the Captain, which would extend, as a
matter of course, to their titles; 'Lieutenant Walters, I can have no
objection to make a straightforward reply. The fact is, that feeling
extremely interested in everything that relates to Miss Dombey - not
for any selfish reason, Lieutenant Walters, for I am well aware that
the most able thing I could do for all parties would be to put an end
to my existence, which can only be regarded as an inconvenience - I
have been in the habit of bestowing a trifle now and then upon a
footman; a most respectable young man, of the name of Towlinson, who
has lived in the family some time; and Towlinson informed me,
yesterday evening, that this was the state of things. Since which,
Captain Gills - and Lieutenant Walters - I have been perfectly
frantic, and have been lying down on the sofa all night, the Ruin you
behold.'

'Mr Toots,' said Walter, 'I am happy to be able to relieve your
mind. Pray calm yourself. Miss Dombey is safe and well.'

'Sir!' cried Mr Toots, starting from his chair and shaking hands
with him anew, 'the relief is so excessive, and unspeakable, that if
you were to tell me now that Miss Dombey was married even, I could
smile. Yes, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, appealing to him, 'upon my
soul and body, I really think, whatever I might do to myself
immediately afterwards, that I could smile, I am so relieved.'

'It will be a greater relief and delight still, to such a generous
mind as yours,' said Walter, not at all slow in returning his
greeting, 'to find that you can render service to Miss Dombey. Captain
Cuttle, will you have the kindness to take Mr Toots upstairs?'

The Captain beckoned to Mr Toots, who followed him with a
bewildered countenance, and, ascending to the top of the house, was
introduced, without a word of preparation from his conductor, into
Florence's new retreat.

Poor Mr Toots's amazement and pleasure at sight of her were such,
that they could find a vent in nothing but extravagance. He ran up to
her, seized her hand, kissed it, dropped it, seized it again, fell
upon one knee, shed tears, chuckled, and was quite regardless of his
danger of being pinned by Diogenes, who, inspired by the belief that
there was something hostile to his mistress in these demonstrations,
worked round and round him, as if only undecided at what particular
point to go in for the assault, but quite resolved to do him a fearful
mischief.

'Oh Di, you bad, forgetful dog! Dear Mr Toots, I am so rejoiced to
see you!'

'Thankee,' said Mr Toots, 'I am pretty well, I'm much obliged to
you, Miss Dombey. I hope all the family are the same.'

Mr Toots said this without the least notion of what he was talking
about, and sat down on a chair, staring at Florence with the liveliest
contention of delight and despair going on in his face that any face
could exhibit.

'Captain Gills and Lieutenant Walters have mentioned, Miss Dombey,'
gasped Mr Toots, 'that I can do you some service. If I could by any
means wash out the remembrance of that day at Brighton, when I
conducted myself - much more like a Parricide than a person of
independent property,' said Mr Toots, with severe self-accusation, 'I
should sink into the silent tomb with a gleam of joy.'

'Pray, Mr Toots,' said Florence, 'do not wish me to forget anything
in our acquaintance. I never can, believe me. You have been far too
kind and good to me always.'

'Miss Dombey,' returned Mr Toots, 'your consideration for my
feelings is a part of your angelic character. Thank you a thousand
times. It's of no consequence at all.'

'What we thought of asking you,' said Florence, 'is, whether you
remember where Susan, whom you were so kind as to accompany to the
coach-office when she left me, is to be found.'

'Why I do not certainly, Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots, after a
little consideration, 'remember the exact name of the place that was
on the coach; and I do recollect that she said she was not going to
stop there, but was going farther on. But, Miss Dombey, if your object
is to find her, and to have her here, myself and the Chicken will
produce her with every dispatch that devotion on my part, and great
intelligence on the Chicken's, can ensure.

Mr Toots was so manifestly delighted and revived by the prospect of
being useful, and the disinterested sincerity of his devotion was so
unquestionable, that it would have been cruel to refuse him. Florence,
with an instinctive delicacy, forbore to urge the least obstacle,
though she did not forbear to overpower him with thanks; and Mr Toots
proudly took the commission upon himself for immediate execution.

'Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots, touching her proffered hand, with a
pang of hopeless love visibly shooting through him, and flashing out
in his face, 'Good-bye! Allow me to take the liberty of saying, that
your misfortunes make me perfectly wretched, and that you may trust
me, next to Captain Gills himself. I am quite aware, Miss Dombey, of
my own deficiencies - they're not of the least consequence, thank you
- but I am entirely to be relied upon, I do assure you, Miss Dombey.'

With that Mr Toots came out of the room, again accompanied by the
Captain, who, standing at a little distance, holding his hat under his
arm and arranging his scattered locks with his hook, had been a not
uninterested witness of what passed. And when the door closed behind
them, the light of Mr Toots's life was darkly clouded again.

'Captain Gills,' said that gentleman, stopping near the bottom of
the stairs, and turning round, 'to tell you the truth, I am not in a
frame of mind at the present moment, in which I could see Lieutenant
Walters with that entirely friendly feeling towards him that I should
wish to harbour in my breast. We cannot always command our feelings,
Captain Gills, and I should take it as a particular favour if you'd
let me out at the private door.'

'Brother,' returned the Captain, 'you shall shape your own course.
Wotever course you take, is plain and seamanlike, I'm wery sure.

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'you're extremely kind. Your good
opinion is a consolation to me. There is one thing,' said Mr Toots,
standing in the passage, behind the half-opened door, 'that I hope
you'll bear in mind, Captain Gills, and that I should wish Lieutenant
Walters to be made acquainted with. I have quite come into my property
now, you know, and - and I don't know what to do with it. If I could
be at all useful in a pecuniary point of view, I should glide into the
silent tomb with ease and smoothness.'

Mr Toots said no more, but slipped out quietly and shut the door
upon himself, to cut the Captain off from any reply.

Florence thought of this good creature, long after he had left her,
with mingled emotions of pain and pleasure. He was so honest and
warm-hearted, that to see him again and be assured of his truth to her
in her distress, was a joy and comfort beyond all price; but for that
very reason, it was so affecting to think that she caused him a
moment's unhappiness, or ruffled, by a breath, the harmless current of
his life, that her eyes filled with tears, and her bosom overflowed
with pity. Captain Cuttle, in his different way, thought much of Mr
Toots too; and so did Walter; and when the evening came, and they were
all sitting together in Florence's new room, Walter praised him in a
most impassioned manner, and told Florence what he had said on leaving
the house, with every graceful setting-off in the way of comment and
appreciation that his own honesty and sympathy could surround it with.

Mr Toots did not return upon the next day, or the next, or for
several days; and in the meanwhile Florence, without any new alarm,
lived like a quiet bird in a cage, at the top of the old
Instrument-maker's house. But Florence drooped and hung her head more
and more plainly, as the days went on; and the expression that had
been seen in the face of the dead child, was often turned to the sky
from her high window, as if it sought his angel out, on the bright
shore of which he had spoken: lying on his little bed.

Florence had been weak and delicate of late, and the agitation she
had undergone was not without its influences on her health. But it was
no bodily illness that affected her now. She was distressed in mind;
and the cause of her distress was Walter.

Interested in her, anxious for her, proud and glad to serve her,
and showing all this with the enthusiasm and ardour of his character,
Florence saw that he avoided her. All the long day through, he seldom
approached her room. If she asked for him, he came, again for the
moment as earnest and as bright as she remembered him when she was a
lost child in the staring streets; but he soon became constrained -
her quick affection was too watchful not to know it - and uneasy, and
soon left her. Unsought, he never came, all day, between the morning
and the night. When the evening closed in, he was always there, and
that was her happiest time, for then she half believed that the old
Walter of her childhood was not changed. But, even then, some trivial
word, look, or circumstance would show her that there was an
indefinable division between them which could not be passed.

And she could not but see that these revealings of a great
alteration in Walter manifested themselves in despite of his utmost
efforts to hide them. In his consideration for her, she thought, and
in the earnestness of his desire to spare her any wound from his kind
hand, he resorted to innumerable little artifices and disguises. So
much the more did Florence feel the greatness of the alteration in
him; so much the oftener did she weep at this estrangement of her
brother.

The good Captain - her untiring, tender, ever zealous friend - saw
it, too, Florence thought, and it pained him. He was less cheerful and
hopeful than he had been at first, and would steal looks at her and
Walter, by turns, when they were all three together of an evening,
with quite a sad face.

Florence resolved, at last, to speak to Walter. She believed she
knew now what the cause of his estrangement was, and she thought it
would be a relief to her full heart, and would set him more at ease,
if she told him she had found it out, and quite submitted to it, and
did not reproach him.

It was on a certain Sunday afternoon, that Florence took this
resolution. The faithful Captain, in an amazing shirt-collar, was
sitting by her, reading with his spectacles on, and she asked him
where Walter was.

'I think he's down below, my lady lass,' returned the Captain.

'I should like to speak to him,' said Florence, rising hurriedly as
if to go downstairs.

'I'll rouse him up here, Beauty,' said the Captain, 'in a trice.'

Thereupon the Captain, with much alacrity, shouldered his book -
for he made it a point of duty to read none but very large books on a
Sunday, as having a more staid appearance: and had bargained, years
ago, for a prodigious volume at a book-stall, five lines of which
utterly confounded him at any time, insomuch that he had not yet
ascertained of what subject it treated - and withdrew. Walter soon
appeared.

'Captain Cuttle tells me, Miss Dombey,' he eagerly began on coming
in - but stopped when he saw her face.

'You are not so well to-day. You look distressed. You have been
weeping.'

He spoke so kindly, and with such a fervent tremor in his voice,
that the tears gushed into her eyes at the sound of his words.

'Walter,' said Florence, gently, 'I am not quite well, and I have
been weeping. I want to speak to you.'

He sat down opposite to her, looking at her beautiful and innocent
face; and his own turned pale, and his lips trembled.

'You said, upon the night when I knew that you were saved - and oh!
dear Walter, what I felt that night, and what I hoped!' - '

He put his trembling hand upon the table between them, and sat
looking at her.

- 'that I was changed. I was surprised to hear you say so, but I
understand, now, that I am. Don't be angry with me, Walter. I was too
much overjoyed to think of it, then.'

She seemed a child to him again. It was the ingenuous, confiding,
loving child he saw and heard. Not the dear woman, at whose feet he
would have laid the riches of the earth.

'You remember the last time I saw you, Walter, before you went
away?'

He put his hand into his breast, and took out a little purse.

'I have always worn it round my neck! If I had gone down in the
deep, it would have been with me at the bottom of the sea.'

'And you will wear it still, Walter, for my old sake?'

'Until I die!'

She laid her hand on his, as fearlessly and simply, as if not a day
had intervened since she gave him the little token of remembrance.

'I am glad of that. I shall be always glad to think so, Walter. Do
you recollect that a thought of this change seemed to come into our
minds at the same time that evening, when we were talking together?'

'No!' he answered, in a wondering tone.

'Yes, Walter. I had been the means of injuring your hopes and
prospects even then. I feared to think so, then, but I know it now. If
you were able, then, in your generosity, to hide from me that you knew
it too, you cannot do so now, although you try as generously as
before. You do. I thank you for it, Walter, deeply, truly; but you
cannot succeed. You have suffered too much in your own hardships, and
in those of your dearest relation, quite to overlook the innocent
cause of all the peril and affliction that has befallen you. You
cannot quite forget me in that character, and we can be brother and
sister no longer. But, dear Walter, do not think that I complain of
you in this. I might have known it - ought to have known it - but
forgot it in my joy. All I hope is that you may think of me less
irksomely when this feeling is no more a secret one; and all I ask is,
Walter, in the name of the poor child who was your sister once, that
you will not struggle with yourself, and pain yourself, for my sake,
now that I know all!'

Walter had looked upon her while she said this, with a face so full
of wonder and amazement, that it had room for nothing else. Now he
caught up the hand that touched his, so entreatingly, and held it
between his own.

'Oh, Miss Dombey,' he said, 'is it possible that while I have been
suffering so much, in striving with my sense of what is due to you,
and must be rendered to you, I have made you suffer what your words
disclose to me? Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but
as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my
youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last,
regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be
lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death,
to be forgotten. Again to see you look, and hear you speak, as you did
on that night when we parted, is happiness to me that there are no
words to utter; and to be loved and trusted as your brother, is the
next gift I could receive and prize!'

'Walter,' said Florence, looking at him earnestly, but with a
changing face, 'what is that which is due to me, and must be rendered
to me, at the sacrifice of all this?'

'Respect,' said Walter, in a low tone. 'Reverence.

The colour dawned in her face, and she timidly and thoughtfully
withdrew her hand; still looking at him with unabated earnestness.

'I have not a brother's right,' said Walter. 'I have not a
brother's claim. I left a child. I find a woman.'

The colour overspread her face. She made a gesture as if of
entreaty that he would say no more, and her face dropped upon her
hands.

They were both silent for a time; she weeping.

'I owe it to a heart so trusting, pure, and good,' said Walter,
'even to tear myself from it, though I rend my own. How dare I say it
is my sister's!'

She was weeping still.

'If you had been happy; surrounded as you should be by loving and
admiring friends, and by all that makes the station you were born to
enviable,' said Walter; 'and if you had called me brother, then, in
your affectionate remembrance of the past, I could have answered to
the name from my distant place, with no inward assurance that I
wronged your spotless truth by doing so. But here - and now!'

'Oh thank you, thank you, Walter! Forgive my having wronged you so
much. I had no one to advise me. I am quite alone.'

'Florence!' said Walter, passionately. 'I am hurried on to say,
what I thought, but a few moments ago, nothing could have forced from
my lips. If I had been prosperous; if I had any means or hope of being
one day able to restore you to a station near your own; I would have
told you that there was one name you might bestow upon - me - a right
above all others, to protect and cherish you - that I was worthy of in
nothing but the love and honour that I bore you, and in my whole heart
being yours. I would have told you that it was the only claim that you
could give me to defend and guard you, which I dare accept and dare
assert; but that if I had that right, I would regard it as a trust so
precious and so priceless, that the undivided truth and fervour of my
life would poorly acknowledge its worth.'

The head was still bent down, the tears still falling, and the
bosom swelling with its sobs.

'Dear Florence! Dearest Florence! whom I called so in my thoughts
before I could consider how presumptuous and wild it was. One last
time let me call you by your own dear name, and touch this gentle hand
in token of your sisterly forgetfulness of what I have said.'

She raised her head, and spoke to him with such a solemn sweetness
in her eyes; with such a calm, bright, placid smile shining on him
through her tears; with such a low, soft tremble in her frame and
voice; that the innermost chords of his heart were touched, and his
sight was dim as he listened.

'No, Walter, I cannot forget it. I would not forget it, for the
world. Are you - are you very poor?'

'I am but a wanderer,' said Walter, 'making voyages to live, across
the sea. That is my calling now.

'Are you soon going away again, Walter?'

'Very soon.

She sat looking at him for a moment; then timidly put her trembling
hand in his.

'If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly.
If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world's end
without fear. I can give up nothing for you - I have nothing to
resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be
devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to
God if I have sense and memory left.'

He caught her to his heart, and laid her cheek against his own, and
now, no more repulsed, no more forlorn, she wept indeed, upon the
breast of her dear lover.

Blessed Sunday Bells, ringing so tranquilly in their entranced and
happy ears! Blessed Sunday peace and quiet, harmonising with the
calmness in their souls, and making holy air around them! Blessed
twilight stealing on, and shading her so soothingly and gravely, as
she falls asleep, like a hushed child, upon the bosom she has clung
to!

Oh load of love and trustfulness that lies to lightly there! Ay,
look down on the closed eyes, Walter, with a proudly tender gaze; for
in all the wide wide world they seek but thee now - only thee!


The Captain remained in the little parlour until it was quite dark.
He took the chair on which Walter had been sitting, and looked up at
the skylight, until the day, by little and little, faded away, and the
stars peeped down. He lighted a candle, lighted a pipe, smoked it out,
and wondered what on earth was going on upstairs, and why they didn't
call him to tea.

Florence came to his side while he was in the height of his
wonderment.

'Ay! lady lass!' cried the Captain. 'Why, you and Wal'r have had a
long spell o' talk, my beauty.'

Florence put her little hand round one of the great buttons of his
coat, and said, looking down into his face:

'Dear Captain, I want to tell you something, if you please.

The Captain raised his head pretty smartly, to hear what it was.
Catching by this means a more distinct view of Florence, he pushed
back his chair, and himself with it, as far as they could go.

'What! Heart's Delight!' cried the Captain, suddenly elated, 'Is it
that?'

'Yes!' said Florence, eagerly.

'Wal'r! Husband! THAT?' roared the Captain, tossing up his glazed
hat into the skylight.

'Yes!' cried Florence, laughing and crying together.

The Captain immediately hugged her; and then, picking up the glazed
hat and putting it on, drew her arm through his, and conducted her
upstairs again; where he felt that the great joke of his life was now
to be made.

'What, Wal'r my lad!' said the Captain, looking in at the door,
with his face like an amiable warming-pan. 'So there ain't NO other
character, ain't there?'

He had like to have suffocated himself with this pleasantry, which
he repeated at least forty times during tea; polishing his radiant
face with the sleeve of his coat, and dabbing his head all over with
his pocket-handkerchief, in the intervals. But he was not without a
graver source of enjoyment to fall back upon, when so disposed, for he
was repeatedly heard to say in an undertone, as he looked with
ineffable delight at Walter and Florence:

'Ed'ard Cuttle, my lad, you never shaped a better course in your
life, than when you made that there little property over, jintly!'



CHAPTER 51.

Mr Dombey and the World



What is the proud man doing, while the days go by? Does he ever
think of his daughter, or wonder where she is gone? Does he suppose
she has come home, and is leading her old life in the weary house? No
one can answer for him. He has never uttered her name, since. His
household dread him too much to approach a subject on which he is
resolutely dumb; and the only person who dares question him, he
silences immediately.

'My dear Paul!' murmurs his sister, sidling into the room, on the
day of Florence's departure, 'your wife! that upstart woman! Is it
possible that what I hear confusedly, is true, and that this is her
return for your unparalleled devotion to her; extending, I am sure,
even to the sacrifice of your own relations, to her caprices and
haughtiness? My poor brother!'

With this speech feelingly reminiscent of her not having been asked
to dinner on the day of the first party, Mrs Chick makes great use of
her pocket-handkerchief, and falls on Mr Dombey's neck. But Mr Dombey
frigidly lifts her off, and hands her to a chair.

'I thank you, Louisa,' he says, 'for this mark of your affection;
but desire that our conversation may refer to any other subject. When
I bewail my fate, Louisa, or express myself as being in want of
consolation, you can offer it, if you will have the goodness.'

'My dear Paul,' rejoins his sister, with her handkerchief to her
face, and shaking her head, 'I know your great spirit, and will say no
more upon a theme so painful and revolting;' on the heads of which two
adjectives, Mrs Chick visits scathing indignation; 'but pray let me
ask you - though I dread to hear something that will shock and
distress me - that unfortunate child Florence -

'Louisa!' says her brother, sternly, 'silence! Not another word of
this!'

Mrs Chick can only shake her head, and use her handkerchief, and
moan over degenerate Dombeys, who are no Dombeys. But whether Florence
has been inculpated in the flight of Edith, or has followed her, or
has done too much, or too little, or anything, or nothing, she has not
the least idea.

He goes on, without deviation, keeping his thoughts and feelings
close within his own breast, and imparting them to no one. He makes no
search for his daughter. He may think that she is with his sister, or
that she is under his own roof. He may think of her constantly, or he
may never think about her. It is all one for any sign he makes.

But this is sure; he does not think that he has lost her. He has no
suspicion of the truth. He has lived too long shut up in his towering
supremacy, seeing her, a patient gentle creature, in the path below
it, to have any fear of that. Shaken as he is by his disgrace, he is
not yet humbled to the level earth. The root is broad and deep, and in
the course of years its fibres have spread out and gathered
nourishment from everything around it. The tree is struck, but not
down.

Though he hide the world within him from the world without - which
he believes has but one purpose for the time, and that, to watch him
eagerly wherever he goes - he cannot hide those rebel traces of it,
which escape in hollow eyes and cheeks, a haggard forehead, and a
moody, brooding air. Impenetrable as before, he is still an altered
man; and, proud as ever, he is humbled, or those marks would not be
there.

The world. What the world thinks of him, how it looks at him, what
it sees in him, and what it says - this is the haunting demon of his
mind. It is everywhere where he is; and, worse than that, it is
everywhere where he is not. It comes out with him among his servants,
and yet he leaves it whispering behind; he sees it pointing after him
in the street; it is waiting for him in his counting-house; it leers
over the shoulders of rich men among the merchants; it goes beckoning
and babbling among the crowd; it always anticipates him, in every
place; and is always busiest, he knows, when he has gone away. When he
is shut up in his room at night, it is in his house, outside it,
audible in footsteps on the pavement, visible in print upon the table,
steaming to and fro on railroads and in ships; restless and busy
everywhere, with nothing else but him.

It is not a phantom of his imagination. It is as active in other
people's minds as in his. Witness Cousin Feenix, who comes from
Baden-Baden, purposely to talk to him. Witness Major Bagstock, who
accompanies Cousin Feenix on that friendly mission.

Mr Dombey receives them with his usual dignity, and stands erect,
in his old attitude, before the fire. He feels that the world is
looking at him out of their eyes. That it is in the stare of the
pictures. That Mr Pitt, upon the bookcase, represents it. That there
are eyes in its own map, hanging on the wall.

'An unusually cold spring,' says Mr Dombey - to deceive the world.

'Damme, Sir,' says the Major, in the warmth of friendship, 'Joseph
Bagstock is a bad hand at a counterfeit. If you want to hold your
friends off, Dombey, and to give them the cold shoulder, J. B. is not
the man for your purpose. Joe is rough and tough, Sir; blunt, Sir,
blunt, is Joe. His Royal Highness the late Duke of York did me the
honour to say, deservedly or undeservedly - never mind that - "If
there is a man in the service on whom I can depend for coming to the
point, that man is Joe - Joe Bagstock."'

Mr Dombey intimates his acquiescence.

'Now, Dombey,' says the Major, 'I am a man of the world. Our friend
Feenix - if I may presume to - '

'Honoured, I am sure,' says Cousin Feenix.

' - is,' proceeds the Major, with a wag of his head, 'also a man of
the world. Dombey, you are a man of the world. Now, when three men of
the world meet together, and are friends - as I believe - ' again
appealing to Cousin Feenix.

'I am sure,' says Cousin Feenix, 'most friendly.'

' - and are friends,' resumes the Major, 'Old Joe's opinion is (I
may be wrong), that the opinion of the world on any particular
subject, is very easily got at.

'Undoubtedly,' says Cousin Feenix. 'In point of fact, it's quite a
self-evident sort of thing. I am extremely anxious, Major, that my
friend Dombey should hear me express my very great astonishment and
regret, that my lovely and accomplished relative, who was possessed of
every qualification to make a man happy, should have so far forgotten
what was due to - in point of fact, to the world - as to commit
herself in such a very extraordinary manner. I have been in a devilish
state of depression ever since; and said indeed to Long Saxby last
night - man of six foot ten, with whom my friend Dombey is probably
acquainted - that it had upset me in a confounded way, and made me
bilious. It induces a man to reflect, this kind of fatal catastrophe,'
says Cousin Feenix, 'that events do occur in quite a providential
manner; for if my Aunt had been living at the time, I think the effect
upon a devilish lively woman like herself, would have been
prostration, and that she would have fallen, in point of fact, a
victim.'

'Now, Dombey! - ' says the Major, resuming his discourse with great
energy.

'I beg your pardon,' interposes Cousin Feenix. 'Allow me another
word. My friend Dombey will permit me to say, that if any circumstance
could have added to the most infernal state of pain in which I find
myself on this occasion, it would be the natural amazement of the
world at my lovely and accomplished relative (as I must still beg
leave to call her) being supposed to have so committed herself with a
person - man with white teeth, in point of fact - of very inferior
station to her husband. But while I must, rather peremptorily, request
my friend Dombey not to criminate my lovely and accomplished relative
until her criminality is perfectly established, I beg to assure my
friend Dombey that the family I represent, and which is now almost
extinct (devilish sad reflection for a man), will interpose no
obstacle in his way, and will be happy to assent to any honourable
course of proceeding, with a view to the future, that he may point
out. I trust my friend Dombey will give me credit for the intentions
by which I am animated in this very melancholy affair, and - a - in
point of fact, I am not aware that I need trouble my friend Dombey
with any further observations.'

Mr Dombey bows, without raising his eyes, and is silent.

'Now, Dombey,' says the Major, 'our friend Feenix having, with an
amount of eloquence that Old Joe B. has never heard surpassed - no, by
the Lord, Sir! never!' - says the Major, very blue, indeed, and
grasping his cane in the middle - 'stated the case as regards the
lady, I shall presume upon our friendship, Dombey, to offer a word on
another aspect of it. Sir,' says the Major, with the horse's cough,
'the world in these things has opinions, which must be satisfied.'

'I know it,' rejoins Mr Dombey.

'Of course you know it, Dombey,' says the Major, 'Damme, Sir, I
know you know it. A man of your calibre is not likely to be ignorant
of it.'

'I hope not,' replies Mr Dombey.

'Dombey!' says the Major, 'you will guess the rest. I speak out -
prematurely, perhaps - because the Bagstock breed have always spoke
out. Little, Sir, have they ever got by doing it; but it's in the
Bagstock blood. A shot is to be taken at this man. You have J. B. at
your elbow. He claims the name of friend. God bless you!'

'Major,' returns Mr Dombey, 'I am obliged. I shall put myself in
your hands when the time comes. The time not being come, I have
forborne to speak to you.'

'Where is the fellow, Dombey?' inquires the Major, after gasping
and looking at him, for a minute.

'I don't know.'

'Any intelligence of him?' asks the Major.

'Yes.'

'Dombey, I am rejoiced to hear it,' says the Major. 'I congratulate
you.'

'You will excuse - even you, Major,' replies Mr Dombey, 'my
entering into any further detail at present. The intelligence is of a
singular kind, and singularly obtained. It may turn out to be
valueless; it may turn out to be true; I cannot say at present. My
explanation must stop here.'

Although this is but a dry reply to the Major's purple enthusiasm,
the Major receives it graciously, and is delighted to think that the
world has such a fair prospect of soon receiving its due. Cousin
Feenix is then presented with his meed of acknowledgment by the
husband of his lovely and accomplished relative, and Cousin Feenix and
Major Bagstock retire, leaving that husband to the world again, and to
ponder at leisure on their representation of its state of mind
concerning his affairs, and on its just and reasonable expectations.

But who sits in the housekeeper's room, shedding tears, and talking
to Mrs Pipchin in a low tone, with uplifted hands? It is a lady with
her face concealed in a very close black bonnet, which appears not to
belong to her. It is Miss Tox, who has borrowed this disguise from her
servant, and comes from Princess's Place, thus secretly, to revive her
old acquaintance with Mrs Pipchin, in order to get certain information
of the state of Mr Dombey.

'How does he bear it, my dear creature?' asks Miss Tox.

'Well,' says Mrs Pipchin, in her snappish way, 'he's pretty much as
usual.'

'Externally,' suggests Miss Tox 'But what he feels within!'

Mrs Pipchin's hard grey eye looks doubtful as she answers, in three
distinct jerks, 'Ah! Perhaps. I suppose so.'

'To tell you my mind, Lucretia,' says Mrs Pipchin; she still calls
Miss Tox Lucretia, on account of having made her first experiments in
the child-quelling line of business on that lady, when an unfortunate
and weazen little girl of tender years; 'to tell you my mind,
Lucretia, I think it's a good riddance. I don't want any of your
brazen faces here, myself!'

'Brazen indeed! Well may you say brazen, Mrs Pipchin!' returned
Miss Tox. 'To leave him! Such a noble figure of a man!' And here Miss
Tox is overcome.

'I don't know about noble, I'm sure,' observes Mrs Pipchin;
irascibly rubbing her nose. 'But I know this - that when people meet
with trials, they must bear 'em. Hoity, toity! I have had enough to
bear myself, in my time! What a fuss there is! She's gone, and well
got rid of. Nobody wants her back, I should think!' This hint of the
Peruvian Mines, causes Miss Tox to rise to go away; when Mrs Pipchin
rings the bell for Towlinson to show her out, Mr Towlinson, not having
seen Miss Tox for ages, grins, and hopes she's well; observing that he
didn't know her at first, in that bonnet.

'Pretty well, Towlinson, I thank you,' says Miss Tox. 'I beg you'll
have the goodness, when you happen to see me here, not to mention it.
My visits are merely to Mrs Pipchin.'

'Very good, Miss,' says Towlinson.

'Shocking circumstances occur, Towlinson,' says Miss Tox.

'Very much so indeed, Miss,' rejoins Towlinson.

'I hope, Towlinson,' says Miss Tox, who, in her instruction of the
Toodle family, has acquired an admonitorial tone, and a habit of
improving passing occasions, 'that what has happened here, will be a
warning to you, Towlinson.'

'Thank you, Miss, I'm sure,' says Towlinson.

He appears to be falling into a consideration of the manner in
which this warning ought to operate in his particular case, when the
vinegary Mrs Pipchin, suddenly stirring him up with a 'What are you
doing? Why don't you show the lady to the door?' he ushers Miss Tox
forth. As she passes Mr Dombey's room, she shrinks into the inmost
depths of the black bonnet, and walks, on tip-toe; and there is not
another atom in the world which haunts him so, that feels such sorrow
and solicitude about him, as Miss Tox takes out under the black bonnet
into the street, and tries to carry home shadowed it from the
newly-lighted lamps

But Miss Tox is not a part of Mr Dombey's world. She comes back
every evening at dusk; adding clogs and an umbrella to the bonnet on
wet nights; and bears the grins of Towlinson, and the huffs and
rebuffs of Mrs Pipchin, and all to ask how he does, and how he bears
his misfortune: but she has nothing to do with Mr Dombey's world.
Exacting and harassing as ever, it goes on without her; and she, a by
no means bright or particular star, moves in her little orbit in the
corner of another system, and knows it quite well, and comes, and
cries, and goes away, and is satisfied. Verily Miss Tox is easier of
satisfaction than the world that troubles Mr Dombey so much!

At the Counting House, the clerks discuss the great disaster in all
its lights and shades, but chiefly wonder who will get Mr Carker's
place. They are generally of opinion that it will be shorn of some of
its emoluments, and made uncomfortable by newly-devised checks and
restrictions; and those who are beyond all hope of it are quite sure
they would rather not have it, and don't at all envy the person for
whom it may prove to be reserved. Nothing like the prevailing
sensation has existed in the Counting House since Mr Dombey's little
son died; but all such excitements there take a social, not to say a
jovial turn, and lead to the cultivation of good fellowship. A
reconciliation is established on this propitious occasion between the
acknowledged wit of the Counting House and an aspiring rival, with
whom he has been at deadly feud for months; and a little dinner being
proposed, in commemoration of their happily restored amity, takes
place at a neighbouring tavern; the wit in the chair; the rival acting
as Vice-President. The orations following the removal of the cloth are
opened by the Chair, who says, Gentlemen, he can't disguise from
himself that this is not a time for private dissensions. Recent
occurrences to which he need not more particularly allude, but which
have not been altogether without notice in some Sunday Papers,' and in
a daily paper which he need not name (here every other member of the
company names it in an audible murmur), have caused him to reflect;
and he feels that for him and Robinson to have any personal
differences at such a moment, would be for ever to deny that good
feeling in the general cause, for which he has reason to think and
hope that the gentlemen in Dombey's House have always been
distinguished. Robinson replies to this like a man and a brother; and
one gentleman who has been in the office three years, under continual
notice to quit on account of lapses in his arithmetic, appears in a
perfectly new light, suddenly bursting out with a thrilling speech, in
which he says, May their respected chief never again know the
desolation which has fallen on his hearth! and says a great variety of
things, beginning with 'May he never again,' which are received with
thunders of applause. In short, a most delightful evening is passed,
only interrupted by a difference between two juniors, who, quarrelling
about the probable amount of Mr Carker's late receipts per annum, defy
each other with decanters, and are taken out greatly excited. Soda
water is in general request at the office next day, and most of the
party deem the bill an imposition.

As to Perch, the messenger, he is in a fair way of being ruined for
life. He finds himself again constantly in bars of public-houses,
being treated and lying dreadfully. It appears that he met everybody
concerned in the late transaction, everywhere, and said to them,
'Sir,' or 'Madam,' as the case was, 'why do you look so pale?' at
which each shuddered from head to foot, and said, 'Oh, Perch!' and ran
away. Either the consciousness of these enormities, or the reaction
consequent on liquor, reduces Mr Perch to an extreme state of low
spirits at that hour of the evening when he usually seeks consolation
in the society of Mrs Perch at Balls Pond; and Mrs Perch frets a good
deal, for she fears his confidence in woman is shaken now, and that he
half expects on coming home at night to find her gone off with some
Viscount - 'which,' as she observes to an intimate female friend, 'is
what these wretches in the form of woman have to answer for, Mrs P. It
ain't the harm they do themselves so much as what they reflect upon
us, Ma'am; and I see it in Perch's eye.

Mr Dombey's servants are becoming, at the same time, quite
dissipated, and unfit for other service. They have hot suppers every
night, and 'talk it over' with smoking drinks upon the board. Mr
Towlinson is always maudlin after half-past ten, and frequently begs
to know whether he didn't say that no good would ever come of living
in a corner house? They whisper about Miss Florence, and wonder where
she is; but agree that if Mr Dombey don't know, Mrs Dombey does. This
brings them to the latter, of whom Cook says, She had a stately way
though, hadn't she? But she was too high! They all agree that she was
too high, and Mr Towlinson's old flame, the housemaid (who is very
virtuous), entreats that you will never talk to her any more about
people who hold their heads up, as if the ground wasn't good enough
for 'em.

Everything that is said and done about it, except by Mr Dombey, is
done in chorus. Mr Dombey and the world are alone together.



CHAPTER 52.

Secret Intelligence



Good Mrs Brown and her daughter Alice kept silent company together,
in their own dwelling. It was early in the evening, and late in the
spring. But a few days had elapsed since Mr Dombey had told Major
Bagstock of his singular intelligence, singularly obtained, which
might turn out to be valueless, and might turn out to be true; and the
world was not satisfied yet.

The mother and daughter sat for a long time without interchanging a
word: almost without motion. The old woman's face was shrewdly anxious
and expectant; that of her daughter was expectant too, but in a less
sharp degree, and sometimes it darkened, as if with gathering
disappointment and incredulity. The old woman, without heeding these
changes in its expression, though her eyes were often turned towards
it, sat mumbling and munching, and listening confidently.

Their abode, though poor and miserable, was not so utterly wretched
as in the days when only Good Mrs Brown inhabited it. Some few
attempts at cleanliness and order were manifest, though made in a
reckless, gipsy way, that might have connected them, at a glance, with
the younger woman. The shades of evening thickened and deepened as the
two kept silence, until the blackened walls were nearly lost in the
prevailing gloom.

Then Alice broke the silence which had lasted so long, and said:

'You may give him up, mother. He'll not come here.'

'Death give him up!' returned the old woman, impatiently. 'He will
come here.'

'We shall see,' said Alice.

'We shall see him,' returned her mother.

'And doomsday,' said the daughter.

'You think I'm in my second childhood, I know!' croaked the old
woman. 'That's the respect and duty that I get from my own gal, but
I'm wiser than you take me for. He'll come. T'other day when I touched
his coat in the street, he looked round as if I was a toad. But Lord,
to see him when I said their names, and asked him if he'd like to find
out where they was!'

'Was it so angry?' asked her daughter, roused to interest in a
moment.

'Angry? ask if it was bloody. That's more like the word. Angry? Ha,
ha! To call that only angry!' said the old woman, hobbling to the
cupboard, and lighting a candle, which displayed the workings of her
mouth to ugly advantage, as she brought it to the table. 'I might as
well call your face only angry, when you think or talk about 'em.'

It was something different from that, truly, as she sat as still as
a crouched tigress, with her kindling eyes.

'Hark!' said the old woman, triumphantly. 'I hear a step coming.
It's not the tread of anyone that lives about here, or comes this way
often. We don't walk like that. We should grow proud on such
neighbours! Do you hear him?'

'I believe you are right, mother,' replied Alice, in a low voice.
'Peace! open the door.'

As she drew herself within her shawl, and gathered it about her,
the old woman complied; and peering out, and beckoning, gave admission
to Mr Dombey, who stopped when he had set his foot within the door,
and looked distrustfully around.

'It's a poor place for a great gentleman like your worship,' said
the old woman, curtseying and chattering. 'I told you so, but there's
no harm in it.'

'Who is that?' asked Mr Dombey, looking at her companion.

'That's my handsome daughter,' said the old woman. 'Your worship
won't mind her. She knows all about it.'

A shadow fell upon his face not less expressive than if he had
groaned aloud, 'Who does not know all about it!' but he looked at her
steadily, and she, without any acknowledgment of his presence, looked
at him. The shadow on his face was darker when he turned his glance
away from her; and even then it wandered back again, furtively, as if
he were haunted by her bold eyes, and some remembrance they inspired.

'Woman,' said Mr Dombey to the old witch who was chucKling and
leering close at his elbow, and who, when he turned to address her,
pointed stealthily at her daughter, and rubbed her hands, and pointed
again, 'Woman! I believe that I am weak and forgetful of my station in
coming here, but you know why I come, and what you offered when you
stopped me in the street the other day. What is it that you have to
tell me concerning what I want to know; and how does it happen that I
can find voluntary intelligence in a hovel like this,' with a
disdainful glance about him, 'when I have exerted my power and means
to obtain it in vain? I do not think,' he said, after a moment's
pause, during which he had observed her, sternly, 'that you are so
audacious as to mean to trifle with me, or endeavour to impose upon
me. But if you have that purpose, you had better stop on the threshold
of your scheme. My humour is not a trifling one, and my acknowledgment
will be severe.'

'Oh a proud, hard gentleman!' chuckled the old woman, shaking her
head, and rubbing her shrivelled hands, 'oh hard, hard, hard! But your
worship shall see with your own eyes and hear with your own ears; not
with ours - and if your worship's put upon their track, you won't mind
paying something for it, will you, honourable deary?'

'Money,' returned Mr Dombey, apparently relieved, and assured by
this inquiry, 'will bring about unlikely things, I know. It may turn
even means as unexpected and unpromising as these, to account. Yes.
For any reliable information I receive, I will pay. But I must have
the information first, and judge for myself of its value.'

'Do you know nothing more powerful than money?' asked the younger
woman, without rising, or altering her attitude.

'Not here, I should imagine,' said Mr Dombey.

'You should know of something that is more powerful elsewhere, as I
judge,' she returned. 'Do you know nothing of a woman's anger?'

'You have a saucy tongue, Jade,' said Mr Dombey.

'Not usually,' she answered, without any show of emotion: 'I speak
to you now, that you may understand us better, and rely more on us. A
woman's anger is pretty much the same here, as in your fine house. I
am angry. I have been so, many years. I have as good cause for my
anger as you have for yours, and its object is the same man.'

He started, in spite of himself, and looked at her with

astonishment.

'Yes,' she said, with a kind of laugh. 'Wide as the distance may
seem between us, it is so. How it is so, is no matter; that is my
story, and I keep my story to myself. I would bring you and him
together, because I have a rage against him. My mother there, is
avaricious and poor; and she would sell any tidings she could glean,
or anything, or anybody, for money. It is fair enough, perhaps, that
you should pay her some, if she can help you to what you want to know.
But that is not my motive. I have told you what mine is, and it would
be as strong and all-sufficient with me if you haggled and bargained
with her for a sixpence. I have done. My saucy tongue says no more, if
you wait here till sunrise tomorrow.'

The old woman, who had shown great uneasiness during this speech,
which had a tendency to depreciate her expected gains, pulled Mr
Dombey softly by the sleeve, and whispered to him not to mind her. He
glared at them both, by turns, with a haggard look, and said, in a
deeper voice than was usual with him:

'Go on - what do you know?'

'Oh, not so fast, your worship! we must wait for someone,' answered
the old woman. 'It's to be got from someone else - wormed out -
screwed and twisted from him.'

'What do you mean?' said Mr Dombey.

'Patience,' she croaked, laying her hand, like a claw, upon his
arm. 'Patience. I'll get at it. I know I can! If he was to hold it
back from me,' said Good Mrs Brown, crooking her ten fingers, 'I'd
tear it out of him!'

Mr Dombey followed her with his eyes as she hobbled to the door,
and looked out again: and then his glance sought her daughter; but she
remained impassive, silent, and regardless of him.

'Do you tell me, woman,' he said, when the bent figure of Mrs Brown
came back, shaking its head and chattering to itself, 'that there is
another person expected here?'

'Yes!' said the old woman, looking up into his face, and nodding.

'From whom you are to exact the intelligence that is to be useful
to me?'

'Yes,' said the old woman, nodding again.

'A stranger?'

'Chut!' said the old woman, with a shrill laugh. 'What signifies!
Well, well; no. No stranger to your worship. But he won't see you.
He'd be afraid of you, and wouldn't talk. You'll stand behind that
door, and judge him for yourself. We don't ask to be believed on trust
What! Your worship doubts the room behind the door? Oh the suspicion
of you rich gentlefolks! Look at it, then.'

Her sharp eye had detected an involuntary expression of this
feeling on his part, which was not unreasonable under the
circumstances. In satisfaction of it she now took the candle to the
door she spoke of. Mr Dombey looked in; assured himself that it was an
empty, crazy room; and signed to her to put the light back in its
place.

'How long,' he asked, 'before this person comes?'

'Not long,' she answered. 'Would your worship sit down for a few
odd minutes?'

He made no answer; but began pacing the room with an irresolute
air, as if he were undecided whether to remain or depart, and as if he
had some quarrel with himself for being there at all. But soon his
tread grew slower and heavier, and his face more sternly thoughtful!;
as the object with which he had come, fixed itself in his mind, and
dilated there again.

While he thus walked up and down with his eyes on the ground, Mrs
Brown, in the chair from which she had risen to receive him, sat
listening anew. The monotony of his step, or the uncertainty of age,
made her so slow of hearing, that a footfall without had sounded in
her daughter's ears for some moments, and she had looked up hastily to
warn her mother of its approach, before the old woman was roused by
it. But then she started from her seat, and whispering 'Here he is!'
hurried her visitor to his place of observation, and put a bottle and
glass upon the table, with such alacrity, as to be ready to fling her
arms round the neck of Rob the Grinder on his appearance at the door.

'And here's my bonny boy,' cried Mrs Brown, 'at last! - oho, oho!
You're like my own son, Robby!'

'Oh! Misses Brown!' remonstrated the Grinder. 'Don't! Can't you be
fond of a cove without squeedging and throttling of him? Take care of
the birdcage in my hand, will you?'

'Thinks of a birdcage, afore me!' cried the old woman,
apostrophizing the ceiling. 'Me that feels more than a mother for
him!'

'Well, I'm sure I'm very much obliged to you, Misses Brown,' said
the unfortunate youth, greatly aggravated; 'but you're so jealous of a
cove. I'm very fond of you myself, and all that, of course; but I
don't smother you, do I, Misses Brown?'

He looked and spoke as if he wOuld have been far from objecting to
do so, however, on a favourable occasion.

'And to talk about birdcages, too!' whimpered the Grinder. 'As If
that was a crime! Why, look'ee here! Do you know who this belongs to?'

'To Master, dear?' said the old woman with a grin.

'Ah!' replied the Grinder, lifting a large cage tied up in a
wrapper, on the table, and untying it with his teeth and hands. 'It's
our parrot, this is.'

'Mr Carker's parrot, Rob?'

'Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?' returned the goaded
Grinder. 'What do you go naming names for? I'm blest,' said Rob,
pulling his hair with both hands in the exasperation of his feelings,
'if she ain't enough to make a cove run wild!'

'What! Do you snub me, thankless boy!' cried the old woman, with
ready vehemence.

'Good gracious, Misses Brown, no!' returned the Grinder, with tears
in his eyes. 'Was there ever such a - ! Don't I dote upon you, Misses
Brown?'

'Do you, sweet Rob? Do you truly, chickabiddy?' With that, Mrs
Brown held him in her fond embrace once more; and did not release him
until he had made several violent and ineffectual struggles with his
legs, and his hair was standing on end all over his head.

'Oh!' returned the Grinder, 'what a thing it is to be perfectly
pitched into with affection like this here. I wish she was - How have
you been, Misses Brown?'

'Ah! Not here since this night week!' said the old woman,
contemplating him with a look of reproach.

'Good gracious, Misses Brown,' returned the Grinder, 'I said
tonight's a week, that I'd come tonight, didn't I? And here I am. How
you do go on! I wish you'd be a little rational, Misses Brown. I'm
hoarse with saying things in my defence, and my very face is shiny
with being hugged!' He rubbed it hard with his sleeve, as if to remove
the tender polish in question.

'Drink a little drop to comfort you, my Robin,' said the old woman,
filling the glass from the bottle and giving it to him.

'Thank'ee, Misses Brown,' returned the Grinder. 'Here's your
health. And long may you - et ceterer.' Which, to judge from the
expression of his face, did not include any very choice blessings.
'And here's her health,' said the Grinder, glancing at Alice, who sat
with her eyes fixed, as it seemed to him, on the wall behind him, but
in reality on Mr Dombey's face at the door, 'and wishing her the same
and many of 'em!'

He drained the glass to these two sentiments, and set it down.

'Well, I say, Misses Brown!' he proceeded. 'To go on a little
rational now. You're a judge of birds, and up to their ways, as I know
to my cost.'

'Cost!' repeated Mrs Brown.

'Satisfaction, I mean,' returned the Grinder. 'How you do take up a
cove, Misses Brown! You've put it all out of my head again.'

'Judge of birds, Robby,' suggested the old woman.

'Ah!' said the Grinder. 'Well, I've got to take care of this parrot
- certain things being sold, and a certain establishment broke up -
and as I don't want no notice took at present, I wish you'd attend to
her for a week or so, and give her board and lodging, will you? If I
must come backwards and forwards,' mused the Grinder with a dejected
face, 'I may as well have something to come for.'

'Something to come for?' screamed the old woman.

'Besides you, I mean, Misses Brown,' returned the craven Rob. 'Not
that I want any inducement but yourself, Misses Brown, I'm sure. Don't
begin again, for goodness' sake.'

'He don't care for me! He don't care for me, as I care for him!'
cried Mrs Brown, lifting up her skinny hands. 'But I'll take care of
his bird.'

'Take good care of it too, you know, Mrs Brown,' said Rob, shaking
his head. 'If you was so much as to stroke its feathers once the wrong
way, I believe it would be found out.'

'Ah, so sharp as that, Rob?' said Mrs Brown, quickly.

'Sharp, Misses Brown!' repeated Rob. 'But this is not to be talked
about.'

Checking himself abruptly, and not without a fearful glance across
the room, Rob filled the glass again, and having slowly emptied it,
shook his head, and began to draw his fingers across and across the
wires of the parrot's cage by way of a diversion from the dangerous
theme that had just been broached.

The old woman eyed him slily, and hitching her chair nearer his,
and looking in at the parrot, who came down from the gilded dome at
her call, said:

'Out of place now, Robby?'

'Never you mind, Misses Brown,' returned the Grinder, shortly.

'Board wages, perhaps, Rob?' said Mrs Brown.

'Pretty Polly!' said the Grinder.

The old woman darted a glance at him that might have warned him to
consider his ears in danger, but it was his turn to look in at the
parrot now, and however expressive his imagination may have made her
angry scowl, it was unseen by his bodily eyes.

'I wonder Master didn't take you with him, Rob,' said the old
woman, in a wheedling voice, but with increased malignity of aspect.

Rob was so absorbed in contemplation of the parrot, and in trolling
his forefinger on the wires, that he made no answer.

The old woman had her clutch within a hair's breadth of his shock
of hair as it stooped over the table; but she restrained her fingers,
and said, in a voice that choked with its efforts to be coaxing:

'Robby, my child.'

'Well, Misses Brown,' returned the Grinder.

'I say I wonder Master didn't take you with him, dear.'

'Never you mind, Misses Brown,' returned the Grinder.

Mrs Brown instantly directed the clutch of her right hand at his
hair, and the clutch of her left hand at his throat, and held on to
the object of her fond affection with such extraordinary fury, that
his face began to blacken in a moment.

'Misses Brown!' exclaimed the Grinder, 'let go, will you? What are
you doing of? Help, young woman! Misses Brow- Brow- !'

The young woman, however, equally unmoved by his direct appeal to
her, and by his inarticulate utterance, remained quite neutral, until,
after struggling with his assailant into a corner, Rob disengaged
himself, and stood there panting and fenced in by his own elbows,
while the old woman, panting too, and stamping with rage and
eagerness, appeared to be collecting her energies for another swoop
upon him. At this crisis Alice interposed her voice, but not in the
Grinder's favour, by saying,

'Well done, mother. Tear him to pieces!'

'What, young woman!' blubbered Rob; 'are you against me too? What
have I been and done? What am I to be tore to pieces for, I should
like to know? Why do you take and choke a cove who has never done you
any harm, neither of you? Call yourselves females, too!' said the
frightened and afflicted Grinder, with his coat-cuff at his eye. 'I'm
surprised at you! Where's your feminine tenderness?'

'You thankless dog!' gasped Mrs Brown. 'You impudent insulting
dog!'

'What have I been and done to go and give you offence, Misses
Brown?' retorted the fearful Rob. 'You was very much attached to me a
minute ago.'

'To cut me off with his short answers and his sulky words,' said
the old woman. 'Me! Because I happen to be curious to have a little
bit of gossip about Master and the lady, to dare to play at fast and
loose with me! But I'll talk to you no more, my lad. Now go!'

'I'm sure, Misses Brown,' returned the abject Grinder, 'I never
Insiniwated that I wished to go. Don't talk like that, Misses Brown,
if you please.'

'I won't talk at all,' said Mrs Brown, with an action of her
crooked fingers that made him shrink into half his natural compass in
the corner. 'Not another word with him shall pass my lips. He's an
ungrateful hound. I cast him off. Now let him go! And I'll slip those
after him that shall talk too much; that won't be shook away; that'll
hang to him like leeches, and slink arter him like foxes. What! He
knows 'em. He knows his old games and his old ways. If he's forgotten
'em, they'll soon remind him. Now let him go, and see how he'll do
Master's business, and keep Master's secrets, with such company always
following him up and down. Ha, ha, ha! He'll find 'em a different sort
from you and me, Ally; Close as he is with you and me. Now let him go,
now let him go!'

The old woman, to the unspeakable dismay of the Grinder, walked her
twisted figure round and round, in a ring of some four feet in
diameter, constantly repeating these words, and shaking her fist above
her head, and working her mouth about.

'Misses Brown,' pleaded Rob, coming a little out of his corner,
'I'm sure you wouldn't injure a cove, on second thoughts, and in cold
blood, would you?'

'Don't talk to me,' said Mrs Brown, still wrathfully pursuing her
circle. 'Now let him go, now let him go!'

'Misses Brown,' urged the tormented Grinder, 'I didn't mean to -
Oh, what a thing it is for a cove to get into such a line as this! - I
was only careful of talking, Misses Brown, because I always am, on
account of his being up to everything; but I might have known it
wouldn't have gone any further. I'm sure I'm quite agreeable,' with a
wretched face, 'for any little bit of gossip, Misses Brown. Don't go
on like this, if you please. Oh, couldn't you have the goodness to put
in a word for a miserable cove, here?' said the Grinder, appealing in
desperation to the daughter.

'Come, mother, you hear what he says,' she interposed, in her stern
voice, and with an impatient action of her head; 'try him once more,
and if you fall out with him again, ruin him, if you like, and have
done with him.'

Mrs Brown, moved as it seemed by this very tender exhortation,
presently began to howl; and softening by degrees, took the apologetic
Grinder to her arms, who embraced her with a face of unutterable woe,
and like a victim as he was, resumed his former seat, close by the
side of his venerable friend, whom he suffered, not without much
constrained sweetness of countenance, combating very expressive
physiognomical revelations of an opposite character to draw his arm
through hers, and keep it there.

'And how's Master, deary dear?' said Mrs Brown, when, sitting in
this amicable posture, they had pledged each other.

'Hush! If you'd be so good, Misses Brown, as to speak a little
lower,' Rob implored. 'Why, he's pretty well, thank'ee, I suppose.'

'You're not out of place, Robby?' said Mrs Brown, in a wheedling
tone.

'Why, I'm not exactly out of place, nor in,' faltered Rob. 'I - I'm
still in pay, Misses Brown.'

'And nothing to do, Rob?'

'Nothing particular to do just now, Misses Brown, but to - keep my
eyes open, said the Grinder, rolling them in a forlorn way.

'Master abroad, Rob?'

'Oh, for goodness' sake, Misses Brown, couldn't you gossip with a
cove about anything else?' cried the Grinder, in a burst of despair.

The impetuous Mrs Brown rising directly, the tortured Grinder
detained her, stammering 'Ye-es, Misses Brown, I believe he's abroad.
What's she staring at?' he added, in allusion to the daughter, whose
eyes were fixed upon the face that now again looked out behind

'Don't mind her, lad,' said the old woman, holding him closer to
prevent his turning round. 'It's her way - her way. Tell me, Rob. Did
you ever see the lady, deary?'

'Oh, Misses Brown, what lady?' cried the Grinder in a tone of
piteous supplication.

'What lady?' she retorted. 'The lady; Mrs Dombey.'

'Yes, I believe I see her once,' replied Rob.

'The night she went away, Robby, eh?' said the old woman in his
ear, and taking note of every change in his face. 'Aha! I know it was
that night.'

'Well, if you know it was that night, you know, Misses Brown,'
replied Rob, 'it's no use putting pinchers into a cove to make him say
so.

'Where did they go that night, Rob? Straight away? How did they go?
Where did you see her? Did she laugh? Did she cry? Tell me all about
it,' cried the old hag, holding him closer yet, patting the hand that
was drawn through his arm against her other hand, and searching every
line in his face with her bleared eyes. 'Come! Begin! I want to be
told all about it. What, Rob, boy! You and me can keep a secret
together, eh? We've done so before now. Where did they go first, Rob?'

The wretched Grinder made a gasp, and a pause.

'Are you dumb?' said the old woman, angrily.

'Lord, Misses Brown, no! You expect a cove to be a flash of
lightning. I wish I was the electric fluency,' muttered the bewildered
Grinder. 'I'd have a shock at somebody, that would settle their
business.'

'What do you say?' asked the old woman, with a grin.

'I'm wishing my love to you, Misses Brown,' returned the false Rob,
seeking consolation in the glass. 'Where did they go to first was it?
Him and her, do you mean?'

'Ah!' said the old woman, eagerly. 'Them two.'

'Why, they didn't go nowhere - not together, I mean,' answered Rob.

The old woman looked at him, as though she had a strong impulse
upon her to make another clutch at his head and throat, but was
restrained by a certain dogged mystery in his face.

'That was the art of it,' said the reluctant Grinder; 'that's the
way nobody saw 'em go, or has been able to say how they did go. They
went different ways, I tell you Misses Brown.

'Ay, ay, ay! To meet at an appointed place,' chuckled the old
woman, after a moment's silent and keen scrutiny of his face.

'Why, if they weren't a going to meet somewhere, I suppose they
might as well have stayed at home, mightn't they, Brown?' returned the
unwilling Grinder.

'Well, Rob? Well?' said the old woman, drawing his arm yet tighter
through her own, as if, in her eagerness, she were afraid of his
slipping away.

'What, haven't we talked enough yet, Misses Brown?' returned the
Grinder, who, between his sense of injury, his sense of liquor, and
his sense of being on the rack, had become so lachrymose, that at
almost every answer he scooped his coats into one or other of his
eyes, and uttered an unavailing whine of remonstrance. 'Did she laugh
that night, was it? Didn't you ask if she laughed, Misses Brown?'

'Or cried?' added the old woman, nodding assent.

'Neither,' said the Grinder. 'She kept as steady when she and me -
oh, I see you will have it out of me, Misses Brown! But take your
solemn oath now, that you'll never tell anybody.'

This Mrs Brown very readily did: being naturally Jesuitical; and
having no other intention in the matter than that her concealed
visitor should hear for himself.

'She kept as steady, then, when she and me went down to
Southampton,' said the Grinder, 'as a image. In the morning she was
just the same, Misses Brown. And when she went away in the packet
before daylight, by herself - me pretending to be her servant, and
seeing her safe aboard - she was just the same. Now, are you
contented, Misses Brown?'

'No, Rob. Not yet,' answered Mrs Brown, decisively.

'Oh, here's a woman for you!' cried the unfortunate Rob, in an
outburst of feeble lamentation over his own helplessness.

'What did you wish to know next, Misses Brown?'

'What became of Master? Where did he go?' she inquired, still
holding hIm tight, and looking close into his face, with her sharp
eyes.

'Upon my soul, I don't know, Misses Brown,' answered Rob.

'Upon my soul I don't know what he did, nor where he went, nor
anything about him I only know what he said to me as a caution to hold
my tongue, when we parted; and I tell you this, Misses Brown, as a
friend, that sooner than ever repeat a word of what we're saying now,
you had better take and shoot yourself, or shut yourself up in this
house, and set it a-fire, for there's nothing he wouldn't do, to be
revenged upon you. You don't know him half as well as I do, Misses
Brown. You're never safe from him, I tell you.'

'Haven't I taken an oath,' retorted the old woman, 'and won't I
keep it?'

'Well, I'm sure I hope you will, Misses Brown,' returned Rob,
somewhat doubtfully, and not without a latent threatening in his
manner. 'For your own sake, quite as much as mine'

He looked at her as he gave her this friendly caution, and
emphasized it with a nodding of his head; but finding it uncomfortable
to encounter the yellow face with its grotesque action, and the ferret
eyes with their keen old wintry gaze, so close to his own, he looked
down uneasily and sat skulking in his chair, as if he were trying to
bring hImself to a sullen declaration that he would answer no more
questions. The old woman, still holding him as before, took this
opportunity of raising the forefinger of her right hand, in the air,
as a stealthy signal to the concealed observer to give particular
attention to what was about to follow.

'Rob,' she said, in her most coaxing tone.

'Good gracious, Misses Brown, what's the matter now?' returned the
exasperated Grinder.

'Rob! where did the lady and Master appoint to meet?'

Rob shuffled more and more, and looked up and looked down, and bit
his thumb, and dried it on his waistcoat, and finally said, eyeing his
tormentor askance, 'How should I know, Misses Brown?'

The old woman held up her finger again, as before, and replying,
'Come, lad! It's no use leading me to that, and there leaving me. I
want to know' waited for his answer. Rob, after a discomfited pause,
suddenly broke out with, 'How can I pronounce the names of foreign
places, Mrs Brown? What an unreasonable woman you are!'

'But you have heard it said, Robby,' she retorted firmly, 'and you
know what it sounded like. Come!'

'I never heard it said, Misses Brown,' returned the Grinder.

'Then,' retorted the old woman quickly, 'you have seen it written,
and you can spell it.'

Rob, with a petulant exclamation between laughing and crying - for
he was penetrated with some admiration of Mrs Brown's cunning, even
through this persecution - after some reluctant fumbling in his
waistcoat pocket, produced from it a little piece of chalk. The old
woman's eyes sparkled when she saw it between his thumb and finger,
and hastily clearing a space on the deal table, that he might write
the word there, she once more made her signal with a shaking hand.

'Now I tell you beforehand what it is, Misses Brown,' said Rob,
'it's no use asking me anything else. I won't answer anything else; I
can't. How long it was to be before they met, or whose plan it was
that they was to go away alone, I don't know no more than you do. I
don't know any more about it. If I was to tell you how I found out
this word, you'd believe that. Shall I tell you, Misses Brown?'

'Yes, Rob.'

'Well then, Misses Brown. The way - now you won't ask any more, you
know?' said Rob, turning his eyes, which were now fast getting drowsy
and stupid, upon her.

'Not another word,' said Mrs Brown.

'Well then, the way was this. When a certain person left the lady
with me, he put a piece of paper with a direction written on it in the
lady's hand, saying it was in case she should forget. She wasn't
afraid of forgetting, for she tore it up as soon as his back was
turned, and when I put up the carriage steps, I shook out one of the
pieces - she sprinkled the rest out of the window, I suppose, for
there was none there afterwards, though I looked for 'em. There was
only one word on it, and that was this, if you must and will know. But
remember! You're upon your oath, Misses Brown!'

Mrs Brown knew that, she said. Rob, having nothing more to say,
began to chalk, slowly and laboriously, on the table.

'"D,"' the old woman read aloud, when he had formed the letter.

'Will you hold your tongue, Misses Brown?' he exclaimed, covering
it with his hand, and turning impatiently upon her. 'I won't have it
read out. Be quiet, will you!'

'Then write large, Rob,' she returned, repeating her secret signal;
'for my eyes are not good, even at print.'

Muttering to himself, and returning to his work with an ill will,
Rob went on with the word. As he bent his head down, the person for
whose information he so unconsciously laboured, moved from the door
behind him to within a short stride of his shoulder, and looked
eagerly towards the creeping track of his hand upon the table. At the
same time, Alice, from her opposite chair, watched it narrowly as it
shaped the letters, and repeated each one on her lips as he made it,
without articulating it aloud. At the end of every letter her eyes and
Mr Dombey's met, as if each of them sought to be confirmed by the
other; and thus they both spelt D.I.J.O.N.

'There!' said the Grinder, moistening the palm of his hand hastily,
to obliterate the word; and not content with smearing it out, rubbing
and planing all trace of it away with his coat-sleeve, until the very
colour of the chalk was gone from the table. 'Now, I hope you're
contented, Misses Brown!'

The old woman, in token of her being so, released his arm and
patted his back; and the Grinder, overcome with mortification,
cross-examination, and liquor, folded his arms on the table, laid his
head upon them, and fell asleep.

Not until he had been heavily asleep some time, and was snoring
roundly, did the old woman turn towards the door where Mr Dombey stood
concealed, and beckon him to come through the room, and pass out. Even
then, she hovered over Rob, ready to blind him with her hands, or
strike his head down, if he should raise it while the secret step was
crossing to the door. But though her glance took sharp cognizance of
the sleeper, it was sharp too for the waking man; and when he touched
her hand with his, and in spite of all his caution, made a chinking,
golden sound, it was as bright and greedy as a raven's.

The daughter's dark gaze followed him to the door, and noted well
how pale he was, and how his hurried tread indicated that the least
delay was an insupportable restraint upon him, and how he was burning
to be active and away. As he closed the door behind him, she looked
round at her mother. The old woman trotted to her; opened her hand to
show what was within; and, tightly closing it again in her jealousy
and avarice, whispered:

'What will he do, Ally?'

'Mischief,' said the daughter.

'Murder?' asked the old woman.

'He's a madman, in his wounded pride, and may do that, for anything
we can say, or he either.'

Her glance was brighter than her mother's, and the fire that shone
in it was fiercer; but her face was colourless, even to her lips

They said no more, but sat apart; the mother communing with her
money; the daughter with her thoughts; the glance of each, shining in
the gloom of the feebly lighted room. Rob slept and snored. The
disregarded parrot only was in action. It twisted and pulled at the
wires of its cage, with its crooked beak, and crawled up to the dome,
and along its roof like a fly, and down again head foremost, and
shook, and bit, and rattled at every slender bar, as if it knew its
master's danger, and was wild to force a passage out, and fly away to
warn him of it.



CHAPTER 53.

More Intelligence



There were two of the traitor's own blood - his renounced brother
and sister - on whom the weight of his guilt rested almost more
heavily, at this time, than on the man whom he had so deeply injured.
Prying and tormenting as the world was, it did Mr Dombey the service
of nerving him to pursuit and revenge. It roused his passion, stung
his pride, twisted the one idea of his life into a new shape, and made
some gratification of his wrath, the object into which his whole
intellectual existence resolved itself. All the stubbornness and
implacability of his nature, all its hard impenetrable quality, all
its gloom and moroseness, all its exaggerated sense of personal
importance, all its jealous disposition to resent the least flaw in
the ample recognition of his importance by others, set this way like
many streams united into one, and bore him on upon their tide. The
most impetuously passionate and violently impulsive of mankind would
have been a milder enemy to encounter than the sullen Mr Dombey
wrought to this. A wild beast would have been easier turned or soothed
than the grave gentleman without a wrinkle in his starched cravat.

But the very intensity of his purpose became almost a substitute
for action in it. While he was yet uninformed of the traitor's
retreat, it served to divert his mind from his own calamity, and to
entertain it with another prospect. The brother and sister of his
false favourite had no such relief; everything in their history, past
and present, gave his delinquency a more afflicting meaning to them.

The sister may have sometimes sadly thought that if she had
remained with him, the companion and friend she had been once, he
might have escaped the crime into which he had fallen. If she ever
thought so, it was still without regret for what she had done, without
the least doubt of her duty, without any pricing or enhancing of her
self-devotion. But when this possibility presented itself to the
erring and repentant brother, as it sometimes did, it smote upon his
heart with such a keen, reproachful touch as he could hardly bear. No
idea of retort upon his cruel brother came into his mind. New
accusation of himself, fresh inward lamentings over his own
unworthiness, and the ruin in which it was at once his consolation and
his self-reproach that he did not stand alone, were the sole kind of
reflections to which the discovery gave rise in him.

It was on the very same day whose evening set upon the last
chapter, and when Mr Dombey's world was busiest with the elopement of
his wife, that the window of the room in which the brother and sister
sat at their early breakfast, was darkened by the unexpected shadow of
a man coming to the little porch: which man was Perch the Messenger.

'I've stepped over from Balls Pond at a early hour,' said Mr Perch,
confidentially looking in at the room door, and stopping on the mat to
wipe his shoes all round, which had no mud upon them, 'agreeable to my
instructions last night. They was, to be sure and bring a note to you,
Mr Carker, before you went out in the morning. I should have been here
a good hour and a half ago,' said Mr Perch, meekly, 'but fOr the state
of health of Mrs P., who I thought I should have lost in the night, I
do assure you, five distinct times.'

'Is your wife so ill?' asked Harriet.

'Why, you see,' said Mr Perch, first turning round to shut the door
carefully, 'she takes what has happened in our House so much to heart,
Miss. Her nerves is so very delicate, you see, and soon unstrung. Not
but what the strongest nerves had good need to be shook, I'm sure. You
feel it very much yourself, no doubts.

Harriet repressed a sigh, and glanced at her brother.

'I'm sure I feel it myself, in my humble way,' Mr Perch went on to
say, with a shake of his head, 'in a manner I couldn't have believed
if I hadn't been called upon to undergo. It has almost the effect of
drink upon me. I literally feels every morning as if I had been taking
more than was good for me over-night.'

Mr Perch's appearance corroborated this recital of his symptoms.
There was an air of feverish lassitude about it, that seemed referable
to drams; and, which, in fact, might no doubt have been traced to
those numerous discoveries of himself in the bars of public-houses,
being treated and questioned, which he was in the daily habit of
making.

'Therefore I can judge,' said Mr Perch, shaking his head and
speaking in a silvery murmur, 'of the feelings of such as is at all
peculiarly sitiwated in this most painful rewelation.'

Here Mr Perch waited to be confided in; and receiving no
confidence, coughed behind his hand. This leading to nothing, he
coughed behind his hat; and that leading to nothing, he put his hat on
the ground and sought in his breast pocket for the letter.

'If I rightly recollect, there was no answer,' said Mr Perch, with
an affable smile; 'but perhaps you'll be so good as cast your eye over
it, Sir.'

John Carker broke the seal, which was Mr Dombey's, and possessing
himself of the contents, which were very brief, replied,

'No. No answer is expected.'

'Then I shall wish you good morning, Miss,' said Perch, taking a
step toward the door, and hoping, I'm sure, that you'll not permit
yourself to be more reduced in mind than you can help, by the late
painful rewelation. The Papers,' said Mr Perch, taking two steps back
again, and comprehensively addressing both the brother and sister in a
whisper of increased mystery, 'is more eager for news of it than you'd
suppose possible. One of the Sunday ones, in a blue cloak and a white
hat, that had previously offered for to bribe me - need I say with
what success? - was dodging about our court last night as late as
twenty minutes after eight o'clock. I see him myself, with his eye at
the counting-house keyhole, which being patent is impervious. Another
one,' said Mr Perch, 'with military frogs, is in the parlour of the
King's Arms all the blessed day. I happened, last week, to let a
little obserwation fall there, and next morning, which was Sunday, I
see it worked up in print, in a most surprising manner.'

Mr Perch resorted to his breast pocket, as if to produce the
paragraph but receiving no encouragement, pulled out his beaver
gloves, picked up his hat, and took his leave; and before it was high
noon, Mr Perch had related to several select audiences at the King's
Arms and elsewhere, how Miss Carker, bursting into tears, had caught
him by both hands, and said, 'Oh! dear dear Perch, the sight of you is
all the comfort I have left!' and how Mr John Carker had said, in an
awful voice, 'Perch, I disown him. Never let me hear hIm mentioned as
a brother more!'

'Dear John,' said Harriet, when they were left alone, and had
remained silent for some few moments. 'There are bad tidings in that
letter.'

'Yes. But nothing unexpected,' he replied. 'I saw the writer

yesterday.'

'The writer?'

'Mr Dombey. He passed twice through the Counting House while I was
there. I had been able to avoid him before, but of course could not
hope to do that long. I know how natural it was that he should regard
my presence as something offensive; I felt it must be so, myself.'

'He did not say so?'

'No; he said nothing: but I saw that his glance rested on me for a
moment, and I was prepared for what would happen - for what has
happened. I am dismissed!'

She looked as little shocked and as hopeful as she could, but it
was distressing news, for many reasons.

'"I need not tell you"' said John Carker, reading the letter, '"why
your name would henceforth have an unnatural sound, in however remote
a connexion with mine, or why the daily sight of anyone who bears it,
would be unendurable to me. I have to notify the cessation of all
engagements between us, from this date, and to request that no renewal
of any communication with me, or my establishment, be ever attempted
by you." - Enclosed is an equivalent in money to a generously long
notice, and this is my discharge." Heaven knows, Harriet, it is a
lenient and considerate one, when we remember all!'

'If it be lenient and considerate to punish you at all, John, for
the misdeed of another,' she replied gently, 'yes.'

'We have been an ill-omened race to him,' said John Carker. 'He has
reason to shrink from the sound of our name, and to think that there
is something cursed and wicked in our blood. I should almost think it
too, Harriet, but for you.'

'Brother, don't speak like this. If you have any special reason, as
you say you have, and think you have - though I say, No!- to love me,
spare me the hearing of such wild mad words!'

He covered his face with both his hands; but soon permitted her,
coming near him, to take one in her own.

'After so many years, this parting is a melancholy thing, I know,'
said his sister, 'and the cause of it is dreadful to us both. We have
to live, too, and must look about us for the means. Well, well! We can
do so, undismayed. It is our pride, not our trouble, to strive, John,
and to strive together!'

A smile played on her lips, as she kissed his cheek, and entreated
him to be of of good cheer.

'Oh, dearest sister! Tied, of your own noble will, to a ruined man!
whose reputation is blighted; who has no friend himself, and has
driven every friend of yours away!'

'John!' she laid her hand hastily upon his lips, 'for my sake! In
remembrance of our long companionship!' He was silent 'Now, let me
tell you, dear,' quietly sitting by his side, 'I have, as you have,
expected this; and when I have been thinking of it, and fearing that
it would happen, and preparing myself for it, as well as I could, I
have resolved to tell you, if it should be so, that I have kept a
secret from you, and that we have a friend.'

'What's our friend's name, Harriet?' he answered with a sorrowful

smile.

'Indeed, I don't know, but he once made a very earnest protestation
to me of his friendship and his wish to serve us: and to this day I
believe 'him.'

'Harriet!' exclaimed her wondering brother, 'where does this friend

live?'

'Neither do I know that,' she returned. 'But he knows us both, and
our history - all our little history, John. That is the reason why, at
his own suggestion, I have kept the secret of his coming, here, from
you, lest his acquaintance with it should distress you.

'Here! Has he been here, Harriet?'

'Here, in this room. Once.'

'What kind of man?'

'Not young. "Grey-headed," as he said, "and fast growing greyer."
But generous, and frank, and good, I am sure.'

'And only seen once, Harriet?'

'In this room only once,' said his sister, with the slightest and
most transient glow upon her cheek; 'but when here, he entreated me to
suffer him to see me once a week as he passed by, in token of our
being well, and continuing to need nothing at his hands. For I told
him, when he proffered us any service he could render - which was the
object of his visit - that we needed nothing.'

'And once a week - '

'Once every week since then, and always on the same day, and at the
same hour, he his gone past; always on foot; always going in the same
direction - towards London; and never pausing longer than to bow to
me, and wave his hand cheerfully, as a kind guardian might. He made
that promise when he proposed these curious interviews, and has kept
it so faithfully and pleasantly, that if I ever felt any trifling
uneasiness about them in the beginning (which I don't think I did,
John; his manner was so plain and true) It very soon vanished, and
left me quite glad when the day was coming. Last Monday - the first
since this terrible event - he did not go by; and I have wondered
whether his absence can have been in any way connected with what has
happened.'

'How?' inquired her brother.

'I don't know how. I have only speculated on the coincidence; I
have not tried to account for it. I feel sure he will return. When he
does, dear John, let me tell him that I have at last spoken to you,
and let me bring you together. He will certainly help us to a new
livelihood. His entreaty was that he might do something to smooth my
life and yours; and I gave him my promise that if we ever wanted a
friend, I would remember him.'

'Then his name was to be no secret, 'Harriet,' said her brother,
who had listened with close attention, 'describe this gentleman to me.
I surely ought to know one who knows me so well.'

His sister painted, as vividly as she could, the features, stature,
and dress of her visitor; but John Carker, either from having no
knowledge of the original, or from some fault in her description, or
from some abstraction of his thoughts as he walked to and fro,
pondering, could not recognise the portrait she presented to him.

However, it was agreed between them that he should see the original
when he next appeared. This concluded, the sister applied herself,
with a less anxious breast, to her domestic occupations; and the
grey-haired man, late Junior of Dombey's, devoted the first day of his
unwonted liberty to working in the garden.

It was quite late at night, and the brother was reading aloud while
the sister plied her needle, when they were interrupted by a knocking
at the door. In the atmosphere of vague anxiety and dread that lowered
about them in connexion with their fugitive brother, this sound,
unusual there, became almost alarming. The brother going to the door,
the sister sat and listened timidly. Someone spoke to him, and he
replied and seemed surprised; and after a few words, the two
approached together.

'Harriet,' said her brother, lighting in their late visitor, and
speaking in a low voice, 'Mr Morfin - the gentleman so long in
Dombey's House with James.'

His sister started back, as if a ghost had entered. In the doorway
stood the unknown friend, with the dark hair sprinkled with grey, the
ruddy face, the broad clear brow, and hazel eyes, whose secret she had
kept so long!

'John!' she said, half-breathless. 'It is the gentleman I told you
of, today!'

'The gentleman, Miss Harriet,' said the visitor, coming in - for he
had stopped a moment in the doorway - 'is greatly relieved to hear you
say that: he has been devising ways and means, all the way here, of
explaining himself, and has been satisfied with none. Mr John, I am
not quite a stranger here. You were stricken with astonishment when
you saw me at your door just now. I observe you are more astonished at
present. Well! That's reasonable enough under existing circumstances.
If we were not such creatures of habit as we are, we shouldn't have
reason to be astonished half so often.'

By this time, he had greeted Harriet with that able mingling of
cordiality and respect which she recollected so well, and had sat down
near her, pulled off his gloves, and thrown them into his hat upon the
table.

'There's nothing astonishing,' he said, 'in my having conceived a
desire to see your sister, Mr John, or in my having gratified it in my
own way. As to the regularity of my visits since (which she may have
mentioned to you), there is nothing extraordinary in that. They soon
grew into a habit; and we are creatures of habit - creatures of
habit!'

Putting his hands into his pockets, and leaning back in his chair,
he looked at the brother and sister as if it were interesting to him
to see them together; and went on to say, with a kind of irritable
thoughtfulness:

'It's this same habit that confirms some of us, who are capable of
better things, in Lucifer's own pride and stubbornness - that confirms
and deepens others of us in villainy - more of us in indifference -
that hardens us from day to day, according to the temper of our clay,
like images, and leaves us as susceptible as images to new impressions
and convictions. You shall judge of its influence on me, John. For
more years than I need name, I had my small, and exactly defined
share, in the management of Dombey's House, and saw your brother (who
has proved himself a scoundrel! Your sister will forgive my being
obliged to mention it) extending and extending his influence, until
the business and its owner were his football; and saw you toiling at
your obscure desk every day; and was quite content to be as little
troubled as I might be, out of my own strip of duty, and to let
everything about me go on, day by day, unquestioned, like a great
machine - that was its habit and mine - and to take it all for
granted, and consider it all right. My Wednesday nights came regularly
round, our quartette parties came regularly off, my violoncello was in
good tune, and there was nothing wrong in my world - or if anything
not much - or little or much, it was no affair of mine.'

'I can answer for your being more respected and beloved during all
that time than anybody in the House, Sir,' said John Carker.

'Pooh! Good-natured and easy enough, I daresay,'returned the other,
'a habit I had. It suited the Manager; it suited the man he managed:
it suited me best of all. I did what was allotted to me to do, made no
court to either of them, and was glad to occupy a station in which
none was required. So I should have gone on till now, but that my room
had a thin wall. You can tell your sister that it was divided from the
Manager's room by a wainscot partition.'

'They were adjoining rooms; had been one, Perhaps, originally; and
were separated, as Mr Morfin says,' said her brother, looking back to
him for the resumption of his explanation.

'I have whistled, hummed tunes, gone accurately through the whole
of Beethoven's Sonata in B,' to let him know that I was within
hearing,' said Mr Morfin; 'but he never heeded me. It happened seldom
enough that I was within hearing of anything of a private nature,
certainly. But when I was, and couldn't otherwise avoid knowing
something of it, I walked out. I walked out once, John, during a
conversation between two brothers, to which, in the beginning, young
Walter Gay was a party. But I overheard some of it before I left the
room. You remember it sufficiently, perhaps, to tell your sister what
its nature was?'

'It referred, Harriet,' said her brother in a low voice, 'to the
past, and to our relative positions in the House.'

'Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect.
It shook me in my habit - the habit of nine-tenths of the world - of
believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it,' said
their visitor; 'and induced me to recall the history of the two
brothers, and to ponder on it. I think it was almost the first time in
my life when I fell into this train of reflection - how will many
things that are familiar, and quite matters of course to us now, look,
when we come to see them from that new and distant point of view which
we must all take up, one day or other? I was something less
good-natured, as the phrase goes, after that morning, less easy and
complacent altogether.'

He sat for a minute or so, drumming with one hand on the table; and
resumed in a hurry, as if he were anxious to get rid of his
confession.

'Before I knew what to do, or whether I could do anything, there
was a second conversation between the same two brothers, in which
their sister was mentioned. I had no scruples of conscience in
suffering all the waifs and strays of that conversation to float to me
as freely as they would. I considered them mine by right. After that,
I came here to see the sister for myself. The first time I stopped at
the garden gate, I made a pretext of inquiring into the character of a
poor neighbour; but I wandered out of that tract, and I think Miss
Harriet mistrusted me. The second time I asked leave to come in; came
in; and said what I wished to say. Your sister showed me reasons which
I dared not dispute, for receiving no assistance from me then; but I
established a means of communication between us, which remained
unbroken until within these few days, when I was prevented, by
important matters that have lately devolved upon me, from maintaining
them'

'How little I have suspected this,' said John Carker, 'when I have
seen you every day, Sir! If Harriet could have guessed your name - '

'Why, to tell you the truth, John,' interposed the visitor, 'I kept
it to myself for two reasons. I don't know that the first might have
been binding alone; but one has no business to take credit for good
intentions, and I made up my mind, at all events, not to disclose
myself until I should be able to do you some real service or other. My
second reason was, that I always hoped there might be some lingering
possibility of your brother's relenting towards you both; and in that
case, I felt that where there was the chance of a man of his
suspicious, watchful character, discovering that you had been secretly
befriended by me, there was the chance of a new and fatal cause of
division. I resolved, to be sure, at the risk of turning his
displeasure against myself - which would have been no matter - to
watch my opportunity of serving you with the head of the House; but
the distractions of death, courtship, marriage, and domestic
unhappiness, have left us no head but your brother for this long, long
time. And it would have been better for us,' said the visitor,
dropping his voice, 'to have been a lifeless trunk.'

He seemed conscious that these latter words had escaped hIm against
his will, and stretching out a hand to the brother, and a hand to the
sister, continued: 'All I could desire to say, and more, I have now
said. All I mean goes beyond words, as I hope you understand and
believe. The time has come, John - though most unfortunately and
unhappily come - when I may help you without interfering with that
redeeming struggle, which has lasted through so many years; since you
were discharged from it today by no act of your own. It is late; I
need say no more to-night. You will guard the treasure you have here,
without advice or reminder from me.'

With these words he rose to go.

'But go you first, John,' he said goodhumouredly, 'with a light,
without saying what you want to say, whatever that maybe;' John
Carker's heart was full, and he would have relieved it in speech,' if
he could; 'and let me have a word with your sister. We have talked
alone before, and in this room too; though it looks more natural with
you here.'

Following him out with his eyes, he turned kindly to Harriet, and
said in a lower voice, and with an altered and graver manner:

'You wish to ask me something of the man whose sister it is your
misfortune to be.'

'I dread to ask,' said Harriet.

'You have looked so earnestly at me more than once,' rejoined the
visitor, 'that I think I can divine your question. Has he taken money?
Is it that?'

'Yes.'

'He has not.'

'I thank Heaven!' said Harriet. 'For the sake of John.'

'That he has abused his trust in many ways,' said Mr Morfin; 'that
he has oftener dealt and speculated to advantage for himself, than for
the House he represented; that he has led the House on, to prodigious
ventures, often resulting in enormous losses; that he has always
pampered the vanity and ambition of his employer, when it was his duty
to have held them in check, and shown, as it was in his power to do,
to what they tended here or there; will not, perhaps, surprise you
now. Undertakings have been entered on, to swell the reputation of the
House for vast resources, and to exhibit it in magnificent contrast to
other merchants' Houses, of which it requires a steady head to
contemplate the possibly - a few disastrous changes of affairs might
render them the probably - ruinous consequences. In the midst of the
many transactions of the House, in most parts of the world: a great
labyrinth of which only he has held the clue: he has had the
opportunity, and he seems to have used it, of keeping the various
results afloat, when ascertained, and substituting estimates and
generalities for facts. But latterly - you follow me, Miss Harriet?'

'Perfectly, perfectly,' she answered, with her frightened face
fixed on his. 'Pray tell me all the worst at once.

'Latterly, he appears to have devoted the greatest pains to making
these results so plain and clear, that reference to the private books
enables one to grasp them, numerous and varying as they are, with
extraordinary ease. As if he had resolved to show his employer at one
broad view what has been brought upon him by ministration to his
ruling passion! That it has been his constant practice to minister to
that passion basely, and to flatter it corruptly, is indubitable. In
that, his criminality, as it is connected with the affairs of the
House, chiefly consists.'

'One other word before you leave me, dear Sir,' said Harriet.
'There is no danger in all this?'

'How danger?' he returned, with a little hesitation.

'To the credit of the House?'

'I cannot help answering you plainly, and trusting you completely,'
said Mr Morfin, after a moment's survey of her face.

'You may. Indeed you may!'

'I am sure I may. Danger to the House's credit? No; none There may
be difficulty, greater or less difficulty, but no danger, unless -
unless, indeed - the head of the House, unable to bring his mind to
the reduction of its enterprises, and positively refusing to believe
that it is, or can be, in any position but the position in which he
has always represented it to himself, should urge it beyond its
strength. Then it would totter.'

'But there is no apprehension of that?' said Harriet.

'There shall be no half-confidence,' he replied, shaking her hand,
'between us. Mr Dombey is unapproachable by anyone, and his state of
mind is haughty, rash, unreasonable, and ungovernable, now. But he is
disturbed and agitated now beyond all common bounds, and it may pass.
You now know all, both worst and best. No more to-night, and
good-night!'

With that he kissed her hand, and, passing out to the door where
her brother stood awaiting his coming, put him cheerfully aside when
he essayed to speak; told him that, as they would see each other soon
and often, he might speak at another time, if he would, but there was
no leisure for it then; and went away at a round pace, in order that
no word of gratitude might follow him.

The brother and sister sat conversing by the fireside, until it was
almost day; made sleepless by this glimpse of the new world that
opened before them, and feeling like two people shipwrecked long ago,
upon a solitary coast, to whom a ship had come at last, when they were
old in resignation, and had lost all thought of any other home. But
another and different kind of disquietude kept them waking too. The
darkness out of which this light had broken on them gathered around;
and the shadow of their guilty brother was in the house where his foot
had never trod.

Nor was it to be driven out, nor did it fade before the sun. Next
morning it was there; at noon; at night Darkest and most distinct at
night, as is now to be told.

John Carker had gone out, in pursuance of a letter of appointment
from their friend, and Harriet was left in the house alone. She had
been alone some hours. A dull, grave evening, and a deepening
twilight, were not favourable to the removal of the oppression on her
spirits. The idea of this brother, long unseen and unknown, flitted
about her in frightful shapes He was dead, dying, calling to her,
staring at her, frowning on her. The pictures in her mind were so
obtrusive and exact that, as the twilight deepened, she dreaded to
raise her head and look at the dark corners of the room, lest his
wraith, the offspring of her excited imagination, should be waiting
there, to startle her. Once she had such a fancy of his being in the
next room, hiding - though she knew quite well what a distempered
fancy it was, and had no belief in it - that she forced herself to go
there, for her own conviction. But in vain. The room resumed its
shadowy terrors, the moment she left it; and she had no more power to
divest herself of these vague impressions of dread, than if they had
been stone giants, rooted in the solid earth.

It was almost dark, and she was sitting near the window, with her
head upon her hand, looking down, when, sensible of a sudden increase
in the gloom of the apartment, she raised her eyes, and uttered an
involuntary cry. Close to the glass, a pale scared face gazed in;
vacantly, for an instant, as searching for an object; then the eyes
rested on herself, and lighted up.

'Let me in! Let me in! I want to speak to you!' and the hand
rattled on the glass.

She recognised immediately the woman with the long dark hair, to
whom she had given warmth, food, and shelter, one wet night. Naturally
afraid of her, remembering her violent behaviour, Harriet, retreating
a little from the window, stood undecided and alarmed.

'Let me in! Let me speak to you! I am thankful - quiet - humble -
anything you like. But let me speak to you.'

The vehement manner of the entreaty, the earnest expression of the
face, the trembling of the two hands that were raised imploringly, a
certain dread and terror in the voice akin to her own condition at the
moment, prevailed with Harriet. She hastened to the door and opened
it.

'May I come in, or shall I speak here?' said the woman, catching at
her hand.

'What is it that you want? What is it that you have to say?'

'Not much, but let me say it out, or I shall never say it. I am
tempted now to go away. There seem to be hands dragging me from the
door. Let me come in, if you can trust me for this once!'

Her energy again prevailed, and they passed into the firelight of
the little kitchen, where she had before sat, and ate, and dried her
clothes.

'Sit there,' said Alice, kneeling down beside her, 'and look at me.
You remember me?'

'I do.'

'You remember what I told you I had been, and where I came from,
ragged and lame, with the fierce wind and weather beating on my head?'

'Yes.'

'You know how I came back that night, and threw your money in the
dirt, and you and your race. Now, see me here, upon my knees. Am l
less earnest now, than I was then?'

'If what you ask,' said Harriet, gently, 'is forgiveness - '

'But it's not!' returned the other, with a proud, fierce look 'What
I ask is to be believed. Now you shall judge if I am worthy of belief,
both as I was, and as I am.'

Still upon her knees, and with her eyes upon the fire, and the fire
shining on her ruined beauty and her wild black hair, one long tress
of which she pulled over her shoulder, and wound about her hand, and
thoughtfully bit and tore while speaking, she went on:

'When I was young and pretty, and this,' plucking contemptuously at
the hair she held, was only handled delicately, and couldn't be
admired enough, my mother, who had not been very mindful of me as a
child, found out my merits, and was fond of me, and proud of me. She
was covetous and poor, and thought to make a sort of property of me.
No great lady ever thought that of a daughter yet, I'm sure, or acted
as if she did - it's never done, we all know - and that shows that the
only instances of mothers bringing up their daughters wrong, and evil
coming of it, are among such miserable folks as us.'

Looking at the fire, as if she were forgetful, for the moment, of
having any auditor, she continued in a dreamy way, as she wound the
long tress of hair tight round and round her hand.

'What came of that, I needn't say. Wretched marriages don't come of
such things, in our degree; only wretchedness and ruin. Wretchedness
and ruin came on me - came on me.

Raising her eyes swiftly from their moody gaze upon the fire, to
Harriet's face, she said:

'I am wasting time, and there is none to spare; yet if I hadn't
thought of all, I shouldn't be here now. Wretchedness and ruin came on
me, I say. I was made a short-lived toy, and flung aside more cruelly
and carelessly than even such things are. By whose hand do you think?'

'Why do you ask me?' said Harriet.

'Why do you tremble?' rejoined Alice, with an eager look. 'His
usage made a Devil of me. I sunk in wretchedness and ruin, lower and
lower yet. I was concerned in a robbery - in every part of it but the
gains - and was found out, and sent to be tried, without a friend,
without a penny. Though I was but a girl, I would have gone to Death,
sooner than ask him for a word, if a word of his could have saved me.
I would! To any death that could have been invented. But my mother,
covetous always, sent to him in my name, told the true story of my
case, and humbly prayed and petitioned for a small last gift - for not
so many pounds as I have fingers on this hand. Who was it, do you
think, who snapped his fingers at me in my misery, lying, as he
believed, at his feet, and left me without even this poor sign of
remembrance; well satisfied that I should be sent abroad, beyond the
reach of farther trouble to him, and should die, and rot there? Who
was this, do you think?'

'Why do you ask me?' repeated Harriet.

'Why do you tremble?' said Alice, laying her hand upon her arm' and
looking in her face, 'but that the answer is on your lips! It was your
brother James.

Harriet trembled more and more, but did not avert her eyes from the
eager look that rested on them.

'When I knew you were his sister - which was on that night - I came
back, weary and lame, to spurn your gift. I felt that night as if I
could have travelled, weary and lame, over the whole world, to stab
him, if I could have found him in a lonely place with no one near. Do
you believe that I was earnest in all that?'

'I do! Good Heaven, why are you come again?'

'Since then,' said Alice, with the same grasp of her arm, and the
same look in her face, 'I have seen him! I have followed him with my
eyes, In the broad day. If any spark of my resentment slumbered in my
bosom, it sprung into a blaze when my eyes rested on him. You know he
has wronged a proud man, and made him his deadly enemy. What if I had
given information of him to that man?'

'Information!' repeated Harriet.

'What if I had found out one who knew your brother's secret; who
knew the manner of his flight, who knew where he and the companion of
his flight were gone? What if I had made him utter all his knowledge,
word by word, before his enemy, concealed to hear it? What if I had
sat by at the time, looking into this enemy's face, and seeing it
change till it was scarcely human? What if I had seen him rush away,
mad, in pursuit? What if I knew, now, that he was on his road, more
fiend than man, and must, in so many hours, come up with him?'

'Remove your hand!' said Harriet, recoiling. 'Go away! Your touch
is dreadful to me!'

'I have done this,' pursued the other, with her eager look,
regardless of the interruption. 'Do I speak and look as if I really
had? Do you believe what I am saying?'

'I fear I must. Let my arm go!'

'Not yet. A moment more. You can think what my revengeful purpose
must have been, to last so long, and urge me to do this?'

'Dreadful!' said Harriet.

'Then when you see me now,' said Alice hoarsely, 'here again,
kneeling quietly on the ground, with my touch upon your arm, with my
eyes upon your face, you may believe that there is no common
earnestness in what I say, and that no common struggle has been
battling in my breast. I am ashamed to speak the words, but I relent.
I despise myself; I have fought with myself all day, and all last
night; but I relent towards him without reason, and wish to repair
what I have done, if it is possible. I wouldn't have them come
together while his pursuer is so blind and headlong. If you had seen
him as he went out last night, you would know the danger better.

'How can it be prevented? What can I do?' cried Harriet.

'All night long,' pursued the other, hurriedly, 'I had dreams of
him - and yet I didn't sleep - in his blood. All day, I have had him
near me.

'What can I do?' cried Harriet, shuddering at these words.

'If there is anyone who'll write, or send, or go to him, let them
lose no time. He is at Dijon. Do you know the name, and where it is?'

'Yes.'

'Warn him that the man he has made his enemy is in a frenzy, and
that he doesn't know him if he makes light of his approach. Tell him
that he is on the road - I know he is! - and hurrying on. Urge him to
get away while there is time - if there is time - and not to meet him
yet. A month or so will make years of difference. Let them not
encounter, through me. Anywhere but there! Any time but now! Let his
foe follow him, and find him for himself, but not through me! There is
enough upon my head without.'

The fire ceased to be reflected in her jet black hair, uplifted
face, and eager eyes; her hand was gone from Harriet's arm; and the
place where she had been was empty.


CHAPTER 54.

The Fugitives



Tea-time, an hour short of midnight; the place, a French apartment,
comprising some half-dozen rooms; - a dull cold hall or corridor, a
dining-room, a drawing-room, a bed-room, and an inner drawingroom, or
boudoir, smaller and more retired than the rest. All these shut in by
one large pair of doors on the main staircase, but each room provided
with two or three pairs of doors of its own, establishing several
means of communication with the remaining portion of the apartment, or
with certain small passages within the wall, leading, as is not
unusual in such houses, to some back stairs with an obscure outlet
below. The whole situated on the first floor of so large an Hotel,
that it did not absorb one entire row of windows upon one side of the
square court-yard in the centre, upon which the whole four sides of
the mansion looked.

An air of splendour, sufficiently faded to be melancholy, and
sufficiently dazzling to clog and embarrass the details of life with a
show of state, reigned in these rooms The walls and ceilings were
gilded and painted; the floors were waxed and polished; crimson
drapery hung in festoons from window, door, and mirror; and
candelabra, gnarled and intertwisted like the branches of trees, or
horns of animals, stuck out from the panels of the wall. But in the
day-time, when the lattice-blinds (now closely shut) were opened, and
the light let in, traces were discernible among this finery, of wear
and tear and dust, of sun and damp and smoke, and lengthened intervals
of want of use and habitation, when such shows and toys of life seem
sensitive like life, and waste as men shut up in prison do. Even
night, and clusters of burning candles, could not wholly efface them,
though the general glitter threw them in the shade.

The glitter of bright tapers, and their reflection in
looking-glasses, scraps of gilding and gay colours, were confined, on
this night, to one room - that smaller room within the rest, just now
enumerated. Seen from the hall, where a lamp was feebly burning,
through the dark perspective of open doors, it looked as shining and
precious as a gem. In the heart of its radiance sat a beautiful woman
- Edith.

She was alone. The same defiant, scornful woman still. The cheek a
little worn, the eye a little larger in appearance, and more lustrous,
but the haughty bearing just the same. No shame upon her brow; no late
repentance bending her disdainful neck. Imperious and stately yet, and
yet regardless of herself and of all else, she sat wIth her dark eyes
cast down, waiting for someone.

No book, no work, no occupation of any kind but her own thought,
beguiled the tardy time. Some purpose, strong enough to fill up any
pause, possessed her. With her lips pressed together, and quivering if
for a moment she released them from her control; with her nostril
inflated; her hands clasped in one another; and her purpose swelling
in her breast; she sat, and waited.

At the sound of a key in the outer door, and a footstep in the
hall, she started up, and cried 'Who's that?' The answer was in
French, and two men came in with jingling trays, to make preparation
for supper.

'Who had bade them to do so?' she asked.

'Monsieur had commanded it, when it was his pleasure to take the
apartment. Monsieur had said, when he stayed there for an hour, en
route, and left the letter for Madame - Madame had received it
surely?'

'Yes.'

'A thousand pardons! The sudden apprehension that it might have
been forgotten had struck hIm;' a bald man, with a large beard from a
neighbouring restaurant; 'with despair! Monsieur had said that supper
was to be ready at that hour: also that he had forewarned Madame of
the commands he had given, in his letter. Monsieur had done the Golden
Head the honour to request that the supper should be choice and
delicate. Monsieur would find that his confidence in the Golden Head
was not misplaced.'

Edith said no more, but looked on thoughtfully while they prepared
the table for two persons, and set the wine upon it. She arose before
they had finished, and taking a lamp, passed into the bed-chamber and
into the drawing-room, where she hurriedly but narrowly examined all
the doors; particularly one in the former room that opened on the
passage in the wall. From this she took the key, and put it on the
outer side. She then came back.

The men - the second of whom was a dark, bilious subject, in a
jacket, close shaved, and with a black head of hair close cropped -
had completed their preparation of the table, and were standing
looking at it. He who had spoken before, inquired whether Madame
thought it would be long before Monsieur arrived?

'She couldn't say. It was all one.'

'Pardon! There was the supper! It should be eaten on the instant.
Monsieur (who spoke French like an Angel - or a Frenchman - it was all
the same) had spoken with great emphasis of his punctuality. But the
English nation had so grand a genius for punctuality. Ah! what noise!
Great Heaven, here was Monsieur. Behold him!'

In effect, Monsieur, admitted by the other of the two, came, with
his gleaming teeth, through the dark rooms, like a mouth; and arriving
in that sanctuary of light and colour, a figure at full length,
embraced Madame, and addressed her in the French tongue as his
charming wife

'My God! Madame is going to faint. Madame is overcome with joy!'
The bald man with the beard observed it, and cried out.

Madame had only shrunk and shivered. Before the words were spoken,
she was standing with her hand upon the velvet back of a great chair;
her figure drawn up to its full height, and her face immoveable.

'Francois has flown over to the Golden Head for supper. He flies on
these occasions like an angel or a bird. The baggage of Monsieur is in
his room. All is arranged. The supper will be here this moment.' These
facts the bald man notified with bows and smiles, and presently the
supper came.

The hot dishes were on a chafing-dish; the cold already set forth,
with the change of service on a sideboard. Monsieur was satisfied with
this arrangement. The supper table being small, it pleased him very
well. Let them set the chafing-dish upon the floor, and go. He would
remove the dishes with his own hands.

'Pardon!' said the bald man, politely. 'It was impossible!'

Monsieur was of another opinion. He required no further attendance
that night.

'But Madame - ' the bald man hinted.

'Madame,' replied Monsieur, 'had her own maid. It was enough.'

'A million pardons! No! Madame had no maid!'

'I came here alone,' said Edith 'It was my choice to do so. I am
well used to travelling; I want no attendance. They need send nobody
to me.

Monsieur accordingly, persevering in his first proposed
impossibility, proceeded to follow the two attendants to the outer
door, and secure it after them for the night. The bald man turning
round to bow, as he went out, observed that Madame still stood with
her hand upon the velvet back of the great chair, and that her face
was quite regardless of him, though she was looking straight before
her.

As the sound of Carker's fastening the door resounded through the
intermediate rooms, and seemed to come hushed and stilled into that
last distant one, the sound of the Cathedral clock striking twelve
mingled with it, in Edith's ears She heard him pause, as if he heard
it too and listened; and then came back towards her, laying a long
train of footsteps through the silence, and shutting all the doors
behind him as he came along. Her hand, for a moment, left the velvet
chair to bring a knife within her reach upon the table; then she stood
as she had stood before.

'How strange to come here by yourself, my love!' he said as he
entered.

'What?' she returned.

Her tone was so harsh; the quick turn of her head so fierce; her
attitude so repellent; and her frown so black; that he stood, with the
lamp in his hand, looking at her, as if she had struck him motionless.

'I say,' he at length repeated, putting down the lamp, and smiling
his most courtly smile, 'how strange to come here alone! It was
unnecessarty caution surely, and might have defeated itself. You were
to have engaged an attendant at Havre or Rouen, and have had abundance
of time for the purpose, though you had been the most capricious and
difficult (as you are the most beautiful, my love) of women.'

Her eyes gleamed strangely on him, but she stood with her hand
resting on the chair, and said not a word.

'I have never,' resumed Carker, 'seen you look so handsome, as you
do to-night. Even the picture I have carried in my mind during this
cruel probation, and which I have contemplated night and day, is
exceeded by the reality.'

Not a word. Not a look Her eyes completely hidden by their drooping
lashes, but her head held up.

'Hard, unrelenting terms they were!' said Carker, with a smile,
'but they are all fulfilled and passed, and make the present more
delicious and more safe. Sicily shall be the Place of our retreat. In
the idlest and easiest part of the world, my soul, we'll both seek
compensation for old slavery.'

He was coming gaily towards her, when, in an instant, she caught
the knife up from the table, and started one pace back.

'Stand still!' she said, 'or I shall murder you!'

The sudden change in her, the towering fury and intense abhorrence
sparkling in her eyes and lighting up her brow, made him stop as if a
fire had stopped him.

'Stand still!' she said, 'come no nearer me, upon your life!'

They both stood looking at each other. Rage and astonishment were
in his face, but he controlled them, and said lightly,

'Come, come! Tush, we are alone, and out of everybody's sight and
hearing. Do you think to frighten me with these tricks of virtue?'

'Do you think to frighten me,' she answered fiercely, 'from any
purpose that I have, and any course I am resolved upon, by reminding
me of the solitude of this place, and there being no help near? Me,
who am here alone, designedly? If I feared you, should I not have
avoided you? If I feared you, should I be here, in the dead of night,
telling you to your face what I am going to tell?'

'And what is that,' he said, 'you handsome shrew? Handsomer so,
than any other woman in her best humour?'

'I tell you nothing,' she returned, until you go back to that chair
- except this, once again - Don't come near me! Not a step nearer. I
tell you, if you do, as Heaven sees us, I shall murder you!'

'Do you mistake me for your husband?' he retorted, with a grin.

Disdaining to reply, she stretched her arm out, pointing to the
chair. He bit his lip, frowned, laughed, and sat down in it, with a
baffled, irresolute, impatient air, he was unable to conceal; and
biting his nail nervously, and looking at her sideways, with bitter
discomfiture, even while he feigned to be amused by her caprice.

She put the knife down upon the table, and touching her bosom wIth
her hand, said:

'I have something lying here that is no love trinket, and sooner
than endure your touch once more, I would use it on you - and you know
it, while I speak - with less reluctance than I would on any other
creeping thing that lives.'

He affected to laugh jestingly, and entreated her to act her play
out quickly, for the supper was growing cold. But the secret look with
which he regarded her, was more sullen and lowering, and he struck his
foot once upon the floor with a muttered oath.

'How many times,' said Edith, bending her darkest glance upon him'
'has your bold knavery assailed me with outrage and insult? How many
times in your smooth manner, and mocking words and looks, have I been
twitted with my courtship and my marriage? How many times have you
laid bare my wound of love for that sweet, injured girl and lacerated
it? How often have you fanned the fire on which, for two years, I have
writhed; and tempted me to take a desperate revenge, when it has most
tortured me?'

'I have no doubt, Ma'am,' he replied, 'that you have kept a good
account, and that it's pretty accurate. Come, Edith. To your husband,
poor wretch, this was well enough - '

'Why, if,' she said, surveying him with a haughty contempt and
disgust, that he shrunk under, let him brave it as he would, 'if all
my other reasons for despising him could have been blown away like
feathers, his having you for his counsellor and favourite, would have
almost been enough to hold their place.'

'Is that a reason why you have run away with me?' he asked her,
tauntingly.

'Yes, and why we are face to face for the last time. Wretch! We
meet tonight, and part tonight. For not one moment after I have ceased
to speak, will I stay here!'

He turned upon her with his ugliest look, and gripped the table
with his hand; but neither rose, nor otherwise answered or threatened
her.

'I am a woman,' she said, confronting him steadfastly, 'who from
her childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and
rejected, put up and appraised, until my very soul has sickened. I
have not had an accomplishment or grace that might have been a
resource to me, but it has been paraded and vended to enhance my
value, as if the common crier had called it through the streets. My
poor, proud friends, have looked on and approved; and every tie
between us has been deadened in my breast. There is not one of them
for whom I care, as I could care for a pet dog. I stand alone in the
world, remembering well what a hollow world it has been to me, and
what a hollow part of it I have been myself. You know this, and you
know that my fame with it is worthless to me.'

'Yes; I imagined that,' he said.

'And calculated on it,' she rejoined, 'and so pursued me. Grown too
indifferent for any opposition but indifference, to the daily working
of the hands that had moulded me to this; and knowing that my marriage
would at least prevent their hawking of me up and down; I suffered
myself to be sold, as infamously as any woman with a halter round her
neck is sold in any market-place. You know that.'

'Yes,' he said, showing all his teeth 'I know that.'

'And calculated on it,' she rejoined once more, 'and so pursued me.
From my marriage day, I found myself exposed to such new shame - to
such solicitation and pursuit (expressed as clearly as if it had been
written in the coarsest words, and thrust into my hand at every turn)
from one mean villain, that I felt as if I had never known humiliation
till that time. This shame my husband fixed upon me; hemmed me round
with, himself; steeped me in, with his own hands, and of his own act,
repeated hundreds of times. And thus - forced by the two from every
point of rest I had - forced by the two to yield up the last retreat
of love and gentleness within me, or to be a new misfortune on its
innocent object - driven from each to each, and beset by one when I
escaped the other - my anger rose almost to distraction against both I
do not know against which it rose higher - the master or the man!'

He watched her closely, as she stood before him in the very triumph
of her indignant beauty. She was resolute, he saw; undauntable; with
no more fear of him than of a worm.

'What should I say of honour or of chastity to you!' she went on.
'What meaning would it have to you; what meaning would it have from
me! But if I tell you that the lightest touch of your hand makes my
blood cold with antipathy; that from the hour when I first saw and
hated you, to now, when my instinctive repugnance is enhanced by every
minute's knowledge of you I have since had, you have been a loathsome
creature to me which has not its like on earth; how then?'

He answered with a faint laugh, 'Ay! How then, my queen?'

'On that night, when, emboldened by the scene you had assisted at,
you dared come to my room and speak to me,' she said, 'what passed?'

He shrugged his shoulders, and laughed

'What passed?' she said.

'Your memory is so distinct,' he said, 'that I have no doubt you
can recall it.'

'I can,' she said. 'Hear it! Proposing then, this flight - not this
flight, but the flight you thought it - you told me that in the having
given you that meeting, and leaving you to be discovered there, if you
so thought fit; and in the having suffered you to be alone with me
many times before, - and having made the opportunities, you said, -
and in the having openly avowed to you that I had no feeling for my
husband but aversion, and no care for myself - I was lost; I had given
you the power to traduce my name; and I lived, in virtuous reputation,
at the pleasure of your breath'

'All stratagems in love  - ' he interrupted, smiling. 'The old
adage - '

'On that night,' said Edith, 'and then, the struggle that I long
had had with something that was not respect for my good fame - that
was I know not what - perhaps the clinging to that last retreat- was
ended. On that night, and then, I turned from everything but passion
and resentment. I struck a blow that laid your lofty master in the
dust, and set you there, before me, looking at me now, and knowing
what I mean.'

He sprung up from his chair with a great oath. She put her hand
into her bosom, and not a finger trembled, not a hair upon her head
was stirred. He stood still: she too: the table and chair between
them.~

'When I forget that this man put his lips to mine that night, and
held me in his arms as he has done again to-night,' said Edith,
pointing at him; 'when I forget the taint of his kiss upon my cheek -
the cheek that Florence would have laid her guiltless face against -
when I forget my meeting with her, while that taint was hot upon me,
and in what a flood the knowledge rushed upon me when I saw her, that
in releasing her from the persecution I had caused by my love, I
brought a shame and degradation on her name through mine, and in all
time to come should be the solitary figure representing in her mind
her first avoidance of a guilty creature - then, Husband, from whom I
stand divorced henceforth, I will forget these last two years, and
undo what I have done, and undeceive you!'

Her flashing eyes, uplifted for a moment, lighted again on Carker,
and she held some letters out in her left hand.

'See these!' she said, contemptuously. 'You have addressed these to
me in the false name you go by; one here, some elsewhere on my road.
The seals are unbroken. Take them back!'

She crunched them in her hand, and tossed them to his feet. And as
she looked upon him now, a smile was on her face.

'We meet and part to-night,' she said. 'You have fallen on Sicilian
days and sensual rest, too soon. You might have cajoled, and fawned,
and played your traitor's part, a little longer, and grown richer. You
purchase your voluptuous retirement dear!'

'Edith!' he retorted, menacing her with his hand. 'Sit down! Have
done with this! What devil possesses you?'

'Their name is Legion,' she replied, uprearing her proud form as if
she would have crushed him; 'you and your master have raised them in a
fruitful house, and they shall tear you both. False to him, false to
his innocent child, false every way and everywhere, go forth and boast
of me, and gnash your teeth, for once, to know that you are lying!'

He stood before her, muttering and menacing, and scowling round as
if for something that would help him to conquer her; but with the same
indomitable spirit she opposed him, without faltering.

'In every vaunt you make,' she said, 'I have my triumph I single
out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud
tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper, and may rankle more. Boast,
and revenge me on him! You know how you came here to-night; you know
how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colours quite as
despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you. Boast then,
and revenge me on yourself.'

The foam was on his lips; the wet stood on his forehead. If she
would have faltered once for only one half-moment, he would have
pinioned her; but she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes
never left him.

'We don't part so,' he said. 'Do you think I am drivelling, to let
you go in your mad temper?'

'Do you think,' she answered, 'that I am to be stayed?'

'I'll try, my dear,' he said with a ferocious gesture of his head.

'God's mercy on you, if you try by coming near me!' she replied.

'And what,' he said, 'if there are none of these same boasts and
vaunts on my part? What if I were to turn too? Come!' and his teeth
fairly shone again. 'We must make a treaty of this, or I may take some
unexpected course. Sit down, sit down!'

'Too late!' she cried, with eyes that seemed to sparkle fire. 'I
have thrown my fame and good name to the winds! I have resolved to
bear the shame that will attach to me - resolved to know that it
attaches falsely - that you know it too - and that he does not, never
can, and never shall. I'll die, and make no sign. For this, I am here
alone with you, at the dead of night. For this, I have met you here,
in a false name, as your wife. For this, I have been seen here by
those men, and left here. Nothing can save you now.

He would have sold his soul to root her, in her beauty, to the
floor, and make her arms drop at her sides, and have her at his mercy.
But he could not look at her, and not be afraid of her. He saw a
strength within her that was resistless. He saw that she was
desperate, and that her unquenchable hatred of him would stop at
nothing. His eyes followed the hand that was put with such rugged
uncongenial purpose into her white bosom, and he thought that if it
struck at hIm, and failed, it would strike there, just as soon.

He did not venture, therefore, to advance towards her; but the door
by which he had entered was behind him, and he stepped back to lock
it.

'Lastly, take my warning! Look to yourself!' she said, and smiled
again. 'You have been betrayed, as all betrayers are. It has been made
known that you are in this place, or were to be, or have been. If I
live, I saw my husband in a carriage in the street to-night!'

'Strumpet, it's false!' cried Carker.

At the moment, the bell rang loudly in the hall. He turned white,
as she held her hand up like an enchantress, at whose invocation the
sound had come.

'Hark! do you hear it?'

He set his back against the door; for he saw a change in her, and
fancied she was coming on to pass him. But, in a moment, she was gone
through the opposite doors communicating with the bed-chamber, and
they shut upon her.

Once turned, once changed in her inflexible unyielding look, he
felt that he could cope with her. He thought a sudden terror,
occasioned by this night-alarm, had subdued her; not the less readily,
for her overwrought condition. Throwing open the doors, he followed,
almost instantly.

But the room was dark; and as she made no answer to his call, he
was fain to go back for the lamp. He held it up, and looked round,
everywhere, expecting to see her crouching in some corner; but the
room was empty. So, into the drawing-room and dining-room he went, in
succession, with the uncertain steps of a man in a strange place;
looking fearfully about, and prying behind screens and couches; but
she was not there. No, nor in the hall, which was so bare that he
could see that, at a glance.

All this time, the ringing at the bell was constantly renewed, and
those without were beating at the door. He put his lamp down at a
distance, and going near it, listened. There were several voices
talking together: at least two of them in English; and though the door
was thick, and there was great confusion, he knew one of these too
well to doubt whose voice it was.

He took up his lamp again, and came back quickly through all the
rooms, stopping as he quitted each, and looking round for her, with
the light raised above his head. He was standing thus in the
bed-chamber, when the door, leading to the little passage in the wall,
caught his eye. He went to it, and found it fastened on the other
side; but she had dropped a veil in going through, and shut it in the
door.

All this time the people on the stairs were ringing at the bell,
and knocking with their hands and feet.

He was not a coward: but these sounds; what had gone before; the
strangeness of the place, which had confused him, even in his return
from the hall; the frustration of his schemes (for, strange to say, he
would have been much bolder, if they had succeeded); the unseasonable
time; the recollection of having no one near to whom he could appeal
for any friendly office; above all, the sudden sense, which made even
his heart beat like lead, that the man whose confidence he had
outraged, and whom he had so treacherously deceived, was there to
recognise and challenge him with his mask plucked off his face; struck
a panic through him. He tried the door in which the veil was shut, but
couldn't force it. He opened one of the windows, and looked down
through the lattice of the blind, into the court-yard; but it was a
high leap, and the stones were pitiless.

The ringing and knocking still continuing - his panic too - he went
back to the door in the bed-chamber, and with some new efforts, each
more stubborn than the last, wrenched it open. Seeing the little
staircase not far off, and feeling the night-air coming up, he stole
back for his hat and coat, made the door as secure after hIm as he
could, crept down lamp in hand, extinguished it on seeing the street,
and having put it in a corner, went out where the stars were shining.


CHAPTER 55.

Rob the Grinder loses his Place



The Porter at the iron gate which shut the court-yard from the
street, had left the little wicket of his house open, and was gone
away; no doubt to mingle in the distant noise at the door of the great
staircase. Lifting the latch softly, Carker crept out, and shutting
the jangling gate after him with as little noise as possible, hurried
off.

In the fever of his mortification and unavailing rage, the panic
that had seized upon him mastered him completely. It rose to such a
height that he would have blindly encountered almost any risk, rather
than meet the man of whom, two hours ago, he had been utterly
regardless. His fierce arrival, which he had never expected; the sound
of his voice; their having been so near a meeting, face to face; he
would have braved out this, after the first momentary shock of alarm,
and would have put as bold a front upon his guilt as any villain. But
the springing of his mine upon himself, seemed to have rent and
shivered all his hardihood and self-reliance. Spurned like any
reptile; entrapped and mocked; turned upon, and trodden down by the
proud woman whose mind he had slowly poisoned, as he thought, until
she had sunk into the mere creature of his pleasure; undeceived in his
deceit, and with his fox's hide stripped off, he sneaked away,
abashed, degraded, and afraid.

Some other terror came upon hIm quite removed from this of being
pursued, suddenly, like an electric shock, as he was creeping through
the streets Some visionary terror, unintelligible and inexplicable,
asssociated with a trembling of the ground, - a rush and sweep of
something through the air, like Death upon the wing. He shrunk, as if
to let the thing go by. It was not gone, it never had been there, yet
what a startling horror it had left behind.

He raised his wicked face so full of trouble, to the night sky,
where the stars, so full of peace, were shining on him as they had
been when he first stole out into the air; and stopped to think what
he should do. The dread of being hunted in a strange remote place,
where the laws might not protect him - the novelty of the feeling that
it was strange and remote, originating in his being left alone so
suddenly amid the ruins of his plans - his greater dread of seeking
refuge now, in Italy or in Sicily, where men might be hired to
assissinate him, he thought, at any dark street corner-the waywardness
of guilt and fear - perhaps some sympathy of action with the turning
back of all his schemes - impelled him to turn back too, and go to
England.

'I am safer there, in any case. If I should not decide,' he
thought, 'to give this fool a meeting, I am less likely to be traced
there, than abroad here, now. And if I should (this cursed fit being
over), at least I shall not be alone, with out a soul to speak to, or
advise with, or stand by me. I shall not be run in upon and worried
like a rat.'

He muttered Edith's name, and clenched his hand. As he crept along,
in the shadow of the massive buildings, he set his teeth, and muttered
dreadful imprecations on her head, and looked from side to side, as if
in search of her. Thus, he stole on to the gate of an inn-yard. The
people were a-bed; but his ringing at the bell soon produced a man
with a lantern, in company with whom he was presently in a dim
coach-house, bargaining for the hire of an old phaeton, to Paris.

The bargain was a short one; and the horses were soon sent for.
Leaving word that the carriage was to follow him when they came, he
stole away again, beyond the town, past the old ramparts, out on the
open road, which seemed to glide away along the dark plain, like a
stream.

Whither did it flow? What was the end of it? As he paused, with
some such suggestion within him, looking over the gloomy flat where
the slender trees marked out the way, again that flight of Death came
rushing up, again went on, impetuous and resistless, again was nothing
but a horror in his mind, dark as the scene and undefined as its
remotest verge.

There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of
the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind hIm, lighted here
and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and
roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely
distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly
striking two.

He went forward for what appeared a long time, and a long way;
often stopping to listen. At last the ringing of horses' bells greeted
his anxious ears. Now softer, and now louder, now inaudible, now
ringing very slowly over bad ground, now brisk and merry, it came on;
until with a loud shouting and lashing, a shadowy postillion muffled
to the eyes, checked his four struggling horses at his side.

'Who goes there! Monsieur?'

'Yes.'

'Monsieur has walked a long way in the dark midnight.'

'No matter. Everyone to his task. Were there any other horses
ordered at the Post-house?'

'A thousand devils! - and pardons! other horses? at this hour? No.'

'Listen, my friend. I am much hurried. Let us see how fast we can
travel! The faster, the more money there will be to drink. Off we go
then! Quick!'

'Halloa! whoop! Halloa! Hi!' Away, at a gallop, over the black
landscape, scattering the dust and dirt like spray!

The clatter and commotion echoed to the hurry and discordance of
the fugitive's ideas. Nothing clear without, and nothing clear within.
Objects flitting past, merging into one another, dimly descried,
confusedly lost sight of, gone! Beyond the changing scraps of fence
and cottage immediately upon the road, a lowering waste. Beyond the
shifting images that rose up in his mind and vanished as they showed
themselves, a black expanse of dread and rage and baffled villainy.
Occasionally, a sigh of mountain air came from the distant Jura,
fading along the plain. Sometimes that rush which was so furious and
horrible, again came sweeping through his fancy, passed away, and left
a chill upon his blood.

The lamps, gleaming on the medley of horses' heads, jumbled with
the shadowy driver, and the fluttering of his cloak, made a thousand
indistinct shapes, answering to his thoughts. Shadows of familiar
people, stooping at their desks and books, in their remembered
attitudes; strange apparitions of the man whom he was flying from, or
of Edith; repetitions in the ringing bells and rolling wheels, of
words that had been spoken; confusions of time and place, making last
night a month ago, a month ago last night - home now distant beyond
hope, now instantly accessible; commotion, discord, hurry, darkness,
and confusion in his mind, and all around him. - Hallo! Hi! away at a
gallop over the black landscape; dust and dirt flying like spray, the
smoking horses snorting and plunging as if each of them were ridden by
a demon, away in a frantic triumph on the dark road - whither?

Again the nameless shock comes speeding up, and as it passes, the
bells ring in his ears 'whither?' The wheels roar in his ears
'whither?' All the noise and rattle shapes itself into that cry. The
lights and shadows dance upon the horses' heads like imps. No stopping
now: no slackening! On, on Away with him upon the dark road wildly!

He could not think to any purpose. He could not separate one
subject of reflection from another, sufficiently to dwell upon it, by
itself, for a minute at a time. The crash of his project for the
gaining of a voluptuous compensation for past restraint; the overthrow
of his treachery to one who had been true and generous to him, but
whose least proud word and look he had treasured up, at interest, for
years - for false and subtle men will always secretly despise and
dislike the object upon which they fawn and always resent the payment
and receipt of homage that they know to be worthless; these were the
themes uppermost in his mind. A lurking rage against the woman who had
so entrapped him and avenged herself was always there; crude and
misshapen schemes of retaliation upon her, floated in his brain; but
nothing was distinct. A hurry and contradiction pervaded all his
thoughts. Even while he was so busy with this fevered, ineffectual
thinking, his one constant idea was, that he would postpone reflection
until some indefinite time.

Then, the old days before the second marriage rose up in his
remembrance. He thought how jealous he had been of the boy, how
jealous he had been of the girl, how artfully he had kept intruders at
a distance, and drawn a circle round his dupe that none but himself
should cross; and then he thought, had he done all this to be flying
now, like a scared thief, from only the poor dupe?

He could have laid hands upon himself for his cowardice, but it was
the very shadow of his defeat, and could not be separated from it. To
have his confidence in his own knavery so shattered at a blow - to be
within his own knowledge such a miserable tool - was like being
paralysed. With an impotent ferocity he raged at Edith, and hated Mr
Dombey and hated himself, but still he fled, and could do nothing
else.

Again and again he listened for the sound of wheels behind. Again
and again his fancy heard it, coming on louder and louder. At last he
was so persuaded of this, that he cried out, 'Stop' preferring even
the loss of ground to such uncertainty.

The word soon brought carriage, horses, driver, all in a heap
together, across the road.

'The devil!' cried the driver, looking over his shoulder, 'what's
the matter?'

'Hark! What's that?'

'What?'

'That noise?'

'Ah Heaven, be quiet, cursed brigand!' to a horse who shook his
bells 'What noise?'

'Behind. Is it not another carriage at a gallop? There! what's
that?' Miscreant with a Pig's head, stand still!' to another horse,
who bit another, who frightened the other two, who plunged and backed.
'There is nothing coming.'

'Nothing.'

'No, nothing but the day yonder.'

'You are right, I think. I hear nothing now, indeed. Go on!'

The entangled equipage, half hidden in the reeking cloud from the
horses, goes on slowly at first, for the driver, checked unnecessarily
in his progress, sulkily takes out a pocket-knife, and puts a new lash
to his whip. Then 'Hallo, whoop! Hallo, hi!' Away once more, savagely.

And now the stars faded, and the day glimmered, and standing in the
carriage, looking back, he could discern the track by which he had
come, and see that there was no traveller within view, on all the
heavy expanse. And soon it was broad day, and the sun began to shine
on cornfields and vineyards; and solitary labourers, risen from little
temporary huts by heaps of stones upon the road, were, here and there,
at work repairing the highway, or eating bread. By and by, there were
peasants going to their daily labour, or to market, or lounging at the
doors of poor cottages, gazing idly at him as he passed. And then
there was a postyard, ankle-deep in mud, with steaming dunghills and
vast outhouses half ruined; and looking on this dainty prospect, an
immense, old, shadeless, glaring, stone chateau, with half its windows
blinded, and green damp crawling lazily over it, from the balustraded
terrace to the taper tips of the extinguishers upon the turrets.

Gathered up moodily in a corner of the carriage, and only intent on
going fast - except when he stood up, for a mile together, and looked
back; which he would do whenever there was a piece of open country -
he went on, still postponing thought indefinitely, and still always
tormented with thinking to no purpose.

Shame, disappointment, and discomfiture gnawed at his heart; a
constant apprehension of being overtaken, or met - for he was
groundlessly afraid even of travellers, who came towards him by the
way he was going - oppressed him heavily. The same intolerable awe and
dread that had come upon him in the night, returned unweakened in the
day. The monotonous ringing of the bells and tramping of the horses;
the monotony of his anxiety, and useless rage; the monotonous wheel of
fear, regret, and passion, he kept turning round and round; made the
journey like a vision, in which nothing was quite real but his own
torment.

It was a vision of long roads, that stretched away to an horizon,
always receding and never gained; of ill-paved towns, up hill and
down, where faces came to dark doors and ill-glazed windows, and where
rows of mudbespattered cows and oxen were tied up for sale in the long
narrow streets, butting and lowing, and receiving blows on their blunt
heads from bludgeons that might have beaten them in; of bridges,
crosses, churches, postyards, new horses being put in against their
wills, and the horses of the last stage reeking, panting, and laying
their drooping heads together dolefully at stable doors; of little
cemeteries with black crosses settled sideways in the graves, and
withered wreaths upon them dropping away; again of long, long roads,
dragging themselves out, up hill and down, to the treacherous horizon.

Of morning, noon, and sunset; night, and the rising of an early
moon. Of long roads temporarily left behind, and a rough pavement
reached; of battering and clattering over it, and looking up, among
house-roofs, at a great church-tower; of getting out and eating
hastily, and drinking draughts of wine that had no cheering influence;
of coming forth afoot, among a host of beggars - blind men with
quivering eyelids, led by old women holding candles to their faces;
idiot girls; the lame, the epileptic, and the palsied - of passing
through the clamour, and looking from his seat at the upturned
countenances and outstretched hands, with a hurried dread of
recognising some pursuer pressing forward - of galloping away again,
upon the long, long road, gathered up, dull and stunned, in his
corner, or rising to see where the moon shone faintly on a patch of
the same endless road miles away, or looking back to see who followed.

Of never sleeping, but sometimes dozing with unclosed eyes, and
springing up with a start, and a reply aloud to an imaginary voice. Of
cursing himself for being there, for having fled, for having let her
go, for not having confronted and defied him. Of having a deadly
quarrel with the whole world, but chiefly with himself. Of blighting
everything with his black mood as he was carried on and away.

It was a fevered vision of things past and present all confounded
together; of his life and journey blended into one. Of being madly
hurried somewhere, whither he must go. Of old scenes starting up among
the novelties through which he travelled. Of musing and brooding over
what was past and distant, and seeming to take no notice of the actual
objects he encountered, but with a wearisome exhausting consciousness
of being bewildered by them, and having their images all crowded in
his hot brain after they were gone.

A vision of change upon change, and still the same monotony of
bells and wheels, and horses' feet, and no rest. Of town and country,
postyards, horses, drivers, hill and valley, light and darkness, road
and pavement, height and hollow, wet weather and dry, and still the
same monotony of bells and wheels, and horses' feet, and no rest. A
vision of tending on at last, towards the distant capital, by busier
roads, and sweeping round, by old cathedrals, and dashing through
small towns and villages, less thinly scattered on the road than
formerly, and sitting shrouded in his corner, with his cloak up to his
face, as people passing by looked at him.

Of rolling on and on, always postponing thought, and always racked
with thinking; of being unable to reckon up the hours he had been upon
the road, or to comprehend the points of time and place in his
journey. Of being parched and giddy, and half mad. Of pressing on, in
spite of all, as if he could not stop, and coming into Paris, where
the turbid river held its swift course undisturbed, between two
brawling streams of life and motion.

A troubled vision, then, of bridges, quays, interminable streets;
of wine-shops, water-carriers, great crowds of people, soldiers,
coaches, military drums, arcades. Of the monotony of bells and wheels
and horses' feet being at length lost in the universal din and uproar.
Of the gradual subsidence of that noise as he passed out in another
carriage by a different barrier from that by which he had entered. Of
the restoration, as he travelled on towards the seacoast, of the
monotony of bells and wheels, and horses' feet, and no rest.

Of sunset once again, and nightfall. Of long roads again, and dead
of night, and feeble lights in windows by the roadside; and still the
old monotony of bells and wheels, and horses' feet, and no rest. Of
dawn, and daybreak, and the rising of the sun. Of tolling slowly up a
hill, and feeling on its top the fresh sea-breeze; and seeing the
morning light upon the edges of the distant waves. Of coming down into
a harbour when the tide was at its full, and seeing fishing-boats
float on, and glad women and children waiting for them. Of nets and
seamen's clothes spread out to dry upon the shore; of busy saIlors,
and their voices high among ships' masts and rigging; of the buoyancy
and brightness of the water, and the universal sparkling.

Of receding from the coast, and looking back upon it from the deck
when it was a haze upon the water, with here and there a little
opening of bright land where the Sun struck. Of the swell, and flash,
and murmur of the calm sea. Of another grey line on the ocean, on the
vessel's track, fast growing clearer and higher. Of cliffs and
buildings, and a windmill, and a church, becoming more and more
visible upon it. Of steaming on at last into smooth water, and mooring
to a pier whence groups of people looked down, greeting friends on
board. Of disembarking, passing among them quickly, shunning every
one; and of being at last again in England.

He had thought, in his dream, of going down into a remote
country-place he knew, and lying quiet there, while he secretly
informed himself of what transpired, and determined how to act, Still
in the same stunned condition, he remembered a certain station on the
railway, where he would have to branch off to his place of
destination, and where there was a quiet Inn. Here, he indistinctly
resolved to tarry and rest.

With this purpose he slunk into a railway carriage as quickly as he
could, and lying there wrapped in his cloak as if he were asleep, was
soon borne far away from the sea, and deep into the inland green.
Arrived at his destination he looked out, and surveyed it carefully.
He was not mistaken in his impression of the place. It was a retired
spot, on the borders of a little wood. Only one house, newly-built or
altered for the purpose, stood there, surrounded by its neat garden;
the small town that was nearest, was some miles away. Here he alighted
then; and going straight into the tavern, unobserved by anyone,
secured two rooms upstairs communicating with each other, and
sufficiently retired.

His object was to rest, and recover the command of himself, and the
balance of his mind. Imbecile discomfiture and rage - so that, as he
walked about his room, he ground his teeth - had complete possession
of him. His thoughts, not to be stopped or directed, still wandered
where they would, and dragged him after them. He was stupefied, and he
was wearied to death.

But, as if there were a curse upon him that he should never rest
again, his drowsy senses would not lose their consciousness. He had no
more influence with them, in this regard, than if they had been
another man's. It was not that they forced him to take note of present
sounds and objects, but that they would not be diverted from the whole
hurried vision of his journey. It was constantly before him all at
once. She stood there, with her dark disdainful eyes again upon him;
and he was riding on nevertheless, through town and country, light and
darkness, wet weather and dry, over road and pavement, hill and
valley, height and hollow, jaded and scared by the monotony of bells
and wheels, and horses' feet, and no rest.

'What day is this?' he asked of the waiter, who was making
preparations for his dinner.

'Day, Sir?'

'Is it Wednesday?'

'Wednesday, Sir? No, Sir. Thursday, Sir.'

'I forgot. How goes the time? My watch is unwound.'

'Wants a few minutes of five o'clock, Sir. Been travelling a long
time, Sir, perhaps?'

'Yes'

'By rail, Sir?'

'Yes'

'Very confusing, Sir. Not much in the habit of travelling by rail
myself, Sir, but gentlemen frequently say so.'

'Do many gentlemen come here?

'Pretty well, Sir, in general. Nobody here at present. Rather slack
just now, Sir. Everything is slack, Sir.'

He made no answer; but had risen into a sitting posture on the sofa
where he had been lying, and leaned forward with an arm on each knee,
staring at the ground. He could not master his own attention for a
minute together. It rushed away where it would, but it never, for an
instant, lost itself in sleep.

He drank a quantity of wine after dinner, in vain. No such
artificial means would bring sleep to his eyes. His thoughts, more
incoherent, dragged him more unmercifully after them - as if a wretch,
condemned to such expiation, were drawn at the heels of wild horses.
No oblivion, and no rest.

How long he sat, drinking and brooding, and being dragged in
imagination hither and thither, no one could have told less correctly
than he. But he knew that he had been sitting a long time by
candle-light, when he started up and listened, in a sudden terror.

For now, indeed, it was no fancy. The ground shook, the house
rattled, the fierce impetuous rush was in the air! He felt it come up,
and go darting by; and even when he had hurried to the window, and saw
what it was, he stood, shrinking from it, as if it were not safe to
look.

A curse upon the fiery devil, thundering along so smoothly, tracked
through the distant valley by a glare of light and lurid smoke, and
gone! He felt as if he had been plucked out of its path, and saved
from being torn asunder. It made him shrink and shudder even now, when
its faintest hum was hushed, and when the lines of iron road he could
trace in the moonlight, running to a point, were as empty and as
silent as a desert.

Unable to rest, and irresistibly attracted - or he thought so - to
this road, he went out, and lounged on the brink of it, marking the
way the train had gone, by the yet smoking cinders that were lying in
its track. After a lounge of some half hour in the direction by which
it had disappeared, he turned and walked the other way - still keeping
to the brink of the road - past the inn garden, and a long way down;
looking curiously at the bridges, signals, lamps, and wondering when
another Devil would come by.

A trembling of the ground, and quick vibration in his ears; a
distant shriek; a dull light advancing, quickly changed to two red
eyes, and a fierce fire, dropping glowing coals; an irresistible
bearing on of a great roaring and dilating mass; a high wind, and a
rattle - another come and gone, and he holding to a gate, as if to
save himself!

He waited for another, and for another. He walked back to his
former point, and back again to that, and still, through the wearisome
vision of his journey, looked for these approaching monsters. He
loitered about the station, waiting until one should stay to call
there; and when one did, and was detached for water, he stood parallel
with it, watching its heavy wheels and brazen front, and thinking what
a cruel power and might it had. Ugh! To see the great wheels slowly
turning, and to think of being run down and crushed!

Disordered with wine and want of rest - that want which nothing,
although he was so weary, would appease - these ideas and objects
assumed a diseased importance in his thoughts. When he went back to
his room, which was not until near midnight, they still haunted him,
and he sat listening for the coming of another.

So in his bed, whither he repaired with no hope of sleep. He still
lay listening; and when he felt the trembling and vibration, got up
and went to the window, to watch (as he could from its position) the
dull light changing to the two red eyes, and the fierce fire dropping
glowing coals, and the rush of the giant as it fled past, and the
track of glare and smoke along the valley. Then he would glance in the
direction by which he intended to depart at sunrise, as there was no
rest for him there; and would lie down again, to be troubled by the
vision of his journey, and the old monotony of bells and wheels and
horses' feet, until another came. This lasted all night. So far from
resuming the mastery of himself, he seemed, if possible, to lose it
more and more, as the night crept on. When the dawn appeared, he was
still tormented with thinking, still postponing thought until he
should be in a better state; the past, present, and future all floated
confusedly before him, and he had lost all power of looking steadily
at any one of them.

'At what time,' he asked the man who had waited on hIm over-night,
now entering with a candle, 'do I leave here, did you say?'

'About a quarter after four, Sir. Express comes through at four,
Sir. - It don't stop.

He passed his hand across his throbbing head, and looked at his
watch. Nearly half-past three.

'Nobody going with you, Sir, probably,' observed the man. 'Two
gentlemen here, Sir, but they're waiting for the train to London.'

'I thought you said there was nobody here,' said Carker, turning
upon him with the ghost of his old smile, when he was angry or
suspicious.

'Not then, sir. Two gentlemen came in the night by the short train
that stops here, Sir. Warm water, Sir?'

'No; and take away the candle. There's day enough for me.'

Having thrown himself upon the bed, half-dressed he was at the
window as the man left the room. The cold light of morning had
succeeded to night and there was already, in the sky, the red
suffusion of the coming sun. He bathed his head and face with water -
there was no cooling influence in it for him - hurriedly put on his
clothes, paid what he owed, and went out.

The air struck chill and comfortless as it breathed upon him. There
was a heavy dew; and, hot as he was, it made him shiver. After a
glance at the place where he had walked last night, and at the
signal-lights burning in the morning, and bereft of their
significance, he turned to where the sun was rising, and beheld it, in
its glory, as it broke upon the scene.

So awful, so transcendent in its beauty, so divinely solemn. As he
cast his faded eyes upon it, where it rose, tranquil and serene,
unmoved by all the wrong and wickedness on which its beams had shone
since the beginning of the world, who shall say that some weak sense
of virtue upon Earth, and its in Heaven, did not manifest itself, even
to him? If ever he remembered sister or brother with a touch of
tenderness and remorse, who shall say it was not then?

He needed some such touch then. Death was on him. He was marked off
- the living world, and going down into his grave.

He paid the money for his journey to the country-place he had
thought of; and was walking to and fro, alone, looking along the lines
of iron, across the valley in one direction, and towards a dark bridge
near at hand in the other; when, turning in his walk, where it was
bounded by one end of the wooden stage on which he paced up and down,
he saw the man from whom he had fled, emerging from the door by which
he himself had entered

And their eyes met.

In the quick unsteadiness of the surprise, he staggered, and
slipped on to the road below him. But recovering his feet immediately,
he stepped back a pace or two upon that road, to interpose some wider
space between them, and looked at his pursuer, breathing short and
quick.

He heard a shout - another - saw the face change from its
vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror - felt the earth
tremble - knew in a moment that the rush was come - uttered a shriek -
looked round - saw the red eyes, bleared and dim, in the daylight,
close upon him - was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a
jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from
limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast
his mutilated fragments in the air.

When the traveller, who had been recognised, recovered from a
swoon, he saw them bringing from a distance something covered, that
lay heavy and still, upon a board, between four men, and saw that
others drove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his
blood up, with a train of ashes.


CHAPTER 56.

Several People delighted, and the Game Chicken disgusted



The Midshipman was all alive. Mr Toots and Susan had arrived at
last. Susan had run upstairs like a young woman bereft of her senses,
and Mr Toots and the Chicken had gone into the Parlour.

'Oh my own pretty darling sweet Miss Floy!' cried the Nipper,
running into Florence's room, 'to think that it should come to this
and I should find you here my own dear dove with nobody to wait upon
you and no home to call your own but never never will I go away again
Miss Floy for though I may not gather moss I'm not a rolling stone nor
is my heart a stone or else it wouldn't bust as it is busting now oh
dear oh dear!'

Pouring out these words, without the faintest indication of a stop,
of any sort, Miss Nipper, on her knees beside her mistress, hugged her
close.

'Oh love!' cried Susan, 'I know all that's past I know it all my
tender pet and I'm a choking give me air!'

'Susan, dear good Susan!' said Florence. 'Oh bless her! I that was
her little maid when she was a little child! and is she really, really
truly going to be married?'exclaimed Susan, in a burst of pain and
pleasure, pride and grief, and Heaven knows how many other conflicting
feelings.

'Who told you so?' said Florence.

'Oh gracious me! that innocentest creetur Toots,' returned Susan
hysterically. 'I knew he must be right my dear, because he took on so.
He's the devotedest and innocentest infant! And is my darling,'
pursued Susan, with another close embrace and burst of tears, 'really
really going to be married!'

The mixture of compassion, pleasure, tenderness, protection, and
regret with which the Nipper constantly recurred to this subject, and
at every such once, raised her head to look in the young face and kiss
it, and then laid her head again upon her mistress's shoulder,
caressing her and sobbing, was as womanly and good a thing, in its
way, as ever was seen in the world.

'There, there!' said the soothing voice of Florence presently. 'Now
you're quite yourself, dear Susan!'

Miss Nipper, sitting down upon the floor, at her mistress's feet,
laughing and sobbing, holding her pocket-handkerchief to her eyes with
one hand, and patting Diogenes with the other as he licked her face,
confessed to being more composed, and laughed and cried a little more
in proof of it.

'I-I-I never did see such a creetur as that Toots,' said Susan, 'in
all my born days never!'

'So kind,' suggested Florence.

'And so comic!' Susan sobbed. 'The way he's been going on inside
with me with that disrespectable Chicken on the box!'

'About what, Susan?' inquired Florence, timidly.

'Oh about Lieutenant Walters, and Captain Gills, and you my dear
Miss Floy, and the silent tomb,' said Susan.

'The silent tomb!' repeated Florence.

'He says,' here Susan burst into a violent hysterical laugh, 'that
he'll go down into it now immediately and quite comfortable, but bless
your heart my dear Miss Floy he won't, he's a great deal too happy in
seeing other people happy for that, he may not be a Solomon,' pursued
the Nipper, with her usual volubility, 'nor do I say he is but this I
do say a less selfish human creature human nature never knew!' Miss
Nipper being still hysterical, laughed immoderately after making this
energetic declaration, and then informed Florence that he was waiting
below to see her; which would be a rich repayment for the trouble he
had had in his late expedition.

Florence entreated Susan to beg of Mr Toots as a favour that she
might have the pleasure of thanking him for his kindness; and Susan,
in a few moments, produced that young gentleman, still very much
dishevelled in appearance, and stammering exceedingly.

'Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots. 'To be again permitted to - to - gaze
- at least, not to gaze, but - I don't exactly know what I was going
to say, but it's of no consequence.

'I have to thank you so often,' returned Florence, giving him both
her hands, with all her innocent gratitude beaming in her face, 'that
I have no words left, and don't know how to do it.'

'Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots, in an awful voice, 'if it was
possible that you could, consistently with your angelic nature, Curse
me, you would - if I may be allowed to say so - floor me infinitely
less, than by these undeserved expressions of kindness Their effect
upon me - is - but,' said Mr Toots, abruptly, 'this is a digression,
and of no consequence at all.'

As there seemed to be no means of replying to this, but by thanking
him again, Florence thanked him again.

'I could wish,' said Mr Toots, 'to take this opportunity, Miss
Dombey, if I might, of entering into a word of explanation. I should
have had the pleasure of - of returning with Susan at an earlier
period; but, in the first place, we didn't know the name of the
relation to whose house she had gone, and, in the second, as she had
left that relation's and gone to another at a distance, I think that
scarcely anything short of the sagacity of the Chicken, would have
found her out in the time.'

Florence was sure of it.

'This, however,' said Mr Toots, 'is not the point. The company of
Susan has been, I assure you, Miss Dombey, a consolation and
satisfaction to me, in my state of mind, more easily conceived than
described. The journey has been its own reward. That, however, still,
is not the point. Miss Dombey, I have before observed that I know I am
not what is considered a quick person. I am perfectly aware of that. I
don't think anybody could be better acquainted with his own - if it
was not too strong an expression, I should say with the thickness of
his own head - than myself. But, Miss Dombey, I do, notwithstanding,
perceive the state of - of things - with Lieutenant Walters. Whatever
agony that state of things may have caused me (which is of no
consequence at all), I am bound to say, that Lieutenant Walters is a
person who appears to be worthy of the blessing that has fallen on his
- on his brow. May he wear it long, and appreciate it, as a very
different, and very unworthy individual, that it is of no consequence
to name, would have done! That, however, still, is not the point. Miss
Dombey, Captain Gills is a friend of mine; and during the interval
that is now elapsing, I believe it would afford Captain Gills pleasure
to see me occasionally coming backwards and forwards here. It would
afford me pleasure so to come. But I cannot forget that I once
committed myself, fatally, at the corner of the Square at Brighton;
and if my presence will be, in the least degree, unpleasant to you, I
only ask you to name it to me now, and assure you that I shall
perfectly understand you. I shall not consider it at all unkind, and
shall only be too delighted and happy to be honoured with your
confidence.'

'Mr Toots,' returned Florence, 'if you, who are so old and true a
friend of mine, were to stay away from this house now, you would make
me very unhappy. It can never, never, give me any feeling but pleasure
to see you.

'Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots, taking out his pocket-handkerchief,
'if I shed a tear, it is a tear of joy. It is of no consequence, and I
am very much obliged to you. I may be allowed to remark, after what
you have so kindly said, that it is not my intention to neglect my
person any longer.'

Florence received this intimation with the prettiest expression of
perplexity possible.

'I mean,' said Mr Toots, 'that I shall consider it my duty as a
fellow-creature generally, until I am claimed by the silent tomb, to
make the best of myself, and to - to have my boots as brightly
polished, as - as -circumstances will admit of. This is the last time,
Miss Dombey, of my intruding any observation of a private and personal
nature. I thank you very much indeed. if I am not, in a general way,
as sensible as my friends could wish me to be, or as I could wish
myself, I really am, upon my word and honour, particularly sensible of
what is considerate and kind. I feel,' said Mr Toots, in an
impassioned tone, 'as if I could express my feelings, at the present
moment, in a most remarkable manner, if - if - I could only get a
start.'

Appearing not to get it, after waiting a minute or two to see if it
would come, Mr Toots took a hasty leave, and went below to seek the
Captain, whom he found in the shop.

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'what is now to take place between
us, takes place under the sacred seal of confidence. It is the sequel,
Captain Gills, of what has taken place between myself and Miss Dombey,
upstairs.'

'Alow and aloft, eh, my lad?' murmured the Captain.

'Exactly so, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, whose fervour of
acquiescence was greatly heightened by his entire ignorance of the
Captain's meaning. 'Miss Dombey, I believe, Captain Gills, is to be
shortly united to Lieutenant Walters?'

'Why, ay, my lad. We're all shipmets here, - Wal'r and sweet- heart
will be jined together in the house of bondage, as soon as the askings
is over,' whispered Captain Cuttle, in his ear.

'The askings, Captain Gills!' repeated Mr Toots.

'In the church, down yonder,' said the Captain, pointing his thumb
over his shoulder.

'Oh! Yes!' returned Mr Toots.

'And then,' said the Captain, in his hoarse whisper, and tapping Mr
Toots on the chest with the back of his hand, and falling from him
with a look of infinite admiration, 'what follers? That there pretty
creetur, as delicately brought up as a foreign bird, goes away upon
the roaring main with Wal'r on a woyage to China!'

'Lord, Captain Gills!' said Mr Toots.

'Ay!' nodded the Captain. 'The ship as took him up, when he was
wrecked in the hurricane that had drove her clean out of her course,
was a China trader, and Wal'r made the woyage, and got into favour,
aboard and ashore - being as smart and good a lad as ever stepped -
and so, the supercargo dying at Canton, he got made (having acted as
clerk afore), and now he's supercargo aboard another ship, same
owners. And so, you see,' repeated the Captain, thoughtfully, 'the
pretty creetur goes away upon the roaring main with Wal'r, on a woyage
to China.'

Mr Toots and Captain Cuttle heaved a sigh in concert. 'What then?'
said the Captain. 'She loves him true. He loves her true. Them as
should have loved and tended of her, treated of her like the beasts as
perish. When she, cast out of home, come here to me, and dropped upon
them planks, her wownded heart was broke. I know it. I, Ed'ard Cuttle,
see it. There's nowt but true, kind, steady love, as can ever piece it
up again. If so be I didn't know that, and didn't know as Wal'r was
her true love, brother, and she his, I'd have these here blue arms and
legs chopped off, afore I'd let her go. But I know it, and what then!
Why, then, I say, Heaven go with 'em both, and so it will! Amen!'

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'let me have the pleasure of
shaking hands You've a way of saying things, that gives me an
agreeable warmth, all up my back. I say Amen. You are aware, Captain
Gills, that I, too, have adored Miss Dombey.'

'Cheer up!' said the Captain, laying his hand on Mr Toots's
shoulder. 'Stand by, boy!'

'It is my intention, Captain Gills,' returned the spirited Mr
Toots, 'to cheer up. Also to standby, as much as possible. When the
silent tomb shall yawn, Captain Gills, I shall be ready for burial;
not before. But not being certain, just at present, of my power over
myself, what I wish to say to you, and what I shall take it as a
particular favour if you will mention to Lieutenant Walters, is as
follows.'

'Is as follers,' echoed the Captain. 'Steady!'

'Miss Dombey being so inexpressably kind,' continued Mr Toots with
watery eyes, 'as to say that my presence is the reverse of
disagreeable to her, and you and everybody here being no less
forbearing and tolerant towards one who - who certainly,' said Mr
Toots, with momentary dejection, 'would appear to have been born by
mistake, I shall come backwards and forwards of an evening, during the
short time we can all be together. But what I ask is this. If, at any
moment, I find that I cannot endure the contemplation of Lieutenant
Walters's bliss, and should rush out, I hope, Captain Gills, that you
and he will both consider it as my misfortune and not my fault, or the
want of inward conflict. That you'll feel convinced I bear no malice
to any living creature-least of all to Lieutenant Walters himself -
and that you'll casually remark that I have gone out for a walk, or
probably to see what o'clock it is by the Royal Exchange. Captain
Gills, if you could enter into this arrangement, and could answer for
Lieutenant Walters, it would be a relief to my feelings that I should
think cheap at the sacrifice of a considerable portion of my
property.'

'My lad,' returned the Captain, 'say no more. There ain't a colour
you can run up, as won't be made out, and answered to, by Wal'r and
self.'

'Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots, 'my mind is greatly relieved. I
wish to preserve the good opinion of all here. I - I - mean well, upon
my honour, however badly I may show it. You know,' said Mr Toots,
'it's as exactly as Burgess and Co. wished to oblige a customer with a
most extraordinary pair of trousers, and could not cut out what they
had in their minds.'

With this apposite illustration, of which he seemed a little Proud,
Mr Toots gave Captain Cuttle his blessing and departed.

The honest Captain, with his Heart's Delight in the house, and
Susan tending her, was a beaming and a happy man. As the days flew by,
he grew more beaming and more happy, every day. After some conferences
with Susan (for whose wisdom the Captain had a profound respect, and
whose valiant precipitation of herself on Mrs MacStinger he could
never forget), he proposed to Florence that the daughter of the
elderly lady who usually sat under the blue umbrella in Leadenhall
Market, should, for prudential reasons and considerations of privacy,
be superseded in the temporary discharge of the household duties, by
someone who was not unknown to them, and in whom they could safely
confide. Susan, being present, then named, in furtherance of a
suggestion she had previously offered to the Captain, Mrs Richards.
Florence brightened at the name. And Susan, setting off that very
afternoon to the Toodle domicile, to sound Mrs Richards, returned in
triumph the same evening, accompanied by the identical rosy-cheeked
apple-faced Polly, whose demonstrations, when brought into Florence's
presence, were hardly less affectionate than those of Susan Nipper
herself.

This piece of generalship accomplished; from which the Captain
derived uncommon satisfaction, as he did, indeed, from everything else
that was done, whatever it happened to be; Florence had next to
prepare Susan for their approaching separation. This was a much more
difficult task, as Miss Nipper was of a resolute disposition, and had
fully made up her mind that she had come back never to be parted from
her old mistress any more.

'As to wages dear Miss Floy,' she said, 'you wouldn't hint and
wrong me so as think of naming them, for I've put money by and
wouldn't sell my love and duty at a time like this even if the
Savings' Banks and me were total strangers or the Banks were broke to
pieces, but you've never been without me darling from the time your
poor dear Ma was took away, and though I'm nothing to be boasted of
you're used to me and oh my own dear mistress through so many years
don't think of going anywhere without me, for it mustn't and can't
be!'

'Dear Susan, I am going on a long, long voyage.'

'Well Miss Floy, and what of that? the more you'll want me. Lengths
of voyages ain't an object in my eyes, thank God!' said the impetuous
Susan Nipper.

'But, Susan, I am going with Walter, and I would go with Walter
anywhere - everywhere! Walter is poor, and I am very poor, and I must
learn, now, both to help myself, and help him.'

'Dear Miss Floy!' cried Susan, bursting out afresh, and shaking her
head violently, 'it's nothing new to you to help yourself and others
too and be the patientest and truest of noble hearts, but let me talk
to Mr Walter Gay and settle it with him, for suffer you to go away
across the world alone I cannot, and I won't.'

'Alone, Susan?' returned Florence. 'Alone? and Walter taking me
with him!' Ah, what a bright, amazed, enraptured smile was on her
face! - He should have seen it. 'I am sure you will not speak to
Walter if I ask you not,' she added tenderly; 'and pray don't, dear.'

Susan sobbed 'Why not, Miss Floy?'

'Because,' said Florence, 'I am going to be his wife, to give him
up my whole heart, and to live with him and die with him. He might
think, if you said to him what you have said to me, that I am afraid
of what is before me, or that you have some cause to be afraid for me.
Why, Susan, dear, I love him!'

Miss Nipper was so much affected by the quiet fervour of these
words, and the simple, heartfelt, all-pervading earnestness expressed
in them, and making the speaker's face more beautiful and pure than
ever, that she could only cling to her again, crying. Was her little
mistress really, really going to be married, and pitying, caressing,
and protecting her, as she had done before. But the Nipper, though
susceptible of womanly weaknesses, was almost as capable of putting
constraint upon herself as of attacking the redoubtable MacStinger.
From that time, she never returned to the subject, but was always
cheerful, active, bustling, and hopeful. She did, indeed, inform Mr
Toots privately, that she was only 'keeping up' for the time, and that
when it was all over, and Miss Dombey was gone, she might be expected
to become a spectacle distressful; and Mr Toots did also express that
it was his case too, and that they would mingle their tears together;
but she never otherwise indulged her private feelings in the presence
of Florence or within the precincts of the Midshipman.

Limited and plain as Florence's wardrobe was - what a contrast to
that prepared for the last marriage in which she had taken part! -
there was a good deal to do in getting it ready, and Susan Nipper
worked away at her side, all day, with the concentrated zeal of fifty
sempstresses. The wonderful contributions Captain Cuttle would have
made to this branch of the outfit, if he had been permitted - as pink
parasols, tinted silk stockings, blue shoes, and other articles no
less necessary on shipboard - would occupy some space in the recital.
He was induced, however, by various fraudulent representations, to
limit his contributions to a work-box and dressing case, of each of
which he purchased the very largest specimen that could be got for
money. For ten days or a fortnight afterwards, he generally sat,
during the greater part of the day, gazing at these boxes; divided
between extreme admiration of them, and dejected misgivings that they
were not gorgeous enough, and frequently diving out into the street to
purchase some wild article that he deemed necessary to their
completeness. But his master-stroke was, the bearing of them both off,
suddenly, one morning, and getting the two words FLORENCE GAY engraved
upon a brass heart inlaid over the lid of each. After this, he smoked
four pipes successively in the little parlour by himself, and was
discovered chuckling, at the expiration of as many hours.

Walter was busy and away all day, but came there every morning
early to see Florence, and always passed the evening with her.
Florence never left her high rooms but to steal downstairs to wait for
him when it was his time to come, or, sheltered by his proud,
encircling arm, to bear him company to the door again, and sometimes
peep into the street. In the twilight they were always together. Oh
blessed time! Oh wandering heart at rest! Oh deep, exhaustless, mighty
well of love, in which so much was sunk!

The cruel mark was on her bosom yet. It rose against her father
with the breath she drew, it lay between her and her lover when he
pressed her to his heart. But she forgot it. In the beating of that
heart for her, and in the beating of her own for him, all harsher
music was unheard, all stern unloving hearts forgotten. Fragile and
delicate she was, but with a might of love within her that could, and
did, create a world to fly to, and to rest in, out of his one image.

How often did the great house, and the old days, come before her in
the twilight time, when she was sheltered by the arm, so proud, so
fond, and, creeping closer to him, shrunk within it at the
recollection! How often, from remembering the night when she went down
to that room and met the never-to-be forgotten look, did she raise her
eyes to those that watched her with such loving earnestness, and weep
with happiness in such a refuge! The more she clung to it, the more
the dear dead child was in her thoughts: but as if the last time she
had seen her father, had been when he was sleeping and she kissed his
face, she always left him so, and never, in her fancy, passed that
hour.

'Walter, dear,' said Florence, one evening, when it was almost
dark.'Do you know what I have been thinking to-day?'

'Thinking how the time is flying on, and how soon we shall be upon
the sea, sweet Florence?'

'I don't mean that, Walter, though I think of that too. I have been
thinking what a charge I am to you.

'A precious, sacred charge, dear heart! Why, I think that
sometimes.'

'You are laughing, Walter. I know that's much more in your thoughts
than mine. But I mean a cost.

'A cost, my own?'

'In money, dear. All these preparations that Susan and I are so
busy with - I have been able to purchase very little for myself. You
were poor before. But how much poorer I shall make you, Walter!'

'And how much richer, Florence!'

Florence laughed, and shook her head.

'Besides,' said Walter, 'long ago - before I went to sea - I had a
little purse presented to me, dearest, which had money in it.'

'Ah!' returned Florence, laughing sorrowfully, 'very little! very
little, Walter! But, you must not think,' and here she laid her light
hand on his shoulder, and looked into his face, 'that I regret to be
this burden on you. No, dear love, I am glad of it. I am happy in it.
I wouldn't have it otherwise for all the world!'

'Nor I, indeed, dear Florence.'

'Ay! but, Walter, you can never feel it as I do. I am so proud of
you! It makes my heart swell with such delight to know that those who
speak of you must say you married a poor disowned girl, who had taken
shelter here; who had no other home, no other friends; who had nothing
- nothing! Oh, Walter, if I could have brought you millions, I never
could have been so happy for your sake, as I am!'

'And you, dear Florence? are you nothing?' he returned.

'No, nothing, Walter. Nothing but your wife.' The light hand stole
about his neck, and the voice came nearer - nearer. 'I am nothing any
more, that is not you. I have no earthly hope any more, that is not
you. I have nothing dear to me any more, that is not you.

Oh! well might Mr Toots leave the little company that evening, and
twice go out to correct his watch by the Royal Exchange, and once to
keep an appointment with a banker which he suddenly remembered, and
once to take a little turn to Aldgate Pump and back!

But before he went upon these expeditions, or indeed before he
came, and before lights were brought, Walter said:

'Florence, love, the lading of our ship is nearly finished, and
probably on the very day of our marriage she will drop down the river.
Shall we go away that morning, and stay in Kent until we go on board
at Gravesend within a week?'

'If you please, Walter. I shall be happy anywhere. But - '

'Yes, my life?'

'You know,' said Florence, 'that we shall have no marriage party,
and that nobody will distinguish us by our dress from other people. As
we leave the same day, will you - will you take me somewhere that
morning, Walter - early - before we go to church?'

Walter seemed to understand her, as so true a lover so truly loved
should, and confirmed his ready promise with a kiss - with more than
one perhaps, or two or threes or five or six; and in the grave,
peaceful evening, Florence was very happy.

Then into the quiet room came Susan Nipper and the candles; shortly
afterwards, the tea, the Captain, and the excursive Mr Toots, who, as
above mentioned, was frequently on the move afterwards, and passed but
a restless evening. This, however, was not his habit: for he generally
got on very well, by dint of playing at cribbage with the Captain
under the advice and guidance of Miss Nipper, and distracting his mind
with the calculations incidental to the game; which he found to be a
very effectual means of utterly confounding himself.

The Captain's visage on these occasions presented one of the finest
examples of combination and succession of expression ever observed.
His instinctive delicacy and his chivalrous feeling towards Florence,
taught him that it was not a time for any boisterous jollity, or
violent display of satisfaction; floating reminiscences of Lovely Peg,
on the other hand, were constantly struggling for a vent, and urging
the Captain to commit himself by some irreparable demonstration. Anon,
his admiration of Florence and Walter - well-matched, truly, and full
of grace and interest in their youth, and love, and good looks, as
they sat apart - would take such complete possession of hIm, that he
would lay down his cards, and beam upon them, dabbing his head all
over with his pockethandkerchief; until warned, perhaps, by the sudden
rushing forth of Mr Toots, that he had unconsciously been very
instrumental, indeed, in making that gentleman miserable. This
reflection would make the Captain profoundly melancholy, until the
return of Mr Toots; when he would fall to his cards again, with many
side winks and nods, and polite waves of his hook at Miss Nipper,
importing that he wasn't going to do so any more. The state that
ensued on this, was, perhaps, his best; for then, endeavouring to
discharge all expression from his face, he would sit staring round the
room, with all these expressions conveyed into it at once, and each
wrestling with the other. Delighted admiration of Florence and Walter
always overthrew the rest, and remained victorious and undisguised,
unless Mr Toots made another rush into the air, and then the Captain
would sit, like a remorseful culprit, until he came back again,
occasionally calling upon himself, in a low reproachful voice, to
'Stand by!' or growling some remonstrance to 'Ed'ard Cuttle, my lad,'
on the want of caution observabl in his behaviour.

One of Mr Toots's hardest trials, however, was of his own seeking.
On the approach of the Sunday which was to witness the last of those
askings in church of which the Captain had spoken, Mr Toots thus
stated his feelings to Susan Nipper.

'Susan,' said Mr Toots, 'I am drawn towards the building. The words
which cut me off from Miss Dombey for ever, will strike upon my ears
like a knell you know, but upon my word and honour, I feel that I must
hear them. Therefore,' said Mr Toots, 'will you accompany me
to-morrow, to the sacred edifice?'

Miss Nipper expressed her readiness to do so, if that would be any
satisfaction to Mr Toots, but besought him to abandon his idea of
going.

'Susan,' returned Mr Toots, with much solemnity, 'before my
whiskers began to be observed by anybody but myself, I adored Miss
Dombey. While yet a victim to the thraldom of Blimber, I adored Miss
Dombey. When I could no longer be kept out of my property, in a legal
point of view, and - and accordingly came into it - I adored Miss
Dombey. The banns which consign her to Lieutenant Walters, and me to -
to Gloom, you know,' said Mr Toots, after hesitating for a strong
expression, 'may be dreadful, will be dreadful; but I feel that I
should wish to hear them spoken. I feel that I should wish to know
that the ground wascertainly cut from under me, and that I hadn't a
hope to cherish, or a - or a leg, in short, to - to go upon.'

Susan Nipper could only commiserate Mr Toots's unfortunate
condition, and agree, under these circumstances, to accompany him;
which she did next morning.

The church Walter had chosen for the purpose, was a mouldy old
church in a yard, hemmed in by a labyrinth of back streets and courts,
with a little burying-ground round it, and itself buried in a kind of
vault, formed by the neighbouring houses, and paved with echoing
stones It was a great dim, shabby pile, with high old oaken pews,
among which about a score of people lost themselves every Sunday;
while the clergyman's voice drowsily resounded through the emptiness,
and the organ rumbled and rolled as if the church had got the colic,
for want of a congregation to keep the wind and damp out. But so far
was this city church from languishing for the company of other
churches, that spires were clustered round it, as the masts of
shipping cluster on the river. It would have been hard to count them
from its steeple-top, they were so many. In almost every yard and
blind-place near, there was a church. The confusion of bells when
Susan and Mr Toots betook themselves towards it on the Sunday morning,
was deafening. There were twenty churches close together, clamouring
for people to come in.

The two stray sheep in question were penned by a beadle in a
commodious pew, and, being early, sat for some time counting the
congregation, listening to the disappointed bell high up in the tower,
or looking at a shabby little old man in the porch behind the screen,
who was ringing the same, like the Bull in Cock Robin,' with his foot
in a stirrup. Mr Toots, after a lengthened survey of the large books
on the reading-desk, whispered Miss Nipper that he wondered where the
banns were kept, but that young lady merely shook her head and
frowned; repelling for the time all approaches of a temporal nature.

Mr Toots, however, appearing unable to keep his thoughts from the
banns, was evidently looking out for them during the whole preliminary
portion of the service. As the time for reading them approached, the
poor young gentleman manifested great anxiety and trepidation, which
was not diminished by the unexpected apparition of the Captain in the
front row of the gallery. When the clerk handed up a list to the
clergyman, Mr Toots, being then seated, held on by the seat of the
pew; but when the names of Walter Gay and Florence Dombey were read
aloud as being in the third and last stage of that association, he was
so entirley conquered by his feelings as to rush from the church
without his hat, followed by the beadle and pew-opener, and two
gentlemen of the medical profeesion, who happened to be present; of
whom the first-named presently returned for that article, informing
Miss Nipper in a whisper that she was not to make herself uneasy about
the gentleman, as the gentleman said his indisposition was of no
consequence.

Miss Nipper, feeling that the eyes of that integral portion of
Europe which lost itself weekly among the high-backed pews, were upon
her, would have been sufficient embarrassed by this incident, though
it had terminated here; the more so, as the Captain in the front row
of the gallery, was in a state of unmitigated consciousness which
could hardly fail to express to the congregation that he had some
mysterious connection with it. But the extreme restlessness of Mr
Toots painfully increased and protracted the delicacy of her
situation. That young gentleman, incapable, in his state of mind, of
remaining alone in the churchyard, a prey to solitary meditation, and
also desirous, no doubt, of testifying his respect for the offices he
had in some measure interrupted, suddenly returned - not coming back
to the pew, but stationing himself on a free seat in the aisle,
between two elderly females who were in the habit of receiving their
portion of a weekly dole of bread then set forth on a shelf in the
porch. In this conjunction Mr Toots remained, greatly disturbing the
congregation, who felt it impossible to avoid looking at him, until
his feelings overcame him again, when he departed silently and
suddenly. Not venturing to trust himself in the church any more, and
yet wishing to have some social participation in what was going on
there, Mr Toots was, after this, seen from time to time, looking in,
with a lorn aspect, at one or other of the windows; and as there were
several windows accessible to him from without, and as his
restlessness was very great, it not only became difficult to conceive
at which window he would appear next, but likewise became necessary,
as it were, for the whole congregation to speculate upon the chances
of the different windows, during the comparative leisure afforded them
by the sermon. Mr Toots's movements in the churchyard were so
eccentric, that he seemed generally to defeat all calculation, and to
appear, like the conjuror's figure, where he was least expected; and
the effect of these mysterious presentations was much increased by its
being difficult to him to see in, and easy to everybody else to see
out: which occasioned his remaining, every time, longer than might
have been expected, with his face close to the glass, until he all at
once became aware that all eyes were upon him, and vanished.

These proceedings on the part of Mr Toots, and the strong
individual consciousness of them that was exhibited by the Captain,
rendered Miss Nipper's position so responsible a one, that she was
mightily relieved by the conclusion of the service; and was hardly so
affable to Mr Toots as usual, when he informed her and the Captain, on
the way back, that now he was sure he had no hope, you know, he felt
more comfortable - at least not exactly more comfortable, but more
comfortably and completely miserable.

Swiftly now, indeed, the time flew by until it was the evening
before the day appointed for the marriage. They were all assembled in
the upper room at the Midshipman's, and had no fear of interruption;
for there were no lodgers in the house now, and the Midshipman had it
all to himself. They were grave and quiet in the prospect of
to-morrow, but moderately cheerful too. Florence, with Walter close
beside her, was finishing a little piece of work intended as a parting
gift to the Captain. The Captain was playing cribbage with Mr Toots.
Mr Toots was taking counsel as to his hand, of Susan Nipper. Miss
Nipper was giving it, with all due secrecy and circumspection.
Diogenes was listening, and occasionally breaking out into a gruff
half-smothered fragment of a bark, of which he afterwards seemed
half-ashamed, as if he doubted having any reason for it.

'Steady, steady!' said the Captain to Diogenes, 'what's amiss with
you? You don't seem easy in your mind to-night, my boy!'

Diogenes wagged his tail, but pricked up his ears immediately
afterwards, and gave utterance to another fragment of a bark; for
which he apologised to the Captain, by again wagging his tail.

'It's my opinion, Di,' said the Captain, looking thoughtfully at
his cards, and stroking his chin with his hook, 'as you have your
doubts of Mrs Richards; but if you're the animal I take you to be,
you'll think better o' that; for her looks is her commission. Now,
Brother:' to Mr Toots: 'if so be as you're ready, heave ahead.'

The Captain spoke with all composure and attention to the game, but
suddenly his cards dropped out of his hand, his mouth and eyes opened
wide, his legs drew themselves up and stuck out in front of his chair,
and he sat staring at the door with blank amazement. Looking round
upon the company, and seeing that none of them observed him or the
cause of his astonishment, the Captain recovered himself with a great
gasp, struck the table a tremendous blow, cried in a stentorian roar,
'Sol Gills ahoy!' and tumbled into the arms of a weather-beaten
pea-coat that had come with Polly into the room.

In another moment, Walter was in the arms of the weather-beaten
pea-coat. In another moment, Florence was in the arms of the
weather-beaten pea-coat. In another moment, Captain Cuttle had
embraced Mrs Richards and Miss Nipper, and was violently shaking hands
with Mr Toots, exclaiming, as he waved his hook above his head,
'Hooroar, my lad, hooroar!' To which Mr Toots, wholly at a loss to
account for these proceedings, replied with great politeness,
'Certainly, Captain Gills, whatever you think proper!'

The weather-beaten pea-coat, and a no less weather-beaten cap and
comforter belonging to it, turned from the Captain and from Florence
back to Walter, and sounds came from the weather-beaten pea-coat, cap,
and comforter, as of an old man sobbing underneath them; while the
shaggy sleeves clasped Walter tight. During this pause, there was an
universal silence, and the Captain polished his nose with great
diligence. But when the pea-coat, cap, and comforter lifted themselves
up again, Florence gently moved towards them; and she and Walter
taking them off, disclosed the old Instrument-maker, a little thinner
and more careworn than of old, in his old Welsh wig and his old
coffee-coloured coat and basket buttons, with his old infallible
chronometer ticking away in his pocket.

'Chock full o' science,' said the radiant Captain, 'as ever he was!
Sol Gills, Sol Gills, what have you been up to, for this many a long
day, my ould boy?'

'I'm half blind, Ned,' said the old man, 'and almost deaf and dumb
with joy.'

'His wery woice,' said the Captain, looking round with an
exultation to which even his face could hardly render justice - 'his
wery woice as chock full o' science as ever it was! Sol Gills, lay to,
my lad, upon your own wines and fig-trees like a taut ould patriark as
you are, and overhaul them there adwentures o' yourn, in your own
formilior woice. 'Tis the woice,' said the Captain, impressively, and
announcing a quotation with his hook, 'of the sluggard, I heerd him
complain, you have woke me too soon, I must slumber again. Scatter his
ene-mies, and make 'em fall!'

The Captain sat down with the air of a man who had happily
expressed the feeling of everybody present, and immediately rose again
to present Mr Toots, who was much disconcerted by the arrival of
anybody, appearing to prefer a claim to the name of Gills.

'Although,' stammered Mr Toots, 'I had not the pleasure of your
acquaintance, Sir, before you were - you were - '

'Lost to sight, to memory dear,' suggested the Captain, in a low
voice.

Exactly so, Captain Gills!' assented Mr Toots. 'Although I had not
the pleasure of your acquaintance, Mr - Mr Sols,' said Toots, hitting
on that name in the inspiration of a bright idea, 'before that
happened, I have the greatest pleasure, I assure you, in - you know,
in knowing you. I hope,' said Mr Toots, 'that you're as well as can be
expected.'

With these courteous words, Mr Toots sat down blushing and
chuckling.

The old Instrument-maker, seated in a corner between Walter and
Florence, and nodding at Polly, who was looking on, all smiles and
delight, answered the Captain thus:

'Ned Cuttle, my dear boy, although I have heard something of the
changes of events here, from my pleasant friend there - what a
pleasant face she has to be sure, to welcome a wanderer home!' said
the old man, breaking off, and rubbing his hands in his old dreamy
way.

'Hear him!' cried the Captain gravely. ''Tis woman as seduces all
mankind. For which,' aside to Mr Toots, 'you'll overhaul your Adam and
Eve, brother.'

'I shall make a point of doing so, Captain Gills,' said Mr Toots.

'Although I have heard something of the changes of events, from
her,' resumed the Instrument-maker, taking his old spectacles from his
pocket, and putting them on his forehead in his old manner, 'they are
so great and unexpected, and I am so overpowered by the sight of my
dear boy, and by the,' - glancing at the downcast eyes of Florence,
and not attempting to finish the sentence - 'that I - I can't say much
to-night. But my dear Ned Cuttle, why didn't you write?'

The astonishment depicted in the Captain's features positively
frightened Mr Toots, whose eyes were quite fixed by it, so that he
could not withdraw them from his face.

'Write!' echoed the Captain. 'Write, Sol Gills?'

'Ay,' said the old man, 'either to Barbados, or Jamaica, or
Demerara, That was what I asked.'

'What you asked, Sol Gills?' repeated the Captain.

'Ay,' said the old man. 'Don't you know, Ned? Sure you have not
forgotten? Every time I wrote to you.'

The Captain took off his glazed hat, hung it on his hook, and
smoothing his hair from behind with his hand, sat gazing at the group
around him: a perfect image of wondering resignation.

'You don't appear to understand me, Ned!' observed old Sol.

'Sol Gills,' returned the Captain, after staring at him and the
rest for a long time, without speaking, 'I'm gone about and adrift.
Pay out a word or two respecting them adwenturs, will you! Can't I
bring up, nohows? Nohows?' said the Captain, ruminating, and staring
all round.

'You know, Ned,' said Sol Gills, 'why I left here. Did you open my
packet, Ned?'

'Why, ay, ay,' said the Captain. 'To be sure, I opened the packet.'

'And read it?' said the old man.

'And read it,' answered the Captain, eyeing him attentively, and
proceeding to quote it from memory. '"My dear Ned Cuttle, when I left
home for the West Indies in forlorn search of intelligence of my
dear-" There he sits! There's Wal'r!' said the Captain, as if he were
relieved by getting hold of anything that was real and indisputable.

'Well, Ned. Now attend a moment!' said the old man. 'When I wrote
first - that was from Barbados - I said that though you would receive
that letter long before the year was out, I should be glad if you
would open the packet, as it explained the reason of my going away.
Very good, Ned. When I wrote the second, third, and perhaps the fourth
times - that was from Jamaica - I said I was in just the same state,
couldn't rest, and couldn't come away from that part of the world,
without knowing that my boy was lost or saved. When I wrote next -
that, I think, was from Demerara, wasn't it?'

'That he thinks was from Demerara, warn't it!' said the Captain,
looking hopelessly round.

'I said,' proceeded old Sol, 'that still there was no certain
information got yet. That I found many captains and others, in that
part of the world, who had known me for years, and who assisted me
with a passage here and there, and for whom I was able, now and then,
to do a little in return, in my own craft. That everyone was sorry for
me, and seemed to take a sort of interest in my wanderings; and that I
began to think it would be my fate to cruise about in search of
tidings of my boy, until I died.'

'Began to think as how he was a scientific Flying Dutchman!' said
the Captain, as before, and with great seriousness.

'But when the news come one day, Ned, - that was to Barbados, after
I got back there, - that a China trader home'ard bound had been spoke,
that had my boy aboard, then, Ned, I took passage in the next ship and
came home; arrived at home to-night to find it true, thank God!' said
the old man, devoutly.

The Captain, after bowing his head with great reverence, stared all
round the circle, beginning with Mr Toots, and ending with the
Instrument-maker; then gravely said:

'Sol Gills! The observation as I'm a-going to make is calc'lated to
blow every stitch of sail as you can carry, clean out of the
bolt-ropes, and bring you on your beam ends with a lurch. Not one of
them letters was ever delivered to Ed'ard Cuttle. Not one o' them
letters,' repeated the Captain, to make his declaration the more
solemn and impressive, 'was ever delivered unto Ed'ard Cuttle,
Mariner, of England, as lives at home at ease, and doth improve each
shining hour!'

'And posted by my own hand! And directed by my own hand, Number
nine Brig Place!' exclaimed old Sol.

The colour all went out of the Captain's face and all came back
again in a glow.

'What do you mean, Sol Gills, my friend, by Number nine Brig
Place?' inquired the Captain.

'Mean? Your lodgings, Ned,' returned the old man. 'Mrs
What's-her-name! I shall forget my own name next, but I am behind the
present time - I always was, you recollect - and very much confused.
Mrs - '

'Sol Gills!' said the Captain, as if he were putting the most
improbable case in the world, 'it ain't the name of MacStinger as
you're a trying to remember?'

'Of course it is!' exclaimed the Instrument-maker. 'To be sure Ned.
Mrs MacStinger!'

Captain Cuttle, whose eyes were now as wide open as they would be,
and the knobs upon whose face were perfectly luminous, gave a long
shrill whistle of a most melancholy sound, and stood gazing at
everybody in a state of speechlessness.

'Overhaul that there again, Sol Gills, will you be so kind?' he
said at last.

'All these letters,' returned Uncle Sol, beating time with the
forefinger of his right hand upon the palm of his left, with a
steadiness and distinctness that might have done honour, even to the
infallible chronometer in his pocket, 'I posted with my own hand, and
directed with my own hand, to Captain Cuttle, at Mrs MacStinger's,
Number nine Brig Place.'

The Captain took his glazed hat off his hook, looked into it, put
it on, and sat down.

'Why, friends all,' said the Captain, staring round in the last
state of discomfiture, 'I cut and run from there!'

'And no one knew where you were gone, Captain Cuttle?' cried Walter
hastily.

'Bless your heart, Wal'r,' said the Captain, shaking his head,
'she'd never have allowed o' my coming to take charge o' this here
property. Nothing could be done but cut and run. Lord love you,
Wal'r!' said the Captain, 'you've only seen her in a calm! But see her
when her angry passions rise - and make a note on!'

'I'd give it her!' remarked the Nipper, softly.

'Would you, do you think, my dear?' returned the Captain, with
feeble admiration. 'Well, my dear, it does you credit. But there ain't
no wild animal I wouldn't sooner face myself. I only got my chest away
by means of a friend as nobody's a match for. It was no good sending
any letter there. She wouldn't take in any letter, bless you,' said
the Captain, 'under them circumstances! Why, you could hardly make it
worth a man's while to be the postman!'

'Then it's pretty clear, Captain Cuttle, that all of us, and you
and Uncle Sol especially,' said Walter, 'may thank Mrs MacStinger for
no small anxiety.'

The general obligation in this wise to the determined relict of the
late Mr MacStinger, was so apparent, that the Captain did not contest
the point; but being in some measure ashamed of his position, though
nobody dwelt upon the subject, and Walter especially avoided it,
remembering the last conversation he and the Captain had held together
respecting it, he remained under a cloud for nearly five minutes - an
extraordinary period for him when that sun, his face, broke out once
more, shining on all beholders with extraordinary brilliancy; and he
fell into a fit of shaking hands with everybody over and over again.

At an early hour, but not before Uncle Sol and Walter had
questioned each other at some length about their voyages and dangers,
they all, except Walter, vacated Florence's room, and went down to the
parlour. Here they were soon afterwards joined by Walter, who told
them Florence was a little sorrowful and heavy-hearted, and had gone
to bed. Though they could not have disturbed her with their voices
down there, they all spoke in a whisper after this: and each, in his
different way, felt very lovingly and gently towards Walter's fair
young bride: and a long explanation there was of everything relating
to her, for the satisfaction of Uncle Sol; and very sensible Mr Toots
was of the delicacy with which Walter made his name and services
important, and his presence necessary to their little council.

'Mr Toots,' said Walter, on parting with him at the house door, 'we
shall see each other to-morrow morning?'

'Lieutenant Walters,' returned Mr Toots, grasping his hand
fervently, 'I shall certainly be present.

'This is the last night we shall meet for a long time - the last
night we may ever meet,' said Walter. 'Such a noble heart as yours,
must feel, I think, when another heart is bound to it. I hope you know
that I am very grateful to you?'

'Walters,' replied Mr Toots, quite touched, 'I should be glad to
feel that you had reason to be so.'

'Florence,' said Walter, 'on this last night of her bearing her own
name, has made me promise - it was only just now, when you left us
together - that I would tell you - with her dear love - '

Mr Toots laid his hand upon the doorpost, and his eyes upon his
hand.

- with her dear love,' said Walter, 'that she can never have a
friend whom she will value above you. That the recollection of your
true consideration for her always, can never be forgotten by her. That
she remembers you in her prayers to-night, and hopes that you will
think of her when she is far away. Shall I say anything for you?'

'Say, Walter,' replied Mr Toots indistinctly, 'that I shall think
of her every day, but never without feeling happy to know that she is
married to the man she loves, and who loves her. Say, if you please,
that I am sure her husband deserves her - even her!- and that I am
glad of her choice.'

Mr Toots got more distinct as he came to these last words, and
raising his eyes from the doorpost, said them stoutly. He then shook
Walter's hand again with a fervour that Walter was not slow to return
and started homeward.

Mr Toots was accompanied by the Chicken, whom he had of late
brought with him every evening, and left in the shop, with an idea
that unforeseen circumstances might arise from without, in which the
prowess of that distinguished character would be of service to the
Midshipman. The Chicken did not appear to be in a particularly good
humour on this occasion. Either the gas-lamps were treacherous, or he
cocked his eye in a hideous manner, and likewise distorted his nose,
when Mr Toots, crossing the road, looked back over his shoulder at the
room where Florence slept. On the road home, he was more demonstrative
of aggressive intentions against the other foot-passengers, than
comported with a professor of the peaceful art of self-defence.
Arrived at home, instead of leaving Mr Toots in his apartments when he
had escorted him thither, he remained before him weighing his white
hat in both hands by the brim, and twitching his head and nose (both
of which had been many times broken, and but indifferently repaired),
with an air of decided disrespect.

His patron being much engaged with his own thoughts, did not
observe this for some time, nor indeed until the Chicken, determined
not to be overlooked, had made divers clicking sounds with his tongue
and teeth, to attract attention.

'Now, Master,' said the Chicken, doggedly, when he, at length,
caught Mr Toots's eye, 'I want to know whether this here gammon is to
finish it, or whether you're a going in to win?'

'Chicken,' returned Mr Toots, 'explain yourself.'

'Why then, here's all about it, Master,' said the Chicken. 'I ain't
a cove to chuck a word away. Here's wot it is. Are any on 'em to be
doubled up?'

When the Chicken put this question he dropped his hat, made a dodge
and a feint with his left hand, hit a supposed enemy a violent blow
with his right, shook his head smartly, and recovered himself'

'Come, Master,' said the Chicken. 'Is it to be gammon or pluck?
Which?'

Chicken,' returned Mr Toots, 'your expressions are coarse, and your
meaning is obscure.'

'Why, then, I tell you what, Master,' said the Chicken. 'This is
where it is. It's mean.'

'What is mean, Chicken?' asked Mr Toots.

'It is,' said the Chicken, with a frightful corrugation of his
broken nose. 'There! Now, Master! Wot! When you could go and blow on
this here match to the stiff'un;' by which depreciatory appellation it
has been since supposed that the Game One intended to signify Mr
Dombey; 'and when you could knock the winner and all the kit of 'em
dead out o' wind and time, are you going to give in? To give in? 'said
the Chicken, with contemptuous emphasis. 'Wy, it's mean!'

'Chicken,' said Mr Toots, severely, 'you're a perfect Vulture! Your
sentiments are atrocious.'

'My sentiments is Game and Fancy, Master,' returned the Chicken.
'That's wot my sentiments is. I can't abear a meanness. I'm afore the
public, I'm to be heerd on at the bar of the Little Helephant, and no
Gov'ner o' mine mustn't go and do what's mean. Wy, it's mean,' said
the Chicken, with increased expression. 'That's where it is. It's
mean.'

'Chicken,' said Mr Toots, 'you disgust me.'

'Master,' returned the Chicken, putting on his hat, 'there's a pair
on us, then. Come! Here's a offer! You've spoke to me more than once't
or twice't about the public line. Never mind! Give me a fi'typunnote
to-morrow, and let me go.'

'Chicken,' returned Mr Toots, 'after the odious sentiments you have
expressed, I shall be glad to part on such terms.'

'Done then,' said the Chicken. 'It's a bargain. This here conduct
of yourn won't suit my book, Master. Wy, it's mean,' said the Chicken;
who seemed equally unable to get beyond that point, and to stop short
of it. 'That's where it is; it's mean!'

So Mr Toots and the Chicken agreed to part on this incompatibility
of moral perception; and Mr Toots lying down to sleep, dreamed happily
of Florence, who had thought of him as her friend upon the last night
of her maiden life, and who had sent him her dear love.


CHAPTER 57.

Another Wedding



Mr Sownds the beadle, and Mrs Miff the pew-opener, are early at
their posts in the fine church where Mr Dombey was married. A
yellow-faced old gentleman from India, is going to take unto himself a
young wife this morning, and six carriages full of company are
expected, and Mrs Miff has been informed that the yellow-faced old
gentleman could pave the road to church with diamonds and hardly miss
them. The nuptial benediction is to be a superior one, proceeding from
a very reverend, a dean, and the lady is to be given away, as an
extraordinary present, by somebody who comes express from the Horse
Guards

Mrs Miff is more intolerant of common people this morning, than she
generally is; and she his always strong opinions on that subject, for
it is associated with free sittings. Mrs Miff is not a student of
political economy (she thinks the science is connected with
dissenters; 'Baptists or Wesleyans, or some o' them,' she says), but
she can never understand what business your common folks have to be
married. 'Drat 'em,' says Mrs Miff 'you read the same things over 'em'
and instead of sovereigns get sixpences!'

Mr Sownds the beadle is more liberal than Mrs Miff - but then he is
not a pew-opener. 'It must be done, Ma'am,' he says. 'We must marry
'em. We must have our national schools to walk at the head of, and we
must have our standing armies. We must marry 'em, Ma'am,' says Mr
Sownds, 'and keep the country going.'

Mr Sownds is sitting on the steps and Mrs Miff is dusting in the
church, when a young couple, plainly dressed, come in. The mortified
bonnet of Mrs Miff is sharply turned towards them, for she espies in
this early visit indications of a runaway match. But they don't want
to be married - 'Only,' says the gentleman, 'to walk round the
church.' And as he slips a genteel compliment into the palm of Mrs
Miff, her vinegary face relaxes, and her mortified bonnet and her
spare dry figure dip and crackle.

Mrs Miff resumes her dusting and plumps up her cushions - for the
yellow-faced old gentleman is reported to have tender knees - but
keeps her glazed, pew-opening eye on the young couple who are walking
round the church. 'Ahem,' coughs Mrs Miff whose cough is drier than
the hay in any hassock in her charge, 'you'll come to us one of these
mornings, my dears, unless I'm much mistaken!'

They are looking at a tablet on the wall, erected to the memory of
someone dead. They are a long way off from Mrs Miff, but Mrs Miff can
see with half an eye how she is leaning on his arm, and how his head
is bent down over her. 'Well, well,' says Mrs Miff, 'you might do
worse. For you're a tidy pair!'

There is nothing personal in Mrs Miff's remark. She merely speaks
of stock-in-trade. She is hardly more curious in couples than in
coffins. She is such a spare, straight, dry old lady - such a pew of a
woman - that you should find as many individual sympathies in a chip.
Mr Sownds, now, who is fleshy, and has scarlet in his coat, is of a
different temperament. He says, as they stand upon the steps watching
the young couple away, that she has a pretty figure, hasn't she, and
as well as he could see (for she held her head down coming out), an
uncommon pretty face. 'Altogether, Mrs Miff,' says Mr Sownds with a
relish, 'she is what you may call a rose-bud.'

Mrs Miff assents with a spare nod of her mortified bonnet; but
approves of this so little, that she inwardly resolves she wouldn't be
the wife of Mr Sownds for any money he could give her, Beadle as he
is.

And what are the young couple saying as they leave the church, and
go out at the gate?

'Dear Walter, thank you! I can go away, now, happy.'

'And when we come back, Florence, we will come and see his grave
again.'

Florence lifts her eyes, so bright with tears, to his kind face;
and clasps her disengaged hand on that other modest little hand which
clasps his arm.

'It is very early, Walter, and the streets are almost empty yet.
Let us walk.'

'But you will be so tired, my love.'

'Oh no! I was very tired the first time that we ever walked
together, but I shall not be so to-day.' And thus - not much changed -
she, as innocent and earnest-hearted - he, as frank, as hopeful, and
more proud of her - Florence and Walter, on their bridal morning, walk
through the streets together.

Not even in that childish walk of long ago, were they so far
removed from all the world about them as to-day. The childish feet of
long ago, did not tread such enchanted ground as theirs do now. The
confidence and love of children may be given many times, and will
spring up in many places; but the woman's heart of Florence, with its
undivided treasure, can be yielded only once, and under slight or
change, can only droop and die.

They take the streets that are the quietest, and do not go near
that in which her old home stands. It is a fair, warm summer morning,
and the sun shines on them, as they walk towards the darkening mist
that overspreads the City. Riches are uncovering in shops; jewels,
gold, and silver flash in the goldsmith's sunny windows; and great
houses cast a stately shade upon them as they pass. But through the
light, and through the shade, they go on lovingly together, lost to
everything around; thinking of no other riches, and no prouder home,
than they have now in one another.

Gradually they come into the darker, narrower streets, where the
sun, now yellow, and now red, is seen through the mist, only at street
corners, and in small open spaces where there is a tree, or one of the
innumerable churches, or a paved way and a flight of steps, or a
curious little patch of garden, or a burying-ground, where the few
tombs and tombstones are almost black. Lovingly and trustfully,
through all the narrow yards and alleys and the shady streets,
Florence goes, clinging to his arm, to be his wife.

Her heart beats quicker now, for Walter tells her that their church
is very near. They pass a few great stacks of warehouses, with waggons
at the doors, and busy carmen stopping up the way - but Florence does
not see or hear them - and then the air is quiet, and the day is
darkened, and she is trembling in a church which has a strange smell
like a cellar.

The shabby little old man, ringer of the disappointed bell, is
standing in the porch, and has put his hat in the font - for he is
quite at home there, being sexton. He ushers them into an old brown,
panelled, dusty vestry, like a corner-cupboard with the shelves taken
out; where the wormy registers diffuse a smell like faded snuff, which
has set the tearful Nipper sneezing.

Youthful, and how beautiful, the young bride looks, in this old
dusty place, with no kindred object near her but her husband. There is
a dusty old clerk, who keeps a sort of evaporated news shop underneath
an archway opposite, behind a perfect fortification of posts. There is
a dusty old pew-opener who only keeps herself, and finds that quite
enough to do. There is a dusty old beadle (these are Mr Toots's beadle
and pew-opener of last Sunday), who has something to do with a
Worshipful Company who have got a Hall in the next yard, with a
stained-glass window in it that no mortal ever saw. There are dusty
wooden ledges and cornices poked in and out over the altar, and over
the screen and round the gallery, and over the inscription about what
the Master and Wardens of the Worshipful Company did in one thousand
six hundred and ninety-four. There are dusty old sounding-boards over
the pulpit and reading-desk, looking like lids to be let down on the
officiating ministers in case of their giving offence. There is every
possible provision for the accommodation of dust, except in the
churchyard, where the facilities in that respect are very limited. The
Captain, Uncle Sol, and Mr Toots are come; the clergyman is putting on
his surplice in the vestry, while the clerk walks round him, blowing
the dust off it; and the bride and bridegroom stand before the altar.
There is no bridesmaid, unless Susan Nipper is one; and no better
father than Captain Cuttle. A man with a wooden leg, chewing a faint
apple and carrying a blue bag in has hand, looks in to see what is
going on; but finding it nothing entertaining, stumps off again, and
pegs his way among the echoes out of doors.

No gracious ray of light is seen to fall on Florence, kneeling at
the altar with her timid head bowed down. The morning luminary is
built out, and don't shine there. There is a meagre tree outside,
where the sparrows are chirping a little; and there is a blackbird in
an eyelet-hole of sun in a dyer's garret, over against the window, who
whistles loudly whilst the service is performing; and there is the man
with the wooden leg stumping away. The amens of the dusty clerk
appear, like Macbeth's, to stick in his throat a little'; but Captain
Cuttle helps him out, and does it with so much goodwill that he
interpolates three entirely new responses of that word, never
introduced into the service before.

They are married, and have signed their names in one of the old
sneezy registers, and the clergyman's surplice is restored to the
dust, and the clergymam is gone home. In a dark corner of the dark
church, Florence has turned to Susan Nipper, and is weeping in her
arms. Mr Toots's eyes are red. The Captain lubricates his nose. Uncle
Sol has pulled down his spectacles from his forehead, and walked out
to the door.

'God bless you, Susan; dearest Susan! If you ever can bear witness
to the love I have for Walter, and the reason that I have to love him,
do it for his sake. Good-bye! Good-bye!'

They have thought it better not to go back to the Midshipman, but
to part so; a coach is waiting for them, near at hand.

Miss Nipper cannot speak; she only sobs and chokes, and hugs her
mistress. Mr Toots advances, urges her to cheer up, and takes charge
of her. Florence gives him her hand - gives him, in the fulness of her
heart, her lips - kisses Uncle Sol, and Captain Cuttle, and is borne
away by her young husband.

But Susan cannot bear that Florence should go away with a mournful
recollection of her. She had meant to be so different, that she
reproaches herself bitterly. Intent on making one last effort to
redeem her character, she breaks from Mr Toots and runs away to find
the coach, and show a parting smile. The Captain, divining her object,
sets off after her; for he feels it his duty also to dismiss them with
a cheer, if possible. Uncle Sol and Mr Toots are left behind together,
outside the church, to wait for them.

The coach is gone, but the street is steep, and narrow, and blocked
up, and Susan can see it at a stand-still in the distance, she is
sure. Captain Cuttle follows her as she flies down the hill, and waves
his glazed hat as a general signal, which may attract the right coach
and which may not.

Susan outstrips the Captain, and comes up with it. She looks in at
the window, sees Walter, with the gentle face beside him, and claps
her hands and screams:

'Miss Floy, my darling! look at me! We are all so happy now, dear!
One more good-bye, my precious, one more!'

How Susan does it, she don't know, but she reaches to the window,
kisses her, and has her arms about her neck, in a moment.

We are all so happy now, my dear Miss Floy!' says Susan, with a
suspicious catching in her breath. 'You, you won't be angry with me
now. Now will you?'

'Angry, Susan!'

'No, no; I am sure you won't. I say you won't, my pet, my dearest!'
exclaims Susan; 'and here's the Captain too - your friend the Captain,
you know - to say good-bye once more!'

'Hooroar, my Heart's Delight!' vociferates the Captain, with a
countenance of strong emotion. 'Hooroar, Wal'r my lad. Hooroar!
Hooroar!'

What with the young husband at one window, and the young wife at
the other; the Captain hanging on at this door, and Susan Nipper
holding fast by that; the coach obliged to go on whether it will or
no, and all the other carts and coaches turbulent because it
hesitates; there never was so much confusion on four wheels. But Susan
Nipper gallantly maintains her point. She keeps a smiling face upon
her mistress, smiling through her tears, until the last. Even when she
is left behind, the Captain continues to appear and disappear at the
door, crying 'Hooroar, my lad! Hooroar, my Heart's Delight!' with his
shirt-collar in a violent state of agitation, until it is hopeless to
attempt to keep up with the coach any longer. Finally, when the coach
is gone, Susan Nipper, being rejoined by the Captain, falls into a
state of insensibility, and is taken into a baker's shop to recover.

Uncle Sol and Mr Toots wait patiently in the churchyard, sitting on
the coping-stone of the railings, until Captain Cuttle and Susan come
back, Neither being at all desirous to speak, or to be spoken to, they
are excellent company, and quite satisfied. When they all arrive again
at the little Midshipman, and sit down to breakfast, nobody can touch
a morsel. Captain Cuttle makes a feint of being voracious about toast,
but gives it up as a swindle. Mr Toots says, after breakfast, he will
come back in the evening; and goes wandering about the town all day,
with a vague sensation upon him as if he hadn't been to bed for a
fortnight.

There is a strange charm in the house, and in the room, in which
they have been used to be together, and out of which so much is gone.
It aggravates, and yet it soothes, the sorrow of the separation. Mr
Toots tells Susan Nipper when he comes at night, that he hasn't been
so wretched all day long, and yet he likes it. He confides in Susan
Nipper, being alone with her, and tells her what his feelings were
when she gave him that candid opinion as to the probability of Miss
Dombey's ever loving him. In the vein of confidence engendered by
these common recollections, and their tears, Mr Toots proposes that
they shall go out together, and buy something for supper. Miss Nipper
assenting, they buy a good many little things; and, with the aid of
Mrs Richards, set the supper out quite showily before the Captain and
old Sol came home.

The Captain and old Sol have been on board the ship, and have
established Di there, and have seen the chests put aboard. They have
much to tell about the popularity of Walter, and the comforts he will
have about him, and the quiet way in which it seems he has been
working early and late, to make his cabin what the Captain calls 'a
picter,' to surprise his little wife. 'A admiral's cabin, mind you,'
says the Captain, 'ain't more trim.'

But one of the Captain's chief delights is, that he knows the big
watch, and the sugar-tongs, and tea-spoons, are on board: and again
and again he murmurs to himself, 'Ed'ard Cuttle, my lad, you never
shaped a better course in your life than when you made that there
little property over jintly. You see how the land bore, Ed'ard,' says
the Captain, 'and it does you credit, my lad.'

The old Instrument-maker is more distraught and misty than he used
to be, and takes the marriage and the parting very much to heart. But
he is greatly comforted by having his old ally, Ned Cuttle, at his
side; and he sits down to supper with a grateful and contented face.

'My boy has been preserved and thrives,' says old Sol Gills,
rubbing his hands. 'What right have I to be otherwise than thankful
and happy!'

The Captain, who has not yet taken his seat at the table, but who
has been fidgeting about for some time, and now stands hesitating in
his place, looks doubtfully at Mr Gills, and says:

'Sol! There's the last bottle of the old Madeira down below. Would
you wish to have it up to-night, my boy, and drink to Wal'r and his
wife?'

The Instrument-maker, looking wistfully at the Captain, puts his
hand into the breast-pocket of his coffee-coloured coat, brings forth
his pocket-book, and takes a letter out.

'To Mr Dombey,' says the old man. 'From Walter. To be sent in three
weeks' time. I'll read it.'

'"Sir. I am married to your daughter. She is gone with me upon a
distant voyage. To be devoted to her is to have no claim on her or
you, but God knows that I am.

'"Why, loving her beyond all earthly things, I have yet, without
remorse, united her to the uncertainties and dangers of my life, I
will not say to you. You know why, and you are her father.

'"Do not reproach her. She has never reproached you.

'"I do not think or hope that you will ever forgive me. There is
nothing I expect less. But if an hour should come when it will comfort
you to believe that Florence has someone ever near her, the great
charge of whose life is to cancel her remembrance of past sorrow, I
solemnly assure you, you may, in that hour, rest in that belief."'

Solomon puts back the letter carefully in his pocket-book, and puts
back his pocket-book in his coat.

'We won't drink the last bottle of the old Madeira yet, Ned,' says
the old man thoughtfully. 'Not yet.

'Not yet,' assents the Captain. 'No. Not yet.'

Susan and Mr Toots are of the same opinion. After a silence they
all sit down to supper, and drink to the young husband and wife in
something else; and the last bottle of the old Madeira still remains
among its dust and cobwebs, undisturbed.


A few days have elapsed, and a stately ship is out at sea,
spreading its white wings to the favouring wind.

Upon the deck, image to the roughest man on board of something that
is graceful, beautiful, and harmless - something that it is good and
pleasant to have there, and that should make the voyage prosperous -
is Florence. It is night, and she and Walter sit alone, watching the
solemn path of light upon the sea between them and the moon.

At length she cannot see it plainly, for the tears that fill her
eyes; and then she lays her head down on his breast, and puts her arms
around his neck, saying, 'Oh Walter, dearest love, I am so happy!'

Her husband holds her to his heart, and they are very quiet, and
the stately ship goes on serenely.

'As I hear the sea,' says Florence, 'and sit watching it, it brings
so many days into my mind. It makes me think so much - '

'Of Paul, my love. I know it does.'

Of Paul and Walter. And the voices in the waves are always
whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love - of
love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this
world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea,
beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!


CHAPTER 58.

After a Lapse



The sea had ebbed and flowed, through a whole year. Through a whole
year, the winds and clouds had come and gone; the ceaseless work of
Time had been performed, in storm and sunshine. Through a whole year,
the tides of human chance and change had set in their allotted
courses. Through a whole year, the famous House of Dombey and Son had
fought a fight for life, against cross accidents, doubtful rumours,
unsuccessful ventures, unpropitious times, and most of all, against
the infatuation of its head, who would not contract its enterprises by
a hair's breadth, and would not listen to a word of warning that the
ship he strained so hard against the storm, was weak, and could not
bear it. The year was out, and the great House was down.

One summer afternoon; a year, wanting some odd days, after the
marriage in the City church; there was a buzz and whisper upon 'Change
of a great failure. A certain cold proud man, well known there, was
not there, nor was he represented there. Next day it was noised abroad
that Dombey and Son had stopped, and next night there was a List of
Bankrupts published, headed by that name.

The world was very busy now, in sooth, and had a deal to say. It
was an innocently credulous and a much ill-used world. It was a world
in which there was 'no other sort of bankruptcy whatever. There were
no conspicuous people in it, trading far and wide on rotten banks of
religion, patriotism, virtue, honour. There was no amount worth
mentioning of mere paper in circulation, on which anybody lived pretty
handsomely, promising to pay great sums of goodness with no effects.
There were no shortcomings anywhere, in anything but money. The world
was very angry indeed; and the people especially, who, in a worse
world, might have been supposed to be apt traders themselves in shows
and pretences, were observed to be mightily indignant.

Here was a new inducement to dissipation, presented to that sport
of circumstances, Mr Perch the Messenger! It was apparently the fate
of Mr Perch to be always waking up, and finding himself famous. He had
but yesterday, as one might say, subsided into private life from the
celebrity of the elopement and the events that followed it; and now he
was made a more important man than ever, by the bankruptcy. Gliding
from his bracket in the outer office where he now sat, watching the
strange faces of accountants and others, who quickly superseded nearly
all the old clerks, Mr Perch had but to show himself in the court
outside, or, at farthest, in the bar of the King's Arms, to be asked a
multitude of questions, almost certain to include that interesting
question, what would he take to drink? Then would Mr Perch descant
upon the hours of acute uneasiness he and Mrs Perch had suffered out
at Balls Pond, when they first suspected 'things was going wrong.'
Then would Mr Perch relate to gaping listeners, in a low voice, as if
the corpse of the deceased House were lying unburied in the next room,
how Mrs Perch had first come to surmise that things was going wrong by
hearing him (Perch) moaning in his sleep, 'twelve and ninepence in the
pound, twelve and ninepence in the pound!' Which act of somnambulism
he supposed to have originated in the impression made upon him by the
change in Mr Dombey's face. Then would he inform them how he had once
said, 'Might I make so bold as ask, Sir, are you unhappy in your
mind?' and how Mr Dombey had replied, 'My faithful Perch - but no, it
cannot be!' and with that had struck his hand upon his forehead, and
said, 'Leave me, Perch!' Then, in short, would Mr Perch, a victim to
his position, tell all manner of lies; affecting himself to tears by
those that were of a moving nature, and really believing that the
inventions of yesterday had, on repetition, a sort of truth about them
to-day.

Mr Perch always closed these conferences by meekly remarking, That,
of course, whatever his suspicions might have been (as if he had ever
had any!) it wasn't for him to betray his trust, was it? Which
sentiment (there never being any creditors present) was received as
doing great honour to his feelings. Thus, he generally brought away a
soothed conscience and left an agreeable impression behind him, when
he returned to his bracket: again to sit watching the strange faces of
the accountants and others, making so free with the great mysteries,
the Books; or now and then to go on tiptoe into Mr Dombey's empty
room, and stir the fire; or to take an airing at the door, and have a
little more doleful chat with any straggler whom he knew; or to
propitiate, with various small attentions, the head accountant: from
whom Mr Perch had expectations of a messengership in a Fire Office,
when the affairs of the House should be wound up.

To Major Bagstock, the bankruptcy was quite a calamity. The Major
was not a sympathetic character - his attention being wholly
concentrated on J. B. - nor was he a man subject to lively emotions,
except in the physical regards of gasping and choking. But he had so
paraded his friend Dombey at the club; had so flourished him at the
heads of the members in general, and so put them down by continual
assertion of his riches; that the club, being but human, was delighted
to retort upon the Major, by asking him, with a show of great concern,
whether this tremendous smash had been at all expected, and how his
friend Dombey bore it. To such questions, the Major, waxing very
purple, would reply that it was a bad world, Sir, altogether; that
Joey knew a thing or two, but had been done, Sir, done like an infant;
that if you had foretold this, Sir, to J. Bagstock, when he went
abroad with Dombey and was chasing that vagabond up and down France,
J. Bagstock would have pooh-pooh'd you - would have pooh- pooh'd you,
Sir, by the Lord! That Joe had been deceived, Sir, taken in,
hoodwinked, blindfolded, but was broad awake again and staring;
insomuch, Sir, that if Joe's father were to rise up from the grave
to-morrow, he wouldn't trust the old blade with a penny piece, but
would tell him that his son Josh was too old a soldier to be done
again, Sir. That he was a suspicious, crabbed, cranky, used-up, J. B.
infidel, Sir; and that if it were consistent with the dignity of a
rough and tough old Major, of the old school, who had had the honour
of being personally known to, and commended by, their late Royal
Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and York, to retire to a tub and live in
it, by Gad! Sir, he'd have a tub in Pall Mall to-morrow, to show his
contempt for mankind!'

Of all this, and many variations of the same tune, the Major would
deliver himself with so many apoplectic symptoms, such rollings of his
head, and such violent growls of ill usage and resentment, that the
younger members of the club surmised he had invested money in his
friend Dombey's House, and lost it; though the older soldiers and
deeper dogs, who knew Joe better, wouldn't hear of such a thing. The
unfortunate Native, expressing no opinion, suffered dreadfully; not
merely in his moral feelings, which were regularly fusilladed by the
Major every hour in the day, and riddled through and through, but in
his sensitiveness to bodily knocks and bumps, which was kept
continually on the stretch. For six entire weeks after the bankruptcy,
this miserable foreigner lived in a rainy season of boot-jacks and
brushes.

Mrs Chick had three ideas upon the subject of the terrible reverse.
The first was that she could not understand it. The second, that her
brother had not made an effort. The third, that if she had been
invited to dinner on the day of that first party, it never would have
happened; and that she had said so, at the time.

Nobody's opinion stayed the misfortune, lightened it, or made it
heavier. It was understood that the affairs of the House were to be
wound up as they best could be; that Mr Dombey freely resigned
everything he had, and asked for no favour from anyone. That any
resumption of the business was out of the question, as he would listen
to no friendly negotiation having that compromise in view; that he had
relinquished every post of trust or distinction he had held, as a man
respected among merchants; that he was dying, according to some; that
he was going melancholy mad, according to others; that he was a broken
man, according to all.

The clerks dispersed after holding a little dinner of condolence
among themselves, which was enlivened by comic singing, and went off
admirably. Some took places abroad, and some engaged in other Houses
at home; some looked up relations in the country, for whom they
suddenly remembered they had a particular affection; and some
advertised for employment in the newspapers. Mr Perch alone remained
of all the late establishment, sitting on his bracket looking at the
accountants, or starting off it, to propitiate the head accountant,
who was to get him into the Fire Office. The Counting House soon got
to be dirty and neglected. The principal slipper and dogs' collar
seller, at the corner of the court, would have doubted the propriety
of throwing up his forefinger to the brim of his hat, any more, if Mr
Dombey had appeared there now; and the ticket porter, with his hands
under his white apron, moralised good sound morality about ambition,
which (he observed) was not, in his opinion, made to rhyme to
perdition, for nothing.

Mr Morfin, the hazel-eyed bachelor, with the hair and whiskers
sprinkled with grey, was perhaps the only person within the atmosphere
of the House - its head, of course, excepted - who was heartily and
deeply affected by the disaster that had befallen it. He had treated
Mr Dombey with due respect and deference through many years, but he
had never disguised his natural character, or meanly truckled to him,
or pampered his master passion for the advancement of his own
purposes. He had, therefore, no self-disrespect to avenge; no
long-tightened springs to release with a quick recoil. He worked early
and late to unravel whatever was complicated or difficult in the
records of the transactions of the House; was always in attendance to
explain whatever required explanation; sat in his old room sometimes
very late at night, studying points by his mastery of which he could
spare Mr Dombey the pain of being personally referred to; and then
would go home to Islington, and calm his mind by producing the most
dismal and forlorn sounds out of his violoncello before going to bed.

He was solacing himself with this melodious grumbler one evening,
and, having been much dispirited by the proceedings of the day, was
scraping consolation out of its deepest notes, when his landlady (who
was fortunately deaf, and had no other consciousness of these
performances than a sensation of something rumbling in her bones)
announced a lady.

'In mourning,' she said.

The violoncello stopped immediately; and the performer, laying it
on the sofa with great tenderness and care, made a sign that the lady
was to come in. He followed directly, and met Harriet Carker on the
stair.

'Alone!' he said, 'and John here this morning! Is there anything
the matter, my dear? But no,' he added, 'your face tells quite another
story.'

'I am afraid it is a selfish revelation that you see there, then,'
she answered.

'It is a very pleasant one,' said he; 'and, if selfish, a novelty
too, worth seeing in you. But I don't believe that.'

He had placed a chair for her by this time, and sat down opposite;
the violoncello lying snugly on the sofa between them.

'You will not be surprised at my coming alone, or at John's not
having told you I was coming,' said Harriet; 'and you will believe
that, when I tell you why I have come. May I do so now?'

'You can do nothing better.'

'You were not busy?'

He pointed to the violoncello lying on the sofa, and said 'I have
been, all day. Here's my witness. I have been confiding all my cares
to it. I wish I had none but my own to tell.'

'Is the House at an end?' said Harriet, earnestly.

'Completely at an end.'

'Will it never be resumed?'

'Never.'

The bright expression of her face was not overshadowed as her lips
silently repeated the word. He seemed to observe this with some little
involuntary surprise: and said again:

'Never. You remember what I told you. It has been, all along,
impossible to convince him; impossible to reason with him; sometimes,
impossible even to approach him. The worst has happened; and the House
has fallen, never to be built up any more.'

'And Mr Dombey, is he personally ruined?'

'Ruined.'

'Will he have no private fortune left? Nothing?'

A certain eagerness in her voice, and something that was almost
joyful in her look, seemed to surprise him more and more; to
disappoint him too, and jar discordantly against his own emotions. He
drummed with the fingers of one hand on the table, looking wistfully
at her, and shaking his head, said, after a pause:

'The extent of Mr Dombey's resources is not accurately within my
knowledge; but though they are doubtless very large, his obligations
are enormous. He is a gentleman of high honour and integrity. Any man
in his position could, and many a man in his position would, have
saved himself, by making terms which would have very slightly, almost
insensibly, increased the losses of those who had had dealings with
him, and left him a remnant to live upon. But he is resolved on
payment to the last farthing of his means. His own words are, that
they will clear, or nearly clear, the House, and that no one can lose
much. Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener
than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
His pride shows well in this.'

She heard him with little or no change in her expression, and with
a divided attention that showed her to be busy with something in her
own mind. When he was silent, she asked him hurriedly:

'Have you seen him lately?'

'No one sees him. When this crisis of his affairs renders it
necessary for him to come out of his house, he comes out for the
occasion, and again goes home, and shuts himself up, and will sea no
one. He has written me a letter, acknowledging our past connexion in
higher terms than it deserved, and parting from me. I am delicate of
obtruding myself upon him now, never having had much intercourse with
him in better times; but I have tried to do so. I have written, gone
there, entreated. Quite in vain.'

He watched her, as in the hope that she would testify some greater
concern than she had yet shown; and spoke gravely and feelingly, as if
to impress her the more; but there was no change in her.

'Well, well, Miss Harriet,' he said, with a disappointed air, 'this
is not to the purpose. You have not come here to hear this. Some other
and pleasanter theme is in your mind. Let it be in mine, too, and we
shall talk upon more equal terms. Come!'

'No, it is the same theme,' returned Harriet, with frank and quick
surprise. 'Is it not likely that it should be? Is it not natural that
John and I should have been thinking and speaking very much of late of
these great changes? Mr Dombey, whom he served so many years - you
know upon what terms - reduced, as you describe; and we quite rich!'

Good, true face, as that face of hers was, and pleasant as it had
been to him, Mr Morfin, the hazel-eyed bachelor, since the first time
he had ever looked upon it, it pleased him less at that moment,
lighted with a ray of exultation, than it had ever pleased him before.

'I need not remind you,' said Harriet, casting down her eyes upon
her black dress, 'through what means our circumstances changed. You
have not forgotten that our brother James, upon that dreadful day,
left no will, no relations but ourselves.'

The face was pleasanter to him now, though it was pale and
melancholy, than it had been a moment since. He seemed to breathe more
cheerily.

'You know,' she said, 'our history, the history of both my
brothers, in connexion with the unfortunate, unhappy gentleman, of
whom you have spoken so truly. You know how few our wants are - John's
and mine - and what little use we have for money, after the life we
have led together for so many years; and now that he is earning an
income that is ample for us, through your kindness. You are not
unprepared to hear what favour I have come to ask of you?'

'I hardly know. I was, a minute ago. Now, I think, I am not.'

'Of my dead brother I say nothing. If the dead know what we do -
but you understand me. Of my living brother I could say much; but what
need I say more, than that this act of duty, in which I have come to
ask your indispensable assistance, is his own, and that he cannot rest
until it is performed!'

She raised her eyes again; and the light of exultation in her face
began to appear beautiful, in the observant eyes that watched her.

'Dear Sir,' she went on to say, 'it must be done very quietly and
secretly. Your experience and knowledge will point out a way of doing
it. Mr Dombey may, perhaps, be led to believe that it is something
saved, unexpectedly, from the wreck of his fortunes; or that it is a
voluntary tribute to his honourable and upright character, from some
of those with whom he has had great dealings; or that it is some old
lost debt repaid. There must be many ways of doing it. I know you will
choose the best. The favour I have come to ask is, that you will do it
for us in your own kind, generous, considerate manner. That you will
never speak of it to John, whose chief happiness in this act of
restitution is to do it secretly, unknown, and unapproved of: that
only a very small part of the inheritance may be reserved to us, until
Mr Dombey shall have possessed the interest of the rest for the
remainder of his life; that you will keep our secret, faithfully - but
that I am sure you will; and that, from this time, it may seldom be
whispered, even between you and me, but may live in my thoughts only
as a new reason for thankfulness to Heaven, and joy and pride in my
brother.'

Such a look of exultation there may be on Angels' faces when the
one repentant sinner enters Heaven, among ninety-nine just men. It was
not dimmed or tarnished by the joyful tears that filled her eyes, but
was the brighter for them.

'My dear Harriet,' said Mr Morfin, after a silence, 'I was not
prepared for this. Do I understand you that you wish to make your own
part in the inheritance available for your good purpose, as well as
John's?'

'Oh, yes,' she returned 'When we have shared everything together
for so long a time, and have had no care, hope, or purpose apart,
could I bear to be excluded from my share in this? May I not urge a
claim to be my brother's partner and companion to the last?'

'Heaven forbid that I should dispute it!' he replied.

'We may rely on your friendly help?' she said. 'I knew we might!'

'I should be a worse man than, - than I hope I am, or would
willingly believe myself, if I could not give you that assurance from
my heart and soul. You may, implicitly. Upon my honour, I will keep
your secret. And if it should be found that Mr Dombey is so reduced as
I fear he will be, acting on a determination that there seem to be no
means of influencing, I will assist you to accomplish the design, on
which you and John are jointly resolved.'

She gave him her hand, and thanked him with a cordial, happy face.

'Harriet,' he said, detaining it in his. 'To speak to you of the
worth of any sacrifice that you can make now - above all, of any
sacrifice of mere money - would be idle and presumptuous. To put
before you any appeal to reconsider your purpose or to set narrow
limits to it, would be, I feel, not less so. I have no right to mar
the great end of a great history, by any obtrusion of my own weak
self. I have every right to bend my head before what you confide to
me, satisfied that it comes from a higher and better source of
inspiration than my poor worldly knowledge. I will say only this: I am
your faithful steward; and I would rather be so, and your chosen
friend, than I would be anybody in the world, except yourself.'

She thanked him again, cordially, and wished him good-night. 'Are
you going home?' he said. 'Let me go with you.'

'Not to-night. I am not going home now; I have a visit to make
alone. Will you come to-morrow?'

'Well, well,' said he, 'I'll come to-morrow. In the meantime, I'll
think of this, and how we can best proceed. And perhaps I'll think of
it, dear Harriet, and - and - think of me a little in connexion with
it.'

He handed her down to a coach she had in waiting at the door; and
if his landlady had not been deaf, she would have heard him muttering
as he went back upstairs, when the coach had driven off, that we were
creatures of habit, and it was a sorrowful habit to be an old
bachelor.

The violoncello lying on the sofa between the two chairs, he took
it up, without putting away the vacant chair, and sat droning on it,
and slowly shaking his head at the vacant chair, for a long, long
time. The expression he communicated to the instrument at first,
though monstrously pathetic and bland, was nothing to the expression
he communicated to his own face, and bestowed upon the empty chair:
which was so sincere, that he was obliged to have recourse to Captain
Cuttle's remedy more than once, and to rub his face with his sleeve.
By degrees, however, the violoncello, in unison with his own frame of
mind, glided melodiously into the Harmonious Blacksmith, which he
played over and over again, until his ruddy and serene face gleamed
like true metal on the anvil of a veritable blacksmith. In fine, the
violoncello and the empty chair were the companions of his
bachelorhood until nearly midnight; and when he took his supper, the
violoncello set up on end in the sofa corner, big with the latent
harmony of a whole foundry full of harmonious blacksmiths, seemed to
ogle the empty chair out of its crooked eyes, with unutterable
intelligence.

When Harriet left the house, the driver of her hired coach, taking
a course that was evidently no new one to him, went in and out by
bye-ways, through that part of the suburbs, until he arrived at some
open ground, where there were a few quiet little old houses standing
among gardens. At the garden-gate of one of these he stopped, and
Harriet alighted.

Her gentle ringing at the bell was responded to by a
dolorous-looking woman, of light complexion, with raised eyebrows, and
head drooping on one side, who curtseyed at sight of her, and
conducted her across the garden to the house.

'How is your patient, nurse, to-night?' said Harriet.

'In a poor way, Miss, I am afraid. Oh how she do remind me,
sometimes, of my Uncle's Betsey Jane!' returned the woman of the light
complexion, in a sort of doleful rapture.

'In what respect?' asked Harriet.

'Miss, in all respects,' replied the other, 'except that she's
grown up, and Betsey Jane, when at death's door, was but a child.'

'But you have told me she recovered,' observed Harriet mildly; 'so
there is the more reason for hope, Mrs Wickam.'

'Ah, Miss, hope is an excellent thing for such as has the spirits
to bear it!' said Mrs Wickam, shaking her head. 'My own spirits is not
equal to it, but I don't owe it any grudge. I envys them that is so
blest!'

'You should try to be more cheerful,' remarked Harriet.

'Thank you, Miss, I'm sure,' said Mrs Wickam grimly. 'If I was so
inclined, the loneliness of this situation - you'll excuse my speaking
so free - would put it out of my power, in four and twenty hours; but
I ain't at all. I'd rather not. The little spirits that I ever had, I
was bereaved of at Brighton some few years ago, and I think I feel
myself the better for it.'

In truth, this was the very Mrs Wickam who had superseded Mrs
Richards as the nurse of little Paul, and who considered herself to
have gained the loss in question, under the roof of the amiable
Pipchin. The excellent and thoughtful old system, hallowed by long
prescription, which has usually picked out from the rest of mankind
the most dreary and uncomfortable people that could possibly be laid
hold of, to act as instructors of youth, finger-posts to the virtues,
matrons, monitors, attendants on sick beds, and the like, had
established Mrs Wickam in very good business as a nurse, and had led
to her serious qualities being particularly commended by an admiring
and numerous connexion.

Mrs Wickam, with her eyebrows elevated, and her head on one side,
lighted the way upstairs to a clean, neat chamber, opening on another
chamber dimly lighted, where there was a bed. In the first room, an
old woman sat mechanically staring out at the open window, on the
darkness. In the second, stretched upon the bed, lay the shadow of a
figure that had spurned the wind and rain, one wintry night; hardly to
be recognised now, but by the long black hair that showed so very
black against the colourless face, and all the white things about it.

Oh, the strong eyes, and the weak frame! The eyes that turned so
eagerly and brightly to the door when Harriet came in; the feeble head
that could not raise itself, and moved so slowly round upon its
pillow!

'Alice!' said the visitor's mild voice, 'am I late to-night?'

'You always seem late, but are always early.'

Harriet had sat down by the bedside now, and put her hand upon the
thin hand lying there.

'You are better?'

Mrs Wickam, standing at the foot of the bed, like a disconsolate
spectre, most decidedly and forcibly shook her head to negative this
position.

'It matters very little!' said Alice, with a faint smile. 'Better
or worse to-day, is but a day's difference - perhaps not so much.'

Mrs Wickam, as a serious character, expressed her approval with a
groan; and having made some cold dabs at the bottom of the bedclothes,
as feeling for the patient's feet and expecting to find them stony;
went clinking among the medicine bottles on the table, as who should
say, 'while we are here, let us repeat the mixture as before.'

'No,' said Alice, whispering to her visitor, 'evil courses, and
remorse, travel, want, and weather, storm within, and storm without,
have worn my life away. It will not last much longer.

She drew the hand up as she spoke, and laid her face against it.

'I lie here, sometimes, thinking I should like to live until I had
had a little time to show you how grateful I could be! It is a
weakness, and soon passes. Better for you as it is. Better for me!'

How different her hold upon the hand, from what it had been when
she took it by the fireside on the bleak winter evening! Scorn, rage,
defiance, recklessness, look here! This is the end.

Mrs Wickam having clinked sufficiently among the bottles, now
produced the mixture. Mrs Wickam looked hard at her patient in the act
of drinking, screwed her mouth up tight, her eyebrows also, and shook
her head, expressing that tortures shouldn't make her say it was a
hopeless case. Mrs Wickam then sprinkled a little cooling-stuff about
the room, with the air of a female grave-digger, who was strewing
ashes on ashes, dust on dust - for she was a serious character - and
withdrew to partake of certain funeral baked meats downstairs.

'How long is it,' asked Alice, 'since I went to you and told you
what I had done, and when you were advised it was too late for anyone
to follow?'

'It is a year and more,' said Harriet.

'A year and more,' said Alice, thoughtfully intent upon her face.
'Months upon months since you brought me here!'

Harriet answered 'Yes.'

'Brought me here, by force of gentleness and kindness. Me!' said
Alice, shrinking with her face behind her hand, 'and made me human by
woman's looks and words, and angel's deeds!'

Harriet bending over her, composed and soothed her. By and bye,
Alice lying as before, with the hand against her face, asked to have
her mother called.

Harriet called to her more than once, but the old woman was so
absorbed looking out at the open window on the darkness, that she did
not hear. It was not until Harriet went to her and touched her, that
she rose up, and came.

'Mother,' said Alice, taking the hand again, and fixing her
lustrous eyes lovingly upon her visitor, while she merely addressed a
motion of her finger to the old woman, 'tell her what you know.'

'To-night, my deary?'

'Ay, mother,' answered Alice, faintly and solemnly, 'to-night!'

The old woman, whose wits appeared disorderly by alarm, remorse, or
grief, came creeping along the side of the bed, opposite to that on
which Harriet sat; and kneeling down, so as to bring her withered face
upon a level with the coverlet, and stretching out her hand, so as to
touch her daughter's arm, began:

'My handsome gal - '

Heaven, what a cry was that, with which she stopped there, gazing
at the poor form lying on the bed!

'Changed, long ago, mother! Withered, long ago,' said Alice,
without looking at her. 'Don't grieve for that now.

'My daughter,' faltered the old woman, 'my gal who'll soon get
better, and shame 'em all with her good looks.'

Alice smiled mournfully at Harriet, and fondled her hand a little
closer, but said nothing.

'Who'll soon get better, I say,' repeated the old woman, menacing
the vacant air with her shrivelled fist, 'and who'll shame 'em all
with her good looks - she will. I say she will! she shall!' - as if
she were in passionate contention with some unseen opponent at the
bedside, who contradicted her - 'my daughter has been turned away
from, and cast out, but she could boast relationship to proud folks
too, if she chose. Ah! To proud folks! There's relationship without
your clergy and your wedding rings - they may make it, but they can't
break it - and my daughter's well related. Show me Mrs Dombey, and
I'll show you my Alice's first cousin.'

Harriet glanced from the old woman to the lustrous eyes intent upon
her face, and derived corroboration from them.

'What!' cried the old woman, her nodding head bridling with a
ghastly vanity. 'Though I am old and ugly now, - much older by life
and habit than years though, - I was once as young as any. Ah! as
pretty too, as many! I was a fresh country wench in my time, darling,'
stretching out her arm to Harriet, across the bed, 'and looked it,
too. Down in my country, Mrs Dombey's father and his brother were the
gayest gentlemen and the best-liked that came a visiting from London -
they have long been dead, though! Lord, Lord, this long while! The
brother, who was my Ally's father, longest of the two.'

She raised her head a little, and peered at her daughter's face; as
if from the remembrance of her own youth, she had flown to the
remembrance of her child's. Then, suddenly, she laid her face down on
the bed, and shut her head up in her hands and arms.

'They were as like,' said the old woman, without looking up, as you
could see two brothers, so near an age - there wasn't much more than a
year between them, as I recollect - and if you could have seen my gal,
as I have seen her once, side by side with the other's daughter, you'd
have seen, for all the difference of dress and life, that they were
like each other. Oh! is the likeness gone, and is it my gal - only my
gal - that's to change so!'

'We shall all change, mother, in our turn,' said Alice.

'Turn!' cried the old woman, 'but why not hers as soon as my gal's!
The mother must have changed - she looked as old as me, and full as
wrinkled through her paint - but she was handsome. What have I done,
I, what have I done worse than her, that only my gal is to lie there
fading!' With another of those wild cries, she went running out into
the room from which she had come; but immediately, in her uncertain
mood, returned, and creeping up to Harriet, said:

'That's what Alice bade me tell you, deary. That's all. I found it
out when I began to ask who she was, and all about her, away in
Warwickshire there, one summer-time. Such relations was no good to me,
then. They wouldn't have owned me, and had nothing to give me. I
should have asked 'em, maybe, for a little money, afterwards, if it
hadn't been for my Alice; she'd a'most have killed me, if I had, I
think She was as proud as t'other in her way,' said the old woman,
touching the face of her daughter fearfully, and withdrawing her hand,
'for all she's so quiet now; but she'll shame 'em with her good looks
yet. Ha, ha! She'll shame 'em, will my handsome daughter!'

Her laugh, as she retreated, was worse than her cry; worse than the
burst of imbecile lamentation in which it ended; worse than the doting
air with which she sat down in her old seat, and stared out at the
darkness.

The eyes of Alice had all this time been fixed on Harriet, whose
hand she had never released. She said now:

'I have felt, lying here, that I should like you to know this. It
might explain, I have thought, something that used to help to harden
me. I had heard so much, in my wrongdoing, of my neglected duty, that
I took up with the belief that duty had not been done to me, and that
as the seed was sown, the harvest grew. I somehow made it out that
when ladies had bad homes and mothers, they went wrong in their way,
too; but that their way was not so foul a one as mine, and they had
need to bless God for it.' That is all past. It is like a dream, now,
which I cannot quite remember or understand. It has been more and more
like a dream, every day, since you began to sit here, and to read to
me. I only tell it you, as I can recollect it. Will you read to me a
little more?'

Harriet was withdrawing her hand to open the book, when Alice
detained it for a moment.

'You will not forget my mother? I forgive her, if I have any cause.
I know that she forgives me, and is sorry in her heart. You will not
forget her?'

'Never, Alice!'

'A moment yet. Lay your head so, dear, that as you read I may see
the words in your kind face.'

Harriet complied and read - read the eternal book for all the
weary, and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and
neglected of this earth - read the blessed history, in which the blind
lame palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the
shunned of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human
pride, indifference, or sophistry, through all the ages that this
world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain
reduce - read the ministry of Him who, through the round of human
life, and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy
to age, had sweet compassion for, and interest in, its every scene and
stage, its every suffering and sorrow.

'I shall come,' said Harriet, when she shut the book, 'very early
in the morning.'

The lustrous eyes, yet fixed upon her face, closed for a moment,
then opened; and Alice kissed and blest her.

The same eyes followed her to the door; and in their light, and on
the tranquil face, there was a smile when it was closed.

They never turned away. She laid her hand upon her breast,
murmuring the sacred name that had been read to her; and life passed
from her face, like light removed.

Nothing lay there, any longer, but the ruin of the mortal house on
which the rain had beaten, and the black hair that had fluttered in
the wintry wind.


CHAPTER 59.

Retribution


Changes have come again upon the great house in the long dull
street, once the scene of Florence's childhood and loneliness. It is a
great house still, proof against wind and weather, without breaches in
the roof, or shattered windows, or dilapidated walls; but it is a ruin
none the less, and the rats fly from it.

Mr Towlinson and company are, at first, incredulous in respect of
the shapeless rumours that they hear. Cook says our people's credit
ain't so easy shook as that comes to, thank God; and Mr Towlinson
expects to hear it reported next, that the Bank of England's a-going
to break, or the jewels in the Tower to be sold up. But, next come the
Gazette, and Mr Perch; and Mr Perch brings Mrs Perch to talk it over
in the kitchen, and to spend a pleasant evening.

As soon as there is no doubt about it, Mr Towlinson's main anxiety
is that the failure should be a good round one - not less than a
hundred thousand pound. Mr Perch don't think himself that a hundred
thousand pound will nearly cover it. The women, led by Mrs Perch and
Cook, often repeat 'a hun-dred thou-sand pound!' with awful
satisfaction - as if handling the words were like handling the money;
and the housemaid, who has her eye on Mr Towlinson, wishes she had
only a hundredth part of the sum to bestow on the man of her choice.
Mr Towlinson, still mindful of his old wrong, opines that a foreigner
would hardly know what to do with so much money, unless he spent it on
his whiskers; which bitter sarcasm causes the housemaid to withdraw in
tears.

But not to remain long absent; for Cook, who has the reputation of
being extremely good-hearted, says, whatever they do, let 'em stand by
one another now, Towlinson, for there's no telling how soon they may
be divided. They have been in that house (says Cook) through a
funeral, a wedding, and a running-away; and let it not be said that
they couldn't agree among themselves at such a time as the present.
Mrs Perch is immensely affected by this moving address, and openly
remarks that Cook is an angel. Mr Towlinson replies to Cook, far be it
from him to stand in the way of that good feeling which he could wish
to see; and adjourning in quest of the housemaid, and presently
returning with that young lady on his arm, informs the kitchen that
foreigners is only his fun, and that him and Anne have now resolved to
take one another for better for worse, and to settle in Oxford Market
in the general greengrocery and herb and leech line, where your kind
favours is particular requested. This announcement is received with
acclamation; and Mrs Perch, projecting her soul into futurity, says,
'girls,' in Cook's ear, in a solemn whisper.

Misfortune in the family without feasting, in these lower regions,
couldn't be. Therefore Cook tosses up a hot dish or two for supper,
and Mr Towlinson compounds a lobster salad to be devoted to the same
hospitable purpose. Even Mrs Pipchin, agitated by the occasion, rings
her bell, and sends down word that she requests to have that little
bit of sweetbread that was left, warmed up for her supper, and sent to
her on a tray with about a quarter of a tumbler-full of mulled sherry;
for she feels poorly.

There is a little talk about Mr Dombey, but very little. It is
chiefly speculation as to how long he has known that this was going to
happen. Cook says shrewdly, 'Oh a long time, bless you! Take your oath
of that.' And reference being made to Mr Perch, he confirms her view
of the case. Somebody wonders what he'll do, and whether he'll go out
in any situation. Mr Towlinson thinks not, and hints at a refuge in
one of them genteel almshouses of the better kind. 'Ah, where he'll
have his little garden, you know,' says Cook plaintively, 'and bring
up sweet peas in the spring.' 'Exactly so,' says Mr Towlinson, 'and be
one of the Brethren of something or another.' 'We are all brethren,'
says Mrs Perch, in a pause of her drink. 'Except the sisters,' says Mr
Perch. 'How are the mighty fallen!' remarks Cook. 'Pride shall have a
fall, and it always was and will be so!' observes the housemaid.

It is wonderful how good they feel, in making these reflections;
and what a Christian unanimity they are sensible of, in bearing the
common shock with resignation. There is only one interruption to this
excellent state of mind, which is occasioned by a young kitchen-maid
of inferior rank - in black stockings - who, having sat with her mouth
open for a long time, unexpectedly discharges from it words to this
effect, 'Suppose the wages shouldn't be paid!' The company sit for a
moment speechless; but Cook recovering first, turns upon the young
woman, and requests to know how she dares insult the family, whose
bread she eats, by such a dishonest supposition, and whether she
thinks that anybody, with a scrap of honour left, could deprive poor
servants of their pittance? 'Because if that is your religious
feelings, Mary Daws,' says Cook warmly, 'I don't know where you mean
to go to.

Mr Towlinson don't know either; nor anybody; and the young
kitchen-maid, appearing not to know exactly, herself, and scouted by
the general voice, is covered with confusion, as with a garment.

After a few days, strange people begin to call at the house, and to
make appointments with one another in the dining-room, as if they
lived there. Especially, there is a gentleman, of a Mosaic Arabian
cast of countenance, with a very massive watch-guard, who whistles in
the drawing-room, and, while he is waiting for the other gentleman,
who always has pen and ink in his pocket, asks Mr Towlinson (by the
easy name of 'Old Cock,') if he happens to know what the figure of
them crimson and gold hangings might have been, when new bought. The
callers and appointments in the dining-room become more numerous every
day, and every gentleman seems to have pen and ink in his pocket, and
to have some occasion to use it. At last it is said that there is
going to be a Sale; and then more people arrive, with pen and ink in
their pockets, commanding a detachment of men with carpet caps, who
immediately begin to pull up the carpets, and knock the furniture
about, and to print off thousands of impressions of their shoes upon
the hall and staircase.

The council downstairs are in full conclave all this time, and,
having nothing to do, perform perfect feats of eating. At length, they
are one day summoned in a body to Mrs Pipchin's room, and thus
addressed by the fair Peruvian:

'Your master's in difficulties,' says Mrs Pipchin, tartly. 'You
know that, I suppose?'

Mr Towlinson, as spokesman, admits a general knowledge of the fact.

'And you're all on the look-out for yourselves, I warrant you, says
Mrs Pipchin, shaking her head at them.

A shrill voice from the rear exclaims, 'No more than yourself!'

'That's your opinion, Mrs Impudence, is it?' says the ireful
Pipchin, looking with a fiery eye over the intermediate heads.

'Yes, Mrs Pipchin, it is,' replies Cook, advancing. 'And what then,
pray?'

'Why, then you may go as soon as you like,' says Mrs Pipchin. 'The
sooner the better; and I hope I shall never see your face again.'

With this the doughty Pipchin produces a canvas bag; and tells her
wages out to that day, and a month beyond it; and clutches the money
tight, until a receipt for the same is duly signed, to the last
upstroke; when she grudgingly lets it go. This form of proceeding Mrs
Pipchin repeats with every member of the household, until all are
paid.

'Now those that choose, can go about their business,' says Mrs
Pipchin, 'and those that choose can stay here on board wages for a
week or so, and make themselves useful. Except,' says the inflammable
Pipchin, 'that slut of a cook, who'll go immediately.'

'That,' says Cook, 'she certainly will! I wish you good day, Mrs
Pipchin, and sincerely wish I could compliment you on the sweetness of
your appearance!'

'Get along with you,' says Mrs Pipchin, stamping her foot.

Cook sails off with an air of beneficent dignity, highly
exasperating to Mrs Pipchin, and is shortly joined below stairs by the
rest of the confederation.

Mr Towlinson then says that, in the first place, he would beg to
propose a little snack of something to eat; and over that snack would
desire to offer a suggestion which he thinks will meet the position in
which they find themselves. The refreshment being produced, and very
heartily partaken of, Mr Towlinson's suggestion is, in effect, that
Cook is going, and that if we are not true to ourselves, nobody will
be true to us. That they have lived in that house a long time, and
exerted themselves very much to be sociable together. (At this, Cook
says, with emotion, 'Hear, hear!' and Mrs Perch, who is there again,
and full to the throat, sheds tears.) And that he thinks, at the
present time, the feeling ought to be 'Go one, go all!' The housemaid
is much affected by this generous sentiment, and warmly seconds it.
Cook says she feels it's right, and only hopes it's not done as a
compliment to her, but from a sense of duty. Mr Towlinson replies,
from a sense of duty; and that now he is driven to express his
opinions, he will openly say, that he does not think it
over-respectable to remain in a house where Sales and such-like are
carrying forwards. The housemaid is sure of it; and relates, in
confirmation, that a strange man, in a carpet cap, offered, this very
morning, to kiss her on the stairs. Hereupon, Mr Towlinson is starting
from his chair, to seek and 'smash' the offender; when he is laid hold
on by the ladies, who beseech him to calm himself, and to reflect that
it is easier and wiser to leave the scene of such indecencies at once.
Mrs Perch, presenting the case in a new light, even shows that
delicacy towards Mr Dombey, shut up in his own rooms, imperatively
demands precipitate retreat. 'For what,' says the good woman, 'must
his feelings be, if he was to come upon any of the poor servants that
he once deceived into thinking him immensely rich!' Cook is so struck
by this moral consideration, that Mrs Perch improves it with several
pious axioms, original and selected. It becomes a clear case that they
must all go. Boxes are packed, cabs fetched, and at dusk that evening
there is not one member of the party left.

The house stands, large and weather-proof, in the long dull street;
but it is a ruin, and the rats fly from it.

The men in the carpet caps go on tumbling the furniture about; and
the gentlemen with the pens and ink make out inventories of it, and
sit upon pieces of furniture never made to be sat upon, and eat bread
and cheese from the public-house on other pieces of furniture never
made to be eaten on, and seem to have a delight in appropriating
precious articles to strange uses. Chaotic combinations of furniture
also take place. Mattresses and bedding appear in the dining-room; the
glass and china get into the conservatory; the great dinner service is
set out in heaps on the long divan in the large drawing-room; and the
stair-wires, made into fasces, decorate the marble chimneypieces.
Finally, a rug, with a printed bill upon it, is hung out from the
balcony; and a similar appendage graces either side of the hall door.

Then, all day long, there is a retinue of mouldy gigs and
chaise-carts in the street; and herds of shabby vampires, Jew and
Christian, over-run the house, sounding the plate-glass minors with
their knuckles, striking discordant octaves on the Grand Piano,
drawing wet forefingers over the pictures, breathing on the blades of
the best dinner-knives, punching the squabs of chairs and sofas with
their dirty fists, touzling the feather beds, opening and shutting all
the drawers, balancing the silver spoons and forks, looking into the
very threads of the drapery and linen, and disparaging everything.
There is not a secret place in the whole house. Fluffy and snuffy
strangers stare into the kitchen-range as curiously as into the attic
clothes-press. Stout men with napless hats on, look out of the bedroom
windows, and cut jokes with friends in the street. Quiet, calculating
spirits withdraw into the dressing-rooms with catalogues, and make
marginal notes thereon, with stumps of pencils. Two brokers invade the
very fire-escape, and take a panoramic survey of the neighbourhood
from the top of the house. The swarm and buzz, and going up and down,
endure for days. The Capital Modern Household Furniture, &c., is on
view.

Then there is a palisade of tables made in the best drawing-room;
and on the capital, french-polished, extending, telescopic range of
Spanish mahogany dining-tables with turned legs, the pulpit of the
Auctioneer is erected; and the herds of shabby vampires, Jew and
Christian, the strangers fluffy and snuffy, and the stout men with the
napless hats, congregate about it and sit upon everything within
reach, mantel-pieces included, and begin to bid. Hot, humming, and
dusty are the rooms all day; and - high above the heat, hum, and dust
- the head and shoulders, voice and hammer, of the Auctioneer, are
ever at work. The men in the carpet caps get flustered and vicious
with tumbling the Lots about, and still the Lots are going, going,
gone; still coming on. Sometimes there is joking and a general roar.
This lasts all day and three days following. The Capital Modern
Household Furniture, &c., is on sale.

Then the mouldy gigs and chaise-carts reappear; and with them come
spring-vans and waggons, and an army of porters with knots. All day
long, the men with carpet caps are screwing at screw-drivers and
bed-winches, or staggering by the dozen together on the staircase
under heavy burdens, or upheaving perfect rocks of Spanish mahogany,
best rose-wood, or plate-glass, into the gigs and chaise-carts, vans
and waggons. All sorts of vehicles of burden are in attendance, from a
tilted waggon to a wheelbarrow. Poor Paul's little bedstead is carried
off in a donkey-tandem. For nearly a whole week, the Capital Modern
Household Furniture, & c., is in course of removal.

At last it is all gone. Nothing is left about the house but
scattered leaves of catalogues, littered scraps of straw and hay, and
a battery of pewter pots behind the hall-door. The men with the
carpet-caps gather up their screw-drivers and bed-winches into bags,
shoulder them, and walk off. One of the pen-and-ink gentlemen goes
over the house as a last attention; sticking up bills in the windows
respecting the lease of this desirable family mansion, and shutting
the shutters. At length he follows the men with the carpet caps. None
of the invaders remain. The house is a ruin, and the rats fly from it.

Mrs Pipchin's apartments, together with those locked rooms on the
ground-floor where the window-blinds are drawn down close, have been
spared the general devastation. Mrs Pipchin has remained austere and
stony during the proceedings, in her own room; or has occasionally
looked in at the sale to see what the goods are fetching, and to bid
for one particular easy chair. Mrs Pipchin has been the highest bidder
for the easy chair, and sits upon her property when Mrs Chick comes to
see her.

'How is my brother, Mrs Pipchin?' says Mrs Chick.

'I don't know any more than the deuce,' says Mrs Pipchin. 'He never
does me the honour to speak to me. He has his meat and drink put in
the next room to his own; and what he takes, he comes out and takes
when there's nobody there. It's no use asking me. I know no more about
him than the man in the south who burnt his mouth by eating cold plum
porridge."

This the acrimonious Pipchin says with a flounce.

'But good gracious me!' cries Mrs Chick blandly. 'How long is this
to last! If my brother will not make an effort, Mrs Pipchin, what is
to become of him? I am sure I should have thought he had seen enough
of the consequences of not making an effort, by this time, to be
warned against that fatal error.'

'Hoity toity!' says Mrs Pipchin, rubbing her nose. 'There's a great
fuss, I think, about it. It ain't so wonderful a case. People have had
misfortunes before now, and been obliged to part with their furniture.
I'm sure I have!'

'My brother,' pursues Mrs Chick profoundly, 'is so peculiar - so
strange a man. He is the most peculiar man I ever saw. Would anyone
believe that when he received news of the marriage and emigration of
that unnatural child - it's a comfort to me, now, to remember that I
always said there was something extraordinary about that child: but
nobody minds me - would anybody believe, I say, that he should then
turn round upon me and say he had supposed, from my manner, that she
had come to my house? Why, my gracious! And would anybody believe that
when I merely say to him, "Paul, I may be very foolish, and I have no
doubt I am, but I cannot understand how your affairs can have got into
this state," he should actually fly at me, and request that I will
come to see him no more until he asks me! Why, my goodness!'

'Ah'!' says Mrs Pipchin. 'It's a pity he hadn't a little more to do
with mines. They'd have tried his temper for him.'

'And what,' resumes Mrs Chick, quite regardless of Mrs Pipchin's
observations, 'is it to end in? That's what I want to know. What does
my brother mean to do? He must do something. It's of no use remaining
shut up in his own rooms. Business won't come to him. No. He must go
to it. Then why don't he go? He knows where to go, I suppose, having
been a man of business all his life. Very good. Then why not go
there?'

Mrs Chick, after forging this powerful chain of reasoning, remains
silent for a minute to admire it.

'Besides,' says the discreet lady, with an argumentative air, 'who
ever heard of such obstinacy as his staying shut up here through all
these dreadful disagreeables? It's not as if there was no place for
him to go to. Of course he could have come to our house. He knows he
is at home there, I suppose? Mr Chick has perfectly bored about it,
and I said with my own lips, "Why surely, Paul, you don't imagine that
because your affairs have got into this state, you are the less at
home to such near relatives as ourselves? You don't imagine that we
are like the rest of the world?" But no; here he stays all through,
and here he is. Why, good gracious me, suppose the house was to be
let! What would he do then? He couldn't remain here then. If he
attempted to do so, there would be an ejectment, an action for Doe,
and all sorts of things; and then he must go. Then why not go at first
instead of at last? And that brings me back to what I said just now,
and I naturally ask what is to be the end of it?'

'I know what's to be the end of it, as far as I am concerned,'
replies Mrs Pipchin, 'and that's enough for me. I'm going to take
myself off in a jiffy.'

'In a which, Mrs Pipchin,' says Mrs Chick.

'In a jiffy,' retorts Mrs Pipchin sharply.

'Ah, well! really I can't blame you, Mrs Pipchin,' says Mrs Chick,
with frankness.

'It would be pretty much the same to me, if you could,' replies the
sardonic Pipchin. 'At any rate I'm going. I can't stop here. I should
be dead in a week. I had to cook my own pork chop yesterday, and I'm
not used to it. My constitution will be giving way next. Besides, I
had a very fair connexion at Brighton when I came here - little
Pankey's folks alone were worth a good eighty pounds a-year to me -
and I can't afford to throw it away. I've written to my niece, and she
expects me by this time.'

'Have you spoken to my brother?' inquires Mrs Chick

'Oh, yes, it's very easy to say speak to him,' retorts Mrs Pipchin.
'How is it done? I called out to him yesterday, that I was no use
here, and that he had better let me send for Mrs Richards. He grunted
something or other that meant yes, and I sent. Grunt indeed! If he had
been Mr Pipchin, he'd have had some reason to grunt. Yah! I've no
patience with it!'

Here this exemplary female, who has pumped up so much fortitude and
virtue from the depths of the Peruvian mines, rises from her cushioned
property to see Mrs Chick to the door. Mrs Chick, deploring to the
last the peculiar character of her brother, noiselessly retires, much
occupied with her own sagacity and clearness of head.

In the dusk of the evening Mr Toodle, being off duty, arrives with
Polly and a box, and leaves them, with a sounding kiss, in the hall of
the empty house, the retired character of which affects Mr Toodle's
spirits strongly.

'I tell you what, Polly, me dear,' says Mr Toodle, 'being now an
ingine-driver, and well to do in the world, I shouldn't allow of your
coming here, to be made dull-like, if it warn't for favours past. But
favours past, Polly, is never to be forgot. To them which is in
adversity, besides, your face is a cord'l. So let's have another kiss
on it, my dear. You wish no better than to do a right act, I know; and
my views is, that it's right and dutiful to do this. Good-night,
Polly!'

Mrs Pipchin by this time looms dark in her black bombazeen skirts,
black bonnet, and shawl; and has her personal property packed up; and
has her chair (late a favourite chair of Mr Dombey's and the dead
bargain of the sale) ready near the street door; and is only waiting
for a fly-van, going to-night to Brighton on private service, which is
to call for her, by private contract, and convey her home.

Presently it comes. Mrs Pipchin's wardrobe being handed in and
stowed away, Mrs Pipchin's chair is next handed in, and placed in a
convenient corner among certain trusses of hay; it being the intention
of the amiable woman to occupy the chair during her journey. Mrs
Pipchin herself is next handed in, and grimly takes her seat. There is
a snaky gleam in her hard grey eye, as of anticipated rounds of
buttered toast, relays of hot chops, worryings and quellings of young
children, sharp snappings at poor Berry, and all the other delights of
her Ogress's castle. Mrs Pipchin almost laughs as the fly-van drives
off, and she composes her black bombazeen skirts, and settles herself
among the cushions of her easy chair.

The house is such a ruin that the rats have fled, and there is not
one left.

But Polly, though alone in the deserted mansion - for there is no
companionship in the shut-up rooms in which its late master hides his
head - is not alone long. It is night; and she is sitting at work in
the housekeeper's room, trying to forget what a lonely house it is,
and what a history belongs to it; when there is a knock at the hall
door, as loud sounding as any knock can be, striking into such an
empty place. Opening it, she returns across the echoing hall,
accompanied by a female figure in a close black bonnet. It is Miss
Tox, and Miss Tox's eyes are red.

'Oh, Polly,' says Miss Tox, 'when I looked in to have a little
lesson with the children just now, I got the message that you left for
me; and as soon as I could recover my spirits at all, I came on after
you. Is there no one here but you?'

'Ah! not a soul,' says Polly.

'Have you seen him?' whispers Miss Tox.

'Bless you,' returns Polly, 'no; he has not been seen this many a
day. They tell me he never leaves his room.'

'Is he said to be ill?' inquires Miss Tox.

'No, Ma'am, not that I know of,' returns Polly, 'except in his
mind. He must be very bad there, poor gentleman!'

Miss Tox's sympathy is such that she can scarcely speak. She is no
chicken, but she has not grown tough with age and celibacy. Her heart
is very tender, her compassion very genuine, her homage very real.
Beneath the locket with the fishy eye in it, Miss Tox bears better
qualities than many a less whimsical outside; such qualities as will
outlive, by many courses of the sun, the best outsides and brightest
husks that fall in the harvest of the great reaper.

It is long before Miss Tox goes away, and before Polly, with a
candle flaring on the blank stairs, looks after her, for company, down
the street, and feels unwilling to go back into the dreary house, and
jar its emptiness with the heavy fastenings of the door, and glide
away to bed. But all this Polly does; and in the morning sets in one
of those darkened rooms such matters as she has been advised to
prepare, and then retires and enters them no more until next morning
at the same hour. There are bells there, but they never ring; and
though she can sometimes hear a footfall going to and fro, it never
comes out.

