Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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but when he saw it he appeared more interested, and when he had
opened and read a little of it through his eye-glass, he became
amazed. “Mr. Jarndyce,” he said, looking off it, “you have perused
this?”
“Not I!” returned my guardian.
“But, my dear sir,” said Mr. Kenge, “it is a will of later date
than any in the suit. It appears to be all in the testator’s
handwriting. It is duly executed and attested. And even if
intended to be cancelled, as might possibly be supposed to be
denoted by these marks of fire, it is NOT cancelled. Here it is, a
perfect instrument!”
“Well!” said my guardian. “What is that to me?”
“Mr. Guppy!” cried Mr. Kenge, raising his voice. “I beg your
pardon, Mr. Jarndyce.”
“Sir.”
“Mr. Vholes of Symond’s Inn. My compliments. Jarndyce and
Jarndyce. Glad to speak with him.”
Mr. Guppy disappeared.
“You ask me what is this to you, Mr. Jarndyce. If you had perused
this document, you would have seen that it reduces your interest
considerably, though still leaving it a very handsome one, still
leaving it a very handsome one,” said Mr. Kenge, waving his hand
persuasively and blandly. “You would further have seen that the
interests of Mr. Richard Carstone and of Miss Ada Clare, now Mrs.
Richard Carstone, are very materially advanced by it.”
“Kenge,” said my guardian, “if all the flourishing wealth that the
suit brought into this vile court of Chancery could fall to my two
young cousins, I should be well contented. But do you ask ME to
believe that any good is to come of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?”
“Oh, really, Mr. Jarndyce! Prejudice, prejudice. My dear sir,
this is a very great country, a very great country. Its system of
equity is a very great system, a very great system. Really,
really!”
My guardian said no more, and Mr. Vholes arrived. He was modestly
impressed by Mr. Kenge’s professional eminence.
“How do you do, Mr. Vholes? Willl you be so good as to take a
chair here by me and look over this paper?”
Mr. Vholes did as he was asked and seemed to read it every word.
He was not excited by it, but he was not excited by anything. When
he had well examined it, he retired with Mr. Kenge into a window,
and shading his mouth with his black glove, spoke to him at some
length. I was not surprised to observe Mr. Kenge inclined to
dispute what he said before he had said much, for I knew that no
two people ever did agree about anything in Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
But he seemed to get the better of Mr. Kenge too in a conversation
that sounded as if it were almost composed of the words “Receiver-General,” “Accountant-General,” “report,” “estate,” and “costs.”
When they had finished, they came back to Mr. Kenge’s table and
spoke aloud.
“Well! But this is a very remarkable document, Mr. Vholes,” said
Mr. Kenge.
Mr. Vholes said, “Very much so.”
“And a very important document, Mr. Vholes,” said Mr. Kenge.
Again Mr. Vholes said, “Very much so.”
“And as you say, Mr. Vholes, when the cause is in the paper next
term, this document will be an unexpected and interesting feature
in it,” said Mr. Kenge, looking loftily at my guardian.
Mr. Vholes was gratified, as a smaller practitioner striving to
keep respectable, to be confirmed in any opinion of his own by such
an authority.
“And when,” asked my guardian, rising after a pause, during which
Mr. Kenge had rattled his money and Mr. Vholes had picked his
pimples, “when is next term?”
“Next term, Mr. Jarndyce, will be next month,” said Mr. Kenge. “Of
course we shall at once proceed to do what is necessary with this
document and to collect the necessary evidence concerning it; and
of course you will receive our usual notification of the cause
being in the paper.”
“To which I shall pay, of course, my usual attention.”
“Still bent, my dear sir,” said Mr. Kenge, showing us through the
outer office to the door, “still bent, even with your enlarged
mind, on echoing a popular prejudice? We are a prosperous
community, Mr. Jarndyce, a very prosperous community. We are a
great country, Mr. Jarndyce, we are a very great country. This is
a great system, Mr. Jarndyce, and would you wish a great country to
have a little system? Now, really, really!”
He said this at the stair-head, gently moving his right hand as if
it were a silver trowel with which to spread the cement of his
words on the structure of the system and consolidate it for a
thousand ages.
Steel and Iron
George’s Shooting Gallery is to let, and the stock is sold off, and
George himself is at Chesney Wold attending on Sir Leicester in his
rides and riding very near his bridle-rein because of the uncertain
hand with which he guides his horse. But not to-day is George so
occupied. He is journeying to-day into the iron country farther
north to look about him.
As he comes into the iron country farther north, such fresh green
woods as those of Chesney Wold are left behind; and coal pits and
ashes, high chimneys and red bricks, blighted verdure, scorching
fires, and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke become the
features of the scenery. Among such objects rides the trooper,
looking about him and always looking for something he has come to
find.
