Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗

who twists

it up for a pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his

glasses, every up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before

he releases them from their leathern prison, and as he counts the

money three times over and requires Judy to say every word she

utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and

action as it is possible to be, this business is a long time in

progress. When it is quite concluded, and not before, he

disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it and answers Mr.

George’s last remark by saying, “Afraid to order the pipe? We are

not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to the pipe and

the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George.”

 

The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all

this time except when they have been engrossed by the black

leathern cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the

visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might

leave a traveller to the parental bear.

 

“And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?” says Mr.

George with folded arms.

 

“Just so, just so,” the old man nods.

 

“And don’t you occupy yourself at all?”

 

“I watch the fire—and the boiling and the roasting—”

 

“When there is any,” says Mr. George with great expression.

 

“Just so. When there is any.”

 

“Don’t you read or get read to?”

 

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. “No, no. We

have never been readers in our family. It don’t pay. Stuff.

Idleness. Folly. No, no!”

 

“There’s not much to choose between your two states,” says the

visitor in a key too low for the old man’s dull hearing as he looks

from him to the old woman and back again. “I say!” in a louder

voice.

 

“I hear you.”

 

“You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear.”

 

“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both

hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my

friend in the city that I got to lend you the money—HE might!”

 

“Oh! You can’t answer for him?” says Mr. George, finishing the

inquiry in his lower key with the words “You lying old rascal!”

 

“My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn’t trust

him. He will have his bond, my dear friend.”

 

“Devil doubt him,” says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a tray,

on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water, he asks her, “How do you come here! You haven’t got the

family face.”

 

“I goes out to work, sir,” returns Charley.

 

The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off,

with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head.

“You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of

youth as much as it wants fresh air.” Then he dismisses her,

lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed’s friend in the city—

the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman’s

imagination.

 

“So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?”

 

“I think he might—I am afraid he would. I have known him do it,”

says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, “twenty times.”

 

Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing

over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers

“Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box,

twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty—” and is

then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom

this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her

face as it crushes her in the usual manner.

 

“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone

scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering

clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old

man, prostrate in his chair. “My dear friend, will you shake me up

a little?”

 

Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at

the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance

by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright

in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds

whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him

and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but

agitating him violently enough to make his head roll like a

harlequin’s, he puts him smartly down in his chair again and

adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub that the old man winks with

both eyes for a minute afterwards.

 

“O Lord!” gasps Mr. Smallweed. “That’ll do. Thank you, my dear

friend, that’ll do. Oh, dear me, I’m out of breath. O Lord!” And

Mr. Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear

friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.

 

The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair

and falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the

philosophical reflection, “The name of your friend in the city

begins with a D, comrade, and you’re about right respecting the

bond.”

 

“Did you speak, Mr. George?” inquires the old man.

 

The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right

elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while

his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in

a martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr.

Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of

smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.

 

“I take it,” he says, making just as much and as little change in

his position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with

a round, full action, “that I am the only man alive (or dead

either) that gets the value of a pipe out of YOU?”

 

“Well,” returns the old man, “it’s true that I don’t see company,

Mr. George, and that I don’t treat. I can’t afford to it. But as

you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition—”

 

“Why, it’s not for the value of it; that’s no great thing. It was

a fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money.”

 

“Ha! You’re prudent, prudent, sir!” cries Grandfather Smallweed,

rubbing his legs.

 

“Very. I always was.” Puff. “It’s a sure sign of my prudence

that I ever found the way here.” Puff. “Also, that I am what I

am.” Puff. “I am well known to be prudent,” says Mr. George,

composedly smoking. “I rose in life that way.”

 

“Don’t be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet.”

 

Mr. George laughs and drinks.

 

“Ha’n’t you no relations, now,” asks Grandfather Smallweed with a

twinkle in his eyes, “who would pay off this little principal or

who would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my

friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good

names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha’n’t you no

such relations, Mr. George?”

 

Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, “If I had, I

shouldn’t trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my

belongings in my day. It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a

vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then

to decent people that he never was a credit to and live upon them,

but it’s not my sort. The best kind of amends then for having gone

away is to keep away, in my opinion.”

 

“But natural affection, Mr. George,” hints Grandfather Smallweed.

 

“For two good names, hey?” says Mr. George, shaking his head and

still composedly smoking. “No. That’s not my sort either.”

 

Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair

since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a

voice in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up

in the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain

near him. For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble

of repeating his late attentions.

 

“Ha!” he observes when he is in trim again. “If you could have

traced out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making

of you. If when you first came here, in consequence of our

advertisement in the newspapers—when I say ‘our,’ I’m alluding to

the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others

who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly

towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance—

if at that time you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have

been the making of you.”

 

“I was willing enough to be ‘made,’ as you call it,” says Mr.

George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the

entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a

fascination, not of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at

her as she stands by her grandfather’s chair, “but on the whole, I

am glad I wasn’t now.”

 

“Why, Mr. George? In the name of—of brimstone, why?” says

Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation.

(Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs.

Smallweed in her slumber.)

 

“For two reasons, comrade.”

 

“And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the—”

 

“Of our friend in the city?” suggests Mr. George, composedly

drinking.

 

“Aye, if you like. What two reasons?”

 

“In the first place,” returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy

as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is

indifferent which of the two he addresses, “you gentlemen took me

in. You advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to

the saying ‘Once a captain, always a captain’) was to hear of

something to his advantage.”

 

“Well?” returns the old man shrilly and sharply.

 

“Well!” says Mr. George, smoking on. “It wouldn’t have been much

to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill

and judgment trade of London.”

 

“How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid

his debts or compounded for ‘em. Besides, he had taken US in. He

owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him

than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him,” snarls the old

man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, “I want to strangle him

now.” And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the

unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of

her chair.

 

“I don’t need to be told,” returns the trooper, taking his pipe

from his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from

following the progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is

burning low, “that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have

been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin

full-gallop. I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and

poor. I laid this hand upon him after he had run through

everything and broken down everything beneath him—when he held a

pistol to his head.”

 

“I wish he had let it off,” says the benevolent old man, “and blown

his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!”

 

“That would have been a smash indeed,” returns the trooper