Miss Tox returns early in the day. It then begins to be Miss Tox's
occupation to prepare little dainties - or what are such to her - to
be carried into these rooms next morning. She derives so much
satisfaction from the pursuit, that she enters on it regularly from
that time; and brings daily in her little basket, various choice
condiments selected from the scanty stores of the deceased owner of
the powdered head and pigtail. She likewise brings, in sheets of
curl-paper, morsels of cold meats, tongues of sheep, halves of fowls,
for her own dinner; and sharing these collations with Polly, passes
the greater part of her time in the ruined house that the rats have
fled from: hiding, in a fright at every sound, stealing in and out
like a criminal; only desiring to be true to the fallen object of her
admiration, unknown to him, unknown to all the world but one poor
simple woman.

The Major knows it; but no one is the wiser for that, though the
Major is much the merrier. The Major, in a fit of curiosity, has
charged the Native to watch the house sometimes, and find out what
becomes of Dombey. The Native has reported Miss Tox's fidelity, and
the Major has nearly choked himself dead with laughter. He is
permanently bluer from that hour, and constantly wheezes to himself,
his lobster eyes starting out of his head, 'Damme, Sir, the woman's a
born idiot!'

And the ruined man. How does he pass the hours, alone?

'Let him remember it in that room, years to come!' He did remember
it. It was heavy on his mind now; heavier than all the rest.

'Let him remember it in that room, years to come! The rain that
falls upon the roof, the wind that mourns outside the door, may have
foreknowledge in their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that
room, years to come!'

He did remember it. In the miserable night he thought of it; in the
dreary day, the wretched dawn, the ghostly, memory-haunted twilight.
He did remember it. In agony, in sorrow, in remorse, in despair!
'Papa! Papa! Speak to me, dear Papa!' He heard the words again, and
saw the face. He saw it fall upon the trembling hands, and heard the
one prolonged low cry go upward.

He was fallen, never to be raised up any more. For the night of his
worldly ruin there was no to-morrow's sun; for the stain of his
domestic shame there was no purification; nothing, thank Heaven, could
bring his dead child back to life. But that which he might have made
so different in all the Past - which might have made the Past itself
so different, though this he hardly thought of now - that which was
his own work, that which he could so easily have wrought into a
blessing, and had set himself so steadily for years to form into a
curse: that was the sharp grief of his soul.

Oh! He did remember it! The rain that fell upon the roof, the wind
that mourned outside the door that night, had had foreknowledge in
their melancholy sound. He knew, now, what he had done. He knew, now,
that he had called down that upon his head, which bowed it lower than
the heaviest stroke of fortune. He knew, now, what it was to be
rejected and deserted; now, when every loving blossom he had withered
in his innocent daughter's heart was snowing down in ashes on him.

He thought of her, as she had been that night when he and his bride
came home. He thought of her as she had been, in all the home-events
of the abandoned house. He thought, now, that of all around him, she
alone had never changed. His boy had faded into dust, his proud wife
had sunk into a polluted creature, his flatterer and friend had been
transformed into the worst of villains, his riches had melted away,
the very walls that sheltered him looked on him as a stranger; she
alone had turned the same mild gentle look upon him always. Yes, to
the latest and the last. She had never changed to him - nor had he
ever changed to her - and she was lost.

As, one by one, they fell away before his mind - his baby- hope,
his wife, his friend, his fortune - oh how the mist, through which he
had seen her, cleared, and showed him her true self! Oh, how much
better than this that he had loved her as he had his boy, and lost her
as he had his boy, and laid them in their early grave together!

In his pride - for he was proud yet - he let the world go from him
freely. As it fell away, he shook it off. Whether he imagined its face
as expressing pity for him, or indifference to him, he shunned it
alike. It was in the same degree to be avoided, in either aspect. He
had no idea of any one companion in his misery, but the one he had
driven away. What he would have said to her, or what consolation
submitted to receive from her, he never pictured to himself. But he
always knew she would have been true to him, if he had suffered her.
He always knew she would have loved him better now, than at any other
time; he was as certain that it was in her nature, as he was that
there was a sky above him; and he sat thinking so, in his loneliness,
from hour to hour. Day after day uttered this speech; night after
night showed him this knowledge.

It began, beyond all doubt (however slow it advanced for some
time), in the receipt of her young husband's letter, and the certainty
that she was gone. And yet - so proud he was in his ruin, or so
reminiscent of her only as something that might have been his, but was
lost beyond redemption - that if he could have heard her voice in an
adjoining room, he would not have gone to her. If he could have seen
her in the street, and she had done no more than look at him as she
had been used to look, he would have passed on with his old cold
unforgiving face, and not addressed her, or relaxed it, though his
heart should have broken soon afterwards. However turbulent his
thoughts, or harsh his anger had been, at first, concerning her
marriage, or her husband, that was all past now. He chiefly thought of
what might have been, and what was not. What was, was all summed up in
this: that she was lost, and he bowed down with sorrow and remorse.

And now he felt that he had had two children born to him in that
house, and that between him and the bare wide empty walls there was a
tie, mournful, but hard to rend asunder, connected with a double
childhood, and a double loss. He had thought to leave the house -
knowing he must go, not knowing whither - upon the evening of the day
on which this feeling first struck root in his breast; but he resolved
to stay another night, and in the night to ramble through the rooms
once more.

He came out of his solitude when it was the dead of night, and with
a candle in his hand went softly up the stairs. Of all the footmarks
there, making them as common as the common street, there was not one,
he thought, but had seemed at the time to set itself upon his brain
while he had kept close, listening. He looked at their number, and
their hurry, and contention - foot treading foot out, and upward track
and downward jostling one another - and thought, with absolute dread
and wonder, how much he must have suffered during that trial, and what
a changed man he had cause to be. He thought, besides, oh was there,
somewhere in the world, a light footstep that might have worn out in a
moment half those marks! - and bent his head, and wept as he went up.

He almost saw it, going on before. He stopped, looking up towards
the skylight; and a figure, childish itself, but carrying a child, and
singing as it went, seemed to be there again. Anon, it was the same
figure, alone, stopping for an instant, with suspended breath; the
bright hair clustering loosely round its tearful face; and looking
back at him.

He wandered through the rooms: lately so luxurious; now so bare and
dismal and so changed, apparently, even in their shape and size. The
press of footsteps was as thick here; and the same consideration of
the suffering he had had, perplexed and terrified him. He began to
fear that all this intricacy in his brain would drive him mad; and
that his thoughts already lost coherence as the footprints did, and
were pieced on to one another, with the same trackless involutions,
and varieties of indistinct shapes.

He did not so much as know in which of these rooms she had lived,
when she was alone. He was glad to leave them, and go wandering higher
up. Abundance of associations were here, connected with his false
wife, his false friend and servant, his false grounds of pride; but he
put them all by now, and only recalled miserably, weakly, fondly, his
two children.

Everywhere, the footsteps! They had had no respect for the old room
high up, where the little bed had been; he could hardly find a clear
space there, to throw himself down, on the floor, against the wall,
poor broken man, and let his tears flow as they would. He had shed so
many tears here, long ago, that he was less ashamed of his weakness in
this place than in any other - perhaps, with that consciousness, had
made excuses to himself for coming here. Here, with stooping
shoulders, and his chin dropped on his breast, he had come. Here,
thrown upon the bare boards, in the dead of night, he wept, alone - a
proud man, even then; who, if a kind hand could have been stretched
out, or a kind face could have looked in, would have risen up, and
turned away, and gone down to his cell.

When the day broke he was shut up in his rooms again. He had meant
to go away to-day, but clung to this tie in the house as the last and
only thing left to him. He would go to-morrow. To-morrow came. He
would go to-morrow. Every night, within the knowledge of no human
creature, he came forth, and wandered through the despoiled house like
a ghost. Many a morning when the day broke, his altered face, drooping
behind the closed blind in his window, imperfectly transparent to the
light as yet, pondered on the loss of his two children. It was one
child no more. He reunited them in his thoughts, and they were never
asunder. Oh, that he could have united them in his past love, and in
death, and that one had not been so much worse than dead!

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even
before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen
natures; for they struggle hard to be such. Ground, long undermined,
will often fall down in a moment; what was undermined here in so many
ways, weakened, and crumbled, little by little, more and more, as the
hand moved on the dial.

At last he began to think he need not go at all. He might yet give
up what his creditors had spared him (that they had not spared him
more, was his own act), and only sever the tie between him and the
ruined house, by severing that other link -

It was then that his footfall was audible in the late housekeeper's
room, as he walked to and fro; but not audible in its true meaning, or
it would have had an appalling sound.

The world was very busy and restless about him. He became aware of
that again. It was whispering and babbling. It was never quiet. This,
and the intricacy and complication of the footsteps, harassed him to
death. Objects began to take a bleared and russet colour in his eyes.
Dombey and Son was no more - his children no more. This must be
thought of, well, to-morrow.

He thought of it to-morrow; and sitting thinking in his chair, saw
in the glass, from time to time, this picture:

A spectral, haggard, wasted likeness of himself, brooded and
brooded over the empty fireplace. Now it lifted up its head, examining
the lines and hollows in its face; now hung it down again, and brooded
afresh. Now it rose and walked about; now passed into the next room,
and came back with something from the dressing-table in its breast.
Now, it was looking at the bottom of the door, and thinking.

Hush! what? It was thinking that if blood were to trickle that way,
and to leak out into the hall, it must be a long time going so far. It
would move so stealthily and slowly, creeping on, with here a lazy
little pool, and there a start, and then another little pool, that a
desperately wounded man could only be discovered through its means,
either dead or dying. When it had thought of this a long while, it got
up again, and walked to and fro with its hand in its breast. He
glanced at it occasionally, very curious to watch its motions, and he
marked how wicked and murderous that hand looked.

Now it was thinking again! What was it thinking?

Whether they would tread in the blood when it crept so far, and
carry it about the house among those many prints of feet, or even out
into the street.

It sat down, with its eyes upon the empty fireplace, and as it lost
itself in thought there shone into the room a gleam of light; a ray of
sun. It was quite unmindful, and sat thinking. Suddenly it rose, with
a terrible face, and that guilty hand grasping what was in its breast.
Then it was arrested by a cry - a wild, loud, piercing, loving,
rapturous cry - and he only saw his own reflection in the glass, and
at his knees, his daughter!

Yes. His daughter! Look at her! Look here! Down upon the ground,
clinging to him, calling to him, folding her hands, praying to him.

'Papa! Dearest Papa! Pardon me, forgive me! I have come back to ask
forgiveness on my knees. I never can be happy more, without it!'

Unchanged still. Of all the world, unchanged. Raising the same face
to his, as on that miserable night. Asking his forgiveness!

'Dear Papa, oh don't look strangely on me! I never meant to leave
you. I never thought of it, before or afterwards. I was frightened
when I went away, and could not think. Papa, dear, I am changed. I am
penitent. I know my fault. I know my duty better now. Papa, don't cast
me off, or I shall die!'

He tottered to his chair. He felt her draw his arms about her neck;
he felt her put her own round his; he felt her kisses on his face; he
felt her wet cheek laid against his own; he felt - oh, how deeply! -
all that he had done.

Upon the breast that he had bruised, against the heart that he had
almost broken, she laid his face, now covered with his hands, and
said, sobbing:

'Papa, love, I am a mother. I have a child who will soon call
Walter by the name by which I call you. When it was born, and when I
knew how much I loved it, I knew what I had done in leaving you.
Forgive me, dear Papa! oh say God bless me, and my little child!'

He would have said it, if he could. He would have raised his hands
and besought her for pardon, but she caught them in her own, and put
them down, hurriedly.

'My little child was born at sea, Papa I prayed to God (and so did
Walter for me) to spare me, that I might come home. The moment I could
land, I came back to you. Never let us be parted any more, Papa. Never
let us be parted any more!'

His head, now grey, was encircled by her arm; and he groaned to
think that never, never, had it rested so before.

'You will come home with me, Papa, and see my baby. A boy, Papa.
His name is Paul. I think - I hope - he's like - '

Her tears stopped her.

'Dear Papa, for the sake of my child, for the sake of the name we
have given him, for my sake, pardon Walter. He is so kind and tender
to me. I am so happy with him. It was not his fault that we were
married. It was mine. I loved him so much.'

She clung closer to him, more endearing and more earnest.

'He is the darling of my heart, Papa I would die for him. He will
love and honour you as I will. We will teach our little child to love
and honour you; and we will tell him, when he can understand, that you
had a son of that name once, and that he died, and you were very
sorry; but that he is gone to Heaven, where we all hope to see him
when our time for resting comes. Kiss me, Papa, as a promise that you
will be reconciled to Walter - to my dearest husband - to the father
of the little child who taught me to come back, Papa Who taught me to
come back!'

As she clung closer to him, in another burst of tears, he kissed
her on her lips, and, lifting up his eyes, said, 'Oh my God, forgive
me, for I need it very much!'

With that he dropped his head again, lamenting over and caressing
her, and there was not a sound in all the house for a long, long time;
they remaining clasped in one another's arms, in the glorious sunshine
that had crept in with Florence.

He dressed himself for going out, with a docile submission to her
entreaty; and walking with a feeble gait, and looking back, with a
tremble, at the room in which he had been so long shut up, and where
he had seen the picture in the glass, passed out with her into the
hall. Florence, hardly glancing round her, lest she should remind him
freshly of their last parting - for their feet were on the very stones
where he had struck her in his madness - and keeping close to him,
with her eyes upon his face, and his arm about her, led him out to a
coach that was waiting at the door, and carried him away.

Then, Miss Tox and Polly came out of their concealment, and exulted
tearfully. And then they packed his clothes, and books, and so forth,
with great care; and consigned them in due course to certain persons
sent by Florence, in the evening, to fetch them. And then they took a
last cup of tea in the lonely house.

'And so Dombey and Son, as I observed upon a certain sad occasion,'
said Miss Tox, winding up a host of recollections, 'is indeed a
daughter, Polly, after all.'

'And a good one!' exclaimed Polly.

'You are right,' said Miss Tox; 'and it's a credit to you, Polly,
that you were always her friend when she was a little child. You were
her friend long before I was, Polly,' said Miss Tox; 'and you're a
good creature. Robin!'

Miss Tox addressed herself to a bullet-headed young man, who
appeared to be in but indifferent circumstances, and in depressed
spirits, and who was sitting in a remote corner. Rising, he disclosed
to view the form and features of the Grinder.

'Robin,' said Miss Tox, 'I have just observed to your mother, as
you may have heard, that she is a good creature.

'And so she is, Miss,' quoth the Grinder, with some feeling.

'Very well, Robin,' said Miss Tox, 'I am glad to hear you say so.
Now, Robin, as I am going to give you a trial, at your urgent request,
as my domestic, with a view to your restoration to respectability, I
will take this impressive occasion of remarking that I hope you will
never forget that you have, and have always had, a good mother, and
that you will endeavour so to conduct yourself as to be a comfort to
her.'

'Upon my soul I will, Miss,' returned the Grinder. 'I have come
through a good deal, and my intentions is now as straightfor'ard,
Miss, as a cove's - '

'I must get you to break yourself of that word, Robin, if you
Please,' interposed Miss Tox, politely.

'If you please, Miss, as a chap's - '

'Thankee, Robin, no,' returned Miss Tox, 'I should prefer
individual.'

'As a indiwiddle's,' said the Grinder.

'Much better,' remarked Miss Tox, complacently; 'infinitely more
expressive!'

' - can be,' pursued Rob. 'If I hadn't been and got made a Grinder
on, Miss and Mother, which was a most unfortunate circumstance for a
young co - indiwiddle.'

'Very good indeed,' observed Miss Tox, approvingly.

' - and if I hadn't been led away by birds, and then fallen into a
bad service,' said the Grinder, 'I hope I might have done better. But
it's never too late for a - '

'Indi - ' suggested Miss Tox.

' - widdle,' said the Grinder, 'to mend; and I hope to mend, Miss,
with your kind trial; and wishing, Mother, my love to father, and
brothers and sisters, and saying of it.'

'I am very glad indeed to hear it,' observed Miss Tox. 'Will you
take a little bread and butter, and a cup of tea, before we go,
Robin?'

'Thankee, Miss,' returned the Grinder; who immediately began to use
his own personal grinders in a most remarkable manner, as if he had
been on very short allowance for a considerable period.

Miss Tox, being, in good time, bonneted and shawled, and Polly too,
Rob hugged his mother, and followed his new mistress away; so much to
the hopeful admiration of Polly, that something in her eyes made
luminous rings round the gas-lamps as she looked after him. Polly then
put out her light, locked the house-door, delivered the key at an
agent's hard by, and went home as fast as she could go; rejoicing in
the shrill delight that her unexpected arrival would occasion there.
The great house, dumb as to all that had been suffered in it, and the
changes it had witnessed, stood frowning like a dark mute on the
street; baulking any nearer inquiries with the staring announcement
that the lease of this desirable Family Mansion was to be disposed of.


CHAPTER 60.

Chiefly Matrimonial



The grand half-yearly festival holden by Doctor and Mrs Blimber, on
which occasion they requested the pleasure of the company of every
young gentleman pursuing his studies in that genteel establishment, at
an early party, when the hour was half-past seven o'clock, and when
the object was quadrilles, had duly taken place, about this time; and
the young gentlemen, with no unbecoming demonstrations of levity, had
betaken themselves, in a state of scholastic repletion, to their own
homes. Mr Skettles had repaired abroad, permanently to grace the
establishment of his father Sir Barnet Skettles, whose popular manners
had obtained him a diplomatic appointment, the honours of which were
discharged by himself and Lady Skettles, to the satisfaction even of
their own countrymen and countrywomen: which was considered almost
miraculous. Mr Tozer, now a young man of lofty stature, in Wellington
boots, was so extremely full of antiquity as to be nearly on a par
with a genuine ancient Roman in his knowledge of English: a triumph
that affected his good parents with the tenderest emotions, and caused
the father and mother of Mr Briggs (whose learning, like ill-arranged
luggage, was so tightly packed that he couldn't get at anything he
wanted) to hide their diminished heads. The fruit laboriously gathered
from the tree of knowledge by this latter young gentleman, in fact,
had been subjected to so much pressure, that it had become a kind of
intellectual Norfolk Biffin, and had nothing of its original form or
flavour remaining. Master Bitherstone now, on whom the forcing system
had the happier and not uncommon effect of leaving no impression
whatever, when the forcing apparatus ceased to work, was in a much
more comfortable plight; and being then on shipboard, bound for
Bengal, found himself forgetting, with such admirable rapidity, that
it was doubtful whether his declensions of noun-substantives would
hold out to the end of the voyage.

When Doctor Blimber, in pursuance of the usual course, would have
said to the young gentlemen, on the morning of the party, 'Gentlemen,
we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month,' he
departed from the usual course, and said, 'Gentlemen, when our friend
Cincinnatus retired to his farm, he did not present to the senate any
Roman who he sought to nominate as his successor.' But there is a
Roman here,' said Doctor Blimber, laying his hand on the shoulder of
Mr Feeder, B.A., adolescens imprimis gravis et doctus, gentlemen, whom
I, a retiring Cincinnatus, wish to present to my little senate, as
their future Dictator. Gentlemen, we will resume our studies on the
twenty-fifth of next month, under the auspices of Mr Feeder, B.A.' At
this (which Doctor Blimber had previously called upon all the parents,
and urbanely explained), the young gentlemen cheered; and Mr Tozer, on
behalf of the rest, instantly presented the Doctor with a silver
inkstand, in a speech containing very little of the mother-tongue, but
fifteen quotations from the Latin, and seven from the Greek, which
moved the younger of the young gentlemen to discontent and envy: they
remarking, 'Oh, ah. It was all very well for old Tozer, but they
didn't subscribe money for old Tozer to show off with, they supposed;
did they? What business was it of old Tozer's more than anybody
else's? It wasn't his inkstand. Why couldn't he leave the boys'
property alone?' and murmuring other expressions of their
dissatisfaction, which seemed to find a greater relief in calling him
old Tozer, than in any other available vent.

Not a word had been said to the young gentlemen, nor a hint
dropped, of anything like a contemplated marriage between Mr Feeder,
B.A., and the fair Cornelia Blimber. Doctor Blimber, especially,
seemed to take pains to look as if nothing would surprise him more;
but it was perfectly well known to all the young gentlemen
nevertheless, and when they departed for the society of their
relations and friends, they took leave of Mr Feeder with awe.

Mr Feeder's most romantic visions were fulfilled. The Doctor had
determined to paint the house outside, and put it in thorough repair;
and to give up the business, and to give up Cornelia. The painting and
repairing began upon the very day of the young gentlemen's departure,
and now behold! the wedding morning was come, and Cornelia, in a new
pair of spectacles, was waiting to be led to the hymeneal altar.

The Doctor with his learned legs, and Mrs Blimber in a lilac
bonnet, and Mr Feeder, B.A., with his long knuckles and his bristly
head of hair, and Mr Feeder's brother, the Reverend Alfred Feeder,
M.A., who was to perform the ceremony, were all assembled in the
drawing-room, and Cornelia with her orange-flowers and bridesmaids had
just come down, and looked, as of old, a little squeezed in
appearance, but very charming, when the door opened, and the weak-eyed
young man, in a loud voice, made the following proclamation:

'MR AND MRS TOOTS!'

Upon which there entered Mr Toots, grown extremely stout, and on
his arm a lady very handsomely and becomingly dressed, with very
bright black eyes. 'Mrs Blimber,' said Mr Toots, 'allow me to present
my wife.'

Mrs Blimber was delighted to receive her. Mrs Blimber was a little
condescending, but extremely kind.

'And as you've known me for a long time, you know,' said Mr Toots,
'let me assure you that she is one of the most remarkable women that
ever lived.'

'My dear!' remonstrated Mrs Toots.

'Upon my word and honour she is,' said Mr Toots. 'I - I assure you,
Mrs Blimber, she's a most extraordinary woman.'

Mrs Toots laughed merrily, and Mrs Blimber led her to Cornelia. Mr
Toots having paid his respects in that direction and having saluted
his old preceptor, who said, in allusion to his conjugal state, 'Well,
Toots, well, Toots! So you are one of us, are you, Toots?' - retired
with Mr Feeder, B.A., into a window.

Mr Feeder, B.A., being in great spirits, made a spar at Mr Toots,
and tapped him skilfully with the back of his hand on the breastbone.

'Well, old Buck!' said Mr Feeder with a laugh. 'Well! Here we are!
Taken in and done for. Eh?'

'Feeder,' returned Mr Toots. 'I give you joy. If you're as - as- as
perfectly blissful in a matrimonial life, as I am myself, you'll have
nothing to desire.'

'I don't forget my old friends, you see,' said Mr Feeder. 'I ask em
to my wedding, Toots.'

'Feeder,' replied Mr Toots gravely, 'the fact is, that there were
several circumstances which prevented me from communicating with you
until after my marriage had been solemnised. In the first place, I had
made a perfect Brute of myself to you, on the subject of Miss Dombey;
and I felt that if you were asked to any wedding of mine, you would
naturally expect that it was with Miss Dombey, which involved
explanations, that upon my word and honour, at that crisis, would have
knocked me completely over. In the second place, our wedding was
strictly private; there being nobody present but one friend of myself
and Mrs Toots's, who is a Captain in - I don't exactly know in what,'
said Mr Toots, 'but it's of no consequence. I hope, Feeder, that in
writing a statement of what had occurred before Mrs Toots and myself
went abroad upon our foreign tour, I fully discharged the offices of
friendship.'

'Toots, my boy,' said Mr Feeder, shaking his hands, 'I was joking.'

'And now, Feeder,' said Mr Toots, 'I should be glad to know what
you think of my union.'

'Capital!' returned Mr Feeder.

'You think it's capital, do you, Feeder?'said Mr Toots solemnly.
'Then how capital must it be to Me! For you can never know what an
extraordinary woman that is.'

Mr Feeder was willing to take it for granted. But Mr Toots shook
his head, and wouldn't hear of that being possible.

'You see,' said Mr Toots, 'what I wanted in a wife was - in short,
was sense. Money, Feeder, I had. Sense I - I had not, particularly.'

Mr Feeder murmured, 'Oh, yes, you had, Toots!' But Mr Toots said:

'No, Feeder, I had not. Why should I disguise it? I had not. I knew
that sense was There,' said Mr Toots, stretching out his hand towards
his wife, 'in perfect heaps. I had no relation to object or be
offended, on the score of station; for I had no relation. I have never
had anybody belonging to me but my guardian, and him, Feeder, I have
always considered as a Pirate and a Corsair. Therefore, you know it
was not likely,' said Mr Toots, 'that I should take his opinion.'

'No,' said Mr Feeder.

'Accordingly,' resumed Mr Toots, 'I acted on my own. Bright was the
day on which I did so! Feeder! Nobody but myself can tell what the
capacity of that woman's mind is. If ever the Rights of Women, and all
that kind of thing, are properly attended to, it will be through her
powerful intellect - Susan, my dear!' said Mr Toots, looking abruptly
out of the windows 'pray do not exert yourself!'

'My dear,' said Mrs Toots, 'I was only talking.'

'But, my love,' said Mr Toots, 'pray do not exert yourself. You
really must be careful. Do not, my dear Susan, exert yourself. She's
so easily excited,' said Mr Toots, apart to Mrs Blimber, 'and then she
forgets the medical man altogether.'

Mrs Blimber was impressing on Mrs Toots the necessity of caution,
when Mr Feeder, B.A., offered her his arm, and led her down to the
carriages that were waiting to go to church. Doctor Blimber escorted
Mrs Toots. Mr Toots escorted the fair bride, around whose lambent
spectacles two gauzy little bridesmaids fluttered like moths. Mr
Feeder's brother, Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A., had already gone on, in
advance, to assume his official functions.

The ceremony was performed in an admirable manner. Cornelia, with
her crisp little curls, 'went in,' as the Chicken might have said,
with great composure; and Doctor Blimber gave her away, like a man who
had quite made up his mind to it. The gauzy little bridesmaids
appeared to suffer most. Mrs Blimber was affected, but gently so; and
told the Reverend Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A., on the way home, that if she
could only have seen Cicero in his retirement at Tusculum, she would
not have had a wish, now, ungratified.

There was a breakfast afterwards, limited to the same small party;
at which the spirits of Mr Feeder, B.A., were tremendous, and so
communicated themselves to Mrs Toots that Mr Toots was several times
heard to observe, across the table, 'My dear Susan, don't exert
yourself!' The best of it was, that Mr Toots felt it incunbent on him
to make a speech; and in spite of a whole code of telegraphic
dissuasions from Mrs Toots, appeared on his legs for the first time in
his life.

'I really,' said Mr Toots, 'in this house, where whatever was done
to me in the way of - of any mental confusion sometimes - which is of
no consequence and I impute to nobody - I was always treated like one
of Doctor Blimber's family, and had a desk to myself for a
considerable period - can - not - allow - my friend Feeder to be - '

Mrs Toots suggested 'married.'

'It may not be inappropriate to the occasion, or altogether
uninteresting,' said Mr Toots with a delighted face, 'to observe that
my wife is a most extraordinary woman, and would do this much better
than myself - allow my friend Feeder to be married - especially to - '

Mrs Toots suggested 'to Miss Blimber.'

'To Mrs Feeder, my love!' said Mr Toots, in a subdued tone of
private discussion: "'whom God hath joined," you know, "let no man" -
don't you know? I cannot allow my friend Feeder to be married -
especially to Mrs Feeder - without proposing their - their - Toasts;
and may,' said Mr Toots, fixing his eyes on his wife, as if for
inspiration in a high flight, 'may the torch of Hymen be the beacon of
joy, and may the flowers we have this day strewed in their path, be
the - the banishers of- of gloom!'

Doctor Blimber, who had a taste for metaphor, was pleased with
this, and said, 'Very good, Toots! Very well said, indeed, Toots!' and
nodded his head and patted his hands. Mr Feeder made in reply, a comic
speech chequered with sentiment. Mr Alfred Feeder, M.A, was afterwards
very happy on Doctor and Mrs Blimber; Mr Feeder, B.A., scarcely less
so, on the gauzy little bridesmaids. Doctor Blimber then, in a
sonorous voice, delivered a few thoughts in the pastoral style,
relative to the rushes among which it was the intention of himself and
Mrs Blimber to dwell, and the bee that would hum around their cot.
Shortly after which, as the Doctor's eyes were twinkling in a
remarkable manner, and his son-in-law had already observed that time
was made for slaves, and had inquired whether Mrs Toots sang, the
discreet Mrs Blimber dissolved the sitting, and sent Cornelia away,
very cool and comfortable, in a post-chaise, with the man of her heart

Mr and Mrs Toots withdrew to the Bedford (Mrs Toots had been there
before in old times, under her maiden name of Nipper), and there found
a letter, which it took Mr Toots such an enormous time to read, that
Mrs Toots was frightened.

'My dear Susan,' said Mr Toots, 'fright is worse than exertion.
Pray be calm!'

'Who is it from?' asked Mrs Toots.

'Why, my love,' said Mr Toots, 'it's from Captain Gills. Do not
excite yourself. Walters and Miss Dombey are expected home!'

'My dear,' said Mrs Toots, raising herself quickly from the sofa,
very pale, 'don't try to deceive me, for it's no use, they're come
home - I see it plainly in your face!'

'She's a most extraordinary woman!' exclaimed Mr Toots, in
rapturous admiration. 'You're perfectly right, my love, they have come
home. Miss Dombey has seen her father, and they are reconciled!'

'Reconciled!' cried Mrs Toots, clapping her hands.

'My dear,' said Mr Toots; 'pray do not exert yourself. Do remember
the medical man! Captain Gills says - at least he don't say, but I
imagine, from what I can make out, he means - that Miss Dombey has
brought her unfortunate father away from his old house, to one where
she and Walters are living; that he is lying very ill there - supposed
to be dying; and that she attends upon him night and day.'

Mrs Toots began to cry quite bitterly.

'My dearest Susan,' replied Mr Toots, 'do, do, if you possibly can,
remember the medical man! If you can't, it's of no consequence - but
do endeavour to!'

His wife, with her old manner suddenly restored, so pathetically
entreated him to take her to her precious pet, her little mistress,
her own darling, and the like, that Mr Toots, whose sympathy and
admiration were of the strongest kind, consented from his very heart
of hearts; and they agreed to depart immediately, and present
themselves in answer to the Captain's letter.

Now some hidden sympathies of things, or some coincidences, had
that day brought the Captain himself (toward whom Mr and Mrs Toots
were soon journeying) into the flowery train of wedlock; not as a
principal, but as an accessory. It happened accidentally, and thus:

The Captain, having seen Florence and her baby for a moment, to his
unbounded content, and having had a long talk with Walter, turned out
for a walk; feeling it necessary to have some solitary meditation on
the changes of human affairs, and to shake his glazed hat profoundly
over the fall of Mr Dombey, for whom the generosity and simplicity of
his nature were awakened in a lively manner. The Captain would have
been very low, indeed, on the unhappy gentleman's account, but for the
recollection of the baby; which afforded him such intense satisfaction
whenever it arose, that he laughed aloud as he went along the street,
and, indeed, more than once, in a sudden impulse of joy, threw up his
glazed hat and caught it again; much to the amazement of the
spectators. The rapid alternations of light and shade to which these
two conflicting subjects of reflection exposed the Captain, were so
very trying to his spirits, that he felt a long walk necessary to his
composure; and as there is a great deal in the influence of harmonious
associations, he chose, for the scene of this walk, his old
neighbourhood, down among the mast, oar, and block makers,
ship-biscuit bakers, coal-whippers, pitch-kettles, sailors, canals,
docks, swing-bridges, and other soothing objects.

These peaceful scenes, and particularly the region of Limehouse
Hole and thereabouts, were so influential in calming the Captain, that
he walked on with restored tranquillity, and was, in fact, regaling
himself, under his breath, with the ballad of Lovely Peg, when, on
turning a corner, he was suddenly transfixed and rendered speechless
by a triumphant procession that he beheld advancing towards him.

This awful demonstration was headed by that determined woman Mrs
MacStinger, who, preserving a countenance of inexorable resolution,
and wearing conspicuously attached to her obdurate bosom a stupendous
watch and appendages, which the Captain recognised at a glance as the
property of Bunsby, conducted under her arm no other than that
sagacious mariner; he, with the distraught and melancholy visage of a
captive borne into a foreign land, meekly resigning himself to her
will. Behind them appeared the young MacStingers, in a body, exulting.
Behind them,                M~ two ladies of a terrible and steadfast
aspect, leading between them a short gentleman in a tall hat, who
likewise exulted. In the wake, appeared Bunsby's boy, bearing
umbrellas. The whole were in good marching order; and a dreadful
smartness that pervaded the party would have sufficiently announced,
if the intrepid countenances of the ladies had been wanting, that it
was a procession of sacrifice, and that the victim was Bunsby.

The first impulse of the Captain was to run away. This also
appeared to be the first impulse of Bunsby, hopeless as its execution
must have proved. But a cry of recognition proceeding from the party,
and Alexander MacStinger running up to the Captain with open arms, the
Captain struck.

'Well, Cap'en Cuttle!' said Mrs MacStinger. 'This is indeed a
meeting! I bear no malice now, Cap'en Cuttle - you needn't fear that
I'm a going to cast any reflections. I hope to go to the altar in
another spirit.' Here Mrs MacStinger paused, and drawing herself up,
and inflating her bosom with a long breath, said, in allusion to the
victim, 'My 'usband, Cap'en Cuttle!'

The abject Bunsby looked neither to the right nor to the left, nor
at his bride, nor at his friend, but straight before him at nothing.
The Captain putting out his hand, Bunsby put out his; but, in answer
to the Captain's greeting, spake no word.

'Cap'en Cuttle,' said Mrs MacStinger, 'if you would wish to heal up
past animosities, and to see the last of your friend, my 'usband, as a
single person, we should be 'appy of your company to chapel. Here is a
lady here,' said Mrs MacStinger, turning round to the more intrepid of
the two, 'my bridesmaid, that will be glad of your protection, Cap'en
Cuttle.'

The short gentleman in the tall hat, who it appeared was the
husband of the other lady, and who evidently exulted at the reduction
of a fellow creature to his own condition, gave place at this, and
resigned the lady to Captain Cuttle. The lady immediately seized him,
and, observing that there was no time to lose, gave the word, in a
strong voice, to advance.

The Captain's concern for his friend, not unmingled, at first, with
some concern for himself - for a shadowy terror that he might be
married by violence, possessed him, until his knowledge of the service
came to his relief, and remembering the legal obligation of saying, 'I
will,' he felt himself personally safe so long as he resolved, if
asked any question, distinctly to reply I won't' - threw him into a
profuse perspiration; and rendered him, for a time, insensible to the
movements of the procession, of which he now formed a feature, and to
the conversation of his fair companion. But as he became less
agitated, he learnt from this lady that she was the widow of a Mr
Bokum, who had held an employment in the Custom House; that she was
the dearest friend of Mrs MacStinger, whom she considered a pattern
for her sex; that she had often heard of the Captain, and now hoped he
had repented of his past life; that she trusted Mr Bunsby knew what a
blessing he had gained, but that she feared men seldom did know what
such blessings were, until they had lost them; with more to the same
purpose.

All this time, the Captain could not but observe that Mrs Bokum
kept her eyes steadily on the bridegroom, and that whenever they came
near a court or other narrow turning which appeared favourable for
flight, she was on the alert to cut him off if he attempted escape.
The other lady, too, as well as her husband, the short gentleman with
the tall hat, were plainly on guard, according to a preconcerted plan;
and the wretched man was so secured by Mrs MacStinger, that any effort
at self-preservation by flight was rendered futile. This, indeed, was
apparent to the mere populace, who expressed their perception of the
fact by jeers and cries; to all of which, the dread MacStinger was
inflexibly indifferent, while Bunsby himself appeared in a state of
unconsciousness.

The Captain made many attempts to accost the philosopher, if only
in a monosyllable or a signal; but always failed, in consequence of
the vigilance of the guard, and the difficulty, at all times peculiar
to Bunsby's constitution, of having his attention aroused by any
outward and visible sign whatever. Thus they approached the chapel, a
neat whitewashed edifice, recently engaged by the Reverend
Melchisedech Howler, who had consented, on very urgent solicitation,
to give the world another two years of existence, but had informed his
followers that, then, it must positively go.

While the Reverend Melchisedech was offering up some extemporary
orisons, the Captain found an opportunity of growling in the
bridegroom's ear:

'What cheer, my lad, what cheer?'

To which Bunsby replied, with a forgetfulness of the Reverend
Melchisedech, which nothing but his desperate circumstances could have
excused:

'D-----d bad,'

'Jack Bunsby,' whispered the Captain, 'do you do this here, of your
own free will?'

Mr Bunsby answered 'No.'

'Why do you do it, then, my lad?' inquired the Captain, not
unnaturally.

Bunsby, still looking, and always looking with an immovable
countenance, at the opposite side of the world, made no reply.

'Why not sheer off?' said the Captain. 'Eh?' whispered Bunsby, with
a momentary gleam of hope. 'Sheer off,' said the Captain.

'Where's the good?' retorted the forlorn sage. 'She'd capter me
agen.

'Try!' replied the Captain. 'Cheer up! Come! Now's your time. Sheer
off, Jack Bunsby!'

Jack Bunsby, however, instead of profiting by the advice, said in a
doleful whisper:

'It all began in that there chest o' yourn. Why did I ever conwoy
her into port that night?'

'My lad,' faltered the Captain, 'I thought as you had come over
her; not as she had come over you. A man as has got such opinions as
you have!'

Mr Bunsby merely uttered a suppressed groan.

'Come!' said the Captain, nudging him with his elbow, 'now's your
time! Sheer off! I'll cover your retreat. The time's a flying. Bunsby!
It's for liberty. Will you once?'

Bunsby was immovable. 'Bunsby!' whispered the Captain, 'will you
twice ?' Bunsby wouldn't twice.

'Bunsby!' urged the Captain, 'it's for liberty; will you three
times? Now or never!'

Bunsby didn't then, and didn't ever; for Mrs MacStinger immediately
afterwards married him.

One of the most frightful circumstances of the ceremony to the
Captain, was the deadly interest exhibited therein by Juliana
MacStinger; and the fatal concentration of her faculties, with which
that promising child, already the image of her parent, observed the
whole proceedings. The Captain saw in this a succession of man-traps
stretching out infinitely; a series of ages of oppression and
coercion, through which the seafaring line was doomed. It was a more
memorable sight than the unflinching steadiness of Mrs Bokum and the
other lady, the exultation of the short gentleman in the tall hat, or
even the fell inflexibility of Mrs MacStinger. The Master MacStingers
understood little of what was going on, and cared less; being chiefly
engaged, during the ceremony, in treading on one another's half-boots;
but the contrast afforded by those wretched infants only set off and
adorned the precocious woman in Juliana. Another year or two, the
Captain thought, and to lodge where that child was, would be
destruction.

The ceremony was concluded by a general spring of the young family
on Mr Bunsby, whom they hailed by the endearing name of father, and
from whom they solicited half-pence. These gushes of affection over,
the procession was about to issue forth again, when it was delayed for
some little time by an unexpected transport on the part of Alexander
MacStinger. That dear child, it seemed, connecting a chapel with
tombstones, when it was entered for any purpose apart from the
ordinary religious exercises, could not be persuaded but that his
mother was now to be decently interred, and lost to him for ever. In
the anguish of this conviction, he screamed with astonishing force,
and turned black in the face. However touching these marks of a tender
disposition were to his mother, it was not in the character of that
remarkable woman to permit her recognition of them to degenerate into
weakness. Therefore, after vainly endeavouring to convince his reason
by shakes, pokes, bawlings-out, and similar applications to his head,
she led him into the air, and tried another method; which was
manifested to the marriage party by a quick succession of sharp
sounds, resembling applause, and subsequently, by their seeing
Alexander in contact with the coolest paving-stone in the court,
greatly flushed, and loudly lamenting.

The procession being then in a condition to form itself once more,
and repair to Brig Place, where a marriage feast was in readiness,
returned as it had come; not without the receipt, by Bunsby, of many
humorous congratulations from the populace on his recently-acquired
happiness. The Captain accompanied it as far as the house-door, but,
being made uneasy by the gentler manner of Mrs Bokum, who, now that
she was relieved from her engrossing duty - for the watchfulness and
alacrity of the ladies sensibly diminished when the bridegroom was
safely married - had greater leisure to show an interest in his
behalf, there left it and the captive; faintly pleading an
appointment, and promising to return presently. The Captain had
another cause for uneasiness, in remorsefully reflecting that he had
been the first means of Bunsby's entrapment, though certainly without
intending it, and through his unbounded faith in the resources of that
philosopher.

To go back to old Sol Gills at the wooden Midshipman's, and not
first go round to ask how Mr Dombey was - albeit the house where he
lay was out of London, and away on the borders of a fresh heath - was
quite out of the Captain's course. So he got a lift when he was tired,
and made out the journey gaily.

The blinds were pulled down, and the house so quiet, that the
Captain was almost afraid to knock; but listening at the door, he
heard low voices within, very near it, and, knocking softly, was
admitted by Mr Toots. Mr Toots and his wife had, in fact, just arrived
there; having been at the Midshipman's to seek him, and having there
obtained the address.

They were not so recently arrived, but that Mrs Toots had caught
the baby from somebody, taken it in her arms, and sat down on the
stairs, hugging and fondling it. Florence was stooping down beside
her; and no one could have said which Mrs Toots was hugging and
fondling most, the mother or the child, or which was the tenderer,
Florence of Mrs Toots, or Mrs Toots of her, or both of the baby; it
was such a little group of love and agitation.

'And is your Pa very ill, my darling dear Miss Floy?' asked Susan.

'He is very, very ill,' said Florence. 'But, Susan, dear, you must
not speak to me as you used to speak. And what's this?' said Florence,
touching her clothes, in amazement. 'Your old dress, dear? Your old
cap, curls, and all?'

Susan burst into tears, and showered kisses on the little hand that
had touched her so wonderingly.

'My dear Miss Dombey,' said Mr Toots, stepping forward, 'I'll
explain. She's the most extraordinary woman. There are not many to
equal her! She has always said - she said before we were married, and
has said to this day - that whenever you came home, she'd come to you
in no dress but the dress she used to serve you in, for fear she might
seem strange to you, and you might like her less. I admire the dress
myself,' said Mr Toots, 'of all things. I adore her in it! My dear
Miss Dombey, she'll be your maid again, your nurse, all that she ever
was, and more. There's no change in her. But, Susan, my dear,' said Mr
Toots, who had spoken with great feeling and high admiration, 'all I
ask is, that you'll remember the medical man, and not exert yourself
too much!'


CHAPTER 61.

Relenting



Florence had need of help. Her father's need of it was sore, and
made the aid of her old friend invaluable. Death stood at his pillow.
A shade, already, of what he had been, shattered in mind, and
perilously sick in body, he laid his weary head down on the bed his
daughter's hands prepared for him, and had never raised it since.

She was always with him. He knew her, generally; though, in the
wandering of his brain, he often confused the circumstances under
which he spoke to her. Thus he would address her, sometimes, as if his
boy were newly dead; and would tell her, that although he had said
nothing of her ministering at the little bedside, yet he had seen it -
he had seen it; and then would hide his face and sob, and put out his
worn hand. Sometimes he would ask her for herself. 'Where is
Florence?' 'I am here, Papa, I am here.' 'I don't know her!' he would
cry. 'We have been parted so long, that I don't know her!' and then a
staring dread would he upon him, until she could soothe his
perturbation; and recall the tears she tried so hard, at other times,
to dry.

He rambled through the scenes of his old pursuits - through many
where Florence lost him as she listened - sometimes for hours. He
would repeat that childish question, 'What is money?' and ponder on
it, and think about it, and reason with himself, more or less
connectedly, for a good answer; as if it had never been proposed to
him until that moment. He would go on with a musing repetition of the
title of his old firm twenty thousand times, and at every one of them,
would turn his head upon his pillow. He would count his children - one
- two - stop, and go back, and begin again in the same way.

But this was when his mind was in its most distracted state. In all
the other phases of its illness, and in those to which it was most
constant, it always turned on Florence. What he would oftenest do was
this: he would recall that night he had so recently remembered, the
night on which she came down to his room, and would imagine that his
heart smote him, and that he went out after her, and up the stairs to
seek her. Then, confounding that time with the later days of the many
footsteps, he would be amazed at their number, and begin to count them
as he followed her. Here, of a sudden, was a bloody footstep going on
among the others; and after it there began to be, at intervals, doors
standing open, through which certain terrible pictures were seen, in
mirrors, of haggard men, concealing something in their breasts. Still,
among the many footsteps and the bloody footsteps here and there, was
the step of Florence. Still she was going on before. Still the
restless mind went, following and counting, ever farther, ever higher,
as to the summit of a mighty tower that it took years to climb.

One day he inquired if that were not Susan who had spoken a long
while ago.

Florence said 'Yes, dear Papa;' and asked him would he like to see
her?

He said 'very much.' And Susan, with no little trepidation, showed
herself at his bedside.

It seemed a great relief to him. He begged her not to go; to
understand that he forgave her what she had said; and that she was to
stay. Florence and he were very different now, he said, and very
happy. Let her look at this! He meant his drawing the gentle head down
to his pillow, and laying it beside him.

He remained like this for days and weeks. At length, lying, the
faint feeble semblance of a man, upon his bed, and speaking in a voice
so low that they could only hear him by listening very near to his
lips, he became quiet. It was dimly pleasant to him now, to lie there,
with the window open, looking out at the summer sky and the trees:
and, in the evening, at the sunset. To watch the shadows of the clouds
and leaves, and seem to feel a sympathy with shadows. It was natural
that he should. To him, life and the world were nothing else.

He began to show now that he thought of Florence's fatigue: and
often taxed his weakness to whisper to her, 'Go and walk, my dearest,
in the sweet air. Go to your good husband!' One time when Walter was
in his room, he beckoned him to come near, and to stoop down; and
pressing his hand, whispered an assurance to him that he knew he could
trust him with his child when he was dead.

It chanced one evening, towards sunset, when Florence and Walter
were sitting in his room together, as he liked to see them, that
Florence, having her baby in her arms, began in a low voice to sing to
the little fellow, and sang the old tune she had so often sung to the
dead child: He could not bear it at the time; he held up his trembling
hand, imploring her to stop; but next day he asked her to repeat it,
and to do so often of an evening: which she did. He listening, with
his face turned away.

Florence was sitting on a certain time by his window, with her
work-basket between her and her old attendant, who was still her
faithful companion. He had fallen into a doze. It was a beautiful
evening, with two hours of light to come yet; and the tranquillity and
quiet made Florence very thoughtful. She was lost to everything for
the moment, but the occasion when the so altered figure on the bed had
first presented her to her beautiful Mama; when a touch from Walter
leaning on the back of her chair, made her start.

'My dear,' said Walter, 'there is someone downstairs who wishes to
speak to you.

She fancied Walter looked grave, and asked him if anything had
happened.

'No, no, my love!' said Walter. 'I have seen the gentleman myself,
and spoken with him. Nothing has happened. Will you come?'

Florence put her arm through his; and confiding her father to the
black-eyed Mrs Toots, who sat as brisk and smart at her work as
black-eyed woman could, accompanied her husband downstairs. In the
pleasant little parlour opening on the garden, sat a gentleman, who
rose to advance towards her when she came in, but turned off, by
reason of some peculiarity in his legs, and was only stopped by the
table.

Florence then remembered Cousin Feenix, whom she had not at first
recognised in the shade of the leaves. Cousin Feenix took her hand,
and congratulated her upon her marriage.

'I could have wished, I am sure,' said Cousin Feenix, sitting down
as Florence sat, to have had an earlier opportunity of offering my
congratulations; but, in point of fact, so many painful occurrences
have happened, treading, as a man may say, on one another's heels,
that I have been in a devil of a state myself, and perfectly unfit for
every description of society. The only description of society I have
kept, has been my own; and it certainly is anything but flattering to
a man's good opinion of his own sources, to know that, in point of
fact, he has the capacity of boring himself to a perfectly unlimited
extent.'

Florence divined, from some indefinable constraint and anxiety in
this gentleman's manner - which was always a gentleman's, in spite of
the harmless little eccentricities that attached to it - and from
Walter's manner no less, that something more immediately tending to
some object was to follow this.

'I have been mentioning to my friend Mr Gay, if I may be allowed to
have the honour of calling him so,' said Cousin Feenix, 'that I am
rejoiced to hear that my friend Dombey is very decidedly mending. I
trust my friend Dombey will not allow his mind to be too much preyed
upon, by any mere loss of fortune. I cannot say that I have ever
experienced any very great loss of fortune myself: never having had,
in point of fact, any great amount of fortune to lose. But as much as
I could lose, I have lost; and I don't find that I particularly care
about it. I know my friend Dombey to be a devilish honourable man; and
it's calculated to console my friend Dombey very much, to know, that
this is the universal sentiment. Even Tommy Screwzer, - a man of an
extremely bilious habit, with whom my friend Gay is probably
acquainted - cannot say a syllable in disputation of the fact.'

Florence felt, more than ever, that there was something to come;
and looked earnestly for it. So earnestly, that Cousin Feenix
answered, as if she had spoken.

'The fact is,' said Cousin Feenix, 'that my friend Gay and myself
have been discussing the propriety of entreating a favour at your
hands; and that I have the consent of my friend Gay - who has met me
in an exceedingly kind and open manner, for which I am very much
indebted to him - to solicit it. I am sensible that so amiable a lady
as the lovely and accomplished daughter of my friend Dombey will not
require much urging; but I am happy to know, that I am supported by my
friend Gay's influence and approval. As in my parliamentary time, when
a man had a motion to make of any sort - which happened seldom in
those days, for we were kept very tight in hand, the leaders on both
sides being regular Martinets, which was a devilish good thing for the
rank and file, like myself, and prevented our exposing ourselves
continually, as a great many of us had a feverish anxiety to do - as'
in my parliamentary time, I was about to say, when a man had leave to
let off any little private popgun, it was always considered a great
point for him to say that he had the happiness of believing that his
sentiments were not without an echo in the breast of Mr Pitt; the
pilot, in point of fact, who had weathered the storm. Upon which, a
devilish large number of fellows immediately cheered, and put him in
spirits. Though the fact is, that these fellows, being under orders to
cheer most excessively whenever Mr Pitt's name was mentioned, became
so proficient that it always woke 'em. And they were so entirely
innocent of what was going on, otherwise, that it used to be commonly
said by Conversation Brown - four-bottle man at the Treasury Board,
with whom the father of my friend Gay was probably acquainted, for it
was before my friend Gay's time - that if a man had risen in his
place, and said that he regretted to inform the house that there was
an Honourable Member in the last stage of convulsions in the Lobby,
and that the Honourable Member's name was Pitt, the approbation would
have been vociferous.'

This postponement of the point, put Florence in a flutter; and she
looked from Cousin Feenix to Walter, in increasing agitatioN

'My love,' said Walter, 'there is nothing the matter.

'There is nothing the matter, upon my honour,' said Cousin Feenix;
'and I am deeply distressed at being the means of causing you a
moment's uneasiness. I beg to assure you that there is nothing the
matter. The favour that I have to ask is, simply - but it really does
seem so exceedingly singular, that I should be in the last degree
obliged to my friend Gay if he would have the goodness to break the -
in point of fact, the ice,' said Cousin Feenix.

Walter thus appealed to, and appealed to no less in the look that
Florence turned towards him, said:

'My dearest, it is no more than this. That you will ride to London
with this gentleman, whom you know.

'And my friend Gay, also - I beg your pardon!' interrupted Cousin
Feenix.

And with me - and make a visit somewhere.'

'To whom?' asked Florence, looking from one to the other.

'If I might entreat,' said Cousin Feenix, 'that you would not press
for an answer to that question, I would venture to take the liberty of
making the request.'

'Do you know, Walter?'

'Yes.'

'And think it right?'

'Yes. Only because I am sure that you would too. Though there may
be reasons I very well understand, which make it better that nothing
more should be said beforehand.'

'If Papa is still asleep, or can spare me if he is awake, I will go
immediately,' said Florence. And rising quietly, and glancing at them
with a look that was a little alarmed but perfectly confiding, left
the room.

When she came back, ready to bear them company, they were talking
together, gravely, at the window; and Florence could not but wonder
what the topic was, that had made them so well acquainted in so short
a time. She did not wonder at the look of pride and love with which
her husband broke off as she entered; for she never saw him, but that
rested on her.

'I will leave,' said Cousin Feenix, 'a card for my friend Dombey,
sincerely trusting that he will pick up health and strength with every
returning hour. And I hope my friend Dombey will do me the favour to
consider me a man who has a devilish warm admiration of his character,
as, in point of fact, a British merchant and a devilish upright
gentleman. My place in the country is in a most confounded state of
dilapidation, but if my friend Dombey should require a change of air,
and would take up his quarters there, he would find it a remarkably
healthy spot - as it need be, for it's amazingly dull. If my friend
Dombey suffers from bodily weakness, and would allow me to recommend
what has frequently done myself good, as a man who has been extremely
queer at times, and who lived pretty freely in the days when men lived
very freely, I should say, let it be in point of fact the yolk of an
egg, beat up with sugar and nutmeg, in a glass of sherry, and taken in
the morning with a slice of dry toast. Jackson, who kept the
boxing-rooms in Bond Street - man of very superior qualifications,
with whose reputation my friend Gay is no doubt acquainted - used to
mention that in training for the ring they substituted rum for sherry.
I should recommend sherry in this case, on account of my friend Dombey
being in an invalided condition; which might occasion rum to fly - in
point of fact to his head - and throw him into a devil of a state.'

Of all this, Cousin Feenix delivered himself with an obviously
nervous and discomposed air. Then, giving his arm to Florence, and
putting the strongest possible constraint upon his wilful legs, which
seemed determined to go out into the garden, he led her to the door,
and handed her into a carriage that was ready for her reception.

Walter entered after him, and they drove away.

Their ride was six or eight miles long. When they drove through
certain dull and stately streets, lying westward in London, it was
growing dusk. Florence had, by this time, put her hand in Walter's;
and was looking very earnestly, and with increasing agitation, into
every new street into which they turned.

When the carriage stopped, at last, before that house in Brook
Street, where her father's unhappy marriage had been celebrated,
Florence said, 'Walter, what is this? Who is here?' Walter cheering
her, and not replying, she glanced up at the house-front, and saw that
all the windows were shut, as if it were uninhabited. Cousin Feenix
had by this time alighted, and was offering his hand.

'Are you not coming, Walter?'

'No, I will remain here. Don't tremble there is nothing to fear,
dearest Florence.'

'I know that, Walter, with you so near. I am sure of that, but - '

The door was softly opened, without any knock, and Cousin Feenix
led her out of the summer evening air into the close dull house. More
sombre and brown than ever, it seemed to have been shut up from the
wedding-day, and to have hoarded darkness and sadness ever since.

Florence ascended the dusky staircase, trembling; and stopped, with
her conductor, at the drawing-room door. He opened it, without
speaking, and signed an entreaty to her to advance into the inner
room, while he remained there. Florence, after hesitating an instant,
complied.

Sitting by the window at a table, where she seemed to have been
writing or drawing, was a lady, whose head, turned away towards the
dying light, was resting on her hand. Florence advancing, doubtfully,
all at once stood still, as if she had lost the power of motion. The
lady turned her head.

'Great Heaven!' she said, 'what is this?'

'No, no!' cried Florence, shrinking back as she rose up and putting
out her hands to keep her off. 'Mama!'

They stood looking at each other. Passion and pride had worn it,
but it was the face of Edith, and beautiful and stately yet. It was
the face of Florence, and through all the terrified avoidance it
expressed, there was pity in it, sorrow, a grateful tender memory. On
each face, wonder and fear were painted vividly; each so still and
silent, looking at the other over the black gulf of the irrevocable past.

Florence was the first to change. Bursting into tears, she said
from her full heart, 'Oh, Mama, Mama! why do we meet like this? Why
were you ever kind to me when there was no one else, that we should
meet like this?'

Edith stood before her, dumb and motionless. Her eyes were fixed
upon her face.

'I dare not think of that,' said Florence, 'I am come from Papa's
sick bed. We are never asunder now; we never shall be' any more. If
you would have me ask his pardon, I will do it, Mama. I am almost sure
he will grant it now, if I ask him. May Heaven grant it to you, too,
and comfort you!'

She answered not a word.

'Walter - I am married to him, and we have a son,' said Florence,
timidly - 'is at the door, and has brought me here. I will tell him
that you are repentant; that you are changed,' said Florence, looking
mournfully upon her; 'and he will speak to Papa with me, I know. Is
there anything but this that I can do?'

Edith, breaking her silence, without moving eye or limb, answered
slowly:

'The stain upon your name, upon your husband's, on your child's.
Will that ever be forgiven, Florence?'

'Will it ever be, Mama? It is! Freely, freely, both by Walter and
by me. If that is any consolation to you, there is nothing that you
may believe more certainly. You do not - you do not,' faltered
Florence, 'speak of Papa; but I am sure you wish that I should ask him
for his forgiveness. I am sure you do.'

She answered not a word.

'I will!' said Florence. 'I will bring it you, if you will let me;
and then, perhaps, we may take leave of each other, more like what we
used to be to one another. I have not,' said Florence very gently, and
drawing nearer to her, 'I have not shrunk back from you, Mama, because
I fear you, or because I dread to be disgraced by you. I only wish to
do my duty to Papa. I am very dear to him, and he is very dear to me.
But I never can forget that you were very good to me. Oh, pray to
Heaven,' cried Florence, falling on her bosom, 'pray to Heaven, Mama,
to forgive you all this sin and shame, and to forgive me if I cannot
help doing this (if it is wrong), when I remember what you used to
be!'

Edith, as if she fell beneath her touch, sunk down on her knees,
and caught her round the neck.

'Florence!' she cried. 'My better angel! Before I am mad again,
before my stubbornness comes back and strikes me dumb, believe me,
upon my soul I am innocent!'

'Mama!'

'Guilty of much! Guilty of that which sets a waste between us
evermore. Guilty of what must separate me, through the whole remainder
of my life, from purity and innocence - from you, of all the earth.
Guilty of a blind and passionate resentment, of which I do not,
cannot, will not, even now, repent; but not guilty with that dead man.
Before God!'

Upon her knees upon the ground, she held up both her hands, and
swore it.

'Florence!' she said, 'purest and best of natures, - whom I love -
who might have changed me long ago, and did for a time work some
change even in the woman that I am, - believe me, I am innocent of
that; and once more, on my desolate heart, let me lay this dear head,
for the last time!'

She was moved and weeping. Had she been oftener thus in older days,
she had been happier now.

'There is nothing else in all the world,' she said, 'that would
have wrung denial from me. No love, no hatred, no hope, no threat. I
said that I would die, and make no sign. I could have done so, and I
would, if we had never met, Florence.

'I trust,' said Cousin Feenix, ambling in at the door, and
speaking, half in the room, and half out of it, 'that my lovely and
accomplished relative will excuse my having, by a little stratagem,
effected this meeting. I cannot say that I was, at first, wholly
incredulous as to the possibility of my lovely and accomplished
relative having, very unfortunately, committed herself with the
deceased person with white teeth; because in point of fact, one does
see, in this world - which is remarkable for devilish strange
arrangements, and for being decidedly the most unintelligible thing
within a man's experience - very odd conjunctions of that sort. But as
I mentioned to my friend Dombey, I could not admit the criminality of
my lovely and accomplished relative until it was perfectly
established. And feeling, when the deceased person was, in point of
fact, destroyed in a devilish horrible manner, that her position was a
very painful one - and feeling besides that our family had been a
little to blame in not paying more attention to her, and that we are a
careless family - and also that my aunt, though a devilish lively
woman, had perhaps not been the very best of mothers - I took the
liberty of seeking her in France, and offering her such protection as
a man very much out at elbows could offer. Upon which occasion, my
lovely and accomplished relative did me the honour to express that she
believed I was, in my way, a devilish good sort of fellow; and that
therefore she put herself under my protection. Which in point of fact
I understood to be a kind thing on the part of my lovely and
accomplished relative, as I am getting extremely shaky, and have
derived great comfort from her solicitude.'

Edith, who had taken Florence to a sofa, made a gesture with her
hand as if she would have begged him to say no more.

'My lovely and accomplished relative,' resumed Cousin Feenix, still
ambling about at the door, 'will excuse me, if, for her satisfaction,
and my own, and that of my friend Dombey, whose lovely and
accomplished daughter we so much admire, I complete the thread of my
observations. She will remember that, from the first, she and I never
alluded to the subject of her elopement. My impression, certainly, has
always been, that there was a mystery in the affair which she could
explain if so inclined. But my lovely and accomplished relative being
a devilish resolute woman, I knew that she was not, in point of fact,
to be trifled with, and therefore did not involve myself in any
discussions. But, observing lately, that her accessible point did
appear to be a very strong description of tenderness for the daughter
of my friend Dombey, it occurred to me that if I could bring about a
meeting, unexpected on both sides, it might lead to beneficial
results. Therefore, we being in London, in the present private way,
before going to the South of Italy, there to establish ourselves, in
point of fact, until we go to our long homes, which is a devilish
disagreeable reflection for a man, I applied myself to the discovery
of the residence of my friend Gay - handsome man of an uncommonly
frank disposition, who is probably known to my lovely and accomplished
relative - and had the happiness of bringing his amiable wife to the
present place. And now,' said Cousin Feenix, with a real and genuine
earnestness shining through the levity of his manner and his slipshod
speech, 'I do conjure my relative, not to stop half way, but to set
right, as far as she can, whatever she has done wrong - not for the
honour of her family, not for her own fame, not for any of those
considerations which unfortunate circumstances have induced her to
regard as hollow, and in point of fact, as approaching to humbug - but
because it is wrong, and not right.'

Cousin Feenix's legs consented to take him away after this; and
leaving them alone together, he shut the door.

Edith remained silent for some minutes, with Florence sitting close
beside her. Then she took from her bosom a sealed paper.

'I debated with myself a long time,' she said in a low voice,
'whether to write this at all, in case of dying suddenly or by
accident, and feeling the want of it upon me. I have deliberated, ever
since, when and how to destroy it. Take it, Florence. The truth is
written in it.'

'Is it for Papa?' asked Florence.

'It is for whom you will,' she answered. 'It is given to you, and
is obtained by you. He never could have had it otherwise.'

Again they sat silent, in the deepening darkness.

'Mama,' said Florence, 'he has lost his fortune; he has been at the
point of death; he may not recover, even now. Is there any word that I
shall say to him from you?'

'Did you tell me,' asked Edith, 'that you were very dear to him?'

'Yes!' said Florence, in a thrilling voice.

'Tell him I am sorry that we ever met.

'No more?' said Florence after a pause.

'Tell him, if he asks, that I do not repent of what I have done -
not yet - for if it were to do again to-morrow, I should do it. But if
he is a changed man  - '

She stopped. There was something in the silent touch of Florence's
hand that stopped her.

'But that being a changed man, he knows, now, it would never be.
Tell him I wish it never had been.'

'May I say,' said Florence, 'that you grieved to hear of the
afflictions he has suffered?'

'Not,' she replied, 'if they have taught him that his daughter is
very dear to him. He will not grieve for them himself, one day, if
they have brought that lesson, Florence.'

'You wish well to him, and would have him happy. I am sure you
would!' said Florence. 'Oh! let me be able, if I have the occasion at
some future time, to say so?'

Edith sat with her dark eyes gazing steadfastly before her, and did
not reply until Florence had repeated her entreaty; when she drew her
hand within her arm, and said, with the same thoughtful gaze upon the
night outside:

'Tell him that if, in his own present, he can find any reason to
compassionate my past, I sent word that I asked him to do so. Tell him
that if, in his own present, he can find a reason to think less
bitterly of me, I asked him to do so. Tell him, that, dead as we are
to one another, never more to meet on this side of eternity, he knows
there is one feeling in common between us now, that there never was
before.'

Her sternness seemed to yield, and there were tears in her dark
eyes.

'I trust myself to that,' she said, 'for his better thoughts of me,
and mine of him. When he loves his Florence most, he will hate me
least. When he is most proud and happy in her and her children, he
will be most repentant of his own part in the dark vision of our
married life. At that time, I will be repentant too - let him know it
then - and think that when I thought so much of all the causes that
had made me what I was, I needed to have allowed more for the causes
that had made him what he was. I will try, then, to forgive him his
share of blame. Let him try to forgive me mine!'

'Oh Mama!' said Florence. 'How it lightens my heart, even in such a
strange meeting and parting, to hear this!'

'Strange words in my own ears,' said Edith, 'and foreign to the
sound of my own voice! But even if I had been the wretched creature I
have given him occasion to believe me, I think I could have said them
still, hearing that you and he were very dear to one another. Let him,
when you are dearest, ever feel that he is most forbearing in his
thoughts of me - that I am most forbearing in my thoughts of him!
Those are the last words I send him! Now, goodbye, my life!'

She clasped her in her arms, and seemed to pour out all her woman's
soul of love and tenderness at once.

'This kiss for your child! These kisses for a blessing on your
head! My own dear Florence, my sweet girl, farewell!'

'To meet again!' cried Florence.

'Never again! Never again! When you leave me in this dark room,
think that you have left me in the grave. Remember only that I was
once, and that I loved you!'

And Florence left her, seeing her face no more, but accompanied by
her embraces and caresses to the last.

Cousin Feenix met her at the door, and took her down to Walter in
the dingy dining room, upon whose shoulder she laid her head weeping.

'I am devilish sorry,' said Cousin Feenix, lifting his wristbands
to his eyes in the simplest manner possible, and without the least
concealment, 'that the lovely and accomplished daughter of my friend
Dombey and amiable wife of my friend Gay, should have had her
sensitive nature so very much distressed and cut up by the interview
which is just concluded. But I hope and trust I have acted for the
best, and that my honourable friend Dombey will find his mind relieved
by the disclosures which have taken place. I exceedingly lament that
my friend Dombey should have got himself, in point of fact, into the
devil's own state of conglomeration by an alliance with our family;
but am strongly of opinion that if it hadn't been for the infernal
scoundrel Barker - man with white teeth - everything would have gone
on pretty smoothly. In regard to my relative who does me the honour to
have formed an uncommonly good opinion of myself, I can assure the
amiable wife of my friend Gay, that she may rely on my being, in point
of fact, a father to her. And in regard to the changes of human life,
and the extraordinary manner in which we are perpetually conducting
ourselves, all I can say is, with my friend Shakespeare - man who
wasn't for an age but for all time, and with whom my friend Gay is no
doubt acquainted - that its like the shadow of a dream.'


CHAPTER 62.

Final



A bottle that has been long excluded from the light of day, and is
hoary with dust and cobwebs, has been brought into the sunshine; and
the golden wine within it sheds a lustre on the table.

It is the last bottle of the old Madiera.

'You are quite right, Mr Gills,' says Mr Dombey. 'This is a very
rare and most delicious wine.'

The Captain, who is of the party, beams with joy. There is a very
halo of delight round his glowing forehead.

'We always promised ourselves, Sir,' observes Mr Gills,' Ned and
myself, I mean - '

Mr Dombey nods at the Captain, who shines more and more with
speechless gratification.

'-that we would drink this, one day or other, to Walter safe at
home: though such a home we never thought of. If you don't object to
our old whim, Sir, let us devote this first glass to Walter and his
wife.'

'To Walter and his wife!' says Mr Dombey. 'Florence, my child' -
and turns to kiss her.

'To Walter and his wife!' says Mr Toots.

'To Wal'r and his wife!' exclaims the Captain. 'Hooroar!' and the
Captain exhibiting a strong desire to clink his glass against some
other glass, Mr Dombey, with a ready hand, holds out his. The others
follow; and there is a blithe and merry ringing, as of a little peal
of marriage bells.


Other buried wine grows older, as the old Madeira did in its time;
and dust and cobwebs thicken on the bottles.

Mr Dombey is a white-haired gentleman, whose face bears heavy marks
of care and suffering; but they are traces of a storm that has passed
on for ever, and left a clear evening in its track.

Ambitious projects trouble him no more. His only pride is in his
daughter and her husband. He has a silent, thoughtful, quiet manner,
and is always with his daughter. Miss Tox is not infrequently of the
family party, and is quite devoted to it, and a great favourite. Her
admiration of her once stately patron is, and has been ever since the
morning of her shock in Princess's Place, platonic, but not weakened
in the least.

Nothing has drifted to him from the wreck of his fortunes, but a
certain annual sum that comes he knows not how, with an earnest
entreaty that he will not seek to discover, and with the assurance
that it is a debt, and an act of reparation. He has consulted with his
old clerk about this, who is clear it may be honourably accepted, and
has no doubt it arises out of some forgotten transaction in the times
of the old House.

That hazel-eyed bachelor, a bachelor no more, is married now, and
to the sister of the grey-haired Junior. He visits his old chief
sometimes, but seldom. There is a reason in the greyhaired Junior's
history, and yet a stronger reason in his name, why he should keep
retired from his old employer; and as he lives with his sister and her
husband, they participate in that retirement. Walter sees them
sometimes - Florence too - and the pleasant house resounds with
profound duets arranged for the Piano-Forte and Violoncello, and with
the labours of Harmonious Blacksmiths.

And how goes the wooden Midshipman in these changed days? Why, here
he still is, right leg foremost, hard at work upon the hackney
coaches, and more on the alert than ever, being newly painted from his
cocked hat to his buckled shoes; and up above him, in golden
characters, these names shine refulgent, GILLS AND CUTTLE.

Not another stroke of business does the Midshipman achieve beyond
his usual easy trade. But they do say, in a circuit of some half-mile
round the blue umbrella in Leadenhall Market, that some of Mr Gills's
old investments are coming out wonderfully well; and that instead of
being behind the time in those respects, as he supposed, he was, in
truth, a little before it, and had to wait the fulness of the time and
the design. The whisper is that Mr Gills's money has begun to turn
itself, and that it is turning itself over and over pretty briskly.
Certain it is that, standing at his shop-door, in his coffee-coloured
suit, with his chronometer in his pocket, and his spectacles on his
forehead, he don't appear to break his heart at customers not coming,
but looks very jovial and contented, though full as misty as of yore.

As to his partner, Captain Cuttle, there is a fiction of a business
in the Captain's mind which is better than any reality. The Captain is
as satisfied of the Midshipman's importance to the commerce and
navigation of the country, as he could possibly be, if no ship left
the Port of London without the Midshipman's assistance. His delight in
his own name over the door, is inexhaustible. He crosses the street,
twenty times a day, to look at it from the other side of the way; and
invariably says, on these occasions, 'Ed'ard Cuttle, my lad, if your
mother could ha' know'd as you would ever be a man o' science, the
good old creetur would ha' been took aback in-deed!'

But here is Mr Toots descending on the Midshipman with violent
rapidity, and Mr Toots's face is very red as he bursts into the little
parlour.

'Captain Gills,' says Mr Toots, 'and Mr Sols, I am happy to inform
you that Mrs Toots has had an increase to her family.

'And it does her credit!' cries the Captain.

'I give you joy, Mr Toots!' says old Sol.

'Thank'ee,' chuckles Mr Toots, 'I'm very much obliged to you. I
knew that you'd be glad to hear, and so I came down myself. We're
positively getting on, you know. There's Florence, and Susan, and now
here's another little stranger.'

'A female stranger?' inquires the Captain.

'Yes, Captain Gills,' says Mr Toots, 'and I'm glad of it. The
oftener we can repeat that most extraordinary woman, my opinion is,
the better!'

'Stand by!' says the Captain, turning to the old case-bottle with
no throat - for it is evening, and the Midshipman's usual moderate
provision of pipes and glasses is on the board. 'Here's to her, and
may she have ever so many more!'

'Thank'ee, Captain Gills,' says the delighted Mr Toots. 'I echo the
sentiment. If you'll allow me, as my so doing cannot be unpleasant to
anybody, under the circumstances, I think I'll take a pipe.'

Mr Toots begins to smoke, accordingly, and in the openness of his
heart is very loquacious.

'Of all the remarkable instances that that delightful woman has
given of her excellent sense, Captain Gills and Mr Sols,' said Mr
Toots, 'I think none is more remarkable than the perfection with which
she has understood my devotion to Miss Dombey.'

Both his auditors assent.

'Because you know,' says Mr Toots, 'I have never changed my
sentiments towards Miss Dombey. They are the same as ever. She is the
same bright vision to me, at present, that she was before I made
Walters's acquaintance. When Mrs Toots and myself first began to talk
of - in short, of the tender passion, you know, Captain Gills.'

'Ay, ay, my lad,' says the Captain, 'as makes us all slue round -
for which you'll overhaul the book - '

'I shall certainly do so, Captain Gills,' says Mr Toots, with great
earnestness; 'when we first began to mention such subjects, I
explained that I was what you may call a Blighted Flower, you know.'

The Captain approves of this figure greatly; and murmurs that no
flower as blows, is like the rose.

'But Lord bless me,' pursues Mr Toots, 'she was as entirely
conscious of the state of my feelings as I was myself. There was
nothing I could tell her. She was the only person who could have stood
between me and the silent Tomb, and she did it, in a manner to command
my everlasting admiration. She knows that there's nobody in the world
I look up to, as I do to Miss Dombey. Knows that there's nothing on
earth I wouldn't do for Miss Dombey. She knows that I consider Miss
Dombey the most beautiful, the most amiable, the most angelic of her
sex. What is her observation upon that? The perfection of sense. "My
dear, you're right. I think so too."'

'And so do I!' says the Captain.

'So do I,' says Sol Gills.

'Then,' resumes Mr Toots, after some contemplative pulling at his
pipe, during which his visage has expressed the most contented
reflection, 'what an observant woman my wife is! What sagacity she
possesses! What remarks she makes! It was only last night, when we
were sitting in the enjoyment of connubial bliss - which, upon my word
and honour, is a feeble term to express my feelings in the society of
my wife - that she said how remarkable it was to consider the present
position of our friend Walters. "Here," observes my wife, "he is,
released from sea-going, after that first long voyage with his young
bride" - as you know he was, Mr Sols.'

'Quite true,' says the old Instrument-maker, rubbing his hands.

"'Here he is," says my wife, "released from that, immediately;
appointed by the same establishment to a post of great trust and
confidence at home; showing himself again worthy; mounting up the
ladder with the greatest expedition; beloved by everybody; assisted by
his uncle at the very best possible time of his fortunes" - which I
think is the case, Mr Sols? My wife is always correct.'

'Why yes, yes - some of our lost ships, freighted with gold, have
come home, truly,' returns old Sol, laughing. 'Small craft, Mr Toots,
but serviceable to my boy!'

'Exactly so,' says Mr Toots. 'You'll never find my wife wrong.
"Here he is," says that most remarkable woman, "so situated, - and
what follows? What follows?" observed Mrs Toots. Now pray remark,
Captain Gills, and Mr Sols, the depth of my wife's penetration. "Why
that, under the very eye of Mr Dombey, there is a foundation going on,
upon which a - an Edifice;" that was Mrs Toots's word,' says Mr Toots
exultingly, "'is gradually rising, perhaps to equal, perhaps excel,
that of which he was once the head, and the small beginnings of which
(a common fault, but a bad one, Mrs Toots said) escaped his memory.
Thus," said my wife, "from his daughter, after all, another Dombey and
Son will ascend" - no "rise;" that was Mrs Toots's word -
"triumphant!"'

Mr Toots, with the assistance of his pipe - which he is extremely
glad to devote to oratorical purposes, as its proper use affects him
with a very uncomfortable sensation - does such grand justice to this
prophetic sentence of his wife's, that the Captain, throwing away his
glazed hat in a state of the greatest excitement, cries:

'Sol Gills, you man of science and my ould pardner, what did I tell
Wal'r to overhaul on that there night when he first took to business?
Was it this here quotation, "Turn again Whittington, Lord Mayor of
London, and when you are old you will never depart from it". Was it
them words, Sol Gills?'

'It certainly was, Ned,' replied the old Instrument-maker. 'I
remember well.'

'Then I tell you what,' says the Captain, leaning back in his
chair, and composing his chest for a prodigious roar. 'I'll give you
Lovely Peg right through; and stand by, both on you, for the chorus!'


Buried wine grows older, as the old Madeira did, in its time; and
dust and cobwebs thicken on the bottles.

Autumn days are shining, and on the sea-beach there are often a
young lady, and a white-haired gentleman. With them, or near them, are
two children: boy and girl. And an old dog is generally in their
company.

The white-haired gentleman walks with the little boy, talks with
him, helps him in his play, attends upon him, watches him as if he
were the object of his life. If he be thoughtful, the white-haired
gentleman is thoughtful too; and sometimes when the child is sitting
by his side, and looks up in his face, asking him questions, he takes
the tiny hand in his, and holding it, forgets to answer. Then the
child says:

'What, grandpa! Am I so like my poor little Uncle again?'

'Yes, Paul. But he was weak, and you are very strong.'

'Oh yes, I am very strong.'

'And he lay on a little bed beside the sea, and you can run about.'

And so they range away again, busily, for the white-haired
gentleman likes best to see the child free and stirring; and as they
go about together, the story of the bond between them goes about, and
follows them.

But no one, except Florence, knows the measure of the white-haired
gentleman's affection for the girl. That story never goes about. The
child herself almost wonders at a certain secrecy he keeps in it. He
hoards her in his heart. He cannot bear to see a cloud upon her face.
He cannot bear to see her sit apart. He fancies that she feels a
slight, when there is none. He steals away to look at her, in her
sleep. It pleases him to have her come, and wake him in the morning.
He is fondest of her and most loving to her, when there is no creature
by. The child says then, sometimes:

'Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?'

He only answers, 'Little Florence! little Florence!' and smooths
away the curls that shade her earnest eyes.

The voices in the waves speak low to him of Florence, day and night
- plainest when he, his blooming daughter, and her husband, beside
them in the evening, or sit at an open window, listening to their
roar. They speak to him of Florence and his altered heart; of Florence
and their ceaseless murmuring to her of the love, eternal and
illimitable, extending still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the
invisible country far away.

Never from the mighty sea may voices rise too late, to come between
us and the unseen region on the other shore! Better, far better, that
they whispered of that region in our childish ears, and the swift
river hurried us away!




End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Domby and Son, by Dickens





End of the

PREFACE OF 1848

I cannot forego my usual opportunity of saying
farewell to my readers in this greetingplace,
though I have only to acknowledge the unbounded
warmth and earnestness of their sympathy in every
stage of the journey we have just concluded.

If any of them have felt a sorrow in one of the
principal incidents on which this fiction turns, I
hope it may be a sorrow of that sort which endears
the sharers in it, one to another. This is not
unselfish in me. I may claim to have felt it, at least
as much as anybody else; and I would fain be
remembered kindly for my part in the experience.


DEVONSHIRE TERRACE,
Twenty-Fourth March, 1848.


PREFACE OF 1867

I make so bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of
correctly observing the characters of men, is a rare one. I have not
even found, within my experience, that the faculty (or the habit) of
correctly observing so much as the faces of men, is a general one
by any means. The two commonest mistakes in judgement that I
suppose to arise from the former default, are, the confounding of
shyness with arrogance - a very common mistake indeed - and the
not understanding that an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual
struggle with itself.

Mr Dombey undergoes no violent change, either in this book, or
in real life. A sense of his injustice is within him, all along. The
more he represses it, the more unjust he necessarily is. Internal
shame and external circumstances may bring the contest to a close
in a week, or a day; but, it has been a contest for years, and is only
fought out after a long balance of victory.

I began this book by the Lake of Geneva, and went on with it
for some months in France, before pursuing it in England. The
association between the writing and the place of writing is so
curiously strong in my mind, that at this day, although I know, in
my fancy, every stair in the little midshipman's house, and could
swear to every pew in the church in which Florence was married,
or to every young gentleman's bedstead in Doctor Blimber's
establishment, I yet confusedly imagine Captain Cuttle as secluding
himself from Mrs MacStinger among the mountains of Switzerland.
Similarly, when I am reminded by any chance of what it was
that the waves were always saying, my remembrance wanders for
a whole winter night about the streets of Paris - as I restlessly did
with a heavy heart, on the night when I had written the chapter in
which my little friend and I parted company.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Domby and Son, by Dickens

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Doctor Marigold

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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
Stories" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





DOCTOR MARIGOLD




I am a Cheap Jack, and my own father's name was Willum Marigold.  It
was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but
my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum.  On which
point I content myself with looking at the argument this way:  If a
man is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much
is he allowed to know in a land of slavery?  As to looking at the
argument through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come
into the world before Registers come up much,--and went out of it
too.  They wouldn't have been greatly in his line neither, if they
had chanced to come up before him.

I was born on the Queen's highway, but it was the King's at that
time.  A doctor was fetched to my own mother by my own father, when
it took place on a common; and in consequence of his being a very
kind gentleman, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named
Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to him.  There you have me.
Doctor Marigold.

I am at present a middle-aged man of a broadish build, in cords,
leggings, and a sleeved waistcoat the strings of which is always
gone behind.  Repair them how you will, they go like fiddle-strings.
You have been to the theatre, and you have seen one of the wiolin-
players screw up his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been
whispering the secret to him that it feared it was out of order, and
then you have heard it snap.  That's as exactly similar to my
waistcoat as a waistcoat and a wiolin can be like one another.

I am partial to a white hat, and I like a shawl round my neck wore
loose and easy.  Sitting down is my favourite posture.  If I have a
taste in point of personal jewelry, it is mother-of-pearl buttons.
There you have me again, as large as life.

The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you'll guess that my father
was a Cheap Jack before me.  You are right.  He was.  It was a
pretty tray.  It represented a large lady going along a serpentining
up-hill gravel-walk, to attend a little church.  Two swans had
likewise come astray with the same intentions.  When I call her a
large lady, I don't mean in point of breadth, for there she fell
below my views, but she more than made it up in heighth; her heighth
and slimness was--in short THE heighth of both.

I often saw that tray, after I was the innocently smiling cause (or
more likely screeching one) of the doctor's standing it up on a
table against the wall in his consulting-room.  Whenever my own
father and mother were in that part of the country, I used to put my
head (I have heard my own mother say it was flaxen curls at that
time, though you wouldn't know an old hearth-broom from it now till
you come to the handle, and found it wasn't me) in at the doctor's
door, and the doctor was always glad to see me, and said, "Aha, my
brother practitioner!  Come in, little M.D.  How are your
inclinations as to sixpence?"

You can't go on for ever, you'll find, nor yet could my father nor
yet my mother.  If you don't go off as a whole when you are about
due, you're liable to go off in part, and two to one your head's the
part.  Gradually my father went off his, and my mother went off
hers.  It was in a harmless way, but it put out the family where I
boarded them.  The old couple, though retired, got to be wholly and
solely devoted to the Cheap Jack business, and were always selling
the family off.  Whenever the cloth was laid for dinner, my father
began rattling the plates and dishes, as we do in our line when we
put up crockery for a bid, only he had lost the trick of it, and
mostly let 'em drop and broke 'em.  As the old lady had been used to
sit in the cart, and hand the articles out one by one to the old
gentleman on the footboard to sell, just in the same way she handed
him every item of the family's property, and they disposed of it in
their own imaginations from morning to night.  At last the old
gentleman, lying bedridden in the same room with the old lady, cries
out in the old patter, fluent, after having been silent for two days
and nights:  "Now here, my jolly companions every one,--which the
Nightingale club in a village was held, At the sign of the Cabbage
and Shears, Where the singers no doubt would have greatly excelled,
But for want of taste, voices and ears,--now, here, my jolly
companions, every one, is a working model of a used-up old Cheap
Jack, without a tooth in his head, and with a pain in every bone:
so like life that it would be just as good if it wasn't better, just
as bad if it wasn't worse, and just as new if it wasn't worn out.
Bid for the working model of the old Cheap Jack, who has drunk more
gunpowder-tea with the ladies in his time than would blow the lid
off a washerwoman's copper, and carry it as many thousands of miles
higher than the moon as naught nix naught, divided by the national
debt, carry nothing to the poor-rates, three under, and two over.
Now, my hearts of oak and men of straw, what do you say for the lot?
Two shillings, a shilling, tenpence, eightpence, sixpence,
fourpence.  Twopence?  Who said twopence?  The gentleman in the
scarecrow's hat?  I am ashamed of the gentleman in the scarecrow's
hat.  I really am ashamed of him for his want of public spirit.  Now
I'll tell you what I'll do with you.  Come!  I'll throw you in a
working model of a old woman that was married to the old Cheap Jack
so long ago that upon my word and honour it took place in Noah's
Ark, before the Unicorn could get in to forbid the banns by blowing
a tune upon his horn.  There now!  Come!  What do you say for both?
I'll tell you what I'll do with you.  I don't bear you malice for
being so backward.  Here!  If you make me a bid that'll only reflect
a little credit on your town, I'll throw you in a warming-pan for
nothing, and lend you a toasting-fork for life.  Now come; what do
you say after that splendid offer?  Say two pound, say thirty
shillings, say a pound, say ten shillings, say five, say two and
six.  You don't say even two and six?  You say two and three?  No.
You shan't have the lot for two and three.  I'd sooner give it to
you, if you was good-looking enough.  Here!  Missis!  Chuck the old
man and woman into the cart, put the horse to, and drive 'em away
and bury 'em!"  Such were the last words of Willum Marigold, my own
father, and they were carried out, by him and by his wife, my own
mother, on one and the same day, as I ought to know, having followed
as mourner.

My father had been a lovely one in his time at the Cheap Jack work,
as his dying observations went to prove.  But I top him.  I don't
say it because it's myself, but because it has been universally
acknowledged by all that has had the means of comparison.  I have
worked at it.  I have measured myself against other public
speakers,--Members of Parliament, Platforms, Pulpits, Counsel
learned in the law,--and where I have found 'em good, I have took a
bit of imagination from 'em, and where I have found 'em bad, I have
let 'em alone.  Now I'll tell you what.  I mean to go down into my
grave declaring that of all the callings ill used in Great Britain,
the Cheap Jack calling is the worst used.  Why ain't we a
profession?  Why ain't we endowed with privileges?  Why are we
forced to take out a hawker's license, when no such thing is
expected of the political hawkers?  Where's the difference betwixt
us?  Except that we are Cheap Jacks and they are Dear Jacks, I don't
see any difference but what's in our favour.

For look here!  Say it's election time.  I am on the footboard of my
cart in the market-place, on a Saturday night.  I put up a general
miscellaneous lot.  I say:  "Now here, my free and independent
woters, I'm a going to give you such a chance as you never had in
all your born days, nor yet the days preceding.  Now I'll show you
what I am a going to do with you.  Here's a pair of razors that'll
shave you closer than the Board of Guardians; here's a flat-iron
worth its weight in gold; here's a frying-pan artificially flavoured
with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you've only got for
the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there you
are replete with animal food; here's a genuine chronometer watch in
such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when
you come home late from a social meeting, and rouse your wife and
family, and save up your knocker for the postman; and here's half-a-
dozen dinner plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm baby
when it's fractious.  Stop!  I'll throw in another article, and I'll
give you that, and it's a rolling-pin; and if the baby can only get
it well into its mouth when its teeth is coming and rub the gums
once with it, they'll come through double, in a fit of laughter
equal to being tickled.  Stop again!  I'll throw you in another
article, because I don't like the looks of you, for you haven't the
appearance of buyers unless I lose by you, and because I'd rather
lose than not take money to-night, and that's a looking-glass in
which you may see how ugly you look when you don't bid.  What do you
say now?  Come!  Do you say a pound?  Not you, for you haven't got
it.  Do you say ten shillings?  Not you, for you owe more to the
tallyman.  Well then, I'll tell you what I'll do with you.  I'll
heap 'em all on the footboard of the cart,--there they are! razors,
flat watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and away for four shillings,
and I'll give you sixpence for your trouble!"  This is me, the Cheap
Jack.  But on the Monday morning, in the same market-place, comes
the Dear Jack on the hustings--HIS cart--and, what does HE say?
"Now my free and independent woters, I am a going to give you such a
chance" (he begins just like me) "as you never had in all your born
days, and that's the chance of sending Myself to Parliament.  Now
I'll tell you what I am a going to do for you.  Here's the interests
of this magnificent town promoted above all the rest of the
civilised and uncivilised earth.  Here's your railways carried, and
your neighbours' railways jockeyed.  Here's all your sons in the
Post-office.  Here's Britannia smiling on you.  Here's the eyes of
Europe on you.  Here's uniwersal prosperity for you, repletion of
animal food, golden cornfields, gladsome homesteads, and rounds of
applause from your own hearts, all in one lot, and that's myself.
Will you take me as I stand?  You won't?  Well, then, I'll tell you
what I'll do with you.  Come now!  I'll throw you in anything you
ask for.  There!  Church-rates, abolition of more malt tax, no malt
tax, universal education to the highest mark, or uniwersal ignorance
to the lowest, total abolition of flogging in the army or a dozen
for every private once a month all round, Wrongs of Men or Rights of
Women--only say which it shall be, take 'em or leave 'em, and I'm of
your opinion altogether, and the lot's your own on your own terms.
There!  You won't take it yet!  Well, then, I'll tell you what I'll
do with you.  Come!  You ARE such free and independent woters, and I
am so proud of you,--you ARE such a noble and enlightened
constituency, and I AM so ambitious of the honour and dignity of
being your member, which is by far the highest level to which the
wings of the human mind can soar,--that I'll tell you what I'll do
with you.  I'll throw you in all the public-houses in your
magnificent town for nothing.  Will that content you?  It won't?
You won't take the lot yet?  Well, then, before I put the horse in
and drive away, and make the offer to the next most magnificent town
that can be discovered, I'll tell you what I'll do.  Take the lot,
and I'll drop two thousand pound in the streets of your magnificent
town for them to pick up that can.  Not enough?  Now look here.
This is the very furthest that I'm a going to.  I'll make it two
thousand five hundred.  And still you won't?  Here, missis!  Put the
horse--no, stop half a moment, I shouldn't like to turn my back upon
you neither for a trifle, I'll make it two thousand seven hundred
and fifty pound.  There!  Take the lot on your own terms, and I'll
count out two thousand seven hundred and fifty pound on the foot-
board of the cart, to be dropped in the streets of your magnificent
town for them to pick up that can.  What do you say?  Come now!  You
won't do better, and you may do worse.  You take it?  Hooray!  Sold
again, and got the seat!"

These Dear Jacks soap the people shameful, but we Cheap Jacks don't.
We tell 'em the truth about themselves to their faces, and scorn to
court 'em.  As to wenturesomeness in the way of puffing up the lots,
the Dear Jacks beat us hollow.  It is considered in the Cheap Jack
calling, that better patter can be made out of a gun than any
article we put up from the cart, except a pair of spectacles.  I
often hold forth about a gun for a quarter of an hour, and feel as
if I need never leave off.  But when I tell 'em what the gun can do,
and what the gun has brought down, I never go half so far as the
Dear Jacks do when they make speeches in praise of THEIR guns--their
great guns that set 'em on to do it.  Besides, I'm in business for
myself:  I ain't sent down into the market-place to order, as they
are.  Besides, again, my guns don't know what I say in their
laudation, and their guns do, and the whole concern of 'em have
reason to be sick and ashamed all round.  These are some of my
arguments for declaring that the Cheap Jack calling is treated ill
in Great Britain, and for turning warm when I think of the other
Jacks in question setting themselves up to pretend to look down upon
it.

I courted my wife from the footboard of the cart.  I did indeed.
She was a Suffolk young woman, and it was in Ipswich marketplace
right opposite the corn-chandler's shop.  I had noticed her up at a
window last Saturday that was, appreciating highly.  I had took to
her, and I had said to myself, "If not already disposed of, I'll
have that lot."  Next Saturday that come, I pitched the cart on the
same pitch, and I was in very high feather indeed, keeping 'em
laughing the whole of the time, and getting off the goods briskly.
At last I took out of my waistcoat-pocket a small lot wrapped in
soft paper, and I put it this way (looking up at the window where
she was).  "Now here, my blooming English maidens, is an article,
the last article of the present evening's sale, which I offer to
only you, the lovely Suffolk Dumplings biling over with beauty, and
I won't take a bid of a thousand pounds for from any man alive.  Now
what is it?  Why, I'll tell you what it is.  It's made of fine gold,
and it's not broke, though there's a hole in the middle of it, and
it's stronger than any fetter that ever was forged, though it's
smaller than any finger in my set of ten.  Why ten?  Because, when
my parents made over my property to me, I tell you true, there was
twelve sheets, twelve towels, twelve table-cloths, twelve knives,
twelve forks, twelve tablespoons, and twelve teaspoons, but my set
of fingers was two short of a dozen, and could never since be
matched.  Now what else is it?  Come, I'll tell you.  It's a hoop of
solid gold, wrapped in a silver curl-paper, that I myself took off
the shining locks of the ever beautiful old lady in Threadneedle
Street, London city; I wouldn't tell you so if I hadn't the paper to
show, or you mightn't believe it even of me.  Now what else is it?
It's a man-trap and a handcuff, the parish stocks and a leg-lock,
all in gold and all in one.  Now what else is it?  It's a wedding-
ring.  Now I'll tell you what I'm a going to do with it.  I'm not a
going to offer this lot for money; but I mean to give it to the next
of you beauties that laughs, and I'll pay her a visit to-morrow
morning at exactly half after nine o'clock as the chimes go, and
I'll take her out for a walk to put up the banns."  She laughed, and
got the ring handed up to her.  When I called in the morning, she
says, "O dear!  It's never you, and you never mean it?"  "It's ever
me," says I, "and I am ever yours, and I ever mean it."  So we got
married, after being put up three times--which, by the bye, is quite
in the Cheap Jack way again, and shows once more how the Cheap Jack
customs pervade society.

She wasn't a bad wife, but she had a temper.  If she could have
parted with that one article at a sacrifice, I wouldn't have swopped
her away in exchange for any other woman in England.  Not that I
ever did swop her away, for we lived together till she died, and
that was thirteen year.  Now, my lords and ladies and gentlefolks
all, I'll let you into a secret, though you won't believe it.
Thirteen year of temper in a Palace would try the worst of you, but
thirteen year of temper in a Cart would try the best of you.  You
are kept so very close to it in a cart, you see.  There's thousands
of couples among you getting on like sweet ile upon a whetstone in
houses five and six pairs of stairs high, that would go to the
Divorce Court in a cart.  Whether the jolting makes it worse, I
don't undertake to decide; but in a cart it does come home to you,
and stick to you.  Wiolence in a cart is SO wiolent, and aggrawation
in a cart is SO aggrawating.

We might have had such a pleasant life!  A roomy cart, with the
large goods hung outside, and the bed slung underneath it when on
the road, an iron pot and a kettle, a fireplace for the cold
weather, a chimney for the smoke, a hanging-shelf and a cupboard, a
dog and a horse.  What more do you want?  You draw off upon a bit of
turf in a green lane or by the roadside, you hobble your old horse
and turn him grazing, you light your fire upon the ashes of the last
visitors, you cook your stew, and you wouldn't call the Emperor of
France your father.  But have a temper in the cart, flinging
language and the hardest goods in stock at you, and where are you
then?  Put a name to your feelings.

My dog knew as well when she was on the turn as I did.  Before she
broke out, he would give a howl, and bolt.  How he knew it, was a
mystery to me; but the sure and certain knowledge of it would wake
him up out of his soundest sleep, and he would give a howl, and
bolt.  At such times I wished I was him.

The worst of it was, we had a daughter born to us, and I love
children with all my heart.  When she was in her furies she beat the
child.  This got to be so shocking, as the child got to be four or
five year old, that I have many a time gone on with my whip over my
shoulder, at the old horse's head, sobbing and crying worse than
ever little Sophy did.  For how could I prevent it?  Such a thing is
not to be tried with such a temper--in a cart--without coming to a
fight.  It's in the natural size and formation of a cart to bring it
to a fight.  And then the poor child got worse terrified than
before, as well as worse hurt generally, and her mother made
complaints to the next people we lighted on, and the word went
round, "Here's a wretch of a Cheap Jack been a beating his wife."

Little Sophy was such a brave child!  She grew to be quite devoted
to her poor father, though he could do so little to help her.  She
had a wonderful quantity of shining dark hair, all curling natural
about her.  It is quite astonishing to me now, that I didn't go
tearing mad when I used to see her run from her mother before the
cart, and her mother catch her by this hair, and pull her down by
it, and beat her.

Such a brave child I said she was!  Ah! with reason.

"Don't you mind next time, father dear," she would whisper to me,
with her little face still flushed, and her bright eyes still wet;
"if I don't cry out, you may know I am not much hurt.  And even if I
do cry out, it will only be to get mother to let go and leave off."
What I have seen the little spirit bear--for me--without crying out!

Yet in other respects her mother took great care of her.  Her
clothes were always clean and neat, and her mother was never tired
of working at 'em.  Such is the inconsistency in things.  Our being
down in the marsh country in unhealthy weather, I consider the cause
of Sophy's taking bad low fever; but however she took it, once she
got it she turned away from her mother for evermore, and nothing
would persuade her to be touched by her mother's hand.  She would
shiver and say, "No, no, no," when it was offered at, and would hide
her face on my shoulder, and hold me tighter round the neck.

The Cheap Jack business had been worse than ever I had known it,
what with one thing and what with another (and not least with
railroads, which will cut it all to pieces, I expect, at last), and
I was run dry of money.  For which reason, one night at that period
of little Sophy's being so bad, either we must have come to a dead-
lock for victuals and drink, or I must have pitched the cart as I
did.

I couldn't get the dear child to lie down or leave go of me, and
indeed I hadn't the heart to try, so I stepped out on the footboard
with her holding round my neck.  They all set up a laugh when they
see us, and one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) made the
bidding, "Tuppence for her!"

"Now, you country boobies," says I, feeling as if my heart was a
heavy weight at the end of a broken sashline, "I give you notice
that I am a going to charm the money out of your pockets, and to
give you so much more than your money's worth that you'll only
persuade yourselves to draw your Saturday night's wages ever again
arterwards by the hopes of meeting me to lay 'em out with, which you
never will, and why not?  Because I've made my fortunes by selling
my goods on a large scale for seventy-five per cent. less than I
give for 'em, and I am consequently to be elevated to the House of
Peers next week, by the title of the Duke of Cheap and Markis
Jackaloorul.  Now let's know what you want to-night, and you shall
have it.  But first of all, shall I tell you why I have got this
little girl round my neck?  You don't want to know?  Then you shall.
She belongs to the Fairies.  She's a fortune-teller.  She can tell
me all about you in a whisper, and can put me up to whether you're
going to buy a lot or leave it.  Now do you want a saw?  No, she
says you don't, because you're too clumsy to use one.  Else here's a
saw which would be a lifelong blessing to a handy man, at four
shillings, at three and six, at three, at two and six, at two, at
eighteen-pence.  But none of you shall have it at any price, on
account of your well-known awkwardness, which would make it
manslaughter.  The same objection applies to this set of three
planes which I won't let you have neither, so don't bid for 'em.
Now I am a going to ask her what you do want."  (Then I whispered,
"Your head burns so, that I am afraid it hurts you bad, my pet," and
she answered, without opening her heavy eyes, "Just a little,
father.")  "O!  This little fortune-teller says it's a memorandum-
book you want.  Then why didn't you mention it?  Here it is.  Look
at it.  Two hundred superfine hot-pressed wire-wove pages--if you
don't believe me, count 'em--ready ruled for your expenses, an
everlastingly pointed pencil to put 'em down with, a double-bladed
penknife to scratch 'em out with, a book of printed tables to
calculate your income with, and a camp-stool to sit down upon while
you give your mind to it!  Stop!  And an umbrella to keep the moon
off when you give your mind to it on a pitch-dark night.  Now I
won't ask you how much for the lot, but how little?  How little are
you thinking of?  Don't be ashamed to mention it, because my
fortune-teller knows already."  (Then making believe to whisper, I
kissed her,--and she kissed me.)  "Why, she says you are thinking of
as little as three and threepence!  I couldn't have believed it,
even of you, unless she told me.  Three and threepence!  And a set
of printed tables in the lot that'll calculate your income up to
forty thousand a year!  With an income of forty thousand a year, you
grudge three and sixpence.  Well then, I'll tell you my opinion.  I
so despise the threepence, that I'd sooner take three shillings.
There.  For three shillings, three shillings, three shillings!
Gone.  Hand 'em over to the lucky man."

As there had been no bid at all, everybody looked about and grinned
at everybody, while I touched little Sophy's face and asked her if
she felt faint, or giddy.  "Not very, father.  It will soon be
over."  Then turning from the pretty patient eyes, which were opened
now, and seeing nothing but grins across my lighted grease-pot, I
went on again in my Cheap Jack style.  "Where's the butcher?"  (My
sorrowful eye had just caught sight of a fat young butcher on the
outside of the crowd.)  "She says the good luck is the butcher's.
Where is he?"  Everybody handed on the blushing butcher to the
front, and there was a roar, and the butcher felt himself obliged to
put his hand in his pocket, and take the lot.  The party so picked
out, in general, does feel obliged to take the lot--good four times
out of six.  Then we had another lot, the counterpart of that one,
and sold it sixpence cheaper, which is always wery much enjoyed.
Then we had the spectacles.  It ain't a special profitable lot, but
I put 'em on, and I see what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is
going to take off the taxes, and I see what the sweetheart of the
young woman in the shawl is doing at home, and I see what the
Bishops has got for dinner, and a deal more that seldom fails to
fetch em 'up in their spirits; and the better their spirits, the
better their bids.  Then we had the ladies' lot--the teapot, tea-
caddy, glass sugar-basin, half-a-dozen spoons, and caudle-cup--and
all the time I was making similar excuses to give a look or two and
say a word or two to my poor child.  It was while the second ladies'
lot was holding 'em enchained that I felt her lift herself a little
on my shoulder, to look across the dark street.  "What troubles you,
darling?"  "Nothing troubles me, father.  I am not at all troubled.
But don't I see a pretty churchyard over there?"  "Yes, my dear."
"Kiss me twice, dear father, and lay me down to rest upon that
churchyard grass so soft and green."  I staggered back into the cart
with her head dropped on my shoulder, and I says to her mother,
"Quick.  Shut the door!  Don't let those laughing people see!"
"What's the matter?" she cries.  "O woman, woman," I tells her,
"you'll never catch my little Sophy by her hair again, for she has
flown away from you!"

Maybe those were harder words than I meant 'em; but from that time
forth my wife took to brooding, and would sit in the cart or walk
beside it, hours at a stretch, with her arms crossed, and her eyes
looking on the ground.  When her furies took her (which was rather
seldomer than before) they took her in a new way, and she banged
herself about to that extent that I was forced to hold her.  She got
none the better for a little drink now and then, and through some
years I used to wonder, as I plodded along at the old horse's head,
whether there was many carts upon the road that held so much
dreariness as mine, for all my being looked up to as the King of the
Cheap Jacks.  So sad our lives went on till one summer evening,
when, as we were coming into Exeter, out of the farther West of
England, we saw a woman beating a child in a cruel manner, who
screamed, "Don't beat me!  O mother, mother, mother!"  Then my wife
stopped her ears, and ran away like a wild thing, and next day she
was found in the river.

Me and my dog were all the company left in the cart now; and the dog
learned to give a short bark when they wouldn't bid, and to give
another and a nod of his head when I asked him, "Who said half a
crown?  Are you the gentleman, sir, that offered half a crown?"  He
attained to an immense height of popularity, and I shall always
believe taught himself entirely out of his own head to growl at any
person in the crowd that bid as low as sixpence.  But he got to be
well on in years, and one night when I was conwulsing York with the
spectacles, he took a conwulsion on his own account upon the very
footboard by me, and it finished him.

Being naturally of a tender turn, I had dreadful lonely feelings on
me arter this.  I conquered 'em at selling times, having a
reputation to keep (not to mention keeping myself), but they got me
down in private, and rolled upon me.  That's often the way with us
public characters.  See us on the footboard, and you'd give pretty
well anything you possess to be us.  See us off the footboard, and
you'd add a trifle to be off your bargain.  It was under those
circumstances that I come acquainted with a giant.  I might have
been too high to fall into conversation with him, had it not been
for my lonely feelings.  For the general rule is, going round the
country, to draw the line at dressing up.  When a man can't trust
his getting a living to his undisguised abilities, you consider him
below your sort.  And this giant when on view figured as a Roman.

He was a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance
betwixt his extremities.  He had a little head and less in it, he
had weak eyes and weak knees, and altogether you couldn't look at
him without feeling that there was greatly too much of him both for
his joints and his mind.  But he was an amiable though timid young
man (his mother let him out, and spent the money), and we come
acquainted when he was walking to ease the horse betwixt two fairs.
He was called Rinaldo di Velasco, his name being Pickleson.

This giant, otherwise Pickleson, mentioned to me under the seal of
confidence that, beyond his being a burden to himself, his life was
made a burden to him by the cruelty of his master towards a step-
daughter who was deaf and dumb.  Her mother was dead, and she had no
living soul to take her part, and was used most hard.  She travelled
with his master's caravan only because there was nowhere to leave
her, and this giant, otherwise Pickleson, did go so far as to
believe that his master often tried to lose her.  He was such a very
languid young man, that I don't know how long it didn't take him to
get this story out, but it passed through his defective circulation
to his top extremity in course of time.

When I heard this account from the giant, otherwise Pickleson, and
likewise that the poor girl had beautiful long dark hair, and was
often pulled down by it and beaten, I couldn't see the giant through
what stood in my eyes.  Having wiped 'em, I give him sixpence (for
he was kept as short as he was long), and he laid it out in two
three-penn'orths of gin-and-water, which so brisked him up, that he
sang the Favourite Comic of Shivery Shakey, ain't it cold?--a
popular effect which his master had tried every other means to get
out of him as a Roman wholly in vain.

His master's name was Mim, a wery hoarse man, and I knew him to
speak to.  I went to that Fair as a mere civilian, leaving the cart
outside the town, and I looked about the back of the Vans while the
performing was going on, and at last, sitting dozing against a muddy
cart-wheel, I come upon the poor girl who was deaf and dumb.  At the
first look I might almost have judged that she had escaped from the
Wild Beast Show; but at the second I thought better of her, and
thought that if she was more cared for and more kindly used she
would be like my child.  She was just the same age that my own
daughter would have been, if her pretty head had not fell down upon
my shoulder that unfortunate night.

To cut it short, I spoke confidential to Mim while he was beating
the gong outside betwixt two lots of Pickleson's publics, and I put
it to him, "She lies heavy on your own hands; what'll you take for
her?"  Mim was a most ferocious swearer.  Suppressing that part of
his reply which was much the longest part, his reply was, "A pair of
braces."  "Now I'll tell you," says I, "what I'm a going to do with
you.  I'm a going to fetch you half-a-dozen pair of the primest
braces in the cart, and then to take her away with me."  Says Mim
(again ferocious), "I'll believe it when I've got the goods, and no
sooner."  I made all the haste I could, lest he should think twice
of it, and the bargain was completed, which Pickleson he was thereby
so relieved in his mind that he come out at his little back door,
longways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in a whisper
among the wheels at parting.

It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel
in the cart.  I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever
towards me in the attitude of my own daughter.  We soon made out to
begin to understand one another, through the goodness of the
Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her.  In a
very little time she was wonderful fond of me.  You have no idea
what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have
been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have
mentioned as having once got the better of me.

You'd have laughed--or the rewerse--it's according to your
disposition--if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy.  At
first I was helped--you'd never guess by what--milestones.  I got
some large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of
bone, and saying we was going to WINDSOR, I give her those letters
in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same
letters in that same order again, and pointed towards the abode of
royalty.  Another time I give her CART, and then chalked the same
upon the cart.  Another time I give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a
corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat.  People that met us
might stare a bit and laugh, but what did I care, if she caught the
idea?  She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we
did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you!  At first she was a
little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of
royalty, but that soon wore off.

We had our signs, too, and they was hundreds in number.  Sometimes
she would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate
with me about something fresh,--how to ask me what she wanted
explained,--and then she was (or I thought she was; what does it
signify?) so like my child with those years added to her, that I
half-believed it was herself, trying to tell me where she had been
to up in the skies, and what she had seen since that unhappy night
when she flied away.  She had a pretty face, and now that there was
no one to drag at her bright dark hair, and it was all in order,
there was a something touching in her looks that made the cart most
peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancholy.  [N.B.  In
the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it lemonjolly, and it gets
a laugh.]

The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly
surprising.  When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart
unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes
when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or
articles I wanted.  And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for
joy.  And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she
was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged,
leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give me such heart
that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever, and I put
Pickleson down (by the name of Mim's Travelling Giant otherwise
Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will.

This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old.
By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole
duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching
than I could give her.  It drew a many tears on both sides when I
commenced explaining my views to her; but what's right is right, and
you can't neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.

So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf
and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to
speak to us, I says to him:  "Now I'll tell you what I'll do with
you, sir.  I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have
laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding.  This is my only daughter
(adopted), and you can't produce a deafer nor a dumber.  Teach her
the most that can be taught her in the shortest separation that can
be named,--state the figure for it,--and I am game to put the money
down.  I won't bate you a single farthing, sir, but I'll put down
the money here and now, and I'll thankfully throw you in a pound to
take it.  There!"  The gentleman smiled, and then, "Well, well,"
says he, "I must first know what she has learned already.  How do
you communicate with her?"  Then I showed him, and she wrote in
printed writing many names of things and so forth; and we held some
sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book
which the gentleman showed her, and which she was able to read.
"This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman; "is it possible
that you have been her only teacher?"  "I have been her only
teacher, sir," I says, "besides herself."  "Then," says the
gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, "you're
a clever fellow, and a good fellow."  This he makes known to Sophy,
who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.

We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my
name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it
come out that he was own nephew by the sister's side, if you'll
believe me, to the very Doctor that I was called after.  This made
our footing still easier, and he says to me:

"Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter
to know?"

"I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be,
considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read
whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure."

"My good fellow," urges the gentleman, opening his eyes wide, "why I
can't do that myself!"

I took his joke, and gave him a laugh (knowing by experience how
flat you fall without it), and I mended my words accordingly.

"What do you mean to do with her afterwards?" asks the gentleman,
with a sort of a doubtful eye.  "To take her about the country?"

"In the cart, sir, but only in the cart.  She will live a private
life, you understand, in the cart.  I should never think of bringing
her infirmities before the public.  I wouldn't make a show of her
for any money."

The gentleman nodded, and seemed to approve.

"Well," says he, "can you part with her for two years?"

"To do her that good,--yes, sir."

"There's another question," says the gentleman, looking towards
her,--"can she part with you for two years?"

I don't know that it was a harder matter of itself (for the other
was hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over.  However, she
was pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was
settled.  How it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I
left her at the door in the dark of an evening, I don't tell.  But I
know this; remembering that night, I shall never pass that same
establishment without a heartache and a swelling in the throat; and
I couldn't put you up the best of lots in sight of it with my usual
spirit,--no, not even the gun, nor the pair of spectacles,--for five
hundred pound reward from the Secretary of State for the Home
Department, and throw in the honour of putting my legs under his
mahogany arterwards.

Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old
loneliness, because there was a term put to it, however long to look
forward to; and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that
she belonged to me and I belonged to her.  Always planning for her
coming back, I bought in a few months' time another cart, and what
do you think I planned to do with it?  I'll tell you.  I planned to
fit it up with shelves and books for her reading, and to have a seat
in it where I could sit and see her read, and think that I had been
her first teacher.  Not hurrying over the job, I had the fittings
knocked together in contriving ways under my own inspection, and
here was her bed in a berth with curtains, and there was her
reading-table, and here was her writing-desk, and elsewhere was her
books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters, bindings and no
bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick 'em up for her
in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and East,
Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone
astray, Over the hills and far away.  And when I had got together
pretty well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new
scheme come into my head, which, as it turned out, kept my time and
attention a good deal employed, and helped me over the two years'
stile.

Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of
things.  I shouldn't wish, for instance, to go partners with
yourself in the Cheap Jack cart.  It's not that I mistrust you, but
that I'd rather know it was mine.  Similarly, very likely you'd
rather know it was yours.  Well!  A kind of a jealousy began to
creep into my mind when I reflected that all those books would have
been read by other people long before they was read by her.  It
seemed to take away from her being the owner of 'em like.  In this
way, the question got into my head:  Couldn't I have a book new-made
express for her, which she should be the first to read?

It pleased me, that thought did; and as I never was a man to let a
thought sleep (you must wake up all the whole family of thoughts
you've got and burn their nightcaps, or you won't do in the Cheap
Jack line), I set to work at it.  Considering that I was in the
habit of changing so much about the country, and that I should have
to find out a literary character here to make a deal with, and
another literary character there to make a deal with, as
opportunities presented, I hit on the plan that this same book
should be a general miscellaneous lot,--like the razors, flat-iron,
chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass,--
and shouldn't be offered as a single indiwidual article, like the
spectacles or the gun.  When I had come to that conclusion, I come
to another, which shall likewise be yours.

Often had I regretted that she never had heard me on the footboard,
and that she never could hear me.  It ain't that I am vain, but that
YOU don't like to put your own light under a bushel.  What's the
worth of your reputation, if you can't convey the reason for it to
the person you most wish to value it?  Now I'll put it to you.  Is
it worth sixpence, fippence, fourpence, threepence, twopence, a
penny, a halfpenny, a farthing?  No, it ain't.  Not worth a
farthing.  Very well, then.  My conclusion was that I would begin
her book with some account of myself.  So that, through reading a
specimen or two of me on the footboard, she might form an idea of my
merits there.  I was aware that I couldn't do myself justice.  A man
can't write his eye (at least I don't know how to), nor yet can a
man write his voice, nor the rate of his talk, nor the quickness of
his action, nor his general spicy way.  But he can write his turns
of speech, when he is a public speaker,--and indeed I have heard
that he very often does, before he speaks 'em.

Well!  Having formed that resolution, then come the question of a
name.  How did I hammer that hot iron into shape?  This way.  The
most difficult explanation I had ever had with her was, how I come
to be called Doctor, and yet was no Doctor.  After all, I felt that
I had failed of getting it correctly into her mind, with my utmost
pains.  But trusting to her improvement in the two years, I thought
that I might trust to her understanding it when she should come to
read it as put down by my own hand.  Then I thought I would try a
joke with her and watch how it took, by which of itself I might
fully judge of her understanding it.  We had first discovered the
mistake we had dropped into, through her having asked me to
prescribe for her when she had supposed me to be a Doctor in a
medical point of view; so thinks I, "Now, if I give this book the
name of my Prescriptions, and if she catches the idea that my only
Prescriptions are for her amusement and interest,--to make her laugh
in a pleasant way, or to make her cry in a pleasant way,--it will be
a delightful proof to both of us that we have got over our
difficulty."  It fell out to absolute perfection.  For when she saw
the book, as I had it got up,--the printed and pressed book,--lying
on her desk in her cart, and saw the title, DOCTOR MARIGOLD'S
PRESCRIPTIONS, she looked at me for a moment with astonishment, then
fluttered the leaves, then broke out a laughing in the charmingest
way, then felt her pulse and shook her head, then turned the pages
pretending to read them most attentive, then kissed the book to me,
and put it to her bosom with both her hands.  I never was better
pleased in all my life!

But let me not anticipate.  (I take that expression out of a lot of
romances I bought for her.  I never opened a single one of 'em--and
I have opened many--but I found the romancer saying "let me not
anticipate."  Which being so, I wonder why he did anticipate, or who
asked him to it.)  Let me not, I say, anticipate.  This same book
took up all my spare time.  It was no play to get the other articles
together in the general miscellaneous lot, but when it come to my
own article!  There!  I couldn't have believed the blotting, nor yet
the buckling to at it, nor the patience over it.  Which again is
like the footboard.  The public have no idea.

At last it was done, and the two years' time was gone after all the
other time before it, and where it's all gone to, who knows?  The
new cart was finished,--yellow outside, relieved with wermilion and
brass fittings,--the old horse was put in it, a new 'un and a boy
being laid on for the Cheap Jack cart,--and I cleaned myself up to
go and fetch her.  Bright cold weather it was, cart-chimneys
smoking, carts pitched private on a piece of waste ground over at
Wandsworth, where you may see 'em from the Sou'western Railway when
not upon the road.  (Look out of the right-hand window going down.)

"Marigold," says the gentleman, giving his hand hearty, "I am very
glad to see you."

"Yet I have my doubts, sir," says I, "if you can be half as glad to
see me as I am to see you."

"The time has appeared so long,--has it, Marigold?"

"I won't say that, sir, considering its real length; but--"

"What a start, my good fellow!"

Ah!  I should think it was!  Grown such a woman, so pretty, so
intelligent, so expressive!  I knew then that she must be really
like my child, or I could never have known her, standing quiet by
the door.

"You are affected," says the gentleman in a kindly manner.

"I feel, sir," says I, "that I am but a rough chap in a sleeved
waistcoat."

" I feel," says the gentleman, "that it was you who raised her from
misery and degradation, and brought her into communication with her
kind.  But why do we converse alone together, when we can converse
so well with her?  Address her in your own way."

"I am such a rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat, sir," says I, "and
she is such a graceful woman, and she stands so quiet at the door!"

"TRY if she moves at the old sign," says the gentleman.

They had got it up together o' purpose to please me!  For when I
give her the old sign, she rushed to my feet, and dropped upon her
knees, holding up her hands to me with pouring tears of love and
joy; and when I took her hands and lifted her, she clasped me round
the neck, and lay there; and I don't know what a fool I didn't make
of myself, until we all three settled down into talking without
sound, as if there was a something soft and pleasant spread over the
whole world for us.


[A portion is here omitted from the text, having reference to the
sketches contributed by other writers; but the reader will be
pleased to have what follows retained in a note:

"Now I'll tell you what I am a-going to do with you.  I am a-going
to offer you the general miscellaneous lot, her own book, never read
by anybody else but me, added to and completed by me after her first
reading of it, eight-and-forty printed pages, six-and-ninety
columns, Whiting's own work, Beaufort House to wit, thrown off by
the steam-ingine, best of paper, beautiful green wrapper, folded
like clean linen come home from the clear-starcher's, and so
exquisitely stitched that, regarded as a piece of needlework alone,
it's better than the sampler of a seamstress undergoing a
Competitive examination for Starvation before the Civil Service
Commissioners--and I offer the lot for what?  For eight pound?  Not
so much.  For six pound?  Less.  For four pound.  Why, I hardly
expect you to believe me, but that's the sum.  Four pound!  The
stitching alone cost half as much again.  Here's forty-eight
original pages, ninety-six original columns, for four pound.  You
want more for the money?  Take it.  Three whole pages of
advertisements of thrilling interest thrown in for nothing.  Read
'em and believe 'em.  More?  My best of wishes for your merry
Christmases and your happy New Years, your long lives and your true
prosperities.  Worth twenty pound good if they are delivered as I
send them.  Remember!  Here's a final prescription added, "To be
taken for life," which will tell you how the cart broke down, and
where the journey ended.  You think Four Pound too much?  And still
you think so?  Come!  I'll tell you what then.  Say Four Pence, and
keep the secret."]


So every item of my plan was crowned with success.  Our reunited
life was more than all that we had looked forward to.  Content and
joy went with us as the wheels of the two carts went round, and the
same stopped with us when the two carts stopped.  I was as pleased
and as proud as a Pug-Dog with his muzzle black-leaded for a evening
party, and his tail extra curled by machinery.

But I had left something out of my calculations.  Now, what had I
left out?  To help you to guess I'll say, a figure.  Come.  Make a
guess and guess right.  Nought?  No.  Nine?  No.  Eight?  No.
Seven?  No.  Six?  No.  Five?  No.  Four?  No.  Three?  No.  Two?
No.  One?  No.  Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you.  I'll say
it's another sort of figure altogether.  There.  Why then, says you,
it's a mortal figure.  No, nor yet a mortal figure.  By such means
you got yourself penned into a corner, and you can't help guessing a
IMmortal figure.  That's about it.  Why didn't you say so sooner?

Yes.  It was a immortal figure that I had altogether left out of my
Calculations.  Neither man's, nor woman's, but a child's.  Girl's or
boy's?  Boy's.  "I, says the sparrow with my bow and arrow."  Now
you have got it.

We were down at Lancaster, and I had done two nights more than fair
average business (though I cannot in honour recommend them as a
quick audience) in the open square there, near the end of the street
where Mr. Sly's King's Arms and Royal Hotel stands.  Mim's
travelling giant, otherwise Pickleson, happened at the self-same
time to be trying it on in the town.  The genteel lay was adopted
with him.  No hint of a van.  Green baize alcove leading up to
Pickleson in a Auction Room.  Printed poster, "Free list suspended,
with the exception of that proud boast of an enlightened country, a
free press.  Schools admitted by private arrangement.  Nothing to
raise a blush in the cheek of youth or shock the most fastidious."
Mim swearing most horrible and terrific, in a pink calico pay-place,
at the slackness of the public.  Serious handbill in the shops,
importing that it was all but impossible to come to a right
understanding of the history of David without seeing Pickleson.

I went to the Auction Room in question, and I found it entirely
empty of everything but echoes and mouldiness, with the single
exception of Pickleson on a piece of red drugget.  This suited my
purpose, as I wanted a private and confidential word with him, which
was:  "Pickleson.  Owing much happiness to you, I put you in my will
for a fypunnote; but, to save trouble, here's fourpunten down, which
may equally suit your views, and let us so conclude the
transaction."  Pickleson, who up to that remark had had the dejected
appearance of a long Roman rushlight that couldn't anyhow get
lighted, brightened up at his top extremity, and made his
acknowledgments in a way which (for him) was parliamentary
eloquence.  He likewise did add, that, having ceased to draw as a
Roman, Mim had made proposals for his going in as a conwerted Indian
Giant worked upon by The Dairyman's Daughter.  This, Pickleson,
having no acquaintance with the tract named after that young woman,
and not being willing to couple gag with his serious views, had
declined to do, thereby leading to words and the total stoppage of
the unfortunate young man's beer.  All of which, during the whole of
the interview, was confirmed by the ferocious growling of Mim down
below in the pay-place, which shook the giant like a leaf.

But what was to the present point in the remarks of the travelling
giant, otherwise Pickleson, was this:  "Doctor Marigold,"--I give
his words without a hope of conweying their feebleness,--"who is the
strange young man that hangs about your carts?"--"The strange young
MAN?"  I gives him back, thinking that he meant her, and his languid
circulation had dropped a syllable.  "Doctor," he returns, with a
pathos calculated to draw a tear from even a manly eye, "I am weak,
but not so weak yet as that I don't know my words.  I repeat them,
Doctor.  The strange young man."  It then appeared that Pickleson,
being forced to stretch his legs (not that they wanted it) only at
times when he couldn't be seen for nothing, to wit in the dead of
the night and towards daybreak, had twice seen hanging about my
carts, in that same town of Lancaster where I had been only two
nights, this same unknown young man.

It put me rather out of sorts.  What it meant as to particulars I no
more foreboded then than you forebode now, but it put me rather out
of sorts.  Howsoever, I made light of it to Pickleson, and I took
leave of Pickleson, advising him to spend his legacy in getting up
his stamina, and to continue to stand by his religion.  Towards
morning I kept a look out for the strange young man, and--what was
more--I saw the strange young man.  He was well dressed and well
looking.  He loitered very nigh my carts, watching them like as if
he was taking care of them, and soon after daybreak turned and went
away.  I sent a hail after him, but he never started or looked
round, or took the smallest notice.

We left Lancaster within an hour or two, on our way towards
Carlisle.  Next morning, at daybreak, I looked out again for the
strange young man.  I did not see him.  But next morning I looked
out again, and there he was once more.  I sent another hail after
him, but as before he gave not the slightest sign of being anyways
disturbed.  This put a thought into my head.  Acting on it I watched
him in different manners and at different times not necessary to
enter into, till I found that this strange young man was deaf and
dumb.

The discovery turned me over, because I knew that a part of that
establishment where she had been was allotted to young men (some of
them well off), and I thought to myself, "If she favours him, where
am I? and where is all that I have worked and planned for?"  Hoping-
-I must confess to the selfishness--that she might NOT favour him, I
set myself to find out.  At last I was by accident present at a
meeting between them in the open air, looking on leaning behind a
fir-tree without their knowing of it.  It was a moving meeting for
all the three parties concerned.  I knew every syllable that passed
between them as well as they did.  I listened with my eyes, which
had come to be as quick and true with deaf and dumb conversation as
my ears with the talk of people that can speak.  He was a-going out
to China as clerk in a merchant's house, which his father had been
before him.  He was in circumstances to keep a wife, and he wanted
her to marry him and go along with him.  She persisted, no.  He
asked if she didn't love him.  Yes, she loved him dearly, dearly;
but she could never disappoint her beloved, good, noble, generous,
and I-don't-know-what-all father (meaning me, the Cheap Jack in the
sleeved waistcoat) and she would stay with him, Heaven bless him!
though it was to break her heart.  Then she cried most bitterly, and
that made up my mind.

While my mind had been in an unsettled state about her favouring
this young man, I had felt that unreasonable towards Pickleson, that
it was well for him he had got his legacy down.  For I often
thought, "If it hadn't been for this same weak-minded giant, I might
never have come to trouble my head and wex my soul about the young
man."  But, once that I knew she loved him,--once that I had seen
her weep for him,--it was a different thing.  I made it right in my
mind with Pickleson on the spot, and I shook myself together to do
what was right by all.

She had left the young man by that time (for it took a few minutes
to get me thoroughly well shook together), and the young man was
leaning against another of the fir-trees,--of which there was a
cluster, -with his face upon his arm.  I touched him on the back.
Looking up and seeing me, he says, in our deaf-and-dumb talk, "Do
not be angry."

"I am not angry, good boy.  I am your friend.  Come with me."

I left him at the foot of the steps of the Library Cart, and I went
up alone.  She was drying her eyes.

"You have been crying, my dear."

"Yes, father."

"Why?"

"A headache."

"Not a heartache?"

"I said a headache, father."

"Doctor Marigold must prescribe for that headache."

She took up the book of my Prescriptions, and held it up with a
forced smile; but seeing me keep still and look earnest, she softly
laid it down again, and her eyes were very attentive.

"The Prescription is not there, Sophy."

"Where is it?"

"Here, my dear."

I brought her young husband in, and I put her hand in his, and my
only farther words to both of them were these:  "Doctor Marigold's
last Prescription.  To be taken for life."  After which I bolted.

When the wedding come off, I mounted a coat (blue, and bright
buttons), for the first and last time in all my days, and I give
Sophy away with my own hand.  There were only us three and the
gentleman who had had charge of her for those two years.  I give the
wedding dinner of four in the Library Cart.  Pigeon-pie, a leg of
pickled pork, a pair of fowls, and suitable garden stuff.  The best
of drinks.  I give them a speech, and the gentleman give us a
speech, and all our jokes told, and the whole went off like a sky-
rocket.  In the course of the entertainment I explained to Sophy
that I should keep the Library Cart as my living-cart when not upon
the road, and that I should keep all her books for her just as they
stood, till she come back to claim them.  So she went to China with
her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I
got the boy I had another service; and so as of old, when my child
and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over
my shoulder, at the old horse's head.

Sophy wrote me many letters, and I wrote her many letters.  About
the end of the first year she sent me one in an unsteady hand:
"Dearest father, not a week ago I had a darling little daughter, but
I am so well that they let me write these words to you.  Dearest and
best father, I hope my child may not be deaf and dumb, but I do not
yet know."  When I wrote back, I hinted the question; but as Sophy
never answered that question, I felt it to be a sad one, and I never
repeated it.  For a long time our letters were regular, but then
they got irregular, through Sophy's husband being moved to another
station, and through my being always on the move.  But we were in
one another's thoughts, I was equally sure, letters or no letters.

Five years, odd months, had gone since Sophy went away.  I was still
the King of the Cheap Jacks, and at a greater height of popularity
than ever.  I had had a first-rate autumn of it, and on the twenty-
third of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, I
found myself at Uxbridge, Middlesex, clean sold out.  So I jogged up
to London with the old horse, light and easy, to have my Christmas-
eve and Christmas-day alone by the fire in the Library Cart, and
then to buy a regular new stock of goods all round, to sell 'em
again and get the money.

I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for
my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart.  I knocked up a
beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a
couple of mushrooms thrown in.  It's a pudding to put a man in good
humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his
waistcoat.  Having relished that pudding and cleared away, I turned
the lamp low, and sat down by the light of the fire, watching it as
it shone upon the backs of Sophy's books.

Sophy's books so brought Sophy's self, that I saw her touching face
quite plainly, before I dropped off dozing by the fire.  This may be
a reason why Sophy, with her deaf-and-dumb child in her arms, seemed
to stand silent by me all through my nap.  I was on the road, off
the road, in all sorts of places, North and South and West and East,
Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone
astray, Over the hills and far away, and still she stood silent by
me, with her silent child in her arms.  Even when I woke with a
start, she seemed to vanish, as if she had stood by me in that very
place only a single instant before.

I had started at a real sound, and the sound was on the steps of the
cart.  It was the light hurried tread of a child, coming clambering
up.  That tread of a child had once been so familiar to me, that for
half a moment I believed I was a-going to see a little ghost.

But the touch of a real child was laid upon the outer handle of the
door, and the handle turned, and the door opened a little way, and a
real child peeped in.  A bright little comely girl with large dark
eyes.

Looking full at me, the tiny creature took off her mite of a straw
hat, and a quantity of dark curls fell about her face.  Then she
opened her lips, and said in a pretty voice,

"Grandfather!"

"Ah, my God!" I cries out.  "She can speak!"

"Yes, dear grandfather.  And I am to ask you whether there was ever
any one that I remind you of?"

In a moment Sophy was round my neck, as well as the child, and her
husband was a-wringing my hand with his face hid, and we all had to
shake ourselves together before we could get over it.  And when we
did begin to get over it, and I saw the pretty child a-talking,
pleased and quick and eager and busy, to her mother, in the signs
that I had first taught her mother, the happy and yet pitying tears
fell rolling down my face.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Doctor Marigold by Charles Dickens

Project Gutenberg Etext of Going into Society by Charles Dickens
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Going into Society

by Charles Dickens

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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
Stories" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





GOING INTO SOCIETY




At one period of its reverses, the House fell into the occupation of
a Showman.  He was found registered as its occupier, on the parish
books of the time when he rented the House, and there was therefore
no need of any clue to his name.  But, he himself was less easy to
be found; for, he had led a wandering life, and settled people had
lost sight of him, and people who plumed themselves on being
respectable were shy of admitting that they had ever known anything
of him.  At last, among the marsh lands near the river's level, that
lie about Deptford and the neighbouring market-gardens, a Grizzled
Personage in velveteen, with a face so cut up by varieties of
weather that he looked as if he had been tattooed, was found smoking
a pipe at the door of a wooden house on wheels.  The wooden house
was laid up in ordinary for the winter, near the mouth of a muddy
creek; and everything near it, the foggy river, the misty marshes,
and the steaming market-gardens, smoked in company with the grizzled
man.  In the midst of this smoking party, the funnel-chimney of the
wooden house on wheels was not remiss, but took its pipe with the
rest in a companionable manner.

On being asked if it were he who had once rented the House to Let,
Grizzled Velveteen looked surprised, and said yes.  Then his name
was Magsman?  That was it, Toby Magsman--which lawfully christened
Robert; but called in the line, from a infant, Toby.  There was
nothing agin Toby Magsman, he believed?  If there was suspicion of
such--mention it!

There was no suspicion of such, he might rest assured.  But, some
inquiries were making about that House, and would he object to say
why he left it?

Not at all; why should he?  He left it, along of a Dwarf.

Along of a Dwarf?

Mr. Magsman repeated, deliberately and emphatically, Along of a
Dwarf.

Might it be compatible with Mr. Magsman's inclination and
convenience to enter, as a favour, into a few particulars?

Mr. Magsman entered into the following particulars.

It was a long time ago, to begin with;--afore lotteries and a deal
more was done away with.  Mr. Magsman was looking about for a good
pitch, and he see that house, and he says to himself, "I'll have
you, if you're to be had.  If money'll get you, I'll have you."

The neighbours cut up rough, and made complaints; but Mr. Magsman
don't know what they WOULD have had.  It was a lovely thing.  First
of all, there was the canvass, representin the picter of the Giant,
in Spanish trunks and a ruff, who was himself half the heighth of
the house, and was run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the
roof, so that his Ed was coeval with the parapet.  Then, there was
the canvass, representin the picter of the Albina lady, showing her
white air to the Army and Navy in correct uniform.  Then, there was
the canvass, representin the picter of the Wild Indian a scalpin a
member of some foreign nation.  Then, there was the canvass,
representin the picter of a child of a British Planter, seized by
two Boa Constrictors--not that WE never had no child, nor no
Constrictors neither.  Similarly, there was the canvass, representin
the picter of the Wild Ass of the Prairies--not that WE never had no
wild asses, nor wouldn't have had 'em at a gift.  Last, there was
the canvass, representin the picter of the Dwarf, and like him too
(considerin), with George the Fourth in such a state of astonishment
at him as His Majesty couldn't with his utmost politeness and
stoutness express.  The front of the House was so covered with
canvasses, that there wasn't a spark of daylight ever visible on
that side.  "MAGSMAN'S AMUSEMENTS," fifteen foot long by two foot
high, ran over the front door and parlour winders.  The passage was
a Arbour of green baize and gardenstuff.  A barrel-organ performed
there unceasing.  And as to respectability,--if threepence ain't
respectable, what is?

But, the Dwarf is the principal article at present, and he was worth
the money.  He was wrote up as MAJOR TPSCHOFFKI, OF THE IMPERIAL
BULGRADERIAN BRIGADE.  Nobody couldn't pronounce the name, and it
never was intended anybody should.  The public always turned it, as
a regular rule, into Chopski.  In the line he was called Chops;
partly on that account, and partly because his real name, if he ever
had any real name (which was very dubious), was Stakes.

He was a un-common small man, he really was.  Certainly not so small
as he was made out to be, but where IS your Dwarf as is?  He was a
most uncommon small man, with a most uncommon large Ed; and what he
had inside that Ed, nobody ever knowed but himself:  even supposin
himself to have ever took stock of it, which it would have been a
stiff job for even him to do.

The kindest little man as never growed!  Spirited, but not proud.
When he travelled with the Spotted Baby--though he knowed himself to
be a nat'ral Dwarf, and knowed the Baby's spots to be put upon him
artificial, he nursed that Baby like a mother.  You never heerd him
give a ill-name to a Giant.  He DID allow himself to break out into
strong language respectin the Fat Lady from Norfolk; but that was an
affair of the 'art; and when a man's 'art has been trifled with by a
lady, and the preference giv to a Indian, he ain't master of his
actions.

He was always in love, of course; every human nat'ral phenomenon is.
And he was always in love with a large woman; I never knowed the
Dwarf as could be got to love a small one.  Which helps to keep 'em
the Curiosities they are.

One sing'ler idea he had in that Ed of his, which must have meant
something, or it wouldn't have been there.  It was always his
opinion that he was entitled to property.  He never would put his
name to anything.  He had been taught to write, by the young man
without arms, who got his living with his toes (quite a writing
master HE was, and taught scores in the line), but Chops would have
starved to death, afore he'd have gained a bit of bread by putting
his hand to a paper.  This is the more curious to bear in mind,
because HE had no property, nor hope of property, except his house
and a sarser.  When I say his house, I mean the box, painted and got
up outside like a reg'lar six-roomer, that he used to creep into,
with a diamond ring (or quite as good to look at) on his forefinger,
and ring a little bell out of what the Public believed to be the
Drawing-room winder.  And when I say a sarser, I mean a Chaney
sarser in which he made a collection for himself at the end of every
Entertainment.  His cue for that, he took from me:  "Ladies and
gentlemen, the little man will now walk three times round the
Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain."  When he said anything
important, in private life, he mostly wound it up with this form of
words, and they was generally the last thing he said to me at night
afore he went to bed.

He had what I consider a fine mind--a poetic mind.  His ideas
respectin his property never come upon him so strong as when he sat
upon a barrel-organ and had the handle turned.  Arter the wibration
had run through him a little time, he would screech out, "Toby, I
feel my property coming--grind away!  I'm counting my guineas by
thousands, Toby--grind away!  Toby, I shall be a man of fortun!  I
feel the Mint a jingling in me, Toby, and I'm swelling out into the
Bank of England!"  Such is the influence of music on a poetic mind.
Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on
the contrary, hated it.

He had a kind of a everlasting grudge agin the Public:  which is a
thing you may notice in many phenomenons that get their living out
of it.  What riled him most in the nater of his occupation was, that
it kep him out of Society.  He was continiwally saying, "Toby, my
ambition is, to go into Society.  The curse of my position towards
the Public is, that it keeps me hout of Society.  This don't signify
to a low beast of a Indian; he an't formed for Society.  This don't
signify to a Spotted Baby; HE an't formed for Society.--I am."

Nobody never could make out what Chops done with his money.  He had
a good salary, down on the drum every Saturday as the day came
round, besides having the run of his teeth--and he was a Woodpecker
to eat--but all Dwarfs are.  The sarser was a little income,
bringing him in so many halfpence that he'd carry 'em for a week
together, tied up in a pocket-handkercher.  And yet he never had
money.  And it couldn't be the Fat Lady from Norfolk, as was once
supposed; because it stands to reason that when you have a animosity
towards a Indian, which makes you grind your teeth at him to his
face, and which can hardly hold you from Goosing him audible when
he's going through his War-Dance--it stands to reason you wouldn't
under them circumstances deprive yourself, to support that Indian in
the lap of luxury.

Most unexpected, the mystery come out one day at Egham Races.  The
Public was shy of bein pulled in, and Chops was ringin his little
bell out of his drawing-room winder, and was snarlin to me over his
shoulder as he kneeled down with his legs out at the back-door--for
he couldn't be shoved into his house without kneeling down, and the
premises wouldn't accommodate his legs--was snarlin, "Here's a
precious Public for you; why the Devil don't they tumble up?" when a
man in the crowd holds up a carrier-pigeon, and cries out, "If
there's any person here as has got a ticket, the Lottery's just
drawed, and the number as has come up for the great prize is three,
seven, forty-two!  Three, seven, forty-two!"  I was givin the man to
the Furies myself, for calling off the Public's attention--for the
Public will turn away, at any time, to look at anything in
preference to the thing showed 'em; and if you doubt it, get 'em
together for any indiwidual purpose on the face of the earth, and
send only two people in late, and see if the whole company an't far
more interested in takin particular notice of them two than of you--
I say, I wasn't best pleased with the man for callin out, and wasn't
blessin him in my own mind, when I see Chops's little bell fly out
of winder at a old lady, and he gets up and kicks his box over,
exposin the whole secret, and he catches hold of the calves of my
legs and he says to me, "Carry me into the wan, Toby, and throw a
pail of water over me or I'm a dead man, for I've come into my
property!"

Twelve thousand odd hundred pound, was Chops's winnins.  He had
bought a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand prize, and it had
come up.  The first use he made of his property, was, to offer to
fight the Wild Indian for five hundred pound a side, him with a
poisoned darnin-needle and the Indian with a club; but the Indian
being in want of backers to that amount, it went no further.

Arter he had been mad for a week--in a state of mind, in short, in
which, if I had let him sit on the organ for only two minutes, I
believe he would have bust--but we kep the organ from him--Mr. Chops
come round, and behaved liberal and beautiful to all.  He then sent
for a young man he knowed, as had a wery genteel appearance and was
a Bonnet at a gaming-booth (most respectable brought up, father
havin been imminent in the livery stable line but unfort'nate in a
commercial crisis, through paintin a old gray, ginger-bay, and
sellin him with a Pedigree), and Mr. Chops said to this Bonnet, who
said his name was Normandy, which it wasn't:

"Normandy, I'm a goin into Society.  Will you go with me?"

Says Normandy:  "Do I understand you, Mr. Chops, to hintimate that
the 'ole of the expenses of that move will be borne by yourself?"

"Correct," says Mr. Chops.  "And you shall have a Princely allowance
too."

The Bonnet lifted Mr. Chops upon a chair, to shake hands with him,
and replied in poetry, with his eyes seemingly full of tears:


"My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea,
And I do not ask for more,
But I'll Go:- along with thee."


They went into Society, in a chay and four grays with silk jackets.
They took lodgings in Pall Mall, London, and they blazed away.

In consequence of a note that was brought to Bartlemy Fair in the
autumn of next year by a servant, most wonderful got up in milk-
white cords and tops, I cleaned myself and went to Pall Mall, one
evening appinted.  The gentlemen was at their wine arter dinner, and
Mr. Chops's eyes was more fixed in that Ed of his than I thought
good for him.  There was three of 'em (in company, I mean), and I
knowed the third well.  When last met, he had on a white Roman
shirt, and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played
the clarionet all wrong, in a band at a Wild Beast Show.

This gent took on not to know me, and Mr. Chops said:  "Gentlemen,
this is a old friend of former days:" and Normandy looked at me
through a eye-glass, and said, "Magsman, glad to see you!"--which
I'll take my oath he wasn't.  Mr. Chops, to git him convenient to
the table, had his chair on a throne (much of the form of George the
Fourth's in the canvass), but he hardly appeared to me to be King
there in any other pint of view, for his two gentlemen ordered about
like Emperors.  They was all dressed like May-Day--gorgeous!--And as
to Wine, they swam in all sorts.

I made the round of the bottles, first separate (to say I had done
it), and then mixed 'em all together (to say I had done it), and
then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then t'other two.
Altogether, I passed a pleasin evenin, but with a tendency to feel
muddled, until I considered it good manners to get up and say, "Mr.
Chops, the best of friends must part, I thank you for the wariety of
foreign drains you have stood so 'ansome, I looks towards you in red
wine, and I takes my leave."  Mr. Chops replied, "If you'll just
hitch me out of this over your right arm, Magsman, and carry me
down-stairs, I'll see you out."  I said I couldn't think of such a
thing, but he would have it, so I lifted him off his throne.  He
smelt strong of Maideary, and I couldn't help thinking as I carried
him down that it was like carrying a large bottle full of wine, with
a rayther ugly stopper, a good deal out of proportion.

When I set him on the door-mat in the hall, he kep me close to him
by holding on to my coat-collar, and he whispers:

"I ain't 'appy, Magsman."

"What's on your mind, Mr. Chops?"

"They don't use me well.  They an't grateful to me.  They puts me on
the mantel-piece when I won't have in more Champagne-wine, and they
locks me in the sideboard when I won't give up my property."

"Get rid of 'em, Mr. Chops."

"I can't.  We're in Society together, and what would Society say?"

"Come out of Society!" says I.

"I can't.  You don't know what you're talking about.  When you have
once gone into Society, you mustn't come out of it."

"Then if you'll excuse the freedom, Mr. Chops," were my remark,
shaking my head grave, "I think it's a pity you ever went in."

Mr. Chops shook that deep Ed of his, to a surprisin extent, and
slapped it half a dozen times with his hand, and with more Wice than
I thought were in him.  Then, he says, "You're a good fellow, but
you don't understand.  Good-night, go along.  Magsman, the little
man will now walk three times round the Cairawan, and retire behind
the curtain."  The last I see of him on that occasion was his tryin,
on the extremest werge of insensibility, to climb up the stairs, one
by one, with his hands and knees.  They'd have been much too steep
for him, if he had been sober; but he wouldn't be helped.

It warn't long after that, that I read in the newspaper of Mr.
Chops's being presented at court.  It was printed, "It will be
recollected"--and I've noticed in my life, that it is sure to be
printed that it WILL be recollected, whenever it won't--"that Mr.
Chops is the individual of small stature, whose brilliant success in
the last State Lottery attracted so much attention."  Well, I says
to myself, Such is Life!  He has been and done it in earnest at
last.  He has astonished George the Fourth!

(On account of which, I had that canvass new-painted, him with a bag
of money in his hand, a presentin it to George the Fourth, and a
lady in Ostrich Feathers fallin in love with him in a bag-wig,
sword, and buckles correct.)

I took the House as is the subject of present inquiries--though not
the honour of bein acquainted--and I run Magsman's Amusements in it
thirteen months--sometimes one thing, sometimes another, sometimes
nothin particular, but always all the canvasses outside.  One night,
when we had played the last company out, which was a shy company,
through its raining Heavens hard, I was takin a pipe in the one pair
back along with the young man with the toes, which I had taken on
for a month (though he never drawed--except on paper), and I heard a
kickin at the street door.  "Halloa!" I says to the young man,
"what's up!"  He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, "I
can't imagine, Mr. Magsman"--which he never could imagine nothin,
and was monotonous company.

The noise not leavin off, I laid down my pipe, and I took up a
candle, and I went down and opened the door.  I looked out into the
street; but nothin could I see, and nothin was I aware of, until I
turned round quick, because some creetur run between my legs into
the passage.  There was Mr. Chops!

"Magsman," he says, "take me, on the old terms, and you've got me;
if it's done, say done!"

I was all of a maze, but I said, "Done, sir."

"Done to your done, and double done!" says he.  "Have you got a bit
of supper in the house?"

Bearin in mind them sparklin warieties of foreign drains as we'd
guzzled away at in Pall Mall, I was ashamed to offer him cold
sassages and gin-and-water; but he took 'em both and took 'em free;
havin a chair for his table, and sittin down at it on a stool, like
hold times.  I, all of a maze all the while.

It was arter he had made a clean sweep of the sassages (beef, and to
the best of my calculations two pound and a quarter), that the
wisdom as was in that little man began to come out of him like
prespiration.

"Magsman," he says, "look upon me!  You see afore you, One as has
both gone into Society and come out."

"O!  You ARE out of it, Mr. Chops?  How did you get out, sir?"

"SOLD OUT!" says he.  You never saw the like of the wisdom as his Ed
expressed, when he made use of them two words.

"My friend Magsman, I'll impart to you a discovery I've made.  It's
wallable; it's cost twelve thousand five hundred pound; it may do
you good in life--The secret of this matter is, that it ain't so
much that a person goes into Society, as that Society goes into a
person."

Not exactly keepin up with his meanin, I shook my head, put on a
deep look, and said, "You're right there, Mr. Chops."

"Magsman," he says, twitchin me by the leg, "Society has gone into
me, to the tune of every penny of my property."

I felt that I went pale, and though nat'rally a bold speaker, I
couldn't hardly say, "Where's Normandy?"

"Bolted.  With the plate," said Mr. Chops.

"And t'other one?" meaning him as formerly wore the bishop's mitre.

"Bolted.  With the jewels," said Mr. Chops.

I sat down and looked at him, and he stood up and looked at me.

"Magsman," he says, and he seemed to myself to get wiser as he got
hoarser; "Society, taken in the lump, is all dwarfs.  At the court
of St. James's, they was all a doing my old business--all a goin
three times round the Cairawan, in the hold court-suits and
properties.  Elsewheres, they was most of 'em ringin their little
bells out of make-believes.  Everywheres, the sarser was a goin
round.  Magsman, the sarser is the uniwersal Institution!"

I perceived, you understand, that he was soured by his misfortunes,
and I felt for Mr. Chops.

"As to Fat Ladies," he says, giving his head a tremendious one agin
the wall, "there's lots of THEM in Society, and worse than the
original.  HERS was a outrage upon Taste--simply a outrage upon
Taste--awakenin contempt--carryin its own punishment in the form of
a Indian."  Here he giv himself another tremendious one.  "But
THEIRS, Magsman, THEIRS is mercenary outrages.  Lay in Cashmeer
shawls, buy bracelets, strew 'em and a lot of 'andsome fans and
things about your rooms, let it be known that you give away like
water to all as come to admire, and the Fat Ladies that don't
exhibit for so much down upon the drum, will come from all the pints
of the compass to flock about you, whatever you are.  They'll drill
holes in your 'art, Magsman, like a Cullender.  And when you've no
more left to give, they'll laugh at you to your face, and leave you
to have your bones picked dry by Wulturs, like the dead Wild Ass of
the Prairies that you deserve to be!"  Here he giv himself the most
tremendious one of all, and dropped.

I thought he was gone.  His Ed was so heavy, and he knocked it so
hard, and he fell so stoney, and the sassagerial disturbance in him
must have been so immense, that I thought he was gone.  But, he soon
come round with care, and he sat up on the floor, and he said to me,
with wisdom comin out of his eyes, if ever it come:

"Magsman!  The most material difference between the two states of
existence through which your unhappy friend has passed;" he reached
out his poor little hand, and his tears dropped down on the
moustachio which it was a credit to him to have done his best to
grow, but it is not in mortals to command success,--"the difference
this.  When I was out of Society, I was paid light for being seen.
When I went into Society, I paid heavy for being seen.  I prefer the
former, even if I wasn't forced upon it.  Give me out through the
trumpet, in the hold way, to-morrow."

Arter that, he slid into the line again as easy as if he had been
iled all over.  But the organ was kep from him, and no allusions was
ever made, when a company was in, to his property.  He got wiser
every day; his views of Society and the Public was luminous,
bewilderin, awful; and his Ed got bigger and bigger as his Wisdom
expanded it.

He took well, and pulled 'em in most excellent for nine weeks.  At
the expiration of that period, when his Ed was a sight, he expressed
one evenin, the last Company havin been turned out, and the door
shut, a wish to have a little music.

"Mr. Chops," I said (I never dropped the "Mr." with him; the world
might do it, but not me); "Mr. Chops, are you sure as you are in a
state of mind and body to sit upon the organ?"

His answer was this:  "Toby, when next met with on the tramp, I
forgive her and the Indian.  And I am."

It was with fear and trembling that I began to turn the handle; but
he sat like a lamb.  I will be my belief to my dying day, that I see
his Ed expand as he sat; you may therefore judge how great his
thoughts was.  He sat out all the changes, and then he come off.

"Toby," he says, with a quiet smile, "the little man will now walk
three times round the Cairawan, and retire behind the curtain."

When we called him in the morning, we found him gone into a much
better Society than mine or Pall Mall's.  I giv Mr. Chops as
comfortable a funeral as lay in my power, followed myself as Chief,
and had the George the Fourth canvass carried first, in the form of
a banner.  But, the House was so dismal arterwards, that I giv it
up, and took to the Wan again.


"I don't triumph," said Jarber, folding up the second manuscript,
and looking hard at Trottle.  "I don't triumph over this worthy
creature.  I merely ask him if he is satisfied now?"

"How can he be anything else?" I said, answering for Trottle, who
sat obstinately silent.  "This time, Jarber, you have not only read
us a delightfully amusing story, but you have also answered the
question about the House.  Of course it stands empty now.  Who would
think of taking it after it had been turned into a caravan?"  I
looked at Trottle, as I said those last words, and Jarber waved his
hand indulgently in the same direction.

"Let this excellent person speak," said Jarber.  "You were about to
say, my good man?" -

"I only wished to ask, sir," said Trottle doggedly, "if you could
kindly oblige me with a date or two in connection with that last
story?"

"A date!" repeated Jarber.  "What does the man want with dates!"

"I should be glad to know, with great respect," persisted Trottle,
"if the person named Magsman was the last tenant who lived in the
House.  It's my opinion--if I may be excused for giving it--that he
most decidedly was not."

With those words, Trottle made a low bow, and quietly left the room.

There is no denying that Jarber, when we were left together, looked
sadly discomposed.  He had evidently forgotten to inquire about
dates; and, in spite of his magnificent talk about his series of
discoveries, it was quite as plain that the two stories he had just
read, had really and truly exhausted his present stock.  I thought
myself bound, in common gratitude, to help him out of his
embarrassment by a timely suggestion.  So I proposed that he should
come to tea again, on the next Monday evening, the thirteenth, and
should make such inquiries in the meantime, as might enable him to
dispose triumphantly of Trottle's objection.

He gallantly kissed my hand, made a neat little speech of
acknowledgment, and took his leave.  For the rest of the week I
would not encourage Trottle by allowing him to refer to the House at
all.  I suspected he was making his own inquiries about dates, but I
put no questions to him.

On Monday evening, the thirteenth, that dear unfortunate Jarber
came, punctual to the appointed time.  He looked so terribly
harassed, that he was really quite a spectacle of feebleness and
fatigue.  I saw, at a glance, that the question of dates had gone
against him, that Mr. Magsman had not been the last tenant of the
House, and that the reason of its emptiness was still to seek.

"What I have gone through," said Jarber, "words are not eloquent
enough to tell.  O Sophonisba, I have begun another series of
discoveries!  Accept the last two as stories laid on your shrine;
and wait to blame me for leaving your curiosity unappeased, until
you have heard Number Three."

Number Three looked like a very short manuscript, and I said as
much.  Jarber explained to me that we were to have some poetry this
time.  In the course of his investigations he had stepped into the
Circulating Library, to seek for information on the one important
subject.  All the Library-people knew about the House was, that a
female relative of the last tenant, as they believed, had, just
after that tenant left, sent a little manuscript poem to them which
she described as referring to events that had actually passed in the
House; and which she wanted the proprietor of the Library to
publish.  She had written no address on her letter; and the
proprietor had kept the manuscript ready to be given back to her
(the publishing of poems not being in his line) when she might call
for it.  She had never called for it; and the poem had been lent to
Jarber, at his express request, to read to me.

Before he began, I rang the bell for Trottle; being determined to
have him present at the new reading, as a wholesome check on his
obstinacy.  To my surprise Peggy answered the bell, and told me,
that Trottle had stepped out without saying where.  I instantly felt
the strongest possible conviction that he was at his old tricks:
and that his stepping out in the evening, without leave, meant--
Philandering.

Controlling myself on my visitor's account, I dismissed Peggy,
stifled my indignation, and prepared, as politely as might be, to
listen to Jarber.





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George Silverman's Explanation

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George Silverman's Explanation by Charles Dickens
Scanned and proofed by David Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





GEORGE SILVERMAN'S EXPLANATION




FIRST CHAPTER



IT happened in this wise -

But, sitting with my pen in my hand looking at those words again,
without descrying any hint in them of the words that should follow,
it comes into my mind that they have an abrupt appearance.  They
may serve, however, if I let them remain, to suggest how very
difficult I find it to begin to explain my explanation.  An uncouth
phrase: and yet I do not see my way to a better.



SECOND CHAPTER



IT happened in THIS wise -

But, looking at those words, and comparing them with my former
opening, I find they are the self-same words repeated.  This is the
more surprising to me, because I employ them in quite a new
connection.  For indeed I declare that my intention was to discard
the commencement I first had in my thoughts, and to give the
preference to another of an entirely different nature, dating my
explanation from an anterior period of my life.  I will make a
third trial, without erasing this second failure, protesting that
it is not my design to conceal any of my infirmities, whether they
be of head or heart.



THIRD CHAPTER



NOT as yet directly aiming at how it came to pass, I will come upon
it by degrees.  The natural manner, after all, for God knows that
is how it came upon me.

My parents were in a miserable condition of life, and my infant
home was a cellar in Preston.  I recollect the sound of father's
Lancashire clogs on the street pavement above, as being different
in my young hearing from the sound of all other clogs; and I
recollect, that, when mother came down the cellar-steps, I used
tremblingly to speculate on her feet having a good or an ill-
tempered look, - on her knees, - on her waist, - until finally her
face came into view, and settled the question.  From this it will
be seen that I was timid, and that the cellar-steps were steep, and
that the doorway was very low.

Mother had the gripe and clutch of poverty upon her face, upon her
figure, and not least of all upon her voice.  Her sharp and high-
pitched words were squeezed out of her, as by the compression of
bony fingers on a leathern bag; and she had a way of rolling her
eyes about and about the cellar, as she scolded, that was gaunt and
hungry.  Father, with his shoulders rounded, would sit quiet on a
three-legged stool, looking at the empty grate, until she would
pluck the stool from under him, and bid him go bring some money
home.  Then he would dismally ascend the steps; and I, holding my
ragged shirt and trousers together with a hand (my only braces),
would feint and dodge from mother's pursuing grasp at my hair.

A worldly little devil was mother's usual name for me.  Whether I
cried for that I was in the dark, or for that it was cold, or for
that I was hungry, or whether I squeezed myself into a warm corner
when there was a fire, or ate voraciously when there was food, she
would still say, 'O, you worldly little devil!'  And the sting of
it was, that I quite well knew myself to be a worldly little devil.
Worldly as to wanting to be housed and warmed, worldly as to
wanting to be fed, worldly as to the greed with which I inwardly
compared how much I got of those good things with how much father
and mother got, when, rarely, those good things were going.

Sometimes they both went away seeking work; and then I would be
locked up in the cellar for a day or two at a time.  I was at my
worldliest then.  Left alone, I yielded myself up to a worldly
yearning for enough of anything (except misery), and for the death
of mother's father, who was a machine-maker at Birmingham, and on
whose decease, I had heard mother say, she would come into a whole
courtful of houses 'if she had her rights.'  Worldly little devil,
I would stand about, musingly fitting my cold bare feet into
cracked bricks and crevices of the damp cellar-floor, - walking
over my grandfather's body, so to speak, into the courtful of
houses, and selling them for meat and drink, and clothes to wear.

At last a change came down into our cellar.  The universal change
came down even as low as that, - so will it mount to any height on
which a human creature can perch, - and brought other changes with
it.

We had a heap of I don't know what foul litter in the darkest
corner, which we called 'the bed.'  For three days mother lay upon
it without getting up, and then began at times to laugh.  If I had
ever heard her laugh before, it had been so seldom that the strange
sound frightened me.  It frightened father too; and we took it by
turns to give her water.  Then she began to move her head from side
to side, and sing.  After that, she getting no better, father fell
a-laughing and a-singing; and then there was only I to give them
both water, and they both died.



FOURTH CHAPTER



WHEN I was lifted out of the cellar by two men, of whom one came
peeping down alone first, and ran away and brought the other, I
could hardly bear the light of the street.  I was sitting in the
road-way, blinking at it, and at a ring of people collected around
me, but not close to me, when, true to my character of worldly
little devil, I broke silence by saying, 'I am hungry and thirsty!'

'Does he know they are dead?' asked one of another.

'Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?' asked
a third of me severely.

'I don't know what it is to be dead.  I supposed it meant that,
when the cup rattled against their teeth, and the water spilt over
them.  I am hungry and thirsty.'  That was all I had to say about
it.

The ring of people widened outward from the inner side as I looked
around me; and I smelt vinegar, and what I know to be camphor,
thrown in towards where I sat.  Presently some one put a great
vessel of smoking vinegar on the ground near me; and then they all
looked at me in silent horror as I ate and drank of what was
brought for me.  I knew at the time they had a horror of me, but I
couldn't help it.

I was still eating and drinking, and a murmur of discussion had
begun to arise respecting what was to be done with me next, when I
heard a cracked voice somewhere in the ring say, 'My name is
Hawkyard, Mr. Verity Hawkyard, of West Bromwich.'  Then the ring
split in one place; and a yellow-faced, peak-nosed gentleman, clad
all in iron-gray to his gaiters, pressed forward with a policeman
and another official of some sort.  He came forward close to the
vessel of smoking vinegar; from which he sprinkled himself
carefully, and me copiously.

'He had a grandfather at Birmingham, this young boy, who is just
dead too,' said Mr. Hawkyard.

I turned my eyes upon the speaker, and said in a ravening manner,
'Where's his houses?'

'Hah!  Horrible worldliness on the edge of the grave,' said Mr.
Hawkyard, casting more of the vinegar over me, as if to get my
devil out of me.  'I have undertaken a slight - a very slight -
trust in behalf of this boy; quite a voluntary trust: a matter of
mere honour, if not of mere sentiment: still I have taken it upon
myself, and it shall be (O, yes, it shall be!) discharged.'

The bystanders seemed to form an opinion of this gentleman much
more favourable than their opinion of me.

'He shall be taught,' said Mr. Hawkyard, '(O, yes, he shall be
taught!) but what is to be done with him for the present?  He may
be infected.  He may disseminate infection.'  The ring widened
considerably.  'What is to be done with him?'

He held some talk with the two officials.  I could distinguish no
word save 'Farm-house.'  There was another sound several times
repeated, which was wholly meaningless in my ears then, but which I
knew afterwards to be 'Hoghton Towers.'

'Yes,' said Mr. Hawkyard.  'I think that sounds promising; I think
that sounds hopeful.  And he can be put by himself in a ward, for a
night or two, you say?'

It seemed to be the police-officer who had said so; for it was he
who replied, Yes!  It was he, too, who finally took me by the arm,
and walked me before him through the streets, into a whitewashed
room in a bare building, where I had a chair to sit in, a table to
sit at, an iron bedstead and good mattress to lie upon, and a rug
and blanket to cover me.  Where I had enough to eat too, and was
shown how to clean the tin porringer in which it was conveyed to
me, until it was as good as a looking-glass.  Here, likewise, I was
put in a bath, and had new clothes brought to me; and my old rags
were burnt, and I was camphored and vinegared and disinfected in a
variety of ways.

When all this was done, - I don't know in how many days or how few,
but it matters not, - Mr. Hawkyard stepped in at the door,
remaining close to it, and said, 'Go and stand against the opposite
wall, George Silverman.  As far off as you can.  That'll do.  How
do you feel?'

I told him that I didn't feel cold, and didn't feel hungry, and
didn't feel thirsty.  That was the whole round of human feelings,
as far as I knew, except the pain of being beaten.

'Well,' said he, 'you are going, George, to a healthy farm-house to
be purified.  Keep in the air there as much as you can.  Live an
out-of-door life there, until you are fetched away.  You had better
not say much - in fact, you had better be very careful not to say
anything - about what your parents died of, or they might not like
to take you in.  Behave well, and I'll put you to school; O, yes!
I'll put you to school, though I'm not obligated to do it.  I am a
servant of the Lord, George; and I have been a good servant to him,
I have, these five-and-thirty years.  The Lord has had a good
servant in me, and he knows it.'

What I then supposed him to mean by this, I cannot imagine.  As
little do I know when I began to comprehend that he was a prominent
member of some obscure denomination or congregation, every member
of which held forth to the rest when so inclined, and among whom he
was called Brother Hawkyard.  It was enough for me to know, on that
day in the ward, that the farmer's cart was waiting for me at the
street corner.  I was not slow to get into it; for it was the first
ride I ever had in my life.

It made me sleepy, and I slept.  First, I stared at Preston streets
as long as they lasted; and, meanwhile, I may have had some small
dumb wondering within me whereabouts our cellar was; but I doubt
it.  Such a worldly little devil was I, that I took no thought who
would bury father and mother, or where they would be buried, or
when.  The question whether the eating and drinking by day, and the
covering by night, would be as good at the farm-house as at the
ward superseded those questions.

The jolting of the cart on a loose stony road awoke me; and I found
that we were mounting a steep hill, where the road was a rutty by-
road through a field.  And so, by fragments of an ancient terrace,
and by some rugged outbuildings that had once been fortified, and
passing under a ruined gateway we came to the old farm-house in the
thick stone wall outside the old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers:
which I looked at like a stupid savage, seeing no specially in,
seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses to resemble it;
assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of all ruin
that I knew, - poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights, the
cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond, and the fowls
pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them
might be killed for dinner while I stayed there; wondering whether
the scrubbed dairy vessels, drying in the sunlight, could be goodly
porringers out of which the master ate his belly-filling food, and
which he polished when he had done, according to my ward
experience; shrinkingly doubtful whether the shadows, passing over
that airy height on the bright spring day, were not something in
the nature of frowns, - sordid, afraid, unadmiring, - a small brute
to shudder at.

To that time I had never had the faintest impression of duty.  I
had had no knowledge whatever that there was anything lovely in
this life.  When I had occasionally slunk up the cellar-steps into
the street, and glared in at shop-windows, I had done so with no
higher feelings than we may suppose to animate a mangy young dog or
wolf-cub.  It is equally the fact that I had never been alone, in
the sense of holding unselfish converse with myself.  I had been
solitary often enough, but nothing better.

Such was my condition when I sat down to my dinner that day, in the
kitchen of the old farm-house.  Such was my condition when I lay on
my bed in the old farm-house that night, stretched out opposite the
narrow mullioned window, in the cold light of the moon, like a
young vampire.



FIFTH CHAPTER



WHAT do I know of Hoghton Towers?  Very little; for I have been
gratefully unwilling to disturb my first impressions.  A house,
centuries old, on high ground a mile or so removed from the road
between Preston and Blackburn, where the first James of England, in
his hurry to make money by making baronets, perhaps made some of
those remunerative dignitaries.  A house, centuries old, deserted
and falling to pieces, its woods and gardens long since grass-land
or ploughed up, the Rivers Ribble and Darwen glancing below it, and
a vague haze of smoke, against which not even the supernatural
prescience of the first Stuart could foresee a counter-blast,
hinting at steam-power, powerful in two distances.

What did I know then of Hoghton Towers?  When I first peeped in at
the gate of the lifeless quadrangle, and started from the
mouldering statue becoming visible to me like its guardian ghost;
when I stole round by the back of the farm-house, and got in among
the ancient rooms, many of them with their floors and ceilings
falling, the beams and rafters hanging dangerously down, the
plaster dropping as I trod, the oaken panels stripped away, the
windows half walled up, half broken; when I discovered a gallery
commanding the old kitchen, and looked down between balustrades
upon a massive old table and benches, fearing to see I know not
what dead-alive creatures come in and seat themselves, and look up
with I know not what dreadful eyes, or lack of eyes, at me; when
all over the house I was awed by gaps and chinks where the sky
stared sorrowfully at me, where the birds passed, and the ivy
rustled, and the stains of winter weather blotched the rotten
floors; when down at the bottom of dark pits of staircase, into
which the stairs had sunk, green leaves trembled, butterflies
fluttered, and bees hummed in and out through the broken door-ways;
when encircling the whole ruin were sweet scents, and sights of
fresh green growth, and ever-renewing life, that I had never
dreamed of, - I say, when I passed into such clouded perception of
these things as my dark soul could compass, what did I know then of
Hoghton Towers?

I have written that the sky stared sorrowfully at me.  Therein have
I anticipated the answer.  I knew that all these things looked
sorrowfully at me; that they seemed to sigh or whisper, not without
pity for me, 'Alas! poor worldly little devil!'

There were two or three rats at the bottom of one of the smaller
pits of broken staircase when I craned over and looked in.  They
were scuffling for some prey that was there; and, when they started
and hid themselves close together in the dark, I thought of the old
life (it had grown old already) in the cellar.

How not to be this worldly little devil? how not to have a
repugnance towards myself as I had towards the rats?  I hid in a
corner of one of the smaller chambers, frightened at myself, and
crying (it was the first time I had ever cried for any cause not
purely physical), and I tried to think about it.  One of the farm-
ploughs came into my range of view just then; and it seemed to help
me as it went on with its two horses up and down the field so
peacefully and quietly.

There was a girl of about my own age in the farm-house family, and
she sat opposite to me at the narrow table at meal-times.  It had
come into my mind, at our first dinner, that she might take the
fever from me.  The thought had not disquieted me then.  I had only
speculated how she would look under the altered circumstances, and
whether she would die.  But it came into my mind now, that I might
try to prevent her taking the fever by keeping away from her.  I
knew I should have but scrambling board if I did; so much the less
worldly and less devilish the deed would be, I thought.

From that hour, I withdrew myself at early morning into secret
corners of the ruined house, and remained hidden there until she
went to bed.  At first, when meals were ready, I used to hear them
calling me; and then my resolution weakened.  But I strengthened it
again by going farther off into the ruin, and getting out of
hearing.  I often watched for her at the dim windows; and, when I
saw that she was fresh and rosy, felt much happier.

Out of this holding her in my thoughts, to the humanising of
myself, I suppose some childish love arose within me.  I felt, in
some sort, dignified by the pride of protecting her, - by the pride
of making the sacrifice for her.  As my heart swelled with that new
feeling, it insensibly softened about mother and father.  It seemed
to have been frozen before, and now to be thawed.  The old ruin and
all the lovely things that haunted it were not sorrowful for me
only, but sorrowful for mother and father as well.  Therefore did I
cry again, and often too.

The farm-house family conceived me to be of a morose temper, and
were very short with me; though they never stinted me in such
broken fare as was to be got out of regular hours.  One night when
I lifted the kitchen latch at my usual time, Sylvia (that was her
pretty name) had but just gone out of the room.  Seeing her
ascending the opposite stairs, I stood still at the door.  She had
heard the clink of the latch, and looked round.

'George,' she called to me in a pleased voice, 'to-morrow is my
birthday; and we are to have a fiddler, and there's a party of boys
and girls coming in a cart, and we shall dance.  I invite you.  Be
sociable for once, George.'

'I am very sorry, miss,' I answered; 'but I - but, no; I can't
come.'

'You are a disagreeable, ill-humoured lad,' she returned
disdainfully; 'and I ought not to have asked you.  I shall never
speak to you again.'

As I stood with my eyes fixed on the fire, after she was gone, I
felt that the farmer bent his brows upon me.

'Eh, lad!' said he; 'Sylvy's right.  You're as moody and broody a
lad as never I set eyes on yet.'

I tried to assure him that I meant no harm; but he only said
coldly, 'Maybe not, maybe not!  There, get thy supper, get thy
supper; and then thou canst sulk to thy heart's content again.'

Ah! if they could have seen me next day, in the ruin, watching for
the arrival of the cart full of merry young guests; if they could
have seen me at night, gliding out from behind the ghostly statue,
listening to the music and the fall of dancing feet, and watching
the lighted farm-house windows from the quadrangle when all the
ruin was dark; if they could have read my heart, as I crept up to
bed by the back way, comforting myself with the reflection, 'They
will take no hurt from me,' - they would not have thought mine a
morose or an unsocial nature.

It was in these ways that I began to form a shy disposition; to be
of a timidly silent character under misconstruction; to have an
inexpressible, perhaps a morbid, dread of ever being sordid or
worldly.  It was in these ways that my nature came to shape itself
to such a mould, even before it was affected by the influences of
the studious and retired life of a poor scholar.



SIXTH CHAPTER



BROTHER HAWKYARD (as he insisted on my calling him) put me to
school, and told me to work my way.  'You are all right, George,'
he said.  'I have been the best servant the Lord has had in his
service for this five-and-thirty year (O, I have!); and he knows
the value of such a servant as I have been to him (O, yes, he
does!); and he'll prosper your schooling as a part of my reward.
That's what HE'll do, George.  He'll do it for me.'

From the first I could not like this familiar knowledge of the ways
of the sublime, inscrutable Almighty, on Brother Hawkyard's part.
As I grew a little wiser, and still a little wiser, I liked it less
and less.  His manner, too, of confirming himself in a parenthesis,
- as if, knowing himself, he doubted his own word, - I found
distasteful.  I cannot tell how much these dislikes cost me; for I
had a dread that they were worldly.

As time went on, I became a Foundation-boy on a good foundation,
and I cost Brother Hawkyard nothing.  When I had worked my way so
far, I worked yet harder, in the hope of ultimately getting a
presentation to college and a fellowship.  My health has never been
strong (some vapour from the Preston cellar cleaves to me, I
think); and what with much work and some weakness, I came again to
be regarded - that is, by my fellow-students - as unsocial.

All through my time as a foundation-boy, I was within a few miles
of Brother Hawkyard's congregation; and whenever I was what we
called a leave-boy on a Sunday, I went over there at his desire.
Before the knowledge became forced upon me that outside their place
of meeting these brothers and sisters were no better than the rest
of the human family, but on the whole were, to put the case mildly,
as bad as most, in respect of giving short weight in their shops,
and not speaking the truth, - I say, before this knowledge became
forced upon me, their prolix addresses, their inordinate conceit,
their daring ignorance, their investment of the Supreme Ruler of
heaven and earth with their own miserable meannesses and
littlenesses, greatly shocked me.  Still, as their term for the
frame of mind that could not perceive them to be in an exalted
state of grace was the 'worldly' state, I did for a time suffer
tortures under my inquiries of myself whether that young worldly-
devilish spirit of mine could secretly be lingering at the bottom
of my non-appreciation.

Brother Hawkyard was the popular expounder in this assembly, and
generally occupied the platform (there was a little platform with a
table on it, in lieu of a pulpit) first, on a Sunday afternoon.  He
was by trade a drysalter.  Brother Gimblet, an elderly man with a
crabbed face, a large dog's-eared shirt-collar, and a spotted blue
neckerchief reaching up behind to the crown of his head, was also a
drysalter and an expounder.  Brother Gimblet professed the greatest
admiration for Brother Hawkyard, but (I had thought more than once)
bore him a jealous grudge.

Let whosoever may peruse these lines kindly take the pains here to
read twice my solemn pledge, that what I write of the language and
customs of the congregation in question I write scrupulously,
literally, exactly, from the life and the truth.

On the first Sunday after I had won what I had so long tried for,
and when it was certain that I was going up to college, Brother
Hawkyard concluded a long exhortation thus:

'Well, my friends and fellow-sinners, now I told you when I began,
that I didn't know a word of what I was going to say to you (and
no, I did not!), but that it was all one to me, because I knew the
Lord would put into my mouth the words I wanted.'

('That's it!' from Brother Gimblet.)

'And he did put into my mouth the words I wanted.'

('So he did!' from Brother Gimblet.)

'And why?'

('Ah, let's have that!' from Brother Gimblet.)

'Because I have been his faithful servant for five-and-thirty
years, and because he knows it.  For five-and-thirty years!  And he
knows it, mind you!  I got those words that I wanted on account of
my wages.  I got 'em from the Lord, my fellow-sinners.  Down! I
said, "Here's a heap of wages due; let us have something down, on
account."  And I got it down, and I paid it over to you; and you
won't wrap it up in a napkin, nor yet in a towel, nor yet
pocketankercher, but you'll put it out at good interest.  Very
well.  Now, my brothers and sisters and fellow-sinners, I am going
to conclude with a question, and I'll make it so plain (with the
help of the Lord, after five-and-thirty years, I should rather
hope!) as that the Devil shall not be able to confuse it in your
heads, - which he would be overjoyed to do.'

('Just his way.  Crafty old blackguard!' from Brother Gimblet.)

'And the question is this, Are the angels learned?'

('Not they.  Not a bit on it!' from Brother Gimblet, with the
greatest confidence.)

'Not they.  And where's the proof? sent ready-made by the hand of
the Lord.  Why, there's one among us here now, that has got all the
learning that can be crammed into him.  I got him all the learning
that could be crammed into him.  His grandfather' (this I had never
heard before) 'was a brother of ours.  He was Brother Parksop.
That's what he was.  Parksop; Brother Parksop.  His worldly name
was Parksop, and he was a brother of this brotherhood.  Then wasn't
he Brother Parksop?'

('Must be.  Couldn't help hisself!' from Brother Gimblet.)

'Well, he left that one now here present among us to the care of a
brother-sinner of his (and that brother-sinner, mind you, was a
sinner of a bigger size in his time than any of you; praise the
Lord!), Brother Hawkyard.  Me.  I got him without fee or reward, -
without a morsel of myrrh, or frankincense, nor yet amber, letting
alone the honeycomb, - all the learning that could be crammed into
him.  Has it brought him into our temple, in the spirit?  No.  Have
we had any ignorant brothers and sisters that didn't know round O
from crooked S, come in among us meanwhile?  Many.  Then the angels
are NOT learned; then they don't so much as know their alphabet.
And now, my friends and fellow-sinners, having brought it to that,
perhaps some brother present - perhaps you, Brother Gimblet - will
pray a bit for us?'

Brother Gimblet undertook the sacred function, after having drawn
his sleeve across his mouth, and muttered, 'Well!  I don't know as
I see my way to hitting any of you quite in the right place
neither.'  He said this with a dark smile, and then began to
bellow.  What we were specially to be preserved from, according to
his solicitations, was, despoilment of the orphan, suppression of
testamentary intentions on the part of a father or (say)
grandfather, appropriation of the orphan's house-property, feigning
to give in charity to the wronged one from whom we withheld his
due; and that class of sins.  He ended with the petition, 'Give us
peace!' which, speaking for myself, was very much needed after
twenty minutes of his bellowing.

Even though I had not seen him when he rose from his knees,
steaming with perspiration, glance at Brother Hawkyard, and even
though I had not heard Brother Hawkyard's tone of congratulating
him on the vigour with which he had roared, I should have detected
a malicious application in this prayer.  Unformed suspicions to a
similar effect had sometimes passed through my mind in my earlier
school-days, and had always caused me great distress; for they were
worldly in their nature, and wide, very wide, of the spirit that
had drawn me from Sylvia.  They were sordid suspicions, without a
shadow of proof.  They were worthy to have originated in the
unwholesome cellar.  They were not only without proof, but against
proof; for was I not myself a living proof of what Brother Hawkyard
had done? and without him, how should I ever have seen the sky look
sorrowfully down upon that wretched boy at Hoghton Towers?

Although the dread of a relapse into a stage of savage selfishness
was less strong upon me as I approached manhood, and could act in
an increased degree for myself, yet I was always on my guard
against any tendency to such relapse.  After getting these
suspicions under my feet, I had been troubled by not being able to
like Brother Hawkyard's manner, or his professed religion.  So it
came about, that, as I walked back that Sunday evening, I thought
it would be an act of reparation for any such injury my struggling
thoughts had unwillingly done him, if I wrote, and placed in his
hands, before going to college, a full acknowledgment of his
goodness to me, and an ample tribute of thanks.  It might serve as
an implied vindication of him against any dark scandal from a rival
brother and expounder, or from any other quarter.

Accordingly, I wrote the document with much care.  I may add with
much feeling too; for it affected me as I went on.  Having no set
studies to pursue, in the brief interval between leaving the
Foundation and going to Cambridge, I determined to walk out to his
place of business, and give it into his own hands.

It was a winter afternoon, when I tapped at the door of his little
counting-house, which was at the farther end of his long, low shop.
As I did so (having entered by the back yard, where casks and boxes
were taken in, and where there was the inscription, 'Private way to
the counting-house'), a shopman called to me from the counter that
he was engaged.

'Brother Gimblet' (said the shopman, who was one of the
brotherhood) 'is with him.'

I thought this all the better for my purpose, and made bold to tap
again.  They were talking in a low tone, and money was passing; for
I heard it being counted out.

'Who is it?' asked Brother Hawkyard, sharply.

'George Silverman,' I answered, holding the door open.  'May I come
in?'

Both brothers seemed so astounded to see me that I felt shyer than
usual.  But they looked quite cadaverous in the early gaslight, and
perhaps that accidental circumstance exaggerated the expression of
their faces.

'What is the matter?' asked Brother Hawkyard.

'Ay! what is the matter?' asked Brother Gimblet.

'Nothing at all,' I said, diffidently producing my document: 'I am
only the bearer of a letter from myself.'

'From yourself, George?' cried Brother Hawkyard.

'And to you,' said I.

'And to me, George?'

He turned paler, and opened it hurriedly; but looking over it, and
seeing generally what it was, became less hurried, recovered his
colour, and said, 'Praise the Lord!'

'That's it!' cried Brother Gimblet.  'Well put!  Amen.'

Brother Hawkyard then said, in a livelier strain, 'You must know,
George, that Brother Gimblet and I are going to make our two
businesses one.  We are going into partnership.  We are settling it
now.  Brother Gimblet is to take one clear half of the profits (O,
yes! he shall have it; he shall have it to the last farthing).'

'D.V.!' said Brother Gimblet, with his right fist firmly clinched
on his right leg.

'There is no objection,' pursued Brother Hawkyard, 'to my reading
this aloud, George?'

As it was what I expressly desired should be done, after
yesterday's prayer, I more than readily begged him to read it
aloud.  He did so; and Brother Gimblet listened with a crabbed
smile.

'It was in a good hour that I came here,' he said, wrinkling up his
eyes.  'It was in a good hour, likewise, that I was moved yesterday
to depict for the terror of evil-doers a character the direct
opposite of Brother Hawkyard's.  But it was the Lord that done it:
I felt him at it while I was perspiring.'

After that it was proposed by both of them that I should attend the
congregation once more before my final departure.  What my shy
reserve would undergo, from being expressly preached at and prayed
at, I knew beforehand.  But I reflected that it would be for the
last time, and that it might add to the weight of my letter.  It
was well known to the brothers and sisters that there was no place
taken for me in THEIR paradise; and if I showed this last token of
deference to Brother Hawkyard, notoriously in despite of my own
sinful inclinations, it might go some little way in aid of my
statement that he had been good to me, and that I was grateful to
him.  Merely stipulating, therefore, that no express endeavour
should be made for my conversion, - which would involve the rolling
of several brothers and sisters on the floor, declaring that they
felt all their sins in a heap on their left side, weighing so many
pounds avoirdupois, as I knew from what I had seen of those
repulsive mysteries, - I promised.

Since the reading of my letter, Brother Gimblet had been at
intervals wiping one eye with an end of his spotted blue
neckerchief, and grinning to himself.  It was, however, a habit
that brother had, to grin in an ugly manner even when expounding.
I call to mind a delighted snarl with which he used to detail from
the platform the torments reserved for the wicked (meaning all
human creation except the brotherhood), as being remarkably
hideous.

I left the two to settle their articles of partnership, and count
money; and I never saw them again but on the following Sunday.
Brother Hawkyard died within two or three years, leaving all he
possessed to Brother Gimblet, in virtue of a will dated (as I have
been told) that very day.

Now I was so far at rest with myself, when Sunday came, knowing
that I had conquered my own mistrust, and righted Brother Hawkyard
in the jaundiced vision of a rival, that I went, even to that
coarse chapel, in a less sensitive state than usual.  How could I
foresee that the delicate, perhaps the diseased, corner of my mind,
where I winced and shrunk when it was touched, or was even
approached, would be handled as the theme of the whole proceedings?

On this occasion it was assigned to Brother Hawkyard to pray, and
to Brother Gimblet to preach.  The prayer was to open the
ceremonies; the discourse was to come next.  Brothers Hawkyard and
Gimblet were both on the platform; Brother Hawkyard on his knees at
the table, unmusically ready to pray; Brother Gimblet sitting
against the wall, grinningly ready to preach.

'Let us offer up the sacrifice of prayer, my brothers and sisters
and fellow-sinners.'  Yes; but it was I who was the sacrifice.  It
was our poor, sinful, worldly-minded brother here present who was
wrestled for.  The now-opening career of this our unawakened
brother might lead to his becoming a minister of what was called
'the church.'  That was what HE looked to.  The church.  Not the
chapel, Lord.  The church.  No rectors, no vicars, no archdeacons,
no bishops, no archbishops, in the chapel, but, O Lord! many such
in the church.  Protect our sinful brother from his love of lucre.
Cleanse from our unawakened brother's breast his sin of worldly-
mindedness.  The prayer said infinitely more in words, but nothing
more to any intelligible effect.

Then Brother Gimblet came forward, and took (as I knew he would)
the text, 'My kingdom is not of this world.'  Ah! but whose was, my
fellow-sinners?  Whose?  Why, our brother's here present was.  The
only kingdom he had an idea of was of this world.  ('That's it!'
from several of the congregation.)  What did the woman do when she
lost the piece of money?  Went and looked for it.  What should our
brother do when he lost his way?  ('Go and look for it,' from a
sister.)  Go and look for it, true.  But must he look for it in the
right direction, or in the wrong?  ('In the right,' from a
brother.)  There spake the prophets!  He must look for it in the
right direction, or he couldn't find it.  But he had turned his
back upon the right direction, and he wouldn't find it.  Now, my
fellow-sinners, to show you the difference betwixt worldly-
mindedness and unworldly-mindedness, betwixt kingdoms not of this
world and kingdoms OF this world, here was a letter wrote by even
our worldly-minded brother unto Brother Hawkyard.  Judge, from
hearing of it read, whether Brother Hawkyard was the faithful
steward that the Lord had in his mind only t'other day, when, in
this very place, he drew you the picter of the unfaithful one; for
it was him that done it, not me.  Don't doubt that!

Brother Gimblet then groaned and bellowed his way through my
composition, and subsequently through an hour.  The service closed
with a hymn, in which the brothers unanimously roared, and the
sisters unanimously shrieked at me, That I by wiles of worldly gain
was mocked, and they on waters of sweet love were rocked; that I
with mammon struggled in the dark, while they were floating in a
second ark.

I went out from all this with an aching heart and a weary spirit:
not because I was quite so weak as to consider these narrow
creatures interpreters of the Divine Majesty and Wisdom, but
because I was weak enough to feel as though it were my hard fortune
to be misrepresented and misunderstood, when I most tried to subdue
any risings of mere worldliness within me, and when I most hoped
that, by dint of trying earnestly, I had succeeded.



SEVENTH CHAPTER



MY timidity and my obscurity occasioned me to live a secluded life
at college, and to be little known.  No relative ever came to visit
me, for I had no relative.  No intimate friends broke in upon my
studies, for I made no intimate friends.  I supported myself on my
scholarship, and read much.  My college time was otherwise not so
very different from my time at Hoghton Towers.

Knowing myself to be unfit for the noisier stir of social
existence, but believing myself qualified to do my duty in a
moderate, though earnest way, if I could obtain some small
preferment in the Church, I applied my mind to the clerical
profession.  In due sequence I took orders, was ordained, and began
to look about me for employment.  I must observe that I had taken a
good degree, that I had succeeded in winning a good fellowship, and
that my means were ample for my retired way of life.  By this time
I had read with several young men; and the occupation increased my
income, while it was highly interesting to me.  I once accidentally
overheard our greatest don say, to my boundless joy, 'That he heard
it reported of Silverman that his gift of quiet explanation, his
patience, his amiable temper, and his conscientiousness made him
the best of coaches.'  May my 'gift of quiet explanation' come more
seasonably and powerfully to my aid in this present explanation
than I think it will!

It may be in a certain degree owing to the situation of my college-
rooms (in a corner where the daylight was sobered), but it is in a
much larger degree referable to the state of my own mind, that I
seem to myself, on looking back to this time of my life, to have
been always in the peaceful shade.  I can see others in the
sunlight; I can see our boats' crews and our athletic young men on
the glistening water, or speckled with the moving lights of sunlit
leaves; but I myself am always in the shadow looking on.  Not
unsympathetically, - God forbid! - but looking on alone, much as I
looked at Sylvia from the shadows of the ruined house, or looked at
the red gleam shining through the farmer's windows, and listened to
the fall of dancing feet, when all the ruin was dark that night in
the quadrangle.

I now come to the reason of my quoting that laudation of myself
above given.  Without such reason, to repeat it would have been
mere boastfulness.

Among those who had read with me was Mr. Fareway, second son of
Lady Fareway, widow of Sir Gaston Fareway, baronet.  This young
gentleman's abilities were much above the average; but he came of a
rich family, and was idle and luxurious.  He presented himself to
me too late, and afterwards came to me too irregularly, to admit of
my being of much service to him.  In the end, I considered it my
duty to dissuade him from going up for an examination which he
could never pass; and he left college without a degree.  After his
departure, Lady Fareway wrote to me, representing the justice of my
returning half my fee, as I had been of so little use to her son.
Within my knowledge a similar demand had not been made in any other
case; and I most freely admit that the justice of it had not
occurred to me until it was pointed out.  But I at once perceived
it, yielded to it, and returned the money -

Mr. Fareway had been gone two years or more, and I had forgotten
him, when he one day walked into my rooms as I was sitting at my
books.

Said he, after the usual salutations had passed, 'Mr. Silverman, my
mother is in town here, at the hotel, and wishes me to present you
to her.'

I was not comfortable with strangers, and I dare say I betrayed
that I was a little nervous or unwilling.  'For,' said he, without
my having spoken, 'I think the interview may tend to the
advancement of your prospects.'

It put me to the blush to think that I should be tempted by a
worldly reason, and I rose immediately.

Said Mr. Fareway, as we went along, 'Are you a good hand at
business?'

'I think not,' said I.

Said Mr. Fareway then, 'My mother is.'

'Truly?' said I.

'Yes: my mother is what is usually called a managing woman.
Doesn't make a bad thing, for instance, even out of the spendthrift
habits of my eldest brother abroad.  In short, a managing woman.
This is in confidence.'

He had never spoken to me in confidence, and I was surprised by his
doing so.  I said I should respect his confidence, of course, and
said no more on the delicate subject.  We had but a little way to
walk, and I was soon in his mother's company.  He presented me,
shook hands with me, and left us two (as he said) to business.

I saw in my Lady Fareway a handsome, well-preserved lady of
somewhat large stature, with a steady glare in her great round dark
eyes that embarrassed me.

Said my lady, 'I have heard from my son, Mr. Silverman, that you
would be glad of some preferment in the church.'  I gave my lady to
understand that was so.

'I don't know whether you are aware,' my lady proceeded, 'that we
have a presentation to a living?  I say WE have; but, in point of
fact, I have.'

I gave my lady to understand that I had not been aware of this.

Said my lady, 'So it is: indeed I have two presentations, - one to
two hundred a year, one to six.  Both livings are in our county, -
North Devonshire, - as you probably know.  The first is vacant.
Would you like it?'

What with my lady's eyes, and what with the suddenness of this
proposed gift, I was much confused.

'I am sorry it is not the larger presentation,' said my lady,
rather coldly; 'though I will not, Mr. Silverman, pay you the bad
compliment of supposing that YOU are, because that would be
mercenary, - and mercenary I am persuaded you are not.'

Said I, with my utmost earnestness, 'Thank you, Lady Fareway, thank
you, thank you!  I should be deeply hurt if I thought I bore the
character.'

'Naturally,' said my lady.  'Always detestable, but particularly in
a clergyman.  You have not said whether you will like the living?'

With apologies for my remissness or indistinctness, I assured my
lady that I accepted it most readily and gratefully.  I added that
I hoped she would not estimate my appreciation of the generosity of
her choice by my flow of words; for I was not a ready man in that
respect when taken by surprise or touched at heart.

'The affair is concluded,' said my lady; 'concluded.  You will find
the duties very light, Mr. Silverman.  Charming house; charming
little garden, orchard, and all that.  You will be able to take
pupils.  By the bye!  No: I will return to the word afterwards.
What was I going to mention, when it put me out?'

My lady stared at me, as if I knew.  And I didn't know.  And that
perplexed me afresh.

Said my lady, after some consideration, 'O, of course, how very
dull of me!  The last incumbent, - least mercenary man I ever saw,
- in consideration of the duties being so light and the house so
delicious, couldn't rest, he said, unless I permitted him to help
me with my correspondence, accounts, and various little things of
that kind; nothing in themselves, but which it worries a lady to
cope with.  Would Mr. Silverman also like to -?  Or shall I -?'

I hastened to say that my poor help would be always at her
ladyship's service.

'I am absolutely blessed,' said my lady, casting up her eyes (and
so taking them off me for one moment), 'in having to do with
gentlemen who cannot endure an approach to the idea of being
mercenary!'  She shivered at the word.  'And now as to the pupil.'

'The -?' I was quite at a loss.

'Mr. Silverman, you have no idea what she is.  She is,' said my
lady, laying her touch upon my coat-sleeve, 'I do verily believe,
the most extraordinary girl in this world.  Already knows more
Greek and Latin than Lady Jane Grey.  And taught herself!  Has not
yet, remember, derived a moment's advantage from Mr. Silverman's
classical acquirements.  To say nothing of mathematics, which she
is bent upon becoming versed in, and in which (as I hear from my
son and others) Mr. Silverman's reputation is so deservedly high!'

Under my lady's eyes I must have lost the clue, I felt persuaded;
and yet I did not know where I could have dropped it.

'Adelina,' said my lady, 'is my only daughter.  If I did not feel
quite convinced that I am not blinded by a mother's partiality;
unless I was absolutely sure that when you know her, Mr. Silverman,
you will esteem it a high and unusual privilege to direct her
studies, - I should introduce a mercenary element into this
conversation, and ask you on what terms - '

I entreated my lady to go no further.  My lady saw that I was
troubled, and did me the honour to comply with my request.



EIGHTH CHAPTER



EVERYTHING in mental acquisition that her brother might have been,
if he would, and everything in all gracious charms and admirable
qualities that no one but herself could be, - this was Adelina.

I will not expatiate upon her beauty; I will not expatiate upon her
intelligence, her quickness of perception, her powers of memory,
her sweet consideration, from the first moment, for the slow-paced
tutor who ministered to her wonderful gifts.  I was thirty then; I
am over sixty now: she is ever present to me in these hours as she
was in those, bright and beautiful and young, wise and fanciful and
good.

When I discovered that I loved her, how can I say?  In the first
day? in the first week? in the first month?  Impossible to trace.
If I be (as I am) unable to represent to myself any previous period
of my life as quite separable from her attracting power, how can I
answer for this one detail?

Whensoever I made the discovery, it laid a heavy burden on me.  And
yet, comparing it with the far heavier burden that I afterwards
took up, it does not seem to me now to have been very hard to bear.
In the knowledge that I did love her, and that I should love her
while my life lasted, and that I was ever to hide my secret deep in
my own breast, and she was never to find it, there was a kind of
sustaining joy or pride, or comfort, mingled with my pain.

But later on, - say, a year later on, - when I made another
discovery, then indeed my suffering and my struggle were strong.
That other discovery was -

These words will never see the light, if ever, until my heart is
dust; until her bright spirit has returned to the regions of which,
when imprisoned here, it surely retained some unusual glimpse of
remembrance; until all the pulses that ever beat around us shall
have long been quiet; until all the fruits of all the tiny
victories and defeats achieved in our little breasts shall have
withered away.  That discovery was that she loved me.

She may have enhanced my knowledge, and loved me for that; she may
have over-valued my discharge of duty to her, and loved me for
that; she may have refined upon a playful compassion which she
would sometimes show for what she called my want of wisdom,
according to the light of the world's dark lanterns, and loved me
for that; she may - she must - have confused the borrowed light of
what I had only learned, with its brightness in its pure, original
rays; but she loved me at that time, and she made me know it.

Pride of family and pride of wealth put me as far off from her in
my lady's eyes as if I had been some domesticated creature of
another kind.  But they could not put me farther from her than I
put myself when I set my merits against hers.  More than that.
They could not put me, by millions of fathoms, half so low beneath
her as I put myself when in imagination I took advantage of her
noble trustfulness, took the fortune that I knew she must possess
in her own right, and left her to find herself, in the zenith of
her beauty and genius, bound to poor rusty, plodding me.

No!  Worldliness should not enter here at any cost.  If I had tried
to keep it out of other ground, how much harder was I bound to try
to keep it out from this sacred place!

But there was something daring in her broad, generous character,
that demanded at so delicate a crisis to be delicately and
patiently addressed.  And many and many a bitter night (O, I found
I could cry for reasons not purely physical, at this pass of my
life!) I took my course.

My lady had, in our first interview, unconsciously overstated the
accommodation of my pretty house.  There was room in it for only
one pupil.  He was a young gentleman near coming of age, very well
connected, but what is called a poor relation.  His parents were
dead.  The charges of his living and reading with me were defrayed
by an uncle; and he and I were to do our utmost together for three
years towards qualifying him to make his way.  At this time he had
entered into his second year with me.  He was well-looking, clever,
energetic, enthusiastic; bold; in the best sense of the term, a
thorough young Anglo-Saxon.

I resolved to bring these two together.



NINTH CHAPTER



SAID I, one night, when I had conquered myself, 'Mr. Granville,' -
Mr. Granville Wharton his name was, - 'I doubt if you have ever yet
so much as seen Miss Fareway.'

'Well, sir,' returned he, laughing, 'you see her so much yourself,
that you hardly leave another fellow a chance of seeing her.'

'I am her tutor, you know,' said I.

And there the subject dropped for that time.  But I so contrived as
that they should come together shortly afterwards.  I had
previously so contrived as to keep them asunder; for while I loved
her, - I mean before I had determined on my sacrifice, - a lurking
jealousy of Mr. Granville lay within my unworthy breast.

It was quite an ordinary interview in the Fareway Park but they
talked easily together for some time: like takes to like, and they
had many points of resemblance.  Said Mr. Granville to me, when he
and I sat at our supper that night, 'Miss Fareway is remarkably
beautiful, sir, remarkably engaging.  Don't you think so?'  'I
think so,' said I.  And I stole a glance at him, and saw that he
had reddened and was thoughtful.  I remember it most vividly,
because the mixed feeling of grave pleasure and acute pain that the
slight circumstance caused me was the first of a long, long series
of such mixed impressions under which my hair turned slowly gray.

I had not much need to feign to be subdued; but I counterfeited to
be older than I was in all respects (Heaven knows! my heart being
all too young the while), and feigned to be more of a recluse and
bookworm than I had really become, and gradually set up more and
more of a fatherly manner towards Adelina.  Likewise I made my
tuition less imaginative than before; separated myself from my
poets and philosophers; was careful to present them in their own
light, and me, their lowly servant, in my own shade.  Moreover, in
the matter of apparel I was equally mindful; not that I had ever
been dapper that way; but that I was slovenly now.

As I depressed myself with one hand, so did I labour to raise Mr.
Granville with the other; directing his attention to such subjects
as I too well knew interested her, and fashioning him (do not
deride or misconstrue the expression, unknown reader of this
writing; for I have suffered!) into a greater resemblance to myself
in my solitary one strong aspect.  And gradually, gradually, as I
saw him take more and more to these thrown-out lures of mine, then
did I come to know better and better that love was drawing him on,
and was drawing her from me.

So passed more than another year; every day a year in its number of
my mixed impressions of grave pleasure and acute pain; and then
these two, being of age and free to act legally for themselves,
came before me hand in hand (my hair being now quite white), and
entreated me that I would unite them together.  'And indeed, dear
tutor,' said Adelina, 'it is but consistent in you that you should
do this thing for us, seeing that we should never have spoken
together that first time but for you, and that but for you we could
never have met so often afterwards.'  The whole of which was
literally true; for I had availed myself of my many business
attendances on, and conferences with, my lady, to take Mr.
Granville to the house, and leave him in the outer room with
Adelina.

I knew that my lady would object to such a marriage for her
daughter, or to any marriage that was other than an exchange of her
for stipulated lands, goods, and moneys.  But looking on the two,
and seeing with full eyes that they were both young and beautiful;
and knowing that they were alike in the tastes and acquirements
that will outlive youth and beauty; and considering that Adelina
had a fortune now, in her own keeping; and considering further that
Mr. Granville, though for the present poor, was of a good family
that had never lived in a cellar in Preston; and believing that
their love would endure, neither having any great discrepancy to
find out in the other, - I told them of my readiness to do this
thing which Adelina asked of her dear tutor, and to send them
forth, husband and wife, into the shining world with golden gates
that awaited them.

It was on a summer morning that I rose before the sun to compose
myself for the crowning of my work with this end; and my dwelling
being near to the sea, I walked down to the rocks on the shore, in
order that I might behold the sun in his majesty.

The tranquillity upon the deep, and on the firmament, the orderly
withdrawal of the stars, the calm promise of coming day, the rosy
suffusion of the sky and waters, the ineffable splendour that then
burst forth, attuned my mind afresh after the discords of the
night.  Methought that all I looked on said to me, and that all I
heard in the sea and in the air said to me, 'Be comforted, mortal,
that thy life is so short.  Our preparation for what is to follow
has endured, and shall endure, for unimaginable ages.'

I married them.  I knew that my hand was cold when I placed it on
their hands clasped together; but the words with which I had to
accompany the action I could say without faltering, and I was at
peace.

They being well away from my house and from the place after our
simple breakfast, the time was come when I must do what I had
pledged myself to them that I would do, - break the intelligence to
my lady.

I went up to the house, and found my lady in her ordinary business-
room.  She happened to have an unusual amount of commissions to
intrust to me that day; and she had filled my hands with papers
before I could originate a word.

'My lady,' I then began, as I stood beside her table.

'Why, what's the matter?' she said quickly, looking up.

'Not much, I would fain hope, after you shall have prepared
yourself, and considered a little.'

'Prepared myself; and considered a little!  You appear to have
prepared YOURSELF but indifferently, anyhow, Mr. Silverman.'  This
mighty scornfully, as I experienced my usual embarrassment under
her stare.

Said I, in self-extenuation once for all, 'Lady Fareway, I have but
to say for myself that I have tried to do my duty.'

'For yourself?' repeated my lady.  'Then there are others
concerned, I see.  Who are they?'

I was about to answer, when she made towards the bell with a dart
that stopped me, and said, 'Why, where is Adelina?'

'Forbear! be calm, my lady.  I married her this morning to Mr.
Granville Wharton.'

She set her lips, looked more intently at me than ever, raised her
right hand, and smote me hard upon the cheek.

'Give me back those papers! give me back those papers!'  She tore
them out of my hands, and tossed them on her table.  Then seating
herself defiantly in her great chair, and folding her arms, she
stabbed me to the heart with the unlooked-for reproach, 'You
worldly wretch!'

'Worldly?' I cried.  'Worldly?'

'This, if you please,' - she went on with supreme scorn, pointing
me out as if there were some one there to see, - 'this, if you
please, is the disinterested scholar, with not a design beyond his
books!  This, if you please, is the simple creature whom any one
could overreach in a bargain!  This, if you please, is Mr.
Silverman!  Not of this world; not he!  He has too much simplicity
for this world's cunning.  He has too much singleness of purpose to
be a match for this world's double-dealing.  What did he give you
for it?'

'For what?  And who?'

'How much,' she asked, bending forward in her great chair, and
insultingly tapping the fingers of her right hand on the palm of
her left, - 'how much does Mr. Granville Wharton pay you for
getting him Adelina's money?  What is the amount of your percentage
upon Adelina's fortune?  What were the terms of the agreement that
you proposed to this boy when you, the Rev. George Silverman,
licensed to marry, engaged to put him in possession of this girl?
You made good terms for yourself, whatever they were.  He would
stand a poor chance against your keenness.'

Bewildered, horrified, stunned by this cruel perversion, I could
not speak.  But I trust that I looked innocent, being so.

'Listen to me, shrewd hypocrite,' said my lady, whose anger
increased as she gave it utterance; 'attend to my words, you
cunning schemer, who have carried this plot through with such a
practised double face that I have never suspected you.  I had my
projects for my daughter; projects for family connection; projects
for fortune.  You have thwarted them, and overreached me; but I am
not one to be thwarted and overreached without retaliation.  Do you
mean to hold this living another month?'

'Do you deem it possible, Lady Fareway, that I can hold it another
hour, under your injurious words?'

'Is it resigned, then?'

'It was mentally resigned, my lady, some minutes ago.'

Don't equivocate, sir.  IS it resigned?'

'Unconditionally and entirely; and I would that I had never, never
come near it!'

'A cordial response from me to THAT wish, Mr. Silverman!  But take
this with you, sir.  If you had not resigned it, I would have had
you deprived of it.  And though you have resigned it, you will not
get quit of me as easily as you think for.  I will pursue you with
this story.  I will make this nefarious conspiracy of yours, for
money, known.  You have made money by it, but you have at the same
time made an enemy by it.  YOU will take good care that the money
sticks to you; I will take good care that the enemy sticks to you.'

Then said I finally, 'Lady Fareway, I think my heart is broken.
Until I came into this room just now, the possibility of such mean
wickedness as you have imputed to me never dawned upon my thoughts.
Your suspicions - '

'Suspicions!  Pah!' said she indignantly.  'Certainties.'

'Your certainties, my lady, as you call them, your suspicions as I
call them, are cruel, unjust, wholly devoid of foundation in fact.
I can declare no more; except that I have not acted for my own
profit or my own pleasure.  I have not in this proceeding
considered myself.  Once again, I think my heart is broken.  If I
have unwittingly done any wrong with a righteous motive, that is
some penalty to pay.'

She received this with another and more indignant 'Pah!' and I made
my way out of her room (I think I felt my way out with my hands,
although my eyes were open), almost suspecting that my voice had a
repulsive sound, and that I was a repulsive object.

There was a great stir made, the bishop was appealed to, I received
a severe reprimand, and narrowly escaped suspension.  For years a
cloud hung over me, and my name was tarnished.

But my heart did not break, if a broken heart involves death; for I
lived through it.

They stood by me, Adelina and her husband, through it all.  Those
who had known me at college, and even most of those who had only
known me there by reputation, stood by me too.  Little by little,
the belief widened that I was not capable of what was laid to my
charge.  At length I was presented to a college-living in a
sequestered place, and there I now pen my explanation.  I pen it at
my open window in the summer-time, before me, lying in the
churchyard, equal resting-place for sound hearts, wounded hearts,
and broken hearts.  I pen it for the relief of my own mind, not
foreseeing whether or no it will ever have a reader.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of George Silverman's Explanation

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens
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Barnaby Rudge

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This Etext was created by
Donald Lainson
charlie@idirect.com

I've left in archaic forms such as 'to-morrow' or 'to-day' 
as they occured in my copy.	 Also please be aware if spell-checking,
that within dialog many 'mispelled' words exist, i.e. 'wery' for 
'very', as intended by the author.





BARNABY RUDGE - A TALE OF THE RIOTS OF 'EIGHTY

by

Charles Dickens



PREFACE


The late Mr Waterton having, some time ago, expressed his opinion 
that ravens are gradually becoming extinct in England, I offered 
the few following words about my experience of these birds.

The raven in this story is a compound of two great originals, of 
whom I was, at different times, the proud possessor.  The first was 
in the bloom of his youth, when he was discovered in a modest 
retirement in London, by a friend of mine, and given to me.  He had 
from the first, as Sir Hugh Evans says of Anne Page, 'good gifts', 
which he improved by study and attention in a most exemplary 
manner.  He slept in a stable--generally on horseback--and so 
terrified a Newfoundland dog by his preternatural sagacity, that he 
has been known, by the mere superiority of his genius, to walk off 
unmolested with the dog's dinner, from before his face.  He was 
rapidly rising in acquirements and virtues, when, in an evil hour, 
his stable was newly painted.  He observed the workmen closely, 
saw that they were careful of the paint, and immediately burned to 
possess it.  On their going to dinner, he ate up all they had left 
behind, consisting of a pound or two of white lead; and this 
youthful indiscretion terminated in death.

While I was yet inconsolable for his loss, another friend of mine 
in Yorkshire discovered an older and more gifted raven at a village 
public-house, which he prevailed upon the landlord to part with for 
a consideration, and sent up to me.  The first act of this Sage, 
was, to administer to the effects of his predecessor, by 
disinterring all the cheese and halfpence he had buried in the 
garden--a work of immense labour and research, to which he devoted 
all the energies of his mind.  When he had achieved this task, he 
applied himself to the acquisition of stable language, in which he 
soon became such an adept, that he would perch outside my window 
and drive imaginary horses with great skill, all day.  Perhaps 
even I never saw him at his best, for his former master sent his 
duty with him, 'and if I wished the bird to come out very strong, 
would I be so good as to show him a drunken man'--which I never 
did, having (unfortunately) none but sober people at hand.

But I could hardly have respected him more, whatever the 
stimulating influences of this sight might have been.  He had not 
the least respect, I am sorry to say, for me in return, or for 
anybody but the cook; to whom he was attached--but only, I fear, as 
a Policeman might have been.  Once, I met him unexpectedly, about 
half-a-mile from my house, walking down the middle of a public 
street, attended by a pretty large crowd, and spontaneously 
exhibiting the whole of his accomplishments.  His gravity under 
those trying circumstances, I can never forget, nor the 
extraordinary gallantry with which, refusing to be brought home, he 
defended himself behind a pump, until overpowered by numbers.  It 
may have been that he was too bright a genius to live long, or it 
may have been that he took some pernicious substance into his bill, 
and thence into his maw--which is not improbable, seeing that he 
new-pointed the greater part of the garden-wall by digging out the 
mortar, broke countless squares of glass by scraping away the putty 
all round the frames, and tore up and swallowed, in splinters, the 
greater part of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing--but 
after some three years he too was taken ill, and died before the 
kitchen fire.  He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it 
roasted, and suddenly.  turned over on his back with a sepulchral 
cry of 'Cuckoo!'  Since then I have been ravenless.

No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge 
introduced into any Work of Fiction, and the subject presenting 
very extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project 
this Tale.

It is unnecessary to say, that those shameful tumults, while they 
reflect indelible disgrace upon the time in which they occurred, 
and all who had act or part in them, teach a good lesson.  That 
what we falsely call a religious cry is easily raised by men who 
have no religion, and who in their daily practice set at nought the 
commonest principles of right and wrong; that it is begotten of 
intolerance and persecution; that it is senseless, besotted, 
inveterate and unmerciful; all History teaches us.  But perhaps we 
do not know it in our hearts too well, to profit by even so humble 
an example as the 'No Popery' riots of Seventeen Hundred and Eighty.

However imperfectly those disturbances are set forth in the 
following pages, they are impartially painted by one who has no 
sympathy with the Romish Church, though he acknowledges, as most 
men do, some esteemed friends among the followers of its creed.

In the description of the principal outrages, reference has been 
had to the best authorities of that time, such as they are; the 
account given in this Tale, of all the main features of the Riots, 
is substantially correct.

Mr Dennis's allusions to the flourishing condition of his trade in 
those days, have their foundation in Truth, and not in the 
Author's fancy.  Any file of old Newspapers, or odd volume of the 
Annual Register, will prove this with terrible ease.

Even the case of Mary Jones, dwelt upon with so much pleasure by 
the same character, is no effort of invention.  The facts were 
stated, exactly as they are stated here, in the House of Commons.  
Whether they afforded as much entertainment to the merry gentlemen 
assembled there, as some other most affecting circumstances of a 
similar nature mentioned by Sir Samuel Romilly, is not recorded.

That the case of Mary Jones may speak the more emphatically for 
itself, I subjoin it, as related by SIR WILLIAM MEREDITH in a 
speech in Parliament, 'on Frequent Executions', made in 1777.

'Under this act,' the Shop-lifting Act, 'one Mary Jones was 
executed, whose case I shall just mention; it was at the time when 
press warrants were issued, on the alarm about Falkland Islands.  
The woman's husband was pressed, their goods seized for some debts 
of his, and she, with two small children, turned into the streets 
a-begging.  It is a circumstance not to be forgotten, that she was 
very young (under nineteen), and most remarkably handsome.  She 
went to a linen-draper's shop, took some coarse linen off the 
counter, and slipped it under her cloak; the shopman saw her, and 
she laid it down: for this she was hanged.  Her defence was (I have 
the trial in my pocket), "that she had lived in credit, and wanted 
for nothing, till a press-gang came and stole her husband from her; 
but since then, she had no bed to lie on; nothing to give her 
children to eat; and they were almost naked; and perhaps she might 
have done something wrong, for she hardly knew what she did."  The 
parish officers testified the truth of this story; but it seems, 
there had been a good deal of shop-lifting about Ludgate; an 
example was thought necessary; and this woman was hanged for the 
comfort and satisfaction of shopkeepers in Ludgate Street.  When 
brought to receive sentence, she behaved in such a frantic manner, 
as proved her mind to he in a distracted and desponding state; and 
the child was sucking at her breast when she set out for Tyburn.'



Chapter 1


In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, 
at a distance of about twelve miles from London--measuring from the 
Standard in Cornhill,' or rather from the spot on or near to which 
the Standard used to be in days of yore--a house of public 
entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to 
all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that 
time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in 
this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against 
the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles 
were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty 
feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman 
drew.

The Maypole--by which term from henceforth is meant the house, and 
not its sign--the Maypole was an old building, with more gable ends 
than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag 
chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not 
choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted 
to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, 
and empty.  The place was said to have been built in the days of 
King Henry the Eighth; and there was a legend, not only that Queen 
Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, 
to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay window, but 
that next morning, while standing on a mounting block before the 
door with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and 
there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty.  
The matter-of-fact and doubtful folks, of whom there were a few 
among the Maypole customers, as unluckily there always are in every 
little community, were inclined to look upon this tradition as 
rather apocryphal; but, whenever the landlord of that ancient 
hostelry appealed to the mounting block itself as evidence, and 
triumphantly pointed out that there it stood in the same place to 
that very day, the doubters never failed to be put down by a large 
majority, and all true believers exulted as in a victory.

Whether these, and many other stories of the like nature, were true 
or untrue, the Maypole was really an old house, a very old house, 
perhaps as old as it claimed to be, and perhaps older, which will 
sometimes happen with houses of an uncertain, as with ladies of a 
certain, age.  Its windows were old diamond-pane lattices, its 
floors were sunken and uneven, its ceilings blackened by the hand 
of time, and heavy with massive beams.  Over the doorway was an 
ancient porch, quaintly and grotesquely carved; and here on summer 
evenings the more favoured customers smoked and drank--ay, and 
sang many a good song too, sometimes--reposing on two grim-looking 
high-backed settles, which, like the twin dragons of some fairy 
tale, guarded the entrance to the mansion.

In the chimneys of the disused rooms, swallows had built their 
nests for many a long year, and from earliest spring to latest 
autumn whole colonies of sparrows chirped and twittered in the 
eaves.  There were more pigeons about the dreary stable-yard and 
out-buildings than anybody but the landlord could reckon up.  The 
wheeling and circling flights of runts, fantails, tumblers, and 
pouters, were perhaps not quite consistent with the grave and sober 
character of the building, but the monotonous cooing, which never 
ceased to be raised by some among them all day long, suited it 
exactly, and seemed to lull it to rest.  With its overhanging 
stories, drowsy little panes of glass, and front bulging out and 
projecting over the pathway, the old house looked as if it were 
nodding in its sleep.  Indeed, it needed no very great stretch of 
fancy to detect in it other resemblances to humanity.  The bricks 
of which it was built had originally been a deep dark red, but had 
grown yellow and discoloured like an old man's skin; the sturdy 
timbers had decayed like teeth; and here and there the ivy, like a 
warm garment to comfort it in its age, wrapt its green leaves 
closely round the time-worn walls.

It was a hale and hearty age though, still: and in the summer or 
autumn evenings, when the glow of the setting sun fell upon the oak 
and chestnut trees of the adjacent forest, the old house, partaking 
of its lustre, seemed their fit companion, and to have many good 
years of life in him yet.

The evening with which we have to do, was neither a summer nor an 
autumn one, but the twilight of a day in March, when the wind 
howled dismally among the bare branches of the trees, and rumbling 
in the wide chimneys and driving the rain against the windows of 
the Maypole Inn, gave such of its frequenters as chanced to be 
there at the moment an undeniable reason for prolonging their stay, 
and caused the landlord to prophesy that the night would certainly 
clear at eleven o'clock precisely,--which by a remarkable 
coincidence was the hour at which he always closed his house.

The name of him upon whom the spirit of prophecy thus descended was 
John Willet, a burly, large-headed man with a fat face, which 
betokened profound obstinacy and slowness of apprehension, 
combined with a very strong reliance upon his own merits.  It was 
John Willet's ordinary boast in his more placid moods that if he 
were slow he was sure; which assertion could, in one sense at 
least, be by no means gainsaid, seeing that he was in everything 
unquestionably the reverse of fast, and withal one of the most 
dogged and positive fellows in existence--always sure that what he 
thought or said or did was right, and holding it as a thing quite 
settled and ordained by the laws of nature and Providence, that 
anybody who said or did or thought otherwise must be inevitably and 
of necessity wrong.

Mr Willet walked slowly up to the window, flattened his fat nose 
against the cold glass, and shading his eyes that his sight might 
not be affected by the ruddy glow of the fire, looked abroad.  Then 
he walked slowly back to his old seat in the chimney-corner, and, 
composing himself in it with a slight shiver, such as a man might 
give way to and so acquire an additional relish for the warm blaze, 
said, looking round upon his guests:

'It'll clear at eleven o'clock.  No sooner and no later.  Not 
before and not arterwards.'

'How do you make out that?' said a little man in the opposite 
corner.  'The moon is past the full, and she rises at nine.'

John looked sedately and solemnly at his questioner until he had 
brought his mind to bear upon the whole of his observation, and 
then made answer, in a tone which seemed to imply that the moon was 
peculiarly his business and nobody else's:

'Never you mind about the moon.  Don't you trouble yourself about 
her.  You let the moon alone, and I'll let you alone.'

'No offence I hope?' said the little man.

Again John waited leisurely until the observation had thoroughly 
penetrated to his brain, and then replying, 'No offence as YET,' 
applied a light to his pipe and smoked in placid silence; now and 
then casting a sidelong look at a man wrapped in a loose riding-
coat with huge cuffs ornamented with tarnished silver lace and 
large metal buttons, who sat apart from the regular frequenters of 
the house, and wearing a hat flapped over his face, which was still 
further shaded by the hand on which his forehead rested, looked 
unsociable enough.

There was another guest, who sat, booted and spurred, at some 
distance from the fire also, and whose thoughts--to judge from his 
folded arms and knitted brows, and from the untasted liquor before 
him--were occupied with other matters than the topics under 
discussion or the persons who discussed them.  This was a young man 
of about eight-and-twenty, rather above the middle height, and 
though of somewhat slight figure, gracefully and strongly made.  He 
wore his own dark hair, and was accoutred in a riding dress, which 
together with his large boots (resembling in shape and fashion 
those worn by our Life Guardsmen at the present day), showed 
indisputable traces of the bad condition of the roads.  But travel-
stained though he was, he was well and even richly attired, and 
without being overdressed looked a gallant gentleman.

Lying upon the table beside him, as he had carelessly thrown them 
down, were a heavy riding-whip and a slouched hat, the latter worn 
no doubt as being best suited to the inclemency of the weather.  
There, too, were a pair of pistols in a holster-case, and a short 
riding-cloak.  Little of his face was visible, except the long dark 
lashes which concealed his downcast eyes, but an air of careless 
ease and natural gracefulness of demeanour pervaded the figure, and 
seemed to comprehend even those slight accessories, which were all 
handsome, and in good keeping.

Towards this young gentleman the eyes of Mr Willet wandered but 
once, and then as if in mute inquiry whether he had observed his 
silent neighbour.  It was plain that John and the young gentleman 
had often met before.  Finding that his look was not returned, or 
indeed observed by the person to whom it was addressed, John 
gradually concentrated the whole power of his eyes into one focus, 
and brought it to bear upon the man in the flapped hat, at whom he 
came to stare in course of time with an intensity so remarkable, 
that it affected his fireside cronies, who all, as with one accord, 
took their pipes from their lips, and stared with open mouths at 
the stranger likewise.

The sturdy landlord had a large pair of dull fish-like eyes, and 
the little man who had hazarded the remark about the moon (and who 
was the parish-clerk and bell-ringer of Chigwell, a village hard 
by) had little round black shiny eyes like beads; moreover this 
little man wore at the knees of his rusty black breeches, and on 
his rusty black coat, and all down his long flapped waistcoat, 
little queer buttons like nothing except his eyes; but so like 
them, that as they twinkled and glistened in the light of the fire, 
which shone too in his bright shoe-buckles, he seemed all eyes from 
head to foot, and to be gazing with every one of them at the 
unknown customer.  No wonder that a man should grow restless under 
such an inspection as this, to say nothing of the eyes belonging to 
short Tom Cobb the general chandler and post-office keeper, and 
long Phil Parkes the ranger, both of whom, infected by the example 
of their companions, regarded him of the flapped hat no less 
attentively.

The stranger became restless; perhaps from being exposed to this 
raking fire of eyes, perhaps from the nature of his previous 
meditations--most probably from the latter cause, for as he changed 
his position and looked hastily round, he started to find himself 
the object of such keen regard, and darted an angry and suspicious 
glance at the fireside group.  It had the effect of immediately 
diverting all eyes to the chimney, except those of John Willet, who 
finding himself as it were, caught in the fact, and not being (as 
has been already observed) of a very ready nature, remained staring 
at his guest in a particularly awkward and disconcerted manner.

'Well?' said the stranger.

Well.  There was not much in well.  It was not a long speech.  'I 
thought you gave an order,' said the landlord, after a pause of two 
or three minutes for consideration.

The stranger took off his hat, and disclosed the hard features of a 
man of sixty or thereabouts, much weatherbeaten and worn by time, 
and the naturally harsh expression of which was not improved by a 
dark handkerchief which was bound tightly round his head, and, 
while it served the purpose of a wig, shaded his forehead, and 
almost hid his eyebrows.  If it were intended to conceal or divert 
attention from a deep gash, now healed into an ugly seam, which 
when it was first inflicted must have laid bare his cheekbone, the 
object was but indifferently attained, for it could scarcely fail 
to be noted at a glance.  His complexion was of a cadaverous hue, 
and he had a grizzly jagged beard of some three weeks' date.  Such 
was the figure (very meanly and poorly clad) that now rose from the 
seat, and stalking across the room sat down in a corner of the 
chimney, which the politeness or fears of the little clerk very 
readily assigned to him.

'A highwayman!' whispered Tom Cobb to Parkes the ranger.

'Do you suppose highwaymen don't dress handsomer than that?' 
replied Parkes.  'It's a better business than you think for, Tom, 
and highwaymen don't need or use to be shabby, take my word for it.'

Meanwhile the subject of their speculations had done due honour to 
the house by calling for some drink, which was promptly supplied by 
the landlord's son Joe, a broad-shouldered strapping young fellow 
of twenty, whom it pleased his father still to consider a little 
boy, and to treat accordingly.  Stretching out his hands to warm 
them by the blazing fire, the man turned his head towards the 
company, and after running his eye sharply over them, said in a 
voice well suited to his appearance:

'What house is that which stands a mile or so from here?'

'Public-house?' said the landlord, with his usual deliberation.

'Public-house, father!' exclaimed Joe, 'where's the public-house 
within a mile or so of the Maypole?  He means the great house--the 
Warren--naturally and of course.  The old red brick house, sir, 
that stands in its own grounds--?'

'Aye,' said the stranger.

'And that fifteen or twenty years ago stood in a park five times as 
broad, which with other and richer property has bit by bit changed 
hands and dwindled away--more's the pity!' pursued the young man.

'Maybe,' was the reply.  'But my question related to the owner.  
What it has been I don't care to know, and what it is I can see for 
myself.'

The heir-apparent to the Maypole pressed his finger on his lips, 
and glancing at the young gentleman already noticed, who had 
changed his attitude when the house was first mentioned, replied in 
a lower tone:

'The owner's name is Haredale, Mr Geoffrey Haredale, and'--again he 
glanced in the same direction as before--'and a worthy gentleman 
too--hem!'

Paying as little regard to this admonitory cough, as to the 
significant gesture that had preceded it, the stranger pursued his 
questioning.

'I turned out of my way coming here, and took the footpath that 
crosses the grounds.  Who was the young lady that I saw entering a 
carriage?  His daughter?'

'Why, how should I know, honest man?' replied Joe, contriving in 
the course of some arrangements about the hearth, to advance close 
to his questioner and pluck him by the sleeve, 'I didn't see the 
young lady, you know.  Whew!  There's the wind again--AND rain--
well it IS a night!'

Rough weather indeed!' observed the strange man.

'You're used to it?' said Joe, catching at anything which seemed to 
promise a diversion of the subject.

'Pretty well,' returned the other.  'About the young lady--has Mr 
Haredale a daughter?'

'No, no,' said the young fellow fretfully, 'he's a single 
gentleman--he's--be quiet, can't you, man?  Don't you see this 
talk is not relished yonder?'

Regardless of this whispered remonstrance, and affecting not to 
hear it, his tormentor provokingly continued:

'Single men have had daughters before now.  Perhaps she may be his 
daughter, though he is not married.'

'What do you mean?' said Joe, adding in an undertone as he 
approached him again, 'You'll come in for it presently, I know you 
will!'

'I mean no harm'--returned the traveller boldly, 'and have said 
none that I know of.  I ask a few questions--as any stranger may, 
and not unnaturally--about the inmates of a remarkable house in a 
neighbourhood which is new to me, and you are as aghast and 
disturbed as if I were talking treason against King George.  
Perhaps you can tell me why, sir, for (as I say) I am a stranger, 
and this is Greek to me?'

The latter observation was addressed to the obvious cause of Joe 
Willet's discomposure, who had risen and was adjusting his riding-
cloak preparatory to sallying abroad.  Briefly replying that he 
could give him no information, the young man beckoned to Joe, and 
handing him a piece of money in payment of his reckoning, hurried 
out attended by young Willet himself, who taking up a candle 
followed to light him to the house-door.

While Joe was absent on this errand, the elder Willet and his three 
companions continued to smoke with profound gravity, and in a deep 
silence, each having his eyes fixed on a huge copper boiler that 
was suspended over the fire.  After some time John Willet slowly 
shook his head, and thereupon his friends slowly shook theirs; but 
no man withdrew his eyes from the boiler, or altered the solemn 
expression of his countenance in the slightest degree.

At length Joe returned--very talkative and conciliatory, as though 
with a strong presentiment that he was going to be found fault 
with.

'Such a thing as love is!' he said, drawing a chair near the fire, 
and looking round for sympathy.  'He has set off to walk to 
London,--all the way to London.  His nag gone lame in riding out 
here this blessed afternoon, and comfortably littered down in our 
stable at this minute; and he giving up a good hot supper and our 
best bed, because Miss Haredale has gone to a masquerade up in 
town, and he has set his heart upon seeing her!  I don't think I 
could persuade myself to do that, beautiful as she is,--but then 
I'm not in love (at least I don't think I am) and that's the whole 
difference.'

'He is in love then?' said the stranger.

'Rather,' replied Joe.  'He'll never be more in love, and may very 
easily be less.'

'Silence, sir!' cried his father.

'What a chap you are, Joe!' said Long Parkes.

'Such a inconsiderate lad!' murmured Tom Cobb.

'Putting himself forward and wringing the very nose off his own 
father's face!' exclaimed the parish-clerk, metaphorically.

'What HAVE I done?' reasoned poor Joe.

'Silence, sir!' returned his father, 'what do you mean by talking, 
when you see people that are more than two or three times your age, 
sitting still and silent and not dreaming of saying a word?'

'Why that's the proper time for me to talk, isn't it?' said Joe 
rebelliously.

'The proper time, sir!' retorted his father, 'the proper time's no 
time.'

'Ah to be sure!' muttered Parkes, nodding gravely to the other two 
who nodded likewise, observing under their breaths that that was 
the point.

'The proper time's no time, sir,' repeated John Willet; 'when I was 
your age I never talked, I never wanted to talk.  I listened and 
improved myself that's what I did.'

'And you'd find your father rather a tough customer in argeyment, 
Joe, if anybody was to try and tackle him,' said Parkes.

'For the matter o' that, Phil!' observed Mr Willet, blowing a long, 
thin, spiral cloud of smoke out of the corner of his mouth, and 
staring at it abstractedly as it floated away; 'For the matter o' 
that, Phil, argeyment is a gift of Natur.  If Natur has gifted a 
man with powers of argeyment, a man has a right to make the best of 
'em, and has not a right to stand on false delicacy, and deny that 
he is so gifted; for that is a turning of his back on Natur, a 
flouting of her, a slighting of her precious caskets, and a proving 
of one's self to be a swine that isn't worth her scattering pearls 
before.'

The landlord pausing here for a very long time, Mr Parkes naturally 
concluded that he had brought his discourse to an end; and 
therefore, turning to the young man with some austerity, 
exclaimed:

'You hear what your father says, Joe?  You wouldn't much like to 
tackle him in argeyment, I'm thinking, sir.'

'IF,' said John Willet, turning his eyes from the ceiling to the 
face of his interrupter, and uttering the monosyllable in capitals, 
to apprise him that he had put in his oar, as the vulgar say, with 
unbecoming and irreverent haste; 'IF, sir, Natur has fixed upon me 
the gift of argeyment, why should I not own to it, and rather glory 
in the same?  Yes, sir, I AM a tough customer that way.  You are 
right, sir.  My toughness has been proved, sir, in this room many 
and many a time, as I think you know; and if you don't know,' added 
John, putting his pipe in his mouth again, 'so much the better, for 
I an't proud and am not going to tell you.'

A general murmur from his three cronies, and a general shaking of 
heads at the copper boiler, assured John Willet that they had had 
good experience of his powers and needed no further evidence to 
assure them of his superiority.  John smoked with a little more 
dignity and surveyed them in silence.

'It's all very fine talking,' muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting 
in his chair with divers uneasy gestures.  'But if you mean to tell 
me that I'm never to open my lips--'

'Silence, sir!' roared his father.  'No, you never are.  When your 
opinion's wanted, you give it.  When you're spoke to, you speak.  
When your opinion's not wanted and you're not spoke to, don't you 
give an opinion and don't you speak.  The world's undergone a nice 
alteration since my time, certainly.  My belief is that there an't 
any boys left--that there isn't such a thing as a boy--that there's 
nothing now between a male baby and a man--and that all the boys 
went out with his blessed Majesty King George the Second.'

'That's a very true observation, always excepting the young 
princes,' said the parish-clerk, who, as the representative of 
church and state in that company, held himself bound to the nicest 
loyalty.  'If it's godly and righteous for boys, being of the ages 
of boys, to behave themselves like boys, then the young princes 
must be boys and cannot be otherwise.'

'Did you ever hear tell of mermaids, sir?' said Mr Willet.

'Certainly I have,' replied the clerk.

'Very good,' said Mr Willet.  'According to the constitution of 
mermaids, so much of a mermaid as is not a woman must be a fish.  
According to the constitution of young princes, so much of a young 
prince (if anything) as is not actually an angel, must be godly and 
righteous.  Therefore if it's becoming and godly and righteous in 
the young princes (as it is at their ages) that they should be 
boys, they are and must be boys, and cannot by possibility be 
anything else.'

This elucidation of a knotty point being received with such marks 
of approval as to put John Willet into a good humour, he contented 
himself with repeating to his son his command of silence, and 
addressing the stranger, said:

'If you had asked your questions of a grown-up person--of me or any 
of these gentlemen--you'd have had some satisfaction, and wouldn't 
have wasted breath.  Miss Haredale is Mr Geoffrey Haredale's 
niece.'

'Is her father alive?' said the man, carelessly.

'No,' rejoined the landlord, 'he is not alive, and he is not dead--'

'Not dead!' cried the other.

'Not dead in a common sort of way,' said the landlord.

The cronies nodded to each other, and Mr Parkes remarked in an 
undertone, shaking his head meanwhile as who should say, 'let no 
man contradict me, for I won't believe him,' that John Willet was 
in amazing force to-night, and fit to tackle a Chief Justice.

The stranger suffered a short pause to elapse, and then asked 
abruptly, 'What do you mean?'

'More than you think for, friend,' returned John Willet.  'Perhaps 
there's more meaning in them words than you suspect.'

'Perhaps there is,' said the strange man, gruffly; 'but what the 
devil do you speak in such mysteries for?  You tell me, first, that 
a man is not alive, nor yet dead--then, that he's not dead in a 
common sort of way--then, that you mean a great deal more than I 
think for.  To tell you the truth, you may do that easily; for so 
far as I can make out, you mean nothing.  What DO you mean, I ask 
again?'

'That,' returned the landlord, a little brought down from his 
dignity by the stranger's surliness, 'is a Maypole story, and has 
been any time these four-and-twenty years.  That story is Solomon 
Daisy's story.  It belongs to the house; and nobody but Solomon 
Daisy has ever told it under this roof, or ever shall--that's 
more.'

The man glanced at the parish-clerk, whose air of consciousness 
and importance plainly betokened him to be the person referred to, 
and, observing that he had taken his pipe from his lips, after a 
very long whiff to keep it alight, and was evidently about to tell 
his story without further solicitation, gathered his large coat 
about him, and shrinking further back was almost lost in the gloom 
of the spacious chimney-corner, except when the flame, struggling 
from under a great faggot, whose weight almost crushed it for the 
time, shot upward with a strong and sudden glare, and illumining 
his figure for a moment, seemed afterwards to cast it into deeper 
obscurity than before.

By this flickering light, which made the old room, with its heavy 
timbers and panelled walls, look as if it were built of polished 
ebony--the wind roaring and howling without, now rattling the latch 
and creaking the hinges of the stout oaken door, and now driving at 
the casement as though it would beat it in--by this light, and 
under circumstances so auspicious, Solomon Daisy began his tale:

'It was Mr Reuben Haredale, Mr Geoffrey's elder brother--'

Here he came to a dead stop, and made so long a pause that even 
John Willet grew impatient and asked why he did not proceed.

'Cobb,' said Solomon Daisy, dropping his voice and appealing to the 
post-office keeper; 'what day of the month is this?'

'The nineteenth.'

'Of March,' said the clerk, bending forward, 'the nineteenth of 
March; that's very strange.'

In a low voice they all acquiesced, and Solomon went on:

'It was Mr Reuben Haredale, Mr Geoffrey's elder brother, that 
twenty-two years ago was the owner of the Warren, which, as Joe 
has said--not that you remember it, Joe, for a boy like you can't 
do that, but because you have often heard me say so--was then a 
much larger and better place, and a much more valuable property 
than it is now.  His lady was lately dead, and he was left with one 
child--the Miss Haredale you have been inquiring about--who was 
then scarcely a year old.'

Although the speaker addressed himself to the man who had shown so 
much curiosity about this same family, and made a pause here as if 
expecting some exclamation of surprise or encouragement, the latter 
made no remark, nor gave any indication that he heard or was 
interested in what was said.  Solomon therefore turned to his old 
companions, whose noses were brightly illuminated by the deep red 
glow from the bowls of their pipes; assured, by long experience, of 
their attention, and resolved to show his sense of such indecent 
behaviour.

'Mr Haredale,' said Solomon, turning his back upon the strange man, 
'left this place when his lady died, feeling it lonely like, and 
went up to London, where he stopped some months; but finding that 
place as lonely as this--as I suppose and have always heard say--he 
suddenly came back again with his little girl to the Warren, 
bringing with him besides, that day, only two women servants, and 
his steward, and a gardener.'

Mr Daisy stopped to take a whiff at his pipe, which was going out, 
and then proceeded--at first in a snuffling tone, occasioned by 
keen enjoyment of the tobacco and strong pulling at the pipe, and 
afterwards with increasing distinctness:

'--Bringing with him two women servants, and his steward, and a 
gardener.  The rest stopped behind up in London, and were to follow 
next day.  It happened that that night, an old gentleman who lived 
at Chigwell Row, and had long been poorly, deceased, and an order 
came to me at half after twelve o'clock at night to go and toll the 
passing-bell.'

There was a movement in the little group of listeners, sufficiently 
indicative of the strong repugnance any one of them would have felt 
to have turned out at such a time upon such an errand.  The clerk 
felt and understood it, and pursued his theme accordingly.

'It WAS a dreary thing, especially as the grave-digger was laid up 
in his bed, from long working in a damp soil and sitting down to 
take his dinner on cold tombstones, and I was consequently under 
obligation to go alone, for it was too late to hope to get any 
other companion.  However, I wasn't unprepared for it; as the old 
gentleman had often made it a request that the bell should be 
tolled as soon as possible after the breath was out of his body, 
and he had been expected to go for some days.  I put as good a face 
upon it as I could, and muffling myself up (for it was mortal 
cold), started out with a lighted lantern in one hand and the key 
of the church in the other.'

At this point of the narrative, the dress of the strange man 
rustled as if he had turned himself to hear more distinctly.  
Slightly pointing over his shoulder, Solomon elevated his eyebrows 
and nodded a silent inquiry to Joe whether this was the case.  Joe 
shaded his eyes with his hand and peered into the corner, but could 
make out nothing, and so shook his head.

'It was just such a night as this; blowing a hurricane, raining 
heavily, and very dark--I often think now, darker than I ever saw 
it before or since; that may be my fancy, but the houses were all 
close shut and the folks in doors, and perhaps there is only one 
other man who knows how dark it really was.  I got into the church, 
chained the door back so that it should keep ajar--for, to tell the 
truth, I didn't like to be shut in there alone--and putting my 
lantern on the stone seat in the little corner where the bell-rope 
is, sat down beside it to trim the candle.

'I sat down to trim the candle, and when I had done so I could not 
persuade myself to get up again, and go about my work.  I don't 
know how it was, but I thought of all the ghost stories I had ever 
heard, even those that I had heard when I was a boy at school, and 
had forgotten long ago; and they didn't come into my mind one after 
another, but all crowding at once, like.  I recollected one story 
there was in the village, how that on a certain night in the year 
(it might be that very night for anything I knew), all the dead 
people came out of the ground and sat at the heads of their own 
graves till morning.  This made me think how many people I had 
known, were buried between the church-door and the churchyard gate, 
and what a dreadful thing it would be to have to pass among them 
and know them again, so earthy and unlike themselves.  I had known 
all the niches and arches in the church from a child; still, I 
couldn't persuade myself that those were their natural shadows 
which I saw on the pavement, but felt sure there were some ugly 
figures hiding among 'em and peeping out.  Thinking on in this 
way, I began to think of the old gentleman who was just dead, and I 
could have sworn, as I looked up the dark chancel, that I saw him 
in his usual place, wrapping his shroud about him and shivering as 
if he felt it cold.  All this time I sat listening and listening, 
and hardly dared to breathe.  At length I started up and took the 
bell-rope in my hands.  At that minute there rang--not that bell, 
for I had hardly touched the rope--but another!

'I heard the ringing of another bell, and a deep bell too, plainly.  
It was only for an instant, and even then the wind carried the 
sound away, but I heard it.  I listened for a long time, but it 
rang no more.  I had heard of corpse candles, and at last I 
persuaded myself that this must be a corpse bell tolling of itself 
at midnight for the dead.  I tolled my bell--how, or how long, I 
don't know--and ran home to bed as fast as I could touch the 
ground.

'I was up early next morning after a restless night, and told the 
story to my neighbours.  Some were serious and some made light of 
it; I don't think anybody believed it real.  But, that morning, Mr 
Reuben Haredale was found murdered in his bedchamber; and in his 
hand was a piece of the cord attached to an alarm-bell outside the 
roof, which hung in his room and had been cut asunder, no doubt by 
the murderer, when he seized it.

'That was the bell I heard.

'A bureau was found opened, and a cash-box, which Mr Haredale had 
brought down that day, and was supposed to contain a large sum of 
money, was gone.  The steward and gardener were both missing and 
both suspected for a long time, but they were never found, though 
hunted far and wide.  And far enough they might have looked for 
poor Mr Rudge the steward, whose body--scarcely to be recognised by 
his clothes and the watch and ring he wore--was found, months 
afterwards, at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds, with 
a deep gash in the breast where he had been stabbed with a knife.  
He was only partly dressed; and people all agreed that he had been 
sitting up reading in his own room, where there were many traces of 
blood, and was suddenly fallen upon and killed before his master.

Everybody now knew that the gardener must be the murderer, and 
though he has never been heard of from that day to this, he will 
be, mark my words.  The crime was committed this day two-and-twenty 
years--on the nineteenth of March, one thousand seven hundred and 
fifty-three.  On the nineteenth of March in some year--no matter 
when--I know it, I am sure of it, for we have always, in some 
strange way or other, been brought back to the subject on that day 
ever since--on the nineteenth of March in some year, sooner or 
later, that man will be discovered.'



Chapter 2


'A strange story!' said the man who had been the cause of the 
narration.--'Stranger still if it comes about as you predict.  Is 
that all?'

A question so unexpected, nettled Solomon Daisy not a little.  By 
dint of relating the story very often, and ornamenting it 
(according to village report) with a few flourishes suggested by 
the various hearers from time to time, he had come by degrees to 
tell it with great effect; and 'Is that all?' after the climax, was 
not what he was accustomed to.

'Is that all?' he repeated, 'yes, that's all, sir.  And enough 
too, I think.'

'I think so too.  My horse, young man!  He is but a hack hired from 
a roadside posting house, but he must carry me to London to-
night.'

'To-night!' said Joe.

'To-night,' returned the other.  'What do you stare at?  This 
tavern would seem to be a house of call for all the gaping idlers 
of the neighbourhood!'

At this remark, which evidently had reference to the scrutiny he 
had undergone, as mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the eyes of 
John Willet and his friends were diverted with marvellous rapidity 
to the copper boiler again.  Not so with Joe, who, being a 
mettlesome fellow, returned the stranger's angry glance with a 
steady look, and rejoined:

'It is not a very bold thing to wonder at your going on to-night.  
Surely you have been asked such a harmless question in an inn 
before, and in better weather than this.  I thought you mightn't 
know the way, as you seem strange to this part.'

'The way--' repeated the other, irritably.

'Yes.  DO you know it?'

'I'll--humph!--I'll find it,' replied the nian, waving his hand and 
turning on his heel.  'Landlord, take the reckoning here.'

John Willet did as he was desired; for on that point he was seldom 
slow, except in the particulars of giving change, and testing the 
goodness of any piece of coin that was proffered to him, by the 
application of his teeth or his tongue, or some other test, or in 
doubtful cases, by a long series of tests terminating in its 
rejection.  The guest then wrapped his garments about him so as to 
shelter himself as effectually as he could from the rough weather, 
and without any word or sign of farewell betook himself to the 
stableyard.  Here Joe (who had left the room on the conclusion of 
their short dialogue) was protecting himself and the horse from the 
rain under the shelter of an old penthouse roof.

'He's pretty much of my opinion,' said Joe, patting the horse upon 
the neck.  'I'll wager that your stopping here to-night would 
please him better than it would please me.'

'He and I are of different opinions, as we have been more than once 
on our way here,' was the short reply.

'So I was thinking before you came out, for he has felt your spurs, 
poor beast.'

The stranger adjusted his coat-collar about his face, and made no 
answer.

'You'll know me again, I see,' he said, marking the young fellow's 
earnest gaze, when he had sprung into the saddle.

'The man's worth knowing, master, who travels a road he don't know, 
mounted on a jaded horse, and leaves good quarters to do it on such 
a night as this.'

'You have sharp eyes and a sharp tongue, I find.'

'Both I hope by nature, but the last grows rusty sometimes for 
want of using.'

'Use the first less too, and keep their sharpness for your 
sweethearts, boy,' said the man.

So saying he shook his hand from the bridle, struck him roughly on 
the head with the butt end of his whip, and galloped away; dashing 
through the mud and darkness with a headlong speed, which few badly 
mounted horsemen would have cared to venture, even had they been 
thoroughly acquainted with the country; and which, to one who knew 
nothing of the way he rode, was attended at every step with great 
hazard and danger.

The roads, even within twelve miles of London, were at that time 
ill paved, seldom repaired, and very badly made.  The way this 
rider traversed had been ploughed up by the wheels of heavy 
waggons, and rendered rotten by the frosts and thaws of the 
preceding winter, or possibly of many winters.  Great holes and 
gaps had been worn into the soil, which, being now filled with 
water from the late rains, were not easily distinguishable even by 
day; and a plunge into any one of them might have brought down a 
surer-footed horse than the poor beast now urged forward to the 
utmost extent of his powers.  Sharp flints and stones rolled from 
under his hoofs continually; the rider could scarcely see beyond 
the animal's head, or farther on either side than his own arm 
would have extended.  At that time, too, all the roads in the 
neighbourhood of the metropolis were infested by footpads or 
highwaymen, and it was a night, of all others, in which any evil-
disposed person of this class might have pursued his unlawful 
calling with little fear of detection.

Still, the traveller dashed forward at the same reckless pace, 
regardless alike of the dirt and wet which flew about his head, the 
profound darkness of the night, and the probability of encountering 
some desperate characters abroad.  At every turn and angle, even 
where a deviation from the direct course might have been least 
expected, and could not possibly be seen until he was close upon 
it, he guided the bridle with an unerring hand, and kept the middle 
of the road.  Thus he sped onward, raising himself in the stirrups, 
leaning his body forward until it almost touched the horse's neck, 
and flourishing his heavy whip above his head with the fervour of a 
madman.

There are times when, the elements being in unusual commotion, 
those who are bent on daring enterprises, or agitated by great 
thoughts, whether of good or evil, feel a mysterious sympathy with 
the tumult of nature, and are roused into corresponding violence.  
In the midst of thunder, lightning, and storm, many tremendous 
deeds have been committed; men, self-possessed before, have given 
a sudden loose to passions they could no longer control.  The 
demons of wrath and despair have striven to emulate those who ride 
the whirlwind and direct the storm; and man, lashed into madness 
with the roaring winds and boiling waters, has become for the time 
as wild and merciless as the elements themselves.

Whether the traveller was possessed by thoughts which the fury of 
the night had heated and stimulated into a quicker current, or was 
merely impelled by some strong motive to reach his journey's end, 
on he swept more like a hunted phantom than a man, nor checked his 
pace until, arriving at some cross roads, one of which led by a 
longer route to the place whence he had lately started, he bore 
down so suddenly upon a vehicle which was coming towards him, that 
in the effort to avoid it he well-nigh pulled his horse upon his 
haunches, and narrowly escaped being thrown.

'Yoho!' cried the voice of a man.  'What's that?  Who goes there?'

'A friend!' replied the traveller.

'A friend!' repeated the voice.  'Who calls himself a friend and 
rides like that, abusing Heaven's gifts in the shape of horseflesh, 
and endangering, not only his own neck (which might be no great 
matter) but the necks of other people?'

'You have a lantern there, I see,' said the traveller dismounting, 
'lend it me for a moment.  You have wounded my horse, I think, with 
your shaft or wheel.'

'Wounded him!' cried the other, 'if I haven't killed him, it's no 
fault of yours.  What do you mean by galloping along the king's 
highway like that, eh?'

'Give me the light,' returned the traveller, snatching it from his 
hand, 'and don't ask idle questions of a man who is in no mood for 
talking.'

'If you had said you were in no mood for talking before, I should 
perhaps have been in no mood for lighting,' said the voice.  
'Hows'ever as it's the poor horse that's damaged and not you, one 
of you is welcome to the light at all events--but it's not the 
crusty one.'

The traveller returned no answer to this speech, but holding the 
light near to his panting and reeking beast, examined him in limb 
and carcass.  Meanwhile, the other man sat very composedly in his 
vehicle, which was a kind of chaise with a depository for a large 
bag of tools, and watched his proceedings with a careful eye.

The looker-on was a round, red-faced, sturdy yeoman, with a double 
chin, and a voice husky with good living, good sleeping, good 
humour, and good health.  He was past the prime of life, but Father 
Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none 
of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have 
used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but 
leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour.  With 
such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's 
hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in 
the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

The person whom the traveller had so abruptly encountered was of 
this kind: bluff, hale, hearty, and in a green old age: at peace 
with himself, and evidently disposed to be so with all the world.  
Although muffled up in divers coats and handkerchiefs--one of 
which, passed over his crown, and tied in a convenient crease of 
his double chin, secured his three-cornered hat and bob-wig from 
blowing off his head--there was no disguising his plump and 
comfortable figure; neither did certain dirty finger-marks upon 
his face give it any other than an odd and comical expression, 
through which its natural good humour shone with undiminished 
lustre.

'He is not hurt,' said the traveller at length, raising his head 
and the lantern together.

'You have found that out at last, have you?' rejoined the old man.  
'My eyes have seen more light than yours, but I wouldn't change 
with you.'

'What do you mean?'

'Mean!  I could have told you he wasn't hurt, five minutes ago.  
Give me the light, friend; ride forward at a gentler pace; and good 
night.'

In handing up the lantern, the man necessarily cast its rays full 
on the speaker's face.  Their eyes met at the instant.  He suddenly 
dropped it and crushed it with his foot.

'Did you never see a locksmith before, that you start as if you had 
come upon a ghost?' cried the old man in the chaise, 'or is this,' 
he added hastily, thrusting his hand into the tool basket and 
drawing out a hammer, 'a scheme for robbing me?  I know these 
roads, friend.  When I travel them, I carry nothing but a few 
shillings, and not a crown's worth of them.  I tell you plainly, to 
save us both trouble, that there's nothing to be got from me but a 
pretty stout arm considering my years, and this tool, which, mayhap 
from long acquaintance with, I can use pretty briskly.  You shall 
not have it all your own way, I promise you, if you play at that 
game.  With these words he stood upon the defensive.

'I am not what you take me for, Gabriel Varden,' replied the other.

'Then what and who are you?' returned the locksmith.  'You know my 
name, it seems.  Let me know yours.'

'I have not gained the information from any confidence of yours, 
but from the inscription on your cart which tells it to all the 
town,' replied the traveller.

'You have better eyes for that than you had for your horse, then,' 
said Varden, descending nimbly from his chaise; 'who are you?  Let 
me see your face.'

While the locksmith alighted, the traveller had regained his 
saddle, from which he now confronted the old man, who, moving as 
the horse moved in chafing under the tightened rein, kept close 
beside him.

'Let me see your face, I say.'

'Stand off!'

'No masquerading tricks,' said the locksmith, 'and tales at the 
club to-morrow, how Gabriel Varden was frightened by a surly voice 
and a dark night.  Stand--let me see your face.'

Finding that further resistance would only involve him in a 
personal struggle with an antagonist by no means to be despised, 
the traveller threw back his coat, and stooping down looked 
steadily at the locksmith.

Perhaps two men more powerfully contrasted, never opposed each 
other face to face.  The ruddy features of the locksmith so set off 
and heightened the excessive paleness of the man on horseback, that 
he looked like a bloodless ghost, while the moisture, which hard 
riding had brought out upon his skin, hung there in dark and heavy 
drops, like dews of agony and death.  The countenance of the old 
locksmith lighted up with the smile of one expecting to detect in 
this unpromising stranger some latent roguery of eye or lip, which 
should reveal a familiar person in that arch disguise, and spoil 
his jest.  The face of the other, sullen and fierce, but shrinking 
too, was that of a man who stood at bay; while his firmly closed 
jaws, his puckered mouth, and more than all a certain stealthy 
motion of the hand within his breast, seemed to announce a 
desperate purpose very foreign to acting, or child's play.

Thus they regarded each other for some time, in silence.

'Humph!' he said when he had scanned his features; 'I don't know 
you.'

'Don't desire to?'--returned the other, muffling himself as before.

'I don't,' said Gabriel; 'to be plain with you, friend, you don't 
carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.'

'It's not my wish,' said the traveller.  'My humour is to be 
avoided.'