At last, on the black canal bridge of a busy town, with a clang of
iron in it, and more fires and more smoke than he has seen yet, the
trooper, swart with the dust of the coal roads, checks his horse
and asks a workman does he know the name of Rouncewell thereabouts.
“Why, master,” quoth the workman, “do I know my own name?”
“‘Tis so well known here, is it, comrade?” asks the trooper.
“Rouncewell’s? Ah! You’re right.”
“And where might it be now?” asks the trooper with a glance before
him.
“The bank, the factory, or the house?” the workman wants to know.
“Hum! Rouncewell’s is so great apparently,” mutters the trooper,
stroking his chin, “that I have as good as half a mind to go back
again. Why, I don’t know which I want. Should I find Mr.
Rouncewell at the factory, do you think?”
“Tain’t easy to say where you’d find him—at this time of the day
you might find either him or his son there, if he’s in town; but
his contracts take him away.”
And which is the factory? Why, he sees those chimneys—the tallest
ones! Yes, he sees THEM. Well! Let him keep his eye on those
chimneys, going on as straight as ever he can, and presently he’ll
see ‘em down a turning on the left, shut in by a great brick wall
which forms one side of the street. That’s Rouncewell’s.
The trooper thanks his informant and rides slowly on, looking about
him. He does not turn back, but puts up his horse (and is much
disposed to groom him too) at a public-house where some of
Rouncewell’s hands are dining, as the ostler tells him. Some of
Rouncewell’s hands have just knocked off for dinner-time and seem
to be invading the whole town. They are very sinewy and strong,
are Rouncewell’s hands—a little sooty too.
He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great
perplexity of iron lying about in every stage and in a vast variety
of shapes—in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in
axles, in wheels, in cogs, in cranks, in rails; twisted and
wrenched into eccentric and perverse forms as separate parts of
machinery; mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age; distant
furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks
of it showering about under the blows of the steam-hammer; red-hot
iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron
smell, and a Babel of iron sounds.
“This is a place to make a man’s head ache too!” says the trooper,
looking about him for a counting-house. “Who comes here? This is
very like me before I was set up. This ought to be my nephew, if
likenesses run in families. Your servant, sir.”
“Yours, sir. Are you looking for any one?”
“Excuse me. Young Mr. Rouncewell, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“I was looking for your father, sir. I wish to have a word with
him.”
The young man, telling him he is fortunate in his choice of a time,
for his father is there, leads the way to the office where he is to
be found. “Very like me before I was set up—devilish like me!”
thinks the trooper as he follows. They come to a building in the
yard with an office on an upper floor. At sight of the gentleman
in the office, Mr. George turns very red.
“What name shall I say to my father?” asks the young man.
George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers “Steel,”
and is so presented. He is left alone with the gentleman in the
office, who sits at a table with account-books before him and some
sheets of paper blotted with hosts of figures and drawings of
cunning shapes. It is a bare office, with bare windows, looking on
the iron view below. Tumbled together on the table are some pieces
of iron, purposely broken to be tested at various periods of their
service, in various capacities. There is iron-dust on everything;
and the smoke is seen through the windows rolling heavily out of
the tall chimneys to mingle with the smoke from a vaporous Babylon
of other chimneys.
“I am at your service, Mr. Steel,” says the gentleman when his
visitor has taken a rusty chair.
“Well, Mr. Rouncewell,” George replies, leaning forward with his
left arm on his knee and his hat in his hand, and very chary of
meeting his brother’s eye, “I am not without my expectations that
in the present visit I may prove to be more free than welcome. I
have served as a dragoon in my day, and a comrade of mine that I
was once rather partial to was, if I don’t deceive myself, a
brother of yours. I believe you had a brother who gave his family
some trouble, and ran away, and never did any good but in keeping
away?”
“Are you quite sure,” returns the ironmaster in an altered voice,
“that your name is Steel?”
The trooper falters and looks at him. His brother starts up, calls
him by his name, and grasps him by both hands.
“You are too quick for me!” cries the trooper with the tears
springing out of his eyes. “How do you do, my dear old fellow? I
never could have thought you would have been half so glad to see me
as all this. How do you do, my dear old fellow, how do you do!”
They shake hands and embrace each other over and over again, the
trooper still coupling his “How do you do, my dear old fellow!”
with his protestation that he never thought his brother would have
been half so glad to see him as all this!
“So far from it,” he declares at the end of a full account of what
has preceded his arrival there, “I had very little idea of making
myself known. I thought if you took by any means forgivingly to my
name I might gradually get myself up to the point of writing a
letter. But
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