Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Performer: 0141439726
Book online «Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗». Author Charles Dickens
frozen as I was!—and added this, “Submission, self-denial,
diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a
shadow on it. You are different from other children, Esther,
because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and
wrath. You are set apart.”
I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll’s cheek
against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon
my bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of
my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to
anybody’s heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was
to me.
Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together
afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my
birthday and confided to her that I would try as hard as ever I
could to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I
confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent) and would strive as I
grew up to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted and to do
some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could. I
hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it.
I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help
their coming to my eyes.
There! I have wiped them away now and can go on again properly.
I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more
after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her
house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more
difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my
heart, than ever. I felt in the same way towards my school
companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a
widow; and oh, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who
came to see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet,
and tried to be very diligent.
One sunny afternoon when I had come home from school with my books
and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was
gliding upstairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of
the parlour-door and called me back. Sitting with her, I found—
which was very unusual indeed—a stranger. A portly, important-looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large
gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring
upon his little finger.
“This,” said my godmother in an undertone, “is the child.” Then
she said in her naturally stern way of speaking, “This is Esther,
sir.”
The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me and said, “Come
here, my dear!” He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my
bonnet, looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said,
“Ah!” and afterwards “Yes!” And then, taking off his eye-glasses
and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair,
turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a
nod. Upon that, my godmother said, “You may go upstairs, Esther!”
And I made him my curtsy and left him.
It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen,
when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I
was reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine
o’clock as I always did to read the Bible to her, and was reading
from St. John how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger
in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.
“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said
unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her!’”
I was stopped by my godmother’s rising, putting her hand to her
head, and crying out in an awful voice from quite another part of
the book, “‘Watch ye, therefore, lest coming suddenly he find you
sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!’”
In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she
fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had
sounded through the house and been heard in the street.
She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there,
little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that
I so well knew carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the
day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my
whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed
for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her
to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no.
Her face was immovable. To the very last, and even afterwards, her
frown remained unsoftened.
On the day after my poor good godmother was buried, the gentleman
in black with the white neckcloth reappeared. I was sent for by
Mrs. Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never
gone away.
“My name is Kenge,” he said; “you may remember it, my child; Kenge
and Carboy, Lincoln’s Inn.”
I replied that I remembered to have seen him once before.
“Pray be seated—here near me. Don’t distress yourself; it’s of no
use. Mrs. Rachael, I needn’t inform you who were acquainted with
the late Miss Barbary’s affairs, that her means die with her and
that this young lady, now her aunt is dead—”
“My aunt, sir!”
“It is really of no use carrying on a deception when no object is
to be gained by it,” said Mr. Kenge smoothly, “Aunt in fact, though
not in law. Don’t distress yourself! Don’t weep! Don’t tremble!
Mrs. Rachael, our young friend has no doubt heard of—the—a—
Jarndyce and Jarndyce.”
“Never,” said Mrs. Rachael.
“Is it possible,” pursued Mr. Kenge, putting up his eye-glasses,
“that our young friend—I BEG you won’t distress yourself!—never
heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!”
I shook my head, wondering even what it was.
“Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?” said Mr. Kenge, looking over his
glasses at me and softly turning the case about and about as if he
were petting something. “Not of one of the greatest Chancery suits
known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce—the—a—in itself a monument
of Chancery practice. In which (I would say) every difficulty,
every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure
known in that court, is represented over and over again? It is a
cause that could not exist out of this free and great country. I
should say that the aggregate of costs in Jarndyce and Jarndyce,
Mrs. Rachael”—I was afraid he addressed himself to her because I
appeared inattentive”—amounts at the present hour to from SIX-ty
to SEVENty THOUSAND POUNDS!” said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his
chair.
I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely
unacquainted with the subject that I understood nothing about it
even then.
“And she really never heard of the cause!” said Mr. Kenge.
“Surprising!”
“Miss Barbary, sir,” returned Mrs. Rachael, “who is now among the
Seraphim—”
“I hope so, I am sure,” said Mr. Kenge politely.
“—Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her.
And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more.”
“Well!” said Mr. Kenge. “Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the
point,” addressing me. “Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact
that is, for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being
deceased and it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs.
Rachael—”
“Oh, dear no!” said Mrs. Rachael quickly.
“Quite so,” assented Mr. Kenge; “—that Mrs. Rachael should charge
herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won’t distress
yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer
which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago
and which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable
under the lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now,
if I avow that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise,
a highly humane, but at the same time singular, man, shall I
compromise myself by any stretch of my professional caution?” said
Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again and looking calmly at us
both.
He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice.
I couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave
great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself
with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own
music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was
very much impressed by him—even then, before I knew that he formed
himself on the model of a great lord who was his client and that he
was generally called Conversation Kenge.
“Mr. Jarndyce,” he pursued, “being aware of the—I would say,
desolate—position of our young friend, offers to place her at a
first-rate establishment where her education shall be completed,
where her comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants
shall be anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to
discharge her duty in that station of life unto which it has
pleased—shall I say Providence?—to call her.”
My heart was filled so full, both by what he said and by his
affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though
I tried.
“Mr. Jarndyce,” he went on, “makes no condition beyond expressing
his expectation that our young friend will not at any time remove
herself from the establishment in question without his knowledge
and concurrence. That she will faithfully apply herself to the
acquisition of those accomplishments, upon the exercise of which
she will be ultimately dependent. That she will tread in the paths
of virtue and honour, and—the—a—so forth.”
I was still less able to speak than before.
“Now, what does our young friend say?” proceeded Mr. Kenge. “Take
time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take time!”
What the destitute subject of such an offer tried to say, I need
not repeat. What she did say, I could more easily tell, if it were
worth the telling. What she felt, and will feel to her dying hour,
I could never relate.
This interview took place at Windsor, where I had passed (as far as
I knew) my whole life. On that day week, amply provided with all
necessaries, I left it, inside the stagecoach, for Reading.
Mrs. Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was
not so good, and wept bitterly. I thought that I ought to have
known her better after so many years and ought to have made myself
enough of a favourite with her to make her sorry then. When she
gave me one cold parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop
from the stone porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so miserable
and self-reproachful that I clung to her and told her it was my
fault, I knew, that she could say good-bye so easily!
“No, Esther!” she returned. “It is your misfortune!”
The coach was at the little lawn-gate—we had not come out until we
heard the wheels—and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She
went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof and shut the
door. As long as I could
Comments (0)