'Well,' said the locksmith bluntly, 'I think you'll have your 
humour.'

'I will, at any cost,' rejoined the traveller.  'In proof of it, 
lay this to heart--that you were never in such peril of your life 
as you have been within these few moments; when you are within 
five minutes of breathing your last, you will not be nearer death 
than you have been to-night!'

'Aye!' said the sturdy locksmith.

'Aye! and a violent death.'

'From whose hand?'

'From mine,' replied the traveller.

With that he put spurs to his horse, and rode away; at first 
plashing heavily through the mire at a smart trot, but gradually 
increasing in speed until the last sound of his horse's hoofs died 
away upon the wind; when he was again hurrying on at the same 
furious gallop, which had been his pace when the locksmith first 
encountered him.

Gabriel Varden remained standing in the road with the broken 
lantern in his hand, listening in stupefied silence until no sound 
reached his ear but the moaning of the wind, and the fast-falling 
rain; when he struck himself one or two smart blows in the breast 
by way of rousing himself, and broke into an exclamation of 
surprise.

'What in the name of wonder can this fellow be! a madman? a 
highwayman? a cut-throat?  If he had not scoured off so fast, we'd 
have seen who was in most danger, he or I.  I never nearer death 
than I have been to-night!  I hope I may be no nearer to it for a 
score of years to come--if so, I'll be content to be no farther 
from it.  My stars!--a pretty brag this to a stout man--pooh, 
pooh!'

Gabriel resumed his seat, and looked wistfully up the road by which 
the traveller had come; murmuring in a half whisper:

'The Maypole--two miles to the Maypole.  I came the other road from 
the Warren after a long day's work at locks and bells, on purpose 
that I should not come by the Maypole and break my promise to 
Martha by looking in--there's resolution!  It would be dangerous to 
go on to London without a light; and it's four miles, and a good 
half mile besides, to the Halfway-House; and between this and that 
is the very place where one needs a light most.  Two miles to the 
Maypole!  I told Martha I wouldn't; I said I wouldn't, and I 
didn't--there's resolution!'

Repeating these two last words very often, as if to compensate for 
the little resolution he was going to show by piquing himself on 
the great resolution he had shown, Gabriel Varden quietly turned 
back, determining to get a light at the Maypole, and to take 
nothing but a light.

When he got to the Maypole, however, and Joe, responding to his 
well-known hail, came running out to the horse's head, leaving the 
door open behind him, and disclosing a delicious perspective of 
warmth and brightness--when the ruddy gleam of the fire, streaming 
through the old red curtains of the common room, seemed to bring 
with it, as part of itself, a pleasant hum of voices, and a 
fragrant odour of steaming grog and rare tobacco, all steeped as 
it were in the cheerful glow--when the shadows, flitting across the 
curtain, showed that those inside had risen from their snug seats, 
and were making room in the snuggest corner (how well he knew that 
corner!) for the honest locksmith, and a broad glare, suddenly 
streaming up, bespoke the goodness of the crackling log from which 
a brilliant train of sparks was doubtless at that moment whirling 
up the chimney in honour of his coming--when, superadded to these 
enticements, there stole upon him from the distant kitchen a gentle 
sound of frying, with a musical clatter of plates and dishes, and a 
savoury smell that made even the boisterous wind a perfume--Gabriel 
felt his firmness oozing rapidly away.  He tried to look stoically 
at the tavern, but his features would relax into a look of 
fondness.  He turned his head the other way, and the cold black 
country seemed to frown him off, and drive him for a refuge into 
its hospitable arms.

'The merciful man, Joe,' said the locksmith, 'is merciful to his 
beast.  I'll get out for a little while.'

And how natural it was to get out!  And how unnatural it seemed for 
a sober man to be plodding wearily along through miry roads, 
encountering the rude buffets of the wind and pelting of the rain, 
when there was a clean floor covered with crisp white sand, a well 
swept hearth, a blazing fire, a table decorated with white cloth, 
bright pewter flagons, and other tempting preparations for a well-
cooked meal--when there were these things, and company disposed to 
make the most of them, all ready to his hand, and entreating him to 
enjoyment!



Chapter 3


Such were the locksmith's thoughts when first seated in the snug 
corner, and slowly recovering from a pleasant defect of vision--
pleasant, because occasioned by the wind blowing in his eyes--which 
made it a matter of sound policy and duty to himself, that he 
should take refuge from the weather, and tempted him, for the same 
reason, to aggravate a slight cough, and declare he felt but 
poorly.  Such were still his thoughts more than a full hour 
afterwards, when, supper over, he still sat with shining jovial 
face in the same warm nook, listening to the cricket-like chirrup 
of little Solomon Daisy, and bearing no unimportant or slightly 
respected part in the social gossip round the Maypole fire.

'I wish he may be an honest man, that's all,' said Solomon, winding 
up a variety of speculations relative to the stranger, concerning 
whom Gabriel had compared notes with the company, and so raised a 
grave discussion; 'I wish he may be an honest man.'

'So we all do, I suppose, don't we?' observed the locksmith.

'I don't,' said Joe.

'No!' cried Gabriel.

'No.  He struck me with his whip, the coward, when he was mounted 
and I afoot, and I should be better pleased that he turned out what 
I think him.'

'And what may that be, Joe?'

'No good, Mr Varden.  You may shake your head, father, but I say no 
good, and will say no good, and I would say no good a hundred times 
over, if that would bring him back to have the drubbing he 
deserves.'

'Hold your tongue, sir,' said John Willet.

'I won't, father.  It's all along of you that he ventured to do 
what he did.  Seeing me treated like a child, and put down like a 
fool, HE plucks up a heart and has a fling at a fellow that he 
thinks--and may well think too--hasn't a grain of spirit.  But he's 
mistaken, as I'll show him, and as I'll show all of you before 
long.'

'Does the boy know what he's a saying of!' cried the astonished 
John Willet.

'Father,' returned Joe, 'I know what I say and mean, well--better 
than you do when you hear me.  I can bear with you, but I cannot 
bear the contempt that your treating me in the way you do, brings 
upon me from others every day.  Look at other young men of my age.  
Have they no liberty, no will, no right to speak?  Are they obliged 
to sit mumchance, and to be ordered about till they are the 
laughing-stock of young and old?  I am a bye-word all over 
Chigwell, and I say--and it's fairer my saying so now, than waiting 
till you are dead, and I have got your money--I say, that before 
long I shall be driven to break such bounds, and that when I do, it 
won't be me that you'll have to blame, but your own self, and no 
other.'

John Willet was so amazed by the exasperation and boldness of his 
hopeful son, that he sat as one bewildered, staring in a ludicrous 
manner at the boiler, and endeavouring, but quite ineffectually, to 
collect his tardy thoughts, and invent an answer.  The guests, 
scarcely less disturbed, were equally at a loss; and at length, 
with a variety of muttered, half-expressed condolences, and pieces 
of advice, rose to depart; being at the same time slightly muddled 
with liquor.

The honest locksmith alone addressed a few words of coherent and 
sensible advice to both parties, urging John Willet to remember 
that Joe was nearly arrived at man's estate, and should not be 
ruled with too tight a hand, and exhorting Joe himself to bear with 
his father's caprices, and rather endeavour to turn them aside by 
temperate remonstrance than by ill-timed rebellion.  This advice 
was received as such advice usually is.  On John Willet it made 
almost as much impression as on the sign outside the door, while 
Joe, who took it in the best part, avowed himself more obliged than 
he could well express, but politely intimated his intention 
nevertheless of taking his own course uninfluenced by anybody.

'You have always been a very good friend to me, Mr Varden,' he 
said, as they stood without, in the porch, and the locksmith was 
equipping himself for his journey home; 'I take it very kind of 
you to say all this, but the time's nearly come when the Maypole 
and I must part company.'

'Roving stones gather no moss, Joe,' said Gabriel.

'Nor milestones much,' replied Joe.  'I'm little better than one 
here, and see as much of the world.'

'Then, what would you do, Joe?' pursued the locksmith, stroking 
his chin reflectively.  'What could you be?  Where could you go, 
you see?'

'I must trust to chance, Mr Varden.'

'A bad thing to trust to, Joe.  I don't like it.  I always tell my 
girl when we talk about a husband for her, never to trust to 
chance, but to make sure beforehand that she has a good man and 
true, and then chance will neither make her nor break her.  What 
are you fidgeting about there, Joe?  Nothing gone in the harness, I 
hope?'

'No no,' said Joe--finding, however, something very engrossing to 
do in the way of strapping and buckling--'Miss Dolly quite well?'

'Hearty, thankye.  She looks pretty enough to be well, and good 
too.'

'She's always both, sir'--

'So she is, thank God!'

'I hope,' said Joe after some hesitation, 'that you won't tell this 
story against me--this of my having been beat like the boy they'd 
make of me--at all events, till I have met this man again and 
settled the account.  It'll be a better story then.'

'Why who should I tell it to?' returned Gabriel.  'They know it 
here, and I'm not likely to come across anybody else who would care 
about it.'

'That's true enough,' said the young fellow with a sigh.  'I quite 
forgot that.  Yes, that's true!'

So saying, he raised his face, which was very red,--no doubt from 
the exertion of strapping and buckling as aforesaid,--and giving 
the reins to the old man, who had by this time taken his seat, 
sighed again and bade him good night.

'Good night!' cried Gabriel.  'Now think better of what we have 
just been speaking of; and don't be rash, there's a good fellow!  I 
have an interest in you, and wouldn't have you cast yourself away.  
Good night!'

Returning his cheery farewell with cordial goodwill, Joe Willet 
lingered until the sound of wheels ceased to vibrate in his ears, 
and then, shaking his head mournfully, re-entered the house.

Gabriel Varden went his way towards London, thinking of a great 
many things, and most of all of flaming terms in which to relate 
his adventure, and so account satisfactorily to Mrs Varden for 
visiting the Maypole, despite certain solemn covenants between 
himself and that lady.  Thinking begets, not only thought, but 
drowsiness occasionally, and the more the locksmith thought, the 
more sleepy he became.

A man may be very sober--or at least firmly set upon his legs on 
that neutral ground which lies between the confines of perfect 
sobriety and slight tipsiness--and yet feel a strong tendency to 
mingle up present circumstances with others which have no manner of 
connection with them; to confound all consideration of persons, 
things, times, and places; and to jumble his disjointed thoughts 
together in a kind of mental kaleidoscope, producing combinations 
as unexpected as they are transitory.  This was Gabriel Varden's 
state, as, nodding in his dog sleep, and leaving his horse to 
pursue a road with which he was well acquainted, he got over the 
ground unconsciously, and drew nearer and nearer home.  He had 
roused himself once, when the horse stopped until the turnpike gate 
was opened, and had cried a lusty 'good night!' to the toll-
keeper; but then he awoke out of a dream about picking a lock in 
the stomach of the Great Mogul, and even when he did wake, mixed up 
the turnpike man with his mother-in-law who had been dead twenty 
years.  It is not surprising, therefore, that he soon relapsed, and 
jogged heavily along, quite insensible to his progress.

And, now, he approached the great city, which lay outstretched 
before him like a dark shadow on the ground, reddening the sluggish 
air with a deep dull light, that told of labyrinths of public ways 
and shops, and swarms of busy people.  Approaching nearer and 
nearer yet, this halo began to fade, and the causes which produced 
it slowly to develop themselves.  Long lines of poorly lighted 
streets might be faintly traced, with here and there a lighter 
spot, where lamps were clustered round a square or market, or round 
some great building; after a time these grew more distinct, and the 
lamps themselves were visible; slight yellow specks, that seemed to 
be rapidly snuffed out, one by one, as intervening obstacles hid 
them from the sight.  Then, sounds arose--the striking of church 
clocks, the distant bark of dogs, the hum of traffic in the 
streets; then outlines might be traced--tall steeples looming in 
the air, and piles of unequal roofs oppressed by chimneys; then, 
the noise swelled into a louder sound, and forms grew more distinct 
and numerous still, and London--visible in the darkness by its own 
faint light, and not by that of Heaven--was at hand.

The locksmith, however, all unconscious of its near vicinity, still 
jogged on, half sleeping and half waking, when a loud cry at no 
great distance ahead, roused him with a start.

For a moment or two he looked about him like a man who had been 
transported to some strange country in his sleep, but soon 
recognising familiar objects, rubbed his eyes lazily and might have 
relapsed again, but that the cry was repeated--not once or twice or 
thrice, but many times, and each time, if possible, with increased 
vehemence.  Thoroughly aroused, Gabriel, who was a bold man and not 
easily daunted, made straight to the spot, urging on his stout 
little horse as if for life or death.

The matter indeed looked sufficiently serious, for, coming to the 
place whence the cries had proceeded, he descried the figure of a 
man extended in an apparently lifeless state upon the pathway, 
and, hovering round him, another person with a torch in his hand, 
which he waved in the air with a wild impatience, redoubling 
meanwhile those cries for help which had brought the locksmith to 
the spot.

'What's here to do?' said the old man, alighting.  'How's this--
what--Barnaby?'

The bearer of the torch shook his long loose hair back from his 
eyes, and thrusting his face eagerly into that of the locksmith, 
fixed upon him a look which told his history at once.

'You know me, Barnaby?' said Varden.

He nodded--not once or twice, but a score of times, and that with a 
fantastic exaggeration which would have kept his head in motion for 
an hour, but that the locksmith held up his finger, and fixing his 
eye sternly upon him caused him to desist; then pointed to the body 
with an inquiring look.

'There's blood upon him,' said Barnaby with a shudder.  'It makes 
me sick!'

'How came it there?' demanded Varden.

'Steel, steel, steel!' he replied fiercely, imitating with his hand 
the thrust of a sword.

'Is he robbed?' said the locksmith.

Barnaby caught him by the arm, and nodded 'Yes;' then pointed 
towards the city.

'Oh!' said the old man, bending over the body and looking round as 
he spoke into Barnaby's pale face, strangely lighted up by 
something that was NOT intellect.  'The robber made off that way, 
did he?  Well, well, never mind that just now.  Hold your torch 
this way--a little farther off--so.  Now stand quiet, while I try 
to see what harm is done.'

With these words, he applied himself to a closer examination of the 
prostrate form, while Barnaby, holding the torch as he had been 
directed, looked on in silence, fascinated by interest or 
curiosity, but repelled nevertheless by some strong and secret 
horror which convulsed him in every nerve.

As he stood, at that moment, half shrinking back and half bending 
forward, both his face and figure were full in the strong glare of 
the link, and as distinctly revealed as though it had been broad 
day.  He was about three-and-twenty years old, and though rather 
spare, of a fair height and strong make.  His hair, of which he had 
a great profusion, was red, and hanging in disorder about his face 
and shoulders, gave to his restless looks an expression quite 
unearthly--enhanced by the paleness of his complexion, and the 
glassy lustre of his large protruding eyes.  Startling as his 
aspect was, the features were good, and there was something even 
plaintive in his wan and haggard aspect.  But, the absence of the 
soul is far more terrible in a living man than in a dead one; and 
in this unfortunate being its noblest powers were wanting.

His dress was of green, clumsily trimmed here and there--apparently 
by his own hands--with gaudy lace; brightest where the cloth was 
most worn and soiled, and poorest where it was at the best.  A pair 
of tawdry ruffles dangled at his wrists, while his throat was 
nearly bare.  He had ornamented his hat with a cluster of peacock's 
feathers, but they were limp and broken, and now trailed 
negligently down his back.  Girt to his side was the steel hilt of 
an old sword without blade or scabbard; and some particoloured ends 
of ribands and poor glass toys completed the ornamental portion of 
his attire.  The fluttered and confused disposition of all the 
motley scraps that formed his dress, bespoke, in a scarcely less 
degree than his eager and unsettled manner, the disorder of his 
mind, and by a grotesque contrast set off and heightened the more 
impressive wildness of his face.

'Barnaby,' said the locksmith, after a hasty but careful 
inspection, 'this man is not dead, but he has a wound in his side, 
and is in a fainting-fit.'

'I know him, I know him!' cried Barnaby, clapping his hands.

'Know him?' repeated the locksmith.

'Hush!' said Barnaby, laying his fingers upon his lips.  'He went 
out to-day a wooing.  I wouldn't for a light guinea that he should 
never go a wooing again, for, if he did, some eyes would grow dim 
that are now as bright as--see, when I talk of eyes, the stars come 
out!  Whose eyes are they?  If they are angels' eyes, why do they 
look down here and see good men hurt, and only wink and sparkle all 
the night?'

'Now Heaven help this silly fellow,' murmured the perplexed 
locksmith; 'can he know this gentleman?  His mother's house is not 
far off; I had better see if she can tell me who he is.  Barnaby, 
my man, help me to put him in the chaise, and we'll ride home 
together.'

'I can't touch him!' cried the idiot falling back, and shuddering 
as with a strong spasm; he's bloody!'

'It's in his nature, I know,' muttered the locksmith, 'it's cruel 
to ask him, but I must have help.  Barnaby--good Barnaby--dear 
Barnaby--if you know this gentleman, for the sake of his life and 
everybody's life that loves him, help me to raise him and lay him 
down.'

'Cover him then, wrap him close--don't let me see it--smell it--
hear the word.  Don't speak the word--don't!'

'No, no, I'll not.  There, you see he's covered now.  Gently.  Well 
done, well done!'

They placed him in the carriage with great ease, for Barnaby was 
strong and active, but all the time they were so occupied he 
shivered from head to foot, and evidently experienced an ecstasy of 
terror.

This accomplished, and the wounded man being covered with Varden's 
own greatcoat which he took off for the purpose, they proceeded 
onward at a brisk pace: Barnaby gaily counting the stars upon his 
fingers, and Gabriel inwardly congratulating himself upon having an 
adventure now, which would silence Mrs Varden on the subject of the 
Maypole, for that night, or there was no faith in woman.



Chapter 4


In the venerable suburb--it was a suburb once--of Clerkenwell, 
towards that part of its confines which is nearest to the Charter 
House, and in one of those cool, shady Streets, of which a few, 
widely scattered and dispersed, yet remain in such old parts of the 
metropolis,--each tenement quietly vegetating like an ancient 
citizen who long ago retired from business, and dozing on in its 
infirmity until in course of time it tumbles down, and is replaced 
by some extravagant young heir, flaunting in stucco and ornamental 
work, and all the vanities of modern days,--in this quarter, and in 
a street of this description, the business of the present chapter 
lies.

At the time of which it treats, though only six-and-sixty years 
ago, a very large part of what is London now had no existence.  
Even in the brains of the wildest speculators, there had sprung up 
no long rows of streets connecting Highgate with Whitechapel, no 
assemblages of palaces in the swampy levels, nor little cities in 
the open fields.  Although this part of town was then, as now, 
parcelled out in streets, and plentifully peopled, it wore a 
different aspect.  There were gardens to many of the houses, and 
trees by the pavement side; with an air of freshness breathing up 
and down, which in these days would be sought in vain.  Fields were 
nigh at hand, through which the New River took its winding course, 
and where there was merry haymaking in the summer time.  Nature was 
not so far removed, or hard to get at, as in these days; and 
although there were busy trades in Clerkenwell, and working 
jewellers by scores, it was a purer place, with farm-houses nearer 
to it than many modern Londoners would readily believe, and lovers' 
walks at no great distance, which turned into squalid courts, long 
before the lovers of this age were born, or, as the phrase goes, 
thought of.

In one of these streets, the cleanest of them all, and on the shady 
side of the way--for good housewives know that sunlight damages 
their cherished furniture, and so choose the shade rather than its 
intrusive glare--there stood the house with which we have to deal.  
It was a modest building, not very straight, not large, not tall; 
not bold-faced, with great staring windows, but a shy, blinking 
house, with a conical roof going up into a peak over its garret 
window of four small panes of glass, like a cocked hat on the head 
of an elderly gentleman with one eye.  It was not built of brick or 
lofty stone, but of wood and plaster; it was not planned with a 
dull and wearisome regard to regularity, for no one window matched 
the other, or seemed to have the slightest reference to anything 
besides itself.

The shop--for it had a shop--was, with reference to the first 
floor, where shops usually are; and there all resemblance between 
it and any other shop stopped short and ceased.  People who went in 
and out didn't go up a flight of steps to it, or walk easily in 
upon a level with the street, but dived down three steep stairs, 
as into a cellar.  Its floor was paved with stone and brick, as 
that of any other cellar might be; and in lieu of window framed and 
glazed it had a great black wooden flap or shutter, nearly breast 
high from the ground, which turned back in the day-time, admitting 
as much cold air as light, and very often more.  Behind this shop 
was a wainscoted parlour, looking first into a paved yard, and 
beyond that again into a little terrace garden, raised some feet 
above it.  Any stranger would have supposed that this wainscoted 
parlour, saving for the door of communication by which he had 
entered, was cut off and detached from all the world; and indeed 
most strangers on their first entrance were observed to grow 
extremely thoughtful, as weighing and pondering in their minds 
whether the upper rooms were only approachable by ladders from 
without; never suspecting that two of the most unassuming and 
unlikely doors in existence, which the most ingenious mechanician 
on earth must of necessity have supposed to be the doors of 
closets, opened out of this room--each without the smallest 
preparation, or so much as a quarter of an inch of passage--upon 
two dark winding flights of stairs, the one upward, the other 
downward, which were the sole means of communication between that 
chamber and the other portions of the house.

With all these oddities, there was not a neater, more scrupulously 
tidy, or more punctiliously ordered house, in Clerkenwell, in 
London, in all England.  There were not cleaner windows, or whiter 
floors, or brighter Stoves, or more highly shining articles of 
furniture in old mahogany; there was not more rubbing, scrubbing, 
burnishing and polishing, in the whole street put together.  Nor 
was this excellence attained without some cost and trouble and 
great expenditure of voice, as the neighbours were frequently 
reminded when the good lady of the house overlooked and assisted in 
its being put to rights on cleaning days--which were usually from 
Monday morning till Saturday night, both days inclusive.

Leaning against the door-post of this, his dwelling, the locksmith 
stood early on the morning after he had met with the wounded man, 
gazing disconsolately at a great wooden emblem of a key, painted in 
vivid yellow to resemble gold, which dangled from the house-front, 
and swung to and fro with a mournful creaking noise, as if 
complaining that it had nothing to unlock.  Sometimes, he looked 
over his shoulder into the shop, which was so dark and dingy with 
numerous tokens of his trade, and so blackened by the smoke of a 
little forge, near which his 'prentice was at work, that it would 
have been difficult for one unused to such espials to have 
distinguished anything but various tools of uncouth make and shape, 
great bunches of rusty keys, fragments of iron, half-finished 
locks, and such like things, which garnished the walls and hung in 
clusters from the ceiling.

After a long and patient contemplation of the golden key, and many 
such backward glances, Gabriel stepped into the road, and stole a 
look at the upper windows.  One of them chanced to be thrown open 
at the moment, and a roguish face met his; a face lighted up by the 
loveliest pair of sparkling eyes that ever locksmith looked upon; 
the face of a pretty, laughing, girl; dimpled and fresh, and 
healthful--the very impersonation of good-humour and blooming 
beauty.

'Hush!' she whispered, bending forward and pointing archly to the 
window underneath.  'Mother is still asleep.'

'Still, my dear,' returned the locksmith in the same tone.  'You 
talk as if she had been asleep all night, instead of little more 
than half an hour.  But I'm very thankful.  Sleep's a blessing--no 
doubt about it.'  The last few words he muttered to himself.

'How cruel of you to keep us up so late this morning, and never 
tell us where you were, or send us word!' said the girl.

'Ah Dolly, Dolly!' returned the locksmith, shaking his head, and 
smiling, 'how cruel of you to run upstairs to bed!  Come down to 
breakfast, madcap, and come down lightly, or you'll wake your 
mother.  She must be tired, I am sure--I am.'

Keeping these latter words to himself, and returning his 
daughter's nod, he was passing into the workshop, with the smile 
she had awakened still beaming on his face, when he just caught 
sight of his 'prentice's brown paper cap ducking down to avoid 
observation, and shrinking from the window back to its former 
place, which the wearer no sooner reached than he began to hammer 
lustily.

'Listening again, Simon!' said Gabriel to himself.  'That's bad.  
What in the name of wonder does he expect the girl to say, that I 
always catch him listening when SHE speaks, and never at any other 
time!  A bad habit, Sim, a sneaking, underhanded way.  Ah! you may 
hammer, but you won't beat that out of me, if you work at it till 
your time's up!'

So saying, and shaking his head gravely, he re-entered the 
workshop, and confronted the subject of these remarks.

'There's enough of that just now,' said the locksmith.  'You 
needn't make any more of that confounded clatter.  Breakfast's 
ready.'

'Sir,' said Sim, looking up with amazing politeness, and a peculiar 
little bow cut short off at the neck, 'I shall attend you 
immediately.'

'I suppose,' muttered Gabriel, 'that's out of the 'Prentice's 
Garland or the 'Prentice's Delight, or the 'Prentice's Warbler, or 
the Prentice's Guide to the Gallows, or some such improving 
textbook.  Now he's going to beautify himself--here's a precious 
locksmith!'

Quite unconscious that his master was looking on from the dark 
corner by the parlour door, Sim threw off the paper cap, sprang 
from his seat, and in two extraordinary steps, something between 
skating and minuet dancing, bounded to a washing place at the other 
end of the shop, and there removed from his face and hands all 
traces of his previous work--practising the same step all the time 
with the utmost gravity.  This done, he drew from some concealed 
place a little scrap of looking-glass, and with its assistance 
arranged his hair, and ascertained the exact state of a little 
carbuncle on his nose.  Having now completed his toilet, he placed 
the fragment of mirror on a low bench, and looked over his shoulder 
at so much of his legs as could be reflected in that small compass, 
with the greatest possible complacency and satisfaction.

Sim, as he was called in the locksmith's family, or Mr Simon 
Tappertit, as he called himself, and required all men to style him 
out of doors, on holidays, and Sundays out,--was an old-fashioned, 
thin-faced, sleek-haired, sharp-nosed, small-eyed little fellow, 
very little more than five feet high, and thoroughly convinced in 
his own mind that he was above the middle size; rather tall, in 
fact, than otherwise.  Of his figure, which was well enough formed, 
though somewhat of the leanest, he entertained the highest 
admiration; and with his legs, which, in knee-breeches, were 
perfect curiosities of littleness, he was enraptured to a degree 
amounting to enthusiasm.  He also had some majestic, shadowy ideas, 
which had never been quite fathomed by his intimate friends, 
concerning the power of his eye.  Indeed he had been known to go so 
far as to boast that he could utterly quell and subdue the 
haughtiest beauty by a simple process, which he termed 'eyeing her 
over;' but it must be added, that neither of this faculty, nor of 
the power he claimed to have, through the same gift, of vanquishing 
and heaving down dumb animals, even in a rabid state, had he ever 
furnished evidence which could be deemed quite satisfactory and 
conclusive.

It may be inferred from these premises, that in the small body of 
Mr Tappertit there was locked up an ambitious and aspiring soul.  
As certain liquors, confined in casks too cramped in their 
dimensions, will ferment, and fret, and chafe in their 
imprisonment, so the spiritual essence or soul of Mr Tappertit 
would sometimes fume within that precious cask, his body, until, 
with great foam and froth and splutter, it would force a vent, and 
carry all before it.  It was his custom to remark, in reference to 
any one of these occasions, that his soul had got into his head; 
and in this novel kind of intoxication many scrapes and mishaps 
befell him, which he had frequently concealed with no small 
difficulty from his worthy master.

Sim Tappertit, among the other fancies upon which his before-
mentioned soul was for ever feasting and regaling itself (and which 
fancies, like the liver of Prometheus, grew as they were fed 
upon), had a mighty notion of his order; and had been heard by the 
servant-maid openly expressing his regret that the 'prentices no 
longer carried clubs wherewith to mace the citizens: that was his 
strong expression.  He was likewise reported to have said that in 
former times a stigma had been cast upon the body by the execution 
of George Barnwell, to which they should not have basely 
submitted, but should have demanded him of the legislature--
temperately at first; then by an appeal to arms, if necessary--to 
be dealt with as they in their wisdom might think fit.  These 
thoughts always led him to consider what a glorious engine the 
'prentices might yet become if they had but a master spirit at 
their head; and then he would darkly, and to the terror of his 
hearers, hint at certain reckless fellows that he knew of, and at a 
certain Lion Heart ready to become their captain, who, once afoot, 
would make the Lord Mayor tremble on his throne.

In respect of dress and personal decoration, Sim Tappertit was no 
less of an adventurous and enterprising character.  He had been 
seen, beyond dispute, to pull off ruffles of the finest quality at 
the corner of the street on Sunday nights, and to put them 
carefully in his pocket before returning home; and it was quite 
notorious that on all great holiday occasions it was his habit to 
exchange his plain steel knee-buckles for a pair of glittering 
paste, under cover of a friendly post, planted most conveniently 
in that same spot.  Add to this that he was in years just twenty, 
in his looks much older, and in conceit at least two hundred; that 
he had no objection to be jested with, touching his admiration of 
his master's daughter; and had even, when called upon at a certain 
obscure tavern to pledge the lady whom he honoured with his love, 
toasted, with many winks and leers, a fair creature whose Christian 
name, he said, began with a D--;--and as much is known of Sim 
Tappertit, who has by this time followed the locksmith in to 
breakfast, as is necessary to be known in making his acquaintance.

It was a substantial meal; for, over and above the ordinary tea 
equipage, the board creaked beneath the weight of a jolly round of 
beef, a ham of the first magnitude, and sundry towers of buttered 
Yorkshire cake, piled slice upon slice in most alluring order.  
There was also a goodly jug of well-browned clay, fashioned into 
the form of an old gentleman, not by any means unlike the 
locksmith, atop of whose bald head was a fine white froth answering 
to his wig, indicative, beyond dispute, of sparkling home-brewed 
ale.  But, better far than fair home-brewed, or Yorkshire cake, or 
ham, or beef, or anything to eat or drink that earth or air or 
water can supply, there sat, presiding over all, the locksmith's 
rosy daughter, before whose dark eyes even beef grew insignificant, 
and malt became as nothing.

Fathers should never kiss their daughters when young men are by.  
It's too much.  There are bounds to human endurance.  So thought 
Sim Tappertit when Gabriel drew those rosy lips to his--those lips 
within Sim's reach from day to day, and yet so far off.  He had a 
respect for his master, but he wished the Yorkshire cake might 
choke him.

'Father,' said the locksmith's daughter, when this salute was over, 
and they took their seats at table, 'what is this I hear about last 
night?'

'All true, my dear; true as the Gospel, Doll.'

'Young Mr Chester robbed, and lying wounded in the road, when you 
came up!'

'Ay--Mr Edward.  And beside him, Barnaby, calling for help with all 
his might.  It was well it happened as it did; for the road's a 
lonely one, the hour was late, and, the night being cold, and poor 
Barnaby even less sensible than usual from surprise and fright, the 
young gentleman might have met his death in a very short time.'

'I dread to think of it!' cried his daughter with a shudder.  'How 
did you know him?'

'Know him!' returned the locksmith.  'I didn't know him--how could 
I?  I had never seen him, often as I had heard and spoken of him.  
I took him to Mrs Rudge's; and she no sooner saw him than the truth 
came out.'

'Miss Emma, father--If this news should reach her, enlarged upon as 
it is sure to be, she will go distracted.'

'Why, lookye there again, how a man suffers for being good-
natured,' said the locksmith.  'Miss Emma was with her uncle at the 
masquerade at Carlisle House, where she had gone, as the people at 
the Warren told me, sorely against her will.  What does your 
blockhead father when he and Mrs Rudge have laid their heads 
together, but goes there when he ought to be abed, makes interest 
with his friend the doorkeeper, slips him on a mask and domino, 
and mixes with the masquers.'

'And like himself to do so!' cried the girl, putting her fair arm 
round his neck, and giving him a most enthusiastic kiss.

'Like himself!' repeated Gabriel, affecting to grumble, but 
evidently delighted with the part he had taken, and with her 
praise.  'Very like himself--so your mother said.  However, he 
mingled with the crowd, and prettily worried and badgered he was, I 
warrant you, with people squeaking, "Don't you know me?" and "I've 
found you out," and all that kind of nonsense in his ears.  He 
might have wandered on till now, but in a little room there was a 
young lady who had taken off her mask, on account of the place 
being very warm, and was sitting there alone.'

'And that was she?' said his daughter hastily.

'And that was she,' replied the locksmith; 'and I no sooner 
whispered to her what the matter was--as softly, Doll, and with 
nearly as much art as you could have used yourself--than she gives 
a kind of scream and faints away.'

'What did you do--what happened next?' asked his daughter.  'Why, 
the masks came flocking round, with a general noise and hubbub, and 
I thought myself in luck to get clear off, that's all,' rejoined 
the locksmith.  'What happened when I reached home you may guess, 
if you didn't hear it.  Ah!  Well, it's a poor heart that never 
rejoices.--Put Toby this way, my dear.'

This Toby was the brown jug of which previous mention has been 
made.  Applying his lips to the worthy old gentleman's benevolent 
forehead, the locksmith, who had all this time been ravaging among 
the eatables, kept them there so long, at the same time raising the 
vessel slowly in the air, that at length Toby stood on his head 
upon his nose, when he smacked his lips, and set him on the table 
again with fond reluctance.

Although Sim Tappertit had taken no share in this conversation, no 
part of it being addressed to him, he had not been wanting in such 
silent manifestations of astonishment, as he deemed most compatible 
with the favourable display of his eyes.  Regarding the pause which 
now ensued, as a particularly advantageous opportunity for doing 
great execution with them upon the locksmith's daughter (who he had 
no doubt was looking at him in mute admiration), he began to screw 
and twist his face, and especially those features, into such 
extraordinary, hideous, and unparalleled contortions, that Gabriel, 
who happened to look towards him, was stricken with amazement.

'Why, what the devil's the matter with the lad?' cried the 
locksmith.  'Is he choking?'

'Who?' demanded Sim, with some disdain.

'Who?  Why, you,' returned his master.  'What do you mean by making 
those horrible faces over your breakfast?'

'Faces are matters of taste, sir,' said Mr Tappertit, rather 
discomfited; not the less so because he saw the locksmith's 
daughter smiling.

'Sim,' rejoined Gabriel, laughing heartily.  'Don't be a fool, for 
I'd rather see you in your senses.  These young fellows,' he added, 
turning to his daughter, 'are always committing some folly or 
another.  There was a quarrel between Joe Willet and old John last 
night though I can't say Joe was much in fault either.  He'll be 
missing one of these mornings, and will have gone away upon some 
wild-goose errand, seeking his fortune.--Why, what's the matter, 
Doll?  YOU are making faces now.  The girls are as bad as the boys 
every bit!'

'It's the tea,' said Dolly, turning alternately very red and very 
white, which is no doubt the effect of a slight scald--'so very hot.'

Mr Tappertit looked immensely big at a quartern loaf on the table, 
and breathed hard.

'Is that all?' returned the locksmith.  'Put some more milk in it.--
Yes, I am sorry for Joe, because he is a likely young fellow, and 
gains upon one every time one sees him.  But he'll start off, 
you'll find.  Indeed he told me as much himself!'

'Indeed!' cried Dolly in a faint voice.  'In-deed!'

'Is the tea tickling your throat still, my dear?' said the 
locksmith.

But, before his daughter could make him any answer, she was taken 
with a troublesome cough, and it was such a very unpleasant cough, 
that, when she left off, the tears were starting in her bright 
eyes.  The good-natured locksmith was still patting her on the back 
and applying such gentle restoratives, when a message arrived from 
Mrs Varden, making known to all whom it might concern, that she 
felt too much indisposed to rise after her great agitation and 
anxiety of the previous night; and therefore desired to be 
immediately accommodated with the little black teapot of strong 
mixed tea, a couple of rounds of buttered toast, a middling-sized 
dish of beef and ham cut thin, and the Protestant Manual in two 
volumes post octavo.  Like some other ladies who in remote ages 
flourished upon this globe, Mrs Varden was most devout when most 
ill-tempered.  Whenever she and her husband were at unusual 
variance, then the Protestant Manual was in high feather.

Knowing from experience what these requests portended, the 
triumvirate broke up; Dolly, to see the orders executed with all 
despatch; Gabriel, to some out-of-door work in his little chaise; 
and Sim, to his daily duty in the workshop, to which retreat he 
carried the big look, although the loaf remained behind.

Indeed the big look increased immensely, and when he had tied his 
apron on, became quite gigantic.  It was not until he had several 
times walked up and down with folded arms, and the longest strides 
be could take, and had kicked a great many small articles out of 
his way, that his lip began to curl.  At length, a gloomy derision 
came upon his features, and he smiled; uttering meanwhile with 
supreme contempt the monosyllable 'Joe!'

'I eyed her over, while he talked about the fellow,' he said, 'and 
that was of course the reason of her being confused.  Joe!'

He walked up and down again much quicker than before, and if 
possible with longer strides; sometimes stopping to take a glance 
at his legs, and sometimes to jerk out, and cast from him, another 
'Joe!'  In the course of a quarter of an hour or so he again 
assumed the paper cap and tried to work.  No.  It could not be 
done.

'I'll do nothing to-day,' said Mr Tappertit, dashing it down again, 
'but grind.  I'll grind up all the tools.  Grinding will suit my 
present humour well.  Joe!'

Whirr-r-r-r.  The grindstone was soon in motion; the sparks were 
flying off in showers.  This was the occupation for his heated 
spirit.

Whirr-r-r-r-r-r-r.

'Something will come of this!' said Mr Tappertit, pausing as if in 
triumph, and wiping his heated face upon his sleeve.  'Something 
will come of this.  I hope it mayn't be human gore!'

Whirr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r.



Chapter 5


As soon as the business of the day was over, the locksmith sallied 
forth, alone, to visit the wounded gentleman and ascertain the 
progress of his recovery.  The house where he had left him was in a 
by-street in Southwark, not far from London Bridge; and thither he 
hied with all speed, bent upon returning with as little delay as 
might be, and getting to bed betimes.

The evening was boisterous--scarcely better than the previous night 
had been.  It was not easy for a stout man like Gabriel to keep his 
legs at the street corners, or to make head against the high wind, 
which often fairly got the better of him, and drove him back some 
paces, or, in defiance of all his energy, forced him to take 
shelter in an arch or doorway until the fury of the gust was spent.  
Occasionally a hat or wig, or both, came spinning and trundling 
past him, like a mad thing; while the more serious spectacle of 
falling tiles and slates, or of masses of brick and mortar or 
fragments of stone-coping rattling upon the pavement near at hand, 
and splitting into fragments, did not increase the pleasure of the 
journey, or make the way less dreary.

'A trying night for a man like me to walk in!' said the locksmith, 
as he knocked softly at the widow's door.  'I'd rather be in old 
John's chimney-corner, faith!'

'Who's there?' demanded a woman's voice from within.  Being 
answered, it added a hasty word of welcome, and the door was 
quickly opened.

She was about forty--perhaps two or three years older--with a 
cheerful aspect, and a face that had once been pretty.  It bore 
traces of affliction and care, but they were of an old date, and 
Time had smoothed them.  Any one who had bestowed but a casual 
glance on Barnaby might have known that this was his mother, from 
the strong resemblance between them; but where in his face there 
was wildness and vacancy, in hers there was the patient composure 
of long effort and quiet resignation.

One thing about this face was very strange and startling.  You 
could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling 
that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror.  It 
was not on the surface.  It was in no one feature that it lingered.  
You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and 
say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so.  Yet there 
it always lurked--something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, 
and never absent for a moment.  It was the faintest, palest shadow 
of some look, to which an instant of intense and most unutterable 
horror only could have given birth; but indistinct and feeble as it 
was, it did suggest what that look must have been, and fixed it in 
the mind as if it had had existence in a dream.

More faintly imaged, and wanting force and purpose, as it were, 
because of his darkened intellect, there was this same stamp upon 
the son.  Seen in a picture, it must have had some legend with it, 
and would have haunted those who looked upon the canvas.  They who 
knew the Maypole story, and could remember what the widow was, 
before her husband's and his master's murder, understood it well.  
They recollected how the change had come, and could call to mind 
that when her son was born, upon the very day the deed was known, 
he bore upon his wrist what seemed a smear of blood but half washed 
out.

'God save you, neighbour!' said the locksmith, as he followed her, 
with the air of an old friend, into a little parlour where a 
cheerful fire was burning.

'And you,' she answered smiling.  'Your kind heart has brought you 
here again.  Nothing will keep you at home, I know of old, if there 
are friends to serve or comfort, out of doors.'

'Tut, tut,' returned the locksmith, rubbing his hands and warming 
them.  'You women are such talkers.  What of the patient, 
neighbour?'

'He is sleeping now.  He was very restless towards daylight, and 
for some hours tossed and tumbled sadly.  But the fever has left 
him, and the doctor says he will soon mend.  He must not be removed 
until to-morrow.'

'He has had visitors to-day--humph?' said Gabriel, slyly.

'Yes.  Old Mr Chester has been here ever since we sent for him, and 
had not been gone many minutes when you knocked.'

'No ladies?' said Gabriel, elevating his eyebrows and looking 
disappointed.

'A letter,' replied the widow.

'Come.  That's better than nothing!' replied the locksmith.  'Who 
was the bearer?'

'Barnaby, of course.'

'Barnaby's a jewel!' said Varden; 'and comes and goes with ease 
where we who think ourselves much wiser would make but a poor hand 
of it.  He is not out wandering, again, I hope?'

'Thank Heaven he is in his bed; having been up all night, as you 
know, and on his feet all day.  He was quite tired out.  Ah, 
neighbour, if I could but see him oftener so--if I could but tame 
down that terrible restlessness--'

'In good time,' said the locksmith, kindly, 'in good time--don't be 
down-hearted.  To my mind he grows wiser every day.'

The widow shook her head.  And yet, though she knew the locksmith 
sought to cheer her, and spoke from no conviction of his own, she 
was glad to hear even this praise of her poor benighted son.

'He will be a 'cute man yet,' resumed the locksmith.  'Take care, 
when we are growing old and foolish, Barnaby doesn't put us to the 
blush, that's all.  But our other friend,' he added, looking under 
the table and about the floor--'sharpest and cunningest of all the 
sharp and cunning ones--where's he?'

'In Barnaby's room,' rejoined the widow, with a faint smile.

'Ah!  He's a knowing blade!' said Varden, shaking his head.  'I 
should be sorry to talk secrets before him.  Oh!  He's a deep 
customer.  I've no doubt he can read, and write, and cast accounts 
if he chooses.  What was that?  Him tapping at the door?'

'No,' returned the widow.  'It was in the street, I think.  Hark!  
Yes.  There again!  'Tis some one knocking softly at the shutter.  
Who can it be!'

They had been speaking in a low tone, for the invalid lay overhead, 
and the walls and ceilings being thin and poorly built, the sound 
of their voices might otherwise have disturbed his slumber.  The 
party without, whoever it was, could have stood close to the 
shutter without hearing anything spoken; and, seeing the light 
through the chinks and finding all so quiet, might have been 
persuaded that only one person was there.

'Some thief or ruffian maybe,' said the locksmith.  'Give me the 
light.'

'No, no,' she returned hastily.  'Such visitors have never come to 
this poor dwelling.  Do you stay here.  You're within call, at the 
worst.  I would rather go myself--alone.'

'Why?' said the locksmith, unwillingly relinquishing the candle he 
had caught up from the table.

'Because--I don't know why--because the wish is so strong upon me,' 
she rejoined.  'There again--do not detain me, I beg of you!'

Gabriel looked at her, in great surprise to see one who was usually 
so mild and quiet thus agitated, and with so little cause.  She 
left the room and closed the door behind her.  She stood for a 
moment as if hesitating, with her hand upon the lock.  In this 
short interval the knocking came again, and a voice close to the 
window--a voice the locksmith seemed to recollect, and to have some 
disagreeable association with--whispered 'Make haste.'

The words were uttered in that low distinct voice which finds its 
way so readily to sleepers' ears, and wakes them in a fright.  For 
a moment it startled even the locksmith; who involuntarily drew 
back from the window, and listened.

The wind rumbling in the chimney made it difficult to hear what 
passed, but he could tell that the door was opened, that there was 
the tread of a man upon the creaking boards, and then a moment's 
silence--broken by a suppressed something which was not a shriek, 
or groan, or cry for help, and yet might have been either or all 
three; and the words 'My God!' uttered in a voice it chilled him to 
hear.

He rushed out upon the instant.  There, at last, was that dreadful 
look--the very one he seemed to know so well and yet had never seen 
before--upon her face.  There she stood, frozen to the ground, 
gazing with starting eyes, and livid cheeks, and every feature 
fixed and ghastly, upon the man he had encountered in the dark last 
night.  His eyes met those of the locksmith.  It was but a flash, 
an instant, a breath upon a polished glass, and he was gone.

The locksmith was upon him--had the skirts of his streaming garment 
almost in his grasp--when his arms were tightly clutched, and the 
widow flung herself upon the ground before him.

'The other way--the other way,' she cried.  'He went the other way.  
Turn--turn!'

'The other way!  I see him now,' rejoined the locksmith, pointing--
'yonder--there--there is his shadow passing by that light.  What--
who is this?  Let me go.'

'Come back, come back!' exclaimed the woman, clasping him; 'Do not 
touch him on your life.  I charge you, come back.  He carries other 
lives besides his own.  Come back!'

'What does this mean?' cried the locksmith.

'No matter what it means, don't ask, don't speak, don't think about 
it.  He is not to be followed, checked, or stopped.  Come back!'

The old man looked at her in wonder, as she writhed and clung about 
him; and, borne down by her passion, suffered her to drag him into 
the house.  It was not until she had chained and double-locked the 
door, fastened every bolt and bar with the heat and fury of a 
maniac, and drawn him back into the room, that she turned upon him, 
once again, that stony look of horror, and, sinking down into a 
chair, covered her face, and shuddered, as though the hand of death 
were on her.



Chapter 6


Beyond all measure astonished by the strange occurrences which had 
passed with so much violence and rapidity, the locksmith gazed upon 
the shuddering figure in the chair like one half stupefied, and 
would have gazed much longer, had not his tongue been loosened by 
compassion and humanity.

'You are ill,' said Gabriel.  'Let me call some neighbour in.'

'Not for the world,' she rejoined, motioning to him with her 
trembling hand, and holding her face averted.  'It is enough that 
you have been by, to see this.'

'Nay, more than enough--or less,' said Gabriel.

'Be it so,' she returned.  'As you like.  Ask me no questions, I 
entreat you.'

'Neighbour,' said the locksmith, after a pause.  'Is this fair, or 
reasonable, or just to yourself?  Is it like you, who have known me 
so long and sought my advice in all matters--like you, who from a 
girl have had a strong mind and a staunch heart?'

'I have need of them,' she replied.  'I am growing old, both in 
years and care.  Perhaps that, and too much trial, have made them 
weaker than they used to be.  Do not speak to me.'

'How can I see what I have seen, and hold my peace!' returned the 
locksmith.  'Who was that man, and why has his coming made this 
change in you?'

She was silent, but held to the chair as though to save herself 
from falling on the ground.

'I take the licence of an old acquaintance, Mary,' said the 
locksmith, 'who has ever had a warm regard for you, and maybe has 
tried to prove it when he could.  Who is this ill-favoured man, and 
what has he to do with you?  Who is this ghost, that is only seen 
in the black nights and bad weather?  How does he know, and why 
does he haunt, this house, whispering through chinks and crevices, 
as if there was that between him and you, which neither durst so 
much as speak aloud of?  Who is he?'

'You do well to say he haunts this house,' returned the widow, 
faintly.  'His shadow has been upon it and me, in light and 
darkness, at noonday and midnight.  And now, at last, he has come 
in the body!'

'But he wouldn't have gone in the body,' returned the locksmith 
with some irritation, 'if you had left my arms and legs at liberty.  
What riddle is this?'

'It is one,' she answered, rising as she spoke, 'that must remain 
for ever as it is.  I dare not say more than that.'

'Dare not!' repeated the wondering locksmith.

'Do not press me,' she replied.  'I am sick and faint, and every 
faculty of life seems dead within me.--No!--Do not touch me, 
either.'

Gabriel, who had stepped forward to render her assistance, fell 
back as she made this hasty exclamation, and regarded her in silent 
wonder.

'Let me go my way alone,' she said in a low voice, 'and let the 
hands of no honest man touch mine to-night.'  When she had 
tottered to the door, she turned, and added with a stronger effort, 
'This is a secret, which, of necessity, I trust to you.  You are a 
true man.  As you have ever been good and kind to me,--keep it.  If 
any noise was heard above, make some excuse--say anything but what 
you really saw, and never let a word or look between us, recall 
this circumstance.  I trust to you.  Mind, I trust to you.  How 
much I trust, you never can conceive.'

Casting her eyes upon him for an instant, she withdrew, and left 
him there alone.

Gabriel, not knowing what to think, stood staring at the door with 
a countenance full of surprise and dismay.  The more he pondered on 
what had passed, the less able he was to give it any favourable 
interpretation.  To find this widow woman, whose life for so many 
years had been supposed to be one of solitude and retirement, and 
who, in her quiet suffering character, had gained the good opinion 
and respect of all who knew her--to find her linked mysteriously 
with an ill-omened man, alarmed at his appearance, and yet 
favouring his escape, was a discovery that pained as much as 
startled him.  Her reliance on his secrecy, and his tacit 
acquiescence, increased his distress of mind.  If he had spoken 
boldly, persisted in questioning her, detained her when she rose to 
leave the room, made any kind of protest, instead of silently 
compromising himself, as he felt he had done, he would have been 
more at ease.

'Why did I let her say it was a secret, and she trusted it to me!' 
said Gabriel, putting his wig on one side to scratch his head with 
greater ease, and looking ruefully at the fire.  'I have no more 
readiness than old John himself.  Why didn't I say firmly, "You 
have no right to such secrets, and I demand of you to tell me what 
this means," instead of standing gaping at her, like an old moon-
calf as I am!  But there's my weakness.  I can be obstinate enough 
with men if need be, but women may twist me round their fingers at 
their pleasure.'

He took his wig off outright as he made this reflection, and, 
warming his handkerchief at the fire began to rub and polish his 
bald head with it, until it glistened again.

'And yet,' said the locksmith, softening under this soothing 
process, and stopping to smile, 'it MAY be nothing.  Any drunken 
brawler trying to make his way into the house, would have alarmed a 
quiet soul like her.  But then'--and here was the vexation--'how 
came it to be that man; how comes he to have this influence over 
her; how came she to favour his getting away from me; and, more 
than all, how came she not to say it was a sudden fright, and 
nothing more?  It's a sad thing to have, in one minute, reason to 
mistrust a person I have known so long, and an old sweetheart into 
the bargain; but what else can I do, with all this upon my mind!--
Is that Barnaby outside there?'

'Ay!' he cried, looking in and nodding.  'Sure enough it's 
Barnaby--how did you guess?'

'By your shadow,' said the locksmith.

'Oho!' cried Barnaby, glancing over his shoulder, 'He's a merry 
fellow, that shadow, and keeps close to me, though I AM silly.  We 
have such pranks, such walks, such runs, such gambols on the grass!  
Sometimes he'll be half as tall as a church steeple, and sometimes 
no bigger than a dwarf.  Now, he goes on before, and now behind, 
and anon he'll be stealing on, on this side, or on that, stopping 
whenever I stop, and thinking I can't see him, though I have my eye 
on him sharp enough.  Oh! he's a merry fellow.  Tell me--is he 
silly too?  I think he is.'

'Why?' asked Gabriel.

'Because be never tires of mocking me, but does it all day long.--
Why don't you come?'

'Where?'

'Upstairs.  He wants you.  Stay--where's HIS shadow?  Come.  You're 
a wise man; tell me that.'

'Beside him, Barnaby; beside him, I suppose,' returned the locksmith.

'No!' he replied, shaking his head.  'Guess again.'

'Gone out a walking, maybe?'

'He has changed shadows with a woman,' the idiot whispered in his 
ear, and then fell back with a look of triumph.  'Her shadow's 
always with him, and his with her.  That's sport I think, eh?'

'Barnaby,' said the locksmith, with a grave look; 'come hither, 
lad.'

'I know what you want to say.  I know!' he replied, keeping away 
from him.  'But I'm cunning, I'm silent.  I only say so much to 
you--are you ready?'  As he spoke, he caught up the light, and 
waved it with a wild laugh above his head.

'Softly--gently,' said the locksmith, exerting all his influence to 
keep him calm and quiet.  'I thought you had been asleep.'

'So I HAVE been asleep,' he rejoined, with widely-opened eyes.  
'There have been great faces coming and going--close to my face, 
and then a mile away--low places to creep through, whether I would 
or no--high churches to fall down from--strange creatures crowded 
up together neck and heels, to sit upon the bed--that's sleep, eh?'

'Dreams, Barnaby, dreams,' said the locksmith.

'Dreams!' he echoed softly, drawing closer to him.  'Those are not 
dreams.'

'What are,' replied the locksmith, 'if they are not?'

'I dreamed,' said Barnaby, passing his arm through Varden's, and 
peering close into his face as he answered in a whisper, 'I dreamed 
just now that something--it was in the shape of a man--followed me--
came softly after me--wouldn't let me be--but was always hiding 
and crouching, like a cat in dark corners, waiting till I should 
pass; when it crept out and came softly after me.--Did you ever see 
me run?'

'Many a time, you know.'

'You never saw me run as I did in this dream.  Still it came 
creeping on to worry me.  Nearer, nearer, nearer--I ran faster--
leaped--sprung out of bed, and to the window--and there, in the 
street below--but he is waiting for us.  Are you coming?'

'What in the street below, Barnaby?' said Varden, imagining that he 
traced some connection between this vision and what had actually 
occurred.

Barnaby looked into his face, muttered incoherently, waved the 
light above his head again, laughed, and drawing the locksmith's 
arm more tightly through his own, led him up the stairs in silence.

They entered a homely bedchamber, garnished in a scanty way with 
chairs, whose spindle-shanks bespoke their age, and other furniture 
of very little worth; but clean and neatly kept.  Reclining in an 
easy-chair before the fire, pale and weak from waste of blood, was 
Edward Chester, the young gentleman who had been the first to quit 
the Maypole on the previous night, and who, extending his hand to 
the locksmith, welcomed him as his preserver and friend.

'Say no more, sir, say no more,' said Gabriel.  'I hope I would 
have done at least as much for any man in such a strait, and most 
of all for you, sir.  A certain young lady,' he added, with some 
hesitation, 'has done us many a kind turn, and we naturally feel--I 
hope I give you no offence in saying this, sir?'

The young man smiled and shook his head; at the same time moving in 
his chair as if in pain.

'It's no great matter,' he said, in answer to the locksmith's 
sympathising look, 'a mere uneasiness arising at least as much from 
being cooped up here, as from the slight wound I have, or from the 
loss of blood.  Be seated, Mr Varden.'

'If I may make so bold, Mr Edward, as to lean upon your chair,' 
returned the locksmith, accommodating his action to his speech, and 
bending over him, 'I'll stand here for the convenience of speaking 
low.  Barnaby is not in his quietest humour to-night, and at such 
times talking never does him good.'

They both glanced at the subject of this remark, who had taken a 
seat on the other side of the fire, and, smiling vacantly, was 
making puzzles on his fingers with a skein of string.

'Pray, tell me, sir,' said Varden, dropping his voice still lower, 
'exactly what happened last night.  I have my reason for inquiring.  
You left the Maypole, alone?'

'And walked homeward alone, until I had nearly reached the place 
where you found me, when I heard the gallop of a horse.'

'Behind you?' said the locksmith.

'Indeed, yes--behind me.  It was a single rider, who soon overtook 
me, and checking his horse, inquired the way to London.'

'You were on the alert, sir, knowing how many highwaymen there are, 
scouring the roads in all directions?' said Varden.

'I was, but I had only a stick, having imprudently left my pistols 
in their holster-case with the landlord's son.  I directed him as 
he desired.  Before the words had passed my lips, he rode upon me 
furiously, as if bent on trampling me down beneath his horse's 
hoofs.  In starting aside, I slipped and fell.  You found me with 
this stab and an ugly bruise or two, and without my purse--in which 
he found little enough for his pains.  And now, Mr Varden,' he 
added, shaking the locksmith by the hand, 'saving the extent of my 
gratitude to you, you know as much as I.'

'Except,' said Gabriel, bending down yet more, and looking 
cautiously towards their silent neighhour, 'except in respect of 
the robber himself.  What like was he, sir?  Speak low, if you 
please.  Barnaby means no harm, but I have watched him oftener than 
you, and I know, little as you would think it, that he's listening 
now.'

It required a strong confidence in the locksmith's veracity to 
lead any one to this belief, for every sense and faculty that 
Barnahy possessed, seemed to be fixed upon his game, to the 
exclusion of all other things.  Something in the young man's face 
expressed this opinion, for Gabriel repeated what he had just said, 
more earnestly than before, and with another glance towards 
Barnaby, again asked what like the man was.

'The night was so dark,' said Edward, 'the attack so sudden, and 
he so wrapped and muffled up, that I can hardly say.  It seems 
that--'

'Don't mention his name, sir,' returned the locksmith, following 
his look towards Barnaby; 'I know HE saw him.  I want to know what 
YOU saw.'

'All I remember is,' said Edward, 'that as he checked his horse his 
hat was blown off.  He caught it, and replaced it on his head, 
which I observed was bound with a dark handkerchief.  A stranger 
entered the Maypole while I was there, whom I had not seen--for I 
had sat apart for reasons of my own--and when I rose to leave the 
room and glanced round, he was in the shadow of the chimney and 
hidden from my sight.  But, if he and the robber were two different 
persons, their voices were strangely and most remarkably alike; for 
directly the man addressed me in the road, I recognised his speech 
again.'

'It is as I feared.  The very man was here to-night,' thought the 
locksmith, changing colour.  'What dark history is this!'

'Halloa!' cried a hoarse voice in his ear.  'Halloa, halloa, 
halloa!  Bow wow wow.  What's the matter here!  Hal-loa!'

The speaker--who made the locksmith start as if he had been some 
supernatural agent--was a large raven, who had perched upon the top 
of the easy-chair, unseen by him and Edward, and listened with a 
polite attention and a most extraordinary appearance of 
comprehending every word, to all they had said up to this point; 
turning his head from one to the other, as if his office were to 
judge between them, and it were of the very last importance that he 
should not lose a word.

'Look at him!' said Varden, divided between admiration of the bird 
and a kind of fear of him.  'Was there ever such a knowing imp as 
that!  Oh he's a dreadful fellow!'

The raven, with his head very much on one side, and his bright eye 
shining like a diamond, preserved a thoughtful silence for a few 
seconds, and then replied in a voice so hoarse and distant, that it 
seemed to come through his thick feathers rather than out of his 
mouth.

'Halloa, halloa, halloa!  What's the matter here!  Keep up your 
spirits.  Never say die.  Bow wow wow.  I'm a devil, I'm a devil, 
I'm a devil.  Hurrah!'--And then, as if exulting in his infernal 
character, he began to whistle.

'I more than half believe he speaks the truth.  Upon my word I do,' 
said Varden.  'Do you see how he looks at me, as if he knew what I 
was saying?'

To which the bird, balancing himself on tiptoe, as it were, and 
moving his body up and down in a sort of grave dance, rejoined, 
'I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil,' and flapped his wings 
against his sides as if he were bursting with laughter.  Barnaby 
clapped his hands, and fairly rolled upon the ground in an ecstasy 
of delight.

'Strange companions, sir,' said the locksmith, shaking his head, 
and looking from one to the other.  'The bird has all the wit.'

'Strange indeed!' said Edward, holding out his forefinger to the 
raven, who, in acknowledgment of the attention, made a dive at it 
immediately with his iron bill.  'Is he old?'

'A mere boy, sir,' replied the locksmith.  'A hundred and twenty, 
or thereabouts.  Call him down, Barnaby, my man.'

'Call him!' echoed Barnaby, sitting upright upon the floor, and 
staring vacantly at Gabriel, as he thrust his hair back from his 
face.  'But who can make him come!  He calls me, and makes me go 
where he will.  He goes on before, and I follow.  He's the master, 
and I'm the man.  Is that the truth, Grip?'

The raven gave a short, comfortable, confidential kind of croak;--a 
most expressive croak, which seemed to say, 'You needn't let these 
fellows into our secrets.  We understand each other.  It's all 
right.'

'I make HIM come?' cried Barnaby, pointing to the bird.  'Him, who 
never goes to sleep, or so much as winks!--Why, any time of night, 
you may see his eyes in my dark room, shining like two sparks.  And 
every night, and all night too, he's broad awake, talking to 
himself, thinking what he shall do to-morrow, where we shall go, 
and what he shall steal, and hide, and bury.  I make HIM come!  
Ha ha ha!'

On second thoughts, the bird appeared disposed to come of himself.  
After a short survey of the ground, and a few sidelong looks at the 
ceiling and at everybody present in turn, he fluttered to the 
floor, and went to Barnaby--not in a hop, or walk, or run, but in a 
pace like that of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly 
tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles.  Then, 
stepping into his extended hand, and condescending to be held out 
at arm's length, he gave vent to a succession of sounds, not unlike 
the drawing of some eight or ten dozen of long corks, and again 
asserted his brimstone birth and parentage with great distinctness.

The locksmith shook his head--perhaps in some doubt of the 
creature's being really nothing but a bird--perhaps in pity for 
Bamaby, who by this time had him in his arms, and was rolling 
about, with him, on the ground.  As he raised his eyes from the 
poor fellow he encountered those of his mother, who had entered the 
room, and was looking on in silence.

She was quite white in the face, even to her lips, but had wholly 
subdued her emotion, and wore her usual quiet look.  Varden fancied 
as he glanced at her that she shrunk from his eye; and that she 
busied herself about the wounded gentleman to avoid him the better.

It was time he went to bed, she said.  He was to be removed to his 
own home on the morrow, and he had already exceeded his time for 
sitting up, by a full hour.  Acting on this hint, the locksmith 
prepared to take his leave.

'By the bye,' said Edward, as he shook him by the hand, and looked 
from him to Mrs Rudge and back again, 'what noise was that below?  
I heard your voice in the midst of it, and should have inquired 
before, but our other conversation drove it from my memory.  What 
was it?'

The locksmith looked towards her, and bit his lip.  She leant 
against the chair, and bent her eyes upon the ground.  Barnaby too--
he was listening.

--'Some mad or drunken fellow, sir,' Varden at length made answer, 
looking steadily at the widow as he spoke.  'He mistook the house, 
and tried to force an entrance.'

She breathed more freely, but stood quite motionless.  As the 
locksmith said 'Good night,' and Barnaby caught up the candle to 
light him down the stairs, she took it from him, and charged him--
with more haste and earnestness than so slight an occasion appeared 
to warrant--not to stir.  The raven followed them to satisfy 
himself that all was right below, and when they reached the street-
door, stood on the bottom stair drawing corks out of number.

With a trembling hand she unfastened the chain and bolts, and 
turned the key.  As she had her hand upon the latch, the locksmith 
said in a low voice,

'I have told a lie to-night, for your sake, Mary, and for the sake 
of bygone times and old acquaintance, when I would scorn to do so 
for my own.  I hope I may have done no harm, or led to none.  I 
can't help the suspicions you have forced upon me, and I am loth, I 
tell you plainly, to leave Mr Edward here.  Take care he comes to 
no hurt.  I doubt the safety of this roof, and am glad he leaves it 
so soon.  Now, let me go.'

For a moment she hid her face in her hands and wept; but resisting 
the strong impulse which evidently moved her to reply, opened the 
door--no wider than was sufficient for the passage of his body--
and motioned him away.  As the locksmith stood upon the step, it 
was chained and locked behind him, and the raven, in furtherance of 
these precautions, barked like a lusty house-dog.

'In league with that ill-looking figure that might have fallen from 
a gibbet--he listening and hiding here--Barnaby first upon the spot 
last night--can she who has always borne so fair a name be guilty 
of such crimes in secret!' said the locksmith, musing.  'Heaven 
forgive me if I am wrong, and send me just thoughts; but she is 
poor, the temptation may be great, and we daily hear of things as 
strange.--Ay, bark away, my friend.  If there's any wickedness 
going on, that raven's in it, I'll be sworn.'



Chapter 7


Mrs Varden was a lady of what is commonly called an uncertain 
temper--a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper 
tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable.  
Thus it generally happened, that when other people were merry, Mrs 
Varden was dull; and that when other people were dull, Mrs Varden 
was disposed to be amazingly cheerful.  Indeed the worthy housewife 
was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a 
higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to 
be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an 
instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and 
forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of 
an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the 
peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and 
rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her.

It had been observed in this good lady (who did not want for 
personal attractions, being plump and buxom to look at, though like 
her fair daughter, somewhat short in stature) that this 
uncertainty of disposition strengthened and increased with her 
temporal prosperity; and divers wise men and matrons, on friendly 
terms with the locksmith and his family, even went so far as to 
assert, that a tumble down some half-dozen rounds in the world's 
ladder--such as the breaking of the bank in which her husband kept 
his money, or some little fall of that kind--would be the making 
of her, and could hardly fail to render her one of the most 
agreeable companions in existence.  Whether they were right or 
wrong in this conjecture, certain it is that minds, like bodies, 
will often fall into a pimpled ill-conditioned state from mere 
excess of comfort, and like them, are often successfully cured by 
remedies in themselves very nauseous and unpalatable.

Mrs Varden's chief aider and abettor, and at the same time her 
principal victim and object of wrath, was her single domestic 
servant, one Miss Miggs; or as she was called, in conformity with 
those prejudices of society which lop and top from poor hand-
maidens all such genteel excrescences--Miggs.  This Miggs was a 
tall young lady, very much addicted to pattens in private life; 
slender and shrewish, of a rather uncomfortable figure, and though 
not absolutely ill-looking, of a sharp and acid visage.  As a 
general principle and abstract proposition, Miggs held the male sex 
to be utterly contemptible and unworthy of notice; to be fickle, 
false, base, sottish, inclined to perjury, and wholly undeserving.  
When particularly exasperated against them (which, scandal said, 
was when Sim Tappertit slighted her most) she was accustomed to 
wish with great emphasis that the whole race of women could but die 
off, in order that the men might be brought to know the real value 
of the blessings by which they set so little store; nay, her 
feeling for her order ran so high, that she sometimes declared, if 
she could only have good security for a fair, round number--say ten 
thousand--of young virgins following her example, she would, to 
spite mankind, hang, drown, stab, or poison herself, with a joy 
past all expression.

It was the voice of Miggs that greeted the locksmith, when he 
knocked at his own house, with a shrill cry of 'Who's there?'

'Me, girl, me,' returned Gabriel.

What, already, sir!' said Miggs, opening the door with a look of 
surprise.  'We were just getting on our nightcaps to sit up,--me 
and mistress.  Oh, she has been SO bad!'

Miggs said this with an air of uncommon candour and concern; but 
the parlour-door was standing open, and as Gabriel very well knew 
for whose ears it was designed, he regarded her with anything but 
an approving look as he passed in.

'Master's come home, mim,' cried Miggs, running before him into the 
parlour.  'You was wrong, mim, and I was right.  I thought he 
wouldn't keep us up so late, two nights running, mim.  Master's 
always considerate so far.  I'm so glad, mim, on your account.  I'm 
a little'--here Miggs simpered--'a little sleepy myself; I'll own 
it now, mim, though I said I wasn't when you asked me.  It ain't of 
no consequence, mim, of course.'

'You had better,' said the locksmith, who most devoutly wished that 
Barnaby's raven was at Miggs's ankles, 'you had better get to bed 
at once then.'

'Thanking you kindly, sir,' returned Miggs, 'I couldn't take my 
rest in peace, nor fix my thoughts upon my prayers, otherways than 
that I knew mistress was comfortable in her bed this night; by 
rights she ought to have been there, hours ago.'

'You're talkative, mistress,' said Varden, pulling off his 
greatcoat, and looking at her askew.

'Taking the hint, sir,' cried Miggs, with a flushed face, 'and 
thanking you for it most kindly, I will make bold to say, that if I 
give offence by having consideration for my mistress, I do not ask 
your pardon, but am content to get myself into trouble and to be in 
suffering.'

Here Mrs Varden, who, with her countenance shrouded in a large 
nightcap, had been all this time intent upon the Protestant Manual, 
looked round, and acknowledged Miggs's championship by commanding 
her to hold her tongue.

Every little bone in Miggs's throat and neck developed itself with 
a spitefulness quite alarming, as she replied, 'Yes, mim, I will.'

'How do you find yourself now, my dear?' said the locksmith, 
taking a chair near his wife (who had resumed her book), and 
rubbing his knees hard as he made the inquiry.

'You're very anxious to know, an't you?' returned Mrs Varden, with 
her eyes upon the print.  'You, that have not been near me all day, 
and wouldn't have been if I was dying!'

'My dear Martha--' said Gabriel.

Mrs Varden turned over to the next page; then went back again to 
the bottom line over leaf to be quite sure of the last words; and 
then went on reading with an appearance of the deepest interest and 
study.

'My dear Martha,' said the locksmith, 'how can you say such things, 
when you know you don't mean them?  If you were dying!  Why, if 
there was anything serious the matter with you, Martha, shouldn't I 
be in constant attendance upon you?'

'Yes!' cried Mrs Varden, bursting into tears, 'yes, you would.  I 
don't doubt it, Varden.  Certainly you would.  That's as much as to 
tell me that you would be hovering round me like a vulture, waiting 
till the breath was out of my body, that you might go and marry 
somebody else.'

Miggs groaned in sympathy--a little short groan, checked in its 
birth, and changed into a cough.  It seemed to say, 'I can't help 
it.  It's wrung from me by the dreadful brutality of that monster 
master.'

'But you'll break my heart one of these days,' added Mrs Varden, 
with more resignation, 'and then we shall both be happy.  My only 
desire is to see Dolly comfortably settled, and when she is, you 
may settle ME as soon as you like.'

'Ah!' cried Miggs--and coughed again.

Poor Gabriel twisted his wig about in silence for a long time, and 
then said mildly, 'Has Dolly gone to bed?'

'Your master speaks to you,' said Mrs Varden, looking sternly over 
her shoulder at Miss Miggs in waiting.

'No, my dear, I spoke to you,' suggested the locksmith.

'Did you hear me, Miggs?' cried the obdurate lady, stamping her 
foot upon the ground.  'YOU are beginning to despise me now, are 
you?  But this is example!'

At this cruel rebuke, Miggs, whose tears were always ready, for 
large or small parties, on the shortest notice and the most 
reasonable terms, fell a crying violently; holding both her hands 
tight upon her heart meanwhile, as if nothing less would prevent 
its splitting into small fragments.  Mrs Varden, who likewise 
possessed that faculty in high perfection, wept too, against Miggs; 
and with such effect that Miggs gave in after a time, and, except 
for an occasional sob, which seemed to threaten some remote 
intention of breaking out again, left her mistress in possession of 
the field.  Her superiority being thoroughly asserted, that lady 
soon desisted likewise, and fell into a quiet melancholy.

The relief was so great, and the fatiguing occurrences of last 
night so completely overpowered the locksmith, that he nodded in 
his chair, and would doubtless have slept there all night, but for 
the voice of Mrs Varden, which, after a pause of some five minutes, 
awoke him with a start.

'If I am ever,' said Mrs V.--not scolding, but in a sort of 
monotonous remonstrance--'in spirits, if I am ever cheerful, if I 
am ever more than usually disposed to be talkative and comfortable, 
this is the way I am treated.'

'Such spirits as you was in too, mim, but half an hour ago!' cried 
Miggs.  'I never see such company!'

'Because,' said Mrs Varden, 'because I never interfere or 
interrupt; because I never question where anybody comes or goes; 
because my whole mind and soul is bent on saving where I can save, 
and labouring in this house;--therefore, they try me as they do.'

'Martha,' urged the locksmith, endeavouring to look as wakeful as 
possible, 'what is it you complain of?  I really came home with 
every wish and desire to be happy.  I did, indeed.'

'What do I complain of!' retorted his wife.  'Is it a chilling 
thing to have one's husband sulking and falling asleep directly he 
comes home--to have him freezing all one's warm-heartedness, and 
throwing cold water over the fireside?  Is it natural, when I know 
he went out upon a matter in which I am as much interested as 
anybody can be, that I should wish to know all that has happened, 
or that he should tell me without my begging and praying him to do 
it?  Is that natural, or is it not?'

'I am very sorry, Martha,' said the good-natured locksmith.  'I was 
really afraid you were not disposed to talk pleasantly; I'll tell 
you everything; I shall only be too glad, my dear.'

'No, Varden,' returned his wife, rising with dignity.  'I dare say--
thank you!  I'm not a child to be corrected one minute and petted 
the next--I'm a little too old for that, Varden.  Miggs, carry the 
light.--YOU can be cheerful, Miggs, at least'

Miggs, who, to this moment, had been in the very depths of 
compassionate despondency, passed instantly into the liveliest 
state conceivable, and tossing her head as she glanced towards the 
locksmith, bore off her mistress and the light together.

'Now, who would think,' thought Varden, shrugging his shoulders and 
drawing his chair nearer to the fire, 'that that woman could ever 
be pleasant and agreeable?  And yet she can be.  Well, well, all of 
us have our faults.  I'll not be hard upon hers.  We have been man 
and wife too long for that.'

He dozed again--not the less pleasantly, perhaps, for his hearty 
temper.  While his eyes were closed, the door leading to the upper 
stairs was partially opened; and a head appeared, which, at sight 
of him, hastily drew back again.

'I wish,' murmured Gabriel, waking at the noise, and looking round 
the room, 'I wish somebody would marry Miggs.  But that's 
impossible!  I wonder whether there's any madman alive, who would 
marry Miggs!'

This was such a vast speculation that he fell into a doze again, 
and slept until the fire was quite burnt out.  At last he roused 
himself; and having double-locked the street-door according to 
custom, and put the key in his pocket, went off to bed.

He had not left the room in darkness many minutes, when the head 
again appeared, and Sim Tappertit entered, bearing in his hand a 
little lamp.

'What the devil business has he to stop up so late!' muttered Sim, 
passing into the workshop, and setting it down upon the forge.  
'Here's half the night gone already.  There's only one good that 
has ever come to me, out of this cursed old rusty mechanical trade, 
and that's this piece of ironmongery, upon my soul!'

As he spoke, he drew from the right hand, or rather right leg 
pocket of his smalls, a clumsy large-sized key, which he inserted 
cautiously in the lock his master had secured, and softly opened 
the door.  That done, he replaced his piece of secret workmanship 
in his pocket; and leaving the lamp burning, and closing the door 
carefully and without noise, stole out into the street--as little 
suspected by the locksmith in his sound deep sleep, as by Barnaby 
himself in his phantom-haunted dreams.



Chapter 8


Clear of the locksmith's house, Sim Tappertit laid aside his 
cautious manner, and assuming in its stead that of a ruffling, 
swaggering, roving blade, who would rather kill a man than 
otherwise, and eat him too if needful, made the best of his way 
along the darkened streets.

Half pausing for an instant now and then to smite his pocket and 
assure himself of the safety of his master key, he hurried on to 
Barbican, and turning into one of the narrowest of the narrow 
streets which diverged from that centre, slackened his pace and 
wiped his heated brow, as if the termination of his walk were near 
at hand.

It was not a very choice spot for midnight expeditions, being in 
truth one of more than questionable character, and of an appearance 
by no means inviting.  From the main street he had entered, itself 
little better than an alley, a low-browed doorway led into a blind 
court, or yard, profoundly dark, unpaved, and reeking with stagnant 
odours.  Into this ill-favoured pit, the locksmith's vagrant 
'prentice groped his way; and stopping at a house from whose 
defaced and rotten front the rude effigy of a bottle swung to and 
fro like some gibbeted malefactor, struck thrice upon an iron 
grating with his foot.  After listening in vain for some response 
to his signal, Mr Tappertit became impatient, and struck the 
grating thrice again.

A further delay ensued, but it was not of long duration.  The 
ground seemed to open at his feet, and a ragged head appeared.

'Is that the captain?' said a voice as ragged as the head.

'Yes,' replied Mr Tappertit haughtily, descending as he spoke, 'who 
should it be?'

'It's so late, we gave you up,' returned the voice, as its owner 
stopped to shut and fasten the grating.  'You're late, sir.'

'Lead on,' said Mr Tappertit, with a gloomy majesty, 'and make 
remarks when I require you.  Forward!'

This latter word of command was perhaps somewhat theatrical and 
unnecessary, inasmuch as the descent was by a very narrow, steep, 
and slippery flight of steps, and any rashness or departure from 
the beaten track must have ended in a yawning water-butt.  But Mr 
Tappertit being, like some other great commanders, favourable to 
strong effects, and personal display, cried 'Forward!' again, in 
the hoarsest voice he could assume; and led the way, with folded 
arms and knitted brows, to the cellar down below, where there was a 
small copper fixed in one corner, a chair or two, a form and table, 
a glimmering fire, and a truckle-bed, covered with a ragged 
patchwork rug.

'Welcome, noble captain!' cried a lanky figure, rising as from a 
nap.

The captain nodded.  Then, throwing off his outer coat, he stood 
composed in all his dignity, and eyed his follower over.

'What news to-night?' he asked, when he had looked into his very 
soul.

'Nothing particular,' replied the other, stretching himself--and he 
was so long already that it was quite alarming to see him do it--
'how come you to be so late?'

'No matter,' was all the captain deigned to say in answer.  'Is the 
room prepared?'

'It is,' replied the follower.

'The comrade--is he here?'

'Yes.  And a sprinkling of the others--you hear 'em?'

'Playing skittles!' said the captain moodily.  'Light-hearted 
revellers!'

There was no doubt respecting the particular amusement in which 
these heedless spirits were indulging, for even in the close and 
stifling atmosphere of the vault, the noise sounded like distant 
thunder.  It certainly appeared, at first sight, a singular spot to 
choose, for that or any other purpose of relaxation, if the other 
cellars answered to the one in which this brief colloquy took 
place; for the floors were of sodden earth, the walls and roof of 
damp bare brick tapestried with the tracks of snails and slugs; the 
air was sickening, tainted, and offensive.  It seemed, from one 
strong flavour which was uppermost among the various odours of the 
place, that it had, at no very distant period, been used as a 
storehouse for cheeses; a circumstance which, while it accounted 
for the greasy moisture that hung about it, was agreeably 
suggestive of rats.  It was naturally damp besides, and little 
trees of fungus sprung from every mouldering corner.

The proprietor of this charming retreat, and owner of the ragged 
head before mentioned--for he wore an old tie-wig as bare and 
frowzy as a stunted hearth-broom--had by this time joined them; and 
stood a little apart, rubbing his hands, wagging his hoary bristled 
chin, and smiling in silence.  His eyes were closed; but had they 
been wide open, it would have been easy to tell, from the attentive 
expression of the face he turned towards them--pale and unwholesome 
as might be expected in one of his underground existence--and from 
a certain anxious raising and quivering of the lids, that he was 
blind.

'Even Stagg hath been asleep,' said the long comrade, nodding 
towards this person.

'Sound, captain, sound!' cried the blind man; 'what does my noble 
captain drink--is it brandy, rum, usquebaugh?  Is it soaked 
gunpowder, or blazing oil?  Give it a name, heart of oak, and we'd 
get it for you, if it was wine from a bishop's cellar, or melted 
gold from King George's mint.'

'See,' said Mr Tappertit haughtily, 'that it's something strong, 
and comes quick; and so long as you take care of that, you may 
bring it from the devil's cellar, if you like.'

'Boldly said, noble captain!' rejoined the blind man.  'Spoken like 
the 'Prentices' Glory.  Ha, ha!  From the devil's cellar!  A brave 
joke!  The captain joketh.  Ha, ha, ha!'

'I'll tell you what, my fine feller,' said Mr Tappertit, eyeing the 
host over as he walked to a closet, and took out a bottle and glass 
as carelessly as if he had been in full possession of his sight, 
'if you make that row, you'll find that the captain's very far from 
joking, and so I tell you.'

'He's got his eyes on me!' cried Stagg, stopping short on his way 
back, and affecting to screen his face with the bottle.  'I feel 
'em though I can't see 'em.  Take 'em off, noble captain.  Remove 
'em, for they pierce like gimlets.'

Mr Tappertit smiled grimly at his comrade; and twisting out one 
more look--a kind of ocular screw--under the influence of which the 
blind man feigned to undergo great anguish and torture, bade him, 
in a softened tone, approach, and hold his peace.

'I obey you, captain,' cried Stagg, drawing close to him and 
filling out a bumper without spilling a drop, by reason that he 
held his little finger at the brim of the glass, and stopped at the 
instant the liquor touched it, 'drink, noble governor.  Death to 
all masters, life to all 'prentices, and love to all fair damsels.  
Drink, brave general, and warm your gallant heart!'

Mr Tappertit condescended to take the glass from his outstretched 
hand.  Stagg then dropped on one knee, and gently smoothed the 
calves of his legs, with an air of humble admiration.

'That I had but eyes!' he cried, 'to behold my captain's 
symmetrical proportions!  That I had but eyes, to look upon these 
twin invaders of domestic peace!'

'Get out!' said Mr Tappertit, glancing downward at his favourite 
limbs.  'Go along, will you, Stagg!'

'When I touch my own afterwards,' cried the host, smiting them 
reproachfully, 'I hate 'em.  Comparatively speaking, they've no 
more shape than wooden legs, beside these models of my noble 
captain's.'

'Yours!' exclaimed Mr Tappertit.  'No, I should think not.  Don't 
talk about those precious old toothpicks in the same breath with 
mine; that's rather too much.  Here.  Take the glass.  Benjamin.  
Lead on.  To business!'

With these words, he folded his arms again; and frowning with a 
sullen majesty, passed with his companion through a little door at 
the upper end of the cellar, and disappeared; leaving Stagg to his 
private meditations.

The vault they entered, strewn with sawdust and dimly lighted, was 
between the outer one from which they had just come, and that in 
which the skittle-players were diverting themselves; as was 
manifested by the increased noise and clamour of tongues, which was 
suddenly stopped, however, and replaced by a dead silence, at a 
signal from the long comrade.  Then, this young gentleman, going to 
a little cupboard, returned with a thigh-bone, which in former 
times must have been part and parcel of some individual at least as 
long as himself, and placed the same in the hands of Mr Tappertit; 
who, receiving it as a sceptre and staff of authority, cocked his 
three-cornered hat fiercely on the top of his head, and mounted a 
large table, whereon a chair of state, cheerfully ornamented with a 
couple of skulls, was placed ready for his reception.

He had no sooner assumed this position, than another young 
gentleman appeared, bearing in his arms a huge clasped book, who 
made him a profound obeisance, and delivering it to the long 
comrade, advanced to the table, and turning his back upon it, stood 
there Atlas-wise.  Then, the long comrade got upon the table too; 
and seating himself in a lower chair than Mr Tappertit's, with much 
state and ceremony, placed the large book on the shoulders of their 
mute companion as deliberately as if he had been a wooden desk, and 
prepared to make entries therein with a pen of corresponding size.

When the long comrade had made these preparations, he looked 
towards Mr Tappertit; and Mr Tappertit, flourishing the bone, 
knocked nine times therewith upon one of the skulls.  At the ninth 
stroke, a third young gentleman emerged from the door leading to 
the skittle ground, and bowing low, awaited his commands.

'Prentice!' said the mighty captain, 'who waits without?'

The 'prentice made answer that a stranger was in attendance, who 
claimed admission into that secret society of 'Prentice Knights, 
and a free participation in their rights, privileges, and 
immunities.  Thereupon Mr Tappertit flourished the bone again, and 
giving the other skull a prodigious rap on the nose, exclaimed 
'Admit him!'  At these dread words the 'prentice bowed once more, 
and so withdrew as he had come.

There soon appeared at the same door, two other 'prentices, having 
between them a third, whose eyes were bandaged, and who was attired 
in a bag-wig, and a broad-skirted coat, trimmed with tarnished 
lace; and who was girded with a sword, in compliance with the laws 
of the Institution regulating the introduction of candidates, which 
required them to assume this courtly dress, and kept it constantly 
in lavender, for their convenience.  One of the conductors of this 
novice held a rusty blunderbuss pointed towards his ear, and the 
other a very ancient sabre, with which he carved imaginary 
offenders as he came along in a sanguinary and anatomical manner.

As this silent group advanced, Mr Tappertit fixed his hat upon his 
head.  The novice then laid his hand upon his breast and bent 
before him.  When he had humbled himself sufficiently, the captain 
ordered the bandage to be removed, and proceeded to eye him over.

'Ha!' said the captain, thoughtfully, when he had concluded this 
ordeal.  'Proceed.'

The long comrade read aloud as follows:--'Mark Gilbert.  Age, 
nineteen.  Bound to Thomas Curzon, hosier, Golden Fleece, Aldgate.  
Loves Curzon's daughter.  Cannot say that Curzon's daughter loves 
him.  Should think it probable.  Curzon pulled his ears last 
Tuesday week.'

'How!' cried the captain, starting.

'For looking at his daughter, please you,' said the novice.

'Write Curzon down, Denounced,' said the captain.  'Put a black 
cross against the name of Curzon.'

'So please you,' said the novice, 'that's not the worst--he calls 
his 'prentice idle dog, and stops his beer unless he works to his 
liking.  He gives Dutch cheese, too, eating Cheshire, sir, himself; 
and Sundays out, are only once a month.'

'This,' said Mr Tappert;t gravely, 'is a flagrant case.  Put two 
black crosses to the name of Curzon.'

'If the society,' said the novice, who was an ill-looking, one-
sided, shambling lad, with sunken eyes set close together in his 
head--'if the society would burn his house down--for he's not 
insured--or beat him as he comes home from his club at night, or 
help me to carry off his daughter, and marry her at the Fleet, 
whether she gave consent or no--'

Mr Tappertit waved his grizzly truncheon as an admonition to him 
not to interrupt, and ordered three black crosses to the name of 
Curzon.

'Which means,' he said in gracious explanation, 'vengeance, 
complete and terrible.  'Prentice, do you love the Constitution?'

To which the novice (being to that end instructed by his attendant 
sponsors) replied 'I do!'

'The Church, the State, and everything established--but the 
masters?' quoth the captain.

Again the novice said 'I do.'

Having said it, he listened meekly to the captain, who in an 
address prepared for such occasions, told him how that under that 
same Constitution (which was kept in a strong box somewhere, but 
where exactly he could not find out, or he would have endeavoured 
to procure a copy of it), the 'prentices had, in times gone by, 
had frequent holidays of right, broken people's heads by scores, 
defied their masters, nay, even achieved some glorious murders in 
the streets, which privileges had gradually been wrested from them, 
and in all which noble aspirations they were now restrained; how 
the degrading checks imposed upon them were unquestionably 
attributable to the innovating spirit of the times, and how they 
united therefore to resist all change, except such change as would 
restore those good old English customs, by which they would stand 
or fall.  After illustrating the wisdom of going backward, by 
reference to that sagacious fish, the crab, and the not unfrequent 
practice of the mule and donkey, he described their general 
objects; which were briefly vengeance on their Tyrant Masters (of 
whose grievous and insupportable oppression no 'prentice could 
entertain a moment's doubt) and the restoration, as aforesaid, of 
their ancient rights and holidays; for neither of which objects 
were they now quite ripe, being barely twenty strong, but which 
they pledged themselves to pursue with fire and sword when needful.  
Then he described the oath which every member of that small remnant 
of a noble body took, and which was of a dreadful and impressive 
kind; binding him, at the bidding of his chief, to resist and 
obstruct the Lord Mayor, sword-bearer, and chaplain; to despise the 
authority of the sheriffs; and to hold the court of aldermen as 
nought; but not on any account, in case the fulness of time should 
bring a general rising of 'prentices, to damage or in any way 
disfigure Temple Bar, which was strictly constitutional and always 
to be approached with reverence.  Having gone over these several 
heads with great eloquence and force, and having further informed 
the novice that this society had its origin in his own teeming 
brain, stimulated by a swelling sense of wrong and outrage, Mr 
Tappertit demanded whether he had strength of heart to take the 
mighty pledge required, or whether he would withdraw while retreat 
was yet in his power.

To this the novice made rejoinder, that he would take the vow, 
though it should choke him; and it was accordingly administered 
with many impressive circumstances, among which the lighting up of 
the two skulls with a candle-end inside of each, and a great many 
flourishes with the bone, were chiefly conspicuous; not to mention 
a variety of grave exercises with the blunderbuss and sabre, and 
some dismal groaning by unseen 'prentices without.  All these dark 
and direful ceremonies being at length completed, the table was put 
aside, the chair of state removed, the sceptre locked up in its 
usual cupboard, the doors of communication between the three 
cellars thrown freely open, and the 'Prentice Knights resigned 
themselves to merriment.

But Mr Tappertit, who had a soul above the vulgar herd, and who, on 
account of his greatness, could only afford to be merry now and 
then, threw himself on a bench with the air of a man who was faint 
with dignity.  He looked with an indifferent eye, alike on 
skittles, cards, and dice, thinking only of the locksmith's 
daughter, and the base degenerate days on which he had fallen.

'My noble captain neither games, nor sings, nor dances,' said his 
host, taking a seat beside him.  'Drink, gallant general!'

Mr Tappertit drained the proffered goblet to the dregs; then thrust 
his hands into his pockets, and with a lowering visage walked among 
the skittles, while his followers (such is the influence of 
superior genius) restrained the ardent ball, and held his little 
shins in dumb respect.

'If I had been born a corsair or a pirate, a brigand, genteel 
highwayman or patriot--and they're the same thing,' thought Mr 
Tappertit, musing among the nine-pins, 'I should have been all 
right.  But to drag out a ignoble existence unbeknown to mankind in 
general--patience!  I will be famous yet.  A voice within me keeps 
on whispering Greatness.  I shall burst out one of these days, and 
when I do, what power can keep me down?  I feel my soul getting 
into my head at the idea.  More drink there!'

'The novice,' pursued Mr Tappertit, not exactly in a voice of 
thunder, for his tones, to say the truth were rather cracked and 
shrill--but very impressively, notwithstanding--'where is he?'

'Here, noble captain!' cried Stagg.  'One stands beside me who I 
feel is a stranger.'

'Have you,' said Mr Tappertit, letting his gaze fall on the party 
indicated, who was indeed the new knight, by this time restored to 
his own apparel; 'Have you the impression of your street-door key 
in wax?'

The long comrade anticipated the reply, by producing it from the 
shelf on which it had been deposited.

'Good,' said Mr Tappertit, scrutinising it attentively, while a 
breathless silence reigned around; for he had constructed secret 
door-keys for the whole society, and perhaps owed something of his 
influence to that mean and trivial circumstance--on such slight 
accidents do even men of mind depend!--'This is easily made.  Come 
hither, friend.'

With that, he beckoned the new knight apart, and putting the 
pattern in his pocket, motioned to him to walk by his side.

'And so,' he said, when they had taken a few turns up and down, 
you--you love your master's daughter?'

'I do,' said the 'prentice.  'Honour bright.  No chaff, you know.'

'Have you,' rejoined Mr Tappertit, catching him by the wrist, and 
giving him a look which would have been expressive of the most 
deadly malevolence, but for an accidental hiccup that rather 
interfered with it; 'have you a--a rival?'

'Not as I know on,' replied the 'prentice.

'If you had now--' said Mr Tappertit--'what would you--eh?--'

The 'prentice looked fierce and clenched his fists.

'It is enough,' cried Mr Tappertit hastily, 'we understand each 
other.  We are observed.  I thank you.'

So saying, he cast him off again; and calling the long comrade 
aside after taking a few hasty turns by himself, bade him 
immediately write and post against the wall, a notice, proscribing 
one Joseph Willet (commonly known as Joe) of Chigwell; forbidding 
all 'Prentice Knights to succour, comfort, or hold communion with 
him; and requiring them, on pain of excommunication, to molest, 
hurt, wrong, annoy, and pick quarrels with the said Joseph, 
whensoever and wheresoever they, or any of them, should happen to 
encounter him.

Having relieved his mind by this energetic proceeding, he 
condescended to approach the festive board, and warming by degrees, 
at length deigned to preside, and even to enchant the company with 
a song.  After this, he rose to such a pitch as to consent to 
regale the society with a hornpipe, which be actually performed to 
the music of a fiddle (played by an ingenious member) with such 
surpassing agility and brilliancy of execution, that the spectators 
could not be sufficiently enthusiastic in their admiration; and 
their host protested, with tears in his eyes, that he had never 
truly felt his blindness until that moment.

But the host withdrawing--probably to weep in secret--soon returned 
with the information that it wanted little more than an hour of 
day, and that all the cocks in Barbican had already begun to crow, 
as if their lives depended on it.  At this intelligence, the 
'Prentice Knights arose in haste, and marshalling into a line, 
filed off one by one and dispersed with all speed to their several 
homes, leaving their leader to pass the grating last.

'Good night, noble captain,' whispered the blind man as he held it 
open for his passage out; 'Farewell, brave general.  Bye, bye, 
illustrious commander.  Good luck go with you for a--conceited, 
bragging, empty-headed, duck-legged idiot.'

With which parting words, coolly added as he listened to his 
receding footsteps and locked the grate upon himself, he descended 
the steps, and lighting the fire below the little copper, 
prepared, without any assistance, for his daily occupation; which 
was to retail at the area-head above pennyworths of broth and soup, 
and savoury puddings, compounded of such scraps as were to be 
bought in the heap for the least money at Fleet Market in the 
evening time; and for the sale of which he had need to have 
depended chiefly on his private connection, for the court had no 
thoroughfare, and was not that kind of place in which many people 
were likely to take the air, or to frequent as an agreeable 
promenade.



Chapter 9


Chronicler's are privileged to enter where they list, to come and 
go through keyholes, to ride upon the wind, to overcome, in their 
soarings up and down, all obstacles of distance, time, and place.  
Thrice blessed be this last consideration, since it enables us to 
follow the disdainful Miggs even into the sanctity of her chamber, 
and to hold her in sweet companionship through the dreary watches 
of the night!

Miss Miggs, having undone her mistress, as she phrased it (which 
means, assisted to undress her), and having seen her comfortably to 
bed in the back room on the first floor, withdrew to her own 
apartment, in the attic story.  Notwithstanding her declaration in 
the locksmith's presence, she was in no mood for sleep; so, putting 
her light upon the table and withdrawing the little window curtain, 
she gazed out pensively at the wild night sky.

Perhaps she wondered what star was destined for her habitation when 
she had run her little course below; perhaps speculated which of 
those glimmering spheres might be the natal orb of Mr Tappertit; 
perhaps marvelled how they could gaze down on that perfidious 
creature, man, and not sicken and turn green as chemists' lamps; 
perhaps thought of nothing in particular.  Whatever she thought 
about, there she sat, until her attention, alive to anything 
connected with the insinuating 'prentice, was attracted by a noise 
in the next room to her own--his room; the room in which he slept, 
and dreamed--it might be, sometimes dreamed of her.

That he was not dreaming now, unless he was taking a walk in his 
sleep, was clear, for every now and then there came a shuffling 
noise, as though he were engaged in polishing the whitewashed wall; 
then a gentle creaking of his door; then the faintest indication of 
his stealthy footsteps on the landing-place outside.  Noting this 
latter circumstance, Miss Miggs turned pale and shuddered, as 
mistrusting his intentions; and more than once exclaimed, below her 
breath, 'Oh! what a Providence it is, as I am bolted in!'--which, 
owing doubtless to her alarm, was a confusion of ideas on her part 
between a bolt and its use; for though there was one on the door, 
it was not fastened.

Miss Miggs's sense of hearing, however, having as sharp an edge as 
her temper, and being of the same snappish and suspicious kind, 
very soon informed her that the footsteps passed her door, and 
appeared to have some object quite separate and disconnected from 
herself.  At this discovery she became more alarmed than ever, and 
was about to give utterance to those cries of 'Thieves!' and 
'Murder!' which she had hitherto restrained, when it occurred to 
her to look softly out, and see that her fears had some good 
palpable foundation.

Looking out accordingly, and stretching her neck over the handrail, 
she descried, to her great amazement, Mr Tappertit completely 
dressed, stealing downstairs, one step at a time, with his shoes in 
one hand and a lamp in the other.  Following him with her eyes, and 
going down a little way herself to get the better of an intervening 
angle, she beheld him thrust his head in at the parlour-door, draw 
it back again with great swiftness, and immediately begin a retreat 
upstairs with all possible expedition.

'Here's mysteries!' said the damsel, when she was safe in her own 
room again, quite out of breath.  'Oh, gracious, here's mysteries!'

The prospect of finding anybody out in anything, would have kept 
Miss Miggs awake under the influence of henbane.  Presently, she 
heard the step again, as she would have done if it had been that of 
a feather endowed with motion and walking down on tiptoe.  Then 
gliding out as before, she again beheld the retreating figure of 
the 'prentice; again he looked cautiously in at the parlour-door, 
but this time instead of retreating, he passed in and disappeared.

Miggs was back in her room, and had her head out of the window, 
before an elderly gentleman could have winked and recovered from 
it.  Out he came at the street-door, shut it carefully behind him, 
tried it with his knee, and swaggered off, putting something in his 
pocket as he went along.  At this spectacle Miggs cried 'Gracious!' 
again, and then 'Goodness gracious!' and then 'Goodness gracious 
me!' and then, candle in hand, went downstairs as he had done.  
Coming to the workshop, she saw the lamp burning on the forge, and 
everything as Sim had left it.

'Why I wish I may only have a walking funeral, and never be buried 
decent with a mourning-coach and feathers, if the boy hasn't been 
and made a key for his own self!' cried Miggs.  'Oh the little 
villain!'

This conclusion was not arrived at without consideration, and much 
peeping and peering about; nor was it unassisted by the 
recollection that she had on several occasions come upon the 
'prentice suddenly, and found him busy at some mysterious 
occupation.  Lest the fact of Miss Miggs calling him, on whom she 
stooped to cast a favourable eye, a boy, should create surprise in 
any breast, it may be observed that she invariably affected to 
regard all male bipeds under thirty as mere chits and infants; 
which phenomenon is not unusual in ladies of Miss Miggs's temper, 
and is indeed generally found to be the associate of such 
indomitable and savage virtue.

Miss Miggs deliberated within herself for some little time, looking 
hard at the shop-door while she did so, as though her eyes and 
thoughts were both upon it; and then, taking a sheet of paper from 
a drawer, twisted it into a long thin spiral tube.  Having filled 
this instrument with a quantity of small coal-dust from the forge, 
she approached the door, and dropping on one knee before it, 
dexterously blew into the keyhole as much of these fine ashes as 
the lock would hold.  When she had filled it to the brim in a very 
workmanlike and skilful manner, she crept upstairs again, and 
chuckled as she went.

'There!' cried Miggs, rubbing her hands, 'now let's see whether you 
won't be glad to take some notice of me, mister.  He, he, he!  
You'll have eyes for somebody besides Miss Dolly now, I think.  A 
fat-faced puss she is, as ever I come across!'

As she uttered this criticism, she glanced approvingly at her small 
mirror, as who should say, I thank my stars that can't be said of 
me!--as it certainly could not; for Miss Miggs's style of beauty 
was of that kind which Mr Tappertit himself had not inaptly termed, 
in private, 'scraggy.'

'I don't go to bed this night!' said Miggs, wrapping herself in a 
shawl, and drawing a couple of chairs near the window, flouncing 
down upon one, and putting her feet upon the other, 'till you come 
home, my lad.  I wouldn't,' said Miggs viciously, 'no, not for 
five-and-forty pound!'

With that, and with an expression of face in which a great number 
of opposite ingredients, such as mischief, cunning, malice, 
triumph, and patient expectation, were all mixed up together in a 
kind of physiognomical punch, Miss Miggs composed herself to wait 
and listen, like some fair ogress who had set a trap and was 
watching for a nibble from a plump young traveller.

She sat there, with perfect composure, all night.  At length, just 
upon break of day, there was a footstep in the street, and 
presently she could hear Mr Tappertit stop at the door.  Then she 
could make out that he tried his key--that he was blowing into it--
that he knocked it on the nearest post to beat the dust out--that 
he took it under a lamp to look at it--that he poked bits of stick 
into the lock to clear it--that he peeped into the keyhole, first 
with one eye, and then with the other--that he tried the key again--
that he couldn't turn it, and what was worse, couldn't get it out--
that he bent it--that then it was much less disposed to come out 
than before--that he gave it a mighty twist and a great pull, and 
then it came out so suddenly that he staggered backwards--that he 
kicked the door--that he shook it--finally, that he smote his 
forehead, and sat down on the step in despair.

When this crisis had arrived, Miss Miggs, affecting to be exhausted 
with terror, and to cling to the window-sill for support, put out 
her nightcap, and demanded in a faint voice who was there.

Mr Tappertit cried 'Hush!' and, backing to the road, exhorted her 
in frenzied pantomime to secrecy and silence.

'Tell me one thing,' said Miggs.  'Is it thieves?'

'No--no--no!' cried Mr Tappertit.

'Then,' said Miggs, more faintly than before, 'it's fire.  Where 
is it, sir?  It's near this room, I know.  I've a good conscience, 
sir, and would much rather die than go down a ladder.  All I wish 
is, respecting my love to my married sister, Golden Lion Court, 
number twenty-sivin, second bell-handle on the right-hand door-
post.'

'Miggs!' cried Mr Tappertit, 'don't you know me?  Sim, you know--
Sim--'

'Oh!  what about him!' cried Miggs, clasping her hands.  'Is he in 
any danger?  Is he in the midst of flames and blazes!  Oh gracious, 
gracious!'

'Why I'm here, an't I?' rejoined Mr Tappertit, knocking himself on 
the breast.  'Don't you see me?  What a fool you are, Miggs!'

'There!' cried Miggs, unmindful of this compliment.  'Why--so it--
Goodness, what is the meaning of--If you please, mim, here's--'

'No, no!' cried Mr Tappertit, standing on tiptoe, as if by that 
means he, in the street, were any nearer being able to stop the 
mouth of Miggs in the garret.  'Don't!--I've been out without 
leave, and something or another's the matter with the lock.  Come 
down, and undo the shop window, that I may get in that way.'

'I dursn't do it, Simmun,' cried Miggs--for that was her 
pronunciation of his Christian name.  'I dursn't do it, indeed.  
You know as well as anybody, how particular I am.  And to come 
down in the dead of night, when the house is wrapped in slumbers 
and weiled in obscurity.'  And there she stopped and shivered, for 
her modesty caught cold at the very thought.

'But Miggs,' cried Mr Tappertit, getting under the lamp, that she 
might see his eyes.  'My darling Miggs--'

Miggs screamed slightly.

'--That I love so much, and never can help thinking of,' and it is 
impossible to describe the use he made of his eyes when he said 
this--'do--for my sake, do.'

'Oh Simmun,' cried Miggs, 'this is worse than all.  I know if I 
come down, you'll go, and--'

'And what, my precious?' said Mr Tappertit.

'And try,' said Miggs, hysterically, 'to kiss me, or some such 
dreadfulness; I know you will!'

'I swear I won't,' said Mr Tappertit, with remarkable earnestness.  
'Upon my soul I won't.  It's getting broad day, and the watchman's 
waking up.  Angelic Miggs!  If you'll only come and let me in, I 
promise you faithfully and truly I won't.'

Miss Miggs, whose gentle heart was touched, did not wait for the 
oath (knowing how strong the temptation was, and fearing he might 
forswear himself), but tripped lightly down the stairs, and with 
her own fair hands drew back the rough fastenings of the workshop 
window.  Having helped the wayward 'prentice in, she faintly 
articulated the words 'Simmun is safe!' and yielding to her woman's 
nature, immediately became insensible.

'I knew I should quench her,' said Sim, rather embarrassed by this 
circumstance.  'Of course I was certain it would come to this, but 
there was nothing else to be done--if I hadn't eyed her over, she 
wouldn't have come down.  Here.  Keep up a minute, Miggs.  What a 
slippery figure she is!  There's no holding her, comfortably.  Do 
keep up a minute, Miggs, will you?'

As Miggs, however, was deaf to all entreaties, Mr Tappertit leant 
her against the wall as one might dispose of a walking-stick or 
umbrella, until he had secured the window, when he took her in his 
arms again, and, in short stages and with great difficulty--arising 
from her being tall and his being short, and perhaps in some degree 
from that peculiar physical conformation on which he had already 
remarked--carried her upstairs, and planting her, in the same 
umbrella and walking-stick fashion, just inside her own door, left 
her to her repose.

'He may be as cool as he likes,' said Miss Miggs, recovering as 
soon as she was left alone; 'but I'm in his confidence and he can't 
help himself, nor couldn't if he was twenty Simmunses!'



Chapter 10


It was on one of those mornings, common in early spring, when the 
year, fickle and changeable in its youth like all other created 
things, is undecided whether to step backward into winter or 
forward into summer, and in its uncertainty inclines now to the one 
and now to the other, and now to both at once--wooing summer in the 
sunshine, and lingering still with winter in the shade--it was, in 
short, on one of those mornings, when it is hot and cold, wet and 
dry, bright and lowering, sad and cheerful, withering and genial, 
in the compass of one short hour, that old John Willet, who was 
dropping asleep over the copper boiler, was roused by the sound of 
a horse's feet, and glancing out at window, beheld a traveller of 
goodly promise, checking his bridle at the Maypole door.

He was none of your flippant young fellows, who would call for a 
tankard of mulled ale, and make themselves as much at home as if 
they had ordered a hogshead of wine; none of your audacious young 
swaggerers, who would even penetrate into the bar--that solemn 
sanctuary--and, smiting old John upon the back, inquire if there 
was never a pretty girl in the house, and where he hid his little 
chambermaids, with a hundred other impertinences of that nature; 
none of your free-and-easy companions, who would scrape their 
boots upon the firedogs in the common room, and be not at all 
particular on the subject of spittoons; none of your unconscionable 
blades, requiring impossible chops, and taking unheard-of pickles 
for granted.  He was a staid, grave, placid gentleman, something 
past the prime of life, yet upright in his carriage, for all that, 
and slim as a greyhound.  He was well-mounted upon a sturdy 
chestnut cob, and had the graceful seat of an experienced horseman; 
while his riding gear, though free from such fopperies as were then 
in vogue, was handsome and well chosen.  He wore a riding-coat of a 
somewhat brighter green than might have been expected to suit the 
taste of a gentleman of his years, with a short, black velvet cape, 
and laced pocket-holes and cuffs, all of a jaunty fashion; his 
linen, too, was of the finest kind, worked in a rich pattern at the 
wrists and throat, and scrupulously white.  Although he seemed, 
judging from the mud he had picked up on the way, to have come from 
London, his horse was as smooth and cool as his own iron-grey 
periwig and pigtail.  Neither man nor beast had turned a single 
hair; and saving for his soiled skirts and spatter-dashes, this 
gentleman, with his blooming face, white teeth, exactly-ordered 
dress, and perfect calmness, might have come from making an 
elaborate and leisurely toilet, to sit for an equestrian portrait 
at old John Willet's gate.

It must not be supposed that John observed these several 
characteristics by other than very slow degrees, or that he took in 
more than half a one at a time, or that he even made up his mind 
upon that, without a great deal of very serious consideration.  
Indeed, if he had been distracted in the first instance by 
questionings and orders, it would have taken him at the least a 
fortnight to have noted what is here set down; but it happened that 
the gentleman, being struck with the old house, or with the plump 
pigeons which were skimming and curtseying about it, or with the 
tall maypole, on the top of which a weathercock, which had been out 
of order for fifteen years, performed a perpetual walk to the music 
of its own creaking, sat for some little time looking round in 
silence.  Hence John, standing with his hand upon the horse's 
bridle, and his great eyes on the rider, and with nothing passing 
to divert his thoughts, had really got some of these little 
circumstances into his brain by the time he was called upon to 
speak.

'A quaint place this,' said the gentleman--and his voice was as 
rich as his dress.  'Are you the landlord?'

'At your service, sir,' replied John Willet.

'You can give my horse good stabling, can you, and me an early 
dinner (I am not particular what, so that it be cleanly served), 
and a decent room of which there seems to be no lack in this great 
mansion,' said the stranger, again running his eyes over the 
exterior.

'You can have, sir,' returned John with a readiness quite 
surprising, 'anything you please.'

'It's well I am easily satisfied,' returned the other with a smile, 
'or that might prove a hardy pledge, my friend.'  And saying so, he 
dismounted, with the aid of the block before the door, in a 
twinkling.

'Halloa there!  Hugh!' roared John.  'I ask your pardon, sir, for 
keeping you standing in the porch; but my son has gone to town on 
business, and the boy being, as I may say, of a kind of use to me, 
I'm rather put out when he's away.  Hugh!--a dreadful idle vagrant 
fellow, sir, half a gipsy, as I think--always sleeping in the sun 
in summer, and in the straw in winter time, sir--Hugh!  Dear Lord, 
to keep a gentleman a waiting here through him!--Hugh!  I wish that 
chap was dead, I do indeed.'

'Possibly he is,' returned the other.  'I should think if he were 
living, he would have heard you by this time.'

'In his fits of laziness, he sleeps so desperate hard,' said the 
distracted host, 'that if you were to fire off cannon-balls into 
his ears, it wouldn't wake him, sir.'

The guest made no remark upon this novel cure for drowsiness, and 
recipe for making people lively, but, with his hands clasped behind 
him, stood in the porch, very much amused to see old John, with the 
bridle in his hand, wavering between a strong impulse to abandon 
the animal to his fate, and a half disposition to lead him into the 
house, and shut him up in the parlour, while he waited on his 
master.

'Pillory the fellow, here he is at last!' cried John, in the very 
height and zenith of his distress.  'Did you hear me a calling, 
villain?'

The figure he addressed made no answer, but putting his hand upon 
the saddle, sprung into it at a bound, turned the horse's head 
towards the stable, and was gone in an instant.

'Brisk enough when he is awake,' said the guest.

'Brisk enough, sir!' replied John, looking at the place where the 
horse had been, as if not yet understanding quite, what had become 
of him.  'He melts, I think.  He goes like a drop of froth.  You 
look at him, and there he is.  You look at him again, and--there he 
isn't.'

Having, in the absence of any more words, put this sudden climax to 
what he had faintly intended should be a long explanation of the 
whole life and character of his man, the oracular John Willet led 
the gentleman up his wide dismantled staircase into the Maypole's 
best apartment.

It was spacious enough in all conscience, occupying the whole depth 
of the house, and having at either end a great bay window, as large 
as many modern rooms; in which some few panes of stained glass, 
emblazoned with fragments of armorial bearings, though cracked, and 
patched, and shattered, yet remained; attesting, by their 
presence, that the former owner had made the very light subservient 
to his state, and pressed the sun itself into his list of 
flatterers; bidding it, when it shone into his chamber, reflect the 
badges of his ancient family, and take new hues and colours from 
their pride.

But those were old days, and now every little ray came and went as 
it would; telling the plain, bare, searching truth.  Although the 
best room of the inn, it had the melancholy aspect of grandeur in 
decay, and was much too vast for comfort.  Rich rustling hangings, 
waving on the walls; and, better far, the rustling of youth and 
beauty's dress; the light of women's eyes, outshining the tapers 
and their own rich jewels; the sound of gentle tongues, and music, 
and the tread of maiden feet, had once been there, and filled it 
with delight.  But they were gone, and with them all its gladness.  
It was no longer a home; children were never born and bred there; 
the fireside had become mercenary--a something to be bought and 
sold--a very courtezan: let who would die, or sit beside, or leave 
it, it was still the same--it missed nobody, cared for nobody, had 
equal warmth and smiles for all.  God help the man whose heart ever 
changes with the world, as an old mansion when it becomes an inn!

No effort had been made to furnish this chilly waste, but before 
the broad chimney a colony of chairs and tables had been planted on 
a square of carpet, flanked by a ghostly screen, enriched with 
figures, grinning and grotesque.  After lighting with his own hands 
the faggots which were heaped upon the hearth, old John withdrew to 
hold grave council with his cook, touching the stranger's 
entertainment; while the guest himself, seeing small comfort in 
the yet unkindled wood, opened a lattice in the distant window, and 
basked in a sickly gleam of cold March sun.

Leaving the window now and then, to rake the crackling logs 
together, or pace the echoing room from end to end, he closed it 
when the fire was quite burnt up, and having wheeled the easiest 
chair into the warmest corner, summoned John Willet.

'Sir,' said John.

He wanted pen, ink, and paper.  There was an old standish on the 
mantelshelf containing a dusty apology for all three.  Having set 
this before him, the landlord was retiring, when he motioned him to 
stay.

'There's a house not far from here,' said the guest when he had 
written a few lines, 'which you call the Warren, I believe?'

As this was said in the tone of one who knew the fact, and asked 
the question as a thing of course, John contented himself with 
nodding his head in the affirmative; at the same time taking one 
hand out of his pockets to cough behind, and then putting it in 
again.

'I want this note'--said the guest, glancing on what he had 
written, and folding it, 'conveyed there without loss of time, and 
an answer brought back here.  Have you a messenger at hand?'

John was thoughtful for a minute or thereabouts, and then said Yes.

'Let me see him,' said the guest.

This was disconcerting; for Joe being out, and Hugh engaged in 
rubbing down the chestnut cob, he designed sending on the errand, 
Barnaby, who had just then arrived in one of his rambles, and who, 
so that he thought himself employed on a grave and serious 
business, would go anywhere.

'Why the truth is,' said John after a long pause, 'that the person 
who'd go quickest, is a sort of natural, as one may say, sir; and 
though quick of foot, and as much to be trusted as the post 
itself, he's not good at talking, being touched and flighty, sir.'

'You don't,' said the guest, raising his eyes to John's fat face, 
'you don't mean--what's the fellow's name--you don't mean Barnaby?'

'Yes, I do,' returned the landlord, his features turning quite 
expressive with surprise.

'How comes he to be here?' inquired the guest, leaning back in his 
chair; speaking in the bland, even tone, from which he never 
varied; and with the same soft, courteous, never-changing smile 
upon his face.  'I saw him in London last night.'

'He's, for ever, here one hour, and there the next,' returned old 
John, after the usual pause to get the question in his mind.  
'Sometimes he walks, and sometimes runs.  He's known along the road 
by everybody, and sometimes comes here in a cart or chaise, and 
sometimes riding double.  He comes and goes, through wind, rain, 
snow, and hail, and on the darkest nights.  Nothing hurts HIM.'

'He goes often to the Warren, does he not?' said the guest 
carelessly.  'I seem to remember his mother telling me something to 
that effect yesterday.  But I was not attending to the good woman 
much.'

'You're right, sir,' John made answer, 'he does.  His father, sir, 
was murdered in that house.'

'So I have heard,' returned the guest, taking a gold toothpick 
from his pocket with the same sweet smile.  'A very disagreeable 
circumstance for the family.'

'Very,' said John with a puzzled look, as if it occurred to him, 
dimly and afar off, that this might by possibility be a cool way of 
treating the subject.

'All the circumstances after a murder,' said the guest 
soliloquising, 'must be dreadfully unpleasant--so much bustle and 
disturbance--no repose--a constant dwelling upon one subject--and 
the running in and out, and up and down stairs, intolerable.  I 
wouldn't have such a thing happen to anybody I was nearly 
interested in, on any account.  'Twould be enough to wear one's 
life out.--You were going to say, friend--' he added, turning to 
John again.

'Only that Mrs Rudge lives on a little pension from the family, and 
that Barnaby's as free of the house as any cat or dog about it,' 
answered John.  'Shall he do your errand, sir?'

'Oh yes,' replied the guest.  'Oh certainly.  Let him do it by all 
means.  Please to bring him here that I may charge him to be quick.  
If he objects to come you may tell him it's Mr Chester.  He will 
remember my name, I dare say.'

John was so very much astonished to find who his visitor was, that 
he could express no astonishment at all, by looks or otherwise, but 
left the room as if he were in the most placid and imperturbable of 
all possible conditions.  It has been reported that when he got 
downstairs, he looked steadily at the boiler for ten minutes by 
the clock, and all that time never once left off shaking his head; 
for which statement there would seem to be some ground of truth and 
feasibility, inasmuch as that interval of time did certainly 
elapse, before he returned with Barnaby to the guest's apartment.

'Come hither, lad,' said Mr Chester.  'You know Mr Geoffrey 
Haredale?'

Barnaby laughed, and looked at the landlord as though he would say, 
'You hear him?'  John, who was greatly shocked at this breach of 
decorum, clapped his finger to his nose, and shook his head in mute 
remonstrance.

'He knows him, sir,' said John, frowning aside at Barnaby, 'as well 
as you or I do.'

'I haven't the pleasure of much acquaintance with the gentleman,' 
returned his guest.  'YOU may have.  Limit the comparison to 
yourself, my friend.'

Although this was said with the same easy affability, and the same 
smile, John felt himself put down, and laying the indignity at 
Barnaby's door, determined to kick his raven, on the very first 
opportunity.

'Give that,' said the guest, who had by this time sealed the note, 
and who beckoned his messenger towards him as he spoke, 'into Mr 
Haredale's own hands.  Wait for an answer, and bring it back to me 
here.  If you should find that Mr Haredale is engaged just now, 
tell him--can he remember a message, landlord?'

'When he chooses, sir,' replied John.  'He won't forget this one.'

'How are you sure of that?'

John merely pointed to him as he stood with his head bent forward, 
and his earnest gaze fixed closely on his questioner's face; and 
nodded sagely.

'Tell him then, Barnaby, should he be engaged,' said Mr Chester, 
'that I shall be glad to wait his convenience here, and to see him 
(if he will call) at any time this evening.--At the worst I can 
have a bed here, Willet, I suppose?'

Old John, immensely flattered by the personal notoriety implied in 
this familiar form of address, answered, with something like a 
knowing look, 'I should believe you could, sir,' and was turning 
over in his mind various forms of eulogium, with the view of 
selecting one appropriate to the qualities of his best bed, when 
his ideas were put to flight by Mr Chester giving Barnaby the 
letter, and bidding him make all speed away.

'Speed!' said Barnaby, folding the little packet in his breast, 
'Speed!  If you want to see hurry and mystery, come here.  Here!'

With that, he put his hand, very much to John Willet's horror, on 
the guest's fine broadcloth sleeve, and led him stealthily to the 
back window.

'Look down there,' he said softly; 'do you mark how they whisper in 
each other's ears; then dance and leap, to make believe they are in 
sport?  Do you see how they stop for a moment, when they think 
there is no one looking, and mutter among themselves again; and 
then how they roll and gambol, delighted with the mischief they've 
been plotting?  Look at 'em now.  See how they whirl and plunge.  
And now they stop again, and whisper, cautiously together--little 
thinking, mind, how often I have lain upon the grass and watched 
them.  I say what is it that they plot and hatch?  Do you know?'

'They are only clothes,' returned the guest, 'such as we wear; 
hanging on those lines to dry, and fluttering in the wind.'

'Clothes!' echoed Barnaby, looking close into his face, and falling 
quickly back.  'Ha ha!  Why, how much better to be silly, than as 
wise as you!  You don't see shadowy people there, like those that 
live in sleep--not you.  Nor eyes in the knotted panes of glass, 
nor swift ghosts when it blows hard, nor do you hear voices in the 
air, nor see men stalking in the sky--not you!  I lead a merrier 
life than you, with all your cleverness.  You're the dull men.  
We're the bright ones.  Ha! ha!  I'll not change with you, clever 
as you are,--not I!'

With that, he waved his hat above his head, and darted off.

'A strange creature, upon my word!' said the guest, pulling out a 
handsome box, and taking a pinch of snuff.

'He wants imagination,' said Mr Willet, very slowly, and after a 
long silence; 'that's what he wants.  I've tried to instil it into 
him, many and many's the time; but'--John added this in confidence--
'he an't made for it; that's the fact.'

To record that Mr Chester smiled at John's remark would be little 
to the purpose, for he preserved the same conciliatory and pleasant 
look at all times.  He drew his chair nearer to the fire though, as 
a kind of hint that he would prefer to be alone, and John, having 
no reasonable excuse for remaining, left him to himself.

Very thoughtful old John Willet was, while the dinner was 
preparing; and if his brain were ever less clear at one time than 
another, it is but reasonable to suppose that he addled it in no 
slight degree by shaking his head so much that day.  That Mr 
Chester, between whom and Mr Haredale, it was notorious to all the 
neighbourhood, a deep and bitter animosity existed, should come 
down there for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of seeing him, and 
should choose the Maypole for their place of meeting, and should 
send to him express, were stumbling blocks John could not overcome.  
The only resource he had, was to consult the boiler, and wait 
impatiently for Barnaby's return.

But Barnaby delayed beyond all precedent.  The visitor's dinner was 
served, removed, his wine was set, the fire replenished, the hearth 
clean swept; the light waned without, it grew dusk, became quite 
dark, and still no Barnaby appeared.  Yet, though John Willet was 
full of wonder and misgiving, his guest sat cross-legged in the 
easy-chair, to all appearance as little ruffled in his thoughts as 
in his dress--the same calm, easy, cool gentleman, without a care 
or thought beyond his golden toothpick.

'Barnaby's late,' John ventured to observe, as he placed a pair of 
tarnished candlesticks, some three feet high, upon the table, and 
snuffed the lights they held.

'He is rather so,' replied the guest, sipping his wine.  'He will 
not be much longer, I dare say.'

John coughed and raked the fire together.

'As your roads bear no very good character, if I may judge from my 
son's mishap, though,' said Mr Chester, 'and as I have no fancy to 
be knocked on the head--which is not only disconcerting at the 
moment, but places one, besides, in a ridiculous position with 
respect to the people who chance to pick one up--I shall stop here 
to-night.  I think you said you had a bed to spare.'

'Such a bed, sir,' returned John Willet; 'ay, such a bed as few, 
even of the gentry's houses, own.  A fixter here, sir.  I've heard 
say that bedstead is nigh two hundred years of age.  Your noble 
son--a fine young gentleman--slept in it last, sir, half a year 
ago.'

'Upon my life, a recommendation!' said the guest, shrugging his 
shoulders and wheeling his chair nearer to the fire.  'See that it 
be well aired, Mr Willet, and let a blazing fire be lighted there 
at once.  This house is something damp and chilly.'

John raked the faggots up again, more from habit than presence of 
mind, or any reference to this remark, and was about to withdraw, 
when a bounding step was heard upon the stair, and Barnaby came 
panting in.

'He'll have his foot in the stirrup in an hour's time,' he cried, 
advancing.  'He has been riding hard all day--has just come home--
but will be in the saddle again as soon as he has eat and drank, to 
meet his loving friend.'

'Was that his message?' asked the visitor, looking up, but without 
the smallest discomposure--or at least without the show of any.

'All but the last words,' Barnaby rejoined.  'He meant those.  I 
saw that, in his face.'

'This for your pains,' said the other, putting money in his hand, 
and glancing at him steadfastly.'   This for your pains, sharp 
Barnaby.'

'For Grip, and me, and Hugh, to share among us,' he rejoined, 
putting it up, and nodding, as he counted it on his fingers.  'Grip 
one, me two, Hugh three; the dog, the goat, the cats--well, we 
shall spend it pretty soon, I warn you.  Stay.--Look.  Do you wise 
men see nothing there, now?'

He bent eagerly down on one knee, and gazed intently at the smoke, 
which was rolling up the chimney in a thick black cloud.  John 
Willet, who appeared to consider himself particularly and chiefly 
referred to under the term wise men, looked that way likewise, and 
with great solidity of feature.

'Now, where do they go to, when they spring so fast up there,' 
asked Barnaby; 'eh?  Why do they tread so closely on each other's 
heels, and why are they always in a hurry--which is what you blame 
me for, when I only take pattern by these busy folk about me?  More 
of 'em! catching to each other's skirts; and as fast as they go, 
others come!  What a merry dance it is!  I would that Grip and I 
could frisk like that!'

'What has he in that basket at his back?' asked the guest after a 
few moments, during which Barnaby was still bending down to look 
higher up the chimney, and earnestly watching the smoke.

'In this?' he answered, jumping up, before John Willet could reply--
shaking it as he spoke, and stooping his head to listen.  'In 
this!  What is there here?  Tell him!'

'A devil, a devil, a devil!' cried a hoarse voice.

'Here's money!' said Barnaby, chinking it in his hand, 'money for a 
treat, Grip!'

'Hurrah!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!' replied the raven, 'keep up your 
spirits.  Never say die.  Bow, wow, wow!'

Mr Willet, who appeared to entertain strong doubts whether a 
customer in a laced coat and fine linen could be supposed to have 
any acquaintance even with the existence of such unpolite gentry as 
the bird claimed to belong to, took Barnaby off at this juncture, 
with the view of preventing any other improper declarations, and 
quitted the room with his very best bow.



Chapter 11


There was great news that night for the regular Maypole customers, 
to each of whom, as he straggled in to occupy his allotted seat in 
the chimney-corner, John, with a most impressive slowness of 
delivery, and in an apoplectic whisper, communicated the fact that 
Mr Chester was alone in the large room upstairs, and was waiting 
the arrival of Mr Geoffrey Haredale, to whom he had sent a letter 
(doubtless of a threatening nature) by the hands of Barnaby, then 
and there present.

For a little knot of smokers and solemn gossips, who had seldom any 
new topics of discussion, this was a perfect Godsend.  Here was a 
good, dark-looking mystery progressing under that very roof--
brought home to the fireside, as it were, and enjoyable without the 
smallest pains or trouble.  It is extraordinary what a zest and 
relish it gave to the drink, and how it heightened the flavour of 
the tobacco.  Every man smoked his pipe with a face of grave and 
serious delight, and looked at his neighbour with a sort of quiet 
congratulation.  Nay, it was felt to be such a holiday and special 
night, that, on the motion of little Solomon Daisy, every man 
(including John himself) put down his sixpence for a can of flip, 
which grateful beverage was brewed with all despatch, and set down 
in the midst of them on the brick floor; both that it might simmer 
and stew before the fire, and that its fragrant steam, rising up 
among them, and mixing with the wreaths of vapour from their pipes, 
might shroud them in a delicious atmosphere of their own, and shut 
out all the world.  The very furniture of the room seemed to 
mellow and deepen in its tone; the ceiling and walls looked 
blacker and more highly polished, the curtains of a ruddier red; 
the fire burnt clear and high, and the crickets in the hearthstone 
chirped with a more than wonted satisfaction.

There were present two, however, who showed but little interest in 
the general contentment.  Of these, one was Barnaby himself, who 
slept, or, to avoid being beset with questions, feigned to sleep, 
in the chimney-corner; the other, Hugh, who, sleeping too, lay 
stretched upon the bench on the opposite side, in the full glare of 
the blazing fire.

The light that fell upon this slumbering form, showed it in all its 
muscular and handsome proportions.  It was that of a young man, of 
a hale athletic figure, and a giant's strength, whose sunburnt face 
and swarthy throat, overgrown with jet black hair, might have 
served a painter for a model.  Loosely attired, in the coarsest and 
roughest garb, with scraps of straw and hay--his usual bed--
clinging here and there, and mingling with his uncombed locks, he 
had fallen asleep in a posture as careless as his dress.  The 
negligence and disorder of the whole man, with something fierce and 
sullen in his features, gave him a picturesque appearance, that 
attracted the regards even of the Maypole customers who knew him 
well, and caused Long Parkes to say that Hugh looked more like a 
poaching rascal to-night than ever he had seen him yet.

'He's waiting here, I suppose,' said Solomon, 'to take Mr 
Haredale's horse.'

'That's it, sir,' replied John Willet.  'He's not often in the 
house, you know.  He's more at his ease among horses than men.  I 
look upon him as a animal himself.'

Following up this opinion with a shrug that seemed meant to say, 
'we can't expect everybody to be like us,' John put his pipe into 
his mouth again, and smoked like one who felt his superiority over 
the general run of mankind.

'That chap, sir,' said John, taking it out again after a time, and 
pointing at him with the stem, 'though he's got all his faculties 
about him--bottled up and corked down, if I may say so, somewheres 
or another--'

'Very good!' said Parkes, nodding his head.  'A very good 
expression, Johnny.  You'll be a tackling somebody presently.  
You're in twig to-night, I see.'

'Take care,' said Mr Willet, not at all grateful for the 
compliment, 'that I don't tackle you, sir, which I shall certainly 
endeavour to do, if you interrupt me when I'm making observations.--
That chap, I was a saying, though he has all his faculties about 
him, somewheres or another, bottled up and corked down, has no more 
imagination than Barnaby has.  And why hasn't he?'

The three friends shook their heads at each other; saying by that 
action, without the trouble of opening their lips, 'Do you observe 
what a philosophical mind our friend has?'

'Why hasn't he?' said John, gently striking the table with his open 
hand.  'Because they was never drawed out of him when he was a 
boy.  That's why.  What would any of us have been, if our fathers 
hadn't drawed our faculties out of us?  What would my boy Joe have 
been, if I hadn't drawed his faculties out of him?--Do you mind 
what I'm a saying of, gentlemen?'

'Ah!  we mind you,' cried Parkes.  'Go on improving of us, Johnny.'

'Consequently, then,' said Mr Willet, 'that chap, whose mother was 
hung when he was a little boy, along with six others, for passing 
bad notes--and it's a blessed thing to think how many people are 
hung in batches every six weeks for that, and such like offences, 
as showing how wide awake our government is--that chap that was 
then turned loose, and had to mind cows, and frighten birds away, 
and what not, for a few pence to live on, and so got on by degrees 
to mind horses, and to sleep in course of time in lofts and litter, 
instead of under haystacks and hedges, till at last he come to be 
hostler at the Maypole for his board and lodging and a annual 
trifle--that chap that can't read nor write, and has never had much 
to do with anything but animals, and has never lived in any way but 
like the animals he has lived among, IS a animal.  And,' said Mr 
Willet, arriving at his logical conclusion, 'is to be treated 
accordingly.'

'Willet,' said Solomon Daisy, who had exhibited some impatience at 
the intrusion of so unworthy a subject on their more interesting 
theme, 'when Mr Chester come this morning, did he order the large 
room?'

'He signified, sir,' said John, 'that he wanted a large apartment.  
Yes.  Certainly.'

'Why then, I'll tell you what,' said Solomon, speaking softly and 
with an earnest look.  'He and Mr Haredale are going to fight a 
duel in it.'

Everybody looked at Mr Willet, after this alarming suggestion.  Mr 
Willet looked at the fire, weighing in his own mind the effect 
which such an occurrence would be likely to have on the establishment.

'Well,' said John, 'I don't know--I am sure--I remember that when I 
went up last, he HAD put the lights upon the mantel-shelf.'

'It's as plain,' returned Solomon, 'as the nose on Parkes's face'--
Mr Parkes, who had a large nose, rubbed it, and looked as if he 
considered this a personal allusion--'they'll fight in that room.  
You know by the newspapers what a common thing it is for gentlemen 
to fight in coffee-houses without seconds.  One of 'em will be 
wounded or perhaps killed in this house.'

'That was a challenge that Barnaby took then, eh?' said John.

'--Inclosing a slip of paper with the measure of his sword upon it, 
I'll bet a guinea,' answered the little man.  'We know what sort of 
gentleman Mr Haredale is.  You have told us what Barnaby said about 
his looks, when he came back.  Depend upon it, I'm right.  Now, 
mind.'

The flip had had no flavour till now.  The tobacco had been of mere 
English growth, compared with its present taste.  A duel in that 
great old rambling room upstairs, and the best bed ordered already 
for the wounded man!

'Would it be swords or pistols, now?' said John.

'Heaven knows.  Perhaps both,' returned Solomon.  'The gentlemen 
wear swords, and may easily have pistols in their pockets--most 
likely have, indeed.  If they fire at each other without effect, 
then they'll draw, and go to work in earnest.'

A shade passed over Mr Willet's face as he thought of broken 
windows and disabled furniture, but bethinking himself that one of 
the parties would probably be left alive to pay the damage, he 
brightened up again.

'And then,' said Solomon, looking from face to face, 'then we shall 
have one of those stains upon the floor that never come out.  If Mr 
Haredale wins, depend upon it, it'll be a deep one; or if he loses, 
it will perhaps be deeper still, for he'll never give in unless 
he's beaten down.  We know him better, eh?'

'Better indeed!' they whispered all together.

'As to its ever being got out again,' said Solomon, 'I tell you it 
never will, or can be.  Why, do you know that it has been tried, at 
a certain house we are acquainted with?'

'The Warren!' cried John.  'No, sure!'

'Yes, sure--yes.  It's only known by very few.  It has been 
whispered about though, for all that.  They planed the board away, 
but there it was.  They went deep, but it went deeper.  They put 
new boards down, but there was one great spot that came through 
still, and showed itself in the old place.  And--harkye--draw 
nearer--Mr Geoffrey made that room his study, and sits there, 
always, with his foot (as I have heard) upon it; and he believes, 
through thinking of it long and very much, that it will never fade 
until he finds the man who did the deed.'

As this recital ended, and they all drew closer round the fire, the 
tramp of a horse was heard without.

'The very man!' cried John, starting up.  'Hugh!  Hugh!'

The sleeper staggered to his feet, and hurried after him.  John 
quickly returned, ushering in with great attention and deference 
(for Mr Haredale was his landlord) the long-expected visitor, who 
strode into the room clanking his heavy boots upon the floor; and 
looking keenly round upon the bowing group, raised his hat in 
acknowledgment of their profound respect.

'You have a stranger here, Willet, who sent to me,' he said, in a 
voice which sounded naturally stern and deep.  'Where is he?'

'In the great room upstairs, sir,' answered John.

'Show the way.  Your staircase is dark, I know.  Gentlemen, good 
night.'

With that, he signed to the landlord to go on before; and went 
clanking out, and up the stairs; old John, in his agitation, 
ingeniously lighting everything but the way, and making a stumble 
at every second step.

'Stop!' he said, when they reached the landing.  'I can announce 
myself.  Don't wait.'

He laid his hand upon the door, entered, and shut it heavily.  Mr 
Willet was by no means disposed to stand there listening by 
himself, especially as the walls were very thick; so descended, 
with much greater alacrity than he had come up, and joined his 
friends below.



Chapter 12


There was a brief pause in the state-room of the Maypole, as Mr 
Haredale tried the lock to satisfy himself that he had shut the 
door securely, and, striding up the dark chamber to where the 
screen inclosed a little patch of light and warmth, presented 
himself, abruptly and in silence, before the smiling guest.

If the two had no greater sympathy in their inward thoughts than in 
their outward bearing and appearance, the meeting did not seem 
likely to prove a very calm or pleasant one.  With no great 
disparity between them in point of years, they were, in every other 
respect, as unlike and far removed from each other as two men could 
well be.  The one was soft-spoken, delicately made, precise, and 
elegant; the other, a burly square-built man, negligently dressed, 
rough and abrupt in manner, stern, and, in his present mood, 
forbidding both in look and speech.  The one preserved a calm and 
placid smile; the other, a distrustful frown.  The new-comer, 
indeed, appeared bent on showing by his every tone and gesture his 
determined opposition and hostility to the man he had come to meet.  
The guest who received him, on the other hand, seemed to feel that 
the contrast between them was all in his favour, and to derive a 
quiet exultation from it which put him more at his ease than ever.

'Haredale,' said this gentleman, without the least appearance of 
embarrassment or reserve, 'I am very glad to see you.'

'Let us dispense with compliments.  They are misplaced between us,' 
returned the other, waving his hand, 'and say plainly what we have 
to say.  You have asked me to meet you.  I am here.  Why do we 
stand face to face again?'

'Still the same frank and sturdy character, I see!'

'Good or bad, sir, I am,' returned the other, leaning his arm upon 
the chimney-piece, and turning a haughty look upon the occupant of 
the easy-chair, 'the man I used to be.  I have lost no old likings 
or dislikings; my memory has not failed me by a hair's-breadth.  
You ask me to give you a meeting.  I say, I am here.'

'Our meeting, Haredale,' said Mr Chester, tapping his snuff-box, 
and following with a smile the impatient gesture he had made--
perhaps unconsciously--towards his sword, 'is one of conference and 
peace, I hope?'

'I have come here,' returned the other, 'at your desire, holding 
myself bound to meet you, when and where you would.  I have not 
come to bandy pleasant speeches, or hollow professions.  You are a 
smooth man of the world, sir, and at such play have me at a 
disadvantage.  The very last man on this earth with whom I would 
enter the lists to combat with gentle compliments and masked faces, 
is Mr Chester, I do assure you.  I am not his match at such 
weapons, and have reason to believe that few men are.'

'You do me a great deal of honour Haredale,' returned the other, 
most composedly, 'and I thank you.  I will be frank with you--'

'I beg your pardon--will be what?'

'Frank--open--perfectly candid.'

'Hab!' cried Mr Haredale, drawing his breath.  'But don't let me 
interrupt you.'

'So resolved am I to hold this course,' returned the other, tasting 
his wine with great deliberation; 'that I have determined not to 
quarrel with you, and not to be betrayed into a warm expression or 
a hasty word.'

'There again,' said Mr Haredale, 'you have me at a great advantage.  
Your self-command--'

'Is not to be disturbed, when it will serve my purpose, you would 
say'--rejoined the other, interrupting him with the same 
complacency.  'Granted.  I allow it.  And I have a purpose to serve 
now.  So have you.  I am sure our object is the same.  Let us 
attain it like sensible men, who have ceased to be boys some time.--
Do you drink?'

'With my friends,' returned the other.

'At least,' said Mr Chester, 'you will be seated?'

'I will stand,' returned Mr Haredale impatiently, 'on this 
dismantled, beggared hearth, and not pollute it, fallen as it is, 
with mockeries.  Go on.'

'You are wrong, Haredale,' said the other, crossing his legs, and 
smiling as he held his glass up in the bright glow of the fire.  
'You are really very wrong.  The world is a lively place enough, in 
which we must accommodate ourselves to circumstances, sail with the 
stream as glibly as we can, be content to take froth for substance, 
the surface for the depth, the counterfeit for the real coin.  I 
wonder no philosopher has ever established that our globe itself is 
hollow.  It should be, if Nature is consistent in her works.'

'YOU think it is, perhaps?'

'I should say,' he returned, sipping his wine, 'there could be no 
doubt about it.  Well; we, in trifling with this jingling toy, have 
had the ill-luck to jostle and fall out.  We are not what the world 
calls friends; but we are as good and true and loving friends for 
all that, as nine out of every ten of those on whom it bestows the 
title.  You have a niece, and I a son--a fine lad, Haredale, but 
foolish.  They fall in love with each other, and form what this 
same world calls an attachment; meaning a something fanciful and 
false like the rest, which, if it took its own free time, would 
break like any other bubble.  But it may not have its own free 
time--will not, if they are left alone--and the question is, shall 
we two, because society calls us enemies, stand aloof, and let them 
rush into each other's arms, when, by approaching each other 
sensibly, as we do now, we can prevent it, and part them?'

'I love my niece,' said Mr Haredale, after a short silence.  'It 
may sound strangely in your ears; but I love her.'

'Strangely, my good fellow!' cried Mr Chester, lazily filling his 
glass again, and pulling out his toothpick.  'Not at all.  I like 
Ned too--or, as you say, love him--that's the word among such near 
relations.  I'm very fond of Ned.  He's an amazingly good fellow, 
and a handsome fellow--foolish and weak as yet; that's all.  But 
the thing is, Haredale--for I'll be very frank, as I told you I 
would at first--independently of any dislike that you and I might 
have to being related to each other, and independently of the 
religious differences between us--and damn it, that's important--I 
couldn't afford a match of this description.  Ned and I couldn't do 
it.  It's impossible.'

'Curb your tongue, in God's name, if this conversation is to last,' 
retorted Mr Haredale fiercely.  'I have said I love my niece.  Do 
you think that, loving her, I would have her fling her heart away 
on any man who had your blood in his veins?'

'You see,' said the other, not at all disturbed, 'the advantage of 
being so frank and open.  Just what I was about to add, upon my 
honour!  I am amazingly attached to Ned--quite doat upon him, 
indeed--and even if we could afford to throw ourselves away, that 
very objection would be quite insuperable.--I wish you'd take some 
wine?'

'Mark me,' said Mr Haredale, striding to the table, and laying his 
hand upon it heavily.  'If any man believes--presumes to think--
that I, in word or deed, or in the wildest dream, ever entertained 
remotely the idea of Emma Haredale's favouring the suit of any one 
who was akin to you--in any way--I care not what--he lies.  He 
lies, and does me grievous wrong, in the mere thought.'

'Haredale,' returned the other, rocking himself to and fro as in 
assent, and nodding at the fire, 'it's extremely manly, and really 
very generous in you, to meet me in this unreserved and handsome 
way.  Upon my word, those are exactly my sentiments, only 
expressed with much more force and power than I could use--you know 
my sluggish nature, and will forgive me, I am sure.'

'While I would restrain her from all correspondence with your son, 
and sever their intercourse here, though it should cause her 
death,' said Mr Haredale, who had been pacing to and fro, 'I would 
do it kindly and tenderly if I can.  I have a trust to discharge, 
which my nature is not formed to understand, and, for this reason, 
the bare fact of there being any love between them comes upon me 
to-night, almost for the first time.'

'I am more delighted than I can possibly tell you,' rejoined Mr 
Chester with the utmost blandness, 'to find my own impression so 
confirmed.  You see the advantage of our having met.  We understand 
each other.  We quite agree.  We have a most complete and thorough 
explanation, and we know what course to take.--Why don't you taste 
your tenant's wine?  It's really very good.'

'Pray who,' said Mr Haredale, 'have aided Emma, or your son?  Who 
are their go-betweens, and agents--do you know?'

'All the good people hereabouts--the neighbourhood in general, I 
think,' returned the other, with his most affable smile.  'The 
messenger I sent to you to-day, foremost among them all.'

'The idiot?  Barnaby?'

'You are surprised?  I am glad of that, for I was rather so myself.  
Yes.  I wrung that from his mother--a very decent sort of woman--
from whom, indeed, I chiefly learnt how serious the matter had 
become, and so determined to ride out here to-day, and hold a 
parley with you on this neutral ground.--You're stouter than you 
used to be, Haredale, but you look extremely well.'

'Our business, I presume, is nearly at an end,' said Mr Haredale, 
with an expression of impatience he was at no pains to conceal.  
'Trust me, Mr Chester, my niece shall change from this time.  I 
will appeal,' he added in a lower tone, 'to her woman's heart, her 
dignity, her pride, her duty--'

'I shall do the same by Ned,' said Mr Chester, restoring some 
errant faggots to their places in the grate with the toe of his 
boot.  'If there is anything real in this world, it is those 
amazingly fine feelings and those natural obligations which must 
subsist between father and son.  I shall put it to him on every 
ground of moral and religious feeling.  I shall represent to him 
that we cannot possibly afford it--that I have always looked 
forward to his marrying well, for a genteel provision for myself in 
the autumn of life--that there are a great many clamorous dogs to 
pay, whose claims are perfectly just and right, and who must be 
paid out of his wife's fortune.  In short, that the very highest 
and most honourable feelings of our nature, with every 
consideration of filial duty and affection, and all that sort of 
thing, imperatively demand that he should run away with an 
heiress.'

'And break her heart as speedily as possible?' said Mr Haredale, 
drawing on his glove.

'There Ned will act exactly as he pleases,' returned the other, 
sipping his wine; 'that's entirely his affair.  I wouldn't for the 
world interfere with my son, Haredale, beyond a certain point.  The 
relationship between father and son, you know, is positively quite 
a holy kind of bond.--WON'T you let me persuade you to take one 
glass of wine?  Well! as you please, as you please,' he added, 
helping himself again.

'Chester,' said Mr Haredale, after a short silence, during which he 
had eyed his smiling face from time to time intently, 'you have the 
head and heart of an evil spirit in all matters of deception.'

'Your health!' said the other, with a nod.  'But I have interrupted 
you--'

'If now,' pursued Mr Haredale, 'we should find it difficult to 
separate these young people, and break off their intercourse--if, 
for instance, you find it difficult on your side, what course do 
you intend to take?'

'Nothing plainer, my good fellow, nothing easier,' returned the 
other, shrugging his shoulders and stretching himself more 
comfortably before the fire.  'I shall then exert those powers on 
which you flatter me so highly--though, upon my word, I don't 
deserve your compliments to their full extent--and resort to a few 
little trivial subterfuges for rousing jealousy and resentment.  
You see?'

'In short, justifying the means by the end, we are, as a last 
resource for tearing them asunder, to resort to treachery and--and 
lying,' said Mr Haredale.

'Oh dear no.  Fie, fie!' returned the other, relishing a pinch of 
snuff extremely.  'Not lying.  Only a little management, a little 
diplomacy, a little--intriguing, that's the word.'

'I wish,' said Mr Haredale, moving to and fro, and stopping, and 
moving on again, like one who was ill at ease, 'that this could 
have been foreseen or prevented.  But as it has gone so far, and it 
is necessary for us to act, it is of no use shrinking or 
regretting.  Well! I shall second your endeavours to the utmost of 
my power.  There is one topic in the whole wide range of human 
thoughts on which we both agree.  We shall act in concert, but 
apart.  There will be no need, I hope, for us to meet again.'

'Are you going?' said Mr Chester, rising with a graceful indolence.  
'Let me light you down the stairs.'

'Pray keep your seat,' returned the other drily, 'I know the way.  
So, waving his hand slightly, and putting on his hat as he turned 
upon his heel, he went clanking out as he had come, shut the door 
behind him, and tramped down the echoing stairs.

'Pah!  A very coarse animal, indeed!' said Mr Chester, composing 
himself in the easy-chair again.  'A rough brute.  Quite a human 
badger!'

John Willet and his friends, who had been listening intently for 
the clash of swords, or firing of pistols in the great room, and 
had indeed settled the order in which they should rush in when 
summoned--in which procession old John had carefully arranged that 
he should bring up the rear--were very much astonished to see Mr 
Haredale come down without a scratch, call for his horse, and ride 
away thoughtfully at a footpace.  After some consideration, it was 
decided that he had left the gentleman above, for dead, and had 
adopted this stratagem to divert suspicion or pursuit.

As this conclusion involved the necessity of their going upstairs 
forthwith, they were about to ascend in the order they had agreed 
upon, when a smart ringing at the guest's bell, as if he had pulled 
it vigorously, overthrew all their speculations, and involved them 
in great uncertainty and doubt.  At length Mr Willet agreed to go 
upstairs himself, escorted by Hugh and Barnaby, as the strongest 
and stoutest fellows on the premises, who were to make their 
appearance under pretence of clearing away the glasses.

Under this protection, the brave and broad-faced John boldly 
entered the room, half a foot in advance, and received an order for 
a boot-jack without trembling.  But when it was brought, and he 
leant his sturdy shoulder to the guest, Mr Willet was observed to 
look very hard into his boots as he pulled them off, and, by 
opening his eyes much wider than usual, to appear to express some 
surprise and disappointment at not finding them full of blood.  He 
took occasion, too, to examine the gentleman as closely as he 
could, expecting to discover sundry loopholes in his person, 
pierced by his adversary's sword.  Finding none, however, and 
observing in course of time that his guest was as cool and 
unruffled, both in his dress and temper, as he had been all day, 
old John at last heaved a deep sigh, and began to think no duel had 
been fought that night.

'And now, Willet,' said Mr Chester, 'if the room's well aired, I'll 
try the merits of that famous bed.'

'The room, sir,' returned John, taking up a candle, and nudging 
Barnaby and Hugh to accompany them, in case the gentleman should 
unexpectedly drop down faint or dead from some internal wound, 'the 
room's as warm as any toast in a tankard.  Barnaby, take you that 
other candle, and go on before.  Hugh!  Follow up, sir, with the 
easy-chair.'

In this order--and still, in his earnest inspection, holding his 
candle very close to the guest; now making him feel extremely warm 
about the legs, now threatening to set his wig on fire, and 
constantly begging his pardon with great awkwardness and 
embarrassment--John led the party to the best bedroom, which was 
nearly as large as the chamber from which they had come, and held, 
drawn out near the fire for warmth, a great old spectral bedstead, 
hung with faded brocade, and ornamented, at the top of each carved 
post, with a plume of feathers that had once been white, but with 
dust and age had now grown hearse-like and funereal.

'Good night, my friends,' said Mr Chester with a sweet smile, 
seating himself, when he had surveyed the room from end to end, in 
the easy-chair which his attendants wheeled before the fire.  'Good 
night!  Barnaby, my good fellow, you say some prayers before you go 
to bed, I hope?'

Barnaby nodded.  'He has some nonsense that he calls his prayers, 
sir,' returned old John, officiously.  'I'm afraid there an't much 
good in em.'

'And Hugh?' said Mr Chester, turning to him.

'Not I,' he answered.  'I know his'--pointing to Barnaby--'they're 
well enough.  He sings 'em sometimes in the straw.  I listen.'

'He's quite a animal, sir,' John whispered in his ear with dignity.  
'You'll excuse him, I'm sure.  If he has any soul at all, sir, it 
must be such a very small one, that it don't signify what he does 
or doesn't in that way.  Good night, sir!'

The guest rejoined 'God bless you!' with a fervour that was quite 
affecting; and John, beckoning his guards to go before, bowed 
himself out of the room, and left him to his rest in the Maypole's 
ancient bed.



Chapter 13


If Joseph Willet, the denounced and proscribed of 'prentices, had 
happened to be at home when his father's courtly guest presented 
himself before the Maypole door--that is, if it had not perversely 
chanced to be one of the half-dozen days in the whole year on which 
he was at liberty to absent himself for as many hours without 
question or reproach--he would have contrived, by hook or crook, to 
dive to the very bottom of Mr Chester's mystery, and to come at his 
purpose with as much certainty as though he had been his 
confidential adviser.  In that fortunate case, the lovers would 
have had quick warning of the ills that threatened them, and the 
aid of various timely and wise suggestions to boot; for all Joe's 
readiness of thought and action, and all his sympathies and good 
wishes, were enlisted in favour of the young people, and were 
staunch in devotion to their cause.  Whether this disposition arose 
out of his old prepossessions in favour of the young lady, whose 
history had surrounded her in his mind, almost from his cradle, 
with circumstances of unusual interest; or from his attachment 
towards the young gentleman, into whose confidence he had, through 
his shrewdness and alacrity, and the rendering of sundry important 
services as a spy and messenger, almost imperceptibly glided; 
whether they had their origin in either of these sources, or in the 
habit natural to youth, or in the constant badgering and worrying 
of his venerable parent, or in any hidden little love affair of his 
own which gave him something of a fellow-feeling in the matter, it 
is needless to inquire--especially as Joe was out of the way, and 
had no opportunity on that particular occasion of testifying to his 
sentiments either on one side or the other.

It was, in fact, the twenty-fifth of March, which, as most people 
know to their cost, is, and has been time out of mind, one of those 
unpleasant epochs termed quarter-days.  On this twenty-fifth of 
March, it was John Willet's pride annually to settle, in hard cash, 
his account with a certain vintner and distiller in the city of 
London; to give into whose hands a canvas bag containing its exact 
amount, and not a penny more or less, was the end and object of a 
journey for Joe, so surely as the year and day came round.

This journey was performed upon an old grey mare, concerning whom 
John had an indistinct set of ideas hovering about him, to the 
effect that she could win a plate or cup if she tried.  She never 
had tried, and probably never would now, being some fourteen or 
fifteen years of age, short in wind, long in body, and rather the 
worse for wear in respect of her mane and tail.  Notwithstanding 
these slight defects, John perfectly gloried in the animal; and 
when she was brought round to the door by Hugh, actually retired 
into the bar, and there, in a secret grove of lemons, laughed with 
pride.

'There's a bit of horseflesh, Hugh!' said John, when he had 
recovered enough self-command to appear at the door again.  
'There's a comely creature!  There's high mettle!  There's bone!'

There was bone enough beyond all doubt; and so Hugh seemed to 
think, as he sat sideways in the saddle, lazily doubled up with his 
chin nearly touching his knees; and heedless of the dangling 
stirrups and loose bridle-rein, sauntered up and down on the little 
green before the door.

'Mind you take good care of her, sir,' said John, appealing from 
this insensible person to his son and heir, who now appeared, fully 
equipped and ready.  'Don't you ride hard.'

'I should be puzzled to do that, I think, father,' Joe replied, 
casting a disconsolate look at the animal.

'None of your impudence, sir, if you please,' retorted old John.  
'What would you ride, sir?  A wild ass or zebra would be too tame 
for you, wouldn't he, eh sir?  You'd like to ride a roaring lion, 
wouldn't you, sir, eh sir?  Hold your tongue, sir.'  When Mr 
Willet, in his differences with his son, had exhausted all the 
questions that occurred to him, and Joe had said nothing at all in 
answer, he generally wound up by bidding him hold his tongue.

'And what does the boy mean,' added Mr Willet, after he had stared 
at him for a little time, in a species of stupefaction, 'by cocking 
his hat, to such an extent!  Are you going to kill the wintner, sir?'

'No,' said Joe, tartly; 'I'm not.  Now your mind's at ease, 
father.'

'With a milintary air, too!' said Mr Willet, surveying him from top 
to toe; 'with a swaggering, fire-eating, biling-water drinking 
sort of way with him!  And what do you mean by pulling up the 
crocuses and snowdrops, eh sir?'

'It's only a little nosegay,' said Joe, reddening.  'There's no 
harm in that, I hope?'

'You're a boy of business, you are, sir!' said Mr Willet, 
disdainfully, 'to go supposing that wintners care for nosegays.'

'I don't suppose anything of the kind,' returned Joe.  'Let them 
keep their red noses for bottles and tankards.  These are going to 
Mr Varden's house.'

'And do you suppose HE minds such things as crocuses?' demanded 
John.

'I don't know, and to say the truth, I don't care,' said Joe.  
'Come, father, give me the money, and in the name of patience let 
me go.'

'There it is, sir,' replied John; 'and take care of it; and mind 
you don't make too much haste back, but give the mare a long rest.--
Do you mind?'

'Ay, I mind,' returned Joe.  'She'll need it, Heaven knows.'

'And don't you score up too much at the Black Lion,' said John.  
'Mind that too.'

'Then why don't you let me have some money of my own?' retorted 
Joe, sorrowfully; 'why don't you, father?  What do you send me into 
London for, giving me only the right to call for my dinner at the 
Black Lion, which you're to pay for next time you go, as if I was 
not to be trusted with a few shillings?  Why do you use me like 
this?  It's not right of you.  You can't expect me to be quiet 
under it.'

'Let him have money!' cried John, in a drowsy reverie.  'What does 
he call money--guineas?  Hasn't he got money?  Over and above the 
tolls, hasn't he one and sixpence?'

'One and sixpence!' repeated his son contemptuously.

'Yes, sir,' returned John, 'one and sixpence.  When I was your age, 
I had never seen so much money, in a heap.  A shilling of it is in 
case of accidents--the mare casting a shoe, or the like of that.  
The other sixpence is to spend in the diversions of London; and the 
diversion I recommend is going to the top of the Monument, and 
sitting there.  There's no temptation there, sir--no drink--no 
young women--no bad characters of any sort--nothing but imagination.  
That's the way I enjoyed myself when I was your age, sir.'

To this, Joe made no answer, but beckoning Hugh, leaped into the 
saddle and rode away; and a very stalwart, manly horseman he 
looked, deserving a better charger than it was his fortune to 
bestride.  John stood staring after him, or rather after the grey 
mare (for he had no eyes for her rider), until man and beast had 
been out of sight some twenty minutes, when he began to think they 
were gone, and slowly re-entering the house, fell into a gentle doze.

The unfortunate grey mare, who was the agony of Joe's life, 
floundered along at her own will and pleasure until the Maypole was 
no longer visible, and then, contracting her legs into what in a 
puppet would have been looked upon as a clumsy and awkward 
imitation of a canter, mended her pace all at once, and did it of 
her own accord.  The acquaintance with her rider's usual mode of 
proceeding, which suggested this improvement in hers, impelled her 
likewise to turn up a bye-way, leading--not to London, but through 
lanes running parallel with the road they had come, and passing 
within a few hundred yards of the Maypole, which led finally to an 
inclosure surrounding a large, old, red-brick mansion--the same of 
which mention was made as the Warren in the first chapter of this 
history.  Coming to a dead stop in a little copse thereabout, she 
suffered her rider to dismount with right goodwill, and to tie her 
to the trunk of a tree.

'Stay there, old girl,' said Joe, 'and let us see whether there's 
any little commission for me to-day.'  So saying, he left her to 
browze upon such stunted grass and weeds as happened to grow within 
the length of her tether, and passing through a wicket gate, 
entered the grounds on foot.

The pathway, after a very few minutes' walking, brought him close 
to the house, towards which, and especially towards one particular 
window, he directed many covert glances.  It was a dreary, silent 
building, with echoing courtyards, desolated turret-chambers, and 
whole suites of rooms shut up and mouldering to ruin.

The terrace-garden, dark with the shade of overhanging trees, had 
an air of melancholy that was quite oppressive.  Great iron gates, 
disused for many years, and red with rust, drooping on their hinges 
and overgrown with long rank grass, seemed as though they tried to 
sink into the ground, and hide their fallen state among the 
friendly weeds.  The fantastic monsters on the walls, green with 
age and damp, and covered here and there with moss, looked grim and 
desolate.  There was a sombre aspect even on that part of the 
mansion which was inhabited and kept in good repair, that struck 
the beholder with a sense of sadness; of something forlorn and 
failing, whence cheerfulness was banished.  It would have been 
difficult to imagine a bright fire blazing in the dull and darkened 
rooms, or to picture any gaiety of heart or revelry that the 
frowning walls shut in.  It seemed a place where such things had 
been, but could be no more--the very ghost of a house, haunting the 
old spot in its old outward form, and that was all.

Much of this decayed and sombre look was attributable, no doubt, to 
the death of its former master, and the temper of its present 
occupant; but remembering the tale connected with the mansion, it 
seemed the very place for such a deed, and one that might have been 
its predestined theatre years upon years ago.  Viewed with 
reference to this legend, the sheet of water where the steward's 
body had been found appeared to wear a black and sullen character, 
such as no other pool might own; the bell upon the roof that had 
told the tale of murder to the midnight wind, became a very phantom 
whose voice would raise the listener's hair on end; and every 
leafless bough that nodded to another, had its stealthy whispering 
of the crime.

Joe paced up and down the path, sometimes stopping in affected 
contemplation of the building or the prospect, sometimes leaning 
against a tree with an assumed air of idleness and indifference, 
but always keeping an eye upon the window he had singled out at 
first.  After some quarter of an hour's delay, a small white hand 
was waved to him for an instant from this casement, and the young 
man, with a respectful bow, departed; saying under his breath as he 
crossed his horse again, 'No errand for me to-day!'

But the air of smartness, the cock of the hat to which John Willet 
had objected, and the spring nosegay, all betokened some little 
errand of his own, having a more interesting object than a vintner 
or even a locksmith.  So, indeed, it turned out; for when he had 
settled with the vintner--whose place of business was down in some 
deep cellars hard by Thames Street, and who was as purple-faced an 
old gentleman as if he had all his life supported their arched roof 
on his head--when he had settled the account, and taken the 
receipt, and declined tasting more than three glasses of old 
sherry, to the unbounded astonishment of the purple-faced vintner, 
who, gimlet in hand, had projected an attack upon at least a score 
of dusty casks, and who stood transfixed, or morally gimleted as it 
were, to his own wall--when he had done all this, and disposed 
besides of a frugal dinner at the Black Lion in Whitechapel; 
spurning the Monument and John's advice, he turned his steps 
towards the locksmith's house, attracted by the eyes of blooming 
Dolly Varden.

Joe was by no means a sheepish fellow, but, for all that, when he 
got to the corner of the street in which the locksmith lived, he 
could by no means make up his mind to walk straight to the house.  
First, he resolved to stroll up another street for five minutes, 
then up another street for five minutes more, and so on until he 
had lost full half an hour, when he made a bold plunge and found 
himself with a red face and a beating heart in the smoky workshop.

'Joe Willet, or his ghost?' said Varden, rising from the desk at 
which he was busy with his books, and looking at him under his 
spectacles.  'Which is it?  Joe in the flesh, eh?  That's hearty.  
And how are all the Chigwell company, Joe?'

'Much as usual, sir--they and I agree as well as ever.'

'Well, well!' said the locksmith.  'We must be patient, Joe, and 
bear with old folks' foibles.  How's the mare, Joe?  Does she do 
the four miles an hour as easily as ever?  Ha, ha, ha! Does she, 
Joe?  Eh!--What have we there, Joe--a nosegay!'

'A very poor one, sir--I thought Miss Dolly--'

'No, no,' said Gabriel, dropping his voice, and shaking his head, 
'not Dolly.  Give 'em to her mother, Joe.  A great deal better give 
'em to her mother.  Would you mind giving 'em to Mrs Varden, Joe?'

'Oh no, sir,' Joe replied, and endeavouring, but not with the 
greatest possible success, to hide his disappointment.  'I shall be 
very glad, I'm sure.'

'That's right,' said the locksmith, patting him on the back.  'It 
don't matter who has 'em, Joe?'

'Not a bit, sir.'--Dear heart, how the words stuck in his throat!

'Come in,' said Gabriel.  'I have just been called to tea.  She's 
in the parlour.'

'She,' thought Joe.  'Which of 'em I wonder--Mrs or Miss?'  The 
locksmith settled the doubt as neatly as if it had been expressed 
aloud, by leading him to the door, and saying, 'Martha, my dear, 
here's young Mr Willet.'

Now, Mrs Varden, regarding the Maypole as a sort of human mantrap, 
or decoy for husbands; viewing its proprietor, and all who aided 
and abetted him, in the light of so many poachers among Christian 
men; and believing, moreover, that the publicans coupled with 
sinners in Holy Writ were veritable licensed victuallers; was far 
from being favourably disposed towards her visitor.  Wherefore she 
was taken faint directly; and being duly presented with the 
crocuses and snowdrops, divined on further consideration that they 
were the occasion of the languor which had seized upon her spirits.  
'I'm afraid I couldn't bear the room another minute,' said the good 
lady, 'if they remained here.  WOULD you excuse my putting them out 
of window?'

Joe begged she wouldn't mention it on any account, and smiled 
feebly as he saw them deposited on the sill outside.  If anybody 
could have known the pains he had taken to make up that despised 
and misused bunch of flowers!--

'I feel it quite a relief to get rid of them, I assure you,' said 
Mrs Varden.  'I'm better already.'  And indeed she did appear to 
have plucked up her spirits.

Joe expressed his gratitude to Providence for this favourable 
dispensation, and tried to look as if he didn't wonder where 
Dolly was.

'You're sad people at Chigwell, Mr Joseph,' said Mrs V.

'I hope not, ma'am,' returned Joe.

'You're the cruellest and most inconsiderate people in the world,' 
said Mrs Varden, bridling.  'I wonder old Mr Willet, having been a 
married man himself, doesn't know better than to conduct himself as 
he does.  His doing it for profit is no excuse.  I would rather 
pay the money twenty times over, and have Varden come home like a 
respectable and sober tradesman.  If there is one character,' said 
Mrs Varden with great emphasis, 'that offends and disgusts me more 
than another, it is a sot.'

'Come, Martha, my dear,' said the locksmith cheerily, 'let us have 
tea, and don't let us talk about sots.  There are none here, and 
Joe don't want to hear about them, I dare say.'

At this crisis, Miggs appeared with toast.

'I dare say he does not,' said Mrs Varden; 'and I dare say you do 
not, Varden.  It's a very unpleasant subiect, I have no doubt, 
though I won't say it's personal'--Miggs coughed--'whatever I may 
be forced to think'--Miggs sneezed expressively.  'You never will 
know, Varden, and nobody at young Mr Willet's age--you'll excuse 
me, sir--can be expected to know, what a woman suffers when she is 
waiting at home under such circumstances.  If you don't believe me, 
as I know you don't, here's Miggs, who is only too often a witness 
of it--ask her.'

'Oh! she were very bad the other night, sir, indeed she were, said 
Miggs.  'If you hadn't the sweetness of an angel in you, mim, I 
don't think you could abear it, I raly don't.'

'Miggs,' said Mrs Varden, 'you're profane.'

'Begging your pardon, mim,' returned Miggs, with shrill rapidity, 
'such was not my intentions, and such I hope is not my character, 
though I am but a servant.'

'Answering me, Miggs, and providing yourself,' retorted her 
mistress, looking round with dignity, 'is one and the same thing.  
How dare you speak of angels in connection with your sinful 
fellow-beings--mere'--said Mrs Varden, glancing at herself in a 
neighbouring mirror, and arranging the ribbon of her cap in a more 
becoming fashion--'mere worms and grovellers as we are!'

'I did not intend, mim, if you please, to give offence,' said 
Miggs, confident in the strength of her compliment, and developing 
strongly in the throat as usual, 'and I did not expect it would be 
took as such.  I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate 
and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable 
Christian should.'

'You'll have the goodness, if you please,' said Mrs Varden, 
loftily, 'to step upstairs and see if Dolly has finished dressing, 
and to tell her that the chair that was ordered for her will be 
here in a minute, and that if she keeps it waiting, I shall send it 
away that instant.--I'm sorry to see that you don't take your tea, 
Varden, and that you don't take yours, Mr Joseph; though of course 
it would be foolish of me to expect that anything that can be had 
at home, and in the company of females, would please YOU.'

This pronoun was understood in the plural sense, and included both 
gentlemen, upon both of whom it was rather hard and undeserved, 
for Gabriel had applied himself to the meal with a very promising 
appetite, until it was spoilt by Mrs Varden herself, and Joe had as 
great a liking for the female society of the locksmith's house--or 
for a part of it at all events--as man could well entertain.

But he had no opportunity to say anything in his own defence, for 
at that moment Dolly herself appeared, and struck him quite dumb 
with her beauty.  Never had Dolly looked so handsome as she did 
then, in all the glow and grace of youth, with all her charms 
increased a hundredfold by a most becoming dress, by a thousand 
little coquettish ways which nobody could assume with a better 
grace, and all the sparkling expectation of that accursed party.  
It is impossible to tell how Joe hated that party wherever it was, 
and all the other people who were going to it, whoever they were.

And she hardly looked at him--no, hardly looked at him.  And when 
the chair was seen through the open door coming blundering into the 
workshop, she actually clapped her hands and seemed glad to go.  
But Joe gave her his arm--there was some comfort in that--and 
handed her into it.  To see her seat herself inside, with her 
laughing eyes brighter than diamonds, and her hand--surely she had 
the prettiest hand in the world--on the ledge of the open window, 
and her little finger provokingly and pertly tilted up, as if it 
wondered why Joe didn't squeeze or kiss it!  To think how well one 
or two of the modest snowdrops would have become that delicate 
bodice, and how they were lying neglected outside the parlour 
window!  To see how Miggs looked on with a face expressive of 
knowing how all this loveliness was got up, and of being in the 
secret of every string and pin and hook and eye, and of saying it 
ain't half as real as you think, and I could look quite as well 
myself if I took the pains!  To hear that provoking precious little 
scream when the chair was hoisted on its poles, and to catch that 
transient but not-to-be-forgotten vision of the happy face within--
what torments and aggravations, and yet what delights were these!  
The very chairmen seemed favoured rivals as they bore her down the 
street.

There never was such an alteration in a small room in a small time 
as in that parlour when they went back to finish tea.  So dark, so 
deserted, so perfectly disenchanted.  It seemed such sheer nonsense 
to be sitting tamely there, when she was at a dance with more 
lovers than man could calculate fluttering about her--with the 
whole party doting on and adoring her, and wanting to marry her.  
Miggs was hovering about too; and the fact of her existence, the 
mere circumstance of her ever having been born, appeared, after 
Dolly, such an unaccountable practical joke.  It was impossible to 
talk.  It couldn't be done.  He had nothing left for it but to stir 
his tea round, and round, and round, and ruminate on all the 
fascinations of the locksmith's lovely daughter.

Gabriel was dull too.  It was a part of the certain uncertainty of 
Mrs Varden's temper, that when they were in this condition, she 
should be gay and sprightly.

'I need have a cheerful disposition, I am sure,' said the smiling 
housewife, 'to preserve any spirits at all; and how I do it I can 
scarcely tell.'

'Ah, mim,' sighed Miggs, 'begging your pardon for the interruption, 
there an't a many like you.'

'Take away, Miggs,' said Mrs Varden, rising, 'take away, pray.  I 
know I'm a restraint here, and as I wish everybody to enjoy 
themselves as they best can, I feel I had better go.'

'No, no, Martha,' cried the locksmith.  'Stop here.  I'm sure we 
shall be very sorry to lose you, eh Joe!'  Joe started, and said 
'Certainly.'

'Thank you, Varden, my dear,' returned his wife; 'but I know your 
wishes better.  Tobacco and beer, or spirits, have much greater 
attractions than any I can boast of, and therefore I shall go and 
sit upstairs and look out of window, my love.  Good night, Mr 
Joseph.  I'm very glad to have seen you, and I only wish I could 
have provided something more suitable to your taste.  Remember me 
very kindly if you please to old Mr Willet, and tell him that 
whenever he comes here I have a crow to pluck with him.  Good 
night!'

Having uttered these words with great sweetness of manner, the good 
lady dropped a curtsey remarkable for its condescension, and 
serenely withdrew.

And it was for this Joe had looked forward to the twenty-fifth of 
March for weeks and weeks, and had gathered the flowers with so 
much care, and had cocked his hat, and made himself so smart!  This 
was the end of all his bold determination, resolved upon for the 
hundredth time, to speak out to Dolly and tell her how he loved 
her!  To see her for a minute--for but a minute--to find her going 
out to a party and glad to go; to be looked upon as a common pipe-
smoker, beer-bibber, spirit-guzzler, and tosspot!  He bade 
farewell to his friend the locksmith, and hastened to take horse at 
the Black Lion, thinking as he turned towards home, as many another 
Joe has thought before and since, that here was an end to all his 
hopes--that the thing was impossible and never could be--that she 
didn't care for him--that he was wretched for life--and that the 
only congenial prospect left him, was to go for a soldier or a 
sailor, and get some obliging enemy to knock his brains out as 
soon as possible.



Chapter 14


Joe Willet rode leisurely along in his desponding mood, picturing 
the locksmith's daughter going down long country-dances, and 
poussetting dreadfully with bold strangers--which was almost too 
much to bear--when he heard the tramp of a horse's feet behind him, 
and looking back, saw a well-mounted gentleman advancing at a 
smart canter.  As this rider passed, he checked his steed, and 
called him of the Maypole by his name.  Joe set spurs to the grey 
mare, and was at his side directly.

'I thought it was you, sir,' he said, touching his hat.  'A fair 
evening, sir.  Glad to see you out of doors again.'

The gentleman smiled and nodded.  'What gay doings have been going 
on to-day, Joe?  Is she as pretty as ever?  Nay, don't blush, man.'

'If I coloured at all, Mr Edward,' said Joe, 'which I didn't know I 
did, it was to think I should have been such a fool as ever to have 
any hope of her.  She's as far out of my reach as--as Heaven is.'

'Well, Joe, I hope that's not altogether beyond it,' said Edward, 
good-humouredly.  'Eh?'

'Ah!' sighed Joe.  'It's all very fine talking, sir.  Proverbs are 
easily made in cold blood.  But it can't be helped.  Are you bound 
for our house, sir?'

'Yes.  As I am not quite strong yet, I shall stay there to-night, 
and ride home coolly in the morning.'

'If you're in no particular hurry,' said Joe after a short silence, 
'and will bear with the pace of this poor jade, I shall be glad to 
ride on with you to the Warren, sir, and hold your horse when you 
dismount.  It'll save you having to walk from the Maypole, there 
and back again.  I can spare the time well, sir, for I am too soon.'

'And so am I,' returned Edward, 'though I was unconsciously riding 
fast just now, in compliment I suppose to the pace of my thoughts, 
which were travelling post.  We will keep together, Joe, willingly, 
and be as good company as may be.  And cheer up, cheer up, think of 
the locksmith's daughter with a stout heart, and you shall win her 
yet.'

Joe shook his head; but there was something so cheery in the 
buoyant hopeful manner of this speech, that his spirits rose under 
its influence, and communicated as it would seem some new impulse 
even to the grey mare, who, breaking from her sober amble into a 
gentle trot, emulated the pace of Edward Chester's horse, and 
appeared to flatter herself that he was doing his very best.

It was a fine dry night, and the light of a young moon, which was 
then just rising, shed around that peace and tranquillity which 
gives to evening time its most delicious charm.  The lengthened 
shadows of the trees, softened as if reflected in still water, 
threw their carpet on the path the travellers pursued, and the 
light wind stirred yet more softly than before, as though it were 
soothing Nature in her sleep.  By little and little they ceased 
talking, and rode on side by side in a pleasant silence.

'The Maypole lights are brilliant to-night,' said Edward, as they 
rode along the lane from which, while the intervening trees were 
bare of leaves, that hostelry was visible.

'Brilliant indeed, sir,' returned Joe, rising in his stirrups to 
get a better view.  'Lights in the large room, and a fire 
glimmering in the best bedchamber?  Why, what company can this be 
for, I wonder!'

'Some benighted horseman wending towards London, and deterred from 
going on to-night by the marvellous tales of my friend the 
highwayman, I suppose,' said Edward.

'He must be a horseman of good quality to have such accommodations.  
Your bed too, sir--!'

'No matter, Joe.  Any other room will do for me.  But come--there's 
nine striking.  We may push on.'

They cantered forward at as brisk a pace as Joe's charger could 
attain, and presently stopped in the little copse where he had left 
her in the morning.  Edward dismounted, gave his bridle to his 
companion, and walked with a light step towards the house.

A female servant was waiting at a side gate in the garden-wall, and 
admitted him without delay.  He hurried along the terrace-walk, and 
darted up a flight of broad steps leading into an old and gloomy 
hall, whose walls were ornamented with rusty suits of armour, 
antlers, weapons of the chase, and suchlike garniture.  Here he 
paused, but not long; for as he looked round, as if expecting the 
attendant to have followed, and wondering she had not done so, a 
lovely girl appeared, whose dark hair next moment rested on his 
breast.  Almost at the same instant a heavy hand was laid upon her 
arm, Edward felt himself thrust away, and Mr Haredale stood between 
them.

He regarded the young man sternly without removing his hat; with 
one hand clasped his niece, and with the other, in which he held 
his riding-whip, motioned him towards the door.  The young man drew 
himself up, and returned his gaze.

'This is well done of you, sir, to corrupt my servants, and enter 
my house unbidden and in secret, like a thief!' said Mr Haredale.  
'Leave it, sir, and return no more.'

'Miss Haredale's presence,' returned the young man, 'and your 
relationship to her, give you a licence which, if you are a brave 
man, you will not abuse.  You have compelled me to this course, 
and the fault is yours--not mine.'

'It is neither generous, nor honourable, nor the act of a true 
man, sir,' retorted the other, 'to tamper with the affections of a 
weak, trusting girl, while you shrink, in your unworthiness, from 
her guardian and protector, and dare not meet the light of day.  
More than this I will not say to you, save that I forbid you this 
house, and require you to be gone.'

'It is neither generous, nor honourable, nor the act of a true man 
to play the spy,' said Edward.  'Your words imply dishonour, and I 
reject them with the scorn they merit.'

'You will find,' said Mr Haredale, calmly, 'your trusty go-between 
in waiting at the gate by which you entered.  I have played no 
spy's part, sir.  I chanced to see you pass the gate, and 
followed.  You might have heard me knocking for admission, had you 
been less swift of foot, or lingered in the garden.  Please to 
withdraw.  Your presence here is offensive to me and distressful to 
my niece.'  As he said these words, he passed his arm about the 
waist of the terrified and weeping girl, and drew her closer to 
him; and though the habitual severity of his manner was scarcely 
changed, there was yet apparent in the action an air of kindness 
and sympathy for her distress.

'Mr Haredale,' said Edward, 'your arm encircles her on whom I have 
set my every hope and thought, and to purchase one minute's 
happiness for whom I would gladly lay down my life; this house is 
the casket that holds the precious jewel of my existence.  Your 
niece has plighted her faith to me, and I have plighted mine to 
her.  What have I done that you should hold me in this light 
esteem, and give me these discourteous words?'

'You have done that, sir,' answered Mr Haredale, 'which must he 
undone.  You have tied a lover'-knot here which must be cut 
asunder.  Take good heed of what I say.  Must.  I cancel the bond 
between ye.  I reject you, and all of your kith and kin--all the 
false, hollow, heartless stock.'

'High words, sir,' said Edward, scornfully.

'Words of purpose and meaning, as you will find,' replied the 
other.  'Lay them to heart.'

'Lay you then, these,' said Edward.  'Your cold and sullen temper, 
which chills every breast about you, which turns affection into 
fear, and changes duty into dread, has forced us on this secret 
course, repugnant to our nature and our wish, and far more foreign, 
sir, to us than you.  I am not a false, a hollow, or a heartless 
man; the character is yours, who poorly venture on these injurious 
terms, against the truth, and under the shelter whereof I reminded 
you just now.  You shall not cancel the bond between us.  I will 
not abandon this pursuit.  I rely upon your niece's truth and 
honour, and set your influence at nought.  I leave her with a 
confidence in her pure faith, which you will never weaken, and with 
no concern but that I do not leave her in some gentler care.'

With that, he pressed her cold hand to his lips, and once more 
encountering and returning Mr Haredale's steady look, withdrew.

A few words to Joe as he mounted his horse sufficiently explained 
what had passed, and renewed all that young gentleman's despondency 
with tenfold aggravation.  They rode back to the Maypole without 
exchanging a syllable, and arrived at the door with heavy hearts.

Old John, who had peeped from behind the red curtain as they rode 
up shouting for Hugh, was out directly, and said with great 
importance as he held the young man's stirrup,

'He's comfortable in bed--the best bed.  A thorough gentleman; the 
smilingest, affablest gentleman I ever had to do with.'

'Who, Willet?' said Edward carelessly, as he dismounted.

'Your worthy father, sir,' replied John.  'Your honourable, 
venerable father.'

'What does he mean?' said Edward, looking with a mixture of alarm 
and doubt, at Joe.

'What DO you mean?' said Joe.  'Don't you see Mr Edward doesn't 
understand, father?'

'Why, didn't you know of it, sir?' said John, opening his eyes 
wide.  'How very singular!  Bless you, he's been here ever since 
noon to-day, and Mr Haredale has been having a long talk with him, 
and hasn't been gone an hour.'

'My father, Willet!'

'Yes, sir, he told me so--a handsome, slim, upright gentleman, in 
green-and-gold.  In your old room up yonder, sir.  No doubt you 
can go in, sir,' said John, walking backwards into the road and 
looking up at the window.  'He hasn't put out his candles yet, I 
see.'

Edward glanced at the window also, and hastily murmuring that he 
had changed his mind--forgotten something--and must return to 
London, mounted his horse again and rode away; leaving the Willets, 
father and son, looking at each other in mute astonishment.



Chapter 15


At noon next day, John Willet's guest sat lingering over his 
breakfast in his own home, surrounded by a variety of comforts, 
which left the Maypole's highest flight and utmost stretch of 
accommodation at an infinite distance behind, and suggested 
comparisons very much to the disadvantage and disfavour of that 
venerable tavern.

In the broad old-fashioned window-seat--as capacious as many modern 
sofas, and cushioned to serve the purpose of a luxurious settee--in 
the broad old-fashioned window-seat of a roomy chamber, Mr Chester 
lounged, very much at his ease, over a well-furnished breakfast-
table.  He had exchanged his riding-coat for a handsome morning-
gown, his boots for slippers; had been at great pains to atone for 
the having been obliged to make his toilet when he rose without the 
aid of dressing-case and tiring equipage; and, having gradually 
forgotten through these means the discomforts of an indifferent 
night and an early ride, was in a state of perfect complacency, 
indolence, and satisfaction.

The situation in which he found himself, indeed, was particularly 
favourable to the growth of these feelings; for, not to mention the 
lazy influence of a late and lonely breakfast, with the additional 
sedative of a newspaper, there was an air of repose about his place 
of residence peculiar to itself, and which hangs about it, even in 
these times, when it is more bustling and busy than it was in days 
of yore.

There are, still, worse places than the Temple, on a sultry day, 
for basking in the sun, or resting idly in the shade.  There is yet 
a drowsiness in its courts, and a dreamy dulness in its trees and 
gardens; those who pace its lanes and squares may yet hear the 
echoes of their footsteps on the sounding stones, and read upon its 
gates, in passing from the tumult of the Strand or Fleet Street, 
'Who enters here leaves noise behind.'  There is still the plash of 
falling water in fair Fountain Court, and there are yet nooks and 
corners where dun-haunted students may look down from their dusty 
garrets, on a vagrant ray of sunlight patching the shade of the 
tall houses, and seldom troubled to reflect a passing stranger's 
form.  There is yet, in the Temple, something of a clerkly monkish 
atmosphere, which public offices of law have not disturbed, and 
even legal firms have failed to scare away.  In summer time, its 
pumps suggest to thirsty idlers, springs cooler, and more 
sparkling, and deeper than other wells; and as they trace the 
spillings of full pitchers on the heated ground, they snuff the 
freshness, and, sighing, cast sad looks towards the Thames, and 
think of baths and boats, and saunter on, despondent.

It was in a room in Paper Buildings--a row of goodly tenements, 
shaded in front by ancient trees, and looking, at the back, upon 
the Temple Gardens--that this, our idler, lounged; now taking up 
again the paper he had laid down a hundred times; now trifling with 
the fragments of his meal; now pulling forth his golden toothpick, 
and glancing leisurely about the room, or out at window into the 
trim garden walks, where a few early loiterers were already pacing 
to and fro.  Here a pair of lovers met to quarrel and make up; 
there a dark-eyed nursery-maid had better eyes for Templars than 
her charge; on this hand an ancient spinster, with her lapdog in a 
string, regarded both enormities with scornful sidelong looks; on 
that a weazen old gentleman, ogling the nursery-maid, looked with 
like scorn upon the spinster, and wondered she didn't know she was 
no longer young.  Apart from all these, on the river's margin two 
or three couple of business-talkers walked slowly up and down in 
earnest conversation; and one young man sat thoughtfully on a 
bench, alone.

'Ned is amazingly patient!' said Mr Chester, glancing at this last-
named person as he set down his teacup and plied the golden 
toothpick, 'immensely patient!  He was sitting yonder when I began 
to dress, and has scarcely changed his posture since.  A most 
eccentric dog!'

As he spoke, the figure rose, and came towards him with a rapid 
pace.

'Really, as if he had heard me,' said the father, resuming his 
newspaper with a yawn.  'Dear Ned!'

Presently the room-door opened, and the young man entered; to whom 
his father gently waved his hand, and smiled.

'Are you at leisure for a little conversation, sir?' said Edward.

'Surely, Ned.  I am always at leisure.  You know my constitution.--
Have you breakfasted?'

'Three hours ago.'

'What a very early dog!' cried his father, contemplating him from 
behind the toothpick, with a languid smile.

'The truth is,' said Edward, bringing a chair forward, and seating 
himself near the table, 'that I slept but ill last night, and was 
glad to rise.  The cause of my uneasiness cannot but be known to 
you, sir; and it is upon that I wish to speak.'

'My dear boy,' returned his father, 'confide in me, I beg.  But you 
know my constitution--don't be prosy, Ned.'

'I will be plain, and brief,' said Edward.

'Don't say you will, my good fellow,' returned his father, crossing 
his legs, 'or you certainly will not.  You are going to tell me'--

'Plainly this, then,' said the son, with an air of great concern, 
'that I know where you were last night--from being on the spot, 
indeed--and whom you saw, and what your purpose was.'

'You don't say so!' cried his father.  'I am delighted to hear it.  
It saves us the worry, and terrible wear and tear of a long 
explanation, and is a great relief for both.  At the very house!  
Why didn't you come up?  I should have been charmed to see you.'

'I knew that what I had to say would be better said after a night's 
reflection, when both of us were cool,' returned the son.

''Fore Gad, Ned,' rejoined the father, 'I was cool enough last 
night.  That detestable Maypole!  By some infernal contrivance of 
the builder, it holds the wind, and keeps it fresh.  You remember 
the sharp east wind that blew so hard five weeks ago?  I give you 
my honour it was rampant in that old house last night, though out 
of doors there was a dead calm.  But you were saying'--

'I was about to say, Heaven knows how seriously and earnestly, that 
you have made me wretched, sir.  Will you hear me gravely for a 
moment?'

'My dear Ned,' said his father, 'I will hear you with the patience 
of an anchorite.  Oblige me with the milk.'

'I saw Miss Haredale last night,' Edward resumed, when he had 
complied with this request; 'her uncle, in her presence, 
immediately after your interview, and, as of course I know, in 
consequence of it, forbade me the house, and, with circumstances of 
indignity which are of your creation I am sure, commanded me to 
leave it on the instant.'

'For his manner of doing so, I give you my honour, Ned, I am not 
accountable,' said his father.  'That you must excuse.  He is a 
mere boor, a log, a brute, with no address in life.--Positively a 
fly in the jug.  The first I have seen this year.'

Edward rose, and paced the room.  His imperturbable parent sipped 
his tea.

'Father,' said the young man, stopping at length before him, 'we 
must not trifle in this matter.  We must not deceive each other, or 
ourselves.  Let me pursue the manly open part I wish to take, and 
do not repel me by this unkind indifference.'

'Whether I am indifferent or no,' returned the other, 'I leave you, 
my dear boy, to judge.  A ride of twenty-five or thirty miles, 
through miry roads--a Maypole dinner--a tete-a-tete with Haredale, 
which, vanity apart, was quite a Valentine and Orson business--a 
Maypole bed--a Maypole landlord, and a Maypole retinue of idiots 
and centaurs;--whether the voluntary endurance of these things 
looks like indifference, dear Ned, or like the excessive anxiety, 
and devotion, and all that sort of thing, of a parent, you shall 
determine for yourself.'

'I wish you to consider, sir,' said Edward, 'in what a cruel 
situation I am placed.  Loving Miss Haredale as I do'--

'My dear fellow,' interrupted his father with a compassionate 
smile, 'you do nothing of the kind.  You don't know anything about 
it.  There's no such thing, I assure you.  Now, do take my word for 
it.  You have good sense, Ned,--great good sense.  I wonder you 
should be guilty of such amazing absurdities.  You really surprise 
me.'

'I repeat,' said his son firmly, 'that I love her.  You have 
interposed to part us, and have, to the extent I have just now told 
you of, succeeded.  May I induce you, sir, in time, to think more 
favourably of our attachment, or is it your intention and your 
fixed design to hold us asunder if you can?'

'My dear Ned,' returned his father, taking a pinch of snuff and 
pushing his box towards him, 'that is my purpose most undoubtedly.'

'The time that has elapsed,' rejoined his son, 'since I began to 
know her worth, has flown in such a dream that until now I have 
hardly once paused to reflect upon my true position.  What is it?  
From my childhood I have been accustomed to luxury and idleness, 
and have been bred as though my fortune were large, and my 
expectations almost without a limit.  The idea of wealth has been 
familiarised to me from my cradle.  I have been taught to look upon 
those means, by which men raise themselves to riches and 
distinction, as being beyond my heeding, and beneath my care.  I 
have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for 
nothing.  I find myself at last wholly dependent upon you, with no 
resource but in your favour.  In this momentous question of my life 
we do not, and it would seem we never can, agree.  I have shrunk 
instinctively alike from those to whom you have urged me to pay 
court, and from the motives of interest and gain which have 
rendered them in your eyes visible objects for my suit.  If there 
never has been thus much plain-speaking between us before, sir, the 
fault has not been mine, indeed.  If I seem to speak too plainly 
now, it is, believe me father, in the hope that there may be a 
franker spirit, a worthier reliance, and a kinder confidence 
between us in time to come.'

'My good fellow,' said his smiling father, 'you quite affect me.  
Go on, my dear Edward, I beg.  But remember your promise.  There is 
great earnestness, vast candour, a manifest sincerity in all you 
say, but I fear I observe the faintest indications of a tendency to 
prose.'

'I am very sorry, sir.'

'I am very sorry, too, Ned, but you know that I cannot fix my mind 
for any long period upon one subject.  If you'll come to the point 
at once, I'll imagine all that ought to go before, and conclude it 
said.  Oblige me with the milk again.  Listening, invariably makes 
me feverish.'

'What I would say then, tends to this,' said Edward.  'I cannot 
bear this absolute dependence, sir, even upon you.  Time has been 
lost and opportunity thrown away, but I am yet a young man, and may 
retrieve it.  Will you give me the means of devoting such abilities 
and energies as I possess, to some worthy pursuit?  Will you let me 
try to make for myself an honourable path in life?  For any term 
you please to name--say for five years if you will--I will pledge 
myself to move no further in the matter of our difference without 
your fall concurrence.  During that period, I will endeavour 
earnestly and patiently, if ever man did, to open some prospect for 
myself, and free you from the burden you fear I should become if I 
married one whose worth and beauty are her chief endowments.  Will 
you do this, sir?  At the expiration of the term we agree upon, let 
us discuss this subject again.  Till then, unless it is revived by 
you, let it never be renewed between us.'

'My dear Ned,' returned his father, laying down the newspaper at 
which he had been glancing carelessly, and throwing himself back in 
the window-seat, 'I believe you know how very much I dislike what 
are called family affairs, which are only fit for plebeian 
Christmas days, and have no manner of business with people of our 
condition.  But as you are proceeding upon a mistake, Ned--
altogether upon a mistake--I will conquer my repugnance to entering 
on such matters, and give you a perfectly plain and candid answer, 
if you will do me the favour to shut the door.'

Edward having obeyed him, he took an elegant little knife from his 
pocket, and paring his nails, continued:

'You have to thank me, Ned, for being of good family; for your 
mother, charming person as she was, and almost broken-hearted, and 
so forth, as she left me, when she was prematurely compelled to 
become immortal--had nothing to boast of in that respect.'

'Her father was at least an eminent lawyer, sir,' said Edward.

'Quite right, Ned; perfectly so.  He stood high at the bar, had a 
great name and great wealth, but having risen from nothing--I have 
always closed my eyes to the circumstance and steadily resisted its 
contemplation, but I fear his father dealt in pork, and that his 
business did once involve cow-heel and sausages--he wished to marry 
his daughter into a good family.  He had his heart's desire, Ned.  
I was a younger son's younger son, and I married her.  We each had 
our object, and gained it.  She stepped at once into the politest 
and best circles, and I stepped into a fortune which I assure you 
was very necessary to my comfort--quite indispensable.  Now, my 
good fellow, that fortune is among the things that have been.  It 
is gone, Ned, and has been gone--how old are you?  I always 
forget.'

'Seven-and-twenty, sir.'

'Are you indeed?' cried his father, raising his eyelids in a 
languishing surprise.  'So much!  Then I should say, Ned, that as 
nearly as I remember, its skirts vanished from human knowledge, 
about eighteen or nineteen years ago.  It was about that time when 
I came to live in these chambers (once your grandfather's, and 
bequeathed by that extremely respectable person to me), and 
commenced to live upon an inconsiderable annuity and my past 
reputation.'

'You are jesting with me, sir,' said Edward.

'Not in the slightest degree, I assure you,' returned his father 
with great composure.  'These family topics are so extremely dry, 
that I am sorry to say they don't admit of any such relief.  It is 
for that reason, and because they have an appearance of business, 
that I dislike them so very much.  Well!  You know the rest.  A 
son, Ned, unless he is old enough to be a companion--that is to 
say, unless he is some two or three and twenty--is not the kind of 
thing to have about one.  He is a restraint upon his father, his 
father is a restraint upon him, and they make each other mutually 
uncomfortable.  Therefore, until within the last four years or so--
I have a poor memory for dates, and if I mistake, you will correct 
me in your own mind--you pursued your studies at a distance, and 
picked up a great variety of accomplishments.  Occasionally we 
passed a week or two together here, and disconcerted each other as 
only such near relations can.  At last you came home.  I candidly 
tell you, my dear boy, that if you had been awkward and overgrown, 
I should have exported you to some distant part of the world.'

'I wish with all my soul you had, sir,' said Edward.

'No you don't, Ned,' said his father coolly; 'you are mistaken, I 
assure you.  I found you a handsome, prepossessing, elegant 
fellow, and I threw you into the society I can still command.  
Having done that, my dear fellow, I consider that I have provided 
for you in life, and rely upon your doing something to provide for 
me in return.'

'I do not understand your meaning, sir.'

'My meaning, Ned, is obvious--I observe another fly in the cream-
jug, but have the goodness not to take it out as you did the first, 
for their walk when their legs are milky, is extremely ungraceful 
and disagreeable--my meaning is, that you must do as I did; that 
you must marry well and make the most of yourself.'

'A mere fortune-hunter!' cried the son, indignantly.

'What in the devil's name, Ned, would you be!' returned the father.  
'All men are fortune-hunters, are they not?  The law, the church, 
the court, the camp--see how they are all crowded with fortune-
hunters, jostling each other in the pursuit.  The stock-exchange, 
the pulpit, the counting-house, the royal drawing-room, the 
senate,--what but fortune-hunters are they filled with?  A fortune-
hunter!  Yes.  You ARE one; and you would be nothing else, my dear 
Ned, if you were the greatest courtier, lawyer, legislator, 
prelate, or merchant, in existence.  If you are squeamish and 
moral, Ned, console yourself with the reflection that at the very 
worst your fortune-hunting can make but one person miserable or 
unhappy.  How many people do you suppose these other kinds of 
huntsmen crush in following their sport--hundreds at a step?  Or 
thousands?'

The young man leant his head upon his hand, and made no answer.

'I am quite charmed,' said the father rising, and walking slowly to 
and fro--stopping now and then to glance at himself in the mirror, 
or survey a picture through his glass, with the air of a 
connoisseur, 'that we have had this conversation, Ned, unpromising 
as it was.  It establishes a confidence between us which is quite 
delightful, and was certainly necessary, though how you can ever 
have mistaken our positions and designs, I confess I cannot 
understand.  I conceived, until I found your fancy for this girl, 
that all these points were tacitly agreed upon between us.'

'I knew you were embarrassed, sir,' returned the son, raising his 
head for a moment, and then falling into his former attitude, 'but 
I had no idea we were the beggared wretches you describe.  How 
could I suppose it, bred as I have been; witnessing the life you 
have always led; and the appearance you have always made?'

'My dear child,' said the father--'for you really talk so like a 
child that I must call you one--you were bred upon a careful 
principle; the very manner of your education, I assure you, 
maintained my credit surprisingly.  As to the life I lead, I must 
lead it, Ned.  I must have these little refinements about me.  I 
have always been used to them, and I cannot exist without them.  
They must surround me, you observe, and therefore they are here.  
With regard to our circumstances, Ned, you may set your mind at 
rest upon that score.  They are desperate.  Your own appearance is 
by no means despicable, and our joint pocket-money alone devours 
our income.  That's the truth.'

'Why have I never known this before?  Why have you encouraged me, 
sir, to an expenditure and mode of life to which we have no right 
or title?'

'My good fellow,' returned his father more compassionately than 
ever, 'if you made no appearance, how could you possibly succeed in 
the pursuit for which I destined you?  As to our mode of life, 
every man has a right to live in the best way he can; and to make 
himself as comfortable as he can, or he is an unnatural scoundrel.  
Our debts, I grant, are very great, and therefore it the more 
behoves you, as a young man of principle and honour, to pay them 
off as speedily as possible.'

'The villain's part,' muttered Edward, 'that I have unconsciously 
played!  I to win the heart of Emma Haredale!  I would, for her 
sake, I had died first!'

'I am glad you see, Ned,' returned his father, 'how perfectly self-
evident it is, that nothing can be done in that quarter.  But apart 
from this, and the necessity of your speedily bestowing yourself 
on another (as you know you could to-morrow, if you chose), I wish 
you'd look upon it pleasantly.  In a religious point of view alone, 
how could you ever think of uniting yourself to a Catholic, unless 
she was amazingly rich?  You ought to be so very Protestant, 
coming of such a Protestant family as you do.  Let us be moral, 
Ned, or we are nothing.  Even if one could set that objection 
aside, which is impossible, we come to another which is quite 
conclusive.  The very idea of marrying a girl whose father was 
killed, like meat!  Good God, Ned, how disagreeable!  Consider the 
impossibility of having any respect for your father-in-law under 
such unpleasant circumstances--think of his having been "viewed" by 
jurors, and "sat upon" by coroners, and of his very doubtful 
position in the family ever afterwards.  It seems to me such an 
indelicate sort of thing that I really think the girl ought to have 
been put to death by the state to prevent its happening.  But I 
tease you perhaps.  You would rather be alone?  My dear Ned, most 
willingly.  God bless you.  I shall be going out presently, but we 
shall meet to-night, or if not to-night, certainly to-morrow.  
Take care of yourself in the mean time, for both our sakes.  You 
are a person of great consequence to me, Ned--of vast consequence 
indeed.  God bless you!'

With these words, the father, who had been arranging his cravat in 
the glass, while he uttered them in a disconnected careless manner, 
withdrew, humming a tune as he went.  The son, who had appeared so 
lost in thought as not to hear or understand them, remained quite 
still and silent.  After the lapse of half an hour or so, the elder 
Chester, gaily dressed, went out.  The younger still sat with his 
head resting on his hands, in what appeared to be a kind of stupor.



Chapter 16


A series of pictures representing the streets of London in the 
night, even at the comparatively recent date of this tale, would 
present to the eye something so very different in character from 
the reality which is witnessed in these times, that it would be 
difficult for the beholder to recognise his most familiar walks in 
the altered aspect of little more than half a century ago.

They were, one and all, from the broadest and best to the narrowest 
and least frequented, very dark.  The oil and cotton lamps, though 
regularly trimmed twice or thrice in the long winter nights, burnt 
feebly at the best; and at a late hour, when they were unassisted 
by the lamps and candles in the shops, cast but a narrow track of 
doubtful light upon the footway, leaving the projecting doors and 
house-fronts in the deepest gloom.  Many of the courts and lanes 
were left in total darkness; those of the meaner sort, where one 
glimmering light twinkled for a score of houses, being favoured in 
no slight degree.  Even in these places, the inhabitants had often 
good reason for extinguishing their lamp as soon as it was lighted; 
and the watch being utterly inefficient and powerless to prevent 
them, they did so at their pleasure.  Thus, in the lightest 
thoroughfares, there was at every turn some obscure and dangerous 
spot whither a thief might fly or shelter, and few would care to 
follow; and the city being belted round by fields, green lanes, 
waste grounds, and lonely roads, dividing it at that time from the 
suburbs that have joined it since, escape, even where the pursuit 
was hot, was rendered easy.

It is no wonder that with these favouring circumstances in full and 
constant operation, street robberies, often accompanied by cruel 
wounds, and not unfrequently by loss of life, should have been of 
nightly occurrence in the very heart of London, or that quiet folks 
should have had great dread of traversing its streets after the 
shops were closed.  It was not unusual for those who wended home 
alone at midnight, to keep the middle of the road, the better to 
guard against surprise from lurking footpads; few would venture to 
repair at a late hour to Kentish Town or Hampstead, or even to 
Kensington or Chelsea, unarmed and unattended; while he who had 
been loudest and most valiant at the supper-table or the tavern, 
and had but a mile or so to go, was glad to fee a link-boy to 
escort him home.

There were many other characteristics--not quite so disagreeable--
about the thoroughfares of London then, with which they had been 
long familiar.  Some of the shops, especially those to the eastward 
of Temple Bar, still adhered to the old practice of hanging out a 
sign; and the creaking and swinging of these boards in their iron 
frames on windy nights, formed a strange and mournfal concert for 
the ears of those who lay awake in bed or hurried through the 
streets.  Long stands of hackney-chairs and groups of chairmen, 
compared with whom the coachmen of our day are gentle and polite, 
obstructed the way and filled the air with clamour; night-cellars, 
indicated by a little stream of light crossing the pavement, and 
stretching out half-way into the road, and by the stifled roar of 
voices from below, yawned for the reception and entertainment of 
the most abandoned of both sexes; under every shed and bulk small 
groups of link-boys gamed away the earnings of the day; or one more 
weary than the rest, gave way to sleep, and let the fragment of his 
torch fall hissing on the puddled ground.

Then there was the watch with staff and lantern crying the hour, 
and the kind of weather; and those who woke up at his voice and 
turned them round in bed, were glad to hear it rained, or snowed, 
or blew, or froze, for very comfort's sake.  The solitary passenger 
was startled by the chairmen's cry of 'By your leave there!' as two 
came trotting past him with their empty vehicle--carried backwards 
to show its being disengaged--and hurried to the nearest stand.  
Many a private chair, too, inclosing some fine lady, monstrously 
hooped and furbelowed, and preceded by running-footmen bearing 
flambeaux--for which extinguishers are yet suspended before the 
doors of a few houses of the better sort--made the way gay and 
light as it danced along, and darker and more dismal when it had 
passed.  It was not unusual for these running gentry, who carried 
it with a very high hand, to quarrel in the servants' hall while 
waiting for their masters and mistresses; and, falling to blows 
either there or in the street without, to strew the place of 
skirmish with hair-powder, fragments of bag-wigs, and scattered 
nosegays.  Gaming, the vice which ran so high among all classes 
(the fashion being of course set by the upper), was generally the 
cause of these disputes; for cards and dice were as openly used, 
and worked as much mischief, and yielded as much excitement below 
stairs, as above.  While incidents like these, arising out of drums 
and masquerades and parties at quadrille, were passing at the west 
end of the town, heavy stagecoaches and scarce heavier waggons were 
lumbering slowly towards the city, the coachmen, guard, and 
passengers, armed to the teeth, and the coach--a day or so perhaps 
behind its time, but that was nothing--despoiled by highwaymen; who 
made no scruple to attack, alone and single-handed, a whole caravan 
of goods and men, and sometimes shot a passenger or two, and were 
sometimes shot themselves, as the case might be.  On the morrow, 
rumours of this new act of daring on the road yielded matter for a 
few hours' conversation through the town, and a Public Progress of 
some fine gentleman (half-drunk) to Tyburn, dressed in the newest 
fashion, and damning the ordinary with unspeakable gallantry and 
grace, furnished to the populace, at once a pleasant excitement and 
a wholesome and profound example.

Among all the dangerous characters who, in such a state of society, 
prowled and skulked in the metropolis at night, there was one man 
from whom many as uncouth and fierce as he, shrunk with an 
involuntary dread.  Who he was, or whence he came, was a question 
often asked, but which none could answer.  His name was unknown, he 
had never been seen until within about eight days or thereabouts, 
and was equally a stranger to the old ruffians, upon whose haunts 
he ventured fearlessly, as to the young.  He could be no spy, for 
he never removed his slouched hat to look about him, entered into 
conversation with no man, heeded nothing that passed, listened to 
no discourse, regarded nobody that came or went.  But so surely as 
the dead of night set in, so surely this man was in the midst of 
the loose concourse in the night-cellar where outcasts of every 
grade resorted; and there he sat till morning.

He was not only a spectre at their licentious feasts; a something 
in the midst of their revelry and riot that chilled and haunted 
them; but out of doors he was the same.  Directly it was dark, he 
was abroad--never in company with any one, but always alone; never 
lingering or loitering, but always walking swiftly; and looking (so 
they said who had seen him) over his shoulder from time to time, 
and as he did so quickening his pace.  In the fields, the lanes, 
the roads, in all quarters of the town--east, west, north, and 
south--that man was seen gliding on like a shadow.  He was always 
hurrying away.  Those who encountered him, saw him steal past, 
caught sight of the backward glance, and so lost him in the 
darkness.

This constant restlessness, and flitting to and fro, gave rise to 
strange stories.  He was seen in such distant and remote places, at 
times so nearly tallying with each other, that some doubted whether 
there were not two of them, or more--some, whether he had not 
unearthly means of travelling from spot to spot.  The footpad 
hiding in a ditch had marked him passing like a ghost along its 
brink; the vagrant had met him on the dark high-road; the beggar 
had seen him pause upon the bridge to look down at the water, and 
then sweep on again; they who dealt in bodies with the surgeons 
could swear he slept in churchyards, and that they had beheld him 
glide away among the tombs on their approach.  And as they told 
these stories to each other, one who had looked about him would 
pull his neighbour by the sleeve, and there he would be among them.

At last, one man--he was one of those whose commerce lay among the 
graves--resolved to question this strange companion.  Next night, 
when he had eat his poor meal voraciously (he was accustomed to do 
that, they had observed, as though he had no other in the day), 
this fellow sat down at his elbow.

'A black night, master!'

'It is a black night.'

'Blacker than last, though that was pitchy too.  Didn't I pass you 
near the turnpike in the Oxford Road?'

'It's like you may.  I don't know.'

'Come, come, master,' cried the fellow, urged on by the looks of 
his comrades, and slapping him on the shoulder; 'be more 
companionable and communicative.  Be more the gentleman in this 
good company.  There are tales among us that you have sold yourself 
to the devil, and I know not what.'

'We all have, have we not?' returned the stranger, looking up.  'If 
we were fewer in number, perhaps he would give better wages.'

'It goes rather hard with you, indeed,' said the fellow, as the 
stranger disclosed his haggard unwashed face, and torn clothes.  
'What of that?  Be merry, master.  A stave of a roaring song now'--

'Sing you, if you desire to hear one,' replied the other, shaking 
him roughly off; 'and don't touch me if you're a prudent man; I 
carry arms which go off easily--they have done so, before now--and 
make it dangerous for strangers who don't know the trick of them, 
to lay hands upon me.'

'Do you threaten?' said the fellow.

'Yes,' returned the other, rising and turning upon him, and looking 
fiercely round as if in apprehension of a general attack.

His voice, and look, and bearing--all expressive of the wildest 
recklessness and desperation--daunted while they repelled the 
bystanders.  Although in a very different sphere of action now, 
they were not without much of the effect they had wrought at the 
Maypole Inn.

'I am what you all are, and live as you all do,' said the man 
sternly, after a short silence.  'I am in hiding here like the 
rest, and if we were surprised would perhaps do my part with the 
best of ye.  If it's my humour to be left to myself, let me have 
it.  Otherwise,'--and here he swore a tremendous oath--'there'll be 
mischief done in this place, though there ARE odds of a score 
against me.'

A low murmur, having its origin perhaps in a dread of the man and 
the mystery that surrounded him, or perhaps in a sincere opinion on 
the part of some of those present, that it would be an inconvenient 
precedent to meddle too curiously with a gentleman's private 
affairs if he saw reason to conceal them, warned the fellow who 
had occasioned this discussion that he had best pursue it no 
further.  After a short time the strange man lay down upon a bench 
to sleep, and when they thought of him again, they found he was 
gone.

Next night, as soon as it was dark, he was abroad again and 
traversing the streets; he was before the locksmith's house more 
than once, but the family were out, and it was close shut.  This 
night he crossed London Bridge and passed into Southwark.  As he 
glided down a bye street, a woman with a little basket on her arm, 
turned into it at the other end.  Directly he observed her, he 
sought the shelter of an archway, and stood aside until she had 
passed.  Then he emerged cautiously from his hiding-place, and 
followed.

She went into several shops to purchase various kinds of household 
necessaries, and round every place at which she stopped he hovered 
like her evil spirit; following her when she reappeared.  It was 
nigh eleven o'clock, and the passengers in the streets were 
thinning fast, when she turned, doubtless to go home.  The phantom 
still followed her.

She turned into the same bye street in which he had seen her first, 
which, being free from shops, and narrow, was extremely dark.  She 
quickened her pace here, as though distrustful of being stopped, 
and robbed of such trifling property as she carried with her.  He 
crept along on the other side of the road.  Had she been gifted 
with the speed of wind, it seemed as if his terrible shadow would 
have tracked her down.

At length the widow--for she it was--reached her own door, and, 
panting for breath, paused to take the key from her basket.  In a 
flush and glow, with the haste she had made, and the pleasure of 
being safe at home, she stooped to draw it out, when, raising her 
head, she saw him standing silently beside her: the apparition of 
a dream.

His hand was on her mouth, but that was needless, for her tongue 
clove to its roof, and her power of utterance was gone.  'I have 
been looking for you many nights.  Is the house empty?  Answer me.  
Is any one inside?'

She could only answer by a rattle in her throat.

'Make me a sign.'

She seemed to indicate that there was no one there.  He took the 
key, unlocked the door, carried her in, and secured it carefully 
behind them.



Chapter 17


It was a chilly night, and the fire in the widow's parlour had 
burnt low.  Her strange companion placed her in a chair, and 
stooping down before the half-extinguished ashes, raked them 
together and fanned them with his hat.  From time to time he 
glanced at her over his shoulder, as though to assure himself of 
her remaining quiet and making no effort to depart; and that done, 
busied himself about the fire again.

It was not without reason that he took these pains, for his dress 
was dank and drenched with wet, his jaws rattled with cold, and he 
shivered from head to foot.  It had rained hard during the previous 
night and for some hours in the morning, but since noon it had been 
fine.  Wheresoever he had passed the hours of darkness, his 
condition sufficiently betokened that many of them had been spent 
beneath the open sky.  Besmeared with mire; his saturated clothes 
clinging with a damp embrace about his limbs; his beard unshaven, 
his face unwashed, his meagre cheeks worn into deep hollows,--a 
more miserable wretch could hardly be, than this man who now 
cowered down upon the widow's hearth, and watched the struggling 
flame with bloodshot eyes.

She had covered her face with her hands, fearing, as it seemed, to 
look towards him.  So they remained for some short time in silence.  
Glancing round again, he asked at length:

'Is this your house?'

'It is.  Why, in the name of Heaven, do you darken it?'

'Give me meat and drink,' he answered sullenly, 'or I dare do more 
than that.  The very marrow in my bones is cold, with wet and 
hunger.  I must have warmth and food, and I will have them here.'

'You were the robber on the Chigwell road.'

'I was.'

'And nearly a murderer then.'

'The will was not wanting.  There was one came upon me and raised 
the hue-and-cry', that it would have gone hard with, but for his 
nimbleness.  I made a thrust at him.'

'You thrust your sword at HIM!' cried the widow, looking upwards.  
'You hear this man! you hear and saw!'

He looked at her, as, with her head thrown back, and her hands 
tight clenched together, she uttered these words in an agony of 
appeal.  Then, starting to his feet as she had done, he advanced 
towards her.

'Beware!' she cried in a suppressed voice, whose firmness stopped 
him midway.  'Do not so much as touch me with a finger, or you are 
lost; body and soul, you are lost.'

'Hear me,' he replied, menacing her with his hand.  'I, that in the 
form of a man live the life of a hunted beast; that in the body am 
a spirit, a ghost upon the earth, a thing from which all creatures 
shrink, save those curst beings of another world, who will not 
leave me;--I am, in my desperation of this night, past all fear but 
that of the hell in which I exist from day to day.  Give the 
alarm, cry out, refuse to shelter me.  I will not hurt you.  But I 
will not be taken alive; and so surely as you threaten me above 
your breath, I fall a dead man on this floor.  The blood with which 
I sprinkle it, be on you and yours, in the name of the Evil Spirit 
that tempts men to their ruin!'

As he spoke, he took a pistol from his breast, and firmly clutched 
it in his hand.

'Remove this man from me, good Heaven!' cried the widow.  'In thy 
grace and mercy, give him one minute's penitence, and strike him 
dead!'

'It has no such purpose,' he said, confronting her.  'It is deaf.  
Give me to eat and drink, lest I do that it cannot help my doing, 
and will not do for you.'

'Will you leave me, if I do thus much?  Will you leave me and 
return no more?'

'I will promise nothing,' he rejoined, seating himself at the 
table, 'nothing but this--I will execute my threat if you betray 
me.'

She rose at length, and going to a closet or pantry in the room, 
brought out some fragments of cold meat and bread and put them on 
the table.  He asked for brandy, and for water.  These she produced 
likewise; and he ate and drank with the voracity of a famished 
hound.  All the time he was so engaged she kept at the uttermost 
distance of the chamber, and sat there shuddering, but with her 
face towards him.  She never turned her back upon him once; and 
although when she passed him (as she was obliged to do in going to 
and from the cupboard) she gathered the skirts of her garment about 
her, as if even its touching his by chance were horrible to think 
of, still, in the midst of all this dread and terror, she kept her 
face towards his own, and watched his every movement.

His repast ended--if that can be called one, which was a mere 
ravenous satisfying of the calls of hunger--he moved his chair 
towards the fire again, and warming himself before the blaze which 
had now sprung brightly up, accosted her once more.

'I am an outcast, to whom a roof above his head is often an 
uncommon luxury, and the food a beggar would reject is delicate 
fare.  You live here at your ease.  Do you live alone?'

'I do not,' she made answer with an effort.

'Who dwells here besides?'

'One--it is no matter who.  You had best begone, or he may find you 
here.  Why do you linger?'

'For warmth,' he replied, spreading out his hands before the fire.  
'For warmth.  You are rich, perhaps?'

'Very,' she said faintly.  'Very rich.  No doubt I am very rich.'

'At least you are not penniless.  You have some money.  You were 
making purchases to-night.'

'I have a little left.  It is but a few shillings.'

'Give me your purse.  You had it in your hand at the door.  Give it 
to me.'

She stepped to the table and laid it down.  He reached across, took 
it up, and told the contents into his hand.  As he was counting 
them, she listened for a moment, and sprung towards him.

'Take what there is, take all, take more if more were there, but go 
before it is too late.  I have heard a wayward step without, I know 
full well.  It will return directly.  Begone.'

'What do you mean?'

'Do not stop to ask.  I will not answer.  Much as I dread to touch 
you, I would drag you to the door if I possessed the strength, 
rather than you should lose an instant.  Miserable wretch! fly from 
this place.'

'If there are spies without, I am safer here,' replied the man, 
standing aghast.  'I will remain here, and will not fly till the 
danger is past.'

'It is too late!' cried the widow, who had listened for the step, 
and not to him.  'Hark to that foot upon the ground.  Do you 
tremble to hear it!  It is my son, my idiot son!'

As she said this wildly, there came a heavy knocking at the door.  
He looked at her, and she at him.

'Let him come in,' said the man, hoarsely.  'I fear him less than 
the dark, houseless night.  He knocks again.  Let him come in!'

'The dread of this hour,' returned the widow, 'has been upon me all 
my life, and I will not.  Evil will fall upon him, if you stand eye 
to eye.  My blighted boy!  Oh! all good angels who know the truth--
hear a poor mother's prayer, and spare my boy from knowledge of 
this man!'

'He rattles at the shutters!' cried the man.  'He calls you.  That 
voice and cry!  It was he who grappled with me in the road.  Was it 
he?'

She had sunk upon her knees, and so knelt down, moving her lips, 
but uttering no sound.  As he gazed upon her, uncertain what to do 
or where to turn, the shutters flew open.  He had barely time to 
catch a knife from the table, sheathe it in the loose sleeve of his 
coat, hide in the closet, and do all with the lightning's speed, 
when Barnaby tapped at the bare glass, and raised the sash 
exultingly.

'Why, who can keep out Grip and me!' he cried, thrusting in his 
head, and staring round the room.  'Are you there, mother?  How 
long you keep us from the fire and light.'

She stammered some excuse and tendered him her hand.  But Barnaby 
sprung lightly in without assistance, and putting his arms about 
her neck, kissed her a hundred times.

'We have been afield, mother--leaping ditches, scrambling through 
hedges, running down steep banks, up and away, and hurrying on.  
The wind has been blowing, and the rushes and young plants bowing 
and bending to it, lest it should do them harm, the cowards--and 
Grip--ha ha ha!--brave Grip, who cares for nothing, and when the 
wind rolls him over in the dust, turns manfully to bite it--Grip, 
bold Grip, has quarrelled with every little bowing twig--thinking, 
he told me, that it mocked him--and has worried it like a bulldog.  
Ha ha ha!'

The raven, in his little basket at his master's back, hearing this 
frequent mention of his name in a tone of exultation, expressed his 
sympathy by crowing like a cock, and afterwards running over his 
various phrases of speech with such rapidity, and in so many 
varieties of hoarseness, that they sounded like the murmurs of a 
crowd of people.

'He takes such care of me besides!' said Barnaby.  'Such care, 
mother!  He watches all the time I sleep, and when I shut my eyes 
and make-believe to slumber, he practises new learning softly; but 
he keeps his eye on me the while, and if he sees me laugh, though 
never so little, stops directly.  He won't surprise me till he's 
perfect.'

The raven crowed again in a rapturous manner which plainly said, 
'Those are certainly some of my characteristics, and I glory in 
them.'  In the meantime, Barnaby closed the window and secured it, 
and coming to the fireplace, prepared to sit down with his face
to the closet.  But his mother prevented this, by hastily taking 
that side herself, and motioning him towards the other.

'How pale you are to-night!' said Barnaby, leaning on his stick.  
'We have been cruel, Grip, and made her anxious!'

Anxious in good truth, and sick at heart!  The listener held the 
door of his hiding-place open with his hand, and closely watched 
her son.  Grip--alive to everything his master was unconscious of--
had his head out of the basket, and in return was watching him 
intently with his glistening eye.

'He flaps his wings,' said Barnaby, turning almost quickly enough 
to catch the retreating form and closing door, 'as if there were 
strangers here, but Grip is wiser than to fancy that.  Jump then!'

Accepting this invitation with a dignity peculiar to himself, the 
bird hopped up on his master's shoulder, from that to his extended 
hand, and so to the ground.  Barnaby unstrapping the basket and 
putting it down in a corner with the lid open, Grip's first care 
was to shut it down with all possible despatch, and then to stand 
upon it.  Believing, no doubt, that he had now rendered it utterly 
impossible, and beyond the power of mortal man, to shut him up in 
it any more, he drew a great many corks in triumph, and uttered a 
corresponding number of hurrahs.

'Mother!' said Barnaby, laying aside his hat and stick, and 
returning to the chair from which he had risen, 'I'll tell you 
where we have been to-day, and what we have been doing,--shall I?'

She took his hand in hers, and holding it, nodded the word she 
could not speak.

'You mustn't tell,' said Barnaby, holding up his finger, 'for it's 
a secret, mind, and only known to me, and Grip, and Hugh.  We had 
the dog with us, but he's not like Grip, clever as he is, and 
doesn't guess it yet, I'll wager.--Why do you look behind me so?'

'Did I?' she answered faintly.  'I didn't know I did.  Come nearer 
me.'

'You are frightened!' said Barnaby, changing colour.  'Mother--you 
don't see'--

'See what?'

'There's--there's none of this about, is there?' he answered in a 
whisper, drawing closer to her and clasping the mark upon his 
wrist.  'I am afraid there is, somewhere.  You make my hair stand 
on end, and my flesh creep.  Why do you look like that?  Is it in 
the room as I have seen it in my dreams, dashing the ceiling and 
the walls with red?  Tell me.  Is it?'

He fell into a shivering fit as he put the question, and shutting 
out the light with his hands, sat shaking in every limb until it 
had passed away.  After a time, he raised his head and looked about 
him.

'Is it gone?'

'There has been nothing here,' rejoined his mother, soothing him.  
'Nothing indeed, dear Barnaby.  Look!  You see there are but you 
and me.'

He gazed at her vacantly, and, becoming reassured by degrees, burst 
into a wild laugh.

'But let us see,' he said, thoughtfully.  'Were we talking?  Was it 
you and me?  Where have we been?'

'Nowhere but here.'

'Aye, but Hugh, and I,' said Barnaby,--'that's it.  Maypole Hugh, 
and I, you know, and Grip--we have been lying in the forest, and 
among the trees by the road side, with a dark lantern after night 
came on, and the dog in a noose ready to slip him when the man came 
by.'

'What man?'

'The robber; him that the stars winked at.  We have waited for him 
after dark these many nights, and we shall have him.  I'd know him 
in a thousand.  Mother, see here!  This is the man.  Look!'

He twisted his handkerchief round his head, pulled his hat upon his 
brow, wrapped his coat about him, and stood up before her: so like 
the original he counterfeited, that the dark figure peering out 
behind him might have passed for his own shadow.

'Ha ha ha!  We shall have him,' he cried, ridding himself of the 
semblance as hastily as he had assumed it.  'You shall see him, 
mother, bound hand and foot, and brought to London at a saddle-
girth; and you shall hear of him at Tyburn Tree if we have luck.  
So Hugh says.  You're pale again, and trembling.  And why DO you 
look behind me so?'

'It is nothing,' she answered.  'I am not quite well.  Go you to 
bed, dear, and leave me here.'

'To bed!' he answered.  'I don't like bed.  I like to lie before 
the fire, watching the prospects in the burning coals--the rivers, 
hills, and dells, in the deep, red sunset, and the wild faces.  I 
am hungry too, and Grip has eaten nothing since broad noon.  Let us 
to supper.  Grip!  To supper, lad!'

The raven flapped his wings, and, croaking his satisfaction, hopped 
to the feet of his master, and there held his bill open, ready for 
snapping up such lumps of meat as he should throw him.  Of these he 
received about a score in rapid succession, without the smallest 
discomposure.

'That's all,' said Barnaby.

'More!' cried Grip.  'More!'

But it appearing for a certainty that no more was to be had, he 
retreated with his store; and disgorging the morsels one by one 
from his pouch, hid them in various corners--taking particular 
care, however, to avoid the closet, as being doubtful of the hidden 
man's propensities and power of resisting temptation.  When he had 
concluded these arrangements, he took a turn or two across the room 
with an elaborate assumption of having nothing on his mind (but 
with one eye hard upon his treasure all the time), and then, and 
not till then, began to drag it out, piece by piece, and eat it 
with the utmost relish.

Barnaby, for his part, having pressed his mother to eat in vain, 
made a hearty supper too.  Once during the progress of his meal, he 
wanted more bread from the closet and rose to get it.  She 
hurriedly interposed to prevent him, and summoning her utmost 
fortitude, passed into the recess, and brought it out herself.

'Mother,' said Barnaby, looking at her steadfastly as she sat down 
beside him after doing so; 'is to-day my birthday?'

'To-day!' she answered.  'Don't you recollect it was but a week or 
so ago, and that summer, autumn, and winter have to pass before it 
comes again?'

'I remember that it has been so till now,' said Barnaby.  'But I 
think to-day must be my birthday too, for all that.'

She asked him why?  'I'll tell you why,' he said.  'I have always 
seen you--I didn't let you know it, but I have--on the evening of 
that day grow very sad.  I have seen you cry when Grip and I were 
most glad; and look frightened with no reason; and I have touched 
your hand, and felt that it was cold--as it is now.  Once, mother 
(on a birthday that was, also), Grip and I thought of this after we 
went upstairs to bed, and when it was midnight, striking one 
o'clock, we came down to your door to see if you were well.  You 
were on your knees.  I forget what it was you said.  Grip, what was 
it we heard her say that night?'

'I'm a devil!' rejoined the raven promptly.

'No, no,' said Barnaby.  'But you said something in a prayer; and 
when you rose and walked about, you looked (as you have done ever 
since, mother, towards night on my birthday) just as you do now.  I 
have found that out, you see, though I am silly.  So I say you're 
wrong; and this must be my birthday--my birthday, Grip!'

The bird received this information with a crow of such duration as 
a cock, gifted with intelligence beyond all others of his kind, 
might usher in the longest day with.  Then, as if he had well 
considered the sentiment, and regarded it as apposite to birthdays, 
he cried, 'Never say die!' a great many times, and flapped his 
wings for emphasis.

The widow tried to make light of Barnaby's remark, and endeavoured 
to divert his attention to some new subject; too easy a task at all 
times, as she knew.  His supper done, Barnaby, regardless of her 
entreaties, stretched himself on the mat before the fire; Grip 
perched upon his leg, and divided his time between dozing in the 
grateful warmth, and endeavouring (as it presently appeared) to 
recall a new accomplishment he had been studying all day.

A long and profound silence ensued, broken only by some change of 
position on the part of Barnaby, whose eyes were still wide open 
and intently fixed upon the fire; or by an effort of recollection 
on the part of Grip, who would cry in a low voice from time to 
time, 'Polly put the ket--' and there stop short, forgetting the 
remainder, and go off in a doze again.

After a long interval, Barnaby's breathing grew more deep and 
regular, and his eyes were closed.  But even then the unquiet 
spirit of the raven interposed.  'Polly put the ket--' cried Grip, 
and his master was broad awake again.

At length Barnaby slept soundly, and the bird with his bill sunk 
upon his breast, his breast itself puffed out into a comfortable 
alderman-like form, and his bright eye growing smaller and smaller, 
really seemed to be subsiding into a state of repose.  Now and then 
he muttered in a sepulchral voice, 'Polly put the ket--' but very 
drowsily, and more like a drunken man than a reflecting raven.

The widow, scarcely venturing to breathe, rose from her seat.  The 
man glided from the closet, and extinguished the candle.

'--tle on,' cried Grip, suddenly struck with an idea and very much 
excited.  '--tle on.  Hurrah!  Polly put the ket-tle on, we'll all 
have tea; Polly put the ket-tle on, we'll all have tea.  Hurrah, 
hurrah, hurrah!  I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a ket-tle on, Keep 
up your spirits, Never say die, Bow, wow, wow, I'm a devil, I'm a 
ket-tle, I'm a--Polly put the ket-tle on, we'll all have tea.'

They stood rooted to the ground, as though it had been a voice from 
the grave.

But even this failed to awaken the sleeper.  He turned over towards 
the fire, his arm fell to the ground, and his head drooped heavily 
upon it.  The widow and her unwelcome visitor gazed at him and at 
each other for a moment, and then she motioned him towards the 
door.

'Stay,' he whispered.  'You teach your son well.'

'I have taught him nothing that you heard to-night.  Depart 
instantly, or I will rouse him.'

'You are free to do so.  Shall I rouse him?'

'You dare not do that.'

'I dare do anything, I have told you.  He knows me well, it seems.  
At least I will know him.'

'Would you kill him in his sleep?' cried the widow, throwing 
herself between them.

'Woman,' he returned between his teeth, as he motioned her aside, 
'I would see him nearer, and I will.  If you want one of us to kill 
the other, wake him.'

With that he advanced, and bending down over the prostrate form, 
softly turned back the head and looked into the face.  The light of 
the fire was upon it, and its every lineament was revealed 
distinctly.  He contemplated it for a brief space, and hastily 
uprose.

'Observe,' he whispered in the widow's ear: 'In him, of whose 
existence I was ignorant until to-night, I have you in my power.  
Be careful how you use me.  Be careful how you use me.  I am 
destitute and starving, and a wanderer upon the earth.  I may take 
a sure and slow revenge.'

'There is some dreadful meaning in your words.  I do not fathom it.'

'There is a meaning in them, and I see you fathom it to its very 
depth.  You have anticipated it for years; you have told me as 
much.  I leave you to digest it.  Do not forget my warning.'

He pointed, as he left her, to the slumbering form, and stealthily 
withdrawing, made his way into the street.  She fell on her knees 
beside the sleeper, and remained like one stricken into stone, 
until the tears which fear had frozen so long, came tenderly to her 
relief.

'Oh Thou,' she cried, 'who hast taught me such deep love for this 
one remnant of the promise of a happy life, out of whose 
affliction, even, perhaps the comfort springs that he is ever a 
relying, loving child to me--never growing old or cold at heart, 
but needing my care and duty in his manly strength as in his 
cradle-time--help him, in his darkened walk through this sad world, 
or he is doomed, and my poor heart is broken!'



Chapter 18


Gliding along the silent streets, and holding his course where they 
were darkest and most gloomy, the man who had left the widow's 
house crossed London Bridge, and arriving in the City, plunged into 
the backways, lanes, and courts, between Cornhill and Smithfield; 
with no more fixedness of purpose than to lose himself among their 
windings, and baffle pursuit, if any one were dogging his steps.

It was the dead time of the night, and all was quiet.  Now and then 
a drowsy watchman's footsteps sounded on the pavement, or the 
lamplighter on his rounds went flashing past, leaving behind a 
little track of smoke mingled with glowing morsels of his hot red 
link.  He hid himself even from these partakers of his lonely walk, 
and, shrinking in some arch or doorway while they passed, issued 
forth again when they were gone and so pursued his solitary way.

To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind 
moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to 
listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee 
of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal 
things--but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where 
shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless 
rejected creature.  To pace the echoing stones from hour to hour, 
counting the dull chimes of the clocks; to watch the lights 
twinkling in chamber windows, to think what happy forgetfulness 
each house shuts in; that here are children coiled together in 
their beds, here youth, here age, here poverty, here wealth, all 
equal in their sleep, and all at rest; to have nothing in common 
with the slumbering world around, not even sleep, Heaven's gift to 
all its creatures, and be akin to nothing but despair; to feel, by 
the wretched contrast with everything on every hand, more utterly 
alone and cast away than in a trackless desert; this is a kind of 
suffering, on which the rivers of great cities close full many a 
time, and which the solitude in crowds alone awakens.

The miserable man paced up and down the streets--so long, so 
wearisome, so like each other--and often cast a wistful look 
towards the east, hoping to see the first faint streaks of day.  
But obdurate night had yet possession of the sky, and his disturbed 
and restless walk found no relief.

One house in a back street was bright with the cheerful glare of 
lights; there was the sound of music in it too, and the tread of 
dancers, and there were cheerful voices, and many a burst of 
laughter.  To this place--to be near something that was awake and 
glad--he returned again and again; and more than one of those who 
left it when the merriment was at its height, felt it a check upon 
their mirthful mood to see him flitting to and fro like an uneasy 
ghost.  At last the guests departed, one and all; and then the 
house was close shut up, and became as dull and silent as the rest.

His wanderings brought him at one time to the city jail.  Instead 
of hastening from it as a place of ill omen, and one he had cause 
to shun, he sat down on some steps hard by, and resting his chin 
upon his hand, gazed upon its rough and frowning walls as though 
even they became a refuge in his jaded eyes.  He paced it round and 
round, came back to the same spot, and sat down again.  He did this 
often, and once, with a hasty movement, crossed to where some men 
were watching in the prison lodge, and had his foot upon the steps 
as though determined to accost them.  But looking round, he saw 
that the day began to break, and failing in his purpose, turned and 
fled.

He was soon in the quarter he had lately traversed, and pacing to 
and fro again as he had done before.  He was passing down a mean 
street, when from an alley close at hand some shouts of revelry 
arose, and there came straggling forth a dozen madcaps, whooping 
and calling to each other, who, parting noisily, took different 
ways and dispersed in smaller groups.

Hoping that some low place of entertainment which would afford him 
a safe refuge might be near at hand, he turned into this court when 
they were all gone, and looked about for a half-opened door, or 
lighted window, or other indication of the place whence they had 
come.  It was so profoundly dark, however, and so ill-favoured, 
that he concluded they had but turned up there, missing their way, 
and were pouring out again when he observed them.  With this 
impression, and finding there was no outlet but that by which he 
had entered, he was about to turn, when from a grating near his 
feet a sudden stream of light appeared, and the sound of talking 
came.  He retreated into a doorway to see who these talkers were, 
and to listen to them.

The light came to the level of the pavement as he did this, and a 
man ascended, bearing in his hand a torch.  This figure unlocked 
and held open the grating as for the passage of another, who 
presently appeared, in the form of a young man of small stature and 
uncommon self-importance, dressed in an obsolete and very gaudy 
fashion.

'Good night, noble captain,' said he with the torch.  'Farewell, 
commander.  Good luck, illustrious general!'

In return to these compliments the other bade him hold his tongue, 
and keep his noise to himself, and laid upon him many similar 
injunctions, with great fluency of speech and sternness of manner.

'Commend me, captain, to the stricken Miggs,' returned the torch-
bearer in a lower voice.  'My captain flies at higher game than 
Miggses.  Ha, ha, ha!  My captain is an eagle, both as respects his 
eye and soaring wings.  My captain breaketh hearts as other 
bachelors break eggs at breakfast.'

'What a fool you are, Stagg!' said Mr Tappertit, stepping on the 
pavement of the court, and brushing from his legs the dust he had 
contracted in his passage upward.

'His precious limbs!' cried Stagg, clasping one of his ankles.  
'Shall a Miggs aspire to these proportions!  No, no, my captain.  
We will inveigle ladies fair, and wed them in our secret cavern.  
We will unite ourselves with blooming beauties, captain.'

'I'll tell you what, my buck,' said Mr Tappertit, releasing his 
leg; 'I'll trouble you not to take liberties, and not to broach 
certain questions unless certain questions are broached to you.  
Speak when you're spoke to on particular subjects, and not 
otherways.  Hold the torch up till I've got to the end of the 
court, and then kennel yourself, do you hear?'

'I hear you, noble captain.'

'Obey then,' said Mr Tappertit haughtily.  'Gentlemen, lead on!'  
With which word of command (addressed to an imaginary staff or 
retinue) he folded his arms, and walked with surpassing dignity 
down the court.

His obsequious follower stood holding the torch above his head, and 
then the observer saw for the first time, from his place of 
concealment, that he was blind.  Some involuntary motion on his 
part caught the quick ear of the blind man, before he was conscious 
of having moved an inch towards him, for he turned suddenly and 
cried, 'Who's there?'

'A man,' said the other, advancing.  'A friend.'

'A stranger!' rejoined the blind man.  'Strangers are not my 
friends.  What do you do there?'

'I saw your company come out, and waited here till they were gone.  
I want a lodging.'

'A lodging at this time!' returned Stagg, pointing towards the dawn 
as though he saw it.  'Do you know the day is breaking?'

'I know it,' rejoined the other, 'to my cost.  I have been 
traversing this iron-hearted town all night.'

'You had better traverse it again,' said the blind man, preparing 
to descend, 'till you find some lodgings suitable to your taste.  I 
don't let any.'

'Stay!' cried the other, holding him by the arm.

'I'll beat this light about that hangdog face of yours (for hangdog 
it is, if it answers to your voice), and rouse the neighbourhood 
besides, if you detain me,' said the blind man.  'Let me go.  Do 
you hear?'

'Do YOU hear!' returned the other, chinking a few shillings 
together, and hurriedly pressing them into his hand.  'I beg 
nothing of you.  I will pay for the shelter you give me.  Death!  
Is it much to ask of such as you!  I have come from the country, 
and desire to rest where there are none to question me.  I am 
faint, exhausted, worn out, almost dead.  Let me lie down, like a 
dog, before your fire.  I ask no more than that.  If you would be 
rid of me, I will depart to-morrow.'

'If a gentleman has been unfortunate on the road,' muttered Stagg, 
yielding to the other, who, pressing on him, had already gained a 
footing on the steps--'and can pay for his accommodation--'

'I will pay you with all I have.  I am just now past the want of 
food, God knows, and wish but to purchase shelter.  What companion 
have you below?'

'None.'

'Then fasten your grate there, and show me the way.  Quick!'

The blind man complied after a moment's hesitation, and they 
descended together.  The dialogue had passed as hurriedly as the 
words could be spoken, and they stood in his wretched room before 
he had had time to recover from his first surprise.

'May I see where that door leads to, and what is beyond?' said the 
man, glancing keenly round.  'You will not mind that?'

'I will show you myself.  Follow me, or go before.  Take your 
choice.'

He bade him lead the way, and, by the light of the torch which his 
conductor held up for the purpose, inspected all three cellars 
narrowly.  Assured that the blind man had spoken truth, and that he 
lived there alone, the visitor returned with him to the first, in 
which a fire was burning, and flung himself with a deep groan upon 
the ground before it.

His host pursued his usual occupation without seeming to heed him 
any further.  But directly he fell asleep--and he noted his falling 
into a slumber, as readily as the keenest-sighted man could have 
done--he knelt down beside him, and passed his hand lightly but 
carefully over his face and person.

His sleep was checkered with starts and moans, and sometimes with a 
muttered word or two.  His hands were clenched, his brow bent, and 
his mouth firmly set.  All this, the blind man accurately marked; 
and as if his curiosity were strongly awakened, and he had already 
some inkling of his mystery, he sat watching him, if the expression 
may be used, and listening, until it was broad day.



Chapter 19


Dolly Varden's pretty little head was yet bewildered by various 
recollections of the party, and her bright eyes were yet dazzled by 
a crowd of images, dancing before them like motes in the sunbeams, 
among which the effigy of one partner in particular did especially 
figure, the same being a young coachmaker (a master in his own 
right) who had given her to understand, when he handed her into the 
chair at parting, that it was his fixed resolve to neglect his 
business from that time, and die slowly for the love of her--
Dolly's head, and eyes, and thoughts, and seven senses, were all in 
a state of flutter and confusion for which the party was 
accountable, although it was now three days old, when, as she was 
sitting listlessly at breakfast, reading all manner of fortunes 
(that is to say, of married and flourishing fortunes) in the 
grounds of her teacup, a step was heard in the workshop, and Mr 
Edward Chester was descried through the glass door, standing among 
the rusty locks and keys, like love among the roses--for which apt 
comparison the historian may by no means take any credit to 
himself, the same being the invention, in a sentimental mood, of 
the chaste and modest Miggs, who, beholding him from the doorsteps 
she was then cleaning, did, in her maiden meditation, give 
utterance to the simile.

The locksmith, who happened at the moment to have his eyes thrown 
upward and his head backward, in an intense communing with Toby, 
did not see his visitor, until Mrs Varden, more watchful than the 
rest, had desired Sim Tappertit to open the glass door and give him 
admission--from which untoward circumstance the good lady argued 
(for she could deduce a precious moral from the most trifling 
event) that to take a draught of small ale in the morning was to 
observe a pernicious, irreligious, and Pagan custom, the relish 
whereof should be left to swine, and Satan, or at least to Popish 
persons, and should be shunned by the righteous as a work of sin 
and evil.  She would no doubt have pursued her admonition much 
further, and would have founded on it a long list of precious 
precepts of inestimable value, but that the young gentleman 
standing by in a somewhat uncomfortable and discomfited manner 
while she read her spouse this lecture, occasioned her to bring it 
to a premature conclusion.

'I'm sure you'll excuse me, sir,' said Mrs Varden, rising and 
curtseying.  'Varden is so very thoughtless, and needs so much 
reminding--Sim, bring a chair here.'

Mr Tappertit obeyed, with a flourish implying that he did so, 
under protest.

'And you can go, Sim,' said the locksmith.

Mr Tappertit obeyed again, still under protest; and betaking 
himself to the workshop, began seriously to fear that he might find 
it necessary to poison his master, before his time was out.

In the meantime, Edward returned suitable replies to Mrs Varden's 
courtesies, and that lady brightened up very much; so that when he 
accepted a dish of tea from the fair hands of Dolly, she was 
perfectly agreeable.

'I am sure if there's anything we can do,--Varden, or I, or Dolly 
either,--to serve you, sir, at any time, you have only to say it, 
and it shall be done,' said Mrs V.

'I am much obliged to you, I am sure,' returned Edward.  'You 
encourage me to say that I have come here now, to beg your good 
offices.'

Mrs Varden was delighted beyond measure.

'It occurred to me that probably your fair daughter might be going 
to the Warren, either to-day or to-morrow,' said Edward, glancing 
at Dolly; 'and if so, and you will allow her to take charge of this 
letter, ma'am, you will oblige me more than I can tell you.  The 
truth is, that while I am very anxious it should reach its 
destination, I have particular reasons for not trusting it to any 
other conveyance; so that without your help, I am wholly at a loss.'

'She was not going that way, sir, either to-day, or to-morrow, nor 
indeed all next week,' the lady graciously rejoined, 'but we shall 
be very glad to put ourselves out of the way on your account, and 
if you wish it, you may depend upon its going to-day.  You might 
suppose,' said Mrs Varden, frowning at her husband, 'from Varden's 
sitting there so glum and silent, that he objected to this 
arrangement; but you must not mind that, sir, if you please.  It's 
his way at home.  Out of doors, he can be cheerful and talkative 
enough.'

Now, the fact was, that the unfortunate locksmith, blessing his 
stars to find his helpmate in such good humour, had been sitting 
with a beaming face, hearing this discourse with a joy past all 
expression.  Wherefore this sudden attack quite took him by 
surprise.

'My dear Martha--' he said.

'Oh yes, I dare say,' interrupted Mrs Varden, with a smile of 
mingled scorn and pleasantry.  'Very dear!  We all know that.'

'No, but my good soul,' said Gabriel, 'you are quite mistaken.  You 
are indeed.  I was delighted to find you so kind and ready.  I 
waited, my dear, anxiously, I assure you, to hear what you would 
say.'

'You waited anxiously,' repeated Mrs V.  'Yes!  Thank you, Varden.  
You waited, as you always do, that I might bear the blame, if any 
came of it.  But I am used to it,' said the lady with a kind of 
solemn titter, 'and that's my comfort!'

'I give you my word, Martha--' said Gabriel.

'Let me give you MY word, my dear,' interposed his wife with a 
Christian smile, 'that such discussions as these between married 
people, are much better left alone.  Therefore, if you please, 
Varden, we'll drop the subject.  I have no wish to pursue it.  I 
could.  I might say a great deal.  But I would rather not.  Pray 
don't say any more.'

'I don't want to say any more,' rejoined the goaded locksmith.

'Well then, don't,' said Mrs Varden.

'Nor did I begin it, Martha,' added the locksmith, good-humouredly, 
'I must say that.'

'You did not begin it, Varden!' exclaimed his wife, opening her 
eyes very wide and looking round upon the company, as though she 
would say, You hear this man!  'You did not begin it, Varden!  But 
you shall not say I was out of temper.  No, you did not begin it, 
oh dear no, not you, my dear!'

'Well, well,' said the locksmith.  'That's settled then.'

'Oh yes,' rejoined his wife, 'quite.  If you like to say Dolly 
began it, my dear, I shall not contradict you.  I know my duty.  I 
need know it, I am sure.  I am often obliged to bear it in mind, 
when my inclination perhaps would be for the moment to forget it.  
Thank you, Varden.'  And so, with a mighty show of humility and 
forgiveness, she folded her hands, and looked round again, with a 
smile which plainly said, 'If you desire to see the first and 
foremost among female martyrs, here she is, on view!'

This little incident, illustrative though it was of Mrs Varden's 
extraordinary sweetness and amiability, had so strong a tendency to 
check the conversation and to disconcert all parties but that 
excellent lady, that only a few monosyllables were uttered until 
Edward withdrew; which he presently did, thanking the lady of the 
house a great many times for her condescension, and whispering in 
Dolly's ear that he would call on the morrow, in case there should 
happen to be an answer to the note--which, indeed, she knew without 
his telling, as Barnaby and his friend Grip had dropped in on the 
previous night to prepare her for the visit which was then 
terminating.

Gabriel, who had attended Edward to the door, came back with his 
hands in his pockets; and, after fidgeting about the room in a very 
uneasy manner, and casting a great many sidelong looks at Mrs 
Varden (who with the calmest countenance in the world was five 
fathoms deep in the Protestant Manual), inquired of Dolly how she 
meant to go.  Dolly supposed by the stage-coach, and looked at her 
lady mother, who finding herself silently appealed to, dived down 
at least another fathom into the Manual, and became unconscious of 
all earthly things.

'Martha--' said the locksmith.

'I hear you, Varden,' said his wife, without rising to the surface.

'I am sorry, my dear, you have such an objection to the Maypole and 
old John, for otherways as it's a very fine morning, and Saturday's 
not a busy day with us, we might have all three gone to Chigwell in 
the chaise, and had quite a happy day of it.'

Mrs Varden immediately closed the Manual, and bursting into tears, 
requested to be led upstairs.

'What is the matter now, Martha?' inquired the locksmith.

To which Martha rejoined, 'Oh! don't speak to me,' and protested in 
agony that if anybody had told her so, she wouldn't have believed 
it.

'But, Martha,' said Gabriel, putting himself in the way as she was 
moving off with the aid of Dolly's shoulder, 'wouldn't have 
believed what?  Tell me what's wrong now.  Do tell me.  Upon my 
soul I don't know.  Do you know, child?  Damme!' cried the 
locksmith, plucking at his wig in a kind of frenzy, 'nobody does 
know, I verily believe, but Miggs!'

'Miggs,' said Mrs Varden faintly, and with symptoms of approaching 
incoherence, 'is attached to me, and that is sufficient to draw 
down hatred upon her in this house.  She is a comfort to me, 
whatever she may be to others.'

'She's no comfort to me,' cried Gabriel, made bold by despair.  
'She's the misery of my life.  She's all the plagues of Egypt in 
one.'

'She's considered so, I have no doubt,' said Mrs Varden.  'I was 
prepared for that; it's natural; it's of a piece with the rest.  
When you taunt me as you do to my face, how can I wonder that you 
taunt her behind her back!'  And here the incoherence coming on 
very strong, Mrs Varden wept, and laughed, and sobbed, and 
shivered, and hiccoughed, and choked; and said she knew it was very 
foolish but she couldn't help it; and that when she was dead and 
gone, perhaps they would be sorry for it--which really under the 
circumstances did not appear quite so probable as she seemed to 
think--with a great deal more to the same effect.  In a word, she 
passed with great decency through all the ceremonies incidental to 
such occasions; and being supported upstairs, was deposited in a 
highly spasmodic state on her own bed, where Miss Miggs shortly 
afterwards flung herself upon the body.

The philosophy of all this was, that Mrs Varden wanted to go to 
Chigwell; that she did not want to make any concession or 
explanation; that she would only go on being implored and entreated 
so to do; and that she would accept no other terms.  Accordingly, 
after a vast amount of moaning and crying upstairs, and much 
damping of foreheads, and vinegaring of temples, and hartshorning 
of noses, and so forth; and after most pathetic adjurations from 
Miggs, assisted by warm brandy-and-water not over-weak, and divers 
other cordials, also of a stimulating quality, administered at 
first in teaspoonfuls and afterwards in increasing doses, and of 
which Miss Miggs herself partook as a preventive measure (for 
fainting is infectious); after all these remedies, and many more 
too numerous to mention, but not to take, had been applied; and 
many verbal consolations, moral, religious, and miscellaneous, had 
been super-added thereto; the locksmith humbled himself, and the 
end was gained.

'If it's only for the sake of peace and quietness, father,' said 
Dolly, urging him to go upstairs.

'Oh, Doll, Doll,' said her good-natured father.  'If you ever have 
a husband of your own--'

Dolly glanced at the glass.

'--Well, WHEN you have,' said the locksmith, 'never faint, my 
darling.  More domestic unhappiness has come of easy fainting, 
Doll, than from all the greater passions put together.  Remember 
that, my dear, if you would be really happy, which you never can 
be, if your husband isn't.  And a word in your ear, my precious.  
Never have a Miggs about you!'

With this advice he kissed his blooming daughter on the cheek, and 
slowly repaired to Mrs Varden's room; where that lady, lying all 
pale and languid on her couch, was refreshing herself with a sight 
of her last new bonnet, which Miggs, as a means of calming her 
scattered spirits, displayed to the best advantage at her bedside.

'Here's master, mim,' said Miggs.  'Oh, what a happiness it is 
when man and wife come round again!  Oh gracious, to think that him 
and her should ever have a word together!'  In the energy of these 
sentiments, which were uttered as an apostrophe to the Heavens in 
general, Miss Miggs perched the bonnet on the top of her own head, 
and folding her hands, turned on her tears.

'I can't help it,' cried Miggs.  'I couldn't, if I was to be 
drownded in 'em.  She has such a forgiving spirit!  She'll forget 
all that has passed, and go along with you, sir--Oh, if it was to 
the world's end, she'd go along with you.'

Mrs Varden with a faint smile gently reproved her attendant for 
this enthusiasm, and reminded her at the same time that she was far 
too unwell to venture out that day.

'Oh no, you're not, mim, indeed you're not,' said Miggs; 'I repeal 
to master; master knows you're not, mim.  The hair, and motion of 
the shay, will do you good, mim, and you must not give way, you 
must not raly.  She must keep up, mustn't she, sir, for all out 
sakes?  I was a telling her that, just now.  She must remember us, 
even if she forgets herself.  Master will persuade you, mim, I'm 
sure.  There's Miss Dolly's a-going you know, and master, and you, 
and all so happy and so comfortable.  Oh!' cried Miggs, turning on 
the tears again, previous to quitting the room in great emotion, 'I 
never see such a blessed one as she is for the forgiveness of her 
spirit, I never, never, never did.  Not more did master neither; 
no, nor no one--never!'

For five minutes or thereabouts, Mrs Varden remained mildly opposed 
to all her husband's prayers that she would oblige him by taking a 
day's pleasure, but relenting at length, she suffered herself to be 
persuaded, and granting him her free forgiveness (the merit 
whereof, she meekly said, rested with the Manual and not with her), 
desired that Miggs might come and help her dress.  The handmaid 
attended promptly, and it is but justice to their joint exertions 
to record that, when the good lady came downstairs in course of 
time, completely decked out for the journey, she really looked as 
if nothing had happened, and appeared in the very best health 
imaginable.

As to Dolly, there she was again, the very pink and pattern of good 
looks, in a smart little cherry-coloured mantle, with a hood of 
the same drawn over her head, and upon the top of that hood, a 
little straw hat trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons, and worn the 
merest trifle on one side--just enough in short to make it the 
wickedest and most provoking head-dress that ever malicious 
milliner devised.  And not to speak of the manner in which these 
cherry-coloured decorations brightened her eyes, or vied with her 
lips, or shed a new bloom on her face, she wore such a cruel little 
muff, and such a heart-rending pair of shoes, and was so 
surrounded and hemmed in, as it were, by aggravations of all kinds, 
that when Mr Tappettit, holding the horse's head, saw her come out 
of the house alone, such impulses came over him to decoy her into 
the chaise and drive off like mad, that he would unquestionably 
have done it, but for certain uneasy doubts besetting him as to the 
shortest way to Gretna Green; whether it was up the street or 
down, or up the right-hand turning or the left; and whether, 
supposing all the turnpikes to be carried by storm, the blacksmith 
in the end would marry them on credit; which by reason of his 
clerical office appeared, even to his excited imagination, so 
unlikely, that he hesitated.  And while he stood hesitating, and 
looking post-chaises-and-six at Dolly, out came his master and his 
mistress, and the constant Miggs, and the opportunity was gone for 
ever.  For now the chaise creaked upon its springs, and Mrs Varden 
was inside; and now it creaked again, and more than ever, and the 
locksmith was inside; and now it bounded once, as if its heart beat 
lightly, and Dolly was inside; and now it was gone and its place 
was empty, and he and that dreary Miggs were standing in the street 
together.

The hearty locksmith was in as good a humour as if nothing had 
occurred for the last twelve months to put him out of his way, 
Dolly was all smiles and graces, and Mrs Varden was agreeable 
beyond all precedent.  As they jogged through the streets talking 
of this thing and of that, who should be descried upon the pavement 
but that very coachmaker, looking so genteel that nobody would have 
believed he had ever had anything to do with a coach but riding in 
it, and bowing like any nobleman.  To be sure Dolly was confused 
when she bowed again, and to be sure the cherry-coloured ribbons 
trembled a little when she met his mournful eye, which seemed to 
say, 'I have kept my word, I have begun, the business is going to 
the devil, and you're the cause of it.'  There he stood, rooted to 
the ground: as Dolly said, like a statue; and as Mrs Varden said, 
like a pump; till they turned the corner: and when her father 
thought it was like his impudence, and her mother wondered what he 
meant by it, Dolly blushed again till her very hood was pale.

But on they went, not the less merrily for this, and there was the 
locksmith in the incautious fulness of his heart 'pulling-up' at 
all manner of places, and evincing a most intimate acquaintance 
with all the taverns on the road, and all the landlords and all the 
landladies, with whom, indeed, the little horse was on equally 
friendly terms, for he kept on stopping of his own accord.  Never 
were people so glad to see other people as these landlords and 
landladies were to behold Mr Varden and Mrs Varden and Miss Varden; 
and wouldn't they get out, said one; and they really must walk 
upstairs, said another; and she would take it ill and be quite 
certain they were proud if they wouldn't have a little taste of 
something, said a third; and so on, that it was really quite a 
Progress rather than a ride, and one continued scene of hospitality 
from beginning to end.  It was pleasant enough to be held in such 
esteem, not to mention the refreshments; so Mrs Varden said nothing 
at the time, and was all affability and delight--but such a body of 
evidence as she collected against the unfortunate locksmith that 
day, to be used thereafter as occasion might require, never was got 
together for matrimonial purposes.

In course of time--and in course of a pretty long time too, for 
these agreeable interruptions delayed them not a little,--they 
arrived upon the skirts of the Forest, and riding pleasantly on 
among the trees, came at last to the Maypole, where the locksmith's 
cheerful 'Yoho!' speedily brought to the porch old John, and after 
him young Joe, both of whom were so transfixed at sight of the 
ladies, that for a moment they were perfectly unable to give them 
any welcome, and could do nothing but stare.

It was only for a moment, however, that Joe forgot himself, for 
speedily reviving he thrust his drowsy father aside--to Mr Willet's 
mighty and inexpressible indignation--and darting out, stood ready 
to help them to alight.  It was necessary for Dolly to get out 
first.  Joe had her in his arms;--yes, though for a space of time 
no longer than you could count one in, Joe had her in his arms.  
Here was a glimpse of happiness!

It would be difficult to describe what a flat and commonplace 
affair the helping Mrs Varden out afterwards was, but Joe did it, 
and did it too with the best grace in the world.  Then old John, 
who, entertaining a dull and foggy sort of idea that Mrs Varden 
wasn't fond of him, had been in some doubt whether she might not 
have come for purposes of assault and battery, took courage, hoped 
she was well, and offered to conduct her into the house.  This 
tender being amicably received, they marched in together; Joe and 
Dolly followed, arm-in-arm, (happiness again!) and Varden brought 
up the rear.

Old John would have it that they must sit in the bar, and nobody 
objecting, into the bar they went.  All bars are snug places, but 
the Maypole's was the very snuggest, cosiest, and completest bar, 
that ever the wit of man devised.  Such amazing bottles in old 
oaken pigeon-holes; such gleaming tankards dangling from pegs at 
about the same inclination as thirsty men would hold them to their 
lips; such sturdy little Dutch kegs ranged in rows on shelves; so 
many lemons hanging in separate nets, and forming the fragrant 
grove already mentioned in this chronicle, suggestive, with goodly 
loaves of snowy sugar stowed away hard by, of punch, idealised 
beyond all mortal knowledge; such closets, such presses, such 
drawers full of pipes, such places for putting things away in 
hollow window-seats, all crammed to the throat with eatables, 
drinkables, or savoury condiments; lastly, and to crown all, as 
typical of the immense resources of the establishment, and its 
defiances to all visitors to cut and come again, such a stupendous 
cheese!

It is a poor heart that never rejoices--it must have been the 
poorest, weakest, and most watery heart that ever beat, which would 
not have warmed towards the Maypole bar.  Mrs Varden's did 
directly.  She could no more have reproached John Willet among 
those household gods, the kegs and bottles, lemons, pipes, and 
cheese, than she could have stabbed him with his own bright 
carving-knife.  The order for dinner too--it might have soothed a 
savage.  'A bit of fish,' said John to the cook, 'and some lamb 
chops (breaded, with plenty of ketchup), and a good salad, and a 
roast spring chicken, with a dish of sausages and mashed potatoes, 
or something of that sort.'  Something of that sort!  The resources 
of these inns!  To talk carelessly about dishes, which in 
themselves were a first-rate holiday kind of dinner, suitable to 
one's wedding-day, as something of that sort: meaning, if you can't 
get a spring chicken, any other trifle in the way of poultry will 
do--such as a peacock, perhaps!  The kitchen too, with its great 
broad cavernous chimney; the kitchen, where nothing in the way of 
cookery seemed impossible; where you could believe in anything to 
eat, they chose to tell you of.  Mrs Varden returned from the 
contemplation of these wonders to the bar again, with a head quite 
dizzy and bewildered.  Her housekeeping capacity was not large 
enough to comprehend them.  She was obliged to go to sleep.  Waking 
was pain, in the midst of such immensity.

Dolly in the meanwhile, whose gay heart and head ran upon other 
matters, passed out at the garden door, and glancing back now and 
then (but of course not wondering whether Joe saw her), tripped 
away by a path across the fields with which she was well 
acquainted, to discharge her mission at the Warren; and this 
deponent hath been informed and verily believes, that you might 
have seen many less pleasant objects than the cherry-coloured 
mantle and ribbons, as they went fluttering along the green meadows 
in the bright light of the day, like giddy things as they were.



Chapter 20


The proud consciousness of her trust, and the great importance she 
derived from it, might have advertised it to all the house if she 
had had to run the gauntlet of its inhabitants; but as Dolly had 
played in every dull room and passage many and many a time, when a 
child, and had ever since been the humble friend of Miss Haredale, 
whose foster-sister she was, she was as free of the building as the 
young lady herself.  So, using no greater precaution than holding 
her breath and walking on tiptoe as she passed the library door, 
she went straight to Emma's room as a privileged visitor.

It was the liveliest room in the building.  The chamber was sombre 
like the rest for the matter of that, but the presence of youth and 
beauty would make a prison cheerful (saving alas! that confinement 
withers them), and lend some charms of their own to the gloomiest 
scene.  Birds, flowers, books, drawing, music, and a hundred such 
graceful tokens of feminine loves and cares, filled it with more of 
life and human sympathy than the whole house besides seemed made to 
hold.  There was heart in the room; and who that has a heart, ever 
fails to recognise the silent presence of another!

Dolly had one undoubtedly, and it was not a tough one either, 
though there was a little mist of coquettishness about it, such as 
sometimes surrounds that sun of life in its morning, and slightly 
dims its lustre.  Thus, when Emma rose to greet her, and kissing 
her affectionately on the cheek, told her, in her quiet way, that 
she had been very unhappy, the tears stood in Dolly's eyes, and she 
felt more sorry than she could tell; but next moment she happened 
to raise them to the glass, and really there was something there so 
exceedingly agreeable, that as she sighed, she smiled, and felt 
surprisingly consoled.

'I have heard about it, miss,' said Dolly, 'and it's very sad 
indeed, but when things are at the worst they are sure to mend.'

'But are you sure they are at the worst?' asked Emma with a smile.

'Why, I don't see how they can very well be more unpromising than 
they are; I really don't,' said Dolly.  'And I bring something to 
begin with.'

'Not from Edward?'

Dolly nodded and smiled, and feeling in her pockets (there were 
pockets in those days) with an affectation of not being able to 
find what she wanted, which greatly enhanced her importance, at 
length produced the letter.  As Emma hastily broke the seal and 
became absorbed in its contents, Dolly's eyes, by one of those 
strange accidents for which there is no accounting, wandered to the 
glass again.  She could not help wondering whether the coach-maker 
suffered very much, and quite pitied the poor man.

It was a long letter--a very long letter, written close on all four 
sides of the sheet of paper, and crossed afterwards; but it was not 
a consolatory letter, for as Emma read it she stopped from time to 
time to put her handkerchief to her eyes.  To be sure Dolly 
marvelled greatly to see her in so much distress, for to her 
thinking a love affair ought to be one of the best jokes, and the 
slyest, merriest kind of thing in life.  But she set it down in her 
own mind that all this came from Miss Haredale's being so constant, 
and that if she would only take on with some other young gentleman--
just in the most innocent way possible, to keep her first lover up 
to the mark--she would find herself inexpressibly comforted.

'I am sure that's what I should do if it was me,' thought Dolly.  
'To make one's sweetheart miserable is well enough and quite right, 
but to be made miserable one's self is a little too much!'

However it wouldn't do to say so, and therefore she sat looking on 
in silence.  She needed a pretty considerable stretch of patience, 
for when the long letter had been read once all through it was read 
again, and when it had been read twice all through it was read 
again.  During this tedious process, Dolly beguiled the time in the 
most improving manner that occurred to her, by curling her hair on 
her fingers, with the aid of the looking-glass before mentioned, 
and giving it some killing twists.

Everything has an end.  Even young ladies in love cannot read their 
letters for ever.  In course of time the packet was folded up, and 
it only remained to write the answer.

But as this promised to be a work of time likewise, Emma said she 
would put it off until after dinner, and that Dolly must dine with 
her.  As Dolly had made up her mind to do so beforehand, she 
required very little pressing; and when they had settled this 
point, they went to walk in the garden.

They strolled up and down the terrace walks, talking incessantly--
at least, Dolly never left off once--and making that quarter of the 
sad and mournful house quite gay.  Not that they talked loudly or 
laughed much, but they were both so very handsome, and it was such 
a breezy day, and their light dresses and dark curls appeared so 
free and joyous in their abandonment, and Emma was so fair, and 
Dolly so rosy, and Emma so delicately shaped, and Dolly so plump, 
and--in short, there are no flowers for any garden like such 
flowers, let horticulturists say what they may, and both house and 
garden seemed to know it, and to brighten up sensibly.

After this, came the dinner and the letter writing, and some more 
talking, in the course of which Miss Haredale took occasion to 
charge upon Dolly certain flirtish and inconstant propensities, 
which accusations Dolly seemed to think very complimentary indeed, 
and to be mightily amused with.  Finding her quite incorrigible in 
this respect, Emma suffered her to depart; but not before she had 
confided to her that important and never-sufficiently-to-be-taken-
care-of answer, and endowed her moreover with a pretty little 
bracelet as a keepsake.  Having clasped it on her arm, and again 
advised her half in jest and half in earnest to amend her roguish 
ways, for she knew she was fond of Joe at heart (which Dolly 
stoutly denied, with a great many haughty protestations that she 
hoped she could do better than that indeed! and so forth), she bade 
her farewell; and after calling her back to give her more 
supplementary messages for Edward, than anybody with tenfold the 
gravity of Dolly Varden could be reasonably expected to remember, 
at length dismissed her.

Dolly bade her good bye, and tripping lightly down the stairs 
arrived at the dreaded library door, and was about to pass it again 
on tiptoe, when it opened, and behold! there stood Mr Haredale.  
Now, Dolly had from her childhood associated with this gentleman 
the idea of something grim and ghostly, and being at the moment 
conscience-stricken besides, the sight of him threw her into such a 
flurry that she could neither acknowledge his presence nor run 
away, so she gave a great start, and then with downcast eyes stood 
still and trembled.

'Come here, girl,' said Mr Haredale, taking her by the hand.  'I 
want to speak to you.'

'If you please, sir, I'm in a hurry,' faltered Dolly, 'and--you 
have frightened me by coming so suddenly upon me, sir--I would 
rather go, sir, if you'll be so good as to let me.'

'Immediately,' said Mr Haredale, who had by this time led her into 
the room and closed the door.  You shall go directly.  You have 
just left Emma?'

'Yes, sir, just this minute.--Father's waiting for me, sir, if 
you'll please to have the goodness--'

I know.  I know,' said Mr Haredale.  'Answer me a question.  What 
did you bring here to-day?' 

'Bring here, sir?' faltered Dolly.  

'You will tell me the truth, I am sure.  Yes.'

Dolly hesitated for a little while, and somewhat emboldened by his 
manner, said at last, 'Well then, sir.  It was a letter.'

'From Mr Edward Chester, of course.  And you are the bearer of the 
answer?'

Dolly hesitated again, and not being able to decide upon any other 
course of action, burst into tears.

'You alarm yourself without cause,' said Mr Haredale.  'Why are you 
so foolish?  Surely you can answer me.  You know that I have but 
to put the question to Emma and learn the truth directly.  Have you 
the answer with you?'

Dolly had what is popularly called a spirit of her own, and being 
now fairly at bay, made the best of it.

'Yes, sir,' she rejoined, trembling and frightened as she was.  
'Yes, sir, I have.  You may kill me if you please, sir, but I won't 
give it up.  I'm very sorry,--but I won't.  There, sir.'

'I commend your firmness and your plain-speaking,' said Mr 
Haredale.  'Rest assured that I have as little desire to take your 
letter as your life.  You are a very discreet messenger and a good 
girl.'

Not feeling quite certain, as she afterwards said, whether he might 
not be 'coming over her' with these compliments, Dolly kept as far 
from him as she could, cried again, and resolved to defend her 
pocket (for the letter was there) to the last extremity.

'I have some design,' said Mr Haredale after a short silence, 
during which a smile, as he regarded her, had struggled through 
the gloom and melancholy that was natural to his face, 'of 
providing a companion for my niece; for her life is a very lonely 
one.  Would you like the office?  You are the oldest friend she 
has, and the best entitled to it.'

'I don't know, sir,' answered Dolly, not sure but he was bantering 
her; 'I can't say.  I don't know what they might wish at home.  I 
couldn't give an opinion, sir.'

'If your friends had no objection, would you have any?' said Mr 
Haredale.  'Come.  There's a plain question; and easy to answer.'

'None at all that I know of sir,' replied Dolly.  'I should be very 
glad to be near Miss Emma of course, and always am.'

'That's well,' said Mr Haredale.  'That is all I had to say.  You 
are anxious to go.  Don't let me detain you.'

Dolly didn't let him, nor did she wait for him to try, for the 
words had no sooner passed his lips than she was out of the room, 
out of the house, and in the fields again.

The first thing to be done, of course, when she came to herself and 
considered what a flurry she had been in, was to cry afresh; and 
the next thing, when she reflected how well she had got over it, 
was to laugh heartily.  The tears once banished gave place to the 
smiles, and at last Dolly laughed so much that she was fain to lean 
against a tree, and give vent to her exultation.  When she could 
laugh no longer, and was quite tired, she put her head-dress to 
rights, dried her eyes, looked back very merrily and triumphantly 
at the Warren chimneys, which were just visible, and resumed her 
walk.

The twilight had come on, and it was quickly growing dusk, but the 
path was so familiar to her from frequent traversing that she 
hardly thought of this, and certainly felt no uneasiness at being 
left alone.  Moreover, there was the bracelet to admire; and when 
she had given it a good rub, and held it out at arm's length, it 
sparkled and glittered so beautifully on her wrist, that to look at 
it in every point of view and with every possible turn of the arm, 
was quite an absorbing business.  There was the letter too, and it 
looked so mysterious and knowing, when she took it out of her 
pocket, and it held, as she knew, so much inside, that to turn it 
over and over, and think about it, and wonder how it began, and how 
it ended, and what it said all through, was another matter of 
constant occupation.  Between the bracelet and the letter, there 
was quite enough to do without thinking of anything else; and 
admiring each by turns, Dolly went on gaily.

As she passed through a wicket-gate to where the path was narrow, 
and lay between two hedges garnished here and there with trees, she 
heard a rustling close at hand, which brought her to a sudden stop.  
She listened.  All was very quiet, and she went on again--not 
absolutely frightened, but a little quicker than before perhaps, 
and possibly not quite so much at her ease, for a check of that 
kind is startling.

She had no sooner moved on again, than she was conscious of the 
same sound, which was like that of a person tramping stealthily 
among bushes and brushwood.  Looking towards the spot whence it 
appeared to come, she almost fancied she could make out a crouching 
figure.  She stopped again.  All was quiet as before.  On she went 
once more--decidedly faster now--and tried to sing softly to 
herself.  It must he the wind.

But how came the wind to blow only when she walked, and cease when 
she stood still?  She stopped involuntarily as she made the 
reflection, and the rustling noise stopped likewise.  She was 
really frightened now, and was yet hesitating what to do, when the 
bushes crackled and snapped, and a man came plunging through them, 
close before her.



Chapter 21


It was for the moment an inexpressible relief to Dolly, to 
recognise in the person who forced himself into the path so 
abruptly, and now stood directly in her way, Hugh of the Maypole, 
whose name she uttered in a tone of delighted surprise that came 
from her heart.

'Was it you?' she said, 'how glad I am to see you! and how could 
you terrify me so!'

In answer to which, he said nothing at all, but stood quite still, 
looking at her.

'Did you come to meet me?' asked Dolly.

Hugh nodded, and muttered something to the effect that he had been 
waiting for her, and had expected her sooner.

'I thought it likely they would send,' said Dolly, greatly 
reassured by this.

'Nobody sent me,' was his sullen answer.  'I came of my own 
accord.'

The rough bearing of this fellow, and his wild, uncouth appearance, 
had often filled the girl with a vague apprehension even when other 
people were by, and had occasioned her to shrink from him 
involuntarily.  The having him for an unbidden companion in so 
solitary a place, with the darkness fast gathering about them, 
renewed and even increased the alarm she had felt at first.

If his manner had been merely dogged and passively fierce, as 
usual, she would have had no greater dislike to his company than 
she always felt--perhaps, indeed, would have been rather glad to 
have had him at hand.  But there was something of coarse bold 
admiration in his look, which terrified her very much.  She glanced 
timidly towards him, uncertain whether to go forward or retreat, 
and he stood gazing at her like a handsome satyr; and so they 
remained for some short time without stirring or breaking silence.  
At length Dolly took courage, shot past him, and hurried on.

'Why do you spend so much breath in avoiding me?' said Hugh, 
accommodating his pace to hers, and keeping close at her side.

'I wish to get back as quickly as I can, and you walk too near me, 
answered Dolly.'

'Too near!' said Hugh, stooping over her so that she could feel his 
breath upon her forehead.  'Why too near?  You're always proud to 
ME, mistress.'

'I am proud to no one.  You mistake me,' answered Dolly.  'Fall 
back, if you please, or go on.'

'Nay, mistress,' he rejoined, endeavouring to draw her arm through 
his, 'I'll walk with you.'

She released herself and clenching her little hand, struck him with 
right good will.  At this, Maypole Hugh burst into a roar of 
laughter, and passing his arm about her waist, held her in his 
strong grasp as easily as if she had been a bird.

'Ha ha ha!  Well done, mistress!  Strike again.  You shall beat my 
face, and tear my hair, and pluck my beard up by the roots, and 
welcome, for the sake of your bright eyes.  Strike again, mistress.  
Do.  Ha ha ha!  I like it.'

'Let me go,' she cried, endeavouring with both her hands to push 
him off.  'Let me go this moment.'

'You had as good be kinder to me, Sweetlips,' said Hugh.  'You had, 
indeed.  Come.  Tell me now.  Why are you always so proud?  I 
don't quarrel with you for it.  I love you when you're proud.  Ha 
ha ha!  You can't hide your beauty from a poor fellow; that's a 
comfort!'

She gave him no answer, but as he had not yet checked her progress, 
continued to press forward as rapidly as she could.  At length, 
between the hurry she had made, her terror, and the tightness of 
his embrace, her strength failed her, and she could go no further.

'Hugh,' cried the panting girl, 'good Hugh; if you will leave me I 
will give you anything--everything I have--and never tell one word 
of this to any living creature.'

'You had best not,' he answered.  'Harkye, little dove, you had 
best not.  All about here know me, and what I dare do if I have a 
mind.  If ever you are going to tell, stop when the words are on 
your lips, and think of the mischief you'll bring, if you do, upon 
some innocent heads that you wouldn't wish to hurt a hair of.  
Bring trouble on me, and I'll bring trouble and something more on 
them in return.  I care no more for them than for so many dogs; not 
so much--why should I?  I'd sooner kill a man than a dog any day.  
I've never been sorry for a man's death in all my life, and I have 
for a dog's.'

There was something so thoroughly savage in the manner of these 
expressions, and the looks and gestures by which they were 
accompanied, that her great fear of him gave her new strength, and 
enabled her by a sudden effort to extricate herself and run fleetly 
from him.  But Hugh was as nimble, strong, and swift of foot, as 
any man in broad England, and it was but a fruitless expenditure of 
energy, for he had her in his encircling arms again before she had 
gone a hundred yards.

'Softly, darling--gently--would you fly from rough Hugh, that loves 
you as well as any drawing-room gallant?'

'I would,' she answered, struggling to free herself again.  'I 
will.  Help!'

'A fine for crying out,' said Hugh.  'Ha ha ha!  A fine, pretty 
one, from your lips.  I pay myself!  Ha ha ha!'

'Help! help! help!'  As she shrieked with the utmost violence she 
could exert, a shout was heard in answer, and another, and another.

'Thank Heaven!' cried the girl in an ecstasy.  'Joe, dear Joe, this 
way.  Help!'

Her assailant paused, and stood irresolute for a moment, but the 
shouts drawing nearer and coming quick upon them, forced him to a 
speedy decision.  He released her, whispered with a menacing look, 
'Tell HIM: and see what follows!' and leaping the hedge, was gone 
in an instant.  Dolly darted off, and fairly ran into Joe Willet's 
open arms.

'What is the matter? are you hurt? what was it? who was it? where 
is he? what was he like?' with a great many encouraging expressions 
and assurances of safety, were the first words Joe poured forth.  
But poor little Dolly was so breathless and terrified that for some 
time she was quite unable to answer him, and hung upon his 
shoulder, sobbing and crying as if her heart would break.

Joe had not the smallest objection to have her hanging on his 
shoulder; no, not the least, though it crushed the cherry-coloured 
ribbons sadly, and put the smart little hat out of all shape.  But 
he couldn't bear to see her cry; it went to his very heart.  He 
tried to console her, bent over her, whispered to her--some say 
kissed her, but that's a fable.  At any rate he said all the kind 
and tender things he could think of and Dolly let him go on and 
didn't interrupt him once, and it was a good ten minutes before she 
was able to raise her head and thank him.

'What was it that frightened you?' said Joe.

A man whose person was unknown to her had followed her, she 
answered; he began by begging, and went on to threats of robbery, 
which he was on the point of carrying into execution, and would 
have executed, but for Joe's timely aid.  The hesitation and 
confusion with which she said this, Joe attributed to the fright 
she had sustained, and no suspicion of the truth occurred to him 
for a moment.

'Stop when the words are on your lips.'  A hundred times that 
night, and very often afterwards, when the disclosure was rising 
to her tongue, Dolly thought of that, and repressed it.  A deeply 
rooted dread of the man; the conviction that his ferocious nature, 
once roused, would stop at nothing; and the strong assurance that 
if she impeached him, the full measure of his wrath and vengeance 
would be wreaked on Joe, who had preserved her; these were 
considerations she had not the courage to overcome, and inducements 
to secrecy too powerful for her to surmount.

Joe, for his part, was a great deal too happy to inquire very 
curiously into the matter; and Dolly being yet too tremulous to 
walk without assistance, they went forward very slowly, and in his 
mind very pleasantly, until the Maypole lights were near at hand, 
twinkling their cheerful welcome, when Dolly stopped suddenly and 
with a half scream exclaimed,

'The letter!'

'What letter?' cried Joe.

'That I was carrying--I had it in my hand.  My bracelet too,' she 
said, clasping her wrist.  'I have lost them both.'

'Do you mean just now?' said Joe.

'Either I dropped them then, or they were taken from me,' answered 
Dolly, vainly searching her pocket and rustling her dress.  'They 
are gone, both gone.  What an unhappy girl I am!'  With these words 
poor Dolly, who to do her justice was quite as sorry for the loss 
of the letter as for her bracelet, fell a-crying again, and 
bemoaned her fate most movingly.

Joe tried to comfort her with the assurance that directly he had 
housed her in the Maypole, he would return to the spot with a 
lantern (for it was now quite dark) and make strict search for the 
missing articles, which there was great probability of his finding, 
as it was not likely that anybody had passed that way since, and 
she was not conscious that they had been forcibly taken from her.  
Dolly thanked him very heartily for this offer, though with no 
great hope of his quest being successful; and so with many 
lamentations on her side, and many hopeful words on his, and much 
weakness on the part of Dolly and much tender supporting on the 
part of Joe, they reached the Maypole bar at last, where the 
locksmith and his wife and old John were yet keeping high festival.

Mr Willet received the intelligence of Dolly's trouble with that 
surprising presence of mind and readiness of speech for which he 
was so eminently distinguished above all other men.  Mrs Varden 
expressed her sympathy for her daughter's distress by scolding her 
roundly for being so late; and the honest locksmith divided himself 
between condoling with and kissing Dolly, and shaking hands 
heartily with Joe, whom he could not sufficiently praise or thank.

In reference to this latter point, old John was far from agreeing 
with his friend; for besides that he by no means approved of an 
adventurous spirit in the abstract, it occurred to him that if his 
son and heir had been seriously damaged in a scuffle, the 
consequences would assuredly have been expensive and inconvenient, 
and might perhaps have proved detrimental to the Maypole business.  
Wherefore, and because he looked with no favourable eye upon young 
girls, but rather considered that they and the whole female sex 
were a kind of nonsensical mistake on the part of Nature, he took 
occasion to retire and shake his head in private at the boiler; 
inspired by which silent oracle, he was moved to give Joe various 
stealthy nudges with his elbow, as a parental reproof and gentle 
admonition to mind his own business and not make a fool of himself.

Joe, however, took down the lantern and lighted it; and arming 
himself with a stout stick, asked whether Hugh was in the stable.

'He's lying asleep before the kitchen fire, sir,' said Mr Willet.  
'What do you want him for?'

'I want him to come with me to look after this bracelet and 
letter,' answered Joe.  'Halloa there!  Hugh!'

Dolly turned pale as death, and felt as if she must faint 
forthwith.  After a few moments, Hugh came staggering in, 
stretching himself and yawning according to custom, and presenting 
every appearance of having been roused from a sound nap.

'Here, sleepy-head,' said Joe, giving him the lantern.  'Carry 
this, and bring the dog, and that small cudgel of yours.  And woe 
betide the fellow if we come upon him.'

'What fellow?' growled Hugh, rubbing his eyes and shaking himself.

'What fellow?' returned Joe, who was in a state of great valour and 
bustle; 'a fellow you ought to know of and be more alive about.  
It's well for the like of you, lazy giant that you are, to be 
snoring your time away in chimney-corners, when honest men's 
daughters can't cross even our quiet meadows at nightfall without 
being set upon by footpads, and frightened out of their precious 
lives.'

'They never rob me,' cried Hugh with a laugh.  'I have got nothing 
to lose.  But I'd as lief knock them at head as any other men.  How 
many are there?'

'Only one,' said Dolly faintly, for everybody looked at her.

'And what was he like, mistress?' said Hugh with a glance at young 
Willet, so slight and momentary that the scowl it conveyed was lost 
on all but her.  'About my height?'

'Not--not so tall,' Dolly replied, scarce knowing what she said.

'His dress,' said Hugh, looking at her keenly, 'like--like any of 
ours now?  I know all the people hereabouts, and maybe could give a 
guess at the man, if I had anything to guide me.'

Dolly faltered and turned paler yet; then answered that he was 
wrapped in a loose coat and had his face hidden by a handkerchief 
and that she could give no other description of him.

'You wouldn't know him if you saw him then, belike?' said Hugh with 
a malicious grin.

'I should not,' answered Dolly, bursting into tears again.  'I 
don't wish to see him.  I can't bear to think of him.  I can't talk 
about him any more.  Don't go to look for these things, Mr Joe, 
pray don't.  I entreat you not to go with that man.'

'Not to go with me!' cried Hugh.  'I'm too rough for them all.  
They're all afraid of me.  Why, bless you mistress, I've the 
tenderest heart alive.  I love all the ladies, ma'am,' said Hugh, 
turning to the locksmith's wife.

Mrs Varden opined that if he did, he ought to be ashamed of 
himself; such sentiments being more consistent (so she argued) with 
a benighted Mussulman or wild Islander than with a stanch 
Protestant.  Arguing from this imperfect state of his morals, Mrs 
Varden further opined that he had never studied the Manual.  Hugh 
admitting that he never had, and moreover that he couldn't read, 
Mrs Varden declared with much severity, that he ought to he even 
more ashamed of himself than before, and strongly recommended him 
to save up his pocket-money for the purchase of one, and further to 
teach himself the contents with all convenient diligence.  She was 
still pursuing this train of discourse, when Hugh, somewhat 
unceremoniously and irreverently, followed his young master out, 
and left her to edify the rest of the company.  This she proceeded 
to do, and finding that Mr Willet's eyes were fixed upon her with 
an appearance of deep attention, gradually addressed the whole of 
her discourse to him, whom she entertained with a moral and 
theological lecture of considerable length, in the conviction that 
great workings were taking place in his spirit.  The simple truth 
was, however, that Mr Willet, although his eyes were wide open and 
he saw a woman before him whose head by long and steady looking at 
seemed to grow bigger and bigger until it filled the whole bar, was 
to all other intents and purposes fast asleep; and so sat leaning 
back in his chair with his hands in his pockets until his son's 
return caused him to wake up with a deep sigh, and a faint 
impression that he had been dreaming about pickled pork and greens--
a vision of his slumbers which was no doubt referable to the 
circumstance of Mrs Varden's having frequently pronounced the word 
'Grace' with much emphasis; which word, entering the portals of Mr 
Willet's brain as they stood ajar, and coupling itself with the 
words 'before meat,' which were there ranging about, did in time 
suggest a particular kind of meat together with that description of 
vegetable which is usually its companion.

The search was wholly unsuccessful.  Joe had groped along the path 
a dozen times, and among the grass, and in the dry ditch, and in 
the hedge, but all in vain.  Dolly, who was quite inconsolable for 
her loss, wrote a note to Miss Haredale giving her the same account 
of it that she had given at the Maypole, which Joe undertook to 
deliver as soon as the family were stirring next day.  That done, 
they sat down to tea in the bar, where there was an uncommon 
display of buttered toast, and--in order that they might not grow 
faint for want of sustenance, and might have a decent halting-
place or halfway house between dinner and supper--a few savoury 
trifles in the shape of great rashers of broiled ham, which being 
well cured, done to a turn, and smoking hot, sent forth a tempting 
and delicious fragrance.

Mrs Varden was seldom very Protestant at meals, unless it happened 
that they were underdone, or overdone, or indeed that anything 
occurred to put her out of humour.  Her spirits rose considerably 
on beholding these goodly preparations, and from the nothingness of 
good works, she passed to the somethingness of ham and toast with 
great cheerfulness.  Nay, under the influence of these wholesome 
stimulants, she sharply reproved her daughter for being low and 
despondent (which she considered an unacceptable frame of mind), 
and remarked, as she held her own plate for a fresh supply, that it 
would be well for Dolly, who pined over the loss of a toy and a 
sheet of paper, if she would reflect upon the voluntary sacrifices 
of the missionaries in foreign parts who lived chiefly on salads.

The proceedings of such a day occasion various fluctuations in the 
human thermometer, and especially in instruments so sensitively and 
delicately constructed as Mrs Varden.  Thus, at dinner Mrs V. stood 
at summer heat; genial, smiling, and delightful.  After dinner, in 
the sunshine of the wine, she went up at least half-a-dozen 
degrees, and was perfectly enchanting.  As its effect subsided, she 
fell rapidly, went to sleep for an hour or so at temperate, and 
woke at something below freezing.  Now she was at summer heat 
again, in the shade; and when tea was over, and old John, producing 
a bottle of cordial from one of the oaken cases, insisted on her 
sipping two glasses thereof in slow succession, she stood steadily 
at ninety for one hour and a quarter.  Profiting by experience, the 
locksmith took advantage of this genial weather to smoke his pipe 
in the porch, and in consequence of this prudent management, he was 
fully prepared, when the glass went down again, to start homewards 
directly.

The horse was accordingly put in, and the chaise brought round to 
the door.  Joe, who would on no account be dissuaded from escorting 
them until they had passed the most dreary and solitary part of the 
road, led out the grey mare at the same time; and having helped 
Dolly into her seat (more happiness!) sprung gaily into the saddle.  
Then, after many good nights, and admonitions to wrap up, and 
glancing of lights, and handing in of cloaks and shawls, the chaise 
rolled away, and Joe trotted beside it--on Dolly's side, no doubt, 
and pretty close to the wheel too.



Chapter 22


It was a fine bright night, and for all her lowness of spirits 
Dolly kept looking up at the stars in a manner so bewitching (and 
SHE knew it!) that Joe was clean out of his senses, and plainly 
showed that if ever a man were--not to say over head and ears, but 
over the Monument and the top of Saint Paul's in love, that man was 
himself.  The road was a very good one; not at all a jolting road, 
or an uneven one; and yet Dolly held the side of the chaise with 
one little hand, all the way.  If there had been an executioner 
behind him with an uplifted axe ready to chop off his head if he 
touched that hand, Joe couldn't have helped doing it.  From putting 
his own hand upon it as if by chance, and taking it away again 
after a minute or so, he got to riding along without taking it off 
at all; as if he, the escort, were bound to do that as an important 
part of his duty, and had come out for the purpose.  The most 
curious circumstance about this little incident was, that Dolly 
didn't seem to know of it.  She looked so innocent and unconscious 
when she turned her eyes on Joe, that it was quite provoking.

She talked though; talked about her fright, and about Joe's coming 
up to rescue her, and about her gratitude, and about her fear that 
she might not have thanked him enough, and about their always being 
friends from that time forth--and about all that sort of thing.  
And when Joe said, not friends he hoped, Dolly was quite surprised, 
and said not enemies she hoped; and when Joe said, couldn't they be 
something much better than either, Dolly all of a sudden found out 
a star which was brighter than all the other stars, and begged to 
call his attention to the same, and was ten thousand times more 
innocent and unconscious than ever.

In this manner they travelled along, talking very little above a 
whisper, and wishing the road could be stretched out to some dozen 
times its natural length--at least that was Joe's desire--when, as 
they were getting clear of the forest and emerging on the more 
frequented road, they heard behind them the sound of a horse's feet 
at a round trot, which growing rapidly louder as it drew nearer, 
elicited a scream from Mrs Varden, and the cry 'a friend!' from the 
rider, who now came panting up, and checked his horse beside them.

'This man again!' cried Dolly, shuddering.

'Hugh!' said Joe.  'What errand are you upon?'

'I come to ride back with you,' he answered, glancing covertly at 
the locksmith's daughter.  'HE sent me.

'My father!' said poor Joe; adding under his breath, with a very 
unfilial apostrophe, 'Will he never think me man enough to take 
care of myself!'

'Aye!' returned Hugh to the first part of the inquiry.  'The roads 
are not safe just now, he says, and you'd better have a companion.'

'Ride on then,' said Joe.  'I'm not going to turn yet.'

Hugh complied, and they went on again.  It was his whim or humour 
to ride immediately before the chaise, and from this position he 
constantly turned his head, and looked back.  Dolly felt that he 
looked at her, but she averted her eyes and feared to raise them 
once, so great was the dread with which he had inspired her.

This interruption, and the consequent wakefulness of Mrs Varden, 
who had been nodding in her sleep up to this point, except for a 
minute or two at a time, when she roused herself to scold the 
locksmith for audaciously taking hold of her to prevent her nodding 
herself out of the chaise, put a restraint upon the whispered 
conversation, and made it difficult of resumption.  Indeed, before 
they had gone another mile, Gabriel stopped at his wife's desire, 
and that good lady protested she would not hear of Joe's going a 
step further on any account whatever.  It was in vain for Joe to 
protest on the other hand that he was by no means tired, and would 
turn back presently, and would see them safely past such a point, 
and so forth.  Mrs Varden was obdurate, and being so was not to be 
overcome by mortal agency.

'Good night--if I must say it,' said Joe, sorrowfully.

'Good night,' said Dolly.  She would have added, 'Take care of that 
man, and pray don't trust him,' but he had turned his horse's head, 
and was standing close to them.  She had therefore nothing for it 
but to suffer Joe to give her hand a gentle squeeze, and when the 
chaise had gone on for some distance, to look back and wave it, as 
he still lingered on the spot where they had parted, with the tall 
dark figure of Hugh beside him.

What she thought about, going home; and whether the coach-maker 
held as favourable a place in her meditations as he had occupied in 
the morning, is unknown.  They reached home at last--at last, for 
it was a long way, made none the shorter by Mrs Varden's grumbling.  
Miggs hearing the sound of wheels was at the door immediately.

'Here they are, Simmun!  Here they are!' cried Miggs, clapping her 
hands, and issuing forth to help her mistress to alight.  'Bring a 
chair, Simmun.  Now, an't you the better for it, mim?  Don't you 
feel more yourself than you would have done if you'd have stopped 
at home?  Oh, gracious! how cold you are!  Goodness me, sir, she's 
a perfect heap of ice.'

'I can't help it, my good girl.  You had better take her in to the 
fire,' said the locksmith.

'Master sounds unfeeling, mim,' said Miggs, in a tone of 
commiseration, 'but such is not his intentions, I'm sure.  After 
what he has seen of you this day, I never will believe but that he 
has a deal more affection in his heart than to speak unkind.  Come 
in and sit yourself down by the fire; there's a good dear--do.'

Mrs Varden complied.  The locksmith followed with his hands in his 
pockets, and Mr Tappertit trundled off with the chaise to a 
neighbouring stable.

'Martha, my dear,' said the locksmith, when they reached the 
parlour, 'if you'll look to Dolly yourself or let somebody else do 
it, perhaps it will be only kind and reasonable.  She has been 
frightened, you know, and is not at all well to-night.'

In fact, Dolly had thrown herself upon the sofa, quite regardless 
of all the little finery of which she had been so proud in the 
morning, and with her face buried in her hands was crying very 
much.

At first sight of this phenomenon (for Dolly was by no means 
accustomed to displays of this sort, rather learning from her 
mother's example to avoid them as much as possible) Mrs Varden 
expressed her belief that never was any woman so beset as she; that 
her life was a continued scene of trial; that whenever she was 
disposed to be well and cheerful, so sure were the people around 
her to throw, by some means or other, a damp upon her spirits; and 
that, as she had enjoyed herself that day, and Heaven knew it was 
very seldom she did enjoy herself so she was now to pay the 
penalty.  To all such propositions Miggs assented freely.  Poor 
Dolly, however, grew none the better for these restoratives, but 
rather worse, indeed; and seeing that she was really ill, both Mrs 
Varden and Miggs were moved to compassion, and tended her in 
earnest.

But even then, their very kindness shaped itself into their usual 
course of policy, and though Dolly was in a swoon, it was rendered 
clear to the meanest capacity, that Mrs Varden was the sufferer.  
Thus when Dolly began to get a little better, and passed into that 
stage in which matrons hold that remonstrance and argument may be 
successfully applied, her mother represented to her, with tears in 
her eyes, that if she had been flurried and worried that day, she 
must remember it was the common lot of humanity, and in especial of 
womankind, who through the whole of their existence must expect no 
less, and were bound to make up their minds to meek endurance and 
patient resignation.  Mrs Varden entreated her to remember that one 
of these days she would, in all probability, have to do violence to 
her feelings so far as to be married; and that marriage, as she 
might see every day of her life (and truly she did) was a state 
requiring great fortitude and forbearance.  She represented to her 
in lively colours, that if she (Mrs V.) had not, in steering her 
course through this vale of tears, been supported by a strong 
principle of duty which alone upheld and prevented her from 
drooping, she must have been in her grave many years ago; in which 
case she desired to know what would have become of that errant 
spirit (meaning the locksmith), of whose eye she was the very 
apple, and in whose path she was, as it were, a shining light and 
guiding star?

Miss Miggs also put in her word to the same effect.  She said that 
indeed and indeed Miss Dolly might take pattern by her blessed 
mother, who, she always had said, and always would say, though she 
were to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for it next minute, was 
the mildest, amiablest, forgivingest-spirited, longest-sufferingest 
female as ever she could have believed; the mere narration of whose 
excellencies had worked such a wholesome change in the mind of her 
own sister-in-law, that, whereas, before, she and her husband lived 
like cat and dog, and were in the habit of exchanging brass 
candlesticks, pot-lids, flat-irons, and other such strong 
resentments, they were now the happiest and affectionatest couple 
upon earth; as could be proved any day on application at Golden 
Lion Court, number twenty-sivin, second bell-handle on the right-
hand doorpost.  After glancing at herself as a comparatively 
worthless vessel, but still as one of some desert, she besought her 
to bear in mind that her aforesaid dear and only mother was of a 
weakly constitution and excitable temperament, who had constantly 
to sustain afflictions in domestic life, compared with which 
thieves and robbers were as nothing, and yet never sunk down or 
gave way to despair or wrath, but, in prize-fighting phraseology, 
always came up to time with a cheerful countenance, and went in to 
win as if nothing had happened.  When Miggs finished her solo, her 
mistress struck in again, and the two together performed a duet to 
the same purpose; the burden being, that Mrs Varden was persecuted 
perfection, and Mr Varden, as the representative of mankind in that 
apartment, a creature of vicious and brutal habits, utterly 
insensible to the blessings he enjoyed.  Of so refined a character, 
indeed, was their talent of assault under the mask of sympathy, 
that when Dolly, recovering, embraced her father tenderly, as in 
vindication of his goodness, Mrs Varden expressed her solemn hope 
that this would be a lesson to him for the remainder of his life, 
and that he would do some little justice to a woman's nature ever 
afterwards--in which aspiration Miss Miggs, by divers sniffs and 
coughs, more significant than the longest oration, expressed her 
entire concurrence.

But the great joy of Miggs's heart was, that she not only picked up 
a full account of what had happened, but had the exquisite delight 
of conveying it to Mr Tappertit for his jealousy and torture.  For 
that gentleman, on account of Dolly's indisposition, had been 
requested to take his supper in the workshop, and it was conveyed 
thither by Miss Miggs's own fair hands.

'Oh Simmun!' said the young lady, 'such goings on to-day!  Oh, 
gracious me, Simmun!'

Mr Tappertit, who was not in the best of humours, and who 
disliked Miss Miggs more when she laid her hand on her heart and 
panted for breath than at any other time, as her deficiency of 
outline was most apparent under such circumstances, eyed her over 
in his loftiest style, and deigned to express no curiosity 
whatever.

'I never heard the like, nor nobody else,' pursued Miggs.  'The 
idea of interfering with HER.  What people can see in her to make 
it worth their while to do so, that's the joke--he he he!'

Finding there was a lady in the case, Mr Tappertit haughtily 
requested his fair friend to be more explicit, and demanded to know 
what she meant by 'her.'

'Why, that Dolly,' said Miggs, with an extremely sharp emphasis on 
the name.  'But, oh upon my word and honour, young Joseph Willet is 
a brave one; and he do deserve her, that he do.'

'Woman!' said Mr Tappertit, jumping off the counter on which he was 
seated; 'beware!'

'My stars, Simmun!' cried Miggs, in affected astonishment.  'You 
frighten me to death!  What's the matter?'

'There are strings,' said Mr Tappertit, flourishing his bread-and-
cheese knife in the air, 'in the human heart that had better not be 
wibrated.  That's what's the matter.'

'Oh, very well--if you're in a huff,' cried Miggs, turning away.

'Huff or no huff,' said Mr Tappertit, detaining her by the wrist.  
'What do you mean, Jezebel?  What were you going to say?  Answer 
me!'

Notwithstanding this uncivil exhortation, Miggs gladly did as she 
was required; and told him how that their young mistress, being 
alone in the meadows after dark, had been attacked by three or four 
tall men, who would have certainly borne her away and perhaps 
murdered her, but for the timely arrival of Joseph Willet, who with 
his own single hand put them all to flight, and rescued her; to the 
lasting admiration of his fellow-creatures generally, and to the 
eternal love and gratitude of Dolly Varden.

'Very good,' said Mr Tappertit, fetching a long breath when the 
tale was told, and rubbing his hair up till it stood stiff and 
straight on end all over his head.  'His days are numbered.'

'Oh, Simmun!'

'I tell you,' said the 'prentice, 'his days are numbered.  Leave 
me.  Get along with you.'

Miggs departed at his bidding, but less because of his bidding than 
because she desired to chuckle in secret.  When she had given vent 
to her satisfaction, she returned to the parlour; where the 
locksmith, stimulated by quietness and Toby, had become talkative, 
and was disposed to take a cheerful review of the occurrences of 
the day.  But Mrs Varden, whose practical religion (as is not 
uncommon) was usually of the retrospective order, cut him short by 
declaiming on the sinfulness of such junketings, and holding that 
it was high time to go to bed.  To bed therefore she withdrew, with 
an aspect as grim and gloomy as that of the Maypole's own state 
couch; and to bed the rest of the establishment soon afterwards 
repaired.



Chapter 23


Twilight had given place to night some hours, and it was high noon 
in those quarters of the town in which 'the world' condescended to 
dwell--the world being then, as now, of very limited dimensions and 
easily lodged--when Mr Chester reclined upon a sofa in his 
dressing-room in the Temple, entertaining himself with a book.

He was dressing, as it seemed, by easy stages, and having performed 
half the journey was taking a long rest.  Completely attired as to 
his legs and feet in the trimmest fashion of the day, he had yet 
the remainder of his toilet to perform.  The coat was stretched, 
like a refined scarecrow, on its separate horse; the waistcoat was 
displayed to the best advantage; the various ornamental articles of 
dress were severally set out in most alluring order; and yet he lay 
dangling his legs between the sofa and the ground, as intent upon 
his book as if there were nothing but bed before him.

'Upon my honour,' he said, at length raising his eyes to the 
ceiling with the air of a man who was reflecting seriously on what 
he had read; 'upon my honour, the most masterly composition, the 
most delicate thoughts, the finest code of morality, and the most 
gentlemanly sentiments in the universe!  Ah Ned, Ned, if you would 
but form your mind by such precepts, we should have but one common 
feeling on every subject that could possibly arise between us!'

This apostrophe was addressed, like the rest of his remarks, to 
empty air: for Edward was not present, and the father was quite 
alone.

'My Lord Chesterfield,' he said, pressing his hand tenderly upon 
the book as he laid it down, 'if I could but have profited by your 
genius soon enough to have formed my son on the model you have left 
to all wise fathers, both he and I would have been rich men.  
Shakespeare was undoubtedly very fine in his way; Milton good, 
though prosy; Lord Bacon deep, and decidedly knowing; but the 
writer who should be his country's pride, is my Lord Chesterfield.'

He became thoughtful again, and the toothpick was in requisition.

'I thought I was tolerably accomplished as a man of the world,' he 
continued, 'I flattered myself that I was pretty well versed in all 
those little arts and graces which distinguish men of the world 
from boors and peasants, and separate their character from those 
intensely vulgar sentiments which are called the national 
character.  Apart from any natural prepossession in my own favour, 
I believed I was.  Still, in every page of this enlightened writer, 
I find some captivating hypocrisy which has never occurred to me 
before, or some superlative piece of selfishness to which I was 
utterly a stranger.  I should quite blush for myself before this 
stupendous creature, if remembering his precepts, one might blush 
at anything.  An amazing man! a nobleman indeed! any King or Queen 
may make a Lord, but only the Devil himself--and the Graces--can 
make a Chesterfield.'

Men who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try to hide those 
vices from themselves; and yet in the very act of avowing them, 
they lay claim to the virtues they feign most to despise.  'For,' 
say they, 'this is honesty, this is truth.  All mankind are like 
us, but they have not the candour to avow it.'  The more they 
affect to deny the existence of any sincerity in the world, the 
more they would be thought to possess it in its boldest shape; and 
this is an unconscious compliment to Truth on the part of these 
philosophers, which will turn the laugh against them to the Day of 
Judgment.

Mr Chester, having extolled his favourite author, as above recited, 
took up the book again in the excess of his admiration and was 
composing himself for a further perusal of its sublime morality, 
when he was disturbed by a noise at the outer door; occasioned as 
it seemed by the endeavours of his servant to obstruct the entrance 
of some unwelcome visitor.

'A late hour for an importunate creditor,' he said, raising his 
eyebrows with as indolent an expression of wonder as if the noise 
were in the street, and one with which he had not the smallest 
possible concern.  'Much after their accustomed time.  The usual 
pretence I suppose.  No doubt a heavy payment to make up tomorrow.  
Poor fellow, he loses time, and time is money as the good proverb 
says--I never found it out though.  Well.  What now?  You know I am 
not at home.'

'A man, sir,' replied the servant, who was to the full as cool and 
negligent in his way as his master, 'has brought home the riding-
whip you lost the other day.  I told him you were out, but he said 
he was to wait while I brought it in, and wouldn't go till I did.'

'He was quite right,' returned his master, 'and you're a blockhead, 
possessing no judgment or discretion whatever.  Tell him to come 
in, and see that he rubs his shoes for exactly five minutes first.'

The man laid the whip on a chair, and withdrew.  The master, who 
had only heard his foot upon the ground and had not taken the 
trouble to turn round and look at him, shut his book, and pursued 
the train of ideas his entrance had disturbed.

'If time were money,' he said, handling his snuff-box, 'I would 
compound with my creditors, and give them--let me see--how much a 
day?  There's my nap after dinner--an hour--they're extremely 
welcome to that, and to make the most of it.  In the morning, 
between my breakfast and the paper, I could spare them another 
hour; in the evening before dinner say another.  Three hours a day.  
They might pay themselves in calls, with interest, in twelve 
months.  I think I shall propose it to them.  Ah, my centaur, are 
you there?'

'Here I am,' replied Hugh, striding in, followed by a dog, as rough 
and sullen as himself; 'and trouble enough I've had to get here.  
What do you ask me to come for, and keep me out when I DO come?'

'My good fellow,' returned the other, raising his head a little 
from the cushion and carelessly surveying him from top to toe, 'I 
am delighted to see you, and to have, in your being here, the very 
best proof that you are not kept out.  How are you?'

'I'm well enough,' said Hugh impatiently.

'You look a perfect marvel of health.  Sit down.'

'I'd rather stand,' said Hugh.

'Please yourself my good fellow,' returned Mr Chester rising, 
slowly pulling off the loose robe he wore, and sitting down before 
the dressing-glass.  'Please yourself by all means.'

Having said this in the politest and blandest tone possible, he 
went on dressing, and took no further notice of his guest, who 
stood in the same spot as uncertain what to do next, eyeing him 
sulkily from time to time.

'Are you going to speak to me, master?' he said, after a long 
silence.

'My worthy creature,' returned Mr Chester, 'you are a little 
ruffled and out of humour.  I'll wait till you're quite yourself 
again.  I am in no hurry.'

This behaviour had its intended effect.  It humbled and abashed the 
man, and made him still more irresolute and uncertain.  Hard words 
he could have returned, violence he would have repaid with 
interest; but this cool, complacent, contemptuous, self-possessed 
reception, caused him to feel his inferiority more completely than 
the most elaborate arguments.  Everything contributed to this 
effect.  His own rough speech, contrasted with the soft persuasive 
accents of the other; his rude bearing, and Mr Chester's polished 
manner; the disorder and negligence of his ragged dress, and the 
elegant attire he saw before him; with all the unaccustomed 
luxuries and comforts of the room, and the silence that gave him 
leisure to observe these things, and feel how ill at ease they made 
him; all these influences, which have too often some effect on 
tutored minds and become of almost resistless power when brought to 
bear on such a mind as his, quelled Hugh completely.  He moved by 
little and little nearer to Mr Chester's chair, and glancing over 
his shoulder at the reflection of his face in the glass, as if 
seeking for some encouragement in its expression, said at length, 
with a rough attempt at conciliation,

'ARE you going to speak to me, master, or am I to go away?'

'Speak you,' said Mr Chester, 'speak you, good fellow.  I have 
spoken, have I not?  I am waiting for you.'

'Why, look'ee, sir,' returned Hugh with increased embarrassment, 
'am I the man that you privately left your whip with before you 
rode away from the Maypole, and told to bring it back whenever he 
might want to see you on a certain subject?'

'No doubt the same, or you have a twin brother,' said Mr Chester, 
glancing at the reflection of his anxious face; 'which is not 
probable, I should say.'

'Then I have come, sir,' said Hugh, 'and I have brought it back, 
and something else along with it.  A letter, sir, it is, that I 
took from the person who had charge of it.'  As he spoke, he laid 
upon the dressing-table, Dolly's lost epistle.  The very letter 
that had cost her so much trouble.

'Did you obtain this by force, my good fellow?' said Mr Chester, 
casting his eye upon it without the least perceptible surprise or 
pleasure.

'Not quite,' said Hugh.  'Partly.'

'Who was the messenger from whom you took it?'

'A woman.  One Varden's daughter.'

'Oh indeed!' said Mr Chester gaily.  'What else did you take from 
her?'

'What else?'

'Yes,' said the other, in a drawling manner, for he was fixing a 
very small patch of sticking plaster on a very small pimple near 
the corner of his mouth.  'What else?'

'Well a kiss,' replied Hugh, after some hesitation.

'And what else?'

'Nothing.'

'I think,' said Mr Chester, in the same easy tone, and smiling 
twice or thrice to try if the patch adhered--'I think there was 
something else.  I have heard a trifle of jewellery spoken of--a 
mere trifle--a thing of such little value, indeed, that you may 
have forgotten it.  Do you remember anything of the kind--such as a 
bracelet now, for instance?'

Hugh with a muttered oath thrust his hand into his breast, and 
drawing the bracelet forth, wrapped in a scrap of hay, was about to 
lay it on the table likewise, when his patron stopped his hand and 
bade him put it up again.

'You took that for yourself my excellent friend,' he said, 'and may 
keep it.  I am neither a thief nor a receiver.  Don't show it to 
me.  You had better hide it again, and lose no time.  Don't let me 
see where you put it either,' he added, turning away his head.

'You're not a receiver!' said Hugh bluntly, despite the increasing 
awe in which he held him.  'What do you call THAT, master?' 
striking the letter with his heavy hand.

'I call that quite another thing,' said Mr Chester coolly.  'I 
shall prove it presently, as you will see.  You are thirsty, I 
suppose?'

Hugh drew his sleeve across his lips, and gruffly answered yes.

'Step to that closet and bring me a bottle you will see there, and 
a glass.'

He obeyed.  His patron followed him with his eyes, and when his 
back was turned, smiled as he had never done when he stood beside 
the mirror.  On his return he filled the glass, and bade him drink.  
That dram despatched, he poured him out another, and another.

'How many can you bear?' he said, filling the glass again.

'As many as you like to give me.  Pour on.  Fill high.  A bumper 
with a bead in the middle!  Give me enough of this,' he added, as 
he tossed it down his hairy throat, 'and I'll do murder if you ask 
me!'

'As I don't mean to ask you, and you might possibly do it without 
being invited if you went on much further,' said Mr Chester with 
great composure, we will stop, if agreeable to you, my good friend, 
at the next glass.  You were drinking before you came here.'

'I always am when I can get it,' cried Hugh boisterously, waving 
the empty glass above his head, and throwing himself into a rude 
dancing attitude.  'I always am.  Why not?  Ha ha ha!  What's so 
good to me as this?  What ever has been?  What else has kept away 
the cold on bitter nights, and driven hunger off in starving times?  
What else has given me the strength and courage of a man, when men 
would have left me to die, a puny child?  I should never have had a 
man's heart but for this.  I should have died in a ditch.  Where's 
he who when I was a weak and sickly wretch, with trembling legs and 
fading sight, bade me cheer up, as this did?  I never knew him; not 
I.  I drink to the drink, master.  Ha ha ha!'

'You are an exceedingly cheerful young man,' said Mr Chester, 
putting on his cravat with great deliberation, and slightly moving 
his head from side to side to settle his chin in its proper place.  
'Quite a boon companion.'

'Do you see this hand, master,' said Hugh, 'and this arm?' baring 
the brawny limb to the elbow.  'It was once mere skin and bone, and 
would have been dust in some poor churchyard by this time, but for 
the drink.'

'You may cover it,' said Mr Chester, 'it's sufficiently real in 
your sleeve.'

'I should never have been spirited up to take a kiss from the proud 
little beauty, master, but for the drink,' cried Hugh.  'Ha ha ha!  
It was a good one.  As sweet as honeysuckle, I warrant you.  I 
thank the drink for it.  I'll drink to the drink again, master.  
Fill me one more.  Come.  One more!'

'You are such a promising fellow,' said his patron, putting on his 
waistcoat with great nicety, and taking no heed of this request, 
'that I must caution you against having too many impulses from the 
drink, and getting hung before your time.  What's your age?'

'I don't know.'

'At any rate,' said Mr Chester, 'you are young enough to escape 
what I may call a natural death for some years to come.  How can 
you trust yourself in my hands on so short an acquaintance, with a 
halter round your neck?  What a confiding nature yours must be!'

Hugh fell back a pace or two and surveyed him with a look of 
mingled terror, indignation, and surprise.  Regarding himself in 
the glass with the same complacency as before, and speaking as 
smoothly as if he were discussing some pleasant chit-chat of the 
town, his patron went on:

'Robbery on the king's highway, my young friend, is a very 
dangerous and ticklish occupation.  It is pleasant, I have no 
doubt, while it lasts; but like many other pleasures in this 
transitory world, it seldom lasts long.  And really if in the 
ingenuousness of youth, you open your heart so readily on the 
subject, I am afraid your career will be an extremely short one.'

'How's this?' said Hugh.  'What do you talk of master?  Who was it 
set me on?'

'Who?' said Mr Chester, wheeling sharply round, and looking full 
at him for the first time.  'I didn't hear you.  Who was it?'

Hugh faltered, and muttered something which was not audible.

'Who was it?  I am curious to know,' said Mr Chester, with 
surpassing affability.  'Some rustic beauty perhaps?  But be 
cautious, my good friend.  They are not always to be trusted.  Do 
take my advice now, and be careful of yourself.'  With these words 
he turned to the glass again, and went on with his toilet.

Hugh would have answered him that he, the questioner himself had 
set him on, but the words stuck in his throat.  The consummate art 
with which his patron had led him to this point, and managed the 
whole conversation, perfectly baffled him.  He did not doubt that 
if he had made the retort which was on his lips when Mr Chester 
turned round and questioned him so keenly, he would straightway 
have given him into custody and had him dragged before a justice 
with the stolen property upon him; in which case it was as certain 
he would have been hung as it was that he had been born.  The 
ascendency which it was the purpose of the man of the world to 
establish over this savage instrument, was gained from that time.  
Hugh's submission was complete.  He dreaded him beyond description; 
and felt that accident and artifice had spun a web about him, which 
at a touch from such a master-hand as his, would bind him to the 
gallows.

With these thoughts passing through his mind, and yet wondering at 
the very same time how he who came there rioting in the confidence 
of this man (as he thought), should be so soon and so thoroughly 
subdued, Hugh stood cowering before him, regarding him uneasily 
from time to time, while he finished dressing.  When he had done 
so, he took up the letter, broke the seal, and throwing himself 
back in his chair, read it leisurely through.

'Very neatly worded upon my life!  Quite a woman's letter, full of 
what people call tenderness, and disinterestedness, and heart, and 
all that sort of thing!'

As he spoke, he twisted it up, and glancing lazily round at Hugh as 
though he would say 'You see this?' held it in the flame of the 
candle.  When it was in a full blaze, he tossed it into the grate, 
and there it smouldered away.

'It was directed to my son,' he said, turning to Hugh, 'and you did 
quite right to bring it here.  I opened it on my own 
responsibility, and you see what I have done with it.  Take this, 
for your trouble.'

Hugh stepped forward to receive the piece of money he held out to 
him.  As he put it in his hand, he added:

'If you should happen to find anything else of this sort, or to 
pick up any kind of information you may think I would like to have, 
bring it here, will you, my good fellow?'

This was said with a smile which implied--or Hugh thought it did--
'fail to do so at your peril!'  He answered that he would.

'And don't,' said his patron, with an air of the very kindest 
patronage, 'don't be at all downcast or uneasy respecting that 
little rashness we have been speaking of.  Your neck is as safe in 
my hands, my good fellow, as though a baby's fingers clasped it, I 
assure you.--Take another glass.  You are quieter now.'

Hugh accepted it from his hand, and looking stealthily at his 
smiling face, drank the contents in silence.

'Don't you--ha, ha!--don't you drink to the drink any more?' said 
Mr Chester, in his most winning manner.

'To you, sir,' was the sullen answer, with something approaching to 
a bow.  'I drink to you.'

'Thank you.  God bless you.  By the bye, what is your name, my good 
soul?  You are called Hugh, I know, of course--your other name?'

'I have no other name.'

'A very strange fellow!  Do you mean that you never knew one, or 
that you don't choose to tell it?  Which?'

'I'd tell it if I could,' said Hugh, quickly.  'I can't.  I have 
been always called Hugh; nothing more.  I never knew, nor saw, nor 
thought about a father; and I was a boy of six--that's not very 
old--when they hung my mother up at Tyburn for a couple of thousand 
men to stare at.  They might have let her live.  She was poor 
enough.'

'How very sad!' exclaimed his patron, with a condescending smile.  
'I have no doubt she was an exceedingly fine woman.'

'You see that dog of mine?' said Hugh, abruptly.

'Faithful, I dare say?' rejoined his patron, looking at him through 
his glass; 'and immensely clever?  Virtuous and gifted animals, 
whether man or beast, always are so very hideous.'

'Such a dog as that, and one of the same breed, was the only living 
thing except me that howled that day,' said Hugh.  'Out of the two 
thousand odd--there was a larger crowd for its being a woman--the 
dog and I alone had any pity.  If he'd have been a man, he'd have 
been glad to be quit of her, for she had been forced to keep him 
lean and half-starved; but being a dog, and not having a man's 
sense, he was sorry.'

'It was dull of the brute, certainly,' said Mr Chester, 'and very 
like a brute.'

Hugh made no rejoinder, but whistling to his dog, who sprung up at 
the sound and came jumping and sporting about him, bade his 
sympathising friend good night.

'Good night; he returned.  'Remember; you're safe with me--quite 
safe.  So long as you deserve it, my good fellow, as I hope you 
always will, you have a friend in me, on whose silence you may 
rely.  Now do be careful of yourself, pray do, and consider what 
jeopardy you might have stood in.  Good night! bless you!'

Hugh truckled before the hidden meaning of these words as much as 
such a being could, and crept out of the door so submissively and 
subserviently--with an air, in short, so different from that with 
which he had entered--that his patron on being left alone, smiled 
more than ever.

'And yet,' he said, as he took a pinch of snuff, 'I do not like 
their having hanged his mother.  The fellow has a fine eye, and I 
am sure she was handsome.  But very probably she was coarse--red-
nosed perhaps, and had clumsy feet.  Aye, it was all for the best, 
no doubt.'

With this comforting reflection, he put on his coat, took a 
farewell glance at the glass, and summoned his man, who promptly 
attended, followed by a chair and its two bearers.

'Foh!' said Mr Chester.  'The very atmosphere that centaur has 
breathed, seems tainted with the cart and ladder.  Here, Peak.  
Bring some scent and sprinkle the floor; and take away the chair he 
sat upon, and air it; and dash a little of that mixture upon me.  I 
am stifled!'

The man obeyed; and the room and its master being both purified, 
nothing remained for Mr Chester but to demand his hat, to fold it 
jauntily under his arm, to take his seat in the chair and be 
carried off; humming a fashionable tune.



Chapter 24


How the accomplished gentleman spent the evening in the midst of a 
dazzling and brilliant circle; how he enchanted all those with 
whom he mingled by the grace of his deportment, the politeness of 
his manner, the vivacity of his conversation, and the sweetness of 
his voice; how it was observed in every corner, that Chester was a 
man of that happy disposition that nothing ruffled him, that he was 
one on whom the world's cares and errors sat lightly as his dress, 
and in whose smiling face a calm and tranquil mind was constantly 
reflected; how honest men, who by instinct knew him better, 
bowed down before him nevertheless, deferred to his every word, and 
courted his favourable notice; how people, who really had good in 
them, went with the stream, and fawned and flattered, and approved, 
and despised themselves while they did so, and yet had not the 
courage to resist; how, in short, he was one of those who are 
received and cherished in society (as the phrase is) by scores who 
individually would shrink from and be repelled by the object of 
their lavish regard; are things of course, which will suggest 
themselves.  Matter so commonplace needs but a passing glance, and 
there an end.

The despisers of mankind--apart from the mere fools and mimics, of 
that creed--are of two sorts.  They who believe their merit 
neglected and unappreciated, make up one class; they who receive 
adulation and flattery, knowing their own worthlessness, compose 
the other.  Be sure that the coldest-hearted misanthropes are ever 
of this last order.

Mr Chester sat up in bed next morning, sipping his coffee, and 
remembering with a kind of contemptuous satisfaction how he had 
shone last night, and how he had been caressed and courted, when 
his servant brought in a very small scrap of dirty paper, tightly 
sealed in two places, on the inside whereof was inscribed in pretty 
large text these words: 'A friend.  Desiring of a conference.  
Immediate.  Private.  Burn it when you've read it.'

'Where in the name of the Gunpowder Plot did you pick up this?' 
said his master.

It was given him by a person then waiting at the door, the man 
replied.

'With a cloak and dagger?' said Mr Chester.

With nothing more threatening about him, it appeared, than a 
leather apron and a dirty face.  'Let him come in.'  In he came--Mr 
Tappertit; with his hair still on end, and a great lock in his 
hand, which he put down on the floor in the middle of the chamber 
as if he were about to go through some performances in which it was 
a necessary agent.

'Sir,' said Mr Tappertit with a low bow, 'I thank you for this 
condescension, and am glad to see you.  Pardon the menial office in 
which I am engaged, sir, and extend your sympathies to one, who, 
humble as his appearance is, has inn'ard workings far above his 
station.'

Mr Chester held the bed-curtain farther back, and looked at him 
with a vague impression that he was some maniac, who had not only 
broken open the door of his place of confinement, but had brought 
away the lock.  Mr Tappertit bowed again, and displayed his legs to 
the best advantage.

'You have heard, sir,' said Mr Tappertit, laying his hand upon his 
breast, 'of G. Varden Locksmith and bell-hanger and repairs neatly 
executed in town and country, Clerkenwell, London?'

'What then?' asked Mr Chester.

'I'm his 'prentice, sir.'

'What THEN?'

'Ahem!' said Mr Tappertit.  'Would you permit me to shut the door, 
sir, and will you further, sir, give me your honour bright, that 
what passes between us is in the strictest confidence?'

Mr Chester laid himself calmly down in bed again, and turning a 
perfectly undisturbed face towards the strange apparition, which 
had by this time closed the door, begged him to speak out, and to 
be as rational as he could, without putting himself to any very 
great personal inconvenience.

'In the first place, sir,' said Mr Tappertit, producing a small 
pocket-handkerchief and shaking it out of the folds, 'as I have not 
a card about me (for the envy of masters debases us below that 
level) allow me to offer the best substitute that circumstances 
will admit of.  If you will take that in your own hand, sir, and 
cast your eye on the right-hand corner,' said Mr Tappertit, 
offering it with a graceful air, 'you will meet with my 
credentials.'

'Thank you,' answered Mr Chester, politely accepting it, and 
turning to some blood-red characters at one end.  '"Four.  Simon 
Tappertit.  One."  Is that the--'

'Without the numbers, sir, that is my name,' replied the 'prentice.  
'They are merely intended as directions to the washerwoman, and 
have no connection with myself or family.  YOUR name, sir,' said Mr 
Tappertit, looking very hard at his nightcap, 'is Chester, I 
suppose?  You needn't pull it off, sir, thank you.  I observe E. C. 
from here.  We will take the rest for granted.'

'Pray, Mr Tappertit,' said Mr Chester, 'has that complicated piece 
of ironmongery which you have done me the favour to bring with you, 
any immediate connection with the business we are to discuss?'

'It has not, sir,' rejoined the 'prentice.  'It's going to be 
fitted on a ware'us-door in Thames Street.'

'Perhaps, as that is the case,' said Mr Chester, 'and as it has a 
stronger flavour of oil than I usually refresh my bedroom with, you 
will oblige me so far as to put it outside the door?'

'By all means, sir,' said Mr Tappertit, suiting the action to the 
word.

'You'll excuse my mentioning it, I hope?'

'Don't apologise, sir, I beg.  And now, if you please, to 
business.'

During the whole of this dialogue, Mr Chester had suffered nothing 
but his smile of unvarying serenity and politeness to appear upon 
his face.  Sim Tappertit, who had far too good an opinion of 
himself to suspect that anybody could be playing upon him, thought 
within himself that this was something like the respect to which he 
was entitled, and drew a comparison from this courteous demeanour 
of a stranger, by no means favourable to the worthy locksmith.

'From what passes in our house,' said Mr Tappertit, 'I am aware, 
sir, that your son keeps company with a young lady against your 
inclinations.  Sir, your son has not used me well.'

'Mr Tappertit,' said the other, 'you grieve me beyond description.'

'Thank you, sir,' replied the 'prentice.  'I'm glad to hear you say 
so.  He's very proud, sir, is your son; very haughty.'

'I am afraid he IS haughty,' said Mr Chester.  'Do you know I was 
really afraid of that before; and you confirm me?'

'To recount the menial offices I've had to do for your son, sir,' 
said Mr Tappertit; 'the chairs I've had to hand him, the coaches 
I've had to call for him, the numerous degrading duties, wholly 
unconnected with my indenters, that I've had to do for him, would 
fill a family Bible.  Besides which, sir, he is but a young man 
himself and I do not consider "thank'ee Sim," a proper form of 
address on those occasions.'

'Mr Tappertit, your wisdom is beyond your years.  Pray go on.'

'I thank you for your good opinion, sir,' said Sim, much gratified, 
'and will endeavour so to do.  Now sir, on this account (and 
perhaps for another reason or two which I needn't go into) I am on 
your side.  And what I tell you is this--that as long as our people 
go backwards and forwards, to and fro, up and down, to that there 
jolly old Maypole, lettering, and messaging, and fetching and 
carrying, you couldn't help your son keeping company with that 
young lady by deputy,--not if he was minded night and day by all 
the Horse Guards, and every man of 'em in the very fullest 
uniform.'

Mr Tappertit stopped to take breath after this, and then started 
fresh again.

'Now, sir, I am a coming to the point.  You will inquire of me, 
"how is this to he prevented?"  I'll tell you how.  If an honest, 
civil, smiling gentleman like you--'

'Mr Tappertit--really--'

'No, no, I'm serious,' rejoined the 'prentice, 'I am, upon my soul.  
If an honest, civil, smiling gentleman like you, was to talk but 
ten minutes to our old woman--that's Mrs Varden--and flatter her up 
a bit, you'd gain her over for ever.  Then there's this point got--
that her daughter Dolly,'--here a flush came over Mr Tappertit's 
face--'wouldn't be allowed to be a go-between from that time 
forward; and till that point's got, there's nothing ever will 
prevent her.  Mind that.'

'Mr Tappertit, your knowledge of human nature--'

'Wait a minute,' said Sim, folding his arms with a dreadful 
calmness.  'Now I come to THE point.  Sir, there is a villain at 
that Maypole, a monster in human shape, a vagabond of the deepest 
dye, that unless you get rid of and have kidnapped and carried off 
at the very least--nothing less will do--will marry your son to 
that young woman, as certainly and as surely as if he was the 
Archbishop of Canterbury himself.  He will, sir, for the hatred and 
malice that he bears to you; let alone the pleasure of doing a bad 
action, which to him is its own reward.  If you knew how this chap, 
this Joseph Willet--that's his name--comes backwards and forwards 
to our house, libelling, and denouncing, and threatening you, and 
how I shudder when I hear him, you'd hate him worse than I do,--
worse than I do, sir,' said Mr Tappertit wildly, putting his hair 
up straighter, and making a crunching noise with his teeth; 'if 
sich a thing is possible.'

'A little private vengeance in this, Mr Tappertit?'

'Private vengeance, sir, or public sentiment, or both combined--
destroy him,' said Mr Tappertit.  'Miggs says so too.  Miggs and me 
both say so.  We can't bear the plotting and undermining that takes 
place.  Our souls recoil from it.  Barnaby Rudge and Mrs Rudge are 
in it likewise; but the villain, Joseph Willet, is the ringleader.  
Their plottings and schemes are known to me and Miggs.  If you want 
information of 'em, apply to us.  Put Joseph Willet down, sir.  
Destroy him.  Crush him.  And be happy.'

With these words, Mr Tappertit, who seemed to expect no reply, and 
to hold it as a necessary consequence of his eloquence that his 
hearer should be utterly stunned, dumbfoundered, and overwhelmed, 
folded his arms so that the palm of each hand rested on the 
opposite shoulder, and disappeared after the manner of those 
mysterious warners of whom he had read in cheap story-books.

'That fellow,' said Mr Chester, relaxing his face when he was 
fairly gone, 'is good practice.  I HAVE some command of my 
features, beyond all doubt.  He fully confirms what I suspected, 
though; and blunt tools are sometimes found of use, where sharper 
instruments would fail.  I fear I may be obliged to make great 
havoc among these worthy people.  A troublesome necessity!  I 
quite feel for them.'

With that he fell into a quiet slumber:--subsided into such a 
gentle, pleasant sleep, that it was quite infantine.



Chapter 25


Leaving the favoured, and well-received, and flattered of the 
world; him of the world most worldly, who never compromised himself 
by an ungentlemanly action, and never was guilty of a manly one; to 
lie smilingly asleep--for even sleep, working but little change in 
his dissembling face, became with him a piece of cold, conventional 
hypocrisy--we follow in the steps of two slow travellers on foot, 
making towards Chigwell.

Barnaby and his mother.  Grip in their company, of course.

The widow, to whom each painful mile seemed longer than the last, 
toiled wearily along; while Barnaby, yielding to every inconstant 
impulse, fluttered here and there, now leaving her far behind, now 
lingering far behind himself, now darting into some by-lane or path 
and leaving her to pursue her way alone, until he stealthily 
emerged again and came upon her with a wild shout of merriment, as 
his wayward and capricious nature prompted.  Now he would call to 
her from the topmost branch of some high tree by the roadside; now 
using his tall staff as a leaping-pole, come flying over ditch or 
hedge or five-barred gate; now run with surprising swiftness for a 
mile or more on the straight road, and halting, sport upon a patch 
of grass with Grip till she came up.  These were his delights; and 
when his patient mother heard his merry voice, or looked into his 
flushed and healthy face, she would not have abated them by one sad 
word or murmur, though each had been to her a source of suffering 
in the same degree as it was to him of pleasure.

It is something to look upon enjoyment, so that it be free and 
wild and in the face of nature, though it is but the enjoyment of 
an idiot.  It is something to know that Heaven has left the 
capacity of gladness in such a creature's breast; it is something 
to be assured that, however lightly men may crush that faculty in 
their fellows, the Great Creator of mankind imparts it even to his 
despised and slighted work.  Who would not rather see a poor idiot 
happy in the sunlight, than a wise man pining in a darkened jail!

Ye men of gloom and austerity, who paint the face of Infinite 
Benevolence with an eternal frown; read in the Everlasting Book, 
wide open to your view, the lesson it would teach.  Its pictures 
are not in black and sombre hues, but bright and glowing tints; its 
music--save when ye drown it--is not in sighs and groans, but songs 
and cheerful sounds.  Listen to the million voices in the summer 
air, and find one dismal as your own.  Remember, if ye can, the 
sense of hope and pleasure which every glad return of day awakens 
in the breast of all your kind who have not changed their nature; 
and learn some wisdom even from the witless, when their hearts are 
lifted up they know not why, by all the mirth and happiness it 
brings.

The widow's breast was full of care, was laden heavily with secret 
dread and sorrow; but her boy's gaiety of heart gladdened her, and 
beguiled the long journey.  Sometimes he would bid her lean upon 
his arm, and would keep beside her steadily for a short distance; 
but it was more his nature to be rambling to and fro, and she 
better liked to see him free and happy, even than to have him near 
her, because she loved him better than herself.

She had quitted the place to which they were travelling, directly 
after the event which had changed her whole existence; and for two-
and-twenty years had never had courage to revisit it.  It was her 
native village.  How many recollections crowded on her mind when it 
appeared in sight!

Two-and-twenty years.  Her boy's whole life and history.  The last 
time she looked back upon those roofs among the trees, she carried 
him in her arms, an infant.  How often since that time had she sat 
beside him night and day, watching for the dawn of mind that never 
came; how had she feared, and doubted, and yet hoped, long after 
conviction forced itself upon her!  The little stratagems she had 
devised to try him, the little tokens he had given in his childish 
way--not of dulness but of something infinitely worse, so ghastly 
and unchildlike in its cunning--came back as vividly as if but 
yesterday had intervened.  The room in which they used to be; the 
spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like in face, but 
ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant eye, and 
crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every 
circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most 
trivial, perhaps, the most distinctly.

His older childhood, too; the strange imaginings he had; his terror 
of certain senseless things--familiar objects he endowed with life; 
the slow and gradual breaking out of that one horror, in which, 
before his birth, his darkened intellect began; how, in the midst 
of all, she had found some hope and comfort in his being unlike 
another child, and had gone on almost believing in the slow 
development of his mind until he grew a man, and then his childhood 
was complete and lasting; one after another, all these old thoughts 
sprung up within her, strong after their long slumber and bitterer 
than ever.

She took his arm and they hurried through the village street.  It 
was the same as it was wont to be in old times, yet different too, 
and wore another air.  The change was in herself, not it; but she 
never thought of that, and wondered at its alteration, and where it 
lay, and what it was.

The people all knew Barnaby, and the children of the place came 
flocking round him--as she remembered to have done with their 
fathers and mothers round some silly beggarman, when a child 
herself.  None of them knew her; they passed each well-remembered 
house, and yard, and homestead; and striking into the fields, were 
soon alone again.

The Warren was the end of their journey.  Mr Haredale was walking 
in the garden, and seeing them as they passed the iron gate, 
unlocked it, and bade them enter that way.

'At length you have mustered heart to visit the old place,' he said 
to the widow.  'I am glad you have.'

'For the first time, and the last, sir,' she replied.

'The first for many years, but not the last?'

'The very last.'

'You mean,' said Mr Haredale, regarding her with some surprise, 
'that having made this effort, you are resolved not to persevere 
and are determined to relapse?  This is unworthy of you.  I have 
often told you, you should return here.  You would be happier here 
than elsewhere, I know.  As to Barnaby, it's quite his home.'

'And Grip's,' said Barnaby, holding the basket open.  The raven 
hopped gravely out, and perching on his shoulder and addressing 
himself to Mr Haredale, cried--as a hint, perhaps, that some 
temperate refreshment would be acceptable--'Polly put the ket-tle 
on, we'll all have tea!'

'Hear me, Mary,' said Mr Haredale kindly, as he motioned her to 
walk with him towards the house.  'Your life has been an example of 
patience and fortitude, except in this one particular which has 
often given me great pain.  It is enough to know that you were 
cruelly involved in the calamity which deprived me of an only 
brother, and Emma of her father, without being obliged to suppose 
(as I sometimes am) that you associate us with the author of our 
joint misfortunes.'

'Associate you with him, sir!' she cried.

'Indeed,' said Mr Haredale, 'I think you do.  I almost believe 
that because your husband was bound by so many ties to our 
relation, and died in his service and defence, you have come in 
some sort to connect us with his murder.'

'Alas!' she answered.  'You little know my heart, sir.  You little 
know the truth!'

'It is natural you should do so; it is very probable you may, 
without being conscious of it,' said Mr Haredale, speaking more to 
himself than her.  'We are a fallen house.  Money, dispensed with 
the most lavish hand, would be a poor recompense for sufferings 
like yours; and thinly scattered by hands so pinched and tied as 
ours, it becomes a miserable mockery.  I feel it so, God knows,' he 
added, hastily.  'Why should I wonder if she does!'

'You do me wrong, dear sir, indeed,' she rejoined with great 
earnestness; 'and yet when you come to hear what I desire your 
leave to say--'

'I shall find my doubts confirmed?' he said, observing that she 
faltered and became confused.  'Well!'

He quickened his pace for a few steps, but fell back again to her 
side, and said:

'And have you come all this way at last, solely to speak to me?'

She answered, 'Yes.'

'A curse,' he muttered, 'upon the wretched state of us proud 
beggars, from whom the poor and rich are equally at a distance; the 
one being forced to treat us with a show of cold respect; the other 
condescending to us in their every deed and word, and keeping more 
aloof, the nearer they approach us.--Why, if it were pain to you 
(as it must have been) to break for this slight purpose the chain 
of habit forged through two-and-twenty years, could you not let me 
know your wish, and beg me to come to you?'

'There was not time, sir,' she rejoined.  'I took my resolution 
but last night, and taking it, felt that I must not lose a day--a 
day! an hour--in having speech with you.'

They had by this time reached the house.  Mr Haredale paused for a 
moment, and looked at her as if surprised by the energy of her 
manner.  Observing, however, that she took no heed of him, but 
glanced up, shuddering, at the old walls with which such horrors 
were connected in her mind, he led her by a private stair into his 
library, where Emma was seated in a window, reading.

The young lady, seeing who approached, hastily rose and laid aside 
her book, and with many kind words, and not without tears, gave her 
a warm and earnest welcome.  But the widow shrunk from her embrace 
as though she feared her, and sunk down trembling on a chair.

'It is the return to this place after so long an absence,' said 
Emma gently.  'Pray ring, dear uncle--or stay--Barnaby will run 
himself and ask for wine--'

'Not for the world,' she cried.  'It would have another taste--I 
could not touch it.  I want but a minute's rest.  Nothing but 
that.'

Miss Haredale stood beside her chair, regarding her with silent 
pity.  She remained for a little time quite still; then rose and 
turned to Mr Haredale, who had sat down in his easy chair, and was 
contemplating her with fixed attention.

The tale connected with the mansion borne in mind, it seemed, as 
has been already said, the chosen theatre for such a deed as it had 
known.  The room in which this group were now assembled--hard by 
the very chamber where the act was done--dull, dark, and sombre; 
heavy with worm-eaten books; deadened and shut in by faded 
hangings, muffling every sound; shadowed mournfully by trees whose 
rustling boughs gave ever and anon a spectral knocking at the 
glass; wore, beyond all others in the house, a ghostly, gloomy air.  
Nor were the group assembled there, unfitting tenants of the spot.  
The widow, with her marked and startling face and downcast eyes; Mr 
Haredale stern and despondent ever; his niece beside him, like, yet 
most unlike, the picture of her father, which gazed reproachfully 
down upon them from the blackened wall; Barnaby, with his vacant 
look and restless eye; were all in keeping with the place, and 
actors in the legend.  Nay, the very raven, who had hopped upon the 
table and with the air of some old necromancer appeared to be 
profoundly studying a great folio volume that lay open on a desk, 
was strictly in unison with the rest, and looked like the embodied 
spirit of evil biding his time of mischief.

'I scarcely know,' said the widow, breaking silence, 'how to begin.  
You will think my mind disordered.'

'The whole tenor of your quiet and reproachless life since you were 
last here,' returned Mr Haredale, mildly, 'shall bear witness for 
you.  Why do you fear to awaken such a suspicion?  You do not speak 
to strangers.  You have not to claim our interest or consideration 
for the first time.  Be more yourself.  Take heart.  Any advice or 
assistance that I can give you, you know is yours of right, and 
freely yours.'

'What if I came, sir,' she rejoined, 'I who have but one other 
friend on earth, to reject your aid from this moment, and to say 
that henceforth I launch myself upon the world, alone and 
unassisted, to sink or swim as Heaven may decree!'

'You would have, if you came to me for such a purpose,' said Mr 
Haredale calmly, 'some reason to assign for conduct so 
extraordinary, which--if one may entertain the possibility of 
anything so wild and strange--would have its weight, of course.'

'That, sir,' she answered, 'is the misery of my distress.  I can 
give no reason whatever.  My own bare word is all that I can offer.  
It is my duty, my imperative and bounden duty.  If I did not 
discharge it, I should be a base and guilty wretch.  Having said 
that, my lips are sealed, and I can say no more.'

As though she felt relieved at having said so much, and had nerved 
herself to the remainder of her task, she spoke from this time with 
a firmer voice and heightened courage.

'Heaven is my witness, as my own heart is--and yours, dear young 
lady, will speak for me, I know--that I have lived, since that time 
we all have bitter reason to remember, in unchanging devotion, and 
gratitude to this family.  Heaven is my witness that go where I 
may, I shall preserve those feelings unimpaired.  And it is my 
witness, too, that they alone impel me to the course I must take, 
and from which nothing now shall turn me, as I hope for mercy.'

'These are strange riddles,' said Mr Haredale.

'In this world, sir,' she replied, 'they may, perhaps, never be 
explained.  In another, the Truth will be discovered in its own 
good time.  And may that time,' she added in a low voice, 'be far 
distant!'

'Let me be sure,' said Mr Haredale, 'that I understand you, for I 
am doubtful of my own senses.  Do you mean that you are resolved 
voluntarily to deprive yourself of those means of support you have 
received from us so long--that you are determined to resign the 
annuity we settled on you twenty years ago--to leave house, and 
home, and goods, and begin life anew--and this, for some secret 
reason or monstrous fancy which is incapable of explanation, which 
only now exists, and has been dormant all this time?  In the name 
of God, under what delusion are you labouring?'

'As I am deeply thankful,' she made answer, 'for the kindness of 
those, alive and dead, who have owned this house; and as I would 
not have its roof fall down and crush me, or its very walls drip 
blood, my name being spoken in their hearing; I never will again 
subsist upon their bounty, or let it help me to subsistence.  You 
do not know,' she added, suddenly, 'to what uses it may be applied; 
into what hands it may pass.  I do, and I renounce it.'

'Surely,' said Mr Haredale, 'its uses rest with you.'

'They did.  They rest with me no longer.  It may be--it IS--devoted 
to purposes that mock the dead in their graves.  It never can 
prosper with me.  It will bring some other heavy judgement on the 
head of my dear son, whose innocence will suffer for his mother's 
guilt.'

'What words are these!' cried Mr Haredale, regarding her with 
wonder.  'Among what associates have you fallen?  Into what guilt 
have you ever been betrayed?'

'I am guilty, and yet innocent; wrong, yet right; good in 
intention, though constrained to shield and aid the bad.  Ask me no 
more questions, sir; but believe that I am rather to be pitied than 
condemned.  I must leave my house to-morrow, for while I stay 
there, it is haunted.  My future dwelling, if I am to live in 
peace, must be a secret.  If my poor boy should ever stray this 
way, do not tempt him to disclose it or have him watched when he 
returns; for if we are hunted, we must fly again.  And now this 
load is off my mind, I beseech you--and you, dear Miss Haredale, 
too--to trust me if you can, and think of me kindly as you have 
been used to do.  If I die and cannot tell my secret even then (for 
that may come to pass), it will sit the lighter on my breast in 
that hour for this day's work; and on that day, and every day until 
it comes, I will pray for and thank you both, and trouble you no 
more.

With that, she would have left them, but they detained her, and 
with many soothing words and kind entreaties, besought her to 
consider what she did, and above all to repose more freely upon 
them, and say what weighed so sorely on her mind.  Finding her deaf 
to their persuasions, Mr Haredale suggested, as a last resource, 
that she should confide in Emma, of whom, as a young person and one 
of her own sex, she might stand in less dread than of himself.  
From this proposal, however, she recoiled with the same 
indescribable repugnance she had manifested when they met.  The 
utmost that could be wrung from her was, a promise that she would 
receive Mr Haredale at her own house next evening, and in the mean 
time reconsider her determination and their dissuasions--though any 
change on her part, as she told them, was quite hopeless.  This 
condition made at last, they reluctantly suffered her to depart, 
since she would neither eat nor drink within the house; and she, 
and Barnaby, and Grip, accordingly went out as they had come, by 
the private stair and garden-gate; seeing and being seen of no one 
by the way.

It was remarkable in the raven that during the whole interview he 
had kept his eye on his book with exactly the air of a very sly 
human rascal, who, under the mask of pretending to read hard, was 
listening to everything.  He still appeared to have the 
conversation very strongly in his mind, for although, when they 
were alone again, he issued orders for the instant preparation of 
innumerable kettles for purposes of tea, he was thoughtful, and 
rather seemed to do so from an abstract sense of duty, than with 
any regard to making himself agreeable, or being what is commonly 
called good company.

They were to return by the coach.  As there was an interval of 
full two hours before it started, and they needed rest and some 
refreshment, Barnaby begged hard for a visit to the Maypole.  But 
his mother, who had no wish to be recognised by any of those who 
had known her long ago, and who feared besides that Mr Haredale 
might, on second thoughts, despatch some messenger to that place of 
entertainment in quest of her, proposed to wait in the churchyard 
instead.  As it was easy for Barnaby to buy and carry thither such 
humble viands as they required, he cheerfully assented, and in the 
churchyard they sat down to take their frugal dinner.

Here again, the raven was in a highly reflective state; walking up 
and down when he had dined, with an air of elderly complacency 
which was strongly suggestive of his having his hands under his 
coat-tails; and appearing to read the tombstones with a very 
critical taste.  Sometimes, after a long inspection of an epitaph, 
he would strop his beak upon the grave to which it referred, and 
cry in his hoarse tones, 'I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil!' 
but whether he addressed his observations to any supposed person 
below, or merely threw them off as a general remark, is matter of 
uncertainty.

It was a quiet pretty spot, but a sad one for Barnaby's mother; for 
Mr Reuben Haredale lay there, and near the vault in which his ashes 
rested, was a stone to the memory of her own husband, with a brief 
inscription recording how and when he had lost his life.  She sat 
here, thoughtful and apart, until their time was out, and the 
distant horn told that the coach was coming.

Barnaby, who had been sleeping on the grass, sprung up quickly at 
the sound; and Grip, who appeared to understand it equally well, 
walked into his basket straightway, entreating society in general 
(as though he intended a kind of satire upon them in connection 
with churchyards) never to say die on any terms.  They were soon on 
the coach-top and rolling along the road.

It went round by the Maypole, and stopped at the door.  Joe was 
from home, and Hugh came sluggishly out to hand up the parcel that 
it called for.  There was no fear of old John coming out.  They 
could see him from the coach-roof fast asleep in his cosy bar.  It 
was a part of John's character.  He made a point of going to sleep 
at the coach's time.  He despised gadding about; he looked upon 
coaches as things that ought to be indicted; as disturbers of the 
peace of mankind; as restless, bustling, busy, horn-blowing 
contrivances, quite beneath the dignity of men, and only suited to 
giddy girls that did nothing but chatter and go a-shopping.  'We 
know nothing about coaches here, sir,' John would say, if any 
unlucky stranger made inquiry touching the offensive vehicles; 'we 
don't book for 'em; we'd rather not; they're more trouble than 
they're worth, with their noise and rattle.  If you like to wait 
for 'em you can; but we don't know anything about 'em; they may 
call and they may not--there's a carrier--he was looked upon as 
quite good enough for us, when I was a boy.'

She dropped her veil as Hugh climbed up, and while he hung behind, 
and talked to Barnaby in whispers.  But neither he nor any other 
person spoke to her, or noticed her, or had any curiosity about 
her; and so, an alien, she visited and left the village where she 
had been born, and had lived a merry child, a comely girl, a happy 
wife--where she had known all her enjoyment of life, and had 
entered on its hardest sorrows.



Chapter 26


'And you're not surprised to hear this, Varden?' said Mr Haredale.  
'Well!  You and she have always been the best friends, and you 
should understand her if anybody does.'

'I ask your pardon, sir,' rejoined the locksmith.  'I didn't say I 
understood her.  I wouldn't have the presumption to say that of any 
woman.  It's not so easily done.  But I am not so much surprised, 
sir, as you expected me to be, certainly.'

'May I ask why not, my good friend?'

'I have seen, sir,' returned the locksmith with evident reluctance, 
'I have seen in connection with her, something that has filled me 
with distrust and uneasiness.  She has made bad friends, how, or 
when, I don't know; but that her house is a refuge for one robber 
and cut-throat at least, I am certain.  There, sir!  Now it's out.'

'Varden!'

'My own eyes, sir, are my witnesses, and for her sake I would be 
willingly half-blind, if I could but have the pleasure of 
mistrusting 'em.  I have kept the secret till now, and it will go 
no further than yourself, I know; but I tell you that with my own 
eyes--broad awake--I saw, in the passage of her house one evening 
after dark, the highwayman who robbed and wounded Mr Edward 
Chester, and on the same night threatened me.'

'And you made no effort to detain him?' said Mr Haredale quickly.

'Sir,' returned the locksmith, 'she herself prevented me--held me, 
with all her strength, and hung about me until he had got clear 
off.'  And having gone so far, he related circumstantially all that 
had passed upon the night in question.

This dialogue was held in a low tone in the locksmith's little 
parlour, into which honest Gabriel had shown his visitor on his 
arrival.  Mr Haredale had called upon him to entreat his company to 
the widow's, that he might have the assistance of his persuasion 
and influence; and out of this circumstance the conversation had 
arisen.

'I forbore,' said Gabriel, 'from repeating one word of this to 
anybody, as it could do her no good and might do her great harm.  I 
thought and hoped, to say the truth, that she would come to me, and 
talk to me about it, and tell me how it was; but though I have 
purposely put myself in her way more than once or twice, she has 
never touched upon the subject--except by a look.  And indeed,' 
said the good-natured locksmith, 'there was a good deal in the 
look, more than could have been put into a great many words.  It 
said among other matters "Don't ask me anything" so imploringly, 
that I didn't ask her anything.  You'll think me an old fool, I 
know, sir.  If it's any relief to call me one, pray do.'

'I am greatly disturbed by what you tell me,' said Mr Haredale, 
after a silence.  'What meaning do you attach to it?'

The locksmith shook his head, and looked doubtfully out of window 
at the failing light.

'She cannot have married again,' said Mr Haredale.

'Not without our knowledge surely, sir.'

'She may have done so, in the fear that it would lead, if known, to 
some objection or estrangement.  Suppose she married incautiously--
it is not improbable, for her existence has been a lonely and 
monotonous one for many years--and the man turned out a ruffian, 
she would be anxious to screen him, and yet would revolt from his 
crimes.  This might be.  It bears strongly on the whole drift of 
her discourse yesterday, and would quite explain her conduct.  Do 
you suppose Barnaby is privy to these circumstances?'

'Quite impossible to say, sir,' returned the locksmith, shaking his 
head again: 'and next to impossible to find out from him.  If what 
you suppose is really the case, I tremble for the lad--a notable 
person, sir, to put to bad uses--'

'It is not possible, Varden,' said Mr Haredale, in a still lower 
tone of voice than he had spoken yet, 'that we have been blinded 
and deceived by this woman from the beginning?  It is not possible 
that this connection was formed in her husband's lifetime, and led 
to his and my brother's--'

'Good God, sir,' cried Gabriel, interrupting him, 'don't entertain 
such dark thoughts for a moment.  Five-and-twenty years ago, where 
was there a girl like her?  A gay, handsome, laughing, bright-eyed 
damsel!  Think what she was, sir.  It makes my heart ache now, even 
now, though I'm an old man, with a woman for a daughter, to think 
what she was and what she is.  We all change, but that's with Time; 
Time does his work honestly, and I don't mind him.  A fig for Time, 
sir.  Use him well, and he's a hearty fellow, and scorns to have 
you at a disadvantage.  But care and suffering (and those have 
changed her) are devils, sir--secret, stealthy, undermining devils--
who tread down the brightest flowers in Eden, and do more havoc in 
a month than Time does in a year.  Picture to yourself for one 
minute what Mary was before they went to work with her fresh heart 
and face--do her that justice--and say whether such a thing is 
possible.'

'You're a good fellow, Varden,' said Mr Haredale, 'and are quite 
right.  I have brooded on that subject so long, that every breath 
of suspicion carries me back to it.  You are quite right.'

'It isn't, sir,' cried the locksmith with brightened eyes, and 
sturdy, honest voice; 'it isn't because I courted her before Rudge, 
and failed, that I say she was too good for him.  She would have 
been as much too good for me.  But she WAS too good for him; he 
wasn't free and frank enough for her.  I don't reproach his memory 
with it, poor fellow; I only want to put her before you as she 
really was.  For myself, I'll keep her old picture in my mind; and 
thinking of that, and what has altered her, I'll stand her friend, 
and try to win her back to peace.  And damme, sir,' cried Gabriel, 
'with your pardon for the word, I'd do the same if she had married 
fifty highwaymen in a twelvemonth; and think it in the Protestant 
Manual too, though Martha said it wasn't, tooth and nail, till 
doomsday!'

If the dark little parlour had been filled with a dense fog, which, 
clearing away in an instant, left it all radiance and brightness, 
it could not have been more suddenly cheered than by this outbreak 
on the part of the hearty locksmith.  In a voice nearly as full and 
round as his own, Mr Haredale cried 'Well said!' and bade him come 
away without more parley.  The locksmith complied right willingly; 
and both getting into a hackney coach which was waiting at the 
door, drove off straightway.

They alighted at the street corner, and dismissing their 
conveyance, walked to the house.  To their first knock at the door 
there was no response.  A second met with the like result.  But in 
answer to the third, which was of a more vigorous kind, the parlour 
window-sash was gently raised, and a musical voice cried:

'Haredale, my dear fellow, I am extremely glad to see you.  How 
very much you have improved in your appearance since our last 
meeting!  I never saw you looking better.  HOW do you do?'

Mr Haredale turned his eyes towards the casement whence the voice 
proceeded, though there was no need to do so, to recognise the 
speaker, and Mr Chester waved his hand, and smiled a courteous 
welcome.

'The door will be opened immediately,' he said.  'There is nobody 
but a very dilapidated female to perform such offices.  You will 
excuse her infirmities?  If she were in a more elevated station of 
society, she would be gouty.  Being but a hewer of wood and drawer 
of water, she is rheumatic.  My dear Haredale, these are natural 
class distinctions, depend upon it.'

Mr Haredale, whose face resumed its lowering and distrustful look 
the moment he heard the voice, inclined his head stiffly, and 
turned his back upon the speaker.

'Not opened yet,' said Mr Chester.  'Dear me!  I hope the aged soul 
has not caught her foot in some unlucky cobweb by the way.  She is 
there at last!  Come in, I beg!'

Mr Haredale entered, followed by the locksmith.  Turning with a 
look of great astonishment to the old woman who had opened the 
door, he inquired for Mrs Rudge--for Barnaby.  They were both gone, 
she replied, wagging her ancient head, for good.  There was a 
gentleman in the parlour, who perhaps could tell them more.  That 
was all SHE knew.

'Pray, sir,' said Mr Haredale, presenting himself before this new 
tenant, 'where is the person whom I came here to see?'

'My dear friend,' he returned, 'I have not the least idea.'

'Your trifling is ill-timed,' retorted the other in a suppressed 
tone and voice, 'and its subject ill-chosen.  Reserve it for those 
who are your friends, and do not expend it on me.  I lay no claim 
to the distinction, and have the self-denial to reject it.'

'My dear, good sir,' said Mr Chester, 'you are heated with walking.  
Sit down, I beg.  Our friend is--'

'Is but a plain honest man,' returned Mr Haredale, 'and quite 
unworthy of your notice.'

'Gabriel Varden by name, sir,' said the locksmith bluntly.

'A worthy English yeoman!' said Mr Chester.  'A most worthy 
yeoman, of whom I have frequently heard my son Ned--darling fellow--
speak, and have often wished to see.  Varden, my good friend, I am 
glad to know you.  You wonder now,' he said, turning languidly to 
Mr Haredale, 'to see me here.  Now, I am sure you do.'

Mr Haredale glanced at him--not fondly or admiringly--smiled, and 
held his peace.

'The mystery is solved in a moment,' said Mr Chester; 'in a moment.  
Will you step aside with me one instant.  You remember our little 
compact in reference to Ned, and your dear niece, Haredale?  You 
remember the list of assistants in their innocent intrigue?  You 
remember these two people being among them?  My dear fellow, 
congratulate yourself, and me.  I have bought them off.'

'You have done what?' said Mr Haredale.

'Bought them off,' returned his smiling friend.  'I have found it 
necessary to take some active steps towards setting this boy and 
girl attachment quite at rest, and have begun by removing these two 
agents.  You are surprised?  Who CAN withstand the influence of a 
little money!  They wanted it, and have been bought off.  We have 
nothing more to fear from them.  They are gone.'

'Gone!' echoed Mr Haredale.  'Where?'

'My dear fellow--and you must permit me to say again, that you 
never looked so young; so positively boyish as you do to-night--the 
Lord knows where; I believe Columbus himself wouldn't find them.  
Between you and me they have their hidden reasons, but upon that 
point I have pledged myself to secrecy.  She appointed to see you 
here to-night, I know, but found it inconvenient, and couldn't 
wait.  Here is the key of the door.  I am afraid you'll find it 
inconveniently large; but as the tenement is yours, your good-
nature will excuse that, Haredale, I am certain!'



Chapter 27


Mr Haredale stood in the widow's parlour with the door-key in his 
hand, gazing by turns at Mr Chester and at Gabriel Varden, and 
occasionally glancing downward at the key as in the hope that of 
its own accord it would unlock the mystery; until Mr Chester, 
putting on his hat and gloves, and sweetly inquiring whether they 
were walking in the same direction, recalled him to himself.

'No,' he said.  'Our roads diverge--widely, as you know.  For the 
present, I shall remain here.'

'You will be hipped, Haredale; you will be miserable, melancholy, 
utterly wretched,' returned the other.  'It's a place of the very 
last description for a man of your temper.  I know it will make you 
very miserable.'

'Let it,' said Mr Haredale, sitting down; 'and thrive upon the 
thought.  Good night!'

Feigning to be wholly unconscious of the abrupt wave of the hand 
which rendered this farewell tantamount to a dismissal, Mr Chester 
retorted with a bland and heartfelt benediction, and inquired of 
Gabriel in what direction HE was going.

'Yours, sir, would be too much honour for the like of me,' replied 
the locksmith, hesitating.

'I wish you to remain here a little while, Varden,' said Mr 
Haredale, without looking towards them.  'I have a word or two to 
say to you.'

'I will not intrude upon your conference another moment,' said Mr 
Chester with inconceivable politeness.  'May it be satisfactory to 
you both!  God bless you!'  So saying, and bestowing upon the 
locksmith a most refulgent smile, he left them.

'A deplorably constituted creature, that rugged person,' he said, 
as he walked along the street; 'he is an atrocity that carries its 
own punishment along with it--a bear that gnaws himself.  And here 
is one of the inestimable advantages of having a perfect command 
over one's inclinations.  I have been tempted in these two short 
interviews, to draw upon that fellow, fifty times.  Five men in six 
would have yielded to the impulse.  By suppressing mine, I wound 
him deeper and more keenly than if I were the best swordsman in all 
Europe, and he the worst.  You are the wise man's very last 
resource,' he said, tapping the hilt of his weapon; 'we can but 
appeal to you when all else is said and done.  To come to you 
before, and thereby spare our adversaries so much, is a barbarian 
mode of warfare, quite unworthy of any man with the remotest 
pretensions to delicacy of feeling, or refinement.'

He smiled so very pleasantly as he communed with himself after this 
manner, that a beggar was emboldened to follow for alms, and to dog 
his footsteps for some distance.  He was gratified by the 
circumstance, feeling it complimentary to his power of feature, and 
as a reward suffered the man to follow him until he called a chair, 
when he graciously dismissed him with a fervent blessing.

'Which is as easy as cursing,' he wisely added, as he took his 
seat, 'and more becoming to the face.--To Clerkenwell, my good 
creatures, if you please!'  The chairmen were rendered quite 
vivacious by having such a courteous burden, and to Clerkenwell 
they went at a fair round trot.

Alighting at a certain point he had indicated to them upon the 
road, and paying them something less than they expected from a fare 
of such gentle speech, he turned into the street in which the 
locksmith dwelt, and presently stood beneath the shadow of the 
Golden Key.  Mr Tappertit, who was hard at work by lamplight, in a 
corner of the workshop, remained unconscious of his presence until 
a hand upon his shoulder made him start and turn his head.

'Industry,' said Mr Chester, 'is the soul of business, and the 
keystone of prosperity.  Mr Tappertit, I shall expect you to invite 
me to dinner when you are Lord Mayor of London.'

'Sir,' returned the 'prentice, laying down his hammer, and rubbing 
his nose on the back of a very sooty hand, 'I scorn the Lord Mayor 
and everything that belongs to him.  We must have another state of 
society, sir, before you catch me being Lord Mayor.  How de do, sir?'

'The better, Mr Tappertit, for looking into your ingenuous face 
once more.  I hope you are well.'

'I am as well, sir,' said Sim, standing up to get nearer to his 
ear, and whispering hoarsely, 'as any man can be under the 
aggrawations to which I am exposed.  My life's a burden to me.  If 
it wasn't for wengeance, I'd play at pitch and toss with it on the 
losing hazard.'

'Is Mrs Varden at home?' said Mr Chester.

'Sir,' returned Sim, eyeing him over with a look of concentrated 
expression,--'she is.  Did you wish to see her?'

Mr Chester nodded.

'Then come this way, sir,' said Sim, wiping his face upon his 
apron.  'Follow me, sir.--Would you permit me to whisper in your 
ear, one half a second?'

'By all means.'

Mr Tappertit raised himself on tiptoe, applied his lips to Mr 
Chester's ear, drew back his head without saying anything, looked 
hard at him, applied them to his ear again, again drew back, and 
finally whispered--'The name is Joseph Willet.  Hush!  I say no 
more.'

Having said that much, he beckoned the visitor with a mysterious 
aspect to follow him to the parlour-door, where he announced him 
in the voice of a gentleman-usher.  'Mr Chester.'

'And not Mr Ed'dard, mind,' said Sim, looking into the door again, 
and adding this by way of postscript in his own person; 'it's his 
father.'

'But do not let his father,' said Mr Chester, advancing hat in 
hand, as he observed the effect of this last explanatory 
announcement, 'do not let his father be any check or restraint on 
your domestic occupations, Miss Varden.'

'Oh!  Now!  There!  An't I always a-saying it!' exclaimed Miggs, 
clapping her hands.  'If he an't been and took Missis for her own 
daughter.  Well, she DO look like it, that she do.  Only think of 
that, mim!'

'Is it possible,' said Mr Chester in his softest tones, 'that this 
is Mrs Varden!  I am amazed.  That is not your daughter, Mrs 
Varden?  No, no.  Your sister.'

'My daughter, indeed, sir,' returned Mrs V., blushing with great 
juvenility.

'Ah, Mrs Varden!' cried the visitor.  'Ah, ma'am--humanity is 
indeed a happy lot, when we can repeat ourselves in others, and 
still be young as they.  You must allow me to salute you--the 
custom of the country, my dear madam--your daughter too.'

Dolly showed some reluctance to perform this ceremony, but was 
sharply reproved by Mrs Varden, who insisted on her undergoing it 
that minute.  For pride, she said with great severity, was one of 
the seven deadly sins, and humility and lowliness of heart were 
virtues.  Wherefore she desired that Dolly would be kissed 
immediately, on pain of her just displeasure; at the same time 
giving her to understand that whatever she saw her mother do, she 
might safely do herself, without being at the trouble of any 
reasoning or reflection on the subject--which, indeed, was 
offensive and undutiful, and in direct contravention of the church 
catechism.

Thus admonished, Dolly complied, though by no means willingly; for 
there was a broad, bold look of admiration in Mr Chester's face, 
refined and polished though it sought to be, which distressed her 
very much.  As she stood with downcast eyes, not liking to look up 
and meet his, he gazed upon her with an approving air, and then 
turned to her mother.

'My friend Gabriel (whose acquaintance I only made this very 
evening) should be a happy man, Mrs Varden.'

'Ah!' sighed Mrs V., shaking her head.

'Ah!' echoed Miggs.

'Is that the case?' said Mr Chester, compassionately.  'Dear me!'

'Master has no intentions, sir,' murmured Miggs as she sidled up 
to him, 'but to be as grateful as his natur will let him, for 
everythink he owns which it is in his powers to appreciate.  But we 
never, sir'--said Miggs, looking sideways at Mrs Varden, and 
interlarding her discourse with a sigh--'we never know the full 
value of SOME wines and fig-trees till we lose 'em.  So much the 
worse, sir, for them as has the slighting of 'em on their 
consciences when they're gone to be in full blow elsewhere.'  And 
Miss Miggs cast up her eyes to signify where that might be.

As Mrs Varden distinctly heard, and was intended to hear, all that 
Miggs said, and as these words appeared to convey in metaphorical 
terms a presage or foreboding that she would at some early period 
droop beneath her trials and take an easy flight towards the stars, 
she immediately began to languish, and taking a volume of the 
Manual from a neighbouring table, leant her arm upon it as though 
she were Hope and that her Anchor.  Mr Chester perceiving this, 
and seeing how the volume was lettered on the back, took it gently 
from her hand, and turned the fluttering leaves.

'My favourite book, dear madam.  How often, how very often in his 
early life--before he can remember'--(this clause was strictly 
true) 'have I deduced little easy moral lessons from its pages, for 
my dear son Ned!  You know Ned?'

Mrs Varden had that honour, and a fine affable young gentleman he 
was.

'You're a mother, Mrs Varden,' said Mr Chester, taking a pinch of 
snuff, 'and you know what I, as a father, feel, when he is praised.  
He gives me some uneasiness--much uneasiness--he's of a roving 
nature, ma'am--from flower to flower--from sweet to sweet--but his 
is the butterfly time of life, and we must not be hard upon such 
trifling.'

He glanced at Dolly.  She was attending evidently to what he said.  
Just what he desired!

'The only thing I object to in this little trait of Ned's, is,' 
said Mr Chester, '--and the mention of his name reminds me, by the 
way, that I am about to beg the favour of a minute's talk with you 
alone--the only thing I object to in it, is, that it DOES partake 
of insincerity.  Now, however I may attempt to disguise the fact 
from myself in my affection for Ned, still I always revert to this--
that if we are not sincere, we are nothing.  Nothing upon earth.  
Let us be sincere, my dear madam--'

'--and Protestant,' murmured Mrs Varden.

'--and Protestant above all things.  Let us be sincere and 
Protestant, strictly moral, strictly just (though always with a 
leaning towards mercy), strictly honest, and strictly true, and we 
gain--it is a slight point, certainly, but still it is something 
tangible; we throw up a groundwork and foundation, so to speak, of 
goodness, on which we may afterwards erect some worthy 
superstructure.'

Now, to be sure, Mrs Varden thought, here is a perfect character.  
Here is a meek, righteous, thoroughgoing Christian, who, having 
mastered all these qualities, so difficult of attainment; who, 
having dropped a pinch of salt on the tails of all the cardinal 
virtues, and caught them every one; makes light of their 
possession, and pants for more morality.  For the good woman never 
doubted (as many good men and women never do), that this slighting 
kind of profession, this setting so little store by great matters, 
this seeming to say, 'I am not proud, I am what you hear, but I 
consider myself no better than other people; let us change the 
subject, pray'--was perfectly genuine and true.  He so contrived 
it, and said it in that way that it appeared to have been forced 
from him, and its effect was marvellous.

Aware of the impression he had made--few men were quicker than he 
at such discoveries--Mr Chester followed up the blow by propounding 
certain virtuous maxims, somewhat vague and general in their 
nature, doubtless, and occasionally partaking of the character of 
truisms, worn a little out at elbow, but delivered in so charming a 
voice and with such uncommon serenity and peace of mind, that they 
answered as well as the best.  Nor is this to be wondered at; for 
as hollow vessels produce a far more musical sound in falling than 
those which are substantial, so it will oftentimes be found that 
sentiments which have nothing in them make the loudest ringing in 
the world, and are the most relished.

Mr Chester, with the volume gently extended in one hand, and with 
the other planted lightly on his breast, talked to them in the most 
delicious manner possible; and quite enchanted all his hearers, 
notwithstanding their conflicting interests and thoughts.  Even 
Dolly, who, between his keen regards and her eyeing over by Mr 
Tappertit, was put quite out of countenance, could not help owning 
within herself that he was the sweetest-spoken gentleman she had 
ever seen.  Even Miss Miggs, who was divided between admiration of 
Mr Chester and a mortal jealousy of her young mistress, had 
sufficient leisure to be propitiated.  Even Mr Tappertit, though 
occupied as we have seen in gazing at his heart's delight, could 
not wholly divert his thoughts from the voice of the other charmer.  
Mrs Varden, to her own private thinking, had never been so improved 
in all her life; and when Mr Chester, rising and craving permission 
to speak with her apart, took her by the hand and led her at arm's 
length upstairs to the best sitting-room, she almost deemed him 
something more than human.

'Dear madam,' he said, pressing her hand delicately to his lips; 
'be seated.'

Mrs Varden called up quite a courtly air, and became seated.

'You guess my object?' said Mr Chester, drawing a chair towards 
her.  'You divine my purpose?  I am an affectionate parent, my dear 
Mrs Varden.'

'That I am sure you are, sir,' said Mrs V.

'Thank you,' returned Mr Chester, tapping his snuff-box lid.  
'Heavy moral responsibilities rest with parents, Mrs Varden.'

Mrs Varden slightly raised her hands, shook her head, and looked at 
the ground as though she saw straight through the globe, out at the 
other end, and into the immensity of space beyond.

'I may confide in you,' said Mr Chester, 'without reserve.  I love 
my son, ma'am, dearly; and loving him as I do, I would save him 
from working certain misery.  You know of his attachment to Miss 
Haredale.  You have abetted him in it, and very kind of you it was 
to do so.  I am deeply obliged to you--most deeply obliged to you--
for your interest in his behalf; but my dear ma'am, it is a 
mistaken one, I do assure you.'

Mrs Varden stammered that she was sorry--'

'Sorry, my dear ma'am,' he interposed.  'Never be sorry for what is 
so very amiable, so very good in intention, so perfectly like 
yourself.  But there are grave and weighty reasons, pressing family 
considerations, and apart even from these, points of religious 
difference, which interpose themselves, and render their union 
impossible; utterly im-possible.  I should have mentioned these 
circumstances to your husband; but he has--you will excuse my 
saying this so freely--he has NOT your quickness of apprehension or 
depth of moral sense.  What an extremely airy house this is, and 
how beautifully kept!  For one like myself--a widower so long--
these tokens of female care and superintendence have inexpressible 
charms.'

Mrs Varden began to think (she scarcely knew why) that the young Mr 
Chester must be in the wrong and the old Mr Chester must he in the 
right.

'My son Ned,' resumed her tempter with his most winning air, 'has 
had, I am told, your lovely daughter's aid, and your open-hearted 
husband's.'

'--Much more than mine, sir,' said Mrs Varden; 'a great deal more.  
I have often had my doubts.  It's a--'

'A bad example,' suggested Mr Chester.  'It is.  No doubt it is.  
Your daughter is at that age when to set before her an 
encouragement for young persons to rebel against their parents on 
this most important point, is particularly injudicious.  You are 
quite right.  I ought to have thought of that myself, but it 
escaped me, I confess--so far superior are your sex to ours, dear 
madam, in point of penetration and sagacity.'

Mrs Varden looked as wise as if she had really said something to 
deserve this compliment--firmly believed she had, in short--and her 
faith in her own shrewdness increased considerably.

'My dear ma'am,' said Mr Chester, 'you embolden me to be plain 
with you.  My son and I are at variance on this point.  The young 
lady and her natural guardian differ upon it, also.  And the 
closing point is, that my son is bound by his duty to me, by his 
honour, by every solemn tie and obligation, to marry some one 
else.'

'Engaged to marry another lady!' quoth Mrs Varden, holding up her 
hands.

'My dear madam, brought up, educated, and trained, expressly for 
that purpose.  Expressly for that purpose.--Miss Haredale, I am 
told, is a very charming creature.'

'I am her foster-mother, and should know--the best young lady in 
the world,' said Mrs Varden.

'I have not the smallest doubt of it.  I am sure she is.  And you, 
who have stood in that tender relation towards her, are bound to 
consult her happiness.  Now, can I--as I have said to Haredale, who 
quite agrees--can I possibly stand by, and suffer her to throw 
herself away (although she IS of a Catholic family), upon a young 
fellow who, as yet, has no heart at all?  It is no imputation upon 
him to say he has not, because young men who have plunged deeply 
into the frivolities and conventionalities of society, very seldom 
have.  Their hearts never grow, my dear ma'am, till after thirty.  
I don't believe, no, I do NOT believe, that I had any heart myself 
when I was Ned's age.'

'Oh sir,' said Mrs Varden, 'I think you must have had.  It's 
impossible that you, who have so much now, can ever have been 
without any.'

'I hope,' he answered, shrugging his shoulders meekly, 'I have a 
little; I hope, a very little--Heaven knows!  But to return to Ned; 
I have no doubt you thought, and therefore interfered benevolently 
in his behalf, that I objected to Miss Haredale.  How very 
natural!  My dear madam, I object to him--to him--emphatically to 
Ned himself.'

Mrs Varden was perfectly aghast at the disclosure.

'He has, if he honourably fulfils this solemn obligation of which I 
have told you--and he must be honourable, dear Mrs Varden, or he is 
no son of mine--a fortune within his reach.  He is of most 
expensive, ruinously expensive habits; and if, in a moment of 
caprice and wilfulness, he were to marry this young lady, and so 
deprive himself of the means of gratifying the tastes to which he 
has been so long accustomed, he would--my dear madam, he would 
break the gentle creature's heart.  Mrs Varden, my good lady, my 
dear soul, I put it to you--is such a sacrifice to be endured?  Is 
the female heart a thing to be trifled with in this way?  Ask your 
own, my dear madam.  Ask your own, I beseech you.'

'Truly,' thought Mrs Varden, 'this gentleman is a saint.  But,' she 
added aloud, and not unnaturally, 'if you take Miss Emma's lover 
away, sir, what becomes of the poor thing's heart then?'

'The very point,' said Mr Chester, not at all abashed, 'to which I 
wished to lead you.  A marriage with my son, whom I should be 
compelled to disown, would be followed by years of misery; they 
would be separated, my dear madam, in a twelvemonth.  To break off 
this attachment, which is more fancied than real, as you and I know 
very well, will cost the dear girl but a few tears, and she is 
happy again.  Take the case of your own daughter, the young lady 
downstairs, who is your breathing image'--Mrs Varden coughed and 
simpered--'there is a young man (I am sorry to say, a dissolute 
fellow, of very indifferent character) of whom I have heard Ned 
speak--Bullet was it--Pullet--Mullet--'

'There is a young man of the name of Joseph Willet, sir,' said Mrs 
Varden, folding her hands loftily.

'That's he,' cried Mr Chester.  'Suppose this Joseph Willet now, 
were to aspire to the affections of your charming daughter, and 
were to engage them.'

'It would be like his impudence,' interposed Mrs Varden, bridling, 
'to dare to think of such a thing!'

'My dear madam, that's the whole case.  I know it would be like his 
impudence.  It is like Ned's impudence to do as he has done; but 
you would not on that account, or because of a few tears from your 
beautiful daughter, refrain from checking their inclinations in 
their birth.  I meant to have reasoned thus with your husband when 
I saw him at Mrs Rudge's this evening--'

'My husband,' said Mrs Varden, interposing with emotion, 'would be 
a great deal better at home than going to Mrs Rudge's so often.  I 
don't know what he does there.  I don't see what occasion he has to 
busy himself in her affairs at all, sir.'

'If I don't appear to express my concurrence in those last 
sentiments of yours,' returned Mr Chester, 'quite so strongly as 
you might desire, it is because his being there, my dear madam, and 
not proving conversational, led me hither, and procured me the 
happiness of this interview with one, in whom the whole management, 
conduct, and prosperity of her family are centred, I perceive.'

With that he took Mrs Varden's hand again, and having pressed it to 
his lips with the highflown gallantry of the day--a little 
burlesqued to render it the more striking in the good lady's 
unaccustomed eyes--proceeded in the same strain of mingled 
sophistry, cajolery, and flattery, to entreat that her utmost 
influence might be exerted to restrain her husband and daughter 
from any further promotion of Edward's suit to Miss Haredale, and 
from aiding or abetting either party in any way.  Mrs Varden was 
but a woman, and had her share of vanity, obstinacy, and love of 
power.  She entered into a secret treaty of alliance, offensive and 
defensive, with her insinuating visitor; and really did believe, as 
many others would have done who saw and heard him, that in so doing 
she furthered the ends of truth, justice, and morality, in a very 
uncommon degree.

Overjoyed by the success of his negotiation, and mightily amused 
within himself, Mr Chester conducted her downstairs in the same 
state as before; and having repeated the previous ceremony of 
salutation, which also as before comprehended Dolly, took his 
leave; first completing the conquest of Miss Miggs's heart, by 
inquiring if 'this young lady' would light him to the door.

'Oh, mim,' said Miggs, returning with the candle.  'Oh gracious me, 
mim, there's a gentleman!  Was there ever such an angel to talk as 
he is--and such a sweet-looking man!  So upright and noble, that he 
seems to despise the very ground he walks on; and yet so mild and 
condescending, that he seems to say "but I will take notice on it 
too."  And to think of his taking you for Miss Dolly, and Miss 
Dolly for your sister--Oh, my goodness me, if I was master wouldn't 
I be jealous of him!'

Mrs Varden reproved her handmaid for this vain-speaking; but very 
gently and mildly--quite smilingly indeed--remarking that she was a 
foolish, giddy, light-headed girl, whose spirits carried her 
beyond all bounds, and who didn't mean half she said, or she would 
be quite angry with her.

'For my part,' said Dolly, in a thoughtful manner, 'I half believe 
Mr Chester is something like Miggs in that respect.  For all his 
politeness and pleasant speaking, I am pretty sure he was making 
game of us, more than once.'

'If you venture to say such a thing again, and to speak ill of 
people behind their backs in my presence, miss,' said Mrs Varden, 
'I shall insist upon your taking a candle and going to bed 
directly.  How dare you, Dolly?  I'm astonished at you.  The 
rudeness of your whole behaviour this evening has been disgraceful.  
Did anybody ever hear,' cried the enraged matron, bursting into 
tears, 'of a daughter telling her own mother she has been made game 
of!'

What a very uncertain temper Mrs Varden's was!



Chapter 28


Repairing to a noted coffee-house in Covent Garden when he left the 
locksmith's, Mr Chester sat long over a late dinner, entertaining 
himself exceedingly with the whimsical recollection of his recent 
proceedings, and congratulating himself very much on his great 
cleverness.  Influenced by these thoughts, his face wore an 
expression so benign and tranquil, that the waiter in immediate 
attendance upon him felt he could almost have died in his defence, 
and settled in his own mind (until the receipt of the bill, and a 
very small fee for very great trouble disabused it of the idea) 
that such an apostolic customer was worth half-a-dozen of the 
ordinary run of visitors, at least.

A visit to the gaming-table--not as a heated, anxious venturer, but 
one whom it was quite a treat to see staking his two or three 
pieces in deference to the follies of society, and smiling with 
equal benevolence on winners and losers--made it late before he 
reached home.  It was his custom to bid his servant go to bed at 
his own time unless he had orders to the contrary, and to leave a 
candle on the common stair.  There was a lamp on the landing by 
which he could always light it when he came home late, and having a 
key of the door about him he could enter and go to bed at his 
pleasure.

He opened the glass of the dull lamp, whose wick, burnt up and 
swollen like a drunkard's nose, came flying off in little 
carbuncles at the candle's touch, and scattering hot sparks about, 
rendered it matter of some difficulty to kindle the lazy taper; 
when a noise, as of a man snoring deeply some steps higher up, 
caused him to pause and listen.  It was the heavy breathing of a 
sleeper, close at hand.  Some fellow had lain down on the open 
staircase, and was slumbering soundly.  Having lighted the candle 
at length and opened his own door, he softly ascended, holding the 
taper high above his head, and peering cautiously about; curious to 
see what kind of man had chosen so comfortless a shelter for his 
lodging.

With his head upon the landing and his great limbs flung over half-
a-dozen stairs, as carelessly as though he were a dead man whom 
drunken bearers had thrown down by chance, there lay Hugh, face 
uppermost, his long hair drooping like some wild weed upon his 
wooden pillow, and his huge chest heaving with the sounds which so 
unwontedly disturbed the place and hour.

He who came upon him so unexpectedly was about to break his rest by 
thrusting him with his foot, when, glancing at his upturned face, 
he arrested himself in the very action, and stooping down and 
shading the candle with his hand, examined his features closely.  
Close as his first inspection was, it did not suffice, for he 
passed the light, still carefully shaded as before, across and 
across his face, and yet observed him with a searching eye.

While he was thus engaged, the sleeper, without any starting or 
turning round, awoke.  There was a kind of fascination in meeting 
his steady gaze so suddenly, which took from the other the presence 
of mind to withdraw his eyes, and forced him, as it were, to meet 
his look.  So they remained staring at each other, until Mr Chester 
at last broke silence, and asked him in a low voice, why he lay 
sleeping there.

'I thought,' said Hugh, struggling into a sitting posture and 
gazing at him intently, still, 'that you were a part of my dream.  
It was a curious one.  I hope it may never come true, master.'

'What makes you shiver?'

'The--the cold, I suppose,' he growled, as he shook himself and 
rose.  'I hardly know where I am yet.'

'Do you know me?' said Mr Chester.

'Ay, I know you,' he answered.  'I was dreaming of you--we're not 
where I thought we were.  That's a comfort.'

He looked round him as he spoke, and in particular looked above his 
head, as though he half expected to be standing under some object 
which had had existence in his dream.  Then he rubbed his eyes and 
shook himself again, and followed his conductor into his own rooms.

Mr Chester lighted the candles which stood upon his dressing-table, 
and wheeling an easy-chair towards the fire, which was yet 
burning, stirred up a cheerful blaze, sat down before it, and bade 
his uncouth visitor 'Come here,' and draw his boots off.

'You have been drinking again, my fine fellow,' he said, as Hugh 
went down on one knee, and did as he was told.

'As I'm alive, master, I've walked the twelve long miles, and 
waited here I don't know how long, and had no drink between my lips 
since dinner-time at noon.'

'And can you do nothing better, my pleasant friend, than fall 
asleep, and shake the very building with your snores?' said Mr 
Chester.  'Can't you dream in your straw at home, dull dog as you 
are, that you need come here to do it?--Reach me those slippers, 
and tread softly.'

Hugh obeyed in silence.

'And harkee, my dear young gentleman,' said Mr Chester, as he put 
them on, 'the next time you dream, don't let it be of me, but of 
some dog or horse with whom you are better acquainted.  Fill the 
glass once--you'll find it and the bottle in the same place--and 
empty it to keep yourself awake.'

Hugh obeyed again even more zealously--and having done so, 
presented himself before his patron.

'Now,' said Mr Chester, 'what do you want with me?'

'There was news to-day,' returned Hugh.  'Your son was at our 
house--came down on horseback.  He tried to see the young woman, 
but couldn't get sight of her.  He left some letter or some message 
which our Joe had charge of, but he and the old one quarrelled 
about it when your son had gone, and the old one wouldn't let it be 
delivered.  He says (that's the old one does) that none of his 
people shall interfere and get him into trouble.  He's a landlord, 
he says, and lives on everybody's custom.'

'He's a jewel,' smiled Mr Chester, 'and the better for being a dull 
one.--Well?'

'Varden's daughter--that's the girl I kissed--'

'--and stole the bracelet from upon the king's highway,' said Mr 
Chester, composedly.  'Yes; what of her?'

'She wrote a note at our house to the young woman, saying she lost 
the letter I brought to you, and you burnt.  Our Joe was to carry 
it, but the old one kept him at home all next day, on purpose that 
he shouldn't.  Next morning he gave it to me to take; and here it 
is.'

'You didn't deliver it then, my good friend?' said Mr Chester, 
twirling Dolly's note between his finger and thumb, and feigning to 
be surprised.

'I supposed you'd want to have it,' retorted Hugh.  'Burn one, burn 
all, I thought.'

'My devil-may-care acquaintance,' said Mr Chester--'really if you 
do not draw some nicer distinctions, your career will be cut short 
with most surprising suddenness.  Don't you know that the letter 
you brought to me, was directed to my son who resides in this very 
place?  And can you descry no difference between his letters and 
those addressed to other people?'

'If you don't want it,' said Hugh, disconcerted by this reproof, 
for he had expected high praise, 'give it me back, and I'll deliver 
it.  I don't know how to please you, master.'

'I shall deliver it,' returned his patron, putting it away after a 
moment's consideration, 'myself.  Does the young lady walk out, on 
fine mornings?'

'Mostly--about noon is her usual time.'

'Alone?'

'Yes, alone.'

'Where?'

'In the grounds before the house.--Them that the footpath crosses.'

'If the weather should be fine, I may throw myself in her way to-
morrow, perhaps,' said Mr Chester, as coolly as if she were one of 
his ordinary acquaintance.  'Mr Hugh, if I should ride up to the 
Maypole door, you will do me the favour only to have seen me once.  
You must suppress your gratitude, and endeavour to forget my 
forbearance in the matter of the bracelet.  It is natural it should 
break out, and it does you honour; but when other folks are by, you 
must, for your own sake and safety, be as like your usual self as 
though you owed me no obligation whatever, and had never stood 
within these walls.  You comprehend me?'

Hugh understood him perfectly.  After a pause he muttered that he 
hoped his patron would involve him in no trouble about this last 
letter; for he had kept it back solely with the view of pleasing 
him.  He was continuing in this strain, when Mr Chester with a 
most beneficent and patronising air cut him short by saying:

'My good fellow, you have my promise, my word, my sealed bond (for 
a verbal pledge with me is quite as good), that I will always 
protect you so long as you deserve it.  Now, do set your mind at 
rest.  Keep it at ease, I beg of you.  When a man puts himself in 
my power so thoroughly as you have done, I really feel as though he 
had a kind of claim upon me.  I am more disposed to mercy and 
forbearance under such circumstances than I can tell you, Hugh.  Do 
look upon me as your protector, and rest assured, I entreat you, 
that on the subject of that indiscretion, you may preserve, as long 
as you and I are friends, the lightest heart that ever beat within 
a human breast.  Fill that glass once more to cheer you on your 
road homewards--I am really quite ashamed to think how far you have 
to go--and then God bless you for the night.'

'They think,' said Hugh, when he had tossed the liquor down, 'that 
I am sleeping soundly in the stable.  Ha ha ha!  The stable door is 
shut, but the steed's gone, master.'

'You are a most convivial fellow,' returned his friend, 'and I love 
your humour of all things.  Good night!  Take the greatest 
possible care of yourself, for my sake!'

It was remarkable that during the whole interview, each had 
endeavoured to catch stolen glances of the other's face, and had 
never looked full at it.  They interchanged one brief and hasty 
glance as Hugh went out, averted their eyes directly, and so 
separated.  Hugh closed the double doors behind him, carefully and 
without noise; and Mr Chester remained in his easy-chair, with his 
gaze intently fixed upon the fire.

'Well!' he said, after meditating for a long time--and said with a 
deep sigh and an uneasy shifting of his attitude, as though he 
dismissed some other subject from his thoughts, and returned to 
that which had held possession of them all the day--the plot 
thickens; I have thrown the shell; it will explode, I think, in 
eight-and-forty hours, and should scatter these good folks 
amazingly.  We shall see!'

He went to bed and fell asleep, but had not slept long when he 
started up and thought that Hugh was at the outer door, calling in 
a strange voice, very different from his own, to be admitted.  The 
delusion was so strong upon him, and was so full of that vague 
terror of the night in which such visions have their being, that he 
rose, and taking his sheathed sword in his hand, opened the door, 
and looked out upon the staircase, and towards the spot where Hugh 
had lain asleep; and even spoke to him by name.  But all was dark 
and quiet, and creeping back to bed again, he fell, after an hour's 
uneasy watching, into a second sleep, and woke no more till 
morning.



Chapter 29


The thoughts of worldly men are for ever regulated by a moral law 
of gravitation, which, like the physical one, holds them down to 
earth.  The bright glory of day, and the silent wonders of a 
starlit night, appeal to their minds in vain.  There are no signs 
in the sun, or in the moon, or in the stars, for their reading.  
They are like some wise men, who, learning to know each planet by 
its Latin name, have quite forgotten such small heavenly 
constellations as Charity, Forbearance, Universal Love, and Mercy, 
although they shine by night and day so brightly that the blind may 
see them; and who, looking upward at the spangled sky, see nothing 
there but the reflection of their own great wisdom and book-
learning.

It is curious to imagine these people of the world, busy in 
thought, turning their eyes towards the countless spheres that 
shine above us, and making them reflect the only images their minds 
contain.  The man who lives but in the breath of princes, has 
nothing his sight but stars for courtiers' breasts.  The envious 
man beholds his neighbours' honours even in the sky; to the money-
hoarder, and the mass of worldly folk, the whole great universe 
above glitters with sterling coin--fresh from the mint--stamped 
with the sovereign's head--coming always between them and heaven, 
turn where they may.  So do the shadows of our own desires stand 
between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is 
eclipsed.

Everything was fresh and gay, as though the world were but that 
morning made, when Mr Chester rode at a tranquil pace along the 
Forest road.  Though early in the season, it was warm and genial 
weather; the trees were budding into leaf, the hedges and the grass 
were green, the air was musical with songs of birds, and high above 
them all the lark poured out her richest melody.  In shady spots, 
the morning dew sparkled on each young leaf and blade of grass; 
and where the sun was shining, some diamond drops yet glistened 
brightly, as in unwillingness to leave so fair a world, and have 
such brief existence.  Even the light wind, whose rustling was as 
gentle to the ear as softly-falling water, had its hope and 
promise; and, leaving a pleasant fragrance in its track as it went 
fluttering by, whispered of its intercourse with Summer, and of his 
happy coming.

The solitary rider went glancing on among the trees, from sunlight 
into shade and back again, at the same even pace--looking about 
him, certainly, from time to time, but with no greater thought of 
the day or the scene through which he moved, than that he was 
fortunate (being choicely dressed) to have such favourable weather.  
He smiled very complacently at such times, but rather as if he were 
satisfied with himself than with anything else: and so went riding 
on, upon his chestnut cob, as pleasant to look upon as his own 
horse, and probably far less sensitive to the many cheerful 
influences by which he was surrounded.

In the course of time, the Maypole's massive chimneys rose upon his 
view: but he quickened not his pace one jot, and with the same cool 
gravity rode up to the tavern porch.  John Willet, who was toasting 
his red face before a great fire in the bar, and who, with 
surpassing foresight and quickness of apprehension, had been 
thinking, as he looked at the blue sky, that if that state of 
things lasted much longer, it might ultimately become necessary to 
leave off fires and throw the windows open, issued forth to hold 
his stirrup; calling lustily for Hugh.

'Oh, you're here, are you, sir?' said John, rather surprised by the 
quickness with which he appeared.  'Take this here valuable animal 
into the stable, and have more than particular care of him if you 
want to keep your place.  A mortal lazy fellow, sir; he needs a 
deal of looking after.'

'But you have a son,' returned Mr Chester, giving his bridle to 
Hugh as he dismounted, and acknowledging his salute by a careless 
motion of his hand towards his hat.  'Why don't you make HIM 
useful?'

'Why, the truth is, sir,' replied John with great importance, 'that 
my son--what, you're a-listening are you, villain?'

'Who's listening?' returned Hugh angrily.  'A treat, indeed, to 
hear YOU speak!  Would you have me take him in till he's cool?'

'Walk him up and down further off then, sir,' cried old John, 'and 
when you see me and a noble gentleman entertaining ourselves with 
talk, keep your distance.  If you don't know your distance, sir,' 
added Mr Willet, after an enormously long pause, during which he 
fixed his great dull eyes on Hugh, and waited with exemplary 
patience for any little property in the way of ideas that might 
come to him, 'we'll find a way to teach you, pretty soon.'

Hugh shrugged his shoulders scornfully, and in his reckless 
swaggering way, crossed to the other side of the little green, and 
there, with the bridle slung loosely over his shoulder, led the 
horse to and fro, glancing at his master every now and then from 
under his bushy eyebrows, with as sinister an aspect as one would 
desire to see.

Mr Chester, who, without appearing to do so, had eyed him 
attentively during this brief dispute, stepped into the porch, and 
turning abruptly to Mr Willet, said,

'You keep strange servants, John.'

'Strange enough to look at, sir, certainly,' answered the host; 
'but out of doors; for horses, dogs, and the likes of that; there 
an't a better man in England than is that Maypole Hugh yonder.  He 
an't fit for indoors,' added Mr Willet, with the confidential air 
of a man who felt his own superior nature.  'I do that; but if that 
chap had only a little imagination, sir--'

'He's an active fellow now, I dare swear,' said Mr Chester, in a 
musing tone, which seemed to suggest that he would have said the 
same had there been nobody to hear him.

'Active, sir!' retorted John, with quite an expression in his face; 
'that chap!  Hallo there!  You, sir!  Bring that horse here, and 
go and hang my wig on the weathercock, to show this gentleman 
whether you're one of the lively sort or not.'

Hugh made no answer, but throwing the bridle to his master, and 
snatching his wig from his head, in a manner so unceremonious and 
hasty that the action discomposed Mr Willet not a little, though 
performed at his own special desire, climbed nimbly to the very 
summit of the maypole before the house, and hanging the wig upon 
the weathercock, sent it twirling round like a roasting jack.  
Having achieved this performance, he cast it on the ground, and 
sliding down the pole with inconceivable rapidity, alighted on his 
feet almost as soon as it had touched the earth.

'There, sir,' said John, relapsing into his usual stolid state, 
'you won't see that at many houses, besides the Maypole, where 
there's good accommodation for man and beast--nor that neither, 
though that with him is nothing.'

This last remark bore reference to his vaulting on horseback, as 
upon Mr Chester's first visit, and quickly disappearing by the 
stable gate.

'That with him is nothing,' repeated Mr Willet, brushing his wig 
with his wrist, and inwardly resolving to distribute a small charge 
for dust and damage to that article of dress, through the various 
items of his guest's bill; 'he'll get out of a'most any winder in 
the house.  There never was such a chap for flinging himself about 
and never hurting his bones.  It's my opinion, sir, that it's 
pretty nearly allowing to his not having any imagination; and that 
if imagination could be (which it can't) knocked into him, he'd 
never be able to do it any more.  But we was a-talking, sir, about 
my son.'

'True, Willet, true,' said his visitor, turning again towards the 
landlord with his accustomed serenity of face.  'My good friend, 
what about him?'

It has been reported that Mr Willet, previously to making answer, 
winked.  But as he was never known to be guilty of such lightness 
of conduct either before or afterwards, this may be looked upon as 
a malicious invention of his enemies--founded, perhaps, upon the 
undisputed circumstance of his taking his guest by the third breast 
button of his coat, counting downwards from the chin, and pouring 
his reply into his ear:

'Sir,' whispered John, with dignity, 'I know my duty.  We want no 
love-making here, sir, unbeknown to parents.  I respect a certain 
young gentleman, taking him in the light of a young gentleman; I 
respect a certain young lady, taking her in the light of a young 
lady; but of the two as a couple, I have no knowledge, sir, none 
whatever.  My son, sir, is upon his patrole.'

'I thought I saw him looking through the corner window but this 
moment,' said Mr Chester, who naturally thought that being on 
patrole, implied walking about somewhere.

'No doubt you did, sir,' returned John.  'He is upon his patrole of 
honour, sir, not to leave the premises.  Me and some friends of 
mine that use the Maypole of an evening, sir, considered what was 
best to be done with him, to prevent his doing anything unpleasant 
in opposing your desires; and we've put him on his patrole.  And 
what's more, sir, he won't be off his patrole for a pretty long 
time to come, I can tell you that.'

When he had communicated this bright idea, which had its origin in 
the perusal by the village cronies of a newspaper, containing, 
among other matters, an account of how some officer pending the 
sentence of some court-martial had been enlarged on parole, Mr 
Willet drew back from his guest's ear, and without any visible 
alteration of feature, chuckled thrice audibly.  This nearest 
approach to a laugh in which he ever indulged (and that but seldom 
and only on extreme occasions), never even curled his lip or 
effected the smallest change in--no, not so much as a slight 
wagging of--his great, fat, double chin, which at these times, as 
at all others, remained a perfect desert in the broad map of his 
face; one changeless, dull, tremendous blank.

Lest it should be matter of surprise to any, that Mr Willet adopted 
this bold course in opposition to one whom he had often 
entertained, and who had always paid his way at the Maypole 
gallantly, it may be remarked that it was his very penetration and 
sagacity in this respect, which occasioned him to indulge in those 
unusual demonstrations of jocularity, just now recorded.  For Mr 
Willet, after carefully balancing father and son in his mental 
scales, had arrived at the distinct conclusion that the old 
gentleman was a better sort of a customer than the young one.  
Throwing his landlord into the same scale, which was already turned 
by this consideration, and heaping upon him, again, his strong 
desires to run counter to the unfortunate Joe, and his opposition 
as a general principle to all matters of love and matrimony, it 
went down to the very ground straightway, and sent the light cause 
of the younger gentleman flying upwards to the ceiling.  Mr 
Chester was not the kind of man to be by any means dim-sighted to 
Mr Willet's motives, but he thanked him as graciously as if he had 
been one of the most disinterested martyrs that ever shone on 
earth; and leaving him, with many complimentary reliances on his 
great taste and judgment, to prepare whatever dinner he might deem 
most fitting the occasion, bent his steps towards the Warren.

Dressed with more than his usual elegance; assuming a gracefulness 
of manner, which, though it was the result of long study, sat 
easily upon him and became him well; composing his features into 
their most serene and prepossessing expression; and setting in 
short that guard upon himself, at every point, which denoted that 
he attached no slight importance to the impression he was about to 
make; he entered the bounds of Miss Haredale's usual walk.  He had 
not gone far, or looked about him long, when he descried coming 
towards him, a female figure.  A glimpse of the form and dress as 
she crossed a little wooden bridge which lay between them, 
satisfied him that he had found her whom he desired to see.  He 
threw himself in her way, and a very few paces brought them close 
together.

He raised his hat from his head, and yielding the path, suffered 
her to pass him.  Then, as if the idea had but that moment 
occurred to him, he turned hastily back and said in an agitated 
voice:

'I beg pardon--do I address Miss Haredale?'

She stopped in some confusion at being so unexpectedly accosted by 
a stranger; and answered 'Yes.'

'Something told me,' he said, LOOKING a compliment to her beauty, 
'that it could be no other.  Miss Haredale, I bear a name which is 
not unknown to you--which it is a pride, and yet a pain to me to 
know, sounds pleasantly in your ears.  I am a man advanced in life, 
as you see.  I am the father of him whom you honour and distinguish 
above all other men.  May I for weighty reasons which fill me with 
distress, beg but a minute's conversation with you here?'

Who that was inexperienced in deceit, and had a frank and youthful 
heart, could doubt the speaker's truth--could doubt it too, when 
the voice that spoke, was like the faint echo of one she knew so 
well, and so much loved to hear?  She inclined her head, and 
stopping, cast her eyes upon the ground.

'A little more apart--among these trees.  It is an old man's hand, 
Miss Haredale; an honest one, believe me.'

She put hers in it as he said these words, and suffered him to lead 
her to a neighbouring seat.

'You alarm me, sir,' she said in a low voice.  'You are not the 
bearer of any ill news, I hope?'

'Of none that you anticipate,' he answered, sitting down beside 
her.  'Edward is well--quite well.  It is of him I wish to speak, 
certainly; but I have no misfortune to communicate.'

She bowed her head again, and made as though she would have begged 
him to proceed; but said nothing.

'I am sensible that I speak to you at a disadvantage, dear Miss 
Haredale.  Believe me that I am not so forgetful of the feelings of 
my younger days as not to know that you are little disposed to view 
me with favour.  You have heard me described as cold-hearted, 
calculating, selfish--'

'I have never, sir,'--she interposed with an altered manner and a 
firmer voice; 'I have never heard you spoken of in harsh or 
disrespectful terms.  You do a great wrong to Edward's nature if 
you believe him capable of any mean or base proceeding.'

'Pardon me, my sweet young lady, but your uncle--'

'Nor is it my uncle's nature either,' she replied, with a 
heightened colour in her cheek.  'It is not his nature to stab in 
the dark, nor is it mine to love such deeds.'

She rose as she spoke, and would have left him; but he detained her 
with a gentle hand, and besought her in such persuasive accents to 
hear him but another minute, that she was easily prevailed upon to 
comply, and so sat down again.

'And it is,' said Mr Chester, looking upward, and apostrophising 
the air; 'it is this frank, ingenuous, noble nature, Ned, that you 
can wound so lightly.  Shame--shame upon you, boy!'

She turned towards him quickly, and with a scornful look and 
flashing eyes.  There were tears in Mr Chester's eyes, but he 
dashed them hurriedly away, as though unwilling that his weakness 
should be known, and regarded her with mingled admiration and 
compassion.

'I never until now,' he said, 'believed, that the frivolous actions 
of a young man could move me like these of my own son.  I never 
knew till now, the worth of a woman's heart, which boys so lightly 
win, and lightly fling away.  Trust me, dear young lady, that I 
never until now did know your worth; and though an abhorrence of 
deceit and falsehood has impelled me to seek you out, and would 
have done so had you been the poorest and least gifted of your sex, 
I should have lacked the fortitude to sustain this interview could 
I have pictured you to my imagination as you really are.'

Oh!  If Mrs Varden could have seen the virtuous gentleman as he 
said these words, with indignation sparkling from his eyes--if she 
could have heard his broken, quavering voice--if she could have 
beheld him as he stood bareheaded in the sunlight, and with 
unwonted energy poured forth his eloquence!

With a haughty face, but pale and trembling too, Emma regarded him 
in silence.  She neither spoke nor moved, but gazed upon him as 
though she would look into his heart.

'I throw off,' said Mr Chester, 'the restraint which natural 
affection would impose on some men, and reject all bonds but those 
of truth and duty.  Miss Haredale, you are deceived; you are 
deceived by your unworthy lover, and my unworthy son.'

Still she looked at him steadily, and still said not one word.

'I have ever opposed his professions of love for you; you will do 
me the justice, dear Miss Haredale, to remember that.  Your uncle 
and myself were enemies in early life, and if I had sought 
retaliation, I might have found it here.  But as we grow older, we 
grow wiser--bitter, I would fain hope--and from the first, I have 
opposed him in this attempt.  I foresaw the end, and would have 
spared you, if I could.'

'Speak plainly, sir,' she faltered.  'You deceive me, or are 
deceived yourself.  I do not believe you--I cannot--I should not.'

'First,' said Mr Chester, soothingly, 'for there may be in your 
mind some latent angry feeling to which I would not appeal, pray 
take this letter.  It reached my hands by chance, and by mistake, 
and should have accounted to you (as I am told) for my son's not 
answering some other note of yours.  God forbid, Miss Haredale,' 
said the good gentleman, with great emotion, 'that there should be 
in your gentle breast one causeless ground of quarrel with him.  
You should know, and you will see, that he was in no fault here.'

There appeared something so very candid, so scrupulously 
honourable, so very truthful and just in this course something 
which rendered the upright person who resorted to it, so worthy of 
belief--that Emma's heart, for the first time, sunk within her.  
She turned away and burst into tears.

'I would,' said Mr Chester, leaning over her, and speaking in mild 
and quite venerable accents; 'I would, dear girl, it were my task 
to banish, not increase, those tokens of your grief.  My son, my 
erring son,--I will not call him deliberately criminal in this, for 
men so young, who have been inconstant twice or thrice before, act 
without reflection, almost without a knowledge of the wrong they 
do,--will break his plighted faith to you; has broken it even now.  
Shall I stop here, and having given you this warning, leave it to 
be fulfilled; or shall I go on?'

'You will go on, sir,' she answered, 'and speak more plainly yet, 
in justice both to him and me.'

'My dear girl,' said Mr Chester, bending over her more 
affectionately still; 'whom I would call my daughter, but the Fates 
forbid, Edward seeks to break with you upon a false and most 
unwarrantable pretence.  I have it on his own showing; in his own 
hand.  Forgive me, if I have had a watch upon his conduct; I am his 
father; I had a regard for your peace and his honour, and no better 
resource was left me.  There lies on his desk at this present 
moment, ready for transmission to you, a letter, in which he tells 
you that our poverty--our poverty; his and mine, Miss Haredale--
forbids him to pursue his claim upon your hand; in which he offers, 
voluntarily proposes, to free you from your pledge; and talks 
magnanimously (men do so, very commonly, in such cases) of being in 
time more worthy of your regard--and so forth.  A letter, to be 
plain, in which he not only jilts you--pardon the word; I would 
summon to your aid your pride and dignity--not only jilts you, I 
fear, in favour of the object whose slighting treatment first 
inspired his brief passion for yourself and gave it birth in 
wounded vanity, but affects to make a merit and a virtue of the 
act.'

She glanced proudly at him once more, as by an involuntary impulse, 
and with a swelling breast rejoined, 'If what you say be true, he 
takes much needless trouble, sir, to compass his design.  He's very 
tender of my peace of mind.  I quite thank him.'

'The truth of what I tell you, dear young lady,' he replied, 'you 
will test by the receipt or non-receipt of the letter of which I 
speak.  Haredale, my dear fellow, I am delighted to see you, 
although we meet under singular circumstances, and upon a 
melancholy occasion.  I hope you are very well.'

At these words the young lady raised her eyes, which were filled 
with tears; and seeing that her uncle indeed stood before them, and 
being quite unequal to the trial of hearing or of speaking one word 
more, hurriedly withdrew, and left them.  They stood looking at 
each other, and at her retreating figure, and for a long time 
neither of them spoke.

'What does this mean?  Explain it,' said Mr Haredale at length.  
'Why are you here, and why with her?'

'My dear friend,' rejoined the other, resuming his accustomed 
manner with infinite readiness, and throwing himself upon the bench 
with a weary air, 'you told me not very long ago, at that 
delightful old tavern of which you are the esteemed proprietor (and 
a most charming establishment it is for persons of rural pursuits 
and in robust health, who are not liable to take cold), that I had 
the head and heart of an evil spirit in all matters of deception.  
I thought at the time; I really did think; you flattered me.  But 
now I begin to wonder at your discernment, and vanity apart, do 
honestly believe you spoke the truth.  Did you ever counterfeit 
extreme ingenuousness and honest indignation?  My dear fellow, you 
have no conception, if you never did, how faint the effort makes 
one.'

Mr Haredale surveyed him with a look of cold contempt.  'You may 
evade an explanation, I know,' he said, folding his arms.  'But I 
must have it.  I can wait.'

'Not at all.  Not at all, my good fellow.  You shall not wait a 
moment,' returned his friend, as he lazily crossed his legs.  'The 
simplest thing in the world.  It lies in a nutshell.  Ned has 
written her a letter--a boyish, honest, sentimental composition, 
which remains as yet in his desk, because he hasn't had the heart 
to send it.  I have taken a liberty, for which my parental 
affection and anxiety are a sufficient excuse, and possessed 
myself of the contents.  I have described them to your niece (a 
most enchanting person, Haredale; quite an angelic creature), with 
a little colouring and description adapted to our purpose.  It's 
done.  You may be quite easy.  It's all over.  Deprived of their 
adherents and mediators; her pride and jealousy roused to the 
utmost; with nobody to undeceive her, and you to confirm me; you 
will find that their intercourse will close with her answer.  If 
she receives Ned's letter by to-morrow noon, you may date their 
parting from to-morrow night.  No thanks, I beg; you owe me none.  
I have acted for myself; and if I have forwarded our compact with 
all the ardour even you could have desired, I have done so 
selfishly, indeed.'

'I curse the compact, as you call it, with my whole heart and 
soul,' returned the other.  'It was made in an evil hour.  I have 
bound myself to a lie; I have leagued myself with you; and though I 
did so with a righteous motive, and though it cost me such an 
effort as haply few men know, I hate and despise myself for the 
deed.'

'You are very warm,' said Mr Chester with a languid smile.

'I AM warm.  I am maddened by your coldness.  'Death, Chester, if 
your blood ran warmer in your veins, and there were no restraints 
upon me, such as those that hold and drag me back--well; it is 
done; you tell me so, and on such a point I may believe you.  When 
I am most remorseful for this treachery, I will think of you and 
your marriage, and try to justify myself in such remembrances, for 
having torn asunder Emma and your son, at any cost.  Our bond is 
cancelled now, and we may part.'

Mr Chester kissed his hand gracefully; and with the same tranquil 
face he had preserved throughout--even when he had seen his 
companion so tortured and transported by his passion that his whole 
frame was shaken--lay in his lounging posture on the seat and 
watched him as he walked away.

'My scapegoat and my drudge at school,' he said, raising his head 
to look after him; 'my friend of later days, who could not keep his 
mistress when he had won her, and threw me in her way to carry off 
the prize; I triumph in the present and the past.  Bark on, ill-
favoured, ill-conditioned cur; fortune has ever been with me--I 
like to hear you.'

The spot where they had met, was in an avenue of trees.  Mr 
Haredale not passing out on either hand, had walked straight on.  
He chanced to turn his head when at some considerable distance, and 
seeing that his late companion had by that time risen and was 
looking after him, stood still as though he half expected him to 
follow and waited for his coming up.

'It MAY come to that one day, but not yet,' said Mr Chester, 
waving his hand, as though they were the best of friends, and 
turning away.  'Not yet, Haredale.  Life is pleasant enough to me; 
dull and full of heaviness to you.  No.  To cross swords with such 
a man--to indulge his humour unless upon extremity--would be weak 
indeed.'

For all that, he drew his sword as he walked along, and in an 
absent humour ran his eye from hilt to point full twenty times.  
But thoughtfulness begets wrinkles; remembering this, he soon put 
it up, smoothed his contracted brow, hummed a gay tune with greater 
gaiety of manner, and was his unruffled self again.



Chapter 30


A homely proverb recognises the existence of a troublesome class of 
persons who, having an inch conceded them, will take an ell.  Not 
to quote the illustrious examples of those heroic scourges of 
mankind, whose amiable path in life has been from birth to death 
through blood, and fire, and ruin, and who would seem to have 
existed for no better purpose than to teach mankind that as the 
absence of pain is pleasure, so the earth, purged of their 
presence, may be deemed a blessed place--not to quote such mighty 
instances, it will be sufficient to refer to old John Willet.

Old John having long encroached a good standard inch, full measure, 
on the liberty of Joe, and having snipped off a Flemish ell in the 
matter of the parole, grew so despotic and so great, that his 
thirst for conquest knew no bounds.  The more young Joe submitted, 
the more absolute old John became.  The ell soon faded into 
nothing.  Yards, furlongs, miles arose; and on went old John in the 
pleasantest manner possible, trimming off an exuberance in this 
place, shearing away some liberty of speech or action in that, and 
conducting himself in his small way with as much high mightiness 
and majesty, as the most glorious tyrant that ever had his statue 
reared in the public ways, of ancient or of modern times.

As great men are urged on to the abuse of power (when they need 
urging, which is not often), by their flatterers and dependents, so 
old John was impelled to these exercises of authority by the 
applause and admiration of his Maypole cronies, who, in the 
intervals of their nightly pipes and pots, would shake their heads 
and say that Mr Willet was a father of the good old English sort; 
that there were no new-fangled notions or modern ways in him; that 
he put them in mind of what their fathers were when they were boys; 
that there was no mistake about him; that it would be well for the 
country if there were more like him, and more was the pity that 
there were not; with many other original remarks of that nature.  
Then they would condescendingly give Joe to understand that it was 
all for his good, and he would be thankful for it one day; and in 
particular, Mr Cobb would acquaint him, that when he was his age, 
his father thought no more of giving him a parental kick, or a box 
on the ears, or a cuff on the head, or some little admonition of 
that sort, than he did of any other ordinary duty of life; and he 
would further remark, with looks of great significance, that but 
for this judicious bringing up, he might have never been the man he 
was at that present speaking; which was probable enough, as he was, 
beyond all question, the dullest dog of the party.  In short, 
between old John and old John's friends, there never was an 
unfortunate young fellow so bullied, badgered, worried, fretted, 
and brow-beaten; so constantly beset, or made so tired of his life, 
as poor Joe Willet.

This had come to be the recognised and established state of things; 
but as John was very anxious to flourish his supremacy before the 
eyes of Mr Chester, he did that day exceed himself, and did so 
goad and chafe his son and heir, that but for Joe's having made a 
solemn vow to keep his hands in his pockets when they were not 
otherwise engaged, it is impossible to say what he might have done 
with them.  But the longest day has an end, and at length Mr 
Chester came downstairs to mount his horse, which was ready at the 
door.

As old John was not in the way at the moment, Joe, who was sitting 
in the bar ruminating on his dismal fate and the manifold 
perfections of Dolly Varden, ran out to hold the guest's stirrup 
and assist him to mount.  Mr Chester was scarcely in the saddle, 
and Joe was in the very act of making him a graceful bow, when old 
John came diving out of the porch, and collared him.

'None of that, sir,' said John, 'none of that, sir.  No breaking of 
patroles.  How dare you come out of the door, sir, without leave?  
You're trying to get away, sir, are you, and to make a traitor of 
yourself again?  What do you mean, sir?'

'Let me go, father,' said Joe, imploringly, as he marked the smile 
upon their visitor's face, and observed the pleasure his disgrace 
afforded him.  'This is too bad.  Who wants to get away?'

'Who wants to get away!' cried John, shaking him.  'Why you do, 
sir, you do.  You're the boy, sir,' added John, collaring with one 
band, and aiding the effect of a farewell bow to the visitor with 
the other, 'that wants to sneak into houses, and stir up 
differences between noble gentlemen and their sons, are you, eh?  
Hold your tongue, sir.'

Joe made no effort to reply.  It was the crowning circumstance of 
his degradation.  He extricated himself from his father's grasp, 
darted an angry look at the departing guest, and returned into the 
house.

'But for her,' thought Joe, as he threw his arms upon a table in 
the common room, and laid his head upon them, 'but for Dolly, who I 
couldn't bear should think me the rascal they would make me out to 
be if I ran away, this house and I should part to-night.'

It being evening by this time, Solomon Daisy, Tom Cobb, and Long 
Parkes, were all in the common room too, and had from the window 
been witnesses of what had just occurred.  Mr Willet joining them 
soon afterwards, received the compliments of the company with great 
composure, and lighting his pipe, sat down among them.

'We'll see, gentlemen,' said John, after a long pause, 'who's the 
master of this house, and who isn't.  We'll see whether boys are to 
govern men, or men are to govern boys.'

'And quite right too,' assented Solomon Daisy with some approving 
nods; 'quite right, Johnny.  Very good, Johnny.  Well said, Mr 
Willet.  Brayvo, sir.'

John slowly brought his eyes to bear upon him, looked at him for a 
long time, and finally made answer, to the unspeakable 
consternation of his hearers, 'When I want encouragement from you, 
sir, I'll ask you for it.  You let me alone, sir.  I can get on 
without you, I hope.  Don't you tackle me, sir, if you please.'

'Don't take it ill, Johnny; I didn't mean any harm,' pleaded the 
little man.

'Very good, sir,' said John, more than usually obstinate after his 
late success.  'Never mind, sir.  I can stand pretty firm of 
myself, sir, I believe, without being shored up by you.'  And 
having given utterance to this retort, Mr Willet fixed his eyes 
upon the boiler, and fell into a kind of tobacco-trance.

The spirits of the company being somewhat damped by this 
embarrassing line of conduct on the part of their host, nothing 
more was said for a long time; but at length Mr Cobb took upon 
himself to remark, as he rose to knock the ashes out of his pipe, 
that he hoped Joe would thenceforth learn to obey his father in all 
things; that he had found, that day, he was not one of the sort of 
men who were to be trifled with; and that he would recommend him, 
poetically speaking, to mind his eye for the future.

'I'd recommend you, in return,' said Joe, looking up with a flushed 
face, 'not to talk to me.'

'Hold your tongue, sir,' cried Mr Willet, suddenly rousing himself, 
and turning round.

'I won't, father,' cried Joe, smiting the table with his fist, so 
that the jugs and glasses rung again; 'these things are hard enough 
to bear from you; from anybody else I never will endure them any 
more.  Therefore I say, Mr Cobb, don't talk to me.'

'Why, who are you,' said Mr Cobb, sneeringly, 'that you're not to 
be talked to, eh, Joe?'

To which Joe returned no answer, but with a very ominous shake of 
the head, resumed his old position, which he would have peacefully 
preserved until the house shut up at night, but that Mr Cobb, 
stimulated by the wonder of the company at the young man's 
presumption, retorted with sundry taunts, which proved too much for 
flesh and blood to bear.  Crowding into one moment the vexation and 
the wrath of years, Joe started up, overturned the table, fell upon 
his long enemy, pummelled him with all his might and main, and 
finished by driving him with surprising swiftness against a heap of 
spittoons in one corner; plunging into which, head foremost, with a 
tremendous crash, he lay at full length among the ruins, stunned 
and motionless.  Then, without waiting to receive the compliments 
of the bystanders on the victory be had won, he retreated to his 
own bedchamber, and considering himself in a state of siege, piled 
all the portable furniture against the door by way of barricade.

'I have done it now,' said Joe, as he sat down upon his bedstead 
and wiped his heated face.  'I knew it would come at last.  The 
Maypole and I must part company.  I'm a roving vagabond--she hates 
me for evermore--it's all over!'



Chapter 31


Pondering on his unhappy lot, Joe sat and listened for a long 
time, expecting every moment to hear their creaking footsteps on 
the stairs, or to be greeted by his worthy father with a summons to 
capitulate unconditionally, and deliver himself up straightway.  
But neither voice nor footstep came; and though some distant 
echoes, as of closing doors and people hurrying in and out of 
rooms, resounding from time to time through the great passages, and 
penetrating to his remote seclusion, gave note of unusual commotion 
downstairs, no nearer sound disturbed his place of retreat, which 
seemed the quieter for these far-off noises, and was as dull and 
full of gloom as any hermit's cell.

It came on darker and darker.  The old-fashioned furniture of the 
chamber, which was a kind of hospital for all the invalided 
movables in the house, grew indistinct and shadowy in its many 
shapes; chairs and tables, which by day were as honest cripples as 
need be, assumed a doubtful and mysterious character; and one old 
leprous screen of faded India leather and gold binding, which had 
kept out many a cold breath of air in days of yore and shut in many 
a jolly face, frowned on him with a spectral aspect, and stood at 
full height in its allotted corner, like some gaunt ghost who 
waited to be questioned.  A portrait opposite the window--a queer, 
old grey-eyed general, in an oval frame--seemed to wink and doze as 
the light decayed, and at length, when the last faint glimmering 
speck of day went out, to shut its eyes in good earnest, and fall 
sound asleep.  There was such a hush and mystery about everything, 
that Joe could not help following its example; and so went off into 
a slumber likewise, and dreamed of Dolly, till the clock of 
Chigwell church struck two.

Still nobody came.  The distant noises in the house had ceased, and 
out of doors all was quiet; save for the occasional barking of some 
deep-mouthed dog, and the shaking of the branches by the night 
wind.  He gazed mournfully out of window at each well-known object 
as it lay sleeping in the dim light of the moon; and creeping back 
to his former seat, thought about the late uproar, until, with long 
thinking of, it seemed to have occurred a month ago.  Thus, between 
dozing, and thinking, and walking to the window and looking out, 
the night wore away; the grim old screen, and the kindred chairs 
and tables, began slowly to reveal themselves in their accustomed 
forms; the grey-eyed general seemed to wink and yawn and rouse 
himself; and at last he was broad awake again, and very 
uncomfortable and cold and haggard he looked, in the dull grey 
light of morning.

The sun had begun to peep above the forest trees, and already flung 
across the curling mist bright bars of gold, when Joe dropped from 
his window on the ground below, a little bundle and his trusty 
stick, and prepared to descend himself.

It was not a very difficult task; for there were so many 
projections and gable ends in the way, that they formed a series of 
clumsy steps, with no greater obstacle than a jump of some few feet 
at last.  Joe, with his stick and bundle on his shoulder, quickly 
stood on the firm earth, and looked up at the old Maypole, it might 
be for the last time.

He didn't apostrophise it, for he was no great scholar.  He didn't 
curse it, for he had little ill-will to give to anything on earth.  
He felt more affectionate and kind to it than ever he had done in 
all his life before, so said with all his heart, 'God bless you!' 
as a parting wish, and turned away.

He walked along at a brisk pace, big with great thoughts of going 
for a soldier and dying in some foreign country where it was very 
hot and sandy, and leaving God knows what unheard-of wealth in 
prize-money to Dolly, who would be very much affected when she came 
to know of it; and full of such youthful visions, which were 
sometimes sanguine and sometimes melancholy, but always had her for 
their main point and centre, pushed on vigorously until the noise 
of London sounded in his ears, and the Black Lion hove in sight.

It was only eight o'clock then, and very much astonished the Black 
Lion was, to see him come walking in with dust upon his feet at 
that early hour, with no grey mare to bear him company.  But as he 
ordered breakfast to be got ready with all speed, and on its being 
set before him gave indisputable tokens of a hearty appetite, the 
Lion received him, as usual, with a hospitable welcome; and treated 
him with those marks of distinction, which, as a regular customer, 
and one within the freemasonry of the trade, he had a right to 
claim.

This Lion or landlord,--for he was called both man and beast, by 
reason of his having instructed the artist who painted his sign, to 
convey into the features of the lordly brute whose effigy it bore, 
as near a counterpart of his own face as his skill could compass 
and devise,--was a gentleman almost as quick of apprehension, and 
of almost as subtle a wit, as the mighty John himself.  But the 
difference between them lay in this: that whereas Mr Willet's 
extreme sagacity and acuteness were the efforts of unassisted 
nature, the Lion stood indebted, in no small amount, to beer; of 
which he swigged such copious draughts, that most of his faculties 
were utterly drowned and washed away, except the one great faculty 
of sleep, which he retained in surprising perfection.  The creaking 
Lion over the house-door was, therefore, to say the truth, rather a 
drowsy, tame, and feeble lion; and as these social representatives 
of a savage class are usually of a conventional character (being 
depicted, for the most part, in impossible attitudes and of 
unearthly colours), he was frequently supposed by the more ignorant 
and uninformed among the neighbours, to be the veritable portrait 
of the host as he appeared on the occasion of some great funeral 
ceremony or public mourning.

'What noisy fellow is that in the next room?' said Joe, when he had 
disposed of his breakfast, and had washed and brushed himself.

'A recruiting serjeant,' replied the Lion.

Joe started involuntarily.  Here was the very thing he had been 
dreaming of, all the way along.

'And I wish,' said the Lion, 'he was anywhere else but here.  The 
party make noise enough, but don't call for much.  There's great 
cry there, Mr Willet, but very little wool.  Your father wouldn't 
like 'em, I know.'

Perhaps not much under any circumstances.  Perhaps if he could have 
known what was passing at that moment in Joe's mind, he would have 
liked them still less.

'Is he recruiting for a--for a fine regiment?' said Joe, glancing 
at a little round mirror that hung in the bar.

'I believe he is,' replied the host.  'It's much the same thing, 
whatever regiment he's recruiting for.  I'm told there an't a deal 
of difference between a fine man and another one, when they're shot 
through and through.'

'They're not all shot,' said Joe.

'No,' the Lion answered, 'not all.  Those that are--supposing it's 
done easy--are the best off in my opinion.'

'Ah!' retorted Joe, 'but you don't care for glory.'

'For what?' said the Lion.

'Glory.'

'No,' returned the Lion, with supreme indifference.  'I don't.  
You're right in that, Mr Willet.  When Glory comes here, and calls 
for anything to drink and changes a guinea to pay for it, I'll give 
it him for nothing.  It's my belief, sir, that the Glory's arms 
wouldn't do a very strong business.'

These remarks were not at all comforting.  Joe walked out, stopped 
at the door of the next room, and listened.  The serjeant was 
describing a military life.  It was all drinking, he said, except 
that there were frequent intervals of eating and love-making.  A 
battle was the finest thing in the world--when your side won it--
and Englishmen always did that.  'Supposing you should be killed, 
sir?' said a timid voice in one corner.  'Well, sir, supposing you 
should be,' said the serjeant, 'what then?  Your country loves you, 
sir; his Majesty King George the Third loves you; your memory is 
honoured, revered, respected; everybody's fond of you, and grateful 
to you; your name's wrote down at full length in a book in the War 
Office.  Damme, gentlemen, we must all die some time, or another, 
eh?'

The voice coughed, and said no more.

Joe walked into the room.  A group of half-a-dozen fellows had 
gathered together in the taproom, and were listening with greedy 
ears.  One of them, a carter in a smockfrock, seemed wavering and 
disposed to enlist.  The rest, who were by no means disposed, 
strongly urged him to do so (according to the custom of mankind), 
backed the serjeant's arguments, and grinned among themselves.  'I 
say nothing, boys,' said the serjeant, who sat a little apart, 
drinking his liquor.  'For lads of spirit'--here he cast an eye on 
Joe--'this is the time.  I don't want to inveigle you.  The king's 
not come to that, I hope.  Brisk young blood is what we want; not 
milk and water.  We won't take five men out of six.  We want top-
sawyers, we do.  I'm not a-going to tell tales out of school, but, 
damme, if every gentleman's son that carries arms in our corps, 
through being under a cloud and having little differences with his 
relations, was counted up'--here his eye fell on Joe again, and so 
good-naturedly, that Joe beckoned him out.  He came directly.

'You're a gentleman, by G--!' was his first remark, as he slapped 
him on the back.  'You're a gentleman in disguise.  So am I.  Let's 
swear a friendship.'

Joe didn't exactly do that, but he shook hands with him, and 
thanked him for his good opinion.

'You want to serve,' said his new friend.  'You shall.  You were 
made for it.  You're one of us by nature.  What'll you take to 
drink?'

'Nothing just now,' replied Joe, smiling faintly.  'I haven't quite 
made up my mind.'

'A mettlesome fellow like you, and not made up his mind!' cried 
the serjeant.  'Here--let me give the bell a pull, and you'll make 
up your mind in half a minute, I know.'

'You're right so far'--answered Joe, 'for if you pull the bell 
here, where I'm known, there'll be an end of my soldiering 
inclinations in no time.  Look in my face.  You see me, do you?'

'I do,' replied the serjeant with an oath, 'and a finer young 
fellow or one better qualified to serve his king and country, I 
never set my--' he used an adjective in this place--'eyes on.

'Thank you,' said Joe, 'I didn't ask you for want of a compliment, 
but thank you all the same.  Do I look like a sneaking fellow or a 
liar?'

The serjeant rejoined with many choice asseverations that he 
didn't; and that if his (the serjeant's) own father were to say he 
did, he would run the old gentleman through the body cheerfully, 
and consider it a meritorious action.

Joe expressed his obligations, and continued, 'You can trust me 
then, and credit what I say.  I believe I shall enlist in your 
regiment to-night.  The reason I don't do so now is, because I 
don't want until to-night, to do what I can't recall.  Where shall 
I find you, this evening?'

His friend replied with some unwillingness, and after much 
ineffectual entreaty having for its object the immediate settlement 
of the business, that his quarters would be at the Crooked Billet 
in Tower Street; where he would be found waking until midnight, and 
sleeping until breakfast time to-morrow.

'And if I do come--which it's a million to one, I shall--when will 
you take me out of London?' demanded Joe.

'To-morrow morning, at half after eight o'clock,' replied the 
serjeant.  'You'll go abroad--a country where it's all sunshine and 
plunder--the finest climate in the world.'

'To go abroad,' said Joe, shaking hands with him, 'is the very 
thing I want.  You may expect me.'

'You're the kind of lad for us,' cried the serjeant, holding Joe's 
hand in his, in the excess of his admiration.  'You're the boy to 
push your fortune.  I don't say it because I bear you any envy, or 
would take away from the credit of the rise you'll make, but if I 
had been bred and taught like you, I'd have been a colonel by this 
time.'

'Tush, man!' said Joe, 'I'm not so young as that.  Needs must when 
the devil drives; and the devil that drives me is an empty pocket 
and an unhappy home.  For the present, good-bye.'

'For king and country!' cried the serjeant, flourishing his cap.

'For bread and meat!' cried Joe, snapping his fingers.  And so they 
parted.

He had very little money in his pocket; so little indeed, that 
after paying for his breakfast (which he was too honest and perhaps 
too proud to score up to his father's charge) he had but a penny 
left.  He had courage, notwithstanding, to resist all the 
affectionate importunities of the serjeant, who waylaid him at 
the door with many protestations of eternal friendship, and did in 
particular request that he would do him the favour to accept of 
only one shilling as a temporary accommodation.  Rejecting his 
offers both of cash and credit, Joe walked away with stick and 
bundle as before, bent upon getting through the day as he best 
could, and going down to the locksmith's in the dusk of the 
evening; for it should go hard, he had resolved, but he would have 
a parting word with charming Dolly Varden.

He went out by Islington and so on to Highgate, and sat on many 
stones and gates, but there were no voices in the bells to bid him 
turn.  Since the time of noble Whittington, fair flower of 
merchants, bells have come to have less sympathy with humankind.  
They only ring for money and on state occasions.  Wanderers have 
increased in number; ships leave the Thames for distant regions, 
carrying from stem to stern no other cargo; the bells are silent; 
they ring out no entreaties or regrets; they are used to it and 
have grown worldly.

Joe bought a roll, and reduced his purse to the condition (with a 
difference) of that celebrated purse of Fortunatus, which, 
whatever were its favoured owner's necessities, had one unvarying 
amount in it.  In these real times, when all the Fairies are dead 
and buried, there are still a great many purses which possess that 
quality.  The sum-total they contain is expressed in arithmetic by 
a circle, and whether it be added to or multiplied by its own 
amount, the result of the problem is more easily stated than any 
known in figures.

Evening drew on at last.  With the desolate and solitary feeling of 
one who had no home or shelter, and was alone utterly in the world 
for the first time, he bent his steps towards the locksmith's 
house.  He had delayed till now, knowing that Mrs Varden sometimes 
went out alone, or with Miggs for her sole attendant, to lectures 
in the evening; and devoutly hoping that this might be one of her 
nights of moral culture.

He had walked up and down before the house, on the opposite side of 
the way, two or three times, when as he returned to it again, he 
caught a glimpse of a fluttering skirt at the door.  It was 
Dolly's--to whom else could it belong? no dress but hers had such a 
flow as that.  He plucked up his spirits, and followed it into the 
workshop of the Golden Key.

His darkening the door caused her to look round.  Oh that face!  
'If it hadn't been for that,' thought Joe, 'I should never have 
walked into poor Tom Cobb.  She's twenty times handsomer than ever.  
She might marry a Lord!'

He didn't say this.  He only thought it--perhaps looked it also.  
Dolly was glad to see him, and was SO sorry her father and mother 
were away from home.  Joe begged she wouldn't mention it on any 
account.

Dolly hesitated to lead the way into the parlour, for there it was 
nearly dark; at the same time she hesitated to stand talking in the 
workshop, which was yet light and open to the street.  They had got 
by some means, too, before the little forge; and Joe having her 
hand in his (which he had no right to have, for Dolly only gave it 
him to shake), it was so like standing before some homely altar 
being married, that it was the most embarrassing state of things in 
the world.

'I have come,' said Joe, 'to say good-bye--to say good-bye for I 
don't know how many years; perhaps for ever.  I am going abroad.'

Now this was exactly what he should not have said.  Here he was, 
talking like a gentleman at large who was free to come and go and 
roam about the world at pleasure, when that gallant coachmaker had 
vowed but the night before that Miss Varden held him bound in 
adamantine chains; and had positively stated in so many words that 
she was killing him by inches, and that in a fortnight more or 
thereabouts he expected to make a decent end and leave the business 
to his mother.

Dolly released her hand and said 'Indeed!'  She remarked in the 
same breath that it was a fine night, and in short, betrayed no 
more emotion than the forge itself.

'I couldn't go,' said Joe, 'without coming to see you.  I hadn't 
the heart to.'

Dolly was more sorry than she could tell, that he should have taken 
so much trouble.  It was such a long way, and he must have such a 
deal to do.  And how WAS Mr Willet--that dear old gentleman--

'Is this all you say!' cried Joe.

All!  Good gracious, what did the man expect!  She was obliged to 
take her apron in her hand and run her eyes along the hem from 
corner to corner, to keep herself from laughing in his face;--not 
because his gaze confused her--not at all.

Joe had small experience in love affairs, and had no notion how 
different young ladies are at different times; he had expected to 
take Dolly up again at the very point where he had left her after 
that delicious evening ride, and was no more prepared for such an 
alteration than to see the sun and moon change places.  He had 
buoyed himself up all day with an indistinct idea that she would 
certainly say 'Don't go,' or 'Don't leave us,' or 'Why do you go?' 
or 'Why do you leave us?' or would give him some little 
encouragement of that sort; he had even entertained the possibility 
of her bursting into tears, of her throwing herself into his arms, 
of her falling down in a fainting fit without previous word or 
sign; but any approach to such a line of conduct as this, had been 
so far from his thoughts that he could only look at her in silent 
wonder.

Dolly in the meanwhile, turned to the corners of her apron, and 
measured the sides, and smoothed out the wrinkles, and was as 
silent as he.  At last after a long pause, Joe said good-bye.  
'Good-bye'--said Dolly--with as pleasant a smile as if he were 
going into the next street, and were coming back to supper; 'good-
bye.'

'Come,' said Joe, putting out both hands, 'Dolly, dear Dolly, don't 
let us part like this.  I love you dearly, with all my heart and 
soul; with as much truth and earnestness as ever man loved woman in 
this world, I do believe.  I am a poor fellow, as you know--poorer 
now than ever, for I have fled from home, not being able to bear it 
any longer, and must fight my own way without help.  You are 
beautiful, admired, are loved by everybody, are well off and happy; 
and may you ever be so!  Heaven forbid I should ever make you 
otherwise; but give me a word of comfort.  Say something kind to 
me.  I have no right to expect it of you, I know, but I ask it 
because I love you, and shall treasure the slightest word from you 
all through my life.  Dolly, dearest, have you nothing to say to 
me?'

No.  Nothing.  Dolly was a coquette by nature, and a spoilt child.  
She had no notion of being carried by storm in this way.  The 
coachmaker would have been dissolved in tears, and would have knelt 
down, and called himself names, and clasped his hands, and beat his 
breast, and tugged wildly at his cravat, and done all kinds of 
poetry.  Joe had no business to be going abroad.  He had no right 
to be able to do it.  If he was in adamantine chains, he couldn't.

'I have said good-bye,' said Dolly, 'twice.  Take your arm away 
directly, Mr Joseph, or I'll call Miggs.'

'I'll not reproach you,' answered Joe, 'it's my fault, no doubt.  I 
have thought sometimes that you didn't quite despise me, but I was 
a fool to think so.  Every one must, who has seen the life I have 
led--you most of all.  God bless you!'

He was gone, actually gone.  Dolly waited a little while, thinking 
he would return, peeped out at the door, looked up the street and 
down as well as the increasing darkness would allow, came in again, 
waited a little longer, went upstairs humming a tune, bolted 
herself in, laid her head down on her bed, and cried as if her 
heart would break.  And yet such natures are made up of so many 
contradictions, that if Joe Willet had come back that night, next 
day, next week, next month, the odds are a hundred to one she would 
have treated him in the very same manner, and have wept for it 
afterwards with the very same distress.

She had no sooner left the workshop than there cautiously peered 
out from behind the chimney of the forge, a face which had already 
emerged from the same concealment twice or thrice, unseen, and 
which, after satisfying itself that it was now alone, was followed 
by a leg, a shoulder, and so on by degrees, until the form of Mr 
Tappertit stood confessed, with a brown-paper cap stuck negligently 
on one side of its head, and its arms very much a-kimbo.

'Have my ears deceived me,' said the 'prentice, 'or do I dream! am 
I to thank thee, Fortun', or to cus thee--which?'

He gravely descended from his elevation, took down his piece of 
looking-glass, planted it against the wall upon the usual bench, 
twisted his head round, and looked closely at his legs.

'If they're a dream,' said Sim, 'let sculptures have such wisions, 
and chisel 'em out when they wake.  This is reality.  Sleep has no 
such limbs as them.  Tremble, Willet, and despair.  She's mine!  
She's mine!'

With these triumphant expressions, he seized a hammer and dealt a 
heavy blow at a vice, which in his mind's eye represented the 
sconce or head of Joseph Willet.  That done, he burst into a peal 
of laughter which startled Miss Miggs even in her distant kitchen, 
and dipping his head into a bowl of water, had recourse to a jack-
towel inside the closet door, which served the double purpose of 
smothering his feelings and drying his face.

Joe, disconsolate and down-hearted, but full of courage too, on 
leaving the locksmith's house made the best of his way to the 
Crooked Billet, and there inquired for his friend the serjeant, 
who, expecting no man less, received him with open arms.  In the 
course of five minutes after his arrival at that house of 
entertainment, he was enrolled among the gallant defenders of his 
native land; and within half an hour, was regaled with a steaming 
supper of boiled tripe and onions, prepared, as his friend assured 
him more than once, at the express command of his most Sacred 
Majesty the King.  To this meal, which tasted very savoury after 
his long fasting, he did ample justice; and when he had followed it 
up, or down, with a variety of loyal and patriotic toasts, he was 
conducted to a straw mattress in a loft over the stable, and 
locked in there for the night.

The next morning, he found that the obliging care of his martial 
friend had decorated his hat with sundry particoloured streamers, 
which made a very lively appearance; and in company with that 
officer, and three other military gentlemen newly enrolled, who 
were under a cloud so dense that it only left three shoes, a boot, 
and a coat and a half visible among them, repaired to the 
riverside.  Here they were joined by a corporal and four more 
heroes, of whom two were drunk and daring, and two sober and 
penitent, but each of whom, like Joe, had his dusty stick and 
bundle.  The party embarked in a passage-boat bound for Gravesend, 
whence they were to proceed on foot to Chatham; the wind was in 
their favour, and they soon left London behind them, a mere dark 
mist--a giant phantom in the air.



Chapter 32


Misfortunes, saith the adage, never come singly.  There is little 
doubt that troubles are exceedingly gregarious in their nature, and 
flying in flocks, are apt to perch capriciously; crowding on the 
heads of some poor wights until there is not an inch of room left 
on their unlucky crowns, and taking no more notice of others who 
offer as good resting-places for the soles of their feet, than if 
they had no existence.  It may have happened that a flight of 
troubles brooding over London, and looking out for Joseph Willet, 
whom they couldn't find, darted down haphazard on the first young 
man that caught their fancy, and settled on him instead.  However 
this may be, certain it is that on the very day of Joe's departure 
they swarmed about the ears of Edward Chester, and did so buzz and 
flap their wings, and persecute him, that he was most profoundly 
wretched.

It was evening, and just eight o'clock, when he and his father, 
having wine and dessert set before them, were left to themselves 
for the first time that day.  They had dined together, but a third 
person had been present during the meal, and until they met at 
table they had not seen each other since the previous night.

Edward was reserved and silent.  Mr Chester was more than usually 
gay; but not caring, as it seemed, to open a conversation with one 
whose humour was so different, he vented the lightness of his 
spirit in smiles and sparkling looks, and made no effort to awaken 
his attention.  So they remained for some time: the father lying on 
a sofa with his accustomed air of graceful negligence; the son 
seated opposite to him with downcast eyes, busied, it was plain, 
with painful and uneasy thoughts.

'My dear Edward,' said Mr Chester at length, with a most engaging 
laugh, 'do not extend your drowsy influence to the decanter.  
Suffer THAT to circulate, let your spirits be never so stagnant.'

Edward begged his pardon, passed it, and relapsed into his former 
state.

'You do wrong not to fill your glass,' said Mr Chester, holding up 
his own before the light.  'Wine in moderation--not in excess, for 
that makes men ugly--has a thousand pleasant influences.  It 
brightens the eye, improves the voice, imparts a new vivacity to 
one's thoughts and conversation: you should try it, Ned.'

'Ah father!' cried his son, 'if--'

'My good fellow,' interposed the parent hastily, as he set down his 
glass, and raised his eyebrows with a startled and horrified 
expression, 'for Heaven's sake don't call me by that obsolete and 
ancient name.  Have some regard for delicacy.  Am I grey, or 
wrinkled, do I go on crutches, have I lost my teeth, that you adopt 
such a mode of address?  Good God, how very coarse!'

'I was about to speak to you from my heart, sir,' returned Edward, 
'in the confidence which should subsist between us; and you check 
me in the outset.'

'Now DO, Ned, DO not,' said Mr Chester, raising his delicate hand 
imploringly, 'talk in that monstrous manner.  About to speak from 
your heart.  Don't you know that the heart is an ingenious part of 
our formation--the centre of the blood-vessels and all that sort of 
thing--which has no more to do with what you say or think, than 
your knees have?  How can you be so very vulgar and absurd?  These 
anatomical allusions should be left to gentlemen of the medical 
profession.  They are really not agreeable in society.  You quite 
surprise me, Ned.'

'Well! there are no such things to wound, or heal, or have regard 
for.  I know your creed, sir, and will say no more,' returned his 
son.

'There again,' said Mr Chester, sipping his wine, 'you are wrong.  
I distinctly say there are such things.  We know there are.  The 
hearts of animals--of bullocks, sheep, and so forth--are cooked and 
devoured, as I am told, by the lower classes, with a vast deal of 
relish.  Men are sometimes stabbed to the heart, shot to the heart; 
but as to speaking from the heart, or to the heart, or being warm-
hearted, or cold-hearted, or broken-hearted, or being all heart, or 
having no heart--pah! these things are nonsense, Ned.'

'No doubt, sir,' returned his son, seeing that he paused for him to 
speak.  'No doubt.'

'There's Haredale's niece, your late flame,' said Mr Chester, as a 
careless illustration of his meaning.  'No doubt in your mind she 
was all heart once.  Now she has none at all.  Yet she is the same 
person, Ned, exactly.'

'She is a changed person, sir,' cried Edward, reddening; 'and 
changed by vile means, I believe.'

'You have had a cool dismissal, have you?' said his father.  'Poor 
Ned!  I told you last night what would happen.--May I ask you for 
the nutcrackers?'

'She has been tampered with, and most treacherously deceived,' 
cried Edward, rising from his seat.  'I never will believe that the 
knowledge of my real position, given her by myself, has worked this 
change.  I know she is beset and tortured.  But though our contract 
is at an end, and broken past all redemption; though I charge upon 
her want of firmness and want of truth, both to herself and me; I 
do not now, and never will believe, that any sordid motive, or her 
own unbiassed will, has led her to this course--never!'

'You make me blush,' returned his father gaily, 'for the folly of 
your nature, in which--but we never know ourselves--I devoutly hope 
there is no reflection of my own.  With regard to the young lady 
herself, she has done what is very natural and proper, my dear 
fellow; what you yourself proposed, as I learn from Haredale; and 
what I predicted--with no great exercise of sagacity--she would do.  
She supposed you to be rich, or at least quite rich enough; and 
found you poor.  Marriage is a civil contract; people marry to 
better their worldly condition and improve appearances; it is an 
affair of house and furniture, of liveries, servants, equipage, and 
so forth.  The lady being poor and you poor also, there is an end 
of the matter.  You cannot enter upon these considerations, and 
have no manner of business with the ceremony.  I drink her health 
in this glass, and respect and honour her for her extreme good 
sense.  It is a lesson to you.  Fill yours, Ned.'

'It is a lesson,' returned his son, 'by which I hope I may never 
profit, and if years and experience impress it on--'

'Don't say on the heart,' interposed his father.

'On men whom the world and its hypocrisy have spoiled,' said Edward 
warmly, 'Heaven keep me from its knowledge.'

'Come, sir,' returned his father, raising himself a little on the 
sofa, and looking straight towards him; 'we have had enough of 
this.  Remember, if you please, your interest, your duty, your 
moral obligations, your filial affections, and all that sort of 
thing, which it is so very delightful and charming to reflect upon; 
or you will repent it.'

'I shall never repent the preservation of my self-respect, sir,' 
said Edward.  'Forgive me if I say that I will not sacrifice it at 
your bidding, and that I will not pursue the track which you would 
have me take, and to which the secret share you have had in this 
late separation tends.'

His father rose a little higher still, and looking at him as though 
curious to know if he were quite resolved and earnest, dropped 
gently down again, and said in the calmest voice--eating his nuts 
meanwhile,

'Edward, my father had a son, who being a fool like you, and, like 
you, entertaining low and disobedient sentiments, he disinherited 
and cursed one morning after breakfast.  The circumstance occurs to 
me with a singular clearness of recollection this evening.  I 
remember eating muffins at the time, with marmalade.  He led a 
miserable life (the son, I mean) and died early; it was a happy 
release on all accounts; he degraded the family very much.  It is a 
sad circumstance, Edward, when a father finds it necessary to 
resort to such strong measures.

'It is,' replied Edward, 'and it is sad when a son, proffering him 
his love and duty in their best and truest sense, finds himself 
repelled at every turn, and forced to disobey.  Dear father,' he 
added, more earnestly though in a gentler tone, 'I have reflected 
many times on what occurred between us when we first discussed this 
subject.  Let there be a confidence between us; not in terms, but 
truth.  Hear what I have to say.'

'As I anticipate what it is, and cannot fail to do so, Edward,' 
returned his father coldly, 'I decline.  I couldn't possibly.  I am 
sure it would put me out of temper, which is a state of mind I 
can't endure.  If you intend to mar my plans for your establishment 
in life, and the preservation of that gentility and becoming pride, 
which our family have so long sustained--if, in short, you are 
resolved to take your own course, you must take it, and my curse 
with it.  I am very sorry, but there's really no alternative.'

'The curse may pass your lips,' said Edward, 'but it will be but 
empty breath.  I do not believe that any man on earth has greater 
power to call one down upon his fellow--least of all, upon his own 
child--than he has to make one drop of rain or flake of snow fall 
from the clouds above us at his impious bidding.  Beware, sir, what 
you do.'

'You are so very irreligious, so exceedingly undutiful, so horribly 
profane,' rejoined his father, turning his face lazily towards 
him, and cracking another nut, 'that I positively must interrupt 
you here.  It is quite impossible we can continue to go on, upon 
such terms as these.  If you will do me the favour to ring the 
bell, the servant will show you to the door.  Return to this roof 
no more, I beg you.  Go, sir, since you have no moral sense 
remaining; and go to the Devil, at my express desire.  Good day.'

Edward left the room without another word or look, and turned his 
back upon the house for ever.

The father's face was slightly flushed and heated, but his manner 
was quite unchanged, as he rang the bell again, and addressed the 
servant on his entrance.

'Peak--if that gentleman who has just gone out--'

'I beg your pardon, sir, Mr Edward?'

'Were there more than one, dolt, that you ask the question?--If 
that gentleman should send here for his wardrobe, let him have it, 
do you hear?  If he should call himself at any time, I'm not at 
home.  You'll tell him so, and shut the door.'


So, it soon got whispered about, that Mr Chester was very 
unfortunate in his son, who had occasioned him great grief and 
sorrow.  And the good people who heard this and told it again, 
marvelled the more at his equanimity and even temper, and said what 
an amiable nature that man must have, who, having undergone so 
much, could be so placid and so calm.  And when Edward's name was 
spoken, Society shook its head, and laid its finger on its lip, and 
sighed, and looked very grave; and those who had sons about his 
age, waxed wrathful and indignant, and hoped, for Virtue's sake, 
that he was dead.  And the world went on turning round, as usual, 
for five years, concerning which this Narrative is silent.



Chapter 33


One wintry evening, early in the year of our Lord one thousand 
seven hundred and eighty, a keen north wind arose as it grew dark, 
and night came on with black and dismal looks.  A bitter storm of 
sleet, sharp, dense, and icy-cold, swept the wet streets, and 
rattled on the trembling windows.  Signboards, shaken past 
endurance in their creaking frames, fell crashing on the pavement; 
old tottering chimneys reeled and staggered in the blast; and many 
a steeple rocked again that night, as though the earth were 
troubled.

It was not a time for those who could by any means get light and 
warmth, to brave the fury of the weather.  In coffee-houses of the 
better sort, guests crowded round the fire, forgot to be political, 
and told each other with a secret gladness that the blast grew 
fiercer every minute.  Each humble tavern by the water-side, had 
its group of uncouth figures round the hearth, who talked of 
vessels foundering at sea, and all hands lost; related many a 
dismal tale of shipwreck and drowned men, and hoped that some they 
knew were safe, and shook their heads in doubt.  In private 
dwellings, children clustered near the blaze; listening with timid 
pleasure to tales of ghosts and goblins, and tall figures clad in 
white standing by bed-sides, and people who had gone to sleep in 
old churches and being overlooked had found themselves alone there 
at the dead hour of the night: until they shuddered at the thought 
of the dark rooms upstairs, yet loved to hear the wind moan too, 
and hoped it would continue bravely.  From time to time these happy 
indoor people stopped to listen, or one held up his finger and 
cried 'Hark!' and then, above the rumbling in the chimney, and the 
fast pattering on the glass, was heard a wailing, rushing sound, 
which shook the walls as though a giant's hand were on them; then a 
hoarse roar as if the sea had risen; then such a whirl and tumult 
that the air seemed mad; and then, with a lengthened howl, the 
waves of wind swept on, and left a moment's interval of rest.

Cheerily, though there were none abroad to see it, shone the 
Maypole light that evening.  Blessings on the red--deep, ruby, 
glowing red--old curtain of the window; blending into one rich 
stream of brightness, fire and candle, meat, drink, and company, 
and gleaming like a jovial eye upon the bleak waste out of doors!  
Within, what carpet like its crunching sand, what music merry as 
its crackling logs, what perfume like its kitchen's dainty breath, 
what weather genial as its hearty warmth!  Blessings on the old 
house, how sturdily it stood!  How did the vexed wind chafe and 
roar about its stalwart roof; how did it pant and strive with its 
wide chimneys, which still poured forth from their hospitable 
throats, great clouds of smoke, and puffed defiance in its face; 
how, above all, did it drive and rattle at the casement, emulous to 
extinguish that cheerful glow, which would not be put down and 
seemed the brighter for the conflict!

The profusion too, the rich and lavish bounty, of that goodly 
tavern!  It was not enough that one fire roared and sparkled on its 
spacious hearth; in the tiles which paved and compassed it, five 
hundred flickering fires burnt brightly also.  It was not enough 
that one red curtain shut the wild night out, and shed its cheerful 
influence on the room.  In every saucepan lid, and candlestick, and 
vessel of copper, brass, or tin that hung upon the walls, were 
countless ruddy hangings, flashing and gleaming with every motion 
of the blaze, and offering, let the eye wander where it might, 
interminable vistas of the same rich colour.  The old oak 
wainscoting, the beams, the chairs, the seats, reflected it in a 
deep, dull glimmer.  There were fires and red curtains in the very 
eyes of the drinkers, in their buttons, in their liquor, in the 
pipes they smoked.

Mr Willet sat in what had been his accustomed place five years 
before, with his eyes on the eternal boiler; and had sat there 
since the clock struck eight, giving no other signs of life than 
breathing with a loud and constant snore (though he was wide 
awake), and from time to time putting his glass to his lips, or 
knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and filling it anew.  It was 
now half-past ten.  Mr Cobb and long Phil Parkes were his 
companions, as of old, and for two mortal hours and a half, none of 
the company had pronounced one word.

Whether people, by dint of sitting together in the same place and 
the same relative positions, and doing exactly the same things for 
a great many years, acquire a sixth sense, or some unknown power of 
influencing each other which serves them in its stead, is a 
question for philosophy to settle.  But certain it is that old 
John Willet, Mr Parkes, and Mr Cobb, were one and all firmly of 
opinion that they were very jolly companions--rather choice spirits 
than otherwise; that they looked at each other every now and then 
as if there were a perpetual interchange of ideas going on among 
them; that no man considered himself or his neighbour by any means 
silent; and that each of them nodded occasionally when he caught 
the eye of another, as if he would say, 'You have expressed 
yourself extremely well, sir, in relation to that sentiment, and I 
quite agree with you.'

The room was so very warm, the tobacco so very good, and the fire 
so very soothing, that Mr Willet by degrees began to doze; but as 
he had perfectly acquired, by dint of long habit, the art of 
smoking in his sleep, and as his breathing was pretty much the 
same, awake or asleep, saving that in the latter case he sometimes 
experienced a slight difficulty in respiration (such as a carpenter 
meets with when he is planing and comes to a knot), neither of his 
companions was aware of the circumstance, until he met with one of 
these impediments and was obliged to try again.

'Johnny's dropped off,' said Mr Parkes in a whisper.

'Fast as a top,' said Mr Cobb.

Neither of them said any more until Mr Willet came to another knot--
one of surpassing obduracy--which bade fair to throw him into 
convulsions, but which he got over at last without waking, by an 
effort quite superhuman.

'He sleeps uncommon hard,' said Mr Cobb.

Mr Parkes, who was possibly a hard-sleeper himself, replied with 
some disdain, 'Not a bit on it;' and directed his eyes towards a 
handbill pasted over the chimney-piece, which was decorated at the 
top with a woodcut representing a youth of tender years running 
away very fast, with a bundle over his shoulder at the end of a 
stick, and--to carry out the idea--a finger-post and a milestone 
beside him.  Mr Cobb likewise turned his eyes in the same 
direction, and surveyed the placard as if that were the first time 
he had ever beheld it.  Now, this was a document which Mr Willet 
had himself indited on the disappearance of his son Joseph, 
acquainting the nobility and gentry and the public in general with 
the circumstances of his having left his home; describing his dress 
and appearance; and offering a reward of five pounds to any person 
or persons who would pack him up and return him safely to the 
Maypole at Chigwell, or lodge him in any of his Majesty's jails 
until such time as his father should come and claim him.  In this 
advertisement Mr Willet had obstinately persisted, despite the 
advice and entreaties of his friends, in describing his son as a 
'young boy;' and furthermore as being from eighteen inches to a 
couple of feet shorter than he really was; two circumstances which 
perhaps accounted, in some degree, for its never having been 
productive of any other effect than the transmission to Chigwell 
at various times and at a vast expense, of some five-and-forty 
runaways varying from six years old to twelve.

Mr Cobb and Mr Parkes looked mysteriously at this composition, at 
each other, and at old John.  From the time he had pasted it up 
with his own hands, Mr Willet had never by word or sign alluded to 
the subject, or encouraged any one else to do so.  Nobody had the 
least notion what his thoughts or opinions were, connected with it; 
whether he remembered it or forgot it; whether he had any idea that 
such an event had ever taken place.  Therefore, even while he 
slept, no one ventured to refer to it in his presence; and for such 
sufficient reasons, these his chosen friends were silent now.

Mr Willet had got by this time into such a complication of knots, 
that it was perfectly clear he must wake or die.  He chose the 
former alternative, and opened his eyes.

'If he don't come in five minutes,' said John, 'I shall have supper 
without him.'

The antecedent of this pronoun had been mentioned for the last time 
at eight o'clock.  Messrs Parkes and Cobb being used to this style 
of conversation, replied without difficulty that to be sure Solomon 
was very late, and they wondered what had happened to detain him.

'He an't blown away, I suppose,' said Parkes.  'It's enough to 
carry a man of his figure off his legs, and easy too.  Do you hear 
it?  It blows great guns, indeed.  There'll be many a crash in the 
Forest to-night, I reckon, and many a broken branch upon the ground 
to-morrow.'

'It won't break anything in the Maypole, I take it, sir,' returned 
old John.  'Let it try.  I give it leave--what's that?'

'The wind,' cried Parkes.  'It's howling like a Christian, and has 
been all night long.'

'Did you ever, sir,' asked John, after a minute's contemplation, 
'hear the wind say "Maypole"?'

'Why, what man ever did?' said Parkes.

'Nor "ahoy," perhaps?' added John.

'No.  Nor that neither.'

'Very good, sir,' said Mr Willet, perfectly unmoved; 'then if that 
was the wind just now, and you'll wait a little time without 
speaking, you'll hear it say both words very plain.'

Mr Willet was right.  After listening for a few moments, they could 
clearly hear, above the roar and tumult out of doors, this shout 
repeated; and that with a shrillness and energy, which denoted that 
it came from some person in great distress or terror.  They looked 
at each other, turned pale, and held their breath.  No man stirred.

It was in this emergency that Mr Willet displayed something of that 
strength of mind and plenitude of mental resource, which rendered 
him the admiration of all his friends and neighbours.  After 
looking at Messrs Parkes and Cobb for some time in silence, he 
clapped his two hands to his cheeks, and sent forth a roar which 
made the glasses dance and rafters ring--a long-sustained, 
discordant bellow, that rolled onward with the wind, and startling 
every echo, made the night a hundred times more boisterous--a deep, 
loud, dismal bray, that sounded like a human gong.  Then, with 
every vein in his head and face swollen with the great exertion, 
and his countenance suffused with a lively purple, he drew a little 
nearer to the fire, and turning his back upon it, said with dignity:

'If that's any comfort to anybody, they're welcome to it.  If it 
an't, I'm sorry for 'em.  If either of you two gentlemen likes to 
go out and see what's the matter, you can.  I'm not curious, 
myself.'

While he spoke the cry drew nearer and nearer, footsteps passed the 
window, the latch of the door was raised, it opened, was violently 
shut again, and Solomon Daisy, with a lighted lantern in his hand, 
and the rain streaming from his disordered dress, dashed into the 
room.

A more complete picture of terror than the little man presented, it 
would be difficult to imagine.  The perspiration stood in beads 
upon his face, his knees knocked together, his every limb trembled, 
the power of articulation was quite gone; and there he stood, 
panting for breath, gazing on them with such livid ashy looks, that 
they were infected with his fear, though ignorant of its occasion, 
and, reflecting his dismayed and horror-stricken visage, stared 
back again without venturing to question him; until old John 
Willet, in a fit of temporary insanity, made a dive at his cravat, 
and, seizing him by that portion of his dress, shook him to and fro 
until his very teeth appeared to rattle in his head.

'Tell us what's the matter, sir,' said John, 'or I'll kill you.  
Tell us what's the matter, sir, or in another second I'll have your 
head under the biler.  How dare you look like that?  Is anybody a-
following of you?  What do you mean?  Say something, or I'll be the 
death of you, I will.'

Mr Willet, in his frenzy, was so near keeping his word to the very 
letter (Solomon Daisy's eyes already beginning to roll in an 
alarming manner, and certain guttural sounds, as of a choking man, 
to issue from his throat), that the two bystanders, recovering in 
some degree, plucked him off his victim by main force, and placed 
the little clerk of Chigwell in a chair.  Directing a fearful gaze 
all round the room, he implored them in a faint voice to give him 
some drink; and above all to lock the house-door and close and bar 
the shutters of the room, without a moment's loss of time.  The 
latter request did not tend to reassure his hearers, or to fill 
them with the most comfortable sensations; they complied with it, 
however, with the greatest expedition; and having handed him a 
bumper of brandy-and-water, nearly boiling hot, waited to hear what 
he might have to tell them.

'Oh, Johnny,' said Solomon, shaking him by the hand.  'Oh, Parkes.  
Oh, Tommy Cobb.  Why did I leave this house to-night!  On the 
nineteenth of March--of all nights in the year, on the nineteenth 
of March!'

They all drew closer to the fire.  Parkes, who was nearest to the 
door, started and looked over his shoulder.  Mr Willet, with great 
indignation, inquired what the devil he meant by that--and then 
said, 'God forgive me,' and glanced over his own shoulder, and came 
a little nearer.

'When I left here to-night,' said Solomon Daisy, 'I little thought 
what day of the month it was.  I have never gone alone into the 
church after dark on this day, for seven-and-twenty years.  I have 
heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so 
the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep 
the day they died upon.--How the wind roars!'

Nobody spoke.  All eyes were fastened on Solomon.

'I might have known,' he said, 'what night it was, by the foul 
weather.  There's no such night in the whole year round as this is, 
always.  I never sleep quietly in my bed on the nineteenth of 
March.'

'Go on,' said Tom Cobb, in a low voice.  'Nor I neither.'

Solomon Daisy raised his glass to his lips; put it down upon the 
floor with such a trembling hand that the spoon tinkled in it like 
a little bell; and continued thus:

'Have I ever said that we are always brought back to this subject 
in some strange way, when the nineteenth of this month comes round?  
Do you suppose it was by accident, I forgot to wind up the church-
clock?  I never forgot it at any other time, though it's such a 
clumsy thing that it has to be wound up every day.  Why should it 
escape my memory on this day of all others?

'I made as much haste down there as I could when I went from here, 
but I had to go home first for the keys; and the wind and rain 
being dead against me all the way, it was pretty well as much as I 
could do at times to keep my legs.  I got there at last, opened the 
church-door, and went in.  I had not met a soul all the way, and 
you may judge whether it was dull or not.  Neither of you would 
bear me company.  If you could have known what was to come, you'd 
have been in the right.

'The wind was so strong, that it was as much as I could do to shut 
the church-door by putting my whole weight against it; and even as 
it was, it burst wide open twice, with such strength that any of 
you would have sworn, if you had been leaning against it, as I was, 
that somebody was pushing on the other side.  However, I got the 
key turned, went into the belfry, and wound up the clock--which was 
very near run down, and would have stood stock-still in half an 
hour.

'As I took up my lantern again to leave the church, it came upon me 
all at once that this was the nineteenth of March.  It came upon me 
with a kind of shock, as if a hand had struck the thought upon my 
forehead; at the very same moment, I heard a voice outside the 
tower--rising from among the graves.'

Here old John precipitately interrupted the speaker, and begged 
that if Mr Parkes (who was seated opposite to him and was staring 
directly over his head) saw anything, he would have the goodness 
to mention it.  Mr Parkes apologised, and remarked that he was only 
listening; to which Mr Willet angrily retorted, that his listening 
with that kind of expression in his face was not agreeable, and 
that if he couldn't look like other people, he had better put his 
pocket-handkerchief over his head.  Mr Parkes with great submission 
pledged himself to do so, if again required, and John Willet 
turning to Solomon desired him to proceed.  After waiting until a 
violent gust of wind and rain, which seemed to shake even that 
sturdy house to its foundation, had passed away, the little man 
complied:

'Never tell me that it was my fancy, or that it was any other sound 
which I mistook for that I tell you of.  I heard the wind whistle 
through the arches of the church.  I heard the steeple strain and 
creak.  I heard the rain as it came driving against the walls.  I 
felt the bells shake.  I saw the ropes sway to and fro.  And I 
heard that voice.'

'What did it say?' asked Tom Cobb.

'I don't know what; I don't know that it spoke.  It gave a kind of 
cry, as any one of us might do, if something dreadful followed us 
in a dream, and came upon us unawares; and then it died off: 
seeming to pass quite round the church.'

'I don't see much in that,' said John, drawing a long breath, and 
looking round him like a man who felt relieved.

'Perhaps not,' returned his friend, 'but that's not all.'

'What more do you mean to say, sir, is to come?' asked John, 
pausing in the act of wiping his face upon his apron.  'What are 
you a-going to tell us of next?'

'What I saw.'

'Saw!' echoed all three, bending forward.

'When I opened the church-door to come out,' said the little man, 
with an expression of face which bore ample testimony to the 
sincerity of his conviction, 'when I opened the church-door to come 
out, which I did suddenly, for I wanted to get it shut again before 
another gust of wind came up, there crossed me--so close, that by 
stretching out my finger I could have touched it--something in the 
likeness of a man.  It was bare-headed to the storm.  It turned its 
face without stopping, and fixed its eyes on mine.  It was a ghost--
a spirit.'

'Whose?' they all three cried together.

In the excess of his emotion (for he fell back trembling in his 
chair, and waved his hand as if entreating them to question him no 
further), his answer was lost on all but old John Willet, who 
happened to be seated close beside him.

'Who!' cried Parkes and Tom Cobb, looking eagerly by turns at 
Solomon Daisy and at Mr Willet.  'Who was it?'

'Gentlemen,' said Mr Willet after a long pause, 'you needn't ask.  
The likeness of a murdered man.  This is the nineteenth of March.'

A profound silence ensued.

'If you'll take my advice,' said John, 'we had better, one and all, 
keep this a secret.  Such tales would not be liked at the Warren.  
Let us keep it to ourselves for the present time at all events, or 
we may get into trouble, and Solomon may lose his place.  Whether 
it was really as he says, or whether it wasn't, is no matter.  
Right or wrong, nobody would believe him.  As to the probabilities, 
I don't myself think,' said Mr Willet, eyeing the corners of the 
room in a manner which showed that, like some other philosophers, 
he was not quite easy in his theory, 'that a ghost as had been a 
man of sense in his lifetime, would be out a-walking in such 
weather--I only know that I wouldn't, if I was one.'

But this heretical doctrine was strongly opposed by the other 
three, who quoted a great many precedents to show that bad weather 
was the very time for such appearances; and Mr Parkes (who had had 
a ghost in his family, by the mother's side) argued the matter with 
so much ingenuity and force of illustration, that John was only 
saved from having to retract his opinion by the opportune 
appearance of supper, to which they applied themselves with a 
dreadful relish.  Even Solomon Daisy himself, by dint of the 
elevating influences of fire, lights, brandy, and good company, so 
far recovered as to handle his knife and fork in a highly 
creditable manner, and to display a capacity both of eating and 
drinking, such as banished all fear of his having sustained any 
lasting injury from his fright.

Supper done, they crowded round the fire again, and, as is common 
on such occasions, propounded all manner of leading questions 
calculated to surround the story with new horrors and surprises.  
But Solomon Daisy, notwithstanding these temptations, adhered so 
steadily to his original account, and repeated it so often, with 
such slight variations, and with such solemn asseverations of its 
truth and reality, that his hearers were (with good reason) more 
astonished than at first.  As he took John Willet's view of the 
matter in regard to the propriety of not bruiting the tale abroad, 
unless the spirit should appear to him again, in which case it 
would be necessary to take immediate counsel with the clergyman, it 
was solemnly resolved that it should be hushed up and kept quiet.  
And as most men like to have a secret to tell which may exalt their 
own importance, they arrived at this conclusion with perfect 
unanimity.

As it was by this time growing late, and was long past their usual 
hour of separating, the cronies parted for the night.  Solomon 
Daisy, with a fresh candle in his lantern, repaired homewards under 
the escort of long Phil Parkes and Mr Cobb, who were rather more 
nervous than himself.  Mr Willet, after seeing them to the door, 
returned to collect his thoughts with the assistance of the boiler, 
and to listen to the storm of wind and rain, which had not yet 
abated one jot of its fury.



Chapter 34


Before old John had looked at the boiler quite twenty minutes, he 
got his ideas into a focus, and brought them to bear upon Solomon 
Daisy's story.  The more he thought of it, the more impressed he 
became with a sense of his own wisdom, and a desire that Mr 
Haredale should be impressed with it likewise.  At length, to the 
end that he might sustain a principal and important character in 
the affair; and might have the start of Solomon and his two 
friends, through whose means he knew the adventure, with a variety 
of exaggerations, would be known to at least a score of people, and 
most likely to Mr Haredale himself, by breakfast-time to-morrow; he 
determined to repair to the Warren before going to bed.

'He's my landlord,' thought John, as he took a candle in his hand, 
and setting it down in a corner out of the wind's way, opened a 
casement in the rear of the house, looking towards the stables.  
'We haven't met of late years so often as we used to do--changes 
are taking place in the family--it's desirable that I should stand 
as well with them, in point of dignity, as possible--the whispering 
about of this here tale will anger him--it's good to have 
confidences with a gentleman of his natur', and set one's-self 
right besides.  Halloa there!  Hugh--Hugh.  Hal-loa!'

When he had repeated this shout a dozen times, and startled every 
pigeon from its slumbers, a door in one of the ruinous old 
buildings opened, and a rough voice demanded what was amiss now, 
that a man couldn't even have his sleep in quiet.

'What!  Haven't you sleep enough, growler, that you're not to be 
knocked up for once?' said John.

'No,' replied the voice, as the speaker yawned and shook himself.  
'Not half enough.'

'I don't know how you CAN sleep, with the wind a bellowsing and 
roaring about you, making the tiles fly like a pack of cards,' said 
John; 'but no matter for that.  Wrap yourself up in something or 
another, and come here, for you must go as far as the Warren with 
me.  And look sharp about it.'

Hugh, with much low growling and muttering, went back into his 
lair; and presently reappeared, carrying a lantern and a cudgel, 
and enveloped from head to foot in an old, frowzy, slouching horse-
cloth.  Mr Willet received this figure at the back-door, and 
ushered him into the bar, while he wrapped himself in sundry 
greatcoats and capes, and so tied and knotted his face in shawls 
and handkerchiefs, that how he breathed was a mystery.

'You don't take a man out of doors at near midnight in such weather, 
without putting some heart into him, do you, master?' said Hugh.

'Yes I do, sir,' returned Mr Willet.  'I put the heart (as you call 
it) into him when he has brought me safe home again, and his 
standing steady on his legs an't of so much consequence.  So hold 
that light up, if you please, and go on a step or two before, to 
show the way.'

Hugh obeyed with a very indifferent grace, and a longing glance at 
the bottles.  Old John, laying strict injunctions on his cook to 
keep the doors locked in his absence, and to open to nobody but 
himself on pain of dismissal, followed him into the blustering 
darkness out of doors.

The way was wet and dismal, and the night so black, that if Mr 
Willet had been his own pilot, he would have walked into a deep 
horsepond within a few hundred yards of his own house, and would 
certainly have terminated his career in that ignoble sphere of 
action.  But Hugh, who had a sight as keen as any hawk's, and, 
apart from that endowment, could have found his way blindfold to 
any place within a dozen miles, dragged old John along, quite deaf 
to his remonstrances, and took his own course without the slightest 
reference to, or notice of, his master.  So they made head against 
the wind as they best could; Hugh crushing the wet grass beneath 
his heavy tread, and stalking on after his ordinary savage 
fashion; John Willet following at arm's length, picking his 
steps, and looking about him, now for bogs and ditches, and now 
for such stray ghosts as might be wandering abroad, with looks of 
as much dismay and uneasiness as his immovable face was capable of 
expressing.

At length they stood upon the broad gravel-walk before the Warren-
house.  The building was profoundly dark, and none were moving near 
it save themselves.  From one solitary turret-chamber, however, 
there shone a ray of light; and towards this speck of comfort in 
the cold, cheerless, silent scene, Mr Willet bade his pilot lead 
him.

'The old room,' said John, looking timidly upward; 'Mr Reuben's own 
apartment, God be with us!  I wonder his brother likes to sit 
there, so late at night--on this night too.'

'Why, where else should he sit?' asked Hugh, holding the lantern to 
his breast, to keep the candle from the wind, while he trimmed it 
with his fingers.  'It's snug enough, an't it?'

'Snug!' said John indignantly.  'You have a comfortable idea of 
snugness, you have, sir.  Do you know what was done in that room, 
you ruffian?'

'Why, what is it the worse for that!' cried Hugh, looking into 
John's fat face.  'Does it keep out the rain, and snow, and wind, 
the less for that?  Is it less warm or dry, because a man was 
killed there?  Ha, ha, ha!  Never believe it, master.  One man's no 
such matter as that comes to.'

Mr Willet fixed his dull eyes on his follower, and began--by a 
species of inspiration--to think it just barely possible that he 
was something of a dangerous character, and that it might be 
advisable to get rid of him one of these days.  He was too prudent 
to say anything, with the journey home before him; and therefore 
turned to the iron gate before which this brief dialogue had 
passed, and pulled the handle of the bell that hung beside it.  The 
turret in which the light appeared being at one corner of the 
building, and only divided from the path by one of the garden-
walks, upon which this gate opened, Mr Haredale threw up the 
window directly, and demanded who was there.

'Begging pardon, sir,' said John, 'I knew you sat up late, and made 
bold to come round, having a word to say to you.'

'Willet--is it not?'

'Of the Maypole--at your service, sir.'

Mr Haredale closed the window, and withdrew.  He presently appeared 
at a door in the bottom of the turret, and coming across the 
garden-walk, unlocked the gate and let them in.

'You are a late visitor, Willet.  What is the matter?'

'Nothing to speak of, sir,' said John; 'an idle tale, I thought you 
ought to know of; nothing more.'

'Let your man go forward with the lantern, and give me your hand.  
The stairs are crooked and narrow.  Gently with your light, friend.  
You swing it like a censer.'

Hugh, who had already reached the turret, held it more steadily, 
and ascended first, turning round from time to time to shed his 
light downward on the steps.  Mr Haredale following next, eyed his 
lowering face with no great favour; and Hugh, looking down on him, 
returned his glances with interest, as they climbed the winding 
stairs.

It terminated in a little ante-room adjoining that from which they 
had seen the light.  Mr Haredale entered first, and led the way 
through it into the latter chamber, where he seated himself at a 
writing-table from which he had risen when they had rung the bell.

'Come in,' he said, beckoning to old John, who remained bowing at 
the door.  'Not you, friend,' he added hastily to Hugh, who entered 
also.  'Willet, why do you bring that fellow here?'

'Why, sir,' returned John, elevating his eyebrows, and lowering his 
voice to the tone in which the question had been asked him, 'he's a 
good guard, you see.'

'Don't be too sure of that,' said Mr Haredale, looking towards him 
as he spoke.  'I doubt it.  He has an evil eye.'

'There's no imagination in his eye,' returned Mr Willet, glancing 
over his shoulder at the organ in question, 'certainly.'

'There is no good there, be assured,' said Mr Haredale.  'Wait in 
that little room, friend, and close the door between us.'

Hugh shrugged his shoulders, and with a disdainful look, which 
showed, either that he had overheard, or that he guessed the 
purport of their whispering, did as he was told.  When he was shut 
out, Mr Haredale turned to John, and bade him go on with what he 
had to say, but not to speak too loud, for there were quick ears 
yonder.

Thus cautioned, Mr Willet, in an oily whisper, recited all that he 
had heard and said that night; laying particular stress upon his 
own sagacity, upon his great regard for the family, and upon his 
solicitude for their peace of mind and happiness.  The story moved 
his auditor much more than he had expected.  Mr Haredale often 
changed his attitude, rose and paced the room, returned again, 
desired him to repeat, as nearly as he could, the very words that 
Solomon had used, and gave so many other signs of being disturbed 
and ill at ease, that even Mr Willet was surprised.

'You did quite right,' he said, at the end of a long conversation, 
'to bid them keep this story secret.  It is a foolish fancy on the 
part of this weak-brained man, bred in his fears and superstition.  
But Miss Haredale, though she would know it to be so, would be 
disturbed by it if it reached her ears; it is too nearly connected 
with a subject very painful to us all, to be heard with 
indifference.  You were most prudent, and have laid me under a 
great obligation.  I thank you very much.'

This was equal to John's most sanguine expectations; but he would 
have preferred Mr Haredale's looking at him when he spoke, as if he 
really did thank him, to his walking up and down, speaking by fits 
and starts, often stopping with his eyes fixed on the ground, 
moving hurriedly on again, like one distracted, and seeming almost 
unconscious of what he said or did.

This, however, was his manner; and it was so embarrassing to John 
that he sat quite passive for a long time, not knowing what to 
do.  At length he rose.  Mr Haredale stared at him for a moment as 
though he had quite forgotten his being present, then shook hands 
with him, and opened the door.  Hugh, who was, or feigned to be, 
fast asleep on the ante-chamber floor, sprang up on their entrance, 
and throwing his cloak about him, grasped his stick and lantern, 
and prepared to descend the stairs.

'Stay,' said Mr Haredale.  'Will this man drink?'

'Drink!  He'd drink the Thames up, if it was strong enough, sir, 
replied John Willet.  'He'll have something when he gets home.  
He's better without it, now, sir.'

'Nay.  Half the distance is done,' said Hugh.  'What a hard master 
you are!  I shall go home the better for one glassful, halfway.  
Come!'

As John made no reply, Mr Haredale brought out a glass of liquor, 
and gave it to Hugh, who, as he took it in his hand, threw part of 
it upon the floor.

'What do you mean by splashing your drink about a gentleman's 
house, sir?' said John.

'I'm drinking a toast,' Hugh rejoined, holding the glass above his 
head, and fixing his eyes on Mr Haredale's face; 'a toast to this 
house and its master.'  With that he muttered something to himself, 
and drank the rest, and setting down the glass, preceded them 
without another word.

John was a good deal scandalised by this observance, but seeing 
that Mr Haredale took little heed of what Hugh said or did, and 
that his thoughts were otherwise employed, he offered no apology, 
and went in silence down the stairs, across the walk, and through 
the garden-gate.  They stopped upon the outer side for Hugh to hold 
the light while Mr Haredale locked it on the inner; and then John 
saw with wonder (as he often afterwards related), that he was very 
pale, and that his face had changed so much and grown so haggard 
since their entrance, that he almost seemed another man.

They were in the open road again, and John Willet was walking on 
behind his escort, as he had come, thinking very steadily of what 
be had just now seen, when Hugh drew him suddenly aside, and almost 
at the same instant three horsemen swept past--the nearest brushed 
his shoulder even then--who, checking their steeds as suddenly as 
they could, stood still, and waited for their coming up.



Chapter 35


When John Willet saw that the horsemen wheeled smartly round, and 
drew up three abreast in the narrow road, waiting for him and his 
man to join them, it occurred to him with unusual precipitation 
that they must be highwaymen; and had Hugh been armed with a 
blunderbuss, in place of his stout cudgel, he would certainly have 
ordered him to fire it off at a venture, and would, while the word 
of command was obeyed, have consulted his own personal safety in 
immediate flight.  Under the circumstances of disadvantage, 
however, in which he and his guard were placed, he deemed it 
prudent to adopt a different style of generalship, and therefore 
whispered his attendant to address them in the most peaceable and 
courteous terms.  By way of acting up to the spirit and letter of 
this instruction, Hugh stepped forward, and flourishing his staff 
before the very eyes of the rider nearest to him, demanded roughly 
what he and his fellows meant by so nearly galloping over them, and 
why they scoured the king's highway at that late hour of night.

The man whom be addressed was beginning an angry reply in the same 
strain, when be was checked by the horseman in the centre, who, 
interposing with an air of authority, inquired in a somewhat loud 
but not harsh or unpleasant voice:

'Pray, is this the London road?'

'If you follow it right, it is,' replied Hugh roughly.

'Nay, brother,' said the same person, 'you're but a churlish 
Englishman, if Englishman you be--which I should much doubt but for 
your tongue.  Your companion, I am sure, will answer me more 
civilly.  How say you, friend?'

'I say it IS the London road, sir,' answered John.  'And I wish,' 
he added in a subdued voice, as he turned to Hugh, 'that you was in 
any other road, you vagabond.  Are you tired of your life, sir, 
that you go a-trying to provoke three great neck-or-nothing chaps, 
that could keep on running over us, back'ards and for'ards, till we 
was dead, and then take our bodies up behind 'em, and drown us ten 
miles off?'

'How far is it to London?' inquired the same speaker.

'Why, from here, sir,' answered John, persuasively, 'it's thirteen 
very easy mile.'

The adjective was thrown in, as an inducement to the travellers to 
ride away with all speed; but instead of having the desired effect, 
it elicited from the same person, the remark, 'Thirteen miles!  
That's a long distance!' which was followed by a short pause of 
indecision.

'Pray,' said the gentleman, 'are there any inns hereabouts?'  At 
the word 'inns,' John plucked up his spirit in a surprising manner; 
his fears rolled off like smoke; all the landlord stirred within 
him.

'There are no inns,' rejoined Mr Willet, with a strong emphasis on 
the plural number; 'but there's a Inn--one Inn--the Maypole Inn.  
That's a Inn indeed.  You won't see the like of that Inn often.'

'You keep it, perhaps?' said the horseman, smiling.

'I do, sir,' replied John, greatly wondering how he had found this 
out.

'And how far is the Maypole from here?'

'About a mile'--John was going to add that it was the easiest mile 
in all the world, when the third rider, who had hitherto kept a 
little in the rear, suddenly interposed:

'And have you one excellent bed, landlord?  Hem!  A bed that you 
can recommend--a bed that you are sure is well aired--a bed that 
has been slept in by some perfectly respectable and unexceptionable 
person?'

'We don't take in no tagrag and bobtail at our house, sir,' 
answered John.  'And as to the bed itself--'

'Say, as to three beds,' interposed the gentleman who had spoken 
before; 'for we shall want three if we stay, though my friend only 
speaks of one.'

'No, no, my lord; you are too good, you are too kind; but your life 
is of far too much importance to the nation in these portentous 
times, to be placed upon a level with one so useless and so poor as 
mine.  A great cause, my lord, a mighty cause, depends on you.  You 
are its leader and its champion, its advanced guard and its van.  
It is the cause of our altars and our homes, our country and our 
faith.  Let ME sleep on a chair--the carpet--anywhere.  No one will 
repine if I take cold or fever.  Let John Grueby pass the night 
beneath the open sky--no one will repine for HIM.  But forty 
thousand men of this our island in the wave (exclusive of women and 
children) rivet their eyes and thoughts on Lord George Gordon; and 
every day, from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the 
same, pray for his health and vigour.  My lord,' said the speaker, 
rising in his stirrups, 'it is a glorious cause, and must not be 
forgotten.  My lord, it is a mighty cause, and must not be 
endangered.  My lord, it is a holy cause, and must not be 
deserted.'

'It IS a holy cause,' exclaimed his lordship, lifting up his hat 
with great solemnity.  'Amen.'

'John Grueby,' said the long-winded gentleman, in a tone of mild 
reproof, 'his lordship said Amen.'

'I heard my lord, sir,' said the man, sitting like a statue on his 
horse.

'And do not YOU say Amen, likewise?'

To which John Grueby made no reply at all, but sat looking straight 
before him.

'You surprise me, Grueby,' said the gentleman.  'At a crisis like 
the present, when Queen Elizabeth, that maiden monarch, weeps 
within her tomb, and Bloody Mary, with a brow of gloom and shadow, 
stalks triumphant--'

'Oh, sir,' cied the man, gruffly, 'where's the use of talking of 
Bloody Mary, under such circumstances as the present, when my 
lord's wet through, and tired with hard riding?  Let's either go on 
to London, sir, or put up at once; or that unfort'nate Bloody Mary 
will have more to answer for--and she's done a deal more harm in 
her grave than she ever did in her lifetime, I believe.'

By this time Mr Willet, who had never beard so many words spoken 
together at one time, or delivered with such volubility and 
emphasis as by the long-winded gentleman; and whose brain, being 
wholly unable to sustain or compass them, had quite given itself up 
for lost; recovered so far as to observe that there was ample 
accommodation at the Maypole for all the party: good beds; neat 
wines; excellent entertainment for man and beast; private rooms for 
large and small parties; dinners dressed upon the shortest notice; 
choice stabling, and a lock-up coach-house; and, in short, to run 
over such recommendatory scraps of language as were painted up on 
various portions of the building, and which in the course of some 
forty years he had learnt to repeat with tolerable correctness.  He 
was considering whether it was at all possible to insert any novel 
sentences to the same purpose, when the gentleman who had spoken 
first, turning to him of the long wind, exclaimed, 'What say you, 
Gashford?  Shall we tarry at this house he speaks of, or press 
forward?  You shall decide.'

'I would submit, my lord, then,' returned the person he appealed 
to, in a silky tone, 'that your health and spirits--so important, 
under Providence, to our great cause, our pure and truthful cause'--
here his lordship pulled off his hat again, though it was raining 
hard--'require refreshment and repose.'

'Go on before, landlord, and show the way,' said Lord George 
Gordon; 'we will follow at a footpace.'

'If you'll give me leave, my lord,' said John Grueby, in a low 
voice, 'I'll change my proper place, and ride before you.  The 
looks of the landlord's friend are not over honest, and it may be 
as well to be cautious with him.'

'John Grueby is quite right,' interposed Mr Gashford, falling back 
hastily.  'My lord, a life so precious as yours must not be put in 
peril.  Go forward, John, by all means.  If you have any reason to 
suspect the fellow, blow his brains out.'

John made no answer, but looking straight before him, as his custom 
seemed to be when the secretary spoke, bade Hugh push on, and 
followed close behind him.  Then came his lordship, with Mr Willet 
at his bridle rein; and, last of all, his lordship's secretary--for 
that, it seemed, was Gashford's office.

Hugh strode briskly on, often looking back at the servant, whose 
horse was close upon his heels, and glancing with a leer at his 
bolster case of pistols, by which he seemed to set great store.  He 
was a square-built, strong-made, bull-necked fellow, of the true 
English breed; and as Hugh measured him with his eye, he measured 
Hugh, regarding him meanwhile with a look of bluff disdain.  He was 
much older than the Maypole man, being to all appearance five-and-
forty; but was one of those self-possessed, hard-headed, 
imperturbable fellows, who, if they are ever beaten at fisticuffs, 
or other kind of warfare, never know it, and go on coolly till they 
win.

'If I led you wrong now,' said Hugh, tauntingly, 'you'd--ha ha ha!--
you'd shoot me through the head, I suppose.'

John Grueby took no more notice of this remark than if he had been 
deaf and Hugh dumb; but kept riding on quite comfortably, with his 
eyes fixed on the horizon.

'Did you ever try a fall with a man when you were young, master?' 
said Hugh.  'Can you make any play at single-stick?'

John Grueby looked at him sideways with the same contented air, but 
deigned not a word in answer.

'--Like this?' said Hugh, giving his cudgel one of those skilful 
flourishes, in which the rustic of that time delighted.  'Whoop!'

'--Or that,' returned John Grueby, beating down his guard with his 
whip, and striking him on the head with its butt end.  'Yes, I 
played a little once.  You wear your hair too long; I should have 
cracked your crown if it had been a little shorter.'

It was a pretty smart, loud-sounding rap, as it was, and evidently 
astonished Hugh; who, for the moment, seemed disposed to drag his 
new acquaintance from his saddle.  But his face betokening neither 
malice, triumph, rage, nor any lingering idea that he had given him 
offence; his eyes gazing steadily in the old direction, and his 
manner being as careless and composed as if he had merely brushed 
away a fly; Hugh was so puzzled, and so disposed to look upon him 
as a customer of almost supernatural toughness, that he merely 
laughed, and cried 'Well done!' then, sheering off a little, led 
the way in silence.

Before the lapse of many minutes the party halted at the Maypole 
door.  Lord George and his secretary quickly dismounting, gave 
their horses to their servant, who, under the guidance of Hugh, 
repaired to the stables.  Right glad to escape from the inclemency 
of the night, they followed Mr Willet into the common room, and 
stood warming themselves and drying their clothes before the 
cheerful fire, while he busied himself with such orders and 
preparations as his guest's high quality required.

As he bustled in and out of the room, intent on these 
arrangements, he had an opportunity of observing the two 
travellers, of whom, as yet, he knew nothing but the voice.  The 
lord, the great personage who did the Maypole so much honour, was 
about the middle height, of a slender make, and sallow complexion, 
with an aquiline nose, and long hair of a reddish brown, combed 
perfectly straight and smooth about his ears, and slightly 
powdered, but without the faintest vestige of a curl.  He was 
attired, under his greatcoat, in a full suit of black, quite free 
from any ornament, and of the most precise and sober cut.  The 
gravity of his dress, together with a certain lankness of cheek 
and stiffness of deportment, added nearly ten years to his age, 
but his figure was that of one not yet past thirty.  As he stood 
musing in the red glow of the fire, it was striking to observe his 
very bright large eye, which betrayed a restlessness of thought and 
purpose, singularly at variance with the studied composure and 
sobriety of his mien, and with his quaint and sad apparel.  It had 
nothing harsh or cruel in its expression; neither had his face, 
which was thin and mild, and wore an air of melancholy; but it was 
suggestive of an indefinable uneasiness; which infected those who 
looked upon him, and filled them with a kind of pity for the man: 
though why it did so, they would have had some trouble to explain.

Gashford, the secretary, was taller, angularly made, high-
shouldered, bony, and ungraceful.  His dress, in imitation of his 
superior, was demure and staid in the extreme; his manner, formal 
and constrained.  This gentleman had an overhanging brow, great 
hands and feet and ears, and a pair of eyes that seemed to have 
made an unnatural retreat into his head, and to have dug themselves 
a cave to hide in.  His manner was smooth and humble, but very sly 
and slinking.  He wore the aspect of a man who was always lying in 
wait for something that WOULDN'T come to pass; but he looked 
patient--very patient--and fawned like a spaniel dog.  Even now, 
while he warmed and rubbed his hands before the blaze, he had the 
air of one who only presumed to enjoy it in his degree as a 
commoner; and though he knew his lord was not regarding him, he 
looked into his face from time to time, and with a meek and 
deferential manner, smiled as if for practice.

Such were the guests whom old John Willet, with a fixed and leaden 
eye, surveyed a hundred times, and to whom he now advanced with a 
state candlestick in each hand, beseeching them to follow him into 
a worthier chamber.  'For my lord,' said John--it is odd enough, 
but certain people seem to have as great a pleasure in pronouncing 
titles as their owners have in wearing them--'this room, my lord, 
isn't at all the sort of place for your lordship, and I have to 
beg your lordship's pardon for keeping you here, my lord, one 
minute.'

With this address, John ushered them upstairs into the state 
apartment, which, like many other things of state, was cold and 
comfortless.  Their own footsteps, reverberating through the 
spacious room, struck upon their hearing with a hollow sound; and 
its damp and chilly atmosphere was rendered doubly cheerless by 
contrast with the homely warmth they had deserted.

It was of no use, however, to propose a return to the place they 
had quitted, for the preparations went on so briskly that there was 
no time to stop them.  John, with the tall candlesticks in his 
hands, bowed them up to the fireplace; Hugh, striding in with a 
lighted brand and pile of firewood, cast it down upon the hearth, 
and set it in a blaze; John Grueby (who had a great blue cockade in 
his hat, which he appeared to despise mightily) brought in the 
portmanteau he had carried on his horse, and placed it on the 
floor; and presently all three were busily engaged in drawing out 
the screen, laying the cloth, inspecting the beds, lighting fires 
in the bedrooms, expediting the supper, and making everything as 
cosy and as snug as might be, on so short a notice.  In less than 
an hour's time, supper had been served, and ate, and cleared away; 
and Lord George and his secretary, with slippered feet, and legs 
stretched out before the fire, sat over some hot mulled wine 
together.

'So ends, my lord,' said Gashford, filling his glass with great 
complacency, 'the blessed work of a most blessed day.'

'And of a blessed yesterday,' said his lordship, raising his head.

'Ah!'--and here the secretary clasped his hands--'a blessed 
yesterday indeed!  The Protestants of Suffolk are godly men and 
true.  Though others of our countrymen have lost their way in 
darkness, even as we, my lord, did lose our road to-night, theirs 
is the light and glory.'

'Did I move them, Gashford ?' said Lord George.

'Move them, my lord!  Move them!  They cried to be led on against 
the Papists, they vowed a dreadful vengeance on their heads, they 
roared like men possessed--'

'But not by devils,' said his lord.

'By devils! my lord!  By angels.'

'Yes--oh surely--by angels, no doubt,' said Lord George, thrusting 
his hands into his pockets, taking them out again to bite his 
nails, and looking uncomfortably at the fire.  'Of course by 
angels--eh Gashford?'

'You do not doubt it, my lord?' said the secretary.

'No--No,' returned his lord.  'No.  Why should I?  I suppose it 
would be decidedly irreligious to doubt it--wouldn't it, Gashford?  
Though there certainly were,' he added, without waiting for an 
answer, 'some plaguy ill-looking characters among them.'

'When you warmed,' said the secretary, looking sharply at the 
other's downcast eyes, which brightened slowly as he spoke; 'when 
you warmed into that noble outbreak; when you told them that you 
were never of the lukewarm or the timid tribe, and bade them take 
heed that they were prepared to follow one who would lead them on, 
though to the very death; when you spoke of a hundred and twenty 
thousand men across the Scottish border who would take their own 
redress at any time, if it were not conceded; when you cried 
"Perish the Pope and all his base adherents; the penal laws against 
them shall never be repealed while Englishmen have hearts and 
hands"--and waved your own and touched your sword; and when they 
cried "No Popery!" and you cried "No; not even if we wade in 
blood," and they threw up their hats and cried "Hurrah! not even if 
we wade in blood; No Popery!  Lord George!  Down with the Papists--
Vengeance on their heads:" when this was said and done, and a word 
from you, my lord, could raise or still the tumult--ah! then I felt 
what greatness was indeed, and thought, When was there ever power 
like this of Lord George Gordon's!'

'It's a great power.  You're right.  It is a great power!' he cried 
with sparkling eyes.  'But--dear Gashford--did I really say all 
that?'

'And how much more!' cried the secretary, looking upwards.  'Ah! 
how much more!'

'And I told them what you say, about the one hundred and forty 
thousand men in Scotland, did I!' he asked with evident delight.  
'That was bold.'

'Our cause is boldness.  Truth is always bold.'

'Certainly.  So is religion.  She's bold, Gashford?'

'The true religion is, my lord.'

'And that's ours,' he rejoined, moving uneasily in his seat, and 
biting his nails as though he would pare them to the quick.  'There 
can be no doubt of ours being the true one.  You feel as certain of 
that as I do, Gashford, don't you?'

'Does my lord ask ME,' whined Gashford, drawing his chair nearer 
with an injured air, and laying his broad flat hand upon the table; 
'ME,' he repeated, bending the dark hollows of his eyes upon him 
with an unwholesome smile, 'who, stricken by the magic of his 
eloquence in Scotland but a year ago, abjured the errors of the 
Romish church, and clung to him as one whose timely hand had 
plucked me from a pit?'

'True.  No--No.  I--I didn't mean it,' replied the other, shaking 
him by the hand, rising from his seat, and pacing restlessly about 
the room.  'It's a proud thing to lead the people, Gashford,' he 
added as he made a sudden halt.

'By force of reason too,' returned the pliant secretary.

'Ay, to be sure.  They may cough and jeer, and groan in Parliament, 
and call me fool and madman, but which of them can raise this human 
sea and make it swell and roar at pleasure?  Not one.'

'Not one,' repeated Gashford.

'Which of them can say for his honesty, what I can say for mine; 
which of them has refused a minister's bribe of one thousand 
pounds a year, to resign his seat in favour of another?  Not one.'

'Not one,' repeated Gashford again--taking the lion's share of the 
mulled wine between whiles.

'And as we are honest, true, and in a sacred cause, Gashford,' said 
Lord George with a heightened colour and in a louder voice, as he 
laid his fevered hand upon his shoulder, 'and are the only men who 
regard the mass of people out of doors, or are regarded by them, we 
will uphold them to the last; and will raise a cry against these 
un-English Papists which shall re-echo through the country, and 
roll with a noise like thunder.  I will be worthy of the motto on 
my coat of arms, "Called and chosen and faithful."

'Called,' said the secretary, 'by Heaven.'

'I am.'

'Chosen by the people.'

'Yes.'

'Faithful to both.'

'To the block!'

It would be difficult to convey an adequate idea of the excited 
manner in which he gave these answers to the secretary's 
promptings; of the rapidity of his utterance, or the violence of 
his tone and gesture; in which, struggling through his Puritan's 
demeanour, was something wild and ungovernable which broke through 
all restraint.  For some minutes he walked rapidly up and down the 
room, then stopping suddenly, exclaimed,

'Gashford--YOU moved them yesterday too.  Oh yes!  You did.'

'I shone with a reflected light, my lord,' replied the humble 
secretary, laying his hand upon his heart.  'I did my best.'

'You did well,' said his master, 'and are a great and worthy 
instrument.  If you will ring for John Grueby to carry the 
portmanteau into my room, and will wait here while I undress, we 
will dispose of business as usual, if you're not too tired.'

'Too tired, my lord!--But this is his consideration!  Christian 
from head to foot.'  With which soliloquy, the secretary tilted the 
jug, and looked very hard into the mulled wine, to see how much 
remained.

John Willet and John Grueby appeared together.  The one bearing the 
great candlesticks, and the other the portmanteau, showed the 
deluded lord into his chamber; and left the secretary alone, to 
yawn and shake himself, and finally to fall asleep before the fire.

'Now, Mr Gashford sir,' said John Grueby in his ear, after what 
appeared to him a moment of unconsciousness; 'my lord's abed.'

'Oh.  Very good, John,' was his mild reply.  'Thank you, John.  
Nobody need sit up.  I know my room.'

'I hope you're not a-going to trouble your head to-night, or my 
lord's head neither, with anything more about Bloody Mary,' said 
John.  'I wish the blessed old creetur had never been born.'

'I said you might go to bed, John,' returned the secretary.  'You 
didn't hear me, I think.'

'Between Bloody Marys, and blue cockades, and glorious Queen 
Besses, and no Poperys, and Protestant associations, and making of 
speeches,' pursued John Grueby, looking, as usual, a long way off, 
and taking no notice of this hint, 'my lord's half off his head.  
When we go out o' doors, such a set of ragamuffins comes a-
shouting after us, "Gordon forever!" that I'm ashamed of myself 
and don't know where to look.  When we're indoors, they come a-
roaring and screaming about the house like so many devils; and my 
lord instead of ordering them to be drove away, goes out into the 
balcony and demeans himself by making speeches to 'em, and calls 
'em "Men of England," and "Fellow-countrymen," as if he was fond of 
'em and thanked 'em for coming.  I can't make it out, but they're 
all mixed up somehow or another with that unfort'nate Bloody Mary, 
and call her name out till they're hoarse.  They're all Protestants 
too--every man and boy among 'em: and Protestants are very fond of 
spoons, I find, and silver-plate in general, whenever area-gates is 
left open accidentally.  I wish that was the worst of it, and that 
no more harm might be to come; but if you don't stop these ugly 
customers in time, Mr Gashford (and I know you; you're the man that 
blows the fire), you'll find 'em grow a little bit too strong for 
you.  One of these evenings, when the weather gets warmer and 
Protestants are thirsty, they'll be pulling London down,--and I 
never heard that Bloody Mary went as far as THAT.'

Gashford had vanished long ago, and these remarks had been bestowed 
on empty air.  Not at all discomposed by the discovery, John Grueby 
fixed his hat on, wrongside foremost that he might be unconscious 
of the shadow of the obnoxious cockade, and withdrew to bed; 
shaking his head in a very gloomy and prophetic manner until he 
reached his chamber.



Chapter 36


Gashford, with a smiling face, but still with looks of profound 
deference and humility, betook himself towards his master's room, 
smoothing his hair down as he went, and humming a psalm tune.  As 
he approached Lord George's door, he cleared his throat and hummed 
more vigorously.

There was a remarkable contrast between this man's occupation at 
the moment, and the expression of his countenance, which was 
singularly repulsive and malicious.  His beetling brow almost 
obscured his eyes; his lip was curled contemptuously; his very 
shoulders seemed to sneer in stealthy whisperings with his great 
flapped ears.

'Hush!' he muttered softly, as he peeped in at the chamber-door.  
'He seems to be asleep.  Pray Heaven he is!  Too much watching, too 
much care, too much thought--ah! Lord preserve him for a martyr!  
He is a saint, if ever saint drew breath on this bad earth.'

Placing his light upon a table, he walked on tiptoe to the fire, 
and sitting in a chair before it with his back towards the bed, 
went on communing with himself like one who thought aloud:

'The saviour of his country and his country's religion, the friend 
of his poor countrymen, the enemy of the proud and harsh; beloved 
of the rejected and oppressed, adored by forty thousand bold and 
loyal English hearts--what happy slumbers his should be!'  And here 
he sighed, and warmed his hands, and shook his head as men do when 
their hearts are full, and heaved another sigh, and warmed his 
hands again.

'Why, Gashford?' said Lord George, who was lying broad awake, upon 
his side, and had been staring at him from his entrance.

'My--my lord,' said Gashford, starting and looking round as though 
in great surprise.  'I have disturbed you!'

'I have not been sleeping.'

'Not sleeping!' he repeated, with assumed confusion.  'What can I 
say for having in your presence given utterance to thoughts--but 
they were sincere--they were sincere!' exclaimed the secretary, 
drawing his sleeve in a hasty way across his eyes; 'and why should 
I regret your having heard them?'

'Gashford,' said the poor lord, stretching out his hand with 
manifest emotion.  'Do not regret it.  You love me well, I know--
too well.  I don't deserve such homage.'

Gashford made no reply, but grasped the hand and pressed it to his 
lips.  Then rising, and taking from the trunk a little desk, he 
placed it on a table near the fire, unlocked it with a key he 
carried in his pocket, sat down before it, took out a pen, and, 
before dipping it in the inkstand, sucked it--to compose the 
fashion of his mouth perhaps, on which a smile was hovering yet.

'How do our numbers stand since last enrolling-night?' inquired 
Lord George.  'Are we really forty thousand strong, or do we still 
speak in round numbers when we take the Association at that amount?'

'Our total now exceeds that number by a score and three,' Gashford 
replied, casting his eyes upon his papers.

'The funds?'

'Not VERY improving; but there is some manna in the wilderness, my 
lord.  Hem!  On Friday night the widows' mites dropped in.  "Forty 
scavengers, three and fourpence.  An aged pew-opener of St Martin's 
parish, sixpence.  A bell-ringer of the established church, 
sixpence.  A Protestant infant, newly born, one halfpenny.  The 
United Link Boys, three shillings--one bad.  The anti-popish 
prisoners in Newgate, five and fourpence.  A friend in Bedlam, 
half-a-crown.  Dennis the hangman, one shilling."'

'That Dennis,' said his lordship, 'is an earnest man.  I marked him 
in the crowd in Welbeck Street, last Friday.'

'A good man,' rejoined the secretary, 'a staunch, sincere, and 
truly zealous man.'

'He should be encouraged,' said Lord George.  'Make a note of 
Dennis.  I'll talk with him.'

Gashford obeyed, and went on reading from his list:

'"The Friends of Reason, half-a-guinea.  The Friends of Liberty, 
half-a-guinea.  The Friends of Peace, half-a-guinea.  The Friends 
of Charity, half-a-guinea.  The Friends of Mercy, half-a-guinea.  
The Associated Rememberers of Bloody Mary, half-a-guinea.  The 
United Bulldogs, half-a-guinea."'

'The United Bulldogs,' said Lord George, biting his nails most 
horribly, 'are a new society, are they not?'

'Formerly the 'Prentice Knights, my lord.  The indentures of the 
old members expiring by degrees, they changed their name, it seems, 
though they still have 'prentices among them, as well as workmen.'

'What is their president's name?' inquired Lord George.

'President,' said Gashford, reading, 'Mr Simon Tappertit.'

'I remember him.  The little man, who sometimes brings an elderly 
sister to our meetings, and sometimes another female too, who is 
conscientious, I have no doubt, but not well-favoured?'

'The very same, my lord.'

'Tappertit is an earnest man,' said Lord George, thoughtfully.  
'Eh, Gashford?'

'One of the foremost among them all, my lord.  He snuffs the battle 
from afar, like the war-horse.  He throws his hat up in the street 
as if he were inspired, and makes most stirring speeches from the 
shoulders of his friends.'

'Make a note of Tappertit,' said Lord George Gordon.  'We may 
advance him to a place of trust.'

'That,' rejoined the secretary, doing as he was told, 'is all--
except Mrs Varden's box (fourteenth time of opening), seven 
shillings and sixpence in silver and copper, and half-a-guinea in 
gold; and Miggs (being the saving of a quarter's wages), one-and-
threepence.'

'Miggs,' said Lord George.  'Is that a man?'

'The name is entered on the list as a woman,' replied the 
secretary.  'I think she is the tall spare female of whom you spoke 
just now, my lord, as not being well-favoured, who sometimes comes 
to hear the speeches--along with Tappertit and Mrs Varden.'

'Mrs Varden is the elderly lady then, is she?'

The secretary nodded, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the 
feather of his pen.

'She is a zealous sister,' said Lord George.  'Her collection goes 
on prosperously, and is pursued with fervour.  Has her husband 
joined?'

'A malignant,' returned the secretary, folding up his papers.  
'Unworthy such a wife.  He remains in outer darkness and steadily 
refuses.'

'The consequences be upon his own head!--Gashford!'

'My lord!'

'You don't think,' he turned restlessly in his bed as he spoke, 
'these people will desert me, when the hour arrives?  I have spoken 
boldly for them, ventured much, suppressed nothing.  They'll not 
fall off, will they?'

'No fear of that, my lord,' said Gashford, with a meaning look, 
which was rather the involuntary expression of his own thoughts 
than intended as any confirmation of his words, for the other's 
face was turned away.  'Be sure there is no fear of that.'

'Nor,' he said with a more restless motion than before, 'of their--
but they CAN sustain no harm from leaguing for this purpose.  Right 
is on our side, though Might may be against us.  You feel as sure 
of that as I--honestly, you do?'

The secretary was beginning with 'You do not doubt,' when the other 
interrupted him, and impatiently rejoined:

'Doubt.  No.  Who says I doubt?  If I doubted, should I cast away 
relatives, friends, everything, for this unhappy country's sake; 
this unhappy country,' he cried, springing up in bed, after 
repeating the phrase 'unhappy country's sake' to himself, at least 
a dozen times, 'forsaken of God and man, delivered over to a 
dangerous confederacy of Popish powers; the prey of corruption, 
idolatry, and despotism!  Who says I doubt?  Am I called, and 
chosen, and faithful?  Tell me.  Am I, or am I not?'

'To God, the country, and yourself,' cried Gashford.

'I am.  I will be.  I say again, I will be: to the block.  Who says 
as much!  Do you?  Does any man alive?'

The secretary drooped his head with an expression of perfect 
acquiescence in anything that had been said or might be; and Lord 
George gradually sinking down upon his pillow, fell asleep.

Although there was something very ludicrous in his vehement manner, 
taken in conjunction with his meagre aspect and ungraceful 
presence, it would scarcely have provoked a smile in any man of 
kindly feeling; or even if it had, he would have felt sorry and 
almost angry with himself next moment, for yielding to the impulse.  
This lord was sincere in his violence and in his wavering.  A 
nature prone to false enthusiasm, and the vanity of being a leader, 
were the worst qualities apparent in his composition.  All the rest 
was weakness--sheer weakness; and it is the unhappy lot of 
thoroughly weak men, that their very sympathies, affections, 
confidences--all the qualities which in better constituted minds 
are virtues--dwindle into foibles, or turn into downright vices.

Gashford, with many a sly look towards the bed, sat chuckling at 
his master's folly, until his deep and heavy breathing warned him 
that he might retire.  Locking his desk, and replacing it within 
the trunk (but not before he had taken from a secret lining two 
printed handbills), he cautiously withdrew; looking back, as he 
went, at the pale face of the slumbering man, above whose head the 
dusty plumes that crowned the Maypole couch, waved drearily and 
sadly as though it were a bier.

Stopping on the staircase to listen that all was quiet, and to take 
off his shoes lest his footsteps should alarm any light sleeper who 
might be near at hand, he descended to the ground floor, and thrust 
one of his bills beneath the great door of the house.  That done, 
he crept softly back to his own chamber, and from the window let 
another fall--carefully wrapt round a stone to save it from the 
wind--into the yard below.

They were addressed on the back 'To every Protestant into whose 
hands this shall come,' and bore within what follows:

'Men and Brethren.  Whoever shall find this letter, will take it as 
a warning to join, without delay, the friends of Lord George 
Gordon.  There are great events at hand; and the times are 
dangerous and troubled.  Read this carefully, keep it clean, and 
drop it somewhere else.  For King and Country.  Union.'

'More seed, more seed,' said Gashford as he closed the window.  
'When will the harvest come!'



Chapter 37


To surround anything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with an air 
of mystery, is to invest it with a secret charm, and power of 
attraction which to the crowd is irresistible.  False priests, 
false prophets, false doctors, false patriots, false prodigies of 
every kind, veiling their proceedings in mystery, have always 
addressed themselves at an immense advantage to the popular 
credulity, and have been, perhaps, more indebted to that resource 
in gaining and keeping for a time the upper hand of Truth and 
Common Sense, than to any half-dozen items in the whole catalogue 
of imposture.  Curiosity is, and has been from the creation of the 
world, a master-passion.  To awaken it, to gratify it by slight 
degrees, and yet leave something always in suspense, is to 
establish the surest hold that can be had, in wrong, on the 
unthinking portion of mankind.

If a man had stood on London Bridge, calling till he was hoarse, 
upon the passers-by, to join with Lord George Gordon, although for 
an object which no man understood, and which in that very incident 
had a charm of its own,--the probability is, that he might have 
influenced a score of people in a month.  If all zealous 
Protestants had been publicly urged to join an association for the 
avowed purpose of singing a hymn or two occasionally, and hearing 
some indifferent speeches made, and ultimately of petitioning 
Parliament not to pass an act for abolishing the penal laws against 
Roman Catholic priests, the penalty of perpetual imprisonment 
denounced against those who educated children in that persuasion, 
and the disqualification of all members of the Romish church to 
inherit real property in the United Kingdom by right of purchase or 
descent,--matters so far removed from the business and bosoms of 
the mass, might perhaps have called together a hundred people.  But 
when vague rumours got abroad, that in this Protestant association 
a secret power was mustering against the government for undefined 
and mighty purposes; when the air was filled with whispers of a 
confederacy among the Popish powers to degrade and enslave England, 
establish an inquisition in London, and turn the pens of Smithfield 
market into stakes and cauldrons; when terrors and alarms which no 
man understood were perpetually broached, both in and out of 
Parliament, by one enthusiast who did not understand himself, and 
bygone bugbears which had lain quietly in their graves for 
centuries, were raised again to haunt the ignorant and credulous; 
when all this was done, as it were, in the dark, and secret 
invitations to join the Great Protestant Association in defence of 
religion, life, and liberty, were dropped in the public ways, 
thrust under the house-doors, tossed in at windows, and pressed 
into the hands of those who trod the streets by night; when they 
glared from every wall, and shone on every post and pillar, so that 
stocks and stones appeared infected with the common fear, urging 
all men to join together blindfold in resistance of they knew not 
what, they knew not why;--then the mania spread indeed, and the 
body, still increasing every day, grew forty thousand strong.

So said, at least, in this month of March, 1780, Lord George 
Gordon, the Association's president.  Whether it was the fact or 
otherwise, few men knew or cared to ascertain.  It had never made 
any public demonstration; had scarcely ever been heard of, save 
through him; had never been seen; and was supposed by many to be 
the mere creature of his disordered brain.  He was accustomed to 
talk largely about numbers of men--stimulated, as it was inferred, 
by certain successful disturbances, arising out of the same 
subject, which had occurred in Scotland in the previous year; was 
looked upon as a cracked-brained member of the lower house, who 
attacked all parties and sided with none, and was very little 
regarded.  It was known that there was discontent abroad--there 
always is; he had been accustomed to address the people by placard, 
speech, and pamphlet, upon other questions; nothing had come, in 
England, of his past exertions, and nothing was apprehended from 
his present.  Just as he has come upon the reader, he had come, 
from time to time, upon the public, and been forgotten in a day; as 
suddenly as he appears in these pages, after a blank of five long 
years, did he and his proceedings begin to force themselves, about 
this period, upon the notice of thousands of people, who had 
mingled in active life during the whole interval, and who, without 
being deaf or blind to passing events, had scarcely ever thought of 
him before.

'My lord,' said Gashford in his ear, as he drew the curtains of his 
bed betimes; 'my lord!'

'Yes--who's that?  What is it?'

'The clock has struck nine,' returned the secretary, with meekly 
folded hands.  'You have slept well?  I hope you have slept well?  
If my prayers are heard, you are refreshed indeed.'

'To say the truth, I have slept so soundly,' said Lord George, 
rubbing his eyes and looking round the room, 'that I don't remember 
quite--what place is this?'

'My lord!' cried Gashford, with a smile.

'Oh!' returned his superior.  'Yes.  You're not a Jew then?'

'A Jew!' exclaimed the pious secretary, recoiling.

'I dreamed that we were Jews, Gashford.  You and I--both of us--
Jews with long beards.'

'Heaven forbid, my lord!  We might as well be Papists.'

'I suppose we might,' returned the other, very quickly.  'Eh?  You 
really think so, Gashford?'

'Surely I do,' the secretary cried, with looks of great surprise.

'Humph!' he muttered.  'Yes, that seems reasonable.'

'I hope my lord--' the secretary began.

'Hope!' he echoed, interrupting him.  'Why do you say, you hope?  
There's no harm in thinking of such things.'

'Not in dreams,' returned the Secretary.

'In dreams!  No, nor waking either.'

--'"Called, and chosen, and faithful,"' said Gashford, taking up 
Lord George's watch which lay upon a chair, and seeming to read the 
inscription on the seal, abstractedly.

It was the slightest action possible, not obtruded on his notice, 
and apparently the result of a moment's absence of mind, not worth 
remark.  But as the words were uttered, Lord George, who had been 
going on impetuously, stopped short, reddened, and was silent.  
Apparently quite unconscious of this change in his demeanour, the 
wily Secretary stepped a little apart, under pretence of pulling up 
the window-blind, and returning when the other had had time to 
recover, said:

'The holy cause goes bravely on, my lord.  I was not idle, even 
last night.  I dropped two of the handbills before I went to bed, 
and both are gone this morning.  Nobody in the house has mentioned 
the circumstance of finding them, though I have been downstairs 
full half-an-hour.  One or two recruits will be their first fruit, 
I predict; and who shall say how many more, with Heaven's blessing 
on your inspired exertions!'

'It was a famous device in the beginning,' replied Lord George; 'an 
excellent device, and did good service in Scotland.  It was quite 
worthy of you.  You remind me not to be a sluggard, Gashford, when 
the vineyard is menaced with destruction, and may be trodden down 
by Papist feet.  Let the horses be saddled in half-an-hour.  We 
must be up and doing!'

He said this with a heightened colour, and in a tone of such 
enthusiasm, that the secretary deemed all further prompting 
needless, and withdrew.

--'Dreamed he was a Jew,' he said thoughtfully, as he closed the 
bedroom door.  'He may come to that before he dies.  It's like 
enough.  Well!  After a time, and provided I lost nothing by it, I 
don't see why that religion shouldn't suit me as well as any 
other.  There are rich men among the Jews; shaving is very 
troublesome;--yes, it would suit me well enough.  For the present, 
though, we must be Christian to the core.  Our prophetic motto will 
suit all creeds in their turn, that's a comfort.'  Reflecting on 
this source of consolation, he reached the sitting-room, and rang 
the bell for breakfast.

Lord George was quickly dressed (for his plain toilet was easily 
made), and as he was no less frugal in his repasts than in his 
Puritan attire, his share of the meal was soon dispatched.  The 
secretary, however, more devoted to the good things of this world, 
or more intent on sustaining his strength and spirits for the sake 
of the Protestant cause, ate and drank to the last minute, and 
required indeed some three or four reminders from John Grueby, 
before he could resolve to tear himself away from Mr Willet's 
plentiful providing.

At length he came downstairs, wiping his greasy mouth, and having 
paid John Willet's bill, climbed into his saddle.  Lord George, who 
had been walking up and down before the house talking to himself 
with earnest gestures, mounted his horse; and returning old John 
Willet's stately bow, as well as the parting salutation of a dozen 
idlers whom the rumour of a live lord being about to leave the 
Maypole had gathered round the porch, they rode away, with stout 
John Grueby in the rear.

If Lord George Gordon had appeared in the eyes of Mr Willet, 
overnight, a nobleman of somewhat quaint and odd exterior, the 
impression was confirmed this morning, and increased a hundredfold.  
Sitting bolt upright upon his bony steed, with his long, straight 
hair, dangling about his face and fluttering in the wind; his limbs 
all angular and rigid, his elbows stuck out on either side 
ungracefully, and his whole frame jogged and shaken at every motion 
of his horse's feet; a more grotesque or more ungainly figure can 
hardly be conceived.  In lieu of whip, he carried in his hand a 
great gold-headed cane, as large as any footman carries in these 
days, and his various modes of holding this unwieldy weapon--now 
upright before his face like the sabre of a horse-soldier, now over 
his shoulder like a musket, now between his finger and thumb, but 
always in some uncouth and awkward fashion--contributed in no small 
degree to the absurdity of his appearance.  Stiff, lank, and 
solemn, dressed in an unusual manner, and ostentatiously 
exhibiting--whether by design or accident--all his peculiarities of 
carriage, gesture, and conduct, all the qualities, natural and 
artificial, in which he differed from other men; he might have 
moved the sternest looker-on to laughter, and fully provoked the 
smiles and whispered jests which greeted his departure from the 
Maypole inn.

Quite unconscious, however, of the effect he produced, he trotted 
on beside his secretary, talking to himself nearly all the way, 
until they came within a mile or two of London, when now and then 
some passenger went by who knew him by sight, and pointed him out 
to some one else, and perhaps stood looking after him, or cried in 
jest or earnest as it might be, 'Hurrah Geordie!  No Popery!'  At 
which he would gravely pull off his hat, and bow.  When they 
reached the town and rode along the streets, these notices became 
more frequent; some laughed, some hissed, some turned their heads 
and smiled, some wondered who he was, some ran along the pavement 
by his side and cheered.  When this happened in a crush of carts 
and chairs and coaches, he would make a dead stop, and pulling off 
his hat, cry, 'Gentlemen, No Popery!' to which the gentlemen would 
respond with lusty voices, and with three times three; and then, on 
he would go again with a score or so of the raggedest, following at 
his horse's heels, and shouting till their throats were parched.

The old ladies too--there were a great many old ladies in the 
streets, and these all knew him.  Some of them--not those of the 
highest rank, but such as sold fruit from baskets and carried 
burdens--clapped their shrivelled hands, and raised a weazen, 
piping, shrill 'Hurrah, my lord.'  Others waved their hands or 
handkerchiefs, or shook their fans or parasols, or threw up windows 
and called in haste to those within, to come and see.  All these 
marks of popular esteem, he received with profound gravity and 
respect; bowing very low, and so frequently that his hat was more 
off his head than on; and looking up at the houses as he passed 
along, with the air of one who was making a public entry, and yet 
was not puffed up or proud.

So they rode (to the deep and unspeakable disgust of John Grueby) 
the whole length of Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, and Cheapside, 
and into St Paul's Churchyard.  Arriving close to the cathedral, he 
halted; spoke to Gashford; and looking upward at its lofty dome, 
shook his head, as though he said, 'The Church in Danger!'  Then to 
be sure, the bystanders stretched their throats indeed; and he went 
on again with mighty acclamations from the mob, and lower bows than 
ever.

So along the Strand, up Swallow Street, into the Oxford Road, and 
thence to his house in Welbeck Street, near Cavendish Square, 
whither he was attended by a few dozen idlers; of whom he took 
leave on the steps with this brief parting, 'Gentlemen, No Popery.  
Good day.  God bless you.'  This being rather a shorter address 
than they expected, was received with some displeasure, and cries 
of 'A speech! a speech!' which might have been complied with, but 
that John Grueby, making a mad charge upon them with all three 
horses, on his way to the stables, caused them to disperse into the 
adjoining fields, where they presently fell to pitch and toss, 
chuck-farthing, odd or even, dog-fighting, and other Protestant 
recreations.

In the afternoon Lord George came forth again, dressed in a black 
velvet coat, and trousers and waistcoat of the Gordon plaid, all of 
the same Quaker cut; and in this costume, which made him look a 
dozen times more strange and singular than before, went down on 
foot to Westminster.  Gashford, meanwhile, bestirred himself in 
business matters; with which he was still engaged when, shortly 
after dusk, John Grueby entered and announced a visitor.

'Let him come in,' said Gashford.

'Here! come in!' growled John to somebody without; 'You're a 
Protestant, an't you?'

'I should think so,' replied a deep, gruff voice.

'You've the looks of it,' said John Grueby.  'I'd have known you 
for one, anywhere.'  With which remark he gave the visitor 
admission, retired, and shut the door.

The man who now confronted Gashford, was a squat, thickset 
personage, with a low, retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of 
hair, and eyes so small and near together, that his broken nose 
alone seemed to prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the 
usual size.  A dingy handkerchief twisted like a cord about his 
neck, left its great veins exposed to view, and they were swollen 
and starting, as though with gulping down strong passions, malice, 
and ill-will.  His dress was of threadbare velveteen--a faded, 
rusty, whitened black, like the ashes of a pipe or a coal fire 
after a day's extinction; discoloured with the soils of many a 
stale debauch, and reeking yet with pot-house odours.  In lieu of 
buckles at his knees, he wore unequal loops of packthread; and in 
his grimy hands he held a knotted stick, the knob of which was 
carved into a rough likeness of his own vile face.  Such was the 
visitor who doffed his three-cornered hat in Gashford's presence, 
and waited, leering, for his notice.

'Ah! Dennis!' cried the secretary.  'Sit down.'

'I see my lord down yonder--' cried the man, with a jerk of his 
thumb towards the quarter that he spoke of, 'and he says to me, 
says my lord, "If you've nothing to do, Dennis, go up to my house 
and talk with Muster Gashford."  Of course I'd nothing to do, you 
know.  These an't my working hours.  Ha ha!  I was a-taking the air 
when I see my lord, that's what I was doing.  I takes the air by 
night, as the howls does, Muster Gashford.'

And sometimes in the day-time, eh?' said the secretary--'when you 
go out in state, you know.'

'Ha ha!' roared the fellow, smiting his leg; 'for a gentleman as 
'ull say a pleasant thing in a pleasant way, give me Muster 
Gashford agin' all London and Westminster!  My lord an't a bad 'un 
at that, but he's a fool to you.  Ah to be sure,--when I go out in 
state.'

'And have your carriage,' said the secretary; 'and your chaplain, 
eh? and all the rest of it?'

'You'll be the death of me,' cried Dennis, with another roar, 'you 
will.  But what's in the wind now, Muster Gashford,' he asked 
hoarsely, 'Eh?  Are we to be under orders to pull down one of them 
Popish chapels--or what?'

'Hush!' said the secretary, suffering the faintest smile to play 
upon his face.  'Hush!  God bless me, Dennis!  We associate, you 
know, for strictly peaceable and lawful purposes.'

'I know, bless you,' returned the man, thrusting his tongue into 
his cheek; 'I entered a' purpose, didn't I!'

'No doubt,' said Gashford, smiling as before.  And when he said so, 
Dennis roared again, and smote his leg still harder, and falling 
into fits of laughter, wiped his eyes with the corner of his 
neckerchief, and cried, 'Muster Gashford agin' all England hollow!'

'Lord George and I were talking of you last night,' said Gashford, 
after a pause.  'He says you are a very earnest fellow.'

'So I am,' returned the hangman.

'And that you truly hate the Papists.'

'So I do,' and he confirmed it with a good round oath.  'Lookye 
here, Muster Gashford,' said the fellow, laying his hat and stick 
upon the floor, and slowly beating the palm of one hand with the 
fingers of the other; 'Ob-serve.  I'm a constitutional officer that 
works for my living, and does my work creditable.  Do I, or do I 
not?'

'Unquestionably.'

'Very good.  Stop a minute.  My work, is sound, Protestant, 
constitutional, English work.  Is it, or is it not?'

'No man alive can doubt it.'

'Nor dead neither.  Parliament says this here--says Parliament, "If 
any man, woman, or child, does anything which goes again a certain 
number of our acts"--how many hanging laws may there be at this 
present time, Muster Gashford?  Fifty?'

'I don't exactly know how many,' replied Gashford, leaning back in 
his chair and yawning; 'a great number though.'

'Well, say fifty.  Parliament says, "If any man, woman, or child, 
does anything again any one of them fifty acts, that man, woman, or 
child, shall be worked off by Dennis."  George the Third steps in 
when they number very strong at the end of a sessions, and says, 
"These are too many for Dennis.  I'll have half for myself and 
Dennis shall have half for himself;" and sometimes he throws me in 
one over that I don't expect, as he did three year ago, when I got 
Mary Jones, a young woman of nineteen who come up to Tyburn with a 
infant at her breast, and was worked off for taking a piece of 
cloth off the counter of a shop in Ludgate Hill, and putting it 
down again when the shopman see her; and who had never done any 
harm before, and only tried to do that, in consequence of her 
husband having been pressed three weeks previous, and she being 
left to beg, with two young children--as was proved upon the trial.  
Ha ha!--Well!  That being the law and the practice of England, is 
the glory of England, an't it, Muster Gashford?'

'Certainly,' said the secretary.

'And in times to come,' pursued the hangman, 'if our grandsons 
should think of their grandfathers' times, and find these things 
altered, they'll say, "Those were days indeed, and we've been going 
down hill ever since."  Won't they, Muster Gashford?'

'I have no doubt they will,' said the secretary.

'Well then, look here,' said the hangman.  'If these Papists gets 
into power, and begins to boil and roast instead of hang, what 
becomes of my work!  If they touch my work that's a part of so many 
laws, what becomes of the laws in general, what becomes of the 
religion, what becomes of the country!--Did you ever go to church, 
Muster Gashford?'

'Ever!' repeated the secretary with some indignation; 'of course.'

'Well,' said the ruffian, 'I've been once--twice, counting the time 
I was christened--and when I heard the Parliament prayed for, and 
thought how many new hanging laws they made every sessions, I 
considered that I was prayed for.  Now mind, Muster Gashford,' said 
the fellow, taking up his stick and shaking it with a ferocious 
air, 'I mustn't have my Protestant work touched, nor this here 
Protestant state of things altered in no degree, if I can help it; 
I mustn't have no Papists interfering with me, unless they come to 
be worked off in course of law; I mustn't have no biling, no 
roasting, no frying--nothing but hanging.  My lord may well call 
me an earnest fellow.  In support of the great Protestant principle 
of having plenty of that, I'll,' and here he beat his club upon the 
ground, 'burn, fight, kill--do anything you bid me, so that it's 
bold and devilish--though the end of it was, that I got hung 
myself.--There, Muster Gashford!'

He appropriately followed up this frequent prostitution of a noble 
word to the vilest purposes, by pouring out in a kind of ecstasy at 
least a score of most tremendous oaths; then wiped his heated face 
upon his neckerchief, and cried, 'No Popery!  I'm a religious man, 
by G--!'

Gashford had leant back in his chair, regarding him with eyes so 
sunken, and so shadowed by his heavy brows, that for aught the 
hangman saw of them, he might have been stone blind.  He remained 
smiling in silence for a short time longer, and then said, slowly 
and distinctly:

'You are indeed an earnest fellow, Dennis--a most valuable fellow--
the staunchest man I know of in our ranks.  But you must calm 
yourself; you must be peaceful, lawful, mild as any lamb.  I am 
sure you will be though.'

'Ay, ay, we shall see, Muster Gashford, we shall see.  You won't 
have to complain of me,' returned the other, shaking his head.

'I am sure I shall not,' said the secretary in the same mild tone, 
and with the same emphasis.  'We shall have, we think, about next 
month, or May, when this Papist relief bill comes before the house, 
to convene our whole body for the first time.  My lord has thoughts 
of our walking in procession through the streets--just as an 
innocent display of strength--and accompanying our petition down to 
the door of the House of Commons.'

'The sooner the better,' said Dennis, with another oath.

'We shall have to draw up in divisions, our numbers being so large; 
and, I believe I may venture to say,' resumed Gashford, affecting 
not to hear the interruption, 'though I have no direct instructions 
to that effect--that Lord George has thought of you as an excellent 
leader for one of these parties.  I have no doubt you would be an 
admirable one.'

'Try me,' said the fellow, with an ugly wink.

'You would be cool, I know,' pursued the secretary, still smiling, 
and still managing his eyes so that he could watch him closely, and 
really not be seen in turn, 'obedient to orders, and perfectly 
temperate.  You would lead your party into no danger, I am certain.'

'I'd lead them, Muster Gashford,'--the hangman was beginning in a 
reckless way, when Gashford started forward, laid his finger on his 
lips, and feigned to write, just as the door was opened by John 
Grueby.

'Oh!' said John, looking in; 'here's another Protestant.'

'Some other room, John,' cried Gashford in his blandest voice.  'I 
am engaged just now.'

But John had brought this new visitor to the door, and he walked in 
unbidden, as the words were uttered; giving to view the form and 
features, rough attire, and reckless air, of Hugh.



Chapter 38


The secretary put his hand before his eyes to shade them from the 
glare of the lamp, and for some moments looked at Hugh with a 
frowning brow, as if he remembered to have seen him lately, but 
could not call to mind where, or on what occasion.  His uncertainty 
was very brief, for before Hugh had spoken a word, he said, as his 
countenance cleared up:

'Ay, ay, I recollect.  It's quite right, John, you needn't wait.  
Don't go, Dennis.'

'Your servant, master,' said Hugh, as Grueby disappeared.

'Yours, friend,' returned the secretary in his smoothest manner.  
'What brings YOU here?  We left nothing behind us, I hope?'

Hugh gave a short laugh, and thrusting his hand into his breast, 
produced one of the handbills, soiled and dirty from lying out of 
doors all night, which he laid upon the secretary's desk after 
flattening it upon his knee, and smoothing out the wrinkles with 
his heavy palm.

'Nothing but that, master.  It fell into good hands, you see.'

'What is this!' said Gashford, turning it over with an air of 
perfectly natural surprise.  'Where did you get it from, my good 
fellow; what does it mean?  I don't understand this at all.'

A little disconcerted by this reception, Hugh looked from the 
secretary to Dennis, who had risen and was standing at the table 
too, observing the stranger by stealth, and seeming to derive the 
utmost satisfaction from his manners and appearance.  Considering 
himself silently appealed to by this action, Mr Dennis shook his 
head thrice, as if to say of Gashford, 'No.  He don't know anything 
at all about it.  I know he don't.  I'll take my oath he don't;' 
and hiding his profile from Hugh with one long end of his frowzy 
neckerchief, nodded and chuckled behind this screen in extreme 
approval of the secretary's proceedings.

'It tells the man that finds it, to come here, don't it?' asked 
Hugh.  'I'm no scholar, myself, but I showed it to a friend, and he 
said it did.'

'It certainly does,' said Gashford, opening his eyes to their 
utmost width; 'really this is the most remarkable circumstance I 
have ever known.  How did you come by this piece of paper, my good 
friend?'

'Muster Gashford,' wheezed the hangman under his breath, 'agin' all 
Newgate!'

Whether Hugh heard him, or saw by his manner that he was being 
played upon, or perceived the secretary's drift of himself, he came 
in his blunt way to the point at once.

'Here!' he said, stretching out his hand and taking it back; 'never 
mind the bill, or what it says, or what it don't say.  You don't 
know anything about it, master,--no more do I,--no more does he,' 
glancing at Dennis.  'None of us know what it means, or where it 
comes from: there's an end of that.  Now I want to make one against 
the Catholics, I'm a No-Popery man, and ready to be sworn in.  
That's what I've come here for.'

'Put him down on the roll, Muster Gashford,' said Dennis 
approvingly.  'That's the way to go to work--right to the end at 
once, and no palaver.'

'What's the use of shooting wide of the mark, eh, old boy!' cried 
Hugh.

'My sentiments all over!' rejoined the hangman.  'This is the sort 
of chap for my division, Muster Gashford.  Down with him, sir.  Put 
him on the roll.  I'd stand godfather to him, if he was to be 
christened in a bonfire, made of the ruins of the Bank of England.'

With these and other expressions of confidence of the like 
flattering kind, Mr Dennis gave him a hearty slap on the back, 
which Hugh was not slow to return.

'No Popery, brother!' cried the hangman.

'No Property, brother!' responded Hugh.

'Popery, Popery,' said the secretary with his usual mildness.

'It's all the same!' cried Dennis.  'It's all right.  Down with 
him, Muster Gashford.  Down with everybody, down with everything!  
Hurrah for the Protestant religion!  That's the time of day, 
Muster Gashford!'

The secretary regarded them both with a very favourable expression 
of countenance, while they gave loose to these and other 
demonstrations of their patriotic purpose; and was about to make 
some remark aloud, when Dennis, stepping up to him, and shading his 
mouth with his hand, said, in a hoarse whisper, as he nudged him 
with his elbow:

'Don't split upon a constitutional officer's profession, Muster 
Gashford.  There are popular prejudices, you know, and he mightn't 
like it.  Wait till he comes to be more intimate with me.  He's a 
fine-built chap, an't he?'

'A powerful fellow indeed!'

'Did you ever, Muster Gashford,' whispered Dennis, with a horrible 
kind of admiration, such as that with which a cannibal might regard 
his intimate friend, when hungry,--'did you ever--and here he drew 
still closer to his ear, and fenced his mouth with both his open 
bands--'see such a throat as his?  Do but cast your eye upon it.  
There's a neck for stretching, Muster Gashford!'

The secretary assented to this proposition with the best grace he 
could assume--it is difficult to feign a true professional relish: 
which is eccentric sometimes--and after asking the candidate a few 
unimportant questions, proceeded to enrol him a member of the Great 
Protestant Association of England.  If anything could have exceeded 
Mr Dennis's joy on the happy conclusion of this ceremony, it would 
have been the rapture with which he received the announcement that 
the new member could neither read nor write: those two arts being 
(as Mr Dennis swore) the greatest possible curse a civilised 
community could know, and militating more against the professional 
emoluments and usefulness of the great constitutional office he had 
the honour to hold, than any adverse circumstances that could 
present themselves to his imagination.

The enrolment being completed, and Hugh having been informed by 
Gashford, in his peculiar manner, of the peaceful and strictly 
lawful objects contemplated by the body to which he now belonged--
during which recital Mr Dennis nudged him very much with his elbow, 
and made divers remarkable faces--the secretary gave them both to 
understand that he desired to be alone.  Therefore they took their 
leaves without delay, and came out of the house together.

'Are you walking, brother?' said Dennis.

'Ay!' returned Hugh.  'Where you will.'

'That's social,' said his new friend.  'Which way shall we take?  
Shall we go and have a look at doors that we shall make a pretty 
good clattering at, before long--eh, brother?'

Hugh answering in the affirmative, they went slowly down to 
Westminster, where both houses of Parliament were then sitting.  
Mingling in the crowd of carriages, horses, servants, chairmen, 
link-boys, porters, and idlers of all kinds, they lounged about; 
while Hugh's new friend pointed out to him significantly the weak 
parts of the building, how easy it was to get into the lobby, and 
so to the very door of the House of Commons; and how plainly, when 
they marched down there in grand array, their roars and shouts 
would be heard by the members inside; with a great deal more to the 
same purpose, all of which Hugh received with manifest delight.

He told him, too, who some of the Lords and Commons were, by name, 
as they came in and out; whether they were friendly to the Papists 
or otherwise; and bade him take notice of their liveries and 
equipages, that he might be sure of them, in case of need.  
Sometimes he drew him close to the windows of a passing carriage, 
that he might see its master's face by the light of the lamps; and, 
both in respect of people and localities, he showed so much 
acquaintance with everything around, that it was plain he had often 
studied there before; as indeed, when they grew a little more 
confidential, he confessed he had.

Perhaps the most striking part of all this was, the number of 
people--never in groups of more than two or three together--who 
seemed to be skulking about the crowd for the same purpose.  To the 
greater part of these, a slight nod or a look from Hugh's companion 
was sufficient greeting; but, now and then, some man would come and 
stand beside him in the throng, and, without turning his head or 
appearing to communicate with him, would say a word or two in a low 
voice, which he would answer in the same cautious manner.  Then 
they would part, like strangers.  Some of these men often 
reappeared again unexpectedly in the crowd close to Hugh, and, as 
they passed by, pressed his hand, or looked him sternly in the 
face; but they never spoke to him, nor he to them; no, not a word.

It was remarkable, too, that whenever they happened to stand where 
there was any press of people, and Hugh chanced to be looking 
downward, he was sure to see an arm stretched out--under his own 
perhaps, or perhaps across him--which thrust some paper into the 
hand or pocket of a bystander, and was so suddenly withdrawn that 
it was impossible to tell from whom it came; nor could he see in 
any face, on glancing quickly round, the least confusion or 
surprise.  They often trod upon a paper like the one he carried in 
his breast, but his companion whispered him not to touch it or to 
take it up,--not even to look towards it,--so there they let them 
lie, and passed on.

When they had paraded the street and all the avenues of the 
building in this manner for near two hours, they turned away, and 
his friend asked him what he thought of what he had seen, and 
whether he was prepared for a good hot piece of work if it should 
come to that.  The hotter the better,' said Hugh, 'I'm prepared for 
anything.'--'So am I,' said his friend, 'and so are many of us; 
and they shook hands upon it with a great oath, and with many 
terrible imprecations on the Papists.

As they were thirsty by this time, Dennis proposed that they should 
repair together to The Boot, where there was good company and 
strong liquor.  Hugh yielding a ready assent, they bent their steps 
that way with no loss of time.

This Boot was a lone house of public entertainment, situated in the 
fields at the back of the Foundling Hospital; a very solitary spot 
at that period, and quite deserted after dark.  The tavern stood at 
some distance from any high road, and was approachable only by a 
dark and narrow lane; so that Hugh was much surprised to find 
several people drinking there, and great merriment going on.  He 
was still more surprised to find among them almost every face that 
had caught his attention in the crowd; but his companion having 
whispered him outside the door, that it was not considered good 
manners at The Boot to appear at all curious about the company, he 
kept his own counsel, and made no show of recognition.

Before putting his lips to the liquor which was brought for them, 
Dennis drank in a loud voice the health of Lord George Gordon, 
President of the Great Protestant Association; which toast Hugh 
pledged likewise, with corresponding enthusiasm.  A fiddler who was 
present, and who appeared to act as the appointed minstrel of the 
company, forthwith struck up a Scotch reel; and that in tones so 
invigorating, that Hugh and his friend (who had both been drinking 
before) rose from their seats as by previous concert, and, to the 
great admiration of the assembled guests, performed an 
extemporaneous No-Popery Dance.



Chapter 39


The applause which the performance of Hugh and his new friend 
elicited from the company at The Boot, had not yet subsided, and 
the two dancers were still panting from their exertions, which had 
been of a rather extreme and violent character, when the party was 
reinforced by the arrival of some more guests, who, being a 
detachment of United Bulldogs, were received with very flattering 
marks of distinction and respect.

The leader of this small party--for, including himself, they were 
but three in number--was our old acquaintance, Mr Tappertit, who 
seemed, physically speaking, to have grown smaller with years 
(particularly as to his legs, which were stupendously little), but 
who, in a moral point of view, in personal dignity and self-esteem, 
had swelled into a giant.  Nor was it by any means difficult for 
the most unobservant person to detect this state of feeling in the 
quondam 'prentice, for it not only proclaimed itself impressively 
and beyond mistake in his majestic walk and kindling eye, but found 
a striking means of revelation in his turned-up nose, which scouted 
all things of earth with deep disdain, and sought communion with 
its kindred skies.

Mr Tappertit, as chief or captain of the Bulldogs, was attended by 
his two lieutenants; one, the tall comrade of his younger life; the 
other, a 'Prentice Knight in days of yore--Mark Gilbert, bound in 
the olden time to Thomas Curzon of the Golden Fleece.  These 
gentlemen, like himself, were now emancipated from their 'prentice 
thraldom, and served as journeymen; but they were, in humble 
emulation of his great example, bold and daring spirits, and 
aspired to a distinguished state in great political events.  Hence 
their connection with the Protestant Association of England, 
sanctioned by the name of Lord George Gordon; and hence their 
present visit to The Boot.

'Gentlemen!' said Mr Tappertit, taking off his hat as a great 
general might in addressing his troops.  'Well met.  My lord does 
me and you the honour to send his compliments per self.'

'You've seen my lord too, have you?' said Dennis.  'I see him this 
afternoon.'

'My duty called me to the Lobby when our shop shut up; and I saw 
him there, sir,' Mr Tappertit replied, as he and his lieutenants 
took their seats.  'How do YOU do?'

'Lively, master, lively,' said the fellow.  'Here's a new brother, 
regularly put down in black and white by Muster Gashford; a credit 
to the cause; one of the stick-at-nothing sort; one arter my own 
heart.  D'ye see him?  Has he got the looks of a man that'll do, do 
you think?' he cried, as he slapped Hugh on the back.

'Looks or no looks,' said Hugh, with a drunken flourish of his arm, 
'I'm the man you want.  I hate the Papists, every one of 'em.  They 
hate me and I hate them.  They do me all the harm they can, and 
I'll do them all the harm I can.  Hurrah!'

'Was there ever,' said Dennis, looking round the room, when the 
echo of his boisterous voice bad died away; 'was there ever such a 
game boy!  Why, I mean to say, brothers, that if Muster Gashford 
had gone a hundred mile and got together fifty men of the common 
run, they wouldn't have been worth this one.'

The greater part of the company implicitly subscribed to this 
opinion, and testified their faith in Hugh by nods and looks of 
great significance.  Mr Tappertit sat and contemplated him for a 
long time in silence, as if he suspended his judgment; then drew a 
little nearer to him, and eyed him over more carefully; then went 
close up to him, and took him apart into a dark corner.

'I say,' he began, with a thoughtful brow, 'haven't I seen you 
before?'

'It's like you may,' said Hugh, in his careless way.  'I don't 
know; shouldn't wonder.'

'No, but it's very easily settled,' returned Sim.  'Look at me.  
Did you ever see ME before?  You wouldn't be likely to forget it, 
you know, if you ever did.  Look at me.  Don't be afraid; I won't 
do you any harm.  Take a good look--steady now.'

The encouraging way in which Mr Tappertit made this request, and 
coupled it with an assurance that he needn't be frightened, amused 
Hugh mightily--so much indeed, that be saw nothing at all of the 
small man before him, through closing his eyes in a fit of hearty 
laughter, which shook his great broad sides until they ached again.

'Come!' said Mr Tappertit, growing a little impatient under this 
disrespectful treatment.  'Do you know me, feller?'

'Not I,' cried Hugh.  'Ha ha ha!  Not I!  But I should like to.'

'And yet I'd have wagered a seven-shilling piece," said Mr 
Tappertit, folding his arms, and confronting him with his legs wide 
apart and firmly planted on the ground, 'that you once were hostler 
at the Maypole.'

Hugh opened his eyes on hearing this, and looked at him in great 
surprise.

'--And so you were, too,' said Mr Tappertit, pushing him away with 
a condescending playfulness.  'When did MY eyes ever deceive--
unless it was a young woman!  Don't you know me now?'

'Why it an't--' Hugh faltered.

'An't it?' said Mr Tappertit.  'Are you sure of that?  You remember 
G. Varden, don't you?'

Certainly Hugh did, and he remembered D. Varden too; but that he 
didn't tell him.

'You remember coming down there, before I was out of my time, to 
ask after a vagabond that had bolted off, and left his disconsolate 
father a prey to the bitterest emotions, and all the rest of it--
don't you?' said Mr Tappertit.

'Of course I do!' cried Hugh.  'And I saw you there.'

'Saw me there!' said Mr Tappertit.  'Yes, I should think you did 
see me there.  The place would be troubled to go on without me.  
Don't you remember my thinking you liked the vagabond, and on that 
account going to quarrel with you; and then finding you detested 
him worse than poison, going to drink with you?  Don't you remember 
that?'

'To be sure!' cried Hugh.

'Well! and are you in the same mind now?' said Mr Tappertit.

'Yes!' roared Hugh.

'You speak like a man,' said Mr Tappertit, 'and I'll shake hands 
with you.'  With these conciliatory expressions he suited the 
action to the word; and Hugh meeting his advances readily, they 
performed the ceremony with a show of great heartiness.

'I find,' said Mr Tappertit, looking round on the assembled guests, 
'that brother What's-his-name and I are old acquaintance.--You 
never heard anything more of that rascal, I suppose, eh?'

'Not a syllable,' replied Hugh.  'I never want to.  I don't believe 
I ever shall.  He's dead long ago, I hope.'

'It's to be hoped, for the sake of mankind in general and the 
happiness of society, that he is,' said Mr Tappertit, rubbing his 
palm upon his legs, and looking at it between whiles.  'Is your 
other hand at all cleaner?  Much the same.  Well, I'll owe you 
another shake.  We'll suppose it done, if you've no objection.'

Hugh laughed again, and with such thorough abandonment to his mad 
humour, that his limbs seemed dislocated, and his whole frame in 
danger of tumbling to pieces; but Mr Tappertit, so far from 
receiving this extreme merriment with any irritation, was pleased 
to regard it with the utmost favour, and even to join in it, so far 
as one of his gravity and station could, with any regard to that 
decency and decorum which men in high places are expected to 
maintain.

Mr Tappertit did not stop here, as many public characters might 
have done, but calling up his brace of lieutenants, introduced Hugh 
to them with high commendation; declaring him to be a man who, at 
such times as those in which they lived, could not be too much 
cherished.  Further, he did him the honour to remark, that he would 
be an acquisition of which even the United Bulldogs might be proud; 
and finding, upon sounding him, that he was quite ready and willing 
to enter the society (for he was not at all particular, and would 
have leagued himself that night with anything, or anybody, for any 
purpose whatsoever), caused the necessary preliminaries to be gone 
into upon the spot.  This tribute to his great merit delighted no 
man more than Mr Dennis, as he himself proclaimed with several rare 
and surprising oaths; and indeed it gave unmingled satisfaction to 
the whole assembly.

'Make anything you like of me!' cried Hugh, flourishing the can he 
had emptied more than once.  'Put me on any duty you please.  I'm 
your man.  I'll do it.  Here's my captain--here's my leader.  Ha ha 
ha!  Let him give me the word of command, and I'll fight the whole 
Parliament House single-handed, or set a lighted torch to the 
King's Throne itself!'  With that, he smote Mr Tappertit on the 
back, with such violence that his little body seemed to shrink into 
a mere nothing; and roared again until the very foundlings near at 
hand were startled in their beds.

In fact, a sense of something whimsical in their companionship 
seemed to have taken entire possession of his rude brain.  The bare 
fact of being patronised by a great man whom he could have crushed 
with one hand, appeared in his eyes so eccentric and humorous, that 
a kind of ferocious merriment gained the mastery over him, and 
quite subdued his brutal nature.  He roared and roared again; 
toasted Mr Tappertit a hundred times; declared himself a Bulldog to 
the core; and vowed to be faithful to him to the last drop of blood 
in his veins.

All these compliments Mr Tappertit received as matters of course--
flattering enough in their way, but entirely attributable to his 
vast superiority.  His dignified self-possession only delighted 
Hugh the more; and in a word, this giant and dwarf struck up a 
friendship which bade fair to be of long continuance, as the one 
held it to be his right to command, and the other considered it an 
exquisite pleasantry to obey.  Nor was Hugh by any means a passive 
follower, who scrupled to act without precise and definite orders; 
for when Mr Tappertit mounted on an empty cask which stood by way 
of rostrum in the room, and volunteered a speech upon the alarming 
crisis then at hand, he placed himself beside the orator, and 
though he grinned from ear to ear at every word he said, threw out 
such expressive hints to scoffers in the management of his cudgel, 
that those who were at first the most disposed to interrupt, became 
remarkably attentive, and were the loudest in their approbation.

It was not all noise and jest, however, at The Boot, nor were the 
whole party listeners to the speech.  There were some men at the 
other end of the room (which was a long, low-roofed chamber) in 
earnest conversation all the time; and when any of this group went 
out, fresh people were sure to come in soon afterwards and sit down 
in their places, as though the others had relieved them on some 
watch or duty; which it was pretty clear they did, for these 
changes took place by the clock, at intervals of half an hour.  
These persons whispered very much among themselves, and kept aloof, 
and often looked round, as jealous of their speech being overheard; 
some two or three among them entered in books what seemed to be 
reports from the others; when they were not thus employed) one of 
them would turn to the newspapers which were strewn upon the table, 
and from the St James's Chronicle, the Herald, Chronicle, or 
Public Advertiser, would read to the rest in a low voice some 
passage having reference to the topic in which they were all so 
deeply interested.  But the great attraction was a pamphlet called 
The Thunderer, which espoused their own opinions, and was supposed 
at that time to emanate directly from the Association.  This was 
always in request; and whether read aloud, to an eager knot of 
listeners, or by some solitary man, was certain to be followed by 
stormy talking and excited looks.

In the midst of all his merriment, and admiration of his captain, 
Hugh was made sensible by these and other tokens, of the presence 
of an air of mystery, akin to that which had so much impressed him 
out of doors.  It was impossible to discard a sense that something 
serious was going on, and that under the noisy revel of the public-
house, there lurked unseen and dangerous matter.  Little affected 
by this, however, he was perfectly satisfied with his quarters and 
would have remained there till morning, but that his conductor rose 
soon after midnight, to go home; Mr Tappertit following his 
example, left him no excuse to stay.  So they all three left the 
house together: roaring a No-Popery song until the fields 
resounded with the dismal noise.

Cheer up, captain!' cried Hugh, when they had roared themselves out 
of breath.  'Another stave!'

Mr Tappertit, nothing loath, began again; and so the three went 
staggering on, arm-in-arm, shouting like madmen, and defying the 
watch with great valour.  Indeed this did not require any unusual 
bravery or boldness, as the watchmen of that time, being selected 
for the office on account of excessive age and extraordinary 
infirmity, had a custom of shutting themselves up tight in their 
boxes on the first symptoms of disturbance, and remaining there 
until they disappeared.  In these proceedings, Mr Dennis, who had a 
gruff voice and lungs of considerable power, distinguished himself 
very much, and acquired great credit with his two companions.

'What a queer fellow you are!' said Mr Tappertit.  'You're so 
precious sly and close.  Why don't you ever tell what trade you're 
of?'

'Answer the captain instantly,' cried Hugh, beating his hat down on 
his head; 'why don't you ever tell what trade you're of?'

'I'm of as gen-teel a calling, brother, as any man in England--as 
light a business as any gentleman could desire.'

'Was you 'prenticed to it?' asked Mr Tappertit.

'No.  Natural genius,' said Mr Dennis.  'No 'prenticing.  It come 
by natur'.  Muster Gashford knows my calling.  Look at that hand of 
mine--many and many a job that hand has done, with a neatness and 
dex-terity, never known afore.  When I look at that hand,' said Mr 
Dennis, shaking it in the air, 'and remember the helegant bits of 
work it has turned off, I feel quite molloncholy to think it should 
ever grow old and feeble.  But sich is life!'

He heaved a deep sigh as he indulged in these reflections, and 
putting his fingers with an absent air on Hugh's throat, and 
particularly under his left ear, as if he were studying the 
anatomical development of that part of his frame, shook his head in 
a despondent manner and actually shed tears.

'You're a kind of artist, I suppose--eh!' said Mr Tappertit.

'Yes,' rejoined Dennis; 'yes--I may call myself a artist--a fancy 
workman--art improves natur'--that's my motto.'

'And what do you call this?' said Mr Tappertit taking his stick out 
of his hand.

'That's my portrait atop,' Dennis replied; 'd'ye think it's like?'

'Why--it's a little too handsome,' said Mr Tappertit.  'Who did it?  
You?'

'I!' repeated Dennis, gazing fondly on his image.  'I wish I had 
the talent.  That was carved by a friend of mine, as is now no 
more.  The very day afore he died, he cut that with his pocket-
knife from memory!  "I'll die game," says my friend, "and my last 
moments shall be dewoted to making Dennis's picter."  That's it.'

'That was a queer fancy, wasn't it?' said Mr Tappertit.

'It WAS a queer fancy,' rejoined the other, breathing on his 
fictitious nose, and polishing it with the cuff of his coat, 'but 
he was a queer subject altogether--a kind of gipsy--one of the 
finest, stand-up men, you ever see.  Ah!  He told me some things 
that would startle you a bit, did that friend of mine, on the 
morning when he died.'

'You were with him at the time, were you?' said Mr Tappertit.

'Yes,' he answered with a curious look, 'I was there.  Oh! yes 
certainly, I was there.  He wouldn't have gone off half as 
comfortable without me.  I had been with three or four of his 
family under the same circumstances.  They were all fine fellows.'

'They must have been fond of you,' remarked Mr Tappertit, looking 
at him sideways.

'I don't know that they was exactly fond of me,' said Dennis, with 
a little hesitation, 'but they all had me near 'em when they 
departed.  I come in for their wardrobes too.  This very handkecher 
that you see round my neck, belonged to him that I've been speaking 
of--him as did that likeness.'

Mr Tappertit glanced at the article referred to, and appeared to 
think that the deceased's ideas of dress were of a peculiar and by 
no means an expensive kind.  He made no remark upon the point, 
however, and suffered his mysterious companion to proceed without 
interruption.

'These smalls,' said Dennis, rubbing his legs; 'these very smalls--
they belonged to a friend of mine that's left off sich incumbrances 
for ever: this coat too--I've often walked behind this coat, in the 
street, and wondered whether it would ever come to me: this pair of 
shoes have danced a hornpipe for another man, afore my eyes, full 
half-a-dozen times at least: and as to my hat,' he said, taking it 
off, and whirling it round upon his fist--'Lord! I've seen this hat 
go up Holborn on the box of a hackney-coach--ah, many and many a 
day!'

'You don't mean to say their old wearers are ALL dead, I hope?' 
said Mr Tappertit, falling a little distance from him as he spoke.

'Every one of 'em,' replied Dennis.  'Every man Jack!'

There was something so very ghastly in this circumstance, and it 
appeared to account, in such a very strange and dismal manner, for 
his faded dress--which, in this new aspect, seemed discoloured by 
the earth from graves--that Mr Tappertit abruptly found he was 
going another way, and, stopping short, bade him good night with 
the utmost heartiness.  As they happened to be near the Old Bailey, 
and Mr Dennis knew there were turnkeys in the lodge with whom he 
could pass the night, and discuss professional subjects of common 
interest among them before a rousing fire, and over a social glass, 
he separated from his companions without any great regret, and 
warmly shaking hands with Hugh, and making an early appointment for 
their meeting at The Boot, left them to pursue their road.

'That's a strange sort of man,' said Mr Tappertit, watching the 
hackney-coachman's hat as it went bobbing down the street.  'I 
don't know what to make of him.  Why can't he have his smalls made 
to order, or wear live clothes at any rate?'

'He's a lucky man, captain,' cried Hugh.  'I should like to have 
such friends as his.'

'I hope he don't get 'em to make their wills, and then knock 'em on 
the head,' said Mr Tappertit, musing.  'But come.  The United B.'s 
expect me.  On!--What's the matter?'

'I quite forgot,' said Hugh, who had started at the striking of a 
neighbouring clock.  'I have somebody to see to-night--I must turn 
back directly.  The drinking and singing put it out of my head.  
It's well I remembered it!'

Mr Tappertit looked at him as though he were about to give 
utterance to some very majestic sentiments in reference to this act 
of desertion, but as it was clear, from Hugh's hasty manner, that 
the engagement was one of a pressing nature, he graciously forbore, 
and gave him his permission to depart immediately, which Hugh 
acknowledged with a roar of laughter.

'Good night, captain!' he cried.  'I am yours to the death, 
remember!'

'Farewell!' said Mr Tappertit, waving his hand.  'Be bold and 
vigilant!'

'No Popery, captain!' roared Hugh.

'England in blood first!' cried his desperate leader.  Whereat Hugh 
cheered and laughed, and ran off like a greyhound.

'That man will prove a credit to my corps,' said Simon, turning 
thoughtfully upon his heel.  'And let me see.  In an altered state 
of society--which must ensue if we break out and are victorious--
when the locksmith's child is mine, Miggs must be got rid of 
somehow, or she'll poison the tea-kettle one evening when I'm out.  
He might marry Miggs, if he was drunk enough.  It shall be done.  
I'll make a note of it.'



Chapter 40


Little thinking of the plan for his happy settlement in life which 
had suggested itself to the teeming brain of his provident 
commander, Hugh made no pause until Saint Dunstan's giants struck 
the hour above him, when he worked the handle of a pump which stood 
hard by, with great vigour, and thrusting his head under the spout, 
let the water gush upon him until a little stream ran down from 
every uncombed hair, and he was wet to the waist.  Considerably 
refreshed by this ablution, both in mind and body, and almost 
sobered for the time, he dried himself as he best could; then 
crossed the road, and plied the knocker of the Middle Temple gate.

The night-porter looked through a small grating in the portal with 
a surly eye, and cried 'Halloa!' which greeting Hugh returned in 
kind, and bade him open quickly.

'We don't sell beer here,' cried the man; 'what else do you want?'

'To come in,' Hugh replied, with a kick at the door.

'Where to go?'

'Paper Buildings.'

'Whose chambers?'

'Sir John Chester's.'  Each of which answers, he emphasised with 
another kick.

After a little growling on the other side, the gate was opened, and 
he passed in: undergoing a close inspection from the porter as he 
did so.

'YOU wanting Sir John, at this time of night!' said the man.

'Ay!' said Hugh.  'I!  What of that?'

'Why, I must go with you and see that you do, for I don't believe 
it.'

'Come along then.'

Eyeing him with suspicious looks, the man, with key and lantern, 
walked on at his side, and attended him to Sir John Chester's door, 
at which Hugh gave one knock, that echoed through the dark 
staircase like a ghostly summons, and made the dull light tremble 
in the drowsy lamp.

'Do you think he wants me now?' said Hugh.

Before the man had time to answer, a footstep was heard within, a 
light appeared, and Sir John, in his dressing-gown and slippers, 
opened the door.

'I ask your pardon, Sir John,' said the porter, pulling off his 
hat.  'Here's a young man says he wants to speak to you.  It's late 
for strangers.  I thought it best to see that all was right.'

'Aha!' cried Sir John, raising his eyebrows.  'It's you, 
messenger, is it?  Go in.  Quite right, friend.  I commend your 
prudence highly.  Thank you.  God bless you.  Good night.'

To be commended, thanked, God-blessed, and bade good night by one 
who carried 'Sir' before his name, and wrote himself M.P. to boot, 
was something for a porter.  He withdrew with much humility and 
reverence.  Sir John followed his late visitor into the dressing-
room, and sitting in his easy-chair before the fire, and moving it 
so that he could see him as he stood, hat in hand, beside the door, 
looked at him from head to foot.

The old face, calm and pleasant as ever; the complexion, quite 
juvenile in its bloom and clearness; the same smile; the wonted 
precision and elegance of dress; the white, well-ordered teeth; the 
delicate hands; the composed and quiet manner; everything as it 
used to be: no mark of age or passion, envy, hate, or discontent: 
all unruffled and serene, and quite delightful to behold.

He wrote himself M.P.--but how?  Why, thus.  It was a proud family--
more proud, indeed, than wealthy.  He had stood in danger of 
arrest; of bailiffs, and a jail--a vulgar jail, to which the common 
people with small incomes went.  Gentlemen of ancient houses have 
no privilege of exemption from such cruel laws--unless they are of 
one great house, and then they have.  A proud man of his stock and 
kindred had the means of sending him there.  He offered--not indeed 
to pay his debts, but to let him sit for a close borough until his 
own son came of age, which, if he lived, would come to pass in 
twenty years.  It was quite as good as an Insolvent Act, and 
infinitely more genteel.  So Sir John Chester was a member of 
Parliament.

But how Sir John?  Nothing so simple, or so easy.  One touch with a 
sword of state, and the transformation was effected.  John Chester, 
Esquire, M.P., attended court--went up with an address--headed a 
deputation.  Such elegance of manner, so many graces of deportment, 
such powers of conversation, could never pass unnoticed.  Mr was 
too common for such merit.  A man so gentlemanly should have been--
but Fortune is capricious--born a Duke: just as some dukes should 
have been born labourers.  He caught the fancy of the king, knelt 
down a grub, and rose a butterfly.  John Chester, Esquire, was 
knighted and became Sir John.

'I thought when you left me this evening, my esteemed 
acquaintance,' said Sir John after a pretty long silence, 'that you 
intended to return with all despatch?'

'So I did, master.'

'And so you have?' he retorted, glancing at his watch.  'Is that 
what you would say?'

Instead of replying, Hugh changed the leg on which he leant, 
shuffled his cap from one hand to the other, looked at the ground, 
the wall, the ceiling, and finally at Sir John himself; before 
whose pleasant face he lowered his eyes again, and fixed them on 
the floor.

'And how have you been employing yourself in the meanwhile?' quoth 
Sir John, lazily crossing his legs.  'Where have you been? what 
harm have you been doing?'

'No harm at all, master,' growled Hugh, with humility.  'I have 
only done as you ordered.'

'As I WHAT?' returned Sir John.

'Well then,' said Hugh uneasily, 'as you advised, or said I ought, 
or said I might, or said that you would do, if you was me.  Don't 
be so hard upon me, master.'

Something like an expression of triumph in the perfect control he 
had established over this rough instrument appeared in the knight's 
face for an instant; but it vanished directly, as he said--paring 
his nails while speaking:

'When you say I ordered you, my good fellow, you imply that I 
directed you to do something for me--something I wanted done--
something for my own ends and purposes--you see?  Now I am sure I 
needn't enlarge upon the extreme absurdity of such an idea, however 
unintentional; so please--' and here he turned his eyes upon him--
'to be more guarded.  Will you?'

'I meant to give you no offence,' said Hugh.  'I don't know what to 
say.  You catch me up so very short.'

'You will be caught up much shorter, my good friend--infinitely 
shorter--one of these days, depend upon it,' replied his patron 
calmly.  'By-the-bye, instead of wondering why you have been so 
long, my wonder should be why you came at all.  Why did you?'

'You know, master,' said Hugh, 'that I couldn't read the bill I 
found, and that supposing it to be something particular from the 
way it was wrapped up, I brought it here.'

'And could you ask no one else to read it, Bruin?' said Sir John.

'No one that I could trust with secrets, master.  Since Barnaby 
Rudge was lost sight of for good and all--and that's five years 
ago--I haven't talked with any one but you.'

'You have done me honour, I am sure.'

'I have come to and fro, master, all through that time, when there 
was anything to tell, because I knew that you'd be angry with me if 
I stayed away,' said Hugh, blurting the words out, after an 
embarrassed silence; 'and because I wished to please you if I 
could, and not to have you go against me.  There.  That's the true 
reason why I came to-night.  You know that, master, I am sure.'

'You are a specious fellow,' returned Sir John, fixing his eyes 
upon him, 'and carry two faces under your hood, as well as the 
best.  Didn't you give me in this room, this evening, any other 
reason; no dislike of anybody who has slighted you lately, on all 
occasions, abused you, treated you with rudeness; acted towards 
you, more as if you were a mongrel dog than a man like himself?'

'To be sure I did!' cried Hugh, his passion rising, as the other 
meant it should; 'and I say it all over now, again.  I'd do 
anything to have some revenge on him--anything.  And when you told 
me that he and all the Catholics would suffer from those who joined 
together under that handbill, I said I'd make one of 'em, if their 
master was the devil himself.  I AM one of 'em.  See whether I am 
as good as my word and turn out to be among the foremost, or no.  I 
mayn't have much head, master, but I've head enough to remember 
those that use me ill.  You shall see, and so shall he, and so 
shall hundreds more, how my spirit backs me when the time comes.  
My bark is nothing to my bite.  Some that I know had better have a 
wild lion among 'em than me, when I am fairly loose--they had!'

The knight looked at him with a smile of far deeper meaning than 
ordinary; and pointing to the old cupboard, followed him with his 
eyes while he filled and drank a glass of liquor; and smiled when 
his back was turned, with deeper meaning yet.

'You are in a blustering mood, my friend,' he said, when Hugh 
confronted him again.

'Not I, master!' cried Hugh.  'I don't say half I mean.  I can't.  
I haven't got the gift.  There are talkers enough among us; I'll be 
one of the doers.'

'Oh! you have joined those fellows then?' said Sir John, with an 
air of most profound indifference.

'Yes.  I went up to the house you told me of; and got put down upon 
the muster.  There was another man there, named Dennis--'

'Dennis, eh!' cried Sir John, laughing.  'Ay, ay! a pleasant 
fellow, I believe?'

'A roaring dog, master--one after my own heart--hot upon the matter 
too--red hot.'

'So I have heard,' replied Sir John, carelessly.  'You don't happen 
to know his trade, do you?'

'He wouldn't say,' cried Hugh.  'He keeps it secret.'

'Ha ha!' laughed Sir John.  'A strange fancy--a weakness with some 
persons--you'll know it one day, I dare swear.'

'We're intimate already,' said Hugh.

'Quite natural!  And have been drinking together, eh?' pursued Sir 
John.  'Did you say what place you went to in company, when you 
left Lord George's?'

Hugh had not said or thought of saying, but he told him; and this 
inquiry being followed by a long train of questions, he related all 
that had passed both in and out of doors, the kind of people he had 
seen, their numbers, state of feeling, mode of conversation, 
apparent expectations and intentions.  His questioning was so 
artfully contrived, that he seemed even in his own eyes to 
volunteer all this information rather than to have it wrested from 
him; and he was brought to this state of feeling so naturally, that 
when Mr Chester yawned at length and declared himself quite wearied 
out, he made a rough kind of excuse for having talked so much.

'There--get you gone,' said Sir John, holding the door open in his 
hand.  'You have made a pretty evening's work.  I told you not to 
do this.  You may get into trouble.  You'll have an opportunity of 
revenging yourself on your proud friend Haredale, though, and for 
that, you'd hazard anything, I suppose?'

'I would,' retorted Hugh, stopping in his passage out and looking 
back; 'but what do I risk!  What do I stand a chance of losing, 
master?  Friends, home?  A fig for 'em all; I have none; they are 
nothing to me.  Give me a good scuffle; let me pay off old scores 
in a bold riot where there are men to stand by me; and then use me 
as you like--it don't matter much to me what the end is!'

'What have you done with that paper?' said Sir John.

'I have it here, master.'

'Drop it again as you go along; it's as well not to keep such 
things about you.'

Hugh nodded, and touching his cap with an air of as much respect as 
he could summon up, departed.

Sir John, fastening the doors behind him, went back to his 
dressing-room, and sat down once again before the fire, at which 
he gazed for a long time, in earnest meditation.

'This happens fortunately,' he said, breaking into a smile, 'and 
promises well.  Let me see.  My relative and I, who are the most 
Protestant fellows in the world, give our worst wishes to the Roman 
Catholic cause; and to Saville, who introduces their bill, I have 
a personal objection besides; but as each of us has himself for 
the first article in his creed, we cannot commit ourselves by 
joining with a very extravagant madman, such as this Gordon most 
undoubtedly is.  Now really, to foment his disturbances in secret, 
through the medium of such a very apt instrument as my savage 
friend here, may further our real ends; and to express at all 
becoming seasons, in moderate and polite terms, a disapprobation of 
his proceedings, though we agree with him in principle, will 
certainly be to gain a character for honesty and uprightness of 
purpose, which cannot fail to do us infinite service, and to raise 
us into some importance.  Good!  So much for public grounds.  As to 
private considerations, I confess that if these vagabonds WOULD 
make some riotous demonstration (which does not appear impossible), 
and WOULD inflict some little chastisement on Haredale as a not 
inactive man among his sect, it would be extremely agreeable to my 
feelings, and would amuse me beyond measure.  Good again!  Perhaps 
better!'

When he came to this point, he took a pinch of snuff; then 
beginning slowly to undress, he resumed his meditations, by saying 
with a smile:

'I fear, I DO fear exceedingly, that my friend is following fast in 
the footsteps of his mother.  His intimacy with Mr Dennis is very 
ominous.  But I have no doubt he must have come to that end any 
way.  If I lend him a helping hand, the only difference is, that he 
may, upon the whole, possibly drink a few gallons, or puncheons, or 
hogsheads, less in this life than he otherwise would.  It's no 
business of mine.  It's a matter of very small importance!'

So he took another pinch of snuff, and went to bed.



Chapter 41


From the workshop of the Golden Key, there issued forth a tinkling 
sound, so merry and good-humoured, that it suggested the idea of 
some one working blithely, and made quite pleasant music.  No man 
who hammered on at a dull monotonous duty, could have brought such 
cheerful notes from steel and iron; none but a chirping, healthy, 
honest-hearted fellow, who made the best of everything, and felt 
kindly towards everybody, could have done it for an instant.  He 
might have been a coppersmith, and still been musical.  If he had 
sat in a jolting waggon, full of rods of iron, it seemed as if he 
would have brought some harmony out of it.

Tink, tink, tink--clear as a silver bell, and audible at every 
pause of the streets' harsher noises, as though it said, 'I don't 
care; nothing puts me out; I am resolved to he happy.'  Women 
scolded, children squalled, heavy carts went rumbling by, horrible 
cries proceeded from the lungs of hawkers; still it struck in 
again, no higher, no lower, no louder, no softer; not thrusting 
itself on people's notice a bit the more for having been outdone by 
louder sounds--tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.

It was a perfect embodiment of the still small voice, free from all 
cold, hoarseness, huskiness, or unhealthiness of any kind; foot-
passengers slackened their pace, and were disposed to linger near 
it; neighbours who had got up splenetic that morning, felt good-
humour stealing on them as they heard it, and by degrees became 
quite sprightly; mothers danced their babies to its ringing; still 
the same magical tink, tink, tink, came gaily from the workshop of 
the Golden Key.

Who but the locksmith could have made such music!  A gleam of sun 
shining through the unsashed window, and chequering the dark 
workshop with a broad patch of light, fell full upon him, as though 
attracted by his sunny heart.  There he stood working at his anvil, 
his face all radiant with exercise and gladness, his sleeves turned 
up, his wig pushed off his shining forehead--the easiest, freest, 
happiest man in all the world.  Beside him sat a sleek cat, purring 
and winking in the light, and falling every now and then into an 
idle doze, as from excess of comfort.  Toby looked on from a tall 
bench hard by; one beaming smile, from his broad nut-brown face 
down to the slack-baked buckles in his shoes.  The very locks that 
hung around had something jovial in their rust, and seemed like 
gouty gentlemen of hearty natures, disposed to joke on their 
infirmities.  There was nothing surly or severe in the whole scene.  
It seemed impossible that any one of the innumerable keys could fit 
a churlish strong-box or a prison-door.  Cellars of beer and wine, 
rooms where there were fires, books, gossip, and cheering laughter--
these were their proper sphere of action.  Places of distrust and 
cruelty, and restraint, they would have left quadruple-locked for 
ever.

Tink, tink, tink.  The locksmith paused at last, and wiped his 
brow.  The silence roused the cat, who, jumping softly down, crept 
to the door, and watched with tiger eyes a bird-cage in an opposite 
window.  Gabriel lifted Toby to his mouth, and took a hearty 
draught.

Then, as he stood upright, with his head flung back, and his portly 
chest thrown out, you would have seen that Gabriel's lower man was 
clothed in military gear.  Glancing at the wall beyond, there might 
have been espied, hanging on their several pegs, a cap and feather, 
broadsword, sash, and coat of scarlet; which any man learned in 
such matters would have known from their make and pattern to be the 
uniform of a serjeant in the Royal East London Volunteers.

As the locksmith put his mug down, empty, on the bench whence it 
had smiled on him before, he glanced at these articles with a 
laughing eye, and looking at them with his head a little on one 
side, as though he would get them all into a focus, said, leaning 
on his hammer:

'Time was, now, I remember, when I was like to run mad with the 
desire to wear a coat of that colour.  If any one (except my 
father) had called me a fool for my pains, how I should have fired 
and fumed!  But what a fool I must have been, sure-ly!'

'Ah!' sighed Mrs Varden, who had entered unobserved.  'A fool 
indeed.  A man at your time of life, Varden, should know better 
now.'

'Why, what a ridiculous woman you are, Martha,' said the locksmith, 
turning round with a smile.

'Certainly,' replied Mrs V. with great demureness.  'Of course I 
am.  I know that, Varden.  Thank you.'

'I mean--' began the locksmith.

'Yes,' said his wife, 'I know what you mean.  You speak quite plain 
enough to be understood, Varden.  It's very kind of you to adapt 
yourself to my capacity, I am sure.'

'Tut, tut, Martha,' rejoined the locksmith; 'don't take offence at 
nothing.  I mean, how strange it is of you to run down 
volunteering, when it's done to defend you and all the other women, 
and our own fireside and everybody else's, in case of need.'

'It's unchristian,' cried Mrs Varden, shaking her head.

'Unchristian!' said the locksmith.  'Why, what the devil--'

Mrs Varden looked at the ceiling, as in expectation that the 
consequence of this profanity would be the immediate descent of the 
four-post bedstead on the second floor, together with the best 
sitting-room on the first; but no visible judgment occurring, she 
heaved a deep sigh, and begged her husband, in a tone of 
resignation, to go on, and by all means to blaspheme as much as 
possible, because he knew she liked it.

The locksmith did for a moment seem disposed to gratify her, but he 
gave a great gulp, and mildly rejoined:

'I was going to say, what on earth do you call it unchristian for?  
Which would be most unchristian, Martha--to sit quietly down and 
let our houses be sacked by a foreign army, or to turn out like men 
and drive 'em off?  Shouldn't I be a nice sort of a Christian, if I 
crept into a corner of my own chimney and looked on while a parcel 
of whiskered savages bore off Dolly--or you?'

When he said 'or you,' Mrs Varden, despite herself, relaxed into a 
smile.  There was something complimentary in the idea.  'In such a 
state of things as that, indeed--' she simpered.

'As that!' repeated the locksmith.  'Well, that would be the state 
of things directly.  Even Miggs would go.  Some black tambourine-
player, with a great turban on, would be bearing HER off, and, 
unless the tambourine-player was proof against kicking and 
scratching, it's my belief he'd have the worst of it.  Ha ha ha!  
I'd forgive the tambourine-player.  I wouldn't have him interfered 
with on any account, poor fellow.'  And here the locksmith laughed 
again so heartily, that tears came into his eyes--much to Mrs 
Varden's indignation, who thought the capture of so sound a 
Protestant and estimable a private character as Miggs by a pagan 
negro, a circumstance too shocking and awful for contemplation.

The picture Gabriel had drawn, indeed, threatened serious 
consequences, and would indubitably have led to them, but luckily 
at that moment a light footstep crossed the threshold, and Dolly, 
running in, threw her arms round her old father's neck and hugged 
him tight.

'Here she is at last!' cried Gabriel.  'And how well you look, 
Doll, and how late you are, my darling!'

How well she looked?  Well?  Why, if he had exhausted every 
laudatory adjective in the dictionary, it wouldn't have been praise 
enough.  When and where was there ever such a plump, roguish, 
comely, bright-eyed, enticing, bewitching, captivating, maddening 
little puss in all this world, as Dolly!  What was the Dolly of 
five years ago, to the Dolly of that day!  How many coachmakers, 
saddlers, cabinet-makers, and professors of other useful arts, had 
deserted their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and, most of 
all, their cousins, for the love of her!  How many unknown 
gentlemen--supposed to be of mighty fortunes, if not titles--had 
waited round the corner after dark, and tempted Miggs the 
incorruptible, with golden guineas, to deliver offers of marriage 
folded up in love-letters!  How many disconsolate fathers and 
substantial tradesmen had waited on the locksmith for the same 
purpose, with dismal tales of how their sons had lost their 
appetites, and taken to shut themselves up in dark bedrooms, and 
wandering in desolate suburbs with pale faces, and all because of 
Dolly Varden's loveliness and cruelty!  How many young men, in all 
previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly 
wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of 
unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the 
boxes of rheumatic watchmen!  How had she recruited the king's 
service, both by sea and land, through rendering desperate his 
loving subjects between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five!  How 
many young ladies had publicly professed, with tears in their eyes, 
that for their tastes she was much too short, too tall, too bold, 
too cold, too stout, too thin, too fair, too dark--too everything 
but handsome!  How many old ladies, taking counsel together, had 
thanked Heaven their daughters were not like her, and had hoped she 
might come to no harm, and had thought she would come to no good, 
and had wondered what people saw in her, and had arrived at the 
conclusion that she was 'going off' in her looks, or had never come 
on in them, and that she was a thorough imposition and a popular 
mistake!

And yet here was this same Dolly Varden, so whimsical and hard to 
please that she was Dolly Varden still, all smiles and dimples and 
pleasant looks, and caring no more for the fifty or sixty young 
fellows who at that very moment were breaking their hearts to marry 
her, than if so many oysters had been crossed in love and opened 
afterwards.

Dolly hugged her father as has been already stated, and having 
hugged her mother also, accompanied both into the little parlour 
where the cloth was already laid for dinner, and where Miss Miggs--
a trifle more rigid and bony than of yore--received her with a sort 
of hysterical gasp, intended for a smile.  Into the hands of that 
young virgin, she delivered her bonnet and walking dress (all of a 
dreadful, artful, and designing kind), and then said with a laugh, 
which rivalled the locksmith's music, 'How glad I always am to be 
at home again!'

'And how glad we always are, Doll,' said her father, putting back 
the dark hair from her sparkling eyes, 'to have you at home.  Give 
me a kiss.'

If there had been anybody of the male kind there to see her do it--
but there was not--it was a mercy.

'I don't like your being at the Warren,' said the locksmith, 'I 
can't bear to have you out of my sight.  And what is the news over 
yonder, Doll?'

'What news there is, I think you know already,' replied his 
daughter.  'I am sure you do though.'

'Ay?' cried the locksmith.  'What's that?'

'Come, come,' said Dolly, 'you know very well.  I want you to tell 
me why Mr Haredale--oh, how gruff he is again, to be sure!--has 
been away from home for some days past, and why he is travelling 
about (we know he IS travelling, because of his letters) without 
telling his own niece why or wherefore.'

'Miss Emma doesn't want to know, I'll swear,' returned the 
locksmith.

'I don't know that,' said Dolly; 'but I do, at any rate.  Do tell 
me.  Why is he so secret, and what is this ghost story, which 
nobody is to tell Miss Emma, and which seems to be mixed up with 
his going away?  Now I see you know by your colouring so.'

'What the story means, or is, or has to do with it, I know no more 
than you, my dear,' returned the locksmith, 'except that it's some 
foolish fear of little Solomon's--which has, indeed, no meaning in 
it, I suppose.  As to Mr Haredale's journey, he goes, as I believe--'

'Yes,' said Dolly.

'As I believe,' resumed the locksmith, pinching her cheek, 'on 
business, Doll.  What it may be, is quite another matter.  Read 
Blue Beard, and don't be too curious, pet; it's no business of 
yours or mine, depend upon that; and here's dinner, which is much 
more to the purpose.'

Dolly might have remonstrated against this summary dismissal of the 
subject, notwithstanding the appearance of dinner, but at the 
mention of Blue Beard Mrs Varden interposed, protesting she could 
not find it in her conscience to sit tamely by, and hear her child 
recommended to peruse the adventures of a Turk and Mussulman--far 
less of a fabulous Turk, which she considered that potentate to be.  
She held that, in such stirring and tremendous times as those in 
which they lived, it would be much more to the purpose if Dolly 
became a regular subscriber to the Thunderer, where she would have 
an opportunity of reading Lord George Gordon's speeches word for 
word, which would be a greater comfort and solace to her, than a 
hundred and fifty Blue Beards ever could impart.  She appealed in 
support of this proposition to Miss Miggs, then in waiting, who 
said that indeed the peace of mind she had derived from the perusal 
of that paper generally, but especially of one article of the very 
last week as ever was, entitled 'Great Britain drenched in gore,' 
exceeded all belief; the same composition, she added, had also 
wrought such a comforting effect on the mind of a married sister of 
hers, then resident at Golden Lion Court, number twenty-sivin, 
second bell-handle on the right-hand door-post, that, being in a 
delicate state of health, and in fact expecting an addition to her 
family, she had been seized with fits directly after its perusal, 
and had raved of the Inquisition ever since; to the great 
improvement of her husband and friends.  Miss Miggs went on to say 
that she would recommend all those whose hearts were hardened to 
hear Lord George themselves, whom she commended first, in respect 
of his steady Protestantism, then of his oratory, then of his eyes, 
then of his nose, then of his legs, and lastly of his figure 
generally, which she looked upon as fit for any statue, prince, or 
angel, to which sentiment Mrs Varden fully subscribed.

Mrs Varden having cut in, looked at a box upon the mantelshelf, 
painted in imitation of a very red-brick dwelling-house, with a 
yellow roof; having at top a real chimney, down which voluntary 
subscribers dropped their silver, gold, or pence, into the parlour; 
and on the door the counterfeit presentment of a brass plate, 
whereon was legibly inscribed 'Protestant Association:'--and 
looking at it, said, that it was to her a source of poignant misery 
to think that Varden never had, of all his substance, dropped 
anything into that temple, save once in secret--as she afterwards 
discovered--two fragments of tobacco-pipe, which she hoped would 
not be put down to his last account.  That Dolly, she was grieved 
to say, was no less backward in her contributions, better loving, 
as it seemed, to purchase ribbons and such gauds, than to encourage 
the great cause, then in such heavy tribulation; and that she did 
entreat her (her father she much feared could not be moved) not to 
despise, but imitate, the bright example of Miss Miggs, who flung 
her wages, as it were, into the very countenance of the Pope, and 
bruised his features with her quarter's money.

'Oh, mim,' said Miggs, 'don't relude to that.  I had no intentions, 
mim, that nobody should know.  Such sacrifices as I can make, are 
quite a widder's mite.  It's all I have,' cried Miggs with a great 
burst of tears--for with her they never came on by degrees--'but 
it's made up to me in other ways; it's well made up.'

This was quite true, though not perhaps in the sense that Miggs 
intended.  As she never failed to keep her self-denial full in Mrs 
Varden's view, it drew forth so many gifts of caps and gowns and 
other articles of dress, that upon the whole the red-brick house 
was perhaps the best investment for her small capital she could 
possibly have hit upon; returning her interest, at the rate of 
seven or eight per cent in money, and fifty at least in personal 
repute and credit.

'You needn't cry, Miggs,' said Mrs Varden, herself in tears; 'you 
needn't be ashamed of it, though your poor mistress IS on the same 
side.'

Miggs howled at this remark, in a peculiarly dismal way, and said 
she knowed that master hated her.  That it was a dreadful thing to 
live in families and have dislikes, and not give satisfactions.  
That to make divisions was a thing she could not abear to think of, 
neither could her feelings let her do it.  That if it was master's 
wishes as she and him should part, it was best they should part, 
and she hoped he might be the happier for it, and always wished him 
well, and that he might find somebody as would meet his 
dispositions.  It would be a hard trial, she said, to part from 
such a missis, but she could meet any suffering when her conscience 
told her she was in the rights, and therefore she was willing even 
to go that lengths.  She did not think, she added, that she could 
long survive the separations, but, as she was hated and looked upon 
unpleasant, perhaps her dying as soon as possible would be the best 
endings for all parties.  With this affecting conclusion, Miss 
Miggs shed more tears, and sobbed abundantly.

'Can you bear this, Varden?' said his wife in a solemn voice, 
laying down her knife and fork.

'Why, not very well, my dear,' rejoined the locksmith, 'but I try 
to keep my temper.'

'Don't let there be words on my account, mim,' sobbed Miggs.  'It's 
much the best that we should part.  I wouldn't stay--oh, gracious 
me!--and make dissensions, not for a annual gold mine, and found in 
tea and sugar.'

Lest the reader should be at any loss to discover the cause of Miss 
Miggs's deep emotion, it may be whispered apart that, happening to 
be listening, as her custom sometimes was, when Gabriel and his 
wife conversed together, she had heard the locksmith's joke 
relative to the foreign black who played the tambourine, and 
bursting with the spiteful feelings which the taunt awoke in her 
fair breast, exploded in the manner we have witnessed.  Matters 
having now arrived at a crisis, the locksmith, as usual, and for 
the sake of peace and quietness, gave in.

'What are you crying for, girl?' he said.  'What's the matter with 
you?  What are you talking about hatred for?  I don't hate you; I 
don't hate anybody.  Dry your eyes and make yourself agreeable, in 
Heaven's name, and let us all be happy while we can.'

The allied powers deeming it good generalship to consider this a 
sufficient apology on the part of the enemy, and confession of 
having been in the wrong, did dry their eyes and take it in good 
part.  Miss Miggs observed that she bore no malice, no not to her 
greatest foe, whom she rather loved the more indeed, the greater 
persecution she sustained.  Mrs Varden approved of this meek and 
forgiving spirit in high terms, and incidentally declared as a 
closing article of agreement, that Dolly should accompany her to 
the Clerkenwell branch of the association, that very night.  This 
was an extraordinary instance of her great prudence and policy; 
having had this end in view from the first, and entertaining a 
secret misgiving that the locksmith (who was bold when Dolly was in 
question) would object, she had backed Miss Miggs up to this 
point, in order that she might have him at a disadvantage.  The 
manoeuvre succeeded so well that Gabriel only made a wry face, and 
with the warning he had just had, fresh in his mind, did not dare 
to say one word.

The difference ended, therefore, in Miggs being presented with a 
gown by Mrs Varden and half-a-crown by Dolly, as if she had 
eminently distinguished herself in the paths of morality and 
goodness.  Mrs V., according to custom, expressed her hope that 
Varden would take a lesson from what had passed and learn more 
generous conduct for the time to come; and the dinner being now 
cold and nobody's appetite very much improved by what had passed, 
they went on with it, as Mrs Varden said, 'like Christians.'

As there was to be a grand parade of the Royal East London 
Volunteers that afternoon, the locksmith did no more work; but sat 
down comfortably with his pipe in his mouth, and his arm round his 
pretty daughter's waist, looking lovingly on Mrs V., from time to 
time, and exhibiting from the crown of his head to the sole of his 
foot, one smiling surface of good humour.  And to be sure, when it 
was time to dress him in his regimentals, and Dolly, hanging about 
him in all kinds of graceful winning ways, helped to button and 
buckle and brush him up and get him into one of the tightest coats 
that ever was made by mortal tailor, he was the proudest father in 
all England.

'What a handy jade it is!' said the locksmith to Mrs Varden, who 
stood by with folded hands--rather proud of her husband too--while 
Miggs held his cap and sword at arm's length, as if mistrusting 
that the latter might run some one through the body of its own 
accord; 'but never marry a soldier, Doll, my dear.'

Dolly didn't ask why not, or say a word, indeed, but stooped her 
head down very low to tie his sash.

'I never wear this dress,' said honest Gabriel, 'but I think of 
poor Joe Willet.  I loved Joe; he was always a favourite of mine.  
Poor Joe!--Dear heart, my girl, don't tie me in so tight.'

Dolly laughed--not like herself at all--the strangest little laugh 
that could be--and held her head down lower still.

'Poor Joe!' resumed the locksmith, muttering to himself; 'I always 
wish he had come to me.  I might have made it up between them, if 
he had.  Ah! old John made a great mistake in his way of acting by 
that lad--a great mistake.--Have you nearly tied that sash, my 
dear?'

What an ill-made sash it was!  There it was, loose again and 
trailing on the ground.  Dolly was obliged to kneel down, and 
recommence at the beginning.

'Never mind young Willet, Varden,' said his wife frowning; 'you 
might find some one more deserving to talk about, I think.'

Miss Miggs gave a great sniff to the same effect.

'Nay, Martha,' cried the locksmith, 'don't let us bear too hard 
upon him.  If the lad is dead indeed, we'll deal kindly by his 
memory.'

'A runaway and a vagabond!' said Mrs Varden.

Miss Miggs expressed her concurrence as before.

'A runaway, my dear, but not a vagabond,' returned the locksmith in 
a gentle tone.  'He behaved himself well, did Joe--always--and was 
a handsome, manly fellow.  Don't call him a vagabond, Martha.'

Mrs Varden coughed--and so did Miggs.

'He tried hard to gain your good opinion, Martha, I can tell you,' 
said the locksmith smiling, and stroking his chin.  'Ah! that he 
did.  It seems but yesterday that he followed me out to the Maypole 
door one night, and begged me not to say how like a boy they used 
him--say here, at home, he meant, though at the time, I recollect, 
I didn't understand.  "And how's Miss Dolly, sir?" says Joe,' 
pursued the locksmith, musing sorrowfully, 'Ah!  Poor Joe!'

'Well, I declare,' cried Miggs.  'Oh! Goodness gracious me!'

'What's the matter now?' said Gabriel, turning sharply to her, 
'Why, if here an't Miss Dolly,' said the handmaid, stooping down to 
look into her face, 'a-giving way to floods of tears.  Oh mim! oh 
sir.  Raly it's give me such a turn,' cried the susceptible damsel, 
pressing her hand upon her side to quell the palpitation of her 
heart, 'that you might knock me down with a feather.'

The locksmith, after glancing at Miss Miggs as if he could have 
wished to have a feather brought straightway, looked on with a 
broad stare while Dolly hurried away, followed by that sympathising 
young woman: then turning to his wife, stammered out, 'Is Dolly 
ill?  Have I done anything?  Is it my fault?'

'Your fault!' cried Mrs V. reproachfully.  'There--you had better 
make haste out.'

'What have I done?' said poor Gabriel.  'It was agreed that Mr 
Edward's name was never to be mentioned, and I have not spoken of 
him, have I?'

Mrs Varden merely replied that she had no patience with him, and 
bounced off after the other two.  The unfortunate locksmith wound 
his sash about him, girded on his sword, put on his cap, and walked 
out.

'I am not much of a dab at my exercise,' he said under his breath, 
'but I shall get into fewer scrapes at that work than at this.  
Every man came into the world for something; my department seems to 
be to make every woman cry without meaning it.  It's rather hard!'

But he forgot it before he reached the end of the street, and went 
on with a shining face, nodding to the neighbours, and showering 
about his friendly greetings like mild spring rain.



Chapter 42


The Royal East London Volunteers made a brilliant sight that day: 
formed into lines, squares, circles, triangles, and what not, to 
the beating of drums, and the streaming of flags; and performed a 
vast number of complex evolutions, in all of which Serjeant Varden 
bore a conspicuous share.  Having displayed their military prowess 
to the utmost in these warlike shows, they marched in glittering 
order to the Chelsea Bun House, and regaled in the adjacent taverns 
until dark.  Then at sound of drum they fell in again, and 
returned amidst the shouting of His Majesty's lieges to the place 
from whence they came.

The homeward march being somewhat tardy,--owing to the un-
soldierlike behaviour of certain corporals, who, being gentlemen of 
sedentary pursuits in private life and excitable out of doors, 
broke several windows with their bayonets, and rendered it 
imperative on the commanding officer to deliver them over to a 
strong guard, with whom they fought at intervals as they came 
along,--it was nine o'clock when the locksmith reached home.  A 
hackney-coach was waiting near his door; and as he passed it, Mr 
Haredale looked from the window and called him by his name.

'The sight of you is good for sore eyes, sir,' said the locksmith, 
stepping up to him.  'I wish you had walked in though, rather than 
waited here.'

'There is nobody at home, I find,' Mr Haredale answered; 'besides, 
I desired to be as private as I could.'

'Humph!' muttered the locksmith, looking round at his house.  
'Gone with Simon Tappertit to that precious Branch, no doubt.'

Mr Haredale invited him to come into the coach, and, if he were not 
tired or anxious to go home, to ride with him a little way that 
they might have some talk together.  Gabriel cheerfully complied, 
and the coachman mounting his box drove off.

'Varden,' said Mr Haredale, after a minute's pause, 'you will be 
amazed to hear what errand I am on; it will seem a very strange 
one.'

'I have no doubt it's a reasonable one, sir, and has a meaning in 
it,' replied the locksmith; 'or it would not be yours at all.  Have 
you just come back to town, sir?'

'But half an hour ago.'

'Bringing no news of Barnaby, or his mother?' said the locksmith 
dubiously.  'Ah! you needn't shake your head, sir.  It was a wild-
goose chase.  I feared that, from the first.  You exhausted all 
reasonable means of discovery when they went away.  To begin again 
after so long a time has passed is hopeless, sir--quite hopeless.'

'Why, where are they?' he returned impatiently.  'Where can they 
be?  Above ground?'

'God knows,' rejoined the locksmith, 'many that I knew above it 
five years ago, have their beds under the grass now.  And the world 
is a wide place.  It's a hopeless attempt, sir, believe me.  We 
must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, 
and accident, and Heaven's pleasure.'

'Varden, my good fellow,' said Mr Haredale, 'I have a deeper 
meaning in my present anxiety to find them out, than you can 
fathom.  It is not a mere whim; it is not the casual revival of my 
old wishes and desires; but an earnest, solemn purpose.  My 
thoughts and dreams all tend to it, and fix it in my mind.  I have 
no rest by day or night; I have no peace or quiet; I am haunted.'

His voice was so altered from its usual tones, and his manner 
bespoke so much emotion, that Gabriel, in his wonder, could only 
sit and look towards him in the darkness, and fancy the expression 
of his face.

'Do not ask me,' continued Mr Haredale, 'to explain myself.  If I 
were to do so, you would think me the victim of some hideous fancy.  
It is enough that this is so, and that I cannot--no, I can not--lie 
quietly in my bed, without doing what will seem to you 
incomprehensible.'

'Since when, sir,' said the locksmith after a pause, 'has this 
uneasy feeling been upon you?'

Mr Haredale hesitated for some moments, and then replied: 'Since 
the night of the storm.  In short, since the last nineteenth of 
March.'

As though he feared that Varden might express surprise, or reason 
with him, he hastily went on:

'You will think, I know, I labour under some delusion.  Perhaps I 
do.  But it is not a morbid one; it is a wholesome action of the 
mind, reasoning on actual occurrences.  You know the furniture 
remains in Mrs Rudge's house, and that it has been shut up, by my 
orders, since she went away, save once a-week or so, when an old 
neighbour visits it to scare away the rats.  I am on my way there 
now.'

'For what purpose?' asked the locksmith.

'To pass the night there,' he replied; 'and not to-night alone, but 
many nights.  This is a secret which I trust to you in case of any 
unexpected emergency.  You will not come, unless in case of strong 
necessity, to me; from dusk to broad day I shall be there.  Emma, 
your daughter, and the rest, suppose me out of London, as I have 
been until within this hour.  Do not undeceive them.  This is the 
errand I am bound upon.  I know I may confide it to you, and I rely 
upon your questioning me no more at this time.'

With that, as if to change the theme, he led the astounded 
locksmith back to the night of the Maypole highwayman, to the 
robbery of Edward Chester, to the reappearance of the man at Mrs 
Rudge's house, and to all the strange circumstances which 
afterwards occurred.  He even asked him carelessly about the man's 
height, his face, his figure, whether he was like any one he had 
ever seen--like Hugh, for instance, or any man he had known at any 
time--and put many questions of that sort, which the locksmith, 
considering them as mere devices to engage his attention and 
prevent his expressing the astonishment he felt, answered pretty 
much at random.

At length, they arrived at the corner of the street in which the 
house stood, where Mr Haredale, alighting, dismissed the coach.  
'If you desire to see me safely lodged,' he said, turning to the 
locksmith with a gloomy smile, 'you can.'

Gabriel, to whom all former marvels had been nothing in comparison 
with this, followed him along the narrow pavement in silence.  When 
they reached the door, Mr Haredale softly opened it with a key he 
had about him, and closing it when Varden entered, they were left 
in thorough darkness.

They groped their way into the ground-floor room.  Here Mr 
Haredale struck a light, and kindled a pocket taper he had brought 
with him for the purpose.  It was then, when the flame was full 
upon him, that the locksmith saw for the first time how haggard, 
pale, and changed he looked; how worn and thin he was; how 
perfectly his whole appearance coincided with all that he had said 
so strangely as they rode along.  It was not an unnatural impulse 
in Gabriel, after what he had heard, to note curiously the 
expression of his eyes.  It was perfectly collected and rational;--
so much so, indeed, that he felt ashamed of his momentary 
suspicion, and drooped his own when Mr Haredale looked towards him, 
as if he feared they would betray his thoughts.

'Will you walk through the house?' said Mr Haredale, with a glance 
towards the window, the crazy shutters of which were closed and 
fastened.  'Speak low.'

There was a kind of awe about the place, which would have rendered 
it difficult to speak in any other manner.  Gabriel whispered 
'Yes,' and followed him upstairs.

Everything was just as they had seen it last.  There was a sense of 
closeness from the exclusion of fresh air, and a gloom and 
heaviness around, as though long imprisonment had made the very 
silence sad.  The homely hangings of the beds and windows had begun 
to droop; the dust lay thick upon their dwindling folds; and damps 
had made their way through ceiling, wall, and floor.  The boards 
creaked beneath their tread, as if resenting the unaccustomed 
intrusion; nimble spiders, paralysed by the taper's glare, checked 
the motion of their hundred legs upon the wall, or dropped like 
lifeless things upon the ground; the death-watch ticked; and the 
scampering feet of rats and mice rattled behind the wainscot.

As they looked about them on the decaying furniture, it was strange 
to find how vividly it presented those to whom it had belonged, and 
with whom it was once familiar.  Grip seemed to perch again upon 
his high-backed chair; Barnaby to crouch in his old favourite 
corner by the fire; the mother to resume her usual seat, and watch 
him as of old.  Even when they could separate these objects from 
the phantoms of the mind which they invoked, the latter only glided 
out of sight, but lingered near them still; for then they seemed to 
lurk in closets and behind the doors, ready to start out and 
suddenly accost them in well-remembered tones.

They went downstairs, and again into the room they had just now 
left.  Mr Haredale unbuckled his sword and laid it on the table, 
with a pair of pocket pistols; then told the locksmith he would 
light him to the door.

'But this is a dull place, sir,' said Gabriel lingering; 'may no 
one share your watch?'

He shook his head, and so plainly evinced his wish to be alone, 
that Gabriel could say no more.  In another moment the locksmith 
was standing in the street, whence he could see that the light once 
more travelled upstairs, and soon returning to the room below, 
shone brightly through the chinks of the shutters.

If ever man were sorely puzzled and perplexed, the locksmith was, 
that night.  Even when snugly seated by his own fireside, with Mrs 
Varden opposite in a nightcap and night-jacket, and Dolly beside 
him (in a most distracting dishabille) curling her hair, and 
smiling as if she had never cried in all her life and never could--
even then, with Toby at his elbow and his pipe in his mouth, and 
Miggs (but that perhaps was not much) falling asleep in the 
background, he could not quite discard his wonder and uneasiness.  
So in his dreams--still there was Mr Haredale, haggard and 
careworn, listening in the solitary house to every sound that 
stirred, with the taper shining through the chinks until the day 
should turn it pale and end his lonely watching.



Chapter 43


Next morning brought no satisfaction to the locksmith's thoughts, 
nor next day, nor the next, nor many others.  Often after nightfall 
he entered the street, and turned his eyes towards the well-known 
house; and as surely as he did so, there was the solitary light, 
still gleaming through the crevices of the window-shutter, while 
all within was motionless, noiseless, cheerless, as a grave.  
Unwilling to hazard Mr Haredale's favour by disobeying his strict 
injunction, he never ventured to knock at the door or to make his 
presence known in any way.  But whenever strong interest and 
curiosity attracted him to the spot--which was not seldom--the 
light was always there.

If he could have known what passed within, the knowledge would have 
yielded him no clue to this mysterious vigil.  At twilight, Mr 
Haredale shut himself up, and at daybreak he came forth.  He never 
missed a night, always came and went alone, and never varied his 
proceedings in the least degree.

The manner of his watch was this.  At dusk, he entered the house in 
the same way as when the locksmith bore him company, kindled a 
light, went through the rooms, and narrowly examined them.  That 
done, he returned to the chamber on the ground-floor, and laying 
his sword and pistols on the table, sat by it until morning.

He usually had a book with him, and often tried to read, but never 
fixed his eyes or thoughts upon it for five minutes together.  The 
slightest noise without doors, caught his ear; a step upon the 
pavement seemed to make his heart leap.

He was not without some refreshment during the long lonely hours; 
generally carrying in his pocket a sandwich of bread and meat, and 
a small flask of wine.  The latter diluted with large quantities of 
water, he drank in a heated, feverish way, as though his throat 
were dried; but he scarcely ever broke his fast, by so much as a 
crumb of bread.

If this voluntary sacrifice of sleep and comfort had its origin, as 
the locksmith on consideration was disposed to think, in any 
superstitious expectation of the fulfilment of a dream or vision 
connected with the event on which he had brooded for so many years, 
and if he waited for some ghostly visitor who walked abroad when 
men lay sleeping in their beds, he showed no trace of fear or 
wavering.  His stern features expressed inflexible resolution; his 
brows were puckered, and his lips compressed, with deep and settled 
purpose; and when he started at a noise and listened, it was not 
with the start of fear but hope, and catching up his sword as 
though the hour had come at last, he would clutch it in his tight-
clenched hand, and listen with sparkling eyes and eager looks, 
until it died away.

These disappointments were numerous, for they ensued on almost 
every sound, but his constancy was not shaken.  Still, every night 
he was at his post, the same stern, sleepless, sentinel; and still 
night passed, and morning dawned, and he must watch again.

This went on for weeks; he had taken a lodging at Vauxhall in which 
to pass the day and rest himself; and from this place, when the 
tide served, he usually came to London Bridge from Westminster by 
water, in order that he might avoid the busy streets.

One evening, shortly before twilight, he came his accustomed road 
upon the river's bank, intending to pass through Westminster Hall 
into Palace Yard, and there take boat to London Bridge as usual.  
There was a pretty large concourse of people assembled round the 
Houses of Parliament, looking at the members as they entered and 
departed, and giving vent to rather noisy demonstrations of 
approval or dislike, according to their known opinions.  As he made 
his way among the throng, he heard once or twice the No-Popery cry, 
which was then becoming pretty familiar to the ears of most men; 
but holding it in very slight regard, and observing that the idlers 
were of the lowest grade, he neither thought nor cared about it, 
but made his way along, with perfect indifference.

There were many little knots and groups of persons in Westminster 
Hall: some few looking upward at its noble ceiling, and at the rays 
of evening light, tinted by the setting sun, which streamed in 
aslant through its small windows, and growing dimmer by degrees, 
were quenched in the gathering gloom below; some, noisy passengers, 
mechanics going home from work, and otherwise, who hurried quickly 
through, waking the echoes with their voices, and soon darkening 
the small door in the distance, as they passed into the street 
beyond; some, in busy conference together on political or private 
matters, pacing slowly up and down with eyes that sought the 
ground, and seeming, by their attitudes, to listen earnestly from 
head to foot.  Here, a dozen squabbling urchins made a very Babel 
in the air; there, a solitary man, half clerk, half mendicant, 
paced up and down with hungry dejection in his look and gait; at 
his elbow passed an errand-lad, swinging his basket round and 
round, and with his shrill whistle riving the very timbers of the 
roof; while a more observant schoolboy, half-way through, pocketed 
his ball, and eyed the distant beadle as he came looming on.  It 
was that time of evening when, if you shut your eyes and open them 
again, the darkness of an hour appears to have gathered in a 
second.  The smooth-worn pavement, dusty with footsteps, still 
called upon the lofty walls to reiterate the shuffle and the tread 
of feet unceasingly, save when the closing of some heavy door 
resounded through the building like a clap of thunder, and drowned 
all other noises in its rolling sound.

Mr Haredale, glancing only at such of these groups as he passed 
nearest to, and then in a manner betokening that his thoughts were 
elsewhere, had nearly traversed the Hall, when two persons before 
him caught his attention.  One of these, a gentleman in elegant 
attire, carried in his hand a cane, which he twirled in a jaunty 
manner as he loitered on; the other, an obsequious, crouching, 
fawning figure, listened to what he said--at times throwing in a 
humble word himself--and, with his shoulders shrugged up to his 
ears, rubbed his hands submissively, or answered at intervals by an 
inclination of the head, half-way between a nod of acquiescence, 
and a bow of most profound respect.

In the abstract there was nothing very remarkable in this pair, for 
servility waiting on a handsome suit of clothes and a cane--not to 
speak of gold and silver sticks, or wands of office--is common 
enough.  But there was that about the well-dressed man, yes, and 
about the other likewise, which struck Mr Haredale with no pleasant 
feeling.  He hesitated, stopped, and would have stepped aside and 
turned out of his path, but at the moment, the other two faced 
about quickly, and stumbled upon him before he could avoid them.

The gentleman with the cane lifted his hat and had begun to tender 
an apology, which Mr Haredale had begun as hastily to acknowledge 
and walk away, when he stopped short and cried, 'Haredale!  Gad 
bless me, this is strange indeed!'

'It is,' he returned impatiently; 'yes--a--'

'My dear friend,' cried the other, detaining him, 'why such great 
speed?  One minute, Haredale, for the sake of old acquaintance.'

'I am in haste,' he said.  'Neither of us has sought this meeting.  
Let it be a brief one.  Good night!'

'Fie, fie!' replied Sir John (for it was he), 'how very churlish!  
We were speaking of you.  Your name was on my lips--perhaps you 
heard me mention it?  No?  I am sorry for that.  I am really 
sorry.--You know our friend here, Haredale?  This is really a most 
remarkable meeting!'

The friend, plainly very ill at ease, had made bold to press Sir 
John's arm, and to give him other significant hints that he was 
desirous of avoiding this introduction.  As it did not suit Sir 
John's purpose, however, that it should be evaded, he appeared 
quite unconscious of these silent remonstrances, and inclined his 
hand towards him, as he spoke, to call attention to him more 
particularly.

The friend, therefore, had nothing for it, but to muster up the 
pleasantest smile he could, and to make a conciliatory bow, as Mr 
Haredale turned his eyes upon him.  Seeing that he was recognised, 
he put out his hand in an awkward and embarrassed manner, which was 
not mended by its contemptuous rejection.

'Mr Gashford!' said Haredale, coldly.  'It is as I have heard then.  
You have left the darkness for the light, sir, and hate those whose 
opinions you formerly held, with all the bitterness of a renegade.  
You are an honour, sir, to any cause.  I wish the one you espouse 
at present, much joy of the acquisition it has made.'

The secretary rubbed his hands and bowed, as though he would disarm 
his adversary by humbling himself before him.  Sir John Chester 
again exclaimed, with an air of great gaiety, 'Now, really, this is 
a most remarkable meeting!' and took a pinch of snuff with his 
usual self-possession.

'Mr Haredale,' said Gashford, stealthily raising his eyes, and 
letting them drop again when they met the other's steady gaze, is 
too conscientious, too honourable, too manly, I am sure, to attach 
unworthy motives to an honest change of opinions, even though it 
implies a doubt of those he holds himself.  Mr Haredale is too 
just, too generous, too clear-sighted in his moral vision, to--'

'Yes, sir?' he rejoined with a sarcastic smile, finding the 
secretary stopped.  'You were saying'--

Gashford meekly shrugged his shoulders, and looking on the ground 
again, was silent.

'No, but let us really,' interposed Sir John at this juncture, 'let 
us really, for a moment, contemplate the very remarkable character 
of this meeting.  Haredale, my dear friend, pardon me if I think 
you are not sufficiently impressed with its singularity.  Here we 
stand, by no previous appointment or arrangement, three old 
schoolfellows, in Westminster Hall; three old boarders in a 
remarkably dull and shady seminary at Saint Omer's, where you, 
being Catholics and of necessity educated out of England, were 
brought up; and where I, being a promising young Protestant at that 
time, was sent to learn the French tongue from a native of Paris!'

'Add to the singularity, Sir John,' said Mr Haredale, 'that some of 
you Protestants of promise are at this moment leagued in yonder 
building, to prevent our having the surpassing and unheard-of 
privilege of teaching our children to read and write--here--in this 
land, where thousands of us enter your service every year, and to 
preserve the freedom of which, we die in bloody battles abroad, in 
heaps: and that others of you, to the number of some thousands as 
I learn, are led on to look on all men of my creed as wolves and 
beasts of prey, by this man Gashford.  Add to it besides the bare 
fact that this man lives in society, walks the streets in broad 
day--I was about to say, holds up his head, but that he does not--
and it will be strange, and very strange, I grant you.'

'Oh! you are hard upon our friend,' replied Sir John, with an 
engaging smile.  'You are really very hard upon our friend!'

'Let him go on, Sir John,' said Gashford, fumbling with his gloves.  
'Let him go on.  I can make allowances, Sir John.  I am honoured 
with your good opinion, and I can dispense with Mr Haredale's.  Mr 
Haredale is a sufferer from the penal laws, and I can't expect his 
favour.'

'You have so much of my favour, sir,' retorted Mr Haredale, with a 
bitter glance at the third party in their conversation, 'that I am 
glad to see you in such good company.  You are the essence of your 
great Association, in yourselves.'

'Now, there you mistake,' said Sir John, in his most benignant way.  
'There--which is a most remarkable circumstance for a man of your 
punctuality and exactness, Haredale--you fall into error.  I don't 
belong to the body; I have an immense respect for its members, but 
I don't belong to it; although I am, it is certainly true, the 
conscientious opponent of your being relieved.  I feel it my duty 
to be so; it is a most unfortunate necessity; and cost me a bitter 
struggle.--Will you try this box?  If you don't object to a 
trifling infusion of a very chaste scent, you'll find its flavour 
exquisite.'

'I ask your pardon, Sir John,' said Mr Haredale, declining the 
proffer with a motion of his hand, 'for having ranked you among the 
humble instruments who are obvious and in all men's sight.  I 
should have done more justice to your genius.  Men of your capacity 
plot in secrecy and safety, and leave exposed posts to the duller 
wits.'

'Don't apologise, for the world,' replied Sir John sweetly; 'old 
friends like you and I, may be allowed some freedoms, or the deuce 
is in it.'

Gashford, who had been very restless all this time, but had not 
once looked up, now turned to Sir John, and ventured to mutter 
something to the effect that he must go, or my lord would perhaps 
be waiting.

'Don't distress yourself, good sir,' said Mr Haredale, 'I'll take 
my leave, and put you at your ease--' which he was about to do 
without ceremony, when he was stayed by a buzz and murmur at the 
upper end of the hall, and, looking in that direction, saw Lord 
George Gordon coming in, with a crowd of people round him.

There was a lurking look of triumph, though very differently 
expressed, in the faces of his two companions, which made it a 
natural impulse on Mr Haredale's part not to give way before this 
leader, but to stand there while he passed.  He drew himself up 
and, clasping his hands behind him, looked on with a proud and 
scornful aspect, while Lord George slowly advanced (for the press 
was great about him) towards the spot where they were standing.

He had left the House of Commons but that moment, and had come 
straight down into the Hall, bringing with him, as his custom was, 
intelligence of what had been said that night in reference to the 
Papists, and what petitions had been presented in their favour, and 
who had supported them, and when the bill was to be brought in, and 
when it would be advisable to present their own Great Protestant 
petition.  All this he told the persons about him in a loud voice, 
and with great abundance of ungainly gesture.  Those who were 
nearest him made comments to each other, and vented threats and 
murmurings; those who were outside the crowd cried, 'Silence,' and 
Stand back,' or closed in upon the rest, endeavouring to make a 
forcible exchange of places: and so they came driving on in a very 
disorderly and irregular way, as it is the manner of a crowd to do.

When they were very near to where the secretary, Sir John, and Mr 
Haredale stood, Lord George turned round and, making a few remarks 
of a sufliciently violent and incoherent kind, concluded with the 
usual sentiment, and called for three cheers to back it.  While 
these were in the act of being given with great energy, he 
extricated himself from the press, and stepped up to Gashford's 
side.  Both he and Sir John being well known to the populace, they 
fell back a little, and left the four standing together.

'Mr Haredale, Lord George,' said Sir John Chester, seeing that the 
nobleman regarded him with an inquisitive look.  'A Catholic 
gentleman unfortunately--most unhappily a Catholic--but an esteemed 
acquaintance of mine, and once of Mr Gashford's.  My dear Haredale, 
this is Lord George Gordon.'

'I should have known that, had I been ignorant of his lordship's 
person,' said Mr Haredale.  'I hope there is but one gentleman in 
England who, addressing an ignorant and excited throng, would speak 
of a large body of his fellow-subjects in such injurious language 
as I heard this moment.  For shame, my lord, for shame!'

'I cannot talk to you, sir,' replied Lord George in a loud voice, 
and waving his hand in a disturbed and agitated manner; 'we have 
nothing in common.'

'We have much in common--many things--all that the Almighty gave 
us,' said Mr Haredale; 'and common charity, not to say common sense 
and common decency, should teach you to refrain from these 
proceedings.  If every one of those men had arms in their hands at 
this moment, as they have them in their heads, I would not leave 
this place without telling you that you disgrace your station.'

'I don't hear you, sir,' he replied in the same manner as before; 
'I can't hear you.  It is indifferent to me what you say.  Don't 
retort, Gashford,' for the secretary had made a show of wishing to 
do so; 'I can hold no communion with the worshippers of idols.'

As he said this, he glanced at Sir John, who lifted his hands and 
eyebrows, as if deploring the intemperate conduct of Mr Haredale, 
and smiled in admiration of the crowd and of their leader.

'HE retort!' cried Haredale.  'Look you here, my lord.  Do you know 
this man?'

Lord George replied by laying his hand upon the shoulder of his 
cringing secretary, and viewing him with a smile of confidence.

'This man,' said Mr Haredale, eyeing him from top to toe, 'who in 
his boyhood was a thief, and has been from that time to this, a 
servile, false, and truckling knave: this man, who has crawled and 
crept through life, wounding the hands he licked, and biting those 
he fawned upon: this sycophant, who never knew what honour, truth, 
or courage meant; who robbed his benefactor's daughter of her 
virtue, and married her to break her heart, and did it, with 
stripes and cruelty: this creature, who has whined at kitchen 
windows for the broken food, and begged for halfpence at our chapel 
doors: this apostle of the faith, whose tender conscience cannot 
bear the altars where his vicious life was publicly denounced--Do 
you know this man?'

'Oh, really--you are very, very hard upon our friend!' exclaimed 
Sir John.

'Let Mr Haredale go on,' said Gashford, upon whose unwholesome face 
the perspiration had broken out during this speech, in blotches of 
wet; 'I don't mind him, Sir John; it's quite as indifferent to me 
what he says, as it is to my lord.  If he reviles my lord, as you 
have heard, Sir John, how can I hope to escape?'

'Is it not enough, my lord,' Mr Haredale continued, 'that I, as 
good a gentleman as you, must hold my property, such as it is, by a 
trick at which the state connives because of these hard laws; and 
that we may not teach our youth in schools the common principles of 
right and wrong; but must we be denounced and ridden by such men as 
this!  Here is a man to head your No-Popery cry!  For shame.  For 
shame!'

The infatuated nobleman had glanced more than once at Sir John 
Chester, as if to inquire whether there was any truth in these 
statements concerning Gashford, and Sir John had as often plainly 
answered by a shrug or look, 'Oh dear me! no.'  He now said, in the 
same loud key, and in the same strange manner as before:

'I have nothing to say, sir, in reply, and no desire to hear 
anything more.  I beg you won't obtrude your conversation, or these 
personal attacks, upon me.  I shall not be deterred from doing my 
duty to my country and my countrymen, by any such attempts, whether 
they proceed from emissaries of the Pope or not, I assure you.  
Come, Gashford!'

They had walked on a few paces while speaking, and were now at the 
Hall-door, through which they passed together.  Mr Haredale, 
without any leave-taking, turned away to the river stairs, which 
were close at hand, and hailed the only boatman who remained there.

But the throng of people--the foremost of whom had heard every word 
that Lord George Gordon said, and among all of whom the rumour had 
been rapidly dispersed that the stranger was a Papist who was 
bearding him for his advocacy of the popular cause--came pouring 
out pell-mell, and, forcing the nobleman, his secretary, and Sir 
John Chester on before them, so that they appeared to be at their 
head, crowded to the top of the stairs where Mr Haredale waited 
until the boat was ready, and there stood still, leaving him on a 
little clear space by himself.

They were not silent, however, though inactive.  At first some 
indistinct mutterings arose among them, which were followed by a 
hiss or two, and these swelled by degrees into a perfect storm.  
Then one voice said, 'Down with the Papists!' and there was a 
pretty general cheer, but nothing more.  After a lull of a few 
moments, one man cried out, 'Stone him;' another, 'Duck him;' 
another, in a stentorian voice, 'No Popery!'  This favourite cry 
the rest re-echoed, and the mob, which might have been two hundred 
strong, joined in a general shout.

Mr Haredale had stood calmly on the brink of the steps, until they 
made this demonstration, when he looked round contemptuously, and 
walked at a slow pace down the stairs.  He was pretty near the 
boat, when Gashford, as if without intention, turned about, and 
directly afterwards a great stone was thrown by some hand, in the 
crowd, which struck him on the head, and made him stagger like a 
drunken man.

The blood sprung freely from the wound, and trickled down his coat.  
He turned directly, and rushing up the steps with a boldness and 
passion which made them all fall back, demanded:

'Who did that?  Show me the man who hit me.'

Not a soul moved; except some in the rear who slunk off, and, 
escaping to the other side of the way, looked on like indifferent 
spectators.

'Who did that?' he repeated.  'Show me the man who did it.  Dog, 
was it you?  It was your deed, if not your hand--I know you.'

He threw himself on Gashford as he said the words, and hurled him 
to the ground.  There was a sudden motion in the crowd, and some 
laid hands upon him, but his sword was out, and they fell off 
again.

'My lord--Sir John,'--he cried, 'draw, one of you--you are 
responsible for this outrage, and I look to you.  Draw, if you are 
gentlemen.'  With that he struck Sir John upon the breast with the 
flat of his weapon, and with a burning face and flashing eyes stood 
upon his guard; alone, before them all.

For an instant, for the briefest space of time the mind can readily 
conceive, there was a change in Sir John's smooth face, such as no 
man ever saw there.  The next moment, he stepped forward, and laid 
one hand on Mr Haredale's arm, while with the other he endeavoured 
to appease the crowd.

'My dear friend, my good Haredale, you are blinded with passion--
it's very natural, extremely natural--but you don't know friends 
from foes.'

'I know them all, sir, I can distinguish well--' he retorted, 
almost mad with rage.  'Sir John, Lord George--do you hear me?  Are 
you cowards?'

'Never mind, sir,' said a man, forcing his way between and pushing 
him towards the stairs with friendly violence, 'never mind asking 
that.  For God's sake, get away.  What CAN you do against this 
number?  And there are as many more in the next street, who'll be 
round dfrectly,'--indeed they began to pour in as he said the 
words--'you'd be giddy from that cut, in the first heat of a 
scuffle.  Now do retire, sir, or take my word for it you'll be 
worse used than you would be if every man in the crowd was a woman, 
and that woman Bloody Mary.  Come, sir, make haste--as quick as you 
can.'

Mr Haredale, who began to turn faint and sick, felt how sensible 
this advice was, and descended the steps with his unknown friend's 
assistance.  John Grueby (for John it was) helped him into the 
boat, and giving her a shove off, which sent her thirty feet into 
the tide, bade the waterman pull away like a Briton; and walked up 
again as composedly as if he had just landed.

There was at first a slight disposition on the part of the mob to 
resent this interference; but John looking particularly strong and 
cool, and wearing besides Lord George's livery, they thought better 
of it, and contented themselves with sending a shower of small 
missiles after the boat, which plashed harmlessly in the water; 
for she had by this time cleared the bridge, and was darting 
swiftly down the centre of the stream.

From this amusement, they proceeded to giving Protestant knocks at 
the doors of private houses, breaking a few lamps, and assaulting 
some stray constables.  But, it being whispered that a detachment 
of Life Guards had been sent for, they took to their heels with 
great expedition, and left the street quite clear.



Chapter 44


When the concourse separated, and, dividing into chance clusters, 
drew off in various directions, there still remained upon the scene 
of the late disturbance, one man.  This man was Gashford, who, 
bruised by his late fall, and hurt in a much greater degree by the 
indignity he had undergone, and the exposure of which he had been 
the victim, limped up and down, breathing curses and threats of 
vengeance.

It was not the secretary's nature to waste his wrath in words.  
While he vented the froth of his malevolence in those effusions, he 
kept a steady eye on two men, who, having disappeared with the rest 
when the alarm was spread, had since returned, and were now visible 
in the moonlight, at no great distance, as they walked to and fro, 
and talked together.

He made no move towards them, but waited patiently on the dark side 
of the street, until they were tired of strolling backwards and 
forwards and walked away in company.  Then he followed, but at some 
distance: keeping them in view, without appearing to have that 
object, or being seen by them.

They went up Parliament Street, past Saint Martin's church, and 
away by Saint Giles's to Tottenham Court Road, at the back of 
which, upon the western side, was then a place called the Green 
Lanes.  This was a retired spot, not of the choicest kind, leading 
into the fields.  Great heaps of ashes; stagnant pools, overgrown 
with rank grass and duckweed; broken turnstiles; and the upright 
posts of palings long since carried off for firewood, which menaced 
all heedless walkers with their jagged and rusty nails; were the 
leading features of the landscape: while here and there a donkey, 
or a ragged horse, tethered to a stake, and cropping off a wretched 
meal from the coarse stunted turf, were quite in keeping with the 
scene, and would have suggested (if the houses had not done so, 
sufficiently, of themselves) how very poor the people were who 
lived in the crazy huts adjacent, and how foolhardy it might prove 
for one who carried money, or wore decent clothes, to walk that way 
alone, unless by daylight.

Poverty has its whims and shows of taste, as wealth has.  Some of 
these cabins were turreted, some had false windows painted on their 
rotten walls; one had a mimic clock, upon a crazy tower of four 
feet high, which screened the chimney; each in its little patch of 
ground had a rude seat or arbour.  The population dealt in bones, 
in rags, in broken glass, in old wheels, in birds, and dogs.  
These, in their several ways of stowage, filled the gardens; and 
shedding a perfume, not of the most delicious nature, in the air, 
filled it besides with yelps, and screams, and howling.

Into this retreat, the secretary followed the two men whom he had 
held in sight; and here he saw them safely lodged, in one of the 
meanest houses, which was but a room, and that of small dimensions.  
He waited without, until the sound of their voices, joined in a 
discordant song, assured him they were making merry; and then 
approaching the door, by means of a tottering plank which crossed 
the ditch in front, knocked at it with his hand.

'Muster Gashfordl' said the man who opened it, taking his pipe from 
his mouth, in evident surprise.  'Why, who'd have thought of this 
here honour!  Walk in, Muster Gashford--walk in, sir.'

Gashford required no second invitation, and entered with a gracious 
air.  There was a fire in the rusty grate (for though the spring 
was pretty far advanced, the nights were cold), and on a stool 
beside it Hugh sat smoking.  Dennis placed a chair, his only one, 
for the secretary, in front of the hearth; and took his seat again 
upon the stool he had left when he rose to give the visitor 
admission.

'What's in the wind now, Muster Gashford?' he said, as he resumed 
his pipe, and looked at him askew.  'Any orders from head-quarters?  
Are we going to begin?  What is it, Muster Gashford?'

'Oh, nothing, nothing,' rejoined the secretary, with a friendly nod 
to Hugh.  'We have broken the ice, though.  We had a little spurt 
to-day--eh, Dennis?'

'A very little one,' growled the hangman.  'Not half enough for me.'

'Nor me neither!' cried Hugh.  'Give us something to do with life 
in it--with life in it, master.  Ha, ha!'

'Why, you wouldn't,' said the secretary, with his worst expression 
of face, and in his mildest tones, 'have anything to do, with--with 
death in it?'

'I don't know that,' replied Hugh.  'I'm open to orders.  I don't 
care; not I.'

'Nor I!' vociferated Dennis.

'Brave fellows!' said the secretary, in as pastor-like a voice as 
if he were commending them for some uncommon act of valour and 
generosity.  'By the bye'--and here he stopped and warmed his 
hands: then suddenly looked up--'who threw that stone to-day?'

Mr Dennis coughed and shook his head, as who should say, 'A mystery 
indeed!'  Hugh sat and smoked in silence.

'It was well done!' said the secretary, warming his hands again.  
'I should like to know that man.'

'Would you?' said Dennis, after looking at his face to assure 
himself that he was serious.  'Would you like to know that man, 
Muster Gashford?'

'I should indeed,' replied the secretary.

'Why then, Lord love you,' said the hangman, in his hoarest 
chuckle, as he pointed with his pipe to Hugh, 'there he sits.  
That's the man.  My stars and halters, Muster Gashford,' he added 
in a whisper, as he drew his stool close to him and jogged him with 
his elbow, 'what a interesting blade he is!  He wants as much 
holding in as a thorough-bred bulldog.  If it hadn't been for me 
to-day, he'd have had that 'ere Roman down, and made a riot of it, 
in another minute.'

'And why not?' cried Hugh in a surly voice, as he overheard this 
last remark.  'Where's the good of putting things off?  Strike 
while the iron's hot; that's what I say.'

'Ah!' retorted Dennis, shaking his head, with a kind of pity for 
his friend's ingenuous youth; 'but suppose the iron an't hot, 
brother!  You must get people's blood up afore you strike, and have 
'em in the humour.  There wasn't quite enough to provoke 'em to-
day, I tell you.  If you'd had your way, you'd have spoilt the fun 
to come, and ruined us.'

'Dennis is quite right,' said Gashford, smoothly.  'He is 
perfectly correct.  Dennis has great knowledge of the world.'

'I ought to have, Muster Gashford, seeing what a many people I've 
helped out of it, eh?' grinned the hangman, whispering the words 
behind his hand.

The secretary laughed at this jest as much as Dennis could desire, 
and when he had done, said, turning to Hugh:

'Dennis's policy was mine, as you may have observed.  You saw, for 
instance, how I fell when I was set upon.  I made no resistance.  I 
did nothing to provoke an outbreak.  Oh dear no!'

'No, by the Lord Harry!' cried Dennis with a noisy laugh, 'you went 
down very quiet, Muster Gashford--and very flat besides.  I thinks 
to myself at the time "it's all up with Muster Gashford!"  I never 
see a man lay flatter nor more still--with the life in him--than 
you did to-day.  He's a rough 'un to play with, is that 'ere 
Papist, and that's the fact.'

The secretary's face, as Dennis roared with laughter, and turned 
his wrinkled eyes on Hugh who did the like, might have furnished a 
study for the devil's picture.  He sat quite silent until they 
were serious again, and then said, looking round:

'We are very pleasant here; so very pleasant, Dennis, that but for 
my lord's particular desire that I should sup with him, and the 
time being very near at hand, I should he inclined to stay, until 
it would be hardly safe to go homeward.  I come upon a little 
business--yes, I do--as you supposed.  It's very flattering to you; 
being this.  If we ever should be obliged--and we can't tell, you 
know--this is a very uncertain world'--

'I believe you, Muster Gashford,' interposed the hangman with a 
grave nod.  'The uncertainties as I've seen in reference to this 
here state of existence, the unexpected contingencies as have come 
about!--Oh my eye!'  Feeling the subject much too vast for 
expression, he puffed at his pipe again, and looked the rest.

'I say,' resumed the secretary, in a slow, impressive way; 'we 
can't tell what may come to pass; and if we should be obliged, 
against our wills, to have recourse to violence, my lord (who has 
suffered terribly to-day, as far as words can go) consigns to you 
two--bearing in mind my recommendation of you both, as good staunch 
men, beyond all doubt and suspicion--the pleasant task of 
punishing this Haredale.  You may do as you please with him, or 
his, provided that you show no mercy, and no quarter, and leave no 
two beams of his house standing where the builder placed them.  You 
may sack it, burn it, do with it as you like, but it must come 
down; it must be razed to the ground; and he, and all belonging to 
him, left as shelterless as new-born infants whom their mothers 
have exposed.  Do you understand me?' said Gashford, pausing, and 
pressing his hands together gently.

'Understand you, master!' cried Hugh.  'You speak plain now.  Why, 
this is hearty!'

'I knew you would like it,' said Gashford, shaking him by the hand; 
'I thought you would.  Good night!  Don't rise, Dennis: I would 
rather find my way alone.  I may have to make other visits here, 
and it's pleasant to come and go without disturbing you.  I can 
find my way perfectly well.  Good night!'

He was gone, and had shut the door behind him.  They looked at each 
other, and nodded approvingly: Dennis stirred up the fire.

'This looks a little more like business!' he said.

'Ay, indeed!' cried Hugh; 'this suits me!'

'I've heerd it said of Muster Gashford,' said the hangman, 'that 
he'd a surprising memory and wonderful firmness--that he never 
forgot, and never forgave.--Let's drink his health!'

Hugh readily complied--pouring no liquor on the floor when he drank 
this toast--and they pledged the secretary as a man after their own 
hearts, in a bumper.



Chapter 45


While the worst passions of the worst men were thus working in the 
dark, and the mantle of religion, assumed to cover the ugliest 
deformities, threatened to become the shroud of all that was good 
and peaceful in society, a circumstance occurred which once more 
altered the position of two persons from whom this history has long 
been separated, and to whom it must now return.

In a small English country town, the inhabitants of which supported 
themselves by the labour of their hands in plaiting and preparing 
straw for those who made bonnets and other articles of dress and 
ornament from that material,--concealed under an assumed name, and 
living in a quiet poverty which knew no change, no pleasures, and 
few cares but that of struggling on from day to day in one great 
toil for bread,--dwelt Barnaby and his mother.  Their poor cottage 
had known no stranger's foot since they sought the shelter of its 
roof five years before; nor had they in all that time held any 
commerce or communication with the old world from which they had 
fled.  To labour in peace, and devote her labour and her life to 
her poor son, was all the widow sought.  If happiness can be said 
at any time to be the lot of one on whom a secret sorrow preys, she 
was happy now.  Tranquillity, resignation, and her strong love of 
him who needed it so much, formed the small circle of her quiet 
joys; and while that remained unbroken, she was contented.

For Barnaby himself, the time which had flown by, had passed him 
like the wind.  The daily suns of years had shed no brighter gleam 
of reason on his mind; no dawn had broken on his long, dark night.  
He would sit sometimes--often for days together on a low seat by 
the fire or by the cottage door, busy at work (for he had learnt 
the art his mother plied), and listening, God help him, to the 
tales she would repeat, as a lure to keep him in her sight.  He had 
no recollection of these little narratives; the tale of yesterday 
was new to him upon the morrow; but he liked them at the moment; 
and when the humour held him, would remain patiently within doors, 
hearing her stories like a little child, and working cheerfully 
from sunrise until it was too dark to see.

At other times,--and then their scanty earnings were barely 
sufficient to furnish them with food, though of the coarsest sort,--
he would wander abroad from dawn of day until the twilight 
deepened into night.  Few in that place, even of the children, 
could be idle, and he had no companions of his own kind.  Indeed 
there were not many who could have kept up with him in his rambles, 
had there been a legion.  But there were a score of vagabond dogs 
belonging to the neighbours, who served his purpose quite as well.  
With two or three of these, or sometimes with a full half-dozen 
barking at his heels, he would sally forth on some long expedition 
that consumed the day; and though, on their return at nightfall, 
the dogs would come home limping and sore-footed, and almost spent 
with their fatigue, Barnaby was up and off again at sunrise with 
some new attendants of the same class, with whom he would return in 
like manner.  On all these travels, Grip, in his little basket at 
his master's back, was a constant member of the party, and when 
they set off in fine weather and in high spirits, no dog barked 
louder than the raven.

Their pleasures on these excursions were simple enough.  A crust of 
bread and scrap of meat, with water from the brook or spring, 
sufficed for their repast.  Barnaby's enjoyments were, to walk, and 
run, and leap, till he was tired; then to lie down in the long 
grass, or by the growing corn, or in the shade of some tall tree, 
looking upward at the light clouds as they floated over the blue 
surface of the sky, and listening to the lark as she poured out her 
brilliant song.  There were wild-flowers to pluck--the bright red 
poppy, the gentle harebell, the cowslip, and the rose.  There were 
birds to watch; fish; ants; worms; hares or rabbits, as they darted 
across the distant pathway in the wood and so were gone: millions 
of living things to have an interest in, and lie in wait for, and 
clap hands and shout in memory of, when they had disappeared.  In 
default of these, or when they wearied, there was the merry 
sunlight to hunt out, as it crept in aslant through leaves and 
boughs of trees, and hid far down--deep, deep, in hollow places--
like a silver pool, where nodding branches seemed to bathe and 
sport; sweet scents of summer air breathing over fields of beans or 
clover; the perfume of wet leaves or moss; the life of waving 
trees, and shadows always changing.  When these or any of them 
tired, or in excess of pleasing tempted him to shut his eyes, there 
was slumber in the midst of all these soft delights, with the 
gentle wind murmuring like music in his ears, and everything around 
melting into one delicious dream.

Their hut--for it was little more--stood on the outskirts of the 
town, at a short distance from the high road, but in a secluded 
place, where few chance passengers strayed at any season of the 
year.  It had a plot of garden-ground attached, which Barnaby, in 
fits and starts of working, trimmed, and kept in order.  Within 
doors and without, his mother laboured for their common good; and 
hail, rain, snow, or sunshine, found no difference in her.

Though so far removed from the scenes of her past life, and with so 
little thought or hope of ever visiting them again, she seemed to 
have a strange desire to know what happened in the busy world.  Any 
old newspaper, or scrap of intelligence from London, she caught at 
with avidity.  The excitement it produced was not of a pleasurable 
kind, for her manner at such times expressed the keenest anxiety 
and dread; but it never faded in the least degree.  Then, and in 
stormy winter nights, when the wind blew loud and strong, the old 
expression came into her face, and she would be seized with a fit 
of trembling, like one who had an ague.  But Barnaby noted little 
of this; and putting a great constraint upon herself, she usually 
recovered her accustomed manner before the change had caught his 
observation.

Grip was by no means an idle or unprofitable member of the humble 
household.  Partly by dint of Barnaby's tuition, and partly by 
pursuing a species of self-instruction common to his tribe, and 
exerting his powers of observation to the utmost, he had acquired a 
degree of sagacity which rendered him famous for miles round.  His 
conversational powers and surprising performances were the 
universal theme: and as many persons came to see the wonderful 
raven, and none left his exertions unrewarded--when he condescended 
to exhibit, which was not always, for genius is capricious--his 
earnings formed an important item in the common stock.  Indeed, the 
bird himself appeared to know his value well; for though he was 
perfectly free and unrestrained in the presence of Barnaby and his 
mother, he maintained in public an amazing gravity, and never 
stooped to any other gratuitous performances than biting the ankles 
of vagabond boys (an exercise in which he much delighted), killing 
a fowl or two occasionally, and swallowing the dinners of various 
neighbouring dogs, of whom the boldest held him in great awe and 
dread.

Time had glided on in this way, and nothing had happened to disturb 
or change their mode of life, when, one summer's night in June, 
they were in their little garden, resting from the labours of the 
day.  The widow's work was yet upon her knee, and strewn upon the 
ground about her; and Barnaby stood leaning on his spade, gazing at 
the brightness in the west, and singing softly to himself.

'A brave evening, mother!  If we had, chinking in our pockets, but 
a few specks of that gold which is piled up yonder in the sky, we 
should be rich for life.'

'We are better as we are,' returned the widow with a quiet smile.  
'Let us be contented, and we do not want and need not care to have 
it, though it lay shining at our feet.'

'Ay!' said Barnaby, resting with crossed arms on his spade, and 
looking wistfully at the sunset, that's well enough, mother; but 
gold's a good thing to have.  I wish that I knew where to find it.  
Grip and I could do much with gold, be sure of that.'

'What would you do?' she asked.

'What!  A world of things.  We'd dress finely--you and I, I mean; 
not Grip--keep horses, dogs, wear bright colours and feathers, do 
no more work, live delicately and at our ease.  Oh, we'd find uses 
for it, mother, and uses that would do us good.  I would I knew 
where gold was buried.  How hard I'd work to dig it up!'

'You do not know,' said his mother, rising from her seat and laying 
her hand upon his shoulder, 'what men have done to win it, and how 
they have found, too late, that it glitters brightest at a 
distance, and turns quite dim and dull when handled.'

'Ay, ay; so you say; so you think,' he answered, still looking 
eagerly in the same direction.  'For all that, mother, I should 
like to try.'

'Do you not see,' she said, 'how red it is?  Nothing bears so many 
stains of blood, as gold.  Avoid it.  None have such cause to hate 
its name as we have.  Do not so much as think of it, dear love.  It 
has brought such misery and suffering on your head and mine as few 
have known, and God grant few may have to undergo.  I would rather 
we were dead and laid down in our graves, than you should ever come 
to love it.'

For a moment Barnaby withdrew his eyes and looked at her with 
wonder.  Then, glancing from the redness in the sky to the mark 
upon his wrist as if he would compare the two, he seemed about to 
question her with earnestness, when a new object caught his 
wandering attention, and made him quite forgetful of his purpose.

This was a man with dusty feet and garments, who stood, bare-
headed, behind the hedge that divided their patch of garden from 
the pathway, and leant meekly forward as if he sought to mingle 
with their conversation, and waited for his time to speak.  His 
face was turned towards the brightness, too, but the light that 
fell upon it showed that he was blind, and saw it not.

'A blessing on those voices!' said the wayfarer.  'I feel the 
beauty of the night more keenly, when I hear them.  They are like 
eyes to me.  Will they speak again, and cheer the heart of a poor 
traveller?'

'Have you no guide?' asked the widow, after a moment's pause.

'None but that,' he answered, pointing with his staff towards the 
sun; 'and sometimes a milder one at night, but she is idle now.'

'Have you travelled far?'

'A weary way and long,' rejoined the traveller as he shook his 
head.  'A weary, weary, way.  I struck my stick just now upon the 
bucket of your well--be pleased to let me have a draught of water, 
lady.'

'Why do you call me lady?' she returned.  'I am as poor as you.'

'Your speech is soft and gentle, and I judge by that,' replied the 
man.  'The coarsest stuffs and finest silks, are--apart from the 
sense of touch--alike to me.  I cannot judge you by your dress.'

'Come round this way,' said Barnaby, who had passed out at the 
garden-gate and now stood close beside him.  'Put your hand in 
mine.  You're blind and always in the dark, eh?  Are you frightened 
in the dark?  Do you see great crowds of faces, now?  Do they grin 
and chatter?'

'Alas!' returned the other, 'I see nothing.  Waking or sleeping, 
nothing.'

Barnaby looked curiously at his eyes, and touching them with his 
fingers, as an inquisitive child might, led him towards the house.

'You have come a long distance, 'said the widow, meeting him at the 
door.  'How have you found your way so far?'

'Use and necessity are good teachers, as I have heard--the best of 
any,' said the blind man, sitting down upon the chair to which 
Barnaby had led him, and putting his hat and stick upon the red-
tiled floor.  'May neither you nor your son ever learn under them.  
They are rough masters.'

'You have wandered from the road, too,' said the widow, in a tone 
of pity.

'Maybe, maybe,' returned the blind man with a sigh, and yet with 
something of a smile upon his face, 'that's likely.  Handposts and 
milestones are dumb, indeed, to me.  Thank you the more for this 
rest, and this refreshing drink!'

As he spoke, he raised the mug of water to his mouth.  It was 
clear, and cold, and sparkling, but not to his taste nevertheless, 
or his thirst was not very great, for he only wetted his lips and 
put it down again.

He wore, hanging with a long strap round his neck, a kind of scrip 
or wallet, in which to carry food.  The widow set some bread and 
cheese before him, but he thanked her, and said that through the 
kindness of the charitable he had broken his fast once since 
morning, and was not hungry.  When he had made her this reply, he 
opened his wallet, and took out a few pence, which was all it 
appeared to contain.

'Might I make bold to ask,' he said, turning towards where Barnaby 
stood looking on, 'that one who has the gift of sight, would lay 
this out for me in bread to keep me on my way?  Heaven's blessing 
on the young feet that will bestir themselves in aid of one so 
helpless as a sightless man!'

Barnaby looked at his mother, who nodded assent; in another moment 
he was gone upon his charitable errand.  The blind man sat 
listening with an attentive face, until long after the sound of his 
retreating footsteps was inaudible to the widow, and then said, 
suddenly, and in a very altered tone:

'There are various degrees and kinds of blindness, widow.  There 
is the connubial blindness, ma'am, which perhaps you may have 
observed in the course of your own experience, and which is a kind 
of wilful and self-bandaging blindness.  There is the blindness of 
party, ma'am, and public men, which is the blindness of a mad bull 
in the midst of a regiment of soldiers clothed in red.  There is 
the blind confidence of youth, which is the blindness of young 
kittens, whose eyes have not yet opened on the world; and there is 
that physical blindness, ma'am, of which I am, contrairy to my own 
desire, a most illustrious example.  Added to these, ma'am, is that 
blindness of the intellect, of which we have a specimen in your 
interesting son, and which, having sometimes glimmerings and 
dawnings of the light, is scarcely to be trusted as a total 
darkness.  Therefore, ma'am, I have taken the liberty to get him 
out of the way for a short time, while you and I confer together, 
and this precaution arising out of the delicacy of my sentiments 
towards yourself, you will excuse me, ma'am, I know.'

Having delivered himself of this speech with many flourishes of 
manner, he drew from beneath his coat a flat stone bottle, and 
holding the cork between his teeth, qualified his mug of water with 
a plentiful infusion of the liquor it contained.  He politely 
drained the bumper to her health, and the ladies, and setting it 
down empty, smacked his lips with infinite relish.

'I am a citizen of the world, ma'am,' said the blind man, corking 
his bottle, 'and if I seem to conduct myself with freedom, it is 
therefore.  You wonder who I am, ma'am, and what has brought me 
here.  Such experience of human nature as I have, leads me to that 
conclusion, without the aid of eyes by which to read the movements 
of your soul as depicted in your feminine features.  I will 
satisfy your curiosity immediately, ma'am; immediately.'  With 
that he slapped his bottle on its broad back, and having put it 
under his garment as before, crossed his legs and folded his hands, 
and settled himself in his chair, previous to proceeding any 
further.

The change in his manner was so unexpected, the craft and 
wickedness of his deportment were so much aggravated by his 
condition--for we are accustomed to see in those who have lost a 
human sense, something in its place almost divine--and this 
alteration bred so many fears in her whom he addressed, that she 
could not pronounce one word.  After waiting, as it seemed, for 
some remark or answer, and waiting in vain, the visitor resumed:

'Madam, my name is Stagg.  A friend of mine who has desired the 
honour of meeting with you any time these five years past, has 
commissioned me to call upon you.  I should be glad to whisper that 
gentleman's name in your ear.--Zounds, ma'am, are you deaf?  Do you 
hear me say that I should be glad to whisper my friend's name in 
your ear?'

'You need not repeat it,' said the widow, with a stifled groan; 'I 
see too well from whom you come.'

'But as a man of honour, ma'am,' said the blind man, striking 
himself on the breast, 'whose credentials must not be disputed, I 
take leave to say that I WILL mention that gentleman's name.  Ay, 
ay,' he added, seeming to catch with his quick ear the very motion 
of her hand, 'but not aloud.  With your leave, ma'am, I desire the 
favour of a whisper.'

She moved towards him, and stooped down.  He muttered a word in her 
ear; and, wringing her hands, she paced up and down the room like 
one distracted.  The blind man, with perfect composure, produced 
his bottle again, mixed another glassful; put it up as before; and, 
drinking from time to time, followed her with his face in silence.

'You are slow in conversation, widow,' he said after a time, 
pausing in his draught.  'We shall have to talk before your son.'

'What would you have me do?' she answered.  'What do you want?'

'We are poor, widow, we are poor,' he retorted, stretching out his 
right hand, and rubbing his thumb upon its palm.

'Poor!' she cried.  'And what am I?'

'Comparisons are odious,' said the blind man.  'I don't know, I 
don't care.  I say that we are poor.  My friend's circumstances are 
indifferent, and so are mine.  We must have our rights, widow, or 
we must be bought off.  But you know that, as well as I, so where 
is the use of talking?'

She still walked wildly to and fro.  At length, stopping abruptly 
before him, she said:

'Is he near here?'

'He is.  Close at hand.'

'Then I am lost!'

'Not lost, widow,' said the blind man, calmly; 'only found.  Shall 
I call him?'

'Not for the world,' she answered, with a shudder.

'Very good,' he replied, crossing his legs again, for he had made 
as though he would rise and walk to the door.  'As you please, 
widow.  His presence is not necessary that I know of.  But both he 
and I must live; to live, we must eat and drink; to eat and drink, 
we must have money:--I say no more.'

'Do you know how pinched and destitute I am?' she retorted.  'I do 
not think you do, or can.  If you had eyes, and could look around 
you on this poor place, you would have pity on me.  Oh! let your 
heart be softened by your own affliction, friend, and have some 
sympathy with mine.'

The blind man snapped his fingers as he answered:

'--Beside the question, ma'am, beside the question.  I have the 
softest heart in the world, but I can't live upon it.  Many a 
gentleman lives well upon a soft head, who would find a heart of 
the same quality a very great drawback.  Listen to me.  This is a 
matter of business, with which sympathies and sentiments have 
nothing to do.  As a mutual friend, I wish to arrange it in a 
satisfactory manner, if possible; and thus the case stands.--If you 
are very poor now, it's your own choice.  You have friends who, in 
case of need, are always ready to help you.  My friend is in a more 
destitute and desolate situation than most men, and, you and he 
being linked together in a common cause, he naturally looks to you 
to assist him.  He has boarded and lodged with me a long time (for 
as I said just now, I am very soft-hearted), and I quite approve of 
his entertaining this opinion.  You have always had a roof over 
your head; he has always been an outcast.  You have your son to 
comfort and assist you; he has nobody at all.  The advantages must 
not be all one side.  You are in the same boat, and we must divide 
the ballast a little more equally.'

She was about to speak, but he checked her, and went on.

'The only way of doing this, is by making up a little purse now and 
then for my friend; and that's what I advise.  He bears you no 
malice that I know of, ma'am: so little, that although you have 
treated him harshly more than once, and driven him, I may say, out 
of doors, he has that regard for you that I believe even if you 
disappointed him now, he would consent to take charge of your son, 
and to make a man of him.'

He laid a great stress on these latter words, and paused as if to 
find out what effect they had produced.  She only answered by her 
tears.

'He is a likely lad,' said the blind man, thoughtfully, 'for many 
purposes, and not ill-disposed to try his fortune in a little 
change and bustle, if I may judge from what I heard of his talk 
with you to-night.--Come.  In a word, my friend has pressing 
necessity for twenty pounds.  You, who can give up an annuity, can 
get that sum for him.  It's a pity you should be troubled.  You 
seem very comfortable here, and it's worth that much to remain so.  
Twenty pounds, widow, is a moderate demand.  You know where to 
apply for it; a post will bring it you.--Twenty pounds!'

She was about to answer him again, but again he stopped her.

'Don't say anything hastily; you might be sorry for it.  Think of 
it a little while.  Twenty pounds--of other people's money--how 
easy!  Turn it over in your mind.  I'm in no hurry.  Night's coming 
on, and if I don't sleep here, I shall not go far.  Twenty pounds!  
Consider of it, ma'am, for twenty minutes; give each pound a 
minute; that's a fair allowance.  I'll enjoy the air the while, 
which is very mild and pleasant in these parts.'

With these words he groped his way to the door, carrying his chair 
with him.  Then seating himself, under a spreading honeysuckle, and 
stretching his legs across the threshold so that no person could 
pass in or out without his knowledge, he took from his pocket a 
pipe, flint, steel and tinder-box, and began to smoke.  It was a 
lovely evening, of that gentle kind, and at that time of year, when 
the twilight is most beautiful.  Pausing now and then to let his 
smoke curl slowly off, and to sniff the grateful fragrance of the 
flowers, he sat there at his ease--as though the cottage were his 
proper dwelling, and he had held undisputed possession of it all 
his life--waiting for the widow's answer and for Barnaby's return.



Chapter 46


When Barnaby returned with the bread, the sight of the pious old 
pilgrim smoking his pipe and making himself so thoroughly at home, 
appeared to surprise even him; the more so, as that worthy person, 
instead of putting up the loaf in his wallet as a scarce and 
precious article, tossed it carelessly on the table, and producing 
his bottle, bade him sit down and drink.

'For I carry some comfort, you see,' he said.  'Taste that.  Is it 
good?'

The water stood in Barnaby's eyes as he coughed from the strength 
of the draught, and answered in the affirmative.

'Drink some more,' said the blind man; 'don't be afraid of it.  
You don't taste anything like that, often, eh?'

'Often!' cried Barnaby.  'Never!'

'Too poor?' returned the blind man with a sigh.  'Ay.  That's bad.  
Your mother, poor soul, would be happier if she was richer, 
Barnaby.'

'Why, so I tell her--the very thing I told her just before you came 
to-night, when all that gold was in the sky,' said Barnaby, drawing 
his chair nearer to him, and looking eagerly in his face.  'Tell 
me.  Is there any way of being rich, that I could find out?'

'Any way!  A hundred ways.'

'Ay, ay?' he returned.  'Do you say so?  What are they?--Nay, 
mother, it's for your sake I ask; not mine;--for yours, indeed.  
What are they?'

The blind man turned his face, on which there was a smile of 
triumph, to where the widow stood in great distress; and answered,

'Why, they are not to be found out by stay-at-homes, my good 
friend.'

'By stay-at-homes!' cried Barnaby, plucking at his sleeve.  'But I 
am not one.  Now, there you mistake.  I am often out before the 
sun, and travel home when he has gone to rest.  I am away in the 
woods before the day has reached the shady places, and am often 
there when the bright moon is peeping through the boughs, and 
looking down upon the other moon that lives in the water.  As I 
walk along, I try to find, among the grass and moss, some of that 
small money for which she works so hard and used to shed so many 
tears.  As I lie asleep in the shade, I dream of it--dream of 
digging it up in heaps; and spying it out, hidden under bushes; and 
seeing it sparkle, as the dew-drops do, among the leaves.  But I 
never find it.  Tell me where it is.  I'd go there, if the journey 
were a whole year long, because I know she would be happier when I 
came home and brought some with me.  Speak again.  I'll listen to 
you if you talk all night.'

The blind man passed his hand lightly over the poor fellow's face, 
and finding that his elbows were planted on the table, that his 
chin rested on his two hands, that he leaned eagerly forward, and 
that his whole manner expressed the utmost interest and anxiety, 
paused for a minute as though he desired the widow to observe this 
fully, and then made answer:

'It's in the world, bold Barnaby, the merry world; not in solitary 
places like those you pass your time in, but in crowds, and where 
there's noise and rattle.'

'Good! good!' cried Barnaby, rubbing his hands.  'Yes! I love 
that.  Grip loves it too.  It suits us both.  That's brave!'

'--The kind of places,' said the blind man, 'that a young fellow 
likes, and in which a good son may do more for his mother, and 
himself to boot, in a month, than he could here in all his life--
that is, if he had a friend, you know, and some one to advise 
with.'

'You hear this, mother?' cried Barnaby, turning to her with 
delight.  'Never tell me we shouldn't heed it, if it lay shining 
at out feet.  Why do we heed it so much now?  Why do you toil from 
morning until night?'

'Surely,' said the blind man, 'surely.  Have you no answer, widow?  
Is your mind,' he slowly added, 'not made up yet?'

'Let me speak with you,' she answered, 'apart.'

'Lay your hand upon my sleeve,' said Stagg, arising from the table; 
'and lead me where you will.  Courage, bold Barnaby.  We'll talk 
more of this: I've a fancy for you.  Wait there till I come back.  
Now, widow.'

She led him out at the door, and into the little garden, where they 
stopped.

'You are a fit agent,' she said, in a half breathless manner, 'and 
well represent the man who sent you here.'

'I'll tell him that you said so,' Stagg retorted.  'He has a regard 
for you, and will respect me the more (if possible) for your 
praise.  We must have our rights, widow.'

'Rights!  Do you know,' she said, 'that a word from me--'

'Why do you stop?' returned the blind man calmly, after a long 
pause.  'Do I know that a word from you would place my friend in 
the last position of the dance of life?  Yes, I do.  What of that?  
It will never be spoken, widow.'

'You are sure of that?'

'Quite--so sure, that I don't come here to discuss the question.  I 
say we must have our rights, or we must be bought off.  Keep to 
that point, or let me return to my young friend, for I have an 
interest in the lad, and desire to put him in the way of making his 
fortune.  Bah! you needn't speak,' he added hastily; 'I know what 
you would say: you have hinted at it once already.  Have I no 
feeling for you, because I am blind?  No, I have not.  Why do you 
expect me, being in darkness, to be better than men who have their 
sight--why should you?  Is the hand of Heaven more manifest in my 
having no eyes, than in your having two?  It's the cant of you 
folks to be horrified if a blind man robs, or lies, or steals; oh 
yes, it's far worse in him, who can barely live on the few 
halfpence that are thrown to him in streets, than in you, who can 
see, and work, and are not dependent on the mercies of the world.  
A curse on you!  You who have five senses may be wicked at your 
pleasure; we who have four, and want the most important, are to 
live and be moral on our affliction.  The true charity and justice 
of rich to poor, all the world over!'

He paused a moment when he had said these words, and caught the 
sound of money, jingling in her hand.

'Well?' he cried, quickly resuming his former manner.  'That should 
lead to something.  The point, widow?'

'First answer me one question,' she replied.  'You say he is close 
at hand.  Has he left London?'

'Being close at hand, widow, it would seem he has,' returned the 
blind man.

'I mean, for good?  You know that.'

'Yes, for good.  The truth is, widow, that his making a longer stay 
there might have had disagreeable consequences.  He has come away 
for that reason.'

'Listen,' said the widow, telling some money out, upon a bench 
beside them.  'Count.'

'Six,' said the blind man, listening attentively.  'Any more?'

'They are the savings,' she answered, 'of five years.  Six 
guineas.'

He put out his hand for one of the coins; felt it carefully, put it 
between his teeth, rung it on the bench; and nodded to her to 
proceed.

'These have been scraped together and laid by, lest sickness or 
death should separate my son and me.  They have been purchased at 
the price of much hunger, hard labour, and want of rest.  If you 
CAN take them--do--on condition that you leave this place upon the 
instant, and enter no more into that room, where he sits now, 
expecting your return.'

'Six guineas,' said the blind man, shaking his head, 'though of the 
fullest weight that were ever coined, fall very far short of twenty 
pounds, widow.'

'For such a sum, as you know, I must write to a distant part of the 
country.  To do that, and receive an answer, I must have time.'

'Two days?' said Stagg.

'More.'

'Four days?'

'A week.  Return on this day week, at the same hour, but not to the 
house.  Wait at the corner of the lane.'

'Of course,' said the blind man, with a crafty look, 'I shall find 
you there?'

'Where else can I take refuge?  Is it not enough that you have made 
a beggar of me, and that I have sacrificed my whole store, so 
hardly earned, to preserve this home?'

'Humph!' said the blind man, after some consideration.  'Set me 
with my face towards the point you speak of, and in the middle of 
the road.  Is this the spot?'

'It is.'

'On this day week at sunset.  And think of him within doors.--For 
the present, good night.'

She made him no answer, nor did he stop for any.  He went slowly 
away, turning his head from time to time, and stopping to listen, 
as if he were curious to know whether he was watched by any one.  
The shadows of night were closing fast around, and he was soon lost 
in the gloom.  It was not, however, until she had traversed the 
lane from end to end, and made sure that he was gone, that she re-
entered the cottage, and hurriedly barred the door and window.

'Mother!' said Barnaby.  'What is the matter?  Where is the blind 
man?'

'He is gone.'

'Gone!' he cried, starting up.  'I must have more talk with him.  
Which way did he take?'

'I don't know,' she answered, folding her arms about him.  'You 
must not go out to-night.  There are ghosts and dreams abroad.'

'Ay?' said Barnaby, in a frightened whisper.

'It is not safe to stir.  We must leave this place to-morrow.'

'This place!  This cottage--and the little garden, mother!'

'Yes!  To-morrow morning at sunrise.  We must travel to London; 
lose ourselves in that wide place--there would be some trace of us 
in any other town--then travel on again, and find some new abode.'

Little persuasion was required to reconcile Barnaby to anything 
that promised change.  In another minute, he was wild with delight; 
in another, full of grief at the prospect of parting with his 
friends the dogs; in another, wild again; then he was fearful of 
what she had said to prevent his wandering abroad that night, and 
full of terrors and strange questions.  His light-heartedness in 
the end surmounted all his other feelings, and lying down in his 
clothes to the end that he might be ready on the morrow, he soon 
fell fast asleep before the poor turf fire.

His mother did not close her eyes, but sat beside him, watching.  
Every breath of wind sounded in her ears like that dreaded footstep 
at the door, or like that hand upon the latch, and made the calm 
summer night, a night of horror.  At length the welcome day 
appeared.  When she had made the little preparations which were 
needful for their journey, and had prayed upon her knees with many 
tears, she roused Barnaby, who jumped up gaily at her summons.

His clothes were few enough, and to carry Grip was a labour of 
love.  As the sun shed his earliest beams upon the earth, they 
closed the door of their deserted home, and turned away.  The sky 
was blue and bright.  The air was fresh and filled with a thousand 
perfumes.  Barnaby looked upward, and laughed with all his heart.

But it was a day he usually devoted to a long ramble, and one of 
the dogs--the ugliest of them all--came bounding up, and jumping 
round him in the fulness of his joy.  He had to bid him go back in 
a surly tone, and his heart smote him while he did so.  The dog 
retreated; turned with a half-incredulous, half-imploring look; 
came a little back; and stopped.

It was the last appeal of an old companion and a faithful friend--
cast off.  Barnaby could bear no more, and as he shook his head and 
waved his playmate home, he burst into tears.

'Oh mother, mother, how mournful he will be when he scratches at 
the door, and finds it always shut!'

There was such a sense of home in the thought, that though her own 
eyes overflowed she would not have obliterated the recollection of 
it, either from her own mind or from his, for the wealth of the 
whole wide world.



Chapter 47


In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mercies to mankind, the 
power we have of finding some germs of comfort in the hardest 
trials must ever occupy the foremost place; not only because it 
supports and upholds us when we most require to be sustained, but 
because in this source of consolation there is something, we have 
reason to believe, of the divine spirit; something of that goodness 
which detects amidst our own evil doings, a redeeming quality; 
something which, even in our fallen nature, we possess in common 
with the angels; which had its being in the old time when they trod 
the earth, and lingers on it yet, in pity.

How often, on their journey, did the widow remember with a grateful 
heart, that out of his deprivation Barnaby's cheerfulness and 
affection sprung!  How often did she call to mind that but for 
that, he might have been sullen, morose, unkind, far removed from 
her--vicious, perhaps, and cruel!  How often had she cause for 
comfort, in his strength, and hope, and in his simple nature!  
Those feeble powers of mind which rendered him so soon forgetful of 
the past, save in brief gleams and flashes,--even they were a 
comfort now.  The world to him was full of happiness; in every 
tree, and plant, and flower, in every bird, and beast, and tiny 
insect whom a breath of summer wind laid low upon the ground, he 
had delight.  His delight was hers; and where many a wise son would 
have made her sorrowful, this poor light-hearted idiot filled her 
breast with thankfulness and love.

Their stock of money was low, but from the hoard she had told into 
the blind man's hand, the widow had withheld one guinea.  This, 
with the few pence she possessed besides, was to two persons of 
their frugal habits, a goodly sum in bank.  Moreover they had Grip 
in company; and when they must otherwise have changed the guinea, 
it was but to make him exhibit outside an alehouse door, or in a 
village street, or in the grounds or gardens of a mansion of the 
better sort, and scores who would have given nothing in charity, 
were ready to bargain for more amusement from the talking bird.

One day--for they moved slowly, and although they had many rides in 
carts and waggons, were on the road a week--Barnaby, with Grip upon 
his shoulder and his mother following, begged permission at a trim 
lodge to go up to the great house, at the other end of the avenue, 
and show his raven.  The man within was inclined to give them 
admittance, and was indeed about to do so, when a stout gentleman 
with a long whip in his hand, and a flushed face which seemed to 
indicate that he had had his morning's draught, rode up to the 
gate, and called in a loud voice and with more oaths than the 
occasion seemed to warrant to have it opened directly.

'Who hast thou got here?' said the gentleman angrily, as the man 
threw the gate wide open, and pulled off his hat, 'who are these?  
Eh? art a beggar, woman?'

The widow answered with a curtsey, that they were poor travellers.

'Vagrants,' said the gentleman, 'vagrants and vagabonds.  Thee 
wish to be made acquainted with the cage, dost thee--the cage, the 
stocks, and the whipping-post?  Where dost come from?'

She told him in a timid manner,--for he was very loud, hoarse, and 
red-faced,--and besought him not to be angry, for they meant no 
harm, and would go upon their way that moment.

'Don't he too sure of that,' replied the gentleman, 'we don't allow 
vagrants to roam about this place.  I know what thou want'st---
stray linen drying on hedges, and stray poultry, eh?  What hast 
got in that basket, lazy hound?'

'Grip, Grip, Grip--Grip the clever, Grip the wicked, Grip the 
knowing--Grip, Grip, Grip,' cried the raven, whom Barnaby had shut 
up on the approach of this stern personage.  'I'm a devil I'm a 
devil I'm a devil, Never say die Hurrah Bow wow wow, Polly put the 
kettle on we'll all have tea.'

'Take the vermin out, scoundrel,' said the gentleman, 'and let me 
see him.'

Barnaby, thus condescendingly addressed, produced his bird, but not 
without much fear and trembling, and set him down upon the ground; 
which he had no sooner done than Grip drew fifty corks at least, 
and then began to dance; at the same time eyeing the gentleman with 
surprising insolence of manner, and screwing his head so much on 
one side that he appeared desirous of screwing it off upon the spot.

The cork-drawing seemed to make a greater impression on the 
gentleman's mind, than the raven's power of speech, and was indeed 
particularly adapted to his habits and capacity.  He desired to 
have that done again, but despite his being very peremptory, and 
notwithstanding that Barnaby coaxed to the utmost, Grip turned a 
deaf ear to the request, and preserved a dead silence.

'Bring him along,' said the gentleman, pointing to the house.  But 
Grip, who had watched the action, anticipated his master, by 
hopping on before them;--constantly flapping his wings, and 
screaming 'cook!' meanwhile, as a hint perhaps that there was 
company coming, and a small collation would be acceptable.

Barnaby and his mother walked on, on either side of the gentleman 
on horseback, who surveyed each of them from time to time in a 
proud and coarse manner, and occasionally thundered out some 
question, the tone of which alarmed Barnaby so much that he could 
find no answer, and, as a matter of course, could make him no 
reply.  On one of these occasions, when the gentleman appeared 
disposed to exercise his horsewhip, the widow ventured to inform 
him in a low voice and with tears in her eyes, that her son was of 
weak mind.

'An idiot, eh?' said the gentleman, looking at Barnaby as he spoke.  
'And how long hast thou been an idiot?'

'She knows,' was Barnaby's timid answer, pointing to his mother--
'I--always, I believe.'

'From his birth,' said the widow.

'I don't believe it,' cried the gentleman, 'not a bit of it.  It's 
an excuse not to work.  There's nothing like flogging to cure that 
disorder.  I'd make a difference in him in ten minutes, I'll be 
bound.'

'Heaven has made none in more than twice ten years, sir,' said the 
widow mildly.

'Then why don't you shut him up? we pay enough for county 
institutions, damn 'em.  But thou'd rather drag him about to 
excite charity--of course.  Ay, I know thee.'

Now, this gentleman had various endearing appellations among his 
intimate friends.  By some he was called 'a country gentleman of 
the true school,' by some 'a fine old country gentleman,' by some 
'a sporting gentleman,' by some 'a thorough-bred Englishman,' by 
some 'a genuine John Bull;' but they all agreed in one respect, and 
that was, that it was a pity there were not more like him, and that 
because there were not, the country was going to rack and ruin 
every day.  He was in the commission of the peace, and could write 
his name almost legibly; but his greatest qualifications were, that 
he was more severe with poachers, was a better shot, a harder 
rider, had better horses, kept better dogs, could eat more solid 
food, drink more strong wine, go to bed every night more drunk and 
get up every morning more sober, than any man in the county.  In 
knowledge of horseflesh he was almost equal to a farrier, in stable 
learning he surpassed his own head groom, and in gluttony not a pig 
on his estate was a match for him.  He had no seat in Parliament 
himself, but he was extremely patriotic, and usually drove his 
voters up to the poll with his own hands.  He was warmly attached 
to church and state, and never appointed to the living in his gift 
any but a three-bottle man and a first-rate fox-hunter.  He 
mistrusted the honesty of all poor people who could read and write, 
and had a secret jealousy of his own wife (a young lady whom he had 
married for what his friends called 'the good old English reason,' 
that her father's property adjoined his own) for possessing those 
accomplishments in a greater degree than himself.  In short, 
Barnaby being an idiot, and Grip a creature of mere brute instinct, 
it would be very hard to say what this gentleman was.

He rode up to the door of a handsome house approached by a great 
flight of steps, where a man was waiting to take his horse, and led 
the way into a large hall, which, spacious as it was, was tainted 
with the fumes of last night's stale debauch.  Greatcoats, riding-
whips, bridles, top-boots, spurs, and such gear, were strewn about 
on all sides, and formed, with some huge stags' antlers, and a few 
portraits of dogs and horses, its principal embellishments.

Throwing himself into a great chair (in which, by the bye, he often 
snored away the night, when he had been, according to his admirers, 
a finer country gentleman than usual) he bade the man to tell his 
mistress to come down: and presently there appeared, a little 
flurried, as it seemed, by the unwonted summons, a lady much 
younger than himself, who had the appearance of being in delicate 
health, and not too happy.

'Here!  Thou'st no delight in following the hounds as an 
Englishwoman should have,' said the gentleman.  'See to this 
here.  That'll please thee perhaps.'

The lady smiled, sat down at a little distance from him, and 
glanced at Barnaby with a look of pity.

'He's an idiot, the woman says,' observed the gentleman, shaking 
his head; 'I don't believe it.'

'Are you his mother?' asked the lady.

She answered yes.

'What's the use of asking HER?' said the gentleman, thrusting his 
hands into his breeches pockets.  'She'll tell thee so, of course.  
Most likely he's hired, at so much a day.  There.  Get on.  Make 
him do something.'

Grip having by this time recovered his urbanity, condescended, at 
Barnaby's solicitation, to repeat his various phrases of speech, 
and to go through the whole of his performances with the utmost 
success.  The corks, and the never say die, afforded the gentleman 
so much delight that he demanded the repetition of this part of the 
entertainment, until Grip got into his basket, and positively 
refused to say another word, good or bad.  The lady too, was much 
amused with him; and the closing point of his obstinacy so 
delighted her husband that he burst into a roar of laughter, and 
demanded his price.

Barnaby looked as though he didn't understand his meaning.  
Probably he did not.

'His price,' said the gentleman, rattling the money in his pockets, 
'what dost want for him?  How much?'

'He's not to be sold,' replied Barnaby, shutting up the basket in a 
great hurry, and throwing the strap over his shoulder.  'Mother, 
come away.'

'Thou seest how much of an idiot he is, book-learner,' said the 
gentleman, looking scornfully at his wife.  'He can make a bargain.  
What dost want for him, old woman?'

'He is my son's constant companion,' said the widow.  'He is not to 
be sold, sir, indeed.'

'Not to be sold!' cried the gentleman, growing ten times redder, 
hoarser, and louder than before.  'Not to be sold!'

'Indeed no,' she answered.  'We have never thought of parting with 
him, sir, I do assure you.'

He was evidently about to make a very passionate retort, when a few 
murmured words from his wife happening to catch his ear, he turned 
sharply round, and said, 'Eh?  What?'

'We can hardly expect them to sell the bird, against their own 
desire,' she faltered.  'If they prefer to keep him--'

'Prefer to keep him!' he echoed.  'These people, who go tramping 
about the country a-pilfering and vagabondising on all hands, 
prefer to keep a bird, when a landed proprietor and a justice asks 
his price!  That old woman's been to school.  I know she has.  
Don't tell me no,' he roared to the widow, 'I say, yes.'

Barnaby's mother pleaded guilty to the accusation, and hoped there 
was no harm in it.

'No harm!' said the gentleman.  'No.  No harm.  No harm, ye old 
rebel, not a bit of harm.  If my clerk was here, I'd set ye in the 
stocks, I would, or lay ye in jail for prowling up and down, on the 
look-out for petty larcenies, ye limb of a gipsy.  Here, Simon, put 
these pilferers out, shove 'em into the road, out with 'em!  Ye 
don't want to sell the bird, ye that come here to beg, don't ye?  
If they an't out in double-quick, set the dogs upon 'em!'

They waited for no further dismissal, but fled precipitately, 
leaving the gentleman to storm away by himself (for the poor lady 
had already retreated), and making a great many vain attempts to 
silence Grip, who, excited by the noise, drew corks enough for a 
city feast as they hurried down the avenue, and appeared to 
congratulate himself beyond measure on having been the cause of the 
disturbance.  When they had nearly reached the lodge, another 
servant, emerging from the shrubbery, feigned to be very active 
in ordering them off, but this man put a crown into the widow's 
hand, and whispering that his lady sent it, thrust them gently from 
the gate.

This incident only suggested to the widow's mind, when they halted 
at an alehouse some miles further on, and heard the justice's 
character as given by his friends, that perhaps something more than 
capacity of stomach and tastes for the kennel and the stable, were 
required to form either a perfect country gentleman, a thoroughbred 
Englishman, or a genuine John Bull; and that possibly the terms 
were sometimes misappropriated, not to say disgraced.  She little 
thought then, that a circumstance so slight would ever influence 
their future fortunes; but time and experience enlightened her in 
this respect.

'Mother,' said Barnaby, as they were sitting next day in a waggon 
which was to take them within ten miles of the capital, 'we're 
going to London first, you said.  Shall we see that blind man 
there?'

She was about to answer 'Heaven forbid!' but checked herself, and 
told him No, she thought not; why did he ask?

'He's a wise man,' said Barnaby, with a thoughtful countenance.  'I 
wish that we may meet with him again.  What was it that he said of 
crowds?  That gold was to be found where people crowded, and not 
among the trees and in such quiet places?  He spoke as if he loved 
it; London is a crowded place; I think we shall meet him there.'

'But why do you desire to see him, love?' she asked.

'Because,' said Barnaby, looking wistfully at her, 'he talked to me 
about gold, which is a rare thing, and say what you will, a thing 
you would like to have, I know.  And because he came and went away 
so strangely--just as white-headed old men come sometimes to my 
bed's foot in the night, and say what I can't remember when the 
bright day returns.  He told me he'd come back.  I wonder why he 
broke his word!'

'But you never thought of being rich or gay, before, dear Barnaby.  
You have always been contented.'

He laughed and bade her say that again, then cried, 'Ay ay--oh 
yes,' and laughed once more.  Then something passed that caught his 
fancy, and the topic wandered from his mind, and was succeeded by 
another just as fleeting.

But it was plain from what he had said, and from his returning to 
the point more than once that day, and on the next, that the blind 
man's visit, and indeed his words, had taken strong possession of 
his mind.  Whether the idea of wealth had occurred to him for the 
first time on looking at the golden clouds that evening--and images 
were often presented to his thoughts by outward objects quite as 
remote and distant; or whether their poor and humble way of life 
had suggested it, by contrast, long ago; or whether the accident 
(as he would deem it) of the blind man's pursuing the current of 
his own remarks, had done so at the moment; or he had been 
impressed by the mere circumstance of the man being blind, and, 
therefore, unlike any one with whom he had talked before; it was 
impossible to tell.  She tried every means to discover, but in 
vain; and the probability is that Barnaby himself was equally in 
the dark.

It filled her with uneasiness to find him harping on this string, 
but all that she could do, was to lead him quickly to some other 
subject, and to dismiss it from his brain.  To caution him against 
their visitor, to show any fear or suspicion in reference to him, 
would only be, she feared, to increase that interest with which 
Barnaby regarded him, and to strengthen his desire to meet him once 
again.  She hoped, by plunging into the crowd, to rid herself of 
her terrible pursuer, and then, by journeying to a distance and 
observing increased caution, if that were possible, to live again 
unknown, in secrecy and peace.

They reached, in course of time, their halting-place within ten 
miles of London, and lay there for the night, after bargaining to 
be carried on for a trifle next day, in a light van which was 
returning empty, and was to start at five o'clock in the morning.  
The driver was punctual, the road good--save for the dust, the 
weather being very hot and dry--and at seven in the forenoon of 
Friday the second of June, one thousand seven hundred and eighty, 
they alighted at the foot of Westminster Bridge, bade their 
conductor farewell, and stood alone, together, on the scorching 
pavement.  For the freshness which night sheds upon such busy 
thoroughfares had already departed, and the sun was shining with 
uncommon lustre.



Chapter 48


Uncertain where to go next, and bewildered by the crowd of people 
who were already astir, they sat down in one of the recesses on the 
bridge, to rest.  They soon became aware that the stream of life 
was all pouring one way, and that a vast throng of persons were 
crossing the river from the Middlesex to the Surrey shore, in 
unusual haste and evident excitement.  They were, for the most 
part, in knots of two or three, or sometimes half-a-dozen; they 
spoke little together--many of them were quite silent; and hurried 
on as if they had one absorbing object in view, which was common to 
them all.

They were surprised to see that nearly every man in this great 
concourse, which still came pouring past, without slackening in the 
least, wore in his hat a blue cockade; and that the chance 
passengers who were not so decorated, appeared timidly anxious to 
escape observation or attack, and gave them the wall as if they 
would conciliate them.  This, however, was natural enough, 
considering their inferiority in point of numbers; for the 
proportion of those who wore blue cockades, to those who were 
dressed as usual, was at least forty or fifty to one.  There was no 
quarrelling, however: the blue cockades went swarming on, passing 
each other when they could, and making all the speed that was 
possible in such a multitude; and exchanged nothing more than 
looks, and very often not even those, with such of the passers-by 
as were not of their number.

At first, the current of people had been confined to the two 
pathways, and but a few more eager stragglers kept the road.  But 
after half an hour or so, the passage was completely blocked up by 
the great press, which, being now closely wedged together, and 
impeded by the carts and coaches it encountered, moved but slowly, 
and was sometimes at a stand for five or ten minutes together.

After the lapse of nearly two hours, the numbers began to diminish 
visibly, and gradually dwindling away, by little and little, left 
the bridge quite clear, save that, now and then, some hot and dusty 
man, with the cockade in his hat, and his coat thrown over his 
shoulder, went panting by, fearful of being too late, or stopped to 
ask which way his friends had taken, and being directed, hastened 
on again like one refreshed.  In this comparative solitude, which 
seemed quite strange and novel after the late crowd, the widow had 
for the first time an opportunity of inquiring of an old man who 
came and sat beside them, what was the meaning of that great 
assemblage.

'Why, where have you come from,' he returned, 'that you haven't 
heard of Lord George Gordon's great association?  This is the day 
that he presents the petition against the Catholics, God bless 
him!'

'What have all these men to do with that?' she said.

'What have they to do with it!' the old man replied.  'Why, how you 
talk!  Don't you know his lordship has declared he won't present it 
to the house at all, unless it is attended to the door by forty 
thousand good and true men at least?  There's a crowd for you!'

'A crowd indeed!' said Barnaby.  'Do you hear that, mother!'

'And they're mustering yonder, as I am told,' resumed the old man, 
'nigh upon a hundred thousand strong.  Ah!  Let Lord George alone.  
He knows his power.  There'll be a good many faces inside them 
three windows over there,' and he pointed to where the House of 
Commons overlooked the river, 'that'll turn pale when good Lord 
George gets up this afternoon, and with reason too!  Ay, ay.  Let 
his lordship alone.  Let him alone.  HE knows!'  And so, with much 
mumbling and chuckling and shaking of his forefinger, he rose, with 
the assistance of his stick, and tottered off.

'Mother!' said Barnaby, 'that's a brave crowd he talks of.  Come!'

'Not to join it!' cried his mother.

'Yes, yes,' he answered, plucking at her sleeve.  'Why not?  Come!'

'You don't know,' she urged, 'what mischief they may do, where they 
may lead you, what their meaning is.  Dear Barnaby, for my sake--'

'For your sake!' he cried, patting her hand.  'Well! It IS for your 
sake, mother.  You remember what the blind man said, about the 
gold.  Here's a brave crowd!  Come!  Or wait till I come back--yes, 
yes, wait here.'

She tried with all the earnestness her fears engendered, to turn 
him from his purpose, but in vain.  He was stooping down to buckle 
on his shoe, when a hackney-coach passed them rather quickly, and a 
voice inside called to the driver to stop.

'Young man,' said a voice within.

'Who's that?' cried Barnaby, looking up.

'Do you wear this ornament?' returned the stranger, holding out a 
blue cockade.

'In Heaven's name, no.  Pray do not give it him!' exclaimed the 
widow.

'Speak for yourself, woman,' said the man within the coach, coldly.  
'Leave the young man to his choice; he's old enough to make it, and 
to snap your apron-strings.  He knows, without your telling, 
whether he wears the sign of a loyal Englishman or not.'

Barnaby, trembling with impatience, cried, 'Yes! yes, yes, I do,' 
as he had cried a dozen times already.  The man threw him a 
cockade, and crying, 'Make haste to St George's Fields,' ordered 
the coachman to drive on fast; and left them.

With hands that trembled with his eagerness to fix the bauble in 
his hat, Barnaby was adjusting it as he best could, and hurriedly 
replying to the tears and entreaties of his mother, when two 
gentlemen passed on the opposite side of the way.  Observing them, 
and seeing how Barnaby was occupied, they stopped, whispered 
together for an instant, turned back, and came over to them.

'Why are you sitting here?' said one of them, who was dressed in a 
plain suit of black, wore long lank hair, and carried a great cane.  
'Why have you not gone with the rest?'

'I am going, sir,' replied Barnaby, finishing his task, and putting 
his hat on with an air of pride.  'I shall be there directly.'

'Say "my lord," young man, when his lordship does you the honour of 
speaking to you,' said the second gentleman mildly.  'If you don't 
know Lord George Gordon when you see him, it's high time you 
should.'

'Nay, Gashford,' said Lord George, as Barnaby pulled off his hat 
again and made him a low bow, 'it's no great matter on a day like 
this, which every Englishman will remember with delight and pride.  
Put on your hat, friend, and follow us, for you lag behind and are 
late.  It's past ten now.  Didn't you know that the hour for 
assembling was ten o'clock?'

Barnaby shook his head and looked vacantly from one to the other.

'You might have known it, friend,' said Gashford, 'it was perfectly 
understood.  How came you to be so ill informed?'

'He cannot tell you, sir,' the widow interposed.  'It's of no use 
to ask him.  We are but this morning come from a long distance in 
the country, and know nothing of these matters.'

'The cause has taken a deep root, and has spread its branches far 
and wide,' said Lord George to his secretary.  'This is a pleasant 
hearing.  I thank Heaven for it!'

'Amen!' cried Gashford with a solemn face.

'You do not understand me, my lord,' said the widow.  'Pardon me, 
but you cruelly mistake my meaning.  We know nothing of these 
matters.  We have no desire or right to join in what you are about 
to do.  This is my son, my poor afflicted son, dearer to me than my 
own life.  In mercy's name, my lord, go your way alone, and do not 
tempt him into danger!'

'My good woman,' said Gashford, 'how can you!--Dear me!--What do 
you mean by tempting, and by danger?  Do you think his lordship is 
a roaring lion, going about and seeking whom he may devour?  God 
bless me!'

'No, no, my lord, forgive me,' implored the widow, laying both her 
hands upon his breast, and scarcely knowing what she did, or said, 
in the earnestness of her supplication, 'but there are reasons why 
you should hear my earnest, mother's prayer, and leave my son with 
me.  Oh do!  He is not in his right senses, he is not, indeed!'

'It is a bad sign of the wickedness of these times,' said Lord 
George, evading her touch, and colouring deeply, 'that those who 
cling to the truth and support the right cause, are set down as 
mad.  Have you the heart to say this of your own son, unnatural 
mother!'

'I am astonished at you!' said Gashford, with a kind of meek 
severity.  'This is a very sad picture of female depravity.'

'He has surely no appearance,' said Lord George, glancing at 
Barnaby, and whispering in his secretary's ear, 'of being deranged?  
And even if he had, we must not construe any trifling peculiarity 
into madness.  Which of us'--and here he turned red again--'would 
be safe, if that were made the law!'

'Not one,' replied the secretary; 'in that case, the greater the 
zeal, the truth, and talent; the more direct the call from above; 
the clearer would be the madness.  With regard to this young man, 
my lord,' he added, with a lip that slightly curled as he looked at 
Barnaby, who stood twirling his hat, and stealthily beckoning them 
to come away, 'he is as sensible and self-possessed as any one I 
ever saw.'

'And you desire to make one of this great body?' said Lord George, 
addressing him; 'and intended to make one, did you?'

'Yes--yes,' said Barnaby, with sparkling eyes.  'To be sure I did!  
I told her so myself.'

'I see,' replied Lord George, with a reproachful glance at the 
unhappy mother.  'I thought so.  Follow me and this gentleman, and 
you shall have your wish.'

Barnaby kissed his mother tenderly on the cheek, and bidding her be 
of good cheer, for their fortunes were both made now, did as he was 
desired.  She, poor woman, followed too--with how much fear and 
grief it would be hard to tell.

They passed quickly through the Bridge Road, where the shops were 
all shut up (for the passage of the great crowd and the expectation 
of their return had alarmed the tradesmen for their goods and 
windows), and where, in the upper stories, all the inhabitants were 
congregated, looking down into the street below, with faces 
variously expressive of alarm, of interest, expectancy, and 
indignation.  Some of these applauded, and some hissed; but 
regardless of these interruptions--for the noise of a vast 
congregation of people at a little distance, sounded in his ears 
like the roaring of the sea--Lord George Gordon quickened his pace, 
and presently arrived before St George's Fields.

They were really fields at that time, and of considerable extent.  
Here an immense multitude was collected, bearing flags of various 
kinds and sizes, but all of the same colour--blue, like the 
cockades--some sections marching to and fro in military array, and 
others drawn up in circles, squares, and lines.  A large portion, 
both of the bodies which paraded the ground, and of those which 
remained stationary, were occupied in singing hymns or psalms.  
With whomsoever this originated, it was well done; for the sound of 
so many thousand voices in the air must have stirred the heart of 
any man within him, and could not fail to have a wonderful effect 
upon enthusiasts, however mistaken.

Scouts had been posted in advance of the great body, to give notice 
of their leader's coming.  These falling back, the word was quickly 
passed through the whole host, and for a short interval there 
ensued a profound and deathlike silence, during which the mass was 
so still and quiet, that the fluttering of a banner caught the eye, 
and became a circumstance of note.  Then they burst into a 
tremendous shout, into another, and another; and the air seemed 
rent and shaken, as if by the discharge of cannon.

'Gashford!' cried Lord George, pressing his secretary's arm tight 
within his own, and speaking with as much emotion in his voice, as 
in his altered face, 'I arn called indeed, now.  I feel and know 
it.  I am the leader of a host.  If they summoned me at this moment 
with one voice to lead them on to death, I'd do it--Yes, and fall 
first myself!'

'It is a proud sight,' said the secretary.  'It is a noble day for 
England, and for the great cause throughout the world.  Such 
homage, my lord, as I, an humble but devoted man, can render--'

'What are you doing?' cried his master, catching him by both hands; 
for he had made a show of kneeling at his feet.  'Do not unfit me, 
dear Gashford, for the solemn duty of this glorious day--' the 
tears stood in the eyes of the poor gentleman as he said the 
words.--'Let us go among them; we have to find a place in some 
division for this new recruit--give me your hand.'

Gashford slid his cold insidious palm into his master's grasp, and 
so, hand in hand, and followed still by Barnaby and by his mother 
too, they mingled with the concourse.

They had by this time taken to their singing again, and as their 
leader passed between their ranks, they raised their voices to 
their utmost.  Many of those who were banded together to support 
the religion of their country, even unto death, had never heard a 
hymn or psalm in all their lives.  But these fellows having for the 
most part strong lungs, and being naturally fond of singing, 
chanted any ribaldry or nonsense that occurred to them, feeling 
pretty certain that it would not be detected in the general chorus, 
and not caring much if it were.  Many of these voluntaries were 
sung under the very nose of Lord George Gordon, who, quite 
unconscious of their burden, passed on with his usual stiff and 
solemn deportment, very much edified and delighted by the pious 
conduct of his followers.

So they went on and on, up this line, down that, round the exterior 
of this circle, and on every side of that hollow square; and still 
there were lines, and squares, and circles out of number to review.  
The day being now intensely hot, and the sun striking down his 
fiercest rays upon the field, those who carried heavy banners began 
to grow faint and weary; most of the number assembled were fain to 
pull off their neckcloths, and throw their coats and waistcoats 
open; and some, towards the centre, quite overpowered by the 
excessive heat, which was of course rendered more unendurable by 
the multitude around them, lay down upon the grass, and offered all 
they had about them for a drink of water.  Still, no man left the 
ground, not even of those who were so distressed; still Lord 
George, streaming from every pore, went on with Gashford; and still 
Barnaby and his mother followed close behind them.

They had arrived at the top of a long line of some eight hundred 
men in single file, and Lord George had turned his head to look 
back, when a loud cry of recognition--in that peculiar and half-
stifled tone which a voice has, when it is raised in the open air 
and in the midst of a great concourse of persons--was heard, and a 
man stepped with a shout of laughter from the rank, and smote 
Barnaby on the shoulders with his heavy hand.

'How now!' he cried.  'Barnaby Rudge!  Why, where have you been 
hiding for these hundred years?'

Barnaby had been thinking within himself that the smell of the 
trodden grass brought back his old days at cricket, when he was a 
young boy and played on Chigwell Green.  Confused by this sudden 
and boisterous address, he stared in a bewildered manner at the 
man, and could scarcely say 'What! Hugh!'

'Hugh!' echoed the other; 'ay, Hugh--Maypole Hugh!  You remember my 
dog?  He's alive now, and will know you, I warrant.  What, you wear 
the colour, do you?  Well done!  Ha ha ha!'

'You know this young man, I see,' said Lord George.

'Know him, my lord! as well as I know my own right hand.  My 
captain knows him.  We all know him.'

'Will you take him into your division?'

'It hasn't in it a better, nor a nimbler, nor a more active man, 
than Barnaby Rudge,' said Hugh.  'Show me the man who says it has!  
Fall in, Barnaby.  He shall march, my lord, between me and Dennis; 
and he shall carry,' he added, taking a flag from the hand of a 
tired man who tendered it, 'the gayest silken streamer in this 
valiant army.'

'In the name of God, no!' shrieked the widow, darting forward.  
'Barnaby--my lord--see--he'll come back--Barnaby--Barnaby!'

'Women in the field!' cried Hugh, stepping between them, and 
holding her off.  'Holloa!  My captain there!'

'What's the matter here?' cried Simon Tappertit, bustling up in a 
great heat.  'Do you call this order?'

'Nothing like it, captain,' answered Hugh, still holding her back 
with his outstretched hand.  'It's against all orders.  Ladies are 
carrying off our gallant soldiers from their duty.  The word of 
command, captain!  They're filing off the ground.  Quick!'

'Close!' cried Simon, with the whole power of his lungs.  'Form!  
March!'

She was thrown to the ground; the whole field was in motion; 
Barnaby was whirled away into the heart of a dense mass of men, and 
she saw him no more.



Chapter 49


The mob had been divided from its first assemblage into four 
divisions; the London, the Westminster, the Southwark, and the 
Scotch.  Each of these divisions being subdivided into various 
bodies, and these bodies being drawn up in various forms and 
figures, the general arrangement was, except to the few chiefs and 
leaders, as unintelligible as the plan of a great battle to the 
meanest soldier in the field.  It was not without its method, 
however; for, in a very short space of time after being put in 
motion, the crowd had resolved itself into three great parties, and 
were prepared, as had been arranged, to cross the river by 
different bridges, and make for the House of Commons in separate 
detachments.

At the head of that division which had Westminster Bridge for its 
approach to the scene of action, Lord George Gordon took his post; 
with Gashford at his right hand, and sundry ruffians, of most 
unpromising appearance, forming a kind of staff about him.  The 
conduct of a second party, whose route lay by Blackfriars, was 
entrusted to a committee of management, including perhaps a dozen 
men: while the third, which was to go by London Bridge, and through 
the main streets, in order that their numbers and their serious 
intentions might be the better known and appreciated by the 
citizens, were led by Simon Tappertit (assisted by a few 
subalterns, selected from the Brotherhood of United Bulldogs), 
Dennis the hangman, Hugh, and some others.

The word of command being given, each of these great bodies took 
the road assigned to it, and departed on its way, in perfect order 
and profound silence.  That which went through the City greatly 
exceeded the others in number, and was of such prodigious extent 
that when the rear began to move, the front was nearly four miles 
in advance, notwithstanding that the men marched three abreast and 
followed very close upon each other.

At the head of this party, in the place where Hugh, in the madness 
of his humour, had stationed him, and walking between that 
dangerous companion and the hangman, went Barnaby; as many a man 
among the thousands who looked on that day afterwards remembered 
well.  Forgetful of all other things in the ecstasy of the moment, 
his face flushed and his eyes sparkling with delight, heedless of 
the weight of the great banner he carried, and mindful only of its 
flashing in the sun and rustling in the summer breeze, on he went, 
proud, happy, elated past all telling:--the only light-hearted, 
undesigning creature, in the whole assembly.

'What do you think of this?' asked Hugh, as they passed through the 
crowded streets, and looked up at the windows which were thronged 
with spectators.  'They have all turned out to see our flags and 
streamers?  Eh, Barnaby?  Why, Barnaby's the greatest man of all 
the pack!  His flag's the largest of the lot, the brightest too.  
There's nothing in the show, like Barnaby.  All eyes are turned on 
him.  Ha ha ha!'

'Don't make that din, brother,' growled the hangman, glancing with 
no very approving eyes at Barnaby as he spoke: 'I hope he don't 
think there's nothing to be done, but carrying that there piece of 
blue rag, like a boy at a breaking up.  You're ready for action I 
hope, eh?  You, I mean,' he added, nudging Barnaby roughly with 
his elbow.  'What are you staring at?  Why don't you speak?'

Barnaby had been gazing at his flag, and looked vacantly from his 
questioner to Hugh.

'He don't understand your way,' said the latter.  'Here, I'll 
explain it to him.  Barnaby old boy, attend to me.'

'I'll attend,' said Barnaby, looking anxiously round; 'but I wish 
I could see her somewhere.'

'See who?' demanded Dennis in a gruff tone.  'You an't in love I 
hope, brother?  That an't the sort of thing for us, you know.  We 
mustn't have no love here.'

'She would be proud indeed to see me now, eh Hugh?' said Barnaby.  
'Wouldn't it make her glad to see me at the head of this large 
show?  She'd cry for joy, I know she would.  Where CAN she be?  She 
never sees me at my best, and what do I care to be gay and fine if 
SHE'S not by?'

'Why, what palaver's this?' asked Mr Dennis with supreme disdain.  
'We an't got no sentimental members among us, I hope.'

'Don't be uneasy, brother,' cried Hugh, 'he's only talking of his 
mother.'

'Of his what?' said Mr Dennis with a strong oath.

'His mother.'

'And have I combined myself with this here section, and turned out 
on this here memorable day, to hear men talk about their mothers!' 
growled Mr Dennis with extreme disgust.  'The notion of a man's 
sweetheart's bad enough, but a man's mother!'--and here his disgust 
was so extreme that he spat upon the ground, and could say no more.

'Barnaby's right,' cried Hugh with a grin, 'and I say it.  Lookee, 
bold lad.  If she's not here to see, it's because I've provided for 
her, and sent half-a-dozen gentlemen, every one of 'em with a 
blue flag (but not half as fine as yours), to take her, in state, 
to a grand house all hung round with gold and silver banners, and 
everything else you please, where she'll wait till you come, and 
want for nothing.'

'Ay!' said Barnaby, his face beaming with delight: 'have you 
indeed?  That's a good hearing.  That's fine!  Kind Hugh!'

'But nothing to what will come, bless you,' retorted Hugh, with a 
wink at Dennis, who regarded his new companion in arms with great 
astonishment.

'No, indeed?' cried Barnaby.

'Nothing at all,' said Hugh.  'Money, cocked hats and feathers, red 
coats and gold lace; all the fine things there are, ever were, or 
will be; will belong to us if we are true to that noble gentleman--
the best man in the world--carry our flags for a few days, and keep 
'em safe.  That's all we've got to do.'

'Is that all?' cried Barnaby with glistening eyes, as he clutched 
his pole the tighter; 'I warrant you I keep this one safe, then.  
You have put it in good hands.  You know me, Hugh.  Nobody shall 
wrest this flag away.'

'Well said!' cried Hugh.  'Ha ha!  Nobly said!  That's the old 
stout Barnaby, that I have climbed and leaped with, many and many a 
day--I knew I was not mistaken in Barnaby.--Don't you see, man,' he 
added in a whisper, as he slipped to the other side of Dennis, 
'that the lad's a natural, and can be got to do anything, if you 
take him the right way?  Letting alone the fun he is, he's worth a 
dozen men, in earnest, as you'd find if you tried a fall with him.  
Leave him to me.  You shall soon see whether he's of use or not.'

Mr Dennis received these explanatory remarks with many nods and 
winks, and softened his behaviour towards Barnaby from that moment.  
Hugh, laying his finger on his nose, stepped back into his former 
place, and they proceeded in silence.

It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon when the 
three great parties met at Westminster, and, uniting into one huge 
mass, raised a tremendous shout.  This was not only done in token 
of their presence, but as a signal to those on whom the task 
devolved, that it was time to take possession of the lobbies of 
both Houses, and of the various avenues of approach, and of the 
gallery stairs.  To the last-named place, Hugh and Dennis, still 
with their pupil between them, rushed straightway; Barnaby having 
given his flag into the hands of one of their own party, who kept 
them at the outer door.  Their followers pressing on behind, they 
were borne as on a great wave to the very doors of the gallery, 
whence it was impossible to retreat, even if they had been so 
inclined, by reason of the throng which choked up the passages.  It 
is a familiar expression in describing a great crowd, that a person 
might have walked upon the people's heads.  In this case it was 
actually done; for a boy who had by some means got among the 
concourse, and was in imminent danger of suffocation, climbed to 
the shoulders of a man beside him and walked upon the people's hats 
and heads into the open street; traversing in his passage the whole 
length of two staircases and a long gallery.  Nor was the swarm 
without less dense; for a basket which had been tossed into the 
crowd, was jerked from head to head, and shoulder to shoulder, and 
went spinning and whirling on above them, until it was lost to 
view, without ever once falling in among them or coming near the 
ground.

Through this vast throng, sprinkled doubtless here and there with 
honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and 
refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, 
bad prison regulations, and the worst conceivable police, such of 
the members of both Houses of Parliament as had not taken the 
precaution to be already at their posts, were compelled to fight 
and force their way.  Their carriages were stopped and broken; the 
wheels wrenched off; the glasses shivered to atoms; the panels 
beaten in; drivers, footmen, and masters, pulled from their seats 
and rolled in the mud.  Lords, commoners, and reverend bishops, 
with little distinction of person or party, were kicked and pinched 
and hustled; passed from hand to hand through various stages of 
ill-usage; and sent to their fellow-senators at last with their 
clothes hanging in ribands about them, their bagwigs torn off, 
themselves speechless and breathless, and their persons covered 
with the powder which had been cuffed and beaten out of their hair.  
One lord was so long in the hands of the populace, that the Peers 
as a body resolved to sally forth and rescue him, and were in the 
act of doing so, when he happily appeared among them covered with 
dirt and bruises, and hardly to be recognised by those who knew him 
best.  The noise and uproar were on the increase every moment.  The 
air was filled with execrations, hoots, and howlings.  The mob 
raged and roared, like a mad monster as it was, unceasingly, and 
each new outrage served to swell its fury.

Within doors, matters were even yet more threatening.  Lord George--
preceded by a man who carried the immense petition on a porter's 
knot through the lobby to the door of the House of Commons, where 
it was received by two officers of the house who rolled it up to 
the table ready for presentation--had taken his seat at an early 
hour, before the Speaker went to prayers.  His followers pouring in 
at the same time, the lobby and all the avenues were immediately 
filled, as we have seen.  Thus the members were not only attacked 
in their passage through the streets, but were set upon within the 
very walls of Parliament; while the tumult, both within and 
without, was so great, that those who attempted to speak could 
scarcely hear their own voices: far less, consult upon the course 
it would be wise to take in such extremity, or animate each other 
to dignified and firm resistance.  So sure as any member, just 
arrived, with dress disordered and dishevelled hair, came 
struggling through the crowd in the lobby, it yelled and screamed 
in triumph; and when the door of the House, partially and 
cautiously opened by those within for his admission, gave them a 
momentary glimpse of the interior, they grew more wild and savage, 
like beasts at the sight of prey, and made a rush against the 
portal which strained its locks and bolts in their staples, and 
shook the very beams.

The strangers' gallery, which was immediately above the door of the 
House, had been ordered to be closed on the first rumour of 
disturbance, and was empty; save that now and then Lord George took 
his seat there, for the convenience of coming to the head of the 
stairs which led to it, and repeating to the people what had passed 
within.  It was on these stairs that Barnaby, Hugh, and Dennis were 
posted.  There were two flights, short, steep, and narrow, running 
parallel to each other, and leading to two little doors 
communicating with a low passage which opened on the gallery.  
Between them was a kind of well, or unglazed skylight, for the 
admission of light and air into the lobby, which might be some 
eighteen or twenty feet below.

Upon one of these little staircases--not that at the head of which 
Lord George appeared from time to time, but the other--Gashford 
stood with his elbow on the bannister, and his cheek resting on his 
hand, with his usual crafty aspect.  Whenever he varied this 
attitude in the slightest degree--so much as by the gentlest motion 
of his arm--the uproar was certain to increase, not merely there, 
but in the lobby below; from which place no doubt, some man who 
acted as fugleman to the rest, was constantly looking up and 
watching him.

'Order!' cried Hugh, in a voice which made itself heard even above 
the roar and tumult, as Lord George appeared at the top of the 
staircase.  'News!  News from my lord!'

The noise continued, notwithstanding his appearance, until Gashford 
looked round.  There was silence immediately--even among the people 
in the passages without, and on the other staircases, who could 
neither see nor hear, but to whom, notwithstanding, the signal was 
conveyed with marvellous rapidity.

'Gentlemen,' said Lord George, who was very pale and agitated, we 
must be firm.  They talk of delays, but we must have no delays.  
They talk of taking your petition into consideration next Tuesday, 
but we must have it considered now.  Present appearances look bad 
for our success, but we must succeed and will!'

'We must succeed and will!' echoed the crowd.  And so among their 
shouts and cheers and other cries, he bowed to them and retired, 
and presently came back again.  There was another gesture from 
Gashford, and a dead silence directly.

'I am afraid,' he said, this time, 'that we have little reason, 
gentlemen, to hope for any redress from the proceedings of 
Parliament.  But we must redress our own grievances, we must meet 
again, we must put our trust in Providence, and it will bless our 
endeavours.'

This speech being a little more temperate than the last, was not so 
favourably received.  When the noise and exasperation were at their 
height, he came back once more, and told them that the alarm had 
gone forth for many miles round; that when the King heard of their 
assembling together in that great body, he had no doubt, His 
Majesty would send down private orders to have their wishes 
complied with; and--with the manner of his speech as childish, 
irresolute, and uncertain as his matter--was proceeding in this 
strain, when two gentlemen suddenly appeared at the door where he 
stood, and pressing past him and coming a step or two lower down 
upon the stairs, confronted the people.

The boldness of this action quite took them by surprise.  They were 
not the less disconcerted, when one of the gentlemen, turning to 
Lord George, spoke thus--in a loud voice that they might hear him 
well, but quite coolly and collectedly:

'You may tell these people, if you please, my lord, that I am 
General Conway of whom they have heard; and that I oppose this 
petition, and all their proceedings, and yours.  I am a soldier, 
you may tell them, and I will protect the freedom of this place 
with my sword.  You see, my lord, that the members of this House 
are all in arms to-day; you know that the entrance to it is a 
narrow one; you cannot be ignorant that there are men within these 
walls who are determined to defend that pass to the last, and 
before whom many lives must fall if your adherents persevere.  Have 
a care what you do.'

'And my Lord George,' said the other gentleman, addressing him in 
like manner, 'I desire them to hear this, from me--Colonel Gordon--
your near relation.  If a man among this crowd, whose uproar 
strikes us deaf, crosses the threshold of the House of Commons, I 
swear to run my sword that moment--not into his, but into your 
body!'

With that, they stepped back again, keeping their faces towards the 
crowd; took each an arm of the misguided nobleman; drew him into 
the passage, and shut the door; which they directly locked and 
fastened on the inside.

This was so quickly done, and the demeanour of both gentlemen--who 
were not young men either--was so gallant and resolute, that the 
crowd faltered and stared at each other with irresolute and timid 
looks.  Many tried to turn towards the door; some of the faintest-
hearted cried they had best go back, and called to those behind to 
give way; and the panic and confusion were increasing rapidly, when 
Gashford whispered Hugh.

'What now!' Hugh roared aloud, turning towards them.  'Why go back?  
Where can you do better than here, boys!  One good rush against 
these doors and one below at the same time, will do the business.  
Rush on, then!  As to the door below, let those stand back who are 
afraid.  Let those who are not afraid, try who shall be the first 
to pass it.  Here goes!  Look out down there!'

Without the delay of an instant, he threw himself headlong over the 
bannisters into the lobby below.  He had hardly touched the ground 
when Barnaby was at his side.  The chaplain's assistant, and some 
members who were imploring the people to retire, immediately 
withdrew; and then, with a great shout, both crowds threw 
themselves against the doors pell-mell, and besieged the House in 
earnest.

At that moment, when a second onset must have brought them into 
collision with those who stood on the defensive within, in which 
case great loss of life and bloodshed would inevitably have 
ensued,--the hindmost portion of the crowd gave way, and the rumour 
spread from mouth to mouth that a messenger had been despatched by 
water for the military, who were forming in the street.  Fearful of 
sustaining a charge in the narrow passages in which they were so 
closely wedged together, the throng poured out as impetuously as 
they had flocked in.  As the whole stream turned at once, Barnaby 
and Hugh went with it: and so, fighting and struggling and 
trampling on fallen men and being trampled on in turn themselves, 
they and the whole mass floated by degrees into the open street, 
where a large detachment of the Guards, both horse and foot, came 
hurrying up; clearing the ground before them so rapidly that the 
people seemed to melt away as they advanced.

The word of command to halt being given, the soldiers formed across 
the street; the rioters, breathless and exhausted with their late 
exertions, formed likewise, though in a very irregular and 
disorderly manner.  The commanding officer rode hastily into the 
open space between the two bodies, accompanied by a magistrate and 
an officer of the House of Commons, for whose accommodation a 
couple of troopers had hastily dismounted.  The Riot Act was read, 
but not a man stirred.

In the first rank of the insurgents, Barnaby and Hugh stood side by 
side.  Somebody had thrust into Barnaby's hands when he came out 
into the street, his precious flag; which, being now rolled up and 
tied round the pole, looked like a giant quarter-staff as he 
grasped it firmly and stood upon his guard.  If ever man believed 
with his whole heart and soul that he was engaged in a just cause, 
and that he was bound to stand by his leader to the last, poor 
Barnaby believed it of himself and Lord George Gordon.

After an ineffectual attempt to make himself heard, the magistrate 
gave the word and the Horse Guards came riding in among the crowd.  
But, even then, he galloped here and there, exhorting the people to 
disperse; and, although heavy stones were thrown at the men, and 
some were desperately cut and bruised, they had no orders but to 
make prisoners of such of the rioters as were the most active, and 
to drive the people back with the flat of their sabres.  As the 
horses came in among them, the throng gave way at many points, and 
the Guards, following up their advantage, were rapidly clearing the 
ground, when two or three of the foremost, who were in a manner cut 
off from the rest by the people closing round them, made straight 
towards Barnaby and Hugh, who had no doubt been pointed out as the 
two men who dropped into the lobby: laying about them now with some 
effect, and inflicting on the more turbulent of their opponents, a 
few slight flesh wounds, under the influence of which a man 
dropped, here and there, into the arms of his fellows, amid much 
groaning and confusion.

At the sight of gashed and bloody faces, seen for a moment in the 
crowd, then hidden by the press around them, Barnaby turned pale 
and sick.  But he stood his ground, and grasping his pole more 
firmly yet, kept his eye fixed upon the nearest soldier--nodding 
his head meanwhile, as Hugh, with a scowling visage, whispered in 
his ear.

The soldier came spurring on, making his horse rear as the people 
pressed about him, cutting at the hands of those who would have 
grasped his rein and forced his charger back, and waving to his 
comrades to follow--and still Barnaby, without retreating an inch, 
waited for his coming.  Some called to him to fly, and some were in 
the very act of closing round him, to prevent his being taken, when 
the pole swept into the air above the people's heads, and the man's 
saddle was empty in an instant.

Then, he and Hugh turned and fled, the crowd opening to let them 
pass, and closing up again so quickly that there was no clue to the 
course they had taken.  Panting for breath, hot, dusty, and 
exhausted with fatigue, they reached the riverside in safety, and 
getting into a boat with all despatch were soon out of any 
immediate danger.

As they glided down the river, they plainly heard the people 
cheering; and supposing they might have forced the soldiers to 
retreat, lay upon their oars for a few minutes, uncertain whether 
to return or not.  But the crowd passing along Westminster Bridge, 
soon assured them that the populace were dispersing; and Hugh 
rightly guessed from this, that they had cheered the magistrate for 
offering to dismiss the military on condition of their immediate 
departure to their several homes, and that he and Barnaby were 
better where they were.  He advised, therefore, that they should 
proceed to Blackfriars, and, going ashore at the bridge, make the 
best of their way to The Boot; where there was not only good 
entertainment and safe lodging, but where they would certainly be 
joined by many of their late companions.  Barnaby assenting, they 
decided on this course of action, and pulled for Blackfriars 
accordingly.

They landed at a critical time, and fortunately for themselves at 
the right moment.  For, coming into Fleet Street, they found it in 
an unusual stir; and inquiring the cause, were told that a body of 
Horse Guards had just galloped past, and that they were escorting 
some rioters whom they had made prisoners, to Newgate for safety.  
Not at all ill-pleased to have so narrowly escaped the cavalcade, 
they lost no more time in asking questions, but hurried to The Boot 
with as much speed as Hugh considered it prudent to make, without 
appearing singular or attracting an inconvenient share of public 
notice.


Chapter 50


They were among the first to reach the tavern, but they had not 
been there many minutes, when several groups of men who had formed 
part of the crowd, came straggling in.  Among them were Simon 
Tappertit and Mr Dennis; both of whom, but especially the latter, 
greeted Barnaby with the utmost warmth, and paid him many 
compliments on the prowess he had shown.

'Which,' said Dennis, with an oath, as he rested his bludgeon in a 
corner with his hat upon it, and took his seat at the same table 
with them, 'it does me good to think of.  There was a opportunity!  
But it led to nothing.  For my part, I don't know what would.  
There's no spirit among the people in these here times.  Bring 
something to eat and drink here.  I'm disgusted with humanity.'

'On what account?' asked Mr Tappertit, who had been quenching his 
fiery face in a half-gallon can.  'Don't you consider this a good 
beginning, mister?'

'Give me security that it an't a ending,' rejoined the hangman.  
'When that soldier went down, we might have made London ours; but 
no;--we stand, and gape, and look on--the justice (I wish he had 
had a bullet in each eye, as he would have had, if we'd gone to 
work my way) says, "My lads, if you'll give me your word to 
disperse, I'll order off the military," our people sets up a 
hurrah, throws up the game with the winning cards in their hands, 
and skulks away like a pack of tame curs as they are.  Ah,' said 
the hangman, in a tone of deep disgust, 'it makes me blush for my 
feller creeturs.  I wish I had been born a ox, I do!'

'You'd have been quite as agreeable a character if you had been, I 
think,' returned Simon Tappertit, going out in a lofty manner.

'Don't be too sure of that,' rejoined the hangman, calling after 
him; 'if I was a horned animal at the present moment, with the 
smallest grain of sense, I'd toss every man in this company, 
excepting them two,' meaning Hugh and Barnaby, 'for his manner of 
conducting himself this day.'

With which mournful review of their proceedings, Mr Dennis sought 
consolation in cold boiled beef and beer; but without at all 
relaxing the grim and dissatisfied expression of his face, the 
gloom of which was rather deepened than dissipated by their 
grateful influence.

The company who were thus libelled might have retaliated by strong 
words, if not by blows, but they were dispirited and worn out.  The 
greater part of them had fasted since morning; all had suffered 
extremely from the excessive heat; and between the day's shouting, 
exertion, and excitement, many had quite lost their voices, and so 
much of their strength that they could hardly stand.  Then they 
were uncertain what to do next, fearful of the consequences of what 
they had done already, and sensible that after all they had carried 
no point, but had indeed left matters worse than they had found 
them.  Of those who had come to The Boot, many dropped off within 
an hour; such of them as were really honest and sincere, never, 
after the morning's experience, to return, or to hold any 
communication with their late companions.  Others remained but to 
refresh themselves, and then went home desponding; others who had 
theretofore been regular in their attendance, avoided the place 
altogether.  The half-dozen prisoners whom the Guards had taken, 
were magnified by report into half-a-hundred at least; and their 
friends, being faint and sober, so slackened in their energy, and 
so drooped beneath these dispiriting influences, that by eight 
o'clock in the evening, Dennis, Hugh, and Barnaby, were left alone.  
Even they were fast asleep upon the benches, when Gashford's 
entrance roused them.

'Oh! you ARE here then?' said the Secretary.  'Dear me!'

'Why, where should we be, Muster Gashford!' Dennis rejoined as he 
rose into a sitting posture.

'Oh nowhere, nowhere,' he returned with excessive mildness.  'The 
streets are filled with blue cockades.  I rather thought you might 
have been among them.  I am glad you are not.'

'You have orders for us, master, then?' said Hugh.

'Oh dear, no.  Not I.  No orders, my good fellow.  What orders 
should I have?  You are not in my service.'

'Muster Gashford,' remonstrated Dennis, 'we belong to the cause, 
don't we?'

'The cause!' repeated the secretary, looking at him in a sort of 
abstraction.  'There is no cause.  The cause is lost.'

'Lost!'

'Oh yes.  You have heard, I suppose?  The petition is rejected by a 
hundred and ninety-two, to six.  It's quite final.  We might have 
spared ourselves some trouble.  That, and my lord's vexation, are 
the only circumstances I regret.  I am quite satisfied in all other 
respects.'

As he said this, he took a penknife from his pocket, and putting 
his hat upon his knee, began to busy himself in ripping off the 
blue cockade which he had worn all day; at the same time humming a 
psalm tune which had been very popular in the morning, and dwelling 
on it with a gentle regret.

His two adherents looked at each other, and at him, as if they 
were at a loss how to pursue the subject.  At length Hugh, after 
some elbowing and winking between himself and Mr Dennis, ventured 
to stay his hand, and to ask him why he meddled with that riband in 
his hat.

'Because,' said the secretary, looking up with something between a 
snarl and a smile; 'because to sit still and wear it, or to fall 
asleep and wear it, is a mockery.  That's all, friend.'

'What would you have us do, master!' cried Hugh.

'Nothing,' returned Gashford, shrugging his shoulders, 'nothing.  
When my lord was reproached and threatened for standing by you, I, 
as a prudent man, would have had you do nothing.  When the soldiers 
were trampling you under their horses' feet, I would have had you 
do nothing.  When one of them was struck down by a daring hand, and 
I saw confusion and dismay in all their faces, I would have had you 
do nothing--just what you did, in short.  This is the young man who 
had so little prudence and so much boldness.  Ah! I am sorry for him.'

'Sorry, master!' cried Hugh.

'Sorry, Muster Gashford!' echoed Dennis.

'In case there should be a proclamation out to-morrow, offering 
five hundred pounds, or some such trifle, for his apprehension; and 
in case it should include another man who dropped into the lobby 
from the stairs above,' said Gashford, coldly; 'still, do nothing.'

'Fire and fury, master!' cried Hugh, starting up.  'What have we 
done, that you should talk to us like this!'

'Nothing,' returned Gashford with a sneer.  'If you are cast into 
prison; if the young man--' here he looked hard at Barnaby's 
attentive face--'is dragged from us and from his friends; perhaps 
from people whom he loves, and whom his death would kill; is thrown 
into jail, brought out and hanged before their eyes; still, do 
nothing.  You'll find it your best policy, I have no doubt.'

'Come on!' cried Hugh, striding towards the door.  'Dennis--
Barnaby--come on!'

'Where?  To do what?' said Gashford, slipping past him, and 
standing with his back against it.

'Anywhere!  Anything!' cried Hugh.  'Stand aside, master, or the 
window will serve our turn as well.  Let us out!'

'Ha ha ha!  You are of such--of such an impetuous nature,' said 
Gashford, changing his manner for one of the utmost good fellowship 
and the pleasantest raillery; 'you are such an excitable creature--
but you'll drink with me before you go?'

'Oh, yes--certainly,' growled Dennis, drawing his sleeve across his 
thirsty lips.  'No malice, brother.  Drink with Muster Gashford!'

Hugh wiped his heated brow, and relaxed into a smile.  The artful 
secretary laughed outright.

'Some liquor here!  Be quick, or he'll not stop, even for that.  He 
is a man of such desperate ardour!' said the smooth secretary, whom 
Mr Dennis corroborated with sundry nods and muttered oaths--'Once 
roused, he is a fellow of such fierce determination!'

Hugh poised his sturdy arm aloft, and clapping Barnaby on the back, 
bade him fear nothing.  They shook hands together--poor Barnaby 
evidently possessed with the idea that he was among the most 
virtuous and disinterested heroes in the world--and Gashford 
laughed again.

'I hear,' he said smoothly, as he stood among them with a great 
measure of liquor in his hand, and filled their glasses as quickly 
and as often as they chose, 'I hear--but I cannot say whether it be 
true or false--that the men who are loitering in the streets to-
night are half disposed to pull down a Romish chapel or two, and 
that they only want leaders.  I even heard mention of those in Duke 
Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and in Warwick Street, Golden 
Square; but common report, you know--You are not going?'

--'To do nothing, rnaster, eh?' cried Hugh.  'No jails and halter 
for Barnaby and me.  They must be frightened out of that.  Leaders 
are wanted, are they?  Now boys!'

'A most impetuous fellow!' cried the secretary.  'Ha ha!  A 
courageous, boisterous, most vehement fellow!  A man who--'

There was no need to finish the sentence, for they had rushed out 
of the house, and were far beyond hearing.  He stopped in the 
middle of a laugh, listened, drew on his gloves, and, clasping his 
hands behind him, paced the deserted room for a long time, then 
bent his steps towards the busy town, and walked into the streets.

They were filled with people, for the rumour of that day's 
proceedings had made a great noise.  Those persons who did not care 
to leave home, were at their doors or windows, and one topic of 
discourse prevailed on every side.  Some reported that the riots 
were effectually put down; others that they had broken out again: 
some said that Lord George Gordon had been sent under a strong 
guard to the Tower; others that an attempt had been made upon the 
King's life, that the soldiers had been again called out, and that 
the noise of musketry in a distant part of the town had been 
plainly heard within an hour.  As it grew darker, these stories 
became more direful and mysterious; and often, when some 
frightened passenger ran past with tidings that the rioters were 
not far off, and were coming up, the doors were shut and barred, 
lower windows made secure, and as much consternation engendered, as 
if the city were invaded by a foreign army.

Gashford walked stealthily about, listening to all he heard, and 
diffusing or confirming, whenever he had an opportunity, such false 
intelligence as suited his own purpose; and, busily occupied in 
this way, turned into Holborn for the twentieth time, when a great 
many women and children came flying along the street--often panting 
and looking back--and the confused murmur of numerous voices struck 
upon his ear.  Assured by these tokens, and by the red light which 
began to flash upon the houses on either side, that some of his 
friends were indeed approaching, he begged a moment's shelter at a 
door which opened as he passed, and running with some other 
persons to an upper window, looked out upon the crowd.

They had torches among them, and the chief faces were distinctly 
visible.  That they had been engaged in the destruction of some 
building was sufficiently apparent, and that it was a Catholic 
place of worship was evident from the spoils they bore as trophies, 
which were easily recognisable for the vestments of priests, and 
rich fragments of altar furniture.  Covered with soot, and dirt, 
and dust, and lime; their garments torn to rags; their hair hanging 
wildly about them; their hands and faces jagged and bleeding with 
the wounds of rusty nails; Barnaby, Hugh, and Dennis hurried on 
before them all, like hideous madmen.  After them, the dense throng 
came fighting on: some singing; some shouting in triumph; some 
quarrelling among themselves; some menacing the spectators as they 
passed; some with great wooden fragments, on which they spent their 
rage as if they had been alive, rending them limb from limb, and 
hurling the scattered morsels high into the air; some in a drunken 
state, unconscious of the hurts they had received from falling 
bricks, and stones, and beams; one borne upon a shutter, in the 
very midst, covered with a dingy cloth, a senseless, ghastly heap.  
Thus--a vision of coarse faces, with here and there a blot of 
flaring, smoky light; a dream of demon heads and savage eyes, and 
sticks and iron bars uplifted in the air, and whirled about; a 
bewildering horror, in which so much was seen, and yet so little, 
which seemed so long, and yet so short, in which there were so many 
phantoms, not to be forgotten all through life, and yet so many 
things that could not be observed in one distracting glimpse--it 
flitted onward, and was gone.

As it passed away upon its work of wrath and ruin, a piercing 
scream was heard.  A knot of persons ran towards the spot; 
Gashford, who just then emerged into the street, among them.  He 
was on the outskirts of the little concourse, and could not see or 
hear what passed within; but one who had a better place, informed 
him that a widow woman had descried her son among the rioters.

'Is that all?' said the secretary, turning his face homewards.  
'Well! I think this looks a little more like business!'



Chapter 51


Promising as these outrages were to Gashford's view, and much like 
business as they looked, they extended that night no farther.  The 
soldiers were again called out, again they took half-a-dozen 
prisoners, and again the crowd dispersed after a short and 
bloodless scuffle.  Hot and drunken though they were, they had not 
yet broken all bounds and set all law and government at defiance.  
Something of their habitual deference to the authority erected by 
society for its own preservation yet remained among them, and had 
its majesty been vindicated in time, the secretary would have had 
to digest a bitter disappointment.

By midnight, the streets were clear and quiet, and, save that there 
stood in two parts of the town a heap of nodding walls and pile of 
rubbish, where there had been at sunset a rich and handsome 
building, everything wore its usual aspect.  Even the Catholic 
gentry and tradesmen, of whom there were many resident in different 
parts of the City and its suburbs, had no fear for their lives or 
property, and but little indignation for the wrong they had already 
sustained in the plunder and destruction of their temples of 
worship.  An honest confidence in the government under whose 
protection they had lived for many years, and a well-founded 
reliance on the good feeling and right thinking of the great mass 
of the community, with whom, notwithstanding their religious 
differences, they were every day in habits of confidential, 
affectionate, and friendly intercourse, reassured them, even under 
the excesses that had been committed; and convinced them that they 
who were Protestants in anything but the name, were no more to be 
considered as abettors of these disgraceful occurrences, than they 
themselves were chargeable with the uses of the block, the rack, 
the gibbet, and the stake in cruel Mary's reign.

The clock was on the stroke of one, when Gabriel Varden, with his 
lady and Miss Miggs, sat waiting in the little parlour.  This fact; 
the toppling wicks of the dull, wasted candles; the silence that 
prevailed; and, above all, the nightcaps of both maid and matron, 
were sufficient evidence that they had been prepared for bed some 
time ago, and had some reason for sitting up so far beyond their 
usual hour.

If any other corroborative testimony had been required, it would 
have been abundantly furnished in the actions of Miss Miggs, who, 
having arrived at that restless state and sensitive condition of 
the nervous system which are the result of long watching, did, by a 
constant rubbing and tweaking of her nose, a perpetual change of 
position (arising from the sudden growth of imaginary knots and 
knobs in her chair), a frequent friction of her eyebrows, the 
incessant recurrence of a small cough, a small groan, a gasp, a 
sigh, a sniff, a spasmodic start, and by other demonstrations of 
that nature, so file down and rasp, as it were, the patience of the 
locksmith, that after looking at her in silence for some time, he 
at last broke out into this apostrophe:--

'Miggs, my good girl, go to bed--do go to bed.  You're really worse 
than the dripping of a hundred water-butts outside the window, or 
the scratching of as many mice behind the wainscot.  I can't bear 
it.  Do go to bed, Miggs.  To oblige me--do.'

'You haven't got nothing to untie, sir,' returned Miss Miggs, 'and 
therefore your requests does not surprise me.  But missis has--and 
while you sit up, mim'--she added, turning to the locksmith's wife, 
'I couldn't, no, not if twenty times the quantity of cold water was 
aperiently running down my back at this moment, go to bed with a 
quiet spirit.'

Having spoken these words, Miss Miggs made divers efforts to rub 
her shoulders in an impossible place, and shivered from head to 
foot; thereby giving the beholders to understand that the imaginary 
cascade was still in full flow, but that a sense of duty upheld her 
under that and all other sufferings, and nerved her to endurance.

Mrs Varden being too sleepy to speak, and Miss Miggs having, as the 
phrase is, said her say, the locksmith had nothing for it but to 
sigh and be as quiet as he could.

But to be quiet with such a basilisk before him was impossible.  
If he looked another way, it was worse to feel that she was rubbing 
her cheek, or twitching her ear, or winking her eye, or making all 
kinds of extraordinary shapes with her nose, than to see her do it.  
If she was for a moment free from any of these complaints, it was 
only because of her foot being asleep, or of her arm having got the 
fidgets, or of her leg being doubled up with the cramp, or of some 
other horrible disorder which racked her whole frame.  If she did 
enjoy a moment's ease, then with her eyes shut and her mouth wide 
open, she would be seen to sit very stiff and upright in her chair; 
then to nod a little way forward, and stop with a jerk; then to nod 
a little farther forward, and stop with another jerk; then to 
recover herself; then to come forward again--lower--lower--lower--
by very slow degrees, until, just as it seemed impossible that she 
could preserve her balance for another instant, and the locksmith 
was about to call out in an agony, to save her from dashing down 
upon her forehead and fracturing her skull, then all of a sudden 
and without the smallest notice, she would come upright and rigid 
again with her eyes open, and in her countenance an expression of 
defiance, sleepy but yet most obstinate, which plainly said, 'I've 
never once closed 'em since I looked at you last, and I'll take my 
oath of it!'

At length, after the clock had struck two, there was a sound at the 
street door, as if somebody had fallen against the knocker by 
accident.  Miss Miggs immediately jumping up and clapping her 
hands, cried with a drowsy mingling of the sacred and profane, 
'Ally Looyer, mim! there's Simmuns's knock!'

'Who's there?' said Gabriel.

'Me!' cried the well-known voice of Mr Tappertit.  Gabriel opened 
the door, and gave him admission.

He did not cut a very insinuating figure, for a man of his stature 
suffers in a crowd; and having been active in yesterday morning's 
work, his dress was literally crushed from head to foot: his hat 
being beaten out of all shape, and his shoes trodden down at heel 
like slippers.  His coat fluttered in strips about him, the buckles 
were torn away both from his knees and feet, half his neckerchief 
was gone, and the bosom of his shirt was rent to tatters.  Yet 
notwithstanding all these personal disadvantages; despite his being 
very weak from heat and fatigue; and so begrimed with mud and dust 
that he might have been in a case, for anything of the real texture 
(either of his skin or apparel) that the eye could discern; he 
stalked haughtily into the parlour, and throwing himself into a 
chair, and endeavouring to thrust his hands into the pockets of his 
small-clothes, which were turned inside out and displayed upon his 
legs, like tassels, surveyed the household with a gloomy dignity.

'Simon,' said the locksmith gravely, 'how comes it that you return 
home at this time of night, and in this condition?  Give me an 
assurance that you have not been among the rioters, and I am 
satisfied.'

'Sir,' replied Mr Tappertit, with a contemptuous look, 'I wonder at 
YOUR assurance in making such demands.'

'You have been drinking,' said the locksmith.

'As a general principle, and in the most offensive sense of the 
words, sir,' returned his journeyman with great self-possession, 
'I consider you a liar.  In that last observation you have 
unintentionally--unintentionally, sir,--struck upon the truth.'

'Martha,' said the locksmith, turning to his wife, and shaking his 
head sorrowfully, while a smile at the absurd figure beside him 
still played upon his open face, 'I trust it may turn out that this 
poor lad is not the victim of the knaves and fools we have so often 
had words about, and who have done so much harm to-day.  If he has 
been at Warwick Street or Duke Street to-night--'

'He has been at neither, sir,' cried Mr Tappertit in a loud voice, 
which he suddenly dropped into a whisper as he repeated, with eyes 
fixed upon the locksmith, 'he has been at neither.'

'I am glad of it, with all my heart,' said the locksmith in a 
serious tone; 'for if he had been, and it could be proved against 
him, Martha, your Great Association would have been to him the cart 
that draws men to the gallows and leaves them hanging in the air.  
It would, as sure as we're alive!'

Mrs Varden was too much scared by Simon's altered manner and 
appearance, and by the accounts of the rioters which had reached 
her ears that night, to offer any retort, or to have recourse to 
her usual matrimonial policy.  Miss Miggs wrung her hands, and 
wept.

'He was not at Duke Street, or at Warwick Street, G. Varden,' said 
Simon, sternly; 'but he WAS at Westminster.  Perhaps, sir, he 
kicked a county member, perhaps, sir, he tapped a lord--you may 
stare, sir, I repeat it--blood flowed from noses, and perhaps he 
tapped a lord.  Who knows?  This,' he added, putting his hand into 
his waistcoat-pocket, and taking out a large tooth, at the sight of 
which both Miggs and Mrs Varden screamed, 'this was a bishop's.  
Beware, G. Varden!'

'Now, I would rather,' said the locksmith hastily, 'have paid five 
hundred pounds, than had this come to pass.  You idiot, do you know 
what peril you stand in?'

'I know it, sir,' replied his journeyman, 'and it is my glory.  I 
was there, everybody saw me there.  I was conspicuous, and 
prominent.  I will abide the consequences.'

The locksmith, really disturbed and agitated, paced to and fro in 
silence--glancing at his former 'prentice every now and then--and 
at length stopping before him, said:

'Get to bed, and sleep for a couple of hours that you may wake 
penitent, and with some of your senses about you.  Be sorry for 
what you have done, and we will try to save you.  If I call him by 
five o'clock,' said Varden, turning hurriedly to his wife, and he 
washes himself clean and changes his dress, he may get to the Tower 
Stairs, and away by the Gravesend tide-boat, before any search is 
made for him.  From there he can easily get on to Canterbury, 
where your cousin will give him work till this storm has blown 
over.  I am not sure that I do right in screening him from the 
punishment he deserves, but he has lived in this house, man and 
boy, for a dozen years, and I should be sorry if for this one day's 
work he made a miserable end.  Lock the front-door, Miggs, and show 
no light towards the street when you go upstairs.  Quick, Simon!  
Get to bed!'

'And do you suppose, sir,' retorted Mr Tappertit, with a thickness 
and slowness of speech which contrasted forcibly with the rapidity 
and earnestness of his kind-hearted master--'and do you suppose, 
sir, that I am base and mean enough to accept your servile 
proposition?--Miscreant!'

'Whatever you please, Sim, but get to bed.  Every minute is of 
consequence.  The light here, Miggs!'

'Yes yes, oh do!  Go to bed directly,' cried the two women 
together.

Mr Tappertit stood upon his feet, and pushing his chair away to 
show that he needed no assistance, answered, swaying himself to and 
fro, and managing his head as if it had no connection whatever with 
his body:

'You spoke of Miggs, sir--Miggs may be smothered!'

'Oh Simmun!' ejaculated that young lady in a faint voice.  'Oh mim!  
Oh sir!  Oh goodness gracious, what a turn he has give me!'

'This family may ALL be smothered, sir,' returned Mr Tappertit, 
after glancing at her with a smile of ineffable disdain, 'excepting 
Mrs V.  I have come here, sir, for her sake, this night.  Mrs 
Varden, take this piece of paper.  It's a protection, ma'am.  You 
may need it.'

With these words he held out at arm's length, a dirty, crumpled 
scrap of writing.  The locksmith took it from him, opened it, and 
read as follows:


'All good friends to our cause, I hope will be particular, and do 
no injury to the property of any true Protestant.  I am well 
assured that the proprietor of this house is a staunch and worthy 
friend to the cause.

GEORGE GORDON.'


'What's this!' said the locksmith, with an altered face.

'Something that'll do you good service, young feller,' replied his 
journeyman, 'as you'll find.  Keep that safe, and where you can 
lay your hand upon it in an instant.  And chalk "No Popery" on your 
door to-morrow night, and for a week to come--that's all.'

'This is a genuine document,' said the locksmith, 'I know, for I 
have seen the hand before.  What threat does it imply?  What devil 
is abroad?'

'A fiery devil,' retorted Sim; 'a flaming, furious devil.  Don't 
you put yourself in its way, or you're done for, my buck.  Be 
warned in time, G. Varden.  Farewell!'

But here the two women threw themselves in his way--especially Miss 
Miggs, who fell upon him with such fervour that she pinned him 
against the wall--and conjured him in moving words not to go forth 
till he was sober; to listen to reason; to think of it; to take 
some rest, and then determine.

'I tell you,' said Mr Tappertit, 'that my mind is made up.  My 
bleeding country calls me and I go!  Miggs, if you don't get out of 
the way, I'll pinch you.'

Miss Miggs, still clinging to the rebel, screamed once 
vociferously--but whether in the distraction of her mind, or 
because of his having executed his threat, is uncertain.

'Release me,' said Simon, struggling to free himself from her 
chaste, but spider-like embrace.  'Let me go!  I have made 
arrangements for you in an altered state of society, and mean to 
provide for you comfortably in life--there!  Will that satisfy 
you?'

'Oh Simmun!' cried Miss Miggs.  'Oh my blessed Simmun!  Oh mim! 
what are my feelings at this conflicting moment!'

Of a rather turbulent description, it would seem; for her nightcap 
had been knocked off in the scuffle, and she was on her knees upon 
the floor, making a strange revelation of blue and yellow curl-
papers, straggling locks of hair, tags of staylaces, and strings of 
it's impossible to say what; panting for breath, clasping her 
hands, turning her eyes upwards, shedding abundance of tears, and 
exhibiting various other symptoms of the acutest mental suffering.

'I leave,' said Simon, turning to his master, with an utter 
disregard of Miggs's maidenly affliction, 'a box of things 
upstairs.  Do what you like with 'em.  I don't want 'em.  I'm never 
coming back here, any more.  Provide yourself, sir, with a 
journeyman; I'm my country's journeyman; henceforward that's MY 
line of business.'

'Be what you like in two hours' time, but now go up to bed,' 
returned the locksmith, planting himself in the doorway.  'Do you 
hear me?  Go to bed!'

'I hear you, and defy you, Varden,' rejoined Simon Tappertit.  
'This night, sir, I have been in the country, planning an 
expedition which shall fill your bell-hanging soul with wonder and 
dismay.  The plot demands my utmost energy.  Let me pass!'

'I'll knock you down if you come near the door,' replied the 
locksmith.  'You had better go to bed!'

Simon made no answer, but gathering himself up as straight as he 
could, plunged head foremost at his old master, and the two went 
driving out into the workshop together, plying their hands and feet 
so briskly that they looked like half-a-dozen, while Miggs and Mrs 
Varden screamed for twelve.

It would have been easy for Varden to knock his old 'prentice down, 
and bind him hand and foot; but as he was loth to hurt him in his 
then defenceless state, he contented himself with parrying his 
blows when he could, taking them in perfect good part when he could 
not, and keeping between him and the door, until a favourable 
opportunity should present itself for forcing him to retreat up-
stairs, and shutting him up in his own room.  But, in the goodness 
of his heart, he calculated too much upon his adversary's weakness, 
and forgot that drunken men who have lost the power of walking 
steadily, can often run.  Watching his time, Simon Tappertit made a 
cunning show of falling back, staggered unexpectedly forward, 
brushed past him, opened the door (he knew the trick of that lock 
well), and darted down the street like a mad dog.  The locksmith 
paused for a moment in the excess of his astonishment, and then 
gave chase.

It was an excellent season for a run, for at that silent hour the 
streets were deserted, the air was cool, and the flying figure 
before him distinctly visible at a great distance, as it sped away, 
with a long gaunt shadow following at its heels.  But the short-
winded locksmith had no chance against a man of Sim's youth and 
spare figure, though the day had been when he could have run him 
down in no time.  The space between them rapidly increased, and as 
the rays of the rising sun streamed upon Simon in the act of 
turning a distant corner, Gabriel Varden was fain to give up, and 
sit down on a doorstep to fetch his breath.  Simon meanwhile, 
without once stopping, fled at the same degree of swiftness to The 
Boot, where, as he well knew, some of his company were lying, and 
at which respectable hostelry--for he had already acquired the 
distinction of being in great peril of the law--a friendly watch 
had been expecting him all night, and was even now on the look-out 
for his coming.

'Go thy ways, Sim, go thy ways,' said the locksmith, as soon as he 
could speak.  'I have done my best for thee, poor lad, and would 
have saved thee, but the rope is round thy neck, I fear.'

So saying, and shaking his head in a very sorrowful and 
disconsolate manner, he turned back, and soon re-entered his own 
house, where Mrs Varden and the faithful Miggs had been anxiously 
expecting his return.

Now Mrs Varden (and by consequence Miss Miggs likewise) was 
impressed with a secret misgiving that she had done wrong; that she 
had, to the utmost of her small means, aided and abetted the growth 
of disturbances, the end of which it was impossible to foresee; 
that she had led remotely to the scene which had just passed; and 
that the locksmith's time for triumph and reproach had now arrived 
indeed.  And so strongly did Mrs Varden feel this, and so 
crestfallen was she in consequence, that while her husband was 
pursuing their lost journeyman, she secreted under her chair the 
little red-brick dwelling-house with the yellow roof, lest it 
should furnish new occasion for reference to the painful theme; and 
now hid the same still more, with the skirts of her dress.

But it happened that the locksmith had been thinking of this very 
article on his way home, and that, coming into the room and not 
seeing it, he at once demanded where it was.

Mrs Varden had no resource but to produce it, which she did with 
many tears, and broken protestations that if she could have known--

'Yes, yes,' said Varden, 'of course--I know that.  I don't mean to 
reproach you, my dear.  But recollect from this time that all good 
things perverted to evil purposes, are worse than those which are 
naturally bad.  A thoroughly wicked woman, is wicked indeed.  When 
religion goes wrong, she is very wrong, for the same reason.  Let 
us say no more about it, my dear.'

So he dropped the red-brick dwelling-house on the floor, and 
setting his heel upon it, crushed it into pieces.  The halfpence, 
and sixpences, and other voluntary contributions, rolled about in 
all directions, but nobody offered to touch them, or to take them 
up.

'That,' said the locksmith, 'is easily disposed of, and I would to 
Heaven that everything growing out of the same society could be 
settled as easily.'

'It happens very fortunately, Varden,' said his wife, with her 
handkerchief to her eyes, 'that in case any more disturbances 
should happen--which I hope not; I sincerely hope not--'

'I hope so too, my dear.'

'--That in case any should occur, we have the piece of paper which 
that poor misguided young man brought.'

'Ay, to be sure,' said the locksmith, turning quickly round.  
'Where is that piece of paper?'

Mrs Varden stood aghast as he took it from her outstretched band, 
tore it into fragments, and threw them under the grate.

'Not use it?' she said.

'Use it!' cried the locksmith.  No!  Let them come and pull the 
roof about our ears; let them burn us out of house and home; I'd 
neither have the protection of their leader, nor chalk their howl 
upon my door, though, for not doing it, they shot me on my own 
threshold.  Use it!  Let them come and do their worst.  The first 
man who crosses my doorstep on such an errand as theirs, had better 
be a hundred miles away.  Let him look to it.  The others may have 
their will.  I wouldn't beg or buy them off, if, instead of every 
pound of iron in the place, there was a hundred weight of gold.  
Get you to bed, Martha.  I shall take down the shutters and go to 
work.'

'So early!' said his wife.

'Ay,' replied the locksmith cheerily, 'so early.  Come when they 
may, they shall not find us skulking and hiding, as if we feared to 
take our portion of the light of day, and left it all to them.  So 
pleasant dreams to you, my dear, and cheerful sleep!'

With that he gave his wife a hearty kiss, and bade her delay no 
longer, or it would be time to rise before she lay down to rest.  
Mrs Varden quite amiably and meekly walked upstairs, followed by 
Miggs, who, although a good deal subdued, could not refrain from 
sundry stimulative coughs and sniffs by the way, or from holding up 
her hands in astonishment at the daring conduct of master.



Chapter 52


A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, 
particularly in a large city.  Where it comes from or whither it 
goes, few men can tell.  Assembling and dispersing with equal 
suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as 
the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is 
not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more 
unreasonable, or more cruel.

The people who were boisterous at Westminster upon the Friday 
morning, and were eagerly bent upon the work of devastation in Duke 
Street and Warwick Street at night, were, in the mass, the same.  
Allowing for the chance accessions of which any crowd is morally 
sure in a town where there must always be a large number of idle 
and profligate persons, one and the same mob was at both places.  
Yet they spread themselves in various directions when they 
dispersed in the afternoon, made no appointment for reassembling, 
had no definite purpose or design, and indeed, for anything they 
knew, were scattered beyond the hope of future union.

At The Boot, which, as has been shown, was in a manner the head-
quarters of the rioters, there were not, upon this Friday night, a 
dozen people.  Some slept in the stable and outhouses, some in the 
common room, some two or three in beds.  The rest were in their 
usual homes or haunts.  Perhaps not a score in all lay in the 
adjacent fields and lanes, and under haystacks, or near the warmth 
of brick-kilns, who had not their accustomed place of rest beneath 
the open sky.  As to the public ways within the town, they had 
their ordinary nightly occupants, and no others; the usual amount 
of vice and wretchedness, but no more.

The experience of one evening, however, had taught the reckless 
leaders of disturbance, that they had but to show themselves in the 
streets, to be immediately surrounded by materials which they could 
only have kept together when their aid was not required, at great 
risk, expense, and trouble.  Once possessed of this secret, they 
were as confident as if twenty thousand men, devoted to their will, 
had been encamped about them, and assumed a confidence which could 
not have been surpassed, though that had really been the case.  All 
day, Saturday, they remained quiet.  On Sunday, they rather studied 
how to keep their men within call, and in full hope, than to follow 
out, by any fierce measure, their first day's proceedings.

'I hope,' said Dennis, as, with a loud yawn, he raised his body 
from a heap of straw on which he had been sleeping, and supporting 
his head upon his hand, appealed to Hugh on Sunday morning, 'that 
Muster Gashford allows some rest?  Perhaps he'd have us at work 
again already, eh?'

'It's not his way to let matters drop, you may be sure of that,' 
growled Hugh in answer.  'I'm in no humour to stir yet, though.  
I'm as stiff as a dead body, and as full of ugly scratches as if I 
had been fighting all day yesterday with wild cats.'

'You've so much enthusiasm, that's it,' said Dennis, looking with 
great admiration at the uncombed head, matted beard, and torn hands 
and face of the wild figure before him; 'you're such a devil of a 
fellow.  You hurt yourself a hundred times more than you need, 
because you will be foremost in everything, and will do more than 
the rest.'

'For the matter of that,' returned Hugh, shaking back his ragged 
hair and glancing towards the door of the stable in which they lay; 
'there's one yonder as good as me.  What did I tell you about him?  
Did I say he was worth a dozen, when you doubted him?'

Mr Dennis rolled lazily over upon his breast, and resting his chin 
upon his hand in imitation of the attitude in which Hugh lay, said, 
as he too looked towards the door:

'Ay, ay, you knew him, brother, you knew him.  But who'd suppose to 
look at that chap now, that he could be the man he is!  Isn't it a 
thousand cruel pities, brother, that instead of taking his nat'ral 
rest and qualifying himself for further exertions in this here 
honourable cause, he should be playing at soldiers like a boy?  And 
his cleanliness too!' said Mr Dennis, who certainly had no reason 
to entertain a fellow feeling with anybody who was particular on 
that score; 'what weaknesses he's guilty of; with respect to his 
cleanliness!  At five o'clock this morning, there he was at the 
pump, though any one would think he had gone through enough, the 
day before yesterday, to be pretty fast asleep at that time.  But 
no--when I woke for a minute or two, there he was at the pump, and 
if you'd seen him sticking them peacock's feathers into his hat 
when he'd done washing--ah! I'm sorry he's such a imperfect 
character, but the best on us is incomplete in some pint of view or 
another.'

The subject of this dialogue and of these concluding remarks, which 
were uttered in a tone of philosophical meditation, was, as the 
reader will have divined, no other than Barnaby, who, with his flag 
in hand, stood sentry in the little patch of sunlight at the 
distant door, or walked to and fro outside, singing softly to 
himself; and keeping time to the music of some clear church bells.  
Whether he stood still, leaning with both hands on the flagstaff, 
or, bearing it upon his shoulder, paced slowly up and down, the 
careful arrangement of his poor dress, and his erect and lofty 
bearing, showed how high a sense he had of the great importance of 
his trust, and how happy and how proud it made him.  To Hugh and 
his companion, who lay in a dark corner of the gloomy shed, he, and 
the sunlight, and the peaceful Sabbath sound to which he made 
response, seemed like a bright picture framed by the door, and set 
off by the stable's blackness.  The whole formed such a contrast to 
themselves, as they lay wallowing, like some obscene animals, in 
their squalor and wickedness on the two heaps of straw, that for a 
few moments they looked on without speaking, and felt almost 
ashamed.

'Ah!'said Hugh at length, carrying it off with a laugh: 'He's a 
rare fellow is Barnaby, and can do more, with less rest, or meat, 
or drink, than any of us.  As to his soldiering, I put him on duty 
there.'

'Then there was a object in it, and a proper good one too, I'll be 
sworn,' retorted Dennis with a broad grin, and an oath of the same 
quality.  'What was it, brother?'

'Why, you see,' said Hugh, crawling a little nearer to him, 'that 
our noble captain yonder, came in yesterday morning rather the 
worse for liquor, and was--like you and me--ditto last night.'

Dennis looked to where Simon Tappertit lay coiled upon a truss of 
hay, snoring profoundly, and nodded.

'And our noble captain,' continued Hugh with another laugh, 'our 
noble captain and I, have planned for to-morrow a roaring 
expedition, with good profit in it.'

'Again the Papists?' asked Dennis, rubbing his hands.

'Ay, against the Papists--against one of 'em at least, that some of 
us, and I for one, owe a good heavy grudge to.'

'Not Muster Gashford's friend that he spoke to us about in my 
house, eh?' said Dennis, brimfull of pleasant expectation.

'The same man,' said Hugh.

'That's your sort,' cried Mr Dennis, gaily shaking hands with him, 
'that's the kind of game.  Let's have revenges and injuries, and 
all that, and we shall get on twice as fast.  Now you talk, 
indeed!'

'Ha ha ha!  The captain,' added Hugh, 'has thoughts of carrying off 
a woman in the bustle, and--ha ha ha!--and so have I!'

Mr Dennis received this part of the scheme with a wry face, 
observing that as a general principle he objected to women 
altogether, as being unsafe and slippery persons on whom there was 
no calculating with any certainty, and who were never in the same 
mind for four-and-twenty hours at a stretch.  He might have 
expatiated on this suggestive theme at much greater length, but 
that it occurred to him to ask what connection existed between the 
proposed expedition and Barnaby's being posted at the stable-door 
as sentry; to which Hugh cautiously replied in these words:

'Why, the people we mean to visit, were friends of his, once upon a 
time, and I know that much of him to feel pretty sure that if he 
thought we were going to do them any harm, he'd be no friend to our 
side, but would lend a ready hand to the other.  So I've persuaded 
him (for I know him of old) that Lord George has picked him out to 
guard this place to-morrow while we're away, and that it's a great 
honour--and so he's on duty now, and as proud of it as if he was a 
general.  Ha ha!  What do you say to me for a careful man as well 
as a devil of a one?'

Mr Dennis exhausted himself in compliments, and then added,

'But about the expedition itself--'

'About that,' said Hugh, 'you shall hear all particulars from me 
and the great captain conjointly and both together--for see, he's 
waking up.  Rouse yourself, lion-heart.  Ha ha!  Put a good face 
upon it, and drink again.  Another hair of the dog that bit you, 
captain!  Call for drink!  There's enough of gold and silver cups 
and candlesticks buried underneath my bed,' he added, rolling back 
the straw, and pointing to where the ground was newly turned, 'to 
pay for it, if it was a score of casks full.  Drink, captain!'

Mr Tappertit received these jovial promptings with a very bad 
grace, being much the worse, both in mind and body, for his two 
nights of debauch, and but indifferently able to stand upon his 
legs.  With Hugh's assistance, however, he contrived to stagger to 
the pump; and having refreshed himself with an abundant draught of 
cold water, and a copious shower of the same refreshing liquid on 
his head and face, he ordered some rum and milk to be served; and 
upon that innocent beverage and some biscuits and cheese made a 
pretty hearty meal.  That done, he disposed himself in an easy 
attitude on the ground beside his two companions (who were 
carousing after their own tastes), and proceeded to enlighten Mr 
Dennis in reference to to-morrow's project.

That their conversation was an interesting one, was rendered 
manifest by its length, and by the close attention of all three.  
That it was not of an oppressively grave character, but was 
enlivened by various pleasantries arising out of the subject, was 
clear from their loud and frequent roars of laughter, which 
startled Barnaby on his post, and made him wonder at their levity.  
But he was not summoned to join them, until they had eaten, and 
drunk, and slept, and talked together for some hours; not, indeed, 
until the twilight; when they informed him that they were about to 
make a slight demonstration in the streets--just to keep the 
people's hands in, as it was Sunday night, and the public might 
otherwise be disappointed--and that he was free to accompany them 
if he would.

Without the slightest preparation, saving that they carried clubs 
and wore the blue cockade, they sallied out into the streets; and, 
with no more settled design than that of doing as much mischief as 
they could, paraded them at random.  Their numbers rapidly 
increasing, they soon divided into parties; and agreeing to meet 
by-and-by, in the fields near Welbeck Street, scoured the town in 
various directions.  The largest body, and that which augmented 
with the greatest rapidity, was the one to which Hugh and Barnaby 
belonged.  This took its way towards Moorfields, where there was a 
rich chapel, and in which neighbourhood several Catholic families 
were known to reside.

Beginning with the private houses so occupied, they broke open the 
doors and windows; and while they destroyed the furniture and left 
but the bare walls, made a sharp search for tools and engines of 
destruction, such as hammers, pokers, axes, saws, and such like 
instruments.  Many of the rioters made belts of cord, of 
handkerchiefs, or any material they found at hand, and wore these 
weapons as openly as pioneers upon a field-day.  There was not the 
least disguise or concealment--indeed, on this night, very little 
excitement or hurry.  From the chapels, they tore down and took 
away the very altars, benches, pulpits, pews, and flooring; from 
the dwelling-houses, the very wainscoting and stairs.  This Sunday 
evening's recreation they pursued like mere workmen who had a 
certain task to do, and did it.  Fifty resolute men might have 
turned them at any moment; a single company of soldiers could have 
scattered them like dust; but no man interposed, no authority 
restrained them, and, except by the terrified persons who fled from 
their approach, they were as little heeded as if they were pursuing 
their lawful occupations with the utmost sobriety and good 
conduct.

In the same manner, they marched to the place of rendezvous agreed 
upon, made great fires in the fields, and reserving the most 
valuable of their spoils, burnt the rest.  Priestly garments, 
images of saints, rich stuffs and ornaments, altar-furniture and 
household goods, were cast into the flames, and shed a glare on the 
whole country round; but they danced and howled, and roared about 
these fires till they were tired, and were never for an instant 
checked.

As the main body filed off from this scene of action, and passed 
down Welbeck Street, they came upon Gashford, who had been a 
witness of their proceedings, and was walking stealthily along the 
pavement.  Keeping up with him, and yet not seeming to speak, Hugh 
muttered in his ear:

'Is this better, master?'

'No,' said Gashford.  'It is not.'

'What would you have?' said Hugh.  'Fevers are never at their 
height at once.  They must get on by degrees.'

'I would have you,' said Gashford, pinching his arm with such 
malevolence that his nails seemed to meet in the skin; 'I would 
have you put some meaning into your work.  Fools!  Can you make no 
better bonfires than of rags and scraps?  Can you burn nothing 
whole?'

'A little patience, master,' said Hugh.  'Wait but a few hours, and 
you shall see.  Look for a redness in the sky, to-morrow night.'

With that, he fell back into his place beside Barnaby; and when the 
secretary looked after him, both were lost in the crowd.



Chapter 53


The next day was ushered in by merry peals of bells, and by the 
firing of the Tower guns; flags were hoisted on many of the church-
steeples; the usual demonstrations were made in honour of the 
anniversary of the King's birthday; and every man went about his 
pleasure or business as if the city were in perfect order, and 
there were no half-smouldering embers in its secret places, which, 
on the approach of night, would kindle up again and scatter ruin 
and dismay abroad.  The leaders of the riot, rendered still more 
daring by the success of last night and by the booty they had 
acquired, kept steadily together, and only thought of implicating 
the mass of their followers so deeply that no hope of pardon or 
reward might tempt them to betray their more notorious confederates 
into the hands of justice.

Indeed, the sense of having gone too far to be forgiven, held the 
timid together no less than the bold.  Many who would readily have 
pointed out the foremost rioters and given evidence against them, 
felt that escape by that means was hopeless, when their every act 
had been observed by scores of people who had taken no part in the 
disturbances; who had suffered in their persons, peace, or 
property, by the outrages of the mob; who would be most willing 
witnesses; and whom the government would, no doubt, prefer to any 
King's evidence that might be offered.  Many of this class had 
deserted their usual occupations on the Saturday morning; some had 
been seen by their employers active in the tumult; others knew they 
must be suspected, and that they would be discharged if they 
returned; others had been desperate from the beginning, and 
comforted themselves with the homely proverb, that, being hanged at 
all, they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.  They all 
hoped and believed, in a greater or less degree, that the 
government they seemed to have paralysed, would, in its terror, 
come to terms with them in the end, and suffer them to make their 
own conditions.  The least sanguine among them reasoned with 
himself that, at the worst, they were too many to be all punished, 
and that he had as good a chance of escape as any other man.  The 
great mass never reasoned or thought at all, but were stimulated by 
their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance, by the love 
of mischief, and the hope of plunder.

One other circumstance is worthy of remark; and that is, that from 
the moment of their first outbreak at Westminster, every symptom of 
order or preconcerted arrangement among them vanished.  When they 
divided into parties and ran to different quarters of the town, it 
was on the spontaneous suggestion of the moment.  Each party 
swelled as it went along, like rivers as they roll towards the sea; 
new leaders sprang up as they were wanted, disappeared when the 
necessity was over, and reappeared at the next crisis.  Each tumult 
took shape and form from the circumstances of the moment; sober 
workmen, going home from their day's labour, were seen to cast down 
their baskets of tools and become rioters in an instant; mere boys 
on errands did the like.  In a word, a moral plague ran through the 
city.  The noise, and hurry, and excitement, had for hundreds and 
hundreds an attraction they had no firmness to resist.  The 
contagion spread like a dread fever: an infectious madness, as yet 
not near its height, seized on new victims every hour, and society 
began to tremble at their ravings.

It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon when 
Gashford looked into the lair described in the last chapter, and 
seeing only Barnaby and Dennis there, inquired for Hugh.

He was out, Barnaby told him; had gone out more than an hour ago; 
and had not yet returned.

'Dennis!' said the smiling secretary, in his smoothest voice, as he 
sat down cross-legged on a barrel, 'Dennis!'

The hangman struggled into a sitting posture directly, and with his 
eyes wide open, looked towards him.

'How do you do, Dennis?' said Gashford, nodding.  'I hope you have 
suffered no inconvenience from your late exertions, Dennis?'

'I always will say of you, Muster Gashford,' returned the hangman, 
staring at him, 'that that 'ere quiet way of yours might almost 
wake a dead man.  It is,' he added, with a muttered oath--still 
staring at him in a thoughtful manner--'so awful sly!'

'So distinct, eh Dennis?'

'Distinct!' he answered, scratching his head, and keeping his eyes 
upon the secretary's face; 'I seem to hear it, Muster Gashford, in 
my wery bones.'

'I am very glad your sense of hearing is so sharp, and that I 
succeed in making myself so intelligible,' said Gashford, in his 
unvarying, even tone.  'Where is your friend?'

Mr Dennis looked round as in expectation of beholding him asleep 
upon his bed of straw; then remembering he had seen him go out, 
replied:

'I can't say where he is, Muster Gashford, I expected him back 
afore now.  I hope it isn't time that we was busy, Muster 
Gashford?'

'Nay,' said the secretary, 'who should know that as well as you?  
How can I tell you, Dennis?  You are perfect master of your own 
actions, you know, and accountable to nobody--except sometimes to 
the law, eh?'

Dennis, who was very much baffled by the cool matter-of-course 
manner of this reply, recovered his self-possession on his 
professional pursuits being referred to, and pointing towards 
Barnaby, shook his head and frowned.

'Hush!' cried Barnaby.

'Ah!  Do hush about that, Muster Gashford,' said the hangman in a 
low voice, 'pop'lar prejudices--you always forget--well, Barnaby, 
my lad, what's the matter?'

'I hear him coming,' he answered: 'Hark!  Do you mark that?  That's 
his foot!  Bless you, I know his step, and his dog's too.  Tramp, 
tramp, pit-pat, on they come together, and, ha ha ha!--and here 
they are!' he cried, joyfully welcoming Hugh with both hands, and 
then patting him fondly on the back, as if instead of being the 
rough companion he was, he had been one of the most prepossessing 
of men.  'Here he is, and safe too!  I am glad to see him back 
again, old Hugh!'

'I'm a Turk if he don't give me a warmer welcome always than any 
man of sense,' said Hugh, shaking hands with him with a kind of 
ferocious friendship, strange enough to see.  'How are you, boy?'

'Hearty!' cried Barnaby, waving his hat.  'Ha ha ha!  And merrry 
too, Hugh!  And ready to do anything for the good cause, and the 
right, and to help the kind, mild, pale-faced gentleman--the lord 
they used so ill--eh, Hugh?'

'Ay!' returned his friend, dropping his hand, and looking at 
Gashford for an instant with a changed expression before he spoke 
to him.  'Good day, master!'

'And good day to you,' replied the secretary, nursing his leg.

'And many good days--whole years of them, I hope.  You are heated.'

'So would you have been, master,' said Hugh, wiping his face, 'if 
you'd been running here as fast as I have.'

'You know the news, then?  Yes, I supposed you would have heard it.'

'News! what news?'

'You don't?' cried Gashford, raising his eyebrows with an 
exclamation of surprise.  'Dear me!  Come; then I AM the first to 
make you acquainted with your distinguished position, after all.  
Do you see the King's Arms a-top?' he smilingly asked, as he took a 
large paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and held it out for 
Hugh's inspection.

'Well!' said Hugh.  'What's that to me?'

'Much.  A great deal,' replied the secretary.  'Read it.'

'I told you, the first time I saw you, that I couldn't read,' said 
Hugh, impatiently.  'What in the Devil's name's inside of it?'

'It is a proclamation from the King in Council,' said Gashford, 
'dated to-day, and offering a reward of five hundred pounds--five 
hundred pounds is a great deal of money, and a large temptation to 
some people--to any one who will discover the person or persons 
most active in demolishing those chapels on Saturday night.'

'Is that all?' cried Hugh, with an indifferent air.  'I knew of 
that.'

'Truly I might have known you did,' said Gashford, smiling, and 
folding up the document again.  'Your friend, I might have guessed--
indeed I did guess--was sure to tell you.'

'My friend!' stammered Hugh, with an unsuccessful effort to appear 
surprised.  'What friend?'

'Tut tut--do you suppose I don't know where you have been?' 
retorted Gashford, rubbing his hands, and beating the back of one 
on the palm of the other, and looking at him with a cunning eye.  
'How dull you think me!  Shall I say his name?'

'No,' said Hugh, with a hasty glance towards Dennis.

'You have also heard from him, no doubt,' resumed the secretary, 
after a moment's pause, 'that the rioters who have been taken (poor 
fellows) are committed for trial, and that some very active 
witnesses have had the temerity to appear against them.  Among 
others--' and here he clenched his teeth, as if he would suppress 
by force some violent words that rose upon his tongue; and spoke 
very slowly.  'Among others, a gentleman who saw the work going on 
in Warwick Street; a Catholic gentleman; one Haredale.'

Hugh would have prevented his uttering the word, but it was out 
already.  Hearing the name, Barnaby turned swiftly round.

'Duty, duty, bold Barnaby!' cried Hugh, assuming his wildest and 
most rapid manner, and thrusting into his hand his staff and flag 
which leant against the wall.  'Mount guard without loss of time, 
for we are off upon our expedition.  Up, Dennis, and get ready!  
Take care that no one turns the straw upon my bed, brave Barnaby; 
we know what's underneath it--eh?  Now, master, quick!  What you 
have to say, say speedily, for the little captain and a cluster of 
'em are in the fields, and only waiting for us.  Sharp's the word, 
and strike's the action.  Quick!'

Barnaby was not proof against this bustle and despatch.  The look 
of mingled astonishtnent and anger which had appeared in his face 
when he turned towards them, faded from it as the words passed from 
his memory, like breath from a polished mirror; and grasping the 
weapon which Hugh forced upon him, he proudly took his station at 
the door, beyond their hearing.

'You might have spoiled our plans, master,' said Hugh.  'YOU, too, 
of all men!'

'Who would have supposed that HE would be so quick?' urged 
Gashford.

'He's as quick sometimes--I don't mean with his hands, for that you 
know, but with his head--as you or any man,' said Hugh.  'Dennis, 
it's time we were going; they're waiting for us; I came to tell 
you.  Reach me my stick and belt.  Here!  Lend a hand, master.  
Fling this over my shoulder, and buckle it behind, will you?'

'Brisk as ever!' said the secretary, adjusting it for him as he 
desired.

'A man need be brisk to-day; there's brisk work a-foot.'

'There is, is there?' said Gashford.  He said it with such a 
provoking assumption of ignorance, that Hugh, looking over his 
shoulder and angrily down upon him, replied:

'Is there!  You know there is!  Who knows better than you, master, 
that the first great step to be taken is to make examples of these 
witnesses, and frighten all men from appearing against us or any of 
our body, any more?'

'There's one we know of,' returned Gashford, with an expressive 
smile, 'who is at least as well informed upon that subject as you 
or I.'

'If we mean the same gentleman, as I suppose we do,' Hugh rejoined 
softly, 'I tell you this--he's as good and quick information about 
everything as--' here he paused and looked round, as if to make 
sure that the person in question was not within hearing, 'as Old 
Nick himself.  Have you done that, master?  How slow you are!'

'It's quite fast now,' said Gashford, rising.  'I say--you didn't 
find that your friend disapproved of to-day's little expedition?  
Ha ha ha!  It is fortunate it jumps so well with the witness 
policy; for, once planned, it must have been carried out.  And now 
you are going, eh?'

'Now we are going, master!' Hugh replied.  'Any parting words?'

'Oh dear, no,' said Gashford sweetly.  'None!'

'You're sure?' cried Hugh, nudging the grinning Dennis.

'Quite sure, eh, Muster Gashford?' chuckled the hangman.

Gashford paused a moment, struggling with his caution and his 
malice; then putting himself between the two men, and laying a hand 
upon the arm of each, said, in a cramped whisper:

'Do not, my good friends--I am sure you will not--forget our talk 
one night--in your house, Dennis--about this person.  No mercy, no 
quarter, no two beams of his house to be left standing where the 
builder placed them!  Fire, the saying goes, is a good servant, but 
a bad master.  Makes it HIS master; he deserves no better.  But I 
am sure you will be firm, I am sure you will be very resolute, I am 
sure you will remember that he thirsts for your lives, and those of 
all your brave companions.  If you ever acted like staunch 
fellows, you will do so to-day.  Won't you, Dennis--won't you, 
Hugh?'

The two looked at him, and at each other; then bursting into a roar 
of laughter, brandished their staves above their heads, shook 
hands, and hurried out.

When they had been gone a little time, Gashford followed.  They 
were yet in sight, and hastening to that part of the adjacent 
fields in which their fellows had already mustered; Hugh was 
looking back, and flourishing his hat to Barnaby, who, delighted 
with his trust, replied in the same way, and then resumed his 
pacing up and down before the stable-door, where his feet had worn 
a path already.  And when Gashford himself was far distant, and 
looked back for the last time, he was still walking to and fro, 
with the same measured tread; the most devoted and the blithest 
champion that ever maintained a post, and felt his heart lifted up 
with a brave sense of duty, and determination to defend it to the 
last.

Smiling at the simplicity of the poor idiot, Gashford betook 
himself to Welbeck Street by a different path from that which he 
knew the rioters would take, and sitting down behind a curtain in 
one of the upper windows of Lord George Gordon's house, waited 
impatiently for their coming.  They were so long, that although he 
knew it had been settled they should come that way, he had a 
misgiving they must have changed their plans and taken some other 
route.  But at length the roar of voices was heard in the 
neighbouring fields, and soon afterwards they came thronging past, 
in a great body.

However, they were not all, nor nearly all, in one body, but were, 
as he soon found, divided into four parties, each of which stopped 
before the house to give three cheers, and then went on; the 
leaders crying out in what direction they were going, and calling 
on the spectators to join them.  The first detachment, carrying, by 
way of banners, some relics of the havoc they had made in 
Moorfields, proclaimed that they were on their way to Chelsea, 
whence they would return in the same order, to make of the spoil 
they bore, a great bonfire, near at hand.  The second gave out that 
they were bound for Wapping, to destroy a chapel; the third, that 
their place of destination was East Smithfield, and their object 
the same.  All this was done in broad, bright, summer day.  Gay 
carriages and chairs stopped to let them pass, or turned back to 
avoid them; people on foot stood aside in doorways, or perhaps 
knocked and begged permission to stand at a window, or in the hall, 
until the rioters had passed: but nobody interfered with them; and 
when they had gone by, everything went on as usual.

There still remained the fourth body, and for that the secretary 
looked with a most intense eagerness.  At last it came up.  It was 
numerous, and composed of picked men; for as he gazed down among 
them, he recognised many upturned faces which he knew well--those 
of Simon Tappertit, Hugh, and Dennis in the front, of course.  They 
halted and cheered, as the others had done; but when they moved 
again, they did not, like them, proclaim what design they had.  
Hugh merely raised his hat upon the bludgeon he carried, and 
glancing at a spectator on the opposite side of the way, was gone.

Gashford followed the direction of his glance instinctively, and 
saw, standing on the pavement, and wearing the blue cockade, Sir 
John Chester.  He held his hat an inch or two above his head, to 
propitiate the mob; and, resting gracefully on his cane, smiling 
pleasantly, and displaying his dress and person to the very best 
advantage, looked on in the most tranquil state imaginable.  For 
all that, and quick and dexterous as he was, Gashford had seen him 
recognise Hugh with the air of a patron.  He had no longer any eyes 
for the crowd, but fixed his keen regards upon Sir John.

He stood in the same place and posture until the last man in the 
concourse had turned the corner of the street; then very 
deliberately took the blue cockade out of his hat; put it carefully 
in his pocket, ready for the next emergency; refreshed himself with 
a pinch of snuff; put up his box; and was walking slowly off, when 
a passing carriage stopped, and a lady's hand let down the glass.  
Sir John's hat was off again immediately.  After a minute's 
conversation at the carriage-window, in which it was apparent that 
he was vastly entertaining on the subject of the mob, he stepped 
lightly in, and was driven away.

The secretary smiled, but he had other thoughts to dwell upon, and 
soon dismissed the topic.  Dinner was brought him, but he sent it 
down untasted; and, in restless pacings up and down the room, and 
constant glances at the clock, and many futile efforts to sit down 
and read, or go to sleep, or look out of the window, consumed four 
weary hours.  When the dial told him thus much time had crept away, 
he stole upstairs to the top of the house, and coming out upon the 
roof sat down, with his face towards the east.

Heedless of the fresh air that blew upon his heated brow, of the 
pleasant meadows from which he turned, of the piles of roofs and 
chimneys upon which he looked, of the smoke and rising mist he 
vainly sought to pierce, of the shrill cries of children at their 
evening sports, the distant hum and turmoil of the town, the 
cheerful country breath that rustled past to meet it, and to droop, 
and die; he watched, and watched, till it was dark save for the 
specks of light that twinkled in the streets below and far away--
and, as the darkness deepened, strained his gaze and grew more 
eager yet.

'Nothing but gloom in that direction, still!' he muttered 
restlessly.  'Dog! where is the redness in the sky, you promised 
me!'



Chapter 54


Rumours of the prevailing disturbances had, by this time, begun to 
be pretty generally circulated through the towns and villages round 
London, and the tidings were everywhere received with that appetite 
for the marvellous and love of the terrible which have probably 
been among the natural characteristics of mankind since the 
creation of the world.  These accounts, however, appeared, to many 
persons at that day--as they would to us at the present, but that 
we know them to be matter of history--so monstrous and improbable, 
that a great number of those who were resident at a distance, and 
who were credulous enough on other points, were really unable to 
bring their minds to believe that such things could be; and 
rejected the intelligence they received on all hands, as wholly 
fabulous and absurd.

Mr Willet--not so much, perhaps, on account of his having argued 
and settled the matter with himself, as by reason of his 
constitutional obstinacy--was one of those who positively refused 
to entertain the current topic for a moment.  On this very evening, 
and perhaps at the very time when Gashford kept his solitary watch, 
old John was so red in the face with perpetually shaking his head 
in contradiction of his three ancient cronies and pot companions, 
that he was quite a phenomenon to behold, and lighted up the 
Maypole Porch wherein they sat together, like a monstrous carbuncle 
in a fairy tale.

'Do you think, sir,' said Mr Willet, looking hard at Solomon 
Daisy--for it was his custom in cases of personal altercation to 
fasten upon the smallest man in the party--'do you think, sir, that 
I'm a born fool?'

'No, no, Johnny,' returned Solomon, looking round upon the little 
circle of which he formed a part: 'We all know better than that.  
You're no fool, Johnny.  No, no!'

Mr Cobb and Mr Parkes shook their heads in unison, muttering, 'No, 
no, Johnny, not you!'  But as such compliments had usually the 
effect of making Mr Willet rather more dogged than before, he 
surveyed them with a look of deep disdain, and returned for answer:

'Then what do you mean by coming here, and telling me that this 
evening you're a-going to walk up to London together--you three--
you--and have the evidence of your own senses?  An't,' said Mr 
Willet, putting his pipe in his mouth with an air of solemn 
disgust, 'an't the evidence of MY senses enough for you?'

'But we haven't got it, Johnny,' pleaded Parkes, humbly.

'You haven't got it, sir?' repeated Mr Willet, eyeing him from top 
to toe.  'You haven't got it, sir?  You HAVE got it, sir.  Don't I 
tell you that His blessed Majesty King George the Third would no 
more stand a rioting and rollicking in his streets, than he'd stand 
being crowed over by his own Parliament?'

'Yes, Johnny, but that's your sense--not your senses,' said the 
adventurous Mr Parkes.

'How do you know?  'retorted John with great dignity.  'You're a 
contradicting pretty free, you are, sir.  How do YOU know which it 
is?  I'm not aware I ever told you, sir.'

Mr Parkes, finding himself in the position of having got into 
metaphysics without exactly seeing his way out of them, stammered 
forth an apology and retreated from the argument.  There then 
ensued a silence of some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, at 
the expiration of which period Mr Willet was observed to rumble and 
shake with laughter, and presently remarked, in reference to his 
late adversary, 'that he hoped he had tackled him enough.'  
Thereupon Messrs Cobb and Daisy laughed, and nodded, and Parkes was 
looked upon as thoroughly and effectually put down.

'Do you suppose if all this was true, that Mr Haredale would be 
constantly away from home, as he is?' said John, after another 
silence.  'Do you think he wouldn't be afraid to leave his house 
with them two young women in it, and only a couple of men, or so?'

'Ay, but then you know,' returned Solomon Daisy, 'his house is a 
goodish way out of London, and they do say that the rioters won't 
go more than two miles, or three at the farthest, off the stones.  
Besides, you know, some of the Catholic gentlefolks have actually 
sent trinkets and suchlike down here for safety--at least, so the 
story goes.'

'The story goes!' said Mr Willet testily.  'Yes, sir.  The story 
goes that you saw a ghost last March.  But nobody believes it.'

'Well!' said Solomon, rising, to divert the attention of his two 
friends, who tittered at this retort: 'believed or disbelieved, 
it's true; and true or not, if we mean to go to London, we must be 
going at once.  So shake hands, Johnny, and good night.'

'I shall shake hands,' returned the landlord, putting his into his 
pockets, 'with no man as goes to London on such nonsensical 
errands.'

The three cronies were therefore reduced to the necessity of 
shaking his elbows; having performed that ceremony, and brought 
from the house their hats, and sticks, and greatcoats, they bade 
him good night and departed; promising to bring him on the morrow 
full and true accounts of the real state of the city, and if it 
were quiet, to give him the full merit of his victory.

John Willet looked after them, as they plodded along the road in 
the rich glow of a summer evening; and knocking the ashes out of 
his pipe, laughed inwardly at their folly, until his sides were 
sore.  When he had quite exhausted himself--which took some time, 
for he laughed as slowly as he thought and spoke--he sat himself 
comfortably with his back to the house, put his legs upon the 
bench, then his apron over his face, and fell sound asleep.

How long he slept, matters not; but it was for no brief space, for 
when he awoke, the rich light had faded, the sombre hues of night 
were falling fast upon the landscape, and a few bright stars were 
already twinkling overhead.  The birds were all at roost, the 
daisies on the green had closed their fairy hoods, the honeysuckle 
twining round the porch exhaled its perfume in a twofold degree, as 
though it lost its coyness at that silent time and loved to shed 
its fragrance on the night; the ivy scarcely stirred its deep green 
leaves.  How tranquil, and how beautiful it was!

Was there no sound in the air, besides the gentle rustling of the 
trees and the grasshopper's merry chirp?  Hark!  Something very 
faint and distant, not unlike the murmuring in a sea-shell.  Now it 
grew louder, fainter now, and now it altogether died away.  
Presently, it came again, subsided, came once more, grew louder, 
fainter--swelled into a roar.  It was on the road, and varied with 
its windings.  All at once it burst into a distinct sound--the 
voices, and the tramping feet of many men.

It is questionable whether old John Willet, even then, would have 
thought of the rioters but for the cries of his cook and housemaid, 
who ran screaming upstairs and locked themselves into one of the 
old garrets,--shrieking dismally when they had done so, by way of 
rendering their place of refuge perfectly secret and secure.  These 
two females did afterwards depone that Mr Willet in his 
consternation uttered but one word, and called that up the stairs 
in a stentorian voice, six distinct times.  But as this word was a 
monosyllable, which, however inoffensive when applied to the 
quadruped it denotes, is highly reprehensible when used in 
connection with females of unimpeachable character, many persons 
were inclined to believe that the young women laboured under some 
hallucination caused by excessive fear; and that their ears 
deceived them.

Be this as it may, John Willet, in whom the very uttermost extent 
of dull-headed perplexity supplied the place of courage, stationed 
himself in the porch, and waited for their coming up.  Once, it 
dimly occurred to him that there was a kind of door to the house, 
which had a lock and bolts; and at the same time some shadowy ideas 
of shutters to the lower windows, flitted through his brain.  But 
he stood stock still, looking down the road in the direction in 
which the noise was rapidly advancing, and did not so much as take 
his hands out of his pockets.

He had not to wait long.  A dark mass, looming through a cloud of 
dust, soon became visible; the mob quickened their pace; shouting 
and whooping like savages, they came rushing on pell mell; and in a 
few seconds he was bandied from hand to hand, in the heart of a 
crowd of men.

'Halloa!' cried a voice he knew, as the man who spoke came cleaving 
through the throng.  'Where is he?  Give him to me.  Don't hurt 
him.  How now, old Jack!  Ha ha ha!'

Mr Willet looked at him, and saw it was Hugh; but he said nothing, 
and thought nothing.

'These lads are thirsty and must drink!' cried Hugh, thrusting him 
back towards the house.  'Bustle, Jack, bustle.  Show us the best--
the very best--the over-proof that you keep for your own drinking, 
Jack!'

John faintly articulated the words, 'Who's to pay?'

'He says "Who's to pay?"' cried Hugh, with a roar of laughter which 
was loudly echoed by the crowd.  Then turning to John, he added, 
'Pay! Why, nobody.'

John stared round at the mass of faces--some grinning, some fierce, 
some lighted up by torches, some indistinct, some dusky and 
shadowy: some looking at him, some at his house, some at each 
other--and while he was, as he thought, in the very act of doing 
so, found himself, without any consciousness of having moved, in 
the bar; sitting down in an arm-chair, and watching the destruction 
of his property, as if it were some queer play or entertainment, of 
an astonishing and stupefying nature, but having no reference to 
himself--that he could make out--at all.

Yes.  Here was the bar--the bar that the boldest never entered 
without special invitation--the sanctuary, the mystery, the 
hallowed ground: here it was, crammed with men, clubs, sticks, 
torches, pistols; filled with a deafening noise, oaths, shouts, 
screams, hootings; changed all at once into a bear-garden, a 
madhouse, an infernal temple: men darting in and out, by door and 
window, smashing the glass, turning the taps, drinking liquor out 
of China punchbowls, sitting astride of casks, smoking private and 
personal pipes, cutting down the sacred grove of lemons, hacking 
and hewing at the celebrated cheese, breaking open inviolable 
drawers, putting things in their pockets which didn't belong to 
them, dividing his own money before his own eyes, wantonly wasting, 
breaking, pulling down and tearing up: nothing quiet, nothing 
private: men everywhere--above, below, overhead, in the bedrooms, 
in the kitchen, in the yard, in the stables--clambering in at 
windows when there were doors wide open; dropping out of windows 
when the stairs were handy; leaping over the bannisters into chasms 
of passages: new faces and figures presenting themselves every 
instant--some yelling, some singing, some fighting, some breaking 
glass and crockery, some laying the dust with the liquor they 
couldn't drink, some ringing the bells till they pulled them down, 
others beating them with pokers till they beat them into fragments: 
more men still--more, more, more--swarming on like insects: noise, 
smoke, light, darkness, frolic, anger, laughter, groans, plunder, 
fear, and ruin!

Nearly all the time while John looked on at this bewildering scene, 
Hugh kept near him; and though he was the loudest, wildest, most 
destructive villain there, he saved his old master's bones a score 
of times.  Nay, even when Mr Tappertit, excited by liquor, came up, 
and in assertion of his prerogative politely kicked John Willet on 
the shins, Hugh bade him return the compliment; and if old John had 
had sufficient presence of mind to understand this whispered 
direction, and to profit by it, he might no doubt, under Hugh's 
protection, have done so with impunity.

At length the band began to reassemble outside the house, and to 
call to those within, to join them, for they were losing time.  
These murmurs increasing, and attaining a high pitch, Hugh, and 
some of those who yet lingered in the bar, and who plainly were the 
leaders of the troop, took counsel together, apart, as to what was 
to be done with John, to keep him quiet until their Chigwell work 
was over.  Some proposed to set the house on fire and leave him in 
it; others, that he should be reduced to a state of temporary 
insensibility, by knocking on the head; others, that he should be 
sworn to sit where he was until to-morrow at the same hour; others 
again, that he should be gagged and taken off with them, under a 
sufficient guard.  All these propositions being overruled, it was 
concluded, at last, to bind him in his chair, and the word was 
passed for Dennis.

'Look'ee here, Jack!' said Hugh, striding up to him: 'We are going 
to tie you, hand and foot, but otherwise you won't be hurt.  D'ye 
hear?'

John Willet looked at another man, as if he didn't know which was 
the speaker, and muttered something about an ordinary every Sunday 
at two o'clock.

'You won't be hurt I tell you, Jack--do you hear me?' roared Hugh, 
impressing the assurance upon him by means of a heavy blow on the 
back.  'He's so dead scared, he's woolgathering, I think.  Give him 
a drop of something to drink here.  Hand over, one of you.'

A glass of liquor being passed forward, Hugh poured the contents 
down old John's throat.  Mr Willet feebly smacked his lips, thrust 
his hand into his pocket, and inquired what was to pay; adding, as 
he looked vacantly round, that he believed there was a trifle of 
broken glass--

'He's out of his senses for the time, it's my belief,' said Hugh, 
after shaking him, without any visible effect upon his system, 
until his keys rattled in his pocket.  'Where's that Dennis?'

The word was again passed, and presently Mr Dennis, with a long 
cord bound about his middle, something after the manner of a friar, 
came hurrying in, attended by a body-guard of half-a-dozen of his 
men.

'Come!  Be alive here!' cried Hugh, stamping his foot upon the 
ground.  'Make haste!'

Dennis, with a wink and a nod, unwound the cord from about his 
person, and raising his eyes to the ceiling, looked all over it, 
and round the walls and cornice, with a curious eye; then shook his 
head.

'Move, man, can't you!' cried Hugh, with another impatient stamp of 
his foot.  'Are we to wait here, till the cry has gone for ten 
miles round, and our work's interrupted?'

'It's all very fine talking, brother,' answered Dennis, stepping 
towards him; 'but unless--' and here he whispered in his ear--
'unless we do it over the door, it can't be done at all in this 
here room.'

'What can't?' Hugh demanded.

'What can't!' retorted Dennis.  'Why, the old man can't.'

'Why, you weren't going to hang him!' cried Hugh.

'No, brother?' returned the hangman with a stare.  'What else?'

Hugh made no answer, but snatching the rope from his companion's 
hand, proceeded to bind old John himself; but his very first move 
was so bungling and unskilful, that Mr Dennis entreated, almost 
with tears in his eyes, that he might be permitted to perform the 
duty.  Hugh consenting, be achieved it in a twinkling.

'There,' he said, looking mournfully at John Willet, who displayed 
no more emotion in his bonds than he had shown out of them.  
'That's what I call pretty and workmanlike.  He's quite a picter 
now.  But, brother, just a word with you--now that he's ready 
trussed, as one may say, wouldn't it be better for all parties if 
we was to work him off?  It would read uncommon well in the 
newspapers, it would indeed.  The public would think a great deal 
more on us!'

Hugh, inferring what his companion meant, rather from his gestures 
than his technical mode of expressing himself (to which, as he was 
ignorant of his calling, he wanted the clue), rejected this 
proposition for the second time, and gave the word 'Forward!' which 
was echoed by a hundred voices from without.

'To the Warren!' shouted Dennis as he ran out, followed by the 
rest.  'A witness's house, my lads!'

A loud yell followed, and the whole throng hurried off, mad for 
pillage and destruction.  Hugh lingered behind for a few moments to 
stimulate himself with more drink, and to set all the taps running, 
a few of which had accidentally been spared; then, glancing round 
the despoiled and plundered room, through whose shattered window 
the rioters had thrust the Maypole itself,--for even that had been 
sawn down,--lighted a torch, clapped the mute and motionless John 
Willet on the back, and waving his light above his head, and 
uttering a fierce shout, hastened after his companions.



Chapter 55


John Willet, left alone in his dismantled bar, continued to sit 
staring about him; awake as to his eyes, certainly, but with all 
his powers of reason and reflection in a sound and dreamless 
sleep.  He looked round upon the room which had been for years, 
and was within an hour ago, the pride of his heart; and not a 
muscle of his face was moved.  The night, without, looked black and 
cold through the dreary gaps in the casement; the precious liquids, 
now nearly leaked away, dripped with a hollow sound upon the floor; 
the Maypole peered ruefully in through the broken window, like the 
bowsprit of a wrecked ship; the ground might have been the bottom 
of the sea, it was so strewn with precious fragments.  Currents of 
air rushed in, as the old doors jarred and creaked upon their 
hinges; the candles flickered and guttered down, and made long 
winding-sheets; the cheery deep-red curtains flapped and fluttered 
idly in the wind; even the stout Dutch kegs, overthrown and lying 
empty in dark corners, seemed the mere husks of good fellows whose 
jollity had departed, and who could kindle with a friendly glow no 
more.  John saw this desolation, and yet saw it not.  He was 
perfectly contented to sit there, staring at it, and felt no more 
indignation or discomfort in his bonds than if they had been robes 
of honour.  So far as he was personally concerned, old Time lay 
snoring, and the world stood still.

Save for the dripping from the barrels, the rustling of such light 
fragments of destruction as the wind affected, and the dull 
creaking of the open doors, all was profoundly quiet: indeed, 
these sounds, like the ticking of the death-watch in the night, 
only made the silence they invaded deeper and more apparent.  But 
quiet or noisy, it was all one to John.  If a train of heavy 
artillery could have come up and commenced ball practice outside 
the window, it would have been all the same to him.  He was a long 
way beyond surprise.  A ghost couldn't have overtaken him.

By and by he heard a footstep--a hurried, and yet cautious 
footstep--coming on towards the house.  It stopped, advanced again, 
then seemed to go quite round it.  Having done that, it came 
beneath the window, and a head looked in.

It was strongly relieved against the darkness outside by the glare 
of the guttering candles.  A pale, worn, withered face; the eyes--
but that was owing to its gaunt condition--unnaturally large and 
bright; the hair, a grizzled black.  It gave a searching glance all 
round the room, and a deep voice said:

'Are you alone in this house?'

John made no sign, though the question was repeated twice, and he 
heard it distinctly.  After a moment's pause, the man got in at the 
window.  John was not at all surprised at this, either.  There had 
been so much getting in and out of window in the course of the last 
hour or so, that he had quite forgotten the door, and seemed to 
have lived among such exercises from infancy.

The man wore a large, dark, faded cloak, and a slouched hat; he 
walked up close to John, and looked at him.  John returned the 
compliment with interest.

'How long have you been sitting thus?' said the man.

John considered, but nothing came of it.

'Which way have the party gone?'

Some wandering speculations relative to the fashion of the 
stranger's boots, got into Mr Willet's mind by some accident or 
other, but they got out again in a hurry, and left him in his 
former state.

'You would do well to speak,' said the man; 'you may keep a whole 
skin, though you have nothing else left that can be hurt.  Which 
way have the party gone?'

'That!' said John, finding his voice all at once, and nodding with 
perfect good faith--he couldn't point; he was so tightly bound--in 
exactly the opposite direction to the right one.

'You lie!' said the man angrily, and with a threatening gesture.  
'I came that way.  You would betray me.'

It was so evident that John's imperturbability was not assumed, but 
was the result of the late proceedings under his roof, that the man 
stayed his hand in the very act of striking him, and turned away.

John looked after him without so much as a twitch in a single nerve 
of his face.  He seized a glass, and holding it under one of the 
little casks until a few drops were collected, drank them greedily 
off; then throwing it down upon the floor impatiently, he took the 
vessel in his hands and drained it into his throat.  Some scraps of 
bread and meat were scattered about, and on these he fell next; 
eating them with voracity, and pausing every now and then to 
listen for some fancied noise outside.  When he had refreshed 
himself in this manner with violent haste, and raised another 
barrel to his lips, he pulled his hat upon his brow as though he 
were about to leave the house, and turned to John.

'Where are your servants?'

Mr Willet indistinctly remembered to have heard the rioters calling 
to them to throw the key of the room in which they were, out of 
window, for their keeping.  He therefore replied, 'Locked up.'

'Well for them if they remain quiet, and well for you if you do the 
like,' said the man.  'Now show me the way the party went.'

This time Mr Willet indicated it correctly.  The man was hurrying 
to the door, when suddenly there came towards them on the wind, the 
loud and rapid tolling of an alarm-bell, and then a bright and 
vivid glare streamed up, which illumined, not only the whole 
chamber, but all the country.

It was not the sudden change from darkness to this dreadful light, 
it was not the sound of distant shrieks and shouts of triumph, it 
was not this dread invasion of the serenity and peace of night, 
that drove the man back as though a thunderbolt had struck him.  It 
was the Bell.  If the ghastliest shape the human mind has ever 
pictured in its wildest dreams had risen up before him, he could 
not have staggered backward from its touch, as he did from the 
first sound of that loud iron voice.  With eyes that started from 
his head, his limbs convulsed, his face most horrible to see, he 
raised one arm high up into the air, and holding something 
visionary back and down, with his other hand, drove at it as though 
he held a knife and stabbed it to the heart.  He clutched his hair, 
and stopped his ears, and travelled madly round and round; then 
gave a frightful cry, and with it rushed away: still, still, the 
Bell tolled on and seemed to follow him--louder and louder, hotter 
and hotter yet.  The glare grew brighter, the roar of voices 
deeper; the crash of heavy bodies falling, shook the air; bright 
streams of sparks rose up into the sky; but louder than them all--
rising faster far, to Heaven--a million times more fierce and 
furious--pouring forth dreadful secrets after its long silence--
speaking the language of the dead--the Bell--the Bell!

What hunt of spectres could surpass that dread pursuit and flight!  
Had there been a legion of them on his track, he could have better 
borne it.  They would have had a beginning and an end, but here all 
space was full.  The one pursuing voice was everywhere: it sounded 
in the earth, the air; shook the long grass, and howled among the 
trembling trees.  The echoes caught it up, the owls hooted as it 
flew upon the breeze, the nightingale was silent and hid herself 
among the thickest boughs: it seemed to goad and urge the angry 
fire, and lash it into madness; everything was steeped in one 
prevailing red; the glow was everywhere; nature was drenched in 
blood: still the remorseless crying of that awful voice--the Bell, 
the Bell!

It ceased; but not in his ears.  The knell was at his heart.  No 
work of man had ever voice like that which sounded there, and 
warned him that it cried unceasingly to Heaven.  Who could hear 
that hell, and not know what it said!  There was murder in its 
every note--cruel, relentless, savage murder--the murder of a 
confiding man, by one who held his every trust.  Its ringing 
summoned phantoms from their graves.  What face was that, in which 
a friendly smile changed to a look of half incredulous horror, 
which stiffened for a moment into one of pain, then changed again 
into an imploring glance at Heaven, and so fell idly down with 
upturned eyes, like the dead stags' he had often peeped at when a 
little child: shrinking and shuddering--there was a dreadful thing 
to think of now!--and clinging to an apron as he looked!  He sank 
upon the ground, and grovelling down as if he would dig himself a 
place to hide in, covered his face and ears: but no, no, no,--a 
hundred walls and roofs of brass would not shut out that bell, for 
in it spoke the wrathful voice of God, and from that voice, the 
whole wide universe could not afford a refuge!

While he rushed up and down, not knowing where to turn, and while 
he lay crouching there, the work went briskly on indeed.  When 
they left the Maypole, the rioters formed into a solid body, and 
advanced at a quick pace towards the Warren.  Rumour of their 
approach having gone before, they found the garden-doors fast 
closed, the windows made secure, and the house profoundly dark: not 
a light being visible in any portion of the building.  After some 
fruitless ringing at the bells, and beating at the iron gates, they 
drew off a few paces to reconnoitre, and confer upon the course it 
would be best to take.

Very little conference was needed, when all were bent upon one 
desperate purpose, infuriated with liquor, and flushed with 
successful riot.  The word being given to surround the house, some 
climbed the gates, or dropped into the shallow trench and scaled 
the garden wall, while others pulled down the solid iron fence, and 
while they made a breach to enter by, made deadly weapons of the 
bars.  The house being completely encircled, a small number of men 
were despatched to break open a tool-shed in the garden; and during 
their absence on this errand, the remainder contented themselves 
with knocking violently at the doors, and calling to those within, 
to come down and open them on peril of their lives.

No answer being returned to this repeated summons, and the 
detachment who had been sent away, coming back with an accession of 
pickaxes, spades, and hoes, they,--together with those who had such 
arms already, or carried (as many did) axes, poles, and crowbars,--
struggled into the foremost rank, ready to beset the doors and 
windows.  They had not at this time more than a dozen lighted 
torches among them; but when these preparations were completed, 
flaming links were distributed and passed from hand to hand with 
such rapidity, that, in a minute's time, at least two-thirds of the 
whole roaring mass bore, each man in his hand, a blazing brand.  
Whirling these about their heads they raised a loud shout, and fell 
to work upon the doors and windows.

Amidst the clattering of heavy blows, the rattling of broken glass, 
the cries and execrations of the mob, and all the din and turmoil 
of the scene, Hugh and his friends kept together at the turret-door 
where Mr Haredale had last admitted him and old John Willet; and 
spent their united force on that.  It was a strong old oaken door, 
guarded by good bolts and a heavy bar, but it soon went crashing in 
upon the narrow stairs behind, and made, as it were, a platform to 
facilitate their tearing up into the rooms above.  Almost at the 
same moment, a dozen other points were forced, and at every one the 
crowd poured in like water.

A few armed servant-men were posted in the hall, and when the 
rioters forced an entrance there, they fired some half-a-dozen 
shots.  But these taking no effect, and the concourse coming on 
like an army of devils, they only thought of consulting their own 
safety, and retreated, echoing their assailants' cries, and hoping 
in the confusion to be taken for rioters themselves; in which 
stratagem they succeeded, with the exception of one old man who was 
never heard of again, and was said to have had his brains beaten 
out with an iron bar (one of his fellows reported that he had seen 
the old man fall), and to have been afterwards burnt in the flames.

The besiegers being now in complete possession of the house, spread 
themselves over it from garret to cellar, and plied their demon 
labours fiercely.  While some small parties kindled bonfires 
underneath the windows, others broke up the furniture and cast the 
fragments down to feed the flames below; where the apertures in 
the wall (windows no longer) were large enough, they threw out 
tables, chests of drawers, beds, mirrors, pictures, and flung them 
whole into the fire; while every fresh addition to the blazing 
masses was received with shouts, and howls, and yells, which added 
new and dismal terrors to the conflagration.  Those who had axes 
and had spent their fury on the movables, chopped and tore down the 
doors and window frames, broke up the flooring, hewed away the 
rafters, and buried men who lingered in the upper rooms, in heaps 
of ruins.  Some searched the drawers, the chests, the boxes, 
writing-desks, and closets, for jewels, plate, and money; while 
others, less mindful of gain and more mad for destruction, cast 
their whole contents into the courtyard without examination, and 
called to those below, to heap them on the blaze.  Men who had 
been into the cellars, and had staved the casks, rushed to and fro 
stark mad, setting fire to all they saw--often to the dresses of 
their own friends--and kindling the building in so many parts that 
some had no time for escape, and were seen, with drooping hands and 
blackened faces, hanging senseless on the window-sills to which 
they had crawled, until they were sucked and drawn into the 
burning gulf.  The more the fire crackled and raged, the wilder and 
more cruel the men grew; as though moving in that element they 
became fiends, and changed their earthly nature for the qualities 
that give delight in hell.

The burning pile, revealing rooms and passages red hot, through 
gaps made in the crumbling walls; the tributary fires that licked 
the outer bricks and stones, with their long forked tongues, and 
ran up to meet the glowing mass within; the shining of the flames 
upon the villains who looked on and fed them; the roaring of the 
angry blaze, so bright and high that it seemed in its rapacity to 
have swallowed up the very smoke; the living flakes the wind bore 
rapidly away and hurried on with, like a storm of fiery snow; the 
noiseless breaking of great beams of wood, which fell like feathers 
on the heap of ashes, and crumbled in the very act to sparks and 
powder; the lurid tinge that overspread the sky, and the darkness, 
very deep by contrast, which prevailed around; the exposure to the 
coarse, common gaze, of every little nook which usages of home had 
made a sacred place, and the destruction by rude hands of every 
little household favourite which old associations made a dear and 
precious thing: all this taking place--not among pitying looks and 
friendly murmurs of compassion, but brutal shouts and exultations, 
which seemed to make the very rats who stood by the old house too 
long, creatures with some claim upon the pity and regard of those 
its roof had sheltered:--combined to form a scene never to be 
forgotten by those who saw it and were not actors in the work, so 
long as life endured.

And who were they?  The alarm-bell rang--and it was pulled by no 
faint or hesitating hands--for a long time; but not a soul was 
seen.  Some of the insurgents said that when it ceased, they heard 
the shrieks of women, and saw some garments fluttering in the air, 
as a party of men bore away no unresisting burdens.  No one could 
say that this was true or false, in such an uproar; but where was 
Hugh?  Who among them had seen him, since the forcing of the doors?  
The cry spread through the body.  Where was Hugh!

'Here!' he hoarsely cried, appearing from the darkness; out of 
breath, and blackened with the smoke.  'We have done all we can; 
the fire is burning itself out; and even the corners where it 
hasn't spread, are nothing but heaps of ruins.  Disperse, my lads, 
while the coast's clear; get back by different ways; and meet as 
usual!'  With that, he disappeared again,--contrary to his wont, 
for he was always first to advance, and last to go away,--leaving 
them to follow homewards as they would.

It was not an easy task to draw off such a throng.  If Bedlam gates 
had been flung wide open, there would not have issued forth such 
maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made.  There were men 
there, who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though 
they trod down human enemies, and wrenched them from the stalks, 
like savages who twisted human necks.  There were men who cast 
their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon 
their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep unseemly 
burns.  There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled in it 
with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by 
force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing.  On the 
skull of one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon 
the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came 
streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his 
head like wax.  When the scattered parties were collected, men--
living yet, but singed as with hot irons--were plucked out of the 
cellars, and carried off upon the shoulders of others, who strove 
to wake them as they went along, with ribald jokes, and left them, 
dead, in the passages of hospitals.  But of all the howling throng 
not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these sights; nor was 
the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.

Slowly, and in small clusters, with hoarse hurrahs and repetitions 
of their usual cry, the assembly dropped away.  The last few red-
eyed stragglers reeled after those who had gone before; the distant 
noise of men calling to each other, and whistling for others whom 
they missed, grew fainter and fainter; at length even these sounds 
died away, and silence reigned alone.

Silence indeed!  The glare of the flames had sunk into a fitful, 
flashing light; and the gentle stars, invisible till now, looked 
down upon the blackening heap.  A dull smoke hung upon the ruin, as 
though to hide it from those eyes of Heaven; and the wind forbore 
to move it.  Bare walls, roof open to the sky--chambers, where the 
beloved dead had, many and many a fair day, risen to new life and 
energy; where so many dear ones had been sad and merry; which were 
connected with so many thoughts and hopes, regrets and changes--all 
gone.  Nothing left but a dull and dreary blank--a smouldering heap 
of dust and ashes--the silence and solitude of utter desolation.



Chapter 56


The Maypole cronies, little drearning of the change so soon to come 
upon their favourite haunt, struck through the Forest path upon 
their way to London; and avoiding the main road, which was hot and 
dusty, kept to the by-paths and the fields.  As they drew nearer to 
their destination, they began to make inquiries of the people whom 
they passed, concerning the riots, and the truth or falsehood of 
the stories they had heard.  The answers went far beyond any 
intelligence that had spread to quiet Chigwell.  One man told them 
that that afternoon the Guards, conveying to Newgate some rioters 
who had been re-examined, had been set upon by the mob and 
compelled to retreat; another, that the houses of two witnesses 
near Clare Market were about to be pulled down when he came away; 
another, that Sir George Saville's house in Leicester Fields was to 
be burned that night, and that it would go hard with Sir George if 
he fell into the people's hands, as it was he who had brought in 
the Catholic bill.  All accounts agreed that the mob were out, in 
stronger numbers and more numerous parties than had yet appeared; 
that the streets were unsafe; that no man's house or life was worth 
an hour's purchase; that the public consternation was increasing 
every moment; and that many families had already fled the city.  
One fellow who wore the popular colour, damned them for not having 
cockades in their hats, and bade them set a good watch to-morrow 
night upon their prison doors, for the locks would have a 
straining; another asked if they were fire-proof, that they 
walked abroad without the distinguishing mark of all good and true 
men;--and a third who rode on horseback, and was quite alone, 
ordered them to throw each man a shilling, in his hat, towards the 
support of the rioters.  Although they were afraid to refuse 
compliance with this demand, and were much alarmed by these 
reports, they agreed, having come so far, to go forward, and see 
the real state of things with their own eyes.  So they pushed on 
quicker, as men do who are excited by portentous news; and 
ruminating on what they had heard, spoke little to each other.

It was now night, and as they came nearer to the city they had 
dismal confirmation of this intelligence in three great fires, all 
close together, which burnt fiercely and were gloomily reflected in 
the sky.  Arriving in the immediate suburbs, they found that almost 
every house had chalked upon its door in large characters 'No 
Popery,' that the shops were shut, and that alarm and anxiety were 
depicted in every face they passed.

Noting these things with a degree of apprehension which neither of 
the three cared to impart, in its full extent, to his companions, 
they came to a turnpike-gate, which was shut.  They were passing 
through the turnstile on the path, when a horseman rode up from 
London at a hard gallop, and called to the toll-keeper in a voice 
of great agitation, to open quickly in the name of God.

The adjuration was so earnest and vehement, that the man, with a 
lantern in his hand, came running out--toll-keeper though he was--
and was about to throw the gate open, when happening to look behind 
him, he exclaimed, 'Good Heaven, what's that!  Another fire!'

At this, the three turned their heads, and saw in the distance--
straight in the direction whence they had come--a broad sheet of 
flame, casting a threatening light upon the clouds, which glimmered 
as though the conflagration were behind them, and showed like a 
wrathful sunset.

'My mind misgives me,' said the horseman, 'or I know from what far 
building those flames come.  Don't stand aghast, my good fellow.  
Open the gate!'

'Sir,' cried the man, laying his hand upon his horse's bridle as he 
let him through: 'I know you now, sir; be advised by me; do not go 
on.  I saw them pass, and know what kind of men they are.  You will 
be murdered.'

'So be it!' said the horseman, looking intently towards the fire, 
and not at him who spoke.

'But sir--sir,' cried the man, grasping at his rein more tightly 
yet, 'if you do go on, wear the blue riband.  Here, sir,' he added, 
taking one from his own hat, 'it's necessity, not choice, that 
makes me wear it; it's love of life and home, sir.  Wear it for 
this one night, sir; only for this one night.'

'Do!' cried the three friends, pressing round his horse.  'Mr 
Haredale--worthy sir--good gentleman--pray be persuaded.'

'Who's that?' cried Mr Haredale, stooping down to look.  'Did I 
hear Daisy's voice?'

'You did, sir,' cried the little man.  'Do be persuaded, sir.  This 
gentleman says very true.  Your life may hang upon it.'

'Are you,' said Mr Haredale abruptly, 'afraid to come with me?'

'I, sir?--N-n-no.'

'Put that riband in your hat.  If we meet the rioters, swear that I 
took you prisoner for wearing it.  I will tell them so with my own 
lips; for as I hope for mercy when I die, I will take no quarter 
from them, nor shall they have quarter from me, if we come hand to 
hand to-night.  Up here--behind me--quick!  Clasp me tight round 
the body, and fear nothing.'

In an instant they were riding away, at full gallop, in a dense 
cloud of dust, and speeding on, like hunters in a dream.

It was well the good horse knew the road he traversed, for never 
once--no, never once in all the journey--did Mr Haredale cast his 
eyes upon the ground, or turn them, for an instant, from the light 
towards which they sped so madly.  Once he said in a low voice, 'It 
is my house,' but that was the only time he spoke.  When they came 
to dark and doubtful places, he never forgot to put his hand upon 
the little man to hold him more securely in his seat, but he kept 
his head erect and his eyes fixed on the fire, then, and always.

The road was dangerous enough, for they went the nearest way--
headlong--far from the highway--by lonely lanes and paths, where 
waggon-wheels had worn deep ruts; where hedge and ditch hemmed in 
the narrow strip of ground; and tall trees, arching overhead, made 
it profoundly dark.  But on, on, on, with neither stop nor stumble, 
till they reached the Maypole door, and could plainly see that the 
fire began to fade, as if for want of fuel.

'Down--for one moment--for but one moment,' said Mr Haredale, 
helping Daisy to the ground, and following himself.  'Willet--
Willet--where are my niece and servants--Willet!'

Crying to him distractedly, he rushed into the bar.--The landlord 
bound and fastened to his chair; the place dismantled, stripped, 
and pulled about his ears;--nobody could have taken shelter here.

He was a strong man, accustomed to restrain himself, and suppress 
his strong emotions; but this preparation for what was to follow--
though he had seen that fire burning, and knew that his house must 
be razed to the ground--was more than he could bear.  He covered 
his face with his hands for a moment, and turned away his head.

'Johnny, Johnny,' said Solomon--and the simple-hearted fellow 
cried outright, and wrung his hands--'Oh dear old Johnny, here's a 
change!  That the Maypole bar should come to this, and we should 
live to see it!  The old Warren too, Johnny--Mr Haredale--oh, 
Johnny, what a piteous sight this is!'

Pointing to Mr Haredale as he said these words, little Solomon 
Daisy put his elbows on the back of Mr Willet's chair, and fairly 
blubbered on his shoulder.

While Solomon was speaking, old John sat, mute as a stock-fish, 
staring at him with an unearthly glare, and displaying, by every 
possible symptom, entire and complete unconsciousness.  But when 
Solomon was silent again, John followed,with his great round eyes, 
the direction of his looks, and did appear to have some dawning 
distant notion that somebody had come to see him.

'You know us, don't you, Johnny?' said the little clerk, rapping 
himself on the breast.  'Daisy, you know--Chigwell Church--bell-
ringer--little desk on Sundays--eh, Johnny?'

Mr Willet reflected for a few moments, and then muttered, as it 
were mechanically: 'Let us sing to the praise and glory of--'

'Yes, to be sure,' cried the little man, hastily; 'that's it--
that's me, Johnny.  You're all right now, an't you?  Say you're all 
right, Johnny.'

'All right?' pondered Mr Willet, as if that were a matter entirely 
between himself and his conscience.  'All right?  Ah!'

'They haven't been misusing you with sticks, or pokers, or any 
other blunt instruments--have they, Johnny?' asked Solomon, with a 
very anxious glance at Mr Willet's head.  'They didn't beat you, 
did they?'

John knitted his brow; looked downwards, as if he were mentally 
engaged in some arithmetical calculation; then upwards, as if the 
total would not come at his call; then at Solomon Daisy, from his 
eyebrow to his shoe-buckle; then very slowly round the bar.  And 
then a great, round, leaden-looking, and not at all transparent 
tear, came rolling out of each eye, and he said, as he shook his 
head:

'If they'd only had the goodness to murder me, I'd have thanked 'em 
kindly.'

'No, no, no, don't say that, Johnny,' whimpered his little friend.  
'It's very, very bad, but not quite so bad as that.  No, no!'

'Look'ee here, sir!' cried John, turning his rueful eyes on Mr 
Haredale, who had dropped on one knee, and was hastily beginning to 
untie his bonds.  'Look'ee here, sir!  The very Maypole--the old 
dumb Maypole--stares in at the winder, as if it said, "John Willet, 
John Willet, let's go and pitch ourselves in the nighest pool of 
water as is deep enough to hold us; for our day is over!"'

'Don't, Johnny, don't,' cried his friend: no less affected with 
this mournful effort of Mr Willet's imagination, than by the 
sepulchral tone in which he had spoken of the Maypole.  'Please 
don't, Johnny!'

'Your loss is great, and your misfortune a heavy one,' said Mr 
Haredale, looking restlessly towards the door: 'and this is not a 
time to comfort you.  If it were, I am in no condition to do so.  
Before I leave you, tell me one thing, and try to tell me plainly, 
I implore you.  Have you seen, or heard of Emma?'

'No!' said Mr Willet.

'Nor any one but these bloodhounds?'

'No!'

'They rode away, I trust in Heaven, before these dreadful scenes 
began,' said Mr Haredale, who, between his agitation, his eagerness 
to mount his horse again, and the dexterity with which the cords 
were tied, had scarcely yet undone one knot.  'A knife, Daisy!'

'You didn't,' said John, looking about, as though he had lost his 
pocket-handkerchief, or some such slight article--'either of you 
gentlemen--see a--a coffin anywheres, did you?'

'Willet!' cried Mr Haredale.  Solomon dropped the knife, and 
instantly becoming limp from head to foot, exclaimed 'Good 
gracious!'

'--Because,' said John, not at all regarding them, 'a dead man 
called a little time ago, on his way yonder.  I could have told you 
what name was on the plate, if he had brought his coffin with him, 
and left it behind.  If he didn't, it don't signify.'

His landlord, who had listened to these words with breathless 
attention, started that moment to his feet; and, without a word, 
drew Solomon Daisy to the door, mounted his horse, took him up 
behind again, and flew rather than galloped towards the pile of 
ruins, which that day's sun had shone upon, a stately house.  Mr 
Willet stared after them, listened, looked down upon himself to 
make quite sure that he was still unbound, and, without any 
manifestation of impatience, disappointment, or surprise, gently 
relapsed into the condition from which he had so imperfectly 
recovered.

Mr Haredale tied his horse to the trunk of a tree, and grasping his 
companion's arm, stole softly along the footpath, and into what had 
been the garden of his house.  He stopped for an instant to look 
upon its smoking walls, and at the stars that shone through roof 
and floor upon the heap of crumbling ashes.  Solomon glanced 
timidly in his face, but his lips were tightly pressed together, a 
resolute and stern expression sat upon his brow, and not a tear, a 
look, or gesture indicating grief, escaped him.

He drew his sword; felt for a moment in his breast, as though he 
carried other arms about him; then grasping Solomon by the wrist 
again, went with a cautious step all round the house.  He looked 
into every doorway and gap in the wall; retraced his steps at every 
rustling of the air among the leaves; and searched in every 
shadowed nook with outstretched hands.  Thus they made the circuit 
of the building: but they returned to the spot from which they had 
set out, without encountering any human being, or finding the least 
trace of any concealed straggler.

After a short pause, Mr Haredale shouted twice or thrice.  Then 
cried aloud, 'Is there any one in hiding here, who knows my voice!  
There is nothing to fear now.  If any of my people are near, I 
entreat them to answer!'  He called them all by name; his voice was 
echoed in many mournful tones; then all was silent as before.

They were standing near the foot of the turret, where the alarm-
bell hung.  The fire had raged there, and the floors had been sawn, 
and hewn, and beaten down, besides.  It was open to the night; but 
a part of the staircase still remained, winding upward from a great 
mound of dust and cinders.  Fragments of the jagged and broken 
steps offered an insecure and giddy footing here and there, and 
then were lost again, behind protruding angles of the wall, or in 
the deep shadows cast upon it by other portions of the ruin; for by 
this time the moon had risen, and shone brightly.

As they stood here, listening to the echoes as they died away, and 
hoping in vain to hear a voice they knew, some of the ashes in this 
turret slipped and rolled down.  Startled by the least noise in 
that melancholy place, Solomon looked up in his companion's face, 
and saw that he had turned towards the spot, and that he watched 
and listened keenly.

He covered the little man's mouth with his hand, and looked again.  
Instantly, with kindling eyes, he bade him on his life keep still, 
and neither speak nor move.  Then holding his breath, and stooping 
down, he stole into the turret, with his drawn sword in his hand, 
and disappeared.

Terrified to be left there by himself, under such desolate 
circumstances, and after all he had seen and heard that night, 
Solomon would have followed, but there had been something in Mr 
Haredale's manner and his look, the recollection of which held him 
spellbound.  He stood rooted to the spot; and scarcely venturing to 
breathe, looked up with mingled fear and wonder.

Again the ashes slipped and rolled--very, very softly--again--and 
then again, as though they crumbled underneath the tread of a 
stealthy foot.  And now a figure was dimly visible; climbing very 
softly; and often stopping to look down; now it pursued its 
difficult way; and now it was hidden from the view again.

It emerged once more, into the shadowy and uncertain light--higher 
now, but not much, for the way was steep and toilsome, and its 
progress very slow.  What phantom of the brain did he pursue; and 
why did he look down so constantly?  He knew he was alone.  Surely 
his mind was not affected by that night's loss and agony.  He was 
not about to throw himself headlong from the summit of the 
tottering wall.  Solomon turned sick, and clasped his hands.  His 
limbs trembled beneath him, and a cold sweat broke out upon his 
pallid face.

If he complied with Mr Haredale's last injunction now, it was 
because he had not the power to speak or move.  He strained his 
gaze, and fixed it on a patch of moonlight, into which, if he 
continued to ascend, he must soon emerge.  When he appeared there, 
he would try to call to him.

Again the ashes slipped and crumbled; some stones rolled down, and 
fell with a dull, heavy sound upon the ground below.  He kept his 
eyes upon the piece of moonlight.  The figure was coming on, for 
its shadow was already thrown upon the wall.  Now it appeared--and 
now looked round at him--and now--

The horror-stricken clerk uttered a scream that pierced the air, 
and cried, 'The ghost!  The ghost!'

Long before the echo of his cry had died away, another form rushed 
out into the light, flung itself upon the foremost one, knelt down 
upon its breast, and clutched its throat with both hands.

'Villain!' cried Mr Haredale, in a terrible voice--for it was he.  
'Dead and buried, as all men supposed through your infernal arts, 
but reserved by Heaven for this--at last--at last I have you.  You, 
whose hands are red with my brother's blood, and that of his 
faithful servant, shed to conceal your own atrocious guilt--You, 
Rudge, double murderer and monster, I arrest you in the name of 
God, who has delivered you into my hands.  No.  Though you had the 
strength of twenty men,' he added, as the murderer writhed and 
struggled, you could not escape me or loosen my grasp to-night!'



Chapter 57


Barnaby, armed as we have seen, continued to pace up and down 
before the stable-door; glad to be alone again, and heartily 
rejoicing in the unaccustomed silence and tranquillity.  After the 
whirl of noise and riot in which the last two days had been passed, 
the pleasures of solitude and peace were enhanced a thousandfold.  
He felt quite happy; and as he leaned upon his staff and mused, a 
bright smile overspread his face, and none but cheerful visions 
floated into his brain.

Had he no thoughts of her, whose sole delight he was, and whom he 
had unconsciously plunged in such bitter sorrow and such deep 
affliction?  Oh, yes.  She was at the heart of all his cheerful 
hopes and proud reflections.  It was she whom all this honour and 
distinction were to gladden; the joy and profit were for her.  What 
delight it gave her to hear of the bravery of her poor boy!  Ah!  
He would have known that, without Hugh's telling him.  And what a 
precious thing it was to know she lived so happily, and heard with 
so much pride (he pictured to himself her look when they told her) 
that he was in such high esteem: bold among the boldest, and 
trusted before them all!  And when these frays were over, and the 
good lord had conquered his enemies, and they were all at peace 
again, and he and she were rich, what happiness they would have in 
talking of these troubled times when he was a great soldier: and 
when they sat alone together in the tranquil twilight, and she had 
no longer reason to be anxious for the morrow, what pleasure would 
he have in the reflection that this was his doing--his--poor 
foolish Barnaby's; and in patting her on the cheek, and saying with 
a merry laugh, 'Am I silly now, mother--am I silly now?'

With a lighter heart and step, and eyes the brighter for the happy 
tear that dimmed them for a moment, Barnaby resumed his walk; and 
singing gaily to himself, kept guard upon his quiet post.

His comrade Grip, the partner of his watch, though fond of basking 
in the sunshine, preferred to-day to walk about the stable; having 
a great deal to do in the way of scattering the straw, hiding under 
it such small articles as had been casually left about, and 
haunting Hugh's bed, to which he seemed to have taken a particular 
attachment.  Sometimes Barnaby looked in and called him, and then 
he came hopping out; but he merely did this as a concession to his 
master's weakness, and soon returned again to his own grave 
pursuits: peering into the straw with his bill, and rapidly 
covering up the place, as if, Midas-like, he were whispering 
secrets to the earth and burying them; constantly busying himself 
upon the sly; and affecting, whenever Barnaby came past, to look up 
in the clouds and have nothing whatever on his mind: in short, 
conducting himself, in many respects, in a more than usually 
thoughtful, deep, and mysterious manner.

As the day crept on, Barnaby, who had no directions forbidding him 
to eat and drink upon his post, but had been, on the contrary, 
supplied with a bottle of beer and a basket of provisions, 
determined to break his fast, which he had not done since morning.  
To this end, he sat down on the ground before the door, and putting 
his staff across his knees in case of alarm or surprise, summoned 
Grip to dinner.

This call, the bird obeyed with great alacrity; crying, as he 
sidled up to his master, 'I'm a devil, I'm a Polly, I'm a kettle, 
I'm a Protestant, No Popery!'  Having learnt this latter sentiment 
from the gentry among whom he had lived of late, he delivered it 
with uncommon emphasis.

'Well said, Grip!' cried his master, as he fed him with the 
daintiest bits.  'Well said, old boy!'

'Never say die, bow wow wow, keep up your spirits, Grip Grip Grip, 
Holloa!  We'll all have tea, I'm a Protestant kettle, No Popery!' 
cried the raven.

'Gordon for ever, Grip!' cried Barnaby.

The raven, placing his head upon the ground, looked at his master 
sideways, as though he would have said, 'Say that again!'  
Perfectly understanding his desire, Barnaby repeated the phrase a 
great many times.  The bird listened with profound attention; 
sometimes repeating the popular cry in a low voice, as if to 
compare the two, and try if it would at all help him to this new 
accomplishment; sometimes flapping his wings, or barking; and 
sometimes in a kind of desperation drawing a multitude of corks, 
with extraordinary viciousness.

Barnaby was so intent upon his favourite, that he was not at first 
aware of the approach of two persons on horseback, who were riding 
at a foot-pace, and coming straight towards his post.  When he 
perceived them, however, which he did when they were within some 
fifty yards of him, he jumped hastily up, and ordering Grip within 
doors, stood with both hands on his staff, waiting until he should 
know whether they were friends or foes.

He had hardly done so, when he observed that those who advanced 
were a gentleman and his servant; almost at the same moment he 
recognised Lord George Gordon, before whom he stood uncovered, with 
his eyes turned towards the ground.

'Good day!' said Lord George, not reining in his horse until he was 
close beside him.  'Well!'

'All quiet, sir, all safe!' cried Barnaby.  'The rest are away--
they went by that path--that one.  A grand party!'

'Ay?' said Lord George, looking thoughtfully at him.  'And you?'

'Oh!  They left me here to watch--to mount guard--to keep 
everything secure till they come back.  I'll do it, sir, for your 
sake.  You're a good gentleman; a kind gentleman--ay, you are.  
There are many against you, but we'll be a match for them, never 
fear!'

'What's that?' said Lord George--pointing to the raven who was 
peeping out of the stable-door--but still looking thoughtfully, and 
in some perplexity, it seemed, at Barnaby.

'Why, don't you know!' retorted Barnaby, with a wondering laugh.  
'Not know what HE is!  A bird, to be sure.  My bird--my friend--
Grip.'

'A devil, a kettle, a Grip, a Polly, a Protestant, no Popery!' 
cried the raven.

'Though, indeed,' added Barnaby, laying his hand upon the neck of 
Lord George's horse, and speaking softly: 'you had good reason to 
ask me what he is, for sometimes it puzzles me--and I am used to 
him--to think he's only a bird.  He's my brother, Grip is--always 
with me--always talking--always merry--eh, Grip?'

The raven answered by an affectionate croak, and hopping on his 
master's arm, which he held downward for that purpose, submitted 
with an air of perfect indifference to be fondled, and turned his 
restless, curious eye, now upon Lord George, and now upon his man.

Lord George, biting his nails in a discomfited manner, regarded 
Barnaby for some time in silence; then beckoning to his servant, 
said:

'Come hither, John.'

John Grueby touched his hat, and came.

'Have you ever seen this young man before?' his master asked in a 
low voice.

'Twice, my lord,' said John.  'I saw him in the crowd last night 
and Saturday.'

'Did--did it seem to you that his manner was at all wild or 
strange?' Lord George demanded, faltering.

'Mad,' said John, with emphatic brevity.

'And why do you think him mad, sir?' said his master, speaking in a 
peevish tone.  'Don't use that word too freely.  Why do you think 
him mad?'

'My lord,' John Grueby answered, 'look at his dress, look at his 
eyes, look at his restless way, hear him cry "No Popery!"  Mad, my 
lord.'

'So because one man dresses unlike another,' returned his angry 
master, glancing at himself; 'and happens to differ from other men 
in his carriage and manner, and to advocate a great cause which the 
corrupt and irreligious desert, he is to be accounted mad, is he?'

'Stark, staring, raving, roaring mad, my lord,' returned the 
unmoved John.

'Do you say this to my face?' cried his master, turning sharply 
upon him.

'To any man, my lord, who asks me,' answered John.

'Mr Gashford, I find, was right,' said Lord George; 'I thought him 
prejudiced, though I ought to have known a man like him better than 
to have supposed it possible!'

'I shall never have Mr Gashford's good word, my lord,' replied 
John, touching his hat respectfully, 'and I don't covet it.'

'You are an ill-conditioned, most ungrateful fellow,' said Lord 
George: 'a spy, for anything I know.  Mr Gashford is perfectly 
correct, as I might have felt convinced he was.  I have done wrong 
to retain you in my service.  It is a tacit insult to him as my 
choice and confidential friend to do so, remembering the cause you 
sided with, on the day he was maligned at Westminster.  You will 
leave me to-night--nay, as soon as we reach home.  The sooner the 
better.'

'If it comes to that, I say so too, my lord.  Let Mr Gashford have 
his will.  As to my being a spy, my lord, you know me better than 
to believe it, I am sure.  I don't know much about causes.  My 
cause is the cause of one man against two hundred; and I hope it 
always will be.'

'You have said quite enough,' returned Lord George, motioning him 
to go back.  'I desire to hear no more.'

'If you'll let me have another word, my lord,' returned John 
Grueby, 'I'd give this silly fellow a caution not to stay here by 
himself.  The proclamation is in a good many hands already, and 
it's well known that he was concerned in the business it relates 
to.  He had better get to a place of safety if he can, poor 
creature.'

'You hear what this man says?' cried Lord George, addressing 
Barnaby, who had looked on and wondered while this dialogue passed.  
'He thinks you may be afraid to remain upon your post, and are kept 
here perhaps against your will.  What do you say?'

'I think, young man,' said John, in explanation, 'that the soldiers 
may turn out and take you; and that if they do, you will certainly 
be hung by the neck till you're dead--dead--dead.  And I think you 
had better go from here, as fast as you can.  That's what I think.'

'He's a coward, Grip, a coward!' cried Barnaby, putting the raven 
on the ground, and shouldering his staff.  'Let them come!  Gordon 
for ever!  Let them come!'

'Ay!' said Lord George, 'let them!  Let us see who will venture to 
attack a power like ours; the solemn league of a whole people.  
THIS a madman!  You have said well, very well.  I am proud to be 
the leader of such men as you.'

Bamaby's heart swelled within his bosom as he heard these words.  
He took Lord George's hand and carried it to his lips; patted his 
horse's crest, as if the affection and admiration he had conceived 
for the man extended to the animal he rode; then unfurling his 
flag, and proudly waving it, resumed his pacing up and down.

Lord George, with a kindling eye and glowing cheek, took off his 
hat, and flourishing it above his head, bade him exultingly 
Farewell!--then cantered off at a brisk pace; after glancing 
angrily round to see that his servant followed.  Honest John set 
spurs to his horse and rode after his master, but not before he had 
again warned Barnaby to retreat, with many significant gestures, 
which indeed he continued to make, and Barnaby to resist, until the 
windings of the road concealed them from each other's view.

Left to himself again with a still higher sense of the importance 
of his post, and stimulated to enthusiasm by the special notice and 
encouragement of his leader, Barnaby walked to and fro in a 
delicious trance rather than as a waking man.  The sunshine which 
prevailed around was in his mind.  He had but one desire 
ungratified.  If she could only see him now!

The day wore on; its heat was gently giving place to the cool of 
evening; a light wind sprung up, fanning his long hair, and making 
the banner rustle pleasantly above his head.  There was a freedom 
and freshness in the sound and in the time, which chimed exactly 
with his mood.  He was happier than ever.

He was leaning on his staff looking towards the declining sun, and 
reflecting with a smile that he stood sentinel at that moment over 
buried gold, when two or three figures appeared in the distance, 
making towards the house at a rapid pace, and motioning with their 
hands as though they urged its inmates to retreat from some 
approaching danger.  As they drew nearer, they became more earnest 
in their gestures; and they were no sooner within hearing, than the 
foremost among them cried that the soldiers were coming up.

At these words, Barnaby furled his flag, and tied it round the 
pole.  His heart beat high while he did so, but he had no more fear 
or thought of retreating than the pole itself.  The friendly 
stragglers hurried past him, after giving him notice of his danger, 
and quickly passed into the house, where the utmost confusion 
immediately prevailed.  As those within hastily closed the windows 
and the doors, they urged him by looks and signs to fly without 
loss of time, and called to him many times to do so; but he only 
shook his head indignantly in answer, and stood the firmer on his 
post.  Finding that he was not to be persuaded, they took care of 
themselves; and leaving the place with only one old woman in it, 
speedily withdrew.

As yet there had been no symptom of the news having any better 
foundation than in the fears of those who brought it, but The Boot 
had not been deserted five minutes, when there appeared, coming 
across the fields, a body of men who, it was easy to see, by the 
glitter of their arms and ornaments in the sun, and by their 
orderly and regular mode of advancing--for they came on as one 
man--were soldiers.  In a very little time, Barnaby knew that they 
were a strong detachment of the Foot Guards, having along with them 
two gentlemen in private clothes, and a small party of Horse; the 
latter brought up the rear, and were not in number more than six or 
eight.

They advanced steadily; neither quickening their pace as they came 
nearer, nor raising any cry, nor showing the least emotion or 
anxiety.  Though this was a matter of course in the case of regular 
troops, even to Barnaby, there was something particularly 
impressive and disconcerting in it to one accustomed to the noise 
and tumult of an undisciplined mob.  For all that, he stood his 
ground not a whit the less resolutely, and looked on undismayed.

Presently, they marched into the yard, and halted.  The 
commanding-officer despatched a messenger to the horsemen, one of 
whom came riding back.  Some words passed between them, and they 
glanced at Barnaby; who well remembered the man he had unhorsed at 
Westminster, and saw him now before his eyes.  The man being 
speedily dismissed, saluted, and rode back to his comrades, who 
were drawn up apart at a short distance.

The officer then gave the word to prime and load.  The heavy 
ringing of the musket-stocks upon the ground, and the sharp and 
rapid rattling of the ramrods in their barrels, were a kind of 
relief to Batnahy, deadly though he knew the purport of such sounds 
to be.  When this was done, other commands were given, and the 
soldiers instantaneously formed in single file all round the house 
and stables; completely encircling them in every part, at a 
distance, perhaps, of some half-dozen yards; at least that seemed 
in Barnaby's eyes to be about the space left between himself and 
those who confronted him.  The horsemen remained drawn up by 
themselves as before.

The two gentlemen in private clothes who had kept aloof, now rode 
forward, one on either side the officer.  The proclamation having 
been produced and read by one of them, the officer called on 
Barnaby to surrender.

He made no answer, but stepping within the door, before which he 
had kept guard, held his pole crosswise to protect it.  In the 
midst of a profound silence, he was again called upon to yield.

Still he offered no reply.  Indeed he had enough to do, to run his 
eye backward and forward along the half-dozen men who immediately 
fronted him, and settle hurriedly within himself at which of them 
he would strike first, when they pressed on him.  He caught the eye 
of one in the centre, and resolved to hew that fellow down, though 
he died for it.

Again there was a dead silence, and again the same voice called 
upon him to deliver himself up.

Next moment he was back in the stable, dealing blows about him like 
a madman.  Two of the men lay stretched at his feet: the one he 
had marked, dropped first--he had a thought for that, even in the 
hot blood and hurry of the struggle.  Another blow--another!  Down, 
mastered, wounded in the breast by a heavy blow from the butt-end 
of a gun (he saw the weapon in the act of falling)--breathless--and 
a prisoner.

An exclamation of surprise from the officer recalled him, in some 
degree, to himself.  He looked round.  Grip, after working in 
secret all the afternoon, and with redoubled vigour while 
everybody's attention was distracted, had plucked away the straw 
from Hugh's bed, and turned up the loose ground with his iron bill.  
The hole had been recklessly filled to the brim, and was merely 
sprinkled with earth.  Golden cups, spoons, candlesticks, coined 
guineas--all the riches were revealed.

They brought spades and a sack; dug up everything that was hidden 
there; and carried away more than two men could lift.  They 
handcuffed him and bound his arms, searched him, and took away all 
he had.  Nobody questioned or reproached him, or seemed to have 
much curiosity about him.  The two men he had stunned, were carried 
off by their companions in the same business-like way in which 
everything else was done.  Finally, he was left under a guard of 
four soldiers with fixed bayonets, while the officer directed in 
person the search of the house and the other buildings connected 
with it.

This was soon completed.  The soldiers formed again in the yard; he 
was marched out, with his guard about him; and ordered to fall in, 
where a space was left.  The others closed up all round, and so 
they moved away, with the prisoner in the centre.

When they came into the streets, he felt he was a sight; and 
looking up as they passed quickly along, could see people running 
to the windows a little too late, and throwing up the sashes to 
look after him.  Sometimes he met a staring face beyond the heads 
about him, or under the arms of his conductors, or peering down 
upon him from a waggon-top or coach-box; but this was all he saw, 
being surrounded by so many men.  The very noises of the streets 
seemed muffled and subdued; and the air came stale and hot upon 
him, like the sickly breath of an oven.

Tramp, tramp.  Tramp, tramp.  Heads erect, shoulders square, every 
man stepping in exact time--all so orderly and regular--nobody 
looking at him--nobody seeming conscious of his presence,--he could 
hardly believe he was a Prisoner.  But at the word, though only 
thought, not spoken, he felt the handcuffs galling his wrists, the 
cord pressing his arms to his sides: the loaded guns levelled at 
his head; and those cold, bright, sharp, shining points turned 
towards him: the mere looking down at which, now that he was bound 
and helpless, made the warm current of his life run cold.



Chapter 58


They were not long in reaching the barracks, for the officer who 
commanded the party was desirous to avoid rousing the people by the 
display of military force in the streets, and was humanely anxious 
to give as little opportunity as possible for any attempt at 
rescue; knowing that it must lead to bloodshed and loss of life, 
and that if the civil authorities by whom he was accompanied, 
empowered him to order his men to fire, many innocent persons would 
probably fall, whom curiosity or idleness had attracted to the 
spot.  He therefore led the party briskly on, avoiding with a 
merciful prudence the more public and crowded thoroughfares, and 
pursuing those which he deemed least likely to be infested by 
disorderly persons.  This wise proceeding not only enabled them to 
gain their quarters without any interruption, but completely 
baffled a body of rioters who had assembled in one of the main 
streets, through which it was considered certain they would pass, 
and who remained gathered together for the purpose of releasing the 
prisoner from their hands, long after they had deposited him in a 
place of security, closed the barrack-gates, and set a double guard 
at every entrance for its better protection.

Arrived at this place, poor Barnaby was marched into a stone-
floored room, where there was a very powerful smell of tobacco, a 
strong thorough draught of air, and a great wooden bedstead, large 
enough for a score of men.  Several soldiers in undress were 
lounging about, or eating from tin cans; military accoutrements 
dangled on rows of pegs along the whitewashed wall; and some half-
dozen men lay fast asleep upon their backs, snoring in concert.  
After remaining here just long enough to note these things, he was 
marched out again, and conveyed across the parade-ground to another 
portion of the building.

Perhaps a man never sees so much at a glance as when he is in a 
situation of extremity.  The chances are a hundred to one, that if 
Barnaby had lounged in at the gate to look about him, he would have 
lounged out again with a very imperfect idea of the place, and 
would have remembered very little about it.  But as he was taken 
handcuffed across the gravelled area, nothing escaped his notice.  
The dry, arid look of the dusty square, and of the bare brick 
building; the clothes hanging at some of the windows; and the men 
in their shirt-sleeves and braces, lolling with half their bodies 
out of the others; the green sun-blinds at the officers' quarters, 
and the little scanty trees in front; the drummer-boys practising 
in a distant courtyard; the men at drill on the parade; the two 
soldiers carrying a basket between them, who winked to each other 
as he went by, and slily pointed to their throats; the spruce 
serjeant who hurried past with a cane in his hand, and under his 
arm a clasped book with a vellum cover; the fellows in the ground-
floor rooms, furbishing and brushing up their different articles of 
dress, who stopped to look at him, and whose voices as they spoke 
together echoed loudly through the empty galleries and passages;--
everything, down to the stand of muskets before the guard-house, 
and the drum with a pipe-clayed belt attached, in one corner, 
impressed itself upon his observation, as though he had noticed 
them in the same place a hundred times, or had been a whole day 
among them, in place of one brief hurried minute.

He was taken into a small paved back yard, and there they opened a 
great door, plated with iron, and pierced some five feet above the 
ground with a few holes to let in air and light.  Into this dungeon 
he was walked straightway; and having locked him up there, and 
placed a sentry over him, they left him to his meditations.

The cell, or black hole, for it had those words painted on the 
door, was very dark, and having recently accommodated a drunken 
deserter, by no means clean.  Barnaby felt his way to some straw at 
the farther end, and looking towards the door, tried to accustom 
himself to the gloom, which, coming from the bright sunshine out of 
doors, was not an easy task.

There was a kind of portico or colonnade outside, and this 
obstructed even the little light that at the best could have found 
its way through the small apertures in the door.  The footsteps of 
the sentinel echoed monotonously as he paced its stone pavement to 
and fro (reminding Barnaby of the watch he had so lately kept 
himself); and as he passed and repassed the door, he made the cell 
for an instant so black by the interposition of his body, that his 
going away again seemed like the appearance of a new ray of light, 
and was quite a circumstance to look for.

When the prisoner had sat sometime upon the ground, gazing at the 
chinks, and listening to the advancing and receding footsteps of 
his guard, the man stood still upon his post.  Barnaby, quite 
unable to think, or to speculate on what would be done with him, 
had been lulled into a kind of doze by his regular pace; but his 
stopping roused him; and then he became aware that two men were in 
conversation under the colonnade, and very near the door of his 
cell.

How long they had been talking there, he could not tell, for he had 
fallen into an unconsciousness of his real position, and when the 
footsteps ceased, was answering aloud some question which seemed to 
have been put to him by Hugh in the stable, though of the fancied 
purport, either of question or reply, notwithstanding that he awoke 
with the latter on his lips, he had no recollection whatever.  The 
first words that reached his ears, were these:

'Why is he brought here then, if he has to be taken away again so 
soon?'

'Why where would you have him go!  Damme, he's not as safe anywhere 
as among the king's troops, is he?  What WOULD you do with him?  
Would you hand him over to a pack of cowardly civilians, that shake 
in their shoes till they wear the soles out, with trembling at the 
threats of the ragamuffins he belongs to?'

'That's true enough.'

'True enough!--I'll tell you what.  I wish, Tom Green, that I was a 
commissioned instead of a non-commissioned officer, and that I had 
the command of two companies--only two companies--of my own 
regiment.  Call me out to stop these riots--give me the needful 
authority, and half-a-dozen rounds of ball cartridge--'

'Ay!' said the other voice.  'That's all very well, but they won't 
give the needful authority.  If the magistrate won't give the 
word, what's the officer to do?'

Not very well knowing, as it seemed, how to overcome this 
difficulty, the other man contented himself with damning the 
magistrates.

'With all my heart,' said his friend.

'Where's the use of a magistrate?' returned the other voice.  
'What's a magistrate in this case, but an impertinent, unnecessary, 
unconstitutional sort of interference?  Here's a proclamation.  
Here's a man referred to in that proclamation.  Here's proof 
against him, and a witness on the spot.  Damme!  Take him out and 
shoot him, sir.  Who wants a magistrate?'

'When does he go before Sir John Fielding?' asked the man who had 
spoken first.

'To-night at eight o'clock,' returned the other.  'Mark what 
follows.  The magistrate commits him to Newgate.  Our people take 
him to Newgate.  The rioters pelt our people.  Our people retire 
before the rioters.  Stones are thrown, insults are offered, not a 
shot's fired.  Why?  Because of the magistrates.  Damn the 
magistrates!'

When he had in some degree relieved his mind by cursing the 
magistrates in various other forms of speech, the man was silent, 
save for a low growling, still having reference to those 
authorities, which from time to time escaped him.

Barnaby, who had wit enough to know that this conversation 
concerned, and very nearly concerned, himself, remained perfectly 
quiet until they ceased to speak, when he groped his way to the 
door, and peeping through the air-holes, tried to make out what 
kind of men they were, to whom he had been listening.

The one who condemned the civil power in such strong terms, was a 
serjeant--engaged just then, as the streaming ribands in his cap 
announced, on the recruiting service.  He stood leaning sideways 
against a pillar nearly opposite the door, and as he growled to 
himself, drew figures on the pavement with his cane.  The other 
man had his back towards the dungeon, and Barnaby could only see 
his form.  To judge from that, he was a gallant, manly, handsome 
fellow, but he had lost his left arm.  It had been taken off 
between the elbow and the shoulder, and his empty coat-sleeve hung 
across his breast.

It was probably this circumstance which gave him an interest beyond 
any that his companion could boast of, and attracted Barnaby's 
attention.  There was something soldierly in his bearing, and he 
wore a jaunty cap and jacket.  Perhaps he had been in the service 
at one time or other.  If he had, it could not have been very long 
ago, for he was but a young fellow now.

'Well, well,' he said thoughtfully; 'let the fault be where it may, 
it makes a man sorrowful to come back to old England, and see her 
in this condition.'

'I suppose the pigs will join 'em next,' said the serjeant, with an 
imprecation on the rioters, 'now that the birds have set 'em the 
example.'

'The birds!' repeated Tom Green.

'Ah--birds,' said the serjeant testily; 'that's English, an't it?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Go to the guard-house, and see.  You'll find a bird there, that's 
got their cry as pat as any of 'em, and bawls "No Popery," like a 
man--or like a devil, as he says he is.  I shouldn't wonder.  The 
devil's loose in London somewhere.  Damme if I wouldn't twist his 
neck round, on the chance, if I had MY way.'

The young man had taken two or three steps away, as if to go and 
see this creature, when he was arrested by the voice of Barnaby.

'It's mine,' he called out, half laughing and half weeping--'my 
pet, my friend Grip.  Ha ha ha!  Don't hurt him, he has done no 
harm.  I taught him; it's my fault.  Let me have him, if you 
please.  He's the only friend I have left now.  He'll not dance, or 
talk, or whistle for you, I know; but he will for me, because he 
knows me and loves me--though you wouldn't think it--very well.  
You wouldn't hurt a bird, I'm sure.  You're a brave soldier, sir, 
and wouldn't harm a woman or a child--no, no, nor a poor bird, I'm 
certain.'

This latter adjuration was addressed to the serjeant, whom Barnaby 
judged from his red coat to be high in office, and able to seal 
Grip's destiny by a word.  But that gentleman, in reply, surlily 
damned him for a thief and rebel as he was, and with many 
disinterested imprecations on his own eyes, liver, blood, and body, 
assured him that if it rested with him to decide, he would put a 
final stopper on the bird, and his master too.

'You talk boldly to a caged man,' said Barnaby, in anger.  'If I 
was on the other side of the door and there were none to part us, 
you'd change your note--ay, you may toss your head--you would!  
Kill the bird--do.  Kill anything you can, and so revenge yourself 
on those who with their bare hands untied could do as much to you!'

Having vented his defiance, he flung himself into the furthest 
corner of his prison, and muttering, 'Good bye, Grip--good bye, 
dear old Grip!' shed tears for the first time since he had been 
taken captive; and hid his face in the straw.

He had had some fancy at first, that the one-armed man would help 
him, or would give him a kind word in answer.  He hardly knew why, 
but he hoped and thought so.  The young fellow had stopped when he 
called out, and checking himself in the very act of turning round, 
stood listening to every word he said.  Perhaps he built his feeble 
trust on this; perhaps on his being young, and having a frank and 
honest manner.  However that might be, he built on sand.  The other 
went away directly he had finished speaking, and neither answered 
him, nor returned.  No matter.  They were all against him here: he 
might have known as much.  Good bye, old Grip, good bye!

After some time, they came and unlocked the door, and called to him 
to come out.  He rose directly, and complied, for he would not have 
THEM think he was subdued or frightened.  He walked out like a man, 
and looked from face to face.

None of them returned his gaze or seemed to notice it.  They 
marched him back to the parade by the way they had brought him, and 
there they halted, among a body of soldiers, at least twice as 
numerous as that which had taken him prisoner in the afternoon.  
The officer he had seen before, bade him in a few brief words take 
notice that if he attempted to escape, no matter how favourable a 
chance he might suppose he had, certain of the men had orders to 
fire upon him, that moment.  They then closed round him as before, 
and marched him off again.

In the same unbroken order they arrived at Bow Street, followed and 
beset on all sides by a crowd which was continually increasing.  
Here he was placed before a blind gentleman, and asked if he wished 
to say anything.  Not he.  What had he got to tell them?  After a 
very little talking, which he was careless of and quite indifferent 
to, they told him he was to go to Newgate, and took him away.

He went out into the street, so surrounded and hemmed in on every 
side by soldiers, that he could see nothing; but he knew there was 
a great crowd of people, by the murmur; and that they were not 
friendly to the soldiers, was soon rendered evident by their yells 
and hisses.  How often and how eagerly he listened for the voice of 
Hugh!  There was not a voice he knew among them all.  Was Hugh a 
prisoner too?  Was there no hope!

As they came nearer and nearer to the prison, the hootings of the 
people grew more violent; stones were thrown; and every now and 
then, a rush was made against the soldiers, which they staggered 
under.  One of them, close before him, smarting under a blow upon 
the temple, levelled his musket, but the officer struck it upwards 
with his sword, and ordered him on peril of his life to desist.  
This was the last thing he saw with any distinctness, for directly 
afterwards he was tossed about, and beaten to and fro, as though in 
a tempestuous sea.  But go where he would, there were the same 
guards about him.  Twice or thrice he was thrown down, and so were 
they; but even then, he could not elude their vigilance for a 
moment.  They were up again, and had closed about him, before he, 
with his wrists so tightly bound, could scramble to his feet.  
Fenced in, thus, he felt himself hoisted to the top of a low flight 
of steps, and then for a moment he caught a glimpse of the fighting 
in the crowd, and of a few red coats sprinkled together, here and 
there, struggling to rejoin their fellows.  Next moment, everything 
was dark and gloomy, and he was standing in the prison lobby; the 
centre of a group of men.

A smith was speedily in attendance, who riveted upon him a set of 
heavy irons.  Stumbling on as well as he could, beneath the unusual 
burden of these fetters, he was conducted to a strong stone cell, 
where, fastening the door with locks, and bolts, and chains, they 
left him, well secured; having first, unseen by him, thrust in 
Grip, who, with his head drooping and his deep black plumes rough 
and rumpled, appeared to comprehend and to partake, his master's 
fallen fortunes.



Chapter 59


It is necessary at this juncture to return to Hugh, who, having, as 
we have seen, called to the rioters to disperse from about the 
Warren, and meet again as usual, glided back into the darkness from 
which he had emerged, and reappeared no more that night.

He paused in the copse which sheltered him from the observation of 
his mad companions, and waited to ascertain whether they drew off 
at his bidding, or still lingered and called to him to join them.  
Some few, he saw, were indisposed to go away without him, and made 
towards the spot where he stood concealed as though they were about 
to follow in his footsteps, and urge him to come back; but these 
men, being in their turn called to by their friends, and in truth 
not greatly caring to venture into the dark parts of the grounds, 
where they might be easily surprised and taken, if any of the 
neighbours or retainers of the family were watching them from among 
the trees, soon abandoned the idea, and hastily assembling such men 
as they found of their mind at the moment, straggled off.

When he was satisfied that the great mass of the insurgents were 
imitating this example, and that the ground was rapidly clearing, 
he plunged into the thickest portion of the little wood; and, 
crashing the branches as he went, made straight towards a distant 
light: guided by that, and by the sullen glow of the fire behind 
him.

As he drew nearer and nearer to the twinkling beacon towards which 
he bent his course, the red glare of a few torches began to reveal 
itself, and the voices of men speaking together in a subdued tone 
broke the silence which, save for a distant shouting now and then, 
already prevailed.  At length he cleared the wood, and, springing 
across a ditch, stood in a dark lane, where a small body of ill-
looking vagabonds, whom he had left there some twenty minutes 
before, waited his coming with impatience.

They were gathered round an old post-chaise or chariot, driven by 
one of themselves, who sat postilion-wise upon the near horse.  The 
blinds were drawn up, and Mr Tappertit and Dennis kept guard at the 
two windows.  The former assumed the command of the party, for he 
challenged Hugh as he advanced towards them; and when he did so, 
those who were resting on the ground about the carriage rose to 
their feet and clustered round him.

'Well!' said Simon, in a low voice; 'is all right?'

'Right enough,' replied Hugh, in the same tone.  'They're 
dispersing now--had begun before I came away.'

'And is the coast clear?'

'Clear enough before our men, I take it,' said Hugh.  'There are 
not many who, knowing of their work over yonder, will want to 
meddle with 'em to-night.--Who's got some drink here?'

Everybody had some plunder from the cellar; half-a-dozen flasks and 
bottles were offered directly.  He selected the largest, and 
putting it to his mouth, sent the wine gurgling down his throat.  
Having emptied it, he threw it down, and stretched out his hand for 
another, which he emptied likewise, at a draught.  Another was 
given him, and this he half emptied too.  Reserving what remained 
to finish with, he asked:

'Have you got anything to eat, any of you?  I'm as ravenous as a 
hungry wolf.  Which of you was in the larder--come?'

'I was, brother,' said Dennis, pulling off his hat, and fumbling in 
the crown.  'There's a matter of cold venison pasty somewhere or 
another here, if that'll do.'

'Do!' cried Hugh, seating himself on the pathway.  'Bring it out! 
Quick!  Show a light here, and gather round!  Let me sup in state, 
my lads!  Ha ha ha!'

Entering into his boisterous humour, for they all had drunk deeply, 
and were as wild as he, they crowded about him, while two of their 
number who had torches, held them up, one on either side of him, 
that his banquet might not be despatched in the dark.  Mr Dennis, 
having by this time succeeded in extricating from his hat a great 
mass of pasty, which had been wedged in so tightly that it was not 
easily got out, put it before him; and Hugh, having borrowed a 
notched and jagged knife from one of the company, fell to work upon 
it vigorously.

'I should recommend you to swallow a little fire every day, about 
an hour afore dinner, brother,' said Dennis, after a pause.  'It 
seems to agree with you, and to stimulate your appetite.'

Hugh looked at him, and at the blackened faces by which he was 
surrounded, and, stopping for a moment to flourish his knife above 
his head, answered with a roar of laughter.

'Keep order, there, will you?' said Simon Tappertit.

'Why, isn't a man allowed to regale himself, noble captain,' 
retorted his lieutenant, parting the men who stood between them, 
with his knife, that he might see him,--'to regale himself a little 
bit after such work as mine?  What a hard captain!  What a strict 
captain!  What a tyrannical captain!  Ha ha ha!'

'I wish one of you fellers would hold a bottle to his mouth to keep 
him quiet,' said Simon, 'unless you want the military to be down 
upon us.'

'And what if they are down upon us!' retorted Hugh.  'Who cares?  
Who's afraid?  Let 'em come, I say, let 'em come.  The more, the 
merrier.  Give me bold Barnaby at my side, and we two will settle 
the military, without troubling any of you.  Barnaby's the man for 
the military.  Barnaby's health!'

But as the majority of those present were by no means anxious for 
a second engagement that night, being already weary and exhausted, 
they sided with Mr Tappertit, and pressed him to make haste with 
his supper, for they had already delayed too long.  Knowing, even 
in the height of his frenzy, that they incurred great danger by 
lingering so near the scene of the late outrages, Hugh made an end 
of his meal without more remonstrance, and rising, stepped up to Mr 
Tappertit, and smote him on the back.

'Now then,' he cried, 'I'm ready.  There are brave birds inside 
this cage, eh?  Delicate birds,--tender, loving, little doves.  I 
caged 'em--I caged 'em--one more peep!'

He thrust the little man aside as he spoke, and mounting on the 
steps, which were half let down, pulled down the blind by force, 
and stared into the chaise like an ogre into his larder.

'Ha ha ha! and did you scratch, and pinch, and struggle, pretty 
mistress?' he cried, as he grasped a little hand that sought in 
vain to free itself from his grip: 'you, so bright-eyed, and 
cherry-lipped, and daintily made?  But I love you better for it, 
mistress.  Ay, I do.  You should stab me and welcome, so that it 
pleased you, and you had to cure me afterwards.  I love to see you 
proud and scornful.  It makes you handsomer than ever; and who so 
handsome as you at any time, my pretty one!'

'Come!' said Mr Tappertit, who had waited during this speech with 
considerable impatience.  'There's enough of that.  Come down.'

The little hand seconded this admonition by thrusting Hugh's great 
head away with all its force, and drawing up the blind, amidst his 
noisy laughter, and vows that he must have another look, for the 
last glimpse of that sweet face had provoked him past all bearing.  
However, as the suppressed impatience of the party now broke out 
into open murmurs, he abandoned this design, and taking his seat 
upon the bar, contented himself with tapping at the front windows 
of the carriage, and trying to steal a glance inside; Mr Tappertit, 
mounting the steps and hanging on by the door, issued his 
directions to the driver with a commanding voice and attitude; the 
rest got up behind, or ran by the side of the carriage, as they 
could; some, in imitation of Hugh, endeavoured to see the face he 
had praised so highly, and were reminded of their impertinence by 
hints from the cudgel of Mr Tappertit.  Thus they pursued their 
journey by circuitous and winding roads; preserving, except when 
they halted to take breath, or to quarrel about the best way of 
reaching London, pretty good order and tolerable silence.

In the mean time, Dolly--beautiful, bewitching, captivating little 
Dolly--her hair dishevelled, her dress torn, her dark eyelashes wet 
with tears, her bosom heaving--her face, now pale with fear, now 
crimsoned with indignation--her whole self a hundred times more 
beautiful in this heightened aspect than ever she had been before--
vainly strove to comfort Emma Haredale, and to impart to her the 
consolation of which she stood in so much need herself.  The 
soldiers were sure to come; they must be rescued; it would be 
impossible to convey them through the streets of London when they 
set the threats of their guards at defiance, and shrieked to the 
passengers for help.  If they did this when they came into the more 
frequented ways, she was certain--she was quite certain--they must 
be released.  So poor Dolly said, and so poor Dolly tried to think; 
but the invariable conclusion of all such arguments was, that Dolly 
burst into tears; cried, as she wrung her hands, what would they do 
or think, or who would comfort them, at home, at the Golden Key; 
and sobbed most piteously.

Miss Haredale, whose feelings were usually of a quieter kind than 
Dolly's, and not so much upon the surface, was dreadfully 
alarmed, and indeed had only just recovered from a swoon.  She was 
very pale, and the hand which Dolly held was quite cold; but she 
bade her, nevertheless, remember that, under Providence, much must 
depend upon their own discretion; that if they remained quiet and 
lulled the vigilance of the ruffians into whose hands they had 
fallen, the chances of their being able to procure assistance when 
they reached the town, were very much increased; that unless 
society were quite unhinged, a hot pursuit must be immediately 
commenced; and that her uncle, she might be sure, would never rest 
until he had found them out and rescued them.  But as she said 
these latter words, the idea that he had fallen in a general 
massacre of the Catholics that night--no very wild or improbable 
supposition after what they had seen and undergone--struck her 
dumb; and, lost in the horrors they had witnessed, and those they 
might be yet reserved for, she sat incapable of thought, or speech, 
or outward show of grief: as rigid, and almost as white and cold, 
as marble.

Oh, how many, many times, in that long ride, did Dolly think of her 
old lover,--poor, fond, slighted Joe!  How many, many times, did 
she recall that night when she ran into his arms from the very man 
now projecting his hateful gaze into the darkness where she sat, 
and leering through the glass in monstrous admiration!  And when 
she thought of Joe, and what a brave fellow he was, and how he 
would have rode boldly up, and dashed in among these villains now, 
yes, though they were double the number--and here she clenched her 
little hand, and pressed her foot upon the ground--the pride she 
felt for a moment in having won his heart, faded in a burst of 
tears, and she sobbed more bitterly than ever.

As the night wore on, and they proceeded by ways which were quite 
unknown to them--for they could recognise none of the objects of 
which they sometimes caught a hurried glimpse--their fears 
increased; nor were they without good foundation; it was not 
difficult for two beautiful young women to find, in their being 
borne they knew not whither by a band of daring villains who eyed 
them as some among these fellows did, reasons for the worst alarm.  
When they at last entered London, by a suburb with which they were 
wholly unacquainted, it was past midnight, and the streets were 
dark and empty.  Nor was this the worst, for the carriage stopping 
in a lonely spot, Hugh suddenly opened the door, jumped in, and 
took his seat between them.

It was in vain they cried for help.  He put his arm about the neck 
of each, and swore to stifle them with kisses if they were not as 
silent as the grave.

'I come here to keep you quiet,' he said, 'and that's the means I 
shall take.  So don't be quiet, pretty mistresses--make a noise--
do--and I shall like it all the better.'

They were proceeding at a rapid pace, and apparently with fewer 
attendants than before, though it was so dark (the torches being 
extinguished) that this was mere conjecture.  They shrunk from his 
touch, each into the farthest corner of the carriage; but shrink as 
Dolly would, his arm encircled her waist, and held her fast.  She 
neither cried nor spoke, for terror and disgust deprived her of the 
power; but she plucked at his hand as though she would die in the 
effort to disengage herself; and crouching on the ground, with her 
head averted and held down, repelled him with a strength she 
wondered at as much as he.  The carriage stopped again.

'Lift this one out,' said Hugh to the man who opened the door, as 
he took Miss Haredale's hand, and felt how heavily it fell.  'She's 
fainted.'

'So much the better,' growled Dennis--it was that amiable 
gentleman.  'She's quiet.  I always like 'em to faint, unless 
they're very tender and composed.'

'Can you take her by yourself?' asked Hugh.

'I don't know till I try.  I ought to be able to; I've lifted up a 
good many in my time,' said the hangman.  'Up then!  She's no small 
weight, brother; none of these here fine gals are.  Up again!  Now 
we have her.'

Having by this time hoisted the young lady into his arms, he 
staggered off with his burden.

'Look ye, pretty bird,' said Hugh, drawing Dolly towards him.  
'Remember what I told you--a kiss for every cry.  Scream, if you 
love me, darling.  Scream once, mistress.  Pretty mistress, only 
once, if you love me.'

Thrusting his face away with all her force, and holding down her 
head, Dolly submitted to be carried out of the chaise, and borne 
after Miss Haredale into a miserable cottage, where Hugh, after 
hugging her to his breast, set her gently down upon the floor.

Poor Dolly!  Do what she would, she only looked the better for it, 
and tempted them the more.  When her eyes flashed angrily, and her 
ripe lips slightly parted, to give her rapid breathing vent, who 
could resist it?  When she wept and sobbed as though her heart 
would break, and bemoaned her miseries in the sweetest voice that 
ever fell upon a listener's ear, who could be insensible to the 
little winning pettishness which now and then displayed itself, 
even in the sincerity and earnestness of her grief?  When, 
forgetful for a moment of herself, as she was now, she fell on her 
knees beside her friend, and bent over her, and laid her cheek to 
hers, and put her arms about her, what mortal eyes could have 
avoided wandering to the delicate bodice, the streaming hair, the 
neglected dress, the perfect abandonment and unconsciousness of the 
blooming little beauty?  Who could look on and see her lavish 
caresses and endearments, and not desire to be in Emma Haredale's 
place; to be either her or Dolly; either the hugging or the hugged?  
Not Hugh.  Not Dennis.

'I tell you what it is, young women,' said Mr Dennis, 'I an't much 
of a lady's man myself, nor am I a party in the present business 
further than lending a willing hand to my friends: but if I see 
much more of this here sort of thing, I shall become a principal 
instead of a accessory.  I tell you candid.'

'Why have you brought us here?' said Emma.  'Are we to be 
murdered?'

'Murdered!' cried Dennis, sitting down upon a stool, and regarding 
her with great favour.  'Why, my dear, who'd murder sich 
chickabiddies as you?  If you was to ask me, now, whether you was 
brought here to be married, there might be something in it.'

And here he exchanged a grin with Hugh, who removed his eyes from 
Dolly for the purpose.

'No, no,' said Dennis, 'there'll be no murdering, my pets.  Nothing 
of that sort.  Quite the contrairy.'

'You are an older man than your companion, sir,' said Emma, 
trembling.  'Have you no pity for us?  Do you not consider that we 
are women?'

'I do indeed, my dear,' retorted Dennis.  'It would be very hard 
not to, with two such specimens afore my eyes.  Ha ha!  Oh yes , I 
consider that.  We all consider that, miss.'

He shook his head waggishly, leered at Hugh again, and laughed very 
much, as if he had said a noble thing, and rather thought he was 
coming out.

'There'll be no murdering, my dear.  Not a bit on it.  I tell you 
what though, brother,' said Dennis, cocking his hat for the 
convenience of scratching his head, and looking gravely at Hugh, 
'it's worthy of notice, as a proof of the amazing equalness and 
dignity of our law, that it don't make no distinction between men 
and women.  I've heerd the judge say, sometimes, to a highwayman or 
housebreaker as had tied the ladies neck and heels--you'll excuse 
me making mention of it, my darlings--and put 'em in a cellar, that 
he showed no consideration to women.  Now, I say that there judge 
didn't know his business, brother; and that if I had been that 
there highwayman or housebreaker, I should have made answer: "What 
are you a talking of, my lord?  I showed the women as much 
consideration as the law does, and what more would you have me do?"  
If you was to count up in the newspapers the number of females as 
have been worked off in this here city alone, in the last ten 
year,' said Mr Dennis thoughtfully, 'you'd be surprised at the 
total--quite amazed, you would.  There's a dignified and equal 
thing; a beautiful thing!  But we've no security for its lasting.  
Now that they've begun to favour these here Papists, I shouldn't 
wonder if they went and altered even THAT, one of these days.  Upon 
my soul, I shouldn't.'

The subject, perhaps from being of too exclusive and professional a 
nature, failed to interest Hugh as much as his friend had 
anticipated.  But he had no time to pursue it, for at this crisis 
Mr Tappertit entered precipitately; at sight of whom Dolly uttered 
a scream of joy, and fairly threw herself into his arms.

'I knew it, I was sure of it!' cried Dolly.  'My dear father's at 
the door.  Thank God, thank God!  Bless you, Sim.  Heaven bless you 
for this!'

Simon Tappertit, who had at first implicitly believed that the 
locksmith's daughter, unable any longer to suppress her secret 
passion for himself, was about to give it full vent in its 
intensity, and to declare that she was his for ever, looked 
extremely foolish when she said these words;--the more so, as they 
were received by Hugh and Dennis with a loud laugh, which made her 
draw back, and regard him with a fixed and earnest look.

'Miss Haredale,' said Sim, after a very awkward silence, 'I hope 
you're as comfortable as circumstances will permit of.  Dolly 
Varden, my darling--my own, my lovely one--I hope YOU'RE pretty 
comfortable likewise.'

Poor little Dolly!  She saw how it was; hid her face in her hands; 
and sobbed more bitterly than ever.

'You meet in me, Miss V.,' said Simon, laying his hand upon his 
breast, 'not a 'prentice, not a workman, not a slave, not the 
wictim of your father's tyrannical behaviour, but the leader of a 
great people, the captain of a noble band, in which these gentlemen 
are, as I may say, corporals and serjeants.  You behold in me, not 
a private individual, but a public character; not a mender of 
locks, but a healer of the wounds of his unhappy country.  Dolly 
V., sweet Dolly V., for how many years have I looked forward to 
this present meeting!  For how many years has it been my intention 
to exalt and ennoble you!  I redeem it.  Behold in me, your 
husband.  Yes, beautiful Dolly--charmer--enslaver--S. Tappertit is 
all your own!'

As he said these words he advanced towards her.  Dolly retreated 
till she could go no farther, and then sank down upon the floor.  
Thinking it very possible that this might be maiden modesty, Simon 
essayed to raise her; on which Dolly, goaded to desperation, wound 
her hands in his hair, and crying out amidst her tears that he was 
a dreadful little wretch, and always had been, shook, and pulled, 
and beat him, until he was fain to call for help, most lustily.  
Hugh had never admired her half so much as at that moment.

'She's in an excited state to-night,' said Simon, as he smoothed 
his rumpled feathers, 'and don't know when she's well off.  Let her 
be by herself till to-morrow, and that'll bring her down a little.  
Carry her into the next house!'

Hugh had her in his arms directly.  It might be that Mr Tappertit's 
heart was really softened by her distress, or it might be that he 
felt it in some degree indecorous that his intended bride should be 
struggling in the grasp of another man.  He commanded him, on 
second thoughts, to put her down again, and looked moodily on as 
she flew to Miss Haredale's side, and clinging to her dress, hid 
her flushed face in its folds.

'They shall remain here together till to-morrow,' said Simon, who 
had now quite recovered his dignity--'till to-morrow.  Come away!'

'Ay!' cried Hugh.  'Come away, captain.  Ha ha ha!'

'What are you laughing at?' demanded Simon sternly.

'Nothing, captain, nothing,' Hugh rejoined; and as he spoke, and 
clapped his hand upon the shoulder of the little man, he laughed 
again, for some unknown reason, with tenfold violence.

Mr Tappertit surveyed him from head to foot with lofty scorn (this 
only made him laugh the more), and turning to the prisoners, said:

'You'll take notice, ladies, that this place is well watched on 
every side, and that the least noise is certain to be attended with 
unpleasant consequences.  You'll hear--both of you--more of our 
intentions to-morrow.  In the mean time, don't show yourselves at 
the window, or appeal to any of the people you may see pass it; for 
if you do, it'll be known directly that you come from a Catholic 
house, and all the exertions our men can make, may not be able to 
save your lives.'

With this last caution, which was true enough, he turned to the 
door, followed by Hugh and Dennis.  They paused for a moment, going 
out, to look at them clasped in each other's arms, and then left 
the cottage; fastening the door, and setting a good watch upon it, 
and indeed all round the house.

'I say,' growled Dennis, as they walked away in company, 'that's a 
dainty pair.  Muster Gashford's one is as handsome as the other, 
eh?'

'Hush!' said Hugh, hastily.  'Don't you mention names.  It's a bad 
habit.'

'I wouldn't like to be HIM, then (as you don't like names), when he 
breaks it out to her; that's all,' said Dennis.  'She's one of them 
fine, black-eyed, proud gals, as I wouldn't trust at such times 
with a knife too near 'em.  I've seen some of that sort, afore now.  
I recollect one that was worked off, many year ago--and there was a 
gentleman in that case too--that says to me, with her lip a 
trembling, but her hand as steady as ever I see one: "Dennis, I'm 
near my end, but if I had a dagger in these fingers, and he was 
within my reach, I'd strike him dead afore me;"--ah, she did--and 
she'd have done it too!'

Strike who dead?' demanded Hugh.

'How should I know, brother?' answered Dennis.  'SHE never said; 
not she.'

Hugh looked, for a moment, as though he would have made some 
further inquiry into this incoherent recollection; but Simon 
Tappertit, who had been meditating deeply, gave his thoughts a new 
direction.

'Hugh!' said Sim.  'You have done well to-day.  You shall be 
rewarded.  So have you, Dennis.--There's no young woman YOU want to 
carry off, is there?'

'N--no,' returned that gentleman, stroking his grizzly beard, which 
was some two inches long.  'None in partickler, I think.'

'Very good,' said Sim; 'then we'll find some other way of making it 
up to you.  As to you, old boy'--he turned to Hugh--'you shall have 
Miggs (her that I promised you, you know) within three days.  Mind.  
I pass my word for it.'

Hugh thanked him heartily; and as he did so, his laughing fit 
returned with such violence that he was obliged to hold his side 
with one hand, and to lean with the other on the shoulder of his 
small captain, without whose support he would certainly have rolled 
upon the ground.



Chapter 60


The three worthies turned their faces towards The Boot, with the 
intention of passing the night in that place of rendezvous, and of 
seeking the repose they so much needed in the shelter of their old 
den; for now that the mischief and destruction they had purposed 
were achieved, and their prisoners were safely bestowed for the 
night, they began to be conscious of exhaustion, and to feel the 
wasting effects of the madness which had led to such deplorable 
results.

Notwithstanding the lassitude and fatigue which oppressed him now, 
in common with his two companions, and indeed with all who had 
taken an active share in that night's work, Hugh's boisterous 
merriment broke out afresh whenever he looked at Simon Tappertit, 
and vented itself--much to that gentleman's indignation--in such 
shouts of laughter as bade fair to bring the watch upon them, and 
involve them in a skirmish, to which in their present worn-out 
condition they might prove by no means equal.  Even Mr Dennis, who 
was not at all particular on the score of gravity or dignity, and 
who had a great relish for his young friend's eccentric humours, 
took occasion to remonstrate with him on this imprudent behaviour, 
which he held to be a species of suicide, tantamount to a man's 
working himself off without being overtaken by the law, than which 
he could imagine nothing more ridiculous or impertinent.

Not abating one jot of his noisy mirth for these remonstrances, 
Hugh reeled along between them, having an arm of each, until they 
hove in sight of The Boot, and were within a field or two of that 
convenient tavern.  He happened by great good luck to have roared 
and shouted himself into silence by this time.  They were 
proceeding onward without noise, when a scout who had been creeping 
about the ditches all night, to warn any stragglers from 
encroaching further on what was now such dangerous ground, peeped 
cautiously from his hiding-place, and called to them to stop.

'Stop! and why?' said Hugh.

Because (the scout replied) the house was filled with constables 
and soldiers; having been surprised that afternoon.  The inmates 
had fled or been taken into custody, he could not say which.  He 
had prevented a great many people from approaching nearer, and he 
believed they had gone to the markets and such places to pass the 
night.  He had seen the distant fires, but they were all out now.  
He had heard the people who passed and repassed, speaking of them 
too, and could report that the prevailing opinion was one of 
apprehension and dismay.  He had not heard a word of Barnaby--
didn't even know his name--but it had been said in his hearing that 
some man had been taken and carried off to Newgate.  Whether this 
was true or false, he could not affirm.

The three took counsel together, on hearing this, and debated what 
it might be best to do.  Hugh, deeming it possible that Barnaby was 
in the hands of the soldiers, and at that moment under detention at 
The Boot, was for advancing stealthily, and firing the house; but 
his companions, who objected to such rash measures unless they had 
a crowd at their backs, represented that if Barnaby were taken he 
had assuredly been removed to a stronger prison; they would never 
have dreamed of keeping him all night in a place so weak and open 
to attack.  Yielding to this reasoning, and to their persuasions, 
Hugh consented to turn back and to repair to Fleet Market; for 
which place, it seemed, a few of their boldest associates had 
shaped their course, on receiving the same intelligence.

Feeling their strength recruited and their spirits roused, now that 
there was a new necessity for action, they hurried away, quite 
forgetful of the fatigue under which they had been sinking but a 
few minutes before; and soon arrived at their new place of 
destination.

Fleet Market, at that time, was a long irregular row of wooden 
sheds and penthouses, occupying the centre of what is now called 
Farringdon Street.  They were jumbled together in a most unsightly 
fashion, in the middle of the road; to the great obstruction of the 
thoroughfare and the annoyance of passengers, who were fain to make 
their way, as they best could, among carts, baskets, barrows, 
trucks, casks, bulks, and benches, and to jostle with porters, 
hucksters, waggoners, and a motley crowd of buyers, sellers, pick-
pockets, vagrants, and idlers.  The air was perfumed with the 
stench of rotten leaves and faded fruit; the refuse of the 
butchers' stalls, and offal and garbage of a hundred kinds.  It was 
indispensable to most public conveniences in those days, that they 
should be public nuisances likewise; and Fleet Market maintained 
the principle to admiration.

To this place, perhaps because its sheds and baskets were a 
tolerable substitute for beds, or perhaps because it afforded the 
means of a hasty barricade in case of need, many of the rioters had 
straggled, not only that night, but for two or three nights before.  
It was now broad day, but the morning being cold, a group of them 
were gathered round a fire in a public-house, drinking hot purl, 
and smoking pipes, and planning new schemes for to-morrow.

Hugh and his two friends being known to most of these men, were 
received with signal marks of approbation, and inducted into the 
most honourable seats.  The room-door was closed and fastened to 
keep intruders at a distance, and then they proceeded to exchange 
news.

'The soldiers have taken possession of The Boot, I hear,' said 
Hugh.  'Who knows anything about it?'

Several cried that they did; but the majority of the company 
having been engaged in the assault upon the Warren, and all 
present having been concerned in one or other of the night's 
expeditions, it proved that they knew no more than Hugh himself; 
having been merely warned by each other, or by the scout, and 
knowing nothing of their own knowledge.

'We left a man on guard there to-day,' said Hugh, looking round 
him, 'who is not here.  You know who it is--Barnaby, who brought 
the soldier down, at Westminster.  Has any man seen or heard of 
him?'

They shook their heads, and murmured an answer in the negative, as 
each man looked round and appealed to his fellow; when a noise was 
heard without, and a man was heard to say that he wanted Hugh--that 
he must see Hugh.

'He is but one man,' cried Hugh to those who kept the door; 'let 
him come in.'

'Ay, ay!' muttered the others.  'Let him come in.  Let him come 
in.'

The door was accordingly unlocked and opened.  A one-armed man, 
with his head and face tied up with a bloody cloth, as though he 
had been severely beaten, his clothes torn, and his remaining hand 
grasping a thick stick, rushed in among them, and panting for 
breath, demanded which was Hugh.

'Here he is,' replied the person he inquired for.  'I am Hugh.  
What do you want with me?'

'I have a message for you,' said the man.  'You know one Barnaby.'

'What of him?  Did he send the message?'

'Yes.  He's taken.  He's in one of the strong cells in Newgate.  He 
defended himself as well as he could, but was overpowered by 
numbers.  That's his message.'

'When did you see him?' asked Hugh, hastily.

'On his way to prison, where he was taken by a party of soldiers.  
They took a by-road, and not the one we expected.  I was one of 
the few who tried to rescue him, and he called to me, and told me 
to tell Hugh where he was.  We made a good struggle, though it 
failed.  Look here!'

He pointed to his dress and to his bandaged head, and still panting 
for breath, glanced round the room; then faced towards Hugh again.

'I know you by sight,' he said, 'for I was in the crowd on Friday, 
and on Saturday, and yesterday, but I didn't know your name.  
You're a bold fellow, I know.  So is he.  He fought like a lion 
tonight, but it was of no use.  I did my best, considering that I 
want this limb.'

Again he glanced inquisitively round the room or seemed to do so, 
for his face was nearly hidden by the bandage--and again facing 
sharply towards Hugh, grasped his stick as if he half expected to 
be set upon, and stood on the defensive.

If he had any such apprehension, however, he was speedily reassured 
by the demeanour of all present.  None thought of the bearer of the 
tidings.  He was lost in the news he brought.  Oaths, threats, and 
execrations, were vented on all sides.  Some cried that if they 
bore this tamely, another day would see them all in jail; some, 
that they should have rescued the other prisoners, and this would 
not have happened.  One man cried in a loud voice, 'Who'll follow 
me to Newgate!' and there was a loud shout and general rush towards 
the door.

But Hugh and Dennis stood with their backs against it, and kept 
them back, until the clamour had so far subsided that their voices 
could be heard, when they called to them together that to go now, 
in broad day, would be madness; and that if they waited until night 
and arranged a plan of attack, they might release, not only their 
own companions, but all the prisoners, and burn down the jail.

'Not that jail alone,' cried Hugh, 'but every jail in London.  They 
shall have no place to put their prisoners in.  We'll burn them all 
down; make bonfires of them every one!  Here!' he cried, catching 
at the hangman's hand.  'Let all who're men here, join with us.  
Shake hands upon it.  Barnaby out of jail, and not a jail left 
standing!  Who joins?'

Every man there.  And they swore a great oath to release their 
friends from Newgate next night; to force the doors and burn the 
jail; or perish in the fire themselves.



Chapter 61


On that same night--events so crowd upon each other in convulsed 
and distracted times, that more than the stirring incidents of a 
whole life often become compressed into the compass of four-and-
twenty hours--on that same night, Mr Haredale, having strongly 
bound his prisoner, with the assistance of the sexton, and forced 
him to mount his horse, conducted him to Chigwell; bent upon 
procuring a conveyance to London from that place, and carrying him 
at once before a justice.  The disturbed state of the town would 
be, he knew, a sufficient reason for demanding the murderer's 
committal to prison before daybreak, as no man could answer for the 
security of any of the watch-houses or ordinary places of 
detention; and to convey a prisoner through the streets when the 
mob were again abroad, would not only be a task of great danger and 
hazard, but would be to challenge an attempt at rescue.  Directing 
the sexton to lead the horse, he walked close by the murderer's 
side, and in this order they reached the village about the middle 
of the night.

The people were all awake and up, for they were fearful of being 
burnt in their beds, and sought to comfort and assure each other by 
watching in company.  A few of the stoutest-hearted were armed and 
gathered in a body on the green.  To these, who knew him well, Mr 
Haredale addressed himself, briefly narrating what had happened, 
and beseeching them to aid in conveying the criminal to London 
before the dawn of day.

But not a man among them dared to help him by so much as the motion 
of a finger.  The rioters, in their passage through the village, 
had menaced with their fiercest vengeance, any person who should 
aid in extinguishing the fire, or render the least assistance to 
him, or any Catholic whomsoever.  Their threats extended to their 
lives and all they possessed.  They were assembled for their own 
protection, and could not endanger themselves by lending any aid to 
him.  This they told him, not without hesitation and regret, as 
they kept aloof in the moonlight and glanced fearfully at the 
ghostly rider, who, with his head drooping on his breast and his 
hat slouched down upon his brow, neither moved nor spoke.

Finding it impossible to persuade them, and indeed hardly knowing 
how to do so after what they had seen of the fury of the crowd, Mr 
Haredale besought them that at least they would leave him free to 
act for himself, and would suffer him to take the only chaise and 
pair of horses that the place afforded.  This was not acceded to 
without some difficulty, but in the end they told him to do what he 
would, and go away from them in heaven's name.

Leaving the sexton at the horse's bridle, he drew out the chaise 
with his own hands, and would have harnessed the horses, but that 
the post-boy of the village--a soft-hearted, good-for-nothing, 
vagabond kind of fellow--was moved by his earnestness and passion, 
and, throwing down a pitchfork with which he was armed, swore that 
the rioters might cut him into mincemeat if they liked, but he 
would not stand by and see an honest gentleman who had done no 
wrong, reduced to such extremity, without doing what he could to 
help him.  Mr Haredale shook him warmly by the hand, and thanked 
him from his heart.  In five minutes' time the chaise was ready, 
and this good scapegrace in his saddle.  The murderer was put 
inside, the blinds were drawn up, the sexton took his seat upon the 
bar, Mr Haredale mounted his horse and rode close beside the door; 
and so they started in the dead of night, and in profound silence, 
for London.

The consternation was so extreme that even the horses which had 
escaped the flames at the Warren, could find no friends to shelter 
them.  They passed them on the road, browsing on the stunted grass; 
and the driver told them, that the poor beasts had wandered to the 
village first, but had been driven away, lest they should bring 
the vengeance of the crowd on any of the inhabitants.

Nor was this feeling confined to such small places, where the 
people were timid, ignorant, and unprotected.  When they came near 
London they met, in the grey light of morning, more than one poor 
Catholic family who, terrified by the threats and warnings of 
their neighbours, were quitting the city on foot, and who told them 
they could hire no cart or horse for the removal of their goods, 
and had been compelled to leave them behind, at the mercy of the 
crowd.  Near Mile End they passed a house, the master of which, a 
Catholic gentleman of small means, having hired a waggon to remove 
his furniture by midnight, had had it all brought down into the 
street, to wait the vehicle's arrival, and save time in the 
packing.  But the man with whom he made the bargain, alarmed by the 
fires that night, and by the sight of the rioters passing his 
door, had refused to keep it: and the poor gentleman, with his wife 
and servant and their little children, were sitting trembling among 
their goods in the open street, dreading the arrival of day and not 
knowing where to turn or what to do.

It was the same, they heard, with the public conveyances.  The 
panic was so great that the mails and stage-coaches were afraid to 
carry passengers who professed the obnoxious religion.  If the 
drivers knew them, or they admitted that they held that creed, they 
would not take them, no, though they offered large sums; and 
yesterday, people had been afraid to recognise Catholic 
acquaintance in the streets, lest they should be marked by spies, 
and burnt out, as it was called, in consequence.  One mild old man--
a priest, whose chapel was destroyed; a very feeble, patient, 
inoffensive creature--who was trudging away, alone, designing to 
walk some distance from town, and then try his fortune with the 
coaches, told Mr Haredale that he feared he might not find a 
magistrate who would have the hardihood to commit a prisoner to 
jail, on his complaint.  But notwithstanding these discouraging 
accounts they went on, and reached the Mansion House soon after 
sunrise.

Mr Haredale threw himself from his horse, but he had no need to 
knock at the door, for it was already open, and there stood upon 
the step a portly old man, with a very red, or rather purple face, 
who with an anxious expression of countenance, was remonstrating 
with some unseen personage upstairs, while the porter essayed to 
close the door by degrees and get rid of him.  With the intense 
impatience and excitement natural to one in his condition, Mr 
Haredale thrust himself forward and was about to speak, when the 
fat old gentleman interposed:

'My good sir,' said he, 'pray let me get an answer.  This is the 
sixth time I have been here.  I was here five times yesterday.  My 
house is threatened with destruction.  It is to be burned down to-
night, and was to have been last night, but they had other business 
on their hands.  Pray let me get an answer.'

'My good sir,' returned Mr Haredale, shaking his head, 'my house 
is burned to the ground.  But heaven forbid that yours should be.  
Get your answer.  Be brief, in mercy to me.'

'Now, you hear this, my lord?'--said the old gentleman, calling up 
the stairs, to where the skirt of a dressing-gown fluttered on the 
landing-place.  'Here is a gentleman here, whose house was actually 
burnt down last night.'

'Dear me, dear me,' replied a testy voice, 'I am very sorry for 
it, but what am I to do?  I can't build it up again.  The chief 
magistrate of the city can't go and be a rebuilding of people's 
houses, my good sir.  Stuff and nonsense!'

'But the chief magistrate of the city can prevent people's houses 
from having any need to be rebuilt, if the chief magistrate's a 
man, and not a dummy--can't he, my lord?' cried the old gentleman 
in a choleric manner.

'You are disrespectable, sir,' said the Lord Mayor--'leastways, 
disrespectful I mean.'

'Disrespectful, my lord!' returned the old gentleman.  'I was 
respectful five times yesterday.  I can't be respectful for ever.  
Men can't stand on being respectful when their houses are going to 
be burnt over their heads, with them in 'em.  What am I to do, my 
lord?  AM I to have any protection!'

'I told you yesterday, sir,' said the Lord Mayor, 'that you might 
have an alderman in your house, if you could get one to come.'

'What the devil's the good of an alderman?' returned the choleric 
old gentleman.

'--To awe the crowd, sir,' said the Lord Mayor.

'Oh Lord ha' mercy!' whimpered the old gentleman, as he wiped his 
forehead in a state of ludicrous distress, 'to think of sending an 
alderman to awe a crowd!  Why, my lord, if they were even so many 
babies, fed on mother's milk, what do you think they'd care for an 
alderman!  Will YOU come?'

'I!' said the Lord Mayor, most emphatically: 'Certainly not.'

'Then what,' returned the old gentleman, 'what am I to do?  Am I a 
citizen of England?  Am I to have the benefit of the laws?  Am I to 
have any return for the King's taxes?'

'I don't know, I am sure,' said the Lord Mayor; 'what a pity it is 
you're a Catholic!  Why couldn't you be a Protestant, and then you 
wouldn't have got yourself into such a mess?  I'm sure I don't know 
what's to be done.--There are great people at the bottom of these 
riots.--Oh dear me, what a thing it is to be a public character!--
You must look in again in the course of the day.--Would a javelin-
man do?--Or there's Philips the constable,--HE'S disengaged,--he's 
not very old for a man at his time of life, except in his legs, and 
if you put him up at a window he'd look quite young by candle-
light, and might frighten 'em very much.--Oh dear!--well!--we'll 
see about it.'

'Stop!' cried Mr Haredale, pressing the door open as the porter 
strove to shut it, and speaking rapidly, 'My Lord Mayor, I beg you 
not to go away.  I have a man here, who committed a murder eight-
and-twenty years ago.  Half-a-dozen words from me, on oath, will 
justify you in committing him to prison for re-examination.  I only 
seek, just now, to have him consigned to a place of safety.  The 
least delay may involve his being rescued by the rioters.'

'Oh dear me!' cried the Lord Mayor.  'God bless my soul--and body--
oh Lor!--well I!--there are great people at the bottom of these 
riots, you know.--You really mustn't.'

'My lord,' said Mr Haredale, 'the murdered gentleman was my 
brother; I succeeded to his inheritance; there were not wanting 
slanderous tongues at that time, to whisper that the guilt of this 
most foul and cruel deed was mine--mine, who loved him, as he 
knows, in Heaven, dearly.  The time has come, after all these years 
of gloom and misery, for avenging him, and bringing to light a 
crime so artful and so devilish that it has no parallel.  Every 
second's delay on your part loosens this man's bloody hands again, 
and leads to his escape.  My lord, I charge you hear me, and 
despatch this matter on the instant.'

'Oh dear me!' cried the chief magistrate; 'these an't business 
hours, you know--I wonder at you--how ungentlemanly it is of you--
you mustn't--you really mustn't.--And I suppose you are a Catholic 
too?'

'I am,' said Mr Haredale.

'God bless my soul, I believe people turn Catholics a'purpose to 
vex and worrit me,' cried the Lord Mayor.  'I wish you wouldn't 
come here; they'll be setting the Mansion House afire next, and we 
shall have you to thank for it.  You must lock your prisoner up, 
sir--give him to a watchman--and--call again at a proper time.  
Then we'll see about it!'

Before Mr Haredale could answer, the sharp closing of a door and 
drawing of its bolts, gave notice that the Lord Mayor had retreated 
to his bedroom, and that further remonstrance would be unavailing.  
The two clients retreated likewise, and the porter shut them out 
into the street.

'That's the way he puts me off,' said the old gentleman, 'I can 
get no redress and no help.  What are you going to do, sir?'

'To try elsewhere,' answered Mr Haredale, who was by this time on 
horseback.

'I feel for you, I assure you--and well I may, for we are in a 
common cause,' said the old gentleman.  'I may not have a house to 
offer you to-night; let me tender it while I can.  On second 
thoughts though,' he added, putting up a pocket-book he had 
produced while speaking, 'I'll not give you a card, for if it was 
found upon you, it might get you into trouble.  Langdale--that's my 
name--vintner and distiller--Holborn Hill--you're heartily welcome, 
if you'll come.'

Mr Haredale bowed, and rode off, close beside the chaise as before; 
determining to repair to the house of Sir John Fielding, who had 
the reputation of being a bold and active magistrate, and fully 
resolved, in case the rioters should come upon them, to do 
execution on the murderer with his own hands, rather than suffer 
him to be released.

They arrived at the magistrate's dwelling, however, without 
molestation (for the mob, as we have seen, were then intent on 
deeper schemes), and knocked at the door.  As it had been pretty 
generally rumoured that Sir John was proscribed by the rioters, a 
body of thief-takers had been keeping watch in the house all night.  
To one of them Mr Haredale stated his business, which appearing to 
the man of sufficient moment to warrant his arousing the justice, 
procured him an immediate audience.

No time was lost in committing the murderer to Newgate; then a new 
building, recently completed at a vast expense, and considered to 
be of enormous strength.  The warrant being made out, three of the 
thief-takers bound him afresh (he had been struggling, it seemed, 
in the chaise, and had loosened his manacles); gagged him lest they 
should meet with any of the mob, and he should call to them for 
help; and seated themselves, along with him, in the carriage.  
These men being all well armed, made a formidable escort; but they 
drew up the blinds again, as though the carriage were empty, and 
directed Mr Haredale to ride forward, that he might not attract 
attention by seeming to belong to it.

The wisdom of this proceeding was sufficiently obvious, for as they 
hurried through the city they passed among several groups of men, 
who, if they had not supposed the chaise to be quite empty, would 
certainly have stopped it.  But those within keeping quite close, 
and the driver tarrying to be asked no questions, they reached the 
prison without interruption, and, once there, had him out, and safe 
within its gloomy walls, in a twinkling.

With eager eyes and strained attention, Mr Haredale saw him 
chained, and locked and barred up in his cell.  Nay, when he had 
left the jail, and stood in the free street, without, he felt the 
iron plates upon the doors, with his hands, and drew them over the 
stone wall, to assure himself that it was real; and to exult in its 
being so strong, and rough, and cold.  It was not until he turned 
his back upon the jail, and glanced along the empty streets, so 
lifeless and quiet in the bright morning, that he felt the weight 
upon his heart; that he knew he was tortured by anxiety for those 
he had left at home; and that home itself was but another bead in 
the long rosary of his regrets.



Chapter 62


The prisoner, left to himself, sat down upon his bedstead: and 
resting his elbows on his knees, and his chin upon his hands, 
remained in that attitude for hours.  It would be hard to say, of 
what nature his reflections were.  They had no distinctness, and, 
saving for some flashes now and then, no reference to his condition 
or the train of circumstances by which it had been brought about.  
The cracks in the pavement of his cell, the chinks in the wall 
where stone was joined to stone, the bars in the window, the iron 
ring upon the floor,--such things as these, subsiding strangely 
into one another, and awakening an indescribable kind of interest 
and amusement, engrossed his whole mind; and although at the bottom 
of his every thought there was an uneasy sense of guilt, and dread 
of death, he felt no more than that vague consciousness of it, 
which a sleeper has of pain.  It pursues him through his dreams, 
gnaws at the heart of all his fancied pleasures, robs the banquet 
of its taste, music of its sweetness, makes happiness itself 
unhappy, and yet is no bodily sensation, but a phantom without 
shape, or form, or visible presence; pervading everything, but 
having no existence; recognisable everywhere, but nowhere seen, or 
touched, or met with face to face, until the sleep is past, and 
waking agony returns.

After a long time the door of his cell opened.  He looked up; saw 
the blind man enter; and relapsed into his former position.

Guided by his breathing, the visitor advanced to where he sat; and 
stopping beside him, and stretching out his hand to assure himself 
that he was right, remained, for a good space, silent.

'This is bad, Rudge.  This is bad,' he said at length.

The prisoner shuffled with his feet upon the ground in turning his 
body from him, but made no other answer.

'How were you taken?' he asked.  'And where?  You never told me 
more than half your secret.  No matter; I know it now.  How was it, 
and where, eh?' he asked again, coming still nearer to him.

'At Chigwell,' said the other.

'At Chigwell!  How came you there?'

'Because I went there to avoid the man I stumbled on,' he answered.  
'Because I was chased and driven there, by him and Fate.  Because I 
was urged to go there, by something stronger than my own will.  
When I found him watching in the house she used to live in, night 
after night, I knew I never could escape him--never! and when I 
heard the Bell--'

He shivered; muttered that it was very cold; paced quickly up and 
down the narrow cell; and sitting down again, fell into his old 
posture.

'You were saying,' said the blind man, after another pause, 'that 
when you heard the Bell--'

'Let it be, will you?' he retorted in a hurried voice.  'It hangs 
there yet.'

The blind man turned a wistful and inquisitive face towards him, 
but he continued to speak, without noticing him.

'I went to Chigwell, in search of the mob.  I have been so hunted 
and beset by this man, that I knew my only hope of safety lay in 
joining them.  They had gone on before; I followed them when it 
left off.'

'When what left off?'

'The Bell.  They had quitted the place.  I hoped that some of them 
might be still lingering among the ruins, and was searching for 
them when I heard--' he drew a long breath, and wiped his forehead 
with his sleeve--'his voice.'

'Saying what?'

'No matter what.  I don't know.  I was then at the foot of the 
turret, where I did the--'

'Ay,' said the blind man, nodding his head with perfect composure, 
'I understand.'

'I climbed the stair, or so much of it as was left; meaning to hide 
till he had gone.  But he heard me; and followed almost as soon as 
I set foot upon the ashes.'

'You might have hidden in the wall, and thrown him down, or stabbed 
him,' said the blind man.

'Might I?  Between that man and me, was one who led him on--I saw 
it, though he did not--and raised above his head a bloody hand.  It 
was in the room above that HE and I stood glaring at each other on 
the night of the murder, and before he fell he raised his hand like 
that, and fixed his eyes on me.  I knew the chase would end there.'

'You have a strong fancy,' said the blind man, with a smile.

'Strengthen yours with blood, and see what it will come to.'

He groaned, and rocked himself, and looking up for the first time, 
said, in a low, hollow voice:

'Eight-and-twenty years!  Eight-and-twenty years!  He has never 
changed in all that time, never grown older, nor altered in the 
least degree.  He has been before me in the dark night, and the 
broad sunny day; in the twilight, the moonlight, the sunlight, the 
light of fire, and lamp, and candle; and in the deepest gloom.  
Always the same!  In company, in solitude, on land, on shipboard; 
sometimes leaving me alone for months, and sometimes always with 
me.  I have seen him, at sea, come gliding in the dead of night 
along the bright reflection of the moon in the calm water; and I 
have seen him, on quays and market-places, with his hand uplifted, 
towering, the centre of a busy crowd, unconscious of the terrible 
form that had its silent stand among them.  Fancy!  Are you real?  
Am I?  Are these iron fetters, riveted on me by the smith's hammer, 
or are they fancies I can shatter at a blow?'

The blind man listened in silence.

'Fancy!  Do I fancy that I killed him?  Do I fancy that as I left 
the chamber where he lay, I saw the face of a man peeping from a 
dark door, who plainly showed me by his fearful looks that he 
suspected what I had done?  Do I remember that I spoke fairly to 
him--that I drew nearer--nearer yet--with the hot knife in my 
sleeve?  Do I fancy how HE died?  Did he stagger back into the 
angle of the wall into which I had hemmed him, and, bleeding 
inwardly, stand, not fail, a corpse before me?  Did I see him, for 
an instant, as I see you now, erect and on his feet--but dead!'

The blind man, who knew that he had risen, motioned him to sit down 
again upon his bedstead; but he took no notice of the gesture.

'It was then I thought, for the first time, of fastening the murder 
upon him.  It was then I dressed him in my clothes, and dragged him 
down the back-stairs to the piece of water.  Do I remember 
listening to the bubbles that came rising up when I had rolled him 
in?  Do I remember wiping the water from my face, and because the 
body splashed it there, in its descent, feeling as if it MUST be 
blood?

'Did I go home when I had done?  And oh, my God! how long it took 
to do!  Did I stand before my wife, and tell her?  Did I see her 
fall upon the ground; and, when I stooped to raise her, did she 
thrust me back with a force that cast me off as if I had been a 
child, staining the hand with which she clasped my wrist?  Is THAT 
fancy?

'Did she go down upon her knees, and call on Heaven to witness that 
she and her unborn child renounced me from that hour; and did she, 
in words so solemn that they turned me cold--me, fresh from the 
horrors my own hands had made--warn me to fly while there was time; 
for though she would be silent, being my wretched wife, she would 
not shelter me?  Did I go forth that night, abjured of God and man, 
and anchored deep in hell, to wander at my cable's length about the 
earth, and surely be drawn down at last?'

'Why did you return?  said the blind man.

'Why is blood red?  I could no more help it, than I could live 
without breath.  I struggled against the impulse, but I was drawn 
back, through every difficult and adverse circumstance, as by a 
mighty engine.  Nothing could stop me.  The day and hour were none 
of my choice.  Sleeping and waking, I had been among the old haunts 
for years--had visited my own grave.  Why did I come back?  Because 
this jail was gaping for me, and he stood beckoning at the door.'

'You were not known?' said the blind man.

'I was a man who had been twenty-two years dead.  No.  I was not 
known.'

'You should have kept your secret better.'

'MY secret?  MINE?  It was a secret, any breath of air could 
whisper at its will.  The stars had it in their twinkling, the 
water in its flowing, the leaves in their rustling, the seasons in 
their return.  It lurked in strangers' faces, and their voices.  
Everything had lips on which it always trembled.--MY secret!'

'It was revealed by your own act at any rate,' said the blind man.

'The act was not mine.  I did it, but it was not mine.  I was 
forced at times to wander round, and round, and round that spot.  
If you had chained me up when the fit was on me, I should have 
broken away, and gone there.  As truly as the loadstone draws iron 
towards it, so he, lying at the bottom of his grave, could draw me 
near him when he would.  Was that fancy?  Did I like to go there, 
or did I strive and wrestle with the power that forced me?'

The blind man shrugged his shoulders, and smiled incredulously.  
The prisoner again resumed his old attitude, and for a long time 
both were mute.

'I suppose then,' said his visitor, at length breaking silence, 
'that you are penitent and resigned; that you desire to make peace 
with everybody (in particular, with your wife who has brought you 
to this); and that you ask no greater favour than to be carried to 
Tyburn as soon as possible?  That being the case, I had better take 
my leave.  I am not good enough to be company for you.'

'Have I not told you,' said the other fiercely, 'that I have 
striven and wrestled with the power that brought me here?  Has my 
whole life, for eight-and-twenty years, been one perpetual 
struggle and resistance, and do you think I want to lie down and 
die?  Do all men shrink from death--I most of all!'

'That's better said.  That's better spoken, Rudge--but I'll not 
call you that again--than anything you have said yet,' returned the 
blind man, speaking more familiarly, and laying his hands upon his 
arm.  'Lookye,--I never killed a man myself, for I have never been 
placed in a position that made it worth my while.  Farther, I am 
not an advocate for killing men, and I don't think I should 
recommend it or like it--for it's very hazardous--under any 
circumstances.  But as you had the misfortune to get into this 
trouble before I made your acquaintance, and as you have been my 
companion, and have been of use to me for a long time now, I 
overlook that part of the matter, and am only anxious that you 
shouldn't die unnecessarily.  Now, I do not consider that, at 
present, it is at all necessary.'

'What else is left me?' returned the prisoner.  'To eat my way 
through these walls with my teeth?'

'Something easier than that,' returned his friend.  'Promise me 
that you will talk no more of these fancies of yours--idle, foolish 
things, quite beneath a man--and I'll tell you what I mean.'

'Tell me,' said the other.

'Your worthy lady with the tender conscience; your scrupulous, 
virtuous, punctilious, but not blindly affectionate wife--'

'What of her?'

'Is now in London.'

'A curse upon her, be she where she may!'

'That's natural enough.  If she had taken her annuity as usual, you 
would not have been here, and we should have been better off.  But 
that's apart from the business.  She's in London.  Scared, as I 
suppose, and have no doubt, by my representation when I waited upon 
her, that you were close at hand (which I, of course, urged only as 
an inducement to compliance, knowing that she was not pining to see 
you), she left that place, and travelled up to London.'

'How do you know?'

'From my friend the noble captain--the illustrious general--the 
bladder, Mr Tappertit.  I learnt from him the last time I saw him, 
which was yesterday, that your son who is called Barnaby--not after 
his father, I suppose--'

'Death! does that matter now!'

'--You are impatient,' said the blind man, calmly; 'it's a good 
sign, and looks like life--that your son Barnaby had been lured 
away from her by one of his companions who knew him of old, at 
Chigwell; and that he is now among the rioters.'

'And what is that to me?  If father and son be hanged together, 
what comfort shall I find in that?'

'Stay--stay, my friend,' returned the blind man, with a cunning 
look, 'you travel fast to journeys' ends.  Suppose I track my lady 
out, and say thus much: "You want your son, ma'am--good.  I, 
knowing those who tempt him to remain among them, can restore him 
to you, ma'am--good.  You must pay a price, ma'am, for his 
restoration--good again.  The price is small, and easy to be paid--
dear ma'am, that's best of all."'

'What mockery is this?'

'Very likely, she may reply in those words.  "No mockery at all," I 
answer: "Madam, a person said to be your husband (identity is 
difficult of proof after the lapse of many years) is in prison, his 
life in peril--the charge against him, murder.  Now, ma'am, your 
husband has been dead a long, long time.  The gentleman never can 
be confounded with him, if you will have the goodness to say a few 
words, on oath, as to when he died, and how; and that this person 
(who I am told resembles him in some degree) is no more he than I 
am.  Such testimony will set the question quite at rest.  Pledge 
yourself to me to give it, ma' am, and I will undertake to keep 
your son (a fine lad) out of harm's way until you have done this 
trifling service, when he shall he delivered up to you, safe and 
sound.  On the other hand, if you decline to do so, I fear he will 
be betrayed, and handed over to the law, which will assuredly 
sentence him to suffer death.  It is, in fact, a choice between his 
life and death.  If you refuse, he swings.  If you comply, the 
timber is not grown, nor the hemp sown, that shall do him any 
harm."'

'There is a gleam of hope in this!' cried the prisoner.

'A gleam!' returned his friend, 'a noon-blaze; a full and glorious 
daylight.  Hush! I hear the tread of distant feet.  Rely on me.'

'When shall I hear more?'

'As soon as I do.  I should hope, to-morrow.  They are coming to 
say that our time for talk is over.  I hear the jingling of the 
keys.  Not another word of this just now, or they may overhear us.'

As he said these words, the lock was turned, and one of the prison 
turnkeys appearing at the door, announced that it was time for 
visitors to leave the jail.

'So soon!' said Stagg, meekly.  'But it can't be helped.  Cheer up, 
friend.  This mistake will soon be set at rest, and then you are a 
man again!  If this charitable gentleman will lead a blind man (who 
has nothing in return but prayers) to the prison-porch, and set him 
with his face towards the west, he will do a worthy deed.  Thank 
you, good sir.  I thank you very kindly.'

So saying, and pausing for an instant at the door to turn his 
grinning face towards his friend, he departed.

When the officer had seen him to the porch, he returned, and again 
unlocking and unbarring the door of the cell, set it wide open, 
informing its inmate that he was at liberty to walk in the adjacent 
yard, if he thought proper, for an hour.

The prisoner answered with a sullen nod; and being left alone 
again, sat brooding over what he had heard, and pondering upon the 
hopes the recent conversation had awakened; gazing abstractedly, 
the while he did so, on the light without, and watching the shadows 
thrown by one wall on another, and on the stone-paved ground.

It was a dull, square yard, made cold and gloomy by high walls, and 
seeming to chill the very sunlight.  The stone, so bare, and 
rough, and obdurate, filled even him with longing thoughts of 
meadow-land and trees; and with a burning wish to be at liberty.  
As he looked, he rose, and leaning against the door-post, gazed up 
at the bright blue sky, smiling even on that dreary home of crime.  
He seemed, for a moment, to remember lying on his back in some 
sweet-scented place, and gazing at it through moving branches, long 
ago.

His attention was suddenly attracted by a clanking sound--he knew 
what it was, for he had startled himself by making the same noise 
in walking to the door.  Presently a voice began to sing, and he 
saw the shadow of a figure on the pavement.  It stopped--was 
silent all at once, as though the person for a moment had forgotten 
where he was, but soon remembered--and so, with the same clanking 
noise, the shadow disappeared.

He walked out into the court and paced it to and fro; startling the 
echoes, as he went, with the harsh jangling of his fetters.  There 
was a door near his, which, like his, stood ajar.

He had not taken half-a-dozen turns up and down the yard, when, 
standing still to observe this door, he heard the clanking sound 
again.  A face looked out of the grated window--he saw it very 
dimly, for the cell was dark and the bars were heavy--and directly 
afterwards, a man appeared, and came towards him.

For the sense of loneliness he had, he might have been in jail a 
year.  Made eager by the hope of companionship, he quickened his 
pace, and hastened to meet the man half way--

What was this!  His son!

They stood face to face, staring at each other.  He shrinking and 
cowed, despite himself; Barnahy struggling with his imperfect 
memory, and wondering where he had seen that face before.  He was 
not uncertain long, for suddenly he laid hands upon him, and 
striving to bear him to the ground, cried:

'Ah! I know!  You are the robber!'

He said nothing in reply at first, but held down his head, and 
struggled with him silently.  Finding the younger man too strong 
for him, he raised his face, looked close into his eyes, and said,

'I am your father.'

God knows what magic the name had for his ears; but Barnaby 
released his hold, fell back, and looked at him aghast.  Suddenly 
he sprung towards him, put his arms about his neck, and pressed his 
head against his cheek.

Yes, yes, he was; he was sure he was.  But where had he been so 
long, and why had he left his mother by herself, or worse than by 
herself, with her poor foolish boy?  And had she really been as 
happy as they said?  And where was she?  Was she near there?  She 
was not happy now, and he in jail?  Ah, no.

Not a word was said in answer; but Grip croaked loudly, and hopped 
about them, round and round, as if enclosing them in a magic 
circle, and invoking all the powers of mischief.



Chapter 63


During the whole of this day, every regiment in or near the 
metropolis was on duty in one or other part of the town; and the 
regulars and militia, in obedience to the orders which were sent to 
every barrack and station within twenty-four hours' journey, began 
to pour in by all the roads.  But the disturbance had attained to 
such a formidable height, and the rioters had grown, with impunity, 
to be so audacious, that the sight of this great force, continually 
augmented by new arrivals, instead of operating as a check, 
stimulated them to outrages of greater hardihood than any they had 
yet committed; and helped to kindle a flame in London, the like of 
which had never been beheld, even in its ancient and rebellious 
times.

All yesterday, and on this day likewise, the commander-in-chief 
endeavoured to arouse the magistrates to a sense of their duty, and 
in particular the Lord Mayor, who was the faintest-hearted and most 
timid of them all.  With this object, large bodies of the soldiery 
were several times despatched to the Mansion House to await his 
orders: but as he could, by no threats or persuasions, be induced 
to give any, and as the men remained in the open street, 
fruitlessly for any good purpose, and thrivingly for a very bad 
one; these laudable attempts did harm rather than good.  For the 
crowd, becoming speedily acquainted with the Lord Mayor's temper, 
did not fail to take advantage of it by boasting that even the 
civil authorities were opposed to the Papists, and could not find 
it in their hearts to molest those who were guilty of no other 
offence.  These vaunts they took care to make within the hearing of 
the soldiers; and they, being naturally loth to quarrel with the 
people, received their advances kindly enough: answering, when 
they were asked if they desired to fire upon their countrymen, 'No, 
they would be damned if they did;' and showing much honest 
simplicity and good nature.  The feeling that the military were No-
Popery men, and were ripe for disobeying orders and joining the 
mob, soon became very prevalent in consequence.  Rumours of their 
disaffection, and of their leaning towards the popular cause, 
spread from mouth to mouth with astonishing rapidity; and whenever 
they were drawn up idly in the streets or squares, there was sure 
to be a crowd about them, cheering and shaking hands, and treating 
them with a great show of confidence and affection.

By this time, the crowd was everywhere; all concealment and 
disguise were laid aside, and they pervaded the whole town.  If 
any man among them wanted money, he had but to knock at the door of 
a dwelling-house, or walk into a shop, and demand it in the rioters 
name; and his demand was instantly complied with.  The peaceable 
citizens being afraid to lay hands upon them, singly and alone, it 
may be easily supposed that when gathered together in bodies, they 
were perfectly secure from interruption.  They assembled in the 
streets, traversed them at their will and pleasure, and publicly 
concerted their plans.  Business was quite suspended; the greater 
part of the shops were closed; most of the houses displayed a blue 
flag in token of their adherence to the popular side; and even the 
Jews in Houndsditch, Whitechapel, and those quarters, wrote upon 
their doors or window-shutters, 'This House is a True Protestant.'  
The crowd was the law, and never was the law held in greater dread, 
or more implicitly obeyed.

It was about six o'clock in the evening, when a vast mob poured 
into Lincoln's Inn Fields by every avenue, and divided--evidently 
in pursuance of a previous design--into several parties.  It must 
not be understood that this arrangement was known to the whole 
crowd, but that it was the work of a few leaders; who, mingling 
with the men as they came upon the ground, and calling to them to 
fall into this or that parry, effected it as rapidly as if it had 
been determined on by a council of the whole number, and every man 
had known his place.

It was perfectly notorious to the assemblage that the largest 
body, which comprehended about two-thirds of the whole, was 
designed for the attack on Newgate.  It comprehended all the 
rioters who had been conspicuous in any of their former 
proceedings; all those whom they recommended as daring hands and 
fit for the work; all those whose companions had been taken in the 
riots; and a great number of people who were relatives or friends 
of felons in the jail.  This last class included, not only the most 
desperate and utterly abandoned villains in London, but some who 
were comparatively innocent.  There was more than one woman there, 
disguised in man's attire, and bent upon the rescue of a child or 
brother.  There were the two sons of a man who lay under sentence 
of death, and who was to be executed along with three others, on 
the next day but one.  There was a great parry of boys whose 
fellow-pickpockets were in the prison; and at the skirts of all, 
a score of miserable women, outcasts from the world, seeking to 
release some other fallen creature as miserable as themselves, or 
moved by a general sympathy perhaps--God knows--with all who were 
without hope, and wretched.

Old swords, and pistols without ball or powder; sledge-hammers, 
knives, axes, saws, and weapons pillaged from the butchers' shops; 
a forest of iron bars and wooden clubs; long ladders for scaling 
the walls, each carried on the shoulders of a dozen men; lighted 
torches; tow smeared with pitch, and tar, and brimstone; staves 
roughly plucked from fence and paling; and even crutches taken from 
crippled beggars in the streets; composed their arms.  When all was 
ready, Hugh and Dennis, with Simon Tappertit between them, led the 
way.  Roaring and chafing like an angry sea, the crowd pressed 
after them.

Instead of going straight down Holborn to the jail, as all 
expected, their leaders took the way to Clerkenwell, and pouring 
down a quiet street, halted before a locksmith's house--the Golden 
Key.

'Beat at the door,' cried Hugh to the men about him.  'We want one 
of his craft to-night.  Beat it in, if no one answers.'

The shop was shut.  Both door and shutters were of a strong and 
sturdy kind, and they knocked without effect.  But the impatient 
crowd raising a cry of 'Set fire to the house!' and torches being 
passed to the front, an upper window was thrown open, and the stout 
old locksmith stood before them.

'What now, you villains!' he demanded.  'Where is my daughter?'

'Ask no questions of us, old man,' retorted Hugh, waving his 
comrades to be silent, 'but come down, and bring the tools of your 
trade.  We want you.'

'Want me!' cried the locksmith, glancing at the regimental dress he 
wore: 'Ay, and if some that I could name possessed the hearts of 
mice, ye should have had me long ago.  Mark me, my lad--and you 
about him do the same.  There are a score among ye whom I see now 
and know, who are dead men from this hour.  Begone! and rob an 
undertaker's while you can!  You'll want some coffins before long.'

'Will you come down?' cried Hugh.

'Will you give me my daughter, ruffian?' cried the locksmith.

'I know nothing of her,' Hugh rejoined.  'Burn the door!'

'Stop!' cried the locksmith, in a voice that made them falter--
presenting, as he spoke, a gun.  'Let an old man do that.  You can 
spare him better.'

The young fellow who held the light, and who was stooping down 
before the door, rose hastily at these words, and fell back.  The 
locksmith ran his eye along the upturned faces, and kept the weapon 
levelled at the threshold of his house.  It had no other rest than 
his shoulder, but was as steady as the house itself.

'Let the man who does it, take heed to his prayers,' he said 
firmly; 'I warn him.'

Snatching a torch from one who stood near him, Hugh was stepping 
forward with an oath, when he was arrested by a shrill and piercing 
shriek, and, looking upward, saw a fluttering garment on the house-
top.

There was another shriek, and another, and then a shrill voice 
cried, 'Is Simmun below!' At the same moment a lean neck was 
stretched over the parapet, and Miss Miggs, indistinctly seen in 
the gathering gloom of evening, screeched in a frenzied manner, 
'Oh! dear gentlemen, let me hear Simmuns's answer from his own 
lips.  Speak to me, Simmun.  Speak to me!'

Mr Tappertit, who was not at all flattered by this compliment, 
looked up, and bidding her hold her peace, ordered her to come down 
and open the door, for they wanted her master, and would take no 
denial.

'Oh good gentlemen!' cried Miss Miggs.  'Oh my own precious, 
precious Simmun--'

'Hold your nonsense, will you!' retorted Mr Tappertit; 'and come 
down and open the door.--G. Varden, drop that gun, or it will be 
worse for you.'

'Don't mind his gun,' screamed Miggs.  'Simmun and gentlemen, I 
poured a mug of table-beer right down the barrel.'

The crowd gave a loud shout, which was followed by a roar of 
laughter.

'It wouldn't go off, not if you was to load it up to the muzzle,' 
screamed Miggs.  'Simmun and gentlemen, I'm locked up in the front 
attic, through the little door on the right hand when you think 
you've got to the very top of the stairs--and up the flight of 
corner steps, being careful not to knock your heads against the 
rafters, and not to tread on one side in case you should fall into 
the two-pair bedroom through the lath and plasture, which do not 
bear, but the contrairy.  Simmun and gentlemen, I've been locked up 
here for safety, but my endeavours has always been, and always will 
be, to be on the right side--the blessed side and to prenounce the 
Pope of Babylon, and all her inward and her outward workings, which 
is Pagin.  My sentiments is of little consequences, I know,' cried 
Miggs, with additional shrillness, 'for my positions is but a 
servant, and as sich, of humilities, still I gives expressions to 
my feelings, and places my reliances on them which entertains my 
own opinions!'

Without taking much notice of these outpourings of Miss Miggs after 
she had made her first announcement in relation to the gun, the 
crowd raised a ladder against the window where the locksmith stood, 
and notwithstanding that he closed, and fastened, and defended it 
manfully, soon forced an entrance by shivering the glass and 
breaking in the frames.  After dealing a few stout blows about him, 
he found himself defenceless, in the midst of a furious crowd, 
which overflowed the room and softened off in a confused heap of 
faces at the door and window.

They were very wrathful with him (for he had wounded two men), and 
even called out to those in front, to bring him forth and hang him 
on a lamp-post.  But Gabriel was quite undaunted, and looked from 
Hugh and Dennis, who held him by either arm, to Simon Tappertit, 
who confronted him.

'You have robbed me of my daughter,' said the locksmith, 'who is 
far dearer to me than my life; and you may take my life, if you 
will.  I bless God that I have been enabled to keep my wife free of 
this scene; and that He has made me a man who will not ask mercy at 
such hands as yours.'

'And a wery game old gentleman you are,' said Mr Dennis, 
approvingly; 'and you express yourself like a man.  What's the 
odds, brother, whether it's a lamp-post to-night, or a feather-
bed ten year to come, eh?'

The locksmith glanced at him disdainfully, but returned no other 
answer.

'For my part,' said the hangman, who particularly favoured the 
lamp-post suggestion, 'I honour your principles.  They're mine 
exactly.  In such sentiments as them,' and here he emphasised his 
discourse with an oath, 'I'm ready to meet you or any man halfway.--
Have you got a bit of cord anywheres handy?  Don't put yourself 
out of the way, if you haven't.  A handkecher will do.'

'Don't be a fool, master,' whispered Hugh, seizing Varden roughly 
by the shoulder; 'but do as you're bid.  You'll soon hear what 
you're wanted for.  Do it!'

'I'll do nothing at your request, or that of any scoundrel here,' 
returned the locksmith.  'If you want any service from me, you may 
spare yourselves the pains of telling me what it is.  I tell you, 
beforehand, I'll do nothing for you.'

Mr Dennis was so affected by this constancy on the part of the 
staunch old man, that he protested--almost with tears in his eyes--
that to baulk his inclinations would be an act of cruelty and hard 
dealing to which he, for one, never could reconcile his conscience.  
The gentleman, he said, had avowed in so many words that he was 
ready for working off; such being the case, he considered it their 
duty, as a civilised and enlightened crowd, to work him off.  It 
was not often, he observed, that they had it in their power to 
accommodate themselves to the wishes of those from whom they had 
the misfortune to differ.  Having now found an individual who 
expressed a desire which they could reasonably indulge (and for 
himself he was free to confess that in his opinion that desire did 
honour to his feelings), he hoped they would decide to accede to 
his proposition before going any further.  It was an experiment 
which, skilfully and dexterously performed, would be over in five 
minutes, with great comfort and satisfaction to all parties; and 
though it did not become him (Mr Dennis) to speak well of himself 
he trusted he might be allowed to say that he had practical 
knowledge of the subject, and, being naturally of an obliging and 
friendly disposition, would work the gentleman off with a deal of 
pleasure.

These remarks, which were addressed in the midst of a frightful din 
and turmoil to those immediately about him, were received with 
great favour; not so much, perhaps, because of the hangman's 
eloquence, as on account of the locksmith's obstinacy.  Gabriel was 
in imminent peril, and he knew it; but he preserved a steady 
silence; and would have done so, if they had been debating whether 
they should roast him at a slow fire.

As the hangman spoke, there was some stir and confusion on the 
ladder; and directly he was silent--so immediately upon his holding 
his peace, that the crowd below had no time to learn what he had 
been saying, or to shout in response--some one at the window cried:

'He has a grey head.  He is an old man: Don't hurt him!'

The locksmith turned, with a start, towards the place from which 
the words had come, and looked hurriedly at the people who were 
hanging on the ladder and clinging to each other.

'Pay no respect to my grey hair, young man,' he said, answering the 
voice and not any one he saw.  'I don't ask it.  My heart is green 
enough to scorn and despise every man among you, band of robbers 
that you are!'

This incautious speech by no means tended to appease the ferocity 
of the crowd.  They cried again to have him brought out; and it 
would have gone hard with the honest locksmith, but that Hugh 
reminded them, in answer, that they wanted his services, and must 
have them.

'So, tell him what we want,' he said to Simon Tappertit, 'and 
quickly.  And open your ears, master, if you would ever use them 
after to-night.'

Gabriel folded his arms, which were now at liberty, and eyed his 
old 'prentice in silence.

'Lookye, Varden,' said Sim, 'we're bound for Newgate.'

'I know you are,' returned the locksmith.  'You never said a truer 
word than that.'

'To burn it down, I mean,' said Simon, 'and force the gates, and 
set the prisoners at liberty.  You helped to make the lock of the 
great door.'

'I did,' said the locksmith.  'You owe me no thanks for that--as 
you'll find before long.'

'Maybe,' returned his journeyman, 'but you must show us how to 
force it.'

'Must I!'

'Yes; for you know, and I don't.  You must come along with us, and 
pick it with your own hands.'

'When I do,' said the locksmith quietly, 'my hands shall drop off 
at the wrists, and you shall wear them, Simon Tappertit, on your 
shoulders for epaulettes.'

'We'll see that,' cried Hugh, interposing, as the indignation of 
the crowd again burst forth.  'You fill a basket with the tools 
he'll want, while I bring him downstairs.  Open the doors below, 
some of you.  And light the great captain, others!  Is there no 
business afoot, my lads, that you can do nothing but stand and 
grumble?'

They looked at one another, and quickly dispersing, swarmed over 
the house, plundering and breaking, according to their custom, and 
carrying off such articles of value as happened to please their 
fancy.  They had no great length of time for these proceedings, for 
the basket of tools was soon prepared and slung over a man's 
shoulders.  The preparations being now completed, and everything 
ready for the attack, those who were pillaging and destroying in 
the other rooms were called down to the workshop.  They were about 
to issue forth, when the man who had been last upstairs, stepped 
forward, and asked if the young woman in the garret (who was making 
a terrible noise, he said, and kept on screaming without the least 
cessation) was to be released?

For his own part, Simon Tappertit would certainly have replied in 
the negative, but the mass of his companions, mindful of the good 
service she had done in the matter of the gun, being of a different 
opinion, he had nothing for it but to answer, Yes.  The man, 
accordingly, went back again to the rescue, and presently returned 
with Miss Miggs, limp and doubled up, and very damp from much 
weeping.

As the young lady had given no tokens of consciousness on their way 
downstairs, the bearer reported her either dead or dying; and being 
at some loss what to do with her, was looking round for a 
convenient bench or heap of ashes on which to place her senseless 
form, when she suddenly came upon her feet by some mysterious 
means, thrust back her hair, stared wildly at Mr Tappertit, cried, 
'My Simmuns's life is not a wictim!' and dropped into his arms with 
such promptitude that he staggered and reeled some paces back, 
beneath his lovely burden.

'Oh bother!' said Mr Tappertit.  'Here.  Catch hold of her, 
somebody.  Lock her up again; she never ought to have been let out.'

'My Simmun!' cried Miss Miggs, in tears, and faintly.  'My for 
ever, ever blessed Simmun!'

'Hold up, will you,' said Mr Tappertit, in a very unresponsive 
tone, 'I'll let you fall if you don't.  What are you sliding your 
feet off the ground for?'

'My angel Simmuns!' murmured Miggs--'he promised--'

'Promised!  Well, and I'll keep my promise,' answered Simon, 
testily.  'I mean to provide for you, don't I?  Stand up!'

'Where am I to go?  What is to become of me after my actions of 
this night!' cried Miggs.  'What resting-places now remains but in 
the silent tombses!'

'I wish you was in the silent tombses, I do,' cried Mr Tappertit, 
'and boxed up tight, in a good strong one.  Here,' he cried to one 
of the bystanders, in whose ear he whispered for a moment: 'Take 
her off, will you.  You understand where?'

The fellow nodded; and taking her in his arms, notwithstanding her 
broken protestations, and her struggles (which latter species of 
opposition, involving scratches, was much more difficult of 
resistance), carried her away.  They who were in the house poured 
out into the street; the locksmith was taken to the head of the 
crowd, and required to walk between his two conductors; the whole 
body was put in rapid motion; and without any shouts or noise they 
bore down straight on Newgate, and halted in a dense mass before 
the prison-gate.



Chapter 64


Breaking the silence they had hitherto preserved, they raised a 
great cry as soon as they were ranged before the jail, and demanded 
to speak to the governor.  This visit was not wholly unexpected, 
for his house, which fronted the street, was strongly barricaded, 
the wicket-gate of the prison was closed up, and at no loophole or 
grating was any person to be seen.  Before they had repeated their 
summons many times, a man appeared upon the roof of the governor's 
house, and asked what it was they wanted.

Some said one thing, some another, and some only groaned and 
hissed.  It being now nearly dark, and the house high, many persons 
in the throng were not aware that any one had come to answer them, 
and continued their clamour until the intelligence was gradually 
diffused through the whole concourse.  Ten minutes or more elapsed 
before any one voice could be heard with tolerable distinctness; 
during which interval the figure remained perched alone, against 
the summer-evening sky, looking down into the troubled street.

'Are you,' said Hugh at length, 'Mr Akerman, the head jailer here?'

'Of course he is, brother,' whispered Dennis.  But Hugh, without 
minding him, took his answer from the man himself.

'Yes,' he said.  'I am.'

'You have got some friends of ours in your custody, master.'

'I have a good many people in my custody.'  He glanced downward, as 
he spoke, into the jail: and the feeling that he could see into 
the different yards, and that he overlooked everything which was 
hidden from their view by the rugged walls, so lashed and goaded 
the mob, that they howled like wolves.

'Deliver up our friends,' said Hugh, 'and you may keep the rest.'

'It's my duty to keep them all.  I shall do my duty.'

'If you don't throw the doors open, we shall break 'em down,' said 
Hugh; 'for we will have the rioters out.'

'All I can do, good people,' Akerman replied, 'is to exhort you to 
disperse; and to remind you that the consequences of any 
disturbance in this place, will be very severe, and bitterly 
repented by most of you, when it is too late.'

He made as though he would retire when he said these words, but he 
was checked by the voice of the locksmith.

'Mr Akerman,' cried Gabriel, 'Mr Akerman.'

'I will hear no more from any of you,' replied the governor, 
turning towards the speaker, and waving his hand.

'But I am not one of them,' said Gabriel.  'I am an honest man, 
Mr Akerman; a respectable tradesman--Gabriel Varden, the locksmith.  
You know me?' 

'You among the crowd!' cried the governor in an altered voice.

'Brought here by force--brought here to pick the lock of the great 
door for them,' rejoined the locksmith.  'Bear witness for me, Mr 
Akerman, that I refuse to do it; and that I will not do it, come 
what may of my refusal.  If any violence is done to me, please to 
remember this.'

'Is there no way (if helping you?' said the governor.

'None, Mr Akerman.  You'll do your duty, and I'll do mine.  Once 
again, you robbers and cut-throats,' said the locksmith, turning 
round upon them, 'I refuse.  Ah!  Howl till you're hoarse.  I 
refuse.'

'Stay--stay!' said the jailer, hastily.  'Mr Varden, I know you for 
a worthy man, and one who would do no unlawful act except upon 
compulsion--'

'Upon compulsion, sir,' interposed the locksmith, who felt that the 
tone in which this was said, conveyed the speaker's impression that 
he had ample excuse for yielding to the furious multitude who beset 
and hemmed him in, on every side, and among whom he stood, an old 
man, quite alone; 'upon compulsion, sir, I'll do nothing.'

'Where is that man,' said the keeper, anxiously, 'who spoke to me 
just now?'

'Here!' Hugh replied.

'Do you know what the guilt of murder is, and that by keeping that 
honest tradesman at your side you endanger his life!'

'We know it very well,' he answered, 'for what else did we bring 
him here?  Let's have our friends, master, and you shall have your 
friend.  Is that fair, lads?'

The mob replied to him with a loud Hurrah!

'You see how it is, sir?' cried Varden.  'Keep 'em out, in King 
George's name.  Remember what I have said.  Good night!'

There was no more parley.  A shower of stones and other missiles 
compelled the keeper of the jail to retire; and the mob, pressing 
on, and swarming round the walls, forced Gabriel Varden close up to 
the door.

In vain the basket of tools was laid upon the ground before him, 
and he was urged in turn by promises, by blows, by offers of 
reward, and threats of instant death, to do the office for which 
they had brought him there.  'No,' cried the sturdy locksmith, 'I 
will not!'

He had never loved his life so well as then, but nothing could move 
him.  The savage faces that glared upon him, look where he would; 
the cries of those who thirsted, like wild animals, for his blood; 
the sight of men pressing forward, and trampling down their 
fellows, as they strove to reach him, and struck at him above the 
heads of other men, with axes and with iron bars; all failed to 
daunt him.  He looked from man to man, and face to face, and still, 
with quickened breath and lessening colour, cried firmly, 'I will 
not!'

Dennis dealt him a blow upon the face which felled him to the 
ground.  He sprung up again like a man in the prime of life, and 
with blood upon his forehead, caught him by the throat.

'You cowardly dog!' he said: 'Give me my daughter.  Give me my 
daughter.'

They struggled together.  Some cried 'Kill him,' and some (but they 
were not near enough) strove to trample him to death.  Tug as he 
would at the old man's wrists, the hangman could not force him to 
unclench his hands.

'Is this all the return you make me, you ungrateful monster?' he 
articulated with great difficulty, and with many oaths.

'Give me my daughter!' cried the locksmith, who was now as fierce 
as those who gathered round him: 'Give me my daughter!'

He was down again, and up, and down once more, and buffeting with a 
score of them, who bandied him from hand to hand, when one tall 
fellow, fresh from a slaughter-house, whose dress and great thigh-
boots smoked hot with grease and blood, raised a pole-axe, and 
swearing a horrible oath, aimed it at the old man's uncovered head.  
At that instant, and in the very act, he fell himself, as if struck 
by lightning, and over his body a one-armed man came darting to the 
locksmith's side.  Another man was with him, and both caught the 
locksmith roughly in their grasp.

'Leave him to us!' they cried to Hugh--struggling, as they spoke, 
to force a passage backward through the crowd.  'Leave him to us.  
Why do you waste your whole strength on such as he, when a couple 
of men can finish him in as many minutes!  You lose time.  Remember 
the prisoners! remember Barnaby!'

The cry ran through the mob.  Hammers began to rattle on the walls; 
and every man strove to reach the prison, and be among the foremost 
rank.  Fighting their way through the press and struggle, as 
desperately as if they were in the midst of enemies rather than 
their own friends, the two men retreated with the locksmith between 
them, and dragged him through the very heart of the concourse.

And now the strokes began to fall like hail upon the gate, and on 
the strong building; for those who could not reach the door, spent 
their fierce rage on anything--even on the great blocks of stone, 
which shivered their weapons into fragments, and made their hands 
and arms to tingle as if the walls were active in their stout 
resistance, and dealt them back their blows.  The clash of iron 
ringing upon iron, mingled with the deafening tumult and sounded 
high above it, as the great sledge-hammers rattled on the nailed 
and plated door: the sparks flew off in showers; men worked in 
gangs, and at short intervals relieved each other, that all their 
strength might be devoted to the work; but there stood the portal 
still, as grim and dark and strong as ever, and, saving for the 
dints upon its battered surface, quite unchanged.

While some brought all their energies to bear upon this toilsome 
task; and some, rearing ladders against the prison, tried to 
clamber to the summit of the walls they were too short to scale; 
and some again engaged a body of police a hundred strong, and beat 
them back and trod them under foot by force of numbers; others 
besieged the house on which the jailer had appeared, and driving in 
the door, brought out his furniture, and piled it up against the 
prison-gate, to make a bonfire which should burn it down.  As soon 
as this device was understood, all those who had laboured hitherto, 
cast down their tools and helped to swell the heap; which reached 
half-way across the street, and was so high, that those who threw 
more fuel on the top, got up by ladders.  When all the keeper's 
goods were flung upon this costly pile, to the last fragment, they 
smeared it with the pitch, and tar, and rosin they had brought, and 
sprinkled it with turpentine.  To all the woodwork round the 
prison-doors they did the like, leaving not a joist or beam 
untouched.  This infernal christening performed, they fired the 
pile with lighted matches and with blazing tow, and then stood by, 
awaiting the result.

The furniture being very dry, and rendered more combustible by wax 
and oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once.  The 
flames roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison-wall, and 
twining up its loftly front like burning serpents.  At first they 
crowded round the blaze, and vented their exultation only in their 
looks: but when it grew hotter and fiercer--when it crackled, 
leaped, and roared, like a great furnace--when it shone upon the 
opposite houses, and lighted up not only the pale and wondering 
faces at the windows, but the inmost corners of each habitation--
when through the deep red heat and glow, the fire was seen sporting 
and toying with the door, now clinging to its obdurate surface, now 
gliding off with fierce inconstancy and soaring high into the sky, 
anon returning to fold it in its burning grasp and lure it to its 
ruin--when it shone and gleamed so brightly that the church clock 
of St Sepulchre's so often pointing to the hour of death, was 
legible as in broad day, and the vane upon its steeple-top 
glittered in the unwonted light like something richly jewelled--
when blackened stone and sombre brick grew ruddy in the deep 
reflection, and windows shone like burnished gold, dotting the 
longest distance in the fiery vista with their specks of 
brightness--when wall and tower, and roof and chimney-stack, seemed 
drunk, and in the flickering glare appeared to reel and stagger--
when scores of objects, never seen before, burst out upon the view, 
and things the most familiar put on some new aspect--then the mob 
began to join the whirl, and with loud yells, and shouts, and 
clamour, such as happily is seldom heard, bestirred themselves to 
feed the fire, and keep it at its height.

Although the heat was so intense that the paint on the houses over 
against the prison, parched and crackled up, and swelling into 
boils, as it were from excess of torture, broke and crumbled away; 
although the glass fell from the window-sashes, and the lead and 
iron on the roofs blistered the incautious hand that touched them, 
and the sparrows in the eaves took wing, and rendered giddy by the 
smoke, fell fluttering down upon the blazing pile; still the fire 
was tended unceasingly by busy hands, and round it, men were going 
always.  They never slackened in their zeal, or kept aloof, but 
pressed upon the flames so hard, that those in front had much ado 
to save themselves from being thrust in; if one man swooned or 
dropped, a dozen struggled for his place, and that although they 
knew the pain, and thirst, and pressure to be unendurable.  Those 
who fell down in fainting-fits, and were not crushed or burnt, 
were carried to an inn-yard close at hand, and dashed with water 
from a pump; of which buckets full were passed from man to man 
among the crowd; but such was the strong desire of all to drink, 
and such the fighting to be first, that, for the most part, the 
whole contents were spilled upon the ground, without the lips of 
one man being moistened.

Meanwhile, and in the midst of all the roar and outcry, those who 
were nearest to the pile, heaped up again the burning fragments 
that came toppling down, and raked the fire about the door, which, 
although a sheet of flame, was still a door fast locked and barred, 
and kept them out.  Great pieces of blazing wood were passed, 
besides, above the people's heads to such as stood about the 
ladders, and some of these, climbing up to the topmost stave, and 
holding on with one hand by the prison wall, exerted all their 
skill and force to cast these fire-brands on the roof, or down into 
the yards within.  In many instances their efforts were successful; 
which occasioned a new and appalling addition to the horrors of the 
scene: for the prisoners within, seeing from between their bars 
that the fire caught in many places and thrived fiercely, and being 
all locked up in strong cells for the night, began to know that 
they were in danger of being burnt alive.  This terrible fear, 
spreading from cell to cell and from yard to yard, vented itself in 
such dismal cries and wailings, and in such dreadful shrieks for 
help, that the whole jail resounded with the noise; which was 
loudly heard even above the shouting of the mob and roaring of the 
flames, and was so full of agony and despair, that it made the 
boldest tremble.

It was remarkable that these cries began in that quarter of the 
jail which fronted Newgate Street, where, it was well known, the 
men who were to suffer death on Thursday were confined.  And not 
only were these four who had so short a time to live, the first to 
whom the dread of being burnt occurred, but they were, throughout, 
the most importunate of all: for they could be plainly heard, 
notwithstanding the great thickness of the walls, crying that the 
wind set that way, and that the flames would shortly reach them; 
and calling to the officers of the jail to come and quench the 
fire from a cistern which was in their yard, and full of water.  
Judging from what the crowd outside the walls could hear from time 
to time, these four doomed wretches never ceased to call for help; 
and that with as much distraction, and in as great a frenzy of 
attachment to existence, as though each had an honoured, happy 
life before him, instead of eight-and-forty hours of miserable 
imprisonment, and then a violent and shameful death.

But the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these men, 
when they heard, or fancied that they heard, their father's voice, 
is past description.  After wringing their hands and rushing to and 
fro as if they were stark mad, one mounted on the shoulders of his 
brother, and tried to clamber up the face of the high wall, guarded 
at the top with spikes and points of iron.  And when he fell among 
the crowd, he was not deterred by his bruises, but mounted up 
again, and fell again, and, when he found the feat impossible, 
began to beat the stones and tear them with his hands, as if he 
could that way make a breach in the strong building, and force a 
passage in.  At last, they cleft their way among the mob about the 
door, though many men, a dozen times their match, had tried in vain 
to do so, and were seen, in--yes, in--the fire, striving to prize 
it down, with crowbars.

Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the prison.  
The women who were looking on, shrieked loudly, beat their hands 
together, stopped their ears; and many fainted: the men who were 
not near the walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing, 
tore up the pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and 
fury they could not have surpassed if that had been the jail, and 
they were near their object.  Not one living creature in the throng 
was for an instant still.  The whole great mass were mad.

A shout!  Another!  Another yet, though few knew why, or what it 
meant.  But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield, and 
drop from its topmost hinge.  It hung on that side by but one, but 
it was upright still, because of the bar, and its having sunk, of 
its own weight, into the heap of ashes at its foot.  There was now 
a gap at the top of the doorway, through which could be descried a 
gloomy passage, cavernous and dark.  Pile up the fire!

It burnt fiercely.  The door was red-hot, and the gap wider.  They 
vainly tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing 
as if in readiness for a spring, watched the place.  Dark figures, 
some crawling on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of 
others, were seen to pass along the roof.  It was plain the jail 
could hold out no longer.  The keeper, and his officers, and their 
wives and children, were escaping.  Pile up the fire!

The door sank down again: it settled deeper in the cinders--
tottered--yielded--was down!

As they shouted again, they fell back, for a moment, and left a 
clear space about the fire that lay between them and the jail 
entry.  Hugh leapt upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train of 
sparks into the air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those 
that hung upon his dress, dashed into the jail.

The hangman followed.  And then so many rushed upon their track, 
that the fire got trodden down and thinly strewn about the street; 
but there was no need of it now, for, inside and out, the prison 
was in flames.



Chapter 65


During the whole course of the terrible scene which was now at its 
height, one man in the jail suffered a degree of fear and mental 
torment which had no parallel in the endurance, even of those who 
lay under sentence of death.

When the rioters first assembled before the building, the murderer 
was roused from sleep--if such slumbers as his may have that 
blessed name--by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a great 
crowd.  He started up as these sounds met his ear, and, sitting on 
his bedstead, listened.

After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again.  Still 
listening attentively, he made out, in course of time, that the 
jail was besieged by a furious multitude.  His guilty conscience 
instantly arrayed these men against himself, and brought the fear 
upon him that he would be singled out, and torn to pieces.

Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything tended 
to confirm and strengthen it.  His double crime, the circumstances 
under which it had been committed, the length of time that had 
elapsed, and its discovery in spite of all, made him, as it were, 
the visible object of the Almighty's wrath.  In all the crime and 
vice and moral gloom of the great pest-house of the capital, he 
stood alone, marked and singled out by his great guilt, a Lucifer 
among the devils.  The other prisoners were a host, hiding and 
sheltering each other--a crowd like that without the walls.  He was 
one man against the whole united concourse; a single, solitary, 
lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off and 
shrunk appalled.

It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been 
bruited abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and 
kill him in the street; or it might be that they were the rioters, 
and, in pursuance of an old design, had come to sack the prison.  
But in either case he had no belief or hope that they would spare 
him.  Every shout they raised, and every sound they made, was a 
blow upon his heart.  As the attack went on, he grew more wild and 
frantic in his terror: tried to pull away the bars that guarded the 
chimney and prevented him from climbing up: called loudly on the 
turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the fury of 
the rabble; or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter of 
what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats and 
creeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.

But no one came, or answered him.  Fearful, even while he cried to 
them, of attracting attention, he was silent.  By and bye, he saw, 
as he looked from his grated window, a strange glimmering on the 
stone walls and pavement of the yard.  It was feeble at first, and 
came and went, as though some officers with torches were passing to 
and fro upon the roof of the prison.  Soon it reddened, and lighted 
brands came whirling down, spattering the ground with fire, and 
burning sullenly in corners.  One rolled beneath a wooden bench, 
and set it in a blaze; another caught a water-spout, and so went 
climbing up the wall, leaving a long straight track of fire behind 
it.  After a time, a slow thick shower of burning fragments, from 
some upper portion of the prison which was blazing nigh, began to 
fall before his door.  Remembering that it opened outwards, he knew 
that every spark which fell upon the heap, and in the act lost its 
bright life, and died an ugly speck of dust and rubbish, helped to 
entomb him in a living grave.  Still, though the jail resounded 
with shrieks and cries for help,--though the fire bounded up as if 
each separate flame had had a tiger's life, and roared as though, 
in every one, there were a hungry voice--though the heat began to 
grow intense, and the air suffocating, and the clamour without 
increased, and the danger of his situation even from one merciless 
element was every moment more extreme,--still he was afraid to 
raise his voice again, lest the crowd should break in, and should, 
of their own ears or from the information given them by the other 
prisoners, get the clue to his place of confinement.  Thus fearful 
alike, of those within the prison and of those without; of noise 
and silence; light and darkness; of being released, and being left 
there to die; he was so tortured and tormented, that nothing man 
has ever done to man in the horrible caprice of power and cruelty, 
exceeds his self-inflicted punishment.

Now, now, the door was down.  Now they came rushing through the 
jail, calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing the 
iron gates dividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cells 
and wards; wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down the 
door-posts to get men out; endeavouring to drag them by main force 
through gaps and windows where a child could scarcely pass; 
whooping and yelling without a moment's rest; and running through 
the heat and flames as if they were cased in metal.  By their legs, 
their arms, the hair upon their heads, they dragged the prisoners 
out.  Some threw themselves upon the captives as they got towards 
the door, and tried to file away their irons; some danced about 
them with a frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and were ready, 
as it seemed, to tear them limb from limb.  Now a party of a dozen 
men came darting through the yard into which the murderer cast 
fearful glances from his darkened window; dragging a prisoner along 
the ground whose dress they had nearly torn from his body in their 
mad eagerness to set him free, and who was bleeding and senseless 
in their hands.  Now a score of prisoners ran to and fro, who had 
lost themselves in the intricacies of the prison, and were so 
bewildered with the noise and glare that they knew not where to 
turn or what to do, and still cried out for help, as loudly as 
before.  Anon some famished wretch whose theft had been a loaf of 
bread, or scrap of butcher's meat, came skulking past, barefooted--
going slowly away because that jail, his house, was burning; not 
because he had any other, or had friends to meet, or old haunts to 
revisit, or any liberty to gain, but liberty to starve and die.  
And then a knot of highwaymen went trooping by, conducted by the 
friends they had among the crowd, who muffled their fetters as they 
went along, with handkerchiefs and bands of hay, and wrapped them 
in coats and cloaks, and gave them drink from bottles, and held it 
to their lips, because of their handcuffs which there was no time 
to remove.  All this, and Heaven knows how much more, was done 
amidst a noise, a hurry, and distraction, like nothing that we know 
of, even in our dreams; which seemed for ever on the rise, and 
never to decrease for the space of a single instant.

He was still looking down from his window upon these things, when a 
band of men with torches, ladders, axes, and many kinds of weapons, 
poured into the yard, and hammering at his door, inquired if there 
were any prisoner within.  He left the window when he saw them 
coming, and drew back into the remotest corner of the cell; but 
although he returned them no answer, they had a fancy that some one 
was inside, for they presently set ladders against it, and began to 
tear away the bars at the casement; not only that, indeed, but with 
pickaxes to hew down the very stones in the wall.

As soon as they had made a breach at the window, large enough for 
the admission of a man's head, one of them thrust in a torch and 
looked all round the room.  He followed this man's gaze until it 
rested on himself, and heard him demand why he had not answered, 
but made him no reply.

In the general surprise and wonder, they were used to this; without 
saying anything more, they enlarged the breach until it was large 
enough to admit the body of a man, and then came dropping down upon 
the floor, one after another, until the cell was full.  They caught 
him up among them, handed him to the window, and those who stood 
upon the ladders passed him down upon the pavement of the yard.  
Then the rest came out, one after another, and, bidding him fly, 
and lose no time, or the way would be choked up, hurried away to 
rescue others.

It seemed not a minute's work from first to last.  He staggered to 
his feet, incredulous of what had happened, when the yard was 
filled again, and a crowd rushed on, hurrying Barnaby among them.  
In another minute--not so much: another minute! the same instant, 
with no lapse or interval between!--he and his son were being 
passed from hand to hand, through the dense crowd in the street, 
and were glancing backward at a burning pile which some one said 
was Newgate.

From the moment of their first entrance into the prison, the crowd 
dispersed themselves about it, and swarmed into every chink and 
crevice, as if they had a perfect acquaintance with its innermost 
parts, and bore in their minds an exact plan of the whole.  For 
this immediate knowledge of the place, they were, no doubt, in a 
great degree, indebted to the hangman, who stood in the lobby, 
directing some to go this way, some that, and some the other; and 
who materially assisted in bringing about the wonderful rapidity 
with which the release of the prisoners was effected.

But this functionary of the law reserved one important piece of 
intelligence, and kept it snugly to himself.  When he had issued 
his instructions relative to every other part of the building, and 
the mob were dispersed from end to end, and busy at their work, he 
took a bundle of keys from a kind of cupboard in the wall, and 
going by a kind of passage near the chapel (it joined the governors 
house, and was then on fire), betook himself to the condemned 
cells, which were a series of small, strong, dismal rooms, opening 
on a low gallery, guarded, at the end at which he entered, by a 
strong iron wicket, and at its opposite extremity by two doors and 
a thick grate.  Having double locked the wicket, and assured 
himself that the other entrances were well secured, he sat down on 
a bench in the gallery, and sucked the head of his stick with the 
utmost complacency, tranquillity, and contentment.

It would have been strange enough, a man's enjoying himself in this 
quiet manner, while the prison was burning, and such a tumult was 
cleaving the air, though he had been outside the walls.  But here, 
in the very heart of the building, and moreover with the prayers 
and cries of the four men under sentence sounding in his ears, and 
their hands, stretched our through the gratings in their cell-
doors, clasped in frantic entreaty before his very eyes, it was 
particularly remarkable.  Indeed, Mr Dennis appeared to think it an 
uncommon circumstance, and to banter himself upon it; for he thrust 
his hat on one side as some men do when they are in a waggish 
humour, sucked the head of his stick with a higher relish, and 
smiled as though he would say, 'Dennis, you're a rum dog; you're a 
queer fellow; you're capital company, Dennis, and quite a 
character!'

He sat in this way for some minutes, while the four men in the 
cells, who were certain that somebody had entered the gallery, but 
could not see who, gave vent to such piteous entreaties as wretches 
in their miserable condition may be supposed to have been inspired 
with: urging, whoever it was, to set them at liberty, for the love 
of Heaven; and protesting, with great fervour, and truly enough, 
perhaps, for the time, that if they escaped, they would amend their 
ways, and would never, never, never again do wrong before God or 
man, but would lead penitent and sober lives, and sorrowfully 
repent the crimes they had committed.  The terrible energy with 
which they spoke, would have moved any person, no matter how good 
or just (if any good or just person could have strayed into that 
sad place that night), to have set them at liberty: and, while he 
would have left any other punishment to its free course, to have 
saved them from this last dreadful and repulsive penalty; which 
never turned a man inclined to evil, and has hardened thousands who 
were half inclined to good.

Mr Dennis, who had been bred and nurtured in the good old school, 
and had administered the good old laws on the good old plan, always 
once and sometimes twice every six weeks, for a long time, bore 
these appeals with a deal of philosophy.  Being at last, however, 
rather disturbed in his pleasant reflection by their repetition, he 
rapped at one of the doors with his stick, and cried:

'Hold your noise there, will you?'

At this they all cried together that they were to be hanged on the 
next day but one; and again implored his aid.

'Aid! For what!' said Mr Dennis, playfully rapping the knuckles of 
the hand nearest him.

'To save us!' they cried.

'Oh, certainly,' said Mr Dennis, winking at the wall in the absence 
of any friend with whom he could humour the joke.  'And so you're 
to be worked off, are you, brothers?'

'Unless we are released to-night,' one of them cried, 'we are dead 
men!'

'I tell you what it is,' said the hangman, gravely; 'I'm afraid, my 
friend, that you're not in that 'ere state of mind that's suitable 
to your condition, then; you're not a-going to be released: don't 
think it--Will you leave off that 'ere indecent row?  I wonder you 
an't ashamed of yourselves, I do.'

He followed up this reproof by rapping every set of knuckles one 
after the other, and having done so, resumed his seat again with a 
cheerful countenance.

'You've had law,' he said, crossing his legs and elevating his 
eyebrows: 'laws have been made a' purpose for you; a wery handsome 
prison's been made a' purpose for you; a parson's kept a purpose 
for you; a constitootional officer's appointed a' purpose for you; 
carts is maintained a' purpose for you--and yet you're not 
contented!--WILL you hold that noise, you sir in the furthest?'

A groan was the only answer.

'So well as I can make out,' said Mr Dennis, in a tone of mingled 
badinage and remonstrance, 'there's not a man among you.  I begin 
to think I'm on the opposite side, and among the ladies; though for 
the matter of that, I've seen a many ladies face it out, in a 
manner that did honour to the sex.--You in number two, don't grind 
them teeth of yours.  Worse manners,' said the hangman, rapping at 
the door with his stick, 'I never see in this place afore.  I'm 
ashamed of you.  You're a disgrace to the Bailey.'

After pausing for a moment to hear if anything could be pleaded in 
justification, Mr Dennis resumed in a sort of coaxing tone:

'Now look'ee here, you four.  I'm come here to take care of you, 
and see that you an't burnt, instead of the other thing.  It's no 
use your making any noise, for you won't be found out by them as 
has broken in, and you'll only be hoarse when you come to the 
speeches,--which is a pity.  What I say in respect to the speeches 
always is, "Give it mouth."  That's my maxim.  Give it mouth.  I've 
heerd,' said the hangman, pulling off his hat to take his 
handkerchief from the crown and wipe his face, and then putting it 
on again a little more on one side than before, 'I've heerd a 
eloquence on them boards--you know what boards I mean--and have 
heerd a degree of mouth given to them speeches, that they was as 
clear as a bell, and as good as a play.  There's a pattern!  And 
always, when a thing of this natur's to come off, what I stand up 
for, is, a proper frame of mind.  Let's have a proper frame of 
mind, and we can go through with it, creditable--pleasant--
sociable.  Whatever you do (and I address myself in particular, to 
you in the furthest), never snivel.  I'd sooner by half, though I 
lose by it, see a man tear his clothes a' purpose to spile 'em 
before they come to me, than find him snivelling.  It's ten to one 
a better frame of mind, every way!'

While the hangman addressed them to this effect, in the tone and 
with the air of a pastor in familiar conversation with his flock, 
the noise had been in some degree subdued; for the rioters were 
busy in conveying the prisoners to the Sessions House, which was 
beyond the main walls of the prison, though connected with it, and 
the crowd were busy too, in passing them from thence along the 
street.  But when he had got thus far in his discourse, the sound 
of voices in the yard showed plainly that the mob had returned and 
were coming that way; and directly afterwards a violent crashing at 
the grate below, gave note of their attack upon the cells (as they 
were called) at last.

It was in vain the hangman ran from door to door, and covered the 
grates, one after another, with his hat, in futile efforts to 
stifle the cries of the four men within; it was in vain he dogged 
their outstretched hands, and beat them with his stick, or menaced 
them with new and lingering pains in the execution of his office; 
the place resounded with their cries.  These, together with the 
feeling that they were now the last men in the jail, so worked upon 
and stimulated the besiegers, that in an incredibly short space of 
time they forced the strong grate down below, which was formed of 
iron rods two inches square, drove in the two other doors, as if 
they had been but deal partitions, and stood at the end of the 
gallery with only a bar or two between them and the cells.

'Halloa!' cried Hugh, who was the first to look into the dusky 
passage: 'Dennis before us!  Well done, old boy.  Be quick, and 
open here, for we shall be suffocated in the smoke, going out.'

'Go out at once, then,' said Dennis.  'What do you want here?'

'Want!' echoed Hugh.  'The four men.'

'Four devils!' cried the hangman.  'Don't you know they're left for 
death on Thursday?  Don't you respect the law--the constitootion--
nothing?  Let the four men be.'

'Is this a time for joking?' cried Hugh.  'Do you hear 'em?  Pull 
away these bars that have got fixed between the door and the 
ground; and let us in.'

'Brother,' said the hangman, in a low voice, as he stooped under 
pretence of doing what Hugh desired, but only looked up in his 
face, 'can't you leave these here four men to me, if I've the whim!  
You do what you like, and have what you like of everything for your 
share,--give me my share.  I want these four men left alone, I tell 
you!'

'Pull the bars down, or stand out of the way,' was Hugh's reply.

'You can turn the crowd if you like, you know that well enough, 
brother,' said the hangman, slowly.  'What!  You WILL come in, will 
you?'

'Yes.'

'You won't let these men alone, and leave 'em to me?  You've no 
respect for nothing--haven't you?' said the hangman, retreating to 
the door by which he had entered, and regarding his companion with 
a scowl.  'You WILL come in, will you, brother!'

'I tell you, yes.  What the devil ails you?  Where are you going?'

'No matter where I'm going,' rejoined the hangman, looking in again 
at the iron wicket, which he had nearly shut upon himself, and 
held ajar.  'Remember where you're coming.  That's all!'

With that, he shook his likeness at Hugh, and giving him a grin, 
compared with which his usual smile was amiable, disappeared, and 
shut the door.

Hugh paused no longer, but goaded alike by the cries of the 
convicts, and by the impatience of the crowd, warned the man 
immediately behind him--the way was only wide enough for one 
abreast--to stand back, and wielded a sledge-hammer with such 
strength, that after a few blows the iron bent and broke, and gave 
them free admittance.

It the two sons of one of these men, of whom mention has been made, 
were furious in their zeal before, they had now the wrath and 
vigour of lions.  Calling to the man within each cell, to keep as 
far back as he could, lest the axes crashing through the door 
should wound him, a party went to work upon each one, to beat it in 
by sheer strength, and force the bolts and staples from their hold.  
But although these two lads had the weakest party, and the worst 
armed, and did not begin until after the others, having stopped to 
whisper to him through the grate, that door was the first open, and 
that man was the first out.  As they dragged him into the gallery 
to knock off his irons, he fell down among them, a mere heap of 
chains, and was carried out in that state on men's shoulders, with 
no sign of life.

The release of these four wretched creatures, and conveying them, 
astounded and bewildered, into the streets so full of life--a 
spectacle they had never thought to see again, until they emerged 
from solitude and silence upon that last journey, when the air 
should be heavy with the pent-up breath of thousands, and the 
streets and houses should be built and roofed with human faces, not 
with bricks and tiles and stones--was the crowning horror of the 
scene.  Their pale and haggard looks and hollow eyes; their 
staggering feet, and hands stretched out as if to save themselves 
from falling; their wandering and uncertain air; the way they 
heaved and gasped for breath, as though in water, when they were 
first plunged into the crowd; all marked them for the men.  No need 
to say 'this one was doomed to die;' for there were the words 
broadly stamped and branded on his face.  The crowd fell off, as if 
they had been laid out for burial, and had risen in their shrouds; 
and many were seen to shudder, as though they had been actually 
dead men, when they chanced to touch or brush against their 
garments.

At the bidding of the mob, the houses were all illuminated that 
night--lighted up from top to bottom as at a time of public gaiety 
and joy.  Many years afterwards, old people who lived in their 
youth near this part of the city, remembered being in a great glare 
of light, within doors and without, and as they looked, timid and 
frightened children, from the windows, seeing a FACE go by.  Though 
the whole great crowd and all its other terrors had faded from 
their recollection, this one object remained; alone, distinct, and 
well remembered.  Even in the unpractised minds of infants, one of 
these doomed men darting past, and but an instant seen, was an 
image of force enough to dim the whole concourse; to find itself an 
all-absorbing place, and hold it ever after.

When this last task had been achieved, the shouts and cries grew 
fainter; the clank of fetters, which had resounded on all sides as 
the prisoners escaped, was heard no more; all the noises of the 
crowd subsided into a hoarse and sullen murmur as it passed into 
the distance; and when the human tide had rolled away, a melancholy 
heap of smoking ruins marked the spot where it had lately chafed 
and roared.



Chapter 66


Although he had had no rest upon the previous night, and had 
watched with little intermission for some weeks past, sleeping only 
in the day by starts and snatches, Mr Haredale, from the dawn of 
morning until sunset, sought his niece in every place where he 
deemed it possible she could have taken refuge.  All day long, 
nothing, save a draught of water, passed his lips; though he 
prosecuted his inquiries far and wide, and never so much as sat 
down, once.

In every quarter he could think of; at Chigwell and in London; at 
the houses of the tradespeople with whom he dealt, and of the 
friends he knew; he pursued his search.  A prey to the most 
harrowing anxieties and apprehensions, he went from magistrate to 
magistrate, and finally to the Secretary of State.  The only 
comfort he received was from this minister, who assured him that 
the Government, being now driven to the exercise of the extreme 
prerogatives of the Crown, were determined to exert them; that a 
proclamation would probably be out upon the morrow, giving to the 
military, discretionary and unlimited power in the suppression of 
the riots; that the sympathies of the King, the Administration, and 
both Houses of Parliament, and indeed of all good men of every 
religious persuasion, were strongly with the injured Catholics; and 
that justice should be done them at any cost or hazard.  He told 
him, moreover, that other persons whose houses had been burnt, had 
for a time lost sight of their children or their relatives, but 
had, in every case, within his knowledge, succeeded in discovering 
them; that his complaint should be remembered, and fully stated in 
the instructions given to the officers in command, and to all the 
inferior myrmidons of justice; and that everything that could be 
done to help him, should be done, with a goodwill and in good 
faith.

Grateful for this consolation, feeble as it was in its reference to 
the past, and little hope as it afforded him in connection with the 
subject of distress which lay nearest to his heart; and really 
thankful for the interest the minister expressed, and seemed to 
feel, in his condition; Mr Haredale withdrew.  He found himself, 
with the night coming on, alone in the streets; and destitute of 
any place in which to lay his head.

He entered an hotel near Charing Cross, and ordered some 
refreshment and a bed.  He saw that his faint and worn appearance 
attracted the attention of the landlord and his waiters; and 
thinking that they might suppose him to be penniless, took out his 
purse, and laid it on the table.  It was not that, the landlord 
said, in a faltering voice.  If he were one of those who had 
suffered by the rioters, he durst not give him entertainment.  He 
had a family of children, and had been twice warned to be careful 
in receiving guests.  He heartily prayed his forgiveness, but what 
could he do?

Nothing.  No man felt that more sincerely than Mr Haredale.  He 
told the man as much, and left the house.

Feeling that he might have anticipated this occurrence, after what 
he had seen at Chigwell in the morning, where no man dared to touch 
a spade, though he offered a large reward to all who would come and 
dig among the ruins of his house, he walked along the Strand; too 
proud to expose himself to another refusal, and of too generous a 
spirit to involve in distress or ruin any honest tradesman who 
might be weak enough to give him shelter.  He wandered into one of 
the streets by the side of the river, and was pacing in a 
thoughtful manner up and down, thinking of things that had happened 
long ago, when he heard a servant-man at an upper window call to 
another on the opposite side of the street, that the mob were 
setting fire to Newgate.

To Newgate! where that man was!  His failing strength returned, 
his energies came back with tenfold vigour, on the instant.  If it 
were possible--if they should set the murderer free--was he, after 
all he had undergone, to die with the suspicion of having slain his 
own brother, dimly gathering about him--

He had no consciousness of going to the jail; but there he stood, 
before it.  There was the crowd wedged and pressed together in a 
dense, dark, moving mass; and there were the flames soaring up into 
the air.  His head turned round and round, lights flashed before 
his eyes, and he struggled hard with two men.

'Nay, nay,' said one.  'Be more yourself, my good sir.  We attract 
attention here.  Come away.  What can you do among so many men?'

'The gentleman's always for doing something,' said the other, 
forcing him along as he spoke.  'I like him for that.  I do like 
him for that.'

They had by this time got him into a court, hard by the prison.  He 
looked from one to the other, and as he tried to release himself, 
felt that he tottered on his feet.  He who had spoken first, was 
the old gentleman whom he had seen at the Lord Mayor's.  The other 
was John Grueby, who had stood by him so manfully at Westminster.

'What does this mean?' he asked them faintly.  'How came we 
together?'

'On the skirts of the crowd,' returned the distiller; 'but come 
with us.  Pray come with us.  You seem to know my friend here?'

'Surely,' said Mr Haredale, looking in a kind of stupor at John.

'He'll tell you then,' returned the old gentleman, 'that I am a man 
to be trusted.  He's my servant.  He was lately (as you know, I 
have no doubt) in Lord George Gordon's service; but he left it, and 
brought, in pure goodwill to me and others, who are marked by the 
rioters, such intelligence as he had picked up, of their designs.'

--'On one condition, please, sir,' said John, touching his hat.  No 
evidence against my lord--a misled man--a kind-hearted man, sir.  
My lord never intended this.'

'The condition will be observed, of course,' rejoined the old 
distiller.  'It's a point of honour.  But come with us, sir; pray 
come with us.'

John Grueby added no entreaties, but he adopted a different kind of 
persuasion, by putting his arm through one of Mr Haredale's, while 
his master took the other, and leading him away with all speed.

Sensible, from a strange lightness in his head, and a difficulty in 
fixing his thoughts on anything, even to the extent of bearing his 
companions in his mind for a minute together without looking at 
them, that his brain was affected by the agitation and suffering 
through which he had passed, and to which he was still a prey, Mr 
Haredale let them lead him where they would.  As they went along, 
he was conscious of having no command over what he said or thought, 
and that he had a fear of going mad.

The distiller lived, as he had told him when they first met, on 
Holborn Hill, where he had great storehouses and drove a large 
trade.  They approached his house by a back entrance, lest they 
should attract the notice of the crowd, and went into an upper 
room which faced towards the street; the windows, however, in 
common with those of every other room in the house, were boarded up 
inside, in order that, out of doors, all might appear quite dark.

They laid him on a sofa in this chamber, perfectly insensible; but 
John immediately fetching a surgeon, who took from him a large 
quantity of blood, he gradually came to himself.  As he was, for 
the time, too weak to walk, they had no difficulty in persuading 
him to remain there all night, and got him to bed without loss of a 
minute.  That done, they gave him cordial and some toast, and 
presently a pretty strong composing-draught, under the influence 
of which he soon fell into a lethargy, and, for a time, forgot his 
troubles.

The vintner, who was a very hearty old fellow and a worthy man, had 
no thoughts of going to bed himself, for he had received several 
threatening warnings from the rioters, and had indeed gone out that 
evening to try and gather from the conversation of the mob whether 
his house was to be the next attacked.  He sat all night in an 
easy-chair in the same room--dozing a little now and then--and 
received from time to time the reports of John Grueby and two or 
three other trustworthy persons in his employ, who went out into 
the streets as scouts; and for whose entertainment an ample 
allowance of good cheer (which the old vintner, despite his 
anxiety, now and then attacked himself) was set forth in an 
adjoining chamber.

These accounts were of a sufficiently alarming nature from the 
first; but as the night wore on, they grew so much worse, and 
involved such a fearful amount of riot and destruction, that in 
comparison with these new tidings all the previous disturbances 
sunk to nothing.

The first intelligence that came, was of the taking of Newgate, and 
the escape of all the prisoners, whose track, as they made up 
Holborn and into the adjacent streets, was proclaimed to those 
citizens who were shut up in their houses, by the rattling of 
their chains, which formed a dismal concert, and was heard in every 
direction, as though so many forges were at work.  The flames too, 
shone so brightly through the vintner's skylights, that the rooms 
and staircases below were nearly as light as in broad day; while 
the distant shouting of the mob seemed to shake the very walls and 
ceilings.

At length they were heard approaching the house, and some minutes 
of terrible anxiety ensued.  They came close up, and stopped before 
it; but after giving three loud yells, went on.  And although they 
returned several times that night, creating new alarms each time, 
they did nothing there; having their hands full.  Shortly after 
they had gone away for the first time, one of the scouts came 
running in with the news that they had stopped before Lord 
Mansfield's house in Bloomsbury Square.

Soon afterwards there came another, and another, and then the first 
returned again, and so, by little and little, their tale was this:--
That the mob gathering round Lord Mansfield's house, had called on 
those within to open the door, and receiving no reply (for Lord and 
Lady Mansfield were at that moment escaping by the backway), forced 
an entrance according to their usual custom.  That they then began 
to demolish the house with great fury, and setting fire to it in 
several parts, involved in a common ruin the whole of the costly 
furniture, the plate and jewels, a beautiful gallery of pictures, 
the rarest collection of manuscripts ever possessed by any one 
private person in the world, and worse than all, because nothing 
could replace this loss, the great Law Library, on almost every 
page of which were notes in the Judge's own hand, of inestimable 
value,--being the results of the study and experience of his whole 
life.  That while they were howling and exulting round the fire, a 
troop of soldiers, with a magistrate among them, came up, and being 
too late (for the mischief was by that time done), began to 
disperse the crowd.  That the Riot Act being read, and the crowd 
still resisting, the soldiers received orders to fire, and 
levelling their muskets shot dead at the first discharge six men 
and a woman, and wounded many persons; and loading again directly, 
fired another volley, but over the people's heads it was supposed, 
as none were seen to fall.  That thereupon, and daunted by the 
shrieks and tumult, the crowd began to disperse, and the soldiers 
went away, leaving the killed and wounded on the ground: which they 
had no sooner done than the rioters came back again, and taking up 
the dead bodies, and the wounded people, formed into a rude 
procession, having the bodies in the front.  That in this order 
they paraded off with a horrible merriment; fixing weapons in the 
dead men's hands to make them look as if alive; and preceded by a 
fellow ringing Lord Mansfield's dinner-bell with all his might.

The scouts reported further, that this party meeting with some 
others who had been at similar work elsewhere, they all united into 
one, and drafting off a few men with the killed and wounded, 
marched away to Lord Mansfield's country seat at Caen Wood, between 
Hampstead and Highgate; bent upon destroying that house likewise, 
and lighting up a great fire there, which from that height should 
be seen all over London.  But in this, they were disappointed, for 
a party of horse having arrived before them, they retreated faster 
than they went, and came straight back to town.

There being now a great many parties in the streets, each went to 
work according to its humour, and a dozen houses were quickly 
blazing, including those of Sir John Fielding and two other 
justices, and four in Holborn--one of the greatest thoroughfares in 
London--which were all burning at the same time, and burned until 
they went out of themselves, for the people cut the engine hose, 
and would not suffer the firemen to play upon the flames.  At one 
house near Moorfields, they found in one of the rooms some canary 
birds in cages, and these they cast into the fire alive.  The poor 
little creatures screamed, it was said, like infants, when they 
were flung upon the blaze; and one man was so touched that he tried 
in vain to save them, which roused the indignation of the crowd, 
and nearly cost him his life.

At this same house, one of the fellows who went through the rooms, 
breaking the furniture and helping to destroy the building, found a 
child's doll--a poor toy--which he exhibited at the window to the 
mob below, as the image of some unholy saint which the late 
occupants had worshipped.  While he was doing this, another man 
with an equally tender conscience (they had both been foremost in 
throwing down the canary birds for roasting alive), took his seat 
on the parapet of the house, and harangued the crowd from a 
pamphlet circulated by the Association, relative to the true 
principles of Christianity!  Meanwhile the Lord Mayor, with his 
hands in his pockets, looked on as an idle man might look at any 
other show, and seemed mightily satisfied to have got a good place.

Such were the accounts brought to the old vintner by his servants 
as he sat at the side of Mr Haredale's bed, having been unable even 
to doze, after the first part of the night; too much disturbed by 
his own fears; by the cries of the mob, the light of the fires, and 
the firing of the soldiers.  Such, with the addition of the release 
of all the prisoners in the New Jail at Clerkenwell, and as many 
robberies of passengers in the streets, as the crowd had leisure to 
indulge in, were the scenes of which Mr Haredale was happily 
unconscious, and which were all enacted before midnight.



Chapter 67


When darkness broke away and morning began to dawn, the town wore a 
strange aspect indeed.

Sleep had hardly been thought of all night.  The general alarm was 
so apparent in the faces of the inhabitants, and its expression was 
so aggravated by want of rest (few persons, with any property to 
lose, having dared go to bed since Monday), that a stranger coming 
into the streets would have supposed some mortal pest or plague to 
have been raging.  In place of the usual cheerfulness and animation 
of morning, everything was dead and silent.  The shops remained 
closed, offices and warehouses were shut, the coach and chair 
stands were deserted, no carts or waggons rumbled through the 
slowly waking streets, the early cries were all hushed; a universal 
gloom prevailed.  Great numbers of people were out, even at 
daybreak, but they flitted to and fro as though they shrank from 
the sound of their own footsteps; the public ways were haunted 
rather than frequented; and round the smoking ruins people stood 
apart from one another and in silence, not venturing to condemn 
the rioters, or to be supposed to do so, even in whispers.

At the Lord President's in Piccadilly, at Lambeth Palace, at the 
Lord Chancellor's in Great Ormond Street, in the Royal Exchange, 
the Bank, the Guildhall, the Inns of Court, the Courts of Law, and 
every chamber fronting the streets near Westminster Hall and the 
Houses of Parliament, parties of soldiers were posted before 
daylight.  A body of Horse Guards paraded Palace Yard; an 
encampment was formed in the Park, where fifteen hundred men and 
five battalions of Militia were under arms; the Tower was 
fortified, the drawbridges were raised, the cannon loaded and 
pointed, and two regiments of artillery busied in strengthening the 
fortress and preparing it for defence.  A numerous detachment of 
soldiers were stationed to keep guard at the New River Head, which 
the people had threatened to attack, and where, it was said, they 
meant to cut off the main-pipes, so that there might be no water 
for the extinction of the flames.  In the Poultry, and on Cornhill, 
and at several other leading points, iron chains were drawn across 
the street; parties of soldiers were distributed in some of the old 
city churches while it was yet dark; and in several private houses 
(among them, Lord Rockingham's in Grosvenor Square); which were 
blockaded as though to sustain a siege, and had guns pointed from 
the windows.  When the sun rose, it shone into handsome apartments 
filled with armed men; the furniture hastily heaped away in 
corners, and made of little or no account, in the terror of the 
time--on arms glittering in city chambers, among desks and stools, 
and dusty books--into little smoky churchyards in odd lanes and by-
ways, with soldiers lying down among the tombs, or lounging under 
the shade of the one old tree, and their pile of muskets sparkling 
in the light--on solitary sentries pacing up and down in 
courtyards, silent now, but yesterday resounding with the din and 
hum of business--everywhere on guard-rooms, garrisons, and 
threatening preparations.

As the day crept on, still more unusual sights were witnessed in 
the streets.  The gates of the King's Bench and Fleet Prisons 
being opened at the usual hour, were found to have notices affixed 
to them, announcing that the rioters would come that night to burn 
them down.  The wardens, too well knowing the likelihood there was 
of this promise being fulfilled, were fain to set their prisoners 
at liberty, and give them leave to move their goods; so, all day, 
such of them as had any furniture were occupied in conveying it, 
some to this place, some to that, and not a few to the brokers' 
shops, where they gladly sold it, for any wretched price those 
gentry chose to give.  There were some broken men among these 
debtors who had been in jail so long, and were so miserable and 
destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and utterly forgotten 
and uncared for, that they implored their jailers not to set them 
free, and to send them, if need were, to some other place of 
custody.  But they, refusing to comply, lest they should incur the 
anger of the mob, turned them into the streets, where they wandered 
up and down hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so 
long, and crying--such abject things those rotten-hearted jails had 
made them--as they slunk off in their rags, and dragged their 
slipshod feet along the pavement.

Even of the three hundred prisoners who had escaped from Newgate, 
there were some--a few, but there were some--who sought their 
jailers out and delivered themselves up: preferring imprisonment 
and punishment to the horrors of such another night as the last.  
Many of the convicts, drawn back to their old place of captivity by 
some indescribable attraction, or by a desire to exult over it in 
its downfall and glut their revenge by seeing it in ashes, actually 
went back in broad noon, and loitered about the cells.  Fifty were 
retaken at one time on this next day, within the prison walls; but 
their fate did not deter others, for there they went in spite of 
everything, and there they were taken in twos and threes, twice or 
thrice a day, all through the week.  Of the fifty just mentioned, 
some were occupied in endeavouring to rekindle the fire; but in 
general they seemed to have no object in view but to prowl and 
lounge about the old place: being often found asleep in the ruins, 
or sitting talking there, or even eating and drinking, as in a 
choice retreat.

Besides the notices on the gates of the Fleet and the King's Bench, 
many similar announcements were left, before one o'clock at noon, 
at the houses of private individuals; and further, the mob 
proclaimed their intention of seizing on the Bank, the Mint, the 
Arsenal at Woolwich, and the Royal Palaces.  The notices were 
seldom delivered by more than one man, who, if it were at a shop, 
went in, and laid it, with a bloody threat perhaps, upon the 
counter; or if it were at a private house, knocked at the door, and 
thrust it in the servant's hand.  Notwithstanding the presence of 
the military in every quarter of the town, and the great force in 
the Park, these messengers did their errands with impunity all 
through the day.  So did two boys who went down Holborn alone, 
armed with bars taken from the railings of Lord Mansfield's house, 
and demanded money for the rioters.  So did a tall man on horseback 
who made a collection for the same purpose in Fleet Street, and 
refused to take anything but gold.

A rumour had now got into circulation, too, which diffused a 
greater dread all through London, even than these publicly 
announced intentions of the rioters, though all men knew that if 
they were successfully effected, there must ensue a national 
bankruptcy and general ruin.  It was said that they meant to throw 
the gates of Bedlam open, and let all the madmen loose.  This 
suggested such dreadful images to the people's minds, and was 
indeed an act so fraught with new and unimaginable horrors in the 
contemplation, that it beset them more than any loss or cruelty of 
which they could foresee the worst, and drove many sane men nearly 
mad themselves.

So the day passed on: the prisoners moving their goods; people 
running to and fro in the streets, carrying away their property; 
groups standing in silence round the ruins; all business suspended; 
and the soldiers disposed as has been already mentioned, remaining 
quite inactive.  So the day passed on, and dreaded night drew near 
again.

At last, at seven o'clock in the evening, the Privy Council issued 
a solemn proclamation that it was now necessary to employ the 
military, and that the officers had most direct and effectual 
orders, by an immediate exertion of their utmost force, to repress 
the disturbances; and warning all good subjects of the King to keep 
themselves, their servants, and apprentices, within doors that 
night.  There was then delivered out to every soldier on duty, 
thirty-six rounds of powder and ball; the drums beat; and the whole 
force was under arms at sunset.

The City authorities, stimulated by these vigorous measures, held a 
Common Council; passed a vote thanking the military associations 
who had tendered their aid to the civil authorities; accepted it; 
and placed them under the direction of the two sheriffs.  At the 
Queen's palace, a double guard, the yeomen on duty, the groom-
porters, and all other attendants, were stationed in the passages 
and on the staircases at seven o'clock, with strict instructions to 
be watchful on their posts all night; and all the doors were 
locked.  The gentlemen of the Temple, and the other Inns, mounted 
guard within their gates, and strengthened them with the great 
stones of the pavement, which they took up for the purpose.  In 
Lincoln's Inn, they gave up the hall and commons to the 
Northumberland Militia, under the command of Lord Algernon Percy; 
in some few of the city wards, the burgesses turned out, and 
without making a very fierce show, looked brave enough.  Some 
hundreds of stout gentlemen threw themselves, armed to the teeth, 
into the halls of the different companies, double-locked and bolted 
all the gates, and dared the rioters (among themselves) to come on 
at their peril.  These arrangements being all made simultaneously, 
or nearly so, were completed by the time it got dark; and then the 
streets were comparatively clear, and were guarded at all the great 
corners and chief avenues by the troops: while parties of the 
officers rode up and down in all directions, ordering chance 
stragglers home, and admonishing the residents to keep within their 
houses, and, if any firing ensued, not to approach the windows.  
More chains were drawn across such of the thoroughfares as were of 
a nature to favour the approach of a great crowd, and at each of 
these points a considerable force was stationed.  All these 
precautions having been taken, and it being now quite dark, those 
in command awaited the result in some anxiety: and not without a 
hope that such vigilant demonstrations might of themselves 
dishearten the populace, and prevent any new outrages.

But in this reckoning they were cruelly mistaken, for in half an 
hour, or less, as though the setting in of night had been their 
preconcerted signal, the rioters having previously, in small 
parties, prevented the lighting of the street lamps, rose like a 
great sea; and that in so many places at once, and with such 
inconceivable fury, that those who had the direction of the troops 
knew not, at first, where to turn or what to do.  One after 
another, new fires blazed up in every quarter of the town, as 
though it were the intention of the insurgents to wrap the city in 
a circle of flames, which, contracting by degrees, should burn the 
whole to ashes; the crowd swarmed and roared in every street; and 
none but rioters and soldiers being out of doors, it seemed to the 
latter as if all London were arrayed against them, and they stood 
alone against the town.

In two hours, six-and-thirty fires were raging--six-and-thirty 
great conflagrations: among them the Borough Clink in Tooley 
Street, the King's Bench, the Fleet, and the New Bridewell.  In 
almost every street, there was a battle; and in every quarter the 
muskets of the troops were heard above the shouts and tumult of the 
mob.  The firing began in the Poultry, where the chain was drawn 
across the road, where nearly a score of people were killed on the 
first discharge.  Their bodies having been hastily carried into St 
Mildred's Church by the soldiers, the latter fired again, and 
following fast upon the crowd, who began to give way when they saw 
the execution that was done, formed across Cheapside, and charged 
them at the point of the bayonet.

The streets were now a dreadful spectacle.  The shouts of the 
rabble, the shrieks of women, the cries of the wounded, and the 
constant firing, formed a deafening and an awful accompaniment to 
the sights which every corner presented.  Wherever the road was 
obstructed by the chains, there the fighting and the loss of life 
were greatest; but there was hot work and bloodshed in almost every 
leading thoroughfare.

At Holborn Bridge, and on Holborn Hill, the confusion was greater 
than in any other part; for the crowd that poured out of the city 
in two great streams, one by Ludgate Hill, and one by Newgate 
Street, united at that spot, and formed a mass so dense, that at 
every volley the people seemed to fall in heaps.  At this place a 
large detachment of soldiery were posted, who fired, now up Fleet 
Market, now up Holborn, now up Snow Hill--constantly raking the 
streets in each direction.  At this place too, several large fires 
were burning, so that all the terrors of that terrible night seemed 
to be concentrated in one spot.

Full twenty times, the rioters, headed by one man who wielded an 
axe in his right hand, and bestrode a brewer's horse of great size 
and strength, caparisoned with fetters taken out of Newgate, which 
clanked and jingled as he went, made an attempt to force a passage 
at this point, and fire the vintner's house.  Full twenty times 
they were repulsed with loss of life, and still came back again; 
and though the fellow at their head was marked and singled out by 
all, and was a conspicuous object as the only rioter on horseback, 
not a man could hit him.  So surely as the smoke cleared away, so 
surely there was he; calling hoarsely to his companions, 
brandishing his axe above his head, and dashing on as though he 
bore a charmed life, and was proof against ball and powder.

This man was Hugh; and in every part of the riot, he was seen.  He 
headed two attacks upon the Bank, helped to break open the Toll-
houses on Blackfriars Bridge, and cast the money into the street: 
fired two of the prisons with his own hand: was here, and there, 
and everywhere--always foremost--always active--striking at the 
soldiers, cheering on the crowd, making his horse's iron music 
heard through all the yell and uproar: but never hurt or stopped.  
Turn him at one place, and he made a new struggle in anotlter; 
force him to retreat at this point, and he advanced on that, 
directly.  Driven from Holborn for the twentieth time, he rode at 
the head of a great crowd straight upon Saint Paul's, attacked a 
guard of soldiers who kept watch over a body of prisoners within 
the iron railings, forced them to retreat, rescued the men they had 
in custody, and with this accession to his party, came back again, 
mad with liquor and excitement, and hallooing them on like a 
demon.

It would have been no easy task for the most careful rider to sit a 
horse in the midst of such a throng and tumult; but though this 
madman rolled upon his back (he had no saddle) like a boat upon the 
sea, he never for an instant lost his seat, or failed to guide him 
where he would.  Through the very thickest of the press, over dead 
bodies and burning fragments, now on the pavement, now in the road, 
now riding up a flight of steps to make himself the more 
conspicuous to his party, and now forcing a passage through a mass 
of human beings, so closely squeezed together that it seemed as if 
the edge of a knife would scarcely part them,--on he went, as 
though he could surmount all obstacles by the mere exercise of his 
will.  And perhaps his not being shot was in some degree 
attributable to this very circumstance; for his extreme audacity, 
and the conviction that he must be one of those to whom the 
proclamation referred, inspired the soldiers with a desire to take 
him alive, and diverted many an aim which otherwise might have been 
more near the mark.

The vintner and Mr Haredale, unable to sit quietly listening to the 
noise without seeing what went on, had climbed to the roof of the 
house, and hiding behind a stack of chimneys, were looking 
cautiously down into the street, almost hoping that after so many 
repulses the rioters would be foiled, when a great shout proclaimed 
that a parry were coming round the other way; and the dismal 
jingling of those accursed fetters warned them next moment that 
they too were led by Hugh.  The soldiers had advanced into Fleet 
Market and were dispersing the people there; so that they came on 
with hardly any check, and were soon before the house.

'All's over now,' said the vintner.  'Fifty thousand pounds will be 
scattered in a minute.  We must save ourselves.  We can do no 
more, and shall have reason to be thankful if we do as much.'

Their first impulse was, to clamber along the roofs of the houses, 
and, knocking at some garret window for admission, pass down that 
way into the street, and so escape.  But another fierce cry from 
below, and a general upturning of the faces of the crowd, apprised 
them that they were discovered, and even that Mr Haredale was 
recognised; for Hugh, seeing him plainly in the bright glare of 
the fire, which in that part made it as light as day, called to him 
by his name, and swore to have his life.

'Leave me here,' said Mr Haredale, 'and in Heaven's name, my good 
friend, save yourself!  Come on!' he muttered, as he turned towards 
Hugh and faced him without any further effort at concealment: 'This 
roof is high, and if we close, we will die together!'

'Madness,' said the honest vintner, pulling him back, 'sheer 
madness.  Hear reason, sir.  My good sir, hear reason.  I could 
never make myself heard by knocking at a window now; and even if I 
could, no one would be bold enough to connive at my escape.  
Through the cellars, there's a kind of passage into the back street 
by which we roll casks in and out.  We shall have time to get down 
there before they can force an entry.  Do not delay an instant, but 
come with me--for both our sakes--for mine--my dear good sir!'

As he spoke, and drew Mr Haredale back, they had both a glimpse of 
the street.  It was but a glimpse, but it showed them the crowd, 
gathering and clustering round the house: some of the armed men 
pressing to the front to break down the doors and windows, some 
bringing brands from the nearest fire, some with lifted faces 
following their course upon the roof and pointing them out to their 
companions: all raging and roaring like the flames they lighted up.  
They saw some men thirsting for the treasures of strong liquor 
which they knew were stored within; they saw others, who had been 
wounded, sinking down into the opposite doorways and dying, 
solitary wretches, in the midst of all the vast assemblage; here a 
frightened woman trying to escape; and there a lost child; and 
there a drunken ruffian, unconscious of the death-wound on his 
head, raving and fighting to the last.  All these things, and even 
such trivial incidents as a man with his hat off, or turning round, 
or stooping down, or shaking hands with another, they marked 
distinctly; yet in a glance so brief, that, in the act of stepping 
back, they lost the whole, and saw but the pale faces of each 
other, and the red sky above them.

Mr Haredale yielded to the entreaties of his companion--more 
because he was resolved to defend him, than for any thought he had 
of his own life, or any care he entertained for his own safety--and 
quickly re-entering the house, they descended the stairs together.  
Loud blows were thundering on the shutters, crowbars were already 
thrust beneath the door, the glass fell from the sashes, a deep 
light shone through every crevice, and they heard the voices of the 
foremost in the crowd so close to every chink and keyhole, that 
they seemed to be hoarsely whispering their threats into their very 
ears.  They had but a moment reached the bottom of the cellar-steps 
and shut the door behind them, when the mob broke in.

The vaults were profoundly dark, and having no torch or candle--for 
they had been afraid to carry one, lest it should betray their 
place of refuge--they were obliged to grope with their hands.  But 
they were not long without light, for they had not gone far when 
they heard the crowd forcing the door; and, looking back among the 
low-arched passages, could see them in the distance, hurrying to 
and fro with flashing links, broaching the casks, staving the great 
vats, turning off upon the right hand and the left, into the 
different cellars, and lying down to drink at the channels of 
strong spirits which were already flowing on the ground.

They hurried on, not the less quickly for this; and had reached the 
only vault which lay between them and the passage out, when 
suddenly, from the direction in which they were going, a strong 
light gleamed upon their faces; and before they could slip aside, 
or turn back, or hide themselves, two men (one bearing a torch) 
came upon them, and cried in an astonished whisper, 'Here they 
are!'

At the same instant they pulled off what they wore upon their 
heads.  Mr Haredale saw before him Edward Chester, and then saw, 
when the vintner gasped his name, Joe Willet.

Ay, the same Joe, though with an arm the less, who used to make the 
quarterly journey on the grey mare to pay the bill to the purple-
faced vintner; and that very same purple-faced vintner, formerly 
of Thames Street, now looked him in the face, and challenged him by 
name.

'Give me your hand,' said Joe softly, taking it whether the 
astonished vintner would or no.  'Don't fear to shake it; it's a 
friendly one and a hearty one, though it has no fellow.  Why, how 
well you look and how bluff you are!  And you--God bless you, sir.  
Take heart, take heart.  We'll find them.  Be of good cheer; we 
have not been idle.'

There was something so honest and frank in Joe's speech, that Mr 
Haredale put his hand in his involuntarily, though their meeting 
was suspicious enough.  But his glance at Edward Chester, and that 
gentleman's keeping aloof, were not lost upon Joe, who said 
bluntly, glancing at Edward while he spoke:

'Times are changed, Mr Haredale, and times have come when we ought 
to know friends from enemies, and make no confusion of names.  Let 
me tell you that but for this gentleman, you would most likely 
have been dead by this time, or badly wounded at the best.'

'What do you say?' cried Mr Haredale.

'I say,' said Joe, 'first, that it was a bold thing to be in the 
crowd at all disguised as one of them; though I won't say much 
about that, on second thoughts, for that's my case too.  Secondly, 
that it was a brave and glorious action--that's what I call it--to 
strike that fellow off his horse before their eyes!'

'What fellow!  Whose eyes!'

'What fellow, sir!' cried Joe: 'a fellow who has no goodwill to 
you, and who has the daring and devilry in him of twenty fellows.  
I know him of old.  Once in the house, HE would have found you, 
here or anywhere.  The rest owe you no particular grudge, and, 
unless they see you, will only think of drinking themselves dead.  
But we lose time.  Are you ready?'

'Quite,' said Edward.  'Put out the torch, Joe, and go on.  And be 
silent, there's a good fellow.'

'Silent or not silent,' murmured Joe, as he dropped the flaring 
link upon the ground, crushed it with his foot, and gave his hand 
to Mr Haredale, 'it was a brave and glorious action;--no man can 
alter that.'

Both Mr Haredale and the worthy vintner were too amazed and too 
much hurried to ask any further questions, so followed their 
conductors in silence.  It seemed, from a short whispering which 
presently ensued between them and the vintner relative to the best 
way of escape, that they had entered by the back-door, with the 
connivance of John Grueby, who watched outside with the key in his 
pocket, and whom they had taken into their confidence.  A party of 
the crowd coming up that way, just as they entered, John had 
double-locked the door again, and made off for the soldiers, so 
that means of retreat was cut off from under them.

However, as the front-door had been forced, and this minor crowd, 
being anxious to get at the liquor, had no fancy for losing time in 
breaking down another, but had gone round and got in from Holborn 
with the rest, the narrow lane in the rear was quite free of 
people.  So, when they had crawled through the passage indicated by 
the vintner (which was a mere shelving-trap for the admission of 
casks), and had managed with some difficulty to unchain and raise 
the door at the upper end, they emerged into the street without 
being observed or interrupted.  Joe still holding Mr Haredale 
tight, and Edward taking the same care of the vintner, they hurried 
through the streets at a rapid pace; occasionally standing aside to 
let some fugitives go by, or to keep out of the way of the soldiers 
who followed them, and whose questions, when they halted to put 
any, were speedily stopped by one whispered word from Joe.



Chapter 68


While Newgate was burning on the previous night, Barnaby and his 
father, having been passed among the crowd from hand to hand, stood 
in Smithfield, on the outskirts of the mob, gazing at the flames 
like men who had been suddenly roused from sleep.  Some moments 
elapsed before they could distinctly remember where they were, or 
how they got there; or recollected that while they were standing 
idle and listless spectators of the fire, they had tools in their 
hands which had been hurriedly given them that they might free 
themselves from their fetters.

Barnaby, heavily ironed as he was, if he had obeyed his first 
impulse, or if he had been alone, would have made his way back to 
the side of Hugh, who to his clouded intellect now shone forth with 
the new lustre of being his preserver and truest friend.  But his 
father's terror of remaining in the streets, communicated itself to 
him when he comprehended the full extent of his fears, and 
impressed him with the same eagerness to fly to a place of safety.

In a corner of the market among the pens for cattle, Barnaby knelt 
down, and pausing every now and then to pass his hand over his 
father's face, or look up to him with a smile, knocked off his 
irons.  When he had seen him spring, a free man, to his feet, and 
had given vent to the transport of delight which the sight 
awakened, he went to work upon his own, which soon fell rattling 
down upon the ground, and left his limbs unfettered.

Gliding away together when this task was accomplished, and passing 
several groups of men, each gathered round a stooping figure to 
hide him from those who passed, but unable to repress the clanking 
sound of hammers, which told that they too were busy at the same 
work,--the two fugitives made towards Clerkenwell, and passing 
thence to Islington, as the nearest point of egress, were quickly 
in the fields.  After wandering about for a long time, they found 
in a pasture near Finchley a poor shed, with walls of mud, and roof 
of grass and brambles, built for some cowherd, but now deserted.  
Here, they lay down for the rest of the night.

They wandered to and fro when it was day, and once Barnaby went off 
alone to a cluster of little cottages two or three miles away, to 
purchase some bread and milk.  But finding no better shelter, they 
returned to the same place, and lay down again to wait for night.

Heaven alone can tell, with what vague hopes of duty, and 
affection; with what strange promptings of nature, intelligible to 
him as to a man of radiant mind and most enlarged capacity; with 
what dim memories of children he had played with when a child 
himself, who had prattled of their fathers, and of loving them, and 
being loved; with how many half-remembered, dreamy associations of 
his mother's grief and tears and widowhood; he watched and tended 
this man.  But that a vague and shadowy crowd of such ideas came 
slowly on him; that they taught him to be sorry when he looked upon 
his haggard face, that they overflowed his eyes when he stooped to 
kiss him, that they kept him waking in a tearful gladness, shading 
him from the sun, fanning him with leaves, soothing him when he 
started in his sleep--ah! what a troubled sleep it was--and 
wondering when SHE would come to join them and be happy, is the 
truth.  He sat beside him all that day; listening for her footsteps 
in every breath of air, looking for her shadow on the gently-waving 
grass, twining the hedge flowers for her pleasure when she came, 
and his when he awoke; and stooping down from time to time to 
listen to his mutterings, and wonder why he was so restless in that 
quiet place.  The sun went down, and night came on, and he was 
still quite tranquil; busied with these thoughts, as if there were 
no other people in the world, and the dull cloud of smoke hanging 
on the immense city in the distance, hid no vices, no crimes, no 
life or death, or cause of disquiet--nothing but clear air.

But the hour had now come when he must go alone to find out the 
blind man (a task that filled him with delight) and bring him to 
that place; taking especial care that he was not watched or 
followed on his way back.  He listened to the directions he must 
observe, repeated them again and again, and after twice or thrice 
returning to surprise his father with a light-hearted laugh, went 
forth, at last, upon his errand: leaving Grip, whom he had carried 
from the jail in his arms, to his care.

Fleet of foot, and anxious to return, he sped swiftly on towards 
the city, but could not reach it before the fires began, and made 
the night angry with their dismal lustre.  When he entered the 
town--it might be that he was changed by going there without his 
late companions, and on no violent errand; or by the beautiful 
solitude in which he had passed the day, or by the thoughts that 
had come upon him,--but it seemed peopled by a legion of devils.  
This flight and pursuit, this cruel burning and destroying, these 
dreadful cries and stunning noises, were THEY the good lord's noble 
cause!

Though almost stupefied by the bewildering scene, still be found 
the blind man's house.  It was shut up and tenantless.

He waited for a long while, but no one came.  At last he withdrew; 
and as he knew by this time that the soldiers were firing, and many 
people must have been killed, he went down into Holborn, where he 
heard the great crowd was, to try if he could find Hugh, and 
persuade him to avoid the danger, and return with him.

If he had been stunned and shocked before, his horror was 
increased a thousandfold when he got into this vortex of the riot, 
and not being an actor in the terrible spectacle, had it all before 
his eyes.  But there, in the midst, towering above them all, close 
before the house they were attacking now, was Hugh on horseback, 
calling to the rest!

Sickened by the sights surrounding him on every side, and by the 
heat and roar, and crash, he forced his way among the crowd (where 
many recognised him, and with shouts pressed back to let him pass), 
and in time was nearly up with Hugh, who was savagely threatening 
some one, but whom or what he said, he could not, in the great 
confusion, understand.  At that moment the crowd forced their way 
into the house, and Hugh--it was impossible to see by what means, 
in such a concourse--fell headlong down.

Barnaby was beside him when he staggered to his feet.  It was well 
he made him hear his voice, or Hugh, with his uplifted axe, would 
have cleft his skull in twain.

'Barnaby--you!  Whose hand was that, that struck me down?'

'Not mine.'

'Whose!--I say, whose!' he cried, reeling back, and looking wildly 
round.  'What are you doing?  Where is he?  Show me!'

'You are hurt,' said Barnaby--as indeed he was, in the head, both 
by the blow he had received, and by his horse's hoof.  'Come away 
with me.'

As he spoke, he took the horse's bridle in his hand, turned him, 
and dragged Hugh several paces.  This brought them out of the 
crowd, which was pouring from the street into the vintner's 
cellars.

'Where's--where's Dennis?' said Hugh, coming to a stop, and 
checking Barnaby with his strong arm.  'Where has he been all day?  
What did he mean by leaving me as he did, in the jail, last night?  
Tell me, you--d'ye hear!'

With a flourish of his dangerous weapon, he fell down upon the 
ground like a log.  After a minute, though already frantic with 
drinking and with the wound in his head, he crawled to a stream of 
burning spirit which was pouring down the kennel, and began to 
drink at it as if it were a brook of water.

Barnaby drew him away, and forced him to rise.  Though he could 
neither stand nor walk, he involuntarily staggered to his horse, 
climbed upon his back, and clung there.  After vainly attempting to 
divest the animal of his clanking trappings, Barnaby sprung up 
behind him, snatched the bridle, turned into Leather Lane, which 
was close at hand, and urged the frightened horse into a heavy 
trot.

He looked back, once, before he left the street; and looked upon a 
sight not easily to be erased, even from his remembrance, so long 
as he had life.

The vintner's house with a half-a-dozen others near at hand, was 
one great, glowing blaze.  All night, no one had essayed to quench 
the flames, or stop their progress; but now a body of soldiers 
were actively engaged in pulling down two old wooden houses, which 
were every moment in danger of taking fire, and which could 
scarcely fail, if they were left to burn, to extend the 
conflagration immensely.  The tumbling down of nodding walls and 
heavy blocks of wood, the hooting and the execrations of the crowd, 
the distant firing of other military detachments, the distracted 
looks and cries of those whose habitations were in danger, the 
hurrying to and fro of frightened people with their goods; the 
reflections in every quarter of the sky, of deep, red, soaring 
flames, as though the last day had come and the whole universe were 
burning; the dust, and smoke, and drift of fiery particles, 
scorching and kindling all it fell upon; the hot unwholesome 
vapour, the blight on everything; the stars, and moon, and very 
sky, obliterated;--made up such a sum of dreariness and ruin, that 
it seemed as if the face of Heaven were blotted out, and night, in 
its rest and quiet, and softened light, never could look upon the 
earth again.

But there was a worse spectacle than this--worse by far than fire 
and smoke, or even the rabble's unappeasable and maniac rage.  The 
gutters of the street, and every crack and fissure in the stones, 
ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands, 
overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool, into 
which the people dropped down dead by dozens.  They lay in heaps 
all round this fearful pond, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, 
mothers and daughters, women with children in their arms and babies 
at their breasts, and drank until they died.  While some stooped 
with their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, 
others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half in a 
mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell, 
and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them.  Nor 
was even this the worst or most appalling kind of death that 
happened on this fatal night.  From the burning cellars, where they 
drank out of hats, pails, buckets, tubs, and shoes, some men were 
drawn, alive, but all alight from head to foot; who, in their 
unendurable anguish and suffering, making for anything that had the 
look of water, rolled, hissing, in this hideous lake, and splashed 
up liquid fire which lapped in all it met with as it ran along the 
surface, and neither spared the living nor the dead.  On this last 
night of the great riots--for the last night it was--the wretched 
victims of a senseless outcry, became themselves the dust and ashes 
of the flames they had kindled, and strewed the public streets of 
London.

With all he saw in this last glance fixed indelibly upon his mind, 
Barnaby hurried from the city which enclosed such horrors; and 
holding down his head that he might not even see the glare of the 
fires upon the quiet landscape, was soon in the still country 
roads.

He stopped at about half-a-mile from the shed where his father 
lay, and with some difficulty making Hugh sensible that he must 
dismount, sunk the horse's furniture in a pool of stagnant water, 
and turned the animal loose.  That done, he supported his companion 
as well as he could, and led him slowly forward.



Chapter 69


It was the dead of night, and very dark, when Barnaby, with his 
stumbling comrade, approached the place where he had left his 
father; but he could see him stealing away into the gloom, 
distrustful even of him, and rapidly retreating.  After calling to 
him twice or thrice that there was nothing to fear, but without 
effect, he suffered Hugh to sink upon the ground, and followed to 
bring him back.

He continued to creep away, until Barnaby was close upon him; then 
turned, and said in a terrible, though suppressed voice:

'Let me go.  Do not lay hands upon me.  You have told her; and you 
and she together have betrayed me!'

Barnaby looked at him, in silence.

'You have seen your mother!'

'No,' cried Barnaby, eagerly.  'Not for a long time--longer than I 
can tell.  A whole year, I think.  Is she here?'

His father looked upon him steadfastly for a few moments, and then 
said--drawing nearer to him as he spoke, for, seeing his face, and 
hearing his words, it was impossible to doubt his truth:

'What man is that?'

'Hugh--Hugh.  Only Hugh.  You know him.  HE will not harm you.  
Why, you're afraid of Hugh!  Ha ha ha!  Afraid of gruff, old, noisy 
Hugh!'

'What man is he, I ask you,' he rejoined so fiercely, that Barnaby 
stopped in his laugh, and shrinking back, surveyed him with a look 
of terrified amazement.

'Why, how stern you are!  You make me fear you, though you are my 
father.  Why do you speak to me so?'

--'I want,' he answered, putting away the hand which his son, with 
a timid desire to propitiate him, laid upon his sleeve,--'I want an 
answer, and you give me only jeers and questions.  Who have you 
brought with you to this hiding-place, poor fool; and where is the 
blind man?'

'I don't know where.  His house was close shut.  I waited, but no 
person came; that was no fault of mine.  This is Hugh--brave Hugh, 
who broke into that ugly jail, and set us free.  Aha!  You like him 
now, do you?  You like him now!'

'Why does he lie upon the ground?'

'He has had a fall, and has been drinking.  The fields and trees go 
round, and round, and round with him, and the ground heaves under 
his feet.  You know him?  You remember?  See!'

They had by this time returned to where he lay, and both stooped 
over him to look into his face.

'I recollect the man,' his father murmured.  'Why did you bring him 
here?'

'Because he would have been killed if I had left him over yonder.  
They were firing guns and shedding blood.  Does the sight of blood 
turn you sick, father?  I see it does, by your face.  That's like 
me--What are you looking at?'

'At nothing!' said the murderer softly, as he started back a pace 
or two, and gazed with sunken jaw and staring eyes above his son's 
head.  'At nothing!'

He remained in the same attitude and with the same expression on 
his face for a minute or more; then glanced slowly round as if he 
had lost something; and went shivering back, towards the shed.

'Shall I bring him in, father?' asked Barnaby, who had looked on, 
wondering.

He only answered with a suppressed groan, and lying down upon the 
ground, wrapped his cloak about his head, and shrunk into the 
darkest corner.

Finding that nothing would rouse Hugh now, or make him sensible for 
a moment, Barnaby dragged him along the grass, and laid him on a 
little heap of refuse hay and straw which had been his own bed; 
first having brought some water from a running stream hard by, and 
washed his wound, and laved his hands and face.  Then he lay down 
himself, between the two, to pass the night; and looking at the 
stars, fell fast asleep.

Awakened early in the morning, by the sunshine and the songs of 
birds, and hum of insects, he left them sleeping in the hut, and 
walked into the sweet and pleasant air.  But he felt that on his 
jaded senses, oppressed and burdened with the dreadful scenes of 
last night, and many nights before, all the beauties of opening 
day, which he had so often tasted, and in which he had had such 
deep delight, fell heavily.  He thought of the blithe mornings when 
he and the dogs went bounding on together through the woods and 
fields; and the recollection filled his eyes with tears.  He had no 
consciousness, God help him, of having done wrong, nor had he any 
new perception of the merits of the cause in which he had been 
engaged, or those of the men who advocated it; but he was full of 
cares now, and regrets, and dismal recollections, and wishes (quite 
unknown to him before) that this or that event had never happened, 
and that the sorrow and suffering of so many people had been 
spared.  And now he began to think how happy they would be--his 
father, mother, he, and Hugh--if they rambled away together, and 
lived in some lonely place, where there were none of these 
troubles; and that perhaps the blind man, who had talked so wisely 
about gold, and told him of the great secrets he knew, could teach 
them how to live without being pinched by want.  As this occurred 
to him, he was the more sorry that he had not seen him last night; 
and he was still brooding over this regret, when his father came, 
and touched him on the shoulder.

'Ah!' cried Barnaby, starting from his fit of thoughtfulness.  'Is 
it only you?'

'Who should it be?'

'I almost thought,' he answered, 'it was the blind man.  I must 
have some talk with him, father.'

'And so must I, for without seeing him, I don't know where to fly 
or what to do, and lingering here, is death.  You must go to him 
again, and bring him here.'

'Must I!' cried Barnaby, delighted; 'that's brave, father.  That's 
what I want to do.'

'But you must bring only him, and none other.  And though you wait 
at his door a whole day and night, still you must wait, and not 
come back without him.'

'Don't you fear that,' he cried gaily.  'He shall come, he shall 
come.'

'Trim off these gewgaws,' said his father, plucking the scraps of 
ribbon and the feathers from his hat, 'and over your own dress wear 
my cloak.  Take heed how you go, and they will be too busy in the 
streets to notice you.  Of your coming back you need take no 
account, for he'll manage that, safely.'

'To be sure!' said Barnaby.  'To be sure he will!  A wise man, 
father, and one who can teach us to be rich.  Oh! I know him, I 
know him.'

He was speedily dressed, and as well disguised as he could be.  
With a lighter heart he then set off upon his second journey, 
leaving Hugh, who was still in a drunken stupor, stretched upon the 
ground within the shed, and his father walking to and fro before it.

The murderer, full of anxious thoughts, looked after him, and paced 
up and down, disquieted by every breath of air that whispered among 
the boughs, and by every light shadow thrown by the passing clouds 
upon the daisied ground.  He was anxious for his safe return, and 
yet, though his own life and safety hung upon it, felt a relief 
while he was gone.  In the intense selfishness which the constant 
presence before him of his great crimes, and their consequences 
here and hereafter, engendered, every thought of Barnaby, as his 
son, was swallowed up and lost.  Still, his presence was a torture 
and reproach; in his wild eyes, there were terrible images of that 
guilty night; with his unearthly aspect, and his half-formed mind, 
he seemed to the murderer a creature who had sprung into existence 
from his victim's blood.  He could not bear his look, his voice, 
his touch; and yet he was forced, by his own desperate condition 
and his only hope of cheating the gibbet, to have him by his side, 
and to know that he was inseparable from his single chance of escape.

He walked to and fro, with little rest, all day, revolving these 
things in his mind; and still Hugh lay, unconscious, in the shed.  
At length, when the sun was setting, Barnaby returned, leading the 
blind man, and talking earnestly to him as they came along together.

The murderer advanced to meet them, and bidding his son go on and 
speak to Hugh, who had just then staggered to his feet, took his 
place at the blind man's elbow, and slowly followed, towards the 
shed.

'Why did you send HIM?' said Stagg.  'Don't you know it was the way 
to have him lost, as soon as found?'

'Would you have had me come myself?' returned the other.

'Humph!  Perhaps not.  I was before the jail on Tuesday night, but 
missed you in the crowd.  I was out last night, too.  There was 
good work last night--gay work--profitable work'--he added, 
rattling the money in his pockets.

'Have you--'

--'Seen your good lady?  Yes.'

'Do you mean to tell me more, or not?'

'I'll tell you all,' returned the blind man, with a laugh.  'Excuse 
me--but I love to see you so impatient.  There's energy in it.'

'Does she consent to say the word that may save me?'

'No,' returned the blind man emphatically, as he turned his face 
towards him.  'No.  Thus it is.  She has been at death's door since 
she lost her darling--has been insensible, and I know not what.  I 
tracked her to a hospital, and presented myself (with your leave) 
at her bedside.  Our talk was not a long one, for she was weak, and 
there being people near I was not quite easy.  But I told her all 
that you and I agreed upon, and pointed out the young gentleman's 
position, in strong terms.  She tried to soften me, but that, of 
course (as I told her), was lost time.  She cried and moaned, you 
may be sure; all women do.  Then, of a sudden, she found her voice 
and strength, and said that Heaven would help her and her innocent 
son; and that to Heaven she appealed against us--which she did; in 
really very pretty language, I assure you.  I advised her, as a 
friend, not to count too much on assistance from any such distant 
quarter--recommended her to think of it--told her where I lived--
said I knew she would send to me before noon, next day--and left 
her, either in a faint or shamming.'

When he had concluded this narration, during which he had made 
several pauses, for the convenience of cracking and eating nuts, of 
which he seemed to have a pocketful, the blind man pulled a flask 
from his pocket, took a draught himself, and offered it to his 
companion.

'You won't, won't you?' he said, feeling that he pushed it from 
him.  'Well!  Then the gallant gentleman who's lodging with you, 
will.  Hallo, bully!'

'Death!' said the other, holding him back.  'Will you tell me what 
I am to do!'

'Do!  Nothing easier.  Make a moonlight flitting in two hours' time 
with the young gentleman (he's quite ready to go; I have been 
giving him good advice as we came along), and get as far from 
London as you can.  Let me know where you are, and leave the rest 
to me.  She MUST come round; she can't hold out long; and as to the 
chances of your being retaken in the meanwhile, why it wasn't one 
man who got out of Newgate, but three hundred.  Think of that, for 
your comfort.'

'We must support life.  How?'

'How!' repeated the blind man.  'By eating and drinking.  And how 
get meat and drink, but by paying for it!  Money!' he cried, 
slapping his pocket.  'Is money the word?  Why, the streets have 
been running money.  Devil send that the sport's not over yet, for 
these are jolly times; golden, rare, roaring, scrambling times.  
Hallo, bully!  Hallo!  Hallo!  Drink, bully, drink.  Where are ye 
there!  Hallo!'

With such vociferations, and with a boisterous manner which bespoke 
his perfect abandonment to the general licence and disorder, he 
groped his way towards the shed, where Hugh and Barnaby were 
sitting on the ground.

'Put it about!' he cried, handing his flask to Hugh.  'The kennels 
run with wine and gold.  Guineas and strong water flow from the 
very pumps.  About with it, don't spare it!'

Exhausted, unwashed, unshorn, begrimed with smoke and dust, his 
hair clotted with blood, his voice quite gone, so that he spoke in 
whispers; his skin parched up by fever, his whole body bruised and 
cut, and beaten about, Hugh still took the flask, and raised it to 
his lips.  He was in the act of drinking, when the front of the 
shed was suddenly darkened, and Dennis stood before them.

'No offence, no offence,' said that personage in a conciliatory 
tone, as Hugh stopped in his draught, and eyed him, with no 
pleasant look, from head to foot.  'No offence, brother.  Barnaby 
here too, eh?  How are you, Barnaby?  And two other gentlemen!  
Your humble servant, gentlemen.  No offence to YOU either, I hope.  
Eh, brothers?'

Notwithstanding that he spoke in this very friendly and confident 
manner, he seemed to have considerable hesitation about entering, 
and remained outside the roof.  He was rather better dressed than 
usual: wearing the same suit of threadbare black, it is true, but 
having round his neck an unwholesome-looking cravat of a yellowish 
white; and, on his hands, great leather gloves, such as a gardener 
might wear in following his trade.  His shoes were newly greased, 
and ornamented with a pair of rusty iron buckles; the packthread at 
his knees had been renewed; and where he wanted buttons, he wore 
pins.  Altogether, he had something the look of a tipstaff, or a 
bailiff's follower, desperately faded, but who had a notion of 
keeping up the appearance of a professional character, and making 
the best of the worst means.

'You're very snug here,' said Mr Dennis, pulling out a mouldy 
pocket-handkerchief, which looked like a decomposed halter, and 
wiping his forehead in a nervous manner.

'Not snug enough to prevent your finding us, it seems,' Hugh 
answered, sulkily.

'Why I'll tell you what, brother,' said Dennis, with a friendly 
smile, 'when you don't want me to know which way you're riding, you 
must wear another sort of bells on your horse.  Ah! I know the 
sound of them you wore last night, and have got quick ears for 'em; 
that's the truth.  Well, but how are you, brother?'

He had by this time approached, and now ventured to sit down by him.

'How am I?' answered Hugh.  'Where were you yesterday?  Where did 
you go when you left me in the jail?  Why did you leave me?  And 
what did you mean by rolling your eyes and shaking your fist at me, 
eh?'

'I shake my fist!--at you, brother!' said Dennis, gently checking 
Hugh's uplifted hand, which looked threatening.

'Your stick, then; it's all one.'

'Lord love you, brother, I meant nothing.  You don't understand me 
by half.  I shouldn't wonder now,' he added, in the tone of a 
desponding and an injured man, 'but you thought, because I wanted 
them chaps left in the prison, that I was a going to desert the 
banners?'

Hugh told him, with an oath, that he had thought so.

'Well!' said Mr Dennis, mournfully, 'if you an't enough to make a 
man mistrust his feller-creeturs, I don't know what is.  Desert the 
banners!  Me!  Ned Dennis, as was so christened by his own 
father!--Is this axe your'n, brother?'

Yes, it's mine,' said Hugh, in the same sullen manner as before; 
'it might have hurt you, if you had come in its way once or twice 
last night.  Put it down.'

'Might have hurt me!' said Mr Dennis, still keeping it in his hand, 
and feeling the edge with an air of abstraction.  'Might have hurt 
me! and me exerting myself all the time to the wery best advantage.  
Here's a world!  And you're not a-going to ask me to take a sup out 
of that 'ere bottle, eh?'

Hugh passed it towards him.  As he raised it to his lips, Barnaby 
jumped up, and motioning them to be silent, looked eagerly out.

'What's the matter, Barnaby?' said Dennis, glancing at Hugh and 
dropping the flask, but still holding the axe in his hand.

'Hush!' he answered softly.  'What do I see glittering behind the 
hedge?'

'What!' cried the hangman, raising his voice to its highest pitch, 
and laying hold of him and Hugh.  'Not SOLDIERS, surely!'

That moment, the shed was filled with armed men; and a body of 
horse, galloping into the field, drew up before it.

'There!' said Dennis, who remained untouched among them when they 
had seized their prisoners; 'it's them two young ones, gentlemen, 
that the proclamation puts a price on.  This other's an escaped 
felon.--I'm sorry for it, brother,' he added, in a tone of 
resignation, addressing himself to Hugh; 'but you've brought it on 
yourself; you forced me to do it; you wouldn't respect the 
soundest constitootional principles, you know; you went and 
wiolated the wery framework of society.  I had sooner have given 
away a trifle in charity than done this, I would upon my soul.--If 
you'll keep fast hold on 'em, gentlemen, I think I can make a shift 
to tie 'em better than you can.'

But this operation was postponed for a few moments by a new 
occurrence.  The blind man, whose ears were quicker than most 
people's sight, had been alarmed, before Barnaby, by a rustling in 
the bushes, under cover of which the soldiers had advanced.  He 
retreated instantly--had hidden somewhere for a minute--and 
probably in his confusion mistaking the point at which he had 
emerged, was now seen running across the open meadow.

An officer cried directly that he had helped to plunder a house 
last night.  He was loudly called on, to surrender.  He ran the 
harder, and in a few seconds would have been out of gunshot.  The 
word was given, and the men fired.

There was a breathless pause and a profound silence, during which 
all eyes were fixed upon him.  He had been seen to start at the 
discharge, as if the report had frightened him.  But he neither 
stopped nor slackened his pace in the least, and ran on full forty 
yards further.  Then, without one reel or stagger, or sign of 
faintness, or quivering of any limb, he dropped.

Some of them hurried up to where he lay;--the hangman with them.  
Everything had passed so quickly, that the smoke had not yet 
scattered, but curled slowly off in a little cloud, which seemed 
like the dead man's spirit moving solemnly away.  There were a few 
drops of blood upon the grass--more, when they turned him over--
that was all.

'Look here! Look here!' said the hangman, stooping one knee beside 
the body, and gazing up with a disconsolate face at the officer and 
men.  'Here's a pretty sight!'

'Stand out of the way,' replied the officer.  'Serjeant! see what 
he had about him.'

The man turned his pockets out upon the grass, and counted, besides 
some foreign coins and two rings, five-and-forty guineas in gold.  
These were bundled up in a handkerchief and carried away; the body 
remained there for the present, but six men and the serjeant were 
left to take it to the nearest public-house.

'Now then, if you're going,' said the serjeant, clapping Dennis on 
the back, and pointing after the officer who was walking towards 
the shed.

To which Mr Dennis only replied, 'Don't talk to me!' and then 
repeated what he had said before, namely, 'Here's a pretty sight!'

'It's not one that you care for much, I should think,' observed the 
serjeant coolly.

'Why, who,' said Mr Dennis rising, 'should care for it, if I 
don't?'

'Oh! I didn't know you was so tender-hearted,' said the serjeant.  
'That's all!'

'Tender-hearted!' echoed Dennis.  'Tender-hearted!  Look at this 
man.  Do you call THIS constitootional?  Do you see him shot 
through and through instead of being worked off like a Briton?  
Damme, if I know which party to side with.  You're as bad as the 
other.  What's to become of the country if the military power's to 
go a superseding the ciwilians in this way?  Where's this poor 
feller-creetur's rights as a citizen, that he didn't have ME in 
his last moments!  I was here.  I was willing.  I was ready.  These 
are nice times, brother, to have the dead crying out against us in 
this way, and sleep comfortably in our beds arterwards; wery 
nice!'

Whether he derived any material consolation from binding the 
prisoners, is uncertain; most probably he did.  At all events his 
being summoned to that work, diverted him, for the time, from these 
painful reflections, and gave his thoughts a more congenial 
occupation.

They were not all three carried off together, but in two parties; 
Barnaby and his father, going by one road in the centre of a body 
of foot; and Hugh, fast bound upon a horse, and strongly guarded by 
a troop of cavalry, being taken by another.

They had no opportunity for the least communication, in the short 
interval which preceded their departure; being kept strictly apart.  
Hugh only observed that Barnaby walked with a drooping head among 
his guard, and, without raising his eyes, that he tried to wave 
his fettered hand when he passed.  For himself, he buoyed up his 
courage as he rode along, with the assurance that the mob would 
force his jail wherever it might be, and set him at liberty.  But 
when they got into London, and more especially into Fleet Market, 
lately the stronghold of the rioters, where the military were 
rooting out the last remnant of the crowd, he saw that this hope 
was gone, and felt that he was riding to his death.



Chapter 70


Mr Dennis having despatched this piece of business without any 
personal hurt or inconvenience, and having now retired into the 
tranquil respectability of private life, resolved to solace himself 
with half an hour or so of female society.  With this amiable 
purpose in his mind, he bent his steps towards the house where 
Dolly and Miss Haredale were still confined, and whither Miss Miggs 
had also been removed by order of Mr Simon Tappertit.

As he walked along the streets with his leather gloves clasped 
behind him, and his face indicative of cheerful thought and 
pleasant calculation, Mr Dennis might have been likened unto a 
farmer ruminating among his crops, and enjoying by anticipation the 
bountiful gifts of Providence.  Look where he would, some heap of 
ruins afforded him rich promise of a working off; the whole town 
appeared to have been ploughed and sown, and nurtured by most 
genial weather; and a goodly harvest was at hand.

Having taken up arms and resorted to deeds of violence, with the 
great main object of preserving the Old Bailey in all its purity, 
and the gallows in all its pristine usefulness and moral grandeur, 
it would perhaps be going too far to assert that Mr Dennis had ever 
distinctly contemplated and foreseen this happy state of things.  
He rather looked upon it as one of those beautiful dispensations 
which are inscrutably brought about for the behoof and advantage of 
good men.  He felt, as it were, personally referred to, in this 
prosperous ripening for the gibbet; and had never considered 
himself so much the pet and favourite child of Destiny, or loved 
that lady so well or with such a calm and virtuous reliance, in 
all his life.

As to being taken up, himself, for a rioter, and punished with the 
rest, Mr Dennis dismissed that possibility from his thoughts as an 
idle chimera; arguing that the line of conduct he had adopted at 
Newgate, and the service he had rendered that day, would be more 
than a set-off against any evidence which might identify him as a 
member of the crowd.  That any charge of companionship which might 
be made against him by those who were themselves in danger, would 
certainly go for nought.  And that if any trivial indiscretion on 
his part should unluckily come out, the uncommon usefulness of his 
office, at present, and the great demand for the exercise of its 
functions, would certainly cause it to be winked at, and passed 
over.  In a word, he had played his cards throughout, with great 
care; had changed sides at the very nick of time; had delivered up 
two of the most notorious rioters, and a distinguished felon to 
boot; and was quite at his ease.

Saving--for there is a reservation; and even Mr Dennis was not 
perfectly happy--saving for one circumstance; to wit, the forcible 
detention of Dolly and Miss Haredale, in a house almost adjoining 
his own.  This was a stumbling-block; for if they were discovered 
and released, they could, by the testimony they had it in their 
power to give, place him in a situation of great jeopardy; and to 
set them at liberty, first extorting from them an oath of secrecy 
and silence, was a thing not to be thought of.  It was more, 
perhaps, with an eye to the danger which lurked in this quarter, 
than from his abstract love of conversation with the sex, that the 
hangman, quickening his steps, now hastened into their society, 
cursing the amorous natures of Hugh and Mr Tappertit with great 
heartiness, at every step he took.

When be entered the miserable room in which they were confined, 
Dolly and Miss Haredale withdrew in silence to the remotest corner.  
But Miss Miggs, who was particularly tender of her reputation, 
immediately fell upon her knees and began to scream very loud, 
crying, 'What will become of me!'--'Where is my Simmuns!'--'Have 
mercy, good gentlemen, on my sex's weaknesses!'--with other doleful 
lamentations of that nature, which she delivered with great 
propriety and decorum.

'Miss, miss,' whispered Dennis, beckoning to her with his 
forefinger, 'come here--I won't hurt you.  Come here, my lamb, will 
you?'

On hearing this tender epithet, Miss Miggs, who had left off 
screaming when he opened his lips, and had listened to him 
attentively, began again, crying: 'Oh I'm his lamb!  He says I'm 
his lamb!  Oh gracious, why wasn't I born old and ugly!  Why was I 
ever made to be the youngest of six, and all of 'em dead and in 
their blessed graves, excepting one married sister, which is 
settled in Golden Lion Court, number twenty-sivin, second bell-
handle on the--!'

'Don't I say I an't a-going to hurt you?' said Dennis, pointing to 
a chair.  'Why miss, what's the matter?'

'I don't know what mayn't be the matter!' cried Miss Miggs, 
clasping her hands distractedly.  'Anything may be the matter!'

'But nothing is, I tell you,' said the hangman.  'First stop that 
noise and come and sit down here, will you, chuckey?'

The coaxing tone in which he said these latter words might have 
failed in its object, if he had not accompanied them with sundry 
sharp jerks of his thumb over one shoulder, and with divers winks 
and thrustings of his tongue into his cheek, from which signals the 
damsel gathered that he sought to speak to her apart, concerning 
Miss Haredale and Dolly.  Her curiosity being very powerful, and 
her jealousy by no means inactive, she arose, and with a great deal 
of shivering and starting back, and much muscular action among all 
the small bones in her throat, gradually approached him.

'Sit down,' said the hangman.

Suiting the action to the word, he thrust her rather suddenly and 
prematurely into a chair, and designing to reassure her by a little 
harmless jocularity, such as is adapted to please and fascinate 
the sex, converted his right forefinger into an ideal bradawl or 
gimlet, and made as though he would screw the same into her side--
whereat Miss Miggs shrieked again, and evinced symptoms of 
faintness.

'Lovey, my dear,' whispered Dennis, drawing his chair close to 
hers.  'When was your young man here last, eh?'

'MY young man, good gentleman!' answered Miggs in a tone of 
exquisite distress.

'Ah!  Simmuns, you know--him?' said Dennis.

'Mine indeed!' cried Miggs, with a burst of bitterness--and as she 
said it, she glanced towards Dolly.  'MINE, good gentleman!'

This was just what Mr Dennis wanted, and expected.

'Ah!' he said, looking so soothingly, not to say amorously on 
Miggs, that she sat, as she afterwards remarked, on pins and 
needles of the sharpest Whitechapel kind, not knowing what 
intentions might be suggesting that expression to his features: 
'I was afraid of that.  I saw as much myself.  It's her fault.  She 
WILL entice 'em.'

'I wouldn't,' cried Miggs, folding her hands and looking upwards 
with a kind of devout blankness, 'I wouldn't lay myself out as she 
does; I wouldn't be as bold as her; I wouldn't seem to say to all 
male creeturs "Come and kiss me"'--and here a shudder quite 
convulsed her frame--'for any earthly crowns as might be offered.  
Worlds,' Miggs added solemnly, 'should not reduce me.  No.  Not if 
I was Wenis.'

'Well, but you ARE Wenus, you know,' said Mr Dennis, 
confidentially.

'No, I am not, good gentleman,' answered Miggs, shaking her head 
with an air of self-denial which seemed to imply that she might be 
if she chose, but she hoped she knew better.  'No, I am not, good 
gentleman.  Don't charge me with it.'

Up to this time she had turned round, every now and then, to where 
Dolly and Miss Haredale had retired and uttered a scream, or groan, 
or laid her hand upon her heart and trembled excessively, with a 
view of keeping up appearances, and giving them to understand that 
she conversed with the visitor, under protest and on compulsion, 
and at a great personal sacrifice, for their common good.  But at 
this point, Mr Dennis looked so very full of meaning, and gave such 
a singularly expressive twitch to his face as a request to her to 
come still nearer to him, that she abandoned these little arts, and 
gave him her whole and undivided attention.

'When was Simmuns here, I say?' quoth Dennis, in her ear.

'Not since yesterday morning; and then only for a few minutes.  Not 
all day, the day before.'

'You know he meant all along to carry off that one!' said Dennis, 
indicating Dolly by the slightest possible jerk of his head:--'And 
to hand you over to somebody else.'

Miss Miggs, who had fallen into a terrible state of grief when the 
first part of this sentence was spoken, recovered a little at the 
second, and seemed by the sudden check she put upon her tears, to 
intimate that possibly this arrangement might meet her views; and 
that it might, perhaps, remain an open question.

'--But unfort'nately,' pursued Dennis, who observed this: 'somebody 
else was fond of her too, you see; and even if he wasn't, somebody 
else is took for a rioter, and it's all over with him.'

Miss Miggs relapsed.

'Now I want,' said Dennis, 'to clear this house, and to see you 
righted.  What if I was to get her off, out of the way, eh?'

Miss Miggs, brightening again, rejoined, with many breaks and 
pauses from excess of feeling, that temptations had been Simmuns's 
bane.  That it was not his faults, but hers (meaning Dolly's).  
That men did not see through these dreadful arts as women did, and 
therefore was caged and trapped, as Simmun had been.  That she had 
no personal motives to serve--far from it--on the contrary, her 
intentions was good towards all parties.  But forasmuch as she 
knowed that Simmun, if united to any designing and artful minxes 
(she would name no names, for that was not her dispositions)--to 
ANY designing and artful minxes--must be made miserable and unhappy 
for life, she DID incline towards prewentions.  Such, she added, 
was her free confessions.  But as this was private feelings, and 
might perhaps be looked upon as wengeance, she begged the gentleman 
would say no more.  Whatever he said, wishing to do her duty by all 
mankind, even by them as had ever been her bitterest enemies, she 
would not listen to him.  With that she stopped her ears, and shook 
her head from side to side, to intimate to Mr Dennis that though he 
talked until he had no breath left, she was as deaf as any adder.

'Lookee here, my sugar-stick,' said Mr Dennis, 'if your view's the 
same as mine, and you'll only be quiet and slip away at the right 
time, I can have the house clear to-morrow, and be out of this 
trouble.--Stop though! there's the other.'

'Which other, sir?' asked Miggs--still with her fingers in her ears 
and her head shaking obstinately.

'Why, the tallest one, yonder,' said Dennis, as he stroked his 
chin, and added, in an undertone to himself, something about not 
crossing Muster Gashford.

Miss Miggs replied (still being profoundly deaf) that if Miss 
Haredale stood in the way at all, he might make himself quite easy 
on that score; as she had gathered, from what passed between Hugh 
and Mr Tappertit when they were last there, that she was to be 
removed alone (not by them, but by somebody else), to-morrow night.

Mr Dennis opened his eyes very wide at this piece of information, 
whistled once, considered once, and finally slapped his head once 
and nodded once, as if he had got the clue to this mysterious 
removal, and so dismissed it.  Then he imparted his design 
concerning Dolly to Miss Miggs, who was taken more deaf than 
before, when he began; and so remained, all through.

The notable scheme was this.  Mr Dennis was immediately to seek out 
from among the rioters, some daring young fellow (and he had one in 
his eye, he said), who, terrified by the threats he could hold out 
to him, and alarmed by the capture of so many who were no better 
and no worse than he, would gladly avail himself of any help to get 
abroad, and out of harm's way, with his plunder, even though his 
journey were incumbered by an unwilling companion; indeed, the 
unwilling companion being a beautiful girl, would probably be an 
additional inducement and temptation.  Such a person found, he 
proposed to bring him there on the ensuing night, when the tall one 
was taken off, and Miss Miggs had purposely retired; and then that 
Dolly should be gagged, muffled in a cloak, and carried in any 
handy conveyance down to the river's side; where there were 
abundant means of getting her smuggled snugly off in any small 
craft of doubtful character, and no questions asked.  With regard 
to the expense of this removal, he would say, at a rough 
calculation, that two or three silver tea or coffee-pots, with 
something additional for drink (such as a muffineer, or toast-
rack), would more than cover it.  Articles of plate of every kind 
having been buried by the rioters in several lonely parts of 
London, and particularly, as he knew, in St James's Square, which, 
though easy of access, was little frequented after dark, and had a 
convenient piece of water in the midst, the needful funds were 
close at hand, and could be had upon the shortest notice.  With 
regard to Dolly, the gentleman would exercise his own discretion.  
He would be bound to do nothing but to take her away, and keep her 
away.  All other arrangements and dispositions would rest entirely 
with himself.

If Miss Miggs had had her hearing, no doubt she would have been 
greatly shocked by the indelicacy of a young female's going away 
with a stranger by night (for her moral feelings, as we have said, 
were of the tenderest kind); but directly Mr Dennis ceased to 
speak, she reminded him that he had only wasted breath.  She then 
went on to say (still with her fingers in her ears) that nothing 
less than a severe practical lesson would save the locksmith's 
daughter from utter ruin; and that she felt it, as it were, a moral 
obligation and a sacred duty to the family, to wish that some one 
would devise one for her reformation.  Miss Miggs remarked, and 
very justly, as an abstract sentiment which happened to occur to 
her at the moment, that she dared to say the locksmith and his wife 
would murmur, and repine, if they were ever, by forcible abduction, 
or otherwise, to lose their child; but that we seldom knew, in this 
world, what was best for us: such being our sinful and imperfect 
natures, that very few arrived at that clear understanding.

Having brought their conversation to this satisfactory end, they 
parted: Dennis, to pursue his design, and take another walk about 
his farm; Miss Miggs, to launch, when he left her, into such a 
burst of mental anguish (which she gave them to understand was 
occasioned by certain tender things he had had the presumption and 
audacity to say), that little Dolly's heart was quite melted.  
Indeed, she said and did so much to soothe the outraged feelings of 
Miss Miggs, and looked so beautiful while doing so, that if that 
young maid had not had ample vent for her surpassing spite, in a 
knowledge of the mischief that was brewing, she must have scratched 
her features, on the spot.



Chapter 71


All next day, Emma Haredale, Dolly, and Miggs, remained cooped up 
together in what had now been their prison for so many days, 
without seeing any person, or hearing any sound but the murmured 
conversation, in an outer room, of the men who kept watch over 
them.  There appeared to be more of these fellows than there had 
been hitherto; and they could no longer hear the voices of women, 
which they had before plainly distinguished.  Some new excitement, 
too, seemed to prevail among them; for there was much stealthy 
going in and out, and a constant questioning of those who were 
newly arrived.  They had previously been quite reckless in their 
behaviour; often making a great uproar; quarrelling among 
themselves, fighting, dancing, and singing.  They were now very 
subdued and silent, conversing almost in whispers, and stealing in 
and out with a soft and stealthy tread, very different from the 
boisterous trampling in which their arrivals and departures had 
hitherto been announced to the trembling captives.

Whether this change was occasioned by the presence among them of 
some person of authority in their ranks, or by any other cause, 
they were unable to decide.  Sometimes they thought it was in part 
attributable to there being a sick man in the chamber, for last 
night there had been a shuffling of feet, as though a burden were 
brought in, and afterwards a moaning noise.  But they had no means 
of ascertaining the truth: for any question or entreaty on their 
parts only provoked a storm of execrations, or something worse; and 
they were too happy to be left alone, unassailed by threats or 
admiration, to risk even that comfort, by any voluntary 
communication with those who held them in durance.

It was sufficiently evident, both to Emma and to the locksmith's 
poor little daughter herself, that she, Dolly, was the great 
object of attraction; and that so soon as they should have leisure 
to indulge in the softer passion, Hugh and Mr Tappertit would 
certainly fall to blows for her sake; in which latter case, it was 
not very difficult to see whose prize she would become.  With all 
her old horror of that man revived, and deepened into a degree of 
aversion and abhorrence which no language can describe; with a 
thousand old recollections and regrets, and causes of distress, 
anxiety, and fear, besetting her on all sides; poor Dolly Varden--
sweet, blooming, buxom Dolly--began to hang her head, and fade, and 
droop, like a beautiful flower.  The colour fled from her cheeks, 
her courage forsook her, her gentle heart failed.  Unmindful of all 
her provoking caprices, forgetful of all her conquests and 
inconstancy, with all her winning little vanities quite gone, she 
nestled all the livelong day in Emma Haredale's bosom; and, 
sometimes calling on her dear old grey-haired father, sometimes on 
her mother, and sometimes even on her old home, pined slowly away, 
like a poor bird in its cage.

Light hearts, light hearts, that float so gaily on a smooth stream, 
that are so sparkling and buoyant in the sunshine--down upon fruit, 
bloom upon flowers, blush in summer air, life of the winged insect, 
whose whole existence is a day--how soon ye sink in troubled water!  
Poor Dolly's heart--a little, gentle, idle, fickle thing; giddy, 
restless, fluttering; constant to nothing but bright looks, and 
smiles and laughter--Dolly's heart was breaking.

Emma had known grief, and could bear it better.  She had little 
comfort to impart, but she could soothe and tend her, and she did 
so; and Dolly clung to her like a child to its nurse.  In 
endeavouring to inspire her with some fortitude, she increased her 
own; and though the nights were long, and the days dismal, and she 
felt the wasting influence of watching and fatigue, and had 
perhaps a more defined and clear perception of their destitute 
condition and its worst dangers, she uttered no complaint.  Before 
the ruffians, in whose power they were, she bore herself so 
calmly, and with such an appearance, in the midst of all her 
terror, of a secret conviction that they dared not harm her, that 
there was not a man among them but held her in some degree of 
dread; and more than one believed she had a weapon hidden in her 
dress, and was prepared to use it.

Such was their condition when they were joined by Miss Miggs, who 
gave them to understand that she too had been taken prisoner 
because of her charms, and detailed such feats of resistance she 
had performed (her virtue having given her supernatural strength), 
that they felt it quite a happiness to have her for a champion.  
Nor was this the only comfort they derived at first from Miggs's 
presence and society: for that young lady displayed such 
resignation and long-suffering, and so much meek endurance, under 
her trials, and breathed in all her chaste discourse a spirit of 
such holy confidence and resignation, and devout belief that all 
would happen for the best, that Emma felt her courage strengthened 
by the bright example; never doubting but that everything she said 
was true, and that she, like them, was torn from all she loved, and 
agonised by doubt and apprehension.  As to poor Dolly, she was 
roused, at first, by seeing one who came from home; but when she 
heard under what circumstances she had left it, and into whose 
hands her father had fallen, she wept more bitterly than ever, and 
refused all comfort.

Miss Miggs was at some trouble to reprove her for this state of 
mind, and to entreat her to take example by herself, who, she 
said, was now receiving back, with interest, tenfold the amount of 
her subscriptions to the red-brick dwelling-house, in the articles 
of peace of mind and a quiet conscience.  And, while on serious 
topics, Miss Miggs considered it her duty to try her hand at the 
conversion of Miss Haredale; for whose improvement she launched 
into a polemical address of some length, in the course whereof, 
she likened herself unto a chosen missionary, and that young lady 
to a cannibal in darkness.  Indeed, she returned so often to these 
sublects, and so frequently called upon them to take a lesson from 
her,--at the same time vaunting and, as it were, rioting in, her 
huge unworthiness, and abundant excess of sin,--that, in the course 
of a short time, she became, in that small chamber, rather a 
nuisance than a comfort, and rendered them, if possible, even more 
unhappy than they had been before.

The night had now come; and for the first time (for their jailers 
had been regular in bringing food and candles), they were left in 
darkness.  Any change in their condition in such a place inspired 
new fears; and when some hours had passed, and the gloom was still 
unbroken, Emma could no longer repress her alarm.

They listened attentively.  There was the same murmuring in the 
outer room, and now and then a moan which seemed to be wrung from a 
person in great pain, who made an effort to subdue it, but could 
not.  Even these men seemed to be in darkness too; for no light 
shone through the chinks in the door, nor were they moving, as 
their custom was, but quite still: the silence being unbroken by 
so much as the creaking of a board.

At first, Miss Miggs wondered greatly in her own mind who this sick 
person might be; but arriving, on second thoughts, at the 
conclusion that he was a part of the schemes on foot, and an artful 
device soon to be employed with great success, she opined, for Miss 
Haredale's comfort, that it must be some misguided Papist who had 
been wounded: and this happy supposition encouraged her to say, 
under her breath, 'Ally Looyer!' several times.

'Is it possible,' said Emma, with some indignation, 'that you who 
have seen these men committing the outrages you have told us of, 
and who have fallen into their hands, like us, can exult in their 
cruelties!'

'Personal considerations, miss,' rejoined Miggs, 'sinks into 
nothing, afore a noble cause.  Ally Looyer!  Ally Looyer!  Ally 
Looyer, good gentlemen!'

It seemed from the shrill pertinacity with which Miss Miggs 
repeated this form of acclamation, that she was calling the same 
through the keyhole of the door; but in the profound darkness she 
could not be seen.

'If the time has come--Heaven knows it may come at any moment--when 
they are bent on prosecuting the designs, whatever they may be, 
with which they have brought us here, can you still encourage, and 
take part with them?' demanded Emma.

'I thank my goodness-gracious-blessed-stars I can, miss,' returned 
Miggs, with increased energy.--'Ally Looyer, good gentlemen!'

Even Dolly, cast down and disappointed as she was, revived at this, 
and bade Miggs hold her tongue directly.

'WHICH, was you pleased to observe, Miss Varden?' said Miggs, with 
a strong emphasis on the irrelative pronoun.

Dolly repeated her request.

'Ho, gracious me!' cried Miggs, with hysterical derision.  'Ho, 
gracious me!  Yes, to be sure I will.  Ho yes!  I am a abject 
slave, and a toiling, moiling, constant-working, always-being-
found-fault-with, never-giving-satisfactions, nor-having-no-
time-to-clean-oneself, potter's wessel--an't I, miss!  Ho yes!  My 
situations is lowly, and my capacities is limited, and my duties is 
to humble myself afore the base degenerating daughters of their 
blessed mothers as is--fit to keep companies with holy saints but 
is born to persecutions from wicked relations--and to demean myself 
before them as is no better than Infidels--an't it, miss!  Ho yes!  
My only becoming occupations is to help young flaunting pagins to 
brush and comb and titiwate theirselves into whitening and 
suppulchres, and leave the young men to think that there an't a bit 
of padding in it nor no pinching ins nor fillings out nor pomatums 
nor deceits nor earthly wanities--an't it, miss!  Yes, to be sure 
it is--ho yes!'

Having delivered these ironical passages with a most wonderful 
volubility, and with a shrillness perfectly deafening (especially 
when she jerked out the interjections), Miss Miggs, from mere 
habit, and not because weeping was at all appropriate to the 
occasion, which was one of triumph, concluded by bursting into a 
flood of tears, and calling in an impassioned manner on the name of 
Simmuns.

What Emma Haredale and Dolly would have done, or how long Miss 
Miggs, now that she had hoisted her true colours, would have gone 
on waving them before their astonished senses, it is impossible to 
tell.  Nor is it necessary to speculate on these matters, for a 
startling interruption occurred at that moment, which took their 
whole attention by storm.

This was a violent knocking at the door of the house, and then its 
sudden bursting open; which was immediately succeeded by a scuffle 
in the room without, and the clash of weapons.  Transported with 
the hope that rescue had at length arrived, Emma and Dolly shrieked 
aloud for help; nor were their shrieks unanswered; for after a 
hurried interval, a man, bearing in one hand a drawn sword, and in 
the other a taper, rushed into the chamber where they were confined.

It was some check upon their transport to find in this person an 
entire stranger, but they appealed to him, nevertheless, and 
besought him, in impassioned language, to restore them to their 
friends.

'For what other purpose am I here?' he answered, closing the door, 
and standing with his back against it.  'With what object have I 
made my way to this place, through difficulty and danger, but to 
preserve you?'

With a joy for which it was impossible to find adequate expression, 
they embraced each other, and thanked Heaven for this most timely 
aid.  Their deliverer stepped forward for a moment to put the light 
upon the table, and immediately returning to his former position 
against the door, bared his head, and looked on smilingly.

'You have news of my uncle, sir?' said Emma, turning hastily 
towards him.

'And of my father and mother?' added Dolly.

'Yes,' he said.  'Good news.'

'They are alive and unhurt?' they both cried at once.

'Yes, and unhurt,' he rejoined.

'And close at hand?'

'I did not say close at hand,' he answered smoothly; 'they are at 
no great distance.  YOUR friends, sweet one,' he added, addressing 
Dolly, 'are within a few hours' journey.  You will be restored to 
them, I hope, to-night.'

'My uncle, sir--' faltered Emma.

'Your uncle, dear Miss Haredale, happily--I say happily, because he 
has succeeded where many of our creed have failed, and is safe--has 
crossed the sea, and is out of Britain.'

'I thank God for it,' said Emma, faintly.

'You say well.  You have reason to be thankful: greater reason 
than it is possible for you, who have seen but one night of these 
cruel outrages, to imagine.'

'Does he desire,' said Emma, 'that I should follow him?'

'Do you ask if he desires it?' cried the stranger in surprise.  'IF 
he desires it!  But you do not know the danger of remaining in 
England, the difficulty of escape, or the price hundreds would pay 
to secure the means, when you make that inquiry.  Pardon me.  I had 
forgotten that you could not, being prisoner here.'

'I gather, sir,' said Emma, after a moment's pause, 'from what you 
hint at, but fear to tell me, that I have witnessed but the 
beginning, and the least, of the violence to which we are exposed, 
and that it has not yet slackened in its fury?'

He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, lifted up his hands; and 
with the same smooth smile, which was not a pleasant one to see, 
cast his eyes upon the ground, and remained silent.

'You may venture, sir, to speak plain,' said Emma, 'and to tell me 
the worst.  We have undergone some preparation for it.'

But here Dolly interposed, and entreated her not to hear the worst, 
but the best; and besought the gentleman to tell them the best, and 
to keep the remainder of his news until they were safe among their 
friends again.

'It is told in three words,' he said, glancing at the locksmith's 
daughter with a look of some displeasure.  'The people have risen, 
to a man, against us; the streets are filled with soldiers, who 
support them and do their bidding.  We have no protection but from 
above, and no safety but in flight; and that is a poor resource; 
for we are watched on every hand, and detained here, both by force 
and fraud.  Miss Haredale, I cannot bear--believe me, that I cannot 
bear--by speaking of myself, or what I have done, or am prepared 
to do, to seem to vaunt my services before you.  But, having 
powerful Protestant connections, and having my whole wealth 
embarked with theirs in shipping and commerce, I happily possessed 
the means of saving your uncle.  I have the means of saving you; 
and in redemption of my sacred promise, made to him, I am here; 
pledged not to leave you until I have placed you in his arms.  The 
treachery or penitence of one of the men about you, led to the 
discovery of your place of confinement; and that I have forced my 
way here, sword in hand, you see.'

'You bring,' said Emma, faltering, 'some note or token from my 
uncle?'

'No, he doesn't,' cried Dolly, pointing at him earnestly; 'now I am 
sure he doesn't.  Don't go with him for the world!'

'Hush, pretty fool--be silent,' he replied, frowning angrily upon 
her.  'No, Miss Haredale, I have no letter, nor any token of any 
kind; for while I sympathise with you, and such as you, on whom 
misfortune so heavy and so undeserved has fallen, I value my life.  
I carry, therefore, no writing which, found upon me, would lead to 
its certain loss.  I never thought of bringing any other token, nor 
did Mr Haredale think of entrusting me with one--possibly because 
he had good experience of my faith and honesty, and owed his life 
to me.'

There was a reproof conveyed in these words, which to a nature like 
Emma Haredale's, was well addressed.  But Dolly, who was 
differently constituted, was by no means touched by it, and still 
conjured her, in all the terms of affection and attachment she 
could think of, not to be lured away.

'Time presses,' said their visitor, who, although he sought to 
express the deepest interest, had something cold and even in his 
speech, that grated on the ear; 'and danger surrounds us.  If I 
have exposed myself to it, in vain, let it be so; but if you and he 
should ever meet again, do me justice.  If you decide to remain (as 
I think you do), remember, Miss Haredale, that I left you with a 
solemn caution, and acquitting myself of all the consequences to 
which you expose yourself.'

'Stay, sir!' cried Emma--one moment, I beg you.  Cannot we--and she 
drew Dolly closer to her--'cannot we go together?'

'The task of conveying one female in safety through such scenes as 
we must encounter, to say nothing of attracting the attention of 
those who crowd the streets,' he answered, 'is enough.  I have said 
that she will be restored to her friends to-night.  If you accept 
the service I tender, Miss Haredale, she shall be instantly placed 
in safe conduct, and that promise redeemed.  Do you decide to 
remain?  People of all ranks and creeds are flying from the town, 
which is sacked from end to end.  Let me be of use in some 
quarter.  Do you stay, or go?'

'Dolly,' said Emma, in a hurried manner, 'my dear girl, this is our 
last hope.  If we part now, it is only that we may meet again in 
happiness and honour.  I will trust to this gentleman.'

'No no-no!' cried Dolly, clinging to her.  'Pray, pray, do not!'

'You hear,' said Emma, 'that to-night--only to-night--within a few 
hours--think of that!--you will be among those who would die of 
grief to lose you, and who are now plunged in the deepest misery 
for your sake.  Pray for me, dear girl, as I will for you; and 
never forget the many quiet hours we have passed together.  Say 
one "God bless you!"  Say that at parting!'

But Dolly could say nothing; no, not when Emma kissed her cheek a 
hundred times, and covered it with tears, could she do more than 
hang upon her neck, and sob, and clasp, and hold her tight.

'We have time for no more of this,' cried the man, unclenching her 
hands, and pushing her roughly off, as he drew Emma Haredale 
towards the door: 'Now!  Quick, outside there! are you ready?'

'Ay!' cried a loud voice, which made him start.  'Quite ready!  
Stand back here, for your lives!'

And in an instant he was felled like an ox in the butcher's 
shambles--struck down as though a block of marble had fallen from 
the roof and crushed him--and cheerful light, and beaming faces 
came pouring in--and Emma was clasped in her uncle's embrace, and 
Dolly, with a shriek that pierced the air, fell into the arms of 
her father and mother.

What fainting there was, what laughing, what crying, what sobbing, 
what smiling, how much questioning, no answering, all talking 
together, all beside themselves with joy; what kissing, 
congratulating, embracing, shaking of hands, and falling into all 
these raptures, over and over and over again; no language can 
describe.

At length, and after a long time, the old locksmith went up and 
fairly hugged two strangers, who had stood apart and left them to 
themselves; and then they saw--whom?  Yes, Edward Chester and 
Joseph Willet.

'See here!' cried the locksmith.  'See here! where would any of us 
have been without these two?  Oh, Mr Edward, Mr Edward--oh, Joe, 
Joe, how light, and yet how full, you have made my old heart to-
night!'

'It was Mr Edward that knocked him down, sir,' said Joe: 'I longed 
to do it, but I gave it up to him.  Come, you brave and honest 
gentleman!  Get your senses together, for you haven't long to lie 
here.'

He had his foot upon the breast of their sham deliverer, in the 
absence of a spare arm; and gave him a gentle roll as he spoke.  
Gashford, for it was no other, crouching yet malignant, raised his 
scowling face, like sin subdued, and pleaded to be gently used.

'I have access to all my lord's papers, Mr Haredale,' he said, in a 
submissive voice: Mr Haredale keeping his back towards him, and not 
once looking round: 'there are very important documents among them.  
There are a great many in secret drawers, and distributed in 
various places, known only to my lord and me.  I can give some very 
valuable information, and render important assistance to any 
inquiry.  You will have to answer it, if I receive ill usage.

'Pah!' cried Joe, in deep disgust.  'Get up, man; you're waited 
for, outside.  Get up, do you hear?'

Gashford slowly rose; and picking up his hat, and looking with a 
baffled malevolence, yet with an air of despicable humility, all 
round the room, crawled out.

'And now, gentlemen,' said Joe, who seemed to be the spokesman of 
the party, for all the rest were silent; 'the sooner we get back 
to the Black Lion, the better, perhaps.'

Mr Haredale nodded assent, and drawing his niece's arm through his, 
and taking one of her hands between his own, passed out 
straightway; followed by the locksmith, Mrs Varden, and Dolly--who 
would scarcely have presented a sufficient surface for all the hugs 
and caresses they bestowed upon her though she had been a dozen 
Dollys.  Edward Chester and Joe followed.

And did Dolly never once look behind--not once?  Was there not one 
little fleeting glimpse of the dark eyelash, almost resting on her 
flushed cheek, and of the downcast sparkling eye it shaded?  Joe 
thought there was--and he is not likely to have been mistaken; for 
there were not many eyes like Dolly's, that's the truth.

The outer room through which they had to pass, was full of men; 
among them, Mr Dennis in safe keeping; and there, had been since 
yesterday, lying in hiding behind a wooden screen which was now 
thrown down, Simon Tappertit, the recreant 'prentice, burnt and 
bruised, and with a gun-shot wound in his body; and his legs--his 
perfect legs, the pride and glory of his life, the comfort of his 
existence--crushed into shapeless ugliness.  Wondering no longer at 
the moans they had heard, Dolly kept closer to her father, and 
shuddered at the sight; but neither bruises, burns, nor gun-shot 
wound, nor all the torture of his shattered limbs, sent half so 
keen a pang to Simon's breast, as Dolly passing out, with Joe for 
her preserver.

A coach was ready at the door, and Dolly found herself safe and 
whole inside, between her father and mother, with Emma Haredale and 
her uncle, quite real, sitting opposite.  But there was no Joe, no 
Edward; and they had said nothing.  They had only bowed once, and 
kept at a distance.  Dear heart! what a long way it was to the 
Black Lion!



Chapter 72


The Black Lion was so far off, and occupied such a length of time 
in the getting at, that notwithstanding the strong presumptive 
evidence she had about her of the late events being real and of 
actual occurrence, Dolly could not divest herself of the belief 
that she must be in a dream which was lasting all night.  Nor was 
she quite certain that she saw and heard with her own proper 
senses, even when the coach, in the fulness of time, stopped at the 
Black Lion, and the host of that tavern approached in a gush of 
cheerful light to help them to dismount, and give them hearty 
welcome.

There too, at the coach door, one on one side, one upon the other, 
were already Edward Chester and Joe Willet, who must have followed 
in another coach: and this was such a strange and unaccountable 
proceeding, that Dolly was the more inclined to favour the idea of 
her being fast asleep.  But when Mr Willet appeared--old John 
himself--so heavy-headed and obstinate, and with such a double 
chin as the liveliest imagination could never in its boldest 
flights have conjured up in all its vast proportions--then she 
stood corrected, and unwillingly admitted to herself that she was 
broad awake.

And Joe had lost an arm--he--that well-made, handsome, gallant 
fellow!  As Dolly glanced towards him, and thought of the pain he 
must have suffered, and the far-off places in which he had been 
wandering, and wondered who had been his nurse, and hoped that 
whoever it was, she had been as kind and gentle and considerate as 
she would have been, the tears came rising to her bright eyes, one 
by one, little by little, until she could keep them back no longer, 
and so before them all, wept bitterly.

'We are all safe now, Dolly,' said her father, kindly.  'We shall 
not be separated any more.  Cheer up, my love, cheer up!'

The locksmith's wife knew better perhaps, than he, what ailed her 
daughter.  But Mrs Varden being quite an altered woman--for the 
riots had done that good--added her word to his, and comforted her 
with similar representations.

'Mayhap,' said Mr Willet, senior, looking round upon the company, 
'she's hungry.  That's what it is, depend upon it--I am, myself.'

The Black Lion, who, like old John, had been waiting supper past 
all reasonable and conscionable hours, hailed this as a 
philosophical discovery of the profoundest and most penetrating 
kind; and the table being already spread, they sat down to supper 
straightway.

The conversation was not of the liveliest nature, nor were the 
appetites of some among them very keen.  But, in both these 
respects, old John more than atoned for any deficiency on the part 
of the rest, and very much distinguished himself.

It was not in point of actual conversation that Mr Willet shone so 
brilliantly, for he had none of his old cronies to 'tackle,' and 
was rather timorous of venturing on Joe; having certain vague 
misgivings within him, that he was ready on the shortest notice, 
and on receipt of the slightest offence, to fell the Black Lion to 
the floor of his own parlour, and immediately to withdraw to China 
or some other remote and unknown region, there to dwell for 
evermore, or at least until he had got rid of his remaining arm and 
both legs, and perhaps an eye or so, into the bargain.  It was with 
a peculiar kind of pantomime that Mr Willet filled up every pause; 
and in this he was considered by the Black Lion, who had been his 
familiar for some years, quite to surpass and go beyond himself, 
and outrun the expectations of his most admiring friends.

The subject that worked in Mr Willet's mind, and occasioned these 
demonstrations, was no other than his son's bodily disfigurement, 
which he had never yet got himself thoroughly to believe, or 
comprehend.  Shortly after their first meeting, he had been 
observed to wander, in a state of great perplexity, to the kitchen, 
and to direct his gaze towards the fire, as if in search of his 
usual adviser in all matters of doubt and difficulty.  But there 
being no boiler at the Black Lion, and the rioters having so beaten 
and battered his own that it was quite unfit for further service, 
he wandered out again, in a perfect bog of uncertainty and mental 
confusion, and in that state took the strangest means of resolving 
his doubts: such as feeling the sleeve of his son's greatcoat as 
deeming it possible that his arm might be there; looking at his own 
arms and those of everybody else, as if to assure himself that two 
and not one was the usual allowance; sitting by the hour together 
in a brown study, as if he were endeavouring to recall Joe's image 
in his younger days, and to remember whether he really had in those 
times one arm or a pair; and employing himself in many other 
speculations of the same kind.

Finding himself at this supper, surrounded by faces with which he 
had been so well acquainted in old times, Mr Willet recurred to the 
subject with uncommon vigour; apparently resolved to understand it 
now or never.  Sometimes, after every two or three mouthfuls, he 
laid down his knife and fork, and stared at his son with all his 
might--particularly at his maimed side; then, he looked slowly 
round the table until he caught some person's eye, when he shook 
his head with great solemnity, patted his shoulder, winked, or as 
one may say--for winking was a very slow process with him--went to 
sleep with one eye for a minute or two; and so, with another solemn 
shaking of his head, took up his knife and fork again, and went on 
eating.  Sometimes, he put his food into his mouth abstractedly, 
and, with all his faculties concentrated on Joe, gazed at him in a 
fit of stupefaction as he cut his meat with one hand, until he was 
recalled to himself by symptoms of choking on his own part, and was 
by that means restored to consciousness.  At other times he 
resorted to such small devices as asking him for the salt, the 
pepper, the vinegar, the mustard--anything that was on his maimed 
side--and watching him as he handed it.  By dint of these 
experiments, he did at last so satisfy and convince himself, that, 
after a longer silence than he had yet maintained, he laid down his 
knife and fork on either side his plate, drank a long draught from 
a tankard beside him (still keeping his eyes on Joe), and leaning 
backward in his chair and fetching a long breath, said, as he 
looked all round the board:

'It's been took off!'

'By George!' said the Black Lion, striking the table with his hand, 
'he's got it!'

'Yes, sir,' said Mr Willet, with the look of a man who felt that he 
had earned a compliment, and deserved it.  'That's where it is.  
It's been took off.'

'Tell him where it was done,' said the Black Lion to Joe.

'At the defence of the Savannah, father.'

'At the defence of the Salwanners,' repeated Mr Willet, softly; 
again looking round the table.

'In America, where the war is,' said Joe.

'In America, where the war is,' repeated Mr Willet.  'It was took 
off in the defence of the Salwanners in America where the war is.'  
Continuing to repeat these words to himself in a low tone of voice 
(the same information had been conveyed to him in the same terms, 
at least fifty times before), Mr Willet arose from table, walked 
round to Joe, felt his empty sleeve all the way up, from the cuff, 
to where the stump of his arm remained; shook his hand; lighted his 
pipe at the fire, took a long whiff, walked to the door, turned 
round once when he had reached it, wiped his left eye with the back 
of his forefinger, and said, in a faltering voice: 'My son's arm--
was took off--at the defence of the--Salwanners--in America--where 
the war is'--with which words he withdrew, and returned no more 
that night.

Indeed, on various pretences, they all withdrew one after another, 
save Dolly, who was left sitting there alone.  It was a great 
relief to be alone, and she was crying to her heart's content, when 
she heard Joe's voice at the end of the passage, bidding somebody 
good night.

Good night!  Then he was going elsewhere--to some distance, 
perhaps.  To what kind of home COULD he be going, now that it was 
so late!

She heard him walk along the passage, and pass the door.  But there 
was a hesitation in his footsteps.  He turned back--Dolly's heart 
beat high--he looked in.

'Good night!'--he didn't say Dolly, but there was comfort in his 
not saying Miss Varden.

'Good night!' sobbed Dolly.

'I am sorry you take on so much, for what is past and gone,' said 
Joe kindly.  'Don't.  I can't bear to see you do it.  Think of it 
no longer.  You are safe and happy now.'

Dolly cried the more.

'You must have suffered very much within these few days--and yet 
you're not changed, unless it's for the better.  They said you 
were, but I don't see it.  You were--you were always very 
beautiful,' said Joe, 'but you are more beautiful than ever, now.  
You are indeed.  There can be no harm in my saying so, for you must 
know it.  You are told so very often, I am sure.'

As a general principle, Dolly DID know it, and WAS told so, very 
often.  But the coachmaker had turned out, years ago, to be a 
special donkey; and whether she had been afraid of making similar 
discoveries in others, or had grown by dint of long custom to be 
careless of compliments generally, certain it is that although she 
cried so much, she was better pleased to be told so now, than ever 
she had been in all her life.

'I shall bless your name,' sobbed the locksmith's little daughter, 
'as long as I live.  I shall never hear it spoken without feeling 
as if my heart would burst.  I shall remember it in my prayers, 
every night and morning till I die!'

'Will you?' said Joe, eagerly.  'Will you indeed?  It makes me--
well, it makes me very glad and proud to hear you say so.'

Dolly still sobbed, and held her handkerchief to her eyes.  Joe 
still stood, looking at her.

'Your voice,' said Joe, 'brings up old times so pleasantly, that, 
for the moment, I feel as if that night--there can be no harm in 
talking of that night now--had come back, and nothing had happened 
in the mean time.  I feel as if I hadn't suffered any hardships, 
but had knocked down poor Tom Cobb only yesterday, and had come to 
see you with my bundle on my shoulder before running away.--You 
remember?'

Remember!  But she said nothing.  She raised her eyes for an 
instant.  It was but a glance; a little, tearful, timid glance.  It 
kept Joe silent though, for a long time.

'Well!' he said stoutly, 'it was to be otherwise, and was.  I have 
been abroad, fighting all the summer and frozen up all the winter, 
ever since.  I have come back as poor in purse as I went, and 
crippled for life besides.  But, Dolly, I would rather have lost 
this other arm--ay, I would rather have lost my head--than have 
come back to find you dead, or anything but what I always pictured 
you to myself, and what I always hoped and wished to find you.  
Thank God for all!'

Oh how much, and how keenly, the little coquette of five years ago, 
felt now!  She had found her heart at last.  Never having known its 
worth till now, she had never known the worth of his.  How 
priceless it appeared!

'I did hope once,' said Joe, in his homely way, 'that I might come 
back a rich man, and marry you.  But I was a boy then, and have 
long known better than that.  I am a poor, maimed, discharged 
soldier, and must be content to rub through life as I can.  I can't 
say, even now, that I shall be glad to see you married, Dolly; but 
I AM glad--yes, I am, and glad to think I can say so--to know that 
you are admired and courted, and can pick and choose for a happy 
life.  It's a comfort to me to know that you'll talk to your 
husband about me; and I hope the time will come when I may be able 
to like him, and to shake hands with him, and to come and see you 
as a poor friend who knew you when you were a girl.  God bless 
you!'

His hand DID tremble; but for all that, he took it away again, and 
left her.



Chapter 73


By this Friday night--for it was on Friday in the riot week, that 
Emma and Dolly were rescued, by the timely aid of Joe and Edward 
Chester--the disturbances were entirely quelled, and peace and 
order were restored to the affrighted city.  True, after what had 
happened, it was impossible for any man to say how long this better 
state of things might last, or how suddenly new outrages, exceeding 
even those so lately witnessed, might burst forth and fill its 
streets with ruin and bloodshed; for this reason, those who had 
fled from the recent tumults still kept at a distance, and many 
families, hitherto unable to procure the means of flight, now 
availed themselves of the calm, and withdrew into the country.  The 
shops, too, from Tyburn to Whitechapel, were still shut; and very 
little business was transacted in any of the places of great 
commercial resort.  But, notwithstanding, and in spite of the 
melancholy forebodings of that numerous class of society who see 
with the greatest clearness into the darkest perspectives, the town 
remained profoundly quiet.  The strong military force disposed in 
every advantageous quarter, and stationed at every commanding 
point, held the scattered fragments of the mob in check; the search 
after rioters was prosecuted with unrelenting vigour; and if there 
were any among them so desperate and reckless as to be inclined, 
after the terrible scenes they had beheld, to venture forth again, 
they were so daunted by these resolute measures, that they quickly 
shrunk into their hiding-places, and had no thought but for their 
safety.

In a word, the crowd was utterly routed.  Upwards of two hundred 
had been shot dead in the streets.  Two hundred and fifty more were 
lying, badly wounded, in the hospitals; of whom seventy or eighty 
died within a short time afterwards.  A hundred were already in 
custody, and more were taken every hour.  How many perished in the 
conflagrations, or by their own excesses, is unknown; but that 
numbers found a terrible grave in the hot ashes of the flames they 
had kindled, or crept into vaults and cellars to drink in secret or 
to nurse their sores, and never saw the light again, is certain.  
When the embers of the fires had been black and cold for many 
weeks, the labourers' spades proved this, beyond a doubt.

Seventy-two private houses and four strong jails were destroyed in 
the four great days of these riots.  The total loss of property, as 
estimated by the sufferers, was one hundred and fifty-five thousand 
pounds; at the lowest and least partial estimate of disinterested 
persons, it exceeded one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds.  
For this immense loss, compensation was soon afterwards made out of 
the public purse, in pursuance of a vote of the House of Commons; 
the sum being levied on the various wards in the city, on the 
county, and the borough of Southwark.  Both Lord Mansfield and Lord 
Saville, however, who had been great sufferers, refused to accept 
of any compensation whatever.

The House of Commons, sitting on Tuesday with locked and guarded 
doors, had passed a resolution to the effect that, as soon as the 
tumults subsided, it would immediately proceed to consider the 
petitions presented from many of his Majesty's Protestant subjects, 
and would take the same into its serious consideration.  While this 
question was under debate, Mr Herbert, one of the members present, 
indignantly rose and called upon the House to observe that Lord 
George Gordon was then sitting under the gallery with the blue 
cockade, the signal of rebellion, in his hat.  He was not only 
obliged, by those who sat near, to take it out; but offering to go 
into the street to pacify the mob with the somewhat indefinite 
assurance that the House was prepared to give them 'the 
satisfaction they sought,' was actually held down in his seat by 
the combined force of several members.  In short, the disorder and 
violence which reigned triumphant out of doors, penetrated into the 
senate, and there, as elsewhere, terror and alarm prevailed, and 
ordinary forms were for the time forgotten.

On the Thursday, both Houses had adjourned until the following 
Monday se'nnight, declaring it impossible to pursue their 
deliberations with the necessary gravity and freedom, while they 
were surrounded by armed troops.  And now that the rioters were 
dispersed, the citizens were beset with a new fear; for, finding 
the public thoroughfares and all their usual places of resort 
filled with soldiers entrusted with the free use of fire and sword, 
they began to lend a greedy ear to the rumours which were afloat of 
martial law being declared, and to dismal stories of prisoners 
having been seen hanging on lamp-posts in Cheapside and Fleet 
Street.  These terrors being promptly dispelled by a Proclamation 
declaring that all the rioters in custody would be tried by a 
special commission in due course of law, a fresh alarm was 
engendered by its being whispered abroad that French money had been 
found on some of the rioters, and that the disturbances had been 
fomented by foreign powers who sought to compass the overthrow and 
ruin of England.  This report, which was strengthened by the 
diffusion of anonymous handbills, but which, if it had any 
foundation at all, probably owed its origin to the circumstance of 
some few coins which were not English money having been swept into 
the pockets of the insurgents with other miscellaneous booty, and 
afterwards discovered on the prisoners or the dead bodies,--caused 
a great sensation; and men's minds being in that excited state 
when they are most apt to catch at any shadow of apprehension, was 
bruited about with much industry.

All remaining quiet, however, during the whole of this Friday, and 
on this Friday night, and no new discoveries being made, confidence 
began to be restored, and the most timid and desponding breathed 
again.  In Southwark, no fewer than three thousand of the 
inhabitants formed themselves into a watch, and patrolled the 
streets every hour.  Nor were the citizens slow to follow so good 
an example: and it being the manner of peaceful men to be very bold 
when the danger is over, they were abundantly fierce and daring; 
not scrupling to question the stoutest passenger with great 
severity, and carrying it with a very high hand over all errand-
boys, servant-girls, and 'prentices.

As day deepened into evening, and darkness crept into the nooks and 
corners of the town as if it were mustering in secret and gathering 
strength to venture into the open ways, Barnaby sat in his dungeon, 
wondering at the silence, and listening in vain for the noise and 
outcry which had ushered in the night of late.  Beside him, with 
his hand in hers, sat one in whose companionship he felt at peace.  
She was worn, and altered, full of grief, and heavy-hearted; but 
the same to him.

'Mother,' he said, after a long silence: 'how long,--how many days 
and nights,--shall I be kept here?'

'Not many, dear.  I hope not many.'

'You hope!  Ay, but your hoping will not undo these chains.  I 
hope, but they don't mind that.  Grip hopes, but who cares for 
Grip?'

The raven gave a short, dull, melancholy croak.  It said 'Nobody,' 
as plainly as a croak could speak.

'Who cares for Grip, except you and me?' said Barnaby, smoothing 
the bird's rumpled feathers with his hand.  'He never speaks in 
this place; he never says a word in jail; he sits and mopes all day 
in his dark corner, dozing sometimes, and sometimes looking at the 
light that creeps in through the bars, and shines in his bright eye 
as if a spark from those great fires had fallen into the room and 
was burning yet.  But who cares for Grip?'

The raven croaked again--Nobody.

'And by the way,' said Barnaby, withdrawing his hand from the bird, 
and laying it upon his mother's arm, as he looked eagerly in her 
face; 'if they kill me--they may: I heard it said they would--what 
will become of Grip when I am dead?'

The sound of the word, or the current of his own thoughts, 
suggested to Grip his old phrase 'Never say die!'  But he stopped 
short in the middle of it, drew a dismal cork, and subsided into a 
faint croak, as if he lacked the heart to get through the shortest 
sentence.

'Will they take HIS life as well as mine?' said Barnaby.  'I wish 
they would.  If you and I and he could die together, there would be 
none to feel sorry, or to grieve for us.  But do what they will, I 
don't fear them, mother!'

'They will not harm you,' she said, her tears choking her 
utterance.  'They never will harm you, when they know all.  I am 
sure they never will.'

'Oh!  Don't be too sure of that,' cried Barnaby, with a strange 
pleasure in the belief that she was self-deceived, and in his own 
sagacity.  'They have marked me from the first.  I heard them say 
so to each other when they brought me to this place last night; and 
I believe them.  Don't you cry for me.  They said that I was bold, 
and so I am, and so I will be.  You may think that I am silly, but 
I can die as well as another.--I have done no harm, have I?' he 
added quickly.

'None before Heaven,' she answered.

'Why then,' said Barnaby, 'let them do their worst.  You told me 
once--you--when I asked you what death meant, that it was nothing 
to be feared, if we did no harm--Aha! mother, you thought I had 
forgotten that!'

His merry laugh and playful manner smote her to the heart.  She 
drew him closer to her, and besought him to talk to her in whispers 
and to be very quiet, for it was getting dark, and their time was 
short, and she would soon have to leave him for the night.

'You will come to-morrow?' said Barnaby.

Yes.  And every day.  And they would never part again.

He joyfully replied that this was well, and what he wished, and 
what he had felt quite certain she would tell him; and then he 
asked her where she had been so long, and why she had not come to 
see him when he had been a great soldier, and ran through the wild 
schemes he had had for their being rich and living prosperously, 
and with some faint notion in his mind that she was sad and he had 
made her so, tried to console and comfort her, and talked of their 
former life and his old sports and freedom: little dreaming that 
every word he uttered only increased her sorrow, and that her tears 
fell faster at the freshened recollection of their lost 
tranquillity.

'Mother,' said Barnaby, as they heard the man approaching to close 
the cells for the night,' when I spoke to you just now about my 
father you cried "Hush!" and turned away your head.  Why did you do 
so?  Tell me why, in a word.  You thought HE was dead.  You are not 
sorry that he is alive and has come back to us.  Where is he?  
Here?'

'Do not ask any one where he is, or speak about him,' she made 
answer.

'Why not?' said Barnaby.  'Because he is a stern man, and talks 
roughly?  Well!  I don't like him, or want to be with him by 
myself; but why not speak about him?'

'Because I am sorry that he is alive; sorry that he has come back; 
and sorry that he and you have ever met.  Because, dear Barnaby, 
the endeavour of my life has been to keep you two asunder.'

'Father and son asunder!  Why?'

'He has,' she whispered in his ear, 'he has shed blood.  The time 
has come when you must know it.  He has shed the blood of one who 
loved him well, and trusted him, and never did him wrong in word or 
deed.'

Barnaby recoiled in horror, and glancing at his stained wrist for 
an instant, wrapped it, shuddering, in his dress.

'But,' she added hastily as the key turned in the lock, 'although 
we shun him, he is your father, dearest, and I am his wretched 
wife.  They seek his life, and he will lose it.  It must not be by 
our means; nay, if we could win him back to penitence, we should be 
bound to love him yet.  Do not seem to know him, except as one who 
fled with you from the jail, and if they question you about him, do 
not answer them.  God be with you through the night, dear boy!  God 
be with you!'

She tore herself away, and in a few seconds Barnaby was alone.  He 
stood for a long time rooted to the spot, with his face hidden in 
his hands; then flung himself, sobbing, on his miserable bed.

But the moon came slowly up in all her gentle glory, and the stars 
looked out, and through the small compass of the grated window, as 
through the narrow crevice of one good deed in a murky life of 
guilt, the face of Heaven shone bright and merciful.  He raised his 
head; gazed upward at the quiet sky, which seemed to smile upon the 
earth in sadness, as if the night, more thoughtful than the day, 
looked down in sorrow on the sufferings and evil deeds of men; and 
felt its peace sink deep into his heart.  He, a poor idiot, caged 
in his narrow cell, was as much lifted up to God, while gazing on 
the mild light, as the freest and most favoured man in all the 
spacious city; and in his ill-remembered prayer, and in the 
fragment of the childish hymn, with which he sung and crooned 
himself asleep, there breathed as true a spirit as ever studied 
homily expressed, or old cathedral arches echoed.

As his mother crossed a yard on her way out, she saw, through a 
grated door which separated it from another court, her husband, 
walking round and round, with his hands folded on his breast, and 
his head hung down.  She asked the man who conducted her, if she 
might speak a word with this prisoner.  Yes, but she must be quick 
for he was locking up for the night, and there was but a minute or 
so to spare.  Saying this, he unlocked the door, and bade her go 
in.

It grated harshly as it turned upon its hinges, but he was deaf to 
the noise, and still walked round and round the little court, 
without raising his head or changing his attitude in the least.  
She spoke to him, but her voice was weak, and failed her.  At 
length she put herself in his track, and when he came near, 
stretched out her hand and touched him.

He started backward, trembling from head to foot; but seeing who it 
was, demanded why she came there.  Before she could reply, he spoke 
again.

'Am I to live or die?  Do you murder too, or spare?'

'My son--our son,' she answered, 'is in this prison.'

'What is that to me?' he cried, stamping impatiently on the stone 
pavement.  'I know it.  He can no more aid me than I can aid him.  
If you are come to talk of him, begone!'

As he spoke he resumed his walk, and hurried round the court as 
before.  When he came again to where she stood, he stopped, and 
said,

'Am I to live or die?  Do you repent?'

'Oh!--do YOU?' she answered.  'Will you, while time remains?  Do 
not believe that I could save you, if I dared.'

'Say if you would,' he answered with an oath, as he tried to 
disengage himself and pass on.  'Say if you would.'

'Listen to me for one moment,' she returned; 'for but a moment.  I 
am but newly risen from a sick-bed, from which I never hoped to 
rise again.  The best among us think, at such a time, of good 
intentions half-performed and duties left undone.  If I have ever, 
since that fatal night, omitted to pray for your repentance before 
death--if I omitted, even then, anything which might tend to urge 
it on you when the horror of your crime was fresh--if, in our later 
meeting, I yielded to the dread that was upon me, and forgot to 
fall upon my knees and solemnly adjure you, in the name of him you 
sent to his account with Heaven, to prepare for the retribution 
which must come, and which is stealing on you now--I humbly before 
you, and in the agony of supplication in which you see me, beseech 
that you will let me make atonement.'

'What is the meaning of your canting words?' he answered roughly.  
'Speak so that I may understand you.'

'I will,' she answered, 'I desire to.  Bear with me for a moment 
more.  The hand of Him who set His curse on murder, is heavy on us 
now.  You cannot doubt it.  Our son, our innocent boy, on whom His 
anger fell before his birth, is in this place in peril of his life--
brought here by your guilt; yes, by that alone, as Heaven sees and 
knows, for he has been led astray in the darkness of his intellect, 
and that is the terrible consequence of your crime.'

'If you come, woman-like, to load me with reproaches--' he 
muttered, again endeavouring to break away.

'I do not.  I have a different purpose.  You must hear it.  If not 
to-night, to-morrow; if not to-morrow, at another time.  You MUST 
hear it.  Husband, escape is hopeless--impossible.'

'You tell me so, do you?' he said, raising his manacled hand, and 
shaking it.  'You!'

'Yes,' she said, with indescribable earnestness.  'But why?'

'To make me easy in this jail.  To make the time 'twixt this and 
death, pass pleasantly.  For my good--yes, for my good, of 
course,' he said, grinding his teeth, and smiling at her with a 
livid face.

'Not to load you with reproaches,' she replied; 'not to aggravate 
the tortures and miseries of your condition, not to give you one 
hard word, but to restore you to peace and hope.  Husband, dear 
husband, if you will but confess this dreadful crime; if you will 
but implore forgiveness of Heaven and of those whom you have 
wronged on earth; if you will dismiss these vain uneasy thoughts, 
which never can be realised, and will rely on Penitence and on the 
Truth, I promise you, in the great name of the Creator, whose image 
you have defaced, that He will comfort and console you.  And for 
myself,' she cried, clasping her hands, and looking upward, 'I 
swear before Him, as He knows my heart and reads it now, that from 
that hour I will love and cherish you as I did of old, and watch 
you night and day in the short interval that will remain to us, and 
soothe you with my truest love and duty, and pray with you, that 
one threatening judgment may be arrested, and that our boy may be 
spared to bless God, in his poor way, in the free air and light!'

He fell back and gazed at her while she poured out these words, as 
though he were for a moment awed by her manner, and knew not what 
to do.  But anger and fear soon got the mastery of him, and he 
spurned her from him.

'Begone!' he cried.  'Leave me!  You plot, do you!  You plot to 
get speech with me, and let them know I am the man they say I am.  
A curse on you and on your boy.'

'On him the curse has already fallen,' she replied, wringing her 
hands.

'Let it fall heavier.  Let it fall on one and all.  I hate you 
both.  The worst has come to me.  The only comfort that I seek or I 
can have, will be the knowledge that it comes to you.  Now go!'

She would have urged him gently, even then, but he menaced her with 
his chain.

'I say go--I say it for the last time.  The gallows has me in its 
grasp, and it is a black phantom that may urge me on to something 
more.  Begone!  I curse the hour that I was born, the man I slew, 
and all the living world!'

In a paroxysm of wrath, and terror, and the fear of death, he broke 
from her, and rushed into the darkness of his cell, where he cast 
himself jangling down upon the stone floor, and smote it with his 
ironed hands.  The man returned to lock the dungeon door, and 
having done so, carried her away.

On that warm, balmy night in June, there were glad faces and light 
hearts in all quarters of the town, and sleep, banished by the late 
horrors, was doubly welcomed.  On that night, families made merry 
in their houses, and greeted each other on the common danger they 
had escaped; and those who had been denounced, ventured into the 
streets; and they who had been plundered, got good shelter.  Even 
the timorous Lord Mayor, who was summoned that night before the 
Privy Council to answer for his conduct, came back contented; 
observing to all his friends that he had got off very well with a 
reprimand, and repeating with huge satisfaction his memorable 
defence before the Council, 'that such was his temerity, he thought 
death would have been his portion.'

On that night, too, more of the scattered remnants of the mob were 
traced to their lurking-places, and taken; and in the hospitals, 
and deep among the ruins they had made, and in the ditches, and 
fields, many unshrouded wretches lay dead: envied by those who had 
been active in the disturbances, and who pillowed their doomed 
heads in the temporary jails.

And in the Tower, in a dreary room whose thick stone walls shut out 
the hum of life, and made a stillness which the records left by 
former prisoners with those silent witnesses seemed to deepen and 
intensify; remorseful for every act that had been done by every man 
among the cruel crowd; feeling for the time their guilt his own, 
and their lives put in peril by himself; and finding, amidst such 
reflections, little comfort in fanaticism, or in his fancied call; 
sat the unhappy author of all--Lord George Gordon.

He had been made prisoner that evening.  'If you are sure it's me 
you want,' he said to the officers, who waited outside with the 
warrant for his arrest on a charge of High Treason, 'I am ready to 
accompany you--' which he did without resistance.  He was conducted 
first before the Privy Council, and afterwards to the Horse 
Guards, and then was taken by way of Westminster Bridge, and back 
over London Bridge (for the purpose of avoiding the main streets), 
to the Tower, under the strongest guard ever known to enter its 
gates with a single prisoner.

Of all his forty thousand men, not one remained to bear him 
company.  Friends, dependents, followers,--none were there.  His 
fawning secretary had played the traitor; and he whose weakness had 
been goaded and urged on by so many for their own purposes, was 
desolate and alone.



Chapter 74


Me Dennis, having been made prisoner late in the evening, was 
removed to a neighbouring round-house for that night, and carried 
before a justice for examination on the next day, Saturday.  The 
charges against him being numerous and weighty, and it being in 
particular proved, by the testimony of Gabriel Varden, that he had 
shown a special desire to take his life, he was committed for 
trial.  Moreover he was honoured with the distinction of being 
considered a chief among the insurgents, and received from the 
magistrate's lips the complimentary assurance that he was in a 
position of imminent danger, and would do well to prepare himself 
for the worst.

To say that Mr Dennis's modesty was not somewhat startled by these 
honours, or that he was altogether prepared for so flattering a 
reception, would be to claim for him a greater amount of stoical 
philosophy than even he possessed.  Indeed this gentleman's 
stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear 
with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but 
renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive 
in respect of any that happen to befall himself.  It is therefore 
no disparagement to the great officer in question to state, without 
disguise or concealment, that he was at first very much alarmed, 
and that he betrayed divers emotions of fear, until his reasoning 
powers came to his relief, and set before him a more hopeful 
prospect.

In proportion as Mr Dennis exercised these intellectual qualities 
with which he was gifted, in reviewing his best chances of coming 
off handsomely and with small personal inconvenience, his spirits 
rose, and his confidence increased.  When he remembered the great 
estimation in which his office was held, and the constant demand 
for his services; when he bethought himself, how the Statute Book 
regarded him as a kind of Universal Medicine applicable to men, 
women, and children, of every age and variety of criminal 
constitution; and how high he stood, in his official capacity, in 
the favour of the Crown, and both Houses of Parliament, the Mint, 
the Bank of England, and the Judges of the land; when he 
recollected that whatever Ministry was in or out, he remained their 
peculiar pet and panacea, and that for his sake England stood 
single and conspicuous among the civilised nations of the earth: 
when he called these things to mind and dwelt upon them, he felt 
certain that the national gratitude MUST relieve him from the 
consequences of his late proceedings, and would certainly restore 
him to his old place in the happy social system.

With these crumbs, or as one may say, with these whole loaves of 
comfort to regale upon, Mr Dennis took his place among the escort 
that awaited him, and repaired to jail with a manly indifference.  
Arriving at Newgate, where some of the ruined cells had been 
hastily fitted up for the safe keeping of rioters, he was warmly 
received by the turnkeys, as an unusual and interesting case, which 
agreeably relieved their monotonous duties.  In this spirit, he was 
fettered with great care, and conveyed into the interior of the 
prison.

'Brother,' cried the hangman, as, following an officer, he 
traversed under these novel circumstances the remains of passages 
with which he was well acquainted, 'am I going to be along with 
anybody?'

'If you'd have left more walls standing, you'd have been alone,' 
was the reply.  'As it is, we're cramped for room, and you'll have 
company.'

'Well,' returned Dennis, 'I don't object to company, brother.  I 
rather like company.  I was formed for society, I was.'

'That's rather a pity, an't it?' said the man.

'No,' answered Dennis, 'I'm not aware that it is.  Why should it be 
a pity, brother?'

'Oh! I don't know,' said the man carelessly.  'I thought that was 
what you meant.  Being formed for society, and being cut off in 
your flower, you know--'

'I say,' interposed the other quickly, 'what are you talking of?  
Don't.  Who's a-going to be cut off in their flowers?'

'Oh, nobody particular.  I thought you was, perhaps,' said the man.

Mr Dennis wiped his face, which had suddenly grown very hot, and 
remarking in a tremulous voice to his conductor that he had always 
been fond of his joke, followed him in silence until he stopped at 
a door.

'This is my quarters, is it?' he asked facetiously.

'This is the shop, sir,' replied his friend.

He was walking in, but not with the best possible grace, when he 
suddenly stopped, and started back.

'Halloa!' said the officer.  'You're nervous.'

'Nervous!' whispered Dennis in great alarm.  'Well I may be.  Shut 
the door.'

'I will, when you're in,' returned the man.

'But I can't go in there,' whispered Dennis.  'I can't be shut up 
with that man.  Do you want me to be throttled, brother?'

The officer seemed to entertain no particular desire on the subject 
one way or other, but briefly remarking that he had his orders, and 
intended to obey them, pushed him in, turned the key, and retired.

Dennis stood trembling with his back against the door, and 
involuntarily raising his arm to defend himself, stared at a man, 
the only other tenant of the cell, who lay, stretched at his fall 
length, upon a stone bench, and who paused in his deep breathing as 
if he were about to wake.  But he rolled over on one side, let his 
arm fall negligently down, drew a long sigh, and murmuring 
indistinctly, fell fast asleep again.

Relieved in some degree by this, the hangman took his eyes for an 
instant from the slumbering figure, and glanced round the cell in 
search of some 'vantage-ground or weapon of defence.  There was 
nothing moveable within it, but a clumsy table which could not be 
displaced without noise, and a heavy chair.  Stealing on tiptoe 
towards this latter piece of furniture, he retired with it into the 
remotest corner, and intrenching himself behind it, watched the 
enemy with the utmost vigilance and caution.

The sleeping man was Hugh; and perhaps it was not unnatural for 
Dennis to feel in a state of very uncomfortable suspense, and to 
wish with his whole soul that he might never wake again.  Tired of 
standing, he crouched down in his corner after some time, and 
rested on the cold pavement; but although Hugh's breathing still 
proclaimed that he was sleeping soundly, he could not trust him out 
of his sight for an instant.  He was so afraid of him, and of some 
sudden onslaught, that he was not content to see his closed eyes 
through the chair-back, but every now and then, rose stealthily to 
his feet, and peered at him with outstretched neck, to assure 
himself that he really was still asleep, and was not about to 
spring upon him when he was off his guard.

He slept so long and so soundly, that Mr Dennis began to think he 
might sleep on until the turnkey visited them.  He was 
congratulating himself upon these promising appearances, and 
blessing his stars with much fervour, when one or two unpleasant 
symptoms manifested themselves: such as another motion of the arm, 
another sigh, a restless tossing of the head.  Then, just as it 
seemed that he was about to fall heavily to the ground from his 
narrow bed, Hugh's eyes opened.

It happened that his face was turned directly towards his 
unexpected visitor.  He looked lazily at him for some half-dozen 
seconds without any aspect of surprise or recognition; then 
suddenly jumped up, and with a great oath pronounced his name.

'Keep off, brother, keep off!' cried Dennis, dodging behind the 
chair.  'Don't do me a mischief.  I'm a prisoner like you.  I 
haven't the free use of my limbs.  I'm quite an old man.  Don't 
hurt me!'

He whined out the last three words in such piteous accents, that 
Hugh, who had dragged away the chair, and aimed a blow at him with 
it, checked himself, and bade him get up.

'I'll get up certainly, brother,' cried Dennis, anxious to 
propitiate him by any means in his power.  'I'll comply with any 
request of yours, I'm sure.  There--I'm up now.  What can I do for 
you?  Only say the word, and I'll do it.'

'What can you do for me!' cried Hugh, clutching him by the collar 
with both hands, and shaking him as though he were bent on stopping 
his breath by that means.  'What have you done for me?'

'The best.  The best that could be done,' returned the hangman.

Hugh made him no answer, but shaking him in his strong grip until 
his teeth chattered in his head, cast him down upon the floor, and 
flung himself on the bench again.

'If it wasn't for the comfort it is to me, to see you here,' he 
muttered, 'I'd have crushed your head against it; I would.'

It was some time before Dennis had breath enough to speak, but as 
soon as he could resume his propitiatory strain, he did so.

'I did the best that could be done, brother,' he whined; 'I did 
indeed.  I was forced with two bayonets and I don't know how many 
bullets on each side of me, to point you out.  If you hadn't been 
taken, you'd have been shot; and what a sight that would have been--
a fine young man like you!'

'Will it be a better sight now?' asked Hugh, raising his head, with 
such a fierce expression, that the other durst not answer him just 
then.

'A deal better,' said Dennis meekly, after a pause.  'First, 
there's all the chances of the law, and they're five hundred 
strong.  We may get off scot-free.  Unlikelier things than that 
have come to pass.  Even if we shouldn't, and the chances fail, we 
can but be worked off once: and when it's well done, it's so neat, 
so skilful, so captiwating, if that don't seem too strong a word, 
that you'd hardly believe it could be brought to sich perfection.  
Kill one's fellow-creeturs off, with muskets!--Pah!' and his 
nature so revolted at the bare idea, that he spat upon the dungeon 
pavement.

His warming on this topic, which to one unacquainted with his 
pursuits and tastes appeared like courage; together with his artful 
suppression of his own secret hopes, and mention of himself as 
being in the same condition with Hugh; did more to soothe that 
ruffian than the most elaborate arguments could have done, or the 
most abject submission.  He rested his arms upon his knees, and 
stooping forward, looked from beneath his shaggy hair at Dennis, 
with something of a smile upon his face.

'The fact is, brother,' said the hangman, in a tone of greater 
confidence, 'that you got into bad company.  The man that was with 
you was looked after more than you, and it was him I wanted.  As to 
me, what have I got by it?  Here we are, in one and the same plight.'

'Lookee, rascal,' said Hugh, contracting his brows, 'I'm not 
altogether such a shallow blade but I know you expected to get 
something by it, or you wouldn't have done it.  But it's done, and 
you're here, and it will soon be all over with you and me; and I'd 
as soon die as live, or live as die.  Why should I trouble myself 
to have revenge on you?  To eat, and drink, and go to sleep, as 
long as I stay here, is all I care for.  If there was but a little 
more sun to bask in, than can find its way into this cursed place, 
I'd lie in it all day, and not trouble myself to sit or stand up 
once.  That's all the care I have for myself.  Why should I care 
for YOU?'

Finishing this speech with a growl like the yawn of a wild beast, 
he stretched himself upon the bench again, and closed his eyes once 
more.

After looking at him in silence for some moments, Dennis, who was 
greatly relieved to find him in this mood, drew the chair towards 
his rough couch and sat down near him--taking the precaution, 
however, to keep out of the range of his brawny arm.

'Well said, brother; nothing could be better said,' he ventured to 
observe.  'We'll eat and drink of the best, and sleep our best, and 
make the best of it every way.  Anything can be got for money.  
Let's spend it merrily.'

'Ay,' said Hugh, coiling himself into a new position.--'Where is it?'

'Why, they took mine from me at the lodge,' said Mr Dennis; 'but 
mine's a peculiar case.'

'Is it?  They took mine too.'

'Why then, I tell you what, brother,' Dennis began.  'You must look 
up your friends--'

'My friends!' cried Hugh, starting up and resting on his hands.  
'Where are my friends?'

'Your relations then,' said Dennis.

'Ha ha ha!' laughed Hugh, waving one arm above his head.  'He talks 
of friends to me--talks of relations to a man whose mother died the 
death in store for her son, and left him, a hungry brat, without a 
face he knew in all the world!  He talks of this to me!'

'Brother,' cried the hangman, whose features underwent a sudden 
change, 'you don't mean to say--'

'I mean to say,' Hugh interposed, 'that they hung her up at Tyburn.  
What was good enough for her, is good enough for me.  Let them do 
the like by me as soon as they please--the sooner the better.  Say 
no more to me.  I'm going to sleep.'

'But I want to speak to you; I want to hear more about that,' said 
Dennis, changing colour.

'If you're a wise man,' growled Hugh, raising his head to look at 
him with a frown, 'you'll hold your tongue.  I tell you I'm going 
to sleep.'

Dennis venturing to say something more in spite of this caution, 
the desperate fellow struck at him with all his force, and missing 
him, lay down again with many muttered oaths and imprecations, and 
turned his face towards the wall.  After two or three ineffectual 
twitches at his dress, which he was hardy enough to venture upon, 
notwithstanding his dangerous humour, Mr Dennis, who burnt, for 
reasons of his own, to pursue the conversation, had no alternative 
but to sit as patiently as he could: waiting his further pleasure.



Chapter 75


A month has elapsed,--and we stand in the bedchamber of Sir John 
Chester.  Through the half-opened window, the Temple Garden looks 
green and pleasant; the placid river, gay with boat and barge, and 
dimpled with the plash of many an oar, sparkles in the distance; 
the sky is blue and clear; and the summer air steals gently in, 
filling the room with perfume.  The very town, the smoky town, is 
radiant.  High roofs and steeple-tops, wont to look black and 
sullen, smile a cheerful grey; every old gilded vane, and ball, and 
cross, glitters anew in the bright morning sun; and, high among 
them all, St Paul's towers up, showing its lofty crest in burnished 
gold.

Sir John was breakfasting in bed.  His chocolate and toast stood 
upon a little table at his elbow; books and newspapers lay ready to 
his hand, upon the coverlet; and, sometimes pausing to glance with 
an air of tranquil satisfaction round the well-ordered room, and 
sometimes to gaze indolently at the summer sky, he ate, and drank, 
and read the news luxuriously.

The cheerful influence of the morning seemed to have some effect, 
even upon his equable temper.  His manner was unusually gay; his 
smile more placid and agreeable than usual; his voice more clear 
and pleasant.  He laid down the newspaper he had been reading; 
leaned back upon his pillow with the air of one who resigned 
himself to a train of charming recollections; and after a pause, 
soliloquised as follows:

'And my friend the centaur, goes the way of his mamma!  I am not 
surprised.  And his mysterious friend Mr Dennis, likewise!  I am 
not surprised.  And my old postman, the exceedingly free-and-easy 
young madman of Chigwell!  I am quite rejoiced.  It's the very best 
thing that could possibly happen to him.'

After delivering himself of these remarks, he fell again into his 
smiling train of reflection; from which he roused himself at length 
to finish his chocolate, which was getting cold, and ring the bell 
for more.

The new supply arriving, he took the cup from his servant's hand; 
and saying, with a charming affability, 'I am obliged to you, 
Peak,' dismissed him.

'It is a remarkable circumstance,' he mused, dallying lazily with 
the teaspoon, 'that my friend the madman should have been within an 
ace of escaping, on his trial; and it was a good stroke of chance 
(or, as the world would say, a providential occurrence) that the 
brother of my Lord Mayor should have been in court, with other 
country justices, into whose very dense heads curiosity had 
penetrated.  For though the brother of my Lord Mayor was decidedly 
wrong; and established his near relationship to that amusing person 
beyond all doubt, in stating that my friend was sane, and had, to 
his knowledge, wandered about the country with a vagabond parent, 
avowing revolutionary and rebellious sentiments; I am not the less 
obliged to him for volunteering that evidence.  These insane 
creatures make such very odd and embarrassing remarks, that they 
really ought to be hanged for the comfort of society.'

The country justice had indeed turned the wavering scale against 
poor Barnaby, and solved the doubt that trembled in his favour.  
Grip little thought how much he had to answer for.

'They will be a singular party,' said Sir John, leaning his head 
upon his hand, and sipping his chocolate; 'a very curious party.  
The hangman himself; the centaur; and the madman.  The centaur 
would make a very handsome preparation in Surgeons' Hall, and 
would benefit science extremely.  I hope they have taken care to 
bespeak him.--Peak, I am not at home, of course, to anybody but the 
hairdresser.'

This reminder to his servant was called forth by a knock at the 
door, which the man hastened to open.  After a prolonged murmur of 
question and answer, he returned; and as he cautiously closed the 
room-door behind him, a man was heard to cough in the passage.

'Now, it is of no use, Peak,' said Sir John, raising his hand in 
deprecation of his delivering any message; 'I am not at home.  I 
cannot possibly hear you.  I told you I was not at home, and my 
word is sacred.  Will you never do as you are desired?'

Having nothing to oppose to this reproof, the man was about to 
withdraw, when the visitor who had given occasion to it, probably 
rendered impatient by delay, knocked with his knuckles at the 
chamber-door, and called out that he had urgent business with Sir 
John Chester, which admitted of no delay.

'Let him in,' said Sir John.  'My good fellow,' he added, when the 
door was opened, 'how come you to intrude yourself in this 
extraordinary manner upon the privacy of a gentleman?  How can you 
be so wholly destitute of self-respect as to be guilty of such 
remarkable ill-breeding?'

'My business, Sir John, is not of a common kind, I do assure you,' 
returned the person he addressed.  'If I have taken any uncommon 
course to get admission to you, I hope I shall be pardoned on that 
account.'

'Well! we shall see; we shall see,' returned Sir John, whose face 
cleared up when he saw who it was, and whose prepossessing smile 
was now restored.  'I am sure we have met before,' he added in his 
winning tone, 'but really I forget your name?'

'My name is Gabriel Varden, sir.'

'Varden, of course, Varden,' returned Sir John, tapping his 
forehead.  'Dear me, how very defective my memory becomes!  Varden 
to be sure--Mr Varden the locksmith.  You have a charming wife, Mr 
Varden, and a most beautiful daughter.  They are well?'

Gabriel thanked him, and said they were.

'I rejoice to hear it,' said Sir John.  'Commend me to them when 
you return, and say that I wished I were fortunate enough to 
convey, myself, the salute which I entrust you to deliver.  And 
what,' he asked very sweetly, after a moment's pause, 'can I do for 
you?  You may command me freely.'

'I thank you, Sir John,' said Gabriel, with some pride in his 
manner, 'but I have come to ask no favour of you, though I come on 
business.--Private,' he added, with a glance at the man who stood 
looking on, 'and very pressing business.'

'I cannot say you are the more welcome for being independent, and 
having nothing to ask of me,' returned Sir John, graciously, 'for I 
should have been happy to render you a service; still, you are 
welcome on any terms.  Oblige me with some more chocolate, Peak, 
and don't wait.'

The man retired, and left them alone.

'Sir John,' said Gabriel, 'I am a working-man, and have been so, 
all my life.  If I don't prepare you enough for what I have to 
tell; if I come to the point too abruptly; and give you a shock, 
which a gentleman could have spared you, or at all events lessened 
very much; I hope you will give me credit for meaning well.  I wish 
to be careful and considerate, and I trust that in a straightforward 
person like me, you'll take the will for the deed.'

'Mr Varden,' returned the other, perfectly composed under this 
exordium; 'I beg you'll take a chair.  Chocolate, perhaps, you 
don't relish?  Well! it IS an acquired taste, no doubt.'

'Sir John,' said Gabriel, who had acknowledged with a bow the 
invitation to be seated, but had not availed himself of it.  'Sir 
John'--he dropped his voice and drew nearer to the bed--'I am just 
now come from Newgate--'

'Good Gad!' cried Sir John, hastily sitting up in bed; 'from 
Newgate, Mr Varden!  How could you be so very imprudent as to come 
from Newgate!  Newgate, where there are jail-fevers, and ragged 
people, and bare-footed men and women, and a thousand horrors!  
Peak, bring the camphor, quick!  Heaven and earth, Mr Varden, my 
dear, good soul, how COULD you come from Newgate?'

Gabriel returned no answer, but looked on in silence while Peak 
(who had entered with the hot chocolate) ran to a drawer, and 
returning with a bottle, sprinkled his master's dressing-gown and 
the bedding; and besides moistening the locksmith himself, 
plentifully, described a circle round about him on the carpet.  
When he had done this, he again retired; and Sir John, reclining in 
an easy attitude upon his pillow, once more turned a smiling face 
towards his visitor.

'You will forgive me, Mr Varden, I am sure, for being at first a 
little sensitive both on your account and my own.  I confess I was 
startled, notwithstanding your delicate exordium.  Might I ask you 
to do me the favour not to approach any nearer?--You have really 
come from Newgate!'

The locksmith inclined his head.

'In-deed!  And now, Mr Varden, all exaggeration and embellishment 
apart,' said Sir John Chester, confidentially, as he sipped his 
chocolate, 'what kind of place IS Newgate?'

'A strange place, Sir John,' returned the locksmith, 'of a sad and 
doleful kind.  A strange place, where many strange things are heard 
and seen; but few more strange than that I come to tell you of.  
The case is urgent.  I am sent here.'

'Not--no, no--not from the jail?'

'Yes, Sir John; from the jail.'

'And my good, credulous, open-hearted friend,' said Sir John, 
setting down his cup, and laughing,--'by whom?'

'By a man called Dennis--for many years the hangman, and to-morrow 
morning the hanged,' returned the locksmith.

Sir John had expected--had been quite certain from the first--that 
he would say he had come from Hugh, and was prepared to meet him on 
that point.  But this answer occasioned him a degree of 
astonishment, which, for the moment, he could not, with all his 
command of feature, prevent his face from expressing.  He quickly 
subdued it, however, and said in the same light tone:

'And what does the gentleman require of me?  My memory may be at 
fault again, but I don't recollect that I ever had the pleasure of 
an introduction to him, or that I ever numbered him among my 
personal friends, I do assure you, Mr Varden.'

'Sir John,' returned the locksmith, gravely, 'I will tell you, as 
nearly as I can, in the words he used to me, what he desires that 
you should know, and what you ought to know without a moment's loss 
of time.'

Sir John Chester settled himself in a position of greater repose, 
and looked at his visitor with an expression of face which seemed 
to say, 'This is an amusing fellow!  I'll hear him out.'

'You may have seen in the newspapers, sir,' said Gabriel, pointing 
to the one which lay by his side, 'that I was a witness against 
this man upon his trial some days since; and that it was not his 
fault I was alive, and able to speak to what I knew.'

'MAY have seen!' cried Sir John.  'My dear Mr Varden, you are quite 
a public character, and live in all men's thoughts most deservedly.  
Nothing can exceed the interest with which I read your testimony, 
and remembered that I had the pleasure of a slight acquaintance 
with you.---I hope we shall have your portrait published?'

'This morning, sir,' said the locksmith, taking no notice of these 
compliments, 'early this morning, a message was brought to me from 
Newgate, at this man's request, desiring that I would go and see 
him, for he had something particular to communicate.  I needn't 
tell you that he is no friend of mine, and that I had never seen 
him, until the rioters beset my house.'

Sir John fanned himself gently with the newspaper, and nodded.

'I knew, however, from the general report,' resumed Gabriel, 'that 
the order for his execution to-morrow, went down to the prison 
last night; and looking upon him as a dying man, I complied with 
his request.'

'You are quite a Christian, Mr Varden,' said Sir John; 'and in that 
amiable capacity, you increase my desire that you should take a 
chair.'

'He said,' continued Gabriel, looking steadily at the knight, 'that 
he had sent to me, because he had no friend or companion in the 
whole world (being the common hangman), and because he believed, 
from the way in which I had given my evidence, that I was an honest 
man, and would act truly by him.  He said that, being shunned by 
every one who knew his calling, even by people of the lowest and 
most wretched grade, and finding, when he joined the rioters, that 
the men he acted with had no suspicion of it (which I believe is 
true enough, for a poor fool of an old 'prentice of mine was one of 
them), he had kept his own counsel, up to the time of his being 
taken and put in jail.'

'Very discreet of Mr Dennis,' observed Sir John with a slight yawn, 
though still with the utmost affability, 'but--except for your 
admirable and lucid manner of telling it, which is perfect--not 
very interesting to me.'

'When,' pursued the locksmith, quite unabashed and wholly 
regardless of these interruptions, 'when he was taken to the jail, 
he found that his fellow-prisoner, in the same room, was a young 
man, Hugh by name, a leader in the riots, who had been betrayed and 
given up by himself.  From something which fell from this unhappy 
creature in the course of the angry words they had at meeting, he 
discovered that his mother had suffered the death to which they 
both are now condemned.--The time is very short, Sir John.'

The knight laid down his paper fan, replaced his cup upon the table 
at his side, and, saving for the smile that lurked about his mouth, 
looked at the locksmith with as much steadiness as the locksmith 
looked at him.

'They have been in prison now, a month.  One conversation led to 
many more; and the hangman soon found, from a comparison of time, 
and place, and dates, that he had executed the sentence of the law 
upon this woman, himself.  She had been tempted by want--as so many 
people are--into the easy crime of passing forged notes.  She was 
young and handsome; and the traders who employ men, women, and 
children in this traffic, looked upon her as one who was well 
adapted for their business, and who would probably go on without 
suspicion for a long time.  But they were mistaken; for she was 
stopped in the commission of her very first offence, and died for 
it.  She was of gipsy blood, Sir John--'

It might have been the effect of a passing cloud which obscured the 
sun, and cast a shadow on his face; but the knight turned deadly 
pale.  Still he met the locksmith's eye, as before.

'She was of gipsy blood, Sir John,' repeated Gabriel, 'and had a 
high, free spirit.  This, and her good looks, and her lofty manner, 
interested some gentlemen who were easily moved by dark eyes; and 
efforts were made to save her.  They might have been successful, if 
she would have given them any clue to her history.  But she never 
would, or did.  There was reason to suspect that she would make an 
attempt upon her life.  A watch was set upon her night and day; and 
from that time she never spoke again--'

Sir John stretched out his hand towards his cup.  The locksmith 
going on, arrested it half-way.

--'Until she had but a minute to live.  Then she broke silence, and 
said, in a low firm voice which no one heard but this executioner, 
for all other living creatures had retired and left her to her 
fate, "If I had a dagger within these fingers and he was within my 
reach, I would strike him dead before me, even now!"  The man asked 
"Who?"  She said, "The father of her boy."'

Sir John drew back his outstretched hand, and seeing that the 
locksmith paused, signed to him with easy politeness and without 
any new appearance of emotion, to proceed.

'It was the first word she had ever spoken, from which it could be 
understood that she had any relative on earth.  "Was the child 
alive?" he asked.  "Yes."  He asked her where it was, its name, and 
whether she had any wish respecting it.  She had but one, she said.  
It was that the boy might live and grow, in utter ignorance of his 
father, so that no arts might teach him to be gentle and 
forgiving.  When he became a man, she trusted to the God of their 
tribe to bring the father and the son together, and revenge her 
through her child.  He asked her other questions, but she spoke no 
more.  Indeed, he says, she scarcely said this much, to him, but 
stood with her face turned upwards to the sky, and never looked 
towards him once.'

Sir John took a pinch of snuff; glanced approvingly at an elegant 
little sketch, entitled 'Nature,' on the wall; and raising his eyes 
to the locksmith's face again, said, with an air of courtesy and 
patronage, 'You were observing, Mr Varden--'

'That she never,' returned the locksmith, who was not to be 
diverted by any artifice from his firm manner, and his steady gaze, 
'that she never looked towards him once, Sir John; and so she died, 
and he forgot her.  But, some years afterwards, a man was 
sentenced to die the same death, who was a gipsy too; a sunburnt, 
swarthy fellow, almost a wild man; and while he lay in prison, 
under sentence, he, who had seen the hangman more than once while 
he was free, cut an image of him on his stick, by way of braving 
death, and showing those who attended on him, how little he cared 
or thought about it.  He gave this stick into his hands at Tyburn, 
and told him then, that the woman I have spoken of had left her own 
people to join a fine gentleman, and that, being deserted by him, 
and cast off by her old friends, she had sworn within her own proud 
breast, that whatever her misery might be, she would ask no help of 
any human being.  He told him that she had kept her word to the 
last; and that, meeting even him in the streets--he had been fond 
of her once, it seems--she had slipped from him by a trick, and he 
never saw her again, until, being in one of the frequent crowds at 
Tyburn, with some of his rough companions, he had been driven 
almost mad by seeing, in the criminal under another name, whose 
death he had come to witness, herself.  Standing in the same place 
in which she had stood, he told the hangman this, and told him, 
too, her real name, which only her own people and the gentleman for 
whose sake she had left them, knew.  That name he will tell again, 
Sir John, to none but you.'

'To none but me!' exclaimed the knight, pausing in the act of 
raising his cup to his lips with a perfectly steady hand, and 
curling up his little finger for the better display of a brilliant 
ring with which it was ornamented: 'but me!--My dear Mr Varden, 
how very preposterous, to select me for his confidence!  With you 
at his elbow, too, who are so perfectly trustworthy!'

'Sir John, Sir John,' returned the locksmith, 'at twelve tomorrow, 
these men die.  Hear the few words I have to add, and do not hope 
to deceive me; for though I am a plain man of humble station, and 
you are a gentleman of rank and learning, the truth raises me to 
your level, and I KNOW that you anticipate the disclosure with 
which I am about to end, and that you believe this doomed man, 
Hugh, to be your son.'

'Nay,' said Sir John, bantering him with a gay air; 'the wild 
gentleman, who died so suddenly, scarcely went as far as that, I 
think?'

'He did not,' returned the locksmith, 'for she had bound him by 
some pledge, known only to these people, and which the worst among 
them respect, not to tell your name: but, in a fantastic pattern on 
the stick, he had carved some letters, and when the hangman asked 
it, he bade him, especially if he should ever meet with her son in 
after life, remember that place well.'

'What place?'

'Chester.'

The knight finished his cup of chocolate with an appearance of 
infinite relish, and carefully wiped his lips upon his 
handkerchief.

'Sir John,' said the locksmith, 'this is all that has been told to 
me; but since these two men have been left for death, they have 
conferred together closely.  See them, and hear what they can add.  
See this Dennis, and learn from him what he has not trusted to me.  
If you, who hold the clue to all, want corroboration (which you do 
not), the means are easy.'

'And to what,' said Sir John Chester, rising on his elbow, after 
smoothing the pillow for its reception; 'my dear, good-natured, 
estimable Mr Varden--with whom I cannot be angry if I would--to 
what does all this tend?'

'I take you for a man, Sir John, and I suppose it tends to some 
pleading of natural affection in your breast,' returned the 
locksmith.  'I suppose to the straining of every nerve, and the 
exertion of all the influence you have, or can make, in behalf of 
your miserable son, and the man who has disclosed his existence to 
you.  At the worst, I suppose to your seeing your son, and 
awakening him to a sense of his crime and danger.  He has no such 
sense now.  Think what his life must have been, when he said in my 
hearing, that if I moved you to anything, it would be to hastening 
his death, and ensuring his silence, if you had it in your power!'

'And have you, my good Mr Varden,' said Sir John in a tone of mild 
reproof, 'have you really lived to your present age, and remained 
so very simple and credulous, as to approach a gentleman of 
established character with such credentials as these, from 
desperate men in their last extremity, catching at any straw?  Oh 
dear!  Oh fie, fie!'

The locksmith was going to interpose, but he stopped him:

'On any other subject, Mr Varden, I shall be delighted--I shall be 
charmed--to converse with you, but I owe it to my own character not 
to pursue this topic for another moment.'

'Think better of it, sir, when I am gone,' returned the locksmith; 
'think better of it, sir.  Although you have, thrice within as many 
weeks, turned your lawful son, Mr Edward, from your door, you may 
have time, you may have years to make your peace with HIM, Sir 
John: but that twelve o'clock will soon be here, and soon be past 
for ever.'

'I thank you very much,' returned the knight, kissing his delicate 
hand to the locksmith, 'for your guileless advice; and I only wish, 
my good soul, although your simplicity is quite captivating, that 
you had a little more worldly wisdom.  I never so much regretted 
the arrival of my hairdresser as I do at this moment.  God bless 
you!  Good morning!  You'll not forget my message to the ladies, Mr 
Varden?  Peak, show Mr Varden to the door.'

Gabriel said no more, but gave the knight a parting look, and left 
him.  As he quitted the room, Sir John's face changed; and the 
smile gave place to a haggard and anxious expression, like that of 
a weary actor jaded by the performance of a difficult part.  He 
rose from his bed with a heavy sigh, and wrapped himself in his 
morning-gown.

'So she kept her word,' he said, 'and was constant to her threat!  
I would I had never seen that dark face of hers,--I might have read 
these consequences in it, from the first.  This affair would make a 
noise abroad, if it rested on better evidence; but, as it is, and 
by not joining the scattered links of the chain, I can afford to 
slight it.--Extremely distressing to be the parent of such an 
uncouth creature!  Still, I gave him very good advice.  I told him 
he would certainly be hanged.  I could have done no more if I had 
known of our relationship; and there are a great many fathers who 
have never done as much for THEIR natural children.--The 
hairdresser may come in, Peak!'

The hairdresser came in; and saw in Sir John Chester (whose 
accommodating conscience was soon quieted by the numerous 
precedents that occurred to him in support of his last 
observation), the same imperturbable, fascinating, elegant 
gentleman he had seen yesterday, and many yesterdays before.



Chapter 76


As the locksmith walked slowly away from Sir John Chester's 
chambers, he lingered under the trees which shaded the path, almost 
hoping that he might be summoned to return.  He had turned back 
thrice, and still loitered at the corner, when the clock struck 
twelve.

It was a solemn sound, and not merely for its reference to to-
morrow; for he knew that in that chime the murderer's knell was 
rung.  He had seen him pass along the crowded street, amidst the 
execration of the throng; and marked his quivering lip, and 
trembling limbs; the ashy hue upon his face, his clammy brow, the 
wild distraction of his eye--the fear of death that swallowed up 
all other thoughts, and gnawed without cessation at his heart and 
brain.  He had marked the wandering look, seeking for hope, and 
finding, turn where it would, despair.  He had seen the remorseful, 
pitiful, desolate creature, riding, with his coffin by his side, to 
the gibbet.  He knew that, to the last, he had been an unyielding, 
obdurate man; that in the savage terror of his condition he had 
hardened, rather than relented, to his wife and child; and that the 
last words which had passed his white lips were curses on them as 
his enemies.

Mr Haredale had determined to be there, and see it done.  Nothing 
but the evidence of his own senses could satisfy that gloomy thirst 
for retribution which had been gathering upon him for so many 
years.  The locksmith knew this, and when the chimes had ceased to 
vibrate, hurried away to meet him.

'For these two men,' he said, as he went, 'I can do no more.  
Heaven have mercy on them!--Alas! I say I can do no more for them, 
but whom can I help?  Mary Rudge will have a home, and a firm 
friend when she most wants one; but Barnaby--poor Barnaby--willing 
Barnaby--what aid can I render him?  There are many, many men of 
sense, God forgive me,' cried the honest locksmith, stopping in a 
narrow count to pass his hand across his eyes, 'I could better 
afford to lose than Barnaby.  We have always been good friends, but 
I never knew, till now, how much I loved the lad.'

There were not many in the great city who thought of Barnaby that 
day, otherwise than as an actor in a show which was to take place 
to-morrow.  But if the whole population had had him in their minds, 
and had wished his life to be spared, not one among them could have 
done so with a purer zeal or greater singleness of heart than the 
good locksmith.

Barnaby was to die.  There was no hope.  It is not the least evil 
attendant upon the frequent exhibition of this last dread 
punishment, of Death, that it hardens the minds of those who deal 
it out, and makes them, though they be amiable men in other 
respects, indifferent to, or unconscious of, their great 
responsibility.  The word had gone forth that Barnaby was to die.  
It went forth, every month, for lighter crimes.  It was a thing so 
common, that very few were startled by the awful sentence, or 
cared to question its propriety.  Just then, too, when the law had 
been so flagrantly outraged, its dignity must be asserted.  The 
symbol of its dignity,--stamped upon every page of the criminal 
statute-book,--was the gallows; and Barnaby was to die.

They had tried to save him.  The locksmith had carried petitions 
and memorials to the fountain-head, with his own hands.  But the 
well was not one of mercy, and Barnaby was to die.

From the first his mother had never left him, save at night; and 
with her beside him, he was as usual contented.  On this last day, 
he was more elated and more proud than he had been yet; and when 
she dropped the book she had been reading to him aloud, and fell 
upon his neck, he stopped in his busy task of folding a piece of 
crape about his hat, and wondered at her anguish.  Grip uttered a 
feeble croak, half in encouragement, it seemed, and half in 
remonstrance, but he wanted heart to sustain it, and lapsed 
abruptly into silence.

With them who stood upon the brink of the great gulf which none can 
see beyond, Time, so soon to lose itself in vast Eternity, rolled 
on like a mighty river, swollen and rapid as it nears the sea.  It 
was morning but now; they had sat and talked together in a dream; 
and here was evening.  The dreadful hour of separation, which even 
yesterday had seemed so distant, was at hand.

They walked out into the courtyard, clinging to each other, but not 
speaking.  Barnaby knew that the jail was a dull, sad, miserable 
place, and looked forward to to-morrow, as to a passage from it to 
something bright and beautiful.  He had a vague impression too, 
that he was expected to be brave--that he was a man of great 
consequence, and that the prison people would be glad to make him 
weep.  He trod the ground more firmly as he thought of this, and 
bade her take heart and cry no more, and feel how steady his hand 
was.  'They call me silly, mother.  They shall see to-morrow!'

Dennis and Hugh were in the courtyard.  Hugh came forth from his 
cell as they did, stretching himself as though he had been 
sleeping.  Dennis sat upon a bench in a corner, with his knees and 
chin huddled together, and rocked himself to and fro like a person 
in severe pain.

The mother and son remained on one side of the court, and these two 
men upon the other.  Hugh strode up and down, glancing fiercely 
every now and then at the bright summer sky, and looking round, 
when he had done so, at the walls.

'No reprieve, no reprieve!  Nobody comes near us.  There's only the 
night left now!' moaned Dennis faintly, as he wrung his hands.  'Do 
you think they'll reprieve me in the night, brother?  I've known 
reprieves come in the night, afore now.  I've known 'em come as 
late as five, six, and seven o'clock in the morning.  Don't you 
think there's a good chance yet,--don't you?  Say you do.  Say you 
do, young man,' whined the miserable creature, with an imploring 
gesture towards Barnaby, 'or I shall go mad!'

'Better be mad than sane, here,' said Hugh.  'GO mad.'

'But tell me what you think.  Somebody tell me what he thinks!' 
cried the wretched object,--so mean, and wretched, and despicable, 
that even Pity's self might have turned away, at sight of such a 
being in the likeness of a man--'isn't there a chance for me,--
isn't there a good chance for me?  Isn't it likely they may be 
doing this to frighten me?  Don't you think it is?  Oh!' he almost 
shrieked, as he wrung his hands, 'won't anybody give me comfort!'

'You ought to be the best, instead of the worst,' said Hugh, 
stopping before him.  'Ha, ha, ha!  See the hangman, when it comes 
home to him!'

'You don't know what it is,' cried Dennis, actually writhing as he 
spoke: 'I do.  That I should come to be worked off!  I!  I!  That I 
should come!'

'And why not?' said Hugh, as he thrust back his matted hair to get 
a better view of his late associate.  'How often, before I knew 
your trade, did I hear you talking of this as if it was a treat?'

'I an't unconsistent,' screamed the miserable creature; 'I'd talk 
so again, if I was hangman.  Some other man has got my old 
opinions at this minute.  That makes it worse.  Somebody's longing 
to work me off.  I know by myself that somebody must be!'

'He'll soon have his longing,' said Hugh, resuming his walk.  
'Think of that, and be quiet.'

Although one of these men displayed, in his speech and bearing, the 
most reckless hardihood; and the other, in his every word and 
action, testified such an extreme of abject cowardice that it was 
humiliating to see him; it would be difficult to say which of them 
would most have repelled and shocked an observer.  Hugh's was the 
dogged desperation of a savage at the stake; the hangman was 
reduced to a condition little better, if any, than that of a hound 
with the halter round his neck.  Yet, as Mr Dennis knew and could 
have told them, these were the two commonest states of mind in 
persons brought to their pass.  Such was the wholesome growth of 
the seed sown by the law, that this kind of harvest was usually 
looked for, as a matter of course.

In one respect they all agreed.  The wandering and uncontrollable 
train of thought, suggesting sudden recollections of things distant 
and long forgotten and remote from each other--the vague restless 
craving for something undefined, which nothing could satisfy--the 
swift flight of the minutes, fusing themselves into hours, as if by 
enchantment--the rapid coming of the solemn night--the shadow of 
death always upon them, and yet so dim and faint, that objects the 
meanest and most trivial started from the gloom beyond, and forced 
themselves upon the view--the impossibility of holding the mind, 
even if they had been so disposed, to penitence and preparation, or 
of keeping it to any point while one hideous fascination tempted it 
away--these things were common to them all, and varied only in 
their outward tokens.

'Fetch me the book I left within--upon your bed,' she said to 
Barnaby, as the clock struck.  'Kiss me first.'

He looked in her face, and saw there, that the time was come.  
After a long embrace, he tore himself away, and ran to bring it to 
her; bidding her not stir till he came back.  He soon returned, for 
a shriek recalled him,--but she was gone.

He ran to the yard-gate, and looked through.  They were carrying 
her away.  She had said her heart would break.  It was better so.

'Don't you think,' whimpered Dennis, creeping up to him, as he 
stood with his feet rooted to the ground, gazing at the blank 
walls--'don't you think there's still a chance?  It's a dreadful 
end; it's a terrible end for a man like me.  Don't you think 
there's a chance?  I don't mean for you, I mean for me.  Don't let 
HIM hear us (meaning Hugh); 'he's so desperate.'

Now then,' said the officer, who had been lounging in and out with 
his hands in his pockets, and yawning as if he were in the last 
extremity for some subject of interest: 'it's time to turn in, 
boys.'

'Not yet,' cried Dennis, 'not yet.  Not for an hour yet.'

'I say,--your watch goes different from what it used to,' returned 
the man.  'Once upon a time it was always too fast.  It's got the 
other fault now.'

'My friend,' cried the wretched creature, falling on his knees, 'my 
dear friend--you always were my dear friend--there's some mistake.  
Some letter has been mislaid, or some messenger has been stopped 
upon the way.  He may have fallen dead.  I saw a man once, fall 
down dead in the street, myself, and he had papers in his pocket.  
Send to inquire.  Let somebody go to inquire.  They never will hang 
me.  They never can.--Yes, they will,' he cried, starting to his 
feet with a terrible scream.  'They'll hang me by a trick, and keep 
the pardon back.  It's a plot against me.  I shall lose my life!'  
And uttering another yell, he fell in a fit upon the ground.

'See the hangman when it comes home to him!' cried Hugh again, as 
they bore him away--'Ha ha ha!  Courage, bold Barnaby, what care 
we?  Your hand!  They do well to put us out of the world, for if we 
got loose a second time, we wouldn't let them off so easy, eh?  
Another shake!  A man can die but once.  If you wake in the night, 
sing that out lustily, and fall asleep again.  Ha ha ha!'

Barnaby glanced once more through the grate into the empty yard; 
and then watched Hugh as he strode to the steps leading to his 
sleeping-cell.  He heard him shout, and burst into a roar of 
laughter, and saw him flourish his hat.  Then he turned away 
himself, like one who walked in his sleep; and, without any sense 
of fear or sorrow, lay down on his pallet, listening for the clock 
to strike again.



Chapter 77


The time wore on.  The noises in the streets became less frequent 
by degrees, until silence was scarcely broken save by the bells in 
church towers, marking the progress--softer and more stealthy 
while the city slumbered--of that Great Watcher with the hoary 
head, who never sleeps or rests.  In the brief interval of darkness 
and repose which feverish towns enjoy, all busy sounds were hushed; 
and those who awoke from dreams lay listening in their beds, and 
longed for dawn, and wished the dead of the night were past.

Into the street outside the jail's main wall, workmen came 
straggling at this solemn hour, in groups of two or three, and 
meeting in the centre, cast their tools upon the ground and spoke 
in whispers.  Others soon issued from the jail itself, bearing on 
their shoulders planks and beams: these materials being all brought 
forth, the rest bestirred themselves, and the dull sound of hammers 
began to echo through the stillness.

Here and there among this knot of labourers, one, with a lantern or 
a smoky link, stood by to light his fellows at their work; and by 
its doubtful aid, some might be dimly seen taking up the pavement 
of the road, while others held great upright posts, or fixed them 
in the holes thus made for their reception.  Some dragged slowly 
on, towards the rest, an empty cart, which they brought rumbling 
from the prison-yard; while others erected strong barriers across 
the street.  All were busily engaged.  Their dusky figures moving 
to and fro, at that unusual hour, so active and so silent, might 
have been taken for those of shadowy creatures toiling at midnight 
on some ghostly unsubstantial work, which, like themselves, would 
vanish with the first gleam of day, and leave but morning mist and 
vapour.

While it was yet dark, a few lookers-on collected, who had plainly 
come there for the purpose and intended to remain: even those who 
had to pass the spot on their way to some other place, lingered, 
and lingered yet, as though the attraction of that were 
irresistible.  Meanwhile the noise of saw and mallet went on 
briskly, mingled with the clattering of boards on the stone 
pavement of the road, and sometimes with the workmen's voices as 
they called to one another.  Whenever the chimes of the 
neighbouring church were heard--and that was every quarter of an 
hour--a strange sensation, instantaneous and indescribable, but 
perfectly obvious, seemed to pervade them all.

Gradually, a faint brightness appeared in the east, and the air, 
which had been very warm all through the night, felt cool and 
chilly.  Though there was no daylight yet, the darkness was 
diminished, and the stars looked pale.  The prison, which had been 
a mere black mass with little shape or form, put on its usual 
aspect; and ever and anon a solitary watchman could be seen upon 
its roof, stopping to look down upon the preparations in the 
street.  This man, from forming, as it were, a part of the jail, 
and knowing or being supposed to know all that was passing within, 
became an object of as much interest, and was as eagerly looked 
for, and as awfully pointed out, as if he had been a spirit.

By and by, the feeble light grew stronger, and the houses with 
their signboards and inscriptions, stood plainly out, in the dull 
grey morning.  Heavy stage waggons crawled from the inn-yard 
opposite; and travellers peeped out; and as they rolled sluggishly 
away, cast many a backward look towards the jail.  And now, the 
sun's first beams came glancing into the street; and the night's 
work, which, in its various stages and in the varied fancies of the 
lookers-on had taken a hundred shapes, wore its own proper form--a 
scaffold, and a gibbet.

As the warmth of the cheerful day began to shed itself upon the 
scanty crowd, the murmur of tongues was heard, shutters were thrown 
open, and blinds drawn up, and those who had slept in rooms over 
against the prison, where places to see the execution were let at 
high prices, rose hastily from their beds.  In some of the houses, 
people were busy taking out the window-sashes for the better 
accommodation of spectators; in others, the spectators were already 
seated, and beguiling the time with cards, or drink, or jokes among 
themselves.  Some had purchased seats upon the house-tops, and 
were already crawling to their stations from parapet and garret-
window.  Some were yet bargaining for good places, and stood in 
them in a state of indecision: gazing at the slowly-swelling crowd, 
and at the workmen as they rested listlessly against the scaffold--
affecting to listen with indifference to the proprietor's eulogy of 
the commanding view his house afforded, and the surpassing 
cheapness of his terms.

A fairer morning never shone.  From the roofs and upper stories of 
these buildings, the spires of city churches and the great 
cathedral dome were visible, rising up beyond the prison, into the 
blue sky, and clad in the colour of light summer clouds, and 
showing in the clear atmosphere their every scrap of tracery and 
fretwork, and every niche and loophole.  All was brightness and 
promise, excepting in the street below, into which (for it yet lay 
in shadow) the eye looked down as into a dark trench, where, in the 
midst of so much life, and hope, and renewal of existence, stood 
the terrible instrument of death.  It seemed as if the very sun 
forbore to look upon it.

But it was better, grim and sombre in the shade, than when, the day 
being more advanced, it stood confessed in the full glare and glory 
of the sun, with its black paint blistering, and its nooses 
dangling in the light like loathsome garlands.  It was better in 
the solitude and gloom of midnight with a few forms clustering 
about it, than in the freshness and the stir of morning: the centre 
of an eager crowd.  It was better haunting the street like a 
spectre, when men were in their beds, and influencing perchance the 
city's dreams, than braving the broad day, and thrusting its 
obscene presence upon their waking senses.

Five o'clock had struck--six--seven--and eight.  Along the two main 
streets at either end of the cross-way, a living stream had now 
set in, rolling towards the marts of gain and business.  Carts, 
coaches, waggons, trucks, and barrows, forced a passage through the 
outskirts of the throng, and clattered onward in the same 
direction.  Some of these which were public conveyances and had 
come from a short distance in the country, stopped; and the driver 
pointed to the gibbet with his whip, though he might have spared 
himself the pains, for the heads of all the passengers were turned 
that way without his help, and the coach-windows were stuck full of 
staring eyes.  In some of the carts and waggons, women might be 
seen, glancing fearfully at the same unsightly thing; and even 
little children were held up above the people's heads to see what 
kind of a toy a gallows was, and learn how men were hanged.

Two rioters were to die before the prison, who had been concerned 
in the attack upon it; and one directly afterwards in Bloomsbury 
Square.  At nine o'clock, a strong body of military marched into 
the street, and formed and lined a narrow passage into Holborn, 
which had been indifferently kept all night by constables.  Through 
this, another cart was brought (the one already mentioned had been 
employed in the construction of the scaffold), and wheeled up to 
the prison-gate.  These preparations made, the soldiers stood at 
ease; the officers lounged to and fro, in the alley they had made, 
or talked together at the scaffold's foot; and the concourse, 
which had been rapidly augmenting for some hours, and still 
received additions every minute, waited with an impatience which 
increased with every chime of St Sepulchre's clock, for twelve at 
noon.

Up to this time they had been very quiet, comparatively silent, 
save when the arrival of some new party at a window, hitherto 
unoccupied, gave them something new to look at or to talk of.  But, 
as the hour approached, a buzz and hum arose, which, deepening 
every moment, soon swelled into a roar, and seemed to fill the air.  
No words or even voices could be distinguished in this clamour, nor 
did they speak much to each other; though such as were better 
informed upon the topic than the rest, would tell their neighbours, 
perhaps, that they might know the hangman when he came out, by his 
being the shorter one: and that the man who was to suffer with him 
was named Hugh: and that it was Barnaby Rudge who would be hanged 
in Bloomsbury Square.

The hum grew, as the time drew near, so loud, that those who were 
at the windows could not hear the church-clock strike, though it 
was close at hand.  Nor had they any need to hear it, either, for 
they could see it in the people's faces.  So surely as another 
quarter chimed, there was a movement in the crowd--as if something 
had passed over it--as if the light upon them had been changed--in 
which the fact was readable as on a brazen dial, figured by a 
giant's hand.

Three quarters past eleven!  The murmur now was deafening, yet 
every man seemed mute.  Look where you would among the crowd, you 
saw strained eyes and lips compressed; it would have been difficult 
for the most vigilant observer to point this way or that, and say 
that yonder man had cried out.  It were as easy to detect the 
motion of lips in a sea-shell.

Three quarters past eleven!  Many spectators who had retired from 
the windows, came back refreshed, as though their watch had just 
begun.  Those who had fallen asleep, roused themselves; and every 
person in the crowd made one last effort to better his position--
which caused a press against the sturdy barriers that made them 
bend and yield like twigs.  The officers, who until now had kept 
together, fell into their several positions, and gave the words of 
command.  Swords were drawn, muskets shouldered, and the bright 
steel winding its way among the crowd, gleamed and glittered in the 
sun like a river.  Along this shining path, two men came hurrying 
on, leading a horse, which was speedily harnessed to the cart at 
the prison-door.  Then, a profound silence replaced the tumult that 
had so long been gathering, and a breathless pause ensued.  Every 
window was now choked up with heads; the house-tops teemed with 
people--clinging to chimneys, peering over gable-ends, and holding 
on where the sudden loosening of any brick or stone would dash them 
down into the street.  The church tower, the church roof, the 
church yard, the prison leads, the very water-spouts and 
lampposts--every inch of room--swarmed with human life.

At the first stroke of twelve the prison-bell began to toll.  Then 
the roar--mingled now with cries of 'Hats off!' and 'Poor fellows!' 
and, from some specks in the great concourse, with a shriek or 
groan--burst forth again.  It was terrible to see--if any one in 
that distraction of excitement could have seen--the world of eager 
eyes, all strained upon the scaffold and the beam.

The hollow murmuring was heard within the jail as plainly as 
without.  The three were brought forth into the yard, together, as 
it resounded through the air.  They knew its import well.

'D'ye hear?' cried Hugh, undaunted by the sound.  'They expect us!  
I heard them gathering when I woke in the night, and turned over on 
t'other side and fell asleep again.  We shall see how they welcome 
the hangman, now that it comes home to him.  Ha, ha, ha!'

The Ordinary coming up at this moment, reproved him for his 
indecent mirth, and advised him to alter his demeanour.

'And why, master?' said Hugh.  'Can I do better than bear it 
easily?  YOU bear it easily enough.  Oh! never tell me,' he cried, 
as the other would have spoken, 'for all your sad look and your 
solemn air, you think little enough of it!  They say you're the 
best maker of lobster salads in London.  Ha, ha!  I've heard that, 
you see, before now.  Is it a good one, this morning--is your hand 
in?  How does the breakfast look?  I hope there's enough, and to 
spare, for all this hungry company that'll sit down to it, when the 
sight's over.'

'I fear,' observed the clergyman, shaking his head, 'that you are 
incorrigible.'

'You're right.  I am,' rejoined Hugh sternly.  'Be no hypocrite, 
master!  You make a merry-making of this, every month; let me be 
merry, too.  If you want a frightened fellow there's one that'll 
suit you.  Try your hand upon him.'

He pointed, as he spoke, to Dennis, who, with his legs trailing on 
the ground, was held between two men; and who trembled so, that all 
his joints and limbs seemed racked by spasms.  Turning from this 
wretched spectacle, he called to Barnaby, who stood apart.

'What cheer, Barnaby?  Don't be downcast, lad.  Leave that to HIM.'

'Bless you,' cried Barnaby, stepping lightly towards him, 'I'm not 
frightened, Hugh.  I'm quite happy.  I wouldn't desire to live now, 
if they'd let me.  Look at me!  Am I afraid to die?  Will they see 
ME tremble?'

Hugh gazed for a moment at his face, on which there was a strange, 
unearthly smile; and at his eye, which sparkled brightly; and 
interposing between him and the Ordinary, gruffly whispered to the 
latter:

'I wouldn't say much to him, master, if I was you.  He may spoil 
your appetite for breakfast, though you ARE used to it.'

He was the only one of the three who had washed or trimmed himself 
that morning.  Neither of the others had done so, since their doom 
was pronounced.  He still wore the broken peacock's feathers in his 
hat; and all his usual scraps of finery were carefully disposed 
about his person.  His kindling eye, his firm step, his proud and 
resolute bearing, might have graced some lofty act of heroism; some 
voluntary sacrifice, born of a noble cause and pure enthusiasm; 
rather than that felon's death.

But all these things increased his guilt.  They were mere 
assumptions.  The law had declared it so, and so it must be.  The 
good minister had been greatly shocked, not a quarter of an hour 
before, at his parting with Grip.  For one in his condition, to 
fondle a bird!--The yard was filled with people; bluff civic 
functionaries, officers of justice, soldiers, the curious in such 
matters, and guests who had been bidden as to a wedding.  Hugh 
looked about him, nodded gloomily to some person in authority, who 
indicated with his hand in what direction he was to proceed; and 
clapping Barnaby on the shoulder, passed out with the gait of a 
lion.

They entered a large room, so near to the scaffold that the voices 
of those who stood about it, could be plainly heard: some 
beseeching the javelin-men to take them out of the crowd: others 
crying to those behind, to stand back, for they were pressed to 
death, and suffocating for want of air.

In the middle of this chamber, two smiths, with hammers, stood 
beside an anvil.  Hugh walked straight up to them, and set his foot 
upon it with a sound as though it had been struck by a heavy 
weapon.  Then, with folded arms, he stood to have his irons knocked 
off: scowling haughtily round, as those who were present eyed him 
narrowly and whispered to each other.

It took so much time to drag Dennis in, that this ceremony was over 
with Hugh, and nearly over with Barnaby, before he appeared.  He no 
sooner came into the place he knew so well, however, and among 
faces with which he was so familiar, than he recovered strength and 
sense enough to clasp his hands and make a last appeal.

'Gentlemen, good gentlemen,' cried the abject creature, grovelling 
down upon his knees, and actually prostrating himself upon the 
stone floor: 'Governor, dear governor--honourable sheriffs--worthy 
gentlemen--have mercy upon a wretched man that has served His 
Majesty, and the Law, and Parliament, for so many years, and don't--
don't let me die--because of a mistake.'

'Dennis,' said the governor of the jail, 'you know what the course 
is, and that the order came with the rest.  You know that we could 
do nothing, even if we would.'

'All I ask, sir,--all I want and beg, is time, to make it sure,' 
cried the trembling wretch, looking wildly round for sympathy.  
'The King and Government can't know it's me; I'm sure they can't 
know it's me; or they never would bring me to this dreadful 
slaughterhouse.  They know my name, but they don't know it's the 
same man.  Stop my execution--for charity's sake stop my execution, 
gentlemen--till they can be told that I've been hangman here, nigh 
thirty year.  Will no one go and tell them?' he implored, clenching 
his hands and glaring round, and round, and round again--'will no 
charitable person go and tell them!'

'Mr Akerman,' said a gentleman who stood by, after a moment's 
pause, 'since it may possibly produce in this unhappy man a better 
frame of mind, even at this last minute, let me assure him that he 
was well known to have been the hangman, when his sentence was 
considered.'

'--But perhaps they think on that account that the punishment's not 
so great,' cried the criminal, shuffling towards this speaker on 
his knees, and holding up his folded hands; 'whereas it's worse, 
it's worse a hundred times, to me than any man.  Let them know 
that, sir.  Let them know that.  They've made it worse to me by 
giving me so much to do.  Stop my execution till they know that!'

The governor beckoned with his hand, and the two men, who had 
supported him before, approached.  He uttered a piercing cry:

'Wait!  Wait.  Only a moment--only one moment more!  Give me a last 
chance of reprieve.  One of us three is to go to Bloomsbury Square.  
Let me be the one.  It may come in that time; it's sure to come.  
In the Lord's name let me be sent to Bloomsbury Square.  Don't hang 
me here.  It's murder.'

They took him to the anvil: but even then he could he heard above 
the clinking of the smiths' hammers, and the hoarse raging of the 
crowd, crying that he knew of Hugh's birth--that his father was 
living, and was a gentleman of influence and rank--that he had 
family secrets in his possession--that he could tell nothing unless 
they gave him time, but must die with them on his mind; and he 
continued to rave in this sort until his voice failed him, and he 
sank down a mere heap of clothes between the two attendants.

It was at this moment that the clock struck the first stroke of 
twelve, and the bell began to toll.  The various officers, with the 
two sheriffs at their head, moved towards the door.  All was ready 
when the last chime came upon the ear.

They told Hugh this, and asked if he had anything to say.

'To say!' he cried.  'Not I.  I'm ready.--Yes,' he added, as his 
eye fell upon Barnaby, 'I have a word to say, too.  Come hither, 
lad.'

There was, for the moment, something kind, and even tender, 
struggling in his fierce aspect, as he wrung his poor companion by 
the hand.

'I'll say this,' he cried, looking firmly round, 'that if I had ten 
lives to lose, and the loss of each would give me ten times the 
agony of the hardest death, I'd lay them all down--ay, I would, 
though you gentlemen may not believe it--to save this one.  This 
one,' he added, wringing his hand again, 'that will be lost through 
me.'

'Not through you,' said the idiot, mildly.  'Don't say that.  You 
were not to blame.  You have always been very good to me.--Hugh, we 
shall know what makes the stars shine, NOW!'

'I took him from her in a reckless mood, and didn't think what harm 
would come of it,' said Hugh, laying his hand upon his head, and 
speaking in a lower voice.  'I ask her pardon; and his.--Look 
here,' he added roughly, in his former tone.  'You see this lad?'

They murmured 'Yes,' and seemed to wonder why he asked.

'That gentleman yonder--' pointing to the clergyman--'has often in 
the last few days spoken to me of faith, and strong belief.  You 
see what I am--more brute than man, as I have been often told--but 
I had faith enough to believe, and did believe as strongly as any 
of you gentlemen can believe anything, that this one life would be 
spared.  See what he is!--Look at him!'

Barnaby had moved towards the door, and stood beckoning him to 
follow.

'If this was not faith, and strong belief!' cried Hugh, raising 
his right arm aloft, and looking upward like a savage prophet whom 
the near approach of Death had filled with inspiration, 'where are 
they!  What else should teach me--me, born as I was born, and 
reared as I have been reared--to hope for any mercy in this 
hardened, cruel, unrelenting place!  Upon these human shambles, I, 
who never raised this hand in prayer till now, call down the wrath 
of God!  On that black tree, of which I am the ripened fruit, I do 
invoke the curse of all its victims, past, and present, and to 
come.  On the head of that man, who, in his conscience, owns me for 
his son, I leave the wish that he may never sicken on his bed of 
down, but die a violent death as I do now, and have the night-wind 
for his only mourner.  To this I say, Amen, amen!'

His arm fell downward by his side; he turned; and moved towards 
them with a steady step, the man he had been before.

'There is nothing more?' said the governor.

Hugh motioned Barnaby not to come near him (though without looking 
in the direction where he stood) and answered, 'There is nothing 
more.'

'Move forward!'

'--Unless,' said Hugh, glancing hurriedly back,--'unless any 
person here has a fancy for a dog; and not then, unless he means to 
use him well.  There's one, belongs to me, at the house I came 
from, and it wouldn't be easy to find a better.  He'll whine at 
first, but he'll soon get over that.--You wonder that I think about 
a dog just now, he added, with a kind of laugh.  'If any man 
deserved it of me half as well, I'd think of HIM.'

He spoke no more, but moved onward in his place, with a careless 
air, though listening at the same time to the Service for the Dead, 
with something between sullen attention, and quickened curiosity.  
As soon as he had passed the door, his miserable associate was 
carried out; and the crowd beheld the rest.

Barnaby would have mounted the steps at the same time--indeed he 
would have gone before them, but in both attempts he was 
restrained, as he was to undergo the sentence elsewhere.  In a few 
minutes the sheriffs reappeared, the same procession was again 
formed, and they passed through various rooms and passages to 
another door--that at which the cart was waiting.  He held down his 
head to avoid seeing what he knew his eyes must otherwise 
encounter, and took his seat sorrowfully,--and yet with something 
of a childish pride and pleasure,--in the vehicle.  The officers 
fell into their places at the sides, in front and in the rear; the 
sheriffs' carriages rolled on; a guard of soldiers surrounded the 
whole; and they moved slowly forward through the throng and 
pressure toward Lord Mansfield's ruined house.

It was a sad sight--all the show, and strength, and glitter, 
assembled round one helpless creature--and sadder yet to note, as 
he rode along, how his wandering thoughts found strange 
encouragement in the crowded windows and the concourse in the 
streets; and how, even then, he felt the influence of the bright 
sky, and looked up, smiling, into its deep unfathomable blue.  But 
there had been many such sights since the riots were over--some so 
moving in their nature, and so repulsive too, that they were far 
more calculated to awaken pity for the sufferers, than respect for 
that law whose strong arm seemed in more than one case to be as 
wantonly stretched forth now that all was safe, as it had been 
basely paralysed in time of danger.

Two cripples--both mere boys--one with a leg of wood, one who 
dragged his twisted limbs along by the help of a crutch, were 
hanged in this same Bloomsbury Square.  As the cart was about to 
glide from under them, it was observed that they stood with their 
faces from, not to, the house they had assisted to despoil; and 
their misery was protracted that this omission might be remedied.  
Another boy was hanged in Bow Street; other young lads in various 
quarters of the town.  Four wretched women, too, were put to 
death.  In a word, those who suffered as rioters were, for the most 
part, the weakest, meanest, and most miserable among them.  It was 
a most exquisite satire upon the false religious cry which had led 
to so much misery, that some of these people owned themselves to be 
Catholics, and begged to be attended by their own priests.

One young man was hanged in Bishopsgate Street, whose aged grey-
headed father waited for him at the gallows, kissed him at its foot 
when he arrived, and sat there, on the ground, till they took him 
down.  They would have given him the body of his child; but he had 
no hearse, no coffin, nothing to remove it in, being too poor--and 
walked meekly away beside the cart that took it back to prison, 
trying, as he went, to touch its lifeless hand.

But the crowd had forgotten these matters, or cared little about 
them if they lived in their memory: and while one great multitude 
fought and hustled to get near the gibbet before Newgate, for a 
parting look, another followed in the train of poor lost Barnaby, 
to swell the throng that waited for him on the spot.



Chapter 78


On this same day, and about this very hour, Mr Willet the elder sat 
smoking his pipe in a chamber at the Black Lion.  Although it was 
hot summer weather, Mr Willet sat close to the fire.  He was in a 
state of profound cogitation, with his own thoughts, and it was his 
custom at such times to stew himself slowly, under the impression 
that that process of cookery was favourable to the melting out of 
his ideas, which, when he began to simmer, sometimes oozed forth so 
copiously as to astonish even himself.

Mr Willet had been several thousand times comforted by his friends 
and acquaintance, with the assurance that for the loss he had 
sustained in the damage done to the Maypole, he could 'come upon 
the county.'  But as this phrase happened to bear an unfortunate 
resemblance to the popular expression of 'coming on the parish,' it 
suggested to Mr Willet's mind no more consolatory visions than 
pauperism on an extensive scale, and ruin in a capacious aspect.  
Consequently, he had never failed to receive the intelligence with 
a rueful shake of the head, or a dreary stare, and had been always 
observed to appear much more melancholy after a visit of condolence 
than at any other time in the whole four-and-twenty hours.

It chanced, however, that sitting over the fire on this particular 
occasion--perhaps because he was, as it were, done to a turn; 
perhaps because he was in an unusually bright state of mind; 
perhaps because he had considered the subject so long; perhaps 
because of all these favouring circumstances, taken together--it 
chanced that, sitting over the fire on this particular occasion, Mr 
Willet did, afar off and in the remotest depths of his intellect, 
perceive a kind of lurking hint or faint suggestion, that out of 
the public purse there might issue funds for the restoration of the 
Maypole to its former high place among the taverns of the earth.  
And this dim ray of light did so diffuse itself within him, and did 
so kindle up and shine, that at last he had it as plainly and 
visibly before him as the blaze by which he sat; and, fully 
persuaded that he was the first to make the discovery, and that he 
had started, hunted down, fallen upon, and knocked on the head, a 
perfectly original idea which had never presented itself to any 
other man, alive or dead, he laid down his pipe, rubbed his hands, 
and chuckled audibly.

'Why, father!' cried Joe, entering at the moment, 'you're in 
spirits to-day!'

'It's nothing partickler,' said Mr Willet, chuckling again.  'It's 
nothing at all partickler, Joseph.  Tell me something about the 
Salwanners.'  Having preferred this request, Mr Willet chuckled a 
third time, and after these unusual demonstrations of levity, he 
put his pipe in his mouth again.

'What shall I tell you, father?' asked Joe, laying his hand upon 
his sire's shoulder, and looking down into his face.  'That I have 
come back, poorer than a church mouse?  You know that.  That I have 
come back, maimed and crippled?  You know that.'

'It was took off,' muttered Mr Willet,with his eyes upon the fire, 
'at the defence of the Salwanners, in America, where the war is.'

'Quite right,' returned Joe, smiling, and leaning with his 
remaining elbow on the back of his father's chair; 'the very 
subject I came to speak to you about.  A man with one arm, father, 
is not of much use in the busy world.'

This was one of those vast propositions which Mr Willet had never 
considered for an instant, and required time to 'tackle.'  
Wherefore he made no answer.

'At all events,' said Joe, 'he can't pick and choose his means of 
earning a livelihood, as another man may.  He can't say "I will 
turn my hand to this," or "I won't turn my hand to that," but must 
take what he can do, and be thankful it's no worse.--What did you 
say?'

Mr Willet had been softly repeating to himself, in a musing tone, 
the words 'defence of the Salwanners:' but he seemed embarrassed at 
having been overheard, and answered 'Nothing.'

'Now look here, father.--Mr Edward has come to England from the 
West Indies.  When he was lost sight of (I ran away on the same 
day, father), he made a voyage to one of the islands, where a 
school-friend of his had settled; and, finding him, wasn't too 
proud to be employed on his estate, and--and in short, got on well, 
and is prospering, and has come over here on business of his own, 
and is going back again speedily.  Our returning nearly at the 
same time, and meeting in the course of the late troubles, has been 
a good thing every way; for it has not only enabled us to do old 
friends some service, but has opened a path in life for me which I 
may tread without being a burden upon you.  To be plain, father, he 
can employ me; I have satisfied myself that I can be of real use to 
him; and I am going to carry my one arm away with him, and to make 
the most of it.

In the mind's eye of Mr Willet, the West Indies, and indeed all 
foreign countries, were inhabited by savage nations, who were 
perpetually burying pipes of peace, flourishing tomahawks, and 
puncturing strange patterns in their bodies.  He no sooner heard 
this announcement, therefore, than he leaned back in his chair, 
took his pipe from his lips, and stared at his son with as much 
dismay as if he already beheld him tied to a stake, and tortured 
for the entertainment of a lively population.  In what form of 
expression his feelings would have found a vent, it is impossible 
to say.  Nor is it necessary: for, before a syllable occurred to 
him, Dolly Varden came running into the room, in tears, threw 
herself on Joe's breast without a word of explanation, and clasped 
her white arms round his neck.

'Dolly!' cried Joe.  'Dolly!'

'Ay, call me that; call me that always,' exclaimed the locksmith's 
little daughter; 'never speak coldly to me, never be distant, never 
again reprove me for the follies I have long repented, or I shall 
die, Joe.'

'I reprove you!' said Joe.

'Yes--for every kind and honest word you uttered, went to my heart.  
For you, who have borne so much from me--for you, who owe your 
sufferings and pain to my caprice--for you to be so kind--so noble 
to me, Joe--'

He could say nothing to her.  Not a syllable.  There was an odd 
sort of eloquence in his one arm, which had crept round her waist: 
but his lips were mute.

'If you had reminded me by a word--only by one short word,' sobbed 
Dolly, clinging yet closer to him, 'how little I deserved that you 
should treat me with so much forbearance; if you had exulted only 
for one moment in your triumph, I could have borne it better.'

'Triumph!' repeated Joe, with a smile which seemed to say, 'I am a 
pretty figure for that.'

'Yes, triumph,' she cried, with her whole heart and soul in her 
earnest voice, and gushing tears; 'for it is one.  I am glad to 
think and know it is.  I wouldn't be less humbled, dear--I wouldn't 
be without the recollection of that last time we spoke together in 
this place--no, not if I could recall the past, and make our 
parting, yesterday.'

Did ever lover look as Joe looked now!

'Dear Joe,' said Dolly, 'I always loved you--in my own heart I 
always did, although I was so vain and giddy.  I hoped you would 
come back that night.  I made quite sure you would.  I prayed for 
it on my knees.  Through all these long, long years, I have never 
once forgotten you, or left off hoping that this happy time might 
come.'

The eloquence of Joe's arm surpassed the most impassioned language; 
and so did that of his lips--yet he said nothing, either.

'And now, at last,' cried Dolly, trembling with the fervour of her 
speech, 'if you were sick, and shattered in your every limb; if you 
were ailing, weak, and sorrowful; if, instead of being what you 
are, you were in everybody's eyes but mine the wreck and ruin of a 
man; I would be your wife, dear love, with greater pride and joy, 
than if you were the stateliest lord in England!'

'What have I done,' cried Joe, 'what have I done to meet with this 
reward?'

'You have taught me,' said Dolly, raising her pretty face to his, 
'to know myself, and your worth; to be something better than I 
was; to be more deserving of your true and manly nature.  In years 
to come, dear Joe, you shall find that you have done so; for I will 
be, not only now, when we are young and full of hope, but when we 
have grown old and weary, your patient, gentle, never-tiring 
wife.  I will never know a wish or care beyond our home and you, 
and I will always study how to please you with my best affection 
and my most devoted love.  I will: indeed I will!'

Joe could only repeat his former eloquence--but it was very much to 
the purpose.

'They know of this, at home,' said Dolly.  'For your sake, I would 
leave even them; but they know it, and are glad of it, and are as 
proud of you as I am, and as full of gratitude.--You'll not come 
and see me as a poor friend who knew me when I was a girl, will 
you, dear Joe?'

Well, well!  It don't matter what Joe said in answer, but he said a 
great deal; and Dolly said a great deal too: and he folded Dolly in 
his one arm pretty tight, considering that it was but one; and 
Dolly made no resistance: and if ever two people were happy in this 
world--which is not an utterly miserable one, with all its faults--
we may, with some appearance of certainty, conclude that they 
were.

To say that during these proceedings Mr Willet the elder underwent 
the greatest emotions of astonishment of which our common nature is 
susceptible--to say that he was in a perfect paralysis of surprise, 
and that he wandered into the most stupendous and theretofore 
unattainable heights of complicated amazement--would be to shadow 
forth his state of mind in the feeblest and lamest terms.  If a 
roc, an eagle, a griffin, a flying elephant, a winged sea-horse, 
had suddenly appeared, and, taking him on its back, carried him 
bodily into the heart of the 'Salwanners,' it would have been to 
him as an everyday occurrence, in comparison with what he now 
beheld.  To be sitting quietly by, seeing and hearing these things; 
to be completely overlooked, unnoticed, and disregarded, while his 
son and a young lady were talking to each other in the most 
impassioned manner, kissing each other, and making themselves in 
all respects perfectly at home; was a position so tremendous, so 
inexplicable, so utterly beyond the widest range of his capacity of 
comprehension, that he fell into a lethargy of wonder, and could no 
more rouse himself than an enchanted sleeper in the first year of 
his fairy lease, a century long.

'Father,' said Joe, presenting Dolly.  'You know who this is?'

Mr Willet looked first at her, then at his son, then back again at 
Dolly, and then made an ineffectual effort to extract a whiff from 
his pipe, which had gone out long ago.

'Say a word, father, if it's only "how d'ye do,"' urged Joe.

'Certainly, Joseph,' answered Mr Willet.  'Oh yes!  Why not?'

'To be sure,' said Joe.  'Why not?'

'Ah!' replied his father.  'Why not?' and with this remark, which 
he uttered in a low voice as though he were discussing some grave 
question with himself, he used the little finger--if any of his 
fingers can be said to have come under that denomination--of his 
right hand as a tobacco-stopper, and was silent again.

And so he sat for half an hour at least, although Dolly, in the 
most endearing of manners, hoped, a dozen times, that he was not 
angry with her.  So he sat for half an hour, quite motionless, and 
looking all the while like nothing so much as a great Dutch Pin or 
Skittle.  At the expiration of that period, he suddenly, and 
without the least notice, burst (to the great consternation of the 
young people) into a very loud and very short laugh; and 
repeating, 'Certainly, Joseph.  Oh yes!  Why not?' went out for a 
walk.



Chapter 79


Old John did not walk near the Golden Key, for between the Golden 
Key and the Black Lion there lay a wilderness of streets--as 
everybody knows who is acquainted with the relative bearings of 
Clerkenwell and Whitechapel--and he was by no means famous for 
pedestrian exercises.  But the Golden Key lies in our way, though 
it was out of his; so to the Golden Key this chapter goes.

The Golden Key itself, fair emblem of the locksmith's trade, had 
been pulled down by the rioters, and roughly trampled under foot.  
But, now, it was hoisted up again in all the glory of a new coat of 
paint, and shewed more bravely even than in days of yore.  Indeed 
the whole house-front was spruce and trim, and so freshened up 
throughout, that if there yet remained at large any of the rioters 
who had been concerned in the attack upon it, the sight of the old, 
goodly, prosperous dwelling, so revived, must have been to them as 
gall and wormwood.

The shutters of the shop were closed, however, and the window-
blinds above were all pulled down, and in place of its usual 
cheerful appearance, the house had a look of sadness and an air of 
mourning; which the neighbours, who in old days had often seen poor 
Barnaby go in and out, were at no loss to understand.  The door 
stood partly open; but the locksmith's hammer was unheard; the cat 
sat moping on the ashy forge; all was deserted, dark, and silent.

On the threshold of this door, Mr Haredale and Edward Chester met.  
The younger man gave place; and both passing in with a familiar 
air, which seemed to denote that they were tarrying there, or were 
well-accustomed to go to and fro unquestioned, shut it behind them.

Entering the old back-parlour, and ascending the flight of stairs, 
abrupt and steep, and quaintly fashioned as of old, they turned 
into the best room; the pride of Mrs Varden's heart, and erst the 
scene of Miggs's household labours.

'Varden brought the mother here last evening, he told me?' said Mr 
Haredale.

'She is above-stairs now--in the room over here,' Edward rejoined.  
'Her grief, they say, is past all telling.  I needn't add--for that 
you know beforehand, sir--that the care, humanity, and sympathy of 
these good people have no bounds.'

'I am sure of that.  Heaven repay them for it, and for much more!  
Varden is out?'

'He returned with your messenger, who arrived almost at the moment 
of his coming home himself.  He was out the whole night--but that 
of course you know.  He was with you the greater part of it?'

'He was.  Without him, I should have lacked my right hand.  He is 
an older man than I; but nothing can conquer him.'

'The cheeriest, stoutest-hearted fellow in the world.'

'He has a right to be.  He has a right to he.  A better creature 
never lived.  He reaps what he has sown--no more.'

'It is not all men,' said Edward, after a moment's hesitation, 'who 
have the happiness to do that.'

'More than you imagine,' returned Mr Haredale.  'We note the 
harvest more than the seed-time.  You do so in me.'

In truth his pale and haggard face, and gloomy bearing, had so far 
influenced the remark, that Edward was, for the moment, at a loss 
to answer him.

'Tut, tut,' said Mr Haredale, ''twas not very difficult to read a 
thought so natural.  But you are mistaken nevertheless.  I have 
had my share of sorrows--more than the common lot, perhaps, but I 
have borne them ill.  I have broken where I should have bent; and 
have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all 
God's great creation.  The men who learn endurance, are they who 
call the whole world, brother.  I have turned FROM the world, and I 
pay the penalty.'

Edward would have interposed, but he went on without giving him 
time.

'It is too late to evade it now.  I sometimes think, that if I had 
to live my life once more, I might amend this fault--not so much, I 
discover when I search my mind, for the love of what is right, as 
for my own sake.  But even when I make these better resolutions, I 
instinctively recoil from the idea of suffering again what I have 
undergone; and in this circumstance I find the unwelcome assurance 
that I should still be the same man, though I could cancel the 
past, and begin anew, with its experience to guide me.'

'Nay, you make too sure of that,' said Edward.

'You think so,' Mr Haredale answered, 'and I am glad you do.  I 
know myself better, and therefore distrust myself more.  Let us 
leave this subject for another--not so far removed from it as it 
might, at first sight, seem to be.  Sir, you still love my niece, 
and she is still attached to you.'

'I have that assurance from her own lips,' said Edward, 'and you 
know--I am sure you know--that I would not exchange it for any 
blessing life could yield me.'

'You are frank, honourable, and disinterested,' said Mr Haredale; 
'you have forced the conviction that you are so, even on my once-
jaundiced mind, and I believe you.  Wait here till I come back.'

He left the room as he spoke; but soon returned with his niece.  
'On that first and only time,' he said, looking from the one to the 
other, 'when we three stood together under her father's roof, I 
told you to quit it, and charged you never to return.'

'It is the only circumstance arising out of our love,' observed 
Edward, 'that I have forgotten.'

'You own a name,' said Mr Haredale, 'I had deep reason to remember.  
I was moved and goaded by recollections of personal wrong and 
injury, I know, but, even now I cannot charge myself with having, 
then, or ever, lost sight of a heartfelt desire for her true 
happiness; or with having acted--however much I was mistaken--with 
any other impulse than the one pure, single, earnest wish to be to 
her, as far as in my inferior nature lay, the father she had lost.'

'Dear uncle,' cried Emma, 'I have known no parent but you.  I have 
loved the memory of others, but I have loved you all my life.  
Never was father kinder to his child than you have been to me, 
without the interval of one harsh hour, since I can first 
remember.'

'You speak too fondly,' he answered, 'and yet I cannot wish you 
were less partial; for I have a pleasure in hearing those words, 
and shall have in calling them to mind when we are far asunder, 
which nothing else could give me.  Bear with me for a moment 
longer, Edward, for she and I have been together many years; and 
although I believe that in resigning her to you I put the seal upon 
her future happiness, I find it needs an effort.'

He pressed her tenderly to his bosom, and after a minute's pause, 
resumed:

'I have done you wrong, sir, and I ask your forgiveness--in no 
common phrase, or show of sorrow; but with earnestness and 
sincerity.  In the same spirit, I acknowledge to you both that the 
time has been when I connived at treachery and falsehood--which if 
I did not perpetrate myself, I still permitted--to rend you two 
asunder.'

'You judge yourself too harshly,' said Edward.  'Let these things 
rest.'

'They rise in judgment against me when I look back, and not now for 
the first time,' he answered.  'I cannot part from you without your 
full forgiveness; for busy life and I have little left in common 
now, and I have regrets enough to carry into solitude, without 
addition to the stock.'

'You bear a blessing from us both,' said Emma.  'Never mingle 
thoughts of me--of me who owe you so much love and duty--with 
anything but undying affection and gratitude for the past, and 
bright hopes for the future.'

'The future,' returned her uncle, with a melancholy smile, 'is a 
bright word for you, and its image should be wreathed with 
cheerful hopes.  Mine is of another kind, but it will be one of 
peace, and free, I trust, from care or passion.  When you quit 
England I shall leave it too.  There are cloisters abroad; and now 
that the two great objects of my life are set at rest, I know no 
better home.  You droop at that, forgetting that I am growing old, 
and that my course is nearly run.  Well, we will speak of it again--
not once or twice, but many times; and you shall give me cheerful 
counsel, Emma.'

'And you will take it?' asked his niece.

'I'll listen to it,' he answered, with a kiss, 'and it will have 
its weight, be certain.  What have I left to say?  You have, of 
late, been much together.  It is better and more fitting that the 
circumstances attendant on the past, which wrought your separation, 
and sowed between you suspicion and distrust, should not be entered 
on by me.'

'Much, much better,' whispered Emma.

'I avow my share in them,' said Mr Haredale, 'though I held it, at 
the time, in detestation.  Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, 
from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is 
justified by the goodness of his end.  All good ends can he worked 
out by good means.  Those that cannot, are bad; and may be counted 
so at once, and left alone.'

He looked from her to Edward, and said in a gentler tone:

'In goods and fortune you are now nearly equal.  I have been her 
faithful steward, and to that remnant of a richer property which my 
brother left her, I desire to add, in token of my love, a poor 
pittance, scarcely worth the mention, for which I have no longer 
any need.  I am glad you go abroad.  Let our ill-fated house 
remain the ruin it is.  When you return, after a few thriving 
years, you will command a better, and a more fortunate one.  We are 
friends?'

Edward took his extended hand, and grasped it heartily.

'You are neither slow nor cold in your response,' said Mr Haredale, 
doing the like by him, 'and when I look upon you now, and know you, 
I feel that I would choose you for her husband.  Her father had a 
generous nature, and you would have pleased him well.  I give her 
to you in his name, and with his blessing.  If the world and I part 
in this act, we part on happier terms than we have lived for many a 
day.'

He placed her in his arms, and would have left the room, but that 
he was stopped in his passage to the door by a great noise at a 
distance, which made them start and pause.

It was a loud shouting, mingled with boisterous acclamations, that 
rent the very air.  It drew nearer and nearer every moment, and 
approached so rapidly, that, even while they listened, it burst 
into a deafening confusion of sounds at the street corner.

'This must be stopped--quieted,' said Mr Haredale, hastily.  'We 
should have foreseen this, and provided against it.  I will go out 
to them at once.'

But, before he could reach the door, and before Edward could catch 
up his hat and follow him, they were again arrested by a loud 
shriek from above-stairs: and the locksmith's wife, bursting in, 
and fairly running into Mr Haredale's arms, cried out:

'She knows it all, dear sir!--she knows it all!  We broke it out to 
her by degrees, and she is quite prepared.'  Having made this 
communication, and furthermore thanked Heaven with great fervour 
and heartiness, the good lady, according to the custom of matrons, 
on all occasions of excitement, fainted away directly.

They ran to the window, drew up the sash, and looked into the 
crowded street.  Among a dense mob of persons, of whom not one was 
for an instant still, the locksmith's ruddy face and burly form 
could be descried, beating about as though he was struggling with a 
rough sea.  Now, he was carried back a score of yards, now onward 
nearly to the door, now back again, now forced against the opposite 
houses, now against those adjoining his own: now carried up a 
flight of steps, and greeted by the outstretched hands of half a 
hundred men, while the whole tumultuous concourse stretched their 
throats, and cheered with all their might.  Though he was really in 
a fair way to be torn to pieces in the general enthusiasm, the 
locksmith, nothing discomposed, echoed their shouts till he was as 
hoarse as they, and in a glow of joy and right good-humour, waved 
his hat until the daylight shone between its brim and crown.

But in all the bandyings from hand to hand, and strivings to and 
fro, and sweepings here and there, which--saving that he looked 
more jolly and more radiant after every struggle--troubled his 
peace of mind no more than if he had been a straw upon the water's 
surface, he never once released his firm grasp of an arm, drawn 
tight through his.  He sometimes turned to clap this friend upon 
the back, or whisper in his ear a word of staunch encouragement, or 
cheer him with a smile; but his great care was to shield him from 
the pressure, and force a passage for him to the Golden Key.  
Passive and timid, scared, pale, and wondering, and gazing at the 
throng as if he were newly risen from the dead, and felt himself a 
ghost among the living, Barnaby--not Barnaby in the spirit, but in 
flesh and blood, with pulses, sinews, nerves, and beating heart, 
and strong affections--clung to his stout old friend, and followed 
where he led.

And thus, in course of time, they reached the door, held ready for 
their entrance by no unwilling hands.  Then slipping in, and 
shutting out the crowd by main force, Gabriel stood between Mr 
Haredale and Edward Chester, and Barnaby, rushing up the stairs, 
fell upon his knees beside his mother's bed.

'Such is the blessed end, sir,' cried the panting locksmith, to Mr 
Haredale, 'of the best day's work we ever did.  The rogues! it's 
been hard fighting to get away from 'em.  I almost thought, once or 
twice, they'd have been too much for us with their kindness!'

They had striven, all the previous day, to rescue Barnaby from his 
impending fate.  Failing in their attempts, in the first quarter 
to which they addressed themselves, they renewed them in another.  
Failing there, likewise, they began afresh at midnight; and made 
their way, not only to the judge and jury who had tried him, but to 
men of influence at court, to the young Prince of Wales, and even 
to the ante-chamber of the King himself.  Successful, at last, in 
awakening an interest in his favour, and an inclination to inquire 
more dispassionately into his case, they had had an interview with 
the minister, in his bed, so late as eight o'clock that morning.  
The result of a searching inquiry (in which they, who had known the 
poor fellow from his childhood, did other good service, besides 
bringing it about) was, that between eleven and twelve o'clock, a 
free pardon to Barnaby Rudge was made out and signed, and entrusted 
to a horse-soldier for instant conveyance to the place of 
execution.  This courier reached the spot just as the cart appeared 
in sight; and Barnaby being carried back to jail, Mr Haredale, 
assured that all was safe, had gone straight from Bloomsbury Square 
to the Golden Key, leaving to Gabriel the grateful task of bringing 
him home in triumph.

'I needn't say,' observed the locksmith, when he had shaken hands 
with all the males in the house, and hugged all the females, five-
and-forty times, at least, 'that, except among ourselves, I didn't 
want to make a triumph of it.  But, directly we got into the street 
we were known, and this hubbub began.  Of the two,' he added, as he 
wiped his crimson face, 'and after experience of both, I think I'd 
rather be taken out of my house by a crowd of enemies, than 
escorted home by a mob of friends!'

It was plain enough, however, that this was mere talk on Gabriel's 
part, and that the whole proceeding afforded him the keenest 
delight; for the people continuing to make a great noise without, 
and to cheer as if their voices were in the freshest order, and 
good for a fortnight, he sent upstairs for Grip (who had come home 
at his master's back, and had acknowledged the favours of the 
multitude by drawing blood from every finger that came within his 
reach), and with the bird upon his arm presented himself at the 
first-floor window, and waved his hat again until it dangled by a 
shred, between his finger and thumb.  This demonstration having 
been received with appropriate shouts, and silence being in some 
degree restored, he thanked them for their sympathy; and taking the 
liberty to inform them that there was a sick person in the house, 
proposed that they should give three cheers for King George, three 
more for Old England, and three more for nothing particular, as a 
closing ceremony.  The crowd assenting, substituted Gabriel Varden 
for the nothing particular; and giving him one over, for good 
measure, dispersed in high good-humour.

What congratulations were exchanged among the inmates at the Golden 
Key, when they were left alone; what an overflowing of joy and 
happiness there was among them; how incapable it was of expression 
in Barnaby's own person; and how he went wildly from one to 
another, until he became so far tranquillised, as to stretch 
himself on the ground beside his mother's couch and fall into a 
deep sleep; are matters that need not be told.  And it is well they 
happened to be of this class, for they would be very hard to tell, 
were their narration ever so indispensable.

Before leaving this bright picture, it may be well to glance at a 
dark and very different one which was presented to only a few eyes, 
that same night.

The scene was a churchyard; the time, midnight; the persons, Edward 
Chester, a clergyman, a grave-digger, and the four bearers of a 
homely coffin.  They stood about a grave which had been newly dug, 
and one of the bearers held up a dim lantern,--the only light 
there--which shed its feeble ray upon the book of prayer.  He 
placed it for a moment on the coffin, when he and his companions 
were about to lower it down.  There was no inscription on the lid.

The mould fell solemnly upon the last house of this nameless man; 
and the rattling dust left a dismal echo even in the accustomed 
ears of those who had borne it to its resting-place.  The grave was 
filled in to the top, and trodden down.  They all left the spot 
together.

'You never saw him, living?' asked the clergyman, of Edward.

'Often, years ago; not knowing him for my brother.'

'Never since?'

'Never.  Yesterday, he steadily refused to see me.  It was urged 
upon him, many times, at my desire.'

'Still he refused?  That was hardened and unnatural.'

'Do you think so?'

'I infer that you do not?'

'You are right.  We hear the world wonder, every day, at monsters 
of ingratitude.  Did it never occur to you that it often looks for 
monsters of affection, as though they were things of course?'

They had reached the gate by this time, and bidding each other good 
night, departed on their separate ways.



Chapter 80


That afternoon, when he had slept off his fatigue; had shaved, and 
washed, and dressed, and freshened himself from top to toe; when he 
had dined, comforted himself with a pipe, an extra Toby, a nap in 
the great arm-chair, and a quiet chat with Mrs Varden on everything 
that had happened, was happening, or about to happen, within the 
sphere of their domestic concern; the locksmith sat himself down at 
the tea-table in the little back-parlour: the rosiest, cosiest, 
merriest, heartiest, best-contented old buck, in Great Britain or 
out of it.

There he sat, with his beaming eye on Mrs V., and his shining face 
suffused with gladness, and his capacious waistcoat smiling in 
every wrinkle, and his jovial humour peeping from under the table 
in the very plumpness of his legs; a sight to turn the vinegar of 
misanthropy into purest milk of human kindness.  There he sat, 
watching his wife as she decorated the room with flowers for the 
greater honour of Dolly and Joseph Willet, who had gone out 
walking, and for whom the tea-kettle had been singing gaily on the 
hob full twenty minutes, chirping as never kettle chirped before; 
for whom the best service of real undoubted china, patterned with 
divers round-faced mandarins holding up broad umbrellas, was now 
displayed in all its glory; to tempt whose appetites a clear, 
transparent, juicy ham, garnished with cool green lettuce-leaves 
and fragrant cucumber, reposed upon a shady table, covered with a 
snow-white cloth; for whose delight, preserves and jams, crisp 
cakes and other pastry, short to eat, with cunning twists, and 
cottage loaves, and rolls of bread both white and brown, were all 
set forth in rich profusion; in whose youth Mrs V.  herself had 
grown quite young, and stood there in a gown of red and white: 
symmetrical in figure, buxom in bodice, ruddy in cheek and lip, 
faultless in ankle, laughing in face and mood, in all respects 
delicious to behold--there sat the locksmith among all and every 
these delights, the sun that shone upon them all: the centre of the 
system: the source of light, heat, life, and frank enjoyment in the 
bright household world.

And when had Dolly ever been the Dolly of that afternoon?  To see 
how she came in, arm-in-arm with Joe; and how she made an effort 
not to blush or seem at all confused; and how she made believe she 
didn't care to sit on his side of the table; and how she coaxed the 
locksmith in a whisper not to joke; and how her colour came and 
went in a little restless flutter of happiness, which made her do 
everything wrong, and yet so charmingly wrong that it was better 
than right!--why, the locksmith could have looked on at this (as he 
mentioned to Mrs Varden when they retired for the night) for four-
and-twenty hours at a stretch, and never wished it done.

The recollections, too, with which they made merry over that long 
protracted tea!  The glee with which the locksmith asked Joe if he 
remembered that stormy night at the Maypole when he first asked 
after Dolly--the laugh they all had, about that night when she was 
going out to the party in the sedan-chair--the unmerciful manner in 
which they rallied Mrs Varden about putting those flowers outside 
that very window--the difficulty Mrs Varden found in joining the 
laugh against herself, at first, and the extraordinary perception 
she had of the joke when she overcame it--the confidential 
statements of Joe concerning the precise day and hour when he was 
first conscious of being fond of Dolly, and Dolly's blushing 
admissions, half volunteered and half extorted, as to the time from 
which she dated the discovery that she 'didn't mind' Joe--here was 
an exhaustless fund of mirth and conversation.

Then, there was a great deal to be said regarding Mrs Varden's 
doubts, and motherly alarms, and shrewd suspicions; and it appeared 
that from Mrs Varden's penetration and extreme sagacity nothing had 
ever been hidden.  She had known it all along.  She had seen it 
from the first.  She had always predicted it.  She had been aware 
of it before the principals.  She had said within herself (for she 
remembered the exact words) 'that young Willet is certainly 
looking after our Dolly, and I must look after HIM.'  Accordingly, 
she had looked after him, and had observed many little 
circumstances (all of which she named) so exceedingly minute that 
nobody else could make anything out of them even now; and had, it 
seemed from first to last, displayed the most unbounded tact and 
most consummate generalship.

Of course the night when Joe WOULD ride homeward by the side of the 
chaise, and when Mrs Varden WOULD insist upon his going back again, 
was not forgotten--nor the night when Dolly fainted on his name 
being mentioned--nor the times upon times when Mrs Varden, ever 
watchful and prudent, had found her pining in her own chamber.  In 
short, nothing was forgotten; and everything by some means or other 
brought them back to the conclusion, that that was the happiest 
hour in all their lives; consequently, that everything must have 
occurred for the best, and nothing could be suggested which would 
have made it better.

While they were in the full glow of such discourse as this, there 
came a startling knock at the door, opening from the street into 
the workshop, which had been kept closed all day that the house 
might be more quiet.  Joe, as in duty bound, would hear of nobody 
but himself going to open it; and accordingly left the room for 
that purpose.

It would have been odd enough, certainly, if Joe had forgotten the 
way to this door; and even if he had, as it was a pretty large one 
and stood straight before him, he could not easily have missed it.  
But Dolly, perhaps because she was in the flutter of spirits before 
mentioned, or perhaps because she thought he would not be able to 
open it with his one arm--she could have had no other reason--
hurried out after him; and they stopped so long in the passage--no 
doubt owing to Joe's entreaties that she would not expose herself 
to the draught of July air which must infallibly come rushing in on 
this same door being opened--that the knock was repeated, in a yet 
more startling manner than before.

'Is anybody going to open that door?' cried the locksmith.  'Or 
shall I come?'

Upon that, Dolly went running back into the parlour, all dimples 
and blushes; and Joe opened it with a mighty noise, and other 
superfluous demonstrations of being in a violent hurry.

'Well,' said the locksmith, when he reappeared: 'what is it?  eh 
Joe? what are you laughing at?'

'Nothing, sir.  It's coming in.'

'Who's coming in? what's coming in?'  Mrs Varden, as much at a loss 
as her husband, could only shake her head in answer to his 
inquiring look: so, the locksmith wheeled his chair round to 
command a better view of the room-door, and stared at it with his 
eyes wide open, and a mingled expression of curiosity and wonder 
shining in his jolly face.

Instead of some person or persons straightway appearing, divers 
remarkable sounds were heard, first in the workshop and afterwards 
in the little dark passage between it and the parlour, as though 
some unwieldy chest or heavy piece of furniture were being brought 
in, by an amount of human strength inadequate to the task.  At 
length after much struggling and humping, and bruising of the wall 
on both sides, the door was forced open as by a battering-ram; and 
the locksmith, steadily regarding what appeared beyond, smote his 
thigh, elevated his eyebrows, opened his mouth, and cried in a loud 
voice expressive of the utmost consternation:

'Damme, if it an't Miggs come back!'

The young damsel whom he named no sooner heard these words, than 
deserting a small boy and a very large box by which she was 
accompanied, and advancing with such precipitation that her bonnet 
flew off her head, burst into the room, clasped her hands (in which 
she held a pair of pattens, one in each), raised her eyes devotedly 
to the ceiling, and shed a flood of tears.

'The old story!' cried the locksmith, looking at her in 
inexpressible desperation.  'She was born to be a damper, this 
young woman! nothing can prevent it!'

'Ho master, ho mim!' cried Miggs, 'can I constrain my feelings in 
these here once agin united moments!  Ho Mr Warsen, here's 
blessedness among relations, sir!  Here's forgivenesses of 
injuries, here's amicablenesses!'

The locksmith looked from his wife to Dolly, and from Dolly to Joe, 
and from Joe to Miggs, with his eyebrows still elevated and his 
mouth still open.  When his eyes got back to Miggs, they rested on 
her; fascinated.

'To think,' cried Miggs with hysterical joy, 'that Mr Joe, and dear 
Miss Dolly, has raly come together after all as has been said and 
done contrairy!  To see them two a-settin' along with him and her, 
so pleasant and in all respects so affable and mild; and me not 
knowing of it, and not being in the ways to make no preparations 
for their teas.  Ho what a cutting thing it is, and yet what sweet 
sensations is awoke within me!'

Either in clasping her hands again, or in an ecstasy of pious joy, 
Miss Miggs clinked her pattens after the manner of a pair of 
cymbals, at this juncture; and then resumed, in the softest 
accents:

'And did my missis think--ho goodness, did she think--as her own 
Miggs, which supported her under so many trials, and understood her 
natur' when them as intended well but acted rough, went so deep 
into her feelings--did she think as her own Miggs would ever leave 
her?  Did she think as Miggs, though she was but a servant, and 
knowed that servitudes was no inheritances, would forgit that she 
was the humble instruments as always made it comfortable between 
them two when they fell out, and always told master of the meekness 
and forgiveness of her blessed dispositions!  Did she think as 
Miggs had no attachments!  Did she think that wages was her only 
object!'

To none of these interrogatories, whereof every one was more 
pathetically delivered than the last, did Mrs Varden answer one 
word: but Miggs, not at all abashed by this circumstance, turned to 
the small boy in attendance--her eldest nephew--son of her own 
married sister--born in Golden Lion Court, number twenty-sivin, 
and bred in the very shadow of the second bell-handle on the right-
hand door-post--and with a plentiful use of her pocket-
handkerchief, addressed herself to him: requesting that on his 
return home he would console his parents for the loss of her, his 
aunt, by delivering to them a faithful statement of his having left 
her in the bosom of that family, with which, as his aforesaid 
parents well knew, her best affections were incorporated; that he 
would remind them that nothing less than her imperious sense of 
duty, and devoted attachment to her old master and missis, likewise 
Miss Dolly and young Mr Joe, should ever have induced her to 
decline that pressing invitation which they, his parents, had, as 
he could testify, given her, to lodge and board with them, free of 
all cost and charge, for evermore; lastly, that he would help her 
with her box upstairs, and then repair straight home, bearing her 
blessing and her strong injunctions to mingle in his prayers a 
supplication that he might in course of time grow up a locksmith, 
or a Mr Joe, and have Mrs Vardens and Miss Dollys for his relations 
and friends.

Having brought this admonition to an end--upon which, to say the 
truth, the young gentleman for whose benefit it was designed, 
bestowed little or no heed, having to all appearance his faculties 
absorbed in the contemplation of the sweetmeats,--Miss Miggs 
signified to the company in general that they were not to be 
uneasy, for she would soon return; and, with her nephew's aid, 
prepared to bear her wardrobe up the staircase.

'My dear,' said the locksmith to his wife.  'Do you desire this?'

'I desire it!' she answered.  'I am astonished--I am amazed--at her 
audacity.  Let her leave the house this moment.'

Miggs, hearing this, let her end of the box fall heavily to the 
floor, gave a very loud sniff, crossed her arms, screwed down the 
corners of her mouth, and cried, in an ascending scale, 'Ho, good 
gracious!' three distinct times.

'You hear what your mistress says, my love,' remarked the 
locksmith.  'You had better go, I think.  Stay; take this with you, 
for the sake of old service.'

Miss Miggs clutched the bank-note he took from his pocket-book and 
held out to her; deposited it in a small, red leather purse; put 
the purse in her pocket (displaying, as she did so, a considerable 
portion of some under-garment, made of flannel, and more black 
cotton stocking than is commonly seen in public); and, tossing her 
head, as she looked at Mrs Varden, repeated--

'Ho, good gracious!'

'I think you said that once before, my dear,' observed the 
locksmith.

'Times is changed, is they, mim!' cried Miggs, bridling; 'you can 
spare me now, can you?  You can keep 'em down without me?  You're 
not in wants of any one to scold, or throw the blame upon, no 
longer, an't you, mim?  I'm glad to find you've grown so 
independent.  I wish you joy, I'm sure!'

With that she dropped a curtsey, and keeping her head erect, her 
ear towards Mrs Varden, and her eye on the rest of the company, as 
she alluded to them in her remarks, proceeded:

'I'm quite delighted, I'm sure, to find sich independency, feeling 
sorry though, at the same time, mim, that you should have been 
forced into submissions when you couldn't help yourself--he he he!  
It must be great vexations, 'specially considering how ill you 
always spoke of Mr Joe--to have him for a son-in-law at last; and 
I wonder Miss Dolly can put up with him, either, after being off 
and on for so many years with a coachmaker.  But I HAVE heerd say, 
that the coachmaker thought twice about it--he he he!--and that he 
told a young man as was a frind of his, that he hoped he knowed 
better than to be drawed into that; though she and all the family 
DID pull uncommon strong!'

Here she paused for a reply, and receiving none, went on as before.

'I HAVE heerd say, mim, that the illnesses of some ladies was all 
pretensions, and that they could faint away, stone dead, whenever 
they had the inclinations so to do.  Of course I never see sich 
cases with my own eyes--ho no!  He he he!  Nor master neither--ho 
no!  He he he!  I HAVE heerd the neighbours make remark as some one 
as they was acquainted with, was a poor good-natur'd mean-spirited 
creetur, as went out fishing for a wife one day, and caught a 
Tartar.  Of course I never to my knowledge see the poor person 
himself.  Nor did you neither, mim--ho no.  I wonder who it can 
be--don't you, mim?  No doubt you do, mim.  Ho yes.  He he he!'

Again Miggs paused for a reply; and none being offered, was so 
oppressed with teeming spite and spleen, that she seemed like to 
burst.

'I'm glad Miss Dolly can laugh,' cried Miggs with a feeble titter.  
'I like to see folks a-laughing--so do you, mim, don't you?  You 
was always glad to see people in spirits, wasn't you, mim?  And you 
always did your best to keep 'em cheerful, didn't you, mim?  
Though there an't such a great deal to laugh at now either; is 
there, mim?  It an't so much of a catch, after looking out so sharp 
ever since she was a little chit, and costing such a deal in dress 
and show, to get a poor, common soldier, with one arm, is it, mim?  
He he!  I wouldn't have a husband with one arm, anyways.  I would 
have two arms.  I would have two arms, if it was me, though instead 
of hands they'd only got hooks at the end, like our dustman!'

Miss Miggs was about to add, and had, indeed, begun to add, that, 
taking them in the abstract, dustmen were far more eligible matches 
than soldiers, though, to be sure, when people were past choosing 
they must take the best they could get, and think themselves well 
off too; but her vexation and chagrin being of that internally 
bitter sort which finds no relief in words, and is aggravated to 
madness by want of contradiction, she could hold out no longer, and 
burst into a storm of sobs and tears.

In this extremity she fell on the unlucky nephew, tooth and nail, 
and plucking a handful of hair from his head, demanded to know how 
long she was to stand there to be insulted, and whether or no he 
meant to help her to carry out the box again, and if he took a 
pleasure in hearing his family reviled: with other inquiries of 
that nature; at which disgrace and provocation, the small boy, who 
had been all this time gradually lashed into rebellion by the sight 
of unattainable pastry, walked off indignant, leaving his aunt and 
the box to follow at their leisure.  Somehow or other, by dint of 
pushing and pulling, they did attain the street at last; where Miss 
Miggs, all blowzed with the exertion of getting there, and with her 
sobs and tears, sat down upon her property to rest and grieve, 
until she could ensnare some other youth to help her home.

'It's a thing to laugh at, Martha, not to care for,' whispered the 
locksmith, as he followed his wife to the window, and good-
humouredly dried her eyes.  'What does it matter?  You had seen 
your fault before.  Come!  Bring up Toby again, my dear; Dolly 
shall sing us a song; and we'll be all the merrier for this 
interruption!'



Chapter 81


Another month had passed, and the end of August had nearly come, 
when Mr Haredale stood alone in the mail-coach office at Bristol.  
Although but a few weeks had intervened since his conversation with 
Edward Chester and his niece, in the locksmith's house, and he had 
made no change, in the mean time, in his accustomed style of dress, 
his appearance was greatly altered.  He looked much older, and more 
care-worn.  Agitation and anxiety of mind scatter wrinkles and grey 
hairs with no unsparing hand; but deeper traces follow on the 
silent uprooting of old habits, and severing of dear, familiar 
ties.  The affections may not be so easily wounded as the passions, 
but their hurts are deeper, and more lasting.  He was now a 
solitary man, and the heart within him was dreary and lonesome.

He was not the less alone for having spent so many years in 
seclusion and retirement.  This was no better preparation than a 
round of social cheerfulness: perhaps it even increased the 
keenness of his sensibility.  He had been so dependent upon her for 
companionship and love; she had come to be so much a part and 
parcel of his existence; they had had so many cares and thoughts in 
common, which no one else had shared; that losing her was beginning 
life anew, and being required to summon up the hope and elasticity 
of youth, amid the doubts, distrusts, and weakened energies of 
age.

The effort he had made to part from her with seeming cheerfulness 
and hope--and they had parted only yesterday--left him the more 
depressed.  With these feelings, he was about to revisit London for 
the last time, and look once more upon the walls of their old home, 
before turning his back upon it, for ever.

The journey was a very different one, in those days, from what the 
present generation find it; but it came to an end, as the longest 
journey will, and he stood again in the streets of the metropolis.  
He lay at the inn where the coach stopped, and resolved, before he 
went to bed, that he would make his arrival known to no one; would 
spend but another night in London; and would spare himself the pang 
of parting, even with the honest locksmith.

Such conditions of the mind as that to which he was a prey when he 
lay down to rest, are favourable to the growth of disordered 
fancies, and uneasy visions.  He knew this, even in the horror with 
which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to 
dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which 
had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.  But it was not 
a new terror of the night; it had been present to him before, in 
many shapes; it had haunted him in bygone times, and visited his 
pillow again and again.  If it had been but an ugly object, a 
childish spectre, haunting his sleep, its return, in its old form, 
might have awakened a momentary sensation of fear, which, almost in 
the act of waking, would have passed away.  This disquiet, 
however, lingered about him, and would yield to nothing.  When he 
closed his eyes again, he felt it hovering near; as he slowly sunk 
into a slumber, he was conscious of its gathering strength and 
purpose, and gradually assuming its recent shape; when he sprang up 
from his bed, the same phantom vanished from his heated brain, and 
left him filled with a dread against which reason and waking 
thought were powerless.

The sun was up, before he could shake it off.  He rose late, but 
not refreshed, and remained within doors all that day.  He had a 
fancy for paying his last visit to the old spot in the evening, for 
he had been accustomed to walk there at that season, and desired to 
see it under the aspect that was most familiar to him.  At such an 
hour as would afford him time to reach it a little before sunset, 
he left the inn, and turned into the busy street.

He had not gone far, and was thoughtfully making his way among the 
noisy crowd, when he felt a hand upon his shoulder, and, turning, 
recognised one of the waiters from the inn, who begged his pardon, 
but he had left his sword behind him.

'Why have you brought it to me?' he asked, stretching out his hand, 
and yet not taking it from the man, but looking at him in a 
disturbed and agitated manner.

The man was sorry to have disobliged him, and would carry it back 
again.  The gentleman had said that he was going a little way into 
the country, and that he might not return until late.  The roads 
were not very safe for single travellers after dark; and, since the 
riots, gentlemen had been more careful than ever, not to trust 
themselves unarmed in lonely places.  'We thought you were a 
stranger, sir,' he added, 'and that you might believe our roads to 
be better than they are; but perhaps you know them well, and carry 
fire-arms--'

He took the sword, and putting it up at his side, thanked the man, 
and resumed his walk.

It was long remembered that he did this in a manner so strange, and 
with such a trembling hand, that the messenger stood looking after 
his retreating figure, doubtful whether he ought not to follow, and 
watch him.  It was long remembered that he had been heard pacing 
his bedroom in the dead of the night; that the attendants had 
mentioned to each other in the morning, how fevered and how pale he 
looked; and that when this man went back to the inn, he told a 
fellow-servant that what he had observed in this short interview 
lay very heavy on his mind, and that he feared the gentleman 
intended to destroy himself, and would never come back alive.

With a half-consciousness that his manner had attracted the man's 
attention (remembering the expression of his face when they 
parted), Mr Haredale quickened his steps; and arriving at a stand 
of coaches, bargained with the driver of the best to carry him so 
far on his road as the point where the footway struck across the 
fields, and to await his return at a house of entertainment which 
was within a stone's-throw of that place.  Arriving there in due 
course, he alighted and pursued his way on foot.

He passed so near the Maypole, that he could see its smoke rising 
from among the trees, while a flock of pigeons--some of its old 
inhabitants, doubtless--sailed gaily home to roost, between him and 
the unclouded sky.  'The old house will brighten up now,' he said, 
as he looked towards it, 'and there will be a merry fireside 
beneath its ivied roof.  It is some comfort to know that everything 
will not be blighted hereabouts.  I shall be glad to have one 
picture of life and cheerfulness to turn to, in my mind!'

He resumed his walk, and bent his steps towards the Warren.  It was 
a clear, calm, silent evening, with hardly a breath of wind to stir 
the leaves, or any sound to break the stillness of the time, but 
drowsy sheep-bells tinkling in the distance, and, at intervals, 
the far-off lowing of cattle, or bark of village dogs.  The sky 
was radiant with the softened glory of sunset; and on the earth, 
and in the air, a deep repose prevailed.  At such an hour, he 
arrived at the deserted mansion which had been his home so long, 
and looked for the last time upon its blackened walls.

The ashes of the commonest fire are melancholy things, for in them 
there is an image of death and ruin,--of something that has been 
bright, and is but dull, cold, dreary dust,--with which our nature 
forces us to sympathise.  How much more sad the crumbled embers of 
a home: the casting down of that great altar, where the worst among 
us sometimes perform the worship of the heart; and where the best 
have offered up such sacrifices, and done such deeds of heroism, 
as, chronicled, would put the proudest temples of old Time, with 
all their vaunting annals, to the blush!

He roused himself from a long train of meditation, and walked 
slowly round the house.  It was by this time almost dark.

He had nearly made the circuit of the building, when he uttered a 
half-suppressed exclamation, started, and stood still.  Reclining, 
in an easy attitude, with his back against a tree, and 
contemplating the ruin with an expression of pleasure,--a pleasure 
so keen that it overcame his habitual indolence and command of 
feature, and displayed itself utterly free from all restraint or 
reserve,--before him, on his own ground, and triumphing then, as he 
had triumphed in every misfortune and disappointment of his life, 
stood the man whose presence, of all mankind, in any place, and 
least of all in that, he could the least endure.

Although his blood so rose against this man, and his wrath so 
stirred within him, that he could have struck him dead, he put such 
fierce constraint upon himself that he passed him without a word or 
look.  Yes, and he would have gone on, and not turned, though to 
resist the Devil who poured such hot temptation in his brain, 
required an effort scarcely to be achieved, if this man had not 
himself summoned him to stop: and that, with an assumed compassion 
in his voice which drove him well-nigh mad, and in an instant 
routed all the self-command it had been anguish--acute, poignant 
anguish--to sustain.

All consideration, reflection, mercy, forbearance; everything by 
which a goaded man can curb his rage and passion; fled from him as 
he turned back.  And yet he said, slowly and quite calmly--far more 
calmly than he had ever spoken to him before:

'Why have you called to me?'

'To remark,' said Sir John Chester with his wonted composure, 'what 
an odd chance it is, that we should meet here!'

'It IS a strange chance.'

'Strange?  The most remarkable and singular thing in the world.  I 
never ride in the evening; I have not done so for years.  The whim 
seized me, quite unaccountably, in the middle of last night.--How 
very picturesque this is!'--He pointed, as he spoke, to the 
dismantled house, and raised his glass to his eye.

'You praise your own work very freely.'

Sir John let fall his glass; inclined his face towards him with an 
air of the most courteous inquiry; and slightly shook his head as 
though he were remarking to himself, 'I fear this animal is going 
mad!'

'I say you praise your own work very freely,' repeated Mr 
Haredale.

'Work!' echoed Sir John, looking smilingly round.  'Mine!--I beg 
your pardon, I really beg your pardon--'

'Why, you see,' said Mr Haredale, 'those walls.  You see those 
tottering gables.  You see on every side where fire and smoke have 
raged.  You see the destruction that has been wanton here.  Do you 
not?'

'My good friend,' returned the knight, gently checking his 
impatience with his hand, 'of course I do.  I see everything you 
speak of, when you stand aside, and do not interpose yourself 
between the view and me.  I am very sorry for you.  If I had not 
had the pleasure to meet you here, I think I should have written to 
tell you so.  But you don't bear it as well as I had expected--
excuse me--no, you don't indeed.'

He pulled out his snuff-box, and addressing him with the superior 
air of a man who, by reason of his higher nature, has a right to 
read a moral lesson to another, continued:

'For you are a philosopher, you know--one of that stern and rigid 
school who are far above the weaknesses of mankind in general.  You 
are removed, a long way, from the frailties of the crowd.  You 
contemplate them from a height, and rail at them with a most 
impressive bitterness.  I have heard you.'

--'And shall again,' said Mr Haredale.

'Thank you,' returned the other.  'Shall we walk as we talk?  The 
damp falls rather heavily.  Well,--as you please.  But I grieve to 
say that I can spare you only a very few moments.'

'I would,' said Mr Haredale, 'you had spared me none.  I would, 
with all my soul, you had been in Paradise (if such a monstrous 
lie could be enacted), rather than here to-night.'

'Nay,' returned the other--'really--you do yourself injustice.  You 
are a rough companion, but I would not go so far to avoid you.'

'Listen to me,' said Mr Haredale.  'Listen to me.'

'While you rail?' inquired Sir John.

'While I deliver your infamy.  You urged and stimulated to do your 
work a fit agent, but one who in his nature--in the very essence of 
his being--is a traitor, and who has been false to you (despite the 
sympathy you two should have together) as he has been to all 
others.  With hints, and looks, and crafty words, which told again 
are nothing, you set on Gashford to this work--this work before us 
now.  With these same hints, and looks, and crafty words, which 
told again are nothing, you urged him on to gratify the deadly 
hate he owes me--I have earned it, I thank Heaven--by the abduction 
and dishonour of my niece.  You did.  I see denial in your looks,' 
he cried, abruptly pointing in his face, and stepping back, 'and 
denial is a lie!'

He had his hand upon his sword; but the knight, with a contemptuous 
smile, replied to him as coldly as before.

'You will take notice, sir--if you can discriminate sufficiently--
that I have taken the trouble to deny nothing.  Your discernment is 
hardly fine enough for the perusal of faces, not of a kind as 
coarse as your speech; nor has it ever been, that I remember; or, 
in one face that I could name, you would have read indifference, 
not to say disgust, somewhat sooner than you did.  I speak of a 
long time ago,--but you understand me.'

'Disguise it as you will, you mean denial.  Denial explicit or 
reserved, expressed or left to be inferred, is still a lie.  You 
say you don't deny.  Do you admit?'

'You yourself,' returned Sir John, suffering the current of his 
speech to flow as smoothly as if it had been stemmed by no one word 
of interruption, 'publicly proclaimed the character of the 
gentleman in question (I think it was in Westminster Hall) in terms 
which relieve me from the necessity of making any further allusion 
to him.  You may have been warranted; you may not have been; I 
can't say.  Assuming the gentleman to be what you described, and 
to have made to you or any other person any statements that may 
have happened to suggest themselves to him, for the sake of his 
own security, or for the sake of money, or for his own amusement, 
or for any other consideration,--I have nothing to say of him, 
except that his extremely degrading situation appears to me to be 
shared with his employers.  You are so very plain yourself, that 
you will excuse a little freedom in me, I am sure.'

'Attend to me again, Sir John but once,' cried Mr Haredale; 'in 
your every look, and word, and gesture, you tell me this was not 
your act.  I tell you that it was, and that you tampered with the 
man I speak of, and with your wretched son (whom God forgive!) to 
do this deed.  You talk of degradation and character.  You told me 
once that you had purchased the absence of the poor idiot and his 
mother, when (as I have discovered since, and then suspected) you 
had gone to tempt them, and had found them flown.  To you I traced 
the insinuation that I alone reaped any harvest from my brother's 
death; and all the foul attacks and whispered calumnies that 
followed in its train.  In every action of my life, from that first 
hope which you converted into grief and desolation, you have stood, 
like an adverse fate, between me and peace.  In all, you have ever 
been the same cold-blooded, hollow, false, unworthy villain.  For 
the second time, and for the last, I cast these charges in your 
teeth, and spurn you from me as I would a faithless dog!'

With that he raised his arm, and struck him on the breast so that 
he staggered.  Sir John, the instant he recovered, drew his sword, 
threw away the scabbard and his hat, and running on his adversary 
made a desperate lunge at his heart, which, but that his guard was 
quick and true, would have stretched him dead upon the grass.

In the act of striking him, the torrent of his opponent's rage had 
reached a stop.  He parried his rapid thrusts, without returning 
them, and called to him, with a frantic kind of terror in his face, 
to keep back.

'Not to-night! not to-night!' he cried.  'In God's name, not 
tonight!'

Seeing that he lowered his weapon, and that he would not thrust in 
turn, Sir John lowered his.

'Not to-night!' his adversary cried.  'Be warned in time!'

'You told me--it must have been in a sort of inspiration--' said 
Sir John, quite deliberately, though now he dropped his mask, and 
showed his hatred in his face, 'that this was the last time.  Be 
assured it is!  Did you believe our last meeting was forgotten?  
Did you believe that your every word and look was not to be 
accounted for, and was not well remembered?  Do you believe that I 
have waited your time, or you mine?  What kind of man is he who 
entered, with all his sickening cant of honesty and truth, into a 
bond with me to prevent a marriage he affected to dislike, and when 
I had redeemed my part to the spirit and the letter, skulked from 
his, and brought the match about in his own time, to rid himself of 
a burden he had grown tired of, and cast a spurious lustre on his 
house?'

'I have acted,' cried Mr Haredale, 'with honour and in good faith.  
I do so now.  Do not force me to renew this duel to-night!'

'You said my "wretched" son, I think?' said Sir John, with a smile.  
'Poor fool!  The dupe of such a shallow knave--trapped into 
marriage by such an uncle and by such a niece--he well deserves 
your pity.  But he is no longer a son of mine: you are welcome to 
the prize your craft has made, sir.'

'Once more,' cried his opponent, wildly stamping on the ground, 
'although you tear me from my better angel, I implore you not to 
come within the reach of my sword to-night.  Oh! why were you here 
at all!  Why have we met!  To-morrow would have cast us far apart 
for ever!'

'That being the case,' returned Sir John, without the least 
emotion, 'it is very fortunate we have met to-night.  Haredale, I 
have always despised you, as you know, but I have given you credit 
for a species of brute courage.  For the honour of my judgment, 
which I had thought a good one, I am sorry to find you a coward.'

Not another word was spoken on either side.  They crossed swords, 
though it was now quite dusk, and attacked each other fiercely.  
They were well matched, and each was thoroughly skilled in the 
management of his weapon.

After a few seconds they grew hotter and more furious, and pressing 
on each other inflicted and received several slight wounds.  It was 
directly after receiving one of these in his arm, that Mr Haredale, 
making a keener thrust as he felt the warm blood spirting out, 
plunged his sword through his opponent's body to the hilt.

Their eyes met, and were on each other as he drew it out.  He put 
his arm about the dying man, who repulsed him, feebly, and dropped 
upon the turf.  Raising himself upon his hands, he gazed at him for 
an instant, with scorn and hatred in his look; but, seeming to 
remember, even then, that this expression would distort his 
features after death, he tried to smile, and, faintly moving his 
right hand, as if to hide his bloody linen in his vest, fell back 
dead--the phantom of last night.



Chapter the Last


A parting glance at such of the actors in this little history as 
it has not, in the course of its events, dismissed, will bring it 
to an end.

Mr Haredale fled that night.  Before pursuit could be begun, indeed 
before Sir John was traced or missed, he had left the kingdom.  
Repairing straight to a religious establishment, known throughout 
Europe for the rigour and severity of its discipline, and for the 
merciless penitence it exacted from those who sought its shelter as 
a refuge from the world, he took the vows which thenceforth shut 
him out from nature and his kind, and after a few remorseful years 
was buried in its gloomy cloisters.

Two days elapsed before the body of Sir John was found.  As soon as 
it was recognised and carried home, the faithful valet, true to his 
master's creed, eloped with all the cash and movables he could lay 
his hands on, and started as a finished gentleman upon his own 
account.  In this career he met with great success, and would 
certainly have married an heiress in the end, but for an unlucky 
check which led to his premature decease.  He sank under a 
contagious disorder, very prevalent at that time, and vulgarly 
termed the jail fever.

Lord George Gordon, remaining in his prison in the Tower until 
Monday the fifth of February in the following year, was on that 
day solemnly tried at Westminster for High Treason.  Of this crime 
he was, after a patient investigation, declared Not Guilty; upon 
the ground that there was no proof of his having called the 
multitude together with any traitorous or unlawful intentions.  Yet 
so many people were there, still, to whom those riots taught no 
lesson of reproof or moderation, that a public subscription was set 
on foot in Scotland to defray the cost of his defence.

For seven years afterwards he remained, at the strong intercession 
of his friends, comparatively quiet; saving that he, every now and 
then, took occasion to display his zeal for the Protestant faith in 
some extravagant proceeding which was the delight of its enemies; 
and saving, besides, that he was formally excommunicated by the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, for refusing to appear as a witness in 
the Ecclesiastical Court when cited for that purpose.  In the year 
1788 he was stimulated by some new insanity to write and publish 
an injurious pamphlet, reflecting on the Queen of France, in very 
violent terms.  Being indicted for the libel, and (after various 
strange demonstrations in court) found guilty, he fled into Holland 
in place of appearing to receive sentence: from whence, as the 
quiet burgomasters of Amsterdam had no relish for his company, 
he was sent home again with all speed.  Arriving in the month of 
July at Harwich, and going thence to Birmingham, he made in the 
latter place, in August, a public profession of the Jewish 
religion; and figured there as a Jew until he was arrested, and 
brought back to London to receive the sentence he had evaded.  By 
virtue of this sentence he was, in the month of December, cast 
into Newgate for five years and ten months, and required besides to 
pay a large fine, and to furnish heavy securities for his future 
good behaviour.

After addressing, in the midsummer of the following year, an appeal 
to the commiseration of the National Assembly of France, which the 
English minister refused to sanction, he composed himself to 
undergo his full term of punishment; and suffering his beard to 
grow nearly to his waist, and conforming in all respects to the 
ceremonies of his new religion, he applied himself to the study of 
history, and occasionally to the art of painting, in which, in his 
younger days, he had shown some skill.  Deserted by his former 
friends, and treated in all respects like the worst criminal in the 
jail, he lingered on, quite cheerful and resigned, until the 1st 
of November 1793, when he died in his cell, being then only three-
and-forty years of age.

Many men with fewer sympathies for the distressed and needy, with 
less abilities and harder hearts, have made a shining figure and 
left a brilliant fame.  He had his mourners.  The prisoners 
bemoaned his loss, and missed him; for though his means were not 
large, his charity was great, and in bestowing alms among them he 
considered the necessities of all alike, and knew no distinction of 
sect or creed.  There are wise men in the highways of the world who 
may learn something, even from this poor crazy lord who died in 
Newgate.

To the last, he was truly served by bluff John Grueby.  John was at 
his side before he had been four-and-twenty hours in the Tower, and 
never left him until he died.  He had one other constant attendant, 
in the person of a beautiful Jewish girl; who attached herself to 
him from feelings half religious, half romantic, but whose virtuous 
and disinterested character appears to have been beyond the censure 
even of the most censorious.

Gashford deserted him, of course.  He subsisted for a time upon his 
traffic in his master's secrets; and, this trade failing when the 
stock was quite exhausted, procured an appointment in the 
honourable corps of spies and eavesdroppers employed by the 
government.  As one of these wretched underlings, he did his 
drudgery, sometimes abroad, sometimes at home, and long endured the 
various miseries of such a station.  Ten or a dozen years ago--not 
more--a meagre, wan old man, diseased and miserably poor, was found 
dead in his bed at an obscure inn in the Borough, where he was 
quite unknown.  He had taken poison.  There was no clue to his 
name; but it was discovered from certain entries in a pocket-book 
he carried, that he had been secretary to Lord George Gordon in the 
time of the famous riots.

Many months after the re-establishment of peace and order, and even 
when it had ceased to be the town-talk, that every military 
officer, kept at free quarters by the City during the late alarms, 
had cost for his board and lodging four pounds four per day, and 
every private soldier two and twopence halfpenny; many months after 
even this engrossing topic was forgotten, and the United Bulldogs 
were to a man all killed, imprisoned, or transported, Mr Simon 
Tappertit, being removed from a hospital to prison, and thence to 
his place of trial, was discharged by proclamation, on two wooden 
legs.  Shorn of his graceful limbs, and brought down from his high 
estate to circumstances of utter destitution, and the deepest 
misery, he made shift to stump back to his old master, and beg for 
some relief.  By the locksmith's advice and aid, he was established 
in business as a shoeblack, and opened shop under an archway near 
the Horse Guards.  This being a central quarter, he quickly made a 
very large connection; and on levee days, was sometimes known to 
have as many as twenty half-pay officers waiting their turn for 
polishing.  Indeed his trade increased to that extent, that in 
course of time he entertained no less than two apprentices, besides 
taking for his wife the widow of an eminent bone and rag collector, 
formerly of MilIbank.  With this lady (who assisted in the 
business) he lived in great domestic happiness, only chequered by 
those little storms which serve to clear the atmosphere of wedlock, 
and brighten its horizon.  In some of these gusts of bad weather, 
Mr Tappertit would, in the assertion of his prerogative, so far 
forget himself, as to correct his lady with a brush, or boot, or 
shoe; while she (but only in extreme cases) would retaliate by 
taking off his legs, and leaving him exposed to the derision of 
those urchins who delight in mischief.

Miss Miggs, baffled in all her schemes, matrimonial and otherwise, 
and cast upon a thankless, undeserving world, turned very sharp and 
sour; and did at length become so acid, and did so pinch and slap 
and tweak the hair and noses of the youth of Golden Lion Court, 
that she was by one consent expelled that sanctuary, and desired to 
bless some other spot of earth, in preference.  It chanced at that 
moment, that the justices of the peace for Middlesex proclaimed by 
public placard that they stood in need of a female turnkey for the 
County Bridewell, and appointed a day and hour for the inspection 
of candidates.  Miss Miggs attending at the time appointed, was 
instantly chosen and selected from one hundred and twenty-four 
competitors, and at once promoted to the office; which she held 
until her decease, more than thirty years afterwards, remaining 
single all that time.  It was observed of this lady that while she 
was inflexible and grim to all her female flock, she was 
particularly so to those who could establish any claim to beauty: 
and it was often remarked as a proof of her indomitable virtue and 
severe chastity, that to such as had been frail she showed no 
mercy; always falling upon them on the slightest occasion, or on no 
occasion at all, with the fullest measure of her wrath.  Among 
other useful inventions which she practised upon this class of 
offenders and bequeathed to posterity, was the art of inflicting an 
exquisitely vicious poke or dig with the wards of a key in the 
small of the back, near the spine.  She likewise originated a mode 
of treading by accident (in pattens) on such as had small feet; 
also very remarkable for its ingenuity, and previously quite 
unknown.

It was not very long, you may be sure, before Joe Willet and Dolly 
Varden were made husband and wife, and with a handsome sum in bank 
(for the locksmith could afford to give his daughter a good dowry), 
reopened the Maypole.  It was not very long, you may be sure, 
before a red-faced little boy was seen staggering about the Maypole 
passage, and kicking up his heels on the green before the door.  It 
was not very long, counting by years, before there was a red-faced 
little girl, another red-faced little boy, and a whole troop of 
girls and boys: so that, go to Chigwell when you would, there would 
surely be seen, either in the village street, or on the green, or 
frolicking in the farm-yard--for it was a farm now, as well as a 
tavern--more small Joes and small Dollys than could be easily 
counted.  It was not a very long time before these appearances 
ensued; but it WAS a VERY long time before Joe looked five years 
older, or Dolly either, or the locksmith either, or his wife 
either: for cheerfulness and content are great beautifiers, and 
are famous preservers of youthful looks, depend upon it.

It was a long time, too, before there was such a country inn as the 
Maypole, in all England: indeed it is a great question whether 
there has ever been such another to this hour, or ever will be.  It 
was a long time too--for Never, as the proverb says, is a long day--
before they forgot to have an interest in wounded soldiers at the 
Maypole, or before Joe omitted to refresh them, for the sake of his 
old campaign; or before the serjeant left off looking in there, now 
and then; or before they fatigued themselves, or each other, by 
talking on these occasions of battles and sieges, and hard weather 
and hard service, and a thousand things belonging to a soldier's 
life.  As to the great silver snuff-box which the King sent Joe 
with his own hand, because of his conduct in the Riots, what guest 
ever went to the Maypole without putting finger and thumb into that 
box, and taking a great pinch, though he had never taken a pinch of 
snuff before, and almost sneezed himself into convulsions even 
then?  As to the purple-faced vintner, where is the man who lived 
in those times and never saw HIM at the Maypole: to all appearance 
as much at home in the best room, as if he lived there?  And as to 
the feastings and christenings, and revellings at Christmas, and 
celebrations of birthdays, wedding-days, and all manner of days, 
both at the Maypole and the Golden Key,--if they are not notorious, 
what facts are?

Mr Willet the elder, having been by some extraordinary means 
possessed with the idea that Joe wanted to be married, and that it 
would be well for him, his father, to retire into private life, and 
enable him to live in comfort, took up his abode in a small cottage 
at Chigwell; where they widened and enlarged the fireplace for him, 
hung up the boiler, and furthermore planted in the little garden 
outside the front-door, a fictitious Maypole; so that he was quite 
at home directly.  To this, his new habitation, Tom Cobb, Phil 
Parkes, and Solomon Daisy went regularly every night: and in the 
chimney-corner, they all four quaffed, and smoked, and prosed, and 
dozed, as they had done of old.  It being accidentally discovered 
after a short time that Mr Willet still appeared to consider 
himself a landlord by profession, Joe provided him with a slate, 
upon which the old man regularly scored up vast accounts for meat, 
drink, and tobacco.  As he grew older this passion increased upon 
him; and it became his delight to chalk against the name of each of 
his cronies a sum of enormous magnitude, and impossible to be paid: 
and such was his secret joy in these entries, that he would be 
perpetually seen going behind the door to look at them, and coming 
forth again, suffused with the liveliest satisfaction.

He never recovered the surprise the Rioters had given him, and 
remained in the same mental condition down to the last moment of 
his life.  It was like to have been brought to a speedy 
termination by the first sight of his first grandchild, which 
appeared to fill him with the belief that some alarming miracle had 
happened to Joe.  Being promptly blooded, however, by a skilful 
surgeon, he rallied; and although the doctors all agreed, on his 
being attacked with symptoms of apoplexy six months afterwards, 
that he ought to die, and took it very ill that he did not, he 
remained alive--possibly on account of his constitutional slowness--
for nearly seven years more, when he was one morning found 
speechless in his bed.  He lay in this state, free from all tokens 
of uneasiness, for a whole week, when he was suddenly restored to 
consciousness by hearing the nurse whisper in his son's ear that he 
was going.  'I'm a-going, Joseph,' said Mr Willet, turning round 
upon the instant, 'to the Salwanners'--and immediately gave up 
the ghost.

He left a large sum of money behind him; even more than he was 
supposed to have been worth, although the neighbours, according to 
the custom of mankind in calculating the wealth that other people 
ought to have saved, had estimated his property in good round 
numbers.  Joe inherited the whole; so that he became a man of great 
consequence in those parts, and was perfectly independent.

Some time elapsed before Barnaby got the better of the shock he had 
sustained, or regained his old health and gaiety.  But he recovered 
by degrees: and although he could never separate his condemnation 
and escape from the idea of a terrific dream, he became, in other 
respects, more rational.  Dating from the time of his recovery, he 
had a better memory and greater steadiness of purpose; but a dark 
cloud overhung his whole previous existence, and never cleared 
away.

He was not the less happy for this, for his love of freedom and 
interest in all that moved or grew, or had its being in the 
elements, remained to him unimpaired.  He lived with his mother on 
the Maypole farm, tending the poultry and the cattle, working in a 
garden of his own, and helping everywhere.  He was known to every 
bird and beast about the place, and had a name for every one.  
Never was there a lighter-hearted husbandman, a creature more 
popular with young and old, a blither or more happy soul than 
Barnaby; and though he was free to ramble where he would, he never 
quitted Her, but was for evermore her stay and comfort.

It was remarkable that although he had that dim sense of the past, 
he sought out Hugh's dog, and took him under his care; and that he 
never could be tempted into London.  When the Riots were many years 
old, and Edward and his wife came back to England with a family 
almost as numerous as Dolly's, and one day appeared at the Maypole 
porch, he knew them instantly, and wept and leaped for joy.  But 
neither to visit them, nor on any other pretence, no matter how 
full of promise and enjoyment, could he be persuaded to set foot in 
the streets: nor did he ever conquer this repugnance or look upon 
the town again.

Grip soon recovered his looks, and became as glossy and sleek as 
ever.  But he was profoundly silent.  Whether he had forgotten the 
art of Polite Conversation in Newgate, or had made a vow in those 
troubled times to forego, for a period, the display of his 
accomplishments, is matter of uncertainty; but certain it is that 
for a whole year he never indulged in any other sound than a grave, 
decorous croak.  At the expiration of that term, the morning being 
very bright and sunny, he was heard to address himself to the 
horses in the stable, upon the subject of the Kettle, so often 
mentioned in these pages; and before the witness who overheard him 
could run into the house with the intelligence, and add to it upon 
his solemn affirmation the statement that he had heard him laugh, 
the bird himself advanced with fantastic steps to the very door of 
the bar, and there cried, 'I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil!' 
with extraordinary rapture.

From that period (although he was supposed to be much affected by 
the death of Mr Willet senior), he constantly practised and 
improved himself in the vulgar tongue; and, as he was a mere infant 
for a raven when Barnaby was grey, he has very probably gone on 
talking to the present time.





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The Chimes

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The Chimes by Charles Dickens
Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Chimes




CHAPTER I - First Quarter.



HERE are not many people - and as it is desirable that a story-
teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding
as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I confine this
observation neither to young people nor to little people, but
extend it to all conditions of people:  little and big, young and
old:  yet growing up, or already growing down again - there are
not, I say, many people who would care to sleep in a church.  I
don't mean at sermon-time in warm weather (when the thing has
actually been done, once or twice), but in the night, and alone.  A
great multitude of persons will be violently astonished, I know, by
this position, in the broad bold Day.  But it applies to Night.  It
must be argued by night, and I will undertake to maintain it
successfully on any gusty winter's night appointed for the purpose,
with any one opponent chosen from the rest, who will meet me singly
in an old churchyard, before an old church-door; and will
previously empower me to lock him in, if needful to his
satisfaction, until morning.

For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and round
a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; and of trying,
with its unseen hand, the windows and the doors; and seeking out
some crevices by which to enter.  And when it has got in; as one
not finding what it seeks, whatever that may be, it wails and howls
to issue forth again:  and not content with stalking through the
aisles, and gliding round and round the pillars, and tempting the
deep organ, soars up to the roof, and strives to rend the rafters:
then flings itself despairingly upon the stones below, and passes,
muttering, into the vaults.  Anon, it comes up stealthily, and
creeps along the walls, seeming to read, in whispers, the
Inscriptions sacred to the Dead.  At some of these, it breaks out
shrilly, as with laughter; and at others, moans and cries as if it
were lamenting.  It has a ghostly sound too, lingering within the
altar; where it seems to chaunt, in its wild way, of Wrong and
Murder done, and false Gods worshipped, in defiance of the Tables
of the Law, which look so fair and smooth, but are so flawed and
broken.  Ugh!  Heaven preserve us, sitting snugly round the fire!
It has an awful voice, that wind at Midnight, singing in a church!

But, high up in the steeple!  There the foul blast roars and
whistles!  High up in the steeple, where it is free to come and go
through many an airy arch and loophole, and to twist and twine
itself about the giddy stair, and twirl the groaning weathercock,
and make the very tower shake and shiver!  High up in the steeple,
where the belfry is, and iron rails are ragged with rust, and
sheets of lead and copper, shrivelled by the changing weather,
crackle and heave beneath the unaccustomed tread; and birds stuff
shabby nests into corners of old oaken joists and beams; and dust
grows old and grey; and speckled spiders, indolent and fat with
long security, swing idly to and fro in the vibration of the bells,
and never loose their hold upon their thread-spun castles in the
air, or climb up sailor-like in quick alarm, or drop upon the
ground and ply a score of nimble legs to save one life!  High up in
the steeple of an old church, far above the light and murmur of the
town and far below the flying clouds that shadow it, is the wild
and dreary place at night:  and high up in the steeple of an old
church, dwelt the Chimes I tell of.

They were old Chimes, trust me.  Centuries ago, these Bells had
been baptized by bishops:  so many centuries ago, that the register
of their baptism was lost long, long before the memory of man, and
no one knew their names.  They had had their Godfathers and
Godmothers, these Bells (for my own part, by the way, I would
rather incur the responsibility of being Godfather to a Bell than a
Boy), and had their silver mugs no doubt, besides.  But Time had
mowed down their sponsors, and Henry the Eighth had melted down
their mugs; and they now hung, nameless and mugless, in the church-
tower.

Not speechless, though.  Far from it.  They had clear, loud, lusty,
sounding voices, had these Bells; and far and wide they might be
heard upon the wind.  Much too sturdy Chimes were they, to be
dependent on the pleasure of the wind, moreover; for, fighting
gallantly against it when it took an adverse whim, they would pour
their cheerful notes into a listening ear right royally; and bent
on being heard on stormy nights, by some poor mother watching a
sick child, or some lone wife whose husband was at sea, they had
been sometimes known to beat a blustering Nor' Wester; aye, 'all to
fits,' as Toby Veck said; - for though they chose to call him
Trotty Veck, his name was Toby, and nobody could make it anything
else either (except Tobias) without a special act of parliament; he
having been as lawfully christened in his day as the Bells had been
in theirs, though with not quite so much of solemnity or public
rejoicing.

For my part, I confess myself of Toby Veck's belief, for I am sure
he had opportunities enough of forming a correct one.  And whatever
Toby Veck said, I say.  And I take my stand by Toby Veck, although
he DID stand all day long (and weary work it was) just outside the
church-door.  In fact he was a ticket-porter, Toby Veck, and waited
there for jobs.

And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed,
tooth-chattering place it was, to wait in, in the winter-time, as
Toby Veck well knew.  The wind came tearing round the corner -
especially the east wind - as if it had sallied forth, express,
from the confines of the earth, to have a blow at Toby.  And
oftentimes it seemed to come upon him sooner than it had expected,
for bouncing round the corner, and passing Toby, it would suddenly
wheel round again, as if it cried 'Why, here he is!'  Incontinently
his little white apron would be caught up over his head like a
naughty boy's garments, and his feeble little cane would be seen to
wrestle and struggle unavailingly in his hand, and his legs would
undergo tremendous agitation, and Toby himself all aslant, and
facing now in this direction, now in that, would be so banged and
buffeted, and to touzled, and worried, and hustled, and lifted off
his feet, as to render it a state of things but one degree removed
from a positive miracle, that he wasn't carried up bodily into the
air as a colony of frogs or snails or other very portable creatures
sometimes are, and rained down again, to the great astonishment of
the natives, on some strange corner of the world where ticket-
porters are unknown.

But, windy weather, in spite of its using him so roughly, was,
after all, a sort of holiday for Toby.  That's the fact.  He didn't
seem to wait so long for a sixpence in the wind, as at other times;
the having to fight with that boisterous element took off his
attention, and quite freshened him up, when he was getting hungry
and low-spirited.  A hard frost too, or a fall of snow, was an
Event; and it seemed to do him good, somehow or other - it would
have been hard to say in what respect though, Toby!  So wind and
frost and snow, and perhaps a good stiff storm of hail, were Toby
Veck's red-letter days.

Wet weather was the worst; the cold, damp, clammy wet, that wrapped
him up like a moist great-coat - the only kind of great-coat Toby
owned, or could have added to his comfort by dispensing with.  Wet
days, when the rain came slowly, thickly, obstinately down; when
the street's throat, like his own, was choked with mist; when
smoking umbrellas passed and re-passed, spinning round and round
like so many teetotums, as they knocked against each other on the
crowded footway, throwing off a little whirlpool of uncomfortable
sprinklings; when gutters brawled and waterspouts were full and
noisy; when the wet from the projecting stones and ledges of the
church fell drip, drip, drip, on Toby, making the wisp of straw on
which he stood mere mud in no time; those were the days that tried
him.  Then, indeed, you might see Toby looking anxiously out from
his shelter in an angle of the church wall - such a meagre shelter
that in summer time it never cast a shadow thicker than a good-
sized walking stick upon the sunny pavement - with a disconsolate
and lengthened face.  But coming out, a minute afterwards, to warm
himself by exercise, and trotting up and down some dozen times, he
would brighten even then, and go back more brightly to his niche.

They called him Trotty from his pace, which meant speed if it
didn't make it.  He could have walked faster perhaps; most likely;
but rob him of his trot, and Toby would have taken to his bed and
died.  It bespattered him with mud in dirty weather; it cost him a
world of trouble; he could have walked with infinitely greater
ease; but that was one reason for his clinging to it so
tenaciously.  A weak, small, spare old man, he was a very Hercules,
this Toby, in his good intentions.  He loved to earn his money.  He
delighted to believe - Toby was very poor, and couldn't well afford
to part with a delight - that he was worth his salt.  With a
shilling or an eighteenpenny message or small parcel in hand, his
courage always high, rose higher.  As he trotted on, he would call
out to fast Postmen ahead of him, to get out of the way; devoutly
believing that in the natural course of things he must inevitably
overtake and run them down; and he had perfect faith - not often
tested - in his being able to carry anything that man could lift.

Thus, even when he came out of his nook to warm himself on a wet
day, Toby trotted.  Making, with his leaky shoes, a crooked line of
slushy footprints in the mire; and blowing on his chilly hands and
rubbing them against each other, poorly defended from the searching
cold by threadbare mufflers of grey worsted, with a private
apartment only for the thumb, and a common room or tap for the rest
of the fingers; Toby, with his knees bent and his cane beneath his
arm, still trotted.  Falling out into the road to look up at the
belfry when the Chimes resounded, Toby trotted still.

He made this last excursion several times a day, for they were
company to him; and when he heard their voices, he had an interest
in glancing at their lodging-place, and thinking how they were
moved, and what hammers beat upon them.  Perhaps he was the more
curious about these Bells, because there were points of resemblance
between themselves and him.  They hung there, in all weathers, with
the wind and rain driving in upon them; facing only the outsides of
all those houses; never getting any nearer to the blazing fires
that gleamed and shone upon the windows, or came puffing out of the
chimney tops; and incapable of participation in any of the good
things that were constantly being handled, through the street doors
and the area railings, to prodigious cooks.  Faces came and went at
many windows:  sometimes pretty faces, youthful faces, pleasant
faces:  sometimes the reverse:  but Toby knew no more (though he
often speculated on these trifles, standing idle in the streets)
whence they came, or where they went, or whether, when the lips
moved, one kind word was said of him in all the year, than did the
Chimes themselves.

Toby was not a casuist - that he knew of, at least - and I don't
mean to say that when he began to take to the Bells, and to knit up
his first rough acquaintance with them into something of a closer
and more delicate woof, he passed through these considerations one
by one, or held any formal review or great field-day in his
thoughts.  But what I mean to say, and do say is, that as the
functions of Toby's body, his digestive organs for example, did of
their own cunning, and by a great many operations of which he was
altogether ignorant, and the knowledge of which would have
astonished him very much, arrive at a certain end; so his mental
faculties, without his privity or concurrence, set all these wheels
and springs in motion, with a thousand others, when they worked to
bring about his liking for the Bells.

And though I had said his love, I would not have recalled the word,
though it would scarcely have expressed his complicated feeling.
For, being but a simple man, he invested them with a strange and
solemn character.  They were so mysterious, often heard and never
seen; so high up, so far off, so full of such a deep strong melody,
that he regarded them with a species of awe; and sometimes when he
looked up at the dark arched windows in the tower, he half expected
to be beckoned to by something which was not a Bell, and yet was
what he had heard so often sounding in the Chimes.  For all this,
Toby scouted with indignation a certain flying rumour that the
Chimes were haunted, as implying the possibility of their being
connected with any Evil thing.  In short, they were very often in
his ears, and very often in his thoughts, but always in his good
opinion; and he very often got such a crick in his neck by staring
with his mouth wide open, at the steeple where they hung, that he
was fain to take an extra trot or two, afterwards, to cure it.

The very thing he was in the act of doing one cold day, when the
last drowsy sound of Twelve o'clock, just struck, was humming like
a melodious monster of a Bee, and not by any means a busy bee, all
through the steeple!

'Dinner-time, eh!' said Toby, trotting up and down before the
church.  'Ah!'

Toby's nose was very red, and his eyelids were very red, and he
winked very much, and his shoulders were very near his ears, and
his legs were very stiff, and altogether he was evidently a long
way upon the frosty side of cool.

'Dinner-time, eh!' repeated Toby, using his right-hand muffler like
an infantine boxing-glove, and punishing his chest for being cold.
'Ah-h-h-h!'

He took a silent trot, after that, for a minute or two.

'There's nothing,' said Toby, breaking forth afresh - but here he
stopped short in his trot, and with a face of great interest and
some alarm, felt his nose carefully all the way up.  It was but a
little way (not being much of a nose) and he had soon finished.

'I thought it was gone,' said Toby, trotting off again.  'It's all
right, however.  I am sure I couldn't blame it if it was to go.  It
has a precious hard service of it in the bitter weather, and
precious little to look forward to; for I don't take snuff myself.
It's a good deal tried, poor creetur, at the best of times; for
when it DOES get hold of a pleasant whiff or so (which an't too
often) it's generally from somebody else's dinner, a-coming home
from the baker's.'

The reflection reminded him of that other reflection, which he had
left unfinished.

'There's nothing,' said Toby, 'more regular in its coming round
than dinner-time, and nothing less regular in its coming round than
dinner.  That's the great difference between 'em.  It's took me a
long time to find it out.  I wonder whether it would be worth any
gentleman's while, now, to buy that obserwation for the Papers; or
the Parliament!'

Toby was only joking, for he gravely shook his head in self-
depreciation.

'Why! Lord!' said Toby.  'The Papers is full of obserwations as it
is; and so's the Parliament.  Here's last week's paper, now;'
taking a very dirty one from his pocket, and holding it from him at
arm's length; 'full of obserwations!  Full of obserwations!  I like
to know the news as well as any man,' said Toby, slowly; folding it
a little smaller, and putting it in his pocket again:  'but it
almost goes against the grain with me to read a paper now.  It
frightens me almost.  I don't know what we poor people are coming
to.  Lord send we may be coming to something better in the New Year
nigh upon us!'

'Why, father, father!' said a pleasant voice, hard by.

But Toby, not hearing it, continued to trot backwards and forwards:
musing as he went, and talking to himself.

'It seems as if we can't go right, or do right, or be righted,'
said Toby.  'I hadn't much schooling, myself, when I was young; and
I can't make out whether we have any business on the face of the
earth, or not.  Sometimes I think we must have - a little; and
sometimes I think we must be intruding.  I get so puzzled sometimes
that I am not even able to make up my mind whether there is any
good at all in us, or whether we are born bad.  We seem to be
dreadful things; we seem to give a deal of trouble; we are always
being complained of and guarded against.  One way or other, we fill
the papers.  Talk of a New Year!' said Toby, mournfully.  'I can
bear up as well as another man at most times; better than a good
many, for I am as strong as a lion, and all men an't; but supposing
it should really be that we have no right to a New Year - supposing
we really ARE intruding - '

'Why, father, father!' said the pleasant voice again.

Toby heard it this time; started; stopped; and shortening his
sight, which had been directed a long way off as seeking the
enlightenment in the very heart of the approaching year, found
himself face to face with his own child, and looking close into her
eyes.

Bright eyes they were.  Eyes that would bear a world of looking in,
before their depth was fathomed.  Dark eyes, that reflected back
the eyes which searched them; not flashingly, or at the owner's
will, but with a clear, calm, honest, patient radiance, claiming
kindred with that light which Heaven called into being.  Eyes that
were beautiful and true, and beaming with Hope.  With Hope so young
and fresh; with Hope so buoyant, vigorous, and bright, despite the
twenty years of work and poverty on which they had looked; that
they became a voice to Trotty Veck, and said:  'I think we have
some business here - a little!'

Trotty kissed the lips belonging to the eyes, and squeezed the
blooming face between his hands.

'Why, Pet,' said Trotty.  'What's to do?  I didn't expect you to-
day, Meg.'

'Neither did I expect to come, father,' cried the girl, nodding her
head and smiling as she spoke.  'But here I am!  And not alone; not
alone!'

'Why you don't mean to say,' observed Trotty, looking curiously at
a covered basket which she carried in her hand, 'that you - '

'Smell it, father dear,' said Meg.  'Only smell it!'

Trotty was going to lift up the cover at once, in a great hurry,
when she gaily interposed her hand.

'No, no, no,' said Meg, with the glee of a child.  'Lengthen it out
a little.  Let me just lift up the corner; just the lit-tle ti-ny
cor-ner, you know,' said Meg, suiting the action to the word with
the utmost gentleness, and speaking very softly, as if she were
afraid of being overheard by something inside the basket; 'there.
Now.  What's that?'

Toby took the shortest possible sniff at the edge of the basket,
and cried out in a rapture:

'Why, it's hot!'

'It's burning hot!' cried Meg.  'Ha, ha, ha!  It's scalding hot!'

'Ha, ha, ha!' roared Toby, with a sort of kick.  'It's scalding
hot!'

'But what is it, father?' said Meg.  'Come.  You haven't guessed
what it is.  And you must guess what it is.  I can't think of
taking it out, till you guess what it is.  Don't be in such a
hurry!  Wait a minute!  A little bit more of the cover.  Now
guess!'

Meg was in a perfect fright lest he should guess right too soon;
shrinking away, as she held the basket towards him; curling up her
pretty shoulders; stopping her ear with her hand, as if by so doing
she could keep the right word out of Toby's lips; and laughing
softly the whole time.

Meanwhile Toby, putting a hand on each knee, bent down his nose to
the basket, and took a long inspiration at the lid; the grin upon
his withered face expanding in the process, as if he were inhaling
laughing gas.

'Ah!  It's very nice,' said Toby.  'It an't - I suppose it an't
Polonies?'

'No, no, no!' cried Meg, delighted.  'Nothing like Polonies!'

'No,' said Toby, after another sniff.  'It's - it's mellower than
Polonies.  It's very nice.  It improves every moment.  It's too
decided for Trotters.  An't it?'

Meg was in an ecstasy.  He could not have gone wider of the mark
than Trotters - except Polonies.

'Liver?' said Toby, communing with himself.  'No.  There's a
mildness about it that don't answer to liver.  Pettitoes?  No.  It
an't faint enough for pettitoes.  It wants the stringiness of
Cocks' heads.  And I know it an't sausages.  I'll tell you what it
is.  It's chitterlings!'

'No, it an't!' cried Meg, in a burst of delight.  'No, it an't!'

'Why, what am I a-thinking of!' said Toby, suddenly recovering a
position as near the perpendicular as it was possible for him to
assume.  'I shall forget my own name next.  It's tripe!'

Tripe it was; and Meg, in high joy, protested he should say, in
half a minute more, it was the best tripe ever stewed.

'And so,' said Meg, busying herself exultingly with the basket,
'I'll lay the cloth at once, father; for I have brought the tripe
in a basin, and tied the basin up in a pocket-handkerchief; and if
I like to be proud for once, and spread that for a cloth, and call
it a cloth, there's no law to prevent me; is there, father?'

'Not that I know of, my dear,' said Toby.  'But they're always a-
bringing up some new law or other.'

'And according to what I was reading you in the paper the other
day, father; what the Judge said, you know; we poor people are
supposed to know them all.  Ha ha!  What a mistake!  My goodness
me, how clever they think us!'

'Yes, my dear,' cried Trotty; 'and they'd be very fond of any one
of us that DID know 'em all.  He'd grow fat upon the work he'd get,
that man, and be popular with the gentlefolks in his neighbourhood.
Very much so!'

'He'd eat his dinner with an appetite, whoever he was, if it smelt
like this,' said Meg, cheerfully.  'Make haste, for there's a hot
potato besides, and half a pint of fresh-drawn beer in a bottle.
Where will you dine, father?  On the Post, or on the Steps?  Dear,
dear, how grand we are.  Two places to choose from!'

'The steps to-day, my Pet,' said Trotty.  'Steps in dry weather.
Post in wet.  There's a greater conveniency in the steps at all
times, because of the sitting down; but they're rheumatic in the
damp.'

'Then here,' said Meg, clapping her hands, after a moment's bustle;
'here it is, all ready!  And beautiful it looks!  Come, father.
Come!'

Since his discovery of the contents of the basket, Trotty had been
standing looking at her - and had been speaking too - in an
abstracted manner, which showed that though she was the object of
his thoughts and eyes, to the exclusion even of tripe, he neither
saw nor thought about her as she was at that moment, but had before
him some imaginary rough sketch or drama of her future life.
Roused, now, by her cheerful summons, he shook off a melancholy
shake of the head which was just coming upon him, and trotted to
her side.  As he was stooping to sit down, the Chimes rang.

'Amen!' said Trotty, pulling off his hat and looking up towards
them.

'Amen to the Bells, father?' cried Meg.

'They broke in like a grace, my dear,' said Trotty, taking his
seat.  'They'd say a good one, I am sure, if they could.  Many's
the kind thing they say to me.'

'The Bells do, father!' laughed Meg, as she set the basin, and a
knife and fork, before him.  'Well!'

'Seem to, my Pet,' said Trotty, falling to with great vigour.  'And
where's the difference?  If I hear 'em, what does it matter whether
they speak it or not?  Why bless you, my dear,' said Toby, pointing
at the tower with his fork, and becoming more animated under the
influence of dinner, 'how often have I heard them bells say, "Toby
Veck, Toby Veck, keep a good heart, Toby!  Toby Veck, Toby Veck,
keep a good heart, Toby!"  A million times?  More!'

'Well, I never!' cried Meg.

She had, though - over and over again.  For it was Toby's constant
topic.

'When things is very bad,' said Trotty; 'very bad indeed, I mean;
almost at the worst; then it's "Toby Veck, Toby Veck, job coming
soon, Toby!  Toby Veck, Toby Veck, job coming soon, Toby!"  That
way.'

'And it comes - at last, father,' said Meg, with a touch of sadness
in her pleasant voice.

'Always,' answered the unconscious Toby.  'Never fails.'

While this discourse was holding, Trotty made no pause in his
attack upon the savoury meat before him, but cut and ate, and cut
and drank, and cut and chewed, and dodged about, from tripe to hot
potato, and from hot potato back again to tripe, with an unctuous
and unflagging relish.  But happening now to look all round the
street - in case anybody should be beckoning from any door or
window, for a porter - his eyes, in coming back again, encountered
Meg:  sitting opposite to him, with her arms folded and only busy
in watching his progress with a smile of happiness.

'Why, Lord forgive me!' said Trotty, dropping his knife and fork.
'My dove!  Meg! why didn't you tell me what a beast I was?'

'Father?'

'Sitting here,' said Trotty, in penitent explanation, 'cramming,
and stuffing, and gorging myself; and you before me there, never so
much as breaking your precious fast, nor wanting to, when - '

'But I have broken it, father,' interposed his daughter, laughing,
'all to bits.  I have had my dinner.'

'Nonsense,' said Trotty.  'Two dinners in one day!  It an't
possible!  You might as well tell me that two New Year's Days will
come together, or that I have had a gold head all my life, and
never changed it.'

'I have had my dinner, father, for all that,' said Meg, coming
nearer to him.  'And if you'll go on with yours, I'll tell you how
and where; and how your dinner came to be brought; and - and
something else besides.'

Toby still appeared incredulous; but she looked into his face with
her clear eyes, and laying her hand upon his shoulder, motioned him
to go on while the meat was hot.  So Trotty took up his knife and
fork again, and went to work.  But much more slowly than before,
and shaking his head, as if he were not at all pleased with
himself.

'I had my dinner, father,' said Meg, after a little hesitation,
'with - with Richard.  His dinner-time was early; and as he brought
his dinner with him when he came to see me, we - we had it
together, father.'

Trotty took a little beer, and smacked his lips.  Then he said,
'Oh!' - because she waited.

'And Richard says, father - ' Meg resumed.  Then stopped.

'What does Richard say, Meg?' asked Toby.

'Richard says, father - '  Another stoppage.

'Richard's a long time saying it,' said Toby.

'He says then, father,' Meg continued, lifting up her eyes at last,
and speaking in a tremble, but quite plainly; 'another year is
nearly gone, and where is the use of waiting on from year to year,
when it is so unlikely we shall ever be better off than we are now?
He says we are poor now, father, and we shall be poor then, but we
are young now, and years will make us old before we know it.  He
says that if we wait:  people in our condition:  until we see our
way quite clearly, the way will be a narrow one indeed - the common
way - the Grave, father.'

A bolder man than Trotty Veck must needs have drawn upon his
boldness largely, to deny it.  Trotty held his peace.

'And how hard, father, to grow old, and die, and think we might
have cheered and helped each other!  How hard in all our lives to
love each other; and to grieve, apart, to see each other working,
changing, growing old and grey.  Even if I got the better of it,
and forgot him (which I never could), oh father dear, how hard to
have a heart so full as mine is now, and live to have it slowly
drained out every drop, without the recollection of one happy
moment of a woman's life, to stay behind and comfort me, and make
me better!'

Trotty sat quite still.  Meg dried her eyes, and said more gaily:
that is to say, with here a laugh, and there a sob, and here a
laugh and sob together:

'So Richard says, father; as his work was yesterday made certain
for some time to come, and as I love him, and have loved him full
three years - ah! longer than that, if he knew it! - will I marry
him on New Year's Day; the best and happiest day, he says, in the
whole year, and one that is almost sure to bring good fortune with
it.  It's a short notice, father - isn't it? - but I haven't my
fortune to be settled, or my wedding dresses to be made, like the
great ladies, father, have I?  And he said so much, and said it in
his way; so strong and earnest, and all the time so kind and
gentle; that I said I'd come and talk to you, father.  And as they
paid the money for that work of mine this morning (unexpectedly, I
am sure!) and as you have fared very poorly for a whole week, and
as I couldn't help wishing there should be something to make this
day a sort of holiday to you as well as a dear and happy day to me,
father, I made a little treat and brought it to surprise you.'

'And see how he leaves it cooling on the step!' said another voice.

It was the voice of this same Richard, who had come upon them
unobserved, and stood before the father and daughter; looking down
upon them with a face as glowing as the iron on which his stout
sledge-hammer daily rung.  A handsome, well-made, powerful
youngster he was; with eyes that sparkled like the red-hot
droppings from a furnace fire; black hair that curled about his
swarthy temples rarely; and a smile - a smile that bore out Meg's
eulogium on his style of conversation.

'See how he leaves it cooling on the step!' said Richard.  'Meg
don't know what he likes.  Not she!'

Trotty, all action and enthusiasm, immediately reached up his hand
to Richard, and was going to address him in great hurry, when the
house-door opened without any warning, and a footman very nearly
put his foot into the tripe.

'Out of the ways here, will you!  You must always go and be a-
settin on our steps, must you!  You can't go and give a turn to
none of the neighbours never, can't you!  WILL you clear the road,
or won't you?'

Strictly speaking, the last question was irrelevant, as they had
already done it.

'What's the matter, what's the matter!' said the gentleman for whom
the door was opened; coming out of the house at that kind of light-
heavy pace - that peculiar compromise between a walk and a jog-trot
- with which a gentleman upon the smooth down-hill of life, wearing
creaking boots, a watch-chain, and clean linen, MAY come out of his
house:  not only without any abatement of his dignity, but with an
expression of having important and wealthy engagements elsewhere.
'What's the matter!  What's the matter!'

'You're always a-being begged, and prayed, upon your bended knees
you are,' said the footman with great emphasis to Trotty Veck, 'to
let our door-steps be.  Why don't you let 'em be?  CAN'T you let
'em be?'

'There!  That'll do, that'll do!' said the gentleman.  'Halloa
there!  Porter!' beckoning with his head to Trotty Veck.  'Come
here.  What's that?  Your dinner?'

'Yes, sir,' said Trotty, leaving it behind him in a corner.

'Don't leave it there,' exclaimed the gentleman.  'Bring it here,
bring it here.  So!  This is your dinner, is it?'

'Yes, sir,' repeated Trotty, looking with a fixed eye and a watery
mouth, at the piece of tripe he had reserved for a last delicious
tit-bit; which the gentleman was now turning over and over on the
end of the fork.

Two other gentlemen had come out with him.  One was a low-spirited
gentleman of middle age, of a meagre habit, and a disconsolate
face; who kept his hands continually in the pockets of his scanty
pepper-and-salt trousers, very large and dog's-eared from that
custom; and was not particularly well brushed or washed.  The
other, a full-sized, sleek, well-conditioned gentleman, in a blue
coat with bright buttons, and a white cravat.  This gentleman had a
very red face, as if an undue proportion of the blood in his body
were squeezed up into his head; which perhaps accounted for his
having also the appearance of being rather cold about the heart.

He who had Toby's meat upon the fork, called to the first one by
the name of Filer; and they both drew near together.  Mr. Filer
being exceedingly short-sighted, was obliged to go so close to the
remnant of Toby's dinner before he could make out what it was, that
Toby's heart leaped up into his mouth.  But Mr. Filer didn't eat
it.

'This is a description of animal food, Alderman,' said Filer,
making little punches in it with a pencil-case, 'commonly known to
the labouring population of this country, by the name of tripe.'

The Alderman laughed, and winked; for he was a merry fellow,
Alderman Cute.  Oh, and a sly fellow too!  A knowing fellow.  Up to
everything.  Not to be imposed upon.  Deep in the people's hearts!
He knew them, Cute did.  I believe you!

'But who eats tripe?' said Mr. Filer, looking round.  'Tripe is
without an exception the least economical, and the most wasteful
article of consumption that the markets of this country can by
possibility produce.  The loss upon a pound of tripe has been found
to be, in the boiling, seven-eights of a fifth more than the loss
upon a pound of any other animal substance whatever.  Tripe is more
expensive, properly understood, than the hothouse pine-apple.
Taking into account the number of animals slaughtered yearly within
the bills of mortality alone; and forming a low estimate of the
quantity of tripe which the carcases of those animals, reasonably
well butchered, would yield; I find that the waste on that amount
of tripe, if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men
for five months of thirty-one days each, and a February over.  The
Waste, the Waste!'

Trotty stood aghast, and his legs shook under him.  He seemed to
have starved a garrison of five hundred men with his own hand.

'Who eats tripe?' said Mr. Filer, warmly.  'Who eats tripe?'

Trotty made a miserable bow.

'You do, do you?' said Mr. Filer.  'Then I'll tell you something.
You snatch your tripe, my friend, out of the mouths of widows and
orphans.'

'I hope not, sir,' said Trotty, faintly.  'I'd sooner die of want!'

'Divide the amount of tripe before-mentioned, Alderman,' said Mr.
Filer, 'by the estimated number of existing widows and orphans, and
the result will be one pennyweight of tripe to each.  Not a grain
is left for that man.  Consequently, he's a robber.'

Trotty was so shocked, that it gave him no concern to see the
Alderman finish the tripe himself.  It was a relief to get rid of
it, anyhow.

'And what do you say?' asked the Alderman, jocosely, of the red-
faced gentleman in the blue coat.  'You have heard friend Filer.
What do YOU SAY?'

'What's it possible to say?' returned the gentleman.  'What IS to
be said?  Who can take any interest in a fellow like this,' meaning
Trotty; 'in such degenerate times as these?  Look at him.  What an
object!  The good old times, the grand old times, the great old
times!  THOSE were the times for a bold peasantry, and all that
sort of thing.  Those were the times for every sort of thing, in
fact.  There's nothing now-a-days.  Ah!' sighed the red-faced
gentleman.  'The good old times, the good old times!'

The gentleman didn't specify what particular times he alluded to;
nor did he say whether he objected to the present times, from a
disinterested consciousness that they had done nothing very
remarkable in producing himself.

'The good old times, the good old times,' repeated the gentleman.
'What times they were!  They were the only times.  It's of no use
talking about any other times, or discussing what the people are in
THESE times.  You don't call these times, do you?  I don't.  Look
into Strutt's Costumes, and see what a Porter used to be, in any of
the good old English reigns.'

'He hadn't, in his very best circumstances, a shirt to his back, or
a stocking to his foot; and there was scarcely a vegetable in all
England for him to put into his mouth,' said Mr. Filer.  'I can
prove it, by tables.'

But still the red-faced gentleman extolled the good old times, the
grand old times, the great old times.  No matter what anybody else
said, he still went turning round and round in one set form of
words concerning them; as a poor squirrel turns and turns in its
revolving cage; touching the mechanism, and trick of which, it has
probably quite as distinct perceptions, as ever this red-faced
gentleman had of his deceased Millennium.

It is possible that poor Trotty's faith in these very vague Old
Times was not entirely destroyed, for he felt vague enough at that
moment.  One thing, however, was plain to him, in the midst of his
distress; to wit, that however these gentlemen might differ in
details, his misgivings of that morning, and of many other
mornings, were well founded.  'No, no.  We can't go right or do
right,' thought Trotty in despair.  'There is no good in us.  We
are born bad!'

But Trotty had a father's heart within him; which had somehow got
into his breast in spite of this decree; and he could not bear that
Meg, in the blush of her brief joy, should have her fortune read by
these wise gentlemen.  'God help her,' thought poor Trotty.  'She
will know it soon enough.'

He anxiously signed, therefore, to the young smith, to take her
away.  But he was so busy, talking to her softly at a little
distance, that he only became conscious of this desire,
simultaneously with Alderman Cute.  Now, the Alderman had not yet
had his say, but HE was a philosopher, too - practical, though!
Oh, very practical - and, as he had no idea of losing any portion
of his audience, he cried 'Stop!'

'Now, you know,' said the Alderman, addressing his two friends,
with a self-complacent smile upon his face which was habitual to
him, 'I am a plain man, and a practical man; and I go to work in a
plain practical way.  That's my way.  There is not the least
mystery or difficulty in dealing with this sort of people if you
only understand 'em, and can talk to 'em in their own manner.  Now,
you Porter!  Don't you ever tell me, or anybody else, my friend,
that you haven't always enough to eat, and of the best; because I
know better.  I have tasted your tripe, you know, and you can't
"chaff" me.  You understand what "chaff" means, eh?  That's the
right word, isn't it?  Ha, ha, ha! Lord bless you,' said the
Alderman, turning to his friends again, 'it's the easiest thing on
earth to deal with this sort of people, if you understand 'em.'

Famous man for the common people, Alderman Cute!  Never out of
temper with them!  Easy, affable, joking, knowing gentleman!

'You see, my friend,' pursued the Alderman, 'there's a great deal
of nonsense talked about Want - "hard up," you know; that's the
phrase, isn't it? ha! ha! ha! - and I intend to Put it Down.
There's a certain amount of cant in vogue about Starvation, and I
mean to Put it Down.  That's all!  Lord bless you,' said the
Alderman, turning to his friends again, 'you may Put Down anything
among this sort of people, if you only know the way to set about
it.'

Trotty took Meg's hand and drew it through his arm.  He didn't seem
to know what he was doing though.

'Your daughter, eh?' said the Alderman, chucking her familiarly
under the chin.

Always affable with the working classes, Alderman Cute!  Knew what
pleased them!  Not a bit of pride!

'Where's her mother?' asked that worthy gentleman.

'Dead,' said Toby.  'Her mother got up linen; and was called to
Heaven when She was born.'

'Not to get up linen THERE, I suppose,' remarked the Alderman
pleasantly

Toby might or might not have been able to separate his wife in
Heaven from her old pursuits.  But query:  If Mrs. Alderman Cute
had gone to Heaven, would Mr. Alderman Cute have pictured her as
holding any state or station there?

'And you're making love to her, are you?' said Cute to the young
smith.

'Yes,' returned Richard quickly, for he was nettled by the
question.  'And we are going to be married on New Year's Day.'

'What do you mean!' cried Filer sharply.  'Married!'

'Why, yes, we're thinking of it, Master,' said Richard.  'We're
rather in a hurry, you see, in case it should be Put Down first.'

'Ah!' cried Filer, with a groan.  'Put THAT down indeed, Alderman,
and you'll do something.  Married!  Married!!  The ignorance of the
first principles of political economy on the part of these people;
their improvidence; their wickedness; is, by Heavens! enough to -
Now look at that couple, will you!'

Well?  They were worth looking at.  And marriage seemed as
reasonable and fair a deed as they need have in contemplation.

'A man may live to be as old as Methuselah,' said Mr. Filer, 'and
may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those;
and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on
figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to
persuade 'em that they have no right or business to be married,
than he can hope to persuade 'em that they have no earthly right or
business to be born.  And THAT we know they haven't.  We reduced it
to a mathematical certainty long ago!'

Alderman Cute was mightily diverted, and laid his right forefinger
on the side of his nose, as much as to say to both his friends,
'Observe me, will you!  Keep your eye on the practical man!' - and
called Meg to him.

'Come here, my girl!' said Alderman Cute.

The young blood of her lover had been mounting, wrathfully, within
the last few minutes; and he was indisposed to let her come.  But,
setting a constraint upon himself, he came forward with a stride as
Meg approached, and stood beside her.  Trotty kept her hand within
his arm still, but looked from face to face as wildly as a sleeper
in a dream.

'Now, I'm going to give you a word or two of good advice, my girl,'
said the Alderman, in his nice easy way.  'It's my place to give
advice, you know, because I'm a Justice.  You know I'm a Justice,
don't you?'

Meg timidly said, 'Yes.'  But everybody knew Alderman Cute was a
Justice!  Oh dear, so active a Justice always!  Who such a mote of
brightness in the public eye, as Cute!

'You are going to be married, you say,' pursued the Alderman.
'Very unbecoming and indelicate in one of your sex!  But never mind
that.  After you are married, you'll quarrel with your husband and
come to be a distressed wife.  You may think not; but you will,
because I tell you so.  Now, I give you fair warning, that I have
made up my mind to Put distressed wives Down.  So, don't be brought
before me.  You'll have children - boys.  Those boys will grow up
bad, of course, and run wild in the streets, without shoes and
stockings.  Mind, my young friend!  I'll convict 'em summarily,
every one, for I am determined to Put boys without shoes and
stockings, Down.  Perhaps your husband will die young (most likely)
and leave you with a baby.  Then you'll be turned out of doors, and
wander up and down the streets.  Now, don't wander near me, my
dear, for I am resolved, to Put all wandering mothers Down.  All
young mothers, of all sorts and kinds, it's my determination to Put
Down.  Don't think to plead illness as an excuse with me; or babies
as an excuse with me; for all sick persons and young children (I
hope you know the church-service, but I'm afraid not) I am
determined to Put Down.  And if you attempt, desperately, and
ungratefully, and impiously, and fraudulently attempt, to drown
yourself, or hang yourself, I'll have no pity for you, for I have
made up my mind to Put all suicide Down!  If there is one thing,'
said the Alderman, with his self-satisfied smile, 'on which I can
be said to have made up my mind more than on another, it is to Put
suicide Down.  So don't try it on.  That's the phrase, isn't it?
Ha, ha! now we understand each other.'

Toby knew not whether to be agonised or glad, to see that Meg had
turned a deadly white, and dropped her lover's hand.

'And as for you, you dull dog,' said the Alderman, turning with
even increased cheerfulness and urbanity to the young smith, 'what
are you thinking of being married for?  What do you want to be
married for, you silly fellow?  If I was a fine, young, strapping
chap like you, I should be ashamed of being milksop enough to pin
myself to a woman's apron-strings!  Why, she'll be an old woman
before you're a middle-aged man!  And a pretty figure you'll cut
then, with a draggle-tailed wife and a crowd of squalling children
crying after you wherever you go!'

O, he knew how to banter the common people, Alderman Cute!

'There!  Go along with you,' said the Alderman, 'and repent.  Don't
make such a fool of yourself as to get married on New Year's Day.
You'll think very differently of it, long before next New Year's
Day:  a trim young fellow like you, with all the girls looking
after you.  There!  Go along with you!'

They went along.  Not arm in arm, or hand in hand, or interchanging
bright glances; but, she in tears; he, gloomy and down-looking.
Were these the hearts that had so lately made old Toby's leap up
from its faintness?  No, no.  The Alderman (a blessing on his
head!) had Put THEM Down.

'As you happen to be here,' said the Alderman to Toby, 'you shall
carry a letter for me.  Can you be quick?  You're an old man.'

Toby, who had been looking after Meg, quite stupidly, made shift to
murmur out that he was very quick, and very strong.

'How old are you?' inquired the Alderman.

'I'm over sixty, sir,' said Toby.

'O!  This man's a great deal past the average age, you know,' cried
Mr. Filer breaking in as if his patience would bear some trying,
but this really was carrying matters a little too far.

'I feel I'm intruding, sir,' said Toby.  'I - I misdoubted it this
morning.  Oh dear me!'

The Alderman cut him short by giving him the letter from his
pocket.  Toby would have got a shilling too; but Mr. Filer clearly
showing that in that case he would rob a certain given number of
persons of ninepence-halfpenny a-piece, he only got sixpence; and
thought himself very well off to get that.

Then the Alderman gave an arm to each of his friends, and walked
off in high feather; but, he immediately came hurrying back alone,
as if he had forgotten something.

'Porter!' said the Alderman.

'Sir!' said Toby.

'Take care of that daughter of yours.  She's much too handsome.'

'Even her good looks are stolen from somebody or other, I suppose,'
thought Toby, looking at the sixpence in his hand, and thinking of
the tripe.  'She's been and robbed five hundred ladies of a bloom
a-piece, I shouldn't wonder.  It's very dreadful!'

'She's much too handsome, my man,' repeated the Alderman.  'The
chances are, that she'll come to no good, I clearly see.  Observe
what I say.  Take care of her!'  With which, he hurried off again.

'Wrong every way.  Wrong every way!' said Trotty, clasping his
hands.  'Born bad.  No business here!'

The Chimes came clashing in upon him as he said the words.  Full,
loud, and sounding - but with no encouragement.  No, not a drop.

'The tune's changed,' cried the old man, as he listened.  'There's
not a word of all that fancy in it.  Why should there be?  I have
no business with the New Year nor with the old one neither.  Let me
die!'

Still the Bells, pealing forth their changes, made the very air
spin.  Put 'em down, Put 'em down!  Good old Times, Good old Times!
Facts and Figures, Facts and Figures!  Put 'em down, Put 'em down!
If they said anything they said this, until the brain of Toby
reeled.

He pressed his bewildered head between his hands, as if to keep it
from splitting asunder.  A well-timed action, as it happened; for
finding the letter in one of them, and being by that means reminded
of his charge, he fell, mechanically, into his usual trot, and
trotted off.



CHAPTER II - The Second Quarter.



THE letter Toby had received from Alderman Cute, was addressed to a
great man in the great district of the town.  The greatest district
of the town.  It must have been the greatest district of the town,
because it was commonly called 'the world' by its inhabitants.  The
letter positively seemed heavier in Toby's hand, than another
letter.  Not because the Alderman had sealed it with a very large
coat of arms and no end of wax, but because of the weighty name on
the superscription, and the ponderous amount of gold and silver
with which it was associated.

'How different from us!' thought Toby, in all simplicity and
earnestness, as he looked at the direction.  'Divide the lively
turtles in the bills of mortality, by the number of gentlefolks
able to buy 'em; and whose share does he take but his own!  As to
snatching tripe from anybody's mouth - he'd scorn it!'

With the involuntary homage due to such an exalted character, Toby
interposed a corner of his apron between the letter and his
fingers.

'His children,' said Trotty, and a mist rose before his eyes; 'his
daughters - Gentlemen may win their hearts and marry them; they may
be happy wives and mothers; they may be handsome like my darling M-
e-'.

He couldn't finish the name.  The final letter swelled in his
throat, to the size of the whole alphabet.

'Never mind,' thought Trotty.  'I know what I mean.  That's more
than enough for me.'  And with this consolatory rumination, trotted
on.

It was a hard frost, that day.  The air was bracing, crisp, and
clear.  The wintry sun, though powerless for warmth, looked
brightly down upon the ice it was too weak to melt, and set a
radiant glory there.  At other times, Trotty might have learned a
poor man's lesson from the wintry sun; but, he was past that, now.

The Year was Old, that day.  The patient Year had lived through the
reproaches and misuses of its slanderers, and faithfully performed
its work.  Spring, summer, autumn, winter.  It had laboured through
the destined round, and now laid down its weary head to die.  Shut
out from hope, high impulse, active happiness, itself, but active
messenger of many joys to others, it made appeal in its decline to
have its toiling days and patient hours remembered, and to die in
peace.  Trotty might have read a poor man's allegory in the fading
year; but he was past that, now.

And only he?  Or has the like appeal been ever made, by seventy
years at once upon an English labourer's head, and made in vain!

The streets were full of motion, and the shops were decked out
gaily.  The New Year, like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was
waited for, with welcomes, presents, and rejoicings.  There were
books and toys for the New Year, glittering trinkets for the New
Year, dresses for the New Year, schemes of fortune for the New
Year; new inventions to beguile it.  Its life was parcelled out in
almanacks and pocket-books; the coming of its moons, and stars, and
tides, was known beforehand to the moment; all the workings of its
seasons in their days and nights, were calculated with as much
precision as Mr. Filer could work sums in men and women.

The New Year, the New Year.  Everywhere the New Year!  The Old Year
was already looked upon as dead; and its effects were selling
cheap, like some drowned mariner's aboardship.  Its patterns were
Last Year's, and going at a sacrifice, before its breath was gone.
Its treasures were mere dirt, beside the riches of its unborn
successor!

Trotty had no portion, to his thinking, in the New Year or the Old.

'Put 'em down, Put 'em down!  Facts and Figures, Facts and Figures!
Good old Times, Good old Times!  Put 'em down, Put 'em down!' - his
trot went to that measure, and would fit itself to nothing else.

But, even that one, melancholy as it was, brought him, in due time,
to the end of his journey.  To the mansion of Sir Joseph Bowley,
Member of Parliament.

The door was opened by a Porter.  Such a Porter!  Not of Toby's
order.  Quite another thing.  His place was the ticket though; not
Toby's.

This Porter underwent some hard panting before he could speak;
having breathed himself by coming incautiously out of his chair,
without first taking time to think about it and compose his mind.
When he had found his voice - which it took him a long time to do,
for it was a long way off, and hidden under a load of meat - he
said in a fat whisper,

'Who's it from?'

Toby told him.

'You're to take it in, yourself,' said the Porter, pointing to a
room at the end of a long passage, opening from the hall.
'Everything goes straight in, on this day of the year.  You're not
a bit too soon; for the carriage is at the door now, and they have
only come to town for a couple of hours, a' purpose.'

Toby wiped his feet (which were quite dry already) with great care,
and took the way pointed out to him; observing as he went that it
was an awfully grand house, but hushed and covered up, as if the
family were in the country.  Knocking at the room-door, he was told
to enter from within; and doing so found himself in a spacious
library, where, at a table strewn with files and papers, were a
stately lady in a bonnet; and a not very stately gentleman in black
who wrote from her dictation; while another, and an older, and a
much statelier gentleman, whose hat and cane were on the table,
walked up and down, with one hand in his breast, and looked
complacently from time to time at his own picture - a full length;
a very full length - hanging over the fireplace.

'What is this?' said the last-named gentleman.  'Mr. Fish, will you
have the goodness to attend?'

Mr. Fish begged pardon, and taking the letter from Toby, handed it,
with great respect.

'From Alderman Cute, Sir Joseph.'

'Is this all?  Have you nothing else, Porter?' inquired Sir Joseph.

Toby replied in the negative.

'You have no bill or demand upon me - my name is Bowley, Sir Joseph
Bowley - of any kind from anybody, have you?' said Sir Joseph.  'If
you have, present it.  There is a cheque-book by the side of Mr.
Fish.  I allow nothing to be carried into the New Year.  Every
description of account is settled in this house at the close of the
old one.  So that if death was to - to - '

'To cut,' suggested Mr. Fish.

'To sever, sir,' returned Sir Joseph, with great asperity, 'the
cord of existence - my affairs would be found, I hope, in a state
of preparation.'

'My dear Sir Joseph!' said the lady, who was greatly younger than
the gentleman.  'How shocking!'

'My lady Bowley,' returned Sir Joseph, floundering now and then, as
in the great depth of his observations, 'at this season of the year
we should think of - of - ourselves.  We should look into our - our
accounts.  We should feel that every return of so eventful a period
in human transactions, involves a matter of deep moment between a
man and his - and his banker.'

Sir Joseph delivered these words as if he felt the full morality of
what he was saying; and desired that even Trotty should have an
opportunity of being improved by such discourse.  Possibly he had
this end before him in still forbearing to break the seal of the
letter, and in telling Trotty to wait where he was, a minute.

'You were desiring Mr. Fish to say, my lady - ' observed Sir
Joseph.

'Mr. Fish has said that, I believe,' returned his lady, glancing at
the letter.  'But, upon my word, Sir Joseph, I don't think I can
let it go after all.  It is so very dear.'

'What is dear?' inquired Sir Joseph.

'That Charity, my love.  They only allow two votes for a
subscription of five pounds.  Really monstrous!'

'My lady Bowley,' returned Sir Joseph, 'you surprise me.  Is the
luxury of feeling in proportion to the number of votes; or is it,
to a rightly constituted mind, in proportion to the number of
applicants, and the wholesome state of mind to which their
canvassing reduces them?  Is there no excitement of the purest kind
in having two votes to dispose of among fifty people?'

'Not to me, I acknowledge,' replied the lady.  'It bores one.
Besides, one can't oblige one's acquaintance.  But you are the Poor
Man's Friend, you know, Sir Joseph.  You think otherwise.'

'I AM the Poor Man's Friend,' observed Sir Joseph, glancing at the
poor man present.  'As such I may be taunted.  As such I have been
taunted.  But I ask no other title.'

'Bless him for a noble gentleman!' thought Trotty.

'I don't agree with Cute here, for instance,' said Sir Joseph,
holding out the letter.  'I don't agree with the Filer party.  I
don't agree with any party.  My friend the Poor Man, has no
business with anything of that sort, and nothing of that sort has
any business with him.  My friend the Poor Man, in my district, is
my business.  No man or body of men has any right to interfere
between my friend and me.  That is the ground I take.  I assume a -
a paternal character towards my friend.  I say, "My good fellow, I
will treat you paternally."'

Toby listened with great gravity, and began to feel more
comfortable.

'Your only business, my good fellow,' pursued Sir Joseph, looking
abstractedly at Toby; 'your only business in life is with me.  You
needn't trouble yourself to think about anything.  I will think for
you; I know what is good for you; I am your perpetual parent.  Such
is the dispensation of an all-wise Providence!  Now, the design of
your creation is - not that you should swill, and guzzle, and
associate your enjoyments, brutally, with food; Toby thought
remorsefully of the tripe; 'but that you should feel the Dignity of
Labour.  Go forth erect into the cheerful morning air, and - and
stop there.  Live hard and temperately, be respectful, exercise
your self-denial, bring up your family on next to nothing, pay your
rent as regularly as the clock strikes, be punctual in your
dealings (I set you a good example; you will find Mr. Fish, my
confidential secretary, with a cash-box before him at all times);
and you may trust to me to be your Friend and Father.'

'Nice children, indeed, Sir Joseph!' said the lady, with a shudder.
'Rheumatisms, and fevers, and crooked legs, and asthmas, and all
kinds of horrors!'

'My lady,' returned Sir Joseph, with solemnity, 'not the less am I
the Poor Man's Friend and Father.  Not the less shall he receive
encouragement at my hands.  Every quarter-day he will be put in
communication with Mr. Fish.  Every New Year's Day, myself and
friends will drink his health.  Once every year, myself and friends
will address him with the deepest feeling.  Once in his life, he
may even perhaps receive; in public, in the presence of the gentry;
a Trifle from a Friend.  And when, upheld no more by these
stimulants, and the Dignity of Labour, he sinks into his
comfortable grave, then, my lady' - here Sir Joseph blew his nose -
'I will be a Friend and a Father - on the same terms - to his
children.'

Toby was greatly moved.

'O! You have a thankful family, Sir Joseph!' cried his wife.

'My lady,' said Sir Joseph, quite majestically, 'Ingratitude is
known to be the sin of that class.  I expect no other return.'

'Ah!  Born bad!' thought Toby.  'Nothing melts us.'

'What man can do, I do,' pursued Sir Joseph.  'I do my duty as the
Poor Man's Friend and Father; and I endeavour to educate his mind,
by inculcating on all occasions the one great moral lesson which
that class requires.  That is, entire Dependence on myself.  They
have no business whatever with - with themselves.  If wicked and
designing persons tell them otherwise, and they become impatient
and discontented, and are guilty of insubordinate conduct and
black-hearted ingratitude; which is undoubtedly the case; I am
their Friend and Father still.  It is so Ordained.  It is in the
nature of things.'

With that great sentiment, he opened the Alderman's letter; and
read it.

'Very polite and attentive, I am sure!' exclaimed Sir Joseph.  'My
lady, the Alderman is so obliging as to remind me that he has had
"the distinguished honour" - he is very good - of meeting me at the
house of our mutual friend Deedles, the banker; and he does me the
favour to inquire whether it will be agreeable to me to have Will
Fern put down.'

'MOST agreeable!' replied my Lady Bowley.  'The worst man among
them!  He has been committing a robbery, I hope?'

'Why no,' said Sir Joseph', referring to the letter.  'Not quite.
Very near.  Not quite.  He came up to London, it seems, to look for
employment (trying to better himself - that's his story), and being
found at night asleep in a shed, was taken into custody, and
carried next morning before the Alderman.  The Alderman observes
(very properly) that he is determined to put this sort of thing
down; and that if it will be agreeable to me to have Will Fern put
down, he will be happy to begin with him.'

'Let him be made an example of, by all means,' returned the lady.
'Last winter, when I introduced pinking and eyelet-holing among the
men and boys in the village, as a nice evening employment, and had
the lines,


O let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations,


set to music on the new system, for them to sing the while; this
very Fern - I see him now - touched that hat of his, and said, "I
humbly ask your pardon, my lady, but AN'T I something different
from a great girl?"  I expected it, of course; who can expect
anything but insolence and ingratitude from that class of people!
That is not to the purpose, however.  Sir Joseph!  Make an example
of him!'

'Hem!' coughed Sir Joseph.  'Mr. Fish, if you'll have the goodness
to attend - '

Mr. Fish immediately seized his pen, and wrote from Sir Joseph's
dictation.

'Private.  My dear Sir.  I am very much indebted to you for your
courtesy in the matter of the man William Fern, of whom, I regret
to add, I can say nothing favourable.  I have uniformly considered
myself in the light of his Friend and Father, but have been repaid
(a common case, I grieve to say) with ingratitude, and constant
opposition to my plans.  He is a turbulent and rebellious spirit.
His character will not bear investigation.  Nothing will persuade
him to be happy when he might.  Under these circumstances, it
appears to me, I own, that when he comes before you again (as you
informed me he promised to do to-morrow, pending your inquiries,
and I think he may be so far relied upon), his committal for some
short term as a Vagabond, would be a service to society, and would
be a salutary example in a country where - for the sake of those
who are, through good and evil report, the Friends and Fathers of
the Poor, as well as with a view to that, generally speaking,
misguided class themselves - examples are greatly needed.  And I
am,' and so forth.

'It appears,' remarked Sir Joseph when he had signed this letter,
and Mr. Fish was sealing it, 'as if this were Ordained:  really.
At the close of the year, I wind up my account and strike my
balance, even with William Fern!'

Trotty, who had long ago relapsed, and was very low-spirited,
stepped forward with a rueful face to take the letter.

'With my compliments and thanks,' said Sir Joseph.  'Stop!'

'Stop!' echoed Mr. Fish.

'You have heard, perhaps,' said Sir Joseph, oracularly, 'certain
remarks into which I have been led respecting the solemn period of
time at which we have arrived, and the duty imposed upon us of
settling our affairs, and being prepared.  You have observed that I
don't shelter myself behind my superior standing in society, but
that Mr. Fish - that gentleman - has a cheque-book at his elbow,
and is in fact here, to enable me to turn over a perfectly new
leaf, and enter on the epoch before us with a clean account.  Now,
my friend, can you lay your hand upon your heart, and say, that you
also have made preparations for a New Year?'

'I am afraid, sir,' stammered Trotty, looking meekly at him, 'that
I am a - a - little behind-hand with the world.'

' Behind-hand with the world!' repeated Sir Joseph Bowley, in a
tone of terrible distinctness.

'I am afraid, sir,' faltered Trotty, 'that there's a matter of ten
or twelve shillings owing to Mrs. Chickenstalker.'

'To Mrs. Chickenstalker!' repeated Sir Joseph, in the same tone as
before.

'A shop, sir,' exclaimed Toby, 'in the general line.  Also a - a
little money on account of rent.  A very little, sir.  It oughtn't
to be owing, I know, but we have been hard put to it, indeed!'

Sir Joseph looked at his lady, and at Mr. Fish, and at Trotty, one
after another, twice all round.  He then made a despondent gesture
with both hands at once, as if he gave the thing up altogether.

'How a man, even among this improvident and impracticable race; an
old man; a man grown grey; can look a New Year in the face, with
his affairs in this condition; how he can lie down on his bed at
night, and get up again in the morning, and - There!' he said,
turning his back on Trotty.  'Take the letter.  Take the letter!'

'I heartily wish it was otherwise, sir,' said Trotty, anxious to
excuse himself.  'We have been tried very hard.'

Sir Joseph still repeating 'Take the letter, take the letter!' and
Mr. Fish not only saying the same thing, but giving additional
force to the request by motioning the bearer to the door, he had
nothing for it but to make his bow and leave the house.  And in the
street, poor Trotty pulled his worn old hat down on his head, to
hide the grief he felt at getting no hold on the New Year,
anywhere.

He didn't even lift his hat to look up at the Bell tower when he
came to the old church on his return.  He halted there a moment,
from habit:  and knew that it was growing dark, and that the
steeple rose above him, indistinct and faint, in the murky air.  He
knew, too, that the Chimes would ring immediately; and that they
sounded to his fancy, at such a time, like voices in the clouds.
But he only made the more haste to deliver the Alderman's letter,
and get out of the way before they began; for he dreaded to hear
them tagging 'Friends and Fathers, Friends and Fathers,' to the
burden they had rung out last.

Toby discharged himself of his commission, therefore, with all
possible speed, and set off trotting homeward.  But what with his
pace, which was at best an awkward one in the street; and what with
his hat, which didn't improve it; he trotted against somebody in
less than no time, and was sent staggering out into the road.

'I beg your pardon, I'm sure!' said Trotty, pulling up his hat in
great confusion, and between the hat and the torn lining, fixing
his head into a kind of bee-hive.  'I hope I haven't hurt you.'

As to hurting anybody, Toby was not such an absolute Samson, but
that he was much more likely to be hurt himself:  and indeed, he
had flown out into the road, like a shuttlecock.  He had such an
opinion of his own strength, however, that he was in real concern
for the other party:  and said again,

'I hope I haven't hurt you?'

The man against whom he had run; a sun-browned, sinewy, country-
looking man, with grizzled hair, and a rough chin; stared at him
for a moment, as if he suspected him to be in jest.  But, satisfied
of his good faith, he answered:

'No, friend.  You have not hurt me.'

'Nor the child, I hope?' said Trotty.

'Nor the child,' returned the man.  'I thank you kindly.'

As he said so, he glanced at a little girl he carried in his arms,
asleep:  and shading her face with the long end of the poor
handkerchief he wore about his throat, went slowly on.

The tone in which he said 'I thank you kindly,' penetrated Trotty's
heart.  He was so jaded and foot-sore, and so soiled with travel,
and looked about him so forlorn and strange, that it was a comfort
to him to be able to thank any one:  no matter for how little.
Toby stood gazing after him as he plodded wearily away, with the
child's arm clinging round his neck.

At the figure in the worn shoes - now the very shade and ghost of
shoes - rough leather leggings, common frock, and broad slouched
hat, Trotty stood gazing, blind to the whole street.  And at the
child's arm, clinging round its neck.

Before he merged into the darkness the traveller stopped; and
looking round, and seeing Trotty standing there yet, seemed
undecided whether to return or go on.  After doing first the one
and then the other, he came back, and Trotty went half-way to meet
him.

'You can tell me, perhaps,' said the man with a faint smile, 'and
if you can I am sure you will, and I'd rather ask you than another
- where Alderman Cute lives.'

'Close at hand,' replied Toby.  'I'll show you his house with
pleasure.'

'I was to have gone to him elsewhere to-morrow,' said the man,
accompanying Toby, 'but I'm uneasy under suspicion, and want to
clear myself, and to be free to go and seek my bread - I don't know
where.  So, maybe he'll forgive my going to his house to-night.'

'It's impossible,' cried Toby with a start, 'that your name's
Fern!'

'Eh!' cried the other, turning on him in astonishment.

'Fern!  Will Fern!' said Trotty.

'That's my name,' replied the other.

'Why then,' said Trotty, seizing him by the arm, and looking
cautiously round, 'for Heaven's sake don't go to him!  Don't go to
him!  He'll put you down as sure as ever you were born.  Here! come
up this alley, and I'll tell you what I mean.  Don't go to HIM.'

His new acquaintance looked as if he thought him mad; but he bore
him company nevertheless.  When they were shrouded from
observation, Trotty told him what he knew, and what character he
had received, and all about it.

The subject of his history listened to it with a calmness that
surprised him.  He did not contradict or interrupt it, once.  He
nodded his head now and then - more in corroboration of an old and
worn-out story, it appeared, than in refutation of it; and once or
twice threw back his hat, and passed his freckled hand over a brow,
where every furrow he had ploughed seemed to have set its image in
little.  But he did no more.

'It's true enough in the main,' he said, 'master, I could sift
grain from husk here and there, but let it be as 'tis.  What odds?
I have gone against his plans; to my misfortun'.  I can't help it;
I should do the like to-morrow.  As to character, them gentlefolks
will search and search, and pry and pry, and have it as free from
spot or speck in us, afore they'll help us to a dry good word! -
Well! I hope they don't lose good opinion as easy as we do, or
their lives is strict indeed, and hardly worth the keeping.  For
myself, master, I never took with that hand' - holding it before
him - 'what wasn't my own; and never held it back from work,
however hard, or poorly paid.  Whoever can deny it, let him chop it
off!  But when work won't maintain me like a human creetur; when my
living is so bad, that I am Hungry, out of doors and in; when I see
a whole working life begin that way, go on that way, and end that
way, without a chance or change; then I say to the gentlefolks
"Keep away from me!  Let my cottage be.  My doors is dark enough
without your darkening of 'em more.  Don't look for me to come up
into the Park to help the show when there's a Birthday, or a fine
Speechmaking, or what not.  Act your Plays and Games without me,
and be welcome to 'em, and enjoy 'em.  We've nowt to do with one
another.  I'm best let alone!"'

Seeing that the child in his arms had opened her eyes, and was
looking about her in wonder, he checked himself to say a word or
two of foolish prattle in her ear, and stand her on the ground
beside him.  Then slowly winding one of her long tresses round and
round his rough forefinger like a ring, while she hung about his
dusty leg, he said to Trotty:

'I'm not a cross-grained man by natu', I believe; and easy
satisfied, I'm sure.  I bear no ill-will against none of 'em.  I
only want to live like one of the Almighty's creeturs.  I can't - I
don't - and so there's a pit dug between me, and them that can and
do.  There's others like me.  You might tell 'em off by hundreds
and by thousands, sooner than by ones.'

Trotty knew he spoke the Truth in this, and shook his head to
signify as much.

'I've got a bad name this way,' said Fern; 'and I'm not likely, I'm
afeared, to get a better.  'Tan't lawful to be out of sorts, and I
AM out of sorts, though God knows I'd sooner bear a cheerful spirit
if I could.  Well!  I don't know as this Alderman could hurt ME
much by sending me to jail; but without a friend to speak a word
for me, he might do it; and you see - !' pointing downward with his
finger, at the child.

'She has a beautiful face,' said Trotty.

'Why yes!' replied the other in a low voice, as he gently turned it
up with both his hands towards his own, and looked upon it
steadfastly.  'I've thought so, many times.  I've thought so, when
my hearth was very cold, and cupboard very bare.  I thought so
t'other night, when we were taken like two thieves.  But they -
they shouldn't try the little face too often, should they, Lilian?
That's hardly fair upon a man!'

He sunk his voice so low, and gazed upon her with an air so stern
and strange, that Toby, to divert the current of his thoughts,
inquired if his wife were living.

'I never had one,' he returned, shaking his head.  'She's my
brother's child:  a orphan.  Nine year old, though you'd hardly
think it; but she's tired and worn out now.  They'd have taken care
on her, the Union - eight-and-twenty mile away from where we live -
between four walls (as they took care of my old father when he
couldn't work no more, though he didn't trouble 'em long); but I
took her instead, and she's lived with me ever since.  Her mother
had a friend once, in London here.  We are trying to find her, and
to find work too; but it's a large place.  Never mind.  More room
for us to walk about in, Lilly!'

Meeting the child's eyes with a smile which melted Toby more than
tears, he shook him by the hand.

'I don't so much as know your name,' he said, 'but I've opened my
heart free to you, for I'm thankful to you; with good reason.  I'll
take your advice, and keep clear of this - '

'Justice,' suggested Toby.

'Ah!' he said.  'If that's the name they give him.  This Justice.
And to-morrow will try whether there's better fortun' to be met
with, somewheres near London.  Good night.  A Happy New Year!'

'Stay!' cried Trotty, catching at his hand, as he relaxed his grip.
'Stay!  The New Year never can be happy to me, if we part like
this.  The New Year never can be happy to me, if I see the child
and you go wandering away, you don't know where, without a shelter
for your heads.  Come home with me!  I'm a poor man, living in a
poor place; but I can give you lodging for one night and never miss
it.  Come home with me!  Here!  I'll take her!' cried Trotty,
lifting up the child.  'A pretty one!  I'd carry twenty times her
weight, and never know I'd got it.  Tell me if I go too quick for
you.  I'm very fast.  I always was!'  Trotty said this, taking
about six of his trotting paces to one stride of his fatigued
companion; and with his thin legs quivering again, beneath the load
he bore.

'Why, she's as light,' said Trotty, trotting in his speech as well
as in his gait; for he couldn't bear to be thanked, and dreaded a
moment's pause; 'as light as a feather.  Lighter than a Peacock's
feather - a great deal lighter.  Here we are and here we go!  Round
this first turning to the right, Uncle Will, and past the pump, and
sharp off up the passage to the left, right opposite the public-
house.  Here we are and here we go!  Cross over, Uncle Will, and
mind the kidney pieman at the corner!  Here we are and here we go!
Down the Mews here, Uncle Will, and stop at the black door, with
"T. Veck, Ticket Porter," wrote upon a board; and here we are and
here we go, and here we are indeed, my precious.  Meg, surprising
you!'

With which words Trotty, in a breathless state, set the child down
before his daughter in the middle of the floor.  The little visitor
looked once at Meg; and doubting nothing in that face, but trusting
everything she saw there; ran into her arms.

'Here we are and here we go!' cried Trotty, running round the room,
and choking audibly.  'Here, Uncle Will, here's a fire you know!
Why don't you come to the fire?  Oh here we are and here we go!
Meg, my precious darling, where's the kettle?  Here it is and here
it goes, and it'll bile in no time!'

Trotty really had picked up the kettle somewhere or other in the
course of his wild career and now put it on the fire:  while Meg,
seating the child in a warm corner, knelt down on the ground before
her, and pulled off her shoes, and dried her wet feet on a cloth.
Ay, and she laughed at Trotty too - so pleasantly, so cheerfully,
that Trotty could have blessed her where she kneeled; for he had
seen that, when they entered, she was sitting by the fire in tears.

'Why, father!' said Meg.  'You're crazy to-night, I think.  I don't
know what the Bells would say to that.  Poor little feet.  How cold
they are!'

'Oh, they're warmer now!' exclaimed the child.  'They're quite warm
now!'

'No, no, no,' said Meg.  'We haven't rubbed 'em half enough.  We're
so busy.  So busy!  And when they're done, we'll brush out the damp
hair; and when that's done, we'll bring some colour to the poor
pale face with fresh water; and when that's done, we'll be so gay,
and brisk, and happy - !'

The child, in a burst of sobbing, clasped her round the neck;
caressed her fair cheek with its hand; and said, 'Oh Meg! oh dear
Meg!'

Toby's blessing could have done no more.  Who could do more!

'Why, father!' cried Meg, after a pause.

'Here I am and here I go, my dear!' said Trotty.

'Good Gracious me!' cried Meg.  'He's crazy!  He's put the dear
child's bonnet on the kettle, and hung the lid behind the door!'

'I didn't go for to do it, my love,' said Trotty, hastily repairing
this mistake.  'Meg, my dear?'

Meg looked towards him and saw that he had elaborately stationed
himself behind the chair of their male visitor, where with many
mysterious gestures he was holding up the sixpence he had earned.

'I see, my dear,' said Trotty, 'as I was coming in, half an ounce
of tea lying somewhere on the stairs; and I'm pretty sure there was
a bit of bacon too.  As I don't remember where it was exactly, I'll
go myself and try to find 'em.'

With this inscrutable artifice, Toby withdrew to purchase the
viands he had spoken of, for ready money, at Mrs. Chickenstalker's;
and presently came back, pretending he had not been able to find
them, at first, in the dark.

'But here they are at last,' said Trotty, setting out the tea-
things, 'all correct!  I was pretty sure it was tea, and a rasher.
So it is.  Meg, my pet, if you'll just make the tea, while your
unworthy father toasts the bacon, we shall be ready, immediate.
It's a curious circumstance,' said Trotty, proceeding in his
cookery, with the assistance of the toasting-fork, 'curious, but
well known to my friends, that I never care, myself, for rashers,
nor for tea.  I like to see other people enjoy 'em,' said Trotty,
speaking very loud, to impress the fact upon his guest, 'but to me,
as food, they're disagreeable.'

Yet Trotty sniffed the savour of the hissing bacon - ah! - as if he
liked it; and when he poured the boiling water in the tea-pot,
looked lovingly down into the depths of that snug cauldron, and
suffered the fragrant steam to curl about his nose, and wreathe his
head and face in a thick cloud.  However, for all this, he neither
ate nor drank, except at the very beginning, a mere morsel for
form's sake, which he appeared to eat with infinite relish, but
declared was perfectly uninteresting to him.

No.  Trotty's occupation was, to see Will Fern and Lilian eat and
drink; and so was Meg's.  And never did spectators at a city dinner
or court banquet find such high delight in seeing others feast:
although it were a monarch or a pope:  as those two did, in looking
on that night.  Meg smiled at Trotty, Trotty laughed at Meg.  Meg
shook her head, and made belief to clap her hands, applauding
Trotty; Trotty conveyed, in dumb-show, unintelligible narratives of
how and when and where he had found their visitors, to Meg; and
they were happy.  Very happy.

'Although,' thought Trotty, sorrowfully, as he watched Meg's face;
'that match is broken off, I see!'

'Now, I'll tell you what,' said Trotty after tea.  'The little one,
she sleeps with Meg, I know.'

'With good Meg!' cried the child, caressing her.  'With Meg.'

'That's right,' said Trotty.  'And I shouldn't wonder if she kiss
Meg's father, won't she?  I'M Meg's father.'

Mightily delighted Trotty was, when the child went timidly towards
him, and having kissed him, fell back upon Meg again.

'She's as sensible as Solomon,' said Trotty.  'Here we come and
here we - no, we don't - I don't mean that - I - what was I saying,
Meg, my precious?'

Meg looked towards their guest, who leaned upon her chair, and with
his face turned from her, fondled the child's head, half hidden in
her lap.

'To be sure,' said Toby.  'To be sure!  I don't know what I'm
rambling on about, to-night.  My wits are wool-gathering, I think.
Will Fern, you come along with me.  You're tired to death, and
broken down for want of rest.  You come along with me.'  The man
still played with the child's curls, still leaned upon Meg's chair,
still turned away his face.  He didn't speak, but in his rough
coarse fingers, clenching and expanding in the fair hair of the
child, there was an eloquence that said enough.

'Yes, yes,' said Trotty, answering unconsciously what he saw
expressed in his daughter's face.  'Take her with you, Meg.  Get
her to bed.  There!  Now, Will, I'll show you where you lie.  It's
not much of a place:  only a loft; but, having a loft, I always
say, is one of the great conveniences of living in a mews; and till
this coach-house and stable gets a better let, we live here cheap.
There's plenty of sweet hay up there, belonging to a neighbour; and
it's as clean as hands, and Meg, can make it.  Cheer up!  Don't
give way.  A new heart for a New Year, always!'

The hand released from the child's hair, had fallen, trembling,
into Trotty's hand.  So Trotty, talking without intermission, led
him out as tenderly and easily as if he had been a child himself.
Returning before Meg, he listened for an instant at the door of her
little chamber; an adjoining room.  The child was murmuring a
simple Prayer before lying down to sleep; and when she had
remembered Meg's name, 'Dearly, Dearly' - so her words ran - Trotty
heard her stop and ask for his.

It was some short time before the foolish little old fellow could
compose himself to mend the fire, and draw his chair to the warm
hearth.  But, when he had done so, and had trimmed the light, he
took his newspaper from his pocket, and began to read.  Carelessly
at first, and skimming up and down the columns; but with an earnest
and a sad attention, very soon.

For this same dreaded paper re-directed Trotty's thoughts into the
channel they had taken all that day, and which the day's events had
so marked out and shaped.  His interest in the two wanderers had
set him on another course of thinking, and a happier one, for the
time; but being alone again, and reading of the crimes and
violences of the people, he relapsed into his former train.

In this mood, he came to an account (and it was not the first he
had ever read) of a woman who had laid her desperate hands not only
on her own life but on that of her young child.  A crime so
terrible, and so revolting to his soul, dilated with the love of
Meg, that he let the journal drop, and fell back in his chair,
appalled!

'Unnatural and cruel!' Toby cried.  'Unnatural and cruel!  None but
people who were bad at heart, born bad, who had no business on the
earth, could do such deeds.  It's too true, all I've heard to-day;
too just, too full of proof.  We're Bad!'

The Chimes took up the words so suddenly - burst out so loud, and
clear, and sonorous - that the Bells seemed to strike him in his
chair.

And what was that, they said?

'Toby Veck, Toby Veck, waiting for you Toby!  Toby Veck, Toby Veck,
waiting for you Toby!  Come and see us, come and see us, Drag him
to us, drag him to us, Haunt and hunt him, haunt and hunt him,
Break his slumbers, break his slumbers!  Toby Veck Toby Veck, door
open wide Toby, Toby Veck Toby Veck, door open wide Toby - ' then
fiercely back to their impetuous strain again, and ringing in the
very bricks and plaster on the walls.

Toby listened.  Fancy, fancy!  His remorse for having run away from
them that afternoon!  No, no.  Nothing of the kind.  Again, again,
and yet a dozen times again.  'Haunt and hunt him, haunt and hunt
him, Drag him to us, drag him to us!'  Deafening the whole town!

'Meg,' said Trotty softly:  tapping at her door.  'Do you hear
anything?'

'I hear the Bells, father.  Surely they're very loud to-night.'

'Is she asleep?' said Toby, making an excuse for peeping in.

'So peacefully and happily!  I can't leave her yet though, father.
Look how she holds my hand!'

'Meg,' whispered Trotty.  'Listen to the Bells!'

She listened, with her face towards him all the time.  But it
underwent no change.  She didn't understand them.

Trotty withdrew, resumed his seat by the fire, and once more
listened by himself.  He remained here a little time.

It was impossible to bear it; their energy was dreadful.

'If the tower-door is really open,' said Toby, hastily laying aside
his apron, but never thinking of his hat, 'what's to hinder me from
going up into the steeple and satisfying myself?  If it's shut, I
don't want any other satisfaction.  That's enough.'

He was pretty certain as he slipped out quietly into the street
that he should find it shut and locked, for he knew the door well,
and had so rarely seen it open, that he couldn't reckon above three
times in all.  It was a low arched portal, outside the church, in a
dark nook behind a column; and had such great iron hinges, and such
a monstrous lock, that there was more hinge and lock than door.

But what was his astonishment when, coming bare-headed to the
church; and putting his hand into this dark nook, with a certain
misgiving that it might be unexpectedly seized, and a shivering
propensity to draw it back again; he found that the door, which
opened outwards, actually stood ajar!

He thought, on the first surprise, of going back; or of getting a
light, or a companion, but his courage aided him immediately, and
he determined to ascend alone.

'What have I to fear?' said Trotty.  'It's a church!  Besides, the
ringers may be there, and have forgotten to shut the door.'  So he
went in, feeling his way as he went, like a blind man; for it was
very dark.  And very quiet, for the Chimes were silent.

The dust from the street had blown into the recess; and lying
there, heaped up, made it so soft and velvet-like to the foot, that
there was something startling, even in that.  The narrow stair was
so close to the door, too, that he stumbled at the very first; and
shutting the door upon himself, by striking it with his foot, and
causing it to rebound back heavily, he couldn't open it again.

This was another reason, however, for going on.  Trotty groped his
way, and went on.  Up, up, up, and round, and round; and up, up,
up; higher, higher, higher up!

It was a disagreeable staircase for that groping work; so low and
narrow, that his groping hand was always touching something; and it
often felt so like a man or ghostly figure standing up erect and
making room for him to pass without discovery, that he would rub
the smooth wall upward searching for its face, and downward
searching for its feet, while a chill tingling crept all over him.
Twice or thrice, a door or niche broke the monotonous surface; and
then it seemed a gap as wide as the whole church; and he felt on
the brink of an abyss, and going to tumble headlong down, until he
found the wall again.

Still up, up, up; and round and round; and up, up, up; higher,
higher, higher up!

At length, the dull and stifling atmosphere began to freshen:
presently to feel quite windy:  presently it blew so strong, that
he could hardly keep his legs.  But, he got to an arched window in
the tower, breast high, and holding tight, looked down upon the
house-tops, on the smoking chimneys, on the blur and blotch of
lights (towards the place where Meg was wondering where he was and
calling to him perhaps), all kneaded up together in a leaven of
mist and darkness.

This was the belfry, where the ringers came.  He had caught hold of
one of the frayed ropes which hung down through apertures in the
oaken roof.  At first he started, thinking it was hair; then
trembled at the very thought of waking the deep Bell.  The Bells
themselves were higher.  Higher, Trotty, in his fascination, or in
working out the spell upon him, groped his way.  By ladders now,
and toilsomely, for it was steep, and not too certain holding for
the feet.

Up, up, up; and climb and clamber; up, up, up; higher, higher,
higher up!

Until, ascending through the floor, and pausing with his head just
raised above its beams, he came among the Bells.  It was barely
possible to make out their great shapes in the gloom; but there
they were.  Shadowy, and dark, and dumb.

A heavy sense of dread and loneliness fell instantly upon him, as
he climbed into this airy nest of stone and metal.  His head went
round and round.  He listened, and then raised a wild 'Holloa!'
Holloa! was mournfully protracted by the echoes.

Giddy, confused, and out of breath, and frightened, Toby looked
about him vacantly, and sunk down in a swoon.



CHAPTER III - Third Quarter.



BLACK are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when
the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead.
Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect
resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are
joined and mixed by chance; and when, and how, and by what
wonderful degrees, each separates from each, and every sense and
object of the mind resumes its usual form and lives again, no man -
though every man is every day the casket of this type of the Great
Mystery - can tell.

So, when and how the darkness of the night-black steeple changed to
shining light; when and how the solitary tower was peopled with a
myriad figures; when and how the whispered 'Haunt and hunt him,'
breathing monotonously through his sleep or swoon, became a voice
exclaiming in the waking ears of Trotty, 'Break his slumbers;' when
and how he ceased to have a sluggish and confused idea that such
things were, companioning a host of others that were not; there are
no dates or means to tell.  But, awake and standing on his feet
upon the boards where he had lately lain, he saw this Goblin Sight.

He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him,
swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the
Bells.  He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the
Bells without a pause.  He saw them, round him on the ground; above
him, in the air; clambering from him, by the ropes below; looking
down upon him, from the massive iron-girded beams; peeping in upon
him, through the chinks and loopholes in the walls; spreading away
and away from him in enlarging circles, as the water ripples give
way to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing in among them.  He
saw them, of all aspects and all shapes.  He saw them ugly,
handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed.  He saw them young, he saw
them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry,
he saw them grim; he saw them dance, and heard them sing; he saw
them tear their hair, and heard them howl.  He saw the air thick
with them.  He saw them come and go, incessantly.  He saw them
riding downward, soaring upward, sailing off afar, perching near at
hand, all restless and all violently active.  Stone, and brick, and
slate, and tile, became transparent to him as to them.  He saw them
IN the houses, busy at the sleepers' beds.  He saw them soothing
people in their dreams; he saw them beating them with knotted
whips; he saw them yelling in their ears; he saw them playing
softest music on their pillows; he saw them cheering some with the
songs of birds and the perfume of flowers; he saw them flashing
awful faces on the troubled rest of others, from enchanted mirrors
which they carried in their hands.

He saw these creatures, not only among sleeping men but waking
also, active in pursuits irreconcilable with one another, and
possessing or assuming natures the most opposite.  He saw one
buckling on innumerable wings to increase his speed; another
loading himself with chains and weights, to retard his.  He saw
some putting the hands of clocks forward, some putting the hands of
clocks backward, some endeavouring to stop the clock entirely.  He
saw them representing, here a marriage ceremony, there a funeral;
in this chamber an election, in that a ball he saw, everywhere,
restless and untiring motion.

Bewildered by the host of shifting and extraordinary figures, as
well as by the uproar of the Bells, which all this while were
ringing, Trotty clung to a wooden pillar for support, and turned
his white face here and there, in mute and stunned astonishment.

As he gazed, the Chimes stopped.  Instantaneous change!  The whole
swarm fainted! their forms collapsed, their speed deserted them;
they sought to fly, but in the act of falling died and melted into
air.  No fresh supply succeeded them.  One straggler leaped down
pretty briskly from the surface of the Great Bell, and alighted on
his feet, but he was dead and gone before he could turn round.
Some few of the late company who had gambolled in the tower,
remained there, spinning over and over a little longer; but these
became at every turn more faint, and few, and feeble, and soon went
the way of the rest.  The last of all was one small hunchback, who
had got into an echoing corner, where he twirled and twirled, and
floated by himself a long time; showing such perseverance, that at
last he dwindled to a leg and even to a foot, before he finally
retired; but he vanished in the end, and then the tower was silent.

Then and not before, did Trotty see in every Bell a bearded figure
of the bulk and stature of the Bell - incomprehensibly, a figure
and the Bell itself.  Gigantic, grave, and darkly watchful of him,
as he stood rooted to the ground.

Mysterious and awful figures!  Resting on nothing; poised in the
night air of the tower, with their draped and hooded heads merged
in the dim roof; motionless and shadowy.  Shadowy and dark,
although he saw them by some light belonging to themselves - none
else was there - each with its muffled hand upon its goblin mouth.

He could not plunge down wildly through the opening in the floor;
for all power of motion had deserted him.  Otherwise he would have
done so - aye, would have thrown himself, headforemost, from the
steeple-top, rather than have seen them watching him with eyes that
would have waked and watched although the pupils had been taken
out.

Again, again, the dread and terror of the lonely place, and of the
wild and fearful night that reigned there, touched him like a
spectral hand.  His distance from all help; the long, dark,
winding, ghost-beleaguered way that lay between him and the earth
on which men lived; his being high, high, high, up there, where it
had made him dizzy to see the birds fly in the day; cut off from
all good people, who at such an hour were safe at home and sleeping
in their beds; all this struck coldly through him, not as a
reflection but a bodily sensation.  Meantime his eyes and thoughts
and fears, were fixed upon the watchful figures; which, rendered
unlike any figures of this world by the deep gloom and shade
enwrapping and enfolding them, as well as by their looks and forms
and supernatural hovering above the floor, were nevertheless as
plainly to be seen as were the stalwart oaken frames, cross-pieces,
bars and beams, set up there to support the Bells.  These hemmed
them, in a very forest of hewn timber; from the entanglements,
intricacies, and depths of which, as from among the boughs of a
dead wood blighted for their phantom use, they kept their darksome
and unwinking watch.

A blast of air - how cold and shrill! - came moaning through the
tower.  As it died away, the Great Bell, or the Goblin of the Great
Bell, spoke.

'What visitor is this!' it said.  The voice was low and deep, and
Trotty fancied that it sounded in the other figures as well.

'I thought my name was called by the Chimes!' said Trotty, raising
his hands in an attitude of supplication.  'I hardly know why I am
here, or how I came.  I have listened to the Chimes these many
years.  They have cheered me often.'

'And you have thanked them?' said the Bell.

'A thousand times!' cried Trotty.

'How?'

'I am a poor man,' faltered Trotty, 'and could only thank them in
words.'

'And always so?' inquired the Goblin of the Bell.  'Have you never
done us wrong in words?'

'No!' cried Trotty eagerly.

'Never done us foul, and false, and wicked wrong, in words?'
pursued the Goblin of the Bell.

Trotty was about to answer, 'Never!'  But he stopped, and was
confused.

'The voice of Time,' said the Phantom, 'cries to man, Advance!
Time is for his advancement and improvement; for his greater worth,
his greater happiness, his better life; his progress onward to that
goal within its knowledge and its view, and set there, in the
period when Time and He began.  Ages of darkness, wickedness, and
violence, have come and gone - millions uncountable, have suffered,
lived, and died - to point the way before him.  Who seeks to turn
him back, or stay him on his course, arrests a mighty engine which
will strike the meddler dead; and be the fiercer and the wilder,
ever, for its momentary check!'

'I never did so to my knowledge, sir,' said Trotty.  'It was quite
by accident if I did.  I wouldn't go to do it, I'm sure.'

'Who puts into the mouth of Time, or of its servants,' said the
Goblin of the Bell, 'a cry of lamentation for days which have had
their trial and their failure, and have left deep traces of it
which the blind may see - a cry that only serves the present time,
by showing men how much it needs their help when any ears can
listen to regrets for such a past - who does this, does a wrong.
And you have done that wrong, to us, the Chimes.'

Trotty's first excess of fear was gone.  But he had felt tenderly
and gratefully towards the Bells, as you have seen; and when he
heard himself arraigned as one who had offended them so weightily,
his heart was touched with penitence and grief.

'If you knew,' said Trotty, clasping his hands earnestly - 'or
perhaps you do know - if you know how often you have kept me
company; how often you have cheered me up when I've been low; how
you were quite the plaything of my little daughter Meg (almost the
only one she ever had) when first her mother died, and she and me
were left alone; you won't bear malice for a hasty word!'

'Who hears in us, the Chimes, one note bespeaking disregard, or
stern regard, of any hope, or joy, or pain, or sorrow, of the many-
sorrowed throng; who hears us make response to any creed that
gauges human passions and affections, as it gauges the amount of
miserable food on which humanity may pine and wither; does us
wrong.  That wrong you have done us!' said the Bell.

'I have!' said Trotty.  'Oh forgive me!'

'Who hears us echo the dull vermin of the earth:  the Putters Down
of crushed and broken natures, formed to be raised up higher than
such maggots of the time can crawl or can conceive,' pursued the
Goblin of the Bell; 'who does so, does us wrong.  And you have done
us wrong!'

'Not meaning it,' said Trotty.  'In my ignorance.  Not meaning it!'

'Lastly, and most of all,' pursued the Bell.  'Who turns his back
upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile;
and does not trace and track with pitying eyes the unfenced
precipice by which they fell from good - grasping in their fall
some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them still
when bruised and dying in the gulf below; does wrong to Heaven and
man, to time and to eternity.  And you have done that wrong!'

'Spare me!' cried Trotty, falling on his knees; 'for Mercy's sake!'

'Listen!' said the Shadow.

'Listen!' cried the other Shadows.

'Listen!' said a clear and childlike voice, which Trotty thought he
recognised as having heard before.

The organ sounded faintly in the church below.  Swelling by
degrees, the melody ascended to the roof, and filled the choir and
nave.  Expanding more and more, it rose up, up; up, up; higher,
higher, higher up; awakening agitated hearts within the burly piles
of oak:  the hollow bells, the iron-bound doors, the stairs of
solid stone; until the tower walls were insufficient to contain it,
and it soared into the sky.

No wonder that an old man's breast could not contain a sound so
vast and mighty.  It broke from that weak prison in a rush of
tears; and Trotty put his hands before his face.

'Listen!' said the Shadow.

'Listen!' said the other Shadows.

'Listen!' said the child's voice.

A solemn strain of blended voices, rose into the tower.

It was a very low and mournful strain - a Dirge - and as he
listened, Trotty heard his child among the singers.

'She is dead!' exclaimed the old man.  'Meg is dead!  Her Spirit
calls to me.  I hear it!'

'The Spirit of your child bewails the dead, and mingles with the
dead - dead hopes, dead fancies, dead imaginings of youth,'
returned the Bell, 'but she is living.  Learn from her life, a
living truth.  Learn from the creature dearest to your heart, how
bad the bad are born.  See every bud and leaf plucked one by one
from off the fairest stem, and know how bare and wretched it may
be.  Follow her!  To desperation!'

Each of the shadowy figures stretched its right arm forth, and
pointed downward.

'The Spirit of the Chimes is your companion,' said the figure.

'Go!  It stands behind you!'

Trotty turned, and saw - the child!  The child Will Fern had
carried in the street; the child whom Meg had watched, but now,
asleep!

'I carried her myself, to-night,' said Trotty.  'In these arms!'

'Show him what he calls himself,' said the dark figures, one and
all.

The tower opened at his feet.  He looked down, and beheld his own
form, lying at the bottom, on the outside:  crushed and motionless.

'No more a living man!' cried Trotty.  'Dead!'

'Dead!' said the figures all together.

'Gracious Heaven!  And the New Year - '

'Past,' said the figures.

'What!' he cried, shuddering.  'I missed my way, and coming on the
outside of this tower in the dark, fell down - a year ago?'

'Nine years ago!' replied the figures.

As they gave the answer, they recalled their outstretched hands;
and where their figures had been, there the Bells were.

And they rung; their time being come again.  And once again, vast
multitudes of phantoms sprung into existence; once again, were
incoherently engaged, as they had been before; once again, faded on
the stopping of the Chimes; and dwindled into nothing.

'What are these?' he asked his guide.  'If I am not mad, what are
these?'

'Spirits of the Bells.  Their sound upon the air,' returned the
child.  'They take such shapes and occupations as the hopes and
thoughts of mortals, and the recollections they have stored up,
give them.'

'And you,' said Trotty wildly.  'What are you?'

'Hush, hush!' returned the child.  'Look here!'

In a poor, mean room; working at the same kind of embroidery which
he had often, often seen before her; Meg, his own dear daughter,
was presented to his view.  He made no effort to imprint his kisses
on her face; he did not strive to clasp her to his loving heart; he
knew that such endearments were, for him, no more.  But, he held
his trembling breath, and brushed away the blinding tears, that he
might look upon her; that he might only see her.

Ah!  Changed.  Changed.  The light of the clear eye, how dimmed.
The bloom, how faded from the cheek.  Beautiful she was, as she had
ever been, but Hope, Hope, Hope, oh where was the fresh Hope that
had spoken to him like a voice!

She looked up from her work, at a companion.  Following her eyes,
the old man started back.

In the woman grown, he recognised her at a glance.  In the long
silken hair, he saw the self-same curls; around the lips, the
child's expression lingering still.  See!  In the eyes, now turned
inquiringly on Meg, there shone the very look that scanned those
features when he brought her home!

Then what was this, beside him!

Looking with awe into its face, he saw a something reigning there:
a lofty something, undefined and indistinct, which made it hardly
more than a remembrance of that child - as yonder figure might be -
yet it was the same:  the same:  and wore the dress.

Hark.  They were speaking!

'Meg,' said Lilian, hesitating.  'How often you raise your head
from your work to look at me!'

'Are my looks so altered, that they frighten you?' asked Meg.

'Nay, dear!  But you smile at that, yourself!  Why not smile, when
you look at me, Meg?'

'I do so.  Do I not?' she answered:  smiling on her.

'Now you do,' said Lilian, 'but not usually.  When you think I'm
busy, and don't see you, you look so anxious and so doubtful, that
I hardly like to raise my eyes.  There is little cause for smiling
in this hard and toilsome life, but you were once so cheerful.'

'Am I not now!' cried Meg, speaking in a tone of strange alarm, and
rising to embrace her.  'Do I make our weary life more weary to
you, Lilian!'

'You have been the only thing that made it life,' said Lilian,
fervently kissing her; 'sometimes the only thing that made me care
to live so, Meg.  Such work, such work!  So many hours, so many
days, so many long, long nights of hopeless, cheerless, never-
ending work - not to heap up riches, not to live grandly or gaily,
not to live upon enough, however coarse; but to earn bare bread; to
scrape together just enough to toil upon, and want upon, and keep
alive in us the consciousness of our hard fate!  Oh Meg, Meg!' she
raised her voice and twined her arms about her as she spoke, like
one in pain.  'How can the cruel world go round, and bear to look
upon such lives!'

'Lilly!' said Meg, soothing her, and putting back her hair from her
wet face.  'Why, Lilly!  You!  So pretty and so young!'

'Oh Meg!' she interrupted, holding her at arm's-length, and looking
in her face imploringly.  'The worst of all, the worst of all!
Strike me old, Meg!  Wither me, and shrivel me, and free me from
the dreadful thoughts that tempt me in my youth!'

Trotty turned to look upon his guide.  But the Spirit of the child
had taken flight.  Was gone.

Neither did he himself remain in the same place; for, Sir Joseph
Bowley, Friend and Father of the Poor, held a great festivity at
Bowley Hall, in honour of the natal day of Lady Bowley.  And as
Lady Bowley had been born on New Year's Day (which the local
newspapers considered an especial pointing of the finger of
Providence to number One, as Lady Bowley's destined figure in
Creation), it was on a New Year's Day that this festivity took
place.

Bowley Hall was full of visitors.  The red-faced gentleman was
there, Mr. Filer was there, the great Alderman Cute was there -
Alderman Cute had a sympathetic feeling with great people, and had
considerably improved his acquaintance with Sir Joseph Bowley on
the strength of his attentive letter:  indeed had become quite a
friend of the family since then - and many guests were there.
Trotty's ghost was there, wandering about, poor phantom, drearily;
and looking for its guide.

There was to be a great dinner in the Great Hall.  At which Sir
Joseph Bowley, in his celebrated character of Friend and Father of
the Poor, was to make his great speech.  Certain plum-puddings were
to be eaten by his Friends and Children in another Hall first; and,
at a given signal, Friends and Children flocking in among their
Friends and Fathers, were to form a family assemblage, with not one
manly eye therein unmoistened by emotion.

But, there was more than this to happen.  Even more than this.  Sir
Joseph Bowley, Baronet and Member of Parliament, was to play a
match at skittles - real skittles - with his tenants!

'Which quite reminds me,' said Alderman Cute, 'of the days of old
King Hal, stout King Hal, bluff King Hal.  Ah!  Fine character!'

'Very,' said Mr. Filer, dryly.  'For marrying women and murdering
'em.  Considerably more than the average number of wives by the
bye.'

'You'll marry the beautiful ladies, and not murder 'em, eh?' said
Alderman Cute to the heir of Bowley, aged twelve.  'Sweet boy!  We
shall have this little gentleman in Parliament now,' said the
Alderman, holding him by the shoulders, and looking as reflective
as he could, 'before we know where we are.  We shall hear of his
successes at the poll; his speeches in the House; his overtures
from Governments; his brilliant achievements of all kinds; ah! we
shall make our little orations about him in the Common Council,
I'll be bound; before we have time to look about us!'

'Oh, the difference of shoes and stockings!' Trotty thought.  But
his heart yearned towards the child, for the love of those same
shoeless and stockingless boys, predestined (by the Alderman) to
turn out bad, who might have been the children of poor Meg.

'Richard,' moaned Trotty, roaming among the company, to and fro;
'where is he?  I can't find Richard!  Where is Richard?'  Not
likely to be there, if still alive!  But Trotty's grief and
solitude confused him; and he still went wandering among the
gallant company, looking for his guide, and saying, 'Where is
Richard?  Show me Richard!'

He was wandering thus, when he encountered Mr. Fish, the
confidential Secretary:  in great agitation.

'Bless my heart and soul!' cried Mr. Fish.  'Where's Alderman Cute?
Has anybody seen the Alderman?'

Seen the Alderman?  Oh dear!  Who could ever help seeing the
Alderman?  He was so considerate, so affable, he bore so much in
mind the natural desires of folks to see him, that if he had a
fault, it was the being constantly On View.  And wherever the great
people were, there, to be sure, attracted by the kindred sympathy
between great souls, was Cute.

Several voices cried that he was in the circle round Sir Joseph.
Mr. Fish made way there; found him; and took him secretly into a
window near at hand.  Trotty joined them.  Not of his own accord.
He felt that his steps were led in that direction.

'My dear Alderman Cute,' said Mr. Fish.  'A little more this way.
The most dreadful circumstance has occurred.  I have this moment
received the intelligence.  I think it will be best not to acquaint
Sir Joseph with it till the day is over.  You understand Sir
Joseph, and will give me your opinion.  The most frightful and
deplorable event!'

'Fish!' returned the Alderman.  'Fish!  My good fellow, what is the
matter?  Nothing revolutionary, I hope!  No - no attempted
interference with the magistrates?'

'Deedles, the banker,' gasped the Secretary.  'Deedles Brothers -
who was to have been here to-day - high in office in the
Goldsmiths' Company - '

'Not stopped!' exclaimed the Alderman, 'It can't be!'

'Shot himself.'

'Good God!'

'Put a double-barrelled pistol to his mouth, in his own counting
house,' said Mr. Fish, 'and blew his brains out.  No motive.
Princely circumstances!'

'Circumstances!' exclaimed the Alderman.  'A man of noble fortune.
One of the most respectable of men.  Suicide, Mr. Fish!  By his own
hand!'

'This very morning,' returned Mr. Fish.

'Oh the brain, the brain!' exclaimed the pious Alderman, lifting up
his hands.  'Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this
machine called Man!  Oh the little that unhinges it:  poor
creatures that we are!  Perhaps a dinner, Mr. Fish.  Perhaps the
conduct of his son, who, I have heard, ran very wild, and was in
the habit of drawing bills upon him without the least authority!  A
most respectable man.  One of the most respectable men I ever knew!
A lamentable instance, Mr. Fish.  A public calamity!  I shall make
a point of wearing the deepest mourning.  A most respectable man!
But there is One above.  We must submit, Mr. Fish.  We must
submit!'

What, Alderman!  No word of Putting Down?  Remember, Justice, your
high moral boast and pride.  Come, Alderman!  Balance those scales.
Throw me into this, the empty one, no dinner, and Nature's founts
in some poor woman, dried by starving misery and rendered obdurate
to claims for which her offspring HAS authority in holy mother Eve.
Weigh me the two, you Daniel, going to judgment, when your day
shall come!  Weigh them, in the eyes of suffering thousands,
audience (not unmindful) of the grim farce you play.  Or supposing
that you strayed from your five wits - it's not so far to go, but
that it might be - and laid hands upon that throat of yours,
warning your fellows (if you have a fellow) how they croak their
comfortable wickedness to raving heads and stricken hearts.  What
then?

The words rose up in Trotty's breast, as if they had been spoken by
some other voice within him.  Alderman Cute pledged himself to Mr.
Fish that he would assist him in breaking the melancholy
catastrophe to Sir Joseph when the day was over.  Then, before they
parted, wringing Mr. Fish's hand in bitterness of soul, he said,
'The most respectable of men!'  And added that he hardly knew (not
even he), why such afflictions were allowed on earth.

'It's almost enough to make one think, if one didn't know better,'
said Alderman Cute, 'that at times some motion of a capsizing
nature was going on in things, which affected the general economy
of the social fabric.  Deedles Brothers!'

The skittle-playing came off with immense success.  Sir Joseph
knocked the pins about quite skilfully; Master Bowley took an
innings at a shorter distance also; and everybody said that now,
when a Baronet and the Son of a Baronet played at skittles, the
country was coming round again, as fast as it could come.

At its proper time, the Banquet was served up.  Trotty
involuntarily repaired to the Hall with the rest, for he felt
himself conducted thither by some stronger impulse than his own
free will.  The sight was gay in the extreme; the ladies were very
handsome; the visitors delighted, cheerful, and good-tempered.
When the lower doors were opened, and the people flocked in, in
their rustic dresses, the beauty of the spectacle was at its
height; but Trotty only murmured more and more, 'Where is Richard!
He should help and comfort her!  I can't see Richard!'

There had been some speeches made; and Lady Bowley's health had
been proposed; and Sir Joseph Bowley had returned thanks, and had
made his great speech, showing by various pieces of evidence that
he was the born Friend and Father, and so forth; and had given as a
Toast, his Friends and Children, and the Dignity of Labour; when a
slight disturbance at the bottom of the Hall attracted Toby's
notice.  After some confusion, noise, and opposition, one man broke
through the rest, and stood forward by himself.

Not Richard.  No.  But one whom he had thought of, and had looked
for, many times.  In a scantier supply of light, he might have
doubted the identity of that worn man, so old, and grey, and bent;
but with a blaze of lamps upon his gnarled and knotted head, he
knew Will Fern as soon as he stepped forth.

'What is this!' exclaimed Sir Joseph, rising.  'Who gave this man
admittance?  This is a criminal from prison!  Mr. Fish, sir, WILL
you have the goodness - '

'A minute!' said Will Fern.  'A minute!  My Lady, you was born on
this day along with a New Year.  Get me a minute's leave to speak.'

She made some intercession for him.  Sir Joseph took his seat
again, with native dignity.

The ragged visitor - for he was miserably dressed - looked round
upon the company, and made his homage to them with a humble bow.

'Gentlefolks!' he said.  'You've drunk the Labourer.  Look at me!'

'Just come from jail,' said Mr. Fish.

'Just come from jail,' said Will.  'And neither for the first time,
nor the second, nor the third, nor yet the fourth.'

Mr. Filer was heard to remark testily, that four times was over the
average; and he ought to be ashamed of himself.

'Gentlefolks!' repeated Will Fern.  'Look at me!  You see I'm at
the worst.  Beyond all hurt or harm; beyond your help; for the time
when your kind words or kind actions could have done me good,' - he
struck his hand upon his breast, and shook his head, 'is gone, with
the scent of last year's beans or clover on the air.  Let me say a
word for these,' pointing to the labouring people in the Hall; 'and
when you're met together, hear the real Truth spoke out for once.'

'There's not a man here,' said the host, 'who would have him for a
spokesman.'

'Like enough, Sir Joseph.  I believe it.  Not the less true,
perhaps, is what I say.  Perhaps that's a proof on it.
Gentlefolks, I've lived many a year in this place.  You may see the
cottage from the sunk fence over yonder.  I've seen the ladies draw
it in their books, a hundred times.  It looks well in a picter,
I've heerd say; but there an't weather in picters, and maybe 'tis
fitter for that, than for a place to live in.  Well!  I lived
there.  How hard - how bitter hard, I lived there, I won't say.
Any day in the year, and every day, you can judge for your own
selves.'

He spoke as he had spoken on the night when Trotty found him in the
street.  His voice was deeper and more husky, and had a trembling
in it now and then; but he never raised it passionately, and seldom
lifted it above the firm stern level of the homely facts he stated.

''Tis harder than you think for, gentlefolks, to grow up decent,
commonly decent, in such a place.  That I growed up a man and not a
brute, says something for me - as I was then.  As I am now, there's
nothing can be said for me or done for me.  I'm past it.'

'I am glad this man has entered,' observed Sir Joseph, looking
round serenely.  'Don't disturb him.  It appears to be Ordained.
He is an example:  a living example.  I hope and trust, and
confidently expect, that it will not be lost upon my Friends here.'

'I dragged on,' said Fern, after a moment's silence, 'somehow.
Neither me nor any other man knows how; but so heavy, that I
couldn't put a cheerful face upon it, or make believe that I was
anything but what I was.  Now, gentlemen - you gentlemen that sits
at Sessions - when you see a man with discontent writ on his face,
you says to one another, "He's suspicious.  I has my doubts," says
you, "about Will Fern.  Watch that fellow!"  I don't say,
gentlemen, it ain't quite nat'ral, but I say 'tis so; and from that
hour, whatever Will Fern does, or lets alone - all one - it goes
against him.'

Alderman Cute stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, and
leaning back in his chair, and smiling, winked at a neighbouring
chandelier.  As much as to say, 'Of course!  I told you so.  The
common cry!  Lord bless you, we are up to all this sort of thing -
myself and human nature.'

'Now, gentlemen,' said Will Fern, holding out his hands, and
flushing for an instant in his haggard face, 'see how your laws are
made to trap and hunt us when we're brought to this.  I tries to
live elsewhere.  And I'm a vagabond.  To jail with him!  I comes
back here.  I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks - who don't?
- a limber branch or two.  To jail with him!  One of your keepers
sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden, with a gun.
To jail with him!  I has a nat'ral angry word with that man, when
I'm free again.  To jail with him!  I cuts a stick.  To jail with
him!  I eats a rotten apple or a turnip.  To jail with him!  It's
twenty mile away; and coming back I begs a trifle on the road.  To
jail with him!  At last, the constable, the keeper - anybody -
finds me anywhere, a-doing anything.  To jail with him, for he's a
vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and jail's the only home he's got.'

The Alderman nodded sagaciously, as who should say, 'A very good
home too!'

'Do I say this to serve MY cause!' cried Fern.  'Who can give me
back my liberty, who can give me back my good name, who can give me
back my innocent niece?  Not all the Lords and Ladies in wide
England.  But, gentlemen, gentlemen, dealing with other men like
me, begin at the right end.  Give us, in mercy, better homes when
we're a-lying in our cradles; give us better food when we're a-
working for our lives; give us kinder laws to bring us back when
were a-going wrong; and don't set jail, jail, jail, afore us,
everywhere we turn.  There an't a condescension you can show the
Labourer then, that he won't take, as ready and as grateful as a
man can be; for, he has a patient, peaceful, willing heart.  But
you must put his rightful spirit in him first; for, whether he's a
wreck and ruin such as me, or is like one of them that stand here
now, his spirit is divided from you at this time.  Bring it back,
gentlefolks, bring it back!  Bring it back, afore the day comes
when even his Bible changes in his altered mind, and the words seem
to him to read, as they have sometimes read in my own eyes - in
jail:  "Whither thou goest, I can Not go; where thou lodgest, I do
Not lodge; thy people are Not my people; Nor thy God my God!'

A sudden stir and agitation took place in Hall.  Trotty thought at
first, that several had risen to eject the man; and hence this
change in its appearance.  But, another moment showed him that the
room and all the company had vanished from his sight, and that his
daughter was again before him, seated at her work.  But in a
poorer, meaner garret than before; and with no Lilian by her side.

The frame at which she had worked, was put away upon a shelf and
covered up.  The chair in which she had sat, was turned against the
wall.  A history was written in these little things, and in Meg's
grief-worn face.  Oh! who could fail to read it!

Meg strained her eyes upon her work until it was too dark to see
the threads; and when the night closed in, she lighted her feeble
candle and worked on.  Still her old father was invisible about
her; looking down upon her; loving her - how dearly loving her! -
and talking to her in a tender voice about the old times, and the
Bells.  Though he knew, poor Trotty, though he knew she could not
hear him.

A great part of the evening had worn away, when a knock came at her
door.  She opened it.  A man was on the threshold.  A slouching,
moody, drunken sloven, wasted by intemperance and vice, and with
his matted hair and unshorn beard in wild disorder; but, with some
traces on him, too, of having been a man of good proportion and
good features in his youth.

He stopped until he had her leave to enter; and she, retiring a
pace of two from the open door, silently and sorrowfully looked
upon him.  Trotty had his wish.  He saw Richard.

'May I come in, Margaret?'

'Yes!  Come in.  Come in!'

It was well that Trotty knew him before he spoke; for with any
doubt remaining on his mind, the harsh discordant voice would have
persuaded him that it was not Richard but some other man.

There were but two chairs in the room.  She gave him hers, and
stood at some short distance from him, waiting to hear what he had
to say.

He sat, however, staring vacantly at the floor; with a lustreless
and stupid smile.  A spectacle of such deep degradation, of such
abject hopelessness, of such a miserable downfall, that she put her
hands before her face and turned away, lest he should see how much
it moved her.

Roused by the rustling of her dress, or some such trifling sound,
he lifted his head, and began to speak as if there had been no
pause since he entered.

'Still at work, Margaret?  You work late.'

'I generally do.'

'And early?'

'And early.'

'So she said.  She said you never tired; or never owned that you
tired.  Not all the time you lived together.  Not even when you
fainted, between work and fasting.  But I told you that, the last
time I came.'

'You did,' she answered.  'And I implored you to tell me nothing
more; and you made me a solemn promise, Richard, that you never
would.'

'A solemn promise,' he repeated, with a drivelling laugh and vacant
stare.  'A solemn promise.  To he sure.  A solemn promise!'
Awakening, as it were, after a time; in the same manner as before;
he said with sudden animation:

'How can I help it, Margaret?  What am I to do?  She has been to me
again!'

'Again!' cried Meg, clasping her hands.  'O, does she think of me
so often!  Has she been again!'

'Twenty times again,' said Richard.  'Margaret, she haunts me.  She
comes behind me in the street, and thrusts it in my hand.  I hear
her foot upon the ashes when I'm at my work (ha, ha! that an't
often), and before I can turn my head, her voice is in my ear,
saying, "Richard, don't look round.  For Heaven's love, give her
this!"  She brings it where I live:  she sends it in letters; she
taps at the window and lays it on the sill.  What CAN I do?  Look
at it!"

He held out in his hand a little purse, and chinked the money it
enclosed.

'Hide it,' sad Meg.  'Hide it!  When she comes again, tell her,
Richard, that I love her in my soul.  That I never lie down to
sleep, but I bless her, and pray for her.  That, in my solitary
work, I never cease to have her in my thoughts.  That she is with
me, night and day.  That if I died to-morrow, I would remember her
with my last breath.  But, that I cannot look upon it!'

He slowly recalled his hand, and crushing the purse together, said
with a kind of drowsy thoughtfulness:

'I told her so.  I told her so, as plain as words could speak.
I've taken this gift back and left it at her door, a dozen times
since then.  But when she came at last, and stood before me, face
to face, what could I do?'

'You saw her!' exclaimed Meg.  'You saw her!  O, Lilian, my sweet
girl!  O, Lilian, Lilian!'

'I saw her,' he went on to say, not answering, but engaged in the
same slow pursuit of his own thoughts.  'There she stood:
trembling!  "How does she look, Richard?  Does she ever speak of
me?  Is she thinner?  My old place at the table:  what's in my old
place?  And the frame she taught me our old work on - has she burnt
it, Richard!"  There she was.  I heard her say it.'

Meg checked her sobs, and with the tears streaming from her eyes,
bent over him to listen.  Not to lose a breath.

With his arms resting on his knees; and stooping forward in his
chair, as if what he said were written on the ground in some half
legible character, which it was his occupation to decipher and
connect; he went on.

'"Richard, I have fallen very low; and you may guess how much I
have suffered in having this sent back, when I can bear to bring it
in my hand to you.  But you loved her once, even in my memory,
dearly.  Others stepped in between you; fears, and jealousies, and
doubts, and vanities, estranged you from her; but you did love her,
even in my memory!"  I suppose I did,' he said, interrupting
himself for a moment.  'I did!  That's neither here nor there - "O
Richard, if you ever did; if you have any memory for what is gone
and lost, take it to her once more.  Once more!  Tell her how I
laid my head upon your shoulder, where her own head might have
lain, and was so humble to you, Richard.  Tell her that you looked
into my face, and saw the beauty which she used to praise, all
gone:  all gone:  and in its place, a poor, wan, hollow cheek, that
she would weep to see.  Tell her everything, and take it back, and
she will not refuse again.  She will not have the heart!"'

So he sat musing, and repeating the last words, until he woke
again, and rose.

'You won't take it, Margaret?'

She shook her head, and motioned an entreaty to him to leave her.

'Good night, Margaret.'

'Good night!'

He turned to look upon her; struck by her sorrow, and perhaps by
the pity for himself which trembled in her voice.  It was a quick
and rapid action; and for the moment some flash of his old bearing
kindled in his form.  In the next he went as he had come.  Nor did
this glimmer of a quenched fire seem to light him to a quicker
sense of his debasement.

In any mood, in any grief, in any torture of the mind or body,
Meg's work must be done.  She sat down to her task, and plied it.
Night, midnight.  Still she worked.

She had a meagre fire, the night being very cold; and rose at
intervals to mend it.  The Chimes rang half-past twelve while she
was thus engaged; and when they ceased she heard a gentle knocking
at the door.  Before she could so much as wonder who was there, at
that unusual hour, it opened.

O Youth and Beauty, happy as ye should be, look at this.  O Youth
and Beauty, blest and blessing all within your reach, and working
out the ends of your Beneficent Creator, look at this!

She saw the entering figure; screamed its name; cried 'Lilian!'

It was swift, and fell upon its knees before her:  clinging to her
dress.

'Up, dear!  Up!  Lilian!  My own dearest!'

'Never more, Meg; never more!  Here!  Here!  Close to you, holding
to you, feeling your dear breath upon my face!'

'Sweet Lilian!  Darling Lilian!  Child of my heart - no mother's
love can be more tender - lay your head upon my breast!'

'Never more, Meg.  Never more!  When I first looked into your face,
you knelt before me.  On my knees before you, let me die.  Let it
be here!'

'You have come back.  My Treasure!  We will live together, work
together, hope together, die together!'

'Ah!  Kiss my lips, Meg; fold your arms about me; press me to your
bosom; look kindly on me; but don't raise me.  Let it be here.  Let
me see the last of your dear face upon my knees!'

O Youth and Beauty, happy as ye should be, look at this!  O Youth
and Beauty, working out the ends of your Beneficent Creator, look
at this!

'Forgive me, Meg!  So dear, so dear!  Forgive me!  I know you do, I
see you do, but say so, Meg!'

She said so, with her lips on Lilian's cheek.  And with her arms
twined round - she knew it now - a broken heart.

'His blessing on you, dearest love.  Kiss me once more!  He
suffered her to sit beside His feet, and dry them with her hair.  O
Meg, what Mercy and Compassion!'

As she died, the Spirit of the child returning, innocent and
radiant, touched the old man with its hand, and beckoned him away.



CHAPTER IV - Fourth Quarter.



SOME new remembrance of the ghostly figures in the Bells; some
faint impression of the ringing of the Chimes; some giddy
consciousness of having seen the swarm of phantoms reproduced and
reproduced until the recollection of them lost itself in the
confusion of their numbers; some hurried knowledge, how conveyed to
him he knew not, that more years had passed; and Trotty, with the
Spirit of the child attending him, stood looking on at mortal
company.

Fat company, rosy-cheeked company, comfortable company.  They were
but two, but they were red enough for ten.  They sat before a
bright fire, with a small low table between them; and unless the
fragrance of hot tea and muffins lingered longer in that room than
in most others, the table had seen service very lately.  But all
the cups and saucers being clean, and in their proper places in the
corner-cupboard; and the brass toasting-fork hanging in its usual
nook and spreading its four idle fingers out as if it wanted to be
measured for a glove; there remained no other visible tokens of the
meal just finished, than such as purred and washed their whiskers
in the person of the basking cat, and glistened in the gracious,
not to say the greasy, faces of her patrons.

This cosy couple (married, evidently) had made a fair division of
the fire between them, and sat looking at the glowing sparks that
dropped into the grate; now nodding off into a doze; now waking up
again when some hot fragment, larger than the rest, came rattling
down, as if the fire were coming with it.

It was in no danger of sudden extinction, however; for it gleamed
not only in the little room, and on the panes of window-glass in
the door, and on the curtain half drawn across them, but in the
little shop beyond.  A little shop, quite crammed and choked with
the abundance of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with
a maw as accommodating and full as any shark's.  Cheese, butter,
firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops,
sweetmeats, boys' kites, bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth-
stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard,
mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs,
and slate pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this
greedy little shop, and all articles were in its net.  How many
other kinds of petty merchandise were there, it would be difficult
to say; but balls of packthread, ropes of onions, pounds of
candles, cabbage-nets, and brushes, hung in bunches from the
ceiling, like extraordinary fruit; while various odd canisters
emitting aromatic smells, established the veracity of the
inscription over the outer door, which informed the public that the
keeper of this little shop was a licensed dealer in tea, coffee,
tobacco, pepper, and snuff.

Glancing at such of these articles as were visible in the shining
of the blaze, and the less cheerful radiance of two smoky lamps
which burnt but dimly in the shop itself, as though its plethora
sat heavy on their lungs; and glancing, then, at one of the two
faces by the parlour-fire; Trotty had small difficulty in
recognising in the stout old lady, Mrs. Chickenstalker:  always
inclined to corpulency, even in the days when he had known her as
established in the general line, and having a small balance against
him in her books.

The features of her companion were less easy to him.  The great
broad chin, with creases in it large enough to hide a finger in;
the astonished eyes, that seemed to expostulate with themselves for
sinking deeper and deeper into the yielding fat of the soft face;
the nose afflicted with that disordered action of its functions
which is generally termed The Snuffles; the short thick throat and
labouring chest, with other beauties of the like description;
though calculated to impress the memory, Trotty could at first
allot to nobody he had ever known:  and yet he had some
recollection of them too.  At length, in Mrs. Chickenstalker's
partner in the general line, and in the crooked and eccentric line
of life, he recognised the former porter of Sir Joseph Bowley; an
apoplectic innocent, who had connected himself in Trotty's mind
with Mrs. Chickenstalker years ago, by giving him admission to the
mansion where he had confessed his obligations to that lady, and
drawn on his unlucky head such grave reproach.

Trotty had little interest in a change like this, after the changes
he had seen; but association is very strong sometimes; and he
looked involuntarily behind the parlour-door, where the accounts of
credit customers were usually kept in chalk.  There was no record
of his name.  Some names were there, but they were strange to him,
and infinitely fewer than of old; from which he argued that the
porter was an advocate of ready-money transactions, and on coming
into the business had looked pretty sharp after the Chickenstalker
defaulters.

So desolate was Trotty, and so mournful for the youth and promise
of his blighted child, that it was a sorrow to him, even to have no
place in Mrs. Chickenstalker's ledger.

'What sort of a night is it, Anne?' inquired the former porter of
Sir Joseph Bowley, stretching out his legs before the fire, and
rubbing as much of them as his short arms could reach; with an air
that added, 'Here I am if it's bad, and I don't want to go out if
it's good.'

'Blowing and sleeting hard,' returned his wife; 'and threatening
snow.  Dark.  And very cold.'

'I'm glad to think we had muffins,' said the former porter, in the
tone of one who had set his conscience at rest.  'It's a sort of
night that's meant for muffins.  Likewise crumpets.  Also Sally
Lunns.'

The former porter mentioned each successive kind of eatable, as if
he were musingly summing up his good actions.  After which he
rubbed his fat legs as before, and jerking them at the knees to get
the fire upon the yet unroasted parts, laughed as if somebody had
tickled him.

'You're in spirits, Tugby, my dear,' observed his wife.

The firm was Tugby, late Chickenstalker.

'No,' said Tugby.  'No.  Not particular.  I'm a little elewated.
The muffins came so pat!'

With that he chuckled until he was black in the face; and had so
much ado to become any other colour, that his fat legs took the
strangest excursions into the air.  Nor were they reduced to
anything like decorum until Mrs. Tugby had thumped him violently on
the back, and shaken him as if he were a great bottle.

'Good gracious, goodness, lord-a-mercy bless and save the man!'
cried Mrs. Tugby, in great terror.  'What's he doing?'

Mr. Tugby wiped his eyes, and faintly repeated that he found
himself a little elewated.

'Then don't be so again, that's a dear good soul,' said Mrs. Tugby,
'if you don't want to frighten me to death, with your struggling
and fighting!'

Mr. Tugby said he wouldn't; but, his whole existence was a fight,
in which, if any judgment might be founded on the constantly-
increasing shortness of his breath, and the deepening purple of his
face, he was always getting the worst of it.

'So it's blowing, and sleeting, and threatening snow; and it's
dark, and very cold, is it, my dear?' said Mr. Tugby, looking at
the fire, and reverting to the cream and marrow of his temporary
elevation.

'Hard weather indeed,' returned his wife, shaking her head.

'Aye, aye!  Years,' said Mr. Tugby, 'are like Christians in that
respect.  Some of 'em die hard; some of 'em die easy.  This one
hasn't many days to run, and is making a fight for it.  I like him
all the better.  There's a customer, my love!'

Attentive to the rattling door, Mrs. Tugby had already risen.

'Now then!' said that lady, passing out into the little shop.
'What's wanted?  Oh!  I beg your pardon, sir, I'm sure.  I didn't
think it was you.'

She made this apology to a gentleman in black, who, with his
wristbands tucked up, and his hat cocked loungingly on one side,
and his hands in his pockets, sat down astride on the table-beer
barrel, and nodded in return.

'This is a bad business up-stairs, Mrs. Tugby,' said the gentleman.
'The man can't live.'

'Not the back-attic can't!' cried Tugby, coming out into the shop
to join the conference.

'The back-attic, Mr. Tugby,' said the gentleman, 'is coming down-
stairs fast, and will be below the basement very soon.'

Looking by turns at Tugby and his wife, he sounded the barrel with
his knuckles for the depth of beer, and having found it, played a
tune upon the empty part.

'The back-attic, Mr. Tugby,' said the gentleman:  Tugby having
stood in silent consternation for some time:  'is Going.'

'Then,' said Tugby, turning to his wife, 'he must Go, you know,
before he's Gone.'

'I don't think you can move him,' said the gentleman, shaking his
head.  'I wouldn't take the responsibility of saying it could be
done, myself.  You had better leave him where he is.  He can't live
long.'

'It's the only subject,' said Tugby, bringing the butter-scale down
upon the counter with a crash, by weighing his fist on it, 'that
we've ever had a word upon; she and me; and look what it comes to!
He's going to die here, after all.  Going to die upon the premises.
Going to die in our house!'

'And where should he have died, Tugby?' cried his wife.

'In the workhouse,' he returned.  'What are workhouses made for?'

'Not for that,' said Mrs. Tugby, with great energy.  'Not for that!
Neither did I marry you for that.  Don't think it, Tugby.  I won't
have it.  I won't allow it.  I'd be separated first, and never see
your face again.  When my widow's name stood over that door, as it
did for many years:  this house being known as Mrs.
Chickenstalker's far and wide, and never known but to its honest
credit and its good report:  when my widow's name stood over that
door, Tugby, I knew him as a handsome, steady, manly, independent
youth; I knew her as the sweetest-looking, sweetest-tempered girl,
eyes ever saw; I knew her father (poor old creetur, he fell down
from the steeple walking in his sleep, and killed himself), for the
simplest, hardest-working, childest-hearted man, that ever drew the
breath of life; and when I turn them out of house and home, may
angels turn me out of Heaven.  As they would!  And serve me right!'

Her old face, which had been a plump and dimpled one before the
changes which had come to pass, seemed to shine out of her as she
said these words; and when she dried her eyes, and shook her head
and her handkerchief at Tugby, with an expression of firmness which
it was quite clear was not to be easily resisted, Trotty said,
'Bless her!  Bless her!'

Then he listened, with a panting heart, for what should follow.
Knowing nothing yet, but that they spoke of Meg.

If Tugby had been a little elevated in the parlour, he more than
balanced that account by being not a little depressed in the shop,
where he now stood staring at his wife, without attempting a reply;
secretly conveying, however - either in a fit of abstraction or as
a precautionary measure - all the money from the till into his own
pockets, as he looked at her.

The gentleman upon the table-beer cask, who appeared to be some
authorised medical attendant upon the poor, was far too well
accustomed, evidently, to little differences of opinion between man
and wife, to interpose any remark in this instance.  He sat softly
whistling, and turning little drops of beer out of the tap upon the
ground, until there was a perfect calm:  when he raised his head,
and said to Mrs. Tugby, late Chickenstalker:

'There's something interesting about the woman, even now.  How did
she come to marry him?'

'Why that,' said Mrs. Tugby, taking a seat near him, 'is not the
least cruel part of her story, sir.  You see they kept company, she
and Richard, many years ago.  When they were a young and beautiful
couple, everything was settled, and they were to have been married
on a New Year's Day.  But, somehow, Richard got it into his head,
through what the gentlemen told him, that he might do better, and
that he'd soon repent it, and that she wasn't good enough for him,
and that a young man of spirit had no business to be married.  And
the gentlemen frightened her, and made her melancholy, and timid of
his deserting her, and of her children coming to the gallows, and
of its being wicked to be man and wife, and a good deal more of it.
And in short, they lingered and lingered, and their trust in one
another was broken, and so at last was the match.  But the fault
was his.  She would have married him, sir, joyfully.  I've seen her
heart swell many times afterwards, when he passed her in a proud
and careless way; and never did a woman grieve more truly for a
man, than she for Richard when he first went wrong.'

'Oh! he went wrong, did he?' said the gentleman, pulling out the
vent-peg of the table-beer, and trying to peep down into the barrel
through the hole.

'Well, sir, I don't know that he rightly understood himself, you
see.  I think his mind was troubled by their having broke with one
another; and that but for being ashamed before the gentlemen, and
perhaps for being uncertain too, how she might take it, he'd have
gone through any suffering or trial to have had Meg's promise and
Meg's hand again.  That's my belief.  He never said so; more's the
pity!  He took to drinking, idling, bad companions:  all the fine
resources that were to be so much better for him than the Home he
might have had.  He lost his looks, his character, his health, his
strength, his friends, his work:  everything!'

'He didn't lose everything, Mrs. Tugby,' returned the gentleman,
'because he gained a wife; and I want to know how he gained her.'

'I'm coming to it, sir, in a moment.  This went on for years and
years; he sinking lower and lower; she enduring, poor thing,
miseries enough to wear her life away.  At last, he was so cast
down, and cast out, that no one would employ or notice him; and
doors were shut upon him, go where he would.  Applying from place
to place, and door to door; and coming for the hundredth time to
one gentleman who had often and often tried him (he was a good
workman to the very end); that gentleman, who knew his history,
said, "I believe you are incorrigible; there is only one person in
the world who has a chance of reclaiming you; ask me to trust you
no more, until she tries to do it."  Something like that, in his
anger and vexation.'

'Ah!' said the gentleman.  'Well?'

'Well, sir, he went to her, and kneeled to her; said it was so;
said it ever had been so; and made a prayer to her to save him.'

'And she? - Don't distress yourself, Mrs. Tugby.'

'She came to me that night to ask me about living here.  "What he
was once to me," she said, "is buried in a grave, side by side with
what I was to him.  But I have thought of this; and I will make the
trial.  In the hope of saving him; for the love of the light-
hearted girl (you remember her) who was to have been married on a
New Year's Day; and for the love of her Richard."  And she said he
had come to her from Lilian, and Lilian had trusted to him, and she
never could forget that.  So they were married; and when they came
home here, and I saw them, I hoped that such prophecies as parted
them when they were young, may not often fulfil themselves as they
did in this case, or I wouldn't be the makers of them for a Mine of
Gold.'

The gentleman got off the cask, and stretched himself, observing:

'I suppose he used her ill, as soon as they were married?'

'I don't think he ever did that,' said Mrs. Tugby, shaking her
head, and wiping her eyes.  'He went on better for a short time;
but, his habits were too old and strong to be got rid of; he soon
fell back a little; and was falling fast back, when his illness
came so strong upon him.  I think he has always felt for her.  I am
sure he has.  I have seen him, in his crying fits and tremblings,
try to kiss her hand; and I have heard him call her "Meg," and say
it was her nineteenth birthday.  There he has been lying, now,
these weeks and months.  Between him and her baby, she has not been
able to do her old work; and by not being able to be regular, she
has lost it, even if she could have done it.  How they have lived,
I hardly know!'

'I know,' muttered Mr. Tugby; looking at the till, and round the
shop, and at his wife; and rolling his head with immense
intelligence.  'Like Fighting Cocks!'

He was interrupted by a cry - a sound of lamentation - from the
upper story of the house.  The gentleman moved hurriedly to the
door.

'My friend,' he said, looking back, 'you needn't discuss whether he
shall be removed or not.  He has spared you that trouble, I
believe.'

Saying so, he ran up-stairs, followed by Mrs. Tugby; while Mr.
Tugby panted and grumbled after them at leisure:  being rendered
more than commonly short-winded by the weight of the till, in which
there had been an inconvenient quantity of copper.  Trotty, with
the child beside him, floated up the staircase like mere air.

'Follow her!  Follow her!  Follow her!'  He heard the ghostly
voices in the Bells repeat their words as he ascended.  'Learn it,
from the creature dearest to your heart!'

It was over.  It was over.  And this was she, her father's pride
and joy!  This haggard, wretched woman, weeping by the bed, if it
deserved that name, and pressing to her breast, and hanging down
her head upon, an infant.  Who can tell how spare, how sickly, and
how poor an infant!  Who can tell how dear!

'Thank God!' cried Trotty, holding up his folded hands.  'O, God be
thanked!  She loves her child!'

The gentleman, not otherwise hard-hearted or indifferent to such
scenes, than that he saw them every day, and knew that they were
figures of no moment in the Filer sums - mere scratches in the
working of these calculations - laid his hand upon the heart that
beat no more, and listened for the breath, and said, 'His pain is
over.  It's better as it is!'  Mrs. Tugby tried to comfort her with
kindness.  Mr. Tugby tried philosophy.

'Come, come!' he said, with his hands in his pockets, 'you mustn't
give way, you know.  That won't do.  You must fight up.  What would
have become of me if I had given way when I was porter, and we had
as many as six runaway carriage-doubles at our door in one night!
But, I fell back upon my strength of mind, and didn't open it!'

Again Trotty heard the voices saying, 'Follow her!'  He turned
towards his guide, and saw it rising from him, passing through the
air.  'Follow her!' it said.  And vanished.

He hovered round her; sat down at her feet; looked up into her face
for one trace of her old self; listened for one note of her old
pleasant voice.  He flitted round the child:  so wan, so
prematurely old, so dreadful in its gravity, so plaintive in its
feeble, mournful, miserable wail.  He almost worshipped it.  He
clung to it as her only safeguard; as the last unbroken link that
bound her to endurance.  He set his father's hope and trust on the
frail baby; watched her every look upon it as she held it in her
arms; and cried a thousand times, 'She loves it!  God be thanked,
she loves it!'

He saw the woman tend her in the night; return to her when her
grudging husband was asleep, and all was still; encourage her, shed
tears with her, set nourishment before her.  He saw the day come,
and the night again; the day, the night; the time go by; the house
of death relieved of death; the room left to herself and to the
child; he heard it moan and cry; he saw it harass her, and tire her
out, and when she slumbered in exhaustion, drag her back to
consciousness, and hold her with its little hands upon the rack;
but she was constant to it, gentle with it, patient with it.
Patient!  Was its loving mother in her inmost heart and soul, and
had its Being knitted up with hers as when she carried it unborn.

All this time, she was in want:  languishing away, in dire and
pining want.  With the baby in her arms, she wandered here and
there, in quest of occupation; and with its thin face lying in her
lap, and looking up in hers, did any work for any wretched sum; a
day and night of labour for as many farthings as there were figures
on the dial.  If she had quarrelled with it; if she had neglected
it; if she had looked upon it with a moment's hate; if, in the
frenzy of an instant, she had struck it!  No.  His comfort was, She
loved it always.

She told no one of her extremity, and wandered abroad in the day
lest she should be questioned by her only friend:  for any help she
received from her hands, occasioned fresh disputes between the good
woman and her husband; and it was new bitterness to be the daily
cause of strife and discord, where she owed so much.

She loved it still.  She loved it more and more.  But a change fell
on the aspect of her love.  One night.

She was singing faintly to it in its sleep, and walking to and fro
to hush it, when her door was softly opened, and a man looked in.

'For the last time,' he said.

'William Fern!'

'For the last time.'

He listened like a man pursued:  and spoke in whispers.

'Margaret, my race is nearly run.  I couldn't finish it, without a
parting word with you.  Without one grateful word.'

'What have you done?' she asked:  regarding him with terror.

He looked at her, but gave no answer.

After a short silence, he made a gesture with his hand, as if he
set her question by; as if he brushed it aside; and said:

'It's long ago, Margaret, now:  but that night is as fresh in my
memory as ever 'twas.  We little thought, then,' he added, looking
round, 'that we should ever meet like this.  Your child, Margaret?
Let me have it in my arms.  Let me hold your child.'

He put his hat upon the floor, and took it.  And he trembled as he
took it, from head to foot.

'Is it a girl?'

'Yes.'

He put his hand before its little face.

'See how weak I'm grown, Margaret, when I want the courage to look
at it!  Let her be, a moment.  I won't hurt her.  It's long ago,
but - What's her name?'

'Margaret,' she answered, quickly.

'I'm glad of that,' he said.  'I'm glad of that!'  He seemed to
breathe more freely; and after pausing for an instant, took away
his hand, and looked upon the infant's face.  But covered it again,
immediately.

'Margaret!' he said; and gave her back the child.  'It's Lilian's.'

'Lilian's!'

'I held the same face in my arms when Lilian's mother died and left
her.'

'When Lilian's mother died and left her!' she repeated, wildly.

'How shrill you speak!  Why do you fix your eyes upon me so?
Margaret!'

She sunk down in a chair, and pressed the infant to her breast, and
wept over it.  Sometimes, she released it from her embrace, to look
anxiously in its face:  then strained it to her bosom again.  At
those times, when she gazed upon it, then it was that something
fierce and terrible began to mingle with her love.  Then it was
that her old father quailed.

'Follow her!' was sounded through the house.  'Learn it, from the
creature dearest to your heart!'

'Margaret,' said Fern, bending over her, and kissing her upon the
brow:  'I thank you for the last time.  Good night.  Good bye!  Put
your hand in mine, and tell me you'll forget me from this hour, and
try to think the end of me was here.'

'What have you done?' she asked again.

'There'll be a Fire to-night,' he said, removing from her.
'There'll be Fires this winter-time, to light the dark nights,
East, West, North, and South.  When you see the distant sky red,
they'll be blazing.  When you see the distant sky red, think of me
no more; or, if you do, remember what a Hell was lighted up inside
of me, and think you see its flames reflected in the clouds.  Good
night.  Good bye!'  She called to him; but he was gone.  She sat
down stupefied, until her infant roused her to a sense of hunger,
cold, and darkness.  She paced the room with it the livelong night,
hushing it and soothing it.  She said at intervals, 'Like Lilian,
when her mother died and left her!'  Why was her step so quick, her
eye so wild, her love so fierce and terrible, whenever she repeated
those words?

'But, it is Love,' said Trotty.  'It is Love.  She'll never cease
to love it.  My poor Meg!'

She dressed the child next morning with unusual care - ah, vain
expenditure of care upon such squalid robes! - and once more tried
to find some means of life.  It was the last day of the Old Year.
She tried till night, and never broke her fast.  She tried in vain.

She mingled with an abject crowd, who tarried in the snow, until it
pleased some officer appointed to dispense the public charity (the
lawful charity; not that once preached upon a Mount), to call them
in, and question them, and say to this one, 'Go to such a place,'
to that one, 'Come next week;' to make a football of another
wretch, and pass him here and there, from hand to hand, from house
to house, until he wearied and lay down to die; or started up and
robbed, and so became a higher sort of criminal, whose claims
allowed of no delay.  Here, too, she failed.

She loved her child, and wished to have it lying on her breast.
And that was quite enough.

It was night:  a bleak, dark, cutting night:  when, pressing the
child close to her for warmth, she arrived outside the house she
called her home.  She was so faint and giddy, that she saw no one
standing in the doorway until she was close upon it, and about to
enter.  Then, she recognised the master of the house, who had so
disposed himself - with his person it was not difficult - as to
fill up the whole entry.

'O!' he said softly.  'You have come back?'

She looked at the child, and shook her head.

'Don't you think you have lived here long enough without paying any
rent?  Don't you think that, without any money, you've been a
pretty constant customer at this shop, now?' said Mr. Tugby.

She repeated the same mute appeal.

'Suppose you try and deal somewhere else,' he said.  'And suppose
you provide yourself with another lodging.  Come!  Don't you think
you could manage it?'

She said in a low voice, that it was very late.  To-morrow.

'Now I see what you want,' said Tugby; 'and what you mean.  You
know there are two parties in this house about you, and you delight
in setting 'em by the ears.  I don't want any quarrels; I'm
speaking softly to avoid a quarrel; but if you don't go away, I'll
speak out loud, and you shall cause words high enough to please
you.  But you shan't come in.  That I am determined.'

She put her hair back with her hand, and looked in a sudden manner
at the sky, and the dark lowering distance.

'This is the last night of an Old Year, and I won't carry ill-blood
and quarrellings and disturbances into a New One, to please you nor
anybody else,' said Tugby, who was quite a retail Friend and
Father.  'I wonder you an't ashamed of yourself, to carry such
practices into a New Year.  If you haven't any business in the
world, but to be always giving way, and always making disturbances
between man and wife, you'd be better out of it.  Go along with
you.'

'Follow her!  To desperation!'

Again the old man heard the voices.  Looking up, he saw the figures
hovering in the air, and pointing where she went, down the dark
street.

'She loves it!' he exclaimed, in agonised entreaty for her.
'Chimes! she loves it still!'

'Follow her!'  The shadow swept upon the track she had taken, like
a cloud.

He joined in the pursuit; he kept close to her; he looked into her
face.  He saw the same fierce and terrible expression mingling with
her love, and kindling in her eyes.  He heard her say, 'Like
Lilian!  To be changed like Lilian!' and her speed redoubled.

O, for something to awaken her!  For any sight, or sound, or scent,
to call up tender recollections in a brain on fire!  For any gentle
image of the Past, to rise before her!

'I was her father!  I was her father!' cried the old man,
stretching out his hands to the dark shadows flying on above.
'Have mercy on her, and on me!  Where does she go?  Turn her back!
I was her father!'

But they only pointed to her, as she hurried on; and said, 'To
desperation!  Learn it from the creature dearest to your heart!'  A
hundred voices echoed it.  The air was made of breath expended in
those words.  He seemed to take them in, at every gasp he drew.
They were everywhere, and not to be escaped.  And still she hurried
on; the same light in her eyes, the same words in her mouth, 'Like
Lilian!  To be changed like Lilian!'  All at once she stopped.

'Now, turn her back!' exclaimed the old man, tearing his white
hair.  'My child!  Meg!  Turn her back!  Great Father, turn her
back!'

In her own scanty shawl, she wrapped the baby warm.  With her
fevered hands, she smoothed its limbs, composed its face, arranged
its mean attire.  In her wasted arms she folded it, as though she
never would resign it more.  And with her dry lips, kissed it in a
final pang, and last long agony of Love.

Putting its tiny hand up to her neck, and holding it there, within
her dress, next to her distracted heart, she set its sleeping face
against her:  closely, steadily, against her:  and sped onward to
the River.

To the rolling River, swift and dim, where Winter Night sat
brooding like the last dark thoughts of many who had sought a
refuge there before her.  Where scattered lights upon the banks
gleamed sullen, red, and dull, as torches that were burning there,
to show the way to Death.  Where no abode of living people cast its
shadow, on the deep, impenetrable, melancholy shade.

To the River!  To that portal of Eternity, her desperate footsteps
tended with the swiftness of its rapid waters running to the sea.
He tried to touch her as she passed him, going down to its dark
level:  but, the wild distempered form, the fierce and terrible
love, the desperation that had left all human check or hold behind,
swept by him like the wind.

He followed her.  She paused a moment on the brink, before the
dreadful plunge.  He fell down on his knees, and in a shriek
addressed the figures in the Bells now hovering above them.

'I have learnt it!' cried the old man.  'From the creature dearest
to my heart!  O, save her, save her!'

He could wind his fingers in her dress; could hold it!  As the
words escaped his lips, he felt his sense of touch return, and knew
that he detained her.

The figures looked down steadfastly upon him.

'I have learnt it!' cried the old man.  'O, have mercy on me in
this hour, if, in my love for her, so young and good, I slandered
Nature in the breasts of mothers rendered desperate!  Pity my
presumption, wickedness, and ignorance, and save her.'  He felt his
hold relaxing.  They were silent still.

'Have mercy on her!' he exclaimed, 'as one in whom this dreadful
crime has sprung from Love perverted; from the strongest, deepest
Love we fallen creatures know!  Think what her misery must have
been, when such seed bears such fruit!  Heaven meant her to be
good.  There is no loving mother on the earth who might not come to
this, if such a life had gone before.  O, have mercy on my child,
who, even at this pass, means mercy to her own, and dies herself,
and perils her immortal soul, to save it!'

She was in his arms.  He held her now.  His strength was like a
giant's.

'I see the Spirit of the Chimes among you!' cried the old man,
singling out the child, and speaking in some inspiration, which
their looks conveyed to him.  'I know that our inheritance is held
in store for us by Time.  I know there is a sea of Time to rise one
day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away
like leaves.  I see it, on the flow!  I know that we must trust and
hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one
another.  I have learnt it from the creature dearest to my heart.
I clasp her in my arms again.  O Spirits, merciful and good, I take
your lesson to my breast along with her!  O Spirits, merciful and
good, I am grateful!'

He might have said more; but, the Bells, the old familiar Bells,
his own dear, constant, steady friends, the Chimes, began to ring
the joy-peals for a New Year:  so lustily, so merrily, so happily,
so gaily, that he leapt upon his feet, and broke the spell that
bound him.


'And whatever you do, father,' said Meg, 'don't eat tripe again,
without asking some doctor whether it's likely to agree with you;
for how you HAVE been going on, Good gracious!'

She was working with her needle, at the little table by the fire;
dressing her simple gown with ribbons for her wedding.  So quietly
happy, so blooming and youthful, so full of beautiful promise, that
he uttered a great cry as if it were an Angel in his house; then
flew to clasp her in his arms.

But, he caught his feet in the newspaper, which had fallen on the
hearth; and somebody came rushing in between them.

'No!' cried the voice of this same somebody; a generous and jolly
voice it was!  'Not even you.  Not even you.  The first kiss of Meg
in the New Year is mine.  Mine!  I have been waiting outside the
house, this hour, to hear the Bells and claim it.  Meg, my precious
prize, a happy year!  A life of happy years, my darling wife!'

And Richard smothered her with kisses.

You never in all your life saw anything like Trotty after this.  I
don't care where you have lived or what you have seen; you never in
all your life saw anything at all approaching him!  He sat down in
his chair and beat his knees and cried; he sat down in his chair
and beat his knees and laughed; he sat down in his chair and beat
his knees and laughed and cried together; he got out of his chair
and hugged Meg; he got out of his chair and hugged Richard; he got
out of his chair and hugged them both at once; he kept running up
to Meg, and squeezing her fresh face between his hands and kissing
it, going from her backwards not to lose sight of it, and running
up again like a figure in a magic lantern; and whatever he did, he
was constantly sitting himself down in his chair, and never
stopping in it for one single moment; being - that's the truth -
beside himself with joy.

'And to-morrow's your wedding-day, my pet!' cried Trotty.  'Your
real, happy wedding-day!'

'To-day!' cried Richard, shaking hands with him.  'To-day.  The
Chimes are ringing in the New Year.  Hear them!'

They WERE ringing!  Bless their sturdy hearts, they WERE ringing!
Great Bells as they were; melodious, deep-mouthed, noble Bells;
cast in no common metal; made by no common founder; when had they
ever chimed like that, before!

'But, to-day, my pet,' said Trotty.  'You and Richard had some
words to-day.'

'Because he's such a bad fellow, father,' said Meg.  'An't you,
Richard?  Such a headstrong, violent man!  He'd have made no more
of speaking his mind to that great Alderman, and putting HIM down I
don't know where, than he would of - '

' - Kissing Meg,' suggested Richard.  Doing it too!

'No.  Not a bit more,' said Meg.  'But I wouldn't let him, father.
Where would have been the use!'

'Richard my boy!' cried Trotty.  'You was turned up Trumps
originally; and Trumps you must be, till you die!  But, you were
crying by the fire to-night, my pet, when I came home!  Why did you
cry by the fire?'

'I was thinking of the years we've passed together, father.  Only
that.  And thinking that you might miss me, and be lonely.'

Trotty was backing off to that extraordinary chair again, when the
child, who had been awakened by the noise, came running in half-
dressed.

'Why, here she is!' cried Trotty, catching her up.  'Here's little
Lilian!  Ha ha ha!  Here we are and here we go!  O here we are and
here we go again!  And here we are and here we go! and Uncle Will
too!'  Stopping in his trot to greet him heartily.  'O, Uncle Will,
the vision that I've had to-night, through lodging you!  O, Uncle
Will, the obligations that you've laid me under, by your coming, my
good friend!'

Before Will Fern could make the least reply, a band of music burst
into the room, attended by a lot of neighbours, screaming 'A Happy
New Year, Meg!'  'A Happy Wedding!'  'Many of em!' and other
fragmentary good wishes of that sort.  The Drum (who was a private
friend of Trotty's) then stepped forward, and said:

'Trotty Veck, my boy!  It's got about, that your daughter is going
to be married to-morrow.  There an't a soul that knows you that
don't wish you well, or that knows her and don't wish her well.  Or
that knows you both, and don't wish you both all the happiness the
New Year can bring.  And here we are, to play it in and dance it
in, accordingly.'

Which was received with a general shout.  The Drum was rather
drunk, by-the-bye; but, never mind.

'What a happiness it is, I'm sure,' said Trotty, 'to be so
esteemed!  How kind and neighbourly you are!  It's all along of my
dear daughter.  She deserves it!'

They were ready for a dance in half a second (Meg and Richard at
the top); and the Drum was on the very brink of feathering away
with all his power; when a combination of prodigious sounds was
heard outside, and a good-humoured comely woman of some fifty years
of age, or thereabouts, came running in, attended by a man bearing
a stone pitcher of terrific size, and closely followed by the
marrow-bones and cleavers, and the bells; not THE Bells, but a
portable collection on a frame.

Trotty said, 'It's Mrs. Chickenstalker!'  And sat down and beat his
knees again.

'Married, and not tell me, Meg!' cried the good woman.  'Never!  I
couldn't rest on the last night of the Old Year without coming to
wish you joy.  I couldn't have done it, Meg.  Not if I had been
bed-ridden.  So here I am; and as it's New Year's Eve, and the Eve
of your wedding too, my dear, I had a little flip made, and brought
it with me.'

Mrs. Chickenstalker's notion of a little flip did honour to her
character.  The pitcher steamed and smoked and reeked like a
volcano; and the man who had carried it, was faint.

'Mrs. Tugby!' said Trotty, who had been going round and round her,
in an ecstasy. - 'I SHOULD say, Chickenstalker - Bless your heart
and soul!  A Happy New Year, and many of 'em!  Mrs. Tugby,' said
Trotty when he had saluted her; - 'I SHOULD say, Chickenstalker -
This is William Fern and Lilian.'

The worthy dame, to his surprise, turned very pale and very red.

'Not Lilian Fern whose mother died in Dorsetshire!' said she.

Her uncle answered 'Yes,' and meeting hastily, they exchanged some
hurried words together; of which the upshot was, that Mrs.
Chickenstalker shook him by both hands; saluted Trotty on his cheek
again of her own free will; and took the child to her capacious
breast.

'Will Fern!' said Trotty, pulling on his right-hand muffler.  'Not
the friend you was hoping to find?'

'Ay!' returned Will, putting a hand on each of Trotty's shoulders.
'And like to prove a'most as good a friend, if that can be, as one
I found.'

'O!' said Trotty.  'Please to play up there.  Will you have the
goodness!'

To the music of the band, and, the bells, the marrow-bones and
cleavers, all at once; and while the Chimes were yet in lusty
operation out of doors; Trotty, making Meg and Richard, second
couple, led off Mrs. Chickenstalker down the dance, and danced it
in a step unknown before or since; founded on his own peculiar
trot.

Had Trotty dreamed?  Or, are his joys and sorrows, and the actors
in them, but a dream; himself a dream; the teller of this tale a
dreamer, waking but now?  If it be so, O listener, dear to him in
all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which
these shadows come; and in your sphere - none is too wide, and none
too limited for such an end - endeavour to correct, improve, and
soften them.  So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to
many more whose happiness depends on you!  So may each year be
happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or
sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator
formed them to enjoy.





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The Cricket on the Hearth

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The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens
SCanned and David Price ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





The Cricket on the Hearth





CHAPTER I - Chirp the First



THE kettle began it!  Don't tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said.  I
know better.  Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of
time that she couldn't say which of them began it; but, I say the
kettle did.  I ought to know, I hope!  The kettle began it, full
five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner,
before the Cricket uttered a chirp.

As if the clock hadn't finished striking, and the convulsive little
Haymaker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a
scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn't mowed down half an acre
of imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in at all!

Why, I am not naturally positive.  Every one knows that.  I
wouldn't set my own opinion against the opinion of Mrs.
Peerybingle, unless I were quite sure, on any account whatever.
Nothing should induce me.  But, this is a question of act.  And the
fact is, that the kettle began it, at least five minutes before the
Cricket gave any sign of being in existence.  Contradict me, and
I'll say ten.

Let me narrate exactly how it happened.  I should have proceeded to
do so in my very first word, but for this plain consideration - if
I am to tell a story I must begin at the beginning; and how is it
possible to begin at the beginning, without beginning at the
kettle?

It appeared as if there were a sort of match, or trial of skill,
you must understand, between the kettle and the Cricket.  And this
is what led to it, and how it came about.

Mrs. Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and clicking
over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable
rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the
yard - Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt.
Presently returning, less the pattens (and a good deal less, for
they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short), she set the
kettle on the fire.  In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid
it for an instant; for, the water being uncomfortably cold, and in
that slippy, slushy, sleety sort of state wherein it seems to
penetrate through every kind of substance, patten rings included -
had laid hold of Mrs. Peerybingle's toes, and even splashed her
legs.  And when we rather plume ourselves (with reason too) upon
our legs, and keep ourselves particularly neat in point of
stockings, we find this, for the moment, hard to bear.

Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate.  It wouldn't
allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it wouldn't hear of
accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it WOULD lean
forward with a drunken air, and dribble, a very Idiot of a kettle,
on the hearth.  It was quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered
morosely at the fire.  To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs.
Peerybingle's fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy, and then,
with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, dived
sideways in - down to the very bottom of the kettle.  And the hull
of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to
coming out of the water, which the lid of that kettle employed
against Mrs. Peerybingle, before she got it up again.

It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then; carrying its
handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly and
mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle, as if it said, 'I won't boil.
Nothing shall induce me!'

But Mrs. Peerybingle, with restored good humour, dusted her chubby
little hands against each other, and sat down before the kettle,
laughing.  Meantime, the jolly blaze uprose and fell, flashing and
gleaming on the little Haymaker at the top of the Dutch clock,
until one might have thought he stood stock still before the
Moorish Palace, and nothing was in motion but the flame.

He was on the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the second,
all right and regular.  But, his sufferings when the clock was
going to strike, were frightful to behold; and, when a Cuckoo
looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times,
it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice - or like a
something wiry, plucking at his legs.

It was not until a violent commotion and a whirring noise among the
weights and ropes below him had quite subsided, that this terrified
Haymaker became himself again.  Nor was he startled without reason;
for these rattling, bony skeletons of clocks are very disconcerting
in their operation, and I wonder very much how any set of men, but
most of all how Dutchmen, can have had a liking to invent them.
There is a popular belief that Dutchmen love broad cases and much
clothing for their own lower selves; and they might know better
than to leave their clocks so very lank and unprotected, surely.

Now it was, you observe, that the kettle began to spend the
evening.  Now it was, that the kettle, growing mellow and musical,
began to have irrepressible gurglings in its throat, and to indulge
in short vocal snorts, which it checked in the bud, as if it hadn't
quite made up its mind yet, to be good company.  Now it was, that
after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial
sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst
into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious, as never maudlin
nightingale yet formed the least idea of.

So plain too!  Bless you, you might have understood it like a book
- better than some books you and I could name, perhaps.  With its
warm breath gushing forth in a light cloud which merrily and
gracefully ascended a few feet, then hung about the chimney-corner
as its own domestic Heaven, it trolled its song with that strong
energy of cheerfulness, that its iron body hummed and stirred upon
the fire; and the lid itself, the recently rebellious lid - such is
the influence of a bright example - performed a sort of jig, and
clattered like a deaf and dumb young cymbal that had never known
the use of its twin brother.

That this song of the kettle's was a song of invitation and welcome
to somebody out of doors:  to somebody at that moment coming on,
towards the snug small home and the crisp fire:  there is no doubt
whatever.  Mrs. Peerybingle knew it, perfectly, as she sat musing
before the hearth.  It's a dark night, sang the kettle, and the
rotten leaves are lying by the way; and, above, all is mist and
darkness, and, below, all is mire and clay; and there's only one
relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don't know that it is
one, for it's nothing but a glare; of deep and angry crimson, where
the sun and wind together; set a brand upon the clouds for being
guilty of such weather; and the widest open country is a long dull
streak of black; and there's hoar-frost on the finger-post, and
thaw upon the track; and the ice it isn't water, and the water
isn't free; and you couldn't say that anything is what it ought to
be; but he's coming, coming, coming! -

And here, if you like, the Cricket DID chime in! with a Chirrup,
Chirrup, Chirrup of such magnitude, by way of chorus; with a voice
so astoundingly disproportionate to its size, as compared with the
kettle; (size! you couldn't see it!) that if it had then and there
burst itself like an overcharged gun, if it had fallen a victim on
the spot, and chirruped its little body into fifty pieces, it would
have seemed a natural and inevitable consequence, for which it had
expressly laboured.

The kettle had had the last of its solo performance.  It persevered
with undiminished ardour; but the Cricket took first fiddle and
kept it.  Good Heaven, how it chirped!  Its shrill, sharp, piercing
voice resounded through the house, and seemed to twinkle in the
outer darkness like a star.  There was an indescribable little
trill and tremble in it, at its loudest, which suggested its being
carried off its legs, and made to leap again, by its own intense
enthusiasm.  Yet they went very well together, the Cricket and the
kettle.  The burden of the song was still the same; and louder,
louder, louder still, they sang it in their emulation.

The fair little listener - for fair she was, and young:  though
something of what is called the dumpling shape; but I don't myself
object to that - lighted a candle, glanced at the Haymaker on the
top of the clock, who was getting in a pretty average crop of
minutes; and looked out of the window, where she saw nothing, owing
to the darkness, but her own face imaged in the glass.  And my
opinion is (and so would yours have been), that she might have
looked a long way, and seen nothing half so agreeable.  When she
came back, and sat down in her former seat, the Cricket and the
kettle were still keeping it up, with a perfect fury of
competition.  The kettle's weak side clearly being, that he didn't
know when he was beat.

There was all the excitement of a race about it.  Chirp, chirp,
chirp!  Cricket a mile ahead.  Hum, hum, hum - m - m!  Kettle
making play in the distance, like a great top.  Chirp, chirp,
chirp!  Cricket round the corner.  Hum, hum, hum - m - m!  Kettle
sticking to him in his own way; no idea of giving in.  Chirp,
chirp, chirp!  Cricket fresher than ever.  Hum, hum, hum - m - m!
Kettle slow and steady.  Chirp, chirp, chirp!  Cricket going in to
finish him.  Hum, hum, hum - m - m!  Kettle not to be finished.
Until at last they got so jumbled together, in the hurry-skurry,
helter-skelter, of the match, that whether the kettle chirped and
the Cricket hummed, or the Cricket chirped and the kettle hummed,
or they both chirped and both hummed, it would have taken a clearer
head than yours or mine to have decided with anything like
certainty.  But, of this, there is no doubt:  that, the kettle and
the Cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of
amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside
song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out
through the window, and a long way down the lane.  And this light,
bursting on a certain person who, on the instant, approached
towards it through the gloom, expressed the whole thing to him,
literally in a twinkling, and cried, 'Welcome home, old fellow!
Welcome home, my boy!'

This end attained, the kettle, being dead beat, boiled over, and
was taken off the fire.  Mrs. Peerybingle then went running to the
door, where, what with the wheels of a cart, the tramp of a horse,
the voice of a man, the tearing in and out of an excited dog, and
the surprising and mysterious appearance of a baby, there was soon
the very What's-his-name to pay.

Where the baby came from, or how Mrs. Peerybingle got hold of it in
that flash of time, I don't know.  But a live baby there was, in
Mrs. Peerybingle's arms; and a pretty tolerable amount of pride she
seemed to have in it, when she was drawn gently to the fire, by a
sturdy figure of a man, much taller and much older than herself,
who had to stoop a long way down, to kiss her.  But she was worth
the trouble.  Six foot six, with the lumbago, might have done it.

'Oh goodness, John!' said Mrs. P.  'What a state you are in with
the weather!'

He was something the worse for it, undeniably.  The thick mist hung
in clots upon his eyelashes like candied thaw; and between the fog
and fire together, there were rainbows in his very whiskers.

'Why, you see, Dot,' John made answer, slowly, as he unrolled a
shawl from about his throat; and warmed his hands; 'it - it an't
exactly summer weather.  So, no wonder.'

'I wish you wouldn't call me Dot, John.  I don't like it,' said
Mrs. Peerybingle:  pouting in a way that clearly showed she DID
like it, very much.

'Why what else are you?' returned John, looking down upon her with
a smile, and giving her waist as light a squeeze as his huge hand
and arm could give.  'A dot and' - here he glanced at the baby - 'a
dot and carry - I won't say it, for fear I should spoil it; but I
was very near a joke.  I don't know as ever I was nearer.'

He was often near to something or other very clever, by his own
account:  this lumbering, slow, honest John; this John so heavy,
but so light of spirit; so rough upon the surface, but so gentle at
the core; so dull without, so quick within; so stolid, but so good!
Oh Mother Nature, give thy children the true poetry of heart that
hid itself in this poor Carrier's breast - he was but a Carrier by
the way - and we can bear to have them talking prose, and leading
lives of prose; and bear to bless thee for their company!

It was pleasant to see Dot, with her little figure, and her baby in
her arms:  a very doll of a baby:  glancing with a coquettish
thoughtfulness at the fire, and inclining her delicate little head
just enough on one side to let it rest in an odd, half-natural,
half-affected, wholly nestling and agreeable manner, on the great
rugged figure of the Carrier.  It was pleasant to see him, with his
tender awkwardness, endeavouring to adapt his rude support to her
slight need, and make his burly middle-age a leaning-staff not
inappropriate to her blooming youth.  It was pleasant to observe
how Tilly Slowboy, waiting in the background for the baby, took
special cognizance (though in her earliest teens) of this grouping;
and stood with her mouth and eyes wide open, and her head thrust
forward, taking it in as if it were air.  Nor was it less agreeable
to observe how John the Carrier, reference being made by Dot to the
aforesaid baby, checked his hand when on the point of touching the
infant, as if he thought he might crack it; and bending down,
surveyed it from a safe distance, with a kind of puzzled pride,
such as an amiable mastiff might be supposed to show, if he found
himself, one day, the father of a young canary.

'An't he beautiful, John?  Don't he look precious in his sleep?'

'Very precious,' said John.  'Very much so.  He generally IS
asleep, an't he?'

'Lor, John!  Good gracious no!'

'Oh,' said John, pondering.  'I thought his eyes was generally
shut.  Halloa!'

'Goodness, John, how you startle one!'

'It an't right for him to turn 'em up in that way!' said the
astonished Carrier, 'is it?  See how he's winking with both of 'em
at once!  And look at his mouth!  Why he's gasping like a gold and
silver fish!'

'You don't deserve to be a father, you don't,' said Dot, with all
the dignity of an experienced matron.  'But how should you know
what little complaints children are troubled with, John!  You
wouldn't so much as know their names, you stupid fellow.'  And when
she had turned the baby over on her left arm, and had slapped its
back as a restorative, she pinched her husband's ear, laughing.

'No,' said John, pulling off his outer coat.  'It's very true, Dot.
I don't know much about it.  I only know that I've been fighting
pretty stiffly with the wind to-night.  It's been blowing north-
east, straight into the cart, the whole way home.'

'Poor old man, so it has!' cried Mrs. Peerybingle, instantly
becoming very active.  'Here!  Take the precious darling, Tilly,
while I make myself of some use.  Bless it, I could smother it with
kissing it, I could!  Hie then, good dog!  Hie, Boxer, boy!  Only
let me make the tea first, John; and then I'll help you with the
parcels, like a busy bee.  "How doth the little" - and all the rest
of it, you know, John.  Did you ever learn "how doth the little,"
when you went to school, John?'

'Not to quite know it,' John returned.  'I was very near it once.
But I should only have spoilt it, I dare say.'

'Ha ha,' laughed Dot.  She had the blithest little laugh you ever
heard.  'What a dear old darling of a dunce you are, John, to be
sure!'

Not at all disputing this position, John went out to see that the
boy with the lantern, which had been dancing to and fro before the
door and window, like a Will of the Wisp, took due care of the
horse; who was fatter than you would quite believe, if I gave you
his measure, and so old that his birthday was lost in the mists of
antiquity.  Boxer, feeling that his attentions were due to the
family in general, and must be impartially distributed, dashed in
and out with bewildering inconstancy; now, describing a circle of
short barks round the horse, where he was being rubbed down at the
stable-door; now feigning to make savage rushes at his mistress,
and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops; now, eliciting a
shriek from Tilly Slowboy, in the low nursing-chair near the fire,
by the unexpected application of his moist nose to her countenance;
now, exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the baby; now, going round
and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established
himself for the night; now, getting up again, and taking that
nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, out into the weather, as if
he had just remembered an appointment, and was off, at a round
trot, to keep it.

'There!  There's the teapot, ready on the hob!' said Dot; as
briskly busy as a child at play at keeping house.  'And there's the
old knuckle of ham; and there's the butter; and there's the crusty
loaf, and all!  Here's the clothes-basket for the small parcels,
John, if you've got any there - where are you, John?'

'Don't let the dear child fall under the grate, Tilly, whatever you
do!'

It may be noted of Miss Slowboy, in spite of her rejecting the
caution with some vivacity, that she had a rare and surprising
talent for getting this baby into difficulties and had several
times imperilled its short life, in a quiet way peculiarly her own.
She was of a spare and straight shape, this young lady, insomuch
that her garments appeared to be in constant danger of sliding off
those sharp pegs, her shoulders, on which they were loosely hung.
Her costume was remarkable for the partial development, on all
possible occasions, of some flannel vestment of a singular
structure; also for affording glimpses, in the region of the back,
of a corset, or pair of stays, in colour a dead-green.  Being
always in a state of gaping admiration at everything, and absorbed,
besides, in the perpetual contemplation of her mistress's
perfections and the baby's, Miss Slowboy, in her little errors of
judgment, may be said to have done equal honour to her head and to
her heart; and though these did less honour to the baby's head,
which they were the occasional means of bringing into contact with
deal doors, dressers, stair-rails, bed-posts, and other foreign
substances, still they were the honest results of Tilly Slowboy's
constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated, and
installed in such a comfortable home.  For, the maternal and
paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been
bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only
differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in
meaning, and expresses quite another thing.

To have seen little Mrs. Peerybingle come back with her husband,
tugging at the clothes-basket, and making the most strenuous
exertions to do nothing at all (for he carried it), would have
amused you almost as much as it amused him.  It may have
entertained the Cricket too, for anything I know; but, certainly,
it now began to chirp again, vehemently.

'Heyday!' said John, in his slow way.  'It's merrier than ever, to-
night, I think.'

'And it's sure to bring us good fortune, John!  It always has done
so.  To have a Cricket on the Hearth, is the luckiest thing in all
the world!'

John looked at her as if he had very nearly got the thought into
his head, that she was his Cricket in chief, and he quite agreed
with her.  But, it was probably one of his narrow escapes, for he
said nothing.

'The first time I heard its cheerful little note, John, was on that
night when you brought me home - when you brought me to my new home
here; its little mistress.  Nearly a year ago.  You recollect,
John?'

O yes.  John remembered.  I should think so!

'Its chirp was such a welcome to me!  It seemed so full of promise
and encouragement.  It seemed to say, you would be kind and gentle
with me, and would not expect (I had a fear of that, John, then) to
find an old head on the shoulders of your foolish little wife.'

John thoughtfully patted one of the shoulders, and then the head,
as though he would have said No, no; he had had no such
expectation; he had been quite content to take them as they were.
And really he had reason.  They were very comely.

'It spoke the truth, John, when it seemed to say so; for you have
ever been, I am sure, the best, the most considerate, the most
affectionate of husbands to me.  This has been a happy home, John;
and I love the Cricket for its sake!'

'Why so do I then,' said the Carrier.  'So do I, Dot.'

'I love it for the many times I have heard it, and the many
thoughts its harmless music has given me.  Sometimes, in the
twilight, when I have felt a little solitary and down-hearted, John
- before baby was here to keep me company and make the house gay -
when I have thought how lonely you would be if I should die; how
lonely I should be if I could know that you had lost me, dear; its
Chirp, Chirp, Chirp upon the hearth, has seemed to tell me of
another little voice, so sweet, so very dear to me, before whose
coming sound my trouble vanished like a dream.  And when I used to
fear - I did fear once, John, I was very young you know - that ours
might prove to be an ill-assorted marriage, I being such a child,
and you more like my guardian than my husband; and that you might
not, however hard you tried, be able to learn to love me, as you
hoped and prayed you might; its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp has cheered me
up again, and filled me with new trust and confidence.  I was
thinking of these things to-night, dear, when I sat expecting you;
and I love the Cricket for their sake!'

'And so do I,' repeated John.  'But, Dot?  I hope and pray that I
might learn to love you?  How you talk!  I had learnt that, long
before I brought you here, to be the Cricket's little mistress,
Dot!'

She laid her hand, an instant, on his arm, and looked up at him
with an agitated face, as if she would have told him something.
Next moment she was down upon her knees before the basket, speaking
in a sprightly voice, and busy with the parcels.

'There are not many of them to-night, John, but I saw some goods
behind the cart, just now; and though they give more trouble,
perhaps, still they pay as well; so we have no reason to grumble,
have we?  Besides, you have been delivering, I dare say, as you
came along?'

'Oh yes,' John said.  'A good many.'

'Why what's this round box?  Heart alive, John, it's a wedding-
cake!'

'Leave a woman alone to find out that,' said John, admiringly.
'Now a man would never have thought of it.  Whereas, it's my belief
that if you was to pack a wedding-cake up in a tea-chest, or a
turn-up bedstead, or a pickled salmon keg, or any unlikely thing, a
woman would be sure to find it out directly.  Yes; I called for it
at the pastry-cook's.'

'And it weighs I don't know what - whole hundredweights!' cried
Dot, making a great demonstration of trying to lift it.

'Whose is it, John?  Where is it going?'

'Read the writing on the other side,' said John.

'Why, John!  My Goodness, John!'

'Ah! who'd have thought it!' John returned.

'You never mean to say,' pursued Dot, sitting on the floor and
shaking her head at him, 'that it's Gruff and Tackleton the
toymaker!'

John nodded.

Mrs. Peerybingle nodded also, fifty times at least.  Not in assent
- in dumb and pitying amazement; screwing up her lips the while
with all their little force (they were never made for screwing up;
I am clear of that), and looking the good Carrier through and
through, in her abstraction.  Miss Slowboy, in the mean time, who
had a mechanical power of reproducing scraps of current
conversation for the delectation of the baby, with all the sense
struck out of them, and all the nouns changed into the plural
number, inquired aloud of that young creature, Was it Gruffs and
Tackletons the toymakers then, and Would it call at Pastry-cooks
for wedding-cakes, and Did its mothers know the boxes when its
fathers brought them homes; and so on.

'And that is really to come about!' said Dot.  'Why, she and I were
girls at school together, John.'

He might have been thinking of her, or nearly thinking of her,
perhaps, as she was in that same school time.  He looked upon her
with a thoughtful pleasure, but he made no answer.

'And he's as old!  As unlike her! - Why, how many years older than
you, is Gruff and Tackleton, John?'

'How many more cups of tea shall I drink to-night at one sitting,
than Gruff and Tackleton ever took in four, I wonder!' replied
John, good-humouredly, as he drew a chair to the round table, and
began at the cold ham.  'As to eating, I eat but little; but that
little I enjoy, Dot.'

Even this, his usual sentiment at meal times, one of his innocent
delusions (for his appetite was always obstinate, and flatly
contradicted him), awoke no smile in the face of his little wife,
who stood among the parcels, pushing the cake-box slowly from her
with her foot, and never once looked, though her eyes were cast
down too, upon the dainty shoe she generally was so mindful of.
Absorbed in thought, she stood there, heedless alike of the tea and
John (although he called to her, and rapped the table with his
knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on the arm;
when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place
behind the teaboard, laughing at her negligence.  But, not as she
had laughed before.  The manner and the music were quite changed.

The Cricket, too, had stopped.  Somehow the room was not so
cheerful as it had been.  Nothing like it.

'So, these are all the parcels, are they, John?' she said, breaking
a long silence, which the honest Carrier had devoted to the
practical illustration of one part of his favourite sentiment -
certainly enjoying what he ate, if it couldn't be admitted that he
ate but little.  'So, these are all the parcels; are they, John?'

'That's all,' said John.  'Why - no - I - ' laying down his knife
and fork, and taking a long breath.  'I declare - I've clean
forgotten the old gentleman!'

'The old gentleman?'

'In the cart,' said John.  'He was asleep, among the straw, the
last time I saw him.  I've very nearly remembered him, twice, since
I came in; but he went out of my head again.  Holloa!  Yahip there!
Rouse up!  That's my hearty!'

John said these latter words outside the door, whither he had
hurried with the candle in his hand.

Miss Slowboy, conscious of some mysterious reference to The Old
Gentleman, and connecting in her mystified imagination certain
associations of a religious nature with the phrase, was so
disturbed, that hastily rising from the low chair by the fire to
seek protection near the skirts of her mistress, and coming into
contact as she crossed the doorway with an ancient Stranger, she
instinctively made a charge or butt at him with the only offensive
instrument within her reach.  This instrument happening to be the
baby, great commotion and alarm ensued, which the sagacity of Boxer
rather tended to increase; for, that good dog, more thoughtful than
its master, had, it seemed, been watching the old gentleman in his
sleep, lest he should walk off with a few young poplar trees that
were tied up behind the cart; and he still attended on him very
closely, worrying his gaiters in fact, and making dead sets at the
buttons.

'You're such an undeniable good sleeper, sir,' said John, when
tranquillity was restored; in the mean time the old gentleman had
stood, bareheaded and motionless, in the centre of the room; 'that
I have half a mind to ask you where the other six are - only that
would be a joke, and I know I should spoil it.  Very near though,'
murmured the Carrier, with a chuckle; 'very near!'

The Stranger, who had long white hair, good features, singularly
bold and well defined for an old man, and dark, bright, penetrating
eyes, looked round with a smile, and saluted the Carrier's wife by
gravely inclining his head.

His garb was very quaint and odd - a long, long way behind the
time.  Its hue was brown, all over.  In his hand he held a great
brown club or walking-stick; and striking this upon the floor, it
fell asunder, and became a chair.  On which he sat down, quite
composedly.

'There!' said the Carrier, turning to his wife.  'That's the way I
found him, sitting by the roadside!  Upright as a milestone.  And
almost as deaf.'

'Sitting in the open air, John!'

'In the open air,' replied the Carrier, 'just at dusk.  "Carriage
Paid," he said; and gave me eighteenpence.  Then he got in.  And
there he is.'

'He's going, John, I think!'

Not at all.  He was only going to speak.

'If you please, I was to be left till called for,' said the
Stranger, mildly.  'Don't mind me.'

With that, he took a pair of spectacles from one of his large
pockets, and a book from another, and leisurely began to read.
Making no more of Boxer than if he had been a house lamb!

The Carrier and his wife exchanged a look of perplexity.  The
Stranger raised his head; and glancing from the latter to the
former, said,

'Your daughter, my good friend?'

'Wife,' returned John.

'Niece?' said the Stranger.

'Wife,' roared John.

'Indeed?' observed the Stranger.  'Surely?  Very young!'

He quietly turned over, and resumed his reading.  But, before he
could have read two lines, he again interrupted himself to say:

'Baby, yours?'

John gave him a gigantic nod; equivalent to an answer in the
affirmative, delivered through a speaking trumpet.

'Girl?'

'Bo-o-oy!' roared John.

'Also very young, eh?'

Mrs. Peerybingle instantly struck in.  'Two months and three da-
ays!  Vaccinated just six weeks ago-o!  Took very fine-ly!
Considered, by the doctor, a remarkably beautiful chi-ild!  Equal
to the general run of children at five months o-old!  Takes notice,
in a way quite wonderful!  May seem impossible to you, but feels
his legs al-ready!'

Here the breathless little mother, who had been shrieking these
short sentences into the old man's ear, until her pretty face was
crimsoned, held up the Baby before him as a stubborn and triumphant
fact; while Tilly Slowboy, with a melodious cry of 'Ketcher,
Ketcher' - which sounded like some unknown words, adapted to a
popular Sneeze - performed some cow-like gambols round that all
unconscious Innocent.

'Hark!  He's called for, sure enough,' said John.  'There's
somebody at the door.  Open it, Tilly.'

Before she could reach it, however, it was opened from without;
being a primitive sort of door, with a latch, that any one could
lift if he chose - and a good many people did choose, for all kinds
of neighbours liked to have a cheerful word or two with the
Carrier, though he was no great talker himself.  Being opened, it
gave admission to a little, meagre, thoughtful, dingy-faced man,
who seemed to have made himself a great-coat from the sack-cloth
covering of some old box; for, when he turned to shut the door, and
keep the weather out, he disclosed upon the back of that garment,
the inscription G & T in large black capitals.  Also the word GLASS
in bold characters.

'Good evening, John!' said the little man.  'Good evening, Mum.
Good evening, Tilly.  Good evening, Unbeknown!  How's Baby, Mum?
Boxer's pretty well I hope?'

'All thriving, Caleb,' replied Dot.  'I am sure you need only look
at the dear child, for one, to know that.'

'And I'm sure I need only look at you for another,' said Caleb.

He didn't look at her though; he had a wandering and thoughtful eye
which seemed to be always projecting itself into some other time
and place, no matter what he said; a description which will equally
apply to his voice.

'Or at John for another,' said Caleb.  'Or at Tilly, as far as that
goes.  Or certainly at Boxer.'

'Busy just now, Caleb?' asked the Carrier.

'Why, pretty well, John,' he returned, with the distraught air of a
man who was casting about for the Philosopher's stone, at least.
'Pretty much so.  There's rather a run on Noah's Arks at present.
I could have wished to improve upon the Family, but I don't see how
it's to be done at the price.  It would be a satisfaction to one's
mind, to make it clearer which was Shems and Hams, and which was
Wives.  Flies an't on that scale neither, as compared with
elephants you know!  Ah! well!  Have you got anything in the parcel
line for me, John?'

The Carrier put his hand into a pocket of the coat he had taken
off; and brought out, carefully preserved in moss and paper, a tiny
flower-pot.

'There it is!' he said, adjusting it with great care.  'Not so much
as a leaf damaged.  Full of buds!'

Caleb's dull eye brightened, as he took it, and thanked him.

'Dear, Caleb,' said the Carrier.  'Very dear at this season.'

'Never mind that.  It would be cheap to me, whatever it cost,'
returned the little man.  'Anything else, John?'

'A small box,' replied the Carrier.  'Here you are!'

'"For Caleb Plummer,"' said the little man, spelling out the
direction.  '"With Cash."  With Cash, John?  I don't think it's for
me.'

'With Care,' returned the Carrier, looking over his shoulder.
'Where do you make out cash?'

'Oh!  To be sure!' said Caleb.  'It's all right.  With care!  Yes,
yes; that's mine.  It might have been with cash, indeed, if my dear
Boy in the Golden South Americas had lived, John.  You loved him
like a son; didn't you?  You needn't say you did.  I know, of
course.  "Caleb Plummer.  With care."  Yes, yes, it's all right.
It's a box of dolls' eyes for my daughter's work.  I wish it was
her own sight in a box, John.'

'I wish it was, or could be!' cried the Carrier.

'Thank'ee,' said the little man.  'You speak very hearty.  To think
that she should never see the Dolls - and them a-staring at her, so
bold, all day long!  That's where it cuts.  What's the damage,
John?'

'I'll damage you,' said John, 'if you inquire.  Dot!  Very near?'

'Well! it's like you to say so,' observed the little man.  'It's
your kind way.  Let me see.  I think that's all.'

'I think not,' said the Carrier.  'Try again.'

'Something for our Governor, eh?' said Caleb, after pondering a
little while.  'To be sure.  That's what I came for; but my head's
so running on them Arks and things!  He hasn't been here, has he?'

'Not he,' returned the Carrier.  'He's too busy, courting.'

'He's coming round though,' said Caleb; 'for he told me to keep on
the near side of the road going home, and it was ten to one he'd
take me up.  I had better go, by the bye. - You couldn't have the
goodness to let me pinch Boxer's tail, Mum, for half a moment,
could you?'

'Why, Caleb! what a question!'

'Oh never mind, Mum,' said the little man.  'He mightn't like it
perhaps.  There's a small order just come in, for barking dogs; and
I should wish to go as close to Natur' as I could, for sixpence.
That's all.  Never mind, Mum.'

It happened opportunely, that Boxer, without receiving the proposed
stimulus, began to bark with great zeal.  But, as this implied the
approach of some new visitor, Caleb, postponing his study from the
life to a more convenient season, shouldered the round box, and
took a hurried leave.  He might have spared himself the trouble,
for he met the visitor upon the threshold.

'Oh!  You are here, are you?  Wait a bit.  I'll take you home.
John Peerybingle, my service to you.  More of my service to your
pretty wife.  Handsomer every day!  Better too, if possible!  And
younger,' mused the speaker, in a low voice; 'that's the Devil of
it!'

'I should be astonished at your paying compliments, Mr. Tackleton,'
said Dot, not with the best grace in the world; 'but for your
condition.'

'You know all about it then?'

'I have got myself to believe it, somehow,' said Dot.

'After a hard struggle, I suppose?'

'Very.'

Tackleton the Toy-merchant, pretty generally known as Gruff and
Tackleton - for that was the firm, though Gruff had been bought out
long ago; only leaving his name, and as some said his nature,
according to its Dictionary meaning, in the business - Tackleton
the Toy-merchant, was a man whose vocation had been quite
misunderstood by his Parents and Guardians.  If they had made him a
Money Lender, or a sharp Attorney, or a Sheriff's Officer, or a
Broker, he might have sown his discontented oats in his youth, and,
after having had the full run of himself in ill-natured
transactions, might have turned out amiable, at last, for the sake
of a little freshness and novelty.  But, cramped and chafing in the
peaceable pursuit of toy-making, he was a domestic Ogre, who had
been living on children all his life, and was their implacable
enemy.  He despised all toys; wouldn't have bought one for the
world; delighted, in his malice, to insinuate grim expressions into
the faces of brown-paper farmers who drove pigs to market, bellmen
who advertised lost lawyers' consciences, movable old ladies who
darned stockings or carved pies; and other like samples of his
stock in trade.  In appalling masks; hideous, hairy, red-eyed Jacks
in Boxes; Vampire Kites; demoniacal Tumblers who wouldn't lie down,
and were perpetually flying forward, to stare infants out of
countenance; his soul perfectly revelled.  They were his only
relief, and safety-valve.  He was great in such inventions.
Anything suggestive of a Pony-nightmare was delicious to him.  He
had even lost money (and he took to that toy very kindly) by
getting up Goblin slides for magic-lanterns, whereon the Powers of
Darkness were depicted as a sort of supernatural shell-fish, with
human faces.  In intensifying the portraiture of Giants, he had
sunk quite a little capital; and, though no painter himself, he
could indicate, for the instruction of his artists, with a piece of
chalk, a certain furtive leer for the countenances of those
monsters, which was safe to destroy the peace of mind of any young
gentleman between the ages of six and eleven, for the whole
Christmas or Midsummer Vacation.

What he was in toys, he was (as most men are) in other things.  You
may easily suppose, therefore, that within the great green cape,
which reached down to the calves of his legs, there was buttoned up
to the chin an uncommonly pleasant fellow; and that he was about as
choice a spirit, and as agreeable a companion, as ever stood in a
pair of bull-headed-looking boots with mahogany-coloured tops.

Still, Tackleton, the toy-merchant, was going to be married.  In
spite of all this, he was going to be married.  And to a young wife
too, a beautiful young wife.

He didn't look much like a bridegroom, as he stood in the Carrier's
kitchen, with a twist in his dry face, and a screw in his body, and
his hat jerked over the bridge of his nose, and his hands tucked
down into the bottoms of his pockets, and his whole sarcastic ill-
conditioned self peering out of one little corner of one little
eye, like the concentrated essence of any number of ravens.  But, a
Bridegroom he designed to be.

'In three days' time.  Next Thursday.  The last day of the first
month in the year.  That's my wedding-day,' said Tackleton.

Did I mention that he had always one eye wide open, and one eye
nearly shut; and that the one eye nearly shut, was always the
expressive eye?  I don't think I did.

'That's my wedding-day!' said Tackleton, rattling his money.

'Why, it's our wedding-day too,' exclaimed the Carrier.

'Ha ha!' laughed Tackleton.  'Odd!  You're just such another
couple.  Just!'

The indignation of Dot at this presumptuous assertion is not to be
described.  What next?  His imagination would compass the
possibility of just such another Baby, perhaps.  The man was mad.

'I say!  A word with you,' murmured Tackleton, nudging the Carrier
with his elbow, and taking him a little apart.  'You'll come to the
wedding?  We're in the same boat, you know.'

'How in the same boat?' inquired the Carrier.

'A little disparity, you know,' said Tackleton, with another nudge.
'Come and spend an evening with us, beforehand.'

'Why?' demanded John, astonished at this pressing hospitality.

'Why?' returned the other.  'That's a new way of receiving an
invitation.  Why, for pleasure - sociability, you know, and all
that!'

'I thought you were never sociable,' said John, in his plain way.

'Tchah!  It's of no use to be anything but free with you, I see,'
said Tackleton.  'Why, then, the truth is you have a - what tea-
drinking people call a sort of a comfortable appearance together,
you and your wife.  We know better, you know, but - '

'No, we don't know better,' interposed John.  'What are you talking
about?'

'Well!  We DON'T know better, then,' said Tackleton.  'We'll agree
that we don't.  As you like; what does it matter?  I was going to
say, as you have that sort of appearance, your company will produce
a favourable effect on Mrs. Tackleton that will be.  And, though I
don't think your good lady's very friendly to me, in this matter,
still she can't help herself from falling into my views, for
there's a compactness and cosiness of appearance about her that
always tells, even in an indifferent case.  You'll say you'll
come?'

'We have arranged to keep our Wedding-Day (as far as that goes) at
home,' said John.  'We have made the promise to ourselves these six
months.  We think, you see, that home - '

'Bah! what's home?' cried Tackleton.  'Four walls and a ceiling!
(why don't you kill that Cricket?  I would!  I always do.  I hate
their noise.)  There are four walls and a ceiling at my house.
Come to me!'

'You kill your Crickets, eh?' said John.

'Scrunch 'em, sir,' returned the other, setting his heel heavily on
the floor.  'You'll say you'll come? it's as much your interest as
mine, you know, that the women should persuade each other that
they're quiet and contented, and couldn't be better off.  I know
their way.  Whatever one woman says, another woman is determined to
clinch, always.  There's that spirit of emulation among 'em, sir,
that if your wife says to my wife, "I'm the happiest woman in the
world, and mine's the best husband in the world, and I dote on
him," my wife will say the same to yours, or more, and half believe
it.'

'Do you mean to say she don't, then?' asked the Carrier.

'Don't!' cried Tackleton, with a short, sharp laugh.  'Don't what?'

The Carrier had some faint idea of adding, 'dote upon you.'  But,
happening to meet the half-closed eye, as it twinkled upon him over
the turned-up collar of the cape, which was within an ace of poking
it out, he felt it such an unlikely part and parcel of anything to
be doted on, that he substituted, 'that she don't believe it?'

'Ah you dog!  You're joking,' said Tackleton.

But the Carrier, though slow to understand the full drift of his
meaning, eyed him in such a serious manner, that he was obliged to
be a little more explanatory.

'I have the humour,' said Tackleton:  holding up the fingers of his
left hand, and tapping the forefinger, to imply 'there I am,
Tackleton to wit:' 'I have the humour, sir, to marry a young wife,
and a pretty wife:' here he rapped his little finger, to express
the Bride; not sparingly, but sharply; with a sense of power.  'I'm
able to gratify that humour and I do.  It's my whim.  But - now
look there!'

He pointed to where Dot was sitting, thoughtfully, before the fire;
leaning her dimpled chin upon her hand, and watching the bright
blaze.  The Carrier looked at her, and then at him, and then at
her, and then at him again.

'She honours and obeys, no doubt, you know,' said Tackleton; 'and
that, as I am not a man of sentiment, is quite enough for ME.  But
do you think there's anything more in it?'

'I think,' observed the Carrier, 'that I should chuck any man out
of window, who said there wasn't.'

'Exactly so,' returned the other with an unusual alacrity of
assent.  'To be sure!  Doubtless you would.  Of course.  I'm
certain of it.  Good night.  Pleasant dreams!'

The Carrier was puzzled, and made uncomfortable and uncertain, in
spite of himself.  He couldn't help showing it, in his manner.

'Good night, my dear friend!' said Tackleton, compassionately.
'I'm off.  We're exactly alike, in reality, I see.  You won't give
us to-morrow evening?  Well!  Next day you go out visiting, I know.
I'll meet you there, and bring my wife that is to be.  It'll do her
good.  You're agreeable?  Thank'ee.  What's that!'

It was a loud cry from the Carrier's wife:  a loud, sharp, sudden
cry, that made the room ring, like a glass vessel.  She had risen
from her seat, and stood like one transfixed by terror and
surprise.  The Stranger had advanced towards the fire to warm
himself, and stood within a short stride of her chair.  But quite
still.

'Dot!' cried the Carrier.  'Mary!  Darling!  What's the matter?'

They were all about her in a moment.  Caleb, who had been dozing on
the cake-box, in the first imperfect recovery of his suspended
presence of mind, seized Miss Slowboy by the hair of her head, but
immediately apologised.

'Mary!' exclaimed the Carrier, supporting her in his arms.  'Are
you ill!  What is it?  Tell me, dear!'

She only answered by beating her hands together, and falling into a
wild fit of laughter.  Then, sinking from his grasp upon the
ground, she covered her face with her apron, and wept bitterly.
And then she laughed again, and then she cried again, and then she
said how cold it was, and suffered him to lead her to the fire,
where she sat down as before.  The old man standing, as before,
quite still.

'I'm better, John,' she said.  'I'm quite well now - I -'

'John!'  But John was on the other side of her.  Why turn her face
towards the strange old gentleman, as if addressing him!  Was her
brain wandering?

'Only a fancy, John dear - a kind of shock - a something coming
suddenly before my eyes - I don't know what it was.  It's quite
gone, quite gone.'

'I'm glad it's gone,' muttered Tackleton, turning the expressive
eye all round the room.  'I wonder where it's gone, and what it
was.  Humph!  Caleb, come here!  Who's that with the grey hair?'

'I don't know, sir,' returned Caleb in a whisper.  'Never see him
before, in all my life.  A beautiful figure for a nut-cracker;
quite a new model.  With a screw-jaw opening down into his
waistcoat, he'd be lovely.'

'Not ugly enough,' said Tackleton.

'Or for a firebox, either,' observed Caleb, in deep contemplation,
'what a model!  Unscrew his head to put the matches in; turn him
heels up'ards for the light; and what a firebox for a gentleman's
mantel-shelf, just as he stands!'

'Not half ugly enough,' said Tackleton.  'Nothing in him at all!
Come!  Bring that box!  All right now, I hope?'

'Quite gone!' said the little woman, waving him hurriedly away.
'Good night!'

'Good night,' said Tackleton.  'Good night, John Peerybingle!  Take
care how you carry that box, Caleb.  Let it fall, and I'll murder
you!  Dark as pitch, and weather worse than ever, eh?  Good night!'

So, with another sharp look round the room, he went out at the
door; followed by Caleb with the wedding-cake on his head.

The Carrier had been so much astounded by his little wife, and so
busily engaged in soothing and tending her, that he had scarcely
been conscious of the Stranger's presence, until now, when he again
stood there, their only guest.

'He don't belong to them, you see,' said John.  'I must give him a
hint to go.'

'I beg your pardon, friend,' said the old gentleman, advancing to
him; 'the more so, as I fear your wife has not been well; but the
Attendant whom my infirmity,' he touched his ears and shook his
head, 'renders almost indispensable, not having arrived, I fear
there must be some mistake.  The bad night which made the shelter
of your comfortable cart (may I never have a worse!) so acceptable,
is still as bad as ever.  Would you, in your kindness, suffer me to
rent a bed here?'

'Yes, yes,' cried Dot.  'Yes!  Certainly!'

'Oh!' said the Carrier, surprised by the rapidity of this consent.

'Well!  I don't object; but, still I'm not quite sure that - '

'Hush!' she interrupted.  'Dear John!'

'Why, he's stone deaf,' urged John.

'I know he is, but - Yes, sir, certainly.  Yes! certainly!  I'll
make him up a bed, directly, John.'

As she hurried off to do it, the flutter of her spirits, and the
agitation of her manner, were so strange that the Carrier stood
looking after her, quite confounded.

'Did its mothers make it up a Beds then!' cried Miss Slowboy to the
Baby; 'and did its hair grow brown and curly, when its caps was
lifted off, and frighten it, a precious Pets, a-sitting by the
fires!'

With that unaccountable attraction of the mind to trifles, which is
often incidental to a state of doubt and confusion, the Carrier as
he walked slowly to and fro, found himself mentally repeating even
these absurd words, many times.  So many times that he got them by
heart, and was still conning them over and over, like a lesson,
when Tilly, after administering as much friction to the little bald
head with her hand as she thought wholesome (according to the
practice of nurses), had once more tied the Baby's cap on.

'And frighten it, a precious Pets, a-sitting by the fires.  What
frightened Dot, I wonder!' mused the Carrier, pacing to and fro.

He scouted, from his heart, the insinuations of the Toy-merchant,
and yet they filled him with a vague, indefinite uneasiness.  For,
Tackleton was quick and sly; and he had that painful sense,
himself, of being of slow perception, that a broken hint was always
worrying to him.  He certainly had no intention in his mind of
linking anything that Tackleton had said, with the unusual conduct
of his wife, but the two subjects of reflection came into his mind
together, and he could not keep them asunder.

The bed was soon made ready; and the visitor, declining all
refreshment but a cup of tea, retired.  Then, Dot - quite well
again, she said, quite well again - arranged the great chair in the
chimney-corner for her husband; filled his pipe and gave it him;
and took her usual little stool beside him on the hearth.

She always WOULD sit on that little stool.  I think she must have
had a kind of notion that it was a coaxing, wheedling little stool.

She was, out and out, the very best filler of a pipe, I should say,
in the four quarters of the globe.  To see her put that chubby
little finger in the bowl, and then blow down the pipe to clear the
tube, and, when she had done so, affect to think that there was
really something in the tube, and blow a dozen times, and hold it
to her eye like a telescope, with a most provoking twist in her
capital little face, as she looked down it, was quite a brilliant
thing.  As to the tobacco, she was perfect mistress of the subject;
and her lighting of the pipe, with a wisp of paper, when the
Carrier had it in his mouth - going so very near his nose, and yet
not scorching it - was Art, high Art.

And the Cricket and the kettle, turning up again, acknowledged it!
The bright fire, blazing up again, acknowledged it!  The little
Mower on the clock, in his unheeded work, acknowledged it!  The
Carrier, in his smoothing forehead and expanding face, acknowledged
it, the readiest of all.

And as he soberly and thoughtfully puffed at his old pipe, and as
the Dutch clock ticked, and as the red fire gleamed, and as the
Cricket chirped; that Genius of his Hearth and Home (for such the
Cricket was) came out, in fairy shape, into the room, and summoned
many forms of Home about him.  Dots of all ages, and all sizes,
filled the chamber.  Dots who were merry children, running on
before him gathering flowers, in the fields; coy Dots, half
shrinking from, half yielding to, the pleading of his own rough
image; newly-married Dots, alighting at the door, and taking
wondering possession of the household keys; motherly little Dots,
attended by fictitious Slowboys, bearing babies to be christened;
matronly Dots, still young and blooming, watching Dots of
daughters, as they danced at rustic balls; fat Dots, encircled and
beset by troops of rosy grandchildren; withered Dots, who leaned on
sticks, and tottered as they crept along.  Old Carriers too,
appeared, with blind old Boxers lying at their feet; and newer
carts with younger drivers ('Peerybingle Brothers' on the tilt);
and sick old Carriers, tended by the gentlest hands; and graves of
dead and gone old Carriers, green in the churchyard.  And as the
Cricket showed him all these things - he saw them plainly, though
his eyes were fixed upon the fire - the Carrier's heart grew light
and happy, and he thanked his Household Gods with all his might,
and cared no more for Gruff and Tackleton than you do.


But, what was that young figure of a man, which the same Fairy
Cricket set so near Her stool, and which remained there, singly and
alone?  Why did it linger still, so near her, with its arm upon the
chimney-piece, ever repeating 'Married! and not to me!'

O Dot!  O failing Dot!  There is no place for it in all your
husband's visions; why has its shadow fallen on his hearth!



CHAPTER II - Chirp The Second



CALEB PLUMMER and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by themselves,
as the Story-books say - and my blessing, with yours to back it I
hope, on the Story-books, for saying anything in this workaday
world! - Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter lived all alone by
themselves, in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house, which
was, in truth, no better than a pimple on the prominent red-brick
nose of Gruff and Tackleton.  The premises of Gruff and Tackleton
were the great feature of the street; but you might have knocked
down Caleb Plummer's dwelling with a hammer or two, and carried off
the pieces in a cart.

If any one had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour
to miss it after such an inroad, it would have been, no doubt, to
commend its demolition as a vast improvement.  It stuck to the
premises of Gruff and Tackleton, like a barnacle to a ship's keel,
or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the stem
of a tree.

But, it was the germ from which the full-grown trunk of Gruff and
Tackleton had sprung; and, under its crazy roof, the Gruff before
last, had, in a small way, made toys for a generation of old boys
and girls, who had played with them, and found them out, and broken
them, and gone to sleep.

I have said that Caleb and his poor Blind Daughter lived here.  I
should have said that Caleb lived here, and his poor Blind Daughter
somewhere else - in an enchanted home of Caleb's furnishing, where
scarcity and shabbiness were not, and trouble never entered.  Caleb
was no sorcerer, but in the only magic art that still remains to
us, the magic of devoted, deathless love, Nature had been the
mistress of his study; and from her teaching, all the wonder came.

The Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured, walls
blotched and bare of plaster here and there, high crevices
unstopped and widening every day, beams mouldering and tending
downward.  The Blind Girl never knew that iron was rusting, wood
rotting, paper peeling off; the size, and shape, and true
proportion of the dwelling, withering away.  The Blind Girl never
knew that ugly shapes of delf and earthenware were on the board;
that sorrow and faintheartedness were in the house; that Caleb's
scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey, before her
sightless face.  The Blind Girl never knew they had a master, cold,
exacting, and uninterested - never knew that Tackleton was
Tackleton in short; but lived in the belief of an eccentric
humourist who loved to have his jest with them, and who, while he
was the Guardian Angel of their lives, disdained to hear one word
of thankfulness.

And all was Caleb's doing; all the doing of her simple father!  But
he too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its
music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit
had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation
might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by
these little means.  For all the Cricket tribe are potent Spirits,
even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it
(which is frequently the case); and there are not in the unseen
world, voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly
relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest
counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the
Hearth address themselves to human kind.

Caleb and his daughter were at work together in their usual
working-room, which served them for their ordinary living-room as
well; and a strange place it was.  There were houses in it,
finished and unfinished, for Dolls of all stations in life.
Suburban tenements for Dolls of moderate means; kitchens and single
apartments for Dolls of the lower classes; capital town residences
for Dolls of high estate.  Some of these establishments were
already furnished according to estimate, with a view to the
convenience of Dolls of limited income; others could be fitted on
the most expensive scale, at a moment's notice, from whole shelves
of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads, and upholstery.  The
nobility and gentry, and public in general, for whose accommodation
these tenements were designed, lay, here and there, in baskets,
staring straight up at the ceiling; but, in denoting their degrees
in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which
experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the
makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often
froward and perverse; for, they, not resting on such arbitrary
marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag, had superadded
striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake.  Thus,
the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but
only she and her compeers.  The next grade in the social scale
being made of leather, and the next of coarse linen stuff.  As to
the common-people, they had just so many matches out of tinder-
boxes, for their arms and legs, and there they were - established
in their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of
it.

There were various other samples of his handicraft, besides Dolls,
in Caleb Plummer's room.  There were Noah's Arks, in which the
Birds and Beasts were an uncommonly tight fit, I assure you; though
they could be crammed in, anyhow, at the roof, and rattled and
shaken into the smallest compass.  By a bold poetical licence, most
of these Noah's Arks had knockers on the doors; inconsistent
appendages, perhaps, as suggestive of morning callers and a
Postman, yet a pleasant finish to the outside of the building.
There were scores of melancholy little carts, which, when the
wheels went round, performed most doleful music.  Many small
fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture; no end of cannon,
shields, swords, spears, and guns.  There were little tumblers in
red breeches, incessantly swarming up high obstacles of red-tape,
and coming down, head first, on the other side; and there were
innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable,
appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs, inserted, for the
purpose, in their own street doors.  There were beasts of all
sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted
barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the
thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle.  As it would have been
hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were
ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities on the turning of a
handle, so it would have been no easy task to mention any human
folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or
remote, in Caleb Plummer's room.  And not in an exaggerated form,
for very little handles will move men and women to as strange
performances, as any Toy was ever made to undertake.

In the midst of all these objects, Caleb and his daughter sat at
work.  The Blind Girl busy as a Doll's dressmaker; Caleb painting
and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion.

The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb's face, and his absorbed
and dreamy manner, which would have sat well on some alchemist or
abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrast to his
occupation, and the trivialities about him.  But, trivial things,
invented and pursued for bread, become very serious matters of
fact; and, apart from this consideration, I am not at all prepared
to say, myself, that if Caleb had been a Lord Chamberlain, or a
Member of Parliament, or a lawyer, or even a great speculator, he
would have dealt in toys one whit less whimsical, while I have a
very great doubt whether they would have been as harmless.

'So you were out in the rain last night, father, in your beautiful
new great-coat,' said Caleb's daughter.

'In my beautiful new great-coat,' answered Caleb, glancing towards
a clothes-line in the room, on which the sack-cloth garment
previously described, was carefully hung up to dry.

'How glad I am you bought it, father!'

'And of such a tailor, too,' said Caleb.  'Quite a fashionable
tailor.  It's too good for me.'

The Blind Girl rested from her work, and laughed with delight.

'Too good, father!  What can be too good for you?'

'I'm half-ashamed to wear it though,' said Caleb, watching the
effect of what he said, upon her brightening face; 'upon my word!
When I hear the boys and people say behind me, "Hal-loa!  Here's a
swell!"  I don't know which way to look.  And when the beggar
wouldn't go away last night; and when I said I was a very common
man, said "No, your Honour!  Bless your Honour, don't say that!"  I
was quite ashamed.  I really felt as if I hadn't a right to wear
it.'

Happy Blind Girl!  How merry she was, in her exultation!

'I see you, father,' she said, clasping her hands, 'as plainly, as
if I had the eyes I never want when you are with me.  A blue coat -
'

'Bright blue,' said Caleb.

'Yes, yes!  Bright blue!' exclaimed the girl, turning up her
radiant face; 'the colour I can just remember in the blessed sky!
You told me it was blue before!  A bright blue coat - '

'Made loose to the figure,' suggested Caleb.

'Made loose to the figure!' cried the Blind Girl, laughing
heartily; 'and in it, you, dear father, with your merry eye, your
smiling face, your free step, and your dark hair - looking so young
and handsome!'

'Halloa!  Halloa!' said Caleb.  'I shall be vain, presently!'

'I think you are, already,' cried the Blind Girl, pointing at him,
in her glee.  'I know you, father!  Ha, ha, ha!  I've found you
out, you see!'

How different the picture in her mind, from Caleb, as he sat
observing her!  She had spoken of his free step.  She was right in
that.  For years and years, he had never once crossed that
threshold at his own slow pace, but with a footfall counterfeited
for her ear; and never had he, when his heart was heaviest,
forgotten the light tread that was to render hers so cheerful and
courageous!

Heaven knows!  But I think Caleb's vague bewilderment of manner may
have half originated in his having confused himself about himself
and everything around him, for the love of his Blind Daughter.  How
could the little man be otherwise than bewildered, after labouring
for so many years to destroy his own identity, and that of all the
objects that had any bearing on it!

'There we are,' said Caleb, falling back a pace or two to form the
better judgment of his work; 'as near the real thing as
sixpenn'orth of halfpence is to sixpence.  What a pity that the
whole front of the house opens at once!  If there was only a
staircase in it, now, and regular doors to the rooms to go in at!
But that's the worst of my calling, I'm always deluding myself, and
swindling myself.'

'You are speaking quite softly.  You are not tired, father?'

'Tired!' echoed Caleb, with a great burst of animation, 'what
should tire me, Bertha?  I was never tired.  What does it mean?'

To give the greater force to his words, he checked himself in an
involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning
figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal
state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of
a song.  It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling
Bowl.  He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice,
that made his face a thousand times more meagre and more thoughtful
than ever.

'What!  You're singing, are you?' said Tackleton, putting his head
in at the door.  'Go it!  I can't sing.'

Nobody would have suspected him of it.  He hadn't what is generally
termed a singing face, by any means.

'I can't afford to sing,' said Tackleton.  'I'm glad YOU CAN.  I
hope you can afford to work too.  Hardly time for both, I should
think?'

'If you could only see him, Bertha, how he's winking at me!'
whispered Caleb.  'Such a man to joke! you'd think, if you didn't
know him, he was in earnest - wouldn't you now?'

The Blind Girl smiled and nodded.

'The bird that can sing and won't sing, must be made to sing, they
say,' grumbled Tackleton.  'What about the owl that can't sing, and
oughtn't to sing, and will sing; is there anything that HE should
be made to do?'

'The extent to which he's winking at this moment!' whispered Caleb
to his daughter.  'O, my gracious!'

'Always merry and light-hearted with us!' cried the smiling Bertha.

'O, you're there, are you?' answered Tackleton.  'Poor Idiot!'

He really did believe she was an Idiot; and he founded the belief,
I can't say whether consciously or not, upon her being fond of him.

'Well! and being there, - how are you?' said Tackleton, in his
grudging way.

'Oh! well; quite well.  And as happy as even you can wish me to be.
As happy as you would make the whole world, if you could!'

'Poor Idiot!' muttered Tackleton.  'No gleam of reason.  Not a
gleam!'

The Blind Girl took his hand and kissed it; held it for a moment in
her own two hands; and laid her cheek against it tenderly, before
releasing it.  There was such unspeakable affection and such
fervent gratitude in the act, that Tackleton himself was moved to
say, in a milder growl than usual:

'What's the matter now?'

'I stood it close beside my pillow when I went to sleep last night,
and remembered it in my dreams.  And when the day broke, and the
glorious red sun - the RED sun, father?'

'Red in the mornings and the evenings, Bertha,' said poor Caleb,
with a woeful glance at his employer.

'When it rose, and the bright light I almost fear to strike myself
against in walking, came into the room, I turned the little tree
towards it, and blessed Heaven for making things so precious, and
blessed you for sending them to cheer me!'

'Bedlam broke loose!' said Tackleton under his breath.  'We shall
arrive at the strait-waistcoat and mufflers soon.  We're getting
on!'

Caleb, with his hands hooked loosely in each other, stared vacantly
before him while his daughter spoke, as if he really were uncertain
(I believe he was) whether Tackleton had done anything to deserve
her thanks, or not.  If he could have been a perfectly free agent,
at that moment, required, on pain of death, to kick the Toy-
merchant, or fall at his feet, according to his merits, I believe
it would have been an even chance which course he would have taken.
Yet, Caleb knew that with his own hands he had brought the little
rose-tree home for her, so carefully, and that with his own lips he
had forged the innocent deception which should help to keep her
from suspecting how much, how very much, he every day, denied
himself, that she might be the happier.

'Bertha!' said Tackleton, assuming, for the nonce, a little
cordiality.  'Come here.'

'Oh!  I can come straight to you!  You needn't guide me!' she
rejoined.

'Shall I tell you a secret, Bertha?'

'If you will!' she answered, eagerly.

How bright the darkened face!  How adorned with light, the
listening head!

'This is the day on which little what's-her-name, the spoilt child,
Peerybingle's wife, pays her regular visit to you - makes her
fantastic Pic-Nic here; an't it?' said Tackleton, with a strong
expression of distaste for the whole concern.

'Yes,' replied Bertha.  'This is the day.'

'I thought so,' said Tackleton.  'I should like to join the party.'

'Do you hear that, father!' cried the Blind Girl in an ecstasy.

'Yes, yes, I hear it,' murmured Caleb, with the fixed look of a
sleep-walker; 'but I don't believe it.  It's one of my lies, I've
no doubt.'

'You see I - I want to bring the Peerybingles a little more into
company with May Fielding,' said Tackleton.  'I am going to be
married to May.'

'Married!' cried the Blind Girl, starting from him.

'She's such a con-founded Idiot,' muttered Tackleton, 'that I was
afraid she'd never comprehend me.  Ah, Bertha!  Married!  Church,
parson, clerk, beadle, glass-coach, bells, breakfast, bride-cake,
favours, marrow-bones, cleavers, and all the rest of the
tomfoolery.  A wedding, you know; a wedding.  Don't you know what a
wedding is?'

'I know,' replied the Blind Girl, in a gentle tone.  'I
understand!'

'Do you?' muttered Tackleton.  'It's more than I expected.  Well!
On that account I want to join the party, and to bring May and her
mother.  I'll send in a little something or other, before the
afternoon.  A cold leg of mutton, or some comfortable trifle of
that sort.  You'll expect me?'

'Yes,' she answered.

She had drooped her head, and turned away; and so stood, with her
hands crossed, musing.

'I don't think you will,' muttered Tackleton, looking at her; 'for
you seem to have forgotten all about it, already.  Caleb!'

'I may venture to say I'm here, I suppose,' thought Caleb.  'Sir!'

'Take care she don't forget what I've been saying to her.'

'SHE never forgets,' returned Caleb.  'It's one of the few things
she an't clever in.'

'Every man thinks his own geese swans,' observed the Toy-merchant,
with a shrug.  'Poor devil!'

Having delivered himself of which remark, with infinite contempt,
old Gruff and Tackleton withdrew.

Bertha remained where he had left her, lost in meditation.  The
gaiety had vanished from her downcast face, and it was very sad.
Three or four times she shook her head, as if bewailing some
remembrance or some loss; but her sorrowful reflections found no
vent in words.

It was not until Caleb had been occupied, some time, in yoking a
team of horses to a waggon by the summary process of nailing the
harness to the vital parts of their bodies, that she drew near to
his working-stool, and sitting down beside him, said:

'Father, I am lonely in the dark.  I want my eyes, my patient,
willing eyes.'

'Here they are,' said Caleb.  'Always ready.  They are more yours
than mine, Bertha, any hour in the four-and-twenty.  What shall
your eyes do for you, dear?'

'Look round the room, father.'

'All right,' said Caleb.  'No sooner said than done, Bertha.'

'Tell me about it.'

'It's much the same as usual,' said Caleb.  'Homely, but very snug.
The gay colours on the walls; the bright flowers on the plates and
dishes; the shining wood, where there are beams or panels; the
general cheerfulness and neatness of the building; make it very
pretty.'

Cheerful and neat it was wherever Bertha's hands could busy
themselves.  But nowhere else, were cheerfulness and neatness
possible, in the old crazy shed which Caleb's fancy so transformed.

'You have your working dress on, and are not so gallant as when you
wear the handsome coat?' said Bertha, touching him.

'Not quite so gallant,' answered Caleb.  'Pretty brisk though.'

'Father,' said the Blind Girl, drawing close to his side, and
stealing one arm round his neck, 'tell me something about May.  She
is very fair?'

'She is indeed,' said Caleb.  And she was indeed.  It was quite a
rare thing to Caleb, not to have to draw on his invention.

'Her hair is dark,' said Bertha, pensively, 'darker than mine.  Her
voice is sweet and musical, I know.  I have often loved to hear it.
Her shape - '

'There's not a Doll's in all the room to equal it,' said Caleb.
'And her eyes! - '

He stopped; for Bertha had drawn closer round his neck, and from
the arm that clung about him, came a warning pressure which he
understood too well.

He coughed a moment, hammered for a moment, and then fell back upon
the song about the sparkling bowl; his infallible resource in all
such difficulties.

'Our friend, father, our benefactor.  I am never tired, you know,
of hearing about him. - Now, was I ever?' she said, hastily.

'Of course not,' answered Caleb, 'and with reason.'

'Ah!  With how much reason!' cried the Blind Girl.  With such
fervency, that Caleb, though his motives were so pure, could not
endure to meet her face; but dropped his eyes, as if she could have
read in them his innocent deceit.

'Then, tell me again about him, dear father,' said Bertha.  'Many
times again!  His face is benevolent, kind, and tender.  Honest and
true, I am sure it is.  The manly heart that tries to cloak all
favours with a show of roughness and unwillingness, beats in its
every look and glance.'

'And makes it noble!' added Caleb, in his quiet desperation.

'And makes it noble!' cried the Blind Girl.  'He is older than May,
father.'

'Ye-es,' said Caleb, reluctantly.  'He's a little older than May.
But that don't signify.'

'Oh father, yes!  To be his patient companion in infirmity and age;
to be his gentle nurse in sickness, and his constant friend in
suffering and sorrow; to know no weariness in working for his sake;
to watch him, tend him, sit beside his bed and talk to him awake,
and pray for him asleep; what privileges these would be!  What
opportunities for proving all her truth and devotion to him!  Would
she do all this, dear father?

'No doubt of it,' said Caleb.

'I love her, father; I can love her from my soul!' exclaimed the
Blind Girl.  And saying so, she laid her poor blind face on Caleb's
shoulder, and so wept and wept, that he was almost sorry to have
brought that tearful happiness upon her.

In the mean time, there had been a pretty sharp commotion at John
Peerybingle's, for little Mrs. Peerybingle naturally couldn't think
of going anywhere without the Baby; and to get the Baby under weigh
took time.  Not that there was much of the Baby, speaking of it as
a thing of weight and measure, but there was a vast deal to do
about and about it, and it all had to be done by easy stages.  For
instance, when the Baby was got, by hook and by crook, to a certain
point of dressing, and you might have rationally supposed that
another touch or two would finish him off, and turn him out a tip-
top Baby challenging the world, he was unexpectedly extinguished in
a flannel cap, and hustled off to bed; where he simmered (so to
speak) between two blankets for the best part of an hour.  From
this state of inaction he was then recalled, shining very much and
roaring violently, to partake of - well?  I would rather say, if
you'll permit me to speak generally - of a slight repast.  After
which, he went to sleep again.  Mrs. Peerybingle took advantage of
this interval, to make herself as smart in a small way as ever you
saw anybody in all your life; and, during the same short truce,
Miss Slowboy insinuated herself into a spencer of a fashion so
surprising and ingenious, that it had no connection with herself,
or anything else in the universe, but was a shrunken, dog's-eared,
independent fact, pursuing its lonely course without the least
regard to anybody.  By this time, the Baby, being all alive again,
was invested, by the united efforts of Mrs. Peerybingle and Miss
Slowboy, with a cream-coloured mantle for its body, and a sort of
nankeen raised-pie for its head; and so in course of time they all
three got down to the door, where the old horse had already taken
more than the full value of his day's toll out of the Turnpike
Trust, by tearing up the road with his impatient autographs; and
whence Boxer might be dimly seen in the remote perspective,
standing looking back, and tempting him to come on without orders.

As to a chair, or anything of that kind for helping Mrs.
Peerybingle into the cart, you know very little of John, if you
think THAT was necessary.  Before you could have seen him lift her
from the ground, there she was in her place, fresh and rosy,
saying, 'John!  How CAN you!  Think of Tilly!'

If I might be allowed to mention a young lady's legs, on any terms,
I would observe of Miss Slowboy's that there was a fatality about
them which rendered them singularly liable to be grazed; and that
she never effected the smallest ascent or descent, without
recording the circumstance upon them with a notch, as Robinson
Crusoe marked the days upon his wooden calendar.  But as this might
be considered ungenteel, I'll think of it.

'John?  You've got the Basket with the Veal and Ham-Pie and things,
and the bottles of Beer?' said Dot.  'If you haven't, you must turn
round again, this very minute.'

'You're a nice little article,' returned the Carrier, 'to be
talking about turning round, after keeping me a full quarter of an
hour behind my time.'

'I am sorry for it, John,' said Dot in a great bustle, 'but I
really could not think of going to Bertha's - I would not do it,
John, on any account - without the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and
the bottles of Beer.  Way!'

This monosyllable was addressed to the horse, who didn't mind it at
all.

'Oh DO way, John!' said Mrs. Peerybingle.  'Please!'

'It'll be time enough to do that,' returned John, 'when I begin to
leave things behind me.  The basket's here, safe enough.'

'What a hard-hearted monster you must be, John, not to have said
so, at once, and save me such a turn!  I declared I wouldn't go to
Bertha's without the Veal and Ham-Pie and things, and the bottles
of Beer, for any money.  Regularly once a fortnight ever since we
have been married, John, have we made our little Pic-Nic there.  If
anything was to go wrong with it, I should almost think we were
never to be lucky again.'

'It was a kind thought in the first instance,' said the Carrier:
'and I honour you for it, little woman.'

'My dear John,' replied Dot, turning very red, 'don't talk about
honouring ME.  Good Gracious!'

'By the bye - ' observed the Carrier.  'That old gentleman - '

Again so visibly, and instantly embarrassed!

'He's an odd fish,' said the Carrier, looking straight along the
road before them.  'I can't make him out.  I don't believe there's
any harm in him.'

'None at all.  I'm - I'm sure there's none at all.'

'Yes,' said the Carrier, with his eyes attracted to her face by the
great earnestness of her manner.  'I am glad you feel so certain of
it, because it's a confirmation to me.  It's curious that he should
have taken it into his head to ask leave to go on lodging with us;
an't it?  Things come about so strangely.'

'So very strangely,' she rejoined in a low voice, scarcely audible.

'However, he's a good-natured old gentleman,' said John, 'and pays
as a gentleman, and I think his word is to be relied upon, like a
gentleman's.  I had quite a long talk with him this morning:  he
can hear me better already, he says, as he gets more used to my
voice.  He told me a great deal about himself, and I told him a
great deal about myself, and a rare lot of questions he asked me.
I gave him information about my having two beats, you know, in my
business; one day to the right from our house and back again;
another day to the left from our house and back again (for he's a
stranger and don't know the names of places about here); and he
seemed quite pleased.  "Why, then I shall be returning home to-
night your way," he says, "when I thought you'd be coming in an
exactly opposite direction.  That's capital!  I may trouble you for
another lift perhaps, but I'll engage not to fall so sound asleep
again."  He WAS sound asleep, sure-ly! - Dot! what are you thinking
of?'

'Thinking of, John?  I - I was listening to you.'

'O!  That's all right!' said the honest Carrier.  'I was afraid,
from the look of your face, that I had gone rambling on so long, as
to set you thinking about something else.  I was very near it, I'll
be bound.'

Dot making no reply, they jogged on, for some little time, in
silence.  But, it was not easy to remain silent very long in John
Peerybingle's cart, for everybody on the road had something to say.
Though it might only be 'How are you!' and indeed it was very often
nothing else, still, to give that back again in the right spirit of
cordiality, required, not merely a nod and a smile, but as
wholesome an action of the lungs withal, as a long-winded
Parliamentary speech.  Sometimes, passengers on foot, or horseback,
plodded on a little way beside the cart, for the express purpose of
having a chat; and then there was a great deal to be said, on both
sides.

Then, Boxer gave occasion to more good-natured recognitions of, and
by, the Carrier, than half-a-dozen Christians could have done!
Everybody knew him, all along the road - especially the fowls and
pigs, who when they saw him approaching, with his body all on one
side, and his ears pricked up inquisitively, and that knob of a
tail making the most of itself in the air, immediately withdrew
into remote back settlements, without waiting for the honour of a
nearer acquaintance.  He had business everywhere; going down all
the turnings, looking into all the wells, bolting in and out of all
the cottages, dashing into the midst of all the Dame-Schools,
fluttering all the pigeons, magnifying the tails of all the cats,
and trotting into the public-houses like a regular customer.
Wherever he went, somebody or other might have been heard to cry,
'Halloa!  Here's Boxer!' and out came that somebody forthwith,
accompanied by at least two or three other somebodies, to give John
Peerybingle and his pretty wife, Good Day.

The packages and parcels for the errand cart, were numerous; and
there were many stoppages to take them in and give them out, which
were not by any means the worst parts of the journey.  Some people
were so full of expectation about their parcels, and other people
were so full of wonder about their parcels, and other people were
so full of inexhaustible directions about their parcels, and John
had such a lively interest in all the parcels, that it was as good
as a play.  Likewise, there were articles to carry, which required
to be considered and discussed, and in reference to the adjustment
and disposition of which, councils had to be holden by the Carrier
and the senders:  at which Boxer usually assisted, in short fits of
the closest attention, and long fits of tearing round and round the
assembled sages and barking himself hoarse.  Of all these little
incidents, Dot was the amused and open-eyed spectatress from her
chair in the cart; and as she sat there, looking on - a charming
little portrait framed to admiration by the tilt - there was no
lack of nudgings and glancings and whisperings and envyings among
the younger men.  And this delighted John the Carrier, beyond
measure; for he was proud to have his little wife admired, knowing
that she didn't mind it - that, if anything, she rather liked it
perhaps.

The trip was a little foggy, to be sure, in the January weather;
and was raw and cold.  But who cared for such trifles?  Not Dot,
decidedly.  Not Tilly Slowboy, for she deemed sitting in a cart, on
any terms, to be the highest point of human joys; the crowning
circumstance of earthly hopes.  Not the Baby, I'll be sworn; for
it's not in Baby nature to be warmer or more sound asleep, though
its capacity is great in both respects, than that blessed young
Peerybingle was, all the way.

You couldn't see very far in the fog, of course; but you could see
a great deal!  It's astonishing how much you may see, in a thicker
fog than that, if you will only take the trouble to look for it.
Why, even to sit watching for the Fairy-rings in the fields, and
for the patches of hoar-frost still lingering in the shade, near
hedges and by trees, was a pleasant occupation:  to make no mention
of the unexpected shapes in which the trees themselves came
starting out of the mist, and glided into it again.  The hedges
were tangled and bare, and waved a multitude of blighted garlands
in the wind; but there was no discouragement in this.  It was
agreeable to contemplate; for it made the fireside warmer in
possession, and the summer greener in expectancy.  The river looked
chilly; but it was in motion, and moving at a good pace - which was
a great point.  The canal was rather slow and torpid; that must be
admitted.  Never mind.  It would freeze the sooner when the frost
set fairly in, and then there would be skating, and sliding; and
the heavy old barges, frozen up somewhere near a wharf, would smoke
their rusty iron chimney pipes all day, and have a lazy time of it.

In one place, there was a great mound of weeds or stubble burning;
and they watched the fire, so white in the daytime, flaring through
the fog, with only here and there a dash of red in it, until, in
consequence, as she observed, of the smoke 'getting up her nose,'
Miss Slowboy choked - she could do anything of that sort, on the
smallest provocation - and woke the Baby, who wouldn't go to sleep
again.  But, Boxer, who was in advance some quarter of a mile or
so, had already passed the outposts of the town, and gained the
corner of the street where Caleb and his daughter lived; and long
before they had reached the door, he and the Blind Girl were on the
pavement waiting to receive them.

Boxer, by the way, made certain delicate distinctions of his own,
in his communication with Bertha, which persuade me fully that he
knew her to be blind.  He never sought to attract her attention by
looking at her, as he often did with other people, but touched her
invariably.  What experience he could ever have had of blind people
or blind dogs, I don't know.  He had never lived with a blind
master; nor had Mr. Boxer the elder, nor Mrs. Boxer, nor any of his
respectable family on either side, ever been visited with
blindness, that I am aware of.  He may have found it out for
himself, perhaps, but he had got hold of it somehow; and therefore
he had hold of Bertha too, by the skirt, and kept hold, until Mrs.
Peerybingle and the Baby, and Miss Slowboy, and the basket, were
all got safely within doors.

May Fielding was already come; and so was her mother - a little
querulous chip of an old lady with a peevish face, who, in right of
having preserved a waist like a bedpost, was supposed to be a most
transcendent figure; and who, in consequence of having once been
better off, or of labouring under an impression that she might have
been, if something had happened which never did happen, and seemed
to have never been particularly likely to come to pass - but it's
all the same - was very genteel and patronising indeed.  Gruff and
Tackleton was also there, doing the agreeable, with the evident
sensation of being as perfectly at home, and as unquestionably in
his own element, as a fresh young salmon on the top of the Great
Pyramid.

'May!  My dear old friend!' cried Dot, running up to meet her.
'What a happiness to see you.'

Her old friend was, to the full, as hearty and as glad as she; and
it really was, if you'll believe me, quite a pleasant sight to see
them embrace.  Tackleton was a man of taste beyond all question.
May was very pretty.

You know sometimes, when you are used to a pretty face, how, when
it comes into contact and comparison with another pretty face, it
seems for the moment to be homely and faded, and hardly to deserve
the high opinion you have had of it.  Now, this was not at all the
case, either with Dot or May; for May's face set off Dot's, and
Dot's face set off May's, so naturally and agreeably, that, as John
Peerybingle was very near saying when he came into the room, they
ought to have been born sisters - which was the only improvement
you could have suggested.

Tackleton had brought his leg of mutton, and, wonderful to relate,
a tart besides - but we don't mind a little dissipation when our
brides are in the case. we don't get married every day - and in
addition to these dainties, there were the Veal and Ham-Pie, and
'things,' as Mrs. Peerybingle called them; which were chiefly nuts
and oranges, and cakes, and such small deer.  When the repast was
set forth on the board, flanked by Caleb's contribution, which was
a great wooden bowl of smoking potatoes (he was prohibited, by
solemn compact, from producing any other viands), Tackleton led his
intended mother-in-law to the post of honour.  For the better
gracing of this place at the high festival, the majestic old soul
had adorned herself with a cap, calculated to inspire the
thoughtless with sentiments of awe.  She also wore her gloves.  But
let us be genteel, or die!

Caleb sat next his daughter; Dot and her old schoolfellow were side
by side; the good Carrier took care of the bottom of the table.
Miss Slowboy was isolated, for the time being, from every article
of furniture but the chair she sat on, that she might have nothing
else to knock the Baby's head against.

As Tilly stared about her at the dolls and toys, they stared at her
and at the company.  The venerable old gentlemen at the street
doors (who were all in full action) showed especial interest in the
party, pausing occasionally before leaping, as if they were
listening to the conversation, and then plunging wildly over and
over, a great many times, without halting for breath - as in a
frantic state of delight with the whole proceedings.

Certainly, if these old gentlemen were inclined to have a fiendish
joy in the contemplation of Tackleton's discomfiture, they had good
reason to be satisfied.  Tackleton couldn't get on at all; and the
more cheerful his intended bride became in Dot's society, the less
he liked it, though he had brought them together for that purpose.
For he was a regular dog in the manger, was Tackleton; and when
they laughed and he couldn't, he took it into his head,
immediately, that they must be laughing at him.

'Ah, May!' said Dot.  'Dear dear, what changes!  To talk of those
merry school-days makes one young again.'

'Why, you an't particularly old, at any time; are you?' said
Tackleton.

'Look at my sober plodding husband there,' returned Dot.  'He adds
twenty years to my age at least.  Don't you, John?'

'Forty,' John replied.

'How many YOU'll add to May's, I am sure I don't know,' said Dot,
laughing.  'But she can't be much less than a hundred years of age
on her next birthday.'

'Ha ha!' laughed Tackleton.  Hollow as a drum, that laugh though.
And he looked as if he could have twisted Dot's neck, comfortably.

'Dear dear!' said Dot.  'Only to remember how we used to talk, at
school, about the husbands we would choose.  I don't know how
young, and how handsome, and how gay, and how lively, mine was not
to be!  And as to May's! - Ah dear!  I don't know whether to laugh
or cry, when I think what silly girls we were.'

May seemed to know which to do; for the colour flushed into her
face, and tears stood in her eyes.

'Even the very persons themselves - real live young men - were
fixed on sometimes,' said Dot.  'We little thought how things would
come about.  I never fixed on John I'm sure; I never so much as
thought of him.  And if I had told you, you were ever to be married
to Mr. Tackleton, why you'd have slapped me.  Wouldn't you, May?'

Though May didn't say yes, she certainly didn't say no, or express
no, by any means.

Tackleton laughed - quite shouted, he laughed so loud.  John
Peerybingle laughed too, in his ordinary good-natured and contented
manner; but his was a mere whisper of a laugh, to Tackleton's.

'You couldn't help yourselves, for all that.  You couldn't resist
us, you see,' said Tackleton.  'Here we are!  Here we are!'

'Where are your gay young bridegrooms now!'

'Some of them are dead,' said Dot; 'and some of them forgotten.
Some of them, if they could stand among us at this moment, would
not believe we were the same creatures; would not believe that what
they saw and heard was real, and we COULD forget them so.  No! they
would not believe one word of it!'

'Why, Dot!' exclaimed the Carrier.  'Little woman!'

She had spoken with such earnestness and fire, that she stood in
need of some recalling to herself, without doubt.  Her husband's
check was very gentle, for he merely interfered, as he supposed, to
shield old Tackleton; but it proved effectual, for she stopped, and
said no more.  There was an uncommon agitation, even in her
silence, which the wary Tackleton, who had brought his half-shut
eye to bear upon her, noted closely, and remembered to some purpose
too.

May uttered no word, good or bad, but sat quite still, with her
eyes cast down, and made no sign of interest in what had passed.
The good lady her mother now interposed, observing, in the first
instance, that girls were girls, and byegones byegones, and that so
long as young people were young and thoughtless, they would
probably conduct themselves like young and thoughtless persons:
with two or three other positions of a no less sound and
incontrovertible character.  She then remarked, in a devout spirit,
that she thanked Heaven she had always found in her daughter May, a
dutiful and obedient child; for which she took no credit to
herself, though she had every reason to believe it was entirely
owing to herself.  With regard to Mr. Tackleton she said, That he
was in a moral point of view an undeniable individual, and That he
was in an eligible point of view a son-in-law to be desired, no one
in their senses could doubt.  (She was very emphatic here.)  With
regard to the family into which he was so soon about, after some
solicitation, to be admitted, she believed Mr. Tackleton knew that,
although reduced in purse, it had some pretensions to gentility;
and if certain circumstances, not wholly unconnected, she would go
so far as to say, with the Indigo Trade, but to which she would not
more particularly refer, had happened differently, it might perhaps
have been in possession of wealth.  She then remarked that she
would not allude to the past, and would not mention that her
daughter had for some time rejected the suit of Mr. Tackleton; and
that she would not say a great many other things which she did say,
at great length.  Finally, she delivered it as the general result
of her observation and experience, that those marriages in which
there was least of what was romantically and sillily called love,
were always the happiest; and that she anticipated the greatest
possible amount of bliss - not rapturous bliss; but the solid,
steady-going article - from the approaching nuptials.  She
concluded by informing the company that to-morrow was the day she
had lived for, expressly; and that when it was over, she would
desire nothing better than to be packed up and disposed of, in any
genteel place of burial.

As these remarks were quite unanswerable - which is the happy
property of all remarks that are sufficiently wide of the purpose -
they changed the current of the conversation, and diverted the
general attention to the Veal and Ham-Pie, the cold mutton, the
potatoes, and the tart.  In order that the bottled beer might not
be slighted, John Peerybingle proposed To-morrow:  the Wedding-Day;
and called upon them to drink a bumper to it, before he proceeded
on his journey.

For you ought to know that he only rested there, and gave the old
horse a bait.  He had to go some four of five miles farther on; and
when he returned in the evening, he called for Dot, and took
another rest on his way home.  This was the order of the day on all
the Pic-Nic occasions, had been, ever since their institution.

There were two persons present, besides the bride and bridegroom
elect, who did but indifferent honour to the toast.  One of these
was Dot, too flushed and discomposed to adapt herself to any small
occurrence of the moment; the other, Bertha, who rose up hurriedly,
before the rest, and left the table.

'Good bye!' said stout John Peerybingle, pulling on his dreadnought
coat.  'I shall be back at the old time.  Good bye all!'

'Good bye, John,' returned Caleb.

He seemed to say it by rote, and to wave his hand in the same
unconscious manner; for he stood observing Bertha with an anxious
wondering face, that never altered its expression.

'Good bye, young shaver!' said the jolly Carrier, bending down to
kiss the child; which Tilly Slowboy, now intent upon her knife and
fork, had deposited asleep (and strange to say, without damage) in
a little cot of Bertha's furnishing; 'good bye!  Time will come, I
suppose, when YOU'LL turn out into the cold, my little friend, and
leave your old father to enjoy his pipe and his rheumatics in the
chimney-corner; eh?  Where's Dot?'

'I'm here, John!' she said, starting.

'Come, come!' returned the Carrier, clapping his sounding hands.
'Where's the pipe?'

'I quite forgot the pipe, John.'

Forgot the pipe!  Was such a wonder ever heard of!  She!  Forgot
the pipe!

'I'll - I'll fill it directly.  It's soon done.'

But it was not so soon done, either.  It lay in the usual place -
the Carrier's dreadnought pocket - with the little pouch, her own
work, from which she was used to fill it, but her hand shook so,
that she entangled it (and yet her hand was small enough to have
come out easily, I am sure), and bungled terribly.  The filling of
the pipe and lighting it, those little offices in which I have
commended her discretion, were vilely done, from first to last.
During the whole process, Tackleton stood looking on maliciously
with the half-closed eye; which, whenever it met hers - or caught
it, for it can hardly be said to have ever met another eye:  rather
being a kind of trap to snatch it up - augmented her confusion in a
most remarkable degree.

'Why, what a clumsy Dot you are, this afternoon!' said John.  'I
could have done it better myself, I verify believe!'

With these good-natured words, he strode away, and presently was
heard, in company with Boxer, and the old horse, and the cart,
making lively music down the road.  What time the dreamy Caleb
still stood, watching his blind daughter, with the same expression
on his face.

'Bertha!' said Caleb, softly.  'What has happened?  How changed you
are, my darling, in a few hours - since this morning.  YOU silent
and dull all day!  What is it?  Tell me!'

'Oh father, father!' cried the Blind Girl, bursting into tears.
'Oh my hard, hard fate!'

Caleb drew his hand across his eyes before he answered her.

'But think how cheerful and how happy you have been, Bertha!  How
good, and how much loved, by many people.'

'That strikes me to the heart, dear father!  Always so mindful of
me!  Always so kind to me!'

Caleb was very much perplexed to understand her.

'To be - to be blind, Bertha, my poor dear,' he faltered, 'is a
great affliction; but - '

'I have never felt it!' cried the Blind Girl.  'I have never felt
it, in its fulness.  Never!  I have sometimes wished that I could
see you, or could see him - only once, dear father, only for one
little minute - that I might know what it is I treasure up,' she
laid her hands upon her breast, 'and hold here!  That I might be
sure and have it right!  And sometimes (but then I was a child) I
have wept in my prayers at night, to think that when your images
ascended from my heart to Heaven, they might not be the true
resemblance of yourselves.  But I have never had these feelings
long.  They have passed away and left me tranquil and contented.'

'And they will again,' said Caleb.

'But, father!  Oh my good, gentle father, bear with me, if I am
wicked!' said the Blind Girl.  'This is not the sorrow that so
weighs me down!'

Her father could not choose but let his moist eyes overflow; she
was so earnest and pathetic, but he did not understand her, yet.

'Bring her to me,' said Bertha.  'I cannot hold it closed and shut
within myself.  Bring her to me, father!'

She knew he hesitated, and said, 'May.  Bring May!'

May heard the mention of her name, and coming quietly towards her,
touched her on the arm.  The Blind Girl turned immediately, and
held her by both hands.

'Look into my face, Dear heart, Sweet heart!' said Bertha.  'Read
it with your beautiful eyes, and tell me if the truth is written on
it.'

'Dear Bertha, Yes!'

The Blind Girl still, upturning the blank sightless face, down
which the tears were coursing fast, addressed her in these words:

'There is not, in my soul, a wish or thought that is not for your
good, bright May!  There is not, in my soul, a grateful
recollection stronger than the deep remembrance which is stored
there, of the many many times when, in the full pride of sight and
beauty, you have had consideration for Blind Bertha, even when we
two were children, or when Bertha was as much a child as ever
blindness can be!  Every blessing on your head!  Light upon your
happy course!  Not the less, my dear May;' and she drew towards
her, in a closer grasp; 'not the less, my bird, because, to-day,
the knowledge that you are to be His wife has wrung my heart almost
to breaking!  Father, May, Mary! oh forgive me that it is so, for
the sake of all he has done to relieve the weariness of my dark
life:  and for the sake of the belief you have in me, when I call
Heaven to witness that I could not wish him married to a wife more
worthy of his goodness!'

While speaking, she had released May Fielding's hands, and clasped
her garments in an attitude of mingled supplication and love.
Sinking lower and lower down, as she proceeded in her strange
confession, she dropped at last at the feet of her friend, and hid
her blind face in the folds of her dress.

'Great Power!' exclaimed her father, smitten at one blow with the
truth, 'have I deceived her from the cradle, but to break her heart
at last!'

It was well for all of them that Dot, that beaming, useful, busy
little Dot - for such she was, whatever faults she had, and however
you may learn to hate her, in good time - it was well for all of
them, I say, that she was there:  or where this would have ended,
it were hard to tell.  But Dot, recovering her self-possession,
interposed, before May could reply, or Caleb say another word.

'Come, come, dear Bertha! come away with me!  Give her your arm,
May.  So!  How composed she is, you see, already; and how good it
is of her to mind us,' said the cheery little woman, kissing her
upon the forehead.  'Come away, dear Bertha.  Come! and here's her
good father will come with her; won't you, Caleb?  To - be - sure!'

Well, well! she was a noble little Dot in such things, and it must
have been an obdurate nature that could have withstood her
influence.  When she had got poor Caleb and his Bertha away, that
they might comfort and console each other, as she knew they only
could, she presently came bouncing back, - the saying is, as fresh
as any daisy; I say fresher - to mount guard over that bridling
little piece of consequence in the cap and gloves, and prevent the
dear old creature from making discoveries.

'So bring me the precious Baby, Tilly,' said she, drawing a chair
to the fire; 'and while I have it in my lap, here's Mrs. Fielding,
Tilly, will tell me all about the management of Babies, and put me
right in twenty points where I'm as wrong as can be.  Won't you,
Mrs. Fielding?'

Not even the Welsh Giant, who, according to the popular expression,
was so 'slow' as to perform a fatal surgical operation upon
himself, in emulation of a juggling-trick achieved by his arch-
enemy at breakfast-time; not even he fell half so readily into the
snare prepared for him, as the old lady did into this artful
pitfall.  The fact of Tackleton having walked out; and furthermore,
of two or three people having been talking together at a distance,
for two minutes, leaving her to her own resources; was quite enough
to have put her on her dignity, and the bewailment of that
mysterious convulsion in the Indigo trade, for four-and-twenty
hours.  But this becoming deference to her experience, on the part
of the young mother, was so irresistible, that after a short
affectation of humility, she began to enlighten her with the best
grace in the world; and sitting bolt upright before the wicked Dot,
she did, in half an hour, deliver more infallible domestic recipes
and precepts, than would (if acted on) have utterly destroyed and
done up that Young Peerybingle, though he had been an Infant
Samson.

To change the theme, Dot did a little needlework - she carried the
contents of a whole workbox in her pocket; however she contrived
it, I don't know - then did a little nursing; then a little more
needlework; then had a little whispering chat with May, while the
old lady dozed; and so in little bits of bustle, which was quite
her manner always, found it a very short afternoon.  Then, as it
grew dark, and as it was a solemn part of this Institution of the
Pic-Nic that she should perform all Bertha's household tasks, she
trimmed the fire, and swept the hearth, and set the tea-board out,
and drew the curtain, and lighted a candle.  Then she played an air
or two on a rude kind of harp, which Caleb had contrived for
Bertha, and played them very well; for Nature had made her delicate
little ear as choice a one for music as it would have been for
jewels, if she had had any to wear.  By this time it was the
established hour for having tea; and Tackleton came back again, to
share the meal, and spend the evening.

Caleb and Bertha had returned some time before, and Caleb had sat
down to his afternoon's work.  But he couldn't settle to it, poor
fellow, being anxious and remorseful for his daughter.  It was
touching to see him sitting idle on his working-stool, regarding
her so wistfully, and always saying in his face, 'Have I deceived
her from her cradle, but to break her heart!'

When it was night, and tea was done, and Dot had nothing more to do
in washing up the cups and saucers; in a word - for I must come to
it, and there is no use in putting it off - when the time drew nigh
for expecting the Carrier's return in every sound of distant
wheels, her manner changed again, her colour came and went, and she
was very restless.  Not as good wives are, when listening for their
husbands.  No, no, no.  It was another sort of restlessness from
that.

Wheels heard.  A horse's feet.  The barking of a dog.  The gradual
approach of all the sounds.  The scratching paw of Boxer at the
door!

'Whose step is that!' cried Bertha, starting up.

'Whose step?' returned the Carrier, standing in the portal, with
his brown face ruddy as a winter berry from the keen night air.
'Why, mine.'

'The other step,' said Bertha.  'The man's tread behind you!'

'She is not to be deceived,' observed the Carrier, laughing.  'Come
along, sir.  You'll be welcome, never fear!'

He spoke in a loud tone; and as he spoke, the deaf old gentleman
entered.

'He's not so much a stranger, that you haven't seen him once,
Caleb,' said the Carrier.  'You'll give him house-room till we go?'

'Oh surely, John, and take it as an honour.'

'He's the best company on earth, to talk secrets in,' said John.
'I have reasonable good lungs, but he tries 'em, I can tell you.
Sit down, sir.  All friends here, and glad to see you!'

When he had imparted this assurance, in a voice that amply
corroborated what he had said about his lungs, he added in his
natural tone, 'A chair in the chimney-corner, and leave to sit
quite silent and look pleasantly about him, is all he cares for.
He's easily pleased.'

Bertha had been listening intently.  She called Caleb to her side,
when he had set the chair, and asked him, in a low voice, to
describe their visitor.  When he had done so (truly now; with
scrupulous fidelity), she moved, for the first time since he had
come in, and sighed, and seemed to have no further interest
concerning him.

The Carrier was in high spirits, good fellow that he was, and
fonder of his little wife than ever.

'A clumsy Dot she was, this afternoon!' he said, encircling her
with his rough arm, as she stood, removed from the rest; 'and yet I
like her somehow.  See yonder, Dot!'

He pointed to the old man.  She looked down.  I think she trembled.

'He's - ha ha ha! - he's full of admiration for you!' said the
Carrier.  'Talked of nothing else, the whole way here.  Why, he's a
brave old boy.  I like him for it!'

'I wish he had had a better subject, John,' she said, with an
uneasy glance about the room.  At Tackleton especially.

'A better subject!' cried the jovial John.  'There's no such thing.
Come, off with the great-coat, off with the thick shawl, off with
the heavy wrappers! and a cosy half-hour by the fire!  My humble
service, Mistress.  A game at cribbage, you and I?  That's hearty.
The cards and board, Dot.  And a glass of beer here, if there's any
left, small wife!'

His challenge was addressed to the old lady, who accepting it with
gracious readiness, they were soon engaged upon the game.  At
first, the Carrier looked about him sometimes, with a smile, or now
and then called Dot to peep over his shoulder at his hand, and
advise him on some knotty point.  But his adversary being a rigid
disciplinarian, and subject to an occasional weakness in respect of
pegging more than she was entitled to, required such vigilance on
his part, as left him neither eyes nor ears to spare.  Thus, his
whole attention gradually became absorbed upon the cards; and he
thought of nothing else, until a hand upon his shoulder restored
him to a consciousness of Tackleton.

'I am sorry to disturb you - but a word, directly.'

'I'm going to deal,' returned the Carrier.  'It's a crisis.'

'It is,' said Tackleton.  'Come here, man!'

There was that in his pale face which made the other rise
immediately, and ask him, in a hurry, what the matter was.

'Hush!  John Peerybingle,' said Tackleton.  'I am sorry for this.
I am indeed.  I have been afraid of it.  I have suspected it from
the first.'

'What is it?' asked the Carrier, with a frightened aspect.

'Hush!  I'll show you, if you'll come with me.'

The Carrier accompanied him, without another word.  They went
across a yard, where the stars were shining, and by a little side-
door, into Tackleton's own counting-house, where there was a glass
window, commanding the ware-room, which was closed for the night.
There was no light in the counting-house itself, but there were
lamps in the long narrow ware-room; and consequently the window was
bright.

'A moment!' said Tackleton.  'Can you bear to look through that
window, do you think?'

'Why not?' returned the Carrier.

'A moment more,' said Tackleton.  'Don't commit any violence.  It's
of no use.  It's dangerous too.  You're a strong-made man; and you
might do murder before you know it.'

The Carrier looked him in the face, and recoiled a step as if he
had been struck.  In one stride he was at the window, and he saw -

Oh Shadow on the Hearth!  Oh truthful Cricket!  Oh perfidious Wife!

He saw her, with the old man - old no longer, but erect and gallant
- bearing in his hand the false white hair that had won his way
into their desolate and miserable home.  He saw her listening to
him, as he bent his head to whisper in her ear; and suffering him
to clasp her round the waist, as they moved slowly down the dim
wooden gallery towards the door by which they had entered it.  He
saw them stop, and saw her turn - to have the face, the face he
loved so, so presented to his view! - and saw her, with her own
hands, adjust the lie upon his head, laughing, as she did it, at
his unsuspicious nature!

He clenched his strong right hand at first, as if it would have
beaten down a lion.  But opening it immediately again, he spread it
out before the eyes of Tackleton (for he was tender of her, even
then), and so, as they passed out, fell down upon a desk, and was
as weak as any infant.

He was wrapped up to the chin, and busy with his horse and parcels,
when she came into the room, prepared for going home.

'Now, John, dear!  Good night, May!  Good night, Bertha!'

Could she kiss them?  Could she be blithe and cheerful in her
parting?  Could she venture to reveal her face to them without a
blush?  Yes.  Tackleton observed her closely, and she did all this.

Tilly was hushing the Baby, and she crossed and re-crossed
Tackleton, a dozen times, repeating drowsily:

'Did the knowledge that it was to be its wifes, then, wring its
hearts almost to breaking; and did its fathers deceive it from its
cradles but to break its hearts at last!'

'Now, Tilly, give me the Baby!  Good night, Mr. Tackleton.  Where's
John, for goodness' sake?'

'He's going to walk beside the horse's head,' said Tackleton; who
helped her to her seat.

'My dear John.  Walk?  To-night?'

The muffled figure of her husband made a hasty sign in the
affirmative; and the false stranger and the little nurse being in
their places, the old horse moved off.  Boxer, the unconscious
Boxer, running on before, running back, running round and round the
cart, and barking as triumphantly and merrily as ever.

When Tackleton had gone off likewise, escorting May and her mother
home, poor Caleb sat down by the fire beside his daughter; anxious
and remorseful at the core; and still saying in his wistful
contemplation of her, 'Have I deceived her from her cradle, but to
break her heart at last!'

The toys that had been set in motion for the Baby, had all stopped,
and run down, long ago.  In the faint light and silence, the
imperturbably calm dolls, the agitated rocking-horses with
distended eyes and nostrils, the old gentlemen at the street-doors,
standing half doubled up upon their failing knees and ankles, the
wry-faced nut-crackers, the very Beasts upon their way into the
Ark, in twos, like a Boarding School out walking, might have been
imagined to be stricken motionless with fantastic wonder, at Dot
being false, or Tackleton beloved, under any combination of
circumstances.



CHAPTER III - Chirp the Third



THE Dutch clock in the corner struck Ten, when the Carrier sat down
by his fireside.  So troubled and grief-worn, that he seemed to
scare the Cuckoo, who, having cut his ten melodious announcements
as short as possible, plunged back into the Moorish Palace again,
and clapped his little door behind him, as if the unwonted
spectacle were too much for his feelings.

If the little Haymaker had been armed with the sharpest of scythes,
and had cut at every stroke into the Carrier's heart, he never
could have gashed and wounded it, as Dot had done.

It was a heart so full of love for her; so bound up and held
together by innumerable threads of winning remembrance, spun from
the daily working of her many qualities of endearment; it was a
heart in which she had enshrined herself so gently and so closely;
a heart so single and so earnest in its Truth, so strong in right,
so weak in wrong; that it could cherish neither passion nor revenge
at first, and had only room to hold the broken image of its Idol.

But, slowly, slowly, as the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now
cold and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him,
as an angry wind comes rising in the night.  The Stranger was
beneath his outraged roof.  Three steps would take him to his
chamber-door.  One blow would beat it in.  'You might do murder
before you know it,' Tackleton had said.  How could it be murder,
if he gave the villain time to grapple with him hand to hand!  He
was the younger man.

It was an ill-timed thought, bad for the dark mood of his mind.  It
was an angry thought, goading him to some avenging act, that should
change the cheerful house into a haunted place which lonely
travellers would dread to pass by night; and where the timid would
see shadows struggling in the ruined windows when the moon was dim,
and hear wild noises in the stormy weather.

He was the younger man!  Yes, yes; some lover who had won the heart
that HE had never touched.  Some lover of her early choice, of whom
she had thought and dreamed, for whom she had pined and pined, when
he had fancied her so happy by his side.  O agony to think of it!

She had been above-stairs with the Baby, getting it to bed.  As he
sat brooding on the hearth, she came close beside him, without his
knowledge - in the turning of the rack of his great misery, he lost
all other sounds - and put her little stool at his feet.  He only
knew it, when he felt her hand upon his own, and saw her looking up
into his face.

With wonder?  No.  It was his first impression, and he was fain to
look at her again, to set it right.  No, not with wonder.  With an
eager and inquiring look; but not with wonder.  At first it was
alarmed and serious; then, it changed into a strange, wild,
dreadful smile of recognition of his thoughts; then, there was
nothing but her clasped hands on her brow, and her bent head, and
falling hair.

Though the power of Omnipotence had been his to wield at that
moment, he had too much of its diviner property of Mercy in his
breast, to have turned one feather's weight of it against her.  But
he could not bear to see her crouching down upon the little seat
where he had often looked on her, with love and pride, so innocent
and gay; and, when she rose and left him, sobbing as she went, he
felt it a relief to have the vacant place beside him rather than
her so long-cherished presence.  This in itself was anguish keener
than all, reminding him how desolate he was become, and how the
great bond of his life was rent asunder.

The more he felt this, and the more he knew he could have better
borne to see her lying prematurely dead before him with their
little child upon her breast, the higher and the stronger rose his
wrath against his enemy.  He looked about him for a weapon.

There was a gun, hanging on the wall.  He took it down, and moved a
pace or two towards the door of the perfidious Stranger's room.  He
knew the gun was loaded.  Some shadowy idea that it was just to
shoot this man like a wild beast, seized him, and dilated in his
mind until it grew into a monstrous demon in complete possession of
him, casting out all milder thoughts and setting up its undivided
empire.

That phrase is wrong.  Not casting out his milder thoughts, but
artfully transforming them.  Changing them into scourges to drive
him on.  Turning water into blood, love into hate, gentleness into
blind ferocity.  Her image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading
to his tenderness and mercy with resistless power, never left his
mind; but, staying there, it urged him to the door; raised the
weapon to his shoulder; fitted and nerved his finger to the
trigger; and cried 'Kill him!  In his bed!'

He reversed the gun to beat the stock up the door; he already held
it lifted in the air; some indistinct design was in his thoughts of
calling out to him to fly, for God's sake, by the window -

When, suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the whole chimney
with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to Chirp!

No sound he could have heard, no human voice, not even hers, could
so have moved and softened him.  The artless words in which she had
told him of her love for this same Cricket, were once more freshly
spoken; her trembling, earnest manner at the moment, was again
before him; her pleasant voice - O what a voice it was, for making
household music at the fireside of an honest man! - thrilled
through and through his better nature, and awoke it into life and
action.

He recoiled from the door, like a man walking in his sleep,
awakened from a frightful dream; and put the gun aside.  Clasping
his hands before his face, he then sat down again beside the fire,
and found relief in tears.

The Cricket on the Hearth came out into the room, and stood in
Fairy shape before him.

'"I love it,"' said the Fairy Voice, repeating what he well
remembered, '"for the many times I have heard it, and the many
thoughts its harmless music has given me."'

'She said so!' cried the Carrier.  'True!'

'"This has been a happy home, John; and I love the Cricket for its
sake!"'

'It has been, Heaven knows,' returned the Carrier.  'She made it
happy, always, - until now.'

'So gracefully sweet-tempered; so domestic, joyful, busy, and
light-hearted!' said the Voice.

'Otherwise I never could have loved her as I did,' returned the
Carrier.

The Voice, correcting him, said 'do.'

The Carrier repeated 'as I did.'  But not firmly.  His faltering
tongue resisted his control, and would speak in its own way, for
itself and him.

The Figure, in an attitude of invocation, raised its hand and said:

'Upon your own hearth - '

'The hearth she has blighted,' interposed the Carrier.

'The hearth she has - how often! - blessed and brightened,' said
the Cricket; 'the hearth which, but for her, were only a few stones
and bricks and rusty bars, but which has been, through her, the
Altar of your Home; on which you have nightly sacrificed some petty
passion, selfishness, or care, and offered up the homage of a
tranquil mind, a trusting nature, and an overflowing heart; so that
the smoke from this poor chimney has gone upward with a better
fragrance than the richest incense that is burnt before the richest
shrines in all the gaudy temples of this world! - Upon your own
hearth; in its quiet sanctuary; surrounded by its gentle influences
and associations; hear her!  Hear me!  Hear everything that speaks
the language of your hearth and home!'

'And pleads for her?' inquired the Carrier.

'All things that speak the language of your hearth and home, must
plead for her!' returned the Cricket.  'For they speak the truth.'

And while the Carrier, with his head upon his hands, continued to
sit meditating in his chair, the Presence stood beside him,
suggesting his reflections by its power, and presenting them before
him, as in a glass or picture.  It was not a solitary Presence.
From the hearthstone, from the chimney, from the clock, the pipe,
the kettle, and the cradle; from the floor, the walls, the ceiling,
and the stairs; from the cart without, and the cupboard within, and
the household implements; from every thing and every place with
which she had ever been familiar, and with which she had ever
entwined one recollection of herself in her unhappy husband's mind;
Fairies came trooping forth.  Not to stand beside him as the
Cricket did, but to busy and bestir themselves.  To do all honour
to her image.  To pull him by the skirts, and point to it when it
appeared.  To cluster round it, and embrace it, and strew flowers
for it to tread on.  To try to crown its fair head with their tiny
hands.  To show that they were fond of it and loved it; and that
there was not one ugly, wicked or accusatory creature to claim
knowledge of it - none but their playful and approving selves.

His thoughts were constant to her image.  It was always there.

She sat plying her needle, before the fire, and singing to herself.
Such a blithe, thriving, steady little Dot!  The fairy figures
turned upon him all at once, by one consent, with one prodigious
concentrated stare, and seemed to say, 'Is this the light wife you
are mourning for!'

There were sounds of gaiety outside, musical instruments, and noisy
tongues, and laughter.  A crowd of young merry-makers came pouring
in, among whom were May Fielding and a score of pretty girls.  Dot
was the fairest of them all; as young as any of them too.  They
came to summon her to join their party.  It was a dance.  If ever
little foot were made for dancing, hers was, surely.  But she
laughed, and shook her head, and pointed to her cookery on the
fire, and her table ready spread:  with an exulting defiance that
rendered her more charming than she was before.  And so she merrily
dismissed them, nodding to her would-be partners, one by one, as
they passed, but with a comical indifference, enough to make them
go and drown themselves immediately if they were her admirers - and
they must have been so, more or less; they couldn't help it.  And
yet indifference was not her character.  O no!  For presently,
there came a certain Carrier to the door; and bless her what a
welcome she bestowed upon him!

Again the staring figures turned upon him all at once, and seemed
to say, 'Is this the wife who has forsaken you!'

A shadow fell upon the mirror or the picture:  call it what you
will.  A great shadow of the Stranger, as he first stood underneath
their roof; covering its surface, and blotting out all other
objects.  But the nimble Fairies worked like bees to clear it off
again.  And Dot again was there.  Still bright and beautiful.

Rocking her little Baby in its cradle, singing to it softly, and
resting her head upon a shoulder which had its counterpart in the
musing figure by which the Fairy Cricket stood.

The night - I mean the real night:  not going by Fairy clocks - was
wearing now; and in this stage of the Carrier's thoughts, the moon
burst out, and shone brightly in the sky.  Perhaps some calm and
quiet light had risen also, in his mind; and he could think more
soberly of what had happened.

Although the shadow of the Stranger fell at intervals upon the
glass - always distinct, and big, and thoroughly defined - it never
fell so darkly as at first.  Whenever it appeared, the Fairies
uttered a general cry of consternation, and plied their little arms
and legs, with inconceivable activity, to rub it out.  And whenever
they got at Dot again, and showed her to him once more, bright and
beautiful, they cheered in the most inspiring manner.

They never showed her, otherwise than beautiful and bright, for
they were Household Spirits to whom falsehood is annihilation; and
being so, what Dot was there for them, but the one active, beaming,
pleasant little creature who had been the light and sun of the
Carrier's Home!

The Fairies were prodigiously excited when they showed her, with
the Baby, gossiping among a knot of sage old matrons, and affecting
to be wondrous old and matronly herself, and leaning in a staid,
demure old way upon her husband's arm, attempting - she! such a bud
of a little woman - to convey the idea of having abjured the
vanities of the world in general, and of being the sort of person
to whom it was no novelty at all to be a mother; yet in the same
breath, they showed her, laughing at the Carrier for being awkward,
and pulling up his shirt-collar to make him smart, and mincing
merrily about that very room to teach him how to dance!

They turned, and stared immensely at him when they showed her with
the Blind Girl; for, though she carried cheerfulness and animation
with her wheresoever she went, she bore those influences into Caleb
Plummer's home, heaped up and running over.  The Blind Girl's love
for her, and trust in her, and gratitude to her; her own good busy
way of setting Bertha's thanks aside; her dexterous little arts for
filling up each moment of the visit in doing something useful to
the house, and really working hard while feigning to make holiday;
her bountiful provision of those standing delicacies, the Veal and
Ham-Pie and the bottles of Beer; her radiant little face arriving
at the door, and taking leave; the wonderful expression in her
whole self, from her neat foot to the crown of her head, of being a
part of the establishment - a something necessary to it, which it
couldn't be without; all this the Fairies revelled in, and loved
her for.  And once again they looked upon him all at once,
appealingly, and seemed to say, while some among them nestled in
her dress and fondled her, 'Is this the wife who has betrayed your
confidence!'

More than once, or twice, or thrice, in the long thoughtful night,
they showed her to him sitting on her favourite seat, with her bent
head, her hands clasped on her brow, her falling hair.  As he had
seen her last.  And when they found her thus, they neither turned
nor looked upon him, but gathered close round her, and comforted
and kissed her, and pressed on one another to show sympathy and
kindness to her, and forgot him altogether.

Thus the night passed.  The moon went down; the stars grew pale;
the cold day broke; the sun rose.  The Carrier still sat, musing,
in the chimney corner.  He had sat there, with his head upon his
hands, all night.  All night the faithful Cricket had been Chirp,
Chirp, Chirping on the Hearth.  All night he had listened to its
voice.  All night the household Fairies had been busy with him.
All night she had been amiable and blameless in the glass, except
when that one shadow fell upon it.

He rose up when it was broad day, and washed and dressed himself.
He couldn't go about his customary cheerful avocations - he wanted
spirit for them - but it mattered the less, that it was Tackleton's
wedding-day, and he had arranged to make his rounds by proxy.  He
thought to have gone merrily to church with Dot.  But such plans
were at an end.  It was their own wedding-day too.  Ah! how little
he had looked for such a close to such a year!

The Carrier had expected that Tackleton would pay him an early
visit; and he was right.  He had not walked to and fro before his
own door, many minutes, when he saw the Toy-merchant coming in his
chaise along the road.  As the chaise drew nearer, he perceived
that Tackleton was dressed out sprucely for his marriage, and that
he had decorated his horse's head with flowers and favours.

The horse looked much more like a bridegroom than Tackleton, whose
half-closed eye was more disagreeably expressive than ever.  But
the Carrier took little heed of this.  His thoughts had other
occupation.

'John Peerybingle!' said Tackleton, with an air of condolence.  'My
good fellow, how do you find yourself this morning?'

'I have had but a poor night, Master Tackleton,' returned the
Carrier, shaking his head:  'for I have been a good deal disturbed
in my mind.  But it's over now!  Can you spare me half an hour or
so, for some private talk?'

'I came on purpose,' returned Tackleton, alighting.  'Never mind
the horse.  He'll stand quiet enough, with the reins over this
post, if you'll give him a mouthful of hay.'

The Carrier having brought it from his stable, and set it before
him, they turned into the house.

'You are not married before noon,' he said, 'I think?'

'No,' answered Tackleton.  'Plenty of time.  Plenty of time.'

When they entered the kitchen, Tilly Slowboy was rapping at the
Stranger's door; which was only removed from it by a few steps.
One of her very red eyes (for Tilly had been crying all night long,
because her mistress cried) was at the keyhole; and she was
knocking very loud; and seemed frightened.

'If you please I can't make nobody hear,' said Tilly, looking
round.  'I hope nobody an't gone and been and died if you please!'

This philanthropic wish, Miss Slowboy emphasised with various new
raps and kicks at the door; which led to no result whatever.

'Shall I go?' said Tackleton.  'It's curious.'

The Carrier, who had turned his face from the door, signed to him
to go if he would.

So Tackleton went to Tilly Slowboy's relief; and he too kicked and
knocked; and he too failed to get the least reply.  But he thought
of trying the handle of the door; and as it opened easily, he
peeped in, looked in, went in, and soon came running out again.

'John Peerybingle,' said Tackleton, in his ear.  'I hope there has
been nothing - nothing rash in the night?'

The Carrier turned upon him quickly.

'Because he's gone!' said Tackleton; 'and the window's open.  I
don't see any marks - to be sure it's almost on a level with the
garden:  but I was afraid there might have been some - some
scuffle.  Eh?'

He nearly shut up the expressive eye altogether; he looked at him
so hard.  And he gave his eye, and his face, and his whole person,
a sharp twist.  As if he would have screwed the truth out of him.

'Make yourself easy,' said the Carrier.  'He went into that room
last night, without harm in word or deed from me, and no one has
entered it since.  He is away of his own free will.  I'd go out
gladly at that door, and beg my bread from house to house, for
life, if I could so change the past that he had never come.  But he
has come and gone.  And I have done with him!'

'Oh! - Well, I think he has got off pretty easy,' said Tackleton,
taking a chair.

The sneer was lost upon the Carrier, who sat down too, and shaded
his face with his hand, for some little time, before proceeding.

'You showed me last night,' he said at length, 'my wife; my wife
that I love; secretly - '

'And tenderly,' insinuated Tackleton.

'Conniving at that man's disguise, and giving him opportunities of
meeting her alone.  I think there's no sight I wouldn't have rather
seen than that.  I think there's no man in the world I wouldn't
have rather had to show it me.'

'I confess to having had my suspicions always,' said Tackleton.
'And that has made me objectionable here, I know.'

'But as you did show it me,' pursued the Carrier, not minding him;
'and as you saw her, my wife, my wife that I love' - his voice, and
eye, and hand, grew steadier and firmer as he repeated these words:
evidently in pursuance of a steadfast purpose - 'as you saw her at
this disadvantage, it is right and just that you should also see
with my eyes, and look into my breast, and know what my mind is,
upon the subject.  For it's settled,' said the Carrier, regarding
him attentively.  'And nothing can shake it now.'

Tackleton muttered a few general words of assent, about its being
necessary to vindicate something or other; but he was overawed by
the manner of his companion.  Plain and unpolished as it was, it
had a something dignified and noble in it, which nothing but the
soul of generous honour dwelling in the man could have imparted.

'I am a plain, rough man,' pursued the Carrier, 'with very little
to recommend me.  I am not a clever man, as you very well know.  I
am not a young man.  I loved my little Dot, because I had seen her
grow up, from a child, in her father's house; because I knew how
precious she was; because she had been my life, for years and
years.  There's many men I can't compare with, who never could have
loved my little Dot like me, I think!'

He paused, and softly beat the ground a short time with his foot,
before resuming.

'I often thought that though I wasn't good enough for her, I should
make her a kind husband, and perhaps know her value better than
another; and in this way I reconciled it to myself, and came to
think it might be possible that we should be married.  And in the
end it came about, and we were married.'

'Hah!' said Tackleton, with a significant shake of the head.

'I had studied myself; I had had experience of myself; I knew how
much I loved her, and how happy I should be,' pursued the Carrier.
'But I had not - I feel it now - sufficiently considered her.'

'To be sure,' said Tackleton.  'Giddiness, frivolity, fickleness,
love of admiration!  Not considered!  All left out of sight!  Hah!'

'You had best not interrupt me,' said the Carrier, with some
sternness, 'till you understand me; and you're wide of doing so.
If, yesterday, I'd have struck that man down at a blow, who dared
to breathe a word against her, to-day I'd set my foot upon his
face, if he was my brother!'

The Toy-merchant gazed at him in astonishment.  He went on in a
softer tone:

'Did I consider,' said the Carrier, 'that I took her - at her age,
and with her beauty - from her young companions, and the many
scenes of which she was the ornament; in which she was the
brightest little star that ever shone, to shut her up from day to
day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company?  Did I consider
how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome
a plodding man like me must be, to one of her quick spirit?  Did I
consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved
her, when everybody must, who knew her?  Never.  I took advantage
of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; and I married
her.  I wish I never had!  For her sake; not for mine!'

The Toy-merchant gazed at him, without winking.  Even the half-shut
eye was open now.

'Heaven bless her!' said the Carrier, 'for the cheerful constancy
with which she tried to keep the knowledge of this from me!  And
Heaven help me, that, in my slow mind, I have not found it out
before!  Poor child!  Poor Dot!  I not to find it out, who have
seen her eyes fill with tears, when such a marriage as our own was
spoken of!  I, who have seen the secret trembling on her lips a
hundred times, and never suspected it till last night!  Poor girl!
That I could ever hope she would be fond of me!  That I could ever
believe she was!'

'She made a show of it,' said Tackleton.  'She made such a show of
it, that to tell you the truth it was the origin of my misgivings.'

And here he asserted the superiority of May Fielding, who certainly
made no sort of show of being fond of HIM.

'She has tried,' said the poor Carrier, with greater emotion than
he had exhibited yet; 'I only now begin to know how hard she has
tried, to be my dutiful and zealous wife.  How good she has been;
how much she has done; how brave and strong a heart she has; let
the happiness I have known under this roof bear witness!  It will
be some help and comfort to me, when I am here alone.'

'Here alone?' said Tackleton.  'Oh!  Then you do mean to take some
notice of this?'

'I mean,' returned the Carrier, 'to do her the greatest kindness,
and make her the best reparation, in my power.  I can release her
from the daily pain of an unequal marriage, and the struggle to
conceal it.  She shall be as free as I can render her.'

'Make HER reparation!' exclaimed Tackleton, twisting and turning
his great ears with his hands.  'There must be something wrong
here.  You didn't say that, of course.'

The Carrier set his grip upon the collar of the Toy-merchant, and
shook him like a reed.

'Listen to me!' he said.  'And take care that you hear me right.
Listen to me.  Do I speak plainly?'

'Very plainly indeed,' answered Tackleton.

'As if I meant it?'

'Very much as if you meant it.'

'I sat upon that hearth, last night, all night,' exclaimed the
Carrier.  'On the spot where she has often sat beside me, with her
sweet face looking into mine.  I called up her whole life, day by
day.  I had her dear self, in its every passage, in review before
me.  And upon my soul she is innocent, if there is One to judge the
innocent and guilty!'

Staunch Cricket on the Hearth!  Loyal household Fairies!

'Passion and distrust have left me!' said the Carrier; 'and nothing
but my grief remains.  In an unhappy moment some old lover, better
suited to her tastes and years than I; forsaken, perhaps, for me,
against her will; returned.  In an unhappy moment, taken by
surprise, and wanting time to think of what she did, she made
herself a party to his treachery, by concealing it.  Last night she
saw him, in the interview we witnessed.  It was wrong.  But
otherwise than this she is innocent if there is truth on earth!'

'If that is your opinion' - Tackleton began.

'So, let her go!' pursued the Carrier.  'Go, with my blessing for
the many happy hours she has given me, and my forgiveness for any
pang she has caused me.  Let her go, and have the peace of mind I
wish her!  She'll never hate me.  She'll learn to like me better,
when I'm not a drag upon her, and she wears the chain I have
riveted, more lightly.  This is the day on which I took her, with
so little thought for her enjoyment, from her home.  To-day she
shall return to it, and I will trouble her no more.  Her father and
mother will be here to-day - we had made a little plan for keeping
it together - and they shall take her home.  I can trust her,
there, or anywhere.  She leaves me without blame, and she will live
so I am sure.  If I should die - I may perhaps while she is still
young; I have lost some courage in a few hours - she'll find that I
remembered her, and loved her to the last!  This is the end of what
you showed me.  Now, it's over!'

'O no, John, not over.  Do not say it's over yet!  Not quite yet.
I have heard your noble words.  I could not steal away, pretending
to be ignorant of what has affected me with such deep gratitude.
Do not say it's over, 'till the clock has struck again!'

She had entered shortly after Tackleton, and had remained there.
She never looked at Tackleton, but fixed her eyes upon her husband.
But she kept away from him, setting as wide a space as possible
between them; and though she spoke with most impassioned
earnestness, she went no nearer to him even then.  How different in
this from her old self!

'No hand can make the clock which will strike again for me the
hours that are gone,' replied the Carrier, with a faint smile.
'But let it be so, if you will, my dear.  It will strike soon.
It's of little matter what we say.  I'd try to please you in a
harder case than that.'

'Well!' muttered Tackleton.  'I must be off, for when the clock
strikes again, it'll be necessary for me to be upon my way to
church.  Good morning, John Peerybingle.  I'm sorry to be deprived
of the pleasure of your company.  Sorry for the loss, and the
occasion of it too!'

'I have spoken plainly?' said the Carrier, accompanying him to the
door.

'Oh quite!'

'And you'll remember what I have said?'

'Why, if you compel me to make the observation,' said Tackleton,
previously taking the precaution of getting into his chaise; 'I
must say that it was so very unexpected, that I'm far from being
likely to forget it.'

'The better for us both,' returned the Carrier.  'Good bye.  I give
you joy!'

'I wish I could give it to YOU,' said Tackleton.  'As I can't;
thank'ee.  Between ourselves, (as I told you before, eh?) I don't
much think I shall have the less joy in my married life, because
May hasn't been too officious about me, and too demonstrative.
Good bye!  Take care of yourself.'

The Carrier stood looking after him until he was smaller in the
distance than his horse's flowers and favours near at hand; and
then, with a deep sigh, went strolling like a restless, broken man,
among some neighbouring elms; unwilling to return until the clock
was on the eve of striking.

His little wife, being left alone, sobbed piteously; but often
dried her eyes and checked herself, to say how good he was, how
excellent he was! and once or twice she laughed; so heartily,
triumphantly, and incoherently (still crying all the time), that
Tilly was quite horrified.

'Ow if you please don't!' said Tilly.  'It's enough to dead and
bury the Baby, so it is if you please.'

'Will you bring him sometimes, to see his father, Tilly,' inquired
her mistress, drying her eyes; 'when I can't live here, and have
gone to my old home?'

'Ow if you please don't!' cried Tilly, throwing back her head, and
bursting out into a howl - she looked at the moment uncommonly like
Boxer.  'Ow if you please don't!  Ow, what has everybody gone and
been and done with everybody, making everybody else so wretched!
Ow-w-w-w!'

The soft-hearted Slowboy trailed off at this juncture, into such a
deplorable howl, the more tremendous from its long suppression,
that she must infallibly have awakened the Baby, and frightened him
into something serious (probably convulsions), if her eyes had not
encountered Caleb Plummer, leading in his daughter.  This spectacle
restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few
moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to
the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, Saint
Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her
face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief
from those extraordinary operations.

'Mary!' said Bertha.  'Not at the marriage!'

'I told her you would not be there, mum,' whispered Caleb.  'I
heard as much last night.  But bless you,' said the little man,
taking her tenderly by both hands, 'I don't care for what they say.
I don't believe them.  There an't much of me, but that little
should be torn to pieces sooner than I'd trust a word against you!'

He put his arms about her and hugged her, as a child might have
hugged one of his own dolls.

'Bertha couldn't stay at home this morning,' said Caleb.  'She was
afraid, I know, to hear the bells ring, and couldn't trust herself
to be so near them on their wedding-day.  So we started in good
time, and came here.  I have been thinking of what I have done,'
said Caleb, after a moment's pause; 'I have been blaming myself
till I hardly knew what to do or where to turn, for the distress of
mind I have caused her; and I've come to the conclusion that I'd
better, if you'll stay with me, mum, the while, tell her the truth.
You'll stay with me the while?' he inquired, trembling from head to
foot.  'I don't know what effect it may have upon her; I don't know
what she'll think of me; I don't know that she'll ever care for her
poor father afterwards.  But it's best for her that she should be
undeceived, and I must bear the consequences as I deserve!'

' Mary,' said Bertha, 'where is your hand!  Ah!  Here it is here it
is!' pressing it to her lips, with a smile, and drawing it through
her arm.  'I heard them speaking softly among themselves, last
night, of some blame against you.  They were wrong.'

The Carrier's Wife was silent.  Caleb answered for her.

'They were wrong,' he said.

'I knew it!' cried Bertha, proudly.  'I told them so.  I scorned to
hear a word!  Blame HER with justice!' she pressed the hand between
her own, and the soft cheek against her face.  'No!  I am not so
blind as that.'

Her father went on one side of her, while Dot remained upon the
other:  holding her hand.

'I know you all,' said Bertha, 'better than you think.  But none so
well as her.  Not even you, father.  There is nothing half so real
and so true about me, as she is.  If I could be restored to sight
this instant, and not a word were spoken, I could choose her from a
crowd!  My sister!'

'Bertha, my dear!' said Caleb, 'I have something on my mind I want
to tell you, while we three are alone.  Hear me kindly!  I have a
confession to make to you, my darling.'

'A confession, father?'

'I have wandered from the truth and lost myself, my child,' said
Caleb, with a pitiable expression in his bewildered face.  'I have
wandered from the truth, intending to be kind to you; and have been
cruel.'

She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him, and repeated
'Cruel!'

'He accuses himself too strongly, Bertha,' said Dot.  'You'll say
so, presently.  You'll be the first to tell him so.'

'He cruel to me!' cried Bertha, with a smile of incredulity.

'Not meaning it, my child,' said Caleb.  'But I have been; though I
never suspected it, till yesterday.  My dear blind daughter, hear
me and forgive me!  The world you live in, heart of mine, doesn't
exist as I have represented it.  The eyes you have trusted in, have
been false to you.'

She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him still; but drew
back, and clung closer to her friend.

'Your road in life was rough, my poor one,' said Caleb, 'and I
meant to smooth it for you.  I have altered objects, changed the
characters of people, invented many things that never have been, to
make you happier.  I have had concealments from you, put deceptions
on you, God forgive me! and surrounded you with fancies.'

'But living people are not fancies!' she said hurriedly, and
turning very pale, and still retiring from him.  'You can't change
them.'

'I have done so, Bertha,' pleaded Caleb.  'There is one person that
you know, my dove - '

'Oh father! why do you say, I know?' she answered, in a term of
keen reproach.  'What and whom do I know!  I who have no leader!  I
so miserably blind.'

In the anguish of her heart, she stretched out her hands, as if she
were groping her way; then spread them, in a manner most forlorn
and sad, upon her face.

'The marriage that takes place to-day,' said Caleb, 'is with a
stern, sordid, grinding man.  A hard master to you and me, my dear,
for many years.  Ugly in his looks, and in his nature.  Cold and
callous always.  Unlike what I have painted him to you in
everything, my child.  In everything.'

'Oh why,' cried the Blind Girl, tortured, as it seemed, almost
beyond endurance, 'why did you ever do this!  Why did you ever fill
my heart so full, and then come in like Death, and tear away the
objects of my love!  O Heaven, how blind I am!  How helpless and
alone!'

Her afflicted father hung his head, and offered no reply but in his
penitence and sorrow.

She had been but a short time in this passion of regret, when the
Cricket on the Hearth, unheard by all but her, began to chirp.  Not
merrily, but in a low, faint, sorrowing way.  It was so mournful
that her tears began to flow; and when the Presence which had been
beside the Carrier all night, appeared behind her, pointing to her
father, they fell down like rain.

She heard the Cricket-voice more plainly soon, and was conscious,
through her blindness, of the Presence hovering about her father.

'Mary,' said the Blind Girl, 'tell me what my home is.  What it
truly is.'

'It is a poor place, Bertha; very poor and bare indeed.  The house
will scarcely keep out wind and rain another winter.  It is as
roughly shielded from the weather, Bertha,' Dot continued in a low,
clear voice, 'as your poor father in his sack-cloth coat.'

The Blind Girl, greatly agitated, rose, and led the Carrier's
little wife aside.

'Those presents that I took such care of; that came almost at my
wish, and were so dearly welcome to me,' she said, trembling;
'where did they come from?  Did you send them?'

'No.'

'Who then?'

Dot saw she knew, already, and was silent.  The Blind Girl spread
her hands before her face again.  But in quite another manner now.

'Dear Mary, a moment.  One moment?  More this way.  Speak softly to
me.  You are true, I know.  You'd not deceive me now; would you?'

'No, Bertha, indeed!'

'No, I am sure you would not.  You have too much pity for me.
Mary, look across the room to where we were just now - to where my
father is - my father, so compassionate and loving to me - and tell
me what you see.'

'I see,' said Dot, who understood her well, 'an old man sitting in
a chair, and leaning sorrowfully on the back, with his face resting
on his hand.  As if his child should comfort him, Bertha.'

'Yes, yes.  She will.  Go on.'

'He is an old man, worn with care and work.  He is a spare,
dejected, thoughtful, grey-haired man.  I see him now, despondent
and bowed down, and striving against nothing.  But, Bertha, I have
seen him many times before, and striving hard in many ways for one
great sacred object.  And I honour his grey head, and bless him!'

The Blind Girl broke away from her; and throwing herself upon her
knees before him, took the grey head to her breast.

'It is my sight restored.  It is my sight!' she cried.  'I have
been blind, and now my eyes are open.  I never knew him!  To think
I might have died, and never truly seen the father who has been so
loving to me!'

There were no words for Caleb's emotion.

'There is not a gallant figure on this earth,' exclaimed the Blind
Girl, holding him in her embrace, 'that I would love so dearly, and
would cherish so devotedly, as this!  The greyer, and more worn,
the dearer, father!  Never let them say I am blind again.  There's
not a furrow in his face, there's not a hair upon his head, that
shall be forgotten in my prayers and thanks to Heaven!'

Caleb managed to articulate 'My Bertha!'

'And in my blindness, I believed him,' said the girl, caressing him
with tears of exquisite affection, 'to be so different!  And having
him beside me, day by day, so mindful of me - always, never dreamed
of this!'

'The fresh smart father in the blue coat, Bertha,' said poor Caleb.
'He's gone!'

'Nothing is gone,' she answered.  'Dearest father, no!  Everything
is here - in you.  The father that I loved so well; the father that
I never loved enough, and never knew; the benefactor whom I first
began to reverence and love, because he had such sympathy for me;
All are here in you.  Nothing is dead to me.  The soul of all that
was most dear to me is here - here, with the worn face, and the
grey head.  And I am NOT blind, father, any longer!'

Dot's whole attention had been concentrated, during this discourse,
upon the father and daughter; but looking, now, towards the little
Haymaker in the Moorish meadow, she saw that the clock was within a
few minutes of striking, and fell, immediately, into a nervous and
excited state.

'Father,' said Bertha, hesitating.  'Mary.'

'Yes, my dear,' returned Caleb.  'Here she is.'

'There is no change in HER.  You never told me anything of HER that
was not true?'

'I should have done it, my dear, I am afraid,' returned Caleb, 'if
I could have made her better than she was.  But I must have changed
her for the worse, if I had changed her at all.  Nothing could
improve her, Bertha.'

Confident as the Blind Girl had been when she asked the question,
her delight and pride in the reply and her renewed embrace of Dot,
were charming to behold.

'More changes than you think for, may happen though, my dear,' said
Dot.  'Changes for the better, I mean; changes for great joy to
some of us.  You mustn't let them startle you too much, if any such
should ever happen, and affect you?  Are those wheels upon the
road?  You've a quick ear, Bertha.  Are they wheels?'

'Yes.  Coming very fast.'

'I - I - I know you have a quick ear,' said Dot, placing her hand
upon her heart, and evidently talking on, as fast as she could to
hide its palpitating state, 'because I have noticed it often, and
because you were so quick to find out that strange step last night.
Though why you should have said, as I very well recollect you did
say, Bertha, "Whose step is that!" and why you should have taken
any greater observation of it than of any other step, I don't know.
Though as I said just now, there are great changes in the world:
great changes:  and we can't do better than prepare ourselves to be
surprised at hardly anything.'

Caleb wondered what this meant; perceiving that she spoke to him,
no less than to his daughter.  He saw her, with astonishment, so
fluttered and distressed that she could scarcely breathe; and
holding to a chair, to save herself from falling.

'They are wheels indeed!' she panted.  'Coming nearer!  Nearer!
Very close!  And now you hear them stopping at the garden-gate!
And now you hear a step outside the door - the same step, Bertha,
is it not! - and now!' -

She uttered a wild cry of uncontrollable delight; and running up to
Caleb put her hands upon his eyes, as a young man rushed into the
room, and flinging away his hat into the air, came sweeping down
upon them.

'Is it over?' cried Dot.

'Yes!'

'Happily over?'

'Yes!'

'Do you recollect the voice, dear Caleb?  Did you ever hear the
like of it before?' cried Dot.

'If my boy in the Golden South Americas was alive' - said Caleb,
trembling.

'He is alive!' shrieked Dot, removing her hands from his eyes, and
clapping them in ecstasy; 'look at him!  See where he stands before
you, healthy and strong!  Your own dear son!  Your own dear living,
loving brother, Bertha

All honour to the little creature for her transports!  All honour
to her tears and laughter, when the three were locked in one
another's arms!  All honour to the heartiness with which she met
the sunburnt sailor-fellow, with his dark streaming hair, half-way,
and never turned her rosy little mouth aside, but suffered him to
kiss it, freely, and to press her to his bounding heart!

And honour to the Cuckoo too - why not! - for bursting out of the
trap-door in the Moorish Palace like a house-breaker, and
hiccoughing twelve times on the assembled company, as if he had got
drunk for joy!

The Carrier, entering, started back.  And well he might, to find
himself in such good company.

'Look, John!' said Caleb, exultingly, 'look here!  My own boy from
the Golden South Americas!  My own son!  Him that you fitted out,
and sent away yourself!  Him that you were always such a friend
to!'

The Carrier advanced to seize him by the hand; but, recoiling, as
some feature in his face awakened a remembrance of the Deaf Man in
the Cart, said:

'Edward!  Was it you?'

'Now tell him all!' cried Dot.  'Tell him all, Edward; and don't
spare me, for nothing shall make me spare myself in his eyes, ever
again.'

'I was the man,' said Edward.

'And could you steal, disguised, into the house of your old
friend?' rejoined the Carrier.  'There was a frank boy once - how
many years is it, Caleb, since we heard that he was dead, and had
it proved, we thought? - who never would have done that.'

'There was a generous friend of mine, once; more a father to me
than a friend;' said Edward, 'who never would have judged me, or
any other man, unheard.  You were he.  So I am certain you will
hear me now.'

The Carrier, with a troubled glance at Dot, who still kept far away
from him, replied, 'Well! that's but fair.  I will.'

'You must know that when I left here, a boy,' said Edward, 'I was
in love, and my love was returned.  She was a very young girl, who
perhaps (you may tell me) didn't know her own mind.  But I knew
mine, and I had a passion for her.'

'You had!' exclaimed the Carrier.  'You!'

'Indeed I had,' returned the other.  'And she returned it.  I have
ever since believed she did, and now I am sure she did.'

'Heaven help me!' said the Carrier.  'This is worse than all.'

'Constant to her,' said Edward, 'and returning, full of hope, after
many hardships and perils, to redeem my part of our old contract, I
heard, twenty miles away, that she was false to me; that she had
forgotten me; and had bestowed herself upon another and a richer
man.  I had no mind to reproach her; but I wished to see her, and
to prove beyond dispute that this was true.  I hoped she might have
been forced into it, against her own desire and recollection.  It
would be small comfort, but it would be some, I thought, and on I
came.  That I might have the truth, the real truth; observing
freely for myself, and judging for myself, without obstruction on
the one hand, or presenting my own influence (if I had any) before
her, on the other; I dressed myself unlike myself - you know how;
and waited on the road - you know where.  You had no suspicion of
me; neither had - had she,' pointing to Dot, 'until I whispered in
her ear at that fireside, and she so nearly betrayed me.'

'But when she knew that Edward was alive, and had come back,'
sobbed Dot, now speaking for herself, as she had burned to do, all
through this narrative; 'and when she knew his purpose, she advised
him by all means to keep his secret close; for his old friend John
Peerybingle was much too open in his nature, and too clumsy in all
artifice - being a clumsy man in general,' said Dot, half laughing
and half crying - 'to keep it for him.  And when she - that's me,
John,' sobbed the little woman - 'told him all, and how his
sweetheart had believed him to be dead; and how she had at last
been over-persuaded by her mother into a marriage which the silly,
dear old thing called advantageous; and when she - that's me again,
John - told him they were not yet married (though close upon it),
and that it would be nothing but a sacrifice if it went on, for
there was no love on her side; and when he went nearly mad with joy
to hear it; then she - that's me again - said she would go between
them, as she had often done before in old times, John, and would
sound his sweetheart and be sure that what she - me again, John -
said and thought was right.  And it was right, John!  And they were
brought together, John!  And they were married, John, an hour ago!
And here's the Bride!  And Gruff and Tackleton may die a bachelor!
And I'm a happy little woman, May, God bless you!'

She was an irresistible little woman, if that be anything to the
purpose; and never so completely irresistible as in her present
transports.  There never were congratulations so endearing and
delicious, as those she lavished on herself and on the Bride.

Amid the tumult of emotions in his breast, the honest Carrier had
stood, confounded.  Flying, now, towards her, Dot stretched out her
hand to stop him, and retreated as before.

'No, John, no!  Hear all!  Don't love me any more, John, till
you've heard every word I have to say.  It was wrong to have a
secret from you, John.  I'm very sorry.  I didn't think it any harm,
till I came and sat down by you on the little stool last night.
But when I knew by what was written in your face, that you had seen
me walking in the gallery with Edward, and when I knew what you
thought, I felt how giddy and how wrong it was.  But oh, dear John,
how could you, could you, think so!'

Little woman, how she sobbed again!  John Peerybingle would have
caught her in his arms.  But no; she wouldn't let him.

'Don't love me yet, please, John!  Not for a long time yet!  When I
was sad about this intended marriage, dear, it was because I
remembered May and Edward such young lovers; and knew that her
heart was far away from Tackleton.  You believe that, now.  Don't
you, John?'

John was going to make another rush at this appeal; but she stopped
him again.

'No; keep there, please, John!  When I laugh at you, as I sometimes
do, John, and call you clumsy and a dear old goose, and names of
that sort, it's because I love you, John, so well, and take such
pleasure in your ways, and wouldn't see you altered in the least
respect to have you made a King to-morrow.'

'Hooroar!' said Caleb with unusual vigour.  'My opinion!'

'And when I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John,
and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot
sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John,
that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all
that:  and make believe.'

She saw that he was coming; and stopped him again.  But she was
very nearly too late.

'No, don't love me for another minute or two, if you please, John!
What I want most to tell you, I have kept to the last.  My dear,
good, generous John, when we were talking the other night about the
Cricket, I had it on my lips to say, that at first I did not love
you quite so dearly as I do now; that when I first came home here,
I was half afraid I mightn't learn to love you every bit as well as
I hoped and prayed I might - being so very young, John!  But, dear
John, every day and hour I loved you more and more.  And if I could
have loved you better than I do, the noble words I heard you say
this morning, would have made me.  But I can't.  All the affection
that I had (it was a great deal, John) I gave you, as you well
deserve, long, long ago, and I have no more left to give.  Now, my
dear husband, take me to your heart again!  That's my home, John;
and never, never think of sending me to any other!'

You never will derive so much delight from seeing a glorious little
woman in the arms of a third party, as you would have felt if you
had seen Dot run into the Carrier's embrace.  It was the most
complete, unmitigated, soul-fraught little piece of earnestness
that ever you beheld in all your days.

You maybe sure the Carrier was in a state of perfect rapture; and
you may be sure Dot was likewise; and you may be sure they all
were, inclusive of Miss Slowboy, who wept copiously for joy, and
wishing to include her young charge in the general interchange of
congratulations, handed round the Baby to everybody in succession,
as if it were something to drink.

But, now, the sound of wheels was heard again outside the door; and
somebody exclaimed that Gruff and Tackleton was coming back.
Speedily that worthy gentleman appeared, looking warm and
flustered.

'Why, what the Devil's this, John Peerybingle!' said Tackleton.
'There's some mistake.  I appointed Mrs. Tackleton to meet me at
the church, and I'll swear I passed her on the road, on her way
here.  Oh! here she is!  I beg your pardon, sir; I haven't the
pleasure of knowing you; but if you can do me the favour to spare
this young lady, she has rather a particular engagement this
morning.'

'But I can't spare her,' returned Edward.  'I couldn't think of
it.'

'What do you mean, you vagabond?' said Tackleton.

'I mean, that as I can make allowance for your being vexed,'
returned the other, with a smile, 'I am as deaf to harsh discourse
this morning, as I was to all discourse last night.'

The look that Tackleton bestowed upon him, and the start he gave!

'I am sorry, sir,' said Edward, holding out May's left hand, and
especially the third finger; 'that the young lady can't accompany
you to church; but as she has been there once, this morning,
perhaps you'll excuse her.'

Tackleton looked hard at the third finger, and took a little piece
of silver-paper, apparently containing a ring, from his waistcoat-
pocket.

'Miss Slowboy,' said Tackleton.  'Will you have the kindness to
throw that in the fire?  Thank'ee.'

'It was a previous engagement, quite an old engagement, that
prevented my wife from keeping her appointment with you, I assure
you,' said Edward.

'Mr. Tackleton will do me the justice to acknowledge that I
revealed it to him faithfully; and that I told him, many times, I
never could forget it,' said May, blushing.

'Oh certainly!' said Tackleton.  'Oh to be sure.  Oh it's all
right.  It's quite correct.  Mrs. Edward Plummer, I infer?'

'That's the name,' returned the bridegroom.

'Ah, I shouldn't have known you, sir,' said Tackleton, scrutinising
his face narrowly, and making a low bow.  'I give you joy, sir!'

'Thank'ee.'

'Mrs. Peerybingle,' said Tackleton, turning suddenly to where she
stood with her husband; 'I am sorry.  You haven't done me a very
great kindness, but, upon my life I am sorry.  You are better than
I thought you.  John Peerybingle, I am sorry.  You understand me;
that's enough.  It's quite correct, ladies and gentlemen all, and
perfectly satisfactory.  Good morning!'

With these words he carried it off, and carried himself off too:
merely stopping at the door, to take the flowers and favours from
his horse's head, and to kick that animal once, in the ribs, as a
means of informing him that there was a screw loose in his
arrangements.

Of course it became a serious duty now, to make such a day of it,
as should mark these events for a high Feast and Festival in the
Peerybingle Calendar for evermore.  Accordingly, Dot went to work
to produce such an entertainment, as should reflect undying honour
on the house and on every one concerned; and in a very short space
of time, she was up to her dimpled elbows in flour, and whitening
the Carrier's coat, every time he came near her, by stopping him to
give him a kiss.  That good fellow washed the greens, and peeled
the turnips, and broke the plates, and upset iron pots full of cold
water on the fire, and made himself useful in all sorts of ways:
while a couple of professional assistants, hastily called in from
somewhere in the neighbourhood, as on a point of life or death, ran
against each other in all the doorways and round all the corners,
and everybody tumbled over Tilly Slowboy and the Baby, everywhere.
Tilly never came out in such force before.  Her ubiquity was the
theme of general admiration.  She was a stumbling-block in the
passage at five-and-twenty minutes past two; a man-trap in the
kitchen at half-past two precisely; and a pitfall in the garret at
five-and-twenty minutes to three.  The Baby's head was, as it were,
a test and touchstone for every description of matter, - animal,
vegetable, and mineral.  Nothing was in use that day that didn't
come, at some time or other, into close acquaintance with it.

Then, there was a great Expedition set on foot to go and find out
Mrs. Fielding; and to be dismally penitent to that excellent
gentlewoman; and to bring her back, by force, if needful, to be
happy and forgiving.  And when the Expedition first discovered her,
she would listen to no terms at all, but said, an unspeakable
number of times, that ever she should have lived to see the day!
and couldn't be got to say anything else, except, 'Now carry me to
the grave:' which seemed absurd, on account of her not being dead,
or anything at all like it.  After a time, she lapsed into a state
of dreadful calmness, and observed, that when that unfortunate
train of circumstances had occurred in the Indigo Trade, she had
foreseen that she would be exposed, during her whole life, to every
species of insult and contumely; and that she was glad to find it
was the case; and begged they wouldn't trouble themselves about
her, - for what was she? oh, dear! a nobody! - but would forget
that such a being lived, and would take their course in life
without her.  From this bitterly sarcastic mood, she passed into an
angry one, in which she gave vent to the remarkable expression that
the worm would turn if trodden on; and, after that, she yielded to
a soft regret, and said, if they had only given her their
confidence, what might she not have had it in her power to suggest!
Taking advantage of this crisis in her feelings, the Expedition
embraced her; and she very soon had her gloves on, and was on her
way to John Peerybingle's in a state of unimpeachable gentility;
with a paper parcel at her side containing a cap of state, almost
as tall, and quite as stiff, as a mitre.

Then, there were Dot's father and mother to come, in another little
chaise; and they were behind their time; and fears were
entertained; and there was much looking out for them down the road;
and Mrs. Fielding always would look in the wrong and morally
impossible direction; and being apprised thereof, hoped she might
take the liberty of looking where she pleased.  At last they came:
a chubby little couple, jogging along in a snug and comfortable
little way that quite belonged to the Dot family; and Dot and her
mother, side by side, were wonderful to see.  They were so like
each other.

Then, Dot's mother had to renew her acquaintance with May's mother;
and May's mother always stood on her gentility; and Dot's mother
never stood on anything but her active little feet.  And old Dot -
so to call Dot's father, I forgot it wasn't his right name, but
never mind - took liberties, and shook hands at first sight, and
seemed to think a cap but so much starch and muslin, and didn't
defer himself at all to the Indigo Trade, but said there was no
help for it now; and, in Mrs. Fielding's summing up, was a good-
natured kind of man - but coarse, my dear.

I wouldn't have missed Dot, doing the honours in her wedding-gown,
my benison on her bright face! for any money.  No! nor the good
Carrier, so jovial and so ruddy, at the bottom of the table.  Nor
the brown, fresh sailor-fellow, and his handsome wife.  Nor any one
among them.  To have missed the dinner would have been to miss as
jolly and as stout a meal as man need eat; and to have missed the
overflowing cups in which they drank The Wedding-Day, would have
been the greatest miss of all.

After dinner, Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl.  As I'm
a living man, hoping to keep so, for a year or two, he sang it
through.

And, by-the-by, a most unlooked-for incident occurred, just as he
finished the last verse.

There was a tap at the door; and a man came staggering in, without
saying with your leave, or by your leave, with something heavy on
his head.  Setting this down in the middle of the table,
symmetrically in the centre of the nuts and apples, he said:

'Mr. Tackleton's compliments, and as he hasn't got no use for the
cake himself, p'raps you'll eat it.'

And with those words, he walked off.

There was some surprise among the company, as you may imagine.
Mrs. Fielding, being a lady of infinite discernment, suggested that
the cake was poisoned, and related a narrative of a cake, which,
within her knowledge, had turned a seminary for young ladies, blue.
But she was overruled by acclamation; and the cake was cut by May,
with much ceremony and rejoicing.

I don't think any one had tasted it, when there came another tap at
the door, and the same man appeared again, having under his arm a
vast brown-paper parcel.

'Mr. Tackleton's compliments, and he's sent a few toys for the
Babby.  They ain't ugly.'

After the delivery of which expressions, he retired again.

The whole party would have experienced great difficulty in finding
words for their astonishment, even if they had had ample time to
seek them.  But they had none at all; for the messenger had
scarcely shut the door behind him, when there came another tap, and
Tackleton himself walked in.

'Mrs. Peerybingle!' said the Toy-merchant, hat in hand.  'I'm
sorry.  I'm more sorry than I was this morning.  I have had time to
think of it.  John Peerybingle!  I'm sour by disposition; but I
can't help being sweetened, more or less, by coming face to face
with such a man as you.  Caleb!  This unconscious little nurse gave
me a broken hint last night, of which I have found the thread.  I
blush to think how easily I might have bound you and your daughter
to me, and what a miserable idiot I was, when I took her for one!
Friends, one and all, my house is very lonely to-night.  I have not
so much as a Cricket on my Hearth.  I have scared them all away.
Be gracious to me; let me join this happy party!'

He was at home in five minutes.  You never saw such a fellow.  What
HAD he been doing with himself all his life, never to have known,
before, his great capacity of being jovial!  Or what had the
Fairies been doing with him, to have effected such a change!

'John! you won't send me home this evening; will you?' whispered
Dot.

He had been very near it though!

There wanted but one living creature to make the party complete;
and, in the twinkling of an eye, there he was, very thirsty with
hard running, and engaged in hopeless endeavours to squeeze his
head into a narrow pitcher.  He had gone with the cart to its
journey's end, very much disgusted with the absence of his master,
and stupendously rebellious to the Deputy.  After lingering about
the stable for some little time, vainly attempting to incite the
old horse to the mutinous act of returning on his own account, he
had walked into the tap-room and laid himself down before the fire.
But suddenly yielding to the conviction that the Deputy was a
humbug, and must be abandoned, he had got up again, turned tail,
and come home.

There was a dance in the evening.  With which general mention of
that recreation, I should have left it alone, if I had not some
reason to suppose that it was quite an original dance, and one of a
most uncommon figure.  It was formed in an odd way; in this way.

Edward, that sailor-fellow - a good free dashing sort of a fellow
he was - had been telling them various marvels concerning parrots,
and mines, and Mexicans, and gold dust, when all at once he took it
in his head to jump up from his seat and propose a dance; for
Bertha's harp was there, and she had such a hand upon it as you
seldom hear.  Dot (sly little piece of affectation when she chose)
said her dancing days were over; I think because the Carrier was
smoking his pipe, and she liked sitting by him, best.  Mrs.
Fielding had no choice, of course, but to say HER dancing days were
over, after that; and everybody said the same, except May; May was
ready.

So, May and Edward got up, amid great applause, to dance alone; and
Bertha plays her liveliest tune.

Well! if you'll believe me, they have not been dancing five
minutes, when suddenly the Carrier flings his pipe away, takes Dot
round the waist, dashes out into the room, and starts off with her,
toe and heel, quite wonderfully.  Tackleton no sooner sees this,
than he skims across to Mrs. Fielding, takes her round the waist,
and follows suit.  Old Dot no sooner sees this, than up he is, all
alive, whisks off Mrs. Dot in the middle of the dance, and is the
foremost there.  Caleb no sooner sees this, than he clutches Tilly
Slowboy by both hands and goes off at score; Miss Slowboy, firm in
the belief that diving hotly in among the other couples, and
effecting any number of concussions with them, is your only
principle of footing it.

Hark! how the Cricket joins the music with its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp;
and how the kettle hums!

* * * * *

But what is this!  Even as I listen to them, blithely, and turn
towards Dot, for one last glimpse of a little figure very pleasant
to me, she and the rest have vanished into air, and I am left
alone.  A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child's-toy lies
upon the ground; and nothing else remains.




End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Cricket on the Hearth